1866. | as indicating the Antiquity of Man. 227 
Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Celtic, unless houses had been known 
before the separation of these dialects. In this manner a history of 
Aryan civilization has been written from the archives of language 
stretching back to times far beyond the reach of any documentary 
history.”* 
‘vhe Semitic languages were spoken from the eastern shores of 
the Mediterranean to the River Tigris, and even beyond that boun- 
dary eastward, and from the Caucasian mountains on the north to 
the Arabian peninsula, extending to the Indian Ocean on the south. 
Similar interesting circumstances may be predicated of this grand 
division of the human race to those which Professor Max Miller 
has elicited respecting the Aryans. Thus, the term for gold is the 
same in Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldee, and Syriac, and so is that for 
brass or rather copper. This shows that while the various tribes of 
the Semitic family were inhabiting the same locality, those metals 
were known to all; for had the various tribes already separated, all 
could not possibly have given the same names to those metals. Not 
so, however, with respect to iron, because the word for iron (barze/) 
is the same in Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee, but not in Arabic. 
Therefore the Arab branch of the family must have separated first 
from their fellow Semites, and retired to the Arabian peninsula 
before the discovery of iron. This event evidently occurred during 
the age of bronze, which had succeeded that of gold, and before the 
age of iron commenced ; the discovery of iron was, however, made 
by the Semitic race in pre-historic times. During the age of bronze 
and before the final separation of the various tribes, the Semites, 
like the Aryans, were agricultural nomads, the words for plough 
and ploughing being the same in the speech of all, and they not only 
dwelt in tents, but possessed houses, and had already formed villages _ 
and cities many thousands of years before the commencement of the 
Christian era, and at the latest during the age of bronze. It is impos- 
sible to determine when iron became known to the Arab tribes, but 
the Chaldeans and Hebrew-speaking nations certainly knew it long 
before them. 
The Semitic tongues, though now and for so many ages differing 
so widely from the Aryan, can be clearly shown to have originated 
in one common source with them. Many, and in fact most, objects 
are designated by different words in each of these two great families 
of languages—thus river in Hebrew is n*har, and in Latin flumen. 
These words are widely dissimilar both in sound and appearance ; 
but when we know that the Hebrew nahar is derived from the 
root nahar, to flow, and that the Latin is from fluo, also to flow ; 
that the Spanish Rio and the French and Italian equivalents find 
their root in the Latin rwo, Greek rheo, to flow; and that this 
instance is only one of very many, we see that the same idealism 
* * Lectures on the Science of Language.’ First Series, p. 245. 
