226 



THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



inhabitants of India, though there are dark individuals amongst 

 them too. Having for 3,000 years been the pre-eminently- 

 educated Hindoo caste, intellect has become so nearly universal 

 among them, that the Brahman boys are the best scholars in 

 every Indian school. The Brahmanic religion is now totally 

 different from what it was at first, having largely borrowed from 

 the Turanian faith, which it has failed to displace. Booddhism 

 is of Indian origin, though it is now all but extinct in that 

 country ; its great seat being China. Thus of the leading 

 religions now in the world, Brahmanism, Zoroastrianism, and 

 Booddhism originated with the Aryans. 



THE SYRO-ARABIAN RACE. 



As before mentioned, instead of the appellation Syro-Arabian, 

 some use the term Shemitic, or Semitic, in speaking of this 

 family of mankind. Its exact limits have not yet been settled 

 beyond dispute. Using language as our guide, and omitting 

 for the present tongues doubtfully Semitic, the forms of speech 

 now under consideration fall naturally under three divisions 

 the Northern, or Aramaic ; the Middle, or Hebraic ; and the 

 Southern, or Arabic. 



Much light has been thrown on the first-mentioned of these 

 divisions, the North Semitic one, by the examination of the 

 cuneiform inscriptions found in the territories successively ruled 

 by the old Asiatic empires. Cuneiform means wedge-shaped, 

 the first part of the word being derived from the Latin cuneus, 

 a wedge. The characters called cuneiform are also often de- 

 scribed as arrow-headed. London readers, at least, will at once 

 recognise them as those singular lines, thick at one end, covering 

 men, lions, bulls, etc., in the Ninevite sculptures in the British 

 Museum, and the copies of them at the Crystal Palace. It 

 required a great deal of ingenuity and perseverance before the 

 arrow-headed writing was deciphered, and when the feat was 

 at least, to a certain limited extent, accomplished, it was found 

 that the Persian writing on the rock of Behistun, at Persepolis, 

 and other places ruled by the Zoroastrians, was, as might 

 have been anticipated, in a language allied to Zend ; that of 

 Nineveh, and Babylon, on the contrary, is held to be in the 

 main Semitic. The other ancient dialects belonging to this 

 division of tongues are the Chaldee and the Syriac ; tiie former 

 spoken of old in the eastern, and the latter in the western part 

 of the Aramaean area. The term Chaldee is not a good one, for 

 it is supposed that the Chaldees of Scripture were Aryans. The 

 so-called Chaldee and Syriac are believed to be so closely allied, 

 that some deny their separate existence as dialects. The Jews, 

 in a measure, lost their Hebrew, and acquired East Aramaean 

 during their residence in Babylon ; and parts of the books of 

 Ezra and Daniel are written in it. Words and phrases belonging 

 to it occur in various parts of our English version of the Bible, 

 as in Gen. xxxi. 47 ; Mark v. 41 ; vii. 34 ; xv. 34. In the first 

 of these passages, Jegar-sahadutha is Arama3an, and Galeed is 

 Hebrew. Both signify "the heap of witness ;" or, more accu- 

 rately, the Aramaean phrase means the "heap of witness," and 

 the Hebrew equivalent, the " witness-heap." One finding the 

 two so different would naturally suppose that Hebrew and 

 Aramaean had no close affinity, but the inference would be 

 rroneous. The words in the passage in Genesis happen to be 

 exceptionally unlike ; the comparison of a multitude of others 

 would conduct to a conclusion just the opposite of that sug- 

 gested by this single case. The Arabic has long extinguished 

 the Aramasan or Syriac itself, but it still lingers among the 

 Nestorians of the Upper Tigris near Lakes Ooroomiah and 

 Van. 



Th3 second division of the Syro-Arabian race is that speaking 

 the Hebraic branch of the Semitic tongues. With the very 

 limited space at our command, we can do no more than mention 

 the Jews, in some respects the most interesting of all nations ; 

 but, happily, their history is so well known that it is unnecessary 

 to enter on it here. Latham thus describes the physical charac- 

 teristics which distinguish the Jews from the Arabs, to whom 

 they are closely allied : " Physical conformation, differing 

 from that of the Arab in (a) greater massiveness of frame ; (b) 

 thicker lips ; (c) nose more frequently aquiline ; (d) cranium 

 (skull) of greater capacity." 



Samaritan is a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaean. The evi- 

 dence of language proves the remarkably interesting fact that 

 the Phoenician tongue, the on spoken first in Tyre and Sidon, 

 and subsequently in Carthage, in connection with which it 



obtained the name of Punic, was almost identical with Hebrew. 

 A recent writer, Farrar, thus neatly sums up the evidence on 

 the subject in his " Families of Speech," a work well worth 

 the reader's attention : " We know that Carthage itself means 

 in Hebrew, ' Newtown ; ' that Byrsa, its citadel, is the Hebrew 

 bozra (a fortress) ; that bal in such names as Hasdrubal and 

 Hannibal is simply Baal; that Barca, the family name of 

 Hannibal, is the same as barak (lightning) ; that suffetes, which 

 Livy tells us was the name of the Carthaginian magistrates, is 

 the Hebrew shophetim, or 'judges;' that Lilybaeum, the name 

 they gave to the western angle of Sicily, means ' towards Libya ' 

 U being simply the Hebrew preposition. Finally, not to 

 dwell on other proofs, Plautus wrote a play called ' Pcenulus ' 

 (the little Carthaginian) ; and in that play a Punic scene is 

 introduced, which, so far as it has been yet deciphered, is most 

 distinctly Hebraic in its character. St. Augustine, who was 

 himself a Carthaginian, says that Hebrew and Carthaginian 

 differed but little." 



The Arabic, or southern division of the Syro-Arabian race, is 

 the last to which we shall turn our attention. The French 

 Baron Larrey thought the Arabs, physically and mentally con- 

 sidered, the most perfect of mankind ; maintaining that they 

 had more convolutions in the brain, and a finer organisation of 

 the physical parts ministering to intellect, than other people. 

 This opinion has not been perfectly confirmed. Latham thus 

 describes the physical characteristics of the Arab race : 

 "Face, oval; forehead, vaulted; nose, straight, or aquiline; 

 lips, thin, even when thick, not projecting ; hair, wavy, or 

 curled ; complexion, various shades of brown ; limbs, spare." 

 The Bedouins constitute but a limited part of the Arab race. 

 A very large section of the Arabs live like other people in towns, 

 of which there are many in the Arabian peninsula itself. The 

 Arabs are formidable in war, especially when they fight from 

 behind stone walls. It was among them, as is well known, 

 that the Mohammedan faith arose. During the brief period 

 that they gave their attention to science, they achieved some 

 intellectual reputation, and have left their memorial behind them, 

 in such words as zenith, nadir, or the star Aldcbaran. Fig. 5 

 affords a characteristic representation of a Bedouin of Sinai. 



The Arabic division of the Semitic tongues is again separated 

 into two the Northern, or proper Arabic ; and the Southern, or 

 Himyaritic. With the last is conjoined at least one, and pro- 

 bably two, of the Abyssinian tongues. The old Gheez, now 

 extinct, was Semitic ; so was the language of Tigre. The 

 modern Amharic, that of Theodore's court, is more mixed. 

 Apparently the old Himyaritic Arabs must have overflowed into- 

 Abyssinia. 



It is believed that the Berber or Amazirgh language, that 

 spread here and there through the Barbary States, is also 

 Semitic. 



The Coptic language was once ranked as undoubtedly Semitic, 

 but further researches into the subject have thrown considerable 

 doubt on the correctness of this classification. We shall return 

 to the subject of the Abyssinian, the Egyptian, and the Berber 

 tongues in a subsequent paper. 



Throughout a great portion of the world's history the rela- 

 tions between the Aryans and the Syro-Arabians have been the 

 reverse of friendly. Of the great empires of antiquity, the 

 Assyrian and the Babylonian monarchies were Semitic. When 

 Cyrus took Babylon, the sceptre of the world passed into Aryan 

 hands, which have retained it ever since. The death-struggle 

 between the Romans and the Carthaginians was a contest 

 between the Aryans and the Syro-Arabians ; so also was the 

 decisive battle at Poictiers between Charles Martel and the 

 Arab Moslem Abderrahman. The Aryans are now much 

 more numerous than the Syro-Arabians, if, indeed, they have 

 not been so from the earliest times, so that the issue of any 

 future struggle of the same nature cannot be doubtful. 



The faith now professed by the most civilised nations of the 

 world came to them by means of the Jews, a Semitic race. In the 

 same Syro-Arabian family of mankind arose Mohammedanism, 

 which is a development in some respects of Judaism, in others 

 of Christianity. Thus the Syro-Arabians have played a great 

 part in the drama of human history. If they have, as a rule, 

 failed in achieving empire by the sword, they have become the 

 religious teachers of the leading nations in the world, thus 

 gaining a great moral triumph with which the victories of the 

 soldier are not for a moment to be compared. 



