THE DISPERSION 203 



cian colonisation. 1 Unfortunately no burials of these 

 early men have yet been found, and perhaps the 

 Lebanon caves were only their summer sojourns on 

 hunting expeditions. They were, however, probably 

 of the same stock with the races (the Cro-magnon 

 and Canstadt) of the so-called mammoth age in 

 Western Europe, who have left similar remains. Thus 

 we can carry man in the Lebanon back to that abso- 

 lutely prehistoric age which preceded the Noachian 

 Deluge and the dispersion of the Noachidae. 2 



If in imagination we suppose ourselves to visit 

 the caves of the Nahr-el-Kelb pass, when they were 

 inhabited by these early men, we should find them to 

 be tall muscular people, clothed in skins, armed with 

 flint-tipped javelins and flint hatchets, and cooking 

 the animals caught in the chase in the mouths of 

 their caves. They were probably examples of the 

 ruder and less civilised members of that powerful and 

 energetic antediluvian population which had appa- 

 rently perfected so many arts, and the remains of 

 whose more advanced communities are now buried 

 in the silt of the sea bottom. If we looked out 

 westward on what is now the Mediterranean, we 

 should see a wide wooded or grassy plain as far as 

 eye could reach, and perhaps might discern vast 

 herds of elephant, rhinoceros, and bison wandering 



1 Some of these tribes also lived in caves, as that of Ant Elias, but 

 the animals they consumed are those now living in the Lebanon. 



2 Dawson, Trans. Viet. Institute, May 1884; also Modern Science 

 in Bible Lands. 



