BABYLONIAN LITERATURE. 79 



Kanaan, son of Kush, son of Ham. They 

 inhabited the province of Babylon, and 

 had for their king Mmrod the great. 1 The 

 same thing is found in the Kitab talacdth al- 

 umem, the Said of Toledo : " The Chaldeans 

 are a nation illustrious from the antiquity 

 of their empire, and the celebrity of their 

 kings, who were descended from the Nim- 

 rods the giants, of whom the first was 

 Nimrod, son of Gush, son of Ham." 2 M. 

 Chwolson himself thinks that Masoudi has 

 borrowed what he says of his Mmrodian 

 dynasty, from Christian sources. AVho 

 knows, that the name of Canaanites is 

 not in this instance one of those con- 



1 Quatremere, pp. 56, 57, 62. 



2 Here is the entire passage, according to the MS. of M. 

 Schefer, p. 19 



tc. According to the 

 passage in the Koran, xvi. 28. The plurals Uj>- an( l i' J LJ 

 formed, after the same analogy, from "135 and lip? (Gen. i. 8-9), 

 betray in themselves a biblical origin. Some lines below there is, 

 in the Said, the identical genealogies given by Masoudi. 



