BABYLONIAN LITERATURE. 79 



Kanaan, son of Kush, son of Ham. They 

 inhabited the province of Babylon, and 

 had for their king JSTimrod the great. 1 The 

 same thing is found in the Kitab tdbacdth al- 

 umem, the Said of Toledo : " The Chaldeeans 

 are a nation illustrious from the antiquity 

 of their empire, and the celebrity of their 

 kings, who were descended from the Xim- 

 rods the giants, of whom the first was 

 Mmrod, son of Cush, son of Ham." 2 M. 

 Chwolson himself thinks that Masoudi has 

 borrowed what he says of his Mmrodian 

 dynasty, from Christian sources. Who 

 knows, that the name of Canaanites ib 

 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 : e^AG ^JLnKH +*>j &M V4\ Clj 



JUi \)jd\ to\s£ (j <1H >^i t/Jul,* 40 " According to the 

 passage in the Koran, xvi. 28. The plurals £ «U^- an< i io ,LiJ 

 formed, after the same analogy, from "Gil and T1P3 (Gen. x. 8-9), 



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

 in the Said, the identical genealogies given by Masoudi. 



