56 H0E3IUZL EASSAMj ESQ., ON BIBLICAL LANDS, THEIR 



There is a short article in the present ninth edition of 

 the Encyclopa:dia Britannica, under the head of " Syro-Chal- 

 deans," whicli reads very strangely (after the testimony of 

 Bar Hebr93us regarding the existence of the name of 

 "Chaldean" as a national term), by P. L. Connellan of 

 Rome. Who this gentleman is I have been unable to find out. 

 His information is this, "The Oriental Syrians," he says, "are 

 called ecclesiastically Chaldeans. The name comprises not 

 only the inhabitants of Chalclea, but also those of Assyria, 

 ]\Ie8opotamia, and a part of Persia. To distinguish them 

 from those having other rites equally Syrian they were 

 exclusively termed Chaldeans by Pope Eugenius IV (1431, 

 1447). Previous to the Council of Florence (1438) they 

 were called Orientals or Syro-Orientals." What Oriental or 

 Syro-Oriental has to do with the title of nationality is an 

 enigma to me, to say nothing about what Bar Hebra3us had 

 recorded two hundred years before the time of Pope 

 Eugenius IV, as to the existence of the Chaldeans, and much 

 more as to the absurdity of the Pope being able to create a 

 new name for a nation who are not his subjects or in any 

 way subservient to his dictation. On reading the above 

 extract I wrote to my friend the present Patriarch of the 

 Syrian Catholics, who happened to be in Rome at the time, 

 and asked him to find out for me from the archives in the 

 Vatican if there was any truth in that report, and who 

 P. L. Connellan is ; but he could find no clue to either one 

 or the other. As I have found two mistakes in the same 

 present edition of the Encyclopa'clia, in vol. iii, page 184, 

 and the other in vol. xvii, page 572, about my discoveries, 

 the former relating to the site of Sippara (Sepharvaim of 

 scripture), which I discovered in 1881, and the other 

 regarding the library I found in Assurbani-pal's palace in 

 1853, the editor may have been misinformed likewise 

 touching the nationality created by Pope Eugenius IV for 

 the Chaldeans. 



As there has been also some dispute about the meaning 

 of the word Syrian in connexion with Assyria, I must briefly 

 allude to the discussion. Herodotus mentions (in Book vii, 

 ch. 63) that the Greeks called the Assyrians Syrians, upon 

 which Professor George Rawlinson (the present canon of 

 Canterbury) makes the following remark in his History of 

 Herodotus : " ' Syrian ' " and " ' Assyrian,' " he says, *' are in 

 reality two entirely different words. ' Syrian ' is nothing but 

 a variation of ' Tyrian.' The Greeks when they first 



