EVIDENCES OF TffB MIGRATION OF ABBAM. 95 



Thus the sign for mountain and country V" are synonymous, 

 sliowing that the country, ^:'ar excellence the home, was a 

 mountainous one. As an illustration of this, we may show 

 how this pictorial representation of land was carried out in 

 the pictorial systems of the Egyptians and Hittites. Thus the 

 home royalty of the flat plains of the Nile valley was repre- 

 sented by the sign ^^=^_ neb-ta, '' lord of the two lands," — — 

 being the ideograph of country ; but the sign for a foreign 

 land was Q:£^^, a picture of mountain-peaks similar to that 

 Hittite group which Professor Sayce identifies as the sign 

 for country. In the fauna of the land we find individual 

 ideographs for the bear and the wolf, but not for the lion, 

 tiger, and jackal, which were common in Chaldea ; and still 

 more important is the fact that the compound ideograph for 

 camel denotes an animal with two humps — that is the species 

 of Upper Asia, as distinct from the Arabian species. In the 

 flora we find the pine and cedar, but not the palm or the vine ; 

 while the earliest form of the house or dwelling was a cave. 

 All these facts tend to show that if the Cuneiform writing did 

 undergo a considerable enlargement and modification in 

 Chaldea, yet, at any rate, the first elements were invented in 

 a land differing in many respects from the delta of the Tigro- 

 Euphrates valley. The language of these first inhabitants is 

 known to us from numerous inscribed bricks and tablets, and 

 the labours of Dr. Paul Haupt and the late M. Francois 

 Lenormant have elucidated the nature of the grammar and 

 vocabulary, showing it to differ entirely in both of these im- 

 portant features from the Semitic families. The mode of 

 reading the characters from left to right, the use of ideographs 

 and polyphones, all point to the non- Semitic origin of the 

 writing, and this fact is stated most clearly by so great an 

 authority on all relating to Semitic languages as M. Ernest 

 Kenan, who says, " No one in the present day can doubt that 

 this (Turanian) civilisation possessed, and most probably 

 created, the writing called Cuneiform," — that is, he adds, if we 

 take the word Turanian as a synonym for that which is neither 

 Aryan or Semitic. 



While the Chaldean inscriptions show, undoubtedly, a 

 Turanian civilisation at the base of the culture of the nations 

 of the Tigro-Euphrates Valley, they also reveal the important 

 fact that at a very early period, tribes of Semitic nomads 

 had come and settled in the land and had adopted the 

 Cuneiform mode of writing which they found in use among 

 their Akkadian countrymen.* This borrowing must have taken 



* A curious and important record of the relative position of the homes of 

 the Semitic and non-Semitic elements in the population of Chaldea is pre- 



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