TBANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. DEPT. ANTHROPOLOGY. 385 



distinct opinion may be formed on the problem of primitive civilised man. When 

 it is asked what races of mankind first attained to civilisation, it may be answered 

 that the earliest nations known to have had the art of writing, the great mark of 

 civilisation as distinguished from barbarism, were the Egyptians and Babylonians, 

 who in the remotest ages of history appear as nations advanced to the civilised' 

 stage in arts and social organisation. The question is, Under what races to class 

 them ? What the ancient Egyptians were like is well lenown from the monuments, 

 which show how closely much of the present fellah population, as little changed in 

 features as in climate and life, represent their ancestors of the times of the 

 Pharaohs. Their reddish-brown skin, and features tending toward the negroid, have 

 led Hartmann, the latest anthropologist who has carefully studied them, to adopt 

 the classification of them as belonging to the African rather than the Asiatic 

 peoples, and specially to insist on their connection with the Berber type, a view 

 which_ seems to have been held by Blumenbach. The contrast of the brown 

 Egyptians with the dark-white Syro-Arabians on their frontiers is strongly 

 marked, and the portraits on the monuments show how distinctly the Egyptian 

 knew himself to be of different race from the Semite. Yet there was mixture 

 between the two races, and what is most remarkable, there is a deep-seated 

 Semitic element in the Egyptian language, only to be accounted for by some 

 extremely ancient and intimate connection. On the whole, the Egyptians may 

 be a mixed race, mainly of African origin, perhaps from the southern Somali-land, 

 whence the Egyptian tradition was that the gods came, while their African type 

 may have since been modified by Asiatic admixture. Next, as to the early rela- 

 tions of Babylonia and Media, a different problem presents itself. The languages 

 of these nations, the so-called Akkadian and the early Medic, were certainly not 

 of the same family with either the Assyrian or the Persian which afterwards 

 prevailed in their districts. Their connection with the Tatar or Turanian family 

 of languages, asserted twenty years ago by Oppert, has since been further main- 

 tained by Lenormant and Sayce, and seems, if not conclusively settled, at any rate 

 to have much evidence for it, not depending merely on similarity of words, such 

 as the term for ' god,' Akkadian dingira, being like the Tatar tengri, but also on 

 similarity of pronouns and grammatical structure by post-positions. Now language, 

 though not a conclusive argument as to race, always proves more or less as to con- 

 nection. The comparison of the Akkadian language to that of the Tatar family is 

 at any rate prima facie evidence that the nations who founded the ancient civilisa- 

 tion of Babylonia, who invented the cuneiform writing, and who carried on the 

 astronomical observations which made the name of Chaldean famous for all time, 

 may have been not dark-white peoples like the Assyrians who came after them, but 

 perhaps belonged to the yellow race of Central Asia, of whom the Chinese are the 

 branch now most distinguished in civilisation. M. Lenormant has tried to identify 

 among the Assyrian bas-reliefs certain figures of men whose round skulls, high 

 cheek-bones, and low-bridged noses present a Mongoloid type contrasting with that 

 of the Assyrians. We cannot, I think, take this as proved, but at any rate in 

 these figures the features are not those of the aquiline Semitic type. The bronze 

 statuette of the Ckaldasan king called Gudea, which I have examined with Mr. 

 Pinches at the British Museum, is also, with its straight nose and long thin beard, 

 as un-Assyrian as may be. The anthropological point towards which all this 

 tends is one of great interest. We of the white race are so used to the position 

 of leaders in civilisation, that it does not come easy to us to think we may not 

 have been its original founders. Yet the white race, whether the dark-whites, such 

 as Phoenicians or Hebrews, Greeks or Romans, or the fair-whites, such as Scandi- 

 navians and Teutons, appear in history as followers and disciples of the Egyptians 

 and Babylonians who taught the world writing, mathematics, philosophy. These 

 Egyptians and Babylonians, so far as present evidence reaches, seem rather to have 

 belonged to the races of brown and yellow skin than to the white race. 



It may be objected that this reasoning is in several places imperfect, but it is 



the use of a departmental address not only to lay down proved doctrines, but to 



state problems tentatively as they lie open to further inquiry. This will justify 



my calling attention to a line of argument which, imcertain as it at present is, mav 



1879. CC 



