THE CANADIAN JOURNAL. 



NEW SERIES. 



No. LXXXyill.— JULY, 1875. 



THE PRIMITIVE HISTORY OF THE lONIANS. 



BY JOHN CAMPBELL, M.A., 



Professor of Church History, &c., Freshyterian College, Montreal. 



The only people of antiquity of wliom we possess a continuous 

 authentic histoiy is that of Israel. The history of the nations that 

 dwelt witliin the areas of the Tigris and the Euphrates and along 

 the ^hores of Nile is now in process of construction on the basis 

 of the materials afforded by the written monuments of Babylonia 

 and Assyria, and of Egypt. The antiquity, I do not say of these 

 monuments, but of the times and persons they treat of, exceeds that 

 of the patriarch Abraham, with whose story the annals of Israel 

 begin. No such antiquity has been claimed for the Greek tribes as 

 integers among primitive nationalities, because they are supposed to 

 have arisen into a state of civilization in Hellas, many centuries after 

 their ancestors, as savage nomads, had taken possession of that' land. 

 The unairimous voice of tradition and history, with that of a candid 

 reasoning from analogy, is opposed to such a gratuitous hypothesis. 

 The Greeks, whether Javan or any other son of Japheth be their 

 ancestor, struck out for themselves no new track of migration through, 

 the inhospitable wilds of Armenia and Asia Minor in quest of the 

 peninsula of Europe, which became the home of some of them in the 

 accepted historical period. They simply followed in the westward 

 course of the families of mankind from the plain of dispersion. 

 Eii'st to move in that direction were the descendants of Ham, who 

 peopled Arabia, Egypt and Palestine. Into these same countries 

 other emigrants from Shinar found their way. There is little 

 evidence that the children of Shem, with the exception of the family 



