EELIGIONS Nl) CIVILIZATION 161 



peculiarities confined to a few unenlightened peoples, such as the 

 ancient Germans and Britons, it would be a graceful thing to admit 

 that the schoolmaster was abroad when the so-called myth sprang into 

 being, and there leave the matter. But when they are found common 

 to the traditions of Phoenicia, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India, Arabia, 

 Ethiopia, North Africa, Italy, Greece, the Celtic and Germanic peoples 

 and the numerous families of Asia Minor; when they are seen to 

 have been perpetuated from age to age, and retained in spite of 

 advancing knowledge, even to the prejudice of the traditions in which 

 they are found ; when the romance of the middle ages, spite of all the 

 changes to which it subjects the old world story, did not discard them 

 nor alter what were well known as geographical absurdities and unheard 

 of relations among nations : it is then wise to ask if no other reason 

 than universal unbounded ignorance in regard to relation and locality 

 on the part of the ancients can be given for their singular agreement 

 • in these particulars. 



So numerous are the facts, from a consideration of which the inti- 

 mate connection of all peoples prior to the historic period may be 

 inferred, that I can simply indicate a few of the classes into which 

 they may be divided. Some are philological in character. The study 

 of comparative philology has resulted in an established belief in the 

 common origin of the languages called Indo-European. It has, how- 

 ever, been customary to erect a barrier between the Semitic and the 

 Indo-European languages, and thus to cut off Phoenician, Hebrew, 

 Chaldee, Arabic, &c., from the last great brotherhood of tongues, while 

 Coptic, Ethiopic, and the languages of the Assyrian inscriptions have 

 been kept in a state of suspense, being assigned now to one family and 

 now to another. It must surely have occurred to those who hold out 

 most strongly for a radical diversity of the Semitic from the Indo- 

 European languages, that the many connections of old Greek, Boeotic 

 especially, with Phoenician,^^ and the conclusion often arrived at that 

 the Pelasgian and Phoenician tongues were identical f^ the fact that 

 Coptic lies midway between the Semitic and Indo-European languages, 

 and comes nearest of all to the Celtic branch of the latter;*" and the 

 unsatisfactory way in which the difficulty that leaves the cuneiform 

 inscriptions of Chaldea between heaven and earth is removed by call- 

 ing them Hamitic : — from these considerations — it must surely have 



'8 StiUingfleet, Origines Sacrae, p. 400. Eawlinson ia Herod, ii., 49. 



5' RusseU'a Connection, by Wheeler, ii., 99. 



** Pococke, India in Greece, 20S. Rawlinson, Herod. App. Bk, ii., Ch. 1. 



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