RELIGIONS AND CIVILIZATION. 169 



while Professor Rawlinson derives the Chaldeans from Meroe.^^ The 

 Atlantica of Olaus Rudbeck brings Greeks and Romans, G-ermans and 

 Danes from Sweden, which he makes the Atlantis of Plato.*' Von 

 Hammer calls the Germans a Bactriano-Median nation and gives them 

 a local habitation of the past in Khorassan.^" Dom Pezron, who wrote 

 on the '' Origin and antiquity of the Celtic tongue," would have Celts 

 to be the chief people of the ancient world. ^^ Dr. Pritchard's Eastern 

 origin of the Celtic nations is well known ; and the latter pait of his 

 Eesearches into the Physical History of Man, which happily deals 

 with anything rather than physical history, is so full of links to connect 

 civilized peoples one with the other that it almost appears as if it were 

 written for the special purpose of proving Faber right. ^^ 



Enough I think has been said to show that '' all nations were once 

 assembled together in a single place and in a single community, where 

 they adopted a corrupt form of religion which they afterwards respec- 

 tively carried with them into the lands that they colonized ; " the 

 term "all nations" being understood generally of civilized peoples, 

 and not absolutely of all, except in regard to the time prior to the 

 earliest dispersion, and the terms " single place " and " single com- 

 munity," except in regard to the same, being capable of sufficient 

 expansion to denote an empire half as large as that of Alexander the 

 Great, of which the states that constituted and the tribes that peopled 

 it were distinct one from the other. 



It has proved a far more difficult matter to settle the locality in 

 which the primitive civilization, that Faber and others have supposed, 

 sprang into existence, than to justify a belief in their conclusion. A 

 faithful adherence, not to the letter of the Bible, but to the inferences of 

 early commentators, has shut up believers in the truth of the statements 

 contained in the book of Genesis to a single centre, from which the 

 human race spread at a very remote period, and to a later central seat 

 of civilization and empire. The first is the mountainous region of 

 Armenia; the second, the plain of Shinar. The idea commonly enter- 

 tained in regard to the dispersion from Armenia is, that the grandsons 

 of Noah at once betook themselves to the regions which, at the com- 



88 Bawlinson's Herodot., App. Bk. i , Essay vi , sec. 16. 



89 Atlantica, Sive vera Japheti posterorum sedes ac patris, 1679-98. 



90 Von Hammer, Wien Jahrbuch, ii., 319. 



*i Pezron, Antiquites de la Nation et de la Langue des Celtes. Paris, 1703. 

 '" Physical History of Man, from p. 318. 



