Continued from The Divine Programme of The World’s History Chapter II. The Noahic Programme. – Part II..

THE ARYAN FAMILY.

The great Indo-Aryan, or Japhethic family, is so extensive and so varied that we shall best convey a fair idea of it by presenting Professor Max Muller’s own table of its principal members.

GENEALOGICAL TABLE OF THE ARYAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES.

It will be seen at a glance that this family of languages comprises most of the ancient and modern languages of Europe, including Greek and Latin and all the Slavonic and Teutonic dialects; in fact, with a few exceptions—the Finn, the Lapp, the Hungarian, and the Crimean languages —all. It comprises also the Indian languages derived from the ancient Sanskrit, though not the Tamil and Telegu tongues, nor the languages of the aboriginal tribes in India, which are Turanian.¹

¹ The aboriginal races of India belong to the Turanian type, though the Hindu—the leading race—is Aryan. The difference is very marked between the hill-tribes, as they are called, and the Aryans of the plains. The former are despised and outlawed by the Hindus, own no property, seldom cultivate the land, and have institutions and customs wholly different from those of the Hindus. They do not observe caste; their widows are allowed to marry again; they eat flesh and have no objection to the shedding of blood; they indulge freely in intoxicating drinks, do not venerate the Brahmans, and bury their dead instead of burning them. All these things establish decisively that they are of a different origin, and the difference in their language confirms that conclusion. There are a great variety of races among them, but they all differ as widely as possible from the Aryan Hindus, among whom they have dwelt for ages.

The Parsee, the Persian, and the Armenian languages are also Aryan. Though differing so widely among themselves, all these forms of speech, belonging to various and widely scattered nations and peoples, have retained enough of the original language from which all alike sprang to demonstrate their common origin.

“One of the greatest discoveries of modern time, as affecting the question of races, is that conclusion from comparison of languages, which has defined what is called the Aryan or Indo-European family of nations.

“By a simple examination of the roots and structure of various languages, and their comparison especially with those of the Sanskrit, it has been ascertained, on evidence clear and unassailable, that certain nations, the most widely separated and the most diverse in physical characteristics, have a common origin. The blonde Norwegian and the dark-eyed Spaniard, the mercurial Celt and the steady Anglo-Saxon, the Slavonic Russian and the lively Frenchman, the practical Anglo-American and the dreamy Hindu, the German and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman, are proved to be all emigrants from one home, and to have spoken once a common tongue.

“We can see also, in the words they have all preserved, how far their common forefathers had progressed in thought and in civilization, before the remarkable causes arose which scattered them in various tribes over the face of the earth.

“The words which all, or nearly all, their descendants have in common are those which convey the simplest ideas of existence and action; those which describe the nearest family relations, such as father and mother, son and daughter; those for domestic animals, such as dog, pig, sow, boar, goose, and duck; those for the simplest articles of food, for certain for the great luminaries of the sky, and the objects of religious worship, derived from these great phenomena; and words of feeling, like heart and tears.

“Language shows conclusively that the Aryan tribes had passed beyond the lowest barbaric stage before they separated. There is no certain evidence that they were agricultural, but they were probably nomadic or occupied with the care of flocks; they had built houses and worked in metals; they had constructed boats and fastened animals to vehicles for domestic labour, and were acquainted with the art of sewing if not of weaving. Words present to us as clearly as a historical record that even in that distant antiquity, certain great features, common to Indo-European nations, whether for good or evil, still existed.

“The relation of husband and wife, the position of the sexes, the absence of caste, and the priestly authority of the father, were characteristics of our earliest ancestors. It is an additional evidence of their early peaceful life, that the words which are different in the many branches of their descendants are, with a few exceptions, the names of wild animals, and those for the instruments of war. The common parent tongue of our ancestors has perished, but in the various languages of their descendants—whether Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Celtic, or English—we see traces of the primeval tongue.

“The centre from which these various races first migrated is hid in the mists of a distant antiquity; but both language and the traditions of two races designate the high plateau of Asia lying east of the Caspian, as their common home.

From the Indian Aryans have come the great people of the Brahmanic Hindus; and from the Iran or Persic Aryans descended the Persians, the Medes, the Carmanians, the Bactrians, the Sogdians, the Hyrcanians, the Sargartians, and others of minor importance. . . . However early may have been the original dispersion of the Aryan tribes, the historical appearance of this powerful family is comparatively late. The Turanian, the Hamitic, and the Semitic peoples, had successively erected powerful empires, ere the vigorous Aryan family came forward upon the field of history. Since that period, with the exception of the Assyrian empire, and the Semitic conquests under Mohammed, and occasional Turanian invasions, the Aryan races have held the dominion of the world; bearing with them Art and Law, and Science and Civilization; exercising the singular philosophic and intellectual power of this family; manifesting especially to the world the principle of public spirit (or individual sacrifice for the good of a community); and becoming the universal instruments through which the Semitic conceptions of Deity, and the Semitic inspirations of Christianity, have been spread through all nations.

“Their two great streams of population—the European and the Asiatic Aryans, the practical races and the meditative races—after unknown ages of separation, modified by incomprehensible and countless influences of climate and of nature, as apparently diverse as any two branches of the human family, have, during the past two centuries, met again in the valleys of India, and the last few years have witnessed what is perhaps the final prostration of the Asiatic Aryan beneath the ingenuity and vigour of the European Aryan.” (From Brace’s “Manual of Ethnology,” pp. 38-42.)

THE HAMITIC FAMILY.

It is difficult to define the elements of the Hamitic family, as the most varied opinions exist among philologists on the question. Dr, Edkins, of the London Missionary Society, thinks that even Chinese is a Cushite, or Hamitic, language, and that the migration which peopled the Celestial empire was connected with the age and race of Nimrod. It is impossible to decide that many of the so-called Turanian languages are not Hamitic; but it is easy to prove that certain languages are so, and a consideration of these is sufficient for our present purpose.

The unquestionably Hamitic nations include Egypt, Babylonia, Ancient Syria and Palestine, and other parts of Africa.

1. EGYPT. There is abundant proof that the most ancient organized state of which we have any knowledge—Egypt— was peopled by the descendants of Mizraim, the son of Ham. The present Arabic name of Egypt is Misr; and the Hebrew Mizraim, which is dual in form and signifies the two Misrs, or Egypts, indicates the upper and lower sections of the long valley of the Nile. We learn from the tenth chapter of Genesis that the early Egyptians were closely related to the primitive inhabitants of Canaan, who were descended from Mizraim’s brother Cush. Herodotus, Diodorus, and other Greek writers are agreed that settled government was established in Egypt under monarchical institutions at an earlier date than in any other country. Some writers carry back the origin of Egypt into a fabulous antiquity, but historians of repute are agreed that it dates from a time anterior to B.C. 2000; in other words, that it goes back to a time soon after the Noahic deluge. Hamitic speech seems to have developed first in Egypt, and to have spread thence to other Hamitic races who were then perhaps dwellers in that land, by whom it was carried in two distinct lines to other parts of the earth—in one line it passed to Ethiopia, Southern Arabia, Babylonia, Susiana, and the adjoining coast; and in another line to Philistia, Tyre, Sidon, and the country of the Hittites.

In Scripture Egypt is frequently mentioned as “the land of Ham.” “He smote all the firstborn in Egypt; the chief of their strength in the tabernacles of Ham.”(Psalm 78:51) “Israel also came into Egypt; and Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham.”(Psalm 105:23) “They forgat God their Saviour, which had done great things in Egypt; wondrous works in the land of Ham, and terrible things by the Red Sea.” (Psalm 106:21,22)

2. BABYLONIA. The earliest or one of the earliest empires established in the great Mesopotamian valley was undoubtedly a Cushite or Hamitic one. Nimrod was the founder of a dynasty which reigned in Babylonia for some centuries; but whether his empire was the earliest founded in that region —whether it rose soon after the flood, as is commonly supposed, or nearer to the days of Moses—is as yet an undecided question. On account of its mention in the genealogical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis, it is generally assigned to the earliest post-diluvian antiquity. But it should be noted that Nimrod is there introduced in a parenthetical way. He is not mentioned among the sons of Cush in verse 7, but separately and subsequently. It is not asserted that he built Babel or Babylon, but only that it became his first seat of empire, and that from Babylon he went forth to Asshur and built a new capital for himself—Nineveh.

It is further asserted that his renown was proverbial apparently in the days when the Pentateuch was published, as if his exploits were fresh in the minds of men as late as the days of Moses, a thousand years after the flood. Several things are implied in these statements:—That Babylonia and the country to the north of it in the great valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates, “the land of Shinar,” was originally inhabited and governed by “Asshur,” or by Assyrians, i.e., by descendants of Shem. That after a considerable lapse of time— sufficient for many great cities to have arisen beside Babylon itself—Nimrod, a Hamite and a descendant of Cush, invaded and conquered the country, taking Babylon and the other places mentioned first, and gradually extending his dominion northward and eastward, till he reached the magnificent site on the Tigris which tempted him to erect a new capital to his empire—Nineveh, the remains of which are with us to this day.

The words “Cush begat Nimrod” need not necessarily mean that the latter was the great-grandson of Noah, for very numerous parallel expressions elsewhere, both in Scripture and in various oriental works, prove distinctly that the words convey nothing more than that Nimrod was by descent a Cushite. No information of his chronological distance from his ancestor, nor of the number of generations which intervened between them, is given in the passage. That his empire did not belong to the earliest post-diluvian antiquity is implied in Genesis xiv. where we have an enumeration of the monarchs reigning in Abraham’s time in the great valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The kings of Shinar and Elam are specially mentioned, and yet there is not the least allusion to Nimrod as reigning at Babylon, or to the existence of such a city as Nineveh, indicating that the latter was not built, nor the kingdom of Nimrod established in the days of Abraham. The rulers of the entire district seem to have been involved, more or less, in the great war of the “four kings with five,” and the occupants of Babylon at the time were descendants of Shem, as is evident from their names. Hence it would seem as if Nimrod and his Cushite dynasty cannot at that time have come into existence.

Now cuneiform monuments speak distinctly, like Genesis x., of a Cushite dynasty conquering Babylonia, spreading to the north, and erecting Nineveh on the Tigris. But they place this event about the sixteenth or seventeenth century before Christ, and state that by these conquests one original Chaldean empire was overthrown. Traces of Nimrod’s empire—i.e. of a Hamite dynasty—having ruled in Mesopotamia were found by Layard among the ruins of Nimrod, carved ivories bearing a strong resemblance to similar antiquities found in Egypt, and even monuments with distinctly Egyptian physiognomies. Cush and Mizraim, the founders of the Egyptian kingdom, were brothers. Berosus, the Chaldean priest, of whose history of his people considerable fragments exist, also throws light on the subject. He states that the fifth dynasty which ruled in Babylon consisted of “nine Arabian kings,” who reigned 245 years. Now as Arabia was originally peopled by the Cushites, this dynasty may well be that of Nimrod. Further, some very ancient Babylonian writings, discovered in an Arabic translation, and investigated by Professor Chwolson, of St. Petersburg, mention a foreign dynasty founded in Babylonia by one called Nemroda, or Nimrod, as actually ruling in the days when the author wrote. His book has no date, but its internal evidence shows that it belongs to a period long prior to the second Babylonian empire founded by Nabonassar, and subsequent to the early Chaldean monarchy.

On these and other grounds the existence of the Cushite empire of Nimrod is, by many careful scholars, now considered to be proved, independently of the statement in the tenth chapter of Genesis; but they hold it to have intervened between the old Chaldean monarchy and the rise of the Semitic Assyrians to supreme power in Western Asia. Even as late as the century of Nebuchadnezzar, 600 B.C. the Hamitic race is shown by the monuments to have formed a large element in the population of Babylonia.

Thus, while altering our preconceived opinion as to its precise chronological position, profane history and archaeological discovery alike agree in maintaining what Scripture asserts: (1) That Babylon was founded very soon after the flood; (2) that Mesopotamia was at first occupied by descendants of Shem; (3) that Nimrod, a Cushite invader, conquered the country, and then extending his empire northward, built Nineveh, and founded a dynasty which ruled over the neighbouring nations for a considerable period of time before the later Assyrian dynasty arose. Further explorations of the mounds on the Tigris and Euphrates will probably in years to come make still clearer our present conceptions of the exact nature of these events, and help us more accurately to determine the dates of these early political revolutions.

“The close connection between Egypt and Babylonia is in any case unquestionable. Ancient classical tradition and recent linguistic research agree in establishing a close connection between the early inhabitants of the lower Mesopotamian plain and the people which under the various names of Cushites, Ethiopians, and Abyssinian, had long been settled upon the Nile, . . . Names which are modifications of Cush have always hung about the lower Mesopotamian region, indicating its primitive connection with the Cush upon the Nile. Even now ancient Susina is known as Khuzistan, or the land of the Cushites. Standing alone, these might be weak arguments; but Sir Henry Rawlinson, the first translator of primitive Babylonian documents, declares the vocabulary employed to be decidedly Cushite or Ethiopian, and states that he was able to interpret the inscriptions chiefly by the aid which was furnished to him from published works on the Galla or Abyssinian and the Mahra or South Arabian dialects.” – From Rawlinson’s “Egypt and Babylon,” p. 8.

The EMPIRE OF THE HITTITES.

Nor was it in Egypt and in Babylonia only that the Hamites rose to supremacy in early post-diluvian times. A third great empire arose among them before any of the descendants of Shem or Japheth became prominent on the stage of the world’s history. And this third empire was not merely Hamitic, it was also distinctly. Canaanitish; so that whatever reading we adopt of the text of Noah’s prophecy— whether we read “Ham the father of Canaan,” or “Canaan” alone—the history of this empire is in point.

The Bible notices of the races who occupied the land promised to Abraham include a variety of nations under the general name Canaanites. Among these the Hittites appear frequently as first and mightiest, as having widespread dominions and great power. They are called “the children of Heth,” the second son of Canaan. In the Bible we first meet with them at Hebron, on the high-road from Egypt to Jerusalem, where they seem to have been recognised as the rightful owners of the place, from whom Abraham, regarded as a prince among them, purchased a burying ground. The Hittites were not only a commercial people, as we see by this money transaction, but they were also the proprietors of the land. This is the earliest transfer of land on record, and they were Hittites who made out these earliest title deeds. It seems that they subsequently secured sufficient foothold in Egypt to found the city called Zoan; as we are told in a parenthetical sentence, that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.

Esau married several Hittite wives, who were a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebecca. When Joshua took possession of Canaan, the command to destroy the Hittites was definitely given; and the limits of the land were defined in the words, “From the wilderness and Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.”

In the various confederacies formed against the Israelites by the nations of Canaan, the Hittites are frequently mentioned; and in the great and decisive battle of Lake Merom their chariots and horses are alluded to. Though their power was crushed on the conquest of Canaan, many of them were spared and continued to dwell in the land (Jud. iii. 5). David had Hittite warriors in his army; and Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon and ancestress of our Lord, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Solomon also had Hittite wives. At the time of David’s extensive empire, Kadesh, the southern capital of the Hittites, was included in it (2 Sam. viii.), for he sent Joab there to number the people.

Some of them, however, continued to enjoy an independent existence, for in 1 Kings x. 29 we read that the kings of the Hittites had horses and chariots brought up for them out of Egypt. In 2 Kings we read that the Syrians fled panic-stricken from the siege of Samaria, on imagining that the king of Israel had hired against them “the kings of the Hittites.”

In all these passages there is implied, if not plainly stated, the existence of a wide-spread Hittite power from the days of Abraham to those of David.

Historical critics, however, asserted that there were no traces of any such empire in classic history, and pronounced the Bible notices of it to be unhistoric and unworthy of credence. Professor Newman and the Rev. I. K. Cheyne entirely rejected the Scripture account, and asserted that it was not, in spite of its great antiquity, of equal value as historic evidence with the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt. Remarkable recent discoveries prove the Bible to be right and the critics to be wrong, and establish by a surprising amount of evidence the existence for about a thousand years of a great and mighty Hittite empire, which was able to dispute supremacy in the earth with the most powerful Pharaohs of Egypt for many centuries, and to extort from one of them at last a treaty of peace, which was sealed by a matrimonial alliance—a marriage from which it seems probable that the foster-mother of Moses was born.

It is about ten years since Dr. Wright first obtained casts of some very ancient inscriptions from Hamath in Northern Syria, and called public attention to them as Hittite remains. Many similar ones have since been discovered in the same script elsewhere by other explorers, in Asia Minor, on the shores of the Euxine Archipelago and Levant, on the borders of Egypt, and on the banks of the Euphrates. These inscriptions have been deciphered by Professor Sayce, who has devoted his life to the study of such questions, and who says: “We may now consider the Hittite origin of the peculiar system of writing first noticed by modern travellers on the site of Hamath, to be among the ascertained facts of science;” (“Transactions of the Soc, Bib, Arch,” vol. vii. part ii. p. 246) and Dr. Isaac Taylor, in his learned book, “The Alphabet,” refers to those hieroglyphics and sculptures “as in the unmistakable style of Hittite art.” (Vol. ii, p. 120)

The cumulative evidence resulting from the decipherment of these very ancient historical remains proves that the empire of the Hittites was wider and their power even greater than is implied in the Scripture notices. “That their empire extended,” says Dr. Isaac Taylor, “as far as the Euxine and the Egean, is shown by hieroglyphics scattered over Asia Minor, more especially in Lydia, Lycaonia, Cappadocia, and Cilicia.”

“Scholars are only just beginning to realize the vast extent of the dominions of the Hittites, and their important place in primitive history. Till the rise of Assyria, they were the most powerful nation in North-western Asia. Dr. Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy, and the Hittite monuments scattered over Asia, as far west as the neighbourhood of Smyrna, prove the extent of their empire to the west; while to the south, at a time prior to the exodus of the Hebrews, their dominion extended as far as Hebron; and if Mariette is right in his belief that one of the Hyksos dynasties was Hittite, they must have established their rule over Egypt itself.” (“The Alphabet,” by Dr. Isaac Taylor, vol. ii. p. 121.)

“In the inscriptions at Karnak, referring to the victories of Thothmes III, there is a long list of towns in the land of the Hittites. Of these Brugsch says: ‘It is clear that this list exhibits in their oldest orthography the greater number of these towns which are afterwards mentioned so frequently in the records of wars, in Assyrian history, in the cuneiform inscriptions which have been deciphered. They are the old allied cities of those “Kheta,” of unknown origin, who long before the rise of Nineveh and Babylon played the same part as at a later period the Assyrians undertook with success’ (Brugsch’s “Egypt under the Pharaohs,” vol. ii, p. 7.) . . . As at Megiddo in Palestine, so at Kadesh on the Orontes, the king of the Hittites had under his command all the surrounding peoples, either as subjects or allies, and it is clear that the mighty host was brought into the field by a voice of command that had to be obeyed.” (Wright’s “The Empire of the Hittites,” pp. 52, 53)

Dr. Isaac Taylor says, speaking of the monuments: “They are those of a people who have been identified with the Hittites of the Old Testament, the Kheta of the Egyptian monuments, the Khattai of the Assyrian records, and the Keteioi of Homer.

“They were one of the most powerful peoples of the primeval world, their empire extending from the frontier of Egypt to the shores of the Egean, and, like the Babylonians and the Egyptians, they possessed a culture, an art, and a script peculiar to themselves, and plainly of indigenous origin.” (“The Alphabet,” vol. ii. p. 120.)

Perhaps, however, the most striking indication of the might of this ancient empire is afforded by its relations to Egypt. After tracing these by means of the monumental records of Egypt itself, Dr. Wright says: “We thus see the Hittite kings the rivals of the Pharaohs in peace and war from the twelfth to the twentieth dynasty. The shock of Egyptian invasion exhausted itself against the frontier cities of Kadesh and Carchemish, but the mighty empire of the Hittite extended beyond, on the broad plains and islands of Asia Minor, and so there were always fresh Hittite armies, and abundance of Hittite wealth, to enable the Hittite empire to withstand the might of Egypt for a thousand years.” (“Empire of the Hittites,” p. 35.)

If we ask how far back can the existence of this Hittite empire be traced, Professor Sayce replies: “Already in the astrological tables of Sargon of Agané, in the nineteenth century B.C, the Hittites are regarded as a formidable power.” (“Transactions of the Soc. Bib. Arch.,” vol. vii. part ii. p. 261.)

THE ASSYRIAN INSCRIPTIONS record the struggles of Tiglath-Pileser, Assur-Nasir-Pal, and other Assyrian monarchs with these same “Kheta,” or Hittites. Shalmaneser conducted thirty campaigns against them, according to his own account on two important monuments, one of which is known as the Black Obelisk of Nimrod, and the other as the Monolith of Kurkh; but still the warlike sons of Heth renewed the conflict, nor was it until the days of Sargon that they were finally subdued at Carchemish, their Eastern capital. This important event is narrated in one of Sargon’s numerous annals, translated by Dr. Julius Oppert:

“In the fifth year of my reign, Pisiri of Carchemish sinned against the great gods, and sent against Mita the Moschian messenger, hostile to Assyria. He took hostages. I lifted my hands to Assur, my lord. I made him leave the town. I sent away the holy vases out of his dwelling. I made them throw him into chains of iron. I took away the gold, the silver, and treasures of his palace. The Circesian rebels who were with him, and their properties, I transplanted to Assyria, I took among them fifty cars, two hundred riders, three thousand men on foot, and I augmented the part of my kingdom. I made the Assyrians to dwell in Circesium, and I placed them under the domination of Assur my lord.” (“Records of the Past,” vol. vii. p. 30.)

If now we inquire what was the moral character of these people, and what their religion, we shall perceive that they shared with Egypt and Babylon the moral degradation which fitted them to exchange dominion and rule for a servile position, that their moral decadence involved their perishing and passing away from the stage of history. The rites with which their goddesses were honoured should hardly be called religion. The priestesses were mere ritualists, and the business of their service was attention to ceremonies without any reference to morality. Their impure worship seems to have been mingled with the primitive nature-worship; and in the name Kadesh, the capital of the Hittites, we see one of the numerous shrines where Hittite girls were devoted to wickedness in the name of religion. The worship of these deities took many repulsive forms. Devotees surrendered their children to Baal in the flames, and the children’s screams were drowned by trumpet and drum; and the rites of Astarte were equally vile, though accompanied by the cooing of doves and clouds of incense.(Wright’s “ Empire of the Hittites,” pp. 75, 76) Their idol-gods were innumerable. Treaties and agreements were placed under the sanction of gods and goddesses just as in Egypt, and the catalogues of deities whose names are affixed to such documents are very long.

The Hittite empire passed away after an existence of about 1000 years. It disappears from the stage of history subsequently to the battle of Carchemish, and leaves scarcely a trace behind, so that its ever having existed at all was eventually called in question. But its records happily withstood the ravages of time, though the power to read them was lost. The key to their decipherment now recovered, the old empire emerges from the oblivion of ages, a resuscitated witness to the historical accuracy of the Old Testament. And though the Hittite monuments leave unrevealed much which we would fain learn, yet they bring clearly to our knowledge an important early development of the posterity of the youngest son of Noah, and the Hittites must henceforth take their place along side of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Canaanites. All four rose to early eminence in the earth; the moral and religious character of three of them is sufficiently evidenced by their still existing remains, and that of the fourth is plainly stated in Scripture.

THE TURANIAN RACES.

We have now indicated the three leading groups of nations connected with the three sons of Noah as they appear in ancient and modern times. A very large number of nations which have existed and exist still in the earth are, however, as we have said, not included in any of these groups—the Turanian races, the Chinese, and most of the nations who speak the hundreds of African languages. No certain knowledge of the racial connections of these nations and peoples has as yet been attained. Ethnographers and linguists differ among themselves on the question at present. Science is therefore silent, or ventures only to make suggestions; it cannot announce any conclusions. But from this very fact it is clear that the nations we have omitted are not those who have made history. Had they exerted any great influence in the world, their genealogy would not have been thus obscured, nor the family connections of their language lost.

Great peoples preserve their archives just as noble families preserve their genealogies, and can trace back their family tree to its founder. It is only the most illiterate who can scarcely tell the names of their great-grandfathers, and only as to the less influential! And degenerate peoples of the earth can any doubt exist as to their true ancestry.

This will be seen at once by a glance at the names of the Turanian group of languages. There are few among them known generally at all, and fewer still known to fame. The family embraces the greater portion of the Asiatic peoples—the Tartars, Mongols, Thibetians, Tamulians, and aboriginal Indian peoples, as well as in Europe such nations as the Finns and the Lapps; and it is possible that the Malay inhabitants of the Eastern Archipelago and the Central African nations also belong to it, but it is by no means certain. None of them have in any obvious or notorious way shared in the distinctive fortunes of either Shem or Japheth; none of them have attained any great religious supremacy, or exercised any marked spiritual influence in the earth like the Semites; nor have any of them secured vast extension or enlargement like the sons of Japheth.

If we could, as we doubtless shall be able to do in due time, connect them by means of their languages with their parent stock, it would in no way affect our conclusions as to the fulfilment of Noah’s wonderful prophecy; for just as a family of great musicians may have some unmusical members, or a family of painters some who have no talent for art, so a great family of nations, characterized as a whole, and in its leading members by certain peculiarities, may have inferior members wholly destitute of such distinctive features. Such characteristics as these nations do possess, associate them rather with the Hamitic races than with either of the other two, and the special destiny of Ham’s descendants attaches very clearly to some of them. So markedly have servitude and slavery been the portion of the coloured races of the Dark Continent, that it is difficult not to believe that they are descendants of the youngest son of Noah. It has indeed generally been assumed that they are so,—as, for instance, by Dr. Keith in his admirable unanswered and unanswerable “Evidence of Prophecy;”¹ but it must be admitted in the light of modern linguistic discovery that this is an assumption which it is as impossible to prove as to disprove.²

¹ “Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion derived from the Literal Fulfilment of Prophecy,” by Dr. Alexander Keith, p. 513, 37th edition.

² We have consulted on this point Robert Cust, Esq., the well-known writer on languages, and our inquiry referred especially to the large family of dialects known as the Bantu languages of Central Africa, which extend from the east to the west of the continent, and from the south of the Sudan to the borders of Cape Colony, embracing thus nearly the southern half of Africa, and including hundreds of large tribes and nations—all the languages spoken on the Congo and its great tributaries, the Zulu and Kaffre tongues with their sub-divisions, though not the Hottentot. As regards these languages, Mr. Cust says: ‘The Bantu family is quite distinct and separate from any other linguistic family; it has no affinity whatsoever to any, either in structure or vocabulary. How it came into existence is a secret reserved for the next century. We have not a tittle of evidence to hang a theory upon. It will be safe to say nothing, because we know nothing; nor can I for a moment admit that the Berber, Galla, Agau, etc., are Semitic tongues in any sense—they are Hamitic.”

Language does not as yet indicate the connection, but on the other hand it gives no counter-indication. In the case of the Central African races, history cannot enable us to decide their origin any more than language, for Central Africa may be said to have no history. Geography, however, points distinctly to a Hamitic source for all the populations of Africa. South-western Asia was the cradle of the human race, and the nature of the case requires, consequently, that Africa should have been entered from its north-eastern quarter—not across the Isthmus of Suez only, but also from the shores of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to the south of it. The early Hamitic Chaldeans had ships, and were great traders by sea to these regions, as we know. Now as Ethiopia, Nubia, and Egypt were unquestionably peopled by Hamites, we have no reason to doubt that it was the same with the rest of the continent.

Conquest, commerce, and colonization have, in the course of ages, introduced many other elements—Arabs, Moors, Greeks, Romans, English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch. But in considering the dark races as one and all descended from Ham, we take the most probable, and therefore the most scientific, ground. As long as no whit of evidence can be adduced for an opposite theory, we are justified in assuming from geographical probabilities, and from the marvellous and long-continued social degradation of the people, that the condition of the population of the Dark Continent illustrates and fulfils the brief but pregnant foreview of Noah as to the posterity of his youngest son.

Four men and four women were saved in the ark; who were the latter? We know the names and characters of the men, but Scripture gives no particulars of the women. Noah’s wife was doubtless a godly woman, and so, in all probability, the wives of Shem and Japheth. Ham’s unfilial (not becoming a child) and impious character suggests the question as to the sort of wife such a man would have been likely to choose. Can the foreseen character of his posterity, which was to blight them with the doom of servitude in the earth, be traceable to the mother’s character as well as to that of the father? We must remember that Noah was five hundred years old when he begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and six hundred years old at the time of the flood, so that the young men had lived for a century in the midst of that ungodly antediluvian race, one of whose specially recorded sins was the contraction of unequal marriages. Ham, though actually one of the godly family, may, like others, have taken to himself a wife of Canaanite origin (as Esau afterwards intermarried with the daughters of Heth and Canaan). If so—and there is nothing in Scripture to forbid the thought, and much, on the other hand, to suggest it—may there not lie in this fact an explanation of more difficulties than one? Not only would it account for the character of the family of Noah’s youngest son, as evidenced afterwards in their conduct, but it may furnish an explanation of the remarkable physical differences which existed in the very earliest ages between the Hamites and the rest of mankind.

REVIEW OF THE Facts.

We have now indicated the three groups of nations descended respectively from the three sons of Noah, including all those whose ancestry can be undoubtedly ascertained. We have consequently before us the facts on which must be based any valid reply to the question, Has the second section of the Divine programme of the world’s history been fulfilled ?

We recall first the dark foreview which it gives of the descendants of HAM, and we inquire, Does the state of the Hamitic peoples of this day justify it? We look round the world, we see many ruling races, foremost among which is the Anglo-Saxon, girdling the globe with its empires, and holding in subjection men of all creeds and colours. We see Europe and America in the forefront of civilization and power—Asia enormously behindhand (in the 19th century), and Africa almost immeasurably in the rear.

Europe and America call Japheth father; and even India, if we except its degraded aboriginal hill-tribes, is Aryan or Japhethic. China and the Turanian races of Asia cannot be adduced in evidence at all, as their ancestry is uncertain; the Jews and the Arabs are Shemites, and there remains only poor, dark, degraded Africa to tell us the present condition of the descendants of Ham. The distinguishing feature of Africa is slavery. The low type of its populations morally and intellectually is such that liberty and independence, to say nothing of rule and dominion over others, is to them impossible. To tyrants at home, and to slave-raiders from afar, they submit without a thought of struggling for their liberties. Disunion and mutual distrust reign among neighbouring tribes, and forbid their uniting for mutual defence. Public spirit is wholly wanting; the bracing and elevating influence of true religion is replaced by degrading superstition, and hence despotic tyranny and cruel devil-worship reign unopposed. The woman is slave to the man, the subject to the chief, the petty tyrant to the great tyrant, and the negro races as a whole to the white races. In America, until recently, millions of Africa’s sable sons served the children of Japheth as bond-slaves. In Egypt, the Hamitic races have for ages served the Semitic; the degradation of the land is indeed wonderful (or full of wonder), and especially so when contrasted with its early glory.

It is long since its days of dominion passed away for ever. Nebuchadnezzar, a Semitic monarch, was its first conqueror; and Ezekiel, the prophet of the Captivity, announced its fate from that time forth in a very distinct and detailed way. “It shall be a base kingdom; it shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt itself any more above the nations.” “I will diminish them,” said God, “that they shall no more rule over the nations, . . . The sword shall come upon Egypt, and great pain shall be in Ehiopia, when the slain shall fall in Egypt, and they shall take away her multitude, and her foundations shall be broken down.” “They also that uphold Egypt shall fall… . I will also destroy the idols, and I will cause their images to cease out of Noph; and there shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt: and I will put a fear in the land of Egypt. . . . The pomp of her strength shall cease in her, . . . a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters shall go into captivity.” (Ezek. xxix, xxx)

When the Persian power succeeded the Babylonian, Cambyses—a Median, and therefore Aryan or Japhethic monarch— conquered Egypt, and treated the people with barbarous cruelty. As Isaiah had predicted, they were given over “into the hand of a cruel lord, and a fierce king ruled over them.” The Persians oppressed them so severely that they were driven again and again to revolt, but each time they were subdued with fresh cruelties. When the Persian empire fell, Alexander the Great—a Grecian, and therefore another Aryan or Japhethic conqueror—became their master, and left the city of Alexandria as a memento of his dominion in the land. After his death Egypt fell to the share of his general, Ptolemy, whose successors governed it for many generations, the first few fairly well; but, as Strabo asserts, “all after the third very ill, being corrupted by luxury.” This dynasty, after reigning 294 years, ended in the suicide of the infamous Cleopatra. Octavius Caesar then reduced Egypt to a Roman province (30 B.C.), and for 670 years it was governed by prefects sent from Rome, or—after the division of the empire —from Constantinople. Then succeeded the Saracen dominion, when Omar conquered Egypt, and burned the invaluable Alexandrian library of 400,000 volumes, sinking the already base kingdom lower than ever before, by leaving it a prey to ignorance and superstition. For six centuries this Saracenic rule lasted; and then a dynasty of actual slaves ruled Egypt for 267 years. (Until A.D. 1517.)

THE MAMELUKS were Circassian or Turkish slaves bought young and trained to military service by the Sultans of Egypt, who grew insolent at last, slew their sovereign, and usurped the government of the country. Here then were the once proud Egyptians become servants of servants indeed! The rule of the Mameluks was a succession of “wars, battles, injuries, and rapines.” Twenty-four Turkish and twenty-three Circassian sultans succeeded each other, the last being hanged before one of the gates of Cairo by Selim, the Turkish emperor, who put an end to the Mameluk government, and annexed Egypt to the Ottoman empire, to which nominally it still (then in the 19th century) belongs.

Thus, for twenty-five long centuries, the Egyptian descendants of Ham have been in subjection to successive forms of Semitic and Aryan rule; never once independent, never ruled even by a native viceroy, never able to throw off the yoke, much less to impose their authority on others, they have continued a kingdom, but have been, and are, “the basest of the kingdoms.” “A servant of servants will he be unto his brethren,” said Noah; and such is Egypt to this day. Look where we will the world over, nowhere can we see Hamitic races in a position of supremacy.

But it was not always thus. The earliest empires of antiquity were Hamitic. Nimrod conquered Semitic peoples; Egypt held Israel in bondage. In chronological order, supremacy in the earth fell first to the Hamites, then to the Shemites or Semitic nations, and lastly, up to the present time, to the descendants of Japheth.

Now, here a remarkable and most interesting fact claims our attention, and is in itself a strong argument for the inspiration of this Noahic prophecy. So far from there being any sign of its fulfilment in the days of Moses, or even at the latest date to which skeptical criticism assigns the authorship of the Pentateuch, appearances were all entirely the other way. No human foresight would have anticipated degradation and servile subjection for the Hamitic races in those early ages. Things looked as if nothing could have well been more mistaken than the prediction. All the greatest empires of the earliest antiquity were Hamitic: the mighty and long-continued kingdom of Egypt; the great empire of Nimrod, of whose gigantic and magnificent cities and temples we have ocular evidence in our own day; all the seven nations of Canaan; and above all, this mighty, warlike, extensive, and long-lasting empire of the Hittites— all were Hamitic. Wherever the eye turned, the posterity of the youngest son of Noah would in those early ages have been observed to be in the ascendant. While Abraham was still nothing but a sheik of a pastoral tribe wandering over the quiet uplands of Palestine, the Hamitic Pharaoh surrounded by his princes was already reigning in state in Egypt; and centuries later, when Abraham’s posterity were groaning under cruel bondage in the land of Ham, its proud monarch refused to liberate his oppressed captives. Even when a first installment of fulfilment occurred in the conquest of the Canaanites by the Israelites under Joshua, the mighty empire of the Hittites remained, and continued to hold by far the larger part of the territory promised to the seed of Abraham. Just as Cain, who was cursed from the earth which had opened her mouth to receive his brother’s blood from his hand, went out from the presence of the Lord, and with his descendants built cities, invented arts, cultivated music, grew rich and great and wicked, so with the descendants of Noah’s youngest son. Their doom of degradation did not overtake them all at once. God’s great judgments linger; they are slow, but sure. The nations of Canaan were not expelled until their iniquity was full; the Hamites generally did not sink into servile subjection to their brethren until they had proved their utter unfitness to be the leading races of the world.

A thousand years is with the Lord only as one day. The Lord was not slack concerning His promise of supremacy to Shem and Japheth, but He was in no haste to vindicate His own truth and faithfulness. The two great branches of the Hamitic family —the African and the Asiatic—were both permitted to rise into eminence in the earliest ages of history:

“For the last three thousand years the world has been mainly indebted for its advancement to the Semitic and Indo-European races, but it was otherwise in the first ages. Egypt and Babylon, Mizraim and Nimrod—both descendants of Ham—led the way and acted as the pioneers of mankind in the various untrodden fields of art, literature, and science. Alphabetic writing, astronomy, history, chronology, architecture, plastic art, sculpture, navigation, agriculture, textile industry, seem all of them to have had their origin in one or other of these two countries.” (Rawlinson’s “Ancient Monarchies,” vol. i, p. 60)

Is this strange? No, but it is in harmony with the course of Divine providence revealed to us throughout Scripture: “That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” “Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” These sons of Ham had ample time and a wide sphere allowed them in which to show forth what was in them, in which to display the character that was subsequently to bring down upon them the degradation predicted. God never inflicts undeserved judgments; He waits until men fill up the measure of their iniquity. Had servitude overtaken the Hamites from the first, it might have seemed an arbitrary and unjust infliction —a thing of which the providential government of God affords no instance. He renders to every man according to his works, What a man sows, that he also reaps; and what is true of individuals, is true also of nations and of races. Egypt and Babylon, the Canaanites and the Hittites, one and all fell into the lowest depths of idolatry, and into the vilest forms of sensualism, cruelty, and sin; they perished in their own corruption, and were the victims of their own iniquities. They deserved the degradation that in after ages overtook them, and sank not into servitude ere they had proved themselves unworthy of supremacy.

The Hamitic races have left us—what? The inheritance of great and influential religions, like the Semites? Descendants who form the leading nations of the earth to-day, like the Japhethites? A rich and precious literature moulding still the minds of men? No; none of these, They have left us—the pyramids of Egypt, the monstrous carvings of Memphis and Thebes, the masses of masonry buried in the mounds of Nimrud; boastful, vainglorious inscriptions by the hundred, with bas-relief presentations, all too vivid, of their horrible cruelties, their devastating wars, and their degrading superstitions. We know what their religion and their morals must have been from these, as well as from the assertions of history. Nineveh, Babylon, and Egypt were, besides all of them, enemies and oppressors of Israel. Ezekiel’s description of the idolatry, the pride, and the wickedness of Egypt present an awfully dark picture of the nation.

They are described by contemporary historians as a luxurious, unwarlike, vicious, and faithless people. “Such men are evidently born not to command, but to obey; they are altogether unworthy of liberty, and slavery is the fittest for them, as they are fittest for slavery.” For “righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people.” Where now are the Hamite races? What thrones do they occupy? what sceptres do they wield? what influence do they exert in the earth? They have disappeared from the stage of history as rulers, leaders, actors, almost as completely as if they had never been. They continue to exist, but as degraded and enslaved peoples; living witnesses of the truth of God, almost as great a miracle as the Jews themselves.

And next we inquire, What about the religious supremacy of Shem? Has God in any peculiar sense been the God of His descendants, and have they held Hamitic races in subjection ?

The answer to this question is the simple but all-comprehensive statement that Shem was the father of Abraham. As we shall see more fully in a later section, all the true religion in the world comes to it through Abraham, and thus through Shem. The only three religions on earth which have any knowledge at all of the one living and true God are Semitic. Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism (which, defective and even blasphemous as it is, is yet infinitely nearer the truth than any form of idol-worship or “fetish ”)—all three flow from Abraham, the Hebrew, as their human fountainhead; and thus from the second son of Noah—Shem. God has been the Lord God of Shem in an altogether peculiar and distinctive sense.

The Saviour of the world descended from this son of Noah. Revealed religion has flowed through Semitic channels. This is a fact that none can deny, and a fact that must have been foreseen, and that well deserved to be foretold. We do not dwell further on it here, as it must come under consideration in our next chapter in another connection. Every psalm of David, and every Christian hymn and sacred song of later days, every authentic narrative of the earliest ages of humanity, the sublime law of Sinai, and the beatitudes and parables of Christ, the visions of prophecy, the teachings of apostles, the testimony of the martyrs, the missions of modern Christianity—all that has lifted our world from ruin and misery and darkness and death, all that has purified and ennobled it and opened to it a door of hope for the future—all has come to it through Shem.

It is true that the bud of Judaism, when it blossomed into the flower of Christianity, exhaled its heavenly perfume far and wide, and knew no distinction of races. The sons of Japheth and the sons of Ham shared in the great salvation. It was to the Jew first and also to the Gentile, but the point is that it came through Shem. Religious supremacy belonged to his line. No fact in human history is clearer than this. The prediction has been fully accomplished, and the future will exhibit this even more clearly than the present; for the unspeakable blessings of the ages to come all flow to our race through Christ, who, as Son of man, is the offspring of Shem.

And it is equally clear that the prediction as to Japheth has been and is abundantly accomplished. Not only were the Medo-Persian, Grecian, and Roman empires, which ruled the world in their day, Japhethic, or Aryan (meaning, in Sanskrit, lordly, or of good family), but so are the vast majority of the nations of modern Europe Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic alike, with all their colonies throughout the world, as well as the United States of America, and some of the leading nations of Asia, including India, Armenia, and Persia. When we remember what the dominion of Greece and Rome were, and what the dominion of the Teutonic race now is, to say nothing of the vast power of Russia and the Slavonic nations, there can be no question as to the superior dominion which has fallen to this branch of the human family. The British empire alone exceeds the old Roman empire both in area and in population. For industrial and commercial development and for wealth it has no equal in the world, and never had even in bygone ages. No previous kingdom ever extended its dominions into all parts of the world. And yet it represents only half the Anglo-Saxon race, and that race is only one out of a multitude of Japhethic kingdoms.

Some 300 millions of mankind are under the government of Great Britain; and if we add to this the sixty millions governed by the United States, we may say a third of the human family is under the dominion of the Anglo-Saxons alone! The Germans and French rule another 150 millions, and the Russians 100 millions more. The Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and other European nations rule about another 100 millions; so that probably half the human race is even now under the government of the sons of Japheth, and that in all parts of the world. Here is indeed enlargement and dominion on a vast and long-enduring scale!

The HAMITIC races lost all rule and empire twenty-five centuries ago; they now count for nothing among the powers of the world. The SEMITIC races were never greatly enlarged—never great conquerors, save for a short period in the Saracenic era. They have ruled the world by another weapon than the sword; they rule it still, and will rule it for ever— religiously. The Japhethic races are, and have for over 2,000 years been, supreme among the children of men. The round globe itself is the only measure of their enlargement. They influence even China and Japan and the vast expanses of Central Asia and Central Africa. The North Pole and the South alike are visited by them. They girdle the globe with submarine cables, cross its continents with their railways, and its oceans with their steam-ships, carry their commerce to its most distant shores, and force the unwilling heathen into friendly intercourse. Moreover, they dwell in the tents of Shem both spiritually and physically; they share by faith the blessings of Abraham’s covenant, and they occupy and influence lands once occupied by Semitic peoples.

Is not all this fulfilled prophecy on the grandest of scale: The entire ethnological development of the posterity of Noah foreseen and foretold when as yet the patriarch himself still lived! Did he guess how all this prolonged future would turn out? Was it by chance he assigned these widely different destinies to the descendants of his three sons? How came he to make no mistake? If Moses puts these words into his lips, why did he delineate a future absolutely contrary to every indication of his times? Why did he not make Noah assign supremacy to Ham, seeing, as he did, Hamitic empires all around him? Why did he not assign enlargement to Shem, and, as he knew little of Japheth, put the servitude down to his account? It would have seemed to human foresight a much more likely outline of the future. But no. Moses had nothing to do with the prophecy save as an editor. Noah had nothing to do with it save as an utterer. God Himself was and must have been its Author; and the second father of the human race was and must have been one of the “holy men of old,” who “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

Continued in Chapter III. The Abrahamic Programme – Part I.

All sections of The Divine Programme of The World’s History By H. Grattan Guinness