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The one, tall, dark, and wiry, with pure, Semitic features, and the limbs of a giant, was Magro, the famous Carthaginian captain, whose name was still a terror on every shore, from Gaul to the Euxine.
The term Semitic is applied to that family of languages which are native in Southwestern Asia, and which are supposed to have been spoken by the descendants of Shem, the son of Noah. They are the Hebrew, Aramaeic, Arabic, the ancient Egyptian or Coptic, the Chaldaic, and Phoenician.
This theory, however, tempting as it is by its simplicity, cannot be accepted in this unqualified form. Advancing knowledge has made it certain that the ancient civilization, including the religion, is Semitic in character. The assumption therefore of a purely non-Semitic culture for southern Babylonia is untenable.
Statuary is inert and massive, and appears inseparable from the buildings to which it is attached. Literature, with the exception of the Hebrew, is hardly less monotonous than art. The religion of the Semitic nations, the Hebrews excepted, so far from containing in it a purifying element, tended to degrade its votaries by feeding the flame of sensual and revengeful passion.
Here is the point, where the two great intellectual currents of the Aryan and Semitic worlds flow together, in that the long-expected Messiah of the Jews was recognised as the Logos, the true son of God, and that he opened or revealed to every man the possibility to become what he had always been, but had never before apprehended, the highest thought, the Word, the Logos, the Son of God.
But, fortunately, a language once developed is not blotted out in toto; it merely outlives its usefulness and is gradually supplanted, its successor retaining many traces of its origin. So, just as Latin, for example, has its living representatives in Italian and the other Romance tongues, the language of Assyria is represented by cognate Semitic languages.
It is not, however, into the character of these primeval inhabitants that we have here to inquire, but into the ethnic affinities and characteristics of that race, whatever it was, which first established an important kingdom in the lower part of the plain a kingdom which eventually became an empire. According to the ordinary theory, this race was Aramaic or Semitic.
The Semitic-Babylonian Version, on the other hand, is mainly occupied with events that led up to the acts of creation, and it concerns our problem to inquire how far those episodes were of Semitic and how far of Sumerian origin. A further question arises as to whether some strands of the narrative may not at one time have existed in Sumerian form independently of the Creation myth.
There can be no reasonable doubt that his sixth Babylonian dynasty represents the line of kings which ruled in Babylon during the period known as that of the Old Empire in Assyria. Now this line, which was Semitic, appears to have been placed upon the throne by the Assyrians, and to have been among the first results of that conquering energy which the Assyrians at this time began to develop.
In the Semitic and Chinese races this inner symbolism of the mind, with reference to the interpretation of nature, was less tenacious, intense, and productive, and they soon freed themselves from their mental bonds in order to rise to the conception of the absolute Being, distinct from the world.
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