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If we turn to the religion of the Iranian or Persian branch of the Aryan family, we find among them also the traces of a primitive monotheism; and that it was not borrowed from Semitic sources, through the descendants of Abraham or others, Ebrard has shown clearly in the second volume of his "Apologetics." Max Müller also maintains the identity of the Iranian faith with that of the Indo-Aryans.
The conclusion is that the x or conquering race was Semitic and brought to Egypt the Semitic elements in the Egyptian religion and a culture originally derived from that of the Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia, the non-Semitic parent of all Semitic civilizations. The question now arises, how did this Semitic people reach Egypt?
The history of the god is that of the tribe; the gods are too little independent of their human clients to form a society by themselves, or to give rise to stories about their doings. This is one side of the natural history of the Semitic gods; but that history has another side.
While cautious philologists are slow in admitting distinct affinities between the generic families of speech, as the Semitic and Indo-European, which would be indicative of a common origin, they agree in the judgment, that, on account of the mutability of language, especially when unwritten, and while in its earlier stages, no conclusion adverse to the monogenist doctrine can be drawn from the diversities of speech now existing, or that are known to have existed at any past time.
The whole Semitic dramaturgy has come to seem to me a work of the imagination. The apostolic documents have changed in value and meaning to my eyes. Belief and truth have become distinct to me with a growing distinctness. Religious psychology has become a simple phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and absolute value.
It is, therefore, decidedly of importance to find that the Egyptian race, the creator of a third great religion, has also a large Semitic strain. In fact, the investigations of the last ten years appear to show that this Semitic strain it was which gave the Egyptian race its creative power and made possible the development of the Egyptian civilization.
Many of the more noted Stoic thinkers and teachers of the day came from Cilicia and had semitic blood in their veins. Athenodorus, the teacher of Cicero and Augustus, came from Tarsus, itself; and it is said that his grateful and admiring fellow citizens made him a hero upon his death and annually celebrated him in a memorial feast, a procedure very characteristic of the age.
If the serpent had not tempted Eve to break God's commandment, we should still be basking in Paradise." He looked at her curiously. "You believe that?" "Isn't it in the Bible?" she answered, seriously astonished. "Whatever the primitive Semitic allegorist may have thought, work is a blessing, not a curse." "Then you are an atheist!" Eileen recoiled from this strange young man.
Who, I say, will believe, when he really considers the matter, that where the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and our relations to them, are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and chivalry, and the Madonna, is to find its last word on this question in the institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest king had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines?
The existence of an independent goddess, unmarried and possessing all the attributes of the god, was contrary to the fundamental conceptions of the Semitic mind. Nevertheless we find in Canaan an Ashtoreth, whom the Greeks called Astarte, as well as a Baal. The cuneiform inscriptions have given us an explanation of the fact. Ashtoreth came from Babylonia.
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