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More than one historian is inclined to believe that the Kushites and Shemites were less distantly related than the Hebrew writers pretend. Almost every day criticism discovers new points of resemblance between the Jews before the captivity and certain of their neighbours, such as the Phoenicians.
The terms used by Berosus are vague enough, while the Hebraic tradition seems to have preserved the memory of only two races who lived one after the other in Chaldæa, namely, the Kushites and the Shemites. And may not these groups, though distinct, have been more closely connected than the Jews were willing to admit?
It is remarkable that the time of this first contact of Media with Assyria a contact taking place when Assyria was in her prime, and Media was only just emerging from a long period of weakness and obscurity is almost exactly that which Ctesias selects as a day of the great revolution whereby the Empire of the East passed from the hands of the Shemites into those of the Arians.
On the other hand, the name of Ethiopians, often applied by the same authors to the dwellers upon the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, recalls the relationship which attached the Kushites of Asia to those of Africa in the Hebrew genealogies. We have still stronger reasons of the same kind for affirming that the Shemites or Semites occupied an important place in Chaldæa from the very beginning.
In the study of ethnology we first recognized the more civilized races. The Aryan, Hamites, Shemites, and Chinese, and the rest were the weeds of humanity the barbarian and savage, sometimes called Turanians. But, when we come carefully to study these lower people, what numbers of races are discovered!
The most approved commentators properly apply the text to the Canaanites, whom Providence afterwards dispossessed of their territories in Palestine, and gave them to the children of Shem, and so the Canaanites became the slaves of the Shemites for a limited period. But to prove that it does not refer to the Negroes of North and Central Africa, I may be allowed to produce the following reasons:
The Shemites were located, generally speaking, between the territories occupied by the sons of Ham and Japheth. Aram, one of the sons of Japheth, settled in Syria near Damascus in northern part of Mesopotamia and through his son, Uz, gave the name of Uz to the territory, thus showing how that branch of the Hebrews came from western Mesopotamia, a fact now confirmed by modern discovery.
The prophecy of Noah was not only fulfilled in the case of Ham and his punishment but in the blessing of the Others. During that period of the ascendancy of the Shemites not much was known of the descendants of Japheth. But now for more than two thousand years his have been the dominant race of the earth.
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