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Show I I 138 TilE NATIONS OF THE tat~d the Egyptians, .Assyrians, and Greeks, or relapsed into complete barbarism, but never felt any inward impulse of their own to reproduce nature in sculpture and painting. . . Our researches on Shemitic art clearly cstabhsh the fact, that, h1gbly gifted races may be unartistic, and that neither wealth nor love of display, neither inventive genius nor culture, can create art among them. IV .-TilE NATIONS OF THE CUNEIFORM WRITING. TnE country lying east of tho homestead of tho Shcmites, embracing the plain of Mesopotamia, and the highlands flanking the Tigris up to the Persian desert, was in antiquity always the scat of great cmpil'cs,-cxpanding principally towards the west, often tlU'catcning and sometimes subduing the Asiatic coast of the Mediterranean, and extending its influence to Europe. The populations dwelling along the Euphrates and Tigris, and on the Armenian and Persian ta,ble-land-wcre not homogeneous. Cushite, Shomit,ic, Arian, and Turanian elements struggled here against one another: the sceptre of tho West .Asiatic empire often changed hands amongst them, but always within the limits mentioned above; being transferred from Nineveh to Babylon, from Babylon to Ecbatana and Persepolis; again to Seleucia, thence to Ctcsiphon, and at last to Bagdad. The national peculiarities of this empire have remained in many respects a puzzle for the ethnologists. What was the precise character of the languages of Assyria and Babylonia-what the seat of the Scythians who invaded the empire, and ruled it for twenty-eight years; and what the national type of the Modes, and perhaps even of tho Parthians,- are difficulties not yet solved, which require further investigation. All modern chronologists and philologists agree about the ancient Persians, that they were pure and unmixed Japetidos, or IndoEuropeans; so much so, that the name by which they themselves c.allcd their rac.e-Ari~ns or Iranians-has been adopted for dcsignatmg the pocuhar fam1ly of the white race to which they belong. The Mcde~118 and the P~rthians, on the other side, are classed among the TUt'amans, or Scyth1ans, or Turk-Tartars. As to the Assyrians and Babylonians, the following is the result of the latest researches : The Chevalier BuNSEN, -whose eminently su<l'o-estive works will . f h h" 00 remam o : e 1ghest value, even when a more thorough knowledge of the subJects he treats may have modified many of his hypotheses ~8 According to. BTRADO, .the difference of the Mode and Persian langungos wna n diff~ l once of mo.ro d1~le.ct: still, our scholnra unanimously designate tho Scythian (or 1-'uro.IUO. n), second msortpt1on of llohistun, by the word .Median. CUNEU'ORM WRI'l'ING. 139 and conclusions; MAX MULLmt, the well-known Sanscrit scholar; and LEPsrus, the celebrated Egypiologist; arc the foremost of a school which tries to find out a union between the Shemitic and the Arian races, and to derive all the languages of Europe and of Asia from one common origi.llal stock. .According to their theory, the languages of the old world may be classed into four distinct families: llamitic or Cushito, Sltemitic, Turanian (including tho Chinese, the Tul'k-Tal't.:'Lt'S and Malays,) and Arian. Proceeding farther, they ass et that the Hamitic is but an earlier form of the hcmitic, whilst tho Arian is for them nothing more than the development of the Turauian. llaving r duccd the four families to two, tlley seck a union between the Shcmitic and Arian, and believe they have found the traces of this original unity, first iu the ancient Egyptian, and again in the Babylonian and Assyrian.119 liowcvcr, these conclusions arc rather speculative hypotheses than acquiecd scientific facts. Lcpsius acknowledges that the Coptic forms a branch as distinct and as distant from the Shemitic, as the Shemitic is from the Arian; whilst Bunsen and Max Muller admit the same, by placing that which they call the sacred language of Assyria and Babylonia" between llamitism, or the ante-historical Shemitism in Egypt, and tho historical Shcmitic languages ;"120 and again, by stating that "the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylon exhibit to us a language in the transition from primordial to historical Shemitisln." 121 Ronan, on the other hand, cannot imagine how any Shemitic language could have been written in a non-Shcmitic alphabet: "In early antiquity, language nnd nlphnbet aro inscpnrable: tho cuneiform characters mny lmvc been adopted by nations having no nlphnbet of their own; but how should the imperfect, ideographic, system of Assyrio. nnd llabylon hnvc servod for writing languages which had a more dovoloped sy~ tcm of writing of their own?" Besides, according to him, the national history of the Assyrians and Babylonians has no Shemitic characters. "Shornitic lifo is simplo and nrwrow, patriarchal, and hostile to centrali~r\tion: T~e Shcmitc dislikes manunl labor, nnd the patienco and disciplino-suob ns 1:nrsed grgnnt10 structures liko those of Egypt and Assyria,-are wnntiug with him. At N1novoh, on the contrrtry, wo moet with a great dovolopmont of matcrinl civiliza.tion, with. an absoluto mormrohy with flouri shing imitntivo art, with a grand style of Mohrtooturo, wrth a myth?· logy impr~gnatod with Arian ideas, with a tendency to see an incarnation of Godhead m tho king. and with a spirit of conquest and oentralizatiou." m lluNs •;N and MAx Miir,um, Outlines of the Pliilo3opfly of History :-L&Pstus, Ist, Anordnung 1md Verwandtsclwft du Semitischeu, Indischen, AUpcrsischen und .Altretliiopisclim Alphabelts; t\lld Hd, Ur.!p,·ung und Verwandtsclwft der Zafllworter. 120 JN.ppolytus, III, p. 183, soqq. :-Outlines, I, p. 183, soq,q. 121 Livre 1, Chap. II. e 8, 4. |