SHEMITIC NATIONS or SIIEMITES. The different nations generally comprised under this name, viz., the Assyrians. the Chaldeans or Babylonians, the Syrians, Pbeni eians, Hebrews, Arabs, and Ethiopians, are all treated specially in the course of this work; it only remains here to add a few observations on the characteristics ascribed to them all in common, and on the influence they have exercised upon the history and development of humanity. As regards the language, the poverty of the inflections, the well-nigh absolute impossibility of expressing abstract ideas, the general absence of compound verbs and substantives, and the primitive state of the syntax in the Shemitic; as contrasted with the wealth and vigor of the Aryan, have been noticed in the previous article. From this arises, as an almost natural consequence, the general inferiority of Shemitic literature to what we emphatically call "classical literature." Certain most important forms of Indo-Germanic poetry, for instance, are completely wanting in the Shemitic, such as the epopee and the drama; although, on the other hand, the peculiar ancient form of Arabic poetry—the Kasida—and the grand bursts of pathos found in the religious books • of the Hebrews are vainly sought in Indo-European literature. Again, a primitive state of law seems to have developed among the Aryan nations, the tilde characteristic of which was a recognition, albeit a dim enough one, of individual rights, in as far as they did not war against the complex unity of the " state." With the Sliemites, in the absence of that talent for organization and conciliation which is so essential a mark of the Indo-Europeans, we find either a patriarchal, an anarchical, or a despotical kind of government. Science and philosophy, in the larger sense of the word, arc the almost exclusive property of the Aryans. The inferiority of the Shemites iu these respects, however, is amply counterbalanced by the sublime place they take as the ethical teachers of all humanity. How the hard and narrow egotism which, not
quite unjustly, is ascribed to them ever came to bear and ripen those grand moral maxims with which we meet in the earliest Jewish records, and which, wrought up to their purest idealism, form the shining glory of the New Testament, is a problem of /chid' some seek the solution in a peculiar intensity of character inherent in the Shemitic races; while others account for it by direct " inspiration :" The same may be said of that monotheism which belonged, in the first instance, to the Hi brews out of all the nations of the earth. It is a grave, mistake, however, to describe, as Bevan does, the Shemites indiscriminately as monotheists. Babylon and Assyria, and Syria or Phenicia, and the ante-Islamic Arabs, were neither more nor less polytheistic than the early or inhabitants of India. And, we may well add, not befere return from the abylonian exile are the Jews themselves, as a body, to be considered as real monctlie ists. But eversince, both they, and, from the time of Mohammed, the Arabs, have been the representatives of a more austere and exclusive dogma of the unity of the godhead than a great part of the civilized world has found good to accept up to this day. Both Christianity and Islam, the most powerful religious agents, the one for nearly 2,000 years, the other for about 1200, are in their origin Shemitic, and their influence need not here be enlarged upon. For what we owe to the Shemites in the field of industry and inventions, and the civilization these carried with them wherever they were im ported. we need only refer to PIIENICIA. Nor ought we to forget that the very alphabet itself is of Shemitic origin.