These points being premised, we can clear away the fogs which have been gathered around this little luminous spot in the early history of the world, and can trace at least the principal ethnic lines of radiation from it. Though the writer gives us three main branches of affiliation of the children of Noah, he really refers to six principal lines of migration, three of them belonging to that multifarious progeny of Ham, in which he seems to include both the Turanian and Negroid types of our ordinary classifications, as well as some of the brown and yellow races.
One of the lines of affiliation of Ham leads eastward and is not traced; but if the Cushite people, who are said to have gone to the land which in earlier antediluvian times was that of 'gold and bedolach and shoham stone,' that is, along the fertile valley of Susiana, were those primitive people, preceding the Elamites of history, who are said to have spoken an agglutinate language,[78] then we have at least one stage of this migration. A second line leads west to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, to Egypt and to North Africa. A third passes south-westward through Southern Arabia and across the Red Sea into interior Africa. To the sons of Japhet are ascribed two lines of migration, one through Asia Minor and the northern coasts of the Mediterranean; another north-west, around the Black Sea. The Semites would seem to have been a less wandering people at the first, but subsequently to have encroached on and mingled with the Hamites, and especially on that western line of migration leading to the Mediterranean. All this can be gathered from undisputed national names in the several lines of migration above sketched, without touching on the more obscure and doubtful names or referring to tribes which remained near the original centre. We must, however, inquire a little more particularly into the movements bearing on Palestine and Egypt.
[78] Sayce (_Hibbert Lectures_) and Bagster's _Records of the Past_. Inscriptions of Cyrus published in the last volume of the latter appear to set at rest the vexed questions relating to early Elam. It would seem that in the earliest times Cushites and Semitic Elamites contended for the fertile plains and the mountains east of the Tigris, and were finally subjugated by Japhetic Medes and Persians. Thus this region first formed a part of the Cushite Nimrodic empire (Genesis ii. 11, x. 8); it then became the seat of a conquering Elamite power (Genesis xiv. 1 to 4); and was finally a central part of the Medo-Persian empire. All this agrees with the Bible and the inscriptions, as well as in the main with Herodotus.