To these early civilizations in the old world, may we add any from the new, and believe in a great antiquity of the highest civilization of the _red_ race? The trace of an early civilization in Mexico and Peru, bearing many remarkable points of resemblance to the civilization of Chaldæa, is undoubted. This _may_ have been passed on by the Chinese at a very early date. But there is nothing to show that the identity in some of the features of their culture extended to an identity in their respective epochs.
[Sidenote: Assyrians, Phœnicians, Hebrews.]
A greater destiny, though a more tardy development, awaited the pure Semitic and Japhetic races. Among the former we might notice many nations which started into life during the thousand years following that date of 3000 B.C., which we have taken as our starting-point. Of the Assyrians we have already spoken. The next most conspicuous stand the Phœnicians, who, either in their early home upon the seacoast of Syria, or in their second home, the sea itself, or in one of their countless colonies, came into contact with almost every one of the great nations of antiquity, from the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Israelites, to the Greeks and Romans.
But it is upon the life and history of the nomadic Shemites, and among them of one chosen people, that our thoughts chiefly rest. Among the prouder citied nations which inhabited the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, dwelt a numerous people, more or less nomadic in their habits, under the patriarchal form of government which belonged to their mode of life. Among such a people the chief of one particular family or clan was summoned by a Divine call to escape from the influence of the idolatrous nations around, and to live that vagrant pastoral life which was in such an age most fitted for the needs of purity and religious contemplation. It is as something like a wandering Bedouin chieftain that we must picture Abraham, while we watch him, now joining with one small city king against another, now driven by famine to travel with his flocks and herds as far as Egypt. Then again he returns, and settles in the fertile valley of the Jordan, where Lot leaves him, and, seduced by the luxuries of a town life, quits his flocks and herds and settles in Sodom, till driven out again by the destruction of that city. And we are not now reading dry dynastic lists, but the very life and thought of an early time.[50] To us--whose lives are so unsimple--the mere picture of this simple nomadic life of early days would have an interest and a charm; but it has a double charm and interest viewed by the light of the high destiny to which Abraham and his descendants were called. Plying the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade, these people lived poor and despised beside the rich monarchies of Egypt or Chaldæa; one more example, if one more were needed, how wide apart lie the empires of spiritual and of material things.