Ethnology, though one of the youngest, is perhaps neither the least beautiful nor the least attractive of that fair sisterhood of sciences whose birth has rewarded the patient industry and inflexible love of truth which characterises the philosophy of the present day. It takes up the history of the world at the point where it is left by its elder sister Geology, and, following the same line of argument, strives to reduce to the same scientific mode of expression the apparent chaos of facts which have hitherto been looked upon as inexplicable by the general observer.
It is only within the limits of the present century that Geology was rescued from the dreams of cataclysms and convulsions which formed the staple of the science in the last century; and that step by step, by slow degrees, rocks have been classified and phenomena explained. All that picturesque wildness with which the materials seemed at first sight to be distributed over the world’s surface has been reduced to order, and they now lie arranged as clearly, and as certainly in the mind of a geologist, as if they had been squared by the tool of a mason and placed in order by the hand of a mechanic. So it is with Ethnology. Race has succeeded race;—all have been disturbed, some obliterated—many contorted—and sometimes the older, apparently, superimposed upon the newer. All at first sight is chaos and confusion, and it seems almost hopeless to attempt to unravel the mysteries of the long-forgotten past. It is true nevertheless, in Ethnology, as in the sister science, that no change on the world’s surface has taken place without leaving its mark. A race may be obliterated, or only crop up at the edge of some great basin of population; but it has left its traces either as fossil remains in the shape of buildings or works, or as impressions on language or on the arts of those who supplanted the perishing race. When these are read,—when all the phenomena are gathered together and classified, we find the same perfection of Order, the same beautiful simplicity of law pervading the same complex variety of results, which characterise all the phenomena of nature, and the knowledge of which is the highest reward of intellectual exertion.
Language has hitherto been the great implement of analysis which has been employed to elucidate the affiliation of races; and the present state of the science may be said to be almost entirely due to the acumen and industry of learned linguists. Physiology has lent her aid; but the objects offered for her examination are so few, especially in remote ages, and the individual differences are so small, as compared with the general resemblance, that, in the present state of that science, its aid has not been of the importance which it may fairly be expected hereafter to assume. In both sciences History plays an important part: in Geology, by furnishing analogies without which it would be hardly possible to interpret the facts; in Ethnology, by pointing out the direction in which inquiries should be made, and by guiding and controlling the conclusions which may have been arrived at. With the assistance of these sciences, Ethnologists have accomplished a great deal, and may do more; but Ethnology, based merely on Language[16] and Physiology, is like Geology based only on Mineralogy and Chemistry. Without Palæontology, that science would never have assumed the importance or reached the perfection to which it has now attained; and Ethnology will never take the place which it is really entitled to, till its results are checked, and its conclusions elucidated, by the science of Archæology.
Without the aid and vivifying influence derived from the study of fossil remains, Geology would lose half its value and more than half its interest. It may be interesting to the man of science to know what rock is superimposed upon another, and how and in what relative periods these changes occurred; but it is far more interesting to watch the dawn of life on this globe, and to trace its development into the present teeming stage of existence. So it will be when, with the aid of Archæology, Ethnologists are able to identify the various strata in which mankind have been distributed; to fix identities of race from similarities of Art; and to read the history of the past from the unconscious testimony of material remains. When properly studied and understood, there is no language so clear, or whose testimony is so undoubted, as that of those petrified thoughts and feelings which men have left engraved on the walls of their temples, or buried with them in the chambers of their tombs. Unconsciously expressed, but imperishably written, they are there to this hour. Any one who likes may read, and no one who can translate them can for one moment doubt but that they are the best, and frequently the only, records that remain of bygone races.
It is not difficult to explain why ethnographers have not hitherto considered Archæology of that importance to their researches to which it is undoubtedly entitled. We live in an age when all Art is a chaos of copying and confusion; we are daily masquerading in the costume of every nation of the earth, ancient and modern, and are unable to realise that these dresses in which we deck ourselves were once realities. Because Architecture, since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, has in Europe been a mere hortus siccus of dried specimens of the art of all countries and of all ages, we cannot feel that, before that time, Art was earnest and progressive; and that men then did what they felt to be best and most appropriate, by the same processes by which Nature works. We do not therefore perceive that, though in an infinitely lower grade, we may reason of the works of man before a given date, with the same certainty with which we can reason of those of Nature. When this great fact is once recognised—and it is indisputable—Archæology and Palæontology take their places side by side, as the guiding and vivifying elements in the sister sciences of Ethnology and Geology; and give to each of these a value they could never otherwise attain.
As may well be expected, however, when Archæology is employed to aid in these researches, results are frequently arrived at, which at first sight are discrepant from those to which the study of language alone has hitherto led scientific men. But this is no proof either of the truth or falsehood of the conclusions arrived at, or of the value or worthlessness of the processes employed. Both are essential to the question of knowledge, and it is by a skilful balancing of both classes of evidence that truth is ultimately arrived at.
It would be out of place to attempt in an introduction like the present anything approaching to a complete investigation of this subject. Nor is it necessary. The various ethnographic relations of one style to another will be pointed out as they arise in the course of the narrative, and their influence traced to such an extent as may be necessary to render them intelligible. But for the same reasons which made it expedient to try, in the preceding pages, to define the meaning of the term architecture and to point out its position and limits, it is believed that it will add to the clearness of what follows if the typical characteristics of the principal races[17] of mankind with whom the narrative deals, are first defined as clearly, though as succinctly as possible.
As the object of introducing the subject here is not to write an essay on Ethnology, but to render the history of Architecture interesting and intelligible, it may be expedient to avoid all speculation as to the origin of mankind, or the mode in which the various races diverged from one another and became so markedly distinct. Stretch the history of Architecture as we will, we cannot get beyond the epoch of the Pyramid builders (3500 B.C.), and when these were erected the various races of mankind had acquired those distinctive characteristics which mark them now. Not long afterwards, when the tombs at Beni Hassan were painted (2500 B.C.), these distinctions were so marked and so well understood, that these pictures might serve for the illustration of a book on Ethnography at the present day. Nor will it be necessary in this preliminary sketch to attempt more than to point out the typical features of the four great building races of mankind. The Turanian, the Semitic, the Celtic, and the Aryan. Even with regard to these, all that will be necessary will be to point out the typical characteristics without even attempting to define too accurately their boundaries, and leaving the minuter gradations to be developed in the sequel.
The one great fact which it is essential to insist on here is, that if we do not take into account its connexion with Ethnography, the History of Architecture is a mere dry, hard recapitulation of uninteresting facts and terms; but when its relation to the world’s history is understood,—when we read in their buildings the feelings and aspirations of the people who erected them, and above all through their arts we can trace their relationship to, and their descent from one another, the study becomes one of the most interesting, as well as one of the most useful which can be presented to an inquiring mind.
The result of recent researches has enabled the ethnographer to divide and arrange prehistoric man into three great groups or periods, which in Europe at least seem to have succeeded to one another; though at what time has not yet been determined even approximately; nor is it known how long any of the three subsisted before it was superseded by the next, nor how far the one overlapped the other, or indeed, whether, as was almost certainly the case, at some time all three may not have subsisted together.
The first is called the Stone age, from the rude race who then peopled Europe having no knowledge of the use of metals. All the cutting parts of their implements were formed of flint or other hard stones, probably fitted with wooden or bone handles, and used as tools of these materials.
These were succeeded by a people having a knowledge of the use of copper and tin, with the possession of gold, and perhaps silver. Their principal weapons and tools were formed of a compound of the two first-named metals; and their age has consequently been called the age of Bronze.
Both these were superseded, perhaps in historic times, by a people having a knowledge of the properties and use of Iron. Hence their epoch came to be distinguished by the name of that metal.
There seems no doubt but that the people of the Stone age were generally, if not exclusively, of that great family which we now know as the Turanian.
The race who introduced bronze seem to have been the ancestors of the Celtic races who afterwards peopled so large a portion of Europe.
The Aryans were those who introduced the use of iron, and with it dominated over and expelled the older races.
If any prehistoric traces of the Semitic races are to be found, they must be looked for in Western Asia or in Africa; they certainly had no settlements in Europe.
Further researches may perhaps at some future time enable us to fix approximative dates to these various migrations. At present we know that men using flint implements lived in the valleys of the Garonne and Dordogne when the climate of the south of France was as cold as that of Lapland, or perhaps Greenland; when the reindeer was their principal domestic animal, and the larger animals of the country belonged to species many of which had ceased to inhabit those regions before the dawn of history. On the other hand, we may assert with certainty that the climate of Egypt has not varied since the age of the Pyramid builders; and there is nothing in the history of either Greece or Italy that would lead us to believe that any remarkable alteration in the climate of these countries has taken place in historic times.
These questions, however, hardly come within the scope of the present work. The men of the Stone age have left nothing which can be styled architecture, unless we include in that term the rude tumuli of earth with which they covered the remains of their dead. It is also extremely uncertain if we can identify any building of stone as belonging certainly to the age of Bronze. All the rude cromlechs, dolmens, menhirs, &c., which usher in the early dawn of civilisation in Europe, belong, it is true to the earlier races, but seem to have been erected by them at a time when the Aryan races had taught them the use of iron, and they had learnt to appreciate the value of stone as a monumental record. This, however, was at a period long subsequent to the use of iron in Egypt and the East, and long after architecture had attained maturity; and its history became easily and distinctly legible in the Valley of the Nile.[18]
The great feature in the history of the Turanian races is that they were the first to people the whole world beyond the limits of the original cradle of mankind. Like the primitive unstratified rocks of geologists, they form the substructure of the whole world, frequently rising into the highest and most prominent peaks, sometimes overflowing whole districts and occupying a vast portion of the world’s surface;—everywhere underlying all the others, and affording their disintegrated materials to form the more recent strata that now overlie and frequently obliterate them,—in appearance at least.
In the old world the typical Turanians were the Egyptians; in the modern the Chinese and Japanese; and to these we are perhaps justified in adding the Mexicans. If this last adscription stands good, we have at three nearly equidistant points (120 degrees apart) on the earth’s surface, and under the tropic of Cancer, the three great culminating points of this form of civilisation. The outlying strata in Asia are the Tamuls, who now occupy the whole of the south of India, and all the races now existing in the countries between India and China. The Turanians existed in the Valley of the Euphrates before the Semitic or Aryan races came there. The Tunguses in the north are Turanians, and so are the Mongols, the Turks, and all those tribes generally described as Tartars.
In Europe the oldest people of this family we are acquainted with are the Pelasgi and Etruscans, but the race also crops up in the Magyars, the Finns, the Lapps, and in odd broken fragments here and there, but everywhere overpowered by the more civilised Aryans, who succeeded and have driven them into the remotest corners of the continent.
In Africa they have been almost as completely overpowered by the Semitic race, and in America are now being everywhere as entirely overwhelmed as they were in Europe by the Aryan races, and in all probability must eventually disappear altogether.
Even if the linguist should hesitate to affirm that all their languages can be traced to a common root, or present sufficient affinities for a classification, the general features of the races enumerated above are so alike the one to the other, that, for all real ethnographic purposes, they may certainly be considered as belonging to one great group. Whether nearly obliterated, as they are in most parts of Europe, or whether they still retain their nationality, as in the eastern parts of Asia, they always appear as the earliest of races, and everywhere present peculiarities of feeling and civilisation easily recognised, and which distinguish them from all the other races of mankind.
If they do not all speak cognate languages, or if we cannot now trace their linguistic affinities, we must not too readily assume that therefore they are distinct the one from the other. It must be more philosophical to believe, what probably is the case, that the one instrument of analysis we have hitherto used is not sufficient for the purpose, and we ought consequently to welcome every other process which will throw further light on the subject.
It is perhaps not too much to assert that no Turanian race ever rose to the idea of a God external to the world. All their gods were men who had lived with them on the face of the earth. In the old world they were kings,—men who had acquired fame from the extent of their power, or greatness from their wisdom. The Buddhist reform taught the Turanian races that virtue, not power, was true greatness, and that the humblest as well as the highest might attain beatitude through the practice of piety.
All the Turanians have a distinct idea of rewards and punishments after death, and generally also of a preparatory purgatory by transmigration through the bodies of animals, clean or unclean according to the actions of the defunct spirit, but always ending in another world. With some races transmigration becomes nearly all in all; in others it is nearly evanescent, and Heaven and Hell take its place; but the two are essentially doctrines of this race.
From the fact of their gods having been only ordinary mortals, and all men being able to aspire to the godhead, their form of worship was essentially anthropic and ancestral; their temples were palaces, where the gods sat on thrones and received petitions and dispensed justice as in life, and where men paid that homage to the image of the dead which they would have paid to the living king. They were in fact the idolators, par excellence. Their tombs were even more sacred than their temples, and their reverence was more frequently directed to the remains of their ancestors than to the images of their gods. Hence arose that reverence for relics which formed so marked a feature in their ritual in all ages, and which still prevails among many races almost in the direct ratio in which Turanian blood can be traced in their veins.
Unable to rise above humanity in their conceptions of the deity, they worshipped all material things. Trees with them in all times were objects of veneration, and of especial worship in particular localities. The mysterious serpent was with them a god, and the bull in most Turanian countries a being to be worshipped. The sun, the moon, the stars, all filled niches in their Pantheon; in fact, whatever they saw they believed in, whatever they could not comprehend they worshipped. They cared not to inquire beyond the evidence of their senses, and were incapable of abstracting their conceptions. To the Turanians also is due that peculiar reverence for localities made celebrated by great historical events, or rendered sacred by being the scene of great religious events, and hence to them must be ascribed the origin of pilgrimages, and all their concomitant adjuncts and ceremonies.
It is to this race also that we owe the existence of human sacrifices. Always fatalists, always and everywhere indifferent of life, and never fearing death, these sacrifices never were to them so terrible as they appear to more highly-organised races. Thus a child, a relative, or a friend, was the most precious, and consequently the most acceptable offering a man could bring to appease the wrath or propitiate the favour of a god who had been human, and who was supposed to have retained all the feelings of humanity for ever afterwards.
It is easy to trace their Tree and Serpent worship in every corner of the old world from Anuradhapura in Ceylon, to Upsala in Sweden. Their tombs and tumuli exist everywhere. Their ancestral worship is the foundation at the present day of half the popular creeds of the world, and the planets have hardly ceased to be worshipped at the present hour. Most of the more salient peculiarities of this faith were softened down by the great Buddhist reform in the sixth century B.C., and that refinement of their rude primitive belief has been adopted by most of the Turanian people of the modern world, and is now almost exclusively the appanage of people having Turanian blood in their veins. Even, however, through the gloss of their Buddhist refinements we can still discern most of the old forms of faith, and even its most devoted votaries are yet hardly more than half converted.
The only form of government ever adopted by any people of Turanian race was that of absolute despotism,—with a tribe, a chief,—in a kingdom, a despot. In highly civilised communities, like those of Egypt and China, their despotism was tempered by bureaucratic forms, but the chief was always as absolute as a Timour or an Attila, though not always strong enough to use his power as terribly as they did. Their laws were real or traditional edicts of their kings, seldom written, and never administered according to any fixed form of procedure.
As a consequence or a cause of this, the Turanian race are absolutely casteless; no hereditary nobility, no caste of priests ever existed among them; between the ruler and the people there could be nothing, and every one might aspire equally to all the honours of the State, or to the highest dignity of the priesthood. “La carrière ouverte aux talens,” is essentially the motto of these races or of those allied to them, and whether it was the slave of a Pharaoh, or the pipe-bearer of a Turkish sultan, every office except the throne is and always was open to the ambitious. No republic, no limited monarchy, ever arose among them. Despotism pure and simple is all they ever knew, or are even now capable of appreciating.
Woman among the Turanian races was never regarded otherwise than as the helpmate of the poor and the plaything of the rich; born to work for the lower classes and to administer to the gratification of the higher. No equality of rights or position was ever dreamt of, and the consequence was polyandry where people were poor and women scarce, and polygamy where wealth and luxury prevailed; and with these it need hardly be added, a loss of half those feelings which ennoble man or make life valuable.
Neither loving nor beloved in the bosom of his own family,—too much of a fatalist to care for the future,—neither enjoying life nor fearing death,—the Turanian is generally free from those vices which contaminate more active minds; he remains sober, temperate, truthful, and kindly in all the relations of life. If, however, he has few vices, he has fewer virtues, and both are far more passive than active in their nature,—in fact, approach more nearly to the instincts of the lower animals than to the intellectual responsibilities of the highest class of minds.
No Turanian race ever distinguished itself in literature, properly so called. They all possessed annals, because they loved to record the names, the dates, and the descent of their ancestors; but these never rose to the dignity of history even in its simplest form. Prose they could hardly write, because none of the greater groups ever appreciated the value of an alphabet. Hieroglyphics, signs, symbols, anything sufficed for their simple intellectual wants, and they preferred trusting to memory to remember what a sign stood for, rather than exercise their intellect to compound or analyse a complex alphabetical arrangement. Their system of poetry helped them, to some extent, over the difficulty; and, with a knowledge of the metre, a few suggestive signs enabled the reader to remember at least a lyric composition. But without a complex grammar to express and an alphabet to record their conceptions it is hopeless to expect that either Epic or Dramatic Poetry could flourish, still less that a prose narrative of any extent could be remembered; and philosophy, beyond the use of proverbs, was out of the question.
In their most advanced stages they have, like the Chinese, invented syllabaria of hideous complexity, and have even borrowed alphabets from their more advanced neighbours. By some it is supposed that they have even invented them; but though they have thus got over the mechanical difficulties of the case, their intellectual condition remains the same, and they have never advanced beyond the merest rudiments of a literature, and have never mastered even the elements of any scientific philosophy.
If so singularly deficient in the phonetic modes of literary expression, the Turanian races made up for it to a great extent in the excellence they attained in most of the branches of æsthetic art. As architects they were unsurpassed, and in Egypt alone have left monuments which are still the world’s wonder. The Tamul race in Southern, the Moguls in Northern India, in Burmah, in China, and in Mexico, wherever these races are found, they have raised monuments of dimensions unsurpassed; and, considering the low state of civilisation in which they often existed, displaying a degree of taste and skill as remarkable as it is unexpected.
In consequence of the circumstance above mentioned of their gods having been kings, and after death still only considered as watching over and influencing the destiny of mankind, their temples were only exaggerated palaces, containing halls, and chambers, and thrones, and all the appurtenances required by the living, but on a scale befitting the celestial character now acquired. So much is this the case in Egypt that we hardly know by which name to designate them, and the same remark applies to all.
Even more sacred, however, than their temples were their tombs. Wherever a Turanian race exists or existed, there their tombs remain; and from the Pyramids of Egypt to the mausoleum of Hyder Ali, the last Tartar king in India, they form the most remarkable series of monuments the world possesses, and all were built by people of Turanian race. No Semite and no Aryan ever built a tomb that could last a century or was worthy to remain so long.
The Buddhist reform altered the funereal tumulus into a relic shrine, modifying this, as it did most of the Turanian forms of utterance, from a literal to a somewhat more spiritual form of expression, but leaving the meaning the same,—the Tope being still essentially a Tomb.
Combined with that wonderful appreciation of form which characterises all the architectural works of the Turanians, they possessed an extraordinary passion for coloured decoration and an instinctive knowledge of the harmony of colours. They used throughout the primitive colours in all their elemental crudeness; and though always brilliant, are never vulgar, and are guiltless of any mistake in harmony. From the first dawn of painting in Egypt to the last signboard in Constantinople or Canton, it is always the same,—the same brilliancy and harmony produced by the simplest means.
In sculpture they were not so fortunate. Having no explanatory literature to which to refer, it was necessary that their statues should tell their whole tale themselves; and sculpture does not lend itself to this so readily as painting. With them it is not sufficient that a god should be colossal, he must be symbolical; he must have more arms and legs or more heads than common men; he must have wings and attributes of power, or must combine the strength of a lion or a bull with the intellect of humanity. The statue must, in short, tell the whole story itself; and where this is attempted the result can only be pleasing to the narrow faith of the unreflecting devotee. So far from being able to express more than humanity, sculpture must attempt even less if it would be successful; but this of course rendered it useless for the purposes to which the Turanians wished to apply it.
The same remarks apply to painting, properly so called. This never can attain its highest development except when it is the exponent of phonetic utterances. In Greece the painter strove only to give form and substance to the more purely intellectual creation of the poet, and could consequently dispense with all but the highest elements of his art. In Egypt the picture was all in all; it had no text to refer to, and must tell the whole tale with all its adjuncts, in simple intelligible prose, or be illegible, and the consequence is that the story is told with a clearness that charms us even now. It is however, only a story; and, like everything else Turanian, however great or wonderful, its greatness and its wonder are of a lower class and less intellectual than the utterances of the other great divisions of the human family.
We have scarcely the means of knowing whether any Turanian race ever successfully cultivated music to any extent. It is more than probable that all their families can and always could appreciate the harmony of musical intervals, and might be charmed with simple cadences; but it is nearly certain that a people who did not possess phonetic poetry could never rise to that higher class of music which is now carried to such a pitch of perfection, that harmonic combinations almost supply the place of phonetic expression and influence the feelings and passions to almost the same extent.
There is also this further peculiarity about their arts, that they seem always more instinctive than intellectual, and consequently are incapable of that progress which distinguishes most of the works of man. At the first dawn of art in Egypt, in the age of the Pyramid builders, all the arts were as perfect and as complete as they were when the country fell under the domination of the Romans. The earliest works in China are as perfect—in some respects more so—as those of to-day; and in Mexico, so soon as a race of red savages peopled a country so densely as to require art and to appreciate magnificence, the arts sprung up among them with as much perfection, we may fairly assume, as they would have attained had they been practised for thousands of years under the same circumstances and uninfluenced by foreigners. It is even more startling to find that the arts of the savages who inhabited the south of France, on the skirts of the glacial period, are identical with those of the Esquimaux of the present day, and even at that early time attained a degree of perfection which is startling, and could hardly be surpassed by any people in the same condition of life at the present day.
There is no reason to suppose that any people occupying so low a position in the intellectual scale could ever cultivate anything approaching to abstract science, and there is no proof of it existing. Living, however, as they did, on the verge of the tropics, in the most beautiful climates of the world, and where the sky is generally serene and unclouded, it was impossible but that they should become to some extent astronomers.
It is not known that any of them ever formed any theory to account for the phenomena they observed, but they seem to have watched the paths of the planets, to have recorded eclipses, and generally to have noted times and events with such correctness as enabled them to predict their return with very considerable precision; but here their science stopped, and it is not known that they ever attempted any other of the multifarious branches of modern knowledge.
We have only very imperfect means of knowing what their agriculture was; but it seems always to have been careful when once they passed from the shepherd state, though whether scientific or not it is not easy to say. On the point of artificial irrigation the Turanians have always been singularly expert. Wherever you follow their traces, the existence of a tunnel is almost as certain an indication of their pre-existence as that of a tomb. It is amusing, as it is instructive, to see at this hour an Arab Pacha breaking down in his attempts to restore the irrigation works of the old Pharaohs, or an English Engineer officer blundering in his endeavours to copy the works instinctively performed by a Mogul, or a Spaniard trying to drain the lakes of Mexico. Building and irrigation were the special instincts of this old people, and the practical intellect of the higher races seems hardly yet to have come up to the point where these arts were left by the early Turanian races, while the perfection they attained in them is the more singular from the contrast it affords to what they did, or rather, did not do, in other branches of art or science.
From the extraordinary influence the Semitic races have had in the religious development of mankind, we are apt to consider them as politically more important than they really ever were. At no period of their history do they seem to have numbered more than twenty or thirty millions of souls. The principal locality in which they developed themselves was the small tract of country between the Tigris, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; but they also existed as a separate race in Abyssinia, and extended their colonies along the northern coast of Africa. Their intellectual development has been in all ages so superior to that of the Turanian races, that they have subdued them mentally wherever they came in contact with them; and notwithstanding their limited geographical extension, they have influenced the intellect of the Aryan tribes to a greater extent than almost any of their own congeners.
If anything were required to justify the ethnographer in treating the various families of mankind as distinct and separate varieties, it would be the study of the history of the Semitic race. What they were in the time of Abraham, that they are at the present day. A large section of them sojourned in Egypt, among people of a different race, and they came out as unmixed as oil would do that is floated on water. For the last two thousand years they have dwelt dispersed among the Gentiles, without a nationality, almost without a common language, yet they remain the same in feature, the same in intellectual development and feeling, they exhibit the same undying repugnance to all except those of their own blood, which characterised the Arab and the Jew when we first recognise their names in history. So unchangeable are they in this respect, that it seems in vain to try to calculate how long this people must have lived by themselves, separated from other races, that they should have thus acquired that distinctive fixity of character nothing can alter or obliterate, and which is perhaps even more wonderful intellectually than are the woolly hair and physical characteristics of the negro, though not so obvious to the superficial observer.
From the circumstance of our possessing a complete series of the religious literature of the Semitic race, extending over the two thousand years which elapsed between Moses and Mahomet, we are enabled to speak on this point with more precision than we can regarding the doctrines of almost any other people.
The great and distinguishing tenet of this race when pure is and always seems to have been the unity of God, and his not being born of man. Unlike the gods of the Turanians, their Deity never was man, never reigned or lived on earth, but was the Creator and Preserver of the universe, living before all time, and extending beyond all space; though it must be confessed they have not always expressed this idea with the purity and distinctness which might be desired.
It is uncertain how far they adhered to this purity of belief in Assyria, where they were more mixed up with other races than they have ever been before or since. In Syria, where they were superimposed upon and mixed with a people of Turanian origin, they occasionally worshipped stones and groves, serpents, and even bulls; but they inevitably oscillated back to the true faith and retained it to the last. In Arabia, after they became dominant, they cast off their Turanian idolatries, and rallied as one man to the watchword of their race, “There is no God but God,” expressed with a clearness that nothing can obscure, and clung to it with a tenacity that nothing could shake or change. Since then they have never represented God as man, and hardly ever looked upon Him as actuated by the feelings of humanity.
The channel of communication between God and man has always been, with all the Semitic races, by means of prophecy. Prophets are sent, or are inspired, by God, to communicate His will to man, to propound His laws, and sometimes to foretell events; but in all instances without losing their character as men, or becoming more than messengers for the special service for which they are sent.
With the Jews, but with them only, does there seem to have been a priest caste set aside for the special service of God; not selected from all the people, as would have been the case with the casteless Turanians, but deriving their sanctity from descent, as would have been the case with the Aryans; still they differed from the Aryan institution inasmuch as the Levites always retained the characteristics of a tribe, and never approached the form of an aristocracy. They may therefore be considered ethnographically as an intermediate institution, partaking of the characteristics of the other two races.
The one point in which the Semitic form of religion seems to come in contact with the Turanian is that of sacrifice—human, in early times perhaps, even till the time of Abraham, but afterwards only of oxen and sheep and goats in hecatombs; and this apparently not among the Arabs, but only with the Jews and the less pure Phœnicians.
From their having no human gods they avoided all the palatial temples or ceremonial forms of idolatrous worship. Strictly speaking, they have no temples. There was one holy place in the old world, the Hill of Zion at Jerusalem, and one in the new dispensation, the Kaaba at Mecca. Solomon, it is true, adorned the first to an extent but little consonant with the true feeling of his race, but the Kaaba remains in its primitive insignificance; and neither of these temples, either then or now, derive their sanctity from the buildings. They are the spots where God’s prophets stood and communicated His will to man. It is true that in after ages a Roman Tetrarch and a Turkish Sultan surrounded these two Semitic cells with courts and cloisters, which made them wonders of magnificence in the cities where they existed; but this does not affect the conclusion that no Semitic race ever erected a durable building, or even thought of possessing more than one temple at a time, or cared to emulate the splendour of the temple-palaces of the Turanians.
Although no Semitic race was ever quite republican, which is a purely Aryan characteristic, they never sank under such an unmitigated despotism as is generally found among the Turanians. When in small nuclei, their form of government is what is generally called patriarchal, the chief being neither necessarily hereditary, nor necessarily elective, but attaining his headship partly by the influence due to age and wisdom, or to virtue, partly to the merits of his connexions, and sometimes of his ancestors; but never wholly to the latter without some reference at least to the former.
In larger aggregations the difficulty of selection made the chiefship more generally hereditary; but even then the power of the King was always controlled by the authority of the written law, and never sank into the pure despotism of the Turanians. With the Jews, too, the sacred caste of the Levites always had considerable influence in checking any excesses of kingly power; but more was due in this respect to their peculiar institution of prophets, who, protected by the sacredness of their office, at all times dared to act the part of tribunes of the people, and to rebuke with authority any attempt on the part of the King to step beyond the limits of the constitution.
One of the most striking characteristics in the morals of the Semitic races is the improvement in the position of woman, and the attempt to elevate her in the scale of existence. If not absolutely monogamic, there is among the Jews, and among the Arabic races where they are pure, a strong tendency in this direction; and but for the example of those nations among whom they were placed, they might have gone further in this direction, and the dignity of mankind have been proportionately improved.
Their worst faults arise from their segregation from the rest of mankind. With them war against all but those of their own race is an obligation and a pleasure, and it is carried on with a relentless cruelty which knows no pity. To smite root and branch, to murder men, women, and children, is a duty which admits of no hesitation, and has stained the character of the Semites in all ages. Against this must be placed the fact that they are patriotic beyond all other races, and steadfast in their faith as no other people have ever been; and among themselves they have been tempered to kindness and charity by the sufferings they have had to bear because of their uncompromising hatred and repugnance to all their fellow-men.
This isolation has had the further effect of making them singularly apathetic to all that most interests the other nations of the earth. What their God has revealed to them through His prophets suffices for them. “God is great,” is a sufficient explanation with them for all the wonders of science. “God wills it,” solves all the complex problems of the moral government of the world. If not such absolute fatalists as the Turanians, they equally shrink from the responsibility of thinking for themselves, or of applying their independent reason to the great problems of human knowledge. They may escape by this from many aberrations that trouble more active minds, but their virtues at best can be but negative, and their vices unredeemed by the higher aspirations that sometimes half ennoble even crime.
In this again we have an immense advance above all the Turanian races. No Semitic people ever used a hieroglyph or mere symbol, or were content to trust to memory only. Everywhere and at all times—so far as we know—they used an alphabet of more or less complicated form. Whether they invented this mode of notation or not is still unknown, but its use by them is certain; and the consequence is that they possess, if not the oldest, at least one of the very oldest literatures of the world. History with them is no longer a mere record of names and titles, but a chronicle of events, and with the moral generally elicited. The story and the rhapsody take their places side by side, the preaching and the parable are used to convey their lessons to the world. If they had not the Epos and the Drama, they had lyric poetry of a beauty and a pathos which has hardly ever been surpassed.
It was this possession of an alphabet, conjoined with the sublimity of their monotheistic creed, that gave these races the only superiority to which they have attained. It is this which has enabled them to keep themselves pure and undefiled in all the catastrophes to which they have been exposed, and that still enables their literature and their creed to exert an influence over almost all the nations of the earth, even in times when the people themselves have been held in most supreme contempt.
It may have been partly in consequence of their love of phonetic literature, and partly in order to keep themselves distinct from those great builders the Turanians, that the Semitic races never erected a building worthy of the name; neither at Jerusalem, nor at Tyre or Sidon, nor at Carthage, is there any vestige of Semitic Architectural Art. Not that these have perished, but because they never existed. When Solomon proposed to build a temple at Jerusalem, though plain externally, and hardly so large as an ordinary parish church, he was forced to have recourse to some Turanian people to do it for him, and by a display of gold and silver and brass ornaments to make up for the architectural forms he knew not how to apply.
In Assyria we have palaces of dynasties more or less purely Semitic, splendid enough, but of wood and sunburnt bricks, and only preserved to our knowledge from the accident of their having been so clumsily built as to bury themselves and their wainscot slabs in their own ruins. Though half the people were probably of Turanian origin, their temples seem to have been external and unimportant till Sennacherib and others learnt the art of using stone from the Egyptians, as the Syrians did afterwards from the Romans. During the domination of the last-named people, we have the temples of Palmyra and Baalbec, of Jerusalem and Petra: everywhere an art of the utmost splendour, but with no trace of Semitic feeling or Semitic taste in any part, or in any detail.
The Jewish worship being neither ancestral, nor the bodies of their dead being held in special reverence, they had no tombs worthy of the name. They buried the bodies of their patriarchs and kings with care, and knew where they were laid; but not until after the return from the Babylonish captivity did they either worship there, or mark the spot with any architectural forms, though after that epoch we find abundant traces of a tendency towards that especial form of Turanian idolatry. But even then the adornment of their tombs with architectural magnificence cannot be traced back to an earlier period than the time of the Romans; and all that we find marked with splendour of this class was the work of that people, and stamped with their peculiar forms of Art.
Painting and sculpture were absolutely forbidden to the Jews because they were Turanian arts, and because their practice might lead the people to idolatry, so that these nowhere existed: though we cannot understand a people with any mixture of Turanian blood who had not an eye for colour, and a feeling for beauty of form, in detail at least. Music alone was therefore the one æsthetic art of the Semitic races, and, wedded to the lyric verse, seems to have influenced their feelings and excited their passions to an extent unknown to other nations; but to posterity it cannot supply the place of the more permanent arts, whose absence is so much felt in attempting to realise the feelings or aspirations of a people like this.[19]
As regards the useful arts, the Semites were always more pastoral than agricultural, and have not left in the countries they inhabited any traces of such hydraulic works as the earlier races executed; but in commerce they excelled all nations. The Jews—from their inland situation, cut off from all access to the sea—could not do much in foreign trade; but they always kept up their intercourse with Assyria. The Phœnicians traded backwards and forwards with every part of the Mediterranean, and first opened out a knowledge of the Atlantic; and the Arabs first commenced, and for long afterwards alone carried on, the trade with India. From the earliest dawn of history to the present hour, commerce has been the art which the Semitic nations have cultivated with the greatest assiduity, and in which they consequently have attained the greatest, and an unsurpassed success.
In Asia and in Africa at the present day, all the native trade is carried on by Arabs; and it need hardly be remarked that the monetary transactions of the rest of the world are practically managed by the descendants of those who, one thousand years before Christ, traded from Eziongeber to Ophir.