On the occasion of my first visit to Palestine I was struck by the number of blue eyed, fair haired children whom I met with in the towns and villages, more especially in the mountainous parts of the country. At the time I supposed them to be the descendants of the Crusaders or of the other natives of Northern Europe who found their way to the Holy Land during the Middle Ages. But a new light has recently been thrown on the matter by the ethnological observations made by Mr. Flinders Petrie in Egypt.
The winter before last Mr. Petrie was commissioned by the British Association to take casts and photographs of the ethnological types represented on the Egyptian monuments, and to note, wherever it was possible, the colour of the skin, eyes and hair. It was not the first time, however, that notes of the kind had been taken. Some years ago, Osburn, a careful observer, had noticed that in the sculptures of Ramses lI at Abu Simbel the Shasu of Kanana were depicted with blue eyes, red hair, eyebrows and beard, and the Amaur with the eyes blue the eyebrows and beard red. As the Shasu of Kanana lived a little to the south of Hebron, while the Amaur are the Amorites of the Old Testament, it was clear that a population existed in Palestine in the fourteenth century before our era which had all the characteristics of the white race.
Mr. Petrie's observations have abundantly verified this conclusion. He finds that, on the walls of a Theban tomb, the chief of Kadesh on the Orontes is painted with a white skin and light red brown hair. Kadesh was the southern capital of the Hittites, after their invasion of Syria, but the Egyptian inscriptions describe it as being in the land of Amaur and that its chief must have been an Amorite is shown by the fact that the Hittites are depicted with yellow or orange skins, their hair being black and their eyes dark.
The physiognomy of the Hittites and Amorites, more over, differed widely. The Egyptian artists agree with the native Hittite monuments in representing the former with protrusive profile and Asiatic features, the hair being arranged at the back of the head in a sort of pig tail. The Amaur or Amorites, on the other hand, are a handsome people, tall and dolichocephalic, with large sub aquiline noses and a short pointed beard at the end of the chin. The defenders of the fort of Amaur are represented as having been burnt a light pink red by the action of the sun. Otherwise the skin is white or sallow.
We learn, then, from the ancient monuments of Egypt that a portion of Palestine was occupied by a white race before its conquest by the Israelites. And they further inform us that this white race continued to exist in the country after the conquest. The physical characteristics of the captives taken by Shishak in the time of Rehoboam from the cities of Judah have Amorite and not Jewish features. There is nothing in common between them and the tribute bearers of Jehu, who are depicted on the black obelisk from Nimroud, now in the British Museum, with faces of a most typically Jewish cast. In the tenth century before our era, consequently, the bulk of the population in the southern part of Judæa must have been of Amorite origin.
It is not wonderful, therefore, if we find traces of the same population still surviving in Palestine. There is no need of explaining their existence by a theory of their descent from the Crusaders. The survival of the ancient white race of Palestine is parallel to the survival of the ancient white race of Northern Africa, now generally known among French writers under the name of Kabyles. The Kabyles were at one time imagined to be the descendants of the Vandals, but we now know that they have inhabited the southern coast of the Mediterranean since the later Neolithic age. They are the Libyans of antiquity, represented on the Egyptian monuments, like the Amorites, with white skins, blue eyes, dolichocephalic skulls and similarly described by classical writers. They extended into Teneriffe and the Canary Islands and their long headed skulls have been disinterred from the dolmens of Northern Africa.
To the traveller who sees them for the first time the Kabyles offer a striking appearance. Their clear white skins, covered with freckles, their blue eyes and light hair, remind him of the so called Red Kelts he has met with in an Irish village. They bear a high reputation for physical courage and love of independence, though at the same time they seem to be an orderly people. But they have two characteristics which they share with the white race of Northern Europe. They are mountaineers, the climate of the African plains being apparently too hot for them, and they are distinguished by their tall stature.
These were equally the characteristics of the Amorites of ancient Palestine. The Jews declared that their height was like the height of the cedar," the Semitic tribes by the side of them seeming to be but grasshoppers," and the iron couch of Og, the Amorite king of Bashan, preserved at Rabbath, afterwards the capital of Ammon, excited the wonder of later generations on account of its size.
The Amorites also occupied the whole of the mountainous district of Syria and Palestine from the neighbourhood of Kadesh in the north to the desert southward of Judah, and on the eastern side of the Jordan they founded the two kingdoms of Bashan and Heshbon. In the mountains of Moab and Seir they formed the aboriginal population, partially dispossessed by the Semitic tribes of Moab, Ammon and Edom, and the name of Horite under which they went in Edom is best explained as meaning white, in contradistinction to the Semitic Edomite or red man. A passage in the Pentateuch (Numbers xiii. 29) expressly states that along with the Hittites and Jebusites they inhabited the mountainous region, while the Canaanites dwelt on the coast and the valley of the Jordan. That Jebusite simply means a cross between Hittite and Amorite is clear from the statement of Ezekiel (xvi. 3, 4, 5) that Jerusalem, whose old name of Jebus gave rise to that of Jebusite, was born of a Hittite mother and an Amorite father. The Egyptian monuments bear witness to the same interlocking of Hittite and Amorite.
There is yet a third characteristic which has been ascribed to the white race of Northern Europe. It has been brought into close connection with the dolmens which cover so large a part of its territory. Faidherbe and others have traced a continuous line of dolmens of similar construction along the northern coast of Africa, through Spain, Portugal, and France, into the British Isles. No one, indeed, who has examined the famous dolmens of Roknia, in Algeria, can fail to be struck by their resemblance to the sepulchral cromlechs of our own country. If they are really due to the genius and influence of a single race, it would seem that the race moved from north to south, since the objects found in the dolmens of the south of France betray a more advanced stage of culture than those found in the north.
The chief objection hitherto raised against ascribing these dolmens to the white race with whom they are associated has been that similar megalithic monuments exist in Palestine. Over 700 have been discovered in Moab on the eastern side of the Jordan. Major Conder has drawn attention to others in the basaltic region in the neighbourhood of the ancient Dan, and though none have as yet been observed in Judah, this is probably due to the fact that the attention of travellers has not been called to them. I have myself come across a fine specimen on a hill to the south of Jenin which had been overlooked by the Palestine Survey, and that megalithic structures once existed in Judah is evident from the occurrence in the Old Testament of names like Gilgal or Stone circle and Ai or cairn (Joshua viii. 29). It will be noticed that they are especially plentiful on the eastern side of the Jordan, where the two chief Amorite kingdoms once flourished. Just as the dolmens of Northern Africa were the burial places of the ancestors of the Kabyles, so tradition affirmed that the Amorite king of Ai had been buried beneath a cairn of stones.
The discovery that the Amorites of Palestine were racially allied to the ancient Libyans opens up ethnological and archæological questions of considerable interest. These cannot be touched upon here, but must be reserved for a future occasion. It is sufficient for the present to have drawn attention to a new and curious ethnological fact. A H. Sayce.
doi.org/10.1038/038321a0
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