The Races of the Old Testament Author:Archibald Henry Sayce Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE TENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS. THE tenth chapter of Genesis has been called the oldest ethnological record in existence. But the statement is n... more »ot strictly correct. On the one hand, in a tomb at Thebes belonging to Rekh-ma-Ra, an Egyptian prince who lived a century before the Exodus, we find the races of the known world each depicted with its own peculiar characteristics. The black-skinned negro, with all the features which still characterise him, is the representative of the south ; the white-skinned European and Libyan, with fair hair and blue eyes, is the representative of the north and west; while the Asiatic, with olive complexion and somewhat aquiline nose, comes from the east; and the valley of the Nile, like the ' land of the gods' in Southern Arabia, is occupied by a race whose skin has been burnt red by the sun, and who display all the traits that distinguish the Egyptian of to-day. Already in the sixteenth century before our era, the Egyptian artist had accurately noted the outward features of the several races of mankind so far as they were known to him. On the other hand, the tenth chapter of Genesis is ethnographical rather than ethnological. It does not profess to give an account of the different races of the world and to separate them one from another according to their various characteristics. It is descriptive merely,and such races of men as fell within the horizon of the writer are described from the point of view of the geographer and not of the ethnologist. The Greeks and Medes, for example, are grouped along with the Tiba- renian and Moschian tribes because they all alike lived in the north ; the Egyptian and the Canaanite are similarly classed together, while the Semitic Assyrian and the non-Semitic Elamite are both the children of Shem. ...« less