onal vanity. Some foreign conquest of Babylon
must have taken place about the period named; and it is certainly a most
important fact that Berosus should call the conquerors Medes. He may no
doubt have been mistaken about an event so ancient; he may have misread
his authorities, or he may have described as Medes a people of which he
really knew nothing except that they had issued from the tract which
in his own time bore the name of Media. But, while these axe mere
possibilities, hypotheses to which the mind resorts in order to escape
a difficulty, the hard fact remains that he has used the word; and this
fact, coupled with the mention of the Medes in the book of Genesis, does
certainly raise a presumption of no inconsiderable strength against,
the view which it would be natural to take if the Zendavesta and the
Assyrian annals were our solo authorities on the subject. It lends a
substantial basis to the theories of those who regard the Medes as one
of the principal primeval races; who believe that they were well known
to the Semitic inhabitants of the Mesopotamian valley as early as the
twenty-third century before Christ--long ere Abraham left Ur for Harran;
and that they actually formed the dominant power in Western Asia
for more than two centuries, prior to the establishment of the first
Chaldaean kingdom.

And if there are thus distinct historical grounds for the notion of an
early Median development, there are not wanting these obscurer but to
many minds more satisfactory proofs wherewith comparative philology
and ethnology are wont to illustrate and confirm the darker passages of
ancient history. Recent linguistic research has clearly traced among the
Arba Lisun, or, "Four Tongues" of ancient Chaldaea, which are so often
mentioned on the ancient monuments, an Arian formation, such as would
naturally have been left in the country, if it had been occupied for
some considerable period by a dominant Arian power. The early Chaldaean
ideographs have often several distinct values; and when this is the
case, one of the powers is almost always an Arian name of the object
represented. Words like nir, "man", ar, "river," (compare the names
Aras, Araxes, Endanus, Rha, Rhodanus, etc., the Slavonic rika, "river,"
etc.), san, "sun," (compare German Sonne, Slavonic solnce, English
"sun," Dutch zon, etc.), are seemingly Arian roots; and the very
term "Arian" (Ariya, "noble") is perhaps contained in the name of a
primitive Chaldaea