"to confound." One chief source of myths about names springs from the confusion which races at a low level make between them and persons or things. For example, the savage, who shrinks from having his likeness taken, in the fear that a part of himself is being carried away thereby, regards his name as something through which he may be harmed or bewitched. So he will use all sorts of roundabout phrases to avoid saying it, will fear that any one seeking to know it may steal it or gain power over him, will give his children horrid names to frighten demons away, will change his own name, thinking thereby to elude his foes and puzzle or cheat even death when he comes to look for him, and will shrink from uttering the name of a dead man lest it call up the ghost. The Bible supplies examples of relics of such savage notions lingering among the Jews in the importance which they accorded to names, finding in them omens of events and even in their sounds mystic meanings, while they were not only careful what they called their children, but

believed that a man's fate might be changed by changing his name. Their use, too, of another word instead of "Jehovah" for their chief god,1 like the Mohammadan use of " Allah," which is only a title for the "great name," may be traced to the dislike which causes savages to shrink from uttering the names of superhuman beings. Names never being treated by barbarous people merely as signs by which things are known, we see how a tribe, in accounting for its name, could not think of it apart from a person, and so invented its tales of a great ancestor, father and founder of his people. Fathers and founders of course every people had; but so remote are man's beginnings, that it was not possible for him to know aught as to whence or from whom he sprang; hence the play of fancy about these matters and the birth of myths.

Among rude races, as the North American Indians, whom we find named after some animal, as Bear, Beaver, Wolf, the tribes claim the very creatures themselves as ancestors! The nations 1 See p. 163.

of Europe had, during the Middle Ages, quite a craze for tracing their origin to heroes of the Trojan war, as France from Francus, Paris from the son of Priam, Britain from Brutus, and the Greeks, the ancient name of whose country was Hellene, guessed that Hellen was their forefather. In like manner we British, who are sometimes called in poetry "sons of Albion," might have made a similar blunder had we not learned that Albion was the name given to our island, more than two thousand years ago, as a "hilly land.”

Now the oldest parts of the written history of the Israelites have preserved traces of a like confusion in their minds as to the source of their tribal and other names, some of which, as the tenth chapter of Genesis shows, are names of countries,1 and, here and there, of the powers of nature transformed into patriarchs and heroes. But passing by the details concerning these, it suffices to say that they derived their origin and that of kindred peoples from

1

e.g., Cush, Asshur, Mizraim, Canaan, Arphaxad, and of cities, as Sidon.

forefathers who dwelt in the land of Shinar, or, using the Greek name given to it from its lying "between rivers," Mesopotamia. Their common ancestor was said to be Terah, who lived at Ur, and whose three sons were Abraham, Nahor, and Haran. Terah removed from Ur to Charran, and thence his sons and their families spread southward. The Israelites were in direct line from Abraham, the father of Isaac and grandfather of Jacob, afterwards called Israel, and the twelve tribes, into which they were said to be divided, traced their descent from Israel's twelve sons.

Let us now see what groundwork of fact underlies these legends.

The Israelites belonged to the Shemitic, or, to use its Latin form, Semitic race,1 so called after Shem, whose name occurs as a son of the patriarch Noah in the Bible legend of a deluge. Such a term does not correctly describe them, but its meaning is now so fixed that its use cannot mislead us. It includes the Babylonians,

1 Note A.

Assyrians, Phoenicians, Syrians, Hebrews, Arabs, and some lesser peoples, the kinship between all of whom is now well proven; while history is ever yielding witness to the mighty part which the leading members have played in the world, how rich and varied their influence on the life and thought of men has been to this day, notably in religion, for from them have sprung the Jewish, Christian, and Mohammadan faiths, with their sacred books, the Bible and the Korân.

The earliest traces that we have of the Semites show them scattered over the deserts of Arabia and Syria, and from the uplands of Armenia to the countries watered by the Tigris and Euphrates.1 Ages before this they had swarmed from their common home, and as they poured into the country lying near the Persian Gulf, found, as did the Aryan tribes when they crossed into Europe, an older and alien population, known as the "Accadians," or "highlanders," as coming from the mountains of Elam, settled in the land. These Accadians, whom it is not 2 And see Gen. x. 10.

1 See Map.