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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: m. PRE-HISTORIC GREATNESS OF ARABIA. In our researches into the beginnings of culture in the oldest nations mentioned in history, we perceive that they did not originate civilization. It preceded their existence, and came from an older people. They gave it new forms, each developing an individuality of its own; but it came originally from abroad. On this point tradition is uniform and explicit. In Eastern Africa, the civilizers proceeded from the south toward the Mediterranean, creating the countries in the valley of the Nile. The traditions of inner Asia bring civilization from the south, and connect its origin with the shores of the Erythraean Sea, meaning the Arabian shores of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf; and these traditions are confirmed by inscriptions found in the old rums of Chaldea. These inscriptions reveal also the fact that the first civilizers were neither Semites nor Aryans, but a " third race," which ethnic and linguistic investigators have been slow to recognise. Meanwhile, it is distinctly apparent in the religions, mythologies, institutions, and customs of these ancient nations that they all had the beginnings of their civilization from the same source. The foundations of their culture were all laid by the same hand, whose traces are still visible in its ruins—in the remains of its most ancient religious forms, its most primitive architecture, and its most archaic styles of writing. This is so plain that some writers, notable to see the vast extent of pre-historic times, or to comprehend the possibility of human development in ages too remote for their chronology, have sought to show that some one of these nations gave civilization to all the others. Some have suggested that it came from Egypt, a hypothesis which neither facts nor probability c...
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