that between the thirtieth and twentieth centuries B.C., a
period in which he places the establishment of the first
Chaldæan Empire, the fore-shore was more than 120 miles
above the mouth of Shatt-el-Arab, to the north of the
present village of Kornah.

*** Fr. Lenormant has energetically defended this hypothesis
in the majority of his works: it is set forth at some length
in his work on _La Langue primitive de la Chaldée_. Hommel,
on the other hand, maintains and strives to demonstrate
scientifically the relationship of the non-Semitic tongue
with Turkish.

The traveller Olivier noticed this, and writes as follows: "The land
there is rather less fertile [than in Egypt], because it does not
receive the alluvial deposits of the rivers with the same regularity as
that of the Delta. It is necessary to irrigate it in order to render it
productive, and to protect it sedulously from the inundations which are
too destructive in their action and too irregular."

The first races to colonize this country of rivers, or at any rate
the first of which we can find traces, seem to have belonged to three
different types. The most important were the Semites, who spoke a
dialect akin to Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenician. It was for a long
time supposed that they came down from the north, and traces of their
occupation have been pointed out in Armenia in the vicinity of Ararat,
or halfway down the course of the Tigris, at the foot of the Gordysean
mountains. It has recently been suggested that we ought rather to seek
for their place of origin in Southern Arabia, and this view is gaining
ground among the learned. Side by side with these Semites, the monuments