grammatical structure, as in its use of post-positions, particles, and pronominal suffixes; and it would seem, therefore, scarcely to admit of a doubt that the Cushites of Lower Babylon must in some way or other have become mixed with a Turanian people.  The mode and time of the commixture are matters altogether beyond our knowledge.  We can only note the fact as indicated by the phenomena, and form, or abstain from forming, as we please, hypotheses with respect to its accompanying circumstances.

Besides these two main constituents of the Chaldaean race, there is reason to believe that both a Semitic and an Arian element existed in the early population of the country.  The subjects of the early kings are continually designated in the inscriptions by the title of kiprat-arbat, “the four nations,” or arba lisun, “the four tongues.”  In Abraham’s time, again, the league of four kings seems correspondent to a fourfold ethnic division, Cushite, Turanian, Semitic, and Arian, the chief authority and ethnic preponderance being with the Cushites.  The language also of the early inscriptions is thought to contain traces of Semitic and Arian influence; so that it is at least probable that the “four tongues” intended were not mere local dialects, but distinct languages, the representatives respectively of the four great families of human speech.

It would result from this review of the linguistic facts and other ethnic indications, that the Chaldaeans were not a pure, but a very mixed people.  Like the Romans in ancient and the English in modern Europe, they were a “colluvio gentium omnium,” a union of various races between which there was marked and violent contrast.  It is now generally admitted that such races are among those which play the most distinguished part in the world’s history, and most vitally affect its progress.

With respect to the name of Chaldaean, under which it has been customary to designate this mixed people, it is curious to find that in the native documents of the early period it does not occur at all.  Indeed it first appears in the Assyrian inscriptions of the ninth century before our era, being then used as the name of the dominant race in the country about Babylon.  Still, as Berosus, who cannot easily have been ignorant of the ancient appellation of his race, applies the term Chaldaean to the primitive people, and as Scripture assigns Ur to the Chaldees as early as the time of Abraham, we are entitled to assume that this term, whenever it came historically into use, is in fact no unfit designation for the early inhabitants of the country.  Perhaps the most probable account of the origin of the word is that it designates properly the inhabitants of the ancient capital, Ur or Hur-Khaldi being in the Burbur dialect the exact equivalent of Hur, which was the proper name of the Moon-God, and Chaldaeans being thus either “Moon-worshippers,” or simply “inhabitants of the town dedicated to, and called after, the Moon.”  Like the term “Babylonian,” it would at first have designated simply the dwellers in the capital, and would subsequently have been extended to the people generally.