The conquest of a powerful Chaldæan king by a handful of wandering Semites seems extraordinary, and might have sounded a note of warning to the ear of the Chaldæans. Their kingdom was destined soon to be overthrown by another Semitic people. After a duration of about half a thousand years for the Elamite kingdom, and some seven hundred years since the time of Nimrod, the Chaldæan dynasty was overthrown and succeeded by an Arabian one, that is, by a race of nomadic Shemites from the Arabian plains; and after two hundred and forty-five years they in their turn succumbed to another more powerful people of the same Semitic race, the Assyrians. The empire thus founded upon the ruins of the old Chaldæan was one of the greatest of the ancient world, as we well know from the records which meet us in the Bible. Politically it may be said to have balanced the power of Egypt. But the stability of this monarchy rested upon a basis much less firm than that of Egypt; the southern portion--the old Chaldæa--of which Babylon was the capital, was always ready for revolt, and after about seven hundred years the Babylonians and Medes succeeded in overthrowing their former conquerors. All this belongs to history--or at least to chronicle--and is therefore scarcely a part of our present inquiry.
To these primitive civilizations of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Susa we might, if we could put faith in native records, be inclined to add a fourth.
The _Chinese_ profess to extend their lists of dynasties seven, eight, or even ten thousand years backward, but there is nothing on which to rest such extravagant pretensions. Their earliest known book is believed to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It is therefore not probable that they possessed the art of writing more than fifteen hundred years before our era, and before writing is invented there can be no reliable history. The best record of early times _then_ is to be found in the popular songs of a country, and of these China possessed a considerable number, which were collected into a book--the _Book of Odes_--by their sage Confucius.[49] The picture which these odes present is of a society so very different from that of the time from which their earliest book--the _Book of Changes_--dates, that we cannot refuse to credit it with a high antiquity. From the songs we learn that before China coalesced into the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its inhabitants lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which distinguished the surrounding Turanian nations had already been exchanged for a settled agricultural one, to which houses, and all the civilization which these imply, had long been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have been then, as now, a simple, slow-moving life, not devoid of piety and domestic affection. But it should be mentioned here that recent researches seem to point to the conclusion, strange as it may appear, that the Chinese civilization is closely connected with that of the Accadians, and may have had an origin from some contact with the Accadian peoples in their earliest homes in Central Asia. In any case it hardly seems likely that this can be classed as the fourth civilization which may have existed in the world when the pyramids were being built. But it is without doubt after these three the next oldest of the civilizations which the world has known. It seems to be remote alike from the half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone age, and from the mixed Turanian-Semitic civilizations of Egypt and Chaldæa.