University Of Cambridge Alumni

"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens during a rain-storm in the spring-fed moat that lies close to the house. In Wildwood (2007), his epic account of trees, woods and forest cultures around the world, Walnut Tree Farm is the fixed point to which Roger returns and from which he learns,even as he journeys out to the groves of Kazakhstan and the of Australia. And in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (2008), extracts from Roger's copious journals record both the labour and wonder involved in living in twelve acres of meadow, and woodland; the night-time bark of foxes, the viper-bite of s as he cleared scrub or laid hedges, and the fallen stars of glow-worms in the long grass."

"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives. To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. sends the future as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in . There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees."

"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of , in , and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed . It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder by the bank, near the spreading roots of a tree; and began regularly swimming in the cold, greenish water. He gained what he called a frog’s-eye view of the changing seasons, and an intimate familiarity with the creatures sharing the moat, from to s."

"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clocks that drifted on the s over the moat."

"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new."

"Der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen."

"Genius transcends the boundaries and frontiers of race, and makes its happy possessor an understanding citizen in whatever state he inhabits."

"How far is patriotism necessary to the equipment of a statesman? Now patriotism, out of fashion though it be to-day, should be the first and plainest of the virtues. It is but an extension of the feeling for family, which is the foundation of all society. A man who insults his father and despises his mother is a bad son. He is a bad citizen, who despises and insults his country. And a bad citizen, though he has every right to exist, is not likely to prove the wisest ruler."

"Again Shakespeare proves himself a gentleman in his moderation. He does not insist. He harbours no inapposite desire to make us better. Some of his critics have been saddened by the thought that his plays solve no moral problems and preach no obvious sermons—that, in fact, he is content to be a mere master of the revels, a purveyor of joy and pleasure. His refusal to preach is but another title of honour."

"He was intolerant of fools and humbugs, and did not conceal his opinions; he had a real hatred of whiggery and indeed of liberalism in any form; and his unmeasured denunciation of all that he considered vulgar and insincere doubtless made him enemies. But he was fond of the society of his intellectual equals, whether at University dining societies or the Beefsteak Club, and his death removes a forceful and forthright character from the English literary world. Both he and his opinions would perhaps have been more at home in London somewhere between the Restoration and the French Revolution; but we may be glad that there was at least one of his sort among us in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

"The poet of England, he gave to the love of country, to patriotism as nowadays we call it, a voice which never shall be stilled. His histories are, and will ever be, the epic of our race."

"A bare record of his work can give but little idea of Whibley's place in the estimation of his contemporaries, which is attributable at least as much to the effect of his personality on those who came into contact with him as to his literary eminence. The warmth of his human sympathies, his brilliant wit, his love of good cheer, of good talk, and of all that was vital and sincere made him the best of companions. He had his prejudices, to which he would sometimes give alarming expression; but his impeccable intellectual honesty and the courageous vigour of mind and spirit which shone out in his conversation made him an acknowledged leader among his intimates. In this, as in some of his other qualities, including his unbending toryism, he resembled Dr. Johnson; and it may well be that like Johnson he will rather live through the influence which he exerted on those who were privileged to know him than through the written word. Nevertheless, he was a great master of the written word. He maintained throughout his life the loftiest standards of his craft: his literary style was in the highest degree chaste and austere. His most ephemeral work—and much of it was ephemeral—was always that of a scholar; and although as a writer he was critical rather than constructive, he was a power in his time."

"Genius transcends the common rules of life and blood."

"The “Musings Without Method” which Whibley contributed once a month to Blackwood's for thirty years, excepting two months, one of which was the last, are the best sustained piece of literary journalism that I know in recent times."

"For Shakespeare, as I have said, was above and before all things a lover of England. With how bitter a contempt would he have lashed those friends of every country but their own, who nowadays unpack what they have of souls to strangers, and believe that flat treason is a mark of superiority! And Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also. He loved not those who disturbed the peace of England. He believed firmly in the established order, and in the great traditions of his native land. He was a firm supporter of Church and State."

"It is in Henry V. that Shakespeare fashioned for us the true epic of England. The dramatic form sits very loosely upon it. It is epic in shape as in spirit. Splendid in eloquence, swift in narrative, it is a pæan sung in our country's praise. Its noble lines sound in our ears like a trumpet-call, and it has lost not a jot of its force and energy by the passage of three hundred years."

"Like most Radicals, he [Richard Cobden] lived in a fool's paradise where facts are of no account, and where, if principles prove fallacious, it is not the fault of the optimist who frames them, but of some vile conspirator against the common good."

"He gives always the impression of fearless sincerity, and that is more important than being always right. One always feels that he is ready to say bluntly what every one else is afraid to say. Thus a feeling of apprehensiveness, conducive to attention, is aroused in the reader. And, in fact, he was, when he chose to be, a master of invective."

"The political game, as it is played in England, bears this resemblance to the game of fives, that you must get your adversary out before you may begin to score yourself."

"I will boldly say, that England...hath more fallow dear than all Europe that I have seen. No kingdom in the world hath so many dove-houses...The English husbandmen eat barley and rye brown bread, and prefer it to white bread as abiding longer in the stomach, and not so soon disgested with their labour; but citizens and gentlemen care eat most pure white bread, England yielding...all kinds of corn in plenty...The English have abundance of white meats, of all kinds of flesh, fowl and fish and of all things good for food...The oysters of England were of old carried as far as Rome, being more plentiful and savoury than in any other part...In the seasons of the year the English eat fallow deer plentifully, as bucks in summer and does in winter, which they bake in pasties, and this venison pasty is a dainty, rarely found in any other kingdom. Likewise brawn is a proper meat to the English, not known to others...In general, the English cooks, in comparison with other nations, are most commended for roasted meats...But the Italian Sansovine is much deceived, writing, that in general the English eat and cover the table at least four times in the day; for howsoever those that journey, and some sickly men staying at home, may perhaps take a small breakfast, yet in general the English eat but two meals (of dinner and supper) each day, and I could never see him that useth to eat four times in the day."

"Moryson is a sober and truthful writer, without imagination or much literary skill. He delights in statistics respecting the mileage of his daily journeys and the varieties in the values of the coins he encountered. His descriptions of the inns in which he lodged, of the costume and the food of the countries visited, render his work invaluable to the social historian."

"I pray to God the Scottish King do deceive me, but I am afeared he will not. For my own part, I have made of the French King, the Scottish King, and the King of Spain, a Trinity that I mean never to trust to be saved by; and I would others were, in that, of my opinion.Sir, there was never, since England was England, such a stratagem and mask made to deceive England withal as this is of the treaty of peace."

"You are, and haue beene feared ouer all, England's an Ile, of stoute and hardie men: Be stronge in faith, your foes downe right shall fall, For one of you, in armes shall vanquish ten."

"England, our native country, one of the most renowned monarchies in the world, against which the Pope beareth a special eye of envy and malice: envy for the wealth and peace that we enjoy through the goodness of Almighty God...[and] malice for the religion of the Gospel which we profess, whereby the dignity of his triple crown is almost shaken in pieces...Their [our enemies'] scope is by invasion and rebellion to subdue and conquer all, with purpose, as it seemeth, to root out from them [Britain and Ireland] the English nation for ever. And if it fall not out according to their desires — as, with God's help, it never shall — yet at the least they will do their best to trouble the Queen and her State, to burn, to spoil, to kill, to rob...By sea is one of the things we ought chiefly to regard, being rightly termed the wall of England; for which her Majesty, with her provident care, is so furnished with great and good shipping...as in no age the like, and such and so many as no Prince in Christendom may compare with."

"For the safeguard of your country, if you be called to the wars, grutch [complain] not nor groan at it. Go with good wills and lusty courages to meet them in the field rather than to tarry till they come home to you and hang you at your own gates. Play not the milksops in making curtsy who shall go first, but Show yourselves true Englishmen in readiness, courage, and boldness. And be ashamed to be the last. Fear neither French nor Scot. For first you have God and all his army of angels on your side [a marginal note observes "God is English"]. You have right and truth, and seek not to do them wrong but to defend your own right. Think not that God will suffer you to be foiled at their hands, for your fall is his dishonor. If you lose the victory, he must lose the glory. For you fight not only in the quarrel of your country but also and chiefly in defense of his true religion and of his dear son Christ....What people be they with whom we shall match. Are they giants? Are they conquerors or monarchs of the world? No, good Englishman, they be effeminate Frenchmen, stout in brag but nothing in deed. They be such as you have always made to take to their heels..., saving that William of Normandy crept in among us through the civil war of two brethren, Harold and Tostig. And yet, what did he? He left his posterity to reign which were rather by time turned to be English than the noble English to become French, as our tongue and manners at this day declareth, which differeth very little from our ancestors the Saxons....Thus have we nothing to dismay us but all things to encourage us. God to fight for us, the strength of our land, the courage of our men, the goodness of our soil....Now, therefore, it is our duties to be in every wise obedient....Do you not hear how lamentably your natural mother, your country of England, calleth upon you for obedience?...I have been and am glad of you. I delight and rejoice in you above all over nations. In declaration whereof I have always spued out and cast from me Danes, French, Norwegians, and Scots. I could brook none of them for the tender love that I bare unto you, of whom I have my name. I never denied to minister to you by my singular commodities which God hath lent me for you, as corn and cattle, land and pasture, wool and cloth, lead and tin, flesh and fish, gold and silver, and all my other treasures. I have poured them out among you and enriched you above all your neighbors....Besides this, God hath brought forth in me the greatest and excellentest treasure that he hath for your comfort and all the world’s. He would that out of my womb should come that servant of his, your brother John Wyclif, who begat [John] Hus, who begat [Martin] Luther, who begat truth. What greater honor could you or I have than it pleased Christ, as it were in a second birth, to be born again of me among you? [A marginal note comments: "Christ's second birth in England"]. And will you now suffer me, or rather by your disobedience purchase me, to be a mother without my children?...Stick to your mother as she sticketh to you. Let me keep in quiet and feed, as I have done, your wives, your children, and your kinsfolks. Obey your mistress and mine which God hath made lady [queen] over us, both by nature and law. You cannot be my children, if you be not her subjects....?Thus good, truehearted Englishmen, speaketh your country unto you, not in word but in deed. Wherefore give no dull ear to hear, nor hearken to any vain blasts or voices which may draw you from the love of your country and the defense of your sovereign...."

"The most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the parliament: for as in war where the king himself in person, the nobility, the rest of the gentility and the yeomanry are, is the force and power of England; so in peace and consultation, where the prince is, to give life and the last and highest commandment, the barony or nobility for the higher, the knights, esquires, gentlemen, and commons for the lower part of the commonwealth, the bishops for the clergy, be present to advertise, consult and show what is good and necessary for the commonwealth, and to consult together; and upon mature deliberation, every bill or law being thrice read and disputed upon in either house, the other two parts, first each apart, and after the prince himself in the presence of both the parties, doth consent unto and alloweth. That is the prince's and the whole realm's deed, whereupon no man justly can complain, but must accommodate himself to find it good and obey it."

"To be short, the prince is the life, the head and the authority of all things that be done in the realm of England. And to no prince is done more honour and reverence than to the king and queen of England; no man speaketh to the prince nor serveth at the table but in adoration and kneeling, all persons of the realm be bareheaded before him; insomuch that in the chamber of presence, where the cloth of estate is set, no man dare walk, yea though the prince be not there, no man dare tarry there but bareheaded. This is understood of the subjects of the realm: for all strangers be suffered there and in all places to use the manner of their country, such is the civility of our nation."

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."

"Death at the headlands, Hesiod, long ago Gave thee to drink of his unhonied wine: Now Boreas cannot reach thee lying low, Nor Sirius' heat vex any hour of thine: The Pleiads rising are no more a sign For thee to reap, nor, when they set, to sow: Whether at morn or eve Arcturus shine, To pluck or prune the vine thou canst not know.Vain now for thee the crane's autumnal flight, The loud cuckoo, the twittering swallow—vain The flow'ring scolymus, the budding trees, Seedtime and Harvest, Blossoming and Blight, The mid, the early, and the latter rain, And strong Orion and the Hyades."

"The kingdome of Benin [has] a very proper towne of that name, and an haven called Gurte. The inhabitants live in idolatry, and are a rude and brutish nation; notwithstanding that their prince is served with such high reverence, and never commeth in sight but with great solemnity, and many ceremonies: at whose death his chiefe favorites count it the greatest point of honour to be buried with him, to the end (as they vainly imagine) they may doe him service in another world."

"The rise of Benin...is closely connected with the European demand for slaves...The profits from the trade with the Europeans gave the rulers and merchants of Benin an incentive and also, in the form of firearms, the means, to extend their rule...By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the continual warfare was destroying the prosperity and even the structure of the state...Large parts of the city were deserted and left to crumble into ruins. Trade, even the trade in slaves, declined, and, as European traders came ever less frequently to the city, so the purpose of slave-raids became increasingly to provide victims for human sacrifices. Eventually, of all the greatness of Benin, all that survived was the unchecked and self-destructive lust of its rulers for power and human booty."

"The scattered Jewish components of my ancestry would have given nightmares to assessors trying to apply the Nuremberg Laws, and although pleased to have these fractions, I had not previously given much thought to them or to Jewish culture. It was at this stage that I became intrigued—in a Romantic way—in this part of my 'roots'. I started looking into ancient Jewish history and— being on the periphery myself—into the relationship between the Israelites and the surrounding peoples, particularly the Canaanites and the Phoenicians....During this time, I was beginning to study Hebrew and I found what seemed to me a number of striking similarities between it and Greek."

"I...became convinced that anything up to a quarter of the Greek vocabulary could be traced to Semitic origins. This, together with 40–50 per cent that seem to be Indo-European, still left a quarter to a third of the Greek vocabulary unexplained. I hesitated between seeing this irreducible fraction conventionally as ‘Pre-Hellenic’ or of postulating a third outside language, either from Anatolian or—as I preferred—Hurrian. When I looked into these languages, however, they provided virtually no promising material. It was only in 1979, when I was glancing through a copy of Černy’s Coptic Etymological Dictionary, that I was able to get some sense of Late Ancient Egyptian. Almost immediately, I realized that this was the third outside language. Within a few months I became convinced that one could find plausible etymologies for a further 20–25 per cent of the Greek vocabulary from Egyptian, as well as the names for most Greek gods and many place names. Putting the Indo-European, Semitic and Egyptian roots together, I now believed that—with further research—one could provide plausible explanations for 80–90 per cent of the Greek vocabulary, which is as high a proportion as one can hope for in any language. Thus there was now no need for the ‘Pre-Hellenic’ element at all."

"The Greek War of Independence...united all Europeans against the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa.This War – and the philhellenic movement, which supported the struggle for independence – completed the already powerful image of Greece as the epitome of Europe. The Ancient Greeks were now seen as perfect, and as having transcended the laws of history and language. Thus it was now thought profane to study any aspect of their culture as one would the culture of other peoples. Moreover, with the rise of a passionate and systematic racism in the early 19th century, the ancient notion that Greece was a mixed culture that had been civilized by Africans and Semites became not only abominable but unscientific. Just as one had to discount the ‘credulous’ Greeks’ stories about sirens and centaurs, so one had to reject legends of their having been colonized by inferior races. Paradoxically, the more the 19th century admired the Greeks, the less it respected their writing of their own history."

"The same social and intellectual forces that had brought down the Ancient Model in the 1820s were even more intense in the 1840s and 50s, and they clearly played a role in the increasingly ‘northern’ picture of Ancient Greece that developed in the late 19th century. At the same time, the sense that only 19th-century men knew how to think ‘scientifically’ gave the – mainly German – scholars the confidence both to dismiss ancient descriptions of early Greek history and to invent new ones of their own without any regard to the Ancients."

"Why was Astour’s work considered so...offensive? First, it offended at a formal level, because it challenged the academic hierarchy; this was a reflection of the relative power of the two disciplines. Although Classicists had previously discussed Eastern parallels to Hellenic mythology, it was entirely different and unacceptable for Orientalists to pronounce on Greece.There were also fundamental objections to the content of Astour’s work. Scholars like Fontenrose and Walcot had made broad sweeps of world mythology – including India, Iran and so on – and they gave preference, if possible, to the less offensive sources. By contrast, Astour’s derivation of Greek names from Semitic not only poached on the sacred ground of language, but also made the connections between West Semites and Greeks disturbingly close and specific. Furthermore, two of the myth cycles he treated – those of Kadmos and Danaos – were concerned with Near Eastern colonization in Greece, and he made a plausible case for their having a historical kernel of truth. The fourth section of Hellenosemitica was even more provocative in that it went into the sociology of knowledge, and its sketch of the history and ideology of Classics and Classical archaeology has been the basis of all later writings on this subject, this volume included. In doing this Astour injected relativism into subjects that had previously been impervious to the forces of probabilism and uncertainty that have transformed other disciplines since the 1890s."

"It seems...that the Aryan Model is being maintained very largely by its own tradition and academic inertia. Neither of these forces should be underestimated; nevertheless, they have been considerably weakened by a number of startling internal developments – all of which show that the Bronze Age civilizations were much more advanced and cosmopolitan than had been thought, and that in general the ancient records are more reliable than more recent reconstructions. Given these externalist and internalist contexts, I am convinced that even the Broad Aryan Model is untenable and that the Ancient Model will be restored at some point in the early 21st century."

"I was staggered to discover that what I began to call the ‘Ancient Model’ had not been overthrown until the early 19th century, and that the version of Greek history which I had been taught—far from being as old as the Greeks themselves—had been developed only in the 1840s and 50s. Astour had taught me that attitudes towards the Phoenicians in historiography were profoundly affected by anti-Semitism; it was therefore easy for me to make a connection between the dismissal of the Egyptians and the explosion of Northern European racism in the 19th century."

"It is absurd to try to summarize this book in a dozen paragraphs, when even the previous hundreds of pages in which I have attempted to set out some of the complications of this vast and extraordinarily ramified theme can best be described by the Chinese expression ‘looking at flowers from horseback’."

"By the 1830s [European fascination with Sanskrit] had led to a general perception of the Indo-European language family which, in the racist atmosphere of the time, developed quite quickly into the notion of an Indo-European or ‘Aryan race’. The passion for India also meant that it replaced Egypt as the exotic ancestor of Europe. This time, however, the ancestry was not seen in terms of the transmission of philosophy and reason but as a Romantic one of ‘blood’ and kinship."

"It is hardly surprising that scholars working within the Aryan Model prefer to neglect the Christian factor and see these events as representing a resurgence of Egyptian Oriental fanaticism against Hellenistic rationalism. But, if one disregards the absurd implication that Europeans cannot be fanatical, these two explanations – that the fanatical mob was both Christian and Egyptian – are not mutually exclusive. By the 4th century AD, Egypt was a passionately – if not the most passionately – Christian province in the Roman Empire."

"In 390 AD the temple of Serapis and the adjacent great library of Alexandria were destroyed by a Christian mob; twenty-five years later, the brilliant and beautiful philosopher and mathematician Hypatia was gruesomely murdered in the same city by a gang of monks instigated by St Cyril. These two acts of violence mark the end of Egypto-Paganism and the beginning of the Christian Dark Ages."

"As...Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out, it is not accidental that Dupuis is so little known today. His beliefs continue to form a coherent challenge to both Christianity and the myth of Greece as a cultural beginning; thus he and his work had to be buried. Dupuis was a brilliant scientist and the inventor of semaphore, and was also active in politics during the French Revolution. His great reputation as a scholar and his dedication to moderate revolutionary principles made him a natural choice for director of cultural events during the Directory from 1795 to 1799, and he became president of the legislative body during the Consulate under Napoleon that followed."

"After the 1780s, the intensification of racism and the new belief in the central importance of ‘ethnicity’ as a principle of historical explanation became critical for perceptions of Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians were increasingly detached from the noble Caucasians, and their ‘black’ and African nature was more and more emphasized. Thus the idea that they were the cultural ancestors of the Greeks – the epitome and pure childhood of Europe – became unbearable. There was also a new crisis between Egyptian mythology and Christianity with the works of Dupuis, which represented the ideological or theological counterpart of the French Revolution’s attack on European social order. It is only with this background that one can make sense of the tormented career of Champollion during the years of reaction between 1815 and 1830. Although Champollion was an avowed revolutionary and an enthusiastic Bonapartist, one of his earliest discoveries discredited some of the theories of Dupuis’s supporters, and he and his decipherment were therefore welcomed by the Church and the Restoration nobility. On the other hand, his championing of Egypt over Greece combined with his political beliefs to infuriate Hellenist and Indianist scholars, who continued to do all they could to block his academic career."

"The Classical writer most often appealed to to justify slavery was Aristotle, who had argued at length in its favour. The appeal was linked to the fact that his work was shot through with the belief that Greeks were inherently superior to other peoples."

"Winckelmann] loved every aspect of his image of Greece, seeing its two dominant essences as liberty and youth. According to him Greece epitomized freedom, while Egyptian culture had been stunted by its monarchism and conservatism and was the symbol of rigid authority and stagnation — which also happened to be non-European. In his mind, the Greek city-states contained the liberty without which it was impossible to create great art. Winckelmann, and his followers, loved this liberty and youth for their freshness and vitality. Yet he insisted upon the soft gentleness of Greek art, and the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘serene greatness’ of Greek culture as a whole, which he saw as the result of the equable Greek climate. Moreover, central to his love of Greece was his appreciation of Greek homosexuality. Winckelmann himself was homosexual, and the major homosexual strand which has persisted in modern Hellenism has continued to be associated with him."

"There have been...persistent attempts to diminish the Egyptian aspects of the play [the Suppliants of Aischylos], which in later times became so important a prop for the Ancient Model. For instance, while Io is seen as coming from Argos, most sources agree that she was only the distant ancestor of Aigyptos and Danaos. Thus the brothers and their children were Egyptianized, if not purely Egyptian, and the Danaids are explicitly described as ‘black’. The mainstream of German scholarship, however, has preferred the one scholiast who can dubiously be construed to say that the twins were the children of Io herself. The same scholiast also maintains that the whole action of the trilogy took place in Argos. This version has been preferred to all the other sources, some of which held that all the events were situated in Egypt, and all of which...had the Danaids arriving from Egypt."

"I hope to demonstrate that Herodotos’ views on the Egyptian and Phoenician settlements, though treated with condescension and scorn by most modern Classicists and ancient historians, were conventional not only in his own times but also throughout Archaic, Classical and later Antiquity."

"To use a military analogy of the type favoured by Reinach himself, the demotion of China, Egypt and the Turks had been achieved by an Indo-European-Semitic alliance. In the 1820s only K. O. Müller, whom Reinach described as 'always in advance of his times', had had the courage to discard Europe's allies.By 1885 Europe’s conquest of the world was so complete that this courage had become commonplace and could now cast the Indians and the Semites aside."

"It seems to have been...the belief expressed by Herodotos that the ancestry of the Spartan kings went up to the Hyksos colonists – that, sometime around 300 BC, Areios King of Sparta wrote to Jerusalem beginning: "To Onias High Priest, greeting. A document has come to light which shows that the Spartans and Jews are kinsmen descended alike from Abraham.""