"That the nation of , which the biblical table of nations (Gen. x. 22) places second among ’s own children, was of purely Semitic race, has never been doubted. The striking likeness of the n to the type of face would almost alone have sufficed to establish the relationship, even were not the two languages so very nearly akin. But the kinship goes deeper than that, and asserts itself in certain spiritual tendencies, which find their expression in the national religion, or, more correctly, in the one essential modificationintroduced by the Assyrians into the , which they otherwise adopted wholesale, just as they brought it from their Southern home. Like their Hebrew brethren, they arrived at the perception of the Divine Unity; but while the wise men of the Hebrews took their stand uncompromisingly on monotheism and imposed it on their reluctant followers with a fervor and energy that no resistance or backsliding could abate, the Assyrian priests thought to reconcile the truth, which they but imperfectly grasped, with the old traditions and the established religious system. They retained the entire Babylonian pantheon, with all its theory of successive emanations, its two great triads, its five planetary deities, and the host of inferior divinities, but, at the head of them all, and above them all, they placed the one God and Master whom they recognized as supreme. They did not leave him wrapped in uncertainty and lost in misty remoteness, but gave him a very distinct individuality and a personal name: they called him ..."