The Professor smiled. Being English, he could not appreciate Charlie’s horror at its full value.

“Undoubtedly your Afro-Americans are a branch of the wonderful and mysterious Ethiopians who had a prehistoric existence of magnificence, the full record of which is lost in obscurity.

“We associate with the name ‘Chaldea’ the sciences of astronomy and philosophy and chronology. It was to the Wise Men of the East to whom the birth of Christ was revealed; they were Chaldeans—of the Ethiopians. Eighty-eight years before the birth of Abraham, these people, known in history as ‘Shepherd Kings,’ subjugated the whole of Upper Egypt, which they held in bondage more than three hundred years.”

“It is said that Egyptian civilization antedates that of Ethiopia,” broke in Reuel. “How do you say, Professor?”

“Nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. I know that in connecting Egypt with Ethiopia, one meets with most bitter denunciation from most modern scholars. Science has done its best to separate the race from Northern Africa, but the evidence is with the Ethiopians. If I mistake not, the ruins of Meroe will prove my words. Traditions with respect to Memnon connect Egypt and Ethiopia with the country at the head of the Nile. Memnon personifies the ethnic identity of the two races. Ancient Greeks believed it. All the traditions of Armenia, where lies Mt. Ararat, are in accordance with this fact. The Armenian geography applies the name of Cush to four great regions—Media, Persia, Susiana, Asia, or the whole territory between the Indus and the Tigris. Moses of Chorene identifies Belus, king of Babylon with Nimrod.

“But the Biblical tradition is paramount to all. In it lies the greatest authority that we have for the affiliation of nations, and it is delivered to us very simply and plainly: ‘The sons of Ham were Cush and Mizraim and Phut and Canaan…and Cush begot Nimrod…and the beginning of his kingdom was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.’ It is the best interpretation of this passage to understand it as asserting that the four races—Egyptians, Ethiopians, Libyans and Canaanites—were ethnically connected, being all descended from Ham; and that the primitive people of Babylon were a subdivision of one of these races; namely, of the Cushite or Ethiopian.