The Empires of the Bible from the Confusion of Tongues to the Babylonian Captivity

MAGOG

9. This name, like that of Gomer, is not mentioned in the Scriptures, apart from its genealogical relation, except in Ezekiel 38 and 39, and Revelation 20:8. And, like Gomer, the land of Magog and his people is located northward from Palestine. Speaking of “Gog, the land of Magog,” Ezekiel 38:15 says: “And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army.” There is an inscription of about 650 B. C., by Assur-bani-pal, king of Assyria, in which occur the words, “Sariti and Payiza, sons of Gog, a chief of the Saka;” and the Saka were the Scythians. EB 8.3

10. The Scythians, therefore, who inhabited the vast regions to the north of the Caspian Sea, and who drove out the Cimmerians and took possession of their country, were the people of Magog. By some of the successors of Alexander the Great, there was a wall built, called the Caucasian wall, which extended from the western shore of the Caspian Sea, at Derbend, almost to the eastern shore of the Black Sea. This wall was built as a defense against the inroads of the Scythian hordes, and is still called “the wall of Gog and Magog.” EB 9.1

11. “From the accounts found among the Arabians, Persians, and Syrians,... we learn that they comprehended under the designation Yajuj and Majuj all the less known barbarous people of the Northeast and Northwest of Asia.” ⁵ EB 9.2

12. Of these peoples Ramband says: “Beyond the line of Greek colonies [about the northern coast of the Black Sea] dwelt a whole world of tribes, whom the Greeks designated by the common name of Scythians.” ⁶ EB 9.3

13. Of the multitude of people who dwelt in this boundless region, the chief in the time of Herodotus were three distinct bodies of Scythians, properly so called. EB 9.4

14. First, there were the “Scythian cultivators,” or “husbandmen,” who possessed the country drained by the Dnieper—the Ukraine—of which the Cimmerians had been dispossessed. EB 9.5

15. Second, the Nomad or “Wandering Scythians, who neither plow nor sow.” EB 9.6

16. Third, the Royal Scythians, “the largest and bravest of the Scythian tribes, which looks upon all the other tribes in the light of slaves.” These were of the same habits as the Wandering Scythians. Their principal seat was between the Dnieper and the Don. EB 9.7

17. Besides these, there was a fourth division, composed of tribes that had revolted from the Royal Scythians, and dwelt upon the eastern sources of the Volga. EB 9.8

18. “The Nomads were the genuine Scythians, possessing the marked attributes of the race, and including among their number the Royal Scythians—hordes so much more populous and more effective in war than the rest, as to maintain undisputed ascendency, and to account all other Scythians no better than their slaves.” “If the habits of the Scythians were such as to create in the near observer no other feeling than repugnance, their force at least inspired terror. They appeared in the eyes of Thucydides [B. C. 471-429] so numerous and so formidable that he pronounces them irresistible, if they could but unite, by any other nation within his knowledge. Herodotus, too, conceived the same idea of a race among whom every man was a warrior and a practised horse-bow-man, and who were placed by their mode of life out of all reach of an enemy’s attack.”—Grote. ⁷ EB 10.1

19. About 625 B. C., after driving out the Cimmerians from the Ukraine, a torrent of the Scythians swept down by the Caspian Sea, and overran Media, Assyria, and Upper Mesopotamia, and continued westward even to the Jordan, where, on its western bank in the land of the half-tribe of Manasseh, the city of Bethshan was afterward called Scythopolis from its having been captured by the Scythians. They kept Media and Assyria in a state of terror for about fourteen years before they could be driven out. EB 10.2

20. Nor was the country of the Scythians confined to the Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga; for when Alexander the Great, in his conquering march, reached the River Jaxartes—the present SyrDaria—at the seventieth degree of east longitude, he found Scythian warriors there to dispute his passage of that river; he crossed, nevertheless, and defeated them. In truth, the region of the Altai Mountains was about the center, from east to west, of the widespread people of Magog; for they extended from Europe to the Pacific Ocean. Of the principal divisions of the races that sprang from these, we may name at least nine. EB 10.3

21. (1) The ancient Mongols, or Mongolians, from whom came the Chinese and Indo-Chinese, the Siamese, the Anamese, the Burmese, the Cambodians, the Thibetans, the Japanese, and the aborigines of North and South America, from Alaska to Patagonia. “Says Fontaine: ‘If a congregation of twelve men from Malacca, China, Japan, Mongolia, the South Sea Islands, Chili, Peru, Brazil, Chickasaws, and Comanches were dressed alike, or undressed and unshaven, the most skilful anatomist could not from their appearance separate them.’” ⁸ EB 10.4

22. (2) The Malays, who have peopled the Malay Peninsula, the Malay, or East Indian Archipelago, Madagascar, and the greater portion of the islands of the Pacific Ocean. “This astonishing expansion of the Malaysian peoples throughout the Oceanic area is sufficiently attested by the diffusion of a common Malayo-Polynesian speech from Madagascar to Easter Island and from Hawaii to New Zealand.” ⁹ EB 11.1

23. (3) The Huns, whose “ancient and perhaps original seat” was in the country now called Mongolia, immediately north of the Great Wall of China; who in the early part of the third century before Christ had spread their power eastward to the Pacific at the extremity of Corea, westward to the River Irtysh, and northward to the extremity of Lake Baikal; and against whose inroads the Great Wall—1500 miles long—was built to protect the territories of China. But this great wall was built in vain; for in 201 B. C., the Huns swept over China and brought it under tribute till about 87 B. C., when their power over China was broken. Their power then steadily declined till A. D. 93, when it was utterly destroyed in the east by the rise of the Sienpi. In A. D. 375 they poured into Europe, and under Attila, A. D. 433-453, their power was established from the Danube to the Ural, and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean Sea. EB 11.2

24. At the death of Attila, their power was broken, their empire was destroyed, and they were driven back into the Scythian steppes, in the country of the Volga and the Ural. Their modern representatives are the Bulgarians proper, numbering about 1,500,000 people. “It may be considered, as M. Zeuss has shown, as an historical fact, that the Bulgarians were the remains of the Hunns, who, after their defeat on the death of Attila, retreated to the banks of the Wolga and the plains, extending from Bolgari [Wolga or Volga, Wolgari, Bolgari, Bulgari, Bulgarians] to the Euxine. From that country, called, as we have seen, Great Bulgaria, issued the hordes of Bulgarians who, at a later period, crossed the Danube and established the Bulgarian kingdom.”—Prichard. ¹⁰ EB 11.3

25. (4) The modern Mongols, or Moguls, who, under Jenghiz Khan, or Zingis Khan, and his sons, A. D. 1162-1241, established their empire from the China Sea to the borders of Moravia; almost repeated it under Tamerlane, A. D. 1361-1405; and who still remain, in the country and nation of Mongolia. EB 12.1

26. (5) The Tartars, who, under the name of Sienpi, broke the power of the Huns in A. D. 93; who led the vanguard in the great Mogul invasion of Europe, A. D. 1238; and whose name still remains in the Uzbeck, Kalmuck, and Crim, or Crimea, Tartars. EB 12.2

27. (6) The Turks, Turkmans, or Turcomans, who early in the Christian era emigrated from Central Asia to the northern country about the Caspian and Aral Seas. In A. D. 997-1028 Mahmud, the first who bore the title of “sultan,” began a career of conquest that has made the name and nation of the Turks one among the most famous in history, and now a source of constant jealousy and contention among the nations of Europe. EB 12.3

28. (7) The Finns, who in five groups have peopled the following countries: (a) The Finns proper, in Finland and the Baltic provinces of Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland; (b) the Lapps, in Lapland and parts of northern Sweden and Norway; (c) the Permian Finns, in the northern habitable portion of Russia proper; (d) the Volga Finns, on both banks, and the branches of the Upper Volga; (e) the Ugrian Finns, between the Ural Mountains and the Yenisei River above the fifty-ninth degree north latitude, and in Hungary. For it was from the tribes of Ugrian Finns that the Magyars came, who in the ninth century were such a scourge to eastern Europe, and who in 889 and onward finally settled in what is now Hungary (Ugri, Wengri, Ungri, Ungari, Hungari, Hungary). Besides these there are, of the Ugrain Finns, the Esquimaux of North America. EB 12.4

29.(8) The Sarmatians, who sprung from the Royal Scythians, and who in the days of Herodotus dwelt east of the Don. Before the end of the first century of the Christian era, they had spread their name over all eastern Europe, from the River Volga to the Baltic Sea; and their name was even extended to the Baltic itself, that sea being then called the Sarmatian Ocean. Tacitus says that in his time Germany was “separated from Sarmatia and Dacia, by mountains and mutual dread.” From the Sarmatians are descended the Slavonians who have peopled Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Servia, and other provinces of lesser note, in those regions. EB 12.5

30. (9) The Parthians, who gave name to the country of Parthia, in central Asia. They were subdued by the great Cyrus, and their country became one of the most important provinces of the Medo-Persian Empire. They regained their independence about 250 B. C., by a successful revolt from the rule of Antiochus Theos, one of the “successors” of Alexander the Great. The leader in the revolt was named Arsaces, and that name was assumed as the kingly title by all his successors, as in Egypt “Pharaoh” was used in early times, and “Ptolemy” in later. The kingdom thus established went forward in a continuous course of success until it became an empire ruling “all the lands of central Asia,” “from the Indian Caucasus to the Euphrates,” and continued four hundred and seventy-eight years, from B. C. 250 to A. D. 228. By inflicting two terrible defeats upon the Roman armies,—the defeat of Crassus at Carrhae, B. C. 53, and the defeat of Macrinus at Nisibis, A. D. 217 and 218,—they “forced the arrogant Romans to respect them, and to allow that there was at least one nation which could meet them on equal terms and not be worsted in the encounter;” and by a contest of nearly three hundred years they “obtained recognition ... as the second power in the world, the admitted rival of Rome, the only real counterpoise upon the earth to the power which ruled from the Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean.”—Rawlinson. ¹¹ In A. D. 228 the power of the Parthians was permanently broken by the rise of the Persian Artaxerxes, the son of Sasan, who established the New Persian or Sassanian Empire. EB 13.1

31. All these are the people of Magog, and it will be seen at a glance that “the land of Magog” is the steppe country of northern Asia, and is now represented in the Russian possessions, which stretch from the borders of Germany to the Pacific Ocean. EB 14.1