The Anthropology of the Near East

Abstract

IN 1929 Dr. Ariens Kappers, director of the Central Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam, landed in Syria as a visiting professor in the American University of Beirut. There he remained for a year lecturing on “Histology and Neural Anatomy”—for it is as a neurologist that he has made his world-wide reputation. At Beirut he was tempted into a new field of inquiry—that of anthropology. Amongst his students he found representatives of that welter of races which has made the Near East the despair of the modern anthropologist. Near at hand were the peoples of Syria the Lebanese, the Druses, the Alouites along the coast to the north, the inhabitants of Damascus and of other Syrian cities on the border of the desert and the bedouin Syrians. He had communities of Armenians, Jews and Arabs open to him for observation. Near at hand was Palestine with its puzzling mixture of human types?old and new. He took the field, callipers in hand, and succeeded in measuring 2,500 individuals, representing the more outstanding racial types. To his own measurements he added those made by others. To obtain explanations of the data he collected in Syria, he found it necessary to extend his inquiries until they carried him far beyond the Caspian on one hand and the Persian Gulf on the other. The results of his inquiries appeared as a series of papers in the Proceedings of the Eoyal Academy of Science of Amsterdam. These researches have now been systematised and form the basis of the present work—“An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Near East”. A very valuable chapter has been added by Dr. L. W. Parr, of George Washington University, Washington, D.C., in which is summarised the results of an investigation of the blood-reactions of Near Eastern race groups. Before attempting to indicate the conclusions reached by Dr. Kappers as to the number of races he has identified in the south-western part of Asia, and the relationships in which these races stand to each other, in an evolutionary sense, it is necessary to touch on the methods he has employed for the discrimination of one race from another. His method has the recommendation of simplicity. He takes two measurements of the head—its length and its width—and relies on the proportion which the width bears to the length to give him an indication of race. He insists, however, and all anthropologists will agree with him on this, that when a group of measurements has been made the result must not be expressed in a single figure as a mean or average but must be tabulated so that the individual measurements are expressed in the form of a “frequency curve”. An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Near East in Ancient and Recent Times. By C. U. Ariens Kappers. With a Chapter on Near Eastern Bloodgroups, by Leland W. Parr. Pp. vii + 200 + 3 plates. (Amsterdam: N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1934.)