THE NATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD.
[Sidenote: Prehistoric nationalities.]
When we try and gather into one view the results of our inquiries upon
the kindreds and nations of the old world, it must be confessed we are
struck rather by the extent of our ignorance than of our knowledge. For
all the light we are able to shed, the movements and the passage of the
various races in this prehistoric time appear to the eye of the mind
most like the movement of great hosts of men seen dimly through a mist.
Or shall we say that we are in the position of persons living upon some
one of many great military highways, while before their eyes pass
continually bodies of troops in doubtful progress to and fro, affording
to them, where they stand, no indication of the order of battle or the
plan of the campaign? Still, to men in such a position there would be
more or less of intelligence possible in the way in which they watched
the steps of those who passed before them; and we, too, though we cannot
attempt really to follow the track of mankind down from the earliest
times, may yet gather some idea of the changing positions which from age
to age have been occupied by the larger divisions of our race.
In the Bible narrative continuous history begins, at the earliest, not
before the time of Abraham. In the earlier chapters of Genesis we find
only scattered notices of individuals who dwelt in one particular corner
of the world, nothing to indicate the general distribution of races, or
the continuous lapse of time. It is, moreover, a fact that, owing partly
to the associations of childhood, we are apt, by a too literal
interpretation, to rob the narrative of some part of its historical
value. Here, proper names, which we might be inclined to take for the
names of single individuals, often stand for whole races, and sometimes
for the countries which gave their names to the people dwelling in them.
‘Son of,’ too, must not be taken in its most literal meaning, but in the
wider, and in old languages the perfectly natural, sense of ‘descended
from.’ When nations kept the idea of a common ancestor before their
minds, in a way with which we of the present day are quite unfamiliar,
it was very customary to describe any one person of that people as the
‘son of’ the common ancestor. Thus a Greek who wished to bring before
his hearers the common nationality of the Greek people--the
Hellenes--would speak of them as being the sons of Hellen, of the
Æolians or Ionians as sons of Æolus or Ion. In another way, again, an
Athenian or Theban might speak of his fellow-citizens as sons of Athens
or of Thebes. Such language among any ancient people is not poetical or
hyperbolical language, but the usual speech of every day. It is in a
similar fashion that in the Bible narrative, centuries are passed
rapidly over. And if the remains of the stone ages lift a little the
veil which hides man’s earliest doings upon earth, it must be confessed
that the light which these can shed is but slight and partial. We catch
sight of a portion of the human race making their rude implements of
stone and bone, living in caves as hunters and fishers, without domestic
animals and without agriculture, but not without faculties which raise
them far above the level of the beasts by which they are surrounded.
Yet of these early men we may say we know not whence they come or
whither they go. We cannot tell whether the picture which we are able to
form of man of the earliest time--of the first stone age--is a general
or a partial picture; whether it represents the majority of his
fellow-creatures, or only a particular race strayed from the first home
of man.
[Sidenote: Black, yellow, red, and white races.]
We must therefore be content to resign the hope of anything like a
review of man’s life since the beginning. Before we see him clearly, he
had probably spread far and wide over the earth, and already separated
into the three or four most important divisions of the race. It is usual
to divide the human race into four divisions named after, but not
entirely founded upon, the colour of their skins. These divisions are
the black, yellow, red, and white races. I do not propose to go into any
elaborate description either of the peculiarities or the _habitat_ of
these four sections of humanity. The greater part of mankind have no
place in history properly so called. We know them only in the present,
their past is lost for ever. And the present volume being designed to
open the door to history is really not concerned with races such as
these. It will be enough very briefly to indicate the main
characteristics of the four races of mankind, and to refer the reader
for more information to the chapter in Mr. Tylor’s _Anthropology_
dealing with the subject.
[Sidenote: The Black Races.]
The black or negro race, then, consists of two divisions the negroes of
Africa, and the negroes of certain among the islands of the Pacific
bordering upon Australia and called Melanesia. This Melanesia, or ‘the
negro islands’ as we might call them, include Tasmania, New Guinea, and
a great number of smaller islands. But they do not include Australia
and New Zealand, the inhabitants of both which countries have physical
features differing from those of the genuine negro, though the
Australian type approaches very near to his. The colour of the skin is
not really the chief characteristic of this race, but far more so is the
very crisp hair (what is called wool), the very flat and broadened nose,
the broad lips, and the advanced under-jaw, or, as it is called, the
_prognathism_ of the face. This black race has never had anything that
deserves to be called either a literature or a history.
[Sidenote: The Red Races.]
The red race, which we will take next, is that which inhabits or, till
the Europeans came, inhabited the whole of America, North and South,
except the extreme North, the country of the Eskimo. We take these
people next because they are almost as unknown to history as are the
negroes. The peculiarities of the red races are their red skin, their
high cheek-bones, the straight black hair which, exactly opposite to
that of the negro, never curls.[40] This race has not been quite so
stationary as the negro. Some of its members, the Aztecs of Mexico, the
Incas of Peru, did attain to a considerable civilization. But they had
advanced no way in the art of writing or keeping records of their past,
which is thus wholly lost to us; and we have no means of connecting the
civilization of the red races with the civilization of that part of the
world which has had a history.
We are therefore left to deal with the two remaining classes, the yellow
and the white. The oldest, that is to say apparently the least changed,
of these is the yellow
[Sidenote: The Yellow Races.]
race, and perhaps their most typical representatives are the Chinese.
The type is a sufficiently familiar one. ‘The skull of the yellow race
is rounded in form. The oval of the head is larger than with Europeans.
The cheek-bones are very projecting; the cheeks rise towards the
temples, so that the outer corners of the eyes are elevated; the eyelids
seem half closed. The forehead is flat above the eyes. The bridge of the
nose is flat, the chin short, the ears disproportionately large and
projecting from the head. The colour of the skin is generally yellow,
and in some branches turns to brown. There is little hair on the body;
beard is rare. The hair of the head is coarse, and, like the eyes,
almost always black.’[41] In the present day the different families of
the globe have gone through the changes which time and variety of
climate slowly bring about in all; and the yellow race has not escaped
these influences. While some of its members have by a mixture with white
races or by gradual improvement, reached a type not easily
distinguishable from the European, others have, through the effect of
climate, approached more nearly to the characteristics of the black
family. We may, however, still class these divergent types under the
head of the yellow race, which we consequently find extending over a
vast portion of our globe. Round the North Pole the Eskimo, the Lapps,
and the Finns form a belt of people belonging to this division of
mankind. Over all Northern and Central Asia the various tribes of
Mongolian or Turanian race inhabiting the plains of Siberia and of
Tartary, and again the Thibetans, the Chinese, Siamese, and other
kindred peoples of Eastern Asia, are members of this yellow family. From
the Malay peninsula the same race has spread southward, passing from
land to land over the countless isles which cover the South Pacific,
until they have reached the islands which lie around the Australian
continent, the islands of _Polynesia_ in the South Pacific, and have
mingled with the negro race that had preceded them there and that
remains unmixed in the _Melanesian_ islands. The Maoris, the inhabitants
of New Zealand, belong to this yellow race; and the Australians,
_perhaps_, represent a mixture of negro and yellow races. In all, this
division of mankind covers an immense portion of the globe stretching
from Greenland in a curved line, through North America and China,
downwards to New Zealand, and again westward from China through Tartary
or Siberia, up to Lapland in the north of Europe. And it must be added
that many anthropologists consider the red races of America only a
variety of this wide-spread yellow race.
[Sidenote: The White Races.]
From the results of the previous chapter we see that to the yellow race
must be attributed all those peoples of Europe and Asia which speak
agglutinative languages, and therefore that for the white race are left
the inflected tongues. These it will be remembered, we divided into two
great families, the Semitic and the Aryan or Japhetic. We thus see that
from the earliest times to which we are able to point we have living in
Europe and Asia these three divisions of the human family, whom some
have looked upon as the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. What
relationship the other excluded races of mankind, the black and red,
bear to the Hamites, Shemites, and Japhetites, has not been suggested.
It seems more reasonable to consider Noah as merely the ancestor of the
white races, and, therefore, so far as our linguistic knowledge goes, of
the Semitic and Aryan families of speech only. But outside the pure
Semites there lived a race of a less pure nationality, springing,
probably, from a mixture of Semites with earlier black and yellow races.
These people we may distinguish as Hamites. A division of this race were
the Cushites, the stock from which the Egyptian, the Chaldæan, and many
of the Canaanite nations were mainly formed.
But though from the earliest times there were probably in Asia these
three divisions of mankind, their relative position and importance was
very different from what it is now. At the present time the Turanian
races are everywhere shrinking and dwindling before the descendants of
Japhet. At the moment at which I write it is the Aryan Slavs who are
pushing the yellow-skinned Tartars farther and farther back in Siberia
and Central Asia, and are endeavouring to push the Mongolian Turks from
their last foothold in Europe.[42] The Tartar races have had their era
of great conquest too, for to them belong those races--Huns, Avars,
Magyars--who have spread such devastation in Europe, to them belong such
conquerors as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timûr Lenk (Tamerlane). In the
first few centuries after Mohammedism was introduced among them, the
Turanians of Central Asia rose into power. Several different Tartar
races in succession--Seljûks, Ayyûbites, Mongols (Moghuls), etc.--rose
upon the ruins of the Arab Chalifate, and invaded India, Persia, Africa,
and Europe. The last of these is the race of the Osmanlîs, or, as we
call them simply, the Turks. Their days of conquest are past, and
therefore, great as is the space which the Turanian people now occupy
over the face of the globe, there is reason to believe that in early
prehistoric times they were still more widely extended. In all
probability the men of the polished-stone age in Europe and Asia were of
this yellow-skinned Mongolian type. We know that the human remains of
this period seem to have come from a short and round-skulled people; and
this roundness of the skull is one of the chief marks of the Mongolians
as distinguished from the white races of mankind.
We know, too, that the earliest inhabitants of India belonged to a
Turanian, and therefore to a yellow, race; and that Turanians mingled
with one of the oldest historical Semitic peoples, and helped to produce
the civilization of the Chaldæans. And as, moreover, we find in various
parts of Asia traces of a civilization similar to that of Europe during
the latter part of the polished-stone age, it seems not unreasonable, in
casting our eyes back upon the remotest antiquity on which research
sheds any light, to suppose an early widespread Turanian or Mongolian
family extending over the greater part of Europe and Asia. These
Turanians were in various stages of civilization or barbarism, from the
rude condition of the hunters and fishers of the Danish shell-mounds to
a higher state reigning in Central and Southern Asia, and similar to
that which was afterwards attained towards the end of the polished-stone
age in Europe. The earliest home of these pure Turanians was probably a
region lying somewhere to the east of Lake Aral. ‘There,’ says a writer
from whom we have already quoted, ‘from very remote antiquity they had
possessed a peculiar civilization, characterized by gross Sabeism,
peculiarly materialistic tendencies, and complete want of moral
elevation; but at the same time, by an extraordinary development in some
branches of knowledge, great progress in material culture in some
respects, while in others they remained in an entirely rudimentary
state. This strange and incomplete civilization exercised over great
part of Asia an absolute preponderance, lasting, according to the
historian Justin, 1500 years.’[43]
As regards its pre-historic remains, we know that this civilization, or
half-civilization, was especially distinguished by the raising of
enormous grave-mounds and altar-stones, and it must have been
characterized by strong, if not by the most elevated, religious ideas,
and by a peculiar reverence paid to the dead. Now, we have seen that it
is by characteristics very similar to these that the civilization of
Egypt is distinguished, and Egypt, of all nations which have possessed a
history, is the oldest.
[Sidenote: Egypt.]
These are reasons, therefore, for considering the Egyptian civilization,
which is in some sort the dawn of history in the world, as the
continuation--the improvement, no doubt, but still the continuation--of
the half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on from the
Turanian to the Cushite peoples. We may look upon this very primitive
form of culture as spreading first through Asia, and later on outwards
to the west. Four thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the
dates disputed over as those of Menes, the first recorded King of
Egypt.[44] And Egypt even at this early time seems to have emerged from
the age of stone, and been possessed, at least, of bronze, possibly of
iron. The later date, 4000 B.C., probably marks the beginning of the
stone-age life corresponding to the more extensive remains in Europe. It
was therefore with this early culture as it has been with subsequent
fuller civilizations--
‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.’
The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with Menes, say 5000
B.C., reaches its zenith under the third and fourth dynasty, under the
builders of the pyramids some eight hundred or a thousand years
afterwards. Then in its full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the
past like a giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy
plains. It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great
that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the Egyptians first
come before us everything seems to point them out as a people already
old; whether it be their enormous tombs and temples, their elaborately
ordered social life, or their complicated religious system, with its
long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and thought
present two elements of character which may well spring from the union
of two distinct nationalities. Its enormous tombs and temples and its
excessive care for the bodies of the dead--for what are the pyramids but
exaggerations of the stone-age grave-mounds, and the temples but
improvements upon the megalithic dolmens?--recall the era of stone-age
culture. The evident remains of an early animal worship show a descent
from a low form of religion, such a religion as we find among Turanian
or African races. But with these co-existed some much grander features.
The Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree,--in the highest
degree then known to the world; and, unlike the stone-age men, succeeded
in other than merely mechanical arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by
but one nation, the Chaldæans; in painting and sculpture they were at
the head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history as of
writing itself,--not _quite_ of either, as will be seen hereafter.
Mixed, too, with their animal worship were some lofty religious
conceptions stretching not only beyond _it_--the animal worship--but
beyond that ‘natural’ polytheism which was the earliest creed of our own
ancestors the Aryans, and a noble hope and ambition for the future of
the soul. Were these higher features due to the influx of Semitic blood?
It seems likely, when we remember how from the same race came a chosen
people to whom the world is indebted for all that is greatest in
religious thought.
[Sidenote: Chaldæa.]
During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or four thousand
years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians do, as we have said, rise
up distinctly out of the region of mere conjecture. Three or four
thousand years before Christ--five or six thousand years ago: this is no
small distance through which to look back to the place where the first
mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was doing in the other
unseen regions round this mountain? Only probably in one other part of
the globe could there have been found at this date a civilization in the
smallest degree comparable to that of the Egyptians. This region is the
valley of the Tigrus and Euphrates.
The Tigro-Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, was in early days as regards
appearance and position very similar to the land of Egypt. These two
territories are in fact two oases in an immense band of desert, which
stretches from the western edge of the great Sahara (which is almost the
edge of Africa itself) in a curved sweep, through part of Arabia, part
of Persia, up to the great plains of central Asia; in other words, it
stretches across more than one-third of the circumference of the globe.
The Tigro-Euphrates oasis which the Greeks called Mesopotamia is in the
Bible called Chaldæa or the country of the Chaldees. In days known to
history, its inhabitants were a mixed people, of whom the oldest
element was undoubtedly Turanian; and this section of the nation had
probably descended from the country afterwards called Iran to the mouths
of the Tigris and Euphrates. These people are called by modern scholars
the Accadians, or the Shûmîro-Accadians.[45] They are the Accad of the
Bible. Mixed with them were a people of Semitic, or half-Semitic origin,
whose language is closely allied to the Hebrew and the Aramæan. If we
take the Biblical name for them, we should call them Hamites or
Cushites. But the best ethnological name would be that of Aramæans.
These two races mingled, and formed the nation of Chaldæans as known to
history; and in time the Semitic element predominated over the Turanian.
Nevertheless it was the Accadians who had brought to the common stock
the earliest elements of civilization. Their earliest tombs show them in
possession of both the metals bronze and iron, though of the latter in
such small quantities that it took with them the position of a precious
metal; ornaments were made from it as much as from gold. What is far
more important, the Accadians possessed a hieroglyphic writing similar
in character to that of the Egyptians, and, after their junction with
the Semite people, that developed into a syllabic alphabet.[46] We may
date the fusion of the Accadian and Aramæan peoples at about 4000 B.C.
It is in this country, be it remembered, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin,
that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. ‘And it
came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in
the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.’[47] Here, too, is placed the
building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family.
Here ruled Nimrod, ‘the son of Cush,’ the first of the kings of this
region of whom any authentic mention is made; though we have dynastic
lists of supernatural beings who were supposed to have reigned in
Chaldæa in far distant ages of the world, as we have in the case of
Egypt. Even of Nimrod’s reign no monumental records have yet come to
light. The cities which Nimrod built, says the Bible, were Erech [in
Accadian, Ounoug, or Ûrûk] and Ur [Accad. Urû]--these two are the
present Warkah and Mugheir,--Accad [Agadê] and Calneh. But the earliest
human king of whom we have anything like an authentic date is either
Sargon I., who may have reigned as early as 3800 B.C., or Ûrbagûs, who
seems to have ruled over all Mesopotamia, contemporaneously with the
fifth Egyptian dynasty (3900 or 2900 B.C.).
The Chaldean buildings of this period, like the contemporary Egyptian
ones, are of gigantic proportions, and like them seem to recall bygone
days, the grandiose conceptions of the later stone-age, those _tumuli_
and cromlechs which, spread over the face of the world, most undoubtedly
have suggested to subsequent nations of mankind the belief in a giant
race which had preceded them on earth--
‘The far-famed hold,
Piled by the hands of giants
For god-like kings of old.’
And thus, as has already been often said, this earliest civilization in
the world looks back to pre-historic days as much as forward to historic
ones.
Close beside Chaldæa, in the more mountainous country to the east, but
not far from the Persian Gulf, rose another civilization, that of the
Elamites, which may possibly have been not much later than the Chaldæan.
This, too, we may believe, was in its origin Turanian. The capital of
the country of Elam was Susa. Between 2300 and 2280 B.C., a king of
Susa, Kurdur-Nankunty, conquered the reigning king of Chaldæa, and
henceforward the two districts were incorporated into one country. The
accession of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the kings
of the Elamitic line, Kudur-lagomer (Chedorlaomer) by name, to aspire
towards a wider empire (c. 2200 B.C.). He sent his armies against the
Semitic nations on his west, who were now beginning to settle down in
cities, and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt and
Chaldæa. These he subdued, but after sixteen years they rebelled; and it
was after a second expedition to punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he
had conquered the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the
prisoners taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was
pursued and defeated by the patriarch. ‘And when Abram heard that his
brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his
own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he
divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote
them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of
Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his
brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.’[48]
The conquest of a powerful Chaldæan king by a handful of wandering
Semites seems extraordinary, and might have sounded a note of warning to
the ear of the Chaldæans. Their kingdom was destined soon to be
overthrown by another Semitic people. After a duration of about half a
thousand years for the Elamite kingdom, and some seven hundred years
since the time of Nimrod, the Chaldæan dynasty was overthrown and
succeeded by an Arabian one, that is, by a race of nomadic Shemites
from the Arabian plains; and after two hundred and forty-five years they
in their turn succumbed to another more powerful people of the same
Semitic race, the Assyrians. The empire thus founded upon the ruins of
the old Chaldæan was one of the greatest of the ancient world, as we
well know from the records which meet us in the Bible. Politically it
may be said to have balanced the power of Egypt. But the stability of
this monarchy rested upon a basis much less firm than that of Egypt; the
southern portion--the old Chaldæa--of which Babylon was the capital, was
always ready for revolt, and after about seven hundred years the
Babylonians and Medes succeeded in overthrowing their former conquerors.
All this belongs to history--or at least to chronicle--and is therefore
scarcely a part of our present inquiry.
To these primitive civilizations of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Susa we might,
if we could put faith in native records, be inclined to add a fourth.
[Sidenote: China.]
The _Chinese_ profess to extend their lists of dynasties seven, eight,
or even ten thousand years backward, but there is nothing on which to
rest such extravagant pretensions. Their earliest known book is believed
to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It is therefore not
probable that they possessed the art of writing more than fifteen
hundred years before our era, and before writing is invented there can
be no reliable history. The best record of early times _then_ is to be
found in the popular songs of a country, and of these China possessed a
considerable number, which were collected into a book--the _Book of
Odes_--by their sage Confucius.[49] The picture which these odes present
is of a society so very different from that of the time from which their
earliest book--the _Book of Changes_--dates, that we cannot refuse to
credit it with a high antiquity. From the songs we learn that before
China coalesced into the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its
inhabitants lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of
petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which distinguished the
surrounding Turanian nations had already been exchanged for a settled
agricultural one, to which houses, and all the civilization which these
imply, had long been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have
been then, as now, a simple, slow-moving life, not devoid of piety and
domestic affection. But it should be mentioned here that recent
researches seem to point to the conclusion, strange as it may appear,
that the Chinese civilization is closely connected with that of the
Accadians, and may have had an origin from some contact with the
Accadian peoples in their earliest homes in Central Asia. In any case it
hardly seems likely that this can be classed as the fourth civilization
which may have existed in the world when the pyramids were being built.
But it is without doubt after these three the next oldest of the
civilizations which the world has known. It seems to be remote alike
from the half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone
age, and from the mixed Turanian-Semitic civilizations of Egypt and
Chaldæa.
To these early civilizations in the old world, may we add any from the
new, and believe in a great antiquity of the highest civilization of the
_red_ race? The trace of an early civilization in Mexico and Peru,
bearing many remarkable points of resemblance to the civilization of
Chaldæa, is undoubted. This _may_ have been passed on by the Chinese at
a very early date. But there is nothing to show that the identity in
some of the features of their culture extended to an identity in their
respective epochs.
[Sidenote: Assyrians, Phœnicians, Hebrews.]
A greater destiny, though a more tardy development, awaited the pure
Semitic and Japhetic races. Among the former we might notice many
nations which started into life during the thousand years following that
date of 3000 B.C., which we have taken as our starting-point. Of the
Assyrians we have already spoken. The next most conspicuous stand the
Phœnicians, who, either in their early home upon the seacoast of
Syria, or in their second home, the sea itself, or in one of their
countless colonies, came into contact with almost every one of the great
nations of antiquity, from the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the
Israelites, to the Greeks and Romans.
But it is upon the life and history of the nomadic Shemites, and among
them of one chosen people, that our thoughts chiefly rest. Among the
prouder citied nations which inhabited the plains of the Tigris and
Euphrates, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, dwelt a numerous
people, more or less nomadic in their habits, under the patriarchal form
of government which belonged to their mode of life. Among such a people
the chief of one particular family or clan was summoned by a Divine call
to escape from the influence of the idolatrous nations around, and to
live that vagrant pastoral life which was in such an age most fitted for
the needs of purity and religious contemplation. It is as something like
a wandering Bedouin chieftain that we must picture Abraham, while we
watch him, now joining with one small city king against another, now
driven by famine to travel with his flocks and herds as far as Egypt.
Then again he returns, and settles in the fertile valley of the Jordan,
where Lot leaves him, and, seduced by the luxuries of a town life, quits
his flocks and herds and settles in Sodom, till driven out again by the
destruction of that city. And we are not now reading dry dynastic lists,
but the very life and thought of an early time.[50] To us--whose lives
are so unsimple--the mere picture of this simple nomadic life of early
days would have an interest and a charm; but it has a double charm and
interest viewed by the light of the high destiny to which Abraham and
his descendants were called. Plying the homely, slighted shepherd’s
trade, these people lived poor and despised beside the rich monarchies
of Egypt or Chaldæa; one more example, if one more were needed, how wide
apart lie the empires of spiritual and of material things.
Up to very late times the Children of Israel bore many of the
characteristics of a nomadic people. It was as a nation of shepherds
that they were excluded from the national life of Egypt. For long years
after their departure thence they led a wandering life; and though, when
they entered Palestine, they found cities ready for their
occupation--for the nations which they dispossessed were for the most
part settled people, builders of cities--and inhabited them, and,
growing corn and wine, settled partly into an agricultural life, yet the
chief wealth of the nation still probably consisted in their flocks, and
the greater portion of the people still dwelt in tents. This was,
perhaps, especially the case with the people of the north, for even so
late as the separation, when the ten tribes determined to free
themselves from the tyranny of Rehoboam, we know how Jeroboam cried out,
‘To your tents, O Israel.’ ‘So Israel departed unto their tents,’ the
narrative continues. After the separation we are told that Jeroboam
built several cities in his own dominions. The history of the Israelites
generally may be summed up as the constant expression and the ultimate
triumph of a wish to exchange their simple life and theocratic
government for one which might place them more on a level with their
neighbour states. At first it is their religion which they wish to
change, whether for the gorgeous ritual of Egypt or for the vicious
creeds of Asiatic nations; and after a while, madly forgetful of the
tyrannies of a Ramses or a Tiglath-Pileser, they desire a king to reign
over them in order that they may ‘take their place’ among the other
Oriental monarchies. Still their first two kings have rather the
character of military leaders, the monarchy not having become
hereditary; the second, the warrior-poet, the greatest of Israel’s sons,
was himself in the beginning no more than a shepherd. But under his son
Solomon the monarchical government becomes assured, the country attains
(like Rome under Augustus) the summit of its splendour and power, and
then enters upon its career of slow and inevitable decline.
[Sidenote: The Aryans.]
Now let us turn to the Japhetic people--the Aryans. It is curious that
the date of three thousand years before Christ, from which we started in
our glance over the world, should also be considered about that of the
separation of the Aryan people. Till that time they had continued to
live--since when we know not--in their early home near the Oxus and
Jaxartes, and we are able by the help of comparative philology to gain
some little picture of their life at the time immediately preceding the
separation. We have already seen how this picture is obtained; how,
taking a word out of one of the Aryan languages and making allowance for
the changed form which it would wear in the other tongues, if we find
the same word with the same meaning reappearing in all the languages of
the family, we may fairly assume that the _thing_ for which it stands
was known to the old Aryans before the separation. If, again, we find a
word which runs through all the European languages, but is not found in
the Sanskrit and Persian, we guess that in this case the thing was known
only to the Yavanas, the first separating body of younger Aryans, from
whom it will be remembered all the European branches are descended. Thus
we get a very interesting list of words, and the means of drawing a
picture of the life of our primæval ancestors. The earliest appearance
of the Aryans is as a pastoral people, for words derived from the
pastoral life have left the deepest traces on their language. Daughter,
we saw, meant originally ‘the milker;’ the name of money, and of booty,
in many Aryan languages is derived from that of cattle;[51] words which
have since come to mean lord or prince originally meant the guardian of
the cattle;[52] and others which have expanded into words for district
or country, or even for the whole earth, meant at first simply the
pasturage. So not without reason did we say that the king had grown out
of the head of the family, and the pens of sheepfolds expanded into
walled cities.
But though a pastoral, the ancient Aryans do not seem to have been a
nomadic race, and in this respect they differed from the Shemites of the
same period, and from the Turanians, by whom they were surrounded. For
the Turanian _civilization_ had pretty well departed from Asia by that
time, and having taught its lessons to Egypt and Chaldæa, lived on, if
at all, in Europe only. There it faded before the advance of the Celts
and other Aryan people, who came bringing with them the use of bronze
weapons and the civilization which belonged to the bronze age. The stone
age lingered in the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as we thought, till
about two thousand years before Christ or perhaps later, and it may be
that this date, B.C. 2000, which is also nearly that of Abraham,
represents within a few hundred years the entry of the Aryans into
Europe. The Greeks are generally believed to have appeared in Greece, or
at least in Asia Minor, about the nineteenth century before our era, and
they were probably preceded by the Latin branch of the Aryan family, as
well as by the Celts in the north of Europe. So that the period of one
thousand years which intervened between our starting-point and the call
of Abraham, the starting-point of the Hebrew history, and which saw the
growth and change of many great Asiatic monarchies, must for the Aryans
be only darkly filled up by the gradual separation of the different
nations, and their unknown life between this separation and the time
when they again become vaguely known to history.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Summary.]
The general result, then, of our inquiries into the grouping of nations
of the world in pre-historic times may be sketched in rough outline. At
a very early date, say 4000 or 5000 B.C., arose an extensive Turanian
half-civilization, which, flourishing probably in Central and Southern
Asia, spread in time and through devious routes to India and China upon
one side, on the other side to Europe. This was, at first at any rate, a
stone age, and was especially distinguished by the raising of great
stones and grave-mounds. This civilization was communicated to the
Egyptians and Chaldæans, a mixed people--Semite, Turanian,
Ethiopian--who were not strangers to the use of metals. As early as 3000
years before our era the civilization of Egypt had attained its full
growth, and had probably even then a considerable past. Chaldæa, too,
and the neighbouring Elam were both advanced out of their primitive
state; possibly so also were China, Peru, and Mexico. But the pure
Semite peoples, the ancestors of the Jews, and the Aryans, were still
pastoral races, the one by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the
other by the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. The first of these
continued pastoral and nomadic for hundreds of years, but about this
time the Western Aryans separated from those of the East, and soon after
added some use of agriculture to their shepherd life. Then between 3000
and 2000 B.C. came the separation of the various peoples of the Western
Aryans and their migration towards Europe, where they began to appear at
the latter date. After all the Western Aryans had left the East, the
older Aryans seem to have lived on for some little time together, and at
last to have separated into the nations of Iranians and Hindus, the
first migrating southward, and the second crossing the Hindoo-Koosh and
descending into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges. Thence they
drove away or exterminated most of the older Turanian inhabitants, as
their brethren had a short time before done to the Turanians whom they
found in Europe. Such, so far as we can surmise, were in rough outline
the doings of the different kindreds and nations and languages of the
old world in times long before history.