We know that Palæolithic man had a keen sense of form and attitude,

because of his drawings; and it has been suggested that he communicated

his ideas very largely by gesture. Probably such words as the earlier

men used were mainly cries of alarm or passion or names for concrete

things, and in many cases they were probably imitative sounds made by or

associated with the things named.[78]

The first languages were probably small collections of such words; they

consisted of interjections and nouns. Probably the nouns were said in

different intonations to convey different meanings. If Palæolithic man

had a word for “horse” or “bear,” he probably showed by tone or gesture

whether he meant “bear is coming,” “bear is going,” “bear is to be

hunted,” “dead bear,” “bear has been here,” “bear did this,” and so on.

Only very slowly did the human mind develop methods of indicating action

and relationship in a formal manner. Modern languages contain many

thousands of words, but the earlier languages could have consisted only

of a few hundred. It is said that even modern European peasants can get

along with something less than a thousand words, and it is quite

conceivable that so late as the Early Neolithic Period that was the

limit of the available vocabulary. Probably men did not indulge in those

days in conversation or description. For narrative purposes they danced

and acted rather than told. They had no method of counting beyond a

method of indicating two by a dual number, and some way of expressing

many. The growth of speech was at first a very slow process indeed, and

grammatical forms and the expression of abstract ideas may have come

very late in human history, perhaps only 400 or 500 generations ago.

§ 2

The students of languages (philologists) tell us that they are unable to

trace with certainty any common features in all the languages of

mankind. They cannot even find any elements common to all the Caucasian

languages. They find over great areas groups of languages which have

similar root words and similar ways of expressing the same idea, but

then they find in other areas languages which appear to be dissimilar

down to their fundamental structure, which express action and relation

by entirely dissimilar devices, and have an altogether different

grammatical scheme.[79] One great group of languages, for example, now

covers nearly all Europe and stretches out to India; it includes

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Russian, Armenian,

Persian, and various Indian tongues. It is called the Indo-European or

ARYAN family. The same fundamental roots, the same grammatical ideas,

are traceable through all this family. Compare, for example, English

_father, mother_, Gothic _fadar, moutar_, German _vater, mutter_, Latin

_pater, mater_, Greek _pater, meter_, French _père, mère_, Armenian

_hair, mair_, Sanscrit _pitar, matar_, etc., etc. In a similar manner

the Aryan languages ring the changes on a great number of fundamental

words, _f_ in the Germanic languages becoming _p_ in Latin, and so on.

They follow a law of variation called Grimm’s Law. These languages are

not different things, they are variations of one thing. The people who

use these languages think in the same way.

At one time in the remote past, in the Neolithic Age, that is to say

6000[80] years or more ago, there may have been one simple original

speech from which all these Aryan languages have differentiated.

Somewhere between central Europe and western Asia there must have

wandered a number of tribes sufficiently intermingled to develop and use

one tongue. It is convenient here to call them the Aryan peoples. Sir H.

H. Johnston has called them “Aryan Russians.” They belonged mostly to

the Caucasian group of races and to the blond and northern subdivision

of the group, to the Nordic race that is.

Here one must sound a note of warning. There was a time when the

philologists were disposed to confuse languages and races, and to

suppose that people who once all spoke the same tongue must be all of

the same blood. That, however, is not the case, as the reader will

understand if he will think of the negroes of the United States who now

all speak English, or of the Irish, who--except for purposes of

political demonstration--no longer speak the old Erse language but

English, or of the Cornish people, who have lost their ancient Keltic

speech. But what a common language does do, is to show that a common

intercourse has existed, and the possibility of intermixture; and if it

does not point to a common origin, it points at least to a common

future.

But even this original Aryan language, which was a spoken speech perhaps

4000 or 3000 B.C., was by no means a _primordial_ language or the

language of a savage race. Its speakers were in or past the Neolithic

stage of civilization. It had grammatical forms and verbal devices of

some complexity. The vanished methods of expression of the later

Palæolithic peoples, of the Azilians, or of the early Neolithic

kitchen-midden people for instance, were probably much cruder than the

most elementary form of Aryan.

Probably the Aryan group of languages became distinct in a wide region

of which the Danube, Dnieper, Don, and Volga were the main rivers, a

region that extended eastward beyond the Ural mountains north of the

Caspian Sea. The area over which the Aryan speakers roamed probably did

not for a long time reach to the Atlantic or to the south of the Black

Sea beyond Asia Minor. There was no effectual separation of Europe from

Asia then at the Bosphorus.[81] The Danube flowed eastward to a great

sea that extended across the Volga region of south-eastern Russia right

into Turkestan, and included the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas of

to-day. Perhaps it sent out arms to the Arctic Ocean. It must have been

a pretty effective barrier between the Aryan speakers and the people in

north-eastern Asia. South of this sea stretched a continuous shore from

the Balkans to Afghanistan.[82] North-west of it a region of swamps and

lagoons reached to the Baltic.

§ 3

Next to Aryan, philologists distinguish another group of languages which

seem to have been made quite separately from the Aryan languages, the

Semitic. Hebrew and Arabic are kindred, but they seem to have even a

different set of root words from the Aryan tongues; they express their

ideas of relationship in a different way; the fundamental ideas of their

grammars are generally different. They were in all probability made by

human communities quite out of touch with the Aryans, separately and

independently. Hebrew, Arabic, Abyssinian, ancient Assyrian, ancient

Phœnician, and a number of associated tongues are put together,

therefore, as being derived from a second primary language, which is

called the SEMITIC. In the very beginnings of recorded history we find

Aryan-speaking peoples and Semitic-speaking peoples carrying on the

liveliest intercourse of war and trade round and about the eastern end

of the Mediterranean, but the fundamental differences of the primary

Aryan and primary Semitic languages oblige us to believe that in early

Neolithic times, before the historical period, there must for thousands

of years have been an almost complete separation of the Aryan-speaking

and the Semitic-speaking peoples. The latter seem to have lived either

in south Arabia or in north-east Africa. In the opening centuries of the

Neolithic Age the original Aryan speakers and the original Semitic

speakers were probably living, so to speak, in different worlds, with a

minimum of intercourse. Racially, it would seem, they had a remote

common origin; both Aryan speakers and Semites are classed as

Caucasians; but while the original Aryan speakers seem to have been of

Nordic race, the original Semites were rather of the Mediterranean type.

§ 4

Philologists speak with less unanimity of a third group of languages,

the HAMITIC, which some declare to be distinct from, and others allied

to, the Semitic. The weight of opinion inclines now towards the idea of

some primordial connection of these two groups. The Hamitic group is

certainly a much wider and more various language group than the Semitic

or the Aryan, and the Semitic tongues are more of a family, have more of

a common likeness, than the Aryan. The Semitic languages may have arisen

as some specialized proto-Hamitic group, just as the birds arose from a

special group of reptiles (Chap. IV). It is a tempting speculation, but

one for which there is really no basis of justifying fact, to suppose

that the rude primordial ancestor group of the Aryan tongues branched

off from the proto-Hamitic speech forms at some still earlier date than

the separation and specialization of Semitic. The Hamitic speakers

to-day, like the Semitic speakers, are mainly of the Mediterranean

Caucasian race. Among the Hamitic languages are the ancient Egyptian and

Coptic, the Berber languages (of the mountain people of north Africa,

the Masked Tuaregs, and other such peoples), and what are called the

Ethiopic group of African languages in eastern Africa, including the

speech of the Gallas and the Somalis. The general grouping of these

various tongues suggests that they originated over some great area to

the west, as the primitive Semitic may have arisen to the east of the

Red Sea divide. That divide was probably much more effective in

Pleistocene times; the sea extended across to the west of the Isthmus of

Suez, and a great part of lower Egypt was under water. Long before the

dawn of history, however, Asia and Africa had joined at Suez, and these

two language systems were in contact in that region. And if Asia and

Africa were separated then at Suez, they may, on the other hand, have

been joined by way of Arabia and Abyssinia.

[Illustration: Possible Development of LANGUAGES

disregarding admixtures, e.g. Turkish elements in Russian, Latin in

English, Hamitic in Keltic, & so forth; & omitting various Indian,

Melanesian & other groups.]

These Hamitic languages may have radiated from a centre on the African

coast of the Mediterranean, and they may have extended over the then

existing land connections very widely into western Europe.

All these three great groups of languages, it may be noted, the Aryan,

Semitic, and Hamitic, have one feature in common which they do not share

with any other language, and that is grammatical gender; but whether

that has much weight as evidence of a remote common origin of Aryan,

Semitic, and Hamitic, is a question for the philologist rather than for

the general student. It does not affect the clear evidence of a very

long and very ancient prehistoric separation of the speakers of these

three diverse groups of tongues.

The bulk of the Semitic and Hamitic-speaking peoples are put by

ethnologists with the Aryans among the Caucasian group of races. They

are “white.” The Semitic and Nordic “races” have a much more distinctive

physiognomy; they seem, like their characteristic languages, to be more

marked and specialized than the Hamitic-speaking peoples.

§ 5

Across to the north-east of the Aryan and Semitic areas there must once

have spread a further distinct language system which is now represented

by a group of languages known as the TURANIAN, or URAL-ALTAIC group.

This included the Lappish of Lapland and the Samoyed speech of Siberia,

the Finnish language, Magyar, Turkish or Tartar, Manchu and Mongol; it

has not as a group been so exhaustively studied by European

philologists, and there is insufficient evidence yet whether it does or

does not include the Korean and Japanese languages. (A Japanese writer,

Mr. K. Hirai, has attempted to show that Japanese and Aryan may have had

a common parent tongue.[83])

§ 6

A fifth region of language formation was south-eastern Asia, where there

still prevails a group of languages consisting of monosyllables without

any inflections, in which the tone used in uttering a word determines

its meaning. This may be called the Chinese or MONOSYLLABIC group, and

it includes Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, and Tibetan. The difference

between any of these Chinese tongues and the more western languages is

profound. In the Pekinese form of Chinese there are only about 420

primary monosyllables, and consequently each of these has to do duty for

a great number of things, and the different meanings are indicated

either by the context or by saying the word in a distinctive tone. The

relations of these words to each other are expressed by quite different

methods from the Aryan methods; Chinese grammar is a thing different in

nature from English grammar; it is a separate and different invention.

Many writers declare there is no Chinese grammar at all, and that is

true if we mean by grammar anything in the European sense of inflections

and concords. Consequently any such thing as a literal translation from

Chinese into English is an impossibility. The very method of the thought

is different.[84] Their philosophy remains still largely a sealed book

to the European on this account, and vice versa, because of the

different nature of the expressions.

§ 7

In addition the following other great language families are

distinguished by the philologist. All the American-Indian languages,

which vary widely among themselves, are separable from any Old World

group. Here we may lump them together not so much as a family as a

miscellany.[85] There is one great group of languages in Africa, from a

little way north of the equator to its southern extremity, the BANTU,

and in addition a complex of other languages across the centre of the

continent about which we will not trouble here.[86] There are also two

probably separate groups, the DRAVIDIAN in South India, and the

MALAY-POLYNESIAN stretched over Polynesia, and also now including Indian

tongues.

Now it seems reasonable to conclude from these fundamental differences

that about the time when men were passing from the Palæolithic to

Neolithic conditions, and beginning to form rather larger communities

than the family herd, when they were beginning to tell each other long

stories and argue and exchange ideas, human beings were distributed

about the world in a number of areas which communicated very little with

each other. They were separated by oceans, seas, thick forests, deserts

or mountains from one another. There may have been in that remote time,

it may be 10,000 years ago or more, Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, Turanian,

American, and Chinese-speaking tribes and families, wandering over their

several areas of hunting and pasture, all at very much the same stage of

culture, and each developing its linguistic instrument in its own way.

Probably each of these original tribes was not more numerous altogether

than the Indians in Hudson Bay Territory to-day. Agriculture was barely

beginning, and until agriculture made a denser population possible men

may have been almost as rare as the great apes have always been.

In addition to these early Neolithic tribes, there must have been

various varieties of still more primitive forest folk in Africa and in

India. Central Africa, from the Upper Nile, was then a vast forest,

impenetrable to ordinary human life, a forest of which the Congo forests

of to-day are the last shrunken remains.

Possibly the spread of men of a race higher than primitive Australoids

into the East Indies,[87] and the development of the languages of the

Malay-Polynesian type came later in time than the origination of these

other language groups.

The language divisions of the philologist do tally, it is manifest, in a

broad sort of way with the main race classes of the ethnologist, and

they carry out the same idea of age-long separations between great

divisions of mankind. In the Glacial Age, ice, or at least a climate too

severe for the free spreading of peoples, extended from the north pole

into central Europe and across Russia and Siberia to the great

tablelands of central Asia. After the last Glacial Age, this cold north

mitigated its severities very slowly, and was for long without any other

population than the wandering hunters who spread eastward and across

Bering Strait. North and central Europe and Asia did not become

sufficiently temperate for agriculture until quite recent times, times

that is within the limit of 12,000 or possibly even 10,000 years, and a

dense forest period intervened between the age of the hunter and the

agricultural clearings.

This forest period was also a very wet period. It has been called the

Pluvial or Lacustrine Age, the rain or pond period. It has to be

remembered that the outlines of the land of the world have changed

greatly even in the last hundred centuries. Across European Russia, from

the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, as the ice receded there certainly spread

much water and many impassable swamps; the Caspian Sea and the Sea of

Aral and parts of the Desert of Turkestan, are the vestiges of a great

extent of sea that reached far up to the Volga valley and sent an arm

westward to join the Black Sea. Mountain barriers much higher than they

are now, and the arm of the sea that is now the region of the Indus,

completed the separation of the early Caucasian races from the

Mongolians and the Dravidians, and made the broad racial differentiation

of those groups possible.

Again the blown-sand Desert of Sahara--it is not a dried-up sea, but a

wind desert, and was once fertile and rich in life--becoming more and

more dry and sandy, cut the Caucasians off from the sparse primitive

Negro population in the central forest region of Africa.

The Persian Gulf extended very far to the north of its present head, and

combined with the Syrian desert to cut off the Semitic peoples from the

eastern areas, while on the other hand the south of Arabia, much more

fertile than it is to-day, may have reached across what is now the Gulf

of Aden towards Abyssinia and Somaliland. The Mediterranean and Red Sea

were probably still joined at Suez. The Himalayas and the higher and

vaster massif of central Asia and the northward extension of the Bay of

Bengal up to the present Ganges valley divided off the Dravidians from

the Mongolians, the canoe was the chief link between Dravidian and

Southern Mongol, and the Gobi system of seas and lakes which presently

became the Gobi desert, and the great system of mountain chains which

follow one another across Asia from the center to the north-east, split

the Mongolian races into the Chinese and the Ural-Altaic language

groups.

Bering Strait, when this came into existence, before or after the

Pluvial Period, isolated the Amer-Indians.

These ancient separations must have remained effectual well into

Neolithic times. The barriers between Africa, Asia, and Europe were

lowered or bridged by that time, but mixing had not gone far. The

practical separation of the west from Dravidian India and China

continued indeed down almost into historical times; but the Semite, the

Hamite, and the Aryan were already in close contact and vigorous

reaction again in the very dawn of history.

We are not suggesting here, be it noted, that these ancient separations

were absolute separations, but that they were effectual enough at least

to prevent any great intermixture of blood or any great intermixture of

speech in those days of man’s social beginnings. There was,

nevertheless, some amount of meeting and exchange even then, some drift

of knowledge that spread the crude patterns and use of various

implements, and the seeds of a primitive agriculture about the world.

§ 8

The fundamental tongues of these nine main language groups we have noted

were not by any means all the human speech beginnings of the Neolithic

Age. There may have been other, and possibly many other, ineffective

centres of speech which were afterwards overrun by the speakers of still

surviving tongues, and of elementary languages which faded out. We find

strange little patches of speech still in the world which do not seem to

be connected with any other language about them. Sometimes, however, an

exhaustive inquiry seems to affiliate these disconnected patches, seems

to open out to us tantalizing glimpses of some simpler, wider, and more

fundamental and universal form of human speech. One language group that

has been keenly discussed is the Basque group of dialects. The Basques

live now on the north and south slopes of the Pyrenees; they number

perhaps 600,000 altogether in Europe, and to this day they are a very

sturdy and independent-spirited people. Their language, as it exists

to-day, is a fully developed one. But it is developed upon lines

absolutely different from those of the Aryan languages about it. Basque

newspapers have been published in the Argentine and in the United States

to supply groups of prosperous emigrants. The earliest “French” settlers

in Canada were Basque, and Basque names are frequent among the French

Canadians to this day. Ancient remains point to a much wider

distribution of the Basque speech and people over Spain. For a long time

this Basque language was a profound perplexity to scholars, and its

structural character led to the suggestion that it might be related to

some Amer-Indian tongue. A. H. Keane, in _Man Past and Present_,

assembles reasons for linking it--though remotely--with the Berber

language of North Africa, and through the Berber with the general body

of Hamitic languages, but this relationship is questioned by other

philologists. They find Basque more akin to certain similarly stranded

vestiges of speech found in the Caucasian Mountains, and they are

disposed to regard it as a last surviving member, much changed and

specialized, of a once very widely extended group of pre-Hamitic

languages, otherwise extinct, spoken chiefly by peoples of that brunet

Mediterranean race (round-barrow men) which once occupied most of

western and southern Europe and western Asia, and which may have been

very closely related to the Dravidians of India and the peoples with a

heliolithic culture who spread eastward thence through the East Indies

to Polynesia and beyond.

It is quite possible that over western and southern Europe language

groups extended 10,000 years ago that have completely vanished before

Aryan tongues. Later on we shall note, in passing, the possibility of

three lost language groups represented by (1) Ancient Cretan, Lydian,

and the like (though these may have belonged, says Sir H. H. Johnston,

to the “Basque-Caucasian-Dravidian (!) group”), (2) Sumerian, and (3)

Elamite. The suggestion has been made--it is a mere guess--that ancient

Sumerian may have been a linking language between the early

Basque-Caucasian and early Mongolian groups. If this is true, then we

have in this “Basque-Caucasian-Dravidian-Sumerian-proto-Mongolian” group

a still more ancient and more ancestral system of speech than the

fundamental Hamitic.

The Hottentot language is said to have affinities with the Hamitic

tongues, from which it is separated by the whole breadth of

Bantu-speaking central Africa. A Hottentot-like language with Bushman

affinities is still spoken in equatorial east Africa, and this

strengthens the idea that the whole of east Africa was once

Hamitic-speaking. The Bantu languages and peoples spread, in

comparatively recent times, from some center of origin in west central

Africa and cut off the Hottentots from the other Hamitic peoples. But it

is at least equally probable that the Hottentot is a separate language

group.

Among other remote and isolated little patches of language are the

Papuan speech of New Guinea and the native Australian. The now extinct

Tasmanian language is little known. What we know of it is in support of

what we have guessed about the comparative speechlessness of Palæolithic

man.

We may quote a passage from Hutchinson’s _Living Races of Mankind_ upon

this matter:--

“The language of the natives is irretrievably lost, only imperfect

indication of its structure and a small proportion of its words having

been preserved. In the absence of sibilants and some other features,

their dialects resembled the Australian, but were of ruder, of less

developed structure, and so imperfect that, according to Joseph

Milligan, our best authority on the subject, they observed no settled

order or arrangement of words in the construction of their sentences,

but conveyed in a supplementary fashion by tone, manner, and gesture

those modifications of meaning which we express by mood, tense, number,

etc. Abstract terms were rare; for every variety of gum-tree or

wattle-tree there was a name, but no word for ‘tree’ in general, nor for

qualities such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round, etc.

Anything hard was ‘like a stone,’ anything round ‘like the moon,’ and so

on, usually suiting the action to the word and confirming by some sign

the meaning to be understood.”

[Illustration: Racial Types ... From Egyptian tomb-paintings. (After

Champollion.)]

§ 9

In reading this chapter it is well to remember how laborious and

difficult are the tasks of comparative philology, and how necessary it

is to understand the qualifications and limitations that are to be put

upon its conclusions. The Aryan group of languages is much better

understood than any other, for the simple reason that it has been more

familiar and accessible to European science. The other groups have been

less thoroughly investigated, because so far they have not been studied

exhaustively by men accustomed to use them, and whose minds are set in

the key of their structure. Even the Semitic languages have been

approached at a disadvantage because few Jews think in Hebrew. But a

time is fast approaching when Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Indian

philologists will come to the rescue in these matters, and good reason

may be found for revising much that has been said above about the native

American, Ural-Altaic, primitive Chinese, and Polynesian groups of

tongues.

BOOK III

THE DAWN OF HISTORY

XV

THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

§ 1. _The Spreading of the Aryan-Speakers._ § 2. _Primitive Aryan

Life._ § 3. _Early Aryan Daily Life._

§ 1

We have spoken of the Aryan language as probably arising in the region

of the Danube and South Russia and spreading from that region of origin.

We say “probably,” because it is by no means certainly proved that that

was the centre; there have been vast discussions upon this point and

wide divergences of opinion. We give the prevalent view. As it spread

widely, Aryan began to differentiate into a number of subordinate

languages. To the west and south it encountered the Basque language,

which was then widely spread in Spain, and also possibly various Hamitic

Mediterranean languages.

The Neolithic Mediterranean race, the Iberian race, was distributed over

Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, north Africa, south Italy, and,

in a more civilized state, Greece and Asia Minor. It was probably

closely related to the Egyptian. To judge by its European vestiges it

was a rather small human type, generally with an oval face and a long

head. It buried its chiefs and important people in megalithic

chambers--_i.e._ made of big stones--covered over by great mounds of

earth; and these mounds of earth, being much longer than they are broad,

are spoken of as the long barrows. These people sheltered at times in

caves, and also buried some of their dead therein; and from the traces

of charred, broken, and cut human bones, including the bones of

children, it is inferred that they were cannibals. These short dark

Iberian tribes (and the Basques also if they were a different race) were

thrust back westward, and conquered and enslaved by slowly advancing

waves of a taller and fairer Aryan-speaking people, coming southward and

westward through central Europe, who are spoken of as the Kelts. Only

the Basque resisted the conquering Aryan speech. Gradually these

Keltic-speakers made their way to the Atlantic, and all that now remains

of the Iberians is mixed into the Keltic population. How far the Keltic

invasion affected the Irish population is a matter of debate at the

present time; the Kelts may have been a mere caste of conquerors who

imposed their language on a larger subject population. It is even

doubtful if the north of England is more Aryan than pre-Keltic in blood.

There is a sort of short dark Welshman, and certain types of Irishmen,

who are Iberians by race. The modern Portuguese are also largely of

Iberian blood.

The Kelts spoke a language, Keltic,[88] which was also in its turn to

differentiate into the language of Gaul, Welsh, Breton, Scotch and Irish

Gaelic, and other tongues. They buried the ashes of their chiefs and

important people in round barrows. While these Nordic Kelts were

spreading westward, other Nordic Aryan peoples were pressing down upon

the dark white Mediterranean race in the Italian and Greek peninsulas,

and developing the Latin and Greek groups of tongues. Certain other

Aryan tribes were drifting towards the Baltic and across into

Scandinavia, speaking varieties of the Aryan which became ancient

Norse--the parent of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic--Gothic,

and Low and High German.

While the primitive Aryan speech was thus spreading and breaking up into

daughter languages to the west, it was also spreading and breaking up to

the east. North of the Carpathians and the Black Sea, Aryan-speaking

tribes were increasing and spreading and using a distinctive dialect

called Slavonian, from which came Russian, Serbian, Polish, Bulgarian,

and other tongues; other variations of Aryan distributed over Asia Minor

and Persia were also being individualized as Armenian and Indo-Iranian,

the parent of Sanscrit and Persian. In this book we have used the word

Aryan for all this family of languages, but the term Indo-European is

sometimes used for the entire family, and “Aryan” itself restricted in a

narrower sense to the Indo-Iranian speech.[89] This Indo-Iranian speech

was destined to split later into a number of languages, including

Persian and Sanscrit, the latter being the language of certain tribes of

fair-complexioned Aryan speakers who pushed eastward into India somewhen

between 3000 and 1000 B.C. and conquered dark Dravidian peoples who were

then in possession of that land.

§ 2

What sort of life did these prehistoric Aryans lead, these Nordic Aryans

who were the chief ancestors of most Europeans and most white Americans

and European colonists of to-day, as well as of the Armenians,[90]

Persians, and high-caste Hindus?

In answering that question we are able to resort to a new source of

knowledge in addition to the dug-up remains and vestiges upon which we

have had to rely in the case of Palæolithic man. We have language. By

careful study of the Aryan languages it has been found possible to

deduce a number of conclusions about the life of these Aryan peoples

5000 or 4000 years ago. All these languages have a common resemblance,

as each, as we have already explained, rings the changes upon a number

of common roots. When we find the same root word running through all or

most of these tongues, it seems reasonable to conclude that the thing

that root word signifies must have been known to the common ancestors.

Of course, if they have _exactly the same word_ in their languages, this

may not be the case; it may be the new name of a new thing or of a new

idea that has spread over the world quite recently. “Gas,” for instance

is a word that was made by Van Helmont, a Dutch chemist, about 1625, and

has spread into most civilized tongues, and “tobacco” again is an

American-Indian word which followed the introduction of smoking almost

everywhere. But if the same word turns up in a number of languages, and

_if it follows the characteristic modifications of each language_, we

may feel sure that it has been in that language, and a part of that

language, since the beginning, suffering the same changes with the rest

of it. We know, for example, that the words for waggon and wheel run in

this fashion through the Aryan tongues, and so we are able to conclude

that the primitive Aryans, the more purely Nordic Aryans, had waggons,

though it would seem from the absence of any common roots for spokes,

rim, or axle that their wheels were not wheelwright’s wheels with

spokes, but made of the trunks of trees shaped out with an axe between

the ends.

These primitive waggons were drawn by oxen. The early Aryans did not

ride or drive horses; they had very little to do with horses. The

Reindeer men were a horse-people, but the Neolithic Aryans were a

cow-people. They ate beef, not horse; and after many ages they began

this use of draught cattle. They reckoned wealth by cows. They wandered,

following pasture, and “trekking” their goods, as the South African

Boers do, in ox-waggons, though of course their waggons were much

clumsier than any to be found in the world to-day. They probably ranged

over very wide areas. They were migratory, but not in the strict sense

of the word “nomadic”; they moved in a slower, clumsier fashion than did

the later, more specialized nomadic peoples. They were forest and

parkland people without horses. They were developing a migratory life

out of the more settled “forest clearing” life of the earlier Neolithic

period. Changes of climate which were replacing forest by pasture, and

the accidental burning of forests by fire may have assisted this

development.

When these early “Aryans” came to big rivers or open water, they built

boats, at first hollow tree trunks and then skin-covered frameworks of

lighter wood. Before history began there was already some Aryan

canoe-traffic across the English Channel and in the Baltic, and also

among the Greek islands. But the Aryans, as we shall see later, were

probably not the first peoples to take to the sea.

We have already described the sort of home the primitive Aryan occupied

and his household life, so far as the remains of the Swiss

pile-dwellings enable us to describe these things. Mostly his houses

were of too flimsy a sort, probably of wattle and mud, to have survived,

and possibly he left them and trekked on for very slight reasons. The

Aryan peoples burnt their dead, a custom they still preserve in India,

but their predecessors, the long-barrow people, the Iberians, buried

their dead in a sitting position. In some ancient Aryan burial mounds

(round barrows) the urns containing the ashes of the departed are shaped

like houses, and these represent rounded huts with thatched roofs. See

Fig. p. 57.

The grazing of the primitive Aryan was far more important to him than

his agriculture. At first he cultivated with a rough wooden hoe; then,

after he had found out the use of cattle for draught purposes, he began

real ploughing with oxen, using at first a suitably bent tree bough as

his plough. His first cultivation before that came about must have been

rather in the form of garden patches near the house buildings than of

fields. Most of the land his tribe occupied was common land on which the

cattle grazed together.

He never used stone for building house walls until upon the very verge

of history. He used stone for hearths (_e.g._ at Glastonbury) and

sometimes stone sub-structures. He did, however, make a sort of stone

house in the centre of the great mounds in which he buried his

illustrious dead. He may have learnt this custom from his Iberian

neighbours and predecessors. It was these dark whites of the heliolithic

culture, and not the primitive Aryans, who were responsible for such

primitive temples as Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany.

His social life was growing. Man was now living in clans and tribal

communities. These clans and communities clashed; they took each other’s

grazing land, they sought to rob each other; there began a new thing in

human life, _war_. For war is not a primeval thing; it has not been in

this world for more than 20,000 years. To this day very primitive

peoples, such as the Australian black-fellows, do not understand war.

The Palæolithic Age was an age of fights and murder, no doubt, but not

of the organized collective fighting of numbers of men.[91] But now men

could talk together and group themselves under leaders, and they found a

need of centres where they could come together with their cattle in time

of raids and danger. They began to make camps with walls of earth and

palisades, many of which are still to be traced in the history-worn

contours of the European scenery. The leaders under whom men fought in

war were often the same men as the sacrificial purifiers who were their

early priests.

The knowledge of bronze spread late in Europe. Neolithic man had been

making his slow advances age by age for 7000 or 8000 years before the

metals came. By that time his social life had developed so that there

were men of various occupations and men and women of different ranks in

the community. There were men who worked wood and leather, potters and

carvers. The women span and wove and embroidered. There were chiefs and

families that were distinguished as leaderly and noble; and man varied

the monotony of his herding and wandering, he consecrated undertakings

and celebrated triumphs, held funeral assemblies, and distinguished the

traditional seasons of the year, by _feasts_. His meats we have already

glanced at; but somewhen between 10,000 B.C. and the broadening

separation of the Aryan peoples towards 2000 or 1000 B.C., mankind

discovered fermentation, and began to brew intoxicating drinks. He made

these of honey, of barley, and, as the Aryan tribes spread southward, of

the grape. And he got merry and drunken. Whether he first used yeast to

make his bread light or to ferment his drink we do not know.

At his feasts there were individuals with a gift for “playing the fool,”

who did so no doubt to win the laughter of their friends,[92] but there

was also another sort of men, of great importance in their time, and

still more important to the historian, certain singers of songs and

stories, the bards or rhapsodists. These _bards_ existed among all the

Aryan-speaking peoples; they were a consequence of and a further factor

in that development of spoken language which was the chief of all the

human advances made in Neolithic times. They chanted or recited stories

of the past, or stories of the living chief and his people; they told

other stories that they invented; they memorized jokes and catches. They

found and seized upon and improved the rhythms, rhymes, alliterations,

and such-like possibilities latent in language; they probably did much

to elaborate and fix grammatical forms. They were the first great

artists of the ear, as the later Aurignacian rock painters were the

first great artists of the eye and hand. No doubt they used much

gesture; probably they learnt appropriate gestures when they learnt

their songs; but the order and sweetness and power of language was their

primary concern.

And they mark a new step forward in the power and range of the human

mind. They sustained and developed in men’s minds a sense of a greater

something than themselves, the tribe, and of a life that extended back

into the past. They not only recalled old hatreds and battles, they

recalled old alliances and a common inheritance. The feats of dead

heroes lived again. A new thought came into men’s minds, the desire to

be remembered. Men began to live in thought before they were born and

after they were dead.

Like most human things, this bardic tradition grew first slowly and then

more rapidly. By the time bronze was coming into Europe there was not an

Aryan people that had not a profession and training of bards. In their

hands language became as beautiful as it is ever likely to be. These

bards were living books, man-histories, guardians and makers of a new

and more powerful tradition in human life. Every Aryan people had its

long poetical records thus handed down, its sagas (Teutonic), its epics

(Greek), its vedas (Old Sanscrit). The earliest Aryan people were

essentially a people of the voice. The recitation seems to have

predominated even in those ceremonial and dramatic dances and that

“dressing-up” which among most human races have also served for the

transmission of tradition.[93]

At that time there was no writing, and when first the art of writing

crept into Europe, as we shall tell later, it must have seemed far too

slow, clumsy, and lifeless a method of record for men to trouble very

much about writing down these glowing and beautiful treasures of the

memory. Writing was at first kept for accounts and matters of fact. The

bards and rhapsodists flourished for long after the introduction of

writing. They survived, indeed, in Europe as the minstrels into the

Middle Ages.

Unhappily their tradition had not the fixity of a written record. They

amended and reconstructed, they had their fashions and their phases of

negligence. Accordingly we have now only the very much altered and

revised vestiges of that spoken literature of prehistoric times. One of

the most interesting and informing of these prehistoric compositions of

the Aryans survives in the Greek _Iliad_. An early form of _Iliad_ was

probably recited by 1000 B.C., but it was not written down until perhaps

700 or 600 B.C. Many men must have had to do with it as authors and

improvers, but later Greek tradition attributed it to a blind bard named

Homer, to whom also is ascribed the _Odyssey_, a composition of a very

different spirit and outlook. To be a bard was naturally a blind man’s

occupation.[94] The Slavs called all bards _sliepac_, which was also

their word for a blind man. The original recited version of the _Iliad_

was older than that of the _Odyssey_. “The _Iliad_ as a complete poem is

older than the _Odyssey_, though the material of the _Odyssey_, being

largely undatable folk-lore, is older than any of the historical

material in the _Iliad_.”[95] Both epics were probably written over and

rewritten by some poet of a later date, in much the same manner that

Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Queen Victoria, in his _Idylls of

the King_, wrote over the _Morte d’Arthur_ (which was itself a writing

over by Sir Thomas Malory, _circ._ 1450, of pre-existing legends),

making the speeches and sentiments and the characters more in accordance

with those of his own time. But the events of the _Iliad_ and the

_Odyssey_, the way of living they describe, the spirit of the acts

recorded, belong to the closing centuries of the prehistoric age. These

sagas, epics, and vedas do supply, in addition to archæology and

philology, a third source of information about those vanished times.

Here, for example, is the concluding passage of the _Iliad_, describing

very exactly the making of a prehistoric barrow. (We have taken here

Chapman’s rhymed translation, correcting certain words with the help of

the prose version of Lang, Leaf, and Myers.)

“ ... Thus oxen, mules, in waggons straight they put,

Went forth, and an unmeasur’d pile of sylvan matter cut;

Nine days employ’d in carriage, but when the tenth morn shin’d

On wretched mortals, then they brought the bravest of his kind

Forth to be burned. Troy swam in tears. Upon the pile’s most height

They laid the body, and gave fire. All day it burn’d, all night.

But when th’ eleventh morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine,

The people flock’d about the pile, and first with gleaming wine

Quench’d all the flames. His brothers then, and friends, the snowy bones,

Gather’d into an urn of gold, still pouring out their moans.

Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn, digg’d a pit,

Grav’d it, built up the grave with stones, and quickly piled on it

A barrow....

... The barrow heap’d once, all the town

In Jove-nurs’d Priam’s Court partook a sumptuous fun’ral feast,

And so horse-taming Hector’s rites gave up his soul to rest.”

There remains also an old English saga, _Beowulf_, made long before the

English had crossed from Germany into England, which winds up with a

similar burial. The preparation of a pyre is first described. It is hung

round with shields and coats of mail. The body is brought and the pyre

fired, and then for ten days the warriors built a mighty mound to be

seen afar by the traveller on sea or land. _Beowulf_, which is at least

a thousand years later than the _Iliad_, is also interesting because one

of the main adventures in it is the looting of the treasures of a barrow

already ancient in those days.

§ 3

The Greek epics reveal the early Greeks with no knowledge of iron,

without writing, and before any Greek-founded cities existed in the land

into which they had evidently come quite recently as conquerors. They

were spreading southward from the Aryan region of origin. They seem to

have been a fair people, newcomers in Greece, newcomers to a land that

had been held hitherto by a darker people, people who are now supposed

to have belonged to a dark white “aboriginal” race, a “Mediterranean”

people allied to those Iberians whom the Kelts pressed westward, and to

the Hamitic white people of North Africa.

[Illustration: Combat between Menelaus & Hector (in the Iliad)

From a platter ascribed to the end of the seventh century in the British

Museum. This is probably the earliest known vase bearing a Greek

inscription. Greek writing was just beginning. Note the Swastika.]

Let us, at the risk of a slight repetition, be perfectly clear upon one

point. The _Iliad_ does not give us the primitive neolithic life of that

Aryan region of origin; it gives us that life already well on the move

towards a new state of affairs. The primitive neolithic way of living,

with its tame and domesticated animals, its pottery and cooking, and its

patches of rude cultivation, we have sketched in Chapter XI. We have

already discussed in § 4 of Chapter XIII the probability of a

widespread _heliolithic_ culture, a sort of sub-civilization, very like

the Polynesian and Indonesian life of a hundred years ago, an

elaboration of the earlier Neolithic stage. Between 15,000 and 6000 B.C.

the neolithic way of living had spread with the forests and abundant

vegetation of the Pluvial Period, over the greater part of the old

world, from the Niger to the Hwang-ho and from Ireland to the south of

India. Now, as the climate of great portions of the earth was swinging

towards drier and more open conditions again, the primitive neolithic

life was developing along two divergent directions. One was leading to a

more wandering life, towards at last a constantly migratory life between

summer and winter pasture, which is called NOMADISM; the other, in

certain sunlit river valleys, was towards a water-treasuring life of

irrigation, in which men gathered into the first towns and made the

first CIVILIZATION. The nature and development of civilization we shall

consider more fully in the next chapter, but here we have to note that

the Greeks, as the _Iliad_ presents them, are neither simple neolithic

nomads, innocent of civilization, nor are they civilized men. They are

primitive nomads in an excited state, because they have just come upon

civilization, and regard it as an opportunity for war and loot.[96] So

far they are exceptional and not representative. But our interest in

them in this chapter is not in their distinctively Greek and predatory

aspect, but in what they reveal of the ordinary northward life from

which they are coming.

These early Greeks of the _Iliad_ are sturdy fighters, but without

discipline--their battles are a confusion of single combats. They have

horses, but no cavalry; they use the horse, which is a comparatively

recent addition to Aryan resources, to drag a rude fighting chariot into

battle. The horse is still novel enough to be something of a terror in

itself. For ordinary draught purposes, as in the quotation from the

_Iliad_ we have just made, oxen were employed.

The only priests of these Aryans are the keepers of shrines and sacred

places. There are chiefs, who are heads of families and who also perform

sacrifices, but there does not seem to be much mystery or sacramental

feeling in their religion. When the Greeks go to war, these heads and

elders meet in council and appoint a king, whose powers are very loosely

defined. There are no laws, but only customs; and no exact standards of

conduct.

[Illustration: Horses & chariots--(from an archaic Greek vase)]

The social life of the early Greeks centred about the households of

these leading men. There were no doubt huts for herds and the like, and

outlying farm buildings; but the hall of the chief was a comprehensive

centre, to which everyone went to feast, to hear the bards, to take part

in games and exercises. The primitive craftsmen were gathered there.

About it were cowsheds and stabling and such-like offices. Unimportant

people slept about anywhere as retainers did in the mediæval castles and

as people still do in Indian households. Except for quite personal

possessions, there was still an air of patriarchal communism about the

tribe. The tribe, or the chief as the head of the tribe, owned the

grazing lands; forest and rivers were the wild.

The Aryan civilization seems, and indeed all early communities seem, to

have been without the little separate households that make up the mass

of the population in western Europe or America to-day. The tribe was a

big family; the nation a group of tribal families; a household often

contained hundreds of people. Human society began, just as herds and

droves begin among animals, by the family delaying its breaking up.

Nowadays the lions in East Africa are apparently becoming social animals

in this way, by the young keeping with the mother after they are fully

grown, and hunting in a group. Hitherto the lion has been much more of a

solitary beast. If men and women do not cling to their families nowadays

as much as they did, it is because the state and the community now

supply safety and help and facilities that were once only possible in

the family group.

In the Hindu community of to-day these great households of the earlier

stages of human society are still to be found. Mr. Bhupendranath Basu

has recently described a typical Hindu household.[97] It is an Aryan

household refined and made gentle by thousands of years of civilization,

but its social structure is the same as that of the households of which

the Aryan epics tell.

“The joint family system,” he said, “has descended to us from time

immemorial, the Aryan patriarchal system of old still holding sway in

India. The structure, though ancient, remains full of life. The joint

family is a co-operative corporation, in which men and women have a

well-defined place. At the head of the corporation is the senior member

of the family, generally the eldest male member, but in his absence the

senior female member often assumes control.” (Cp. Penelope in the

_Odyssey_.)

“All able-bodied members must contribute their labour and earnings,

whether of personal skill or agriculture and trade, to the common stock;

weaker members, widows, orphans, and destitute relations, all must be

maintained and supported; sons, nephews, brothers, cousins, all must be

treated equally, for any undue preference is apt to break up the family.

We have no word for cousins--they are either brothers or sisters, and we

do not know what are cousins two degrees removed. The children of a

first cousin are your nephews and nieces, just the same as the children

of your brothers and sisters. A man can no more marry a cousin, however

removed, than he can marry his own sister, except in certain parts of

Madras, where a man may marry his maternal uncle’s daughter. The family

affections, the family ties, are always very strong, and therefore the

maintenance of an equal standard among so many members is not so

difficult as it may appear at first sight. Moreover, life is very

simple. Until recently shoes were not in general use at home, but

sandals without any leather fastenings. I have known of a well-to-do

middle-class family of several brothers and cousins who had two or three

pairs of leather shoes between them, these shoes being only used when

they had occasion to go out, and the same practice is still followed in

the case of the more expensive garments, like shawls, which last for

generations, and with their age are treated with loving care, as having

been used by ancestors of revered memory.

“The joint family remains together sometimes for several generations,

until it becomes too unwieldy, when it breaks up into smaller families,

and you thus see whole villages peopled by members of the same clan. I

have said that the family is a co-operative society, and it may be

likened to a small state, and is kept in its place by strong discipline

based on love and obedience. You see nearly every day the younger

members coming to the head of the family and taking the dust of his feet

as a token of benediction; whenever they go on an enterprise, they take

his leave and carry his blessing.... There are many bonds which bind the

family together--the bonds of sympathy, of common pleasures, of common

sorrows; when a death occurs, all the members go into mourning; when

there is a birth or a wedding, the whole family rejoices. Then above all

is the family deity, some image of Vishnu, the preserver; his place is

in a separate room, generally known as the room of God, or in well-to-do

families in a temple attached to the house, where the family performs

its daily worship. There is a sense of personal attachment between this

image of the deity and the family, for the image generally comes down

from past generations, often miraculously acquired by a pious ancestor

at some remote time.... With the household gods is intimately associated

the family priest.... The Hindu priest is a part of the family life of

his flock, between whom and himself the tie has existed for many

generations. The priest is not generally a man of much learning; he

knows, however, the traditions of his faith.... He is not a very heavy

burden, for he is satisfied with little--a few handfuls of rice, a few

home-grown bananas or vegetables, a little unrefined sugar made in the

village, and sometimes a few pieces of copper are all that is needed....

A picture of our family life would be incomplete without the household

servants. A female servant is known as the ‘jhi,’ or daughter, in

Bengal--she is like the daughter of the house; she calls the master and

the mistress father and mother, and the young men and women of the

family brothers and sisters. She participates in the life of the family;

she goes to the holy places along with her mistress, for she could not

go alone, and generally she spends her life with the family of her

adoption; her children are looked after by the family. The treatment of

men servants is very similar. These servants, men and women, are

generally people of the humbler castes, but a sense of personal

attachment grows up between them and the members of the family, and as

they get on in years they are affectionately called by the younger

members elder brothers, uncles, aunts, etc.... In a well-to-do house

there is always a resident teacher, who instructs the children of the

family as well as other boys of the village; there is no expensive

school building, but room is found in some veranda or shed in the

courtyard for the children and their teacher, and into this school

low-caste boys are freely admitted. These indigenous schools were not of

a very high order, but they supplied an agency of instruction for the

masses which was probably not available in many other countries....

“With Hindu life is bound up its traditional duty of hospitality.

It is the duty of a householder to offer a meal to any stranger who

may come before midday and ask for one; the mistress of the house

does not sit down to her meal until every member is fed, and, as

sometimes her food is all that is left, she does not take her meal

until well after midday lest a hungry stranger should come and

claim one.” ...

We have been tempted to quote Mr. Basu at some length, because here we

do get to something like a living understanding of the type of household

which has prevailed in human communities since Neolithic days, which

still prevails to-day in India, China, and the Far East, but which in

the west is rapidly giving ground before a state and municipal

organization of education and a large-scale industrialism within which

an amount of individual detachment and freedom is possible, such as

these great households never knew....

But let us return now to the history preserved for us in the Aryan

epics.

The Sanscrit epics tell a very similar story to that underlying the

_Iliad_, the story of a fair, beef-eating people--only later did they

become vegetarians--coming down from Persia into the plain of North

India and conquering their way slowly towards the Indus. From the Indus

they spread over India, but as they spread they acquired much from the

dark Dravidians they conquered, and they seem to have lost their bardic

tradition. The vedas, says Mr. Basu, were transmitted chiefly in the

households by the women....

The oral literature of the Keltic peoples who pressed westward has not

been preserved so completely as that of the Greeks or Indians; it was

written down many centuries later, and so, like the barbaric, primitive

English _Beowulf_, has lost any clear evidence of a period of migration

into the lands of an antecedent people. If the pre-Aryans figure in it

at all, it is as the fairy folk of the Irish stories. Ireland, most cut

off of all the Keltic-speaking communities, retained to the latest date

its primitive life; and the _Táin_, the Irish _Iliad_, describes a

cattle-keeping life in which war chariots are still used, and war dogs

also, and the heads of the slain are carried off slung round the horses’

necks. The _Táin_ is the story of a cattle raid. Here too the same

social order appears as in the _Iliad_; the chiefs sit and feast in

great halls, they build halls for themselves, there is singing and

story-telling by the bards and drinking and intoxication.[98] Priests

are not very much in evidence, but there is a sort of medicine man who

deals in spells and prophecy.

XVI

THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS

§ 1. _Early Cities and Early Nomads._ § 2A. _The Riddle of the

Sumerians._ § 2B. _The Empire of Sargon the First._ § 2C. _The

Empire of Hammurabi._ § 2D. _The Assyrians and their Empire._ § 2E.

_The Chaldean Empire._ § 3. _The Early History of Egypt._ § 4. _The

Early Civilization of India._ § 5. _The Early History of China._ §

6. _While the Civilizations were Growing._

§ 1

When the Aryan way of speech and life was beginning to spread to the

east and west of the region in which it began, and breaking up as it

spread into a number of languages and nations, considerable communities

of much more civilized men were already in existence in Egypt and in

Mesopotamia, and probably also in China and in (still purely Dravidian)

India. Our story has overshot itself in its account of the Aryans and of

their slow progress from early Neolithic conditions to the heroic

barbarism of the Bronze Age. We must now go back. Such a pre-Keltic

gathering as we sketched at Avebury would have happened about 2000

B.C., and the building of the barrow for Hector as the _Iliad_

describes it, 1300 B.C. or even later. It is perhaps natural for a

European writer writing primarily for English-reading students to

overrun his subject in this way. No great harm is done if the student

does clearly grasp that there has been an overlap.

Here then we take up the main thread of human history again. We must

hark back to 6000 B.C. or even earlier. But although we shall go back

so far, the people we shall describe are people already in some respects

beyond the Neolithic Aryans of three thousand years later, more

particularly in their social organization and their material welfare.

While in Central Europe and Central Asia the primitive Neolithic way of

life was becoming more migratory and developing into nomadism, in the

great river valleys it is becoming more settled and localized. It is

still doubtful whether we are to consider Mesopotamia or Egypt the

earlier scene of the two parallel beginnings of settled communities

living in towns. By 4000 B.C., in both these regions of the earth,

such communities existed, and had been going on for a very considerable

time. The excavations of the American expedition[99] at Nippur have

unearthed evidence of a city community existing there at least as early

as 5000 B.C., and probably as early as 6000 B.C., an earlier date

than anything we know of in Egypt. De Candolle asserts that it is only

in the Euphrates-Tigris district that wheat has ever been found growing

wild.[100] It may be that from Mesopotamia as a centre the cultivation

of wheat spread over the entire eastern hemisphere. Or it may be that

wheat grew wild in some regions now submerged. There may have been a

wild wheat region in what is now the sea bottom of the eastern

Mediterranean. But cultivation is not civilization; the growing of wheat

had spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the distribution of the

Neolithic culture by perhaps 10,000 or 9000 B.C., before the

beginnings of civilization. Civilization is something more than the

occasional seasonal growing of wheat. It is the settlement of men upon

an area continuously cultivated and possessed, who live in buildings

continuously inhabited with a common rule and a common city or citadel.

For a long time civilization may quite possibly have developed in

Mesopotamia without any relations with the parallel beginnings in Egypt.

The two settlements may have been quite independent, arising separately

out of the widely diffused Heliolithic Neolithic culture. Or they may

have had a common origin in the region of the Mediterranean, the Red

Sea, and southern Arabia.

[Illustration: Map of The CRADLE of WESTERN CIVILIZATION

6,000 to 4,000 B.C.

J.F.H.]

The first condition necessary to a real settling down of Neolithic men,

as distinguished from a mere temporary settlement among abundant food,

was of course a trustworthy all-the-year-round supply of water, fodder

for the animals, food for themselves, and building material for their

homes. There had to be everything they could need at any season, and no

want that would tempt them to wander further. This was a possible state

of affairs, no doubt, in many European and Asiatic valleys; and in many

such valleys, as in the case of the Swiss lake-dwellings, men settled

from a very early date indeed; but nowhere, of any countries now known

to us, were these favourable conditions found upon such a scale, and

nowhere did they hold good so surely year in and year out as in Egypt

and in the country between the upper waters of the Euphrates and Tigris

and the Persian Gulf.[101] Here was a constant water supply under

enduring sunlight; trustworthy harvests year by year; in Mesopotamia

wheat yielded, says Herodotus, two hundredfold to the sower; Pliny says

that it was cut twice and afterwards yielded good fodder for sheep;

there were abundant palms and many sorts of fruits; and as for building

material, in Egypt there was clay and easily worked stone, and in

Mesopotamia a clay that becomes a brick in the sunshine. In such

countries men would cease to wander and settle down almost unawares;

they would multiply and discover themselves numerous and by their

numbers safe from any casual assailant. They multiplied, producing a

denser human population than the earth had ever known before; their

houses became more substantial, wild beasts were exterminated over great

areas, the security of life increased so that ordinary men went about in

the towns and fields without encumbering themselves with weapons, and,

among themselves at least, they became peaceful peoples. Men took root

as man had never taken root before.

But in the less fertile and more seasonal lands outside these favoured

areas, there developed on the other hand a thinner, more active

population of peoples, the primitive nomadic peoples. In contrast with

the settled folk, the agriculturists, these nomads lived freely and

dangerously. They were in comparison lean and hungry men. Their herding

was still blended with hunting; they fought constantly for their

pastures against hostile families. The discoveries in the elaboration of

implements and the use of metals made by the settled peoples spread to

them and improved their weapons. They followed the settled folk from

Neolithic phase to Bronze phase. It is possible that, in the case of

iron, the first users were nomadic. They became more warlike with better

arms, and more capable of rapid movements with the improvement of their

transport. One must not think of a nomadic stage as a predecessor of a

settled stage in human affairs. To begin with, man was a slow drifter,

following food. Then one sort of men began to settle down, and another

sort became more distinctly nomadic. The settled sort began to rely more

and more upon grain for food; the nomad began to make a greater use of

milk for food. He bred his cows for milk. The two ways of life

specialized in opposite directions. It was inevitable that nomad folk

and the settled folk should clash, that the nomads should seem hard

barbarians to the settled peoples, and the settled peoples soft and

effeminate and very good plunder to the nomad peoples. Along the fringes

of the developing civilizations there must have been a constant raiding

and bickering between hardy nomad tribes and mountain tribes and the

more numerous and less warlike peoples in the towns and villages.

For the most part this was a mere raiding of the borders. The settled

folk had the weight of numbers on their side; the herdsmen might raid

and loot, but they could not stay. That sort of mutual friction might go

on for many generations. But ever and again we find some leader or some

tribe amidst the disorder of free and independent nomads, powerful

enough to force a sort of unity upon its kindred tribes, and then woe

betide the nearest civilization. Down pour the united nomads on the

unwarlike, unarmed plains, and there ensues a war of conquest. Instead

of carrying off the booty, the conquerors settle down on the conquered

land, which becomes all booty for them; the villagers and townsmen are

reduced to servitude and tribute-paying, they become hewers of wood and

drawers of water, and the leaders of the nomads become kings and

princes, masters and aristocrats. They too settle down, they learn many

of the arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and

hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their old nomadic

habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports, they drive and race

chariots, they regard work, especially agricultural work, as the lot of

an inferior race and class.

This in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories in

history for the last seventy centuries or more. In the first history

that we can clearly decipher we find already in all the civilized

regions a distinction between a non-working ruler class and the working

mass of the population. And we find too that after some generations, the

aristocrat, having settled down, begins to respect the arts and

refinements and law-abidingness of settlement, and to lose something of

his original hardihood. He intermarries, he patches up a sort of

toleration between conqueror and conquered; he exchanges religious ideas

and learns the lessons upon which soil and climate insist. He becomes a

part of the civilization he has captured. And as he does so, events

gather towards a fresh invasion by the free adventurers of the outer

world.[102]

§ 2A

[Illustration: A very early Sumerian stone carving showing Sumerian

warriors in phalanx]

This alternation of settlement, conquest, refinement, fresh conquest,

refinement, is particularly to be noted in the region of the Euphrates

and Tigris, which lay open in every direction to great areas which are

not arid enough to be complete deserts, but which were not fertile

enough to support civilized populations. Perhaps the earliest people to

form real cities in this part of the world, or indeed in any part of the

world, were a people of mysterious origin called the Sumerians. They

were neither Semites nor Aryans, and whence they came we do not know.

Whether they were dark whites of Iberian or Dravidian affinities is less

certainly to be denied.[103] They used a kind of writing which they

scratched upon clay, and their language has been deciphered.[104] It was

a language more like the unclassified Caucasic language groups than any

others that now exist. These languages may be connected with Basque, and

may represent what was once a widespread group extending from Spain and

western Europe to eastern India, and reaching southwards to Central

Africa. These people shaved their heads and wore simple tunic-like

garments of wool. They settled first on the lower courses of the great

river and not very far from the Persian Gulf, which in those days ran up

for a hundred and thirty miles[105] and more beyond its present head.

They fertilized their fields by letting water run through irrigation

trenches, and they gradually became very skilful hydraulic engineers;

they had cattle, asses, sheep, and goats, but no horses; their

collections of mud huts grew into towns, and their religion raised up

towerlike temple buildings.

Clay, dried in the sun, was a very great fact in the lives of these

people. This lower country of the Euphrates-Tigris valleys had little or

no stone. They built of brick, they made pottery and earthenware images,

and they drew and presently wrote upon thin tile-like cakes of clay.

They do not seem to have had paper or to have used parchment. Their

books and memoranda, even their letters, were potsherds.

At Nippur they built a great tower of brick to their chief god, El-lil

(Enlil), the memory of which is supposed to be preserved in the story of

the Tower of Babel. They seem to have been divided up into city states,

which warred among themselves and maintained for many centuries their

military capacity. Their soldiers carried long spears and shields, and

fought in close formation. Sumerians conquered Sumerians. Sumeria

remained unconquered by any stranger race for a very long period of time

indeed. They developed their civilization, their writing, and their

shipping, through a period that may be twice as long as the whole period

from the Christian era to the present time.

The first of all known empires was that founded by the high priest of

the god of the Sumerian city of Erech. It reached, says an inscription

at Nippur, from the Lower (Persian Gulf) to the Upper (Mediterranean or

Red?) Sea. Among the mud heaps of the Euphrates-Tigris valley the record

of that vast period of history, that first half of the Age of

Cultivation, is buried. There flourished the first temples and the first

priest-rulers that we know of among mankind.

§ 2B

Upon the western edge of this country appeared nomadic tribes of

Semitic-speaking peoples who traded, raided, and fought with the

Sumerians for many generations. Then arose at last a great leader among

these Semites, Sargon (2750 B.C.),[106] who united them, and not only

conquered the Sumerians, but extended his rule from beyond the Persian

Gulf on the east to the Mediterranean on the west. His own people were

called the Akkadians and his empire is called the Sumerian Akkadian

Empire. It endured for over two hundred years.

But though the Semites conquered and gave a king to the Sumerian cities,

it was the Sumerian civilization which prevailed over the simpler

Semitic culture. The newcomers learnt the Sumerian writing (the

“cuneiform” writing) and the Sumerian language; they set up no Semitic

writing of their own. The Sumerian language became for these barbarians

the language of knowledge and power, as Latin was the language of

knowledge and power among the barbaric peoples of the middle ages in

Europe. This Sumerian learning had a very great vitality. It was

destined to survive through a long series of conquests and changes that

now began in the valley of the two rivers.

§ 2C

As the people of the Sumerian Akkadian Empire lost their political and

military vigour, fresh inundations of a warlike people began from the

east, the Elamites,[107] while from the west came the Semitic Amorites,

pinching the Sumerian Akkadian Empire between them. The Amorites settled

in what was at first a small up-river town, named Babylon; and after a

hundred years of warfare became masters of all Mesopotamia under a great

king, Hammurabi (2100 B.C.), who founded the first Babylonian Empire.

Again came peace and security and a decline in aggressive prowess, and

in another hundred years fresh nomads from the east were invading

Babylonia, bringing with them the horse and the war chariot, and setting

up their own king in Babylon....

§2D

Higher up the Tigris, above the clay lands and with easy supplies of

workable stone, a Semitic people, the Assyrians, while the Sumerians

were still unconquered by the Semites, were settling about a number of

cities of which Assur and Nineveh were the chief. Their peculiar

physiognomy, the long nose and thick lips, was very like that of the

commoner type of Polish Jew to-day. They wore great beards and

ringletted long hair, tall caps and long robes. They were constantly

engaged in mutual raiding with the Hittites to the west; they were

conquered by Sargon I and became free again; a certain Tushratta, King

of Mitanni, to the north-west, captured and held their capital, Nineveh,

for a time; they intrigued with Egypt against Babylon and were in the

pay of Egypt; they developed the military art to a very high pitch, and

became mighty raiders and exacters of tribute; and at last, adopting the

horse and the war chariot, they settled accounts for a time with the

Hittites, and then, under Tiglath Pileser I, conquered Babylon for

themselves (about 1100 B.C.[108]). But their hold on the lower, older,

and more civilized land was not secure, and Nineveh, the stone city, as

distinguished from Babylon, the brick city, remained their capital. For

many centuries power swayed between Nineveh and Babylon, and sometimes

it was an Assyrian and sometimes a Babylonian who claimed to be “king of

the world.”

For four centuries Assyria was restrained from expansion towards Egypt

by a fresh northward thrust and settlement of another group of Semitic

peoples, the Arameans, whose chief city was Damascus, and whose

descendants are the Syrians of to-day. (There is, we may note, no

connection whatever between the words Assyrian and Syrian. It is an

accidental similarity.) Across these Syrians the Assyrian kings fought

for power and expansion south-westward. In 745 B.C. arose another

Tiglath Pileser, Tiglath Pileser III, the Tiglath Pileser of the

Bible.[109] He not only directed the transfer of the Israelites to Media

(the “Lost Ten Tribes” whose ultimate fate has exercised so many curious

minds), but he conquered and ruled Babylon, so founding what historians

know as the New Assyrian Empire. His son, Shalmaneser IV,[110] died

during the siege of Samaria, and was succeeded by a usurper, who, no

doubt to flatter Babylonian susceptibilities, took the ancient Akkadian

Sumerian name of Sargon, Sargon II. He seems to have armed the Assyrian

forces for the first time with iron weapons. It was probably Sargon II

who actually carried out the deportation of the Ten Tribes.

Such shiftings about of population became a very distinctive part of the

political methods of the Assyrian new empire. Whole nations who were

difficult to control in their native country would be shifted en _masse_

to unaccustomed regions and amidst strange neighbours, where their only

hope of survival would lie in obedience to the supreme power.

[Illustration: Assyrian warrior

(Bas-relief from the palace of Sargon II)]

Sargon’s son, Sennacherib, led the Assyrian hosts to the borders of

Egypt. There Sennacherib’s army was smitten by a pestilence, a disaster

described in the nineteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings.

“And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out,

and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five

thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were

all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and

returned, and dwelt at Nineveh.”[111]

Sennacherib’s grandson, Assurbanipal (called by the Greeks

Sardanapalus), did succeed in conquering and for a time holding lower

Egypt.

§2E

The Assyrian Empire lasted only a hundred and fifty years after Sargon

II. Fresh nomadic Semites coming from the south-east, the Chaldeans,

assisted by two Aryan peoples from the north, the Medes and Persians,

combined against it, and took Nineveh in 606 B.C.

The Chaldean Empire, with its capital at Babylon (Second Babylonian

Empire), lasted under Nebuchadnezzar the Great (Nebuchadnezzar II) and

his successors until 539 B.C., when it collapsed before the attack of

Cyrus, the founder of the Persian power....

So the story goes on. In 330 B.C., as we shall tell later in some

detail, a Greek conqueror, Alexander the Great, is looking on the

murdered body of the last of the Persian rulers.

The story of the Tigris and Euphrates civilizations, of which we have

given as yet only the bare outline, is a story of conquest following

after conquest, and each conquest replaces old rulers and ruling classes

by new; races like the Sumerian and the Elamite are swallowed up, their

languages vanish, they interbreed and are lost, the Assyrian melts away

into Chaldean and Syrian, the Hittites become Aryanized and lose

distinction, the Semites who swallowed up the Sumerians give place to

Aryan rulers, Medes and Persians appear in the place of the Elamites,

the Aryan Persian language dominates the empire until the Aryan Greek

ousts it from official life. Meanwhile the plough does its work year by

year, the harvests are gathered, the builders build as they are told,

the tradesmen work and acquire fresh devices; the knowledge of writing

spreads, novel things, the horse and wheeled vehicles and iron, are

introduced and become part of the permanent inheritance of mankind; the

volume of trade upon sea and desert increases, men’s ideas widen, and

knowledge grows. There are set-backs, massacres, pestilence; but the

story is, on the whole, one of enlargement. For four thousand years this

new thing, civilization, which had set its root into the soil of the two

rivers, grew as a tree grows; now losing a limb, now stripped by a

storm, but always growing and resuming its growth. After four thousand

years the warriors and conquerors were still going to and fro over this

growing thing they did not understand, but men had now (330 B.C.) got

iron, horses, writing and computation, money, a greater variety of foods

and textiles, a wider knowledge of their world.

The time that elapsed between the empire of Sargon I and the conquest of

Babylon by Alexander the Great was as long, be it noted, at the least

estimate, as the time from Alexander the Great to the present day. And

before the time of Sargon, men had been settled in the Sumerian land,

living in towns, worshipping in temples, following an orderly Neolithic

agricultural life in an organized community for at least as long again.

“Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Larsa, have already an immemorial past when

first they appear in history.”[112]

One of the most difficult things for both the writer and student of

history is to sustain the sense of these time intervals and prevent

these ages becoming shortened by perspective in his imagination. Half

the duration of human civilization and the keys to all its chief

institutions are to be found _before_ Sargon I. Moreover, the reader

cannot too often compare the scale of the dates in these latter fuller

pages of man’s history with the succession of countless generations to

which the time diagrams given on pages 14, 60, and 89 bear witness.

§ 3

The story of the Nile valley from the dawn of its traceable history

until the time of Alexander the Great is not very dissimilar from that

of Babylonia; but while Babylonia lay open on every side to invasion,

Egypt was protected by desert to the west and by desert and sea to the

east, while to the south she had only negro peoples. Consequently her

history is less broken by the invasions of strange races than is the

history of Assyria and Babylon, and until towards the eighth century

B.C., when she fell under an Ethiopian dynasty, whenever a conqueror did

come into her story, he came in from Asia by way of the Isthmus of

Suez.

[Illustration: Iron Weapons]

The Stone Age remains in Egypt are of very uncertain date; there are

Palæolithic and then Neolithic remains. It is not certain whether the

Neolithic pastoral people who left those remains were the direct

ancestors of the later Egyptians. In many respects they differed

entirely from their successors. They buried their dead, but before they

buried them they cut up the bodies and apparently ate portions of the

flesh. They seem to have done this out of a feeling of reverence for the

departed; the dead were “eaten with honour” according to the phrase of

Mr. Flinders Petrie. It may have been that the survivors hoped to retain

thereby some vestige of the strength and virtue that had died. Traces of

similar savage customs have been found in the long barrows that were

scattered over western Europe before the spreading of the Aryan peoples,

and they have pervaded negro Africa, where they are only dying out at

the present time.

[Illustration: Early figure of the Egyptian hippopotamus goddess.]

About 5000 B.C., or earlier, the traces of these primitive peoples

cease, and the true Egyptians appear on the scene. The former people

were hut builders and at a comparatively low stage of Neolithic culture,

the latter were already a civilized Neolithic people; they used brick

and wood buildings instead of their predecessors’ hovels, and they were

working stone. Very soon they passed into the Bronze Age. They possessed

a system of picture writing almost as developed as the contemporary

writing of the Sumerians, but quite different in character. Possibly

there was an irruption from southern Arabia by way of Aden, of a fresh

people, who came into upper Egypt and descended slowly towards the delta

of the Nile. Dr. Wallis Budge writes of them as “conquerors from the

East.” But their gods and their ways, like their picture writing, were

very different indeed from the Sumerian. One of the earliest known

figures of a deity is that of a hippopotamus goddess, and so very

distinctively African.[113]

The clay of the Nile is not so fine and plastic as the Sumerian clay,

and the Egyptians made no use of it for writing. But they early resorted

to strips of the papyrus reed fastened together, from whose name comes

our word “paper.”

The broad outline of the history of Egypt is simpler than the history of

Mesopotamia. It has long been the custom to divide the rulers of Egypt

into a succession of Dynasties, and in speaking of the periods of

Egyptian history it is usual to speak of the first, fourth, fourteenth,

and so on, Dynasty. The Egyptians were ultimately conquered by the

Persians after their establishment in Babylon, and when finally Egypt

fell to Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., it was Dynasty XXXI that came

to an end. In that long history of over 4000 years, a much longer period

than that between the career of Alexander the Great and the present day,

certain broad phases of development may be noted here. There was a phase

known as the “old kingdom,” which culminated in the IVth Dynasty; this

Dynasty marks a period of wealth and splendour, and its monarchs were

obsessed by such a passion for making monuments for themselves as no men

have ever before or since had a chance to display and gratify. It was

Cheops[114] and Chephren and Mycerinus of this IVth Dynasty who raised

the vast piles of the great and the second and the third pyramids at

Gizeh. These unmeaning[115] sepulchral piles, of an almost incredible

vastness,[116] erected in an age when engineering science had scarcely

begun, exhausted the resources of Egypt through three long reigns, and

left her wasted as if by a war.

The story of Egypt from the IVth to the XVth Dynasty is a story of

conflicts between alternative capitals and competing religions, of

separations into several kingdoms and reunions. It is, so to speak, an

internal history. Here we can name only one of that long series of

Pharaohs, Pepi II, who reigned ninety years, the longest reign in

history, and left a great abundance of inscriptions and buildings. At

last there happened to Egypt what happened so frequently to the

civilizations of Mesopotamia. Egypt was conquered by nomadic Semites,

who founded a “shepherd” dynasty, the Hyksos (XVIth), which was finally

expelled by native Egyptians. This invasion probably happened while that

first Babylonian Empire which Hammurabi founded was flourishing, but the

exact correspondences of dates between early Egypt and Babylonia are

still very doubtful. Only after a long period of servitude did a popular

uprising expel these foreigners again.

After the war of liberation (circa 1600 B.C.) there followed a period of

great prosperity in Egypt, _the New Empire_. Egypt became a great and

united military state, and pushed her expeditions at last as far as the

Euphrates, and so the age-long struggle between the Egyptian and

Babylonian-Assyrian power began.

For a time Egypt was the ascendant power. Thothmes III[117] and his son

Amenophis III (XVIIIth Dynasty) ruled from Ethiopia to the Euphrates in

the fifteenth century B.C. For various reasons these names stand out

with unusual distinctness in the Egyptian record. They were great

builders, and left many monuments and inscriptions. Amenophis III

founded Luxor, and added greatly to Karnak. At Tel-el-Amarna a mass of

letters has been found, the royal correspondence with Babylonian and

Hittite and other monarchs, including that Tushratta who took Nineveh,

throwing a flood of light upon the political and social affairs of this

particular age. Of Amenophis IV we shall have more to tell later, but of

one, the most extraordinary and able of Egyptian monarchs, Queen Hatasu,

the aunt and stepmother of Thotmes III, we have no space to tell. She is

represented upon her monuments in masculine garb, and with a long beard

as a symbol of wisdom.

Thereafter there was a brief Syrian conquest of Egypt, a series, of

changing dynasties, among which we may note the XIXth, which included

Rameses II, a great builder of temples, who reigned seventy-seven years

(about 1317 to 1250 B.C.), and who is supposed by some to have been the

Pharaoh of Moses, and the XXIInd, which included Shishak, who plundered

Solomon’s temple (circa 930 B.C.). An Ethiopian conqueror from the Upper

Nile founded the XXVth Dynasty, a foreign dynasty, which went down (670

B.C.) before the new Assyrian Empire created by Tiglath Pileser III,

Sargon II, and Sennacherib, of which we have already made mention.

The days of any Egyptian predominance over foreign nations were drawing

to an end. For a time under Psammetichus I of the XXVIth Dynasty

(664-610 B.C.) native rule was restored, and Necho II recovered for a

time the old Egyptian possessions in Syria up to the Euphrates while the

Medes and Chaldeans were attacking Nineveh. From those gains Necho II

was routed out again after the fall of Nineveh and the Assyrians by

Nebuchadnezzar II, the great Chaldean king, the Nebuchadnezzar of the

Bible. The Jews, who had been the allies of Necho II, were taken into

captivity by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon.

When, in the sixth century B.C., Chaldea fell to the Persians, Egypt

followed suit, a rebellion later made Egypt independent once more for

sixty years, and in 332 B.C. she welcomed Alexander the Great as her

conqueror, to be ruled thereafter by foreigners, first by Greeks, then

by Romans, then in succession by Arabs, Turks, and British, until the

present day.

Such briefly is the history of Egypt from its beginnings; a history

first of isolation and then of increasing entanglement with the affairs

of other nations, as increasing facilities of communication drew the

peoples of the world into closer and closer interaction.

§ 4

The history we need to tell here of India is simpler even than this

brief record of Egypt. Somewhere about the time of Hammurabi or later, a

branch of the Aryan-speaking people who then occupied North Persia and

Afghanistan, pushed down the northwest passes into India. They conquered

their way until they prevailed over all the darker populations of North

India, and spread their rule or influence over the whole peninsula. They

never achieved any unity in India; their history is a history of warring

kings and republics. The Persian empire, in the days of its expansion

after the capture of Babylon, pushed its boundaries beyond the Indus,

and later Alexander the Great marched as far as the border of the desert

that separates the Punjab from the Ganges valley. But with this bare

statement we will for a time leave the history of India.

§ 5

[Illustration: The Cradle of CHINESE CIVILIZATION]

Meanwhile, as this triple system of White Man civilization developed in

India and in the lands about the meeting-places of Asia, Africa, and

Europe, another and quite distinct civilization was developing and

spreading out from the then fertile but now dry and desolate valley of

the Tarim and from the slopes of the Kuen-lun mountains in two

directions, down the course of the Hwang-ho, and into the valley of the

Yang-tse-kiang. We know practically nothing as yet of the archæology of

China, we do not know anything of the Stone Age in that part of the

world, and at present our ideas of this early civilization are derived

from the still very imperfectly explored Chinese literature. It has

evidently been from the first and throughout a Mongolian civilization.

Until after the time of Alexander the Great there are few traces of

any Aryan or Semitic, much less of Hamitic influence. All such

influences were still in another world, separated by mountains, deserts,

and wild nomadic tribes until that time. The Chinese seem to have made

their civilization spontaneously and unassisted. Some recent writers

suppose indeed a connection with ancient Sumeria. Of course both China

and Sumeria arose on the basis of the almost world-wide early Neolithic

culture, but the Tarim valley and the lower Euphrates are separated by

such vast obstacles of mountain and desert as to forbid the idea of any

migration or interchange of peoples who had once settled down.

But though the civilization of China is wholly Mongolian (as we have

defined Mongolian), it does not follow that the northern roots are the

only ones from which it grew. If it grew first in the Tarim valley, then

unlike all other civilizations (including the Mexican and Peruvian) it

did not grow out of the heliolithic culture. We Europeans know very

little as yet of the ethnology and pre-history of southern China. There

the Chinese mingle with such kindred peoples as the Siamese and Burmese,

and seem to bridge over towards the darker Dravidian peoples and towards

the Malays. It is quite clear from the Chinese records that there were

southern as well as northern beginnings of a civilization, and that the

Chinese civilization that comes into history 2000 years B.C. is the

result of a long process of conflicts, minglings, and interchanges

between a southern and a northern culture of which the southern may have

been the earlier. The southern Chinese perhaps played the rôle towards

the northern Chinese that the Hamites or Sumerians played to the Aryan

and Semitic peoples in the west, or that the settled Dravidians played

towards the Aryans in India. They may have been the first agriculturists

and the first temple builders. But so little is known as yet of this

attractive chapter in pre-history, that we cannot dwell upon it further

here.

The chief foreigners mentioned in the early annals of China were a

Ural-Altaic people on the north-east frontier, the Huns, against whom

certain of the earlier emperors made war.

Chinese history is still very imperfectly known to European students,

and our accounts of the early records are particularly unsatisfactory.

About 2700 to 2400 B.C. reigned five emperors, who seem to have been

almost incredibly exemplary beings.

There follows upon these first five emperors a series of dynasties, of

which the accounts become more and more exact and convincing as they

become more recent. China has to tell a long history of border warfare

and of graver struggles between the settled and nomad peoples. To begin

with, China, like Sumer and like Egypt, was a land of city states. The

government was at first a government of numerous kings; they became

loosely feudal under an emperor, as the Egyptians did; and then later,

as with the Egyptians, came a centralizing empire. Shang (1750 to 1125

B.C.) and Chow (1125 to 250 B.C.) are named as being the two great

dynasties of the feudal period. Bronze vessels of these earlier

dynasties, beautiful, splendid, and with a distinctive style of their

own, still exist, and there can be no doubt of the existence of a high

state of culture even before the days of Shang.

It is perhaps a sense of symmetry that made the later historians of

Egypt and China talk of the earlier phases of their national history as

being under dynasties comparable to the dynasties of the later empires,

and of such early “Emperors” as Menes (in Egypt) or the First Five

Emperors (in China). The early dynasties exercised far less centralized

powers than the later ones. Such unity as China possessed under the

Shang dynasty was a religious rather than an effective political union.

The “Son of Heaven” offered sacrifices for all the Chinese. There was a

common script, a common civilization, and a common enemy in the Huns of

the north-western borders.

The last of the Shang Dynasty was a cruel and foolish monarch who burnt

himself alive (1125 B.C.) in his palace after a decisive defeat by Wu

Wang, the founder of the Chow Dynasty. Wu Wang seems to have been helped

by allies from among the south-western tribes as well as by a popular

revolt.

For a time China remained loosely united under the Chow emperors, as

loosely united as was Christendom under the popes in the Middle Ages;

the Chow emperors had become the traditional high priests of the land in

the place of the Shang Dynasty and claimed a sort of overlordship in

Chinese affairs, but gradually the loose ties of usage and sentiment

that held the empire together lost their hold upon men’s minds. Hunnish

peoples to the north and west took on the Chinese civilization without

acquiring a sense of its unity. Feudal princes began to regard

themselves as independent. Mr. Liang-Chi-Chao,[118] one of the Chinese

representatives at the Paris Conference of 1919, states that between the

eighth and fourth centuries B.C. “there were in the Hwang-ho and

Yang-tse valleys no less than five or six thousand small states with

about a dozen powerful states dominating over them.” The land was

subjected to perpetual warfare (“Age of Confusion”). In the sixth

century B.C. the great powers in conflict were Ts’i and Ts’in, which

were northern Hwang-ho states, and Ch’u, which was a vigorous,

aggressive power in the Yang-tse valley. A confederation against Ch’u

laid the foundation for a league that kept the peace for a hundred

years; the league subdued and incorporated Ch’u and made a general

treaty of disarmament. It became the foundation of a new pacific empire.

The knowledge of iron entered China at some unknown date, but iron

weapons began to be commonly used only about 500 B.C., that is to say

two or three hundred years or more after this had become customary in

Assyria, Egypt, and Europe. Iron was probably introduced from the north

into China by the Huns.

The last rulers of the Chow Dynasty were ousted by the kings of Ts’in,

the latter seized upon the sacred sacrificial bronze tripods, and so

were able to take over the imperial duty of offering sacrifices to

Heaven. In this manner was the Ts’in Dynasty established. It ruled with

far more vigour and effect than any previous family. The reign of

Shi-Hwang-ti (meaning “first universal emperor”) of this dynasty is

usually taken to mark the end of feudal and divided China. He seems to

have played the unifying rôle in the east that Alexander the Great might

have played in the west, but he lived longer, and the unity he made (or

restored) was comparatively permanent, while the empire of Alexander the

Great fell to pieces, as we shall tell, at his death. Shi-Hwang-ti,

among other feats in the direction of common effort, organized the

building of the Great Wall of China against the Huns. A civil war

followed close upon his reign, and ended in the establishment of the

Han Dynasty. Under this Han Dynasty the empire grew greatly beyond its

original two river valleys, the Huns were effectively restrained, and

the Chinese penetrated westward until they began to learn at last of

civilized races and civilizations other than their own.

By 100 B.C. the Chinese had heard of India, their power had spread

across Tibet and into Western Turkestan, and they were trading by camel

caravans with Persia and the western world. So much for the present must

suffice for our account of China. We shall return to the distinctive

characters of its civilization later.

§ 6

And in these thousands of years during which man was making his way step

by step from the barbarism of the heliolithic culture to civilization at

these old-world centres, what was happening in the rest of the world? To

the north of these centres, from the Rhine to the Pacific, the Nordic

and Mongolian peoples, as we have told, were also learning the use of

metals; but while the civilizations were settling down these men of the

great plains were becoming migratory and developing from a slow

wandering life towards a complete seasonal nomadism. To the south of the

civilized zone, in central and southern Africa, the negro was making a

slower progress, and that, it would seem, under the stimulus of invasion

by whiter tribes from the Mediterranean regions, bringing with them in

succession cultivation and the use of metals. These white men came to

the black by two routes: across the Sahara to the west as Berbers and

Tuaregs and the like, to mix with the negro and create such quasi-white

races as the Fulas; and also by way of the Nile, where the Baganda (=

Gandafolk) of Uganda, for example, may possibly be of remote white

origin. The African forests were denser then, and spread eastward and

northward from the Upper Nile.

The islands of the East Indies, three thousand years ago, were probably

still only inhabited here and there by stranded patches of Palæolithic

Australoids, who had wandered thither in those immemorial ages when

there was a nearly complete land bridge by way of the East Indies to

Australia. The islands of Oceania were uninhabited. The spreading of the

heliolithic peoples by sea-going canoes into the islands of the Pacific

came much later in the history of man, at earliest a thousand years B.C.

Still later did they reach Madagascar. The beauty of New Zealand also

was as yet wasted upon mankind; its highest living creatures were a

great ostrich-like bird, the moa, now extinct, and the little kiwi which

has feathers like coarse hair and the merest rudiment of wings.

In North America a group of Mongoloid tribes were now cut off altogether

from the old world. They were spreading slowly southward, hunting the

innumerable bison of the plains. They had still to learn for themselves

the secrets of a separate agriculture based on maize, and in South

America to tame the lama to their service and so build up in Mexico and

Peru two civilizations roughly parallel in their nature to that of

Sumer, but different in many respects, and later by six or seven

thousand years....

When men reached the southern extremity of America, the _Megatherium_,

the giant sloth, and the _Glyptodon_, the giant armadillo, were still

living....

There is a considerable imaginative appeal in the obscure story of the

early American civilizations. It was largely a separate

development.[119] Somewhen at last the southward drift of the

Amerindians must have met and mingled with the eastward, canoe-borne

drift of the heliolithic culture. But it was the heliolithic culture

still at a very lowly stage and probably before the use of metals. It

has to be noted as evidence of this canoe-borne origin of American

culture, that elephant-headed figures are found in Central American

drawings. American metallurgy may have arisen independently of the

old-world use of metal, or it may have been brought by these elephant

carvers. These American peoples got to the use of bronze and copper, but

not to the use of iron; they had gold and silver; and their stonework,

their pottery, weaving, and dyeing were carried to a very high level. In

all these things the American product resembles the old-world product

generally, but always it has characteristics that are distinctive. The

American civilizations had picture-writing of a primitive sort, but it

never developed even to the pitch of the earliest Egyptian

hieroglyphics. In Yucatan only was there a kind of script, the Maya

writing, but it was used simply for keeping a calendar. In Peru the

beginnings of writing were superseded by a curious and complicated

method of keeping records by means of knots tied upon strings of various

colours and shapes. It is said that even laws and orders could be

conveyed by this code. These string bundles were called _quipus_, but

though quipus are still to be found in collections, the art of reading

them is altogether lost. The Chinese histories, Mr. L. Y. Chen informs

us, state that a similar method of record by knots was used in China

before the invention of writing there. The Peruvians also got to making

maps and the use of counting-frames. “But with all this there was no

means of handing on knowledge and experience from one generation to

another, nor was anything done to fix and summarize these intellectual

possessions, which are the basis of literature and science.”[120]

When the Spaniards came to America, the Mexicans knew nothing of the

Peruvians nor the Peruvians of the Mexicans. Intercourse there was none.

Whatever links had ever existed were lost and forgotten. The Mexicans

had never heard of the potato, which was a principal article of Peruvian

diet. In 5000 B.C. the Sumerians and Egyptians probably knew as little

of one another. America was 6000 years behind the Old World.

XVII

SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES

§ 1. _The Earliest Ships and Sailors._ § 2. _The Ægean Cities

before History._ § 3. _The First Voyages of Exploration._ § 4.

_Early Traders._ § 5. _Early Travellers._

§ 1

The first boats were made very early indeed in the Neolithic stage of

culture by riverside and lakeside peoples. They were no more than trees

and floating wood, used to assist the imperfect natural swimming powers

of men. Then came the hollowing out of the trees, and then, with the

development of tools and a primitive carpentry, the building of boats.

Men in Egypt and Mesopotamia also developed a primitive type of

basket-work boat, caulked with bitumen. Such was the “ark of bulrushes”

in which Moses was hidden by his mother. A kindred sort of vessel grew

up by the use of skins and hides expanded upon a wicker framework. To

this day cow-hide wicker boats (coracles) are used upon the west coast

of Ireland, where there is plenty of cattle and a poverty of big trees.

They are also still used on the Euphrates, and on the Towy in South

Wales. Inflated skins may have preceded the coracle, and are still used

on the Euphrates and upper Ganges. In the valleys of the great rivers,

boats must early have become an important means of communication; and it

seems natural to suppose that it was from the mouths of the great rivers

that man, already in a reasonably seaworthy vessel, first ventured out

upon what must have seemed to him then the trackless and homeless sea.

No doubt he ventured at first as a fisherman, having learnt the elements

of seacraft in creeks and lagoons. Men may have navigated boats upon

the Levantine lake before the refilling of the Mediterranean by the

Atlantic waters. The canoe was an integral part of the heliolithic

culture, it drifted with that culture upon the warm waters of the earth

from the Mediterranean to (at last) America. There were not only canoes,

but Sumerian boats and ships upon the Euphrates and Tigris, when these

rivers in 7000 B.C. fell by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf. The

Sumerian city of Eridu, which stood at the head of the Persian Gulf

(from which it is now separated by a hundred and thirty miles of

alluvium[121]), had ships upon the sea then. We also find evidence of a

fully developed sea life six thousand years ago at the eastern end of

the Mediterranean, and possibly at that time there were already canoes

on the seas among the islands of the nearer East Indies. There are

pre-dynastic Neolithic Egyptian representations of Nile ships of a fair

size, capable of carrying elephants.[122]

Very soon the seafaring men must have realized the peculiar freedom and

opportunities the ship gave them. They could get away to islands; no

chief nor king could pursue a boat or ship with any certainty; every

captain was a king. The seamen would find it easy to make nests upon

islands and in strong positions on the mainland. There they could

harbour, there they could carry on a certain agriculture and fishery;

but their speciality and their main business was, of course, the

expedition across the sea. That was not usually a trading expedition; it

was much more frequently a piratical raid. From what we know of mankind,

we are bound to conclude that the first sailors plundered when they

could, and traded when they had to.

[Illustration: Boats on the Nile, about 2500 B.C. [From Torr’s “Ancient

Ships”.]]

Because it developed in the comparatively warm and tranquil waters of

the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the

western horn of the Indian Ocean, the shipping of the ancient world

retained throughout certain characteristics that make it differ very

widely from the ocean-going sailing shipping, with its vast spread of

canvas, of the last four hundred years. “The Mediterranean,” says Mr.

Torr,[123] “is a sea where a vessel with sails may lie becalmed for

days together, while a vessel with oars would easily be traversing the

smooth waters, with coasts and islands everywhere at hand to give her

shelter in case of storm. In that sea, therefore, oars became the

characteristic instruments of navigation, and the arrangement of oars

the chief problem in shipbuilding. And so long as the Mediterranean

nations dominated Western Europe, vessels of the southern type were

built upon the northern coasts, though there generally was wind enough

here for sails and too much wave for oars.... The art of rowing can

first be discerned upon the Nile. Boats with oars are represented in the

earliest pictorial monuments of Egypt, dating from about 2500 B.C.; and

although some crews are paddling with their faces towards the bow,

others are rowing with their faces towards the stern. The paddling is

certainly the older practice, for the hieroglyph chen depicts two arms

grasping an oar in the attitude of paddling, and the hieroglyphs were

invented in the earliest ages. And that practice may really have ceased

before 2500 B.C., despite the testimony of monuments of that date; for

in monuments dating from about 1250 B.C. crews are represented

unmistakably rowing with their faces towards the stern and yet grasping

their oars in the attitude of paddling, so that even then Egyptian

artists mechanically followed the turn of the hieroglyph to which their

hands were accustomed. In these reliefs there are twenty rowers on the

boats on the Nile, and thirty on the ships on the Red Sea; but in the

earliest reliefs the number varies considerably, and seems dependent on

the amount of space at the sculptor’s disposal.”

[Illustration: Egyptian ship on the Red Sea, about 1250 B.C. (From

Torr’s “Ancient Ships.”)

Mr. Langton Cole calls attention to the rope truss in this illustration,

stiffening the beam of the ship. No other such use of the truss is known

until the days of modern engineering.]

The Aryan peoples came late to the sea. The earliest ships on the sea

were either Sumerian or Hamitic; the Semitic peoples followed close upon

these pioneers. Along the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the

Phœnicians, a Semitic people, set up a string of independent harbour

towns of which Acre, Tyre, and Sidon were the chief; and later they

pushed their voyages westward and founded Carthage and Utica in North

Africa. Possibly Phœnician keels were already in the Mediterranean by

2000 B.C. Both Tyre and Sidon wee originally on islands, an so easily

defensible against a land raid. But before we go on to the marine

exploits of this great sea-going race, we must note a very remarkable

and curious nest of early sea people whose remains have been discovered

in Crete.[124]

§ 2

These early Cretans were of unknown race, but probably of a race akin to

the Iberians of Spain and Western Europe and the dark whites of Asia

Minor and North Africa, and their language is unknown. This race lived

not only in Crete, but in Cyprus, Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, and South

Italy. It was a civilized people for long ages before the fair Aryan

Greeks spread southward through Macedonia. At Cnossos, in Crete, there

have been found the most astonishing ruins and remains, and Cnossos,

therefore, is apt to overshadow the rest of these settlements in

people’s imaginations, but it is well to bear in mind that, though

Cnossos was no doubt a chief city of this Ægean civilization, these

“Ægeans” had in the fullness of their time many cities and a wide range.

Possibly, all that we know of them now are but the vestiges of a far

more extensive heliolithic Neolithic civilization which is now submerged

under the waters of the Mediterranean.

At Cnossos there are Neolithic remains as old or older than any of the

pre-dynastic remains of Egypt. The Bronze Age began in Crete as soon as

it did in Egypt, and there have been vases found by Flinders Petrie in

Egypt and referred by him to the Ist Dynasty, which he declared to be

importations from Crete. Stone vessels have been found in Crete of forms

characteristic of the IVth (pyramid-building) Dynasty, and there can be

no doubt that there was a vigorous trade between Crete and Egypt in the

time of the XIIth Dynasty. This continued until about 1000 B.C. It is

clear that this island civilization arising upon the soil of Crete is at

least as old as the Egyptian, and that it was already launched upon the

sea as early as 4000 B.C.

The great days of Crete were not so early as this. It was only about

2500 B.C. that the island appears to have been unified under one ruler.

Then began an age of peace and prosperity unexampled in the history of

the ancient world. Secure from invasion, living in a delightful climate,

trading with every civilized community in the world, the Cretans were

free to develop all the arts and amenities of life. This Cnossos was not

so much a town as the vast palace of the king and his people. It was not

even fortified. The kings, it would seem, were called Minos always, as

the kings of Egypt were all called Pharaoh; the king of Cnossos figures

in the early legends of the Greeks as King Minos, who lived in the

Labyrinth and kept there a horrible monster, half man, half bull, the

Minotaur, to feed which he levied a tribute of youths and maidens from

the Athenians. Those stories are a part of Greek literature, and have

always been known, but it is only in the last few decades that the

excavations at Cnossos have revealed how close these legends were to the

reality. The Cretan labyrinth was a building as stately, complex, and

luxurious as any in the ancient world. Among other details we find

waterpipes, bathrooms, and the like conveniences, such as have hitherto

been regarded as the latest refinements of modern life. The pottery, the

textile manufactures, the sculpture and painting of these people, their

gem and ivory work, their metal and inlaid work, is as admirable as any

that mankind has produced. They were much given to festivals and shows,

and, in particular, they were addicted to bull-fights and gymnastic

entertainments. Their female costume became astonishingly “modern” in

style; their women wore corsets and flounced dresses. They had a system

of writing which has not yet been deciphered.

[Illustration: ÆGEAN CIVILIZATION]

It is the custom nowadays to make a sort of wonder of these achievements

of the Cretans, as though they were a people of incredible artistic

ability living in the dawn of civilization. But their great time was

long past that dawn; as late as 2000 B.C. It took them many centuries to

reach their best in art and skill, and their art and luxury are by no

means so great a wonder if we reflect that for 3000 years they were

immune from invasion, that for a thousand years they were at peace.

Century after century their artizans could perfect their skill, and

their men and women refine upon refinement. Wherever men of almost any

race have been comparatively safe in this fashion for such a length of

time, they have developed much artistic beauty. Given the opportunity,

all races are artistic. Green legend has it that it was in Crete that

Dædalus attempted to make the first flying machine. Dædalus (= cunning

artificer) was a sort of personified summary of mechanical skill. It is

curious to speculate what germ of fact lies behind him and those waxen

wings that, according to the legend, melted and plunged his son Icarus

in the sea.

[Illustration: J.F.H. from photos by British School at Athens

Faience figure from Cnossos ... A votary of the Snake Goddess....]

There came at last a change in the condition of the lives of these

Cretans, for other peoples, the Greeks and the Phœnicians, were also

coming out with powerful fleets upon the seas. We do not know what led

to the disaster nor who inflicted it; but somewhen about 1400 B.C.

Cnossos was sacked and burnt, and though the Cretan life struggled on

there rather lamely for another four centuries, there came at last a

final blow about 1000 B.C. (that is to say, in the days of the Assyrian

ascendancy in the East). The palace at Cnossos was destroyed, and never

rebuilt nor reinhabited. Possibly this was done by the ships of those

newcomers into the Mediterranean, the barbaric Greeks, a group of Aryan

tribes, who may have wiped out Cnossos as they wiped out the city of

Troy. The legend of Theseus tells of such a raid. He entered the

Labyrinth (which may have been the Cnossos Palace) by the aid of

Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, and slew the Minotaur.

The _Iliad_ makes it clear that destruction came upon Troy because the

Trojans stole Greek women. Modern writers, with modern ideas in their

heads, have tried to make out that the Greeks assailed Troy in order to

secure a trade route or some such fine-spun commercial advantage. If so,

the authors of the _Iliad_ hid the motives of their characters very

skilfully. It would be about as reasonable to say that the Homeric

Greeks went to war with the Trojans in order to be well ahead with a

station on the Berlin to Bagdad railway. The Homeric Greeks were a

healthy barbaric Aryan people, with very poor ideas about trade and

“trade routes”; they went to war with the Trojans because they were

thoroughly annoyed about this stealing of women. It is fairly clear from

the Minos legend and from the evidence of the Cnossos remains, that the

Cretans kidnapped or stole youths and maidens to be slaves,

bull-fighters, athletes, and perhaps sacrifices. They traded fairly with

the Egyptians, but it may be they did not realize the gathering strength

of the Greek barbarians; they “traded” violently with them, and so

brought sword and flame upon themselves.[125]

Another great sea people were the Phœnicians. They were great seamen

because they were great traders. Their colony of Carthage (founded

before 800 B.C. by Tyre) became at last greater than any of the older

Phœnician cities, but already before 1500 B.C. both Sidon and Tyre

had settlements upon the African coast. Carthage was comparatively

inaccessible to the Assyrian and Babylonian hosts, and, profiting

greatly by the long siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar II, became the

greatest maritime power the world had hitherto seen. She claimed the

Western Mediterranean as her own, and seized every ship she could catch

west of Sardinia. Roman writers accuse her of great cruelties. She

fought the Greeks for Sicily, and later (in the second century B.C.) she

fought the Romans. Alexander the Great formed plans for her conquest;

but he died, as we shall tell later, before he could carry them out.

§ 3

At her zenith Carthage probably had the hitherto unheard-of population

of a million. This population was largely industrial, and her woven

goods were universally famous. As well as a coasting trade, she had a

considerable land trade with Central Africa,[126] and she sold negro

slaves, ivory, metals, precious stones and the like, to all the

Mediterranean people; she worked Spanish copper mines, and her ships

went out into the Atlantic and coasted along Portugal and France

northward as far as the Cassiterides (the Scilly Isles, or Cornwall, in

England) to get tin. About 520 B.C. a certain Hanno made a voyage that

is still one of the most notable in the world. This Hanno, if we may

trust the _Periplus of Hanno_, the Greek translation of his account

which still survives, followed the African coast southward from the

Straits of Gibraltar as far as the confines of Liberia. He had sixty big

ships, and his main task was to found or reinforce certain Carthaginian

stations upon the Morocco coast. Then he pushed southward. He founded a

settlement in the Rio de Oro (on Kerne or Herne Island), and sailed on

past the Senegal river. The voyagers passed on for seven days beyond

the Gambia, and landed at last upon some island. This they left in a

panic, because, although the day was silent with the silence of the

tropical forest, at night they heard the sound of flutes, drums, and

gongs, and the sky was red with the blaze of the bush fires. The coast

country for the rest of the voyage was one blaze of fire, from the

burning of the bush. Streams of fire ran down the hills into the sea,

and at length a blaze arose so loftily that it touched the skies. Three

days further brought them to an island containing a lake (? Sherbro

Island). In this lake was another island (? Macaulay Island), and on

this were wild, hairy men and women, “whom the interpreters called

gorilla.” The Carthaginians, having caught some of the females of these

“gorillas”--they were probably chimpanzees--turned back and eventually

deposited the skins of their captives--who had proved impossibly violent

guests to entertain on board ship--in the Temple of Juno.

A still more wonderful Phœnician sea voyage, long doubted, but now

supported by some archæological evidence, is related by Herodotus, who

declares that the Pharaoh Necho of the XXVIth Dynasty commissioned some

Phœnicians to attempt the circumnavigation of Africa, and that

starting from the Gulf of Suez southward, they did finally come back

through the Mediterranean to the Nile delta. They took nearly three

years to complete their voyage. Each year they landed, and sowed and

harvested a crop of wheat before going on.

§ 4

The great trading cities of the Phœnicians are the most striking of

the early manifestations of the peculiar and characteristic gift of the

Semitic peoples to mankind, trade and exchange.[127] While the Semitic

Phœnician peoples were spreading themselves upon the seas, another

kindred Semitic people, the Arameans, whose occupation of Damascus we

have already noted, were developing the caravan routes of the Arabian

and Persian deserts, and becoming the chief trading people of Western

Asia. The Semitic peoples, earlier civilized than the Aryan, have

always shown, and still show to-day, a far greater sense of quality and

quantity in marketable goods than the latter; it is to their need of

account-keeping that the development of alphabetical writing is to be

ascribed, and it is to them that most of the great advances in

computation are due. Our modern numerals are Arabic; our arithmetic and

algebra are essentially Semitic sciences.

The Semitic peoples, we may point out here, are to this day _counting

peoples_ strong in their sense of equivalents and reparation. The moral

teaching of the Hebrews was saturated by such ideas. “With what measure

ye mete, the same shall be meted unto you.” Other races and peoples have

imagined diverse and fitful and marvellous gods, but it was the trading

Semites who first began to think of God as a Righteous Dealer, whose

promises were kept, who failed not the humblest creditor, and called to

account every spurious act.

The trade that was going on in the ancient world before the sixth or

seventh century B.C. was almost entirely a barter trade. There was

little or no credit or coined money. The ordinary standard of value with

the early Aryans was cattle, as it still is with the Zulus and Kaffirs

to-day. In the _Iliad_, the respective values of two shields are stated

in head of cattle, and the Roman word for moneys, _pecunia_, is derived

from _pecus_, cattle. Cattle as money had this advantage; it did not

need to be carried from one owner to another, and if it needed attention

and food, at any rate it bred. But it was inconvenient for ship or

caravan transit. Many other substances have at various times been found

convenient as a standard; tobacco was once legal tender in the colonial

days in North America, and in West Africa fines are paid and bargains

made in bottles of trade gin. The early Asiatic trade included metals;

and weighed lumps of metal, since they were in general demand and were

convenient for hoarding and storage, costing nothing for fodder and

needing small house-room, soon asserted their superiority over cattle

and sheep. Iron, which seems to have been first reduced from its ores by

the Hittites, was, to begin with, a rare and much-desired

substance.[128] It is stated by Aristotle to have supplied the first

currency. In the collection of letters found at Tel-el-Amarna, addressed

to and from Amenophis III (already mentioned) and his successor

Amenophis IV, one from a Hittite king promises iron as an extremely

valuable gift. Gold, then as now, was the most precious and therefore

most portable, security. In early Egypt silver was almost as rare as

gold until after the XVIIIth Dynasty. Later the general standard of

value in the Eastern world became silver, measured by weight.

To begin with, metals were handed about in ingots and weighed at each

transaction. Then they were stamped to indicate their fineness and

guarantee their purity. The first recorded coins were minted about 600

B.C. in Lydia, a gold-producing country in the west of Asia Minor. The

first-known gold coins were minted in Lydia by Crœsus, whose name has

become a proverb for wealth; he was conquered, as we shall tell later,

by that same Cyrus the Persian who took Babylon in 539 B.C. But very

probably coined money had been used in Babylonia before that time. The

“sealed shekel,” a stamped piece of silver, came very near to being a

coin. The promise to pay so much silver or gold on “leather” (=

parchment) with the seal of some established firm is probably as old or

older than coinage. The Carthaginians used such “leather money.” We know

very little of the way in which small traffic was conducted. Common

people, who in those ancient times were in dependent positions, seem to

have had no money at all; they did their business by barter. Early

Egyptian paintings show this going on.[129]

§ 5

When one realizes the absence of small money or of any conveniently

portable means of exchange in the pre-Alexandrian world, one perceives

how impossible was private travel in those days.[130] The first

“inns”--no doubt a sort of caravanserai--are commonly said to have come

into existence in Lydia in the third or fourth century B.C. That,

however, is too late a date. They are certainly older than that. There

is good evidence of them at least as early as the sixth century.

Æschylus twice mentions inns. His word is “all-receiver,” or

“all-receiving house.”[131] Private travellers must have been fairly

common in the Greek world, including its colonies, by this time. But

such private travel was a comparatively new thing then. The early

historians Hecatæus and Herodotus travelled widely. “I suspect,” says

Professor Gilbert Murray, “that this sort of travel ‘for Historie’ or

‘for discovery’ was rather a Greek invention. Solon is supposed to have

practiced it; and even Lycurgus.”... The earlier travellers were

traders travelling in a caravan or in a shipload, and carrying their

goods and their minas and shekels of metal or gems or bales of fine

stuff with them, or government officials travelling with letters of

introduction and a proper retinue. Possibly there were a few mendicants,

and, in some restricted regions, religious pilgrims.

That earlier world before 600 B.C. was one in which a lonely “stranger”

was a rare and suspected and endangered being. He might suffer horrible

cruelties, for there was little law to protect such as he. Few

individuals strayed therefore. One lived and died attached and tied to

some patriarchal tribe if one was a nomad, or to some great household if

one was civilized, or to one of the big temple establishments which we

will presently discuss. Or one was a herded slave. One knew nothing,

except for a few monstrous legends, of the rest of the world in which

one lived. We know more to-day, indeed, of the world of 600 B.C. than

any single living being knew at that time. We map it out, see it as a

whole in relation to past and future. We begin to learn precisely what

was going on at the same time in Egypt and Spain and Media and India and

China. We can share in imagination, not only the wonder of Hanno’s

sailors, but of the men who lit the warning beacons on the shore. We

know that those “mountains flaming to the sky” were only the customary

burning of the dry grass at that season of the year. Year by year, more

and more rapidly, our common knowledge increases. In the years to come

men will understand still more of those lives in the past until perhaps

they will understand them altogether.

XVIII

WRITING

§ 1. _Picture Writing._ § 2. _Syllable Writing._ § 3. _Alphabet

Writing._ § 4. _The Place of Writing in Human Life._

§ 1

In the five preceding chapters (XIII to XVII) we have sketched in broad

outline the development of the chief human communities from the

primitive beginnings of the heliolithic culture to the great historical

kingdoms and empires in the sixth century B.C. We must now study a

little more closely the general process of social change, the growth of

human ideas, and the elaboration of human relationships that were going

on during these ages between 10,000 B.C. and 500 B.C. What we have done

so far is to draw the map and name the chief kings and empires, to

define the relations in time and space of Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt,

Phœnicia, Cnossos, and the like; we come now to the real business of

history, which is to get down below these outer forms to the thoughts

and lives of individual men.

By far the most important thing that was going on during those fifty or

sixty centuries of social development was the invention of writing and

its gradual progress to importance in human affairs. It was a new

instrument for the human mind, an enormous enlargement of its range of

action, a new means of continuity. We have seen how in later Palæolithic

and early Neolithic times the elaboration of articulate speech gave men

a mental handhold for consecutive thought and a vast enlargement of

their powers of co-operation. For a time this new acquirement seems to

have overshadowed their earlier achievement of drawing, and possibly it

checked the use of gesture. But drawing presently reappeared again, for

record, for signs, for the joy of drawing. Before real writing came

picture-writing, such as is still practised by the Amerindians, the

Bushmen, and savage and barbaric people in all parts of the world. It is

essentially a drawing of things and acts, helped out by heraldic

indications of proper names, and by strokes and dots to represent days

and distances and such-like quantitative ideas.

Quite kindred to such picture-writing is the pictograph that one finds

still in use to-day in international railway time-tables upon the

continent of Europe, where a little black sign of a cup indicates a

stand-up buffet for light refreshments; a crossed knife and fork, a

restaurant; a little steamboat, a transfer to a steamboat; and a

postilion’s horn, a diligence. Similar signs are used in the well-known

Michelin guides for automobilists in Europe, to show a post-office

(envelope) or a telephone (telephone receiver). The quality of hotels is

shown by an inn with one, two, three, or four gables, and so forth.

Similarly, the roads of Europe are marked with wayside signs

representing a gate, to indicate a level crossing ahead, a sinuous bend

for a dangerous curve, and the like. From such pictographic signs to the

first elements of Chinese writing is not a very long stretch.

In Chinese writing there are still traceable a number of pictographs.

Most are now difficult to recognize. A mouth was originally written as a

mouth-shaped hole and is now, for convenience of brushwork, squared; a

child, originally a recognizable little mannikin, is now a hasty wriggle

and a cross; the sun, originally a large circle with a dot in the

centre, has been converted, for the sake of convenience of combination,

into a crossed oblong, which is easier to make with a brush. By

combining these pictographs, a second order of ideas is expressed. For

example, the pictograph for mouth combined with pictograph for vapour

expressed “words.”[132]

[Illustration: _Specimens of American Indian picture-writing_

(_after Schoolcraft ..._)]

No. 1, painted on a rock on the shore of Lake Superior, records an

expedition across the lake, in which five canoes took part. The

upright strokes in each indicate the number of the crew, and the

bird represents a chief, “The Kingfisher.” The three circles (suns)

under the arch (of heaven) indicate that the voyage lasted three

days, and the tortoise, a symbol of land, denotes a safe arrival.

No. 2 is a petition sent to the United States Congress by a group

of Indian tribes, asking for fishing rights in certain small lakes.

The tribes are represented by their totems, martens, bear, manfish,

and catfish, led by the crane. Lines running from the heart and eye

of each animal to the heart and eye of the crane denote that they

are all of one mind; and a line runs from the eye of the crane to

the lakes, shown in the crude little “map” in the lower left-hand

corner.

]

From such combinations one passes to what are called _ideograms_: the

sign for “words” and the sign for “tongue” combine to make “speech”; the

sign for “roof” and the sign for “pig” make “home”--for in the early

domestic economy of China the pig was as important as it used to be in

Ireland. But, as we have already noted earlier, the Chinese language

consists of a comparatively few elementary monosyllabic sounds, which

are all used in a great variety of meanings, and the Chinese soon

discovered that a number of these _pictographs_ and _ideographs_ could

be used also to express other ideas, not so conveniently pictured, but

having the same sound. Characters so used are called _phonograms_. For

example, the sound fang meant not only “boat,” but “a place,”

“spinning,” “fragrant,” “inquire,” and several other meanings according

to the context. But while a boat is easy to draw most of the other

meanings are undrawable. How can one draw “fragrant” or “inquire”? The

Chinese, therefore, took the same sign for all these meanings of _fang_,

but added to each of them another distinctive sign, the determinative,

to show what sort of _fang_ was intended. A “place” was indicated by the

same sign as for “boat” (_fang_) and the determinative sign for “earth”;

“spinning” by the sign for _fang_ and the sign for “silk”; “inquire” by

the sign for _fang_ and the sign for “words,” and so on.

One may perhaps make this development of pictographs, ideographs, and

phonograms a little clearer by taking an analogous case in English.

Suppose we were making up a sort of picture-writing in English, then it

would be very natural to use a square with a slanting line to suggest a

lid, for the word and thing _box_. That would be a pictograph. But now

suppose we had a round sign for money, and suppose we put this sign

inside the box sign, that would do for “cash-box” or “treasury.” That

would be an ideogram. But the word “box” is used for other things than

boxes. There is the box shrub which gives us boxwood. It would be hard

to draw a recognizable box-tree distinct from other trees, but it is

quite easy to put our sign “box,” and add our sign for shrub as a

determinative to determine that it is that sort of box and not a common

box that we want to express. And then there is “box,” the verb, meaning

to fight with fists. Here, again, we need a determinative; we might add

the two crossed swords, a sign which is used very often upon maps to

denote a battle. A box at a theatre needs yet another determinative, and

so we go on, through a long series of phonograms.

Now it is manifest that here in the Chinese writing is a very peculiar

and complex system of sign-writing. A very great number of characters

have to be learnt and the mind habituated to their use. The power it

possesses to carry ideas and discussion is still ungauged by western

standards, but we may doubt whether with this instrument it will ever be

possible to establish such a wide, common mentality as the simpler and

swifter alphabets of the western civilizations permit. In China it

created a special reading-class, the mandarins, who were also the ruling

and official class. Their necessary concentration upon words and

classical forms, rather than upon ideas and realities, seems, in spite

of her comparative peacefulness and the very high individual

intellectual quality of her people, to have greatly hampered the social

and economic development of China. Probably it is the complexity of her

speech and writing, more than any other imaginable cause, that has made

China to-day politically, socially, and individually a vast pool of

backward people rather than the foremost power in the whole world.[133]

§ 2