But while the Chinese mind thus made for itself an instrument which is

probably too elaborate in structure, too laborious in use, and too

inflexible in its form to meet the modern need for simple, swift, exact,

and lucid communications, the growing civilizations of the west were

working out the problem of a written record upon rather different and,

on the whole, more advantageous lines. They did not seek to improve

their script to make it swift and easy, but circumstances conspired to

make it so. The Sumerian picture-writing, which had to be done upon clay

and with little styles, which made curved marks with difficulty and

inaccurately, rapidly degenerated by a conventionalized dabbing down of

wedged-shaped marks (cuneiform = wedge-shaped) into almost

unrecognizable hints of the shapes intended. It helped the Sumerians

greatly to learn to write, that they had to draw so badly. They got very

soon to the Chinese pictographs, ideographs, and phonograms, and beyond

them.

Most people know a sort of puzzle called a rebus. It is a way of

representing words by pictures, not of the things the words represent,

but by the pictures of other things having a similar sound. For example,

two gates and a head is a rebus for Gates-head; a little streamlet

(beck), a crowned monarch, and a ham, Beckingham. The Sumerian language

was a language well adapted to this sort of representation. It was

apparently a language of often quite vast polysyllables, made up of very

distinct inalterable syllables; and many of the syllables taken

separately were the names of concrete things. So that this cuneiform

writing developed very readily into a syllabic way of writing, in which

each sign conveys a syllable just as each act in a charade conveys a

syllable. When presently the Semites conquered Sumeria, they adapted the

syllabic system to their own speech, and so this writing became entirely

a sign-for-a-sound writing. It was so used by the Assyrians and by the

Chaldeans. But it was not a letter-writing, it was a syllable-writing.

This cuneiform script prevailed for long ages over Assyria, Babylonia,

and the Near East generally; there are vestiges of it in some of the

letters of our alphabet to-day.

§ 3

But, meanwhile, in Egypt and upon the Mediterranean coast another system

of writing grew up. Its beginnings are probably to be found in the

priestly picture-writing (hieroglyphics) of the Egyptians, which also in

the usual way became partly a sound-sign system. As we see it on the

Egyptian monuments, the hieroglyphic writing consists of decorative but

stiff and elaborate forms, but for such purpose as letter-writing and

the keeping of recipes and the like, the Egyptian priests used a much

simplified and flowing form of these characters, the _hieratic script_.

Side by side with this hieratic script rose another, probably also

derivative from the hieroglyphs, a script now lost to us, which was

taken over by various non-Egyptian peoples in the Mediterranean, the

Phœnicians, Libyans, Lydians, Cretans, and Celt-Iberians, and used

for business purposes. Possibly a few letters were borrowed from the

later cuneiform. In the hands of these foreigners this writing was, so

to speak, cut off from its roots; it lost all but a few traces of its

early pictorial character. It ceased to be pictographic or ideographic;

it became simply a pure sound-sign system, an _alphabet_.

There were a number of such alphabets in the Mediterranean differing

widely from each other.[134] It may be noted that the Phœnician

alphabet (and perhaps others) omitted vowels. Possibly they pronounced

their consonants very hard and had rather indeterminate vowels, as is

said to be still the case with tribes of South Arabia. Quite probably,

too, the Phœnicians used their alphabet at first not so much for

writing as for single initial letters in their business accounts and

tallies. One of these Mediterranean alphabets reached the Greeks, long

after the time of the Iliad, who presently set to work to make it

express the clear and beautiful sounds of their own highly developed

Aryan speech. It consisted at first of consonants, and the Greeks added

the vowels. They began to write for record, to help and fix their bardic

tradition....

§ 4

So it was by a series of very natural steps that writing grew out of the

life of man. At first and for long ages it was the interest and the

secret of only a few people in a special class, a mere accessory to the

record of pictures. But there were certain very manifest advantages,

quite apart from the increased expressiveness of mood and qualification,

to be gained by making writing a little less plain than straightforward

pictures, and in conventionalizing and codifying it. One of these was

that so messages might be sent understandable by the sender and

receiver, but not plain to the uninitiated. Another was that so one

might put down various matters and help one’s memory and the memory of

one’s friends, without giving away too much to the common herd. Among

some of the earliest Egyptian writings, for example, are medical recipes

and magic formulæ. Accounts, letters, recipes, name lists, itineraries;

these were the earliest of written documents. Then, as the art of

writing and reading spread, came that odd desire, that pathetic desire

so common among human beings, to astonish some strange and remote person

by writing down something striking, some secret one knew, some strange

thought, or even one’s name, so that long after one had gone one’s way,

it might strike upon the sight and mind of another reader. Even in

Sumeria men scratched on walls, and all that remains to us of the

ancient world, its rocks, its buildings, is plastered thickly with the

names and the boasting of those foremost among human advertisers, its

kings. Perhaps half the early inscriptions in that ancient world are of

this nature, if, that is, we group with the name-writing and boasting

the epitaphs, which were probably in many cases prearranged by the

deceased.

For long the desire for crude self-assertion of the name-scrawling sort

and the love of secret understandings kept writing within a narrow

scope; but that other, more truly social desire in men, the desire to

_tell_, was also at work. The profounder possibilities of writing, the

possibilities of a vast extension and definition and settlement of

knowledge and tradition, only grew apparent after long ages. But it will

be interesting at this point and in this connection to recapitulate

certain elemental facts about life, upon which we laid stress in our

earlier chapters, because they illuminate not only the huge value of

writing in the whole field of man’s history, but also the rôle it is

likely to play in his future.

1. Life had at first, it must be remembered, only a discontinuous

repetition of consciousness, as the old died and the young were born.

Such a creature as a reptile has in its brain a capacity for experience,

but when the individual dies, its experience dies with it. Most of its

motives are purely instinctive, and all the mental life that it has is

the result of heredity (birth inheritance).

2. But ordinary mammals have added to pure instinct _tradition_, a

tradition of experience imparted by the imitated example of the mother,

and in the case of such mentally developed animals as dogs, cats, or

apes, by a sort of mute precept also. For example, the mother cat

chastises her young for misbehaviour. So do mother apes and baboons.

3. Primitive man added to his powers of transmitting experience,

representative art and speech. Pictorial and sculptured record and

_verbal tradition_ began.

Verbal tradition was developed to its highest possibility by the bards.

They did much to make language what it is to the world to-day.

4. With the invention of writing, which developed out of pictorial

record, human tradition was able to become fuller and much more exact.

Verbal tradition, which had hitherto changed from age to age, began to

be fixed. Men separated by hundreds of miles could now communicate their

thoughts. An increasing number of human beings began to share a common

written knowledge and a common sense of a past and a future. Human

thinking became a larger operation in which hundreds of minds in

different places and in different ages could react upon one another; it

became a process constantly more continuous and sustained....

5. For hundreds of generations the full power of writing was not

revealed to the world, because for a long time the idea of multiplying

writings by taking prints of a first copy did not become effective. The

only way of multiplying writings was by copying one copy at a time, and

this made books costly and rare. Moreover, the tendency to keep things

secret, to make a cult and mystery of them, and so to gain an advantage

over the generality of men, has always been very strong in men’s minds.

It is only nowadays that the great masses of mankind are learning to

read, and reaching out towards the treasures of knowledge and thought

already stored in books.

Nevertheless, from the first writings onward a new sort of tradition, an

enduring and immortal tradition, began in the minds of men. Life,

through mankind, grew thereafter more and more distinctly conscious of

itself and its world. It is a thin streak of intellectual growth we

trace in history, at first in a world of tumultuous ignorance and

forgetfulness; it is like a mere line of light coming through the chink

of an opening door into a darkened room; but slowly it widens, it grows.

At last came a time in the history of Europe when the door, at the push

of the printer, began to open more rapidly. Knowledge flared up, and as

it flared it ceased to be the privilege of a favoured minority. For us

now that door swings wider, and the light behind grows brighter. Misty

it is still, glowing through clouds of dust and reek.

The door is not half open; the light is but a light new lit. Our world

to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge.

XIX

GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS

§ 1. _Nomadic and Settled Religion._ § 2. _The Priest Comes into

History._ § 3. _Priests and the Stars._ § 4. _Priests and the Dawn

of Learning._ § 5. _King against Priest._ § 6. _How Bel-Marduk

Struggled against the Kings._ § 7. _The God-Kings of Egypt._ § 8.

_Shi Hwang-ti Destroys the Books._

§ 1

We have already told what there is to tell of the social life of the

Aryan tribes when they were settling down to the beginnings of civilized

life; we have seen how they were associated in great households, grouped

together under tribal leaders, who made a sort of informal aristocracy

rather like that of the sixth form and prefects in an English boys’

school; we have considered the rôle of the bards in the creation of an

oral tradition, and we have glanced at their not very complex religious

ideas. We may note one or two points of difference from the equivalent

life of the nomadic Semites.

Like the early Aryan life, it was a life in a sort of family-tribe

household. But it had differences due originally perhaps to the warmer,

drier climate. Though both groups of races had cattle and sheep, the

Aryans were rather herdsmen, the Semites, shepherds. The Semites had no

long winter evenings and no bardic singing. They never sat in hall. They

have consequently no epics. They had stories, camp-fire stories, but not

verbally beautified story-recitations. The Semite also was more

polygamous than the Aryan, his women less self-assertive,[135] and the

tendency of his government more patriarchal. The head of the household

or the tribe was less of a leader and more of a master, more like the

Palæolithic Old Man. And the Semitic nomads were closer to the earlier

civilizations, a thing that fitted in with their greater aptitude for

trade and counting. But the religion of the nomadic Semite was as little

organized as the religion of the Aryan. In either case the leading man

performed most of the functions of the priest. The Aryan gods were

little more than a kind of magical super-prince; they were supposed to

sit in hall together, and to talk and make scenes with one another under

Jupiter or Thor. The early Semitic gods, on the other hand, were thought

of as tribal patriarchs. As peoples develop towards nomadism, they seem

to lose even such primitive religion and magic as their Neolithic

ancestors professed. Nomadism cuts men off from fixed temples and

intense local associations; they take a broader and simpler view of the

world. They tend towards religious simplification.

We write here of the nomadic peoples, the Aryan herdsmen and Semitic

shepherds, and we write in the most general terms. They had their

undercurrent of fables and superstitions, their phases of fear and

abjection and sacrificial fury. These people were people like ourselves,

with brains as busy and moody and inconsistent, and with even less

training and discipline. It is absurd to suppose--as so many writers

about early religion do seem to suppose--that their religious notions

can be reduced to the consistent logical development of some one simple

idea. We have already glanced, in Chapter XII, at the elements of

religion that must have arisen necessarily in the minds of those early

peoples. But for most of the twenty-four hours these nomads were busy

upon other things, and there is no sign that their houses, their daily

routines, their ordinary acts, were dominated or their social order

shaped, by any ideas that we should now call religious. As yet life and

its ideas were too elementary for that.

But directly we turn our attention to these new accumulations of human

beings that are beginning in Egypt and Mesopotamia, we find that one of

the most conspicuous objects in every city is a temple or a group of

temples. In some cases there arises beside it in these regions a royal

palace, but as often the temple towers over the palace. This presence of

the temple is equally true of the Phœnician cities and of the Greek

and Roman as they arise. The palace of Cnossos, with its signs of

comfort and pleasure-seeking, and the kindred cities of the Ægean

peoples, include religious shrines, but in Crete there are also temples

standing apart from the palatial city-households. All over the ancient

civilized world we find them; wherever primitive civilization set its

foot in Africa, Europe, or western Asia, a temple arose, and where the

civilization is most ancient, in Egypt and in Sumer, there the temple is

most in evidence. When Hanno reached what he thought was the most

westerly point of Africa, he set up a temple to Hercules. We have, in

fact, come now to a new stage in the history of mankind, the temple

stage.

§ 2

In all these temples there was a shrine; dominating the shrine there was

commonly a great figure, usually of some monstrous half-animal form,

before which stood an altar for sacrifices. This figure was either

regarded as the god or as the image or symbol of the god, for whose

worship the temple existed. And connected with the temple there were a

number, and often a considerable number, of priests or priestesses, and

temple servants, generally wearing a distinctive costume and forming an

important part of the city population. They belonged to no household, as

did the simple priest of the primitive Aryan; they made up a new kind of

household of their own. They were a caste and a class apart, attracting

intelligent recruits from the general population.

The primary duty of this priesthood was concerned with the worship of

and the sacrifices to the god of the temple. And these things were done,

not at any time, but at particular times and seasons. There had come

into the life of man with his herding and agriculture a sense of a

difference between the parts of the year and of a difference between day

and day. Men were beginning to work--and to need days of rest. The

temple, by its festivals, kept count. The temple in the ancient city was

like the clock and calendar upon a writing-desk.

But it was a centre of other functions. It was in the early temples that

the records and tallies of events were kept and that writing began. And

there was knowledge there. The people went to the temple not only _en

masse_ for festivals, but individually for help. The early priests were

also doctors and magicians. In the earliest temples we already find

those little offerings for some private and particular end, which are

still made in the chapels of Catholic churches to-day, _ex votos_,

little models of hearts relieved and limbs restored, acknowledgment of

prayers answered and accepted vows.

It is clear that here we have that comparatively unimportant element in

the life of the early nomad, the medicine-man, the shrine-keeper, and

the memorist, developed, with the development of the community and as a

part of the development of the community from barbarism to civilized

settlement, into something of very much greater importance. And it is

equally evident that those primitive fears of (and hopes of help from)

strange beings, the desire to propitiate unknown forces, the primitive

desire for cleansing and the primitive craving for power and knowledge

have all contributed to crystallize out this new social fact of the

temple.

The temple was accumulated by complex necessities, it grew from many

roots and needs, and the god that dominated the temple was the creation

of many imaginations and made up of all sorts of impulses, ideas, and

half ideas. Here there was a god in which one sort of ideas

predominated, and there another. It is necessary to lay some stress upon

this confusion and variety of origin in gods, because there is a very

abundant literature now in existence upon religious origins, in which a

number of writers insist, some on this leading idea and some on that--we

have noted several in our Chapter XII on “Early Thought”--as though it

were the only idea. Professor Max Müller in his time, for example,

harped perpetually on the idea of sun stories and sun worship. He would

have had us think that early man never had lusts or fears, cravings for

power, nightmares or fantasies, but that he meditated perpetually on the

beneficent source of light and life in the sky. Now dawn and sunset are

very moving facts in the daily life, but they are only two among many.

[Illustration:

Set

Egyptian god of

darkness.

Anubis

darkness god.

Typhon

wife of Anubis, also

known as the Terrible One

The cheerful

Bes

J.F.H.]

Early men, three or four hundred generations ago, had brains very like

our own. The fancies of our childhood and youth are perhaps the best

clue we have to the ground-stuff of early religion, and anyone who can

recall those early mental experiences will understand very easily the

vagueness, the monstrosity, and the incoherent variety of the first

gods. There were sun gods, no doubt, early in the history of temples,

but there were also hippopotamus gods and hawk gods; there were cow

deities, there were monstrous male and female gods, there were gods of

terror and gods of an adorable quaintness, there were gods who were

nothing but lumps of meteoric stone that had fallen amazingly out of the

sky, and gods who were mere natural stones that had chanced to have a

queer and impressive shape. Some gods, like Marduk of Babylon and the

Baal (= the Lord) of the Phœnicians, Canaanites, and the like, were

quite probably at bottom just legendary wonder beings, such as little

boys will invent for themselves to-day. The early Semites, it is said,

as soon as they thought of a god, invented a wife for him; most of the

Egyptian and Babylonian gods were married. But the gods of the nomadic

Semites had not this marrying disposition. Children were less eagerly

sought by the inhabitants of the food-grudging steppes.

Even more natural than to provide a wife for a god is to give him a

house to live in to which offerings can be brought. Of this house the

knowing man, the magician, would naturally become the custodian. A

certain seclusion, a certain aloofness, would add greatly to the

prestige of the god. The steps by which the early temple and the early

priesthood developed so soon as an agricultural population settled and

increased are all quite natural and understandable, up to the stage of

the long temple with the image, shrine and altar at one end and the long

nave in which the worshippers stood. And this temple, because it had

records and secrets, because it was a centre of power, advice, and

instruction, because it sought and attracted imaginative and clever

people for its service, naturally became a kind of brain in the growing

community. The attitude of the common people who tilled the fields and

herded the beasts towards the temple would remain simple and credulous.

There, rarely seen and so imaginatively enhanced, lived the god whose

approval gave prosperity, whose anger meant misfortune; he could be

propitiated by little presents and the help of his servants could be

obtained. He was wonderful, and of such power and knowledge that it did

not do to be disrespectful to him even in one’s thoughts. Within the

priesthood, however, a certain amount of thinking went on at a rather

higher level than that.

§ 3[136]

And now we have to note a very interesting fact about the chief temples

of Egypt and, so far as we know--because the ruins are not so

distinct--of Babylonia, and that is that they were “oriented”--that is

to say, that the same sort of temple was built so that the shrine and

entrance always faced in the same direction.[137] In Babylonian temples

this was most often due east, facing the sunrise on March 21st and

September 21st, the equinoxes; and it is to be noted that it was at the

spring equinox that the Euphrates and Tigris came down in flood. The

Pyramids of Gizeh are also oriented east and west, and the Sphinx faces

due east, but very many of the Egyptian temples to the south of the

delta of the Nile do not point due east, but to the point where the sun

rises at the longest day--and in Egypt the inundation comes close to

that date. Others, however, pointed nearly northward, and others again

pointed to the rising of the star Sirius or to the rising-point of other

conspicuous stars. The fact of orientation links up with the fact that

there early arose a close association between various gods and the sun

and various fixed stars. Whatever the mass of people outside were

thinking, the priests of the temples were beginning to link the

movements of those heavenly bodies with the power in the shrine. They

were thinking about the gods they served and thinking new meanings into

them. They were brooding upon the mystery of the stars. It was very

natural for them to suppose that these shining bodies, so irregularly

distributed and circling so solemnly and silently, must be charged with

portents to mankind.

[Illustration:

Thoth-lunus

god of letters and

all learning

Hathor (Isis)

the Egyptian cow goddess ...

Chnemu

creator-god, married to

Hekt, a frog goddess.

]

Among other things, this orientation of the temples served to fix and

help the great annual festival of the New Year. On one morning in the

year, and one morning alone, in a temple oriented to the rising-place of

the sun at Midsummer Day, the sun’s first rays would smite down through

the gloom of the temple and the long alley of the temple pillars, and

light up the god above the altar and irradiate him with glory. The

narrow, darkened structure of the ancient temples seems to be

deliberately planned for such an effect. No doubt the people were

gathered in the darkness before the dawn; in the darkness there was

chanting and perhaps the offering of sacrifices; the god alone stood

mute and invisible. Prayers and invocations would be made. Then upon the

eyes of the worshippers, sensitized by the darkness, as the sun rose

behind them, the god would suddenly shine.

So, at least, one explanation of orientation is found by such students

of orientation as Sir Norman Lockyer.[138] Not only is orientation

apparent in most of the temples of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and the

east, it is found in the Greek temples; Stonehenge is oriented to the

midsummer sunrise, and so are most of the megalithic circles of Europe;

the Temple of Heaven in Peking is oriented to midwinter. In the days of

the Chinese Empire, up to a few years ago, one of the most important of

all the duties of the Emperor of China was to sacrifice and pray in this

temple upon midwinter’s day for a propitious year.

The Egyptian priests had mapped out the stars into the constellations,

and divided up the zodiac into twelve signs, by 3000 B.C. ...

§ 4

This clear evidence of astronomical inquiry and of a development of

astronomical ideas is the most obvious, but only the most obvious,

evidence of the very considerable intellectual activities that went on

within the temple precincts in ancient times. There is a curious

disposition among many modern writers to deprecate priesthoods and to

speak of priests as though they had always been impostors and

tricksters, preying upon the simplicity of mankind. But, indeed, they

were for long the only writing class, the only reading public, the only

learned and the only thinkers; they were all the professional classes of

the time. You could have no intellectual life at all, you could not get

access to literature or any knowledge except through the priesthood. The

temples were not only observatories and libraries and clinics, they were

museums and treasure-houses. The original _Periplus_ of Hanno hung in

one temple in Carthage, skins of his “gorillas” were hung and treasured

in another. Whatever there was of abiding worth in the life of the

community sheltered there. Herodotus, the early Greek historian (485-425

B.C.), collected most of his material from the priests of the countries

in which he travelled, and it is evident they met him generously and put

their very considerable resources completely at his disposal. Outside

the temples the world was still a world of blankly illiterate and

unspeculative human beings, living from day to day entirely for

themselves. Moreover, there is little evidence that the commonalty felt

cheated by the priests, or had anything but trust and affection for the

early priesthoods. Even the great conquerors of later times were anxious

to keep themselves upon the right side of the priests of the nations and

cities whose obedience they desired, because of the immense popular

influence of these priests.

No doubt there were great differences between temple and temple and cult

and cult in the spirit and quality of the priesthood. Some probably were

cruel, some vicious and greedy, many dull and doctrinaire, stupid with

tradition, but it has to be kept in mind that there were distinct limits

to the degeneracy or inefficiency of a priesthood. It had to keep its

grip upon the general mind. It could not go beyond what people would

stand--either towards the darkness or towards the light. Its authority

rested, in the end, on the persuasion that its activities were

propitious.

§ 5[139]

It is clear that the earliest civilized governments were essentially

priestly governments. It was not kings and captains who first set men

to the plough and a settled life. It was the ideas of the gods and

plenty, working with the acquiescence of common men. The early rulers of

Sumer we know were all priests, kings only because they were chief

priests. And priestly government had its own weaknesses as well as its

peculiar deep-rooted strength. The power of a priesthood is a power over

their own people alone. It is a subjugation through mysterious fears and

hopes. The priesthood can gather its people together for war, but its

traditionalism and all its methods unfit it for military control.

Against the enemy without, a priest-led people is feeble.

Moreover, a priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man

belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense _esprit de

corps_. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a

very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his

own temple. He lives or dies for the honour of his particular god. But

in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is

his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious

cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they

will overcome, but they will never coalesce. Our first perceptions of

events in Sumer, in the dim uncertain light before history began, is of

priests and gods in conflict; until the Sumerians were conquered by the

Semites they were never united; and the same incurable conflict of

priesthoods scars all the temple ruins of Egypt. It was impossible that

it could have been otherwise, having regard to the elements out of which

religion arose.

[Illustration: An Assyrian King & his Chief Minister]

It was out of those two main weaknesses of all priesthoods, namely, the

incapacity for efficient military leadership and their inevitable

jealousy of all other religious cults, that the power of secular

kingship arose. The foreign enemy either prevailed and set up a king

over the people, or the priesthoods who would not give way to each other

set up a common fighting captain, who retained more or less power in

peace time. This secular king developed a group of officials about him

and began, in relation to military organization, to take a share in the

priestly administration of the people’s affairs. So, growing out of

priestcraft and beside the priest, the king, the protagonist of the

priest, appears upon the stage of human history, and a very large

amount of the subsequent experiences of mankind is only to be understood

as an elaboration, complication, and distortion of the struggle,

unconscious or deliberate, between these two systems of human control,

the temple and the palace. And it was in the original centres of

civilization that this antagonism was most completely developed. The

Aryan peoples never passed through a phase of temple rule on their way

to civilization; they came to civilization late; they found that drama

already half-played. They took over the ideas of both temple and

kingship, when those ideas were already elaborately developed, from the

more civilized Hamitic or Semitic people they conquered.

The greater importance of the gods and the priests in the earlier

history of the Mesopotamian civilization is very apparent, but gradually

the palace won its way until it was at last in a position to struggle

definitely for the supreme power. At first, in the story, the palace is

ignorant and friendless in the face of the temple; the priests alone

read, the priests alone know, the people are afraid of him. But in the

dissensions of the various cults comes the opportunity of the palace.

From other cities, from among captives, from defeated or suppressed

religious cults, the palace gets men who also can read and who can do

magic things.[140] The court also becomes a centre of writing and

record; the king thinks for himself and becomes politic. Traders and

foreigners drift to the court, and if the king has not the full records

and the finished scholarship of the priests, he has a wider and fresher

first-hand knowledge of many things. The priest comes into the temple

when he is very young; he passes many years as a neophyte; the path of

learning the clumsy letters of primitive times is slow and toilsome; he

becomes erudite and prejudiced rather than a man of the world. Some of

the more active-minded young priests may even cast envious eyes at the

king’s service. There are many complications and variations in this

ages-long drama of the struggle going on beneath the outward conflicts

of priest and king, between the made man and the born man, between

learning and originality, between established knowledge and settled

usage on the one hand, and creative will and imagination on the other.

It is not always, as we shall find later, the priest who is the

conservative and unimaginative antagonist. Sometimes a king struggles

against narrow and obstructive priesthoods; sometimes priesthoods uphold

the standards of civilization against savage, egotistical, or

reactionary kings.

One or two outstanding facts and incidents of the early stages of this

fundamental struggle in political affairs are all that we can note here

between 4000 B.C. and the days of Alexander.

§ 6

In the early days of Sumeria and Akkadia the city-kings were priests and

medicine-men rather than kings, and it was only when foreign conquerors

sought to establish their hold in relation to existing institutions that

the distinction of priest and king became definite. But the god of the

priests remained as the real overlord of the land and of priest and king

alike. He was the universal landlord; the wealth and authority of his

temples and establishments outshone those of the king. Especially was

this the case within the city walls. Hammurabi, the founder of the first

Babylonian Empire, is one of the earlier monarchs whom we find taking a

firm grip upon the affairs of the community. He does it with the utmost

politeness to the gods. In an inscription recording his irrigation work

in Sumeria and Akkadia, he begins: “When Anu and Bel entrusted me with

the rule of Sumer and Akkad----.” We possess a code of laws made by this

same Hammurabi--it is the earliest known code of law--and at the head of

this code we see the figure of Hammurabi receiving the law from its

nominal promulgator, the god Shamash.

An act of great political importance in the conquest of any city was the

carrying off of its god to become a subordinate in the temple of its

conqueror. This was far more important than the subjugation of king by

king. Merodach, the Babylonian Jupiter, was carried off by the Elamites,

and Babylon did not feel independent until its return. But sometimes a

conqueror was afraid of the god he had conquered. In the collection of

letters addressed to Amenophis III and IV at Tel-Amarna in Egypt, to

which allusion has already been made, is one from a certain king,

Tushratta, King of Mitani, who has conquered Assyria and taken the

statue of the goddess Ishtar. Apparently he has sent this statue into

Egypt, partly to acknowledge the overlordship of Amenophis, but partly

because he fears her anger. (Winckler.) In the Bible is related (Sam. i.

v. 1) how the Ark of the Covenant of the God of the Hebrews was carried

off by the Philistines, as a token of conquest, into the temple of the

fish god, Dagon, at Ashdod, and how Dagon fell down and was broken, and

how the people of Ashdod were smitten with disease. In the latter story

particularly the gods and priests fill the scene; there is no king in

evidence at all.

Right through the history of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires no

monarch seems to have felt his tenure of power secure in Babylon until

he had “taken the hand of Bel”--that is to say, that he had been adopted

by the priesthood of “Bel” as the god’s son and representative. As our

knowledge of Assyrian and Babylonian history grows clearer, it becomes

plainer that the politics of that world, the revolutions, usurpations,

changes of dynasty, intrigues with foreign powers, turned largely upon

issues between the great wealthy priesthoods and the growing but still

inadequate power of the monarchy. The king relied on his army, and this

was usually a mercenary army of foreigners, speedily mutinous if there

was no pay or plunder, and easily bribed. We have already noted the name

of Sennacherib, the son of Sargon II, among the monarchs of the Assyrian

Empire. Sennacherib was involved in a violent quarrel with the

priesthood of Babylon; he never “took the hand of Bel”; and finally

struck at that power by destroying altogether the holy part of the city

of Babylon (691 B.C.) and removing the statue of Bel-Marduk to Assyria.

He was assassinated by one of his sons, and his successor, Esarhaddon

(his son, but not the son who was his assassin), found it expedient to

restore Bel-Marduk and rebuild his temple, and make his peace with the

god.[141]

Assurbanipal (Greek, Sardanapalus), the son of this Esarhaddon, is a

particularly interesting figure from this point of view of the

relationship of priesthood and king. His father’s reconciliation with

the priests of Bel-Marduk went so far that Sardanapalus was given a

Babylonian instead of a military Assyrian education. He became a great

collector of the clay documents of the past, and his library, which has

been unearthed, is now the most precious source of historical material

in the world. But for all his learning he kept his grip on the Assyrian

army; he made a temporary conquest of Egypt, suppressed a rebellion in

Babylon, and carried out a number of successful expeditions. As we have

already told in Chapter XVI, he was almost the last of the Assyrian

monarchs. The Aryan tribes, who knew more of war than of priestcraft,

and particularly the Scythians, the Medes and Persians, had long been

pressing upon Assyria from the north and north-east. The Medes and

Persians formed an alliance with the nomadic Semitic Chaldeans of the

south for the joint undoing of Assyria. Nineveh, the Assyrian capital,

fell to these Aryans in 606 B.C.

Sixty-seven years after the taking of Nineveh by the Aryans, which left

Babylonia to the Semitic Chaldeans, the last monarch of the Chaldean

Empire (the Second Babylonian Empire), Nabonidus, the father of

Belshazzar, was overthrown by Cyrus, the Persian. This Nabonidus, again,

was a highly educated monarch, who brought far too much intelligence and

imagination and not enough of the short range wisdom of this world to

affairs of state. He conducted antiquarian researches, and to his

researches it is that we owe the date of 3750 B.C., assigned to Sargon I

and still accepted by many authorities. He was proud of this

determination, and left inscriptions to record it. It is clear he was a

religious innovator; he built and rearranged temples and attempted to

centralize religion in Babylon by bringing a number of local gods to the

temple of Bel-Marduk. No doubt he realized the weakness and disunion of

his empire due to these conflicting cults, and had some conception of

unification in his mind.

Events were marching too rapidly for any such development. His

innovation had manifestly raised the suspicion and hostility of the

priesthood of Bel. They sided with the Persians. “The soldiers of Cyrus

entered Babylon without fighting.” Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and

Persian sentinels were set at the gates of the temple of Bel, “where the

services continued without intermission.”

Cyrus did, in fact, set up the Persian Empire in Babylon with the

blessing of Bel-Marduk. He gratified the conservative instincts of the

priests by packing off the local gods back to their ancestral temples.

He also restored the Jews to Jerusalem.[142] These were merely matters

of immediate policy to him. But in bringing in the irreligious Aryans,

the ancient priesthood was paying too highly for the continuation of its

temple services. It would have been wiser to have dealt with the

innovations of Nabonidus, that earnest heretic, to have listened to his

ideas, and to have met the needs of a changing world. Cyrus entered

Babylon 539 B.C.; by 521 B.C. Babylon was in insurrection again, and in

520 B.C. another Persian monarch, Darius, was pulling down her walls.

Within two hundred years the life had altogether gone out of those

venerable rituals of Bel-Marduk, and the temple of Bel-Marduk was being

used by builders as a quarry.

[Illustration: CHEPHREN]

§ 7[143]

The story of priest and king in Egypt is similar to, but by no means

parallel with, that of Babylonia. The kings of Sumeria and Assyria were

priests who had become kings; they were secularized priests. The Pharaoh

of Egypt does not appear to have followed precisely that line. Already

in the very oldest records the Pharaoh has a power and importance

exceeding that of any priest. He is, in fact, a god, and more than

either priest or king. We do not know how he got to that position. No

monarch of Sumeria or Babylonia or Assyria could have induced his people

to do for him what the great pyramid-building Pharaohs of the IVth

Dynasty made their people do in those vast erections. The earlier

Pharaohs were not improbably regarded as incarnations of the dominant

god. The falcon god Horus sits behind the head of the great statue of

Chephren. So late a monarch as Rameses III (XIXth Dynasty) is

represented upon his sarcophagus (now at Cambridge) bearing the

distinctive symbols of the three great gods of the Egyptian system.[144]

He carries the two sceptres of Osiris, the god of Day and Resurrection;

upon his head are the horns of the cow goddess Hathor, and also the sun

ball and feathers of Ammon Ra. He is not merely wearing the symbols of

these gods as a devout Babylonian might wear the symbols of Bel-Marduk;

he is these three gods in one.

[Illustration: Ramses III as Osiris--between the goddesses Nephthys and

Isis....

Relief on the cover of the sarcophagus (at Cambridge). After Sharpe.

Inscription (round the edges of cover), as far as decipherable.

“Osiris, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord of the two countries

... son of the Sun, beloved of the gods, lord of diadems, Rameses,

prince of Heliopolis, triumphant! Thou art in the condition of a

god, thou shalt arise as Usr, there is no enemy to thee, I give to

thee triumph among them....” BUDGE, _Catalogue, Egyptian

Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge_.

]

The student will find much more in Sir J. G. Frazer’s _Golden Bough_

about the ancient use of human beings as well as statues to represent

gods. Here we have merely to point to an apparent difference of idea

between the Asiatic and African monarchies in this respect.

We find also a number of sculptures and paintings to enforce the idea

that the Pharaohs were the actual sons of gods. The divine fathering and

birth of Amenophis III, for instance (of the XVIIIth Dynasty), is

displayed in extraordinary detail in a series of sculptures at Luxor.

Moreover, it was held that the Pharaohs, being of so divine a strain,

could not marry common clay, and consequently they were accustomed to

marry blood relations within the degrees of consanguinity now

prohibited, even marrying their sisters.

The struggle between palace and temple came into Egyptian history,

therefore, at a different angle from that at which it came into

Babylonia. Nevertheless, it came in. Professor Maspero (in his _New

Light on Ancient Egypt_) gives a very interesting account of the

struggle of Amenophis IV with the priesthoods, and particularly with

priests of the great god, Ammon Ra, Lord of Karnak. The mother of

Amenophis IV was not of the race of Pharaoh; it would seem that his

father, Amenophis III, made a love match with a subject, a beautiful

Syrian named Tii, and Professor Maspero finds in the possible opposition

to and annoyance of this queen by the priests of Ammon Ra the beginnings

of the quarrel. She may, he thinks, have inspired her son with a

fanatical hatred of Ammon Ra. But Amenophis IV may have had a wider

view. Like the Babylonian Nabonidus, who lived a thousand years later,

he may have had in mind the problem of moral unity in his empire. We

have already noted that Amenophis III ruled from Ethiopia to the

Euphrates, and that the store of letters to himself and his son found at

Tel Amarna show a very wide range of interest and influence. At any

rate, Amenophis IV set himself to close all the Egyptian and Syrian

temples, to put an end to all sectarian worship throughout his

dominions, and to establish everywhere the worship of one god, Aton, the

solar disk. He left his capital, Thebes, which was even more the city of

Ammon Ra than later Babylon was the city of Bel-Marduk, and set up his

capital at Tel Amarna; he altered his name from “Amenophis,” which

consecrated him to Ammon (Amen) to “Akhnaton,” the Sun’s Glory; and he

held his own against all the priesthoods of his empire for eighteen

years and died a Pharaoh.

[Illustration: Akhnaton(Amenophis IV)

[based on the cast at Cairo, & the reliefs in the Berlin Museum.]]

Opinions upon Amenophis IV, or Akhnaton, differ very widely. There are

those who regard him as the creature of his mother’s hatred of Ammon and

the uxorious spouse of a beautiful wife. Certainly he loved his wife

very passionately; he showed her great honour--Egypt honoured women, and

was ruled at different times by several queens--and he was sculptured in

one instance with his wife seated upon his knees, and in another in the

act of kissing her in a chariot; but men who live under the sway of

their womenkind do not sustain great empires in the face of the bitter

hostility of the most influential organized bodies in their realm.[145]

Others write of him as a “gloomy fanatic.” Matrimonial bliss is rare in

the cases of gloomy fanatics. It is much more reasonable to regard him

as the Pharaoh who refused to be a god. It is not simply his religious

policy and his frank display of natural affection that seem to mark a

strong and very original personality. His æsthetic ideas were his own.

He refused to have his portrait conventionalized into the customary

smooth beauty of the Pharaoh god, and his face looks out at us across an

interval of thirty-four centuries, a man amidst ranks of divine

insipidities.

A reign of eighteen years was not long enough for the revolution he

contemplated, and his son-in-law who succeeded him went back to Thebes

and made his peace with Ammon Ra.

To the very end of the story the divinity of kings haunted the Egyptian

mind, and infected the thoughts of intellectually healthier races. When

Alexander the Great reached Babylon, the prestige of Bel-Marduk was

already far gone in decay, but in Egypt, Ammon Ra was still god enough

to make a snob of the conquering Grecian. The priests of Ammon Ra, about

the time of the XVIIIth or XIXth Dynasty (_circa_ 1400 B.C.), had set up

in an oasis of the desert a temple and oracle. Here was an image of the

god which could speak, move its head, and accept or reject scrolls of

inquiry. This oracle was still flourishing in 332 B.C. The young master

of the world, it is related, made a special journey to visit it; he came

into the sanctuary, and the image advanced out of the darkness at the

back to meet him. There was an impressive exchange of salutations. Some

such formula as this must have been used (says Professor Maspero):

“Come, son of my loins, who loves me so that I give thee the royalty of

Ra and the royalty of Horus! I give thee valiance, I give thee to hold

all countries and all religions under thy feet; I give thee to strike

all the peoples united together with thy arm!”

So it was that the priests of Egypt conquered their conqueror, and an

Aryan monarch first became a god....[146]

§ 8

The struggle of priest and king in China cannot be discussed here at any

length. It was different again, as in Egypt it was different from

Babylonia, but we find the same effort on the part of the ruler to break

up tradition because it divides up the people. The Chinese Emperor, the

“Son of Heaven,” was himself a high-priest, and his chief duty was

sacrificial; in the more disorderly phases of Chinese history he ceases

to rule and continues only to sacrifice. The literary class was detached

from the priestly class at an early date. It became a bureaucratic body

serving the local kings and rulers. That is a fundamental difference

between the history of China and any Western history. While Alexander

was overrunning Western Asia, China, under the last priest-emperors of

the Chow Dynasty, was sinking into a state of great disorder. Each

province clung to its separate nationality and traditions, and the Huns

spread from province to province. The King of Ts’in (who lived about

eighty years after Alexander the Great), impressed by the mischief

tradition was doing in the land, resolved to destroy the entire Chinese

literature, and his son, Shi Hwang-ti, the “first universal Emperor,”

made a strenuous attempt to seek out and destroy all the existing

classics.[147] They vanished while he ruled, and he ruled without

tradition, and welded China into a unity that endured for some

centuries; but when he had passed, the hidden books crept out again.

China remained united, though not under his descendants, but after a

civil war under a fresh dynasty, the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.). The first

Han monarch did not sustain this campaign of Shi Hwang-ti against the

_literati_, and his successor made his peace with them and restored the

texts of the classics.

XX

SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES, AND FREE INDIVIDUALS

§ 1. _The Common Man in Ancient Times._ § 2. _The Earliest Slaves._

§ 3. _The first “Independent” Persons._ § 4. _Social Classes Three

Thousand Years Ago._ § 5. _Classes Hardening into Castes._ § 6.

_Caste in India._ § 7. _The System of the Mandarins._ § 8. _A

Summary of Five Thousand Years._

§ 1

We have been sketching in the last four chapters the growth of civilized

states out of the primitive Neolithic agriculture that began in

Mesopotamia perhaps 15,000, perhaps 20,000, years ago. It was at first

horticulture rather than agriculture; it was done with the hoe before

the plough, and at first it was quite supplementary to the sheep, goat,

and cattle tending that made the “living” of the family tribe. We have

traced the broad outlines of the development in regions of exceptional

fruitfulness of the first settled village communities into more populous

towns and cities, and the growth of the village shrine and the village

medicine-man into the city temple and the city priesthood. We have noted

the beginnings of organized war, first as a bickering between villages,

and then as a more disciplined struggle between the priest-king and god

of one city and those of another. Our story has passed on rapidly from

the first indications of conquest and empire in Sumer, perhaps 6000 or

7000 B.C., to the spectacle of great empires growing up, with roads and

armies, with inscriptions and written documents, with educated

priesthoods and kings and rulers sustained by a tradition already

ancient. We have traced in broad outline the appearance and conflicts

and replacements of these empires of the great rivers. We have directed

attention, in particular, to the evidence of a development of still

wider political ideas as we find it betrayed by the actions and

utterances of such men as Nabonidus and Amenophis IV. It has been an

outline of the accumulations of human experience for ten or fifteen

thousand years, a vast space of time in comparison with all subsequent

history, but a brief period when we measure it against the succession of

endless generations that intervenes between us and the first rude

flint-using human creatures of the Pleistocene dawn. But for these last

four chapters we have been writing almost entirely not about mankind

generally, but only about the men who thought, the men who could draw

and read and write, the men who were altering their world. Beneath their

activities what was the life of the mute multitude?

The life of the common man was, of course, affected and changed by these

things, just as the lives of the domestic animals and the face of the

cultivated country were changed; but for the most part it was a change

suffered and not a change in which the common man upon the land had any

voice or will. Reading and writing were not yet for the likes of him. He

went on cultivating his patch, loving his wife and children, beating his

dog and tending his beasts, grumbling at hard times, fearing the magic

of the priests and the power of the gods, desiring little more except to

be left alone by the powers above him. So he was in 10,000 B.C.; so he

was, unchanged in nature and outlook, in the time of Alexander the

Great; so over the greater part of the world he remains to-day. He got

rather better tools, better seeds, better methods, a slightly sounder

house, he sold his produce in a more organized market as civilization

progressed. A certain freedom and a certain equality passed out of human

life when men ceased to wander. Men paid in liberty for safety, shelter,

and regular meals. By imperceptible degrees the common man found the

patch he cultivated was not his own; it belonged to the god; and he had

to pay a fraction of his produce to the god. Or the god had given it to

the king, who exacted his rent and tax. Or the king had given it to an

official, who was the lord of the common man. And sometimes the god or

the king or the noble had work to be done, and then the common man had

to leave his patch and work for his master.

How far the patch he cultivated was his own was never very clear to him.

In ancient Assyria the land seems to have been held as a sort of

freehold and the occupier paid taxes; in Babylonia the land was the

god’s, and he permitted the cultivator to work thereon. In Egypt the

temples or Pharaoh-the-god or the nobles under Pharaoh were the owners

and rent receivers. But the cultivator was not a slave; he was a

peasant, and only bound to the land in so far that there was nothing

else for him to do but cultivate, and nowhere else for him to go. He

lived in a village or town, and went out to his work. The village, to

begin with, was often merely a big household of related people under a

patriarch headman, the early town a group of householders under its

elders. There was no process of enslavement as civilization grew, but

the headmen and leaderly men grew in power and authority, and the common

men did not keep pace with them, and fell into a tradition of dependence

and subordination.

On the whole, the common men were probably well content to live under

lord or king or god and obey their bidding. It was safer. It was easier.

All animals--and man is no exception--begin life as dependents. Most men

never shake themselves loose from the desire for leading and

protection.[148]

§ 2

[Illustration: Egyptian peasants seized for non-payment of taxes ...

(Pyramid Age)]

The earlier wars did not involve remote or prolonged campaigns, and they

were waged by levies of the common people. But war brought in a new

source of possessions, plunder, and a new social factor, the captive. In

the earlier, simpler days of war, the captive man was kept only to be

tortured or sacrificed to the victorious god; the captive women and

children were assimilated into the tribe. But later many captives were

spared to be slaves because they had exceptional gifts or peculiar arts.

It would be the kings and captains who would take these slaves at first,

and it would speedily become apparent to them that these men were much

more their own than were the peasant cultivators and common men of their

own race.[149] The slave could be commanded to do all sorts of things

for his master that the quasi-free common man would not do so willingly

because of his attachment to his own patch of cultivation. From a very

early period the artificer was often a household slave, and the

manufacture of trade goods, pottery, textiles, metal ware, and so forth,

such as went on vigorously in the household city of the Minos of

Cnossos, was probably a slave industry from the beginning. Sayce, in his

_Babylonians and Assyrians_,[150] quotes Babylonian agreements for the

teaching of trades to slaves, and dealing with the exploitation of slave

products. Slaves produced slave children, enslavement in discharge of

debts added to the slave population; it is probable that as the cities

grew larger, a larger part of the new population consisted of these

slave artificers and slave servants in the large households. They were

by no means abject slaves; in later Babylon their lives and property

were protected by elaborate laws. Nor were they all outlanders. Parents

might sell their children into slavery, and brothers their orphan

sisters. Free men who had no means of livelihood would even sell

themselves into slavery. And slavery was the fate of the insolvent

debtor. Craft apprenticeship, again, was a sort of fixed-term slavery.

Out of the slave population, by a converse process, arose the freed-man

and freed-woman, who worked for wages and had still more definite

individual rights. Since in Babylon slaves could themselves own

property, many slaves saved up and bought themselves. Probably the town

slave was often better off and practically as free as the cultivator of

the soil, and as the rural population increased, its sons and daughters

came to mix with and swell the growing ranks of artificers, some bound,

some free.

As the extent and complexity of government increased, the number of

households multiplied. Under the king’s household grew up the households

of his great ministers and officials, under the temple grew up the

personal households of temple functionaries; it is not difficult to

realize how houses and patches of land would become more and more

distinctly the property of the occupiers, and more and more definitely

alienated from the original owner-god. The earlier empires in Egypt and

China both passed into a feudal stage, in which families, originally

official, became for a time independent noble families. In the later

stages of Babylonian civilization we find an increasing propertied class

of people appearing in the social structure, neither slaves nor peasants

nor priests nor officials, but widows and descendants of such people, or

successful traders and the like, and all _masterless_ folk. Traders came

in from the outside. Babylon was full of Aramean traders, who had great

establishments, with slaves, freed-men, employees of all sorts. (Their

book-keeping was a serious undertaking. It involved storing a great

multitude of earthenware tablets in huge earthenware jars.) Upon this

gathering mixture of more or less free and detached people would live

other people, traders, merchants, small dealers, catering for their

needs. Sayce (_op. cit._) gives the particulars of an agreement for the

setting up and stocking of a tavern and beerhouse, for example. The

passer-by, the man who happened to be about, had come into existence.

But another and far less kindly sort of slavery also arose in the old

civilization, and that was gang slavery. If it did not figure very

largely in the cities, it was very much in evidence elsewhere. The king

was, to begin with, the chief _entrepreneur_. He made the canals and

organized the irrigation (_e.g._ Hammurabi’s enterprises noted in the

previous chapter). He exploited mines. He seems (at Cnossos, _e.g._) to

have organized manufactures for export. The Pharaohs of the 1st Dynasty

were already working the copper and turquoise mines in the peninsula of

Sinai. For many such purposes gangs of captives were cheaper and far

more controllable than levies of the king’s own people. From an early

period, too, captives may have tugged the oars of the galleys, though

Torr (_Ancient Ships_) notes that up to the age of Pericles (450 B.C.)

the free Athenians were not above this task. And the monarch also found

slaves convenient for his military expeditions. They were uprooted men;

they did not fret to go home, because they had no homes to go to. The

Pharaohs hunted slaves in Nubia, in order to have black troops for their

Syrian expeditions. Closely allied to such slave troops were the

mercenary barbaric troops the monarchs caught into their service, not by

positive compulsion, but by the bribes of food and plunder and under the

pressure of need. As the old civilization developed, these mercenary

armies replaced the national levies of the old order more and more, and

servile gang labour became a more and more important and significant

factor in the economic system. From mines and canal and wall building,

the servile gang spread into cultivation. Nobles and temples adopted the

gang slave system for their works. Plantation gangs began to oust the

patch cultivation of the labourer-serf in the case of some staple

products....

§ 3

So, in a few paragraphs, we trace the development of the simple social

structure of the early Sumerian cities to the complex city crowds, the

multitude of individuals varying in race, tradition, education, and

function, varying in wealth, freedom, authority, and usefulness, in the

great cities of the last thousand years B.C. The most notable thing of

all is the gradual increase amidst this heterogeneous multitude of what

we may call _free individuals_, detached persons who are neither

priests, nor kings, nor officials, nor serfs, nor slaves, who are under

no great pressure to work, who have time to read and inquire. They

appear side by side with the development of social security and private

property. Coined money and monetary reckoning developed. The operations

of the Arameans and such-like Semitic trading people led to the

organization of credit and monetary security. In the earlier days almost

the only property, except a few movables, consisted of rights in land

and in houses; later, one could deposit and lend securities, could go

away and return to find one’s property faithfully held and secure.

Towards the middle of the period of the Persian Empire there lived one

free individual, Herodotus, who has a great interest for us because he

was among the first writers of critical and intelligent history, as

distinguished from a mere priestly or court chronicle. It is worth while

to glance here very briefly at the circumstances of his life. Later on

we shall quote from his history.

[Illustration: Brawl among boatmen ... (From tomb of

Ptah-hetep----Pyramid Age)]

We have already noted the conquest of Babylonia by the Aryan Persians

under Cyrus in 539 B.C. We have noted, further, that the Persian Empire

spread into Egypt, where its hold was precarious; and it extended also

over Asia Minor. Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in a Greek city of

Asia Minor, Halicarnassus, which was under the overlordship of the

Persians, and directly under the rule of a political boss or tyrant.

There is no sign that he was obliged either to work for a living or

spend very much time in the administration of his property. We do not

know the particulars of his affairs, but it is clear that in this minor

Greek city, under foreign rule, he was able to obtain and read and study

manuscripts of nearly everything that had been written in the Greek

language before his time. He travelled, so far as one can gather, with

freedom and comfort about the Greek archipelagoes; he stayed wherever he

wanted to stay, and he seems to have found comfortable accommodation; he

went to Babylon and to Susa, the new capital the Persians had set up in

Babylonia to the east of the Tigris; he toured along the coast of the

Black Sea, and accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge about the

Scythians, the Aryan people who were then distributed over South Russia;

he went to the south of Italy, explored the antiquities of Tyre, coasted

Palestine, landed at Gaza, and made a long stay in Egypt. He went about

Egypt looking at temples and monuments and gathering information. We

know, not only from him, but from other evidence, that in those days the

older temples and the pyramids (which were already nearly three thousand

years old) were visited by strings of tourists, a special sort of

priests acting as guides. The inscriptions the sightseers scribbled upon

the walls remain to this day, and many of them have been deciphered and

published.

[Illustration: STATUETTES FROM MIDDLE-CLASS EGYPTIAN TOMBS SHOWING LOW

CLASS SOCIAL TYPES IN THE ANCIENT COMMUNITIES.]

As his knowledge accumulated, he conceived the idea of writing a great

history of the attempts of Persia to subdue Greece. But in order to

introduce that history he composed an account of the past of Greece,

Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Scythia, and of the geography and

peoples of those countries. He then set himself, it is said, to make his

history known among his friends in Halicarnassus by reciting it to them,

but they failed to appreciate it; and he then betook himself to Athens,

the most flourishing of all Greek cities at that time. There his work

was received with applause. We find him in the centre of a brilliant

circle of intelligent and active-minded people, and the city authorities

voted him a reward of ten talents (a sum of money equivalent to £2,400)

in recognition of his literary achievement....

But we will not complete the biography of this most interesting man, nor

will we enter into any criticism of his garrulous, marvel-telling, and

most entertaining history. It is a book to which all intelligent readers

come sooner or later, abounding as it does in illuminating errors and

Boswellian charm. We give these particulars here simply to show that in

the fifth century B.C. a new factor was becoming evident in human

affairs. Reading and writing had already long escaped from the temple

precincts and the ranks of the court scribes. Record was no longer

confined to court and temple. A new sort of people, these people of

leisure and independent means, were asking questions, exchanging

knowledge and views, and developing ideas. So beneath the march of

armies and the policies of monarchs, and above the common lives of

illiterate and incurious men, we note the beginnings of what is becoming

at last nowadays a dominant power in human affairs, the _free

intelligence of mankind_.

Of that free intelligence we shall have more to say when in a subsequent

chapter we tell of the Greeks.

§ 4

We may summarize the discussion of the last two chapters here by making

a list of the chief elements in this complicated accumulation of human

beings which made up the later Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations of

from two thousand five hundred to three thousand years ago. These

elements grew up and became distinct one from another in the great

river valleys of the world in the course of five or six thousand years.

They developed mental dispositions and traditions and attitudes of

thought one to another. The civilization in which we live to-day is

simply carrying on and still further developing and working out and

rearranging these relationships. This is the world from which we

inherit. It is only by the attentive study of their origins that we can

detach ourselves from the prejudices and immediate ideas of the

particular class to which we may belong, and begin to understand the

social and political questions of our own time.

(1) First, then, came the priesthood, _the temple system_, which

was the nucleus and the guiding intelligence about which the

primitive civilizations grew. It was still in these later days a

great power in the world, the chief repository of knowledge and

tradition, an influence over the lives of every one, and a binding

force to hold the community together. But it was no longer

all-powerful, because its nature made it conservative and

inadaptable. It no longer monopolized knowledge nor initiated fresh

ideas. Learning had already leaked out to other less pledged and

controlled people, who thought for themselves. About the temple

system were grouped its priests and priestesses, its scribes, its

physicians, its magicians, its lay brethren, treasurers, managers,

directors, and the like. It owned great properties and often

hoarded huge treasures.

(2) Over against the priesthood, and originally arising out of it,

was the _court system_, headed by a king or a “king of kings,” who

was in later Assyria and Babylonia a sort of captain and lay

controller of affairs, and in Egypt a god-man, who had released

himself from the control of his priests. About the monarch were

accumulated his scribes, counsellors, record keepers, agents,

captains, and guards. Many of his officials, particularly his

provincial officials, had great subordinate establishments, and

were constantly tending to become independent. The nobility of the

old river valley civilizations arose out of the court system. It

was, therefore, a different thing in its origins from the nobility

of the early Aryans, which was a republican nobility of elders and

leading men.

(3) At the base of the social pyramid was the large and most

necessary class in the community, _the tillers of the soil_. Their

status varied from age to age and in different lands; they were

free peasants paying taxes, or serfs of the god, or serfs or

tenants of king or noble, or of a private owner, paying him a rent;

in most cases tax or rent was paid in produce. In the states of the

river valleys they were high cultivators, cultivating comparatively

small holdings; they lived together for safety in villages, and had

a common interest in maintaining their irrigation channels and a

sense of community in their village life. The cultivation of the

soil is an exacting occupation; the seasons and the harvest sunsets

will not wait for men; children can be utilized at an early age,

and so the cultivator class is generally a poorly educated,

close-toiling class, superstitious by reason of ignorance and the

uncertainty of the seasons, ill-informed and easily put upon. It is

capable at times of great passive resistance, but it has no purpose

in its round but crops and crops, to keep out of debt and hoard

against bad times. So it has remained to our own days over the

greater part of Europe and Asia.

(4) Differing widely in origin and quality from the tillers of the

soil was _the artisan class_. At first, this was probably in part a

town-slave class, in part it consisted of peasants who had

specialized upon a craft. But in developing an art and mystery of

its own, a technique that had to be learnt before it could be

practised, each sort of craft probably developed a certain

independence and a certain sense of community of its own. The

artisans were able to get together and discuss their affairs more

readily than the toilers on the land, and they were able to form

guilds to restrict output, maintain rates of pay, and protect their

common interest.

(5) As the power of the Babylonian rulers spread out beyond the

original areas of good husbandry into grazing regions and less

fertile districts, a class of _herdsmen_ came into existence. In

the case of Babylonia these were nomadic Semites, the Bedouin, like

the Bedouin of to-day. They probably grazed their flocks over great

areas much as the sheep ranchers of California do.[151] They were

paid and esteemed much more highly than the husbandmen.

(6) The first _merchants_ in the world were shipowners, like the

people of Tyre and Cnossos, or nomads who carried and traded goods

as they wandered between one area of primitive civilization and

another. In the Babylonian and Assyrian world the traders were

predominantly the Semitic Arameans, the ancestors of the modern

Syrians. They became a distinct factor in the life of the

community; they formed great households of their own. Usury

developed largely in the last thousand years B.C. Traders needed

accommodation; cultivators wished to anticipate their crops. Sayce

(_op. cit._) gives an account of the Babylonian banking-house of

Egibi, which lasted through several generations and outlived the

Chaldean Empire.

(7) A class of _small retailers_, one must suppose, came into

existence with the complication of society during the later days of

the first empires, but it was not probably of any great importance.

It is difficult to understand how there could be much active

retailing without small change, and there is little evidence of

small change to be found either in Egypt or Mesopotamia.[152]

Shekels and half-shekels of silver, weighing something between a

quarter and half an ounce, are the lightest weights of stamped

metal of which we find mention.

(8) A growing class of _independent property owners_.

(9) As the amenities of life increased, there grew up in the court,

temples, and prosperous private houses a class of _domestic

servants_, slaves or freed slaves, or young peasants taken into the

household.

(10) _Gang workers._--These were prisoners of war or debt slaves,

or impressed or deported men.

(11) _Mercenary soldiers._--These also were often captives or

impressed men. Sometimes they were enlisted from friendly foreign

populations in which the military spirit still prevailed.

(12) _Seamen._

In modern political and economic discussions we are apt to talk rather

glibly of “labour.” Much has been made of the _solidarity of labour_ and

its sense of community. It is well to note that in these first

civilizations, what we speak of as “labour” is represented by five

distinct classes dissimilar in origin, traditions, and outlook--namely,

classes 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and the oar-tugging part of 12. The “solidarity

of labour” is, we shall find when we come to study the mechanical

revolution of the nineteenth century A.D., a new idea and a new

possibility in human affairs.

§ 5

Let us, before we leave this discussion of the social classes that were

developing in these first civilizations, devote a little attention to

their fixity. How far did they stand aloof from each other, and how far

did they intermingle? So far as the classes we have counted as 9, 10,

11, and 12 go, the servants, the gang labourers and slaves, the gang

soldiers, and, to a lesser extent, the sailors, or at any rate the

galley rowers among the sailors, they were largely recruited classes,

they did not readily and easily form homes, they were not distinctively

breeding classes; they were probably replenished generation after

generation by captives, by the failures of other classes, and especially

from the failures of the class of small retailers, and by persuasion and

impressment from among the cultivators. But so far as the sailors go, we

have to distinguish between the mere rower and the navigating and

shipowning seamen of such ports as Tyre and Sidon. The shipowners pass,

no doubt, by insensible gradations into the mercantile class, but the

navigators must have made a peculiar community in the great seaports,

having homes there and handing on the secrets of seacraft to their sons.

The eighth class we have distinguished was certainly a precarious class,

continually increased by the accession of the heirs and dependents, the

widows and retired members of the wealthy and powerful, and continually

diminished by the deaths or speculative losses of these people and the

dispersal of their properties. The priests and priestesses too, so far

as all this world west of India went, were not a very reproductive

class; many priesthoods were celibate, and that class, too, may also be

counted as a recruited class. Nor are servants, as a rule, reproductive.

They live in the households of other people; they do not have households

and rear large families of their own. This leaves us as the really vital

classes of the ancient civilized community:

(_a_) The royal and aristocratic class, officials, military officers,

and the like;

(_b_) The mercantile class;

(_c_) The town artisans;

(_d_) The cultivators of the soil; and

(_e_) The herdsmen.

Each of these classes reared its own children in its own fashion, and so

naturally kept itself more or less continuously distinct from the

others. General education was not organized in those ancient states,

education was mainly a household matter (as it is still in many parts of

India to-day), and so it was natural and necessary for the sons to

follow in the footsteps of their father and to marry women accustomed to

their own sort of household. Except during times of great political

disturbance therefore, there would be a natural and continuous

separation of classes; which would not, however, prevent exceptional

individuals from intermarrying or passing from one class to another.

Poor aristocrats would marry rich members of the mercantile class;

ambitious herdsmen, artisans, or sailors would become rich merchants. So

far as one can gather, that was the general state of affairs in both

Egypt and Babylonia. The idea was formerly entertained that in Egypt

there was a fixity of classes, but this appears to be a misconception

due to a misreading of Herodotus. The only exclusive class in Egypt

which did not intermarry was, as in England to-day, the semi-divine

royal family.

At various points in the social system there were probably developments

of exclusiveness, an actual barring out of interlopers. Artisans of

particular crafts possessing secrets, for example, have among all races

and in all ages tended to develop guild organizations restricting the

practice of their craft and the marriage of members outside their guild.

Conquering people have also, and especially when there were marked

physical differences of race, been disposed to keep themselves aloof

from the conquered peoples, and have developed an aristocratic

exclusiveness. Such organizations of restriction upon free intercourse

have come and gone in great variety in the history of all long-standing

civilizations. The natural boundaries of function were always there, but

sometimes they have been drawn sharply and laid stress upon, and

sometimes they have been made little of. There has been a general

tendency among the Aryan peoples to distinguish noble (patrician) from

common (plebeian) families; the traces of it are evident throughout the

literature and life of Europe to-day, and it has received a picturesque

enforcement in the “science” of heraldry. This tradition is still active

even in democratic America. Germany, the most methodical of European

countries, had in the Middle Ages a very clear conception of the fixity

of such distinctions. Below the princes (who themselves constituted an

exclusive class which did not marry beneath itself) there were the:

(_a_) Knights, the military and official caste, with heraldic

coats-of-arms;

(_b_ and _c_) The Bürgerstand, the merchants, shipping people, and

artisans; and

(_d_) The Bauernstand, the cultivating serfs or peasants.

Mediæval Germany went as far as any of the Western heirs of the first

great civilizations towards a fixation of classes. The idea is far less

congenial both to the English-speaking people and to the French and

Italians, who, by a sort of instinct, favour a free movement from class

to class. Such exclusive ideas began at first among, and were promoted

chiefly by, the upper classes, but it is a natural response and a

natural Nemesis to such ideas that the mass of the excluded should

presently range themselves in antagonism to their superiors. It was in

Germany, as we shall see in the concluding chapters of this story, that

the conception of a natural and necessary conflict, “the class war,”

between the miscellaneous multitudes of the disinherited (“the

class-conscious proletariat” of the Marxist) and the rulers and

merchants first arose. It was an idea more acceptable to the German mind

than to the British or French.... But before we come to that conflict,

we must traverse a long history of many centuries.

§ 6

If now we turn eastward from this main development of civilization in

the world between Central Asia and the Atlantic, to the social

development of India in the 2000 years next before the Christian era, we

find certain broad and very interesting differences. The first of these

is that we find such a fixity of classes in process of establishment as

no other part of the world can present. This fixity of classes is known

to Europeans as the institution of _caste_;[153] its origins are still

in complete obscurity, but it was certainly well rooted in the Ganges

valley before the days of Alexander the Great. It is a complicated

horizontal division of the social structure into classes or castes, the

members of which may neither eat nor intermarry with persons of a lower

caste under penalty of becoming outcasts, and who may also “lose caste”

for various ceremonial negligences and defilements. By losing caste a

man does not sink to a lower caste; he becomes outcast. The various

subdivisions of caste are very complex; many are practically trade

organizations. Each caste has its local organization which maintains

discipline, distributes various charities, looks after its own poor,

protects the common interests of its members, and examines the

credentials of newcomers from other districts. (There is little to check

the pretensions of a travelling Hindu to be of a higher caste than is

legitimately his.) Originally, the four main castes seem to have been:

The Brahmins--the priests and teachers;

The Kshatriyas--the warriors;

The Vaisyas--herdsmen, merchants, money-lenders, and land-owners;

The Sudras;

And, outside the castes, the Pariahs.

But these primary divisions have long been superseded by the

disappearance of the second and third primary castes, and the

subdivision of the Brahmins and Sudras into a multitude of minor castes,

all exclusive, each holding its members to one definite way of living

and one group of associates.

Next to this extraordinary fission and complication of the social body

we have to note that the Brahmins, the priests and teachers of the

Indian world, unlike so many Western priesthoods, are a reproductive and

exclusive class, taking no recruits from any other social stratum.

Whatever may have been the original incentive to this extensive fixation

of class in India, there can be little doubt of the rôle played by the

Brahmins as the custodians of tradition and the only teachers of the

people in sustaining it. By some it is supposed that the first three of

the four original castes, known also as the “twice born,” were the

descendants of the Vedic Aryan conquerors of India, who established

these hard-and-fast separations to prevent racial mixing with the

conquered Sudras and Pariahs. The Sudras are represented as a previous

wave of northern conquerors, and the Pariahs are the original Dravidian

inhabitants of India. But those speculations are not universally

accepted, and it is, perhaps, rather the case that the uniform

conditions of life in the Ganges valley throughout long centuries served

to stereotype a difference of classes that have never had the same

steadfastness of definition under the more various and variable

conditions of the greater world to the west.

However caste arose, there can be no doubt of its extraordinary hold

upon the Indian mind. In the sixth century B.C. arose Gautama, the great

teacher of Buddhism, proclaiming, “As the four streams that flow into

the Ganges lose their names as soon as they mingle their waters in the

holy river, so all who believe in Buddha cease to be Brahmins,

Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras.” His teaching prevailed in India for

some centuries; it spread over China, Tibet, Japan, Burmah, Ceylon,

Turkestan, Manchuria; it is to-day the religion of one-third of the

human race, but it was finally defeated and driven out of Indian life by

the vitality and persistence of the Brahmins and of their caste

ideas....

§ 7

In China we find a social system travelling along yet another and only a

very roughly parallel line to that followed by the Indian and Western

civilizations. The Chinese civilization even more than the Hindu is

organized for peace, and the warrior plays a small part in its social

scheme. As in the Indian civilization, the leading class is an

intellectual one; less priestly than the Brahmin and more official. But

unlike the Brahmins, the mandarins, who are the literate men of China,

are not a caste; one is not a mandarin by birth, but by education; they

are drawn by education and examination from all classes of the

community, and the son of a mandarin has no prescriptive right to

succeed his father.[154] As a consequence of these differences, while

the Brahmins of India are, as a class, ignorant even of their own sacred

books, mentally slack, and full of a pretentious assurance, the Chinese

mandarin has the energy that comes from hard mental work. But since his

education so far has been almost entirely a scholarly study of the

classical Chinese literature, his influence has been entirely

conservative. Before the days of Alexander the Great, China had already

formed itself and set its feet in the way in which it was still walking

in the year 1900 A.D. Invaders and dynasties had come and gone, but the

routine of life of the yellow civilization remained unchanged.

The traditional Chinese social system recognized four main classes below

the priest-emperor.

(_a_) The literary class, which was equivalent partly to the officials

of the Western world and partly to its teachers and clerics. In the time

of Confucius its education included archery and horsemanship. Rites and

music, history and mathematics completed the “Six Accomplishments.”

(_b_) The cultivators of the land.

(_c_) The artisans.

(_d_) The mercantile class.

But since from the earliest times it has been the Chinese way to divide

the landed possessions of a man among all his sons, there has never been

in Chinese history any class of great land-owners, renting their land to

tenants, such as most other countries have displayed. The Chinese land

has always been cut up into small holdings, which are chiefly freeholds,

and cultivated intensively. There are landlords in China who own one or

a few farms and rent them to tenants, but there are no great, permanent

estates. When a patch of land, by repeated division, is too small to

sustain a man, it is sold to some prospering neighbour, and the former

owner drifts to one of the great towns of China to join the mass of

wage-earning workers there. In China, for many centuries, there have

been these masses of town population with scarcely any property at all,

men neither serfs nor slaves, but held to their daily work by their

utter impecuniousness. From such masses it is that the soldiers needed

by the Chinese government are recruited, and also such gang labour as

has been needed for the making of canals, the building of walls, and the

like has been drawn.[155] The war captive and the slave class play a

smaller part in Chinese history than in any more westerly record of

these ages before the Christian era.

One fact, we may note, is common to all these three stories of

developing social structure, and that is the immense power exercised by

the educated class in the early stages before the crown or the

commonalty began to read and, consequently, to think for itself. In

India, by reason of their exclusiveness, the Brahmins, the educated

class, retain their influence to this day; over the masses of China,

along entirely different lines and because of the complexities of the

written language, the mandarinate has prevailed. The diversity of race

and tradition in the more various and eventful world of the West has

delayed, and perhaps arrested for ever, any parallel organization of the

specially intellectual elements of society into a class ascendancy. In

the Western world, as we have already noted, education early “slopped

over,” and soaked away out of the control of any special class; it

escaped from the limitation of castes and priesthoods and traditions

into the general life of the community. Writing and reading had been

simplified down to a point when it was no longer possible to make a cult

and mystery of them. It may be due to the peculiar elaboration and

difficulty of the Chinese characters, rather than to any racial

difference, that the same thing did not happen to the same extent in

China.

§ 8

In these last six chapters we have traced in outline the whole process

by which, in the course of 5000 or 6000 years--that is to say, in

something between 150 and 200 generations--mankind passed from the stage

of early Neolithic husbandry, in which the primitive skin-clad family

tribe reaped and stored in their rude mud huts the wild-growing fodder

and grain-bearing grasses with sickles of stone, to the days of the

fourth century B.C., when all round the shores of the Mediterranean and

up the Nile, and across Asia to India, and again over the great alluvial

areas of China, spread the fields of human cultivation and busy cities,

great temples, and the coming and going of human commerce. Galleys and

lateen-sailed ships entered and left crowded harbours, and made their

careful way from headland to headland and from headland to island,

keeping always close to the land. Phœnician shipping under Egyptian

owners was making its way into the East Indies and perhaps even further

into the Pacific. Across the deserts of Africa and Arabia and through

Turkestan toiled the caravans with their remote trade; silk was already

coming from China, ivory from Central Africa, and tin from Britain to

the centres of this new life in the world. Men had learnt to weave fine

linen[156] and delicate fabrics of coloured wool; they could bleach and

dye; they had iron as well as copper, bronze, silver, and gold; they had

made the most beautiful pottery and porcelain; there was hardly a

variety of precious stone in the world that they had not found and cut

and polished; they could read and write; divert the course of rivers,

pile pyramids, and make walls a thousand miles long. The fifty or sixty

centuries in which all this had to be achieved may seem a long time in

comparison with the threescore and ten years of a single human life, but

it is utterly inconsiderable in comparison with the stretches of

geological time. Measuring backward from these Alexandrian cities to the

days of the first stone implements, the _rostro-carinate_ implements of

the Pliocene Age, gives us an extent of time fully a hundred times as

long.

We have tried in this account, and with the help of maps and figures and

time charts, to give a just idea of the order and shape of these fifty

or sixty centuries. Our business is with that outline. We have named but

a few names of individuals; though henceforth the personal names must

increase in number. But the content of this outline that we have drawn

here in a few diagrams and charts cannot but touch the imagination. If

only we could look closelier, we should see through all these sixty

centuries a procession of lives more and more akin in their fashion to

our own. We have shown how the naked Palæolithic savage gave place to

the Neolithic cultivator, a type of man still to be found in the

backward places of the world. We have given an illustration of Sumerian

soldiers copied from a carved stone that was set up long before the days

when the Semitic Sargon I conquered the land. Day by day some busy

brownish man carved those figures, and, no doubt, whistled as he carved.

In those days the plain of the Egyptian delta was crowded with gangs of

swarthy workmen unloading the stone that had come down the Nile to add a

fresh course to the current pyramid. One might paint a thousand scenes

from those ages: of some hawker merchant in Egypt spreading his stock of

Babylonish garments before the eyes of some pretty, rich lady; of a

miscellaneous crowd swarming between the pylons to some temple festival

at Thebes; of an excited, dark-eyed audience of Cretans like the

Spaniards of to-day, watching a bull-fight, with the bull-fighters in

trousers and tightly girded, exactly like any contemporary bull-fighter;

of children learning their cuneiform signs--at Nippur the clay exercise

tiles of a school have been found; of a woman with a sick husband at

home slipping into some great temple in Carthage to make a vow for his

recovery. Or perhaps it is a wild Greek, skin-clad and armed with a

bronze axe, standing motionless on some Illyrian mountain crest, struck

with amazement at his first vision of a many-oared Cretan galley

crawling like a great insect across the amethystine mirror of the

Adriatic Sea. He went home to tell his folk a strange story of a

monster, Briareus with his hundred arms. Of millions of such stitches in

each of these 200 generations is the fabric of this history woven. But

unless they mark the presence of a primary seam or join, we cannot pause

now to examine any of these stitches.

BOOK IV

JUDEA, GREECE, AND INDIA

XXI

THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS[157]

§ 1. _The Place of the Israelites in History._ § 2. _Saul, David,

and Solomon._ § 3. _The Jews a People of Mixed Origin._ § 4. _The

Importance of the Hebrew Prophets._

§ 1

We are now in a position to place in their proper relationship to this

general outline of human history the Israelites, and the most remarkable

collection of ancient documents in the world, that collection which is

known to all Christian peoples as the Old Testament. We find in these

documents the most interesting and valuable lights upon the development

of civilization, and the clearest indications of a new spirit that was

coming into human affairs during the struggles of Egypt and Assyria for

predominance in the world of men.

All the books that constitute the Old Testament were certainly in

existence, and in very much their present form, at latest by the year

100 B.C. They were probably already recognized as sacred writings in the

time of Alexander the Great (330 B.C.), and known and read with the

utmost respect a hundred years before his time.[158] At that time some

of them were of comparatively recent composition; others were already of

very considerable antiquity. They were the sacred literature of a

people, the Jews, who, except for a small remnant of common people, had

recently been deported to Babylonia from their own country in 587 B.C.

by Nebuchadnezzar II, the Chaldean. They had returned to their city,

Jerusalem, and had rebuilt their temple there under the auspices of

Cyrus, that Persian conqueror who, we have already noted, in 539 B.C.

overthrew Nabonidus, the last of the Chaldean rulers in Babylon. The

Babylonian Captivity had lasted about fifty years, and many authorities

are of opinion that there was a considerable admixture during that

period both of race and ideas with the Babylonians.

The position of the land of Judea and of Jerusalem, its capital, is a

peculiar one. The country is a band-shaped strip between the

Mediterranean to the west and the desert beyond the Jordan to the east;

through it lies the natural high road between the Hittites, Syria,

Assyria, and Babylonia to the north and Egypt to the south. It was a

country predestined, therefore, to a stormy history. Across it Egypt,

and whatever power was ascendant in the north, fought for empire;

against its people they fought for a trade route. It had itself neither

the area, the agricultural possibilities, nor the mineral wealth to be

important. The story of its people that these scriptures have preserved

runs like a commentary to the greater history of the two systems of

civilization to the north and south and of the sea peoples to the west.

These scriptures consist of a number of different elements. The first

five books, the _Pentateuch_, were early regarded with peculiar respect.

They begin in the form of a universal history with a double account of

the Creation of the world and mankind, of the early life of the race,

and of a great Flood by which, except for certain favoured individuals,

mankind was destroyed. Excavations have revealed Babylonian versions of

both the Creation story and the Flood story of prior date to the

restoration of the Jews, and it is therefore argued by Biblical critics

that these opening chapters were acquired by the Jews during their

captivity. They constitute the first ten chapters of Genesis. There

follows a history of the fathers and founders of the Hebrew nation,

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are presented as patriarchal Bedouin

chiefs, living the life of nomadic shepherds in the country between

Babylonia and Egypt. The existing Biblical account is said by the

critics to be made up out of several pre-existing versions; but whatever

its origins, the story, as we have it to-day, is full of colour and

vitality. What is called Palestine to-day was at that time the land of

Canaan, inhabited by a Semitic people called the Canaanites, closely

related to the Phœnicians who founded Tyre and Sidon, and to the

Amorites who took Babylon and, under Hammurabi, founded the first

Babylonian Empire. The Canaanites were a settled folk in the days--which

were perhaps contemporary with the days of Hammurabi--when Abraham’s

flocks and herds passed through the land. The God of Abraham, says the

Bible narrative, promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him

and to his children. To the book of Genesis the reader must go to read

how Abraham, being childless, doubted this promise, and of the births of

Ishmael and Isaac. And in Genesis too, he will find the lives of Isaac

and Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, and of the twelve sons of

Israel; and how in the days of a great famine they went down into Egypt.

With that, Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch, ends. The next

book, Exodus, is concerned with the story of Moses.

The story of the settlement and slavery of the children of Israel in

Egypt is a difficult one. There is an Egyptian record of a settlement of

certain Semitic peoples in the land of Goshen by the Pharaoh Rameses II,

and it is stated that they were drawn into Egypt by want of food. But of

the life and career of Moses there is no Egyptian record at all; there

is no account of any plagues of Egypt or of any Pharaoh who was drowned

in the Red Sea. There is much about the story of Moses that has a

mythical flavour, and one of the most remarkable incidents in it, his

concealment by his mother in an ark of bulrushes, has also been found in

an ancient Sumerian inscription made at least a thousand years before

his time by that Sargon I who founded the ancient Akkadian Sumerian

Empire. It runs:

“Sargon, the powerful king, the king of Akkadia am I, my mother was

poor, my father I knew not; the brother of my father lived in the

mountains.... My mother, who was poor, secretly gave birth to me; she

placed me in a _basket of reeds_, she shut up the mouth of it with

bitumen, she abandoned me to the river, which did not overwhelm me. The

river bore me away and brought me to Akki the irrigator. Akki the

irrigator received me in the goodness of his heart. Akki the irrigator

reared me to boyhood. Akki the irrigator made me a gardener. My service

as a gardener was pleasing unto Istar and I became king.”

[Illustration: The LAND of the HEBREWS]

This is perplexing. Still more perplexing is the discovery of a clay

tablet written by the Egyptian governors of a city in Canaan to the

Pharaoh Amenophis IV, who came in the XVIIIth Dynasty before Rameses II,

apparently mentioning the Hebrews by name and declaring that they are

overrunning Canaan. Manifestly, if the Hebrews were conquering Canaan in

the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, they could not have been made captive

and oppressed, before they conquered Canaan, by Rameses II of the XIXth

Dynasty. But it is quite understandable that the Exodus story, written

long after the events it narrates, may have concentrated and simplified,

and perhaps personified and symbolized, what was really a long and

complicated history of tribal invasions. One Hebrew tribe may have

drifted down into Egypt and become enslaved, while the others were

already attacking the outlying Canaanite cities. It is even possible

that the land of the captivity was not Egypt (Hebrew, Misraim), but

Misrim in the north of Arabia, on the other side of the Red Sea. These

questions are discussed fully and acutely in the _Encyclopædia Biblica_

(articles _Moses_ and _Exodus_), to which the curious reader must be

referred.[159]

Two other books of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy and Leviticus, are

concerned with the Law and the priestly rules. The book of Numbers takes

up the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert and their invasion of

Canaan.

Whatever the true particulars of the Hebrew invasion of Canaan may be,

there can be no doubt that the country they invaded had changed very

greatly since the days of the legendary promise, made centuries before,

to Abraham. Then it seems to have been largely a Semitic land, with many

prosperous trading cities. But great waves of strange peoples had washed

along this coast. We have already told how the dark Iberian or

Mediterranean peoples of Italy and Greece, the peoples of that Ægean

civilization which culminated at Cnossos, were being assailed by the

southward movement of Aryan-speaking races, such as the Italians and

Greeks, and how Cnossos was sacked about 1400 B.C., and destroyed

altogether about 1000 B.C. It is now evident that the people of these

Ægean seaports were crossing the sea in search of securer land nests.

They invaded the Egyptian delta and the African coast to the west, they

formed alliances with the Hittites and other Aryan or Aryanized races.

This happened after the time of Rameses II, in the time of Rameses III.

Egyptian monuments record great sea fights, and also a march of these

people along the coast of Palestine towards Egypt. Their transport was

in the ox-carts characteristic of the Aryan tribes, and it is clear that

these Cretans were acting in alliance with some early Aryan invaders. No

connected narrative of these conflicts that went on between 1300 B.C.

and 1000 B.C. has yet been made out, but it is evident from the Bible

narrative, that when the Hebrews under Joshua pursued their slow

subjugation of the promised land, they came against a new people, the

Philistines, unknown to Abraham,[160] who were settling along the coast

in a series of cities of which Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon, and Joppa

became the chief, who were really, like the Hebrews, newcomers, and

probably chiefly these Cretans from the sea and from the north. The

invasion, therefore, that began as an attack upon the Canaanites,

speedily became a long and not very successful struggle for the coveted

and promised land with these much more formidable newcomers, the

Philistines.

It cannot be said that the promised land was ever completely in the

grasp of the Hebrews. Following after the Pentateuch in the Bible come

the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth (a digression), Samuel I and II, and

Kings I and II, with Chronicles repeating with variation much of the

matter of Samuel II and Kings; there is a growing flavour of reality in

most of this latter history, and in these books we find the Philistines

steadfastly in possession of the fertile lowlands of the south, and the

Canaanites and Phœnicians holding out against the Israelites in the

north. The first triumphs of Joshua are not repeated. The book of Judges

is a melancholy catalogue of failures. The people lose heart. They

desert the worship of their own god Jehovah,[161] and worship Baal and

Ashtaroth (= Bel and Ishtar). They mixed their race with the

Philistines, with the Hittites, and so forth, and became, as they have

always subsequently been, a racially mixed people. Under a series of

wise men and heroes they wage a generally unsuccessful and never very

united warfare against their enemies. In succession they are conquered

by the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Midianites, and the Philistines.

The story of these conflicts, of Gideon and of Samson and the other

heroes who now and then cast a gleam of hope upon the distresses of

Israel, is told in the book of Judges. In the first book of Samuel is

told the story of their great disaster at Ebenezer in the days when Eli

was judge.

This was a real pitched battle in which the Israelites lost 30,000 (!)

men. They had previously suffered a reverse and lost 4000 men, and then

they brought out their most sacred symbol, the Ark of the Covenant of

God.

“And when the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all

Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again. And

when the Philistines heard the noise of the shout, they said, ‘What

meaneth the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews?’ And

they understood, that the ark of the Lord was come into the camp. And

the Philistines were afraid, for they said, ‘God is come into the camp,’

And they said, ‘Woe unto us! for there hath not been such a thing

heretofore. Woe unto us! who shall deliver us out of the hand of these

mighty Gods? these are the Gods that smote the Egyptians with all the

plagues in the wilderness. Be strong, and quit yourselves like men, O ye

Philistines, that ye be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they have been

to you: quit yourselves like men, and fight.’

“And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled every

man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter for there fell

of Israel thirty thousand[162] footmen. And the ark of God was taken;

and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were slain.

“And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the army, and came to Shiloh the

same day with his clothes rent, and with earth upon his head. And when

he came, lo, Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside watching: for his heart

trembled for the ark of God. And when the man came into the city and

told it, all the city cried out. And when Eli heard the noise of the

crying, he said, ‘What meaneth the noise of this tumult?’ And the man

came in hastily, and told Eli. Now Eli was ninety and eight years old;

and his eyes were dim, that he could not see. And the man said unto Eli,

‘I am he that came out of the army, and I fled to-day out of the army.’

And he said, ‘What is there done, my son?’ And the messenger answered

and said, ‘Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath been

also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons also, Hophni

and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of God is taken.’ And it came to

pass when he made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off his

seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died:

for he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged Israel forty years.

“And his daughter in law, Phinehas’ wife, was with child, near to be

delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was taken,

and that her father in law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself

and travailed; for her pains came upon her. And about the time of her

death the women that stood by her said unto her, ‘Fear not; for thou

hast born a son! But she answered not, neither did she regard it. And

she named the child I-chabod,[163] saying, ‘The glory is departed from

Israel:’ because the ark of God was taken, and because of her father in

law and her husband.” (1 Sam., chap. iv.)

The successor of Eli and the last of the Judges was Samuel, and at the

end of his rule came an event in the history of Israel which paralleled

and was suggested by the experience of the greater nations around. A

king arose. We are told in vivid language the plain issue between the

more ancient rule of priestcraft and the newer fashion in human affairs.

It is impossible to avoid a second quotation.

“Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to

Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him: ‘Behold, thou art old, and thy

sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the

nations.’

“But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, ‘Give us a king to

judge us.’ And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto

Samuel, ‘Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto

thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I

should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have

done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this

day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they

also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet

protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that

shall reign over them.’

“And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of

him a king. And he said, ‘This will be the manner of the king that shall

reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself,

for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his

chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains

over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his

harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his

chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectioners, and to be

cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your

vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to

his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your

vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will

take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young

men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of

your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that

day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord

will not hear you in that day.’

“Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they

said, ‘Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like

all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us,

and fight our battles.’” (I Sam., chap. viii.)

§ 2

But the nature and position of their land was against the Hebrews, and

their first king Saul was no more successful than their judges. The long

intrigues of the adventurer David against Saul are told in the rest of

the first book of Samuel, and the end of Saul was utter defeat upon

Mount Gilboa. His army was overwhelmed by the Philistine archers.

“And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines came to strip

the slain, that they found Saul and his three sons fallen in Mount

Gilboa. And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent

into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house

of their idols, and among the people. And they put his armour in the

house of Ashtaroth; and they fastened his body to the wall of

Beth-shan.” (I Sam., chap, xxxi.)

David (990 B.C. roughly) was more politic and successful than his

predecessor, and he seems to have placed himself under the protection

of Hiram, King of Tyre. This Phœnician alliance sustained him, and

was the essential element in the greatness of his son Solomon. His

story, with its constant assassinations and executions, reads rather

like the history of some savage chief than of a civilized monarch. It is

told with great vividness in the second book of Samuel.

The first book of Kings begins with the reign of King Solomon (960 B.C.

roughly). The most interesting thing in that story, from the point of

view of the general historian, is the relationship of Solomon to the

national religion and the priesthood, and his dealings with the

tabernacle, the priest Zadok, and the prophet Nathan.

The opening of Solomon’s reign is as bloody as his father’s. The last

recorded speech of David arranges for the murder of Shimei; his last

recorded word is “blood.” “But his hoar head bring thou down to the

grave with blood,” he says, pointing out that though old Shimei is

protected by a vow David had made to the Lord so long as David lives,

there is nothing to bind Solomon in that matter. Solomon proceeds to

murder his brother, who has sought the throne but quailed and made

submission. He then deals freely with his brother’s party. The weak hold

of religion upon the racially and mentally confused Hebrews at that time

is shown by the ease with which he replaces the hostile chief priest by

his own adherent Zadok, and still more strikingly by the murder of Joab

by Benaiah, Solomon’s chief ruffian, in the Tabernacle, while the victim

is claiming sanctuary and holding to the very horns of Jehovah’s altar.

Then Solomon sets to work, in what was for that time a thoroughly modern

spirit, to recast the religion of his people. He continues the alliance

with Hiram, King of Sidon, who uses Solomon’s kingdom as a high road by

which to reach and build shipping upon the Red Sea, and a hitherto

unheard-of wealth accumulates in Jerusalem as a result of this

partnership. Gang labour appears in Israel; Solomon sends relays of men

to cut cedarwood in Lebanon under Hiram, and organizes a service of

porters through the land. (There is much in all this to remind the

reader of the relations of some Central African chief to a European

trading concern.) Solomon then builds a palace for himself, and a temple

not nearly as big for Jehovah. Hitherto, the Ark of the Covenant, the

divine symbol of these ancient Hebrews, had abode in a large tent,

which had been shifted from one high place to another, and sacrifices

had been offered to the God of Israel upon a number of different high

places. Now the ark is brought into the golden splendours of the inner

chamber of a temple of cedar-sheathed stone, and put between two great

winged figures of gilded olivewood, and sacrifices are henceforth to be

made only upon the altar before it.

This centralizing innovation will remind the reader of both Akhnaton and

Nabonidus. Such things as this are done successfully only when the

prestige and tradition and learning of the priestly order has sunken to

a very low level.[164]

“And he appointed, according to the order of David his father, the

courses of the priests to their service, and the Levites to their

charges, to praise and minister before the priests, as the duty of every

day required; the porters also by their courses at every gate; for so

had David the man of God commanded. And they departed not from the

commandment of the king unto the priests and Levites concerning any

matter, or concerning the treasures.”

Neither Solomon’s establishment of the worship of Jehovah in Jerusalem

upon this new footing, nor his vision of and conversation with his God

at the opening of his reign, stood in the way of his developing a sort

of theological flirtatiousness in his declining years. He married

widely, if only for reasons of state and splendour, and he entertained

his numerous wives by sacrificing to their national deities, to the

Sidonian goddess Ashtaroth (Ishtar), to Chemosh (a Moabitish god), to

Moloch, and so forth. The Bible account of Solomon does, in fact, show

us a king and a confused people, both superstitious and mentally

unstable, in no way more religious than any other people of the

surrounding world.

A point of considerable interest in the story of Solomon, because it

marks a phase in Egyptian affairs, is his marriage to a daughter of

Pharaoh: This must have been one of the Pharaohs of the XXIst Dynasty:

In the great days of Amenophis III, as the Tel Amarna letters witness,

Pharaoh could condescend to receive a Babylonian princess into his

harem, but he refused absolutely to grant so divine a creature as an

Egyptian princess in marriage to the Babylonian monarch. It points to

the steady decline of Egyptian prestige that now, three centuries later,

such a petty monarch as Solomon could wed on equal terms with an

Egyptian princess. There was, however, a revival with the next Egyptian

dynasty (XXII); and the Pharaoh Shishak, the founder, taking advantage

of the cleavage between Israel and Judah, which had been developing

through the reigns of both David and Solomon, took Jerusalem and looted

the all-too-brief splendours both of the new temple and of the king’s

house.

Shishak seems also to have subjugated Philistia. From this time onward

it is to be noted that the Philistines fade in importance. They had

already lost their Cretan language and adopted that of the Semites they

had conquered, and although their cities remain more or less

independent, they merge gradually into the general Semitic life of

Palestine.

There is evidence that the original rude but convincing narrative of

Solomon’s rule, of his various murders, of his association with Hiram,

of his palace and temple building, and the extravagances that weakened

and finally tore his kingdom in twain, has been subjected to extensive

interpolations and expansions by a later writer, anxious to exaggerate

his prosperity and glorify his wisdom. It is not the place here to deal

with the criticism of Bible origins, but it is a matter of ordinary

common sense rather than of scholarship to note the manifest reality and

veracity of the main substance of the account of David and Solomon, an

account explaining sometimes and justifying sometimes, but nevertheless

relating facts, even the harshest facts, as only a contemporary or

almost contemporary writer, convinced that they cannot be concealed,

would relate them, and then to remark the sudden lapse into adulation

when the inserted passages occur. It is a striking tribute to the power

of the written assertion over realities in men’s minds that this Bible

narrative has imposed, not only upon the Christian, but upon the Moslim

world, the belief that King Solomon was not only one of the most

magnificent, but one of the wisest of men. Yet the first book of Kings

tells in detail his utmost splendours, and beside the beauty and wonder

of the buildings and organizations of such great monarchs as Thotmes III

or Rameses II or half a dozen other Pharaohs, or of Sargon II or

Sardanapalus or Nebuchadnezzar the Great, they are trivial. His temple,

measured internally, was twenty cubits broad, about 35 feet[165]--that

is, the breadth of a small villa residence--and sixty cubits, say, 100

feet, long. And as for his wisdom and statescraft, one need go no

further than the Bible to see that Solomon was a mere helper in the

wide-reaching schemes of the trader-king Hiram, and his kingdom a pawn

between Phœnicia and Egypt. His importance was due largely to the

temporary enfeeblement of Egypt, which encouraged the ambition of the

Phœnician and made it necessary to propitiate the holder of the key

to an alternate trade route to the East. To his own people Solomon was a

wasteful and oppressive monarch, and already before his death his

kingdom was splitting, visibly to all men.

With the reign of King Solomon the brief glory of the Hebrews ends; the

northern and richer section of his kingdom, long oppressed by taxation

to sustain his splendours, breaks off from Jerusalem to become the

separate kingdom of Israel, and this split ruptures that linking

connection between Sidon and the Red Sea by which Solomon’s gleam of

wealth was possible. There is no more wealth in Hebrew history.

Jerusalem remains the capital of one tribe, the tribe of Judah, the

capital of a land of barren hills, cut off by Philistia from the sea and

surrounded by enemies.

The tales of wars, of religious conflicts, of usurpations,

assassinations, and of fratricidal murders to secure the throne goes on

for three centuries. It is a tale frankly barbaric. Israel wars with

Judah and the neighbouring states; forms alliances first with one and

then with the other. The power of Aramean Syria burns like a baleful

star over the affairs of the Hebrews, and then there rises behind it the

great and growing power of the last Assyrian Empire. For three centuries

the life of the Hebrews was like the life of a man who insists upon

living in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, and is consequently being

run over constantly by omnibuses and motor-lorries.

“Pul” (apparently the same person as Tiglath Pileser III) is, according

to the Bible narrative, the first Assyrian monarch to appear upon the

Hebrew horizon, and Menahem buys him off with a thousand talents of

silver (738 B.C.). But the power of Assyria is heading straight for the

now aged and decadent land of Egypt, and the line of attack lies through

Judea; Tiglath Pileser III returns and Shalmaneser follows in his steps,

the King of Israel intrigues for help with Egypt, that “broken reed,”

and in 721 B.C., as we have already noted, his kingdom is swept off into

captivity and utterly lost to history. The same fate hung over Judah,

but for a little while it was averted. The fate of Sennacherib’s army in

the reign of King Hezekiah (701 B.C.), and how he was murdered by his

sons (II Kings xix. 37), we have already mentioned. The subsequent

subjugation of Egypt by Assyria finds no mention in Holy Writ, but it is

clear that before the reign of Sennacherib, King Hezekiah had carried on

a diplomatic correspondence with Babylon (700 B.C.), which was in revolt

against Sargon II of Assyria. There followed the conquest of Egypt by

Esarhaddon, and then for a time Assyria was occupied with her own

troubles; the Scythians and Medes and Persians were pressing her on the

north, and Babylon was in insurrection. As we have already noted, Egypt,

relieved for a time from Assyrian pressure, entered upon a phase of

revival, first under Psammetichus and then under Necho II.

Again the little country in between made mistakes in its alliances. But

on neither side was there safety. Josiah opposed Necho, and was slain at

the battle of Megiddo (608 B.C.). The king of Judah became an Egyptian

tributary. Then when Necho, after pushing as far as the Euphrates, fell

before Nebuchadnezzar II, Judah fell with him (604 B.C.).

Nebuchadnezzar, after a trial of three puppet kings, carried off the

greater part of the people into captivity in Babylon (586 B.C.), and the

rest, after a rising and a massacre of Babylonian officials, took refuge

from the vengeance of Chaldea in Egypt.

“And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the

treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king, and

of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon. And they burnt the

house of God and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the

palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof.

And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon;

where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the

kingdom of Persia.” (II Chron. xxxvi. 18, 19, 20.)

So the four centuries of Hebrew kingship comes to an end. From first to

last it was a mere incident in the larger and greater history of Egypt,

Syria, Assyria, and Phœnicia. But out of it there were now to arise

moral and intellectual consequences of primary importance to all

mankind.

§ 3

The Jews who returned, after an interval of more than two generations,

to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the time of Cyrus were a very different

people from the warring Baal worshippers and Jehovah worshippers, the

sacrificers in the high places and sacrificers at Jerusalem of the

kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The plain fact of the Bible narrative is

that the Jews went to Babylon barbarians and came back civilized. They

went a confused and divided multitude, with no national

self-consciousness; they came back with an intense and exclusive

national spirit. They went with no common literature generally known to

them, for it was only about forty years before the captivity that king

Josiah is said to have discovered “a book of the law” in the temple (II

Kings xxii.), and, besides that, there is not a hint in the record of

any reading of books; and they returned with most of their material for

the Old Testament. It is manifest that, relieved of their bickering and

murderous kings, restrained from politics and in the intellectually

stimulating atmosphere of that Babylonian world, the Jewish mind made a

great step forward during the captivity.

It was an age of historical inquiry and learning in Babylonia. The

Babylonian influences that had made Sardanapalus collect a great library

of ancient writings in Nineveh were still at work. We have already told

how Nabonidus was so preoccupied with antiquarian research as to neglect

the defence of his kingdom against Cyrus. Everything, therefore,

contributed to set the exiled Jews inquiring into their own history, and

they found an inspiring leader in the prophet Ezekiel. From such hidden

and forgotten records as they had with them, genealogies, contemporary

histories of David, Solomon, and their other kings, legends and

traditions, they made out and amplified their own story, and told it to

Babylon and themselves. The story of the Creation and the Flood, much of

the story of Moses, much of Samson, were probably incorporated from

Babylonian sources.[166] When the Jews returned to Jerusalem, only the

Pentateuch had been put together into one book, but the grouping of the

rest of the historical books was bound to follow.

The rest of their literature remained for some centuries as separate

books, to which a very variable amount of respect was paid. Some of the

later books are frankly post-captivity compositions. Over all this

literature were thrown certain leading ideas. There was an idea, which

even these books themselves gainsay in detail, that all the people were

pure-blooded children of Abraham; there was next an idea of a promise

made by Jehovah to Abraham that he would exalt the Jewish race above all

other races; and, thirdly, there was the belief first of all that

Jehovah was the greatest and most powerful of tribal gods, and then that

he was a god above all other gods, and at last that he was the only true

god. The Jews became convinced at last, as a people, that they were the

chosen people of the one God of all the earth.

And arising very naturally out of these three ideas, was a fourth, the

idea of a coming leader, a saviour, a Messiah who would realize the

long-postponed promises of Jehovah.

This welding together of the Jews into one tradition-cemented people in

the course of the “seventy years” is the first instance in history of

the new power of the written word in human affairs. It was a mental

consolidation that did much more than unite the people who returned to

Jerusalem. This idea of belonging to a chosen race predestined to

pre-eminence was a very attractive one. It possessed also those Jews who

remained in Babylonia. Its literature reached the Jews now established

in Egypt. It affected the mixed people who had been placed in Samaria,

the old capital of the kings of Israel when the ten tribes were deported

to Media. It inspired a great number of Babylonians and the like to

claim Abraham as their father, and thrust their company upon the

returning Jews. Ammonites and Moabites became adherents. The book of

Nehemiah is full of the distress occasioned by this invasion of the

privileges of the chosen. The Jews were already a people dispersed in

many lands and cities, when their minds and hopes were unified and they

became an exclusive people. But at first their exclusiveness is merely

to preserve soundness of doctrine and worship, warned by such lamentable

lapses as those of King Solomon. To genuine proselytes of whatever race,

Judaism long held out welcoming arms.

To Phœnicians after the falls of Tyre and Carthage, conversion to

Judaism must have been particularly easy and attractive. Their language

was closely akin to Hebrew. It is possible that the great majority of

African and Spanish Jews are really of Phœnician origin. There were

also great Arabian accessions. In South Russia, as we shall note later,

there were even Mongolian Jews.

§ 4

The historical books from Genesis to Nehemiah, upon which the idea of

the promise to the chosen people had been imposed later, were no doubt

the backbone of Jewish mental unity, but they by no means complete the

Hebrew literature from which finally the Bible was made up. Of such

books as Job, said to be an imitation of Greek tragedy, the Song of

Solomon, the Psalms, Proverbs, and others, there is no time to write in

this _Outline_, but it is necessary to deal with the books known as “the

Prophets” with some fullness. For those books are almost the earliest

and certainly the best evidence of the appearance of a new kind of

leading in human affairs.[167]

These prophets are not a new class in the community; they are of the

most various origins--Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and of priestly

sympathies, and Amos was a shepherd; but they have this in common, that

they bring into life a religious force outside the sacrifices and

formalities of priesthood and temple. The earlier prophets seem most

like the earlier priests, they are oracular, they give advice and

foretell events; it is quite possible that at first, in the days when

there were many high places in the land and religious ideas were

comparatively unsettled, there was no great distinction between priest

and prophet. The prophets danced, it would seem, somewhat after the

Dervish fashion, and uttered oracles. Generally they wore a distinctive

mantle of rough goat-skin. They kept up the nomadic tradition as against

the “new ways” of the settlement. But after the building of the temple

and the organization of the priesthood, the prophetic type remains over

and outside the formal religious scheme. They were probably always more

or less of an annoyance to the priests. They became informal advisers

upon public affairs, denouncers of sin and strange practices,

“self-constituted,” as we should say, having no sanction but an inner

light. “Now the word of the Lord came unto”--so and so; that is the

formula.

In the latter and most troubled days of the kingdom of Judah, as Egypt,

North Arabia, Assyria, and then Babylonia closed like a vice upon the

land, these prophets became very significant and powerful. Their appeal

was to anxious and fearful minds, and at first their exhortation was

chiefly towards repentance, the pulling down of this or that high place,

the restoration of worship in Jerusalem, or the like. But through some

of the prophecies there runs already a note like the note of what we

call nowadays a “social reformer.” The rich are “grinding the faces of

the poor”; the luxurious are consuming the children’s bread; influential

and wealthy people make friends with and imitate the splendours and

vices of foreigners, and sacrifice the common people to these new

fashions; and this is hateful to Jehovah, who will certainly punish the

land.

But with the broadening of ideas that came with the Captivity, the

tenour of prophecy broadens and changes. The jealous pettiness that

disfigures the earlier tribal ideas of God give place to a new idea of a

god of universal righteousness. It is clear that the increasing

influence of prophets was not confined to the Jewish people; it was

something that was going on in those days all over the Semitic world.

The breaking down of nations and kingdoms to form the great and changing

empires of that age, the smashing up of cults and priesthoods, the

mutual discrediting of temple by temple in their rivalries and

disputes--all these influences were releasing men’s minds to a freer

and wider religious outlook. The temples had accumulated great stores of

golden vessels and lost their hold upon the imaginations of men. It is

difficult to estimate whether, amidst these constant wars, life had

become more uncertain and unhappy than it had ever been before, but

there can be no doubt that men had become more conscious of its miseries

and insecurities. Except for the weak and the women, there remained

little comfort or assurance in the sacrifices, ritual and formal

devotions of the temples. Such was the world to which the later prophets

of Israel began to talk of the One God, and of a Promise that some day

the world should come to peace and unity and happiness. This great God

that men were now discovering lived in a temple “not made with hands,

eternal in the heavens.” There can be little doubt of a great body of

such thought and utterance in Babylonia, Egypt, and throughout the

Semitic east. The prophetic books of the Bible can be but specimens of

the prophesyings of that time....

We have already drawn attention to the gradual escape of writing and

knowledge from their original limitation to the priesthood and the

temple precincts, from the shell in which they were first developed and

cherished. We have taken Herodotus as an interesting specimen of what we

have called the free intelligence of mankind. Now here we are dealing

with a similar overflow of moral ideas into the general community. The

Hebrew prophets, and the steady expansion of their ideas towards one God

in all the world, is a parallel development of the free conscience of

mankind. From this time onward there runs through human thought, now

weakly and obscurely, now gathering power, the idea of one rule in the

world, and of a promise and possibility of an active and splendid peace

and happiness in human affairs. From being a temple religion of the old

type, the Jewish religion becomes, to a large extent, a prophetic and

creative religion of a new type. Prophet succeeds prophet. Later on, as

we shall tell, there was born a prophet of unprecedented power, Jesus,

whose followers founded the great universal religion of Christianity.

Still later Muhammad, another prophet, appears in Arabia and founds

Islam. In spite of very distinctive features of their own, these two

teachers do in a manner arise out of, and in succession to these Jewish

prophets. It is not the place of the historian to discuss the truth and

falsity of religion, but it is his business to record the appearance of

great constructive ideas. Two thousand four hundred years ago, and six

or seven or eight thousand years after the walls of the first Sumerian

cities arose, the ideas of the moral unity of mankind and of a world

peace had come into the world.[168]

XXII

THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS[169]

§ 1. _The Hellenic Peoples._ § 2. _Distinctive Features of Hellenic

Civilization._ § 3. _Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy in Greece._ §

4. _The Kingdom of Lydia._ § 5. _The Rise of the Persians in the East._

§ 6. _The Story of Crœsus._ § 7. _Darius Invades Russia._ § 8. _The

Battle of Marathon._ § 9. _Thermopylæ and Salamis._ § 10. _Platæa and

Mycale._

§ 1

And now our history must go back again to those Aryan-speaking peoples

of whose early beginnings we have given an account in Chapters XIV and

XV. We must, for the sake of precision, repeat here two warnings we have

already given the reader: first, that we use the word Aryan in its

widest sense, to express all the early peoples who spoke languages of

the “Indo-Germanic” or “Indo-European” group; and, secondly, that when

we use the word Aryan we do not imply any racial purity.

The original speakers of the fundamental Aryan language, 2000 or 3000

years B.C., were probably a specialized and distinctive Nordic race of

fair white men, accustomed to forests and cattle, who wandered east of

the Rhine and through the forests of the Danube valley, the Balkan

peninsula, Asia Minor, and eastward to the north and west of the great

Central Asian Sea; but very early they had encountered and mixed

themselves extensively, and as they spread they continued to mix

themselves with other races, with races of uncertain affinities in Asia

Minor and with Iberian and Mediterranean peoples of the dark-haired

white race. For instance, the Aryans, spreading and pressing westward

in successive waves of Keltic-speaking peoples through Gaul and Britain

and Ireland, mixed more and more with Iberian races, and were affected

more and more by that Iberian blood and their speech by the

characteristics of the language their Keltic tongue superseded. Other

waves of Keltic peoples washed with diminishing force into Spain and

Portugal, where to this day the pre-Keltic strain is altogether dominant

although the languages spoken are Aryan. Northward, in Europe, the Aryan

peoples were spreading into hitherto uninhabited country, and so

remaining racially more purely Nordic blonds. They had already reached

Scandinavia many centuries B.C.