[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: THE GREAT PYRAMID FROM THE AIR (PRESENT DAY).]
THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD
BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
210 VICTORIA STREET, TORONTO
1923
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
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PREFACE
There is much truth in the old saying about the difficulty of seeing
the wood for the trees. It is the aim of this short book to keep the
number of the trees as few as possible so that the wood, as a whole,
may be clearly visible.
It is designed to provide scholars and their teachers with an outline
of the most important facts in the history of mankind up to the date
of the firm establishment of the Roman Empire and the final
destruction of Jerusalem--a date at which the various threads of the
story come together to a point. In order to avoid confusing the
learner, and to enable him to get a clear view of the most important
facts, all less important facts and names and dates have been omitted.
With such an outline in his mind, the scholar, coming to the study of
a particular nation or period, should be able to fit that nation or
period into its proper place. In the absence of any such outline, he
must necessarily be at a loss to know the bearing of this or that
episode on the whole great story.
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I have to record, very gratefully, my deep obligation to Mr. R. B.
Lattimer for reading this book in MS., and for many valuable
suggestions and emendations.
H. G. H.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Before History was Written
II. Egypt down to 1500 B.C.
III. Egyptian Religions, Sacred Writings, Etc.
IV. Babylonia
V. The Minoans in Crete
VI. The Meeting of the Empires
VII. The Jews and Israelites
VIII. The Persians and the Greeks
IX. The Glorious Days of Greece
X. The Meeting of the Nations round Sicily
XI. Macedon
XII. Rome and Carthage
XIII. Rome at Home and in the East
XIV. Rome Mistress of the World
XV. Troubles in the East
XVI. The Dispersal of the Jews
XVII. How the Threads draw together
Index
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Great Pyramids, taken from an Aeroplane ... _Frontispiece_
A Baked Clay Tablet, inscribed with Babylonian Account of
the Deluge
_British Museum._
Cyperus Papyrus
Isis (with Horus) and Horus (with Symbols)
Bandaging a Mummy
_Wilkinson._
Ancient Egyptian Machine for raising Water, identical with
the "Shadoof" of the Present Day
_Wilkinson._
Assyrian King in his Robes
Coin of Knossos
Battering-Ram
Sennacherib in his Chariot returning from Battle
_Kouyurijik._
Greek Warrior, 7th-6th Century
_Gerhard_, 207.
Corinthian Architecture
_From Monument of Lysicrates._
Alexander the Great
_From a Bust in the British Museum._
Gallic Warriors
_From Bronzes in the British Museum._
Hannibal
Roman Legionaries
Slab from the Arch of Titus, representing the Spoils of
Jerusalem borne in Triumph
{1}
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN
The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the
Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is
that it is really our own story. It is the story of the doings of
mankind from the earliest date at which we know anything at all about
man; and it is the story of the doings which have made you and me
what we are to-day, and have made our lives what they are.
You must first look at the world map to understand the story
properly. Take out the atlas or the globe of the world, and have a
look at the Mediterranean Sea as shown upon it. You will see how
very little space this sea occupies in comparison with the whole.
And I want you to observe this very particularly, because, as I hope
to show you, small though this space is, it is the space in, or
closely around, which nearly the whole story of man on the world, so
far as we know it, was made up to--what date shall we say?--only a
few hundred years ago--say the date of Columbus' discovery of
America. If you know the story of what happened in and about the
Mediterranean {2} Sea, you will know nearly all that anybody does
know of the really important things that men did in the world up to
the date of our Queen Elizabeth.
"But," you may say, "surely things were happening in other places, as
in China and in Peru, and in Mexico, and all over the world, all the
time?"
And so there were things happening, and things which made a very
great difference, no doubt, to the people to whom they happened; but
they were things that made scarcely any difference at all, so far as
we are able to see, to the history of the world. They made great
differences within the borders of the countries in which they
happened, but not beyond. The happenings that went on round the
shores of the Mediterranean were the making of the world as we know
it to-day: I mean, of course, in so far as men's actions have had
anything to do with the making of it.
For the first part of the story we shall be occupied with the eastern
end only of the Mediterranean; and I must ask you to carry your eye
just a little--not far--to the east again of the eastern shore of
that sea. That shore is called the Levant, from the Latin _levare_,
to rise, and it means the region in which the sun was seen to rise by
those who gave the name--that is to say, the East.
A very short way, as it looks on the map of the Western Hemisphere,
to the east of that Levant shore, you may see the two rivers
Euphrates and Tigris, rising very near together only a little south
of the Black Sea, yet not finding their way out into the sea till
they have gone a very long way south. Then, after coming together,
they go out in each other's company into the Persian Gulf. A great
part of that space between the two rivers is called Mesopotamia, {3}
and is the country where our armies had hard fighting in the Great
War. Mesopotamia is from Greek μέσος, meaning the middle, and
πόταμος, a river, and means the land in the middle of, or between,
the two rivers. Mediterranean, the name of the big sea, is from
Latin _medius_, meaning, again, the middle, and _terra_, the earth;
that is to say, the sea in the middle of the land. It is almost
entirely shut in by the land, its only way out being by the narrow
Straits of Gibraltar at the western end.
[Sidenote: The great rivers]
So there you see those two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, running
south and making the land in the neighbourhood of their course very
rich and fertile, producing splendid crops and vegetation of all
kinds. And now, if you will carry your eye just a little to the west
and south of these, across Arabia and the Red Sea, you will see
another great river, only this time it is a river running, not from
the north to the south, but from the south to the north. It is the
Nile, the river of Egypt. It goes out into the Mediterranean past a
city called Alexandria. At its mouth it spreads out into a number of
channels, making an area intersected by water channels. This area
has something of the shape of the letter in the Greek alphabet which
corresponds to our "d" and is drawn thus Δ. That is roughly
the shape of the space occupied by these many mouths of the Nile, and
the region is therefore called the "Delta," which is the name of that
letter of the Greek alphabet.
I want you to take particular notice of these two great
river-courses, those of the Nile and of the Euphrates with the
Tigris. I say Euphrates "with Tigris," because the two are together
the fertilisers and waterers of the country lying between and around
{4} them. The Nile does his business of watering his own valley by
himself. It is most important that you should give your attention to
these two great water-courses, because it is along them that arose
the two greatest empires, the two strongest and most formidable
powers, of which the early history of the world has anything to tell
us.
You may easily understand how this should be so. Man, at first, from
what we are able to learn about him, knew very little of farming.
Such ideas as a "rotation of crops," or of manuring the fields were
probably quite unknown to him for very many ages. The first men whom
we are able to learn anything about seem to have depended on the
hunting of other animals for their living. Then came a time when
they began to live on their flocks and herds. Now, both for the
hunting and for the living by keeping cattle and sheep, they had to
be constantly on the move. They would kill out all the game in one
district and therefore have to move on to another. Or their cows and
sheep would eat up all the pasture in one place and so they had to be
moved to fresh feeding-grounds. These two first stages, which all
the scholars recognise, in man's story require that the people who
lived in them should be always moving, or at least ready to move.
The stages are called the Hunting Age and the Pastoral Age
respectively. The next age is called the Agricultural Age, when man
began to give "culture" to the "ager," or field. He was able to
settle then. It was not necessary for him to be constantly on the
move when he had begun to live by the crops which he grew. But he
was not yet a very clever or scientific farmer. He could grow good
crops only when Nature helped him very freely, only {5} on the best
soils, only in the river valleys or lands watered by the rivers, and
in a favourable climate.
The soil of Mesopotamia is still considered the most t naturally rich
in all the world: the Nile overflows its banks every year, and the
overflow leaves a wonderfully rich mud behind it; the climate both in
Mesopotamia and in Egypt is very favourable to the growth of
vegetation. Therefore, it is not to be wondered at that when men
began to lead a settled life they settled themselves down along the
courses of these two great rivers--I write two, because I am
regarding the Euphrates and Tigris as one, for the moment--and here
formed themselves into communities and nations so many in number and
so prosperous that they became stronger than any of their neighbours.
[Sidenote: Earliest man]
And now you are very likely to ask me, "What do we know about the
early history of man on the earth, and how do we know it?"
The first thing that we know about man on the earth is what we know
by finding the weapons or tools that show signs of his handiwork. It
is one of the most distinguishing marks of man, setting him most
clearly apart from all other animals, that he has been a maker of
tools and weapons for an immense number of years. Intelligent though
some dogs and monkeys and other animals are, not one of them has
thought of doing this. The oldest sort of tools or weapons that we
find are made of stone, generally of flint, chipped to a sharp edge
or point, so as to make axe or spear-head. We know them to be older
than any of the metal tools or weapons that we find, because we find
them in a deeper layer, or stratum, of the earth--a stratum deposited
before those which lie above it. And we find them in company with
fossil remains of animals which are {6} of less-developed species
than those in the strata above.
[Sidenote: Man's tools and weapons]
After a while--an immensely long while--there can be little doubt
that man discovered that the ore of metals, which is found in the
ground, can be fused, that is to say, melted by fire; that it can be
separated from its earthy surroundings, and so be made useful. Man
then began to make weapons and implements of metal, and found them
better than the weapons of stone. We may infer this from the fact
that the stone implements, of sharp and shapen flint, become less
numerous as we come to higher strata, or layers, in the ground, and
the metal implements are more numerous.
The metal of which the earliest metal implements were made is either
pure copper or bronze, which is a mixture of copper and tin. Copper
is not a very hard metal. I suppose that the more tin that was put
into the mixture, in comparison with the copper, the harder it would
be. And then, after a while--again a very very long while--man
discovered another, a harder, and therefore a better, kind of metal,
that is to say iron. And he has never found a better metal in all
the long years of his story since. Gold and platinum may be more
precious, because they are less common; but iron is a great deal more
useful to man. His weapons, his swords, bayonets, and cannons are
made of it; so are his ships; and you hardly can open your eyes in a
room without their resting on something made of iron. As soon as he
had found out the hardness of iron we may suppose that man quickly
gave up the use of the soft bronze, as he had formerly given up the
use of the stone in favour of the bronze. Thus it comes that you may
read of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. They refer
to these three stages {7} in man's history: first, when he was using
stone implements, made of the chipped flint or the like hard stone;
second, when he was using the bronze weapons and tools; and third,
when he was using iron.
"But," you will say, "all this is hardly history. It is not man's
story. We don't want to know so much what kind of tools and weapons
man had; we want to know what he did with them. You are not telling
us this."
It is quite true; I am not. But the reason why I have told you all
this about man's tools, before telling you what he did with them, is
that I want you to get clearly into your heads this truth--that even
the best and most learned of the men who have searched back into
history are able to tell us only a very small part of the whole story
of man's doings on the earth. They have found out, perhaps, all that
there is to find about the records that man has intentionally left of
himself. But the records begin rather far on--at what we may call a
late chapter--in the story. They begin only about six or seven
thousand years ago. And though that sounds a long time you must
understand that it really is quite short in comparison with all the
time that man has been living on the earth.
It is very difficult for us, who have lived only a few years, to form
an idea in our minds of a great many years. I hardly know how best I
may help you to do so. Suppose we take a thousand years as a length
for our consideration in the first place. Consider this, next, that
there are, certainly, people alive now who are a hundred years old,
and perhaps a little older. Imagine, if you can, the lives of ten
such persons who have lived one after the other. Imagine that each
{8} as a baby saw one of the others when that other was a hundred
years old. Thus it would only take ten of such happenings to cover
the whole stretch of a thousand years of which I want you to form
some idea. The years of the lives of ten very long-lived men would
cover it.
It is quite possible that you may have seen a living oak tree of much
more than a thousand years old. The people who have studied trees
tell us that there are oaks alive in England now which were alive in
the Saxon times; that is to say, some 1500 years ago--one and a half
thousand years. I know that these hints are not very effectual
towards helping you to get an idea of what a thousand years mean, but
they are the best that I can give you. They seem to help me to
realise just a little what this great stretch of years is. We can do
no better.
I wrote, a little while ago (p. 7), "the records that man has
intentionally left of himself." I put in that word "intentionally"
because, of course, the weapons and tools and implements and
ornaments that we find were not left, by those who used them, with
any intention that they should give us any information about their
users. They were just left, as a rule, accidentally. We can imagine
something from them about the kind of life that their users led, and
what kind of men they were that used them, but they were not trying
to give us any such information.
[Illustration: A BAKED CLAY TABLET INSCRIBED WITH BABYLONION ACCOUNT
OF THE DELUGE]
What we may call, I think, the intentional records began when we find
that man began to carve designs on stone of what he had been doing,
or to paint pictures showing his doings, and, especially, when he
began to cut written words on the stone. When we {9} begin to get
records of this kind, then we really do begin to read the story---we
begin to know what man was doing. And the first records of the kind
are of date some five thousand years before the birth of Christ; that
is to say, some seven thousand years ago.
[Sidenote: The first records]
And what do we find, from these carvings and pictures and writings,
that man was doing? The records that we are best able to read now
are those which we find in the more westerly of the two great
river-courses on which, as we have seen, man congregated. It is
along the Nile, in Egypt, that we find the record most clear. I have
little doubt that we might find it no less clear along the other
great river-courses, those of the Euphrates and Tigris, also, were it
not for this difference--that Egypt and the Nile region was very much
better supplied with hard stone than the Euphrates and Tigris region.
The result of that is that the inscriptions and figures cut on the
hard Egyptian stone are legible still. The other, more eastern,
records, cut on the brick which, in the absence of stone, the
builders made use of for nearly all building purposes, have crumbled
to pieces. The wonder, after so many years, is that anything at all
should be left, rather than that much has been lost. The Egyptian
climate is very dry, except near the river's mouth, at the Delta, and
that dryness has helped to preserve the records.
If we had the same records for the eastern as for the western
river-course, we should find, I expect, that the way the people lived
was very much alike in both. We may gather that it was a very
pleasant life, on the whole. The climate was delightfully warm; the
soil gave them plentiful crops with very {10} little work for it.
Probably the eastern people were the more pastoral, that is to say,
kept more cattle and sheep, but there were flocks and herds in the
Nile region also. And in both there were wild beasts for the hunting.
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