King of Nineveh in his chariot hunting the wild bull. The warrior
rides on one horse and leads a second, richly caparisoned, for the
use of the monarch. Numerous small marks on the body of the animal
probably denote long and shaggy hair.
]
[Illustration: BABYLON: THE WONDER CITY OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION AT THE
HEIGHT OF ITS POWER]
[Illustration: NIMRUD: ALL THAT IS LEFT OF ONE OF THE WONDER CITIES OF
ANCIENT BABYLONIA
A view of Birs Nimrud, the traditional site of the Tower of Babel.
On the plain below are the silent ruins of the ancient city, once
filled with a teeming population.
]
[Illustration: A VIEW OF HILLAH, THE MODERN BABYLON]
We have now reviewed the questions of the rise of civilisation, as
apart from the ordinary history of the countries, which is dealt with
in its proper place in this work. Though it is difficult, and rather
misleading, to look at civilisation and the political history apart,
yet, so much has come to light in recent years to clear our view of the
origins of culture that we may be allowed to focus our attention on
that view of man, apart from his better known history. We seem at last
to have reached back to a definite beginning of arts and capacities on
both the Nile and the Euphrates, and to have touched a condition of
things that seems to point in both lands to some external source of a
yet pre-existing culture, which yet has to be traced. I am happy to add
that one of our greatest Babylonian scholars, Dr. Pinches, concurs in
the view of his subject which is here presented.
W. M. FLINDERS PETRIE
[Illustration: THE EXILES IN BABYLON
“By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down; yea, we wept.” From
the painting by Bendemann.
]
[Illustration: THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EUROPE
By DAVID GEORGE HOGARTH, M.A.]
[Sidenote: “Out of the East came Light”.]
“Out of the East came Light” has been the text on which all great
historians of civilisation have preached, from the authors of the
Mosaic literature down through Greek and Roman times to our own. Hebrew
writers have looked back to Mesopotamia; Greek writers to Egypt; Roman
writers to Greece; writers of Western and Northern Europe and the
New World to Rome, Greece, and Palestine. Their belief is justified
in so far as it is based on two great facts. Man first found in the
warm, alluvial valleys of Southern Asia and North-Eastern Africa the
conditions of climate and soil most favourable to his upward progress
from the savage state; and from these regions, so soon as with increase
of numbers he was moved to migrate, his steps were turned by the
geographical conditions surrounding his early homes, in a general way,
westward. He knew not yet how to cross broad seas; deserts, sandy
steppes, high mountains and tropical forests and swamps were equally
deterrent. The Polar ice-sheet, which had extended in Pleistocene
times to the Caspian, Black Sea, and Danube basins, and still lay,
in the dawn of human civilisation, far south of its present limits,
probably rendered, with its wide fringe of impassable moraine, forest,
and tundra country, all the lands included in the present Empire of
Russia singularly inhospitable. Whoso looks at the map of the Western
Hemisphere, bearing these facts in mind, will see at once that the
line of least resistance, and, indeed, the only possible line, led
the men of the great sub-tropic river valleys towards and along the
Mediterranean coasts.
[Sidenote: Civilisation from Without]
In so far, therefore, as European civilisation is a state of things
due to influences from without, it is due to the East; but that is
very far from the whole explanation of its origin. The impulse to rise
above savagery has not always--not, indeed, usually--come to peoples
from without; and probably in primitive time, when communications
were slow and difficult to a degree which we can hardly realise, the
origin of local culture was seldom or never to be accounted for thus.
In modern days there have been obvious instances to the contrary; but
even now it remains to be seen how far civilisations originated among
absolutely barbarous peoples by contact with higher races are real and
living growths. Examples of the modification and possible elevation
of ancient indigenous societies by incoming aliens, such as have been
seen in Mexico or Peru, India or Japan, Egypt or Barbary, are not
in point; for in these cases local civilisations certainly existed
long before the foreign influence. We must look to the history of the
relations of white and negro, or other savage, races in the homes of
the latter, and the results of such inquiries are far from conclusive.
Does civilisation so originated grow and thrive? Do even the races
thus civilised themselves any longer thrive and grow? Our antipodean
colonies, and the story of the native races of North America, if there
were no other instances, would not admit a categorical affirmative.
Nay, rather, the evidence so far available tends to discount the
permanence of transferred civilisation, and to throw doubt on the
continued vitality of races so civilised.
[Sidenote: The Escape from Savagery]
[Sidenote: Conditions Essential for Civilisation]
It is necessary to raise this question at the outset of the present
essay because it has been too often assumed, both implicitly and
explicitly, by historians of our civilisation, that all the cultural
development of Central, Western, and Northern Europe has been due to
alien influence, exerted from the south and south-east, and mainly by
the agency of the Greek, Græco-Roman, and Græco-Romano-Semitic (the
Christian) systems. Maine’s famous dictum that “Nothing moves in the
world which is not Greek in origin” has long dominated our thoughts.
Yet that magnificent generalisation is contrary not only to inherent
probability, but to known fact. Escape from the savage state, as Buckle
showed, depends in the first place on the existence of such conditions
of geographical environment as favour the accumulation of wealth and
the development of a leisured class--that is, such as conduce to the
production of a good deal more than the minimum necessary for life.
It can, therefore, have taken place wherever man found comparatively
genial climate and remunerative soil, and, in process of time, made for
himself, by clearing forests or draining swamps, an arable area which
would feed him and his more abundantly than was absolutely necessary.
Where these conditions were presumably present it is unreasonable to
suppose that the beginnings of civilisation were deferred age after
age, until late in time some stimulus chanced to be imparted by an
alien race or races which had, after all, advanced towards their
own civilisation, albeit earlier, through the operation of similar
conditions elsewhere. In the European areas inhabited by the Celtic
and Germanic peoples, for instance, long before we have the slightest
reason to believe that these can have come into intimate relation with
the civilisations of the South and East, both climate and soil were
unquestionably favourable, and local civilisations cannot but have been
originated independently. As has been well said, “Man everywhere has
the same humble beginnings”; and, up to a certain point, which is found
to be, in fact, far later than the inception of some kind of culture,
he will satisfy his primitive needs and desires in very much the same
ways.
[Sidenote: Spontaneous Civilisation in Europe]
Under certain conditions, known to have arisen independently in
many different regions of the earth, articles of luxury and art,
irrefragable witnesses to incipient civilisation, begin to be produced
spontaneously. To what remote periods have not cave deposits thrown
back the history of artistic effort in the valleys of Gaul? And what
credit, in reason, can be given to Greece, or even to Rome, for the
elaborate social order of the Teutonic tribes, which was of ancient
standing when first the Romans penetrated beyond the Danube and Rhine?
So well rooted in the soil, so potent and so widely diffused were
the Teutonic and Celtic social systems, that in the history of our
actual civilisation they are factors as worthy of consideration as the
influences of Rome, Greece, or Palestine. If Græco-Roman Christianity
came greatly to modify them in the end, they had, perhaps, ere that,
modified Christianity itself hardly less; and the social superiority
of the northern and western adherents of the now dominant religion is
probably as much due to character and habits developed before ever its
creed was formulated, as the dominance of the Turkish peoples in the
Islamic system is undoubtedly due to social characteristics evolved in
the oases and steppe-lands of Central Asia far back in the “Times of
Ignorance.”
Let it, therefore, be understood that in the following pages it is not
necessarily the whole origin of European civilisation that is being set
forth, but the modification and heightening of probably pre-existent
European culture by the first influences of the Nearer East which
can be supposed to have reached it. Of these influences the effect
is to some extent a matter of inference only. We cannot always, or,
indeed, often, point with any assurance to actual results of their
action. In great part we must still be content with little more than a
demonstration that directly along certain lines of communication, or
indirectly through certain intermediaries, the civilisations of the
South could, or did, come into relation with European areas at an early
age.
[Sidenote: The Two Great Sea Routes]
The sea routes which were most likely to be used in ruder ages by
Levantine mariners, after leaving the Nile estuaries or the Syrian
ports--which, as a matter of fact, are known to have been most
used--are: that which followed the littoral of Asia Minor to Rhodes,
whence it bifurcated, to Crete on the one hand, and to the Ægean isles
and coasts on the other; or that striking across the narrow strait
to Cyprus, and thence by way of Rhodes, or directly, to Crete. In
connection with both these routes, the importance of Crete and Rhodes,
and especially the former, must be obvious. Thence the Cyrenean and
Carthaginian projections of Africa were reached with greater ease than
by way of the littoral to west of Egypt, which, for some hundreds of
miles, is desert, reef-girt, almost harbourless, and pitilessly vexed
by an on-shore wind. From Carthage, Sicily and the Italian peninsula
were readily accessible, or the Gibraltar strait and the Iberian shores
could be made after coasting a littoral much kinder to navigation than
that between Egypt and the western bight of the Syrtis.
[Illustration: THE GREAT SEA ROUTES OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION
Along the routes marked in this map lay the course of Ægean and
Phœnician civilisation. The importance of Crete and Rhodes in the
spreading of civilisation is clearly seen; they may be called the
“half-way houses” between Mesopotamian culture, with its seat in
the valley of the Euphrates, and Egyptian culture, in the valley of
the Nile.
]
[Sidenote: The Two Great Land Routes]
The land routes in chief were also two. The Nile valley, closed by
desert on the western side, had comparatively easy access to the great
natural road which, leading northwards through Syria, passes at first
along the Palestinian littoral, and then through the central cleft
between the Lebanons to the Orontes valley. Mesopotamian traders,
following up the Euphrates till they had left the desert part of its
course behind them, fell into this same road in the region of Aleppo
and Antioch. Thence by the easy passes which turn the southern end of
Mount Amanus, the combined caravans reached Tarsus, penetrated Taurus
by the gap of the Cilician Gates, and found themselves on the plateau
of Asia Minor with a choice of easy routes leading either to the rich
western littoral, or the north-western straits, and from any and
every point offering safe passage to South-eastern Europe. This was
the only land route for Egyptian civilisation. But the Mesopotamian
had an alternative one, leading by way of the upper Tigris valley to
the north of Taurus and the Cappadocian plateau, whence it descended
the Sangarius and debouched, like the first route, on either the
north-western or the western coast of Anatolia.
[Sidenote: The Royal Road up into Asia]
In speaking of such land routes, we do not, of course, mean to imply
the existence of any made road, nor even of a single track. When most
definite, they probably resembled the Syrian Pilgrim Way--a skein of
separate paths now spreading widely, now running into and across one
another; and doubtless the early tracks diverged far more than this,
and making great elbows, followed now one valley, now another, to meet
again only after many days. One of the great lines from Mesopotamia to
the western Anatolian coast, that described last in our enumeration,
came to be defined more strictly than the rest, perhaps by the Kings
of Nineveh and their “Hittite” rivals and allies in Cappadocia, and
was known in the Persian era to the Greeks as the Royal Road “of all
who go up into Asia.” But at the much earlier time with which we are
most concerned, the influences of the East did not rush westward
torrent-wise in one bed, but soaked slowly, finding a way now here, now
there, in one general westward direction, and sending offshoots far out
to right and left of the main streams.
[Illustration: LAND ROUTES OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION
The great natural roads along which lay the path of Egyptian and
Mesopotamian culture are marked in white lines on this map. A study
of the map, with a careful reading of this chapter, will make clear
the way in which civilisation spread in Egypt and Babylon. It is
along these lines that there are found evidences of the influence
exerted upon Europe by the civilisation of the valley of the Nile
and the Euphrates.
]
[Sidenote: Half-way Houses of Civilisation]
It has been said that there is evidence of the routes just indicated
having been, in fact, those most used. It is upon these lines, and
no others, that we find certain remarkable focuses of early culture
disposed as half-way houses between the Mesopotamian and Egyptian
civilisations on the one hand, and continental Europe on the other.
These are, in relation to the sea routes, first, the prehistoric
Ægean civilisation, focused from the first in Crete, but extended
to all isles and peninsulas of South-eastern Europe from Cyprus to
Sardinia and Spain; and, secondly, the Phœnician, originated on the
Syrian coast, but focused also at a later time at a second point
much farther west--namely, on that Carthaginian projection, whence
lay easy sea-ways to Sicily and Italy and all the western seas. Hard
by the Egyptian land route lay this same Phœnician society; while
all about its point of junction with the Euphrates road, on both its
continuations north-westward, and on the northern road from Mesopotamia
so soon as this had passed Euphrates, was established the singular
but as yet little understood civilisation which we call Hittite. How
early we may assume the latter’s existence in North Syria is still
doubtful; but since the discoveries of Winckler at Boghaz Keui,
there is little question that it was focused in prehistoric time in
Northern Cappadocia, whence its influence seems to have radiated
southward to the confines of Palestine, and westward to Lydia and
almost the shore of the Ægean Sea. It is to this North Cappadocian
region that the Tigris route from Assyria and Babylonia, which was
afterwards the Persian “Royal Road,” tended. Among these civilisations
the most important for our present purpose is the Ægean, because its
geographical area touched at some point all the westward roads, whether
by sea or land; and, moreover, because it is the one which actual
evidence both dates from the remotest antiquity and most clearly proves
to have been operative on Europe, especially on the most expansive of
its early cultures, the Hellenic. The recent exploration of Crete, due
in the main to Messrs. Arthur Evans and Federico Halbherr, has enhanced
enormously the significance of the civilisation revealed to the modern
world at Hissarlik and Mycenæ by the faith and fervour of Henry
Schliemann.
[Sidenote: Far-back Evidences of Culture]
We are now assured of certain facts of much moment to our inquiry.
Firstly, that this civilisation was developed originally from its
rudest beginnings within the Ægean area itself. This is proved by
evidence of the uninterrupted evolution of fabrics and decoration,
especially in ceramic ware, produced at Cnossus from the dawn of the
historic Hellenic period right back to Neolithic time. At various
points in this long retrocession we can place the Cnossian culture
in synchronic relation with the Egyptian by the presence both of
Egyptian objects in the Ægean strata, and Ægean in the Egyptian. These
points correspond with the highest developments respectively of the
New, Middle, and Old Pharaonic Empires--moments at which we should
naturally expect to find evidence of international communication. The
earliest point indicated by these synchronisms lies possibly as far
back as the First Dynasty, if certain vases, exported apparently from
the Ægean as vehicles for colouring matter, and found by Dr. Petrie at
Abydos, are accepted as of the remote date to which their discoverer
attributed them; but in any case the contemporaneity of some part of
the Old Empire period with the Ægean civilisation is assured, and that,
moreover, when the latter was already far advanced beyond its rudest
origins, as represented by the contents of the thick strata of yellow
clay which underlie the earliest structures at Cnossus.
[Sidenote: The Ægean Civilisation is Native]
Thus is the indigenous origin of Ægean civilisation assured. So also
is the independence of its after development. The typical Cretan
pottery, known as the “Kamares” style and lineally descended from
Neolithic ware, which attained, about the acme of the Pharaonic
Middle Empire a perfection both of fabric and ornament worthy of the
highest ceramic products of any age, remained absolutely distinct.
The same independence characterises a later ceramic product of the
Ægean, a glazed ware with monochrome decoration, which went into Egypt
abundantly under the Eighteenth Dynasty, and especially when Amenhotep
IV., “Khuenaten,” was reigning in his new capital at Tell-el-Amarna.
Nor is Ægean art distinctive only in its humbler products. The
frescoes, the plaster reliefs, the chased work in precious metals,
the ivory carvings, and the gem intaglios of the Ægean area, of which
Sir Charles Newton said thirty years ago that they were not to be
confounded with products of any other glyptic art, show the development
and retention of an individual naturalistic style--a style which
reacted on the fresco paintings of Egypt itself under Khuenaten.
Finally, to clinch the proof of its independence with the strongest
possible argument, the Ægean civilisation, as soon as it became
articulate, evolved for itself, in Crete at any rate, a system of
writing, displayed to us on some thousands of surviving clay documents,
which was purely its own, and cannot be interpreted by comparison with
any other known script.
[Illustration: THESEION TEMPLE, ATHENS: DORIC ORDER OF ARCHITECTURE
The perfection of the Hellenic style, derived from Ægean
architecture. 5th century B.C.
]
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF WINGLESS VICTORY: IONIC ORDER
The perfection of the second Hellenic style, refined from the
Doric, probably in the first place by Asiatic Greeks. Fifth century
B.C.
]
[Sidenote: The Contact of Early Civilisations]
Secondly, it is now known that this civilisation, of remote indigenous
origin and independent development, reached a very high point of
achievement in many respects which afford the best-known tests of
culture--namely, in its artistic products, extant examples of which
offer ample evidence of wonderfully close study of natural forms, of
mastery of decorative principles and their execution, and of a sort
of idealistic quality, which has been rightly called “a premonition
of the later Hellenic”; also, in architectural construction and
the organisation of domestic comfort, as displayed in the palaces
at Cnossus and Phæstus, with their superposed stories, their broad
stairways of many flights, their rich ornament, their arrangements
for admitting air and light, and their astonishing systems of
sanitation and drainage. The written documents found, though still
undeciphered, plainly attest an advanced knowledge of account-keeping
and correspondence. The frescoes and gem scenes, as well as many
surviving objects of luxury, attest the existence of a leisured and
pleasure-loving class; and, lastly, the tribute-tallies of Cnossus
support the inference which is legitimately drawn from the uniformity
of certain material objects all over the Ægean area at certain
periods--notably that contemporaneous with the earlier part of the
Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty--and also from the wide range of certain
place-names, that there was an extensive imperial organisation.
The centre of this empire, as well as the original focus of the
civilisation, was almost beyond question in Crete. The prejudice in
favour of other focuses raised by the priority of Ægean discoveries
elsewhere, especially those made in the Argolid, has been greatly
weakened by demonstration of the superior catholicity and quality of
Cretan culture, and by recognition of the failure of Mycenæ to offer
evidence of anything like the same antiquity. And no more need be
said here to counteract it than that, if Buckle’s statement of the
climatic and geographical conditions necessary to the first development
and upward progress of culture be sound, those conditions were never
present in plenitude anywhere in the Ægean area except in Crete. There
are found in the most conspicuous degree the combination of these
geographical features--large tracts of fertile and deep lowland soil;
mountains so situated as to cause abundant precipitation, and so high
as to store snow against the early summer; absence of both swamps and
desert areas; and a climate not prone to extremes.
[Sidenote: What Crete has Taught us]
Like all other high civilisations the Ægean both borrowed and lent.
Since its debts could be contracted only with contemporary cultures as
high as its own, they were owed mainly to Egypt and Babylonia, while
its loans went out chiefly to lower civilisations further removed
than itself from the eastern centres, those, namely, of the European
continent. As regards Egypt, something has been said already of its
intercourse with the Ægean in all ages of the latter’s prehistoric
period. The evidence of that intercourse, known even before the
exploration of Crete, was fairly abundant, though limited almost
entirely to later ages of Ægean culture, often called particularly
“Mycenæan.” The “pre-Cretan” case was set forth very concisely in a
paper read before the Royal Society of Literature in 1897 by Professor
Flinders Petrie, who enumerated the objects of Egyptian fabric or style
found on Ægean sites, notably at Mycenæ, and in Cyprus and Rhodes; and
of objects of Ægean style or fabric found in Egypt, notably at Thebes,
Memphis and Tell-el-Amarna and in the Fayum. One word of warning only
may be added--that the occurrence of such imported objects, especially
if they be of the amulet class, on a site of a certain date does not
necessarily imply exact contemporaneity with the period at which the
objects were actually produced; for they may well have been carried
hither and thither in the stream of trade for some time ere coming to
rest, and been long preserved afterwards. Some of the Cypriote and
Rhodian tombs, for example, in which scarabs and other Egyptian objects
of the Eighteenth Pharaonic Dynasty have been found, are probably
considerably later than that dynasty.