And it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world _A Short History of the World

there is sowing and harvesting there is still traceable the vestiges of

a strong primitive association of the idea of sowing with the idea of a

blood sacrifice, and primarily of the sacrifice of a human being. The

study of the original entanglement of these two things is a profoundly

attractive one to the curious mind; the interested reader will find it

very fully developed in that monumental work, Sir J. G. Frazer’s

_Golden Bough_. It was an entanglement, we must remember, in the

childish, dreaming, myth-making primitive mind; no reasoned process

will explain it. But in that world of 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, it

would seem that whenever seed time came round to the Neolithic peoples

there was a human sacrifice. And it was not the sacrifice of any mean

or outcast person; it was the sacrifice usually of a chosen youth or

maiden, a youth more often who was treated with profound deference and

even worship up to the moment of his immolation. He was a sort of

sacrificial god-king, and all the details of his killing had become a

ritual directed by the old, knowing men and sanctioned by the

accumulated usage of ages.

NEOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS

_Brit. Mus._

At first primitive men, with only a very rough idea of the seasons,

must have found great difficulty in determining when was the propitious

moment for the seed-time sacrifice and the sowing. There is some

reason for supposing that there was an early stage in human experience

when men had no idea of a year. The first chronology was in lunar

months; it is supposed that the years of the Biblical patriarchs are

really moons, and the Babylonian calendar shows distinct traces of an

attempt to reckon seed time by taking thirteen lunar months to see it

round. This lunar influence upon the calendar reaches down to our own

days. If usage did not dull our sense of its strangeness we should

think it a very remarkable thing indeed that the Christian Church does

not commemorate the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ on the

proper anniversaries but on dates that vary year by year with the

phases of the moon.

It may be doubted whether the first agriculturalists made any

observation of the stars. It is more likely that stars were first

observed by migratory herdsmen, who found them a convenient mark of

direction. But once their use in determining seasons was realized,

their importance to agriculture became very great. The seed-time

sacrifice was linked up with the southing or northing of some prominent

star. A myth and worship of that star was for primitive man an almost

inevitable consequence.

NEOLITHICISM OF TO-DAY

Spearheads, exactly as in the true Neolithic days, but made recently by

Australian Natives,

(1) Made from a telegraph insulator;

(2) from a piece of broken bottle glass.

_Brit. Mus._

It is easy to see how important the man of knowledge and experience,

the man who knew about the blood sacrifice and the stars, became in

this early Neolithic world.

The fear of uncleanness and pollution, and the methods of cleansing

that were advisable, constituted another source of power for the

knowledgeable men and women. For there have always been witches as well

as wizards, and priestesses as well as priests. The early priest was

really not so much a religious man as a man of applied science. His

science was generally empirical and often bad; he kept it secret from

the generality of men very jealously; but that does not alter the fact

that his primary function was knowledge and that his primary use was a

practical use.

SPECIMEN OF NEOLITHIC POTTERY

Dug up at Mortlake from the Thames Bed

_Brit. Mus._

Twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, in all the warm and fairly

well-watered parts of the Old World these Neolithic human communities,

with their class and tradition of priests and priestesses and their

cultivated fields and their development of villages and little walled

cities, were spreading. Age by age a drift and exchange of ideas went

on between these communities. Eliot Smith and Rivers have used the

term “Heliolithic culture” for the culture of these first agricultural

peoples. “Heliolithic” (Sun and Stone) is not perhaps the best

possible word to use for this, but until scientific men give us a

better one we shall have to use it. Originating somewhere in the

Mediterranean and western Asiatic area, it spread age by age eastward

and from island to island across the Pacific until it may even have

reached America and mingled with the more primitive ways of living of

the Mongoloid immigrants coming down from the North.

Wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture went they

took with them all or most of a certain group of curious ideas and

practices. Some of them are such queer ideas that they call for the

explanation of the mental expert. They made pyramids and great mounds,

and set up great circles of big stones, perhaps to facilitate the

astronomical observation of the priests; they made mummies of some or

all of their dead; they tattooed and circumcized; they had the old

custom, known as the _couvade_, of sending the _father_ to bed and rest

when a child was born, and they had as a luck symbol the well-known

Swastika.

If we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how far these

group practices have left their traces, we should make a belt along the

temperate and sub-tropical coasts of the world from Stonehenge and

Spain across the world to Mexico and Peru. But Africa below the

equator, north central Europe, and north Asia would show none of these

dottings; there lived races who were developing along practically

independent lines.

[1] The term Palæolithic we may note is also used to cover the

Neanderthaler and even the Eolithic implements. The pre-human age is

called the “Older Palæolithic;” the age of true men using unpolished

stones in the “Newer Palæolithic.”

XIV

PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS

About 10,000 B.C. the geography of the world was very similar in its

general outline to that of the world to-day. It is probable that by

that time the great barrier across the Straits of Gibraltar that had

hitherto banked back the ocean waters from the Mediterranean valley had

been eaten through, and that the Mediterranean was a sea following much

the same coastlines as it does now. The Caspian Sea was probably still

far more extensive than it is at present, and it may have been

continuous with the Black Sea to the north of the Caucasus Mountains.

About this great Central Asian sea lands that are now steppes and

deserts were fertile and habitable. Generally it was a moister and more

fertile world. European Russia was much more a land of swamp and lake

than it is now, and there may still have been a land connexion between

Asia and America at Behring Straits.

It would have been already possible at that time to have distinguished

the main racial divisions of mankind as we know them to-day. Across

the warm temperate regions of this rather warmer and better-wooded

world, and along the coasts, stretched the brownish peoples of the

Heliolithic culture, the ancestors of the bulk of the living

inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, of the Berbers, the Egyptians

and of much of the population of South and Eastern Asia. This great

race had of course a number of varieties. The Iberian or Mediterranean

or “dark-white” race of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coast, the

“Hamitic” peoples which include the Berbers and Egyptians, the

Dravidians; the darker people of India, a multitude of East Indian

people, many Polynesian races and the Maoris are all divisions of

various value of this great main mass of humanity. Its western

varieties are whiter than its eastern.

In the forests of central and northern Europe a more blonde variety of

men with blue eyes was becoming distinguishable, branching off from the

main mass of brownish people, a variety which many people now speak of

as the Nordic race. In the more open regions of northeastern Asia was

another differentiation of this brownish humanity in the direction of a

type with more oblique eyes, high cheek-bones, a yellowish skin, and

very straight black hair, the Mongolian peoples. In South Africa,

Australia, in many tropical islands in the south of Asia were remains

of the early negroid peoples. The central parts of Africa were already

a region of racial intermixture. Nearly all the coloured races of

Africa to-day seem to be blends of the brownish peoples of the north

with a negroid substratum.

A Diagrammatic Summary of Current Ideas of the Relationship of Human

Races

We have to remember that human races can all interbreed freely and that

they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds do. Human races do not

branch out like trees with branches that never come together again. It

is a thing we need to bear constantly in mind, this remingling of races

at any opportunity. It will save us from many cruel delusions and

prejudices if we do so. People will use such a word as race in the

loosest manner, and base the most preposterous generalizations upon it.

They will speak of a “British” race or of a “European” race. But

nearly all the European nations are confused mixtures of brownish,

dark-white, white and Mongolian elements.

A MAYA STELE

Showing a worshipper and a Serpent God. Note the grotesque faces in

the writing

_Brit. Mus._

It was at the Neolithic phase of human development that peoples of the

Mongolian breed first made their way into America. Apparently they

came by way of Behring Straits and spread southward. They found

caribou, the American reindeer, in the north and great herds of bison

in the south. When they reached South America there were still living

the Glyptodon, a gigantic armadillo, and the Megatherium, a monstrous

clumsy sloth as high as an elephant. They probably exterminated the

latter beast, which was as helpless as it was big.

The greater portion of these American tribes never rose above a hunting

nomadic Neolithic life. They never discovered the use of iron, and

their chief metal possessions were native gold and copper. But in

Mexico, Yucatan and Peru conditions existed favourable to settled

cultivation, and here about 1000 B.C. or so arose very interesting

civilizations of a parallel but different type from the old-world

civilization. Like the much earlier primitive civilizations of the old

world these communities displayed a great development of human

sacrifice about the processes of seed time and harvest; but while in

the old world, as we shall see, these primary ideas were ultimately

mitigated, complicated and overlaid by others, in America they

developed and were elaborated, to a very high degree of intensity.

These American civilized countries were essentially priest-ruled

countries; their war chiefs and rulers were under a rigorous rule of

law and omen.

These priests carried astronomical science to a high level of accuracy.

They knew their year better than the Babylonians of whom we shall

presently tell. In Yucatan they had a kind of writing, the Maya

writing, of the most curious and elaborate character. So far as we

have been able to decipher it, it was used mainly for keeping the exact

and complicated calendars upon which the priests expended their

intelligence. The art of the Maya civilization came to a climax about

700 or 800 A.D. The sculptured work of these people amazes the modern

observer by its great plastic power and its frequent beauty, and

perplexes him by a grotesqueness and by a sort of insane

conventionality and intricacy outside the circle of his ideas. There

is nothing quite like it in the old world. The nearest approach, and

that is a remote one, is found in archaic Indian carvings. Everywhere

there are woven feathers and serpents twine in and out. Many Maya

inscriptions resemble a certain sort of elaborate drawing made by

lunatics in European asylums, more than any other old-world work. It

is as if the Maya mind had developed upon a different line from the

old-world mind, had a different twist to its ideas, was not, by

old-world standards, a rational mind at all.

This linking of these aberrant American civilizations to the idea of a

general mental aberration finds support in their extraordinary

obsession by the shedding of human blood. The Mexican civilization in

particular ran blood; it offered thousands of human victims yearly.

The cutting open of living victims, the tearing out of the still

beating heart, was an act that dominated the minds and lives of these

strange priesthoods. The public life, the national festivities all

turned on this fantastically horrible act.

NEOLITHIC WARRIOR

Modelled from drawing by Prof. Rutot

The ordinary existence of the common people in these communities was

very like the ordinary existence of any other barbaric peasantry.

Their pottery, weaving and dyeing was very good. The Maya writing was

not only carven on stone but written and painted upon skins and the

like. The European and American museums contain many enigmatical Maya

manuscripts of which at present little has been deciphered except the

dates. In Peru there were beginnings of a similar writing but they

were superseded by a method of keeping records by knotting cords. A

similar method of mnemonics was in use in China thousands of years ago.

In the old world before 4000 or 5000 B.C., that is to say three or four

thousand years earlier, there were primitive civilizations not unlike

these American civilizations; civilizations based upon a temple, having

a vast quantity of blood sacrifices and with an intensely astronomical

priesthood. But in the old world the primitive civilizations reacted

upon one another and developed towards the conditions of our own world.

In America these primitive civilizations never progressed beyond this

primitive stage. Each of them was in a little world of its own.

Mexico it seems knew little or nothing of Peru, until the Europeans

came to America. The potato, which was the principal food stuff in

Peru, was unknown in Mexico.

Age by age these peoples lived and marvelled at their gods and made

their sacrifices and died. Maya art rose to high levels of decorative

beauty. Men made love and tribes made war. Drought and plenty,

pestilence and health, followed one another. The priests elaborated

their calendar and their sacrificial ritual through long centuries, but

made little progress in other directions.

SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING

The old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000 or

7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilized communities almost at the

Peruvian level, appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and in the

Nile valley. At that time north Persia and western Turkestan and south

Arabia were all more fertile than they are now, and there are traces of

very early communities in these regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia

however and in Egypt that there first appear cities, temples,

systematic irrigation, and evidences of a social organization rising

above the level of a mere barbaric village-town. In those days the

Euphrates and Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf,

and it was in the country between them that the Sumerians built their

first cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the

great history of Egypt was beginning.

These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with prominent

noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been deciphered, and

their language is now known. They had discovered the use of bronze and

they built great tower-like temples of sun-dried brick. The clay of

this country is very fine; they used it to write upon, and so it is

that their inscriptions have been preserved to us. They had cattle,

sheep, goats and asses, but no horses. They fought on foot, in close

formation, carrying spears and shields of skin. Their clothing was of

wool and they shaved their heads.

Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been an independent

state with a god of its own and priests of its own. But sometimes one

city would establish an ascendancy over others and exact tribute from

their population. A very ancient inscription at Nippur records the

“empire,” the first recorded empire, of the Sumerian city of Erech.

Its god and its priest-king claimed an authority from the Persian Gulf

to the Red Sea.

BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C.

Note the cuneiform characters of the inscription, which records the

building of a temple to a Sun God

At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial record.

Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write. The Azilian

rock pictures to which we have already referred show the beginning of

the process. Many of them record hunts and expeditions, and in most of

these the human figures are plainly drawn. But in some the painter

would not bother with head and limbs; he just indicated men by a

vertical and one or two transverse strokes. From this to a

conventional condensed picture writing was an easy transition. In

Sumeria, where the writing was done on clay with a stick, the dabs of

the characters soon became unrecognizably unlike the things they stood

for, but in Egypt where men painted on walls and on strips of the

papyrus reed (the first paper) the likeness to the thing imitated

remained. From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria made

wedge-shaped marks, the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform (=

wedge-shaped).

EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY

Recovered from the Tombs at Abydos in 1921 by the British School of

Archæology. They give evidence of early form of block printing

An important step towards writing was made when pictures were used to

indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing. In the

rebus dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done to-day.

We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child is delighted to

guess that this is the Scotch name Campbell. The Sumerian language was

a language made up of accumulated syllables rather like some

contemporary Amerindian languages, and it lent itself very readily to

this syllabic method of writing words expressing ideas that could not

be conveyed by pictures directly. Egyptian writing underwent parallel

developments. Later on, when foreign peoples with less distinctly

syllabled methods of speech were to learn and use these picture scripts

they were to make those further modifications and simplifications that

developed at last into alphabetical writing. All the true alphabets of

the later world derived from a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and

the Egyptian hieroglyphic (priest writing). Later in China there was

to develop a conventionalized picture writing, but in China it never

got to the alphabetical stage.

The invention of writing was of very great importance in the

development of human societies. It put agreements, laws, commandments

on record. It made the growth of states larger than the old city

states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness

possible. The command of the priest or king and his seal could go far

beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. It is

interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals were greatly used. A

king or a nobleman or a merchant would have his seal often very

artistically carved, and would impress it on any clay document he

wished to authorize. So close had civilization got to printing six

thousand years ago. Then the clay was dried hard and became permanent.

For the reader must remember that in the land of Mesopotamia for

countless years, letters, records and accounts were all written on

comparatively indestructible tiles. To that fact we owe a great wealth

of recovered knowledge.

THE SAKHARA PYRAMIDS

The Pyramid to the right, the step Pyramid, is the oldest stone

building in the world

_Photo: F. Boyer_

Bronze, copper, gold, silver and, as a precious rarity, meteoric iron

were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a very early stage.

VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT OF THE GREAT PYRAMID OF CHEOPS

Showing how these great monuments dominate the plain

_Photo: D. McLeish_

THE TEMPLE OF HATHOR AT DENDEREH

_Photo: D. McLeish_

Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have been

very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria. And except for the asses and

cattle in the streets it must have been not unlike the life in the Maya

cities of America three or four thousand years later. Most of the

people in peace time were busy with irrigation and cultivation—except

on days of religious festivity. They had no money and no need for it.

They managed their small occasional trades by barter. The princes and

rulers who alone had more than a few possessions used gold and silver

bars and precious stones for any incidental act of trade. The temple

dominated life; in Sumeria it was a great towering temple that went up

to a roof from which the stars were observed; in Egypt it was a massive

building with only a ground floor. In Sumeria the priest ruler was the

greatest, most splendid of beings. In Egypt however there was one who

was raised above the priests; he was the living incarnation of the

chief god of the land, the Pharaoh, the god king.

There were few changes in the world in those days; men’s days were

sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers came into the land and

such as did fared uncomfortably. The priest directed life according to

immemorial rules and watched the stars for seed time and marked the

omens of the sacrifices and interpreted the warnings of dreams. Men

worked and loved and died, not unhappily, forgetful of the savage past

of their race and heedless of its future. Sometimes the ruler was

benign. Such was Pepi II, who reigned in Egypt for ninety years.

Sometimes he was ambitious and took men’s sons to be soldiers and sent

them against neighbouring city states to war and plunder, or he made

them toil to build great buildings. Such were Cheops and Chephren and

Mycerinus, who built those vast sepulchral piles, the pyramids at

Gizeh. The largest of these is 450 feet high and the weight of stone in

it is 4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down the Nile in boats and

lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. Its erection must have

exhausted Egypt more than a great war would have done.

XVI

PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES

It was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that men were

settling down to agriculture and the formation of city states in the

centuries between 6000 and 8000 B.C. Wherever there were possibilities

of irrigation and a steady all-the-year-round food supply men were

exchanging the uncertainties and hardships of hunting and wandering for

the routines of settlement. On the upper Tigris a people called the

Assyrians were founding cities; in the valleys of Asia Minor and on the

Mediterranean shores and islands, there were small communities growing

up to civilization. Possibly parallel developments of human life were

already going on in favourable regions of India, and China. In many

parts of Europe where there were lakes well stocked with fish, little

communities of men had long settled in dwellings built on piles over

the water, and were eking out agriculture by fishing and hunting. But

over much larger areas of the old world no such settlement was

possible. The land was too harsh, too thickly wooded or too arid, or

the seasons too uncertain for mankind, with only the implements and

science of that age to take root.

For settlement under the conditions of the primitive civilizations men

needed a constant water supply and warmth and sunshine. Where these

needs were not satisfied, man could live as a transient, as a hunter

following his game, as a herdsman following the seasonal grass, but he

could not settle. The transition from the hunting to the herding life

may have been very gradual. From following herds of wild cattle or (in

Asia) wild horses, men may have come to an idea of property in them,

have learnt to pen them into valleys, have fought for them against

wolves, wild dogs and other predatory beasts.

POTTERY AND IMPLEMENTS OF THE LAKE DWELLERS

_Brit. Mus._

A CONTEMPORARY LAKE VILLAGE

And it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world wherever