These Borneo dwellings are practically counterparts of the h_A Short History of the World

European neolithic communities 6000 B.C.

So while the primitive civilizations of the cultivators were growing up

chiefly in the great river valleys, a different way of living, the

nomadic life, a life in constant movement to and fro from winter

pasture to summer pasture, was also growing up. The nomadic peoples

were on the whole hardier than the agriculturalists; they were less

prolific and numerous, they had no permanent temples and no highly

organized priesthood; they had less gear; but the reader must not

suppose that theirs was necessarily a less highly developed way of

living on that account. In many ways this free life was a fuller life

than that of the tillers of the soil. The individual was more

self-reliant; less of a unit in a crowd. The leader was more

important; the medicine man perhaps less so.

NOMADS IN EGYPT

Egyptian wall painting in a tomb near ancient Beni Hassan, middle

Egypt. It depicts the arrival of a tribe of Semitic Nomads in Egypt

about the year of 1895 B.C.

Moving over large stretches of country the nomad took a wider view of

life. He touched on the confines of this settled land and that. He

was used to the sight of strange faces. He had to scheme and treat for

pasture with competing tribes. He knew more of minerals than the folk

upon the plough lands because he went over mountain passes and into

rocky places. He may have been a better metallurgist. Possibly bronze

and much more probably iron smelting were nomadic discoveries. Some of

the earliest implements of iron reduced from its ores have been found

in Central Europe far away from the early civilizations.

FLINT KNIVES OF 4500 B.C.

Excavated 1922 by the British School of Archæology in Egypt from First

Dynasty Tombs

On the other hand the settled folk had their textiles and their pottery

and made many desirable things. It was inevitable that as the two

sorts of life, the agricultural and the nomadic differentiated, a

certain amount of looting and trading should develop between the two.

In Sumeria particularly which had deserts and seasonal country on

either hand it must have been usual to have the nomads camping close to

the cultivated fields, trading and stealing and perhaps tinkering, as

gipsies do to this day. (But hens they would not steal, because the

domestic fowl—an Indian jungle fowl originally was not domesticated by

man until about 1000 B.C.) They would bring precious stones and things

of metal and leather. If they were hunters they would bring skins.

They would get in exchange pottery and beads and glass, garments and

suchlike manufactured things.

EGYPT PEASANTS GOING TO WORK

From an ancient and curiously painted model in the British Museum

Three main regions and three main kinds of wandering and imperfectly

settled people there were in those remote days of the first

civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in the forests of

Europe were the blonde Nordic peoples, hunters and herdsmen, a lowly

race. The primitive civilizations saw very little of this race before

1500 B.C. Away on the steppes of eastern Asia various Mongolian

tribes, the Hunnish peoples, were domesticating the horse and

developing a very wide sweeping habit of seasonal movement between

their summer and winter camping places. Possibly the Nordic and Hunnish

peoples were still separated from one another by the swamps of Russia

and the greater Caspian Sea of that time. For very much of Russia

there was swamp and lake. In the deserts, which were growing more arid

now, of Syria and Arabia, tribes of a dark white or brownish people,

the Semitic tribes, were driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses

from pasture to pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and certain

more negroid people from southern Persia, the Elamites, who were the

first nomads to come into close contact with the early civilizations.

They came as traders and as raiders. Finally there arose leaders among

them with bolder imaginations, and they became conquerors.

STELE GLORIFYING KING NARAM SIN, OF AKKAD

This monarch, son of Sargon I, was a great architecht as well as a

famous conqueror. Discovered in 1898 among the ruins of Susa, Persia

About 2750 B.C. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had conquered the whole

Sumerian land and was master of all the world from the Persian Gulf to

the Mediterranean Sea. He was an illiterate barbarian and his people,

the Akkadians, learnt the Sumerian writing and adopted the Sumerian

language as the speech of the officials and the learned. The empire he

founded decayed after two centuries, and after one inundation of

Elamites a fresh Semitic people, the Amorites, by degrees established

their rule over Sumeria. They made their capital in what had hitherto

been a small up-river town, Babylon, and their empire is called the

first Babylonian Empire. It was consolidated by a great king called

Hammurabi (circa 2100 B.C.) who made the earliest code of laws yet

known to history.

The narrow valley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic invasion than

Mesopotamia, but about the time of Hammurabi occurred a successful

Semitic invasion of Egypt and a line of Pharaohs was set up, the Hyksos

or “shepherd kings,” which lasted for several centuries. These Semitic

conquerors never assimilated themselves with the Egyptians; they were

always regarded with hostility as foreigners and barbarians; and they

were at last expelled by a popular uprising about 1600 B.C.

But the Semites had come into Sumeria for good and all, the two races

assimilated and the Babylonian Empire became Semitic in its language

and character.

XVII

THE FIRST SEAGOING PEOPLES

The earliest boats and ships must have come into use some twenty-five

or thirty thousand years ago. Man was probably paddling about on the

water with a log of wood or an inflated skin to assist him, at latest

in the beginnings of the Neolithic period. A basketwork boat covered

with skin and caulked was used in Egypt and Sumeria from the beginnings

of our knowledge. Such boats are still used there. They are used to

this day in Ireland and Wales and in Alaska; sealskin boats still make

the crossing of Behring Straits. The hollow log followed as tools

improved. The building of boats and then ships came in a natural

succession.

Perhaps the legend of Noah’s Ark preserves the memory of some early

exploit in shipbuilding, just as the story of the Flood, so widely

distributed among the peoples of the world, may be the tradition of the

flooding of the Mediterranean basin.

There were ships upon the Red Sea long before the pyramids were built,

and there were ships on the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf by 7000 B.C.

Mostly these were the ships of fishermen, but some were already

trading and pirate ships—for knowing what we do of mankind we may guess

pretty safely that the first sailors plundered where they could and

traded where they had to do so.

The seas on which these first ships adventured were inland seas on

which the wind blew fitfully and which were often at a dead calm for

days together, so that sailing did not develop beyond an accessory use.

It is only in the last four hundred years that the well-rigged,

ocean-going, sailing ship has developed. The ships of the ancient

world were essentially rowing ships which hugged the shore and went

into harbour at the first sign of rough weather. As ships grew into

big galleys they caused a demand for war captives as galley slaves.

We have already noted the appearance of the Semitic people as wanderers

and nomads in the region of Syria and Arabia, and how they conquered

Sumeria and set up first the Akkadian and then the first Babylonian

Empire. In the west these same Semitic peoples were taking to the sea.

They set up a string of harbour towns along the Eastern coast of the

Mediterranean, of which Tyre and Sidon were the chief; and by the time

of Hammurabi in Babylon, they had spread as traders, wanderers and

colonizers over the whole Mediterranean basin. These sea Semites were

called the Phœnicians, They settled largely in Spain, pushing back the

old Iberian Basque population and sending coasting expeditions through

the straits of Gibraltar; and they set up colonies upon the north coast

of Africa. Of Carthage, one of these Phœnician cities, we shall have

much more to tell later.

But the Phœnicians were not the first people to have galleys in the

Mediterranean waters. There was already a series of towns and cities

among the islands and coasts of that sea belonging to a race or races

apparently connected by blood and language with the Basques to the west

and the Berbers and Egyptians to the south, the Ægean peoples. These

peoples must not be confused with the Greeks, who come much later into

our story; they were pre-Greek, but they had cities in Greece and Asia

Minor; Mycenæ and Troy for example, and they had a great and prosperous

establishment at Cnossos in Crete.

It is only in the last half century that the industry of excavating

archæologists has brought the extent and civilization of the Ægean

peoples to our knowledge. Cnossos has been most thoroughly explored; it

was happily not succeeded by any city big enough to destroy its ruins,

and so it is our chief source of information about this once almost

forgotten civilization.

The history of Cnossos goes back as far as the history of Egypt; the

two countries were trading actively across the sea by 4000 B.C. By

2500 B.C., that is between the time of Sargon I and Hammurabi, Cretan

civilization was at its zenith.

Cnossos was not so much a town as a great palace for the Cretan monarch

and his people. It was not even fortified. It was only fortified later

as the Phœnicians grew strong, and as a new and more terrible breed of

pirates, the Greeks, came upon the sea from the north.

THE TREASURE HOUSE AT MYCENÆ

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

The monarch was called Minos, as the Egyptian monarch was called

Pharaoh; and he kept his state in a palace fitted with running water,

with bathrooms and the like conveniences such as we know of in no other

ancient remains. There he held great festivals and shows. There was

bull-fighting, singularly like the bull-fighting that still survives in

Spain; there was resemblance even in the costumes of the bull-fighters;

and there were gymnastic displays. The women’s clothes were remarkably

modern in spirit; they wore corsets and flounced dresses. The pottery,

the textile manufactures, the sculpture, painting, jewellery, ivory,

metal and inlay work of these Cretans was often astonishingly

beautiful. And they had a system of writing, but that still remains to

be deciphered.

This happy and sunny and civilized life lasted for some score of

centuries. About 2000 B.C. Cnossos and Babylon abounded in comfortable

and cultivated people who probably led very pleasant lives. They had

shows and they had religious festivals, they had domestic slaves to

look after them and industrial slaves to make a profit for them. Life

must have seemed very secure in Cnossos for such people, sunlit and

girdled by the blue sea. Egypt of course must have appeared rather a

declining country in those days under the rule of her half-barbaric

shepherd kings, and if one took an interest in politics one must have

noticed how the Semitic people seemed to be getting everywhere, ruling

Egypt, ruling distant Babylon, building Nineveh on the upper Tigris,

sailing west to the Pillars of Hercules (the straits of Gibraltar) and

setting up their colonies on those distant coasts.

There were some active arid curious minds in Cnossos, because later on

the Greeks told legends of a certain skilful Cretan artificer, Dædalus,

who attempted to make some sort of flying machine, perhaps a glider,

which collapsed and fell into the sea.

It is interesting to note some of the differences as well as the

resemblances between the life of Cnossos and our own. To a Cretan

gentleman of 2500 B.C. iron was a rare metal which fell out of the sky

and was curious rather than useful—for as yet only meteoric iron was

known, iron had not been obtained from its ores. Compare that with our

modern state of affairs pervaded by iron everywhere. The horse again

would be a quite legendary creature to our Cretan, a sort of super-ass

which lived in the bleak northern lands far away beyond the Black Sea.

Civilization for him dwelt chiefly in Ægean Greece and Asia Minor,

where Lydians and Carians and Trojans lived a life and probably spoke

languages like his own. There were Phœnicians and Ægeans settled in

Spain and North Africa, but those were very remote regions to his

imagination. Italy was still a desolate land covered with dense

forests; the brown-skinned Etruscans had not yet gone there from Asia

Minor. And one day perhaps this Cretan gentleman went down to the

harbour and saw a captive who attracted his attention because he was

very fair-complexioned and had blue eyes. Perhaps our Cretan tried to

talk to him and was answered in an unintelligible gibberish. This

creature came from somewhere beyond the Black Sea and seemed to be an

altogether benighted savage. But indeed he was an Aryan tribesman, of

a race and culture of which we shall soon have much to tell, and the

strange gibberish he spoke was to differentiate some day into Sanskrit,

Persian, Greek, Latin, German, English and most of the chief languages

of the world.

THE PALACE AT CNOSSOS

The painted walls of the Throne Room

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

Such was Cnossos at its zenith, intelligent, enterprising, bright and

happy. But about 1400 B.C. disaster came perhaps very suddenly upon

its prosperity. The palace of Minos was destroyed, and its ruins have

never been rebuilt or inhabited from that day to this. We do not know

how this disaster occurred. The excavators note what appears to be

scattered plunder and the marks of the fire. But the traces of a very

destructive earthquake have also been found. Nature alone may have

destroyed Cnossos, or the Greeks may have finished what the earthquake

began.

XVIII

EGYPT, BABYLON AND ASSYRIA

The Egyptians had never submitted very willingly to the rule of their

Semitic shepherd kings and about 1600 A.D. a vigorous patriotic

movement expelled these foreigners. Followed a new phase or revival for

Egypt, a period known to Egyptologists as the New Empire. Egypt, which

had not been closely consolidated before the Hyksos invasion, was now a

united country; and the phase of subjugation and insurrection left her

full of military spirit. The Pharaohs became aggressive conquerors.

They had now acquired the war horse and the war chariot, which the

Hyksos had brought to them. Under Thothmes III and Amenophis III Egypt

had extended her rule into Asia as far as the Euphrates.

We are entering now upon a thousand years of warfare between the once

quite separated civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile. At first

Egypt was ascendant. The great dynasties, the Seventeenth Dynasty,

which included Thothmes III and Amenophis III and IV and a great queen

Hatasu, and the Nineteenth, when Rameses II, supposed by some to have

been the Pharaoh of Moses, reigned for sixty-seven years, raised Egypt

to high levels of prosperity. In between there were phases of

depression for Egypt, conquest by the Syrians and later conquest by the

Ethiopians from the South. In Mesopotamia Babylon ruled, then the

Hittites and the Syrians of Damascus rose to a transitory predominance;

at one time the Syrians conquered Egypt; the fortunes of the Assyrians

of Nineveh ebbed and flowed; sometimes the city was a conquered city;

sometimes the Assyrians ruled in Babylon and assailed Egypt. Our space

is too limited here to tell of the comings and goings of the armies of

the Egyptians and of the various Semitic powers of Asia Minor, Syria

and Mesopotamia. They were armies now provided with vast droves of war

chariots, for the horse—still used only for war and glory—had spread by

this time into the old civilizations from Central Asia.

TEMPLE AT ABU SIMBEL

Showing the statues of Rameses II at entrance

Great conquerors appear in the dim light of that distant time and pass,

Tushratta, King of Mitanni, who captured Nineveh, Tiglath Pileser I of

Assyria who conquered Babylon. At last the Assyrians became the

greatest military power of the time. Tiglath Pileser III conquered

Babylon in 745 B.C. and founded what historians call the New Assyrian

Empire. Iron had also come now into civilization out of the north; the

Hittites, the precursors of the Armenians, had it first and

communicated its use to the Assyrians, and an Assyrian usurper, Sargon

II, armed his troops with it. Assyria became the first power to

expound the doctrine of blood and iron. Sargon’s son Sennacherib led

an army to the borders of Egypt, and was defeated not by military

strength but by the plague. Sennacherib’s grandson Assurbanipal (who is

also known in history by his Greek name of Sardanapalus) did actually

conquer Egypt in 670 B.C. But Egypt was already a conquered country

then under an Ethiopian dynasty. Sardanapalus simply replaced one

conqueror by another.

AVENUE OF SPHINXES

Leading from the Nile to the great Temple of Karnak

_Photo: D. McLeish_

If one had a series of political maps of this long period of history,

this interval of ten centuries, we should have Egypt expanding and

contracting like an amœba under a microscope, and we should see these

various Semitic states of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites

and the Syrians coming and going, eating each other up and disgorging

each other again. To the west of Asia Minor there would be little

Ægean states like Lydia, whose capital was Sardis, and Caria. But

after about 1200 B.C. and perhaps earlier, a new set of names would

come into the map of the ancient world from the north-east and from the

north- west. These would be the names of certain barbaric tribes,

armed with iron weapons and using horse-chariots, who were becoming a

great affliction to the Ægean and Semitic civilizations on the northern

borders. They all spoke variants of what once must have been the same

language, Aryan.

THE GREAT HYPOSTYLE HALL AT KARNAK

_Photo: D. McLeish_

Round the north-east of the Black and Caspian Seas were coming the

Medes and Persians. Confused with these in the records of the time

were Scythians and Samatians. From north-east or north-west came the

Armenians, from the north- west of the sea-barrier through the Balkan

peninsula came Cimmerians, Phrygians and the Hellenic tribes whom now

we call the Greeks. They were raiders and robbers and plunderers of

cities, these Ayrans, east and west alike. They were all kindred and

similar peoples, hardy herdsmen who had taken to plunder. In the east

they were still only borderers and raiders, but in the west they were

taking cities and driving out the civilized Ægean populations. The

Ægean peoples were so pressed that they were seeking new homes in lands

beyond the Aryan range. Some were seeking a settlement in the delta of

the Nile and being repulsed by the Egyptians; some, the Etruscans, seem

to have sailed from Asia Minor to found a state in the forest

wildernesses of middle Italy; some built themselves cities upon the

south- east coasts of the Mediterranean and became later that people

known in history as the Philistines.

Of these Aryans who came thus rudely upon the scene of the ancient

civilizations we will tell more fully in a later section. Here we note

simply all this stir and emigration amidst the area of the ancient

civilizations, that was set up by the swirl of the gradual and

continuous advance of these Aryan barbarians out of the northern

forests and wildernesses between 1600 and 600 B.C.

And in a section to follow we must tell also of a little Semitic

people, the Hebrews, in the hills behind the Phœnician and Philistine

coasts, who began to be of significance in the world towards the end of

this period. They produced a literature of very great importance in

subsequent history, a collection of books, histories, poems, books of

wisdom and prophetic works, the Hebrew Bible.

In Mesopotamia and Egypt the coming of the Aryans did not cause

fundamental changes until after 600 B.C. The flight of the Ægeans

before the Greeks and even the destruction of Cnossos must have seemed

a very remote disturbance to both the citizens of Egypt and of Babylon.

Dynasties came and went in these cradle states of civilization, but

the main tenor of human life went on, with a slow increase in

refinement and complexity age by age. In Egypt the accumulated

monuments of more ancient times—the pyramids were already in their

third thousand of years and a show for visitors just as they are to-

day—were supplemented by fresh and splendid buildings, more

particularly in the time of the seventeenth and nineteenth dynasties.

The great temples at Karnak and Luxor date from this time. All the

chief monuments of Nineveh, the great temples, the winged bulls with

human heads, the reliefs of kings and chariots and lion hunts, were

done in these centuries between 1600 and 600 B.C., and this period also

covers most of the splendours of Babylon.

FRIEZE SHOWING EGYPTIAN FEMALE SLAVES CARRYING LUXURIOUS FOODS

_Photo: Jacques Boyer_

Both from Mesopotamia and Egypt we now have abundant public records,

business accounts, stories, poetry and private correspondence. We know

that life, for prosperous and influential people in such cities as

Babylon and the Egyptian Thebes, was already almost as refined and as

luxurious as that of comfortable and prosperous people to-day. Such

people lived an orderly and ceremonious life in beautiful and

beautifully furnished and decorated houses, wore richly decorated

clothing and lovely jewels; they had feasts and festivals, entertained

one another with music and dancing, were waited upon by highly trained

servants, were cared for by doctors and dentists. They did not travel

very much or very far, but boating excursions were a common summer

pleasure both on the Nile and on the Euphrates. The beast of burthen

was the ass; the horse was still used only in chariots for war and upon

occasions of state. The mule was still novel and the camel, though it

was known in Mesopotamia, had not been brought into Egypt. And there

were few utensils of iron; copper and bronze remained the prevailing

metals. Fine linen and cotton fabrics were known as well as wool. But

there was no silk yet. Glass was known and beautifully coloured, but

glass things were usually small. There was no clear glass and no

optical use of glass. People had gold stoppings in their teeth but no

spectacles on their noses.

One odd contrast between the life of old Thebes or Babylon and modern

life was the absence of coined money. Most trade was still done by

barter. Babylon was financially far ahead of Egypt. Gold and silver

were used for exchange and kept in ingots; and there were bankers,

before coinage, who stamped their names and the weight on these lumps

of precious metal. A merchant or traveller would carry precious stones

to sell to pay for his necessities. Most servants and workers were

slaves who were paid not money but in kind. As money came in slavery

declined.

A modern visitor to these crowning cities of the ancient world would

have missed two very important articles of diet; there were no hens and

no eggs. A French cook would have found small joy in Babylon. These

things came from the East somewhere about the time of the last Assyrian

empire.

These Borneo dwellings are practically counterparts of the homes of