sacrifice for instance had long since disappeared; animals or bread
dummies had been substituted for the victim. (But the Phœnicians and
especially the citizens of Carthage, their greatest settlement in
Africa, were accused, later of immolating human beings.) When a great
chief had died in the ancient days it had been customary to sacrifice
his wives and slaves and break spear and bow at his tomb so that he
should not go unattended and unarmed in the spirit world. In Egypt
there survived of this dark tradition the pleasant custom of burying
small models of house and shop and servants and cattle with the dead,
models that give us to-day the liveliest realization of the safe and
cultivated life of these ancient people, three thousand years and more
ago.
THE TEMPLE OF HORUS AT EDFU
THE TEMPLE OF HORUS AT EDFU
Such was the ancient world before the coming of the Aryans out of the
northern forests and plains. In India and China there were parallel
developments. In the great valleys of both these regions agricultural
city states of brownish peoples were growing up, but in India they do
not seem to have advanced or coalesced so rapidly as the city states of
Mesopotamia or Egypt. They were nearer the level of the ancient
Sumerians or of the Maya civilization of America. Chinese history has
still to be modernized by Chinese scholars and cleared of much
legendary matter. Probably China at this time was in advance of India.
Contemporary with the seventeenth dynasty in Egypt, there was a
dynasty of emperors in China, the Shang dynasty, priest emperors over a
loose-knit empire of subordinate kings. The chief duty of these early
emperors was to perform the seasonal sacrifices. Beautiful bronze
vessels from the time of the Shang dynasty still exist, and their
beauty and workmanship compel us to recognize that many centuries of
civilization must have preceded their manufacture.
XIX
THE PRIMITIVE ARYANS
Four thousand years ago, that is to say about 2000 B.C., central and
south-eastern Europe and central Asia were probably warmer, moister and
better wooded than they are now. In these regions of the earth wandered
a group of tribes mainly of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race,
sufficiently in touch with one another to speak merely variations of
one common language from the Rhine to the Caspian Sea. At that time
they may not have been a very numerous people, and their existence was
unsuspected by the Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws, or by
the already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt which was tasting in
those days for the first time the bitterness of foreign conquest.
These Nordic people were destined to play a very important part indeed
in the world’s history. They were a people of the parklands and the
forest clearings; they had no horses at first but they had cattle; when
they wandered they put their tents and other gear on rough ox waggons;
when they settled for a time they may have made huts of wattle and mud.
They burnt their important dead; they did not bury them ceremoniously
as the brunette peoples did. They put the ashes of their greater
leaders in urns and then made a great circular mound about them. These
mounds are the “round barrows” that occur all over north Europe. The
brunette people, their predecessors, did not burn their dead but buried
them in a sitting position in elongated mounds; the “long barrows.”
The Aryans raised crops of wheat, ploughing with oxen, but they did not
settle down by their crops; they would reap and move on. They had
bronze, and somewhen about 1500 B.C. they acquired iron. They may have
been the discoverers of iron smelting. And somewhen vaguely about that
time they also got the horse—which to begin with they used only for
draught purposes. Their social life did not centre upon a temple like
that of the more settled people round the Mediterranean, and their
chief men were leaders rather than priests. They had an aristocratic
social order rather than a divine and regal order; from a very early
stage they distinguished certain families as leaderly and noble.
A BEAUTIFUL ARCHAIC AMPHORA
A BEAUTIFUL ARCHAIC AMPHORA
Compare the horses and other animals with the Altamira drawing on p.
54, and also with the Greek frieze, p. 140
They were a very vocal people. They enlivened their wanderings by
feasts, at which there was much drunkenness and at which a special sort
of man, the bards, would sing and recite. They had no writing until
they had come into contact with civilization, and the memories of these
bards were their living literature. This use of recited language as an
entertainment did much to make it a fine and beautiful instrument of
expression, and to that no doubt the subsequent predominance of the
languages derived from Aryan is, in part, to be ascribed. Every Aryan
people had its legendary history crystallized in bardic recitations,
epics, sagas and vedas, as they were variously called.
The social life of these people centred about the households of their
leading men. The hall of the chief where they settled for a time was
often a very capacious timber building. There were no doubt huts for
herds and outlying farm buildings; but with most of the Aryan peoples
this hall was the general centre, everyone went there to feast and hear
the bards and take part in games and discussions. Cowsheds and
stabling surrounded it. The chief and his wife and so forth would
sleep on a dais or in an upper gallery; the commoner sort slept about
anywhere, as people still do in Indian households. Except for weapons,
ornaments, tools and suchlike personal possessions there was a sort of
patriarchal communism in the tribe. The chief owned the cattle and
grazing lands in the common interest; forest and rivers were the wild.
This was the fashion of the people who were increasing and multiplying
over the great spaces of central Europe and west central Asia during
the growth of the great civilization of Mesopotamia and the Nile, and
whom we find pressing upon the heliolithic peoples everywhere in the
second millennium before Christ. They were coming into France and
Britain and into Spain. They pushed westward in two waves. The first
of these people who reached Britain and Ireland were armed with bronze
weapons. They exterminated or subjugated the people who had made the
great stone monuments of Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge and Avebury
in England. They reached Ireland. They are called the Goidelic Celts.
The second wave of a closely kindred people, perhaps intermixed with
other racial elements, brought iron with it into Great Britain, and is
known as the wave of Brythonic Celts. From them the Welsh derive their
language.
THE MOUND OF NIPPUR
THE MOUND OF NIPPUR
The site of a city which recent excavations have proved to date from at
least as early as 5000 B.C., and probably 1000 years earlier
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
Kindred Celtic peoples were pressing southward into Spain and coming
into contact not only with the heliolithic Basque people who still
occupied the country but with the Semitic Phœnician colonies of the sea
coast. A closely allied series of tribes, the Italians, were making
their way down the still wild and wooded Italian peninsula. They did
not always conquer. In the eighth century B.C. Rome appears in
history, a trading town on the Tiber, inhabited by Aryan Latins but
under the rule of Etruscan nobles and kings.
At the other extremity of the Aryan range there was a similar progress
southward of similar tribes. Aryan peoples, speaking Sanskrit, had
come down through the western passes into North India long before 1000
B.C. There they came into contact with a primordial brunette
civilization, the Dravidian civilization, and learnt much from it.
Other Aryan tribes seem to have spread over the mountain masses of
Central Asia far to the east of the present range of such peoples. In
Eastern Turkestan there are still fair, blue-eyed Nordic tribes, but
now they speak Mongolian tongues.
Between the Black and Caspian Seas the ancient Hittites had been
submerged and “Aryanized” by the Armenians before 1000 B.C., and the
Assyrians and Babylonians were already aware of a new and formidable
fighting barbarism on the north-eastern frontiers, a group of tribes
amidst which the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians remain as
outstanding names.
But it was through the Balkan peninsula that Aryan tribes made their
first heavy thrust into the heart of the old-world civilization. They
were already coming southward and crossing into Asia Minor many
centuries before 1000 B.C. First came a group of tribes of whom the
Phrygians were the most conspicuous, and then in succession the Æolic,
the Ionic and the Dorian Greeks. By 1000 B.C. they had wiped out the
ancient Ægean civilization both in the mainland of Greece and in most
of the Greek islands; the cities of Mycenæ and Tiryns were obliterated
and Cnossos was nearly forgotten. The Greeks had taken to the sea
before 1000 A.D., they had settled in Crete and Rhodes, and they were
founding colonies in Sicily and the south of Italy after the fashion of
the Phœnician trading cities that were dotted along the Mediterranean
coasts.
So it was, while Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II and Sardanapalus
were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt,
the Aryan peoples were learning the methods of civilization and making
it over for their own purposes in Italy and Greece and north Persia.
The theme of history from the ninth century B.C. A.D. onward for six
centuries is the story of how these Aryan peoples grew to power and
enterprise and how at last they subjugated the whole Ancient World,
Semitic, Ægean and Egyptian alike. In form the Aryan peoples were
altogether victorious; but the struggle of Aryan, Semitic and Egyptian
ideas and methods was continued long after the sceptre was in Aryan
hands. It is indeed a struggle that goes on through all the rest of
history and still in a manner continues to this day.
XX
THE LAST BABYLONIAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF DARIUS I
We have already mentioned how Assyria became a great military power
under Tiglath Pileser III and under the usurper Sargon II. Sargon was
not this man’s original name; he adopted it to flatter the conquered
Babylonians by reminding them of that ancient founder of the Akkadian
Empire, Sargon I, two thousand years before his time. Babylon, for all
that it was a conquered city, was of greater population and importance
than Nineveh, and its great god Bel Marduk and its traders and priests
had to be treated politely. In Mesopotamia in the eighth century B.C.
A.D. we are already far beyond the barbaric days when the capture of a
town meant loot and massacre. Conquerors sought to propitiate and win
the conquered. For a century and a half after Sargon the new Assyrian
empire endured and, as we have noted, Assurbanipal (Sardanapalus) held
at least lower Egypt.
But the power and solidarity of Assyria waned rapidly. Egypt by an
effort threw off the foreigner under a Pharoah Psammetichus I, and
under Necho II attempted a war of conquest in Syria. By that time
Assyria was grappling with foes nearer at hand, and could make but a
poor resistance. A Semitic people from south-east Mesopotamia, the
Chaldeans, combined with Aryan Medes and Persians from the north-east
against Nineveh, and in 606 B.C.—for now we are coming down to exact
chronology—took that city.
There was a division of the spoils of Assyria. A Median Empire was set
up in the north under Cyaxares. It included Nineveh, and its capital
was Ecbatana. Eastward it reached to the borders of India. To the
south of this in a great crescent was a new Chaldean Empire, the Second
Babylonian Empire, which rose to a very great degree of wealth and
power under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar the Great (the Nebuchadnezzar of
the Bible). The last great days, the greatest days of all, for Babylon
began. For a time the two Empires remained at peace, and the daughter
of Nebuchadnezzar was married to Cyaxares.
Meanwhile Necho II was pursuing his easy conquests in Syria. He had
defeated and slain King Josiah of Judah, a small country of which there
is more to tell presently, at the battle of Megiddo in 608 B.C., and he
pushed on to the Euphrates to encounter not a decadent Assyria but a
renascent Babylonia. The Chaldeans dealt very vigorously with the
Egyptians. Necho was routed and driven back to Egypt, and the
Babylonian frontier pushed down to the ancient Egyptian boundaries.
Map showing the relation of the Median and Second Babylonian (Chaldæan)
Empires in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great
From 606 until 589 B.C. the Second Babylonian Empire flourished
insecurely. It flourished so long as it kept the peace with the
stronger, hardier Median Empire to the north. And during these
sixty-seven years not only life but learning flourished in the ancient
city.
Map: The Empire of Darius (tribute-paying countries) at its greatest
extent
Even under the Assyrian monarchs and especially under Sardanapalus,
Babylon had been a scene of great intellectual activity. Sardanapalus,
though an Assyrian, had been quite Babylon-ized. He made a library, a
library not of paper but of the clay tablets that were used for writing
in Mesopotamia since early Sumerian days. His collection has been
unearthed and is perhaps the most precious store of historical material
in the world. The last of the Chaldean line of Babylonian monarchs,
Nabonidus, had even keener literary tastes. He patronized antiquarian
researches, and when a date was worked out by his investigators for the
accession of Sargon I he commemorated the fact by inscriptions. But
there were many signs of disunion in his empire, and he sought to
centralize it by bringing a number of the various local gods to Babylon
and setting up temples to them there. This device was to be practised
quite successfully by the Romans in later times, but in Babylon it
roused the jealousy of the powerful priesthood of Bel Marduk, the
dominant god of the Babylonians. They cast about for a possible
alternative to Nabonidus and found it in Cyrus the Persian, the ruler
of the adjacent Median Empire. Cyrus had already distinguished himself
by conquering Croesus, the rich king of Lydia in Eastern Asia Minor.
He came up against Babylon, there was a battle outside the walls, and
the gates of the city were opened to him (538 B.C.). His soldiers
entered the city without fighting. The crown prince Belshazzar, the
son of Nabonidus, was feasting, the Bible relates, when a hand appeared
and wrote in letters of fire upon the wall these mystical words:
_“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,”_ which was interpreted by the prophet
Daniel, whom he summoned to read the riddle, as “God has numbered thy
kingdom and finished it; thou art weighed in the balance and found
wanting and thy kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians.” Possibly
the priests of Bel Marduk knew something about that writing on the
wall. Belshazzar was killed that night, says the Bible. Nabonidus was
taken prisoner, and the occupation of the city was so peaceful that the
services of Bel Marduk continued without intermission.
PERSIAN MONARCH
PERSIAN MONARCH
From the ruins of Persepolis
_Photo: Miss F. Biggs_
Thus it was the Babylonian and Median empires were united. Cambyses,
the son of Cyrus, subjugated Egypt. Cambyses went mad and was
accidentally killed, and was presently succeeded by Darius the Mede,
Darius I, the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief councillors of Cyrus.
THE RUINS OF PERSEPOLIS
THE RUINS OF PERSEPOLIS
The capital city of the Persian Empire; burnt by Alexander the Great
_Photo: Major W. F. P. Rodd_
THE GREAT PORCH OF XERXES, AT PERSEPOLIS
THE GREAT PORCH OF XERXES, AT PERSEPOLIS
_Photo: Major W. F. P. Rodd_
The Persian Empire of Darius I, the first of the new Aryan empires in
the seat of the old civilizations, was the greatest empire the world
had hitherto seen. It included all Asia Minor and Syria, all the old
Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian
regions, Media, Persia, and it extended into India as far as the Indus.
Such an empire was possible because the horse and rider and the
chariot and the made-road had now been brought into the world.
Hitherto the ass and ox and the camel for desert use had afforded the
swiftest method of transport. Great arterial roads were made by the
Persian rulers to hold their new empire, and post horses were always in
waiting for the imperial messenger or the traveller with an official
permit. Moreover the world was now beginning to use coined money,
which greatly facilitated trade and intercourse. But the capital of
this vast empire was no longer Babylon. In the long run the priesthood
of Bel Marduk gained nothing by their treason. Babylon though still
important was now a declining city, and the great cities of the new
empire were Persepolis and Susa and Ecbatana. The capital was Susa.
Nineveh was already abandoned and sinking into ruins.
XXI
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS
And now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so important
in their own time as in their influence upon the later history of the
world. They were settled in Judea long before 1000 B.C., and their
capital city after that time was Jerusalem. Their story is interwoven
with that of the great empires on either side of them, Egypt to the
south and the changing empires of Syria, Assyria and Babylon to the
north. Their country was an inevitable high road between these latter
powers and Egypt.
Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they produced a
written literature, a world history, a collection of laws, chronicles,
psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction and political utterances
which became at last what Christians know as the Old Testament, the
Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in history in the fourth or
fifth century B.C.
Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We have
already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded the Assyrian Empire
while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians and
Chaldeans. Josiah King of Judah opposed him, and was defeated and
slain at Megiddo (608 B.C.). Judah became a tributary to Egypt, and
when Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean king in Babylon, rolled
back Necho into Egypt, he attempted to manage Judah by setting up
puppet kings in Jerusalem. The experiment failed, the people massacred
his Babylonian officials, and he then determined to break up this
little state altogether, which had long been playing off Egypt against
the northern empire. Jerusalem was sacked and burnt, and the remnant
of the people was carried off captive to Babylon.
There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.C.). He then
collected them together and sent them back to resettle their country
and rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem.
Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civilized or
united people. Probably only a very few of them could read or write.
In their own history one never hears of the early books of the Bible
being read; the first mention of a book is in the time of Josiah. The
Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated them. They
returned aware of their own literature, an acutely self-conscious and
political people.
Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the
Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament as
we know it. In addition, as separate books they already had many of
the other books that have since been incorporated with the Pentateuch
into the present Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for
example.
The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and of the
Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with similar
Babylonian legends; they seem to have been part of the common beliefs
of all the Semitic peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Samson
have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of Abraham
and onward begins something more special to the Jewish race.
Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in Babylon.
He was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader
must go for the story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons
and grandchildren and how they became captive in the Land of Egypt. He
travelled through Canaan, and the God of Abraham, says the Bible story,
promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him and to his
children.
And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of wandering in
the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the children of Abraham,
grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded the land of Canaan from
the Arabian deserts to the East. They may have done this somewhen
between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C.; there are no Egyptian records of Moses
nor of Canaan at this time to help out the story. But at any rate they
did not succeed in conquering any more than the hilly backgrounds of
the promised land. The coast was now in the hands, not of the
Canaanites but of newcomers, those Ægean peoples, the Philistines; and
their cities, Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully
withstood the Hebrew attack. For many generations the children of
Abraham remained an obscure people of the hilly back country engaged in
incessant bickerings with the Philistines and with the kindred tribes
about them, the Moabites, the Midianites and so forth. The reader will
find in the book of Judges a record of their struggles and disasters
during this period. For very largely it is a record of disasters and
failures frankly told.
Map: The Land of the Hebrews
For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as there was any
rule among them, by priestly judges selected by the elders of the
people, but at last somewhen towards 1000 B.C. they chose themselves a
king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul’s leading was no great
improvement upon the leading of the Judges; he perished under the hail
of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount Gilboa, his armour went
into the temple of the Philistine Venus, and his body was nailed to the
walls of Beth-shan.
MOUND AT BABYLON
THE MOUND AT BABYLON
Beneath which are the remains of a great palace of Nebuchadnezzar
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
His successor David was more successful and more politic. With David
dawned the only period of prosperity the Hebrew peoples were ever to
know. It was based on a close alliance with the Phœnician city of
Tyre, whose King Hiram seems to have been a man of very great
intelligence and enterprise. He wished to secure a trade route to the
Red Sea through the Hebrew hill country. Normally Phœnician trade went
to the Red Sea by Egypt, but Egypt was in a state of profound disorder
at this time; there may have been other obstructions to Phœnician trade
along this line, and at any rate Hiram established the very closest
relations both with David and with his son and successor Solomon.
Under Hiram’s auspices the walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem arose,
and in return Hiram built and launched his ships on the Red Sea. A
very considerable trade passed northward and southward through
Jerusalem. And Solomon achieved a prosperity and magnificence
unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was even given a
daughter of Pharaoh in marriage.
But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the climax
of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king in a little
city. His power was so transitory that within a few years of his
death, Shishak the first Pharaoh of the twenty-second dynasty, had
taken Jerusalem and looted most of its splendours. The account of
Solomon’s magnificence given in the books of Kings and Chronicles is
questioned by many critics. They say that it was added to and
exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later writers. But the Bible
account read carefully is not so overwhelming as it appears at the
first reading. Solomon’s temple, if one works out the measurements,
would go inside a small suburban church, and his fourteen hundred
chariots cease to impress us when we learn from an Assyrian monument
that his successor Ahab sent a contingent of two thousand to the
Assyrian army. It is also plainly manifest from the Bible narrative
that Solomon spent himself in display and overtaxed and overworked his
people. At his death the northern part of his kingdom broke off from
Jerusalem and became the independent kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem
remained the capital city of Judah.
THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON
THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON
The bulls are in richly coloured enamel on baked brick