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THE GREAT EVENTS
BY
FAMOUS HISTORIANS
A COMPREHENSIVE AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S HISTORY, EMPHASIZING
THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND PRESENTING THESE AS COMPLETE NARRATIVES
IN THE MASTER-WORDS OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS
NON-SECTARIAN NON-PARTISAN NON-SECTIONAL
ON THE PLAN EVOLVED FROM A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS GATHERED FROM THE MOST
DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF AMERICA AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF
INTRODUCTIONS BY SPECIALISTS TO CONNECT AND EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED
NARRATIVES, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH THOROUGH INDICES,
BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CHRONOLOGIES, AND COURSES OF READING
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D. JOHN RUDD, LL.D.
_With a staff of specialists_
_VOLUME 1_
The National Alumni
COPYRIGHT, 1905,
By THE NATIONAL ALUMNI
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
_General Introduction_
_An Outline Narrative of the Great Events_
CHARLES F. HORNE
_Dawn of Civilization_ (_B.C. 5867_)
G.C.C. MASPERO
_Compilation of the Earliest Code_ (_B.C. 2250_)
HAMMURABI
_Theseus Founds Athens_ (_B.C. 1235_)
PLUTARCH
_The Formation of the Castes in India_ (_B.C. 1200_)
GUSTAVE LE BON
W.W. HUNTER
_Fall of Troy_ (_B.C. 1184_)
GEORGE GROTE
_Accession of Solomon_
_Building of the Temple at Jerusalem_ (_B.C. 1017_)
HENRY HART MILMAN
_Rise and Fall of Assyria_
_Destruction of Nineveh_ (_B.C. 789_)
F. LENORMANT AND E. CHEVALLIER
_The Foundation of Rome_ (_B.C. 753_)
BARTHOLD GEORG NIEBUHR
_Prince Jimmu Founds Japan's Capital_ (_B.C. 660_)
SIR EDWARD REED
THE "NEHONGI"
_The Foundation of Buddhism_ (_B.C. 623_)
THOMAS W. RHYS-DAVIDS
_Pythian Games at Delphi_ (_B.C. 585_)
GEORGE GROTE
_Solon's Early Greek Legislation_ (_B.C. 594_)
GEORGE GROTE
_Conquests of Cyrus the Great_ (_B.C. 550_)
GEORGE GROTE
_Rise of Confucius, the Chinese Sage_ (_B.C. 550_)
R.K. DOUGLAS
_Rome Established as a Republic_
_Institution of Tribunes_ (_B.C. 510-494_)
HENRY GEORGE LIDDELL
_The Battle of Marathon_ (_B.C. 490_)
SIR EDWARD SHEPHERD CREASY
_Invasion of Greece by Persians under Xerxes_
_Defence of Thermopylæ_ (_B.C. 480_)
HERODOTUS
_Universal Chronology_ (_B.C. 5867-451_)
JOHN RUDD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME I
_Sphinx, with Great and Second Pyramids of Gizeh_ (_page 12_)
Frontispiece From an original photograph.
_The Rosetta Stone, and Description_
Facsimile of original in the British Museum.
_The Sabine Women_--_now mothers_--_suing for peace between the
combatants_ (_their Roman husbands and their Sabine relatives_)
Painting by Jacques L. David.
THE GREAT EVENTS
BY
FAMOUS HISTORIANS
* * * * *
General Introduction
THE GREAT EVENTS BY FAMOUS HISTORIANS is the answer to a problem which
has long been agitating the learned world. How shall real history, the
ablest and profoundest work of the greatest historians, be rescued from
its present oblivion on the dusty shelves of scholars, and made welcome
to the homes of the people?
THE NATIONAL ALUMNI, an association of college men, having given this
question long and earnest discussion among themselves, sought finally
the views of a carefully elaborated list of authorities throughout
America and Europe. They consulted the foremost living historians and
professors of history, successful writers in other fields, statesmen,
university and college presidents, and prominent business men. From this
widely gathered consensus of opinions, after much comparison and sifting
of ideas, was evolved the following practical, and it would seem
incontrovertible, series of plain facts. And these all pointed toward
"THE GREAT EVENTS."
In the first place, the entire American public, from top to bottom of
the social ladder, are at this moment anxious to read history. Its
predominant importance among the varied forms of literature is fully
recognized. To understand the past is to understand the future. The
successful men in every line of life are those who look ahead, whose
keen foresight enables them to probe into the future, not by magic, but
by patiently acquired knowledge. To see clearly what the world has done,
and why, is to see at least vaguely what the world will do, and when.
Moreover, no man can understand himself unless he understands others;
and he cannot do that without some idea of the past, which has produced
both him and them. To know his neighbors, he must know something of the
country from which they came, the conditions under which they formerly
lived. He cannot do his own simple duty by his own country if he does
not know through what tribulations that country has passed. He cannot be
a good citizen, he cannot even vote honestly, much less intelligently,
unless he has read history. Fortunately the point needs little urging.
It is almost an impertinence to refer to it. We are all anxious, more
than anxious to learn--_if only the path of study be made easy_.
Can this be accomplished? Can the vanishing pictures of the past be made
as simply obvious as mathematics, as fascinating as a breezy novel of
adventure? Genius has already answered, yes. Hand to a mere boy
Macaulay's sketch of Warren Hastings in India, and the lad will see as
easily as if laid out upon a map the host of interwoven and elaborate
problems that perplexed the great administrator. Offer to the youngest
lass the tale told by Guizot of King Robert of France and his struggle
to retain his beloved wife Bertha. Its vivid reality will draw from the
girl's heart far deeper and truer tears than the most pathetic romance.
We begin to realize that in very truth History has been one vast
stupendous drama, world-embracing in its splendor, majestic, awful,
irresistible in the insistence of its pointing finger of fate. It has
indeed its comic interludes, a Prussian king befuddling ambassadors in
his "Tobacco Parliament"; its pauses of intense and cumulative suspense,
Queen Louise pleading to Napoleon for her country's life; but it has
also its magnificent pageants, its gorgeous culminating spectacles of
wonder. Kings and emperors are but the supernumeraries upon its boards;
its hero is the common man, its plot his triumph over ignorance, his
struggle upward out of the slime of earth.
_Yet the great historians are not being widely read_. The ablest and
most convincing stories of his own development seem closed against the
ordinary man. Why? In the first place, the works of the masters are too
voluminous. Grote's unrivalled history of Greece fills ten large and
forbidding volumes. Guizot takes thirty-one to tell a portion of the
story of France. Freeman won credit in the professorial world by
devoting five to the detailing of a single episode, the Norman Conquest.
Surely no busy man can gather a general historic knowledge, if he must
read such works as these! We are told that the great library of Paris
contains over four hundred thousand volumes and pamphlets on French
history alone. The output of historic works in all languages approaches
ten thousand volumes every year. No scholar, even, can peruse more than
the smallest fraction of this enormously increasing mass. Herodotus is
forgotten, Livy remains to most of us but a recollection of our
school-days, and Thucydides has become an exercise in Greek.
There is yet another difficulty. Even the honest man who tries, who
takes down his Grote or Freeman, heroically resolved to struggle through
it at all speed, fails often in his purpose. He discovers that the
greatest masters nod. Sometimes in their slow advance they come upon a
point that rouses their enthusiasm; they become vigorous, passionate,
sarcastic, fascinating, they are masters indeed. But the fire soon dies,
the inspiration flags, "no man can be always on the heights," and the
unhappy reader drowses in the company of his guide.
This leads us then to one clear point. From these justly famous works a
selection should be made. Their length should be avoided, their prosy
passages eliminated; the one picture, or perhaps the many pictures,
which each master has painted better than any rival before or since,
that and that alone should be preserved.
Read in this way, history may be sought with genuine pleasure. It is
only pedantry has made it dreary, only blindness has left it dull. The
story of man is the most wonderful ever conceived. It can be made the
most fascinating ever written.
With this idea firmly established in mind, we seek another line of
thought. The world grows smaller every day. Russia fights huge battles
five thousand miles from her capital. England governs India. Spain and
the United States contend for empire in the antipodes. Our rapidly
improving means of communication, electric trains, and, it may be,
flying machines, cables, and wireless telegraphy, link lands so close
together that no man lives to-day the subject of an isolated state.
Rather, indeed, do all the kingdoms seem to shrink, to become but
districts in one world-including commonwealth.
To tell the story of one nation by itself is thus no longer possible.
Great movements of the human race do not stop for imaginary boundary
lines thrown across a map. It was not the German students, nor the
Parisian mob, nor the Italian peasants who rebelled in 1848; it was the
"people of Europe" who arose against their oppressors. To read the
history of one's own country only is to get distorted views, to
exaggerate our own importance, to remain often in densest ignorance of
the real meaning of what we read. The ideas American school-boys get of
the Revolution are in many cases simply absurd, until they have been
modified by wider reading.
From this it becomes very evident that a good history now must be, not a
local, but a world history. The idea of such a work is not new. Diodorus
penned one two hundred years before Christ. But even then the tale took
forty books; and we have been making history rather rapidly since
Diodorus' time. Of the many who have more recently attempted his task,
few have improved upon his methods; and the best of these works only
shows upon a larger scale the same dreariness that we have found in
other masters.
Let us then be frank and admit that no one man can make a thoroughly
good world history. No one man could be possessed of the almost infinite
learning required; none could have the infinite enthusiasm to delight
equally in each separate event, to dwell on all impartially and yet
ecstatically. So once more we are forced back upon the same conclusion.
We will take what we already have. We will appeal to each master for the
event in which he did delight, the one in which we find him at his best.
This also has been attempted before, but perhaps in a manner too
lengthy, too exact, too pedantic to be popular. The aim has been to get
in everything. Everything great or small has been narrated, and so the
real points of value have been lost in the multiplicity of lesser facts,
about which no ordinary reader cares or needs to care. After all, what
we want to know and remember are the Great Events, the ones which have
really changed and influenced humanity. How many of us do really know
about them? or even know what they are? or one-twentieth part of them?
And until we know, is it not a waste of time to pore over the lesser
happenings between?
Yet the connection between these events must somehow be shown. They must
not stand as separate, unrelated fragments. If the story of the world is
indeed one, it must be shown as one, not even broken by arbitrary
division into countries, those temporary political constructions, often
separating a single race, lines of imaginary demarcation, varying with
the centuries, invisible in earth's yesterday, sure to change if not to
perish in her to-morrow. Moreover, such a system of division
necessitates endless repetition. Each really important occurrence
influences many countries, and so is told of again and again with
monotonous iteration and extravagant waste of space.
It may, however, be fairly urged that the story should vary according to
the country for which it is designed. To our individual lives the events
happening nearest prove most important. Great though others be, their
influence diminishes with their increasing distance in space and time.
For the people of North America the story of the world should have the
part taken by America written large across the pages.
From all these lines of reasoning arose the present work, which the
National Alumni believe has solved the problem. It tells the story of
the world, tells it in the most famous words of the most famous writers,
makes of it a single, continued story, giving the results of the most
recent research. Yet all dry detail has been deliberately eliminated;
the tale runs rapidly and brightly. Whatever else may happen, the reader
shall not yawn. Only important points are dwelt on, and their relative
value is made clear.
Each volume of THE GREAT EVENTS opens with a brief survey of the period
with which it deals. The broad world movements of the time are pointed
out, their importance is emphasized, their mutual relationship made
clear. If the reader finds his interest specially roused in one of these
events, and he would learn more of it, he is aided by a directing note,
which, in each case, tells him where in the body of the volume the
subject is further treated. Turning thither he may plunge at once into
the fuller account which he desires, sure that it will be both vivid and
authoritative; in short, the best-known treatment of the subject.
Meanwhile the general survey, being thus relieved from the necessity of
constant explanation, expansion, and digression, is enabled to flow
straight onward with its story, rapidly, simply, entertainingly. Indeed,
these opening sketches, written especially for this series, and in a
popular style, may be read on from volume to volume, forming a book in
themselves, presenting a bird's-eye view of the whole course of earth,
an ideal world history which leaves the details to be filled in by the
reader at his pleasure. It is thus, we believe, and thus only, that
world history can be made plain and popular. The great lessons of
history can thus be clearly grasped. And by their light all life takes
on a deeper meaning.
The body of each volume, then, contains the Great Events of the period,
ranged in chronological order. Of each event there are given one,
perhaps two, or even three complete accounts, not chosen hap-hazard, but
selected after conference with many scholars, accounts the most accurate
and most celebrated in existence, gathered from all languages and all
times. Where the event itself is under dispute, the editors do not
presume to judge for the reader; they present the authorities upon both
sides. The Reformation is thus portrayed from the Catholic as well as
the Protestant standpoint. The American Revolution is shown in part as
England saw it; and in the American Civil War, and the causes which
produced it, the North and the South speak for themselves in the words
of their best historians.
To each of these accounts is prefixed a brief introduction, prepared for
this work by a specialist in the field of history of which it treats.
This introduction serves a double purpose. In the first place, it
explains whatever is necessary for the understanding and appreciation
of the story that follows. Unfortunately, many a striking bit of
historic writing has become antiquated in the present day. Scholars have
discovered that it blunders here and there, perhaps is prejudiced,
perhaps extravagant. Newer writers, therefore, base a new book upon the
old one, not changing much, but paraphrasing it into deadly dullness by
their efforts after accuracy. Thanks to our introduction we can revive
the more spirited account, and, while pointing out its value to the
reader, can warn him of its errors. Thus he secures in briefest form the
results of the most recent research.
Another purpose of the introduction is to link each event with the
preceding ones in whatever countries it affects. Thus if one chooses he
may read by countries after all, and get a completed story of a single
nation. That is, he may peruse the account of the battle of Hastings and
then turn onward to the making of the _Domesday Book_, where he will
find a few brief lines to cover the intervening space in England's
history. From the struggles of Stephen and Matilda he is led to the
quarrel of her son, King Henry, with Thomas Becket, and so onward step
by step.
Starting with this ground plan of the design in mind, the reader will
see that its compilation was a work of enormous labor. This has been
undertaken seriously, patiently, and with earnest purpose. The first
problem to be confronted was, What were the Great Events that should be
told? Almost every writer and teacher of history, every well-known
authority, was appealed to; many lists of events were compiled, revised,
collated, and compared; and so at last our final list was evolved,
fitted to bear the brunt of every criticism.
Then came the heavier problem of what authorities to quote for each
event. And here also the editors owe much to the capable aid of many
generous, unremunerated advisers. Thus, for instance, they sought and
obtained from the Hon. Joseph Chamberlain his advice as to the
authorities to be used for the Jameson raid and the Boer war. The
account presented may therefore be fairly regarded as England's own
authoritative presentment of those events. Several little known and
wholly unused Russian sources were pointed out by Professor Rambaud,
the French Academician. But this is mentioned only to illustrate the
impartiality with which the editors have endeavored to cover all fields.
If, under the plea of expressing gratitude to all those who have lent us
courteous assistance, we were to spread across these pages the long roll
of their distinguished names, it would sound too much like boasting of
their condescension.
The work of selecting the accounts has been one of time and careful
thought. Many thousands of books have been read and read again. The
cardinal points of consideration in the choice have been: (1) Interest,
that is, vividness of narration; (2) simplicity, for we aim to reach the
people, to make a book fit even for a child; (3) the fame of the author,
for everyone is pleased to be thus easily introduced to some
long-heard-of celebrity, distantly revered, but dreaded; and (4)
accuracy, a point set last because its defects could be so easily
remedied by the specialist's introduction to each event.
These considerations have led occasionally to the selection of very
ancient documents, the original "sources" of history themselves, as, for
instance, Columbus' own story of his voyage, rather than any later
account built up on this; Pliny's picture of the destruction of Pompeii,
for Pliny was there and saw the heavens rain down fire, and told of it
as no man has done since. So, too, we give a literal translation of the
earliest known code of laws, antedating those of Moses by more than a
thousand years, rather than some modern commentary on them. At other
times the same principles have led to the other extreme, and on modern
events, where there seemed no wholly satisfactory or standard accounts,
we have had them written for us by the specialists best acquainted with
the field.
As the work thus grew in hand, it became manifest that it would be, in
truth, far more than a mere story of events. With each event was
connected the man who embodied it. Often his life was handled quite as
fully as the event, and so we had biography. Lands had to be
described--geography. Peoples and customs--sociology. Laws and the
arguments concerning them--political economy. In short, our history
proved a universal cyclopædia as well.
To give it its full value, therefore, an index became obviously
necessary--and no ordinary index. Its aim must be to anticipate every
possible question with which a reader might approach the past, and
direct him to the answer. Even, it might be, he would want details more
elaborate than we give. If so, we must direct him where to find them.
Professional index-makers were therefore summoned to our help, a
complete and readable chronology was appended to each volume, and the
final volume of the series was turned over to the indexers entirely. We
believe their work will prove not the least valuable feature of the
whole. Briefly, the Index Volume contains:
1. A complete list of the Great Events of the world's history. Opposite
each event are given the date, the name of the author and standard work
from which our account is selected, and a number of references to other
works and to a short discussion of these in our Bibliography. Thus the
reader may pursue an extended course of study on each particular event.
2. A bibliography of the best general histories of ancient, mediæval,
and modern times, and of important political, religious, and educational
movements; also a bibliography of the best historical works dealing with
each nation, and arranged under the following subdivisions: (_a_) The
general history of the nation; (_b_) special periods in its career;
(_c_) the descriptions of the people, their civilization and
institutions. On each work thus mentioned there is a critical comment
with suggestions to readers. This bibliography is designed chiefly for
those who desire to pursue more extended courses of reading, and it
offers them the experience and guidance of those who have preceded them
on their special field.
3. A classified index of famous historic characters. The names are
grouped under such headings as "Rulers, Statesmen, and Patriots,"
"Famous Women," "Military and Naval Commanders," "Philosophers and
Teachers," "Religious Leaders," etc. Under each person's name is given a
biographical chronology of his career, showing every important event in
which he played a part, together with the date of the event, and the
volume and page of this series where a full account of it may be found.
This plan provides a new and very valuable means of reading the
biography of any noted personage, one of the great advantages being that
the accounts of the various events in his life are not all in the
language of the same author, not written by a man anxious to bring out
the importance of his special hero. The writers are mainly interested in
the event, and show the hero only in his true and unexaggerated relation
to it. Under each name will also be found references to such further
authorities on the biography of the personage as may be consulted with
profit by those students and scholars who wish to pursue an exhaustive
study of his career.
4. A biographical index of the authors represented in the series. This
consists of brief sketches of the many writers whose work has been drawn
upon for the narratives of Great Events. It is intended for ready
reference, and gives only the essential facts. This index serves a
double purpose. Suppose, for instance, that a reader is familiar with
the name of John Lothrop Motley, but happens not to know whether he is
still living, whether he had other occupation than writing, or what
offices he held. This index will answer these questions. On the other
hand, an admirer of Thomas Jefferson or Theodore Roosevelt may wish to
know whether we have taken anything--and, if so, what--from their
writings. This index will answer at once.
5. A general index covering every reference in the series to dates,
events, persons, and places of historic importance. These are made
easily accessible by a careful and elaborate system of cross-references.
6. A separate and complete chronology of each nation of ancient,
mediæval, and modern times, with references to the volume and page where
each item is treated, either as an entire article or as part of one; so
that the history of any one nation may be read in its logical order and
in the language of its best historians.
Such, as the National Alumni regard it, are the general character, wide
scope, and earnest purpose of THE GREAT EVENTS BY FAMOUS HISTORIANS. Let
us end by saying, in the friendly fashion of the old days when
bookmakers and their readers were more intimate than now: "Kind reader,
if this our performance doth in aught fall short of promise, blame not
our good intent, but our unperfect wit."
THE NATIONAL ALUMNI.
AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS
A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE, ITS ADVANCE IN
KNOWLEDGE AND CIVILIZATION, AND THE BROAD WORLD MOVEMENTS WHICH HAVE
SHAPED ITS DESTINY
CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
CONTINUED THROUGH THE SUCCESSIVE VOLUMES AND COVERING THE SUCCESSIVE
PERIODS OF
THE GREAT EVENTS BY FAMOUS HISTORIANS
AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS
(FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE OVERTHROW OF THE PERSIANS)
CHARLES F. HORNE
History, if we define it as the mere transcription of the written
records of former generations, can go no farther back than the time such
records were first made, no farther than the art of writing. But now
that we have come to recognize the great earth itself as a story-book,
as a keeper of records buried one beneath the other, confused and half
obliterated, yet not wholly beyond our comprehension, now the historian
may fairly be allowed to speak of a far earlier day.
For unmeasured and immeasurable centuries man lived on earth a creature
so little removed from "the beasts that die," so little superior to
them, that he has left no clearer record than they of his presence here.
From the dry bones of an extinct mammoth or a plesiosaur, Cuvier
reconstructed the entire animal and described its habits and its home.
So, too, looking on an ancient, strange, scarce human skull, dug from
the deeper strata beneath our feet, anatomists tell us that the owner
was a man indeed, but one little better than an ape. A few æons later
this creature leaves among his bones chipped flints that narrow to a
point; and the archæologist, taking up the tale, explains that man has
become tool-using, he has become intelligent beyond all the other
animals of earth. Physically he is but a mite amid the beast monsters
that surround him, but by value of his brain he conquers them. He has
begun his career of mastery.
If we delve amid more recent strata, we find the flint weapons have
become bronze. Their owner has learned to handle a ductile metal, to
draw it from the rocks and fuse it in the fire. Later still he has
discovered how to melt the harder and more useful iron. We say roughly,
therefore, that man passed through a stone age, a bronze age, and then
an iron age.
Somewhere, perhaps in the earliest of these, he began to build rude
houses. In the next, he drew pictures. During the latest, his pictures
grew into an alphabet of signs, his structures developed into vast and
enduring piles of brick or stone. Buildings and inscriptions became his
relics, more like to our own, more fully understandable, giving us a
sense of closer kinship with his race.
SOURCES OF EARLY KNOWLEDGE
There are three different lines along which we have succeeded in
securing some knowledge of these our distant ancestors, three telephones
from the past, over which they send to us confused and feeble
murmurings, whose fascination makes only more maddening the vagueness of
their speech.
First, we have the picture-writings, whether of Central America, of
Egypt, of Babylonia, or of other lands. These when translatable bring us
nearest of all to the heart of the great past. It is the mind, the
thought, the spoken word, of man that is most intimately he; not his
face, nor his figure, nor his clothes. Unfortunately, the translation of
these writings is no easy task. Those of Central America are still an
unsolved riddle. Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like
a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able
thought. Yet they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had the
luck to stumble on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ancient
writing fairly clear.[1]
[Footnote 1: See page 1 for an engraving and account of this famous
stone. It was found over a century ago and its value was instantly
recognized, but many years passed before its secrets were deciphered. It
contains an inscription repeated in three forms of writing: the early
Egyptian of the hieroglyphics, a later Egyptian (the demotic), and
Greek.]
Where this mode of communication fails, we turn to another which carries
us even farther into the past. The records which have been less
intentionally preserved, not only the buildings themselves, but their
decorations, the personal ornaments of men, idols, coins, every
imaginable fragment, chance escaped from the maw of time, has its own
story for our reading. In Egypt we have found deep-hidden, secret tombs,
and, intruding on their many centuries of silence, have reaped rich
harvests of knowledge from the garnered wealth. In Babylonia the rank
vegetation had covered whole cities underneath green hillocks, and
preserved them till our modern curiosity delved them out. To-day, he who
wills, may walk amid the halls of Sennacherib, may tread the streets
whence Abraham fled, ay, he may gaze upon the handiwork of men who lived
perhaps as far before Abraham as we ourselves do after him.
Nor are our means of penetrating the past even thus exhausted. A third
chain yet more subtle and more marvellous has been found to link us to
an ancestry immeasurably remote. This unbroken chain consists of the
words from our own mouths. We speak as our fathers spoke; and they did
but follow the generations before. Occasional pronunciations have
altered, new words have been added, and old ones forgotten; but some
basal sounds of names, some root-thoughts of the heart, have proved as
immutable as the superficial elegancies are changeful. "Father" and
"mother" mean what they have meant for uncounted ages.
Comparative philology, the science which compares one language with
another to note the points of similarity between them, has discovered
that many of these root-sounds are alike in almost all the varied
tongues of Europe. The resemblance is too common to be the result of
coincidence, too deep-seated to be accounted for by mere communication
between the nations. We have gotten far beyond the possibility of such
explanations; and science says now with positive confidence that there
must have been a time when all these nations were but one, that their
languages are all but variations of the tongue their distant ancestors
once held in common.
Study has progressed beyond this point, can tell us far more intricate
and fainter facts. It argues that one by one the various tribes left
their common home and became completely separated; and that each
root-sound still used by all the nations represents an idea, an object,
they already possessed before their dispersal. Thus we can vaguely
reconstruct that ancient, aboriginal civilization. We can even guess
which tribes first broke away, and where again these wanderers
subdivided, and at what stage of progress. Surely a fascinating science
this! And in its infancy! If its later development shall justify present
promise, it has still strange tales to tell us in the future.
THE RACES OF MAN
Turn now from this tracing of our means of knowledge, to speak of the
facts they tell us. When our humankind first become clearly visible they
are already divided into races, which for convenience we speak of as
white, yellow, and black. Of these the whites had apparently advanced
farthest on the road to civilization; and the white race itself had
become divided into at least three varieties, so clearly marked as to
have persisted through all the modern centuries of communication and
intermarriage. Science is not even able to say positively that these
varieties or families had a common origin. She inclines to think so; but
when all these later ages have failed to obliterate the marks of
difference, what far longer period of separation must have been required
to establish them!
These three clearly outlined families of the whites are the Hamites, of
whom the Egyptians are the best-known type; the Semites, as represented
by ancient Babylonians and modern Jews and Arabs; and the great Aryan or
Indo-European family, once called the Japhites, and including Hindus,
Persians, Greeks, Latins, the modern Celtic and Germanic races, and even
the Slavs or Russians.
The Egyptians, when we first see them, are already well advanced toward
civilization.[2] To say that they were the first people to emerge from
barbarism is going much further than we dare. Their records are the most
ancient that have come clearly down to us; but there may easily have
been other social organisms, other races, to whom the chances of time
and nature have been less gentle. Cataclysms may have engulfed more than
one Atlantis; and few climates are so fitted for the preservation of
man's buildings as is the rainless valley of the Nile.
[Footnote 2: See the _Dawn of Civilization_, page 1.]
Moreover, the Egyptians may not have been the earliest inhabitants even
of their own rich valley. We find hints that they were wanderers,
invaders, coming from the East, and that with the land they appropriated
also the ideas, the inventions, of an earlier negroid race. But whatever
they took they added to, they improved on. The idea of futurity, of
man's existence beyond the grave, became prominent among them; and in
the absence of clearer knowledge we may well take this idea as the
groundwork, the starting-point, of all man's later and more striking
progress.
Since the Egyptians believed in a future life they strove to preserve
the body for it, and built ever stronger and more gigantic tombs. They
strove to fit the mind for it, and cultivated virtues, not wholly animal
such as physical strength, nor wholly commercial such as cunning. They
even carved around the sepulchre of the departed a record of his doings,
lest they--and perhaps he too in that next life--forget. There were
elements of intellectual growth in all this, conditions to stimulate the
mind beyond the body.
And the Egyptians did develop. If one reads the tales, the romances,
that have survived from their remoter periods, he finds few emotions
higher than childish curiosity or mere animal rage and fear. Amid their
latest stories, on the contrary, we encounter touches of sentiment, of
pity and self-sacrifice, such as would even now be not unworthy of
praise. But, alas! the improvement seems most marked where it was most
distant. Perhaps the material prosperity of the land was too great, the
conditions of life too easy; there was no stimulus to effort, to
endeavor. By about the year 2200 B.C. we find Egypt fallen into the grip
of a cold and lifeless formalism. Everything was fixed by law; even
pictures must be drawn in a certain way, thoughts must be expressed by
stated and unvariable symbols. Advance became well-nigh impossible.
Everything lay in the hands of a priestly caste the completeness of
whose dominion has perhaps never been matched in history. The leaders
lived lives of luxurious pleasure enlightened by scientific study; but
the people scarce existed except as automatons. The race was dead; its
true life, the vigor of its masses, was exhausted, and the land soon
fell an easy prey to every spirited invader.
Meanwhile a rougher, stronger civilization was growing in the river
valleys eastward from the Nile. The Semitic tribes, who seem to have had
their early seat and centre of dispersion somewhere in this region, were
coalescing into nations, Babylonians along the lower Tigris and
Euphrates, Assyrians later along the upper rivers, Hebrews under David
and Solomon[3] by the Jordan, Phoenicians on the Mediterranean coast.
[Footnote 3: See _Accession of Solomon_, page 92.]
The early Babylonian civilization may antedate even the Egyptian; but
its monuments were less permanent, its rulers less anxious for the
future. The "appeal to posterity," the desire for a posthumous fame,
seems with them to have been slower of conception. True, the first
Babylonian monarchs of whom we have any record, in an era perhaps over
five thousand years before Christianity, stamped the royal signet on
every brick of their walls and temples. But common-sense suggests that
this was less to preserve their fame than to preserve their bricks.
Theft is no modern innovation.
They were a mathematical race, these Babylonians. In fact, Semite and
mathematician are names that have been closely allied through all the
course of history, and one cannot help but wish our Aryan race had
somewhere lived through an experience which would produce in them the
exactitude in balance and measurement of facts that has distinguished
the Arabs and the Jews. The Babylonians founded astronomy and
chronology; they recorded the movements of the stars, and divided their
year according to the sun and moon. They built a vast and intricate
network of canals to fertilize their land; and they arranged the
earliest system of legal government, the earliest code of laws, that has
come down to us.[4]
[Footnote 4: _Compilation of the Earliest Code_, page 14.]
The sciences, then, arise more truly here than with the Egyptians. Man
here began to take notice, to record and to classify the facts of
nature. We may count this the second visible step in his great progress.
Never again shall we find him in a childish attitude of idle wonder.
Always is his brain alert, striving to understand, self-conscious of its
own power over nature.
It may have been wealth and luxury that enfeebled the Babylonians as,
it did the Egyptians. At any rate, their empire was overturned by a
border colony of their own, the Assyrians, a rough and hardy folk who
had maintained themselves for centuries battling against tribes from the
surrounding mountains. It was like a return to barbarism when about B.C.
880 the Assyrians swept over the various Semite lands. Loud were the
laments of the Hebrews; terrible the tales of cruelty; deep the scorn
with which the Babylonians submitted to the rude conquerors. We approach
here a clearer historic period; we can trace with plainness the
devastating track of war;[5] we can read the boastful triumph of the
Assyrian chiefs, can watch them step by step as they adopt the culture
and the vices of their new subjects, growing ever more graceful and more
enfeebled, until they too are overthrown by a new and hardier race, the
Persians, an Aryan folk.
[Footnote 5: See _Rise and Fall of Assyria_, page 105.]
Before turning to this last and most prominent family of humankind, let
us look for a moment at the other, darker races, seen vaguely as they
come in contact with the whites. The negroes, set sharply by themselves
in Africa, never seem to have created any progressive civilization of
their own, never seem to have advanced further than we find the wild
tribes in the interior of the country to-day. But the yellow or Turanian
races, the Chinese and Japanese, the Turks and the Tartars, did not
linger so helplessly behind. The Chinese, at least, established a social
world of their own, widely different from that of the whites, in some
respects perhaps superior to it. But the fatal weakness of the yellow
civilization was that it was not ennobling like the Egyptian, not
scientific like the Babylonian, not adventurous and progressive as we
shall find the Aryan.
This, of course, is speaking in general terms. Something somewhat
ennobling there may be in the contemplations of Confucius;[6] but no man
can favorably compare the Chinese character to-day with the European,
whether we regard either intensity of feeling, or variety, range,
subtlety, and beauty of emotion. So, also, the Chinese made scientific
discoveries--but knew not how to apply them or improve them. So also
they made conquests--and abandoned them; toiled--and sank back into
inertia.
[Footnote 6: See _Rise of Confucius_, page 270.]
The Japanese present a separate problem, as yet little understood in its
earlier stages.[7] As to the Tartars, wild and hardy horsemen roaming
over Northern Asia, they kept for ages their independent animal strength
and fierceness. They appear and disappear like flashes. They seem to
seek no civilization of their own; they threaten again and again to
destroy that of all the other races of the globe. Fitly, indeed, was
their leader Attila once termed "the Scourge of God."
[Footnote 7: See _Prince Jimmu_, page 140.]
THE ARYANS
Of our own progressive Aryan race, we have no monuments nor inscriptions
so old as those of the Hamites and the Semites. What comparative
philology tells is this: An early, if not the original, home of the
Aryans was in Asia, to the eastward of the Semites, probably in the
mountain district back of modern Persia. That is, they were not, like
the other whites, a people of the marsh lands and river valleys. They
lived in a higher, hardier, and more bracing atmosphere. Perhaps it was
here that their minds took a freer bent, their spirits caught a bolder
tone. Wherever they moved they came as conquerors among other races.
In their primeval home and probably before the year B.C. 3000, they had
already acquired a fair degree of civilization. They built houses,
ploughed the land, and ground grain into flour for their baking. The
family relations were established among them; they had some social
organization and simple form of government; they had learned to worship
a god, and to see in him a counterpart of their tribal ruler.
From their upland farms they must have looked eastward upon yet higher
mountains, rising impenetrable above the snowline; but to north and
south and west they might turn to lower regions; and by degrees, perhaps
as they grew too numerous for comfort, a few families wandered off along
the more inviting routes. Whichever way they started, their adventurous
spirit led them on. We find no trace of a single case where hearts
failed or strength grew weary and the movement became retrograde, back
toward the ancient home. Spreading out, radiating in all directions, it
is they who have explored the earth, who have measured it and marked its
bounds and penetrated almost to its every corner. It is they who still
pant to complete the work so long ago begun.
Before B.C. 2000 one of these exuded swarms had penetrated India,
probably by way of the Indus River. In the course of a thousand years or
so, the intruders expanded and fought their way slowly from the Indus to
the Ganges. The earlier and duskier inhabitants gave way before them or
became incorporated in the stronger race. A mighty Aryan or Hindu empire
was formed in India and endured there until well within historic times.
Yet its power faded. Life in the hot and languid tropics tends to
weaken, not invigorate, the sinews of a race. Then, too, a formal
religion, a system of castes[8] as arbitrary as among the Egyptians,
laid its paralyzing grip upon the land. About B.C. 600 Buddhism, a new
and beautiful religion, sought to revive the despairing people; but they
were beyond its help.[9] Their slothful languor had become too deep.
From having been perhaps the first and foremost and most civilized of
the Aryan tribes, the Hindus sank to be degenerate members of the race.
We shall turn to look on them again in a later period; but they will be
seen in no favorable light.
[Footnote 8: See _The Formation of the Castes_, page 52.]
[Footnote 9: See _The Foundation of Buddhism_, page 160.]
Meanwhile other wanderers from the Aryan home appear to the north and
west. Perhaps even the fierce Tartars are an Aryan race, much altered
from long dwelling among the yellow peoples. One tribe, the Persians,
moved directly west, and became neighbors of the already noted Semitic
group. After long wars backward and forward, bringing us well within the
range of history, the Persians proved too powerful for the whole Semite
group. They helped destroy Assyria,[10] they overthrew the second
Babylonian empire which Nebuchadnezzar had built up, and then, pressing
on to the conquest of Egypt, they swept the Hamites too from their place
of sovereignty.[11]
[Footnote 10: See _Destruction of Nineveh_, page 105.]
[Footnote 11: See _Conquests of Cyrus_, page 250.]
How surely do those tropic lands avenge themselves on each new savage
horde of invaders from the hardy North. It is not done in a generation,
not in a century, perhaps. But drop by drop the vigorous, tingling,
Arctic blood is sapped away. Year after year the lazy comfort, the loose
pleasure, of the south land fastens its curse upon the mighty warriors.
As we watch the Persians, we see their kings go mad, or become
effeminate tyrants sending underlings to do their fighting for them. We
see the whole race visibly degenerate, until one questions if
Marathon[12] were after all so marvellous a victory, and suspects that
at whatever point the Persians had begun their advance on Europe they
would have been easily hurled back.
[Footnote 12: See _The Battle of Marathon_, page 322.]
It was in Europe only that the Aryan wanderers found a temperate
climate, a region similar to that in which they had been bred. Recent
speculation has even suggested that Europe was their primeval home, from
which they had strayed toward Asia, and to which they now returned.
Certainly it is in Europe that the race has continued to develop.
Earliest of these Aryan waves to take possession of their modern
heritage, were the Celts, who must have journeyed over the European
continent at some dim period too remote even for a guess. Then came the
Greeks and Latins, closely allied tribes, representing possibly a single
migration, that spread westward along the islands and peninsulas of the
Mediterranean. The Teutons may have left Asia before B.C. 1000, for they
seem to have reached their German forests by three centuries beyond that
time, and these vast migratory movements were very slow. The latest
Aryan wave, that of the Slavs, came well within historic times. We
almost fancy we can see its movement. Russian statesmen, indeed, have
hopes that this is not yet completed. They dream that they, the youngest
of the peoples, are yet to dominate the whole.
THE GREEKS AND LATINS
Of these European Aryans the only branches that come within the limits
of our present period, that become noteworthy before B.C. 480, are the
Greeks and Latins.
Their languages tell us that they formed but a single tribe long after
they became separated from the other peoples of their race. Finally,
however, the Latins, journeying onward, lost sight of their friends, and
it must have taken many centuries of separation for the two tongues to
grow so different as they were when Greeks and Romans, each risen to a
mighty nation, met again.
The Greeks, or Hellenes as they called themselves, seem to have been
only one of a number of kindred tribes who occupied not only the shores
of the Ægean, but Thrace, Macedonia, a considerable part of Asia Minor,
and other neighboring regions. The Greeks developed in intellect more
rapidly than their neighbors, outdistanced them in the race for
civilization, forgot these poor relations, and grouped them with the
rest of outside mankind under the scornful name "barbarians."
Why it was that the Greeks were thus specially stimulated beyond their
brethren we do not know. It has long been one of the commonplaces of
history to declare them the result of their environment. It is pointed
out that in Greece they lived amid precipitous mountains, where, as
hunters, they became strong and venturesome, independent and
self-reliant. A sea of islands lay all around; and while an open ocean
might only have awed and intimidated them, this ever-luring prospect of
shore beyond shore rising in turn on the horizon made them sailors, made
them friendly traffickers among themselves. Always meeting new faces,
driving new bargains, they became alert, quick-witted, progressive, the
foremost race of all the ancient world.