by their bodies. So when a person died they put in the tomb with him
all sorts of things that he had used in daily life--things to eat and
drink, furniture and dishes, toys and games. They thought the soul
would return to its own body at the day of judgment. They wanted their
bodies to be kept from decaying until judgment day, in order that the
soul might then have a body to return to. So they pickled the bodies
of the dead by soaking them in a kind of melted tar and wrapping them
round and round and round with a cloth like a bandage. A dead body
pickled in this way is called a mummy, and after thousands of years the
mummies of the Egyptian kings may still be seen. Most of them are not,
however, in the tombs where they were at first placed. They have been
moved away and put in museums, and we may see them there now. Although
they are yellow and dried up, they still look like
“Little old men
All skin and bones.”
At first only kings or important people of the highest classes were
made mummies, but after a while all the classes, except perhaps the
lowest, were treated in the same way. Sacred animals from beetles to
cows were also made into mummies.
When an Egyptian died his friends heaped up a few stones over his body
just to cover it up decently and keep it from being stolen or destroyed
by those wild animals that fed on dead bodies. But a king or a rich
man wanted a bigger pile of stones over his body than just ordinary
people had. So to make sure that his pile would be big enough, a king
built it for himself before he died. Each king tried to make his pile
larger than any one else’s until at last the pile of stones became so
big it was a hill of rocks and called a pyramid. The pyramids therefore
were tombs of the kings who built them while they were alive to be
monuments to themselves when they were dead. In fact a king was much
more interested in building a home for his dead body than he was in a
home for his live body. So, instead of palaces, kings built pyramids.
There are many of these pyramids built along the bank of the Nile, and
most of them were built, we think, just after 3000 B.C.
When a building is being put up nowadays, men use derricks and cranes
and engines to haul and raise heavy stones and beams. But the Egyptians
had no such machinery, and though they used huge stones to build the
pyramids, they had to drag these stones for many miles and raise them
into place simply by pushing and pulling them. The three biggest of
all the pyramids are near the city of Cairo. The largest one of them,
which is called the Great Pyramid, was built by a king named Cheops.
To remember when he lived, simply think of this as another telephone
number:
Cheops 2900 B.C.
It is said that one hundred thousand men worked twenty years to build
his pyramid. It is one of the largest buildings in the world, and some
of the blocks of stone themselves are as big as a small house. I have
been to the top of it, and it is like climbing a steep mountain with
rocky sides. I have also been far inside to the cave-like room in the
center where Cheop’s mummy was placed. There is nothing in there now,
however, except bats that fly about in the darkness, for the mummy has
disappeared--been stolen, perhaps.
[Illustration: Cheops building his pyramid.]
Near the Pyramid of Cheops is the Sphinx. It is a huge statue of a
lion with a man’s head. It is as big as a church, and though it is so
big, it has been carved out of one single rock. The rock, however, was
already there and so did not have to be carried. The Sphinx is a statue
of the god of the morning, and the head is that of one of the Egyptian
Pharaohs who built a pyramid near that of Cheops. The desert sand has
covered the paws and most of the body. Though the sand has been dug
away from time to time, the wind quickly covers the body with sand
again.
The Egyptians carved other large statues of men and women out of rock.
These figures are usually many times bigger than life-size, and sit or
stand stiffly erect with both feet flat on the ground and hands close
to the body in the position some children take when they “sit” for
their photograph.
They built huge houses for their gods. These were called temples and
took the place of our churches. These temples had gigantic--that’s the
way it is spelled, though it means “giant-ic”--columns and pillars.
Ordinary people standing beside them look like dwarfs. Here is one of
these temples, and you can see how different it is from our churches:
[Illustration: Egyptian temple.]
They decorated their temples and pyramids, and the cases in which the
mummies were put, with drawings and paintings. The pictures they made,
however, looked something like those a young child might draw. For
example, when they wanted to make a picture of water, they simply made
a zigzag line to represent waves; when they tried to draw a row of men
back of a row in front, they put those in the back _on top_ of those
in front. To show that a man was a king, they made him several times
larger than the other men in the picture. When they painted a picture
they used any color they thought was pretty, usually blue or yellow or
brown. Whether the person or thing was really that color or not made no
difference.
8
A Rich Land Where There Was No Money
You have read in fairy-tales of a land where cakes and candy and
sugar-plums grow on trees, where everything you want to eat or to play
with can be had just by picking it. Well, long, long ago people used to
think there had been really such a country, and where do you suppose
they said it was? Somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers--those
rivers with the strange names I asked you to learn--and they called
this spot the Garden of Eden. We do not know exactly where it was, for
there is no such place now quite as wonderful as the Garden of Eden was
supposed to be.
Egypt was a land of one river, the Nile. The land of the Two Rivers had
several names.
Let us suppose we are flying over the country in an airplane and
looking down at the land between these two rivers. It is called
Mesopotamia, which is two Greek words simply meaning “Between the
Rivers.”
See the land over there by the upper Tigris. It is called _Assyria_.
See the land near where the rivers join each other. That is called
_Babylonia_.
See the land near where they empty. That is called _Chaldea_.
And see over there is _Mount Ararat_, where it is supposed Noah’s Ark
rested after the flood.
Here are a lot of new names. A young friend of mine had a train of toy
cars. He had noticed that the Pullman cars on which he had ridden had
names, and so he gave his toy cars names also. He called them:
ASSYRIA MESOPOTAMIA
BABYLONIA ARARAT
CHALDEA EUPHRATES
Babylonia was a very rich country, for the two rivers brought down
and dropped great quantities of earth just as the Nile did in Egypt,
and this made very rich soil. Wheat, from which we make bread, is
called the staff of life. It is the most valuable of all foods which
grow. It is supposed that wheat first grew in Babylonia. Dates in
that part of the world are almost as important a food as wheat.
Dates, too, grow there very plentifully. Now, you may think dates are
something to be eaten almost like candy but in Babylonia dates took the
place of oatmeal. In the rivers there were quantities of good fish,
and as fishing was just fun, you see that the people who lived in
Babylonia--the Babylonians, as they were called--had plenty of good
food without having to do much work for it. No one had any money in
those days; people had cows and sheep and goats, and a man was rich who
had much of these “goods.” But if a man wanted to buy or sell, he had
to buy or sell by trading something he had for something he wanted.
Somewhere in Babylonia the people built a great tower called the _Tower
of Babel_, which you have probably heard about. It was more like a
mountain than a tower. They built other towers, too. Some say the Tower
of Babel and towers like it were built so that the people might have
a high place to which they could climb in case of another flood. But
others give a different reason. They say that the people who built
these towers came to Babylonia from farther north where there were
mountains. In this northern land they had always placed their altars
on the top of a mountain, to be close to heaven. So when they moved
to a flat country like Mesopotamia and Babylonia, where there were no
mountains, they _built_ mountains in order to have a high place for the
altar on top. To reach the top of these mountains or towers, they made,
instead of a staircase on the inside, a slanting roadway that wound
around the outside in somewhat the way a road winds around a mountain.
There was hardly any stone either in or near Babylonia as there was in
Egypt, and so the Babylonians built their buildings of bricks, which
were made of mud formed into blocks and dried in the sun. In the course
of time, bricks of this sort crumble and turn back into dust again just
as mud pies that you might make would do. This is the reason why all
that is left of the Tower of Babel and the other buildings that were
put up so long ago are now simply hills of clay into which the brick
has turned.
The Egyptians wrote on papyrus or carved their history in stone, but
the Babylonians had neither papyrus nor stone. All they had were
bricks. So they wrote on bricks before they were dried, while they
were still soft clay. This writing was made by punching marks into the
clay with the end of a stick. It was called _cuneiform_, which means
wedge-shaped, for it looked like little groups of wedge-shaped marks,
like chicken-tracks, made in the mud. I have seen boys’ writing that
looked more like cuneiform than it did like English.
The Babylonians as they watched their flocks by night and by day
watched also the sun and the moon and the stars moving across the sky.
So they came to know a great deal about these heavenly bodies.
Did you ever see the moon in the daytime?
Oh, yes, you can.
[Illustration: Babylonians watching eclipse.]
Well, every once in a great while the moon as it moves across the sky
gets in front of the sun and shuts out its light--just as, if you
should put a white plate in front of an electric light, the electric
light would be darkened. It may be ten o’clock in the morning and broad
daylight when suddenly the sun is covered up by the moon as by a white
plate and it becomes night and the stars shine out and chickens,
thinking it is night, go to roost. But in a few moments the moon passes
by and the sun shines out once again. This is called an _eclipse_ of
the sun.
Now you probably have never seen an eclipse of the sun, but some day
you may. At that time, and even to-day when ignorant people see an
eclipse of the sun, they think that something dreadful is going to
happen--the end of the world, perhaps, just because they have never
seen such a strange sight before and do not know that it is a thing
that happens regularly and that no harm comes from it.
Well, nearly twenty-three hundred years before Christ, 2300 B. C., the
Babylonians told beforehand just when there was going to be an eclipse
of the sun. They had watched the moon moving across the sky and they
had figured out how long it would be before it would catch up with the
sun and cross directly over it. So you see how much the old Babylonians
knew about such things. Men who study the stars and other heavenly
bodies are called astronomers, and the Babylonians, therefore, were
famous astronomers.
The Egyptians worshiped animals; but it was quite natural that the
Babylonians should worship these wonderful heavenly bodies, the sun,
moon, and stars, and they did.
The first king of Babylonia whom we know much about--and that much is
very little--was Sargon I, who may have lived about the same time that
the pyramids were built in Egypt.
About 2100 B. C. Babylonia had a king known far and wide for the laws
he made. His name was Hammurabi, and we still have the laws he made
though we no longer obey them; for they were carved into a stone in
cuneiform, and we have the stone. Sargon and Hammurabi are strange
names like no one’s name you ever heard before, yet they are real names
of real kings who ruled over real people.
[Illustration]
9
The Wandering Jews
“You are” spells “Ur.” It is one of the shortest names I know. It is
the name of a little place in that part of Babylonia called Chaldea. In
this place--about nineteen hundred years B.C.--there lived a man named
Abraham. Abraham had a very large family and though he had no money he
was rich. He had large herds of sheep and goats, and these were the
chief riches in those days. Now, Abraham believed in one God, as we do,
while his neighbors, the Babylonians, worshiped idols and the heavenly
bodies, such as the sun, moon, and stars, as I have just said. Abraham
did not like his neighbors for this reason; and his neighbors didn’t
like him, either, for they thought his ideas were peculiar or even
crazy. So, about nineteen hundred years before Christ, Abraham took
his large family, his flocks, and his herds and moved to a land called
Canaan, far away on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
Abraham lived to be a very old man, and he had a large family. One of
his grandsons named Jacob, who was also known by the name of Israel,
had a son Joseph. You probably remember the Bible story of Jacob’s
favorite son Joseph with the coat of many colors. Joseph’s brothers
were jealous of him, as boys and even dogs are apt to be jealous of
any one who is liked better than they are. So they put Joseph into a
well and then sold him as a slave to some Egyptians who were passing
by. Then they told their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by
wild animals. The Egyptians took Joseph to far-off Egypt--far away from
Canaan.
[Illustration: Abraham leaving Ur. 1900 B.C.]
But although Joseph was a slave in Egypt, and although, as I told you,
it was very difficult for any one to work his way up out of his class
to a higher class, he was so bright that at last he became one of the
rulers in Egypt.
Now, at that time when he was ruler there came a famine in Canaan and
there was no food. In Egypt, however, there was plenty of food stored
up. So Joseph’s wicked brothers went down to Egypt to beg the rulers
for bread. They probably thought by that time their brother was dead.
They did not know that he had become such a great man and that he was
now the ruler of whom they were begging food. You can imagine how
surprised they were and how ashamed they must have felt when they found
out that the great ruler was their own brother, whom they had planned
to kill and then had sold as a slave.
Joseph might have let his brothers starve to death or put them in
prison, or sent them back to Canaan without anything, if he had wanted
to revenge himself on them. But instead of doing any of these things,
he gave them not only all the food they wanted and more to take back
home, but made them rich presents besides. Then he told them to go back
and get the rest of his family and return with them to Egypt, and he
promised to give them a piece of land called Goshen where there would
be no famines and they might live happily. So they did as they were
told, and Israel and his sons and all their families came down and
settled in Goshen about 1700 B.C. They were called Israelites, which
means of course the children of Israel, and they believed they were
God’s chosen people. These are the people we now call the Jews.
After Joseph, who was of course an Israelite himself, died, the kings
or Pharaohs of Egypt did not like these foreign people who belonged to
the Semite family, and treated them very badly, as other peoples have
always treated the Jews badly ever since. Though the Jews and their
sons and sons’ sons lived in Egypt for about four hundred years, they
were always hated by the Egyptians.
Now about four hundred years from the time the Jews first came into
Egypt--400 from 1700 is 1300 B.C.--there was a ruler of Egypt called
Rameses the Great.
[Illustration: Rameses’ mummy.]
Rameses so hated the Jews that finally he gave orders to have every
Jewish boy baby killed. In this way he thought to get rid of these
people. One little Jewish boy named Moses, however, was saved, and when
he grew up he became the greatest leader of his people. Moses wanted to
get the Jews out of this unfriendly country where the people worshiped
false gods. And so at last he led all his people out of Egypt across
the Red Sea. This was called the Exodus, and it took place about 1300
B.C.
[Illustration: Rameses the Great.]
After the Jews had left Egypt they first stopped at the foot of a
mountain called Mount Sinai, while Moses went up to the top where he
could be by himself and learn what God wanted him and the Jews to do.
Moses spent forty days praying on top of the mountain. When he came
down from the mountain-top, he brought with him the Ten Commandments,
the same Ten Commandments you may have learned in Sunday-school. But
Moses had been gone so long that when he came back again to his people
he found them worshiping a golden calf as the Egyptians had done. They
had lived in Egypt until they had come to think it was all right to
worship idols.
Moses was very angry. It was high time, he thought, that they should
get rid of the bad influence of their old Egyptian neighbors. And at
last he succeeded in making them worship God again and gave them the
Ten Commandments for their rule of life. So Moses is called a lawgiver
and the founder of the Jewish religion. Then Moses died, and the Jews
wandered from place to place for a great many years before they finally
settled in Canaan.
The Jews had no kings. They were ruled by men called judges, but the
judges lived very simply, just like every one else and not like kings
in palaces with servants and fine robes and rich jewels. But the Jews
wanted a real king as their enemies had and other nations who were
their neighbors. Strange they wanted a king which so many countries
have tried to get rid of--we should think they would have preferred a
President as we have.
So at last a judge who was named Samuel said they should have a king,
and Saul was chosen. Then Samuel poured olive-oil over Saul’s head.
This may seem a queer thing to do, but it took the place of putting
a crown on his head and was a sign that he was to be king. Samuel,
therefore, was the last one of their judges, and Saul was their first
king.
All other nations at that time believed as the Egyptians and Chaldeans
did, in fairy-tale gods or idols. But the Jews alone believed in one
God. They had a Holy Book which had been written by their prophets.
This book is the Old Testament part of the Christian Bible.
So this is the story of the Wandering Jews who gave us the Old
Testament and the Ten Commandments, and here is the way they wandered:
From Ur to Canaan--1900 B.C.
From Canaan to Egypt--1700 B.C.
From Egypt back to Canaan--1300 B.C.
10
Fairy-Tale Gods
There was once a man named Hellen--strange-sounding name for a man,
isn’t it? He was not a Semite and not a Hamite. He was an Aryan. He
had a great many children and children’s children, and they called
themselves Hellenes. They lived in a little scrap of a country that
juts out into the Mediterranean Sea, and they called their land Hellas.
I once upset a bottle of ink on my desk, and the ink ran out into a
wriggly spot that looked exactly as Hellas does on the map. Though
Hellas is hardly any bigger than one of our States, its history is more
famous than that of any other country of its size in the world. We call
Hellas “Greece” and the people who lived there “Greeks.”
About the same time the Jews were leaving Egypt, about the time when
people were beginning to use iron instead of bronze, that is, about
1300 B.C., we first begin to hear of Hellas and the Hellenes, of Greece
and the Greeks.
The Greeks believed in many gods, not in one God as we do and as the
Jews did, and their gods were more like people in fairy-tales than
like divine beings. Many beautiful statues have been made of their
different gods, and poems and stories have been written about them.
There were twelve--just a dozen--chief gods. They were supposed to
live on Mount Olympus, which was the highest mountain in Greece. These
gods were not always good, but often quarreled and cheated and did
even worse things. The gods lived on a kind of food that was much more
delicious than what we eat. It was called nectar and ambrosia, and the
Greeks thought it made those who ate it immortal; that is, so that they
would never die.
Let me introduce you to the family of the gods. I know you will be
pleased to meet them. Most of them have two names.
_Jupiter or Zeus_ is the father of the gods and the the king who rules
over all human beings. He sits on a throne and holds a zigzag flash
of lightning called a thunderbolt in his hand. An eagle, the king of
birds, is usually by his side.
_Juno or Hera_ is his wife and therefore queen. She carries a scepter,
and her pet bird, the peacock, is often with her.
_Neptune or Poseidon_ is one of the brothers of Jupiter. He rules over
the sea. He rides in a chariot drawn by sea-horses and carries in his
hand a trident, which looks like a pitchfork with three points. He
can make a storm at sea or quiet the waves simply by striking them
with his trident.
_Vulcan or Hephæstus_ is the god of fire. He is a lame blacksmith and
works at a forge. His forge is said to be in the cave of a mountain,
and as smoke and fire come forth from some mountains they are called
volcanoes after the god Vulcan inside.
_Apollo_ is the most beautiful of all the gods. He is the god of the
sun and of song and music. Every morning--so the Greeks said--he
drives his sun-chariot across the sky from the east to the west, and
this makes the sun-lighted day.
_Diana or Artemis_ is the twin sister of Apollo. She is the goddess of
the moon and of hunting.
_Mars or Ares_ is the terrible god of war, who is only happy when a
war is going on--so that he is happy most of the time.
_Mercury or Hermes_ is the messenger of the gods. He has wings on
his cap and on his sandals, and he carries in his hand a wonderful
winged stick or wand, which, if placed between two people who are
quarreling, will immediately make them friends. One day Mercury saw
two snakes fighting and he put his wand between them, whereupon they
twined around it as if in a loving hug, and ever since the snakes have
remained entwined around it. This wand is called a _caduceus_.
[Illustration: Birth of Minerva or Athene.]
_Minerva or Athene_ is the goddess of wisdom. She was born in a very
strange way. One day Jupiter had a terrible headache--what we call a
“splitting” headache. It got worse and worse, until at last he could
stand it no longer, but he took a very strange way to cure it. He
called Vulcan, the lame blacksmith, and told him to hit him on the
head with his hammer. Though Vulcan must have thought this a funny
request, of course he had to obey the father god. So he struck Jupiter
a terrible blow on the head, whereupon there sprang forth Minerva in
all her armor, and the headache, of which she had been the cause, had
gone. So she was born from his brain, that is why she is the goddess
of wisdom. Minerva’s Greek name is Athene, and she founded a great
city in Greece and named it after herself, Athens. She is supposed to
look out for this city as a mother does for her child.
_Venus or Aphrodite_ is the goddess of love and beauty. She is the
most beautiful of the goddesses as Apollo is the most beautiful of the
gods. She is said to have been born from the sea-foam. Cupid, her son,
is a little chubby boy with a quiver of arrows on his back. He goes
about shooting his invisible arrows into the hearts of human beings,
but instead of dying when they are hit they at once fall in love
with some one. That is why we put hearts with arrows through them on
valentines.
_Vesta_ is the goddess of the home and fireside, who looks out for the
family.
_Ceres or Demeter_ is the goddess of the farmer. These are the twelve
gods of the Olympian family.
_Pluto_ is a brother of Jupiter. He rules the world underground and
lives down there.
There are many other less important gods and goddesses as well as some
gods that are half human, such as the three Fates and three Graces and
the nine Muses.
Some of the planets in the sky which look like stars are still called
by the names of these Greek gods. Jupiter is the name of the largest
planet. Mars is the name of one that is reddish--the color of blood.
Venus is the name of one that is very beautiful. There is also a
Mercury and a Neptune.