AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE

TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CON

NECTIONS, 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.'

Where this mode of communication fails, we turn to another which carries us even farther into the past. The records which

'See page 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.

THE GREAT EVENTS

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 na

tions 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.' 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. 1See the Dawn of Civilization, page 1.