ANCIENT MAN THE BEGINNING OF CIVILIZATIONS BY HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON 1922 DEDICATION To HANSJE AND WILLEM. My darling boys, You are twelve and eight years old. Soon you will be grown up. You willleave home and begin your own lives. I have been thinking about thatday, wondering what I could do to help you. At last, I have had an idea. The best compass is a thorough understanding of the growth and theexperience of the human race. Why should I not write a specialhistory for you? So I took my faithful Corona and five bottles of ink and a box ofmatches and a bale of paper and began to work upon the first volume. Ifall goes well there will be eight more and they will tell you what youought to know of the last six thousand years. But before you start to read let me explain what I intend to do. I am not going to present you with a textbook. Neither will it be avolume of pictures. It will not even be a regular history in theaccepted sense of the word. I shall just take both of you by the hand and together we shall wanderforth to explore the intricate wilderness of the bygone ages. I shall show you mysterious rivers which seem to come from nowhere andwhich are doomed to reach no ultimate destination. I shall bring you close to dangerous abysses, hidden carefully beneath athick overgrowth of pleasant but deceiving romance. Here and there we shall leave the beaten track to scale a solitary andlonely peak, towering high above the surrounding country. Unless we are very lucky we shall sometimes lose ourselves in a suddenand dense fog of ignorance. Wherever we go we must carry our warm cloak of human sympathy andunderstanding for vast tracts of land will prove to be a steriledesert--swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed andunless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity andthat, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could happen to anyof us. I shall not pretend to be an infallible guide. Whenever you have achance, take counsel with other travelers who have passed along the sameroute before. Compare their observations with mine and if this leads youto different conclusions, I shall certainly not be angry with you. I have never preached to you in times gone by. I am not going to preach to you today. You know what the world expects of you--that you shall do your share ofthe common task and shall do it bravely and cheerfully. If these books can help you, so much the better. And with all my love I dedicate these histories to you and to the boysand girls who shall keep you company on the voyage through life. HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON. _Barrow Street, New York City. May 8, xx_. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. PREHISTORIC MANII. THE WORLD GROWS COLDIII. END OF THE STONE AGEIV. THE EARLIEST SCHOOL OF THE HUMAN RACEV. THE KEY OF STONEVI. THE LAND OF THE LIVING AND THE LAND OF THE DEADVII. THE MAKING OF A STATEVIII. THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPTIX. MESOPOTAMIA--THE COUNTRY BETWEEN THE RIVERSX. THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERSXI. ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA--THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POTXII. THE STORY OF MOSESXIII. JERUSALEM--THE CITY OF THE LAWXIV. DAMASCUS--THE CITY OF TRADEXV. THE PHOENICIANS WHO SAILED BEYOND THE HORIZONXVI. THE ALPHABET FOLLOWS THE TRADEXVII. THE END OF THE ANCIENT WORLD PREHISTORIC MAN It took Columbus more than four weeks to sail from Spain to the WestIndian Islands. We on the other hand cross the ocean in sixteen hours ina flying machine. Five hundred years ago, three or four years were necessary to copy abook by hand. We possess linotype machines and rotary presses and we canprint a new book in a couple of days. We understand a great deal about anatomy and chemistry and mineralogyand we are familiar with a thousand different branches of science ofwhich the very name was unknown to the people of the past. In one respect, however, we are quite as ignorant as the most primitiveof men--we do not know where we came from. We do not know how or why orwhen the human race began its career upon this Earth. With a millionfacts at our disposal we are still obliged to follow the example of thefairy-stories and begin in the old way: "Once upon a time there was a man. " This man lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. What did he look like? We do not know. We never saw his picture. Deep in the clay of an ancientsoil we have sometimes found a few pieces of his skeleton. They werehidden amidst masses of bones of animals that have long sincedisappeared from the face of the earth. We have taken these bones andthey allow us to reconstruct the strange creature who happens to beour ancestor. The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly andunattractive mammal. He was quite small. The heat of the sun and thebiting wind of the cold winter had colored his skin a dark brown. Hishead and most of his body were covered with long hair. He had very thinbut strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey. Hisforehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal whichuses its teeth both as fork and knife. [Illustration: PREHISTORIC MAN. ] He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of therumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke andtheir lava. He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests. When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots ofplants or he stole the eggs from the nest of an angry bird. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase, he managed to catch asparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbit These he would eat raw, for prehistoric man did not know that food could be cooked. His teeth were large and looked like the teeth of many of our ownanimals. During the hours of day this primitive human being went about in searchof food for himself and his wife and his young. At night, frightened by the noise of the beasts, who were in search ofprey, he would creep into a hollow tree or he would hide himself behinda few big boulders, covered with moss and great, big spiders. In summer he was exposed to the scorching rays of the sun. During the winter he froze with cold. When he hurt himself (and hunting animals are for ever breaking theirbones or spraining their ankles) he had no one to take care of him. He had learned how to make certain sounds to warn his fellow-beingswhenever danger threatened. In this he resembled a dog who barks when astranger approaches. In many other respects he was far less attractivethan a well-bred house pet. Altogether, early man was a miserable creature who lived in a world offright and hunger, who was surrounded by a thousand enemies and who wasfor ever haunted by the vision of friends and relatives who had beeneaten up by wolves and bears and the terrible sabre-toothed tiger. Of the earliest history of this man we know nothing. He had no tools andhe built no homes. He lived and died and left no traces of hisexistence. We keep track of him through his bones and they tell us thathe lived more than two thousand centuries ago. The rest is darkness. Until we reach the time of the famous Stone Age, when man learned thefirst rudimentary principles of what we call civilization. Of this Stone Age I must tell you in some detail. THE WORLD GROWS COLD Something was the matter with the weather. Early man did not know what "time" meant. He kept no records of birthdays and wedding-anniversaries or the hour ofdeath. He had no idea of days or weeks or years. When the sun arose in the morning he did not say "Behold another day. "He said "It is Light" and he used the rays of the early sun to gatherfood for his family. When it grew dark, he returned to his wife and children, gave them partof the day's catch (some berries and a few birds), stuffed himself fullwith raw meat and went to sleep. In a very general way he kept track of the seasons. Long experience hadtaught him that the cold Winter was invariably followed by the mildSpring--that Spring grew into the hot Summer when fruits ripened and thewild ears of corn were ready to be plucked and eaten. The Summer endedwhen gusts of wind swept the leaves from the trees and when a number ofanimals crept into their holes to make ready for the longhibernal sleep. [Illustration: THE GLACIAL PERIOD. ] It had always been that way. Early man accepted these useful changes ofcold and warm but asked no questions. He lived and that was enough tosatisfy him. Suddenly, however, something happened that worried him greatly. The warm days of Summer had come very late. The fruits had not ripenedat all. The tops of the mountains which used to be covered with grasslay deeply hidden under a heavy burden of snow. Then one morning quite a number of wild people, different from the otherinhabitants of his valley had approached from the region of thehigh peaks. They muttered sounds which no one could understand. They looked lean andappeared to be starving. Hunger and cold seemed to have driven them fromtheir former homes. There was not enough food in the valley for both the old inhabitants andthe newcomers. When they tried to stay more than a few days there was aterrible fight and whole families were killed. The others fled into thewoods and were not seen again. For a long time nothing occurred of any importance. But all the while, the days grew shorter and the nights were colder thanthey ought to have been. Finally, in a gap between the two high hills, there appeared a tinyspeck of greenish ice. It increased in size as the years went by. Veryslowly a gigantic glacier was sliding down the slopes of the mountainridge. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With the noise ofa dozen thunderstorms they suddenly tumbled among the frightened peopleand killed them while they slept. Century-old trees were crushed intokindling wood by the high walls of ice that knew of no mercy to eitherman or beast. At last, it began to snow. It snowed for months and months and months. [Illustration: THE CAVE-MAN. ] All the plants died. The animals fled in search of the southern sun. Thevalley became uninhabitable. Man hoisted his children upon his back, took the few pieces of stone which he had used as a weapon and wentforth to find a new home. Why the world should have grown cold at that particular moment, we donot know. We can not even guess at the cause. The gradual lowering of the temperature, however, made a greatdifference to the human race. For a time it looked as if every one would die. But in the end thisperiod of suffering proved a real blessing. It killed all the weakerpeople and forced the survivors to sharpen their wits lest theyperish, too. Placed before the choice of hard thinking or quick dying the same brainthat had first turned a stone into a hatchet now solved difficultieswhich had never faced the older generations. In the first place, there was the question of clothing. It had grownmuch too cold to do without some sort of artificial covering. Bears andbisons and other animals who live in northern regions are protectedagainst snow and ice by a heavy coat of fur. Man possessed no such coat. His skin was very delicate and he suffered greatly. He solved his problem in a very simple fashion. He dug a hole and hecovered it with branches and leaves and a little grass. A bear came byand fell into this artificial cave. Man waited until the creature wasweak from lack of food and then killed him with many blows of a bigstone. With a sharp piece of flint he cut the fur of the animal's back. Then he dried it in the sparse rays of the sun, put it around his ownshoulders and enjoyed the same warmth that had formerly kept the bearhappy and comfortable. Then there was the housing problem. Many animals were in the habit ofsleeping in a dark cave. Man followed their example and searched untilhe found an empty grotto. He shared it with bats and all sorts ofcreeping insects but this he did not mind. His new home kept him warmand that was enough. Often, during a thunderstorm a tree had been hit by lightning. Sometimesthe entire forest had been set on fire. Man had seen these forest-fires. When he had come too near he had been driven away by the heat. He nowremembered that fire gave warmth. Thus far, fire had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree, dragged into a cave and lighted by means of smoulderingbranches from a burning forest filled the room with unusual but verypleasant heat. Perhaps you will laugh. All these things seem so very simple. They arevery simple to us because some one, ages and ages ago, was clever enoughto think of them. But the first cave that was made comfortable by thefire of an old log attracted more attention than the first house thatever was lighted by electricity. When at last, a specially brilliant fellow hit upon the idea of throwingraw meat into the hot ashes before eating it, he added something to thesum total of human knowledge which made the cave-man feel that theheight of civilization had been reached. Nowadays, when we hear of another marvelous invention we are very proud. "What more, " we ask, "can the human brain accomplish?" And we smile contentedly for we live in the most remarkable of all agesand no one has ever performed such miracles as our engineers andour chemists. Forty thousand years ago when the world was on the point of freezing todeath, an unkempt and unwashed cave-man, pulling the feathers out of ahalf-dead chicken with the help of his brown fingers and his big whiteteeth--throwing the feathers and the bones upon the same floor thatserved him and his family as a bed, felt just as happy and just as proudwhen he was taught how the hot cinders of a fire would change raw meatinto a delicious meal. "What a wonderful age, " he would exclaim and he would lie down amidstthe decaying skeletons of the animals which had served him as his dinnerand he would dream of his own perfection while bats, as large as smalldogs, flew restlessly through the cave and while Prehistoric man livedthrough at least four definite eras when the ice descended far downinto the valleys and covered the greater part of the European continent. The last one of these periods came to an end almost thirty thousandyears ago. From that moment on man left behind him concrete evidence of hisexistence in the form of tools and arms and pictures and in a generalway we can say that history begins when the last cold period had becomea thing of the past. The endless struggle for life had taught the survivors many things. Stone and wooden implements had become as common as steel tools are inour own days. Gradually the rudely chipped flint axe had been replaced by one ofpolished flint which was infinitely more practical. It allowed man toattack many animals at whose mercy he had been since the beginningof time. The mammoth was no longer seen. The musk-ox had retreated to the polar circle. The tiger had left Europe for good. The cave-bear no longer ate little children. The powerful brain of the weakest and most helpless of all livingcreatures--Man--had devised such terrible instruments of destructionthat he was now the master of all the other animals. The first great victory over Nature had been gained but many others wereto follow. Equipped with a full set of tools both for hunting and fishing, thecave-dweller looked for new living quarters. The shores of rivers and lakes offered the best opportunity for aregular livelihood. The old caves were deserted and the human race moved toward the water. Now that man could handle heavy axes, the felling of trees no longeroffered any great difficulties. For countless ages birds had been constructing comfortable houses out ofchips of wood and grass amidst the branches of trees. Man followed their example. He, too, built himself a nest and called it his "home. " He did not, except in a few parts of Asia, take to the trees which werea bit too small and unsteady for his purpose. He cut down a number of logs. These he drove firmly into the soft bottomof a shallow lake. On top of them he constructed a wooden platform andupon this platform he erected his first wooden house. It offered many advantages over the old cave. No wild animals could break into it and robbers could not enter it. Thelake itself was an inexhaustible store-room containing an endless supplyof fresh fish. These houses built on piles were much healthier than the old caves andthey gave the children a chance to grow up into strong men. Thepopulation increased steadily and man began to occupy vast tracts ofwilderness which had been unoccupied since the beginning of time. And all the time new inventions were made which made life morecomfortable and less dangerous. Often enough these innovations were not due to the cleverness of man'sbrain. He simply copied the animals. You know of course that there are a large number of beasties who preparefor the long winter by burying nuts and acorns and other food which isabundant during the summer. Just think of the squirrels who are for everfilling their larder in gardens and parks with supplies for the winterand the early spring. Early man, less intelligent in many respects than the squirrels, had notknown how to preserve anything for the future. He ate until his hunger was stilled, but what he did not need right awayhe allowed to rot. As a result he often went without his meals duringthe cold period and many of his children died from hunger and want. Until he followed the example of the animals and prepared for the futureby laying in sufficient stores when the harvest had been good and therewas an abundance of wheat and grain. We do not know which genius first discovered the use of pottery but hedeserves a statue. Very likely it was a woman who had got tired of the eternal chores ofthe kitchen and wanted to make her household duties a little lessexacting. She noticed that chunks of clay, when exposed to the rays ofthe sun, got baked into a hard substance. If a flat piece of clay could be transformed into a brick, a slightlycurved piece of the same material must produce a similar result. And behold, the brick grew into a piece of pottery and the human racewas able to save for the day of tomorrow. If you think that my praises of this invention are exaggerated, look atthe breakfast table and see what pottery, in one form and the other, means in your own life. Your oatmeal is served in a dish. The cream is served from a pitcher. Your eggs are carried from the kitchen to the dining-room table on aplate. Your milk is brought to you in a china mug. Then go to the store-room(if there is no store-room in your house go to the nearest Delicatessenstore). You will see how all the things which we are supposed to eattomorrow and next week and next year have been put away in jars and cansand other artificial containers which Nature did not provide for us butwhich man was forced to invent and perfect before he could be assured ofhis regular meals all the year around. Even a gas-tank is nothing but a large pitcher, made of iron becauseiron does not break as easily as china and is less porous than clay. Soare barrels and bottles and pots and pans. They all serve the samepurpose--of providing us in the future with those things of which wehappen to have an abundance at the present moment. And because he could preserve eatable things for the day of need, manbegan to raise vegetables and grain and saved the surplus for futureconsumption. This explains why, during the late Stone Age, we find the firstwheat-fields and the first gardens, grouped around the settlements ofthe early pile-dwellers. It also tells us why man gave up his habit of wandering and settled downin one fixed spot where he raised his children until the day of hisdeath when he was decently buried among his own people. [Illustration: PREHISTORIC MAN IS DISCOVERED. ] It is safe to say that these earliest ancestors of ours would have givenup the ways of savages of their own accord if they had been left totheir fate. But suddenly there was an end to their isolation. Prehistoric man was discovered. A traveler from the unknown south-land who had dared to cross theturbulent sea and the forbidding mountain passes had found his way tothe wild people of Central Europe. On his back he carried a pack. When he had spread his wares before the gaping curiosity of thebewildered natives, their eyes beheld wonders of which their minds hadnever dared to dream. They saw bronze hammers and axes and tools made of iron and helmets madeof copper and beautiful ornaments consisting of a strangely coloredsubstance which the foreign visitor called "glass. " And overnight the Age of Stone came to an end. It was replaced by a new civilization which had discarded wooden andstone implements centuries before and had laid the foundations for that"Age of Metal" which has endured until our own day. It is of this new civilization that I shall tell you in the rest of mybook and if you do not mind, we shall leave the northern continent for acouple of thousand years and pay a visit to Egypt and to western Asia. "But, " you will say, "this is not fair. You promise to tell us aboutprehistoric man and then, just when the story is going to beinteresting, you close the chapter and you jump to another part of theworld and we must jump with you whether we like it or not. " I know. It does not seem the right thing to do. Unfortunately, history is not at all like mathematics. When you solve a sum you go from "a" to "b" and from "b" to "c" and from"c" to "d" and so on. History on the other hand jumps from "a" to "z" and then back to "f" andnext to "m" without any apparent respect for neatness and order. There is a good reason for this. History is not exactly a science. It tells the story of the human race and most people, however much wemay try to change their nature, refuse to behave with the regularity andthe precision of the tables of multiplication. No two men ever do precisely the same thing. No two human brains ever reach exactly the same conclusion. You will notice that for yourself when you grow up. It was not different a few hundred centuries ago. Prehistoric man, as I just told you, was on a fair way to progress. He had managed to survive the ice and the snow and the wild animals andthat in itself, was a great deal. He had invented many useful things. Suddenly, however, other people in a different part of the world enteredthe race. They rushed forward at a terrible speed and within a very short space oftime they reached a height of civilization which had never before beenseen upon our planet. Then they set forth to teach what they knew to theothers who had been less intelligent than themselves. Now that I have explained this to you, does it not seem just to give theEgyptians and the people of western Asia their full share of thechapters of this book? THE EARLIEST SCHOOL OF THE HUMAN RACE We are the children of a practical age. We travel from place to place in our own little locomotives which wecall automobiles. When we wish to speak to a friend whose home is a thousand miles away, we say "Hello" into a rubber tube and ask for a certain telephone numberin Chicago. At night when the room grows dark we push a button and there is light. If we happen to be cold we push another button and the electric stovespreads its pleasant glow through our study. On the other hand in summer when it is hot the same electric currentwill start a small artificial storm (an electric fan) which keeps uscool and comfortable. We seem to be the masters of all the forces of nature and we make themwork for us as if they were our very obedient slaves. But do not forget one thing when you pride yourself upon our splendidachievements. We have constructed the edifice of our modern civilization upon thefundament of wisdom that had been built at great pains by the people ofthe ancient world. Do not be afraid of their strange names which you will meet upon everypage of the coming chapters. Babylonians and Egyptians and Chaldeans and Sumerians are all dead andgone, but they continue to influence our own lives in everything we do, in the letters we write, in the language we use, in the complicatedmathematical problems which we must solve before we can build a bridgeor a skyscraper. And they deserve our grateful respect as long as our planet continues torace through the wide space of the high heavens. These ancient people of whom I shall now tell you lived in threedefinite spots. Two of these were found along the banks of vast rivers. The third was situated on the shores of the Mediterranean. The oldest center of civilization developed in the valley of the Nile, in a country which was called Egypt. The second was located in the fertile plains between two big rivers ofwestern Asia, to which the ancients gave the name of Mesopotamia. The third one which you will find along the shore of the Mediterranean, was inhabited by the Phoenicians, the earliest of all colonizers and bythe Jews who bestowed upon the rest of the world the main principles oftheir moral laws. This third center of civilization is known by its ancient Babylonianname of Suri, or as we pronounce it, Syria. The history of the people who lived in these regions covers more thanfive thousand years. It is a very, very complicated story. I can not give you many details. I shall try and weave their adventures into a single fabric, which willlook like one of those marvelous rugs of which you read in the taleswhich Scheherazade told to Harun the Just. THE KEY OF STONE Fifty years before the birth of Christ, the Romans conquered the landalong the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and among this newlyacquired territory was a country called Egypt. The Romans, who are to play such a great role in our history, were arace of practical men. They built bridges, they constructed roads, and with a small but highlytrained army of soldiers and civil officers, they managed to rule thegreater part of Europe, of eastern Africa and western Asia. As for art and the sciences, these did not interest them very much. Theyregarded with suspicion a man who could play the lute or who could writea poem about Spring and only thought him little better than the cleverfellow who could walk the tightrope or who had trained his poodle dog tostand on its hind legs. They left such things to the Greeks and to theOrientals, both of whom they despised, while they themselves spent theirdays and nights keeping order among the thousand and one nations oftheir vast empire. When they first set foot in Egypt that country was already terribly old. More than six thousand and five hundred years had gone by since thehistory of the Egyptian people had begun. Long before any one had dreamed of building a city amidst the swamps ofthe river Tiber, the kings of Egypt had ruled far and wide and had madetheir court the center of all civilization. While the Romans were still savages who chased wolves and bears withclumsy stone axes, the Egyptians were writing books, performingintricate medical operations and teaching their children the tables ofmultiplication. This great progress they owed chiefly to one very wonderful invention, to the art of preserving their spoken words and their ideas for thebenefit of their children and grandchildren. We call this the art of writing. We are so familiar with writing that we can not understand how peopleever managed to live without books and newspapers and magazines. But they did and it was the main reason why they made such slow progressduring the first million years of their stay upon this planet. They were like cats and dogs who can only teach their puppies and theirkittens a few simple things (barking at a stranger and climbing treesand such things) and who, because they can not write, possess no way inwhich they can use the experience of their countless ancestors. This sounds almost funny, doesn't it? And why make such a fuss about so simple a matter? But did you ever stop to think what happens when you write a letter? Suppose that you are taking a trip in the mountains and you have seen adeer. You want to tell this to your father who is in the city. What do you do? You put a lot of dots and dashes upon a piece of paper--you add a fewmore dots and dashes upon an envelope and you carry your epistle to themailbox together with a two-cent stamp. What have you really been doing? You have changed a number of spoken words into a number of pothooks andscrawls. But how did you know how to make your curlycues in such a fashion thatboth the postman and your father could retranslate them intospoken words? You knew, because some one had taught you how to draw the precisefigures which represented the sound of your spoken words. Just take a few letters and see the way this game is played. We make a guttural noise and write down a "G. " We let the air pass through our closed teeth and we write down "S. " We open our mouth wide and make a noise like a steam engine and thesound is written down "H. " It took the human race hundreds of thousands of years to discover thisand the credit for it goes to the Egyptians. Of course they did not use the letters which have been used to printthis book. They had a system of their own. It was much prettier than ours but not quite so simple. It consisted of little figures and images of things around the house andaround the farm, of knives and plows and birds and pots and pans. Theselittle figures their scribes scratched and painted upon the wall of thetemples, upon the coffins of their dead kings and upon the dried leavesof the papyrus plant which has given its name to our "paper. " But when the Romans entered this vast library they showed neitherenthusiasm nor interest. They possessed a system of writing of their own which they thoughtvastly superior. [Illustration: THE KEY OF STONE] They did not know that the Greeks (from whom they had learned theiralphabet) had in turn obtained theirs from the Phoenicians who had againborrowed with great success from the old Egyptians. They did not knowand they did not care. In their schools the Roman alphabet was taughtexclusively and what was good enough for the Roman children was goodenough for everybody else. You will understand that the Egyptian language did not long survive theindifference and the opposition of the Roman governors. It wasforgotten. It died just as the languages of most of our Indian tribeshave become a thing of the past. The Arabs and the Turks who succeeded the Romans as the rulers of Egyptabhorred all writing that was not connected with their holy book, the Koran. At last in the middle of the sixteenth century a few western visitorscame to Egypt and showed a mild interest in these strange pictures. But there was no one to explain their meaning and these first Europeanswere as wise as the Romans and the Turks had been before them. Now it happened, late in the eighteenth century that a certain Frenchgeneral by the name of Buonaparte visited Egypt. He did not go there tostudy ancient history. He wanted to use the country as a starting pointfor a military expedition against the British colonies in India. Thisexpedition failed completely but it helped solve the mysterious problemof the ancient Egyptian writing. Among the soldiers of Napoleon Buonaparte there was a young officer bythe name of Broussard. He was stationed at the fortress of St. Julien onthe western mouth of the Nile which is called the Rosetta river. Broussard liked to rummage among the ruins of the lower Nile and one dayhe found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in that neighborhood, it was covered with picturewriting. But this slab of black basalt was different from anything that had everbeen discovered. It carried three inscriptions and one of these (oh joy!) was in Greek. The Greek language was known. As it was almost certain that the Egyptian part contained a translationof the Greek (or vice versa), the key to ancient Egyptian seemed to havebeen discovered. But it took more than thirty years of very hard work before the key hadbeen made to fit the lock. Then the mysterious door was opened and the ancient treasure house ofEgypt was forced to surrender its secrets. The man who gave his life to the task of deciphering this language wasJean Francois Champollion--usually called Champollion Junior todistinguish him from his older brother who was also a very learned man. Champollion Junior was a baby when the French revolution broke out andtherefore he escaped serving in the armies of the General Buonaparte. While his countrymen were marching from one glorious victory to another(and back again as such Imperial armies are apt to do) Champollionstudied the language of the Copts, the native Christians of Egypt. Atthe age of nineteen he was appointed a professor of History at one ofthe smaller French universities and there he began his great work oftranslating the pictures of the old Egyptian language. For this purpose he used the famous black stone of Rosetta whichBroussard had discovered among the ruins near the mouth of the Nile. The original stone was still in Egypt. Napoleon had been forced tovacate the country in a hurry and he had left this curiosity behind. When the English retook Alexandria in the year 1801 they found the stoneand carried it to London, where you may see it this very day in theBritish Museum. The Inscriptions however had been copied and had beentaken to France, where they were used by Champollion. The Greek text was quite clear. It contained the story of Ptolemy V andhis wife Cleopatra, the grandmother of that other Cleopatra about whomShakespeare wrote. The other two inscriptions, however, refused tosurrender their secrets. One of them was in hieroglyphics, the name we give to the oldest knownEgyptian writing. The word Hieroglyphic is Greek and means "sacredcarving. " It is a very good name for it fully describes the purpose andnature of this script. The priests who had invented this art did notwant the common people to become too familiar with the deep mysteries ofpreserving speech. They made writing a sacred business. They surrounded it with much mystery and decreed that the carving ofhieroglyphics be regarded as a sacred art and forbade the people topractice it for such a common purpose as business or commerce. They could enforce this rule with success so long as the country wasinhabited by simple farmers who lived at home and grew everything theyneeded upon their own fields. But gradually Egypt became a land oftraders and these traders needed a means of communication beyond thespoken word. So they boldly took the little figures of the priests andsimplified them for their own purposes. Thereafter they wrote theirbusiness letters in the new script which became known as the "popularlanguage" and which we call by its Greek name, the "Demotic language. " The Rosetta stone carried both the sacred and the popular translationsof the Greek text and upon these two Champollion centered his attack. Hecollected every piece of Egyptian script which he could get and togetherwith the Rosetta stone he compared and studied them until after twentyyears of patient drudgery he understood the meaning of fourteenlittle figures. That means that he spent more than a whole year to decipher each singlepicture. Finally he went to Egypt and in the year 1823 he printed the firstscientific book upon the subject of the ancient hieroglyphics. Nine years later he died from overwork, as a true martyr to the greattask which he had set himself as a boy. His work, however, lived after him. Others continued his studies and today Egyptologists can readhieroglyphics as easily as we can read the printed pages of ournewspapers. Fourteen pictures in twenty years seems very slow work. But let me tellyou something of Champollion's difficulties. Then you will understand, and understanding, you will admire his courage. The old Egyptians did not use a simple sign language. They had passedbeyond that stage. Of course, you know what sign language is. Every Indian story has a chapter about queer messages, written in theform of little pictures. Hardly a boy but at some stage or other of hislife, as a buffalo hunter or an Indian fighter, has invented a signlanguage of his own, and all Boy Scouts are familiar with it. ButEgyptian was something quite different and I must try and make thisclear to you with a few pictures. Suppose that you were Champollion andthat you were reading an old papyrus which told the story of a farmerwho lived somewhere along the banks of the river Nile. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw. [Illustration: saw] "Very well, " you said, "that means, of course, that the farmer went outand cut a tree down. " Most likely you had guessed correctly. Next you took another page of hieroglyphics. They told the story of a queen who had lived to be eighty-two years old. Right in the middle of the text the same picture occurred. That was verypuzzling, to say the least. Queens do not go about cutting down trees. They let other people do it for them. A young queen may saw wood for thesake of exercise, but a queen of eighty-two stays at home with her catand her spinning wheel. Yet, the picture was there. The ancient priestwho drew it must have placed it there for a definite purpose. What could he have meant? That was the riddle which Champollion finally solved. He discovered that the Egyptians were the first people to use what wecall "phonetic writing. " Like most other words which express a scientific idea, the word"phonetic" is of Greek origin. It means the "science of the sound whichis made by our speech. " You have seen the Greek word "phone, " whichmeans the voice, before. It occurs in our word "telephone, " the machinewhich carries the voice to a distant point. Ancient Egyptian was "phonetic" and it set man free from the narrowlimits of that sign language which in some primitive form had been usedever since the cave-dweller began to scratch pictures of wild animalsupon the walls of his home. Now let us return for a moment to the little fellow with his saw whosuddenly appeared in the story of the old queen. Evidently he hadsomething to do with a saw. A "saw" is either a tool which you find in a carpenter shop or it meansthe past tense of the verb "to see. " This is what had happened to the word during the course of manycenturies. First of all it had meant a man with a saw. Then it came to mean the sound which we reproduce by the three modernletters, s, a and w. In the end the original meaning of carpentering waslost entirely and the picture indicated the past tense of "to see. " A modern English sentence done into the images of ancient Egypt willshow you what I mean. [Illustration: eye bee leaf eye saw giraffe] The [Illustration: eye] means either these two round objects in yourhead which allow you to see, or it means "I, " the person who is talkingor writing. A [Illustration: bee] is either an animal which gathers honey and pricksyou in the finger when you try to catch it, or it represents to verb "tobe, " which is pronounced the same way and which means to "exist. " Againit may be the first part of a verb like "be-come" or "be-have. " In thiscase the bee is followed by a [Illustration: leaf] which represents thesound which we find in the word "leave" or "leaf. " Put your "bee" andyour "leaf" together and you have the two sounds which make the verb"bee-leave" or "believe" as we write it nowadays. The "eye" you know all about. Finally you get a picture which looks like a giraffe. [Illustration:Giraffe] It is a giraffe, and it is part of the old sign language, whichhas been continued wherever it seemed most convenient. Therefore you get the following sentence, "I believe I saw a giraffe. " This system, once invented, was developed during thousands of years. Gradually the most important figures came to mean single letters orshort sounds like "fu" or "em" or "dee" or "zee, " or as we write them, fand m and d and z. And with the help of these, the Egyptians could writeanything they wanted upon every conceivable subject, and could preservethe experience of one generation for the benefit of the next without theslightest difficulty. That, in a very general way, is what Champollion taught us after theexhausting search which killed him when he was a young man. That too, is the reason why today we know Egyptian history better thanthat of any other ancient country. THE LAND OF THE LIVING AND THE LAND OF THE DEAD The History of Man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful and easily gathered, thither man travelledto make his home. The fame of the Nile valley must have spread at an early date. From farand wide, wild people flocked to the banks of the river. Surrounded onall sides by desert or sea, it was not easy to reach these fertilefields and only the hardiest men and women survived. We do not know who they were. Some came from the interior of Africa andhad woolly hair and thick lips. Others, with a yellowish skin, came from the desert of Arabia and thebroad rivers of western Asia. They fought each other for the possession of this wonderful land. They built villages which their neighbors destroyed and they rebuiltthem with the bricks they had taken from other neighbors whom they inturn had vanquished. Gradually a new race developed. They called themselves "remi, " whichmeans simply "the Men. " There was a touch of pride in this name and theyused it in the same sense that we refer to America as "God'sown country. " Part of the year, during the annual flood of the Nile, they lived onsmall islands within a country which itself was cut off from the rest ofthe world by the sea and the desert. No wonder that these people werewhat we call "insular, " and had the habits of villagers who rarely comein contact with their neighbors. They liked their own ways best. They thought their own habits andcustoms just a trifle better than those of anybody else. In the sameway, their own gods were considered more powerful than the gods of othernations. They did not exactly despise foreigners, but they felt a mildpity for them and if possible they kept them outside of the Egyptiandomains, lest their own people be corrupted by "foreign notions. " They were kind-hearted and rarely did anything that was cruel. They werepatient and in business dealings they were rather indifferent Life cameas an easy gift and they never became stingy and mean like northernpeople who have to struggle for mere existence. When the sun arose above the blood-red horizon of the distant desert, they went forth to till their fields. When the last rays of light haddisappeared beyond the mountain ridges, they went to bed. They worked hard, they plodded and they bore whatever happened withstolid unconcern and profound patience. They believed that this life was but a short preface to a new existencewhich began the moment Death had entered the house. Until at last, thelife of the future came to be regarded as more important than the lifeof the present and the people of Egypt turned their teeming land intoone vast shrine for the worship of the dead. [Illustration: THE LAND OF THE DEAD. ] And as most of the papyrus-rolls of the ancient valley tell stories of areligious nature we know with great accuracy just what gods theEgyptians revered and how they tried to assure all possible happinessand comfort to those who had entered upon the eternal sleep. In thebeginning each little village had possessed a god of its own. Often this god was supposed to reside in a queerly shaped stone or inthe branch of a particularly large tree. It was well to be good friendswith him for he could do great harm and destroy the harvest and prolongthe period of drought until the people and the cattle had all died ofthirst. Therefore the villages made him presents--offered him things toeat or a bunch of flowers. When the Egyptians went forth to fight their enemies the god must needsbe taken along, until he became a sort of battle flag around which thepeople rallied in time of danger. But when the country grew older and better roads had been built and theEgyptians had begun to travel, the old "fetishes, " as such chunks ofstone and wood were called, lost their importance and were thrown awayor were left in a neglected corner or were used as doorsteps or chairs. Their place was taken by new gods who were more powerful than the oldones had been and who represented those forces of nature whichinfluenced the lives of the Egyptians of the entire valley. First among these was the Sun which makes all things grow. Next came the river Nile which tempered the heat of the day and broughtrich deposits of clay to refresh the fields and make them fertile. Then there was the kindly Moon which at night rowed her little boatacross the arch of heaven and there was Thunder and there was Lightningand there were any number of things which could make life happy ormiserable according to their pleasure and desire. Ancient man, entirely at the mercy of these forces of nature, could notget rid of them as easily as we do when we plant lightning rods upon ourhouses or build reservoirs which keep us alive during the summer monthswhen there is no rain. On the contrary they formed an intimate part of his daily life--theyaccompanied him from the moment he was put into his cradle until the daythat his body was prepared for eternal rest. Neither could he imagine that such vast and powerful phenomena as a boltof lightning or the flood of a river were mere impersonal things. Someone--somewhere--must be their master and must direct them as theengineer directs his engine or a captain steers his ship. A God-in-Chief was therefore created, like the commanding general of anarmy. A number of lower officers were placed at his disposal. Within their own territory each one could act independently. In grave matters, however, which affected the happiness of all thepeople, they must take orders from their master. The Supreme Divine Ruler of the land of Egypt was called Osiris, and allthe little Egyptian children knew the story of his wonderful life. Once upon a time, in the valley of the Nile, there lived a king calledOsiris. He was a good man who taught his subjects how to till their fields andwho gave his country just laws. But he had a bad brother whose namewas Seth. Now Seth envied Osiris because he was so virtuous and one day he invitedhim to dinner and afterwards he said that he would like to show himsomething. Curious Osiris asked what it was and Seth said that it was afunnily shaped coffin which fitted one like a suit of clothes. Osirissaid that he would like to try it. So he lay down in the coffin but nosooner was he inside when bang!--Seth shut the lid. Then he called forhis servants and ordered them to throw the coffin into the Nile. Soon the news of his terrible deed spread throughout the land. Isis, thewife of Osiris, who had loved her husband very dearly, went at once tothe banks of the Nile, and after a short while the waves threw thecoffin upon the shore. Then she went forth to tell her son Horus, whoruled in another land, but no sooner had she left than Seth, the wickedbrother, broke into the palace and cut the body of Osiris intofourteen pieces. [Illustration: A PYRAMID. ] When Isis returned, she discovered what Seth had done. She took thefourteen pieces of the dead body and sewed them together and then Osiriscame back to life and reigned for ever and ever as king of the lowerworld to which the souls of men must travel after they have leftthe body. As for Seth, the Evil One, he tried to escape, but Horus, the son ofOsiris and Isis, who had been warned by his mother, caught him andslew him. This story of a faithful wife and a wicked brother and a dutiful son whoavenged his father and the final victory of virtue over wickednessformed the basis of the religious life of the people of Egypt. Osiris was regarded as the god of all living things which seemingly diein the winter and yet return to renewed existence the next spring. Asruler of the Life Hereafter, he was the final judge of the acts of men, and woe unto him who had been cruel and unjust and had oppressedthe weak. As for the world of the departed souls, it was situated beyond the highmountains of the west (which was also the home of the young Nile) andwhen an Egyptian wanted to say that someone had died, he said that he"had gone west. " Isis shared the honors and the duties of Osiris with him. Their sonHorus, who was worshipped as the god of the Sun (hence the word"horizon, " the place where the sun sets) became the first of a new lineof Egyptian kings and all the Pharaohs of Egypt had Horus as theirmiddle name. Of course, each little city and every small village continued to worshipa few divinities of their own. But generally speaking, all the peoplerecognized the sublime power of Osiris and tried to gain his favor. This was no easy task, and led to many strange customs. In the firstplace, the Egyptians came to believe that no soul could enter into therealm of Osiris without the possession of the body which had been itsplace of residence in this world. [Illustration: HOW THE PYRAMIDS GREW. ] Whatever happened, the body must be preserved after death, and it mustbe given a permanent and suitable home. Therefore as soon as a man haddied, his corpse was embalmed. This was a difficult and complicatedoperation which was performed by an official who was half doctor andhalf priest, with the help of an assistant whose duty it was to make theincision through which the chest could be filled with cedar-tree pitchand myrrh and cassia. This assistant belonged to a special class ofpeople who were counted among the most despised of men. The Egyptiansthought it a terrible thing to commit acts of violence upon a humanbeing, whether dead or living, and only the lowest of the low could behired to perform this unpopular task. Afterwards the priest took the body again and for a period of ten weekshe allowed it to be soaked in a solution of natron which was brought forthis purpose from the distant desert of Libya. Then the body had becomea "mummy" because it was filled with "Mumiai" or pitch. It was wrappedin yards and yards of specially prepared linen and it was placed in abeautifully decorated wooden coffin, ready to be removed to its finalhome in the western desert. The grave itself was a little stone room in the sand of the desert or acave in a hill-side. After the coffin had been placed in the center the little room was wellsupplied with cooking utensils and weapons and statues (of clay or wood)representing bakers and butchers who were expected to wait upon theirdead master in case he needed anything. Flutes and fiddles were added togive the occupant of the grave a chance to while away the long hourswhich he must spend in this "house of eternity. " Then the roof was covered with sand and the dead Egyptian was left tothe peaceful rest of eternal sleep. But the desert is full of wild creatures, hyenas and wolves, and theydug their way through the wooden roof and the sand and ate up the mummy. This was a terrible thing, for then the soul was doomed to wanderforever and suffer agonies of a man without a home. To assure the corpseall possible safety a low wall of brick was built around the grave andthe open space was filled with sand and gravel. In this way a lowartificial hill was made which protected the mummy against wild animalsand robbers. Then one day, an Egyptian who had just buried his Mother, of whom he hadbeen particularly fond, decided to give her a monument that shouldsurpass anything that had ever been built in the valley of the Nile. He gathered his serfs and made them build an artificial mountain thatcould be seen for miles around. The sides of this hill he covered with alayer of bricks that the sand might not be blown away. People liked the novelty of the idea. Soon they were trying to outdo each other and the graves rose twenty andthirty and forty feet above the ground. At last a rich nobleman ordered a burial chamber made of solid stone. On top of the actual grave where the mummy rested, he constructed a pileof bricks which rose several hundred feet into the air. A smallpassage-way gave entrance to the vault and when this passage was closedwith a heavy slab of granite the mummy was safe from all intrusion. The King of course could not allow one of his subjects to outdo him insuch a matter. He was the most powerful man of all Egypt who lived inthe biggest house and therefore he was entitled to the best grave. What others had done in brick he could do with the help of more costlymaterials. Pharaoh sent his officers far and wide to gather workmen. He constructedroads. He built barracks in which the workmen could live and sleep (youmay see those barracks this very day). Then he set to work and madehimself a grave which was to endure for all time. We call this great pile of masonry a "pyramid. " The origin of the word is a curious one. When the Greeks visited Egypt the Pyramids were already several thousandyears old. [Illustration: THE MUMMY] Of course the Egyptians took their guests into the desert to see thesewondrous sights just as we take foreigners to gaze at the Wool-worthTower and Brooklyn Bridge. The Greek guest, lost in admiration, waved his hands and asked what thestrange mountains might be. His guide thought that he referred to the extraordinary height and said"Yes, they are very high indeed. " The Egyptian word for height was "pir-em-us. " The Greek must have thought that this was the name of the wholestructure and giving it a Greek ending he called it a "pyramis. " We have changed the "s" into a "d" but we still use the same Egyptianword when we talk of the stone graves along the banks of the Nile. The biggest of these many pyramids, which was built fifty centuries ago, was five hundred feet high. At the base it was seven hundred and fifty-five feet wide. It covered more than thirteen acres of desert, which is three times asmuch space as that occupied by the church of Saint Peter, the largestedifice of the Christian world. During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were used to carry thestones from the distant peninsula of Sinai--to ferry them across theNile (how they ever managed to do this we do not understand)--to dragthem halfway across the desert and finally hoist them into theircorrect position. But so well did Pharaoh's architects and engineers perform their taskthat the narrow passage-way which leads to the royal tomb in the heartof the pyramid has never yet been pushed out of shape by the terrificweight of those thousands and thousands of tons of stone which pressupon it from all sides. THE MAKING OF A STATE Nowadays we all are members of a "state. " We may be Frenchmen or Chinamen or Russians; we may live in the furthestcorner of Indonesia (do you know where that is?), but in some way orother we belong to that curious combination of people which is calledthe "state. " It does not matter whether we recognize a king or an emperor or apresident as our ruler. We are born and we die as a small part of thislarge Whole and no one can escape this fate. The "state, " as a matter of fact, is quite a recent invention. The earliest inhabitants of the world did not know what it was. Every family lived and hunted and worked and died for and by itself. Sometimes it happened that a few of these families, for the sake ofgreater protection against the wild animals and against other wildpeople, formed a loose alliance which was called a tribe or a clan. Butas soon as the danger was past, these groups of people acted again byand for themselves and if the weak could not defend their own cave, theywere left to the mercies of the hyena and the tiger and nobody was verysorry if they were killed. In short, each person was a nation unto himself and he felt noresponsibility for the happiness and safety of his neighbor. Very, veryslowly this was changed and Egypt was the first country where the peoplewere organized into a well-regulated empire. The Nile was directly responsible for this useful development. I havetold you how in the summer of each year the greater part of the Nilevalley and the Nile delta is turned into a vast inland sea. To derivethe greatest benefit from this water and yet survive the flood, it hadbeen necessary at certain points to build dykes and small islands whichwould offer shelter for man and beast during the months of August andSeptember. The construction of these little artificial islands howeverhad not been simple. [Illustration: THE YOUNG NILE. ] A single man or a single family or even a small tribe could notconstruct a river-dam without the help of others. However much a farmer might dislike his neighbors he disliked gettingdrowned even more and he was obliged to call upon the entirecountry-side when the water of the river began to rise and threatenedhim and his wife and his children and his cattle with destruction. Necessity forced the people to forget their small differences and soonthe entire valley of the Nile was covered with little combinations ofpeople who constantly worked together for a common purpose and whodepended upon each other for life and prosperity. Out of such small beginnings grew the first powerful State. It was a great step forward along the road of progress. It made the land of Egypt a truly inhabitable place. It meant the end oflawless murder. It assured the people greater safety than ever beforeand gave the weaker members of the tribe a chance to survive. Nowadays, when conditions of absolute disorder exist only in the jungles ofAfrica, it is hard to imagine a world without laws and policemen andjudges and health officers and hospitals and schools. But five thousand years ago, Egypt stood alone as an organized state andwas greatly envied by those of her neighbors who were obliged to facethe difficulties of life single-handedly. A state, however, is not only composed of citizens. There must be a few men who execute the laws and who, in case of anemergency, take command of the entire community. Therefore no countryhas ever been able to endure without a single head, be he called a Kingor an Emperor or a Shah (as in Persia) or a President, as he is calledin our own land. [Illustration: THE FERTILE VALLEY. ] In ancient Egypt, every village recognized the authority of theVillage-Elders, who were old men and possessed greater experience thanthe young ones. These Elders selected a strong man to command theirsoldiers in case of war and to tell them what to do when there was aflood. They gave him a title which distinguished him from the others. They called him a King or a prince and obeyed his orders for their owncommon benefit. Therefore in the oldest days of Egyptian history, we find the followingdivision among the people: The majority are peasants. All of them are equally rich and equally poor. They are ruled by a powerful man who is the commander-in-chief of theirarmies and who appoints their judges and causes roads to be built forthe common benefit and comfort. He also is the chief of the police force and catches the thieves. In return for these valuable services he receives a certain amount ofeverybody's money which is called a tax. The greater part of thesetaxes, however, do not belong to the King personally. They are moneyentrusted to him to be used for the common good. But after a short while a new class of people, neither peasants norking, begins to develop. This new class, commonly called the nobles, stands between the ruler and his subjects. Since those early days it has made its appearance in the history ofevery country and it has played a great role in the development ofevery nation. I must try and explain to you how this class of nobles developed out ofthe most commonplace circumstances of everyday life and why it hasmaintained itself to this very day, against every form of opposition. To make my story quite clear, I have drawn a picture. It shows you five Egyptian farms. The original owners of these farms hadmoved into Egypt years and years ago. Each had taken a piece ofunoccupied land and had settled down upon it to raise grain and cows andpigs and do whatever was necessary to keep themselves and their childrenalive. Apparently they had the same chance in life. How then did it happen that one became the ruler of his neighbors andgot hold of all their fields and barns without breaking a single law? [Illustration: THE ORIGINS OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM. ] One day after the harvest, Mr. Fish (you see his name in hieroglyphicson the map) sent his boat loaded with grain to the town of Memphis tosell the cargo to the inhabitants of central Egypt. It happened to havebeen a good year for the farmer and Fish got a great deal of money forhis wheat. After ten days the boat returned to the homestead and thecaptain handed the money which he had received to his employer. A few weeks later, Mr. Sparrow, whose farm was next to that of Fish, sent his wheat to the nearest market. Poor Sparrow had not been verylucky for the last few years. But he hoped to make up for his recentlosses by a profitable sale of his grain. Therefore he had waited untilthe price of wheat in Memphis should have gone a little higher. That morning a rumor had reached the village of a famine in the islandof Crete. As a result the grain in the Egyptian markets had greatlyincreased in value. Sparrow hoped to profit through this unexpected turn of the market andhe bade his skipper to hurry. The skipper handled the rudder of his craft so clumsily that the boatstruck a rock and sank, drowning the mate who was caught under the sail. Sparrow not only lost all his grain and his ship but he was also forcedto pay the widow of his drowned mate ten pieces of gold to make up forthe loss of her husband. These disasters occurred at the very moment when Sparrow could notafford another loss. Winter was near and he had no money to buy cloaks for his children. Hehad put off buying new hoes and spades for such a long time that the oldones were completely worn out. He had no seeds for his fields. He was ina desperate plight. He did not like his neighbor, Mr. Fish, any too well but there was noway out. He must go and humbly he must ask for the loan of a smallsum of money. He called on Fish. The latter said that he would gladly let him havewhatever he needed but could Sparrow put up any sort of guaranty? Sparrow said, "Yes. " He would offer his own farm as a pledge of goodfaith. Unfortunately Fish knew all about that farm. It had belonged to theSparrow family for many generations. But the Father of the present ownerhad allowed himself to be terribly cheated by a Phoenician trader whohad sold him a couple of "Phrygian Oxen" (nobody knew what the namemeant) which were said to be of a very fine breed, which needed littlefood and performed twice as much labor as the common Egyptian oxen. Theold farmer had believed the solemn words of the impostor. He had boughtthe wonderful beasts, greatly envied by all his neighbors. They had not proved a success. They were very stupid and very slow and exceedingly lazy and withinthree weeks they had died from a mysterious disease. The old farmer was so angry that he suffered a stroke and the managementof his estate was left to the son, who worked hard but withoutmuch result. The loss of his grain and his vessel were the last straw. Young Sparrow must either starve or ask his neighbor to help him with aloan. Fish who was familiar with the lives of all his neighbors (he was thatkind of person, not because he loved gossip but one never knew how suchinformation might come in handy) and who knew to a penny the state ofaffairs in the Sparrow household, felt strong enough to insist uponcertain terms. Sparrow could have all the money he needed upon thefollowing condition. He must promise to work for Fish six weeks of everyyear and he must allow him free access to his grounds at all times. Sparrow did not like these terms, but the days were growing shorter andwinter was coming on fast and his family were without food. He was forced to accept and from that time on, he and his sons anddaughters were no longer quite as free as they had been before. They did not exactly become the servants or the slaves of theirneighbor, but they were dependent upon his kindness for their ownlivelihood. When they met Fish in the road they stepped aside and said"Good morning, sir. " And he answered them--or not--as the case might be. He now owned a great deal of water-front, twice as much as before. He had more land and more laborers and he could raise more grain than inthe past years. The nearby villagers talked of the new house he wasbuilding and in a general way, he was regarded as a man of growingwealth and importance. Late that summer an unheard-of-thing happened. It rained. The oldest inhabitants could not remember such a thing, but it rainedhard and steadily for two whole days. A little brook, the existence ofwhich everybody had forgotten, was suddenly turned into a wild torrent. In the middle of the night it came thundering down from the mountainsand destroyed the harvest of the farmer who occupied the rocky ground atthe foot of the hills. His name was Cup and he too had inherited hisland from a hundred other Cups who had gone before. The damage wasalmost irreparable. Cup needed new seed grain and he needed it at once. He had heard Sparrow's story. He too hated to ask a favor of Fish whowas known far and wide as a shrewd dealer. But in the end, he found hisway to the Fishs' homestead and humbly begged for the loan of a fewbushels of wheat. He got them but not until he had agreed to work twowhole months of each year on the farm of Fish. Fish was now doing very well. His new house was ready and he thought thetime had come to establish himself as the head of a household. Just across the way, there lived a farmer who had a young daughter. Thename of this farmer was Knife. He was a happy-go-lucky person and hecould not give his child a large dowry. Fish called on Knife and told him that he did not care for money. He wasrich and he was willing to take the daughter without a single penny. Knife, however, must promise to leave his land to his son-in-law incase he died. This was done. The will was duly drawn up before a notary, the wedding took place andFish now possessed (or was about to possess) the greater part offour farms. It is true there was a fifth farm situated right in between the others. But its owner, by the name of Sickle, could not carry his wheat to themarket without crossing the lands over which Fish held sway. Besides, Sickle was not very energetic and he willingly hired himself out to Fishon condition that he and his old wife be given a room and food andclothes for the rest of their days. They had no children and thissettlement assured them a peaceful old age. When Sickle died, a distantnephew appeared who claimed a right to his uncle's farm. Fish had thedogs turned loose on him and the fellow was never seen again. These transactions had covered a period of twenty years. The younger generations of the Cup and Sickle and Sparrow families accepted their situation in life withoutquestioning. They knew old Fish as "the Squire" upon whose good-willthey were more or less dependent if they wanted to succeed in life. When the old man died he left his son many wide acres and a position ofgreat influence among his immediate neighbors. Young Fish resembled his father. He was very able and had a great dealof ambition. When the king of Upper Egypt went to war against the wildBerber tribes, he volunteered his services. He fought so bravely that the king appointed him Collector of the RoyalRevenue for three hundred villages. Often it happened that certain farmers could not pay their tax. Then young Fish offered to give them a small loan. Before they knew it, they were working for the Royal Tax Gatherer, torepay both the money which they had borrowed and the interest onthe loan. The years went by and the Fish family reigned supreme in the land oftheir birth. The old home was no longer good enough for suchimportant people. A noble hall was built (after the pattern of the Royal Banqueting Hallof Thebes). A high wall was erected to keep the crowd at a respectfuldistance and Fish never went out without a bodyguard of armed soldiers. Twice a year he travelled to Thebes to be with his King, who lived inthe largest palace of all Egypt and who was therefore known as"Pharaoh, " the owner of the "Big House. " Upon one of his visits, he took Fish the Third, grandson of the founderof the family, who was a handsome young fellow. The daughter of Pharaoh saw the youth and desired him for her husband. The wedding cost Fish most of his fortune, but he was still Collector ofthe Royal Revenue and by treating the people without mercy he was ableto fill his strong-box in less than three years. When he died he was buried in a small Pyramid, just as if he had been amember of the Royal Family, and a daughter of Pharaoh wept overhis grave. That is my story which begins somewhere along the banks of the Nile andwhich in the course of three generations lifts a farmer from the ranksof his own humble ancestors and drops him outside the gate but near thethrone-room of the King's palace. What happened to Fish, happened to a large number of equally energeticand resourceful men. They formed a class apart. They married each other's daughters and in this way they kept the familyfortunes in the hands of a small number of people. They served the King faithfully as officers in his army and ascollectors of his taxes. They looked after the safety of the roads and the waterways. They performed many useful tasks and among themselves they obeyed thelaws of a very strict code of honor. If the Kings were bad, the nobles were apt to be bad too. When the Kings were weak the nobles often managed to get hold of theState. Then it often happened that the people arose in their wrath anddestroyed those who oppressed them. Many of the old nobles were killed and a new division of the land tookplace which gave everybody an equal chance. But after a short while the old story repeated itself. This time it was perhaps a member of the Sparrow family who used hisgreater shrewdness and industry to make himself master of thecountryside while the descendants of Fish (of glorious memory!) werereduced to poverty. Otherwise very little was changed. The faithful peasants continued to work and pay taxes. The equally faithful tax gatherers continued to gather wealth. But the old Nile, indifferent to the ambitions of men, flowed asplacidly as ever between its age-worn banks and bestowed its fertileblessings upon the poor and upon the rich with the impartial justicewhich is found only in the forces of nature. THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT We often hear it said that "civilization travels westward. " What we meanis that hardy pioneers have crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled alongthe shores of New England and New Netherland--that their children havecrossed the vast prairies--that their great-grandchildren have movedinto California--and that the present generation hopes to turn the vastPacific into the most important sea of the ages. As a matter of fact, "civilization" never remains long in the same spot. It is always going somewhere but it does not always move westward by anymeans. Sometimes its course points towards the east or the south. Oftenit zigzags across the map. But it keeps moving. After two or threehundred years, civilization seems to say, "Well, I have been keepingcompany with these particular people long enough, " and it packs itsbooks and its science and its art and its music, and wanders forth insearch of new domains. But no one knows whither it is bound, and that iswhat makes life so interesting. [Illustration: THE SOIL OF THE FERTILE VALLEY. ] In the case of Egypt, the center of civilization moved northward andsouthward, along the banks of the Nile. First of all, as I told you, people from all over Africa and western Asia moved into the valley andsettled down. Thereupon they formed small villages and townships andaccepted the rule of a Commander-in-Chief, who was called Pharaoh, andwho had his capital in Memphis, in the lower part of Egypt. After a couple of thousand years, the rulers of this ancient housebecame too weak to maintain themselves. A new family from the town ofThebes, 350 miles towards the south in Upper Egypt, tried to make itselfmaster of the entire valley. In the year 2400 B. C. They succeeded. Asrulers of both Upper and Lower Egypt, they set forth to conquer the restof the world. They marched towards the sources of the Nile (which theynever reached) and conquered black Ethiopia. Next they crossed thedesert of Sinai and invaded Syria where they made their name feared bythe Babylonians and Assyrians. The possession of these outlyingdistricts assured the safety of Egypt and they could set to work to turnthe valley into a happy home, for as many of the people as could findroom there. They built many new dikes and dams and a vast reservoir inthe desert which they filled with water from the Nile to be kept andused in case of a prolonged drought. They encouraged people to devotethemselves to the study of mathematics and astronomy so that they mightdetermine the time when the floods of the Nile were to be expected. Since for this purpose it was necessary to have a handy method by whichtime could be measured, they established the year of 365 days, whichthey divided into twelve months. Contrary to the old tradition which made the Egyptians keep away fromall things foreign, they allowed the exchange of Egyptian merchandisefor goods which had been carried to their harbors from elsewhere. They traded with the Greeks of Crete and with the Arabs of western Asiaand they got spices from the Indies and they imported gold and silkfrom China. But all human institutions are subject to certain definite laws ofprogress and decline and a State or a dynasty is no exception. Afterfour hundred years of prosperity, these mighty kings showed signs ofgrowing tired. Rather than ride a camel at the head of their army, therulers of the great Egyptian Empire stayed within the gates of theirpalace and listened to the music of the harp or the flute. One day there came rumors to the town of Thebes that wild tribes ofhorsemen had been pillaging along the frontiers. An army was sent todrive them away. This army moved into the desert. To the last man it waskilled by the fierce Arabs, who now marched towards the Nile, bringingtheir flocks of sheep and their household goods. Another army was told to stop their progress. The battle was disastrousfor the Egyptians and the valley of the Nile was open to the invaders. They rode fleet horses and they used bows and arrows. Within a shorttime they had made themselves master of the entire country. For fivecenturies they ruled the land of Egypt. They removed the old capital tothe Delta of the Nile. They oppressed the Egyptian peasants. They treated the men cruelly and they killed the children and they wererude to the ancient gods. They did not like to live in the cities butstayed with their flocks in the open fields and therefore they werecalled the Hyksos, which means the Shepherd Kings. At last their rule grew unbearable. A noble family from the city of Thebes placed itself at the head of anational revolution against the foreign usurpers. It was a desperatefight but the Egyptians won. The Hyksos were driven out of the country, and they went back to the desert whence they had come. The experiencehad been a warning to the Egyptian people. Their five hundred years offoreign slavery had been a terrible experience. Such a thing must neverhappen again. The frontier of the fatherland must be made so strong thatno one dare to attack the holy soil. A new Theban king, called Tethmosis, invaded Asia and never stoppeduntil he reached the plains of Mesopotamia. He watered his oxen in theriver Euphrates, and Babylon and Nineveh trembled at the mention of hisname. Wherever he went, he built strong fortresses, which were connectedby excellent roads. Tethmosis, having built a barrier against futureinvasions, went home and died. But his daughter, Hatshepsut, continuedhis good work. She rebuilt the temples which the Hyksos had destroyedand she founded a strong state in which soldiers and merchants workedtogether for a common purpose and which was called the New Empire, andlasted from 1600 to 1300 B. C. Military nations, however, never last very long. The larger the empire, the more men are needed for its defense and the more men there are inthe army, the fewer can stay at home to work the farms and attend to thedemands of trade. Within a few years, the Egyptian state had becometop-heavy and the army, which was meant to be a bulwark against foreigninvasion, dragged the country into ruin from sheer lack of both menand money. Without interruption, wild people from Asia were attacking those strongwalls behind which Egypt was hoarding the riches of the entirecivilized world. At first the Egyptian garrisons could hold their own. One day, however, in distant Mesopotamia, there arose a new militaryempire which was called Assyria. It cared for neither art nor science, but it could fight. The Assyrians marched against the Egyptians anddefeated them in battle. For more than twenty years they ruled the landof the Nile. To Egypt this meant the beginning of the end. A few times, for short periods, the people managed to regain theirindependence. But they were an old race, and they were worn out bycenturies of hard work. The time had come for them to disappear from the stage of history andsurrender their leadership as the most civilized people of the world. Greek merchants were swarming down upon the cities at the mouth ofthe Nile. A new capital was built at Sais, near the mouth of the Nile, and Egyptbecame a purely commercial state, the half-way house for the tradebetween western Asia and eastern Europe. After the Greeks came the Persians, who conquered all of northernAfrica. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great turned the ancient land of thePharaoh? into a Greek province. When he died, one of his generals, Ptolemy by name, established himself as the independent king of a newEgyptian state. The Ptolemy family continued to rule for two hundred years. In the year 30 B. C. , Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemys, killedherself, rather than become a prisoner of the victorious Roman general, Octavianus. That was the end. Egypt became part of the Roman Empire and her life as an independentstate ceased for all time. MESOPOTAMIA, THE COUNTRY BETWEEN THE RIVERS I am going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid. It is a good deal of a climb. The casing of fine stones which in the beginning covered the roughgranite blocks which were used to construct this artificial mountain, has long since worn off or has been stolen to help build new Romancities. A goat would have a fine time scaling this strange peak. Butwith the help of a few Arab boys, we can get to the top after a fewhours of hard work, and there we can rest and look far into the nextchapter of the history of the human race. Way, way off, in the distance, far beyond the yellow sands of the vastdesert, through which the old Nile had cut herself a way to the sea, youwill (if you have the eyes of a hawk), see something shimmeringand green. It is a valley situated between two big rivers. It is the most interesting spot of the ancient map. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the old land of mystery and wonder which the Greeks calledMesopotamia. The word "Mesos" means "middle" or "in between" and "potomos" is theGreek expression for river. (Just think of the Hippopotamus, the horseor "hippos" that lives in the rivers. ) Mesopotamia, therefore, meant astretch of land "between the rivers. " The two rivers in this case werethe Euphrates which the Babylonians called the "Purattu" and the Tigris, which the Babylonians called the "Diklat. " You will see them both uponthe map. They begin their course amidst the snows of the northernmountains of Armenia and slowly they flow through the southern plainuntil they reach the muddy banks of the Persian Gulf. But before theyhave lost themselves amidst the waves of this branch of the IndianOcean, they have performed a great and useful task. They have turned an otherwise arid and dry region into the only fertilespot of western Asia. That fact will explain to you why Mesopotamia was so very popular withthe inhabitants of the northern mountains and the southern desert. It is a well-known fact that all living beings like to be comfortable. When it rains, the cat hastens to a place of shelter. When it is cold, the dog finds a spot in front of the stove. When acertain part of the sea becomes more salty than it has been before (orless, for that matter) myriads of little fishes swim hastily to anotherpart of the wide ocean. As for the birds, a great many of them move fromone place to another regularly once a year. When the cold weather setsin, the geese depart, and when the first swallow returns, we know thatsummer is about to smile upon us. Man is no exception to this rule. He likes the warm stove much betterthan the cold wind. Whenever he has the choice between a good dinner anda crust of bread, he prefers the dinner. He will live in the desert orin the snow of the arctic zone if it is absolutely necessary. But offerhim a more agreeable place of residence and he will accept without amoment's hesitation. This desire to improve his condition, which reallymeans a desire to make life more comfortable and less wearisome, hasbeen a very good thing for the progress of the world. It has driven the white people of Europe to the ends of the earth. It has populated the mountains and the plains of our own country. It has made many millions of men travel ceaselessly from east to westand from south to north until they have found the climate and the livingconditions which suit them best. In the western part of Asia this instinct which compels living beings toseek the greatest amount of comfort possible with the smallestexpenditure of labor forced both the inhabitants of the cold andinhospitable mountains and the people of the parched desert to look fora new dwelling place in the happy valley of Mesopotamia. It caused them to fight for the sole possession of this Paradise uponEarth. It forced them to exercise their highest power of inventiveness andtheir noblest courage to defend their homes and farms and their wivesand children against the newcomers, who century after century wereattracted by the fame of this pleasant spot. This constant rivalry was the cause of an everlasting struggle betweenthe old and established tribes and the others who clamored for theirshare of the soil. Those who were weak and those who did not have a great deal of energyhad little chance of success. Only the most intelligent and the bravest survived. That will explain toyou why Mesopotamia became the home of a strong race of men, capable ofcreating that state of civilization which was to be of such enormousbenefit to all later generations. THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS In the year 1472, a short time before Columbus discovered America, acertain Venetian, by the name of Josaphat Barbaro, traveling throughPersia, crossed the hills near Shiraz and saw something which puzzledhim. The hills of Shiraz were covered with old temples which had beencut into the rock of the mountainside. The ancient worshippers haddisappeared centuries before and the temples were in a state of greatdecay. But clearly visible upon their walls, Barbara noticed longlegends written in a curious script which looked like a series ofscratches made by a sharp nail. When he returned he mentioned his discovery to his fellow-townsmen, butjust then the Turks were threatening Europe with an invasion and peoplewere too busy to bother about a new and unknown alphabet, somewhere inthe heart of western Asia. The Persian inscriptions therefore werepromptly forgotten. Two and a half centuries later, a noble young Roman by the name ofPietro della Valle visited the same hillsides of Shiraz which Barbarohad passed two hundred years before. He, too, was puzzled by the strangeinscriptions on the ruins and being a painstaking young fellow, hecopied them carefully and sent his report together with some remarksabout the trip to a friend of his, Doctor Schipano, who practicedmedicine in Naples and who besides took an interest in mattersof learning. Schipano copied the funny little figures and brought them to theattention of other scientific men. Unfortunately Europe was againoccupied with other matters. The terrible wars between the Protestants and Catholics had broken outand people were busily killing those who disagreed with them uponcertain points of a religious nature. Another century was to pass before the study of the wedge-shapedinscriptions could be taken up seriously. The eighteenth century--a delightful age for people of an active andcurious mind--loved scientific puzzles. Therefore when King Frederick Vof Denmark asked for men of learning to join an expedition which he wasgoing to send to western Asia, he found no end of volunteers. Hisexpedition, which left Copenhagen in 1761, lasted six years. During thisperiod all of the members died except one, by the name of KarstenNiebuhr, who had begun life as a German peasant and could stand greaterhardships than the professors who had spent their days amidst the stuffybooks of their libraries. This Niebuhr, who was a surveyor by profession, was a young man whodeserves our admiration. He continued his voyage all alone until he reached the ruins ofPersepolis where he spent a month copying every inscription that was tobe found upon the walls of the ruined palaces and temples. After his return to Denmark he published his discoveries for the benefitof the scientific world and seriously tried to read some meaning intohis own texts. He was not successful. But this does not astonish us when we understand the difficulties whichhe was obliged to solve. When Champollion tackled the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics he was ableto make his studies from little pictures. The writing of Persepolis did not show any pictures at all. They consisted of v-shaped figures that were repeated endlessly andsuggested nothing at all to the European eye. Nowadays, when the puzzle has been solved we know that the originalscript of the Sumerians had been a picture-language, quite as much asthat of the Egyptians. But whereas the Egyptians at a very early date had discovered thepapyrus plant and had been able to paint their images upon a smoothsurface, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia had been forced to carve theirwords into the hard rock of a mountain side or into a soft brickof clay. [Illustration: THE ROCKS OF BEHISTUN. ] Driven by necessity they had gradually simplified the original picturesuntil they devised a system of more than five hundred differentletter-combinations which were necessary for their needs. Let me give you a few examples. In the beginning, a star, when drawnwith a nail into a brick looked as follows. [Illustration: Star] But after a time the star shape was discarded as being too cumbersomeand the figure was given this shape. [Illustration: Asterisk] After a while the meaning of "heaven" was added to that of "star, " andthe picture was simplified in this way [Illustration: Odd Cross] whichmade it still more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from [Illustration: Ox Head] into[Illustration: Pattern] A fish changed from [Illustration: Fish] into [Illustration: FishScales] The sun, which was originally a plain circle, became[Illustration: Diamond] and if we were using the Sumerian script todaywe would make an [Illustration: Bike] look like this [Illustration:Pattern]. You will understand how difficult it was to guess at the meaning ofthese figures but the patient labors of a German schoolmaster by thename of Grotefend was at last rewarded and thirty years after the firstpublication of Niebuhr's texts and three centuries after the firstdiscovery of the wedge-formed pictures, four letters had beendeciphered. These four letters were the D, the A, the R and the Sh. They formed the name of Darheush the King, whom we call Darius. Then occurred one of those events which were only possible in thosehappy days before the telegraph-wire and the mail-steamer had turned theentire world into one large city. While patient European professors were burning the midnight candles intheir attempt to solve the new Asiatic mystery, young Henry Rawlinsonwas serving his time as a cadet of the British East Indian Company. He used his spare hours to learn Persian and when the Shah of Persiaasked the English government for the loan of a few officers to train hisnative army, Rawlinson was ordered to go to Teheran. He travelled allover Persia and one day he happened to visit the village of Behistun. The Persians called it Bagistana which means the "dwellingplace ofthe Gods. " Centuries before the main road from Mesopotamia to Iran (the early homeof the Persians) had run through this village and the Persian KingDarius had used the steep walls of the high cliffs to tell all the worldwhat a great man he was. High above the roadside he had engraved an account of his gloriousdeeds. The inscription had been made in the Persian language, in Babylonian andin the dialect of the city of Susa. To make the story plain to those whocould not read at all, a fine piece of sculpture had been added showingthe King of Persia placing his triumphant foot upon the body of Gaumata, the usurper who had tried to steal the throne away from the legitimaterulers. For good measure a dozen followers of Gaumata had been added. They stood in the background. Their hands were tied and they were to beexecuted in a few moments. The picture and the three texts were several hundred feet above the roadbut Rawlinson scaled the walls of the rock at great danger to life andlimb and copied the entire text. His discovery was of the greatest importance. The Rock of Behistunbecame as famous as the Stone of Rosetta and Rawlinson shared the honorsof deciphering the old nail-writing with Grotefend. Although they had never seen each other or heard each other's names, theGerman schoolmaster and the British officer worked together for a commonpurpose as all good scientific men should do. Their copies of the old text were reprinted in every land and by themiddle of the nineteenth century, the cuneiform language (so calledbecause the letters were wedge-shaped and "cuneus" is the Latin name forwedge) had given up its secrets. Another human mystery had been solved. [Illustration: A TOWER OF BABEL. ] But about the people who had invented this clever way of writing, wehave never been able to learn very much. They were a white race and they were called the Sumerians. They lived in a land which we call Shomer and which they themselvescalled Kengi, which means the "country of the reeds" and which shows usthat they had dwelt among the marshy parts of the Mesopotamian valley. Originally the Sumerians had been mountaineers, but the fertile fieldshad tempted them away from the hills. But while they had left theirancient homes amidst the peaks of western Asia they had not given uptheir old habits and one of these is of particular interest to us. Living amidst the peaks of western Asia, they had worshipped their Godsupon altars erected on the tops of rocks. In their new home, among theflat plains, there were no such rocks and it was impossible to constructtheir shrines in the old fashion. The Sumerians did not like this. All Asiatic people have a deep respect for tradition and the Sumeriantradition demanded that an altar be plainly visible for miles around. To overcome this difficulty and keep their peace with the Gods of theirFathers, the Sumerians had built a number of low towers (resemblinglittle hills) on the top of which they had lighted their sacred fires inhonor of the old divinities. When the Jews visited the town of Bab-Illi (which we call Babylon) manycenturies after the last of the Sumerians had died, they had been muchimpressed by the strange-looking towers which stood high amidst thegreen fields of Mesopotamia. The Tower of Babel of which we hear so muchin the Old Testament was nothing but the ruin of an artificial peak, built hundreds of years before by a band of devout Sumerians. It was acurious contraption. The Sumerians had not known how to construct stairs. They had surrounded their tower with a sloping gallery which slowlycarried people from the bottom to the top. A few years ago it was found necessary to build a new railroad stationin the heart of New York City in such a way that thousands of travelerscould be brought from the lower to the higher levels at the same moment. It was not thought safe to use a staircase for in case of a rush or apanic people might have tumbled and that would have meant a terriblecatastrophe. To solve their problem the engineers borrowed an idea from theSumerians. And the Grand Central Station is provided with the same ascendinggalleries which had first been introduced into the plains ofMesopotamia, three thousand years ago. ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA--THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POT We often call America the "Melting-pot. " When we use this term we meanthat many races from all over the earth have gathered along the banks ofthe Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans to find a new home and begin a newcareer amidst more favorable surroundings than were to be found in thecountry of their birth. It is true, Mesopotamia was much smaller thanour own country. But the fertile valley was the most extraordinary"melting-pot" the world has ever seen and it continued to absorb newtribes for almost two thousand years. The story of each new people, clamoring for homesteads along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphratesis interesting in itself but we can give you only a very short record oftheir adventures. [Illustration: HAMMURAPI. ] The Sumerians whom we met in the previous chapter, scratching theirhistory upon rocks and bits of clay (and who did not belong to theSemitic race) had been the first nomads to wander into Mesopotamia. Nomads are people who have no settled homes and no grain fields and novegetable gardens but who live in tents and keep sheep and goats andcows and who move from pasture to pasture, taking their flocks and theirtents wherever the grass is green and the water abundant. Far and wide their mud huts had covered the plains. They were goodfighters and for a long time they were able to hold their own againstall invaders. But four thousand years ago a tribe of Semitic desert people called theAkkadians left Arabia, defeated the Sumerians and conquered Mesopotamia. The most famous king of these Akkadians was called Sargon. He taught his people how to write their own Semitic language in thealphabet of the Sumerians whose territory they had just occupied. Heruled so wisely that soon the differences between the original settlersand the invaders disappeared and they became fast friends and livedtogether in peace and harmony. The fame of his empire spread rapidly throughout western Asia andothers, hearing of this success, were tempted to try their own luck. A new tribe of desert nomads, called the Amorites, broke up camp andmoved northward. Thereupon the valley was the scene of a great turmoil until an Amoritechieftain by the name of Hammurapi (or Hammurabi, as you please)established himself in the town of Bab-Illi (which means the Gate of theGod) and made himself the ruler of a great Bab-Illian orBabylonian Empire. This Hammurapi, who lived twenty-one centuries before the birth ofChrist, was a very interesting man. He made Babylon the most importanttown of the ancient world, where learned priests administered the lawswhich their great Ruler had received from the Sun God himself and wherethe merchant loved to trade because he was treated fairly and honorably. Indeed if it were not for the lack of space (these laws of Hammurapiwould cover fully forty of these pages if I were to give them to you indetail) I would be able to show you that this ancient Babylonian Statewas in many respects better managed and that the people were happier andthat law and order was maintained more carefully and that there wasgreater freedom of speech and thought than in many of our moderncountries. But our world was never meant to be too perfect and soon other hordes ofrough and murderous men descended from the northern mountains anddestroyed the work of Hammurapi's genius. The name of these new invaders was the Hittites. Of these Hittites I cantell you even less than of the Sumerians. The Bible mentions them. Ruinsof their civilization have been found far and wide. They used a strangesort of hieroglyphics but no one has as yet been able to decipher theseand read their meaning. They were not greatly gifted as administrators. They ruled only a few years and then their domains fell to pieces. Of all their glory there remains nothing but a mysterious name and thereputation of having destroyed many things which other people had builtup with great pain and care. Then came another invasion which was of a very different nature. A fierce tribe of desert wanderers, who murdered and pillaged in thename of their great God Assur, left Arabia and marched northward untilthey reached the slopes of the mountains. Then they turned eastward andalong the banks of the Euphrates they built a city which they calledNinua, a name which has come down to us in the Greek form of Nineveh. Atonce these new-comers, who are generally known as the Assyrians, began aslow but terrible warfare upon all the other inhabitants of Mesopotamia. In the twelfth century before Christ they made a first attempt todestroy Babylon but after a first success on the part of their King, Tiglath Pileser, they were defeated and forced to return to theirown country. Five hundred years later they tried again. An adventurous general by thename of Bulu made himself master of the Assyrian throne. He assumed thename of old Tiglath Pileser, who was considered the national hero of theAssyrians and announced his intention of conquering the whole world. [Illustration: NINEVEH. ] He was as good as his word. Asia Minor and Armenia and Egypt and Northern Arabia and Western Persiaand Babylonia became Assyrian provinces. They were ruled by Assyriangovernors, who collected the taxes and forced all the young men to serveas soldiers in the Assyrian armies and who made themselves thoroughlyhated and despised both for their greed and their cruelty. Fortunately the Assyrian Empire at its greatest height did not last verylong. It was like a ship with too many masts and sails and too small ahull. There were too many soldiers and not enough farmers--too manygenerals and not enough business men. The King and the nobles grew very rich but the masses lived in squalorand poverty. Never for a moment was the country at peace. It was forever fighting someone, somewhere, for causes which did not interest thesubjects at all. Until, through this continuous and exhausting warfare, most of the Assyrian soldiers had been killed or maimed and it becamenecessary to allow foreigners to enter the army. These foreigners hadlittle love for their brutal masters who had destroyed their homes andhad stolen their children and therefore they fought badly. Life along the Assyrian frontier was no longer safe. Strange new tribes were constantly attacking the northern boundaries. One of these was called the Cimmerians. The Cimmerians, when we firsthear of them, inhabited the vast plain beyond the northern mountains. Homer describes their country in his account of the voyage of Odysseusand he tells us that it was a place "for ever steeped in darkness. " Theywere a race of white men and they had been driven out of their formerhomes by still another group of Asiatic wanderers, the Scythians. The Scythians were the ancestors of the modern Cossacks, and even inthose remote days they were famous for their horsemanship. [Illustration: NINEVEH DESTROYED. ] The Cimmerians, hard pressed by the Scythians, crossed from Europe intoAsia and conquered the land of the Hittites. Then they left themountains of Asia Minor and descended into the valley of Mesopotamia, where they wrought terrible havoc among the impoverished people of theAssyrian Empire. Nineveh called for volunteers to stop this invasion. Her worn-outregiments marched northward when news came of a more immediate andformidable danger. For many years a small tribe of Semitic nomads, called the Chaldeans, had been living peacefully in the south-eastern part of the fertilevalley, in the country called Ur. Suddenly these Chaldeans had gone uponthe war-path and had begun a regular campaign against the Assyrians. Attacked from all sides, the Assyrian State, which had never gained thegood-will of a single neighbor, was doomed to perish. When Nineveh fell and this forbidding treasure house, filled with theplunder of centuries, was at last destroyed, there was joy in every hutand hamlet from the Persian Gulf to the Nile. And when the Greeks visited the Euphrates a few generations later andasked what these vast ruins, covered with shrubs and trees might be, there was no one to tell them. The people had hastened to forget the very name of the city that hadbeen such a cruel master and had so miserably oppressed them. Babylon, on the other hand, which had ruled its subjects in a verydifferent way, came back to life. During the long reign of the wise King Nebuchadnezzar the ancienttemples were rebuilt. Vast palaces were erected within a short space oftime. New canals were dug all over the valley to help irrigate thefields. Quarrelsome neighbors were severely punished. Egypt was reduced to a mere frontier-province and Jerusalem, the capitalof the Jews, was destroyed. The Holy Books of Moses were taken toBabylon and several thousand Jews were forced to follow the BabylonianKing to his capital as hostages for the good behavior of those whoremained behind in Palestine. But Babylon was made into one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Trees were planted along the banks of the Euphrates. Flowers were made to grow upon the many walls of the city and after afew years it seemed that a thousand gardens were hanging from the roofsof the ancient town. As soon as the Chaldeans had made their capital the show-place of theworld they devoted their attention to matters of the mind and ofthe spirit. Like all desert folk they were deeply interested in the stars which atnight had guided them safely through the trackless desert. They studied the heavens and named the twelve signs of the Zodiak. They made maps of the sky and they discovered the first five planets. Tothese they gave the names of their Gods. When the Romans conqueredMesopotamia they translated the Chaldean names into Latin and thatexplains why today we talk of Jupiter and Venus and Mars and Mercuryand Saturn. They divided the equator into three hundred and sixty degrees and theydivided the day into twenty-four hours and the hour into sixty minutesand no modern man has ever been able to improve upon this old Babylonianinvention. They possessed no watches but they measured time by theshadow of the sun-dial. They learned to use both the decimal and the duodecimal systems(nowadays we use only the decimal system, which is a great pity). Theduodecimal system (ask your father what the word means), accounts forthe sixty minutes and the sixty seconds and the twenty-four hours whichseem to have so little in common with our modern world which would havedivided day and night into twenty hours and the hour into fifty minutesand the minute into fifty seconds according to the rules of therestricted decimal system. The Chaldeans also were the first people to recognize the necessity of aregular day of rest. When they divided the year into weeks they ordered that six days oflabor should be followed by one day, devoted to the "peace of the soul. " [Illustration: THE CHALDEANS. ] It was a great pity that the center of so much intelligence and industrycould not exist for ever. But not even the genius of a number of verywise Kings could save the ancient people of Mesopotamia from theirultimate fate. The Semitic world was growing old. It was time for a new race of men. In the fifth century before Christ, an Indo-European people called thePersians (I shall tell you about them later) left its pastures amidstthe high mountains of Iran and conquered the fertile valley. The city of Babylon was captured without a struggle. Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, who had been more interested inreligious problems than in defending his own country, fled. A few days later his small son, who had remained behind, died. Cyrus, the Persian King, buried the child with great honor and thenproclaimed himself the legitimate successor of the old rulers ofBabylonia. Mesopotamia ceased to be an independent State. It became a Persian province ruled by a Persian "Satrap" or Governor. As for Babylon, when the Kings no longer used the city as theirresidence it soon lost all importance and became a mere country village. In the fourth century before Christ it enjoyed another spell of glory. It was in the year 331 B. C. That Alexander the Great, the young Greekwho had just conquered Persia and India and Egypt and every other place, visited the ancient city of sacred memories. He wanted to use the oldcity as a background for his own newly-acquired glory. He began torebuild the palace and ordered that the rubbish be removed fromthe temples. Unfortunately he died quite suddenly in the Banqueting Hall ofNebuchadnezzar and after that nothing on earth could save Babylonfrom her ruin. As soon as one of Alexander's generals, Seleucus Nicator, had perfectedthe plans for a new city at the mouth of the great canal which unitedthe Tigris and the Euphrates, the fate of Babylon was sealed. A tablet of the year 275 B. C. Tells us how the last of the Babylonianswere forced to leave their home and move into this new settlement whichhad been called Seleucia. Even then, a few of the faithful continued to visit the holy placeswhich were now inhabited by wolves and jackals. The majority of the people, little interested in those half-forgottendivinities of a bygone age, made a more practical use of theirformer home. They used it as a stone-quarry. For almost thirty centuries Babylon had been the great spiritual andintellectual center of the Semitic world and a hundred generations hadregarded the city as the most perfect expression of theirpeople's genius. It was the Paris and London and New York of the ancient world. At present three large mounds show us where the ruins lie buried beneaththe sand of the ever-encroaching desert. THIS IS THE STORY OF MOSES High above the thin line of the distant horizon there appeared a smallcloud of dust. The Babylonian peasant, working his poor farm on theoutskirts of the fertile lands, noticed it. "Another tribe is trying to break into our land, " he said to himself. "They will not get far. The King's soldiers will drive them away. " He was right. The frontier guards welcomed the new arrivals with drawnswords and bade them try their luck elsewhere. They moved westward following the borders of the land of Babylon andthey wandered until they reached the shores of the Mediterranean. There they settled down and tended their flocks and lived the simplelives of their earliest ancestors who had dwelt in the land of Ur. Then there came a time when the rain ceased to fall and there was notenough to eat for man or beast and it became necessary to look for newpastures or perish on the spot. Once more the shepherds (who were called the Hebrews) moved theirfamilies into a new home which they found along the banks of the Red Seanear the land of Egypt. But hunger and want had followed them upon their voyage and they wereforced to go to the Egyptian officials and beg for food that they mightnot starve. The Egyptians had long expected a famine. They had built largestore-houses and these were all filled with the surplus wheat of thelast seven years. This wheat was now being distributed among the peopleand a food-dictator had been appointed to deal it out equally to therich and to the poor. His name was Joseph and he belonged to the tribeof the Hebrews. As a mere boy he had run away from his own family. It was said that hehad escaped to save himself from the anger of his brethren who enviedhim because he was the favorite of their Father. Whatever the truth, Joseph had gone to Egypt and he had found favor inthe eyes of the Hyksos Kings who had just conquered the country and whoused this bright young man to assist them in administering their newpossessions. As soon as the hungry Hebrews appeared before Joseph with their requestfor help, Joseph recognized his relatives. But he was a generous man and all meanness of spirit was foreign to hissoul. He did not revenge himself upon those who had wronged him but he gavethem wheat and allowed them to settle in the land of Egypt, they andtheir children and their flocks--and be happy. For many years the Hebrews (who are more commonly known as the Jews)lived in the eastern part of their adopted country and all was wellwith them. Then a great change took place. A sudden revolution deprived the Hyksos Kings of their power and forcedthem to leave the country. Once more the Egyptians were masters withintheir own house. They had never liked foreigners any too well. Threehundred years of oppression by a band of Arab shepherds had greatlyincreased this feeling of loathing for everything that was alien. [Illustration: MOSES. ] The Jews on the other hand had been on friendly terms with the Hyksoswho were related to them by blood and by race. This was enough to makethem traitors in the eyes of the Egyptians. Joseph no longer lived to protect his people. After a short struggle they were taken away from their old homes, theywere driven into the heart of the country and they were treatedlike slaves. For many years they performed the dreary tasks of common laborers, carrying stones for the building of pyramids, making bricks for publicbuildings, constructing roads, and digging canals to carry the water ofthe Nile to the distant Egyptian farms. Their suffering was great but they never lost courage and help was near. There lived a certain young man whose name was Moses. He was veryintelligent and he had received a good education because the Egyptianshad decided that he should enter the service of Pharaoh. If nothing had happened to arouse his anger, Moses would have ended hisdays peacefully as the governor of a small province or the collector oftaxes of an outlying district. But the Egyptians, as I have told you before, despised those who did notlook like themselves nor dress in true Egyptian fashion and they wereapt to insult such people because they were "different. " And because the foreigners were in the minority they could not welldefend themselves. Nor did it serve any good purpose to carry theircomplaints before a tribunal for the Judge did not smile upon thegrievances of a man who refused to worship the Egyptian gods and whopleaded his case with a strong foreign accent. Now it occurred one day that Moses was taking a walk with a few of hisEgyptian friends and one of these said something particularlydisagreeable about the Jews and even threatened to lay hands on them. Moses, who was a hot-headed youth hit him. The blow was a bit too severe and the Egyptian fell down dead. To kill a native was a terrible thing and the Egyptian laws were not aswise as those of Hammurapi, the good Babylonian King, who recognized thedifference between a premeditated murder and the killing of a man whoseinsults had brought his opponent to a point of unreasoning rage. Moses fled. He escaped into the land of his ancestors, into the Midian desert, alongthe eastern bank of the Red Sea, where his tribe had tended their sheepseveral hundred years before. A kind priest by the name of Jethro received him in his house and gavehim one of his seven daughters, Zipporah, as his wife. There Moses lived for a long time and there he pondered upon many deepsubjects. He had left the luxury and the comfort of the palace ofPharaoh to share the rough and simple life of a desert priest. In the olden days, before the Jewish people had moved into Egypt, theytoo had been wanderers among the endless plains of Arabia. They hadlived in tents and they had eaten plain food, but they had been honestmen and faithful women, contented with few possessions but proud of therighteousness of their mind. All this had been changed after they had become exposed to thecivilization of Egypt. They had taken to the ways of the comfort-lovingEgyptians. They had allowed another race to rule them and they had notcared to fight for their independence. Instead of the old gods of the wind-swept desert they had begun toworship strange divinities who lived in the glimmering splendors of thedark Egyptian temples. Moses felt that it was his duty to go forth and save his people fromtheir fate and bring them back to the simple Truth of the olden days. And so he sent messengers to his relatives and suggested that they leavethe land of slavery and join him in the desert. But the Egyptians heard of this and guarded the Jews more carefully thanever before. It seemed that the plans of Moses were doomed to failure when suddenlyan epidemic broke out among the people of the Nile Valley. The Jews who had always obeyed certain very strict laws of health (whichthey had learned in the hardy days of their desert life) escaped thedisease while the weaker Egyptians died by the hundreds of thousands. Amidst the confusion and the panic which followed this Silent Death, theJews packed their belongings and hastily fled from the land which hadpromised them so much and which had given them so little. As soon as the flight became known the Egyptians tried to follow themwith their armies but their soldiers met with disaster and theJews escaped. They were safe and they were free and they moved eastward into the wastespaces which are situated at the foot of Mount Sinai, the peak which hasbeen called after Sin, the Babylonian God of the Moon. There Moses took command of his fellow-tribesmen and commenced upon hisgreat task of reform. In those days, the Jews, like all other people, worshipped many gods. During their stay in Egypt they had even learned to do homage to thoseanimals which the Egyptians held in such high honor that they built holyshrines for their special benefit. Moses on the other hand, during hislong and lonely life amidst the sandy hills of the peninsula, hadlearned to revere the strength and the power of the great God of theStorm and the Thunder, who ruled the high heavens and upon whosegood-will the wanderer in the desert depended for life and lightand breath. This God was called Jehovah and he was a mighty Being who was held intrembling respect by all the Semitic people of western Asia. Through the teaching of Moses he was to become the sole Master of theJewish race. One day Moses disappeared from the camp of the Hebrews. He took with himtwo tablets of rough-hewn stone. It was whispered that he had gone toseek the solitude of Mount Sinai's highest peak. That afternoon, the top of the mountain was lost to sight. The darkness of a terrible storm hid it from the eye of man. But when Moses returned, behold! ... There stood engraved upon thetablets the words which Jehovah himself had spoken amidst the crash ofhis thunder and the blinding flashes of his lightning. From that moment on, no Jew dared to question the authority of Moses. When he told his people that Jehovah commanded them to continue theirwanderings, they obeyed with eagerness. For many years they lived amidst the trackless hills of the desert. They suffered great hardships and almost perished from lack of food andwater. But Moses kept high their hopes of a Promised Land which would offer alasting home to the true followers of Jehovah. At last they reached a more fertile region. They crossed the river Jordan and, carrying the Holy Tablets of Law, they made ready to occupy the pastures which stretch from Dan toBeersheba. As for Moses, he was no longer their leader. He had grown old and he was very tired. He had been allowed to see the distant ridges of the Palestine Mountainsamong which the Jews were to find a Fatherland. Then he had closed his wise eyes for all time. He had accomplished the task which he had set himself in his youth. He had led his people out of foreign slavery into the new freedom of anindependent life. He had united them and he had made them the first of all nations toworship a single God. JERUSALEM--THE CITY OF THE LAW Palestine is a small strip of land between the mountains of Syria andthe green waters of the Mediterranean. It has been inhabited since timeimmemorial, but we do not know very much about the first settlers, although we have given them the name of Canaanites. The Canaanites belonged to the Semitic race. Their ancestors, like thoseof the Jews and the Babylonians, had been a desert folk. But when theJews entered Palestine, the Canaanites lived in towns and villages. Theywere no longer shepherds but traders. Indeed, in the Jewish language, Canaanite and merchant came to mean the same thing. They had built themselves strong cities, surrounded by high walls andthey did not allow the Jews to enter their gates, but they forced themto keep to the open country and make their home amidst the grassy landsof the valleys. After a time, however, the Jews and the Canaanites became friends. Thiswas not so very difficult for they both belonged to the same race. Besides they feared a common enemy and only their united strength coulddefend their country against these dangerous neighbors, who were calledthe Philistines and who belonged to an entirely different race. The Philistines really had no business in Asia. They were Europeans, andtheir earliest home had been in the Isle of Crete. At what age they hadsettled along the shores of the Mediterranean is quite uncertain becausewe do not know when the Indo-European invaders had driven them fromtheir island home. But even the Egyptians, who called them Purasati, hadfeared them greatly and when the Philistines (who wore a headdress offeathers just like our Indians) went upon the war-path, all the peopleof western Asia sent large armies to protect their frontiers. [Illustration: JERUSALEM. ] As for the war between the Philistines and the Jews, it never came to anend. For although David slew Goliath (who wore a suit of armor which wasa great curiosity in those days and had been no doubt imported from theisland of Cyprus where the copper mines of the ancient world were found)and although Samson killed the Philistines wholesale when he buriedhimself and his enemies beneath the temple of Dagon, the Philistinesalways proved themselves more than a match for the Jews and neverallowed the Hebrew people to get hold of any of the harbors of theMediterranean. The Jews therefore were obliged by fate to content themselves with thevalleys of eastern Palestine and there, on the top of a barren hill, they erected their capital. The name of this city was Jerusalem and for thirty centuries it has beenone of the most holy spots of the western world. In the dim ages of the unknown past, Jerusalem, the Home of Peace, hadbeen a little fortified outpost of the Egyptians who had built manysmall fortifications and castles along the mountain ridges of Palestine, to defend their outlying frontier against attacks from the East. After the downfall of the Egyptian Empire, a native tribe, theJebusites, had moved into the deserted city. Then came the Jews whocaptured the town after a long struggle and made it the residence oftheir King David. At last, after many years of wandering the Tables of the Law seemed tohave reached a place of enduring rest. Solomon, the Wise, decided toprovide them with a magnificent home. Far and wide his messengerstravelled to ransack the world for rare woods and precious metals. Theentire nation was asked to offer its wealth to make the House of Godworthy of its holy name. Higher and higher the walls of the temple aroseguarding the sacred Laws of Jehovah for all the ages. Alas, the expected eternity proved to be of short duration. Themselvesintruders among hostile neighbors, surrounded by enemies on all sides, harassed by the Philistines, the Jews did not maintain theirindependence for very long. They fought well and bravely. But their little state, weakened by pettyjealousies, was easily overpowered by the Assyrians and the Egyptiansand the Chaldeans and when Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, tookJerusalem in the year 586 before the birth of Christ, he destroyed thecity and the temple, and the Tablets of Stone went up in the generalconflagration. At once the Jews set to work to rebuild their holy shrine. But the daysof Solomon's glory were gone. The Jews were the subjects of a foreignrace and money was scarce. It took seventy years to reconstruct the oldedifice. It stood securely for three hundred years but then a secondinvasion took place and once more the red flames of the burning templebrightened the skies of Palestine. When it was rebuilt for the third time, it was surrounded by two highwalls with narrow gates and several inner courts were added to makesudden invasion in the future an impossibility. But ill-luck pursued the city of Jerusalem. In the sixty-fifth year before the birth of Christ, the Romans undertheir general Pompey took possession of the Jewish capital. Theirpractical sense did not take kindly to an old city with crooked and darkstreets and many unhealthy alley-ways. They cleaned up this old rubbish(as they considered it) and built new barracks and large publicbuildings and swimming-pools and athletic parks and they forced theirmodern improvements upon an unwilling populace. The temple which served no practical purposes (as far as they could see)was neglected until the days of Herod, who was King of the Jews by theGrace of the Roman sword and whose vanity wished to renew the ancientsplendor of the bygone ages. In a half-hearted manner the oppressedpeople set to work to obey the orders of a master who was not of theirown choosing. When the last stone had been placed in its proper position anotherrevolution broke out against the merciless Roman tax gatherers. Thetemple was the first victim of this rioting. The soldiers of the EmperorTitus promptly set fire to this center of the old Jewish faith. But thecity of Jerusalem was spared. Palestine however continued to be the scene of unrest. The Romans who were familiar with all sorts of races of men and whoruled countries where a thousand different divinities were worshippeddid not know how to handle the Jews. They did not understand the Jewishcharacter at all. Extreme tolerance (based upon indifference) was thefoundation upon which Rome had constructed her very successful Empire. Roman governors never interfered with the religious belief of subjecttribes. They demanded that a picture or a statue of the Emperor beplaced in the temples of the people who inhabited the outlying parts ofthe Roman domains. This was a mere formality and it did not have anydeep significance. But to the Jews such a thing seemed highlysacrilegious and they would not desecrate their Holiest of Holies by thecarven image of a Roman potentate. They refused. The Romans insisted. In itself a matter of small importance, a misunderstanding of this sortwas bound to grow and cause further ill-feeling. Fifty-two years afterthe revolt under the Emperor Titus the Jews once more rebelled. Thistime the Romans decided to be thorough in their work of destruction. Jerusalem was destroyed. The temple was burned down. A new Roman city, called Aelia Capitolina was erected upon the ruins ofthe old city of Solomon. A heathenish temple devoted to the worship of Jupiter was built upon thesite where the faithful had worshipped Jehovah for almost athousand years. The Jews themselves were expelled from their capital and thousands ofthem were driven away from the home of their ancestors. From that moment on they became wanderers upon the face of the Earth. But the Holy Laws no longer needed the safe shelter of a royal shrine. Their influence had long since passed beyond the narrow confines of theland of Judah. They had become a living symbol of Justice whereverhonorable people tried to live a righteous life. DAMASCUS--THE CITY OF TRADE The old cities of Egypt have disappeared from the face of the earth. Nineveh and Babylon are deserted mounds of dust and brick. The ancienttemple of Jerusalem lies buried beneath the blackened ruins of itsown glory. One city alone has survived the ages. It is called Damascus. Within its four great gates and its strong walls a busy people hasfollowed its daily occupations for five thousand consecutive years andthe "Street called Straight" which is the city's main artery ofcommerce, has seen the coming and going of one hundred and fiftygenerations. Humbly Damascus began its career as a fortified frontier town of theAmorites, those famous desert folk who had given birth to the great KingHammurapi. When the Amorites moved further eastward into the valley ofMesopotamia to found the Kingdom of Babylon, Damascus had been continuedas a trading post with the wild Hittites who inhabited the mountains ofAsia Minor. In due course of time the earliest inhabitants had been absorbed byanother Semitic tribe, called the Aramaeans. The city itself however hadnot changed its character. It remained throughout these many changes animportant center of commerce. It was situated upon the main road from Egypt to Mesopotamia and it waswithin a week's distance from the harbors on the Mediterranean. Itproduced no great generals and statesmen and no famous Kings. It did notconquer a single mile of neighboring territory. It traded with all theworld and offered a safe home to the merchant and to the artisan. Incidentally it bestowed its language upon the greater part ofwestern Asia. Commerce has always demanded quick and practical ways of communicationbetween different nations. The elaborate system of nail-writing of theancient Sumerians was too involved for the Aramaean business man. Heinvented a new alphabet which could be written much faster than the oldwedge-shaped figures of Babylon. The spoken language of the Aramaeans followed their businesscorrespondence. Aramaean became the English of the ancient world. In most parts ofMesopotamia it was understood as readily as the native tongue. In somecountries it actually took the place of the old tribal dialect. And when Christ preached to the multitudes, he did not use the ancientJewish speech in which Moses had explained the Laws unto his fellowwanderers. He spoke in Aramaean, the language of the merchant, which had become thelanguage of the simple people of the old Mediterranean world. THE PHOENICIANS WHO SAILED BEYOND THE HORIZON A pioneer is a brave fellow, with the courage of his own curiosity. Perhaps he lives at the foot of a high mountain. So do thousands of other people. They are quite contented to leave themountain alone. But the pioneer feels unhappy. He wants to know what mysteries thismountain hides from his eyes. Is there another mountain behind it, or aplain? Does it suddenly arise with its steep cliffs from the dark wavesof the ocean or does it overlook a desert? One fine day the true pioneer leaves his family and the safe comfort ofhis home to go and find out. Perhaps he will come back and tell hisexperience to his indifferent relatives. Or he will be killed by fallingstones or a treacherous blizzard. In that case he does not return at alland the good neighbors shake their heads and say, "He got what hedeserved. Why did he not stay at home like the rest of us?" [Illustration: THE DISTANT HORIZON] But the world needs such men and after they have been dead for manyyears and others have reaped the benefits of their discoveries, theyalways receive a statue with a fitting inscription. More terrifying than the highest mountain is the thin line of thedistant horizon. It seems to be the end of the world itself. Heaven havemercy upon those who pass beyond this meeting-place of sky and water, where all is black despair and death. And for centuries and centuries after man had built his first clumsyboats, he remained within the pleasant sight of one familiar shore andkept away from the horizon. Then came the Phoenicians who knew no such fears. They passed beyond thesight of land. Suddenly the forbidding ocean was turned into a peacefulhighway of commerce and the dangerous menace of the horizon becamea myth. These Phoenician navigators were Semites. Their ancestors had lived inthe desert of Arabia together with the Babylonians, the Jews and all theothers. But when the Jews occupied Palestine, the cities of thePhoenicians were already old with the age of many centuries. There were two Phoenician centers of trade. One was called Tyre and the other was called Sidon. They were built uponhigh cliffs and rumor had it that no enemy could take them. Far and widetheir ships sailed to gather the products of the Mediterranean for thebenefit of the people of Mesopotamia. At first the sailors only visited the distant shores of France and Spainto barter with the natives and hastened home with their grain and metal. Later they had built fortified trading posts along the coasts of Spainand Italy and Greece and the far-off Scilly Islands where the valuabletin was found. [Illustration: THE PHOENICIANS. ] To the uncivilized savages of Europe, such a trading post appeared as adream of beauty and luxury. They asked to be allowed to live close toits walls, to see the wonderful sights when the boats of many sailsentered the harbor, carrying the much-desired merchandise of the unknowneast. Gradually they left their huts to build themselves small woodenhouses around the Phoenician fortresses. In this way many a trading posthad grown into a market place for all the people of the entireneighborhood. Today such big cities as Marseilles and Cadiz are proud of theirPhoenician origin, but their ancient mothers, Tyre and Sidon, have beendead and forgotten for over two thousand years and of the Phoeniciansthemselves, none have survived. This is a sad fate but it was fully deserved. The Phoenicians had grown rich without great effort, but they had notknown how to use their wealth wisely. They had never cared for books orlearning. They had only cared for money. They had bought and sold slaves all over the world. They had forced theforeign immigrants to work in their factories. They cheated theirneighbors whenever they had a chance and they had made themselvesdetested by all the other people of the Mediterranean. They were brave and energetic navigators, but they showed themselvescowards whenever they were obliged to choose between honorable dealingand an immediate profit, obtained through fraudulent and shrewd trading. As long as they had been the only sailors in the world who could handlelarge ships, all other nations had been in need of their services. Assoon as the others too had learned how to handle a rudder and a set ofsails, they at once got rid of the tricky Phoenician merchant. From that moment on, Tyre and Sidon had lost their old hold upon thecommercial world of Asia. They had never encouraged art or science. Theyhad known how to explore the seven seas and turn their ventures intoprofitable investments. No state, however, can be safely built uponmaterial possessions alone. The land of Phoenicia had always been a counting-house without a soul. It perished because it had honored a well-filled treasure chest as thehighest ideal of civic pride. THE ALPHABET FOLLOWS THE TRADE I have told you how the Egyptians preserved speech by means of littlefigures. I have described the wedge-shaped signs which served the peopleof Mesopotamia as a handy means of transacting business at homeand abroad. But how about our own alphabet? From whence came those compact littleletters which follow us throughout our life, from the date on our birthcertificate to the last word of our funeral notice? Are they Egyptian orBabylonian or Aramaic or are they something entirely different? They area little bit of everything, as I shall now tell you. Our modern alphabet is not a very satisfactory instrument for thepurpose of reproducing our speech. Some day a genius will invent a newsystem of writing which shall give each one of our sounds a littlepicture of its own. But with all its many imperfections the letters ofour modern alphabet perform their daily task quite nicely and fully aswell as their very accurate and precise cousins, the numerals, whowandered into Europe from distant India, almost ten centuries after thefirst invasion of the alphabet. The earliest history of these letters, however, is a deep mystery and it will take many years of painstakinginvestigation before we can solve it. This much we know--that our alphabet was not suddenly invented by abright young scribe. It developed and grew during hundreds of years outof a number of older and more complicated systems. In my last chapter I have told you of the language of the intelligentAramaean traders which spread throughout western Asia, as aninternational means of communication. The language of the Phoenicianswas never very popular among their neighbors. Except for a very fewwords we do not know what sort of tongue it was. Their system ofwriting, however, was carried into every corner of the vastMediterranean and every Phoenician colony became a center for itsfurther distribution. It remains to be explained why the Phoenicians, who did nothing tofurther either art or science, hit upon such a compact and handy systemof writing, while other and superior nations remained faithful to theold clumsy scribbling. The Phoenicians, before all else, were practical business men. They didnot travel abroad to admire the scenery. They went upon their perilousvoyages to distant parts of Europe and more distant parts of Africa insearch of wealth. Time was money in Tyre and Sidon and commercialdocuments written in hieroglyphics or Sumerian wasted useful hours ofbusy clerks who might be employed upon more useful errands. When our modern business world decided that the old-fashioned way ofdictating letters was too slow for the hurry of modern life, a cleverman devised a simple system of dots and dashes which could follow thespoken word as closely as a hound follows a hare. This system we call "shorthand. " The Phoenician traders did the same thing. They borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptian hieroglyphics andsimplified a number of wedge-shaped figures from the Babylonians. They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older system for the benefit ofspeed and they reduced the thousands of images of the ancient world to ashort and handy alphabet of only twenty-two letters. They tried it outat home and when it proved a success, they carried it abroad. Among the Egyptians and the Babylonians, writing had been a very seriousaffair--something almost holy. Many improvements had been proposed butthese had been invariably discarded as sacrilegious innovations. ThePhoenicians who were not interested in piety succeeded where the othershad failed. They could not introduce their script into Mesopotamia andEgypt, but among the people of the Mediterranean, who were totallyignorant of the art of writing, the Phoenician alphabet was a greatsuccess and in all nooks and corners of that vast sea we find vases andpillars and ruins covered with Phoenician inscriptions. The Indo-European Greeks who had migrated to the many islands of theAegean Sea at once applied this foreign alphabet to their own language. Certain Greek sounds, unknown to the ears of the Semitic Phoenicians, needed letters of their own. These were invented and added tothe others. But the Greeks did not stop at this. They improved the whole system of speech-recording. All the systems of writing of the ancient people of Asia had one thingin common. The consonants were reproduced but the reader was forced to guess at thevowels. This is not as difficult as it seems. We often omit the vowels in advertisements and in announcements whichare printed in our newspapers. Journalists and telegraph operators, too, are apt to invent languages of their own which do away with all thesuperfluous vowels and use only such consonants as are necessary toprovide a skeleton around which the vowels can be draped when the storyis rewritten. But such an imperfect scheme of writing can never become popular, andthe Greeks, with their sense of order, added a number of extra signs toreproduce the "a" and the "e" and the "i" and the "o" and the "u. " Whenthis had been done, they possessed an alphabet which allowed them towrite everything in almost every language. Five centuries before the birth of Christ these letters crossed theAdriatic and wandered from Athens to Rome. The Roman soldiers carried them to the furthest corners of westernEurope and taught our own ancestors the use of the littlePhoenician signs. Twelve centuries later, the missionaries of Byzantine took the alphabetinto the dreary wilderness of the dark Russian plain. Today more than half of the people of the world use this Asiaticalphabet to keep a record of their thoughts and to preserve a record oftheir knowledge for the benefit of their children and theirgrandchildren. THE END OF THE ANCIENT WORLD So far, the story of ancient man has been the record of a wonderfulachievement. Along the banks of the river Nile, in Mesopotamia and onthe shores of the Mediterranean, people had accomplished great thingsand wise rulers had performed mighty deeds. There, for the first time inhistory, man had ceased to be a roving animal. He had built himselfhouses and villages and vast cities. He had formed states. He had learned the art of constructing and navigating swift-sailingboats. He had explored the heavens and within his own soul he had discoveredcertain great moral laws which made him akin to the divinities which heworshipped. He had laid the foundations for all our further knowledgeand our science and our art and those things that tend to make lifesublime beyond the mere grubbing for food and lodging. Most important of all he had devised a system of recording sound whichgave unto his children and unto his children's children the benefit oftheir ancestors' experience and allowed them to accumulate such a storeof information that they could make themselves the masters of the forcesof nature. But together with these many virtues, ancient man had one great failing. He was too much a slave of tradition. He did not ask enough questions. He reasoned "My father did such and such a thing before me and mygrandfather did it before my father and they both fared well andtherefore this thing ought to be good for me too and I must not changeit. " He forgot that this patient acceptance of facts would never havelifted us above the common herd of animals. Once upon a time there must have been a man of genius who refused anylonger to swing from tree to tree with the help of his long, curly tail(as all his people had done before him) and who began to walk onhis feet. But ancient man had lost sight of this fact and continued to use thewooden plow of his earliest ancestors and continued to believe in thesame gods that had been worshipped ten thousand years before and taughthis children to do likewise. Instead of going forward he stood still and this was fatal. For a new and more energetic race appeared upon the horizon and theancient world was doomed. We call these new people the Indo-Europeans. They were white men likeyou and me, and they spoke a language which was the common ancestor ofall our European languages with the exception of Hungarian, Finnish andthe Basque of Northern Spain. When we first hear of them they had for many centuries made their homealong the banks of the Caspian Sea. But one day (for reasons which aretotally unknown to us) they packed their belongings on the backs of thehorses which they had trained and they gathered their cows and dogs andgoats and began to wander in search of distant happiness and food. Someof them moved into the mountains of central Asia and for a long timethey lived amidst the peaks of the plateau of Iran, whence they arecalled the Iranians or Aryans. Others slowly followed the setting sunand took possession of the vast plains of western Europe. They were almost as uncivilized as those prehistoric men who made theirappearance within the first pages of this book. But they were a hardyrace and good fighters and without difficulty they seem to have occupiedthe hunting grounds and the pastures of the men of the stone age. They were as yet quite ignorant but thanks to a happy Fate they werecurious. The wisdom of the ancient world, which was carried to them bythe traders of the Mediterranean, they very soon made their own. But the age-old learning of Egypt and Babylonia and Chaldea they merelyused as a stepping-stone to something higher and better. For"tradition, " as such, meant nothing to them and they considered that theUniverse was theirs to explore and to exploit as they saw fit and thatit was their duty to submit all experience to the acid test of humanintelligence. [Illustration: A COLONY. ] Soon therefore they passed beyond those boundaries which the ancientworld had accepted as impassable barriers--a sort of spiritual Mountainsof the Moon. Then they turned against their former masters and within ashort time a new and vigorous civilization replaced the out-wornstructure of the ancient Asiatic world. But of these Indo-Europeans and their adventures I give you a detailedaccount in "The Story of Mankind, " which tells you about the Greeks andthe Romans and all the other races in the world. A FEW DATES CONNECTED WITH THE PEOPLE OF THE ANCIENT WORLD I can not give you any positive dates connected with Prehistoric Man. The early Europeans who appear in the first chapters of this book begantheir career about fifty thousand years ago. THE EGYPTIANS The earliest civilization in the Nile Valleydeveloped forty centuries before the birth ofChrist. 3400 B. C. The Old Egyptian Empire is founded. Memphis is the capital. 2800--2700 B. C. The Pyramids are built. 2000 B. C. The Old Empire is destroyed by the Arab shepherds, called the "Hyksos. " 1800 B. C. Thebes delivers Egypt from the Hyksos and becomes the center of the New Egyptian Empire. 1350 B. C. King Rameses conquers Eastern Asia. 1300 B. C. The Jews leave Egypt. 1000 B. C. Egypt begins to decline. 700 B. C. Egypt becomes an Assyrian province. 650 B. C. Egypt regains her independence and a new State is founded with Sais in the Delta as its capital. Foreigners, especially Greeks, begin to dominate the country. 525 B. C. Egypt becomes a Persian province. 300 B. C. Egypt becomes an independent Kingdom ruled by one of Alexander the Great's generals, called Ptolemy. 30 B. C. Cleopatra, the last princess of the Ptolemy dynasty, kills herself and Egypt becomes part of the Roman Empire. THE JEWS 2000 B. C. Abraham moves away from the land of Ur in eastern Babylonia and looks for a new home in the western part of Asia. 1550 B. C. The Jews occupy the land of Goshen in Egypt. 1300 B. C. Moses leads the Jews out of Egypt and gives them the Law. 1250 B. C. The Jews have crossed the river Jordan and have occupied Palestine. 1055 B. C. Saul is King of the Jews. 1025 B. C. David is King of a powerful Jewish state. 1000 B. C. Solomon builds the Great Temple of Jerusalem. 950 B. C. The Jewish state divided into two Kingdoms, that of Judah and that of Israel. 900-600 B. C. The age of the great Prophets. 722 B. C. The Assyrians conquer Palestine. 586 B. C. Nebuchadnezzar conquers Palestine. The Babylonian captivity. 537 B. C. Cyrus, King of the Persians, allows the Jews to return to Palestine. 167-130 B. C. Last period of Jewish independence under the Maccabees. 63 B. C. Pompeius makes Palestine part of the Roman Empire. 40 B. C. Herod King of the Jews. 70 A. D. The Emperor Titus destroys Jerusalem. MESOPOTAMIA 4000 B. C. The Sumerians take possession of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. 2200 B. C. Hammurapi, King of Babylon, gives his people a famous code of law. 1900 B. C. Beginning of the Assyrian State, with Nineveh as its capital. 950-650 B. C. Assyria becomes the master of western Asia. 700 B. C. Sargon, the ruler of the Assyrians, conquers Palestine, Egypt and Arabia. 640 B. C. The Medes revolt against the Assyrian rule. 530 B. C. The Scythians attack Assyria. There are revolutions all over the Kingdom. 608 B. C. Nineveh is destroyed. Assyria disappears from the map. 608-538 B. C. The Chaldeans reestablish the Babylonian Kingdom. 604-561 B. C. Nebuchadnezzar destroys Jerusalem, takes Phoenicia and makes Babylon the center of civilization. 538 B. C. Mesopotamia becomes a Persian province. 330 B. C. Alexander the Great conquers Mesopotamia. THE PHOENICIANS 1500-1200 B. C. The city of Sklon is the chief Phoenician center of trade. 1100-950 B. C. Tyre becomes the commercial center of Phoenicia. 1000-600 B. C. Development of the Phoenician colonial Empire. 850 B. C. Carthage is founded. 586-573 B. C. Siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar. The city is captured and destroyed. 538 B. C. Phoenicia becomes a Persian province. 60 B. C. Phoenicia becomes part of the Roman Empire. [Illustration: A Persian altar] THE PERSIANS At an unknown date the Indo-Europeanpeople began their march into Europe andinto India. The year 1000 B. C. Is usually given forZarathustra, the great teacher of the Persians, who gave an excellent moral law. 650-B. C. The Indo-European Medes founda state along the eastern boundariesof Babylonia. 550-330 B. C. The Kingdom of the Persians. Beginning of the struggle between Indo-Europeans and Semites. 525-8. C. Cambyses, King of the Persians, takes Egypt. 520-485 B. C. Rule of Darius, King of the Persians, who conquers Babylon and attacks Greece. 485-465 B. C. Rule of King Xerxes, who tries to establish himself in eastern Europe but fails. 330 B. C. The Greek, Alexander the Great, conquers all of western Asia and Egypt and Persia becomes a Greek Province. The ancient world which was dominated by Semitic peoples lasted almostforty centuries. In the fourth century before the birth of Christ itdied of old age. Western Asia and Egypt had been the teachers of the Indo-Europeans whohad occupied Europe at an unknown date. In the fourth century before Christ, the Indo-European pupils had so farsurpassed their teachers that they could begin their conquest ofthe world. The famous expedition of Alexander the Great in 330 B. C. Made an end tothe civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia and established the supremacyof Greek (that is European) culture.