THE GREAT PYRAMID FROM THE AIR (PRESENT DAY).
THE GREAT PYRAMID FROM THE AIR (PRESENT DAY).

PREFACE

There is much truth in the old saying about the difficulty of seeing the wood for the trees. It is the aim of this short book to keep the number of the trees as few as possible so that the wood, as a whole, may be clearly visible.

It is designed to provide scholars and their teachers with an outline of the most important facts in the history of mankind up to the date of the firm establishment of the Roman Empire and the final destruction of Jerusalem—a date at which the various threads of the story come together to a point. In order to avoid confusing the learner, and to enable him to get a clear view of the most important facts, all less important facts and names and dates have been omitted.

With such an outline in his mind, the scholar, coming to the study of a particular nation or period, should be able to fit that nation or period into its proper place. In the absence of any such outline, he must necessarily be at a loss to know the bearing of this or that episode on the whole great story.

I have to record, very gratefully, my deep obligation to Mr. R. B. Lattimer for reading this book in MS., and for many valuable suggestions and emendations.

H. G. H.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. Before History was Written
II. Egypt down to 1500 B.C.
III. Egyptian Religions, Sacred Writings, Etc.
IV. Babylonia
V. The Minoans in Crete
VI. The Meeting of the Empires
VII. The Jews and Israelites
VIII. The Persians and the Greeks
IX. The Glorious Days of Greece
X. The Meeting of the Nations round Sicily
XI. Macedon
XII. Rome and Carthage
XIII. Rome at Home and in the East
XIV. Rome Mistress of the World
XV. Troubles in the East
XVI. The Dispersal of the Jews
XVII. How the Threads draw Together
Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Great Pyramids, taken from an Aeroplane ... Frontispiece

A Baked Clay Tablet, inscribed with Babylonian Account of the Deluge
      British Museum.

Cyperus Papyrus

Isis (with Horus) and Horus (with Symbols)

Bandaging a Mummy
      Wilkinson.

Ancient Egyptian Machine for Raising Water, identical with the "Shadoof" of the Present Day
      Wilkinson.

Assyrian King in his RobeS

Coin of Knossos

Battering-Ram

Sennacherib in his Chariot returning from Battle
      Kouyurijik.

Greek Warrior, 7th-6th Century
      Gerhard, 207.

Corinthian Architecture
      From Monument of Lysicrates.

Alexander the Great
      from a Bust in the British Museum.

Gallic Warriors
      From Bronzes in the British Museum.

Hannibal

Roman Legionaries

Slab from the Arch of Titus, representing the Spoils of Jerusalem borne in Triumph

THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER I

BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN

The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is that it is really our own story. It is the story of the doings of mankind from the earliest date at which we know anything at all about man; and it is the story of the doings which have made you and me what we are to-day, and have made our lives what they are.

You must first look at the world map to understand the story properly. Take out the atlas or the globe of the world, and have a look at the Mediterranean Sea as shown upon it. You will see how very little space this sea occupies in comparison with the whole. And I want you to observe this very particularly, because, as I hope to show you, small though this space is, it is the space in, or closely around, which nearly the whole story of man on the world, so far as we know it, was made up to—what date shall we say?—only a few hundred years ago—say the date of Columbus' discovery of America. If you know the story of what happened in and about the Mediterranean Sea, you will know nearly all that anybody does know of the really important things that men did in the world up to the date of our Queen Elizabeth.

"But," you may say, "surely things were happening in other places, as in China and in Peru, and in Mexico, and all over the world, all the time?"

And so there were things happening, and things which made a very great difference, no doubt, to the people to whom they happened; but they were things that made scarcely any difference at all, so far as we are able to see, to the history of the world. They made great differences within the borders of the countries in which they happened, but not beyond. The happenings that went on round the shores of the Mediterranean were the making of the world as we know it to-day: I mean, of course, in so far as men's actions have had anything to do with the making of it.

For the first part of the story we shall be occupied with the eastern end only of the Mediterranean; and I must ask you to carry your eye just a little—not far—to the east again of the eastern shore of that sea. That shore is called the Levant, from the Latin levare, to rise, and it means the region in which the sun was seen to rise by those who gave the name—that is to say, the East.

A very short way, as it looks on the map of the Western Hemisphere, to the east of that Levant shore, you may see the two rivers Euphrates and Tigris, rising very near together only a little south of the Black Sea, yet not finding their way out into the sea till they have gone a very long way south. Then, after coming together, they go out in each other's company into the Persian Gulf. A great part of that space between the two rivers is called Mesopotamia, and is the country where our armies had hard fighting in the Great War. Mesopotamia is from Greek μέσος, meaning the middle, and πόταμος, a river, and means the land in the middle of, or between, the two rivers. Mediterranean, the name of the big sea, is from Latin medius, meaning, again, the middle, and terra, the earth; that is to say, the sea in the middle of the land. It is almost entirely shut in by the land, its only way out being by the narrow Straits of Gibraltar at the western end.

The great rivers

So there you see those two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, running south and making the land in the neighbourhood of their course very rich and fertile, producing splendid crops and vegetation of all kinds. And now, if you will carry your eye just a little to the west and south of these, across Arabia and the Red Sea, you will see another great river, only this time it is a river running, not from the north to the south, but from the south to the north. It is the Nile, the river of Egypt. It goes out into the Mediterranean past a city called Alexandria. At its mouth it spreads out into a number of channels, making an area intersected by water channels. This area has something of the shape of the letter in the Greek alphabet which corresponds to our "d" and is drawn thus Δ. That is roughly the shape of the space occupied by these many mouths of the Nile, and the region is therefore called the "Delta," which is the name of that letter of the Greek alphabet.

I want you to take particular notice of these two great river-courses, those of the Nile and of the Euphrates with the Tigris. I say Euphrates "with Tigris," because the two are together the fertilisers and waterers of the country lying between and around them. The Nile does his business of watering his own valley by himself. It is most important that you should give your attention to these two great water-courses, because it is along them that arose the two greatest empires, the two strongest and most formidable powers, of which the early history of the world has anything to tell us.

You may easily understand how this should be so. Man, at first, from what we are able to learn about him, knew very little of farming. Such ideas as a "rotation of crops," or of manuring the fields were probably quite unknown to him for very many ages. The first men whom we are able to learn anything about seem to have depended on the hunting of other animals for their living. Then came a time when they began to live on their flocks and herds. Now, both for the hunting and for the living by keeping cattle and sheep, they had to be constantly on the move. They would kill out all the game in one district and therefore have to move on to another. Or their cows and sheep would eat up all the pasture in one place and so they had to be moved to fresh feeding-grounds. These two first stages, which all the scholars recognise, in man's story require that the people who lived in them should be always moving, or at least ready to move. The stages are called the Hunting Age and the Pastoral Age respectively. The next age is called the Agricultural Age, when man began to give "culture" to the "ager," or field. He was able to settle then. It was not necessary for him to be constantly on the move when he had begun to live by the crops which he grew. But he was not yet a very clever or scientific farmer. He could grow good crops only when Nature helped him very freely, only on the best soils, only in the river valleys or lands watered by the rivers, and in a favourable climate.

The soil of Mesopotamia is still considered the most t naturally rich in all the world: the Nile overflows its banks every year, and the overflow leaves a wonderfully rich mud behind it; the climate both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt is very favourable to the growth of vegetation. Therefore, it is not to be wondered at that when men began to lead a settled life they settled themselves down along the courses of these two great rivers—I write two, because I am regarding the Euphrates and Tigris as one, for the moment—and here formed themselves into communities and nations so many in number and so prosperous that they became stronger than any of their neighbours.

Earliest man

And now you are very likely to ask me, "What do we know about the early history of man on the earth, and how do we know it?"

The first thing that we know about man on the earth is what we know by finding the weapons or tools that show signs of his handiwork. It is one of the most distinguishing marks of man, setting him most clearly apart from all other animals, that he has been a maker of tools and weapons for an immense number of years. Intelligent though some dogs and monkeys and other animals are, not one of them has thought of doing this. The oldest sort of tools or weapons that we find are made of stone, generally of flint, chipped to a sharp edge or point, so as to make axe or spear-head. We know them to be older than any of the metal tools or weapons that we find, because we find them in a deeper layer, or stratum, of the earth—a stratum deposited before those which lie above it. And we find them in company with fossil remains of animals which are of less-developed species than those in the strata above.

Man's tools and weapons

After a while—an immensely long while—there can be little doubt that man discovered that the ore of metals, which is found in the ground, can be fused, that is to say, melted by fire; that it can be separated from its earthy surroundings, and so be made useful. Man then began to make weapons and implements of metal, and found them better than the weapons of stone. We may infer this from the fact that the stone implements, of sharp and shapen flint, become less numerous as we come to higher strata, or layers, in the ground, and the metal implements are more numerous.

The metal of which the earliest metal implements were made is either pure copper or bronze, which is a mixture of copper and tin. Copper is not a very hard metal. I suppose that the more tin that was put into the mixture, in comparison with the copper, the harder it would be. And then, after a while—again a very very long while—man discovered another, a harder, and therefore a better, kind of metal, that is to say iron. And he has never found a better metal in all the long years of his story since. Gold and platinum may be more precious, because they are less common; but iron is a great deal more useful to man. His weapons, his swords, bayonets, and cannons are made of it; so are his ships; and you hardly can open your eyes in a room without their resting on something made of iron. As soon as he had found out the hardness of iron we may suppose that man quickly gave up the use of the soft bronze, as he had formerly given up the use of the stone in favour of the bronze. Thus it comes that you may read of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. They refer to these three stages in man's history: first, when he was using stone implements, made of the chipped flint or the like hard stone; second, when he was using the bronze weapons and tools; and third, when he was using iron.

"But," you will say, "all this is hardly history. It is not man's story. We don't want to know so much what kind of tools and weapons man had; we want to know what he did with them. You are not telling us this."

It is quite true; I am not. But the reason why I have told you all this about man's tools, before telling you what he did with them, is that I want you to get clearly into your heads this truth—that even the best and most learned of the men who have searched back into history are able to tell us only a very small part of the whole story of man's doings on the earth. They have found out, perhaps, all that there is to find about the records that man has intentionally left of himself. But the records begin rather far on—at what we may call a late chapter—in the story. They begin only about six or seven thousand years ago. And though that sounds a long time you must understand that it really is quite short in comparison with all the time that man has been living on the earth.

It is very difficult for us, who have lived only a few years, to form an idea in our minds of a great many years. I hardly know how best I may help you to do so. Suppose we take a thousand years as a length for our consideration in the first place. Consider this, next, that there are, certainly, people alive now who are a hundred years old, and perhaps a little older. Imagine, if you can, the lives of ten such persons who have lived one after the other. Imagine that each as a baby saw one of the others when that other was a hundred years old. Thus it would only take ten of such happenings to cover the whole stretch of a thousand years of which I want you to form some idea. The years of the lives of ten very long-lived men would cover it.

It is quite possible that you may have seen a living oak tree of much more than a thousand years old. The people who have studied trees tell us that there are oaks alive in England now which were alive in the Saxon times; that is to say, some 1500 years ago—one and a half thousand years. I know that these hints are not very effectual towards helping you to get an idea of what a thousand years mean, but they are the best that I can give you. They seem to help me to realise just a little what this great stretch of years is. We can do no better.

I wrote, a little while ago (p. 7), "the records that man has intentionally left of himself." I put in that word "intentionally" because, of course, the weapons and tools and implements and ornaments that we find were not left, by those who used them, with any intention that they should give us any information about their users. They were just left, as a rule, accidentally. We can imagine something from them about the kind of life that their users led, and what kind of men they were that used them, but they were not trying to give us any such information.

A BAKED CLAY TABLET INSCRIBED WITH BABYLONION ACCOUNT OF THE DELUGE
A BAKED CLAY TABLET INSCRIBED WITH BABYLONION ACCOUNT OF THE DELUGE

What we may call, I think, the intentional records began when we find that man began to carve designs on stone of what he had been doing, or to paint pictures showing his doings, and, especially, when he began to cut written words on the stone. When we begin to get records of this kind, then we really do begin to read the story—-we begin to know what man was doing. And the first records of the kind are of date some five thousand years before the birth of Christ; that is to say, some seven thousand years ago.

The first records

And what do we find, from these carvings and pictures and writings, that man was doing? The records that we are best able to read now are those which we find in the more westerly of the two great river-courses on which, as we have seen, man congregated. It is along the Nile, in Egypt, that we find the record most clear. I have little doubt that we might find it no less clear along the other great river-courses, those of the Euphrates and Tigris, also, were it not for this difference—that Egypt and the Nile region was very much better supplied with hard stone than the Euphrates and Tigris region. The result of that is that the inscriptions and figures cut on the hard Egyptian stone are legible still. The other, more eastern, records, cut on the brick which, in the absence of stone, the builders made use of for nearly all building purposes, have crumbled to pieces. The wonder, after so many years, is that anything at all should be left, rather than that much has been lost. The Egyptian climate is very dry, except near the river's mouth, at the Delta, and that dryness has helped to preserve the records.

If we had the same records for the eastern as for the western river-course, we should find, I expect, that the way the people lived was very much alike in both. We may gather that it was a very pleasant life, on the whole. The climate was delightfully warm; the soil gave them plentiful crops with very little work for it. Probably the eastern people were the more pastoral, that is to say, kept more cattle and sheep, but there were flocks and herds in the Nile region also. And in both there were wild beasts for the hunting.

CHAPTER II

EGYPT DOWN TO 1500 B.C.

I told you that one of the ways by which man, at different ages of the world, has been described is to speak of him in the Hunting stage, the Pastoral, and the Agricultural. Although these people along the great rivers probably settled down into the agricultural stage earlier than others, still, that did not prevent them from keeping cattle and hunting wild creatures. The older the inscriptions and records, the more we see of the hunting, so that we may imagine, as we should expect, that the quieter business of farming gradually came to occupy more of their lives as time went on, and that the hunting occupied them less. The wild beasts would no doubt get hunted farther and farther back from the country that man had settled in. An interesting fact is that one of the very oldest of all the Egyptian engravings portrays ostriches, showing that these great birds were inhabitants of Egypt at that time, though they do not appear in any later engravings and are, of course, not living in any part of Egypt now. These ostriches are carved on the face of a sandstone rock, standing as nature placed it, and not worked into any building. It is near a place which in the old days was called Silsilla, and it was nearly at the southern end of the Egypt of those times. For that Egypt did not extend nearly as far south as the country which we call by that name now. It ended at the first cataract, where is now the town called Assouan. In ancient times this Assouan was called Syene. Farther south than this, the country was no longer called Egypt, but Nubia, though some Egyptians inhabited the region a little south of the cataract. Look at your map and you will very likely see that region still written down as the "Nubian Desert." Look to the west of the line of the Nile and you may read "Libyan Desert." Look to the right, again, and there is "Arabian Desert."

The Nile

You will realise now what this means: that these people were here living all along the banks of the great river, and that on either side were deserts—sandy, barren wastes—which, for all they knew, stretched away without end. They lived along this narrow and very fertile strip which depended almost entirely on the river for its fertility, and which that river fertilised in a very peculiar way.

At a certain time in the year it came down in a great flood and inundated, that is to say, flowed over, all the low land lying on either side of its course. This happened just about the season that the star which we call Sirius, or the Dog-Star, but which they called Sothis, or the star of their god Seth, showed itself above the horizon at the moment of sunrise; and they dated the beginning of their year from this rising with the sun of this exceedingly bright and large star. This occurred in middle summer, so that the beginning of their year, their "New Year's Day," was very different from ours. It came nearly at the season of our Midsummer's Day. But they had a very good reason for counting the beginning of their year from it, because it was such a very important date for them. It really did begin a new year for them, for it was this inundation, or overflow of the river, which gave their seeds, when they put them into the ground, a chance of growing and giving them good crops. After a time, during which the water had lain out over the low land, it fell back again into the usual channel of the river and left all the land which it had covered with a deposit, or layer, of rich dark mud, better than any manure they could have given it.

We know now what it was that caused, and that still every year causes, this overflow; it is the excessively heavy rainfall which occurs annually in the interior of the country, where the sources of the river are. But they did not know the reason, and made many curious guesses to account for it.

Although there were these deserts around them, it seems certain that the country quite close about the river had more trees and bushes on it than it has now. For one thing, as the people settled in the country and their numbers grew, they would be likely to clear off patches of the woodland for their crops, and in the second place a great eating down of the vegetation must have happened when they began, as we know they did begin, to keep goats and, later, camels.

The long-necked camels would be able to reach up to the tops of small trees, and to the lower branches of the taller ones, and, together, it seems that the goats and camels made a great difference after a while in the number of the trees. When a country is much stripped of its trees, one of the results is that less rain falls there; so it is quite sure that this stripping of the trees by the goats and camels in Egypt caused the rainfall to be less than it had been before those creatures were brought in. The country had to depend more than ever, for its crops, on the overflow of the river. Of course the cutting down of the trees by carpenters with the stone or bronze axes would help to reduce the numbers, and we know that the ancient Egyptians understood the use of charcoal, which is made by burning wood. So it is easy to understand that, in a country which had no great supply of woodland to start with, what there was of it was soon almost destroyed.

But until that destruction happened there was woodland enough to give shelter to numbers of wild animals. Many of the animals which the early Egyptians hunted were of kinds that are able to live in sandy places where there is very little shelter, and, as it seems, very little grass for them to eat. We find, by the old carvings and written records, that they hunted the lion, leopard, jackal, wild boars, antelopes of many kinds, wild sheep and oxen, the hippopotamus in the river, and that they caught a variety of fish in the river and in the Lake Moeris, into which water was led from the river by a canal. The making of canals, to carry the water to places where it was required, was done in very early days, and at the season of the river's overflow water was led by a canal into this big lake which acted as a reservoir, or storing place, for the water, from which they could draw it off when wanted. The crocodiles, by which the Nile was infested, were looked on as sacred.

They understood the use of nets for fishing, and used nets also for surrounding four-footed animals and for catching birds. For the killing of the larger and dangerous animals they had spears of various make, and bows and arrows. It is doubtful whether they used the boomerang—that wooden, flat, curved weapon, used still by the natives of Australia, which returns to the thrower after going out to a distance of more than a hundred yards. There are carved figures which look as if they might be figures of boomerangs, but they might be "throwing sticks" such as some savage people still use to give greater length of "leverage"—if you know what that means—to increase the length and force of their throw of a spear. There were immense numbers of wild-fowl about the river and the marshes. So the ancient Egyptians must have had splendid sport.

Domestic animals

They seem to have kept, as domestic animals, ducks and geese, but it was not till several thousand years later than the date of those engravings in which we see the ostriches that our domestic fowls were introduced. Hairy-coated sheep are shown on some of the early carvings, but later a better sort of sheep, with woollier coat, and curved, instead of straight, horns appears. They had oxen, which drew their wooden ploughs and trod out the corn from the straw on the threshing-floors, and were also used to draw weights. They had, after a time, as we have seen, goats and camels, but the donkey was the most common beast of burden, both when they traversed the desert and when they were in their own fertile strip of country. Horses were only brought in at rather a late date in the story. At first they seem to have been used only for drawing chariots, and we find them thus harnessed a long while before we are shown a rider mounted on a horse, or, indeed, on any animal. They do not seem to have known either the elephant or the giraffe, which are perhaps the most remarkable creatures in all Africa. We know that they kept bees for their honey. They had dogs, of a variety of breeds, and used them for hunting, apparently not regarding them as the unclean creatures that most people in the East consider them now. They kept cats and monkeys as pets, and used the cats to catch birds.

But the great business of their lives was the cultivation of their crops. Egypt was a great corn-producing country. Make a note of that in your minds, for the corn supply of Egypt became of great importance in the later story of the Mediterranean and its shores.

The corn was principally of the kinds that we call wheat and barley. And they had vegetables, such as lettuce, beans, peas, onions, and so on. We may imagine a certain amount of sowing and hoeing, and weeding and harvesting going on at the right seasons; but a great deal of their time must have been taken up with the watering under the scorching Egyptian sun. When the big flood had ceased to come down from the rain-filled lakes in the south, and the river had gone back into its ordinary channel, they had, after a while, to refresh the ground again by raising water in buckets hung by a rope to a long pole. The pole worked on a hinge about three-quarters of the way down from the end to which the rope was fastened, so that the bucket could be let down or drawn up by a man working at the end of the pole. There are many pictures and carvings of this apparatus. Probably very little rain fell at any part of the year in Egypt itself after most of the trees had gone.

They had the palm trees on which the dates grow, and fig trees and pomegranates. The wood of the palm must have been useful to them for timber, in a country where timber trees were so scarce. And they had the flax, of which they made linen. In early days there does not seem to have been any cultivation of the vine, though the wine made in Egypt became quite important later. And they had the papyrus.

CYPERUS PAPYRUS.
CYPERUS PAPYRUS.

The papyrus was a plant which grew wild in the marshes, and it was of the greatest importance to them, and also to us, because it was on strips cut from the stalk and fastened flat together that the substance was made which served them for paper, on which very much of the story which I am now telling you was written. I have said that much of the story is taken from the writings and pictures on stone, whether on the rocks as they stood where nature had put them, or as the stone was worked into the tombs or monuments of kings and great people, into pyramids and the like. But the greatest part of the record is written on the papyrus. The stem of the plant was used also for the building of boats, and it supplied them with material for ropes. Though it was found wild, they cultivated it, and so increased the natural supply.

It is likely that their houses were commonly built of brick. You will have noticed that as the country was so poorly supplied with timber-trees few wooden houses could be built. But the brick of which the houses of most of the people were made would not be of the brick that we know. You will remember that one of the burdens imposed on the Israelites in Egypt was to make bricks "without straw," and it may have happened to you to wonder at that, because, as you know, our bricks are not made with straw. But straw and pieces of reed were used in the making of much of the ancient brick, because the clay often was not burnt in a kiln, but only dried by the sun's heat. This did not give nearly so hard or lasting a brick as the brick that was burnt by the fire in a kiln, but a mixture of the straw helped to hold the clay together and to prevent its crumbling.

They knew all about the proper burning of bricks, to make them durable, also, but this sun-drying was a less troublesome way, and was used for the commoner kind of brick.

Works of art

At a very early period they became skilful in the making of pottery, by which I mean vessels for household use, such as jugs, etc., in clay, and they were clever workers of glass. They made ornaments of gold, and engraved jewels. They were interested in medicine, and knew the use of splints for setting broken bones. They knew something of the movement of the stars, as seen from the earth. We have noticed that they began their New Year at the date of the rising of Sothis, as they called the Dog-Star, about the season that the Nile began to rise. The carvings and drawings on stone and on papyrus are remarkable, even from the first, for the correctness and firmness of the outline. The earliest show the hands and feet left in a curiously unfinished state, and many of the figures have the two legs shown as one. As time went on they came to draw the figure very much more perfectly and with attention to finishing the hands and feet. The faces indicate quite clearly the race of men to which the originals of the portraits belonged.

But, of course, the achievements of the old Egyptians by which they are best known to us are those gigantic monuments the Pyramids, that strange head of the Sphinx, the many temples and the mummied corpses found within them. All these, as well as their hieroglyphical or picture writing, are connected very closely with their religious beliefs; and this is such a very curious and interesting subject that I propose to write about it in a chapter of its own.

I do not know whether you will agree, but it seems to me that the story of mankind is much more amusing, and will do us much more good, if we try to see how the peoples of the world lived from time to time, what kind of people they were, and how they worked and played and fought, rather than if we just study a list of the names of their kings and of their towns. I do not think the names can help us much, unless we know what the people that the names belonged to did, or what happened in the towns so called. For that reason I have avoided mentioning any names that do not seem to have that kind of interest in the story. I think they only confuse us and get in the way of our seeing how the things happened that really did make a difference in the world.

But you are not to suppose that when these Egyptian people had settled themselves down along the course of this pleasant river, they were allowed to remain there quite peaceably, without any interference from their neighbours who lived in a far less fertile and agreeable country. The greatest of all facts in Egypt was the Nile. It went from end to end of the country. People went along it in boats and ships, they fished in it, hunted the hippopotamus, and possibly the crocodile, in it. Sometimes they were killed by either of these, and especially by the latter. The Nile was their life. Without it they would have died.

There was desert all about them, but it was not desert so deserted that it was quite without inhabitants. There were "oases," or fertile patches, in the desert itself, and the deserts had their limits; there were tolerably fertile lands beyond them again. And it has always been a wonder how the desert-dwellers, such as the Arabs and some kinds of antelopes, do manage to subsist where there seems to be so little for them to eat, and almost nothing for them to drink.

But there were people—Libyans on the west, Nubians on the south, Ethiopians (what we should call negroes)—of various tribes who probably were envious enough of the easy life that they saw their neighbours living along the river-bank. Therefore, although it sounds as if it were a very peaceful, as well as pleasant, life that I have tried to show you that these ancient Egyptians were leading, you are not to suppose that they were not beset, from time to time, by incursions and invasions and attacks by the peoples round about them. It would take far too long to recite all these invasions against which they succeeded more or less in holding their own. That they were not always successful is quite evident from the records.

The First Dynasty

The record of Egyptian kings is given to us by an Egyptian priest, named Manctho, and the date of the earliest king, the founder of what is called the First Dynasty, has been estimated by some students to have been as far back as 5500 years before Christ was born. That is to say, more than seven thousand years ago. Other learned men have supposed the date of this first king to be quite two thousand years later in the story. This shows the very great difficulty of fixing the dates of these events that happened so very long ago.

What is more important is that we know at least one of the great acts of this first Egyptian king, whose name was Menes. It is known, from inscriptions, that he united into one kingdom what had, before him, been two countries, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt.

And here I must warn you of a difficulty which may perplex you. On the map you may see that Lower Egypt is the part near the Delta, that is the mouth, or mouths, of the Nile where it flows into the sea. Upper Egypt is the more southern part reaching as far south as the first cataract. But, as you look at the map, this Lower Egypt looks upper, to your eye. You must not pay any attention to that, but must remember that the northern part must be lower, really, because it is the part towards which the river runs; and a river, as you know, must run from higher ground to lower. Remember, then, that Lower Egypt is the northern part, near the sea and Upper Egypt the southern.

Menes united these into one kingdom, but they were separated for a time again, under later kings, and this shows that not only were the Egyptians sometimes at war with the tribes from the deserts, who invaded them, but also that the people along the river-banks were sometimes fighting among themselves.

By a dynasty is meant both the king who is the founder, the first, of that dynasty, and also those of his children and grandchildren, or relatives, who followed him on the throne. It is as we may speak of the Stuart dynasty or the Hanover dynasty, of our own kings. When there were no more relations of a dynasty to come to the throne, or when one king was conquered by a foreign invader, or by a revolution of his own subjects, the next king was called the founder of a new dynasty, which went on till his family also died out or was turned out.

In the long history of Egypt, from the time of Menes, the founder of the first dynasty, to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander of Macedon in 332 B.C.—that is, 332 years before the birth of Christ—there were thirty-one of these dynasties, or kingly families, which ruled Egypt one after the other.

We speak of the rulers of all these dynasties as kings, but it is evident that they did not all have the same authority over their subjects. In our own history we know that sometimes the barons were very powerful, and the king of England had great difficulty in keeping them under his rule. Something of the same kind happened at various times in Egypt. There were local chiefs, with a large following of men, who were nearly independent of the actual king. But in the end the kings regained the authority over them.

The new empire

The capital city, in the earliest times, was Memphis, in Lower Egypt, and so it remained until the ninth and tenth dynasties, when the power of the Memphis kings was overthrown by conquerors from the north, and the country was distracted by revolutions, so far as we can learn, for a long period. Then a people called the Hyksos, coming from the north-east, from Syria, invaded Egypt and established their power there for many generations. And then came a new dynasty, which is thought to have arisen from a combining together of the chief men in Upper Egypt, of which Thebes was the capital. This rising drove out the foreign Hyksos and gave a military strength to Egypt which it never had before. The greatest king of this the greatest period of Egypt in the old days was Tethmosis III. He was a stepson of Hatshepsut, the wife of his father Tethmosis II., and Hatshepsut herself ruled as queen until Tethmosis came of age. That was in, or about, 1500 B.C.

The date of the founding of this, the eighteenth, dynasty was 1580 B.C.; and with this period begins what is called the New Empire. The word "empire," taking the place of that of kingdom, seems to show that the Egyptians were claiming to extend their power beyond their own country. And we know that they actually did so.

I do not want, for the moment, to follow down the story of Egypt any further than this, because it is time that we turned our eyes eastward, to see what was going on along that other great river-fed region, where the Euphrates and the Tigris flow down together. The point which we have now come to in the Egyptian story is a point at or about which new and great things began to happen. The two great world forces—that of Egypt on the one side and that of Babylonia, which is the name given to the empire established in the east, on the other—began to clash together as they had not clashed before. Their rivalry, and the wars between them, and the catching up into these wars and the squeezing between them of the unfortunate smaller peoples that lived in the country by which the two big empires were divided—these are the principal things in the story of the world for a thousand years and more after the time of the founding of the eighteenth dynasty. So we must now try to make out something of the story of that other great power along those more eastern rivers.

But before we go to that eastern story I want to put in a chapter, the chapter that I spoke of a few pages back, to tell you something about the religion of the old Egyptians, the strange gods that they worshipped, the burial of their dead, their tombs, their language, and their sacred writing or hieroglyphic.

I think, however, before we begin the new chapter, I should like you to take a look at the map again and observe the position of the two great river-courses—the western, which we have been talking about, and the eastern, to which we are soon to come—because these are the real big facts which matter in the world's story. The Egyptian religion and all connected with it are most interesting, but the clash of the big empires was what made the early history of the world.

The two empires

You will see, then, these great river regions and will imagine the two powerful empires established in them, and then you will see that there lies between the two a country in which lies the land of Palestine, where the Jews lived. You will see that the big empires are divided from each other, nearly separated, by the Red Sea running up into the land with two arms, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Akaba. Between these two stretches or arms lies the Sinai Peninsula, and northward of Egypt and westward of Palestine there is the Mediterranean Sea. The result of this distribution of sea and land is that the only way by which the two big empires could come into touch with one another was by way of Palestine. The southern desert, even where those big arms of the sea did not run up into it, was almost as impassable for the passage of armies as the sea itself. Neither of the empires, in the early days, had much of a fleet, by which they could get at one another across sea. The consequence is that we have to regard that stretch of land which is occupied on the map by Palestine as the bridge, and the only bridge, by which they could come into contact, either for purposes of trade or of war.

It is only natural to think, therefore, that when they began, as they did in the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, to make big wars on each other, the tribes that held, or that vainly tried to hold, that bridge, would be terribly squeezed and harassed by first one and then the other of the big neighbours coming upon them, with very little respect for their rights. That is, in fact, exactly what we know did happen. And it is only a wonder that the Jews at that time were not squeezed utterly out of existence between the two. It is one of the biggest wonders, as well as one of the biggest facts, in history that they were not so squeezed out. When I say it is one of the biggest facts, I mean that it made an enormous difference to the history of the world, for if they had allowed themselves to be squeezed out, if they had not even then showed that extraordinary toughness and tenacity which has always been a great part of their national character, the history of the world would have been very different from what it has been, Christianity could not have spread through the world as it has spread, and the whole course of events would have been largely changed.

In what way it would have been changed we cannot say; but that it would have been changed enormously we cannot doubt.

Keep, then, these great facts clearly in your minds: the position of these two big empires to west and east, and the comparatively narrow bridge between them, by which they could communicate with each other. If you have this, like a map without any of the other names filled in, in the background of your minds, you will be able to fit in the happenings as they occur.

And now for our chapter on the Egyptian religions, beliefs, customs, and so on.

CHAPTER III

EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.

Talking, if you will carefully think of it, you will find to be just sending messages to one another by means of sounds. You learned to talk—that is to say, to send messages in this way—when you were a child, before you learned to write. So did the early Egyptians and all early peoples. But the difference between you and them is that you had some one to teach you to write, and they had not. They had to invent a way of doing this for themselves.

When you were a child you saw the sun rising, winter and summer following each other, and all the rest of the events in Nature, and you had some one to tell you how they all happened. The early Egyptians and the others saw all these things, but they had no one to tell them how they happened. They had to puzzle them out, or try to do so, for themselves.

They saw that such things were entirely beyond the power of any mere man to make to happen; therefore they attributed the happenings to some invisible power or powers immensely stronger and more gifted than themselves. And of course they were perfectly right in so doing. Only the mistake, or one of the mistakes, they made was this: they imagined each of the greatest marvels that they saw to be caused by a power which was busied with that particular marvel. Thus they thought that it was one power which made the corn to grow in the spring-time, for instance; another power that caused the sun to rise in the morning, and so on. They would see the flowing of a river, with its appearance of being a live thing as it went along, now smooth, now rippling, and they would go so far as to imagine that each stream had its own particular power or god looking after it.

Or they might actually look on the marvellous thing as itself a god. The sun, for instance, which they saw to give them light and warmth and to be a very splendid object—many races thought, and not unnaturally, that the sun itself was a god, and a very great god. They saw the moon, and to some of them it seemed that the moon was a power not unlike the sun, but less strong, and so it occurred to them that perhaps the moon was a goddess and the wife of the great god the sun. But the Egyptians, unlike others, looked on the moon as a male deity. When they had gone thus far in guesses about the heavenly bodies, they did not have to go any great way farther in order to ascribe all sorts of power—less than the power of the sun or of the moon—to the other planets and stars.

Sacrifices

And, once more, these early, unlearned men, who had no one to teach them, but had to find out everything for themselves, saw indeed that they received great good from, let us say, the warmth of the sun and the overflowing of the river, and the growing of their crops, to give them food. They could worship the power that they thought had given them all this. But then, again, they would sometimes find themselves visited by some dreadful disaster, perhaps an earthquake, or terrible pestilence, or famine when the river did not overflow in its usual way. And these evil things they had to ascribe to some power very much more strong than themselves. Thence they got the idea of evil gods, or devils, as well as of the good and kind gods. The idea arose that they must do something to avert these calamities, by giving to the powers or gods who caused the calamities something that the gods would like. And since men had to think that the gods would like the things that they themselves liked, they sacrificed to them, as it was called—that is to say, gave them gifts of such things as they themselves liked best. It was rather a puzzle, perhaps, to know how to give a gift to a being who was invisible, and who would not come and take the gift away; but they solved that puzzle as best they could. They burned some of the gifts, or sacrifices, so that the solid flesh of the sacrificed creature was turned into smoke and went up into the air and disappeared. Or they poured libation of wine or of blood upon the earth, where it soaked in. So in both instances it became invisible, and therefore it might be supposed that it had been accepted by the invisible god.

And then, finally, there is this other point that I want you to notice about the speculations, or guesses, of man in his earliest ages, about the powers by which he was surrounded and which he was trying to understand—early man did not distinguish so clearly as we do between himself and the other animals. He regarded them as closely related to himself. Many of the Red Indians and other tribes even to-day believe themselves to be descended from some animal who was the founder, the first ancestor, of their tribe. Men of that tribe will on no account kill an animal of the species to which they believe that their first ancestor belonged. Thus a tribe which believes its ancestor to have been a beaver, let us say, would hold all beavers sacred, would never kill one, and very likely would use the figure of a beaver as a kind of family crest. The beaver would become a kind of god to them, and when it was looked on in this way it was called the "totem" of the tribe.

I mention this idea of "totem" worship because it may have been somewhat in this way that the Egyptians came to consider as sacred such curious, and so many, animals as they did—cats, hawks, bulls, crocodiles, even beetles. I do not say that it was thus that the worship of these creatures came to prevail among the Egyptians. I do not think that there is any at all clear evidence that it came about in this way; but it may have been so, and it is rather difficult to see how else it grew.

You may have noticed that I wrote, for the heading of this chapter, "religions" in the plural, with an "s," not "religion." And this I did because the religion of the ancient Egyptians was not one. There are at least three different lines of religious thought and speculation to be traced, so tangled up together that the whole subject becomes very difficult to understand, but beyond all doubt there are these three. There is this animal worship; there is the worship of the sun and moon; and there is the worship of the two opposed and yet connected powers that bring good and evil.

Legends of the Gods

The invention, the imagination, of the mind of early man was disposed to making up stories about these gods. If the stories explained the events that people saw happening, so much the better. Now there was a god, by name Osiris, who was first worshipped, as it seems, only in a town called Busiris. Near by was a town called Buto, where it is thought that a goddess, to whom they gave the name of Tsis, was worshipped. For some reason which we do not know, the worship of Osiris extended until it spread over the whole of Egypt, and with it the worship of Isis, who was supposed to be the wife of Osiris. The story of Osiris and Isis was told very differently at different times and in different places. According to the Greek writer, Plutarch, the legend which he heard about them went thus: that Osiris a very long time ago reigned as a great king over all Egypt. He civilised the people and taught them arts and science. He had a wicked brother Seth, who made a conspiracy against him and killed him, and put his body into a coffin and threw it into the Nile. The wife of Osiris, Isis, after long search, found the body and brought it back. Then she went on a visit to her son, Horus, who lived at Buto; and while she was away the wicked Seth came back, found the body (mummified, as we may suppose) of Osiris, took it away and cut it up into fourteen pieces, so that Isis might never again have it as a whole body.

HORUS, ISIS (WITH HORUS)
HORUS, ISIS (WITH HORUS)

Horus, according to one story, later attacked and slew his uncle, the wicked Seth, to avenge his father; and in this contest between the good Osiris and the bad Seth we perhaps see an attempt to account for the good and evil in the world. If that is so, the good finally triumphed in that story, because Horus, the good son of the good father, killed the bad Seth.

Another story, however, says that the struggle between Horus and Seth was so equal that Egypt was divided between them, Lower Egypt going to Horus and Upper Egypt to Seth.

On the inscriptions, in the hieroglyphic, or sacred graving, to which we will come directly, Horus is represented by the figure of a falcon, Seth by that of some animal which has been variously guessed to be a jerboa or an okapi, but which looks very much as if it might be some kind of dog. It has been conjectured that the contest recorded between Horus and Seth may be a growth from wars waged between tribes represented the one by the falcon and the other by this four-footed animal of Seth's, whatever it may be.

The story, and the different shapes it takes, and the way in which the incidents get transformed so as to fit in with the incidents of quite a different story, may help you to understand something of the way in which the legends grew. They not only grew, separately, into very strange shapes, but they grew into one another, like neighbouring trees with their branches inter-tangled, so that it is very hard to distinguish them.

One thing you may have noticed in the story—that Osiris, according to one version at least, becomes king of the dead in the nether world. That means, of course, that these people so very long ago believed in the life of a man's soul after his body was dead. That is curious, is it not, seeing that they had had no revelation, so far as we know, to tell them that it was so? We may speak of that a little more, in a minute or two.

Probably you may have seen pictures of some of the hieroglyphics or sacred inscriptions, and if you have you may have noticed that some of the figures have human bodies and beasts' heads.

Thus Horus is often shown with a man's body and a falcon's head. Anubis has a man's body and a jackal's head, and the like happens with many of the other animal gods. We may take it all as sign of the confusion in the minds of these early people with regard to the difference between gods and man and other animals.

Various religions

The confusion of religions in Egypt is particularly great, very likely because different tribes brought in different beliefs and gods, and they grew confused with the beliefs and gods already there. Where they believed that there was such a great number of gods, it was almost necessary that the power of each god must be supposed to be restricted to a certain place. Otherwise the fighting between them for mastery would be endless. We have seen, however, how, as time went on, the idea grew of Osiris as a god universal throughout Egypt. That was a long step forward in the direction of belief in a single god, ruler and maker of all the universe. And yet then a further confusion arose, which led a step farther again in the same right direction, when Osiris began to be identified with—that is to say, to be considered the same as—the Sun-god, whom they called Re or Ra.

They had very many and various stories and fancies about this great god Re, the Sun—that at dawn he began to sail across the sky in a boat called the boat of the dawn, and again, at night, that he got into another boat, the boat of the dark, and sailed along underneath the earth all night to catch his morning boat again. Another story was that he was born a baby in the dawn, grew to his full manly strength at midday, and then declined again into an old man, dying at night. Stories of the same sort were invented to account for the apparent movements of the moon and stars and other planets. Of course they had no knowledge of the earth turning on its own axis, or travelling round the sun.

It seems curious enough that Osiris should be at one time identified with the sun, the god of the heavens, and yet be the ruler of the under-world, where the souls of dead men and women went after death. Perhaps it seems less curious when we remember that the sun himself was supposed to sail nightly underneath the earth. But it is quite impossible for us to have any clear idea of how they reasoned about these things, partly because the accounts we have of it are all very vague and given to us only by the records of the inscriptions which survive, and by travellers, like the Greek Herodotus, to whom the priests would not tell a great deal, and partly because the ideas of the people even who held those beliefs must have been very far from clear.

We know that they worshipped a great number of gods, and different gods in different places. The bull, Apis, was a sacred animal which was worshipped especially at Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt. Bast was the cat goddess, worshipped principally at Bubastis, where thousands of mummied bodies of cats have been found. Horus, the falcon; Seth, an animal not quite clearly identified; and Anubis, the jackal, I have mentioned already. And they worshipped the crocodile, the serpent, the ram, and many other creatures, but especially the sacred beetle, the scarabæus, in whose likeness those "scarabs" which we have in great numbers from Egypt, were made. Very often the "scarabs," in stone or glazed pottery, were engraved with the crests of the kings and used as seals.

The priests

There were a very great many priests. Every town seems to have had its temple to one or other of the many gods, and there were priests attached to every temple. But all the priests were not only priests and nothing else. I mean, that they might do other business as well; rather as if a clergyman here were to be a tradesman or a lawyer as well as doing his work in the Church. Sometimes the principal priest would be the great man of the district, the chief land-owner. But where religions were so many and so different, the customs must have differed very much too.

During the course of the eighteenth dynasty, with which the new empire and the great power of Egypt began, one of the kings tried to do away with all these different religions and to extend the worship of Osiris, identified with Ra, the Sun-god, over the whole of Egypt. And he succeeded; but his success was only for a time, and after a short period the Egyptians went back to the worship of their many gods again.

It was very important, in the opinion of the Egyptians, that the gods at each place, and of each kind, should be worshipped with the exactly right ceremonies. If the ceremonies were not rightly performed the god might be angry and bring all kinds of calamities upon you. It seemed to them far more important that these rites should be properly performed than that those who performed them should lead very good lives. They had their laws and their customs which regulated their conduct, but they do not seem to have feared that the gods would visit them with punishment in this life for any wrong-doing. They did, however, consider that any acts of injustice, such as robbery or dishonesty, would affect the state of their soul after death. That would be the business of Osiris, the ruler of the dead, to look after. We will speak of that in a minute.

The priests were the people who knew exactly how the worship of the gods at each place should be performed. They could read the religious instructions which were written in what is called the hieroglyphic—the sacred engravings. The hieroglyphic was probably the beginning of all writing.

If you can imagine a time when writing was unknown, and when there was need to send communications from one to another, and that these communications must not be known to the bearer of the message, how would you set about doing it?

Well, one way, at least, of doing it would be by sending signs marked on papyrus or parchment or on a slate, or whatever you might have convenient for making marks on, and to hope that the man you were sending them to would be clever enough to understand what you meant, and that the man by whom you were sending them would not. And if you wanted to send a message about any particular thing, the most easy and obvious way to begin would be by making a simple drawing of that thing. So, if you wanted to send a message about a bird, you would draw the figure, or outline, of a bird. If you wanted to send a message about an eye, a human eye, you might draw the figure of an eye. I suggest these two things because they are two of the most simple figures that actually do appear in the picture-writing which is the old Egyptian hieroglyphic.

Now we can go a step farther. The eye is the thing that we see with. Therefore, if we want to send a message to our friend and tell him that we "see a bird," if we put the picture of an eye, which is the organ of sight, and a bird next to it, our friend, if he is at all intelligent, may understand the message to mean "I see a bird."

Three kinds of writing

That, or something like that, may have been—I do not say that it was, but I think it most likely—the way in which this picture-writing began. I ought not to call it picture-writing, really, for it was not that. Hieros is Greek for sacred, or for a priest; glyphein is Greek for to grave, or engrave. So hieroglyphic meant sacred characters engraved; that is, cut in on stone. The word for the sacred writing was hieratic, meaning simply sacred, without the meaning of engraving. The hieratic was written on papyrus. It was derived from the hieroglyphic, the hieroglyphic being the older, but it was not quite the same because the pictures, so to call them, had become a good deal simplified so that they could be drawn much more quickly. The figures were not so carefully made, and certain signs, sometimes not very like the original figures, came to be understood as representing these figures.

That was one alteration from the hieroglyphic that was made, as time went on; and then there came another, further change, still in the direction of making simpler and simpler signs in place of the original figures; and when this third kind of writing had established itself it seems to have been found the easiest of the three and best suited for everyday use. It was called "Demotic," from "demos," meaning the populace, whence we get our "democracy" and the like words. "Demotic," then, meant that it was the writing of the common people, of the nation at large, as contrasted with the "hieratic," which was the writing used and known by the priests.