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people who lived along its banks the noble art of "team-work." They depended upon each
other to build their irrigation trenches and keep their dikes in repair. In this way they
learned how to get along with their neighbours and their mutual-benefit-association quite
easily developed into an organised state.
Then one man grew more powerful than most of his neighbours and he became the leader
of the community and their commander-in-chief when the envious neighbours of western
Asia invaded the prosperous valey. In due course of time he became their King and ruled
al the land from the Mediterranean to the mountains of the west.
But these political adventures of the old Pharaohs (the word meant "the Man who lived in
the Big House") rarely interested the patient and toiling peasant of the grain fields.
Provided he was not obliged to pay more taxes to his King than he thought just, he
accepted the rule of Pharaoh as he accepted the rule of Mighty Osiris.
It was different however when a foreign invader came and robbed him of his possessions.
After twenty centuries of independent life, a savage Arab tribe of shepherds, caled the
Hyksos, attacked Egypt and for five hundred years they were the masters of the valey of
the Nile. They were highly un-popular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who
came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long wandering through the desert
and who helped the foreign usurper by acting as his tax-gatherers and his civil servants.
But shortly after the year 1700 B.C. the people of Thebes began a revolution and after a
long struggle the Hyksos were driven out of the country and Egypt was free once more.
A thousand years later, when Assyria conquered al of western Asia, Egypt became part
of the empire of Sardanapalus. In the seventh century B.C. it became once more an
independent state which obeyed the rule of a king who lived in the city of Sais in the Delta
of the Nile. But in the year 525 B.C., Cambyses, the king of the Persians, took possession
of Egypt and in the fourth century B.C., when Persia was conquered by Alexander the
Great, Egypt too became a Macedonian province. It regained a semblance of
independence when one of Alexander's generals set himself up as king of a new Egyptian
state and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies, who resided in the newly built city of
Alexandria.
Finaly, in the year 89 B.C., the Romans came. The last Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, tried
her best to save the country. Her beauty and charm were more dangerous to the Roman
generals than half a dozen Egyptian army corps. Twice she was successful in her attacks
upon the hearts of her Roman conquerors. But in the year 30 B.C., Augustus, the nephew
and heir of Caesar, landed in Alexandria. He did not share his late uncle's admiration for
the lovely princess. He destroyed her armies, but spared her life that he might make her
march in his triumph as part of the spoils of war. When Cleopatra heard of this plan, she
kiled herself by taking poison. And Egypt became a Roman province.
MESOPOTAMIA
MESOPOTAMIA—THE SECOND CENTRE OF EASTERN
CIVILISATION
I AM going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid and I am going to ask that you
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imagine yourself possessed of the eyes of a hawk. Way, way off, in the distance, far
beyond the yelow sands of the desert, you wil see something green and shimmering. It is
a valey situated between two rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the land
of mystery and wonder which the Greeks caled Mesopotamia—the "country between the
rivers."
The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates (which the Babylonians caled the Purattu)
and the Tigris (which was known as the Diklat). They begin their course amidst the snows
of the mountains of Armenia where Noah's Ark found a resting place and slowly they flow
through the southern plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian gulf. They
perform a very useful service. They turn the arid regions of western Asia into a fertile
garden.
The valey of the Nile had attracted people because it had offered them food upon fairly
easy terms. The "land between the rivers" was popular for the same reason. It was a
country ful of promise and both the inhabitants of the northern mountains and the tribes
which roamed through the southern deserts tried to claim this territory as their own and
most exclusive possession. The constant rivalry between the mountaineers and the desert-
nomads led to endless warfare. Only the strongest and the bravest could hope to survive
and that wil explain why Mesopotamia became the home of a very strong race of men
who were capable of creating a civilisation which was in every respect as important as that
of Egypt.
THE SUMERIANS
THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US THE
STORY OF ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-
POT
THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. Columbus tried to find a way to the
island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Austrian bishop
equipped an expedition which was to travel eastward and find the home of the Grand
Duke of Muscovy, a voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not visited by
western men until a generation later. Meanwhile a certain Venetian by the name of
Barbero had explored the ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most
curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and
engraved upon endless pieces of baked clay.
But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the end of the eighteenth
century that the first "cuneiform inscriptions" (so-caled because the letters were wedge-
shaped and wedge is caled "Cuneus" in Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish
surveyor, named Niebuhr. Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-
master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four letters, the D, the A, the R
and the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by
until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun,
gave us a workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.
Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of Champolion had
been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants
of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay,
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had discarded pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been developed. A few
examples wil show you what I mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into a
brick looked as folows: {ilust.} This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short
while when the meaning of "heaven" was added to that of star the picture was simplified in
this way {ilust.} which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed
from {ilust} into {ilust.} and a fish changed from {ilust.} into {ilust.} The sun was
originaly a plain circle {ilust.} and became {ilust.} If we were using the Sumerian script
today we would make an {ilust.} look like {ilust.}. This system of writing down our ideas
looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries it was used by the Sumerians
and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Persians and al the different races which
forced their way into the fertile valey.
The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First the Sumerians
came from the North. They were a white People who had lived in the mountains. They
had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of hils. After they had entered
the plain they constructed artificial little hils on top of which they built their altars. They did
not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their towers with sloping
galeries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad
stations where ascending galeries lead from one floor to another. We may have borrowed
other ideas from the Sumerians but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-
sorbed by those races that entered the fertile valey at a later date. Their towers however
stil stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile
in the land of Babylon and they caled them towers of Babilli, or towers of Babel.
In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered Mesopotamia. They
were soon afterwards over-powered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the
desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are known as the "Semites,"
because in the olden days people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem,
one of the three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced to
submit to the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe whose great King
Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who gave his
people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state the best administered empire of the
ancient world. Next the Hittites, whom you wil also meet in the Old Testament, over-ran
the Fertile Valey and destroyed whatever they could not carry away. They in turn were
vanquished by the folowers of the great desert God, Ashur, who caled themselves
Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast and terrible empire which
conquered al of western Asia and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races
until the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans, also a
Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and made that city the most important capital of that
day. Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged the study of science,
and our modern knowledge of astronomy and mathematics is al based upon certain first
principles which were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a crude tribe of
Persian shepherds invaded this old land and overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two
hundred years later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the
Fertile Valey, the old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next
came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the second centre
of the world's civilisation, became a vast wilderness where huge mounds of earth told a
story of ancient glory.
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MOSES
THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE JEWISH
PEOPLE
SOME time during the twentieth century before our era, a smal and unimportant tribe of
Semitic shepherds had left its old home, which was situated in the land of Ur on the mouth
of the Euphrates, and had tried to find new pastures within the domain of the Kings of
Babylonia. They had been driven away by the royal soldiers and they had moved
westward looking for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they might set up their
tents.
This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as we cal them, the Jews. They
had wandered far and wide, and after many years of dreary peregrinations they had been
given shelter in Egypt. For more than five centuries they had dwelt among the Egyptians
and when their adopted country had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told you
in the story of Egypt) they had managed to make themselves useful to the foreign invader
and had been left in the undisturbed possession of their grazing fields. But after a long war
of independence the Egyptians had driven the Hyksos out of the valey of the Nile and
then the Jews had come upon evil times for they had been degraded to the rank of
common slaves and they had been forced to work on the royal roads and on the
Pyramids. And as the frontiers were guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it had been
impossible for the Jews to escape.
After many years of suffering they were saved from their miserable fate by a young Jew,
caled Moses, who for a long time had dwelt in the desert and there had learned to
appreciate the simple virtues of his earliest ancestors, who had kept away from cities and
city-life and had refused to let themselves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a
foreign civilisation.
Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways of the patriarchs. He
succeeded in evading the Egyptian troops that were sent after him and led his felow
tribesmen into the heart of the plain at the foot of Mount Sinai. During his long and lonely
life in the desert, he had learned to revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder and
the Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds depended for life
and light and breath. This God, one of the many divinities who were widely worshipped in
western Asia, was caled Jehovah, and through the teaching of Moses, he became the sole
Master of the Hebrew race.
One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. It was whispered that he had
gone away carrying two tablets of rough-hewn stone. 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 the tablets the words which
Jehovah had spoken unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and the
blinding flashes of his lightning. And from that moment, Jehovah was recognised by al the
Jews as the Highest Master of their Fate, the only True God, who had taught them how to
live holy lives when he bade them to folow the wise lessons of his Ten Commandments.
They folowed Moses when he bade them continue their journey through the desert. They
obeyed him when he told them what to eat and drink and what to avoid that they might
keep wel in the hot climate. And finaly after many years of wandering they came to a land
which seemed pleasant and prosperous. It was caled Palestine, which means the country
of the "Pilistu" the Philistines, a smal tribe of Cretans who had settled along the coast after
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they had been driven away from their own island. Unfortunately, the mainland, Palestine,
was already inhabited by another Semitic race, caled the Canaanites. But the Jews forced
their way into the valeys and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple in a
town which they named Jerusalem, the Home of Peace. As for Moses, he was no longer
the leader of his people. He had been alowed to see the mountain ridges of Palestine from
afar. Then he had closed his tired eyes for al time. He had worked faithfuly and hard to
please Jehovah. Not only had he guided his brethren out of foreign slavery into the free
and independent life of a new home but he had also made the Jews the first of al nations
to worship a single God.
THE PHOENICIANS
THE PHOENICIANS WHO GAVE US OUR ALPHABET
THE Phoenicians, who were the neighbours of the Jews, were a Semitic tribe which at a
very early age had settled along the shores of the Mediterranean. They had built
themselves two wel-fortified towns, Tyre and Sidon, and within a short time they had
gained a monopoly of the trade of the western seas. Their ships went regularly to Greece
and Italy and Spain and they even ventured beyond the straits of Gibraltar to visit the
Scily islands where they could buy tin. Wherever they went, they built themselves smal
trading stations, which they caled colonies. Many of these were the origin of modern
cities, such as Cadiz and Marseiles.
They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a good profit. They were not
troubled by a conscience. If we are to believe al their neighbours they did not know what
the words honesty or integrity meant. They regarded a wel-filed treasure chest the highest
ideal of al good citizens. Indeed they were very unpleasant people and did not have a
single friend. Nevertheless they have rendered al coming generations one service of the
greatest possible value. They gave us our alphabet.
The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, invented by the Sumerians. But
they regarded these pothooks as a clumsy waste of time. They were practical business
men and could not spend hours engraving two or three letters. They set to work and
invented a new system of writing which was greatly superior to the old one. They
borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of the wedge-
shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older system for
the advantage of speed and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short and
handy alphabet of twenty-two letters.
In due course of time, this alphabet traveled across the AEgean Sea and entered Greece.
The Greeks added a few letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy.
The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught them to the wild barbarians
of western Europe. Those wild barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason
why this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not in the
hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-script of the Sumerians.
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THE INDO-EUROPEANS
THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER THE
SEMITIC AND THE EGYPTIAN WORLD
THE world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia had existed almost thirty
centuries and the venerable races of the Fertile Valey were getting old and tired. Their
doom was sealed when a new and more energetic race appeared upon the horizon. We
cal this race the Indo-European race, because it conquered not only Europe but also
made itself the ruling class in the country which is now known as British India.
These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites but they spoke a different
language which is regarded as the common ancestor of al European tongues with the
exception of Hungarian and Finnish and the Basque dialects of Northern Spain.
When we first hear of them, they had been living along the shores of the Caspian Sea for
many centuries. But one day they had packed their tents and they had wandered forth in
search of a new home. Some of them had moved into the mountains of Central Asia and
for many centuries they had lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and
that is why we cal them Aryans. Others had folowed the setting sun and they had taken
possession of the plains of Europe as I shal tel you when I give you the story of Greece
and Rome.
For the moment we must folow the Aryans. Under the leadership of Zarathustra (or
Zoroaster) who was their great teacher many of them had left their mountain homes to
folow the swiftly flowing Indus river on its way to the sea.
Others had preferred to stay among the hils of western Asia and there they had founded
the half-independent communities of the Medes and the Persians, two peoples whose
names we have copied from the old Greek history-books. In the seventh century before
the birth of Christ, the Medes had established a kingdom of their own caled Media, but
this perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan, made himself king of
al the Persian tribes and started upon a career of conquest which soon made him and his
children the undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and of Egypt.
Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians push their triumphant
campaigns in the west that they soon found themselves in serious difficulties with certain
other Indo-European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe and had taken
possession of the Greek peninsula and the islands of the AEgean Sea.
These difficulties led to the three famous wars between Greece and Persia during which
King Darius and King Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern part of the peninsula. They
ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to get a foothold upon the European
continent.
But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens proved unconquerable. By cutting off
the lines of supplies of the Persian armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the Asiatic
rulers to return to their base.
It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient teacher, and Europe, the young and
eager pupil. A great many of the other chapters of this book wil tel you how the struggle
between east and west has continued until this very day.
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THE AEGEAN SEA
THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED THE CIVILISATION OF OLD
ASIA INTO THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
WHEN Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his father told him the story of Troy. He liked
that story better than anything else he had ever heard and he made up his mind, that as
soon as he was big enough to leave home, he would travel to Greece and "find Troy."
That he was the son of a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg vilage did not bother him.
He knew that he would need money but he decided to gather a fortune first and do the
digging afterwards. As a matter of fact, he managed to get a large fortune within a very
short time, and as soon as he had enough money to equip an expedition, he went to the
northwest corner of Asia Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.
In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high mound covered with grainfields.
According to tradition it had been the home of Priamus the king of Troy. Schliemann,
whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge, wasted no time in
preliminary explorations. At once he began to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such
speed that his trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he was looking
and carried him to the ruins of another buried town which was at least a thousand years
older than the Troy of which Homer had written. Then something very interesting
occurred. If Schliemann had found a few polished stone hammers and perhaps a few
pieces of crude pottery, no one would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such
objects, which people had generaly associated with the prehistoric men who had lived in
these regions before the coming of the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and
very costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was unknown to the Greeks.
He ventured the suggestion that fuly ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast
of the AEgean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men who in many ways had
been the superiors of the wild Greek tribes who had invaded their country and had
destroyed their civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost al trace of originality. And this
proved to be the case. In the late seventies of the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins
of Mycenae, ruins which were so old that Roman guide-books marveled at their antiquity.
There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a smal round enclosure, Schliemann
stumbled upon a wonderful treasure-trove, which had been left behind by those
mysterious people who had covered the Greek coast with their cities and who had built
wals, so big and so heavy and so strong, that the Greeks caled them the work of the
Titans, those god-like giants who in very olden days had used to play bal with mountain
peaks.
A very careful study of these many relics has done away with some of the romantic
features of the story. The makers