THE GREAT PYRAMID FROM THE AIR (PRESENT DAY).
THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD
BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
210 VICTORIA STREET, TORONTO
1923
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
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.
[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.
[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.
[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
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.
The 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)
From that point there seem to be two versions of the story. One is that Isis, having found the fourteen pieces, buried each piece where she found it. Another is that she collected the pieces, put them all together again, and that Osiris, thus made whole again, ruled in the under-world as king of the dead.
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.
All the old religious writings and the instructions about the ceremonies to be performed at the worship of the various gods were, of course, in the sacred writing. And when the priests added to them they were careful to do it in their own sacred script. And so, by knowing this script, or writing, which the others did not, they grew to have a knowledge of their own, which they kept rather jealously to themselves. It gave them all the greater importance. And their importance and power were very great.
Egyptian dress
They were distinguished from the rest of the people, probably on all occasions, and certainly on the occasions of performing the religious rites, by a peculiar costume. The costume in which we see the common people figured in the earliest engravings is extremely simple. The climate was warm and they did not require much covering. The dress consists simply in a cloth wound around the loins and passing between the legs, just as the most savage peoples in the world to-day wear the loin-cloth.
A little later we find the engravings showing us the cloth lengthening downward, perhaps as far as the knees, or even a little lower in the female costume, but the upper part of the body was generally bare in both sexes. Linen woven from the flax, for the art of weaving was very early known, was the light material of which this costume was made.
And then we find them wearing something not unlike a night-gown to-day, rather open at the neck, and without sleeves. Another variety of the linen dress was as if it were a night-gown with the front closed up to the neck, but all the right shoulder and sleeve taken out of it, so that the left shoulder was covered, but the right arm and shoulder were left all free.
That was the kind of dress of the common people. At first we see them bare-foot. Gradually they took more and more to sandals, and there are pictures of great men going along bare-foot, but followed by a servant carrying their sandals—perhaps to put on when they came to rough ground. But it is also likely that the wearing of the sandals had a meaning in a religious rite which they might be going to perform.
The head was at first always uncovered; but we see at one time a fillet, or simple band for the hair, beginning to be worn; then we come to a curious low cap, and next to a high, almost mitre-like cap, and finally to a variety of headgear. The hair and the beard are sometimes elaborately curled; but as a rule the Egyptians were clean-shaven. The beard, however, was recognised as so important in some of the religious ceremonies that it is said that a false beard was sometimes worn on these sacred occasions. It is rather like the wearing of wigs by our judges and barristers in Court.
At the beginning of the great eighteenth dynasty, we find the longer gowns, which are like our night-gowns, worn more and more, and the priestly garments and those of the great men becoming more and more rich and long. Likely enough this change was due to the closer intercourse which the Egyptians now began to have with the Eastern Empire, where the longer and richer garments were commonly worn.
But, after all, when you hear or read the words Ancient Egypt, what, at first, do you begin to think of? I know what ideas the words first suggest to me—pyramids and mummies. They are both so extraordinary and unlike what we find in other countries. And they both have rather the same meaning at the back of them, namely, that the Egyptians paid a very great respect to the bodies of the dead. For the mummifying was, of course, to preserve the body, and the pyramids were only one form of the immense and immensely expensive tombs which they built for the mummies to be laid in.
And I do not want you to be misled by something that I wrote a few pages back about the Egyptians not supposing that the favour of the gods was to be won by good behaviour, but rather by very exact ritual and ceremonies. That is true, but I also said then that they did think that the behaviour of a person while alive made a great difference to his future after death.
That is a fact that we may be quite certain of. There is a very famous old Egyptian book, called The Book of the Dead, illustrated with pictures showing all that happened, after his death, to a certain illustrious Egyptian; how he passed through several gates, each guarded by its own horrible demons, how he arrived at the great judgment-seat at last, and how there his good deeds in this life were weighed against his bad, and the good were found to be more than the bad, so that he was allowed to go on to a place in which it hardly seems as if he was likely to be very, very happy, but at least it was far better fortune for him than if he had been found guilty and been given to the tormentor. The tormentor is shown in many of the pictures waiting for him. He is a terrible creature, with teeth and claws.
Slaves
The inner walls of some of the pyramids are covered with texts describing events of this kind in the after-death life of kings. Some are of such antiquity that they go back before the uniting into one of the two kingdoms by Menes; and even in those far-away times the instructions were lengthy and very precise about the kind of food and drink, and means of protection from evil things, that should be buried with the king for his use in the after-life. They had much the same thoughts as we have about the difference between good conduct and bad. One of the evil acts which would most certainly condemn the doer to punishment after death was oppression of the poor. Even as long ago as that it was accounted a virtue to be kindly and generous to those who had been less fortunate than yourself. It seems probable they were a kindly, rather gentle people, inclined to peace and arts rather than to war, but compelled to be in a constant state of defence against the incursions of enemies who lived in less fertile lands. In the course of such defence and resistance many prisoners would be taken. The prisoners would be retained alive, as valuable slaves. It does not follow that because they were slaves they would be ill-treated. A kind master would treat a slave well out of kindness; and a sensible master, even if he were not kind of heart, would treat a slave well because the better a slave, like a horse, was fed and cared for, the more work could be got out of him.
And that brings us again to the pyramids and the other great tombs of the kings and temples of the gods; for it is very certain that but for "slave labour," as it is called, the building of the pyramids would have been an impossibility. As it is, with all allowance made for the multitude of the labourers and the cheapness of their food and of the material for the building, the pyramids remain perhaps the greatest wonder of man's making in all the world, especially when we consider their age and the small engineering appliances that the builders had for their making. How they dealt with the huge blocks of stone is a marvel.
You probably know, roughly, the shape of a pyramid. The largest now standing is the Great Pyramid, or the Pyramid of Cheops, near Gizeh. Its base, or lowest and largest part, covers 13 acres, and its top is 150 feet higher than the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. A space of 13 acres measures about 250 yards each way and well over half a mile round. Ask somebody to show you a piece of ground, near where you live, that is about the size of 13 acres. Then remember that 150 feet is 50 yards, or more than the length of two cricket pitches, and imagine St. Paul's dome all that higher. With that idea for the height, and with an idea of the size of the piece of ground for the size of the base, you may perhaps form some kind of idea of the immense appearance of this pyramid rising out of the desert in the clear Egyptian air. And the purpose of all this vast construction is to make a covering over two little burial chambers in the middle of it all, in which were laid, thousands of years ago, the mummied bodies of King Cheops and of the queen who was his wife.
This is certainly the biggest pyramid now standing, and probably the largest ever built; but there are many pyramids to which reference is made in the inscriptions or writings which have entirely disappeared. Probably their materials have been used for other buildings, and sand-storms from the desert have helped to cover their foundations.
Temples
A temple, in which the pious people might worship, was often connected with the pyramid. When this was so, the temple always seems to have been placed to the east of the burial pyramid, so that the worshippers should look towards the body and to the west. It was towards the west of the burial chamber that a passage was made, with a door of exit for the soul to go out into the under-world. We have to remember that even in life the Egyptian king was regarded as a kind of god. It is difficult for us to find our way back into the thoughts of these ancient people, who saw far less difference than we know that we are obliged to see between the human nature and the divine; but we must try to get back into their thoughts, if we want to understand them.
And this, and a great deal more that I have written in this chapter and in the one before, is true not of the early Egyptians only, but of early man all the world over. I shall not keep you nearly so long in my description of what went on in the old days along the Euphrates and Tigris and elsewhere, because a good deal of what I am telling you now about these old Egyptians applies to dwellers in those other places.
Some of the inscriptions speak of the important part which a priest accompanying the spirit in the under-world played in getting the spirit through the various demon-guarded doors and arguing his case, as a barrister might, before the judge. I say spirit, but in the pictures the body is shown, very substantially. Of course it was all the more to the priests' advantage to prove how useful they could be in the after-life, as well as in this.
The mummies, as you must know, were dead bodies preserved by putting chemicals into them and over them, and wrapping them round, and often by painting their faces, and giving them altogether an appearance which to us, discovering them after all these years, seems rather dreadful, but no doubt was much admired. We have no record of the time when the Egyptians began thus to "mummy" their dead; we may almost say that we have no record of a time when they did not do so. There were mummies long before Menes, whose date, you may remember, has been guessed so early as 5500 years B.C. and so late as 3300 B.C. At first it seems as if only kings were mummied. The kings were always looked on as semi-divine, and later the people began to regard the king as being almost identical with—almost the same as—Osiris. It is as if they thought that the god came down in spirit to live in the body of the reigning king.
BANDAGING A MUMMY.
Mummies
Later on in the story, many great people, as well as the kings, were mummied, and yet later again it became quite common with all classes. Sacred animals, such as the cats in Bubastis, hawks in the temples of Horus, and even crocodiles and quite large creatures, have been found, mummied, in great numbers. The art and trade of making mummies was a very important one, and grew to greater perfection as the artists began to learn more of the preserving power of chemicals. Generally, they are the mummies of royal personages that have come down to us in the best preservation, no doubt because the greatest care and expense were given to their embalming. One of the best is of that famous king Tethmosis III. who was the greatest hero of that greatest eighteenth dynasty up, or down, to which we have now brought our story.
I have said, and you will be ready to agree with it, that all this care for the dead body shows what high value the Egyptians placed on the corpse, although life and the soul had left it. But they had the idea that the soul could be brought back again, by incantations, to go into the body again through the mouth, and so make the mouth and the legs and other parts move, almost as they did before death. That idea explains perhaps why they took so much pains about keeping the body perfect. It may explain why the wicked Seth, in his malice, cut up the body of Osiris, whom he had murdered, and scattered the pieces in fourteen different places, and also why the faithful Isis collected them and put them all together again.
The Egyptians, like other ancient people and like many savage races to-day, believed that a man possessed and had in his body, but capable of separation from it, two souls, or spirits, and perhaps more, and though that is an idea so very different from ours it is not very difficult for us to understand a way in which it might have come into their minds.
It has been thought likely by many who have given much learned and deep attention to the subject, that the idea arose from what people saw in dreams. They would know, perhaps, that a friend of theirs had gone away on a journey, yet they might go to sleep, and see, in a dream, the friend beside them. What were they likely to think? They had not our knowledge about dreams, and did not know that all that they saw in them came from their own fancy. They would be very likely to think, then, that their friend, in his soul or spirit with something that looked like his body, really had come and had stood beside them, although what we should call his real self was far away. They would say, then, that he had a second self, or spirit, which could be in one place and doing one thing while his other self was in another place and doing quite a different thing. Thus they might get the idea of one kind of soul and body which would be different from the man whom they actually saw and spoke to when they were awake.
And then, when a friend had died, had gone through that great change which we call death, they would often, still in dreams, see him again, as he had been in life, though they knew that his body had not moved from the place where it had been buried. Other friends might be able to assure them as to this. Therefore they might say, "Here is another self or spirit of my friend, who is dead, which I saw come and do this or that. It is the soul not of a living man, but of a dead man." Thus the idea might arise of a second soul different from that which was seen while the friend was alive.
You must understand that I am not saying that it certainly was thus that the idea of more than one soul arose; but it may have been in this way. It is a way in which we can easily see that it might have come into their minds.
Many of the old writings and inscriptions give instructions about the prayers and ceremonies and forms of words to be used for bringing back the soul into the dead body, and these, of course, were best understood by the priests. This, again, helped to make the priests very important persons. The greatest people in the land performed the priests' duties; and some of what we may call professed priests, those whose whole business was the performance of these rites and ceremonies, became the greatest people. Also some of these very same people acted as judges and decided points of law, and gave punishments for the breaking of the laws. You may realise, then, how extensive their power was.
Laws
We do not know a great deal about their laws, but it is singular that all we do know shows that they had very much the same ideas as to what was right or wrong as we have. The king issued decrees. We find decrees against the oppression of the poor by the large landowners. Crime was punished by death, by fines, by mutilation, such as by cutting off the nose or by the infliction of other wounds, and by banishment out of the kingdom. They had their codes of laws, for they are referred to in inscriptions, but the codes themselves have not been found.
I do not know whether this short account will help you to get a picture into your minds of the life of the ancient Egyptians. A large part of the picture should be filled by the religious ceremonies, by the worship of the gods and by the offerings which had to be made, at stated times, to the souls of dead relations. The power and the number of the priesthood became so great as to rival that of the king, and actually one of the ruling dynasties was set up by the priest class itself.
So now, with that picture, such as I have been able to set it before your minds, of the people living along the Nile, let us go eastward and see what was being done all that while along the courses of the Tigris and Euphrates.
CHAPTER IV
BABYLONIA.
If you will look at the map once more you will see that the Euphrates and the Tigris draw together near their outgoing into the Persian Gulf and flow together as one stream. It was not always so, however. At the earliest times of which we have any knowledge at all the sea stretched up northward into the land to a point at which the two rivers ran in separate channels, so that each went out by its own mouth into the gulf.
I told you that I did not mean to make this story about the eastern rivers nearly as long as that about the Nile. There are two reasons for this. In the first place there is not so much to tell. The records are not so many nor so full. The cause of that is plain. Egypt is a land well furnished with hard stone, granite, and the like. In the land which we will call Babylonia there is very little stone. Therefore the builders built with brick. The inscriptions were engraven on brick. And brick is not so long lasting a material as stone. It does not take the mark of the graving tool as sharply at the first cutting, and it is more liable to wear away in the course of years. Moreover, the climate of Egypt, in its upper part at least, is so dry that it is probably the best preserving climate in the world—the climate in which inscriptions on stone or papyrus would last and keep fresh longer than in any other. For these reasons we have more records from Egypt than from Babylonia.
But that is only a part, and the smaller part, of the whole reason why this story that we are telling now may be told more shortly. The larger reason is that a good deal of it has been told already in the Egyptian story. There is no need for me to go back and re-tell you the history of these Babylonians living through their ages of stone weapons, bronze weapons, and iron weapons, and through their hunting stage, their flock-keeping stage, and their agricultural stage; there is no need to tell this, for it was told to you about the Egyptians, and it is the story common to all mankind as they lived and worked their way up from the most primitive conditions to civilisation.
You must please take all that for granted, as being true of the Babylonians as of the rest of the world. You may imagine, too, that the same puzzles beset them as beset the Egyptians when they began to wonder how things, including themselves, had happened—how the world had come into being and what the sun, moon, and stars were, and so on. They, like the Egyptians, wondered about the invisible forces by which they found themselves surrounded and more or less controlled. They made rather different answers to the puzzles, but the puzzles were the same.
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MACHINE FOR RAISING WATER
(PRESENT-DAY "SHADOOF").
And so a great deal of the life-story of the Egyptians, of their way of living and so on, may be considered to be the way that the Babylonians followed also. What will perhaps bring the life of the Babylonians most clearly before your eyes will be to see, so far as we can, the chief differences between their lives and the lives of those old Egyptians.
Water-raising
Both nations lived along river-courses—we have seen that. And both were very dependent on the overflow of the rivers for the fertilisation of their fields and for the growth of their crops. But, though this was in a measure true of both, the dependence of the Egyptians on the overflow of the Nile was much more complete than the dependence of these others on the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris. Those rivers were not so punctual in the date of the overflow, and the difference between their lowest and highest flow was not so great as in the Nile. Both countries, however, depended largely on irrigation, that is to say, on leading the water by canals from the main rivers to the fields where it was wanted. Egypt, even when it had more trees than it has now, had probably less rainfall than Babylonia; but in both countries the rivers were the sources and givers of their food supply.
We have seen the Egyptians living along a river which went down between desert country, barren country, on either side. The country on either side the courses of the Euphrates and Tigris was not nearly so barren and desert as that which lay about the Nile.
The neighbouring states
But now it becomes necessary to look at the map again. If you will do so you will see just how this Babylonia is situated in relation to the countries round about it. I speak of it as Babylonia, and speak of the "other countries," but you are not to suppose that even at the latest date to which we have brought down the story at present men had at all the same distinct idea that we have now about where one country ended and another began. You may have heard of "boundary commissions," meaning committees of men appointed to trace out the boundary line between two countries. The nations we are speaking of had no boundary commissions: they had no clear idea of boundaries, or of one nation having a right to live and to bear rule up to a certain point or line and no farther. It was all very shifting, and one nation took from another what it could get.
The shifting perhaps did not matter so much in those days, because people had not learnt to look on their homes as very settled, or lasting. A good many of those among whom the story is to take us now were, if not dwellers in tents themselves, at least the descendants of those who had dwelt in tents only a generation or two before.
But a look at the map will show you that this country, which we may call, in a general way of speaking, Babylonia, had its bounds, its limits, though it was not nearly as closely limited as Egypt was between the deserts. Babylonia, you will see, has the Mediterranean Sea on its west, but with Palestine and Syria between itself and that sea. On the south there is the Persian Gulf; and Arabia, which is largely desert and barren, also lies to the south and south-west. On the north, away up towards the sources of the great rivers, is a wild mountainous region whence, as we shall see, wild, fierce people were apt to come down to harass the dwellers in the rich plain.
So, on these three sides we find Babylonia bounded, though the boundaries are large as compared with the narrow boundaries of the people along the Nile; but on the fourth, the eastern side, away towards Persia and the heart of Asia, there seems no limit whatever, either of mountain or of desert or of sea. The possibilities of peoples coming in by that way seem without any limit. In this respect, then, the situations of the two ancient empires of the world were very different.
I am speaking of all this country as Babylonia, and it may occur to you to wonder at that because you will have heard so much from your Bibles of the Assyrians coming upon Palestine from this very country round about the Euphrates. And so they did; and at one period in the story the Assyrians became so powerful that they took possession of all this land, and just at that time it would be more correct to call the land Assyria instead of Babylonia. But this was for a period only. At the beginning of our knowledge of this region Assyria was only a province, a northern province, of Babylonia, and was ruled from Babylon. But the Assyrians became very strong and revolted, and conquered those who had been their masters, and it was during this victorious period that they made those incursions into Palestine of which the Bible tells us. But at length the Babylonians, their old masters, rose up against them and got the mastery over them again, and after this blaze of glory Assyria sinks back into its old place as a province of Babylon, in the northern part of the empire.
Now who were they, where did they come from—the earliest of the people whom we find to have lived in Babylonia? We do not quite know that. What it is quite useful to note, however, is that we do seem to know who they were not. They were not Semites—not a Semitic people. It is useful to know they were not this, because Semitic is just what most of the people whom we now meet in the human story were.
The name comes from Shem, the name of one of the sons of Noah in the book of Genesis; and the so-called Semites appear, coming into the story of mankind, out of Arabia, that strange desert country. They came up thence into Babylonia, and in Babylonia, when they came to it, there was already a people with a high civilisation, as we know by evidences that have been found. It was different from the civilisation of the Semitic people. The name given to that earlier people and that earlier civilisation is Sumerian, and I really do not think you need trouble to inquire precisely what is meant by that, for even the most learned have very little to tell us about it. It had to have a name. Let us call it Sumerian, and say it was different from the Semitic, probably older, and so leave it.
It is a curious thing about these Semites, who at a very early date came in and took possession of all Babylonia, that though they apparently came from Arabia and the south, they made their first appearance in history in the north of Babylonia. How that happened we cannot tell. Perhaps some records of a southern invasion have been lost. Or they may have skirted round on the eastern side. It is all guess-work. They appeared in the north, and they quickly overran the country—not only of Babylonia, but of Palestine and of Syria also—except, it may be, a strip of Syria along the Mediterranean shore which is called on the map Phœnicia. That is an exception which you will do well to bear in mind. It is important, because these Phœnicians belonged to one of the greatest civilisations of the old world, and because they too were great makers of history, as you shall see before very long.
"Ur of the Chaldees"
On their western border, therefore, the people of the powerful empire which began to be formed along the Tigris and Euphrates had tribes very closely akin to themselves. On the east and on the north they had neighbours of a different race from their own. It seems to have been in the south of Babylonia, near the outgoing of the great rivers, that the first capital of the empire was formed. Probably this southern Babylonia is that "Ur of the Chaldees" from which we are told that Abraham came and established himself in Palestine. He came, as we see, living with his family and his dependants in tents, with flocks and herds, easily moving on from one place to another when the sheep or oxen had eaten the grass or when water failed. He was the patriarch (pater=father, and arch=ruler), the father-ruler of the small tribe or large family that came with him. In your history books you will sometimes read that "society was in the patriarchal stage." That means that the people of whom the historian is writing were living in the way in which Abraham and his dependent people lived; and we may be sure that it was the way of life of the greater number of those Semites who came up from Arabia and took possession of Syria and Palestine at a very early date. They took possession of the country of Babylonia also, and as they settled along the fertile river-banks we may imagine that they would begin to unite together into a nation and become strong, with a feeling of union, in a way that it was not at all likely that the small tribes of patriarchs and their families, moving about with their flocks and herds, would unite. So the Babylonians and the Syrians and the dwellers in Palestine would easily fall into the way of regarding each other as of different nations, although really they were of the same race.
There would be this difference, then: the settlers along the rivers really would begin to lead settled lives, like the people who tilled the soil in Egypt, but beyond those limits there would be wanderers, with their cattle—wanderers for the most part of the same race as the settlers, but growing more and more distinct and divided from them in manners and feelings as time went on and they lived such different lives.
I spoke of these Babylonians having just the same puzzles presented to their minds by what we call "the forces of Nature" as the Egyptians had, but said that they answered them a little differently. The Egyptians, as we saw, tried three different kinds of answer. They made a great god of the sun, they made a great god of Osiris, who was originally just the god of one place (like many others), and they made gods of all sorts of animals. Now, trying to understand the religion of the ancient Babylonians, we may rule out entirely all idea of animal worship—that is to say, the third kind of answer which the Egyptians made to their puzzles. It does not seem to have been thought of by the Babylonians at all. Let us forget those sacred cats and crocodiles of the Nile.
Osiris and Ra
And then, having cast them aside, we may see a very remarkable likeness between the other guesses that the two peoples made, and the way in which they tried to work the different guesses in with one another. For you may remember that the Egyptians, after forming the idea of Ra, the sun-god—a god that had his eye over all the world—and after imagining Osiris to be so powerful as to rule divinely over all Egypt: after they had thus exalted these two gods at the expense of all the others, they then began to regard the two as one—the one being but one form of the other—Osiris, as Ra, traversing the heavens, and Ra, as Osiris, ruling the earth. And since Ra, the Sun, was supposed to go under the earth at night, in order to get back to the east to begin his journey across the sky again the next morning, there was no great difficulty in imagining him, again as Osiris, ruling over the dead in the under-world also.
And now, in Babylonia, we find that almost exactly the same thing happened. Shamash was their name for the sun-god, the Egyptians' Ra. Then there was a god whom they called Merodach, or Marduk: he was the god of Babylon. But Babylon was not always a great city. The earliest capital city was south of Babylon. So Marduk was only as one god among many. But then, as Babylon grew and became the great centre, Marduk came to be regarded as the great god of all the country, exactly as had happened with Osiris in Egypt. And then, again just as in Egypt, they began to look on Shamash and on Marduk as two forms of one and the same great deity. Thus, it is wonderful how like each other were the guesses at truth in the two empires. Bel-Merodach, as he was sometimes called (Bel or Baal means Lord), became of such immense importance that the king was never considered to be properly appointed as ruler until he had been received by Merodach at Babylon, in the god's great temple there. The Assyrian kings, whose capital was Nineveh, in the north of Babylonia, when they had conquered their former masters of Babylon, still came to Babylon and paid their homage to the Babylonian god.
But, again as in Egypt, there were a number of other gods besides Marduk, in other places, whose authority was considered very powerful just in these places; and there were other heavenly bodies besides Shamash, the sun, that had worship. There was Sin, the moon, and especially there was Ishtar, the planet Venus, the Ashtaroth that you read of in the Bible. Ishtar was goddess of the spring and of all the life-giving forces in Nature.
And in Babylonia, as in Egypt, there were immense numbers of priests, and their power was great. They were occupied in the ceremonies to the gods, and in care of the temples, and a great part of their time was taken up in watching the stars and planets. They saw that many of the happenings on earth depended on the heavenly bodies—the sun made the seed grow in the damp warm earth; perhaps they knew that the moon affected the tides. At all events they saw that certain events on earth happened at the same time as certain other events in the heavens; so they grew to think that the earthly happenings were caused by the changes of the planets in the sky far more than they are.
Astronomy
But this mistaken idea about the influence of the stars on the earth had the excellent effect that it made these old Babylonian priests to be great star-gazers. They were great astronomers, and in spite of their errors made great steps in knowledge. And because you can go very little way in astronomy without mathematics, they became mathematicians too. We owe a great deal to what these wise men of the East, watching the stars so long ago, found out for us.
Some of the Babylonians also believed in fearful demons and powers of evil, and it seems as if they imagined their gods to take much more notice of their behaviour, their good and bad conduct, than the Egyptians' gods were supposed to take. We saw that the Egyptian idea was that so long as they performed all the religious rites exactly, that was all that the gods cared about. But the Babylonians thought that their gods did interest themselves a great deal about the right or wrong conduct of the men over whom they ruled, and punished or rewarded them in this life accordingly.
And through all this that I am telling you about the religion of the early Babylonians, I want you to bear in mind that Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, came from "Ur of the Chaldees," that is, from the south of Babylonia. That means that he came carrying with him beliefs and customs that he and his clan (if I may call it so) had learnt in Babylonia. Telling you these Babylonian beliefs, I am really telling you the origins of the beliefs which have come down to us through the Israelites. That is what makes their story so particularly interesting for us.
The Babylonians, then, had an idea of a deity who punished their wrong-doing by sending them illnesses and famine and so on. The Egyptians had not this idea nearly so clearly, but they had the idea that the man who did well in this life would have his reward in the life after death. The Babylonians did not have this idea of the life after death; we find, at least, no reason to think that they had it. Abraham, therefore, came from Ur without this belief in a life after death. It was only at a far later period—possibly, though by no means certainly, as something they learned from the Egyptians—that the belief in a future life came to the Jews and Israelites.
But although Abraham brought traditions from Ur, so soon as we are allowed to know anything about the beliefs held by him and his people we find them to be very much more pure and free from superstitions than the Babylonian ones. The Babylonian idea of the creation was that there was at first a great dragon of prodigious size. Merodach, the chief of the gods, identified with the sun, then fought the dragon, killed him, cut him in two; of one half of his body made the firmament of heaven, of the other half made the earth. Then in the heavens, as stars, he set the lesser gods, with the moon. The moon ruled the night and regulated the division of the year into months (moon-eths). Mona is the old Anglo-Saxon word for moon.
This account is inscribed on tablets, and so much is readable, but there is much more which has crumbled away so that it cannot be read. The account of the Creation given in Genesis is, of course, free of all this fantastic account of the fight with the dragon.
The Flood
There are other Babylonian tablets which give an account of the Flood, but here again we find the idea that it is sent not by one great god, but by several gods, working together. Over them all seems to be the sun-god, here called Shamash, who is in Heaven. The flood is so dreadful that it compels the lesser gods living on the earth to fly to Heaven for refuge. There Ishtar (Venus), taking pity on mankind, prays Shamash to stop the flood, and he consents to do so. One of the earth gods had warned a certain man, named Ut-napistim, that the flood was coming, and advised him to make a ship to save himself from it. So Ut-napistim built the ship, made it water-tight with pitch, put in it his family, pairs of all the animals, workmen and a pilot, and so they floated for seven days until the ship came to ground on a mountain to the east of the Tigris. Then, apparently after another seven days, Ut-napistim sent out first a dove, then a swallow, then a raven. The first two came back, but the last did not, from which Ut-napistim concluded that the raven had found dry ground somewhere.
You will see how like this is to the story of Noah and the Ark in the Bible, and almost certainly it was with some such tradition as this in their minds that Abraham and his people came from Ur.
It is my purpose, in this story of mankind around the Mediterranean, to bother you as little as possible with names, either of persons or of places, and as little as possible with dates, because the more we have of them, the more difficult it becomes to remember those that are really important. For the years very far back it is impossible to fix the dates at all exactly. What is important is to know in what order the great events in the story happened.
The date at which Abraham came out of Ur and settled in the southern part of what was afterwards called Judah has been determined by scholars to have been about 2250 or 2300 B.C. You will remember that the date to which we brought down the Egyptian story was about 1500 B.C. So Abraham came to Palestine about 750 years earlier than that.
Abraham's date is more or less fixed by the evidence of what is by far the most famous code of ancient laws and customs that has come down to us, far beyond anything of the kind that has been found in Egypt, the code of Khammurabi. Khammurabi was king of Babylon, and it is considered nearly sure that it is he who is meant by "Amraphel, king of Shinar" mentioned in Genesis. He lived at the same time as Abraham.
Code of Khammurabi
Now, this code, or list, of laws engraved on tablets is most interesting to us not only because it is ancient, but also because it is so very modern. I mean that although these laws were made so very long ago, they are laws which we could very nearly accept as suitable for us to live under to-day. Our lives would be very little altered if we were to try to lead them according to those laws instead of according to the laws under which we actually do live.
If Khammurabi, in 2250 B.C., had these laws engraven, we may be nearly sure that they were the laws by which the country was governed many years before that. How long before, we cannot tell. Tablets on which some of them were recorded were found in what has been called the library (though I do not suppose that there were exactly what we should call books in it, and the name "library" comes from liber, a book)—collected by a certain great king of Assyria, Assurbanipal or Sardanapalus, by name, who reigned in Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria, about 700 B.C. or a little later. A great many similar records and tablets collected by this king have been found. But a far more complete list of the laws was found later at Susa, a city which was afterwards called Persepolis.
Not only are the laws themselves such as we might make and use, but they seem to show that there existed in Babylon at that far-away time a society and a kind of life not at all unlike ours. There were doctors, lawyers and merchants, and the fees of the doctors and the ways in which the merchants were to carry on their trade were fixed by the laws. It is clear that there were a great many slaves employed—that is a difference, of course, from our society. The punishments for law-breaking were more severe than ours. Murder is the only crime which we now punish with death. In Khammurabi's code, burglary and stealing are punished by death; so is any attempt to induce witnesses in a case at law to give false witness; and there are numerous other offences for which death was the punishment in Babylon, but for which we should make the offender pay a fine or go to prison for a while. But we have to remember that it is not so very many years ago even in this country since a man could be hanged for forgery or for stealing a sheep. The laws of Khammurabi are not more severe than ours were not much more than a hundred years ago.
When there were serfs in England, labourers almost in a state of slavery, English law made a great distinction between them and freemen. An offence against the laws, if committed by a serf, was very much more heavily punished than the same offence committed by a freeman. And we find exactly the same distinction made in this ancient code; the slave suffers far more heavily than the freeman.
Some of the laws show the importance of the canals for watering the land, and each owner of land beside a canal was made responsible for the canal bank which ran through or beside his property. If he let it fall into bad repair, and the water, overflowing, damaged his neighbour's land or drowned his sheep, he had to make good the loss caused to his neighbour.
The law of "a tooth for a tooth" and "an eye for an eye" which we find in the Bible, in the book of Exodus, we find here too. If you knocked out a man's eye in a fight, you would have to submit to having an eye of your own knocked out. If you knocked out a tooth, a tooth of yours would be knocked out.
Susa, where the full code of Khammurabi was found, was the capital of the kingdom of a people called Elamites, of whom you hear in the Bible. Elam lay on the eastern, the Persian, side of Babylonia, and the Elamites gave continual trouble to the Babylonian conquerors. The code is cut on a great block of black stone eight feet high. It is in forty-four columns and consists of no less than 3654 lines—a lengthy document. And at the top of it there is cut the figure of King Khammurabi receiving the tablets of the law from Shamash, the great sun-god. It must remind us of Moses receiving the tablets with the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.
There can be little doubt that these laws, more or less as they are graven on this stone, were those under which the greater number of the Semitic tribes lived which inhabited Syria and Palestine. Among these tribes were the Jews. For this reason we may imagine that when the Babylonians made attacks upon them and reduced them, as they did from time to time, to submission, their own laws and customs were not much altered. They had to pay tribute, perhaps, and their homes were broken up, and some of them, like the Jews, were taken away into Babylonia, but they went among a people not altogether different from themselves either in nationality or in their ways of living.
Art in Babylonia
And just as we are surprised by the advanced state of civilisation which these old laws show us, so we have to be no less astonished by the fine works of art which they made. Stone, as we have said, was rare in Babylonia; therefore they looked on it as precious, and kept it for engraving. Some of the cut stones of very early date are finely finished. In the Louvre in Paris there is a splendidly worked Babylonian vase with a hunting scene of lions upon it, and it is thought to have been made long before the time of this Khammurabi, whose code we have been speaking of. There were lions in this country then, though there are none now. You may remember many references to lions in the Bible.
We know, then, that the Babylonians had their artists and their workers in gold. Probably the gold came to them either through Egypt or across the Red Sea from Nubia and Africa farther south; Babylonia had no gold. Some, however, may have come from the East. They made ornaments of the gold and of the cut stones, and their costume would seem to have been like that of the Egyptians, but with more flowing skirts. We have seen that the Egyptians, just about the time that they began to know more of the Babylonians, that is a little before 1500 B.C., began to lengthen their skirts also. Probably the dresses of the Babylonians were more rich in ornament than the Egyptian. With both, as with the dwellers in all the warm climates of the world, there can be little doubt that the dress was a natural development from the cloth round the loins—the skirts lengthened downwards and some species of jacket drawn on over the upper part of the body. Or a long robe of light material, which I have likened to a nightgown, was put on over the shoulders and hung down to the ankles, perhaps, so that it did for both skirt and jacket in one. To this it would be very easy and natural to add a girdle or sash, to tie it in round the waist and prevent its flapping in too inconvenient a manner.
ASSYRIAN KING IN HIS ROBES.
Once you get the long robe, you come to something which would need very little change to become the sort of robe which the Greeks and Romans wore—what the Romans called the "toga." I should think these long skirts would be very much in the way when those who wore them wanted to run or make any swift movement, and I suppose that when we read in the Bible of people "girding up their loins," when they were going on any expedition, it means that they tucked up these skirts and fastened them round with the girdle about their waists, so that they should not hang around their legs.
Rise of Assyria
In order to make this story pleasant and easy reading, as it ought to be, I have said that I want to bother you about dates as little as possible, but it is necessary to take some notice of them. In the first place, for the understanding of this particular part of the great story—the part that has to do with Babylonia—you ought to know that the date at which the Assyrians, in the northeen section of the country, with their capital of Nineveh, revolted against the rule of Babylon, to which we find that they were subject when the story opens, was about 1900 B.C. That is to say, about 400 years before the great period of the Egyptian power, dating from 1500 B.C., or thereabouts. Assyria, which at first was subject to Babylon, revolted and became master of Babylon about 1900 B.C. and retained that mastery, with some ups and downs, for about 1500 years. This greatest story in the world deals with big spaces of time! Then the Assyrian power went to pieces and Babylon established itself again as the master power about the time of that Nebuchadnezzar of whom the Bible tells us.
So we have to realise that when, in 1500 B.C., or rather sooner, Egypt and Babylonia, according to the Egyptian records, began to clash against each other harder than ever before, with the result of squeezing very uncomfortably those Semitic tribes in Palestine, it was a Babylonia under the Assyrian domination. And the Assyrians were a more war-like people than the Babylonians. They had a better-ordered and doubtless a better-equipped army. Theirs seems to have been almost what we should call a military state, constituted for war, and they called themselves masters of the whole country north of the Persian Gulf and of Egypt and of all east of the Mediterranean Sea.
In the story of mankind we find it happening again and again that after a people have been comfortably settled for a while in the fertile plains and river valleys they lose the warlike habits by means of which they got possession of these good lands, and are overthrown by others coming from a more mountainous and barren country where they have been obliged to live hardier lives. Thus, these Assyrians from the north got the better of the Babylonians, and the Assyrians in their turn were constantly being troubled by the attacks of a people called the Hittites, from farther north again.
You read of the Hittites in the Bible. Not a very great deal is known about them, but it is certain that they were a great power in all that country lying north and north-west of Assyria which is now called Asia Minor. They made incursions and attacks down south, and it is probable that after their great attacks were repulsed they left some of their tribes in the south, separated from the rest of the nation. In the latter part of our story it is these scattered tribes that we hear most about.
Cuneiform writing
Now, the earliest of the inscriptions which tell us anything about these people of Babylonia goes back to the time before the Semites had come up from Arabia in the south. Edim, or the plain of Babylonia, from which we may suppose that the name Eden, in Genesis, came, was probably then inhabited by those Sumerians of whom we know very little. We know little, but we find inscriptions by them, and the inscriptions are in a very curious form of writing, a writing which went on being used for thousands of years. It is called cuneiform, from "cuneus," meaning a wedge, because all the lines of the writing are inclined to go into the shape of a wedge.
You will remember something about the Egyptian hieroglyphic and picture writing. Probably all writing began in this way, with making pictures. Then it was found troublesome to make a picture of everything that you wanted to say, and a few dashes or lines, very roughly representing the thing, were used instead, and began to be understood as standing for a sign of that thing.
This wedge writing of the Babylonians doubtless began in this way. I say doubtless, because some of it is almost picture-writing, and the older the inscriptions the more like actual pictures of the thing as we see it the signs are. Thus, the sign which they made to mean heaven was something like this *, which we call an asterisk, from "aster," meaning a star. They made a drawing like a star to give the idea of heaven, because heaven is the place where the stars are. The rays, as we call them, of the star, were more wedge-shaped than the lines of our asterisk, but that is a small difference. It is said that when the "stilus," which is the tool they used for making the inscriptions, is used to make the mark of a line on wet clay, the shape into which that mark would naturally go is that of a wedge; they had much clay for their bricks, and very likely that is why we see this writing in the form that it has.
You may remember how we cited, as an instance of the way in which the Egyptians developed their writing, that we had first the picture of an eye, and then the picture of a bird, and, putting the eye before the bird, we got the idea "I see a bird." Now, in much the same way, in the wedge-writing we find that an arrangement of three upright wedges is taken as the sign which means "water." There is an arrangement of a good many wedges which is the sign that means "mouth," and this arrangement is in such a shape that it must make us think that it came from an original drawing of a mouth. So, having this sign for water and this other sign for a mouth, what these cuneiform writers did when they wanted to make a sign which should mean "drinking" was to put the sign for water inside the sign for mouth. A good idea!
But all this writing, so far, proceeded on the plan of making signs to represent things that you saw or the ideas that came from what you saw. And then, I imagine, it occurred to some inventive genius to say, "Suppose, instead of making these signs to represent things that we see, that we make them represent sounds—make them stand for the names that we call them by? Now, suppose we take the word 'dog': (only he, of course, would make use of the Babylonian sound, whatever it was, which they used for 'dog'). "Suppose we take the word 'dog,'" he said, "and suppose we take one of our signs, which we use to represent things, and let it stand for the first sound that we make in saying the word. Suppose that we take another sign to stand for the second sound, the middle sound, in the word, and a third sign to stand for the last sound."
"Well," the people to whom he suggested the idea might say, "you do not seem to gain much by that. It would be much simpler and easier to go on making the sign for a dog, as we always have done."
"Yes," he might answer, "that is quite true, so far as writing about a dog, and a dog only, is concerned, but the advantage that I claim for my idea is that these signs, which I say we might use to stand for the sound that we make when we say 'dog,' may be used over and over again, whenever we have to make those sounds. And we do not make a very large number of different sounds—not nearly so many as there are ideas and objects that we wish to write about. So, on my plan, we shall not need nearly so many signs as we have been using."
The alphabet
I take it that it was thus, or in some way rather like this, that what we call writing (that is to say, making signs on paper or some other substance to represent the sounds by which we call things), came to take the place of the more primitive way of sending messages, or of making records, which was by drawing pictures of them. We, as you know, have twenty-six signs, twenty-six letters, in what we call our alphabet—twenty-six signs for the sounds that we make in speaking. The alphabet is called so from the first two letters "alpha" and "beta," corresponding to our "a" and "b," in the Greek alphabet. Different alphabets have different numbers of letters, standing for different sounds. In our own alphabet we know that the same letter, that is to say the same sign, may stand for different sounds. Take the very first letter "a," and take the words "father," "paper," and "many"; there you have three quite different sounds for each of which the one sign "a" does the work. An alphabet with signs enough to include all the sounds we make in talking would be terribly long.
The cuneiform writing was in use up to within 100 years of the birth of Christ, and its use extended from very far up in the north of Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf and away south-westward of the Red Sea in Upper Egypt. It is there found on some very important tablets of just about that greatest date in all Egyptian history, 1500. And it was in use for trading and correspondence from Elam on the eastern boundary of Babylonia, right to the Mediterranean Sea.
Thus it was of far more general use in those old days than the picture-writing of the Egyptians. Probably it was far more convenient. Then, in its turn, it fell out of use because of the invention of a mode of writing more convenient still, and not unlike ours—from which, indeed, ours is taken. But that is "another story," as Rudyard Kipling says.
Let us just take a look now and see what Abraham and his descendants were doing in this interval between their coming up from Ur, which was in the land of the Chaldee, in the south of Babylonia, and the year 1500 B.C. The story will not be long in the telling, because we know so little about it.
What we do know is that they lived for many many years in the southern part of the country which, later on, was called Judah. We may imagine that they increased and multiplied, till they became a large and formidable tribe. It is thought that they stayed in this Southern Judah, leading a pastoral life, with sheep and cattle, for some 600 years. And then there came upon them a time of famine, when there was no food for their sheep or oxen and very little for themselves. But they lived right on the great road by which the traders and merchants travelled when they went from Egypt into Babylonia, or vice versâ, and it was told to them that "there is corn in Egypt."
You will remember that, about the corn in Egypt, from the story of Joseph and his brethren, as told in the Bible. And the end of that story, as you know, is that the whole tribe—all the children of Israel, as the Bible says—moved down into that "land of Goshen" which was in the north-east of Egypt. It was a country of rich land, lying low.
Now, what are we to suppose was the reason that the Egyptians allowed these foreigners to come down, as they did, and settle on this land over which they claimed to rule? We may answer that question in this way.
The Shepherd Kings
If the Israelites, as we now may call them—the tribe of which Jacob, who was also called Israel, was the head—were in the south of Judah for 600 years, between the time that they came from Chaldæa and the time that they went into the land of Goshen, it must have been in somewhere about the year 1700 B.C. that they made this later journey. That is 200 years before the rule of the famous eighteenth dynasty. And in 1700 B.C. the dynasty then ruling in Egypt was the so-called Hyksos dynasty. It was also called the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings. The Egyptians, as we have seen, had become weakened as a nation. They were constantly quarrelling among themselves, rather as the old English barons used to quarrel among themselves or against the king. The result was that foreign invaders came in from time to time, in the course of the story, and took the kingship for a while, excluding all the native Egyptian great men from the throne.
These Hyksos, who had the rule in Egypt when the Israelites were welcomed there, were invaders of this kind, foreigners who had seized the throne and the power. They were shepherds, living the pastoral life—though perhaps they left off that when they became the rulers of Egypt—and wherever they came from, whether direct from Arabia or, as is more likely, from farther north, probably from Syria, all scholars are, I think, agreed that they were Semites. Josephus, the historian of the Jews, asserts that they actually were the Israelites. Modern historians think him mistaken there. But, though not Israelites, they were almost certainly of the same Arabian origin.
And there you have the answer to the question how it came about that the Israelites found a welcome in Egypt. The powerful people in the country were their relations.
And so things went well with them for many years, perhaps about three or four hundred; but other powers—"a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph"—at length threw off the yoke of the Hyksos, the Shepherds, and took the throne from them. The Israelites were shown no favour then. They were set hard tasks, were treated like slaves, until finally, under the leadership of a very great man and prophet, Moses, they decided to flee away into the desert, away from the land of Goshen, in which they were made so unhappy, although it was a fertile land.
After the Exodus
Probably they were very useful slaves and tillers of the soil, and probably that was the reason why, as we are told in the Bible, Pharaoh was so unwilling to let them go. At length, however, go they did—only, as we are further told, to be pursued, and only, as the Bible also tells us, to be saved by a miracle at the passage of the Red Sea.
This Exodus, as it is called, probably took place in 1200 B.C. or a little earlier, and the Israelites wandered some forty years in the wilderness, living in tents, and moving about as the manner of pastoral tribes was, and is, with their flocks and herds. We see, then, that 1150 B.C. or a few years sooner, would be about the date at which they would begin, under Joshua, the invasion of Canaan. Our story has not reached that point yet.
CHAPTER V
THE MINOANS IN CRETE
Those, then, were the two great powers on land in the very old days of the story of mankind. There was Egypt along the Nile, and Babylonia—for a thousand and more years, rather to be called Assyria—along the Euphrates and Tigris.