 Chapter 14 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells Chapter 14 Primitive Neolithic Civilizations About 10,000 BC, the geography of the world was very similar in its general outline to that of the world of today. It is probable that by that time the Great Barrier across the Straits of Gibraltar that had hither to banked back the ocean waters from the Mediterranean Wally had been eaten through, and that the Mediterranean was a sea following much the same coastlines as it does now. The Caspian Sea was probably still far more extensive than it is at present, and it may have been continuous with the Black Sea to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. About this, Great Central Asian Sea, lands that are now steppes and deserts, were fertile and habitable. Generally, it was a moisture and more fertile world. European Russia was much more a land of swamp and lake than it is now, and there may still have been a land connection between Asia and America at Bering Straits. It would have been already possible at that time to have distinguished the main racial divisions of mankind as we know them today. Across the warm temperate regions of this rather warmer and better wooded world, and along the coasts stretched the brownish peoples of the heliolithic culture, the ancestors of the bulk of the living inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, of the Berbers, the Egyptians, and of much of the population of South and Eastern Asia. This great race had of course a number of varieties. The Iberian or Mediterranean, or dark white race of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coast. The Hermitic peoples, which include the Berbers and Egyptians, the Dravidians, the darker people of India, and multitude of East Indian people, many Polynesian races and the Maori, are all divisions of various value of this great main mass of humanity. Its western varieties are whiter than its eastern. In the forests of central and northern Europe, a more blonde variety of men with blue eyes was becoming distinguishable, branching off from the main mass of brownish people. A variety which many people now speak of as the Nordic race. In the more open regions of northeastern Asia, was another differentiation of this brownish humanity in the direction of a type with more oblique eyes, high cheekbones, a yellowish skin, and very straight black hair, the Mongolian peoples. In South Africa, Australia, in many tropical islands in the south of Asia, were remains of early Negroid peoples. The central parts of Africa were already a region of racial intermixture. Nearly all the colored races of Africa today, seem to be blends of the brownish peoples of the north with a Negroid substratum. We have to remember that human races can all interbreed freely, and that they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds do. Human races do not branch out like trees, with branches, that never come together again. It is a thing we need to bear constantly in mind, this remingling of races at any opportunity. It will save us from many cruel delusions and prejudices if we do so. People will use such a word as race in the loosest manner, and base the most preposterous generalizations upon it. They will speak of a British race, or of a European race. But nearly all the European nations are confused mixtures of brownish, dark white, white and Mongolian elements. It was at the neolithic phase of human development that peoples of the Mongolian breed first made their way into America. Apparently they came by way of bearing straits and spread southward. They found Caribou, the American reindeer, in the north and great herds of business in the south. When they reached South America, there were still living the Glyptodon, a gigantic armadillo, and the Megaterium, a monstrous clumsy sloth, as high as an elephant. They probably exterminated the latter beast, which was as helpless as it was big. The greater portion of these American tribes never rose above a hunting nomadic neolithic life. They never discovered the use of iron, and their chief metal possessions were native gold and copper. But in Mexico, Yucatan and Peru, conditions existed favorable to settled cultivation. And here, about 1000 BC or so, arose very interesting civilizations of a parallel, but different type from the Old World civilization. Like the much earlier primitive civilizations of the Old World, these communities displayed a great development of human sacrifice about the processes of seed time and harvest. But while in the Old World, as we shall see, these primary ideas were ultimately mitigated, complicated and overlaid by others. In America they developed and were elaborated to a very high degree of intensity. These American civilized countries were essentially priest ruled countries, their war chiefs and rulers were under a rigorous rule of law and omen. These priests carried astronomical science to a higher level of accuracy. They knew their year better than the Babylonians, of whom we shall presently tell. In Yucatan, they had a kind of writing, the Maya writing, of the most curious and elaborate character. So far as we have been able to decipher it, it was used mainly for keeping the exact and complicated calendars upon which the priests expended their intelligence. The art of the Maya civilization came to a climax about 700 or 800 AD. The sculptured work of these peoples amazes the modern observer by its great plastic power and its frequent beauty, and perplexes him by a grotesqueness and by a sort of insane conventionality, an intricacy outside the circle of his ideas. There is nothing quite like it in the Old World. The nearest approach, and that is a remote one, is found in Arhaic Indian carvings. Everywhere there are woven feathers and serpents twine in and out. Many Maya inscriptions resemble a certain sort of elaborate drawing made by lunatics in European asylums more than any other Old World work. It is as if the Maya mind had developed upon a different line from the Old World mind, had a different twist to its ideas, was not, by Old World standards, a rational mind at all. This linking of these aberrant American civilizations to the idea of a general mental aberration finds support in their extraordinary obsession by the shedding of human blood. The Mexican civilization in particular ran blood. It offered thousands of human victims yearly. The cutting open of living victims, the tearing out of the still beating heart, was an act that dominated the minds and lives of these strange priesthoods. The public life, the national festivities all turned on this fantastically horrible act. The ordinary existence of the common people in these communities was very like the ordinary existence of any other barbaric peasantry. Their pottery, weaving and dyeing was very good. The Maya writing was not only carven on stone but written and painted upon skins and the like. The European and American museums contain many enigmatic Mayan manuscripts of which at present little has been deciphered except the dates. In Peru there were beginnings of a similar writing but they were superseded by a method of keeping records by knotting cords. The similar method of mnemonics was in use in China thousands of years ago. In the old world before 4000 or 5000 BC that is to say 3000 or 4000 years earlier there were primitive civilizations not unlike these American civilizations. Civilizations based upon a temple having a vast quantity of blood sacrifices and with an intensely astronomical priesthood. But in the old world the primitive civilizations reacted upon one another and developed towards the conditions of our own world. In America these primitive civilizations never progressed beyond this primitive stage. Each of them was in a little world of its own. Mexico it seems knew little or nothing of Peru until the Europeans came to America. The potato which was the principal foodstuff in Peru was unknown in Mexico. Age by age these peoples lived and marveled at their gods and made their sacrifices and died. Maya art rose to high levels of decorative beauty. Men made love and tribes made war, drought and plenty, pestilence and health followed one another. The priests elaborated their calendar and their sacrificial ritual through long centuries but made little progress in other directions. End of Chapter 14 Chapter 15 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 15 Shumeria Early Egypt and Writing The old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000 or 7000 BC there were already quasi-civilized communities almost at the Peruvian level appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile valley. At that time North Persia and Western Turkestan and South Arabia were all more fertile than they are now and there are traces of very early communities in these regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia however and in Egypt that their first appear cities, temples, systematic irrigation and evidences of a social organization rising above the level of a mere barbaric village town. In those days the Euphrates and Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf and it was in the country between them that the Sumerians built their first cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the great history of Egypt was beginning. These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with prominent noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been deciphered and their language is now known. They had discovered the use of bronze and they built great tour-like temples of sun-dried brick. The clay of this country is very fine, they used it to write upon and so it is that their inscriptions have been preserved to us. They had cattle, sheep, goats and asses but no horses. They fought on foot in close formation carrying spears and shields of skin. Their clothing was of wool and they shaved their heads. Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been an independent state with a guard of its own and priests of its own. But sometimes one city would establish an ascendancy over others and exact tribute from their population. A very ancient inscription at Nipur records the empire, the first recorded empire of the Sumerian city of Irak. Its guard and its priest king claimed an authority from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. But first, writing was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial record. Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write. The Azeelian rock pictures to which we have already referred show the beginning of this process. Many of them record hunts and expeditions and in most of these the human figures are plainly drawn. But in some the painter would not bother with head and limbs. He just indicated men by a vertical and one or two transverse strokes. From this to a conventional condensed picture writing was an easy transition. In Sumeria, where the writing was done on clay was a stick. The dabs of the characters soon became unrecognisably unlike the stings they stood for. But in Egypt, where men painted on walls and on strips of the papyrus reed, the likeliness to the thing imitated remained. From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria made wedge-shaped marks, the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform, wedge-shaped. An important step towards writing was made when pictures were used to indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing. In the reboots dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done today. We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child is delighted to guess that this is the scotch-name Campbell. The Sumerian language was a language made up of accumulated syllables rather like some contemporary Amer-Indian languages. And it lent itself very readily to this syllabic method of writing words, expressing ideas that could not be conveyed by pictures directly. Egyptian writing underwent parallel developments. Later on, when foreign peoples with less distinctly syllable methods of speech were to learn and use these picture scripts, there were to make those further modifications and simplifications that developed at last into alphabetical writing. All the true alphabets of the later world derived from a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphic priest writing. Later in China, there was to develop a conventionalized picture writing, but in China it never got to the alphabetical stage. The invention of writing was of very great importance in the development of human societies. It put agreements, laws, commandments on record. It made the growth of states larger than the old city-states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness possible. The command of the priest or king and his seal could go far beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. It is interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals were greatly used. A king or a nobleman or a merchant would have his seal often very artistically carved and would impress it on any clay document he wished to authorize. So close had civilization got to printing six thousand years ago. Then the clay was dried hard and became permanent. For the reader must remember that in the land of Mesopotamia for countless years, letters, records and accounts were all written on comparatively indestructible tiles. To that fact we owe a great wealth of recovered knowledge, bronze, copper, gold, silver, and, as a precious rarity, meteoroic iron were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a very early stage. Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have been very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria, and except for the asses and cattle in the streets, it must have been not unlike the life in the Maya cities of America, three or four thousand years later. Most of the people in peacetime were busy with irrigation and cultivation, except of days of religious festivity. They had no money and no need for it. They managed their small occasional trades by barter. The princes and rulers, who alone had more than a few possessions, used gold and silver bars and precious stones for any incidental act of trade. The temple dominated life. In Sumeria it was a great towering temple that went up to Aruv, from which the stars were observed. In Egypt it was a massive building with only a ground floor. In Sumeria the priest's ruler was the greatest, most splendid of beings. In Egypt, however, there was one who was raised above the priests. He was the living incarnation of the chief god of the land, the pharaoh, the god king. There were few changes in the world in those days, men's days were sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers came into the land, and such as did fared uncomfortably. The priest directed life according to immemorial rules, and watched the stars for seed time, and marked the omens of the sacrifices, and interpreted the warnings of the dreams. Men worked and loved and died, not unhappily, forgetful of the savage past of their race, and heedless for its future. Sometimes the ruler was benign. Such was Pepius II, who reigned in Egypt for ninety years. Sometimes he was ambitious, and took men's sons to be soldiers, and sent them against neighboring city-states to war and lander. Or he made them toil to build great buildings. Such were Hiopes, and Hiperan, and Mycorinus, who built those vast sepulchral piles, the pyramids of Giza. The largest of these is 450 feet high, and the weight of the stone in it is 4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down denial in boats, and locked into place chiefly by human muscle. His erection must have exhausted Egypt more than a great war would have done. CHAPTER XVI It was not only in Mesopotamia and Nile Valley that men were settling down to agriculture and the formation of city-states in the centuries between 6,000 and 8,000 BC. Wherever there were possibilities of irrigation and a steady all-the-year-round food supply, men were exchanging the uncertainties and hardships of hunting and wandering for the routines of settlement. On the upper Tigris a people called the Assyrians were founding cities. In the valleys of Asia Minor, and on the Mediterranean shores and islands, there were small communities growing up to civilization. Possibly parallel developments of human life were already going on in favourable regions of India and China. In many parts of Europe, where there were lakes well-stocked with fish, local communities of men had long settled in dwellings built on piles over the water, and were eking out agriculture by fishing and hunting. But over much larger areas of the old world no such settlement was possible. The land was too harsh, too thickly wooded or too arid, or the seasons too uncertain for mankind, with only the implements and science of that age to take root. For settlement under the conditions of the primitive civilizations, men needed a constant water supply and warmth and sunshine. Where their needs were not satisfied, men could live as a transient, as a hunter following his game, as a herdsman following the seasonal grass, but he could not settle. The transition from the hunting to the herding life may have been very gradual. From following herds of wild cattle or in Asia wild horses, men may have come to an idea of property in them, have learned to pen them into valleys, have fought for them against wolves, wild dogs and other predatory beasts. So while the primitive civilizations of the cultivators were growing up, chiefly in the Great River Volies, a different way of living, the nomadic life, a life in constant movement to and fro, from winter pasture to summer pasture, was also growing up. The nomadic peoples were on the whole hardier than the agricultural lists. They were less prolific and numerous. They had no permanent temples and no highly organized priesthood. They had less gear, but the reader must not suppose that theirs was necessarily a less highly developed way of living on that account. In many ways this free life was a fuller life than that of the tillers of the soil. The individual was more self-reliant, less of a unit in a crowd. The leader was more important, the medicine man perhaps less so. Moving over large stretches of country, the nomad took a wider view of life. He touched on the confines of this settled land and that. He was used to the sight of strange faces. He had to scheme and treat for pasture with competing tribes. He knew more of minerals than the folk upon the plow lands, because he went over mountain passes and into rocky places. He may have been a better metallurgist. Possibly bronze and much more probably iron smelting were nomadic discoveries. Some of the earliest implements of iron, reduced from its ores, have been found in central Europe, far away from the early civilizations. On the other hand, the settled folk had their textiles and their pottery and made many desirable things. It was inevitable that, as the two sorts of life, the agricultural and the nomadic differentiated, a certain amount of looting and trading should develop between the two. In Sumeria particularly, which had deserts and seasonal country on either hand, it must have been usual to have the nomads camping close to the cultivated fields, trading and stealing, and perhaps tinkering, as gypsies do to this day. But hence they would not steal, because the domestic fowl, an Indian jungle fowl originally, was not domesticated by man, until about 1000 BC. They would bring precious stones and things of metal and leather. If they were hunters, they would bring skins. But they would get, in exchange, pottery and beads and gloss, garments and such like manufactured things. Three main regions, and three main kinds of wandering and imperfectly settled people there were, in those remote days, of the first civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in the forests of Europe, were the blonde Nordic peoples, hunters and herdsmen, a lowly race. The primitive civilizations saw very little of this race before 1500 BC. Away on the steps of Eastern Asia, various Mongolian tribes, the harnished peoples, were domesticating the horse and developing a very wide sweeping habit of seasonal movement between their summer and winter camping places. Possibly the Nordic and harnished peoples were still separated from one another by the swamps of Russia and the greater Caspian Sea of that time. For very much of Russia there was swamp and lake. In the deserts which were growing more arid now, of Syria and Arabia, tribes of a dark white or brownish people, the Semitic tribes were driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses from pasture to pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and certain more Negroid people from southern Persia, the Elamites, who were the first nomads to come into close contact with the early civilizations. They came as traders and as raiders. Finally, there arose leaders among them with bolder imaginations, and they became conquerors. About 2750 BC a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had conquered the whole Sumerian land and was master of all the world from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. He was an illiterate barbarian and his people, the Akkadians, learned the Sumerian writing and adopted the Sumerian language as the speech of the officials and the learned. The empire he founded, decayed after two centuries, and after one inundation of Elamites, a fresh Semitic people, the Amorites by degrees established their rule over Sumeria. They made their capital in what was hitherto been a small upriver town, Babylon, and their empire is called the First Babylonian Empire. It was consolidated by a great king called Hammurabi, circa 2100 BC, who made the earliest code of laws yet known to history. The narrow volley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic invasion than Mesopotamia, but about the time of Hammurabi occurred a successful Semitic invasion of Egypt, and a line of pharaohs was set up, the Higgsos or shepherd kings, which lasted for several centuries. These Semitic conquerors never assimilated themselves with the Egyptians. They were always regarded with hostility as foreigners and barbarians, and they were at last expelled by a popular uprising about 1600 BC. But the Semites had come into Sumeria for good, and all the two races assimilated, and the Babylonian Empire became Semitic in its language and character. End of CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII THE FIRST SEAGOING PEOPLE The earliest boats and ships must have come into use some 25 or 30 thousand years ago. Man was probably paddling about on the water with a log of wood, or an inflated skin to assist him, at latest in the beginnings of the Neolithic period. A basketwork boat covered with skin and caulked was used in Egypt and Sumeria from the beginnings of our knowledge. Such boats are still used there. They are used to this day in Ireland and Wales and in Alaska. Sealskin boats still make the crossing of Bering Straits. The hollow log followed as tools improved. The building of boats and then ships came in a natural succession. Perhaps the legend of Noah's Ark preserves the memory of some early exploit in shipbuilding. Just as the story of the flood, so widely distributed among the peoples of the world, may be the tradition of the flooding of the Mediterranean basin. There were ships upon the Red Sea long before the pyramids were built, and there were ships on the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf by 7000 BC. Mostly these were the ships of fishermen, but some were already trading and pirate ships. For knowing what we do of mankind, we may guess pretty safely that the first sailors plundered where they could and traded where they had to do so. The seas on which these first ships adventured were inland seas, on which the wind blew fitfully, and which were often at a dead calm for days together, so that sailing did not develop beyond accessory use. It is only in the last 400 years that the well-rigged ocean-going sailing ship has developed. The ships of the ancient world were essentially rowing ships, which hugged the shore and went into harbor at the first sign of rough weather. As ships grew into big galleys, they caused demand for war captives as galley slaves. We have already noted the appearance of the Semitic people as wanderers and nomads in the region of Syria and Arabia, and how they conquered Shomeria and set up first the Akkadian and then the first Babylonian Empire. In the west these same Semitic peoples were taken to the sea. They set up a string of harbour towns along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, of which Tyre and Sidon were the chief. And by the time of Hammurabi in Babylon they had spread as traders, wanderers and colonizers, over the whole Mediterranean basin. These sea Semites were called the Phoenicians. They settled largely in Spain, pushing back the old Iberian Basque population and sending coasting expeditions through the Straits of Gibraltar. And they set up colonies upon the north coast of Africa. Of cartage, one of those Phoenician cities, we shall have much more to tell later. But the Phoenicians were not the first people to have galleys in the Mediterranean waters. There was already a series of towns and cities, among the islands and coasts of the sea, belonging to a race or races, apparently connected by blood and language with the Basques to the west, and the Berbers and Egyptians to the south. The Aegean peoples. These peoples must not be confused with the Greeks, who come much later into our story. They were pretty Greek, but they had cities in Greece and Asia Minor, Mycenaean Troy, for example, and they had a great and prosperous establishment at Knossos in Crete. It is only in the last half century that the industry of excavating archaeologists has brought the extent and civilization of the Aegean peoples to our knowledge. Knossos has been most thoroughly explored. It was happily not succeeded by any city big enough to destroy its ruins, and so it is our chief source of information about this once almost forgotten civilization. The history of Knossos goes back as far as the history of Egypt. The two countries were trading actively across the sea by 4000 BC, by 2500 BC, that is between the time of Sargon I and Hammurabi, Cretian civilization was at its zenith. Knossos was not so much as town as the Great Palace, for the Cretan monarch and his people. It was not even fortified. It was only fortified later, as the Phoenicians grew strong, and as a new and more terrible breed of pirates the Greeks came upon the sea from the north. The monarch was called Minos, as the Egyptian monarch was called Pharaoh, and he kept his state in a palace fitted with running water, with bathrooms and alike conveniences, such as we know of in no other ancient remains. There he held great festivals and shows. There was bullfighting, singularly like the bullfighting that still survives in Spain. There was resemblance even in the costumes of the bullfighters, and there were gymnastic displays. The women's clothes were remarkably modern in spirit, they wore corsets and flouncy dresses. The pottery, the textile, manufacturers' sculpture, painting, jewelry, ivory, metal and inlay work of these Cretians was often astonishingly beautiful, and they had a system of writing, but that still remains to be deciphered. This happy and sunny and civilized life lasted for some score of centuries. About 2000 BC, Knossos and Babylon abounded in comfortable and cultivated people, who probably led very pleasant lives. They had shows, and they had religious festivals, they had domestic slaves to look after them, and industrial slaves to make a profit for them. Egypt must have seemed very secure in Knossos, for such people, sunlit and girdled by the blue sea. Egypt of course must have appeared, rather a declining country in those days, under the rule of her half-barbaric shepherd-kings, and if one took an interest in politics, one must have noticed how the Semitic people seemed to be getting everywhere, ruling Egypt, building distant Babylon, building Ninevee on the upper Tigris, sailing west to the Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar, and setting up their colonies on those distant coasts. There were some active, arid, curious minds in Knossos, because later on the Greeks told legends of a certain skillful Christian artificer, Deodolus, who attempted to make some sort of flying machine, perhaps a glider, which collapsed and fell into the sea. It is interesting to note some of the differences, as well as the resemblances between the life of Knossos on our own. To a Christian gentleman of 2,500 BC, iron was a rare metal which fell out of the sky, and was curious rather than useful, for as yet only meteoric iron was known. Iron had not been obtained from its oars. Compare that with our modern state of affairs, paraded by iron everywhere. The horse, again, would be a quite legendary creature to our Cretan, a sort of super-ass, which lived in the bleak northern lands far away beyond the Black Sea. Civilization for him dwelt chiefly in Aegean, Greece, and Asia Minor, where Lydians and Carians and Troians lived alive and probably spoke languages like his own. There were Phoenicians and Aegeans settled in Spain and North Africa, but those were very remote regions to his imagination. Probably was still a desolate land covered with dense forests. The brown-skinned Etruscans had not yet gone there from Asia Minor. And one day perhaps this Christian gentleman went down to the harbor and saw a captive who attracted his attention, because he was very fair complexioned and had blue eyes. Our Christian tried to talk to him and was answered in an unintelligible gibberish. This creature came from somewhere beyond the Black Sea and seemed to be an altogether benighted savage. But indeed he was an Aryan tribesman of a race and culture of which we shall soon have much to tell, and the strange gibberish he spoke was to differentiate some day into Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, German, English, and most of the chief languages of the world. Such was Knossos at its zenith, intelligent, enterprising, bright and happy. But about 1400 BC disaster came, perhaps very suddenly upon its prosperity. The palace of Minos was destroyed, and its ruins have never been rebuilt or inhabited from that day to this. We do not know how this disaster occurred. The excavator's note what appears to be scattered plunder and the marks of the fire. But the traces of a very destructive earthquake have also been found. Nature alone may have destroyed Knossos, or the Greeks may have finished what the earthquake began. End of Chapter 17 Chapter 18 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells Chapter 18 Egypt, Babylon and Assyria The Egyptians had never submitted very willingly to the rule of their Semitic shepherd kings, and about 1600 BC a vicarous patriotic movement expelled these foreigners. They followed a new phase or revival for Egypt, a period known to Egyptologists as the New Empire. Egypt which had not been closely consolidated before the Hyksos invasion was now a united country, and the phase of subjugation and insurrection left her full of military spirit. The pharaohs became aggressive conquerors. They had now acquired the War Horse and the War Chariot, which the Hyksos had brought to them. Under Totemes III and Amanophis III Egypt had extended her rule into Asia as far as the Euphrates. We are entering now upon a thousand years of warfare between the once quite separated civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile. At first Egypt was ascendant. The great dynasties, the 17th dynasty, which included Totemes III and Amanophis III and IV, and a great Queen Hattasu, and the 19th, when Ramses II, supposed by some to have been the pharaoh of Moses, reigned for 67 years, raised Egypt to high levels of prosperity. In between there were phases of depression for Egypt, conquest by the Syrians, and lighter conquest by the Ethiopians from the south. In Mesopotamia Babylon ruled, then the Hittites and the Syrians of Damascus rose to a transitory predominance. At one time the Syrians conquered Egypt. The fortunes of the Assyrians of Nineveh ebbed and flowed. Sometimes the city was a conquered city. Sometimes the Assyrians ruled in Babylon and assailed Egypt. Our space is too limited here to tell of the comings and goings of the armies of the Egyptians and of the various Semitic powers of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia. There were armies now provided with vast droves of varcharites, for the horse, still used only for war and glory, had spread by this time into the old civilizations from Central Asia. Great conquerors appear in the dim light of that distant time and pass. Tushrata, king of Mitani, who captured Nineveh, Tiglospilisar the first of Assyria, who conquered Babylon. At last the Assyrians became the greatest military power of the time. Tiglospilisar the third conquered Babylon in 745 BC and founded what historians call the New Assyrian Empire. Iron had also come now into civilization out of the north. The Hittites, the precursors of the Armenians, had it first and communicated its use to the Assyrians. And an Assyrian azerper, Sargan the second, armed his troops with it. Assyria became the first power to expound the doctrine of blood and iron. Sargan's son, Sennahirrib, led an army to the borders of Egypt and was defeated not by military strength but by the plague. Sennahirrib's grandson Ashurpanipal, who is also known in history by his Greek name of Sardinopolis, did actually conquer Egypt in 670 BC. But Egypt was already a conquered country then under an Ethiopian dynasty. Sardinopolis simply replaced one conqueror by another. If one had a series of political maps of this long period of history, this interval of 10 centuries, we should have Egypt expanding and contracting like an amoeba under a microscope. And we should see these various Semitic states of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites and the Syrians coming and going, eating each other up and disgorging each other again. To the west of Asia Minor, there would be little Aegean states like Lydia, whose capital was Sardis and Keria. But after about 1200 BC and perhaps earlier, a new set of names would come into the map of the ancient world from the northeast and from the northwest. These would be the names of certain barbaric tribes, armed with iron weapons and using horse chariots, who were becoming a great affliction to the Aegean and Semitic civilizations on the northern borders. They all spoke variants of what once must have been the same language, Arian. Around the northeast of the Black and Caspian seas were coming the Medes and Persians. Confused with these in the records of the time were Thcissians and Samatians. From northeast or northwest came the Armenians. From the northwest of the Sea Barrier. Through the Balkan Peninsula came Semerians, Phrygians and the Hellenic tribes, whom now we call the Greeks. They were raiders and robbers and plunderers of cities, these Aryans, east and west alike. They were all kindred and similar peoples, hardy herdsmen, who had taken to plunder. In the east there were still only borderers and raiders, but in the west they were taking cities and driving out the civilized Aegean populations. The Aegean peoples were so pressed that they were seeking new homes in lands beyond the Aryan range. Some were seeking a settlement in the Delta of the Nahil and being repulsed by the Egyptians. Some, the Etruscans, seemed to have sailed from Asia Minor to found a state in the forest wildernesses of Middle Italy. Some built themselves cities upon the southeast coast of the Mediterranean and became later that people known in history as the Philistines. Of these Aryans who come thus rudely upon the scene of the ancient civilizations, we will tell more fully in a later section. Here we note simply all this stir and emigration amidst the area of the ancient civilizations that was set up by the swirl of the gradual and continuous advance of these Aryan barbarians out of the northern forests and wildernesses between 1600 and 600 BC. And in a section to fellow we must tell also of a little Semitic people, the Hebrews in the hills behind the Phoenician and Philistine coasts who began to be of significance in the world towards the end of this period. They produced a literature of very great importance in subsequent history. A collection of books, histories, poems, books of wisdom and prophetic works, the Hebrew Bible. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, the coming of the Aryans did not cause fundamental changes until after 600 BC. The flight of the Aegeans before Greeks and even the destruction of Knossos must have seemed a very remote disturbance to both the citizens of Egypt and of Babylon. Dynasties came and went in these cradle states of civilization, but the main tenor of human life went on with a slow increase in refinement and complexity age by age. In Egypt, the accumulated monuments of more ancient times, the pyramids, were already in their third thousand of years, and a show for visitors just as they are today, were supplemented by fresh and splendid buildings, more particularly in the time of the 17th and 19th dynasties. The great temples at Karnak and Luxor date from this time. All the chief monuments of Nineveh, the great temples, the winged bulls with human heads, their leaves of kings and chariots and lion hunts, were done in these centuries between 1600 and 600 BC, and this period also covers most of the splendors of Babylon. Both from Mesopotamia and Egypt we now have abundant public records, business accounts, stories, poetry and private correspondence. We know that life for prosperous and influential people in such cities as Babylon and the Egyptian Thebes was already almost as refined and as luxurious as that of comfortable and prosperous people today. Such people lived an orderly and ceremonious life in beautiful and beautifully furnished and decorated houses, wore richly decorated clothing and lovely jewels. They had feasts and festivals, entertained one another with music and dancing, were waited upon by highly trained servants, were cared for by doctors and dentists. They did not travel very much or very far, but boating excursions were a common summer pleasure both on the Nile and on the Euphrates. The beast of Berthen was the arse. The horse was still used only in chariots for war and upon occasions of state. The mule was still novel and the camel, though it was known in Mesopotamia, had not been brought into Egypt. And there were few utensils of iron. Copper and bronze remained the prevailing metals. Fine linen and cotton fabrics were known as well as wool, but there was no silk yet. Glass was known and beautifully colored, but glass things were usually small. There was no clear glass and no optical use of glass. People had gold stoppings in their teeth, but no spectacles on their noses. One odd contrast between the life of old thieves or Babylon and modern life was the absence of coined money. Most trade was still done by barter. Babylon was financially far ahead of Egypt. Gold and silver were used for exchange and kept in ingots, and there were bankers before coinage who stamped their names and the weight on these lumps of precious metal. A merchant or traveler would carry precious stones to sell to pay for his necessities. Most servants and workers were slaves who were paid not money, but in kind. As money came in, slavery declined. A modern visitor to these crowning cities of the ancient world would have missed two very important articles of diet. There were no hens and no eggs. A French cook would have found small joy in Babylon. These things came from the east somewhere about the time of the last Assyrian Empire. Religion, like everything else, had undergone great refinement. Human sacrifice, for instance, had long since disappeared. Animals or bread dummies had been substituted for the victim. But the Phoenicians, and especially the citizens of Cartage, their greatest settlement in Africa, were accused, later, of immolating human beings. When a great chief had died in the ancient days, it had been customary to sacrifice his wives and slaves and break spear and bow in his tomb, so that he should not go unattended and unarmed in the spirit world. In Egypt, there survived of this dark tradition, the pleasant custom of burying small models of house and shop and servants and cattle with the dead. Models that give us today the liveliest realization of the safe and cultivated life of those ancient people three thousand years and more ago. Such was the ancient world before the coming of the Aryans out of the northern forests and plains. In India and China, there were parallel developments. In the great wallies of both these regions, agricultural city-states of brownish peoples were growing up. But in India, they do not seem to have advanced, or coalesced so rapidly, as the city-states of Mesopotamia or Egypt. They were nearer the level of the ancient Schumerians or of the Maya Civilization of America. Chinese history has still to be modernized by Chinese scholars and cleared of much legendary matter. Probably, China at this time was in advance of India. Contemporary was the 17th dynasty in Egypt. There was a dynasty of emperors in China, the Shang dynasty, priest emperors over a loose-knit empire of subordinate kings. The chief duty of these early emperors was to perform the seasonal sacrifices. Beautiful bronze vessels from the type of the Shang dynasty still exist, and their beauty and workmanship compel us to recognize that many centuries of civilization must have preceded their manufacture. End of Chapter 18 Chapter 19 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 19. The Primitive Arians 4,000 years ago, that is to say about 200 B.C., Central and Southeastern Europe and Central Asia were probably warmer, moister and better wooded than they are now. In these regions of the earth wandered a group of tribes, mainly of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race, sufficiently in touch with one another to speak merely variations of one common language from the Rhine to the Caspian Sea. At that time they may not have been a very numerous people, and their existence was unsuspected by the Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws, or by the already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt, which was tasting in those days for the first time the bitterness of foreign conquest. The Nordic people were destined to play a very important part, indeed, in the world's history. They were a people of the parklands, and of the forest clearings. They had no horses at first, but they had cattle. When they wandered, they put their tents and other gear on rough ox wagons. When they settled for a time, they may have made huts of wattle and mud. They burned their important dead. They did not bury them ceremoniously as the Brunet peoples did. They put the ashes of their greater leaders in urns, and then made a great circular mound about them. Those mounds are the round barrows that occur all over North Europe. The Brunet people, their predecessors, did not burn their dead, but buried them in a sitting position in elongated mounds, the long barrows. The Aryans raised crops of wheat, ploughing with oxen, but they did not settle down by their crops. They would reap and move on. They had bronze, and some when about 1500 BC, they acquired iron. They may have been the discoverers of iron smelting, and some when vaguely about that time, they also got the horse, which to begin with they used only for draught purposes. Their social life did not center upon a temple, like that of the more settled people round the Mediterranean, and their chief men were leaders rather than priests. They had an aristocratic social order rather than a divine and regal order. From a very early stage, they distinguished certain families as leaderly and noble. They were a very vocal people. They enlivened their wandering by feasts, at which there was much drunkenness, and at which a special sort of man, the bards, would sign and recite. They had no writing, until they had come into contact with civilization, and the memories of these bards were the living literature. This use of recited language as an entertainment did much to make it a fine and beautiful instrument of expression, and does that no doubt the consequent predominance of the languages derived from Arian is, in part, to be ascribed. Every Arian people had its legendary history, crystallized in bardic recitations, epics, sagas and vidas, as they were variously called. The social life of these people centered about the households of their leading men. The Hall of the Chief, where they settled for a time, was often a very capacious timber building. There were no doubt huts for herds and outlying farm buildings, but with most of the Arian peoples this hall was the general center. Everyone went there to feast and hear the bards and take part in games and discussions. Cowsheds and stabbling surrounded it. The chief and his wife and so forth would sleep on a daze or in an upper gallery, the commoner sort slept about anywhere, as people still do in Indian households. Except for weapons, ornaments, tools and such like personal possessions, there was a sort of patriarchal communism in the tribe. The chief owned a kettle and grazing lands in the common interest. Forests and rivers were the wild. This was the fashion of the people who were increasing and multiplying over the great spaces of Central Europe and West Central Asia during the growth of the great civilization of Mesopotamia and denial, and whom we find pressing upon the Heliolithic peoples everywhere in the second millennium before Christ. They were coming into France and Britain and into Spain. They pushed westward in two waves. The first of these people, who reached Britain and Ireland, were armed with bronze weapons. They exterminated or subjugated the people who had made the great stone monuments of Carnac in Brittany and Stone Age and Everbury in England. They reached Ireland. They are called the Goidelic Celts. The second wave of a closely kindred people, perhaps intermixed with other racial elements, brought iron was it into Great Britain, and is known as the wave of Britonic Celts. From them, the Welsh derived their language. Kindred Celtic peoples were pressing southward into Spain and coming into contact not only with the Heliolithic Basque people, who still occupied the country, but with the Semitic Phoenician colonies of the Seacoast. A closely allied series of tribes, the Italians, were making their way down the still wild and wooded Italian peninsula. They did not always conquer. In the 8th century BC, Rome appears in history, a trading town on the Tiber, inhabited by the Aryan Latins, but under the rule of Etruscan nobles and kings. At the other extremity of the Aryan range, there was a similar progress southward of similar tribes. Aryan peoples speaking Sanskrit had come down through the western passes into north India, long before 100 BC. There they came into contact with the primordial Brunet civilization, the Dravidian civilization, and learned much from it. Other Aryan tribes seemed to have spread over the mountain masses of Central Asia, far to the east of the present range of such peoples. In eastern Turkestan, there are still fair, blue-eyed Nordic tribes, but now they speak Mongolian tongues. Between the Black and Caspian seas, the ancient Hittites had been submerged and aeronized by the Armenians before 100 BC, and the Assyrians and Babylonians were already aware of a new and formidable fighting barbarism on the northeastern frontiers, a group of tribes amongst which the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians remain as outstanding names. But it was through the Balkan peninsula that Aryan tribes made their first heavy thrust into the heart of the old world civilization. They were already coming southward and crossing into Asia Minor many centuries before 100 BC. First came a group of tribes of whom the Phrygians were the most conspicuous, and then, in succession, the Aeolic, the Yonik and the Dorian Greeks. By 100 BC, they had wiped out the ancient Aegean civilization, both in the mainland of Greece and in most of the Greek islands. The cities of Mycenae and Tyrens were obliterated, and Knossos was nearly forgotten. The Greeks had taken to the sea before 100 BC. They had settled in Creeks and Rhodes, and they were found in colonies in Sicily and the south of Italy, after the fashion of the Phoenician trading cities that were dotted along the Mediterranean coasts. So it was, while Tiglas Pilisar III and Sargon II and Sardinopoulos were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt, the Aryan peoples were learning the methods of civilization and making it over for their own purposes in Italy and Greece and North Persia. The theme of history from the 9th century BC and onward for six centuries is the story of how these Aryan peoples grew to power and enterprise, and how at last they subjugated the whole ancient world Semitic, Aegean and Egyptian alike. In form, the Aryan peoples were altogether victorious, but the struggle of Aryan Semitic and Egyptian ideas and methods was continued long after the Scipitra was in Aryan hands. It is indeed a struggle that goes on through all the rest of history, and still in a manner continues to this day. 20. The last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of Darius I. We have already mentioned how Assyria became a great military power under Tiglas Pilaster III and under the usurper Sargon II. Sargon was not this man's original name. He adopted it to flatter the conquered Babylonians by reminding them of that ancient founder of the Akkadian Empire Sargon I two thousand years before his time. Babylon, for all that, it was a conquered city, was of greater population and importance than Nineveh, and its great god Bel Marduk and its traders and priests had to be treated politely. In Mesopotamia in the 8th century BC, we are already far beyond the barbaric days when the capture of a town meant loot and massacre. Conquerors sought to propitiate and win the conquered. For a century and a half after Sargon, the new Assyrian Empire endured, and, as we have noted, Ashurbanipal, Cerdinopolis, held at least lower Egypt. But the power and solidarity of Assyria waned rapidly. Egypt by an effort threw off the foreigner under Afaro Samsemeticus I and under Nihos II attempted a war of conquest in Syria. By that time, Assyria was grappling with foes nearer at hand and could make but a poor resistance. As Semitic people from southeast Mesopotamia, the Caldeans, combined with Aryan means and Persians from the northeast against Nineveh, and in 606 BC, for now we are coming down to exact chronology, took that city. There was a division of the spoils of Assyria. A Median Empire was set up in the north under Kyaksaris. It included Nineveh and its capital was Ekbatana. Eastward it reached the borders of India. To the south of this, in a great crescent, was a new Caldean Empire, the Second Babylonian Empire, which rose to a very great degree of wealth and power under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the Nebuchadnezzar of the Bible. The last great days, the greatest days of all for Babylon begun. For a time, the two empires remained at peace, and the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar was married to Kyaksaris. Meanwhile, Neko II was pursuing his easy conquest in Syria. He had defeated and slain King Joshua of Judah, a small country of which there is more to tell presently, at the Battle of Megiddo in 608 BC. And he pushed on to the Euphrates to encounter not a decadent Assyria, but the renaissance Babylonia. The Caldeans dealt very vigorously with the Egyptians. Neko was routed and driven back to Egypt. And the Babylonian frontier pushed down to the ancient Egyptian boundaries. From 606 until 589 BC, the Second Babylonian Empire flourished insecurely. It flourished so long as it kept the peace with the stronger, hardier Median Empire to the north. And during these 67 years, not only life, but learning flourished in the ancient city. Even under the Assyrian monarchs, and especially under Sardinopolis, Babylon had been a scene of great intellectual activity. Sardinopolis, though an Assyrian, had been quite Babylonized. He made a library, a library not of paper but of the clay tablets that were used for writing in Mesopotamia since early Sumerian days. His collection has been unearthed, and is perhaps the most precious store of historical material in the world. The last of the Caldean line of Babylonian monarchs, Nabonidus, had even keener literary tastes. He patronized antiquarian researches. And when a date was worked out by his investigators, for the accession of Sardinopolis I, he commemorated the fact by inscriptions. But there were many signs of disunion in his empire, and he sought to centralize it by bringing a number of the various local gods to Babylon, and setting up temples to them there. This device was to be practiced quite successfully by the Romans in later times. But in Babylon it roused the jealousy of the powerful priesthood of Bel Marduk, the dominant god of the Babylonians. They cast about for a possible alternative to Nabonidus, and found it in Cyrus the Persian, the ruler of the adjacent Median Empire. Cyrus had already distinguished himself by conquering Croesus, the rich king of Lydia in eastern Asia Minor. He came up against Babylon, there was a battle outside the walls, and the gates of the city were open to him, 538 BC. His soldiers entered the city without fighting. The crown prince Bel Shazar, the son of Nabonidus, was feasting, the Bible relates, when a hand appeared and wrote in letters of fire upon the wall these mystical words, mene mene tekel upharsin, which was interpreted by the prophet Daniel, whom he summoned to read the riddle, as, God has numbered thy kingdom and finished it, though are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and thy kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians. Possibly the priests of Bel Marduk knew something about that writing on the wall. Bel Shazar was killed that night, says the Bible. Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and the occupation of the city was so peaceful that the services of Bel Marduk continued without intermission. Thus it was the Babylonian and Median empires were united. Cambusus, the son of Cyrus, subjugated Egypt. Cambusus went mad, and was accidentally killed, and was presently succeeded by Darius the Mede, Darius I, the son of Histops, one of the chief counselors of Cyrus. The Persian Empire of Darius I, the first of the new Aryan empires in the seat of the old civilizations, was the greatest empire the world had hitherto seen. It included all Asia Minor and Syria, all the old Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions, Medea, Persia, and it extended into India as far as the Indus. Such an empire was possible because the horse and rider and the chariot and the made road had now been brought into the world. Hitherto the Ass and Ox and the camel for desert use had afforded the swiftest method of transport. Great arterial roads were made by the Persian rulers to hold their new empire, and post horses were always invading for the imperial messenger or the traveler with an official permit. Moreover, the world was now beginning to use coined money, which greatly facilitated trade and intercourse. But the capital of this vast empire was no longer Babylon. In the long run, the priesthood of Bel Marduk gained nothing by their treason. Babylon, though still important, was now a declining city, and the great cities of the new empire were Persepolis and Sousa and Ekbatana. The capital was Sousa. Nineveh was already abandoned and sinking into ruins. End of Chapter 20 And now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so important in their own time as in their influence upon the later history of the world. They were settled in Judea long before 100 BC, and their capital city after that time was Jerusalem. Their story is interwoven with that of the great empires on either side of them, Egypt to the south, and the changing empires of Syria as Syria and Babylon to the north. Their country was an inevitable high road between these later powers and Egypt. Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they produced a written literature, a world history, a collection of laws, chronicles, Psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction, and political utterances, which became at last what Christians know as the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in history in the 4th or 5th century BC. Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We have already told how the pharaoh, Nicholas II, invaded the Assyrian Empire, while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians and Caudians. Joshua, king of Judah, opposed him, and was defeated and slain at Megiddo, 608 BC. Judah became a tributary to Egypt, and when Nebuchadnezzar the great, the New Caldean king in Babylon rolled back Neco into Egypt, he attempted to manage Judah by setting up puppet kings in Jerusalem. The experiment failed. The people massacred his Babylonian officers, and he then determined to break up this little state altogether, which had long been playing off Egypt against the Northern Empire. Jerusalem was sacked and burned, and the remnant of the people was carried off captive to Babylon. There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon, 538 BC. He then collected them together and sent them back to resettle their country and rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem. Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civilized or united people. Probably only a very few of them could read or write. In their own history one never hears of the early books of the Bible being read. The first mention of a book is in the time of Joshua. The Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated them. They returned, aware of their own literature, and acutely self-conscious and political people. Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament as we know it. In addition, a separate books they already had many of the other books that have since been incorporated with the Pentateuch into the present Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for example. The accounts of the creation of the world of Adam and Eve and of the flood with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with similar Babylonian legends. They seem to have been part of the common beliefs of all the Semitic peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Samson have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of Abraham and Onward begins something more special to the Jewish race. Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in Babylon. He was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader must go for the story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons and grandchildren and how they became captive in the land of Egypt. He traveled through Canaan and the God of Abraham says the Bible story, promised the smiling land of prosperous cities to him and to his children. And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after 50 years of wandering in the wilderness and there's a leadership of Moses, the children of Abraham grown now to a host of 12 tribes invaded the land of Canaan from the Arabic deserts to the east. They may have done this somewhere between 1600 BC and 1300 BC. There are no Egyptian records of Moses nor of Canaan at this time to help out the story. But at any rate they did not succeed in conquering any more than the hilly backgrounds of the promised land. The coast was now in the hands not of the Canaanites but of newcomers, those Aegean peoples the Philistines and their cities Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully withstood the Hebrew attack. For many generations the children of Abraham remained an obscure people of the hilly back country engaged in incessant bickering with the Philistines and with the kindred tribes about them, the Moabites, the Medianites and so forth. The reader will find in the book of Judges a record of their struggles and disasters during this period for very largely it is a record of disasters and failures frankly told. For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled so far as there was any rule among them by priestly judges selected by the elders of the people. But at last someone towards 100 BC they choose themselves a king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul's leading was no great improvement upon the leading of the judges. He perished under the hail of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount Gilboa. His armor went into the temple of the Philistine Venus and his body was nailed to the walls of Beshan. His successor David was more successful and more politic. With David dawned the only period of prosperity the Hebrew peoples were ever to know. It was based on a close alliance with the Phoenician city of Tyre whose king Hiram seems to have been a man of very great intelligence and enterprise. He wished to secure a trade route to the Red Sea through the Hebrew hill country. Normally Phoenician trade went to the Red Sea by Egypt, but Egypt was in a state of profound disorder at this time. There may have been other obstructions to Phoenician trade along this line. And at any rate Hiram established the very closest relations both with David and with his son and successor Solomon. Under Hiram's auspices the walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem arose and in return Hiram built and launched his ships on the Red Sea. A very considerable trade passed northward and southward through Jerusalem and Solomon achieved a prosperity and magnificence unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was even given a daughter of Pharaoh in marriage. But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the climax of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king in a little city. His power was so transitory that within a few years of his death she sharked the first Pharaoh of the 22nd dynasty had taken Jerusalem and looted most of its splendors. The account of Solomon's magnificence given in the books of kings and chronicles is questioned by many critics. They say that it was added to and exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later writers. But the Bible account read carefully is not so overwhelming as it appears at the first reading. Solomon's temple, if one works out the measurements, would go inside a small suburban church and his 1400 chariot ceased to impress us when we learned from an Assyrian monument that his successor Ahab sent a contingent of 2000 to the Assyrian army. It is also plainly manifest from the Bible narrative that Solomon spent himself in display and overtaxed and overworked his people. At his death the northern part of his kingdom broke off from Jerusalem and became the independent kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem remains a capital city of Judah. The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short lived, Hiram died, and the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt grew strong again. The history of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah becomes a history of two little states, ground between first Syria, then Assyria and then Babylon to the north and Egypt to the south. It is a tale of disasters and of deliverances that only delayed disaster. It is a tale of barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In 721 BC the kingdom of Israel was swept away into captivity by the Assyrians and its people utterly lost to history. Judah struggled on until in 604 BC as we have told it shared the fate of Israel. There may be details open to criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew history from the days of the judges onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true story which squares was all that has been learned in the excavation of Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past century. It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history together and evolved their tradition. The people who came back to Jerusalem at the command of Cyrus were a very different people in spirit and knowledge from those who had gone into captivity. They had learned civilization. In the development of their peculiar character a very great part was played by certain men, a new sort of men, the prophets to whom we must now direct our attention. Those prophets mark the appearance of new and remarkable forces in the steady development of human society. End of chapter 21 Chapter 22 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells The fall of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a series of disasters that were to happen to the Semitic peoples. In the 7th century BC it would have seemed as though the whole civilized world was to be dominated by Semitic rulers. They ruled the great Assyrian Empire and they had conquered Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Syria were all Semitic, speaking languages that were mutually intelligible. The trade of the world was in Semitic hands. Tyre, Sidon, the great mother cities of the Phoenician coast had thrown out colonies that grew at last to even greater proportion in Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage founded before 800 BC had risen to a population of more than a million. It was for a time the greatest city on earth. Its ships went to Britain and out into the Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira. We have already noted how Hiram cooperated with Solomon to build ships on the Red Sea for the Arabian and perhaps for the Indian trade. In the time of the Faroonejo a Phoenician expedition sailed completely round Africa. At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only the Greeks were reconstructing a new civilization of the ruins of the ones they had destroyed and the Medes were becoming formidable as an Assyrian inscription calls them in Central Asia. In 800 BC no one could have prophesied that before the third century BC every trace of Semitic dominion would be wiped out by Aryan speaking conquerors and that everywhere the Semitic peoples would be subjects or tributaries or scattered altogether. Everywhere except in the northern deserts of Arabia where the Bedouin adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life. The ancient way of life of the Semites before Sargon I and his Acadians went down to conquer Sumeria. But the Arab Bedouin were never conquered by Aryan masters. Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and overrun in these five eventful centuries one people only held together and clung to its ancient traditions and that was this little people the Jews who were sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian and they were able to do this because they had got together this literature of theirs their Bible in Babylon. It is not so much the Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running through this Bible were certain ideas different from the ideas of the people about them very stimulating and sustaining ideas to which they were destined to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship adventure and oppression. For most of these Jewish ideas were this that their God was invisible and remote an invisible God in a temple not made with hands a lord of righteousness throughout the earth. All other peoples had national gods embodied in images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed and the temple raised presently that God died out but this was a new idea this God of the Jews in the heavens high above priests and sacrifices and this God of Abraham the Jews believed had chosen them to be his peculiar people to restore Jerusalem and make it the capital of righteousness in the world. They were a people exalted by their sense of a common destiny. This belief saturated them all when they returned to Jerusalem after the captivity in Babylon. Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation many Babylonians and Syrians and so forth and later on many Phoenicians speaking practically the same language and having endless customs habits tastes and traditions in common should be attracted by this inspiring cult and should seek to share in its fellowship and its promise. After the fall of Tyre, Cedon, Carthage and the Spanish Phoenician cities the Phoenicians suddenly vanished from history and as suddenly we find not simply in Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt, Arabia, the East wherever the Phoenicians had set their feet communities of Jews and they were all held together by the Bible and by the reading of the Bible Jerusalem was from the first only their nominal capital their real city was this book of books this is a new sort of thing in history it is something of which the seeds were sown long before when the Schumerians and Egyptians began to turn their hieroglyphics into writing the Jews were a new thing a people without a king and presently without a temple for as we shall tell Jerusalem itself was broken up in 70 AD held together and consolidated out of heterogeneous elements by nothing but the power of the written board and this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned nor foreseen nor done by either priests or statement not only a new kind of community but a new kind of man comes into history with the development of the Jews in the days of Solomon the Hebrews looked like becoming a little people just like any other little people of that time clustering around court and temple ruled by the wisdom of the priest and led by the ambition of the king but already the reader may learn from the Bible this new sort of man of which we speak the prophet was in evidence as trouble thick and round divided Hebrews the importance of these prophets increases what were these prophets they were men of the most diverse origins the prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly cost and the prophet Amos was a goat skin mantle of a shepherd but all had this in common that they gave allegiance to no one but to the God of righteousness and that they spoke directly to the people they came without license or consecration now the word of the Lord came unto me that was the formula they were intensely political they exhorted the people against Egypt the broken reed or against Assyria or Babylon they denounced the indolence of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of the king some of them turned their attention to what we should now call social reform the rich were grinding the faces of the poor the luxurious were consuming the children's bread wealthy people made friends with and imitated the splendors and vices of foreigners and this was hateful to Jehovah the god of andrehan who would certainly punish this land these fulminations were written down and preserved and studied they went wherever the Jews went and wherever they went they spread a new religious spirit they carried the common man past priest and temple past court and king and brought him face to face with the rule of righteousness that is their supreme importance in the history of mankind in the great utterances of Isaiac the prophetic voice rises to a pitch of splendid anticipation and foreshadows the whole earth united and at peace under one god therein the Jewish prophecies culminate all the prophets did not speak in this fashion and the intelligent reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in them much prejudice and much that will remind him of the propaganda pamphlets of the present time nevertheless it is the Hebrew prophets of the period round and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the appearance of a new power in the world the power of individual moral appeal of an appeal to the free conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race end of chapter 22 chapter 23 of a short history of the world by H. G. Wells this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 23 the Greeks now while after Solomon whose reign was probably about 960 BC the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were suffering destruction and deportation and while the Jewish people were developing their tradition in captivity in Babylon another great power over the human mind the Greek tradition was also arising while the Hebrew prophets were working out a new sense of direct moral responsibility between the people and an eternal and universal god of right the Greek philosophers were training the human mind in a new method and spirit of intellectual adventure the Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the Aryan speaking stem they had to come down amongst the Aegean cities and islands some centuries before 100 BC they were probably already in southward movement before the Pharaoh Tothmas hunted his first elephants beyond the conquered authorities for in those days there were elephants in Mesopotamia and lions in Greece it is possible that it was a Greek raid that burned Knossos but there are no Greek legends of such a victory though there are stories of Minos and his palace delivering and of the skill of the Christian artificers like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and reciters whose performances were an important social link and these handed down from the barbaric beginnings of their people two great epics the Iliad telling how a league of Greek tribes besieged and took and sacked the town of Troy in Asia Minor and the Odyssey being a long adventure story of the return of the sage captain Odysseus from Troy to his own island these epics were written down someone in the eighth or seventh century BC when the Greeks had acquired the use of an alphabet from their more civilized neighbors but they are supposed to have been in existence very much earlier formerly they were ascribed to a particular blind bard Homer who was supposed to have sat down and composed them as Milton composed Paradise Lost whether there really was such a poet whether he composed or only wrote down and polished these epics and so forth is a favorite quarreling ground for the erudite we need not concern ourselves with such bickering here the things that matters from our point of view is that the Greeks were in possession of their epics in the eighth century BC and that they were a common possession and a link between their various tribes giving them a sense of fellowship as against the outer barbarians they were a group of kindred peoples linked by the spoken and afterwards by the written word and sharing common ideals of courage and behavior the epics showed the Greeks as barbaric people without iron without writing and still not living in cities they seem to have lived at first in open villages of huts around the halls of their chiefs outside the ruins of the Aegean cities they had destroyed then they began to wall their cities and to adopt the idea of temples from the people they had conquered it has been said that the cities of the primitive civilizations grew up about the altar of some tribal god and that the wall was added in the cities of the Greeks the wall preceded the temple they began to trade and send out colonies by the seventh century BC a new series of cities had grown up in the volleys and islands of Greece forgetful of the Aegean cities and civilization that had preceded them Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Debes, Samos, Miletus, among the chiefs there were already Greek settlements along the coast of the Black Sea and in Italy and Sicily the heel and toe of Italy was called Magna Graecia Marcellus was a Greek town established on the site of an earlier Phoenician colony now countries which are great plains or which have a chief means of transport some great river like the Euphrates or Nile tend to become united under some common rule the cities of Egypt and the cities of Shomeria for example ran together under one system of government but the Greek peoples were cut up among islands and mountain volleys both Greece and Magna Graecia are very mountainous and the tendency was all the other way when the Greeks come into history they are divided up into a number of little states which showed no signs of coalescence they are different even in race some consist chiefly of citizens of this or that Greek tribe Ionic Aeolian or Doric some have a mingled population of Greeks and descendants of the pre-greek Mediterranean folk some have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks lording it over an enslaved conquering population like the hellots in Sparta in some the old literally Aryan families have become a close aristocracy in some there is a democracy of all the Aryan citizens in some there are elected or even hereditary kings in some usurpers or tyrants and the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek states divided and various kept them small the largest states were smaller than many English counties and it is doubtful if the population of any of their cities ever exceeded a third of million few came up even to 50 000 there were unions of interest and sympathy but no coalescences cities made leagues and alliances as trade increased and small cities put themselves under the protection of great ones yet all Greece was held together in a certain community of feeling by two things by the epics and by the custom of taking part every fourth year in the athletic contests at olympia this did not prevent wars and feuds but it mitigated something of the savagery of war between them and the truth protected all travelers to and from the games as time went on the sentiment of a common heritage grew and the number of states participating in the olympic games increased until at last not only Greeks but competitors from the closely kindred countries of aphorus and macadonia to the north were admitted the Greek cities grew in trade and importance and the quality of their civilization rose steadily in the seventh and sixth centuries bc their social life differed in many interesting points from the social life of the Aegean and river valley civilizations they had splendid temples but the priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in the cities of the older world the repository of all knowledge the storehouse of ideas they had leaders and noble families but no quasi-divine monarch surrounded by an elaborately organized court rather their organization was aristocratic with leading families which kept each other in order even their so-called democracies were aristocratic every citizen had a share in public affairs and came to the assembly in a democracy but everybody was not a citizen the Greek democracies were not like our modern democracies in which everyone has a vote many of the Greek democracies had a few hundred or a few thousand citizens and then many thousands of slaves freedmen and so forth with no share in public affairs generally in Greece affairs were in the hands of a community of substantial men their kings and their tyrants alike were just men set in front of other men or usurping leadership they were not quasi-divine overmen like pharaoh or minos or the monarchs of mesopotamia both thought and government therefore had a freedom under greek conditions such as they had known in none of the older civilizations the greeks had brought down into cities the individualism the personal initiative of the wandering life of the northern parklands they were the first republicans of importance in history and we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric warfare a new thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life we find men who are not priests seeking and recording knowledge and inquiring into the mysteries of life and being in a way that has hitherto been the sublime privilege of priesthood or the presumptuous amusement of kings we find already in the sixth century bc perhaps while isiah was still prophesying in Babylon such men as tales and anoxymander of miletus and heraclitus of Ephesus who were what we should now call independent gentlemen giving their minds to shrewd questionings of the world in which we live asking what's it real nature was when it came and what its destiny might be and be and refusing already made or evasive answers of these questionings of the universe by the greek mind we shall have more to say a little later in this history these greek inquires who begin to be remarkable in the sixth century bc are the first philosophers the first wisdom lovers in the world and it may be noted here how important a century this sixth century bc was in the history of humanity for not only were these greek philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas about this universe and man's place in it and isiah carrying jewish prophecy to its sublimest levels but as we shall tell later gautama buddha was then teaching in india and confucius and lao tsai in china from athens to the pacific the human mind was a stir end of chapter 23 chapter 24 of a short history of the world by hg wells the slibrivox recording is in the public domain chapter 24 the wars of the greeks and persians while the greeks and the cities of greece south isidli and asia minor were embarking upon three intellectual inquiry and while in babelan and jerusalem the last of the hebrew prophets were creating a free conscience of mankind two adventurous arian peoples the meads and the persians were in possession of the civilization of the ancient world and were making a great empire the persian empire which was far larger in extent than any empire the world had seen hither too under syrus babelan and the rich and ancient civilization of lidia had been added to the persian rule the phonician cities of the levant and all the greek cities in asia minor had been made tributary cambuses had subjected egypt and darius the first the mead the third of the persian rulers 521 bc found himself monarch as it seemed of all the world his couriers rode with his decrees from the dardanelles to the indus and from upper egypt to central asia the greeks in europe it is true italy cartage sicily and the spanish phonician settlements were not under the persian peace but they treated it with respect and the only people who gave any serious trouble were the old parent hordes of nordic people in south russia and central asia the schizians who raided the northern and northeastern borders of course the population of this great persian empire was not a population of persians the persians were only the small conquering minority of this enormous realm the rest of the population was what it had been before the persians came from time immemorial only that persian was the administrative language trade and finance were still largely semitic tire and sidon as of old were the great mediterranean ports and semitic shipping plied upon the seas but many of these semitic merchants and business people as they went from place to place already found a sympathetic and convenient common history in the hebrew tradition and the hebrew scriptures a new element which was increasing rapidly in this empire was the greek element the greeks were becoming serious rivals to the semites upon the sea and their detached and vigorous intelligence made them useful and unprojudiced officials it was on account of the schizians that derius the first invaded europe he wanted to reach south russia the homeland of the schizian horsemen he crossed the bosphorus with a great army and marched through bulgaria to the danube crossed this by a bridge of boats and pushed far northward his army suffered terribly it was largely an infantry force and the mounted schizians rolled all around it cut off its supplies destroyed any stragglers and never came to a pitched battle derius was forced into an inglorious retreat he returned himself to susa but he left an army in thrace and macadonia and macadonia submitted to derius in directions of the greek cities in asia followed this failure and the european greeks were drawn into the contest derius resolved upon the subjugation of the greeks in europe with the phonician fleet at his disposal he was able to subdue one island after another and finally in 490 bc he made his main attack upon athens a considerable armada sailed from the ports of asia minor and the eastern mediterranean and the expedition landed its troops at marathon to the north of athens there they were met and signally defeated by the athenians an extraordinary thing happened at this time the bitterest travel of athens in greeks was sparta but now athens appealed to sparta sending a herald a swift runner imploring the spartans not to let greeks become slaves to barbarians this runner the prototype of all marathon runners did over a hundred miles of broken country in less than two days the spartans responded promptly and generously but when in three days the spartan force reached athens there was nothing for it to do but to view the battlefield and the bodies of the defeated persian soldiers the persian fleet had returned to asia so ended the first persian attack on greece the next was much more impressive derius died soon after the news of his defeat at marathon reached him and for four years his son and successor xerxes prepared a host to crush the greeks for a time terror united all the greeks the army of xerxes was certainly the greatest that had hitherto been assembled in the world it was a huge assembly of discordant elements it crossed the dardanelles 480 bc by a bridge of boats and along the coast as it advanced moved an equally miscellaneous fleet carrying supplies at the narrow pass of termaphilia small force of 104 000 men under the spartan leonidas resisted this multitude and after a fight of unsurpassed heroism was completely destroyed every man was killed but the losses they inflicted upon the persians were enormous and the army of xerxes pushed on to thebes and athenes in a chastened mood thebes surrendered and made terms the athenians abandoned their city and it was burned greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror but again came victory against the odds and all expectations the greek fleet though not a third the size of the persian assailed it in the bay of salamis and destroyed it xerxes found himself and his immense army cut off from supplies and his heart failed him he retreated to asia with one half of his army leaving the rest to be defeated at platea 479 bc what times the remnants of the persian fleet were hunted down by the greeks and destroyed at micalae in asia minor the persian danger was at an end most of the greek cities in asia became free all this is told in great detail and was much pictoresqueness in the first of britain histories the history of herodotus this herodotus was born about 484 bc in the yonian city of hallekarnassus in asia minor and he visited babelon and egypt in his search for exact particulars from micalae onward persia sank into confusion of dynastic troubles xerxes was murdered in 465 bc and rebellions in egypt syria and media broke up the brief order of that mighty realm the history of herodotus lays stress on the weakness of persia this history is indeed what we should now call propaganda propaganda for greece to unite and conquer persia herodotus makes one character aris tagoras go to the spartans with a map of the known world and say to them these barbarians are not valiant in fight you on the other hand have now attained the utmost skill in war no other nations in the world have what they possess gold silver bronze embroidered garments beasts and slaves all this you might have for yourselves if you so desired end of chapter 24