 forward of the story of mankind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Michelle Crandall. The Story of Mankind by Hendrick Von Lone. For Hans and Willem. When I was twelve or thirteen years old, an uncle of mine who gave me my love for books and pictures promised to take me upon a memorable expedition. I was to go with him to the top of the tower of old St. Lawrence in Rotterdam. And so, one fine day, a sexton with a key as large as that of St. Peter opened a mysterious door. Bring the bell, he said, when you come back and want to get out. And with a great grinding of rusty old hinges, he separated us from the noise of the busy street and locked us into a world of new and strange experiences. For the first time in my life, I was confronted by the phenomenon of audible silence. When we had climbed the first flight of stairs, I added another discovery to my limited knowledge of natural phenomena, that of tangible darkness. A match showed us where the upward road continued. We went to the next floor, and then to the next, and the next, until I had lost count. And then there came still another floor. And suddenly we had plenty of light. This floor was on an even height with the roof of the church, and it was used as a storeroom. Covered with many inches of dust, there lay the abandoned symbols of a venerable faith which had been discarded by the good people of the city many years ago. That which had meant life and death to our ancestors was here reduced to junk and rubbish. The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved images, and the ever-watchful spider had opened up shop between the outspread arms of a kindly saint. The next floor showed us from where we had derived our light. Enormous open windows with heavy iron bars made the high and barren room the roosting place of hundreds of pigeons. The wind blew through the iron bars, and the air was filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was the noise of the town below us, but a noise which had been purified and cleansed by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts, and the clinking of the horse's hooves, the winding of cranes and pulleys, hit the hissing sound of the patient's steam, which had been set to do the work of man in a thousand different ways. They had all been blended into a softly wrestling whisper, which provided a beautiful background for the trembling cooing of the pigeons. Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began, and after the first ladder, a slippery old thing which made one feel his way with a cautious foot, there was a new and even greater wonder, the town clock. I saw the heart of time. I could hear the heavy pulse beats of the rapid seconds. One, two, three, up to sixty, then a sudden quivering noise, when all the wheels seemed to stop, and another minute had been chopped off eternity. Without pause it began again. One, two, three, until at last, after a warning rumble and the scraping of many wheels, a thunderous voice high above us told the world that it was the hour of noon. On the next floor were the bells, the nice little bells and their terrible sisters. In the center, the big bell which made me turn stiff with fright when I heard it in the middle of the night telling a story of fire or flood. In solitary grandeur it seemed to reflect upon those six hundred years during which it had shared the joys and the sorrows of the good people of Rotterdam. Around it, neatly arranged like the blue jars in an old fashioned apothecary shop, hung the little fellows, who twice each week played a merry tune for the benefit of the country folk who had come to market to buy and sell and hear what the big world had been doing. But in a corner, all alone and shunned by the others, a big black bell, silent and stern, the bell of death. Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and even more dangerous than those we had climbed before, and suddenly, the fresh air of the wide heavens. We had reached the highest gallery, above us the sky, below us the city, a little toy town where busy ants were hastily crawling hither and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular business, and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the open country. It was my first glimpse of the big world. Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have gone to the top of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard work, but it repaid in full the mere physical exertion of climbing a few stairs. Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the land and the sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind friend the Watchman, who lived in a small shack, built in a sheltered corner of the gallery. He looked after the clock and was a father to the bells, and he warned of fires, but he enjoyed many free hours, and then he smoked a pipe and thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost fifty years before, and he had rarely read a book, but he had lived on top of his tower for so many years that he had absorbed the wisdom of that wide world which surrounded him on all sides. History, he knew well, for it was a living thing with him. There, he would say, pointing to a bend of the river. There, my boy, do you see those trees? That is where the Prince of Orange cut the dykes to drown the land and save Leiden. Or he would tell me the tale of the Old Moise, until the broad river ceased to be a convenient harbor and became a wonderful high road, carrying the ships of Debroiter and Tromp upon that famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the sea might be free to all. Then there were the little villages, clustering around the Protecting Church, which once, many years ago, had been the home of their patron saints. In the distance, we could see the Leaning Tower of Delft. Within sight of its high arches, William the Silent had been murdered, and there, Groscius had learned to construe his first Latin sentences, and, still further away, the long, low body of the Church of Gouda, the early home of the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of many an emperor, the charity boy whom the world came to know as Erasmus. Finally, the silver line of the endless sea, and, as a contrast immediately below us, the patchwork of roofs and chimneys and houses and gardens and hospitals and schools and railways, which we called our home. But the tower showed us the old home in a new light. The confused commotion of the streets and the marketplace of the factories and the workshop became the well-ordered expression of human energy and purpose. Best of all, the wide view of the glorious pass, which surrounded us on all sides, gave us new courage to face the problems of the future when we had gone back to our daily tasks. History is the mighty tower of experience, which time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong, and it can be done. Here I give you the key that will open the door. When you return, you too will understand the reason for my enthusiasm. Hendrick Willem von Luhn End of forward Read by Michelle Crandall, Fremont, CA, August 2008 Chapter 1 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Kara Schellenberg. The Story of Mankind by Hendrick van Luhn Chapter 1 The Setting of the Stage We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where there are we bound? Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question mark further and further towards that distant line beyond the horizon where we hope to find our answer. We have not gone very far. We still know very little, but we have reached the point where, with a fair degree of accuracy, we can guess at many things. In this chapter, I shall tell you how, according to our best belief, the stage was set for the first appearance of man. If we represent the time during which it has been possible for animal life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length, then the tiny line just below indicates the age during which man, or a creature more or less resembling man, has lived upon this earth. Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for the purpose of conquering the forces of nature. That is the reason why we are going to study him, rather than cats or dogs or horses, or any of the other animals who, all in their own way, have a very interesting historical development behind them. In the beginning, the planet upon which we live was, as far as we now know, a large ball of flaming matter, a tiny cloud of smoke in the endless ocean of space. Gradually, in the course of millions of years, the surface burned itself out and was covered with a thin layer of rocks. Upon these lifeless rocks the rain descended in endless torrents, wearing out the hard granite and carrying the dust to the valleys that lay hidden between the high cliffs of the steaming earth. Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the clouds and saw how this little planet was covered with a few small puddles which were to develop into the mighty oceans of the eastern and western hemispheres. Then one day the great wonder happened. What had been dead gave birth to life. The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea. For millions of years it drifted aimlessly with the currents, but during all that time it was developing certain habits that it might survive more easily upon the inhospitable earth. Some of these cells were happiest in the dark depths of the lakes and the pools. They took root in the slimy sediments which had been carried down from the tops of the hills, and they became plants. Others preferred to move about, and they grew strange, jointed legs like scorpions and began to crawl along the bottom of the sea amidst the plants and the pale green things that looked like jellyfishes. Still others, covered with scales, depended upon a swimming motion to go from place to place in their search for food, and gradually they populated the ocean with myriads of fishes. Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they had to search for new dwelling places. There was no more room for them at the bottom of the sea. Reluctantly they left the water and made a new home in the marshes and on the mud banks that lay at the foot of the mountains. Twice a day the tides of the ocean covered them with their brine. For the rest of the time the plants made the best of their uncomfortable situation and tried to survive in the thin air which surrounded the surface of the planet. After centuries of training they learned how to live as comfortably in the air as they had done in the water. They increased in size and became shrubs and trees and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which attracted the attention of the busy big bumblebees and the birds who carried the seeds far and wide until the whole earth had become covered with green pastures or lay dark under the shadow of the big trees. But some of the fishes too had begun to leave the sea and they had learned how to breathe with lungs as well as with gills. We call such creatures amphibious which means that they are able to live with equal ease on the land and in the water. The first frog who crosses your path can tell you all about the pleasures of the double existence of the amphibian. Once outside of the water these animals gradually adapted themselves more and more to life on land. Some became reptiles, creatures who crawl like lizards, and they shared the silence of the forest with the insects. And that they might move faster through the soft soil they improved upon their legs and their size increased until the world was populated with gigantic forms which the handbooks of biology list under the names of Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaurus and Brontosaurus who grew to be thirty to forty feet long and who could have played with elephants as a full grown cat plays with her kittens. Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in the tops of the trees which were then often more than a hundred feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the purpose of walking but it was necessary for them to move quickly from branch to branch and so they changed a part of their skin into a sort of parachute which stretched between the sides of their bodies and the small toes of their forefeet and gradually they covered this skinny parachute with feathers and made their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and developed into true birds. Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles died within a short time. We do not know the reason. Perhaps it was due to a sudden change in climate. Perhaps they had grown so large that they could neither swim nor walk nor crawl and they starved to death within sight but not within reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the million year old world empire of the big reptiles was over. The world now began to be occupied by very different creatures. They were the descendants of the reptiles but they were quite unlike these because they fed their young from the mame or the breasts of the mother wherefore modern science calls these animals mammals. They had shed the scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of the bird but they covered their bodies with hair. The mammals however developed other habits which gave their race a great advantage over the other animals. The female of the species carried the eggs of the young inside her body until they were hatched and while all other living beings up to that time had left their children exposed to the dangers of cold and heat and the attacks of wild beasts the mammals kept their young with them for a long time and sheltered them while they were still too weak to fight their enemies. In this way the young mammals were given a much better chance to survive because they learned many things from their mothers as you will know if you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens to take care of themselves and how to wash their faces and how to catch mice. But of these mammals I need not tell you much for you know them well. They surround you on all sides. They are your daily companions in the streets and in your home and you can see your less familiar cousins behind the bars of the zoological garden. And now we come to the parting of the ways when man suddenly leaves the endless procession of dumbly living and dying creatures and begins to use his reason to shape the destiny of his race. One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in its ability to find food and shelter. It had learned to use its forefeet for the purpose of holding its prey and by dint of practice it had developed a hand-like claw. After innumerable attempts it had learned how to balance the whole of the body upon the hind legs. This is a difficult act which every child has to learn anew although the human race has been doing it for over a million years. This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to both became the most successful hunter and could make a living in every climb. For greater safety it usually moved about in groups. It learned how to make strange grunts to warn its young of approaching danger and after many hundreds of thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises for the purpose of talking. This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your first man-like ancestor. End of Chapter 1 Read by Kara Schallenberg www.kray.org On August 6th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 2 Our earliest ancestors We know very little about the first true men. We have never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay, of an ancient soil, we have sometimes found pieces of their bones. These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. Anthropologists Learned scientists who devote their lives to the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom have taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our earliest ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy. The great great grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much smaller than the people of today. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had colored his skin a dark brown. His head and most of his body, his arms and legs, too, were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey. His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke and their lava. He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests as the pygmies of Africa do to this very day. When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his own young. Once in a while after a long and patient chase he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbit. These he would eat raw for he had never discovered that food tasted better when it was cooked. During the hours of day this primitive human being prowled about looking for things to eat. When night descended upon the earth he hid his wife and his children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders for he was surrounded on all sides by ferocious animals and when it was dark these animals began to prowl about looking for something to eat for their mates and their own young and they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where you must either eat or be eaten and life was very unhappy because it was full of fear and misery. In summer man was exposed to the scorching rays of the sun and during the winter his children would freeze to death in his arms. When such a creature hurt itself and hunting animals are forever breaking their bones or spreading their ankles he had no one to take care of him and he must die a horrible death. Like many of the animals who fill the zoo with their strange noises early man liked to jabber. That is to say he endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it pleased him to hear the sound of his own voice. In due time he learned that he could use the scuttural noise to warn his fellow beings whenever danger threatened and he gave certain little shrieks which came to mean there is a tiger or here come five elephants. Then the others grunted something back at him and their growl meant I see them or let us run away and hide and this was probably the origin of all language. But as I have said before of these beginnings we know so very little. Early man had no tools and he built himself no houses. He lived and died and left no trace of his existence except a few collar bones and a few pieces of his skull. These tell us that many thousands of years ago the world was inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different from all the other animals who had probably developed from another unknown ape-like animal which had learned to walk on its hind legs and use its forepaws as hands and who were most probably connected with the creatures who happened to be our own immediate ancestors. It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness. End of Chapter 2 Recorded by Michelle Crandall Fremont, California August 2008 Chapter 3 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Kara Schellenberg The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon Chapter 3 Prehistoric Man Prehistoric man begins to make things for himself. Early man did not know what time meant. He kept no records of birthdays or wedding anniversaries or the hour of death. He had no idea of days or weeks or even years. But in a general way he kept track of the seasons for he had noticed that the cold winter was invariably followed by the mild spring. Spring grew into the hot summer when fruits ripened and the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten and that summer ended when sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves from the trees and a number of animals were getting ready for the long hibernal sleep. But now something unusual and rather frightening had happened. Something was the matter with the weather. The warm days of summer had come very late. The fruits had not ripened. The tops of the mountains, which used to be covered with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a heavy burden of snow. Then one morning a number of wild people, different from the other creatures who lived in that neighbourhood, came wandering down from the region of the high peaks. They looked lean and appeared to be starving. They uttered sounds which no one could understand. They seemed to say that they were hungry. There was not food enough for both the old inhabitants and the newcomers. When they tried to stay more than a few days in a terrible battle with claw-like hands and feet and whole families were killed, the others fled back to their mountain slopes and died in the next blizzard. But the people in the forest were greatly frightened. All the time the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than they ought to have been. Finally in a gap between two high hills there appeared a tiny speck of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A gigantic glacier came sliding downhill. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen thunderstorms, torrents of ice and mud and blocks of granite suddenly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them while they slept. Century-old trees were crushed into kindling wood. And then it began to snow. It snowed for months and months. All the plants died and the animals fled in search of the southern sun. Man hoisted his young upon his back and followed them, but he could not travel as fast as the wilder creatures, and he was forced to choose between quick thinking or quick dying. He seems to have preferred the former, for he has managed to survive the terrible glacial periods which upon four different occasions threatened to kill every human being on the face of the earth. In the first place it was necessary that man clothed himself lest he freeze to death. He learned how to dig holes and cover them with branches and leaves, and in these traps he caught bears and hyenas, which he then killed with heavy stones and whose skins he used as coats for himself and his family. Next came the housing problem. This was simple. Many animals were in the habit of sleeping in dark caves. Man now followed their example, drove the animals out of their warm homes, and claimed them for his own. Even so, the climate was too severe for most people, and the old and the young died at a terrible rate. Then a genius bethought himself of the use of fire. Once, while out hunting, he had been caught in a forest fire. He remembered that he had been almost roasted to death by the flames. Thus far fire had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree was dragged into the cave and lighted by means of smoldering branches from a burning wood. This turned the cave into a cozy little room. And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire. It was not rescued until it had been well roasted. Man discovered that meat tasted better when cooked, and he then and there discarded one of the old habits which he had shared with the other animals and began to prepare his food. In this way thousands of years passed. Only the people with the cleverest brains survived. They had to struggle day and night against cold and hunger. They were forced to invent tools. They learned how to sharpen stones into axes and how to make hammers. They were obliged to put up large stores of food for the endless days of the winter, and they found that clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in the rays of the sun. And so the glacial period which had threatened to destroy the human race became its greatest teacher because it forced man to use his brain. End of Chapter 3 Read by Kara Schellenberg on August 6, 2008 in San Diego, California. The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Lohn Chapter 4, Hieroglyphics. This chapter contains several drawings which the reader will do her best to attempt to describe. Hieroglyphics. The Egyptians invent the art of writing and the record of history begins. These earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great European wilderness were rapidly learning many new things. It is safe to say that in due course of time they would have given up the ways of savages and would have developed a civilization of their own. But suddenly there came an end to their isolation. They were discovered. A traveler from an unknown Southland who had dared to cross the sea and the high mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of the European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt. The Valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilization thousands of years before the people of the West had dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves while we visit the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean where stood the earliest school of the human race. The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent farmers. They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest models for the churches in which we worship nowadays. They had invented a calendar which proved such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most important of all the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit of future generations. They had invented the art of writing. We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions is quite new. Without written documents we would be like cats and dogs who can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have gone before. In the first century before our era when the Romans came to Egypt they found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to have something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not interested in anything foreign and did not inquire into the origin of these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art of making such pictures had died several years before. Egypt, deprived of its independence, had become a storehouse filled with important historical documents which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use to either man or beast. Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British Indian colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile and his campaign was a failure. But quite accidentally the famous French expedition solved the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture language. One day a young French officer much bored by the dreary life of his little fortress on the Rosetta River a mouth of a Nile decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta and behold he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt it was covered with little figures but this particular slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It carried three inscriptions one of these was in Greek the Greek language was known all that is necessary so he reasoned is to compare the Greek text with the Egyptian figures and they will at once tell their secrets. The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta Stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from overwork but the main principles of Egyptian writing had become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is better known to us than the Mississippi River. We possess a written record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history. As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics the word means sacred writing have played such a great role in history a few of them in modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet. You ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to preserve the spoken word of the coming generations. Of course you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages written in the form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to understand the meaning of such messages. Ancient Egyptian however was not a sign language. The clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object which they represented as I shall try to explain to you now. Suppose that you were champagne and that you were examining a stack of papyrus sheets all covered with hieroglyphics. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw. Very well you would say that means of course that a farmer is on a tree. Then you take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age of 82. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of a man with a saw. Queens of 82 do not handle saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But what? That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. He discovered that the Egyptians had a phonetic writing a system of characters which reproduced the sound or phone of the spoken word in which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words into a written form with the help of only a few dots and dashes and pot hooks. Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. The word saw either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter's shop the contents of the verb to see. This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries. First of all, it had meant only the particular tool which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle of a verb. After several hundred years the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and the picture here's a picture of a little man with a saw came to stand for a single letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in hieroglyphics. Here in the text you see a picture of a man's face a bee, a leaf another picture of a man's face a man carrying a saw and a giraffe. The man's face picture either means one of these two round objects in your head which allow you to see or it means I, the person who is talking. A, and here you see a picture of the bee, is either an insect which gathers honey or it represents the verb to be which means to exist. Again it may be the first part of a verb like become or behave. In this particular instance it is followed by and here is a picture of a leaf which means a leaf or leave. The sound of all three of these words is the same. The I, you know all about. Finally you get the picture of a and here is a picture of the giraffe. It is a giraffe. It is a part of the old sign language out of which the hieroglyphics developed. You can now read that sentence without much difficulty. I believe I saw a giraffe. When they invented this system the Egyptians developed it during thousands of years until they could write anything they wanted and they used these canned words to send messages to friends to keep business accounts and to keep a record of the history of their country that future generations might benefit by the mistakes of the past. End of chapter 4 Recorded by Michelle Crandall Prima, California August 2008 Chapter 5 The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Kara Schellenberg The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon Chapter 5 The Nile Valley The beginning of civilization The Valley of the Nile The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful thither man has traveled to make his home. The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at an early date. From the interior of Africa and from the desert of Arabia and from the western part of Asia people had flocked to Egypt to claim their share of the rich farms. Together these invaders had formed a new race which called itself Remi or The Men just as we sometimes call America God's own country. They had good reason to be grateful to a fate which had carried them to this narrow strip of land. In the summer of each year the Nile turned the valley into a shallow lake and when the waters receded all the grain fields of the most fertile clay. In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all the arable land was not in the valley but a complicated system of small canals and well sweeps carried water from the river level to the top of the highest banks and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it throughout the land. While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend sixteen hours out of every twenty-four gathering food for himself and the members of his tribe the Egyptian peasant or the inhabitant of the Egyptian city found himself possessed of a certain leisure. He used this spare time to make himself many things that were merely ornamental and not in the least bit useful. More than that one day he discovered that his brain was capable of thinking all kinds of thoughts which had nothing to do with the problems of eating and sleeping and finding a home for the children. The Egyptian began to speculate upon many strange problems that confronted him. Where did the stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which frightened him so terribly? Who made the river Nile rise with such regularity that it was possible to base the appearance and the disappearance of the annual floods? Who was he himself a strange little creature surrounded on all sides by death and sickness and yet happy and full of laughter? He asked these many questions and certain people obligingly stepped forward to answer these inquiries to the best of their ability. The Egyptians called them priests and they became the guardians of his thoughts They were highly learned men who were entrusted with the sacred task of keeping the written records. They understood that it is not good for a man to think only of his immediate advantage in this world and they drew his attention to the days of the future when his soul would dwell beyond the mountains of the west and must give an account of his deeds to Osiris, the mighty God who was the ruler of the living and the dead and who judged their merits. Indeed, the priests made so much of that future day in the realm of Isis and Osiris that the Egyptians began to regard life merely as a short preparation for the hereafter and turned the teeming valley of the Nile into a land devoted to the dead. In a strange way the Egyptians had come to believe that no soul could enter the realm of Osiris without the possession of the body which had been therefore as soon as a man was dead his relatives took his corpse and had it embalmed. For weeks it was soaked in a solution of natron and then it was filled with pitch. The Persian word for pitch was mumii and the embalmed body was called a mummy. It was wrapped in yards and yards of specially prepared linen and it was placed in a specially prepared coffin ready to be removed but an Egyptian grave was a real home where the body was surrounded by pieces of furniture and musical instruments to while away the dreary hours of waiting and by little statues of cooks and bakers and barbers that the occupant of this dark home might be decently provided with food and need not go about unshaven. Originally these graves had been dug into the rocks of the western mountains but as the Egyptians moved northward they were obliged to build their cemeteries in the desert. The desert however is full of wild animals and equally wild robbers and they broke into the graves and disturbed the mummy or stole the jewelry that had been buried with the body. To prevent such unholy desecration the Egyptians used to build small mounds of stones on top of the graves. These little mounds gradually grew in size because the rich people built higher mounds than the poor and there was a good deal of competition to see who could make the highest hill of stones. The record was made by King Khufu whom the Greeks called Chiops and who lived thirty centuries before our era. His mound which the Greeks called a pyramid because the Egyptian word for high was pyrimus was over five hundred feet high. It covered more than thirteen acres of desert which is three times as much space as that occupied by the church of St. Peter the largest edifice of the Christian world. During twenty years over a hundred thousand men were busy carrying the necessary stones from the other side of the river ferrying them across the Nile how they ever managed to do this we do not understand dragging them in many instances a long distance across the desert and finally hoisting them into their correct position but so well did the King's architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow passageway which leads to the royal tomb in the heart of the stone monster has never yet been pushed out of shape by the weight of those thousands of tons of stone which press upon it from all sides. End of Chapter 5 Read by Kara Schellenberg on August 6th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 6 of the Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Michelle Crandall The Story of Mankind by Hendrick von Lohn Chapter 6 The Story of Egypt The Rise and Fall of Egypt The River Nile was a kind friend but occasionally it was a hard taskmaster It taught the people who lived along its banks the noble art of teamwork They depended upon each other to build their irrigation trenches and keep their dykes in repair In this way they learned how to get along with their neighbors and their mutual benefit association quite easily developed into an organized state Then one man became more powerful than most of his neighbors and he became the leader of the community and their commander in chief when the envious neighbors of western Asia invaded the prosperous valley In due course of time he became their king and ruled all the land from the Mediterranean to the mountains of the west But these political adventures of the old pharaohs the word meant the man who lived in the big house Rarely interested the patient and toiling peasant of the grain fields Provided he was not obliged to pay more taxes to his king than he thought just he accepted the rule of pharaoh as he accepted the rule of mighty Osiris It was different however when a foreign invader came and robbed him of his possessions After 20 centuries of independent life a savage Arab tribe of shepherds called the Hixos came to Egypt and for 500 years they were the masters of the valley of the Nile They were highly unpopular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long wandering through the desert and who helped the foreign usurper by acting as his tax gatherers and his civil servants But shortly after the year 1700 BC the people of Thebes came to a resolution and after a long struggle the Hixos were driven out of the country and Egypt was free once more A thousand years later when Assyria conquered all of western Asia Egypt became a part of the empire of the Sardinopolis In the 7th century BC it became once more an independent state which obeyed the rule of a king who lived in the city of Seis in the delta of the Nile But in the year 525 BC Canvases the king of the Persians took possession of Egypt and in the 4th century BC when Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great Egypt too became a Macedonian province It regained a semblance of independence when one of Alexander's generals set himself up as king of a new Egyptian state and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies who resided in the newly built city of Alexandria Finally in the year 39 BC the Romans came The last Egyptian queen Cleopatra tried her best to save the country Her beauty and charm were more dangerous to the Roman generals than half a dozen Egyptian army corps Twice she was successful in her attacks upon the hearts of her Roman conquerors But in the year 30 BC Augustus the nephew and heir of Caesar landed in Alexandria He did not share his late uncle's admiration for the lovely princess He destroyed her armies but spared her life that he might make her march in his triumph as part of the spoils of war When Cleopatra heard of this plan she killed herself by taking poison and Egypt became a Roman province End of chapter 6 Recording by Michelle Crandall Fremont, California August 2008 Chapter 7 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Kara Schellenberg The Story of Mankind by Hendrick Fanlon Chapter 7 Mesopotamia Mesopotamia The second center of eastern civilization I am going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid and I am going to ask that you imagine yourself possessed of the eyes of a hawk way, way off in the distance far beyond the yellow sands of the desert you will see something green and shimmering it is a valley situated between two rivers it is the paradise of the Old Testament it is the land of mystery and wonder which the Greeks called Mesopotamia the country between the rivers the names of the two rivers are the Euphrates which the Babylonians called the Poratu and the Tigris which was known as the Diklat they begin their course to the snows of the mountains of Armenia where Noah's Ark found a resting place and slowly they flow through the southern plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian Gulf they perform a very useful service they turn the arid regions of western Asia into a fertile garden the valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had offered them food upon fairly easy terms the land between the rivers was popular for the same reason it was a country full of promise and both the inhabitants of the northern mountains and the tribes which roamed through the southern deserts tried to claim this territory as their own and most exclusive possession the constant rivalry between the mountaineers and the desert nomads led to endless warfare only the strongest and the bravest could hope to survive and that will explain why Mesopotamia became the home of a very strong race of men and was capable of creating a civilization which was in every respect as important as that of Egypt End of Chapter 7 Read on August 6th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 8 The Sumerians The Sumerian Nail Writers whose clay tablets tell us the story of Assyria and Babylonia the Great Semitic Melting Pot The 15th Century was an age of great discoveries Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Cathay and stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent an Austrian Bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel eastward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy a voyage which led to complete failure for Moscow was not visited by western men until a generation later meanwhile a certain Venetian by the name of Barbaro had explored the ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of baked clay but Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the end of the 18th Century that the first Cuneiform inscriptions so called because the letters were wedge shaped and wedge is called Cuneas in Latin were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor named Niber then it took 30 years before a patient German school master by the name of Grotvend had deciphered the first four letters the D, the A, the R the S H the name of the Persian king Darius and another 20 years had to go by until a British officer Henry Rawlinson who found the famous inscription of Behestan gave us a workable key to the nail writing of western Asia compared to the problem of deciphering these nail writings the job of Champaillon had been an easy one the Egyptians used pictures but the Sumerians the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia who had hit upon the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay had discarded pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V shaped figures which showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been developed a few examples will show you what I mean in the beginning a star when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows here is a picture of a star this sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of heaven was added to that of star the picture was simplified in this way here is a more stylized picture of a star which made it even more of a puzzle in the same way an ox changed from here you see a small picture of an ox's head into here is another picture it is several lines and triangles and a fish changed from here is a picture of a fish into here is a picture with some more triangles and lines representing a fish the sun was originally a plain circle here is a picture of a plain circle and became a picture with four triangles in the insert of a square if we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an here is a picture of a ship look like and here is a picture of a very stylized ship this system of writing down our ideas looks rather complicated but for more than 30 centuries it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races which forced their way into the fertile valley the story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest first the Sumerians came from the north they were a white people who had lived in the mountains they had been accustomed to worship their gods on the tops of hills after they had entered the plain they constructed artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars they did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their towers with sloping galleries our engineers have borrowed this idea as you may see in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to another we may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumerians but we do not know it the Sumerians were entirely absorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later date their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia the Jews saw them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and they called them the towers of Babyloni or towers of Babel here is a picture of a tower of Babel in the 40th century before our era the Sumerians had entered Mesopotamia they were soon afterwards overpowered by the Akkadians one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are known as the Semites because in the olden days people believed them to be direct descendants of Shem one of the three sons of Noah a thousand years later the Akkadians were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites another Semitic desert tribe whose great king Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who here is a picture of the holy city of Babylon gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonians state the best administered empire of the ancient world next the Hittites whom you will also meet in the Old Testament overran the fertile valley and destroyed whatever they could not carry away they in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert god Asher who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until the end of the 7th century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans also a Semitic tribe reestablished Babylon and made that city the most important capital of that day Nebuchadnezzar the best known of their kings established the study of science and our modern knowledge of astronomy and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which were discovered by the Chaldeans in the year 538 BC a crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans 200 years later they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great who turned the fertile valley the old melting pot of so many Semitic races to a Greek province next came the Romans and after the Romans the Turks and Mesopotamia the second center of the world civilization became a vast wilderness where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory here is a picture of the walled city of Nineveh End of Chapter 8 Recording by Michelle Crandall Fremont, California September 2008 of The Story of Mankind this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Kara Schellenberg The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon Chapter 9 Moses The Story of Moses the leader of the Jewish people sometime during the 20th century before our era a small and unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left its old home which was situated in the land of Ur on the mouth of the Euphrates and had tried to find new pastures within the domain of the kings of Babylonia they had been driven away by the royal soldiers and they had moved westward looking for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they might set up their tents this tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or as we call them the Jews they had wandered far and wide and after many years of dreary peregrinations they had been given shelter in Egypt for more than five centuries they had dwelt among the Egyptians and when their adopted country had been overrun by the Hyksos Marauders as I told you in the story of Egypt they had managed to make themselves useful to the foreign invader and had been left in the undisturbed possession of the surrounding fields but after a long war of independence the Egyptians had driven the Hyksos out of the valley of the Nile and then the Jews had come upon evil times for they had been degraded to the rank of common slaves and they had been forced to work on the royal roads and on the pyramids and as the frontiers were guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it had been impossible for the Jews to escape after many years of suffering they were saved from their miserable fate by a young Jew called Moses who for a long time had dwelt in the desert and there had learned to appreciate the simple virtues of his earliest ancestors who had kept away from cities and city life and had refused to let themselves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a foreign civilization Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways of the patriarchs he succeeded in evading the Egyptian troops that were sent after him and led his fellow tribesmen into the heart of the plain at the foot of Mount Sinai during his long and lonely life in the desert he had learned to revere the strength of the great God of the thunder and the storm who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds depended for life and light and breath this God one of the many divinities who were widely worshiped in western Asia was called Jehovah and through the teaching of Moses he became the sole master of the Hebrew race one day Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews it was whispered that he had gone away carrying two tablets of rough hewn stone that afternoon the top of the mountain was lost to sight the darkness of a terrible storm hid it from the eye of man but when Moses returned behold, there stood engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah had spoken unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and the blinding flashes of his lightning and from that moment Jehovah was recognized by all the Jews as the highest master of their fate the only true God who had taught them how to live holy lives when he bade them follow the wise lessons of his ten commandments they followed Moses when he bade them continue their journey they obeyed him when he told them what to eat and drink and what to avoid that they might keep well in the hot climate and finally after many years of wandering they came to a land which seemed pleasant and prosperous it was called Palestine which means the country of the Pilistu the Philistines a small tribe of Cretans who had settled along the coast after they had been driven away from their own island unfortunately the mainland Palestine was already inhabited by another Semitic race called the Canaanites but the Jews forced their way into the valleys and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple in a town which they named Jerusalem the home of peace as for Moses he was no longer the leader of his people he had been allowed to see the mountain ridges of Palestine from afar then he had closed his tired eyes for all time but faithfully and hard to please Jehovah not only had he guided his brother and out of foreign slavery into the free and independent life of a new home but he had also made the Jews the first of all nations to worship a single God End of Chapter 9 read on August 6th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 10 of the Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Michelle Crandall The Story of Mankind by Hendrick von Lohn Chapter 10 The Phoenicians The Phoenicians who gave us our alphabet The Phoenicians who were the neighbors of the Jews were a Semitic tribe which at a very early age they had built two well fortified towns Terror and Sidon and within a short time they had gained a monopoly of the trade of the western seas Their ships went regularly to Greece and Italy and Spain and they even ventured beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to visit the Silly Islands where they could buy tin Wherever they went they built themselves small trading stations called colonies Many of these were the origin of modern cities such as Kadith and Marseille Here is a picture of a Phoenician trader They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a good profit They were not troubled by a conscience If we are to believe all their neighbors they did not know what the words honesty or integrity meant They regarded a well filled treasure chest the highest ideal of all good citizens Indeed they were very unpleasant people and did not have a single friend Nevertheless they have rendered all coming generations one service of the greatest possible value They gave us our alphabet The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing invented by the Sumerians but they regarded these pot hooks as a clumsy waste of time They were practical businessmen and could not spend hours two or three letters They set to work and invented a new system of writing which was greatly superior to the old one They borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of the wedge shaped figures of the Sumerians They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older system for the advantage of speed and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short and handy alphabet of 22 letters In due course of time this alphabet traveled across the Aegean Sea and entered Greece The Greeks added a few letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy The Romans modified the figure somewhat and in turn taught them to the wild barbarians of western Europe Those wild barbarians were our own ancestors and that is the reason why this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the Nailscript of the Sumerians End of Chapter 10 Recording by Michelle Crandall Fremont, California September 2008 Chapter 11 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Kara Schellenberg The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Fanlone Chapter 11 The Indo-Europeans The Indo-European Persians conquer the Semitic and the Egyptian world The world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia had existed almost 30 centuries and the venerable races of the fertile valley were getting old and tired Their doom was sealed and a new and more energetic race appeared upon the horizon We call this race the Indo-European race because it conquered not only Europe but also made itself the ruling class in the country which is now known as British India These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites but they spoke a different language which is regarded as the common ancestor of all European tongues with the exception of Hungarian and the Basque dialects of northern Spain When we first hear of them they had been living along the shores of the Caspian Sea for many centuries but one day they had packed their tents and they had wandered forth in search of a new home Some of them had moved into the mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and that is why we call them Aryans Others had followed the setting sun and they had taken possession of the plains of Europe as I shall tell you when I give you the story of Greece and Rome For the moment we must follow the Aryans Under the leadership of Zara Thustra or Zoro Raster who was their great teacher many of them had left their mountain homes to follow the swiftly flowing Indus River on its way to the sea Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western Asia and there they had founded half independent communities of the Medes and the Persians two peoples whose names we have copied from the old Greek history books In the 7th century before the birth of Christ the Medes had established a kingdom of their own called Medea but this perished when Cyrus the chief of a clan known as the Anshan made himself king of all the Persian tribes and started upon a career of conquest which soon made him and his children the undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and of Egypt Indeed with such energy did these Indo-European Persians push their triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon found themselves in serious difficulties with certain other Indo-European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe and had taken possession of the Greek peninsula and the islands of the Aegean Sea These difficulties led to the three famous wars between Greece and Persia during which King Darius and King Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern part of the peninsula They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to get a foothold upon the European continent but in this they did not succeed The Navy of Athens proved unconquerable By cutting off the lines of supplies of the Persian armies the Greek sailors invariably forced the Asiatic rulers to return to their base It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient teacher and Europe, the young and eager pupil A great many of the other chapters of this book will tell you how the struggle between east and west has continued until this very day End of Chapter 11 read by Kara Schellenberg on August 6th, 2008 in San Diego, California and the history of the story of mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Michele Crandall The story of mankind by Hendrik Von Lohn Chapter 12 The Aegean Sea The people of the Aegean Sea carried the civilization of Old Asia into the wilderness of Europe When Rick Schleyman was a little boy his father told him the story of Troy He liked that story better than anything else he had ever heard and he made up his mind that as soon as he was big enough to leave home he would travel to Greece and find Troy That he was the son of a poor country person in a Mecklenburg village did not bother him He knew that he would need money but he decided to gather a fortune first and do the digging afterwards As a matter of fact he managed to get a large fortune within a very short time and as soon as he had enough money to equip an expedition he went to the northwest corner of Asia Minor where he supposed that Troy had been situated Here you see a picture of a Trojan horse In that particular nook of Old Asia Minor stood a high mound covered with grain fields According to tradition it had been the home of Priamis, the king of Troy If Schlemen, whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge wasted no time in preliminary explorations At once he began to dig and he dug with such zeal and such speed that his trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he was looking and carried him into the ruins of another buried town which was at least a thousand years older than the Troy of which Homer had written Then something very interesting occurred If Schlemen had found a few polished stone hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery no one would have been surprised Instead of discovering such objects which people had generally associated with the prehistoric men who had lived in these regions before the coming of the Greeks Schlemen found beautiful statuettes and very costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was unknown to the Greeks He ventured the suggestion that in the ten centuries before the Great Trojan War the coast of the Aegean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men who in many ways had been the superiors of the wild Greek tribes who had invaded their country and had destroyed their civilization or absorbed it until it had lost all trace of originality Here you see a picture of a mound that has several cities buried underneath different layers of sediment entitled Schlemen digs for Troy And this proved to be the case In the late 70s of the last century Schlemen visited the ruins of Mycenae ruins which were so old that Roman guidebooks marveled at their antiquity There again beneath the flat slabs of stone of a small round enclosure Schlemen stumbled upon a wonderful treasure trove which had been left behind by those mysterious people who had covered the Greek coast with their cities and who had built walls so big and so heavy and so strong that the Greeks called them the works of the Titans those god-like giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with mountain peaks Here you see a picture of Mycenae and Argolis a man standing underneath a wall which has a very large arch in it A very careful study of these many relics has done away with some of the romantic features of the story The makers of those early works of art and the builders of these strong fortresses were no sorcerers but simple sailors and traders They had lived in Crete and on the many small islands of the Aegean Sea They had been hardy mariners and they had turned the Aegean into a center of commerce for the exchange of goods between the highly civilized east and the slowly developing wilderness of the European mainland Here you see a picture of an Aegean ship on the Aegean Sea it's got a sail and it's being tossed about by the waves For more than a thousand years they had maintained an island empire which had developed a very high form of art Indeed, their most important city, Snosis on the northern coast of Crete had been entirely modern in its insistence upon hygiene and comfort The palace had been properly drained and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Snosians had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto unknown bathtub The palace of their king had been famous for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall The cellars underneath this palace where the wine and the grain and the olive oil were stored had been so vast and had so greatly impressed the first Greek visitors that they had given rise to the story of the labyrinth the name which we give to a structure with so many complicated passages that is almost impossible to find our way out once the front door has closed upon our frightened cells But what finally became of this great Aegean empire and what caused its sudden downfall that I cannot tell The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing but no one has yet been able to decipher their inscriptions Their history, therefore, is unknown to us We have to reconstruct the record of their inventures from the ruins which the Aegeans have left behind These ruins make it clear that the Aegean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilized race which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe Unless we are very much mistaken the savages who were responsible for the destruction of the Cretan and the Aegean civilization were none other than certain tribes of wandering shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky peninsula between the Adriatic and the Aegean seas and who are known to us as Greeks Here you see a large map that depicts the island bridges between Asia and Europe which are a series of islands that connect Asia and its environs to different places in Europe End of Chapter 12 Recorded by Michelle Crandall, Fremont, California November 2008 Chapter 13 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Fanlon Chapter 13 The Greeks Meanwhile the Indo-European tribe of the Hellenes was taking possession of Greece The pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning to show the first signs of decay Hammurabi, the wise king of Babylon had been dead and buried several centuries when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along the banks of the river Danube and wandered southward in search of fresh pastures They called themselves Hellenes after Helen, the son of Duicalion and Pira According to the old myths these were the only two human beings who had escaped the great flood which countless years before had destroyed all the people of the world when they had grown so wicked that they disgusted Zeus the mighty god who lived on Mount Olympus Of these early Hellenes we know nothing Thucydides, the historian of the fall of Athens describing his earliest ancestors said that they did not amount to very much and this was probably true They were very ill-mannered They lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild dogs who guarded their sheep They had very little respect for other people's rights and they killed the natives of the Greek peninsula who were called the Pelasgians and stole their farms and took their cattle and made their wives and daughters slaves and wrote endless songs praising the courage of the clan of the Achaeans who had led the Hellenic advance guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponnesus But here and there, on the tops of high rocks they saw the castles of the Achaeans and those they did not attack for they feared the metal swords and the spears of the Achaean soldiers and knew that they could not hope to defeat them with their clumsy stone axes For many centuries they continued to wander from valley to valley and from mountain side to mountain side Then the whole of the land had been occupied and the migration had come to an end That moment was the beginning of Greek civilization The Greek farmer, living within sight of the Achaean colonies was finally driven by curiosity to visit his haughty neighbors He discovered that he could learn many useful things from the men who dwelt behind the high stone walls of Mycenae and Tyrens He was a clever pupil Within a short time he mastered the art of handling those strange iron weapons which the Achaeans had brought from Babylon and from Thebes He came to understand the mysteries of navigation He began to build little boats for his own use And when he had learned everything the Achaeans could teach him he turned upon his teachers and drove them back to their islands Soon afterwards he ventured forth upon the sea and conquered all the cities of the Achaean Finally in the fifteenth century before our era he plundered and ravaged Knossos and ten centuries after their first appearance upon the scene the Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece, of the Achaean and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor Troy, the last great commercial stronghold of the older civilization was destroyed in the eleventh century B.C. European history was to begin in all seriousness End of Chapter 13 Recorded on Monday, August 25th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 14 of the Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Michelle Crandall The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Lohn Chapter 14 The Greek Cities The Greek Cities that were released states We modern people love the sound of the word big We pride ourselves upon the fact that we belong to the biggest country in the world and possess the biggest navy and grow the biggest oranges and potatoes and we love to live in cities of millions of inhabitants and when we are dead we are buried in the biggest cemetery of the whole state A citizen of ancient Greece could he have heard us talk would not have known what we meant moderation in all things was the ideal of his life and mere bulk did not impress him at all and this love of moderation was not merely a hollow phrase used upon special occasions it influenced the life of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the hour of their death it was part of their literature and it made them build small but perfect temples it found expression in the clothes which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets of their wives it followed the crowds that went to the theater and made them hoot down any playwright against the iron law of good taste or good sense here you see a picture of Mount Olympus where the gods lived it is a two-paked mountain with a bowl in the middle the Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their politicians and in their most popular athletes when a powerful runner came to Sparta and boasted that he could stand longer on one foot than any other man in Hellas the people drove him from the city because he prided himself upon an accomplishment at which he could be beaten by any common goose that is all very well you will say and no doubt it is a great virtue to care so much for moderation and perfection but why should the Greeks have been the only people to develop this quality in olden times for an answer I shall point to the way in which the Greeks lived the people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the subjects of a mysterious supreme ruler who lived miles and miles away from a dark palace and who was rarely seen by the masses of the population the Greeks on the other hand were free citizens of a hundred independent little cities the largest of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large modern village when a peasant who lived in Ur said that he was a Babylonian he meant that he was one of millions of other people who paid tribute to the king who at that particular moment happened to be a master of western Asia but when a Greek said proudly that he was an Athenian or a Theban he spoke of a small town which was both his home and his country and which recognized no master but the will of the people in the marketplace to the Greek his fatherland was the place where he was born where he had spent his earliest years playing hide and seek amidst the forbidden rocks of the Acropolis where he had grown into manhood with a thousand other boys and girls and his nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your own schoolmates his fatherland was the holy soil where his father and mother lay buried it was the small house within the high city walls where his wife and children lived in safety it was a complete world which covered no more than four or five acres of rocky land don't you see how these surroundings must have influenced a man in everything he did and said and thought the people of Babylon and Syria and Egypt had been part of a vast mob they had been lost in the multitude the Greek on the other hand had never lost touch with his immediate surroundings he never ceased to be a part of the little town where everybody knew everyone else he felt that his intelligent neighbors were watching him whatever he did whether he wrote plays or made statues out of marble or composed songs he remembered that his efforts were judged by all the free born citizens of his hometown who knew about such things this knowledge forced him to strive after perfection and perfection as he had been taught from childhood was not possible without moderation in this hard school the Greeks learned to excel in many things they created new forms of government and new forms of literature and new ideals in art which we have never been able to surpass they performed these miracles in little villages that covered less ground than four or five modern city blocks and look what finally happened in the fourth century before our era Alexander of Macedonia conquered the world as soon as he had done with fighting Alexander decided that he must bestow the benefits of the true Greek genius upon all mankind he took it away from the little cities and the little villages he had to blossom and bear fruit amidst the vast royal residences of his newly acquired empire but the Greeks removed from the familiar side of their own temples removed from the well-known sounds and smells of their own crooked streets at once lost the cheerful joy and the marvelous sense of moderation which had inspired the work of their hands and brains while they labored for the glory of their old city-states they became cheap artisans content with second rate work the day the little city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and were forced to become part of a big nation the old Greek spirit died and it has been dead ever since End of Chapter 14 recorded by Michelle Crandall Fremont, California November 2008 Chapter 15 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon Chapter 15 Greek Self-Government The Greeks were the first people to try the difficult experiment of self-government In the beginning all the Greeks had been equally rich and equally poor Every man had owned a certain number of cows and sheep Mud hut had been his castle He had been free to come and go as he wished Whenever it was necessary to discuss matters of public importance all the citizens had gathered in the marketplace One of the older men of the village was elected chairman and it was his duty to see that everybody had a chance to express his views In case of war a particularly energetic and self-confident villager was chosen commander in chief but the same people who had voluntarily done the right to be their leader claimed an equal right to deprive him of his job once the danger had been averted But gradually the village had grown into a city Some people had worked hard and others had been lazy a few had been unlucky and still others had been just plain dishonest in dealing with their neighbors and had gathered wealth As a result the city no longer consisted of a number of men who were equally well off On the contrary it was inhabited by a class of very rich people and a large class of very poor ones There had been another change the old commander in chief who had been willingly recognized as headman or king because he knew how to lead his men to victory had disappeared from the scene His place had been taken by the nobles a class of rich people who during the course of time had got hold of an undue share of the farms and estates These nobles enjoyed many advantages They were the common crowd of free men They were able to buy the best weapons which were to be found on the market of the eastern Mediterranean They had much spare time in which they could practice the art of fighting They lived in strongly built houses and they could hire soldiers to fight for them They were constantly quarreling among each other to decide who should rule the city The victorious noblemen then assumed a sort of kingship over all his neighbors and governed the town until he in turn was driven away by still another ambitious noblemen Such a king, by the grace of his soldiers was called a tyrant and during the seventh and sixth centuries before our era every Greek city was for a time ruled by such tyrants many of whom by the way happened to be exceedingly capable men But in the long run this state of affairs became unbearable Then attempts were made to bring about reforms grew the first democratic government of which the world has a record It was early in the seventh century that the people of Athens decided to do some house cleaning and give the large number of free men once more a voice in the government as they were supposed to have had in the days of their Achaean ancestors They asked a man by the name of Draco to provide them with a set of laws that would protect the poor against the aggressions of the rich Draco set to work Unfortunately he was a professional lawyer and very much out of touch with ordinary life In his eyes a crime was a crime and when he had finished his code the people of Athens discovered that these Draconian laws were so severe that they could not possibly be put into effect There would not have been rope enough to hang all the criminals under their new system of jurisprudence which made the stealing of an apple a capital offence The Athenians looked about for a more humane reformer At last they found someone who could do that sort of thing better than anybody else His name was Solon He belonged to a noble family and he had travelled all over the world and had studied the forms of government of many other countries After a careful study of the subject Solon gave Athens a set of laws which bore testimony to that wonderful principle of moderation which was part of the Greek character He tried to improve the condition of the peasant without however destroying the prosperity of the nobles who were or rather who could be of such great service to the state as soldiers To protect the poorer classes against abuse on the part of the judges who were always elected from the class of the nobles because they received no salary Solon made a provision whereby a citizen with a grievance had the right to state his case in the memory of thirty of his fellow Athenians Most important of all Solon forced the average free man to take a direct and personal interest in the affairs of the city No longer could he stay at home and say, oh, I'm too busy today or it is raining and I had better stay indoors He was expected to do his share to be at the meeting of the town council and carry part of the responsibility for the safety and the prosperity of the state This government by the Demos, the people was often far from successful There was too much idle talk There were too many hateful and spiteful scenes between rivals for official honor But it taught the Greek people to be independent and to rely upon themselves for their salvation and that was a very good thing End of Chapter 15 read on August 25th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 16 of the Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Michelle Crandall The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Lohn Chapter 16 Greek Life How the Greeks Lived But how, you will ask, did the ancient Greeks have time to look after their families and their business if they were forever running to the marketplace to discuss affairs of state? In this chapter I shall tell you In all matters of government the Greek democracy recognized only one class of citizens, the free men Every Greek city was composed of a number of free-born citizens a large number of slaves and a sprinkling of foreigners At rare intervals usually during a war needed for the army the Greeks showed themselves willing to confer the rights of citizenship upon the barbarians as they called the foreigners but this was an exception Citizenship was a matter of birth You were an Athenian because your father and your grandfather had been Athenians before you But however great your merits as a traitor or a soldier if you were born of non-Athenian parents you remained a foreigner until the end of time This city therefore whenever it was not ruled by a king or a tyrant was run by and for the free men and this would not have been possible without a large army of slaves who outnumbered the free citizens at the rate of six or five to one and who performed those tasks to which we modern people must devote most of our time and energy if we wished to provide for our families and pay the rent of our apartments The slaves did all the cooking and plastic-making of the entire city They were the tailors and the carpenters and the jewelers and the school teachers and the bookkeepers and they tended the store and looked after the factory while the master went to the public meeting to discuss questions of war and peace or visited the theater to see the latest play of Escalus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary ideas of Euripides who had dared to express certain doubts Here you see a picture of a temple upon the hill with all the free men indicated as being inside and discussing and then all of the slaves down around working at the foot of the hill in the marketplace and elsewhere and it's titled Greek Society Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modern club All the free born citizens were hereditary members and all the slaves were hereditary servants and waited upon the needs of their masters and it was very pleasant to be a member of the organization But when we talk about slaves we do not mean the sort of people about whom you have read in the pages of Uncle Tom's cabin It is true that the position of those slaves who tilled the fields was a very unpleasant one but the average free man who had come down in the world and who had been obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand led just as miserable a life In the cities furthermore many of the slaves were more prosperous than the poorer classes of the free men For the Greeks who loved moderation in all things did not like to treat their slaves after the fashion which afterward was so common in Rome where a slave had as few rights as an engine in a modern factory and could be thrown to the wild animals upon the smallest pretext The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution without which no city could possibly become a truly civilized people The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are performed by the business men and the professional men As for those household duties which take up so much of the time of your mother and which worry your father when he comes home from his office the Greeks who understood the value of leisure had reduced such duties to the smallest possible minimum by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity To begin with their homes were very plain Even the rich nobles spent their lives in a sort of adobe barn which lacked all the comforts which a modern workman expects as his natural right A Greek home consisted of four walls and a roof There was a door which led into the street but there were no windows The kitchen, the living rooms and the sleeping quarters were built around an open courtyard in which there was a small fountain or a statue and a few plants to make it look bright In this courtyard the family lived when it did not rain or when it was not too cold In one corner of the yard the cook who was a slave prepared the meal and in another corner the teacher who was also a slave taught the children and the alphabeta gamma and the tables of multiplication and in still another corner the lady of the house who rarely left her domain since it was not considered good form for a married woman to be seen on the street too often there seemed stresses who were slaves and in the little office right off the door the master was inspecting the accounts which the overseer of his farm who was a slave had just brought to him When dinner was ready the family came together but the meal was a very simple one and did not take much time The Greeks seemed to have regarded eating as an unavoidable evil and not a pastime which kills many dreary hours and eventually kills many dreary people They drank on bread and on wine with a little meat and some green vegetables They drank water only when nothing else was available because they did not think it very healthy They loved to call on each other for dinner but our idea of a festive meal where everybody is supposed to eat much more than is good for him would have disgusted them They came together at the table for the purpose of a good talk and a good glass of wine and water but as they were moderate people they despised those who drank too much Here you see a picture of a temple on a hill with a small lake at the foot of the hill and a road winding up the side to the temple The same simplicity which prevailed in the dining room also dominated their choice of clothes They liked to be clean and well-groomed to have their hair and beards neatly cut to feel their bodies strong with the exercise and the swimming of the gymnasium but they never followed the Asiatic fashion which prescribed loud colours and strange patterns They wore a long white coat and they managed to look as smart as a modern Italian officer in his long blue cape They loved to see their wives were ornaments but they thought it very vulgar to display their wealth or their wives in public and whenever the women left their home they were as inconspicuous as possible In short the story of Greek life is a story not only of moderation but also of simplicity The chairs and tables and books and houses and carriages are out to take up a great deal of their owner's time In the end they invariably make him their slave and his hours are spent looking after their wants keeping them polished and brushed and painted The Greeks before everything else wanted to be free both in mind and in body that they might maintain their liberty and be truly free in spirit they reduce their daily needs to the lowest possible point End of Chapter 16 Recorded by Michelle Crandall Fremont, California, November 2008 Chapter 17 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon Chapter 17 The Greek Theatre The origins of the theatre the first form of public amusement At a very early stage of their history the Greeks had begun to collect the poems which had been written in honour of their brave ancestors who had driven the Pulaskians out of Hellas and had destroyed the power of Troy These poems were recited in public and everybody came to listen to them But the theatre, the form of entertainment which has become almost a necessary part of our own lives did not grow out of these recited heroic tales It had such a curious origin that I must tell you something about it in a separate chapter The Greeks had always been fond of parades Every year they held solemn processions in honour of Dionysus, the god of the wine As everybody in Greece drank wine the Greeks thought water only useful for the purpose of swimming and sailing This particular divinity was as popular as a god of the soda fountain would be in our own land And because the wine god was supposed to live in the vineyards amidst a merry mob of satyrs strange creatures who were half man and half goat the crowd that joined the procession used to wear goat skins and to he-ha like real billy goats The Greek word for goat is tragos and the Greek word for singer is oidos The singer who me-me-ed like a goat therefore was called a tragos oidos or goat singer and it is this strange name which developed into the modern word tragedy which means in the theatrical sense a peace with an unhappy ending just as comedy which really means the singing of something komos or gay is the name given to a play which ends happily But how, you will ask did this noisy chorus of masqueraders stamping around like wild goats ever develop into the noble tragedies which have filled the theatres of the world for almost two thousand years The connecting link between the goat singer and hamlet is really very simple as I shall show you in a moment The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and attracted large crowds of spectators who stood along the side of the road and laughed But soon this business of he-hawing grew tiresome and the Greeks thought dullness and evil only comparable to ugliness or sickness They asked for something more entertaining Then an inventive young poet from the village of Ikaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a tremendous success He made one of the members of the goat chorus step forward and engage in conversation with the leader of the musicians who marched at the head of the parade playing upon their pipes of pant This individual was allowed to step out of line He waved his arms and gesticulated while he spoke, that is to say he acted while the others merely stood by and sang And he asked a lot of questions which the bandmaster answered according to the role of Papyrus upon which the poet had written down these answers before the show began This rough and ready conversation The dialogue which told the story of Dionysus or one of the other gods became at once popular with the crowd Henceforth every Dionysian procession had an acted scene and very soon the acting was considered more important than the procession and the me-me-ing Aeschylus, the most successful of all tragedians who wrote no less than 80 plays during his long life from 526 to 455 BC made a bold step forward when he introduced two actors instead of one A generation later Sophocles increased the number of actors to three When Euripides began to write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the 5th century BC he was allowed as many actors as he liked and when Aristophanes wrote those famous comedies in which he poked fun with everybody and everything including the gods of Mount Olympus the chorus had been reduced to the role of mere bystanders who were lined up behind the principal performers and who sang, this is a terrible world while the hero in the foreground committed a crime against the will of the gods This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a proper setting and soon every Greek city owned a theater cut out of the rock of a nearby hill Spectators sat upon wooden benches and faced a wide circle our present orchestra where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for a seat Upon this half circle, which was the stage the actors and the chorus took their stand Behind them there was a tent where they made up with large clay masks which hid their faces and which showed the spectators whether the actors were supposed to be happy and smiling or unhappy and weeping The Greek word for tent is skeina and that is the reason why we talk of the scenery of the stage When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life the people took it very seriously and never went to the theater to give their minds a vacation A new play became as important an event as an election and a successful playwright was received with greater honors than those bestowed upon a general who had just returned from a famous victory End of Chapter 17 Read on October 10th, 2008 in San Diego, California Chapter 18 of the Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Michelle Crandall The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Lohn Chapter 18 The Persian Wars How the Greeks defended Europe against Asiatic invasion and drove the Persians back across the Aegean Sea The Greeks had learned the art of trading from the Aegeans who had been the pupils of the Phoenicians They had founded colonies after the Phoenician pattern They had even improved upon the Phoenician methods by a more general use of money in dealing with foreign customers In the sixth century before our era they had established themselves firmly along the coast of Asia Minor and they were taking away trade from the Phoenicians at a fast rate This the Phoenicians of course did not like but they were not strong enough to risk a war with their Greek competitors They sat and waited nor did they wait in vain In a former chapter I have told you how a humble tribe of Persian shepherds had suddenly gone upon the warpath as part of Western Asia The Persians were too civilized to plunder their new subjects They contented themselves with a yearly tribute When they reached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian kings as their overlords and pay them a stipulated tax The Greek colonies objected The Persians insisted Then the Greek colonies appealed to the home country and the stage was set for a quarrel To the truth be told the Persian kings regarded the Greek city-states as very dangerous political institutions and bad examples for all other people who were supposed to be the patient slaves of the mighty Persian kings Of course the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety because their country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the Aegean But here their old enemies the Phoenicians stepped forward with offers of help and advice to the Persians If the Persian king wanted to provide the soldiers the Phoenicians would guaranteed to deliver the necessary ships to carry them to Europe It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ and Asia made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe As a final warning the king of Persia sent messengers to the Greeks asking for earth and water as a token of their submission The Greeks promptly threw the messengers into the nearest well where they would find both earth and water Of course peace was impossible But the gods of High Olympus watched over their children and when the Phoenician fleet carrying the Persian troops was near Mount Athos the storm god blew his cheeks until he almost burst the veins of his brow and the fleet was destroyed by a terrible hurricane and the Persians were all drowned Here you see a picture of the Persian fleet as it is destroyed near Mount Athos Two years later more Persians came Last time they sailed straight across the Aegean sea and landed near the village of Marathon As soon as the Athenians heard this they sent their army of 10,000 men to guard the hills that surrounded the Marathonian plain At the same time they dispatched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help But Sparta was envious of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her assistance The other Greek cities followed her example with the exception of tiny Plataea of 10,000 men On the 12th of September of the year 490 Maltiades the Athenian commander threw this little army against the hordes of the Persians The Greeks broke through the Persian barrage of arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the disorganized Asiatic troops who had never been called upon to resist such an enemy That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow red with the flame of burning ships Anxiously they waited for news At last a little cloud of dust appeared upon the road that led to the north It was Phydipides the runner He stumbled and gassed for his end was near Only a few days before had he returned from his air into Sparta He had hastened to join Maltiades That morning he had taken part in the attack and later he had volunteered to carry the news of victory to his beloved city The people saw him fall and they rushed forward to support him We have won, he whispered and then he died, a glorious death which made him envied of all men Here you see a picture of a map that describes the movements of the Greeks and the Persians in the Battle of Marathon As for the Persians they tried after this defeat to land near Athens but they found the coast guarded and disappeared and once more Eight years they waited and during this time the Greeks were not idle They knew that a final attack was to be expected but they did not agree upon the best way to avert the danger Some people wanted to increase the army Others said that a strong fleet was necessary for success The two parties led by Aristides for the army and Themistocles, the leader of the bigger navy men fought each other bitterly until Aristides was exiled Then Themistocles had his chance and he built all the ships he could and turned the Piraeus into a strong naval base In the year 481 BC a tremendous Persian army appeared in Thessaly a province of northern Greece In this hour of danger Sparta, the great military city of Greece was elected commander in chief but the Spartans cared little what happened to northern Greece and invaded their own country was not invaded they neglected to fortify the passes that led into Greece A small detachment of Spartans under Leonidas had been told to guard the narrow road between the high mountains and the sea which connected Thessaly with the southern provinces Leonidas obeyed his orders he fought and held the pass with unequaled bravery but a trader by the name of Aphialtes who knew the little byways of Malice guided a regiment of Persians to the hills and made it possible for them to attack Leonidas in the rear near the warm wells the Thermopylae a terrible battle was fought here you see a picture of Thermopylae when night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead under the corpses of their enemies here you see another picture of the battle of Thermopylae which is a map showing where the main Persian army marched to Athens but the pass had been lost and the peace fell into the hands of the Persians they marched upon Athens through the garrison from the rocks of the Acropolis and burned the city the people fled to the island of Salamis all seemed lost but on the 20th of September of the year 480 Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the narrow straits which separated the island of Salamis from the mainland and within a few hours he destroyed three quarters of the Persian ships here you see a picture of the Persians burning Athens and the ships in the harbor in this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught Xerxes was forced to retire the next year so he decreed would bring a final decision he took his troops to Thessaly and there he waited for spring but this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of the hour they left the safe shelter of the wall which they had built across the Isthmus of Corinth and under the leadership of Pausanias they marched against Mardonius the Persian general the united Greeks some 100,000 men from a dozen different cities attacked the 300,000 men of the enemy near Plataea once more the heavy Greek infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows the Persians were defeated as they had been at Marathon and this time they left for good by a strange coincidence the same day that the Greek armies when their victory near Plataea destroyed the enemy's fleet near Cape Michael in Asia Minor thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end Athens had covered herself with glory and Sparta had fought bravely and well if these two cities had been able to come to an agreement if they had been willing to forget their little jealousies they might have become the leaders of a strong and united Hellas but alas they allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm to slip by and the same opportunity never returned end of chapter 18