They grubbed edible things from the earth with bare hands; they imitated or used the claws

and tusks of the animals, and fashioned tools out of ivory, bone or

stone; they made nets and traps and snares of rushes or fibre, and

devised innumerable artifices for fishing and hunting their prey.

The Polynesians had nets a thousand ells long, which could be

handled only by a hundred men; in such ways economic provision grew

hand in hand with political organization, and the united quest for

food helped to generate the state. The Tlingit fisherman put upon

his head a cap like the head of a seal, and hiding his body among

the rocks, made a noise like a seal; seals came toward him, and he

speared them with the clear conscience of primitive war. Many tribes

threw narcotics into the streams to stupefy the fish into

cooperation with the fishermen; the Tahitians, for example, put into

the water an intoxicating mixture prepared from the huteo nut or the

hora plant; the fish, drunk with it, floated leisurely on the

surface, and were caught at the anglers' will. Australian natives,

swimming under water while breathing through a reed, pulled ducks

beneath the surface by the legs, and gently held them there till

they were pacified. The Tarahumaras caught birds by stringing

kernels on tough fibres half buried under the ground; the birds ate

the kernels, and the Tarahumaras ate the birds. `01025

Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon

some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to

hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death. For

hunting was not merely a quest for food, it was a war for security and

mastery, a war beside which all the wars of recorded history are but a

little noise. In the jungle man still fights for his life, for

though there is hardly an animal that will attack him unless it is

desperate for food or cornered in the chase, yet there is not always

food for all, and sometimes only the fighter, or the breeder of

fighters, is allowed to eat. We see in our museums the relics of

that war of the species in the knives, clubs, spears, arrows,

lassos, bolas, lures, traps, boomerangs and slings with which

primitive men won possession of the land, and prepared to transmit

to an ungrateful posterity the gift of security from every beast

except man. Even today, after all these wars of elimination, how

many different populations move over the earth! Sometimes, during a

walk in the woods, one is awed by the variety of languages spoken

there, by the myriad species of insects, reptiles, carnivores and

birds; one feels that man is an interloper on this crowded scene, that

he is the object of universal dread and endless hostility. Some day,

perhaps, these chattering quadrupeds, these ingratiating centipedes,

these insinuating bacilli, will devour man and all his works, and free

the planet from this marauding biped, these mysterious and unnatural

weapons, these careless feet!

Hunting and fishing were not stages in economic development, they

were modes of activity destined to survive into the highest forms of

civilized society. Once the center of life, they are still its

hidden foundations; behind our literature and philosophy, our ritual

and art, stand the stout killers of Packingtown. We do our hunting

by proxy, not having the stomach for honest killing in the fields; but

our memories of the chase linger in our joyful pursuit of anything

weak or fugitive, and in the games of our children- even in the word

game. In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food

supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert

chamber, the library and the university are the facade; in the rear

are the shambles.

Then, perhaps (for most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice), he imitated the

tools and industry of the animal: he saw the monkey flinging rocks and

fruit upon his enemies, or breaking open nuts and oysters with a

stone; he saw the beaver building a dam, the birds making nests and

bowers, the chimpanzees raising something very like a hut. He envied

the power of their claws, teeth, tusks and horns, and the toughness of

their hides; and he set to work to fashion tools and weapons that

would resemble and rival these.

Bark, leaves and grass fibres were woven into

clothing, carpets and tapestry, sometimes so excellent that it could

not be rivaled today, even with the resources of contemporary

machinery. Aleutian women may spend a year in weaving one robe. The

blankets and garments made by the North American Indians were richly

ornamented with fringes and embroideries of hairs and tendon-threads

dyed in brilliant colors with berry juice; colors "so alive," says

Father Theodut, "that ours do not seem even to approach

them." `010227 Again art began where nature left off; the bones of

birds and fishes, and the slim shoots of the bamboo tree, were

polished into needles, and the tendons of animals were drawn into

threads- delicate enough to pass through the eye of the finest needle

today. Bark was beaten into mats and cloths, skins were dried for

clothing and shoes, fibres were twisted into the strongest yarn, and

supple branches and colored filaments were woven into baskets more

beautiful than any modern forms. `010228

Akin to basketry, perhaps born of it, was the art of pottery. Clay

placed upon wickerwork to keep the latter from being burned, hardened

into a fireproof shell which kept its form when the wickerwork was

taken away; `010229

Other logs he bound together as rafts, or dug into

canoes; and the streams became his most convenient avenues of

transport. By land he went first through trackless fields and hills,

then by trails, at last by roads. He studied the stars, and guided his

caravans across mountains and deserts by tracing his route in the sky.

He paddled, rowed or sailed his way bravely from island to island, and

at last spanned oceans to spread his modest culture from continent

to continent. Here, too, the main problems were solved before

written history began.

Certain American Indian villages were almost

entirely devoted to making arrow-heads; some in New Guinea to making

pottery; some in Africa to blacksmithing, or to making boats or

lances. Such specializing tribes or villages sometimes acquired the

names of their industry (Smith, Fisher, Potter...), and these names

were in time attached to specializing families. `010230a Trade in

surpluses was at first by an interchange of gifts; even in our

calculating days a present (if only a meal) sometimes precedes or

seals a trade. The exchange was facilitated by war, robbery,

tribute, fines, and compensation; goods had to be kept moving!

Gradually an orderly system of barter grew up, and trading posts,

markets and bazaars were established- occasionally, then periodically,

then permanently- where those who had some article in excess might

offer it for some article of need. `010231

For a long time commerce was purely such exchange, and centuries

passed before a circulating medium of value was invented to quicken

trade. A Dyak might be seen wandering for days through a bazaar, with

a ball of beeswax in his hand, seeking a customer who could offer him

in return something that he might more profitably use. `010232 The

earliest mediums of exchange were articles universally in demand,

which anyone would take in payment: dates, salt, skins, furs,

ornaments, implements, weapons; in such traffic two knives equaled one

pair of stockings, all three equaled a blanket, all four equaled a

gun, all five equaled a horse; two elk-teeth equaled one pony, and

eight ponies equaled a wife. `010233 There is hardly any thing that

has not been employed as money by some people at some time: beans,

fish-hooks, shells, pearls, beads, cocoa seeds, tea, pepper, at last

sheep, pigs, cows, and slaves.

Cattle were a convenient standard of

value and medium of exchange among hunters and herders; they bore

interest through breeding, and they were easy to carry, since they

transported themselves. Even in Homer's days men and things were

valued in terms of cattle: the armor of Diomedes was worth nine head

of cattle, a skilful slave was worth four. The Romans used kindred

words- pecus and pecunia - for cattle and money, and placed the

image of an ox upon their early coins. Our own words capital,

chattel and cattle go back through the French to the Latin

capitale, meaning property: and this in turn derives from caput,

meaning head- i.e., of cattle. When metals were mined they slowly

replaced other articles as standards of value; copper, bronze, iron,

finally- because of their convenient representation of great worth

in little space and weight- silver and gold, became the money of

mankind. The advance from token goods to a metallic currency does

not seem to have been made by primitive men; it was left for the

historic civilizations to invent coinage and credit, and so, by

further facilitating the exchange of surpluses, to increase again

the wealth and comfort of man. `010234

Among the Hottentots it was the custom for one who

had more than others to share his surplus till all were equal. White

travelers in Africa before the advent of civilization noted that a

present of food or other valuables to a "black man" was at once

distributed; so that when a suit of clothes was given to one of them

the donor soon found the recipient wearing the hat, a friend the

trousers, another friend the coat. The Eskimo hunter had no personal

right to his catch; it had to be divided among the inhabitants of

the village, and tools and provisions were the common property of all.

The North American Indians were described by Captain Carver as

"strangers to all distinctions of property, except in the articles

of domestic use.... They are extremely liberal to each other, and

supply the deficiencies of their friends with any superfluity of their

own." "What is extremely surprising," reports a missionary, "is to see

them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one

does not find among common people in the most civilized nations. This,

doubtless, arises from the fact that the words 'mine' and 'thine,'

which St. Chrysostom says extinguish in our hearts the fire of charity

and kindle that of greed, are unknown to these savages." "I have

seen them," says another observer, "divide game among themselves

when they sometimes had many shares to make; and cannot recollect a

single instance of their falling into a dispute or finding fault

with the distribution as being unequal or otherwise objectionable.

They would rather lie down themselves on an empty stomach than have it

laid to their charge that they neglected to satisfy the needy.... They

look upon themselves as but one great family." `010240

Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we,

with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that

communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for

existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness,

industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and

punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was

hostile to growth or to successful competition with other

groups. `010241 Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast

as "so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon

the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce

with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of

their labor than the idle, they plant less every year." `010242

Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal

to any hope of their becoming civilized; `010243 or, as the Fuegians

might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their

equality. Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the

diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive

society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism

brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it

stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the

competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which,

when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none. *01011

The invention of money

cooperated with these factors by facilitating the accumulation,

transport and transmission of property. The old tribal rights and

traditions reasserted themselves in the technical ownership of the

soil by the village community or the king, and in periodical

redistributions of the land; but after an epoch of natural oscillation

between the old and the new, private property established itself

definitely as the basic economic institution of historical society.

Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to

private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery

had been unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the

menial work. The men alternated between the excited activity of

hunting or war, and the exhausted lassitude of satiety or peace. The

characteristic laziness of primitive peoples had its origin,

presumably, in this habit of slowly recuperating from the fatigue of

battle or the chase; it was not so much laziness as rest. To transform

this spasmodic activity into regular work two things were needed:

the routine of tillage, and the organization of labor.

Such organization remains loose and spontaneous where men are

working for themselves; where they work for others, the organization

of labor depends in the last analysis upon force.

The rise of

agriculture and the inequality of men led to the employment of the

socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to

the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one.

Butchery and cannibalism lessened, slavery grew. `010244 It was a

great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their

fellowmen, and merely made them slaves. A similar development on a

larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no

longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities.

Once slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was

extended by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate

criminals, and by raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War

helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war.

Probably it was through centuries of slavery that our race

acquired its traditions and habits of toil. No one would do any hard

or persistent work if he could avoid it without physical, economic

or social penalty. Slavery became part of the discipline by which

man was prepared for industry.

Gradually, through agriculture and slavery, through the division

of labor and the inherent diversity of men, the comparative equality

of natural society was replaced by inequality and class divisions. "In

the primitive group we find as a rule no distinction between slave and

free, no serfdom, no caste, and little if any distinction between

chief and followers." `010245 Slowly the increasing complexity of

tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or

strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong,

and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the

weak. *01012 Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior

possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze

of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively conscious

of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red thread

through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable

instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of

property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace.

CHAPTER III: The Political Elements of Civilization

I. THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT

-

The unsocial instinct- Primitive anarchism-

The clan and the tribe- The king- War

-

MAN is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates

with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the

compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he

fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers

him, and because there are many things that can be done better

together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual,

pitted heroically against the world. If the average man had had his

way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he

resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government

which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is

sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an

unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case

superfluous.

In the simplest societies there is hardly any government.

Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the

hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in

solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of

Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then

scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs,

no laws, no regular government; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small

circles according to family relationship, but had no government; the

Kubus of Sumatra "live without men in authority," every family

governing itself; the Fuegians are seldom more than twelve together;

the Tungus associate sparingly in groups of ten tents or so; the

It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it

is these that make war. In Samoa the chief had power during war, but

at other times no one paid much attention to him. The Dyaks had no

other government than that of each family by its head; in case of

strife they chose their bravest warrior to lead them, and obeyed him

strictly; but once the conflict was ended they literally sent him

about his business. `01035 In the intervals of peace it was the

priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and

when at last a permanent kingship developed as the usual mode of

government among a majority of tribes, it combined- and derived

from- the offices of warrior, father and priest.- Societies are

ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword;

force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone

hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns

in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared

separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.

How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally

inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful; and the

Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith

should hunt one another like seals and steal one another's land.

"How well it is"- they apostrophized their soil- "that you are covered

with ice and snow! How well it is that if in your rocks there are gold

and silver, for which the Christians are so greedy, it is covered with

so much snow that they cannot get at it! Your unfruitfulness makes

us happy, and saves us from molestation."

League of the Iroquois maintained the

"Great Peace" for three hundred years. `01037 But for the most part

war was the favorite instrument of natural selection among primitive

nations and groups.

Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of

weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence,

cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons

that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace.

(How many railroads today begin in strategy and end in trade!) Above

all, war dissolved primitive communism and anarchism, introduced

organization and discipline, and led to the enslavement of

prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the growth of government.

Property was the mother, war was the father, of the state.

II. THE STATE

-

As the organization of force- The village community-

The psychological aides of the state

-

"A herd of blonde beasts of prey," says Nietzsche, "a race of

conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and

all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a

population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet

formless, such is the origin of the state." `01038 "The state as

distinct from tribal organization," says Lester Ward, "begins with the

conquest of one race by another." `01039 "Everywhere," says

Oppenheimer, "we find some warlike tribe breaking through the

boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and

founding its state." `010310 "Violence," says Ratzenhofer, "is the

agent which has created the state." `010311 The state, says

Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the

victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished. `010312 "The state,"

says Sumner, "is the product of force, and exists by force." `010313

This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group

by a tribe of hunters and herders. `010314 For agriculture teaches

men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them

with the long day's toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget

the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed

to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of

the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them

abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they

look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with

modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer,

enslave and rule. *01013

The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the

time of written history. For it presupposes a change in the very

principle of social organization- from kinship to domination; and in

primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best

where it binds diverse natural groups into an advantageous unity of

order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the

progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into

their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent

conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and

almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized,

until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that

had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had

subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most

arrant theft, in the hands of the robber's grandchildren, becomes

sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion;

but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon

every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.

The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon

becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and

tribes, relations spring up that depend not on kinship but on

contiguity, and therefore require an artificial principle of

regulation. The village community may serve as an example: it

displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and

achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through

a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such

communities created a need for some external force that could regulate

their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The

state, ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became

not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the

interests of the thousand conflicting groups that constitute a complex

society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and

wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than

before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be

defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was

better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay

tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all. What an

interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be

judged from the behavior of the Baganda, among whom, when the king

died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot,

killing and plundering everywhere. `010315 "Without autocratic

rule," as Spencer said, "the evolution of society could not have

commenced. `010316

A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for

though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate,

and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and

indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and

forged many instruments of indoctrination- the family, the church, the

school- to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic

loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the

public mind for that docile coherence which is indispensable in war.

Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its

forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that

mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people,

and would recognize the rights of the "subject" *01014 sufficiently

to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State.

III. LAW

-

Law-lessness- Law and custom- Revenge- Fines- Courts-

Ordeal- The duel- Punishment- Primitive freedom

-

Law comes with property, marriage and government; the lowest

societies manage to get along without it. "I have lived with

communities of savages in South America and in the East," said

Alfred Russel Wallace, "who have no law or law-courts but the public

opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously

respects the rights of his fellows, and any infraction of those rights

rarely or never takes place. In such a community all are nearly

equal." `010317 Herman Melville writes similarly of the Marquesas

Islanders: "During the time I have lived among the Typees no one was

ever put upon his trial for any violence to the public. Everything

went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled, I

will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious

associations of mortals in Christendom." `010318 The old Russian

Government established courts of law in the Aleutian Islands, but in

fifty years those courts found no employment. "Crime and offenses,"

reports Brinton, "were so infrequent under the social system of the

Iroquois that they can scarcely be said to have had a penal

code." `010319 Such are the ideal- perhaps the idealized- conditions

for whose return the anarchist perennially pines.

When to this natural basis of custom a supernatural sanction is

added by religion, and the ways of one's ancestors are also the will

of the gods, then custom becomes stronger than law, and subtracts

substantially from primitive freedom. To violate law is to win the

admiration of half the populace, who secretly envy anyone who can

outwit this ancient enemy; to violate custom is to incur almost

universal hostility. For custom rises out of the people, whereas law

is forced upon them from above; law is usually a decree of the master,

but custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have

been found most convenient in the experience of the group. Law

partly replaces custom when the state replaces the natural order of

the family, the clan, the tribe, and the village community; it more

fully replaces custom when writing appears, and laws graduate from a

code carried down in the memory of elders and priests into a system of

legislation proclaimed in written tables. But the replacement is never

complete; in the determination and judgment of human conduct custom

remains to the end the force behind the law, the power behind the

throne, the last "magistrate of men's lives."

=================================

The second step toward law and civilization in the treatment of

crime was the substitution of damages for revenge. Very often the

chief, to maintain internal harmony, used his power or influence to

have the revengeful family content itself with gold or goods instead

of blood. Soon a regular tariff arose, determining how much must be

paid for an eye, a tooth, an arm, or a life; Hammurabi legislated

extensively in such terms. The Abyssinians were so meticulous in this

regard that when a boy fell from a tree upon his companion and killed

him, the judges decided that the bereaved mother should send another

of her sons into the tree to fall upon the culprit's neck. `010320

Rights do not come to us from nature, which knows

no rights except cunning and strength; they are privileges assured

to individuals by the community as advantageous to the common good.

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product

and a mark of civilization.

IV. THE FAMILY

-

Its function in civilization- The clan vs. the family- Growth

of parental care- Unimportance of the father- Separation of the

sexes- Mother-right- Status of woman- Her occupations- Her

economic achievements- The patriarchate- The subjection of woman

-

As the basic needs of man are hunger and love, so the fundamental

functions of social organization are economic provision and biological

maintenance; a stream of children is as vital as a continuity of food.

To institutions which seek material welfare and political order,

society always adds institutions for the perpetuation of the race.

Until the state- towards the dawn of the historic civilizations-

becomes the central and permanent source of social order, the clan

undertakes the delicate task of regulating the relations between the

sexes and between the generations; and even after the state has been

established, the essential government of mankind remains in that

most deep-rooted of all historic institutions, the family.

It is highly improbable that the first human beings lived in

isolated families, even in the hunting stage; for the inferiority of

man in physiological organs of defense would have left such families a

prey to marauding beasts. Usually, in nature, those organisms that are

poorly equipped for individual defense live in groups, and find in

united action a means of survival in a world bristling with tusks

and claws and impenetrable hides. Presumably it was so with man; he

saved himself by solidarity in the hunting-pack and the clan. When

economic relations and political mastery replaced kinship as the

principle of social organization, the clan lost its position as the

substructure of society; at the bottom it was supplanted by the

family, at the top it was superseded by the state. Government took

over the problem of maintaining order, while the family assumed the

tasks of reorganizing industry and carrying on the race.

In Melanesia intercourse was recognized as the cause of pregnancy,

but unmarried girls insisted on blaming some article in their

diet. `010328 Even where the function of the male was understood,

sex relationships were so irregular that it was never a simple

matter to determine the father. Consequently the quite primitive

mother seldom bothered to inquire into the paternity of her child;

it belonged to her, and she belonged not to a husband but to her

father- or her brother- and the clan; it was with these that she

remained, and these were the only male relatives whom her child

would know. `010329 The bonds of affection between brother and

sister were usually stronger than between husband and wife. The

husband, in many cases, remained in the family and clan of his mother,

and saw his wife only as a clandestine visitor. Even in classical

civilization the brother was dearer than the husband: it was her

brother, not her husband, that the wife of Intaphernes saved from

the wrath of Darius; it was for her brother, not for her husband, that

Antigone sacrificed herself. `010330 "The notion that a man's wife

is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern

notion, and one which is restricted to a comparatively small part of

the human race." `010331

 "The notion that a man's wife

is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern

notion, and one which is restricted to a comparatively small part of

the human race." `010331

"Women," said a chieftain of the Chippewas, "are created for work. One

of them can draw or carry as much as two men. They also pitch our

tents, make our clothes, mend them, and keep us warm at night.... We

absolutely cannot get along without them on a journey. They do

everything and cost only a little; for since they must be forever

cooking, they can be satisfied in lean times by licking their

fingers." `010340

Most economic advances, in early society, were made by the woman

rather than the man. While for centuries he clung to his ancient

ways of hunting and herding, she developed agriculture near the

camp, and those busy arts of the home which were to become the most

important industries of later days. From the "wool-bearing tree," as

the Greeks called the cotton plant, the primitive woman rolled

thread and made cotton cloth. `010341 It was she, apparently, who

developed sewing, weaving, basketry, pottery, woodworking, and

building; and in many cases it was she who carried on primitive

trade. `010342 It was she who developed the home, slowly adding man

to the list of her domesticated animals, and training him in those

social dispositions and amenities which are the psychological basis

and cement of civilization.

But as agriculture became more complex and brought larger rewards,

the stronger sex took more and more of it into its own

hands. `010343 The growth of cattle-breeding gave the man a new

source of wealth, stability and power; even agriculture, which must

have seemed so prosaic to the mighty Nimrods of antiquity, was at last

accepted by the wandering male, and the economic leadership which

tillage had for a time given to women was wrested from them by the

men. The application to agriculture of those very animals that woman

had first domesticated led to her replacement by the male in the

control of the fields; the advance from the hoe to the plough put a

premium upon physical strength, and enabled the man to assert his

supremacy. The growth of transmissible property in cattle and in the

products of the soil led to the sexual subordination of woman, for the

male now demanded from her that fidelity which he thought would enable

him to pass on his accumulations to children presumably his own.

Gradually the man had his way: fatherhood became recognized, and

property began to descend through the male; mother-right yielded to

father-right; and the patriarchal family, with the oldest male at

its head, became the economic, legal, political and moral unit of

society. The gods, who had been mostly feminine, became great

bearded patriarchs, with such harems as ambitious men dreamed of in

their solitude.

This passage to the patriarchal- father-ruled- family was fatal to

the position of woman. In all essential aspects she and her children

became the property first of her father or oldest brother, then of her

husband. She was bought in marriage precisely as a slave was bought in

the market. She was bequeathed as property when her husband died;

and in some places (New Guinea, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands,

Fiji, India, etc.) she was strangled and buried with her dead husband,

or was expected to commit suicide, in order to attend upon him in

the other world. `010344 The father had now the right to treat,

give, sell or lend his wives and daughters very much as he pleased,

subject only to the social condemnation of other fathers exercising

the same rights. While the male reserved the privilege of extending

his sexual favors beyond his home, the woman- under patriarchal

institutions- was vowed to complete chastity before marriage, and

complete fidelity after it. The double standard was born.

The general subjection of woman which had existed in the hunting

stage, and had persisted, in diminished form, through the period of

mother-right, became now more pronounced and merciless than before. In

ancient Russia, on the marriage of a daughter, the father struck her

gently with a whip, and then presented the whip to the

bridegroom, `010345 as a sign that her beatings were now to come

from a rejuvenated hand. Even the American Indians, among whom

mother-right survived indefinitely, treated their women harshly,

consigned to them all drudgery, and often called them dogs. `010346

Everywhere the life of a woman was considered cheaper than that of a

man; and when girls were born there was none of the rejoicing that

marked the coming of a male. Mothers sometimes destroyed their female

children to keep them from misery. In Fiji wives might be sold at

pleasure, and the usual price was a musket. `010347

CHAPTER IV: The Moral Elements of Civilization

-

Through the slow magic of time

such customs, by long repetition, become a second nature in the

individual; if he violates them he feels a certain fear, discomfort or

shame; this is the origin of that conscience, or moral sense, which

Darwin chose as the most impressive distinction between animals and

men. `01041 In its higher development conscience is social

consciousness- the feeling of the individual that he belongs to a

group, and owes it some measure of loyalty and consideration. Morality

is the cooperation of the part with the whole, and of each group

with some larger whole. Civilization, of course, would be impossible

without it.

I. MARRIAGE

-

The meaning of marriage- Its biological origins- Sexual communism-

Trial marriage- Group marriage- Individual marriage- Polygamy- Its

eugenic value- Exogamy- Marriage by service- By capture- By

purchase- Primitive love- The economic function of marriage

-

Societies without marriage are rare, but the sedulous inquirer can

find enough of them to form a respectable transition from the

promiscuity of the lower mammals to the marriages of primitive men. In

Futuna and Hawaii the majority of the people did not marry at

all; `01044 the Lubus mated freely and indiscriminately, and had no

conception of marriage; certain tribes of Borneo lived in marriageless

association, freer than the birds; and among some peoples of primitive

Russia "the men utilized the women without distinction, so that no

woman had her appointed husband." African pygmies have been

described as having no marriage institutions, but as following

"their animal instincts wholly without restraint." `01045 This

primitive "nationalization of women," corresponding to primitive

communism in land and food, passed away at so early a stage that few

traces of it remain. Some memory of it, however, lingered on in divers

forms: in the feeling of many nature peoples that monogamy- which they

would define as the monopoly of a woman by one man- is unnatural and

immoral; `01046

in the custom of wife-lending, so essential to many primitive codes of hospitality; and in the jus

primae noctis, or right of the first night, by which, in early feudal

Europe, the lord of the manor, perhaps representing the ancient rights

of the tribe, occasionally deflowered the bride before the bridegroom

was allowed to consummate the marriage. `01046a

A variety of tentative unions gradually took the place of

indiscriminate relations. Among the Orang Sakai of Malacca a girl

remained for a time with each man of the tribe, passing from one to

another until she had made the rounds; then she began again. `01047

In a few cases we find "group marriage," by which a

number of men belonging to one group married collectively a number

of women belonging to another group. `010413 In Tibet, for example,

it was the custom for a group of brothers to marry a group of sisters,

and for the two groups to practise sexual communism between them, each

of the men cohabiting with each of the women. `010414 Caesar

reported a similar custom in ancient Britain. `010415 Survivals of

it appear in the "levirate," a custom existing among the early Jews

and other ancient peoples, by which a man was obligated to marry his

brother's widow; `010416 this was the rule that so irked Onan.

What was it that led men to replace the semi-promiscuity of

primitive society with individual marriage? Since, in a great majority

of nature peoples, there are few, if any, restraints on premarital

relations, it is obvious that physical desire does not give rise to

the institution of marriage. For marriage, with its restrictions and

psychological irritations, could not possibly compete with sexual

communism as a mode of satisfying the erotic propensities of men.

Nor could the individual establishment offer at the outset any mode of

rearing children that would be obviously superior to their rearing

by the mother, her family, and the clan. Some powerful economic

motives must have favored the evolution of marriage. In all

probability (for again we must remind ourselves how little we really

know of origins) these motives were connected with the rising

institution of property.

Individual marriage came through the desire of the male to have

cheap slaves, and to avoid bequeathing his property to other men's

children. Polygamy, or the marriage of one person to several mates,

appears here and there in the form of polyandry- the marriage of one

woman to several men- as among the Todas and some tribes of

Tibet; `010417 the custom may still be found where males outnumber

females considerably. `010418

Again, men like variety; as the Negroes of Angola

expressed it, they were "not able to eat always of the same dish."

Also, men like youth in their mates, and women age rapidly in

primitive communities. The women themselves often favored polygamy; it

permitted them to nurse their children longer, and therefore to reduce

the frequency of motherhood without interfering with the erotic and

philoprogenitive inclinations of the male. Sometimes the first wife,

burdened with toil, helped her husband to secure an additional wife,

so that her burden might be shared, and additional children might

raise the productive power and the wealth of the family. `010420

Children were economic assets, and men invested in wives in order to

draw children from them like interest. In the patriarchal system wives

and children were in effect the slaves of the man; the more a man

had of them, the richer he was. The poor man practised monogamy, but

he looked upon it as a shameful condition, from which some day he

would rise to the respected position of a polygamous male. `010421

Jealousy in the male, and possessiveness in the female,

entered into the situation more effectively as the sexes

approximated in number; for where the strong could not have a

multiplicity of wives except by taking the actual or potential wives

of other men, and by (in some cases) offending their own, polygamy

became a difficult matter, which only the cleverest could manage. As

property accumulated, and men were loath to scatter it in small

bequests, it became desirable to differentiate wives into "chief wife"

and concubines, so that only the children of the former should share

the legacy; this remained the status of marriage in Asia until our own

generation. Gradually the chief wife became the only wife, the

concubines became kept women in secret and apart, or they disappeared;

and as Christianity entered upon the scene, monogamy, in Europe,

took the place of polygamy as the lawful and outward form of sexual

association. But monogamy, like letters and the state, is

artificial, and belongs to the history, not to the origins, of

civilization.

Exogamy,

too, was compulsory: that is to say, a man was expected to secure

his wife from another clan than his own. Whether this custom arose

because the primitive mind suspected the evil effects of close

inbreeding, or because such intergroup marriages created or cemented

useful political alliances, promoted social organization, and lessened

the danger of war, or because the capture of a wife from another tribe

had become a fashionable mark of male maturity, or because familiarity

breeds contempt and distance lends enchantment to the view- we do

not know. In any case the restriction was well-nigh universal in early

society; and though it was successfully violated by the Pharaohs,

the Ptolemies and the Incas, who all favored the marriage of brother

and sister, it survived into Roman and modern law and consciously or

unconsciously moulds our behavior to this day.

Sometimes the suitor shortened

the matter with plain, blunt force. It was an advantage as well as a

distinction to have stolen a wife; not only would she be a cheap

slave, but new slaves could be begotten of her, and these children

would chain her to her slavery. Such marriage by capture, though not

the rule, occurred sporadically in the primitive world. Among the

North American Indians the women were included in the spoils of war,

and this happened so frequently that in some tribes the husbands and

their wives spoke mutually unintelligible languages. The Slavs of

Russia and Serbia practised occasional marriage by capture until the

last century. *01019 `010425 Vestiges of it remain in the custom

of simulating the capture of the bride by the groom in certain wedding

ceremonies. `010427 All in all it was a logical aspect of the almost

incessant war of the tribes, and a logical starting-point for that

eternal war of the sexes whose only truces are brief nocturnes and

dreamless sleep.

A Maori mother, wailing

loudly, bitterly cursed the youth who had eloped with her daughter,

until he presented her with a blanket. "That was all I wanted," she

said; "I only wanted to get a blanket, and therefore made this

noise." `010430 Usually the bride cost more than a blanket: among

the Hottentots her price was an ox or a cow; among the Croo three cows

and a sheep; among the Kaffirs six to thirty head of cattle, depending

upon the rank of the girl's family; and among the Togos sixteen

dollars cash and six dollars in goods. `010431

-

Papuans of New Guinea; among other primitive peoples we come upon

instances of love (in the sense of mutual devotion rather than mutual

need), but usually these attachments have nothing to do with marriage.

In simple days men married for cheap labor, profitable parentage, and

regular meals. "In Yariba," says Lander, "marriage is celebrated by

the natives as unconcernedly as possible; a man thinks as little of

taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn- affection is altogether

out of the question." `010439 Since premarital relations are

abundant in primitive society, passion is not dammed up by denial, and

seldom affects the choice of a wife. For the same reason- the absence

of delay between desire and fulfilment- no time is given for that

brooding introversion of frustrated, and therefore idealizing, passion

which is usually the source of youthful romantic love. Such love is

reserved for developed civilizations, in which morals have raised

barriers against desire, and the growth of wealth has enabled some men

to afford, and some women to provide, the luxuries and delicacies of

romance; primitive peoples are too poor to be romantic.

 It never occurs to him to be ashamed that he subordinates

emotional to practical considerations in choosing his mate; he would

rather be ashamed of the opposite, and would demand of us, if he

were as immodest as we are, some explanation of our custom of

binding a man and a woman together almost for life because sexual

desire has chained them for a moment with its lightning. The primitive

male looked upon marriage in terms not of sexual license but of

economic cooperation. He expected the woman- and the woman expected

herself- to be not so much gracious and beautiful (though he

appreciated these qualities in her) as useful and industrious; she was

to be an economic asset rather than a total loss; otherwise the

matter-of-fact "savage" would never have thought of marriage at all.

Marriage was a profitable partnership, not a private debauch; it was a

way whereby a man and a woman, working together, might be more

prosperous than if each worked alone. Wherever, in the history of

civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset in marriage,

marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed with it.

II. SEXUAL MORALITY

-

Premarital relations- Prostitution- Chastity- Virginity-

The double standard- Modesty- The relativity of morals-

The biological role of modesty- Adultery- Divorce-

Abortion- Infanticide- Childhood- The individual

-

Among the North American Indians the young men and women

mated freely; and these relations were not held an impediment to

marriage. Among the Papuans of New Guinea sex life began at an

extremely early age, and premarital promiscuity was the

rule. `010443 Similar premarital liberty obtained among the Soyots

of Siberia, the Igorots of the Philippines, the natives of Upper

Burma, the Kaffirs and Bushmen of Africa, the tribes of the Niger

and the Uganda, of New Georgia, the Murray Islands, the Andaman

Islands, Tahiti, Polynesia, Assam, etc. `010444

Under such conditions we must not expect to find much prostitution

in primitive society. The "oldest profession" is comparatively

young; it arises only with civilization, with the appearance of

property and the disappearance of premarital freedom. Here and there

we find girls selling themselves for a while to raise a dowry, or to

provide funds for the temples; but this occurs only where the local

moral code approves of it as a pious sacrifice to help thrifty parents

or hungry gods. `010445

The Kamchadal bridegroom who

found his bride to be a virgin was much put out, and "roundly abused

her mother for the negligent way in which she had brought up her

daughter." `010447 In many places virginity was considered a barrier

to marriage, because it laid upon the husband the unpleasant task of

violating the tabu that forbade him to shed the blood of any member of

his tribe. Sometimes girls offered themselves to a stranger in order

to break this tabu against their marriage. In Tibet mothers anxiously

sought men who would deflower their daughters; in Malabar the girls

themselves begged the services of passers-by to the same end, "for

while they were virgins they could not find a husband." In some tribes

the bride was obliged to give herself to the wedding guests before

going in to her husband; in others the bridegroom hired a man to end

the virginity of his bride; among certain Philippine tribes a special

official was appointed, at a high salary, to perform this function for

prospective husbands. `010448

What was it that changed virginity from a fault into a virtue, and

made it an element in the moral codes of all the higher civilizations?

Doubtless it was the institution of property. Premarital chastity came

as an extension, to the daughters, of the proprietary feeling with

which the patriarchal male looked upon his wife.

The men never thought of applying the same restrictions to

themselves; no society in history has ever insisted on the premarital

chastity of the male; no language has ever had a word for a virgin

man. `010450

The aura of virginity was kept exclusively for

daughters, and pressed upon them in a thousands ways. The Tuaregs

punished the irregularity of a daughter or a sister with death; the

Negroes of Nubia, Abyssinia, Somaliland, etc., practised upon their

daughters the cruel art of infibulation- i.e., the attachment of a

ring or lock to the genitals to prevent copulation; in Burma and Siam

a similar practice survived to our own day. `010451 Forms of

seclusion arose by which girls were kept from providing or receiving

temptation. In New Britain the richer parents confined their

daughters, through five dangerous years, in huts guarded by virtuous

old crones; the girls were never allowed to come out, and only their

relatives could see them. Some tribes in Borneo kept their unmarried

girls in solitary confinement. `010452 From these primitive customs

to the purdah of the Moslems and the Hindus is but a step, and

indicates again how nearly "civilization" touches "savagery."

Modesty came with virginity and the patriarchate. There are many

tribes which to this day show no shame in exposing the

body; `010452a indeed, some are ashamed to wear clothing. All Africa

rocked with laughter when Livingstone begged his black hosts to put on

some clothing before the arrival of his wife. The Queen of the Balonda

was quite naked when she held court for Livingstone. `010453

At first modesty is the feeling of the

woman that she is tabu in her periods. When marriage by purchase takes

form, and virginity in the daughter brings a profit to her father,

seclusion and the compulsion to virginity beget in the girl a sense of

obligation to chastity. Again, modesty is the feeling of the wife who,

under purchase marriage, feels a financial obligation to her husband

to refrain from such external sexual relations as cannot bring him any

recompense. Clothing appears at this point, if motives of adornment

and protection have not already engendered it; in many tribes women

wore clothing only after marriage, `010455 as a sign of their

exclusive possession by a husband, and as a deterrent to gallantry;

primitive man did not agree with the author of Penguin Isle that

clothing encouraged lechery. Chastity, however, bears no necessary

relation to clothing; some travelers report that morals in Africa vary

inversely as the amount of dress. `010456 It is clear that what men

are ashamed of depends entirely upon the local tabus and customs of

their group. Until recently a Chinese woman was ashamed to show her

foot, an Arab woman her face, a Tuareg woman her mouth; but the

women of ancient Egypt, of nineteenth-century India and of

twentieth-century Bali (before prurient tourists came) never thought

of shame at the exposure of their breasts.

A little anthropology is a dangerous thing. It is substantially

true that- as Anatole France ironically expressed the matter-

"morality is the sum of the prejudices of a community"; `010457 and

that, as Anacharsis put it among the Greeks, if one were to bring

together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to

take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing

would remain. But this does not prove the worthlessness of morals;

it only shows in what varied ways social order has been preserved.

Social order is none the less necessary; the game must still have

rules in order to be played; men must know what to expect of one

another in the ordinary circumstances of life. Hence the unanimity

with which the members of a society practise its moral code is quite

as important as the contents of that code. Our heroic rejection of the

customs and morals of our tribe, upon our adolescent discovery of

their relativity, betrays the immaturity of our minds; given another

decade and we begin to understand that there may be more wisdom in the

moral code of the group- the formulated experience of generations of

the race- than can be explained in a college course.

The inculcation of virginity destroyed the naturalness

and ease of primitive sexual life; but, by discouraging early sex

development and premature motherhood, it lessened the gap- which tends

to widen disruptively as civilization develops- between economic and

sexual maturity. Probably it served in this way to strengthen the

individual physically and mentally, to lengthen adolescence and

training, and so to lift the level of the race.

As the institution of property developed, adultery graduated from

a venial into a mortal sin. Half of the primitive peoples known to us

attach no great importance to it. `010458 The rise of property not

only led to the exaction of complete fidelity from the woman, but

generated in the male a proprietary attitude towards her; even when he

lent her to a guest it was because she belonged to him in body and

soul. Suttee was the completion of this conception; the woman must

go down into the master's grave along with his other belongings. Under

the patriarchate adultery was classed with theft; `010459

 it was, so

to speak, an infringement of patent. Punishment for it varied through

all degrees of severity from the indifference of the simpler tribes to

the disembowelment of adulteresses among certain California

Indians. `010460 After centuries of punishment the new virtue of

wifely fidelity was firmly established, and had generated an

appropriate conscience in the feminine heart. Many Indian tribes

surprised their conquerors by the unapproachable virtue of their

squaws; and certain male travelers have hoped that the women of Europe

and America might some day equal in marital faithfulness the wives of

the Zulus and the Papuans. `010461

It was easier for the Papuans, since among them, as among most

primitive peoples, there were few impediments to the divorce of the

woman by the man. Unions seldom lasted more than a few years among the

American Indians. "A large proportion of the old and middle-aged men,"

says Schoolcraft, "have had many different wives, and their children,

scattered around the country, are unknown to them." `010462 They

"laugh at Europeans for having only one wife, and that for life; they

consider that the Good Spirit formed them to be happy, and not to

continue together unless their tempers and dispositions were

congenial." `010463 The Cherokees changed wives three or four times

a year; the conservative Samoans kept them as long as three

years. `010464

As the family became the productive

unit of society, tilling the soil together, it prospered- other things

equal- according to its size and cohesion; it was found to some

advantage that the union of the mates should continue until the last

child was reared. By that time no energy remained for a new romance,

and the lives of the parents had been forged into one by common work

and trials. Only with the passage to urban industry, and the

consequent reduction of the family in size and economic importance,

has divorce become widespread again.

In general, throughout history, men have wanted many children, and

therefore have called motherhood sacred; while women, who know more

about reproduction, have secretly rebelled against this heavy

assignment, and have used an endless variety of means to reduce the

burdens of maternity. Primitive men do not usually care to restrict

population; under normal conditions children are profitable, and the

male regrets only that they cannot all be sons. It is the woman who

invents abortion, infanticide and contraception- for even the last

occurs, sporadically, among primitive peoples. `010466

It is

astonishing to find how similar are the motives of the "savage" to the

"civilized" woman in preventing birth: to escape the burden of rearing

offspring, to preserve a youthful figure, to avert the disgrace of

extramarital motherhood, to avoid death, etc. The simplest means of

reducing maternity was the refusal of the man by the woman during

the period of nursing, which might be prolonged for many years.

Sometimes, as among the Cheyenne Indians, the women developed the

custom of refusing to bear a second child until the first was ten

years old. In New Britain the women had no children till two or four

years after marriage. The Guaycurus of Brazil were constantly

diminishing because the women would bear no children till the age of

thirty. Among the Papuans abortion was frequent; "children are

burdensome," said the women; "we are weary of them; we go dead."

Some Maori tribes used herbs or induced artificial malposition of

the uterus, to prevent conception. `010467

III. SOCIAL MORALITY

-

The nature of virtue and vice- Greed- Dishonesty- Violence-

Homicide- Suicide- The socialization of the individual-

Altruism- Hospitality- Manners- Tribal limits of morality-

Primitive vs. modern morals- Religion and morals

-

The simplest "savages" seem to be the most honest. `010476

"Their word is sacred," said Kolben of the Hottentots; they know

"nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe." `010477

As international communications improved, this naive honesty

disappeared; Europe has taught the gentle art to the Hottentots. In

general, dishonesty rises with civilization, because under

civilization the stakes of diplomacy are larger, there are more things

to be stolen, and education makes men clever. When property develops

among primitive men, lying and stealing come in its train. `010478

The Fuegians punished a murderer merely by exiling him until his

fellows had forgotten his crime. The Kaffirs considered a murderer

unclean, and required that he should blacken his face with charcoal;

but after a while, if he washed himself, rinsed his mouth, and dyed

himself brown, he was received into society again. The savages of

Futuna, like our own, looked upon a murderer as a hero. `010481 In

several tribes no woman would marry a man who had not killed some one,

in fair fight or foul; hence the practice of head-hunting, which

survives in the Philippines today. The Dyak who brought back most

heads from such a man-hunt had the choice of all the girls in his

village; these were eager for his favors, feeling that through him

they might become the mothers of brave and potent

men. *01020 `010482

To transmute greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder

into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task

of civilization. It was a great advance when the strong consented to

eat the weak by due process of law. No society can survive if it

allows its members to behave toward one another in the same way in

which it encourages them to behave as a group toward other groups;

internal cooperation is the first law of external competition. The

struggle for existence is not ended by mutual aid, it is incorporated,

or transferred to the group. Other things equal, the ability to

compete with rival groups will be proportionate to the ability of

the individual members and families to combine with one another. Hence

every society inculcates a moral code, and builds up in the heart of

the individual, as its secret allies and aides, social dispositions

that mitigate the natural war of life; it encourages- by calling

them virtues- those qualities or habits in the individual which

redound to the advantage of the group, and discourages contrary

qualities by calling them vices. In this way the individual is in some

outward measure socialized, and the animal becomes a citizen.

-

It was hardly more difficult to generate social sentiments in the

soul of the "savage" than it is to raise them now in the heart of

modern man. The struggle for life encouraged communalism, but the

struggle for property intensifies individualism. Primitive man was

perhaps readier than contemporary man to cooperate with his fellows;

social solidarity came more easily to him since he had more perils and

interests in common with his group, and less possessions to separate

him from the rest. `010486 The natural man was violent and greedy;

but he was also kindly and generous, ready to share even with

strangers, and to make presents to his guests. `010487 Every

schoolboy knows that primitive hospitality, in many tribes, went to

the extent of offering to the traveler the wife or daughter of the

host. `010488 To decline such an offer was a serious offense, not

only to the host but to the woman; these are among the perils faced by

missionaries. Often the later treatment of the guest was determined by

the manner in which he had acquitted himself of these

responsibilities. `010489

Almost all groups agree in holding other groups to be inferior to

themselves. The American Indians looked upon themselves as the

chosen people, specially created by the Great Spirit as an uplifting

example for mankind. One Indian tribe called itself "The Only Men";

another called itself "Men of Men"; the Caribs said, "We alone are

people." The Eskimos believed that the Europeans had come to Greenland

to learn manners and virtues. `010494 Consequently it seldom

occurred to primitive man to extend to other tribes the moral

restraints which he acknowledged in dealing with his own; he frankly

conceived it to be the function of morals to give strength and

coherence to his group against other groups. Commandments and tabus

applied only to the people of his tribe; with others, except when they

were his guests, he might go as far as he dared. `010495

 There are no morals in diplomacy,

and la politique n'a pas d'entrailles; but there are morals in

international trade, merely because such trade cannot go on without

some degree of restraint, regulation, and confidence. Trade began in

piracy; it culminates in morality.

IV. RELIGION

-

Primitive atheists

Certain Pygmy tribes of Africa had no observable cult or rites;

they had no totem, no fetishes, and no gods; they buried their dead

without ceremony, and seem to have paid no further attention to

them; they lacked even superstitions, if we may believe otherwise

incredible travelers. `010496a The dwarfs of the Cameroon recognized

only malevolent deities, and did nothing to placate them, on the

ground that it was useless to try. The Veddahs of Ceylon went no

further than to admit the possibility of gods and immortal souls;

but they offered no prayers or sacrifices. Asked about God they

answered, as puzzled as the latest philosopher: "Is he on a rock? On a

white-ant hill? On a tree? I never saw a god!" `010496b The North

American Indians conceived a god, but did not worship him; like

Epicurus they thought him too remote to be concerned in their

affairs. `010496c An Abipone Indian rebuffed a metaphysical inquirer

in a manner quite Confucian: "Our grandfathers and our

great-grandfathers were wont to contemplate the earth alone,

solicitous only to see whether the plain afford grass and water for

their horses. They never troubled themselves about what went on in the

heavens, and who was the creator and governor of the stars." The

Eskimos, when asked who had made the heavens and the earth, always

replied, "We do not know." `010496d A Zulu was asked: "When you see

the sun rising and setting, and the trees growing, do you know who

made them and governs them?" He answered, simply: "No, we see them,

but cannot tell how they came; we suppose that they came by

themselves." `010496e

1. The Sources of Religion

-

Fear- Wonder- Dreams- The soul- Animism

-

Fear, as Lucretius said, was the first mother of the gods. Fear,

above all, of death. Primitive life was beset with a thousand dangers,

and seldom ended with natural decay; long before old age could come,

violence or some strange disease carried off the great majority of

men. Hence early man did not believe that death was ever

natural; `010497 he attributed it to the operation of supernatural

agencies. In the mythology of the natives of New Britain death came to

men by an error of the gods. The good god Kambinana told his foolish

brother Korvouva, "Go down to men and tell them to cast their skins;

so shall they avoid death. But tell the serpents that they must

henceforth die." Korvouva mixed the messages; he delivered the

secret of immortality to the snakes, and the doom of death to

men. `010498 Many tribes thought that death was due to the shrinkage

of the skin, and that man would be immortal if only he could

moult. `010499

The

personal way of conceiving objects and events preceded the

impersonal or abstract; religion preceded philosophy. Such animism

is the poetry of religion, and the religion of poetry. We may see it

at its lowest in the wonder-struck eyes of a dog that watches a

paper blown before him by the wind, and perhaps believes that a spirit

moves the paper from within; and we find the same feeling at its

highest in the language of the poet. To the primitive mind- and to the

poet in all ages- mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, stars, sun, moon

and sky are sacramentally holy things, because they are the outward

and visible signs of inward and invisible souls. To the early Greeks

the sky was the god Ouranos, the moon was Selene, the earth was

Gaea, the sea was Poseidon, and everywhere in the woods was Pan. To

the ancient Germans the forest primeval was peopled with genii, elves,

trolls, giants, dwarfs and fairies; these sylvan creatures survive

in the music of Wagner and the poetic dramas of Ibsen. The simpler

peasants of Ireland still believe in fairies, and no poet or

playwright can belong to the Irish literary revival unless he

employs them. There is wisdom as well as beauty in this animism;  it is

good and nourishing to treat all things as alive. To the sensitive

spirit, says the most sensitive of contemporary writers,

-

Nature begins to present herself as a vast congeries of separate

living entities, some visible, some invisible, but all possessed of

mind-stuff, all possessed of matter-stuff, and all blending mind and

matter together in the basic mystery of being.... The world is full of

gods! From every planet and from every stone there emanates a presence

that disturbs us with a sense of the multitudinousness of god-like

powers, strong and feeble, great and little, moving between heaven and

earth upon their secret purposes. `0104103

2. The Objects of Religion

-

The sun- The stars- The earth- Sex- Animals- Totemism- The

transition to human gods- Ghost-worship- Ancestor-worship

Since all things have souls, or contain hidden gods, the objects

of religious worship are numberless. They fall into six classes:

celestial, terrestrial, sexual, animal, human, and divine. Of course

we shall never know which of our universe of objects was worshiped

first. One of the first was probably the moon. Just as our own

folk-lore speaks of the " man in the moon," so primitive legend

conceived the moon as a bold male who caused women to menstruate by

seducing them. He was a favorite god with women, who worshiped him

as their protecting deity. The pale orb was also the measure of

time; it was believed to control the weather, and to make both rain

and snow; even the frogs prayed to it for rain. `0104104

We do not know when the sun replaced the moon as the lord of the sky

in primitive religion. Perhaps it was when vegetation replaced

hunting, and the transit of the sun determined the seasons of sowing

and reaping, and its heat was recognized as the main cause of the

bounty of the soil. Then the earth became a goddess fertilized by

the hot rays, and men worshiped the great orb as the father of all

things living. `0104105 From this simple beginning sun-worship

passed down into the pagan faiths of antiquity, and many a later god

was only a personification of the sun. Anaxagoras was exiled by the

learned Greeks because he ventured the guess that the sun was not a

god, but merely a ball of fire, about the size of the Peloponnesus.

The Middle Ages kept a relic of sun-worship in the halo pictured

around the heads of saints, `0104106 and in our own day the Emperor

of Japan is regarded by most of his people as an incarnation of the

sun-god. `0104107 There is hardly any superstition so old but it can

be found flourishing somewhere today. Civilization is the precarious

labor and luxury of a minority; the basic masses of mankind hardly

change from millennium to millennium.

Like the sun and the moon, every star contained or was a god, and

moved at the command of its indwelling spirit. Under Christianity

these spirits became guiding angels, star-pilots, so to speak; and

Kepler was not too scientific to believe in them. The sky itself was a

great god, worshiped devotedly as giver and withholder of rain.

Among many primitive peoples the word for god meant sky; among the

Lubari and the Dinkas it meant rain. Among the Mongols the supreme god

was Tengri - the sky; in China it was Ti - the sky; in Vedic India

it was Dyaus pitar - the "father sky"; among the Greeks it was

Zeus - the sky, the "cloud-compeller"; among the Persians it was

Ahura - the "azure sky"; `0104108 and among ourselves men still ask

"Heaven" to protect them. The central point in most primitive

mythology is the fertile mating of earth and sky.

Almost everywhere the earth was the Great Mother;

our language, which is often the precipitate of primitive or

unconscious beliefs, suggests to this day a kinship between matter

( materia ) and mother ( mater ). `0104112 Ishtar and Cybele,

Demeter and Ceres, Aphrodite and Venus and Freya- these are

comparatively late forms of the ancient goddesses of the earth, whose

fertility constituted the bounty of the fields; their birth and

marriage, their death and triumphant resurrection were conceived as

the symbols or causes of the sprouting, the decay, and the vernal

renewal of all vegetation. These deities reveal by their gender the

primitive association of agriculture with woman. When agriculture

became the dominant mode of human life, the vegetation goddesses

reigned supreme. Most early gods were of the gentler sex; they were

superseded by male deities presumably as a heavenly reflex of the

victorious patriarchal family. `0104113

There is hardly an animal in nature, from the Egyptian scarab to the

Hindu elephant, that has not somewhere been worshiped as a god. The

Ojibwa Indians gave the name of totem to their special sacred

animal, to the clan that worshiped it, and to any member of the

clan; and this confused word has stumbled into anthropology as

totemism, denoting vaguely any worship of a particular object-

usually an animal or a plant- as especially sacred to a group.

Varieties of totemism have been found scattered over apparently

unconnected regions of the earth, from the Indian tribes of North

America to the natives of Africa, the Dravidians of India, and the

tribes of Australia. `0104115 The totem as a religious object helped

to unify the tribe, whose members thought themselves bound up with

it or descended from it; the Iroquois, in semi-Darwinian fashion,

believed that they were sprung from the primeval mating of women

with bears, wolves and deer.

The dove, the fish and the lamb, in the symbolism

of nascent Christianity, were relics of totemic adoration; even the

lowly pig was once a totem of prehistoric Jews. `0104116 In most

cases the totem animal was tabu- i.e., forbidden, not to be touched;

Among several primitive

peoples the word for god actually meant "a dead man"; even today the

English word spirit and the German word Geist mean both ghost

and soul. The Greeks invoked their dead precisely as the Christians

were to invoke the saints. `0104122 So strong was the belief- first

generated in dreams- in the continued life of the dead, that primitive

men sometimes sent messages to them in the most literal way; in one

tribe the chief, to convey such a letter, recited it verbally to a

slave, and then cut off his head for special delivery; if the chief

forgot something he sent another decapitated slave as a

postscript. `0104123

Gradually the cult of the ghost became the worship of ancestors. All

the dead were feared, and had to be propitiated, lest they should

curse and blight the lives of the living. This ancestor-worship was so

well adapted to promote social authority and continuity,

conservatism and order, that it soon spread to every region of the

earth. It flourished in Egypt, Greece and Rome, and survives

vigorously in China and Japan today; many peoples worship ancestors

but no god. `0104124 *01024 The institution held the family

powerfully together despite the hostility of successive generations,

and provided an invisible structure for many early societies. And just

as compulsion grew into conscience, so fear graduated into love; the

ritual of ancestor-worship, probably generated by terror, later

aroused the sentiment of awe, and finally developed piety and

devotion. It is the tendency of gods to begin as ogres and to end as

loving fathers; the idol passes into an ideal as the growing security,

peacefulness and moral sense of the worshipers pacify and transform

the features of their once ferocious deities.

The idea of a human god was a late step in a long development; it

was slowly differentiated, through many stages, out of the

conception of an ocean or multitude of spirits and ghosts

surrounding and inhabiting everything. From the fear and worship of

vague and formless spirits men seem to have passed to adoration of

celestial, vegetative and sexual powers, then to reverence for

animals, and worship of ancestors. The notion of God as Father was

probably derived from ancestor-worship; it meant originally that men

had been physically begotten by the gods. `0104125 In primitive

theology there is no sharp or generic distinction between gods and

men; to the early Greeks, for example, their gods were ancestors,

and their ancestors were gods. A further development came when, out of

the medley of ancestors, certain men and women who had been especially

distinguished were singled out for clearer deification; so the greater

kings became gods, sometimes even before their death. But with this

development we reach the historic civilizations.

3. The Methods of Religion

-

Magic- Vegetation rites- Festivals of license- Myths of

the resurrected god- Magic and superstition- Magic

and science- Priests

Festivals of promiscuity, coming in nearly all cases at the season

of sowing, served partly as a moratorium on morals (recalling the

comparative freedom of sex relations in earlier days), partly as a

means of fertilizing the wives of sterile men, and partly as a

ceremony of suggestion to the earth in spring to abandon her wintry

reserve, accept the proffered seed, and prepare to deliver herself

of a generous litter of food. Such festivals appear among a great

number of nature peoples, but particularly among the Cameroons of

the Congo, the Kaffirs, the Hottentots and the Bantus. "Their

harvest festivals," says the Reverend H. Rowley of the Bantus,

-

are akin in character to the feasts of Bacchus.... It is

impossible to witness them without being ashamed.... Not only is

full sexual license permitted to the neophytes, and indeed in most

cases enjoined, but any visitor attending the festival is encouraged

to indulge in licentiousness. Prostitution is freely indulged in,

and adultery is not viewed with any sense of heinousness, on account

of the surroundings. No man attending the festival is allowed to

have intercourse with his wife. `0104131

-

Similar festivals appear in the historic civilizations: in the

Bacchic celebrations of Greece, the Saturnalia of Rome, the Fete

des Fous in medieval France, May Day in England, and the Carnival

or Mardi Gras of contemporary ways.

Here and there, as among the Pawnees and the Indians of Guayaquil,

vegetation rites took on a less attractive form. A man- or, in later

and milder days, an animal- was sacrificed to the earth at sowing

time, so that it might be fertilized by his blood. When the harvest

came it was interpreted as the resurrection of the dead man; the

victim was given, before and after his death, the honors of a god; and

from this origin arose, in a thousand forms, the almost universal myth

of a god dying for his people, and then returning triumphantly to

life. `0104132

Solar myths mingled harmoniously with vegetation rites,

and the legend of a god dying and reborn came to apply not only to the

winter death and spring revival of the earth but to the autumnal and

vernal equinoxes, and the waning and waxing of the day. For the coming

of night was merely a part of this tragic drama; daily the sun-god was

born and died; every sunset was a crucifixion, and every sunrise was a

resurrection.

Human sacrifice, of which we have here but one of many varieties,

seems to have been honored at some time or another by almost every

people. On the island of Carolina in the Gulf of Mexico a great hollow

metal statue of an old Mexican deity has been found, within which

still lay the remains of human beings apparently burned to death as an

offering to the god. `0104133 Every one knows of the Moloch to whom

the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, and occasionally other Semites,

offered human victims. In our own time the custom has been practised

in Rhodesia. `0104134 Probably it was bound up with cannibalism; men

thought that the gods had tastes like their own. As religious

beliefs change more slowly than other creeds, and rites change more

slowly than beliefs, this divine cannibalism survived after human

cannibalism disappeared. `0104135

Slowly, however, evolving morals

changed even religious rites; the gods imitated the increasing

gentleness of their worshipers, and resigned themselves to accepting

animal instead of human meat; a hind took the place of Iphigenia,

and a ram was substituted for Abraham's son. In time the gods did

not receive even the animal; the priests liked savory food, ate all

the edible parts of the sacrificial victim themselves, and offered

upon the altar only the entrails and the bones. `0104136

Since early man believed that he acquired the powers of whatever

organism he consumed, he came naturally to the conception of eating

the god. In many cases he ate the flesh and drank the blood of the

human god whom he had deified and fattened for the sacrifice. When,

through increased continuity in the food-supply, he became more

humane, he substituted images for the victim, and was content to eat

these. In ancient Mexico an image of the god was made of grain,

seeds and vegetables, was kneaded with the blood of boys sacrificed

for the purpose, and was then consumed as a religious ceremony of

eating the god. Similar ceremonies have been found in many primitive

tribes. Usually the participant was required to fast before eating the

sacred image; and the priest turned the image into the god by the

power of magic formulas. `0104137

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. A wilderness of

weird beliefs came out of animism, and resulted in many strange

formulas and rites. The Kukis encouraged themselves in war by the

notion that all the enemies they slew would attend them as slaves in

the after life. On the other hand a Bantu, when he had slain his

foe, shaved his own head and anointed himself with goat-dung, to

prevent the spirit of the dead man from returning to pester him.

Almost all primitive peoples believed in the efficacy of curses, and

the destructiveness of the "evil eye." `0104138 Australian natives

were sure that the curse of a potent magician could kill at a

hundred miles. The belief in witchcraft began early in human

history, and has never quite disappeared. Fetishism- *01025 the

worship of idols or other objects as having magic power- is still more

ancient and indestructible. Since many amulets are limited to a

special power, some peoples are heavily laden with a variety of them,

so that they may be ready for any emergency. `0104139

The philosopher accepts gracefully this human need of supernatural

aid and comfort, and consoles himself by observing that just as

animism generates poetry, so magic begets drama and science. Frazer

has shown, with the exaggeration natural to a brilliant innovator,

that the glories of science have their roots in the absurdities of

magic. For since magic often failed, it became of advantage to the

magician to discover natural operations by which he might help

supernatural forces to produce the desired event. Slowly the natural

means came to predominate, even though the magician, to preserve his

standing with the people, concealed these natural means as well as

he could, and gave the credit to supernatural magic- much as our own

people often credit natural cures to magical prescriptions and

pills. In this way magic gave birth to the physician, the chemist, the

metallurgist, and the astronomer. `0104140

More immediately, however, magic made the priest. Gradually, as

religious rites became more numerous and complex, they outgrew the

knowledge and competence of the ordinary man, and generated a

special class which gave most of its time to the functions and

ceremonies of religion. The priest as magician had access, through

trance, inspiration or esoteric prayer, to the will of the spirits

or gods, and could change that will for human purposes. Since such

knowledge and skill seemed to primitive men the most valuable of

all, and supernatural forces were conceived to affect man's fate at

every turn, the power of the clergy became as great as that of the

state; and from the latest societies to modern times the priest has

vied and alternated with the warrior in dominating and disciplining

men. Let Egypt, Judea and medieval Europe suffice as instances.

The priest did not create religion, he merely used it, as a

statesman uses the impulses and customs of mankind; religion arises

not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the

persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of

men.

If he had not existed the people would have invented him.

4. The Moral Function of Religion

-

Religion and government- Tabu- Sexual tabus-

The lag of religion- Secularization

-

The Macusi of British

Guiana forbade women to bathe at their periods lest they should poison

the waters; and they forbade them to go into the forests on these

occasions, lest they be bitten by enamored snakes. `0104145 Even

childbirth was unclean, and after it the mother was to purify

herself with laborious religious rites. Sexual relations, in most

primitive peoples, were tabu not only in the menstrual period but

whenever the woman was pregnant or nursing. Probably these

prohibitions were originated by women themselves, out of their own

good sense and for their own protection and convenience; but origins

are easily forgotten, and soon woman found herself "Impure" and

"unclean." In the end she accepted man's point of view, and felt shame

in her periods, even in her pregnancy. Out of such tabus as a

partial source came modesty, the sense of sin, the view of sex as

unclean, asceticism, priestly celibacy, and the subjection of woman.

Religion is not the basis of morals, but an aid to them; conceivably

they could exist without it, and not infrequently they have progressed

against its indifference or its obstinate resistance.

The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and-

after some hesitation- the moral code allied with it; literature and

philosophy become anti-clerical. The movement of liberation rises to

an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing

disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived

of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life

itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to

conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its

religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious

death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new

form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries

of chaos builds another civilization.

CHAPTER V: The Mental Elements of Civilization

I. LETTERS

-

Language- Its animal background- Its human origins- Its

development- Its results- Education- Initiation- Writing- Poetry

-

For words are to thought what tools are to work; the product depends largely on the growth of the

tools. `01051

Even after indefinite

millenniums of linguistic changes and complications every language

still contains hundreds of imitative words- roar, rush, murmur,

tremor, giggle, groan, hiss, heave, hum, cackle, etc. *01027 The

Tecuna tribe, of ancient Brazil, had a perfect verb for sneeze:

haitschu. `01055 Out of such beginnings, perhaps, came the

root-words of every language. Renan reduced all Hebrew words to five

hundred roots, and Skeat nearly all European words to some four

hundred stems. *01028

Nearly all primitive tongues, however, limit themselves to the sensual and particular,

and are uniformly poor in general or abstract terms. So the Australian

natives had a name for a dog's tail, and another name for a cow's

tail; but they had no name for tail in general. `01058 The

Tasmanians had separate names for specific trees, but no general

name for tree; the Choctaw Indians had names for the black oak, the

white oak and the red oak, but no name for oak, much less for tree.

Doubtless many generations passed before the proper noun ended in

the common noun. In many tribes there are no separate words for the

color as distinct from the colored object; no words for such

abstractions as tone, sex, species, space, spirit, instinct, reason,

quantity, hope, fear, matter, consciousness, etc. `01059 Such

abstract terms seem to grow in a reciprocal relation of cause and

effect with the development of thought; they become the tools of

subtlety and the symbols of civilization.

They made not only for clearer thinking, but for better social organization; they

cemented the generations mentally, by providing a better medium for

education and the transmission of knowledge and the arts; they created

a new organ of communication, by which one doctrine or belief could

mold a people into homogeneous unity. They opened new roads for the

transport and traffic of ideas, and immensely accelerated the tempo,

and enlarged the range and content, of life. Has any other invention

ever equaled, in power and glory, the common noun?

The environment of the natural man was comparatively permanent; it

called not for mental agility but for courage and character. The

primitive father put his trust in character, as modern education has

put its trust in intellect; he was concerned to make not scholars

but men. Hence the initiation rites which, among nature peoples,

ordinarily marked the arrival of the youth at maturity and

membership in the tribe, were designed to test courage rather than

knowledge; their function was to prepare the young for the hardships

of war and the responsibilities of marriage, while at the same time

they indulged the old in the delights of inflicting pain. Some of

these initiation tests are "too terrible and too revolting to be

seen or told." `010512 Among the Kaffirs (to take a mild example)

the boys who were candidates for maturity were given arduous work by

day, and were prevented from sleeping by night, until they dropped

from exhaustion; and to make the matter more certain they were

scourged "frequently and mercilessly until blood spurted from them." A

considerable proportion of the boys died as a result; but this seems

to have been looked upon philosophically by the elders, perhaps as

an auxiliary anticipation of natural selection. `010513

An Egyptian legend

relates that when the god Thoth revealed his discovery of the art of

writing to King Thamos, the good King denounced it as an enemy of

civilization. "Children and young people," protested the monarch, "who

had hitherto been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and

retain whatever was taught them, would cease to apply themselves,

and would neglect to exercise their memories." `010516

Such words as five, the German funf and the

Greek pente go back to a root meaning hand; `010517 so the Roman

numerals indicated fingers, "V" represented an expanded hand, and

"X" was merely two "V's" connected at their points. Writing was in its

beginnings- as it still is in China and Japan- a form of drawing, an

art. As men used gestures when they could not use words, so they

used pictures to transmit their thoughts across time and space;

every word and every letter known to us was once a picture, even as

trade-marks and the signs of the zodiac are to this day. The

primeval Chinese pictures that preceded writing were called

ku-wan - literally, "gesture-pictures." Totem poles were pictograph

writing; they were, as Mason suggests, tribal autographs.

Literature is at first words rather than letters, despite its name;

it arises as clerical chants or magic charms, recited usually by the

priests, and transmitted orally from memory to memory. Carmina, as

the Romans named poetry, meant both verses and charms; ode, among

the Greeks, meant originally a magic spell; so did the English rune

and lay, and the German Lied. Rhythm and meter, suggested,

perhaps, by the rhythms of nature and bodily life, were apparently

developed by magicians or shamans to preserve, transmit, and enhance

the "magic incantations of their verse." `010520 The Greeks

attributed the first hexameters to the Delphic priests, who were

believed to have invented the meter for use in oracles. `010521

Gradually, out of these sacerdotal origins, the poet, the orator and

the historian were differentiated and secularized: the orator as the

official lauder of the king or solicitor of the deity; the historian

as the recorder of the royal deeds; the poet as the singer of

originally sacred chants, the formulator and preserver of heroic

legends, and the musician who put his tales to music for the

instruction of populace and kings.

II. SCIENCE

-

Origins- Mathematics- Astronomy- Medicine- Surgery

-

In the opinion of Herbert Spencer, that supreme expert in the

collection of evidence post judicium, science, like letters, began

with the priests, originated in astronomic observations, governing

religious festivals, and was preserved in the temples and

transmitted across the generations as part of the clerical

heritage. `010523

Counting was probably one of the earliest forms of speech, and in

many tribes it still presents a relieving simplicity. The Tasmanians

counted up to two: "Parmery, calabawa, cardia"- i.e., "one, two,

plenty"; the Guaranis of Brazil adventured further and said: "One,

two, three, four, innumerable." The New Hollanders had no words for

three or four; three they called "two-one"; four was

"two-two." Damara natives would not exchange two sheep for four

sticks, but willingly exchanged, twice in succession, one sheep for

two sticks. Counting was by the fingers; hence the decimal system.

When- apparently after some time- the idea of twelve was reached,

the number became a favorite because it was so pleasantly divisible by

five of the first six digits; and that duodecimal system was born

which obstinately survives in English measurements today: twelve

months in a year, twelve pence in a shilling, twelve units in a dozen,

twelve dozen in a gross, twelve inches in a foot. Thirteen, on the

other hand, refused to be divided, and became disreputable and unlucky

forever. Toes added to fingers created the idea of twenty or a

score; the use of this unit in reckoning lingers in the French

quatre-vingt (four twenties) for eighty. `

III. ART

-

The meaning of beauty- Of art- The primitive sense of beauty-

The painting of the body- Cosmetics- Tattooing- Scarification-

Clothing- Ornaments- Pottery- Painting- Sculpture-

Architecture- The dance- Music- Summary of the

primitive preparation for civilization

-

The Botocudos derived their name from a plug ( botoque ) which they

inserted into the lower lip and the ears in the eighth year of life,

and repeatedly replaced with a larger plug until the opening was as

much as four inches in diameter. `010548 Hottentot women trained the

labia minora to assume enormous lengths, so producing at last the

"Hottentot apron" so greatly admired by their men. `010549 Ear-rings

and nose-rings were de rigueur; the natives of Gippsland believed

that one who died without a nose-ring would suffer horrible torments

in the next life. `010550 It is all very barbarous, says the modern

lady, as she bores her ears for rings, paints her lips and her cheeks,

tweezes her eyebrows, reforms her eyelashes, powders her face, her

neck and her arms, and compresses her feet. The tattooed sailor speaks

with superior sympathy of the "savages" he has known; and the

Continental student, horrified by primitive mutilations, sports his

honorific scars.

How did architecture begin? We can hardly apply so magnificent a

term to the construction of the primitive hut; for architecture is not

mere building, but beautiful building. It began when for the first

time a man or a woman thought of a dwelling in terms of appearance

as well as of use. Probably this effort to give beauty or sublimity to

a structure was directed first to graves rather than to homes; while

the commemorative pillar developed into statuary, the tomb grew into a

temple. For to primitive thought the dead were more important and

powerful than the living; and, besides, the dead could remain

settled in one place, while the living wandered too often to warrant

their raising permanent homes.

CHAPTER VI: The Prehistoric Beginnings of Civilization

1. Men of the Old Stone Age

-

The geological background- Paleolithic types

-

These ancient inhabitants of Europe seem to have been displaced,

some 20,000 B.C., by a new race, named Cro-Magnon, from the

discovery of its relics (1868) in a grotto of that name in the

Dordogne region of southern France. Abundant remains of like type

and age have been exhumed at various points in France, Switzerland,

Germany and Wales. They indicate a people of magnificent vigor and

stature, ranging from five feet ten inches to six feet four inches

in height, and having a skull capacity of 1590 to 1715 cubic

centimeters. `01065 Like the Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon men are known

to us as "cave-men," because their remains are found in caves; but

there is no proof that these were their sole dwelling-place; it may be

again but a jest of time that only those of them who lived in caves,

or died in them, have transmitted their bones to archaeologists.

According to present theory this splendid race came from central

Asia through Africa into Europe by land-bridges presumed to have then

connected Africa with Italy and Spain. `01

At all events,

Neanderthal Man disappeared; Cro-Magnon Man survived, became the chief

progenitor of the modern western European, and laid the bases of

that civilization which we inherit today.

The cultural remains of these and other European types of the Old

Stone Age have been classified into seven main groups, according to

the location of the earliest or principal finds in France. All are

characterized by the use of unpolished stone implements. The first

three took form in the precarious interval between the third and

fourth glaciations.

-

I. The Pre-Chellean Culture or Industry, dating some 125,000 B.C.:

most of the flints found in this low layer give little evidence of

fashioning, and appear to have been used (if at all) as nature

provided them; but the presence of many stones of a shape to fit the

fist, and in some degree flaked and pointed, gives to Pre-Chellean man

the presumptive honor of having made the first known tool of

European man- the coup-de-poing, or "blow-of-the-fist" stone.

-

II. The Chellean Culture, ca. 100,000 B.C., improved this tool

by roughly flaking it on both sides, pointing it into the shape of

an almond, and fitting it better to the hand.

III. The Acheulean Culture, about 75,000 B.C., left an abundance

of remains in Europe, Greenland, the United States, Canada, Mexico,

Africa, the Near East, India, and China; it not only brought the

coup-de-poing to greater symmetry and point, but it produced a vast

variety of special tools- hammers, anvils, scrapers, planes,

arrow-heads, spear-heads, and knives; already one sees a picture of

busy human industry.

-

IV. The Mousterian Culture is found on all continents, in especial

association with the remains of Neanderthal Man, about 40,000 B.C.

Among these flints the coup-de-poing is comparatively rare, as

something already ancient and superseded. The implements were formed

from a large single flake, lighter, sharper and shapelier than before,

and by skilful hands with a long-established tradition of artisanship.

Higher in the Pleistocene strata of southern France appear the remains

of

V. The Aurignacian Culture, ca. 25,000 B.C., the first of the

postglacial industries, and the first known culture of Cro-Magnon Man.

Bone tools- pins, anvils, polishers, etc.- were now added to those

of stone; and art appeared in the form of crude engravings on the

rocks, or simple figurines in high relief, mostly of nude

women. `01067 At a higher stage of Cro-Magnon development

-

VI. The Solutrean Culture appears ca. 20,000 B.C., in France,

Spain, Czechoslovakia and Poland: points, planes, drills, saws,

javelins and spears were added to the tools and weapons of Aurignacian

days; slim, sharp needles were made of bone, many implements were

carved out of reindeer horn, and the reindeer's antlers were

engraved occasionally with animal figures appreciably superior to

Aurignacian art. Finally, at the peak of Cro-Magnon growth,

-

VII. The Magdalenian Culture appears throughout Europe about

16,000 B.C.; in industry it was characterized by a large assortment of

delicate utensils in ivory, bone and horn, culminating in humble but

perfect needles and pins; in art it was the age of the Altamira

drawings, the most perfect and subtle accomplishment of Cro-Magnon

Man.

Throughout

the prehistoric Mediterranean- Egypt, Crete, Italy, France and

Spain- countless figures of fat little women are found, which indicate

either a worship of motherhood or an African conception of beauty.

Stone statues of a wild horse, a reindeer and a mammoth have been

unearthed in Czechoslovakia, among remains uncertainly ascribed to

30,000 B.C. `010622

II. NEOLITHIC CULTURE

-

The Kitchen-Middens- The Lake-Dwellers- The coming of

agriculture- The taming of animals- Technology- Neolithic

weaving- pottery- building- transport- religion- science-

Summary of the prehistoric preparation for civilization

-

At various times in the last one hundred years great heaps of

seemingly prehistoric refuse have been found, in France, Sardinia,

Portugal, Brazil, Japan and Manchuria, but above all in Denmark, where

they received that queer name of Kitchen-Middens ( Kjokken-moddinger )

by which such ancient messes are now generally known. These rubbish

heaps are composed of shells, especially of oysters, mussels and

periwinkles; of the bones of various land and marine animals; of tools

and weapons of horn, bone and unpolished stone; and of mineral remains

like charcoal, ashes and broken pottery. These unprepossessing

relics are apparently signs of a culture formed about the eighth

millennium before Christ- later than the true paleolithic, and yet not

properly neolithic, because not yet arrived at the use of polished

stone. We know hardly anything of the men who left these remains,

except that they had a certain catholic taste. Along with the slightly

older culture of the Mas-d'Azil, in France, the Middens represent a

"mesolithic" (middle-stone) or transition period between the

paleolithic and the neolithic age.

If from such remains we attempt to patch together some picture of

the New Stone Age, we find at once a startling innovation-

agriculture. In one sense all human history hinges upon two

revolutions: the neolithic passage from hunting to agriculture, and

the modern passage from agriculture to industry; no other

revolutions have been quite as real or basic as these. The remains

show that the Lake-Dwellers ate wheat, millet, rye, barley and oats,

besides one hundred and twenty kinds of fruit and many varieties of

nut. `010629 No ploughs have been found in these ruins, probably

because the first ploughshares were of wood- some strong tree-trunk

and branch fitted with a flint edge; but a neolithic rock-carving

unmistakably shows a peasant guiding a plough drawn by two

oxen. `010630 This marks the appearance of one of the epochal

inventions of history. Before agriculture the earth could have

supported (in the rash estimate of Sir Arthur Keith) only some

twenty million men, and the lives of these were shortened by the

mortality of the chase and war; `010631 now began that

multiplication of mankind which definitely confirmed man's mastery

of the planet.

The oldest bones in the neolithic remains (ca.

8000 B.C.) are those of the dog- the most ancient and honorable

companion of the human race. A little later (ca. 6000 B.C.) came the

goat, the sheep, the pig and the ox. `010633 Finally the horse,

which to paleolithic man had been, if we may judge from the cave

drawings, merely a beast of prey, was taken into camp, tamed, and

turned into a beloved slave; `010634 in a hundred ways he was now

put to work to increase the leisure, the wealth, and the power of man.

The new lord of the earth began to replenish his food-supply by

breeding as well as hunting; and perhaps he learned, in this same

neolithic age, to use cow's milk as food.

Outside of pottery the New Stone Age has left us no art, nothing

to compare with the painting and statuary of paleolithic man. Here and

there among the scenes of neolithic life from England to China we find

circular heaps of stone called dolmens, upright monoliths called

menhirs, and gigantic cromlechs- stone structures of unknown

purpose- like those at Stonehenge or in Morbihan. Probably we shall

never know the meaning or function of these megaliths; presumably they

are the remains of altars and temples. `010645 For neolithic man

doubtless had religions, myths with which to dramatize the daily

tragedy and victory of the sun, the death and resurrection of the

soil, and the strange earthly influences of the moon; we cannot

understand the historic faiths unless we postulate such prehistoric

origins. `010646 Perhaps the arrangement of the stones was

determined by astronomic considerations, and suggests, as Schneider

thinks, an acquaintance with the calendar. `010647 Some scientific

knowledge was present, for certain neolithic skulls give evidence of

trephining; and a few skeletons reveal limbs apparently broken and

reset. `010648

III. THE TRANSITION TO HISTORY

1. The Coming of Metals

-

Copper- Bronze- Iron

-

The oldest known metal to be adapted to human use was copper. We

find it in a Lake-Dwelling at Robenhausen, Switzerland, ca. 6000

B.C.; `010649 in prehistoric Mesopotamia ca. 4500 B.C.; in the

Badarian graves of Egypt towards 4000 B.C.; in the ruins of Ur ca.

3100 B.C.; and in the relics of the North American Mound-Builders at

an unknown age. `010650 The Age of Metals began not with their

discovery, but with their transformation to human purpose by fire

and working. Metallurgists believe that the first fusing of copper out

of its stony ore came by haphazard when a primeval camp fire melted

the copper lurking in the rocks that enclosed the flames; such an

event has often been seen at primitive camp fires in our own day.

Possibly this was the hint which, many times repeated, led early

man, so long content with refractory stone, to seek in this malleable

metal a substance more easily fashioned into durable weapons and

tools. `010651 Presumably the metal was first used as it came from

the profuse but careless hand of nature-sometimes nearly pure, most

often grossly alloyed. Much later, doubtless- apparently about 3500

B.C. in the region around the Eastern Mediterranean- men discovered

the art of smelting, of extracting metals from their ores. Then,

towards 1500 B.C. (as we may judge from bas-reliefs on the tomb of

Rekh-mara in Egypt), they proceeded to cast metal: dropping the molten

copper into a clay or sand receptacle, they let it cool into some

desired form like a spear-head or an axe. `010652

Perhaps it was because the Eastern Mediterranean lands were

rich in copper that vigorous new cultures arose, in the fourth

millennium B.C., in Elam, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and spread thence

in all directions to transform the world. `010653

The discovery is at least five thousand

years old, for bronze is found in Cretan remains of 3000 B.C., in

Egyptian remains of 2800 B.C., and in the second city of Troy 2000

B.C. `010654 We can no longer speak strictly of an "Age of Bronze,"

for the metal came to different peoples at diverse epochs, and the

term would therefore be without chronological meaning; `010655

furthermore, some cultures- like those of Finland, northern Russia,

Polynesia, central Africa, southern India, North America, Australia

and Japan- passed over the Bronze Age directly from stone to

iron; `010656 and in those cultures where bronze appears it seems to

have had a subordinate place as a luxury of priests, aristocrats and

kings, while commoners had still to be content with stone. `010657

Men may have begun the art by

making weapons out of meteoric iron as the Mound-Builders seem to have

done, and as some primitive peoples do to this day; then, perhaps,

they melted it from the ore by fire, and hammered it into wrought

iron. Fragments of apparently meteoric iron have been found in

predynastic Egyptian tombs; and Babylonian inscriptions mention iron

as a costly rarity in Hammurabi's capital (2100 B.C.). An iron foundry

perhaps four thousand years old has been discovered in Northern

Rhodesia; mining in South Africa is no modern invention. The oldest

wrought iron known is a group of knives found at Gerar, in

Palestine, and dated by Petrie about 1350 B.C. A century later the

metal appears in Egypt, in the reign of the great Rameses II; still

another century and it is found in the AEgean. In Western Europe it

turns up first at Halistatt, Austria, ca. 900 B.C., and in the La Tene

industry in Switzerland ca. 500 B.C. It entered India with

Alexander, America with Columbus, Oceania with Cook. `010659 In this

leisurely way, century by century, iron has gone about its rough

conquest of the earth.

2. Writing

-

Its possible ceramic origins- The "Mediterranean Signary"-

Hieroglyphics- Alphabets

-

This

"Mediterranean Signary" numbered some three hundred signs; most of

them were the same in all localities, indicating commercial bonds from

one end of the Mediterranean to the other as far back as 5000 B.C.

They were not pictures but chiefly mercantile symbols- marks of

property, quantity, or other business memoranda; the berated

bourgeoisie may take consolation in the thought that literature

originated in bills of lading. The signs were not letters, since

they represented entire words or ideas; but many of them were

astonishingly like letters of the "Phoenician" alphabet. Petrie

concludes that "a wide body of signs had been gradually brought into

use in primitive times for various purposes. These were interchanged

by trade, and spread from land to land,... until a couple of dozen

signs triumphed and became common property to a group of trading

communities, while the local survivals of other forms were gradually

extinguished in isolated seclusion." `010661 That this signary was

the source of the alphabet is an interesting theory, which Professor

Petrie has the distinction of holding alone. `010662

Such alphabetic writing probably dates back to 3000 B.C. in

Egypt; in Crete it appears ca. 1600 B.C. `010665 The Phoenicians did

not create the alphabet, they marketed it; taking it apparently from

Egypt and Crete, `010666

The Phoenicians did

not create the alphabet, they marketed it; taking it apparently from

Egypt and Crete, `010666 they imported it piecemeal to Tyre, Sidon

and Byblos, and exported it to every city on the Mediterranean; they

were the middlemen, not the producers, of the alphabet. By the time of

Homer the Greeks were taking over this Phoenician- or the allied

Aramaic- alphabet, and were calling it by the Semitic names of the

first two letters ( Alpha, Beta; Hebrew Aleph, Beth ). `010667

Writing seems to be a product and convenience of commerce; here

again culture may see how much it owes to trade. When the priests

devised a system of pictures with which to write their magical,

ceremonial and medical formulas, the secular and clerical strains in

history, usually in conflict, merged for a moment to produce the

greatest human invention since the coming of speech.

4. Cradles of Civilization

-

Central Asia- Anau- Lines of Dispersion

-

We cannot be sure which of these cultures came first, and it does

not much matter; they were in essence of one family and one type. If

we violate honored precedents here and place Elam and Sumeria before

Egypt, it is from no vainglory of unconventional innovation, but

rather because the age of these Asiatic civilizations, compared with

those of Africa and Europe, grows as our knowledge of them deepens. As

the spades of archeology, after a century of victorious inquiry along

the Nile, pass across Suez into Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia and

Persia, it becomes more probable with every year of accumulating

research that it was the rich delta of Mesopotamia's rivers that saw

the earliest known scenes in the historic drama of civilization.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF NEAR EASTERN HISTORY

*01037

-

B.C. EGYPT B.C. WESTERN

ASIA

-

18000: Nile Paleolithic 40000: Paleolithic Culture

Culture in Palestine

10000: Nile Neolithic Culture 9000: Bronze Culture in

- Turkestan

5000: Nile Bronze Culture 4500: Civilization in Susa

- and Kish

4241: Egyptian Calendar 3800: Civilization in Crete

appears (?)

4000: Badarian Culture 3638: III Dynasty of Kish

3500-2631: A. THE OLD KINGDOM. 3600: Civilization in

Sumeria

3500-3100: I-III Dynasties 3200: Dynasty of Akshak in

- Sumeria

3100-2965: IV Dynasty: the 3100: Ur-nina, first (?) King

Pyramids of Lagash

3098-3075: Khufu ("Cheops" of 3089: IV Dynasty of Kish

Herodotus)

3067-3011: Khafre ("Chephren") 2903: King Urukagina reforms

- Lagash

3011-2988: Menkaure 2897: Lugal-zaggisi conquers

("Mycerinus") Lagash

2965-2631: V-VI Dynasties 2872-2817: Sargon I unites Sumeria

- & Akkad

2738-2644: Pepi II (longest 2795-2739: Naram-sin, King of

reign known) Sumeria & Akkad

2631-2212: The Feudal Age 2600: Gudea King of Lagash

2375-1800: B. THE MIDDLE 2474-2398: Golden Age of Ur; 1st

KINGDOM code of laws

2212-2000: XII Dynasty 2357: Sack of Ur by the

- Elamites

2212-2192: Amenemhet I 2169-1926: I Babylonian Dynasty

2192-2157: Senusret I 2123-2081: Hammurabi King of

("Seostris") Babylon

2099-2061: Senusret III 2117-2094: Hammurabi conquers

- Sumeria & Elam

2061-2013: Amenemhet III

1800-1600: The Hyksos 1926-1703: II Babylonian Dynasty

Domination 1900: Hittite Civilization

- appears

1580-1100: C. THE EMPIRE 1800: Civilization in

- Palestine

1580-1322: XVIII Dynasty 1746-1169: Kassite Domination in

- Babylonia

1545-1514: Thutmose I 1716: Rise of Assyria under

- Shamshi-Adad II

1514-1501: Thutmose II 1650-1220: Jewish Bondage in

- Egypt (?)

1501-1479: Queen Hatshepsut 1600-1360: Egyptian Domination of

- Palestine & Syria

1479-1447: Thutmose III 1550: The Civilization of

- Mitanni

1412-1376: Amenhotep III 1461: Burra-Buriash I King of

- Babylonia

-

1400-1360: Age of the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence; Revolt of

Western Asia against Egypt

-

1380-1362: Amenhotep IV 1276: Shalmaneser I unifies

(Ikhnaton) Assyria

1360-1350: Tutenkhamon 1200: Conquest of Canaan by

- the Jews

1346-1210: XIX Dynasty 1115-1102: Tiglath-Pileser I

- extends Assyria

1346-1322: Harmhab 1025-1010: Saul King of the Jews

1321-1300: Seti I 1010-974: David King of the Jews

1300-1233: Rameses II 1000-600: Golden Age of Phoenicia

1233-1223: Merneptah & Syria

1214-1210: Seti II 974-937: Solomon King of the

- Jews

1205-1100: XX Dynasty: 937: Schism of the Jews:

the Ramessid Kings Judah & Israel

1204-1172: Rameses III

1100-947: XXI Dynasty: 894-859: Ashurnasirpal II King

the Libyan Kings of Assyria

947-720: XXII Dynasty: the 859-824: Shalmaneser III King of

Bubastite Kings Assyria

947-925: Sheshonk I 811-808: Sammuramat ("Semi-

- ramis") in Assyria

925-889: Osorkon I 785-700: Golden Age of Armenia

880-850: Osorkon II ("Urartu")

850-825: Sheshonk II 745-727: Tiglath-Pileser III

821-769: Sheshonk III 732-722: Assyria takes Damascus

- & Samaria

763-725: Sheshonk IV

850-745: XXIII Dynasty: 722-705: Sargon II King of

The Theban Kings Assyria

- 709: Deioces King of the

- Medes

725-663: XXIV Dynasty: 705-681: Sennacherib King of

The Memphite Kings Assyria

- 702: The First Isaiah

745-663: XXV Dynasty: 689: Sennacherib sacks

The Ethiopian Kings Babylon

689-663: Taharka 681-669: Esarhaddon King of

- Assyria

685: Commercial revival 669-626: Ashurbanipal

of Egypt ("Sardanapalus")

King

- of Assyria

674-650: Assyrian Occupation 660-583: Zarathustra

of Egypt ("Zoroaster") ?

663-525: XXVI Dynasty: 652: Gyges King of Lydia

the Saite Kings

663-609: Psamtik 640-584: Cyaxares King of the

("Psammetichos") I Medes

663-525: Saite Revival of 639: Fall of Susa; end of

Egyptian Art Elam

- 639: Josiah King of the Jews

- 625: Nabopolassar restores

- independence of

- Babylon

- 621: Beginnings of the

- Pentateuch

615: Jews begin to colonize 612: Fall of Nineveh; end of

Egypt Assyria

609-593: Niku ("Necho") II 610-561: Alyattes King of Lydia

605: Niku begins the 605-562: Nebuchadrezzar II King

Hellenization of of Babylonia

Egypt 600: Jeremiah at Jerusalem;

- coinage in Lydia

593-588: Psamtik II 597-586: Nebuchadrezzar takes

- Jerusalem

- 586-538: Jewish Captivity in

- Babylon

- 580: Ezekiel in Babylon

569-526: Ahmose ("Amasis") II 570-546: Croesus King of Lydia

568-567: Nebuchadrezzar II 555-529: Cyrus I King of the

invades Egypt Medes & the Persians

560: Growing Influence of 546: Cyrus takes Sardis

Greece in Egypt 540: The Second Isaiah

- 539: Cyrus takes Babylon &

- creates the Persian

- Empire

526-525: Psamtik III 529-522: Cambyses King of Persia

525: Persian Conquest of 521-485: Darius I King of Persia

Egypt 520: Building of 2nd Temple

- at Jerusalem

485: Revolt of Egypt 490: Battle of Marathon

against Persia

484: Reconquest of Egypt 485-464: Xerxes I King of Persia

by Xerxes

482: Egypt joins with 480: Battle of Salamis

Persia in war 464-423: Artaxerxes I King of

against Greece Persia

455: Failure of Athenian 450: The "Book of Job" (?)

Expedition to Egypt 444: Ezra at Jerusalem

- 423-404: Darius II King of

- Persia

- 404-359: Artaxerxes II King of

- Persia

- 401: Cyrus the Younger

- defeated at Cunaxa

- 359-338: Ochus King of Persia

- 338-330: Darius III king of

- Persia

- 334: Battle of the Granicus;

- Alexander enters

- Jerusalem

332: Greek Conquest of Egypt; 333: Battle of Issus

foundation of 331: Alexander takes Babylon

Alexandria

283-30: The Ptolemaic Kings 330: Battle of Arbela; the

30: Egypt absorbed into the Near East becomes

Roman Empire part of Alexander's

- Empire

CHAPTER VII: Sumeria

-

Orient-ation- Contributions of the Near East to

Western civilization

WRITTEN history is at least six thousand years old. During half of

this period the center of human affairs, so far as they are now

known to us, was in the Near East. By this vague term we shall mean

here all southwestern Asia south of Russia and the Black Sea, and west

of India and Afghanistan; still more loosely, we shall include

within it Egypt, too, as anciently bound up with the Near East in

one vast web and communicating complex of Oriental civilization. In

this rough theatre of teeming peoples and conflicting cultures were

developed the agriculture and commerce, the horse and wagon, the

coinage and letters of credit, the crafts and industries, the law

and government, the mathematics and medicine, the enemas and

drainage systems, the geometry and astronomy, the calendar and clock

and zodiac, the alphabet and writing, the paper and ink, the books and

libraries and schools, the literature and music, the sculpture and

architecture, the glazed pottery and fine furniture, the monotheism

and monogamy, the cosmetics and jewelry, the checkers and dice, the

ten-pins and income-tax, the wet-nurses and beer, from which our own

European and American culture derive by a continuous succession

through the mediation of Crete and Greece and Rome. The "Aryans" did

not establish civilization- they took it from Babylonia and Egypt.

Greece did not begin civilization- it inherited far more

civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three

millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near

East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the

Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real

founders of European and American civilization.

I. ELAM

-

The culture of Susa- The potter's wheel- The wagon-wheel

-

If the reader will look at a map of Persia, and will run his

finger north along the Tigris from the Persian Gulf to Amara, and then

east across the Iraq border to the modern town of Shushan, he will

have located the site of the ancient city of Susa, center of a

region known to the Jews as Elam- the high land. In this narrow

territory, protected on the west by marshes, and on the east by the

mountains that shoulder the great Iranian Plateau, a people of unknown

race and origin developed one of the first historic civilizations.

Here, a generation ago, French archeologists found human remains

dating back 20,000 years, and evidences of an advanced culture as

old as 4500 B.C. *01038 `01071

II. THE SUMERIANS

1. The Historical Background

-

The exhuming of Sumeria- Geography- Race- Appearance-

The Sumerian Flood- The kings- An ancient reformer-

Sargon of Akkad- The Golden Age of Ur

-

If we return to our map and follow the combined Tigris and Euphrates

from the Persian Gulf to where these historic streams diverge (at

modern Kurna), and then follow the Euphrates westward, we shall

find, north and south of it, the buried cities of ancient Sumeria:

Eridu (now Abu Shahrein), Ur (now Mukayyar), Uruk (Biblical Erech, now

Warka), Larsa (Biblical Ellasar, now Senkereh), Lagash (now

Shippurla), Nippur (Niffer) and Nisin. Follow the Euphrates

northwest to Babylon, once the most famous city of Mesopotamia (the

land "between the rivers"); observe, directly east of it, Kish, site

of the oldest culture known in this region; then pass some sixty miles

farther up the Euphrates to Agade, capital, in ancient days, of the

Kingdom of Akkad. The early history of Mesopotamia is in one aspect

the struggle of the non-Semitic peoples of Sumeria to preserve their

independence against the expansion and inroads of the Semites from

Kish and Agade and other centers in the north. In the midst of their

struggles these varied stocks unconsciously, perhaps unwillingly,

cooperated to produce the first extensive civilization known to

history, and one of the most creative and unique. *01039

-

When their civilization was already old- about 2300 B.C.- the

poets and scholars of Sumeria tried to reconstruct its ancient

history. The poets wrote legends of a creation, a primitive Paradise

and a terrible flood that engulfed and destroyed it because of the sin

of an ancient king. `010711 This flood passed down into Babylonian

and Hebrew tradition, and became part of the Christian creed. In 1929

Professor Woolley, digging into the ruins of Ur, discovered, at

considerable depth, an eight-foot layer of silt and clay; this, if

we are to believe him, was deposited during a catastrophic overflow of

the Euphrates, which lingered in later memory as the Flood. Beneath

that layer were the remains of a prediluvian culture that would

later be pictured by the poets as a Golden Age.

So for two hundred years, which to our self-centered eyes seem but

an empty moment, Elam and Amor ruled Sumeria. Then from the north came

the great Hammurabi, King of Babylon; retook from the Elamites Uruk

and Isin; bided his time for twenty-three years; invaded Elam and

captured its king; established his sway over Amor and distant Assyria,

built an empire of unprecedented power, and disciplined it with a

universal law. For many centuries now, until the rise of Persia, the

Semites would rule the Land between the Rivers. Of the Sumerians

nothing more is heard; their little chapter in the book of history was

complete.

2. Economic Life

-

The soil- Industry- Trade- Classes- Science

-

But Sumerian civilization remained. Sumer and Akkad still produced

handicraftsmen, poets, artists, sages and saints; the culture of the

southern cities passed north along the Euphrates and the Tigris to

Babylonia and Assyria as the initial heritage of Mesopotamian

civilization.

3. Government

-

The kings- Ways of war- The feudal barons- Law

-

 King Manishtusu of Akkad announced frankly that he was

invading Elam to get control of its silver mines, and to secure

diorite stone to immortalize himself with statuary- the only

instance known of a war fought for the sake of art.

As in Renaissance Italy, the chauvinistic

separatism of the cities stimulated life and art, but led to civic

violence and suicidal strife that weakened each petty state, and at

last destroyed Sumeria. `010735

Courts of justice sat in the

temples, and the judges were for the most part priests; professional

judges presided over a superior court. The best element in this code

was a plan for avoiding litigation: every case was first submitted

to a public arbitrator whose duty it was to bring about an amicable

settlement without recourse to law. `010738 It is a poor

civilization from which we may not learn something to improve our own.

4. Religion and Morality

-

The Sumerian Pantheon- The food of the gods- Mythology-

Education- A Sumerian prayer- Temple prostitutes-

The rights of woman- Sumerian cosmetics

-

King Ur-engur proclaimed his code of laws in the name of the great

god Shamash, for government had so soon discovered the political

utility of heaven. Having been found useful, the gods became

innumerable; every city and state, every human activity, had some

inspiring and disciplinary divinity. Sun-worship, doubtless already

old when Sumeria began, expressed itself in the cult of Shamash,

"light of the gods," who passed the night in the depths of the

north, until Dawn opened its gates for him; then he mounted the sky

like a flame, driving his chariot over the steeps of the firmament;

the sun was merely a wheel of his fiery car.

Ningirsu was the god of irrigation, the "Lord of

Floods"; Abu or Tammuz was the god of vegetation. Even Sin was a

god- of the moon; he was represented in human form with a thin

crescent about his head, presaging the halos of medieval saints. The

air was full of spirits- beneficent angels, one each as protector to

every Sumerian, and demons or devils who sought to expel the

protective deity and take possession of body and soul.

Most of the gods lived in the temples, where they were provided by

the faithful with revenue, food and wives. The tablets of Gudea list

the objects which the gods preferred: oxen, goats, sheep, doves,

chickens, ducks, fish, dates, figs, cucumbers, butter, oil and

cakes; `010741 we may judge from this list that the well-to-do

Sumerian enjoyed a plentiful cuisine.

A liturgical tablet found in the Sumerian ruins

says, with strange theological premonitions: "The lamb is the

substitute for humanity; he hath given up a lamb for his

life." `010742 Enriched by such beneficence, the priests became the

wealthiest and most powerful class in the Sumerian cities. In most

matters they were the government; it is difficult to make out to what

extent the patesi was a priest, and to what extent a king. Urukagina

rose like a Luther against the exactions of the clergy, denounced them

for their voracity, accused them of taking bribes in their

administration of the law, and charged that they were levying such

taxes upon farmers and fishermen as to rob them of the fruits of their

toil. He swept the courts clear for a time of these corrupt officials,

and established laws regulating the taxes and fees paid to the

temples, protecting the helpless against extortion, and providing

against the violent alienation of funds or property.

But like the Greeks

they pictured the other world as a dark abode of miserable shadows, to

which all the dead descended indiscriminately. They had not yet

conceived heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment; they offered

prayer and sacrifice not for "eternal life," but for tangible

advantages here on the earth. `

Marriage was already a complex institution regulated by many laws.

The bride kept control of the dowry given her by her father in

marriage, and though she held it jointly with her husband, she alone

determined its bequest. She exercised equal rights with her husband

over their children; and in the absence of the husband and a

grown-up son she administered the estate as well as the home. She

could engage in business independently of her husband, and could

keep or dispose of her own slaves. Sometimes, like Shub-ad, she

could rise to the status of queen, and rule her city with luxurious

and imperious grace.

But in all crises the man was lord and

master. Under certain conditions he could sell his wife, or hand her

over as a slave to pay his debts. The double standard was already in

force, as a corollary of property and inheritance: adultery in the man

was a forgivable whim, but in the woman it was punished with death.

She was expected to give many children to her husband and the state;

if barren, she could be divorced without further reason; if merely

averse to continuous maternity she was drowned. Children were

without legal rights; their parents, by the act of publicly

disowning them, secured their banishment from the city. `010753

Nevertheless, as in most civilizations, the women of the upper

classes almost balanced, by their luxury and their privileges, the

toil and disabilities of their poorer sisters. Cosmetics and jewelry

are prominent in the Sumerian tombs. In Queen Shub-ad's grave

Professor Woolley picked up a little compact of blue-green

malachite, golden pins with knobs of lapis-lazuli, and a vanity-case

of filigree gold shell.

5. Letters and Arts

-

Writing- Literature- Temples and palaces- Statuary- Ceramics-

Jewelry- Summary of Sumerian civilization

-

The startling fact in the Sumerian remains is writing. The marvelous

art seems already well advanced, fit to express complex thought in

commerce, poetry and religion. The oldest inscriptions are on stone,

and date apparently as far back as 3600 B.C. `010754 Towards 3200

B.C. the clay tablet appears, and from that time on the Sumerians seem

to have delighted in the great discovery. It is our good fortune that

the people of Mesopotamia wrote not upon fragile, ephemeral paper in

fading ink, but upon moist clay deftly impressed with the wedge-like

("cuneiform") point of a stylus. With this malleable material the

scribe kept records, executed contracts, drew up official documents,

recorded property, judgments and sales, and created a culture in which

the stylus became as mighty as the sword. Having completed the

writing, the scribe baked the clay tablet with heat or in the sun, and

made it thereby a manuscript far more durable than paper, and only

less lasting than stone. This development of cuneiform script was

the outstanding contribution of Sumeria to the civilizing of mankind.

-

Sumerian writing reads from right to left; the Babylonians were,

so far as we know, the first people to write from left to right. The

linear script, as we have seen, was apparently a stylized and

conventionalized form of the signs and pictures painted or impressed

upon primitive Sumerian pottery. *01040 Presumably from repetition

and haste over centuries of time, the original pictures were gradually

contracted into signs so unlike the objects which they had once

represented that they became the symbols of sounds rather than of

things. We should have an analogous process in English if the

picture of a bee should in time be shortened and simplified, and

come to mean not a bee but the sound be, and then serve to

indicate that syllable in any combination as in be-ing. The

Sumerians and Babylonians never advanced from such representation of

syllables to the representation of letters- never dropped the vowel in

the syllabic sign to make be mean b; it seems to have remained for

the Egyptians to take this simple but revolutionary step.

The transition from writing to literature probably required many

hundreds of years. For centuries writing was a tool of commerce, a

matter of contracts and bills, of shipments and receipts; and

secondarily, perhaps, it was an instrument of religious record, an

attempt to preserve magic formulas, ceremonial procedures, sacred

legends, prayers and hymns from alteration or decay. Nevertheless, by

2700 B.C., great libraries had been formed in Sumeria; at Tello, for

example, in ruins contemporary with Gudea, De Sarzac discovered a

collection of over 30,000 tablets ranged one upon another in neat and

logical array. `010756 As early as 2000 B.C. Sumerian historians

began to reconstruct the past and record the present for the

edification of the future; portions of their work have come down to us

not in the original form but as quotations in later Babylonian

chronicles. Among the original fragments, however, is a tablet found

at Nippur, bearing the Sumerian prototype of the epic of Gilgamesh,

which we shall study later in its developed Babylonian

expression.

Vessels of gold,

tasteful in design and delicate in finish, have been found in the

earliest graves at Ur, some as old as 4000 B.C. `010766 The silver

vase of Entemenu, now in the Louvre, is as stocky as Gudea, but is

adorned with a wealth of animal imagery finely engraved. `010767

Best of all is the gold sheath and lapis-lazuli dagger exhumed at

Ur; `010768 here, if one may judge from photographs, *01042 the

form almost touches perfection. The ruins have given us a great number

of cylindrical seals, mostly made of precious metal or stone, with

reliefs carefully carved upon a square inch or two of surface; these

seem to have served the Sumerians in place of signatures, and indicate

a refinement of life and manners disturbing to our naive conception of

progress as a continuous rise of man through the unfortunate

cultures of the past to the unrivaled zenith of today.

Sumerian civilization may be summed up in this contrast between

crude pottery and consummate jewelry; it was a synthesis of rough

beginnings and occasional but brilliant mastery. Here, within the

limits of our present knowledge, are the first states and empires, the

first irrigation, the first use of gold and silver as standards of

value, the first business contracts, the first credit system, the

first code of law, the first extensive development of writing, the

first stories of the Creation and the Flood, the first libraries and

schools, the first literature and poetry, the first cosmetics and

jewelry, the first sculpture and bas-relief, the first palaces and

temples, the first ornamental metal and decorative themes, the first

arch, column, vault and dome. Here, for the first known time on a

large scale, appear some of the sins of civilization: slavery,

despotism, ecclesiasticism, and imperialistic war. It was a life

differentiated and subtle, abundant and complex. Already the natural

inequality of men was producing a new degree of comfort and luxury for

the strong, and a new routine of hard and disciplined labor for the

rest. The theme was struck on which history would strum its myriad

variations.

III. PASSAGE TO EGYPT

-

Sumerian influence in Mesopotamia- Ancient Arabia-

Mesopotamian influence in Egypt

Egypt could well afford to concede the priority of Sumeria. For

whatever the Nile may have borrowed from the Tigris and the Euphrates,

it soon flowered into a civilization specifically and uniquely its

own; one of the richest and greatest, one of the most powerful and yet

one of the most graceful, cultures in history. By its side Sumeria was

but a crude beginning; and not even Greece or Rome would surpass it.

CHAPTER VIII: Egypt

I. THE GIFT OF THE NILE

1. In the Delta

-

Alexandria- The Nile- The Pyramids- The Sphinx

-

THIS is a perfect harbor. Outside the long breakwater the

waves topple over one another roughly; within it the sea is a silver

mirror. There, on the little island of Pharos, when Egypt was very

old, Sostratus built his great lighthouse of white marble, five

hundred feet high, as a beacon to all ancient mariners of the

Mediterranean, and as one of the seven wonders of the world. Time and

the nagging waters have washed it away, but a new lighthouse has taken

its place, and guides the steamer through the rocks to the quays of

Alexandria. Here that astonishing boy-statesman, Alexander, founded

the subtle, polyglot metropolis that was to inherit the culture of

Egypt, Palestine and Greece. In this harbor Caesar received without

gladness the severed head of Pompey.

As the train glides through the city, glimpses come of unpaved

alleys and streets, heat waves dancing in the air, workingmen naked to

the waist, black-garbed women bearing burdens sturdily, white-robed

and turbaned Moslems of regal dignity, and in the distance spacious

squares and shining palaces, perhaps as fair as those that the

Ptolemies built when Alexandria was the meeting-place of the world.

Then suddenly it is open country, and the city recedes into the

horizon of the fertile Delta- that green triangle which looks on the

map like the leaves of a lofty palm-tree held up on the slender

stalk of the Nile.

The river has had

one of its annual inundations, which begin at the summer solstice

and last for a hundred days; through that overflow the desert became

fertile, and Egypt blossomed, in Herodotus' phrase, as the "gift of

the Nile." It is clear why civilization found here one of its earliest

homes; nowhere else was a river so generous in irrigation, and so

controllable in its rise; only Mesopotamia could rival it. For

thousands of years the peasants have watched this rise with anxious

eagerness; to this day public criers announce its progress each

morning in the streets of Cairo. `01082 So the past, with the quiet

continuity of this river, flows into the future, lightly touching

the present on its way. Only historians make divisions; time does not.

But every gift must be paid for; and the peasant, though he valued

the rising waters, knew that without control they could ruin as well

as irrigate his fields. So from time beyond history he built these

ditches that cross and recross the land; he caught the surplus in

canals, and when the river fell he raised the water with buckets

pivoted on long poles, singing, as he worked, the songs that the

Nile has heard for five thousand years. For as these peasants are now,

sombre and laughterless even in their singing, so they have been, in

all likelihood, for fifty centuries. `01083 This water-raising

apparatus is as old as the Pyramids; and a million of these

fellaheen, despite the conquests of Arabic, still speak the language

of the ancient monuments. `01084

2. Upstream

-

Memphis- The masterpiece of Queen Hatshepsut- The "Colossi of

Memnon"- Luxor and Karnak- The grandeur of Egyptian civilization

-

Let us contemplate the glory of Egypt once more, in her history

and her civilization, before her last monuments crumble into the sand.

II. THE MASTER BUILDERS

1. The Discovery of Egypt

-

Champollion and the Rosetta Stone

-

The recovery of Egypt is one of the most brilliant chapters in

archeology. The Middle Ages knew of Egypt as a Roman colony and a

Christian settlement; the Renaissance presumed that civilization had

begun with Greece; even the Enlightenment, though it concerned

itself intelligently with China and India, knew nothing of Egypt

beyond the Pyramids. Egyptology was a by-product of Napoleonic

imperialism. When the great Corsican led a French expedition to

Egypt in 1798 he took with him a number of draughtsmen and engineers

to explore and map the terrain, and made place also for certain

scholars absurdly interested in Egypt for the sake of a better

understanding of history. It was this corps of men who first

revealed the temples of Luxor and Karnak to the modern world; and

the elaborate Description de L'Egypte (1809-13) which they

prepared for the French Academy was the first milestone in the

scientific study of this forgotten civilization. `

For many years, however, they were unable to read the inscriptions

surviving on the monuments. Typical of the scientific temperament

was the patient devotion with which Champollion, one of these savants,

applied himself to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics. He found

at last an obelisk covered with such "sacred carvings" in Egyptian,

but bearing at the base a Greek inscription which indicated that the

writing concerned Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Guessing that two

hieroglyphics often repeated, with a royal cartouche attached, were

the names of these rulers, he made out tentatively (1822) eleven

Egyptian letters; this was the first proof that Egypt had had an

alphabet. Then he applied this alphabet to a great black stone slab

that Napoleon's troops had stumbled upon near the Rosetta mouth of the

Nile. This "Rosetta Stone" *01049 contained an inscription in three

languages: first in hieroglyphics, second in "demotic"- the popular

script of the Egyptians- and third in Greek. With his knowledge of

Greek, and the eleven letters made out from the obelisk,

Champollion, after more than twenty years of labor, deciphered the

whole inscription, discovered the entire Egyptian alphabet, and opened

the way to the recovery of a lost world. It was one of the peaks in

the history of history.

2. Prehistoric Egypt

-

Paleolithic- Neolithic- The Badarians- Predynastic- Race

-

...

3. The Old Kingdom

-

The "nomes"- The first historic individual- "Cheops"- "Chephren"-

The purpose of the Pyramids- Art of the tombs- Mummification

-

The first real person in known history is not a conqueror or a

king but an artist and a scientist- Imhotep, physician, architect

and chief adviser of King Zoser (ca. 3150 B.C.). He did so much for

Egyptian medicine that later generations worshiped him as a god of

knowledge, author of their sciences and their arts; and at the same

time he appears to have founded the school of architecture which

provided the next dynasty with the first great builders in history. It

was under his administration, according to Egyptian tradition, that

the first stone house was built; it was he who planned the oldest

Egyptian structure extant- the Step-Pyramid of Sakkara, a terraced

structure of stone which for centuries set the style in tombs; and

apparently it was he who designed the funerary temple of Zoser, with

its lovely lotus columns and its limestone paneled walls.

In Khufu's pyramid there are two and a half million blocks, some of them weighing

one hundred and fifty tons, `010830 all of them averaging two and a

half tons; they cover half a million square feet, and rise 481 feet

into the air. And the mass is solid; only a few blocks were omitted,

to leave a secret passage way for the carcass of the King. A guide

leads the trembling visitor on all fours into the cavernous mausoleum,

up a hundred crouching steps to the very heart of the pyramid; there

in the damp, still center, buried in darkness and secrecy, once rested

the bones of Khufu and his queen. The marble sarcophagus of the

Pharaoh is still in place, but broken and empty.

A man's descendants were

inclined to be lazy and economical, and even if he had left an

endowment to cover the costs they were apt to neglect the rule that

religion originally put upon them of supplying the dead with

provender. Hence pictorial substitutes were in any case a wise

precaution: they could provide the ka of the deceased with fertile

fields, plump oxen, innumerable servants and busy artisans, at an

attractively reduced rate. Having discovered this principle, the

artist accomplished marvels with it. One tomb picture shows a field

being ploughed, the next shows the grain being reaped or threshed,

another the bread being baked; one shows the bull copulating with

the cow, another the calf being born, another the grown cattle being

slaughtered, another the meat served hot on the dish. `010832 A fine

limestone bas-relief in the tomb of Prince Rahotep portrays the dead

man enjoying the varied victuals on the table before him `010833

"All the world fears Time," says an Arab proverb, "but Time fears

the Pyramids." `010835 However, the pyramid of Khufu has lost twenty

feet of its height, and all its ancient marble casing is gone; perhaps

Time is only leisurely with it. Beside it stands Khafre's pyramid, a

trifle smaller, but still capped with the granite casing that once

covered it all. Humbly beyond this squats the pyramid of Khafre's

successor Menkaure, *01056 covered not with granite but with

shamefaced brick, as if to announce that when men raised it the zenith

of the Old Kingdom had passed. The statues of Menkaure that have

come down to us show him as a man more refined and less forceful

than Khafre. *01057 Civilization, like life, destroys what it has

perfected. Already, it may be, the growth of comforts and luxuries,

the progress of manners and morals, had made men lovers of peace and

haters of war. Suddenly a new figure appeared, usurped Menkaure's

throne, and put an end to the pyramid-builders' dynasty.

4. The Middle Kingdom

-

The Feudal Age- The Twelfth Dynasty- The Hyksos Domination

-

Kings were never so plentiful as in Egypt. History lumps them into

dynasties- monarchs of one line or family; but even then they burden

the memory intolerably. *01058 One of these early Pharaohs, Pepi II,

ruled Egypt for ninety-four years (2738-2644 B.C.)- the longest

reign in history. When he died anarchy and dissolution ensued, the

Pharaohs lost control, and feudal barons ruled the nomes

independently: this alternation between centralized and

decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history, as if

men tired alternately of immoderate liberty and excessive order. After

a Dark Age of four chaotic centuries a strong-willed Charlemagne

arose, set things severely in order, changed the capital from

Memphis to Thebes, and under the title of Amenemhet I inaugurated that

Twelfth Dynasty during which all the arts, excepting perhaps

architecture, reached a height of excellence never equaled in known

Egypt before or again. Through an old inscription Amenemhet speaks

to us:

-

I was one who cultivated grain and loved the harvest god;

The Nile greeted me and every valley;

None was hungry in my years, none thirsted then;

Men dwelt in peace through that which I wrought, and conversed

of me.

His reward was a conspiracy among the Talleyrands and Fouches whom

he had raised to high office. He put it down with a mighty hand, but

left for his son, Polonius-like, a scroll of bitter counsel- an

admirable formula for despotism, but a heavy price to pay for royalty:

-

Hearken to that which I say to thee,

That thou mayest be king of the earth,...

That thou mayest increase good:

Harden thyself against all subordinates-

The people give heed to him who terrorizes them;

Approach them not alone.

Fill not thy heart with a brother,

Know not a friend;...

When thou sleepest, guard for thyself thine own heart;

For a man hath no friend in the day of evil. `010836

-

This stern ruler, who seems to us so human across four thousand

years, established a system of administration that held for half a

millennium. Wealth grew again, and then art; Senusret I built a

great canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, repelled Nubian invaders,

and erected great temples at Heliopolis, Abydos, and Karnak; ten

colossal seated figures of him have cheated time, and litter the Cairo

Museum. Another Senusret- the Third- began the subjugation of

Palestine, drove back the recurrent Nubians, and raised a stele or

slab at the southern frontier, "not from any desire that ye should

worship it, but that ye should fight for it." `010837 Amenemhet III,

a great administrator, builder of canals and irrigation, put an end

(perhaps too effectively) to the power of the barons, and replaced

them with appointees of the king. Thirteen years after his death Egypt

was plunged into disorder by a dispute among rival claimants to the

throne, and the Middle Kingdom ended in two centuries of turmoil and

disruption. Then the Hyksos, nomads from Asia, invaded disunited

Egypt, set fire to the cities, razed the temples, squandered the

accumulated wealth, destroyed much of the accumulated art, and for two

hundred years subjected the Nile valley to the rule of the "Shepherd

Kings." Ancient civilizations were little isles in a sea of barbarism,

prosperous settlements surrounded by hungry, envious and warlike

hunters and herders; at any moment the wall of defense might be broken

down. So the Kassites raided Babylonia, the Gauls attacked Greece

and Rome, the Huns overran Italy, the Mongols came down upon Peking.

Soon, however, the conquerors in their turn grew fat and prosperous,

and lost control; the Egyptians rose in a war of liberation,

expelled the Hyksos, and established that Eighteenth Dynasty which was

to lift Egypt to greater wealth, power and glory than ever before.

5. The Empire

-

The great queen- Thutmose III- The zenith of Egypt

-

Perhaps the invasion had brought another rejuvenation by the

infusion of fresh blood; but at the same time the new age marked the

beginning of a thousand-year struggle between Egypt and Western

Asia. Thutmose I not only consolidated the power of the new empire,

but- on the ground that western Asia must be controlled to prevent

further interruptions- invaded Syria, subjugated it from the coast

to Carchemish, put it under guard and tribute, and returned to

Thebes laden with spoils and the glory that always comes from the

killing of men. At the end of his thirty-year reign he raised his

daughter Hatshepsut to partnership with him on the throne. For a

time her husband and step-brother ruled as Thutmose II, and dying,

named as his successor Thutmose III, son of Thutmose I by a

concubine. `010838 But Hatshepsut set this high-destined youngster

aside, assumed full royal powers, and proved herself a king in

everything but gender.

 In the same pass where in 1918 the British defeated the

Turks, Thutmose III, 3397 years before, defeated the Syrians and their

allies. Then Thutmose marched victorious through western Asia,

subduing, taxing and levying tribute, and returned to Thebes in

triumph six months after his departure.

Thutmose made Egypt master of the Mediterranean world. Not only did he

conquer, but he organized; everywhere he left doughty garrisons and

capable governors. The first man in known history to recognize the

importance of sea power, he built a fleet that kept the Near East

effectively in leash. The spoils that he seized became the

foundation of Egyptian art in the period of the Empire; the tribute

that he drained from Syria gave his people an epicurean ease, and

created a new class of artists who filled all Egypt with precious

things. We may vaguely estimate the wealth of the new imperial

government when we learn that on one occasion the treasury was able to

measure out nine thousand pounds of gold and silver alloy. `010843

III. THE CIVILIZATION OF EGYPT

1. Agriculture

-

Behind these kings and queens were pawns; behind these temples,

palaces and pyramids were the workers of the cities and the peasants

of the fields. *01060 Herodotus describes them optimistically as he

found them about 450 B.C.

-

They gather in the fruits of the earth with less labor than any

other people.... for they have not the toil of breaking up the

furrow with the plough, nor of hoeing, nor of any other work which all

other men must labor at to obtain a crop of corn; but when the river

has come of its own accord and irrigated their fields, and having

irrigated them has subsided, then each man sows his own land and turns

his swine into it; and when the seed has been trodden into it by the

swine he waits for harvest time; then... he gathers it in. `010849

-

Every acre of the soil

belonged to the Pharaoh, and other men could use it only by his kind

indulgence; every tiller of the earth had to pay him an annual tax of

ten `010852 or twenty `010853 per cent in kind. Large tracts were

owned by the feudal barons or other wealthy men; the size of some of

these estates may be judged from the circumstance that one of them had

fifteen hundred cows. `010854 Cereals, fish and meat were the chief

items of diet. One fragment tells the school-boy what he is permitted

to eat; it includes thirty-three forms of flesh, forty-eight baked

meats, and twenty-four varieties of drink. `010855 The rich washed

down their meals with wine, the poor with barley beer. `010856

The lot of the peasant was hard. The "free" farmer was subject

only to the middleman and the tax-collector, who dealt with him on the

most time-honored of economic principles, taking "all that the traffic

would bear" out of the produce of the land. Here is how a complacent

contemporary scribe conceived the life of the men who fed ancient

Egypt:

Dost thou not recall the picture of the farmer when the tenth of his

grain is levied? Worms have destroyed half the wheat, and the

hippopotami have eaten the rest; there are swarms of rats in the

fields, the grasshoppers alight there, the cattle devour, the little

birds pilfer; and if the farmer loses sight for an instant of what

remains on the ground, it is carried off by robbers; moreover, the

thongs which bind the iron and the hoe are worn out, and the team

has died at the plough. It is then that the scribe steps out of the

boat at the landing-place to levy the tithe, and there come the

Keepers of the Doors of the (King's) Granary with cudgels, and Negroes

with ribs of palm-leaves, crying, "Come now, come!" There is none, and

they throw the cultivator full length upon the ground, bind him,

drag him to the canal, and fling him in head first; his wife is

bound with him, his children are put into chains. The neighbors in the

meantime leave him and fly to save their grain.

It is a characteristic bit of literary exaggeration; but the

author might have added that the peasant was subject at any time to

the corvee, doing forced labor for the King, dredging the canals,

building roads, tilling the royal lands, or dragging great stones

and obelisks for pyramids, temples and palaces. Probably a majority of

the laborers in the field were moderately content, accepting their

poverty patiently. Many of them were slaves, captured in the wars or

bonded for debt; sometimes slave-raids were organized, and women and

children from abroad were sold to the highest bidder at home. An old

relief in the Leyden Museum pictures a long procession of Asiatic

captives passing gloomily into the land of bondage: one sees them

still alive on that vivid stone, their hands tied behind their backs

or their heads, or thrust through rude handcuffs of wood; their

faces empty with the apathy that has known the last despair.

2. Industry

-

Miners- Manufactures- Workers- Engineers- Transport-

Postal service- Commerce and finance- Scribes

-

In its earliest dynasties Egypt learned the art of fusing copper

with tin to make bronze: first, bronze weapons- swords, helmets and

shields; then bronze tools- wheels, rollers, levers, pulleys,

windlasses, wedges, lathes, screws, drills that bored the toughest

diorite stone, saws that cut the massive slabs of the sarcophagi.

Egyptian workers made brick, cement and plaster of Paris; they

glazed pottery, blew glass, and glorified both with color. They were

masters in the carving of wood; they made everything from boats and

carriages, chairs and beds, to handsome coffins that almost invited

men to die. Out of animal skins they made clothing, quivers, shields

and seats; all the arts of the tanner are pictured on the walls of the

tombs; and the curved knives represented there in the tanner's hand

are used by cobblers to this day. `010861 From the papyrus plant

Egyptian artisans made ropes, mats, sandals and paper. Other workmen

developed the arts of enameling and varnishing, and applied

chemistry to industry. Still others wove tissues of the subtlest weave

in the history of the textile art; specimens of linen woven four

thousand years ago show today, despite time's corrosion, "a weave so

fine that it requires a magnifying glass to distinguish it from

silk; the best work of the modern machine-loom is coarse in comparison

with this fabric of the ancient Egyptian hand-loom." `010862 "If,"

says Peschel, "we compare the technical inventory of the Egyptians

with our own, it is evident that before the invention of the

steam-engine we scarcely excelled them in anything."

 It is

surprising that a civilization so ruthless in its exploitation of

labor should have known- or recorded- so few revolutions.

Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or

Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution; only our time

has excelled it, and we may be mistaken. Senusret III, for example,

built *01062 a wall twenty-seven miles long to gather into Lake

Moeris the waters of the Fayum basin, thereby reclaiming 25,000 acres

of marsh land for cultivation, and providing a vast reservoir for

irrigation. `010869 Great canals were constructed, some from the

Nile to the Red Sea; the caisson was used for digging, `010870 and

obelisks weighing a thousand tons were transported over great

distances. If we may credit Herodotus, or judge from later

undertakings of the same kind represented in the reliefs of the

Eighteenth Dynasty, these immense stones were drawn on greased beams

by thousands of slaves, and raised to the desired level on inclined

approaches beginning. far away. `

There was a regular postal service; an ancient papyrus says,

"Write to me by the letter-carrier." `010875 Communication, however,

was difficult; roads were few and bad, except for the military highway

through Gaza to the Euphrates; `010876 and the serpentine form of

the Nile, which was the main highroad of Egypt, doubled the distance

from town to town. Trade was comparatively primitive; most of it was

by barter in village bazaars. Foreign commerce grew slowly, restricted

severely by the most up-to-date tariff walls; the various kingdoms

of the Near East believed strongly in the "protective principle,"

for customs dues were a mainstay of their royal treasuries.

Nevertheless Egypt grew rich by importing raw materials and

exporting finished products; Syrian, Cretan and Cypriote merchants

crowded the markets of Egypt, and Phoenician galleys sailed up the

Nile to the busy wharves of Thebes

Coinage had not yet developed; payments, even of the highest

salaries, were made in goods- corn, bread, yeast, beer, etc. Taxes

were collected in kind, and the Pharaoh's treasuries were not a mint

of money, but storehouses of a thousand products from the fields and

shops. After the influx of precious metals that followed the conquests

of Thutmose III, merchants began to pay for goods with rings or ingots

of gold, measured by weight at every transaction; but no coins of

definite value guaranteed by the state arose to facilitate exchange.

Credit, however, was highly developed; written transfers frequently

took the place of barter or payment; scribes were busy everywhere

accelerating business with legal documents of exchange, accounting and

finance.

3. Government

-

The bureaucrats- Law- The vizier- The pharaoh

-

At the head of the administration was the

Vizier, who served at once as prime minister, chief justice, and

head of the treasury; he was the court of last resort under the

Pharaoh himself. A tomb relief shows us the Vizier leaving his house

early in the morning to hear the petitions of the poor, "to hear,"

as the inscription reads, "what the people say in their demands, and

to make no distinction between small and great." `010886 A

remarkable papyrus roll, which comes down to us from the days of the

Empire, purports to be the form of address (perhaps it is but a

literary invention) with which the Pharaoh installed a new Vizier:

-

Look to the office of the Vizier; be watchful over all that is

done therein. Behold, it is the established support of the whole

land.... The Vizierate is not sweet; it is bitter.... Behold, it is

not to show respect-of-persons to princes and councillors; it is not

to make for himself slaves of any people.... Behold, when a petitioner

comes from Upper or Lower Egypt.... see thou to it that everything

is done in accordance with law, that everything is done according to

the custom thereof, (giving) to (every man) his right.... It is an

abomination of the god to show partiality.... Look upon him who is

known to thee like him who is unknown to thee; and him who is near the

King like him who is far from (his House). Behold, a prince who does

this, he shall endure here in this place.... The dread of a prince

is that he does justice.... (Behold the regulation) that is laid

upon thee. `010887

-

The Pharaoh himself was the supreme court; any case might under

certain circumstances be brought to him, if the plaintiff was careless

of expense. Ancient carvings show us the "Great House" from which he

ruled, and in which the offices of the government were gathered; from

this Great House, which the Egyptians called Pero and which the Jews

translated Pharaoh, came the title of the emperor.

The oldest of the courtiers

constituted a Council of Elders called Saru, or The Great Ones, who

served as an advisory cabinet to the king. `010890 Such counsel was

in a sense superfluous, for the Pharaoh, with the help of the priests,

assumed divine descent, powers and wisdom; this alliance with the gods

was the secret of his prestige. Consequently he was greeted with forms

of address always flattering, sometimes astonishing, as when, in "The

Story of Sinuhe", a good citizen hails him: "O long-living King, may

the Golden One" (Hathor the goddess) "give life to thy

nose." `010891

As became so godlike a person, the Pharaoh was waited upon by a

variety of aides, including generals, launderers, bleachers, guardians

of the imperial wardrobe, and other men of high degree. Twenty

officials collaborated to take care of his toilet: barbers who were

permitted only to shave him and cut his hair, hairdressers who

adjusted the royal cowl and diadem to his head, manicurists who cut

and polished his nails, perfumers who deodorized his body, blackened

his eyelids with kohl, and reddened his cheeks and lips with

rouge. `010892 One tomb inscription describes its occupant as

"Overseer of the Cosmetic Box, Overseer of the Cosmetic Pencil,

Sandal-Bearer to the King, doing in the matter of the King's sandals

to the satisfaction of his Law." `010893 So pampered, he tended to

degenerate, and sometimes brightened his boredom by manning the

imperial barge with young women clad only in network of a large

mesh. The luxury of Amenhotep III prepared for the debacle of

Ikhnaton.

4. Morals

-

Royal incest- The harem- Marriage- The position of woman-

The matriarchate in Egypt- Sexual morality

-

The government of the Pharaohs resembled that of Napoleon, even to

the incest. Very often the king married his own sister- occasionally

his own daughter- to preserve the purity of the royal blood. It is

difficult to say whether this weakened the stock. Certainly Egypt did

not think so, after several thousand years of experiment; the

institution of sister-marriage spread among the people, and as late as

the second century after Christ two-thirds of the citizens of Arsinoe

were found to be practising the custom. `010894 The words brother

and sister, in Egyptian poetry, have the same significance as

lover and beloved among ourselves. `010895 In addition to his

sisters the Pharaoh had an abundant harem, recruited not only from

captive women but from the daughters of the nobles and the gifts of

foreign potentates; so Amenhotep III received from a prince of

Naharina his eldest daughter and three hundred select

maidens. `010896 Some of the nobility imitated this tiresome

extravagance on a small scale, adjusting their morals to their

resources.

"No people, ancient or modern," said Max Muller,

"has given women so high a legal status as did the inhabitants of

the Nile Valley." `010897 The monuments picture them eating and

drinking in public, going about their affairs in the streets

unattended and unharmed, and freely engaging in industry and trade.

Greek travelers, accustomed to confine their Xanthippes narrowly, were

amazed at this liberty; they jibed at the henpecked husbands of Egypt,

and Diodorus Siculus, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye, reported that

along the Nile obedience of the husband to the wife was required in

the marriage bond- `010898 a stipulation not necessary in America.

Women held and bequeathed property in their own names; one of the most

ancient documents in history is the Third Dynasty will in which the

lady Neb-sent transmits her lands to her children. `010899

Hatshepsut and Cleopatra rose to be queens, and ruled and ruined

like kings.

But the more characteristically Egyptian tone sounds in Ptah-hotep's

instructions to his son:

-

If thou art successful, and hast furnished thy house, and lovest the

wife of thy bosom, then fill her stomach and clothe her back....

Make glad her heart during the time thou hast her, for she is a

field profitable to its owner.... If thou oppose her it will mean

thy ruin.

the Boulak Papyrus admonishes the child with touching wisdom:

-

Thou shalt never forget thy mother.... For she carried thee long

beneath her breast as a heavy burden; and after thy months were

accomplished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon her

shoulder, and gave thee her breast to thy mouth. She nurtured thee,

and took no offense from thy uncleanliness. And when thou didst

enter school, and wast instructed in the writings, daily she stood

by the master with bread and beer from the house. `0108102

-

It is likely that this high status of woman arose from the mildly

matriarchal character of Egyptian society. Not only was woman full

mistress in the house, but all estates descended in the female line;

"even in late times," says Petrie, "the husband made over all his

property and future earnings to his wife in his marriage

settlement." `0108103 Men married their sisters not because

familiarity had bred romance, but because they wished to enjoy the

family inheritance, which passed down from mother to daughter, and

they did not care to see this wealth give aid and comfort to

strangers. `0108104 The powers of the wife underwent a slow

diminution in the course of time, perhaps through contact with the

patriarchal customs of the Hyksos, and through the transit of Egypt

from agricultural isolation and peace to imperialism and war; under

the Ptolemies the influence of the Greeks was so great that freedom of

divorce, claimed in earlier times by the wife, became the exclusive

privilege of the husband. Even then, however, the change was accepted

only by the upper classes; the Egyptian commoner adhered to

matriarchal ways. `0108105 Possibly because of the mastery of woman

over her own affairs, infanticide was rare; Diodorus thought it a

peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child born to them was reared,

and tells us that parents guilty of infanticide were required by law

to hold the dead child in their arms for three days and

nights. `0108106 Families were large, and children swarmed in both

hovels and palaces; the well-to-do were hard put to it to keep count

of their offspring. `0108107

Even in courtship the woman usually took the initiative. The love

poems and letters that have come down to us are generally addressed by

the lady to the man; she begs for assignations, she presses her suit

directly, she formally proposes marriage. `0108108 "Oh my beautiful

friend," says one letter, "my desire is to become, as thy wife, the

mistress of all thy possessions." `0108109 Hence modesty, as

distinct from fidelity, was not prominent among the Egyptians; they

spoke of sexual affairs with a directness alien to our late

morality, adorned their very temples with pictures and bas-reliefs

of startling anatomical candor, and supplied their dead with obscene

literature to amuse them in the grave.

Dancing-girls, in the manner of Japan, were

accepted into the best male society as providers of entertainment

and physical edification; they dressed in diaphanous robes, or

contented themselves with anklets, bracelets and rings. `0108112

Evidences occur of religious prostitution on a small scale; as late as

the Roman occupation the most beautiful girl among the noble

families of Thebes was chosen to be consecrated to Amon. When she

was too old to satisfy the god she received an honorable discharge,

married, and moved in the highest circles. `0108113 It was a

civilization with different prejudices from our own.

5. Manners

-

Character- Games- Appearance- Cosmetics- Costume- Jewelry

-

They were the arch-conservatives of history; the more

they changed, the more they remained the same; through forty centuries

their artists copied the old conventions religiously. They appear to

us, from their monuments, to have been a matter-of-fact people, not

given to non-theological nonsense. They had no sentimental regard

for human life, and killed with the clear conscience of nature;

Egyptian soldiers cut off the right hand, or the phallus, of a slain

enemy, and brought it to the proper scribe that it might be put into

the record to their credit. `0108116 In the later dynasties the

people, long accustomed to internal peace and to none but distant

wars, lost all military habits and qualities, until at last a few

Roman soldiers sufficed to master all Egypt. `0108117

The accident that we know them chiefly from the remains in their

tombs or the inscriptions on their temples has misled us into

exaggerating their solemnity. We perceive from some of their

sculptures and reliefs, and from their burlesque stories of the

gods, `0108118 that they had a jolly turn for humor. They played

many public and private games, such as checkers and dice; `0108119

they gave many modern toys to their children, like marbles, bouncing

balls, tenpins and tops; they enjoyed wrestling contests, boxing

matches and bullfights. `0108120 At feasts and recreations they were

anointed by attendants, were wreathed with flowers, feted with

wines, and presented with gifts.

Their clothing ran through every gradation from primitive nudity

to the gorgeous dress of Empire days. Children of both sexes went

about, till their teens, naked except for ear-rings and necklaces; the

girls, however, showed a beseeming modesty by wearing a string of

beads around the middle. `0108124 Servants and peasants limited

their everyday wardrobe to a loin-cloth. Under the Old Kingdom free

men and women went naked to the navel, and covered themselves from

waist to knees with a short, tight skirt of white linen. `0108125

Since shame is a child of custom rather than of nature, these simple

garments contented the conscience as completely as Victorian

petticoats and corsets, or the evening dress of the contemporary

American male; "our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time."

Even the priests, in the first dynasties, wore nothing but

loin-cloths, as we see from the statue of Ranofer. `0108126 When

wealth increased, clothing increased; the Middle Kingdom added a

second and larger skirt over the first, and the Empire added a

covering for the breast, with now and then a cape. Coachmen and grooms

took on formidable costumes, and ran through the streets in full

livery to clear a way for the chariots of their masters. Women, in the

prosperous dynasties, abandoned the tight skirt for a loose robe

that passed over the shoulder and was joined in a clasp under the

right breast. Flounces, embroideries and a thousand frills appeared,

and fashion entered like a serpent to disturb the paradise of

primitive nudity.

6. Letters

-

Education- Schools of government- Paper and ink- Stages in

the development of writing- Forms of Egyptian writing

-

There, in the first known School of Government,

the young scribes were instructed in public administration. On

graduating they were apprenticed to officials, who taught them through

plenty of work. Perhaps it was a better way of securing and training

public servants than our modern selection of them by popularity and

subserviency, and the noise of the hustings. In this manner Egypt

and Babylonia developed, more or less simultaneously, the earliest

school-systems in history; `0108136 not till the nineteenth century

of our era was the public instruction of the young to be so well

organized again.

As some ideas were too abstract to be literally

pictured, pictography passed into ideography: certain pictures were by

custom and convention used to represent not the objects pictured but

the ideas suggested by them; so the forepart of a lion meant supremacy

(as in the Sphinx), a wasp meant royalty, and a tadpole stood for

thousands. As a further development along this line, abstract ideas,

which had at first resisted representation, were indicated by

picturing objects whose names happened to resemble the spoken words

that corresponded to the ideas; so the picture of a lute came to

mean not only lute, but good, because the Egyptian word-sound

for lute- nefer - resembled the word-sound for good- nofer. Queer

rebus combinations grew out of these homonyms- words of like sound but

different meanings. Since the verb to be was expressed in the spoken

language by the sound khopiru, the scribe, being puzzled to find a

picture for so intangible a conception, split the word into parts,

kho-pi-ru, expressed these by picturing in succession a sieve

(called in the spoken language khau ), a mat ( pi ), and a mouth

( ru ); use and wont, which sanctify so many absurdities, soon made

this strange assortment of characters suggest the idea of being. In

this way the Egyptian arrived at the syllable, the syllabic sign,

and the syllabary- i.e., a collection of syllabic signs; and by

dividing difficult words into syllables, finding homonyms for these,

and drawing in combination the objects suggested by these syllabic

sounds, he was able, in the course of time, to make the hieroglyphic

signs convey almost any idea.

Then the picture was shortened, and used to represent the

sound po, pa, pu, pe or pi in any word; and since vowels were

never written, this was equivalent to having a character for P. By a

like development the sign for a hand (Egyptian dot ) came to mean

do, da, etc., finally D; the sign for mouth ( ro or ru ) came to

mean R; the sign for snake ( zt ) became Z; the sign for lake

( shy ) became Sh.... The result was an alphabet of twenty-four

consonants, which passed with Egyptian and Phoenician trade to all

quarters of the Mediterranean, and came down, via Greece and Rome,

as one of the most precious parts of our Oriental heritage. `0108140

Hieroglyphics are as old as the earliest dynasties; alphabetic

characters appear first in inscriptions left by the Egyptians in the

mines of the Sinai peninsula, variously dated at 2500 and 1500

B.C.

Whether wisely or not, the Egyptians never adopted a completely

alphabetic writing; like modern stenographers they mingled

pictographs, ideographs and syllabic signs with their letters to the

very end of their civilization. This has made it difficult for

scholars to read Egyptian, but it is quite conceivable that such a

medley of longhand and shorthand facilitated the business of writing

for those Egyptians who could spare the time to learn it.

Since English speech is no honorable guide to English spelling, it is

probably as difficult for a contemporary lad to learn the devious ways

of English orthography as it was for the Egyptian scribe to memorize

by use the five hundred hieroglyphs, their secondary syllabic

meanings, and their tertiary alphabetic uses. In the course of time

a more rapid and sketchy form of writing was developed for

manuscripts, as distinguished from the careful "sacred carvings" of

the monuments. Since this corruption of hieroglyphic was first made by

the priests and the temple scribes, it was called by the Greeks

hieratic; but it soon passed into common use for public,

commercial and private documents. A still more abbreviated and

careless form of this script was developed by the common people, and

therefore came to be known as demotic. On the monuments, however,

the Egyptian insisted on having his lordly and lovely hieroglyphic-

perhaps the most picturesque form of writing ever made.

7. Literature

-

Texts and libraries- The Egyptian Sinbad- The Story of Sinuhe-

Fiction- An amorous fragment- Love poems- History-

A literary revolution

-

 Libraries have

come down to us from as far back as 2000 B.C.- papyri rolled and

packed in jars, labeled, and ranged on shelves; `0108145 in one such

jar was found the oldest form of the story of Sinbad the Sailor, or,

as we might rather call it, Robinson Crusoe.

"The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor" is a simple autobiographical

fragment, full of life and feeling. "How glad is he," says this

ancient mariner, in a line reminiscent of Dante, "that relateth what

he hath experienced when the calamity hath passed!"

-

I will relate to thee something that was experienced by me myself,

when I had set out for the mines of the Sovereign and had gone down to

the sea in a ship of 180 feet in length and 60 feet in breadth; and

therein were 120 sailors of the pick of Egypt. They scanned the sky,

they scanned the earth, and their hearts were more... than those of

lions. They foretold a storm or ever it came, and a tempest when as

yet it was not.

A storm burst while we were yet at sea.... We flew before the wind

and it made.... a wave eight cubits high....

Then the ship perished, and of them that were in it not one

survived. And I was cast onto an island by a wave of the sea, and I

spent three days alone with mine heart as my companion. I slept

under the shelter of a tree, and embraced the shade. Then I

stretched forth my feet in order to find out what I could put into

my mouth. I found figs and vines there, and all manner of fine

leeks.... There were fish there and fowl, and there was nothing that

was not in it.... When I had made me a fire-drill I kindled a fire and

made a burnt-offering for the gods. `0108146

-

Another tale recounts the adventures of Sinuhe, a public official

who flees from Egypt at the death of Amenemhet I, wanders from country

to country of the Near East, and, despite prosperity and honors there,

suffers unbearably from lonesomeness for his native land. At last he

gives up riches, and makes his way through many hardships back to

Egypt.

-

O God, whosoever thou art, that didst ordain this flight, bring me

again to the House (i.e., the Pharaoh). Peradventure thou wilt

suffer me to see the place wherein mine heart dwelleth. What is a

greater matter than that my corpse should be buried in the land

wherein I was born? Come to mine aid! May good befall, may God show me

mercy!

-

In the sequel we find him home again, weary and dusty with many

miles of desert travel, and fearful lest the Pharaoh reprove him for

his long absence from a land which, like all others, looked upon

itself as the only civilized country in the world. But the Pharaoh

forgives him, and extends to him every cosmetic courtesy:

-

I was placed in the house of a king's son, in which there was

noble equipment, and a bath was therein.... Years were made to pass

away from my body; I was shaved (?) and my hair was combed (?). A load

(of dirt?) was given over to the desert, and the (filthy) clothes to

the sand-farers. And I was arrayed in finest linen, and anointed

with the best oil.

The early literature of the Egyptians is largely religious; and

the oldest Egyptian poems are the hymns of the Pyramid Texts. Their

form is also the most ancient poetic form known to us- that

"parallelism of members," or repetition of the thought in different

phrase, which the Hebrew poets adopted from the Egyptians and

Babylonians, and immortalized in the Psalms. `0108151 As the Old

passes into the Middle Kingdom, the literature tends to become secular

and "profane." We catch some glimpse of a lost body of amorous

literature in a fragment preserved to us through the laziness of a

Middle Kingdom scribe who did not complete his task of wiping clear an

old papyrus, but left legible some twenty-five lines that tell of a

simple shepherd's encounter with a goddess. "This goddess," says the

story, "met with him as he wended his way to the pool, and she had

stripped off her clothes and disarrayed her hair." The shepherd

reports the matter cautiously:

-

"Behold ye, when I went down to the swamp.... I saw a woman therein,

and she looked not like a mortal being. My hair stood on end when I

saw her tresses, because her color was so bright. Never will I do what

she said; awe of her is in my body." `0108152

-

The love songs abound in number and beauty, but as they celebrate

chiefly the amours of brothers and sisters they will shock or amuse

the modern ear. One collection is called "The Beautiful Joyous Songs

of thy sister whom thy heart loves, who walks in the fields." An

ostracon or shell dating back to the Nineteenth or Twentieth Dynasty

plays a modern theme on the ancient chords of desire:

-

The love of my beloved leaps on the bank of the stream

A crocodile lies in the shadows;

Yet I go down into the water, and breast the wave.

My courage is high on the stream,

And the water is as land to my feet.

It is her love that makes me strong.

She is a book of spells to me.

When I behold my beloved coming my heart is glad,

My arm are spread apart to embrace her;

My heart rejoices forever... since my beloved came.

When I embrace her I am as one who is in Incense Land,

As one who carries perfumes.

When I kiss her, her lips are opened,

And I am made merry without beer.

Would that I were her Negress slave who is in attendance on her;

So should I behold the hue of all her limbs. `0108153

-

The lines have been arbitrarily divided here; we cannot tell from

the external form of the original that it is verse. The Egyptians knew

that music and feeling are the twin essences of poetry; if these

were present, the outward shape did not matter. Often, however, the

rhythm was accentuated, as we have seen, by "parallelism of

members." Sometimes the poet used the device of beginning every

sentence or stanza with the same word; sometimes he played like a

punster with like sounds meaning unlike or incongruous things; and

it is clear from the texts that the trick of alliteration is as old as

the Pyramids. `

As far back as 2500 B.C. Egyptian scholars made lists of

their kings, named the years from them, and chronicled the outstanding

events of each year and reign; by the time of Thutmose III these

documents became full-fledged histories, eloquent with patriotic

emotion. `0108158 Egyptian philosophers of the Middle Kingdom

thought both man and history old and effete, and mourned the lusty

youth of their race; Khekheperre-Sonbu, a savant of the reign of

Senusret II, about 2150 B.C., complained that all things had long

since been said, and nothing remained for literature except

repetition. "Would," he cried unhappily, "that I had words that are

unknown, utterances and sayings in new language, that hath not yet

passed away, and without that which hath been said repeatedly- not

an utterance that hath grown stale, what the ancestors have already

said." `0108159

Distance blurs for us the variety and changefulness of Egyptian

literature, as it blurs the individual differences of unfamiliar

peoples. Nevertheless, in the course of its long development

Egyptian letters passed through movements and moods as varied as those

that have disturbed the history of European literature. As in

Europe, so in Egypt the language of everyday speech diverged

gradually, at last almost completely, from that in which the books

of the Old Kingdom had been written. For a long time authors continued

to compose in the ancient tongue; scholars acquired it in school,

and students were compelled to translate the "classics" with the

help of grammars and vocabularies, and with the occasional

assistance of "interlinears." In the fourteenth century B.C.

Egyptian authors rebelled against this bondage to tradition, and

like Dante and Chaucer dared to write in the language of the people;

Ikhnaton's famous "Hymn to the Sun" is itself composed in the

popular speech. The new literature was realistic, youthful, buoyant;

it took delight in flouting the old forms and describing the new life.

In time this language also became literary and formal, refined and

precise, rigid and impeccable with conventions of word and phrase;

once again the language of letters separated from the language of

speech, and scholasticism flourished; the schools of Saite Egypt spent

half their time studying and translating the "classics" of

Ikhnaton's day.

8. Science

-

Origins of Egyptian science- Mathematics- Astronomy and the

calendar- Anatomy and physiology- Medicine, surgery and hygiene

-

The scholars of Egypt were mostly priests, enjoying, far from the

turmoil of life, the comfort and security of the temples; and it was

these priests who, despite all their superstitions, laid the

foundations of Egyptian science. According to their own legends the

sciences had been invented some 18,000 B.C. by Thoth, the Egyptian god

of wisdom, during his three-thousand-year-long reign on earth; and the

most ancient books in each science were among the twenty thousand

volumes composed by this learned deity. *01065 `0108161 Our

knowledge does not permit us to improve substantially upon this theory

of the origins of science in Egypt.

The figures used were cumbersome- one stroke for 1, two strokes

for 2,... nine strokes for 9, with a new sign for 10. Two 10 signs

stood for 20, three 10 signs for 30,... nine for 90, with a new sign

for 100. Two 100 signs stood for 200, three 100 signs for 300,... nine

for 900, with a new sign for 1000. The sign for 1,000,000 was a

picture of a man striking his hands above his head, as if to express

amazement that such a number should exist. `0108166 The Egyptians

fell just short of the decimal system; they had no zero, and never

reached the idea of expressing all numbers with ten digits: e.g., they

used twenty-seven signs to write 999. `0108167 They had fractions,

but always with the numerator 1; to express 3/4 they wrote 1/2 + 1/4.

Multiplication and division tables are as old as the Pyramids. The

oldest mathematical treatise known is the Ahmes Papyrus, dating back

to 2000-1700 B.C.; but this in turn refers to mathematical writings

five hundred years more ancient than itself. It illustrates by

examples the computation of the capacity of a barn or the area of a

field, and passes to algebraic equations of the first

degree.

the priests regarded their astronomical studies as an

esoteric and mysterious science, which they were reluctant to disclose

to the common world. `0108172 For century after century they kept

track of the position and movements of the planets, until their

records stretched back for thousands of years. They distinguished

between planets and fixed stars, noted in their catalogues stars of

the fifth magnitude (practically invisible to the unaided eye), and

charted what they thought were the astral influences of the heavens on

the fortunes of men. From these observations they built the calendar

which was to be another of Egypt's greatest gifts to mankind.

They began by dividing the year into three seasons of four months

each: first, the rise, overflow and recession of the Nile; second, the

period of cultivation; and third, the period of harvesting. To each of

these months they assigned thirty days, as being the most convenient

approximation to the lunar month of twenty-nine and a half days; their

word for month, like ours, was derived from their symbol for the

moon.

At the end of the twelfth month they added five days to

bring the year into harmony with the river and the sun. `0108174 As

the beginning of their year they chose the day on which the Nile

usually reached its height, and on which, originally, the great star

Sirius (which they called Sothis) rose simultaneously with the sun.

Since their calendar allowed only 365, instead of 365 1/4, days to a

year, this "heliacal rising" of Sirius (i.e., its appearance just

before sunrise, after having been invisible for a number of days) came

a day later every four years; and in this way the Egyptian calendar

diverged by six hours annually from the actual calendar of the sky.

The Egyptians never corrected this error. Many years later (46 B.C.)

the Greek astronomers of Alexandria, by direction of Julius Caesar,

improved this calendar by adding an extra day every fourth year;

this was the "Julian Calendar." Under Pope Gregory XIII (1582) a

more accurate correction was made by omitting this extra day (February

29th) in century years not divisible by 400; this is the "Gregorian

Calendar" that we use today.

They thought that the blood-vessels carried air, water, and excretory

fluids, and they believed the heart and bowels to be the seat of the

mind; perhaps if we knew what they meant by these terms we should find

them not so divergent from our own ephemeral certainties. They

described with general accuracy the larger bones and viscera, and

recognized the function of the heart as the driving power of the

organism and the center of the circulatory system: "its vessels," says

the Ebers Papyrus, `0108176 "lead to all the members; whether the

doctor lays his finger on the forehead, on the back of the head, on

the hands,... or on the feet, everywhere he meets with the heart."

From this to Leonardo and Harvey was but a step- which took three

thousand years.

The glory of Egyptian science was medicine. Like almost everything

else in the cultural life of Egypt, it began with the priests, and

dripped with evidences of its magical origins. Among the people

amulets were more popular than pills as preventive or curative of

disease; disease was to them a possession by devils, and was to be

treated with incantations. A cold for instance, could be exorcised

by such magic words as: "Depart, cold, son of a cold, thou who

breakest the bones, destroyest the skull, makest ill the seven

openings of the head!... Go out on the floor, stink, stink,

stink!"- `0108177 a cure probably as effective as contemporary

remedies for this ancient disease. From such depths we rise in Egypt

to great physicians, surgeons and specialists, who acknowledged an

ethical code that passed down into the famous Hippocratic

oath. `0108178 Some of them specialized in obstetrics or gynecology,

some treated only gastric disorders, some were oculists so

internationally famous that Cyrus sent for one of them to come to

Persia. `0108179 The general practitioner was left to gather the

crumbs and heal the poor; in addition to which he was expected to

provide cosmetics, hair-dyes, skin-culture, limb-beautification, and

flea-exterminators. `

The Kahun Papyrus

(ca. 1850 B.C.) prescribes suppositories apparently used for

contraception. `0108182a The tomb of an Eleventh Dynasty queen

revealed a medicine chest containing vases, spoons, dried drugs, and

roots. Prescriptions hovered between medicine and magic, and relied

for their effectiveness in great part on the repulsiveness of the

concoction. Lizard's blood, swine's ears and teeth, putrid meat and

fat, a tortoise's brains, an old book boiled in oil, the milk of a

lying-in woman, the water of a chaste woman, the excreta of men,

donkeys, dogs, lions, cats and lice- all these are found in the

prescriptions. Baldness was treated by rubbing the head with animal

fat. Some of these cures passed from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from

the Greeks to the Romans, and from the Romans to us; we still

swallow trustfully the strange mixtures that were brewed four thousand

years ago on the banks of the Nile. `0108183

The Egyptians tried to promote health by public sanitation, *01068

by circumcision of males, *01069 `0108185 and by teaching the

people the frequent use of the enema. Diodorus Siculuss `0108187

tells us:

-

In order to prevent sicknesses they look after the health of their

body by means of drenches, fastings and emetics, sometimes every

day, and sometimes at intervals of three or four days. For they say

that the larger part of the food taken into the body is superfluous,

and that it is from this superfluous part that diseases are

engendered. *01070

-

Pliny believed that this habit of taking enemas was learned by the

Egyptians from observing the ibis, a bird that counteracts the

constipating character of its food by using its long bill as a

rectal syringe. `0108188 Herodotus reports that the Egyptians "purge

themselves every month, three days successively, seeking to preserve

health by emetics and enemas; for they suppose that all diseases to

which men are subject proceed from the food they use." And this

first historian of civilization ranks the Egyptians as, "next to the

Libyans, the healthiest people in the world." `0108189

9. Art

-

Architecture- Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, Empire and Saite

sculpture- Bas-relief- Painting- Minor arts- Music- The artists

-

The greatest element in this civilization was its art. Here,

almost at the threshold of history, we find an art powerful and

mature, superior to that of any modern nation, and equaled only by

that of Greece. At first the luxury of isolation and peace, and

then, under Thutmose III and Rameses II, the spoils of oppression

and war, gave to Egypt the opportunity and the means for massive

architecture, masculine statuary, and a hundred minor arts that so

early touched perfection. The whole theory of progress hesitates

before Egyptian art.

Dwellings were mostly of mud, with here and there some

pretty woodwork (a Japanese lattice, a well-carved portal), and a roof

strengthened with the tough and pliable trunks of the palm. Around the

house, normally, was a wall enclosing a court; from the court steps

led to the roof; from this the tenants passed down into the rooms. The

well-to-do had private gardens, carefully landscaped; the cities

provided public gardens for the poor, and hardly a home but had its

ornament of flowers. Inside the house the walls were hung with colored

mattings, and the floors, if the master could afford it, were

covered with rugs. People sat on these rugs rather than on chairs; the

Egyptians of the Old Kingdom squatted for their meals at tables six

inches high, in the fashion of the Japanese; and ate with their

fingers, like Shakespeare. Under the Empire, when slaves were cheap,

the upper classes sat on high cushioned chairs, and had their servants

hand them course after course

Stone for building was too costly for homes; it was a luxury

reserved for priests and kings. Even the nobles, ambitious though they

were, left the greatest wealth and the best building materials to

the temples; in consequence the palaces that overlooked almost every

mile of the river in the days of Amenhotep III crumbled into oblivion,

while the abodes of the gods and the tombs of the dead remained. By

the Twelfth Dynasty the pyramid had ceased to be the fashionable

form of sepulture. Khnumhotep (ca. 2180 B.C.) chose at Beni-Hasan

the quieter form of a colonnade built into the mountainside; and

this theme, once established, played a thousand variations among the

hills on the western slope of the Nile.

From the time of the

Pyramids to the Temple of Hathor at Denderah- i.e., for some three

thousand years- there rose out of the sands of Egypt such a succession

of architectural achievements as no civilization has ever surpassed.

At Karnak and Luxor a riot of columns raised by Thutmose I and

III, Amenhotep III, Seti I, Rameses II and other monarchs from the

Twelfth to the Twenty-second Dynasty; at Medinet-Habu (ca. 1300

B.C.) a vast but less distinguished edifice, on whose columns an

Arab village rested for centuries; at Abydos the Temple of Seti I,

dark and sombre in its massive ruins; at Elephantine the little Temple

of Khnum (ca. 1400 B.C.), "positively Greek in its precision and

elegance"; `0108191 at Der-el-Bahri the stately colonnades of Queen

Hatshepsut; near it the Ramesseum, another forest of colossal

columns and statues reared by the architects and slaves of Rameses II;

at Philae the lovely Temple of Isis (ca. 240 B.C.) desolate and

abandoned now that the damming of the Nile at Assuan has submerged the

bases of its perfect columns- these are sample fragments of the many

monuments that still adorn the valley of the Nile, and attest even

in their ruins the strength and courage of the race that reared

them.

There is nothing finer in the history of sculpture than the

diorite statue of Khafre in the Cairo Museum; as ancient to Praxiteles

as Praxiteles to us, it nevertheless comes down across fifty centuries

almost unhurt by time's rough usages; cut in the most intractable of

stones, it passes on to us completely the strength and authority,

the wilfulness and courage, the sensitivity and intelligence of the

(artist or the) King. Near it, and even older, Pharaoh Zoser sits

pouting in limestone; farther on, the guide with lighted match reveals

the transparency of an alabaster Menkaure.

Quite as perfect in artistry as these portraits of royalty are the

figures of the Sheik-el-Beled and the Scribe. The Scribe has come down

to us in many forms, all of uncertain antiquity; the most

illustrious is the squatting Scribe of the Louvre.

The fine granite bust of the great

Queen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York; the basalt statue

of Thutmose III in the Cairo Museum; the lion sphinx of Amenhotep

III in the British Museum; the limestone seated Ikhnaton in the

Louvre; the granite statue of Rameses II in Turin; *01075 the

perfect crouching figure of the same incredible monarch making an

offering to the gods; `0108199 the meditative cow of Der-el-Bahri,

which Maspero considered "equal, if not superior, to the best

achievements of Greece and Rome in this genre "; `0108200 the two

lions of Amenhotep III, which Ruskin ranked as the best animal

statuary surviving from antiquity; `0108201 the colossi cut into the

rocks at Abu Simbel by the sculptors of Rameses II; the amazing

remains found among the ruins of the artist Thutmose's studio at

Tell-el-Amarna- a plaster model of Ikhnaton's head, full of the

mysticism and poetry of that tragic king, the lovely limestone bust of

Ikhnaton's Queen, Nofretete, and the even finer sandstone head of

the same fair lady

After Rameses II this magnificence passed rapidly away. For many

centuries after him art contented itself with repeating traditional

works and forms. Under the Saite kings it sought to rejuvenate

itself by returning to the simplicity and sincerity of the Old Kingdom

masters. Sculptors attacked bravely the hardest stones- basalt,

breccia, serpentine, diorite- and carved them into such realistic

portraits as that of Montumihait, `0108203 and the green basalt head

of a bald unknown, now looking out blackly upon the wars of the

State Museum at Berlin. In bronze they cast the lovely figure of the

lady Tekoschet. `0108204 Again they delighted in catching the

actual features and movements of men and beasts; they moulded

laughable figures of quaint animals, slaves and gods; and they formed

in bronze a cat and a goat's head which are among the trophies of

Berlin. `0108205 Then the Persians came down like a wolf on the

fold, conquered Egypt, desecrated its temples, broke its spirit, and

put an end to its art.

Very little

remains to us of Old Kingdom painting beyond a remarkable picture of

six geese from a tomb at Medum; `0108210 but from this alone we are

justified in believing that already in the early dynasties this art,

too, had come near to perfection. In the Middle Kingdom we find

distemper painting *01078 of a delightful decorative effect in the

tombs of Ameni and Khnumhotep at Beni-Hasan, and such excellent

examples of the art as the "Gazelles and the Peasants," `0108211 and

the "Cat Watching the Prey"; `0108212 here again the artist has

caught the main point- that his creations must move and live. Under

the Empire the tombs became a riot of painting. The Egyptian artist

had now developed every color in the rainbow, and was anxious to

display his skill. On the walls and ceilings of homes, temples,

palaces and graves he tried to portray refreshingly the life of the

sunny fields- birds in flight through the air, fishes swimming in the

sea, beasts of the jungle in their native haunts.

superposition is again preferred to

perspective; the stiff formalism and conventions of Egyptian sculpture

are the order of the day, and do not reveal that enlivening humor

and realism which distinguish the later statuary. But through these

pictures runs a freshness of conception, a flow of line and execution,

a fidelity to the life and movement of natural things, and a joyous

exuberance of color and ornament, which make them a delight to the eye

and the spirit. With all its shortcomings Egyptian painting would

never be surpassed by any Oriental civilization until the middle

dynasties of China.

Weavers made rugs,

tapestries and cushions rich in color and incredibly fine in

texture; the designs which they created passed down into Syria, and

are used there to this day. `0108218 The relics of Tutenkhamon's

tomb have revealed the astonishing luxury of Egyptian furniture, the

exquisite finish of every piece and part, chairs covered gaudily

with silver and gold, beds of sumptuous workmanship and design,

jewel-boxes and perfume-baskets of minute artistry, and vases that

only China would excel. Tables bore costly vessels of silver, gold and

bronze, crystal goblets, and sparkling bowls of diorite so finely

ground that the light shone through their stone walls. The alabaster

vessels of Tutenkhamon, and the perfect lotus cups and drinking

bowls unearthed amid the ruins of Amenhotep III's villa at Thebes,

indicate to what a high level the ceramic art was raised.

Necklaces, crowns, rings, bracelets, mirrors,

pectorals, chains, medallions; gold and silver, carnelian and felspar,

lapis lazuli and amethyst- everything is here. The rich Egyptians

took the same pleasure as the Japanese in the beauty of the little

things that surrounded them; every square of ivory on their

jewel-boxes had to be carved in relief and refined in precise

detail. They dressed simply, but they lived completely. And when their

day's work was done they refreshed themselves with music softly played

on lutes, harps, sistrums, flutes and lyres. *01079 Temples and

palaces had orchestras and choirs, and on the Pharaoh's staff was a

"superintendent of singing" who organized players and musicians for

the entertainment of the king. There is no trace of a musical notation

in Egypt, but this may be merely a lacuna in the remains. Snefrunofr

and Re'mery-Ptah were the Carusos and De Reszkes of their day, and

across the centuries we hear their boast that they "fulfil every

wish of the king by their beautiful singing."

We hear of Imhotep, the almost mythical architect of

Zoser's reign; of Ineni, who designed great buildings like

Der-el-Bahri for Thutmose I; of Puymre and Hapuseneb and Senmut, who

carried on the architectural enterprises of Queen Hatshepsut, *01080

of the artist Thutmose, in whose studio so many masterpieces have been

found; and of Bek, the proud sculptor who tells us, in Gautier's

strain, that he has saved Ikhnaton from oblivion. `0108221 Amenhotep

III had as his chief architect another Amenhotep, son of Hapu; the

Pharaoh placed almost limitless wealth at the disposal of his talents,

and this favored artist became so famous that later Egypt worshiped

him as a god. For the most part, however, the artist worked in

obscurity and poverty, and was ranked no higher than other artisans or

handicraftsmen by the priests and potentates who engaged him.

Egyptian religion cooperated with Egyptian wealth to inspire and

foster art, and cooperated with Egypt's loss of empire and affluence

to ruin it. Religion offered motives, ideas and the inspiration; but

it imposed conventions and restraints which bound art so completely to

the church that when sincere religion died among the artists, the arts

that had lived on it died too. This is the tragedy of almost every

civilization- that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives

philosophy.

10. Philosophy

-

The "Instructions of Ptah-hotep"- The "Admonitions of Ipuwer"-

The "Dialogue of a Misanthrope"- The Egyptian Ecclesiastes

-

Historians of philosophy have been wont to begin their story with

the Greeks. The Hindus, who believe that they invented philosophy, and

the Chinese, who believe that they perfected it, smile at our

provincialism. It may be that we are all mistaken; for among the

most ancient fragments left to us by the Egyptians are writings that

belong, however loosely and untechnically, under the rubric of moral

philosophy. The wisdom of the Egyptians was a proverb with the Greeks,

who felt themselves children beside this ancient race. `0108222

The oldest work of philosophy known to us is the

"Instructions of Ptah-hotep," which apparently goes back to 2880 B.C.-

2300 years before Confucius, Socrates and Buddha. `0108223

Ptah-hotep was Governor of Memphis, and Prime Minister to the King,

under the Fifth Dynasty. Retiring from office, he decided to leave

to his son a manual of everlasting wisdom. It was transcribed as an

antique classic by some scholars prior to the Eighteenth Dynasty.

The Vizier begins:

-

O Prince my Lord, the end of life is at hand; old age descendeth

upon me; feebleness cometh and childishness is renewed; he that is old

lieth down in misery every day. The eyes are small, the ears are deaf.

Energy is diminished, the heart hath no rest.... Command thy

servant, therefore, to make over my princely authority to my son.

Let me speak unto him the words of them that hearken to the counsel of

the men of old time, those that once heard the gods. I pray thee,

let this thing be done.

His Gracious Majesty grants the permission, advising him, however,

to "discourse without causing weariness"- advice not yet superfluous

for philosophers. Whereupon Ptah-hotep instructs his son:

-

Be not proud because thou art learned; but discourse with the

ignorant man as with the sage. For no limit can be set to skill,

neither is there any craftsman that possesseth full advantages. Fair

speech is more rare than the emerald that is found by slave-maidens

among the pebbles.... Live, therefore, in the house of kindliness, and

men shall come and give gifts of themselves.... Beware of making

enmity by thy words.... Overstep not the truth, neither repeat that

which any man, be he prince or peasant, saith in opening the heart; it

is abhorrent to the soul...

If thou wouldst be a wise man, beget a son for the pleasing of the

god. If he make straight his course after thine example, if he arrange

thine affairs in due order, do all unto him that is good.... If he

be heedless and trespass thy rules of conduct, and is violent; if

every speech that cometh from his mouth is a vile word; then beat thou

him, that his talk may be fitting.... Precious to a man is the

virtue of his son, and good character is a thing remembered....

Wheresover thou goest, beware of consorting with women.... If thou

wouldst be wise, provide for thine house, and love thy wife that is in

thine arms.... Silence is more profitable to thee than abundance of

speech. Consider how thou mayest be opposed by an expert that speaketh

in council. It is a foolish thing to speak on every kind of work....

If thou be powerful make thyself to be honored for knowledge and for

gentleness.... Beware of interruption, and of answering words with

heat; put it from thee; control thyself.

-

Celebrate the glad day;

Be not weary therein.

Lo, no man taketh his goods with him;

Yea, none returneth again that is gone thither. `0108228

-

This pessimism and scepticism were the result, it may be, of the

broken spirit of a nation humiliated and subjected by the Hyksos

invaders; they bear the same relation to Egypt that Stoicism and

Epicureanism bear to a defeated and enslaved Greece. *01081 In part

such literature represents one of those interludes, like our own moral

interregnum, in which thought has for a time overcome belief, and

men no longer know how or why they should live. Such periods do not

endure; hope soon wins the victory over thought; the intellect is

put down to its customary menial place, and religion is born again,

giving to men the imaginative stimulus apparently indispensable to

life and work. We need not suppose that such poems expressed the views

of any large number of Egyptians; behind and around the small but

vital minority that pondered the problems of life and death in secular

and naturalistic terms were millions of simple men and women who

remained faithful to the gods, and never doubted that right would

triumph, that every earthly pain and grief would be atoned for

bountifully in a haven of happiness and peace.

11. Religion

-

Sky gods- The sun god- Plant gods- Animal gods- Sex gods-

Human gods- Osiris- Isis and Horus- Minor deities- The

priests- Immortality- The "Book of the Dead"- The

"Negative Confession"- Magic- Corruption

-

The earliest men and women, being direct children of Ra, had

been perfect and happy; by degrees their descendants had taken to evil

ways, and had forfeited this perfection and happiness; whereupon Ra,

dissatisfied with his creatures, had destroyed a large part of the

human race. Learned Egyptians questioned this popular belief, and

asserted on the contrary (like certain Sumerian scholars), that the

first men had been like brutes, without articulate speech or any of

the arts of life. `0108232 All in all it was an intelligent

mythology, expressing piously man's gratitude to earth and sun.

So exuberant was this piety that the Egyptians worshiped not

merely the source, but almost every form, of life. Many plants were

sacred to them: the palm-tree that shaded them amid the desert, the

spring that gave them drink in the oasis, the grove where they could

meet and rest, the sycamore flourishing miraculously in the sand;

these were, with excellent reason, holy things, and to the end of

his civilization the simple Egyptian brought them offerings of

cucumbers, grapes and figs.

More popular were the animal gods; they were so numerous that they

filled the Egyptian pantheon like a chattering menagerie. In one

nome or another, in one period or another, Egyptians worshiped the

bull, the crocodile, the hawk, the cow, the goose, the goat, the

ram, the cat, the dog, the chicken, the swallow, the jackal, the

serpent, and allowed some of these creatures to roam in the temples

with the same freedom that is accorded to the sacred cow in India

today. `0108235 When the gods became human they still retained

animal doubles and symbols: Amon was represented as a goose or a

ram, Ra as a grasshopper or a bull, Osiris as a bull or a ram, Sebek

as a crocodile, Horus as a hawk or falcon, Hathor as a cow, and Thoth,

the god of wisdom, as a baboon. `0108236 Sometimes women were

offered to certain of these animals as sexual mates; the bull in

particular, as the incarnation of Osiris, received this honor; and

at Mendes, says Plutarch, the most beautiful women were offered in

coitus to the divine goat. `0108237 From beginning to end this

totemism remained as an essential and native element in Egyptian

religion; human gods came to Egypt much later, and probably as gifts

from western Asia.

The goat and the bull were especially sacred to the Egyptians as

representing sexual creative power; they were not merely symbols of

Osiris, but incarnations of him. `0108239 Often Osiris was depicted

with large and prominent organs, as a mark of his supreme power; and

models of him in this form, or with a triple phallus, were borne in

religious processions by the Egyptians; on certain occasions the women

carried such phallic images, and operated them mechanically with

strings. `0108240 *01082 Signs of sex worship appear not only in

the many cases in which figures are depicted, on temple reliefs, with

erect organs, but in the frequent appearance, in Egyptian symbolism,

of the crux ansata - a cross with a handle, as a sign of sexual union

and vigorous life.

At last the gods became human- or rather, men became gods. Like

the deities of Greece, the personal gods of Egypt were merely superior

men and women, made in heroic mould, but composed of bone and

muscle, flesh and blood; they hungered and ate, thirsted and drank,

loved and mated, hated and killed, grew old and died. `0108242 There

was Osiris, for example, god of the beneficent Nile, whose death and

resurrection were celebrated yearly as symbolizing the fall and rise

of the river, and perhaps the decay and growth of the soil. Every

Egyptian of the later dynasties could tell the story of how Set (or

Sit), the wicked god of desiccation, who shriveled up harvests with

his burning breath, was angered at Osiris (the Nile) for extending

(with his overflow) the fertility of the earth, slew him, and

reigned in dry majesty over Osiris' kingdom (i.e., the river once

failed to rise), until Horus, brave son of Isis, overcame Set and

banished him; whereafter Osiris, brought back to life by the warmth of

Isis' love, ruled benevolently over Egypt, suppressed cannibalism,

established civilization, and then ascended to heaven to reign there

endlessly as a god. `0108243 It was a profound myth; for history,

like Oriental religion, is dualistic- a record of the conflict between

creation and destruction, fertility and desiccation, rejuvenation and

exhaustion, good and evil, life and death.

Profound, too, was the myth of Isis, the Great Mother. She was not

only the loyal sister and wife of Osiris; in a sense she was greater

than he, for- like woman in general- she had conquered death through

love. Nor was she merely the black soil of the Delta, fertilized by

the touch of Osiris-Nile, and making all Egypt rich with her

fecundity. She was, above all, the symbol of that mysterious

creative power which had produced the earth and every living thing,

and of that maternal tenderness whereby, at whatever cost to the

mother, the young new life is nurtured to maturity. She represented in

Egypt- as Kali, Ishtar and Cybele represented in Asia, Demeter in

Greece, and Ceres in Rome- the original priority and independence of

the female principle in creation and in inheritance, and the

originative leadership of woman in tilling the earth; for it was

Isis (said the myth) who had discovered wheat and barley growing

wild in Egypt, and had revealed them to Osiris (man). `0108244 The

Egyptians worshiped her with especial fondness and piety, and raised

up jeweled images to her as the Mother of God; her tonsured priests

praised her in sonorous matins and vespers; and in midwinter of each

year, coincident with the annual rebirth of the sun towards the end of

our December, the temples of her divine child, Horus (god of the sun),

showed her, in holy effigy, nursing in a stable the babe that she

had miraculously conceived.

These poetic-philosophic legends and

symbols profoundly affected Christian ritual and theology. Early

Christians sometimes worshiped before the statues of Isis suckling the

infant Horus, seeing in them another form of the ancient and noble

myth by which woman (i.e., the female principle), creating all things,

becomes at last the Mother of God. `0108245

These- Ra (or, as he was called in the South, Amon), Osiris, Isis

and Horus- were the greater gods of Egypt. In later days Ra, Amon

and another god, Ptah, were combined as three embodiments or aspects

of one supreme and triune deity. `0108246 There were countless

lesser divinities: Anubis the jackal, Shu, Tefnut, Nephthys, Ket,

Nut;... but we must not make these pages a museum of dead gods. Even

Pharaoh was a god, always the son of Amon-Ra, ruling not merely by

divine right but by divine birth, as a deity transiently tolerating

the earth as his home. On his head was the falcon, symbol of Horus and

totem of the tribe; from his forehead rose the uraeus or serpent,

symbol of wisdom and life, and communicating magic virtues to the

crown. `0108247

The king was chief-priest of the faith, and led the

great processions and ceremonies that celebrated the festivals of

the gods. It was through this assumption of divine lineage and

powers that he was able to rule so long with so little force.

Hence the priests of Egypt were the necessary props of the throne,

and the secret police of the social order. Given a faith of such

complexity, a class had to arise adept in magic and ritual, whose

skill would make it indispensable in approaching the gods. In

effect, though not in law, the office of priest passed down from

father to son, and a class grew up which, through the piety of the

people and the politic generosity of the kings, became in time

richer and stronger than the feudal aristocracy or the royal family

itself. The sacrifices offered to the gods, supplied the priests

with food and drink; the temple buildings gave them spacious homes;

the revenues of temple lands and services furnished them with ample

incomes; and their exemption from forced labor, military service,

and ordinary taxation, left them in an enviable position of prestige