The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Man, by Hendrik Willem van Loon This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Ancient Man The Beginning of Civilizations Author: Hendrik Willem van Loon Posting Date: November 22, 2011 [EBook #9991] Release Date: February, 2006 First Posted: November 6, 2003 Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANCIENT MAN *** Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Sjaani and PG Distributed Proofreaders ANCIENT MAN THE BEGINNING OF CIVILIZATIONS BY HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON 1922. DEDICATION To HANSJE AND WILLEM. My darling boys, You are twelve and eight years old. Soon you will be grown up. You will leave home and begin your own lives. I have been thinking about that day, wondering what I could do to help you. At last, I have had an idea. The best compass is a thorough understanding of the growth and the experience of the human race. Why should I not write a special history for you? So I took my faithful Corona and five bottles of ink and a box of matches and a bale of paper and began to work upon the first volume. If all goes well there will be eight more and they will tell you what you ought to know of the last six thousand years. But before you start to read let me explain what I intend to do. I am not going to present you with a textbook. Neither will it be a volume of pictures. It will not even be a regular history in the accepted sense of the word. I shall just take both of you by the hand and together we shall wander forth to explore the intricate wilderness of the bygone ages. I shall show you mysterious rivers which seem to come from nowhere and which are doomed to reach no ultimate destination. I shall bring you close to dangerous abysses, hidden carefully beneath a thick overgrowth of pleasant but deceiving romance. Here and there we shall leave the beaten track to scale a solitary and lonely peak, towering high above the surrounding country. Unless we are very lucky we shall sometimes lose ourselves in a sudden and dense fog of ignorance. Wherever we go we must carry our warm cloak of human sympathy and understanding for vast tracts of land will prove to be a sterile desert--swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could happen to any of us. I shall not pretend to be an infallible guide. Whenever you have a chance, take counsel with other travelers who have passed along the same route before. Compare their observations with mine and if this leads you to different conclusions, I shall certainly not be angry with you. I have never preached to you in times gone by. I am not going to preach to you today. You know what the world expects of you--that you shall do your share of the common task and shall do it bravely and cheerfully. If these books can help you, so much the better. And with all my love I dedicate these histories to you and to the boys and girls who shall keep you company on the voyage through life. HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. PREHISTORIC MAN THE WORLD GROWS COLD END OF THE STONE AGE THE EARLIEST SCHOOL OF THE HUMAN RACE THE KEY OF STONE THE LAND OF THE LIVING AND THE LAND OF THE DEAD THE MAKING OF A STATE THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT MESOPOTAMIA--THE COUNTRY BETWEEN THE RIVERS THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA--THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POT THE STORY OF MOSES JERUSALEM--THE CITY OF THE LAW DAMASCUS--THE CITY OF TRADE THE PHOENICIANS WHO SAILED BEYOND THE HORIZON THE ALPHABET FOLLOWS THE TRADE THE END OF THE ANCIENT WORLD PREHISTORIC MAN It took Columbus more than four weeks to sail from Spain to the West Indian Islands. We on the other hand cross the ocean in sixteen hours in a flying machine. Five hundred years ago, three or four years were necessary to copy a book by hand. We possess linotype machines and rotary presses and we can print a new book in a couple of days. We understand a great deal about anatomy and chemistry and mineralogy and we are familiar with a thousand different branches of science of which the very name was unknown to the people of the past. In one respect, however, we are quite as ignorant as the most primitive of men--we do not know where we came from. We do not know how or why or when the human race began its career upon this Earth. With a million facts at our disposal we are still obliged to follow the example of the fairy-stories and begin in the old way: "Once upon a time there was a man." This man lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. What did he look like? We do not know. We never saw his picture. Deep in the clay of an ancient soil we have sometimes found a few pieces of his skeleton. They were hidden amidst masses of bones of animals that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. We have taken these bones and they allow us to reconstruct the strange creature who happens to be our ancestor. The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had colored his skin a dark brown. His head and most of his body were covered with long hair. He had very thin but strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey. His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke and their lava. He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests. When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or he stole the eggs from the nest of an angry bird. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase, he managed to catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbit These he would eat raw, for prehistoric man did not know that food could be cooked. His teeth were large and looked like the teeth of many of our own animals. During the hours of day this primitive human being went about in search of food for himself and his wife and his young. At night, frightened by the noise of the beasts, who were in search of prey, he would creep into a hollow tree or he would hide himself behind a few big boulders, covered with moss and great, big spiders. In summer he was exposed to the scorching rays of the sun. During the winter he froze with cold. When he hurt himself (and hunting animals are for ever breaking their bones or spraining their ankles) he had no one to take care of him. He had learned how to make certain sounds to warn his fellow-beings whenever danger threatened. In this he resembled a dog who barks when a stranger approaches. In many other respects he was far less attractive than a well-bred house pet. Altogether, early man was a miserable creature who lived in a world of fright and hunger, who was surrounded by a thousand enemies and who was for ever haunted by the vision of friends and relatives who had been eaten up by wolves and bears and the terrible sabre-toothed tiger. Of the earliest history of this man we know nothing. He had no tools and he built no homes. He lived and died and left no traces of his existence. We keep track of him through his bones and they tell us that he lived more than two thousand centuries ago. The rest is darkness. Until we reach the time of the famous Stone Age, when man learned the first rudimentary principles of what we call civilization. Of this Stone Age I must tell you in some detail. THE WORLD GROWS COLD Something was the matter with the weather. Early man did not know what "time" meant. He kept no records of birthdays and wedding-anniversaries or the hour of death. He had no idea of days or weeks or years. When the sun arose in the morning he did not say "Behold another day." He said "It is Light" and he used the rays of the early sun to gather food for his family. When it grew dark, he returned to his wife and children, gave them part of the day's catch (some berries and a few birds), stuffed himself full with raw meat and went to sleep. In a very general way he kept track of the seasons. Long experience had taught him that the cold Winter was invariably followed by the mild Spring--that Spring grew into the hot Summer when fruits ripened and the wild ears of corn were ready to be plucked and eaten. The Summer ended when gusts of wind swept the leaves from the trees and when a number of animals crept into their holes to make ready for the long hibernal sleep. It had always been that way. Early man accepted these useful changes of cold and warm but asked no questions. He lived and that was enough to satisfy him. Suddenly, however, something happened that worried him greatly. The warm days of Summer had come very late. The fruits had not ripened at all. The tops of the mountains which used to be covered with grass lay deeply hidden under a heavy burden of snow. Then one morning quite a number of wild people, different from the other inhabitants of his valley had approached from the region of the high peaks. They muttered sounds which no one could understand. They looked lean and appeared to be starving. Hunger and cold seemed to have driven them from their former homes. There was not enough food in the valley for both the old inhabitants and the newcomers. When they tried to stay more than a few days there was a terrible fight and whole families were killed. The others fled into the woods and were not seen again. For a long time nothing occurred of any importance. But all the while, the days grew shorter and the nights were colder than they ought to have been. Finally, in a gap between the two high hills, there appeared a tiny speck of greenish ice. It increased in size as the years went by. Very slowly a gigantic glacier was sliding down the slopes of the mountain ridge. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen thunderstorms they suddenly tumbled among the frightened people and killed them while they slept. Century-old trees were crushed into kindling wood by the high walls of ice that knew of no mercy to either man or beast. At last, it began to snow. It snowed for months and months and months. All the plants died. The animals fled in search of the southern sun. The valley became uninhabitable. Man hoisted his children upon his back, took the few pieces of stone which he had used as a weapon and went forth to find a new home. Why the world should have grown cold at that particular moment, we do not know. We can not even guess at the cause. The gradual lowering of the temperature, however, made a great difference to the human race. For a time it looked as if every one would die. But in the end this period of suffering proved a real blessing. It killed all the weaker people and forced the survivors to sharpen their wits lest they perish, too. Placed before the choice of hard thinking or quick dying the same brain that had first turned a stone into a hatchet now solved difficulties which had never faced the older generations. In the first place, there was the question of clothing. It had grown much too cold to do without some sort of artificial covering. Bears and bisons and other animals who live in northern regions are protected against snow and ice by a heavy coat of fur. Man possessed no such coat. His skin was very delicate and he suffered greatly. He solved his problem in a very simple fashion. He dug a hole and he covered it with branches and leaves and a little grass. A bear came by and fell into this artificial cave. Man waited until the creature was weak from lack of food and then killed him with many blows of a big stone. With a sharp piece of flint he cut the fur of the animal's back. Then he dried it in the sparse rays of the sun, put it around his own shoulders and enjoyed the same warmth that had formerly kept the bear happy and comfortable. Then there was the housing problem. Many animals were in the habit of sleeping in a dark cave. Man followed their example and searched until he found an empty grotto. He shared it with bats and all sorts of creeping insects but this he did not mind. His new home kept him warm and that was enough. Often, during a thunderstorm a tree had been hit by lightning. Sometimes the entire forest had been set on fire. Man had seen these forest-fires. When he had come too near he had been driven away by the heat. He now remembered that fire gave warmth. Thus far, fire had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree, dragged into a cave and lighted by means of smouldering branches from a burning forest filled the room with unusual but very pleasant heat. Perhaps you will laugh. All these things seem so very simple. They are very simple to us because some one, ages and ages ago, was clever enough to think of them. But the first cave that was made comfortable by the fire of an old log attracted more attention than the first house that ever was lighted by electricity. When at last, a specially brilliant fellow hit upon the idea of throwing raw meat into the hot ashes before eating it, he added something to the sum total of human knowledge which made the cave-man feel that the height of civilization had been reached. Nowadays, when we hear of another marvelous invention we are very proud. "What more," we ask, "can the human brain accomplish?" And we smile contentedly for we live in the most remarkable of all ages and no one has ever performed such miracles as our engineers and our chemists. Forty thousand years ago when the world was on the point of freezing to death, an unkempt and unwashed cave-man, pulling the feathers out of a half-dead chicken with the help of his brown fingers and his big white teeth--throwing the feathers and the bones upon the same floor that served him and his family as a bed, felt just as happy and just as proud when he was taught how the hot cinders of a fire would change raw meat into a delicious meal. "What a wonderful age," he would exclaim and he would lie down amidst the decaying skeletons of the animals which had served him as his dinner and he would dream of his own perfection while bats, as large as small dogs, flew restlessly through the cave and while rats, as big as small cats, rummaged among the left overs. Quite often the cave gave way to the pressure of the surrounding rock. Then man was hurled amidst the bones of his own victims. Thousands of years later the anthropologist (ask your father what that means) comes along with his little spade and his wheelbarrow. He digs and he digs and at last he uncovers this age-old tragedy and makes it possible for me to tell you all about it. THE END OF THE STONE AGE The struggle to keep alive during the cold period was terrible. Many races of men and animals, whose bones we have found, disappeared from the face of the earth. Whole tribes and clans were wiped out by hunger and cold and want. First the children would die and then the parents. The old people were left to the mercy of the wild animals who hastened to occupy the undefended cave. Until another change in the climate or the slowly decreasing moisture of the air made life impossible for these wild invaders and forced them to find a retreat in the heart of the African jungle where they have lived ever since. This part of my history is very difficult because the changes which I must describe were so very slow and so very gradual. Nature is never in a hurry. She has all eternity in which to accomplish her task and she can afford to bring about the necessary changes with deliberate care. Prehistoric man lived through at least four definite eras when the ice descended far down into the valleys and covered the greater part of the European continent. The last one of these periods came to an end almost thirty thousand years ago. From that moment on man left behind him concrete evidence of his existence in the form of tools and arms and pictures and in a general way we can say that history begins when the last cold period had become a thing of the past. The endless struggle for life had taught the survivors many things. Stone and wooden implements had become as common as steel tools are in our own days. Gradually the rudely chipped flint axe had been replaced by one of polished flint which was infinitely more practical. It allowed man to attack many animals at whose mercy he had been since the beginning of time. The mammoth was no longer seen. The musk-ox had retreated to the polar circle. The tiger had left Europe for good. The cave-bear no longer ate little children. The powerful brain of the weakest and most helpless of all living creatures--Man-- had devised such terrible instruments of destruction that he was now the master of all the other animals. The first great victory over Nature had been gained but many others were to follow. Equipped with a full set of tools both for hunting and fishing, the cave-dweller looked for new living quarters. The shores of rivers and lakes offered the best opportunity for a regular livelihood. The old caves were deserted and the human race moved toward the water. Now that man could handle heavy axes, the felling of trees no longer offered any great difficulties. For countless ages birds had been constructing comfortable houses out of chips of wood and grass amidst the branches of trees. Man followed their example. He, too, built himself a nest and called it his "home." He did not, except in a few parts of Asia, take to the trees which were a bit too small and unsteady for his purpose. He cut down a number of logs. These he drove firmly into the soft bottom of a shallow lake. On top of them he constructed a wooden platform and upon this platform he erected his first wooden house. It offered many advantages over the old cave. No wild animals could break into it and robbers could not enter it. The lake itself was an inexhaustible store-room containing an endless supply of fresh fish. These houses built on piles were much healthier than the old caves and they gave the children a chance to grow up into strong men. The population increased steadily and man began to occupy vast tracts of wilderness which had been unoccupied since the beginning of time. And all the time new inventions were made which made life more comfortable and less dangerous. Often enough these innovations were not due to the cleverness of man's brain. He simply copied the animals. You know of course that there are a large number of beasties who prepare for the long winter by burying nuts and acorns and other food which is abundant during the summer. Just think of the squirrels who are for ever filling their larder in gardens and parks with supplies for the winter and the early spring. Early man, less intelligent in many respects than the squirrels, had not known how to preserve anything for the future. He ate until his hunger was stilled, but what he did not need right away he allowed to rot. As a result he often went without his meals during the cold period and many of his children died from hunger and want. Until he followed the example of the animals and prepared for the future by laying in sufficient stores when the harvest had been good and there was an abundance of wheat and grain. We do not know which genius first discovered the use of pottery but he deserves a statue. Very likely it was a woman who had got tired of the eternal chores of the kitchen and wanted to make her household duties a little less exacting. She noticed that chunks of clay, when exposed to the rays of the sun, got baked into a hard substance. If a flat piece of clay could be transformed into a brick, a slightly curved piece of the same material must produce a similar result. And behold, the brick grew into a piece of pottery and the human race was able to save for the day of tomorrow. If you think that my praises of this invention are exaggerated, look at the breakfast table and see what pottery, in one form and the other, means in your own life. Your oatmeal is served in a dish. The cream is served from a pitcher. Your eggs are carried from the kitchen to the dining-room table on a plate. Your milk is brought to you in a china mug. Then go to the store-room (if there is no store-room in your house go to the nearest Delicatessen store). You will see how all the things which we are supposed to eat tomorrow and next week and next year have been put away in jars and cans and other artificial containers which Nature did not provide for us but which man was forced to invent and perfect before he could be assured of his regular meals all the year around. Even a gas-tank is nothing but a large pitcher, made of iron because iron does not break as easily as china and is less porous than clay. So are barrels and bottles and pots and pans. They all serve the same purpose--of providing us in the future with those things of which we happen to have an abundance at the present moment. And because he could preserve eatable things for the day of need, man began to raise vegetables and grain and saved the surplus for future consumption. This explains why, during the late Stone Age, we find the first wheat-fields and the first gardens, grouped around the settlements of the early pile-dwellers. It also tells us why man gave up his habit of wandering and settled down in one fixed spot where he raised his children until the day of his death when he was decently buried among his own people. It is safe to say that these earliest ancestors of ours would have given up the ways of savages of their own accord if they had been left to their fate. But suddenly there was an end to their isolation. Prehistoric man was discovered. A traveler from the unknown south-land who had dared to cross the turbulent sea and the forbidding mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of Central Europe. On his back he carried a pack. When he had spread his wares before the gaping curiosity of the bewildered natives, their eyes beheld wonders of which their minds had never dared to dream. They saw bronze hammers and axes and tools made of iron and helmets made of copper and beautiful ornaments consisting of a strangely colored substance which the foreign visitor called "glass." And overnight the Age of Stone came to an end. It was replaced by a new civilization which had discarded wooden and stone implements centuries before and had laid the foundations for that "Age of Metal" which has endured until our own day. It is of this new civilization that I shall tell you in the rest of my book and if you do not mind, we shall leave the northern continent for a couple of thousand years and pay a visit to Egypt and to western Asia. "But," you will say, "this is not fair. You promise to tell us about prehistoric man and then, just when the story is going to be interesting, you close the chapter and you jump to another part of the world and we must jump with you whether we like it or not." I know. It does not seem the right thing to do. Unfortunately, history is not at all like mathematics. When you solve a sum you go from "a" to "b" and from "b" to "c" and from "c" to "d" and so on. History on the other hand jumps from "a" to "z" and then back to "f" and next to "m" without any apparent respect for neatness and order. There is a good reason for this. History is not exactly a science. It tells the story of the human race and most people, however much we may try to change their nature, refuse to behave with the regularity and the precision of the tables of multiplication. No two men ever do precisely the same thing. No two human brains ever reach exactly the same conclusion. You will notice that for yourself when you grow up. It was not different a few hundred centuries ago. Prehistoric man, as I just told you, was on a fair way to progress. He had managed to survive the ice and the snow and the wild animals and that in itself, was a great deal. He had invented many useful things. Suddenly, however, other people in a different part of the world entered the race. They rushed forward at a terrible speed and within a very short space of time they reached a height of civilization which had never before been seen upon our planet. Then they set forth to teach what they knew to the others who had been less intelligent than themselves. Now that I have explained this to you, does it not seem just to give the Egyptians and the people of western Asia their full share of the chapters of this book? THE EARLIEST SCHOOL OF THE HUMAN RACE We are the children of a practical age. We travel from place to place in our own little locomotives which we call automobiles. When we wish to speak to a friend whose home is a thousand miles away, we say "Hello" into a rubber tube and ask for a certain telephone number in Chicago. At night when the room grows dark we push a button and there is light. If we happen to be cold we push another button and the electric stove spreads its pleasant glow through our study. On the other hand in summer when it is hot the same electric current will start a small artificial storm (an electric fan) which keeps us cool and comfortable. We seem to be the masters of all the forces of nature and we make them work for us as if they were our very obedient slaves. But do not forget one thing when you pride yourself upon our splendid achievements. We have constructed the edifice of our modern civilization upon the fundament of wisdom that had been built at great pains by the people of the ancient world. Do not be afraid of their strange names which you will meet upon every page of the coming chapters. Babylonians and Egyptians and Chaldeans and Sumerians are all dead and gone, but they continue to influence our own lives in everything we do, in the letters we write, in the language we use, in the complicated mathematical problems which we must solve before we can build a bridge or a skyscraper. And they deserve our grateful respect as long as our planet continues to race through the wide space of the high heavens. These ancient people of whom I shall now tell you lived in three definite spots. Two of these were found along the banks of vast rivers. The third was situated on the shores of the Mediterranean. The oldest center of civilization developed in the valley of the Nile, in a country which was called Egypt. The second was located in the fertile plains between two big rivers of western Asia, to which the ancients gave the name of Mesopotamia. The third one which you will find along the shore of the Mediterranean, was inhabited by the Phoenicians, the earliest of all colonizers and by the Jews who bestowed upon the rest of the world the main principles of their moral laws. This third center of civilization is known by its ancient Babylonian name of Suri, or as we pronounce it, Syria. The history of the people who lived in these regions covers more than five thousand years. It is a very, very complicated story. I can not give you many details. I shall try and weave their adventures into a single fabric, which will look like one of those marvelous rugs of which you read in the tales which Scheherazade told to Harun the Just. THE KEY OF STONE Fifty years before the birth of Christ, the Romans conquered the land along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and among this newly acquired territory was a country called Egypt. The Romans, who are to play such a great role in our history, were a race of practical men. They built bridges, they constructed roads, and with a small but highly trained army of soldiers and civil officers, they managed to rule the greater part of Europe, of eastern Africa and western Asia. As for art and the sciences, these did not interest them very much. They regarded with suspicion a man who could play the lute or who could write a poem about Spring and only thought him little better than the clever fellow who could walk the tightrope or who had trained his poodle dog to stand on its hind legs. They left such things to the Greeks and to the Orientals, both of whom they despised, while they themselves spent their days and nights keeping order among the thousand and one nations of their vast empire. When they first set foot in Egypt that country was already terribly old. More than six thousand and five hundred years had gone by since the history of the Egyptian people had begun. Long before any one had dreamed of building a city amidst the swamps of the river Tiber, the kings of Egypt had ruled far and wide and had made their court the center of all civilization. While the Romans were still savages who chased wolves and bears with clumsy stone axes, the Egyptians were writing books, performing intricate medical operations and teaching their children the tables of multiplication. This great progress they owed chiefly to one very wonderful invention, to the art of preserving their spoken words and their ideas for the benefit of their children and grandchildren. We call this the art of writing. We are so familiar with writing that we can not understand how people ever managed to live without books and newspapers and magazines. But they did and it was the main reason why they made such slow progress during the first million years of their stay upon this planet. They were like cats and dogs who can only teach their puppies and their kittens a few simple things (barking at a stranger and climbing trees and such things) and who, because they can not write, possess no way in which they can use the experience of their countless ancestors. This sounds almost funny, doesn't it? And why make such a fuss about so simple a matter? But did you ever stop to think what happens when you write a letter? Suppose that you are taking a trip in the mountains and you have seen a deer. You want to tell this to your father who is in the city. What do you do? You put a lot of dots and dashes upon a piece of paper--you add a few more dots and dashes upon an envelope and you carry your epistle to the mailbox together with a two-cent stamp. What have you really been doing? You have changed a number of spoken words into a number of pothooks and scrawls. But how did you know how to make your curlycues in such a fashion that both the postman and your father could retranslate them into spoken words? You knew, because some one had taught you how to draw the precise figures which represented the sound of your spoken words. Just take a few letters and see the way this game is played. We make a guttural noise and write down a "G." We let the air pass through our closed teeth and we write down "S." We open our mouth wide and make a noise like a steam engine and the sound is written down "H." It took the human race hundreds of thousands of years to discover this and the credit for it goes to the Egyptians. Of course they did not use the letters which have been used to print this book. They had a system of their own. It was much prettier than ours but not quite so simple. It consisted of little figures and images of things around the house and around the farm, of knives and plows and birds and pots and pans. These little figures their scribes scratched and painted upon the wall of the temples, upon the coffins of their dead kings and upon the dried leaves of the papyrus plant which has given its name to our "paper." But when the Romans entered this vast library they showed neither enthusiasm nor interest. They possessed a system of writing of their own which they thought vastly superior. They did not know that the Greeks (from whom they had learned their alphabet) had in turn obtained theirs from the Phoenicians who had again borrowed with great success from the old Egyptians. They did not know and they did not care. In their schools the Roman alphabet was taught exclusively and what was good enough for the Roman children was good enough for everybody else. You will understand that the Egyptian language did not long survive the indifference and the opposition of the Roman governors. It was forgotten. It died just as the languages of most of our Indian tribes have become a thing of the past. The Arabs and the Turks who succeeded the Romans as the rulers of Egypt abhorred all writing that was not connected with their holy book, the Koran. At last in the middle of the sixteenth century a few western visitors came to Egypt and showed a mild interest in these strange pictures. But there was no one to explain their meaning and these first Europeans were as wise as the Romans and the Turks had been before them. Now it happened, late in the eighteenth century that a certain French general by the name of Buonaparte visited Egypt. He did not go there to study ancient history. He wanted to use the country as a starting point for a military expedition against the British colonies in India. This expedition failed completely but it helped solve the mysterious problem of the ancient Egyptian writing. Among the soldiers of Napoleon Buonaparte there was a young officer by the name of Broussard. He was stationed at the fortress of St. Julien on the western mouth of the Nile which is called the Rosetta river. Broussard liked to rummage among the ruins of the lower Nile and one day he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in that neighborhood, it was covered with picture writing. But this slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It carried three inscriptions and one of these (oh joy!) was in Greek. The Greek language was known. As it was almost certain that the Egyptian part contained a translation of the Greek (or vice versa), the key to ancient Egyptian seemed to have been discovered. But it took more than thirty years of very hard work before the key had been made to fit the lock. Then the mysterious door was opened and the ancient treasure house of Egypt was forced to surrender its secrets. The man who gave his life to the task of deciphering this language was Jean Francois Champollion--usually called Champollion Junior to distinguish him from his older brother who was also a very learned man. Champollion Junior was a baby when the French revolution broke out and therefore he escaped serving in the armies of the General Buonaparte. While his countrymen were marching from one glorious victory to another (and back again as such Imperial armies are apt to do) Champollion studied the language of the Copts, the native Christians of Egypt. At the age of nineteen he was appointed a professor of History at one of the smaller French universities and there he began his great work of translating the pictures of the old Egyptian language. For this purpose he used the famous black stone of Rosetta which Broussard had discovered among the ruins near the mouth of the Nile. The original stone was still in Egypt. Napoleon had been forced to vacate the country in a hurry and he had left this curiosity behind. When the English retook Alexandria in the year 1801 they found the stone and carried it to London, where you may see it this very day in the British Museum. The Inscriptions however had been copied and had been taken to France, where they were used by Champollion. The Greek text was quite clear. It contained the story of Ptolemy V and his wife Cleopatra, the grandmother of that other Cleopatra about whom Shakespeare wrote. The other two inscriptions, however, refused to surrender their secrets. One of them was in hieroglyphics, the name we give to the oldest known Egyptian writing. The word Hieroglyphic is Greek and means "sacred carving." It is a very good name for it fully describes the purpose and nature of this script. The priests who had invented this art did not want the common people to become too familiar with the deep mysteries of preserving speech. They made writing a sacred business. They surrounded it with much mystery and decreed that the carving of hieroglyphics be regarded as a sacred art and forbade the people to practice it for such a common purpose as business or commerce. They could enforce this rule with success so long as the country was inhabited by simple farmers who lived at home and grew everything they needed upon their own fields. But gradually Egypt became a land of traders and these traders needed a means of communication beyond the spoken word. So they boldly took the little figures of the priests and simplified them for their own purposes. Thereafter they wrote their business letters in the new script which became known as the "popular language" and which we call by its Greek name, the "Demotic language." The Rosetta stone carried both the sacred and the popular translations of the Greek text and upon these two Champollion centered his attack. He collected every piece of Egyptian script which he could get and together with the Rosetta stone he compared and studied them until after twenty years of patient drudgery he understood the meaning of fourteen little figures. That means that he spent more than a whole year to decipher each single picture. Finally he went to Egypt and in the year 1823 he printed the first scientific book upon the subject of the ancient hieroglyphics. Nine years later he died from overwork, as a true martyr to the great task which he had set himself as a boy. His work, however, lived after him. Others continued his studies and today Egyptologists can read hieroglyphics as easily as we can read the printed pages of our newspapers. Fourteen pictures in twenty years seems very slow work. But let me tell you something of Champollion's difficulties. Then you will understand, and understanding, you will admire his courage. The old Egyptians did not use a simple sign language. They had passed beyond that stage. Of course, you know what sign language is. Every Indian story has a chapter about queer messages, written in the form of little pictures. Hardly a boy but at some stage or other of his life, as a buffalo hunter or an Indian fighter, has invented a sign language of his own, and all Boy Scouts are familiar with it. But Egyptian was something quite different and I must try and make this clear to you with a few pictures. Suppose that you were Champollion and that you were reading an old papyrus which told the story of a farmer who lived somewhere along the banks of the river Nile. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw. "Very well," you said, "that means, of course, that the farmer went out and cut a tree down." Most likely you had guessed correctly. Next you took another page of hieroglyphics. They told the story of a queen who had lived to be eighty-two years old. Right in the middle of the text the same picture occurred. That was very puzzling, to say the least. Queens do not go about cutting down trees. They let other people do it for them. A young queen may saw wood for the sake of exercise, but a queen of eighty-two stays at home with her cat and her spinning wheel. Yet, the picture was there. The ancient priest who drew it must have placed it there for a definite purpose. What could he have meant? That was the riddle which Champollion finally solved. He discovered that the Egyptians were the first people to use what we call "phonetic writing." Like most other words which express a scientific idea, the word "phonetic" is of Greek origin. It means the "science of the sound which is made by our speech." You have seen the Greek word "phone," which means the voice, before. It occurs in our word "telephone," the machine which carries the voice to a distant point. Ancient Egyptian was "phonetic" and it set man free from the narrow limits of that sign language which in some primitive form had been used ever since the cave- dweller began to scratch pictures of wild animals upon the walls of his home. Now let us return for a moment to the little fellow with his saw who suddenly appeared in the story of the old queen. Evidently he had something to do with a saw. A "saw" is either a tool which you find in a carpenter shop or it means the past tense of the verb "to see." This is what had happened to the word during the course of many centuries. First of all it had meant a man with a saw. Then it came to mean the sound which we reproduce by the three modern letters, s, a and w. In the end the original meaning of carpentering was lost entirely and the picture indicated the past tense of "to see." A modern English sentence done into the images of ancient Egypt will show you what I mean. The means either these two round objects in your head which allow you to see, or it means "I," the person who is talking or writing. A is either an animal which gathers honey and pricks you in the finger when you try to catch it, or it represents to verb "to be," which is pronounced the same way and which means to "exist." Again it may be the first part of a verb like "be- come" or "be-have." In this case the bee is followed by a which represents the sound which we find in the word "leave" or "leaf." Put your "bee" and your "leaf" together and you have the two sounds which make the verb "bee-leave" or "believe" as we write it nowadays. The "eye" you know all about. Finally you get a picture which looks like a giraffe. It is a giraffe, and it is part of the old sign language, which has been continued wherever it seemed most convenient. Therefore you get the following sentence, "I believe I saw a giraffe." This system, once invented, was developed during thousands of years. Gradually the most important figures came to mean single letters or short sounds like "fu" or "em" or "dee" or "zee," or as we write them, f and m and d and z. And with the help of these, the Egyptians could write anything they wanted upon every conceivable subject, and could preserve the experience of one generation for the benefit of the next without the slightest difficulty. That, in a very general way, is what Champollion taught us after the exhausting search which killed him when he was a young man. That too, is the reason why today we know Egyptian history better than that of any other ancient country. THE LAND OF THE LIVING AND THE LAND OF THE DEAD The History of Man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful and easily gathered, thither man travelled to make his home. The fame of the Nile valley must have spread at an early date. From far and wide, wild people flocked to the banks of the river. Surrounded on all sides by desert or sea, it was not easy to reach these fertile fields and only the hardiest men and women survived. We do not know who they were. Some came from the interior of Africa and had woolly hair and thick lips. Others, with a yellowish skin, came from the desert of Arabia and the broad rivers of western Asia. They fought each other for the possession of this wonderful land. They built villages which their neighbors destroyed and they rebuilt them with the bricks they had taken from other neighbors whom they in turn had vanquished. Gradually a new race developed. They called themselves "remi," which means simply "the Men." There was a touch of pride in this name and they used it in the same sense that we refer to America as "God's own country." Part of the year, during the annual flood of the Nile, they lived on small islands within a country which itself was cut off from the rest of the world by the sea and the desert. No wonder that these people were what we call "insular," and had the habits of villagers who rarely come in contact with their neighbors. They liked their own ways best. They thought their own habits and customs just a trifle better than those of anybody else. In the same way, their own gods were considered more powerful than the gods of other nations. They did not exactly