The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 | Page 8

for the
preservation of man's buildings as is the rainless valley of the Nile.
[Footnote 2: See the Dawn of Civilization, page 1.]
Moreover, the Egyptians may not have been the earliest inhabitants
even of their own rich valley. We find hints that they were wanderers,
invaders, coming from the East, and that with the land they
appropriated also the ideas, the inventions, of an earlier negroid race.
But whatever they took they added to, they improved on. The idea of
futurity, of man's existence beyond the grave, became prominent
among them; and in the absence of clearer knowledge we may well
take this idea as the groundwork, the starting-point, of all man's later
and more striking progress.
Since the Egyptians believed in a future life they strove to preserve the
body for it, and built ever stronger and more gigantic tombs. They
strove to fit the mind for it, and cultivated virtues, not wholly animal
such as physical strength, nor wholly commercial such as cunning.
They even carved around the sepulchre of the departed a record of his
doings, lest they--and perhaps he too in that next life--forget. There
were elements of intellectual growth in all this, conditions to stimulate
the mind beyond the body.
And the Egyptians did develop. If one reads the tales, the romances,
that have survived from their remoter periods, he finds few emotions

higher than childish curiosity or mere animal rage and fear. Amid their
latest stories, on the contrary, we encounter touches of sentiment, of
pity and self-sacrifice, such as would even now be not unworthy of
praise. But, alas! the improvement seems most marked where it was
most distant. Perhaps the material prosperity of the land was too great,
the conditions of life too easy; there was no stimulus to effort, to
endeavor. By about the year 2200 B.C. we find Egypt fallen into the
grip of a cold and lifeless formalism. Everything was fixed by law;
even pictures must be drawn in a certain way, thoughts must be
expressed by stated and unvariable symbols. Advance became
well-nigh impossible. Everything lay in the hands of a priestly caste the
completeness of whose dominion has perhaps never been matched in
history. The leaders lived lives of luxurious pleasure enlightened by
scientific study; but the people scarce existed except as automatons.
The race was dead; its true life, the vigor of its masses, was exhausted,
and the land soon fell an easy prey to every spirited invader.
Meanwhile a rougher, stronger civilization was growing in the river
valleys eastward from the Nile. The Semitic tribes, who seem to have
had their early seat and centre of dispersion somewhere in this region,
were coalescing into nations, Babylonians along the lower Tigris and
Euphrates, Assyrians later along the upper rivers, Hebrews under David
and Solomon[3] by the Jordan, Phoenicians on the Mediterranean
coast.
[Footnote 3: See Accession of Solomon, page 92.]
The early Babylonian civilization may antedate even the Egyptian; but
its monuments were less permanent, its rulers less anxious for the
future. The "appeal to posterity," the desire for a posthumous fame,
seems with them to have been slower of conception. True, the first
Babylonian monarchs of whom we have any record, in an era perhaps
over five thousand years before Christianity, stamped the royal signet
on every brick of their walls and temples. But common-sense suggests
that this was less to preserve their fame than to preserve their bricks.
Theft is no modern innovation.
They were a mathematical race, these Babylonians. In fact, Semite and

mathematician are names that have been closely allied through all the
course of history, and one cannot help but wish our Aryan race had
somewhere lived through an experience which would produce in them
the exactitude in balance and measurement of facts that has
distinguished the Arabs and the Jews. The Babylonians founded
astronomy and chronology; they recorded the movements of the stars,
and divided their year according to the sun and moon. They built a vast
and intricate network of canals to fertilize their land; and they arranged
the earliest system of legal government, the earliest code of laws, that
has come down to us.[4]
[Footnote 4: Compilation of the Earliest Code, page 14.]
The sciences, then, arise more truly here than with the Egyptians. Man
here began to take notice, to record and to classify the facts of nature.
We may count this the second visible step in his great progress. Never
again shall we find him in a childish attitude of idle wonder. Always is
his brain alert, striving to understand, self-conscious of its own power
over nature.
It may have been wealth and luxury that enfeebled the Babylonians as,
it did the Egyptians. At any rate, their empire was overturned by a
border colony of their own,