The Great Events by Famous Historians

Comparative philology, the science which compares one language with another to note the points of similarity between them, has discovered that many of these root-sounds are alike in almost all the varied tongues of Europe. The resemblance is too common to be the result of coincidence, too deep-seated to be accounted for by mere communication between the nations. We have gotten far beyond the possibility of such explanations; and science says now with positive confidence that there must have been a time when all these nations were but one, that their languages are all but variations of the tongue their distant ancestors once held in common.

Study has progressed beyond this point, can tell us far more intricate and fainter facts. It argues that one by one the various tribes left their common home and became completely separated; and that each root-sound still used by all the nations represents an idea, an object, they already possessed before their dispersal. Thus we can vaguely reconstruct that ancient, aboriginal civilization. We can even guess which tribes first broke away, and where again these wanderers subdivided, and at what stage of progress. Surely a fascinating science this! And in its infancy! If its later development shall justify present promise, it has still strange tales to tell us in the future.

[1] See page 1 for an engraving and account of this famous stone. It was found over a century ago and its value was instantly recognized, but many years passed before its secrets were deciphered. It contains an inscription repeated in three forms of writing: the early Egyptian of the hieroglyphics, a later Egyptian (the demotic), and Greek.

THE RACES OF MAN

Turn now from this tracing of our means of knowledge, to speak of the facts they tell us. When our humankind first become clearly visible they are already divided into races, which for convenience we speak of as white, yellow, and black. Of these the whites had apparently advanced farthest on the road to civilization; and the white race itself had become divided into at least three varieties, so clearly marked as to have persisted through all the modern centuries of communication and intermarriage. Science is not even able to say positively that these varieties or families had a common origin. She inclines to think so; but when all these later ages have failed to obliterate the marks of difference, what far longer period of separation must have been required to establish them!

These three clearly outlined families of the whites are the Hamites, of whom the Egyptians are the best-known type; the Semites, as represented by ancient Babylonians and modern Jews and Arabs; and the great Aryan or Indo-European family, once called the Japhites, and including Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Latins, the modern Celtic and Germanic races, and even the Slavs or Russians.

The Egyptians, when we first see them, are already well advanced toward civilization.[2] To say that they were the first people to emerge from barbarism is going much further than we dare. Their records are the most ancient that have come clearly down to us; but there may easily have been other social organisms, other races, to whom the chances of time and nature have been less gentle. Cataclysms may have engulfed more than one Atlantis; and few climates are so fitted for the preservation of man's buildings as is the rainless valley of the Nile.

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.