The Historians' History of the World 01

No thinking man in any age can have failed to wonder about the origin of the world. The answers that the ancients gave to this ever present question were various, but they all had one quality in common, namely, extreme vagueness. Even after men had attained a relatively high stage of civilisation, their ideas of the natural phenomena about them were so endued with superstition, and so hedged about with ignorance as to the real causes, that their explanations of cause and effect in the natural world belong to the domain of poetry rather than to that of science. If this applies to such phenomena as wind and clouds and rain and lightning, the manifestations of which are constantly observed, it naturally applies with ten-fold force to the great mystery of the origin of things. Yet the human mind, childlike in the simplicity of its questionings, demands always an answer, and accepts the answer, if pronounced with a certain authority, in a spirit of childlike faith. The great poets and prophets of every nation of antiquity had supplied, each in his kind, the answers to the riddle of cosmogony, and many of these alleged solutions have come down to us to give us an insight into the mentality of their time. It is worth while to quote two or three of these in brief epitome, if for nothing else, to show their similar trend, and to emphasise their universal trait of vagueness.

Here is the cosmogonic scheme of the Phoenicians as transmitted to us by Sanchoniathon:

“At the beginning of all things was a dark and windy air, or a breeze of thick air and a turbid Chaos resembling Erebus; and that these were unbounded, and for a long series of ages had no limit. But when this wind became enamoured of its own first principles (the Chaos), and an intimate union took place, that connection was called Pothos; and this was the beginning of the creation of all things. But it (the Chaos) knew not its own production; and from its embrace with the wind was generated Mot; which some call mud, but others the putrefaction of a watery mixture. And from this sprung all the seed of the creation, and the generation of the universe.

“And there were certain animals without sensation, from which intelligent animals were produced, and these were called Zophasemin, that is, beholders of the heavens; and they were formed in the shape of an egg: and from Mot shone forth the sun, and the moon, and the less and the greater stars. And when the air began to send forth life, by its fiery influence on the sea and earth, winds were produced and clouds, and very great defluxions and torrents of the heavenly waters. And when they were thus separated, and carried out of their proper places by the heat of the sun, and all met again in the air, and were dashed against each other, thunder and lightnings were the result: and at the sound of the thunder, the before-mentioned intelligent animals were aroused, and startled by the noise, and moved upon the earth and in the sea, male and female.”

This creation scheme of the Phœnicians has a peculiar interest for the Western world, because of the intimate relations that existed between the Phœnicians and the Jews. For a similar reason the ideas of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, as recorded on the so-called creation tablets exhumed at Nineveh, have fascinated the Bible scholars.

Trending still further to the East, one finds with the Hindus a slightly different cast of thought couched in a no less poetic diction. Thus in one of the sacred books, Brahma, the Eternal Worker, is represented as creating the earth while seeing his own reflection in the ocean of sweat that had fallen from his brow (Réclus).

The Chinese scheme of cosmogony is presented in the form of alleged answers to questions, by Confucius. Here is a characteristic excerpt as translated by M’Clatchie:

“At the beginning of Heaven and Earth, before chaos was divided, I think there were only two things, Fire and Water; and the sediment of the water formed the Earth. When we ascend a height and look down, the host of hills resemble the waves of the sea in appearance; the Water just flowed like this: I know not at what period it coagulated. At first it was very soft, but afterward it coagulated and became hard. One asked whether it resembled sand thrown up by the tide? He replied, Just so: the coarsest sediment of the Water became the Earth, and the most pure portion of the Fire became Wind, Thunder, Lightning, Sun, and Stars.