The Historians' History of the World 01

The Babylonians were the astronomers of antiquity, and doubtless the less scientific Greeks regarded their knowledge of the stars as something quite occult, and were ready to believe almost any chronological statement that the Babylonians put forward. The Romans, indeed, practical people that they always were in the day of their prime, were disposed to look with more of scepticism upon such claims. Cicero announces himself as distinctly sceptical regarding the allegation that the Babylonian records extend over a period of two hundred and seventy thousand years. His scepticism, however, was probably based rather upon a shrewd common-sense estimate of human affairs than upon any preconception as to the antiquity of man. In a word, the ancients as a class had no fear of time, and most of them had no religious or other preconception that limited their estimate as to the age of a nation or the exact age of the world itself. The latter-day Hebrew was an exception to this rule. He came at last to look upon the vague historical records of his people as sacred books, inspired in their every word, and detailing among other things the exact genealogy of the leaders of his race from the creation to his own time. It is not, indeed, probable that the ancient Hebrew made any great point of the exact period of time compassed by his records, since, as has been said, questions of exact chronology entered but little into the thoughts of man in that day; but in a more recent time students of Hebrew records have attempted to ascertain the exact age of the earth and the exact period of human existence by aggregating the various disconnected records of the Hebrew scriptures, long after the modern historical method had been applied acutely to all other accessible writings of antiquity.

These writings of the Hebrews were held to constitute a class apart, and were looked to as having an authenticity not to be claimed by any other ancient documents; and while no two scholars of authority, making independent computations, were ever able to agree as to the exact facts connoted by the Hebrew chronology, yet none the less, each prominent investigator clung with full faith to his own estimate, and several of them found schools of followers who battled as eagerly as the masters themselves for the exact dates they believed to be represented by the vague Hebrew estimates. Generally speaking, these estimates ascribe the creation of the world and of man to a period about four thousand years before the Christian era; the year of the Deluge, which was supposed to have engulfed all the inhabitants of the earth except a single family, being variously estimated between the years 3200 and 2300 B.C. That some such figures as these represented the truth regarding a period of man’s residence here on the earth came to be accepted throughout Christendom as an article of faith, to question which was a rank heresy.

The larger figures which the Greeks, Egyptians, Mesopotamians and other nations had employed came to be regarded as absurd guesses, which it were a sacrilege to countenance now that the truth was known; and yet, as every one nowadays knows, these larger figures, vague guesses though they were, approach much nearer to the actual truth than the restricted numbers that supplanted them.

The changed point of view with which the modern historian regards the ancient chronology has been attained through a process of scientific development extending over about a century. A truer knowledge of the cosmic scheme did not bring with it as a necessary counterpart the correct conception as to the length of time that this scheme had been in operation.

Laplace, in formulating his nebular hypothesis, had nothing definite to say as to the length of time required for its development, and there was nothing in his computation to throw any light whatever upon the antiquity of the earth as a habitable sphere.