The Historians' History of the World 01

Such mastery, however, whether held by right of age, or of superior capacity, must have been in the early day very restricted in scope, for of necessity primitive man depended largely on his own individual efforts both for securing food, and for protection of himself and his immediate family against enemies, and under such circumstances an independence of character must have been developed that implies an unwillingness to submit to the autocratic authority of another. Only when the pastoral and agricultural phases of civilisation had become fully established, would communities assume such numerical proportions as to bring the question of leadership of the clan into perpetual prominence; and no doubt a very long series of internal strifes and revolutionary dissensions must have preceded the final recognition of the fact that no large community of people can aspire to anything like integrity without the clear recognition of some centralised authority. Under the conditions incident to the early stages of civilisation, where man was subject to the marauding raids of enemies, it was but natural that this centralised authority should be conceded to some man whose recognised prowess in warfare had aroused the respect and admiration of his fellows. Thus arose the system of monarchial government, which we find fully established everywhere among the nations of antiquity when they first emerge out of the obscuration of the prehistoric period. The slow steps of progress by which the rights of the individual came to strike an evener balance, as against the all-absorbing usurpations of the monarch and a small coterie of his adherents, constitute one of the chief elements of the story of history that is to be unfolded in our pages. But when the story opens, there is no intimation of this reaction. The monarch is all dominant; his individual subjects seem the mere puppets of his will.

Eighth. The Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Architecture.

The graven fragments of ivory and of reindeer horn, found in the cave deposits of the stone age, give ample proof that man early developed the desire and the capacity for drawing. Doubtless there was a more or less steady advance upon this art of the cave-dweller throughout succeeding generations, though the records of such progress are for the most part lost. The monuments of Egypt and of Mesopotamia, however, have been preserved to us in sufficient completeness to prove that the graphic arts had reached a really high stage of development before the close of the prehistoric period. It is but fair to add, however, that in this direction the changes of the earlier centuries of the historic period were far greater than were the changes in the practical arts.

As early as the ninth century B.C. the Assyrians had developed the art of sculpture in bas-relief in a way that constituted a marvellous advance upon anything that may reasonably be believed to have been performed by prehistoric man, and only three centuries later came the culminating period of Greek art, which marked the stage of almost revolutionary progress.

Ninth. The Art of Writing.

One other art remains to be mentioned even in the most cursory survey. This is the latest, and in some respects the greatest of them all—the art of writing. In one sense this art is only a development of the art of drawing, but it is a development that has such momentous consequences that it may well be considered as distinct. Moreover, it led to results so important for the historian, and so directly in line of all our future studies, that we shall do well to examine it somewhat more in detail.

All the various phases of prehistoric culture at which we have just glanced have left reminiscences, more or less vague in character, for the guidance of students of later ages; but the materials for history proper only began to be accumulated after man had learned to give tangible expression to his thoughts in written words. No doubt the first steps toward this accomplishment were taken at a very early day. We have seen that the cave-dweller even made graphic though crude pictures, including hunting scenes, that are in effect the same in intent, and up to a certain point the same in result, as if the features of the event were described in words. Doubtless there was no generation after the stone age in which men did not resort, more or less, to the graphic delineation of ideas.