The Historians' History of the World 01

Now, to be sure, we are told that Archbishop Usher and his kith and kin were but gullible and misguided enthusiasts, to have thought they detected chronological sequence where none such existed; but it was rank heresy to have propounded such a view until the new monuments gave us the rudiments of a true chronology. Other evidence had, indeed, proven the antiquity of the earth and of man himself, but the antiquity of civilisation still depends upon these oriental monuments alone for its demonstration. The chronology of ancient history has no other authenticated source; and chronology, as Professor Petrie has said, is “the backbone of history.” To be sure, the exact chronology of remote antiquity is not by any means as fixed and secure as might be desired. The antiquarian in dealing with the remoter epochs must count by centuries rather than by years. But the broad outlines of the question are placed beyond cavil. So long as the danger mark of the flood year stared the investigator in the face, every foot of earlier chronology was controversial ground, and each remoter century must battle for recognition. But now, thanks to the accumulation of evidence, all that is past, and the most ardent partisans of Hebrew records vie with one another in tracing back the evidences of civilisation in Egypt and Mesopotamia, by centuries and by millennia. It is thought by Professor Hilprecht, that the more recent excavations by the Americans at the site of Nippur have carried the evidence back to 6000 or perhaps even 7000 years B.C., and no one’s equanimity is disturbed by the suggestion, except, possibly, that of the Egyptologist, whose records as yet pause something like a thousand years earlier, and who feels a certain jealousy lest his Egyptian of seven thousand years ago should be proven an uninteresting parvenu.

But note how these new figures disturb the balance of history. If our forerunners of eight or nine thousand years ago were in a noonday glare of civilisation, where shall we look for the much-talked-of “dawnings of history”? By this new standard the Romans seem our contemporaries in latter-day civilisation; the “golden age” of Greece is but of yesterday; the Pyramid builders are only relatively remote. The men who built the temple of Bel, at Nippur, in the year, let us say, 5000 B.C., must have felt themselves at a pinnacle of civilisation and culture. As Professor Mahaffy has suggested, the time of the Pyramids may have been the veritable autumn of civilisation. Where, then, must we look for its spring-time? The answer to that question must come, if it comes at all, from what we now speak of as prehistoric archæology; the monuments from Memphis and Nippur and Nineveh, covering a mere 10,000 years or so, are records of later history.j

FOOTNOTES

[39] Diodorus Siculus, it will be remembered, states that the stones of the bridge built by Semiramis across the Euphrates were united by similar iron cramps, whilst the interstices were filled up with molten lead.

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS

[The letter a is reserved for Editorial Matter]

Chapter I. Land and People

b G. Weber, Allgemeine Weltgeschichte.

c Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums.

d F. Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens.

e R. W. Rogers, History of Babylonia and Assyria.

f J. P. Peters, Nippur.

Chapter II. Old Babylonian History

b Hugo Radau, Early Babylonian History down to the IVth Dynasty of Ur.

c A. H. Sayce, from the article “Babylonia and Assyria,” in the New Volumes of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

d E. A. T. W. Budge, Babylonian Life and History.

Chapter III. The Rise of Assyria

b H. Winckler, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens.

c Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums.

d E. Babelon, Histoire de l’Orient.

e C. P. Tiele, Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte.

Chapter IV. Four Generations of Assyrian Greatness

b C. P. Tiele, Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte.

c Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (translated from the Greek by William Beloe).

g E. A. T. W. Budge, Annals of Shalmaneser II, Sennacherib, and Asshurbanipal.

Chapter V. The Decline and Fall of Assyria

b R. W. Rogers, History of Babylonia and Assyria.

c C. P. Tiele, Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte.