The Historians' History of the World 01

Johann Gottfried von Herder was born at Mohrungen, East Prussia, August 25, 1744. His education was mostly private. His first writings appeared when he was about twenty years of age. His first considerable work, Fragmente über die neure deutsche Literatur, appeared in 1767. This work attracted the favourable attention of Lessing, and made him widely known. In 1776 he obtained the post of upper court preacher and upper member of the Consistory at Weimar. At this post he passed the rest of his life. “He possessed a power of intuition which must be considered in many cases as prophetic, and which made him a pathfinder whose traces are followed up to the present day.” His Study of the Philosophy of History will naturally be compared with the work on the same subject by his contemporary Hegel. It created almost a furor of excitement in its day, and may still be read with interest and profit by every earnest student of history. Its essential attitude of mind appears peculiarly archaic in our day, evidencing the utterly changed point of view from which history is regarded in our generation. Herder, like most other philosophical historians of his time, saw everywhere the hand of God in history, and was firmly imbued with the idea that all human events were but the working out of a divine plan, the broad outlines of which had been fully revealed to man. The modern historian tries to be a scientist rather than a philosopher, and he finds scant proof of this basis on which Herder worked, but views or attempts to view the course of world-history as a candid or impartial investigator of facts and of rational human motives, feeling by no means sure that he grasps the full import of any metaphysical theological bearings of these facts and motives, if such there be. Yet for this very reason the writings of Herder have a peculiar value, as they not alone evidence the mental grasp of the age in which they were written, but serve at the same time to point out a significant difference between that time and our own.

Herodotus, The History of Herodotus. London, 1806, 2nd ed., 4 vols.—Heuzey, L., Un palais chaldéen. Paris, 1888. La construction du roi Our-Nina d’après les levés et les notes de M. de Sarzec (in Rev. d’Assyr. et d’Archéol., vol. 4, p. 87. Paris, 1898).—Hilprecht, H. V., The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania (Old Babylonian Inscriptions), Am. Phil. Soc. Philadelphia, 1896; Recent Researches in the Bible Lands. Philadelphia, 1896; The Recent Excavations of the University at Nippur (in Univ. of Pennsylvania Bul., vol. 2, p. 87, and vol. 3, p. 373, Philadelphia, 1899).

Hermann Hilprecht was born at Hohenerxleben, Germany, June 28, 1859. He is at present professor in the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Hilprecht was interested from the outset in the expedition of the University of Pennsylvania to Babylonia, to which we have more than once referred. At a later stage he was curator and scientific director of the expedition, in which Mr. Haynes had charge of the field-work, 1893-95 and 1897-1900, after Dr. Peters’ retirement. Though he spent but a month in actual field-work, he spent several years in working up at Constantinople or Philadelphia the ample supply of materials which the various expeditions procured, and his results, as published from time to time, have been noted everywhere as distinct and important additions to our technical knowledge of Assyriology. The greatest popular interest in these discoveries perhaps grows out of the light that they throw on the extreme antiquity of Babylonian history. Dr. Peters and Professor Hilprecht both assure us that the secure records gained by the excavations of Nippur carry the history of Babylonia back to a period at least a thousand years earlier than the date ascribed by Archbishop Usher’s long-famed chronology for the creation of the world, and Professor Hilprecht’s latest investigations justify the belief that the earliest records from Nippur are not newer than the year 7000 B.C.

Hincks, E., On the Assyrio-Babylonian Measures of Time. Dublin, 1874.—Hird, W. G., Monumental Records. London, 1889.—Hoefer, J. C. F., Mémoires sur les ruines de Ninive. Paris, 1850.—Hommel, F., Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens. Berlin, 1885; Semitische Völker und Sprachen. Leipsic, 1881; Abriss der babylonisch-assyrischen und israel. Gesch. Leipsic, 1880; Der babylonische Ursprung der aegypt. Kultur. München, 1892.