The Historians' History of the World 01

The earliest historians whose writings have come down to us are the authors of the records on the monuments of Egypt and of Mesopotamia. We shall see later on that these records, made in languages a knowledge of which has only been recovered in the past century, are full of historical interest because of the facts they narrate, and the insight they give us into the life of their times. For the moment, however, we are only concerned with the method of their construction. They are parts of records dating from many centuries before the beginning of the Christian era. Their authors are utterly unknown by name. The narrative is, indeed, in some cases, couched in the first person, but it is not to be supposed from this that the alleged writer—who, of course, is the king whose deeds are glorified—is the actual composer of the narrative. The actual scribes, mere adjuncts of the royal ménage, never dreamed of putting their own names on record beside those of their royal masters. Yet their work has preserved to future generations the names of kings that otherwise would have been absolutely forgotten. For example, Tehutimes III of Egypt and Asshurbanapal of Assyria, two of the most powerful monarchs of antiquity, had ceased to be remembered even by name several centuries before the dawn of our era, and for two thousand years no human being knew that such persons had ever existed. Yet now, thanks to the monuments, their deeds are almost as fully known to us as the deeds of an Alexander or a Cæsar.

There is, indeed, one regard in which these most ancient historical records have an advantage over more recent works. They were for the most part graven in stone or stamped in clay that was burned to stonelike hardness, and they have come down to us with the assurances of authenticity which must always be lacking in many compositions of more recent periods. The Babylonian and Assyrian records lay buried with the ruins of cities whose very location had been forgotten for ages. The most recent of these records had been seen by no human eye for more than two thousand years. Their unnamed authors seem thus to speak to us directly across the centuries. However these earliest of historians may have dreamed of immortality for their work, they can hardly have hoped to speak to eager audiences in regions far beyond the limits of their world, twenty-five centuries after the very nation to which they belonged had vanished from the earth, and the language in which they wrote had ceased to be known to men. Yet that unique glory was reserved for them.

The Classical Historians

It requires but a glance at the historians of the classical period to see how altered is the point of view from which they write. Here we have no longer men commanded by a monarch, or impelled by religious fervour to glorify a single person or epoch or country to the utter exclusion of everything else. We have bounded from insularity of view to universality. Even the Homeric legends deal with the events of two continents and of several countries. Herodotus and Diodorus make the writing of their histories a life-work. They travel from one country to another, and familiarise themselves with their subject as much as possible at first hand. They mingle with the scholars of many lands, and listen to their recitals of the annals of their respective peoples. They weigh and consider, though in a quite different mental balance from that which an historian uses in our day. They spend thirty, forty, years in composing their books. From them, then, we have, not simple chronicles of a single event, but universal histories. These are in many ways different from the universal histories of our own time; but in their frank, human way of looking out upon the world, they have a charm that is quite their own. In their interest for the general reader, they have perhaps never been excelled. And in their citation of fact and fable they become a storehouse upon which succeeding generations of historians have drawn to this day.