The Story of Evolution Part 16

We have, in fine, a race of hunters, with fine stone knives and javelins. Toward the close of the period we find a single representation of an arrow, which was probably just coming into use, but it is not generally known in the Old Stone Age. One of the drawings seems to represent a kind of bridle on a horse, but we need more evidence than this to convince us that the horse was already tamed, nor is there any reason to suppose that the dog or reindeer had been tamed, or that the ground was tilled even in the most rudimentary way. Artistic skill, the use of clothing and fire, and a finer feeling in the shaping of weapons and implements, are the highest certain indications of the progress made by the end of the Old Stone Age.

But there was probably an advance made which we do not find recorded, or only equivocally recorded, in the memorials of the age. Speech was probably the greatest invention of Magdalenian man. It has been pointed out that the spine in the lower jaw, to which the tongue-muscle is attached, is so poorly developed in Palaeolithic man that we may infer from it the absence of articulate speech. The deduction has been criticised, but a comparison of the Palaeolithic jaw with that of the ape on one hand and modern man on the other gives weight to it. Whatever may have been earlier man's power of expression, the closer social life of the Magdalenian period would lead to a great development of it. Some writers go so far as to suggest that certain obscure marks painted on pebbles or drawn on the cavern-walls by men at the close of the Palaeolithic Age may represent a beginning of written language, or numbers, or conventional signs. The interpretation of these is obscure and doubtful. It is not until ages afterwards that we find the first clear traces of written language, and then they take the form of pictographs (like the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the earliest Chinese characters).

We cannot doubt, however, that articulate speech would be rapidly evolved in the social life of the later Magdalenian period, and the importance of this acquisition can hardly be exaggerated. Imagine even a modern community without the device of articulate language. A very large proportion of the community, who are now maintained at a certain level by the thought of others, communicated to them by speech, would sink below the civilised standard, and the transmission and improvement of ideas would be paralysed. It would not be paradoxical to regard the social life and developing speech of Magdalenian man as the chief cause of the rapid advance toward civilisation which will follow in the next period.

And it is not without interest to notice that a fall in the temperature of the earth is the immediate cause of this social life. The building of homes of any kind seems to be unknown to Magdalenian man. The artist would have left us some sketchy representation of it if there had been anything in the nature of a tent in his surroundings. The rock-shelter and the cave are the homes which men seek from the advancing cold. As these are relatively few in number, fixed in locality, and often of large dimensions, the individualism of the earlier times is replaced by collective life. Sociologists still dispute whether the clan arose by the cohesion of families or the family arose within the clan. Such evidence as is afforded by prehistoric remains is entirely in favour of the opinion of Professor Westermarck, that the family preceded the larger group. Families of common descent would now cling together and occupy a common cavern, and, when the men gathered at night with the women for the roasting and eating of the horse or deer they had hunted, and the work of the artist and the woman was considered, the uncouth muttering and gesticulating was slowly forged into the great instrument of articulate speech. The first condition of more rapid progress was instinctively gained.

Our story of life has so often turned on this periodical lowering of the climate of the earth that it is interesting to find this last and most important advance so closely a.s.sociated with it that we are forced once more to regard it as the effective cause. The same may be said of another fundamental advance of the men of the later Palaeolithic age, the discovery of the art of making fire. It coincides with the oncoming of the cold, either in the Mousterian or the Magdalenian. It was more probably a chance discovery than an invention. Savages so commonly make fire by friction--rubbing sticks, drills, etc.--that one is naturally tempted to regard this as the primitive method. I doubt if this was the case. When, in Neolithic times, men commonly bury the dead, and put some of their personal property in the grave with them, the fire-kindling apparatus we find is a flint and a piece of iron pyrites. Palaeolithic man made his implements of any kind of hard and heavy stone, and it is probable that he occasionally selected iron ore for the purpose.

An attempt to chip it with flint would cause sparks that might fall on inflammable material, and set it alight. Little intelligence would be needed to turn this discovery to account.

Apart from these conjectures as to particular features in the life of prehistoric man, it will be seen that we have now a broad and firm conception of its evolution. From the ape-level man very slowly mounts to the stage of human savagery. During long ages he seems to have made almost no progress. There is nothing intrinsically progressive in his nature. Let a group of men be isolated at any stage of human evolution, and placed in an unchanging environment, and they will remain stationary for an indefinite period. When Europeans began to traverse the globe in the last few centuries, they picked up here and there little groups of men who had, in their isolation, remained just where their fathers had been when they quitted the main road of advance in the earlier stages of the Old Stone Age. The evolution of man is guided by the same laws as the evolution of any other species. Thus we can understand the long period of stagnation, or of incalculably slow advance. Thus, too, we can understand why, at length, the pace of man toward his unconscious goal is quickened. He is an inhabitant of the northern hemisphere, and the northern hemisphere is shaken by the last of the great geological revolutions. From its first stress emerges the primeval savage of the early part of the Old Stone Age, still bearing the deep imprint of his origin, surpa.s.sing his fellow-animals only in the use of crude stone implements. Then the stress of conditions relaxes--the great ice-sheet disappears--and again during a vast period he makes very little progress. The stress returns. The genial country is stripped and impoverished, and the reindeer and mammoth spread to the south of Europe. But once more the adversity has its use, and man, stimulated in his hunt for food, invigorated by the cold, driven into social life, advances to the culmination of the Old Stone Age.

We are still very far from civilisation, but the few tens of thousands of years that separate Magdalenian man from it will be traversed with relative speed--though, we should always remember, with a speed far less than the pace at which man is advancing to-day. A new principle now enters into play: a specifically human law of evolution is formulated.

It has no element of mysticism, and is merely an expression of the fact that the previous general agencies of development have created in man an intelligence of a higher grade than that of any other animal. In his larger and more plastic brain the impressions received from the outer world are blended in ideas, and in his articulate speech he has a unique means of entering the idea-world of his fellows. The new principle of evolution, which arises from this superiority, is that man's chief stimulus to advance will now come from his cultural rather than his physical environment. Physical surroundings will continue to affect him. One race will outstrip another because of its advantage in soil, climate, or geographical position. But the chief key to the remaining and more important progress of mankind, which we are about to review, is the stimulating contact of the differing cultures of different races.

This will be seen best in the history of civilisation, but the principle may be recognised in the New Stone Age which leads from primeval savagery to civilisation, or, to be more accurate and just, to the beginning of the historical period. It used to be thought that there was a mysterious blank or gulf between the Old and the New Stone Age.

The Palaeolithic culture seemed to come to an abrupt close, and the Neolithic culture was sharply distinguished from it. It was suspected that some great catastrophe had destroyed the Palaeolithic race in Europe, and a new race entered as the adverse conditions were removed.

This was especially held to be the case in England. The old Palaeolithic race had never reached Ireland, which seems to have been cut oft from the Continent during the Ice-Age, and most of the authorities still believe--in spite of some recent claims--that it never reached Scotland.

England itself was well populated, and the remains found in the caves of Derbys.h.i.+re show that even the artist--or his art--had reached that district. This Palaeolithic race seemed to come to a mysterious end, and Europe was then invaded by the higher Neolithic race. England was probably detached from the Continent about the end of the Magdalenian period. It was thought that some great devastation--the last ice-sheet, a submersion of the land, or a plague--then set in, and men were unable to retreat south.

It is now claimed by many authorities that there are traces of a Middle Stone (Mesolithic) period even in England, and nearly all the authorities admit that such a transitional stage can be identified in the Pyrenean region. This region had been the great centre of the Magdalenian culture. Its large frescoed caverns exhibit the culmination of the Old Stone life, and afford many connecting links with the new.

It is, however, a clearly established and outstanding fact that the characteristic art of Magdalenian man comes to an abrupt and complete close, and it does not seem possible to explain this without supposing that the old race was destroyed or displaced. If we could accept the view that it was the Eskimo-like race of the Palaeolithic that cultivated this art, and that they retreated north with the reindeer and the ice, and survive in our Eskimo, we should have a plausible explanation. In point of fact, we find no trace whatever of this slow migration from the south of Europe to the north. The more probable supposition is that a new race, with more finished stone implements, entered Europe, imposed its culture upon the older race, and gradually exterminated or replaced it. We may leave it open whether a part of the old race retreated to the north, and became the Eskimo.

Whence came the new race and its culture? It will be seen on reflection that we have so far been studying the evolution of man in Europe only, because there alone are his remains known with any fullness. But the important region which stretches from Morocco to Persia must have been an equally, if not more, important theatre of development. While Europe was s.h.i.+vering in the last stage of the Ice-Age, and the mammoth and reindeer browsed in the snows down to the south of France, this region would enjoy an excellent climate and a productive soil. We may confidently a.s.sume that there was a large and stirring population of human beings on it during the Magdalenian cold. We may, with many of the authorities, look to this temperate and fertile region for the slight advance made by early Neolithic man beyond his predecessor. As the cold relaxed, and the southern fringe of dreary steppe w as converted once more into genial country, the race would push north. There is evidence that there were still land bridges across the Mediterranean. From Spain and the south of France this early Neolithic race rapidly spread over Europe.

It must not be supposed that the New Stone Age at first goes much beyond the Old in culture. Works on prehistoric man are apt to give as features of "Neolithic man" all that we know him to have done or discovered during the whole of the New Stone Age. We read that he not only gave a finer finish to, and sometimes polished, his stone weapons, but built houses, put imposing monuments over his dead, and had agriculture, tame cattle, pottery, and weaving. This is misleading, as the more advanced of these accomplishments appear only late in the New Stone Age. The only difference we find at first is that the stone axes, etc., are more finely chipped or flaked, and are frequently polished by rubbing on stone moulds. There is no sudden leap in culture or intelligence in the story of man.

It would be supremely interesting to trace the evolution of human industries and ideas during the few tens of thousands of years of the New Stone Age. During that time moral and religious ideas are largely developed, political or social forms are elaborated, and the arts of civilised man have their first rude inauguration. The foundations of civilisation are laid. Unfortunately, precisely because the period is relatively so short and the advance so rapid, its remains are crushed and mingled in a thin seam of the geological chronicle, and we cannot restore the gradual course of its development with any confidence.

Estimates of its duration vary from 20,000 to 70,000 years; though Sir W. Turner has recently concluded, from an examination of marks on Scottish monuments, that Neolithic man probably came on foot from Scandinavia to Scotland, and most geologists would admit that it must be at least a hundred thousand years since one could cross from Norway to Scotland on foot. As usual, we must leave open the question of chronology, and be content with a modest provisional estimate of 40,000 or 50,000 years.

We dimly perceive the gradual advance of human culture in this important period. During the Old Stone Age man had made more progress than he had made in the preceding million years; during the New Stone Age--at least one-fourth as long as the Old--he made even greater progress; and, we may add, in the historical period, which is one-fourth the length of the Neolithic Age, he will make greater progress still. The pace of advance naturally increases as intelligence grows, but that is not the whole explanation. The spread of the race, the gathering of its members into tribes, and the increasing enterprise of men in hunting and migration, lead to incessant contacts of different cultures and a progressive stimulation.

At first Neolithic man is content with finer weapons. His stone axe is so finely shaped and polished that it sometimes looks like forged or moulded metal. He also drills a clean hole through it--possibly by means of a stick working in wet sand--and gives it a long wooden handle. He digs in the earth for finer flints, and in some of his ancient shafts (Grimes, Graves and Cissbury) we find picks of reindeer horn and hollowed blocks of chalk in which he probably burned fat for illumination underground. But in the later part of the Neolithic--to which much of this finer work also may belong--we find him building huts, rearing large stone monuments, having tame dogs and pigs and oxen, growing corn and barley, and weaving primitive fabrics. He lives in large and strong villages, round which we must imagine his primitive cornfields growing and his cattle grazing, and in which there must have been some political organisation under chiefs.

When we wish to trace the beginning of these inventions we have the same difficulty that we experienced in tracing the first stages of new animal types. The beginning takes place in some restricted region, and our casual scratching of the crust of the earth or the soil may not touch it for ages, if it has survived at all. But for our literature and ill.u.s.trations a future generation would be equally puzzled to know how we got the idea of the aeroplane or the electric light. In some cases we can make a good guess at the origin of Neolithic man's inst.i.tutions. Let us take pottery. Palaeolithic man cooked his joint of horse or reindeer, and, no doubt, scorched it. Suppose that some Palaeolithic Soyer had conceived the idea of protecting the joint, and preserving its juices, by daubing it with a coat of clay. He would accidentally make a clay vessel. This is Mr. Clodd's ingenious theory of the origin of pottery.

The development of agriculture is not very puzzling. The seed of corn would easily be discovered to have a food-value, and the discovery of the growth of the plant from the seed would not require a very high intelligence. Some ants, we may recall, have their fungus-beds. It would be added by many that the ant gives us another parallel in its keeping of droves of aphides, which it "milks." But it is now doubted if the ant deliberately cultivates the aphides with this aim. Early weaving might arise from the plaiting of gra.s.ses. If wild flax were used, it might be noticed that part of it remained strong when the rest decayed, and so the threads might be selected and woven.

The building of houses, after living for ages in stone caverns, would not be a very profound invention. The early houses were--as may be gathered from the many remains in Devons.h.i.+re and Cornwall--mere rings of heaped stones, over which, most probably, was put a roof of branches or reeds, plastered with mud. They belong to the last part of the New Stone Age. In other places, chiefly Switzerland, Neolithic man lived in wooden huts built on piles in the shallow sh.o.r.es of lakes. It is an evidence that life on land is becoming as stimulating as we find it in the age of Deinosaurs or early mammals. These pile-villages of Switzerland lasted until the historical period, and the numerous remains in the mud of the lake show the gradual pa.s.sage into the age of metal.

Before the metal age opened, however, there seem to have been fresh invasions of Europe and changes of its culture. The movements of the various early races of men are very obscure, and it would be useless to give here even an outline of the controversy. Anthropologists have generally taken the relative length and width of the skull as a standard feature of a race, and distinguished long-headed (dolichocephalic), short-headed (brachycephalic), and middle-headed (mesaticephalic) races.

Even on this test the most divergent conclusions were reached in regard to early races, and now the test itself is seriously disputed. Some authorities believe that there is no unchanging type of skull in a particular race, but that, for instance, a long-headed race may become short-headed by going to live in an elevated region.

It may be said, in a few words, that it is generally believed that two races invaded Europe and displaced the first Neolithic race. The race which chiefly settled in the Swiss region is generally believed to have come from Asia, and advanced across Europe by way of the valley of the Danube. The native home of the wheat and barley and millet, which, as we know, the lake-dwellers cultivated, is said to be Asia. On the other hand, the Neolithic men who have left stone monuments on our soil are said to be a different race, coming, by way of North Africa, from Asia, and advancing along the west of Europe to Scandinavia. A map of the earth, on which the distribution of these stone monuments--all probably connected with the burial of the dead--is indicated, suggests such a line of advance from India, with a slighter branch eastward. But the whole question of these invasions is disputed, and there are many who regard the various branches of the population of Europe as sections of one race which spread upward from the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean.

It is clear at least that there were great movements of population, much mingling of types and commercial interchange of products, so that we have the constant conditions of advance. A last invasion seems to have taken place some two or three thousand years before the Christian era, when the Aryans overspread Europe. After all the controversy about the Aryans it seems clear that a powerful race, representing the ancestors of most of the actual peoples of Europe and speaking the dialects which have been modified into the related languages of the Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, Lithuanians, etc., imposed its speech on nearly the whole of the continent. Only in the Basques and Picts do we seem to find some remnants of the earlier non-Aryan tongues. But whether these Aryans really came from Asia, as it used to be thought, or developed in the east of Europe, is uncertain. We seem justified in thinking that a very robust race had been growing in numbers and power during the Neolithic Age, somewhere in the region of South-east Europe and Southwest Asia, and that a few thousand years before the Christian Era one branch of it descended upon India, another upon the Persian region, and another overspread Europe. We will return to the point later. Instead of being the bearers of a higher civilisation, these primitive Aryans seem to have been lower in culture than the peoples on whom they fell.

The Neolithic Age had meantime pa.s.sed into the Age of Metal. Copper was probably the first metal to be used. It is easily worked, and is found in nature. But the few copper implements we possess do not suggest a "Copper Age" of any length or extent. It was soon found, apparently, that an admixture of tin hardened the copper, and the Bronze Age followed. The use of bronze was known in Egypt about 4800 B.C. (Flinders Petrie), but little used until about 2000 B.C. By that time (or a few centuries later) it had spread as far as Scandinavia and Britain. The region of invention is not known, but we have large numbers of beautiful specimens of bronze work--including brooches and hair-pins--in all parts of Europe. Finally, about the thirteenth century B.C., we find the first traces of the use of iron. The first great centre for the making of iron weapons seems to have been Hallstatt, in the Austrian Alps, whence it spread slowly over Europe, reaching Scandinavia and Britain between 500 and 300 B.C. But the story of man had long before this entered the historical period, to which we now turn.

CHAPTER XXI. EVOLUTION IN HISTORY

In the preceding chapters I have endeavoured to show how, without invoking any "definitely directed variations," which we seem to have little chance of understanding, we may obtain a broad conception of the way in which the earth and its living inhabitants came to be what they are. No one is more conscious than the writer that this account is extremely imperfect. The limits of the volume have permitted me to use only a part of the material which modern science affords, but if the whole of our discoveries were described the sketch would still remain very imperfect. The evolutionary conception of the world is itself undergoing evolution in the mind of man. Age by age the bits of fresh discovery are fitted into the great mosaic. Large areas are still left for the scientific artist of the future to fill. Yet even in its imperfect state the evolutionary picture of the world is most illuminating. The questions that have been on the lips of thoughtful men since they first looked out with adult eyes on the panorama of nature are partly answered. Whence and Why are no longer sheer riddles of the sphinx.

It remains to be seen if evolutionary principles will throw at least an equal light on the progress of humanity in the historical period.

Here again the questions, Whence and Why, have been asked in vain for countless ages. If man is a progressive animal, why has the progress been confined to some of the race? If humanity shared at first a common patrimony, why have the savages remained savages, and the barbarians barbaric? Why has progress been incarnated so exceptionally in the white section of the race, the Europeans? We approach these questions more confidently after surveying the story of terrestrial life in the light of evolutionary principles. Since the days of the primeval microbe it has happened that a few were chosen and many were left behind. There was no progressive element in the advancing few that was not shared by the stagnant many. The difference lay in the environment. Let us see if this principle applies to the history of civilisation.

In the last chapter I observed that, with the rise of human intelligence, the cultural environment becomes more important than the physical. Since human progress is a progress in ideas and the emotions which accompany them, this may seem to be a truism. In point of fact it is a.s.sailed by more than one recent historical writer. The scepticism is partly due to a misunderstanding. No one but a fanatical adherent of extreme theories of heredity will deny that the physical surroundings of a race continue to be of great importance. The progress of a particular people may often be traced in part to its physical environment; especially to changes of environment, by migration, for instance.

Further, it is not for a moment suggested that a race never evolves its own culture, but has always to receive it from another. If we said that, we should be ultimately driven to recognise culture, like the early Chinese, as a gift of the G.o.ds. What is meant is that the chief key to the progress of certain peoples, the arrest of progress in others, and the entire absence of progress in others, is the study of their relations with, or isolation from, other peoples. They make progress chiefly according to the amount of stimulation they get by contact with a diverse culture.

Let us see if this furnishes a broad explanation of the position of the various peoples of the world. The Ethnologist tells us that the lowest peoples of the earth are the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the Hottentots, a number of little-understood peoples in Central Africa, the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the (extinct) Tasmanians, the Aetas in the interior of the Philippines, and certain fragments of peoples on islands of the Indian Ocean. There is not the least trace of a common element in the environment of these peoples to explain why they have remained at the level of primitive humanity. Many of them lived in the most promising and resourceful surroundings. What is common to them all is their isolation from the paths of later humanity. They represent the first wave of human distribution, pressed to the tips of continents or on islands by later waves, and isolated. The position of the Veddahs is, to some extent, an exception; and it is interesting to find that the latest German students of that curious people think that they have been cla.s.sed too low by earlier investigators.

We cannot run over all the peoples of the earth in this way, but will briefly glance at the lower races of the various continents. A branch of the second phase of developing humanity, the negroid stock, spread eastward over the Asiatic islands and Australia, and westward into Africa. The extreme wing of this army, the Australian blacks, too clearly ill.u.s.trates the principle to need further reference. It has retained for ages the culture of the middle Palaeolithic. The negritos who penetrated to the Philippines are another extreme instance of isolation. The Melanesians of the islands of the Indian and Pacific Ocean are less low, because those islands have been slowly crossed by a much higher race, the Polynesians. The Maoris of New Zealand, the Tongans, Hawaians, etc., are people of our own (Caucasic) stock, probably diverging to the south-east while our branch of the stock pressed westward. This not only explains the higher condition of the Maoris, etc., but also shows why they have not advanced like their European cousins. Their environment is one of the finest in the world, but--it lies far away from the highways of culture.

In much the same way can we interpret the swarming peoples of Africa.

The more primitive peoples which arrived first, and were driven south or into the central forests by the later and better equipped invaders from the central zone, have remained the more primitive. The more northern peoples, on the fringe of, or liable to invasion from, the central zone, have made more advance, and have occasionally set up rudimentary civilisations. But the movements from the north to the south in early historical times are too obscure to enable us to trace the action of the principle more clearly. The peoples of the Mediterranean fringe of Africa, living in the central zone of stimulation, have proved very progressive. Under the Romans North Africa was at least as civilised as Britain, and an equally wise and humane European policy might lead to their revival to-day.

When we turn to Asia we encounter a ma.s.s of little-understood peoples and a few civilisations with obscure histories, but we have a fairly clear application of the principle. The northern, more isolated peoples, are the more primitive; the north-eastern, whose isolation is accentuated by a severe environment, are most primitive of all. The Eskimo, whether they are the survivors of the Magdalenian race or a regiment thrown off the Asiatic army as it entered America, remain at the primitive level. The American peoples in turn accord with this view.

Those which penetrate furthest south remain stagnant or deteriorate; those which remain in the far north remain below the level of civilisation, because the land-bridge to Asia breaks down; but those which settle in Central America evolve a civilisation. A large zone, from Mexico to Peru, was overspread by this civilisation, and it was advancing steadily when European invaders destroyed it, and reduced the civilised Peruvians to the Quichas of to-day.

There remain the civilisations of Asia, and here we have a new and interesting aspect of the question. How did these civilisations develop in Asia, and how is it that they have remained stagnant for ages, while Europe advanced? The origin of the Asiatic civilisations is obscure.

The common idea of their vast antiquity has no serious ground. The civilisation of j.a.pan cannot be traced back beyond about the eighth century B.C. Even then the population was probably a mixed flotsam from neighbouring lands--Ainus, Koreans, Chinese, and Malays. What was the character of the primitive civilisation resulting from the mixture of these different cultures we do not know. But the chief elements of j.a.panese civilisation came later from China. j.a.pan had no written language of any kind until it received one from China about the sixth century of the Christian Era.

The civilisation of China itself goes back at least to about 2300 B.C., but we cannot carry it further back with any confidence. The authorities, endeavouring to pick their steps carefully among old Chinese legends, are now generally agreed that the primitive Chinese were a nomadic tribe which slowly wandered across Asia from about the sh.o.r.es of the Caspian Sea. In other words, they started from a region close to the cradle of western civilisation. Some students, in fact, make them akin to the Akkadians, who founded civilisation in Mesopotamia. At all events, they seem to have conveyed a higher culture to the isolated inhabitants of Western Asia, and a long era of progress followed their settlement in a new environment. For more than two thousand years, however, they have been enclosed in their walls and mountains and seas, while the nations of the remote west clashed unceasingly against each other. We need no other explanation of their stagnation. To speak of the "unprogressiveness" of the Chinese is pure mysticism. The next generation will see.

The civilisation of India is also far later than the civilisation of the west, and seems to be more clearly due to borrowing from the west. The primitive peoples who live on the hills about India, or in the jungles, are fragments, apparently, of the Stone Age inhabitants of India, or their descendants. Their culture may have degenerated under the adverse conditions of dislodgement from their home, but we may fairly conclude that it was never high. On these primitive inhabitants of the plains of India there fell, somewhere about or before 1000 B.C., the Asiatic branch of the Aryan race.

A very recent discovery (1908) has strongly confirmed and illumined this view of the origin of Indian civilisation. Explorers in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hitt.i.te Empire (in North Syria and Cappadocia) found certain treaties which had been concluded, about 1300 B.C., between the Hitt.i.tes and the king of the Aryans. The names of the deities which are mentioned in the treaties seem to show that the Persian and Indian branches of the Aryan race were not yet separated, but formed a united kingdom on the banks of the Euphrates. They seem to have come from Bactria (and possibly beyond), and introduced the horse (hitherto unknown to the Babylonians) about 1800 B.C. It is surmised by the experts that the Indian and Persian branches separated soon after 1300 B.C., possibly on account of religious quarrels, and the Sanscrit-speaking branch, with its Vedic hymns and its Hinduism, wandered eastward and northward until it discovered and took possession of the Indian peninsula. The long isolation of India, since the cessation of its commerce with Rome until modern times, explains the later stagnation of its civilisation.

Thus the supposed "non-progressiveness" of the east, after once establis.h.i.+ng civilisation, turns out to be a question of geography and history. We have now to see if the same intelligible principles will throw light on the "progressiveness" of the western branch of the Aryan race, and on the course of western civilisation generally. [*]

* In speaking of Europeans as Aryans I am, of course, allowing for an absorption of the conquered non-Aryans. A European nation is no more Aryan, in strict truth, than the English are Anglo-Saxon.

The first two centres of civilisation are found in the valley of the Nile and the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates; the civilisations of Egypt and Babylon, the oldest in the world. There is, however, a good deal of evidence by which we may bring these civilisations nearer to each other in their earliest stages, so that we must not confidently speak of two quite independent civilisations. The civilisation which developed on the Euphrates is found first at Susa, on the hills overlooking the plains of Mesopotamia, about 6000 B.C. A people akin to the Turkish or Chinese lives among the hills, and makes the vague advance from higher Neolithic culture to primitive civilisation. About the same time the historical or dynastic civilisation begins in Egypt, and some high authorities, such as Mr. Flinders Petrie, believe that the evidence suggests that the founders of this dynastic civilisation came from "the mountainous region between Egypt and the Red Sea." From the northern part of the same region, we saw, the ancestors of the Chinese set out across Asia.

We have here a very suggestive set of facts in connection with early civilisation. The Syro-Arabian region seems to have been a thickly populated centre of advancing tribes, which would be in striking accord with the view of progress that I am following. But we need not press the disputed and obscure theory of the origin of the historic Egyptians. The remains are said to show that the lower valley of the Nile, which must have been but recently formed by the river's annual deposit of mud, was a theatre of contending tribes from about 8000 to 6000 B.C. The fertile lands that had thus been provided attracted tribes from east, west, and south, and there is a great confusion of primitive cultures on its soil.

It is not certain that the race which eventually conquered and founded the historical dynasties came from the mountainous lands to the east. It is enough for us to know that the whole region fermented with jostling peoples. Why it did so the previous chapters will explain. It is the temperate zone into which men had been pressed by the northern ice-sheet, and from Egypt to the Indian Ocean it remained a fertile breeding-ground of nations.

These early civilisations are merely the highest point of Neolithic culture. The Egyptian remains show a very gradual development of pottery, ornamentation, etc., into which copper articles are introduced in time. The dawn of civilisation is as gradual as the dawn of the day. The whole gamut of culture--Eolithic, Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and civilised--is struck in the successive layers of Egyptian remains.

But to give even a summary of its historical development is neither necessary nor possible here. The maintenance of its progress is as intelligible as its initial advance. Unlike China, it lay in the main region of human development, and we find that even before 6000 B.C. it developed a system of s.h.i.+pping and commerce which kept it in touch with other peoples over the entire region, and helped to promote development both in them and itself.

Equally intelligible is the development of civilisation in Mesopotamia.

The long and fertile valley which lies between the mountainous region and the southern desert is, like the valley of the Nile, a quite recent formation. The rivers have gradually formed it with their deposit in the course of the last ten thousand years. As this rich soil became covered with vegetation, it attracted the mountaineers from the north. As I said, the earliest centre of the civilisation which was to culminate in Babylon and Nineveh is traced at Susa, on the hills to the north, about 6000 B.C. The Akkadians (highlanders) or Sumerians, the Turanian people who established this civilisation, descended upon the rivers, and, about 5000 B.C., set up the early cities of Mesopotamia. As in the case of Egypt, again, more tribes were attracted to the fertile region, and by about 4000 B.C. we find that Semitic tribes from the north have superseded the Sumerians, and taken over their civilisation.

In these ancient civilisations, developing in touch with each other, and surrounded by great numbers of peoples at the high Neolithic level from which they had themselves started, culture advanced rapidly. Not only science, art, literature, commerce, law, and social forms were developed, but moral idealism reached a height that compares well even with that of modern times. The recovery in our time of the actual remains of Egypt and Babylon has corrected much of the libellous legend, which found its way into Greek and European literature, concerning those ancient civilisations. But, as culture advances, human development becomes so complex that we must refrain from attempting to pursue, even in summary, its many outgrowths. The evolution of morality, of art, of religion, of polity, and of literature would each require a whole volume for satisfactory treatment. All that we can do here is to show how the modern world and its progressive culture are related to these ancient empires.

The aphorism that "all light comes from the east" may at times be pressed too literally. To suggest that western peoples have done no more than receive and develop the culture of the older east would be at once unscientific and unhistorical. By the close of the Neolithic age a great number of peoples had reached the threshold of civilisation, and it would be extremely improbable that in only two parts of the world the conditions would be found of further progress. That the culture of these older empires has enriched Europe and had a great share in its civilisation, is one of the most obvious of historical truths. But we must not seek to confine the action of later peoples to a mere borrowing of arts or inst.i.tutions.