Title: 
Author: 
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0800021.txt
Language:  English
Date first posted: January 2008
Date most recently updated: January 2008

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Title: The Martyrdom of Man
Author: Winwood Reade




NOTE


Reade's full name was William Winwood Reade: on the Martrydom, and on
his last book, The Outcast, it stands as Winwood Reade, his literary
choice. A nephew of Charles Reade, he was born at Murrayfield, near
Crieff, on 26 December, 1838, and died at Wimbledon, on 24th April,
1875. (These are the dates of Mr. Legge, who seems, however, not to have
finally correlated them.) He published in 1859 Charlotte and Myra; in
1860 Liberty Hall Oxon (his college was Magdalen, then known as
Hertford); in 1860 The Veil of Isis, an attack on Catholicism. His first
visit to Africa was in 1862. In 1865 he published See-Saw; in 1868 he
again went to Africa, and in 1873 appeared his African Sketch Book,
which is in part an abridgment of his Savage Africa (1863). The
Martyrdom of Man was published in 1872. In 1873 he made his third trip
to Africa, as Times correspondent in the Ashanti War, which he saw
through, being the only civilian present at the taking of Coomassie; and
in 1874 appeared his Story of the Ashanti Campaign, embodying, with
criticism, his Times letters. In his last illness he wrote The Outcast
(1875) setting forth in fiction form the fate of persecution attaching
to the aggressive profession of "unbelief." Orthodox writers have
stressed the fact that, while he again professes his disbelief in
immortality, he does not profess to "know." The Outcast reached a third
edition in the year of its issue, but does not appear to have been since
reprinted until its publication by Watts & Co., in the Thinker's Library
series in 1933.



AUTHOR'S PREFACE


In 1862-3 I made a tour in Western Africa, and afterwards desired to
revisit that strange country with the view of opening up new ground and
of studying religion and morality among the natives. I was, however,
unable to bear a second time the great expenses of African travel, and
had almost given up the hope of becoming an explorer when I was
introduced by Mr. Bates, the well known Amazon traveller and Secretary
of the Royal Geographical Society, to one of its Associates, Mr. Andrew
Swanzy, who had long desired to do something in the cause of African
discovery. He placed unlimited means at my disposal, and left me free to
choose my own route. I travelled in Africa for two years (1868-70) and
made a journey which is mentioned in the test. The narrative of my
travels will be published in due course; I allude to them now in order
to show that I have had some personal experience of savages. I wish also
to take the first opportunity of thanking Mr. Swanzy for his assistance,
which was given not only in the most generous but also in the most
graceful manner.

With respect to the present work, I began it intending to prove that
"Negroland" or Inner Africa is not cut off from the main-stream of
events, as writers of philosophical history have always maintained, but
connected by means of Islam with the lands of the East; and also that it
has, by means of the slave-trade, powerfully influenced the moral
history of Europe and the political history of the United States. But I
was gradually led from writing the history of Africa into writing the
history of the world. I could not describe the Negroland of ancient
times without describing Egypt and Carthage. From Egypt I was drawn to
Asia and to Greece; from Carthage I was drawn to Rome. That is the first
chapter.

Next, having to relate the progress of the Mohammedans in Central
Africa, it was necessary for me to explain the nature and origin of
Islam, but that religion cannot be understood without a previous study
of Christianity and of Judaism, and those religions cannot be understood
without a study of religion among savages. That is the second chapter.

Thirdly, I sketched the history of the slave-trade, which took me back
to the discoveries of the Portuguese, the glories of Venetian commerce,
the revival of the arts, the Dark Ages, and the invasion of the Germans.
Thus finding that my outline of universal history was almost complete, I
determined in the last chapter to give a brief summary of the whole,
filling up the parts omitted, and adding to it the materials of another
work suggested several years ago by The Origin of Species.

One of my reasons for revisiting Africa was to collect materials for
this work, which I had intended to call The Origin of Mind. However, Mr.
Darwin's Descent of Man has left little for me to say respecting the
birth and infancy of the faculties and affections. I therefore merely
follow in his footsteps, not from blind veneration for a great master,
but because I find that his conclusions are confirmed by the phenomena
of savage life.

On certain minor points I venture to dissent from Mr. Darwin's views, as
I shall show in my personal narrative, and there is probably much in
this work of which Mr. Darwin will disapprove. He must therefore not be
made responsible for all the opinions of his disciple.

I had intended to give my authorities in full with notes and
elucidations, but am prevented from doing so by want of space, this
volume being already larger than it should be. I wish therefore to
impress upon the reader that there is scarcely anything in this work
which I can claim as my own. I have taken not only facts and ideas, but
phrases and even paragraphs, from other writers. I cannot pay all my
debts in full, but I must at least do myself the pleasure of mentioning
those authors who have been my chief guides. On Egypt they are
Wilkinson, Herodotus (Rawlinson's edition), Bunsen; Ethiopia or
Abyssinia, Bruce, Baker, Lepsius; Carthage, Heeren (African Nations),
Niebuhr, ommsen; East Africa, Vincent (Periplus), Guillain, Hakluyt
Society's Publications; Moslem Africa (Central), Park, Caillie, Denham
and Clapperton, Lander, Barth, Ibn Batuta, Leo Africanus; Guinea and
South Africa, Azurara, Barros, Major, Hakluyt, Purchas, Livingstone;
Assyria, Sir H. Rawlinson, Layard; India, Max Muller, Weber; Persia,
Heeren (Asiatic Nations); Central Asia, Burnes, Wolff, Vambery; Arabia,
Niebuhr, Caussin de Perceval,

Sprenger, Deutsch, Muir, Burckhardt, Burton, Palgrave; Palestine, Dean
Stanley, Renan, Dollinger, Spinoza, Robinson, Neander; Greece, Grote, O.
Muller, Curtius, Heeren, Lewes, Taine, About, Becker (Charicles); Rome,
Gibbon, Macaulay, Becker (Gallus); Dark Ages, Hallam, Guizot, Robertson,
Prescott, Irving; Philosophy of History, Herder, Buckle Comte, Lecky,
Mill, Draper; Science, Darwin, Lyell, Herbert, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall,
Chambers (Vestiges of Creation), Wallace, Tylor, and Lubbock. All of the
works of the above named authors deserve to be carefully read by the
students of universal history, and in them he will find references to
the original authorities, and to all writers of importance on the
various subjects treated of in this work.

As for my religious sentiments, they are expressed in opposition to the
advice and wishes of several literary friends, and of the publisher, who
have urged me to alter certain passages which they do not like, and
which they believe will provoke against me the anger of the public. Now,
as a literary workman I am thankful to be guided by the knowledge of
experts, and I bow to the decisions of the great public, for whom alone
I write, whom alone I care to please, and in whose broad unbiased
judgment I place implicit trust. But in the matter of religion I listen
to no remonstrance; I acknowledge no decision save that of the divine
monitor within me. My conscience is my adviser, my audience, and my
judge. It bade me write as I have written, without evasion, without
disguise; it bids me to go on as I have begun, whatever the result may
be. If therefore my religious opinions should be condemned, without a
single exception, by every reader of the book, it will not make me
regret having expressed them, and it will not prevent me from expressing
then again. It is my earnest and sincere conviction that those opinions
are not only true, but also that they tend to elevate and purify the
mind. One thing at all events I know--that it has done me good to write
this book, and therefore I do not think that it can injure those by whom
it will be read.



CHAPTER I: WAR


Egypt


The land of Egypt is six hundred miles long, and is bounded by two
ranges of naked limestone hills which sometimes approach and sometimes
retire from each other, leaving between them an average breadth of seven
miles. On the north they widen and disappear, giving place to a marshy
meadow plain which extends to the Mediterranean coast. On the south they
are no longer of limestone, but of granite; they narrow to a point; they
close in till they almost touch; and through the mountain gate thus
formed the river Nile leaps with a roar into the valley, and runs north
towards the sea.

In the winter and spring it rolls a languid stream through a dry and
dusty plain. But in the summer an extraordinary thing happens. The river
grows troubled and swift; it turns red as blood, and then green; it
rises, it swells, till at length, overflowing its banks, it covers the
adjoining lands to the base of the hills on either side. The whole
valley becomes a lake from which the villages rise like islands, for
they are built on artificial mounds.

This catastrophe was welcomed by the Egyptians with religious gratitude
and noisy mirth. When their fields had entirely disappeared they thanked
the gods and kept their harvest-home. The tax gatherers measured the
water as if it were grain, and announced what the crops and the budget
of the next year would be. Gay barges with painted sails conveyed the
merry husbandmen from village to village and from fair to fair. It was
then that they had their boat tournaments, their wrestling matches,
their bouts at single-stick and other athletic sports. It was then that
the thimble-riggers and jack-puddings, blind harpers and nigger
minstrels from Central Africa, amused the holiday-hearted crowd. It was
then that the old people sat over draughts and dice-box in the cosy
shade, while the boys played at mora, or at pitch and toss, and the
girls at a game of ball, with forfeits for the one who missed a catch.
It was then that the house-father bought new dolls for the children,
and amulets or gold ear-rings or necklaces of porcelain bugles for the
wife. It was then that the market stalls abounded with joints of beef
and venison, and with geese hanging down in long rows, and with chickens
hatched by thousands under heaps of dung. Salted quails, smoked fish,
date sweetmeats, doura cakes, and cheese; leeks, garlic cucumbers, and
onions; lotus seeds mashed in milk, roasted stalks of papyrus, jars of
barley beer and palm wine, with many other kinds of food, were sold in
unusual plenty at that festive time.

It was then also that the white-robed priests, bearing the image of a
god and singing hymns, marched with solemn procession to the waterside,
and cast in a sacrifice of gold. For the water which had thus risen was
their life. Egypt is by nature a rainless desert which the Nile and the
Nile only, converts into a garden every year.

Far, far away in the distant regions of the south, in the deep heart of
Africa, lie two inland seas. These are the headwaters of the Nile; its
sources are in the sky. For the clouds, laden with waters collected out
of many seas, sail to the African equator, and there pour down a ten
months' rain. This ocean of falling water is received on a region
sloping towards the north, and is conveyed by a thousand channels to the
vast rocky cisterns which form the Speke and Baker Lakes. [Lakes
Victoria and Albert] They, filled and bursting, cast forth the Nile, and
drive it from them through a terrible and thirsty land. The hot air lies
on the stream and laps it as it flows. The parched soil swallows it with
open pores, but ton after ton of water is supplied from the gigantic
reservoirs behind, and so it is enabled to cross that vast desert which
spreads from the latitude of Lake Tchad to the borders of the
Mediterranean Sea.

The existence of the Nile is due to the Nyanza Lakes alone, but the
inundation of the river has a distinct and separate cause. In that
phenomenon the lakes are not concerned.

Between the Nile and the mouth of the Arabian Gulf are situated the
highlands of Abyssinia, rising many thousand feet above the level of the
sea, and intercepting the clouds of the Indian Ocean in their flight
towards the north. From these mountains, as soon as the rainy season has
set in, two great rivers come thundering down their dried-up beds, and
rush into the Nile. The main stream is now forced impetuously along; in
the Nubian desert its swelling waters are held in between walls of rock;
as soon as it reaches the low lying lands of Egypt it naturally
overflows.

The Abyssinian tributaries do even more than this. The waters of the
White Nile are transparent and pure; but the Atbara and Blue Nile bring
down from their native land a black silt which the flood strews over the
whole valley as a kind of top-dressing or manure. On that rich and
unctuous mud, as soon as the waters have retired, the natives cast their
seed. Then their labours are completed; no changes of weather need
afterwards be feared; no anxious looks are turned towards the sky;
sunshine only is required to fulfil the crop, and in Egypt the sun is
never covered by a cloud.

Thus, were it not for the White Nile, the Abyssinian rivers would be
drunk up by the desert; and were it not for the Abyssinian rivers, the
White Nile would be a barren stream. The river is created by the rains
of the equator; the land by the tropical rains condensed in one spot by
the Abyssinian mountain pile.

In that fair Egyptian valley, fattened by a foreign soil, brightened by
eternal sunshine, watered by terrestrial rain, the natives were able to
obtain a year's food in return for a few days' toil, and so were
provided with that wealth of time which is essential for a nation's
growth.

A people can never rise from low estate as long as they are engrossed in
the painful struggle for daily bread. On the other hand, leisure alone
is not sufficient to effect the self-promotion of men. The savage of the
primeval forest burns down a few trees every year; his women raise an
easy crop from the ashes which mingle with the soil. He basks all day in
the sunshine, or prostrates himself in his canoe with his arms behind
his head and a fishing-line tied to his big toe. When the meat-hunger
comes upon him he takes up bow and arrow and goes for a few days into
the bush. His life is one long torpor, with spasms of activity. Century
follows century, but he does not change. Again, the shepherd tribes roam
from pasture to pasture; their flocks and herds yield them food and
dress and "houses of hair," as they call their tents. They have little
work to do; their time is almost entirely their own. They pass long
hours in slow conversation, in gazing at the heavens, in the sensuous,
passive oriental reverie. The intellectual capacities of such men are by
no means to be despised, as those who have lived among them are aware.
They are skilful interpreters of nature's language and of the human
heart; they compose beautiful poems; their religion is simple and
sublime; yet time passes on, and they do not advance. The Arab sheikh of
the present day lives precisely as Abraham did three thousand years ago;
the Tartars of Central Asia are the Scythians whom Herodotus described.

It is the first and indispensable condition of human progress that a
people shall be married to a single land; that they shall wander no more
from one region to another, but remain fixed and faithful to their soil.
Then, if the Earth-wife be fruitful, she will bear them children by
hundreds and by thousands; and then calamity will come and teach them by
torture to invent.

The Egyptians were islanders, cut off from the rest of the world by sand
and sea. They were rooted in their valley; they lived entirely upon its
fruits, and happily these fruits sometimes failed. Had they always been
able to obtain enough to eat, they would have remained always in the
semi-savage state.

It may appear strange that Egypt should have suffered from famine, for
there was no country in the ancient world where food was so abundant and
so cheap. Not only did the land produce enormous crops of corn; the
ditches and hollows which were filled by the overflowing Nile supplied a
harvest of wholesome and nourishing aquatic plants, and on the borders
of the desert thick groves of date-palms, which love a neutral soil,
embowered the villages, and formed live granaries of fruit.

But however plentiful food may be in any country, the population of that
country, as Malthus discovered, will outstrip it in the long run. If
food is unusually cheap, population will increase at an unusually rapid
rate, and there is not limit to its ratio of increase--no limit, that
is to say, except disease and death. On the other hand, there is a limit
to the amount of food that can be raised, for the basis of food is land,
and land is a fixed quantity. Unless some discovery is made by means of
which provisions may be manufactured with as much facility as children,
the whole earth will some day be placed in the same predicament as the
island in which we live, which has outgrown its food-producing power,
and is preserved from starvation only by means of foreign corn.

At the time we speak of, Egypt was irrigated by the Nile in a natural
and therefore imperfect manner. Certain tracts were overflooded; others
were left completely dry. The valley was filled with people to the brim.
When it was a good Nile, every ear of corn, every bunch of dates, every
papyrus stalk and lotus root was pre-engaged. There was no waste and no
surplus store. But sometimes a bad Nile came.

The bread of the people depended on the amount of inundation, and that
depended on the tropical rains, which vary more than is usually
supposed. If the rainfall in the Abyssinian highlands happened to be
slight, the river could not pay its full tribute of earth and water to
the valley below; and if the rainfall was unusually severe, houses were
swept away, cattle were drowned, and the water, instead of returning at
the usual time, became stagnant on the fields. In either case famine and
pestilence invariably ensued. The plenty of ordinary years, like a
baited trap, had produced a luxuriance of human life, and the massacre
was proportionally severe. Encompassed by the wilderness, the
unfortunate natives were unable to escape. They died in heaps; the
valley resembled a field of battle; each village became a charnel-house;
skeletons sat grinning at street corners, and the winds clattered among
dead men's bones. A few survivors lingered miserably through the year,
browsing on the thorny shrubs of the desert, and sharing with the
vultures their horrible repast.

"God made all men equal" is a fine sounding phrase, and has also done
good service in its day, but it is not a scientific fact. On the
contrary, there is nothing so certain as the natural inequality of men.
Those who outlive hardships and sufferings which fall on all alike owe
their existence to some superiority, not only of body but of mind. It
will easily be conceived that among such superior-minded men there would
be some who, stimulated by the memory of that which was past and by the
fear of that which might return, would strain to the utmost their
ingenuity to control and guide the fickle river which had hitherto
sported with their lives.

We shall not attempt to trace out their inventions step by step. Humble
in its beginnings, slow in its improvements, the art or science of
hydraulics was finally mastered by the Egyptians. They devised a system
of dikes, reservoirs, and lock-canals, by means of which the excessive
waters of a violent Nile were turned from the fields and stored up to
supply the wants of a dry year. Thus also the precious fluid was
conveyed to tracts of land lying above the level of the river, and was
distributed over the whole valley with such precision that each lot or
farm received a just and equal share. Next, as the inundation destroyed
all landmarks, surveying became a necessary art in order to settle the
disputes which broke out every year. And, as the rising of the waters
was more and more carefully observed, it was found that its beginning
coincided with certain aspects of the stars. This led to the study of
astronomy and the discovery of the solar year. Agriculture became a
mathematical art. It was ascertained that so many feet of water would
yield so many quarters of corn, and thus, before a single seed was sown,
they could count up the harvest as correctly as if it had been already
gathered in.

A natural consequence of all this was the separation of the inventor
class, who became at first the counsellors and afterwards the rulers of
the people. But while the men of mind were battling with the forces of
Nature, a contest of another kind was also going on. Those who dwell on
the rich banks of a river flowing through desert lands are always liable
to be attacked by the wandering shepherd hordes who resort to the
waterside in summer, when the wilderness pasture is dried up. There is
nothing such tribes desire better than to conquer the corn-growing
people of the river lands, and to make them pay a tribute of grain when
the crops are taken in. The Egyptians, as soon as they had won their
harvests from the flood, were obliged to defend them against the robbers
of the desert, and out of such wars arose a military caste. These allied
themselves with the intellectual caste, who were also priests, for among
the primitive nations religion and science were invariably combined. In
this manner the bravest and wisest of the Egyptians rose above the
vulgar crowd, and the nation was divided into two great classes, the
rulers and the ruled.

Then oppression continued the work which war and famine had begun. The
priests announced, and the armies executed, the divine decrees. The
people were reduced to servitude. The soldiers discovered the gold and
emerald mines of the adjoining hills, and filled their dark recesses
with chained slaves and savage overseers. They became invaders; they
explored distant lands with the spear. Communications with Syria and the
fragrant countries at the mouth of the Red Sea, first opened by means of
war, were continued by means of commerce. Foreign produce became an
element of Egyptian life. The privileged classes found it necessary to
be rich. Formerly the priests had merely salted the bodies of the dead;
now a fashionable corpse must be embalmed, at an expense of two hundred
and fifty pounds, with asphalt from the Dead Sea and spices from the
Somali groves; costly incense must be burnt on the altars of the gods;
aristocratic heads must recline on ivory stools; fine ladies must
glitter with gold ornaments and precious stones, and must be served by
waiting-maids and pages with woolly hair and velvety black skins. War
and agriculture were no longer sufficient to supply these patrician
wants. It was no longer sufficient that the people should feed on dates
and the coarse doura-bread, while the wheat which they raised was sold
by their masters for gewgaws and perfumes. Manufactures were
established; slaves laboured at a thousand looms; the linen goods of
Egypt became celebrated throughout the world. Laboratories were opened;
remarkable discoveries were made. The Egyptian priests distilled brandy
and sweet waters. They used the blow-pipe, and were far advanced in the
chemical processes of art. They fabricated glass mosaics, and
counterfeited precious stones and porcelain of exquisite transparency
and delicately blended hues. With the fruits of these inventions they
adorned their daily life, and attracted into Egypt the riches of other
lands.

Thus, when Nature selects a people to endow them with glory and with
wealth, her first proceeding is to massacre their bodies, her second to
debauch their minds. She begins with famine, pestilence and war; next,
force and rapacity above, chains and slavery below. She uses evil as the
raw material of good; though her aim is always noble, her earliest means
are base and cruel. But as soon as a certain point is reached she washes
her black and bloody hands, and uses agents of a higher kind. Having
converted the animal instinct of self-defence into the ravenous lust of
wealth and power, that also she transforms into ambition of a pure and
lofty kind. At first knowledge is sought only for the things which it
will buy--the daily bread indispensable to life, and those trinkets of
body and mind which vanity demands. Yet those low desires do not always
and entirely possess the human soul. Wisdom is like the heiress of the
novel who is at first courted only for her wealth, but whom the
fortune-hunter learns afterwards to love for herself alone.

At first sight there seems little in the arts and sciences of Egypt
which cannot be traced to the enlightened selfishness of the priestly
caste. For in the earlier times it was necessary for the priests to
labour unceasingly to preserve the power which they had usurped. It was
necessary to overawe not only the people who worked in the fields, but
their own dangerous allies, the military class; to make religion not
only mysterious but magnificent; not only to predict the precise hour of
the rising of the waters, or the eclipses of the moon, but also to adopt
and nurture the fine arts, to dazzle the public with temples, monuments,
and paintings. Above all, it was necessary to prepare a system of
government which should keep the labouring classes in subjection and yet
stimulate them to labour indefatigably for the state; which should strip
them of all the rewards of industry and yet keep that industry alive.
Expediency will therefore account for much that the Egyptian intellect
produced, but it certainly will not account for all. The invention of
hieroglyphics is alone sufficient to prove that higher motives were at
work than mere political calculation and the appetite of gold. For
writing was an invention which at no time could have added in a palpable
manner to the wealth or power of the upper classes, and which yet could
not have been finished to a system without a vast expenditure of time
and toil. It could not have been the work of a single man, but of
several men labouring in the same direction, and in its early beginnings
must have appeared as unpractical, as truly scientific to them, as the
study of solar chemistry and the observation of the double stars to us.
Besides, the intense and faithful labour which is conspicuous in all the
Egyptian works of art could only have been inspired by that enthusiasm
which belongs to noble minds.

We may fairly presume that Egypt once possessed its chivalry of the
intellect, its heroic age, and that the violent activity of thought
generated by the love of life and developed by the love of power was
raised to its full zenith by the passion for art and science, for the
beautiful and the true.

At first the Nile valley was divided into a number of independent
states, each possessing its own corporation of priests and soldiers, its
own laws and system of taxation, its own tutelary god and shrine, but
each a member of one body, united by the belief in one religion, and
assembling from time to time to worship the national gods in an
appointed place. There, according to general agreement ratified by
solemn oaths, all feuds were suspended, all weapons laid aside. There
also, under the shelter of the sanctuary, property was secure, and the
surplus commodities of the various districts could be conveniently
interchanged. In such a place, frequented by vast crowds of pilgrims and
traders, a great city would naturally arise, and such it seems probable
was the origin of Thebes.

But Egypt, which possesses a simple undivided form, and which is
nourished by one great arterial stream, appears destined to be
surmounted by a single head, and we perceive in the dim dawn of history
a revolution taking place, and Menes, the Egyptian Charlemagne, founding
an empire upon the ruins of local governments, and inspiring the various
tribes with the sentiment of nationality. Thebes remained the sacred
city, but a new capital, Memphis, was built at the other end of the
valley, not far from the spot where Cairo now stands.

By degrees the Egyptian empire assumed a consolidated form. A regular
constitution was established and a ritual prescribed. The classes were
organised in a more effective manner, and were not at first too strictly
fixed. All were at liberty to intermarry, excepting only the swineherds,
who were regarded as unclean. The system of government became masterly,
and the servitude of the people became complete. Designs of imperial
magnitude were accomplished, some of them gigantic but useless, mere
exploits of naked human strength, others structures of true grandeur and
utility. The valley was adorned with splendid monuments and temples;
colossal statues were erected, which rose above the houses like the
towers and spires of our cathedral towns. An army of labourers was
employed against the Nile. The course of the mighty stream was altered;
its waters were snatched from its bosom and stored up in Lake Moeris, an
artificial basin hollowed out of an extensive swamp, and thence were
conducted by a system of canals into the neighbouring desert, which they
changed to smiling fields. For the Sahara can always be revived. It is
barren only because it receives no rain.

The Empire consisted of three estates--the Monarch, the Army, and the
Church. There were in theory no limits to the power of the king. His
authority was derived directly from the gods. He was called "the Sun";
he was the head of the religion and the state; he was the supreme judge
and lawgiver; he commanded the army and led it to war. But in reality
his power was controlled and reduced to mere pageantry by a parliament
of priests. He was elected by the military class, but as soon as he was
crowned he was initiated into the mysteries and subjected to the severe
discipline of the holy order. No slave or hireling might approach his
person: the lords in waiting, with the state parasol and the
ostrich-feather fans, were princes of the blood; his other attendants
were invariably priests. The royal time was filled and measured by
routine: laws were laid down in the holy books for the order and nature
of the king's occupations. At daybreak he examined and dispatched his
correspondence; he then put on his robes and attended divine service in
the temple. Extracts were read from those holy books which contained the
sayings and actions of distinguished men, and these were followed by a
sermon from the High Priest. He extolled the virtues of the reigning
sovereign, but criticised severely the lives of those who had preceded
him--a post-mortem examination to which the king knew that he would be
subjected in his turn.

He was forbidden to commit any kind of excess: he was restricted to a
plain diet of veal and goose, and to a measured quantity of wine. The
laws hung over him day and night; they governed his public and private
action: they followed him even to the recesses of his chamber, and
appointed a set time for the embraces of his queen. He could not punish
a single person except in accordance with the code; the judges took oath
before the king that they would disobey the king if he ordered them to
do anything contrary to law. The ministry were responsible for the
actions of their master, and they guarded their own safety. They made it
impossible for him to forfeit that reverence and affection which the
ignorant and the religious always entertain for their anointed king. He
was adored as a god when living, and when he died he was mourned by the
whole nation as if each man had lost a well-beloved child. During
seventy-two days the temples were closed; lamentations filled the air;
and the people fasted, abstaining from flesh and wine, cooked food,
ointments, baths, and the company of their wives. The Army appears to
have been severely disciplined. To run twenty miles before breakfast was
part of the ordinary drill. The amusements of the soldiers were athletic
sports and martial games. Yet they were not merely fighting men. They
were also farmers. Each warrior received from the state twelve acres of
choice land; these gave him a solid interest in the prosperity of the
fatherland and in the maintenance of civil peace.

The most powerful of the three estates was undoubtedly the Church. In
the priesthood were included not only the ministers of religion, but
also the whole civil service and the liberal professions. Priests were
the royal chroniclers and keepers of the records, the engravers of
inscriptions, physicians of the sick and embalmers of the dead, lawyers
and lawgivers, sculptors and musicians. Most of the skilled labour of
the country was under their control. In their hands were the linen
manufactories and the quarries between the Cataracts. Even those posts
in the Army which required a knowledge of arithmetic and penmanship were
supplied by them: every general was attended by young priest scribes,
with papyrus rolls in their hands and reed pencils behind their ears.
The clergy preserved the monopoly of the arts which they had invented;
the whole intellectual life of Egypt was in them. It was they who, with
the nilometers, took the measure of the waters, and proclaimed good
harvests to the people or bade them prepare for hungry days. It was they
who studied the diseases of the country, compiled a pharmacopoeia, and
invented the signs which are used in our prescriptions at the present
day. It was they who judged the living and the dead, who enacted laws
which extended beyond the grave, who issued passports to paradise, or
condemned to eternal infamy the memories of men that were no more.

Their power was immense, but it was exercised with justice and
discretion: they issued admirable laws, and taught the people to obey
them by the example of their own humble, self-denying lives.

Under the tutelage of these pious and enlightened men, the Egyptians
became a prosperous and also a highly moral people. The monumental
paintings reveal their whole life, but we read in them no brutal or
licentious scenes. Their great rivals, the Assyrians, even at a later
period, were accustomed to impale and flay alive their prisoners of war.
The Egyptians granted honours to those who fought gallantly against
them. The penalty for the murder of a slave was death; this law exists
without parallel in the dark slavery annals both of ancient and of
modern times. The pardoning power in cases of capital offence was a
cherished prerogative of royalty with them as with us; and with them,
also as with us, when a pregnant woman was condemned to death the
execution was postponed until after the birth of the guiltless child. It
is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the
soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private
citizens did not carry them at all. Women were treated with much regard.
They were allowed to join their husbands in the sacrifices to the gods;
the bodies of man and wife were united in the tomb. When a party was
given the guests were received by the host and hostess seated side by
side in a large armchair. In the paintings their mutual affection is
portrayed. Their fond manners, their gestures of endearment, the
caresses which they lavish on their children, form sweet and touching
scenes of domestic life.

Crimes could not be compounded, as in so many other ancient lands, by
the payment of a fine. The man who witnessed a crime without attempting
to prevent it was punished as partaker. The civil laws were administered
in such a manner that the poor could have recourse to them as well as
the rich. The judges received large salaries that they might be placed
above the temptation of bribery, and might never disgrace the image of
Truth which they wore round their necks suspended on a golden chain.

But most powerful of all, to preserve the morality of the people by
giving a tangible force to public opinion, and by impeaching those sins
against society which no legal code can touch, was that sublime police
institution the "Trial of the Dead."

When the corpse had been brought back from the embalming house it was
encased in a sycamore coffin covered with flowers, placed in a sledge,
and drawn by oxen to the sacred lake. The hearse was followed by the
relations of the deceased, the men unshorn and casting dust upon their
heads, the women beating their breasts and singing mournful hymns. On
the banks of the lake sat forty-two judges in the shape of a crescent; a
great crowd was assembled; in the water floated a canoe, and within it
stood Charon the ferryman, awaiting the sentence of the chief judge. On
the other side of the lake lay a sandy plain, and beyond it a range of
long, low hills, in which might be discerned the black mouths of the
caverns of the dead.

It was in the power of any man to step forward and accuse the departed
before the body could be borne across. If the charge was held to be
proved, the body was denied burial in the consecrated ground, and the
crowd silently dispersed. If a verdict of not guilty was returned, the
accuser suffered the penalty of the crime alleged, and the ceremony took
its course. The relatives began to sing with praises the biography of
the deceased; they sang in what manner he had been brought up from a
child till he came to man's estate, how pious he had been towards the
gods, how righteous he had been towards men. And if this was true, if
the man's life had indeed been good, the crowd joined in chorus,
clapping their hands, and sang back in return that he would be received
into the glory of the just. Then the coffin was laid in the canoe, the
silent ferryman plied his oar, a priest read the service of the dead,
and the body was deposited in the cemetery caves. If he was a man of
rank he was laid in a chamber of his own, and the sacred artists painted
on the walls an illustrated catalogue of his possessions, the principal
occupations of his life, and scenes of the society in which he moved.
For the priests taught that, since life is short and death is long,
man's dwelling-house is but a lodging, and his eternal habitation is the
tomb. Thus the family vault of the Egyptian was his picture gallery, and
thus the manners and customs of this singular people have, like their
bodies, been preserved through long ages by means of religious art.

There are also still existing on the walls of the temples, and in the
grotto tombs, grand historical paintings which illuminate the terse
chronicles engraved upon the granite. Among these may be remarked one
subject in particular which appears to have been a favourite with the
artist and the public, for it again and again recurs. The Egyptians,
distinguished always by their smooth faces and shaven heads, are
pursuing an enemy with long beards and flowing robes, who are surrounded
by flocks and herds. The Egyptians here show no mercy; they appear alive
with fury and revenge. Sometimes the victor is depicted with a scornful
air, his foot placed upon the neck of a prostrate foe; sometimes he is
piercing the body through and through with a spear. Certain sandals have
also been discovered in which the figure of the same enemy is painted on
the inner sole, so that the foot trod upon the portrait when the sandal
was put on.

Those bearded men had inflicted on Egypt long years of dreadful disaster
and disgrace. They were the Bedouins of the Arabian peninsula, a
pastoral race who wandered eternally in a burning land, each tribe or
clan within an orbit of its own. When they met they fought, the women
uttering savage cries and cursing their husbands if they retreated from
the foe. Accustomed to struggle to the death for a handful of withered
grass or for a little muddy water at the bottom of a well, what a rich
harvest must Egypt have appeared to them! In order to obtain it they
were able to suspend all feuds, to take an oath of alliance, and to
unite into a single horde. They descended upon their prey and seized it
at the first swoop. There does not appear to have been even one great
battle, and this can be explained if, as is probable enough, the
Egyptians before that invasion had never seen a horse.

The Arab horse, or rather mare, lived in her master's tent and supped
from the calabash of milk, and lay down to sleep with the other members
of the family. She was the playmate of the children; on her the cruel,
the savage Bedouin lavished the one tender feeling of his heart. He
treasured up in his mind her pedigree as carefully as his own; he
composed songs in honour of his beloved steed--his friend, his
companion, his ally. He sang to her of the gazelles which they had
hunted down, and of the battles which they had fought together--for the
Arab horse was essentially a beast of war. When the signal was given for
the charge, when the rider, loudly yelling, couched his spear, she
snorted and panted and bounded in the air. With tail raised and
spreading to the wind, with neck beautifully arched, mane flapping, red
nostrils dilating, and eyes glaring, she rushed like an arrow into the
midst of the melee. Though covered with wounds, she would never turn
restive or try to escape, but if her master was compelled to take to
flight she would carry him till she dropped down dead.

It is quite possible that when the mounted army appeared in the river
plain the inhabitants were paralysed with fright, and believed them to
be fabulous animals, winged men. Be that as it may, the conquest was
speedy and complete; the imperial Memphis was taken, Egypt was enslaved,
and the king and his family and court were compelled to seek a new home
across the sandy seas.

On the south side of the Nubian desert was the land of Ethiopia, the
modern Sudan, which had been conquered by the Egyptians, and which they
used as an emporium in their caravan trade with Central Africa and the
shores of the Red Sea. But it could be reached only by means of a
journey which is not without danger at the present day, and which must
have been inexpressibly arduous at a time when the camel had not been
introduced.

The Nile, it is true, flows through this desert, and joins Ethiopia to
Egypt with a silver chain. But from the time of its leaving the Sudan
until it reaches the black granite gate which marks the Egyptian
frontier, it is confined within a narrow, crooked, hollow way.
Navigation is impossible, for its bed is continually broken up by rocks
and the stream is walled in; it cannot overflow its banks. The reign of
the Sahara is uninterrupted, undisturbed. On all sides is the desert,
the brown, shining desert, the implacable waste. Above is a ball of fire
ascending and descending in a steel blue sky; below, a dry and scorching
sea which the wind ripples into gloomy waves. The air is a cloud which
rains fire, for it is dim with perpetual dust--each molecule a spark.
The eye is pained and dazzled; it can find no rest. The ear is startled;
it can find no sound. In the soft and yielding sand the footstep
perishes unheard; nothing murmurs, nothing rustles, nothing sings. This
silence is terrible, for it conveys the idea of death, and all know that
in the desert death is not far off. When the elements become active they
assume peculiar and portentous forms. If the wind blows hard a strange
storm arises; the atmosphere is pervaded by a dull and lurid glare;
pillars of sand spring up as if by magic, and whirl round and round in a
ghastly and fantastic dance. Then a mountain appearing on the horizon
spreads upward in the sky, and a darkness more dark than night falls
suddenly upon the earth. To those who gasp with swelled tongues and
blackened lips in the last agonies of thirst, the mirage, like a mocking
stream, exhibits lakes of transparent water and shady trees. But the
wells of this desert are scanty, and the waters found in them are salt.

The fugitives concealed the images of the gods, and taking with them the
sacred animals, embarked upon their voyage of suffering and woe. After
many weary days they again sighted land; they arrived on the shores of
Ethiopia, the country of the blacks. Once more their eyes were refreshed
with green pastures; once more they listened to the rustling of the
palms, and drank the sweet waters of the Nile. Yet soon they discovered
that it was not their own dear river, it was not their own beloved land.
In Egypt Nature was a gentle handmaid; here she was a cruel and
capricious queen. The sky flashed and bellowed against them;
the rain fell in torrents, and battered down the houses of the
Ethiopians--wretched huts like hay-ricks, round in body with a
cone-shaped roof, built of grass and mud. The lowlands changed beneath
the flood, not into meadows of flowers and fields of waving corn, but
into a pestilential morass. At the rising of the dog-star came a
terrible fly which drove even the wild beasts from the river banks and
destroyed all flocks and herds. At that evil season the Egyptian
colonists were forced to migrate to the forests of the interior, which
were filled with savage tribes. Here were the Troglodytes who lived
under ground. An ointment was their only dress; their language resembled
the hissing of serpents and the whistling of bats. Every month they
indulged in a carouse; every month they opened the veins of their sheep
and drank of the warm and gurgling blood as if it had been delicious
wine. They made merry when they buried their dead, and, roaring with
laughter, cast stones upon the corpse until it was concealed from view.
Here were the root-eaters, the twig-eaters and the seed-eaters, who
lived entirely on such wretched kinds of food. Here were the
elephant-eaters, who, sitting on the tops of trees like birds, watched
the roads, and when they had sighted a herd crept after it, and hovered
round it till the sleepy hour of noon arrived. Then they selected a
victim, stole up to it snake-like from behind, hamstrung the enormous
creature with a dexterous cut from a sharp sword, and as it lay helpless
on the ground feasted upon morsels of its live and palpitating flesh.
Here were the locust-eaters, whose harvest was a passing swarm, for they
lit a smoky fire underneath, which made the insects fall like withered
leaves; they roasted them, pounded them, and made them into cakes with
salt. The fish-eaters dwelt by the coral-line borders of the Red Sea;
they lived in wigwams thatched with seaweed, with ribs of whales for the
rafters and the walls. The richest men were those who possessed the
largest bones. There was no fresh water near the shore where they hunted
for their food. At stated times they went in herds like cattle to the
distant river-side, and singing to one another discordant songs, lay
flat on their bellies and drank till they were gorged.

Such was the land to which the Pharaohs were exiled. In the meantime the
Bedouins established a dynasty which ruled a considerable time, and is
known as that of the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings.

But those barbarians were not domiciled in Egypt. They could not breathe
inside houses, and could not understand how the walls remained upright.
The camp was their true fatherland. They lived aloof from the Egyptians;
they did not ally themselves with the country gods; they did not teach
the people whom they had conquered to regard them as the successors of
the Pharaohs. Their art of government began and ended with the
collection of a tax. The Shepherd Kings were associated in the minds of
the Egyptian fellahin, not with their ancient and revered religion, not
with the laws by which they were still governed under their local
chiefs, but only with the tribute of corn which was extorted from them
every harvest by the whip. The idea of revolution was always present in
their minds. Misfortune bestowed upon them the ferocious virtues of the
desert, while the vice of cities crept into the Bedouin camp. The
invaders became corrupted by luxurious indolence and sensual excess,
till at length a descendant of the Pharaohs raised an army in Ethiopia
and invaded Egypt. The uprising was general, and the Arabs were driven
back into their own harsh and meagre land.

The period which followed the Restoration is the most brilliant in
Egyptian history. The expulsion of the Bedouins excited an enthusiasm
which could not be contained within the narrow valley of the Nile. Egypt
became not only an independent but a conquering power. Her armies
overran Asia to the shores of the Euxine and of the Caspian Sea. Her
fleets swept over the Indian Ocean to the mud-stained shallows at the
Indus mouth. On the monuments we may read the proud annals of those
campaigns. We see the Egyptian army, with its companies of archers
shooting from the ear like the Englishmen of old; we see their squadrons
of light and heavy chariots of war, which skilfully skirmished or
heavily charged the dense masses of the foe; we see their remarkable
engines for besieging fortified towns, their scaling ladders, their
movable towers, and their shield-covered rams. We see the Pharaoh
returning in triumph, his car drawn by captive kings, and a long
procession of prisoners bearing the productions of their respective
lands. The nature and variety of those trophies sufficiently prove how
wide and distant the Egyptian conquests must have been, for among the
animals that figure in the triumph are the brown bear, the baboon, the
Indian elephant, and the giraffe. Among the prisoners are negroes of the
Sudan in aprons of bulls' hides, or in wild-beast skins with the tails
hanging down behind. They carry ebony, ivory, and gold; their chiefs are
adorned with leopard robes and ostrich feathers, as they are at the
present day. We see also men from some cold country of the North, with
blue eyes and yellow hair, wearing light dresses and long-fingered
gloves, while others clothed like Indians are bearing beautiful vases,
rich stuffs, and strings of precious stones.

When the kings came back from their campaigns, they built temples of the
yellow and rose-tinted sandstone, with obelisks of green granite and
long avenues of sphinxes, to commemorate their victories and immortalise
their names. They employed prisoners of war to erect these memorials of
war; it became the fashion to boast that a great structure had been
raised without a single Egyptian being doomed to work. By means of these
victories the servitude of the lower classes was mitigated for a time,
and the wealth of the upper classes was enormously increased. The
conquests it is true, were not permanent; they were merely raids on a
large scale. But in very ancient times, when seclusion and suspicion
formed the foreign policy of states, and when national intercourse was
scarcely known, invasion was often the pioneer of trade. The wealth of
Egypt was not derived from military spoil--which soon dissolves, however
large it may appear--but from the new markets opened for her linen
goods.

It is certain that the riches contained in the country were immense. The
house of an Egyptian gentleman was furnished in an elegant and costly
style. The cabinets, tables, and chairs were beautifully carved, and
were made entirely of foreign woods--of ebony from Ethiopia, of a kind
of mahogany from India, of deal from Syria, or of cedar from the heights
of Lebanon. The walls and ceilings were painted in gorgeous patterns
similar to those which are now woven into carpets. Every sitting room
was adorned with a vase of perfumes, a flower-stand, and an altar for
unburnt offerings. The house was usually one storey high, but the roof
was itself an apartment, sometimes covered, but always open at the
sides. There the house-master would ascent in the evening to breathe the
cool wind, and to watch the city waking into life when the heat was
past. The streets swarmed and hummed with men; the river was covered
with gilded gondolas gliding by. And when the sudden night had fallen,
lamps flashed and danced below; from the house-yards came sounds of
laughter and the tinkling of castanets; from the stream came the wailing
music of the boatmen and the soft splashing of the lazy oar.

The Egyptian grandee had also his villa or country house. Its large
walled garden was watered by a canal communicating with the Nile. One
side of the canal was laid out in a walk shaded by trees--the leafy
sycamore, the acacia with its yellow blossoms, and the doum or Theban
palm. In the centre of the garden was a vineyard, the branches being
trained over trellis-work so as to form a boudoir of green leaves, with
clusters of red grapes glowing like pictures on the walls. Beyond the
vineyard, at the further end of the garden, stood a summer house or
kiosk; in front of it a pond which was covered with the broad leaves and
blue flowers of the lotus, and in which waterfowl played. It was also
stocked with fish which the owner amused himself by spearing: or
sometimes he angled for them as he sat on his camp-stool. Adjoining this
garden were the stables and coach-houses, and a large park in which
gazelles were preserved for coursing. The Egyptian gentry were ardent
lovers of the chase. They killed wild ducks with throw-sticks, made use
of decoys, and trained cats to retrieve. They harpooned hippopotami in
the Nile; they went out hunting in the desert with lions trained like
dogs. They were enthusiastic pigeon fanciers, and had many different
breeds of dogs. Their social enjoyments were not unlike our own. Young
ladies in Egypt had no croquet, but the gentle sport of archery was
known among them. They had also boating parties on the Nile, and water
picnics beneath the shady foliage of the Egyptian bean. They gave
dinners, to which, as in all civilised countries, the fair sex were
invited. The guests arrived for the most part in palanquins, but the
young men of fashion drove up to the door in their cabs, and usually
arrived rather late. Each guest was received by a cluster of servants,
who took off his sandals, gave him water to wash his hands, anointed and
perfumed him, presented him with a bouquet, and offered him some raw
cabbage to increase his appetite for wine, a glass of which was taken
before dinner--the sherry and bitters of antiquity.

The gentlemen wore wigs and false beards, and their hands were loaded
with rings. The ladies wore their own hair plaited in a most elaborate
manner, the result of many hours between their little bronze mirrors and
the skilful fingers of their slaves. Their eyelashes were pencilled with
the antimonial powder, their finger-nails tinged with the henna's golden
juice--fashions older than the Pyramids which still govern the women of
the East.

The guests met in the dining-room, and grace was said before they sat
down. They were crowned with garlands of the lotus, the violet, and the
rose--the florists of Egypt were afterwards famous in Rome. A band of
musicians played during the repast on the harp, the lyre, the flute, and
the guitar. Some of the servants carried round glass decanters of wine
encircled with flowers, and various dishes upon trays. Others fanned the
porous earth-jars which contained the almond-flavoured water of the
Nile. Others burnt Arabian incense or flakes of sweet-scented wood to
perfume the air. Others changed the garlands of the guests as soon as
they began to fade. Between the courses dwarfs and deformed persons
skipped about before the company with marvellous antics and contortions;
jugglers and gymnasts exhibited many extraordinary feats; girls jumped
through hoops, tossed several balls into the air after the manner of the
East, and performed dances after the manner of the West. Strange as it
may appear, the pirouette was known to the Egyptians three thousand
years ago, and stranger still, their ballet-girls danced it in lighter
clothing than is worn by those who now grace the operatic boards. At the
beginning of the repast a mummy, richly painted and gilded, was carried
round by a servant, who showed it to each guest in turn and said, "Look
on this, drink and enjoy thyself, for such as it is now, so thou shalt
be when thou art dead." So solemn an injunction was not disregarded, and
the dinner often ended as might be expected from the manner in which it
was begun. The Hogarths of the period have painted the young dandy being
carried home by his footman without his wig, while the lady in her own
apartment is showing unmistakable signs of the same disorder.

But we must leave these pleasant strolls in the bypaths of history and
return to the broad and beaten road. The vast wealth and soft luxury of
the New Empire undermined its strength. It became apparent to the
Egyptians themselves that the nation was enervated and corrupt, a
swollen, pampered body from which all energy and vigour had for ever
fled. A certain Pharaoh commanded a curse to be inscribed in one of the
temples against the name of Menes, who had first seduced the Egyptians
from the wholesome simplicity of early times. Filled with a spirit of
prophecy, the king foresaw his country's ruin, which indeed was near at
hand, for though he himself was buried in peace, his son and successor
was compelled to hide in the marshes from a foreign foe.

To the same cause may be traced the ruin and the fall, not only of
Egypt, but of all the powers of the ancient world; of Nineveh and
Babylon and Persia; of the Macedonian kingdom and the Western Empire. As
soon as those nations became rich they began to decay. If this were the
fifth century, and we were writing history in the silent and melancholy
streets of Rome, we should probably propound a theory entirely false,
yet justified at that time by the universal experience of mankind. We
should declare that nations are mortal like the individuals of which
they are composed; that wealth is the poison, luxury the disease, which
shortens their existence and dooms them to an early death. We should
point to the gigantic ruins around--to that vast and mouldering body
from which the soul had fled--moralise about Lucullus and his thrushes,
recount the enormous sums that had been paid for a dress, a table or a
child, and assure our Gothic pupils that national life and health are
only to be preserved by contented poverty and simple fare.

But what has been the history of those barbarians? In the Dark Ages
there was no luxury in Europe. It was a miserable continent inhabited by
robbers, fetishmen, and slaves. Even the Italians of the eleventh
century wore clothes of unlined leather, and had no taste except for
horses and for shining arms, no pride except that of building strong
towers for their lairs. Man and wife grabbled for their supper from the
same plate, while a squalid boy stood by them with a torch to light
their greasy fingers to their mouths. Then the India trade was opened;
the New World was discovered; Europe became rich, luxurious, and
enlightened. The sunshine of wealth began first to beam upon the costs
of the Mediterranean Sea, and gradually spread towards the North. In the
England of Elizabeth it was declared from the pulpit that the
introduction of forks would demoralise the people and provoke divine
wrath. But in spite of sermons and sumptuary laws, Italian luxuries
continued to pour in, and national prosperity continued to increase. At
the present day the income of a nation affords a fair criterion of its
intellect and also of its strength. It may safely be asserted that the
art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and
credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm. As for
luxury, a small tradesman at the present day is more luxurious than a
king in ancient times. It has been wisely and wittily remarked that
Augustus Caesar had neither glass panes to his windows nor a shirt to
his back, and the luxury of the Roman senators may without exaggeration
be compared with that of the West Indian creoles in the eighteenth
century. The gentleman and his lady glittered with jewels; the table and
sideboard blazed with plate; but the house itself was little better than
a barn, and the attendants a crowd of dirty, half-naked slaves who
jostled the guests as they performed the service of the table, and sat
down in the verandah over the remnants of the soup before they would
condescend to go to the kitchen for the fish.

In the modern world we find luxury the harbinger of progress, in the
ancient world the omen of decline. But how can this be? Nature does not
contradict herself; the laws which govern the movements of society are
as regular and unchangeable as those which govern the movements of the
stars.

Wealth is in reality as indispensable to mankind for purposes of growth
as water to the soil. It is not the fault of the water if its natural
circulation is interfered with, if certain portions of the land are
drowned while others are left completely dry. Wealth in all countries of
the ancient world was artificially confined to a certain class. More
than half the area of the Greek and Roman world was shut off by slavery
from the fertilising stream. This single fact is sufficient to explain
how that old civilisation, in some respects so splendid, was yet so
one-sided and incomplete.

But the civilisation of Egypt was less developed still, for that country
was enthralled by institutions from which Greece and Rome, happily for
them, were free.

It has been shown that the instinct for self-preservation, the struggle
for bare life against hostile nature, first aroused the mental activity
of the Egyptian priests, while the constant attacks of the desert tribes
developed the martial energies of the military men. Next, the ambition
of power produced an equally good effect. The priests invented, the
warriors campaigned; mines were opened, manufactories were founded; a
system of foreign commerce was established; sloth was abolished by whip
and chain; the lower classes were saddled, the upper classes were
spurred; the nation careered gallantly along. Finally, chivalrous
ardour, intellectual passion, inspired heart and brain; war was loved
for glory's sake; the philosopher sought only to discover, the artist to
perfect.

And then there came a race of men who, like those that inherit great
estates, had no incentive to continue the work which had been so
splendidly begun. In one generation the genius of Egypt slumbered, in
the next it died. Its painters and sculptors were no longer possessed of
that fruitful faculty with which kindred spirits contemplate each
other's works; which not only takes, but gives; which produces from
whatever it receives; which embraces to wrestle, and wrestles to
embrace; which is sometimes sympathy, sometimes jealousy, sometimes
hatred, sometimes love, but which always causes the heart to flutter,
and the face to flush, and the mind to swell with the desire to rival
and surpass; which is sometimes as the emulative awe with which
Michaelangelo surveyed the dome that yet gladdens the eyes of those who
sit on the height of fair Fiesole, or who wander afar off in silver
Arno's vale; which is sometimes as that rapture of admiring wrath which
incited the genius of Byron when his great rival was pouring forth
masterpiece on masterpiece with invention more varied, though perhaps
less lofty, and with fancy more luxuriant even than his own.

The creative period passed away, and the critical age set in. Instead of
working, the artists were content to talk. Their admiration was sterile,
yet still it was discerning. But the next period was lower still. It was
that of blind worship and indiscriminating awe. The past became sacred,
and all that it had produced, good and bad, was reverenced alike. This
kind of idolatry invariably springs up in that interval of languor and
reaction which succeeds an epoch of production. In the mind-history of
every land there is a time when slavish imitation is inculcated as a
duty, and novelty regarded as a crime. But in Egypt the arts and
sciences were entangled with religion. The result will easily be
guessed. Egypt stood still, and theology turned her into stone.
Conventionality was admired, then enforced. The development of the mind
was arrested; it was forbidden to do any new thing.

In primitive times it is perhaps expedient that rational knowledge
should be united with religion. It is only by means of superstition that
a rude people can be induced to support, and a robber soldiery to
respect, an intellectual class. But after a certain time this alliance
must be ended, or harm will surely come. The boy must leave the
apartments of the women when he arrives at a certain age. Theology is an
excellent nurse, but a bad mistress for grown-up minds. The essence of
religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the
function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to
improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either
science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the
religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal.

The religious ideas of the Egyptians became associated with a certain
style. It was enacted that the human figure should be drawn always in
the same manner, with the same colours, contour, and proportions. Thus
the artist was degraded to an artisan, and originality was strangled in
its birth.

The physicians were compelled to prescribe for their patients according
to the rules set down in the standard works. If they adopted a treatment
of their own and the patient did not recover, they were put to death.
Thus even in desperate cases heroic remedies could not be tried, and
experiment, the first condition of discovery, was disallowed.

A censorship of literature was not required, for literature in the
proper sense of the term did not exist. Writing, it is true, was widely
spread. Cattle, clothes, and workmen's tools were marked with the
owners' names. The walls of the temples were covered and adorned with
that beautiful picture character, more like drawing than writing, which
cold delight the eyes of those who were unable to penetrate its sense.
Hieroglyphics may be found on everything in Egypt, from the colossal
statue to the amulet and gem. But the art was practised only by the
priests, as the painted history plainly declares. No books are to be
seen in the furniture of houses; no female is depicted in the act of
reading; the papyrus scroll and pencil never appear except in connection
with some official act.

The library at Thebes was much admired. It had a blue ceiling speckled
with golden stars. Allegorical pictures of a religious character and
portraits of the sacred animals were painted on the walls. Above the
door were inscribed these words, "The Balsam of the Soul." Yet this
magnificent building contained merely a collection of prayer books and
ancient hymns, some astronomical almanacs, some works on religious
philosophy, medicine, music, and geometry, and the historical archives,
which were probably little else than a register of the names of kings,
with the dates of certain inventions and a scanty outline of events.

Even these books, so few in number, were not open to all the members of
the learned class. They were the manuals of the various departments or
professions, and each profession stood apart; each profession was even
sub-divided within itself. In medicine and surgery there were no general
practitioners. There were oculists, aurists, dentists, doctors of the
head, doctors of the stomach, etc., and each was forbidden to invade the
territory of his colleagues. This specialist arrangement has been highly
praised, but it has nothing in common with that which has arisen in
modern times.

It is one of the first axioms of medical science that no one is
competent to treat the disease of a single organ unless he is competent
to treat the diseases of the whole frame. The folly of dividing the
diseases of such organs as the head and stomach, between which the most
intimate sympathy exists, is evident even to the unlearned. But the
whole structure is united by delicate white threads, and by innumerable
pipes of blood. It is scarcely possible for any complaint to influence
one part alone. The Egyptian, however, was marked off like a chess board
into little squares, and whenever the pain made a move a fresh doctor
had to be called in.

This arrangement was part of a system founded on an excellent principle,
but carried to absurd excess. It is needless to explain that division of
labour is highly potent in developing skill and economising time. It is
also clearly of advantage that in an early stage of society the son
should follow the occupation of the father. It is possible that
hereditary skill or tastes come into play; it is certain that
apprenticeship at home is more natural and more efficient than
apprenticeship abroad. The father will take more pains to teach, the boy
will take more pains to learn, than will be the case when master and
pupil are strangers to each other.

The founders of Egyptian civilisation were acquainted with these facts.
Hence they established customs which their successors petrified into
unchanging laws. They did it no doubt with the best of motives. They
adored the grand and noble wisdom of their fathers; whatever came from
them must be cherished and preserved. They must not presume to depart
from the guidance of those god-like men. They must paint as they
painted, physic as they physicked, pray as they prayed. The separation
of classes which they had made must be rendered rigid and eternal.

And so the arts and sciences were ordered to stand still, and society
was divided and sub-divided into functions and professions, trades and
crafts. Every man was doomed to follow the occupation of his father, to
marry within his own class, to die as he was born. Hope was torn out of
the human life. Egypt was no longer a nation, but an assemblage of
torpid castes isolated from one another and breeding in and in. It was
no longer a body animated by the same heart, fed by the same blood, but
an automaton neatly pieced together, of which the head was the
priesthood, the arms were the army, and the feet the working-class. In
quiescence it was a perfect image of the living form, but a touch came
from without, and the arms broke asunder at the joints and fell upon the
ground.

The colony founded in the Sudan by the exiled Pharaohs became after the
restoration an important province. When the new empire began to decline
a governor-general rebelled, and the kingdom of Ethiopia was
established. It was a medley dominion composed of brown men and black
men, shepherds and savages, half-caste Egyptians, Arabs, Berbers, and
negroes, ruled over by a king and a college of priests. It was enriched
by annual slave hunts into the Black Country, and by the caravan trade
in ivory, gold dust, and gum. It also received East India goods and
Arabian produce through its ports on the Red Sea. Meroe, its capital,
attained the reputation of a great city; it possessed its temples and
its pyramids like those of Egypt, but on a smaller scale. The Ethiopian
empire in its best days might have comprised the modern Egyptian
provinces of Kordofan and Sennaar, with the mountain kingdom of
Abyssinia as it existed under Theodore. Of all the classical countries
it was the most romantic and the most remote. It was situated, according
to the Greeks, on the extreme limits of the world; its inhabitants were
the most just of men, and Jupiter dined with them twice a year. They
bathed in the waters of a violet-scented spring which endowed them with
long life, noble bodies, and glossy skins. They chained their prisoners
with golden fetters; they had bows which none but themselves could bend.
It is at least certain that Ethiopia took its place among the powers of
the ancient world. It is mentioned in the Jewish records and in the
Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions.

So far had Egypt fallen that now it was conquered by its ancient
province. Sabaco of Ethiopia seized the throne and sat upon it many
years. But he was frightened by a dream; he believed that a misfortune
impended over him in Egypt. He abdicated in haste and fled back to his
native land.

His departure was followed by uproar and confusion, a complete
disruption of Egyptian society, usurpation, and civil war.

But why should this have been? Sabaco was an Egyptian by descent, though
his blood had been darkened on the female side. He had governed in the
Egyptian manner. He had abolished capital punishment, but in no other
way had altered the ancient laws. He had improved the public works. He
had taken the country rather as a native usurper than as a foreign foe.
His reign was merely a change of dynasty, and Egyptian history is
numbered by dynasties as English history is numbered by kings.

But indirectly the Ethiopian conquest had prepared a revolution. Between
the two services, the Army and the Church, there had existed a constant
and perhaps wholesome rivalry since the days of Menes, the first king.
It was a victory of the warrior class which established the regal power.
It was a victory of the priests which assigned to themselves the right
hand, to the officers the left hand, of the sovereign when seated on his
throne. It was an evident compromise between the two that the king
should be elected from the army, and that he should be ordained as soon
as he was crowned. During the brilliant campaigns of the Restoration the
military had been in power, but a long period of inaction had intervened
since then. The discipline of the soldiers was relaxed; their dignity
was lowered; they no longer tilled their own land--that was done by
foreign slaves. Their rivals possessed the affection and reverence of
the common people, while these soldiers, who had never seen a battle,
were detested as idle drones who lived upon what they had not earned.
Under the new dynasty their position became insecure. In Ethiopia there
was no military caste. The army of Sabaco had been levied from the
pastoral tribes on the outskirts of the desert, from the Abyssinian
mountaineers and the negroes of the river plain. The king of Ethiopia
was a priest, elected by his peers. He therefore regarded the soldier
aristocracy with no friendly eye. He did not formally invade their
prescriptive rights, but he must have disarmed them or in some way have
taken out their sting. For as soon as he was gone the priests were able
to form an alliance with the people, and to place one of their own caste
upon the throne. This king deprived the soldiers of their lands, and the
triumph of the hierarchy was complete.

But in such a country as Egypt Disestablishment is a dangerous thing.
During long centuries the people had been taught to associate innovation
with impiety. That venerable structure the Egyptian constitution had
been raised by no human hands. As the gods had appointed certain animals
to swim in the water, and others to fly in the air, and others to move
upon the earth, so they had decreed that one man should be a priest, and
that another should be a soldier, and that another should till the
ground. There are times when every man feels discontented with his lot.
But it is evident that if men were able to change their occupation
whenever they chose, there would be a continual passing to and fro.
Nobody would have patience to learn a trade; nobody would settle down in
life. In a short time the land would become a desert, and society would
be dissolved. To provide against this the gods had ordained that each
man should do his duty in that state of life into which he had been
called, and woe be to him that disobeys the gods! Their laws are eternal
and can never change. Their vengeance is speedy and can never fail.

Such, no doubt, was the teaching of the Egyptian Church, and now the
Church had shown it to be false. The revolution had been begun, and, as
usually happens, it could not be made to stop half way. As soon as the
first precedent was unloosed, down came the whole fabric with a crash.
The priest-king Sethos reigned in peace, but as soon as he died the
central government succumbed; the old local interests which had been
lying dormant for ages raised their heads; the empire broke up into
twelve states, each governed by a petty king.

We now approach the event which first brought Egypt into contact with
the European world. Psammiticus, one of the twelve princes, received as
his allotment the swampy district which adjoined the sea-coast and the
mouths of the Nile. His fortune, as we shall see, was made by this
position.

The commerce of Egypt had hitherto been conducted entirely by means of
caravans. From Arabia Felix came a long train of camels laden with the
gums of that aromatic land, and with the more precious produce of
countries far beyond--with the pearls of the Persian Gulf and the
carpets of Babylon, the pepper and ginger of Malagar, the shawls of
Kashmir, the cinnamon of Ceylon, the fine muslins of Bengal, the
calicoes of Coromandel, the nutmegs and camphor and cloves of the Indian
Archipelago, and even silk and musk from the distant Chinese shores.
From Syria came other caravans with the balm of Gilead, so precious in
medicine, asphalt from the Dead Sea for embalming, cedar from Lebanon,
and enormous quantities of wine and olive oil in earthen jars. Meroe
contributed the spices of the Somali country, ebony, ivory, ostrich
feathers, slaves, and gold in twisted rings; the four latter products
were also imported direct from Darfour, and by another route which
connected Egypt through Fezzan with Carthage, Morocco, and the regions
beyond the desert in the neighbourhood of Timbuktu. In return, the
beautiful glass wares of the Egyptians and other artistic manufactures
were exported to Hindustan; the linen goods of Memphis were carried into
the very heart of Africa as Manchester goods are now; and then, as now,
a girdle of beads was the essential part of an African young lady's
dress.

On the side of the Mediterranean Egypt was a closed land, and this
Chinese policy had not been adopted from superstitious motives. The
first ships which sailed that sea were pirates who had kidnapped and
plundered the dwellers on the coast. The government had therefore in
self-defence placed a garrison at Rhacotis harbour, with orders to kill
or enslave any stranger who should land. When the Phoenicians from
pirates had become merchants they were allowed to trade with Egypt by
way of the land, and with this they were content. It was left for
another people to open up the trade by sea.

Ionia was the fairest province of Asiatic Greece. It lay opposite to
Athens, its motherland. The same soft blue waters, the same fragrant
breezes caressed their shores by turn. It was celebrated by the poets as
one of the gardens of the world. There the black soil granted a rich
harvest and the fruit hung heavily on the branches. It was the
birth-place of poetry, of history, of philosophy, and of art. It was
there that the Homeric poems were composed. It was there that men first
cast off the chains of authority and sought in Nature the materials of a
creed.

It was, however, as a seafaring and commercial people that the Ionians
first obtained renown. They served on board Phoenician vessels and
laboured in the dockyards of Tyre and Sidon until they learnt how to
build the "sea-horses" for themselves, and how to navigate by that small
but constant star which the Tyrians had discovered in the constellation
of the Little Bear. They took to the sea on their own account, and in
Egypt they found a good market. The wine and oil of Palestine, which the
Phoenicians imported, were expensive luxuries; the lower classes drank
only the fermented sap of the palm-tree and barley beer, and had only
castor oil, with which they rubbed their bodies, but with which, for
obvious reasons, they could not cook their food. The Ionians were able
to sell red wine and sweet oil at a much lower price, for in the first
place they had vineyards and olive groves of their own, and secondly
such bulky wares could be brought by sea more cheaply than by land.

The Greeks first appeared on the Egyptian coast as pirates clad in
bronze, next as smugglers, welcomed by the people, but in opposition to
the laws, and lastly as allies and honoured friends. They took advantage
of the confusion which followed the departure of Sabaco to push up the
Nile with thirty vessels, each of fifty oars, and established factories
upon its banks. They negotiated with Psammiticus, who ascertained that
their country produced not only oil but men. He ordered a cargo, and
transports arrived with troops. Europeans for the first time entered the
valley of the Nile. Their gallantry and discipline were irresistible,
and the empire of the Pharaohs was restored. But now commenced a new
regime. There succeeded to the throne a series of kings who were not
related to the ancient Pharaohs, who were not always men of noble birth,
who were not even good Egyptians. They were called Phil-Hellenes, or
Lovers of the Greeks. Of these Psammiticus was the founder and the
first. He moved Egypt towards the sea. He placed his capital near the
mouth of the river, that the Greek ships might anchor beneath its walls.
This new city of Sais, being distant from the quarries, was built of
bricks from the black mud of the Nile, but it was adorned with spoils
from the forsaken Memphis. Chapels, obelisks, and sphinxes were brought
down on rafts. There was also a kind of Renaissance under the new kings;
for a short time the arts again became alive. Psammiticus retained the
soldiers who had fought his battles, and sent children to the camp to be
taught Greek. Hence rose a class who acted as brokers, interpreters, and
ciceroni to the travellers who soon crowded into Egypt. The king
encouraged such visits, and gave safe-conducts to those who desired to
pass into the interior.

All this was a cause of deep offence to the people of the land. They
regarded their country as a temple, and all strangers as impure. And now
they saw men whose swords had been reddened with Egyptian blood
swaggering as conquerors through the streets, pointing with derision at
the sacred animals, eating things strangled and unclean. The warriors
were those who suffered most. As a caste they still survived, but all
their power and prestige were gone. In battle the foreigners were
assigned the post of honour--the right wing. In times of peace the
foreigners were the favourite regiments--the household troops, the
Guards. While the royals lived merrily at Sais crowned with garlands of
the papyrus, and revelling at banquets to the music of the flute, the
native troops were stationed on the hot and dismal frontiers of the
desert; year followed year, and they were not relieved. Such a state of
things was no longer to be borne. One king had robbed them of their
lands, and now another had robbed them of their honour. They were no
longer soldiers, they were slaves; they determined to leave the country
in which they were despised, and to seek a better fortune in the Sudan.
In number two hundred thousand, they gathered themselves together and
began their march.

They were soon overtaken by envoys from the king, who had no desire to
lose an army. The soldiers were entreated to return and not to desert
their fatherland. They cried out, beating their shields and shaking
their spears, that they would soon get another fatherland. Then the
messengers began to speak of their wives and little ones at home. Would
they leave them also, and go wifeless and childless to a savage land?
But one of the soldiers explained, with a coarse gesture, that they had
the means of producing families wherever they might go. This ended the
conference. Psammiticus pursued them with his Ionians, but could not
overtake them. In the wastes of Nubia there may yet be seen a colossal
statue, on the right leg of which is an inscription in Greek announcing
that it was there they gave up the chase. The Egyptian soldiers arrived
at Meroe in safety; the king presented them with a province which had
rebelled. They drove out the men, married the women, and did much to
civilise the native tribes. In the meantime Psammiticus and his
successors opened wider and wider the gloomy portals of the land. The
town of Naucratis was set apart, like Canton, for the foreign trade.
Nine independent Greek cities had their separate establishments within
that town, and their magistrates and consuls, who administered their
respective laws. The merchants met in the Hellenion, which was half
temple, half exchange, to transact their business and offer sacrifices
to the gods. Naucratis was in all respects a European town. There the
garlic-chewing sailors, when they came on shore, could enjoy a holiday
in the true Greek style. They could stroll in the market-place, where
the money-changers sat before their tables and the wine merchants ran
about with sample flasks under their arms, and where garlands of
flowers, strange-looking fish, and heaps of purple dates were set out
for sale. They could resort to the barbers' shops and gather the gossip
of the day, or to taverns where quail fighting was always going on. Nor
were the chief ornaments of sea-port society wanting to grace the scene.
No Egyptian girl, as Herodotus discovered, would kiss a Greek. But
certain benevolent and enterprising men had imported a number of Heterae
or "lady-friends," the most famous of whom was Rhodopis, "the
rosy-faced," with whom Sappho's brother fell in love, and whom the
poetess lampooned.

The foreign policy of Egypt was now completely changed. A long period of
seclusion had followed the conquests of the new empire. But the
battle-pieces of the ancient time still glowed upon the temple walls.
With their vivid colours and animated scenes they seemed to incite the
modern Pharaohs to heroic deeds. The throne was surrounded by warlike
and restless men. It was determined that Egypt should become a naval
power. For this, timber was indispensable, and the forests of Lebanon
must be seized. War was carried to the continent. Syria was reduced. A
garrison was planted on the banks of the Euphrates. A navy was erected
in the Mediterranean Sea, and the Tyrians were defeated in a great
sea-battle. The Suez Canal was opened for the first time, and an
exploring expedition circumnavigated Africa.

Yet, for all that and all that, the Egyptian people were not content.
The victories won by mercenary troops excited little patriotic pride,
and the least reverse occasioned the most gloomy forebodings, the most
serious discontent. The Egyptians indeed had good cause to be
alarmed--the Phil-Hellenes were playing at a dangerous game. Times had
changed since Sesostris overran Asia. A great power had arisen on the
banks of the Tigris; a greater power still on the banks of the
Euphrates. They had narrowly escaped Sennacherib when Nineveh was in its
glory, and now Babylon had arisen and Nebuchadnezzar had drawn the
sword. For a long time Chaldea and Egypt fought over Syria, their
battle-ground and their prey. At last came the decisive day of
Carchemish. The Phoenicians, the Syrians, and the Jews obtained new
masters; the Egyptians were driven out of Asia.

Yet even then the kings were not cured of their taste for war. An
expedition was sent against Cyrene, a Greek kingdom on the northern
coast of Africa. It was unsuccessful, and the sullen disaffection which
had so long smouldered burst forth into flame. The king was killed, and
Amasis, a man of the people, was placed upon the throne.

This monarch did not go to war, and he contrived to favour the Greeks
without offending the prejudices of his fellow-countrymen. He was,
however, a true Phil-Hellene; he encircled himself with a bodyguard of
Greeks; he married a princess of Cyrene; he gave a handsome subscription
to the fund for rebuilding the temple at Delphi; he extended the
commerce of Egypt and improved its manufactures. The liberal policy in
trade which he pursued had the most satisfactory results. Never had
Egypt been so rich as she was then. But she was defenceless; she had
lost her arms. It is probable that under Amasis she was a vassal of
Babylon, paying tribute every year; and now a time was coming when gold
could no longer purchase repose, when the horrified people would see
their temples stripped, their idols dashed to pieces, their sacred
animals murdered, their priests scourged, and the embalmed body of their
king snatched from its last resting-place and flung upon the flames.

A vast wilderness extends from the centre of Africa to the jungles of
Bengal. It consists of rugged mountain and of sandy wastes; it is
traversed by three river basins or valley plains.

In its centre is the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates. On its east is
the basin of the Indus; on its west is the basin of the Nile. Each of
these river systems is enclosed by deserts. The whole region may be
pictured to the mind as a broad yellow field with three green streaks
running north and south.

Egypt, Babylonia, and India proper, or the Punjab, are the primeval
countries of the ancient world. In these three desert-bound,
river-watered valleys we find, in the earliest dawn of history,
civilisation growing wild. Each in a similar manner had been fostered
and tortured by Nature into progress; in each existed a people skilled
in the management of land, acquainted with manufactures, and possessing
some knowledge of practical science and of art. The civilisation of
India was the youngest of the three, yet Egypt and Chaldea were
commercially its vassals and dependents. India offered for sale articles
not elsewhere to be found--the shining warts of the oyster; glass-like
stones dug up out of the bowels of the earth, or gathered in the beds of
dried-up brooks; linen which was plucked as a blossom from a tree, and
manufactured into cloth as white as snow; transparent fabrics, webs of
woven wind which when laid on the dewy grass melted from the eyes; above
all, those glistening, glossy threads stolen from the body of a
caterpillar, beautiful as the wings of the moth into which that
caterpillar is afterwards transformed.

Neither the Indians, the Chaldeans, nor the Egyptians were in the habit
of travelling beyond the confines of their own valleys. They resembled
islanders, and they had no ships. But the intermediate seas were
navigated by the wandering shepherd tribes, who sometimes pastured their
flocks by the waters of the Indus, sometimes by the waters of the Nile.
It was by their means that the trade between the river lands was carried
on. They possessed the camels and other beasts of burden requisite for
the transport of goods. Their numbers and their warlike habits, their
intimate acquaintance with the watering-places and seasons of the
desert, enabled them to carry the goods in safety through a dangerous
land, while the regular profits they derived from the trade, and the
oaths by which they were bound, induced them to act fairly to those by
whom they were employed. At a later period the Chinese, who were once a
great naval people, and who claim the discovery of the New World,
doubled Cape Comorin in their huge junks, and sailed up the western
coasts of India into the Persian Gulf, and along the coast of Arabia to
the mouth of the Red Sea. It as probably from them that the arts of
shipbuilding and navigation were acquired by the Arabs of Yemen and the
Indians of Guzerat, who then made it their business to supply Babylon
and Egypt and Eastern Africa with India goods. At a later period still
these India goods were carried by the Phoenicians to the coasts of
Europe, and acorn-eating savages were awakened to industry and ambition.
India, as a "land of desire," has contributed much to the development of
man. On the routes of the India caravan, as on the banks of navigable
rivers, arose great and wealthy cities, which perished when the route
was changed. Open the book of universal history at what period we may,
it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and
foreign negotiation.

The intercourse between the Indians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians was often
interrupted by wars, which recurred like epidemics, and which like
epidemics closely resembled one another. The roving tribes of the sandy
deserts, the pastoral mountains, or the elevated steppe-plateaux pressed
by some mysterious impulse--a famine, an enemy in their rear, or the
ambition of a single man--swept down upon the plains of the Tigris and
Euphrates, and thence spread their conquests right and left. Sometimes
they merely encamped, and the natives recovered their independence. But
more frequently they adopted the manners of the conquered people, and
flung themselves into luxury with the same ardour which they had
displayed in war. This luxury was not based on refinement but on
sensuality, and it soon made them indolent and weak. Sooner or later
they suffered the fate which their fathers had inflicted, and a new race
of invaders poured over the empire, to be supplanted in their turn when
their time was come.

Invasions of this nature were on the whole beneficial to the human race.
The mingling of a young, powerful people with the wise but somewhat
weary nations of the plains produced an excellent effect. And since the
conquerors adopted the luxury of the conquered, they were obliged to
adopt the same measure for supplying the foreign goods--for luxury means
always something from abroad. As soon as the first shock was over the
trade routes were again opened, and perhaps extended, by the brand-new
energies of the barbarian kings.


Western Asia


Babylonia or Chaldea, the alluvial country which occupies the lower
course of the Euphrates, was undoubtedly the original abode of
civilisation in Western Asia. But it was on the banks of the Tigris that
the first great empire arose--the first at least of which we know. For
who can tell how many cities, undreamt of by historians, lie buried
beneath the Assyrian plains? And Nineveh itself may have been built from
some dead metropolis, as Babylon bricks were used in the building of
Baghdad. Recorded history is a thing of yesterday--the narrative of
modern man. There is, however, a science of history; by this we are
enabled to restore in faint outline the unwritten past, and by this we
are assured that whatever the names and number of the forgotten empires
may have been, they merely repeated one another. In describing the
empire of Nineveh we describe them all.

The Assyrian empire covered a great deal of ground. The kingdom of Troy
was one of its fiefs. Its rule was sometimes extended to the islands of
the Grecian sea. Babylon was its subject. It stretched far away into
Asia. But the conquered provinces were loosely governed, or rather no
attempt was made to govern them at all. Phoenicia was allowed to remain
a federation of republics. Israel, Judah, and Damascus were allowed to
continue their angry bickerings and petty wars. The relations between
the conquered rulers and their subjects were left untouched. Their laws,
their manners, and their religion were in no way changed. It was merely
required that the vassal kings or senates should acknowledge the Emperor
of Nineveh as their suzerain or lord, that they should send him a
certain tribute every year, and that they should furnish a certain
contingent of troops when he went to war.

As long as a vigorous and dreaded king sat upon the throne this simple
machinery worked well enough. Every year the tributes, with certain
forms of homage and with complimentary presents of curiosities and
artisans, were brought to the metropolis. But whenever an imperial
calamity of any kind occurred--an unsuccessful foreign war, the death or
even sickness of the reigning prince--the tributes were withheld. Then
the emperor set to work to subdue the provinces again. But this time the
conquered were treated not as enemies only but as traitors. The vassal
king and his advisers were tortured to death, the cities were razed to
the ground, and the rebels were transplanted by thousands to another
land--an effectual method of destroying their patriotism or religion of
the soil. The Syrian expeditions of Sennacherib were provoked by the
contumacy of Judah and of Israel. The kingdom of Israel was blotted out,
but a camp plague broke up the Assyrian army before Jerusalem, and not
long afterwards the empire crumbled away. All the vassal nations became
free, and for a short time Nineveh stood alone, naked but unattacked.
Then there was war in every direction, and when it was over the city was
a heap of charred ruins, and three great kingdoms took its place.

The first kingdom was that of the Medes, who had set the example of
rebellion, and by whom Nineveh had been destroyed. They inhabited the
highland regions bordering on the Tigris, Ecbatana was their capital.
They were renowned for their luxury, and especially for their robes of
flowing silk. Their priests were called Magi, and formed a separate
tribe or caste; they were dressed in white, lived only on vegetables,
slept on beds of leaves, worshipped the sun and the element of fire, as
symbols of the deity, and followed the precepts of Zoroaster. The empire
of the Medes was bounded on the west by the Tigris. They inherited the
Assyrian provinces in Central Asia, the boundaries of which are not
precisely known.

The civilisation of Nineveh had been derived from Babylon, a city famous
for its rings and gems, which were beautifully engraved, its carpets in
which the figures of fabulous animals were interwoven, its magnifying
glasses, its sun-dials, and its literature printed in cuneiform
characters on clay tablets, which were then baked in the oven. Many
hundreds of these have lately been deciphered, and are found to consist
chiefly of military dispatches, law papers, royal game-books,
observatory reports, agricultural treatises, and religious documents. In
the partition of Assyria Babylon obtained Mesopotamia, or "the Land
between the Rivers," and Syria, including Phoenicia and Palestine.
Nebuchadnezzar was the founder of the Empire; he routed the Egyptians,
he destroyed Jerusalem, transplanted the Jews on account of their
rebellion, and reduced Tyre after a memorable siege. He built a new
Babylon as Augustus built a new Rome, and the city became one of the
wonders of the world. It was a vast fortified district, five or six
times the area of London, interspersed with parks and gardens and
fields, and enclosed by walls on which six chariots could be driven side
by side. Its position in a flat country made it resemble in the distance
a mountain with trees waving at the top. These were the "hanging
gardens," a grove of large trees planted on the square surface of a
gigantic tower, and ingeniously watered from below. Nebuchadnezzar
erected this extraordinary structure to please his wife, who came from
the highlands of Media, and who, weary of the interminable plains,
coveted meadows on mountain tops such as her native land contained. The
Euphrates ran through the centre of the city, and was crossed by a stone
bridge which was a marvel for its time. But more wonderful still, there
was a kind of Thames Tunnel passing underneath the river, and connecting
palaces on either side. The city was united to its provinces by roads
and fortified posts; rafts inflated with skins, and reed boats pitched
over with bitumen, floated down the river with timber from the mountains
of Armenia and stones for the purposes of building. A canal large enough
for ships to ascend was dug from Babylon to the Persian Gulf, and on its
banks were innumerable machines for raising the water and spreading it
upon the soil.

The third kingdom was that of the Lydians, a people in manners and
appearance resembling the Greeks. They did not consider themselves
behind the rest of the world. They boasted that they had invented dice,
coin, and the art of shop-keeping, and also that the famous Etruscan
state was a colony of theirs. They inhabited Asia Minor, a sterile,
rugged tableland, but possessing a western coast enriched by nature and
covered with the prosperous cities of the Asiatic Greeks. Hitherto Ionia
had never been subdued, but the cities were too jealous of one another
to combine, and Croesus was able to conquer them one by one. This was
the man whose wealth is still celebrated in a proverb--he obtained his
gold from the washings of a sandy stream. Croesus admired the Greeks; he
was the first of the lion-hunters, and invited all the men of the day to
visit him at Sardis, where he had the pleasure of hearing Aesop tell
some of his own fables. He was anxious that his capital should form part
of the grand tour which had already become the fashion of the Greek
philosophers, and that they should be able to say when they returned
home that they had not only seen the pyramids of Egypt and the ruins of
Troy, but also the treasure-house of Croesus. When he received a visit
from one of these sages in cloak and beard he would show him his heaps
of gold and silver, and ask him whether, in all his travels, he had ever
seen a happier man--to which question he did not always receive a very
courteous reply.

After long wars, peace was established between the Babylonians, the
Lydians, and the Medes on a lasting and secure foundation. The royal
families were united by marriage; alliances, defensive and offensive,
were made and ratified on oath. Egypt was no longer able to invade, and
there was a period of delicious calm in that stormy Asiatic world,
broken only by the plaintive voices of the poor Jewish captives who sat
by the waters of Babylon and sang of the Holy City that was no more.

In the twinkling of an eye all this was changed. A band of hardy
mountaineers rushed out of the recesses of Persia and swept like a wind
across the plains. They were dressed in leather from top to toe; they
had never tasted fruit or wine; they had never seen a market; they knew
not how to buy or sell. They were taught only three things--to ride on
horseback, to hurl the javelin, and to speak the truth.


The Persians


All Asia was covered with blood and flames. The allied kingdoms fell at
once. India and Egypt were soon afterwards added to this empire, the
greatest that the world had ever seen. The Persians used to boast that
they ruled from the land of uninhabitable heat to the land of
uninhabitable cold; that their dominion began in regions where the sun
frizzled the hair and blackened the faces of the natives, and ended in a
land where the air was filled with snow like feathers and the earth was
hard as stone. The Persian empire was in reality bounded by the deserts
which divided Egypt from Ethiopia on the south and from Carthage on the
west; by the desert which divided the Punjab from Bengal; by the steppes
which lay on the other side of the Jaxartes; by the Mediterranean, the
Caspian, and the Black Sea.

Darius, the third emperor, invented a system of provincial government
which, though imperfect when viewed by the wisdom of modern times, was
far superior to any that had preceded it in Asia. He appointed satraps
or pashas to administer the conquered provinces. Each of these viceroys
received with his commission a map of his province engraved on brass. He
was at once the civil governor and commander of the troops, but his
power was checked and supervised by a secretary or clerk of the
accounts, and the province was visited by royal commissioners once a
year. The troops in each province were of two kinds; some garrisoned the
cities; others, for the most part cavalry, lived, like the Roman
legions, always in a camp; it was their office to keep down brigands,
and to convey the royal treasure from place to place. The troops were
subsisted by the conquered people; this formed part of the tribute, and
was collected at the point of the sword. There was also a fixed tax in
money and in kind, which was received by the clerk of the accounts and
dispatched to the capital every year. The Great King still preserved in
his habits something of the nomad chief. He wintered at Babylon, but in
the summer the heat was terrible in that region; the citizens retired to
their cellars, and the king went to Susa, which was situated on the
hills, or to Ecbatana, the ancient capital of the Medes, or to
Persepolis, the true hearth and home of the Persian race. When he
approached one of these cities the magi came forth to meet him, dressed
all in white and singing hymns. The road was strewn with myrtle boughs
and roses, and silver altars with blazing frankincense were placed by
the wayside.

His palaces were built of precious woods, but the naked wood was never
permitted to be seen: the walls were covered with golden plates, the
roof with silver tiles. The courts were adorned with white, green, and
blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen to pillars of marble by
silver rings. The gardens were filled with rare and exotic plants; from
the cold bosom of the snow-white stone fountains sprang upwards,
sparkling in the air; birds of gorgeous plumage flashed from tree to
tree, resembling flowers where they perched. And as the sun sank low in
the heavens and the shadows on the earth grew deep, the voice of the
nightingale was heard in the thicket, and the low cooing of the dove.
Sounds of laughter proceeded from the house; lattices were opened;
ponderous doors swung back, and out poured a troop of houris which a
Persian poet alone would venture to describe. For there might be seen
the fair Circassian, with cheeks like the apple in its rosy bloom; and
the Abyssinian damsel, with warm brown skin and voluptuous drowsy eyes;
the Hindu girl, with lithe and undulating form and fingers which seemed
created to caress; the Syrian, with aquiline and haughty look; the Greek
with features brightened by intellect and vivacity; and the home-born
beauty prepared expressly for the harem, with a complexion as white as
the milk on which she had been fed, and a face in form and expression
resembling the full moon.

All these dear charmers belonged to the king, and no doubt he often
wished half of them away. For if he felt a serious passion rising in his
breast, etiquette compelled him to put it down. Inconstancy was enjoined
on him by law. He was subjected to a rotation of kisses by the regulated
science of the harem. Ceremony interdicted affection and caprice. He
suffered from unvarying variety and the monotony of eternal change. The
whole empire belonged to him, and all its inhabitants were his slaves.
If he happened to be struck to the heart by a look cast from under a
pair of black-edged eyelids, if he became enamoured of a high-bosomed
virgin, with a form like the oriental willow, he had only to say the
word; she was at once taken to the apartments of the women, and her
parents received the congratulations of their friends. But then he was
not allowed to see his beloved for a twelve-month: six months she must
be prepared with the oil of myrrh, six months with the sweet odours,
before she was sufficiently purified and perfumed to receive the august
embraces of the king, and to soothe a passion which meanwhile had ample
time to cool.

The Great King slept on a splendid couch, overspread by a vine of
branching gold, with clusters of rubies representing grapes. He wore a
dress of purple and white, with scarlet trousers, a girdle like that of
a woman, and a high tiara encircled by a sky-blue turban. He lived in a
prison of rich metal and dazzling stone. Around him stood the courtiers
with their hands wrapped in their robes, and covering their mouths lest
he should be polluted by their base-born breath. Those who desired to
speak to his majesty prostrated themselves before him on the ground. If
any one entered uncalled, a hundred sabres gleamed in the air, and
unless the king stretched out his sceptre the intruder would be killed.

An army sat down to dinner in the palace every day, and every day a herd
of oxen was killed for them to eat. These were only the household
troops. But when the Great King went to war, the provinces sent in their
contingents, and then might be seen, as in some great exhibition, a
collection of warriors from the four quarters of the earth. Then might
be seen the Immortals, or Persian life-guards; their arms were of gold
and silver, their standards were of silk. Then might be seen the
heavy-armed Egyptian troops, with long wooden shields reaching to the
ground; the Greeks from Ionia, with crested helmets and breastplates of
bronze; the fur-clad Tartars of the steppes, who "raised hair" like the
Red Indians, a people probably belonging to the same race; the
Ethiopians of Africa, with fleecy locks, clad in the skins of lions and
armed with throw-sticks and with stakes, the points of which had been
hardened in the fire, or tipped with horn or stone; the Berbers in their
four-horse chariots; the camel cavalry of Arabia, each camel being
mounted by two archers sitting back to back, and thus prepared for the
enemy on either side; the wild horsemen of the Persian hills who caught
the enemy with their lassos; the black-skinned but straight-haired
aborigines of India, with their bows of the bamboo and their shields
made of the skins of cranes; and above all the Hindus, dressed in white
muslin and seated on the necks of elephants, which were clothed in
Indian steel and which looked like moving mountains with snakes for
hands. Towers were erected on their backs, in which sat bowmen, who
shot down the foe with unerring aim, while the elephants were taught to
charge, to trample down the opposing ranks in heaps, and to take up
armed men in their trunks and hand them to their riders. Sometimes huge
scythes were fastened to their trunks, and they mowed down regiments as
they marched along. The army was also attended by packs of enormous
blood-hounds to hunt the fugitives when a victory had been gained, and
by falcons which were trained to fly at the eyes of the enemy to baffle
them, or even blind them as they were fighting.

When this enormous army began to march it devoured the whole land over
which it passed. At night the camp-fires reddened the sky as if a great
city was in flames. In the morning, a little after daybreak, a trumpet
sounded, and the image of the sun, cased in crystal and made of
burnished gold, was raised on the top of the king's pavilion, which was
built of wood, covered with cashmere shawls, and supported on silver
poles. As soon as the ball caught the first rays of the rising sun the
march began. First went the chariot with the altar and the sacred fire,
drawn by eight milk-white horses driven by charioteers, who walked by
the side with golden wands. The chariot was followed by a horse of
extraordinary magnitude, which was called the "Charger of the Sun." The
king followed with the ten thousand Immortals, and with his wives in
covered carriages drawn by mules, or in cages upon camels. Then came the
army without order or precision, and there rose a dust which resembled a
white cloud, and which could be seen across the plain for miles. The
enemy, when this cloud drew near, could distinguish within it the
gleaming of brazen armour, and they could hear the sound of the lash,
which was always part of the military music of the Persians. When a
battle was fought, the king took his seat on a golden throne, surrounded
by his secretaries, who took notes during the engagement and recorded
every word which fell from the royal lips.

This army was frequently required by the Persians. They were a restless
people, always lusting after war. Vast as their empire was, it was not
large enough for them. The courtiers used to assure an enterprising
monarch that he was greater than all the kings that were dead, and
greater than those that were yet unborn; that it was his mission to
extend the Persian territory as far as God's heaven reached, in order
that the sun might shine on no land beyond their borders. Hyperbole
apart, it was the aim and desire of the kings to annex the plains of
Southern Russia, and so to make the Black Sea a lake in the interior of
Persia; and to conquer Greece, the only land in Europe which really
merited their arms. In both these attempts they completely failed. The
Russian Tartars, who had no fixed abode and whose houses were on wheels,
decoyed the Persian army far into the interior, eluded it in pursuit,
harassed and almost destroyed it in retreat. The Greeks defeated them in
pitched battles on Greek soil, and defeated their fleets in Greek
waters.

This contest, which lasted many years, to the Greeks was a matter of
life and death, but it was merely an episode in Persian history. The
defeats of Plataea and Salamis caused the Great King much annoyance, and
cost him a shred of land and sea. But they did not directly affect the
prosperity of his empire. What was the loss of a few thousand slaves,
and of a few hundred Phoenician and Egyptian and Ionian ships, to him?
Indirectly, indeed, it decided the fate of Persia by developing the
power of the Greeks, but ruined in any case that empire must have been,
like all others of its kind. The causes of its fall must be sought for
within and not without. In the natural course of events it would have
become the prey of some people like the Parthian highlanders or the
wandering Turks. The Greek wars had this result; the empire was
conquered at an earlier period than would otherwise have been the case,
and it was conquered by a European instead of an Asiatic power.


The Greeks


There is no problem in history so interesting as the unparalleled
development of Greece. How was it that so small a country could exert so
remarkable an influence on the course of events and on the intellectual
progress of mankind? The Greeks, as the science of language clearly
proves, belonged to the same race as the Persians themselves. Many
centuries before history begins a people migrated from the highlands of
Central Asia and overspread Europe on the one side, on the other side
Hindustan. Celts and Germans, Russians and Poles, Romans and Greeks,
Persians and Hindus, all sprang from the loins of a shepherd tribe
inhabiting the tableland of the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, and
are quite distinct from the Assyrians, the Arabs, and Phoenicians, whose
ancestors descended into the plains of Western Asia from the tableland
of the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates. It is also inferred from the
evidence of language that at some remote period the Egyptians belonged
to the same stock as the mountaineers of Armenia, the Chinese to the same
stock as the highlanders of Central Asia, and that at a period still
more remote the Turanian or Chinese Tartar, the Aryan or Indo-European,
and the Semitic races and languages were one. Upon this last point
philologists are not agreed, though the balance of authority is in
favour of the view expressed. But as regards the descent of the English
and Hindus from the same tribe of Asiatic mountaineers, that is now as
much a fact of history as the common descent of the English and the
Normans from the same race of pirates on the Baltic shores. The Celts
migrated first into Europe; they were followed by the Graeco-Italian
people, and then by the German-Slavonians, the Persians and Hindus
remaining longest in their primeval homes. The great difference between
the various breeds of the Indo-European race is partly due to their
intermixture with the natives of the countries which they colonised and
conquered. In India the Aryans found a black race which yet exist in the
hills and jungles of that country, and who yet speak languages of their
own which have nothing in common with the noble Sanskrit. Europe was
inhabited by a people of Tartar origin who still exist as the Basques of
the Pyrenees, and as the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. It is probable
that these people also were intruders of comparatively recent date, and
that a yet more primeval race existed on the gloomy banks of the Danube
and the Rhine, in huts built on stakes in the shallow waters of the
Swiss lakes, and in the mountain caverns of France and Spain. The
Aryans, who migrated into India, certainly intermarried with the blacks,
and there can be no reasonable doubt that the Celts who first migrated
into Europe took the wives as well as the lands of the natives. The
aborigines were therefore largely absorbed by the Celts, to the
detriment of that race, before the arrival of the Germans, whose blood
remained comparatively pure.

We may freely use the doctrine of intermarriage to explain the
difference in colour between the sepoy and his officer. We may apply
it--though with less confidence--to explain the difference in character
and aspect between the Irish and the English, but we do not think that
the doctrine will help us much towards expounding the genius of Greece.
And if the superiority of that people was not dependent in any way on
race distinction, inherent or acquired, it must have been in some way
connected with locality and other incidents of life.

A glance at the map is sufficient to explain how it was that Greece
became civilised before the other European lands. It is nearest to those
countries in which civilisation first arose. It is the borderland of
East and West. The western coast of Asia and the eastern coast of Greece
lie side by side; the sea between them is narrow, with the islands like
stepping-stones across a brook. On the other hand, a mountain wall
extends in the form of an arc from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and
shuts off Europe from Greece, which is thus compelled to grow towards
Asia as a tree grows towards the light. Its coasts are indented in a
peculiar manner by the sea. Deep bays and snug coves, forming hospitable
ports, abound. The character of the Aegean is mild and humane; its
atmosphere is clear and favourable for those who navigate by the eye
from island to island and from point to point. The purple shell-fish, so
much in request with the Phoenicians for their manufactures, was found
upon the coasts of Greece. A trade was opened up between the two lands,
and with trade there came arithmetic and letters to assist the trade,
and from these a desire on the part of the Greeks for more luxury and
more knowledge. All this was natural enough. But how was it that
whatever came into the hands of the Greeks was used merely as raw
material--that whatever they touched was transmuted into gold? How was
it that Asia was only their dame's school, and that they discovered the
higher branches of knowledge for themselves? How was it that they who
were taught by the Babylonians to divide the day into twelve hours
afterwards exalted astronomy to the rank of an exact science? How was it
that they who received from Egypt the canon of proportions and the first
ideas of the portraiture of the human form, afterwards soared into the
regions of the ideal, and created in marble a beauty more exquisite than
can be found on earth--a vision, as it were, of some unknown yet not
unimagined world?

The mountains of Greece are disposed in a peculiar manner, so as to
enclose extensive tracts of land which assume the appearance of large
basins or circular hollows, level as the ocean and consisting of rich
alluvial soil through which rise steep insulated rocks. The plain
subsisted a numerous population; the rock became the Acropolis or
citadel of the chief town, and the mountains were barriers against
invasion. Other districts were parcelled out by water in the same
manner; their frontiers were swift streaming rivers or estuaries of the
sea. Each of these cantons became an independent city-state, and the
natives of each canton became warmly attached to their fatherland.
Nature had given them ramparts which they knew how to use. They defended
with obstinacy the river and the pass; if those were forced the citadel
became a place of refuge and resistance, and if the worst came to the
worst they could escape to inaccessible mountain caves.

Each of these states possessed a constitution of its own, and each was
home-made and differed slightly from the rest. It may be imagined what a
variety of ideas must have risen in the process of their manufacture.
The laws were debated in a general assembly of the citizens; each
community within itself was full of intellectual activity.

Self-development and independence are too often accompanied by
isolation, and nations, like individuals, become torpid when they retire
from the world. But this was not the case with Greece. Though its people
were divided into separate states, they all spoke the same language and
worshipped the same gods, and there existed certain institutions which
at appointed times assembled them together as a nation.

Greece is a country which possesses the most extraordinary climate in
the world. Within two degrees of latitude it ranges from the beech to
the palm. In the morning the traveller may be shivering in a snow-storm,
and viewing a winter landscape of naked trees; in the afternoon he may
be sweltering beneath a tropical sun, with oleanders blooming around him
and oranges shining in the green foliage like balls of gold. From this
variety of climate resulted a variety of produce which stimulated the
natives to barter and exchange. A central spot was chosen as the
market-place, and it was made, for the common protection, a sanctuary of
Apollo. The people, when they met for the purposes of trade, performed
at the same time religious rites, and also amused themselves, in the rude
manner of the age, with boxing, wrestling, running races, and throwing
the spear; or they listened to the minstrels, who sang the ballads of
ancient times, and to the prophets or inspired politicians, who chanted
predictions in hexameters. That sanctuary became in time the famous
oracle of Delphi, and those sports expanded into the Olympian Games. To
the great fair came Greeks from all parts of the land, and when chariot
races were introduced it became necessary to make good roads from state
to state, and to build bridges across the streams. The administration of
the sanctuary, the laws and regulations of the games, and the management
of the public fund subscribed for the expenses of the fair, could only
be arranged by means of a national council composed of deputies from all
the states. This congress was called the Amphictyonic League, which,
soon extending its powers, enacted national laws, and as a supreme court
of arbitration decided all questions that arose between state and state.

At Olympia the inhabitants of the coast displayed the scarlet cloth and
the rich trinkets which they had obtained from Phoenician ships. At
Olympia those who had been kidnapped into slavery, and had afterwards
been ransomed by their friends at home, related to an eager crowd the
wonders which they had seen in the enchanted regions of the East.

And then throughout all Greece there was an inward stirring and a
hankering after the unknown, and a desire to achieve great deeds. It
began with the expedition of Jason--an exploring voyage to the Black
Sea; it culminated in the siege of Troy.

In such countries as the Grecian states, where the area is small, the
community flourishing, and the frontier inexorably defined, the law of
population operates with unusual force. The mountain walls of the Greek
cantons, like the deserts which surrounded Egypt, not only kept out the
enemy but also kept in the natives; they were not only fortresses but
prisons. In order to exist, the Greeks were obliged to cultivate every
inch of soil. But when this had been done the population still continued
to increase, and now the land could no longer be increased. In those
early days they had no manufactures, mines, or foreign commerce by means
of which they could supply themselves, as we do, with food from other
lands. In such an emergency the government, if it acts at all, has only
two methods to pursue. It must either strangle or bleed the population;
it must organise infanticide or emigration.

The first method was practised to some extent, but happily the last was
now within their power. The Trojan war had made them acquainted with the
Asiatic coast, and overcrowded states began to send forth colonies by
public act. The emigrants consisted chiefly, as may be supposed, of the
poor, the dangerous, and the discontented classes. They took with them
no women; they went forth, like the buccaneers, sword in hand. They
swooped down on the Ionian coast--there was at that time no power in
Asia Minor which was able to resist them. They obtained wives, sometimes
by force, sometimes by peaceable arrangement with the natives. In course
of time the coast of Asia Minor was lined with rich and flourishing
towns. The mother country continued to pour forth colonies, and colonies
also founded colonies. The Greeks sailed and settled in every direction.
They braved the dark mists and the inclement seasons of the Black Sea,
and took up their abode among a people whose faces were almost concealed
in furs, who dwelt at the mouths of great rivers and cultivated
boundless plains of wheat. This wheat the Greeks exported to the mother
country, with barrels of the salted tunny-fish, and the gold of Ural,
and even the rich products of the Oriental trade which were brought
across Asia from India or China by the waters of the Oxus to the Aral
Sea, from the Aral to the Caspian Sea by land, from the Caspian to
the Black Sea by the Volga and the Don.

But where Italy dipped her arched and lovely foot in the blue waters of
an untroubled sea, beneath the blue roof of an unclouded sky--where the
flowers never perished, where eternal summer smiled, where mere
existence was voluptuous and life itself a sensual joy--there the Greek
cities clustered richly together--cities shining with marble and built
in fairy forms, before them the deep tranquil harbour, behind them
violet valleys, myrtle groves, and green lakes of waving corn.

When a bank of emigrants went forth they took with them fire kindled on
the city hearth. Although each colony was independent, it regarded with
reverence the mother state, and all considered themselves with pride not
foreigners but Greeks; for Greece was not a country but a people;
wherever the Greek language was spoken, that was Greece.

They all spoke the same grand and harmonious language--although the
dialects might differ; they had the same bible, for Homer was in all
their hearts, and the memory of their youthful glory was associated in
their minds with the union of Greek warriors beneath the walls of Troy.
The chief colonial states were represented at the meetings of the
Amphictyonic League, and any Greek from the Crimea to Marseilles might
contend at the Olympian Games with the full rights of a Spartan or
Athenian, a privilege which the Great King could by no means have
o