The Martyrdom of Man



By

Winwood Reade


Transcribed by Jan Lloyd (villa_la_miranda@mercuryin.es) and Donal O’Danachair 
(kodak_seaside@hotmail.com)



Contents:

Note
Author’s Preface


Chapter 1 – War

Egypt
Western Asia
The Persians
The Greeks
The Macedonians
Alexandria
The Phoenicians
Carthage and Rome
Roman Africa
The Arabs




Chapter 2 – Religion

The Natural History of Religion
The Israelites
The Jews
The Prophets
The Character of Jesus
The Christians
Arabia
Mecca
The Character of Mohammed
Description of Africa
The Mohammedans in Central Africa


Chapter 3 – Liberty

Ancient Europe
The German Invasion
The Castle
The Town
The Church
Venice
Arab Spain
The Portuguese Discoveries
The Slave-Trade
Abolition in Europe
Abolition in America
Materials of Human History

Chapter 4 – Intellect

Animal Period of the Earth
Origin and early History of Man
Summary of Universal History
The Future of the Human Race
The Religion of Reason and Love














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,  Mommsen; 
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 1


WAR


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.** 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      


[** Lakes Victoria and Albert]
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 
course 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 Michael Angelo 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 
cuniform 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 
casts.  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 earthern 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 birthplace 
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 body-guard 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.

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.

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 bow-men, 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.

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