23 chapters
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23 chapters
PREFACE.
PREFACE.
The present edition of the Dawn of History is a considerable enlargement upon the former one, as may be judged from the fact that the former, including the Appendix, contained only 231 pages, whereas the present edition contains 357. These enlargements have chiefly affected the first four chapters with the ninth and tenth, and, generally speaking, the chapters for which the editor is wholly responsible. He felt himself quite incapable of improving chapters eight, eleven, and thirteen, which can
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The advance of pre-historic study has been during the last ten years exceptionally rapid; and, considering upon how many subsidiary interests it touches, questions of politics, of social life, of religion almost, the science of pre-historic archæology might claim to stand in rivalry with geology as the favourite child of this century; as much a favourite of its declining years as geology was of its prime. But as yet, it will be confessed, we have little popular literature upon the subject, and t
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THE DAWN OF HISTORY. CHAPTER I. THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN.
THE DAWN OF HISTORY. CHAPTER I. THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN.
When St. Paulinus came to preach Christianity to the people of Northumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) being minded to hear him, and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell; and one of the king’s thanes stood up and said, ‘Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where you, K
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CHAPTER II. THE SECOND STONE AGE.
CHAPTER II. THE SECOND STONE AGE.
Between the earlier and the later stone age, between man of the drift period and man of the neolithic era, occurs a vast blank which we cannot fill in. We bid adieu to the primitive inhabitants of our earth while they are still the contemporaries of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, or of the cave lion and the cave bear, and while the very surface of the earth wears a different aspect from what it now wears. With a changed condition of things, with a race of animals which differed not essential
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CHAPTER III. THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE.
CHAPTER III. THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE.
We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses which were ever made; we now turn aside and ask what were the first of those immaterial instruments, those ‘aëriform, mystic’ legacies which were handed down and gradually improved from the time of the earliest inhabitants of our globe? Foremost among these, long anterior to the ‘metallurgic and other manufacturing skill ,’ comes language. With us, in whose minds thought and speech are so bound together as to be almos
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CHAPTER IV. FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE.
CHAPTER IV. FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE.
We have now traced the different stages through which language may pass in attaining to its most perfect form, the inflected stage. There were the two stages in which what we may call the bones of the language were formed, the acquisition of those words which, like pen , ink and paper , when standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, and, next, the acquisition of those other words which, like to , for , and , produce no idea in the mind when taken alone. We saw that while the first clas
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CHAPTER V. THE NATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD.
CHAPTER V. THE NATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD.
When we try and gather into one view the results of our inquiries upon the kindreds and nations of the old world, it must be confessed we are struck rather by the extent of our ignorance than of our knowledge. For all the light we are able to shed, the movements and the passage of the various races in this prehistoric time appear to the eye of the mind most like the movement of great hosts of men seen dimly through a mist. Or shall we say that we are in the position of persons living upon some o
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CHAPTER VI. EARLY SOCIAL LIFE.
CHAPTER VI. EARLY SOCIAL LIFE.
We have seen, so far, that the early traces of man’s existence point to a gradual improvement in the state of his civilization, to the acquirement of fresh knowledge, and the practice of fresh arts. The rude stone implements of the early drift-period are replaced by the more carefully manufactured ones of the polished-stone age, and these again are succeeded by implements of bronze and of iron. By degrees also the arts of domesticating animals and of tilling the land are learnt; and by steps, wh
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CHAPTER VII. THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY.
CHAPTER VII. THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY.
So long as people continued to lead a wandering shepherd life, the institution of the patriarchal family afforded a sufficient and satisfactory basis for such cordial union as was possible. It was a condition of society in which the relations of the different members to each other were extremely simple and confined within very narrow boundaries; but these habits of life prevented the existence of any very complicated social order, and at the same time gave a peculiar force and endurance to those
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CHAPTER VIII. RELIGION.
CHAPTER VIII. RELIGION.
We have hitherto been occupied in tracing the growth of inventions which had for their end the supply of material wants, or the ordering of conditions which should enable men to live peaceably together in communities, and defend the products of their labour from the attacks of rival tribes and warlike neighbours. A very little research into the relics of antiquity, however, brings another side of human thought before us, and we discover, whether by following the revelations of language or by exa
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CHAPTER IX. ARYAN RELIGIONS.
CHAPTER IX. ARYAN RELIGIONS.
That morning speech of Belarius (in Cymbeline ) might serve as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature-religion in its simplest garb: Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of disappointed hopes which once centred round the doing as prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of mountain life, different altogether from our life, free alike from its cares and temptations and moral responsibilities. Belarius gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly depths, and f
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CHAPTER X. THE OTHER WORLD.
CHAPTER X. THE OTHER WORLD.
If the sun-god was so natural a type of a man-like divinity, a god suffering some of the pains of humanity, a sort of type of man’s own ideal life here, it was natural that men should question this oracle concerning their future life and their hopes beyond the grave. We have seen that the Egyptians did so; seen how they watched the course of the day-star, and, beholding him sink behind the sandy desert, pictured a home of happiness beyond that waste, a place to be reached by the soul after many
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CHAPTER XI. MYTHOLOGIES AND FOLK-TALES.
CHAPTER XI. MYTHOLOGIES AND FOLK-TALES.
If we found it difficult to reduce to a consistent simplicity the religious ideas of the Aryan races, what hope have we to find any thread through the labyrinth of their unbridled imagination in dealing with more fanciful subjects? The world is all before them where to choose; nature, in her multitudinous works and ever-changing shows, is at hand to give breath to the faculty of myth-making, and lay the foundation of all the stories which have ever been told. The two elements concurrent to the m
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CHAPTER XII. PICTURE-WRITING.
CHAPTER XII. PICTURE-WRITING.
Though it is true, as we have said before, that every manufactured article involves a long chapter of unwritten history to account for its present form, and the perfection of the material from which it is wrought, there is no one of them, not the most artistic, that will so well repay an effort to hunt it through its metamorphoses in the ages to its first starting-point, as will the letters that rapidly drop from our pen when we proceed to write its name. Each one of these is a manufactured arti
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CHAPTER XIII. PHONETIC WRITING.
CHAPTER XIII. PHONETIC WRITING.
The step from picturing or picture-drawing to writing by pictures is, as we have said, an immense one. But now we have to record one more step, almost as great, which is the transition from the picturing of single things—or, if you wish, single ideas —to the picturing, not of ideas at all, but of sounds merely. This is the step we have now to follow out, to trace the process through which picture-writing passed into sound-writing, and to find out how signs (for we shall see they are the same sig
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CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION.
CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION.
At this point, where we are bringing our inquiries to a conclusion, we would fain look a little nearer into the mists which shroud the past, and descry, were it possible, the actual dawn of history for the individual nations; would see, not only how the larger bodies of men have travelled through the prehistoric stages of their journey, but how, having reached its settled home, each people begins to emerge from the obscurity that surrounds its early days. What were the exact means, we ask, where
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CHAPTERS I. AND II.
CHAPTERS I. AND II.
Christy and Lartet, Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ . Davis and Thurnam, Crania Britannica . Dawkins, Cave Hunting . Dawkins, Early Man in Britain . Evans, Stone Implements of Great Britain . Evans, Bronze Implements of Great Britain . Geikie, The Great Ice Age . Greenwell, British Barrows . Keller, The Lake-Dwellings of Switzerland (trs. Lee). Lyell, Antiquity of Man . Lubbock, Pre-historic Times . Mortillet, Origine de la Navigation et de la Pêche . Mortillet, Promenades Préhistoriques à l’Exposition . Mo
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CHAPTERS III. AND IV.
CHAPTERS III. AND IV.
Bopp, Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit Zend, etc. (trs.). Bréal, Principes de Philologie Comparée . Geiger, Contributions to the History of the Development of the Race (trs.). Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache . Grimm, Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache . Kuhn, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung . Müller, Max, Lectures on the Science of Language . Müller, Max, Sanskrit Literature . Peile, Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology . Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Européennes . Sayce, I
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CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER V.
Brugsch, Recueils de Monuments Égyptiens . Brugsch, Histoire d’Égypt . Brugsch, Matériaux pour servir , etc. Bunsen, Egypt’s Place , etc. (ed. Dr. Birch). Ebers, Egyptian History . Flower, W. H., Races of Men . Legge, Chinese Classics, with Introduction, etc. Lenormant, Manual of the Ancient History of the East (trs.). Lepsius, Chronologie der Egypten . Mariette Pasha, Abrégé de l’Histoire d’Égypte . Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de l’Orient . Maury, Le Livre et l’Homme . Rawlinson, Her
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CHAPTERS VI. AND VII.
CHAPTERS VI. AND VII.
Coulanges, La Cité Antique . Grimm, Deutsche Rechts-Alterthümer . Lavalaye, La Propriété et ses Formes Primitives . Maine, Ancient Law . Maine, Village Communities . Maine, Early Institutions . Maurer, Geschichte der Dorf-Verfassung . Nasse, Agricultural Communities of the Middle Ages (translated by Ouvry). Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Européennes . In the account here given of the two most important social forms, the patriarchal family and the village community, the endeavour has been rather to pr
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CHAPTERS VIII.-XI.
CHAPTERS VIII.-XI.
Bournouf, Commentaire sur le Yaçna . Bugge, Sæmundar Edda . Bunsen, God in History (trs.). Bunsen, Egypt’s Place , etc. Busching, Nibelungen Lied . Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations . Edda den ældra ok Snorra. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie. Grimm, Ueber das Verbr. der Leichen. Grimm, Heldenbuch. Keary, Outlines of Primitive Belief. Kuhn, Herabkunft des Feuers. Kuhn, Sagen, Gebräuche u. Mährchen . Kuhn, in Zeitsch f. v. Sp. and Z. f. deut. Alt . Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion . Lepsius, Todtenbu
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CHAPTERS XII. AND XIII.
CHAPTERS XII. AND XIII.
Edkins, Introduction to Study of the Chinese Characters . Lenormant, Essai sur la Propagation de l’Alphabet Phénicien . Mahaffy, Prolegomena to History . Rawlinson, Five Monarchies . Rougé (Vte de), Origine Égyptienne de l’Alphabet Phénicien . Taylor, The Alphabet . Tylor, Early History of Mankind . None of the Semitic alphabets can be considered as quite complete; as a complete alphabet requires a subdivision of sounds into their smallest divisions, and an appropriate sign for each of these. Bu
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CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XIV.
Curtius, History of Greece (trs.). Gibbon, with notes by Milman, etc. Latham, Germania of Tacitus . Latham, Nationalities of Europe . Von Maurer, Op. cit. Mommsen, Die unterital. Dialekten . Mommsen, Roman History (trs.). P. 320 . Following Mommsen, the Etruscans are here spoken of as though belonging to the Italic family. This is liable to grave doubts; but the question is at present too unsettled to admit of satisfactory discussion in this place. THE END. A , B , C , D , E , F , G , H ,
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