The Outline of History by H. G. Wells (good books to read TXT) 📕

At his feasts there were individuals with a gift for playing the fool, who did so no doubt to win the laughter of their friends, but there was also another sort of men, of great importance in their time, and still more important to the historian, certain singers of songs and stories, the bards or rhapsodists. These bards existed among all the Aryan-speaking peoples; they were a consequence of and a further factor in that development of spoken language which was the chief of all the human advances made in Neolithic times. They chanted or recited stories of the past, or stories of the living chief and his people; they told other stories that they invented; they memorized jokes and catches. They found and seized upon and improved the rhythms, rhymes, alliterations, and such-like possibilities latent in language; they probably did much to elaborate and fix grammatical forms. They were the first great artists of the ear, as the later Aurignacian rock painters were the first great artists of the eye and hand. No doubt they used much gesture; probably they learnt appropriate gestures when they learnt their songs; but the order and sweetness and power of language was their primary concern.

And they mark a new step forward in the power and range of the human mind. They sustained and developed in men's minds a sense of a greater something than themselves, the tribe, and of, a life that extended back into the past. They not only recalled old hatreds and battles, they recalled old alliances and a common inheritance. The feats of dead heroes lived again. The Aryans began to live in thought before they were born and after they were dead.

Like most human things, this bardic tradition grew first slowly and then more rapidly. By the time bronze was coming into Europe there was not an Aryan people that had not a profession and training of bards. In their hands language became as beautiful as it is ever likely to be. These bards were living books, man-histories, guardians and makers of a new and more powerful tradition in human life. Every Aryan people had its long poetical records thus handed down, its sagas (Teutonic), its epics (Greek) its vedas (Old Sanscrit). The earliest Aryan people were essentially a people of the voice. The recitation seems to have predominated even in those ceremonial and dramatic dances and that dressing-up which among most human races have also served for the transmission of tradition.

At that time there was no writing, and when first the art of writing crept into Europe, as we shall tell later, it must have seemed far too slow, clumsy, and lifeless a method of record for men to trouble very much about writing down these glowing and beautiful treasures of the memory. Writing was at first kept for accounts and matters of fact. The, bards and rhapsodists flourished for long after the introduction of writing. They survived, indeed, in Europe as the minstrels into the Middle Ages.

Unhappily their tradition had not the fixity of a written record. They amended and reconstructed, they had their fashions and their phases of negligence. Accordingly we have now only the very much altered and revised vestiges of that spoken literature of prehistoric times. One of the most interesting and informing of these prehistoric compositions of the Aryans survives in the Greek Iliad. An early form of Iliad was probably recited by 1,000 B.C., but it was not written down until perhaps 700 or 600 B.C. Many men must have bad to do with it as authors and improvers, but later Greek tradition attributed it to a blind bard named Homer, to whom also is ascribed the Odyssey, a composition of a very different spirit and outlook. It is possible that many of the Aryan bards were blind men. According to Professor J. L. Myres their bards were blinded to prevent their straying from the tribe. Mr. L. Lloyd has seen in Rhodesia the musician of a troupe of native dancers who had been blinded by his chief for this very reason. The Slavs called all bards sliepac, which was also their word for a blind man. The original recited version of the Iliad was older than that of the Odyssey. The Iliad as a complete poem is older than the Odyssey, though the material of the Odyssey, being largely undatable folk-lore, is older than any of the historical material in the Iliad. Both epics were probably written over and rewritten at a later date, in much the same manner that Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Queen Victoria, in his Idylls of the King, wrote over the Morte d'Arthur (which was itself a writing over by Sir Thomas Malory, circ. 1450, of pre-existing legends), making the speeches and sentiments and the characters more in accordance with those of his own time. But the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the way of living they describe, the spirit of the acts recorded, belong to the closing centuries of the prehistoric age. These sagas, epics, and vedas do supply, in addition to archaeology and philology, a third source of information about those vanished times.

Here, for example, is the concluding passage of the Iliad, describing very exactly the making of a prehistoric barrow. (We have taken here Chapman's rhymed translation, correcting certain words with the help of the prose version of Lang, Leaf, and Myers.)

. . . Thus oxen, mules, in waggons straight they put,

Went forth, and an unmeasured pile of sylvan matter cut;

Nine days employ'd in carriage, but when the tenth morn shin'd

On wretched mortals, then they - brought the bravest of his, kind

Forth to be burned. Troy swam in tears. Upon the pile's most height

They laid the body, and gave fire. All day it burn'd, all night.

But when th' elev'nth morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine,

The people flock'd about the pile, and first, with gleaming wine

Quench'd all the flames. His brothers then, and friends, the snowy bones

Gather'd into an urn of gold, still pouring out their moans.

Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn, digg'd a pit,

Grav'd it, built up the grave with stones, and quickly piled on it

A barrow. . . .

. . . The barrow heap'd once, all the town

In Jove-nurs'd Priam's Court partook a sumptuous fun'ral feast,

And so horse-taming Hector's rites gave up his soul to rest.

There remains also an old English saga, Beowulf made long before the English had crossed from Germany into England, which winds up with a similar burial. The preparation of. a pyre is first described. It is hung round with shields and coats of mail. The body is brought and the pyre fired, and then for ten days the warriors built a mighty mound to be seen afar by the traveller on sea or land. Beowulf, which is at least a thousand years later than the Iliad, is also interesting because one of the main adventures in it is the looting of the treasures of a barrow already ancient in those days.

20.3 Early Daily Aryan Life

The Greek epics reveal the early Greeks with no knowledge of iron, without writing, and before any Greek-founded cities existed in the land into which they had evidently come quite recently as conquerors. They were spreading southward from the Aryan region of origin. They seem to have been a fair people, new-comers in Greece, new-comers to a land that had been held hitherto by the Mediterranean or Iberian peoples.

[Fig. 0246 Combat between Menelaus and Hector]

[From a platter ascribed to the end of the seventh century in the British Museum. This is probably the earliest known vase bearing a Greek inscription. Greek writing was just beginning. Note the Swastika.]

Let us, at the risk of a slight repetition, be perfectly clear upon one point. The Iliad does not give us the primitive neolithic life of that Aryan region of origin; it gives us that life already well on the move towards a new state of affairs. The primitive neolithic way of living, with its tame and domesticated animals, its pottery and cooking, and its transitory patches of rude cultivation, we have already sketched. Between 15,000 and 6,000 B.C. the neolithic way of living had spread with the forests and abundant vegetation of the Pluvial Period, over the greater part of the old world, from the Niger to the Hwangho and from Ireland to the south of India. Now, as the climate of great portions of the earth was swinging towards drier and more open conditions again the earlier, simpler, neolithic life was developing along two divergent directions. One was leading to a more wandering life, towards at last a constantly migratory life between summer and winter pasture, which is called NOMADISM; the other, in certain sunlit river valleys, was towards a water-treasuring life of irrigation, in which men gathered into the first towns and made the first CIVILIZATION. We have already described the first civilizations and their liability to recurrent conquests by nomadic peoples. We have already noted that for many thousands of years there has been an almost rhythmic recurrence of conquest of the civilizations by the nomads. Here we have to note that the Greeks, as the Iliad presents them, are neither simple neolithic nomads, innocent of civilization, nor are they civilized men. They are nomads in an excited state, because they have just come upon civilization, and regard it as an opportunity for war and loot.

[Fig. 0247 Archaic Horses and Chariots]

These early Greeks of the Iliad are sturdy fighters, but without discipline"their battles are a confusion of single combats. They have horses, but no cavalry; they use the horse, which is a comparatively recent addition to Aryan resources, to drag a rude fighting chariot into battle. The horse is still novel enough to be something of a terror in itself. For ordinary draught purposes, as in the quotation from the Iliad we have just made, oxen were employed.

The only priests of these Aryans are the keepers of shrines and sacred places. There are chiefs, who are heads of families, and who also perform sacrifices, but there does not seem to be much mystery or sacramental feeling in their religion. When the Greeks go to war, these beads and elders-meet in council and appoint a king, whose powers are very loosely defined. There are no laws, but only customs; and no exact standards of conduct.

The social life of the early Greeks centred about the households of these leading men. There were no doubt huts for herds and the like, and outlying farm buildings; but the hall of the chief was a comprehensive centre, to which everyone went to feast, to hear the bards, to take part in games and exercises. The primitive craftsmen were gathered there. About it were cowsheds and stabling and such-like offices. Unimportant people slept, about anywhere as retainers did in the mediaeval castles and as people still do in Indian households. Except for quite personal possessions, there was still an air of patriarchal communism about the tribe. The tribe, or the chief as the head of the tribe, owned the grazing lands; forest and rivers were the wild.

The Aryan social organization seems, and indeed all early communities seem, to have been without the little separate households that make up the mass of the population in western Europe or America to-day.

The tribe was a big family; the nation a group of tribal families; a household often contained hundreds of people. Human society began, just as herds and droves begin among animals, by the family delaying its breaking up. Nowadays the lions in