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

East Africa are apparently becoming social animals in this way, by the young keeping with the-mother after they are fully grown, and hunting in a group. Hitherto the lion has been much more of a solitary beast. If men and women do not cling to their families nowadays as much as they did, it is because the state and the community supply now safety and help and facilities that were once only possible in the family group.

 

In the Hindu community of to-day these great households of the earlier stages of human society are still to be found. Mr. Bhupendranath Basu has recently described a typical Hindu household. [4] It is an Aryan household, refined and made gentle by thousands of years of civilization, but its social structure is the same as that of the households of which the Aryan epics tell.

 

The joint family system, he said, has descended to us from time immemorial, the Aryan patriarchal system of old still holding sway in India. The structure, though ancient, remains full of life. The joint family is a co-operative corporation, in which men and women have a well-defined place. At the head of the corporation is the senior member of the family, generally the oldest male member, but in his absence the senior female member often assumes control. (Cp. Penelope in the Odyssey.)

 

All able-bodied members must contribute their labour and earnings, whether of personal skill or agriculture and trade, to the common stock; weaker members, widows, orphans, and destitute relations, all must be maintained and supported; sons, nephews, brothers, cousins, all must be treated equally, for any undue preference is apt to break up the family. We have no word for cousins-they are either brothers or sisters, and we do not know what are cousins two degrees removed. The children of a first cousin are your nephews and nieces, just the same as the children of your brothers and sisters. A man can no more marry a cousin, however removed, than he can marry his own sister, except in certain parts of Madras, where a man may marry his maternal uncle's daughter. The family affections, the family ties, are always very strong, and therefore the maintenance of an equal standard among so many members is not so difficult as it may appear at first sight. Moreover, life is very simple. Until recently shoes were not in general use at home, but sandals without any leather fastenings. I have known of a well-to-do middle-class family of several brothers and cousins who had two or three pairs of leather shoes between them, these shoes being only used when they had occasion to go out, and the same practice is still followed in the case of, the more expensive garments, like shawls, which last for generations, and with their age are treated with loving care, as having been used by ancestors of revered memory.

 

The joint family remains together sometimes for several generations, until it becomes too unwieldy, when it breaks up into smaller families, and you thus see whole villages peopled by members of the same clan. I have said that the family is a co-operative society, and it may be likened to a small state, and is kept in its place by strong discipline based on love and obedience. You see nearly every day the younger members coming to the head of the family and taking the dust of his feet as a token of benediction; whenever they go on an enterprise, they take his leave and carry his blessing. . . . There are many bonds which bind the family together-the bonds of sympathy, of common pleasures, of common sorrows; when a death occurs, all the members go into mourning; when there is a birth or a wedding, the whole family rejoices. Then above all is the family deity, some image of Vishnu, the preserver; his place is in a separate room, generally known as the room of God, or in well-to-do families in a temple attached to the house, where the family performs its daily worship. There is a sense of personal attachment between this image of the deity and the family, for the image generally comes down from past generations, often miraculously acquired by a pious ancestor at some remote time. . . .With the household gods is intimately associated the family priest. . . . The Hindu priest is a part of the family life of his flock, between whom and himself the tie has existed for many generations. The priest is not generally a man of much learning; he knows, however, the traditions of his faith. . . . He is not a very heavy burden, for he is satisfied with little a few handfuls of rice, a few home-grown bananas or vegetables, a little unrefined sugar made in the village, and sometimes a few pieces of copper are all that is needed. . . . A picture of our family life would be incomplete without the household servants. A female servant is known as the 'jhi,' or daughter, in Bengal-she is like the daughter of the house; she calls the master and the mistress father and mother, and the young men and women of the family brothers and sisters. She participates in the life of the family; she goes to the holy places along with her-mistress, for she could not go alone, and generally she spends her life with the family of her adoption; her children are looked after by the family. The treatment of men servants is very similar. These servants, men and women, are generally people of the humbler castes, but a sense, of personal attachment grows up between them and the members of the family, and as they get on in years they are affectionately called by the younger members older brothers, uncles, aunts, etc. . . . In a well-to-do house there is always a resident teacher, who instructs the children of the family as well as, other boys of the village; there is no expensive school building, but room is found in some veranda or shed in the courtyard for the children and their teacher, and into this school low-caste boys are freely admitted. These indigenous schools were not of a very high order, but they supplied an agency of instruction for the masses which was probably not available in many other countries. . . .

 

With Hindu life is bound up its traditional duty of hospitality. It is the duty of a householder to offer a meal to any stranger who may come before midday and ask for one; the mistress of the house does not sit down to her meal until every member is fed, and, as sometimes her food is all that is left, she does not take her meal until well after midday lest a hungry stranger should come and claim one.. . .

 

We, have been tempted to quote Mr. Basu at some length, because here we do get to something like a living understanding of the type of household which has prevailed in human communities since Neolithic days, which still prevails to-day in India, China, and the Far East, but which in the west is rapidly giving ground before a state and municipal organization of education and a large-scale industrialism within which an amount of individual detachment and freedom is possible, such as these great households never knew. . . .

 

But let us return now to the history preserved for us in the Aryan epics.

 

The Sanscrit epics tell a very similar story to that underlying the Iliad, the story of a fair, beef-eating people-only later did they become vegetarians-coming down from Persia into the plain of North India and conquering their way slowly towards the Indus. From the Indus they spread over India, but as they spread they acquired much from the dark. Dravidians they conquered, and they seem to have lost their bardic tradition. The vedas, says Mr. Basu, were transmitted chiefly in the households by the women. . . .

 

The oral literature of the Keltic peoples who pressed westward has not been preserved so completely as that of the Greeks or Indians; it was written down many centuries later, and so, like the barbaric, primitive English Beowulf, has lost any clear evidence of a period of migration into the lands of an antecedent people. If the pre-Aryans figure in it at all, it is as the fairy folk of the Irish stories. Ireland, most cut off of all the Keltic-speaking communities, retained to the latest date its primitive life; and the Tain, the Irish Iliad, describes a cattlekeeping life in which war chariots are still used, and war dogs also, and the heads of the slain are carried off slung round the horses' necks. The Tain is the story of a cattle raid. Here, too, the same social order appears as in the Iliad; the chiefs sit and feast in great halls, they build halls for themselves, there is singing and story-telling by the bards, and drinking and intoxication. Priests are not very much in evidence, but there is a sort of medicine-man who deals in spells and prophecy.

 

21.0 The Greeks and the Persians

 

21.1 The Hellenic Peoples

 

21.2 Distinctive Features of Hellenic Civilization

 

21.3 Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy in Greece

 

21.4 The Kingdom of Lydia

 

21.5 The Rise of the Persians in the East

 

21.6 The Story of Croesus

 

21.7 Darius Invades Russia

 

21.8 The Battle of Marathon

 

21.9 Thermopylae and Salamis

 

21.10 Plataea and Mycale

 

21.1 The Hellenic Peoples

 

The Greeks appear in the dim light before the dawn of history (say, 1,500 B.C.) as one of the wandering imperfectly nomadic Aryan peoples who were gradually extending the range of their pasturage southward into the Balkan peninsula and coming into conflict and mixing with that preceding geancivilization of which Cnossos was the crown.

 

In the Homeric poems these Greek tribes speak one common language, and a common tradition upheld by the epic poems keeps them together in a loose unity; they call their various tribes by a common name, Hellenes. They probably came in successive waves. Three main variations of the Ancient Greek speech are distinguished: the Ionic, the AEolic, and the Doric. There was a great variety of dialects. The Ionians seem to have preceded the other Greeks, and to have mixed very intimately with the civilized peoples they overwhelmed. Racially the people of such cities as Athens and Miletus may have been less Nordic than Mediterranean. The Doric apparently constituted the last most powerful and least civilized wave of the migration. These Hellenic tribes conquered and largely destroyed the geancivilization that had preceded their arrival; upon its ashes they built up a civilization of their own. They took to the sea and crossed by way of the islands to Asia Minor; and, sailing through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, spread their settlements along the south, and presently along the north borders of the Black Sea. They spread also over the south of Italy, which was called at last Magna Graecia, and round the northern coast of the Mediterranean. They founded the town of Marseilles on the site of an earlier Phoenician colony. They began settlements in Sicily in rivalry with the Carthaginians as early as 735 B.C.

 

[Fig. Hellenic Racew 1000-500 B.C. (Map)]

 

In the rear of the Greeks proper came the kindred Macedonians, and Thracians; on their left wing, the Phrygians crossed by the Bosphorus into Asia Minor.

 

[Fig. 0254 Greek Sea Fight, 550 B,C.]

 

We find all this distribution of the Greeks effected before the beginnings of written history. By the seventh century B.C. "that is to say, by the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews"the landmarks of the ancient world of the pre-Hellenic civilization in Europe have been obliterated. Tiryns and