The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (mini ebook reader .TXT) π
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 des
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poured forth in successive streams over Persia, Asia Minor,
Greece, Italy, and the whole of Europe from the Danube and the
Rhine to the shores of the Atlantic. They also descended on the
Punjab, or country of the Indus, where they established their
first colony, and thence spread to the region of the Ganges,
and over the Deccan. They intermarried much with the native
women, but divided the men into servile castes, and kept them
in subjection partly by means of an armed aristocracy, partly
by means of religious terror.
These then are the elemental lands; China, India, Babylonia,
and Egypt. In these countries civilisation was invented;
history begins with them. The Egyptians manufactured linen
goods, and beautiful glass wares, and drew gold, ivory, and
slaves from the Sudan. Babylonia manufactured tapestry and
carpets. These people were known to one another only by their
products; the wandering Bedouins carried the trade between the
Euphrates and the Nile. A caravan route was also opened between
Babylon and India via Bokhara or Balkh and Samarkand. India
possessed much wealth in precious stones, but the true
resources of that country were its vegetable products and the
skilful manufactures of the natives. India, to use their own
expression, sells grass for gold. From one kind of plant they
extracted a beautiful blue dye: from another they boiled a
juice, which cooled into a crystal, delicate and luscious to
the taste; from another they obtained a kind of wool, which
they spun, wove, bleached, glazed, and dyed into fabrics
transparent as the gossamer, bright as the plumage of the
jungle birds. And India was also the half-way station between
China, Ceylon, and the Spice Islands on the one hand: and of
the countries of Western Asia on the other. It was enriched not
only by its own industry and produce, but by the transit trade
as well.
At an early epoch in history, the Chinese became a
great navigating people; they discovered America, at least so
they say; they freighted their junks with cargoes of the
shining fibre, and with musk in porcelain jars; they coasted
along the shores of the Pacific, established colonies in Burmah
and Siam, developed the spice trade of the Indian Archipelago
and the resources of Ceylon, sailed up the shores of Malabar,
entered the Persian Gulf, and even coasted as far as Aden and
the Red Sea. It was probably from them that the Banians of
Gujrat and the Arabs of Yemen acquired the arts of
shipbuilding and navigation. The Indian Ocean became a basin of
commerce; it was whitened by cotton sails. The Phoenicians
explored the desolate waters of the Mediterranean Sea; with the
bright red cloth, and the blue bugles, and the speckled beads,
they tempted the savages of Italy and Greece to trade; they
discovered the silver mines of Spain; they sailed forth through
the Straits of Gibraltar, they braved the storms of the
Atlantic, opened the tin trade of Cornwall, established the
amber diggings of the Baltic. Thus a long thread of commerce
was stretched across the Old World from England and Germany to
China and Japan. Yet, still the great countries in the central
region dwelt in haughty isolation, knowing foreign lands only
by their products until the wide conquests and the superb
administration of the Persians made them members of the same
community. China alone remained outside. Egypt, Babylonia, and
India were united by royal roads with half-way stations in
Palestine and Bokhara, and with seaports in Phoenicia, and on
the western coast of Asia Minor That country is a tableland
belted on all sides by mountains; but beneath the wall of hills
on the western side is a fruitful strip of coast, the estuary
land of four rivers which flow into the Mediterranean parallel
to one another. That coast is Ionia; and opposite to Ionia lies
Greece.
The tableland was occupied by an Aryan or Arya nation,
from whom bands of emigrants went forth in two directions. The
Dorians crossed the Hellespont, and, passing through Thrace,
settled in the hill cantons of Northern Greece, and thence
spread over the lower parts of the peninsula. The Ionians
descended to the fruitful western coast, and thence migrated
into Attica, which afterwards sent back colonies to its ancient
birthplace. These two people spoke the same language, and were
of the same descent; but their characters differed as widely as
the cold and barren mountains from the soft and smiling plains.
The Dorians were rude in their manners, and laconic in their
speech, barbarous in their virtues, morose in their joys. The
Ionians lived among holidays, they could do nothing without
dance and song. The Dorians founded Sparta, a republic which
was in reality a camp, consisting of soldiers fed by slaves.
The girls were educated to be viragoes; the boys to bear
torture, like the Red Indians, with a smile. The wives were
breeding-machines, belonging to the state; a council of elders
examined the new-born children, and selected only the finer
specimens, in order to keep up the good old Spartan breed. They
had no commerce and no arts; they were as filthy in their
persons as they were narrow in their minds. But the Athenians
were the true Greeks, as they exist at the present day;
intellectual, vivacious, inquisitive, shrewd, artistic,
patriotic, and dishonest; ready to die for their country, or to
defraud it. The Greeks received the first rudiments of
knowledge from Phoenicia; the alphabet was circulated
throughout the country by means of the Olympian fairs; colonies
were sent forth all round the Mediterranean; and those of Ionia
and the Delta of the Nile obtained partial access to the arts
and sciences of Babylon and Memphis.
The Persian wars developed the genius of the Greeks. The Persian
conquests opened to them the University of Egypt. The immense area of
the Greek world, extending from the Crimea to the straits of
Gibraltar, for at one time the Greeks had cities in Morocco; the
variety of ideas which they thus gathered, and which they interchanged at
the great festival, where every kind of talent was honoured and
rewarded the spirit of noble rivalry, which made city contend
with city, and citizen with citizen, in order to obtain an
Olympian reputation; the complete freedom from theology in art;
the tastes and manners of the land; the adoration of beauty;
the nudity of the gymnasium: all these sufficiently explain the
unexampled progress of the nation, and the origin of that
progress, as in all other cases, is to be found in physical
geography. Greece was divided into natural cantons; each state
was a fortress; while Egypt, Assyria, India, and China were
wide and open plains, which cavalry could sweep, and which
peasants with their sickles could not defend. But the rivalry
of the Greeks among themselves, so useful to the development of
mental life, prevented them from combining into one great
nation; and Alexander, although he was a Greek by descent, for
he had the right of contending at the Olympian games, conquered
the East with an army of barbarians, his Greek troops being
merely a contingent.
But the kingdoms of Asia and Egypt were Greek, and in Alexandria
the foundations of science were laid. The astrolabes which had been
invented by the Egyptians were improved by the Greeks and afterwards
by the Arabs, were adapted to purposes of navigation by the Portuguese,
and were developed to the sextant of the nineteenth century. The
Egyptians had invented the blow-pipe, the crucible, and the
alembic; the Alexandrines commenced or continued the pursuit of
alchemy, which the Arabs also preserved, and which has since
grown into the science of Lavoisier and Faraday. Hippocrates
separated medicine from theology; his successors dissected and
experimented at Alexandria, learning something no doubt from
th Egyptian school; the Arabs followed in a servile manner the
medicine of the Greeks, and the modern Europeans obtained from
the Canon of Avicenna the first elements of a science which has
made much progress, but which is yet in its infancy, and which
will some day transform us into new beings. The mathematical
studies of the Alexandrines were also serviceable to mankind,
and the work of one of their professors is a text-book in this
country; they discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes; and
the work which they did in Conic Sections enabled Kepler to
discover the true laws of the planetary motions. But Alexandria
did not possess that liberty which is the true source of
continued progress. With slaves below and with despots above,
the mind was starved in its roots, and stifled in its bud,
dried and ticketed in a museum. The land itself had begun to
languish and decay, when a new power arose in the West.
The foot of Italy was lined with Greek towns, and these had
spread culture through the peninsula, among a people of a kindred
race. They dwelt in cities, with municipal governments, public
buildings, and national schools. One Italian city, founded by
desperadoes, adopted a career of war; but the brigands were
also industrious farmers and wise politicians; they conciliated
the cities whom they conquered. Rome became a supreme republic,
ruling a number of minor republics, whose municipal
prerogatives were left undisturbed, who paid no tribute save
military service. The wild Gauls of Lombardy were subdued. The
Greeks on the coast were the only foreigners who retained their
freedom in the land. They called over Pyrrhus to protect them
from the Romans; but the legion conquered the phalanx, the
broadsword vanquished the Macedonian spear. The Asiatic
Carthaginians were masters of the sea; half Sicily belonged to
them; they were, therefore, neighbours of the Romans. They had
already menaced the cities of the southern coast; the Romans
were already jealous and distrustful; they had now a Monroe
doctrine concerning the peninsula: an opportunity occurred, and
they stepped out into the world. The first Punic war gave them
Sicily, the second Punic war gave them Spain, the third Punic
war gave them Africa.
Rome also extended her power towards the East. She did not invade,
she did not conquer, she did not ask for presents and taxes, she merely
offered her friendship and protection. She made war, it is true, but only
on behalf of her allies. And so kingdom after kingdom, province after
province, fell into her vast and patient arms. She became at first the
arbiter and afterwards the mistress of the world. Her legions
halted only on the banks of the Euphrates, and on the shores of
the Sahara, where a wild waste of sand and a sea-horizon
appeared to proclaim that life was at an end. She entered the
unknown world beyond the Alps, established a chain of forts
along the banks of the Danube and the Rhine from the Black Sea
to the Baltic, covered France with noble cities, and made York
a Roman town. The Latin language was planted in all the
countries which this people conquered, except in those where
Alexander had preceded them. The empire was therefore divided
by language into the Greek and Latin world. Greece, Asia Minor,
Syria, and Egypt belonged to the Greek world: Italy, Africa,
Spain, and Gaul belonged to the Latin world. But the Roman law
was everywhere in force, though not to the extinction of the
native laws. In Egypt, for instance, the Romans revived some
of the wise enactments of the Pharaohs which had been abrogated
by the Ptolemies. The old courts of injustice were swept away.
Tribunals were established which resembled those of the English
in India. Men of all races, and of all religions, came before a
judge of a foreign race, who sat high above their schisms and
dissensions, who looked down upon them all with impartial
contempt, and who reverenced the law which was entrusted to his
care. But the provinces were forced to support not only a court
but a
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