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The Historians' History of the World 01 [Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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It will doubtless be at least another century, perhaps two or three centuries, before the inhabitants of Christendom can look out upon the world with as rational a view as that which Plato attained in the fifth century B.C., or Cicero in the first, or Marcus Aurelius some two or three centuries later, just as the storm-cloud of Oriental superstition was thickening. So it need not surprise us that Egypt should have suffered in a like manner for a like period.
In the last analysis, then, it would seem that it is the likeness of Egyptian history to our own history, rather than its mysterious differences, that gives it the greatest charm. The differences are the surface details; the resemblances are as deep as human nature itself. In obtaining this conviction, we curiously reversed the old estimate of the strange weird people of the Nile, but in so doing we prepare ourselves far better than we otherwise could to grasp the import of universal history.a
APPENDIX A. CLASSICAL TRADITIONS
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?—Emerson.
Such is the land which, viewed with the eyes of later epochs, seems a theatre of marvels; such the people whose fortune it was to step first, or among the first, from the ranks of barbarians into the phalanx of civilisation. How and when and where they took this step—or rather made this long slow climb—we do not know. But they themselves had traditions regarding their origin and early history, some of which have come down to us, chiefly through the medium of Greek historians.
These traditions are not, of course, to be weighed in the same scale with the concrete findings of the modern historical investigators. But neither, on the other hand, should they be altogether set aside. We live in a world curiously woven full of paradox and illusion. Often it chances that the records, even of recent times, which bear the fullest stamp of authenticity, are really nothing more than fables—a mixture of prejudice, and falsehood, and myth, and fetich. And, on the other hand, it may chance that a purely fabulous record contains the very essence of history. Indeed, always, where the tradition is of long standing and widely accepted among a people at some stage of its evolution, such tradition must be redolent of the Zeitgeist of its epoch.
It may be, as such fables commonly are, an impossible tale of gods and godlike heroes, of superhuman feats and supernatural revelations; yet none the less it is in one sense historically true. If nothing more, it is the epitomised history of the psychology of an epoch. But generally it is more than that: it is the idealised expression of a racial memory of actual events—idealised, glorified, transfigured, yet perhaps never actually created save upon a substratum of facts. And how infinitely expressive this idealised record becomes. It condenses the events of centuries, sometimes into a phrase; it embodies the essence of the civilisation of an epoch in a parable.
Who would give up the Homeric legends, with their records of gods and supernatural heroes, for the realistic recitals of a Thucydides? Who would give up the myths of Greece for a record of actual wars and conquests? Fortunately we have not to make the choice; we may retain the one record to supplement and complete the other. So the historian should do with the early records of every people, wherever accessible.
Apart from the monuments of the Egyptians themselves, the oldest account of this people which has come down to us in profane literature is that given by Herodotus. This account has peculiar interest because it is given by an eye-witness. Herodotus travelled in Egypt some time about the beginning of the fifth century B.C., when Egypt was just being opened up to the foreigner. It does not appear that Herodotus knew the language of the country, and he was, therefore, necessarily debarred from attaining as intimate a knowledge of the people as might otherwise have been possible. It has been suspected also that the Egyptian priests amused themselves not a little in filling the mind of Herodotus with tales of very doubtful authenticity. But be that as it may, Herodotus had a keen eye, and he has left us vivid and interesting descriptions of the many marvels that he saw, some of which are here presented. In making these citations we shall not for the moment attempt the rôle of the critic, accepting rather the entertaining narrative just as it is given.
It will be obvious that in many points this narrative partakes of the ludicrous; yet even these portions of the tale have their value. What Herodotus tells us of the causes of the rises of the Nile, for example, is important as showing the attitude of Greek thought towards this singular phenomenon. The naïve recital in which Herodotus tells how the wind blows the sun from his course, serves in itself to give a clew, not to the mind of Herodotus alone, but to the minds of his contemporaries,—a clew which will be of the utmost value in aiding one to estimate the status of various historical reports that come to us from antiquity. But, on the other hand, what Herodotus has to tell us of his actual observations as to the land and the manners and customs of its people, is of the utmost importance as the contemporary record of a keen observer, and may be accepted, so far as it relates to the actual observations of the author, as historically accurate in the fullest modern sense of the word.
Next to the works of Herodotus, the amplest description of Egypt that has come down to us from antiquity is that of Diodorus the Sicilian. This author was a contemporary of Cæsar and Augustus. He wrote a very famous history of the world under the title of The Historical Library, in forty books, of which only about eleven have reached us intact.
It is not clear whether Diodorus, like Herodotus, visited Egypt in person, but he at least was familiar with all the knowledge and tradition of his time relating to that country. He lived several centuries later than Herodotus, when Egypt had long been the field of foreign invasion. Whatever the Greek and the Roman had been able to learn of Egyptian history was therefore accessible to him, and what he has to tell us of Egypt has the peculiar merit of epitomising practically all classical knowledge of the people of the Nile. Practically nothing more was added to the stock of Western knowledge regarding Egyptian history from his day till the nineteenth century. Certain statements which Diodorus accepted were indeed such as latter-day scepticism would instinctively reject, but, that qualification aside, the history of Egypt as Diodorus relates it was practically her history as known to the Western world until nineteenth century enterprise found the key to the Egyptian monuments. For this reason, if for no other, the story of Diodorus will have peculiar and lasting interest; but in addition to this, the narrative has intrinsic merits that render it well worthy of preservation.
It will be of the utmost interest here, at the very beginning, to compare and contrast his account of Egypt with that of Herodotus. If we shall find in it certain things, such as his account of the spontaneous generation of mice from the mud of the Nile, which seem to justify what has been quoted from the critics as to his credulity, we shall find, on the other hand, in his critical analysis of the different stories as to the origin of the Nile, and, in his finally correct choosing of a true explanation of the annual rise of that river, clear proof that he did possess and did sometimes utilise a keen critical judgment. Meantime it will be equally clear that he possessed, in no small degree, a capacity to write interesting history very different from the more arid records which make up some of his later annals.a