446	A BRIEF SURVEY OF HUMAN HISTORY
coveries which have influenced human destiny for good and
evil.
First among these are the products of the Nile and Indus
valleys.   The former created standards of comfort and de-
cency never before known to pre-historic man; the latter
gave to the world its first lessons in rational town-planning
and city-life, on which indeed civilisation is based.   Assyria
and Persia set our feet on the dangerous paths of war and
imperialism along lines attempted by none before them,
though copied and improved upon by others in later times,
The Chinese invented above all else, the mariner's compass,
gun-powder, and the printing-press; the first brought the
European into their country, the second enabled mankind
to destroy itself, and the third made a world-renaissance
possible.   Finally, in the world of antiquity, India revealed
her genius for metaphysics and religions, thereby enabling
a Schopenhauer to die in peace and her own children .to
remain under foreign yoke retaining for themselves the proud
privilege of having produced the first Prince of Peace for
the edification of the {pugnacious Mongolian race.    Greece
and Rome, though chronologically belonging to the ancient
world, logically belong to our own.   The only other people
of antiquity that we need comment upon here, are the Israe-
lites, who,—while Egypt worshipped her multitude of quaint
gods, India rejected her Buddha in preference for her own
metaphysics and religions, China accepted the exiled ethic
of India to add to her own Confucianism, and Iran was
engrossed in the eternal dud between Ahura and Ahriman,
—replaced the confused vacancy of the Western mind with
the coherent theology of a humanised and unified god.  Sudi
was the World into which Greece and Rome stepped.
It is not easy to summarise the Greek contributions to
human civilisation, for the ancient Greeks were the most