The Story of Civilization
PART ONE
OUR ORIENTAL HERITAGE
THE STORY OF
CIVILIZATION
i. Our Oriental Heritage
Being a history of civilization in Egypt and the Near East
to the death of Alexander, and in India, China and ]
front the beginning to our own day; 'with an int
on the nature and foundations of civilizatj
ift Diirant
SIMON AND SCHUSTER
NEW YORK : 1942
TO ARIEL
Preface
I HAVE tried in this book to accomplish the first part of a pleasant
assignment which I rashly laid upon myself some twenty years ago: to
write a history of civilization. I wish to tell as much as I can, in as little
space as I can, of the contributions that genius and labor have made to the
cultural heritage of mankind— to chronicle and contemplate, in their causes,
character and effects, the advances of invention, the varieties of economic
organization, the experiments in government, the aspirations of religion,
the mutations of morals and manners, the masterpieces of literature, the de-
velopment of science, the wisdom of philosophy, and the achievements of
art. I do not need to be told how absurd this enterprise is, nor how im-
modest is its very conception; for many years of effort have brought it to
but a fifth of its completion, and have made it clear that no one mind, and
no single lifetime, can adequately compass this task. Nevertheless I have
dreamed that despite the many errors inevitable in this undertaking, it may
be of some use to those upon whom the passion for philosophy has laid the
compulsion to try to see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and
understanding through history in time, as well as to seek them through
science in space.
I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate
longitudinal sections— economic history, political history, religious history,
the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science,
the history of music, the history of art— does injustice to the unity of
human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as lineally,
synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography
would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation's culture,
institutions, adventures and ways. But the accumulation of knowledge has
divided history, like science, into a thousand isolated specialties; and pru-
dent scholars have refrained from attempting any view of the whole—
whether of the material universe, or of the living past of our race. For the
probability of error increases with the scope of the undertaking, and any
man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for a myriad
merry darts of specialist critique. "Consider," said Ptah-hotep five thousand
years ago, "how thou mayest be opposed by an expert in council. It is
vii
PREFACE
foolish to speak on every kind of work."* A history of civilization shares
the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridicu-
lous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such
a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let
us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its
fatal depths.
The plan of the series is to narrate the history of civilization in five inde-
pendent parts:
L Our Oriental Heritage: a history of civilization in Egypt and the
Near East to the death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan
to the present day; with an introduction on the nature and elements
of civilization.
II. Our Classical Heritage: a history of civilization in Greece and
Rome, and of civilization in the Near East under Greek and Roman
domination.
III. Our Medieval Heritage: Catholic and feudal Europe, Byzantine
civilization, Mohammedan and Judaic culture in Asia, Africa and
Spain, and the Italian Renaissance.
IV. Our European Heritage: the cultural history of the European states
from the Protestant Reformation to the French Revolution.
V. Our Modern Heritage: the history of European invention and states-
manship, science and philosophy, religion and morals, literature and
art from the accession of Napoleon to our own times.
Our story begins with the Orient, not merely because Asia was the scene
of the oldest civilizations known to us, but because those civilizations
formed the background and basis of that Greek and Roman culture which
Sir Henry Maine mistakenly supposed to be the whole source of the mod-
ern mind. We shall be surprised to learn how much of our most indis-
pensable inventions, our economic and political organization, our science
and our literature, our philosophy and our religion, goes back to Egypt
and the Orient, t At this historic moment— when the ascendancy of Europe
is so rapidly coming to an end, when Asia is swelling with resurrected life,
and the theme of the twentieth century seems destined to be an all-embrac-
* Cf. p. 193 below.
tThe contributions of the Orient to our cultural heritage are summed up in the con-
cluding pages of this volume.
viii
PREFACE
ing conflict between the East and the West— the provincialism of our tra-
ditional histories, which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line,
has become no merely academic error, but a possibly fatal failure of per-
spective and intelligence. The future faces into the Pacific, and under-
standing must follow it there.
But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight
years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident— that not
even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western
student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap-
ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or
esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive
the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial
scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will
smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth
of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on
Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard; Dr.
Ananda Coomaraswamy of the Boston Institute of Fine Arts has given the
section on India a most painstaking revision, but must not be held responsi-
ble for the conclusions I have reached or the errors that remain; Professor
H. H. Gowen, the learned Orientalist of the University of Washington,
and Upton Close, whose knowledge of the Orient seems inexhaustible,
have checked the more flagrant mistakes in the chapters on China and
Japan; and Mr. George Sokolsky has given to the pages on contemporary
affairs in the Far East the benefit of his first-hand information. Should the
public be indulgent enough to call for a second edition of this book, the
opportunity will be taken to incorporate whatever further corrections may
be suggested by critics, specialists and readers. Meanwhile a weary author
may sympathize with Tai T'ung, who in the thirteenth century issued his
History of Chinese Writing with these words: "Were I to await perfec-
tion, my book would never be finished."*
Since these ear-minded times are not propitious for the popularity of ex-
pensive books on remote subjects of interest only to citizens of the world,
it may be that the continuation of this series will be delayed by the prosaic
necessities of economic life. But if the reception of this adventure in syn-
thesis makes possible an uninterrupted devotion to the undertaking, Part
Two should be ready by the fall of 1940, and its successors should appear,
* Carter, T. F., The Invention of Printing in China, and Its Spread Westward; New York,
1925, p. xviii,
ix
PREFACE *
by the grace of health, at five-year intervals thereafter. Nothing would
make me happier than to be freed, for this work, from every other literary
enterprise. I shall proceed as rapidly as time and circumstance will permit,
hoping that a few of my contemporaries will care to grow old with me
while learning, and that these volumes may help some of our children to
understand and enjoy the infinite riches of their inheritance.
WILL DURANT.
Great Neck, N. Y., March, 1935
A NOTE ON THE USE OF THIS BOOK
To bring the volume into smaller compass certain technical passages, which
may prove difficult for the general reader, have been printed (like this para-
graph) in reduced type. Despite much compression the book is still too long,
and the font of reduced type has not sufficed to indicate all the dull passages.
I trust that the reader will not attempt more than a chapter at a time.
Indented passages in reduced type are quotations. The raised numbers refer
to the Notes at the end of the volume; to facilitate reference to these Notes the
number of the chapter is given at the head of each page. An occasional hiatus
in the numbering of the Notes was caused by abbreviating the printed text.
The books referred to in the Notes are more fully described in the Bibliog-
raphy, whose starred titles may serve as a guide to further reading. The Gloss-
ary defines all foreign words used in the text. The Index pronounces foreign
names, and gives biographical dates.
It should be added that this book has no relation to, and makes no use of,
a biographical Story of Civilization prepared for newspaper publication in
1927-28.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the following authors and publishers for permission to quote from
their books:
Leonard, W. E., Gilgamesh; the Viking Press.
Giles, H. A., A History of Chinese Literature; D. Applcton-Century Co.
Underwood, Edna Worthley, Tu Fu; the Mosher Press.
Waley, Arthur, 170 Chinese Poeins; Alfred A. Knopf.
Breasted, Jas. H., The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt;
Scribner's.
Obata, Shigeyoshi, Works of Li Po; E. P. Dutton.
Tietjens, Eunice, Poetry of the Orient; Alfred A. Knopf.
Van Doren, Mark, Anthology of World Poetry; the Literary Guild.
"Upton Close," unpublished translations of Chinese poems.
X
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE ESTABLISHMENT
OF CIVILIZATION
Chapter I: THE CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION i
Definition — Geological conditions — Geographical — Economic — Racial — Psycho-
logical — Causes of the decay of civilizations
Chapter II: THE ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 5
I. FROM HUNTING TO TILLAGE, 5
Primitive improvidence— Beginnings of provision— Hunting and fishing— Herding—
The domestication of animals— Agriculture— Food— Cooking— Cannibalism
II. THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDUSTRY, I I
Fire— Primitive Tools— Weaving and pottery— Building and transport— Trade and
finance
III. ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION, 1 6
Primitive communism— Causes of its disappearance— Origins of private property-
Slavery— Classes
Chapter III: THE POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 21
I. THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT, 2 1
The unsocial instinct— Primitive anarchism— The clan and the tribe— The king— War
II. THE STATE, 23
As the organization of force— The village community— The psychological aides of
the state
III. LAW, 25
Law-lessness— Law and custom— Revenge— Fines— Courts— Ordeal— The duel— Punish-
ment—Primitive freedom
IV. THE FAMILY, 29
Its function in civilization— The clan vs. the family— Growth of parental care— Un-
importance of the father— Separation of the sexes— Mother-right— Status of woman
—Her occupations— Her economic achievements— The patriarchate— The subjection
of woman
xi
CONTENTS
Chapter IV: THE MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 36
I. MARRIAGE, 36
The meaning of marriage— Its biological origins— Sexual communism— Trial marriage
—Group marriage— Individual marriage— Polygamy— Its eugenic value— Exogamy-
Marriage by service— By capture— By purchase— Primitive love— The economic func-
tion of marriage
II. SEXUAL MORALITY, 44
Premarital relations — Prostitution — Chastity — Virginity — The double standard —
Modesty — The relativity of morals — The biological role of modesty — Adultery -
Divorce— Abortion— Infanticide— Childhood— The individual
III. SOCIAL MORALITY, 51
The nature of virtue and vice— Greed-Dishonesty— Violence— Homicide— Suicide—
The socialization of the individual— Altruism— Hospitality— Manners— Tribal limits of
morality— Primitive vs. modern morals— Religion and morals
IV. RELIGION, 56
Primitive atheists
1. THE SOURCES OF RELIGION
Fear— Wonder— Dreams— The soul— Animism
2. THE OBJECTS OF RELIGION
The sun — The stars — The earth — Sex — Animals — Totemism — The transition to
human gods— Ghost-worship— Ancestor-worship
3. THE METHODS OF RELIGION
Magic — Vegetation rites — Festivals of license — Myths of the resurrected god —
Magic and superstition— Magic and science— Priests
4. THE MORAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION
Religion and government— Tabu— Sexual tabus— The lag of religion— Secularization
Chapter V: THE MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 72
I. LETTERS, 72
Language— Its animal background— Its human origins— Its development— Its results-
Education— Initiation— Writing— Poetry
II. SCIENCE, 78
Origins— Mathematics— Astronomy— Medicine— Surgery
III. ART, 82
The meaning of beauty-Of art-The primitive sense of beauty-The painting of the
body — Cosmetics — Tattooing — Scarification — Clothing — Ornaments — Pottery —
Painting — Sculpture — Architecture'— The dance — Music — Summary of the
primitive preparation for civilization
Chronological Chart: Types and Cultures of Prehistoric Man 90
xii
CONTENTS
Chapter VI: THE PREHISTORIC BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 90
I. PALEOLITHIC CULTURE, 90
The purpose of prehistory— The romances of archeology
1. MEN OF THE OLD STONE AGE
The geological background— Paleolithic types
2. ARTS OF THE OLD STONE ACE
Tools-Fire— Painting— Sculpture
II. NEOLITHIC CULTURE, 98
The Kitchen-Middens-The Lake-Dwellers-The coming of agriculture-The taming
of animals— Technology— Neolithic weaving— pottery— building— transport— religion-
science— Summary of the prehistoric preparation for civilization
III. THE TRANSITION TO HISTORY, IO2
1. THE COMING OF METALS
Copper— Bronze— Iron
2. WRITING
Its possible ceramic origins — The "Mediterranean Signary" — Hieroglyphics —
Alphabets
3. LOST CIVILIZATIONS
Polynesia-"Atlantis"
4. CRADLES OF CIVILIZATION
Central Asia— Anau— Lines of Dispersion
BOOK ONE
THE NEAR EAST
Chronological Table of Near Eastern History 113
Chapter VII: SUMERIA 116
Orientation— Contributions of the Near East to Western civilization
1. ELAM, 117
The culture of Susa— The potter's wheel— The wagon-wheel
II. THE SUMERIANS, Il8
1. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The exhuming of Sumeria— Geography— Race— Appearance— The Sumerian Flood
—The kings— An ancient reformer— Sargon of Akkad— The Golden Age of Ur
2. ECONOMIC LIFE
The soil-Industry— Trade— Classes— Science
3. GOVERNMENT
The kings- Ways of war— The feudal barons— Law
4. RELIGION AND MORALITY
The Sumerian Pantheon— The food of the gods— Mythology— Education— A Sume-
rian prayer— Temple prostitutes— The rights of woman-Sumerian cosmetics
xiii
CONTENTS
5. LETTERS AND ARTS
Writing — Literature — Temples and palaces — Statuary — Ceramics - Jewelry-
Summary of Sumerian civilization
III. PASSAGE TO EGYPT, 134
Sumerian influence in Mesopotamia — Ancient Arabia — Mesopotamia!! influence in
Egypt
Chapter VIII: EGYPT 137
I. THE GIFT OF THE NILE, 137
1. IN THE DELTA
Alexandria-The Nile-The Pyramids-The Sphinx
2. UPSTREAM
Memphis— The masterpiece of Queen Hatshepsut— The "Colossi of Memnon"—
Luxor and Karnak— The grandeur of Egyptian civilization
II. THE MASTER BUILDERS, 144
1. THE DISCOVERY OF EGYPT
Champollion and the Rosetta Stone
2. PREHISTORIC EGYPT
Paleolithic— Neolithic— The Badarians— Predynastic— Race
3. THE OLD KINGDOM
The "nomes"-The first historic individual-"Cheops"-"Chephren"-The purpose
of the Pyramids— Art of the tombs— Mummification
4. THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
The Feudal Age— The Twelfth Dynasty— The Hyksos Domination
5. THE EMPIRE
The great queen— Thutmose III— The zenith of Egypt
HI. THE CIVILIZATION OF EGYPT, 156
1. AGRICULTURE
2. INDUSTRY
Miners — Manufactures — Workers — Engineers — Transport — Postal service —
Commerce and finance — Scribes
3. GOVERNMENT
The bureaucrats— Law— The vizier— The pharaoh
4. MORALS
Royal incest— The harem— Marriage— The position of woman— The matriarchate in
Egypt— Sexual morality
5. MANNERS
Character— Games— Appearance— Cosmetics— Costume— Jewelry
6. LETTERS
Education— Schools of government— Paper and ink— Stages in the development of
writing— Forms of Egyptian writing
7. LITERATURE
Texts and libraries— The Egyptian Sinbad— The Story of Sinuhe— Fiction— An
amorous fragment— Love poems— History— A literary revolution
xiv
CONTENTS
8. SCIENCE
Origins of Egyptian science— Mathematics— Astronomy and the calendar— Anatomy
and physiology— Medicine, surgery and hygiene
p. ART
Architecture— Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, Empire and Sa'ite sculpture— Bas-
relief— Painting— Minor arts— Music— The artists
10. PHILOSOPHY
The Instructions of Ptah-hotep—The Admonitions of Ipuwer— The Dialogue of a
Misanthrope— The Egyptian Ecclesiastes
11. RELIGION
Sky gods— The sun god— Plant gods— Animal gods— Sex gods— Human gods— Osiris
— Isis and Horus— Minor deities— The priests— Immortality— The Book of the Dead—
The "Negative Confession"— Magic— Corruption
IV. THE HERETIC KING, 205
The character of Ikhnaton— The new religion— A hymn to the sun— Monotheism— The
new dogma— The new art— Reaction— Nofretete— Break-up of the Empire— Death of
Ikhnaton
V. DECLINE AND FALL, 2 1 3
Tutenkhamon— The labors of Rameses H— The wealth of the clergy— The poverty of
the people— The conquest of Egypt— Summary of Egyptian contributions to civili-
zation
Chapter IX: BABYLONIA 218
I. FROM HAMMURABI TO NEBUCHADRF77AR, 2l8
Babylonian contributions to modern civilisation— The Land between the Rivers-
Hammurabi— His capital— The Kassite Domination— The Amarna letters— The As-
syrian Conquest— Nebuchadrezzar— Babylon in the days of its glory
II. THE TOILERS, 226
Hunting — Tillage — Food — Industry — Transport — The perils of commerce —
Money-lenders— Slaves
III. THE LAW, 230
The Code of Hammurabi— The powers of the king— Trial by ordeal— Lex Talioms—
Forms of punishment— Codes of wages and prices— State restoration of stolen goods
IV. THE GODS OF BABYLON, 232
Religion and the state— The functions and powers of the clergy— The lesser gods—
Marduk— Ishtar— The Babylonian stories of the Creation and the Flood— The love of
Ishtar and Tammuz— The descent of Ishtar into Hell— The death and resurrection of
Tammuz— Ritual and prayer— Penitential psalms— Sin— Magic— Superstition
V. THE MORALS OF BABYLON, 244
Religion divorced from morals— Sacred prostitution— Free love— Marriage— Adultery
—Divorce— The position of woman— The relaxation of morals
VI. LETTERS AND LITERATURE, 248
Cuneiform— Its decipherment— Language— Literature— The epic of Gilgamcsh
XV
CONTENTS
VII. ARTISTS, 254
The lesser arts— Music— Painting— Sculpture— Bas-relief— Architecture
VHI. BABYLONIAN SCIENCE, 256
Mathematics— Astronomy— The calendar—Geography—Medicine
IX. PHILOSOPHERS, 259
Religion and Philosophy— The Babylonian Job— The Babylonian Koheleth— An anti-
clerical
X. EPITAPH, 263
Chapter X: ASSYRIA 265
I. CHRONICLES, 265
Beginnings — Cities — Race — The conquerors — Sennacherib and Esarhaddon —
"Sardanapalus"
II. ASSYRIAN GOVERNMENT, 270
Imperialism— Assyrian war— The conscript gods— Law— Delicacies of penology— Ad-
ministration—The violence of Oriental monarchies
III. ASSYRIAN LIFE, 274
Industry and trade— Marriage and morals— Religion and science— Letters and libraries
—The Assyrian ideal of a gentleman
IV. ASSYRIAN ART, 278
Minor arts— Bas-relief— Statuary— Building— A page from "Sardanapalus"
V. ASSYRIA PASSES, 282
The last days of a king— Sources of Assyrian decay— The fall of Nineveh
Chapter XI: A MOTLEY OF NATIONS 285
I. THE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES, 285
The ethnic scene- Mitannians—Hittites— Armenians— Scythians— Phrygians— The Di-
vine Mother— Lydians— Croesus— Coinage— Croesus, Solon and Cyrus
II. THE SEMITIC PEOPLES, 2pO
The antiquity of the Arabs— Phoenicians— Their world trade— Their circumnavigation
of Africa— Colonies— Tyre and Sidon— Deities— The dissemination of the alphabet—
Syria-Astarte— The death and resurrection of Adoni— The sacrifice of children
Chapter XII: JUDEA 299
I. THE PROMISED LAND, 299
Palestine - Climate - Prehistory - Abraham's people - The Jews in Egypt - The
Exodus — The conquest of Canaan
II. SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY, 302
Race — Appearance — Language — Organization — Judges and kings — Saul — David
—Solomon— His wealth— The Temple— Rise of the social problem in Israel
III. THE GOD OF HOSTS, 308
Polytheism— Yahveh— Henotheism— Character of the Hebrew religion— The idea of
sin— Sacrifice— Circumcision— The priesthood— Strange gods
xvi
CONTENTS
IV. THE FIRST RADICALS, 314
The class war— Origin of the Prophets— Amos at Jerusalem— Isaiah— His attacks upon
the rich— His doctrine of a Messiah— The influence of the Prophets
V. THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JERUSALEM, 320
The birth of the Bible— The destruction of Jerusalem— The Babylonian Captivity-
Jeremiah— Ezekiel— The Second Isaiah— The liberation of the Jews— The Second
Temple
VI. THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, 328
The "Book of the Law"— The composition of the Pentateuch— The myths of Genesis
—The Mosaic Code— The Ten Commandments— The idea of God— The sabbath—
The Jewish family— Estimate of the Mosaic legislation
VII. THE LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE, 339
History — Fiction — Poetry — The Psalms — The Song of Songs — Proverbs — Job —
The idea of immortality— The pessimism of Ecclesiastes— The advent of Alexander
Chapter XIII: PERSIA 350
I. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MEDES, 350
Their origins— Rulers— The blood treaty of Sardis— Degeneration
II. THE GREAT KINGS, 352
The romantic Cyrus— His enlightened policies— Cambyses— Darius the Great— The
invasion of Greece
III. PERSIAN LIFK AND INDUSTRY, 355
The empire— The people— The language— The peasants— The in.perial highways-
Trade and finance
IV. AN EXPERIMENT IN GOVERNMENT, 359
The king— The nobles— The army— Law— A savage punishment— The capitals— The
satrapies— An achievement in administration
V. ZARATHUSTRA, 364
The coming of the Prophet— Persian religion before Zarathustra— The Bible of Persia
— Ahura-Mazda— The good and the evil spirits— Their struggle for the possession of
the world
VI. ZOROASTRIAN ETHICS, 368
Man as a battlefield— The Undying Fire— Hell, Purgatory and Paradise— The cult of
Mithra— The Magi— The Parsccs
VII. PERSIAN MANNERS AND MORALS, 373
Violence and honor— The code of cleanliness— Sins of the flesh— Virgins and bache-
lors—Marriage—Women—Children—Persian ideas of education
VIII. SCIENCE AND ART, 376
Medicine— Minor arts— The tombs of Cyrus and Darius— The palaces of Persepolis-
The Frieze of the Archers— Estimate of Persian art
IX. DECADENCE, 381
How a nation may die— Xerxes— A paragraph of murders— Artaxerxes II— Cyrus the
Younger— Darius the Little— Causes of decay: political, military, moral— Alexander
conquers Persia, and advances upon India
xvii
CONTENTS
BOOK TWO
INDIA AND HER NEIGHBORS
Chronological Table of Indian History 389
Chapter XIV: THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 391
I. SCENE OF THE DRAMA, 391
The rediscovery of India— A glance at the map— Climatic influences
II. THE OLDEST CIVILIZATION?, 394
Prehistoric India— Mohenjo-daro-Its antiquity
III. THE INDO-ARYANS, 396
The natives— The invaders— The village community— Caste— Warriors— Priests— Mer-
chants—Workers— Outcastes
IV. INDO-ARYAN SOCIETY, 399
Herders— Tillers of the soil— Craftsmen— Traders— Coinage and credit— Morals— Mar-
riage—Woman
V. THE RELIGION OF THE VEDAS, 402
Pre-Vedic religion— Vedic gods— Moral gods— The Vedic story of Creation— Im-
mortality—The horse sacrifice
VI. THE VEDAS AS LITERATURE, 405
Sanskrit and English — Writing — The four Vedas — The Rig-weda — A Hymn of
Creation
VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPAN1SHADS, 410
The authors— Their theme— Intellect vs. intuition— Atman— Brahman— Their identity
—A description of God— Salvation— Influence of the Upanishads—TLmcrson on Brahma
Chapter XV: BUDDHA 416
I. THE HERETICS, 416
Sceptics— Nihilists— Sophists— Atheists— Materialists— Religions without a god
II. MAHAVIRA AND THE JAINS, 419
The Great Hero— The Jain creed— Atheistic polytheism— Asceticism— Salvation by
suicide— Later history of the Jains
III. THE LEGEND OF BUDDHA, 422
The background of Buddhism— The miraculous birth— Youth— The sorrows of life-
Flight—Ascetic years— Enlightenment— A vision of Nirvana
IV. THE TEACHING OF BUDDHA, 428
Portrait of the Master— His methods— The Four Noble Truths— The Eightfold Way
—The Five Moral Rules— Buddha and Christ— Buddha's agnosticism and anti-clerical-
ism—His Atheism— His soul-less psychology— The meaning of Nirvana
V. THE LAST DAYS OF BUDDHA, 436
His miracles— He visits his father's house— The Buddhist monks— Death
xviii
CONTENTS
Chapter XVI: FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 440
I. CHANDRAGUPTA, 440
Alexander in India — Chandragupta the liberator — The people — The university of
Taxila— The royal palace— A day in the life of a king— An older Alachiavelli— Admin-
istration—Law— Public health— Transport and roads— Municipal government
II. THE PHILOSOPHER-KING, 446
Ashoka— The Edict of Tolerance— Ashoka's missionaries— His failure— His success
III. THE GOLDEN AGE OF INDIA, 450
An epoch of invasions— The Kushan kings— The Gupta Empire— The travels of Fa-
Hien— The revival of letters— The Huns in India— Harsha the generous— The travels
of Yuan Chwang
IV. ANNALS OF RAJPUTANA, 454
The Samurai of India— The age of chivalry— The fall of Chitor
V. THE ZENITH OF THE SOUTH, 456
The kingdoms of the Deccan— Vijayanagar— Krishna Raya— A medieval metropolis-
Laws— Arts— Religion— Tragedy
VI. THE MOSLEM CONQUEST, 459
The weakening of India— Mahmud of Ghazni— The Sultanate of Delhi— Its cultural
asides— Its brutal policy— The lesson of Indian history
VII. AKBAR THE GREAT, 463
Tamerlane— Babur— Humayun— Akbar— His government— His character— His patron-
age of the arts— His passion for philosophy— His friendship for Hinduism and Chris-
tianity—His new religion— The last days of Akbar
VIII. THE DECLINE OF THE MOGULS, 472
The children of great men — Jehangir — Shah Jehan — His magnificence — His fall —
Aurangzcb— His fanaticism— His death— The coming of the British
Chapter XVII: THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 477
I. THE MAKERS OF WEALTH, 477
The jungle background — Agriculture — Mining — Handicrafts — Commerce —
Money — Taxes — Famines — Poverty and wealth
II. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY, 482
The monarchy— Law— The Code of "Manu"— Development of the caste system— Rise
of the Brahmans— Their privileges and powers— Their obligations— In defense of caste
III. MORALS AND MARRIAGE, 488
Dharma — Children — Child marriage — The art of love — Prostitution — Romantic
love — Marriage — The family — Woman — Her intellectual life — Her rights —
Purdah - Suttee-The Widow
IV. MANNERS, CUSTOMS AND CHARACTER, 496
Sexual modesty— Hygiene— Dress— Appearance— The gentle art among the Hindus-
Faults and virtues— Games— Festivals— Death
xix
CONTENTS
Chapter XVIII: THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 503
I. THE LATER HISTORY OF BUDDHISM, 503
The Zenith of Buddhism—The Two Vehicles— Mahay ana— Buddhism, Stoicism and
Christianity— The decay of Buddhism— Its migrations: Ceylon, Burma, Turkestan,
Tibet, Cambodia, China, Japan
II. THE NEW DIVINITIES, 507
Hinduism— Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva— Krishna— Kali— Animal gods— The sacred cow-
Polytheism and monotheism
III. BELIEFS, 5 1 1
The Puranas—'Thc reincarnations of the universe— The migrations of the soul— Karma
—Its philosophical aspects— Life as evil— Release
IV. CURIOSITIES OF RELIGION, 517
Superstitions — Astrology — Phallic worship — Ritual — Sacrifice — Purification —
The sacred waters
V. SAINTS AND SCEPTICS, 522
Methods of sanctity— Heretics— Toleration— General view of Hindu religion
Chapter XIX: THE LIFE OF THE MIND 526
I. HINDU SCIENCE, 526
Its religious origins — Astronomers — Mathematicians — The "Arabic" numerals —The
decimal system — Algebra — Geometry — Physics — Chemistry — Physiology — Vedic
medicine — Physicians — Surgeons — Anesthetics — Vaccination — Hypnotism
II. THE SIX SYSTEMS OF BRAHMANICAL PHILOSOPHY, 533
The antiquity of Indian philosophy— Its prominent role— Its scholars— Forms— Con-
ception of orthodoxy— The assumptions of Hindu philosophy
1. THE Nyaya SYSTEM
2. THE Vaisheshika SYSTEM
3. THE Sankbya SYSTEM
Its high repute— Metaphysics— Evolution— Atheism— Idealism— Spirit— Body, mind
and soul— The goal of philosophy— Influence of the Sankbya
4. THE Yoga SYSTEM
The Holy Men— The antiquity of Yoga— Its meaning— The eight stages of discipline
—The aim of Yoga—The miracles of the Yogi— The sincerity of Yoga
5. THE Purva Mimansa
6. THE Vedanta SYSTEM
Origin — Shankara — Logic — Epistemology — Maya — Psychology — Theology —
God — Ethics — Difficulties of the system — Death of Shankara
m. THE CONCLUSIONS OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY, 552
Decadence— Summary— Criticism— Influence
XX
CONTENTS
Chapter XX: THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 555
I. THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA, 555
Sanskrit— The vernaculars— Grammar
II. EDUCATION, 556
Schools— Methods— Universities— Moslem education— An emperor on education
III. THE EPICS, 561
The Mahabharata—Its story— Its form— The Bhagavad-Gita—'The metaphysics of war
—The price of freedom— The Ramayana—A. forest idyl— The rape of Sita— The Hindu
epics and the Greek
IV. DRAMA, 571
Origins— The Clay Cart-Characteristics of Hindu drama— Kalidasa— The story of
Shakuntala— Estimate of Indian drama
V. PROSE AND POETRY, 577
Their unity in India— Fables— History— Tales— Minor poets— Rise of the vernacular
literature— Chandi Das— Tulsi Das— Poets of the south— Kabir
Chapter XXI: INDIAN ART 584
I. THE MINOR ARTS, 584
The great age of Indian art— Its uniqueness— Its association with industry— Pottery-
Metal— Wood-Ivory— Jewelry-Textiles
II. MUSIC, 586
A concert in India— Music and the dance— Musicians— Scale and forms— Themes-
Music and philosophy
III. PAINTING, 589
Prehistoric— The frescoes of A janta— Rajput miniatures— The Mogul school— The
painters— The theorists
iv. SCULPTURE, 593
Primitive— Buddhist-Gandhara— Gupta— "Colonial"— Estimate
V. ARCHITECTURE, 596
1. HINDU ARCHITECTURE
Before Ashoka— Ashokan— Buddhist— Jain— The masterpieces of the north— Their
destruction— The southern style— Monolithic temples— Structural temples
2. "COLONIAL" ARCHITECTURE
Ceylon — Java — Cambodia — The Khmers — Their religion — Angkor — Fall of
the Khmers — Siam — Burma
3. MOSLEM ARCHITECTURE IN INDIA
The Afghan style-The Mogul style-Dclhi-Agra-The Taj Mahal
4. INDIAN ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION
Decay of Indian art— Hindu and Moslem architecture compared— General view of
Indian civilization
xxi
CONTENTS
Chapter XXII: A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 613
I. THE JOLLY BUCCANEERS, 613
The arrival of the Europeans— The British Conquest— The Sepoy Mutiny— Advantages
and disadvantages of British rule
II. LATTER-DAY SAINTS, 615
Christianity in India — The Brahma-Somaj — Mohammedanism — Ramakrishna —
Vivekananda
III. TAGORE, 6l8
Science and art— A family of geniuses— Youth of Rabindranath— His poetry— His poli-
tics—His school
IV. EAST IS WEST, 622
Changing India— Economic changes— Social— The decaying caste system— Castes and
guilds— Untouchables— The emergence of woman
V. THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT, 625
The westernized students — The secularization of heaven — The Indian National
Congress
VI. MAHATMA GANDHI, 626
Portrait of a saint— The ascetic— The Christian— The education of Gandhi— In Africa
—The Revolt of 1921— "I am the man"— Prison years— Young India— The revolution of
the spinning-wheel— The achievements of Gandhi
VII. FAREWELL TO INDIA, 633
The revivification of India— The gifts of India
BOOK THREE
THE FAR EAST
A. CHINA
Chronology of Chinese Civilization 636
Chapter XXIII: THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 639
I. THE BEGINNINGS, 639
1. ESTIMATES OF THE CHINESE
2. THE MIDDLE FLOWERY KINGDOM
Geography— Race— Prehistory
3. THE UNKNOWN CENTURIES
The Creadon according to China— The coming of culture— Wine and chopsticks
—The virtuous emperors— A royal atheist
4. THE FIRST CHINESE CIVILIZATION
The Feudal Age in China— An able minister— The struggle between custom and
law— Culture and anarchy— Love lyrics from the Book of Odes
5. THE PRE-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHERS
The Book of Changes-Tht yang and the yin-The Chinese Enlightenment-Teng
Shih, the Socrates of China
xxii
CONTENTS
6. THE OLD MASTER
Lao-tze— The Tao—On intellectuals in government— The foolishness of laws— A
Rousseauian Utopia and a Christian ethic— Portrait of a wise man— The meeting of
Lao-tze and Confucius
II. CONFUCIUS, 658
1. THE SAGE IN SEARCH OF A STATE
Birth and youth— Marriage and divorce— Pupils and methods— Appearance and
character— The lady and the tiger— A definition of good government— Confucius
in office— Wander-years— The consolations of old age
2. THE NINE CLASSICS
3. THE AGNOSTICISM OF CONFUCIUS
A fragment of logic— The philosopher and the urchins— A formula of wisdom
4. THE WAY OF THE HIGHER MAN
Another portrait of the sage— Elements of character— The Golden Rule
5. CONFUCIAN POLITICS
Popular sovereignty— Government by example— The decentralization of wealth-
Music and manners— Socialism and revolution
6. THE INFLUENCE OF CONFUCIUS
The Confucian scholars— Their victory over the Legalists— Defects of Confucian-
ism—The contemporaneity of Confucius
III. SOCIALISTS AND ANARCHISTS, 677
1. MO TI, ALTRUIST
2. YANG CHU, EGOIST
3. MENCIUS, MENTOR OF PRINCES
A model mother— A philosopher among kings— Are men by nature good?— Single
tax— Mencius and the communists— The profit-motive— The right of revolution
4. HSUN-TZE, REALIST
The evil nature of man— The necessity of law
5. CHUANG-TZE, IDEALIST
The Return to Nature— Governmentlcss society— The Way of Nature— The limits
of the intellect— The evolution of man— The Button-Moulder— The influence of
Chinese philosophy in Europe
Chapter XXIV: THE AGE OF THE POETS 694
i. CHINA'S BISMARCK, 694
The Period of Contending States— The suicide of Ch'u P'ing— Shih Huang-ti unifies
China-The Great Wall-The "Burning of the Books"-The failure of Shih Huang-ti
II. EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIALISM, 698
Chaos and poverty— The Han Dynasty— The reforms of Wu Ti— The income tax—
The planned economy of Wang Mang— Its overthrow— The Tatar invasion
III. THE GLORY OF T*ANG, 70!
The new dynasty— Tai Tsung's method of reducing crime— An age of prosperity—
The "Brilliant Emperor"-The romance of Yang Kwei-fei-The rebellion of An
Lu-shan
xxiii
CON TENTS
IV. THE BANISHED ANGEL, 705
An anecdote of Li Po— His youth, prowess and loves— On the imperial barge— The
gospel of the grape— War— The wanderings of Li Po— In prison— "Deathless Poetry"
V. SOME QUALITIES OF CHINESE POETRY, 7 1 I
"Free verse"— "Imagism"— "Every poem a picture and every picture a poem"— Senti-
mentality—Perfection of form
VI. TU FU, 713
Tao Ch'ien— Po Chii-i— Poems for malaria— Tu Fu and Li Po— A vision of war— Pros-
perous days— Destitution— Death
VII. PROSE, 717
The abundance of Chinese literature— Romances— History— Szuma Ch'ien— Essays—
Han Yii on the bone of Buddha
VIII. THE STAGE, 721
Its low repute in China— Origins—The play— The audience— The actors— Music
Chapter XXV: THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 724
I. THE SUNG RENAISSANCE, 724
1. THE SOCIALISM OF WANG AN-SH1H
The Sung Dynasty— A radical premier— His cure for unemployment— The regula-
tion of industry— Codes of wages and prices— The nationalization of commerce-
State insurance against unemployment, poverty and old age— Examinations for
public office— The defeat of Wang An-shih
2. THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING
The growth of scholarship— Paper and ink in China— Steps in the invention of print-
ing—The oldest book— Paper money— Movable type— Anthologies, dictionaries,
encyclopedias.
3. THE REBIRTH OF PHILOSOPHY
Chu Hsi— Wang Yang-ming— Beyond good and evil
II. BRONZES, LACQUER AND JADE, 735
The role of art in China— Textiles— Furniture— Jewelry— Fans— The making of lacquer
—The cutting of jade— Some masterpieces in bronze— Chinese sculpture
III. PAGODAS AND PALACES, 740
Chinese architecture— The Porcelain Tower of Nanking— The Jade Pagoda of Peking
— The Temple of Confucius — The Temple and Altar of Heaven — The palaces of
Kublai Khan— A Chinese home— The interior— Color and form
IV. PAINTING, 745
1. MASTERS OF CHINESE PAINTING
Ku K'ai-chhi, the "greatest painter, wit and fool"— Han Yii's miniature— The classic
and the romantic schools— Wang Wei— Wu Tao-tze— Hui Tsung, the artist-em-
peror—Masters of the Sung age
2. QUALITIES OF CHINESE PAINTING
The rejection of perspective— Of realism— Line as nobler than color— Form as
rhythm— Representation by suggestion— Conventions and restrictions— Sincerity of
Chinese art
xxiv
CONTENTS
V. PORCELAIN, 754
The ceramic art-The making of porcelain-Its early histoiy-Ce/tf Awi-Enamels-The
skill of Hao Shih-chiu-C/ow0»»<?-The age of K'ang-hsi-Of Ch'ien Lung
Chapter XXVI: THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 760
I. HISTORICAL INTERLUDE, 760
1. MARCO POLO VISITS KUBLAI KHAN
The incredible travelers-Adventures of a Venetian in China-The elegance and
prosperity of Hangchow-The palaces of Peking-The Mongol Conquest- Jenghiz
Khan-Kublai Khan-His character and policy-His harem-"Marco Millions"
2. THE MING AND THE CH*ING
Fall of the Mongols - The Ming Dynasty - The Manchu invasion - The Ch'ing
Dynasty-An enlightened monarch-Ch'ien Lung rejects the Occident
II. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE, 769
Population— Appearance— Dress— Peculiarities of Chinese speech— Of Chinese writing
III. THE PRACTICAL LIFE, 774
1. IN THE FIELDS
The poverty of the peasant — Methods of husbandry — Crops — Tea — Food — The
stoicism of the village
2. IN THE SHOPS
Handicrafts — Silk — Factories — Guilds — Men of burden — Roads and canals -
Merchants— Credit and coinage— Currency experiments— Printing-press inflation
3. INVENTION AND SCIENCE
Gunpowder, fireworks and war— The compass— Poverty of industrial invention-
Geography— Mathematics— Physics— Feng shui— Astronomy— Medicine— Hygiene
IV. RELIGION WITHOUT A CHURCH, 783
Superstition and scepticism— Animism— The worship of Heaven— Ancestor-worship—
Confucianism— Taoism— The elixir of immortality— Buddhism— Religious toleration
and eclecticism— Mohammedanism— Christianity— Causes of its failure in China
V. THE RULE OF MORALS, 788
The high place of morals in Chinese society— The family— Children— Chastity— Prosti-
tution—Premarital relations— Marriage and love— Monogamy and polygamy— Concu-
binage — Divorce — A Chinese empress — The patriarchal male — The subjection of
woman— The Chinese character
VI. A GOVERNMENT PRAISED BY VOLTAIRE, 795
The submergence of the individual— Self-government— The village and the province-
The laxity of the law— The severity of punishment— The Emperor— The Censor— Ad-
ministrative boards— Education for public office— Nomination by education— The ex-
amination system— Its defects— Its virtues
XXV
CONTENTS
Chapter XXVII: REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 803
I. THE WHITE PERIL, 803
The conflict of Asia and Europe-The Portuguese-The Spanish-The Dutch-The
English-The opium trade-The Opium Wars-The Tai-p'ing Rebellion-The War
with Japan— The attempt to dismember China— The "Open Door"— The Empress
Dowager-The reforms of Kuang Hsu-His removal from power-The "Boxers"-
The Indemnity
II. THE DEATH OF A CIVILIZATION, 808
The Indemnity students— Their Westernization— Their disintegrative effect in China
—The role of the missionary— Sun Yat-sen, the Christian— His youthful adventures—
His meeting with Li Hung-chang— His plans for a revolution— Their success— Yuan
Shi-k'ai— The death of Sun Yat-sen— Chaos and pillage— Communism— "The north
pacified"— Chiang Kai-shek— Japan in Manchuria-At Shanghai
III. BEGINNINGS OF A NEW ORDER, 814
Change in the village— In the town— The factories— Commerce— Labor unions— Wages
—The new government— Nationalism vs. Westernization— The dethronement of Con-
fucius—The reaction against religion— The new morality— Marriage in transition-
Birth control— Co-education— The "New Tide" in literature and philosophy— The
new language of literature— Hu Shih— Elements of destruction— Elements of renewal
B. JAPAN
Chronology of Japanese Civilization 826
Chapter XXVIII: THE MAKERS OF JAPAN 829
I. THE CHILDREN OF THE GODS, 829
How Japan was created— The role of earthquakes
II. PRIMITIVE JAPAN, 83!
Racial components— Early civilization— Religion— Shinto— Buddhism— The beginnings
of art-The "Great Reform"
III. THE IMPERIAL AGE, 834
The emperors— The aristocracy— The influence of China— The Golden Age of
Kyoto— Decadence
IV. THE DICTATORS, 836
The shoguns— The Kamakura Bakufu— The Ho jo Regency— Kublai Khan's inva-
sion—The Ashikaga Shogunate— The three buccaneers
V. GREAT MONKEY-FACE, 838
The rise of Hideyoshi— The attack upon Korea— The conflict with Christianity
VI. THE GREAT SHOGUN, 841
The accession of lyeyasu— His philosophy— lyeyasu and Christianity— Death of
lyeyasu— The Tokugawa Shogunate
xxvi
CONTENTS
Chapter XXIX: THE POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 845
I. THE SAMURAI, 845
The powerless emperor—The powers of the shogun— The sword of the Samurai—
The code of the Samurai-Hara-kiri-The Forty-seven Ronin-A commuted sentence
II. THE LAW, 850
The first code— Group responsibility— Punishments
III. THE TOILERS, 851
Castes— An experiment in the nationalization of land— State fixing of wages— A fam-
ine—Handicrafts—Artisans and guilds
IV. THE PEOPLE, 854
Stature— Cosmetics— Costume— Diet— Etiquette— Saki— The tea ceremony— The flower
ceremony— Love of nature— Gardens— Homes
V. THE FAMILY, 860
The paternal autocrat— The status of woman— Children— Sexual morality— The
Geisha— Love
VI. THE SAINTS, 863
Religion in Japan— The transformation of Buddhism— The priests— Sceptics
VII. THE THINKERS, 866
Confucius reaches Japan— A critic of religion— The religion of scholarship— Kaibara
Ekken— On education— On pleasure— The rival schools— A Japanese Spinoza— Ito
Jinsai— Ito Togai— Ogyu Sorai— The war of the scholars— Mabuchi— Moto-ori
Chapter XXX: THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 876
I. LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION, 876
The language— Writing— Education
II. POETRY, 878
The Manyoshu—ThG Kokinshu— Characteristics of Japanese poetry— Examples— The
game of poetry— The hokka-gzmblers
ill. PROSE, 88 1
1. FICTION
Lady Muraski— The Tale of Genji—Its excellence— Later Japanese fiction— A
humorist
2. HISTORY
The historians— Arai Hakuseki
3. THE ESSAY
The Lady Sei Shonagon— Kamo no-Chomei
IV. THE DRAMA, 889
The No plays— Their character— The popular stage— The Japanese Shakespeare-
Summary judgment
V. THE ART OF LITTLE THINGS, 891
Creative imitation— Music and the dance— 7wr0 and netsuke—Hidzri Jingaro— Lacquer
xxvii
CONTENTS
VI. ARCHITECTURE, 894
Temples— Palaces—The shrine of lyeyasu— Homes
VII. METALS AND STATUES, 896
Swords-Mirrors-The Trinity of Horiuji-Colossi-Religion and sculpture
VIII. POTTERY, 899
The Chinese stimulus-The potters of Hizen-Pottery and tea-How Goto Saijiro
brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga— The nineteenth century
IX. PAINTING, 901
Difficulties of the subject— Methods and materials— Forms and ideals— Korean origins
and Buddhist inspiration-The Tosa School-The return to China-Sesshiu-Thc
Kano School— Koyetsu and Korin— The Realistic School
X. PRINTS, 907
The Ukiyoye School— Its founders— Its masters— Hokusai— Hiroshige
XL JAPANESE ART AND CIVILIZATION, 910
A retrospect— Contrasts— An estimate— The doom of the old Japan
Chapter XXXI: THE NEW JAPAN 914
I. THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION, 914
The decay of the Shogunate— America knocks at the door— The Restoration— The
Westernization of Japan— Political reconstruction— The new constitution— Law—
The army— The war with Russia— Its political results
II. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, 919
Industrialization— Factories— Wages— Strikes— Poverty— The Japanese point of view
HI. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION, 922
Changes in dress— In manners— The Japanese character— Morals and marriage in
transition— Religion— Science— Japanese medicine— Art and taste— Language and edu-
cation—Naturalistic fiction— New forms of poetry
IV. THE NEW EMPIRE, 927
The precarious bases of the new civilization— Causes of Japanese imperialism—
The Twenty-one Demands— The Washington Conference— The Immigration Act
of 1924— The invasion of Manchuria— The new kingdom— Japan and Russia— Japan
and Europe— Must America fight Japan?
Envoi: Our Oriental Heritage 934
Glossary of Foreign Terms 939
Bibliography of Books Referred to in the Text 945
Notes 956
Pronouncing and Biographical Index 1001
xxviii
List of Illustrations
(Illustration Section follows page xxxii)
Cover Design: The god Shamash transmits a code of laws to Hammurabi
From a cylinder in The Louvre
FIG. i. Granite statue of Rameses II
Turin Museum, Italy
FIG. 2. Bison painted in paleolithic cave at Altamira, Spain
Photo by American Museum of Natural History
FIG. 3. Hypothetical reconstruction of a neolithic lake dwelling
American Museum of Natural History
FIG. 4. Development of the alphabet
FIG. 5. Stele of Naram-sin
Louvre; photo by Archives Photographiques d'Art et d'Histoire
FIG. 6. The "little" Gudea
Louvre; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 7. Temple of Der-el-Bahri
Photo by Lindsley F. Hall
FIG. 8. Colonnade and court of the temple at Luxor
Photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 9. Hypothetical reconstruction of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak
From a model in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 10. Colonnade of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak
Underwood & Underwood
> FIG. ii. The Rosetta Stone
British Museum
FIG. 12. Diorite head of the Pharaoh Khafre
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 13. The seated Scribe
Louvre; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 14. Wooden figure of the "Sheik-el-Beled"
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 15. Sandstone head from the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose at
Amarna
State Museum, Berlin; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 1 6. Head of a king, probably Senusret III.
Metropolitan Museum or Art
FIG. 17. The royal falcon and serpent. Limestone relief from First Dynasty
Louvre; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
* FIG. 1 8. Head of Thutmose III
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
XFiG. 19. Rameses II presenting an offering
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 20. Bronze figure or the Lady Tekoschet
Athens Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of An
xxix
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. 21. Seated figure of Montumihait
State Museum, Berlin
FIG. 22. Colossi of Rameses II, with life-size figures of Queen Nofretete at
his feet, at the cave temple of Abu Simbel
Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
FIG. 23. The dancing girl. Design on an ostracon
Turin Museum, Italy
FIG. 24. Cat watching his prey. A wall-painting in the grave of Khnumho-
tep at Beni-Hasan
Copy by Howard Carter; courtesy of Egypt Exploration Society
x FIG. 25. Chair of Tutenkhamon
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 26. Painted limestone head of Ikhnaton's Queen Nofretete
Metropolitan Museum of Art facsimile of original in State Museum, Berlin
FIG. 27. The god Shamash transmits a code of laws to Hammurabi
Louvre; photo copyright by W. A. Mansell & Co., London
FIG. 28. The "Lion of Babylon." Painted tile-relief
State Museum, Berlin; Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 29. Head of Esarhaddon
State Museum, Berlin
FIG. 30. The Prism of Sennacherib
Iraq Museum; courtesy of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
FIG. 31. The Dying Lioness of Nineveh
British Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 32. The Lion Hunt; relief on alabaster, from Nineveh
British Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 33. Assyrian relief of Marduk fighting Tiamat, from Kalakh
British Museum; photo copyright by W. A. Mansell, London
FIG. 34. Winged Bull from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Kalakh
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 35. A street in Jerusalem
FIG. 36. Hypothetical restoration of Solomon's Temple
Underwood & Underwood
FIG. 37. The ruins of Persepolis
Courtesy of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
FIG. 38. "Frieze of the Archers." Painted tile-relief from Susa
Louvre; photo by Archives Photographiques d'Art et d'Histoire
FIG. 39. Burning Ghat at Calcutta
Bronson de Cou, from Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
; FIG. 40. "Holy Men" at Benares
j FIG. 41. A fresco at Ajanta
FIG. 42. Mogul painting of Durbar of Akbar at Akbarabad. Ca. 1620
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
FIG. 43. Torso of a youth, from Sanchi
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
FIG. 44. Seated statue of Brahma, loth century
Metropolitan Museum of Art
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. 45. The Buddha of Sarnath, 5th century
Photo by A. K. Coomaraswamy
\ FIG. 46. The Naga-King. Fagade relief on Ajanta Cave-temple XIX
Courtesy of A. K. Coomaraswamy
FIG. 47. The Dancing Shiva. South India, i7th century
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
> FIG. 48. The Three-faced Shiva, or Trimurti, Elephanta
Underwood & Underwood
FIG. 49. The Buddha of Anuradhapura, Ceylon
Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
FIG. 50. Lion capital of Ashoka column
Sarnath Museum, Benares; copyright Archaeological Survey of India
• FIG. 51. Sanchi Tope, north gate
Underwood & Underwood
FIG. 52. Fagade of the Gautami-Putra Monastery at Nasik
India Office, London
<N FIG. 53. Chaitya hall interior, Cave XXVI, Ajanta.,
FIG. 54. Interior of dome of the Tejahpala Temple at Mt. Abu
Johnston & Hoffman, Calcutta
FIG. 55. Temple of Vimala Sah at Mt. Abu
Underwood & Underwood
FIG. 56. Cave XIX, Ajanta
Indian State Railways
> FIG. 57. Elephanta Caves, near Bombay
By Cowling, from Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
X FIG. 58. The rock-cut Temple of Kailasha
Indian State Railways
> FIG. 59. Guardian deities, Temple of Elura
Indian State Railways
» FIG. 60. Fagade, Angkor Wat, Indo-China
Publishers' Photo Service
; FIG. 61. Northeast end of Angkor Wat, Indo-China
Publishers' Photo Service
FIG. 62. Rabindranath Tagore
Underwood & Underwood
FIG. 63. Ananda Palace at Pagan, Burma
Underwood & Underwood
> FIG. 64. The Taj Mahal, Agra
Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
FIG. 65. Imperial jewel casket of blue lacquer
Underwood & Underwood
FIG. 66. The lacquered screen of K'ang-hsi
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
FIG. 67. A bronze Kuan-yin of the Sui period
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 68. Summer Palace, Peiping
FIG. 69. Temple of Heaven, Peiping
Publishers' Photo Service
xxxi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. 70. Portraits of Thirteen Emperors. Attributed to Yen Li-pen, 7th
century
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
FIG. 71. The Silk-beaters. By the Emperor Hui Tsung (1101-26)
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
FIG. 72. Landscape with Bridge and Willows. Ma Yuan, i2th century
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
FIG. 73. A hawthorn vase from the K'ang-hsi period
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 74. Geisha girls
Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
ftc. 75. Kiyomizu Temple, Kyoto, once a favorite resort of Japanese
suicides
Underwood & Underwood
FIG. 76. Yo-mei-mon Gate, Nikko
FIG. 77. The Monkeys of Nikko. "Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil"
Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
FIG. 78. Image of Amida-Buddha at Horiuji
Photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 79. The bronze halo and background of the Amida at Horiuji.
y • Photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 80. The Vairochana Buddha of Japan. Carved and lacquered wood.
Ca. 950 A.D.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FiG. 8 1. The Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, at Kamakura
FIG. 82. Monkeys and Birds. By Sesshiu, i5th century
FIG. 83. A wave screen by Korin
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 84. The Falls of Yoro. By Hokusai
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 85. Foxes. By Hiroshige
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Maps or Egypt, the ancient Near East, India, and the Far East
will be found on the inside covers
Illustration Section
1
FIG. i— Granite statue of Rameses II
FIG. 2— Bison painted in paleolithic cave at Altamira, Spam
Photo by American Museum of Natural History
(See page 96)
FIG. 3- Hypothetical reconstruction of a neolithic lake dwelling
American Museum of Natural History
( See page 98)
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I
FIG. i-Temple of Der-el-Bahri
Photo by Lindslcy F. Hall
(Sec page 154)
FIG. 8- Colonnade and court of the temple at Luxor
Photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
(See page 142)
FIG. 9— Hypothetical reconstruction of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak
From a model in the Metropolitan Museum of An
FIG. 10— Colonnade of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak
Underwood & Underwood
(See page 143)
FIG. 1 1— The Rosetta Stone
British Museum
(See page 145)
FIG. iz-Diorite head of the Pharaoh Khafre
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Seepages 148,186)
FIG. ii-The seated Scribe
Louvre; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
(See pages 161,
FIG. 14—
Wooden figure
of the
"Sheik-el-Beled"
Cairo Museum;
photo by Metro-
politan Museum
of Art
(See pages 168, 186)
FIG. i $— Sandstone bead \rotn the
'workshop of the sculptor
Thutmose at Amaru a
State Museum, Berlin; photo by
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 1 6— Head of a king, probably
Scmisret III
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. ij—The royal falcon and
serpent. Limestone relief from
First Dynasty FIG. iB—Head of Thutmose 111
Louvre; photo by Metropolitan Museum Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan
of Art Museum of Art
(See pages 184-190)
f
iiTan Tir
jpP^WWfe'1'
.X '"
***r
FIG. ly—Rameses II presenting an offering
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 20— Bronze figure of the
Lady Tekoschet
Athens Museum; photo by Metro-
politan Museum of An
FIG. 21— Seated figure of
M.ontwmhait
State Museum, Berlin
FIG. 23— The dancing girl. Design on an ostracon
Turin Museum, Italy
(See page lyi )
FIG. 24— Cat watching his prey. A 'wall-painting in the grave of Khnumhotep
at Beni-Hasan
Copy by Howard Carter; courtesy of Egypt Exploration Society
(See page 190)
FIG. 25— -Chair of Tutenkhamon
Cairo Museum; photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Seepage 19?)
FIG. it-Painted limestone head of Ikhnaton's Queen Nofretete
Metropolitan Museum of Art facsimile of original in State Museum, Berlin
(See page 188)
FIG. 2j-The god
Shamash transmits
a code of laws to
Louvre; photo copy-
right W. A. Manscll
• & Co., London
• (See page 219)
!
C
FIG. 29— Head of Esarhaddon
State Museum, Berlin
(See page 28 i)
FIG. $o-The Prism of Sennacherib
Iraq Museum; courtesy of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
(See Chapter X)
FIG. 32— The Lion Hunt; relief on alabaster, from Nineveh
British Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art
( See page 279)
FIG. M-Assyrian relief of Marduk fighting Tiamat, from Kalakh
British Museum; photo copyright by W. A. Mansell, London
(See page 278)
FIG. ^-Winged Bull from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Kalakh
Metropolitan Museum of Art
(See page 279)
FIG. 35—^4 street in Jerusalem
FIG. ^—Hypothetical restoration of Solomon's Temple
Underwood & Underwood
(See page
11
I
FIG. 39- Burning Ghat at Calcutta
Bronson de Cou, from Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
(See page
/•fcdfe. **.
»4hv*fr.
FIG. 40— "Holy Men'9 at Benares
FIG. 41— /4 fresco at Ajanta
(See pages $89-90)
FIG. 42- Mogul painting of Durbar of Akbar at Akbarabad. Co. 1620
Boston Museum of Fine Arti
(See page
FIG. 43-T07W of a youth, from Sanchi
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
( See pages
FIG. ^.—Seated statue of
Brahma, loth century
Metropolitan Museum of Art
FIG. 46— The Naga-King.
Facade relief on Ajanta
Cave-temple XIX
Courtesy of
A. K. Coomarasvvamv
f S** ptf^M 5W-tf;
FIG. 45— The Buddha of
Sarnath, fth century
Photo by A. K. Coomaraswamy
FIG. 47-TA* Dancing Shiva. South India, nth century
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
(See page 594)
V*MR»
1.5*.
FIG. 49.—
Buddha of Anuradhapura, Ceylon
Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
(Sec page w)
FIG. so—Lion capital of Ashoka column
Sarnath Museum, Benares; copyright Archaeological Survey of India
( See page 596)
FIG. $\—Sanchi Tope, north gate
Underwood & Underwood
(See page 597)
FIG. $2-Faeade of the Gautami-Putra Monastery at Nasik
India Office, London
(See page
FIG. $$— Chatty a hall interior, Cave XXVI, Ajanta
FIG. 54- Interior of dome of the Tejahpala Teinple at Mt. Abu
Johnston & Hoffman, Calcutta
(See page
FIG. 55- -Temple of Vimala Sah at Mt. Abu
Underwood & Underwood
(See page
FIG. $6-Cave X/X, Ajmta
Indian State Railway!
(See page 598)
,^^;.. __,_,,
M-
£j gj ^
R6 ?
Q O «0
i
FIG. 59— Guardian deities, Temple of Elura
Indian State Railways
(See page 601)
fe'
fe
-
8
1
5
I
I
I
I
FIG. 62—Rabindranath
Tagore
Underwood & Underwood
(See page 619)
FIG. 6-$—Ananda Palace at
Pagan, Burma
Undcr\\<>od & Underwood
(See page 606)
FIG. 64-77* Taj Mahal, Agra
Ewing Galloway, N. Y.
(See page 609)
FIG. 65— Imperial jewel casket of blue lacquer
Underwood & Underwood
(See page 136)
^v*-. '-2~r»*-
2
io
5-8
*§
vj
Ii
^
M
&
b
FIG. 67—^4 bronze Kuan-yin of the Sui period
Metropolitan Museum of Art
(See page -738)
FIG. 68— Siniwjcr
Palace, Peiping
(Sec page 742)
FIG. 69- Temple
of Heaven,
Peiping
Publishers' Photo
Service
(See page 142)
FIG. ji-The
Silk-beaters.
By the Emperor
Hui Tsung
(1101-26)
Boston Museum
of Fine Arts
( See page jfo)
FIG. 72— Land-
scape with
Bridge and
Willows.
Ma Yuan,
i2th century
Boston Museum
of Fine Arts
(See page ifi)
FIG. T$—A hawthorn vase from the K'ang-hsi period
Metropolitan Museum of An
(See page
*2
3*
•8*
I
FIG. 7$—Kiyoimzu Temple, Kyoto, once a favorite resort of Japanese suicides
Underwood & Underwood
(Sec
FIG. 76—Yo-wei-mon Gate, Nikko
(See fiave ffoc)
5G-3 *.
3 o ^
* g1 2
|«5
^
FIG. 79— The bronze halo
and background of the
Amida at Horiuji
Photo by
Metropolitan Museum of Art
(See page
FIG. 78— Image of Amida-
Buddha at Horiuji
Photo by
Metropolitan Museum of Art
(See page 897)
FIG. 80— The Vairochana Buddha of Japan. Carved and lacquered wood.
Ca. 950 A.D.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
( See pages 896-8)
FIG. 8 1— The Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, at Kamakura
(See page 898)
t
I
1
INTRODUCTION
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CIVILIZATION
"I want to know what were the steps by
which men passed from barbarism to
civilization."
—VOLTAIRE.1
CHAPTER I
The Conditions of Civilization*
Definition — Geological conditions— Geographical— Economic—
Racial— Psychological— Causes of the decay of civilizations
/CIVILIZATION is social order promoting cultural creation. Four
\^Jl elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization,
moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins
where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and
constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the
understanding and embellishment of life.
Certain factors condition civilization, and may encourage or impede it.
First, geological conditions. Civilization is an interlude between ice ages:
at any time the current of glaciation may rise again, cover with ice and
stone the works of man, and reduce life to some narrow segment of the
earth. Or the demon of earthquake, by whose leave we build our cities,
may shrug his shoulders and consume us indifferently.
Second, geographical conditions. The heat of the tropics, and the in-
numerable parasites that infest them, are hostile to civilization; lethargy
and disease, and a precocious maturity and decay, divert the energies from
those inessentials of life that make civilization, and absorb them in hunger
and reproduction; nothing is left for the play of the arts and the mind.
Rain is necessary; for water is the medium of life, more important even
than the light of the sun; the unintelligible whim of the elements may
condemn to desiccation regions that once flourished with empire and in-
dustry, like Nineveh or Babylon, or may help to swift strength and wealth
cities apparently off the main line of transport and communication, like
those of Great Britain or Puget Sound. If the soil is fertile in food or
minerals, if rivers offer an easy avenue of exchange, if the coast-line is
indented with natural harbors for a commercial fleet, if, above all, a nation
lies on the highroad of the world's trade, like Athens or Carthage, Flor-
* The reader will find, at the end of this volume, a glossary defining foreign terms, a
bibliography with guidance for further reading, a pronouncing index, and a body of
references corresponding to the superior figures in die text.
2 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. I
ence or Venice— then geography, though it can never create it, smiles upon
civilization, and nourishes it.
Economic conditions are more important. A people may possess or-
dered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms
of art, like the American Indians; and yet if it remains in the hunting stage,
if it depends for its existence upon the precarious fortunes of the chase, it
will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization. A nomad stock, like the
Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may
display high qualities of character like courage, generosity and nobility;
but without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its
intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of
trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and
amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization. The first form of culture
is agriculture. It is when man settles down to tilTltlie soil and lay up pro-
visions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized.
Within that little circle of security— a reliable supply of water and food-
he builds his huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools,
and domesticates the dog, the ass, the pig, at last himself. He learns to
work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and
transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of
his race.
Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one
aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement
which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the
civitas or city.* For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the
wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and
industry multiply comforts, luxuries and leisure; in the city traders meet,
and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the cross-
roads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to creative power.
In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and
produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in
the peasant's hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns.
There are no racial conditions to civilization. It may appear on any
continent and in any color: at Pekin or Delhi, at Memphis or Babylon, at
Ravenna or London, in Peru or Yucatan. It is not the great race that makes
• The word civilization (Latin inrifc-pertaining to the chris, citizen) is comparatively
young. Despite BoswelTs suggestion Johnson refused to admit it to his Dictionary in 1772;
he preferred to use the word civility.*
CHAP. l) THE CONDITIONS OF CIVILIZATION 3
the civilization, it is the great civilization that makes the people; circum-
stances geographical and economic create a culture, and the culture
creates a type. The Englishman does not make British civilization, it makes
him; if he carries it with him wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner
in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but
that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. Given like ma-
terial conditions, and another race would beget like results; Japan repro-
duces in the twentieth century the history of England in the nineteenth.
Qvilization is related to race only in the sense that it is often preceded by
the slow intermarriage of different stocks, and their gradual assimilation
into a relatively homogeneous people.*
These physical and biological conditions are only prerequisites to civ-
ilization; they do not constitute or generate it. Subtle psychological
factors must enter into play. There must be political order, even if it be so
near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and
large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every turn. There must
be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange.
Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a uni-
fying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by
those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity,
some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic
belief, some faith, supernatural or Utopian, that lifts morality from calcu-
lation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our
mortal brevity. And finally there must be education— some technique,
however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imi-
tation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher
or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe— its language and knowledge,
its morals and manners, its technology and arts— must be handed down to
the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from
animals into men.
The disappearance of these conditions— sometimes of even one of them
—may destroy a civilization. A geological cataclysm or a profound cli-
matic change; an uncontrolled epidemic like that which wiped out half the
population of the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or the Black Death
that helped to end the Feudal Age; the exhaustion of the land, or the ruin
* Blood, as distinct from race, may affect a civilization in the sense that a nation may
be retarded or advanced by breeding from the biologically (not racially) worse or better
strains among the people.
4 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. I
of agriculture through the exploitation of the country by the town, result-
ing in a precarious dependence upon foreign food supplies; the failure of
natural resources, either of fuels or of raw materials; a change in trade
routes, leaving a nation off the main line of the world's commerce; mental
or moral decay from the strains, stimuli and contacts of urban life, from
the breakdown of traditional sources of social discipline and the inability
to replace them; the weakening of the stock by a disorderly sexual life, or
by an epicurean, pessimist, or quietist philosophy; the decay of leadership
through the infertility of the able, and the relative smallness of the fami-
lies that might bequeath most fully the cultural inheritance of the race; a
pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive
revolutions, and financial exhaustion: these are some of the ways in which
a civilization may die. For civilization is not something inborn or imper-
ishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious
interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man
differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the
technique of transmitting civilization.
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing,
and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore
of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways
of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for
future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before
we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
CHAPTER II
The Economic Elements
of Civilization*
IN one important sense the "savage," too, is civilized, for he carefully
transmits to his children the heritage of the tribe— that complex of
economic, political, mental and moral habits and institutions which it has
developed in its efforts to maintain and enjoy itself on the earth. It is
impossible to be scientific here; for in calling other human beings "savage"
or "barbarous" we may be expressing no objective fact, but only our fierce
fondness for ourselves, and our timid shyness in the presence of alien ways.
Doubtless we underestimate these simple peoples, who have so much to
teach us in hospitality and morals; if we list the bases and constituents of
civilization we shall find that the naked nations invented or arrived at all
but one of them, and left nothing for us to add except embellishments and
writing. Perhaps they, too, were once civilized, and desisted from it as a
nuisance. We must make sparing use of such terms as "savage" and "bar-
barous" in referring to our "contemporaneous ancestry." Preferably we
shall call "primitive" all tribes that make little or no provision for un-
productive days, and little or no use of writing. In contrast, the civilized
may be defined as literate providers.
I. FROM HUNTING TO TILLAGE
Primitive improvidence— Beginnings of provision— Hunting and
fishing— Herding— The domestication of animals— Agri-
culture—Food— Cooking— Cannibalism
"Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge
themselves or fast."1 The wilder tribes among the American Indians con-
* Despite recent high example to the contrary,1 the word civilization will be used in
this volume to mean social organization, moral order, and cultural activity; while culture
will mean, according to the context, cither the practice of manners and the arts, or the
sum-total of a people's institutions, customs and arts. It is in the latter sense that the
word culture will be used 'in reference to primitive or prehistoric societies.
6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. II
sidered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day."
The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not
immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bush-
men of Africa it is always "either a feast or a famine."4 There is a mute
wisdom in this improvidence, as in many "savage" ways. The moment
man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of
Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon
him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the
"thoughtless" native disappears. The American Negro is making this
transition today. "Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his
Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty
of meat." Not to think unless we have to— there is much to be said for this
as the summation of wisdom.
Nevertheless, there were difficulties in this care-lessness, and those or-
ganisms that outgrew it came to possess a serious advantage in the struggle
for survival. The dog that buried .the bone which even a canine appetite
could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the
bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a
rainy day— these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they,
or other subtle creatures like them, who taught our ancestors the art of
providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for
winter in summer's time of plenty.
With what skill those ancestors ferreted out, from land and sea, the food
that was the basis of their simple societies! They grubbed edible things
from the earth with bare hands; they imitated or used the claws and tusks
of the animals, and fashioned tools out of ivory, bone or stone; they made
nets and traps and snares of rushes or fibre, and devised innumerable
artifices for fishing and hunting their prey. The Polynesians had nets a
thousand ells long, which could be handled only by a hundred men; in such
ways economic provision grew hand in hand with political organization,
and the united quest for food helped to generate the state. The Tlingit
fisherman put upon his head a cap like the head of a seal, and hiding his
body among the rocks, made a noise like a seal; seals came toward him,
and he speared them with the clear conscience of primitive war. Many
tribes threw narcotics into the streams to stupefy the fish into cooperation
with the fishermen; the Tahitians, for example, put into the water an in-
toxicating mixture prepared from the butco nut or the hora plant; the
fish, drunk with it, floated leisurely on the surface, and were caught at the
CHAP. Il) ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION J
anglers' will. Australian natives, swimming under water while breathing
through a reed, pulled ducks beneath the surface by the legs, and gently
held them there rill they were pacified. The Tarahumaras caught birds by
stringing kernels on tough fibres half buried under the ground; the birds
ate the kernels, and the Tarahumaras ate the birds."
Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon
some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as
well as hunted it was a matter of life and death. For hunting was not
merely a quest for food, it was a war for security and mastery, a war
beside which all the wars of recorded history are but a little noise. In the
jungle man still fights for his life, for though there is hardly an animal
that will attack him unless it is desperate for food or cornered in the chase,
yet there is not always food for all, and sometimes only the fighter, or the
breeder of fighters, is allowed to eat. We see in our museums the relics
of that war of the species in the knives, clubs, spears, arrows, lassos, bolas,
lures, traps, boomerangs and slings with which primitive men won posses-
sion of the land, and prepared to transmit to an ungrateful posterity the
gift of security from every beast except man. Even today, after all
these wars of elimination, how many different populations move over the
earth! Sometimes, during a walk in the woods, one is awed by the variety
of languages spoken there, by the myriad species of insects, reptiles, carni-
vores and birds; one feels that man is an interloper on this crowded scene,
that he is the object of universal dread and endless hostility. Some day,
perhaps, these chattering quadrupeds, these ingratiating centipedes, these
insinuating bacilli, will devour man and all his works, and free the planet
from this marauding biped, these mysterious and unnatural weapons, these
careless feet!
Hunting and fishing were not stages in economic development, they
were modes of activity destined to survive into the highest forms of civil-
ized society. Once the center of life, they are still its hidden foundations;
behind our literature and philosophy, our ritual and art, stand the stout
killers of Packingtown. We do our hunting by proxy, not having the
stomach for honest killing in the fields; but our memories of the chase
linger in our joyful pursuit of anything weak or fugitive, and in the games
of our children— even in the word game. In the last analysis civilization is
based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum
and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the fajade;
in the rear are the shambles.
8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. II
To live by hunting was not original; if man had confined himself to
that he would have been just another carnivore. He began to be human
when out of the uncertain hunt he developed the greater security and
continuity of the pastoral life. For this involved advantages of high import-
ance: the domestication of animals, the breeding of cattle, and the use of
milk. We do not know when or how domestication began— perhaps when
the helpless young of slain beasts were spared and brought to the camp
as playthings for the children.' The animal continued to be eaten, but
not so soon; it acted as a beast of burden, but it was accepted almost demo-
cratically into the society of man; it became his comrade, and formed
with him a community of labor and residence. The miracle of reproduc-
tion was brought under control, and two captives were multiplied into a
herd. Animal milk released women from prolonged nursing, lowered
infantile mortality, and provided a new and dependable food. Population
increased, life became more stable and orderly, and the mastery of that
timid parvenu, man, became more secure on the earth.
Meanwhile woman was making the greatest economic discovery of
all— the bounty of the soil. While man hunted she grubbed about the tent
or hut for whatever edible things lay ready to her hand on the ground. In
Australia it was understood that during the absence of her mate on the
chase the wife would dig for roots, pluck fruit and nuts from the trees,
and collect honey, mushrooms, seeds and natural grains/ Even today, in
certain tribes of Australia, the grains that grow spontaneously out of the
earth are harvested without any attempt to separate and sow the seed; the
Indians of the Sacramento River Valley never advanced beyond this stage."
We shall never discover when men first noted the function of the seed, and
turned collecting into sowing; such beginnings are the mysteries of his-
tory, about which we may believe and guess, but cannot know. It is
possible that when men began to collect implanted grains, seeds fell along
the way between field and camp, and suggested at last the great secret
of growth. The Juangs threw the seeds together into the ground, leaving
them to find their own way up. The natives of Borneo put the seed into
holes which they dug with a pointed stick as they walked the fields.9 The
simplest known culture of the earth is with this stick or "digger." In Mada-
gascar fifty years ago the traveler could still see women armed with pointed
sticks, standing in a row like soldiers, and then, at a signal, digging their
sticks into the ground, turning over the soil, throwing in the seed, stamp-
ing the earth flat, and passing on to another furrow.10 The second stage in
CHAP. Il) ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 9
complexity was culture with the hoe: the digging stick was tipped with
bone, and fitted with a crosspiece to receive the pressure of the foot.
When the Conquistadores arrived in Mexico they found that the Aztecs
knew no other tool of tillage than the hoe. With the domestication of
animals and the forging of metals a heavier implement could be used; the
hoe was enlarged into a plough, and the deeper turning of the soil revealed
a fertility in the earth that changed the whole career of man. Wild plants
were domesticated, new varieties were developed, old varieties were
improved.
Finally nature taught man the art of provision, the virtue of prudence,*
the concept of time. Watching woodpeckers storing acorns in the trees,
and the bees storing honey in hives, man conceived—perhaps after millen-
niums of improvident savagery—the notion of laying up food for the future.
He found ways of preserving meat by smoking it, salting it, freezing it;
better still, he built granaries secure from rain and damp, vermin and
thieves, and gathered food into them for the leaner months of the year.
Slowly it became apparent that agriculture could provide a better and
steadier food supply than hunting. With that realization man took one of
the three steps that led from the beast to civilization— speech, agriculture,
and writing.
It is not to be supposed that man passed suddenly from hunting to
tillage. Many tribes, like the American Indians, remained permanently
becalmed in the transition— the men given to the chase, the women tilling
the soil. Not only was the change presumably gradual, but it was never
complete. Man merely added a new way of securing food to an old way;
and for the most part, throughout his history, he has preferred the old
food to the new. We picture early man experimenting with a thousand
products of the earth to find, at much cost to his inward comfort, which
of them could be eaten safely; mingling these more and more with the
fruits and nuts, the flesh and fish he was accustomed to, but always yearn-
ing for the booty of the chase. Primitive peoples are ravenously fond of
meat, even when they live mainly on cereals, vegetables and milk."
If they come upon the carcass of a recently dead animal the result is likely
to be a wild debauch. Very often no time is wasted on cooking; the prey
is eaten raw, as fast as good teeth can tear and devour it; soon nothing is
left but the bones. Whole tribes have been known to feast for a week on a
* Note the ultimate identity of the words provision, providence and prudence.
10 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. EL
whale thrown up on the shore." Though the Fuegians can cook, they
prefer their meat raw; when they catch a fish they kill it by biting it behind
the gills, and then consume it from head to tail without further ritual."
The uncertainty of the food supply made these nature peoples almost lit-
erally omnivorous: shellfish, sea urchins, frogs, toads, snails, mice, rats,
spiders, earthworms, scorpions, moths, centipedes, locusts, caterpillars, liz-
ards, snakes, boas, dogs, horses, roots, lice, insects, larvae, the eggs of rep-
tiles and birds— there is not one of these but was somewhere a delicacy, or
. even a piece de resistance, to primitive men.u Some tribes are expert hunt-
ers of ants; others dry insects in the sun and then store them for a feast;
others pick the lice out of one another's hair, and eat them with relish;
if a great number of lice can be gathered to make a petite marmite,'\hey
are devoured with shouts of joy, as enemies of the human race.15 The
menu of the lower hunting tribes hardly differs from that of the higher
apes.1"
The discovery of fire limited this indiscriminate voracity, and cooperated
with agriculture to free man from the chase. Cooking broke down the
cellulose and starch of a thousand plants indigestible in their raw state,
and man turned more and more to cereals and vegetables as his chief reli-
ance. At the same time cooking, by softening tough foods, reduced the
need of chewing, and began that decay of the teeth which is one of the
insignia of civilization.
To all the varied articles of diet that we have enumerated, man added
the greatest delicacy of all— his fellowman. Cannibalism was at one
time practically universal; it has been found in nearly all primitive tribess,
and among such later peoples as the Irish, the Iberians, the Picts, and the
eleventh-century Danes." Among many tribes human flesh was a staple
of trade, and funerals were unknown. In the Upper Congo living men,
women and children were bought and sold frankly as articles of food;1*
on the island of New Britain human meat was sold in shops as butcher's
meat is sold among ourselves; and in some of the Solomon Islands human
victims, preferably women, were fattened for a feast like pigs.19 The
Fuegians ranked women above dogs because, they said, "dogs taste of
otter." In Tahiti an old Polynesian chief explained his diet to Pierre Loti:
'The white man, when well roasted, tastes like a ripe banana." The Fiji-
ans, however, complained that the flesh of the whites was too salty and
tough, and that a European sailor was hardly fit to eat; a Polynesian tasted
better."
CHAP. Il) ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION II
What was the origin of this practice? There is no surety that the
custom arose, as formerly supposed, out of a shortage of other food; if it
did, the taste once formed survived the shortage, and became a passionate
predilection.* Everywhere among nature peoples blood is regarded as a
delicacy— never with horror; even primitive vegetarians take to it with
gusto. Human blood is constantly drunk by tribes otherwise kindly and
generous; sometimes as medicine, sometimes as a rite or covenant, often
in the belief that it will add to the drinker the vital force of the victim."
No shame was felt in preferring human flesh; primitive man seems to have
recognized no distinction in morals between eating men and eating other
animals. In Melanesia the chief who could treat his friends to a dish of
roast man soared in social esteem. "When I have slain an enemy," ex-
plained a Brazilian philosopher-chief, "it is surely better to eat him than
to let him waste. . . . The worst is not to be eaten, but to die; if I am
killed it is all the same whether my tribal enemy eats me or not. But I
could not think of any game that would taste better than he would. . . .
You whites are really too dainty.""
Doubtless the custom had certain social advantages. It anticipated Dean
Swift's plan for the utilization of superfluous children, and it gave the old
an opportunity to die usefully. There is a point of view from which funer-
als seem an unnecessary extravagance. To Montaigne it appeared more
barbarous to torture a man to death under the cover of piety, as was the
mode of his time, than to roast and eat him after he was dead. We must
respect one another's delusions.
II. THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDUSTRY
Fire—Primitive Tools—Weaving and pottery— Building and trans-
port—Trade and finance
If man began with speech, and civilization with agriculture, industry
began with fire. Man did not invent it; probably nature produced the
marvel for him by the friction of leaves or twigs, a stroke of lightning, or
a chance union of chemicals; man merely had the saving wit to imitate
nature, and to improve upon her. He put the wonder to a thousand uses.
First, perhaps, he made it serve as a torch to conquer his fearsome enemy,
the dark; then he used it for warmth, and moved more freely from his
native tropics to less enervating zones, slowly making the planet human;
then he applied it to metals, softening them, tempering them, and com-
12 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. II
bining them into forms stronger and suppler than those in which they had
come to his hand. So beneficent and strange was it that fire always re-
mained a miracle to primitive man, fit to be worshiped as a god; he offered
it countless ceremonies of devotion, and made it the center or focus (which
is Latin for hearth) of his life and home; he carried it carefully with him
as he moved from place to place in his wanderings, and would not will-
ingly let it die. Even the Romans punished with death the careless vestal
virgin who allowed the sacred fire to be extinguished.
Meanwhile, in the midst of hunting, herding and agriculture, invention
was busy, and the primitive brain was racking itself to find mechanical
answers to the economic puzzles of life. At first man was content, appar-
ently, to accept what nature offered him— the fruits of the earth as his
food, the skins and furs of the animals as his clothing, the caves in the
hillsides as his home. Then, perhaps (for most history is guessing, and the
rest is prejudice), he imitated the tools and industry of the animal: he saw
the monkey flinging rocks and fruit upon his enemies, or breaking open
nuts and oysters with a stone; he saw the beaver building a dam, the birds
making nests and bowers, the chimpanzees raising something very like a
hut. He envied the power of their claws, teeth, tusks and horns, and the
toughness of their hides; and he set to work to fashion tools and weapons
that would resemble and rival these. Man, said Franklin, is a tool-using
animal;** but this, too, like the other distinctions on which we plume our-
selves, is only a difference of degree.
Many tools lay potential in the plant world that surrounded primitive
man. From the bamboo he made shafts, knives, needles and bottles; out of
branches he made tongs, pincers and vices; from bark and fibres he wove
cord and clothing of a hundred kinds. Above all, he made himself a stick.
It was a modest invention, but its uses were so varied that man always
looked upon it as a symbol of power and authority, from the wand of the
fairies and the staff of the shepherd to the rod of Moses or Aaron, the
ivory cane of the Roman consul, the lituus of the augurs, and the mace
of the magistrate or the king. In agriculture the stick became the hoe; in
war it became the lance or javelin or spear, the sword or bayonet." Again,
man used the mineral world, and shaped stones into a museum of arms
and implements: hammers, anvils, kettles, scrapers, arrow-heads, saws,
planes, wedges, levers, axes and drills, from the animal world he made
ladles, spoons, vases, gourds, plates, cups, razors and hooks out of the
shells of the shore, and tough or dainty tools out of the horn or ivory, the
CHAP. Il) ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 13
teeth and bones, the hair and hide of the beasts. Most of these fashioned
articles had handles of wood, attached to them in cunning ways, bound
with braids of fibre or cords of animal sinew, and occasionally glued
with strange mixtures of blood. The ingenuity of primitive men prob- ,
ably equaled— perhaps it surpassed— that of the average modern man; we
differ from them through the social accumulation of knowledge, materials
and tools, rather than through innate superiority of brains. Indeed, nature
men delight in mastering the necessities of a situation with inventive wit.
It was a favorite game among the Eskimos to go off into difficult and de-
serted places, and rival one another in devising means for meeting the
needs of a life unequipped and unadorned."
* This primitive skill displayed itself proudly in the art of weaving. Here,
too, the animal showed man the way. The web of the spider, the nest of
the bird, the crossing and texture of fibres and leaves in the natural em-
broidery of the woods, set an example so obvious that in all probability weav-
ing was one of the earliest arts of the human race. Bark, leaves and grass
fibres were woven into clothing, carpets and tapestry, sometimes so excellent
that it could not be rivaled today, even with the resources of contemporary
machinery. Aleutian women may spend a year in weaving one robe. The
blankets and garments made by the North American Indians were richly
ornamented with fringes and embroideries of hairs and tendon-threads dyed
in brilliant colors with berry juice; colors "so alive," says Father Thcodut,
"that ours do not seem even to approach them."*7 Again art began where
nature left off; the bones of birds and fishes, and the slim shoots of the
bamboo tree, were polished into needles, and the tendons of animals were
drawn into threads delicate enough to pass through the eye of the finest
needle today. Bark was beaten into mats and cloths, skins were dried for
clothing and shoes, fibres were twisted into the strongest yarn, and supple
branches and colored filaments were woven into baskets more beautiful than
any modern forms."
Akin to basketry, perhaps born of it, was the art of pottery. Clay placed
upon wickerwork to keep the latter from being burned, hardened into a
fireproof shell which kept its form when the wickerwork was taken away;"
this may have been the first stage of a development that was to culminate
in the perfect porcelains of China. Or perhaps some lumps of clay, baked
and hardened by the sun, suggested the ceramic art; it was but a step from
this to substitute fire for the sun, and to form from the earth myriad shapes
of vessels for every use— for cooking, storing and transporting, at last for
* Reduced type, unindented, will be used occasionally for technical or dispensable matter.
14 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. II
.luxury and ornament. Designs imprinted by finger-nail or tool upon the
• wet clay were one of the first forms of art, and perhaps one of the origins
*of writing.
Out of sun-dried clay primitive tribes made bricks and adobe, and dwelt,
so to speak, in pottery. But that was a late stage of the building art, bind-
ing the mud hut of the "savage" in a chain of continuous development with
the brilliant tiles of Nineveh and Babylon. Some primitive peoples, like the
Veddahs of Ceylon, had no dwellings at all, and were content with the
earth and the sky; some, like the Tasmanians, slept in hollow trees; some,
like the natives of New South Wales, lived in caves; others, like the Bush-
men, built here and there a wind-shelter of branches, or, more rarely, drove
piles into the soil and covered their tops with moss and twigs. From such
wind-shelters, when sides were added, evolved the hut, which is found
among the natives of Australia in all its stages from a tiny cottage of
branches, grass and earth large enough to cover two or three persons, to
great huts housing thirty or more. The nomad hunter or herdsman pre-
ferred a tent, which he could carry wherever the chase might lead him.
The higher type of nature peoples, like the American Indian, built with
wood; the Iroquois, for example, raised, out of timber still bearing the
bark, sprawling edifices five hundred feet long, which sheltered many fami-
lies. Finally, the natives of Oceania made real houses of carefully cut boards,
and the evolution of the wooden dwelling was complete.*
Only three further developments were needed for primitive man to
create all the essentials of economic civilization: the mechanisms of trans-
port, the processes of trade, and the medium of exchange. The porter
carrying his load from a modern plane pictures the earliest and latest stages
in the history of transportation. In the beginning, doubtless, man was his
own beast of burden, unless he was married; to this day, for the most part,
in southern and eastern Asia, man is wagon and donkey and all. Then he
invented ropes, levers, and pulleys; he conquered and loaded the animal;
he made the first sledge by having his cattle draw along the ground long
branches bearing his goods;* he put logs as rollers under the sledge; he cut
cross-sections of the log, and made the greatest of all mechanical inven-
tions, the wheel; he put wheels under the sledge and made a cart. Other
logs he bound together as rafts, or dug into canoes; and the streams be-
came his most convenient avenues of transport. By land he went first
through trackless fields and hills, then by trails, at last by roads. He studied
the stars, and guided his caravans across mountains and deserts by tracing
* The American Indians, content with this device, never used the wheel.
CHAP. Il) ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 15
his route in the sky. He paddled, rowed or sailed his way bravely from
island to island, and at last spanned oceans to spread his modest culture
from continent to continent. Here, too, the main problems were solved
before written history began.
Since human skills and natural resources are diversely and unequally
distributed, a people may be enabled, by the development of specific talents,
or by its proximity to needed materials, to produce certain articles more
cheaply than its neighbors. Of such articles it makes more than it con-
sumes, and offers its surplus to other peoples in exchange for their own;
this is the origin of trade. The Chibcha Indians of Colombia exported
the rock salt that abounded in their territory, and received in return the
cereals that could not be raised on their barren soil. Certain American
Indian villages were almost entirely devoted to making arrow-heads; some
in New Guinea to making pottery; some in Africa to blacksmithing, or to
making boats or lances. Such specializing tribes or villages sometimes ac-
quired the names of their industry (Smith, Fisher, Potter . . . ), and these
names were in time attached to specializing families.3011 Trade in surpluses
was at first by an interchange of gifts; even in our calculating days a
present (if only a meal) sometimes precedes or seals a trade. The ex-
change was facilitated by war, robbery, tribute, fines, and compensation;
goods had to be kept moving! Gradually an orderly system of barter
grew up, and trading posts, markets and bazaars were established— occa-
sionally, then periodically, then permanently— where those who had some
article in excess might offer it for some article of need.81
For a long time commerce was purely such exchange, and centuries
passed before a circulating medium of value was invented to quicken trade.
A Dyak might be seen wandering for days through a bazaar, with a ball of
beeswax in his hand, seeking a customer who could offer him in return
something that he might more profitably use.88 The earliest mediums of
exchange were articles universally in demand, which anyone would take
in payment: dates, salt, skins, furs, ornaments, implements, weapons; in
such traffic two knives equaled one pair of stockings, all three equaled
a blanket, all four equaled a gun, all five equaled a horse; two elk-teeth
equaled one pony, and eight ponies equaled a wife.88 There is hardly any
thing that has not been employed as money by some people at some time:
beans, fish-hooks, shells, pearls, beads, cocoa seeds, tea, pepper, at last
sheep, pigs, cows, and slaves. Cattle were a convenient standard of value
and medium of exchange among hunters and herders; they bore interest
1 6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. II
through breeding, and they were easy to carry, since they transported
themselves. Even in Homer's days men and things were valued in terms
of cattle: the armor of Diomedes was worth nine head of cattle, a skilful
slave was worth four. The Romans used kindred words— pecus and
'pecunia—for cattle and money, and placed the image of an ox upon their
early coins. Our own words capital, chattel and cattle go back through
the French to the Latin capitale, meaning property: and this in turn
derives from caput, meaning head— i.e., of cattle. When metals were
mined they slowly replaced other articles as standards of value; copper,
bronze, iron, finally—because of their convenient representation of great
worth in little space and weight— silver and gold, became the money of
mankind. The advance from token goods to a metallic currency does not
seem to have been made by primitive men; it was left for the historic
civilizations to invent coinage and credit, and so, by further facilitating
the exchange of surpluses, to increase again the wealth and comfort of
man.84
III. ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION
Primitive communism— Causes of its disappearance— Origins of
private property— Slavery— Classes
Trade was the great disturber of the primitive world, for until it came,
bringing money and profit in its wake, there was no property, and there-
fore little government. In the early stages of economic development
property was limited for the most part to things personally used; the
property sense applied so strongly to such articles that they (even the
wife) were often buried with their owner; it applied so weakly to things
not personally used that in their case the sense of property, far from being
innate, required perpetual reinforcement and inculcation.
Almost everywhere, among primitive peoples, land was owned by the
community. The North American Indians, the natives of Peru, the
Chittagong Hill tribes of India, the Borneans and South Sea Islanders seem
to have owned and tilled the soil in common, and to have shared the fruits
together. "The land," said the Omaha Indians, "is like water and wind—
what cannot be sold." In Samoa the idea of selling land was unknown
prior to the coming of the white man. Professor Rivers found communism
in land still existing in Melanesia and Polynesia; and in inner Liberia it
may be observed today.36
Only less widespread was communism in food. It was usual among
CHAP. Il) ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION If
"savages" for the man who had food to share it with the man who had
none, for travelers to be fed at any home they chose to stop at on their
way, and for communities harassed with drought to be maintained by
their neighbors.88 If a man sat down to his meal in the woods he was
expected to call loudly for some one to come and share it with him, before
he might justly eat alone.87 When Turner told a Samoan about the poor in
London the "savage" asked in astonishment: "How is it? No food? No
friends? No house to live in? Where did he grow? Are there no
houses belonging to his friends?"88 The hungry Indian had but to ask to
receive; no matter how small the supply was, food was given him if he
needed it; "no one can want food while there is corn anywhere in the
town."89 Among the Hottentots it was the custom for one who had more
than others to share his surplus till all were equal. White travelers in
Africa before the advent of civilization noted that a present of food or
other valuables to a "black man" was at once distributed; so that when
a suit of clothes was given to one of them the donor soon found the
recipient wearing the hat, a friend the trousers, another friend the coat.
The Eskimo hunter had no personal right to his catch; it had to be divided
among the inhabitants of the village, and tools and provisions were the
common property of all. The North American Indians were described
by Captain Carver as "strangers to all distinctions of property, except in
the articles of domestic use. . . . They are extremely liberal to each other,
and supply the deficiencies of their friends with any superfluity of their
own." "What is extremely surprising," reports a missionary, "is to see
them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one does
not find among common people in the most civilized nations. This, doubt-
less, arises from the fact that the words 'mine' and 'thine,' which St.
Chrysostom says extinguish in our hearts the fire of charity and kindle
that of greed, are unknown to these savages." "I have seen them," says
another observer, "divide game among themselves when they sometimes
had many shares to make; and cannot recollect a single instance of their
falling into a dispute or finding fault with the distribution as being unequal
or otherwise objectionable. They would rather lie down themselves on
an empty stomach than have it laid to their charge that they neglected
to satisfy the needy. . . . They look upon themselves as but one great
family.""
Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we,
with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that communism
l8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. II
proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave
insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the
failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a level-
ing of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition
with other groups.41 Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast
as "so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the
expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them.
Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than
the idle, they plant less every year."41 Darwin thought that the perfect
equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming
civilized;48 or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have
been fatal to their equality. Communism brought a certain security to all
who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance
of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. In-
dividualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery;
it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the com-
petition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all
shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none.*
Communism could survive more easily in societies where men were
always on the move, and danger and want were ever present. Hunters
and herders had no need of private property in land; but when agriculture
became the settled life of men it soon appeared that the land was most
fruitfully tilled when the rewards of careful husbandry accrued to the
family that had provided it. Consequently—since there is a natural selec-
tion of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups— the
passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property
to family property; the most economical unit of production became the
* Perhaps one reason why communism tends to appear chiefly at the beginning of civili-
zations is that it flourishes most readily in times of dearth, when the common danger of
starvation fuses the individual into the group. When abundance comes, and the danger
subsides, social cohesion is lessened, and individualism increases; communism ends where
luxiiry begins. As the life of a society becomes more complex, and the division of labor
differentiates men into diverse occupations and trades, it becomes more and more unlikely
that all these services will be equally valuable to the group; inevitably those whose greater
ability enables them to perform the more vital functions will take more than their equal
share of the rising wealth of the group. Every growing civilization is a scene of multiply-
ing inequalities; the natural differences of human endowment unite with differences of
opportunity to produce artificial differences of wealth and power; and where no laws or
despots suppress these artificial inequalities they reach at last a bursting point where the
poor have nothing to lose by violence, and the chaos of revolution levels men again into a
community of destitution.
Hence the dream of communism lurks in every modern society as a racial memory of a
CHAP. Il) ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 19
unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal
form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became
increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose. Frequently an
enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond
the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest,
the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and
in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual
property began.48* As the pressure of population increased, and older
lands were exhausted, such reclamation went on in a widening circle, until,
in the more complex societies, individual ownership became the order of
the day. The invention of money cooperated with these factors by facili-
tating the accumulation, transport and transmission of property. The
old tribal rights and traditions reasserted themselves in the technical owner-
ship of the soil by the village community or the king, and in periodical
redistributions of the land; but after an epoch of natural oscillation between
the old and the new, private property established itself definitely as the
basic economic institution of historical society.
Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private prop-
erty but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been
unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the menial work.
The men alternated between the excited activity of hunting or war, and
the exhausted lassitude of satiety or peace. The characteristic laziness
of primitive peoples had its origin, presumably, in this habit of slowly re-
cuperating from the fatigue of battle or the chase; it was not so much
laziness as rest. To transform this spasmodic activity into regular work
two things were needed: the routine of tillage, and the organization of
labor.
Such organization remains loose and spontaneous where men are work-
ing for themselves; where they work for others, the organization of labor
simpler and more equal life; and where inequality or insecurity rises beyond sufferance,
men welcome a return to a condition which they idealize by recalling its equality and
forgetting its poverty. Periodically the land gets itself redistributed, legally or not,
whether by the Gracchi in Rome, the Jacobins in France, or the Communists in Russia;
periodically wealth is redistributed, whether by the violent confiscation of property, or
by confiscatory taxation of incomes and bequests. Then the race for wealth, goods and
power begins again, and the pyramid of ability takes form once more; under whatever
laws may be enacted the abler man manages somehow to get the richer soil, the better
place, the lion's share; soon he is strong enough to dominate the state and rewrite or
interpret the laws; and in time the inequality is as great as before. In this aspect all
economic history is the slow heart-beat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole
of naturally concentrating wealth and naturally explosive revolution.
2O
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. II
depends in the last analysis upon force. The rise of agriculture and the
inequality of men led to the employment of the socially weak by the
socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only
good prisoner is a live one. Butchery and cannibalism lessened, slavery
grew.44 It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or
eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves. A similar develop-
ment on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war
no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities. Once
slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was extended
by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate criminals, and by
raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War helped to make
slavery, and slavery helped to make war.
Probably it was through centuries of slavery that our race acquired
its traditions and habits of toil. No one would do any hard or persistent
work if he could avoid it without physical, economic or social penalty.
Slavery became part of the discipline by which man was prepared for
industry. Indirectly it furthered civilization, in so far as it increased
wealth and—for a minority— created leisure. After some centuries men
took it for granted; Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable,
and St. Paul gave his benediction to what must have seemed, by his time,
a divinely ordained institution.
Gradually, through agriculture and slavery, through the division of
labor and the inherent diversity of men, the comparative equality of
natural society was replaced by inequality and class divisions. "In the
primitive group we find as a rule no distinction between slave and free,
no serfdom, no caste, and little if any distinction between chief and
followers."45 Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades sub-
jected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was
a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them
in their mastery and use of the weak.* Inheritance added superior oppor-
tunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies
into a maze of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively
conscious of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red
thread through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable instru-
ment for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging
of war, and the organization of peace.
* So in our time that Mississippi of inventions which we call the Industrial Revolution
has enormously intensified the natural inequality of men.
CHAPTER III
The Political Elements of Civilization
I. THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT
The unsocial instinct— Primitive anarchism— The clan and the
tribe— The king— War
MAN is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates
with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the
compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he
fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers
him, and because there are many things that can be done better together
than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against^
the world. If the average man had had his way there would probably
never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with
taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks
for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them;
privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own
case superfluous.
In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive
hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack
and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families;
the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only
temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their
family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular govern-
ment; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family
relationship, but had no government; the Kubus of Sumatra "live without
men in authority," every family governing itself; the Fuegians are seldom
more than twelve together; the Tungus associate sparingly in groups of
ten tents or so; the Australian "horde" is seldom larger than sixty souls.1
In such cases association and cooperation are for special purposes, like
hunting; they do not rise to any permanent political order.
The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan— a group
of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same
21
22 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. Ill
totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans
united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second
step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many
groups had no chiefs at all/ and many more seem to have tolerated them
only in time of war.* Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the
cap of our own age, it appears at its best in several primitive groups where
such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the
clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed.4 The Iroquois and Delaware
Indians recognized no laws or restraints beyond the natural order of the
family and the clan; their chiefs had modest powers, which might at any
time be ended by the elders of the tribe. The Omaha Indians were ruled
by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous
agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many
tribes bound themselves— and honored their pledge— to keep the peace,
and one sees no great gap between these "savages" and the modern states
that bind themselves revocably to peace in the League of Nations.
It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these
that make war. In Samoa the chief had power during war, but at other
times no one paid much attention to him. The Dyaks had no other
government than that of each family by its head; in case of strife they
chose their bravest warrior to lead them, and obeyed him strictly; but
once the conflict was ended they literally sent him about his business.8
In the intervals of peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most
authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kingship developed
as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined—
and derived from— the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies arc
ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword; force
is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in
Hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the manage-
ment of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and
perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.
How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally in-
clined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful; and the Eskimos
could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt
one another like seals and steal one another's land. "How well it is"—
they apostrophized their soil— "that you are covered with ice and snow!
How well it is that if in your rocks there are gold and silver, for which
the Christians are so greedy, it is covered with so much snow that they
CHAP. Ill) POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 23
cannot get at it! Your unfruitfulness makes us happy, and saves us from
molestation."' Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with inter-
mittent war. Hunters fought for 'happy hunting grounds still rich in
prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for
virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden
and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for
simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions
and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves— certain
hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would
kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized,
certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the
Iroquois maintained the "Great Peace" for three hundred years/ But
for the most part war was the favorite instrument of natural selection
among primitive nations and groups.
Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples,
and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence
and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools,
and arts of war that became arts of peace. (How many railroads today
begin in strategy and end in trade!) Above all, war dissolved primitive
communism and anarchism, introduced organization and discipline, and
led to the enslavement of prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the
growth of government. Property was the mother, war was the father,
of the state. *
II. THE STATE
As the organization of force—The village community—The
psychological aides of the state
"A herd of blonde beasts of prey," says Nietzsche, "a race of con-
querors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its
organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in
numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, . . . such
is the origin of the state."8 "The state as distinct from tribal organization,"
says Lester Ward, "begins with the conquest of one race by another."*
"Everywhere," says Oppenheimer, "we find some warlike tribe breaking
through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as
nobility, and founding its state."10 "Violence," says Ratzenhofer, "is the
agent which has created the state."11 The state, says Gumplowicz, is
the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste
24 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. Ill
over the vanquished." "The state," says Sumner, "is the product of
force, and exists by force."1*
This violent subjection is usually of a settled agricultural group by a
tribe of hunters and herders.14 For agriculture teaches men pacific ways,
inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day's
toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments
of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled
in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly
more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or
flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the
ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible
reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.*
The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of
written history. For it presupposes a change in the very principle of social
organization— from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the
former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural
groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest
is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened
the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppress-
ing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to be-
come concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789
hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aris-
tocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany
and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the
most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber's grandchildren, becomes sacred
and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits
of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen
thrills with loyalty to the flag.
The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an in-
dispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring
up that depend not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore require an
artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an
example: it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and
• It is a law that holds only for early societies, since under more complex conditions a
variety of other factors— greater wealth, better weapons, higher intelligence—contribute to
determine the issue. So Egypt was conquered not only by Hyksos, Ethiopian, Arab and
Turkish nomads, but also by the settled civilizations of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and
England— though not until these nations had become hunters and nomads on an imperial-
istic scale.
CHAP. Ill) POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 25
achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a
concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such com-
munities created a need for some external force that could regulate their
interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state, ogre
though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an or-
ganized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of the thousand
conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of
its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external
war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace;
the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided
that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay
tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all. What an inter-
regnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from
the behavior of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man
had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering every-
where.15 "Without autocratic rule," as Spencer said, "the evolution of so-
ciety could not have commenced."1*
A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though
men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power,
like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state,
in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of in-
doctrination—the family, the church, the school— to build in the soul of
the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand
policemen, and prepared the public mind for that docile coherence which
is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and
more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while
consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order
to the people, and would recognize the rights of the "subject"* sufficiently
to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State.
ra. LAW
Larw-lessness—Laiv and custom— Revenge— Fines—Courts— Ordeal
—The duel— Punishment— Primitive freedom
Law comes with property, marriage and government; the lowest societies
manage to get along without it. "I have lived with communities of savages
in South America and in the East," said Alfred Russel Wallace, "who
* Note how this word betrays the origin of the state.
26 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. Ill
have no law or law-courts but the public opinion of the village freely
expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellows, and
any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a com-
munity all are nearly equal."17 Herman Melville writes similarly of the
Marquesas Islanders: "During the time I have lived among the Typees
no one was ever put upon his trial for any violence to the public. Every-
thing went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled,
I will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious associations1
of mortals in Christendom."11 The old Russian Government established
courts of law in the Aleutian Islands, but in fifty years those courts found
no employment. "Crime and offenses," reports Brinton, "were so infre-
quent under the social system of the Iroquois that they can scarcely be
said to have had a penal code."1* Such are the ideal— perhaps the idealized—
conditions for whose return the anarchist perennially pines.
Certain amendments must be made to these descriptions. Natural socie-
ties arc comparatively free from law first because they are ruled by cus-
toms as rigid and inviolable as any law; and secondly because crimes of
violence, in the beginning, are considered to be private matters, and are left
to bloody personal revenge.
Underneath all the phenomena of society is the great terra firma of cus-
tom, that bedrock of time-hallowed modes of thought and action which
provides a society with some measure of steadiness and order through all
absence, changes, and interruptions of law. Custom gives the same stability
to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the
individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves
along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the
mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.
A law of economy works in instinct and habit, in custom and convention:
the most convenient mode of response to repeated stimuli or traditional sit-
uations is automatic response. Thought and innovation are disturbances of
regularity, and are tolerated only for indispensable readaptations, or
promised gold.
When to this natural basis of custom a supernatural sanction is added by
religion, and the ways of one's ancestors are also the will of the gods, then
custom becomes stronger than law, and subtracts substantially from primi-
tive freedom. To violate law is to win the admiration of half the populace,
who secretly envy anyone who can outwit this ancient enemy; to violate
custom is to incur almost universal hostility. For custom rises out of the
people, whereas law is forced upon them from above; law is usually a de-
CHAP. Ill) POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION ^^
cree of the master, but custom is the natural selection of those modes of
action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group.
Law partly replaces custom when the state replaces the natural order of the
family, the clan, the tribe, and the village community; it more fully replaces
custom when writing appears, and laws graduate from a code carried
down in the memory of elders and priests into a system of legislation pro-
claimed in written tables. But the replacement is never complete; in the!
determination and judgment of human conduct custom remains to the endj
the force behind the law, the power behind the throne, the last "magis-|
trate of men's lives."
The first stage in the evolution of law is personal revenge. "Vengeance
is mine," says the primitive individual; "I will repay." Among the Indian
tribes of Lower California every man was his own policeman, and admin-
istered justice in the form of such vengeance as he was strong enough
to take. So in many early societies the murder of A by B led to the
murder of B by A's son or friend C, the murder of C by B's son or friend
D, and so on perhaps to the end of the alphabet; we may find examples
among the purest-blooded American families of today. This principle of
revenge persists throughout the history of law: it appears in the Lex
Talionis*—or Law of Retaliation— embodied in Roman Law; it plays a
large role in the Code of Hammurabi, and in the "Mosaic" demand of
"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"; and it lurks behind most legal
punishments even in our day.
The second step toward law and civilization in the treatment of crime
was the substitution of damages for revenge. Very often the chief, to
maintain internal harmony, used his power or influence to have the re-
vengeful family content itself with gold or goods instead of blood. Soon
a regular tariff arose, determining how much must be paid for an eye,
a tooth, an arm, or a life; Hammurabi legislated extensively in such terms.
The Abyssinians were so meticulous in this regard that when a boy fell
from a tree upon his companion and killed him, the judges decided that*
the bereaved mother should send another of her sons into the tree to
fall upon the culprit's neck." The penalties assessed in cases of composi-
tion might vary with the sex, age and rank of the offender and the injured;
among the Fijians, for example, petty larceny by a common man was con-
sidered a more heinous crime than murder by a chief.*1 Throughout the
• A phrase apparently invented by Qcero.
28 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. HI
history of law the magnitude of the crime has been lessened by the magni-
tude of the criminal.* Since these fines or compositions, paid to avert
revenge, required some adjudication of offenses and damages, a third step
towards law was taken by the formation of courts; the chief or the elders
or the priests sat in judgment to settle the conflicts of their people. Such
courts were not always judgment seats; often they were boards of volun-
tary conciliation, which arranged some amicable settlement of the dis-
pute, t For many centuries, and among many peoples, resort to courts
remained optional; and where the offended party was dissatisfied with
the judgment rendered, he was still free to seek personal revenge.89
In many cases disputes were settled by a public contest between the
parties, varying in bloodiness from a harmless boxing-match— as among the
wise Eskimos— to a duel to the death. Frequently the primitive mind re-
sorted to an ordeal not so much on the medieval theory that a deity would
reveal the culprit as in the hope that the ordeal, however unjust, would
end a feud that might otherwise embroil the tribe for generations. Some-
times accuser and accused were asked to choose between two bowls of
food of which one was poisoned; the wrong party might be poisoned
(usually not beyond redemption), but then the dispute was ended, since
both parties ordinarily believed in the righteousness of the ordeal. Among
some tribes it was the custom for a native who acknowledged his guilt
to hold out his leg and permit the injured party to pierce it with a spear.
Or the accused submitted to having spears thrown at him by his accusers;
if they all missed him he was declared innocent; if he was hit, even by one,
he was adjudged guilty, and the affair was closed." From such early
forms the ordeal persisted through the laws of Moses and Hammurabi and
down into the Middle Ages; the duel, which is one form of the ordeal, and
which historians thought dead, is being revived in our own day. So brief
and narrow, in some respects, is the span between primitive and modern
man; so short is the history of civilization.
The fourth advance in the growth of law was the assumption, by the
chief or the state, of the obligation to prevent and punish wrongs. It is
but a step from settling disputes and punishing offenses to making some
* Perhaps an exception should be made in the case of the Brahmans, who, by the Code
of Manu (VIII, 336-8), were called upon to bear greater punishments for the same crime
than members of lower castes; but this regulation was well honored in the breach.
tSome of our most modern cities are trying to revive this ancient time-saving institu-
tion.
CHAP. Ill) POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 29
effort to prevent them. So the chief becomes not merely a judge but a
lawgiver; and to the general body of "common law" derived from the
customs of the group is added a body of "positive law," derived from the
decrees of the government; in the one case the laws grow up, in the other
they are handed down. In either case the laws carry with them the mark
of their ancestry, and reek with the vengeance which they tried to replace.
Primitive punishments are cruel,114 because primitive society feels insecure;
as social organization becomes more stable, punishments become less severe.
In general the individual has fewer "rights" in natural society than
under civilization. Everywhere man is born in chains: the chains of
heredity, of environment, of custom, and of law. The primitive in-
dividual moves always within a web of regulations incredibly stringent and
detailed; a thousand tabus restrict his action, a thousand terrors limit his
will. The natives of New Zealand were apparently without laws, but
in actual fact rigid custom ruled every aspect of their lives. Unchangeable
and unquestionable conventions determined the sitting and the rising, the
standing and the walking, the eating, drinking and sleeping of the natives
of Bengal. The individual was hardly recognized as a separate entity in
natural society; what existed was the family and the clan, the tribe and
the village community; it was these that owned land and exercised power.
Only with the coming of private property, which gave him economic
authority, and of the state, which gave him a legal status and defined
rights, did the individual begin to stand out as a distinct reality." Rights?
do not come to us from nature, which knows no rights except cunning
and strength; they are privileges assured to individuals by the community
as advantageous to the common good. Liberty is a luxury of security;
the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
IV. THE FAMILY
Its function in civilization—The clan vs. the family— Growth of
parental care— Unimportance of the father— Separation of the
sexes— Mother-right— Status of woman— Her occupa-
tions — Her economic achievements — The patri-
archate—The subjection of woman
As the basic needs of man are hunger and love, so the fundamental func-
tions of social organization are economic provision and biological main-
tenance; a stream of children is as vital as a continuity of food. To insti-
30 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. Ill
tutions which seek material welfare and political order, society always
adds institutions for the perpetuation of the race. Until the state— towards
the dawn of the historic civilizations— becomes the central and permanent
source of social -order, the clan undertakes the delicate task of regulating
the relations between the sexes and between the generations; and even
after the state has been established, the essential government of mankind
remains in that most deep-rooted of all historic institutions, the family.
It is highly improbable that the first human beings lived in isolated fami-
lies, even in the hunting stage; for the inferiority of man in physiological
organs of defense would have left such families a prey to marauding beasts.
Usually, in nature, those organisms that are poorly equipped for individual
defense live in groups, and find in united action a means of survival in a
world bristling with tusks and claws and impenetrable hides. Presumably it
was so with man; he saved himself by solidarity in the hunting-pack and
the clan. When economic relations and political mastery replaced kinship
as the principle of social organization, the clan lost its position as die sub-
structure of society; at the bottom it was supplanted by the family, at the
top it was superseded by the state. Government took over the problem of
maintaining order, while the family assumed the tasks of reorganizing indus-
try and carrying on the race.
Among the lower animals there is no care of progeny; consequently
eggs are spawned in great number, and some survive and develop while
the great majority are eaten or destroyed. Most fish lay a million eggs
per year; a few species of fish show a modest solicitude for their offspring,
and find half a hundred eggs per year sufficient for their purposes. Birds
care better for their young, and hatch from five to twelve eggs yearly;
mammals, whose very name suggests parental care, master the earth with
an average of three young per female per year." Throughout the animal
world fertility and destruction decrease as parental care increases; through-
out the human world the birth rate and the death rate fall together as
civilization rises. Better family care makes possible a longer adolescence,
in which the young receive fuller training and 'development before they
are flung upon their own resources; and the lowered birth rate releases
human energy for other activities than reproduction.
Since it was the mother who fulfilled most of the parental functions,
the family was at first (so far as we can pierce the mists of history) organ-
ized on the assumption that the position of the man in the family was
CHAP.IIl) POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 3!
superficial and incidental, while that of the woman was fundamental and
supreme. In some existing tribes, and probably in the earliest human
groups the physiological role of the male in reproduction appears to have
escaped notice quite as completely as among animals, who rut and mate
and breed with happy unconsciousness of cause and effect. The Trobriand
Islanders attribute pregnancy not to any commerce of the sexes, but to
the entrance of a baloma^ or ghost, into the woman. Usually the ghost
enters while the woman is bathing; "a fish has bitten me," the girl reports.
"When," says Malinowski, "I asked who was the father of an illegitimate
child, there was only one answer— that there was no father, since the girl
was unmarried. If, then, I asked, in quite plain terms, who was the
physiological father, the question was not understood. . . . The answer
would be: 'It is a baloma who gave her this child.' " These islanders had
a strange belief that the baloma would more readily enter a girl given to
loose relations with men; nevertheless, in choosing precautions against
pregnancy, the girls preferred to avoid bathing at high tide rather than to
forego relations with men."7 It is a delightful story, which must have
proved a great convenience in the embarrassing aftermath of generosity;
it would be still more delightful if it had been invented for anthropologists
as well as for husbands.
In Melanesia intercourse was recognized as the cause of pregnancy, but
unmarried girls insisted on blaming some article in their diet." Even
where the function of the male was understood, sex relationships were so
irregular that it was never a simple matter to determine the father. Con-
sequently the quite primitive mother seldom bothered to inquire into the
paternity of her child; it belonged to her, and she belonged not to a hus1-
band but to her father— or her brother— and the clan; it was with these
that she remained, and these were the only male relatives whom her child
would know." The bonds of affection between brother and sister were
usually stronger than between husband and wife. The husband, in many
cases, remained in the family and clan of his mother, and saw his wife
only as a clandestine visitor. Even in classical civilization the brother was
dearer than the husband: it was her brother, not her husband, that the
wife of Intaphernes saved from the wrath of Darius; it was for her brother,
not for her husband, that Antigone sacrificed herself.80 "The notion that
a man's wife is the nearest person in the world to him is a relatively modern
notion, and one which is restricted to a comparatively small part of the
human race."81
32 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. Ill
So slight is the relation between father and children in primitive society
that in a great number of tribes the sexes live apart. In Australia and
British New Guinea, in Africa and Micronesia, in Assam and Burma,
among the Aleuts, Eskimos and Samoyeds, and here and there over the
earth, tribes may still be found in which there is no visible family life; the
men live apart from the women, and visit them only now and then; even
the meals are taken separately. In northern Papua it is not considered
right for a man to be seen associating socially with a woman, even if she
is the mother of his children. In Tahiti "family life is quite unknown."
Out of this segregation of the sexes come those secret fraternities— usually
of males— which appear everywhere among primitive races, and serve most
often as a refuge against women.88 They resemble our modern fraternities
in another point— their hierarchical organization.
The simplest form of the family, then, was the woman and her children,
living with her mother or her brother in the clan; such an arrangement
was a natural outgrowth of the animal family of the mother and her litter,
and of the biological ignorance of primitive man. An alternative early
form was "matrilocal marriage": the husband left his clan and went to live
with the clan and family of his wife, laboring for her or with her in the
service of her parents. Descent, in such cases, was traced through the
female line, and inheritance was through the mother; sometimes even the
kingship passed down through her rather than through the male.88 This
"mother-right" was not a "matriarchate"— it did not imply the rule of
women over men.*4 Even when property was transmitted through the
woman she had little power over it; she was used as a means of tracing
relationships which, through primitive laxity or freedom, were otherwise
obscure." It is true that in any system of society the woman exercises a
certain authority, rising naturally out of her importance in the home, out
of her function as the dispenser of food, and out of the need that the
male has of her, and her power to refuse him. It is also true that there
have been, occasionally, women rulers among some South African tribes;
that in the Pelew Islands the chief did nothing of consequence without
the advice of a council of elder women; that among the Iroquois the
squaws had an equal right, with the men, of speaking and voting in the
tribal council;8* and that among the Seneca Indians women held great
power, even to the selection of the chief. But these are rare and exceptional
cases. All in all the position of woman in early societies was one of sub-
jection verging upon slavery. Her periodic disability, her unfamiliarity
CHAP. Ill) POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 33
with weapons, the biological absorption of her strength in carrying, nurs-
ing and rearing children, handicapped her in the war of the sexes, and
doomed her to a subordinate status in all but the very lowest and the very
highest societies. Nor was her position necessarily to rise with the develop-
ment of civilization; it was destined to be lower in Periclean Greece than
among the North American Indians; it was to rise and fall with her strategic
importance rather than with the culture and morals of men.
In the hunting stage she did almost all the work except the actual
capture of the game. In return for exposing himself to the hardships and
risks of the chase, the male rested magnificently for the greater part of
the year. The woman bore her children abundantly, reared them, kept
the hut or home in repair, gathered food in woods and fields, cooked,
cleaned, and made the clothing and the boots." Because the men, when
the tribe moved, had to be ready at any moment to fight off attack, they
carried nothing but their weapons; the women carried all the rest. Bush-
women were used as servants and beasts of burden; if they proved too
weak to keep up with the march, tfiey were abandoned.88 When the
natives of the Lower Murray saw pack oxen they thought that these were
the wives of the whites." The differences in strength which now divide
the sexes hardly existed in those days, and are now environmental rather
than innate: woman, apart from her biological disabilities, was almost the
equal of man in stature, endurance, resourcefulness and courage; she was
not yet an ornament, a thing of beauty, or a sexual toy; she was a robust
animal, able to perform arduous work for long hours, and, if necessary,
to fight to the death for her children or her clan. "Women," said a
chieftain of the Chippewas, "are created for work. One of them can
draw or carry as much as two men. They also pitch our tents, make our
clothes, mend them, and keep us warm at night. . . . We absolutely cannot
get along without them on a journey. They do everything and cost only
a little; for since they must be forever cooking, they can be satisfied in
lean times by licking their fingers."40
Most economic advances, in early society, were made by the woman
rather than the man. While for centuries he clung to his ancient ways of
hunting and herding, she developed agriculture near the camp, and those
busy arts of the home which were to become the most important industries
of later days. From the "wool-bearing tree," as the Greeks called the
cotton plant, the primitive woman rolled thread and made cotton cloth."
It was she, apparently, who developed sewing, weaving, basketry, pottery,
J4 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION {CHAP. HI
woodworking, and building; and in many cases it was she who carried on
primitive trade.** It was she who developed the home, slowly adding man
to the list of her domesticated animals, and training him in those social
dispositions and amenities which are the psychological basis and cement
of civilization.
But as agriculture became more complex and brought larger rewards,
the stronger sex took more and more of it into its own hands.4* The
growth of cattle-breeding gave the man a new source of wealth, stability
and power; even agriculture, which must have seemed so prosaic to the
mighty Nimrods of antiquity, was at last accepted by the wandering
male, and the economic leadership which tillage had for a time given to
women was wrested from them by the men. The application to agri-
culture of those very animals that woman had first domesticated led to her
replacement by the male in the control of the fields; the advance from the
hoe to the plough put a premium upon physical strength, and enabled the
man to assert his supremacy. The growth of transmissible property in
cattle and in the products of the soil led to the sexual subordination of
woman, for the male now demanded from her that fidelity which he
thought would enable him to pass on his accumulations to children pre-
sumably his own. Gradually the man had his way: fatherhood became
recognized, and property began to descend through the male; mother-
right yielded to father-right; and the patriarchal family, with the oldest
male at its head, became the economic, legal, political and moral unit of
i society. The gods, who had been mostly feminine, became great bearded
[ patriarchs, with such harems as ambitious men dreamed of in their solitude.
This passage to the patriarchal— father-ruled— family was fatal to the
position of woman. In all essential aspects she and her children became
the property first of her father or oldest brother, then of her husband.
She was bought in marriage precisely as a slave was bought in the market.
She was bequeathed as property when her husband died; and in some
places (New Guinea, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, India,
etc.) she was strangled and buried with her dead husband, or was expected
to commit suicide, in order to attend upon him in the other world.44 The
father had now the right to treat, give, sell or lend his wives and daughters
very much as he pleased, subject only to the social condemnation of other
fathers exercising the same rights. While the male reserved the privilege
of extending his sexual favors beyond his home, the woman— under patri-
CHAP. Ill) POLITICAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 35
archal institutions—was vowed to complete chastity before marriage, and
complete fidelity after it. The double standard was born.
The general subjection of woman which had existed in the hunting
stage, and had persisted, in diminished form, through the period of mother-
right, became now more pronounced and merciless than before. Im
ancient Russia, on the marriage of a daughter, the father struck her
gently with a whip, and then presented the whip to the bridegroom,*6 as
a sign that her beatings were now to come from a rejuvenated hand. Even
the American Indians, among whom mother-right survived indefinitely,
treated their women harshly, consigned to them all drudgery, and often
called them dogs.4* Everywhere the life of a woman was considered
cheaper than that of a man; and when girls were born there was none of
the rejoicing that marked the coming of a male. Mothers sometimes
destroyed their female children to keep them from misery. In Fiji wives
might be sold at pleasure, and the usual price was a musket/7 Among
some tribes man and wife did not sleep together, lest the breath of the
woman should enfeeble the man; in Fiji it was not thought proper for a
man to sleep regularly at home; in New Caledonia the wife slept in a shed,
while the man slept in the house. In Fiji dogs were allowed in some of
the temples, but women were excluded from all;48 such exclusion of
women from religious services survives in Islam to this day. Doubtless
woman enjoyed at all times the mastery that comes of long-continued
speech; the men might be rebuffed, harangued, even—now and then-
beaten.4" But all in all the man was lord, the woman was servant. The
Kaffir bought women like slaves, as a form of life-income insurance; when
he had a sufficient number of wives he could rest for the remainder of his
days; they would do all the work for him. Some tribes of ancient India
reckoned the women of a family as part of the property inheritance, along
with the domestic animals;10 nor did the last commandment of Moses dis-
tinguish very clearly in this matter. Throughout negro Africa women
hardly differed from slaves, except that they were expected to provide
sexual as well as economic satisfaction. Marriage began as a form of the
law of property, as a part of the institution of slavery."1
CHAPTER IV
The Moral Elements of Civilization
SINCE no society can exist without order, and no order without regu-
lation, we may take it as a rule of history that the power of custom
varies inversely as the multiplicity of laws, much as the power of instinct
varies inversely as the multiplicity of thoughts. Some rules are necessary
for the game of life; they may differ in different groups, but within the
group they must be essentially the same. These rules may be conven-
tions, customs, morals, or laws. Conventions are forms of behavior found
expedient by a people; customs are conventions accepted by successive
generations, after natural selection through trial and error and elimination;
morals are such customs as the group considers vital to its welfare and
development. In primitive societies, where there is no written law, these
vital customs or morals regulate every sphere of human existence, and
give stability and continuity to the social order. Through the slow
magic of time such customs, by long repetition, become a second nature
in the individual; if he violates them he feels a certain fear, discomfort or
shame; this is the origin of that conscience, or moral sense, which Darwin
chose as the most impressive distinction between animals and men.1 In
its higher development conscience is social consciousness— the feeling of
the individual that he belongs to a group, and owes it some measure of
loyalty and consideration. Morality is the cooperation of the part with
the whole, and of each group with some larger whole. Civilization, of
course, would be impossible without it.
I. MARRIAGE
The meaning of marriage— Its biological origins— Sexual com-
munism— Trial marriage— Group marriage— Individual mar-
riage—Polygamy— Its eugenic value— Exogamy— Mar-
riage by service— By capture— By purchase— Primi-
tive love— The economic function of marriage
The first task of those customs that constitute the moral code of a group
is to regulate the relations of the sexes, for these are a perennial source of
discord, violence, and possible degeneration. The basic form of this
36
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 37
sexual regulation is marriage, which may be defined as the association of
mates for the care of offspring. It is a variable and fluctuating institution,
which has passed through almost every conceivable form and experiment
in the course of its history, from the primitive care of offspring without
the association of mates to the modern association of mates without the
care of offspring.
Our animal forefathers invented it. Some birds seem to live as repro-
ducing mates in a divorceless monogamy. Among gorillas and orang-
utans the association of the parents continues to the end of the breeding
season, and has many human features. Any approach to loose behavior
on the part of the female is severely punished by the male.* The orangs
of Borneo, says De Crespigny, "live in families: the male, the female, and
a young one"; and Dr. Savage reports of the gorillas that "it is not unusual
to see the 'old folks' sitting under a tree regaling themselves with fruit
and friendly chat, while their children are leaping around them and swing-
ing from branch to branch in boisterous merriment."8 Marriage is older
than man.
Societies without marriage are rare, but the sedulous inquirer can find
enough of them to form a respectable transition from the promiscuity of
the lower mammals to the marriages of primitive men. In Futuna and
Hawaii the majority of the people did not marry at all;4 the Lubus mated
freely and indiscriminately, and had no conception of marriage; certain
tribes of Borneo lived in marriageless association, freer than the birds; and
among some peoples of primitive Russia "the men utilized the women
without distinction, so that no woman had her appointed husband."
African pygmies have been described as having no marriage institutions,
but as following "their animal instincts wholly without restraint."5 This
primitive "nationalization of women," corresponding to primitive com-
munism in land and food, passed away at so early a stage that few traces
of it remain* Some memory of it, however, lingered on in divers forms:
in the feeling of many nature peoples that monogamy—which they would
define as the monopoly of a woman by one man— is unnatural and immoral;9
in periodic festivals of license (still surviving faintly in our Mardi Gras),
when sexual restraints were temporarily abandoned; in the demand that
a woman should give herself— as at the Temple of Mylitta in Babylon— to
any man that solicited her, before she would be allowed to marry;* in
* Cf . below, p. 245.
38 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
the custom of wife-lending, so essential to many primitive codes of hos-
pitality; and in the jus prim<e noctis, or right of the first night, by which,
in early feudal Europe, the lord of the manor, perhaps representing the
ancient rights of the tribe, occasionally deflowered the bride before the
bridegroom was allowed to consummate the marriage."*
A variety of tentative unions gradually took the place of indiscriminate
relations. Among the Orang Sakai of Malacca a girl remained for a time
with each man of the tribe, passing from one to another until she had
made the rounds; then she began again.7 Among the Yakuts of Siberia,
the Botocudos of South Africa, the lower classes of Tibet, and many other
peoples, marriage was quite experimental, and could be ended at the will
of either party, with no reasons given or required. Among the Bushmen
"any disagreement sufficed to end a union, and new connections could
immediately be found for both." Among the Damaras, according to Sir
Francis Galton, "the spouse was changed almost weekly, and I seldom
knew without inquiry who the pro tempore husband of each lady was at
aqy particular time." Among the Baila "women are bandied about from
man to man, and of their own accord leave one husband for another.
Young women scarcely out of their teens often have had four or five
husbands, all still living."8 The original word for marriage, in Hawaii,
meant to try.* Among the Tahitians, a century ago, unions were free and
dissoluble at will, so long as there were no children; if a child came the
parents might destroy it without social reproach, or the couple might
rear the child and enter into a more permanent relation; the man pledged
his support to the woman in return for the burden of parental care that
she now assumed.10
Marco Polo writes of a Central Asiatic tribe, inhabiting Peyn (now
Keriya) in the thirteenth century: "If a married man goes to a distance
from home to be absent twenty days, his wife has a right, if she is so
inclined, to take another husband; and the men, on the same principle,
marry wherever they happen to reside."11 So old are the latest innovations
in marriage and morals.
Letourneau said of marriage that "every possible experiment compatible
with the duration of savage or barbarian societies has been tried, or is still
practised, amongst various races, without the least thought of the moral
ideas generally prevailing in Europe."" In addition to experiments in perma-
nence there were experiments in relationship. In a few cases we find "group
CHAP. IV) MORALELEMENTSOFCIVILIZATION 39
marriage," by which a number of men belonging to one group married
collectively a number of women belonging to another group.18 In Tibet, for
example, it was the custom for a group of brothers to marry a group of
sisters, and for the two groups to practise sexual communism between them,
each of the men cohabiting with each of the women.14 Caesar reported a
similar custom in ancient Britain.18 Survivals of it appear in the "levirate,"
a custom existing among the early Jews and other ancient peoples, by which
a man was obligated to marry his brother's widow;10 this was the rule that so
irked Onan.
What was it that led men to replace the semi-promiscuity of primitive
society with individual marriage? Since, in a great majority of nature
peoples, there are few, if any, restraints on premarital relations, it is
obvious that physical desire does not give rise to the institution of marriage.
For marriage, with its restrictions and psychological irritations, could not
possibly compete with sexual communism as a mode of satisfying the
erotic propensities of men. Nor could the individual establishment offer
at the outset any mode of rearing children that would be obviously
superior to their rearing by the mother, her family, and the clan. Sonic
powerful economic motives must have favored the evolution of marriage.
In all probability (for again we must remind ourselves how little we really
know of origins) these motives were connected with the rising institution
of property.
Individual marriage came through the desire of the male to have cheap
slaves, and to avoid bequeathing his property to other men's children.
Polygamy, or the marriage of one person to several mates, appears here
and there in the form of polyandry— the marriage of one woman to several
men— as among the Todas and some tribes of Tibet;" the custom may
still be found where males outnumber females considerably.18 But this
custom soon falls prey to the conquering male, and polygamy has come to
mean for us, usually, what would more strictly be called polygyny— the
possession of several wives by one man. Medieval theologians thought
that Mohammed had invented polygamy, but it antedated Islam by some
years, being the prevailing mode of marriage in the primitive world.1*
Many causes conspired to make it general. In early society, because of
hunting and war, the life of the male is more violent and dangerous, and
the death rate of men is higher, than that of women. The consequent
excess of women compels a choice between polygamy and the barren
40 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
celibacy of a minority of women; but such celibacy is intolerable to peoples
who require a high birth rate to make up for a high death rate, and who
therefore scorn the mateless and childless woman. Again, men like variety;
as the Negroes of Angola expressed it, they were "not able to eat always
of the same dish." Also, men like youth in their mates, and women age
rapidly in primitive communities. The women themselves often favored
polygamy; it permitted them to nurse their children longer, and therefore
to reduce the frequency of motherhood without interfering with the erotic
and philoprogenitive inclinations of the male. Sometimes the first wife,
burdened with toil, helped her husband to secure an additional wife, so
that her burden might be shared, and additional children might raise the
productive power and the wealth of the family.80 Children were economic
assets, and men invested in wives in order to draw children from them like
interest. In the patriarchal system wives and children were in effect the
slaves of the man; the more a man had of them, the richer he was. The
poor man practised monogamy, but he looked upon it as a shameful condi-
tion, from which some day he would rise to the respected position of a
polygamous male."
Doubtless polygamy was well adapted to the marital needs of a
primitive society in which women outnumbered men. It had a eu-
genic value superior to that of contemporary monogamy; for whereas
in modern society the most able and prudent men marry latest and have
least children, under polygamy the most able men, presumably, secured
the best? mates and had most children. Hence polygamy has survived
among practically all nature peoples, even among the majority of civil-
ized mankind; only in our day has it begun to die in the Orient. Certain
conditions, however, militated against it. The decrease in danger and vio-
lence, consequent upon a settled agricultural life, brought the sexes towards
an approximate numerical equality; and under these circumstances open
polygamy, even in primitive societies, became the privilege of the pros-
perous minority .M The mass of the people practised a monogamy tempered
with adultery, while another minority, of willing or regretful celibates,
balanced the polygamy of the rich. Jealousy in the male, and possessive-
ness in the female, entered into the situation more effectively as the sexes
approximated in number; for where the strong could not have a multiplic-
ity of wives except by taking the actual or potential wives of other men.
and by (in some cases) offending their own, polygamy became a difficult
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 4!
matter, which only the cleverest could manage. As property accumu-
lated, and men were loath to scatter it in small bequests, it became desir-
able to differentiate wives into "chief wife" and concubines, so that only
the children of the former should share the legacy; this remained the status
of marriage in Asia until our own generation. Gradually the chief wife
became the only wife, the concubines became kept women in secret and
apart, or they disappeared; and as Christianity entered upon the scene,
monogamy, in Europe, took the place of polygamy as the lawful and out-
ward form of sexual association. But monogamy, like letters and the state,
is artificial, and belongs to the history, not to the origins, of civilization.
Whatever form the union might take, marriage was obligatory among
nearly all primitive peoples. The unmarried male had no standing in the
community, or was considered only half a man.83 Exogamy, too, was com-
pulsory: that is to say, a man was expected to secure his wife from another
clan than his own. Whether this custom arose because the primitive mind
suspected the evil effects of close inbreeding, or because such intergroup
marriages created or cemented useful political alliances, promoted social
organization, and lessened the danger of war, or because the capture of a
wife from another tribe had become a fashionable mark of male maturity,
or because familiarity breeds contempt and distance lends enchantment to
the view— we do not know. In any case the restriction was well-nigh uni-
versal in early society; and though it was successfully violated by the
Pharaohs, the Ptolemies and the Incas, who all favored the marriage of
brother and sister, it survived into Roman and modern law and consciously
or unconsciously moulds our behavior to this day.
How did the male secure his wife from another tribe? Where the matri-
archal organization was strong he was often required to go and live with
the clan of the girl whom he sought. As the patriarchal system developed,
the suitor was allowed, after a term of service to the father, to take his
bride back to his own clan; so Jacob served Laban for Leah and Rachel.*4
Sometimes the suitor shortened the matter with plain, blunt force. It was
an advantage as well as a distinction to have stolen a wife; not only would
she be a cheap slave, but new slaves could be begotten of her, and these
children would chain her to her slavery. Such marriage by capture, though
not the rule, occurred sporadically in the primitive world. Among the
North American Indians the women were included in the spoils of war,
and this happened so frequently that in some tribes the husbands and their
4* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
wives spoke mutually unintelligible languages. The Slavs of Russia and
Serbia practised occasional marriage by capture until the last century.**
Vestiges of it remain in the custom of simulating the capture of the bride
by the groom in certain wedding ceremonies." All in all it was a logical
aspect of the almost incessant war of the tribes, and a logical starting-point
for that eternal war of the sexes whose only truces are brief nocturnes
and dreamless sleep.
As wealth grew it became more convenient to offer the father a sub-
stantial present— or a sum of money— for his daughter, rather than serve
for her in an alien clan, or risk the violence and feuds that might come of
marriage by capture. Consequently marriage by purchase and parental
arrangement was the rule in early societies.88 Transition forms occur; the
Melanesians sometimes stole their wives, but made the theft legal by a
later payment to her family. Among some natives of New Guinea the man
abducted the girl, and then, while he and she were in hiding, commissioned
his friends to bargain with her father over a purchase price.* The ease with
which moral indignation in these matters might be financially appeased is
illuminating. A Maori mother, wailing loudly, bitterly cursed the youth
who had eloped with her daughter, until he presented her with a blanket.
"That was all I wanted," she said; "I only wanted to get a blanket, and
therefore made this noise."80 Usually the bride cost more than a blanket:
among the Hottentots her price was an ox or a cow; among the Croo three
cows and a sheep; among the Kaffirs six to thirty head of cattle, depend-
ing upon the rank of the girl's family; and among the Togos sixteen dollars
cash and six dollars in goods.31
Marriage by purchase prevails throughout primitive Africa, and is still
a normal institution in China and Japan; it flourished in ancient India and
Judea, and in pre-Columbian Central America and Peru; instances of it occur
in Europe today." It is a natural development of patriarchal institutions;
the father owns the daughter, and may dispose of her, within broad limits,
as he sees fit. The Orinoco Indians expressed the matter by saying that the
suitor should pay the father for rearing the girl for his use." Sometimes
the girl was exhibited to potential suitors in a bride-show; so among the
Somalis the bride, richly caparisoned, was led about on horseback or on
*Briffault thinks that marriage by capture was a transition from matrilocal to patri-
archal marriage: the male, refusing to go and live with the tribe or family of his wife,
forced her to come to his."8 Lippert believed that exogamy arose as a peaceable substitute
for capture;15* theft again graduated into trade.
CHAP. IV) MORALELEMENTSOFCIVILIZAT/ON 43
foot, in an atmosphere heavily perfumed to stir the suitors to a handsome
price.14 There is no record of women objecting to marriage by purchase;
on the contrary, they took keen pride in the sums paid for them, and scorned
the woman who gave herself in marriage without a price;15 they believed that
in a "love-match" the villainous male was getting too much for nothing.18
On the other hand, it was usual for the father to acknowledge the bride-
groom's payment with a return gift which, as time went on, approximated
more and more in value to the sum offered for the bride.17 Rich fathers,
anxious to smooth the way for their daughters, gradually enlarged these
gifts until the institution of the dowry took form; and the purchase of the
husband by the father replaced, or accompanied, the purchase of the wife
by the suitor.18
In all these forms and varieties of marriage there is hardly a trace of
romantic love. We find a few cases of love-marriages among the Papuans
of New Guinea; among other primitive peoples we come upon instances
of love (in the sense of mutual devotion rather than mutual need), but
usually these attachments have nothing to do with marriage. In simple days
men married for cheap labor, profitable parentage, and regular meals. "In
Yariba," says Lander, "marriage is celebrated by the natives as uncon-
cernedly as possible; a man thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an
ear of corn— affection is altogether out of the question."89 Since premarital
relations are abundant in primitive society, passion is not dammed up by
denial, and seldom affects the choice of a wife. For the same reason— the ab-
sence of delay between desire and fulfilment— no time is given for that
brooding introversion of frustrated, and therefore idealizing, passion which
is usually the source of youthful romantic love. Such love is reserved for
developed civilizations, in which morals have raised barriers against desire,
and the growth of wealth has enabled some men to afford, and some women
to provide, the luxuries and delicacies of romance; primitive peoples are too
poor to be romantic. One rarely finds love poetry in their songs. When
the missionaries 'translated the Bible into the language of the Algonquins
they could discover no native equivalent for the word love. The Hotten-
tots are described as "cold and indifferent to one another" in marriage.
On the Gold Coast "not even the appearance of affection exists between
husband and wife"; and it is the same in primitive Australia. "I asked
Baba," said Caillie, speaking of a Senegal Negro, "why he did not some-
times make merry with his wives. He replied that if he did he should not
be able to manage them." An Australian native, asked why he wished to
44 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
marry, answered honestly that he wanted a wife to secure food, water and
wood for him, and to carry his belongings on the march.40 The kiss, which
seems so indispensable to America, is quite unknown to primitive peoples,
• or known only to be scorned.41
In general the "savage" takes his sex philosophically, with hardly more
of metaphysical or theological misgiving than the animal; he does not brood
over it, or fly into a passion with it; it is as much a matter of course with
him as his food. He makes no pretense to idealistic motives. Marriage is
never a sacrament with him, and seldom an affair of lavish ceremony; it is
frankly a commercial transaction. It never occurs to him to be ashamed
that he subordinates emotional to practical considerations in choosing his
mate; he would rather be ashamed of the opposite, and would demand
of us, if he were as immodest as we are, some explanation of our custom of
binding a man and a woman together almost for life because sexual desire
has chained them for a moment with its lightning. The primitive male
looked upon marriage in terms not of sexual license but of economic co-
operation. He expected the woman— and the woman expected herself— to
be not so much gracious and beautiful (though he appreciated these quali-
ties in her) as useful and industrious; she was to be an economic asset rather
than a total loss; otherwise the matter-of-fact "savage" would never have
thought of marriage at all. Marriage was a profitable partnership, not a
private debauch; it was a way whereby a man and a woman, working
together, might be more prosperous than if each worked alone. Wherever,
in the history of civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset
in marriage, marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed
with it.
II. SEXUAL MORALITY
Premarital relations — Prostitution — Chastity — Virginity — The
double standard—Modesty— The relativity of morals— The
biological role of modesty— Adultery— Divorce— Abor-
tion—Infanticide— Childhood— The individual
The greatest task of morals is always sexual regulation; for the repro-
ductive instinct creates problems not only within marriage, but before and
after it, and threatens at any moment to disturb social order with its per-
sistence, its intensity, its scorn of law, and its perversions. The first prob-
lem concerns premarital relations— shall they be restricted, or free? Even
among animals sex is not quite unrestrained; the rejection of the male by
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 45
the female except in periods of rut reduces sex to a much more modest role
in the animal world than it occupies in our own lecherous species. As
Beaumarchais put it, man differs from the animal in eating without being
hungry, drinking without being thirsty, and making love at all seasons.
Among primitive peoples we find some analogue, or converse, of animal
restrictions, in the tabu placed upon relations with a woman in her men-
strual period. With this general exception premarital intercourse is left for
the most part free in the simplest societies. Among the North American
Indians the young men and women mated freely; and these relations were
not held an impediment to marriage. Among the Papuans of New
Guinea sex life began at an extremely early age, and premarital promiscu-
ity was the rule.43 Similar premarital liberty obtained among the Soyots of
Siberia, the Igorots of the Philippines, the natives of Upper Burma, the
Kaffirs and Bushmen of Africa, the tribes of the Niger and the Uganda,
of New Georgia, the Murray Islands, the Andaman Islands, Tahiti, Poly-
nesia, Assam, etc.44
Under such conditions we must not expect to find much prostitution
in primitive society. The "oldest profession" is comparatively young; it
arises only with civilization, with the appearance of property and the dis-
appearance of premarital freedom. Here and there we find girls selling
themselves for a while to raise a dowry, or to provide funds for the tem-
ples; but this occurs only where the local moral code approves of it as a
pious sacrifice to help thrifty parents or hungry gods.4C
Chastity is a correspondingly late development. What the primitive
maiden dreaded was not the loss of virginity, but a reputation for sterility;40
premarital pregnancy was, more often than not, an aid rather than a handi-
cap in finding a husband, for it settled all doubts of sterility, and prom-
ised profitable children. The simpler tribes, before the coming of prop-
erty, seem to have held virginity in contempt, as indicating unpopularity.
The Kamchadal bridegroom who found his bride to be a virgin was much
put out, and "roundly abused her mother for the negligent way in which
she had brought up her daughter."47 In many places virginity was consid-
ered a barrier to marriage, because it laid upon the husband the unpleasant
task of violating the tabu that forbade him to shed the blood of any mem-
ber of his tribe. Sometimes girls offered themselves to a stranger in order
to break this tabu against their marriage. In Tibet mothers anxiously sought
men who would deflower their daughters; in Malabar the girls themselves
begged the services of passers-by to the same end, "for while they were
46 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV%
virgins they could not find a husband." In some tribes the bride was
obliged to give herself to the wedding guests before going in to her hus-
band; in others the bridegroom hired a man to end the virginity of his
bride; among certain Philippine tribes a special official was appointed, at a
high salary, to perform this function for prospective husbands.**
What was it that changed virginity from a fault into a virtue, and made
it an element in the moral codes of all the higher civilizations? Doubtless
it was the institution of property. Premarital chastity came as an exten-
sion, to the daughters, of the proprietary feeling with which the patri-
archal male looked upon his wife. The valuation of virginity rose when,
' under marriage by purchase, the virgin bride was found to bring a higher
price than her weak sister; the virgin gave promise, by her past, of that
marital fidelity which now seemed so precious to men beset by worry lest
they should leave their property to surreptitious children.49
The men never thought of applying the same restrictions to themselves;
no society in history has ever insisted on the premarital chastity of the
male; no language has ever had a word for a virgin man.60 The aura of
virginity was kept exclusively for daughters, and pressed upon them in
a thousands ways. The Tuaregs punished the irregularity of a daughter
or a sister with death; the Negroes of Nubia, Abyssinia, Somaliland, etc.,
practised upon their daughters the cruel art of infibulation— i.e., the attach-
ment of a ring or lock to the genitals to prevent copulation; in Burma and
Siam a similar practice survived to our own day.61 Forms of seclusion arose
by which girls were kept from providing or receiving temptation. In New
Britain the richer parents confined their daughters, through five danger-
ous years, in huts guarded by virtuous old crones; the girls were never
allowed to come out, and only their relatives could see them. Some tribes
in Borneo kept their unmarried girls in solitary confinement.62 From these
primitive customs to the purdah of the Moslems and the Hindus is but a
step, and indicates again how nearly "civilization" touches "savagery."
Modesty came with virginity and the patriarchate. There are many
tribes which to this day show no shame in exposing the body;88" indeed,
some are ashamed to wear clothing. All Africa rocked with laughter
when Livingstone begged his black hosts to put on some clothing before
the arrival of his wife. The Queen of the Balonda was quite naked when
she held court for Livingstone." A small minority of tribes practise sex rela-
tions publicly, without any thought of shame.64 At first modesty is the
feeling of the woman that she is tabu in her periods. When marriage
CHAP. IV) MORALELEMENTSOFCIVILIZATION 47
by purchase takes form, and virginity in the daughter brings a profit to her
father, seclusion and the compulsion to virginity beget in the girl a sense of
obligation to chastity. Again, modesty is the feeling of the wife who,
under purchase marriage, feels a financial obligation to her husband to re-
frain from such external sexual relations as cannot bring him any recom-
pense. Clothing appears at this point, if motives of adornment and pro-
tection have not already engendered it; in many tribes women wore
clothing only after marriage," as a sign of their exclusive possession by a
husband, and as a deterrent to gallantry; primitive man did not agree with
the author of Penguin Isle that clothing encouraged lechery. Chastity,
however, bears no necessary relation to clothing; some travelers report that
morals in Africa vary inversely as the amount of dress." It is clear that
what men are ashamed of depends entirely upon the local tabus and cus-
toms of their group. Until recently a Chinese woman was ashamed to
show her foot, an Arab woman her face, a Tuareg woman her mouth; but
the women of ancient Egypt, of nineteenth-century India and of twen-
tieth-century Bali (before prurient tourists came) never thought of shame
at the exposure of their breasts.
We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ
according to time and place, and that it would be wise to show our his-
toric learning by at once discarding the moral customs of our group. A
little anthropology is a dangerous thing. It is substantially true that— as
Anatole France ironically expressed the matter— "morality is the sum of
the prejudices of a community" ;" and that, as Anacharsis put it among the
Greeks, if one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by
some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral
by some group, nothing would remain. But this does not prove the worth-
lessness of morals; it only shows in what varied ways social order has been
preserved. Social order is none the less necessary; the game must still have
rules in order to be played; men must know what to expect of one another
in the ordinary circumstances of life. Hence the unanimity with which
the members of a society practise its moral code is quite as important as
the contents of that code. Our heroic rejection of the customs and morals
of our tribe, upon our adolescent discovery of their relativity, betrays the
immaturity of our minds; given another decade and we begin to under-
stand that there may be more wisdom in the moral code of the group—
the formulated experience of generations of the race— than can be explained
in a college course. Sooner or later the disturbing realization comes to us
48 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
that even that which we cannot understand may be true. The institu-
tions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure
of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds;
and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much
less in twenty years. We are warranted in concluding that morals are
relative, and indispensable.
Since old and basic customs represent a natural selection of group
ways after centuries of trial and error, we must expect to find some social
utility, or survival value, in virginity and modesty, despite their historical
relativity, their association with marriage by purchase, and their contribu-
tions to neurosis. Modesty was a strategic retreat which enabled the girl,
where she had any choice, to select her mate more deliberately, or compel
him to show finer qualities before winning her; and the very obstructions
it raised against desire generated those sentiments of romantic love which
heightened her value in his eyes. The inculcation of virginity destroyed
the naturalness and ease of primitive sexual life; but, by discouraging
early sex development and premature motherhood, it lessened the gap
—which tends to widen disruptively as civilization develops— between eco-
nomic and sexual maturity. Probably it served in this way to strengthen
the individual physically and mentally, to lengthen adolescence and train-
ing, and so to lift the level of the race.
As the institution of property developed, adultery graduated from a
venial into a mortal sin. Half of the primitive peoples known to us attach no
great importance to it.™ The rise of property not only led to the exaction
of complete fidelity from the woman, but generated in the male a pro-
prietary attitude towards her; even when he lent her to a guest it was
because she belonged to him in body and soul. Suttee was the completion
of this conception; the woman must go down into the master's grave along
with his other belongings. Under the patriarchate adultery was classed
with theft;59 it was, so to speak, an infringement of patent. Punishment for
it varied through all degrees of severity from the indifference of the simpler
tribes to the disembowelment of adulteresses among certain California
Indians.60 After centuries of punishment the new virtue of wifely fidelity
was firmly established, and had generated an appropriate conscience in the
feminine heart. Many Indian tribes surprised their conquerors by the un-
approachable virtue of their squaws; and certain male travelers have hoped
that the women of Europe and America might some day equal in marital
faithfulness the wives of the Zulus and the Papuans.81
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 49
It was easier for the Papuans, since among them, as among most primi-
tive peoples, there were few impediments to the divorce of the woman by
the man. Unions seldom lasted more than a few years among the Amer-
ican Indians. "A large proportion of the old and middle-aged men," says
Schoolcraft, "have had many different wives, and their children, scattered
around the country, are unknown to them."08 They "laugh at Europeans
for having only one wife, and that for life; they consider that the Good
Spirit formed them to be happy, and not to continue together unless
their tempers and dispositions were congenial."" The Cherokees changed
wives three or four times a year; the conservative Samoans kept them as
long as three years.64 With the coming of a settled agricultural life,
unions became more permanent. Under the patriarchal system the man
found it uneconomical to divorce a wife, for this meant, in effect, to lose
a profitable slave." As the family became the productive unit of society,
tilling the soil together, it prospered—other things equal— according to its
size and cohesion; it was found to some advantage that the union of the
mates should continue until the last child was reared. By that time no
energy remained for a new romance, and the lives of the parents had been
forged into one by common work and trials. Only with the passage to
urban industry, and the consequent reduction of the family in size and
economic importance, has divorce become widespread again.
In general, throughout history, men have wanted many children, and
therefore have called motherhood sacred; while women, who know more
about reproduction, have secretly rebelled against this heavy assignment,
and have used an endless variety of means to reduce the burdens of ma-
ternity. Primitive men do not usually care to restrict population; under
normal conditions children are profitable, and the male regrets only that they
cannot all be sons. It is the woman who invents abortion, infanticide and
contraception— for even the last occurs, sporadically, among primitive peo-
ples." It is astonishing to find how similar are the motives of the "savage"
to the "civilized" woman in preventing birth: to escape the burden of
rearing offspring, to preserve a youthful figure, to avert the disgrace of
extramarital motherhood, to avoid death, etc. The simplest means of re-
ducing maternity was the refusal of the man by the woman during the
period of nursing, which might be prolonged for many years. Sometimes,
as among the Cheyenne Indians, the women developed the custom of
refusing to bear a second child until the first was ten years old. In New
Britain the women had no children till two or four years after marriage.
5O THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
The Guaycurus of Brazil were constantly diminishing because the women
would bear no children till the age of thirty. Among the Papuans abortion
was frequent; "children are burdensome," said the women; "we are weary
of them; we go dead." Some Maori tribes used herbs or induced artificial
malposition of the uterus, to prevent conception67
When abortion failed, infanticide remained. Most nature peoples per-
mitted the killing of the newborn child if it was deformed, or diseased,
or a bastard, or if its mother had died in giving it birth. As if any reason
would be good in the task of limiting population to the available means of
subsistence, many tribes killed infants whom they considered to have been
born under unlucky circumstances: so the Bondei natives strangled all
children who entered the world headfirst; the Kamchadals killed babes
born in stormy weather; Madagascar tribes exposed, drowned, or buried
alive children who made their debut in March or April, or on a Wednes-
day or a Friday, or in the last week of the month. If a woman gave birth
to twins it was, in some tribes, held proof of adultery, since no man could
be the father of two children at the same time; and therefore one or both
of the children suffered death. The practice of infanticide was particularly
prevalent among nomads, who found children a problem on their long
marches. The Bangerang tribe of Victoria killed half their children at
birth; the Lenguas of the Paraguayan Chaco allowed only one child per
family per seven years to survive; the Abipones achieved a French econ-
omy in population by rearing a boy and a girl in each household, killing
off other offspring as fast as they appeared. Where famine conditions
existed or threatened, most tribes strangled the newborn, and some tribes
ate them. Usually it was the girl that was most subject to infanticide; occa-
sionally she was tortured to death with a view to inducing the soul to
appear, in its next incarnation, in the form of a boy." Infanticide was prac-
tised without cruelty and without remorse; for in the first moments after
delivery, apparently, the mother felt no instinctive love for the child.
Oijce the child had been permitted to live a few days, it was safe
against infanticide; soon parental love was evoked by its helpless sim-
plicity, and in most cases it was treated more affectionately by its primi-
tive parents than the average child of the higher races.6* For lack of milk
or soft food the mother nursed the child from two to four years, sometimes
for twelve;1* one traveler describes a boy who had learned to smoke before
he was weaned;" and often a youngster running about with other children
would interrupt his play— or his work— to go and be nursed by his
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 51
mother." The Negro mother at work carried her infant on her back, and
sometimes fed it by slinging her breasts over her shoulder.71 Primitive dis-
cipline was indulgent but not ruinous; at an early age the child was left to
face for itself the consequences of its stupidity, its insolence, or its pug-
nacity; and learning went on apace. Filial, as well as parental, love was
highly developed in natural society.74
Dangers and disease were frequent in primitive childhood, and mortal-
ity was high. Youth was brief, for at an early age marital and martial re-
sponsibility began, and soon the individual was lost in the heavy tasks of
replenishing and defending the group. The women were consumed in car-
ing for children, the men in providing for them. When the youngest child
had been reared the parents were worn out; as little space remained for
individual life at the end as at the beginning. Individualism, like liberty,
is a luxury of civilization. Only with the dawn of history were a suffi-
cient number of men and women freed from the burdens of hunger,
reproduction and war to create the intangible values of leisure, culture
and art.
III. SOCIAL MORALITY
The nature of virtue and vice— Greed— Dishonesty— Violence-
Homicide — Suicide — The socialization of the individual —
Altruism— Hospitality— Manners— Tribal limits of ?noral-
ity— Primitive vs. modern morals— Religion and morals
Part of the function of parentage is the transmission of a moral code.b
For the child is more animal than human; it has humanity thrust upon itt
day by day as it receives the moral and mental heritage of the race. Bio-
logically it is badly equipped for civilization, since its instincts provide
only for traditional and basic situations, and include impulses more adapted
to the jungle than to the town. Every vice was once a virtue, necessary in
the struggle for existence; it became a vice only when it survived the condi-
tions that made it indispensable; a vice, therefore, is not an advanced form
of behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded
ways. It is one purpose of a moral code to adjust the unchanged— or slowly
changing— impulses of human nature to the changing needs and circum-
stances of social life.
Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty and violence were for so
many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our
52 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
education, our morals and our religions can quite stamp them out; some
of them, doubtless, have a certain survival value even today. The animal
gorges himself because he does not know when he may find food again;
this uncertainty is the origin of greed. The Yakuts have been known to
eat forty pounds of meat in one day; and similar stories, only less heroic,
are told of the Eskimos and the natives of Australia.75 Economic security
is too recent an achievement of civilization to have eliminated this natural
greed; it still appears in the insatiable acquisitiveness whereby the fretful
modern man or woman stores up gold, or other goods, that may in emer-
gency be turned into food. Greed for drink is not as widespread as greed
for food, for most human aggregations have centered around some water
supply. Nevertheless, the drinking of intoxicants is almost universal; not
so much because men are greedy as because they are cold and wish to be
warmed, or unhappy and wish to forget— or simply because the water
available to them is not fit to drink.
Dishonesty is not so ancient as greed, for hunger is older than property.
The simplest "savages" seem to be the most honest.70 "Their word is
sacred," said Kolben of the Hottentots; they know "nothing of the cor-
ruptness and faithless arts of Europe."77 As international communica-
tions improved, this naive honesty disappeared; Europe has taught the
gentle art to the Hottentots. In general, dishonesty rises with civilization,
because under civilization the stakes of diplomacy are larger, there are
more things to be stolen, and education makes men clever. When prop-
erty develops among primitive men, lying and stealing come in its train.78
Crimes of violence are as old as greed; the struggle for food, land and
mates has in every generation fed the earth with blood, .and has offered
a dark background for the fitful light of civilization. Primitive man was
cruel because he had to be; life taught him that he must have an arm
always ready to strike, and a heart apt for "natural killing." The blackest
page in anthropology is the story of primitive torture, and of the joy that
many primitive men and women seem to have taken in the infliction of
pain.7* Much of this cruelty was associated with war; within the tribe
manners were less ferocious, and primitive men treated one another— and
even their slaves— with a quite civilized kindliness.80 But since men had to
kill vigorously in war, they learned to kill also in time of peace; for to
many a primitive mind no argument is settled until one of the disputants
is dead. Among many tribes murder, even of another member of the same
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 53
clan, aroused far less horror than it used to do with us. The Fuegians pun-
ished a murderer merely by exiling him until his fellows had forgotten
his crime. The Kaffirs considered a murderer unclean, and required that
he should blacken his face with charcoal; but after a while, if he washed
himself, rinsed his mouth, and dyed himself brown, he was received into
society again. The savages of Futuna, like our own, looked upon a mur-
derer as a hero.81 In several tribes no woman would marry a man who had
not killed some one, in fair fight or foul; hence the practice of head-
hunting, which survives in the Philippines today. The Dyak who brought
back most heads from such a man-hunt had the choice of all the girls in
his village; these were eager for his favors, feeling that through him they
might become the mothers of brave and potent men.*82
Where food is dear life is cheap. Eskimo sons must kill their parents
when these have become so old as to be helpless and useless; failure to
kill them in such cases would be considered a breach of filial duty.83 Even
his own life seems cheap to primitive man, for he kills himself with a readi-
ness rivaled only by the Japanese. If an offended person commits suicide,
or mutilates himself, the offender must imitate him or become a pariah;84 so
old is hara-kiri. Any reason may suffice for suicide: some Indian women
of North America killed themselves because their men had assumed the
privilege of scolding them; and a young Trobriand Islander committed
suicide because his wife had smoked all his tobacco.85
To transmute greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into
litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civili-
zation. It was a great advance when the strong consented to eat the weak
by due process of law. No society can survive if it allows its members to
behave toward one another in the same way in which it encourages them
to behave as a group toward other groups; internal cooperation is the first
law of external competition. The struggle for existence is not ended by
mutual aid, it is incorporated, or transferred to the group. Other things
equal, the ability to compete with rival groups will be proportionate to
the ability of the individual members and families to combine with one
another. Hence every society inculcates a moral code, and builds up in the
heart of the individual, as its secret allies and aides, social dispositions that
mitigate the natural war of life; it encourages— by calling them virtues—
* This is half the theme of Synge's drama, The Playboy of the Western World.
54 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
those qualities or habits in the individual which redound to the advantage
of the group, and discourages contrary qualities by calling them vices.
In this way the individual is in some outward measure socialized, and the
animal becomes a citizen.
It was hardly more difficult to generate social sentiments in the soul of
the "savage" than it is to raise them now in the heart of modern man. The
struggle for life encouraged communalism, but the struggle for property
intensifies individualism. Primitive man was perhaps readier than con-
temporary man to cooperate with his fellows; social solidarity came more
easily to him since he had more perils and interests in common with his
group, and less possessions to separate him from the rest.88 The natural man
was violent and greedy; but he was also kindly and generous, ready to share
even with strangers, and to make presents to his guests."7 Every schoolboy
knows that primitive hospitality, in many tribes, went to the extent of
offering to the traveler the wife or daughter of the host." To decline such
an offer was a serious offense, not only to the host but to the woman; these
are among the perils faced by missionaries. Often the later treatment of the
guest was determined by the manner in which he had acquitted himself of
these responsibilities.8* Uncivilized man appears to have felt proprietary, but
not sexual, jealousy; it did not disturb him that his wife had "known" men
before marrying him, or now slept with his guest; but as her owner, rather
than her lover, he would have been incensed to find her cohabiting with an-
other man without his consent. Some African husbands lent their wives to
strangers for a consideration.80
The rules of courtesy were as complex in most simple peoples as in ad-
vanced nations.*1 Each group had formal modes of salutation and farewell.
Two individuals, on meeting, rubbed noses, or smelled each other, or gently
bit each other;*8 as we have seen, they never kissed. Some crude tribes were
more polite than the modern average; the Dyak head-hunters, we are told,
were "gentle and peaceful" in their home life, and the Indians of Central
America considered the loud talking and brusque behavior of the white man
as signs of poor breeding and a primitive culture.*8
Almost all groups agree in holding other groups to be inferior to them-
selves. The American Indians looked upon themselves as the chosen people,
specially created by the Great Spirit as an uplifting example for mankind.
One Indian tribe called itself "The Only Men"; another called itself "Men
of Men"; the Caribs said, "We alone are people." The Eskimos believed that
the Europeans had come to Greenland to learn manners and virtues.*4
Consequently it seldom occurred to primitive man to extend to other tribes
the moral restraints which he acknowledged in dealing with his own; he
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 55
frankly conceived it to be the function of morals to give strength and co-
herence to his group against other groups. Commandments and tabus ap-
plied only to the people of his tribe; with others, except when they were his
guests, he might go as far as he dared.96
Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the
moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied.
The morals of modern man are not unquestionably superior to those of
primitive man, though the two groups of codes may differ considerably in
content, practice and profession; but modern morals are, in normal times,
extended— though with decreasing intensity— to a greater number of people
than before.* As tribes were gathered up into those larger units called
states, morality overflowed its tribal bounds; and as communication— or a
common danger— united and assimilated states, morals seeped through fron-
tiers, and some men began to apply their commandments to all Europeans,
to all whites, at last to all men. Perhaps there have always been idealists
who wished to love all men as their neighbors, and perhaps in every gen-
eration they have been futile voices crying in a wilderness of nationalism
and war. But probably the number— even the relative number— of such men
has increased. There are no morals in diplomacy, and la politique ri*a pas
(Fentrailles; but there are morals in international trade, merely because such
trade cannot go on without some degree of restraint, regulation, and con-
fidence. Trade began in piracy; it culminates in morality.
Few societies have been content to rest their moral codes upon so
frankly rational a basis as economic and political utility. For the individ-
ual is not endowed by nature with any disposition to subordinate his per-
sonal interests to those of the group, or to obey irksome regulations
for which there are no visible means of enforcement. To provide, so
to speak, an invisible watchman, to strengthen the social impulses against
the individualistic by powerful hopes and fears, societies have not in-
vented but made use of, religion. The ancient geographer Strabo expressed
the most advanced views on this subject nineteen hundred years ago:
For in dealing with a crowd of women, at least, or with any
promiscuous mob, a philosopher cannot influence them by reason
or exhort them to reverence, piety and faith; nay, there is need of
religious fear also, and this cannot be aroused without myths and
marvels. For thunderbolt, aegis, trident, torches, snakes, thyrsus-
* However, the range within which the moral code is applied has narrowed since the
Middle Ages, as the result of the rise of nationalism.
56 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
lances-arms of the gods— are myths, and so is the entire ancient
theology. But the founders of states gave their sanction to these
things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded. Now
since this is the nature of mythology, and since it has come to have
its place in the social and civil scheme of life as well as in the his-
tory of actual facts, the ancients clung to their system of education
for children and applied it up to the age of maturity; and by means
of poetry they believed that they could satisfactorily discipline
every period of life. But now, after a long time, the writing of
history and the present-day philosophy have come to the front.
Philosophy, however, is for the few, whereas poetry is more useful
to the people at large.08
Morals, then, are soon endowed with religious sanctions, because mys-
tery and supernaturalism lend a weight which can never attach to things
empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled
by imagination than by science. But was this moral utility the source or
origin of religion?
IV. RELIGION
Primitive atheists
If we define religion as the worship of supernatural forces, we must
observe at the outset that some peoples have apparently no religion at all.
Certain Pygmy tribes of Africa had no observable cult or rites; they had
no totem, no fetishes, and no gods; they buried their dead without cere-
mony, and seem to have paid no further attention to them; they lacked
even superstitions, if we may believe otherwise incredible travelers.9"8 The
dwarfs of the Cameroon recognized only malevolent deities, and did noth-
ing to placate them, on the ground that it was useless to try. The Ved-
dahs of Ceylon went no further than to admit the possibility of gods and
immortal souls; but they offered no prayers or sacrifices. Asked about
God they answered, as puzzled as the latest philosopher: "Is he on a rock?
On a white-ant hill? On a tree? I never saw a god! "WIb The North Amer-
ican Indians conceived a god, but did not worship him; like Epicurus they
thought him too remote to be concerned in their affairs.980 An Abipone
Indian rebuffed a metaphysical inquirer in a manner quite Confucian: "Our
grandfathers and our great-grandfathers were wont to contemplate the
earth alone, solicitous only to see whether the plain afford grass and water
CHAP. IV) MORALELEMENTSOFCIVILIZATION 57
for their horses. They never troubled themselves about what went on in
the heavens, and who was the creator and governor of the stars." The
Eskimos, when asked who had made the heavens and the earth, always
replied, "We do not know."f>fld A Zulu was asked: "When you see the sun
rising and setting, and the trees growing, do you know who made them
and governs them?" He answered, simply: "No, we see them, but cannot
tell how they came; we suppose that they came by themselves."988
Such cases are exceptional, and the old belief that religion is universal
is substantially correct. To the philosopher this is one of the outstanding
facts of history and psychology; he is not content to know that all re-
ligions contain much nonsense, but rather he is fascinated by the problem
of the antiquity and persistence of belief. What are the sources of the
indestructible piety of mankind?
1. The Sources of Religion
Fear— Wonder— Dreams— The soul— Animism
Fear, as Lucretius said, was the first mother of the gods. Fear, above
all, of death. Primitive life was beset with a thousand dangers, and seldom
ended with natural decay; long before old age could come, violence or
some strange disease carried off the great majority of men. Hence early
man did not believe that death was ever natural;07 he attributed it to the
operation of supernatural agencies. In the mythology of the natives of
New Britain death came to men by an error of the gods. The good god
Kambinana told his foolish brother Korvouva, "Go down to men and
tell them to cast their skins; so shall they avoid death. But tell the serpents
that they must henceforth die." Korvouva mixed the messages; he delivered
the secret of immortality to the snakes, and the doom of death to men.98
Many tribes thought that death was due to the shrinkage of the skin, and
that man would be immortal if only he could moult.88
Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible
happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooper-
ated to generate religious belief. Wonder and mystery adhered particularly
to sex and dreams, and the mysterious influence of heavenly bodies upon
the earth and man. Primitive man marveled at the phantoms that he
saw in sleep, and was struck with terror when he beheld, in his dreams,
the figures of those whom he knew to be dead. He buried his dead in the
58 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
earth to prevent their return; he buried victuals and goods with the corpse
lest it should come back to curse him; sometimes he left to the dead the
house in which death had come, while he himself moved on to another
shelter; in some places he carried the body out of the house not through
a door but through a hole in the wall, and bore it rapidly three times
around the dwelling, so that the spirit might forget the entrance and
never haunt the home."0
Such experiences convinced early man that every living thing had a
soul, or secret life, within it, which could be separated from the body
in illness, sleep or death. "Let no one wake a man brusquely," said one
of the Upanishads of ancient India, "for it is a matter difficult of cure if
the soul find not its way back to him.""1 Not man alone but all things had
souls; the external world was not insensitive or dead, it was intensely
alive;101 if this were not so, thought primitive philosophy, nature would be
full of inexplicable occurrences, like the motion of the sun, or the death-
dealing lightning, or the whispering of the trees. The personal way of
conceiving objects and events preceded the impersonal or abstract; religion
preceded philosophy. Such animism is the poetry of religion, and the
religion of poetry. We may see it at its lowest in the wonder-struck eyes
of a dog that watches a paper blown before him by the wind, and perhaps
believes that a spirit moves the paper from within; and we find the same
feeling at its highest in the language of the poet. To the primitive mind—
and to the poet in all ages— mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, stars, sun, moon
and sky are sacramentally holy things, because they are the outward and
visible signs of inward and invisible souls. To the early Greeks the sky
was the god Ouranos, the moon was Selene, the earth was Gaea, the sea was
Poseidon, and everywhere in the woods was Pan. To the ancient Germans
the forest primeval was peopled with genii, elves, trolls, giants, dwarfs
and fairies; these sylvan creatures survive in the music of Wagner and the
poetic dramas of Ibsen. The simpler peasants of Ireland still believe in
fairies, and no poet or playwright can belong to the Irish literary revival
unless he employs them. There is wisdom as well as beauty in this animism;
it is good and nourishing to treat all things as alive. To the sensitive spirit,
says the most sensitive of contemporary writers,
Nature begins to present herself as a vast congeries of separate
living entities, some visible, some invisible, but all possessed of
CHAP. IV ) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 59
mind-stuff, all possessed of matter-stuff, and all blending mind and
matter together in the basic mystery of being. . . . The world is full
of gods! From every planet and from every stone there emanates
a presence that disturbs us with a sense of the multitudinousness
of god-like powers, strong and feeble, great and little, moving be-
tween heaven and earth upon their secret purposes.10*
2. The Objects of Religion
The sun—The stars— The earth— Sex— Animals— Totemism— The
transition to human gods— Ghost-worship— Ancestor-worship
Since all things have souls, or contain hidden gods, the objects of re-
ligious worship are numberless. They fall into six classes: celestial, ter-
restrial, sexual, animal, human, and divine. Of course we shall never know
which of our universe of objects was worshiped first. One of the first was
probably the moon. Just as our own folk-lore speaks of the "man in the
moon," so primitive legend conceived the moon as a bold male who caused
women to menstruate by seducing them. He was a favorite god with
women, who worshiped him as their protecting deity. The pale orb was
also the measure of time; it was believed to control the weather, and to
make both rain and snow; even the frogs prayed to it for rain.104
We do not know when the sun replaced the moon as the lord of the
sky in primitive religion. Perhaps it was when vegetation replaced hunt-
ing, and the transit of the sun determined the seasons of sowing and reaping,
and its heat was recognized as the main cause of the bounty of the soil.
Then the earth became a goddess fertilized by the hot rays, and men wor-
shiped the great orb as the father of all things living.108 From this simple
beginning sun-worship passed down into the pagan faiths of antiquity,
and many a later god was only a personification of the sun. Anaxagoras
was exiled by the learned Greeks because he ventured the guess that the
sun was not a god, but merely a ball of fire, about the size of the Pelo-
ponnesus. The Middle Ages kept a relic of sun-worship in the halo
pictured around the heads of saints,10* and in our own day the Emperor of
Japan is regarded by most of his people as an incarnation of the sun-
god.107 There is hardly any superstition so old but it can be found flourish-
ing somewhere today. Civilization is the precarious labor and luxury of
a minority; the basic masses of mankind hardly change from millennium
to millennium.
60 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
Like the sun and the moon, every star contained or was a god, and
moved at the command of its indwelling spirit. Under Christianity these
spirits became guiding angels, star-pilots, so to speak; and Kepler was not
too scientific to believe in them. The sky itself was a great god, wor-
shiped devotedly as giver and withholder of rain. Among many primitive
peoples the word for god meant sky; among the Lubari and the Dinkas
it meant rain. Among the Mongols the supreme god was Tengri— the sky;
in China it was Tz— the sky; in Vedic India it was Dyaus pitar—the "father
sky"; among the Greeks it was Zeus— the sky, the "cloud-compeller";
among the Persians it was Ahura— the "azure sky";108 and among ourselves
men still ask "Heaven" to protect them. The central point in most primi-
tive mythology is the fertile mating of earth and sky.
For the earth, too, was a god, and every main aspect of it was presided
over by some deity. Trees had souls quite as much as men, and it was
plain murder to cut them down; the North American Indians sometimes
attributed their defeat and decay to the fact that the whites had leveled
the trees whose spirits had protected the Red Men. In the Molucca Islands
blossoming trees were treated as pregnant; no noise, fire, or other disturb-
ance was permitted to mar their peace; else, like a frightened woman, they
might drop their fruit before time. In Amboyna no loud sounds were
allowed near the rice in bloom lest it should abort into straw.109 The
ancient Gauls worshiped the trees of certain sacred forests; and the Druid
priests of England reverenced as holy that mistletoe of the oak which still
suggests a pleasant ritual. The veneration of trees, springs, rivers and
mountains is the oldest traceable religion of Asia.110 Many mountains were
holy places, homes of thundering gods. Earthquakes were the shoulder-
shrugging of irked or irate deities: the Fijians ascribed such agitations to
the earth-god's turning over in his sleep; and the Samoans, when the soil
trembled, gnawed the ground and prayed to the god Mafuie to stop, lest
he should shake the planet to pieces.111 Almost everywhere the earth was
the Great Mother; our language, which is often the precipitate of primi-
tive or unconscious beliefs, suggests to this day a kinship between matter
(materia) and mother (mater).™ Ishtar and Cybele, Demeter and Ceres,
Aphrodite and Venus and Freya— these are comparatively late forms of
the ancient goddesses of the earth, whose fertility constituted the bounty
of the fields; their birth and marriage, their death and triumphant resurrec-
tion were conceived as the symbols or causes of the sprouting, the decay,
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 6l
and the vernal renewal of all vegetation. These deities reveal by their
gender the primitive association of agriculture with woman. When agri-
culture became the dominant mode of human life, the vegetation goddesses
reigned supreme. Most early gods were of the gentler sex; they were
superseded by male deities presumably as a heavenly reflex of the vic-
torious patriarchal family .""
Just as the profound poetry of the primitive mind sees a secret divinity
in the growth of a tree, so it sees a supernatural agency in the conception
or birth of a child. The "savage" does not know anything about the ovum
or the sperm; he sees only the external structures involved, and deifies them;
they, too, have spirits in them, and must be worshiped, for are not these
mysteriously creative powers the most marvelous of all? In them, even
more than in the soil, the miracle of fertility and growth appears; there-
fore they must be the most direct embodiments of the divine potency.
Nearly all ancient peoples worshiped sex in some form and ritual, and not
the lowest people but the highest expressed their worship most com-
pletely; we shall find such worship in Egypt and India, Babylonia and
Assyria, Greece and Rome. The sexual character and functions of primi-
tive deities were held in high regard,114 not through any obscenity of mind,
but through a passion for fertility in women and in the earth. Certain
animals, like the bull and the snake, were worshiped as apparently possess-
ing or symbolizing in a high degree the divine power of reproduction.
The snake in the story of Eden is doubtless a phallic symbol, representing
sex as the origin of evil, suggesting sexual awakening as the beginning of
the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps insinuating a certain pro-
verbial connection between mental innocence and bliss.*
There is hardly an animal in nature, from the Egyptian scarab to the j
Hindu elephant, that has not somewhere been worshiped as a god. The j
Ojibwa Indians gave the name of totein to their special sacred animal, to
the clan that worshiped it, and to any member of the clan; and this con-
fused word has stumbled into anthropology as totemism, denoting vaguely
any worship of a particular object— usually an animal or a plant— as
especially sacred to a group. Varieties of totemism have been found
scattered over apparently unconnected regions of the earth, from the
Indian tribes of North America to the natives of Africa, the Dravidians
* Cf . Chap, xii, § vi below.
62 THESTORYOFCIVILIZATION (CHAP. IV
of India, and the tribes of Australia/1* The totem as a religious object
helped to unify the tribe, whose members thought themselves bound up
with it or descended from it; the Iroquois, in semi-Darwinian fashion,
believed that they were sprung from the primeval mating of women with
bears, wolves and deer. The totem— as object or as symbol— became a
useful sign of relationship and distinction for primitive peoples, and lapsed,
in the course of secularization, into a mascot or emblem, like the lion or
eagle of nations, the elk or moose of our fraternal orders, and those dumb
animals that are used to represent the elephantine immobility and mulish
obstreperousness of our political parties. The dove, the fish and the lamb,
in the symbolism of nascent Christianity, were relics of totemic adoration;
even the lowly pig was once a totem of prehistoric Jews.116 In most cases
the totem animal was tabu— i.e., forbidden, not to be touched; under cer-
tain circumstances it might be eaten, but only as a religious act, amounting
to the ritual eating of the god.* The Gallas of Abyssinia ate in solemn
ceremony the fish that they worshiped, and said, "We feel the spirit
moving within us as we eat." The good missionaries who preached the
Gospel to the Gallas were shocked to find among these simple folk a ritual
so strangely similar to the central ceremony of the Mass.111
Probably fear was the origin of totemism, as of so many cults; men
prayed to animals because the animals were powerful, and had to be
appeased. As hunting cleared the woods of the beasts, and gave way to
the comparative security of agricultural life, the worship of animals de-
clined, though it never quite disappeared; and the ferocity of the first
human gods was probably carried over from the animal deities whom
they replaced. The transition is visible in those famous stories of meta-
morphoses, or changes of form, that are found in the Ovids of all languages,
and tell how gods had been, or had become, animals. Later the animal
qualities adhered to them obstinately, as the odor of the stable might loyally
attend some rural Casanova; even in the complex mind of Homer glaucopis
Athene had the eyes of an owl, and Here boopis had the eyes of a cow.
Egyptian and Babylonian gods or ogres with the face of a human being
* Freud, with characteristic imaginativeness, believes that the totem was a transfigured
symbol of the father, revered and hated for his omnipotence, and rebelliously murdered
and eaten by his sons.m Durkheim thought that the totem was a symbol of the clan,
revered and hated (hence held "sacred" and "unclean") by the individual for its omnipo-
tence and irksome dictatorship; and that the religious attitude was originally the feeling
of the individual toward the authoritarian group.1"
CHAP.IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 63
and the body of a beast reveal the same transition and make the same
confession—that many human gods were once animal deities.1*
Most human gods, however, seem to have been, in the beginning, merely
idealized dead men. The appearance of the dead in dreams was enough to
establish the worship of the dead, for worship, if not the child, is at least
the brother, of fear. Men who had been powerful during life, and there-
fore had been feared, were especially likely to be worshiped after their
death.1*1 Among several primitive peoples the word for god actually meant
"a dead man"; even today the English word spirit and the German word
Geist mean both ghost and soul. The Greeks invoked their dead precisely
as the Christians were to invoke the saints.183 So strong was the belief-
first generated in dreams— in the continued life of the dead, that primitive
men sometimes sent messages to them in the most literal way; in one tribe
the chief, to convey such a letter, recited it verbally to a slave, and then
cut off his head for special delivery; if the chief forgot something he sent
another decapitated slave as a postscript.133
Gradually the cult of the ghost became the worship of ancestors. All
the dead were feared, and had to be propitiated, lest they should curse and
blight the lives of the living. This ancestor-worship was so well adapted
to promote social authority and continuity, conservatism and order, that
it soon spread to every region of the earth. It flourished in Egypt, Greece
and Rome, and survives vigorously in China and Japan today; many peoples
worship ancestors but no god.124* The institution held the family power-
fully together despite the hostility of successive generations, and provided
an invisible structure for many early societies. And just as compulsion
grew into conscience, so fear graduated into love; the ritual of ancestor-
worship, probably generated by terror, later aroused the sentiment of awe,
and finally developed piety and devotion. It is the tendency of gods to
begin as ogres and to end as loving fathers; the idol passes into an ideal
as the growing security, peacefulness and moral sense of the worshipers
pacify and transform the features of their once ferocious deities. The slow
progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.
The idea of a human god was a late step in a long development; it was
slowly differentiated, through many stages, out of the conception of an
ocean or multitude of spirits and ghosts surrounding and inhabiting every-
* Relics of ancestor-worship may be found among ourselves in our care and visitation
of graves, and our masses and prayers for the dead.
64 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
thing. From the fear and worship of vague and formless spirits men seem
to have passed to adoration of celestial, vegetative and sexual powers, then
to reverence for animals, and worship of ancestors. The notion of God
as Father was probably derived from ancestor-worship; it meant originally
that men had been physically begotten by the gods.1* In primitive theology
there is no sharp or generic distinction between gods and men; to the
early Greeks, for example, their gods were ancestors, and their ancestors
were gods. A further development came when, out of the medley of
ancestors, certain men and women who had been especially distinguished
were singled out for clearer deification; so the greater kings became gods,
sometimes even before their death. But with this development we reach
the historic civilizations.
3. The Methods of Religion
Magic—Vegetation rites— Festivals of license—Myths of the
resurrected god — Magic and superstition — Magic and
science— Priests
Having conceived a world of spirits, whose nature and intent were
unknown to him, primitive man sought to propitiate them and to enlist
them in his aid. Hence to animism, which is the essence of primitive re-
ligion, was added magic, which is the soul of primitive ritual. The Poly-
nesians recognized a very ocean of magic power, which they called mana;
the magician, they thought, merely tapped this infinite supply of miraculous
capacity. The methods by which the spirits, and later the gods, were sub-
orned to human purposes were for the most part "sympathetic magic"— a
desired action was suggested to the deities by a partial or imitative perform-
ance of the action by men. To make rain fall some primitive magicians
poured water out upon the ground, preferably from a tree. The Kaffirs,
threatened by drought, asked a missionary to go into the fields with an
opened umbrella."8 In Sumatra a barren woman made an image of a child
and held it in her lap, hoping thereby to become pregnant. In the Babar
Archipelago the would-be mother fashioned a doll out of red cotton, pre-
tended to suckle it, and repeated a magic formula; then she sent word through
the village that she was pregnant, and her friends came to congratulate her;
only a very obstinate reality could refuse to emulate this imagination.
Among the Dyaks of Borneo the magician, to ease the pains of a woman
about to deliver, would go through the contortions of childbirth himself,
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 65
as a magic suggestion to the foetus to come forth; sometimes the magician
slowly rolled a stone down his belly and dropped it to the ground, in the
hope that the backward child would imitate it. In the Middle Ages a
spell was cast upon an enemy by sticking pins into a waxen image of
hirti;m the Peruvian Indians burned people in effigy, and called it burning
the soul."8 Even the modern mob is not above such primitive magic.
These methods of suggestion by example were applied especially to the
fertilization of the soil. Zulu medicine-men fried the genitals of a man
who had died in full vigor, ground the mixture into a powder, and strewed
it over the fields."9 Some peoples chose a King and Queen of the May,
or a Whitsun bridegroom and bride, and married them publicly, so that
the soil might take heed and flower forth. In certain localities the rite
included the public consummation of the marriage, so that Nature, though
she might be nothing but a dull clod, would have no excuse for misunder-
standing her duty. In Java the peasants and their wives, to ensure the
fertility of the rice-fields, mated in the midst of them.130 For primitive
men did not conceive the growth of the soil in terms of nitrogen; they
thought of it— apparently without knowing of sex in plants— in the same
terms as those whereby they interpreted the fruitfulness of woman; our
very terms recall their poetic faith.
Festivals of promiscuity, coming in nearly all cases at the season of
sowing, served partly as a moratorium on morals (recalling the compara-
tive freedom of sex relations in earlier days), partly as a means of fertilizing
the wives of sterile men, and partly as a ceremony of suggestion to the
earth in spring to abandon her wintry reserve, accept the proffered seed,
and prepare to deliver herself of a generous litter of food. Such festivals
appear among a great number of nature peoples, but particularly among
the Cameroons of the Congo, the Kaffirs, the Hottentots and the Bantus.
"Their harvest festivals," says the Reverend H. Rowley of the Bantus,
are akin in character to the feasts of Bacchus. ... It is impossible
to witness them without being ashamed. . . . Not only is full sexual
license permitted to the neophytes, and indeed in most cases en-
joined, but any visitor attending the festival is encouraged to indulge
in licentiousness. Prostitution is freely indulged in, and adultery
is not viewed with any sense of heinousness, on account of the
surroundings. No man attending the festival is allowed to have
intercourse with his wife.m
66 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
Similar festivals appear in the historic civilizations: in the Bacchic cele-
brations of Greece, the Saturnalia of Rome, the Fete des Fous in medieval
France, May Day in England, and the Carnival or Mardi Gras of con-
temporary ways.
Here and there, as among the Pawnees and the Indians of Guayaquil,
vegetation rites took on a less attractive form. A man— or, in later and
milder days, an animal— was sacrificed to the earth at sowing time, so that
it might be fertilized by his blood. When the harvest came it was inter-
preted as the resurrection of the dead man; the victim was given, before
and after his death, the honors of a god; and from this origin arose, in a
thousand forms, the almost universal myth of a god dying for his people,
and then returning triumphantly to life."1 Poetry embroidered magic,
and transformed it into theology. Solar myths mingled harmoniously with
vegetation rites, and the legend of a god dying and reborn came to apply
not only to the winter death and spring revival of the earth but to the
autumnal and vernal equinoxes, and the waning and waxing of the day.
For the coming of night was merely a part of this tragic drama; daily the
sun-god was born and died; every sunset was a crucifixion, and every
sunrise was a resurrection.
Human sacrifice, of which we have here but one of many varieties,
seems to have been honored at some time or another by almost every
people. On the island of Carolina in the Gulf of Mexico a great hollow
metal statue of an old Mexican deity has been found, within which still
lay the remains of human beings apparently burned to death as an offering
to the god.188 Every one knows of the Moloch to whom the Phoenicians,
the Carthaginians, and occasionally other Semites, offered human victims.
In our own time the custom has been practised in Rhodesia.184 Probably it
was bound up with cannibalism; men thought that the gods had tastes like
their own. As religious beliefs change more slowly than other creeds, and
rites change more slowly than beliefs, this divine cannibalism survived after
human cannibalism disappeared.13* Slowly, however, evolving morals
changed even religious rites; the gods imitated the increasing gentleness of
their worshipers, and resigned themselves to accepting animal instead of
human meat; a hind took the place of Iphigenia, and a ram was substituted
for Abraham's son. In time the gods did not receive even the animal; the
priests liked savory food, ate all the edible parts of the sacrificial victim
themselves, and offered upon the altar only the entrails and the bones.18*
CHAP. IV) MORALELEMENTSOFCIVILIZATION 6j
Since early man believed that he acquired the powers of whatever
organism he consumed, he came naturally to the conception of eating the
god. In many cases he ate the flesh and drank the blood of the human god
whom he had deified and fattened for the sacrifice. When, through in-
creased continuity in the food-supply, he became more humane, he sub-
stituted images for the victim, and was content to eat these. In ancient
Mexico an image of the god was made of grain, seeds and vegetables, was
kneaded with the blood of boys sacrificed for the purpose, and was then
consumed as a religious ceremony of eating the god. Similar ceremonies
have been found in many primitive tribes. Usually the participant was
required to fast before eating the sacred image; and the priest turned
the image into the god by the power of magic f ormulas.187
Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. A wilderness of weird
beliefs came out of animism, and resulted in many strange formulas and
rites. The Kukis encouraged themselves in war by the notion that all the
enemies they slew would attend them as slaves in the after life. On the
other hand a Bantu, when he had slain his foe, shaved his own head and
anointed himself with goat-dung, to prevent the spirit of the dead man
from returning to pester him. Almost all primitive peoples believed in the
efficacy of curses, and the dcstructiveness of the "evil eye."138 Australian
natives were sure that the curse of a potent magician could kill at a hundred
miles. The belief in witchcraft began early in human history, and has
never quite disappeared. Fetishism*— the worship of idols or other objects
as having magic power— is still more ancient and indestructible. Since
many amulets are limited to a special power, some peoples are heavily
laden with a variety of them, so that they may be ready for any emerg-
ency.180 Relics are a later and contemporary example of fetishes possessing
magic powers; half the population of Europe wear some pendant or amulet
which gives them supernatural protection or aid. At every step the history
of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization
is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct
volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance.
Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always
remain.
The philosopher accepts gracefully this human need of supernatural
• From the Portuguese feitico, fabricated or factitious.
68 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
aid and comfort, and consoles himself by observing that just as animism
generates poetry, so magic begets drama and science. Frazer has shown,
with the exaggeration natural to a brilliant innovator, that the glories of
science have their roots in the absurdities of magic. For since magic often
failed, it became of advantage to the magician to discover natural opera-
tions by which he might help supernatural forces to produce the desired
event. Slowly the natural means came to predominate, even though the
magician, to preserve his standing with the people, concealed these natural
means as well as he could, and gave the credit to supernatural magic-
much as our own people often credit natural cures to magical prescriptions
and pills. In this way magic gave birth to the physician, the chemist, the
metallurgist, and the astronomer.140
More immediately, however, magic made the priest. Gradually, as
religious rites became more numerous and complex, they outgrew the
knowledge and competence of the ordinary man, and generated a special
class which gave most of its time to the functions and ceremonies of re-
ligion. The priest as magician had access, through trance, inspiration or
esoteric prayer, to the will of the spirits or gods, and could change that
will for human purposes. Since such knowledge and skill seemed to primi-
tive men the most valuable of all, and supernatural forces were conceived
to affect man's fate at every turn, the power of the clergy became as
great as that of the state; and from the latest societies to modern times the
priest has vied and alternated with the warrior in dominating and dis-
ciplining men. Let Egypt, Judea and medieval Europe suffice as instances.
The priest did not create religion, he merely used it, as a statesman uses
the impulses and customs of mankind; religion arises not out of sacerdotal
invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity,
hopefulness and loneliness of men. The priest did harm by tolerating
superstition and monopolizing certain forms of knowledge; but he limited
and often discouraged superstition, he gave the people the rudiments of
education, he acted as a repository and vehicle for the growing cultural
heritage of the race, he consoled the weak in their inevitable exploitation
by the strong, and he became the agent through which religion nourished
art and propped up with supernatural aid the precarious structure of
human morality. If he had not existed the people would have invented him.
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 69
4. The Moral Function of Religion
Religion and government — Tabu—Sexual tabus — The lag of
religion— Secularization
Religion supports morality by two means chiefly: myth and tabu, Myth
creates the supernatural creed through which celestial sanctions may be
given to forms of conduct socially (or sacerdotally) desirable; heavenly
hopes and terrors inspire the individual to put up with restraints placed
upon him by his masters and his group. Man is not naturally obedient,
gentle, or chaste; and next to that ancient compulsion which finally gen-
erates conscience, nothing so quietly and continuously conduces to these
uncongenial virtues as the fear of the gods. The institutions of property
and marriage rest in some measure upon religious sanctions, and tend to
lose their vigor in ages of unbelief. Government itself, which is the most
unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the
support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and
Mussolini soon discovered; and hence "a tendency to theocracy is inci-
dental to all constitutions."141 The power of the primitive chief is increased
by the aid of magic and sorcery; and even our own government derives
some sanctity from its annual recognition of the Pilgrims' God.
The Polynesians gave the word tabu to prohibitions sanctioned by re-
ligion. In the more highly developed of primitive societies such tabus
took the place of what under civilization became laws. Their form was
usually negative: certain acts and objects were declared "sacred" or "un-
clean"; and the two words meant in effect one warning: untouchable. So
the Ark of the Covenant was tabu, and Uzzah was struck dead, we arc
told, for touching it to save it from falling.112 Diodorus would have us
believe that the ancient Egyptians ate one another in famine, rather than
violate the tabu against eating the animal totem of the tribe.143 In most
primitive societies countless things were tabu; certain words and names
were never to be pronounced, and certain days and seasons were tabu in
the sense that work was forbidden at such times. All the knowledge, and
some of the ignorance, of primitive men about food were expressed in
dietetic tabus; and hygiene was inculcated by religion rather than by
science or secular medicine.
The favorite object of primitive tabu was woman. A thousand super-
70 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IV
stitions made her, every now and then, untouchable, perilous, and "un-
clean." The moulders of the world's myths were unsuccessful husbands,
for they agreed that woman was the root of all evil; this was a view
sacred not only to Hebraic and Christian tradition, but to a hundred pagan
mythologies. The strictest of primitive tabus was laid upon the men-
struating woman; any man or thing that touched her at such times lost
virtue or usefulness.1" The Macusi of British Guiana forbade women to
bathe at their periods lest they should poison the waters; and they forbade
them to go into the forests on these occasions, lest they be bitten by
enamored snakes.146 Even childbirth was unclean, and after it the mother
was to purify herself with laborious religious rites. Sexual relations, in
most primitive peoples, were tabu not only in the menstrual period but
whenever the woman was pregnant or nursing. Probably these prohibi-
tions were originated by women themselves, out of their own good sense
and for their own protection and convenience; but origins are easily
forgotten, and soon woman found herself "impure" and "unclean." In
the end she accepted man's point of view, and felt shame in her periods,
even in her pregnancy. Out of such tabus as a partial source came modesty,
.the sense of sin, the view of sex as unclean, asceticism, priestly celibacy,
and the subjection of woman.
Religion is not the basis of morals, but an aid to them; conceivably they
could exist without it, and not infrequently they have progressed against
its indifference or its obstinate resistance. In the earliest societies, and in
some later ones, morals appear at times to be quite independent of religion;
religion then concerns itself not with the ethics of conduct but with magic,
ritual and sacrifice, and the good man is defined in terms of ceremonies
dutifully performed and faithfully financed. As a rule religion sanctions
not any absolute good (since there is none), but those norms of conduct
which have established themselves by force of economic and social cir-
cumstance; like law it looks to the past for its judgments, and is apt to be
left behind as conditions change and morals alter with them. So the Greeks
learned to abhor incest while their mythologies still honored incestuous
gods; the Christians practised monogamy while their Bible legalized polyg-
amy; slavery was abolished while dominies sanctified it with unimpeach-
able Biblical authority; and in our own day the Church fights heroically
for a moral code that the Industrial Revolution has obviously doomed.
In the end terrestrial forces prevail; morals slowly adjust themselves to
CHAP. IV) MORAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 71
economic invention, and religion reluctantly adjusts itself to moral change.*
The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather
than to create new ones.
Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher
stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to
harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity
of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art;
it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge
grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which
change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is
then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history
takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion." In-
stitutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and
punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape
from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The
intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and— after some hesita-
tion—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anti-
clerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of
reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and
every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into
epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden
alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and
its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death.
Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to
human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos
builds another civilization.
* Cf. the contemporary causation of birth control by urban industrialism, and the
gradual acceptance of such control by the Church.
CHAPTER V
The Mental Elements of Civilization
I. LETTERS
Language— Its animal background— Its human origins— Its devel-
opment—Its results— Education— Initiation— Writing— Poetry
IN the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without
those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to in-
dividual objects or experiences sensorily— for the most part visually— re-
membered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct
from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of
objects as distinct from their qualities. Without words as class names one
might think of this man, or that man, or that man; one could not think of
Man, for the eye sees not Man but only men, not classes but particular
things. The beginning of humanity came when some freak or crank, half
animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain
to invent the first Qommon noun, the first sound-sign that would signify
a group of like objects: house that would mean all houses, man that would
mean all men, light that would mean every light that ever shone on land
or sea. From that moment the mental development of the race opened
upon a new and endless road. For words are to thought what tools are to
work; the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.1
Since all origins are guesses, and de fontibus non disputandum, the
imagination has free play in picturing the beginnings of speech. Perhaps
the first form of language— which may be defined as communication
through signs— was the love-call of one animal to another. In this sense
the jungle, the woods and the prairie are alive with speech. Cries of warn-
ing or of terror, the call of the mother to the brood, the cluck and cackle
of euphoric or reproductive ecstasy, the parliament of chatter from tree
to tree, indicate the busy preparations made by the animal kingdom for
the august speech of man. A wild girl found living among the animals
in a forest near Chalons, France, had no other speech than hideous screeches
and howls. These living noises of the woods seem meaningless to our
72
CHAP. V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 73
provincial ear; we are like the philosophical poodle Riquet, who says of
M. Bergeret: "Everything uttered by my voice means something; but
from my master's mouth comes much nonsense." Whitman and Craig
discovered a strange correlation between the actions and the exclamations
of pigeons; Dupont learned to distinguish twelve specific sounds used by
fowl and doves, fifteen by dogs, and twenty-two by horned cattle; Garner
found that the apes carried on their endless gossip with at least twenty
different sounds, plus a repertory of gestures; and from these modest
vocabularies a few steps bring us to the three hundred words that suffice
some unpretentious men.1
Gesture seems primary, speech secondary, in the earlier transmission
of thought; and when speech fails, gesture comes again to the fore. Among
the North American Indians, who had countless dialects, married couples
were often derived from different tribes, and maintained communication
and accord by gestures rather than speech; one couple known to Lewis
Morgan used silent signs for three years. Gesture was so prominent irt
some Indian languages that the Arapahos, like some modern peoples,
could hardly converse in the dark.8 Perhaps the first human words were
interjections, expressions of emotion as among animals; then demonstrative
words accompanying gestures of direction; and imitative sounds that came
in time to be the names of the objects or actions that they simulated.
Even after indefinite millenniums of linguistic changes and complications
every language still contains hundreds of imitative words— roar, rush,
murmur, tremor, giggle, groan, hiss, heave, hum, cackle, etc.* The Tecuna
tribe, of ancient Brazil, had a perfect verb for sneeze: haitschu.' Out of
such beginnings, perhaps, came the root-words of every language. Renan
reduced all Hebrew words to five hundred roots, and Skeat nearly all
European words to some four hundred stems.!
* Such onomatopoeia still remains a refuge in linguistic emergencies. The Englishman
eating his first meal in China, and wishing to know the character of the meat he was eat-
ing, inquired, with Anglo-Saxon dignity and reserve, "Quack, quack?" To which the
Chinaman, shaking his head, answered cheerfully, "Bow-wow."4
tE.g., divine is from Latin divus, which is from deus, Greek theos, Sanskrit deva,
meaning god; in the Gypsy tongue the word for god, by a strange prank, becomes devel.
Historically goes back to the Sanskrit root vid, to know; Greek oida, Latin video (see),
French voir (sec), German ivissen (know), English to wit; plus the suffixes tor (as in
author, praetor , rhetor), ic, al, and ly (=like). Again, the Sanskrit root or, to plough,
gives the Latin arare, Russian orati, English to ear the land, arable^ art, oar, and perhaps
the word Aryan— the ploughers.*
74 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
The languages of nature peoples are not necessarily primitive in any sense
of simplicity; many of them are simple in vocabulary and structure, but
some of them are as complex and wordy as our own, and more highly or-
ganized than Chinese.7 Nearly all primitive tongues, however, limit them-
selves to the sensual and particular, and arc uniformly poor in general or
abstract terms. So the Australian natives had a name for a dog's tail, and an-
other name for a cow's tail; but they had no name for tail in general.* The
Tasmanians had separate names for specific trees, but no general name for
tree; the Choctaw Indians had names for the black oak, the white oak and the
red oak, but no name for oak, much less for tree. Doubtless many gen-
erations passed before the proper noun ended in the common noun. In
many tribes there are no separate words for the color as distinct from the
colored object; no words for such abstractions as tone, sex, species, space,
spirit, instinct, reason, quantity, hope, fear, matter, consciousness, etc.*
Such abstract terms seem to grow in a reciprocal relation of cause and
effect with the development of thought; they become the tools of subtlety
and the symbols of civilization.
Bearing so many gifts to men, words seemed to them a divine boon and
a sacred thing; they became the matter of magic formulas, most reverenced
when most meaningless; and they still survive as sacred in mysteries where,
e.g., the Word becomes Flesh. They made not only for clearer thinking,
but for better social organization; they cemented the generations mentally,
by providing a better medium for education and the transmission of knowl-
edge and the arts; they created a new organ of communication, by which one
doctrine or belief could mold a people into homogeneous unity. They opened
new roads for the transport and traffic of ideas, and immensely accelerated
the tempo, and enlarged the range and content, of life. Has any other in-
vention ever equaled, in power and glory, the common noun?
Next to the enlargement of thought the greatest of these gifts of speech
was education. Civilization is an accumulation, a treasure-house of arts
and wisdom, manners and morals, from which the individual, in his devel-
opment, draws nourishment for his mental life; without that periodical
reacquisition of the racial heritage by each generation, civilization would
die a sudden death. It owes its life to education.
Education had few frills among primitive peoples; to them, as to the
animals, education was chiefly the transmission of skills and the training of
character; it was a wholesome relation of apprentice to master in the ways
of life. This direct and practical tutelage encouraged a rapid growth in the
CHAP.V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 75
primitive child. In the Omaha tribes the boy of ten had already learned
nearly all the arts of his father, and was ready for life; among the Aleuts
the boy of ten often set up his own establishment, and sometimes took a
wife; in Nigeria children of six or eight would leave the parental house,
build a hut, and provide for themselves by hunting and fishing.10 Usually this
educational process came to an end with the beginning of sexual life; the
precocious maturity was followed by an early stagnation. The boy, under
such conditions, was adult at twelve and old at twenty-five.11 This docs not
mean that the "savage" had the mind of a child; it only means that he had
neither the needs nor the opportunities of the modern child; he did not
enjoy that long and protected adolescence which allows a more nearly com-
plete transmission of the cultural heritage, and a greater variety and flexibility
of adaptive reactions to an artificial and unstable environment.
The environment of the natural man was comparatively permanent; it
called not for mental agility but for courage and character. The primitive
father put his trust in character, as modern education has put its trust in
intellect; he was concerned to make not scholars but men. Hence the initia-
tion rites which, among nature peoples, ordinarily marked the arrival of the
youth at maturity and membership in the tribe, were designed to test cour-
age rather than knowledge; their function was to prepare the young for the
hardships of war and the responsibilities of marriage, while at the same time
they indulged the old in the delights of inflicting pain. Some of these initia-
tion tests are "too terrible and too revolting to be seen or told."" Among
the Kaffirs (to take a mild example) the boys who were candidates for ma-
turity were given arduous work by day, and were prevented from sleeping
by night, until they dropped from exhaustion; and to make the matter
more certain they were scourged "frequently and mercilessly until blood
spurted from them." A considerable proportion of the boys died as a re-
sult; but this seems to have been looked upon philosophically by the elders,
perhaps as an auxiliary anticipation of natural selection." Usually these
initiation ceremonies marked the end of adolescence and the preparation for
marriage; and the bride insisted that the bridegroom should prove his
capacity for suffering. In many tribes of the Congo the initiation rite
centered about circumcision; if the youth winced or cried aloud his relatives
were thrashed, and his promised bride, who had watched the ceremony care-
fully, rejected him scornfully, on the ground that she did not want a girl
for her husband.14
Little or no use was made of writing in primitive education. Nothing
surprises the natural man so much as the ability of Europeans to com-
municate with one another, over great distances, by making black scratches
76 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
upon a piece of paper." Many tribes have learned to write by imitating
their civilized exploiters; but some, as in northern Africa, have remained
letterless despite five thousand years of intermittent contact with literate
nations. Simple tribes living for the most part in comparative isolation,
and knowing the happiness of having no history, felt little need for writing.
Their memories were all the stronger for having no written aids; they
learned and retained, and passed on to their children by recitation, what-
ever seemed necessary in the way of historical record and cultural trans-
mission. It was probably by committing such oral traditions and folk-lore
to writing that literature began. Doubtless the invention of writing was
met with a long and holy opposition, as something calculated to undermine
morals and the race. An Egyptian legend relates that when the god Thoth
revealed his discovery of the art of writing to King Thamos, the good
King denounced it as an enemy of civilization. "Children and young
people," protested the monarch, "who had hitherto been forced to apply
themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, would
cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories."1"
Of course we can only guess at the origins of this wonderful toy. Per-
haps, as we shall sec, it was a by-product of pottery, and began as identify-
ing "trade-marks" on vessels of clay. Probably a system of written signs
was made necessary by the increase of trade among the tribes, and its first
forms were rough and conventional pictures of commercial objects and
accounts. As trade connected tribes of diverse languages, some mutually
intelligible mode of record and communication became desirable. Pre-
sumably the numerals were among the earliest written symbols, usually
taking the form of parallel marks representing the fingers; we still call
them fingers when we speak of them as digits. Such words as five, the
German fiinf and the Greek pente go back to a root meaning hand;" so
the Roman numerals indicated fingers, "V" represented an expanded
hand, and "X" was merely two "V's" connected at their points. Writing
was in its beginnings— as it still is in China and Japan— a form of drawing,
an art. As men used gestures when they could not use words, so they
used pictures to transmit their thoughts across time and space; every word
and every letter known to us was once a picture, even as trade-marks and
the signs of the zodiac are to this day. The primeval Chinese pictures that
preceded writing were called ku-ivan— literally, "gesture-pictures." Totem
poles were pictograph writing; they were, as Mason suggests, tribal
CHAP.V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION Jf
autographs. Some tribes used notched sticks to help the memory
or to convey a message; others, like the Algonquin Indians, not only
notched the sticks but painted figures upon them, making them into min-
iature totem poles; or perhaps these poles were notched sticks on a
grandiose scale. The Peruvian Indians kept complex records, both of
numbers and ideas, by knots and loops made in diversely colored cords;
perhaps some light is shed upon the origins of the South American Indians
by the fact that a similar custom existed among the natives of the Eastern
Archipelago and Polynesia. Lao-tse, calling upon the Chinese to return
to the simple life, proposed that they should go back to their primeval use
of knotted cords.18
More highly developed forms of writing appear sporadically among na-
ture men. Hieroglyphics have been found on Easter Island, in the South
Seas; and on one of the Caroline Islands a script has been discovered which
consists of fifty-one syllabic signs, picturing figures and ideas.19 Tradition
tells how the priests and chiefs of Easter Island tried to keep to themselves
all knowledge of writing, and how the people assembled annually to hear
the tablets read; writing was obviously, in its earlier stages, a mysterious and
holy thing, a hieroglyph or sacred carving. We cannot be sure that these
Polynesian scripts were not derived from some of the historic civilizations.
In general, writing is a sign of civilization, the least uncertain of the pre-
carious distinctions between civilized and primitive men.
Literature is at first words rather than letters, despite its name; it arises as
clerical chants or magic charms, recited usually by the priests, and trans-
mitted orally from memory to memory. Carmina, as the Romans named
poetry, meant both verses and charms; ode, among the Greeks, meant
originally a magic spell; so did the English rune and lay, and the German
Lied. Rhythm and meter, suggested, perhaps, by the rhythms of nature and
bodily life, were apparently developed by magicians or shamans to pre-
serve, transmit, and enhance the "magic incantations of their verse."80 The
Greeks attributed the first hexameters to the Delphic priests, who were be-
lieved to have invented the meter for use in oracles.*1 Gradually, out of
these sacerdotal origins, the poet, the orator and the historian were differ-
entiated and secularized: the orator as the official lauder of the king or solic-
itor of the deity; the historian as the recorder of the royal deeds; the poet as
the singer of originally sacred chants, the formulator and preserver of heroic
legends, and the musician who put his tales to music for the instructioi^
populace and kings. So the Fijians, the Tahitians and the Nj
donians had official orators and narrators to make addresses on
78 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
ceremony, and to incite the warriors of the tribe by recounting the deeds of
their forefathers and exalting the unequaled glories of the nation's past: how
little do some recent historians differ from these! The Somali had profes-
sional poets who went from village to village singing songs, like medieval
minnesingers and troubadours. Only exceptionally were these poems of
love; usually they dealt with physical heroism, or battle, or the relations of
parents and children. Here, from the Easter Island tablets, is the lament of
a father separated from his daughter by the fortunes of war:
The sail of my daughter,
Never broken by the force of foreign clans;
The sail of my daughter,
Unbroken by the conspiracy of Honiti!
Ever victorious in all her fights,
She could not be enticed to drink poisoned waters
In the obsidian glass.
Can my sorrow ever be appeased
While we are divided by the mighty seas?
O my daughter, O my daughter!
It is a vast and watery road
Over which I look toward the horizon,
My daughter, O my daughter!"
II. SCIENCE
Origins— Mathematics— Astronomy— Medicine— Surgery
In the opinion of Herbert Spencer, that supreme expert in the collection
of evidence post judicium, science, like letters, began with the priests,
originated in astronomic observations, governing religious festivals, and
was preserved in the temples and transmitted across the generations as
part of the clerical heritage." We cannot say, for here again beginnings
elude us, and we may only surmise. Perhaps science, like civilization in
general, began with agriculture; geometry, as its name indicates, was the
measurement of the soil; and the calculation of crops and seasons, necessi-
tating the observation of the stars and the construction of a calendar, may
have generated astronomy. Navigation advanced astronomy, trade de-
veloped mathematics, and the industrial arts laid the bases of physics and
chemistry.
CHAP. V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 79
Counting was probably one of the earliest forms of speech, and in many
tribes it still presents a relieving simplicity. The Tasmanians counted up
to two: "Farmery, calabawa, cardia"— i.e., "one, two, plenty"; the Gua-
ranis of Brazil adventured further and said: "One, two, three, four, in-
numerable." The New Hollanders had no words for three or four; three
they called "two-one"; four was "two-two." Damara natives would not
exchange two sheep for four sticks, but willingly exchanged, twice in
succession, one sheep for two sticks. Counting was by the fingers; hence
the decimal system. When— apparently after some time— the idea of twelve
was reached, the number became a favorite because it was so pleasantly
divisible by five of the first six digits; and that duodecimal system was
born which obstinately survives in English measurements today: twelve
months in a year, twelve pence in a shilling, twelve units in a dozen, twelve
dozen in a gross, twelve inches in a foot. Thirteen, on the other hand,
refused to be divided, and became disreputable and unlucky forever. Toes
added to fingers created the idea of twenty or a score; the use of this unit
in reckoning lingers in the French quatre-vingt (four twenties) for
eighty" Other parts of the body served as standards of measurement: a
hand for a "span," a thumb for an inch (in French the two words are the
same), an elbow for a "cubit," an arm for an "ell," a foot for a foot. At
an early date pebbles were added to fingers as an aid in counting; the
survival of the abacus, and of the "little stone" (calculus) concealed in
the word calculate, reveal to us how small, again, is the gap between the
simplest and the latest men. Thoreau longed for this primitive simplicity,
and well expressed a universally recurrent mood: "An honest man has
hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or, in extreme cases he
may add his toes, and lump the rest. I say, let our affairs be as two or
three, and not as a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half
a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."*
The measurement of time by the movements of the heavenly bodies
was probably the beginning of astronomy; the very word measure, like
the word month (and perhaps the word man— the measurer), goes back
apparently to a root denoting the moon.80 Men measured time by moons
long before they counted it by years; the sun, like the father, was a com-
paratively late discovery; even today Easter is reckoned according to the
phases of the moon. The Polynesians had a calendar of thirteen months,
regulated by the moon; when their lunar year diverged too flagrantly
8O THESTORYOFCIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
from the procession of the seasons they dropped a moon, and the balance
was restored.*7 But such sane uses of the heavens were exceptional;
astrology antedated— and perhaps will survive— astronomy; simple souls are
more interested in telling futures than in telling time. A myriad of super-
stitions grew up anent the influence of the stars upon human character
and fate; and many of these superstitions flourish in our own day.* Per-
haps they are not superstitions, but only another kind of error than science.
Natural man formulates no physics, but merely practises it; he cannot
plot the path of a projectile, but he can aim an arrow well; he has no
chemical symbols, but he knows at a glance which plants are poison and
which are food, and uses subtle herbs to heal the ills of the flesh. Perhaps
we should employ another gender here, for probably the first doctors
were women; not only because they were the natural nurses of the men,
nor merely because they made midwifery, rather than venality, the oldest
profession, but because their closer connection with the soil gave them a
superior knowledge of plants, and enabled them to develop the art of
medicine as distinct from the magic-mongering of the priests. From the
earliest days to a time yet within our memory, it was the woman who
healed. Only when the woman failed did the primitive sick resort to the
medicine-man and the shaman?
It is astonishing how many cures primitive doctors effected despite their
theories of disease.20 To these simple people disease seemed to be possession
of the body by an alien power or spirit— a conception not essentially differ-
ent from the germ theory which pervades medicine today. The most
popular method of cure was by some magic incantation that would pro-
pitiate the evil spirit or drive it away. How perennial this form of therapy
is may be seen in the story of the Gadarene swine.80* Even now epilepsy
is regarded by many as a possession; some contemporary religions prescribe
forms of exorcism for banishing disease, and prayer is recognized by most
living people as an aid to pills and drugs. Perhaps the primitive practice
was based, as much as the most modern, on the healing power of sugges-
tion. The tricks of these early doctors were more dramatic than those of
their more civilized successors: they tried to scare off the possessing
demon by assuming terrifying masks, covering themselves with the skins
* Extract from an advertisement in the Town Hall (New York) program of March 5,
1934: "HOROSCOPES, by , Astrologer to New York's most distinguished
social and professional clientele. Ten dollars an hour."
CHAP. V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 8l
of animals, shouting, raving, slapping their hands, shaking rattles, and
sucking the demon out through a hollow tube; as an old adage put it,
"Nature cures the disease while the remedy amuses the patient." The
Brazilian Bororos carried the science to a higher stage by having the father
take the medicine in order to cure the sick child; almost invariably the
child got well.80
Along with medicative herbs we find in the vast pharmacopoeia of
primitive man an assortment of soporific drugs calculated to ease pain or to
facilitate operations. Poisons like curare (used so frequently on the
tips of arrows), and drugs like hemp, opium and eucalyptus are older
than history; one of our most popular anesthetics goes back to the Peruvian
use of coca for this purpose. Carrier tells how the Iroquois cured scurvy
with the bark and leaves of the hemlock spruce.*1 Primitive surgery knew
a variety of operations and instruments. Childbirth was well managed;
fractures and wounds were ably set and dressed.83 By means of obsidian
knives, or sharpened flints, or fishes' teeth, blood was let, abscesses were
drained, and tissues were scarified. Trephining of the skull was practised
by primitive medicine-men from the ancient Peruvian Indians to the
modern Melanesians; the latter averaged nine successes out of every ten
operations, while in 1786 the same operation was invariably fatal at the
Hotel-Dieu in Paris.33
We smile at primitive ignorance while we submit anxiously to the ex-
pensive therapeutics of our own day. As Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
wrote, after a lifetime of healing:
There is nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not
done, to recover their health and save their lives. They have sub-
mitted to be half-drowned in water and half-choked with gases, to
be buried up to their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons like
galley-slaves, to be crimped with knives like codfish, to have needles
thrust into their flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin, to swallow
all sorts of abominations, and to pay for all this as if to be singed
and scalded were a costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing and
leeches a luxury.**
8l THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
IU. ART
The meaning of beauty—Of art— The primitive sense of beauty—
The painting of the body— Cosmetics— Tattooing— Scarifica- -
tion — Clothing — Ornaments — Pottery — Painting —
Sculpture — Architecture — The dance — Music —
Summary of the primitive preparation for
civilization
After fifty thousand years of art men still dispute as to its sources in
instinct and in history. What is beauty?— why do we admire it?— why do
we endeavor to create it? Since this is no place for psychological discourse
we shall answer, briefly and precariously, that beauty is any quality by
which an object or a form pleases a beholder. Primarily and originally the
object does not please the beholder because it is beautiful, but rather he
calls it beautiful because it pleases him. Any object that satisfies desire
will seem beautiful: food is beautiful— Thai's is not beautiful— to a starving
man. The pleasing object may as like as not be the beholder himself; in our
secret hearts no other form is quite so fair as ours, and art begins with the
adornment of one's own exquisite body. Or the pleasing object may be the
desired mate; and then the esthetic— beauty-feeling— sense takes on the in-
tensity and creativeness of sex, and spreads the aura of beauty to every-
thing that concerns the beloved one— to all forms that resemble her,
all colors that adorn her, please her or speak of her, all ornaments
and garments that become her, all shapes and motions that recall
her symmetry and grace. Or the pleasing form may be a desired
male; and out of the attraction that here draws frailty to worship strength
comes that sense of sublimity— satisfaction in the presence of power— which
creates the loftiest art of all. Finally nature herself— with our cooperation
—may become both sublime and beautiful; not only because it simulates
and suggests all the tenderness of women and all the strength of men, but
because we project into it our own feelings and fortunes, our love of others
and of ourselves— relishing in it the scenes of our youth, enjoying its quiet
solitude as an escape from the storm of life, living with it through its almost
human seasons of green youth, hot maturity, "mellow fruitfulness" and
cold decay, and recognizing it vaguely as the mother that lent us life
and will receive us in our death.
CHAP.V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 83
Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling
in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some
reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man
to woman. The thought may be any capture of life's significance, the feel-
ing may be any arousal or release of life's tensions. The form may satisfy
us through rhythm, which falls in pleasantly with the alternations of our
breath, the pulsation of our blood, and the majestic oscillations of winter
and summer, ebb and flow, night and day; or the form may please us
through symmetry, which is a static rhythm, standing for strength and
recalling to us the ordered proportions of plants and animals, of women
and men; or it may please us through color, which brightens the spirit or
intensifies life; or finally the form may please us through veracity—be-
cause its lucid and transparent imitation of nature or reality catches some
mortal loveliness of plant or animal, or some transient meaning of circum-
stance, and holds it still for our lingering enjoyment or leisurely under-
standing. From these many sources come those noble superfluities of life
—song and dance, music and drama, pottery and painting, sculpture and
architecture, literature and philosophy. For what is philosophy but an art
—one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience?
If the sense of beauty is not strong in primitive society it may be because
the lack of delay between sexual desire and fulfilment gives no time for
that imaginative enhancement of the object which makes so much of the
object's beauty. Primitive man seldom thinks of selecting women because
of what we should call their beauty; he thinks rather of their usefulness,
and never dreams of rejecting a strong-armed bride because of her ugli-
ness. The Indian chief, being asked which of his wives was loveliest,
apologized for never having thought of the matter. "Their faces," he said,
with the mature wisdom of a Franklin, "might be more or less handsome,
but in other respects women are all the same." Where a sense of beauty
is present in primitive man it sometimes eludes us by being so different
from our own. "All Negro races that I know," says Reichard, "account a
woman beautiful who is not constricted at the waist, and when the body
from the arm-pits to the hips is the same breadth— 'like a ladder,' says the
Coast Negro." Elephantine ears and an overhanging stomach are feminine
charms to some African males; and throughout Africa it is the fat woman
who is accounted loveliest. In Nigeria, says Mungo Park, "corpulence and
beauty seem to be terms nearly synonymous. A woman of even moderate
84 THESTORYOFCIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
pretensions must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm
to support her; and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel." "Most savages/'
says Briffault, "have a preference for what we should regard as one of
the most unsightly features in a woman's form, namely, long, hanging
breasts."* "It is well known," says Darwin, "that with many Hottentot
women the posterior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner . . .;
and Sir Andrew Smith is certain that this peculiarity is greatly admired by
the men. He once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she
was so immensely developed behind that when seated on level ground she
could not rise, and had to push herself along until she came to a slope. . . .
According to Burton the Somali men are said to choose their wives by
ranging them in a line, and by picking her out who projects furthest a tergo.
Nothing can be more hateful to a Negro than the opposite form."88
Indeed it is highly probable that the natural male thinks of beauty in
terms of himself rather than in terms of woman; art begins at home. Primi-
tive men equaled modern men in vanity, incredible as this will seem to
women. Among simple peoples, as among animals, it is the male rather
than the female that puts on ornament and mutilates his body for beauty's
sake. In Australia, says Bonwick, "adornments are almost entirely monop-
olized by men"; so too in Melanesia, New Guinea, New Caledonia, New
Britain, New Hanover, and among the North American Indians.87 In some
tribes more time is given to the adornment of the body than to any other
business of the day.88 Apparently the first form of art is the artificial color-
ing of the body— sometimes to attract women, sometimes to frighten foes.
The Australian native, like the latest American belle, always carried with
him a provision of white, red, and yellow paint for touching up his beauty
now and then; and when the supply threatened to run out he undertook
expeditions of some distance and danger to renew it. On ordinary days he
contented himself with a few spots of color on his cheeks, his shoulders
and his breast; but on festive occasions he felt shamefully nude unless his
entire body was painted.89
In some tribes the men reserved to themselves the right to paint the
body; in others the married women were forbidden to paint their necks.40
But women were not long in acquiring the oldest of the arts— cosmetics.
When Captain Cook dallied in New Zealand he noticed that his sailors,
when they returned from their adventures on shore, had artificially red or
yellow noses; the paint of the native Helens had stuck to them." The
CHAP. V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 85
Fellatah ladies of Central Africa spent several hours a day over their toilette:
they made their fingers and toes purple by keeping them wrapped all night
in henna leaves; they stained their teeth alternately with blue, yellow, and
purple dyes; they colored their hair with indigo, and penciled their eyelids
with sulphuret of antimony." Every Bongo lady carried in her dressing-
case tweezers for pulling out eyelashes and eyebrows, lancet-shaped hair-
pins, rings and bells, buttons and clasps.43
The primitive soul, like the Periclean Greek, fretted over the transi-
toriness of painting, and invented tattooing, scarification and clothing as
more permanent adornments. The women as well as the men, in many tribes,
submitted to the coloring needle, and bore without flinching even the tat-
tooing of their lips. In Greenland the mothers tattooed their daughters
early, the sooner to get them married off." Most often, however, tattooing
itself was considered insufficiently visible or impressive, and a number of
tribes on every continent produced deep scars on their flesh to make them-
selves lovelier to their fellows, or more discouraging to their enemies. As
Theophile Gautier put it, "having no clothes to embroider, they embroid-
ered their skins."46 Flints or mussel shells cut the flesh, and often a ball of
earth was placed within the wound to enlarge the scar. The Torres Straits
natives wore huge scars like epaulets; the Abcokuta cut themselves to pro-
duce scars imitative of lizards, alligators or tortoises.40 "There is," says
Georg, "no part of the body that has not been perfected, decorated, dis-
figured, painted, bleached, tattooed, reformed, stretched or squeezed, out of
vanity or desire for ornament."" The Botocudos derived their name from
a plug (botoque) which they inserted into the lower lip and the ears in
the eighth year of life, and repeatedly replaced with a larger plug until
the opening was as much as four inches in diameter.48 Hottentot women
trained the labia mlnora to assume enoromous lengths, so producing at last
the "Hottentot apron" so greatly admired by their men.49 Ear-rings and
nose-rings were de rigueur; the natives of Gippsland believed that one who
died without a nose-ring would suffer horrible torments in the next life.00
It is all very barbarous, says the modern lady, as she bores her ears for rings,
paints her lips and her cheeks, tweezes her eyebrows, reforms her eyelashes,
powders her face, her neck and her arms, and compresses her feet. The
tattooed sailor speaks with superior sympathy of the "savages" he has
known; and the Continental student, horrified by primitive mutilations,
sports his honorific scars.
Clothing was apparently, in its origins, a form of ornament, a sexual
deterrent or charm rather than an article of use against cold or shame.81
86 THESTORYOFCIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
The Cimbri were in the habit of tobogganing naked over the snow.53 When
Darwin, pitying the nakedness of the Fuegians, gave one of them a red
cloth as a protection against the cold, the native tore it into strips, which
he and his companions then used as ornaments; as Cook had said of them,
timelessly, they were "content to be naked, but ambitious to be fine."" In
like manner the ladies of the Orinoco cut into shreds the materials given
them by the Jesuit Fathers for clothing; they wore the ribbons so made
around their necks, but insisted that "they would be ashamed to wear
clothing/'" An old author describes the Brazilian natives as usually naked,
and adds: "Now alreadie some doe weare apparell, but esteem it so little
that they weare it rather for fashion than for honesties sake, and because
they are commanded to weare it; ... as is well scene by some that some-
times come abroad with certaine garments no further than the navell, with-
out any other thing, or others onely a cap on their heads, and leave the
other garments at home."" When clothing became something more than
an adornment it served partly to indicate the married status of a loyal wife,
partly to accentuate the form and beauty of woman. For the most part
primitive women asked of clothing precisely what later women have
asked— not that it should quite cover their nakedness, but that it should
enhance or suggest their charms. Everything changes, except woman
and man.
From the beginning both sexes preferred ornaments to clothing. Primi-
tive trade seldom deals in necessities; it is usually confined to articles of
adornment or play." Jewelry is one of the most ancient elements of civili-
zation; in tombs twenty thousand years old, shells and teeth have been found
strung into necklaces." From simple beginnings such embellishments soon
reached impressive proportions, and played a lofty role in life. The Galla
women wore rings to the weight of six pounds, and some Dinka women
carried half a hundredweight of decoration. One African belle wore cop-
per rings which became hot under the sun, so that she had to employ an
attendant to shade or fan her. The Queen of the Wabunias on the Congo
wore a brass collar weighing twenty pounds; she had to lie down every
now and then to rest. Poor women who were so unfortunate as to have
only light jewelry imitated carefully the steps of those who carried great
burdens of bedizenment."
The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage
on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify
CHAP. V) MENTAL ELEMENTSOF CIVILIZATION 87
the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their
surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the
personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objec-
tive ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake to
beautify things. Perhaps its first external medium was pottery. The potter's
wheel, like writing and the state, belongs to the historic civilizations; but even
without it primitive men— or rather women— lifted this ancient industry to an
art, and achieved merely with clay, water and deft fingers an astonishing sym-
metry of form; witness the pottery fashioned by the Baronga of South
Africa,89 or by the Pueblo Indians.80
When the potter applied colored designs to the surface of the vessel he had
formed, he was creating the art of painting. In primitive hands painting is not
yet an independent art; it exists as an adjunct to pottery and statuary. Nature
men made colors out of clay, and the Andamanese made oil colors by mixing
ochre with oils or fats.81 Such colors were used to ornament weapons, imple-
ments, vases, clothing, and buildings. Many hunting tribes of Africa and
Oceania painted upon the walls of their caves or upon neighboring rocks
vivid representations of the animals that they sought in the chase.83
Sculpture, like painting, probably owed its origin to pottery: the potter
found that he could mold not only articles of use, but imitative figures that
might serve as magic amulets, and then as things of beauty in themselves.
The Eskimos carved caribou antlers and walrus ivory into figurines of animals
and men.83 Again, primitive man sought to mark his hut, or a totem-pole, or
a grave with some image that would indicate the object worshiped, or the
person deceased; at first he carved merely a face upon a post, then a head,
then the whole post; and through this filial marking of graves sculpture be-
came an art.*4 So the ancient dwellers on Easter Island topped with enormous
monolithic statues the vaults of their dead; scores of such statues, many of
them twenty feet high, have been found there; some, now prostrate in ruins,
were apparently sixty feet tall.
How did architecture begin? We can hardly apply so magnificent a term
to the construction of the primitive hut; for architecture is not mere building,
but beautiful building. It began when for the first time a man or a woman
thought of a dwelling in terms of appearance as well as of use. Probably
this effort to give beauty or sublimity to a structure was directed first to
graves rather than to homes; while the commemorative pillar developed into
statuary, the tomb grew into a temple. For to primitive thought the dead
were more important and powerful than the living; and, besides, the dead
could remain settled in one place, while the living wandered too often to
warrant their raising permanent homes.
Even in early days, and probably long before he thought of carving objects
or building tombs, man found pleasure in rhythm, and began to develop the
88 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. V
crying and warbling, the prancing and preening, of the animal into song and
dance. Perhaps, like the animal, he sang before he learned to talk," and
danced as early as he sang. Indeed no art so characterized or expressed
primitive man as the dance. He developed it from primordial simplicity to a
complexity unrivaled in civilization, and varied it into a thousand forms. The
great festivals of the tribes were celebrated chiefly with communal and in-
dividual dancing; great wars were opened with martial steps and chants; the
great ceremonies of religion were a mingling of song, drama and dance. What
seems to us now to be forms of play were probably serious matters to early
men; they danced not merely to express themselves, but to offer suggestions
to nature or the gods; for example, the periodic incitation to abundant repro-
duction was accomplished chiefly through the hypnotism of the dance.
Spencer derived the dance from the ritual of welcoming a victorious chief
home from the wars; Freud derived it from the natural expression of sensual
desire, and the group technique of erotic stimulation; if one should assert, with
similar narrowness, that the dance was born of sacred rites and mummeries,
and then merge the three theories into one, there might result as definite a
conception of the origin of the dance as can be attained by us today.
From the dance, we may believe, came instrumental music and the drama.
The making of such music appears to arise out of a desire to mark and accen-
tuate with sound the rhythm of the dance, and to intensify with shrill or
rhythmic notes the excitement necessary to patriotism or procreation. The
instruments were limited in range and accomplishment, but almost endless in
variety: native ingenuity exhausted itself in fashioning horns, trumpets, gongs,
tamtams, clappers, rattles, castanets, flutes and drums from horns, skins, shells,
ivory, brass, copper, bamboo and wood; and it ornamented them with elabo-
rate carving and coloring. The taut string of the bow became the origin of
a hundred instruments from the primitive lyre to the Stradivarius violin and
the modern pianoforte. Professional singers, like professional dancers, arose
among the tribes; and vague scales, predominantly minor in tone, were de-
veloped."
With music, song and dance combined, the "savage" created for us the
drama and the opera. For the primitive dance was frequently devoted to
mimicry; it imitated, most simply, the movements of animals and men, and
passed to the mimetic performance of actions and events. So some Australian
tribes staged a sexual dance around a pit ornamented with shrubbery to rep-
resent the vulva, and, after ecstatic and erotic gestures and prancing, cast their
spears symbolically into the pit. The northwestern tribes of the same island
played a drama of death and resurrection differing only in simplicity from
the medieval mystery and modern Passion plays: the dancers slowly sank to
the ground, hid their heads under the boughs they carried, and simulated
CHAP. V) MENTAL ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 89
death; then, at a sign from their leader, they rose abruptly in a wild triumphal
chant and dance announcing the resurrection of the soul.07 In like manner a
thousand forms of pantomime described events significant to the history of
the tribe, or actions important in the individual life. When rhythm dis-
appeared from these performances the dance passed into the drama, and one
of the greatest of art-forms was born.
In these ways precivilized men created the forms and bases of civiliza-
tion. Looking backward upon this brief survey of primitive culture, we
find every element of civilization except writing and the state. All the
modes of economic life are invented for us here: hunting and fishing, herd-
ing and tillage, transport and building, industry and commerce and finance.
AU the simpler structures of political life are organized: the clan, the fam-
ily, the village community, and the tribe; freedom and order— those hostile
foci around which civilization revolves— find their first adjustment and rec-
onciliation; law and justice begin. The fundamentals of morals are estab-
lished: the training of children, the regulation of the sexes, the inculcation
of honor and decency, of manners and loyalty. The bases of religion are
laid, and its hopes and terrors are applied to the encouragement of morals
and the strengthening of the group. Speech is developed into complex
languages, medicine and surgery appear, and modest beginnings are made
in science, literature and art. All in all it is a picture of astonishing creation,
of form rising out of chaos, of one road after another being opened from
the animal to the sage. Without these "savages," and their hundred thou-
sand years of experiment and groping, civilization could not have been.
We owe almost everything to them— as a fortunate, and possibly degen-
erate, youth inherits the means to culture, security and ease through
the long toil of an unlettered ancestry.
CHAPTER VI
The Prehistoric Beginnings
of Civilization
I. PALEOLITHIC CULTURE
The purpose of prehistory— The romances of archeology
BUT we have spoken loosely; these primitive cultures that we have
sketched as a means of studying the elements of civilization were not
necessarily the ancestors of our own; for all that we know they may be the
degenerate remnants of higher cultures that decayed when human leader-
ship moved in the wake of the receding ice from the tropics to the north
temperate zone. We have tried to understand how civilization in general
arises and takes form; we have still to trace the prehistoric* origins of
our own particular civilization. We wish now to inquire briefly— for this
is a field that only borders upon our purpose— by what steps man, before
history, prepared for the civilizations of history: how the man of the
jungle or the cave became an Egyptian architect, a Babylonian astronomer,
a Hebrew prophet, a Persian governor, a Greek poet, a Roman engineer,
a Hindu saint, a Japanese artist, and a Chinese sage. We must pass from
anthropology through archeology to history.
All over the earth seekers are digging into the earth: some for gold, some
for silver, some for iron, some for coal; many of them for knowledge.
What strange busyness of men exhuming paleolithic tools from the banks
of the Somme, studying with strained necks the vivid paintings on the
ceilings of prehistoric caves, unearthing antique skulls at Chou Kou Tien,
revealing the buried cities of Mohenjo-daro or Yucatan, carrying debris
in basket-caravans out of curse-ridden Egyptian tombs, lifting out of the
dust the palaces of Minos and Priam, uncovering the ruins of Persepolis,
burrowing into the soil of Africa for some remnant of Carthage, recaptur-
ing from the jungle the majestic temples of Angkor! In 1839 Jacques
Boucher de Perthes found the first Stone Age flints at Abbeville, in France;
•This word will be used as applying to all ages before historical records.
90
Geological Divisioial
Period Epoch Stagt*y
Hypothetical
AgeB.C.
ist Interg
2nd Intel
1,000,000
475,000
300,000
125,000
r
3rd Inter
100,000
g 11
1 \*?
O ^
4th Ice^
Postglac
75,000
40,000
25,000
20,000
l6,OOO
10,000
7,000
5,000
Holoccne
("Wholly R»
4,500
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 91
for nine years the world laughed at him as a dupe. In 1872 Schliemann,
with his own money, almost with his own hands, unearthed the young-
est of the many cities of Troy; but all the world smiled incredulously.
Never has any century been so interested in history as that which followed
the voyage of young Champollion with young Napoleon to Egypt ( 1 796) ;
Napoleon returned empty-handed, but Champollion came back with all
Egypt, past and current, in his grasp. Every generation since has discov-
ered new civilizations or cultures, and has pushed farther and farther back
the frontier of man's knowledge of his development. There arc not many
things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this rest-
less and reckless passion to understand.
1. Men of the Old Stone Age
The geological background— Paleolithic types
Immense volumes have been written to expound our knowledge, and
conceal our ignorance, of primitive man. We leave to other imaginative
sciences the task of describing the men of the Old and the New Stone
Age; our concern is to trace the contributions of these "paleolithic" and
"neolithic" cultures to our contemporary life.
The picture we must form as background to the story is of an earth con-
siderably different from that which tolerates us transiently today: an earth
presumably shivering with the intermittent glaciations that made our now
temperate zones arctic for thousands of years, and piled up masses of rock
like the Himalayas, the Alps and the Pyrenees before the plough of the ad-
vancing ice.* If we accept the precarious theories of contemporary science,
the creature who became man by learning to speak was one of the adaptable
species that survived from those frozen centuries. In the Interglacial Stages,
while the ice was retreating (and, for all we know, long before that), this
strange organism discovered fire, developed the an of fashioning stone and
bone into weapons and tools, and thereby paved the way to civilization.
* Current geological theory places the First Ice Age about 500,000 B.C.; the First Inter-
glacial Stage about 475,000 to 400,000 B.C.; the Second Ice Age about 400,000 B.C.; the
Second Interglacial Stage about 375,000 to 175,000 B.C.; the Third Ice Age about 175,000
B.C.; the Third Interglacial Stage about 150,000 to 50,000 B.C.; the Fourth (and latest) Ice
Age about 50,000 to 25,000 B.C.* We arc now in the Postglacial Stage, whose date of
termination has not been accurately calculated. These and other details have been
arranged more visibly in the table at the head of this chapter.
92 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VI
Various remains have been found which—subject to later correction— are
attributed to this prehistoric man. In 1929 a young Chinese paleontologist,
W. C. Pei, discovered in a cave at Chou Kou Tien, some thirty-seven miles
from Peiping, a skull adjudged to be human by such experts as the Abbe
Breuil and G. Elliot Smith. Near the skull were traces of fire, and stones
obviously worked into tools; but mingled with these signs of human agency
were the bones of animals ascribed by common consent to the Early Pleisto-
cene Epoch, a million years ago.8 This Peking skull is by common opinion
the oldest human fossil known to us; and the tools found with it are the
first human artefacts in history. At Piltdown, in Sussex, England, Dawson and
Woodward found in 1911 some possibly human fragments now known as
"Piltdown Man," or Eoanthropus (Dawn Man); the dates assigned to it
range spaciously from 1,000,000 to 125,000 B.C. Similar uncertainties attach to
the skull and thigh-bones found in Java in 1891, and the jaw-bone found near
Heidelberg in 1907. The earliest unmistakably human fossils were discovered
at Neanderthal, near Diisseldorf, Germany, in 1857; they date apparently
from 40,000 B.C., and so resemble human remains unearthed in Belgium,
France and Spain, and even on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, that a whole
race of "Neanderthal Men" has been pictured as possessing Europe some
forty millenniums before our era. They were short, but they had a cranial ca-
pacity of 1600 cubic centimeters— which is 200 more than ours.4
These ancient inhabitants of Europe seem to have been displaced, some
20,000 B.C., by a new race, named Cro-Magnon, from the discovery of its
relics (1868) in a grotto of that name in the Dordogne region of southern
France. Abundant remains of like type and age have been exhumed at
various points in France, Switzerland, Germany and Wales. They indicate a
people of magnificent vigor and stature, ranging from five feet ten inches to
six feet four inches in height, and having a skull capacity of 1590 to 1715
cubic centimeters." Like the Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon men are known to
us as "cave-men," because their remains are found in caves; but there is no
proof that these were their sole dwelling-place; it may be again but a jest
of time that only those of them who lived in caves, or died in them, have
transmitted their bones to archeologists. According to present theory this
splendid race came from central Asia through Africa into Europe by land-
bridges presumed to have then connected Africa with Italy and Spain.8 The
distribution of their fossils suggests that they fought for many decades, per-
haps centuries, a war with the Neanderthals for the possession of Europe; so
old is the conflict between Germany and France. At all events, Neanderthal
Man disappeared; Cro-Magnon Man survived, became the chief progeni-
tor of the modern western European, and laid the bases of that civilization
which we inherit today.
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 93
The cultural remains of these and other European types of the Old Stone
Age have been classified into seven main groups, according to the location
of the earliest or principal finds in France. All are characterized by the use
of unpolished stone implements. The first three took form in the precarious
interval between the third and fourth glaciations.
I. The Pre-Chellean Culture or Industry, dating some 125,000
B.C.: most of the flints found in this low layer give little evidence
of fashioning, and appear to have been used (if at all) as nature
provided them; but the presence of many stones of a shape to fit
the fist, and in some degree flaked and pointed, gives to Pre-
Chellean man the presumptive honor of having made the first
known tool of European man— the coup-de-poing, or "blow-of-
the-fist" stone.
II. The Chellean Culture, ca. 100,000 B.C., improved this tool
by roughly flaking it on both sides, pointing it into the shape of
an almond, and fitting it better to the hand.
III. The Acheulean Culture, about 75,000 B.C., left an abun-
dance of remains in Europe, Greenland, the United States, Canada,
Mexico, Africa, the Near East, India, and China; it not only
brought the coup-de-poing to greater symmetry and point, but it
produced a vast variety of special tools— hammers, anvils, scrapers,
planes, arrow-heads, spear-heads, and knives; already one sees a
picture of busy human industry.
IV. The Mousterian Culture is found on all continents, in espe-
cial association with the remains of Neanderthal Man, about 40,000
B.C. Among these flints the coup-de-poing is comparatively rare,
as something already ancient and superseded. The implements
were formed from a large single flake, lighter, sharper and shape-
lier than before, and by skilful hands with a long-established tra-
dition of artisanship. Higher in the Pleistocene strata of southern
France appear the remains of
V. The Aurignacian Culture, ca. 25,000 B.C., the first of the
postglacial industries, and the first known culture of Cro-Magnon
Man. Bone tools— pins, anvils, polishers, etc.— were now added to
those of stone; and art appeared in the form of crude engravings
on the rocks, or simple figurines in high relief, mostly of nude
women/ At a higher stage of Cro-Magnon development
94 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VI
VI. The Solutrean Culture appears ca. 20,000 B.C., in France,
Spain, Czechoslovakia and Poland: points, planes, drills, saws,
javelins and spears were added to the tools and weapons of Aurig-
nacian days; slim, sharp needles were made of bone, many imple-
ments were carved out of reindeer horn, and the reindeer's antlers
were engraved occasionally with animal figures appreciably supe-
rior to Aurignacian art. Finally, at the peak of Cro-Magnon
growth,
VII. The Magdalenian Culture appears throughout Europe
about 16,000 B.C.; in industry it was characterized by a large assort-
ment of delicate utensils in ivory, bone and horn, culminating in
humble but perfect needles and pins; in art it was the age of the
Altamira drawings, the most perfect and subtle accomplishment of
Cro-Magnon Man.
Through these cultures of the Old Stone Age prehistoric man laid the
bases of those handicrafts which were to remain part of the European
heritage until the Industrial Revolution. Their transmission to the classic and
modern civilizations was made easier by the wide spread of paleolithic in-
dustries. The skull and cave-painting found in Rhodesia in 1921, the flints dis-
covered in Egypt by De Morgan in 1896, the paleolithic finds of Seton-Karr
in Somaliland, the Old Stone Age deposits in the basin of the Fayum,* and
the Still Bay Culture of South Africa indicate that the Dark Continent went
through approximately the same prehistoric periods of development in the art
of flaking stone as those which we have outlined in Europe;8 perhaps, indeed,
the quasi-Aurignacian remains in Tunis and Algiers strengthen the hypothesis
of an African origin or stopping-point for the Cro-Magnon race, and there-
fore for European man.' Paleolithic implements have been dug up in Syria,
India, China, Siberia, and other sections of Asia;10 Andrews and his Jesuit
predecessors came upon them in Mongolia;" Neanderthal skeletons and Mous-
terian-Aurignacian flints have been exhumed in great abundance in Palestine;
and we have seen how the oldest known human remains and implements have
lately been unearthed near Peiping. Bone tools have been discovered in
Nebraska which some patriotic authorities would place at 500,000 B.C.; arrow-
heads have been found in Oklahoma and New Mexico which their finders
assure us were made in 350,000 B.C. So vast was the bridge by which pre-
historic transmitted the foundations of civilization to historic man.
* An oasis west of the Middle Nile.
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 95
2. Arts of the Old Stone Age
Tools— Fire— Painting— Sculpture
If now we sum up the implements fashioned by paleolithic man we shall
gain a clearer idea of his life than by giving loose rein to our fancy. It was
natural that a stone in the fist should be the first tool; many an animal
could have taught that to man. So the coup-de-pomg—z rock sharp at
one end, round at the other to fit the palm of the hand— became for pri-
meval man hammer, axe, chisel, scraper, knife and saw; even to this day
the word hammer means, etymologically, a stone.13 Gradually these spe-
cific tools were differentiated out of the one homogeneous form: holes
were bored to attach a handle; teeth were inserted to make a saw, branches
were tipped with the coup-de-poing to make a pick, an arrow or a spear.
The scraper-stone that had the shape of a shell became a shovel or a hoe;
the rough-surfaced stone became a file; the stone in a sling became a
weapon of war that would survive even classical antiquity. Given bone,
wood and ivory as well as stone, and paleolithic man made himself a
varied assortment of weapons and tools: polishers, mortars, axes, planes,
scrapers, drills, lamps, knives, chisels, choppers, lances, anvils, etchers,
daggers, fish-hooks, harpoons, wedges, awls, pins, and doubtless many
more.14 Every day he stumbled upon new knowledge, and sometimes he
had the wit to develop his chance discoveries into purposeful inventions.
But his great achievement was fire. Darwin has pointed out how the
hot lava of volcanoes might have taught men the art of fire; according to
-flSschylus, Prometheus established it by igniting a narthex stalk in the
burning crater of a volcano on the isle of Lcmnos." Among Neanderthal
remains we find bits of charcoal and charred bones; man-made fire, then,
is at least 40,000 years old. " Cro-Magnon man ground stone bowls to hold
the grease that he burned to give him light: the lamp, therefore, is also of
considerable age. Presumably it was fire that enabled man to meet the
threat of cold from the advancing ice; fire that left him free to sleep on
the earth at night, since animals dreaded the marvel as much as primitive
men worshiped it; fire that conquered the dark and began that lessening of
fear which is one of the golden threads in the not quite golden web of
history; fire that created the old and honorable art of cooking, extending
the diet of man to a thousand foods inedible before; fire that led at last
96 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VI
to the fusing of metals, and the only real advance in technology from
Cro-Magnon days to the Industrial Revolution."
Strange to relate— and as if to illustrate Gautier's lines on robust art
outlasting emperors and states— our clearest relics of paleolithic man are
fragments of his art. Sixty years ago Senor Marcelino de Sautuola came up-
on a large cave on his estate at Altamira, in northern Spain. For thousands of
years the entrance had been hermetically sealed by fallen rocks naturally
cemented with stalagmite deposits. Blasts for new construction accident-
ally opened the entrance. Three years later Sautuola explored the cave,
and noticed some curious markings on the walls. One day his little daugh-
ter accompanied him. Not compelled, like her father, to stoop as she
walked through the cave, she could look up and observe the ceiling. There
she saw, in vague outline, the painting of a great bison, magnificently
colored and drawn. Many other drawings were found on closer exami-
nation of the ceiling and the walls. When, in 1880, Sautuola published
his report on these observations, archeologists greeted him with genial
scepticism. Some did him the honor of going to inspect the drawings,
only to pronounce them the forgery of a hoaxer. For thirty years this
quite reasonable incredulity persisted. Then the discovery of other draw-
ings in caves generally conceded to be prehistoric (from their contents of
unpolished flint tools, and polished ivory and bone) confirmed Sautuola's
judgment; but Sautuola now was dead. Geologists came to Altamira and
testified, with the unanimity of hindsight, that the stalagmite coating on
many of the drawings was a paleolithic deposit." General opinion now
places these Altamira drawings— and the greater portion of extant pre-
historic art— in the Magdalenian culture, some 1 6,000 B.C." Paintings slight-
ly later in time, but still of the Old Stone Age, have been found in many
caves of France.*
Most often the subjects of these drawings are animals— reindeers, mam-
moths, horses, boars, bears, etc.; these, presumably, were dietetic luxuries,
and therefore favorite objects of the chase. Sometimes the animals are
transfixed with arrows; these, in the view of Frazer and Reinach, were
intended as magic images that would bring the animal under the power,
and into the stomach, of the artist or the hunter."0 Conceivably they were
just plain art, drawn with the pure joy of esthetic creation; the crudest
* Combarelles, Les Eyzies, Font de Gaume, etc.
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 97
representation should have sufficed the purposes of magic, whereas these
paintings are often of such delicacy, power and skill as to suggest the un-
happy thought that art, in this field at least, has not advanced much in the
long course of human history. Here is life, action, nobility, conveyed over-
whelmingly with one brave line or two; here a single stroke (or is it that
the others have faded? ) creates a living, charging beast. Will Leonardo's
Last Supper, or El Greco's Assumption, bear up as well as these Cro-
Magnon paintings after twenty thousand years?
Painting is a sophisticated art, presuming many centuries of mental and
technical development. If we may accept current theory (which it is always a
perilous thing to do), painting developed from statuary, by a passage from
carving in the round to bas-relief and thence to mere outline and coloring;
painting is sculpture minus a dimension. The intermediate prehistoric art is
well represented by an astonishingly vivid bas-relief of an archer (or a spear-
man) on the Aurignacian cliffs at Laussel in France.21 In a cave in Ariegc,
France, Louis Begouen discovered, among other Magdalenian relics, several
ornamental handles carved out of reindeer antlers; one of these is of mature
and excellent workmanship, as if the art had already generations of tradition
and development behind it. Throughout the prehistoric Mediterranean-
Egypt, Crete, Italy, France and Spain— countless figures of fat little women
are found, which indicate either a worship of motherhood or an African
conception of beauty. Stone statues of a wild horse, a reindeer and a mam-
moth have been unearthed in Czechoslovakia, among remains uncertainly
ascribed to 30,000 B.C.*
The whole interpretation of history as progress falters when we con-
sider that these statues, bas-reliefs and paintings, numerous though they
are, may be but an infinitesimal fraction of the art that expressed or adorned
the life of primeval man. What remains is found in caves, where the
elements were in some measure kept at bay; it does not follow that pre-
historic men were artists only when they were in caves. They may have
carved as sedulously and ubiquitously as the Japanese, and may have
fashioned statuary as abundantly as the Greeks; they may have painted
not only the rocks in their caverns, but textiles, wood, everything—not
excepting themselves. They may have created masterpieces far superior to
the fragments that survive. In one grotto a tube was discovered, made from
the bones of a reindeer, and filled with pigment;28 in another a stone palette
98 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VI
was picked up still thick with red ochre paint despite the transit of two
hundred centuries.*4 Apparently the arts were highly developed and
widely practised eighteen thousand years ago. Perhaps there was a class
of professional artists among paleolithic men; perhaps there were Bohem-
ians starving in the less respectable caves, denouncing the commercial bour-
geoisie, plotting the death of academies, and forging antiques.
II. NEOLITHIC CULTURE
The Kitchen-Middens — The Lake-Dwellers — The coming of
agriculture — The taming of animals — Technology— Neo-
lithic weaving— pottery— building— transport— religion—
science — Summary of the prehistoric preparation
for civilization
At various times in the last one hundred years great heaps of seemingly
prehistoric refuse have been found, in France, Sardinia, Portugal, Brazil, Japan
and Manchuria, but above all in Denmark, where they received that queer
name of Kitchen-Middens (Kjokken-moddinger) by which such ancient
messes are now generally known. These rubbish heaps are composed of
shells, especially of oysters, mussels and periwinkles; of the bones of various
land and marine animals; of tools and weapons of horn, bone and unpolished
stone; and of mineral remains like charcoal, ashes and broken pottery. These
unprepossessing relics are apparently signs of a culture formed about the
eighth millennium before Christ— later than the true paleolithic, and yet not
properly neolithic, because not yet arrived at the use of polished stone. We
know hardly anything of the men who left these remains, except that they
had a certain catholic taste. Along with the slightly older culture of the Mas-
d'Azil, in France, the Middens represent a "mesolithic" (middle-stone) or
transition period between the paleolithic and the neolithic age.
In the year 1854, the winter being unusually dry, the level of the Swiss
lakes sank, and revealed another epoch in prehistory. At some two hun-
dred localities on these lakes piles were found which had stood in place
under the water for from thirty to seventy centuries. The piles were so
arranged as to indicate that small villages had been built upon them, per-
haps for isolation or defense; each was connected with the land only by a
narrow bridge, whose foundations, in some cases, were still in place; here
and there even the framework of the houses had survived the patient play
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 99
of the waters.* Amid these ruins were tools of bone and polished stone
which became for archeologists the distinguishing mark of the New Stone
Age that flourished some 10,000 B.C. in Asia, and some 5000 B.C. in Europe.8*
Akin to these remains are the gigantic tumuli left in the valleys of the
Mississippi and its tributaries by the strange race that we call the Mound-
Builders, and of which we know nothing except that in these mounds,
shaped in the form of altars, geometric figures, or totem animals, are found
objects of stone, shell, bone and beaten metal which place these mysterious
men at the end of the neolithic period.
If from such remains we attempt to patch together some picture of the
New Stone Age, we find at once a startling innovation— agriculture. In one
sense all human history hinges upon two revolutions: the neolithic pas-
sage from hunting to agriculture, and the modern passage from agriculture
to industry; no other revolutions have been quite as real or basic as these.
The remains show that the Lake-Dwellers ate wheat, millet, rye, barley
and oats, besides one hundred and twenty kinds of fruit and many varie-
ties of nut." No ploughs have been found in these ruins, probably because
the first ploughshares were of wood— some strong tree-trunk and branch
fitted with a flint edge; but a neolithic rock-carving unmistakably shows
a peasant guiding a plough drawn by two oxen.30 This marks the appear-
ance of one of the epochal inventions of history. Before agriculture the
earth could have supported (in the rash estimate of Sir Arthur Keith) only
some twenty million men, and the lives of these were shortened by the
mortality of the chase and war;81 now began that multiplication of man-
kind which definitely confirmed man's mastery of the planet.
Meanwhile the men of the New Stone Age were establishing another of
the foundations of civilization: the domestication and breeding of animals.
Doubtless this was a long process, probably antedating the neolithic
period. A certain natural sociability may have contributed to the associa-
tion of man and animal, as we may still see in the delight that primitive
people take in taming wild beasts, and in filling their huts with monkeys,
parrots and similar companions.88 The oldest bones in the neolithic remains
* Remains of similar lake dwellings have been found in France, Italy, Scotland, Russia,
North America, India, and elsewhere. Such villages still exist in Borneo, Sumatra, New
Guinea, etc.98 Venezuela owes its name (Little Venice) to the fact that when Alonso de
Ojeda discovered it for Europe (1499) he found the natives living in pile-dwellings on
Lake Maracaibo."
IOO
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VI
(ca. 8000 B.C.) are those of the dog—the most ancient and honorable com-
panion of the human race. A little later (ca. 6000 B.C.) came the goat, the
sheep, the pig and the ox.88 Finally the horse, which to paleolithic man
had been, if we may judge from the cave drawings, merely a beast of prey,
was taken into camp, tamed, and turned into a beloved slave;84 in a hundred
ways he was now put to work to increase the leisure, the wealth, and the
power of man. The new lord of the earth began to replenish his food-
supply by breeding as well as hunting; and perhaps he learned, in this same
neolithic age, to use cow's milk as food.
Neolithic inventors slowly improved and extended the tool-chest and
armory of man. Here among the remains are pulleys, levers, grindstones,
awls, pincers, axes, hoes, ladders, chisels, spindles, looms, sickles, saws,
fish-hooks, skates, needles, brooches and pins.85 Here, above all, is the
wheel, another fundamental invention of mankind, one of the modest
essentials of industry and civilization; already in this New Stone Age it
was developed into disc and spoked varieties. Stones of every sort— even
obdurate diorite and obsidian—were ground, bored, and finished into a
polished form. Flints were mined on a large scale. In the ruins of a neo-
lithic mine at Brandon, England, eight worn picks of deerhorn were found,
on whose dusty surfaces were the finger-prints of the workmen who had
laid down those tools ten thousand years ago. In Belgium the skeleton of
such a New Stone Age miner, who had been crushed by falling rock, was
discovered with his deerhorn pick still clasped in his hands;" across a hun-
dred centuries we feel him as one of us, and share in weak imagination his
terror and agony. Through how many bitter millenniums men have been
tearing out of the bowels of the earth the mineral bases of civilization!
Having made needles and pins man began to weave; or, beginning to weave,
he was moved to make needles and pins. No longer content to clothe himself
with the furs and hides of beasts, he wove the wool of his sheep and the
fibres found in the plants into garments from which came the robe of the
Hindu, the toga of the Greek, the skirt of the Egyptian, and all the fascinat-
ing gamut of human dress. Dyes were mixed from the juices of plants or the
minerals of the earth, and garments were stained with colors into luxuries for
kings. At first men seem to have plaited textiles as they plaited straw, by
interlacing one fibre with another; then they pierced holes into animal
skins, and bound the skins with coarse fibres passing through the holes, as
with the corsets of yesterday and the shoes of today; gradually the fibres
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION IOI
were refined into thread, and sewing became one of the major arts of woman-
kind. The stone distaffs and spindles among the neolithic ruins reveal one of
the great origins of human industry. Even mirrors are found in these re-
mains;*7 everything was ready for civilization.
No pottery has been discovered in the earlier paleolithic graves; fragments
of it appear in the remains of the Magdalenian culture in Belgium,88 but it
is only in the mesolithic Age of the Kitchen-Middens that we find any de-
veloped use of earthenware. The origin of the art, of course, is unknown.
Perhaps some observant primitive noticed that the trough made by his foot
in clay held water with little seepage;89 perhaps some accidental baking of a
piece of wet clay by an adjoining fire gave him the hint that fertilized inven-
tion, and revealed to him the possibilities of a material so abounding in quan-
tity, so pliable to the hand, and so easy to harden with fire or the sun. Doubt-
less he had for thousands of years carried his food and drink in such natural
containers as gourds and coconuts and the shells of the sea; then he had made
himself cups and ladles of wood or stone, and baskets and hampers of rushes
or straw; now he made lasting vessels of baked clay, and created another of
the major industries of mankind. So far as the remains indicate, neolithic
man did not know the potter's wheel; but with his own hands he fashioned
clay into forms of beauty as well as use, decorated it with simple designs,40
and made pottery, almost at the outset, not only an industry but an art.
Here, too, we find the first evidences of another major industry— building.
Paleolithic man left no known trace of any other home than the cave. But
in the neolithic remains we find such building devices as the ladder, the
pulley, the lever, and the hinge.*1 The Lake-Dwellers were skilful carpenters,
fastening beam to pile with sturdy wooden pins, or mortising them head to
head, or strengthening them with crossbeams notched into their sides. The
floors were of clay, the walls of wattle-work coated with clay, the roofs of
bark, straw, rushes or reeds. With the aid of the pulley and the wheel,
building materials were carried from place to place, and great stone founda-
tions were laid for villages. Transport, too, became an industry: canoes were
built, and must have made the lakes live with traffic; trade was carried
on over mountains and between distant continents.42 Amber, diorite, jadeite
and obsidian were imported into Europe from afar.48 Similar words, letters,
myths, pottery and designs betray the cultural contacts of diverse groups of
prehistoric men.44
Outside of pottery the New Stone Age has left us no art, nothing to com-
pare with the painting and statuary of paleolithic man. Here and there
among the scenes of neolithic life from England to China we find circular
heaps of stone called dolmens, upright monoliths called menhirs, and gigantic
102 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VI
cromlechs— stone structures of unknown purpose— like those at Stonehenge
or in Morbihan. Probably we shall never know the meaning or function of
these megaliths; presumably they are the remains of altars and temples." For
neolithic man doubtless had religions, myths with which to dramatize the
daily tragedy and victory of the sun, the death and resurrection of the soil,
and the strange earthly influences of the moon; we cannot understand the
historic faiths unless we postulate such prehistoric origins.46 Perhaps the
arrangement of the stones was determined by astronomic considerations, and
suggests, as Schneider thinks, an acquaintance with the calendar.47 Some
scientific knowledge was present, for certain neolithic skulls give evidence of
trephining; and a few skeletons reveal limbs apparently broken and reset.48
We cannot properly estimate the achievements of prehistoric men, for
we must guard against describing their life with imagination that tran-
scends the evidence, while on the other hand we suspect that time has
destroyed remains that would have narrowed the gap between primeval
and modern man. Even so, the surviving record of Stone Age advances is
impressive enough: paleolithic tools, fire, and art; neolithic agriculture,
animal breeding, weaving, pottery, building, transport, and medicine, and
the definite domination and wider peopling of the earth by the human
race. All the bases had been laid; everything had been prepared for the
historic civilizations except (perhaps) metals, writing and the state. Let
men find a way to record their thoughts and achievements, and thereby
transmit them more securely across the generations, and civilization would
begin.
III. THE TRANSITION TO HISTORY
1. The Coming of Metals
Copper — Bronze — Iron
When did the use of metals come to man, and how? Again we do not
know; we merely surmise that it came by accident, and we presume, from
the absence of earlier remains, that it began towards the end of the Neolithic
Age. Dating this end about 4000 B.C., we have a perspective in which the
Age of Metals (and of writing and civilization) is a mere six thousand years
appended to an Age of Stone lasting at least forty thousand years, and an
Age of Man lasting* a million years. So young is the subject of our history.
The oldest known metal to be adapted to human use was copper. We find
it in a Lake-Dwelling at Robenhausen, Switzerland, ca. 6000 B.C.;4* in pre-
* If we accept "Peking Man" as early Pleistocene.
CHAP.Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 103
historic Mesopotamia ca. 4500 B.C.; in the Badarian graves of Egypt towards
4000 B.C.; in the ruins of Ur ca. 3100 B.C.; and in the relics of the North
American Mound-Builders at an unknown age.80 The Age of Metals began
not with their discovery, but with their transformation to human purpose by
fire and working. Metallurgists believe that the first fusing of copper out
of its stony ore came by haphazard when a primeval camp fire melted the
copper lurking in the rocks that enclosed the flames; such an event has often
been seen at primitive camp fires in our own day. Possibly this was the hint
which, many times repeated, led early man, so long content with refractory
stone, to seek in this malleable metal a substance more easily fashioned into
durable weapons and tools.61 Presumably the metal was first used as it came
from the profuse but careless hand of nature— sometimes nearly pure, most
often grossly alloyed. Much later, doubtless— apparently about 3500 B.C. in
the region around the Eastern Mediterranean— men discovered the art of
smelting, of extracting metals from their ores. Then, towards 1500 B.C. (as
we may judge from bas-reliefs on the tomb of Rekh-mara in Egypt), they
proceeded to cast metal: dropping the molten copper into a clay or sand
receptacle, they let it cool into some desired form like a spcar-hcad or an
axe.M That process, once discovered, was applied to a great variety of metals,
and provided man with those doughty elements that were to build his great-
est industries, and give him his conquest of the earth, the sea, and the air.
Perhaps it was because the Eastern Mediterranean lands were rich in copper
that vigorous new cultures arose, in the fourth millennium B.C., in Elam, Meso-
potamia and Egypt, and spread thence in all directions to transform the
world.58
But copper by itself was soft, admirably pliable for some purposes (what
would our electrified age do without it?), but too weak for the heavier tasks
of peace and war; an alloy was needed to harden it. Though nature sug-
gested many, and often gave man copper already mixed and hardened with
tin or zinc— forming, therefore, ready-made bronze or brass— he may have
dallied for centuries before taking the next step: the deliberate fusing of
metal with metal to make compounds more suited to his needs. The dis-
covery is at least five thousand years old, for bronze is found in Cretan re-
mains of 3000 B.C., in Egyptian remains of 2800 B.C., and in the second city
of Troy 2000 B.C.M We can no longer speak strictly of an "Age of Bronze,"
for the metal came to different peoples at diverse epochs, and the term
would therefore be without chronological meaning;" furthermore, some cul-
tures—like those of Finland, northern Russia, Polynesia, central Africa, south-
ern India, North America, Australia and Japan— passed over the Bronze Age
directly from stone to iron;"" and in those cultures where bronze appears it
seems to have had a subordinate place as a luxury of priests, aristocrats and
104 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VI
kings, while commoners had still to be content with stone.87 Even the terms
"Old Stone Age" and "New Stone Age" are precariously relative, and de-
scribe conditions rather than times; to this day many primitive peoples (e.g.,
the Eskimos and the Polynesian Islanders) remain in the Age of Stone, know-
ing iron only as a delicacy brought to them by explorers. Captain Cook
bought several pigs for a sixpenny nail when he landed in New Zealand in
1778; and another traveler described the inhabitants of Dog Island as "covet-
ous chiefly of iron, so as to want to take the nails out of the ship."08
Bronze is strong and durable, but the copper and tin which were needed
to make it were not available in such convenient quantities and locations as
to provide man with the best material for industry and war. Sooner or later
iron had to come; and it is one of the anomalies of history that, being so
abundant, it did not appear at least as early as copper and bronze. Men may
have begun the art by making weapons out of meteoric iron as the Mound-
Builders seem to have done, and as some primitive peoples do to this day;
then, perhaps, they melted it from the ore by fire, and hammered it into
wrought iron. Fragments of apparently meteoric iron have been found in
predynastic Egyptian tombs; and Babylonian inscriptions mention iron as a
costly rarity in Hammurabi's capital (2100 B.C.). An iron foundry perhaps
four thousand years old has been discovered in Northern Rhodesia; mining in
South Africa is no modern invention. The oldest wrought iron known is a
group of knives found at Gerar, in Palestine, and dated by Petrie about
1350 B.C. A century later the metal appears in Egypt, in the reign of the
great Rameses II; still another century and it is found in the ^Egean. In
Western Europe it turns up first at Hallstatt, Austria, ca. 900 B.C., and in
the La Tine industry in Switzerland ca. 500 B.C. It entered India with Alex-
ander, America with Columbus, Oceania with Cook.80 In this leisurely way,
century by century, iron has gone about its rough conquest of the earth.
2. Writing
Its possible ceramic origins — The "Mediterranean Signary" —
Hieroglyphics — Alphabets
But by far the most important step in the passage to civilization was
writing. Bits of pottery from neolithic remains show, in some cases, painted
lines which several students have interpreted as signs.80 This is doubtful
enough; but it is possible that writing, in the broad sense of graphic sym-
bols of specific thoughts, began with marks impressed by nails or fingers
upon the still soft clay to adorn or identify pottery. In the earliest Sumer-
ian hieroglyphics the pictograph for bird bears a suggestive resemblance
CHAP. VI ) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 105
to the bird decorations on the oldest pottery at Susa, in Elam; and the
earliest pictograph for grain is taken directly from the geometrical grain-
decoration of Susan and Sumerian vases. The linear script of Sumeria, on
its first appearance (ca. 3600 B.C.), is apparently an abbreviated form of
the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon the primitive pottery of
lower Mesopotamia and Elam."0* Writing, like painting and sculpture, is
probably in its origin a ceramic art; it began as a form of etching and
drawing, and the same clay that gave vases to the potter, figures to the
sculptor and bricks to the builder, supplied writing materials to the scribe.
From such a beginning to the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia would
be an intelligible and logical development.
The oldest graphic symbols known to us are those found by Flinders
Petrie on shards, vases and stones discovered in the prehistoric tombs of
Egypt, Spain and the Near East, to which, with his usual generosity, he
attributes an age of seven thousand years. This "Mediterranean Signary"
numbered some three hundred signs; most of them were the same in all
localities, indicating commercial bonds from one end of the Mediterranean to
the other as far back as 5000 B.C. They were not pictures but chiefly mer-
cantile symbols— marks of property, quantity, or other business memoranda;
the berated bourgeoisie may take consolation in the thought that literature
originated in bills of lading. The signs were not letters, since they repre-
sented entire words or ideas; but many of them were astonishingly like
letters of the "Phoenician" alphabet. Petrie concludes that "a wide body of
signs had been gradually brought into use in primitive times for various pur-
poses. These were interchanged by trade, and spread from land to land,
. . . until a couple of dozen signs triumphed and became common property
to a group of trading communities, while the local survivals of other forms
were gradually extinguished in isolated seclusion."61 That this signary was the
source of the alphabet is an interesting theory, which Professor Petrie has the
distinction of holding alone."
Whatever may have been the development of these early commercial
symbols, there grew up alongside them a form of writing which was a
branch of drawing and painting, and conveyed connected thought by
pictures. Rocks near Lake Superior still bear remains of the crude pictures
with which the American Indians proudly narrated for posterity, or more
probably for their associates, the story of their crossing the mighty lake.8*
A similar evolution of drawing into writing seems to have taken place
throughout the Mediterranean world at the end of the Neolithic Age.
106 % THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VI
Certainly by 3600 B.C., and probably long before that, Elam, Sumeria and
Egypt had developed a system of thought-pictures, called hieroglyphics
because practised chiefly by the priests.04 A similar system appeared in
Crete ca. 2500 B.C. We shall see later how these hieroglyphics, represent-
ing thoughts, were, by the corruption of use, schematized and convention-
alized into syllabaries— i.e., collections of signs indicating syllables; and how
at last signs were used to indicate not the whole syllable but its initial
sound, and therefore became letters. Such alphabetic writing probably
dates back to 3000 B.C. in Egypt; in Crete it appears ca. 1600 B.C." The
Phoenicians did not create the alphabet, they marketed it; taking it appar-
ently from Egypt and Crete,00 they imported it piecemeal to Tyre, Sidon
and Byblos, and exported it to every city on the Mediterranean; they were
the middlemen, not the producers, of the alphabet. By the time of Homer
the Greeks were taking over this Phoenician— or the allied Aramaic— alpha-
bet, and were calling it by the Semitic names of the first two letters
(Alpha, Beta; Hebrew Aleph, Beth).m
Writing seems to be a product and convenience of commerce; here
again culture may see how much it owes to trade. When the priests de-
vised a system of pictures with which to write their magical, ceremonial
and medical formulas, the secular and clerical strains in history, usually
in conflict, merged for a moment to produce the greatest human invention
since the coming of speech. The development of writing almost created
civilization by providing a means for the recording and transmission of
knowledge, the accumulation of science, the growth of literature, and the
spread of peace and order among varied but communicating tribes brought
by one language under a single state. The earliest appearance of writing
marks that ever-receding point at which history begins.
3. Lost Civilizations
Polynesia — "Atlantis"
In approaching now the history of civilized nations we must note that
not only shall we be selecting a mere fraction of each culture for our
study, but we shall be describing perhaps a minority of the civilizations that
have probably existed on the earth. We cannot entirely ignore the legends,
current throughout history, of civilizations once great and cultured, de-
stroyed by some catastrophe of nature or war, and leaving not a wrack
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION IOJ
behind; our recent exhuming of the civilizations of Crete, Sumeria and
Yucatan indicates how true such tales may be.
The Pacific contains the ruins of at least one of these lost civiliza-
tions. The gigantic statuary of Easter Island, the Polynesian tradition of
powerful nations and heroic warriors once ennobling Samoa and Tahiti,
the artistic ability and poetic sensitivity of their present inhabitants, indi-
cate a glory departed, a people not rising to civilization but fallen from
a high estate. And in the Atlantic, from Iceland to the South Pole, the
raised central bed of the oceans* lends some support to the legend so
fascinatingly transmitted to us by Plato,88 of a civilization that once flour-
ished on an island continent between Europe and Asia, and was suddenly
lost when a geological convulsion swallowed that continent into the sea.
Schliemann, the resurrector of Troy, believed that Atlantis had served as
a mediating link between the cultures of Europe and Yucatan, and that
Egyptian civilization had been brought from Atlantis.* Perhaps America
itself was Atlantis, and some pre-Mayan culture may have been in touch
with Africa and Europe in neolithic times. Possibly every discovery is a
rediscovery.
Certainly it is probable, as Aristotle thought, that many civilizations
came, made great inventions and luxuries, were destroyed, and lapsed from
human memory. History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more
of the past is lost than has been saved. We console ourselves with the
thought that as the individual memory must forget the greater part of
experience in order to be sane, so the race has preserved in its heritage
only the most vivid and impressive- or is it only the best-recorded?— of
its cultural experiments. Even if that racial heritage were but one tenth
as rich as it is, no one could possibly absorb it all. We shall find the story
full enough.
4. Cradles of Civilization
Central Asia — Anau — Lines of Dispersion
It is fitting that this chapter of unanswerable questions should end with
the query, "Where did civilization begin?"— which is also unanswerable.
If we may trust the geologists, who deal with prehistoric mists as airy as
* A submarine plateau, from 2000 to 3000 metres below the surface, runs north and
south through the mid-Atlantic, surrounded on both sides by "deeps" of 5000 to 6000
metres.
108 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VI
any metaphysics, the arid regions of central Asia were once moist and tem-
perate, nourished with great lakes and abundant streams.70 The recession
of the last ice wave slowly dried up this area, until the rainfall was insuffi-
cient to support towns and states. City after city was abandoned as men
fled west and east, north and south, in search of water; half buried in the
desert lie ruined cities like Bactra, which must have held a teeming popu-
lation within its twenty-two miles of circumference. As late as 1868 some
80,000 inhabitants of western Turkestan were forced to migrate because
their district was being inundated by the moving sand.71 There are many
who believe that these now dying regions saw the first substantial develop-
ment of that vague complex of order and provision, manners and morals,
comfort and culture, which constitutes civilization.71
In 1907 Pumpelly unearthed at Anau, in southern Turkestan, pottery
and other remains of a culture which he has ascribed to 9000 B.C., with a
possible exaggeration of four thousand years.78 Here we find the cultiva-
tion of wheat, barley and millet, the use of copper, the domestication of
animals, and the ornamentation of pottery in styles so conventionalized as
to suggest an artistic background and tradition of many centuries.74 Ap-
parently the culture of Turkestan was already very old in 5000 B.C. Per-
haps it had historians who delved into its past in a vain search for the
origins of civilization, and philosophers who eloquently mourned the de-
generation of a dying race.
From this center, if we may imagine where we cannot know, a people
driven by a rainless sky and betrayed by a desiccated earth migrated in
three directions, bringing their arts and civilization with them. The arts, if
not the race, reached eastward to China, Manchuria and North America;
southward to northern India; westward to Elam, Sumeria, Egypt, even to
Italy and Spain." At Susa, in ancient Elam (modern Persia), remains have
been found so similar in type to those at Anau that the re-creative imagina-
tion is almost justified in presuming cultural communication between Susa
and Anau at the dawn of civilization (ca. 4000 B.C.).70 A like kinship of
early arts and products suggests a like relationship and continuity be-
tween prehistoric Mesopotamia and Egypt.
We cannot be sure which of these cultures came first, and it does not
much matter; they were in essence of one family and one type. If we
violate honored precedents here and place Elam and Sumeria before Egypt,
it is from no vainglory of unconventional innovation, but rather because
CHAP. Vl) THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION 109
the age of these Asiatic civilizations, compared with those of Africa and
Europe, grows as our knowledge of them deepens. As the spades of
archeology, after a century of victorious inquiry along the Nile, pass
across Suez into Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia, it becomes
more probable with every year of accumulating research that it was the
rich delta of Mesopotamia's rivers that saw the earliest known scenes in
the historic drama of civilization.
BOOK ONE
THE NEAR EAST
"At that time the gods called me, Hammurabi, the
servant whose deeds arc pleasing, .... who helped
his people in time of need, who brought about plenty
and abundance, .... to prevent the strong from op-
pressing the weak, .... to enlighten the land and
further the welfare of the people."
Code of Hammurabi, Prologue.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF NEAR EASTERN HISTORY*
B.c. EGYPT
18000: Nile Paleolithic Culture
i oooo : Nile Neolithic Culture
5000: Nile Bronze Culture
4241: Egyptian Calendar appears (?)
4000: Badarian Culture
3500-2631: A. THE OLD KINGDOM;
3500-3100: I-III Dynasties
3100-2965: IV Dynasty: the Pyramids
3098-3075: Khufu ("Cheops" of Herodotus)
3067-3011: Khafrc ("Chcphren")
3011-2988: Alenkaure ("Alycerinus")
2965-2631: V-VI Dynasties
2738-2644: Pepi II (longest reign known)
The Feudal Age
B.C.
WESTERN ASIA
2631-2212:
2375-1800:
2212-2000:
2212-2192:
2192-2157:
2099-2061:
2061-2013:
1800-1600:
1580-1100:
1580-1322:
1545-1514:
1514-1501:
1501-1479:
1479-1447:
1412-1376:
1400-1360
1380-1362
1360-1350:
1346-1210
1346-1322:
1321-1300.
1300-1233:
1233-1223.
1214-1210*
1205-1100
1204-1172:
1100-947:
40000: Paleolithic Culture in Palestine
9000: Bronze Culture in Turkestan
4500: Civilization in Susa and Kish
3800: Civilization in Crete
3638: III Dynasty of Kish
3600: Civilization in Sumeria
3200: Dynasty of Akshak in Sumeria
3100: Ur-nina, first (?) King of Lagash
3089: IV Dynasty of Kish
2903: King Urukagina reforms Lagash
2897: Lugal-zaggisi conquers Lagash
2872-2817: Sargon I unites Sumcria &
Akkad
2795-2739: Narnm-sin, King of Sumeria &
Akkad
2600 Gudca King of Lagash
2474-2398: Golden Age of Ur; ist code of
laws
2357 Sack of Ur by the Elamites
2169-1926: 1 Babylonian Dynasty
2123-2081: Hammurabi King of Babylon
2117-2094: Hammurabi conquers Sumeria &
El am
1926-1703 II Babylonian Dynasty
1900 I littitc Civilization appears
iSoo: Civilization in Palestine
1746-1169: Kassitc Domination in Babylonia
1716 Rise of Assyria under Shamshi-
Adad II
1650-1220: Jewish Bondage in Egypt (?)
1600-1360: Egyptian Domination of Pales-
tine & Syria
1550: The Civilization of Mitanni
1461: Burra-Buriash I King of Baby-
lonia
: Age of the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence; Revolt of Western Asia against Egypt
A — ,„! — _ — I\T /TI.I — .. — \ 1276: Shalmaneser I unifies Assyria
1200: Conquest of Canaan by the Jews
1115-1102: Tiglath-Pilcscr I extends Assyria
1025-1010: Saul King of the Jews
1010-974: David King of the Jews
1000-600: Golden Age of Phoenicia &
Syria
974-937: Solomon King of the Jews
937: Schism of the Jews: Judah &
Israel
884-859: Ashurnasirpal II King of Assyria
B. THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
XII Dynasty
Amenemhct I
Senusret ("Sesostris") I
Senusret III
Amencmhet III
The Hyksos Domination
C. THE EMPIRE
XVIII Dynasty
Thutmosc I
Thutmose II
Queen Hatshepsut
Thutmose III
Amenhotep III
Amenhotcp IV (Ikhnaton)
Tutenkhamon
XIX Dynasty
Harmhab
Seti I
Ramescs II
Merneptah
Seti II
XX Dynasty: the Ramessid Kings
Ramescs III
XXI Dynasty: the Libyan Kings
* All dates are B.C., and are approximate before 663 B.C. In the case of rulers the dates
are of their reignb, not of their lives.
"3
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
B.C. EGYPT
947-720: XXII Dynasty: the Bubastite
Kings
947-925: Sheshonk I
925-889: Osorkon I
880-850: Osorkon II
850-825: Sheshonk II
821-769: Sheshonk HI
763-725: Sheshonk IV
850-745: XXIII Dynasty: The Theban
Kings
725-663: XXIV Dynasty: The Memphitc
Kings
745-663: XXV Dynasty: The Ethiopian
Kings
689-663: Taharka
685: Commercial Revival of Egypt
674-650: Assyrian Occupation of Egypt
663-525: XXVI Dynasty: the Sai'te Kings
663-609: Psamtik ("Psammctichos") I
663-525: Saite Revival of Egyptian Art
615: Jews begin to colonize Egypt
609-593: Niku ("Necho") II
605: Niku begins the Hellenization
of Egypt
593-588: Psamtik II
B.c. WESTERN ASIA
859-824: Shalmaneser III King of Assyria
811-808: Sammuramat ("Semiramis") in
Assyria
785-700: Golden Age of Armenia
("Urartu")
745-727: Tiglath-Pileser HI
732-722: Assyria takes Damascus &
Samaria
722-705: Sargon II King of Assyria
709: Dcioces King of the Medes
705-681: Sennacherib King of Assyria
702: The First Isaiah
689: Sennacherib sacks Babylon
681-669: Esarhaddon King of Assyria
669-626: Ashurbanipal ("Sardanapalus")
King of Assyria
660-583: Zarathustra ("Zoroaster")?
652: Gygcs King of Lydia
640-584: Cyaxares King of the Medes
639: Fall of Susa; end of Elam
639: Josiah King of the Jews
625: Nabopolassar restores independ-
ence of Babylon
621: Beginnings of the Pentateuch
612: Fall of Nineveh; end of Assyria
610-561: Alyattes King of Lydia
605-562: Nebuchadrezzar II King of
Babylonia
600: Jeremiah at Jerusalem; coinage
in Lydia
597-586: Nebuchadrezzar takes Jerusalem
586-538: Jewish Captivity in Babylon
114
OF NEAR EASTERN HISTORY
B.C.
EGYPT
569-526: Ahmose ("Amasis") II
568-567: Nebuchadrezzar II invades Egypt
560: Growing Influence of Greece in
Egypt
526-525: Psamtik III
525: Persian Conquest of Egypt
485: Revolt of Egypt against Persia
484: Reconqucst of Egypt by Xerxes
482: Egypt joins with Persia in war
against Greece
455: Failure of Athenian Expedition
to Egypt
332: Greek Conquest of Egypt;
foundation of Alexandria
283-30: The Ptolemaic Kings
30: Egypt absorbed into the Roman
Empire
B.c. WESTERN ASIA
580: Ezekiel in Babylon
570-546: Croesus King of Lydia
555-529: Cyrus I King of the Medes & the
Persians
546: Cyrus takes Sardis
540: The Second Isaiah
539: Cyrus takes Babylon & creates
the Persian Empire
529-522: Cambyses King of Persia
521-485: Darius I King of Persia
520: Building of 2nd Temple at Jeru-
salem
490: Battle of Marathon
485-464: Xerxes I King of Persia
480: Battle of Salamis
464-423: Artaxcrxcs I King of Persia
450: The Book of Job (?)
444: Ezra at Jerusalem
423-404: Darius II King of Persia
404-359: Artaxerxes II King of Persia
401: Cyrus the Younger defeated at
Cunaxa
359-338: Ochus King of Persia
338-330: Darius III King of Persia
334: Battle of the Granicus; Alex-
ander enters Jerusalem
333: Battle of Issus
331: Alexander takes Babylon
330: Battle of Arbela; the Near East
becomes part of Alexander's
Empire
CHAPTER VII
Sumeria
Orient-ation— Contributions of the Near East to Western
civilization
WRITTEN history is at least six thousand years old. During half of
this period the center of human affairs, so far as they are now known
to us, was in the Near East. By this vague term we shall mean here all
southwestern Asia south of Russia and the Black Sea, and west of India
and Afghanistan; still more loosely, we shall include within it Egypt, too,
as anciently bound up with the Near East in one vast web and communicat-
ing complex of Oriental civilization. In this rough theatre of teeming
peoples and conflicting cultures were developed the agriculture and com-
merce, the horse and wagon, the coinage and letters of credit, the crafts
and industries, the law and government, the mathematics and medicine,
the enemas and drainage systems, the geometry and astronomy, the calen-
dar and clock and zodiac, the alphabet and writing, the paper and ink, the
books and libraries and schools, the literature and music, the sculpture and
architecture, the glazed pottery and fine furniture, the monotheism and
monogamy, the cosmetics and jewelry, the checkers and dice, the ten-pins
and income-tax, the wet-nurses and beer, from which our own European
and American culture derive by a continuous succession through the medi-
ation of Crete and Greece and Rome. The "Aryans" did not establish
civilization—they took it from Babylonia and Egypt. Greece did not begin
civilization— it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the
spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities
from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and
honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to
the real founders of European and American civilization.
116
CHAP. VIl) SUMERIA 117
I. ELAM
The culture of Susa— The potter's wheel— The wagon-wheel
If the reader will look at a map of Persia, and will run his finger north
along the Tigris from the Persian Gulf to Amara, and then east across the
Iraq border to the modern town of Shushan, he will have located the site
of the ancient city of Susa, center of a region known to the Jews as Elam—
the high land. In this narrow territory, protected on the west by marshes,
and on the east by the mountains that shoulder the great Iranian Plateau,
a people of unknown race and origin developed one of the first historic
civilizations. Here, a generation ago, French archeologists found human
remains dating back 20,000 years, and evidences of an advanced culture
as old as 4500 B.C.*1
Apparently the Elamites had recently emerged from a nomad life of
hunting and fishing; but already they had copper weapons and tools, cul-
tivated grains and domesticated animals, hieroglyphic writing and business
documents, mirrors and jewelry, and a trade that reached from Egypt to
India.8 In the midst of chipped flints that bring us back to the Neolithic
Age we find finished vases elegantly rounded and delicately painted with
geometric designs, or with picturesque representations of animals and
plants; some of this pottery is ranked among the finest ever made by
man.4 Here is the oldest appearance not only of the potter's wheel but of
the wagon wheel; this modest but vital vehicle of civilization is found only
later in Babylonia, and still later in Egypt.6 From these already complex
beginnings the Elamites rose to troubled power, conquering Sumeria
and Babylon, and being conquered by them, turn by turn. The city of
Susa survived six thousand years of history, lived through the imperial
zeniths of Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome,
and flourished, under the name of Shushan, as late as the fourteenth
century of our era. At various times it grew to great wealth; when
Ashurbanipal captured and sacked it (646 B.C.) his historians recounted
without understatement the varied booty of gold and silver, precious
stones and royal ornaments, costly garments and regal furniture, cosmetics
and chariots, which the conqueror brought in his train to Nineveh. His-
tory so soon began its tragic alternance of art and war.
* Professor Breasted believes that the antiquity of this culture, and that of Anau, has
been exaggerated by DC Morgan, Pumpelly and other students.2
Il8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
II. THE SUMERIANS
1. The Historical Background
The exhuming of Sumeria— Geography— Race— Appearance—
The Sumerian Flood— The kings— An ancient reformer—
-Sargon of Akkad-The Golden Age of Ur
If we return to our map and follow the combined Tigris and Euphrates
from the Persian Gulf to where these historic streams diverge (at mod-
ern Kurna), and then follow the Euphrates westward, we shall find, north
and south of it, the buried cities of ancient Sumeria: Eridu (now Abu
Shahrein), Ur (now Mukayyar), Uruk (Biblical Erech, now Warka),
Larsa (Biblical Ellasar, now Senkereh), Lagash (now Shippurla), Nippur
(Niffer) and Nisin. Follow the Euphrates northwest to Babylon, once the
most famous city of Mesopotamia (the land "between the rivers"); ob-
serve, directly east of it, Kish, site of the oldest culture known in this
region; then pass some sixty miles farther up the Euphrates to Agade, cap-
ital, in ancient days, of the Kingdom of Akkad. The early history of
Mesopotamia is in one aspect the struggle of the non-Semitic peoples of
Sumeria to preserve their independence against the expansion and inroads
of the Semites from Kish and Agade and other centers in the north. In
the midst of their struggles these varied stocks unconsciously, perhaps
unwillingly, cooperated to produce the first extensive civilization known
to history, and one of the most creative and unique.*
Despite much research we cannot tell of what race the Sumerians were,
nor by what route they entered Sumeria. Perhaps they came from central
*The unearthing of this forgotten culture is one of the romances of archeology. To
those whom, with a poor sense of the amplitude of time, we call "the ancients"— that is,
to the Romans, the Greeks and the Jews— Sumeria was unknown. Herodotus apparently
never heard of it; if he did, he ignored it, as something more ancient to him than he to
us. Bcrosus, a Babylonian historian writing about 250 B.C., knew of Sumeria only through
the veil of a legend. He described a race of monsters, led by one Oannes, coming out of
the Persian Gulf, and introducing the arts of agriculture, metal-working, and writing; "all
the things that make for the amelioration of life," he declares, "were bequeathed to men
by Oannes, and since that time no further inventions have been made."8 Not till two
thousand years after Bcrosus was Sumeria rediscovered. In 1850 Hincks recognized that
cuneiform writing— made by pressing a wedge-pointed stylus upon soft clay, and used in
the Semitic languages of the Near East-had been borrowed from an earlier people with a
largely non-Semitic speech; and Oppert gave to this hypothetical people the name
CHAP. VIl) SUMERIA
Asia, or the Caucasus, or Armenia, and moved through northern Mesopo-
tamia down the Euphrates and the Tigris— along which, as at Ashur, evidences
of their earliest culture have been found; perhaps, as the legend says, they
sailed in from the Persian Gulf, from Egypt or elsewhere, and slowly made
their way up the great rivers; perhaps they came from Susa, among whose
relics is an asphalt head bearing all the characteristics of the Sumerian type;
perhaps, even, they were of remote Mongolian origin, for there is much in
their language that resembles the Mongol speech." We do not know.
The remains show them as a short and stocky people, with high, straight,
non-Semitic nose, slightly receding forehead and downward-sloping eyes.
Many wore beards, some were clean-shaven, most of them shaved the upper
lip. They clothed themselves in fleece and finely woven wool; the women
draped the garment from the left shoulder, the men bound it at the waist
and left the upper half of the body bare. Later the male dress crept up
towards the neck with the advance of civilization, but servants, male and
female, while indoors, continued to go naked from head to waist. The head
was usually covered with a cap, and the feet were shod with sandals; but
well-to-do women had shoes of soft leather, heel-less, and laced like our
own. Bracelets, necklaces, anklets, finger-rings and ear-rings made the women
of Sumeria, as recently in America, show-windows of their husbands' pros-
perity.10
When their civilization was already old— about 2300 B.C.— the poets and
scholars of Sumeria tried to reconstruct its ancient history. The poets wrote
legends of a creation, a primitive Paradise and a terrible flood that engulfed
and destroyed it because of the sin of an ancient king.11 This flood passed
down into Babylonian and Hebrew tradition, and became part of the Chris-
tian creed. In 1929 Professor Woolley, digging into the ruins of Ur, dis-
covered, at considerable depth, an eight-foot layer of silt and clay; this, if
we are to believe him, was deposited during a catastrophic overflow of the
"Sumerian."7 About the same time Rawlinson and his aides found, among Babylonian ruins,
tablets containing vocabularies of this ancient tongue, with interlinear translations, in
modern college style, from the older language into Babylonian.8 In 1854 two Englishmen
uncovered the sites of Ur, Eridu and Uruk; at the end of the nineteenth century French
explorers revealed the remains of Lagash, including tablets recording the history of the
Sumerian kings; and in our own time Professor Woolley of the University of Pennsyl-
vania, and many others, have exhumed the primeval city of Ur, where the Sumerians
appear to have reached civilization by 4500 B.C. So the students of many nations have
worked together on this chapter of that endless mystery story in which the detectives are
archeologists and the prey is historic truth. Nevertheless, there has been as yet only a
beginning of research in Sumeria; there is no telling what vistas of civilization and history
will be opened up when the ground has been worked, and the mateml studied, as men
have worked and studied in Egypt during the last one hundred years.
120 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
Euphrates, which lingered in later memory as the Flood. Beneath that layer
were the remains of a prediluvian culture that would later be pictured by
the poets as a Golden Age.
Meanwhile the priest-historians sought to create a past spacious enough for
the development of all the marvels of Sumerian civilization. They formu-
lated lists of their ancient kings, extending the dynasties before the Flood to
432,000 years-," and told such impressive stories of two of these rulers,
Tammuz and Gilgamesh, that the latter became the hero of the greatest poem
in Babylonian literature, and Tammuz passed down into the pantheon of
Babylon and became the Adonis of the Greeks. Perhaps the priests ex-
aggerated a little the antiquity of their civilization. We may vaguely judge
the age of Sumerian culture by observing that the ruins of Nippur are
found to a depth of sixty-six feet, of which almost as many feet extend
below the remains of Sargon of Akkad as rise above it to the topmost
stratum (ca. i A.D.);" on this basis Nippur would go back to 5262 B.C. Ten-
acious dynasties of city-kings seem to have flourished at Kish ca. 4500 B.C.,
and at Ur ca. 3500 B.C. In the competition of these two primeval centers
we have the first form of that opposition between Semite and non-Semite
which was to be one bloody theme of Near-Eastern history from the
Semitic ascendancy of Kish and the conquests of the Semitic kings Sargon I
and Hammurabi, through the capture of Babylon by the "Aryan" generals
Cyrus and Alexander in the sixth and fourth centuries before Christ, and the
conflicts of Crusaders and Saracens for the Holy Sepulchre and the emolu-
ments of trade, down to the efforts of the British Government to dominate
and pacify the divided Semites of the Near East today.
From 3000 B.C. onward the clay-tablet records kept by the priests, and
found in the ruins of Ur, present a reasonably accurate account of the ac-
cessions and coronations, uninterrupted victories and sublime deaths of the
petty kings who ruled the city-states of Ur, Lagash, Uruk, and the rest; the
writing of history and the partiality of historians are very ancient things.
One king, Urukagina of Lagash, was a royal reformer, an enlightened
despot who issued decrees aimed at the exploitation of the poor by the
rich, and of everybody by the priests. The high priest, says one edict, must
no longer "come into the garden of a poor mother and take wood there-
from, nor gather tax in fruit therefrom"; burial-fees were to be cut to
one-fifth of what they had been; and the clergy and high officials were
forbidden to share among themselves the revenues and cattle offered to
the gods. It was the King's boast that he "gave liberty to his people";14
CHAP. VIl) SUMERIA 121
and surely the tablets that preserve his decrees reveal to us the oldest,
briefest and justest code of laws in history.
This lucid interval was ended normally by one Lugal-zaggisi, who
invaded Lagash, overthrew Urukagina, and sacked the city at the height
of its prosperity. The temples were destroyed, the citizens were mas-
sacred in the streets, and the statues of the gods were led away in ignomin-
ious bondage. One of the earliest poems in existence is a clay tablet,
apparently 4800 years old, on which the Sumerian poet Dingiraddamu
mourns for the raped goddess of Lagash:
For the city, alas, the treasures, my soul doth sigh,
For my city Girsu (Lagash), alas, the treasures, my soul doth sigh.
In holy Girsu the children are in distress.
Into the interior of the splendid shrine he (the invader) pressed;
The august Queen from her temple he brought forth.
O Lady of my city, desolated, when wilt thou return?"
We pass by the bloody Lugal-zaggisi, and other Sumerian kings of
mighty name: Lugal-shagengur, Lugal-kigub-nidudu, Ninigi-dubti, Lugal-
andanukhunga. . . . Meanwhile another people, of Semitic race, had built
the kingdom of Akkad under the leadership of Sargon I, and had estab-
lished its capital at Agade some two hundred miles northwest of the
Sumerian city-states. A monolith found at Susa portrays Sargon armed
with the dignity of a majestic beard, and dressed in all the pride of long
authority. His origin was not royal: history could find no father for him,
and no other mother than a temple prostitute.18 Sumerian legend composed
for him an autobiography quite Mosaic in its beginning: "My humble
mother conceived me; in secret she brought me forth. She placed me in
a basket-boat of rushes; with pitch she closed my door."17 Rescued by a
workman, he became a cup-bearer to the king, grew in favor and influence,
rebelled, displaced his master, and mounted the throne of Agade. He
called himself "King of Universal Dominion," and ruled a small portion
of Mesopotamia. Historians call him "the Great," for he invaded many
cities, captured much booty, and killed many men. Among his victims
was that same Lugal-zaggisi who had despoiled Lagash and violated its
goddess; him Sargon defeated and carried off to Nippur in chains. East
and west, north and south the mighty warrior marched, conquering Elam,
washing his weapons in symbolic triumph in the Persian Gulf, crossing
122 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
western Asia, reaching the Mediterranean,18 and establishing the first great
empire in history. For fifty-five years he held sway, while legends gath-
ered about him and prepared to make him a god. His reign closed with
all his empire in revolt.
Three sons succeeded him in turn. The third, Naram-sin, was a mighty
builder, of whose works nothing remains but a lovely stele, or memorial
slab, recording his victory over an obscure king. This powerful relief,
found by De Morgan at Susa in 1897, and now a treasure of the Louvre,
shows a muscular Naram-sin armed with bow and dart, stepping with
royal dignity upon the bodies of his fallen foes, and apparently prepared
to answer with quick death the appeal of the vanquished for mercy; while
between them another victim, pierced through the neck with an arrow,
falls dying. Behind them tower the Zagros Mountains; and on one hill
is the record, in elegant cuneiform, of Naram-sin's victory. Here the art
of carving is already adult and confident, already guided and strengthened
with a long tradition.
To be burned to the ground is not always a lasting misfortune for a
city; it is usually an advantage from the standpoint of architecture and
sanitation. By the twenty-sixth century B.C. we find Lagash flourishing
again, now under another enlightened monarch, Gudea, whose stocky
statues are the most prominent remains of Sumerian sculpture. The diorite
figure in the Louvre shows him in a pious posture, with his head crossed
by a heavy band resembling a model of the Colosseum, hands folded in
his lap, bare shoulders and feet, and short, chubby legs covered by a bell-
like skirt embroidered with a volume of hieroglyphics. The strong but
regular features reveal a man thoughtful and just, firm and yet refined.
Gudea was honored by his people not as a warrior but as a Sumerian
Aurelius, devoted to religion, literature and good works; he built temples,
promoted the study of classical antiquities in the spirit of the expeditions
that unearthed him, and tempered the strength of the strong in mercy
to the weak. One of his inscriptions reveals the policy for which his people
worshiped him, after his death, as a god: "During seven years the maid-
servant was the equal of her mistress, the slave walked beside his master,
and in my town the weak rested by the side of the strong."10
Meanwhile "Ur of the Chaldees" was having one of the most pros-
perous epochs in its long career from 3,500 B.C. (the apparent age of its
oldest graves) to 700 B.C. Its greatest king, Ur-engur, brought all
CHAP.VIl) SUMERIA 123
western Asia under his pacific sway, and proclaimed for all Sumeria the
first extensive code of laws in history. "By the laws of righteousness of
Shamash forever I established justice."80 As Ur grew rich by the trade that
flowed through it on the Euphrates, Ur-engur, like Pericles, beautified
his city with temples, and built lavishly in the subject cities of Larsa, Uruk
and Nippur. His son Dungi continued his work through a reign of fifty-
eight years, and ruled so wisely that the people deified him as the god
who had brought back their ancient Paradise.
But soon that glory faded. The warlike Elamites from the East and
the rising Amorites from the West swept down upon the leisure, pros-
perity and peace of Ur, captured its king, and sacked the city with primi-
tive thoroughness. The poets of Ur sang sad chants about the rape of
the statue of Ishtar, their beloved mother-goddess, torn from her shrine
by profane invaders. The form of these poems is unexpectedly first-
personal, and the style does not please the sophisticated ear; but across
the four thousand years that separate us from the Sumerian singer we
feel the desolation of his city and his people.
Me the foe hath ravished, yea, with hands unwashed;
Me his hands have ravished, made me die of terror.
Oh, I am wretched! Naught of reverence hath he!
Stripped me of my robes, and clothed therein his consort,
Tore my jewels from me, therewith decked his daughter.
(Now) I tread his courts— my very person sought he
In the shrines. Alas, the day when to go forth I trembled.
He pursued me in my temple; he made me quake with fear,
There within my walls; and like a dove that fluttering percheth
On a rafter, like a flitting owlet in a cavern hidden,
Birdlike from my shrine he chased me,
From my city like a bird he chased me, me sighing,
"Far behind, behind me is my temple."11
So for two hundred years, which to our self-centered eyes seem but
an empty moment, Elam and Amor ruled Sumeria. Then from the north
came the great Hammurabi, King of Babylon; retook from the Elamites
Uruk and Isin; bided his time for twenty-three years; invaded Elam and
captured its king; established his sway over Amor and distant Assyria,
built an empire of unprecedented power, and disciplined it with a universal
124 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
law. For many centuries now, until the rise of Persia, the Semites would
rule the Land between the Rivers. Of the Sumerians nothing more is
heard; their little chapter in the book of history was complete.
2. Economic Life
The soil — Industry — Trade — Classes — Science
But Sumerian civilization remained. Sumer and Akkad still produced
handicraftsmen, poets, artists, sages and saints; the culture of the southern
cities passed north along the Euphrates and the Tigris to Babylonia and
Assyria as the initial heritage of Mesopotamian civilization.
At the basis of this culture was a soil made fertile by the annual over-
flow of rivers swollen with the winter rains. The overflow was perilous
as well as useful; the Sumerians learned to channel it safely through irri-
gating canals that ribbed and crossed their land; and they commemorated
those early dangers by legends that told of a flood, and how at last the
land had been separated from the waters, and mankind had been saved.38
This irrigation system, dating from 4000 B.C., was one of the great achieve-
ments of Sumerian civilization, and certainly its foundation. Out of these
carefully watered fields came abounding crops of corn, barley, spelt,
dates, and many vegetables. The plough appeared early, drawn by oxen
as even with us until yesterday, and already furnished with a tubular seed-
drill. The gathered harvest was threshed by drawing over it great sledges
of wood armed with flint teeth that cut the straw for the cattle and
released the grain for men.84
It was in many ways a primitive culture. The Sumerians made some
use of copper and tin, and occasionally mixed them to produce bronze;
now and then they went so far as to make large implements of iron.*
But metal was still a luxury and a rarity. Most Sumerian tools were of
flint; some, like the sickles for cutting the barley, were of clay; and cer-
tain finer articles, such as needles and awls, used ivory and bone.98 Weav-
ing was done on a large scale under the supervision of overseers appointed
by the king,*7 after the latest fashion of governmentally controlled industry.
Houses were made of reeds, usually plastered with an adobe mixture of
clay and straw moistened with water and hardened by the sun; such dwell-
ings are still easy to find in what was once Sumeria. The hut had wooden
doors, revolving upon socket hinges of stone. The floors were ordinarily
CHAP. VIl) SUMERIA 125
the beaten earth; the roofs were arched by bending the reeds together
at the top, or were made flat with mud-covered reeds stretched over
crossbeams of wood. Cows, sheep, goats and pigs roamed about the
dwelling in primeval comradeship with man. Water for drinking was
drawn from wells.28
Goods were carried chiefly by water. Since stone was rare in Sumeria
it was brought up the Gulf or down the rivers, and then through numerous
canals to the quays of the cities. But land transportation was developing;
at Kish the Oxford Field Expedition unearthed some of the oldest wheeled
vehicles known." Here and there in the ruins are business seals bearing
indications of traffic with Egypt and India.80 There was no coinage yet,
and trade was normally by barter; but gold and silver were already in use
as standards of value, and were often accepted in exchange for goods—
sometimes in the form of ingots and rings of definite worth, but generally
in quantities measured by weight in each transaction. Many of the clay
tablets that have brought down to us fragments of Sumerian writing are
business documents, revealing a busy commercial life. One tablet speaks,
with fin-de-siecle weariness, of "the city, where the tumult of man is."
Contracts had to be confirmed in writing and duly witnessed. A system
of credit existed by which goods, gold or silver might be borrowed, interest
to be paid in the same material as the loan, and at rates ranging from 15
to 33% per annum.31 Since the stability of a society may be partly mea-
sured by inverse relation with the rate of interest, we may suspect that
Sumerian business, like ours, lived in an atmosphere of economic and po-
litical uncertainty and doubt.
Gold and silver have been found abundantly in the tombs, not only
as jewelry, but as vessels, weapons, ornaments, even as tools. Rich and
poor were stratified into many classes and gradations; slavery was highly
developed, and property rights were already sacred.81 Between the rich
and the poor a middle class took form, composed of small-business men,
scholars, physicians and priests. Medicine flourished, and had a specific
for every disease; but it was still bound up with theology, and admitted
that sickness, being due to possession by evil spirits, could never be cured
without the exorcising of these demons. A calendar of uncertain age and
origin divided the year into lunar months, adding a month every three or
four years to reconcile the calendar with the seasons and the sun. Each
city gave its own names to the months.88
126 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
3. Government
The kings— Ways of war— The feudal barons— Law
Indeed each city, as long as it could, maintained a jealous independence,
and indulged itself in a private king. It called him patesi, or priest-king,
indicating by the very word that government was bound up with religion.
By 2800 B.C. the growth of trade made such municipal separatism im-
possible, and generated "empires" in which some dominating personality
subjected the cities and their patesis to his power, and wove them into
an economic and political unity. The despot lived in a Renaissance atmos-
phere of violence and fear; at any moment he might be despatched by
the same methods that had secured him the throne. He dwelt in an in-
accessible palace, whose two entrances were so narrow as to admit only
one person at a time; to the right and left were recesses from which secret
guards could examine every visitor, or pounce upon him with daggers.84
Even the king's temple was private, hidden away in his palace, so that he
might perform his religious duties without exposure, or neglect them
inconspicuously.
The king went to battle in a chariot, leading a motley host armed with
bows, arrows and spears. The wars were waged frankly for commercial
routes and goods, without catchwords as a sop for idealists. King Manish-
tusu of Akkad announced frankly that he was invading Elam to get control
of its silver mines, and to secure diorite stone to immortalize himself with
statuary— the only instance known of a war fought for the sake of art.
The defeated were customarily sold into slavery; or, if this was unprofit-
able, they were slaughtered on the battlefield. Sometimes a tenth of the
prisoners, struggling vainly in a net, were offered as living victims to the
thirsty gods. As in Renaissance Italy, the chauvinistic separatism of the
cities stimulated life and art, but led to civic violence and suicidal strife
that weakened each petty state, and at last destroyed Sumeria.88
In the empires social order was maintained through a feudal system.
After a successful war the ruler gave tracts of land to his valiant chieftains,
and exempted such estates from taxation; these men kept order in their
territories, and provided soldiers and supplies for the exploits of the king.
The finances of the government were obtained by taxes in kind, stored
in royal warehouses, and distributed as pay to officials and employees of
the state.*8
CHAP.VIl) SUMERIA 127
To this system of royal and feudal administration was added a body of
law, already rich with precedents when Ur-engur and Dungi codified the
statutes of Ur; this was the fountainhead of Hammurabi's famous code.
It was cruder and simpler than later legislation, but less severe: where, for
example, the Semitic code killed a woman for adultery, the Sumerian code
merely allowed the husband to take a second wife, and reduce the first
to a subordinate position." The law covered commercial as well as sexual
relations, and regulated all loans and contracts, all buying and selling, all
adoptions and bequests. Courts of justice sat in the temples, and the judges
were for the most part priests; professional judges presided over a superior
court. The best element in this code was a plan for avoiding litigation:
every case was first submitted to a public arbitrator whose duty it was
to bring about an amicable settlement without recourse to law.88 It is a poor
civilization from which we may not learn something to improve our own.
4. Religion and Morality
The Sumerian Pantheon — The food of the gods — Mythology —
Education— A Sumerian prayer— Temple prostitutes— The
rights of woman— Sumerian cos-metics
King Ur-engur proclaimed his code of laws in the name of the great
god Shamash, for government had so soon discovered the political utility
of heaven. Having been found useful, the gods became innumerable;
every city and state, every human activity, had some inspiring and dis-
ciplinary divinity. Sun-worship, doubtless already old when Sumeria be-
gan, expressed itself in the cult of Shamash, "light of the gods," who
passed the night in the depths of the north, until Dawn opened its gates
for him; then he mounted the sky like a flame, driving his chariot over
the steeps of the firmament; the sun was merely a wheel of his fiery car.18
Nippur built great temples to the god Enlil and his consort Ninlil; Uruk
worshiped especially the virgin earth-goddess Innini, known to the Semites
of Akkad as Ishtar— the loose and versatile Aphrodite-Demeter of the Near
East. Kish and Lagash worshiped a Mat er Dolorosa, the sorrowful mother-
goddess Ninkarsag, who, grieved with the unhappiness of men, interceded
for them with sterner deities.40 Ningirsu was the god of irrigation, the
"Lord of Floods"; Abu or Tammuz was the god of vegetation. Even Sin
was a god—of the moon; he was represented in human form with a thin
128 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
crescent about his head, presaging the halos of medieval saints. The air
was full of spirits—beneficent angels, one each as protector to every
Sumerian, and demons or devils who sought to expel the protective deity
and take possession of body and soul.
Most of the gods lived in the temples, where they were provided by
the faithful with revenue, food and wives. The tablets of Gudea list the
objects which the gods preferred: oxen, goats, sheep, doves, chickens,
ducks, fish, dates, figs, cucumbers, butter, oil and cakes;41 we may judge
from this list that the well-to-do Sumerian enjoyed a plentiful cuisine.
Originally, it seems, the gods preferred human flesh; but as human morality
improved they had to be content with animals. A liturgical tablet found
in the Sumerian ruins says, with strange theological premonitions: "The
lamb is the substitute for humanity; he hath given up a lamb for his life."41
Enriched by such beneficence, the priests became the wealthiest and most
powerful class in the Sumerian cities. In most matters they were the gov-
ernment; it is difficult to make out to what extent the patesi was a priest,
and to what extent a king. Urukagina rose like a Luther against the ex-
actions of the clergy, denounced them for their voracity, accused them of
taking bribes in their administration of the law, and charged that they
were levying such taxes upon farmers and fishermen as to rob them of
the fruits of their toil. He swept the courts clear for a time of these corrupt
officials, and established laws regulating the taxes and fees paid to the
temples, protecting the helpless against extortion, and providing against
the violent alienation of funds or property.48 Already the world was old,
and well established in its time-honored ways.
Presumably the priests recovered their power when Urukagina died,
quite as they were to recover their power in Egypt after the passing of
Ikhnaton; men will pay any price for mythology. Even in this early age
the great myths of religion were taking form. Since food and tools were
placed in the graves with the dead, we may presume that the Sumerians
believed in an after-life.44 But like the Greeks they pictured the other world
as a dark abode of miserable shadows, to which all the dead descended
indiscriminately. They had not yet conceived heaven and hell, eternal
reward and punishment; they offered prayer and sacrifice not for "eternal
life," but for tangible advantages here on the earth.48 Later legend told
how Adapa, a sage of Eridu, had been initiated into all lore by Ea, goddess
of wisdom; one secret only had been refused him— the knowledge of
CHAP. VIl) SUMERIA
deathless life." Another legend narrated how the gods had created man
happy; how man, by his free will, had sinned, and been punished with a
flood, from which but one man— Tagtug the weaver— had survived. Tag-
tug forfeited longevity and health by eating the fruit of a forbidden tree.47
The priests transmitted education as well as mythology, and doubtless
sought to teach, as well as to rule, by their myths. To most of the temples
were attached schools wherein the clergy instructed boys and girls in
writing and arithmetic, formed their habits into patriotism and piety, and
prepared some of them for the high professsion of scribe. School tablets
survive, encrusted with tables of multiplication and division, square and
cube roots, and exercises in applied geometry.4* That the instruction was
not much more foolish than that which is given to our children appears
from a tablet which is a Lucretian outline of anthropology: "Mankind
when created did not know of bread for eating or garments for wearing.
The people walked with limbs on the ground, they ate herbs with their
mouths like sheep, they drank ditch-water."4*
What nobility of spirit and utterance this first of the historic religions
could rise to shines out in the prayer of King Gudca to the goddess Bau,
the patron deity of Lagash:
0 my Queen, the Mother who established Lagash,
The people on whom thou lookcst is rich in power;
The worshiper on whom thou lookest, his life is prolonged.
1 have no mother— thou art my mother;
I have no father— thou art my father. . . .
My goddess Bau, thou knowest what is good;
Thou hast given me the breath of life.
Under the protection of thee, my Mother,
In thy shadow I will reverently dwell.80
Women were attached to every temple, some as domestics, some as
concubines for the gods or their duly constituted representatives on earth.
To serve the temples in this way did not seem any disgrace to a Sumcrian
girl; her father was proud to devote her charms to the alleviation of divine
monotony, and celebrated the admission of his daughter to these sacred
functions with ceremonial sacrifice, and the presentation of the girl's
marriage dowry to the temple.81
Marriage was already a complex institution regulated by many laws.
130 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
The bride kept control of the dowry given her by her father in marriage,
and though she held it jointly with her husband, she alone determined its
bequest. She exercised equal rights with her husband over their children;
and in the absence of the husband and a grown-up son she administered
the estate as well as the home. She could engage in business independently
of her husband, and could keep or dispose of her own slaves. Sometimes,
like Shub-ad, she could rise to the status of queen, and rule her city with
luxurious and imperious grace." But in all crises the man was lord and
master. Under certain conditions he could sell his wife, or hand her over
as a slave to pay his debts. The double standard was already in force, as
a corollary of property and inheritance: adultery in the man was a for-
givable whim, but in the woman it was punished with death. She was
expected to give many children to her husband and the state; if barren,
she could be divorced without further reason; if merely averse to con-
tinuous maternity she was drowned. Children were without legal rights;
their parents, by the act of publicly disowning them, secured their banish-
ment from the city."
Nevertheless, as in most civilizations, the women of the upper classes
almost balanced, by their luxury and their privileges, the toil and dis-
abilities of their poorer sisters. Cosmetics and jewelry are prominent in
the Sumerian tombs. In Queen Shub-ad's grave Professor Woolley picked
up a little compact of blue-green malachite, golden pins with knobs of
lapis-Iazuli, and a vanity-case of filigree gold shell. This vanity-case, as
large as a little finger, contained a tiny spoon, presumably for scooping up
rouge from the compact; a metal stick, perhaps for training the cuticle;
and a pair of tweezers probably used to train the eyebrows or to pluck
out inopportune hairs. The Queen's rings .were made of gold wire; one
ring was inset with segments of lapis-lazuli; her necklace was of fluted
lapis and gold. Surely there is nothing new under the sun; and the differ-
ence between the first woman and the last could pass through the eye of
a needle.
5. Letters and Arts
Writing— Literature—Temples and palaces— Statuary— Ceramics—
Jewelry- -Summary of Sumerian civilization
The startling fact in the Sumerian remains is writing. The marvelous art
seems already well advanced, fit to express complex thought in com-
CHAP. VIl) SUMERIA 131
merce, poetry and religion. The oldest inscriptions are on stone, and
date apparently as far back as 3600 B.C.54 Towards 3200 B.C. the clay
tablet appears, and from that time on the Sumerians seem to have delighted
in the great discovery. It is our good fortune that the people of Mesopo-
tamia wrote not upon fragile, ephemeral paper in fading ink, but upon
moist clay deftly impressed with the wedge-like ("cuneiform") point
of a stylus. With this malleable material the scribe kept records, executed
contracts, drew up official documents, recorded property, judgments and
sales, and created a culture in which the stylus became as mighty as the
sword. Having completed the writing, the scribe baked the clay tablet
with heat or in the sun, and made it thereby a manuscript far more durable
than paper, and only less lasting than stone. This development of cunei-
form script was the outstanding contribution of Sumeria to the civilizing
of mankind.
Sumerian writing reads from right to left; the Babylonians were, so far
as we know, the first people to write from left to right. The linear script,
as we have seen, was apparently a stylized and conventionalized form of
the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon primitive Sumerian pot-
tery.* Presumably from repetition and haste over centuries of time, the
original pictures were gradually contracted into signs so unlike the objects
which they had once represented that they became the symbols of sounds
rather than of things. We should have an analogous process in English if
the picture of a bee should in time be shortened and simplified, and come to
mean not a bee but the sound be, and then serve to indicate that syllable
in any combination as in be-ing. The Sumerians and Babylonians never ad-
vanced from such representation of syllables to the representation of letters—
never dropped the vowel in the syllabic sign to make be mean b; it seems to
have remained for the Egyptians to take this simple but revolutionary step."
The transition from writing to literature probably required many hun-
dreds of years. For centuries writing was a tool of commerce, a matter
of contracts and bills, of shipments and receipts; and secondarily, perhaps,
it was an instrument of religious record, an attempt to preserve magic
formulas, ceremonial procedures, sacred legends, prayers and hymns from
alteration or decay. Nevertheless, by 2700 B.C., great libraries had been
formed in Sumeria; at Tello, for example, in ruins contemporary with
Gudea, De Sarzac discovered a collection of over 30,000 tablets ranged one
* Cf. above, p. 104.
132 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
upon another in neat and logical array.56 As early as 2000 B.C. Sumerian
historians began to reconstruct the past and record the present for the
edification of the future; portions of their work have come down to us
not in the original form but as quotations in later Babylonian chronicles.
Among the original fragments, however, is a tablet found at Nippur, bear-
ing the Sumerian prototype of the epic of Gilgamesh, which we shall study
later in its developed Babylonian expression."7 Some of the shattered
tablets contain dirges of no mean power, and of significant literary form.
Here at the outset appears the characteristic Near-Eastern trick of chant-
ing repetition—many lines beginning in the same way, many clauses reiter-
ating or illustrating the meaning of the clause before. Through these sal-
vaged relics we sec the religious origin of literature in the songs and lamen-
tations of the priests. The first poems were not madrigals, but prayers.
Behind these apparent beginnings of culture were doubtless many cen-
turies of development, in Sumcria and other lands. Nothing has been
created, it has only grown. Just as in writing Sumeria seeins to have
created cuneiform, so in architecture it seems to have created at once the
fundamental shapes of home and temple, column and vault and arch.88
The Sumerian peasant made his cottage by planting reeds in a square, a
rectangle or a circle, bending the tops together, and binding them to form
an arch, a vault or a dome;5" this, we surmise, is the simple origin, or earliest
known appearance, of these architectural forms. Among the ruins of
Nippur is an arched drain 5000 years old; in the royal tombs of Ur there
are arches that go back to 3500 B.C., and arched doors were common
at Ur 2000 B.C.°° And these were true arches: i.e., their stones were set
in full voussoir fashion— each stone a wedge tapering downward tightly
into place.
The richer citizens built palaces, perched on a mound sometimes forty
feet above the plain, and made purposely inaccessible except by one path,
so that every Sumcrian's home might be his castle. Since stone was scarce,
these palaces were mostly of brick. The plain red surface of the walls was
relieved by terracotta decoration in every form— spirals, chevrons, triangles,
even lozenges and diapers. The inner walls were plastered and painted in
simple mural style. The house was built around a central court, which gave
shade and some coolness against the Mediterranean sun; for the same reason,
as well as for security, the rooms opened upon this court rather than upon
the outer world. Windows were a luxury, or perhaps they were not wanted.
CHAP.VIl) SUMERIA 133
Water was drawn from wells; and an extensive system of drainage drew
the waste from the residential districts of the towns. Furniture was not
complex or abundant but neither was it without taste. Some beds were in-
laid with metal or ivory, and occasionally, as in Egypt, armchairs flaunted
feet like lions' claws."1
For the temples stone was imported, and adorned with copper entabla-
tures and friezes inlaid with semiprecious material. The temple of Nannar
at Ur set a fashion for all Mesopotamia with pale blue enameled tiles; while
its interior was paneled with rare woods like cedar and cypress, inlaid with
marble, alabaster, onyx, agate and gold. Usually the most important temple
in the city was not only built upon an elevation, but was topped with a zig-
gurat— a tower of three, four or seven stories, surrounded with a winding
external stairway, and set back at every stage. Here on the heights the
loftiest of the city's gods might dwell, and here the government might
find a last spiritual and physical citadel against invasion or revolt.*08
The temples were sometimes decorated with statuary of animals, heroes
and gods; figures plain, blunt and powerful, but severely lacking in sculp-
tural finish and grace. Most of the extant statues are of King Gudea, exe-
cuted resolutely but crudely in resistant diorite. In the ruins of Tell-cl-
Ubaid, from the early Sumerian period, a copper statuette of a bull was
found, much abused by the centuries, but still full of life and bovine com-
placency. A cow's head in silver from the grave of Queen Shub-ad at
Ur is a masterpiece that suggests a developed art too much despoiled by
time to permit of our giving it its due. This is almost proved by the
bas-reliefs that survive. The "Stele of the Vultures" set up by King Ean-
natum of Lagash, the porphyry cylinder of Ibnishar,63 the humorous cari-
catures (as surely they must be) of Ur-nina,M and above all the "Victory
Stele" of Naram-sin share the crudity of Sumerian sculpture, but have in
them a lusty vitality of drawing and action characteristic of a young and
flourishing art.
Of the pottery one may not speak so leniently. Perhaps time misleads our
judgment by having preserved the worst; perhaps there were many pieces
as well carved as the alabaster vessels discovered at Eridu;" but for the most
part Sumerian pottery, though turned on the wheel, is mere earthenware,
and cannot compare with the vases of Elam. Better work was done by the
goldsmiths. Vessels of gold, tasteful in design and delicate in finish, have
* Such ziggurats have helped American architects to mould a new form for buildings
forced by law to set back their upper stories lest they impede their neighbor's light. His-
tory suddenly contracts into a brief coup d'ceil when we contemplate in one glance the
brick ziggurats of Sumeria 5000 years old, and the brick ziggurats of contemporary
New York.
134 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VII
been found in the earliest graves at Ur, some as old as 4000 B.C." The
silver vase of Entemenu, now in the Louvre, is as stocky as Gudea, but is
adorned with a wealth of animal imagery finely engraved.87 Best of all is the
gold sheath and lapis-lazuli dagger exhumed at Ur;68 here, if one may judge
from photographs,* the form almost touches perfection. The ruins have
given us a great number of cylindrical seals, mostly made of precious metal
or stone, with reliefs carefully carved upon a square inch or two of surface;
these seem to have served the Sumerians in place of signatures, and indicate
a refinement of life and manners disturbing to our naive conception of
progress as a continuous rise of man through the unfortunate cultures of the
past to the unrivaled zenith of today.
Sumerian civilization may be summed up in this contrast between crude
pottery and consummate jewelry; it was a synthesis of rough beginnings
and occasional but brilliant mastery. Here, within the limits of our present
knowledge, are the first states and empires, the first irrigation, the first use
of gold and silver as standards of value, the first business contracts, the
first credit system, the first code of law, the first extensive development
of writing, the first stories of the Creation and the Flood, the first libraries
and schools, the first literature and poetry, the first cosmetics and jewelry,
the first sculpture and bas-relief, the first palaces and temples, the first
ornamental metal and decorative themes, the first arch, column, vault and
dome. Here, for the first known time on a large scale, appear some of the
sins of civilization: slavery, despotism, ecclesiasticism, and imperialistic
war. It was a life differentiated and subtle, abundant and complex.
Already the natural inequality of men was producing a new degree of
comfort and luxury for the strong, and a new routine of hard and dis-
ciplined labor for the rest. The theme was struck on which history would
strum its myriad variations.
III. PASSAGE TO EGYPT
Sunterian influence in Mesopotamia— Ancient Arabia— Mesopo-
tomian influence in Egypt
Nevertheless, we are still so near the beginning of recorded history when
we speak of Sumeria that it is difficult to determine the priority or se-
quence of the many related civilizations that developed in the ancient Near
* The original is in the Iraq Museum at Baghdad.
CHAP. VIl) SUMERIA 135
East. The oldest written records known to us are Sumcrian; this, which may
be a whim of circumstance, a sport of mortality, does not prove that the
first civilization was Sumerian. Statuettes and other remains akin to those of
Sumeria have been found at Ashur and Samarra, in what became Assyria; we
do not know whether this early culture came from Sumeria or passed to it
along the Tigris. The code of Hammurabi resembles that of Ur-engur and
Dungi, but we cannot be sure that it was evolved from it rather than from
some predecessor ancestral to them both. It is only probable, not certain,
that the civilizations of Babylonia and Assyria were derived from or fer-
tilized by that of Sumer and Akkad.* The gods and myths of Babylon and
Nineveh are in many cases modifications or developments of Sumcrian the-
ology; and the languages of these later cultures bear the same relationship
to Sumeria that French and Italian bear to Latin.
Schweinfurth has called attention to the interesting fact that though the
cultivation of barley, millet and wheat, and the domestication of cattle, goats
and sheep, appear in both Egypt and Mesopotamia as far back as our rec-
ords go, these cereals and animals arc found in their wild and natural state
not in Egypt but in western Asia—especially in Yemen or ancient Arabia.
He concludes that civilization— i.e., in this context, the cultivation of cereals
and the use of domesticated animals— appeared in unrecorded antiquity in
Arabia, and spread thence in a "triangular culture" to Mesopotamia (Sumeria,
Babylonia, Assyria) and Egypt.70 Current knowledge of primitive Arabia is
too slight to make this more than a presentable hypothesis.
More definite is the derivation of certain specific elements of Egyptian
culture from Sumeria and Babylonia. We know that trade passed between
Mesopotamia and Egypt— certainly via the isthmus at Suez, and probably
by water from the ancient outlets of Egyptian rivers on the Red Sea.71 A
look at the map explains why Egypt, throughout its known history, has be-
longed to Western Asia rather than to Africa; trade and culture could pass
from Asia along the Mediterranean to the Nile, but shortly beyond that it
was balked by the desert which, with the cataracts of the Nile, isolated
Egypt from the remainder of Africa. Hence it is natural that we should
find many Mcsopotamian elements in the primitive culture of Egypt.
The farther back we trace the Egyptian language the more affinities it
reveals with the Semitic tongues of the Near East.™ The pictographic writ-
ing of the predynastic Egyptians seems to have come in from Sumcria.78
The cylindrical seal, which is of unquestionably Mesopotamian origin, ap-
pears in the earliest period of known Egyptian history, and then disappears,
as if an imported custom had been displaced by a native mode.74 The potter's
wheel is not known in Egypt before the Fourth Dynasty— long after its ap-
pearance in Sumeria; presumably it came into Egypt from the Land be-
136 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VII
tween the Rivers along with the wheel and the chariot.75 Early Egyptian
and Babylonian mace-heads are completely identical in form.78 A finely
worked flint knife, found in predynastic Egyptian remains at Gebcl-el-Arak,
bears reliefs in Mesopotamian themes and style.77 Copper was apparently
developed in western Asia, and brought thence to Egypt.78 Early Egyptian
architecture resembles Mesopotamian in the use of the recessed panel as a
decoration for brick walls.79 Predynastic pottery, statuettes and decorative
motives are in many cases identical, or unmistakably allied, with Mesopo-
tamian products.80 Among these early Egyptian remains are small figures of
a goddess of evident Asiatic origin. At a time when Egyptian civilization
seems to have only begun, the artists of Ur were making statuary and reliefs
whose style and conventions demonstrate the antiquity of these arts in
Sumcria.81*
Egypt could well afford to concede the priority of Sumeria. For what-
ever the Nile may have borrowed from the Tigris and the Euphrates, it
soon flowered into a civilization specifically and uniquely its own; one of
the richest and greatest, one of the most powerful and yet one of the most
graceful, cultures in history. By its side Sumeria was but a crude beginning;
and not even Greece or Rome would surpass it.
* A great scholar, Elliot Smith, has tried to offset these considerations by pointing out
that although barley, millet and wheat are not known in their natural state in Egypt, it is
there that we find the oldest signs of their cultivation; and he believes that it was from
Egypt that agriculture and civilization came to Sumeria.82 The greatest of American
Egyptologists, Professor Breasted, is similarly unconvinced of the priority of Sumeria.
Dr. Breasted believes that the wheel is at least as old in Egypt as in Sumcria, and rejects
the hypothesis of Schweinfurth on the ground that cereals have been found in their
native state in the highlands of Abyssinia.
CHAPTER VIII
Egypt
I. THE GIFT OF THE NILE
/. In the Delta
Alexandria— The Nile— The Pyrainids—The Sphinx
THIS is a perfect harbor. Outside the long breakwater the waves
topple over one another roughly; within it the sea is a silver mirror.
There, on the little island of Pharos, when Egypt was very old, Sostratus
built his great lighthouse of white marble, five hundred feet high, as a
beacon to all ancient mariners of the Mediterranean, and as one of the
seven wonders of the world. Time and the nagging waters have washed
it away, but a new lighthouse has taken its place, and guides the steamer
through the rocks to the quays of Alexandria. Here that astonishing boy-
statesman, Alexander, founded the subtle, polyglot metropolis that was
to inherit the culture of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. In this harbor Cxsar
received without gladness the severed head of Pompey.
As the train glides through the city, glimpses come of unpaved alleys
and streets, heat waves dancing in the air, workingmen naked to the waist,
black-garbed women bearing burdens sturdily, white-robed and turbaned
Moslems of regal dignity, and in the distance spacious squares and shining
palaces, perhaps as fair as those that the Ptolemies built when Alexandria
was the meeting-place of the world. Then suddenly it is open country,
and the city recedes into the horizon of the fertile Delta— that green
triangle which looks on the map like the leaves of a lofty palm-tree held
up on the slender stalk of the Nile.
Once, no doubt, this Delta was a bay; patiently the broad stream filled
it up, too slowly to be seen, with detritus carried down a thousand
miles;* now from this little corner of mud, enclosed by the many mouths
of the river, six million peasants grow enough cotton to export a hundred
million dollars' worth of it every year. There, bright and calm under the
* Even the ancient geographers (e.g., Strabo1) believed that Egypt had once been under
the waters of the Mediterranean, and that its deserts had been the bottom of the sea.
137
138 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
glaring sun, fringed with slim palms and grassy banks, is the most famous
of all rivers. We cannot see the desert that lies so close beyond it, or the
great empty i^tf—river-beds— where once its fertile tributaries flowed;
we cannot realize yet how precariously narrow a thing this Egypt is, owing
everything to the river, and harassed on either side with hostile, shifting
sand.
Now the train passes amid the alluvial plain. The land is half covered
with water, and crossed everywhere with irrigation canals. In the ditches
and the fields black fellaheen* labor, knowing no garment but a cloth
about the loins. The river has had one of its annual inundations, which
begin at the summer solstice and last for a hundred days; through that over-
flow the desert became fertile, and Egypt blossomed, in Herodotus' phrase,
as the "gift of the Nile." It is clear why civilization found here one of
its earliest homes; nowhere else was a river so generous in irrigation, and
so controllable in its rise; only Mesopotamia could rival it. For thousands
of years the peasants have watched this rise with anxious eagerness; to this
day public criers announce its progress each morning in the streets of
Cairo.1 So the past, with the quiet continuity of this river, flows into the
future, lightly touching the present on its way. Only historians make
divisions; time does not.
But every gift must be paid for; and the peasant, though he valued the
rising waters, knew that without control they could ruin as well as irrigate
his fields. So from time beyond history he built these ditches that cross
and rccross the land; he caught the surplus in canals, and when the river
fell he raised the water with buckets pivoted on long poles, singing, as
he worked, the songs that the Nile has heard for five thousand years. For
as these peasants arc now, sombre and laughterless even in their singing,
so they have been, in all likelihood, for fifty centuries.3 This water-raising
apparatus is as old as the Pyramids; and a million of these ]ellabecn, despite
the conquests of Arabic, still speak the language of the ancient monuments.*
Here in the Delta, fifty miles southeast of Alexandria, is the site of
Naucratis, once filled with industrious, scheming Greeks; thirty miles
farther east, the site of Sai's, where, in the centuries before the Persian
and Greek conquests, the native civilization of Egypt had its last revival;
and then, a hundred and twenty-nine miles southeast of Alexandria, is
Cairo. A beautiful city, but not Egyptian; the conquering Moslems
• Plural form of the Arabic fellah, peasant; from f claha, to plough.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 1 39
founded it in A.D. 968; then the bright spirit of France overcame the
gloomy Arab and built here a Paris in the desert, exotic and unreal. One
must pass through it by motorcar or leisurely fiacre to find old Egypt at
the Pyramids.
How small they appear from the long road that approaches them; did
we come so far to see so little? But then they grow larger, as if they were
being lifted up into the air; round a turn in the road we surprise the edge
of the desert; and there suddenly the Pyramids confront us, bare and
solitary in the sand, gigantic and morose against an Italian sky. A motley
crowd scrambles abomPfheir base— stout business men on blinking donkeys,
stouter ladies secure in carts, young men prancing on horseback, young
women sitting uncomfortably on camel-back, their silk knees glistening
in the sun; and everywhere grasping Arabs. We stand where Cxsar and
Napoleon stood, and remember that fifty centuries look down upon us;
where the Father of History came four hundred years before Caesar, and
heard the tales that were to startle Pericles. A new perspective of time
comes to us; two millenniums seem to fall out of the picture, and Cxsar,
Herodotus and ourselves appear for a moment contemporary and modern
before these tombs that were more ancient to them than the Greeks
are to us.
Nearby, the Sphinx, half lion and half philosopher, grimly claws the
sand, and glares unmoved at the transient visitor and the eternal plain.
It is a savage monument, as if designed to frighten old lechers and make
children retire early. The lion body passes into a human head with
prognathous jaws and cruel eyes; the civilization that built it (ca. 2990
B.C.) had not quite forgotten barbarism. Once the sand covered it, and
Herodotus, who saw so much that is not there, says not a word of it.
Nevertheless, what wealth these old Egyptians must have had, what
power and skill, even in the infancy of history, to bring these vast stones
six hundred miles, to raise some of them, weighing many tons, to a height
of half a thousand feet, and to pay, or even to feed, the hundred thousand
slaves who toiled for twenty years on these Pyramids! Herodotus has
preserved for us an inscription that he found on one pyramid, record-
ing the quantity of radishes, garlic and onions consumed by the workmen
who built it; these things, too, had to have their immortality.* Despite
* Diodorus Siculus, who must always be read sceptically, writes: "An inscription on the
larger pyramid . . . sets forth that on vegetables and purgatives for the workmen there
were paid out over 1600 talents"— i.e., $16,000,000."
140 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
these familiar friends we go away disappointed; there is something bar-
barically primitive— or barbarically modern— in this brute hunger for
size. It is the memory and imagination of the beholder that, swollen
with history, make these monuments great; in themselves they are a little
ridiculous— vainglorious tombs in which the dead sought eternal life.
Perhaps pictures have too much ennobled them: photography can catch
everything but dirt, and enhances man-made objects with noble vistas of
land and sky. The sunset at Gizeh is greater than the Pyramids.
2. Upstream
Memphis-The masterpiece of Queen Hatshepsut-The ''Colossi
of Memnon"— Luxor and Karnak—The grandeur of Egyp-
tian civilization
From Cairo a little steamer moves up the river— i.e., southward— through
six leisurely days to Karnak and Luxor. Twenty miles below Cairo it
passes Memphis, the most ancient of Egypt's capitals. Here, where the
great Third and Fourth Dynasties lived, in a city of two million souls,
nothing now greets the eye but a row of small pyramids and a grove of
palms; for the rest there is only desert, infinite, villainous sand, slipping
under the feet, stinging the eyes, filling the pores, covering everything,
stretching from Morocco across Sinai, Arabia, Turkestan, Tibet to Mon-
golia: along that sandy belt across two continents civilization once built
its seats and now is gone, driven away, as the ice receded, by increasing
heat and decreasing rain. By the Nile, for a dozen miles on either side,
runs a ribbon of fertile soil; from the Mediterranean to Nubia there is
only this strip redeemed from the desert. This is the thread upon which
hung the life of Egypt. And yet how brief seems the life-span of Greece, or
the millennium of Rome, beside the long record from Menes to Cleopatra!
A week later the steamer is at Luxor. On this site, now covered with
Arab hamlets or drifting sand, once stood the greatest of Egypt's capitals,
the richest city of the very ancient world, known to the Greeks as Thebes,
and to its own people as Wesi and Ne. On the eastern slope of the Nile is
the famous Winter Palace of Luxor, aflame with bougainvillea; across the
river the sun is setting over the Tombs of the Kings into a sea of sand,
and the sky is flaked with gaudy tints of purple and gold. Far in the west
the pillars of Queen Hatshepsut's noble temple gleam, looking for all the
world like some classic colonnade.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 141
In the morning lazy sailboats ferry the seeker across a river so quiet
and unpretentious that no one would suspect that it had been flowing here
for uncounted centuries. Then over mile after mile of desert, through
dusty mountain passes and by historic graves, until the masterpiece of the
great Queen rises still and white in the trembling heat. Here the artist
decided to transform nature and her hills into a beauty greater than her
own: into the very face of the granite cliff he built these columns, as
stately as those that Ictinus made for Pericles; it is impossible, seeing these,
to doubt that Greece took her architecture, perhaps through Crete, from
this initiative race. And on the walls vast bas-reliefs, alive with motion
and thought, tell the story of the first great woman in history, and not
the least of queens.
On the road back sit two giants in stone, representing the most luxurious
of Egypt's monarchs, Amenhotep HI, but mistakenly called the "Colossi
of Memnon" by the Baedekers of Greece. Each is seventy feet high,
weighs seven hundred tons, and is carved out of a single rock. On the
base of one of them are the inscriptions left by Greek tourists who visited
these ruins two thousand years ago; again the centuries fall out of reckon-
ing, and those Greeks seem strangely contemporary with us in the presence
of these ancient things. A mile to the north lie the stone remains of
Rameses II, one of the most fascinating figures in history, beside whom
Alexander is an immature trifle; alive for ninety-nine years, emperor for
sixty-seven, father of one hundred and fifty children; here he is a statue, once
fifty-six feet high, now fifty-six feet long, prostrate and ridiculous in the
sand. Napoleon's savants measured him zealously; they found his ear three
and a half feet long, his foot five feet wide, his weight a thousand tons;
for him Bonaparte should have used his later salutation of Goethe: "Voild
un homme!— behold a man!"
All around now, on the west bank of the Nile, is the City of the Dead.
At every turn some burrowing Egyptologist has unearthed a royal tomb.
The grave of Tutenkhamon is closed, locked even in the faces of those
who thought that gold would open anything; but the tomb of Seti I is
open, and there in the cool earth one may gaze at decorated ceilings and
passages, and marvel at the wealth and skill that could build such sarcophagi
and surround them with such art. In one of these tombs the excavators
saw, on the sand, the footprints of the slaves who had carried the
to its place three thousand years before.'
142 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
But the best remains adorn the eastern side of the river. Here at Luxor
the lordly Amenhotep HI, with the spoils of Thutmose Ill's victories,
began to build his most pretentious edifice; death came upon him as he
built; then, after the work had been neglected for a century, Rameses II
finished it in regal style. At once the quality of Egyptian architecture
floods the spirit: here are scope and power, not beauty merely, but a
masculine sublimity. A wide court, now waste with sand, paved of old
with marble; on three sides majestic colonnades matched by Karnak alone;
on every hand carved stone in bas-relief, and royal statues proud even in
desolation. Imagine eight long stems of the papyrus plant— nurse of letters
and here the form of art; at the base of the fresh unopened flowers bind
the stems with five firm bands that will give beauty strength; then picture
the whole stately stalk in stone: this is the papyriform column of Luxor.
Fancy a court of such columns, upholding massive entablatures and shade-
giving porticoes; see the whole as the ravages of thirty centuries have left
it; then estimate the men who, in what we once thought the childhood of
civilization, could conceive and execute such monuments.
Through ancient ruins and modern squalor a rough footpath leads to
what Egypt keeps as its final offering— the temples of Karnak. Half a
hundred Pharaohs took part in building them, from the last dynasties of
the Old Kingdom to the days of the Ptolemies; generation by generation
the structures grew, until sixty acres were covered with the lordliest
offerings that architecture ever made to the gods. An "Avenue of
Sphinxes" leads to the place where Champollion, founder of Egyptology,
stood in 1828 and wrote:
I went at last to the palace, or rather to the city of monuments—
to Karnak. There all the magnificence of the Pharaohs appeared to
me, all that men have imagined and executed on the grandest scale.
, . . . No people, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of archi-
tecture on a scale so sublime, so great, so grandiose, as the ancient
Egyptians. They conceived like men a hundred feet high.7
To understand it would require maps and plans, and all an architect's
learning. A spacious enclosure of many courts one-third of a mile on
each side; a population of once 86,000 statues;8 a main group of buildings,
constituting the Temple of Amon, one thousand by three hundred feet;
great pylons or gates between one court and the next; the perfect "Heraldic
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 143
Pillars" of Thutmose III, broken off rudely at the top, but still of astonish-
ingly delicate carving and design; the Festival Hall of the same formidable
monarch, its fluted shafts here and there anticipating all the power of the
Doric column in Greece; the little Temple of Ptah, with graceful pillars
rivaling the living palms beside them; the Promenade, again the work of
Thutmose's builders, with bare and massive colonnades, symbol of Egypt's
Napoleon; above all, the Hypostyle Hall,* a very forest of one hundred
and forty gigantic columns, crowded close to keep out the exhausting
sun, flowering out at their tops into spreading palms of stone, and holding
up, with impressive strength, a roof of mammoth slabs stretched in solid
granite from capital to capital. Nearby two slender obelisks, monoliths
complete in symmetry and grace, rise like pillars of light amid the ruins
of statues and temples, and announce in their inscriptions the proud
message of Queen Hatshepsut to the world. These obelisks, the carv-
ing says,
are of hard granite from the quarries of the South; their tops are
of fine gold chosen from the best in all foreign lands. They can be
seen from afar on the river; the splendor of their radiance fills the
Two Lands, and when the solar disc appears between them it is
truly as if he rose up into the horizon of the sky. . . . You who after
long years shall see these monuments, who shall speak of what I
have done, you will say, "We do not know, we do not know how
they can have made a whole mountain of gold." . . . To guild them
I have given gold measured by the bushel, as though it were sacks
of grain, ... for I knew that Karnak is the celestial horizon of the
earth.9
What a queen, and what kings! Perhaps this first great civilization was
the finest of all, and we have but begun to uncover its glory? Near the
Sacred Lake at Karnak men are digging, carrying away the soil patiently
in little paired baskets slung over the shoulder on a pole; an Egyptologist
is bending absorbed over hieroglyphics on two stones just rescued from
the earth; he is one of a thousand such men, Carters and Breasteds and
Masperos, Petries and Caparts and Weigalls, living simply here in the heat
and dust, trying to read for us the riddle of the Sphinx, to snatch from the
secretive soil the art and literature, the history and wisdom of Egypt.
* A model of this can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of An, New York.
144 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VHI
Every day the earth and the elements fight against them; superstition
curses and hampers them; moisture and corrosion attack the very monu-
ments they have exhumed; and the same Nile that gives food to Egypt
creeps in its overflow into the ruins of Karnak, loosens the pillars, tumbles
them down,* and leaves upon them, when it subsides, a deposit of saltpetre
that eats like a leprosy into the stone.
Let us contemplate the glory of Egypt once more, in her history and
her civilization, before her last monuments crumble into the sand.
II. THE MASTER BUILDERS
1. The Discovery of Egypt
Champollion and the Rosetta Stone
The recovery of Egypt is one of the most brilliant chapters in arche-
ology. The Middle Ages knew of Egypt as a Roman colony and a Chris-
tian settlement; the Renaissance presumed that civilization had begun with
Greece; even the Enlightenment, though it concerned itself intelligently
with China and India, knew nothing of Egypt beyond the Pyramids. Egyp-
tology was a by-product of Napoleonic imperialism. When the great Cor-
sican led a French expedition to Egypt in 1798 he took with him a number
of draughtsmen and engineers to explore and map the terrain, and made^
place also for certain scholars absurdly interested in Egypt for the sake of
a better understanding of history. It was this corps of men who first re-
vealed the temples of Luxor and Karnak to the modern world; and the
elaborate Description de Ufigypte (1809-13) which they prepared for the
French Academy was the first milestone in the scientific study of this for-
gotten civilization.10
For many years, however, they were unable to read the inscriptions sur-
viving on the monuments. Typical of the scientific temperament was the
patient devotion with which Champollion, one of these savants, applied
himself to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics. He found at last an
obelisk covered with such "sacred carvings" in Egyptian, but bearing at the
base a Greek inscription which indicated that the writing concerned Ptolemy
and Cleopatra. Guessing that two hieroglyphics often repeated, with a royal
cartouche attached, were the names of these rulers, he made out tentatively
(1822) eleven Egyptian letters; this was the first proof that Egypt had had
* On October 3, 1899, eleven columns at Karnak, loosened by the water, fell to the
ground.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 145
an alphabet. Then he applied this alphabet to a great black stone slab that
Napoleon's troops had stumbled upon near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile.
This "Rosetta Stone"* contained an inscription in three languages: first in
hieroglyphics, second in "demotic"— the popular script of the Egyptians— and
third in Greek. With his knowledge of Greek, and the eleven letters made
out from the obelisk, Champollion, after more than twenty years of labor,
deciphered the whole inscription, discovered the entire Egyptian alphabet,
and opened the way to the recovery of a lost world. It was one of the
peaks in the history of history, t11
2. Prehistoric Egypt
Paleolithic— Neolithic— The Badarians—Predynastic—Race
Since the radicals of one age are the reactionaries of the next, it was not
to be expected that the men who created Egyptology should be the first to
accept as authentic the remains of Egypt's Old Stone Age; after forty les
savants ne sont pas curieux. When the first flints were unearthed in the
valley of the Nile, Sir Flinders Petrie, not usually hesitant with figures,
classed them as the work of post-dynastic generations; and Maspero, whose
lordly erudition did no hurt to his urbane and polished style, ascribed neo-
lithic Egyptian pottery to the Middle Kingdom. Nevertheless, in 1895 De
Morgan revealed an almost continuous gradation of paleolithic cultures-
corresponding substantially with their succession in Europe— in the flint
hand-axes, harpoons, arrow-heads and hammers exhumed all along the
Nile." Imperceptibly the paleolithic remains graduate into neolithic at depths
indicating an age 10,000-4000 B.C.14 The stone tools become more refined,
and reach indeed a level of sharpness, finish and precision uncqualed by any
other neolithic culture known." Towards the end of the period metal work
enters in the form of vases, chisels and pins of copper, and ornaments of
silver and gold.10
Finally, as a transition to history, agriculture appears. In the year 1901,
near the little town of Badari (half way between Cairo and Karnak), bodies
were excavated amid implements indicating a date approximating to forty
centuries before Christ. In the intestines of these bodies, preserved through
six millenniums by the dry heat of the sand, were husks of unconsumed
barley." Since barley does not grow wild in Egypt, it is presumed that the
Badarians had learned to cultivate cereals. From that early age the in-
* Now in the British Museum.
fThc Swedish diplomat Akcrblad in 1802, and the versatile English physicist Thomas
Young in 1814, had helped by partly deciphering the Rosetta Stone.13
146 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
habitants of the Nile valley began the work of irrigation, cleared the jungles
and the swamps, won the river from the crocodile and the hippopotamus,
and slowly laid the groundwork of civilization.
These and other remains give us some inkling of Egyptian life before the
first of the historic dynasties. It was a culture midway between hunting and
agriculture, and just beginning to replace stone with metal tools. The peo-
ple made boats, ground corn, wove linen and carpets, had jewels and per-
fumes, barbers and domesticated animals, and delighted to draw pictures,
chiefly of the prey they pursued.18 They painted upon their simple pottery
figures of mourning women, representations of animals and men, and ge-
ometrical designs; and they carved such excellent products as the Gebel-el-
Arak knife. They had pictographic writing, and Sumerian-like cylinder
seals.19
No one knows whence these early Egyptians came. Learned guesses in-
cline to the view that they were a cross between Nubian, Ethiopian and
Libyan natives on one side and Semitic or Armenoid immigrants on the
other;80 even at that date there were no pure races on the earth. Probably the
invaders or immigrants from Western Asia brought a higher culture with
them," and their intermarriage with the vigorous native stocks provided
that ethnic blend which is often the prelude to a new civilization. Slowly,
from 4000 to 3000 B.C., these mingling groups became a people, and created
the Egypt of history.
3. The Old Kingdom
The "nowcs"-The first historic individual-"Cheops"-"Che-
phren"—The purpose of the Pyramids— Art of the tombs—
Mwirmification
Already, by 4000 B.C., these peoples of the Nile had forged a form
of government. The population along the river was divided into "nomes,"*
in each of which the inhabitants were essentially of one stock, acknowl-
edged the same totem, obeyed the same chief, and worshiped the same
gods by the same rites. Throughout the history of ancient Egypt these
nomes persisted, their "nomarchs" or rulers having more or less power
and autonomy according to the weakness or strength of the reigning
Pharaoh. As all developing structures tend toward an increasing inter-
dependence of the parts, so in this case the growth of trade and the rising
* So called by the Greeks from their word for law (nomos) .
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 147
costliness of war forced the nomes to organize themselves into two king-
doms—one in the south, one in the north; a division probably reflecting
the conflict between African natives and Asiatic immigrants. This danger-
ous accentuation of geographic and ethnic diff erences was resolved for
a time when Menes, a half-legendary figure, brought the "Two Lands"
under his united power, promulgated a body of laws given him by the
god Thoth," established the first historic dynasty, built a new capital at
Memphis, "taught the people" (in the words of an ancient Greek historian)
"to use tables and couches, and . . . introduced luxury and an extravagant
manner of life."88
The first real person in known history is not a conqueror or a king but
an artist and a scientist— Imhotep, physician, architect and chief adviser
of King Zoser (ca. 3150 B.C.). He did so much for Egyptian medicine
that later generations worshiped him as a god of knowledge, author of
their sciences and their arts; and at the same time he appears to have
founded the school of architecture which provided the next dynasty with
the first great builders in history. It was under his administration, accord-
ing to Egyptian tradition, that the first stone house was built; it was he who
planned the oldest Egyptian structure extant— the Step-Pyramid of
Sakkara, a terraced structure of stone which for centuries set the style in
tombs; and apparently it was he who designed the funerary temple of
Zoser, with its lovely lotus columns and its limestone paneled walls." In
these old remains at Sakkarah, at what is almost the beginning of historic
Egyptian art, we find fluted shafts as fair as any that Greece would build,"
reliefs full of realism and vitality,89 green faience— richly colored glazed
earthenware— rivaling the products of medieval Italy,*1 and a power-
ful stone figure of King Zoser himself, obscured in its details by the blows
of time, but still revealing an astonishingly subtle and sophisticated face.28
We do not know what concourse of circumstance made the Fourth
Dynasty the most important in Egyptian history before the Eighteenth.
Perhaps it was the lucrative mining operations in the last reign of the
Third, perhaps the ascendancy of Egyptian merchants in Mediterranean
trade, perhaps the brutal energy of Khufu,* first Pharaoh of the new
house. Herodotus has passed on to us the traditions of the Egyptian
priests concerning this builder of the first of Gizeh's pyramids:
* The "Cheops" of Herodotus, r. 3098-75 B.C.
148 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
Now they tell me that to the reign of Rhampsinitus there was a
perfect distribution of justice and that all Egypt was in a high state
of prosperity; but that after him Cheops, coming to reign over
them, plunged into every kind of wickedness, for that, having shut
up all the temples, ... he ordered all the Egyptians to work for
himself. Some, accordingly, were appointed to draw stones from
the quarries in the Arabian mountains down to the Nile, others he
ordered to receive the stones when transported in vessels across the
river. . . . And they worked to the number of a hundred thousand
men at a time, each party during three months. The time during
which the people were thus harassed by toil lasted ten years on the
road which they constructed, and along which they drew the stones;
a work, in my opinion, not much less than the Pyramid.*
Of his successor and rival builder, Khafre,* we know something almost
at first hand; for the diorite portrait which is among the treasures of the
Cairo Museum pictures him, if not as he looked, certainly as we might
conceive this Pharaoh of the second pyramid, who ruled Egypt for
fifty-six years. On his head is the falcon, symbol of the royal power; but
even without that sign we should know that he was every inch a king.
Proud, direct, fearless, piercing eyes; a powerful nose and a frame of
reserved and quiet strength; it is evident that nature had long since learned
how to make men, and art had long since learned how to represent them.
Why did these men build pyramids? Their purpose was not archi-
tectural but religious; the pyramids were tombs, lineally descended from
the most primitive of burial mounds. Apparently the Pharaoh believed,
like any commoner among his people, that every living body was inhabited
by a double, or ka, which need not die with the breath; and that the ka
would survive all the more completely if the flesh were preserved against
hunger, violence and decay. The pyramid, by its heigh t,f its form and
its position, sought stability as a means to deathlessness; and except for
its square corners it took the natural form that any homogeneous group
of solids would take if allowed to fall unimpeded to the earth. Again, it
was to have permanence and strength; therefore stones were piled up here
with mad patience as if they had grown by the wayside and had not been
carried from quarries hundreds of miles away. In Khufu's pyramid there
•The "Chcphrcn" of Herodotus, r. 3067-11 B.C.
fThe word pyramid is apparently derived from the Egyptian word pi-re-mus, altitude,
rather than from the Greek pyr, fire.
CHAP. Vin) EGYPT 149
are two and a half million blocks, some of them weighing one hundred
and fifty tons,88 all of them averaging two and a half tons; they cover half
a million square feet, and rise 48 1 feet into the air. And the mass is solid;
only a few blocks were omitted, to leave a secret passage way for the
carcass of the King. A guide leads the trembling visitor on all fours into
the cavernous mausoleum, up a hundred crouching steps to the very heart
of the pyramid; there in the damp, still center, buried in darkness and
secrecy, once rested the bones of Khufu and his queen. The marble
sarcophagus of the Pharaoh is still in place, but broken and empty. Even
these stones could not deter human thievery, nor all the curses of the gods.
Since the ka was conceived as the minute image of the body, it had to
be fed, clothed and served after the death of the frame. Lavatories were
provided in some royal tombs for the convenience of the departed soul;
and a funerary text expresses some anxiety lest the ka, for want of food,
should feed upon its own excreta" One suspects that Egyptian burial
customs, if traced to their source, would lead to the primitive interment
of a warrior's weapons with his corpse, or to some institution like the
Hindu suttee— the burial of a man's wives and slaves with him that they
may attend to his needs. This having proved irksome to the wives and
slaves, painters and sculptors were engaged to draw pictures, carve bas-
reliefs, and make statuettes resembling these aides; by a magic formula,
usually inscribed upon them, the carved or painted objects would be
quite as effective as the real ones. A man's descendants were inclined to
be lazy and economical, and even if he had left an endowment to cover
the costs they were apt to neglect the rule that religion originally put
upon them of supplying the dead with provender. Hence pictorial sub-
stitutes were in any case a wise precaution: they could provide the ka of
the deceased with fertile fields, plump oxen, innumerable servants and
busy artisans, at an attractively reduced rate. Having discovered this
principle, the artist accomplished marvels with it. One tomb picture shows
a field being ploughed, the next shows the grain being reaped or threshed,
another the bread being baked; one shows the bull copulating with the
cow, another the calf being born, another the grown cattle being slaugh-
tered, another the meat served hot on the dish.32 A fine limestone bas-relief
in the tomb of Prince Rahotep portrays the dead man enjoying the varied
victuals on the table before him.88 Never since has art done so much
for men
150 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
Finally the ka was assured long life not only by burying the cadaver
in a sarcophagus of the hardest stone, but by treating it to the most pains-
taking mummification. So well was this done that to this day bits of hair
and flesh cling to the royal skeletons. Herodotus vividly describes the
Egyptian embalmer's art:
First they draw out the brains through the nostrils with an iron
hook, raking part of it out in this manner, the rest by the infusion
of drugs. Then with a sharp stone they make an incision in the side,
and take out all the bowels; and having cleansed the abdomen and
rinsed it with palm wine, they next sprinkle it with pounded per-
fume. Then, having filled the belly with pure myrrh, cassia and
other perfumes, they sew it up again; and when they have done this
they steep it in natron,* leaving it under for seventy days; for a
longer time than this it is not lawful to steep it. At the expiration
of seventy days they wash the corpse, and wrap the whole body in
bandages of waxen cloth, smearing it with gum, which the Egyp-
tians commonly use instead of glue. After this the relations, hav-
ing taken the body back again, make a wooden case in the shape of
a man, and having made it they enclose the body; and then, having
fastened it up, they store it in a sepulchral chamber, setting it up-
right against the wall. In this manner they prepare the bodies that
are embalmed in the most expensive way.*4
"All the world fears Time," says an Arab proverb, "but Time fears the
Pyramids."18 However, the pyramid of Khufu has lost twenty feet of its
height, and all its ancient marble casing is gone; perhaps Time is only
leisurely with it. Beside it stands Khafre's pyramid, a trifle smaller, but
still capped with the granite casing that once covered it all. Humbly be-
yond this squats the pyramid of Khafre's successor Menkaure,t covered
not with granite but with shamefaced brick, as if to announce that when
men raised it the zenith of the Old Kingdom had passed. The statues of
Menkaure that have come down to us show him as a man more refined and
less forceful than Khafre.| ^^H^ation,_like „!!£?! ^destroys what it has
perfected, Already, it may be, the growth of comforts and luxuries, the
* A silicate of sodium and aluminum: Na2ALSi,O102HsO.
t The "Mycerinus" of Herodotus, r. 301 1-2988 B.C.
•jCf. the statues of Menkaure and his consort in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 151
progress of manners and morals, had made men lovers of peace and haters
of war. Suddenly a new figure appeared, usurped Menkaure's throne, and
put an end to the pyramid-builders' dynasty.
4. The Middle Kingdom
The Feudal Age— The Twelfth Dynasty— The Hyksos Domination
ICings were never so plentiful as in Egypt. History lumps them into
dynasties— monarchs of one line or family; but even then they burden the
memory intolerably.* One of these early Pharaohs, Pepi II, ruled Egypt/
for ninety-four years (2738-2644 B.C.)— the longest reign in history. j
When he died anarchy and dissolution ensued, the Pharaohs lost control,
and feudal barons ruled the nomes independently: this alternation between
centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of his-
tory, as if men tired alternately of immoderate liberty and excessive order.
After a Dark Age of four chaotic centuries a strong-willed Charlemagne
arose, set things severely in order, changed the capital from Memphis to
Thebes, and under the title of Amcnemhet 1 inaugurated that Twelfth
Dynasty during which all the arts, excepting perhaps architecture, reached
a height of excellence never equaled in known Egypt before or again.
Through an old inscription Amenemhet speaks to us:
I was one who cultivated grain and loved the harvest god;
The Nile greeted me and every valley; *
None was hungry in my years, none thirsted then;
Men dwelt in peace through that which I wrought, and conversed
of me.
His reward was a conspiracy among the Talleyrands and Pouches whom
he had raised to high office. He put it down with a mighty hand, but left
for his son, Polonius-like, a scroll of bitter counsel—an admirable formula
for despotism, but a heavy price to pay for royalty:
* Historians have helped themselves by further grouping the dynasties into periods: (i)
The Old Kingdom, Dynasties I- VI (3500-2631 B.C.), followed by an interlude of chaos;
(2) The Middle Kingdom, Dynasties XI-XIV (2375-1800 B.C.), followed by another
chaotic interlude; (3) The Empire, Dynasties XVIII-XX (1580-1100 B.C.), followed by a
period of divided rule from rival capitals; and (4; The Saite Age^ Dynasty XXVI, 663-
525. All these dates except the last arc approximate, and Egyptologists amuse themselves
by moving the earlier ones up and down by centuries.
152 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VHI
Hearken to that which I say to thce,
That thou mayest be king of the earth, . . .
That thou mayest increase good:
Harden thyself against all subordinates—
The people give heed to him who terrorizes them;
Approach them not alone.
Fill not thy heart with a brother,
Know not a friend; . . .
When thou sleepest, guard for thyself thine own heart;
For a man hath no friend in the day of evil."
This stern ruler, who seems to us so human across four thousand years,
established a system of administration that held for half a millennium.
Wealth grew again, and then art; Senusret I built a great canal from the
Nile to the Red Sea, repelled Nubian invaders, and erected great temples at
Hcliopolis, Abydos, and Karnak; ten colossal seated figures of him have
cheated time, and litter the Cairo Museum. Another Senusret— the Third-
began the subjugation of Palestine, drove back the recurrent Nubians,
and raised a stele or slab at the southern frontier, "not from any desire that
ye should worship it, but that ye should fight for it."37 Amenemhet III, a
great administrator, builder of canals and irrigation, put an end (perhaps
too effectively) to the power of the barons, and replaced them with
appointees of the king. Thirteen years after his death Egypt was plunged
into disorder by a dispute among rival claimants to the throne, and the
Middle Kingdom ended in two centuries of turmoil and disruption. Then
the Hyksos, nomads from Asia, invaded disunited Egypt, set fire to the
cities, razed the temples, squandered the accumulated wealth, destroyed
much of the accumulated art, and for two hundred years subjected the
Nile valley to the rule of the "Shepherd Kings." Ancient civilizations
were little isles in a sea of barbarism, prosperous settlements surrounded
by hungry, envious and warlike hunters and herders; at any moment the
wall of defense might be broken down. So the Kassites raided Babylonia,
the Gauls attacked Greece and Rome, the Huns overran Italy, the Mongols
came down upon Peking.
Soon, however, the conquerors in their turn grew fat and prosperous,
and lost control; the Egyptians rose in a war of liberation, expelled the
Hyksos, and established that Eighteenth Dynasty which was to lift Egypt
to greater wealth, power and glory than ever before.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT IJ3
5. The Empire
The great queen— Thutmose Ill—The zenith of Egypt
Perhaps the invasion had brought another rejuvenation by the infusion
of fresh blood; but at the same time the new age marked the beginning
of a thousand-year struggle betwen Egypt and Western Asia. Thutmose
I not only consolidated the power of the new empire, but— on the ground
that western Asia must be controlled to prevent further interruptions-
invaded Syria, subjugated it from the coast to Carchemish, put it under
guard and tribute, and returned to Thebes laden with spoils and the glory
that always comes from the killing of men. At the end of his thirty-year
reign he raised his daughter Hatshepsut to partnership with him on the
throne. For a time her husband and step-brother ruled as Thutmose II,
and dying, named as his successor Thutmose HI, son of Thutmose I by a
concubine." But Hatshepsut set this high-destined youngster aside, assumed
full royal powers, and proved herself a king in everything but gender.
Even this exception was not conceded by her. Since sacred tradition
required that every Egyptian ruler should be a son of the great god Amon,
Hatshepsut arranged to be made at once male and divine. A biography
was invented for her by which Amon had descended upon Hatshepsut's
mother Ahmasi in a flood of perfume and light; his attentions had been
gratefully received; and on his departure he had announced that Ahmasi
would give birth to a daughter in whom all the valor and strength of the
god would be made manifest on earth." To satisfy the prejudices of her
people, and perhaps the secret desire of her heart, the great Queen had
herself represented on the monuments as a bearded and breastless warrior;
and though the inscriptions referred to her with the feminine pronoun,
they did not hesitate to speak of her as "Son of the Sun" and "Lord of the
Two Lands." When she appeared in public she dressed in male garb, and
wore a beard.40
She had a right to determine her own sex, for she became one of the
most successful and beneficent of Egypt's many rulers. She maintained
internal order without undue tyranny, and external peace without loss.
She organized a great expedition to Punt (presumably the eastern coast of
Africa), giving new markets to her merchants and new delicacies to her
people. She helped to beautify Karnak, raised there two majestic obelisks,
154 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
built at Der-el-Bahri the stately temple which her father had designed,
and repaired some of the damage that had been done to older temples by
the Hyksos kings. "I have restored that which was in ruins," one of her
proud inscriptions tells us; "I have raised up that which was unfinished
since the Asiatics were in the midst of the Northland, overthrowing that
which had been made."41 Finally she built for herself a secret and ornate
tomb among the sand-swept mountains on the western side of the Nile,
in what came to be called "The Valley of the Kings' Tombs"; her succes-
sors followed her example, until some sixty royal sepulchres had been cut
into the hills, and the city of the dead began to rival living Thebes in
'( population. The "West End" in Egyptian cities was the abode of dead
j aristocrats; to "go west" meant to die.
For twenty-two years the Queen ruled in wisdom and peace; Thutmose
III followed with a reign of many wars. Syria took advantage of Hatshep-
sut's death to revolt; it did not seem likely to the Syrians that Thutmose,
a lad of twenty-two, would be able to maintain the empire created by his
father. But Thutmose set off in the very year of his accession, marched
his army through Kantara and Gaza at twenty miles a day, and confronted
the rebel forces at Har-Mcgiddo (i.e., Mt. Megiddo), a little town so
strategically placed between the rival Lebanon ranges on the road from
Egypt to the Euphrates that it has been the Ar-mageddon of countless wars
from that day to General Allenby's. In the same pass where in 1918 the
British defeated the Turks, Thutmose III, 3397 years before, defeated the
Syrians and their allies. Then Thutmose marched victorious through
western Asia, subduing, taxing and levying tribute, and returned to Thebes
in triumph six months after his departure.*4*
This was the first of fifteen campaigns in which the irresistible Thutmose
made Egypt master of the Mediterranean world. Not only did he conquer,
but he organized; everywhere he left doughty garrisons and capable gov-
ernors. The first man in known history to recognize the importance of sea
power, he built a fleet that kept the Near East effectively in leash. The
spoils that he seized became the foundation of Egyptian art in the period
of the Empire; the tribute that he drained from Syria gave his people an
epicurean ease, and created a new class of artists who filled all Egypt with
* Allenby took twice as long to accomplish a similar result; Napoleon, attempting it at
Acre, failed.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 155
precious things. We may vaguely estimate the wealth of the new imperial
government when we learn that on one occasion the treasury was able to
measure out nine thousand pounds of gold and silver alloy.48 Trade flour-
ished in Thebes as never before; the temples groaned with offerings; and
at Karnak the lordly Promenade and Festival Hall rose to the greater glory
of god and king. Then the King retired from the battlefield, designed
exquisite vases, and gave himself to internal administration. His vizier or
prime minister said of him, as tired secretaries were to say of Napoleon:
"Lo, His Majesty was one who knew what happened; there was nothing
of which he was ignorant; he was the god of knowledge in everything;
there was no matter that he did not carry out."43* He passed away after
a rule of thirty-two (some say fifty-four) years, having made Egyptian
leadership in the Mediterranean world complete.
After him another conqueror, Amenhotep II, subdued again certain
idolaters of liberty in Syria, and returned to Thebes with seven captive
kings, still alive, hanging head downward from the prow of the imperial
galley; six of them he sacrificed to Amon with his own hand.4* Then an-
other Thutmose, who does not count; and in 1412 Amenhotep HI began
a long reign in which the accumulated wealth of a century of mastery
brought Egypt to the acme of her splendor. A fine bust in the British
Museum shows him as a man at once of refinement and of strength, able
to hold firmly together the empire bequeathed to him, and yet living in
an atmosphere of comfort and elegance that might have been envied by
Petronius or the Medici. Only the exhuming of Tutenkhamon's relics
could make us credit the traditions and records of Amenhotep's riches
and luxury. In his reign Thebes was as majestic as any city in history.
Her streets crowded with merchants, her markets filled with the goods of
the world, her buildings "surpassing in magnificence all those of ancient or
modern capitals,"415 her imposing palaces receiving tribute from an endless
chain of vassal states, her massive temples "enriched all over with gold"46
and adorned with ever)" art, her spacious villas and costly chateaux, her
shaded promenades and artificial lakes providing the scene for sumptuous
displays of fashion that anticipated Imperial Rome47— such was Egypt's
capital in the days of her glory, in the reign before her fall.
156 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
in. THE CIVILIZATION OF EGYPT
1. Agriculture
Behind these kings and queens were pawns; behind these temples, pal-
aces and pyramids were the workers of the cities and the peasants of the
fields.* Herodotus describes them optimistically as he found them about
450 B.C.
They gather in the fruits of the earth with less labor than any
other people, ... for they have not the toil of breaking up the
furrow with the plough, nor of hoeing, nor of any other work
which all other men must labor at to obtain a crop of corn; but
when the river has come of its own accord and irrigated their fields,
and having irrigated them has subsided, then each man sows his own
land and turns his swine into it; and when the seed has been trod-
den into it by the swine he waits for harvest time; then ... he
gathers it in.48
As the swine trod in the seed, so apes were tamed and taught to pluck
fruit from the trees."0 And the same Nile that irrigated the fields deposited
upon them, in its inundation, thousands of fish in shallow pools; even the
same net with which the peasant fished during the day was used around
his head at night as a double protection against mosquitoes." Neverthe-
less it was not he who profited by the bounty of the river. Every acre of
the soil belonged to the Pharaoh, and other men could use it only by his kind
indulgence; every tiller of the earth had to pay him an annual tax of ten81
or twenty" per cent in kind. Large tracts were owned by the feudal
barons or other wealthy men; the size of some of these estates may be
judged from the circumstance that one of them had fifteen hundred cows.54
Cereals, fish and meat were the chief items of diet. One fragment tells the
school-boy what he is permitted to eat; it includes thirty-three forms of
flesh, forty-eight baked meats, and twenty-four varieties of drink.85 The
rich washed down their meals with wine, the poor with barley beer."
The lot of the peasant was hard. The "free" farmer was subject only
to the middleman and the tax-collector, who dealt with him on the most
time-honored of economic principles, taking "all that the traffic would
* The population of Egypt in the fourth century before Christ is estimated at some
[ 7,000,000 souls.48
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 157
bear" out of the produce of the land. Here is how a complacent contempo-
rary scribe conceived the life of the men who fed ancient Egypt:
Dost thou not recall the picture of the farmer when the tenth
of his grain is levied? Worms have destroyed half the wheat, and
the hippopotami have eaten the rest; there are swarms of rats in the
fields, the grasshoppers alight there, the cattle devour, the little birds
pilfer; and if the farmer loses sight for an instant of what remains
on the ground, it is carried off by robbers; moreover, the thongs
which bind the iron and the hoe are worn out, and the team has died
at the plough. It is then that the scribe steps out of the boat at the
landing-place to levy the tithe, and there come the Keepers of the
Doors of the (King's) Granary with cudgels, and Negroes with
ribs of palm-leaves, crying, "Come now, come!" There is none, and
they throw the cultivator full length upon the ground, bind him,
drag him to the canal, and fling him in head first; his wife is bound
with him, his children are put into chains. The neighbors in the
meantime leave him and fly to save their grain."
It is a characteristic bit of literary exaggeration; but the author might
have added that the peasant was subject at any time to the corvee, doing
forced labor for the King, dredging the canals, building roads, tilling the
royal lands, or dragging great stones and obelisks for pyramids, temples
and palaces. Probably a majority of the laborers in the field were mod-
erately content, accepting their poverty patiently. Many of them were
slaves, captured in the wars or bonded for debt; sometimes slave-raids were
organized, and women and children from abroad were sold to the highest
bidder at home. An old relief in the Leyden Museum pictures a long
procession of Asiatic captives passing gloomily into the land of bondage:
one sees them still alive on that vivid stone, their hands tied behind their
backs or their heads, or thrust through rude handcuffs of wood; their
faces empty with the apathy that has known the last despair.
2. Industry
Miners — Manufactures — Workers — Engineers — Transport--
Postal service—Commerce and finance—Scribes
Slowly, as the peasants toiled, an economic surplus grew, and food was
laid aside for workers in industry and trade. Having no minerals, Egypt
158 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIH
sought them in Arabia and Nubia. The great distances offered no tempta-
tion to private initiative, and for many centuries mining was a government
monopoly." Copper was mined in small quantities,"* iron was imported
from the Hittites, gold mines were found along the eastern coast, in Nubia,
and in every vassal treasury. Diodorus Siculus (56 B.C.) describes Egyptian
miners following with lamp and pick the veins of gold in the earth, chil-
dren carrying up the heavy ore, stone mortars pounding it to bits, old men
and women washing the dirt away. We cannot tell to what extent
nationalistic exaggeration distorts the famous passage:
The kings of Egypt collect condemned prisoners, prisoners of
war and others who, beset by false accusations, have been in a fit
of anger thrown into prison. These— sometimes alone, sometimes
with their entire family—they send to the gold mines, partly to
exact a just vengeance for crimes committed by the condemned,
partly to secure for themselves a big revenue through their toil.
... As these workers can take no care of their bodies, and have
not even a garment to hide their nakedness, there is no one who,
seeing these luckless people, would not pity them because of the
excess of their misery, for there is no forgiveness or relaxation at
all for the sick, or the maimed, or the old, or for woman's weakness;
but all with blows are compelled to stick to their labor until, worn
out, they die in their servitude. Thus the poor wretches even ac-
count the future more dreadful than the present because of the
excess of their punishment, and look to death as more desirable
than life.60
In its earliest dynasties Egypt learned the art of fusing copper with
tin to make bronze: first, bronze weapons— swords, helmets and shields;
then bronze tools— wheels, rollers, levers, pulleys, windlasses, wedges,
lathes, screws, drills that bored the toughest diorite stone, saws that cut
the massive slabs of the sarcophagi. Egyptian workers made brick, cement
and plaster of Paris; they glazed pottery, blew glass, and glorified both
with color. They were masters in the carving of wood; they made every-
thing from boats and carriages, chairs and beds, to handsome coffins that
almost invited men to die. Out of animal skins they made clothing,
quivers, shields and seats; all the arts of the tanner are pictured on the walls
of the tombs; and the curved knives represented there in the tanner's hand
are used by cobblers to this day.81 From the papyrus plant Egyptian
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 1 59
artisans made ropes, mats, sandals and paper. Other workmen developed
the arts of enameling and varnishing, and applied chemistry to industry.
Still others wove tissues of the subtlest weave in the history of the textile
art; specimens of linen woven four thousand years ago show today, despite
time's corrosion, "a weave so fine that it requires a magnifying glass to dis-
tinguish it from silk; the best work of the modern machine-loom is coarse
in comparison with this fabric of the ancient Egyptian hand-loom."" "If," <
says Peschel, "we compare the technical inventory of the Egyptians with
our own, it is evident that before the invention of the steam-engine we
scarcely excelled them in anything."8*
The workers were mostly freemen, partly slaves. In general every
trade was a caste, as in modern India, and sons were expected to follow
and take over the occupations of their fathers.84* The great wars brought
in thousands of captives, making possible the large estates and the triumphs
of engineering. Ramcses HI presented 1 13,000 slaves to the temples during
the course of his reign.80 The free artisans were usually organized for
the specific undertaking by a "chief workman" or overseer, who sold their
labor as a group and paid them individually. A chalk tablet in the British
Museum contains a chief workman's record of forty-three workers, listing
their absences and their causes— "ill," or "sacrificing to the the god," or just
plain "lazy." Strikes were frequent. Once, their pay being long overdue,
the workmen besieged the overseer and threatened him. "We have been
driven here by hunger and thirst," they told him; "we have no clothes, we
have no oil, we have no food. Write to our lord the Pharaoh on the sub-
ject, and write to the governor" (of the nome) "who is over us, that they
may give us something for our sustenance.""7 A Greek tradition reports a
great revolt in Egypt, in which the slaves captured a province, and held it
so long that time, which sanctions everything, gave them legal ownership
of it; but of this revolt there is no record in Egyptian inscriptions.88 It is
surprising that a civilization so ruthless in its exploitation of labor should
have known— or recorded—so few revolutions.
Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or
Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution; only our time has
excelled it, and we may be mistaken. Senusret III, for example, builtf a
wall twenty-seven miles long to gather into Lake Moeris the waters of
* "If any artisan," adds Diodorus, "takes part in public affairs he is severely beaten."68
t This word, when used in reference to rulers, must always be understood as a euphemism.
l6o THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
the Fayum basin, thereby reclaiming 25,000 acres of marsh land for cul-
tivation, and providing a vast reservoir for irrigation.* Great canals were
constructed, some from the Nile to the Red Sea; the caisson was used for
digging,10 and obelisks weighing a thousand tons were transported over
great distances. If we may credit Herodotus, or judge from later under-
takings of the same kind represented in the reliefs of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, these immense stones were drawn on greased beams by thousands
of slaves, and raised to the desired level on inclined approaches beginning
far away.71 Machinery was rare because muscle was cheap. See, in one
relief, eight hundred rowers in twenty-seven boats drawing a barge laden
with two obelisks;78 this is the Eden to which our romantic machine-
wreckers would return. Ships a hundred feet long by half a hundred
feet wide plied the Nile and the Red Sea, and finally sailed the Mediter-
ranean. On land goods were transported by human muscle, later by
donkeys, later by the horse, which probably the Hyksos brought to Egypt;
the camel did not appear till Ptolemaic days.73 The poor man walked, or
paddled his simple boat; the rich man rode in sedan-chairs carried by
slaves, or later in chariots clumsily made with the weight placed entirely
in front of the axle.74
There was a regular postal service; an ancient papyrus says, "Write to
me by the letter-carrier."76 Communication, however, was difficult; roads
were few and bad, except for the military highwa yAntrough Gaza to
the Euphrates;78 and the serpentine form of the Nile, which was the main
highroad of Egypt, doubled the distance from town to town. Trade was
comparatively primitive; most of it was by barter in village bazaars. For-
eign commerce grew slowly, restricted severely by the most up-to-date
tariff walls; the various kingdoms of the Near East believed strongly in the
"protective principle," for customs dues were a mainstay of their royal
treasuries. Nevertheless Egypt grew rich by importing raw materials and
exporting finished products; Syrian, Cretan and Cypriote merchants
crowded the markets of Egypt, and Phoenician galleys sailed up the Nile
to the busy wharves of Thebes.77
Coinage had not yet developed; payments, even of the highest salaries,
were made in goods— corn, bread, yeast, beer, etc. Taxes were collected
in kind, and the Pharaoh's treasuries were not a mint of money, but store-
houses of a thousand products from the fields and shops. After the influx
of precious metals that followed the conquests of Thutmose HI, merchants
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT l6l
began to pay for goods with rings or ingots of gold, measured by weight
at every transaction; but no coins of definite value guaranteed by the state
arose to facilitate exchange. Credit, however, was highly developed;
written transfers frequently took the place of barter or payment; scribes
were busy everywhere accelerating business with legal documents of ex-
change, accounting and finance.
Every visitor to the Louvre has seen the statue of the Egyptian scribe,
squatting on his haunches, almost completely nude, dressed with a pen
behind the car as reserve for the one he holds in his hand. He keeps record
of work done and goods paid, of prices and costs, of profits and loss; he
counts the cattle as they move to the slaughter, or corn as it is measured
out in sale; he draws up contracts and wills, and makes out his master's
income-tax; verily there is nothing new under the sun. He is sedulously
attentive and mechanically industrious; he has just enough intelligence
not to be dangerous. His life is monotonous, but he consoles himself by
writing essays on the hardships of the manual worker's existence, and
the princely dignity of those whose food is paper and whose blood is ink.
3. Government
The bureaucrats—Law— The vizier—The pharaoh
With these scribes as a clerical bureaucracy the Pharaoh and the pro-
vincial nobles maintained law and order in the state. Ancient slabs show
such clerks taking the census, and examining income-tax returns. Through
Nilometcrs that measured the rise of the river, the scribe-officials forecast
the size of the harvest, and estimated the government's future revenue;
they allotted appropriations in advance to governmental departments,
supervised industry and trade, and in some measure achieved, almost at
the outset of history, a planned economy regulated by the state.78
Civil and criminal legislation were highly developed, and already in the
Fifth Dynasty the law of private property and bequest was intricate and
precise.79 As in our own days, there was absolute equality before the
law— whenever the contesting parties had equal resources and influence.
The oldest legal document in the world is a brief, in the British Museum,
presenting to the court a complex case in inheritance. Judges required
cases to be pled and answered, reargued and rebutted, not in oratory but
in writing—which compares favorably with our windy litigation. Perjury
l6l THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
was punished with death.80 There were regular courts, rising from local
judgment-seats in the nomes to supreme courts at Memphis, Thebes, or
Heliopolis.81 Torture was used occasionally as a midwife to truth;88 beating
with a rod was a frequent punishment, mutilation by cutting off nose or
ears, hand or tongue, was sometimes resorted to,83 or exile to the mines,
or death by strangling, empaling, beheading, or burning at the stake; the
extreme penalty was to be embalmed alive, to be eaten slowly by an in-
escapable coating of corrosive natron.84 Criminals of high rank were saved
the shame of public execution by being permitted to kill themselves, as in
samurai Japan.88 We find no signs of any system of police; even the stand-
ing army— always small because of Egypt's protected isolation between
deserts and seas— was seldom used for internal discipline. Security of life
and property, and the continuity of law and government, rested almost
entirely on the prestige of the Pharaoh, maintained by the schools and the
church. No other nation except China has ever dared to depend so
largely upon psychological discipline.
It was a well-organized government, with a better record of duration
than any other in history. At the head of the administration was the
Vizier, who served at once as prune minister, chief justice, and head of
the treasury; he was the court of last resort under the Pharaoh himself.
A tomb relief shows us the Vizier leaving his house early in the morning
to hear the petitions of the poor, "to hear," as the inscription reads, "what
the people say in their demands, and to make no distinction between small
and great."80 A remarkable papyrus roll, which comes down to us from
the days of the Empire, purports to be the form of address (perhaps it is
but a literary invention) with which the Pharaoh installed a new Vizier:
Look to the office of the Vizier; be watchful over all that is done
therein. Behold, it is the established support of the whole land. . . .
The Vizierate is not sweet; it is bitter. . . . Behold, it is not to
show respect-of-pcrsons to princes and councillors; it is not to make
for himself slaves of any people. . . . Behold, when a petitioner
comes from Upper or Lower Egypt ... see thou to it that every-
thing is done in accordance with law, that everything is done ac-
cording to the custom thereof, (giving) to (every man) his right.
... It is an abomination of the god to show partiality. . . . Look
upon him who is known to thee like him who is unknown to thce;
and him who is near the King like him who is far from (his House).
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 163
Behold, a prince who does this, he shall endure here in this place.
. . . The dread of a prince is that he does justice. . . . (Behold
the regulation) that is laid upon thee.*7
The Pharaoh himself was the supreme court; any case might under
certain circumstances be brought to him, if the plaintiff was careless of
expense. Ancient carvings show us the "Great House" from which he
ruled, and in which the offices of the government were gathered; from this
Great House, which the Egyptians called Pero and which the Jews trans-
lated Pharaoh, came the title of the emperor. Here he carried on an
arduous routine of executive work, sometimes with a schedule as rigorous
as Chandragupta's, Louis XIV's or Napoleon's.88 When he traveled the
nobles met him at the feudal frontiers, escorted and entertained him, and
gave him presents proportionate to their expectations; one lord, says a
proud inscription, gave to Amenhotep II "carriages of silver and gold,
statues of ivory and ebony . . . jewels, weapons, and works of art," 680
shields, 140 bronze daggers, and many vases of precious metal.8" The
Pharaoh reciprocated by taking one of the baron's sons to live with him
at court— a subtle way of exacting a hostage of fidelity. The oldest of
the courtiers constituted a Council of Elders called Saru, or The Great
Ones, who served as an advisory cabinet to the king.*0 Such counsel was
in a sense superfluous, for the Pharaoh, with the help of the priests, assumed
divine descent, powers and wisdom; this alliance with the gods was the
secret of his prestige. Consequently he was greeted with forms of address
always flattering, sometimes astonishing, as when, in The Story of Sinuhe,
a good citizen hails him: "O long-living King, may the Golden One"
(Hathor the goddess) "give life to thy nose."81
As became so godlike a person, the Pharaoh was waited upon by a vari-
ety of aides, including generals, launderers, bleachers, guardians of the
imperial wardrobe, and other men of high degree. Twenty officials col-
laborated to take care of his toilet: barbers who were permitted only to
shave him and cut his hair, hairdressers who adjusted the royal cowl and
diadem to his head, manicurists who cut and polished his nails, perfumers
who deodorized his body, blackened his eyelids with kohl, and reddened
his cheeks and lips with rouge.01 One tomb inscription describes its occu-
pant as "Overseer of the Cosmetic Box, Overseer of the Cosmetic Pencil,
Sandal-Bearer to the King, doing in the matter of the King's sandals to the
satisfaction of his Law."06 So pampered, he tended to degenerate, and some-
164 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
times brightened his boredom by manning the imperial barge with young
women clad only in network of a large mesh. The luxury of Amenhotep
III prepared for the debacle of Ikhnaton.
4. Morals
Royal incest— The harem— Marriage— The position of woman—
The matriarchate in Egypt— Sexual morality
The government of the Pharaohs resembled that of Napoleon, even to
the incest. Very often the king married his own sister— occasionally his
own daughter— to preserve the purity of the royal blood. It is difficult to
say whether this weakened the stock. Certainly Egypt did not think so,
after several thousand years of experiment; the institution of sister-mar-
riage spread among the people, and as late as the second century after
Christ two-thirds of the citizens of Arsinoe were found to be practising the
custom.94 The words brother and sister, in Egyptian poetry, have the same
significance as lover and beloved among ourselves.95 In addition to his sisters
the Pharaoh had an abundant harem, recruited not only from captive
women but from the daughters of the nobles and the gifts of foreign po-
tentates; so Amenhotep III received from a prince of Naharina his eldest
daughter and three hundred select maidens.98 Some of the nobility imi-
tated this tiresome extravagance on a small scale, adjusting their morals to
their resources.
For the most part the common people, like persons of moderate
income everywhere, contented themselves with monogamy. Family life was
apparently as well ordered, as wholesome in moral tone and influence, as
in the highest civilizations of our time. Divorce was rare until the decadent
dynasties. The husband could dismiss his wife without compensation if he
detected her in adultery; if he divorced her for other reasons he was re-
quired to turn over to her a substantial share of the family property.
The fidelity of the husband— so far as we can fathom such arcana— was as
painstaking as in any later culture, and the position of woman was more
advanced than in most countries today. "No people, ancient or modern,"
said Max Miiller, "has given women so high a legal status as did the in-
habitants of the Nile Valley."*7 The monuments picture them eating and
drinking in public, going about their affairs in the streets unattended
and unharmed, and freely engaging in industry and trade. Greek travel-
CHAP. Vin) EGYPT 165
ers, accustomed to confine their Xanthippes narrowly, were amazed at
this liberty; they jibed at the henpecked husbands of Egypt, and Diodorus
Siculus, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye, reported that along the Nile
obedience of the husband to the wife was required in the marriage bond *—
a stipulation not necessary in America. Women held and bequeathed
property in their own names; one of the most ancient documents in his-
tory is the Third Dynasty will in which the lady Neb-sent transmits her
lands to her children." Hatshepsut and Cleopatra rose to be queens, and
ruled and ruined like kings.
Sometimes a cynical note is heard in the literature. One ancient moralist
warns his readers:
Beware of a woman from abroad, who is not known in her city.
Look not upon her when she comes, and know her not. She is like
the vortex of deep waters, whose whirling is unfathomable. The
woman whose husband is far away, she writes to thee every day. If
there is no witness with her she arises and spreads her net. Oh,
deadly crime if one hearkens!100
But the more characteristically Egyptian tone sounds in Ptah-hotep's
instructions to his son:
If thou art successful, and hast furnished thy house, and lovest the
wife of thy bosom, then fill her stomach and clothe her back. . . .
Make glad her heart during the time thou hast her, for she is a field
profitable to its owner. ... If thou oppose her it will mean thy
And the Boulak Papyrus admonishes the child with touching wisdom:
Thou shah never forget thy mother. . . . For she carried thee long
beneath her breast as a heavy burden; and after thy months were ac-
complished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon
her shoulder, and gave thee her breast to thy mouth. She nurtured
thee, and took no offense from thy uncleanliness. And when thou
didst enter school, and wast instructed in the writings, daily she
stood by the master with bread and beer from the house.10*
It is likely that this high status of woman arose from the mildly matri-
archal character of Egyptian society. Not only was woman full mistress
1 66 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
in the house, but all estates descended in the female line; "even in late
times," says Petrie, "the husband made over all his property and future
earnings to his wife in his marriage settlement."108 Men married their
sisters not because familiarity had bred romance, but because they wished
to enjoy the family inheritance, which passed down from mother to
daughter, and they did not care to see this wealth give aid and comfort to
strangers.104 The powers of the wife underwent a slow diminution in the
course of time, perhaps through contact with the patriarchal customs of
the Hyksos, and through the transit of Egypt from agricultural isolation
and peace to imperialism and war; under the Ptolemies the influence of the
Greeks was so great that freedom of divorce, claimed in earlier times by
the wife, became the exclusive privilege of the husband. Even then, how-
ever, the change was accepted only by the upper classes; the Egyptian
commoner adhered to matriarchal ways.105 Possibly because of the mas-
tery of woman over her own affairs, infanticide was rare; Diodorus, thought
it a peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child born to them was reared,
and tells us that parents guilty of infanticide were required by law to hold
the dead child in their arms for three days and nights.100 Families were
large, and children swarmed in both hovels and palaces; the well-to-do
were hard put to it to keep count of their offspring.107
Even in courtship the woman usually took the initiative. The love
poems and letters that have come down to us are generally addressed by
the lady to the man; she begs for assignations, she presses her suit directly,
she formally proposes marriage.108 "Oh my beautiful friend," says one
letter, "my desire is to become, as thy wife, the mistress of all thy posses-
sions."10* Hence modesty, as distinct from fidelity, was not prominent
among the Egyptians; they spoke of sexual affairs with a directness alien
to our late morality, adorned their very temples with pictures and bas-
reliefs of startling anatomical candor, and supplied their dead with obscene
literature to amuse them in the grave."0 Blood ran warm along the Nile:
girls were nubile at ten, and premarital morals were free and easy; one
courtesan, in Ptolemaic days, was reputed to have built a pyramid with her
savings; even sodomy had its clientele.111 Dancing-girls, in the manner of
Japan, were accepted into the best male society as providers of enter-
tainment and physical edification; they dressed in diaphanous robes, or
contented themselves with anklets, bracelets and rings.113 Evidences occur
of religious prostitution on a small scale; as late as the Roman occupa-
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 1 67
tion the most beautiful girl among the noble families of Thebes was chosen
to be consecrated to Amon. When she was too old to satisfy the god she
received an honorable discharge, married, and moved in the highest
circles."* It was a civilization with different prejudices from our own.
5. Manners
Character— Games— Appearance— Cosmetics— Costume— Jewelry
If we try to visualize the Egyptian character we find it difficult to dis-
tinguish between the ethics of the literature and the actual practices of life.
Very frequently noble sentiments occur; a poet, for example, counsels his
countrymen:
Give bread to him who has no field,
And create for thyself a good name for ever more;"1
and some of the elders give very laudable advice to their children. A papyrus
in the British Museum, known to scholars as "The Wisdom of Amenemope"
(ca. 950 B.C.), prepares a student for public office with admonitions that prob-
ably influenced the author or authors of the "Proverbs of Solomon."
Be not greedy for a cubit of land,
And trespass not on the boundary of the widow. . . .
Plough the fields that thou mayest find thy needs,
And receive thy bread from thine own threshing floor.
Better is a bushel which God giveth to thee
Than five thousand gained by transgression. . . .
Better is poverty in the hand of God
Than riches in the storehouse;
And better are loaves when the heart is joyous
Than riches in unhappiness. . . .""
Such pious literature did not prevent the normal operation of human greed.
Plato described the Athenians as loving knowledge, the Egyptians as loving
wealth; perhaps he was too patriotic. In general the Egyptians were the
Americans of antiquity: enamored of size, given to gigantic engineering and
majestic building, industrious and accumulative, practical even in the midst of
many ultramundane superstitions. They were the arch-conservatives of his-
tory; the more they changed, the more they remained the same; through
forty centuries their artists copied the old conventions religiously. They ap-
pear to us, from their monuments, to have been a matter-of-fact people, not
given to non-theological nonsense. They had no sentimental regard for
l68 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
human life, and killed with the clear conscience of nature; Egyptian soldiers
cut off the right hand, or the phallus, of a slain enemy, and brought it to the
proper scribe that it might be put into the record to their credit.11" In the
later dynasties the people, long accustomed to internal peace and to none but
distant wars, lost all military habits and qualities, until at last a few Roman
soldiers sufficed to master all Egypt.1"
The accident that we know them chiefly from the remains in their tombs
or the inscriptions on their temples has misled us into exaggerating their
solemnity. We perceive from some of their sculptures and reliefs, and from
their burlesque stories of the gods,118 that they had a jolly turn for humor.
They played many public and private games, such as checkers and dice;118 they
gave many modern toys to their children, like marbles, bouncing balls, ten-
pins and tops; they enjoyed wrestling contests, boxing matches and bull-
fights.130 At feasts and recreations they were anointed by attendants, were
wreathed with flowers, feted with wines, and presented with gifts.
From the painting and the statuary we picture them as a physically
vigorous people, muscular, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, full-lipped, and
flat-footed from going unshod. The upper classes are represented as
fashionably slender, imperiously tall, with oval face, sloping forehead,
regular features, a long, straight nose, and magnificent eyes. Their skin was
white at birth (indicating an Asiatic rather than an African origin), but
rapidly darkened under the Egyptian sun;121 their artists idealized them in
painting the men red, the women yellow; perhaps these colors were merely
cosmetic styles. The man of the people, however, is pictured as short and
squat, like the "Sheik-el-Belcd," formed by heavy toil and an unbalanced
ration; his features are rough, his nose blunt and wide; he is intelligent but
coarse. Perhaps, as in so many other instances, the people and their rulers
were of different races: the rulers of Asiatic, the people of African, deriva-
tion. The hair was dark, sometimes curly, but never woolly. Women
bobbed their hair in the most modern mode; men shaved lips and chin,
but consoled themselves with magnificent wigs. Often, in order to wear
these more comfortably, they shaved the head; even the queen consort
(e.g., Ikhnaton's mother Tiy) cut off all her hair to wear more easily the
royal wig and crown. It was a matter of rigid etiquette that the king
should have the biggest wig.128
According to their means they repaired the handiwork of nature
with subtle cosmetic art. Faces were rouged, lips were painted, nails were
colored, hair and limbs were oiled; even in the sculptures the Egyptian
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 1 69
women have painted eyes. Those who could afford it had seven creams
and two kinds of rouge put into their tombs when they died. The re-
mains abound in toilet sets, mirrors, razors, hair-curlers, hair-pins, combs,
cosmetic boxes, dishes and spoons— made of wood, ivory, alabaster or
bronze, and designed in delightful and appropriate forms. Eye-paint still
survives in some of the tubes. The kohl that women use today for paint-
ing the eyebrows and the face is a lineal descendant of the oil used by
the Egyptians; it has come down to us through the Arabs, whose word for
it, al-kohl, has given us our word alcohol. Perfumes of all sorts were
used on the body and the clothes, and homes were made fragrant with
incense and myrrh.1*
Their clothing ran through every gradation from primitive nudity to
the gorgeous dress of Empire days. Children of both sexes went about,
till their teens, naked except for ear-rings and necklaces; the girls, however,
showed a beseeming modesty by wearing a string of beads around the
middle."4 Servants and peasants limited their everyday wardrobe to a
loin-cloth. Under the Old Kingdom free men and women went naked
to the navel, and covered themselves from waist to knees with a short, tight
skirt of white linen.125 Since shame is a child of custom rather than of
nature, these simple garments contented the conscience as completely as
Victorian petticoats and corsets, or the evening dress of the contemporary
American male; "our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time." Even
the priests, in the first dynasties, wore nothing but loin-cloths, as we see
from the statue of Ranofcr.130 When wealth increased, clothing increased;
the Middle Kingdom added a second and larger skirt over the first, and
the Empire added a covering for the breast, with now and then a cape.
Coachmen and grooms took on formidable costumes, and ran through
the streets in full livery to clear a way for the chariots of their masters.
Women, in the prosperous dynasties, abandoned the tight skirt for a
loose robe that passed over the shoulder and was joined in a clasp under
the right breast. Flounces, embroideries and a thousand frills appeared,
and fashion entered like a serpent to disturb the paradise of primitive
nudity.187
Both sexes loved ornament, and covered neck, breast, arms, wrists and
ankles with jewelry. As the nation fattened on the tribute of Asia and
the commerce of the Mediterranean world, jewelry ceased to be restricted
to the aristocracy, and became a passion with all classes. Every scribe and
170 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
merchant had his seal of silver or gold; every man had a ring, every woman
had an ornamental chain. These chains, as we see them in the museums
today, are of infinite variety: some of them two to three inches, some
of them five feet, in length; some thick and heavy, some "as slight and
flexible as the finest Venetian lace."188 About the time of the Eighteenth
Dynasty ear-rings became de rigueur; every one had to have the ears
pierced for them, not only girls and women, but boys and men.128 Men as
well as women decorated their persons with bracelets and rings, pendants
and beads of costly stone. The women of ancient Egypt could learn very
little from us in the matter of cosmetics and jewelry if they were rein-
carnated among us today.
6. Letters
Education—Schools of government— Paper and ink— Stages in the
development of writing— Forms of Egyptian writing
The priests imparted rudimentary instruction to the children of the
well-to-do in schools attached to the temples, as in the Roman Catholic
parishes of our age.180 One high-priest, who was what we should term Min-
ister or Secretary of Education, calls himself "Chief of the Royal Stable
of Instruction."181 In the ruins of a school which was apparently part of
the Ramesseum a large number of shells has been found, still bearing
the lessons of the ancient pedagogue. The teacher's function was to pro-
duce scribes for the clerical work of the state. To stimulate his pupils he
wrote eloquent essays on the advantages of education. "Give thy heart
to learning, and love her like a mother," says one edifying papyrus, "for
there is nothing so precious as learning." "Behold," says another, "there is
no profession that is not governed; it is only the learned man who rules
himself." It is a misfortune to be a soldier, writes an early bookworm; it
is a weariness to till the earth; the only happiness is "to turn the heart to
books during the daytime and to read during the night."1*
Copy-books survive from the days of the Empire with the corrections
of the masters still adorning the margins; the abundance of errors would
console the modern schoolboy.1* The chief method of instruction was the
dictation or copying of texts, which were written upon potsherds or lime-
stone flakes.184 The subjects were largely commercial, for the Egyptians
were the first and greatest utilitarians; but the chief topic of pedagogic
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 171
discourse was virtue, and the chief problem, as ever, was discipline. "Do
not spend thy time in wishing, or thou wilt come to a bad end," we read
in one of the copy-books. "Let thy mouth read the book in thy hand;
take advice from those who know more than thou dost"— this last is prob-
ably one of the oldest phrases in any language. Discipline was vigorous,
and based upon the simplest principles. "The youth has a back," says a
euphemistic manuscript, "and attends when he is beaten, ... for the ears
of the young are placed on the back." A pupil writes to his former
teacher: "Thou didst beat my back, and thy instructions went into my
ear." That this animal-training did not always succeed appears from a
papyrus in which a teacher laments that his former pupils love books
much less than beer.1*
Nevertheless, a large number of the temple students were graduated
from the hands of the priest to high schools attached to the offices of the
state treasury. There, in the first known School of Government, the young
scribes were instructed in public administration. On graduating they were
apprenticed to officials, who taught them through plenty of work. Per-
haps it was a better way of securing and training public servants than
our modern selection of them by popularity and subserviency, and the
noise of the hustings. In this manner Egypt and Babylonia developed,
more or less simultaneously, the earliest school-systems in history;130 not till
the nineteenth century of our era was the public instruction of the young
to be so well organized again.
In the higher grades the student was allowed to use paper— one of the
main items of Egyptian trade, and one of the permanent gifts of Egypt
to the world. The stem of the papyrus plant was cut into strips, other
strips were placed crosswise upon these, the sheet was pressed, and
paper, the very stuff (and nonsense) of civilization, was made.187 How well
they made it may be judged from the fact that manuscripts written by
them five thousand years ago are still intact and legible. Sheets were com-
bined into books by gumming the right edge of one sheet to the left edge
of the next; in this way rolls were produced which were sometimes forty
yards in length; they were seldom longer, for there were no verbose his-
torians in Egypt. Ink, black and indestructible, was made by mixing
water with soot and vegetable gums on a wooden palette; the pen was a
simple reed, fashioned at the tip into a tiny brush.1*
With these modern instruments the Egyptians wrote the most ancient
172 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
of literatures. Their language had probably come in from Asia; the
oldest specimens of it show many Semitic affinities.180 The earliest writing
was apparently pictographic— an object was represented by drawing a pic-
ture of it: e.g., the word for house (Egyptian per) was indicated by a
small rectangle with an opening on one of the long sides. As some ideas
were too abstract to be literally pictured, pictography passed into ideog-
raphy: certain pictures were by custom and convention used to represent
not the objects pictured but the ideas suggested by them; so the forepart
of a lion meant supremacy (as in the Sphinx), a wasp meant royalty, and
a tadpole stood for thousands. As a further development along this line,
abstract ideas, which had at first resisted representation, were indicated
by picturing objects whose names happened to resemble the spoken words
that corresponded to the ideas; so the picture of a lute came to mean not
only lute, but good, because the Egyptian word-sound for lute-— nefer—
resembled the word-sound for good— nofer. Queer rebus combinations
grew out of these homonyms— words of like sound but different meanings.
Since the verb to be was expressed in the spoken language by the sound
khopiru, the scribe, being puzzled to find a picture for so intangible a con-
ception, split the word into parts, kho-pi-ru, expressed these by picturing
in succession a sieve (called in the spoken language khau), a mat (pi), and
a mouth (ru)\ use and wont, which sanctify so many absurdities, soon
made this strange assortment of characters suggest the idea of being. In
this way the Egyptian arrived at the syllable, the syllabic sign, and the
syllabary— i.e., a collection of syllabic signs; and by dividing difficult words
into syllables, finding homonyms for these, and drawing in combina-
tion the objects suggested by these syllabic sounds, he was able, in the
course of time, to make the hieroglyphic signs convey almost any idea.
Only one step remained— to invent letters. The sign for a house meant
at first the word for house— per; then it meant the sound per, or p-r with
any vowel in between, as a syllable in any word. Then the picture was
shortened, and used to represent the sound po, pa, pu, pe or pi in any
word; and since vowels were never written, this was equivalent to having
a character for JP. By a like development the sign for a hand (Egyptian
dot) came to mean do, da, etc., finally D; the sign for mouth (ro or ru)
came to mean R; the sign for snake (zt) became Z; the sign for lake (shy)
became Sh. . . . The result was an alphabet of twenty-four consonants,
which passed with Egyptian and Phoenician trade to all quarters of the
Mediterranean, and came down, via Greece and Rome, as one of the most
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 173
precious parts of our Oriental heritage.140 Hieroglyphics are as old as the
earliest dynasties; alphabetic characters appear first in inscriptions left by
the Egyptians in the mines of the Sinai peninsula, variously dated at 2500
and 1500 B.C.141*
Whether wisely or not, the Egyptians never adopted a completely
alphabetic writing; like modern stenographers they mingled pictographs,
ideographs and syllabic signs with their letters to the very end of their
civilization. This has made it difficult for scholars to read Egyptian, but
it is quite conceivable that such a medley of longhand and shorthand
facilitated the business of writing for those Egyptians who could spare the
time to learn it. Since English speech is no honorable guide to English
spelling, it is probably as difficult for a contemporary lad to learn the
devious ways of English orthography as it was for the Egyptian scribe to
memorize by use the five hundred hieroglyphs, their secondary syllabic
meanings, and their tertiary alphabetic uses. In the course of time a more
rapid and sketchy form of writing was developed for manuscripts, as dis-
tinguished from the careful "sacred carvings" of the monuments. Since
this corruption of hieroglyphic was first made by the priests and the
temple scribes, it was called by the Greeks hieratic; but it soon passed into
common use for public, commercial and private documents. A still more
abbreviated and careless form of this script was developed by the common
people, and therefore came to be known as demotic. On the monuments,
however, the Egyptian insisted on having his lordly and lovely hiero-
glyphic—perhaps the most picturesque form of writing ever made.
7. Literature
Texts and libraries—The Egyptian Sinbad—The Story of Sinuhe—
Fiction—An amorous fragment— Love poems— History— A
literary revolution
Most of the literature that survives from ancient Egypt is written in
hieratic script. Little of it remains, and we are forced to estimate it
from the fragments that do it only the blind justice of chance; perhaps time
destroyed the Shakespeares of Egypt, and preserved only the poets laure-
ate. A great official of the Fourth Dynasty is called on his tomb "Scribe
* Sir Charles Marston believes, from his recent researches in Palestine, that the alphabet
was a Semitic invention, and credits it, on highly imaginative grounds, to Abraham him-
self."*
174 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VHl
of the House of Books";148 we cannot tell whether this primeval library
was a repository of literature, or only a dusty storehouse of public records
and documents. The oldest extant Egyptian literature consists of the
"Pyramid Texts"— pious matter engraved on the walls in five pyramids
of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.*148 Libraries have come down to us from
as far back as 2000 B.C.— papyri rolled and packed in jars, labeled, and
ranged. on shelves;1"5 in one such jar was found the oldest form of the story
of Sinbad the Sailor, or, as we might rather call it, Robinson Crusoe.
"The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor" is a simple autobiographical
fragment, full of life and feeling. "How glad is he," says this ancient
mariner, in a line reminiscent of Dante, "that relateth what he hath ex-
perienced when the calamity hath passed!"
I will relate to thee something that was experienced by me myself,
when I had set out for the mines of the Sovereign and had gone
down to the sea in a ship of 180 feet in length and 60 feet in breadth;
and therein were 120 sailors of the pick of Egypt. They scanned the
sky, they scanned the earth, and their hearts were more . . . than
those of lions. They foretold a storm or ever it came, and a tempest
when as yet it was not.
A storm burst while we were yet at sea. . . . We flew before the
wind and it made ... a wave eight cubits high. . . .
Then the ship perished, and of them that were in it not one sur-
vived. And I was cast onto an island by a wave of the sea, and I
spent three days alone with mine heart as my companion. I slept
under the shelter of a tree, and embraced the shade. Then I stretched
forth my feet in order to find out what I could put into my mouth.
I found figs and vines there, and all manner of fine leeks. . . . There
were fish there and fowl, and there was nothing that was not in it.
. . . When I had made me a fire-drill I kindled a fire and made a
burnt-offering for the gods.146
Another tale recounts the adventures of Sinuhe, a public official who
flees from Egypt at the death of Amenemhet I, wanders from country to
country of the Near East, and, despite prosperity and honors there, suffers
unbearably from lonesomeness for his native land. At last he gives up
riches, and makes his way through many hardships back to Egypt.
*A later group of funerary inscriptions, written in ink upon the inner sides of the
wooden coffins used to inter certain nobles and magnates of the Middle Kingdom, have
been gathered together by Breasted and others under the name of "Coffin Texts.""4
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 175
0 God, whosoever thou art, that didst ordain this flight, bring me
again to the House (i.e., the Pharaoh). Peradventure thou wilt suffer
me to see the place wherein mine heart dwelleth. What is a greater
matter than that my corpse should be buried in the land wherein I
was born? Come to mine aid! May good befall, may God show me
mercy!
In the sequel we find him home again, weary and dusty with many miles
of desert travel, and fearful lest the Pharaoh reprove him for his long ab-
sence from a land which, like all others, looked upon itself as the only
civilized country in the world. But the Pharaoh forgives him, and extends
to him every cosmetic courtesy:
1 was placed in the house of a king's son, in which there was noble
equipment, and a bath was therein. . . . Years were made to pass
away from my body; I was shaved (?) and my hair was combed (?).
A load (of dirt?) was given over to the desert, and the (filthy)
clothes to the sand-farers. And I was arrayed in finest linen, and
anointed with the best oil.147
Short stories are diverse and plentiful in the fragments that have come
down to us of Egyptian literature. There arc marvelous tales of ghosts,
miracles, and other fascinating concoctions, as credible as the detective stories
that satisfy modern statesmen; there are high-sounding romances of princes
and princesses, kings and queens, including the oldest known form of the tale
of Cinderella, her exquisite foot, her wandering slipper, and her royal-hymen-
eal denouement;14* there are fables of animals illustrating by their conduct the
foibles and passions of humanity, and pointing morals sagely148— a kind of
premonitory plagiarism from /Esop and La Fontaine. Typical of the Egyptian
mingling of natural and supernatural is the tale of Anupu and Bitiu, older and
younger brothers, who live happily on their farm until Anupu's wife falls in
love with Bitiu, is repulsed by him, and revenges herself by accusing him, to
his brother, of having offered her violence. Gods and crocodiles come to
Bitiu's aid against Anupu; but Bitiu, disgusted with mankind, mutilates himself
to prove his innocence, retires Timon-like to the woods, and places his heart
unreachably high on the topmost flower of a tree. The gods, pitying his lone-
liness, create for him a wife of such beauty that the Nile falls in love with
her, and steals a lock of her hair. Drifting down the stream, the lock is
found by the Pharaoh, who, intoxicated by its scent, commands his henchmen
to find the owner. She is found and brought to him, and he marries her.
Jealous of Bitiu he sends men to cut down the tree on which Bitiu has placed
176 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
his heart. The tree is cut down, and as the flower touches the earth Bitiu
dies."* How little the taste of our ancestors differed from our own!
The early literature of the Egyptians is largely religious; and the oldest
Egyptian poems are the hymns of the Pyramid Texts. Their form is also
the most ancient poetic form known to us— that "parallelism of members,"
or repetition of the thought in different phrase, which the Hebrew poets
adopted from the Egyptians and Babylonians, and immortalized in the
Psalms.151 As the Old passes into the Middle Kingdom, the literature tends
to become secular and "profane." We catch some glimpse of a lost body
of amorous literature in a fragment preserved to us through the laziness of
a Middle Kingdom scribe who did not complete his task of wiping clear
an old papyrus, but left legible some twenty-five lines that tell of a
simple shepherd's encounter with a goddess. "This goddess," says the
story, "met with him as he wended his way to the pool, and she had
stripped off her clothes and disarrayed her hair." The shepherd reports
the matter cautiously:
"Behold ye, when I went down to the swamp. ... I saw a woman
therein, and she looked not like a mortal being. My hair stood on
end when I saw her tresses, because her color was so bright. Never
will I do what she said; awe of her is in my body."153
The love songs abound in number and beauty, but as they celebrate
chiefly the amours of brothers and sisters they will shock or amuse the
modern ear. One collection is called "The Beautiful Joyous Songs of
thy sister whom thy heart loves, who walks in the fields." An ostracon
or shell dating back to the Nineteenth or Twentieth Dynasty plays a
modern theme on the ancient chords of desire:
The love of my beloved leaps on the bank of the stream.
A crocodile lies in the shadows;
Yet I go down into the water, and breast the wave.
My courage is high on the stream,
And the water is as land to my feet.
It is her love that makes me strong.
She is a book of spells to me.
When I behold my beloved coming my heart is glad,
My arms are spread apart to embrace her;
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 177
My heart rejoices forever . . . since my beloved came.
When I embrace her I am as one who is in Incense Land,
As one who carries perfumes.
When I kiss her, her lips are opened,
And I am made merry without beer.
Would that I were her Negress slave who is in attendance on her;
So should I behold the hue of all her limbs.168
The lines have been arbitrarily divided here; we cannot tell from the
external form of the original that it is verse. The Egyptians knew that
music and feeling are the twin essences of poetry; if these were present,
the outward shape did not matter. Often, however, the rhythm was ac-
centuated, as we have seen, by "parallelism of members." Sometimes the
poet used the device of beginning every sentence or stanza with the same
word; sometimes he played like a punster with like sounds meaning unlike
or incongruous things; and it is clear from the texts that the trick of
alliteration is as old as the Pyramids.1" These simple forms were enough;
with them the Egyptian poet could express almost every shade of that
"romantic" love which Nietzsche supposed was an invention of the
Troubadours. The Harris Papyrus shows that such sentiments could be
expressed by a woman as well as by a man:
I am thy first sister,
And thou art to me as the garden
Which I have planted with flowers
And all sweet-smelling herbs.
I directed a canal into it,
That thou mightcst dip thy hand into it
When the north wind blows cool.
The beautiful place where we take a walk,
When thy hand rests within mine,
With thoughtful mind and joyous heart
Because we walk together.
It is intoxicating to me to hear thy voice,
And my life depends upon hearing thee.
Whenever I see thee
It is better to me than food or drink."*
All in all it is astonishing how varied the fragments are. Formal letters,
legal documents, historical narratives, magic formulas, laborious hymns, books
178 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
of devotion, songs of love and war, romantic novelettes, moral exhortations,
philosophical treatises— everything is represented here except epic and drama,
and even of these one might by stretching a point find instances. The story
of Rameses IFs dashing victories, engraved patiently in verse upon brick after
brick of the great pylon at Luxor, is epic at least in length and dulness. In
another inscription Rameses IV boasts that in a play he had defended Osiris
from Set, and had recalled Osiris to life.1" Our knowledge does not allow us
to amplify this hint.
Historiography, in Egypt, is as old as history; even the kings of the pre-
dynastic period kept historical records proudly.3" Official historians accom-
panied the Pharaohs on their expeditions, never saw their defeats, and re-
corded, or invented, the details of their victories; already the writing of his-
tory had become a cosmetic art. As far back as 2500 B.C. Egyptian scholars
made lists of their kings, named the years from them, and chronicled the out-
standing events of each year and reign; by the time of Thutmose III these
documents became full-fledged histories, eloquent with patriotic emotion.1"
Egyptian philosophers of the Middle Kingdom thought both man and history
old and effete, and mourned the lusty youth of their race; Khekheperre-
Sonbu, a savant of the reign of Senusret II, about 2150 B.C., complained that
all things had long since been said, and nothing remained for literature except
repetition. "Would," he cried unhappily, "that I had words that are un-
known, utterances and sayings in new language, that hath not yet passed
away, and without that which hath been said repeatedly— not an utterance
that hath grown stale, what the ancestors have already said."1"
Distance blurs for us the variety and changefulness of Egyptian lit-
erature, as it blurs the individual differences of unfamiliar peoples. Never-
theless, in the course of its long development Egyptian letters passed
through movements and moods as varied as those that have disturbed the
history of European literature. As in Europe, so in Egypt the language
of everyday speech diverged gradually, at last almost completely, from
that in which the books* of the Old Kingdom had been written. For a
long time authors continued to compose in the ancient tongue; scholars
acquired it in school, and students were compelled to translate the "classics"
with the help of grammars and vocabularies, and with the occasional as-
, sistance of "interlinears." In the fourteenth century B.C. Egyptian authors
rebelled against this bondage to tradition, and like Dante and Chaucer
dared to write in the language of the people; Ikhnaton's famous Hymn to
the Sun is itself composed in the popular speech. The new literature was
realistic, youthful, buoyant; it took delight in flouting the old forms and
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 179
describing the new life. In time this language also became literary and
formal, refined and precise, rigid and impeccable with conventions of
word and phrase; once again the language of letters separated from the
language of speech, and scholasticism flourished; the schools of Sa'ite Egypt
spent half their time studying and translating the "classics" of Ikhnaton's
day.180 Similar transformations of the native tongue went on under the
Greeks, under the Romans, under the Arabs; another is going on today.
Panta rei— all things flow; only scholars never change.
8. Science
Origins of Egyptian science— Mathematics— Astronomy and the
calendar — Anatomy and physiology — Medicine, surgery
and hygiene
The scholars of Egypt were mostly priests, enjoying, far from the tur-
moil of life, the comfort and security of the temples; and it was these
priests who, despite all their superstitions, laid the foundations of Egyptian
science. According to their own legends the sciences had been invented
some 18,000 B.C. by Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, during his three-
thousand-year-long reign on earth; and the most ancient books in each
science were among the twenty thousand volumes composed by this
learned deity.*161 Our knowledge does not permit us to improve sub-
stantially upon this theory of the origins of science in Egypt.
At the very outset of recorded Egyptian history we find mathematics
highly developed; the design and construction of the Pyramids involved a pre-
cision of measurement impossible without considerable mathematical lore.
The dependence of Egyptian life upon the fluctuations of the Nile led to
careful records and calculations of the rise and recession of the river; sur-
veyors and scribes were continually remeasuring the land whose boundaries
had been obliterated by the inundation, and this measuring of the land was
evidently the origin of geo-mctry.1* Nearly all the ancients agreed in ascrib-
ing the invention of this science to the Egyptians.104 Josephus, however,
thought that Abraham had brought arithmetic from Chaldea (i.e., Mesopo-
tamia) to Egypt;1"5 and it is not impossible that this and other arts came to
Egypt from "Ur of the Chaldees," or some other center of western Asia.
* So we are assured by lamblichus (ca. 300 AJ>.) . Manetho, the Egyptian historian (ca.
300 B.C.), would have considered this estimate unjust to the god; the proper number of
Thoth's works, in his reckoning, was 36,000. The Greeks celebrated Thoth under the
name of Hermes Trismegistus— Hermes (Mercury) the Thrice-Great.1'12
l8o THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
The figures used were cumbersome— one stroke for i, two strokes for 2, ...
nine strokes for 9, with a new sign for 10. Two 10 signs stood for 20, three
10 signs for 30, ... nine for 90, with a new sign for 100. Two 100 signs stood
for 200, three 100 signs for 300, . . . nine for 900, with a new sign for 1000.
The sign for 1,000,000 was a picture of a man striking his hands above his
head, as if to express amazement that such a number should exist.108 The
Egyptians fell just short of the decimal system; they had no zero, and never
reached the idea of expressing all numbers with ten digits: e.g., they used
twenty-seven signs to write 999-107 They had fractions, but always with the
numerator i; to express % they wrote l/2 + 1A- Multiplication and division
tables are as old as the Pyramids. The oldest mathematical treatise known is
the Ahmes Papyrus, dating back to 2000-1700 B.C.; but this in turn refers to
mathematical writings five hundred years more ancient than itself. It illus-
trates by examples the computation of the capacity of a barn or the area of a
field, and passes to algebraic equations of the first degree.108 Egyptian geome-
try measured not only the area of squares, circles and cubes, but also the
cubic content of cylinders and spheres; and it arrived at 3.16 as the value
of ir.16* We enjoy the honor of having advanced from 3.16 to 3.1416 in four
thousand years.
Of Egyptian physics and chemistry we know nothing, and almost as little
of Egyptian astronomy. The star-gazers of the temples seem to have con-
ceived the earth as a rectangular box, with mountains at the corners uphold-
ing the sky.170 They made no note of eclipses, and were in general less ad-
vanced than their Mesopotamian contemporaries. Nevertheless they knew
enough to predict the day on which the Nile would rise, and to orient their
temples toward that point on the horizon where the sun would appear on the
morning of the summer solstice.1" Perhaps they knew more than they cared
to publish among a people whose superstitions were so precious to their
rulers; the priests regarded their astronomical studies as an esoteric and mys-
terious science, which they were reluctant to disclose to the common world.173
For century after century they kept track of the position and movements of
the planets, until their records stretched back for thousands of years. They
distinguished between planets and fixed stars, noted in their catalogues stars
of the fifth magnitude (practically invisible to the unaided eye), and charted
what they thought were the astral influences of the heavens on the fortunes
of men. From these observations they built the calendar which was to be
another of Egypt's greatest gifts to mankind.
They began by dividing the year into three seasons of four months each:
first, tie rise, overflow and recession of the Nile; second, the period of cul-
tivation; and third, the period of harvesting. To each of these months they
assigned thirty days, as being the most convenient approximation to the lunar
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 1 8 1
month of twenty-nine and a half days; their word for month, like ours, was
derived from their symbol for the moon.* At the end of the twelfth month
they added five days to bring the year into harmony with the river and the
sun."4 As the beginning of their year they chose the day on which the Nile
usually reached its height, and on which, originally, the great star Sirius
(which they called Sothis) rose simultaneously with the sun. Since their
calendar allowed only 365, instead of 36554, days to a year, this "heliacal
rising" of Sirius (i.e., its appearance just before sunrise, after having been
invisible for a number of days) came a day later every four years; and in
this way the Egyptian calendar diverged by six hours annually from the
actual calendar of the sky. The Egyptians never corrected this error. Many
years later (46 B.C.) the Greek astronomers of Alexandria, by direction of
Julius Caesar, improved this calendar by adding an extra day every fourth
year; this was the "Julian Calendar." Under Pope Gregory XIII (1582)
a more accurate correction was made by omitting this extra day (February
zpth) in century years not divisible by 400; this is the "Gregorian Calendar"
that we use today. Our calendar is essentially the creation of the ancient
NearJEast.-r?
Despite the opportunities offered by embalming, the Egyptians made rela-
tively poor progress in the study of the human body. They thought that the
blood-vessels carried air, water, and excretory fluids, and they believed the
* The clepsydra, or water-clock, was so old with the Egyptians that they attributed its
invention to their handy god-of-all-tradcs, Thoth. The oldest clock in existence dates
from Thutmose III, and is now in the Berlin Museum. It consists of a bar of wood,
divided into six parts or hours, upon which a crosspiecc was so placed that its shadow on
the bar would indicate the time of the morning or the afternoon.178
t Since the heliacal rising of Sirius occurred one day later, every four years, than the
Egyptian calendar demanded, the error amounted to 365 days in 1460 years; on the com-
pletion of this "Sothic cycle" (as the Egyptians called it) the paper calendar and the
celestial calendar again agreed. Since we know from the Latin author Censorius that the
heliacal rising of Sirius coincided in 139 A.D. with the beginning of the Egyptian calendar
year, we may presume that a similar coincidence occurred every 1460 years previously—
i.e., in 1321 B.C., 2781 B.C., 4241 B.C., etc. And since the Egyptian calendar was apparently
established in a year when the heliacal rising of Sirius took place on the first day of the
first month, we conclude that that calendar came into operation in a year that opened a
Sothic cycle. The earliest mention of the Egyptian calendar is in the religious texts in-
scribed in the pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty. Since this dynasty is unquestionably
earlier than 1321 B.C., the calendar must have been established in 2781 B.C., or 4241 B.C., or
still earlier. The older date, once acclaimed as the first definite date in history, has been
disputed by Professor ScharfF, and it is possible that we shall have to accept 2781 B.C. as
the approximate birth-year of the Egyptian calendar. This would require a foreshorten-
ing, by three or four hundred years, of the dates assigned above for the early dynasties
and the great Pyramids. As the matter is very much in dispute, the chronology of the
Cambridge Ancient History has been adopted in these pages.
l8l THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
heart and bowels to be the seat of the mind; perhaps if we knew what they
meant by these terms we should find them not so divergent from our own
ephemeral certainties. They described with general accuracy the larger bones
and viscera, and recognized the function of the heart as the driving power of
the organism and the center of the circulatory system: "its vessels," says the
Ebers Papyrus,17" "lead to all the members; whether the doctor lays his finger
on the forehead, on the back of the head, on the hands, ... or on the feet,
f everywhere he meets with the heart." From this to Leonardo and Harvey
was but a step— which took three thousand years.
The glory of Egyptian science was medicine. Like almost everything
else in the cultural life of Egypt, it began with the priests, and dripped
with evidences of its magical origins. Among the people amulets were
more popular than pills as preventive or curative of disease; disease was to
them a possession by devils, and was to be treated with incantations. A
cold for instance, could be exorcised by such magic words as: "Depart,
cold, son of a cold, thou who breakest the bones, destroyest the skull, mak-
est ill the seven openings of the head! . . . Go out on the floor, stink, stink,
stink!"177— a cure probably as effective as contemporary remedies for this
ancient disease. From such depths we rise in Egypt to great physicians,
surgeons and specialists, who acknowledged an ethical code that passed
down into the famous Hippocratic oath.178 Some of them specialized in
obstetrics or gynecology, some treated only gastric disorders, some were
oculists so internationally famous that Cyrus sent for one of them to
come to Persia.179 The general practitioner was left to gather the crumbs
and heal the poor; in addition to which he was expected to provide cos-
metics, hair-dyes, skin-culture, limb-beautification, and flea-exterminators.180
Several papyri devoted to medicine have come down to us. The most
valuable of them, named from the Edwin Smith who discovered it, is a
roll fifteen feet long, dating about 1600 B.C., and going back for its sources
to much earlier works; even in its extant form it is the oldest scientific
document known to history. It describes forty-eight cases in clinical
surgery, from cranial fractures to injuries of the spine. Each case is treated
in logical order, under the heads of provisional diagnosis, examination,
semeiology, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and glosses on the terms used.
The author notes, with a clarity unrivaled till the eighteenth century
of our era, that control of the lower limbs is localized in the "brain"— a
word which here appears for the first time in literature.1*1
The Egyptians enjoyed a great variety of diseases, though they had to
die of them without knowing their Greek names. The mummies and
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 183
papyri tell of spinal tuberculosis, arteriosclerosis, gall-stones, small-pox, in-
fantile paralysis, anemia, rheumatic arthritis, epilepsy, gout, mastoiditis, ap-
pendicitis, and such marvelous affections as spondylitis deformans and
achondroplasia. There are no signs of syphilis or cancer; but pyorrhea and
dental caries, absent in the oldest mummies, become frequent in the later
ones, indicating the progress of civilization. The atrophy and fusion of the
bones of the small toe, often ascribed to the modern shoe, was common in
ancient Egypt, where nearly all ages and ranks went barefoot."*
Against these diseases the Egyptian doctors were armed with an abund-
ant pharmacopoeia. The Ebers Papyrus lists seven hundred remedies for
everything from snake-bite to puerperal fever. The Kahun Papyrus (ca.
1850 B.C.) prescribes suppositories apparently used for contraception.188'
The tomb of an JEleventh Dynasty queen revealed a medicine chest con-
taining vases, spoons, dried drugs, and roots. Prescriptions hovered between
medicine and magic, and relied for their effectiveness in great part on the
repulsiveness of the concoction. Lizard's blood, swine's ears and teeth,
putrid meat and fat, a tortoise's brains, an old book boiled in oil, the milk
of a lying-in woman, the water of a chaste woman, the excreta of men,
donkeys, dogs, lions, cats and lice— all these are found in the prescriptions.
Baldness was treated by rubbing the head with animal fat. Some of these
cures passed from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Greeks to the
Romans, and from»the Romans to us; we still swallow trustfully the strange
mixtures that were brewed four thousand years ago on the banks of the
Nile.183
The Egyptians tried to promote health by public sanitation,* by cir-
cumcision of males, tlw and by teaching the people the frequent use of the
enema. Diodorus Siculus1*7 tells us:
In order to prevent sicknesses they look after the health of their
body by means of drenches, fastings and emetics, sometimes every
day, and sometimes at intervals of three or four days. For they say
that the larger part of the food taken into the body is superfluous,
and that it is from this superfluous part that diseases are engendered.^
Pliny believed that this habit of taking enemas was learned by the
Egyptians from observing the ibis, a bird that counteracts the constipating
* Excavations reveal arrangements for the collection of rain-water and the disposal of
sewage by a system of copper pipes.18*
tEven the earliest tombs give evidence of this practice.18*
J So old is the modern saw that we live on one-fourth of what we eat, and the doctors
live on the rest.
184 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
character of its food by using its long bill as a rectal syringe."8 Herodotus
reports that the Egyptians "purge themselves every month, three days
successively, seeking to preserve health by emetics and enemas; for they
suppose that all diseases to which men are subject proceed from the food
they use." And this first historian of civilization ranks the Egyptians as,
"next to the Libyans, the healthiest people in the world.1*
9. Art
Architecture— Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, Empire and Saite
sculpture— Bas-relief— Painting— Minor arts— Music— The artists
The greatest element in this civilization was its art. Here, almost at
the threshold of history, we find an art powerful and mature, superior to
that of any modern nation, and equaled only by that of Greece. At first
the luxury of isolation and peace, and then, under Thutmose III and
Rameses II, the spoils of oppression and war, gave to Egypt the oppor-
tunity and the means for massive architecture, masculine statuary, and a
hundred minor arts that so early touched perfection. The whole theory of
progress hesitates before Egyptian art.
Architecture* was the noblest of the ancient arts, because it combined in
imposing form mass and duration, beauty and use. It began humbly in
the adornment of tombs and the external decoration of homes. Dwellings
were mostly of mud, with here and there some pretty woodwork (a
Japanese lattice, a well-carved portal), and a roof strengthened with the
tough and pliable trunks of the palm. Around the house, normally, was
a wall enclosing a court; from the court steps led to the roof; from this
the tenants passed down into the rooms. The well-to-do had private
gardens, carefully landscaped; the cities provided public gardens for the
poor, and hardly a home but had its ornament of flowers. Inside the house
the walls were hung with colored mattings, and the floors, if the master
could afford it, were covered with rugs. People sat on these rugs rather
than on chairs; the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom squatted for their
meals at tables six inches high, in the fashion of the Japanese; and ate with
their fingers, like Shakespeare. Under the Empire, when slaves were
cheap, the upper classes sat on high cushioned chairs, and had their servants
hand them course after course.190
Stone for building was too costly for homes; it was a luxury reserved
for priests and kings. Even the nobles, ambitious though they were, left
* For the architecture of the Old Kingdom cf . sections I, i and 3 of this chapter.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 185
the greatest wealth and the best building materials to the temples; in con-
sequence the palaces that overlooked almost every mile of the river in the
days of Amenhotep III crumbled into oblivion, while the abodes of the
gods and the tombs of the dead remained. By the Twelfth Dynasty the
pyramid had ceased to be the fashionable form of sepulture. Khnumhotep
(ca. 2180 B.C.) chose at Beni-Hasan the quieter form of a colonnade built
into the mountainside; and this theme, once established, played a thou-
sand variations among the hills on the western slope of the Nile. From the
time of the Pyramids to the Temple of Hathor at Denderah— i.e., for some
three thousand years— there rose out of the sands of Egypt such a suc-
cession of architectural achievements as no civilization has ever surpassed.
At Karnak and Luxor a riot of columns raised by Thutmose I and HI,
Amenhotep III, Seti I, Rameses II and other monarchs from the Twelfth
to the Twenty-second Dynasty; at Medinet-IIabu (ca. 1300 B.C.) a vast
but less distinguished edifice, on whose columns an Arab village rested for
centuries; at Abydos the Temple of Scti I, dark and sombre in its massive
ruins; at Elephantine the little Temple of Khnum (ca. 1400 B.C.), "posi-
tively Greek in its precision and elegance";"1 at Dcr-el-Bahri the stately
colonnades of Queen Hatshepsut; near it the Ramcsseum, another forest
of colossal columns and statues reared by the architects and slaves of
Rameses II; at Philce the lovely Temple of Isis (ca. 240 B.C.) desolate and
abandoned now that the damming of the Nile at Assuan has submerged
the bases of its perfect columns— these are sample fragments of the many
monuments that still adorn the valley of the Nile, and attest even in their
ruins the strength and courage of the race that reared them. Here, perhaps,
is an excess of pillars, a crowding of columns against the tyranny of the
sun, a Far-Eastern aversion to symmetry, a lack of unity, a barbaric-mod-
ern adoration of size. But here, too, are grandeur, sublimity, majesty and
power; here are the arch and the vault,108 used sparingly because not
needed, but ready to pass on their principles to Greece and Rome and
modern Europe; here are decorative designs never surpassed;109 here are
papyriform columns, lotiform columns, "proto-Doric" columns,1"4 Caryatid
columns,186 Hathor capitals, palm capitals, clerestories, and magnificent
architraves full of the strength and stability that are the very soul of archi-
tecture's powerful appeal.* The Egyptians were the greatest builders
in history.
* A clerestory is that portion of a building which, being above the roof of the sur-
rounding parts, admits light to the edifice by a series of openings. An architrave is the
lowest part of an entablature—which is a superstructure supported by a colonnade.
l86 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
Some would add that they were also the greatest sculptors. Here at the
outset is the Sphinx, conveying by its symbolism the leonine quality of
some masterful Pharaoh—perhaps Khafre-Chephren; it has not only size,
as some have thought, but character. The cannon-shot of the Mamelukes
have broken the nose and shorn the beard, but nevertheless those gigantic
features portray with impressive skill the force and dignity, the calm
and sceptical maturity, of a natural king. Across those motionless features
a subtle smile has hovered for five thousand years, as if already the un-
known artist or monarch had understood all that men would ever under-
stand about men. It is a Mona Lisa in stone.
There is nothing finer in the history of sculpture than the diorite statue
of Khafre in the Cairo Museum; as ancient to Praxiteles as Praxiteles to
us, it nevertheless comes down across fifty centuries almost unhurt by
time's rough usages; cut in the most intractable of stones, it passes on to
us completely the strength and authority, the wilfulness and courage, the
sensitivity and intelligence of the (artist or the) King. Near it, and even
older, Pharaoh Zoser sits pouting in limestone; farther on, the guide with
lighted match reveals the transparency of an alabaster Menkaure.
Quite as perfect in artistry as these portraits of royalty are the figures
of the Sheik-cl-Belcd and the Scribe. The Scribe has come down to us
in many forms, all of uncertain antiquity; the most illustrious is the
squatting Scribe of the Louvre.* The Sheik is no sheik but only an over-
seer of labor, armed with the staff of authority, and stepping forward as
if in supervision or command. His name, apparently, was Kaapiru; but
the Arab workmen who rescued him from his tomb at Sakkara were struck
with his resemblance to the Sheik-el-Beled (i.e., Mayor-of-the- Village)
under whom they lived; and this title which their good humor gave him
is now inseparable from his fame. He is carved only in mortal wood,
but time has not seriously reduced his portly figure or his chubby legs;
his waistline has all the amplitude of the comfortable bourgeois in every
civilization; his rotund face beams with the content of a man who knows
his place and glories in it. The bald head and carelessly loosened robe
display the realism of an art already old enough to rebel against idealiza-
tion; but here, too, is a fine simplicity, a complete humanity, expressed
without bitterness, and with the ease and grace of a practised and confident
hand. "If," says Maspero, "some exhibition of the world's masterpieces
* Cf. p. 161 above. Other scribes adorn the Cairo Museum, and the State Museum at
Berlin.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 187
were to be inaugurated, I should choose this work to uphold the honor
of Egyptian art"1""— or would that honor rest more securely on the head
of Khafre?
These are the chefs-d'oeuvres of Old Kingdom statuary. But lesser
masterpieces abound: the seated portraits of Rahotep and his wife Nofrit,
the powerful figure of Ranofer the priest, the copper statues of King
Phiops and his son, a falcon-head in gold, the humorous figures of the
Beer-Brewer and the Dwarf Knemhotep— all but one in the Cairo Museum,
all without exception instinct with character. It is true that the earlier
pieces are coarse and crude; that by a strange convention, running through-
out Egyptian art, figures are shown with the body and eyes facing for-
ward, but the hands and feet in profile;* that not much attention was given
to the body, which was left in most cases stereotyped and unreal— all female
bodies young, all royal bodies strong; and that individualization, though
masterly, was generally reserved for the head. But with all the stiffness
and sameness that priestly conventions and control forced upon statuary,
paintings and reliefs, these works were fully redeemed by the power and
depth of the conception, the vigor and precision of the execution, the
character, line and finish of the product. Never was sculpture more alive:
the Sheik exudes authority, the woman grinding grain gives every sense
and muscle to her work, the Scribe is on the very verge of writing. And
the thousand little puppets placed in the tombs to carry on essential in-
dustries for the dead were moulded with a like vivacity, so that we can
almost believe, with the pious Egyptian, that the deceased could not be
unhappy while these ministrants were there.
Not for many centuries did Egyptian sculpture equal again the achieve-
ments of the early dynasties. Because most of the statuary was made for
the temples or the tombs, the priests determined to a great degree what
forms the artist should follow; and the natural conservatism of religion
crept into art, slowly stifling sculpture into a conventional, stylistic de-
generation. Under the powerful monarchs of the Twelfth Dynasty the
secular spirit reasserted itself, and art recaptured something of its old vigor
and more than its old skill. A head of Amencmhet III in black diorite1"
suggests at once the recovery of character and the recovery of art; here
is the quiet hardness of an able king, carved with the competence of a
master. A colossal statue of Senusret III is crowned with a head and face
•There are important exceptions to this— e.g., the Sheik-el-Beled and the Scribe; obvi-
ously the convention was not due to incapacity or ignorance.
l88 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
equal in conception and execution to any portrait in the history of sculp-
ture; and the ruined torso of Senusret I, in the Cairo Museum, ranks with
the torso of Hercules in the Louvre. Animal figures abound in the Egyptian
sculpture of every age, and are always full of humor and life: here is a
mouse chewing a nut, an ape devotedly strumming a harp, a porcupine
with every spine on the qui vive. Then came the Shepherd Kings, and for
three hundred years Egyptian art almost ceased to be.
In the age of Hatshepsut, the Thutmoses, the Amenhoteps and the
Rameses, art underwent a second resurrection along the Nile. Wealth
poured in from subject Syria, passed into the temples and the courts, and
trickled through them to nourish every art. Colossi of Thutmose III and
Rameses II began to challenge the sky; statuary crowded every corner of
the temples; masterpieces were flung forth with unprecedented abundance
by a race exhilarated with what they thought was world supremacy. The
fine granite bust of the great Queen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
at New York; the basalt statue of Thutmose III in the Cairo Museum;
the lion sphinx of Amenhotep III in the British Museum; the limestone
seated Ikhnaton in the Louvre; the granite statue of Rameses II in Turin;*
the perfect crouching figure of the same incredible monarch making an
offering to the gods;100 the meditative cow of Der-cl-Bahri, which Maspero
considered "equal, if not superior, to the best achievements of Greece and
Rome in this genre";*00 the two lions of Amenhotep III, which Ruskin
ranked as the best animal statuary surviving from antiquity;201 the colossi
cut into the rocks at Abu Simbel by the sculptors of Rameses II; the amaz-
ing remains found among the ruins of the artist Thutmose's studio at Tell-
el-Amarna— a plaster model of Ikhnaton's head, full of the mysticism and
poetry of that tragic king, the lovely limestone bust of Ikhnaton's Queen,
Nofretete, and the even finer sandstone head of the same fair lady:*2 these
scattered examples may illustrate the sculptural accomplishments of this
abounding Empire age. Amid all these lofty masterpieces humor continues
to find place; Egyptian sculptors frolic with jolly caricatures of men and
animals, and even the kings and queens, in Ikhnaton's iconoclastic age, are
made to smile and play.
After Rameses II this magnificence passed rapidly away. For many
centuries after him art contented itself with repeating traditional works
and forms. Under the Sa'ite kings it sought to rejuvenate itself by return-
* One is reminded here of the remark of an Egyptian statesman, after visiting the
galleries of Europe: "Que vous avez vott mon pays!— How you have raped my country! ""•
CHAP.VIH) EGYPT 189
ing to the simplicity and sincerity of the Old Kingdom masters. Sculptors
attacked bravely the hardest stones— basalt, breccia, serpentine, diorite—
and carved them into such realistic portraits as that of Montumihait,908 and
the green basalt head of a bald unknown, now looking out blackly upon
the walls of the State Museum at Berlin. In bronze they cast the lovely
figure of the lady Tekoschet.** Again they delighted in catching the
actual features and movements of men and beasts; they moulded laughable
figures of quaint animals, slaves and gods; and they formed in bronze a
cat and a goat's head which are among the trophies of Berlin.206 Then the
Persians came down like a wolf on the fold, conquered Egypt, desecrated
its temples, broke its spirit, and put an end to its art.
These— architecture and sculpture*— are the major Egyptian arts; but
if abundance counted, bas-relief would have to be added to them. No
other people so tirelessly carved its history or legends upon its walls. At
first we are shocked by the dull similarity of these glyptic narratives, the
crowded confusion, the absence of proportion and perspective— or the
ungainly attempt to achieve this by representing the far above the near;
we are surprised to see how tall the Pharaoh is, and how small are his
enemies; and, as in the sculpture, we find it hard to adjust our pictorial
habits to eyes and breasts that face us boldly, while noses, chins and feet
turn coldly away. But then we find ourselves caught by the perfect line
and grace of the falcon and serpent carved on King Wencphcs' tomb,""*
by the limestone reliefs of King Zoser on the Step-Pyramid at Sakkara,
by the wood7relief of Prince Hesire from his grave in the same locality,807
and by the wounded Libyan on a Fifth Dynasty tomb at Abusir208— a patient
study of muscles taut in pain. At last we bear with equanimity the long
reliefs that tell how Thutmose III and Rameses II carried all before them;
we recognize the perfection of flowing line in the reliefs carved for Seti
I at Abydos and Karnak; and we follow with interest the picturesque en-
gravings wherein the sculptors of Hatshepsut tell on the walls of Der-el-
Bahri the story of the expedition sent by her to the mysterious land of
Punt (Somaliland?). We see the long ships with full-spread sail and serried
oars heading south amid waters alive with octopi, Crustacea and other
toilers of the sea; we watch the fleet arriving on the shores of Punt, wel-
comed by a startled but fascinated people and king; we see the sailors
* Though the word sculpture includes all carved forms, we shall use it as
especially sculpture in the round; and shall segregate under the term bas-relie
carving of forms upon a background. jv
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
carrying on board a thousand loads of native delicacies; we read the jest
of the Punt workman— "Be careful of your feet, you over there; look
out!" Then we accompany the heavy-laden vessels as they return north-
ward filled (the inscription tells us) "with the marvels of the land of Punt,
all the odoriferous trees of the lands of the gods, incense, ebony, ivory,
gold, woods of divers kinds, cosmetics for the eyes, monkeys, dogs, panther
skins, . . . never have like things been brought back for any king from
the beginning of the world." The ships come through the great canal
between the Red Sea and the Nile; we see the expedition landing at the
docks of Thebes, depositing its varied cargo at the very feet of the Queen.
And lastly we are shown, as if after the lapse of time, all these imported
goods beautifying Egypt: on every side ornaments of gold and ebony,
boxes of perfumes and unguents, elephants' tusks and animals' hides; while
the trees brought back from Punt are flourishing so well on the soil of
Thebes that under their branches oxen enjoy the shade. It is one of the
supreme reliefs in the history of art.*"*
Bas-relief is a liaison between sculpture and painting. In Egypt, except
during the reign of the Ptolemies and under the influence of Greece, paint-
ing never rose to the status of an independent art; it remained an accessory
to architecture, sculpture and relief —the painter filled in the outlines carved
by the cutting tool. But though subordinate, it was ubiquitous; most statues
were painted, all surfaces were colored. It is an an perilously subject to
time, and lacking the persistence of statuary and building. Very little re-
mains to us of Old Kingdom painting beyond a remarkable picture of six
geese from a tomb at Medum;910 but from this alone we are justified in be-
lieving that already in the early dynasties this art, too, had come near to
perfection. In the Middle Kingdom we find distemper paintingt of a
delightful decorative effect in the tombs of Ameni and Khnumhotep at
Beni-Hasan, and such excellent examples of the art as the "Gazelles and
the Peasants,"311 and the "Cat Watching the Prey";*3 here again the artist
has caught the main point— that his creations must move and live. Under
the Empire the tombs became a riot of painting. The Egyptian artist had
now developed every color in the rainbow, and was anxious to display his
skill. On the walls and ceilings of homes, temples, palaces and graves he
* A cast of this relief may be seen in the Twelfth Egyptian Room of the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art at New York.
t Painting in which the pigments are mixed or tempered with egg-yolk, size (diluted
glue), or egg-white.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 191
tried to portray refreshingly the life of the sunny fields— birds in flight
through the air, fishes swimming in the sea, beasts of the jungle in their
native haunts. Floors were painted to look like transparent pools, and ceil-
ings sought to rival the jewelry of the sky. Around these pictures were
borders of geometric or floral design, ranging from a quiet simplicity to
the most fascinating complexity.813 The "Dancing Girl,"214 so full of orig
inality and esprit, the "Bird Hunt in a Boat,"215 the slim, naked beauty in
ochre, mingling with other musicians in the Tomb of Nakht at Thebes21"—
these are stray samples of the painted population of the graves. Here, as
in the bas-reliefs, the line is good and the composition poor; the participants
in an action, whom we should portray as intermingled, are represented
separately in succession;217 superposition is again preferred to perspective;
the stiff formalism and conventions of Egyptian sculpture are the order
of the day, and do not reveal that enlivening humor and realism which
distinguish the later statuary. But through these pictures runs a freshness
of conception, a flow of line and execution, a fidelity to the life and move-
ment of natural things, and a joyous exuberance of color and ornament,
which make them a delight to the eye and the spirit. With all its short-
comings Egyptian painting would never be surpassed by any Oriental
civilization until the middle dynasties of China.
The minor arts were the major art of Egypt. The same skill and energy
that had built Karnak and the Pyramids, and had crowded the temples
with a populace of stone, devoted itself also to the internal beautification
of the home, the adornment of the body, and the development of all the
graces of life. Weavers made rugs, tapestries and cushions rich in color
and incredibly fine in texture; the designs which they created passed down
into Syria, and are used there to this day.21* The relics of Tutenkhamon's
tomb have revealed the astonishing luxury of Egyptian furniture, the ex-
quisite finish of every piece and part, chairs covered gaudily with silver
and gold, beds of sumptuous workmanship and design, jewel-boxes and
perfume-baskets of minute artistry, and vases that only China would excel.
Tables bore costly vessels of silver, gold and bronze, crystal goblets, and
sparkling bowls of diorite so finely ground that the light shone through
their stone walls. The alabaster vessels of Tutenkhamon, and the perfect
lotus cups and drinking bowls unearthed amid the ruins of Amenhotep
Ill's villa at Thebes, indicate to what a high level the ceramic art was
raised. Finally the jewelers of the Middle Kingdom and the Empire brought
forth a profusion of precious ornaments seldom surpassed in design and
19* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
workmanship. Necklaces, crowns, rings, bracelets, mirrors, pectorals,
chains, medallions; gold and silver, carnelian and felspar, lapis lazuli and
amethyst— everything is here. The rich Egyptians took the same pleasure
as the Japanese in the beauty of the little things that surrounded them;
every square of ivory on their jewel-boxes had to be carved in relief and
refined in precise detail. They dressed simply, but they lived completely.
And when their day's work was done they refreshed themselves with
music softly played on lutes, harps, sistrums, flutes and lyres.* Temples
and palaces had orchestras and choirs, and on the Pharaoh's staff was a
"superintendent of singing" who organized players and musicians for the
entertainment of the king. There is no trace of a musical notation in
Egypt, but this may be merely a lacuna in the remains. Snefrunofr and
Re'mery-Ptah were the Carusos and De Reszkes of their day, and across
the centuries we hear their boast that they "fulfil every wish of the king
by their beautiful singing."219
It is exceptional that their names survive, for in most cases the artists
whose labors preserved the features or memory of princes, priests and
kings had no means of transmitting their own names to posterity. We hear
of Imhotep, the almost mythical architect of Zoser's reign; of Ineni, who
designed great buildings like Der-el-Bahri for Thutmose I; of Puymre
and Hapuseneb and Senmut, who carried on the architectural enterprises
of Queen Hatshepsut,t of the artist Thutmose, in whose studio so many
masterpieces have been found; and of Bek, the proud sculptor who tells
us, in Gautier's strain, that he has saved Ikhnaton from oblivion.*81 Amen-
hotep III had as his chief architect another Amenhotep, son of Hapu; the
Pharaoh placed almost limitless wealth at the disposal of his talents, and
this favored artist became so famous that later Egypt worshiped him as
a god. For the most part, however, the artist worked in obscurity and
poverty, and was ranked no higher than other artisans or handicraftsmen
by the priests and potentates who engaged him.
Egyptian religion cooperated with Egyptian wealth to inspire and foster
art, and cooperated with Egypt's loss of empire and affluence to ruin it.
Religion offered motives, ideas and the inspiration; but it imposed con-
* The lute was made by stretching a few strings along a narrow sounding-board; the
sistrum was a group of small discs shaken on wires.
t Senmut was so honored by his sovereigns that he said of himself: "I was the greatest
of the great in the whole land."830 This is an opinion very commonly held, but not tl-
ways so clearly expressed.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 193
ventions and restraints which bound art so completely to the church that
when sincere religion died among the artists, the arts that had lived on it
died too. This is the tragedy of almost every civilization— that its soul is in
its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.
10. Philosophy
The "Instructions of Ptah-hotep"-The "Admonitions of Ipuiver"
—The "Dialogue of a Misanthrope" -The Egyptian Ecclesiastes
Historians of philosophy have been wont to begin their story with the
Greeks. The Hindus, who believe that they invented philosophy, and the
Chinese, who believe that they perfected it, smile at our provincialism.
It may be that we are all mistaken; for among the most ancient fragments
left to us by the Egyptians are writings that belong, however loosely and
untechnically, under the rubric of moral philosophy. The wisdom of the
Egyptians was a proverb with the Greeks, who felt themselves children
beside this ancient race.*"
The oldest work of philosophy known to us is the "Instructions of Ptah-
hotep," which apparently goes back to 2880 B.C.— 2300 years before Con-
fucius, Socrates and Buddha.** Ptah-hotep was Governor of Memphis, and
Prime Minister to the King, under the Fifth Dynasty. Retiring from office,
he decided to leave to his son a manual of everlasting wisdom. It was
transcribed as an antique classic by some scholars prior to the Eighteenth
Dynasty. The Vizier begins:
O Prince my Lord, the end of life is at hand; old age descendeth
upon me; feebleness cometh and childishness is renewed; he that is
old lieth down in misery every day. The eyes are small, the ears are
deaf. Energy is diminished, the heart hath no rest. . . . Command thy
servant, therefore, to make over my princely authority to my son.
Let me speak unto him the words of them that hearken to the coun-
sel of the men of old time, those that once heard the gods. I pray
thee, let this thing be done.
His Gracious Majesty grants the permission, advising him, however, to
"discourse without causing weariness"— advice not yet superfluous for
philosophers. Whereupon Ptah-hotep instructs his son:
Be not proud because thou art learned; but discourse with the ig-
" norant man as with the sage. For no limit can be set to skill, neither
194 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
is there any craftsman that possessed! full advantages. Fair speech is
more rare than the emerald that is found by slave-maidens among the
pebbles. . . . Live, therefore, in the house of kindliness, and men shall
come and give gifts of themselves. . . . Beware of making enmity by
thy words. . . . Overstep not the truth, neither repeat that which
any man, be he prince or peasant, saith in opening the heart; it is
abhorrent to the soul. . . .
If thou wouldst be a wise man, beget a son for the pleasing of the
god. If he make straight his course after thine example, if he ar-
range thine affairs in due order, do all unto him that is good.
... If he be heedless and trespass thy rules of conduct, and is vio-
lent; if every speech that cometh from his mouth is a vile word;
then beat thou him, that his talk may be fitting. . . . Precious to a
man is the virtue of his son, and good character is a thing remem-
bered. . . .
Wheresover thou goest, beware of consorting with women. . . .
If thou wouldst be wise, provide for thine house, and love thy wife
that is in thine arms. . . . Silence is more profitable to thee than
abundance of speech. Consider how thou mayest be opposed by an
expert that speaketh in council. It is a foolish thing to speak on
every kind of work. . . .
If thou be powerful make thyself to be honored for knowledge
and for gentleness. . . . Beware of interruption, and of answering
words with heat; put it from thee; control thyself.
And Ptah-hotep concludes with Horatian pride:
Nor shall any word that hath here been set down cease out of this
land forever, but shall be made a pattern whereby princes shall speak
well. My words shall instruct a man how he shall speak; . . . yea, he
shall become as one skilful in obeying, excellent in speaking. Good
fortune shall befall him; ... he shall be gracious until the end of his
life; he shall be contented always."*
This note of good cheer does not persist in Egyptian thought; age comes
upon it quickly, and sours it. Another sage, Ipuwer, bemoans the disorder,
violence, famine and decay that attended the passing of the Old Kingdom;
he tells of sceptics who "would make offerings if" they "knew where the
god is"; he comments upon increasing suicide, and adds, like another
Schopenhauer: "Would that there might be an end of men, that there
CHAP. VIH) EGYPT 195
might be no conception, no birth. If the land would but cease from noise,
and strife be no more"— it is clear that Ipuwer was tired and old. In the
end he dreams of a philosopher-king who will redeem men from chaos
and injustice:
He brings cooling to the flame (of the social conflagration?). It is
said he is the shepherd of all men. There is no evil in his heart.
When his herds are few he passes the day to gather them together,
their hearts being fevered. Would that he had discerned their char-
acter in the first generation. Then would he have smitten evil. He
would have stretched forth his arm against it. He would have
smitten the seed thereof and their inheritance. . . . Where is he to-
day? Doth he sleep perchance? Behold, his might is not seen.1*
This already is the voice of the prophets; the lines are cast into strophic
form, like the prophetic writings of the Jews; and Breasted properly
acclaims these "Admonitions" as "the earliest emergence of a social idealism
which among the Hebrews we call 'Messianism.' """ Another scroll from
the Middle Kingdom denounces the corruption of the age in words that
almost every generation hears:
To whom do I speak today?
Brothers are evil,
Friends of today are not of love.
To whom do I speak today?
Hearts are thievish,
Every man seizes his neighbor's goods.
To whom do I speak today?
The gentle man perishes,
The bold-faced goes everywhere. . . .
To whom do I speak today?
When a man should arouse wrath by his evil conduct
He stirs all men to mirth, although his iniquity is wicked. . . .
And then this Egyptian Swinburne pours out a lovely eulogy of death:
Death is before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Death is before me today
Like the odor of myrrh,
Like sitting under die sail on a windy day.
196 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
Death is before me today
Like the odor of lotus-flowers,
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
Death is before me today
Like the course of a freshet,
Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house. . . .
Death is before me today
As a man longs to see his home
When he had spent years of captivity.**1
Saddest of all is a poem engraved upon a slab now in the Leyden
Museum, and dating back to 2200 B.C. Carpe diem, it sings— snatch the day!
I have heard the words of Imhotep and Hardedef,
Words greatly celebrated as their utterances.
Behold the places thereof!—
Their walls are dismantled,
Their places are no more,
As if they had never been.
None cometh from thence
That he may tell us how they fare; . . .
That he may content our hearts
Until we too depart
To the place whither they have gone.
Encourage thy heart to forget it,
Making it pleasant for thee to follow thy desire
While thou livest.
Put myrrh upon thy head,
And garments upon thee of fine linen,
Imbued with marvelous luxuries,
The genuine things of the gods.
Increase yet more thy delights,
And let not thy heart languish.
Follow thy desire and thy good,
Fashion thy affairs on earth
After the mandates of thine own heart,
Till that day of lamentation come to thee
When the silent-hearted (dead) hears not their lamentation,
Nor he that is in the tomb attends the mourning.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 197
Celebrate the glad day;
Be not weary therein.
Lo, no man taketh his goods with him;
Yea, none returneth again that is gone thither.""
This pessimism and scepticism were the result, it may be, of the broken
spirit of a nation humiliated and subjected by the Hyksos invaders; they
bear the same relation to Egypt that Stoicism and Epicureanism bear to
a defeated and enslaved Greece.* In part such literature represents one
of those interludes, like our own moral interregnum, in which thought
has for a time overcome belief, and men no longer know how or why they
should live. Such periods do not endure; hope soon wins the victory over
thought; the intellect is put down to its customary menial place, and
religion is born again, giving to men the imaginative stimulus apparently
indispensable to life and work. We need not suppose that such poems
expressed the views of any large number of Egyptians; behind and around
the small but vital minority that pondered the problems of life and death
in secular and naturalistic terms were millions of simple men and women
who remained faithful to the gods, and never doubted that right would
triumph, that every earthly pain and grief would be atoned for bountifully
in a haven of happiness and peace.
11. Religion
Sky gods— The sun god— Plant gods— Animal gods— Sex gods-
Human gods— Osiris— Isis and Horus— Minor deities— The
priests-Immortality— The "Book of the Dead"-The
"Negative Confession"— Magic— Corruption
For beneath and above everything in Egypt was religion. We find it
there in every stage and form from totemism to theology; we see its in-
fluence in literature, in government, in art, in everything except morality.
And it is not only varied, it is tropically abundant; only in Rome and
India shall we find so plentiful a pantheon. We cannot understand the
Egyptian— or man— until we study his gods.
In the beginning, said the Egyptian, was the sky; and to the end this and
the Nile remained his chief divinities. All these marvelous heavenly bodies
were not mere bodies, they were the external forms of mighty spirits,
* "Civil war," says Ipuwer, "pays no revenues."1"
198 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
gods whose wills—not always concordant— ordained their complex and
varied movements.** The sky itself was a vault, across whose vastness a
great cow stood, who was the goddess Hathor; the earth lay beneath her
feet, and her belly was clad in the beauty of ten thousand stars. Or (for
the gods and myths differed from nome to nome) the sky was the god
Sibu, lying tenderly upon the earth, which was the goddess Nuit; from
their gigantic copulation all things had been born."0 Constellations and
stars might be gods: for example, Sahu and Sopdit (Orion and Sirius) were
tremendous deities; Sahu ate gods three times a day regularly. Occasionally
some such monster ate the moon, but only for a moment; soon the prayers
of men and the anger of the other gods forced the greedy sow to vomit
it up again.*1 In this manner the Egyptian populace explained an eclipse
of the moon.
The moon was a god, perhaps the oldest of all that were worshiped
in Egypt; but in the official theology the greatest of the gods was the sun.
Sometimes it was worshiped as the supreme deity Ra or Re, the bright
father who fertilized Mother Earth with rays of penetrating heat and
light; sometimes it was a divine calf, born anew at every dawn, sailing the
sky slowly in a celestial boat, and descending into the west, at evening,
like an old man tottering to his grave. Or the sun was the god Horus,
taking the graceful form of a falcon, flying majestically across the heavens
day after day as if in supervision of his realm, and becoming one of the
recurrent symbols of Egyptian religion and royalty. Always Ra, or the
sun, was the Creator: at his first rising, seeing the earth desert and bare,
he had flooded it with his energizing rays, and all living things— vegetable,
animal and human— had sprung pell-mell from his eyes, and been scattered
over the world. The earliest men and women, being direct children of Ra,
had been perfect and happy; by degrees their descendants had taken to
evil ways, and had forfeited this perfection and happiness; whereupon
Ra, dissatisfied with his creatures, had destroyed a large part of the human
race. Learned Egyptians questioned this popular belief, and asserted on
the contrary (like certain Sumerian scholars), that the first men had been
like brutes, without articulate speech or any of the arts of life.*8 All in
all it was an intelligent mythology, expressing piously man's gratitude to
earth and sun.
So exuberant was this piety that the Egyptians worshiped not merely
the source, but almost every form, of life. Many plants were sacred to
them: the palm-tree that shaded them amid the desert, the spring that
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 1 99
gave them drink in the oasis, the grove where they could meet and rest,
the sycamore flourishing miraculously in the sand; these were, with ex-
cellent reason, holy things, and to the end of his civilization the simple
Egyptian brought them offerings of cucumbers, grapes and figs.** Even
the lowly vegetable found its devotees; and Taine amused himself by
showing how the onion that so displeased Bossuet had been a divinity on
the banks of the Nile.884
More popular were the animal gods; they were so numerous that they
filled the Egyptian pantheon like a chattering menagerie. In one nome or
another, in one period or another, Egyptians worshiped the bull, the croco-
dile, the hawk, the cow, the goose, the goat, the ram, the cat, the dog,
the chicken, the swallow, the jackal, the serpent, and allowed some of
these creatures to roam in the temples with the same freedom that is
accorded to the sacred cow in India today.*5 When the gods became
human they still retained animal doubles and symbols: Amon was repre-
sented as a goose or a ram, Ra as a grasshopper or a bull, Osiris as a bull
or a ram, Sebek as a crocodile, Horus as a hawk or falcon, Hathor as a
cow, and Thoth, the god of wisdom, as a baboon.888 Sometimes women
were offered to certain of these animals as sexual mates; the bull in par-
ticular, as the incarnation of Osiris, received this honor; and at Mendes,
says Plutarch, the most beautiful women were offered in coitus to the
divine goat.837 From beginning to end this totemism remained as an essential
and native element in Egyptian religion; human gods came to Egypt
much later, and probably as gifts from western Asia.888
The goat and the bull were especially sacred to the Egyptians as repre-
senting sexual creative power; they were not merely symbols of Osiris,
but incarnations of him.889 Often Osiris was depicted with large and prom-
inent organs, as a mark of his supreme power; and models of him in this
form, or with a triple phallus, were borne in religious processions by the
Egyptians; on certain occasions the women carried such phallic images,
and operated them mechanically with strings.840* Signs of sex worship
appear not only in the many cases in which figures are depicted, on temple
reliefs, with erect organs, but in the frequent appearance, in Egyptian
symbolism, of the crux ansata—z cross with a handle, as a sign of sexual
union and vigorous life.841
At last the gods became human— or rather, men became gods. Like the
*The curious reader will find again a similar custom in India; cf. Dubois, Hindu
Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Oxford, 1928, p. 595.
200 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
deities of Greece, the personal gods of Egypt were merely superior men
and women, made in heroic mould, but composed of bone and muscle,
flesh and blood; they hungered and ate, thirsted and drank, loved and
mated, hated and killed, grew old and died.*' There was Osiris, for ex-
ample, god of the beneficent Nile, whose death and resurrection were
celebrated yearly as symbolizing the fall and rise of the river, and perhaps
the decay and growth of the soil. Every Egyptian of the later dynasties
could tell the story of how Set (or Sit), the wicked god of desiccation,
who shriveled up harvests with his burning breath, was angered at Osiris
(the Nile) for extending (with his overflow) the fertility of the earth,
slew him, and reigned in dry majesty over Osiris' kingdom (i.e., the river
once failed to rise), until Horus, brave son of Isis, overcame Set and
banished him; whereafter Osiris, brought back to life by the warmth
of Isis' love, ruled benevolently over Egypt, suppressed cannibalism, estab-
lished civilization, and then ascended to heaven to reign there endlessly
as a god."" It was a profound myth; for history, like Oriental religion, is
dualistic— a record of the conflict between creation and destruction, fer-
tility and desiccation, rejuvenation and exhaustion, good and evil, life and
death.
Profound, too, was the myth of Isis, the Great Mother. She was not
only the loyal sister and wife of Osiris; in a sense she was greater than he,
for— like woman in general— she had conquered death through love. Nor
was she merely the black soil of the Delta, fertilized by the touch of
Osiris-Nile, and making all Egypt rich with her fecundity. She was, above
all, the symbol of that mysterious creative power which had produced the
earth and every living thing, and of that maternal tenderness whereby, at
whatever cost to the mother, the young new life is nurtured to maturity.
She represented in Egypt—as Kali, Ishtar and Cybele represented in
Asia, Demeter in Greece, and Ceres in Rome— the original priority and
independence of the female principle in creation and in inheritance, and
the originative leadership of woman in tilling the earth; for it was Isis
(said the myth) who had discovered wheat and barley growing wild in
Egypt, and had revealed them to Osiris (man).844 The Egyptians wor-
shiped her with especial fondness and piety, and raised up jeweled images
to her as the Mother of God; her tonsured priests praised her in sonorous
matins and vespers; and in midwinter of each year, coincident with the
annual rebirth of the sun towards the end of our December, the temples
CHAP. VIII ) EGYPT 2OI
of her divine child, Horus (god of the sun), showed her, in holy effigy,
nursing in a stable the babe that she had miraculously conceived. These
poetic-philosophic legends and symbols profoundly affected Christian
ritual and theology. Early Christians sometimes worshiped before the
statues of Isis suckling the infant Horus, seeing in them another form of
the ancient and noble myth by which woman (i.e., the female principle),
creating all things, becomes at last the Mother of God.14"
These— Ra (or, as he was called in the South, Amon), Osiris, Isis and
Horus— were the greater gods of Egypt. In later days Ra, Amon and
another god, Ptah, were combined as three embodiments or aspects of one
supreme and triune deity ,Mfl There were countless lesser divinities: Anubis
the jackal, Shu, Tefnut, Ncphthys, Ket, Nut; . . . but we must not make
these pages a museum of dead gods. Even Pharaoh was a god, always the
son of Amon-Ra, ruling not merely by divine right but by divine birth,
as a deity transiently tolerating the earth as his home. On his head was
the falcon, symbol of Horus and totem of the tribe; from his forehead rose
the ur^eus or serpent, symbol of wisdom and life, and communicating magic
virtues to the crown.2"7 The king was chief -priest of the faith, and led the
great processions and ceremonies that celebrated the festivals of the gods.
It was through this assumption of divine lineage and powers that he was
able to rule so long with so little force.
Hence the priests of Egypt were the necessary props of the throne,
and the secret police of the social order. Given a faith of such complexity,
a class had to arise adept in magic and ritual, whose skill would make it
indispensable in approaching the gods. In effect, though not in law, the
office of priest passed down from father to son, and a class grew up
which, through the piety of the people and the politic generosity of the
kings, became in time richer and stronger than the feudal aristocracy or
the royal family itself. The sacrifices offered to the gods supplied the
priests with food and drink; the temple buildings gave them spacious
homes; the revenues of temple lands and services furnished them with
ample incomes; and their exemption from forced labor, military service,
and ordinary taxation, left them in an enviable position of prestige and
power. They deserved not a little of this power, for they accumulated
and preserved the learning of Egypt, educated the youth, and disciplined
themselves with rigor and zeal. Herodotus describes them almost with
awe:
202 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
They are of all men the most excessively attentive to the worship
of the gods, and observe the following ceremonies. . . . They wear
linen garments, constantly fresh-washed. . . . They are circumcised
for the sake of cleanliness, thinking it better to be clean than hand-
some. They shave their whole body every third day, that neither
lice nor any other impurity may be found upon them. . . . They
wash themselves in cold water twice every day and twice every
night.148
What distinguished this religion above everything else was its emphasis
on immortality. If Osiris, the Nile, and all vegetation, might rise again,
so might man. The amazing preservation of the dead body in the dry soil
of Egypt lent some encouragement to this belief, which was to dominate
Egyptian faith for thousands of years, and to pass from it, by its own
resurrection, into Christianity ."" The body, Egypt believed, was inhabited
by a small replica of itself called the ka, and also by a soul that dwelr in
the body like a bird flitting among trees. All of these-body, ka and soul-
survived the appearance of death; they could escape mortality for a time
in proportion as the flesh was preserved from decay; but if they came to
Osiris clean of all sin they would be permitted to live forever in the
"Happy Field of Food"— those heavenly gardens where there would
always be abundance and security: judge the harassed penury that spoke
in this consoling dream. These Elysian Fields, however, could be reached
only through the services of a ferryman, an Egyptian prototype of Charon;
and this old gentleman would receive into his boat only such men and
women as had done no evil in their lives. Or Osiris would question the
dead, weighing each candidate's heart in the scale against a feather to test
his truthfulness. Those who failed in this final examination would be
condemned to lie forever in their tombs, hungering and thirsting, fed upon
by hideous crocodiles, and never coming forth to see the sun.
According to the priests there were clever ways of passing these tests;
and they offered to reveal these ways for a consideration. One was to fit
up the tomb with food, drink and servants to nourish and help the dead.
Another was to fill the tomb with talismans pleasing to the gods: fish,
vultures, snakes, above all, the scarab-a beetle which, because it repro-
duced itself apparently with fertilization, typified the resurrected soul;
if these were properly blessed by a priest they would frighten away every
assailant, and annihilate every evil. A still better way was to buy the
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 203
Book of the Dead* scrolls for which the priests had written prayers, for-
mulas and charms calculated to appease, even to deceive, Osiris. When,
after a hundred vicissitudes and perils, the dead soul at last reached Osiris,
it was to address the great Judge in some such manner as this:
O Thou who speedest Time's advancing wing,
Thou dweller in all mysteries of life,
Thou guardian of every word I speak—
Behold, Thou art ashamed of me, thy son;
Thy heart is full of sorrow and of shame,
For that my sins were grievous in the world,
And proud my wickedness and my transgression.
Oh, be at peace with me, oh, be at peace,
And break the barriers that loom between us!
Let all my sins be washed away and fall
Forgotten to the right and left of thee!
Yea, do away with all my wickedness,
And put away the shame that fills thy heart,
That Thou and I henceforth may be at peace."1
Or the soul was to declare its innocence of all major sins, in a "Negative
Confession" that represents for us one of the earliest and noblest expressions
of the moral sense in man:
Hail to Thee, Great God, Lord of Truth and Justice! I have
come before Thee, my Master; I have been brought to see thy
beauties. ... I bring unto you Truth. ... I have not committed in-
iquity against men. I have not oppressed the poor. ... I have not
laid labor upon any free man beyond that which he wrought for
himself. ... I have not defaulted, I have not committed that which
is an abomination to the gods. I have not caused the slave to be ill-
treated of his master. I have not starved any man, I have not made
any to weep, I have not assassinated any man, ... I have not com-
mitted treason against any. I have not in aught diminished the sup-
* A modern title given by Lcpsius to some two thousand papyrus rolls found in vari-
ous tombs, and distinguished by containing formulas to guide the dead. The Egyptian
title is Coming Forth (from death) by Day. They date from the Pyramids, but some
are even older. The Egyptians believed that these texts had been composed by the god
of wisdom, Thoth; chapter Ixiv announced that the book had been found at Heliopolis,
and was "in the very handwriting of the god."880 Josiah made a similar discovery among
the Jews; cf. Chap, xii, §v below.
204 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
plies of the temple; I have not spoiled the show-bread of the gods.
... I have done no carnal act within the sacred enclosure of the
temple. I have not blasphemed. ... I have not falsified the balance.
I have not taken away milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have . . .
not taken with nets the birds of the gods ... I am pure. I am pure.
I am pure.*"1
For the most part, however, Egyptian religion had little to say about
morality; the priests were busier selling charms, mumbling incantations,
and performing magic rites than inculcating ethical precepts. Even the
Book of the Dead teaches the faithful that charms blessed by the clergy
will overcome all the obstacles that the deceased soul may encounter on
its way to salvation; and the emphasis is rather on reciting the prayers
than on living the good life. Says one roll: "If this can be known by
the deceased he shall come forth by day"— i.e., rise to eternal life. Amulets
and incantations were designed and sold to cover a multitude of sins and
secure the entrance of the Devil himself into Paradise. At every step the
pious Egyptian had to mutter strange formulas to avert evil and attract
the good. Hear, for example, an anxious mother trying to drive out
"demons" from her child:
Run out, thou who comest in darkness, who enterest in stealth.
. . . Comest thou to kiss this child? I will not let thce kiss him.
. . . Comest thou to take him away? 1 will not let thee take him
away from me. 1 have made his protection against thee out of
Efet-hcrb, which makes pain; out of onions, which harm thee; out
of honey, which is sweet to the living and bitter to the dead; out
of the evil parts of the Ebdu fish; out of the backbone of the
perch.*8
The gods themselves used magic and charms against one another. The
literature of Egypt is full of magicians— of wizards who dry up lakes with
a word, or cause severed limbs to jump back into place, or raise the dead.354
The king had magicians to help or guide him; and he himself was believed
to have a magical power to make the rain fall, or the river rise."56 Life was
full of talismans, spells, divinations; every door had to have a god to
frighten away evil spirits or fortuitous strokes of bad luck. Children born
on the twenty-third of the month of Thoth would surely die soon; those
born on the twentieth of Choiakh would go blind.300 "Each day and
CHAP. VIII) EGYPT 205
month," says Herodotus, "is assigned to some particular god; and accord-
ing to the day on which each person is born, they determine what will
befall him, how he will die, and what kind of person he will be."807 In
the end the connection between morality and religion tended to be for-
gotten; the road to eternal bliss led not through a good life, but through
magic, ritual, and generosity to the priests. Let a great Egyptologist ex-
press the matter:
The dangers of the hereafter were now greatly multiplied, and
for every critical situation the priest was able to furnish the dead
with an effective charm which would infallibly cure him. Besides
many charms which enabled the dead to reach the world of the
hereafter, there were those which prevented him from losing his
mouth, his head, his heart; others which enabled him to remember
his name, to breathe, eat, drink, avoid eating his own foulness, to
prevent his drinking-water from turning into flame, to turn dark-
ness into light, to ward off all serpents and other hostile monsters,
and many others. . . . Thus the earliest moral development which
we can trace in the ancient East was suddenly arrested, or at least
checked, by the detestable devices of a corrupt priesthood eager
for gain.858
Such was the state of religion in Egypt when Ikhnaton, poet and heretic,
came to the throne, and inaugurated the religious revolution that destroyed
the Empire of Egypt.
IV. THE HERETIC KING
The character of Ikhnaton— The new religion— A hymn to the
sun — Monotheis?n — The new dogma — The new art — Re-
action—N of retete— Break-up of the Empire— Death of
Ikhnaton
In the year 1380 B.C. Amenhotep III, who had succeeded Thutmose
III, died after a life of wordly luxury and display, and was followed by
his son Amenhotep IV, destined to be known as Ikhnaton. A profoundly
revealing portrait-bust of him, discovered at Tell-el-Amarna, shows a
profile of incredible delicacy, a face feminine in softness and poetic in
its sensitivity. Large eyelids like a dreamer's, a long, misshapen skull, a
frame slender and weak: here was a Shelley called to be a king.
2O6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
He had hardly come to power when he began to revolt against the
religion of Amon, and the practices of Amon's priests. In the great temple
at Karnak there was now a large harem, supposedly the concubines of
Amon, but in reality serving to amuse the clergy.*811 The young emperor,
whose private life was a model of fidelity, did not approve of this sacred
harlotry; the blood of the ram slaughtered in sacrifice to Amon stank
in his nostrils; and the traffic of the priests in magic and charms, and their
use of the oracle of Amon to support religious obscurantism and political
corruption** disgusted him to the point of violent protest. "More evil are
the words of the priests," he said, "than those which I heard until the year
IV" (of his reign) ; "more evil are they than those which King Amenhotep
III heard."980 His youthful spirit rebelled against the sordidness into which
the religion of his people had fallen; he abominated the indecent wealth
and lavish ritual of the temples, and the growing hold of a mercenary
hierarchy on the nation's life. With a poet's audacity he threw compromise
to the winds, and announced bravely that all these gods and ceremonies
were a vulgar idolatry, that there was but one god— Aton.
Like Akbar in India thirty centuries later, Ikhnaton saw divinity above
all in the sun, in the source of all earthly life and light. We cannot tell
whether he had adopted his theory from Syria, and whether Aton was
merely a form of Adonis. Of whatever origin, the new god filled the
king's soul with delight; he changed his own name from Amenhotep, which
contained the name of Amon, to Ikhnaton, meaning "Aton is satisfied";
and helping himself with old hymns, and certain monotheistic poems pub-
lished in the preceding reign,* he composed passionate songs to Aton, of
which this, the longest and the best, is the fairest surviving remnant of
Egyptian literature:
Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of the sky,
O living Aton, Beginning of life.
When thou risest in the eastern horizon,
Thou fillest every land with thy beauty.
Thou art beautiful, great, glittering, high above every land,
Thy rays, they encompass the land, even all that thou hast made.
* Under Amenhotep III the architects Suti and Hor had inscribed a monotheistic hymn
to the sun upon a stele now in die British Museum.*01 It had long been the custom in
Egypt to address the sun-god, Amon-Ra, as die greatest god,8" but only as the god of
Egypt.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 207
Thou art Re, and thou earnest them all away captive;
Thou bindest them by thy love.
Though thou art far away, thy rays are upon earth;
Though thou art on high, thy footprints are the day.
When thou settest in the western horizon of the sky,
The earth is in darkness like the dead;
They sleep in their chambers,
Their heads are wrapped up,
Their nostrils are stopped,
And none seeth the other,
All their things are stolen
Which are under their heads,
And they know it not.
Every lion cometh forth from his den,
All serpents they sting. . . .
The world is in silence,
He that made them resteth in his horizon.
Bright is the earth when thou risest in the horizon.
When thou shinest as Aton by day
Thou drivest away the darkness.
When thou sendest forth thy rays,
The Two Lands are in daily festivity,
Awake and standing upon their feet
When thou hast raised them up.
Their limbs bathed, they take their clothing,
Their arms uplifted in adoration to thy dawning.
In all the world they do their work.
All cattle rest upon their pasturage,
The trees and the plants flourish,
The birds flutter in their marshes,
Their wings uplifted in adoration to thee.
All the sheep dance upon their feet,
All winged things fly,
They live when thou hast shone upon them.
The barks sail upstream and downstream.
Every highway is open because thou dawnest.
The fish in the river leap up before thee.
Thy rays are in the midst of the great green sea.
208 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
Creator of the germ in woman,
Maker of seed in man,
Giving life to the son in the body of his mother,
Soothing him that he may not weep,
Nurse even in the womb,
Giver of breath to animate every one that he maketh!
When he cometh forth from the body ... on the day of his birth,
Thou openest his mouth in speech,
Thou suppliest his necessities.
When the fledgling in the egg chirps in the egg,
Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive.
When thou hast brought him together
To the point of bursting the egg,
He cometh forth from the egg,
To chirp with all his might.
He goeth about upon his two feet
When he hath come forth therefrom.
How manifold are thy works!
They are hidden from before us,
O sole god, whose powers no other possesseth.
Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart
While thou wast alone:
Men, all cattle large and small,
All that are upon the earth,
That go about upon their feet;
All that are on high,
That fly with their wings.
The foreign countries, Syria and Rush,
The land of Egypt;
Thou settest every man into his place,
Thou suppliest their necessities. . . .
Thou makest the Nile in the nether world,
Thou bringest it as thou desirest,
To preserve alive the people. . . .
How excellent are thy designs,
O Lord of eternity!
There is a Nile in the sky for the strangers
And for the cattle of every country that go upon their feet. . . •
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 209
Thy rays nourish every garden;
When thou risest they live,
They grow by thee.
Thou makest the seasons
In order to create all thy work:
Winter to bring them coolness,
And heat that they may taste thee.
Thou didst make the distant sky to rise therein,
In order to behold all that thou hast made,
Thou alone, shining in the form as living Aton,
Dawning, glittering, going afar and returning.
Thou makest millions of forms
Through thyself alone;
Cities, towns and tribes,
Highways and rivers.
All eyes see thee before them,
For thou art Aton of the day over the earth. . . .
Thou art in my heart,
There is no other that knoweth thee
Save thy son Ikhnaton.
Thou hast made him wise
In thy designs and in thy might.
The world is in thy hand,
Even as thou hast made them.
When thou hast risen they live,
When thou settest they die;
For thou art length of life of thyself,
Men live through thee,
While their eyes are upon thy beauty
Until thou settest.
All labor is put away
When thou settest in the west. . . .
Thou didst establish the world,
And raised them up for thy son. . . .
Ikhnaton, whose life is long;
And for the chief royal wife, his beloved,
Mistress of the Two Lands,
Nefer-nefru-aton, Nofretete,
Living and flourishing for ever and ever.*8
210 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
This is not only one of the great poems of history, it is the first out-
standing expression of monotheism— seven hundred years before Isaiah.*
Perhaps, as Breasted985 suggests, this conception of one sole god was a
reflex of the unification of the Mediterranean world under Egypt by
Thutmose III. Ikhnaton conceives his god as belonging to all nations
equally, and even names other countries before his own as in Aton's care;
this was an astounding advance upon the old tribal deities. Note the
vitalistic conception: Aton is to be found not in battles and victories but
in flowers and trees, in all forms of life and growth; Aton is the joy that
causes the young sheep to "dance upon their legs," and the birds to "flutter
in their marshes." Nor is the god a person limited to human form; the
real divinity is the creative and nourishing heat of the sun; the flaming
glory of the rising or setting orb is but an emblem of that ultimate power.
Nevertheless, because of its omnipresent, fertilizing beneficence, the sun
becomes to Ikhnaton also the "Lord of love," the tender nurse that "creates
the man-child in woman," and "fills the Two Lands of Egypt with love."
So at last Aton grows by symbolism into a solicitous father, compassionate
and tender; not, like Yahveh, a Lord of Hosts, but a god of gentleness and
peace."88
It is one of the tragedies of history that Ikhnaton, having achieved his
elevating vision of universal unity, was not satisfied to let the noble quality
of his new religion slowly win the hearts of men. He was unable to
think of his truth in relative terms; the thought came to him that other
forms of belief and worship were indecent and intolerable. Suddenly he
gave orders that the names of all gods but Aton should be erased and
chiseled from every public inscription in Egypt; he mutilated his father's
name from a hundred monuments to cut from it the word A?non; he
declared all creeds but his own illegal, and commanded that all the old
temples should be closed. He abandoned Thebes as unclean, and built
for himself a beautiful new capital at Akhetaton— "City of the Horizon
of Aton."
Rapidly Thebes decayed as the offices and emoluments of government
were taken from it, and Akhetaton became a rich metropolis, busy with
fresh building and a Renaissance of arts liberated from the priestly bondage
of tradition. The joyous spirit expressed in the new religion passed over
into its art. At Tell-el-Amarna, a modern village on the site of Akhetaton,
* The obvious similarity of this hymn to Psalm CIV leaves little doubt of Egyptian in-
fluence upon the Hebrew poet.884
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 211
Sir William Flinders Petrie unearthed a beautiful pavement, adorned with
birds, fishes and other animals painted with the most delicate grace.1"
Ikhnaton forbade the artists to make images of Aton, on the lofty ground
that the true god has no form;** for the rest he left art free, merely asking
his favorite artists, Bek, Auta and Nutmose, to describe things as they saw
them, and to forget the conventions of the priests. They took him at his
word, and represented him as a youth of gentle, almost timid, face, and
strangely dolichocephalic head. Taking their lead from his vitalistic con-
ception of deity, they painted every form of plant and animal life with
loving detail, and with a perfection hardly surpassed in any other place
or time.280 For a while art, which in every generation knows the pangs of
hunger and obscurity, flourished in abundance and happiness.
Had Ikhnaton been a mature mind he would have realized that the
change which he had proposed from a superstitious polytheism deeply
rooted in the needs and habits of the people to a naturalistic monotheism
that subjected imagination to intelligence, was too profound to be effected
in a little time; he would have made haste slowly, and softened the transi-
tion with intermediate steps. But he was a poet rather than a philosopher;
like Shelley announcing the demise of Yahveh to the bishops of Oxford,
he grasped for the Absolute, and brought the whole structure of Egypt
down upon his head.
At one blow he had dispossessed and alienated a wealthy and powerful
priesthood, and had forbidden the worship of deities made dear by long
tradition and belief. When he had Amon hacked out from his father's
name it seemed to his people a blasphemous impiety; nothing could be
more vital to them than the honoring of the ancestral dead. He had under-
estimated the strength and pertinacity of the priests, and he had exagger-
ated the capacity of the people to understand a natural religion. Behind
the scenes the priests plotted and prepared; and in the seclusion of their
homes the populace continued to worship their ancient and innumerable
gods. A hundred crafts that had depended upon the temples muttered in
secret against the heretic. Even in his palace his ministers and generals
hated him, and prayed for his death, for was he not allowing the Empire
to fall to pieces in his hands?
Meanwhile the young poet lived in simplicity and trust. He had seven
daughters, but no son; and though by law he might have sought an heir
by his secondary wives, he would not, but preferred to remain faithful
to Nofretete. A little ornament has come down to us that shows him
212 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
embracing the Queen; he allowed artists to depict him riding in a chariot
through the streets, engaged in pleasantries with his wife and children;
on ceremonial occasions the Queen sat beside him and held his hand,
while their daughters frolicked at the foot of the throne. He spoke of
his wife as "Mistress of his Happiness, at hearing whose voice the King
rejoices"; and for an oath he used the phrase, "As my heart is happy in
the Queen and her children."270 It was a tender interlude in Egypt's epic
of power.
Into this simple happiness came alarming messages from Syria.* The
dependencies of Egypt in the Near East were being invaded by Hittites
and other neighboring tribes; the governors appointed by Egypt pleaded
for immediate reinforcements. Ikhnaton hesitated; he was not quite sure
that the right of conquest warranted him in keeping these states in sub-
jection to Egypt; and he was loath to send Egyptians to die on distant
fields for so uncertain a cause. When the dependencies saw that they were
dealing with a saint, they deposed their Egyptian governors, quietly
stopped all payment of tribute, and became to all effects free. Almost in a
moment Egypt ceased to be a vast Empire, and shrank back into a little
state. Soon the Egyptian treasury, which had for a century depended upon
foreign tribute as its mainstay, was empty; domestic taxation had fallen
to a minimum, and the working of the gold mines had stopped. Internal
administration was in chaos. Ikhnaton found himself penniless and friend-
less in a world that had seemed all his own. Every colony was in revolt,
and every power in Egypt was arrayed against him, waiting for his fall.
He was hardly thirty when, in 1362 B.C., he died, broken with the reali-
zation of his failure as a ruler, and the unworthiness of his race.
*In 1893 Sir William Flinders Petrie discovered at Tell-el-Amarna over three hundred
and fifty cuneiform letter-tablets, most of which were appeals for aid addressed to
Ikhnaton by the East.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 213
V. DECLINE AND FALL
Tutenkhamon— The labors of Rameses ll—The 'wealth of the
clergy — The poverty of the people — The conquest of
Egypt— Summary of Egyptian contributions to civilization
Two years after his death his son-in-law, Tutenkhamon, a favorite of
the priests, ascended the throne. He changed the name Tutenkhaton
which his father-in-law had given him, returned the capital to Thebes,
made his peace with the powers of the Church, and announced to a rejoicing
people the restoration of the ancient gods. The words Aton and Ikhnaton
were effaced from all the monuments, the priests forbade the name of the
heretic king to pass any man's lips, and the people referred to him as "The
Great Criminal." The names that Ikhnaton had removed were recarved
upon the monuments, and the feast-days that he had abolished were
renewed. Everything was as before.
For the rest Tutenkhamon reigned without distinction; the world would
hardly have heard of him had not unprecedented treasures been found
in his grave. After him a doughty general, Harmhab, marched his armies
up and down the coast, restoring Egypt's external power and internal
peace. Seti I wisely reaped the fruits of renewed order and wealth, built
the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak,272 began to cut a mighty temple into the
cliffs at Abu Simbel, commemorated his grandeur in magnificent reliefs,
and had the pleasure of lying for thousands of years in one of the most
ornate of Egypt's tombs.
At this point the romantic Rameses II, last of the great Pharaohs,
mounted the throne. Seldom has history known so picturesque a monarch.
Handsome and brave, he added to his charms by his boyish consciousness
of them; and his exploits in war, which he never tired of recording, were
equaled only by his achievements in love. After brushing aside a brother
who had inopportune rights to the throne, he sent an expedition to Nubia
to tap the gold mines there and replenish the treasury of Egypt; and with
the resultant funds he undertook the reconquest of the Asiatic provinces,
which had again rebelled. Three years he gave to recovering Palestine;
then he pushed on, met a great army of the Asiatic allies at Kadesh (1288
B.C.), and turned defeat into victory by his courage and leadership. It may
have been as a result of these campaigns that a considerable number of
Jews were brought into Egypt, as slaves or as immigrants; and Rameses II
214 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. VIII
is believed by some to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus.87" He had
his victories commemorated, without undue impartiality, on half a hundred
walls, commissioned a poet to celebrate him in epic verse, and rewarded
himself with several hundred wives. When he died he left one hundred
sons and fifty daughters to testify to his quality by their number and their
proportion. He married several of his daughters, so that they too might
have splendid children. His offspring were so numerous that they con-
stituted for four hundred years a special class in Egypt, from which, for
over a century, her rulers were chosen.
He deserved these consolations, for he seems to have ruled Egypt well.
He built so lavishly that half the surviving edifices of Egypt are ascribed
to his reign. He completed the main hall at Karnak, added to the temple
of Luxor, raised his own vast shrine, the Ramesseum, west of the river,
finished the great mountain-sanctuary at Abu Simbel, and scattered
colossi of himself throughout the land. Commerce flourished under him,
both across the Isthmus of Suez and on the Mediterranean. He built an-
other canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, but the shifting sands filled it up
soon after his death. He yielded up his life in 1225 B.C., aged ninety, after
one of the most remarkable reigns of history.
Only one human power in Egypt had excelled his, and that was the
clergy: here, as everywhere in history, ran the endless struggle between
church and state. Throughout his reign and those of his immediate suc-
cessors, the spoils of every war, and the lion's share of taxes from the
conquered provinces, went to the temples and the priests. These reached
1 the zenith of their wealth under Rameses HI. They possessed at that time
| 107,000 slaves— one-thirtieth of the population of Egypt; they held 750,000
acres—one-seventh of all the arable land; they owned 500,000 head of
cattle; they received the revenues from 169 towns in Egypt and Syria;
and all this property was exempt from taxation.*" The generous or
timorous Rameses III showered unparalleled gifts upon the priests of
Amon, including 32,000 kilograms of gold and a million kilograms of
silver;*™ every year he gave them 185,000 sacks of corn. When the time
came to pay the workmen employed by the state he found his treasury
empty.*71 More and more the people starved in order that the gods might
eat.
Under such a policy it was only a matter of time before the kings
would become the servants of the priests. In the reign of the last Ramessid
king the High Priest of Amon usurped the throne and ruled as openly
CHAP.VIIl) EGYPT 215
supreme; the Empire became a stagnant theocracy in which architecture
and superstition flourished, and every other element in the national life
decayed. Omens were manipulated to give a divine sanction to every
decision of the clergy. The most vital forces of Egypt were sucked dry
by the thirst of the gods at the very time when foreign invaders were
preparing to sweep down upon all this concentrated wealth.
For meanwhile on every frontier trouble brewed. The prosperity of
the country had come in part from its strategic place on the main line of
Mediterranean trade; its metals and wealth had given it mastery over
Libya on the west, and over Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine on the north
and east. But now at the other end of this trade route— in Assyria, Babylon
and Persia—new nations were growing to maturity and power, were
strengthening themselves with invention and enterprise, and were daring
to compete in commerce and industry with the self-satisfied and pious
Egyptians. The Phoenicians were perfecting the trireme galley, and with
it were gradually wresting from Egypt the control of the sea. The Dorians
and Achaeans had conquered Crete and the jEgean (ca. 1400 B.C.), and
were establishing a commercial empire of their own; trade moved less and
less in slow caravans over the difficult and robber-infested mountains and
deserts of the Near East; it moved more and more, at less expense and with
less loss, in ships that passed through the Black Sea and the jfcgean to
Troy, Crete and Greece, at last to Carthage, Italy and Spain. The nations
along the northern shores of the Mediterranean ripened and blossomed,
the nations on the southern shores faded and rotted away. Egypt lost her
trade, her gold, her power, her art, at last even her pride; one by one her
rivals crept down upon her soil, harassed and conquered her, and laid
her waste.
In 954 B.C. the Libyans came in from the western hills, and laid about
them with fury; in 722 the Ethiopians entered from the south, and avenged
their ancient slavery; in 674 the Assyrians swept down from the north and
subjected priest-ridden Egypt to tribute. For a time Psamtik, Prince of
Sai's, repelled the invaders, and brought Egypt together again under his
leadership. During his long reign, and those of his successors, came the
"Sai'te Revival" of Egyptian art: the architects and sculptors, poets and
scientists of Egypt gathered up the technical and esthetic traditions of their
schools, and prepared to lay them at the feet of the Greeks. But in 525
B.C. the Persians under Cambyses crossed Suez, and again put an end
to Egyptian independence. In 332 B.C. Alexander sallied out of Asia, and
2l6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. VIII
made Egypt a province of Macedon.* In 48 B.C. Caesar arrived to capture
Egypt's new capital, Alexandria, and to give to Cleopatra the son and heir
whom they vainly hoped to crown as the unifying monarch of the greatest
empires of antiquity."77 In 30 B.C. Egypt became a province of Rome, and
disappeared from history.
For a time it flourished again when saints peopled the desert, and Cyril
dragged Hypatia to her death in the streets (415 A.D.); and again when the
Moslems conquered it (ca. A.D. 650), built Cairo with the ruins of Mem-
phis, and filled it with bright-domed mosques and citadels. But these were
alien cultures not really Egypt's own, and they too passed away. Today
there is a place called Egypt, but the Egyptian people are not masters
there; long since they have been broken by conquest, and merged in lan-
guage and marriage with their Arab conquerors; their cities know only the
authority of Moslems and Englishmen, and the feet of weary pilgrims who
travel thousands of miles to find that the Pyramids are merely heaps of
stones. Perhaps greatness could grow there again if Asia should once more
become rich, and make Egypt the half-way house of the planet's trade.
But of the morrow, as Lorenzo sang, there is no certainty; and today the
only certainty is decay. On all sides gigantic ruins, monuments and tombs,
memorials of a savage and titanic energy; on all sides poverty and desola-
tion, and the exhaustion of an ancient blood. And on all sides the hostile,
engulfing sands, blown about forever by hot winds, and grimly resolved
to cover everything in the end.
Nevertheless the sands have destroyed only the body of ancient Egypt;
its spirit survives in the lore and memory of our race. The improvement
of agriculture, metallurgy, industry and engineering; the apparent inven-
tion of glass and linen, of paper and ink, of the calendar and the clock, of
geometry and the alphabet; the refinement of dress and ornament, of furni-
ture and dwellings, of society and life; the remarkable development of
orderly and peaceful government, of census and post, of primary and
secondary education, even of technical training for office and administra-
tion; the advancement of writing and literature, of science and medicine;
the first clear formulation known to us of individual and public con-
science, the first cry for social justice, the first widespread monogamy, the
first monotheism, the first essays in moral philosophy; the elevation of
* The history of classical Egyptian civilization under the Ptolemies and the Caesars be-
longs to a later volume.
CHAP. VIIl) EGYPT 217
architecture, sculpture and the minor arts to a degree of excellence and
power never (so far as we know) reached before, and seldom equaled
since: these contributions were not lost, even when their finest exemplars
were buried under the desert, or overthrown by some convulsion of the
globe.* Through the Phoenicians, the Syrians and the Jews, through the
Cretans, the Greeks and the Romans, the civilization of Egypt passed
down to become part of the cultural heritage of mankind. The effect or
remembrance of what Egypt accomplished at the very dawn of history has
influence in every nation and every age. "It is even possible," as Faure
has said, "that Egypt, through the solidarity, the unity, and the disciplined
variety of its artistic products, through the enormous duration and the sus-
tained power of its effort, offers the spectacle of the greatest civilization
that has yet appeared on the earth."278 We shall do well to equal it.
* Thebes was finally destroyed by an earthquake in 27 B.C.
CHAPTER IX
Babylonia
I. FROM HAMMURABI TO NEBUCHADREZZAR
Babylonian contributions to modern civilization— The Land be-
tween the Rivers — Hammurabi — His capital — The Kassite
Domination— The Amarna letters— The Assyrian Con-
quest—Nebuchadrezzar—Babylon in the days of
its glory
IVILIZATION, like life, is a perpetual struggle with death. And as
life maintains itself only by abandoning old, and recasting itself in
younger and fresher, forms, so civilization achieves a precarious survival
by changing its habitat or its blood. It moved from Ur to Babylon and
Judea, from Babylon to Nineveh, from these to Persepolis, Sardis and
Miletus, and from these, Egypt and Crete to Greece and Rome.
No one looking at the site of ancient Babylon today would suspect that
these hot and dreary wastes along the Euphrates were once the rich and
powerful capital of a civilization that almost created astronomy, added
richly to the progress of medicine, established the science of language,
prepared the first great codes of law, taught the Greeks the rudiments of
mathematics, physics and philosophy,1 gave the Jews the mythology which
they gave to the world, and passed on to the Arabs part of that scientific
and architectural lore with which they aroused the dormant soul of medie-
val Europe. Standing before the silent Tigris and Euphrates one finds it
hard to believe that they are the same rivers that watered Sumeria and
Akkad, and nourished the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
In some ways they are not the same rivers: not only because "one never
steps twice into the same stream," but because these old rivers have long
since remade their beds along new courses,1 and "mow with their scythes
of whiteness"8 other shores. As in Egypt the Nile, so here the Tigris and
the Euphrates provided, for thousands of miles, an avenue of commerce
and— in their southern reaches—springtime inundations that helped the
peasant to fertilize his soil. For rain comes to Babylonia only in the winter
218
CHAP. IX ) BABYLONIA 219
months; from May to November it comes not at all; and the earth, but
for the overflow of the rivers, would be as arid as northern Mesopotamia
was then and is today. Through the abundance of the rivers and the toil
of many generations of men, Babylonia became the Eden of Semitic
legend, the garden and granary of western Asia.*
"" Historically and ethnically Babylonia was a product of the union of the
Akkadians and the Sumerians. Their mating generated the Babylonian
type, in which the Akkadian Semitic strain proved dominant; their warfare
ended in the triumph of Akkad, and the establishment of Babylon as the
capital of all lower Mesopotamia. At the outset of this history stands
the powerful figure of Hammurabi (2123-2081 B.C.) conqueror and law-
giver through a reign of forty-three years. Primeval seals and inscriptions
transmit him to us partially— a youth full of fire and genius, a very whirl-
wind in battle, who crushes all rebels, cuts his enemies into pieces, marches
over inaccessible mountains, and never loses an engagement. Under him
the petty warring states of the lower valley were forced into unity and
peace, and disciplined into order and security by an historic code of laws.
The Code of Hammurabi was unearthed at Susa in 1902, beautifully
engraved upon a diorite cylinder that had been carried from Babylon to
Elam (ca. noo B.C.) as a trophy of war.f Like that of Moses, this legis-
lation was a gift from Heaven, for one side of the cylinder shows the King
receiving the laws from Shamash, the Sun-god himself. The Prologue is
almost in Heaven:
When the lofty Anu, King of the Anunaki and Bel, Lord of
Heaven and Earth, he who determines the destiny of the land,
committed the rule of all mankind to Marduk; . . . when they
pronounced the lofty name of Babylon; when they made it famous
among the quarters of the world and in its midst established an
everlasting kingdom whose foundations were firm as heaven and
earth— at that time Anu and Bel called me, Hammurabi, the ex-
alted prince, the worshiper of the gods, to cause justice to prevail
in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, to prevent the
strong from oppressing the weak, . . . to enlighten the land and to
further the welfare of the people. Hammurabi, the governor named
by Bel, am I, who brought about plenty and abundance; who made
* The Euphrates is one of the four rivers which, according to Genesis (ii, 14), flowed
through Paradise,
fit is now in the Louvre.
220 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
everything for Nippur and Durilu complete; . . . who gave life to
the city of Uruk; who supplied water in abundance to its inhabi-
tants; . . . who made the city of Borsippa beautiful; . . . wlpo stored
up grain for the mighty Urash; . . . who helped his people in time
of need; who establishes in security their property in Babylon; the
governor of the people, the servant, whose deeds are pleasing to
Anunit.4
The words here arbitrarily underlined have a modern ring; one would
not readily attribute them to an Oriental "despot" 2100 B.C., or suspect
that the laws that they introduce were based upon Sumerian prototypes
now six thousand years old. This ancient origin combined with Baby-
lonian circumstance to give the Code a composite and heterogeneous char-
acter. It begins with compliments to the gods, but takes no f urther notice
of them in its astonishingly secular legislation. It mingles the most enlight-
ened laws with the most barbarous punishments, and sets the primitive
lex talionis and trial by ordeal alongside elaborate judicial procedures and
a discriminating attempt to limit marital tyranny.6 All in all, these 285
laws, arranged almost scientifically under the headings of Personal Prop-
erty, Real Estate, Trade and Business, the Family, Injuries, and Labor,
form a code more advanced and civilized than that of Assyria a thousand
and more years later, and in many respects "as good as that of a modern
European state."'* There are few words finer in the history of law than
those with which the great Babylonian brings his legislation to a close:
The righteous laws which Hammurabi, the wise king, estab-
lished, and (by which) he gave the land stable support and pure
government. ... I am the guardian governor. ... In my bosom I
carried the people of the land of Sumer and Akkad; ... in my wis-
dom I restrained them, that the strong might not oppress the weak,
and that they should give justice to the orphan and the widow.
. . . Let any oppressed man, who has a cause, come before my
image as king of righteousness! Let him read the inscription on my
monument! Let him give heed to my weighty words! And may
my monument enlighten him as to his cause, and may he under-
stand his case! May he set his heart at ease, (exclaiming:) "Ham-
* The "Mosaic Code" apparently borrows from it, or derives with it from a common
original. The habit of stamping a legal contract with an official seal goes back to
Hammurabi.'
CHAP. DC) BABYLONIA 221
murabi indeed is a ruler who is like a real father to his people;
... he has established prosperity for his people for all time, and
given a pure government to the land." . . .
In the days that are yet to come, for all future time, may the
king who is in the land observe the words of righteousness which I
have written upon my monument!1
This unifying legislation was but one of Hammurabi's accomplishments.
At his command a great canal was dug between Kish and the Persian Gulf,
thereby irrigating a large area of land, and protecting the cities of the south
from the destructive floods which the Tigris had been wont to visit upon
them. In another inscription which has found its devious way from his
time to ours he tells us proudly how he gave water (that noble and unap-
preciated commonplace, which was once a luxury), security and gov-
ernment to many tribes. Even through the boasting (an honest mannerism
of the Orient) we hear the voice of statesmanship.
When Anu and Enlil (the gods of Uruk and Nippur) gave me
the lands of Sumer and Akkad to rule, and they entrusted this
sceptre to me, I dug the canal Htmmurabi-nukhush-nishi (Ham-
murabi - the - Abundance - of - the - People ) , which bringeth copious
water to the land of Sumer and Akkad. Its banks on both sides I
turned into cultivated ground; I heaped up piles of grain, I pro-
vided unfailing water for the lands. . . . The scattered people I
gathered; with pasturage and water I provided them; I pastured
them with abundance, and settled them in peaceful dwellings.'
Despite the secular quality of his laws Hammurabi was clever enough
, to gild his authority with the approval of the gods. He built temples as
well as forts, and coddled the clergy by constructing at Babylon a gigantic
sanctuary for Marduk and his wife (the national deities), and a massive
granary to store up wheat for gods and priests. These and similar gifts
were an astute investment, from which he expected steady returns in the
awed obedience of the people. From their taxes he financed the forces
of law and order, and had enough left over to beautify his capital. Palaces
and temples rose on every hand; a bridge spanned the Euphrates to let the
city spread itself along both banks; ships manned with ninety men plied up
222 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
and down the river. Two thousand years before Christ Babylon was
already one of the richest cities that history had yet known.*
The people were of Semitic appearance, dark in hair and features, mas-
culinely bearded for the most part, and occasionally bewigged. Both sexes
wore the hak long; sometimes even the men dangled curls; frequently the
men, as well as the women, disguised themselves with perfumes. The
common dress for both sexes was a white linen tunic reaching to the feet;
in the women it left one shoulder bare, in the men it was augmented with
mantle and robe. As wealth grew, the people developed a taste for color,
and dyed for themselves garments of blue on red, or red on blue, in stripes,
circles, checks or dots. The bare feet of the Sumerian period gave way to
shapely sandals, and the male head, in Hammurabi's time, was swathed in
turbans. The women wore necklaces, bracelets and amulets, and strings of
beads in their carefully coiffured hair; the men flourished walking-sticks
with carved heads, and carried on their girdles the prettily designed seals
with which they attested their letters and documents, fhe priests wore
tall conical caps to conceal their humanity.10
It is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civili-
zation announces its decay. For wealth produces ease as well as art; it
softens a people to the ways of luxury and peace, and invites invasion from
stronger arms and hungrier mouths. On the eastern boundary of the new
state a hardy tribe of mountaineers, the Kassites, looked with envy upon
the riches of Babylon. Light years after Hammurabi's death they inun-
dated the land, plundered it, retreated, raided it again and again, and
finally settled down in it as conquerors and rulers; this is the normal
origin of aristocracies. They were of non-Semitic stock, perhaps descend-
ants of European immigrants from neolithic days; their victory over Sem-
itic Babylon represented one more swing of the racial pendulum in west-
ern Asia. For several centuries Babylonia lived in an ethnic and political
chaos that put a stop to the development of science and art.11 We have
a kaleidoscope of this stifling disorder in the "Amarna" letters, in which
the kinglets of Babylonia and Syria, having sent modest tribute to im-
perial Egypt after the victories of Thutmose III, beg for aid against rebels
and invaders, and quarrel about the value of the gifts that they exchange
* "In all essentials Babylonia, in the time of Hammurabi, and even earlier, had reached a
' pitch of material civilization which has never since been surpassed in Asia."— Christopher
Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture, New York, 1933, p. 107. Perhaps we should
except the ages of Xerxes I in Persia, Ming Huang in China, and Akbar in India.
CHAP. EX) BABYLONIA 223
with the disdainful Amenhotep III and the absorbed and negligent
Ikhnaton.*
The Kassites were expelled after almost six centuries of rule as disruptive
as the similar sway of the Hyksos in Egypt. The disorder continued for
four hundred years more under obscure Babylonian rulers, whose poly-
syllabic roster might serve as an obbligato to Gray's Elegy ,t until the
rising power of Assyria in the north stretched down its hand and brought
Babylonia under the kings of Nineveh. When Babylon rebelled, Sennach-
erib destroyed it almost completely; but the genial despotism of Esar-
haddon restored it to prosperity and culture. The rise of the Medes
weakened Assyria, and with their help Nabopolassar liberated Babylonia,
set up an independent dynasty, and dying, bequeathed this second Baby-
lonian kingdom to his son Nebuchadrezzar II, villain of the vengeful
and legendary Book of Daniel.™ Nebuchadrezzar's inaugural address to
Marduk, god-in-chief of Babylon, reveals a glimpse of an Oriental mon-
arch's aims and character:
As my precious life do I love thy sublime appearance! Outside
of my city Babylon, I have not selected among all settlements any
dwelling. ... At thy command, O merciful Marduk, may the house
that I have built endure forever, may I be satiated with its splendor,
attain old age therein, with abundant offspring, and receive therein
tribute of the kings of all regions, from all mankind."
He lived almost up to his hopes, for though illiterate and not unques-
tionably sane, he became the most powerful ruler of his time in the
Near East, and the greatest warrior, statesman and builder in all the suc-
cession of Babylonian kings after Hammurabi himself. When Egypt
conspired with Assyria to reduce Babylonia to vassalage again, Nebuchad-
* The Amarna letters are dreary reading, full of adulation, argument, entreaty and com-
plaint. Hear, e.g., Burraburiash II, King of Karduniash (in Mesopotamia), writing to
Amenhotep HI about an exchange of royal gifts in which Burraburiash seems to have
been worsted: "Ever since my mother and thy father sustained friendly relations with one
another, they exchanged valuable presents; and the choicest desire, each of the other, they
did not refuse. Now my brother (Amenhotep) has sent me as a present (only) two
manehs of gold. But send me as much gold as thy father; and if it be less, let it be half
of what thy father would send. Why didst thou send me only two manehs of gold?""
t Marduk-shapik-zeri, Ninurta-nadin-sham, Enlil-nadin-apli, Itti-Marduk-balatu, Marduk-
shapik-zer-mati, etc. Doubtless our own full names, linked with such hyphens, would
make a like cacophony to alien ears.
224 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
rezzar met the Egyptian hosts at Carchemish (on the upper reaches of the
Euphrates), and almost annihilated them. Palestine and Syria then fell
easily under his sway, and Babylonian merchants controlled all the trade
that flowed across western Asia from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterran-
ean Sea.
Nebuchadrezzar spent the tolls of this trade, the tributes of these sub-
jects, and the taxes of his people, in beautifying his capital and assuaging
the hunger of the priests. "Is not this the great Babylon that I built?"1*
He resisted the temptation to be merely a conqueror; he sallied forth occa-
sionally to teach his subjects the virtues of submission, but for the most
part he stayed at home, making Babylon the unrivaled capital of the Near
East, the largest and most magnificent metropolis of the ancient world.1*
Nabopolassar had laid plans for the reconstruction of the city; Nebuchad-
rezzar used his long reign of forty-three years to carry them to comple-
tion. Herodotus, who saw Babylon a century and a half later, described
it as "standing in a spacious plain," and surrounded by a wall fifty-six
miles in length," so broad that a four-horse chariot could be driven along
the top, and enclosing an area of some two hundred square miles.18*
Through the center of the town ran the palm-fringed Euphrates, busy
with commerce and spanned by a handsome bridge.19! Practically all the
better buildings were of brick, for stone was rare in Mesopotamia; but
the bricks were often faced with enameled tiles of brilliant blue, yellow or
white, adorned with animal and other figures in glazed relief, which remain
to this day supreme in their kind. Nearly all the bricks so far recovered
from the site of Babylon bear the proud inscription: "I am Nebuchad-
rezzar, King of Babylon."31
Approaching the city the traveler saw first— at the crown of a very
mountain of masonry— an immense and lofty ziggurat, rising in seven stages
of gleaming enamel to a height of 650 feet, crowned with a shrine con-
taining a massive table of solid gold, and an ornate bed on which, each
night, some woman slept to await the pleasure of the god.28 This structure,
taller than the pyramids of Egypt, and surpassing in height all but the
latest of modern buildings, was probably the "Tower of Babel" of He-
braic myth, the many-storied audacity of a people who did not know
* Probably this included not only the city proper but a large agricultural hinterland
within the walls, designed to provide the teeming metropolis with sustenance in time of
siege.
t If we may trust Diodoms Siculus, a tunnel fifteen feet wide and twelve feet high 'con-
nected the two banks.*'
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 225
Yahveh, and whom the God of Hosts was supposed to have confounded
with a multiplicity of tongues.* South of the ziggurat stood the gigantic
Temple of Marduk, tutelary deity of Babylon. Around and below this
temple the city spread itself out in a few wide and brilliant avenues, crossed
by crowded canals and narrow winding streets alive, no doubt, with traffic
and bazaars, and Orientally odorous with garbage and humanity. Con-
necting the temples was a spacious "Sacred Way," paved with asphalt-
covered bricks overlaid with flags of limestone and red breccia-, over this
the gods might pass without muddying their feet. This broad avenue
was flanked with walls of colored tile, on which stood out, in low relief,
one hundred and twenty brightly enameled lions, snarling to keep the
impious away. At one end of the Sacred Way rose the magnificent
Ishtar Gate, a massive double portal of resplendent tiles, adorned with
enameled flowers and animals of admirable color, vitality, and line.f
Six hundred yards north of the "Tower of Babel" rose a mound called
Kasr, on which Nebuchadrezzar built the most imposing of his palaces.
At its center stood his principal dwelling-place, the walls of finely made
yellow brick, the floors of white and mottled sandstone; reliefs of vivid
blue glaze adorned the surfaces, and gigantic basalt lions guarded the
entrance. Nearby, supported on a succession of superimposed circular
colonnades, were the famous Hanging Gardens, which the Greeks in-
cluded among the Seven Wonders of the World. The gallant Nebuchad-
rezzar had built them for one of his wives, the daughter of Cyaxares,
King of the Medes; this princess, unaccustomed to the hot sun and dust of
Babylon, pined for the verdure of her native hills. The topmost terrace
was covered with rich soil to the depth of many feet, providing space and
nourishment not merely for varied flowers and plants, but for the largest
and most deep-rooted trees. Hydraulic engines concealed in the columns
and manned by shifts of slaves carried water from the Euphrates to the
highest tier of the gardens.24 Here, seventy-five feet above the ground, in
the cool shade of tall trees, and surrounded by exotic shrubs and fragrant
flowers, the ladies of the royal harem walked unveiled, secure from the
common eye; while, in the plains and streets below, the common man and
woman ploughed, wove, built, carried burdens, and reproduced their
kind.
* Babel, however, does not mean confusion or babble, as the legend supposes; as used in
the word Babylon it meant the Gate of God."13
tA reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate can be seen in the Vorderasiatisches Museum,
Berlin.
226 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
II. THE TOILERS
Hunting - Tillage - Food - Industry - Transport - The perils
of commerce — Money -lenders — Slaves
Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in
the thick grass, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal
sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods,
posed placidly for artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men.
Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle.
Most of the soil was tilled by tenants or by slaves; some of it by peasant
proprietors.* In the earlier centuries the ground was broken up with stone
"hoes, as in neolithic tillage; a seal dating some 1400 B.C. is our earliest
representation of the plough in Babylonia. Probaby this ancient and hon-
orable tool had already a long history behind it in the Land between the
Rivers; and yet it was modern enough, for though it was drawn by oxen
in the manner of our fathers, it had, attached to the plough, as in Sumeria, a
tube through which the seed was sown in the manner of our children."8
The waters of the rising rivers were not allowed to flood the land as in
Egypt; on the contrary, every farm was protected from the inundation by
ridges of earth, some of which can still be seen today. The overflow was
guided into a complex network of canals, or stored into reservoirs, from
which it was sluiced into the fields as needed, or raised over the ridges by
shadufs— buckets lifted and lowered on a pivoted and revolving pole. Neb-
uchadrezzar distinguished his reign by building many canals, and gather-
ing the surplus waters of the overflow into a reservoir, one hundred and
forty miles in circumference, which nourished by its outlets vast areas of
land." Ruins of these canals can be seen in Mesopotamia today, and—as if
further to bind the quick and the dead— the primitive shaduf is still in use in
the valleys of the Euphrates and the Loire."
So watered, the land produced a variety of cereals and pulses, great orchards
of fruits and nuts, and above all, the date; from this beneficent concoction
of sun and soil the Babylonians made bread, honey, cake and other delica-
cies; they mixed it with meal to make one of their most sustaining foods;
and to encourage its reproduction they shook the flowers of the male palm
over those of the female." From Mesopotamia the grape and the olive
were introduced into Greece and Rome and thence into western Europe;
from nearby Persia came the peach; and from the shores of the Black Sea
Lucullus brought the cherry-tree to Rome. Milk, so rare in the distant
Orient, now became one of the staple foods of the Near East. Meat was
rare and costly, but fish from the great streams found their way into the
CHAP, tt) BABYLONIA 227
poorest mouths. And in the evening, when the peasant might have been dis-
turbed by thoughts on life and death, he quieted memory and anticipation
with wine pressed from the date, or beer brewed from die corn.
Meanwhile others pried into the earth, struck oil, and mined copper, lead,
iron, silver and gold. Strabo tells how what he calls "naphtha or liquid as-
phalt" was taken from the soil of Mesopotamia then as now, and how Alex-
ander, hearing that this was a kind of water that burned, tested the report,
incredulously by covering a boy with the strange fluid and igniting hinr
with a torch.80 Tools, which had still been of stone in the days of Ham-
murabi, began, at the turn of the last millennium before Christ, to be made of
bronze, then of iron; and the art of casting metal appeared. Textiles were
woven of cotton and wool; stuffs were dyed and embroidered with such
skill that these tissues became one of the most valued exports of Babylonia,
praised to the skies by the writers of Greece and Rome.81 As far back as we
can go in Mesopotamian history we find the weaver's loom and the potter's
wheel; these were almost the only machines. Buildings were mostly of
adobe—clay mixed with straw; or bricks still soft and moist were placed one
upon the other and allowed to dry into a solid wall cemented by the sun.
It was observed that the bricks in the fireplace became harder and more
durable than those that the sun had baked; the process of hardening them in
kilns was then a natural development, and thenceforth there was no end to
the making of bricks in Babylon. Trades multiplied and became diversified
and skilled, and as early as Hammurabi industry was organized into guilds
(called "tribes") of masters and apprentices."
Local transport used wheeled carts drawn by patient asses.88 The horse
is first mentioned in Babylonian records about 2100 B.C., as ^the ass from
the East"; apparently it came from the table-lands of Central Asia, conquered
Babylonia with the Kassites, and reached Egypt with the Hyksos.84 With
this new means of locomotion and carriage, trade expanded from local to
foreign commerce; Babylon grew wealthy as the commercial hub of the
Near East, and the nations of the ancient Mediterranean world were drawn
into closer contact for good and ill. Nebuchadrezzar facilitated trade by im-
proving the highways; "I have turned inaccessible tracks," he reminds the
historian, "into serviceable roads."* Countless caravans brought to the ba-
zaars and shops of Babylon the products of half the world. From India
they came via Kabul, Herat and Ecbatana; from Egypt via Pelusium and
Palestine; from Asia Minor through Tyre, Sidon and Sardis to Carchemish,
and then down the Euphrates. As a result of all this trade Babylon became,
under Nebuchadrezzar, a thriving and noisy market-place, from which the
wealthy sought refuge in residential suburbs. Note the contemporary ring
of a rich suburbanite's letter to King Cyrus of Persia (ca. 539 B.C.): "Our
228 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. DC
estate seemed to me the finest in the world, for it was so near to Babylon
that we enjoyed all the advantages of a great city, and yet could come back
1 home and be rid of all its rush and worry."88
Government in Mesopotamia never succeeded in establishing such eco-
nomic order as that which the Pharaohs achieved in Egypt. Commerce was
harassed with a multiplicity of dangers and tolls; the merchant did not know
which to fear the more— the robbers that might beset him on the way, or the
towns and baronies that exacted heavy fees from him for the privilege of
using their roads. It was safer, where possible, to take the great national
highway, the Euphrates, which Nebuchadrezzar had made navigable from
the Persian Gulf to Thapsacus.87 His campaigns in Arabia and his subjuga-
tion of Tyre opened up to Babylonian commerce the Indian and Mediterra-
nean Seas, but these opportunities were only partially explored. For on the
open sea, as in the mountain passes and the desert wastes, perils beset the
merchant at every hour. Vessels were large, but reefs were many and
treacherous; navigation was not yet a science; and at any moment pirates, or
the ambitious dwellers on the shore, might board the ships, appropriate the
merchandise, and enslave or kill the crew.88 The merchants reimbursed
themselves for such losses by restricting their honesty to the necessities of
each situation.
These difficult transactions were made easier by a well-developed system
of finance. The Babylonians had no coinage, but even before Ham-
murabi they used— besides barley and corn— ingots of gold and silver as
standards of value and mediums of exchange. The metal was unstamped,
and was weighed at each transaction. The smallest unit of currency was
the shekel— a half-ounce of silver worth from $2.50 to $5.00 of our con-
temporary currency; sixty such shekels made a mina, and sixty mlnas made a
talent— from $10,000 to $2o,ooo.Mtt Loans were made in goods or currency,
but at a high rate^ of interest, fixed by the state at 20% per annum for loans of
money, and 33% for loans in kind; even these rates were exceeded by lenders
who could hire clever scribes to circumvent the law.39 There were no banks,
but certain powerful families carried on from generation to generation the
business of lending money; they dealt also in real estate, and financed indus-
trial enterprises;40 and persons who had funds on deposit with such men could
pay their obligations by written drafts.41 The priests also made loans, particu-
larly to finance the sowing and reaping of the crops. The law occasionally took
the side of the debtor: e.g., if a peasant mortgaged his farm, and through storm
or drought or other "act of God" had no harvest from his toil, then no in-
terest could be exacted from him in that year.42 But for the most part the
law was written with an eye to protecting property and preventing losses;
CHAP. K) BABYLONIA 229
it was a principle of Babylonian law that no man had a right to borrow
money unless he wished to be held completely responsible for its repay-
ment; hence the creditor could seize the debtor's slave or son as hostage
for an unpaid debt, and could hold him for not more than three years. A
plague of usury was the price that Babylonian industry, like our own, paid
for the fertilizing activity of a complex credit system.48
It was eggentially a commercial civilization. Most of the documents that
have come down from it are of a business character— sales, loans, contracts,
partnerships, commissions, exchanges, bequests, agreements, promissory notes,
and the like. We find in these tablets abundant evidence of wealth, and a
certain materialistic spirit that managed, like some later civilizations, to re-
concile piety with greed. We see in the literature many signs of a busy and
prosperous life, but we find also, at every turn, reminders of the slavery
that underlies all cultures. The most interesting contracts of sale from the
age of Nebuchadrezzar are those that have to do with slaves." They were
recruited from captives taken in battle, from slave-raids carried out upon
foreign states by marauding Bedouins, and from the reproductive enthusiasm
of the slaves themselves. Their value ranged from $20 to $65 for a woman,
and from $50 to $100 for a man.46 Most of the physical work in the towns
was done by them, including nearly all of the personal service. Female slaves
were completely at the mercy of their purchaser, and were expected to pro-
vide him with bed as well as board; it was understood that he would breed
through them a copious supply of children, and those slaves who were not
so treated felt themselves neglected and dishonored.40 The slave and all his
belongings were his master's property: he might be sold or pledged for debt;
he might be put to death if his master thought him less lucrative alive than
dead; if he ran away no one could legally harbor him, and a reward was
fixed for his capture. Like the free peasant he was subject to conscription
for both the army and the corvee— i.e., for forced labor in such public
works as cutting roads and digging canals. On the other hand the slave's
master paid his doctor's fees, and kept him moderately alive through illness,
slack employment and old age. He might marry a free woman, and his
children by her would be free; half his property, in such a case, went on his
death to his family. He might be set up in business by his master, and re-
tain part of the profits— with which he might then buy his freedom; or his
master might liberate him for exceptional or long and faithful service. But
only a few slaves achieved such freedom. The rest consoled themselves
with a high birth-rate, until they became more numerous than the free. A
great slave-class moved like a swelling subterranean river underneath the
Babylonian state.
230 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
HI. THE LAW
The Code of Hammurabi—The powers of the king— Trial by
ordeal — Lex Talionis" — Forms of punishment — Codes of
'wages and prices— State restoration of stolen goods
Such a society, of course, never dreamed of democracy; its economic
character necessitated a monarchy supported by commercial wealth or
feudal privilege, and protected by the judicious distribution of legal vio-
lence. A landed aristocracy, gradually displaced by a commercial plutoc-
racy, helped to maintain social control, and served as intermediary between
people and king. The latter passed his throne down to any son of his
choosing, with the result that every son considered himself heir apparent,
formed a clique of supporters, and, as like as not, raised a war of suc-
cession if his hopes were unfulfilled.47 Within the limits of this arbitrary
rule the government was carried on by central and local lords or admin-
istrators appointed by the king. These were advised and checked by
provincial or municipal assemblies of elders or notables, who managed to
maintain, even under Assyrian domination, a proud measure of local
self-government.48
Every administrator, and usually the king himself, acknowledged the
guidance and authority of that great body of law which had been given
form under Hammurabi, and had maintained its substance, despite every
change of circumstance and detail, through fifteen centuries. The legal
development was from supernatural to secular sanctions, from severity to
lenience, and from physical to financial penalties. In the earlier days an
appeal to the gods was taken through trial by ordeal. A man accused of
sorcery, or a woman charged with adultery, was invited to leap into the
Euphrates; and the gods were on the side of the best swimmers. If the
woman emerged alive, she was innocent; if the "sorcerer" was drowned,
his accuser received his property; if he was not, he received the property
of his accuser.40 The first judges were priests, and to the end of Baby-
lonian history the courts were for the most part located in the temples;10
but already in the days of Hammurabi secular courts responsible only to
the government were replacing the judgment-seats presided over by the
clergy.
Penology began with the lex talionis, or law of equivalent retaliation.
If a man knocked out an eye or a tooth, or broke a limb, of a patrician,
CHAP. DC) BABYLONIA 23!
precisely the same was to be done to him.81 If a house collapsed and killed
the purchaser, the architect or builder must die; if the accident killed the
buyer's son, the son of the architect or builder must die; if a man struck
a girl and killed her not he but his daughter must suffer the penalty of
death." Gradually these punishments in kind were replaced by awards of
damages; a payment of money was permitted as an alternative to the
physical retaliation," and later the fine became the sole punishment. So
the eye of a commoner might be knocked out for sixty shekels of silver,
and the eye of a slave might be knocked out for thirty.54 For the penalty
varied not merely with the gravity of the offense, but with the rank of the
offender and the victim. A member of the aristocracy was subject to
severer penalties for the same crime than a man of the people, but an of-
fense against such an aristocrat was a costly extravagance. A plebeian ,
striking a plebeian was fined ten shekels, or fifty dollars; to strike a person
of title or property cost six times more." From such dissuasions the law
passed to barbarous punishments by amputation or death. A man who
struck his father had his hands cut off ;M a physician whose patient died, or
lost an eye, as the result of an operation, had his fingers cut off;" a nurse
who knowingly substituted one child for another had to sacrifice her
breasts." Death was decreed for a variety of crimes: rape, kidnaping,
brigandage, burglary, incest, procurement of a husband's death by his wife
in order to marry another man, the opening or entering of a wine-shop
by a priestess, the harboring of a fugitive slave, cowardice in the face of
the enemy, malfeasance in office, careless or uneconomical housewifery,"
or malpractice in the selling of beer." In such rough ways, through thou-
sands of years, those traditions and habits of order and self-restraint were
established which became part of the unconscious basis of civilization.
Within certain limits the state regulated prices, wages and fees. What
the surgeon might charge was established by law; and wages were fixed
by the Code of Hammurabi for builders, brickmakers, tailors, stone-
masons, carpenters, boatmen, herdsmen, and laborers." The law of in-
heritance made the man's children, rather than his wife, his natural and
direct heirs; the widow received her dowry and her wedding-gift, and re-
mained head of the household as long as she lived. There was no right of
primogeniture; the sons inherited equally, and in this way the largest
estates were soon redivided, and the concentration of wealth was in some
measure checked." Private property in land and goods was taken for
granted by the Code.
232 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
We find no evidence of lawyers in Babylonia, except for priests who
might serve as notaries, and the scribe who would write for pay anything
from a will to a madrigal. The plaintiff preferred his own plea, without
the luxury of terminology. Litigation was discouraged; the very first
law of the Code reads, with almost illegal simplicity: "If a man bring
an accusation against a man, and charge him with a (capital) crime, but
cannot prove it, the accuser shall be put to death."03 There are signs
of bribery, and of tampering with witnesses.04 A court of appeals, staffed
by "the King's Judges," sat at Babylon, and a final appeal might be car-
ried to the king himself. There was nothing in the Code about the
rights of the individual against the state; that was to be a European inno-
vation. But articles 22-24 provided, if not political, at least economic,
protection. "If a man practise brigandage and be captured, that man
shall be put to death. If the brigand be not captured, the man who has
been robbed shall, in the presence of the god, make an itemized statement
of his loss, and the city and governor within whose province and juris-
diction the robbery was committed shall compensate him for whatever
was lost. If it be a life (that was lost), the city and governor shall pay
one mina ($300) to the heirs." What modern city is so well governed
that it would dare to offer such reimbursements to the victims of its neg-
ligence? Has the law progressed since Hammurabi, or only increased
and multiplied?
IV. THE GODS OF BABYLON
Religion and the state—The junctions and powers of the clergy— The
lesser gods— Marduk—lshtar— The Babylonian stories of the Crea-
tion and the Flood— The love of Ishtar and Tammuz—The de-
scent of Ishtar into Hell— The death and resurrection of
Tammuz — Ritual and prayer — Penitential psahns — Sin-
Magic— Superstition
The power of the king was limited not only by the law and the aris-
tocracy, but by the clergy. Technically the king was merely the agent
of the city god. Taxation was in the name of the god, and found its
way directly or deviously into the temple treasuries. The king was not
really king in the eyes of the people until he was invested with royal
authority by the priests, "took the hands of Bel," and conducted the
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 233
image of Marduk in solemn procession through the streets. In these
ceremonies the monarch was dressed as a priest, symbolizing the union of
church and state, and perhaps the priestly origin of the kingship. All the
glamor of the supernatural hedged about the throne, and made rebellion
a colossal impiety which risked not only the neck but the soul. Even the
mighty Hammurabi received his laws from the god. From the patesis
or priest-governors of Sumeria to the religious coronation of Nebuchad-
rezzar, Babylonia remained in effect a theocratic state, always "under the
thumb of the priests."85
The wealth of the temples grew from generation to generation, as the
uneasy rich shared their dividends with the gods. The kings, feeling an
especial need of divine forgiveness, built the temples, equipped them with
furniture, food and slaves, deeded to them great areas of land, and as-
signed to them an annual income from the state. When the army won a
battle, the first share of the captives and the spoils went to the temples;
when any special good fortune befell the king, extraordinary gifts were
dedicated to the gods. Certain lands were required to pay to the temples
a yearly tribute of dates, corn, or fruit; if they failed, the temples could
foreclose on them; and in this way the lands usually came into pos-
session by the priests. Poor as well as rich turned over to the temples
as much as they thought profitable of their earthly gains. Gold, silver,
copper, lapis lazuli, gems and precious woods accumulated in the sacred
treasury.
As the priests could not directly use or consume this wealth, they
turned it into productive or investment capital, and became the greatest
agriculturists, manufacturers and financiers of the nation. Not only did
they hold vast tracts of land; they owned a great number of slaves, or con-
trolled hundreds of laborers, who were hired out to other employers, or
worked for the temples in their divers trades from the playing of music
to the brewing of beer." The priests were also the greatest merchants
and financiers of Babylonia; they sold the varied products of the temple
shops, and handled a large proportion of the country's trade; they had
a reputation for wise investment, and many persons entrusted their sav-
ings to them, confident of a modest but reliable return. They made loans
on more lenient terms than the private money-lenders; sometimes they
lent to the sick or the poor without interest, merely asking a return of the
principal when Marduk should smile upon the borrower again." Finally,
234 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. DC
they performed many legal functions: they served as notaries, attesting
and signing contracts, and making wills; they heard and decided suits and
trials, kept official records, and recorded commercial transactions.
Occasionally the king commandeered some of the temple accumula-
tions to meet an expensive emergency. But this was rare and dangerous, for
the priests had laid terrible curses upon all who should touch, unpermit-
ted, the smallest jot of ecclesiastical property. Besides, their influence
with the people was ultimately greater than that of the king, and they
might in most cases depose him if they set their combined wits and powers
to this end. They had also the advantage of permanence; the king died,
but the god lived on; the council of priests, free from the fortunes of
elections, illnesses, assassinations and wars, had a corporate perpetuity that
made possible long-term and patient policies, such as characterize great
religious organizations to this day. The supremacy of the priests under
these conditions was inevitable. It was fated that the merchants should
make Babylon, and that the priests should enjoy it.
Who were the gods that formed the invisible constabulary of the
state? They were numerous, for the imagination of the people was limit-
less, and there was hardly any end to the needs that deities might serve.
An official census of the gods, undertaken in the ninth century before
Christ, counted them as some 65,000." Every town had its tutelary
divinity; and as, in our own time^ifrfTaith, localities and villages, after
making formal acknowledgment of the Supreme Being, worship specific
minor gods with a special devotion, so Larsa lavished its temples on
Shamash, Uruk on Ishtar, Ur on Nannar— for the Sumerian pantheon had
survived the Sumerian state. The gods were not aloof from men; most
of them lived on earth in the temples, ate with a hearty appetite, and
through nocturnal visits to pious women gave unexpected children to
the busy citizens of Babylon.69
Oldest of all were the astronomic gods: Anu, the immovable firmament,
Shamash, the sun, Nannar, the moon, and Bel or Baal, the earth into whose
bosom all Babylonians returned after death.70 Every family had household
gods, to whom prayers were said and libations poured each morning and
night; every individual had a protective divinity (or, as we should say, a
guardian angel) to keep him from harm and joy; and genii of fertility hov-
ered beneficently over the fields. It was probably out of this multitude of
spirits that the Jews moulded their cherubim.
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 235
We do not find among the Babylonians such signs of monotheism as appear
in Ikhnaton and the Second Isaiah. Two forces, however, brought them near
to it: the enlargement of the state by conquest and growth brought local
deities under the supremacy of a single god; and several of the cities patrioti-
cally conferred omnipotence upon their favored divinities. "Trust in Nebo,"
says Nebo, "trust in no other god";71 this is not unlike the first of the com-
mandments given to the Jews. Gradually the number of the gods was less-
ened by interpreting the minor ones as forms or attributes of the major dei-
ties. In these ways the god of Babylon, Marduk, originally a sun god,
became sovereign of all Babylonian divinities.72 Hence his title, Bel-Marduk—
that is, Marduk the god. To him and to Ishtar the Babylonians sent up the
most eloquent of their prayers.
Ishtar (Astarte to the Greeks, Ashtoreth to the Jews) interests us
not only as analogue of the Egyptian Isis and prototype of the Grecian
Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, but as the formal beneficiary of one
of the strangest of Babylonian customs. She was Demeter as well as
Aphrodite— no mere goddess of physical beauty and love, but the gracious
divinity of bounteous motherhood, the secret inspiration of the growing
soil, and the creative principle everywhere. It is impossible to find much *
harmony, from a modern point of view, in the attributes and functions of
Ishtar: she was the goddess of war as well as of love, of prostitutes as well
as of mothers; she called herself "a compassionate courtesan";78 she was
represented sometimes as a bearded bisexual deity, sometimes as a nude
female offering her breasts to suck;74 and though her worshipers repeat-
edly addressed her as "The Virgin," "The Holy Virgin," and "The
Virgin Mother," this merely meant that her amours were free from all
taint of wedlock. Gilgamesh rejected her advances on the ground that
she could not be trusted; had she not once loved, seduced, and then slain,
a lion?78 It is clear that we must put our own moral code to one side if
we are to understand her. Note with what fervor the Babylonians could
lift up to her throne litanies of laudation only less splendid than those which
a tender piety once raised to the Mother of God:
I beseech thee, Lady of Ladies, Goddess of Goddesses, Ishtar, Queen
of all cities, leader of all men.
Thou art the light of the world, thou art the light of heaven, mighty
daughter of Sin (the moon-god). . . .
Supreme is thy might, O Lady, exalted art thou above all gods.
236 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
Thou renderest judgment, and thy decision is righteous.
Unto thec are subject the laws of the earth and the laws of heaven,
the laws of the temples and the shrines, the laws of the private
apartment and the secret chamber.
Where is the place where thy name is not, and where is the spot
where thy commandments are not known?
At thy name the earth and the heavens shake, and the gods they
tremble. . . .
Thou lookest upon the oppressed, and to the down-trodden thou
bringest justice every day.
How long, Queen of Heaven and Earth, how long,
How long, Shepherdess of pale-faced men, wilt thou tarry?
How long, O Queen whose feet are not weary, and whose knees
make haste?
How long, Lady of Hosts, Lady of Battles?
Glorious one whom all the spirits of heaven fear, who subduest all
angry gods; mighty above all rulers; who boldest the reins of kings.
Opener of the womb of all women, great is thy light.
Shining light of heaven, light of the world, cnlightencr of all the
places where men dwell, who gatherest together the hosts of the
nations.
Goddess of men, Divinity of women, thy counsel passeth under-
standing.
Where thou glancest, the dead come to life, and the sick rise and
walk; the mind of the diseased is healed when it looks upon thy
face.
How long, O Lady, shall mine enemy triumph over me?
Command, and at thy command the angry god will turn back.
Ishtar is great! Ishtar is Queen! My Lady is exalted, my Lady is
Queen, Innini, the mighty daughter. of Sin.
There is none like unto her.76
With these gods as dramatis persons the Babylonians constructed myths
which, have in large measure come down to us, through the Jews, as part
of our own religious lore. There was first of all the myth of the crea-
tion. In the beginning was Chaos. "In the time when nothing which was
called heaven existed above, and when nothing below had yet received
the name of earth, Apsu, the Ocean, who first was their father, and
Tiamat, Chaos, who gave birth to them all, mingled their waters in one."
Things slowly began to grow and take form; but suddenly the monster-
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 237
goddess Tiamat set out to destroy all the other gods, and to make her-
self—Chaos—supreme. A mighty revolution ensued in which all order was
destroyed. Then another god, Marduk, slew Tiamat with her own medi-
cine by casting a hurricane of wind into her mouth as she opened it to
swallow him; then he thrust his lance into Tiamat's wind-swollen paunch,
and the goddess of Chaos blew up. Marduk, "recovering his calm," says the
legend, split the dead Tiamat into two longitudinal halves, as one does
a fish for drying; "then he hung up one of the halves on high, which be-
came the heavens; the other half he spread out under his feet to form the
earth."77 This is as much as we yet know about creation. Perhaps the
ancient poet meant to suggest that the only creation of which we can
know anything is the replacement of chaos with order, for in the end
this is the essence of art and civilization. We should remember, however,
that the defeat of Chaos is only a myth.*
Having moved heaven and earth into place, Marduk undertook to
knead earth with his blood and thereby make men for the service of the
gods. Mesopotamian legends differed on the precise way in which this
was done; they agreed in general that man was fashioned by the deity
from a lump of clay. Usually they represented him as living at first not
in a paradise but in bestial simplicity and ignorance, until a strange mon-
ster called Cannes, half fish and half philosopher, taught him the arts
and sciences, the rules for founding cities, and the principles of law; after
which Cannes plunged into the sea, and wrote a book on the history of
civilization.79 Presently, however, the gods became dissatisfied with the
men whom they had created, and sent a great flood to destroy them and
all their works. The god of wisdom, Ea, took pity on mankind, and
resolved to save one man at least— Shamash-napishtim— and his wife. The
flood raged; men "encumbered the sea like fishes' spawn." Then sud-
denly the gods wept and gnashed their teeth at their own folly, asking
themselves, "Who will make the accustomed offerings now?" But Sham-
ash-napishtim had built an ark, had survived the flood, had perched on
the mountain of Nisir, and had sent out a reconnoitering dove; now he
decided to sacrifice to the gods, who accepted his gifts with surprise and
gratitude. "The gods snuffed up the odor, the gods snuffed up the ex-
cellent odor, the gods gathered like flies above the offering."80
* The Babylonian story of creation consists of seven tablets (one for each day of crea-
tion) found in the ruins of Ashurbanipal's library at Kuyunjik (Nineveh) in 1854; they
are a copy of a legend that came down to Babylonia and Assyria from Sumeria.78
238 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
Lovelier than this vague memory of some catastrophic inundation is
the vegetation myth of Ishtar and Tammuz. In the Sumerian f orm of the
tale Tammuz is Ishtar's young brother; in the Babylonian form he is some-
times her lover, sometimes her son; both forms seem to have entered into
the myths of Venus and Adonis, Demeter and Persephone, and a hun-
dred scattered legends of death and resurrection. Tammuz, son of the
great god Ea, is a shepherd pasturing his flock under the great tree Erida
(which covers the whole earth with its shade) when Ishtar, always in-
satiable, falls in love with him, and chooses him to be the spouse of her
youth. But Tammuz, like Adonis, is gored to death by a wild boar, and
descends, like all the dead, into that dark subterranean Hades which the
Babylonians called Aralu, and over which they set as ruler Ishtar's
jealous sister, Ereshkigal. Ishtar, mourning inconsolably, resolves to go
down to Aralu and restore Tammuz to life by bathing his wounds in the
waters of a healing spring. Soon she appears at the gates of Hades in all
her imperious beauty, and demands entrance. The tablets tell the story
vigorously:
When Ereshkigal heard this,
As when one hews down a tamarisk (she trembled?).
As when one cuts a reed (she shook?).
"What has moved her heart, what has (stirred) her liver?
Ho, there, (does) this one (wish to dwell) with me?
To eat clay as food, to drink (dust?) as wine?
I weep for the men who have left their wives;
I weep for the wives torn from the embrace of their husbands;
For the little ones (cut off) before their time.
Go, gate-keeper, open thy gate for her,
Deal with her according to the ancient decree."
The ancient decree is that none but the nude shall enter Aralu. There-
fore at each of the successive gates through which Ishtar must pass, the
keeper divests her of some garment or ornament: first her crown, then
her ear-rings, then her necklace, then the ornaments from her bosom,
then her many-jeweled girdle, then the spangles from her hands and
feet, and lastly her loin-cloth; and Ishtar, protesting gracefully, yields.
Now when Ishtar had gone down into the land of no return,
Ereshkigal saw her and was angered at her presence.
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 239
Ishtar without reflection threw herself at her.
Ereshkigal opened her mouth and spoke
To Namtar, her messenger. . . .
"Go, Namtar, (imprison her?) in my palace.
Send against her sixty diseases,
Eye disease against her eyes,
Disease of the side against her side,
Foot-disease against her foot,
Heart-disease against her heart,
Head-disease against her head,
Against her whole being."
While Ishtar is detained in Hades by these sisterly attentions, the earth,
missing the inspiration of her presence, forgets incredibly all the arts and
ways of love: plant no longer fertilizes plant, vegetation languishes, ani-
mals experience no heat, men cease to yearn.
After the lady Ishtar had gone down into the land of no return,
The bull did not mount the cow, the ass approached not the she-ass;
To the maid in the street no man drew near;
The man slept in his apartment,
The maid slept by herself.
Population begins to diminish, and the gods note with alarm a sharp
decline in the number of offerings from the earth. In panic they command
Ereshkigal to release Ishtar. It is done, but Ishtar refuses to return to
the surface of the earth unless she is allowed to take Tammuz with her.
She wins her point, passes triumphantly through the seven gates, receives
her loin-cloth, her spangles, her girdle, her pectorals, her necklace, her
ear-rings and her crown. As she appears plants grow and bloom again,
the land swells with food, and every animal resumes the business of re-
producing his kind." Love, stronger than death, is restored to its rightful
place as master of gods and men. To the modern scholar it is only an ad-
mirable legend, symbolizing delightfully the yearly death and rebirth of
the soil, and that omnipotence of Venus which Lucretius was to cele-
brate in his own strong verse; to the Babylonians it was sacred history,
faithfully believed and annually commemorated in a day of mourning and
wailing for the dead Tammuz, followed by riotous rejoicing over his
resurrection."
240 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
Nevertheless the Babylonian derived no satisfaction from the idea of per-
sonal immortality. His religion was terrestrially practical; when he prayed
he asked not for celestial rewards but for earthly goods;* he could not trust
his gods beyond the grave. It is true that one text speaks of Marduk as he
"who gives back life to the dead,"8* and the story of the flood represents its
two survivors as living forever. But for the most part the Babylonian con-
ception of another life was like that of the Greeks: dead men—saints and vil-
lains, geniuses and idiots, alike— went to a dark and shadowy realm within
the bowels of the earth, and none of them saw the light again. There was a
heaven, but only for the gods; the Aralu to which all men descended was
a place frequently of punishment, never of joy; there the dead lay bound
hand and foot forever, shivering with cold, and subject to hunger and
thirst unless their children placed food periodically in their graves.85 Those
who had been especially wicked on earth were subjected to horrible tortures;
leprosy consumed them, or some other of the diseases which Nergal and Allat,
male and female lords of Aralu, had arranged for their rectification.
Most bodies were buried in vaults; a few were cremated, and their remains
were preserved in urns.80 The dead body was not embalmed, but professional
mourners washed and perfumed it, clad it presentably, painted its checks,
darkened its eyelids, put rings upon its fingers, and provided it with a change
of linen. If the corpse was that of a woman it was equipped with scent-
bottles, combs, cosmetic pencils, and eye-paint to preserve its fragrance and
complexion in the nether world.*7 If not properly buried the dead would
torment the living; if not buried at all, the soul would prowl about sewers
and gutters for food, and might afflict an entire city with pestilence.88 It was
a medley of ideas not as consistent as Euclid, but sufficing to prod the simple
Babylonian to keep his gods and priests well fed.
The usual offering was food and drink, for these had the advantage that if
they were not entirely consumed by the gods the surplus need not go to
waste. A frequent sacrifice on Babylonian altars was the lamb; and an old
Babylonian incantation strangely anticipates the symbolism of Judaism and
Christianity: "The lamb as a substitute for a man, the lamb he gives for his
life."89 Sacrifice was a complex ritual, requiring the expert services of a priest;
every act and word of the ceremony was settled by sacred tradition, and
any amateur deviation from these forms might mean that the gods would eat
without listening. In general, to the Babylonian, religion meant correct
ritual rather than the good life. To do one's duty to the gods one had to
offer proper sacrifice to the temples, and recite the appropriate prayers;90 for
the rest he might cut out the eyes of his fallen enemy, cut off the hands and
feet of captives, and roast their remainders alive in a furnace,01 without much
offense to heaven. To participate in— or reverently to attend— long and solemn
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 24!
processions like those in which the priests carried from sanctuary to sanc-
tuary the image of Marduk, and performed the sacred drama of his death
and resurrection; to anoint the idols with sweet-scented oils,* to burn
incense before them, clothe them with rich vestments, or adorn them with
jewelry; to offer up the virginity of their daughters in the great festival of
Ishtar; to put food and drink before the gods, and to be generous to the
priests— these were the essential works of the devout Babylonian soul.98
Perhaps we misjudge him, as doubtless the future will misjudge us from
the fragments that accident will rescue from our decay. Some of the
finest literary relics of the Babylonians are prayers that breathe a profound
and sincere piety. Hear the proud Nebuchadrezzar humbly addressing
Marduk:
Without thee, Lord, what could there be
For the king thou lovest, and dost call his name?
Thou shalt bless his title as thou wilt,
And unto him vouchsafe a path direct.
I, the prince obeying thee,
Am what thy hands have made.
'Tis thou who art my creator,
Entrusting me with the rule of hosts of men.
According to thy mercy, Lord, . . .
Turn into loving-kindness thy dread power,
And make to spring up in my heart
A reverence for thy divinity.
Give as thou thinkest best.04
The surviving literature abounds in hymns full of that passionate self
abasement with which the Semite tries to control and conceal his pride.
Many of them take the character of "penitential psalms," and prepare
us for the magnificent feeling and imagery of "David"; who knows bu*
they served as models for that many-headed Muse?
I, thy servant, full of sighs cry unto thee.
Thou acceptest the fervent prayer of him who is burdened with sin.
Thou lookest upon a man, and that man lives. . . .
Look with true favor upon me, and accept my supplication. . . .
•Therefore Tammuz was called "The Anointed."91
242 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
And then, as if uncertain of the sex of the god-
How long, my god,
How long, my goddess, until thy face be turned to me?
How long, known and unknown god, until the anger of thy heart
shall be appeased?
How long, known and unknown goddess, until thy unfriendly heart
be appeased?
Mankind is perverted, and has no judgment;
Of all men who are alive, who knows anything?
They do not know whether they do good or evil.
O Lord, do not cast aside thy servant;
He is cast into the mire; take his hand!
The sin which I have sinned, turn to mercy!
The iniquity which I have committed, let the wind carry away!
My many transgressions tear off like a garment!
My god, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins!
My goddess, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins! . . .
Forgive my sins, and I will humble myself before thee.
May thy heart, as the heart of a mother who hath borne children,
be glad;
As a mother who hath borne children, as a father who hath begotten,
may it be glad!"
Such psalms and hymns were sung sometimes by the priests, sometimes
by the congregation, sometimes by both in strophe and antistrophe. Per-
haps the strangest circumstance about them is that— like all the religious
literature of Babylon— they were written in the ancient Sumerian lan-
guage, which served the Babylonian and Assyrian churches precisely as
Latin serves the Roman Catholic Church today. And just as a Catholic
hymnal may juxtapose the Latin text to a vernacular translation, so some
of the hymns that have come down to us from Mesopotamia have a
Babylonian or Assyrian translation written between the lines of the
"classic" Sumerian original, in the fashion of a contemporary schoolboy's
"interlinear." And as the form of these hymns and rituals led to the
Psalms of the Jews and the liturgy of the Roman Church, so their content
presaged the pessimistic and sin-struck plaints of the Jews, the early
Christians, and the modern Puritans. The sense of sin, though it did not
interfere victoriously in Babylonian life, filled the Babylonian chants,
and rang a note that survives in all Semitic liturgies and their anti-Semitic
CHAP. IX ) BABYLONIA 243
derivatives. "Lord," cries one hymn, "my sins are many, great are my
misdeeds! ... I sink under affliction, I can no longer raise my head; I turn
to my merciful God to call upon him, and I groan! . . . Lord, reject not
thy servant!""
These groanings were rendered more sincere by the Babylonian concep-
tion of sin. Sin was no mere theoretical state of the soul; like sickness it was
the possession of the body by a demon that might destroy it. Prayer was in
the nature of an incantation against a demon that had come down upon the
individual out of the ocean of magic forces in which the ancient Orient
lived and moved. Everywhere, in the Babylonian view, these hostile demons
lurked: they hid in strange crannies, slipped through doors or even through
bolts and sockets, and pounced upon their victims in the form of illness or
madness whenever some sin had withdrawn for a moment the beneficent
guardianship of the gods. Giants, dwarfs, cripples, above all, women, had
sometimes the power, even with a glance of the "evil eye," to infuse such a
destructive spirit into the bodies of those toward whom they were ill-dis-
posed. Partial protection against these demons was provided by the use of
magic amulets, talismans and kindred charms; images of the gods, carried on
the body, would usually suffice to frighten the devils away. Little stones
strung on a thread or a chain and hung about the neck were especially
effective, but care had to be taken that the stones were such as tradition asso-
ciated with good luck, and the thread had to be of black, white or red
according to the purpose in view. Thread spun from virgin kids was par-
ticularly powerful."7 But in addition to such means it was wise also to exor-
cise the demon by fervent incantation and magic ritual— for example, by
sprinkling the body with water taken from the sacred streams— the Tigris or
the Euphrates. Or an image of the demon could be made, placed on a boat,
and sent over the water with a proper formula; if the boat could be made
to capsize, so much the better. The demon might be persuaded, by the appro-
priate incantation, to leave its human victim and enter an animal— a bird, a
pig, most frequently a lamb.*8
Magic formulas for the elimination of demons, the avoidance of evil and
the prevision of the future constitute the largest category in the Babylonian
writings found in the library of Ashurbanipal. Some of the tablets are
manuals of astrology; others arc lists of omens celestial and terrestrial, with
expert advice for reading them; others are treatises on the interpretation of
dreams, rivaling in their ingenious incredibility the most advanced products
of modern psychology; still others offer instruction in divining the future by
examining the entrails of animals, or by observing the form and position of a
244 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
drop of oil let fall into a jar of water.8* Hepatoscopy— observation of the
liver of animals— was a favorite method of divination among the Babylonian
priests, and passed from them into the classical world; for the liver was
believed to be the seat of the mind in both animals and men. No king would
undertake a campaign or advance to a battle, no Babylonian would risk a
crucial decision or begin an enterprise of great moment, without employing
a priest or a soothsayer to read the omens for him in one or another of these
recondite ways.
Never was a civilization richer in superstitions. Every turn of chance
from the anomalies of birth to the varieties of death received a popular,
sometimes an official and sacerdotal, interpretation in magical or super-
natural terms. Every movement of the rivers, every aspect of the stars,
every dream, every unusual performance of man or beast, revealed the
future to the properly instructed Babylonian. The fate of a king could be
forecast by observing the movements of a dog,100 just as we foretell the
length of the winter by spying upon the groundhog. The superstitions
of Babylonia seem ridiculous to us, because they differ superficially from
our own. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found
flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient
or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery.
Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
V. THE MORALS OF BABYLON
Religion divorced from morals— Sacred prostitution— Free love-
Marriage — Adultery — Divorce — The position of 'woman —
The relaxation of morals
This religion, with all its failings, probably helped to prod the common
Babylonian into some measure of decency and civic docility, else we
should be hard put to explain the generosity of the kings to the priests.
Apparently, however, it had no influence upon the morals of the upper
classes in the later centuries, for (in the eyes and words of her prejudiced
enemies) the "whore of Babylon" was a "sink of iniquity," and a scandal-
ous example of luxurious laxity to all the ancient world. Even Alexander,
who was not above dying of drinking, was shocked by the morals of
Babylon.101
The most striking feature of Babylonian life, to an alien observer, was
the custom known to us chiefly from a famous page in Herodotus:
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 245
Every native woman is obliged, once in her life, to sit in the tem-
ple of Venus, and have intercourse with some stranger. And many
disdaining to mix with the rest, being proud on account of their
wealth, come in covered carriages, and take up their station at the
temple with a numerous train of servants attending them. But the
far greater part do thus: many sit down in the temple of Venus,
wearing a crown of cord round their heads; some are continually
coming in, and others are going out. Passages marked out in a
straight line lead in every direction through the women, along which
strangers pass and make their choice. When a woman has once
seated herself she must not return home till some stranger has thrown
a piece of silver into her lap, and lain with her outside the temple.
He who throws the silver must say thus: "I beseech the goddess
Mylitta to favor thee"; for the Assyrians call Venus Mylitta.* The
silver may be ever so small, for she will not reject it, inasmuch as it
is not lawful for her to do so, for such silver is accounted sacred.
The woman follows the first man that throws, and refuses no one.
But when she has had intercourse and has absolved herself from her
obligation to the goddess, she returns home; and after that time,
however great a sum you may give her you will not gain possession
of her. Those that are endowed with beauty and symmetry of shape
are soon set free; but the deformed are detained a long time, from
inability to satisfy the law, for some wait for a space of three or
four years.10*
What was the origin of this strange rite? Was it a relic of ancient
sexual communism, a concession, by the future bridegroom, of the jus
prim<e noctis, or right of the first night, to the community as represented
by any casual and anonymous citizen?108 Was it due to the bridegroom's
fear of harm from the violation of the tabu against shedding blood?104 Was
it a physical preparation for marriage, such as is still practised among some
Australian tribes?105 Or was it simply a sacrifice to the goddess— an offer-
ing of first fruits?10* We do not know.
Such women, of course, were not prostitutes. But various classes of
prostitutes lived within the temple precincts, plied their trade there, and
amassed, some of them, great fortunes. Such temple prostitutes were
common in western Asia: we find them in Israel,107 Phrygia, Phoenicia,
Syria, etc.; in Lydia and Cyprus the girls earned their marriage dowries
* "Assyrians" meant for the Greeks both Assyrians and Babylonians. "Mylitta" was one
of the forms of Ishtar
246 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
in this way.10" "Sacred prostitution" continued in Babylonia until abol-
ished by Constantine (ca. 325 A.D.)™ Alongside it, in the wine-shops
kept by women, secular prostitution flourished.110
In general the Babylonians were allowed considerable premarital ex-
perience. It was considered permissible for men and women to form un-
licensed unions, "trial marriages," terminable at the will of either party;
but the woman in such cases was obliged to wear an olive— in stone or
terra cotta—zs a sign that she was a concubine.m Some tablets indicate
that the Babylonians wrote poems, and sang songs, of love; but all that
remains of these is an occasional first line, like "My love is a light," or
"My heart is full of merriment and song."1" One letter, dating from 2100
B.C., is in the tone of Napoleon's early messages to Josephine: "To
Bibiya: . . . May Shamash and Marduk give thee health forever. ... I
have sent (to ask) after thy health; let me know how thou art. I have
arrived in Babylon, and see thee not; I am very sad."118
Legal marriage was arranged by the parents, and was sanctioned by
an exchange of gifts obviously descended from marriage by purchase.
The suitor presented to the father of the bride a substantial present, but
the father was expected to give her a dowry greater in value than the
gift,114 so that it was difficult to say who was purchasd, the woman or the
man. Sometimes, however, the arrangement was unabashed purchase;
Shamashnazir, for example, received ten shekels ($50) as the price of his
daughter.11* If we are to believe the Father of History,
those who had marriageable daughters used to bring them once a
year to a place where a great number of men gathered round them.
A public crier made them stand up and sold them all, one after an-
other. He began with the most beautiful, and having got a large sum
for her he put up the second fairest. But he only sold them on con-
dition that the buyers married them. . . . This very wise custom no
longer exists."*
Despite these strange practices, Babylonian marriage seems to have
been as monogamous and faithful as marriage in Christendom is today.
Premarital freedom was followed by the rigid enforcement of marital
fidelity. The adulterous wife and her paramour, according to the Code,
were drowned, unless the husband, in his mercy, preferred to let his wife
off by turning her almost naked into the streets.117 Hammurabi out-
Caesared Csesar: "If the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man be-
CHAP. tt) BABYLONIA 247
cause of another man, and she have not been taken in lying with another
man, for her husband's sake she shall throw herself into the river"110— per-
haps the law was intended as a discouragement to gossip. The man could
divorce his wife simply by restoring her dowry to her and saying, "Thou
art not my wife"; but if she said to him, "Thou art not my husband," she
was to be drowned."* Childlessness, adultery, incompatibility, or careless
management of the household might satisfy the law as ground for grant-
ing the man a divorce;"0 indeed "if she have not been a careful mistress,
have gadded about, have neglected her house, and have belittled her chil-
dren, they shall throw that woman into the water."m As against this in-
credible severity of the Code, we find that in practice the woman, though
she might not divorce her husband, was free to leave him, if she could
show cruelty on his part and fidelity on her own; in such cases she could
return to her parents, and take her marriage portion with her, along with
what other property she might have acquired.1" (The women of Eng-
land did not enjoy these rights till the end of the nineteenth century.)
If a woman's husband was kept from her, through business or war, for
any length of time, and had left no means for her maintenance, she might
cohabit with another man without legal prejudice to her reunion with
her husband on the latter's return.1**
In general the position of woman in Babylonia was lower than in
Egypt or Rome, and yet not worse than in classic Greece or medieval
Europe. To carry out her many functions— begetting and rearing chil-
dren, fetching water from the river or the public well, grinding corn,
cooking, spinning, weaving, cleaning— she had to be free to go about in
public very much like the man.114 She could own property, enjoy its
income, sell and buy, inherit and bequeath.1*6 Some women kept shops,
and carried on commerce; some even became scribes, indicating that girls
as well as boys might receive an education.1*8 But the Semitic practice of
giving almost limitless power to the oldest male of the family won out
against any matriarchal tendencies that may have existed in prehistoric
Mesopotamia. Among the upper classes— by a custom that led to the
purdah of Islam and India— the women were confined to certain quarters
of the house; and when they went out they were chaperoned by eunuchs
and pages.1*7 Among the lower classes they were maternity machines, and
if they had no dowry they were little more than slaves.1* The worship
of Ishtar suggests a certain reverence for woman and motherhood, like
the worship of Mary in the Middle Ages; but we get no glimpse of chiv-
248 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. EX
airy in Herodotus' report that the Babylonians, when besieged, "had
strangled their wives, to prevent the consumption of their provisions."1*
With some excuse, then, the Egyptians looked down upon the Baby-
lonians as not quite civilized. We miss here the refinement of character
and feeling indicated by Egyptian literature and art. When refinement
came to Babylon it was in the guise of an effeminate degeneracy: young
men dyed and curled their hair, perfumed their flesh, rouged their cheeks,
and adorned themselves with necklaces, bangles, ear-rings and pendants.
After the Persian Conquest the death of self-respect brought an end of
self-restraint; the manners of the courtesan crept into every class; women
of good family came to consider it mere courtesy to reveal their charms
indiscriminately for the greatest happiness of the greatest number;1* and
"every man of the people in his poverty," if we may credit Herodotus,
"prostituted his daughters for money."181 "There is nothing more extraor-
dinary than the manners of this city," wrote Quintus Curtius (42 A.D.),
"and nowhere are things better arranged with a view to voluptuous pleas-
ures."188 Morals grew lax when the temples grew rich; and the citizens of
Babylon, wedded to delight, bore with equanimity the subjection of their
city by the Kassites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks.
VI. LETTERS AND LITERATURE
Cuneiform—Its decipherment— Language— Literature— The epic
of Gilgamesh
Did this life of venery, piety and trade receive any ennobling enshrine-
ment in literary or artistic form? It is possible; we cannot judge a civiliza-
tion from such fragments as the ocean of time has thrown up from the
wreckage of Babylon. These fragments are chiefly liturgical, magical
and commercial. Whether through accident or through cultural poverty,
Babylonia, like Assyria and Persia, has left us a very middling heritage of
literature as compared with Egypt and Palestine; its gifts were in com-
merce and law.
Nevertheless, scribes were as numerous in cosmopolitan Babylon as in
Memphis or Thebes. The art of writing was still young enough to give
its master a high rank in society; it was the open sesame to govern-
mental and sacerdotal office; its possessor never failed to mention the
distinction in narrating his deeds, and usually he engraved a notice of it
on his cylinder seal,1* precisely as Christian scholars and gentlemen once
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 249
listed their academic degrees on their cards. The Babylonians wrote in
cuneiform upon tablets of damp clay, with a stylus or pencil cut at the
end into a triangular prism or wedge; when the tablets were filled they
dried and baked them into strange but durable manuscripts of brick. If
the thing written was a letter it was dusted with powder and then
wrapped in a clay envelope stamped with the sender's cylinder seal.
Tablets in jars classified and arranged on shelves filled numerous libraries
in the temples and palaces of Babylonia. These Babylonian libraries are
lost; but one of the greatest of them, that of Borsippa, was copied and
preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal, whose 30,000 tablets are the
main source of our knowledge of Babylonian life.
The decipherment of Babylonian baffled students for centuries; their final
success is an honorable chapter in the history of scholarship. In 1802 Georg
Grotefend, professor of Greek at the University of Gottingen, told the
Gottingen Academy how for years he had puzzled over certain cuneiform
inscriptions from ancient Persia; how at last he had identified eight of the
forty-two characters used, and had made out the names of three kings in
the inscriptions. There, for the most part, the matter rested until 1835, when
Henry Rawlinson, a British diplomatic officer stationed in Persia, quite un-
aware of Grotcfend's work, likewise worked out the names of Hystaspes,
Darius and Xerxes in an inscription couched in Old Persian, a cuneiform de-
rivative of Babylonian script; and through these names he finally deciphered
the entire document. This, however, was not Babylonian; Rawlinson had still
to find, like Champollion, a Rosetta Stone— in this case some inscription bear-
ing the same text in old Persian and Babylonian. He found it three hundred
feet high on an almost inaccessible rock at Behistun, in the mountains of
Media, where Darius I had caused his carvers to engrave a record of his wars
and victories in three languages— old Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. Day
after day Rawlinson risked himself on these rocks, often suspending himself
by a rope, copying every character carefully, even making plastic impressions
of all the engraved surfaces. After twelve years of work he succeeded in
translating both the Babylonian and the Assyrian texts (1847). To test these
and similar findings, the Royal Asiatic Society sent an unpublished cuneiform
document to four Assyriologists, and asked them— working without contact or
communication with one another— to make independent translations. The four
reports were found to be in almost complete agreement. Through these un-
heralded campaigns of scholarship the perspective of history was enriched
with a new civilization.13*
The Babylonian language was a Semitic development of the old tongues
of Sumeria and Akkad. It was written in characters originally Sumerian, but
250 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
the vocabulary diverged in time (like French from Latin) into a language so
different from Sumerian that the Babylonians had to compose dictionaries and
grammars to transmit the old "classic" and sacerdotal tongue of Sumeria to
young scholars and priests. Almost a fourth of the tablets found in the royal
library at Nineveh is devoted to dictionaries and grammars of the Sumerian,
Babylonian and Assyrian languages. According to tradition, such dictionaries
had been made as far back as Sargon of Akkad— so old is scholarship. In
Babylonian, as in Sumerian, the characters represented not letters but sylla-
bles; Babylon never achieved an alphabet of its own, but remained content
with a "syllabary" of some three hundred signs. The memorizing of these
syllabic symbols formed, with mathematics and religious instruction, the cur-
riculum of the temple schools in which the priests imparted to the young as
much as it was expedient for them to know. One excavation unearthed an
ancient classroom in which the clay tablets of boys and girls who had
copied virtuous maxims upon them some two thousand years before Christ
still lay on the floor, as if some almost welcome disaster had suddenly inter-
rupted the lesson.1*
The Babylonians, like the Phoenicians, looked upon letters as a device for
facilitating business; they did not spend much of their clay upon literature.
We find animal fables in verse— one generation of an endless dynasty; hymns
in strict meter, sharply divided lines and elaborate stanzas;136 very little sur-
viving secular verse; religious rituals presaging, but never becoming, drama;
and tons of historiography. Official chroniclers recorded the piety and con-
quests of the kings, the vicissitudes of each temple, and the important events
in the career of each city. Berosus, the most famous of Babylonian historians
(ca. 280 B.C.) narrated with confidence full details concerning the creation
of the world and the early history of man: the first king of Babylonia had
been chosen by a god, and had reigned 36,000 years; from the beginning of
the world to the great Flood, said Berosus, with praiseworthy exactitude
and comparative moderation, there had elapsed 691,200 years."7
Twelve broken tablets found in Ashurbanipal's library, and now in the
British Museum, form the most fascinating relic of Mesopotamian litera-
ture—the Epic of Gilgamesh. Like the Iliad it is an accretion of loosely
connected stories, some of which go back to Sumeria 3000 B.C.; part of it
is the Babylonian account of the Flood. Gilgamesh was a legendary ruler
of Uruk or Erech, a descendant of the Shamash-napishtim who had sur-
vived the Deluge, and had never died. Gilgamesh enters upon the scene
as a sort of Adonis-Samson— tall, massive, heroically powerful and troub-
lesomely handsome.
CHAP. IX ) BABYLONIA 25 1
Two thirds of him is god,
One third of him is man,
There's none can match the form of his body. . . .
All things he saw, even to the ends of the earth,
He underwent all, learned to know all;
He peered through all secrets,
Through wisdom's mantle that veileth all.
What was hidden he saw,
What was covered he undid;
Of times before the stormflood he brought report.
He went on a long far way,
Giving himself toil and distress;
Wrote then on a stone tablet the whole of his labor.1*
Fathers complain to Ishtar that he leads their sons out to exhausting
toil "building the walls through the day, through the night"; and hus-
bands complain that "he leaves not a wife to her master, not a single virgin
to her mother." Ishtar begs Gilgamesh's godmother, Aruru, to create
another son equal to Gilgamesh and able to keep him busy in conflict, so
that the husbands of Uruk may have peace. Aruru kneads a bit of clay,
spits upon it, and moulds from it the satyr Engidu, a man with the
strength of a boar, the mane of a lion, and the speed of a bird. Engidu
does not care for the society of men, but turns and lives with the animals;
"he browses with the gazelles, he sports with the creatures of the water,
he quenches his thirst with the beasts of the field." A hunter tries to
capture him with nets and traps, but fails; and going to Gilgamesh, the
hunter begs for the loan of a priestess who may snare Engidu with love.
"Go, my hunter," says Gilgamesh, "take a priestess; when the beasts
come to the watering-place let her display her beauty; he will see her, and
his beasts that troop around him will be scattered."
The hunter and the priestess go forth, and find Engidu.
"There he is, woman!
Loosen thy buckle,
Unveil thy delight,
That he may take his fill of thee!
Hang not back, take up his lust!
When he sees thee, he will draw near.
Open thy robe that he rest upon thee!
252 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
Arouse in him rapture, the work of woman.
Then will he become a stranger to his wild beasts,
Who on his own steppes grew up with him.
His bosom will press against thee."
Then the priestess loosened her buckle,
Unveiled her delight,
For him to take his fill of her.
She hung not back, she took up his lust,
She opened her robe that he rest upon her.
She aroused in him rapture, the work of woman.
His bosom pressed against her.
Engidu forgot where he was born.1"
For six days but seven nights Engidu remains with the sacred woman.
When he tires of pleasure he awakes to find his friends the animals
gone, whereupon he swoons with sorrow. But the priestess chides him:
"Thou who art superb as a god, why dost thou live among the beasts of
the field? Come, I will conduct thee to Uruk, where is Gilgamesh, whose
might is supreme." Ensnared by the vanity of praise and the conceit of
his strength, Engidu follows the priestess to Uruk, saying, "Lead me to
the place where is Gilgamesh. I will fight with him and manifest to him
my power"; whereat the gods and husbands are well pleased. But Gilga-
mesh overcomes him, first with strength, then with kindness; they become
devoted friends; they march forth together to protect Uruk from Elam;
they return glorious with exploits and victory. Gilgamesh "put aside
his war-harness, he put on his white garments, he adorned himself with
the royal insignia, and bound on the diadem." Thereupon Ishtar the in-
satiate falls in love with him, raises her great eyes to him, and says:
"Come, Gilgamesh, be my husband, thou! Thy love, give it to me
as a gift; thou shalt be my spouse, and I shall be thy wife. I shall
place thee in a chariot of lapis and gold, with golden wheels and
mountings of onyx; thou shalt be drawn in it by great lions, and
thou shalt enter our house with the odorous incense of cedar-wood.
... All the country by the sea shall embrace thy feet, kings shall
bow down before thee, the gifts of the mountains and the plains
they will bring before thee as tribute."
Gilgamesh rejects her, and reminds her of the hard fate she has inflicted
upon her varied lovers, including Tammuz, a hawk, a stallion, a gardener
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 253
and a lion. "Thou lovest me now/' he tells her; "afterwards thou wilt
strike me as thou didst these." The angry Ishtar asks of the great god
Aim that he create a wild urus to kill GUgamesh. Ami refuses, and re-
bukes her: "Canst thou not remain quiet now that Gilgamesh has enu-
merated to thee thy unfaithfulness and ignominies?" She threatens that
unless he grants her request she will suspend throughout the universe all
the impulses of desire and love, and so destroy every living thing. Anu
yields, and creates the ferocious urus; but Gilgamesh, helped by Engidu,
overcomes the beast; and when Ishtar curses the hero, Engidu throws a
limb of the urus into her face. Gilgamesh rejoices and is proud, but
Ishtar strikes him down in the midst of his glory by afflicting Engidu with
a mortal illness.
Mourning over the corpse of his friend, whom he has loved more than
any woman, Gilgamesh wonders over the mystery of death. Is there no
escape from that dull fatality? One man eluded it— Shamash-napish-
tim; he would know the secret of deathlessness. Gilgamesh resolves to
seek Shamash-napishtim, even if he must cross the world to find him. The
way leads through a mountain guarded by a pair of giants whose heads
touch the sky and whose breasts reach down to Hades. But they let
him pass, and he picks his way for twelve miles through a dark tunnel.
He emerges upon the shore of a great ocean, and sees, far over the waters,
the throne of Sabitu, virgin-goddess of the seas. He calls out to her to
help him cross the water; "if it cannot be done, I will lay me down on the
land and die." Sabitu takes pity upon him, and allows him to cross
through forty days of tempest to the Happy Island where lives Shamash-
napishtim, possessor of immortal life. Gilgamesh begs of him the secret
of deathlessness. Shamash-napishtim answers by telling at length the story
of the Flood, and how the gods, relenting of their mad destructiveness,
had made him and his wife immortal because they had preserved the
human species. He offers Gilgamesh a plant whose fruit will confer re-
newed youth upon him who eats it; and Gilgamesh, happy, starts back
on his long journey home. But on the way he stops to bathe, and while
he bathes a serpent crawls by and steals the plant.*
Desolate, Gilgamesh reaches Uruk. He prays in temple after temple
that Engidu may be allowed to return to life, if only to speak to him for
a moment. Engidu appears, and Gilgamesh inquires of him the state of
* The snake was worshiped by many early peoples as a symbol of immortality, because
of its apparent power to escape death by moulting its skin.
254 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. DC
the dead. Engidu answers, "I cannot tell it thee; if I were to open the
earth before thee, if I were to tell thee that which I have seen, terror
would overthrow thee, thou wouldst faint away." Gilgamesh, symbol of
that brave stupidity, philosophy, persists in his quest for truth: "Terror
will overthrow me, I shall faint away, but tell it to me." Engidu de-
scribes the miseries of Hades, and on this gloomy note the fragmentary
epic ends."0
VII. ARTISTS
The lesser arts— Music—Painting— Sculpture— Bas-relief—
Architecture
The story of Gilgamesh is almost the only example by which we may
judge the literary art of Babylon. That a keen esthetic sense, if not a
profound creative spirit, survived to some degree the Babylonian absorp-
tion in commercial life, epicurean recreation and compensatory piety,
may be seen in the chance relics of the minor arts. Patiently glazed tiles,
glittering stones, finely wrought bronze, iron, silver and gold, delicate
embroideries, soft rugs and richly dyed robes, luxurious tapestries, pedes-
taled tables, beds and chairs141— these lent grace, if not dignity or final
worth, to Babylonian civilization. Jewelry abounded in quantity, but
missed the subtle artistry of Egypt; it went in for a display of yellow
metal, and thought it artistic to make entire statues of gold.1" There were
many musical instruments— flutes, psalteries, harps, bagpipes, lyres, drums,
horns, reed-pipes, trumpets, cymbals and tambourines. Orchestras played
and singers sang, individually and chorally, in temples and palaces, and
at the feasts of the well-to-do.1"
Painting was purely subsidiary; it decorated walls and statuary, but made
no attempt to become an independent art.144 We do not find among Baby-
lonian ruins the distemper paintings that glorified the Egyptian tombs, or such
frescoes as adorned the palaces of Crete. Babylonian sculpture remained
similarly undeveloped, and was apparently stiffened into an early death by
conventions derived from Sumeria and enforced by the priests: all the faces
portrayed are one face, all the kings have the same thick and muscular frame,
all the captives are cast in one mould. Very little Babylonian statuary sur-
vives, and that without excuse. The bas-reliefs are better, but they too are
stereotyped and crude; a great gulf separates them from the mobile vigor of
the reliefs that the Egyptians had carved a thousand years before; they
CHAP. IX ) BABYLONIA 255
reach sublimity only when they depict animals possessed of the silent dignity
of nature, or enraged by the cruelty of men.ltt
Babylonian architecture is safe from judgment now, for hardly any of its
remains rise to more than a few feet above the sands; and there are no carved
or painted representations among the relics to show us clearly the form and
structure of palaces and temples. Houses were built of dried mud, or, among
the rich, of brick; they seldom knew windows, and their doors opened not
upon the narrow street but upon an interior court shaded from the sun.
Tradition describes the better dwellings as rising to three or four stories in
height.148 The temple was raised upon foundations level with the roofs of the
houses whose life it was to dominate; usually it was an enormous square of
tiled masonry, built, like the houses, around a court; in this court most of
the religious ceremonies were performed. Near the temple, in most cases,
rose a ziggurat (literally ua high place")— a tower of superimposed and dimin-
ishing cubical stories surrounded by external stairs. Its uses were partly reli-
gious, as a lofty shrine for the god, partly astronomic, as an observatory
from which the priests could watch the all-revealing stars. The great ziggurat
at Borsippa was called "The Stages of the Seven Spheres"; each story was
dedicated to one of the seven planets known to Babylonia, and bore a sym-
bolic color. The lowest was black, as the color of Saturn; the next above it
was white, as the color of Venus; the next was purple, for Jupiter; the fourth
blue, for Mercury; the fifth scarlet, for Mars; the sixth silver, for the moon;
the seventh gold, for the sun. These spheres and stars, beginning at the top,
designated the days of the week.147
There was not much art in this architecture, so far as we can vision
it now; it was a mass of straight lines seeking the glory of size. Here and
there among the ruins are vaults and arches— forms derived from Sumeria,
negligently used, and unconscious of their destiny. Decoration, interior and
exterior, was almost confined to enameling some of the brick surfaces with
bright glazes of yellow, blue, white and red, with occasional tiled figures of
animals or plants. The use of vitrified glaze, not merely to beautify, but to
protect the masonry from sun and rain, was at least as old as Naram-sin, and
was to continue in Mesopotamia down to Moslem days. In this way ceram-
ics, though seldom producing rememberable pottery, became the most
characteristic art of the ancient Near East. Despite such aid, Babylonian
architecture remained a heavy and prosaic thing, condemned to mediocrity
by the material it used. The temples rose rapidly out of the earth which
slave labor turned so readily into brick and cementing pitch; they did not
require centuries for their erection, like the monumental structures of Egypt
or medieval Europe. But they decayed almost as quickly as they rose; fifty
years of neglect reduced them to the dust from which they had been made.148
256 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
The very cheapness of brick corrupted Babylonian design; with such mate-
rials it was easy to achieve size, difficult to compass beauty. Brick does not
lend itself to sublimity, and sublimity is the soul of architecture.
VIII. BABYLONIAN SCIENCE
Mathematics— Astronomy— The calendar— Geography— Medicine
Being merchants, the Babylonians were more likely to achieve successes
in science than in art. Commerce created mathematics, and united with
religion to beget astronomy. In their varied functions as judges, adminis-
trators, agricultural and industrial magnates, and soothsayers skilled in
examining entrails and stars, the priests of Mesopotamia unconsciously
laid the foundations of those sciences which, in the profane hands of the
Greeks, were for a time to depose religion from its leadership of the
world.
Babylonian mathematics rested on a division of the circle into 360
degrees, and of the year into 360 days; on this basis it developed a
sexagesimal system of calculation by sixties, which became the parent of
later duodecimal systems of reckoning by twelves. The numeration
used only three figures: a sign for i, repeated up to 9; a sign for 10, re-
peated up to 50; and a sign for 100. Computation was made easier by
tables which showed not only multiplication and division, but the halves,
quarters, thirds, squares and cubes of the basic numbers. Geometry ad-
vanced to the measurement of complex and irregular areas. The Baby-
lonian figure for * (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a
circle) was 3—3 very crude approximation for a nation of astronomers.
Astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians, for which they
were famous throughout the ancient world. Here again magic was the
mother of science: the Babylonians studied the stars not so much to chart
the courses of caravans and ships, as to divine the future fates of men;
they were astrologers first and astronomers afterward. Every planet was
a god, interested and vital in the affairs of men: Jupiter was Marduk,
Mercury was Nabu, Mars was Nergal, the sun was Shamash, the moon
was Sin, Saturn was Ninib, Venus was Ishtar. Every movement of every
star determined, or forecast, some terrestrial event: if, for example, the
moon was low, a distant nation would submit to the king; if the moon was
in crescent the king would overcome the enemy. Such efforts to wring
the future out of the stars became a passion with the Babylonians; priests
CHAP. DC) BABYLONIA 257
skilled in astrology reaped rich rewards from both people and king. Some
of them were sincere students, poring zealously over astrologic tomes
which, according to their traditions, had been composed in the days of
Sargon of Akkad; they complained of the quacks who, without such
study, went about reading horoscopes for a fee, or predicting the weather
a year ahead, in the fashion of our modern almanacs.1**
Astronomy developed slowly out of this astrologic observation and
charting of the stars. As far back as 2000 B.C. the Babylonians had made
accurate records of the heliacal rising and setting of the planet Venus;
they had fixed the position of various stars, and were slowly mapping the
sky."0 The Kassite conquest interrupted this development for a thou-
sand years. Then, under Nebuchadrezzar, astronomic progress was re-
sumed; the priest-scientists plotted the orbits of sun and moon, noted their
conjunctions and eclipses, calculated the courses of the planets, and made
the first clear distinction between a planet and a star;*"1 they determined
the dates of winter and summer solstices, of vernal and autumnal
equinoxes, and, following the lead of the Sumerians, divided the ecliptic
(i.e., the path of the earth around the sun) into the twelve signs of the
Zodiac. Having divided the circle into 360 degrees, they divided the
degree into sixty minutes, and the minute into sixty seconds.108 They
measured time by a clepsydra or water-clock, and a sun-dial, and these
seem to have been not merely developed but invented by them.1™
They divided the year into twelve lunar months, six having thirty days,
six twenty-nine; and as this made but 354 days in all, they added a thir-
teenth month occasionally to harmonize the calendar with the seasons.
The month was divided into four weeks according to the four phases of
the moon. An attempt was made to establish a more convenient calendar
by dividing the month into six weeks of five days; but the phases of the
moon proved more effective than the conveniences of men. The day was
reckoned not from midnight to midnight but from one rising of the
moon to the next;1*4 it was divided into twelve hours, and each of these
hours was divided into thirty minutes, so that the Babylonian minute had
the feminine quality of being four times as long as its name might suggest.
The division of our month into four weeks, of our clock into twelve
hours (instead of twenty-four), of our hour into sixty minutes, and of
* To the Babylonians a planet was distinguished from the "fixed" stars by its observable
motion or "wandering." In modern astronomy a planet is defined as a heavenly body
regularly revolving about the sun.
258 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
our minute into sixty seconds, are unsuspected Babylonian vestiges in our
contemporary world.*
The dependence of Babylonian science upon religion had a more
stagnant effect in medicine than in astronomy. It was not so much the ob-
scurantism of the priests that held the science back, as the superstition of
the people. Already by the time of Hammurabi the art of healing had
separated itself in some measure from the domain and domination of the
clergy; a regular profession of physician had been established, with fees
and penalties fixed by law. A patient who called in a doctor could know
in advance just how much he would have to pay for such treatment or
operation; and if he belonged to the poorer classes the fee was lowered
accordingly.107 If the doctor bungled badly he had to pay damages to the
patient; in extreme cases, as we have seen, his fingers were cut off so that
he might not readily experiment again.1"
But this almost secularized science found itself helpless before the de-
mand of the people for supernatural diagnosis and magical cures. Sorcer-
ers and necromancers were more popular than physicians, and enforced,
by their influence with the populace, irrational methods of treatment.
Disease was possession, and was due to sin; therefore it had to be treated
mainly by incantations, magic and prayer; when drugs were used they
were aimed not to cleanse the patient but to terrify and exorcise the
demon. The favorite drug was a mixture deliberately compounded of dis-
gusting elements, apparently on the theory that the sick man had a
stronger stomach than the demon that possessed him; the usual ingredi-
ents were raw meat, snake-flesh and wood-shavings mixed with wine and
oil; or rotten food, crushed bones, fat and dirt, mingled with animal or
human urine or excrement.1** Occasionally this Dreckapothek was re-
placed by an effort to appease the demon with milk, honey, cream, and
sweet-smelling herbs.100 If all treatment failed, the patient was in some
cases carried into the market-place, so that his neighbors might indulge
their ancient propensity for prescribing infallible cures.181
Perhaps the eight hundred medical tablets that survive to inform us
* From charting the skies the Babylonians turned to mapping the earth. The oldest
maps of which we have any knowledge were those which the priests prepared of the
roads and cities of Nebuchadrezzar's empire.1*5 A clay tablet found in the ruins of Gasur
(two hundred miles north of Babylon), and dated back to 1600 B.C., contains, in a space
hardly an inch square, a map of the province of Shat-Azalla; it represents mountains by
rounded lines, water by tilting lines, rivers by parallel lines; the names of various town?
are inscribed, and the direction of north and south is indicated in the margin.16*
CHAP. IX ) BABYLONIA 259
of Babylonian medicine do it injustice. Reconstruction of the whole
from a part is hazardous in history, and the writing of history is the re-
construction of the whole from a part. Quite possibly these magical
cures were merely subtle uses of the power of suggestion; perhaps those
evil concoctions were intended as emetics; and the Babylonian may have
meant nothing more irrational by his theory of illness as due to invading
demons and the patient's sins than we do by interpreting it as due to
invading bacteria invited by culpable negligence, uncleanliness, or greed.
We must not be too sure of the ignorance of our ancestors.
IX. PHILOSOPHERS
Religion and Philosophy— The Babylonian Job— The Babylonian
Koheleth—An anti-clerical
A. nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a
thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the
grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and
softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hard-
ship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them
perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the
sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil
does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is for-
gotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives
way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil
and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even
while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men
begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek
refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at
the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclcsiastes.
Since we know the thought of Babylon mostly from the later reigns,
it is natural that we should find it shot through with the weary wisdom
of tired philosophers who took their pleasures like Englishmen. On one
tablet Balta-atrua complains that though he has obeyed the commands of
the gods more strictly than any one else, he has been laid low with a
variety of misfortunes; he has lost his parents and his property, and even
the little that remained to him has been stolen on the highway. His
friends, like Job's, reply that his disaster must be in punishment of some
secret sin— perhaps that hybris, or insolent pride of prosperity, which
260 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
particularly arouses the jealous anger of the gods. They assure him that
evil is merely good in disguise, some part of the divine plan seen too
narrowly by frail minds unconscious of the whole. Let Balta-atrua keep
faith and courage, and he will be rewarded in the end; better still, his
enemies will be punished. Balta-atrua calls out to the gods for help—
and the fragment suddenly ends.188
Another poem, found among the ruins of Ashurbanipal's collection of
Babylonian literature, presents the same problem more definitely in the
person of Tabi-utul-Enlil, who appears to have been a ruler in Nippur.
He describes his difficulties:*
(My eyeballs he obscured, bolting them as with) a lock;
(My cars he bolted), like those of a deaf person.
A king, I have been changed into a slave;
As a madman (my) companions maltreat me.
Send me help from the pit dug (for me)! . . .
By day deep sighs, at night weeping;
The month— cries; the year— distress. . . .
He goes on to tell what a pious fellow he has always been, the very last
man in the world who should have met with so cruel a fate:
As though I had not always set aside the portion for the god,
And had not invoked the goddess at the meal,
Had not bowed my face and brought my tribute;
As though I were one in whose mouth supplication and prayer were
not constant! . . .
I taught my country to guard the name of the god;
To honor the name of the goddess I accustomed my people. . . .
I thought that such things were pleasing to a god.
Stricken with disease despite all this formal piety, he muses on the
impossibility of understanding the gods, and on the uncertainty of human
affairs.
Who is there that can grasp the will of the gods in heaven?
The plan of a god full of mystery— who can understand it? ...
He who was alive yesterday is dead today;
In an instant he is cast into grief; of a sudden he is crushed.
* Parenthetical passages are guesse*
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA l6l
For a moment he sings and plays;
In a twinkling he wails like a mourner. . . .
Like a net trouble has covered me.
My eyes look but see not;
My ears are open but they hear not. . . .
Pollution has fallen upon my genitals,
And it has assailed the glands in my bowels. . . .
With death grows dark my whole body. . . .
All day the pursuer pursues me;
During the night he gives me no breath for a moment. . . .
My limbs are dismembered, they march out of unison.
In my dung I pass the night like an ox;
Like a sheep I mix in my excrements. . . .
Like Job, he makes another act of faith:
But I know the day of the cessation of my tears,
A day of the grace of the protecting spirits; then divinity will be
merciful.1"
In the end everything turns out happily. A spirit appears, and cures all
of Tabi's ailments; a mighty storm drives all the demons of disease out
of his frame. He praises Marduk, offers rich sacrifice, and calls upon
every one never to despair of the gods.*
As there is but a step from this to the Book of Job, so we find in late
Babylonian literature unmistakable premonitions of Ecclesiastes. In the
Epic of Gilgamesh the goddess Sabitu advises the hero to give up his
longing for a life after death, and to eat, drink and be merry on the
earth.
O Gilgamesh, why dost thou run in all directions?
The life that thou seekest thou wilt not find.
When the gods created mankind they determined death for mankind;
Life they kept in their own hands.
Thou, O Gilgamesh, fill thy belly;
Day and night be thou merry; . . .
Day and night be joyous and content!
Let thy garments be pure,
* It is probable that this composition, prototypes of which are found in Sumeria, influ-
enced the author of the Book of Job.™
262 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. IX
Thy head be washed; wash thyself with water!
Regard the little one who takes hold of thy hand;
Enjoy the wife in thy bosom.1"*
In another tablet we hear a bitterer note, culminating in atheism and
blasphemy. Gubarru, a Babylonian Alcibiades, interrogates an elder
sceptically:
O very wise one, O possessor of intelligence, let thy heart groan!
The heart of God is as far as the inner parts of the heavens.
Wisdom is hard, and men do not understand it.
To which the old man answers with a forboding of Amos and Isaiah:
Give attention, my friend, and understand my thought.
Men exalt the work of the great man who is skilled in murder.
They disparage the poor man who has done no sin.
They justify the wicked man, whose fault is grave.
They drive away the just man who seeks the will of God.
They let the strong take the food of the poor;
They strengthen the mighty;
They destroy the weak man, the rich man drives him away.
He advises Gubarru to do the will of the gods none the less. But Gubarru
will have nothing to do with gods or priests who are always on the side
of the biggest fortunes:
They have offered lies and untruth without ceasing.
They say in noble words what is in favor of the rich man.
Is his wealth diminished? They come to his help.
They ill-treat the weak man like a thief,
They destroy him in a tremor, they extinguish him like a flame.16*
We must not exaggerate the prevalence of such moods in Babylon;
doubtless the people listened lovingly to their priests, and crowded the
temples to seek favors of the gods. The marvel is that they were so long
* Cf. Ecclesiastes, ix, 7-9: "Go thy way, cat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine
with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always
white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest,
all the days of the life of thy vanity."
CHAP. IX) BABYLONIA 263
loyal to a religion that offered them so little consolation. Nothing could
be known, said the priests, except by divine revelation; and this revela-
tion came only through the priests. The last chapter of that revelation
told how the dead soul, whether good or bad, descended into Aralu, or
Hades, to spend there an eternity in darkness and suffering. Is it any
wonder that Babylon gave itself to revelry, while Nebuchadrezzar, having
all, understanding nothing, fearing everything, went mad?
x. EPITAPH
Tradition and the Book of Daniel, unverified by any document known
to us, tell how Nebuchadrezzar, after a long reign of uninterrupted vic-
tory and prosperity, after beautifying his city with roads and palaces,
and erecting fifty-four temples to the gods, fell into a strange insanity,
thought himself a beast, walked on all fours, and ate grass.1*7 For four
years his name disappears from the history and governmental records of
Babylonia;188 it reappears for a moment, and then, in 562 B.C., he passes
away.
Within thirty years after his death his empire crumbled to pieces.
Nabonidus, who held the throne for seventeen years, preferred archeology
to government, and devoted himself to excavating the antiquities of
Sumeria while his own realm was going to ruin.108 The army fell into
disorder; business men forgot love of country in the sublime internation-
alism of finance; the people, busy with trade and pleasure, unlearned the
arts of war. The priests usurped more and more of the royal power, and
fattened their treasuries with wealth that tempted invasion and conquest.
When Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates, the anti-
clericals of Babylon connived to open the city to him, and welcomed his
enlightened domination.170 For two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as
part of the greatest empire that history had yet known. Then the exub-
erant Alexander came, captured the unresisting capital, conquered all the
Near East, and drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar.171
The civilization of Babylonia was not as fruitful for humanity as
Egypt's, not as varied and profound as India's, not as subtle and mature
as China's. And yet 'it was from Babylonia that those fascinating legends
came which, through the literary artistry of the Jews, became an insep-
arable portion of Europe's religious lore; it was from Babylonia, rather
than from Egypt, that the roving Greeks brought to their city-stateSj
264 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. IX
and thence to Rome and ourselves, the foundations of mathematics,
astronomy, medicine, grammar, lexicography, archeology, history, and
philosophy. The Greek names for the metals and the constellations, for
weights and measures, for musical instruments and many drugs, are trans-
lations, sometimes mere transliterations, of Babylonian names.172 While
Greek architecture derived its forms and inspiration from Egypt and
Crete, Babylonian architecture, through the ziggurat, led to the towers
of Moslem mosques, the steeples and campaniles of medieval art, and the
"setback" style of contemporary architecture in America. The laws of
Hammurabi became for all ancient societies a legacy comparable to
Rome's gift of order and government to the modern world. Through
Assyria's conquest of Babylon, her appropriation of the ancient city's
culture, and her dissemination of that culture throughout her wide em-
pire; through the long Captivity of the Jews, and the great influence upon
them of Babylonian life and thought; through the Persian and Greek con-
quests, which opened with unprecedented fulness and freedom all the
roads of communication and trade between Babylon and the rising cities
of Ionia, Asia Minor and Greece— through these and many other ways
the civilization of the Land between the Rivers passed down into the
cultural endowment of our race. In the end nothing is lost; for good or
evil every event has effects forever.
CHAPTER X
Assyria
I. CHRONICLES
Beginnings — Cities — Race — The conquerors — Sennacherib and
Esarhaddon — "Sardanapalus"
MEANWHILE, three hundred miles north of Babylon, another
civilization had appeared. Forced to maintain a hard military life
by the mountain tribes always threatening it on every side, it had in time
overcome its assailants, had conquered its parent cities in Elam, Sumeria,
Akkad and Babylonia, had mastered Phoenicia and Egypt, and had for
two centuries dominated the Near East with brutal power. Sumeria was
to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and
Greece to Rome: the first created a civilization, the second developed it to
its height, the third inherited it, added little to it, protected it, and trans-
mitted it as a dying gift to the encompassing and victorious barbarians.
For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready
to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbar-
ism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for cen-
turies to recover the territory it has lost.
The new state grew about four cities fed by the waters or tributaries
of the Tigris: Ashur, which is now Kala'at-Sherghat; Arbela, which is
Irbil; Kalakh, which is Nimrud; and Nineveh, which is Kuyunjik— just
across the river from oily Mosul. At Ashur prehistoric obsidian flakes and
knives have been found, and black pottery with geometric patterns that
suggest a central Asian origin;1 at Tepe Gawra, near the site of Nineveh,
a recent expedition unearthed a town which its proud discoverers date
back to 3700 B.C., despite its many temples and tombs, its well-carved
cylinder seals, its combs and jewelry, and the oldest dice known to his-
tory1—a thought for reformers. The god Ashur gave his name to a city
(and finally to all Assyria); there the earliest of the nation's kings had
their residence, until its exposure to the heat of the desert and the attacks
of the neighboring Babylonians led Ashur's rulers to build a secondary
265
266 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
capital in cooler Nineveh—named also after a god, Nina, the Ishtar of
Assyria. Here, in the heyday of Ashurbanipal, 300,000 people lived, and
all the western Orient came to pay tribute to the Universal King.
The population was a mixture of Semites from the civilized south (Baby-
lonia and Akkadia) with non-Semitic tribes from the west (probably of
Hittite or Mitannian affinity) and Kurdish mountaineers from the Caucasus.*
They took their common language and their arts from Sumeria, but modified
them later into an almost undistinguishable similarity to the language and arts
of Babylonia/ Their circumstances, however, forbade them to indulge in
the effeminate ease of Babylon; from beginning to end they were a race of
warriors, mighty in muscle and courage, abounding in proud hair and beard,
standing straight, stern and stolid on their monuments, and bestriding with
tremendous feet the east-Mediterranean world. Their history is one of kings
and slaves, wars and conquests, bloody victories and sudden defeat. The early
kings— once mere patens tributary to the south— took advantage of the
Kassite domination of Babylonia to establish their independence; and soon
enough one of them decked himself with that title which all the monarchs
of Assyria were to display: "King of Universal Reign." Out of the dull
dynasties of these forgotten potentates certain figures emerge whose deeds
illuminate the development of their country.*
While Babylonia was still in the darkness of the Kassite era, Shalmaneser
I brought the little city-states of the north under one rule, and made Kalakh
his capital. But the first great name in Assyrian history is Tiglath-Pileser I.
He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: if it is wise to believe monarchs,
he slew 120 lions on foot, and 800 from his chariot.6 One of his inscriptions
—written by a scribe more royalist than the King— tells how he hunted nations
as well as animals: "In my fierce valor I marched against the people of
Qummuh, conquered their cities, carried off their booty, their goods and
their property without reckoning, and burned their cities with fire— destroyed
and devastated them. . . . The people of Adansh left their mountains and
embraced my feet. I imposed taxes upon them."6 In every direction he led
his armies, conquering the Hittites, the Armenians, and forty other nations,
capturing Babylon, and frightening Egypt into sending him anxious gifts.
(He was particularly mollified by a crocodile.) With the proceeds of his con-
quests he built temples to the Assyrian gods and goddesses, who, like anxious
*A tablet recently found in the ruins of Sargon IFs library at Khorsabad contains an
unbroken list of Assyrian kings from the twenty-third century EJC. to Ashurnirari
(753-46 B.C.)*
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 267
debutantes, asked no questions about the source of his wealth. Then Babylon
revolted, defeated his armies, pillaged his temples, and carried his gods into
Babylonian captivity. Tiglath-Pileser died of shame.7
His reign was a symbol and summary of all Assyrian history: death and
taxes, first for Assyria's neighbors, then for herself. Ashurnasirpal II con-
quered a dozen petty states, brought much booty home from the wars, cut
out with his own hand the eyes of princely captives, enjoyed his harem, and
passed respectably away.8 Shalmaneser III carried these conquests as far as
Damascus; fought costly battles, killing 16,000 Syrians in one engagement;
built temples, levied tribute, and was deposed by his son in a violent revolu-
tion.9 Sammuramat ruled as queen-mother for three years, and provided a
frail historical basis (for this is all that we know of her) for the Greek legend
of Semiramis— half goddess and half queen, great general, great engineer and
great statesman—so attractively detailed by Diodorus the Sicilian.10 Tiglath-
Pileser III gathered new armies, reconquered Armenia, overran Syria and
Babylonia, made vassal cities of Damascus, Samaria and Babylon, extended the
rule of Assyria from the Caucasus to Egypt, tired of war, became an excel-
lent administrator, built many temples and palaces, held his empire together
with an iron hand, and died peacefully in bed. Sargon II, an officer in the
army, made himself king by a Napoleonic coup d'etat; led his troops in per-
son, and took in every engagement the most dangerous post;11 defeated Elam
and Egypt, reconquered Babylonia, and received the homage of the Jews, the
Philistines, even of the Cypriote Greeks; ruled his empire well, encouraged
arts and letters, handicrafts and trade, and died in a victorious battle that
definitely preserved Assyria from invasion by the wild Cimmerian hordes.
His son Sennacherib put down revolts in the distant provinces adjoin-
ing the Persian Gulf, attacked Jerusalem and Egypt without success,*
sacked eighty-nine cities and 820 villages, captured 7,200 horses, n,ooo
asses, 80,000 oxen, 800,000 sheep, and 208,000 prisoners;18 the official his-
torian, on his life, did not understate these figures. Then, irritated by the
prejudice of Babylon in favor of freedom, he besieged it, took it, and
burned it to the ground; nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, male
and female, were put to death, so that mountains of corpses blocked the
streets; the temples and palaces were pillaged to the last shekel, and the
once omnipotent gods of Babylon were hacked to pieces or carried in
* Egyptian tradition attributed the escape of Egypt to discriminating field mice who ate
up the quivers, bow-strings and shield-straps of the Assyrians encamped before Pelusium,
so that the Egyptians were enabled to defeat the invaders easily the next day."
268 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
bondage to Nineveh: Marduk the god became a menial to Ashur. Such
Babylonians as survived did not conclude that Marduk had been over-
rated; they told themselves— as the captive Jews would tell themselves a
century later in that same Babylon— that their god had condescended to
be defeated in order to punish his people. With the spoils of his con-
quests and pillage Sennacherib rebuilt Nineveh, changed the courses of
rivers to protect it, reclaimed waste lands with the vigor of countries
suffering from an agricultural surplus, and was assassinated by his sons
while piously mumbling his prayers.14
Another son, Esarhaddon, snatched the throne from his blood-stained
brothers, invaded Egypt to punish her for supporting Syrian revolts, made
her an Assyrian province, amazed western Asia with his long triumphal
progress from Memphis to Nineveh, dragging endless booty in his train;
established Assyria in unprecedented prosperity as master of the whole
Near Eastern world; delighted Babylonia by freeing and honoring its cap-
tive gods, and rebuilding its shattered capital; conciliated Elam by feeding
its famine-stricken people in an act of international beneficence almost
without parallel in the ancient world; and died on the way to suppress a
revolt in Egypt, after giving his empire the justest and kindliest rule in
its half -barbarous history.
His successor, Ashurbanipal (the Sardanapalus of the Greeks), reaped
the fruits of Esarhaddon's sowing. During his long reign Assyria reached
the climax of its wealth and prestige; after him his country, ruined by
forty years of intermittent war, fell into exhaustion and decay, and ended
its career hardly a decade after Ashurbanipal's death. A scribe has pre-
served to us a yearly record of this reign;10 it is a dull and bloody mess of
war after war, siege after siege, starved cities and flayed captives. The
scribe represents Ashurbanipal himself as reporting his destruction of
Elam:
For a distance of one month and twenty-five days' march I devas-
tated the districts of Elam. I spread salt and thorn-bush there (to
injure the soil). Sons of the kings, sisters of the kings, members of
Elam's royal family young and old, prefects, governors, knights, arti-
sans, as many as there were, inhabitants male and female, big and
little, horses, mules, asses, flocks and herds more numerous than a
swarm of locusts—I carried them off as booty to Assyria. The dust
of Susa, of Madaktu, of Haltemash and of their other cities, I carried
it off to Assyria. In a month of days I subdued Elam in its whole
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 269
extent. The voice of man, the steps of flocks and herds, the happy
shouts of mirth— I put an end to them in its fields, which I left for
the asses, the gazelles, and all manner of wild beasts to people.1*
The .severed head of the Elamite king was brought to Ashurbanipal as he
feasted with his queen in the palace garden; he had the head raised on a
pole in the midst of his guests, and the royal revel went on; later the
head was fixed over the gate of Nineveh, and slowly rotted away. The
Elamite general, Dananu, was flayed alive, and then was bled like a lamb;
his brother had his throat cut, and his body was divided into pieces, which
were distributed over the country as souvenirs."
It never occurred to Ashurbanipal that he and his men were brutal;
these clean-cut penalties were surgical necessities in his attempt to remove
rebellions and establish discipline among the heterogeneous and turbulent
peoples, from Ethiopia to Armenia, and from Syria to Media, whom his
predecessors had subjected to Assyrian rule; it was his obligation to main-
tain this legacy intact. He boasted of the peace that he had established in
his empire, and of the good order that prevailed in its cities; and the
boast was not without truth. That he was not merely a conqueror intoxi-
cated with blood he proved by his munificence as a builder and as a
patron of letters and the arts. Like some Roman ruler calling to the
Greeks, he sent to all his dominions for sculptors and architects to design
and adorn new temples and palaces; he commissioned innumerable scribes
to secure and copy for him all the classics of Sumerian and Babylonian
' literature, and gathered these copies in his library at Nineveh, where
modern scholarship found them almost intact after twenty-five centuries
of time had flowed over them. Like another Frederick, he was as vain
of his literary abilities as of his triumphs in war and the chase." Diodorus
describes him as a dissolute and bisexual Nero," but in the wealth of docu-
ments that have come down to us from this period there is little corrobo-
ration for this view. From the composition of literary tablets Ashurbani-
pal passed with royal confidence— armed only with knife and javelin— to
hand-to-hand encounters with lions; if we may credit the reports of his
contemporaries he did not hesitate to lead the attack in person, and often
dealt with his own hand the decisive blow." Little wonder that Byron was
fascinated with him, and wove about him a drama half legend and half
history, in which all the wealth and power of Assyria came to their
height, and broke into universal ruin and royal despair.
270 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
II. ASSYRIAN GOVERNMENT
Imperialism— Assyrian 'war— The conscript gods— Law— Delicacies
of penology — Administration — The violence of Oriental
monarchies
If we should admit the imperial principle— that it is good, for the sake
of spreading law, security, commerce and peace, that many states should
be brought, by persuasion or force, under the authority of one govern-
ment—then we should have to concede to Assyria the distinction of having
established in western Asia a larger measure and area of order and pros-
perity than that region of the earth had ever, to our knowledge, enjoyed
before. The government of Ashurbanipal— which ruled Assyria, Baby-
lonia, Armenia, Media, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia, Sumeria, Elam and
Egypt— was without doubt the most extensive administrative organization
yet seen in the Mediterranean or Near Eastern world; only Hammurabi
and Thutmose III had approached it, and Persia alone would equal it be-
fore the coming of Alexander. In some ways it was a liberal empire; its
larger cities retained considerable local autonomy, and each nation in
it was left its own religion, law and ruler, provided it paid its tribute
promptly.81 In so loose an organization every weakening of the central
power was bound to produce rebellions, or, at the best, a certain tributary
negligence, so that the subject states had to be conquered again and again.
To avoid these recurrent rebellions Tiglath-Pilcser III established the
characteristic Assyrian policy of deporting conquered populations to alien
habitats, where, mingling with the natives, they might lose their unity
and identity, and have less opportunity to rebel. Revolts came neverthe-
less, and Assyria had to keep herself always ready for war.
The army was therefore the most vital part of the government. Assyria
recognized frankly that government is the nationalization of force, and
her chief contributions to progress were in the art of war. Chariots,
cavalry, infantry and sappers were organized into flexible formations,
siege mechanisms were as highly developed as among the Romans, strat-
egy and tactics were well understood." Tactics centered about the idea
of rapid movement making possible a piecemeal attack— so old is the secret
of Napoleon. Iron-working had grown to the point of encasing the warrior
with armor to a degree of stiffness rivaling a medieval knight; even the
archers and pikemen wore copper or iron helmets, padded loin-cloths,
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 271
enormous shields, and a leather skirt covered with metal scales. The
weapons were arrows, lances, cutlasses, maces, clubs, slings and battle-
axes. The nobility fought from chariots in the van of the battle, and the
king, in his royal chariot, usually led them in person; generals had not
yet learned to die in bed. Ashurnasirpal introduced the use of cavalry as
an aid to the chariots, and this innovation proved decisive in many en-
gagements. M The principal siege engine was a battering-ram tipped with
iron; sometimes it was suspended from a scaffold by ropes, and was swung
back to give it forward impetus; sometimes it was run forward on wheels.
The besieged fought from the walls with missiles, torches, burning pitch,
chains designed to entangle the ram, and gaseous "stink-pots" (as they
were called) to befuddle the enemy;24 again the novel is not new. A cap-
tured city was usually plundered and burnt to the ground, and its site
was deliberately denuded by killing its trees.*5 The loyalty of the troops
was secured by dividing a large part of the spoils among them; their
bravery was ensured by the general rule of the Near East that all captives
in war might be enslaved or slain. Soldiers were rewarded for every sev-
ered head they brought in from the field, so that the aftermath of a vic-
tory generally witnessed the wholesale decapitation of fallen foes.89 Most
often the prisoners, who would have consumed much food in a long
campaign, and would have constituted a danger and nuisance in the rear,
were despatched after the battle; they knelt with their backs to their
captors, who beat their heads in with clubs, or cut them off with cutlasses.
Scribes stood by to count the number of prisoners taken and killed by
each soldier, and apportioned the booty accordingly; the king, if time
permitted, presided at the slaughter. The nobles among the defeated
were given more special treatment: their ears, noses, hands and feet were
sliced off, or they were thrown from high towers, or they and their chil-
dren were beheaded, or flayed alive, or roasted over a slow fire. No com-
punction seems to have been felt at this waste of human life; the birth
rate would soon make up for it, and meanwhile it relieved the pressure of
population upon the means of subsistence." Probably it was in part by
their reputation for mercy to prisoners of war that Alexander and Caesar
undermined the morale of the enemy, and conquered the Mediterranean
world.
Next to the army the chief reliance of the monarch was upon the church,
and he paid lavishly for the support of the priests. The formal head of the
272 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
state was by concerted fiction the god Ashur; all pronouncements were in
his name, all laws were edicts of his divine will, all taxes were collected for
his treasury, all campaigns were fought to furnish him (or, occasionally, an-
other deity) with spoils and glory. The king had himself described as a god,
usually an incarnation of Shamash, the sun. The religion of Assyria, like its
language, its science and its arts, was imported from Sumeria and Babylonia,
with occasional adaptations to the needs of a military state.
The adaptation was most visible in the case of the law, which was dis-
tinguished by a martial ruthlessness. Punishment ranged from public exhibi-
tion to forced labor, twenty to a hundred lashes, the slitting of nose and
ears, castration, pulling out the tongue, gouging out the eyes, impalement,
and beheading.28 The laws of Sargon II prescribe such additional delicacies
as the drinking of poison, and the burning of the offender's son or daughter
alive on the altar of the god;20 but there is no evidence of these laws being
carried out in the last millennium before Christ. Adultery, rape and some
forms of theft were considered capital crimes.30 Trial by ordeal was occa-
sionally employed; the accused, sometimes bound in fetters, was flung into
the river, and his guilt was left to the arbitrament of the water. In general
Assyrian law was less secular and more primitive than the Babylonian Code
of Hammurabi, which apparently preceded it in time.*
Local administration, originally by feudal barons, fell in the course of time
into the hands of provincial prefects or governors appointed by the king; this
form of imperial government was taken over by Persia, and passed on from
Persia to Rome. The prefects were expected to collect taxes, to organize
the corvee for works which, like irrigation, could not be left to personal
initiative; and above all to raise regiments and lead them in the royal cam-
paigns. Meanwhile royal spies (or, as we should say, "intelligence officers")
kept watch on these prefects and their aides, and informed the king con-
cerning the state of the nation.
All in all, the Assyrian government was primarily an instrument of
war. For war was often more profitable than peace; it cemented dis-
cipline, intensified patriotism, strengthened the royal power, and brought
abundant spoils and slaves for the enrichment and service of the capital.
Hence Assyrian history is largely a picture of cities sacked and villages
or fields laid waste. When Ashurbanipal suppressed the revolt of his
brother, Shamash-shum-ukin, and captured Babylon after a long and
bitter siege,
* The oldest extant Assyrian laws are ninety articles contained on three tablets found at
Ashur and dating ca. 1300 H.C.SI
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA *73
the city presented a terrible spectacle, and shocked even the
Assyrians. . . . Most of the numerous victims to pestilence or
famine lay about the streets or in the public squares, a prey to the
dogs and swine; such of the inhabitants and the soldiery as were
comparatively strong had endeavored to escape into the country,
and only those remained who had not sufficient strength to drag
themselves beyond the walls. Ashurbanipal pursued the fugitives,
and having captured nearly all of them, vented on them the full
fury of his vengeance. He caused the tongues of the soldiers to be
torn out, and then had them clubbed to death. He massacred the
common folk in front of the great winged bulls which had already
witnessed a similar butchery half a century before under his grand-
father Sennacherib. The corpses of the victims remained long un-
buried, a prey to all unclean beasts and birds.8"
The weakness of Oriental monarchies was bound up with this addiction
to violence. Not only did the subject provinces repeatedly revolt, but
within the royal palace or family itself violence again and again attempted
to upset what violence had established and maintained. At or near the end
of almost every reign some disturbance broke out over the succession to
the throne; the aging monarch saw conspiracies forming around him, and
in several cases he was hastened to his end by murder. The nations of the
Near East preferred violent uprisings to corrupt elections, and their form
of recall was assassination. Some of these wars were doubtless inevitable:
barbarians prowled about every frontier, and one reign of weakness
would see the Scythians, the Cimmerians, or some other horde, sweeping
down upon the wealth of the Assyrian cities. And perhaps we exaggerate
the frequency of war and violence in these Oriental states, through the
accident that ancient monuments and modern chroniclers have preserved
the dramatic record of battles, and ignored the victories of peace. His-
torians have been prejudiced in favor of bloodshed; they found it, or
thought their readers would find it, more interesting than the quiet
achievements of the mind. We think war less frequent today because we
are conscious of the lucid intervals of peace, while history seems con-
scious only of the fevered crises of war.
274 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
III. ASSYRIAN LIFE
Industry and trade—Marriage and morals— Religion and science-
Letters and libraries— The Assyrian ideal of a gentleman
The economic life of Assyria did not differ much from that of Baby-
lonia, for in many ways the two countries were merely the north and
south of one civilization. The southern kingdom was more commercial, the
northern more agricultural; rich Babylonians were usually merchants, rich
Assyrians were most often landed gentry actively supervising great estates,
and looking with Roman scorn upon men who made their living by buying
cheap and selling dear." Nevertheless the same rivers flooded and nour-
ished the land, the same method of ridges and canals controlled the over-
flow, the same shadufs raised the water from ever deeper beds to fields
sown with the same wheat and barley, millet and sesame.* The same in-
dustries supported the life of the towns; the same system of weights and
measures governed the exchange of goods; and though Nineveh and her
sister capitals were too far north to be great centers of commerce, the
wealth brought to them by Assyria's sovereigns filled them with handicrafts
and trade. Metal was mined or imported in new abundance, and towards
700 B.C. iron replaced bronze as the basic metal of industry and armament.85
Metal was cast, glass was blown, textiles were dyed,t earthenware was
enameled, and houses were as well equipped in Nineveh as in Europe before
the Industrial Revolution.88 During the reign of Sennacherib an aqueduct was
built which brought water to Nineveh from thirty miles away; a thousand
feet of it, recently discovered,^ constitute the oldest aqueduct known. In-
dustry and trade were financed in part by private bankers, who charged
25% for loans. Lead, copper, silver and gold served as currency; and about
700 B.C. Sennacherib minted silver into half-shekel pieces— one of our earliest
examples of an official coinage.87
The people fell into five classes: patricians or nobles; craftsmen or master-
artisans, organized in guilds, and including the professions as well as the
trades; the unskilled but free workmen and peasants of town and village;
serfs bound to the soil on great estates, in the manner of medieval Europe;
* Other products of Assyrian cultivation were olives, grapes, garlic, onions, lettuce,
cress, beets, turnips, radishes, cucumbers, alfalfa, and licorice. Meat was rarely eaten by
any but the aristocracy;*4 except for fish this war-like nation was largely vegetarian.
fA tablet of Sennacherib, ca. 700 B.C., contains the oldest known reference to cotton:
"The tree that bore wool they clipped and shredded for cotton."*' It was probably im-
ported from India.
$By the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 275
and slaves captured in war or attached for debt, compelled to announce
their status by pierced ears and shaven head, and performing most of the
menial labor everywhere. On a bas-relief of Sennacherib we see super-
visers holding the whip over slaves who, in long parallel lines, are drawing a
heavy piece of statuary on a wooden sledge.88
Like all military states, Assyria encouraged a high birth rate by its
moral code and its laws. Abortion was a capital crime; a woman who
secured miscarriage, even a woman who died of attempting it, was to be
impaled on a stake.30 Though women rose to considerable power through
marriage and intrigue, their position was lower than in Babylonia. Severe
penalties were laid upon them for striking their husbands, wives were not
allowed to go out in public unveiled, and strict fidelity was exacted of
them— though their husbands might have all the concubines they could
afford.40 Prostitution was accepted as inevitable, and was regulated by the
state.40" The king had a varied harem, whose inmates were condemned to
a secluded life of dancing, singing, quarreling, needlework and conspir-
acy.41 A cuckolded husband might kill his rival in flagrante delicto, and
was held to be within his rights; this is a custom that has survived many
codes. For the rest the law of matrimony was as in Babylonia, except
that marriage was often by simple purchase, and in many cases the wife
lived in her father's house, visited occasionally by her husband."
In all departments of Assyrian life we meet with a patriarchal stern-
ness natural to a people that lived by conquest, and in every sense on the
border of barbarism. Just as the Romans took thousands of prisoners into
lifelong slavery after their victories, and dragged others to the Circus
Maximus to be torn to pieces by starving animals, so the Assyrians seemed
to find satisfaction— or a necessary tutelage for their sons— in torturing
captives, blinding children before the eyes of their parents, flaying men
alive, roasting them in kilns, chaining them in cages for the amusement of
the populace, and then sending the survivors off to execution.43 Ashur-
nasirpal tells how "all the chiefs who had revolted I flayed, with their
skins I covered the pillar, some in the midst I walled up, others on stakes
1 impaled, still others I arranged around the pillar on stakes. ... As for
the chieftains and royal officers who had rebelled, I cut off their mem-
bers."44 Ashurbanipal boasts that "I burned three thousand captives with
fire, I left not a single one among them alive to serve as a hostage."4*
Another of his inscriptions reads: "These warriors who had sinned against
276 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
Ashur and had plotted evil against me ... from their hostile mouths have
I torn their tongues, and I have compassed their destruction. As for the
others who remained alive, I offered them as a funerary sacrifice; . . .
their lacerated members have I given unto the dogs, the swine, the wolves.
... By accomplishing these deeds I have rejoiced the heart of the great
gods."" Another monarch instructs his artisans to engrave upon the
bricks these claims on the admiration of posterity: "My war chariots
crush men and beasts. . . . The monuments which I erect are made of
human corpses from which I have cut the head and limbs. I cut off the
hands of all those whom I capture alive."47 Reliefs at Nineveh show men
being impaled or flayed, or having their tongues torn out; one shows a
king gouging out the eyes of prisoners with a lance while he holds their
heads conveniently in place with a cord passed through their lips." As we
read such pages we become reconciled to our own mediocrity.
Religion apparently did nothing to mollify this tendency to brutality and
violence. It had less influence with the government than in Babylonia, and
took its cue from the needs and tastes of the kings. Ashur, the national
deity, was a solar god, warlike and merciless to his enemies; his people be-
lieved that he took a divine satisfaction in the execution of prisoners before
his shrine.'9 The essential function of Assyrian religion was to train the
future citizen to a patriotic docility, and to teach him the art of wheedling
favors out of the gods by magic and sacrifice. The only religious texts that
survive from Assyria are exorcisms and omens. Long lists of omens have
come down to us in which the inevitable results of every manner of event
are given, and methods of avoiding them are prescribed.150 The world was
pictured as crowded with demons, who had to be warded off by charms
suspended about the neck, or by long and careful incantations.
In such an atmosphere the only science that flourished was that of war.
Assyrian medicine was merely Babylonian medicine; Assyrian astronomy
was merely Babylonian astrology— the stars were studied chiefly with a view
to divination." We find no evidence of philosophical speculation, no se-
cular attempt to explain the world. Assyrian philologists made lists of plants,
probably for the use of medicine, and thereby contributed moderately to
establish botany; other scribes made lists of nearly all the objects they had
found under the sun, and their attempts to classify these objects ministered
slightly to the natural science of the Greeks. From these lists our language
has taken, usually through the Greeks, such words as hangar, gypsum, camel,
plinth, shekel, rose, ammonia, jasper, cane, cherry, laudanum* naphtha, sesame,
hyssop and myrrh*
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 277
The tablets recording the deeds of the kings, though they have the
distinction of being at once bloody and dull, must be accorded the honor
of being among the oldest extant forms of historiography. They were in
the early years mere chronicles, registering royal victories, and admitting
of no defeats; they became, in later days, embellished and literary ac-
counts of the important events of the reign. The clearest title of Assyria
to a place in a history of civilization was its libraries. That of Ashur-
banipal contained 30,000 clay tablets, classified and catalogued, each tablet
bearing an easily identifiable tag. Many of them bore the King's book-
mark: "Whoso shall carry off this tablet, . . . may Ashur and Belit over-
throw him in wrath . . . and destroy his name and posterity from the
land."53 A large number of the tablets are copies of undated older works,
of which earlier forms are being constantly discovered; the avowed pur-
pose of AshurbanipaPs library was to preserve the literature of Baby-
lonia from oblivion. But only a small number of the tablets would now
be classed as literature; the majority of them are official records, astro-
logical and augural observations, oracles, medical prescriptions and re-
ports, exorcisms, hymns, prayers, and genealogies of the kings and the
gods." Among the least dull of the tablets are two in which Ashur-
banipal confesses, with quaint insistence, his scandalous delight in books
and knowledge:
I, Ashurbanipal, understood the wisdom of Nabu,* I acquired an
understanding of all the arts of tablet-writing. I learnt to shoot the
bow, to ride horses and chariots, and to hold the reins. . . . Mar-
duk, the wise one of the gods, presented me with information and
understanding as a gift. . . . Enurt and Nergal made me virile and
strong, of incomparable force. I understood the craft of the wise
Adapa, the hidden secrets of all the scribal art; in heavenly and
earthly buildings I read and pondered; in the meetings of clerks I
was present; I watched the omens, I explained the heavens with the
learned priests, recited the complicated multiplications and divisions
that are not immediately apparent. The beautiful writings in Su-
merian that are obscure, in Akkadian that are difficult to bear in mind,
it was my joy to repeat. ... I mounted colts, rode them with
prudence so that they were not violent; I drew the bow, sped the
arrow, the sign of the warrior. I flung the quivering javelins like
short lances. ... I held the reins like a charioteer. ... I directed
* The god of wisdom, corresponding to Thoth, Hermes and Mercury.
278 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
the weaving of reed shields and breastplates like a pioneer. I had
the learning that all clerks of every kind possess when their time of
maturity comes. At the same time I learnt what is proper for lord-
ship, I went my royal ways.80
IV. ASSYRIAN ART
Minor arts — Bas-relief — Statuary — Building — A page from
"Sardanapalus"
At last, in the field of art, Assyria equaled her preceptor Babylonia,
and in bas-relief surpassed her. Stimulated by the influx of wealth into
Ashur, Kalakh and Nineveh, artists and artisans began to produce— for
nobles and their ladies, for kings and palaces, for priests and temples-
jewels of every description, cast metal as skilfully designed and finely
wrought as on the great gates at Balawat, and luxurious furniture of richly
carved and costly woods strengthened with metal and inlaid with gold,
silver, bronze, or precious stones.50 Pottery was poorly developed, and
music, like so much else, was merely imported from Babylon; but tem-
pera painting in bright colors under a thin glaze became one of the char-
acteristic arts of Assyria, from which it passed to its perfection in
Persia. Painting, as always in the ancient East, was a secondary and de-
pendent art.
In the heyday of Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbani-
pal, and presumably through their lavish patronage, the art of bas-relief
created new masterpieces for the British Museum. One of the best ex-
amples, however, dates from Ashurnasirpal II; it represents, in chaste
alabaster, the good god Marduk overcoming the evil god of chaos,
Tiamat.17 The human figures in Assyrian reliefs are stiff and coarse and
all alike, as if some perfect model had insisted on being reproduced for-
ever; all the men have the same massive heads, the same brush of whiskers,
the same stout bellies, the same invisible necks; even the gods are these
same Assyrians in very slight disguise. Only now and then do the human
figures take on vitality, as in the alabaster relief depicting spirits in adora-
tion before a palmetto tree,58 and the fine limestone stele of Shamsi-Adad
VII found at Kalakh.89 Usually it is the animal reliefs that stir us; never
before or since has carving pictured animals so successfully. The panels
monotonously repeat scenes of war and the hunt; but the eye never tires
of their vigor of action, their flow of motion, and their simple directness
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 279
of line. It is as if the artist, forbidden to portray his masters realistically
or individually, had given all his lore and skill to the animals; he repre-
sents them in a profusion of species— lions, horses, asses, goats, dogs, deer,
birds, grasshoppers— and in every attitude except rest; too often he shows
them in the agony of death; but even then they are the center and life of
his picture and his art. The majestic horses of Sargon II on the reliefs
at Khorsabad;80 the wounded lioness from Sennacherib's palace at Nine-
veh;61 the dying lion in alabaster from the palace of Ashurbanipal;8* the
lion-hunts of Ashurnasirpal II and Ashurbanipal;" the resting lioness,*4 and
the lion released from a trap;" the fragment in which a lion and his mate
bask in the shade of the trees80— these are among the world's choicest mas-
terpieces in this form of art. The representation of natural objects in the
reliefs is stylized and crude; the forms are heavy, the outlines are hard,
the muscles are exaggerated; and there is no other attempt at perspective
than the placing of the distant in the upper half of the picture, on the same
scale as the foreground presented below. Gradually, however, the guild
of sculptors under Sennacherib learned to offset these defects with a
boldly realistic portrayal, a technical finish, and above all a vivid percep-
tion of action, which, in the field of animal sculpture, have never been
surpassed. Bas-relief was to the Assyrian what sculpture was to the
Greek, or painting to the Italians of the Renaissance— a favorite art
uniquely expressing the national ideal of form and character.
We cannot say as much for Assyrian sculpture. The carvers of
Nineveh and Kalakh seem to have preferred relief to work in the
round; very little full sculpture has come down to us from the ruins, and
none of it is of a high order. The animals are full of power and majesty,
as if conscious of not only physical but moral superiority to man— like
the bulls that guarded the gateway at Khorsabad;87 the human or divine
figures are primitively coarse and heavy, adorned but undistinguished,
erect but dead. An exception might be made for the massive statue of
Ashurnasirpal II now in the British Museum; through all its heavy lines
one sees a man every inch a king: royal sceptre firmly grasped, thick lips
set with determination, eyes cruel and alert, a bull-like neck boding short
shrift for enemies and falsifiers of tax-reports, and two gigantic feet full
poised on the back of the world.
We must not take too seriously our judgments of this sculpture; very
likely the Assyrians idolized knotted muscles and short necks, and would
have looked with martial scorn upon our almost feminine slenderness, or
280 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
the smooth, voluptuous grace of Praxiteles' Hermes and the Apollo Bel-
vedere. As for Assyrian architecture, how can we estimate its excellence
when nothing remains of it but ruins almost level with the sand, and
serving chiefly as a hook upon which brave archeologists may hang their
imaginative "restorations"? Like Babylonian and recent American archi-
tecture, the Assyrian aimed not at beauty but at grandeur, and sought it
by mass design. Following the traditions of Mesopotamian art, Assyrian
architecture adopted brick as its basic material, but went its own way by
facing it more lavishly with stone. It inherited the arch and the vault from
the south, developed them, and made some experiments in columns which
led the way to the caryatids and the voluted "Ionic" capitals of the Per-
sians and the Greeks." The palaces squatted over great areas of ground,
and were wisely limited to two or three stories in height;60 ordinarily they
were designed as a series of halls and chambers enclosing a quiet and
shaded court. The portals of the royal residences were guarded with
monstrous stone animals, the entrance hall was lined with historical re-
liefs and statuary, the floors were paved with alabaster slabs, the walls
were hung with costly tapestries, or paneled with precious woods, and
bordered with elegant mouldings; the roofs were reinforced with mas-
ive beams, sometimes covered with leaf of silver or gold, and the ceilings
were often painted with representations of natural scenery.70
The six mightiest warriors of Assyria were also its greatest builders.
Tiglath-Pileser I rebuilt in stone the temples of Ashur, and left word
about one of them that he had "made its interior brilliant like the vault
of heaven, decorated its walls like the splendor of the rising stars, and
made it superb with shining brightness."71 The later emperors gave gen-
erously to the temples, but, like Solomon, they preferred their palaces.
Ashurnasirpal II built at Kalakh an immense edifice of stone-faced brick,
ornamented with reliefs praising piety and war. Nearby, at Balawat, Ras-
sam found the ruins of another structure, from which he rescued two
bronze gates of magnificent workmanship.™ Sargon II commemorated
himself by raising a spacious palace at Dur-Sharrukin (i.e., Fort Sargon,
on the site of the modern Khorsabad) ; its gateway was flanked by winged
bulls, its walls were decorated with reliefs and shining tiles, its vast rooms
were equipped with delicately carved furniture, and were adorned with
imposing statuary. From every victory Sargon brought more slaves to
work on this construction, and more marble, lapis lazuli, bronze, silver and
gold to beautify it. Around it he set a group of temples, and in the rear
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 2&I
he offered to the god a ziggurat of seven stories, topped with silver and
gold. Sennacherib raised at Nineveh a royal mansion called "The Incom-
parable," surpassing in size all other palaces of antiquity;78 its walls and
floors sparkled with precious metals, woods, and stones; its tiles vied in
their brilliance with the luminaries of day and night; the metal-workers
cast for it gigantic lions and oxen of copper, and the sculptors carved for
it winged bulls of limestone and alabaster, and lined its walls with pas-
toral symphonies in bas-relief. Esarhaddon continued the rebuilding and
enlargement of Nineveh, and excelled all his predecessors in the grandeur
of his edifices and the luxuriousncss of their equipment; a dozen provinces
provided him with materials and men; new ideas for columns and deco-
rations came to him during his sojourn in Egypt; and when at last his
palaces and temples were complete they were filled with the artistic
booty and conceptions of the whole Near Eastern world.74
The worst commentary on Assyrian architecture lies in the fact that
within sixty years after Esarhaddon had finished his palace it was crum-
bling into ruins.75 Ashurbanipal tells us how he rebuilt it; as we read
his inscription the centuries fade, and we see dimly into the heart of the
King:
At that time the harem, the resting-place of the palace . . .
which Sennacherib, my grandfather, had built for his royal dwell-
ing, had become old with joy and gladness, and its walls had fallen.
I, Ashurbanipal, the Great King, the mighty King, the King of the
World, the King of Assyria, . . . because I had grown up in that
harem, and Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Ramman, Bel, Nabu, Ishtar, . . .
Ninib, Nergal and Nusku had preserved me therein as crown prince,
and had extended their good protection and shelter of prosperity
over me, . . . and had constantly sent me joyful tidings therein of
victory over my enemies; and because my dreams on my bed at
night were pleasant, and in the morning my fancies were bright,
... I tore down its ruins; in order to extend its area I tore it all
down. I erected a building the site of whose structure was fifty
tibki in extent. I raised a terrace; but I was afraid before the shrines
of the great gods my lords, and did not raise that structure very
high. In a good month, on a favorable day, I put in its foundations
upon that terrace, and laid its brickwork. I emptied wine of ses-
ame and wine of grapes upon its cellar, and poured them also
upon its earthen wall. In order to build that harem the people of
282 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
my land hauled its bricks there in wagons of Elam which I had car-
ried away as spoil by the command of the gods. I made the kings
of Arabia who had violated their treaty with me, and whom I had
captured alive in battle with my own hands, carry baskets and
(wear) workmen's caps in order to build that harem. . . . They
spent their days in moulding its bricks and performing forced
service for it to the playing of music. With joy and rejoicing I
built it from its foundations to its roof. I made more room in it
than before, and made the work upon it splendid. I laid upon it
long beams of cedar, which grew upon Sirara and Lebanon. I
covered doors of liaru-wood, whose odor is pleasant, with a sheath
of copper, and hung them in its doorways. ... I planted around
it a grove of all kinds of trees, and . . . fruits of every kind. I
finished the work of its construction, offered splendid sacrifices
to the gods my lords, dedicated it with joy and rejoicing, and
entered therein under a splendid canopy.76
V. ASSYRIA PASSES
The last days of a king — Sources of Assyrian decay — The fall
of Nineveh
Nevertheless the "Great King, the mighty King, the King of the
World, the King of Assyria" complained in his old age of the misfortunes
that had come to his lot. The last tablet bequeathed us by his wedge
raises again the questions of Ecclesiastes and Job:
I did well unto god and man, to dead and living. Why have sick-
ness and misery befallen me? I cannot do away with the strife in
my country and the dissensions in my family; disturbing scandals
oppress me always. Illness of mind and flesh bow me down; with
cries of woe I bring my days to an end. On the day of the city
god, the day of the festival, I am wretched; death is seizing hold
upon me, and bears me down. With lamentation and mourning I
wail day and night, I groan, "O God! grant even to one who is
impious that he may see thy light!"77*
* Diodorus-how reliably we cannot say— pictures the King as rioting away his years in
feminine comforts and gcndcrlcss immorality, and credits him with composing his own
reckless epitaph:
Knowing full well that thou wcrt mortal born,
Thy heart lift up, take thy delight in feasts;
CHAP. X) ASSYRIA 283
We do not know how Ashurbanipal died; the story dramatized by
Byron— that he set fire to his own palace and perished in the flames— rests
on the authority of the marvel-loving Ctesias," and may be merely legend.
His death was in any case a symbol and an omen; soon Assyria too was to
die, and from causes of which Ashurbanipal had been a part. For the
economic vitality of Assyria had been derived too rashly from abroad; it
depended upon profitable conquests bringing in riches and trade; at any
moment it could be ended with a decisive defeat. Gradually the qualities
of body and character that had helped to make the Assyrian armies in-
vincible were weakened by the very victories that they won; in each vic-
tory it was the strongest and bravest who died, while the infirm and cau-
tious survived to multiply their kind; it was a dysgenic process that per-
haps made for civilization by weeding out the more brutal types, but
undermined the biological basis upon which Assyria had risen to power.
The extent of her conquests had helped to weaken her; not only had
they depopulated her fields to feed insatiate Mars, but they had brought
into Assyria, as captives, millions of destitute aliens who bred with the
fertility of the hopeless, destroyed all national unity of character and
blood, and became by their growing numbers a hostile and disintegrating
force in the very midst of the conquerors. More and more the army
itself was filled by these men of other lands, while semi-barbarous maraud-
ers harassed every border, and exhausted the resources of the country in
an endless defense of its unnatural frontiers.
Ashurbanipal died in 626 B.C. Fourteen years later an army of Baby-
lonians under Nabopolassar united with an army of Medes under Cyax-
ares and a horde of Scythians from the Caucasus, and with amazing ease
and swiftness captured the citadels of the north. Nineveh was laid waste
as ruthlessly and completely as her kings had once ravaged Susa and
Babylon; the city was put to the torch, the population was slaughtered or
enslaved, and the palace so recently built by Ashurbanipal was sacked and
destroyed. At one blow Assyria disappeared from history. Nothing
When dead no pleasure more is thine. Thus I,
Who once o'er mighty Ninus ruled, am naught
But dust. Yet these are mine which gave me joy
In life— the food I ate, my wantonness,
And love's delights. But all those other things
Men deem felicities are left behind."
Perhaps there is no inconsistency between this mood and that pictured in the text; the
one may have been the medical preliminary to the other.
284 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. X
remained of her except certain tactics and weapons of war, certain voluted
capitals of semi-"Ionic" columns, and certain methods of provincial ad-
ministration that passed down to Persia, Macedon and Rome. The Near
East remembered her for a while as a merciless unifier of a dozen lesser
states; and the Jews recalled Nineveh vengefully as "the bloody city,
full of lies and robbery."80 In a little while all but the mightiest of the
Great Kings were forgotten, and all their royal palaces were in ruins
under the drifting sands. Two hundred years after its capture, Xeno-
phon's Ten Thousand marched over the mounds that had been Nineveh,
and never suspected that these were the site of the ancient metropolis that
had ruled half the world. Not a stone remained visible of all the temples
with which Assyria's pious warriors had sought to beautify their greatest
capital. Even Ashur, the everlasting god, was dead.
CHAPTER XI
A Motley of Nations
I. THE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES
The ethnic scene— Mitannians— Hittites— Armenians— Scythians-
Phrygians — The Divine Mother — Lydians — Crcssus — Coin-
age—Croesus, Solon and Cyrus
TO a distant and yet discerning eye the Near East, in the days of
Nebuchadrezzar, would have seemed like an ocean in which vast
swarms of human beings moved about in turmoil, forming and dissolving
groups, enslaving and being enslaved, eating and being eaten, killing and
getting killed, endlessly. Behind and around the great empires— Egypt,
Babylonia, Assyria and Persia— flowered this medley of half nomad, half
settled tribes: Cimmerians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, Bithynians, Ashkanians,
Mysians, Maeonians, Carians, Lycians, Pamphylians, Pisidians, Lycaonians,
Philistines, Amorites, Canaanitcs, Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites and a
hundred other peoples each of which felt itself the center of geography
and history, and would have marveled at the ignorant prejudice of an
historian who would reduce them to a paragraph. Thoughont the history
of the Near East such nomads were a peril to the more settled kingdoms
which they almost surrounded; periodically droughts would fling them
upon these richer regions, necessitating frequent wars, and perpetual
readiness for war.1 Usually the nomad tribe survived the settled kingdom,
and overran it in the end. The world is dotted with areas where once
civilization flourished, and where nomads roam again.
In this seething ethnic sea certain minor states took shape, which, even
if only as conductors, contributed their mite to the heritage of the race.
The Mitannians interest us not as the early antagonists of Egypt in the
Near East, but as one of the first Indo-European peoples known to us in
Asia, and as the worshipers of gods— Mithra, Indra and Varuna— whose pas-
285
286 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XI
sage to Persia and India helps us to trace the movements of what was once
so conveniently called the "Aryan" race.*
The Hittites were among the most powerful and civilized of the early
Indo-European peoples. Apparently they had come down across the Bos-
phorus, the Hellespont, the ^Egean or the Caucasus, and had established
themselves as a ruling military caste over the indigenous agriculturists of
that mountainous peninsula, south of the Black Sea, which we know as Asia
Minor. Towards 1800 B.C. we find them settled near the sources of the
Tigris and the Euphrates; thence they spread their arms and influence into
Syria, and gave mighty Egypt some indignant concern. We have seen how
Rameses II was forced to make peace with them, and to acknowledge the
Hittite king as his equal. At Boghaz Keuit they made their capital and
centered their civilization: first on the iron which they mined in the moun-
tains bordering on Armenia, then on a code of laws much influenced by
Hammurabi's, and finally on a crude esthetic sense which drove them to
carve vast and awkward figures in the round, or upon the living rock.J
Their language, recently deciphered by Hronzny from the ten thousand clay
tablets found at Boghaz Keui by Hugo Winckler, was largely of Indo-Euro-
pean affinity; its declensional and conjugational forms closely resembled
those of Latin and Greek, and some of its simpler words are visibly akin to
English. § The Hittites wrote a pictographic script in their own queer
way— one line from left to right, the next from right to left, and so forth
alternately. They learned cuneiform from the Babylonians, taught Crete
* The word Aryan first appears in the Harri, one of the tribes of Mitanni. In general
it was the self-given appellation of peoples living near, or coming from, the shores of the
Caspian Sea. The term is properly applied today chiefly to the Mitannians, Hittites,
Mcdes, Persians, and Vedic Hindus— i.e., only to the eastern branch of the Indo-European
peoples, whose western branch populated Europe.*
tEast of the Halys River. Nearby, across the river, is Angora, capital of Turkey, and
lineal descendant of Ancyra, the ancient metropolis of Phrygia. We may be helped to a
cultural perspective by realizing that the Turks, whom we call "terrible," note with pride
the antiquity of their capital, and mourn the domination of Europe by barbaric infidels.
Every point is the center of the world.
t Baron von Oppenheim unearthed at Tell Halaf and elsewhere many relics of Hittite
art, which he has collected into his own museum, an abandoned factory in Berlin. Most
of these remains are dated by their finder about 1200 B.C.; some of them he attributes pre-
cariously to the fourth millennium B.C. The collection includes a group of lions crudely
but powerfully carved in stone, a bull in fine black stone, and figures of the Hittite triad
of gods—the Sun-god, the Weather-god, and Hepat, the Hittite Ishtar. One of the most
impressive of the figures is an ungainly Sphinx, before which is a stone vessel intended
for offerings.
§Cf., e.g., vadar, water; ezza, eat; ugay I (Latin ego); tug, thee; vesh, we; mu, me;
kuish, who (Lat. quis)\ quit, what (Lat. quid), etc.'
CHAP. Xl) A MOTLEY OF NATIONS 267
the use of the clay tablet for writing, and seem to have mingled with the
ancient Hebrews intimately enough to have given them their sharply)
aquiline nose, so that this Hebraic feature must now be considered strictly l
"Aryan."* Some of the surviving tablets are vocabularies giving Sumerian,
Babylonian and Hittite equivalents; others are administrative enactments re-
vealing a close-knit military and monarchical state; others contain two hun-
dred fragments of a code of laws, including price-regulations for commodi-
ties." The Hittites disappeared from history almost as mysteriously as they
entered it; one after another their capitals decayed— perhaps because their
great advantage, iron, became equally accessible to their competitors. The
last of these capitals, Carchemish, fell before the Assyrians in 717 B.C.
Just north of Assyria was a comparatively stable nation, known to the
Assyrians as Urartu, to the Hebrews as Ararat, and to later times as Ar-
menia. For many centuries, beginning before the dawn of recorded history
and continuing till the establishment of Persian rule over all of western
Asia, the Armenians maintained their independent government, their char-
acteristic customs and arts. Under their greatest king, Argistis II (ca. 708
B.C.), they grew rich by mining iron and selling it to Asia and Greece; they
achieved a high level of prosperity and comfort, of culture and manners;
they built great edifices of stone, and made excellent vases and statuettes.
They lost their wealth in costly wars of offense and defense against Assyria,
and passed under Persian domination in the days of the all-conquering Cyrus.
Still farther north, along the shores of the Black Sea, wandered the
Scythians, a horde of warriors half Mongol and half European, ferocious
bearded giants who lived in wagons, kept their women in purdah seclusion,8
rode bareback on wild horses, fought to live and lived to fight, drank the
blood of their enemies and used the scalps as napkins,7 weakened Assyria
with repeated raids, swept through western Asia (ca. 630-610 B.C.), de-
stroying and killing everything and everyone in their path, advanced to
the very cities of the Egyptian Delta, were suddenly decimated by a mys-
terious disease, and were finally overcome by the Medes and driven back
to their northern haunts.8* We catch from such a story another glimpse of
the barbaric hinterland that hedged in every ancient state.
* Hippocrates tells us that "their women, so long as they are virgins, ride, shoot, throw
the javelin while mounted, and fight with their enemies. They do not lay aside their
virginity until they have killed three of their enemies. ... A woman who takes to her-
self a husband no longer rides, unless she is compelled to do so by a general ex-
pedition. They have no right breast; for while they are yet babies their mothers
make red-hot a bronze instrument constructed for this very purpose and apply it to
the right breast and cauterize it, so that its growth is arrested, and all its strength and
bulk are diverted to the right shoulder and right arm."9
*88 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XI
Towards the end of the ninth century B.C. a new power arose in Asia
Minor, inheriting the remains of the Hittite civilization, and serving as a
cultural bridge to Lydia and Greece. The legend by which the Phrygians
tried to explain for curious historians the foundation of their kingdom
was symbolical of the rise and fall of nations. Their first king, Gordios,
was a simple peasant whose sole inheritance had been a pair of oxen;*
their next king, his son Midas, was a spendthrift who weakened the state
by that greed and extravagance which posterity represented through the
legend of his plea to the gods that he might turn anything to gold by
touching it. The plea was so well heard that everything Midas touched
turned to gold, even the food that he put to his lips; he was on the verge
of starvation when the gods allowed him to cleanse himself of the curse
by bathing in the river Pactolus— which has given up grains of gold
ever since.
The Phrygians made their way into Asia from Europe, built a capital
at Ancyra, and for a time contended with Assyria and Egypt for mastery
of the Near East. They adopted a native mother-goddess, Ma, rechristened
her Cybele from the mountains (kybcla) in which she dwelt, and wor-
shiped her as the great spirit of the untilled earth, the personification of
all the reproductive energies of nature. They took over from the aborig-
ines the custom of serving the goddess through sacred prostitution, and
accepted into their mythical lore the story of how Cybele had fallen
in love with the young god Atys,t and had compelled him to emasculate
himself in her honor; hence the priests of the Great Mother sacrificed
their manhood to her upon entering the service of her temples.11 These
barbarous legends fascinated the imagination of the Greeks, and entered
profoundly into their mythology and their literature. The Romans offi-
cially adopted Cybele into their religion, and some of the orgiastic rites
that marked the Roman carnivals were derived from the wild rituals with
which the Phrygians annually celebrated the death and resurrection of the
handsome Atys.1*
*The oracle of Zeus had commanded the Phrygians to choose as king the first man
who rode up to the temple in a wagon; hence the selection of Gordios. The new king
dedicated his car to the god; and a new oracle predicted that the man who should suc-
ceed in untying the intricate bark knot that bound the yoke of the wagon to the pole
would rule over all Asia. Alexander, story goes, cut the "Gordian knot" with a blow of
his sword.
t Atys, we arc informed, was miraculously born of the virgin-goddess Nana, who con-
ceived him by placing a pomegranate between her breasts.10
CHAP. Xl) A MOTLEY OF NATIONS 289
The ascendency of Phrygia in Asia Minor was ended with the rise
of the new kingdom of Lydia. King Gyges established it with its capital
at Sardis; Alyattes, in a long reign of forty-nine years, raised it to pros-
perity and power; Croesus (570-546 B.C.) inherited and enjoyed it, ex-
panded it by conquest to include nearly all of Asia Minor, and then sur-
rendered it to Persia. By generous bribes to local politicians he brought
one after another of the petty states that surrounded him into subjection
to Lydia, and by pious and unprecedented hecatombs to local deities
he placated these subject peoples and persuaded them that he was the
darling of their gods. Croesus further distinguished himself by issuing
gold and silver coins of admirable design, minted and guaranteed at their
face value by the state; and though these were not, as long supposed, the
first official coins in history, much less the invention of coinage,* never-
theless they set an example that stimulated trade throughout the Mediter-
ranean world. Men had for many centuries used various metals as stand-
ards of value and exchange; but these, whether copper, bronze, iron,
silver or gold, had in most countries been measured by weight or other
tests at each transaction. It was no small improvement that replaced such
cumbersome tokens with a national currency; by accelerating the passage
of goods from those that could best produce them to those that most
effectively demanded them it added to the wealth of the world, and pre-
pared for mercantile civilizations like those of Ionia and Greece, in which
the proceeds of commerce were to finance the achievements of literature
and art.
Of Lydian literature nothing remains; nor docs any specimen survive
of the preciously wrought vases of gold, iron and silver that Croesus
offered to the conquered gods. The vases found in Lydian tombs, and
now housed in the Louvre, show how the artistic leadership of Egypt
and Babylonia was yielding, in the Lydia of Croesus' day, to the growing
influence of Greece; their delicacy of execution rivals their fidelity to
nature. When Herodotus visited Lydia he found its customs almost in-
distinguishable from those of his fellow-Greeks; all that remained to sep-
arate them, he tells us, was the way in which the daughters of the com-
mon people earned their dowries—by prostitution.18
The same great gossip is our chief authority for the dramatic story
of Croesus's fall. Herodotus recounts how Croesus displayed his riches
* Older coins have been found at Mohenjo-daro, in India (2900 B.C.); and we have seen
how Sennacherib (ca. 700 B.C.) minced half-shekel pieces.
2pO THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XI
to Solon, and then asked him whom he considered the happiest of men.
Solon, after naming three individuals who were all dead, refused to call
Croesus happy, on the ground that there was no telling what misfortunes
the morrow would bring him. Croesus dismissed the great legislator as a
fool, turned his hand to plotting against Persia, and suddenly found the
hosts of Cyrus at his gates. According to the same historian the Persians
won through the superior stench of their camels, which the horses of
the Lydian cavalry could not bear; the horses fled, the Lydians were
routed, and Sardis fell. Croesus, according to ancient tradition, prepared
a great funeral pyre, took his place on it with his wives, his daughters,
and the noblest young men among the surviving citizens, and ordered his
eunuchs to burn himself and them to death. In his last moments he re-
membered the words of Solon, mourned his own blindness, and re-
proached the gods who had taken all -his hecatombs and paid him with
destruction. Cyrus, if we may follow Herodotus," took pity on him,
ordered the flames to be extinguished, carried Croesus with him to Persia,
and made him one of his most trusted counsellors.
II. THE SEMITIC PEOPLES
The antiquity of the Arabs— Phoenicians— Their world trade—
Their circumnavigation of Africa — Colonies — Tyre and
Sidon — Deities — The dissemination of the alphabet —
Syria — Astarte — The death and resurrection of
Adoni—The sacrifice of children
11 »
If we attempt to mitigate the confusion of tongues in the Near East
by distinguishing the northern peoples of the region as mostly Indo-
European, and the central and southern peoples, from Assyria to Arabia,
as Semitic,* we shall have to remember that reality is never so clear-cut
in its differences as the rubrics under which we dismember it for neat
handling. The Near East was divided by mountains and deserts into
localities naturally isolated and therefore naturally diverse in language and
traditions; but not only did trade tend to assimilate language, customs and
arts along its main routes (as, for example, along the great rivers from
Nineveh and Carchemish to the Persian Gulf), but the migrations and
imperial deportations of vast communities so mingled stocks and speech
* The term Semite is derived from Shem, legendary son of Noah, on the theory that
Shem was the ancestor of all the Semitic peoples.
CHAP.Xl) A MOTLEY OF NATIONS 291
that a certain homogeneity of culture accompanied the heterogeneity of
blood. By "Indo-European," then, we shall mean predominantly Indo-
European; by "Semitic" we shall mean predominantly Semitic: no strain
was unmixed, no culture was left uninfluenced by its neighbors or its
enemies. We are to vision the vast area as a scene of ethnic diversity and
flux, in which now the Indo-European, now the Semitic, stock for a
time prevailed, but only to take on the general cultural character of the
whole. Hammurabi and Darius I were separated by differences of blood
and religion, and by almost as many centuries as those that divide us from
Christ; nevertheless, when we examine the two great kings we perceive
that they are essentially and profoundly akin.
The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia. Out of that
arid region, where the "man-plant" grows so vigorously and hardly any
other plant will grow at all, came, in a succession of migrations, wave
after wave of sturdy, reckless stoics no longer supportable by desert and
oases, and bound to conquer for themselves a place in the shade. Those
who remained behind created the civilization of Arabia and the Bedouin:
the patriarchal family, the stern morality of obedience, the fatalism of
a hard environment, and the ignorant courage to kill their own daughters
as offerings to the gods. Nevertheless they did not take religion very
much to heart till Mohammed came, and they neglected the arts and re-
finements of life as effeminate devices for degenerate men. For a time they
controlled the trade with the further East: their ports at Cannch and Aden
were heaped with the riches of the Indies, and their patient caravans
carried these goods precariously overland to Phoenicia and Babylon. In
the interior of their broad peninsula they built cities, palaces and temples,
but they did not encourage foreigners to come and see them. For thou-
sands of years they have lived their own life, kept their own customs,
kept their own counsel; they are the same today as in the time of Cheops
and Gudea; they have seen a hundred kingdoms rise and fall about them;
and their soil is still jealously theirs, guarded from profane feet and alien
eyes.
Who, now, were those Phoenicians who have so often been spoken
of in these pages, whose ships sailed every sea, whose merchants bar-
gained in every port? The historian is abashed before any question of
origins: he must confess that he knows next to nothing about either the
early or the late history of this ubiquitous, yet elusive, people." We do
not know whence they came, nor when; we are not certain that they
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XI
were Semites;* and as to the date of their arrival on the Mediterranean
coast, we cannot contradict the statement of the scholars of Tyre, who
told Herodotus that their ancestors had come from the Persian Gulf, and
had founded the city in what we should call the twenty-eighth century
before Christ." Even their name is problematical: the phoinix from which
the Greeks coined it may mean the red dye that Tyrian merchants sold,
or a palm-tree that flourishes along the Phoenician coast. That coast, a
narrow strip a hundred miles long and only ten miles wide, between Syria
and the sea, was almost all of Phoenicia; the people never thought it worth
while to settle in the Lebanon hills behind them, or to bring these ranges
under their rule; they were content that this beneficent barrier should
protect them from the more warlike nations whose goods they carried
out into all the lanes of the sea.
Those mountains compelled them to live on the water. From the Sixth
Egyptian Dynasty onward they were the busiest merchants of the ancient
world; and when they liberated themselves from Egypt (ca. 1200 B.C.)
they became masters of the Mediterranean. They themselves manufac-
tured various forms and objects of glass and metal; they made enameled
vases, weapons, ornaments and jewelry; they had a monopoly of the purple
dye which they extracted from the molluscs abounding along their
shores;18 and the women of Tyre were famous for the gorgeous colors
with which they stained the products of their deft needlework. These,
and the exportable surplus of India and the Near East— cereals, wines,
textiles and precious stones— they shipped to every city of the Mediter-
ranean far and near, bringing back, in return, lead, gold and iron from
the south shores of the Black Sea, copper, cypress and corn from Cyprus, t
ivory from Africa, silver from Spain, tin from Britain, and slaves from
everywhere. They were shrewd traders; they persuaded the natives of
Spain to give them, in exchange for a cargo of oil, so great a quantity of
silver that the holds of their ships could not contain it— whereupon the
subtle Semites replaced the iron or stones in their anchors with silver, and
sailed prosperously away.10 Not satisfied with this, they enslaved the na-
tives, and made them work for long hours in the mines for a subsistence
wage.J Like all early voyagers, and some old languages, they made scant
* Autran has argued that they were a branch of the Cretan civilization."
t Copper and cypress took their names from Cyprus.
$ Cf. Gibbon: "Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old
world. The discovery of the rich western continent by the Phoenicians, and the oppres-
CHAP.Xl) A MOTLEY OF NATIONS 293
distinction between trade and treachery, commerce and robbery; they
stole from the weak, cheated the stupid, and were honest with the rest.
Sometimes they captured ships on the high seas, and confiscated their
cargoes and their crews; sometimes they lured curious natives into visiting
the Phoenician vessels, and then sailed off with them to sell them as
slaves.21 They had much to do with giving the trading Semites of antiquity
an evil reputation, especially with the early Greeks, who did the same
things.*
Their low and narrow galleys, some seventy feet long, set a new style
of design by abandoning the inward-curving bow of the Egyptian vessel,
and turning it outward into a sharp point for cleaving wind or water,
or the ships of the enemy. One large rectangular sail, hoisted on a mast
fixed in the keel, helped the galley-slaves who provided most of the
motive-power with their double bank of oars. On a deck above the
rowers, soldiers stood on guard, ready for trade or war. These frail
ships, having no compasses and drawing hardly five feet of water,
kept cautiously near the shore, and for a long time dared not move during
the night. Gradually the art of navigation developed to the point where
the Phoenician pilots, guiding themselves by the North Star (or the
Phoenician Star, as the Greeks called it), adventured into the oceans,
and at last circumnavigated Africa, sailing down the cast coast first, and
"discovering" the Cape of Good Hope some two thousand years before
Vasco da Gama. "When autumn came," says Herodotus, "they went
ashore, sowed the land, and waited for harvest; then, having reaped the
corn, they put to sea again. When two years had thus passed, in the
third, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), they arrived
in Egypt."23 What an adventure!
At strategic points along the Mediterranean they established garrisons
that grew in time into populous colonies or cities: at Cadiz, Carthage
and Marseilles, in Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, even in distant
England. They occupied Cyprus, Melos and Rhodes.84 They took the
arts and sciences of Egypt, Crete and the Near East and spread them
in Greece, Africa, Italy and Spain. They bound together the East and
sion of the simple natives, who were compelled to labor in their own mines for the
benefit of the strangers, form an exact type of the more recent history of Spanish
America.""
* The Greeks, who for half a millennium were raiders and pirates, gave the name
"Phoenician" to anyone addicted to sharp practices."
294 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XI
the West in a commercial and cultural web, and began to redeem Europe
from barbarism.
Nourished by this trade, and skilfully governed by mercantile aristocra-
cies too clever in diplomacy and finance to waste their fortunes in war, the
cities of Phoenicia rose to a place among the richest and most powerful in
the world. Byblos thought itself the oldest of all cities; the god El had
founded it at the beginning of time, and to the end of its history it re-
mained the religious capital of Phoenicia. Because papyrus was one of the
principal articles in its trade, the Greeks took the name of the city as their
word for book—biblos— and from their word for books named our Bible— ta
biblia.
Some fifty miles to the south, also on the coast, lay Sidon; originally a
fortress, it grew rapidly into a village, a town, a prosperous city; it con-
tributed the best ships to Xerxes' fleet; and when later the Persians be-
sieged and captured it, its proud leaders deliberately burned it to the
ground, forty thousand inhabitants perishing in the conflagration." It was
already rebuilt and flourishing when Alexander came, and some of its en-
terprising merchants followed his army to India "for trafficking.""8
Greatest of the Phoenician cities was Tyre— i.e., the rock— built upon an
island several miles off the coast. It, too, began as a fortress; but its splen-
did harbor and its security from attack soon made it the metropolis of
Phoenicia, a cosmopolitan bedlam of merchants and slaves from the whole
Mediterranean world. Already in the ninth century B.C., Tyre had achieved
affluence under King Hiram, friend of King Solomon; and by the time of
Zechariah (ca. 520 B.C.), she had "heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold
as the mire of the streets."" "The houses here," said Strabo, "have many
stories, even more than the houses at Rome."* Its wealth and courage kept
it independent until Alexander came. The young god saw in it a challenge
to his omnipotence, and reduced it by building a causeway that turned the
island into a peninsula. The success of Alexandria completed the ruin of
Tyre.
Like every nation that feels the complexity of cosmic currents and the
variety of human needs, Phoenicia had many gods. Each city had its Baal
(i.e., Lord) or city-god, who was conceived as ancestor of the kings, and
source of the soil's fertility; the corn, the wine, the figs and the flax were
all the work of the holy Baal. The Baal of Tyre was called Melkarth; like
Hercules, with whom the Greeks identified him, he was a god of strength,
and accomplished feats worthy of a Miinchausen. Astarte was the Greek
name of the Phoenician Ishtar; she had the distinction of being worshiped in
CHAP. Xl) AMOTLEYOFNATIONS 295
some places as the goddess of a cold Artemisian chastity, and in others as
the amorous and wanton deity of physical love, in which form she was
identified by the Greeks with Aphrodite. As Ishtar-Mylitta received in sacri-
fice the virginity of her girl-devotees at Babylon, so the women who hon-
ored Astarte at Byblos had to give up their long tresses to her, or surrender
themselves to the first stranger who solicited their love in the precincts of
the temple. And as Ishtar had loved Tammuz, so Astarte had loved Adoni
(i.e., Lord), whose death on the tusks of a boar was annually mourned at
Byblos and Paphos (in Cyprus) with wailing and beating of the breast.
Luckily Adoni rose from the dead as often as he died, and ascended to heav-
en in the presence of his worshipers." Finally there was Moloch (i.e., King),
the terrible god to whom the Phoenicians offered living children as burnt
sacrifices; at Carthage, during a siege of the city (307 B.C.), two hundred
boys of die best families were burned to death on the altar of this fiery
divinity.30
Nevertheless the Phoenicians deserve some niche in the hall of civilized
nations, for it was probably their merchants who taught the Egyptian
alphabet to the nations of antiquity. Not the ecstasies of literature but
the needs of commerce brought unity to the peoples of the Mediterranean;
nothing could better illustrate a certain generative relation between
commerce and culture. We do not know that the Phoenicians introduced
this alphabet into Greece, though Greek tradition unanimously affirms
it;81 it is possible that Crete gave the alphabet to both the Phoenicians and
the Greeks.88 But it is more probable that the Phoenicians took letters
where they took papyrus. About noo B.C. we find them importing
papyrus from Egypt;38 for a nation that kept and carried many accounts
it was an inestimable convenience compared with the heavy clay tablets
of Mesopotamia; and the Egyptian alphabet was likewise an immense
improvement upon the clumsy syllabaries of the Near East. About 960
B.C. King Hiram of Tyre dedicated to one of his gods a bronze cup en-
graved with an alphabetic inscription;84 and about 840 B.C. King Mesha
of Moab announced his glory (on a stone now in the Louvre) in a
Semitic dialect written from right to left in letters corresponding to
those of the Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks reversed the facing of
some of the letters, because they wrote from left to right; but essentially
their alphabet was that which the Phoenicians had taught them, and
which they were in turn to teach to Europe. These strange symbols
are the most precious portion of our cultural heritage.
296 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XI
The oldest examples of alphabetic writing known to us, however, appear
not in Phoenicia but in Sinai. At Serabit-el-khadim, a little hamlet covering
a site where anciently the Egyptians mined turquoise, Sir William Flinders
Petrie found inscriptions in a strange language, dating back to an uncertain
age, perhaps as early as 2500 B.C. Though these inscriptions have never been
deciphered, it is apparent that they were written not in hieroglyphics, nor
in syllabic cuneiform, but with an alphabet.30 At Zapouna, in southern
Syria, French archeologists discovered an entire library of clay tablets-
some in hieroglyphic, some in a Semitic alphabetic script. As Zapouna seems
to have been permanently destroyed about 1200 B.C., these tablets go back
presumably to the thirteenth century B.C.,80 and suggest to us again how
old civilization was in those centuries to which our ignorance ascribes its
origins.
Syria lay behind Phoenicia, in the very lap of the Lebanon hills, gath-
ering its tribes together loosely under the rule of that capital which still
boasts that it is the oldest city of all, and still harbors Syrians hungry for
liberty. For a time the kings of Damascus dominated a dozen petty
nations about them, and successfully resisted the efforts of Assyria to make
Syria one of her vassal states. The inhabitants of the city were Semitic
merchants, who managed to garner wealth out of the caravan trade that
passed through Syria's mountains and plains. Artisans and slaves worked
for them, none too happily. We hear of masons organizing great unions,
and inscriptions tell of a strike of bakers in Magnesia; across the centuries
we sense the strife and busyness of an ancient Syrian town.37 These
artisans were skilful in shaping graceful pottery, in carving ivory and
wood, in polishing gems, and in weaving stuffs of gay colors for the
adornment of their women."
Fashions, manners and morals in Damascus were very much as at
Babylon, which was the Paris and arbiter elegantiarum of the ancient
East. Religious prostitution flourished, for in Syria, as throughout western
Asia, the fertility of the soil was symbolized in a Great Mother, or
Goddess, whose sexual commerce with her lover gave the hint to all
the reproductive processes and energies of nature; and the sacrifice of
virginity at the temples was not only an offering to Astarte, but a par-
ticipation with her in that annual self-abandonment which, it was hoped,
would offer an irresistible suggestion to the earth, and insure the increase
of plants, animals and men.88 About the time of the vernal equinox the
festival of the Syrian Astarte, like that of Cybele in Phrygia, was cele-
CHAP. Xl) A MOTLEY OF NATIONS 297
brated at Hierapolis with a fervor bordering upon madness. The noise
of flutes and drums mingled with the wailing of the women for Astarte's
dead lord, Adoni; eunuch priests danced wildly, and slashed themselves
with knives; at last many men, who had come merely as spectators, were
overcome with the excitement, threw off their clothing, and emasculated
themselves in pledge of lifelong service to the goddess. Then, in the dark
of the night, the priests brought a mystic illumination to the scene, opened
the tomb of the young god, and announced triumphantly that Adoni,
the Lord, had risen from the dead. Touching the lips of the worshipers
with balm, the priests whispered to them the promise that they, too,
would some day rise from the grave.40
The other gods of Syria were not less bloodthirsty than Astarte. It is
true that the priests recognized a general divinity, embracing all the gods,
and called El or Ilu, like the Elohim of the Jews; but this calm abstraction
was hardly noticed by the people who gave their worship to the Baal.
Usually they identified this city-god with the sun, as they identified
Astarte with the moon; and on occasions of great moment they offered
him their own children in sacrifice, after the manner of the Phoenicians;
the parents came to the ceremony dressed as for a festival, and the cries
of their children burning in the lap of the god were drowned by the
blaring of trumpets and the piping of flutes. Normally, however, a milder
sacrifice sufficed; the priests slashed themselves until the altar was covered
with their blood; or the child's foreskin was offered as a commutation
for his life; or the priests condescended to accept a sum of money to be
presented to the god in place of the prepuce. In some way the god had
to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the
image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human
life, or womanly tears.41
Similar customs, varying only in name and detail, were practised by
the Semitic tribes south of Syria, who filled the land with their confusion
of tongues. It was forbidden the Jews to "make their children pass
through the fire," but occasionally they did it none the less.48 Abraham
about to sacrifice Isaac, and Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia, were but
resorting to an ancient rite in attempting to propitiate the gods with
human blood. Mesha, King of Moab, sacrificed his eldest son by fire as
a means of raising a siege; his prayer having been answered, and the
sacrifice of his son having been accepted, he slaughtered seven thousand
Israelites in gratitude.43 Throughout this region, from the Sumerian days
298 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XI
when the Amorites roamed the plains of Amurru (ca. -2800 B.C.) to the
time when the Jews fell with divine wrath upon the Canaanites, and
Sargon of Assyria captured Samaria, and Nebuchadrezzar captured Jeru-
salem (597 B.C.), the valley of the Jordan was drenched periodically
with fratricidal blood, and many Lords of Hosts rejoiced. These Moabites,
Canaanites, Amorites, Edomites, Philistines and Aramaeans hardly enter
into the cultural record of mankind. It is true that the fertile Aramaeans,
spreading everywhere, made their language the lingua franca of the Near
East, and that the alphabetic script which they had learned either from
the Egyptians or the Phoenicians replaced the cuneiform and syllabaries
of Mesopotamia, first as a mercantile, then as a literary, medium, and
became at last the tongue of Christ and the alphabet of the Arabs today.44
But time preserves their names not so much because of their own accom-
plishments as because they played some pan on the tragic stage of Pales-
tine. We must study, in greater detail than their neighbors, these numer-
ically and geographically insignificant Jews, who gave to the world one
of its greatest literatures, two of its most influential religions, and so many
of its prof oundest men.
CHAPTER XII
Judea
I. THE PROMISED LAND
Palestine — Climate — Prehistory — Abraham's people — The
Jews in Egypt — The Exodus — The conquest of Canaan
A BUCKLE or a Montesquieu, eager to interpret history through
geography, might have taken a handsome leaf out of Palestine.
One hundred and fifty miles from Dan on the north to Beersheba on the
south, twenty-five to eighty miles from the Philistines on the west to
the Syrians, Aramaeans, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites on the east-
one would not expect so tiny a territory to play a major role in history,
or to leave behind it an influence greater than that of Babylonia, Assyria
or Persia, perhaps greater even than that of Egypt or Greece. But it
was the fortune and misfortune of Palestine that it lay midway between
the capitals of the Nile and those of the Tigris and Euphrates. This cir-
cumstance brought trade to Judea, and it brought war; time and again
the harassed Hebrews were compelled to take sides in the struggle of the
empires, to pay tribute or be overrun. Behind the Bible, behind the
plaintive cries of the psalmists and the prophets for help from the sky,
lay this imperiled place of the Jews between the upper and nether mill-
stones of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The climatic history of the land tells us again how precarious a thing
civilization is, and how its great enemies— barbarism and desiccation-
are always waiting to destroy it. Once Palestine was "a land flowing
with milk and honey," as many a passage in the Pentateuch describes it.1
Josephus, in the first century after Christ, still speaks of it as "moist
enough for agriculture, and very beautiful. They have abundance of
trees, and are full of autumn fruits both wild and cultivated. . . . They
are not naturally watered by many rivers, but derive their chief moisture
from rain, of which they have no want."" In ancient days the spring rains
that fed the land were stored in cisterns or brought back to the surface
by a multitude of wells, and distributed over the country by a network
299
3<X> THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
of canals; this was the physical basis of Jewish civilization. The soil, so
nourished, produced barley, wheat and corn, the vine throve on it, and
trees bore olives, figs, dates or other fruits on every slope. When war
came and devastated these artifically fertile fields, or when some con-
queror exiled to distant regions the families that had cared for them,
the desert crept in eagerly, and in a few years undid the work of genera-
tions. We cannot judge the fruitfulness of ancient Palestine from the
barren wastes and timid oases that confronted the brave Jews who in
our own time returned to their old home after eighteen centuries of
exile, dispersion and suffering.
History is older in Palestine than Bishop Ussher supposed. Neanderthal
remains have been unearthed near the Sea of Galilee, and five Neander-
thal skeletons were recently discovered in a cave near Haifa; it appears
likely that the Mousterian culture which flourished in Europe about 40,000
B.C. extended to Palestine. At Jericho neolithic floors and hearths have been
exhumed that carry back the history of the region down to a Middle
Bronze Age (2000-1600 B.C.), in which the towns of Palestine and Syria
had accumulated such wealth as to invite conquest by Egypt. In the fif-
teenth century before Christ Jericho was a well-walled city, ruled by kings
acknowledging the suzerainty of Egypt; the tombs of these kings, ex-
cavated by the Garstang Expedition, contained hundreds of vases, funerary
offerings, and other objects indicating a settled life at Jericho in the time
of the Hyksos domination, and a fairly developed civilization in the days
of Hatshcpsut and Thutmose III.8 It becomes apparent that the different
dates at which we begin the history of divers peoples are merely the marks
of our ignorance. The Tell-el-Amarna letters carry on the general picture
of Palestinian and Syrian life almost to the entrance of the Jews into
the valley of the Nile. It is probable, though not. certain, that the "Habiru"
spoken of in this correspondence were Hebrews.*4
The Jews believed that the people of Abraham had come from Ur in
Sumeria,B and had settled in Palestine (ca. 2200 B.C.) a thousand years
* The discoveries here summarized have restored considerable credit to those chapters
of Genesis that record the early traditions of the Jews. In its outlines, and barring
supernatural incidents, the story of the Jews as unfolded in the Old Testament has stood
the test of criticism and archeology; every year adds corroboration from documents,
monuments, or excavations. E.g., potsherds unearthed at Tel Ad-Duweir in 1935 bore
Hebrew inscriptions confirming pan of the narrative of the Books of Kings.4* We must
accept the Biblical account provisionally until it is disproved. Cf. Pctric, Egypt and
Israel, London, 1925, p. 108.
CHAP. Xn)" JUDEA 301
or more before Moses; and that the conquest of the Canaanites was
merely a capture by the Hebrews of the land promised them by their
God. The Amraphael mentioned in Genesis (xiv, i ) as "King of Shinar
in those days" was probably Amarpal, father of Hammurabi, and his
predecessor on the throne of Babylon.0 There are no direct references
in contemporary sources to either the Exodus or the conquest of Canaan;7
and the only indirect reference is the stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah
(ca. 1225 B.C.), part of which reads as follows:
The kings arc overthrown, saying "Salam!" . . .
Wasted is Tehenu,
The Hittite land is pacified,
Plundered is Canaan, with every evil, ...
Israel is desolated, her seed is not;
Palestine has become a widow for Egypt,
All lands are united, they are pacified;
Every one that is turbulent is bound by King Merneptah.*
This does not prove that Merneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus;
it proves little except that Egyptian armies had again ravaged Palestine.
We cannot tell when the Jews entered Egypt, nor whether they came
to it as freemen or as slaves.* We may take it as likely that the immi-
grants were at first a modest number,11 and that the many thousands of
Jews in Egypt in Moses' time were the consequence of a high birth rate;
as in all periods, "the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied
and grew."13 The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the
Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape—
or emigration— to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled,
of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical
writing of the ancient East. Even the story of Moses must not be rejected
offhand; it is astonishing, however, that no mention is made of him by
either Amos or Isaiah, whose preaching appears to have preceded by a
century the composition of the Pentateuch, f
* Perhaps they followed in the track of the Hyksos, whose Semitic rule in Egypt might
have offered them some protection.9 Pctrie, accepting the Bible figure of four hundred
and thirty years for the stay of the Jews in Egypt, dates their arrival about 1650 B.C.,
their exit about 1220 B.C.10
tManetho, an Egyptian historian of the third century B.C., as reported by Josephus,
tells us that the Exodus was due to the desire of the Egyptians to protect themselves
from a plague that had broken out among the destitute and enslaved Jews, and that Moses
was an Egyptian priest who went as a missionary among the Jewish "lepers," and gave
302 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
When Moses led the Jews to Mt. Sinai he was merely following the
route laid down by Egyptian turquoise-hunting expeditions for a thousand
years before him. The account of the forty years' wandering in the
desert, once looked upon as incredible, now seems reasonable enough in
a traditionally nomadic people; and the conquest of Canaan was but one
more instance of a hungry nomad horde falling upon a settled community.
The conquerors killed as many as they could, and married the rest.
Slaughter was unconfined, and (to follow the text) was divinely ordained
and enjoyed;19 Gideon, in capturing two cities, slew 120,000 men; only
in the annals of the Assyrians do we meet again with such hearty killing,
or easy counting. Occasionally, we are told, "the land rested from
war."" Moses had been a patient statesman, but Joshua was only a plain,
blunt warrior; Moses had ruled bloodlessly by inventing interviews with
God, but Joshua ruled by the second law of nature—that the superior
Killer survives. In this realistic and unsentimental fashion the Jews took
their Promised Land.
II. SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY
Race — Appearance — Language — Organization — Judges and
kings— Saul—David— Solomon—His 'wealth— The Temple—
Rise of the social problem in Israel
Of their racial origin we can only say vaguely that they were Semites,
not sharply distinct or different from the other Semites of western Asia;
it was their history that made them, not they who made their history.
At their very first appearance they are already a mixture of many stocks-
only by the most unbelievable virtue could a "pure" race have existed
them laws of cleanliness modeled upon those of the Egyptian clergy.13 Greek and Roman
writers repeat this explanation of the Exodus;14 but their anti-Semitic inclinations make
them unreliable guides. One verse of the Biblical account supports Ward's interpretation
of the Exodus as a labor strike: "And the king of Egypt said unto them, Wherefore do
ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works? Get you unto your burdens."15
Moses is an Egyptian rather than a Jewish name; perhaps it is a shorter form of
Ahmose" Professor Garstang, of the Alarston Expedition of the University of Liverpool,
claims to have discovered, in the royal tombs of Jericho, evidence that Moses was rescued
(precisely in 1527 B.C.) by the then Princess, later the great Queen, Hatshepsut; that he
was brought up by her as a court favorite, and fled from Egypt upon the accession of
her enemy, Thutmosc III." He believes that the material found in these tombs confirms
the story of the fall of Jericho (Joshua, vi); he dates this fall ca. 1400 B.C., and the
Exodus ca. 1447 B.C." As this chronology rests upon the precarious dating of scarabs and
pottery, it must be received with respectful scepticism.
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 303
among the thousand ethnic cross-currents of the Near East. But the
Jews were the purest of all, for they intermarried only very reluctantly
with other peoples. Hence they have maintained their type with astonish-
ing tenacity; the Hebrew prisoners on the Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs,
despite the prejudices of the artist, are recognizably like the Jews of our
own time: there, too, are the long and curved Hittite nose,* the projecting
cheek-bones, the curly hair and beard; though one cannot see, under
the Egyptian caricature, the scrawny toughness of body, the subtlety
and obstinacy of spirit, that have characterized the Semites from the
"stiff -necked" followers of Moses to the inscrutable Bedouins and trades-
men of today. In the early years of their conquest they dressed in simple
tunics, low-crowned hats or turban-like caps, and easy-going sandals;
as wealth came they covered their feet with leather shoes, and their tunics
with fringed kaftans. Their women, who were among the most beautiful
of antiquity,! painted their cheeks and their eyes, wore all the jewelry
they could get, and adopted to the best of their ability the newest styles
from Babylon, Nineveh, Damascus or Tyre.*1
Hebrew was among the most majestically sonorous of all the languages
of the earth. Despite its gutturals, it was full of masculine music; Renan
described it as "a quiver full of arrows, a trumpet of brasses crashing
through the air."" It did not differ much from the speech of the Phoeni-
cians or the Moabites. The Jews used an alphabet akin to the Phoenician;*
some scholars believe it to be the oldest alphabet known.88* They did not
bother to write vowels, leaving these for the sense to fill in; even today
the Hebrew vowels are mere points adorning the consonants,
The invaders never formed a united nation, but remained for a long
time as twelve more or less independent tribes, organized and ruled on
the principles not of the state but of the patriarchal family. The oldest
head of each family group participated in a council of elders which was
the last court of law and justice in the tribe, and which cooperated with
the leaders of other tribes only under the compulsion of dire emergency.
The family was the most convenient economic unit in tilling the fields
and tending the flocks; this was the source of its strength, its authority,
and its political power. A measure of family communism softened the
rigors of paternal discipline, and created memories to which the prophets
harked back disconsolately in more individualistic days. For when, under
* Cf. p. 287 above.
t Cf . the story of Esther, and the descriptions of Rebecca, Bathsheba, etc.
304 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
Solomon, industry came to the towns, and made the individual the new
economic unit of production, the authority of the family weakened, even
as today, and the inherent order of Jewish life decayed.
The "judges" to whom the tribes occasionally gave a united obedience
were not magistrates, but chieftains or warriors— even when they were
priests.* "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that
which was right in his own eyes."* This incredibly Jeff ersonian condition
gave way under the needs of war; the threat of domination by the Philis-
tines brought a temporary unity to the tribes, and persuaded them to
appoint a king whose authority over them should be continuous. The
prophet Samuel warned them against certain disadvantages in rule by
one man:
And Samuel said, This will be the manner of the king that shall
reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for him-
self, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run
before his chariots. And he will appoint them captains over thous-
ands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground,
and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and
instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be
confectionarics, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will
take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the
best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take your
mcnscrvants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men,
and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth
of your sheep, and ye shall be his servants. And yc shall cry out
in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you;
and the Lord will not hear you in that day.
Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel;
and they said, Nay, but we shall have a king over us; that we also
may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and
go out before us, and fight our battles."
Their first king, Saul, gave them good and evil instructively: fought
their battles bravely, lived simply on his own estate at Gileah, pursued
young David with murderous attentions, and was beheaded in flight from
the Philistines. The Jews learned, then, at the first opportunity, that wars
of succession are among the appanages of monarchy. Unless the little
epic of Saul, Jonathan and David is merely a masterpiece of literary
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 305
creation* (for there is no contemporary mention of these personalities
outside the Bible), this first king, after a bloody interlude, was succeeded
by David, heroic slayer of Goliath, tender lover of Jonathan and many
maidens, half -naked dancer of wild dances,88 seductive player of the harp,
sweet singer of marvelous songs, and able king of the Jews for almost
forty years. Here, so early in literature, is a character fully drawn, real
with all the contradictory' passions of a living soul: as ruthless as his
time, his tribe and his god, and yet as ready to pardon his enemies as
Caesar was, or Christ; putting captives to death wholesale, like any
Assyrian monarch; charging his son Solomon to "bring down to the grave
with blood" the "hoar head" of old Shimei who had cursed him many
years before;90 taking Uriah's wife into his harem incontinently, and send-
ing Uriah into the front line of battle to get rid of him;30 accepting
Nathan's rebuke humbly, but keeping the lovely Bathsheba none the less;
forgiving Saul almost seventy times seven, merely taking his shield when
he might have taken his life; sparing and supporting Mephiboshcth, a
possible pretender to his throne; pardoning his ungrateful son Absalom,
who had been caught in armed rebellion, and bitterly mourning that son's
death in treasonable battle against his father ("O my son Absalom! my son,
my son, Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my
son!")81— this is an authentic man, of full and varied elements, bearing
within him all the vestiges of barbarism, and all the promise of civilization.
On coming to the throne Solomon, for his peace of mind, slew all rival
claimants. This did not disturb Yahveh, who, taking a liking to the young
king, promised him wisdom beyond all men before or after him.82 Per-
haps Solomon deserves his reputation; for not only did he combine in
his own life the epicurean enjoyment of every pleasure and luxury with
a stoic fulfillment of all his obligations as a king,f but he taught his people
the values of law and order, and lured them from discord and war to in-
dustry and peace. He lived up to his name,| for during his long reign
Jerusalem, wThich David had made the capital, took advantage of this un-
wonted quiet, and increased and multiplied its wealth. Originally the city§
had been built around a well; then it had been turned into a fortress
* Like the jolly story of Samson, who burned the crops of the Philistines by letting
loose in them three hundred foxes with torches tied to their tails, and, in the manner of
some orators, slew a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass."7
t"He spake three thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five.""
^ Taken from Shalom, meaning peace.
§ Mentioned in the Tell-el-Amarna tablets as Ursalimmu, or Urusalim.
306 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
because of its exalted position above the plain; now, though it was not
on the main lines of trade, it became one of the busiest markets of the
Near East. By maintaining the good relations that David had established
with King Hiram of Tyre, Solomon encouraged Phoenician merchants to
direct their caravans through Palestine, and developed a profitable ex-
change of agricultural products from Israel for the manufactured articles
of Tyre and Sidon. He built a fleet of mercantile vessels on the Red
Sea, and persuaded Hiram to use this new route, instead of Egypt, in
trading with Arabia and Africa.84 It was probably in Arabia that Solomon
mined the gold and precious stones of "Ophir";85 probably from Arabia
that the Queen of "Sheba" came to seek his friendship, and perhaps his
aid.*5 We are told that "the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one
year was six hundred three score and six talents of gold";87 and though
this could not compare with the revenues of Babylon, Nineveh or Tyre,
it lifted Solomon to a place among the richest potentates of his time.*
Some of this wealth he used for his private pleasure. He indulged
particularly his hobby for collecting concubines— though historians un-
dramatically reduce his "seven hundred wives and three hundred concu-
bines" to sixty and eighty.90 Perhaps by some of these marriages he wished
to strengthen his friendship with Egypt and Phoenicia; perhaps, like
Rameses II, he was animated with a eugenic passion for transmitting his
superior abilities. But most of his revenues went to the strengthening
of his government and the beautification of his capital. He repaired the
citadel around which the city had been built; he raised forts and stationed
garrisons at strategic points of his realm to discourage both invasion and
revolt. He divided his kingdom, for administrative purposes, into twelve
districts which deliberately crossed the tribal boundaries; by this plan he
hoped to lessen the clannish separatism of the tribes, and to weld them
into one people. He failed, and Judea failed with him. To finance his
government he organized expeditions to mine precious metals, and to
import luxuries and strange delicacies— e.g., "ivory, apes and peacocks"40
—which could be sold to the growing bourgeoisie at high prices; he levied
* On the value of the talent in the ancient Near East cf. p. 228 above. The value
varied from time to time; but we should not be exaggerating it if we rated the talent, in
Solomon's day, as having a purchasing power of over $10,000 in our contemporary money.
Probably the Hebrew writer spoke in a literary way, and we must not take his figures
too seriously. On the fluctuations of Hebrew currency cf. the Jewish Encyclopedia,
articles "Numismatics" and "Shekel." Coinage, as distinct from rings or ingots of silver or
gold, docs not appear in Palestine until about 650 B.C.**
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 307
tolls upon all caravans passing through Palestine; he put a poll tax upon
all his subject peoples, required contributions from every district except
his own, and reserved to the state a monopoly of the trade in yarn, horses
and chariots.41 Josephus assures us that Solomon "made silver as plentiful
in Jerusalem as stones in the street."42 Finally he resolved to adorn the
city with a new temple for Yahveh and a new palace for himself.
We gather some sense of the turbulence of Jewish life from the fact
that before this time there had been, apparently, no temple at all in
Judea, not even in Jerusalem; the people had sacrificed to Yahveh in local
sanctuaries or on crude altars in the hills.43 Solomon called the more sub-
stantial burghers together, announced his plans for a temple, pledged to
it great quantities of gold, silver, brass, iron, wood and precious stones
from his own stores, and gently suggested that the temple would welcome
contributions from the citizens. If we may believe the chronicler, they
pledged for his use five thousand gold talents, ten thousand silver talents,
and as much iron and brass as he might need; "and they with whom
precious stones were found gave them to the treasure of the house of the
Lord."44 The site chosen was on a hill; the walls of the Temple rose, like
the Parthenon, continuously from the rocky slopes.* The design was in
the style that the Phoenicians had adopted from Egypt, with decorative
ideas from Assyria and Babylon. The Temple was not a church, but a
quadrangular enclosure composed of several buildings. The main struc-
ture was of modest dimensions— about one hundred and twenty-four feet
in length, fifty-five in breadth, and fifty-two in height; half the length
of the Parthenon, a quarter of the length of Chartres.4' The Hebrews
who came from all Judea to contribute to the Temple, and later to wor-
ship in it, forgivably looked upon it as one of the wonders of the world;
they had not seen the immensely greater temples of Thebes, Babylon and
Nineveh. Before the main structure rose a "porch" some one hundred
and eighty feet high, overlaid with gold. Gold was spread lavishly about,
if we may credit our sole authority: on the beams of the main ceiling,
on the posts, the doors and the walls, on the candelabra, the lamps, the
snuffers, the spoons, the censers, and "a hundred basins of gold." Precious
stones were inlaid here and there, and two gold-plated cherubim guarded
the Ark of the Covenant.47 The walls were of great square stones; the ceil-
ing, posts and doors were of carved cedar and olive wood. Most of the
* It is likely that the site of the Temple was that which is now covered by the Moslem
shrine El-haram-esh-sharif ; but no remains of the Temple have been found.4"
308 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
building materials were brought from Phoenicia, and most of the skilled
work was done by artisans imported from Sidon and Tyre.48 The unskilled
labor was herded together by a ruthless corvee of 150,000 men, after the
fashion of the time."
So for seven years the Temple rose, to provide for four centuries a
lordly home for Yahveh. Then for thirteen years more the artisans and
people labored to build a much larger edifice, for Solomon and his harem.
Merely one wing of it— "the house of the forest of Lebanon"— was four
times as large as the Temple.00 The walls of the main building were made of
immense stone blocks fifteen feet in length, and were ornamented with statu-
ary, reliefs and paintings in the Assyrian style. The palace contained halls
for the royal reception of distinguished visitors, apartments for the King,
separate quarters for the more important wives, and an arsenal as the final
basis of government. Not a stone of the gigantic edifice survives, and its
site is unknown/1
Having established his kingdom, Solomon settled down to enjoy it.
As his reign proceeded he paid less and less attention to religion and fre-
quented his harem rather more than the Temple. The Biblical chroniclers
reproach him bitterly for his gallantry in building altars to the exotic
deities of his foreign wives, and cannot forgive his philosophical— or per-
haps political— impartiality to the gods. The people admired his wisdom,
but suspected in it a certain centripetal quality; the Temple and the palace
had cost them much gold and blood, and were not more popular with
them than the Pyramids had been with the workingmen of Egypt. The
upkeep of these establishments required considerable taxation, and few
governments have made taxation popular. When he died Israel was ex-
hausted, and a discontented proletariat had been created whose labor
found no steady employment, and whose sufferings were to transform
the warlike cult of Yahveh into the almost socialistic religion of the
prophets.
III. THE GOD OF HOSTS
Polytheism— Yahveh— Henothcism— Character of the Hebrew re-
ligion—The idea of sin— Sacrifice— Circumcision— The priest-
hood— Strange gods
Next to the promulgation of the "Book of Law," the building of the
Temple was the most important event in the epic of the Jews. It not only
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 309
gave Yahveh a home, but it gave Judea a spiritual center and capital, a
vehicle of tradition, a memory to serve as a pillar of fire through centuries
of wandering over the earth. And it played its part in lifting the Hebrew
religion from a primitive polytheism to a faith intense and intolerant, but
none the less one of the creative creeds of history.
As they first entered the historic scene the Jews were nomad Bedouins
who feared the djinns of the air, and worshiped rocks, cattle, sheep, and
the spirits of caves and hills.58 The cult of the bull, the sheep and the
lamb was not neglected; Moses could never quite win his flock from
adoration of the Golden Calf, for the Egyptian worship of the bull was
still fresh in their memories, and Yahveh was for a long time symbolized
in that ferocious vegetarian. In Exodus (xxxii, 25-28) we read how the
Jews indulged in a naked dance before the Golden Calf, and how Moses
and the Levites— or priestly class— slew three thousand of them in punish-
ment of their idolatry.* Of serpent worship there are countless traces
in early Jewish history, from the serpent images found in the oldest
ruins,54 to the brazen serpent made by Moses and worshiped in the Temple
until the time of Hezekiah (ca. 720 B.C.).06 As among so many peoples,
the snake seemed sacred to the Jews, partly as a phallic symbol of virility,
partly as typifying wisdom, subtlety and eternity— literally because of its
ability to make both ends meet." Baal, symbolized in conical upright
stones much like the linga of the Hindus, was venerated by some, of the
Hebrews as the male principle of reproduction, the husband of the land
that he fertilized.07 Just as primitive polytheism survived in the worship
of angels and saints, and in the teraphim, or portable idols, that served as
household gods,58 so the magical notions rife in the early cults persisted
to a late day despite the protests of prophets and priests. The people
seem to have looked upon Moses and Aaron as magicians,611 and to have
patronized professional diviners and sorcerers. Divination was sought at
times by shaking dice (Urim and Thuwmini) out of a box (ephod)-z
ritual still used to ascertain the will of the gods. It is to the credit of the
priests that they opposed these practices, and preached an exclusive reli-
ance on the magic of sacrifice, prayer and contributions.
Slowly the conception of Yahveh as the one national god took form,
and gave to Jewish faith a unity and simplicity lifted up above the chaj
* Other vestiges of animal worship among the ancient Hebrews may be
Kings, xii, 28, and Ezekiel, viii, 10. Ahab, King of Israel, worshiped heifers i
after Solomon."
310 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
multiplicity of the Mesopotamian pantheons. Apparently the conquering
Jews took one of the gods of Canaan, Yahu,* and re-created him in their
own image as a stern, warlike, "stiff-necked" deity, with almost lovable
limitations. For this god makes no claim to omniscience: he asks the Jews
to identify their homes by sprinkling them with the blood of the sacrificial
lamb, lest he should destroy their children inadvertently along with the
first-born of the Egyptians;81 he is not above making mistakes, of which
man is his worst; he regrets, too late, that he created Adam, or allowed
Saul to become king. He is, now and then, greedy, irascible, bloodthirtsy,
capricious, petulant: "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and
will show mercy to whom I will show mercy."" He approves Jacob's
use of deceit in revenging himself upon Laban;88 his conscience is as flexible
as that of a bishop in politics. He is talkative, and likes to make long
speeches; but he is shy, and will not allow men to see anything of him
but his hind parts." Never was there so thoroughly human a god.
Originally he seems to have been a god of thunder, dwelling in the
hills," and worshiped for the same reason that the youthful Gorki was a
believer when it thundered. The authors of the Pentateuch, to whom
religion was an instrument of statesmanship, formed this Vulcan into
Mars, so that in their energetic hands Yahvch became predominantly an
imperialistic, expansionist God of Hosts, who fights for his people as
fiercely as the gods of the Iliad. "The Lord is a man of war," says
"Moses";" and David echoes him: "He teacheth my hands to war.""
Yahveh promises to "destroy all the people to whom" the Jews "shall
come," and to drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite "by
little and little";88 and he claims as his own all the territory conquered by
the Jews.8* He will have no pacifist nonsense; he knows that even a
Promised Land can be won, and held, only by the sword; he is a god of
war because he has to be; it will take centuries of military defeat, political
subjugation, and moral development, to transform him into the gentle
and loving Father of Hillel and Christ. He is as vain as a soldier; he drinks
up praise with a bottomless appetite, and he is anxious to display his
prowess by drowning the Egyptians: "They shall know that I am the
Lord when I have gotten me honor upon Pharaoh."70 To gain successes
for his people he commits or commands brutalities as repugnant to our
taste as they were acceptable to the morals of the age; he slaughters whole
* Among some Bronze Age (3000 B.C.) ruins found in Canaan in 1931 were pieces of
pottery bearing the name of a Canaanite deity, Yah or Yahu."0
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 311
nations with the naive pleasure of a Gulliver fighting for Lilliput. Be-
cause the Jews "commit whoredom" with the daughters of Moab he bids
Moses: "Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the
Lord against the sun";71 it is the morality of Ashurbanipal and Ashur. He
offers to show mercy to those who love him and keep his commandments,
but, like some resolute germ, he will punish children for the sins of their
fathers, their grandfathers, even their great-great-grandfathers." He is
so ferocious that he thinks of destroying all the Jews for worshiping the
Golden Calf; and Moses has to argue with him that he should control
himself. "Turn from thy fierce wrath," the man tells his god, "and
repent of this evil against thy people"; and "the Lord repented of the
evil which he thought to do unto his people."78 Again Yahveh proposes
to exterminate the Jews root and branch for rebelling against Moses, but
Moses appeals to his better nature, and bids him think what people will
say when they hear of such a thing.74 He asks a cruel test— human sacrifice
of the bitterest sort— from Abraham. Like Moses, Abraham teaches Yahveh
the principles of morals, and persuades him not to destroy Sodom and
Gomorrah if there shall be found fifty— forty— thirty— twenty— ten good
men in those cities;76 bit by bit he lures his god towards decency, and
illustrates the manner in which the moral development of man compels
the periodical re-creation of his deities. The curses with which Yahveh
tHreatens his chosen people if they disobey him are models of vitupera-
tion, and inspired those who burned heretics in the Inquisition, or ex-
communicated Spinoza:
Cursed shah thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the
field. . . . Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of
thy land. . . . Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and
cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. . . . The Lord shall
smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an in-
flammation. . . . The Lord will smite thee with the botch of
Egypt, and with the emerods (tumors), and with the scab, and
with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed. The Lord shall
smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart.
. . . Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written
in the Book of this Law, them will the Lord bring upon thee,
until thou be destroyed.71
Yahveh was not the only god whose existence was recognized by the
Jews, or by himself; all that he asked, in the First Commandment, was that
312 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
he should be placed above the rest. "I am a jealous god," he confesses, and
he bids his followers "utterly overthrow" his rivals, and "quite break down
their images."77 The Jews, before Isaiah, seldom thought of Yahveh as the
god of all tribes, even of all Hebrews. The Moabites had their god Che-
mosh, to whom Naomi thought it right that Ruth should remain loyal;78
Baalzebub was the god of Ekron, Milcom was the god of Ammon: the eco-
nomic and political separatism of these peoples naturally resulted in what
we might call their theological independence. Moses sings, in his famous
song, "Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?"78 and Solomon
says, "Great is our god above all gods."80 Not only was Tammuz accepted
as a real god by all but the most educated Jews, but his cult was at one time
so popular in Judea that Ezekiel complained that the ritual wailing for Tam-
muz' death could be heard in the Temple.81 So distinct and autonomous were
the Jewish tribes that even in the time of Jeremiah many of them had their
own deities: "according to the number of thy cities arc thy gods, O
Judah"; and the gloomy prophet goes on to protest against the worship of
Baal and Moloch by his people.83 With the growth of political unity un-
der David and Solomon, and the centering of worship in the Temple at Jeru-
salem, theology reflected history and politics, and Yahveh became the sole
god of the Jews. Beyond this "hcnotheism"* they made no further prog-
ress towards monotheism until the Prophets.t Even in the Yahvistic stage
the Hebraic religion came closer to monotheism than any other pre-Prophet-
ic faith except the ephemeral sun-worship of Ikhnaton. At least equal as
sentiment and poetry to the polytheism of Babylonia and Greece, Judaism
was immensely superior to the other religions of the time in majesty and
power, in philosophic unity and grasp, in moral fervor and influence.
This intense and sombre religion never took on any of the ornate ritual
and joyous ceremonies that marked the worship of the Egyptian and Baby-
lonian gods. A sense of human nothingness before an arbitrary deity dark-
ened all ancient Jewish thought. Despite the efforts of Solomon to beau-
* A clumsy but useful word coined by Max Miillcr to designate the worship of a god
as supreme, combined with the explicit (as in India) or tacit (as in Judca) admission of
other gods.
tElisha, however, as far back as the ninth century B.C., announced one God: "I know
that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel."83 It should be remembered that even
modern monotheism is highly relative and incomplete. As the Jews worshiped a tribal
god, so we worship a European god— or an English, or a German, or an Italian, god; no
moment of modesty comes to remind us that the abounding millions of India, China and
Japan— not to speak of the theologians of the jungle— do not yet recognize the God of our
Fathers. Not until the machine weaves all the earth into one economic web, and forces
all the nations under one rule, will there be one god-for the earth.
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 313
tify the cult of Yahveh with color and sound, the worship of this awful
divinity remained for many centuries a religion of fear rather than of love.
One wonders, in looking back upon these faiths, whether they brought as
much consolation as terror to humanity. Religions of hope and love are a
luxury of security and order; the need for striking fear into a subject or
rebellious people made most primitive religions cults of mystery and dread.
The Ark of the Covenant, containing the sacred scrolls of the Law, sym-
bolized by its untouchability the character of the Jewish creed. When the
pious Uzzah, to prevent the Ark from falling into the dust, caught it for
a moment in his hands, "the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah,
and God smote him there for his error; and there he died."84
The central idea in Judaic theology was that of sin. Never has another
people been so fond of virtue—unless it was those Puritans who seemed to
step out of the Old Testament with no interruption of Catholic centuries.
Since the flesh was weak and the Law complex, sin was inevitable, and the
Jewish spirit was often overcast with the thought of sin's consequences,
from the withholding of rain to the ruin of all Israel. There was no Hell
in this faith as a distinctive place of punishment; but almost as bad was the
Shcol, or "land of darkness" under the earth, which received all the dead,
good and wicked alike, except such divine favorites as Moses, Enoch and
Elijah. The Jews, however, made little reference to a life beyond the
grave; their creed said nothing of personal immortality, and confined its
rewards and punishments to this mundane life. Not until the Jews had lost
hope of earthly triumph did they take over, probably from Persia and per-
haps also from Egypt, the notion of personal resurrection. It was out of
this spiritual denouement that Christianity was born.
The threat and consequence of sin might be offset by prayer or sacrifice.
Semitic, like "Aryan," sacrifice began by offering human victims;"5 then it
offered animals— the "first fruits of the flocks"— and food from the fields;
finally it compromised by offering praise. At first no animal might be
eaten unless killed and blessed by the priest, and offered for a moment to
the god.80 Circumcision partook of the nature of a sacrifice, and perhaps of
a commutation: the god took a part for the whole. Menstruation and child-
birth, like sin, made a person spiritually unclean, and necessitated ritual
purification by priestly sacrifice and prayer. At every turn tabus hedged in
the faithful; sin lay potential in almost every desire, and donations were re-
quired in atonement for almost every sin.
Only the priests could offer sacrifice properly, or explain correctly
the ritual and mysteries of the faith. The priests were a closed caste, to
314 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
which none but the descendants of Levi* could belong. They could not
inherit property," but they were exempt from all taxation, toll, or tribute;"
they levied a tithe upon the harvests of the flocks, and turned to their
own use such offerings to the Temple as were left unused by the god.90
After the Exile, the wealth of the clergy grew with that of the renascent
community; and since this sacerdotal wealth was well administered,
augmented and preserved, it finally made the priests of the Second
Temple, in Jerusalem as in Thebes and Babylon, more powerful than
the king.
Nevertheless the growth of clerical power and religious education
never quite sufficed to win the Hebrews from superstition and idolatry.
The hill-tops and groves continued to harbor alien gods and to witness
secret rites; a substantial minority of the people prostrated themselves
before sacred stones, or worshiped Baal or Astarte, or practised divination
in the Babylonian manner, or set up images and burned incense to them,
or knelt before the brazen serpent or the Golden Calf, or filled the
Temple with the noise of heathen feasting,81 or made their children
"pass through the fire" in sacrifice;08 even some of the kings, like Solomon
and Ahab, went "a-whoring" after foreign gods. Holy men like Elijah
and Elisha arose who, without necessarily becoming priests, preached against
these practices, and tried by the example of their lives to lead their people
into righteousness. Out of these conditions and beginnings, and out of
the rise of poverty and exploitation in Israel, came the supreme figures
in Jewish religion— those passionate Prophets who purified and elevated
the creed of the Jews, and prepared it for its vicarious conquest of the
western world.
IV. THE FIRST RADICALS
The class 'war— Origin of the Prophets— Amos at Jerusalem-
Isaiah— His attacks upon the rich— His doctrine of a Messiah—
The influence of the Prophets
Since poverty is created by wealth, and never knows itself poor until
riches stare it in the face, so it required the fabulous fortune of Solomon
to mark the beginning of the class war in Israel. Solomon, like Peter
and Lenin, tried to move too quickly from an agricultural to an industrial
state. Not only did the toil and taxes involved in his enterprises impose
great burdens upon his people, but when those undertakings were com-
• One of the sons of Jacob.
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 315
plete, after twenty years of industry, a proletariat had been created 'in
Jerusalem which, lacking sufficient employment, became a source of
political faction and corruption in Palestine, precisely as it was to become
in Rome. Slums developed step by step with the rise of private wealth
and the increasing luxury of the court. Exploitation and usury became
recognized practises among the owners of great estates and the merchants
and money-lenders who flocked about the Temple. The landlords of
Ephraim, said Amos, "sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a
pair of shoes."08
This growing gap between the needy and the affluent, and the sharpen-
ing of that conflict between the city and the country which always
accompanies an industrial civilization, had something to do with the
division of Palestine into two hostile kingdoms after the death of Solo-
mon: a northern kingdom of Ephraim,* with its capital at Samaria, and
a southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem. From that
time on the Jews were weakened by fraternal hatred and strife, breaking
out occasionally into bitter war. Shortly after the death of Solomon
Jerusalem was captured by Sheshonk, Pharaoh of Egypt, and surrendered,
to appease the conqueror, nearly all the gold that Solomon had gathered
in his long career of taxation.
It was in this atmosphere of political disruption, economic war, and
religious degeneration that the Prophets appeared. The men to whom
the word (in Hebrew, Nabi1[) was first applied were not quite of the
character that our reverence would associate with Amos and Isaiah.
Some were diviners who could read the secrets of the heart and the past,
and foretell the future, according to remuneration; some were fanatics
who worked themselves into a frenzy by weird music, strong drink, or
dervish-like dances, and spoke, in trances, words which their hearers
considered inspired— i.e., breathed into them by some spirit other than
their own.04 Jeremiah speaks with professional scorn of "every man that
is mad, and maketh himself a prophet."95 Some were gloomy recluses,
like Elijah; many of them lived in schools or monasteries near the temples;
but most of them had private property and wives.9* From this motley
crowd of fakirs the Prophets developed into responsible and consistent
critics of their age and their people, magnificent street-corner statesmen
* This kingdom often called itself "Israel"; but this word will be used, in these pages, to
include all the Jews,
t Translated by the Greeks into pro-phe-tes, announcer.
316 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
who were all "thorough-going anti-clericals,"87 and "the most uncom-
promising of anti-Semites,"1* a cross between soothsayers and socialists.
We misunderstand them if we take them as prophets in the weather
sense; their predictions were hopes or threats, or pious interpolations,8"
or prognostications after the event;"0 the Prophets themselves did not
pretend to foretell, so much as to speak out; they were eloquent members
of the Opposition. In one phase they were Tolstoians incensed at in-
dustrial exploitation and ecclesiastical chicanery; they came up from
the simple countryside, and hurled damnation at the corrupt wealth of
the towns.
Amos described himself not as a prophet but as a s;rrmlc village
shepherd. Having left his herds to see Beth-El, he was horrified at the
unnatural complexity of the life which he discovered there, the in-
equality of fortune, the bitterness of competition, the ruthlessness of
exploitation. So he "stood in the gate," and lashed the conscienceless rich
and their luxuries:
Forasmuch, therefore, as your treading is upon the poor, and ye
take from him burdens of wheat; ye have built houses of hewn
stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant
vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them. . . . Woe to them
that arc at case in Zion, . . . that lie upon beds of ivory, and
stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the
flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall; that chant to
the sound of the viol, and invent to themselves instruments of music,
like David; that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with
the chief ointments. . . .
I despise your feast-days (saith the Lord); . . . though ye offer me
burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them. . . .
Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, for I will not hear
the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and
righteousness as a mighty stream.101
This is a new note in the world's literature. It is true that Amos dulls
the edge of his idealism by putting into the mouth of his god a Mississippi
of threats whose severity and accumulation make the reader sympathize
for a moment with the drinkers of wine and the listeners to music. But
here, for the first time in the literature of Asia, the social conscience takes
definite form, and pours into religion a content that lifts it from ceremony
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 317
and flattery to a whip of morals and a call to nobility. With Amos begins
the gospel of Jesus Christ.
One of his bitterest predictions seems to have been fulfilled while
Amos was still alive. "Thus saith the Lord: As the shepherd taketh out
of the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear, so shall the children
of Israel be taken out that dwell in Samaria in the corner of a bed, and
in Damascus in a couch. . . . And the houses of ivory shall perish, and
the great houses shall have an end."loa* About the same time another
prophet threatened Samaria with destruction in one of those myriads of
vivid phrases which King James's translators minted for the currency of
our speech out of the wealth of the Bible: "The calf of Samaria," said
Hosea, "shall be broken into pieces; for they have sown the wind, and
they shall reap the whirlwind."104 In 733 the young kingdom of Judah,
threatened by Ephraim in alliance with Syria, appealed to Assyria for
help. Assyria came, took Damascus, subjected Syria, Tyre and Palestine
to tribute, made note of Jewish efforts to secure Egyptian aid, invaded
again, captured Samaria, indulged in unprintable diplomatic exchanges
with the King of Judah,106 failed to take Jerusalem, and retired to Nineveh
laden with booty and 200,000 Jewish captives doomed to Assyrian
slavery.108
It was during this siege of Jerusalem that the prophet Isaiah became
one of the great figures of Hebrew history, t Less provincial than Amos,
he thought in terms of enduring statesmanship. Convinced that little
Judah could not resist the imperial power of Assyria, even with the help
of distant Egypt— that broken staff which would pierce the hand that
should try to use it— he pled with King Ahaz, and then with King
Hezekiah, to remain neutral in the war between Assyria and Ephraim;
like Amos and Hosea he foresaw the fall of Samaria,108 and the end of the
northern kingdom. When, however, the Assyrians besieged Jerusalem,
Isaiah counseled Hezekiah not to yield. The sudden withdrawal of
Sennacherib's hosts seemed to justify him, and for a time his repute was
high with the King and the people. Always his advice was to deal justly,
*The reference is apparently to the room, made entirely of ivory, in the palace at
Samaria where King Ahab lived with his "painted queen," Jezebel (ca. 875-50 B.C.). Sev-
eral fine ivories have been found by the Harvard Library Expedition in the ruins of a
palace tentatively identified with Ahab's.108
fThe book that bears his name is a collection of "prophecies" (i.e., sermons) by two
or more authors ranging in time from 710 to 300 B.C.107 Chapters i-xxxix are usually
ascribed to the "First Isaiah," who is here discussed.
318 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
and then leave the issue to Yahveh, who would use Assyria as his agent
for a time, but in the end would destroy her, too. Indeed, all the nations
known to Isaiah were, according to him, destined to be struck down by
Yahveh; in a few chapters (xvi-xxiii) Moab, Syria, Ethiopia, Egypt,
Babylon and Tyre are dedicated to destruction; "every one shall howl."109
This ardor for ruination, this litany of curses, mars Isaiah's book, as it
mars all the prophetic literature of the Bible.
Nevertheless his denunciation falls where it belongs— upon economic
exploitation and greed. Here his eloquence rises to the highest point
reached in the Old Testament, in passages that are among the peaks of
the world's prose:
The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people
and the princes thereof; for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the
spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my
people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? . . . Woe unto
them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no
place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! . . .
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees to turn aside the
needy from judgment (justice), and to take away the right from
the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that
they may rob the fatherless. And what will ye do in the day of
visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from afar? to
whom will ye flee for help, and where will ye leave your glory?1"
He is filled with scorn of those who, while fleecing the poor, present a
pious face to the world.
To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?
saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the
fat of fed beasts. . . . Your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they
are a trouble unto me; I am weary to hear them. And when ye
spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when
ye make many prayers I will not hear; your hands are full of blood.
Wash ye, make ye clean, put away the evil of your doings from
before mine eyes, cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment
(justice), relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the
widow."1
He is bitter, but he does not despair of his people; just as Amos had
ended his prophecies with a prediction, strangely apt today, of the
CHAP. Xn) JUDEA 319
restoration of the Jews to their native land,111 so Isaiah concludes by
formulating the Messianic hope— the trust of the Jews in some Redeemer
who will end their political divisions, their subjection, and their misery,
3nd bring an era of universal brotherhood and peace:
Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call
his name Immanuel. . . . For unto us a child is born: and the gov-
ernment shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called
Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father,
the Prince of Peace. . . . And there shall come forth a rod out
of the stem of Jesse. . . . And the spirit of the Lord shall rest
upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of
counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the
Lord. . . . With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and re-
prove with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall smite
the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his
lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle
of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also
shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the
kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fading together; and
a little child shall lead them. . . . And they shall beat their swords
into ploughshares, and their spears into priming-hooks: nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any
It was an admirable aspiration, but not for many generations yet would
ft express the mood of the Jews. The priests of the Temple listened
with a well-controlled sympathy to these useful encouragements to piety;
certain sects looked back to the Prophets for part of their inspiration; and
perhaps these excoriations of all sensual delight had some share in intensi-
fying the desert-born Puritanism of the Jews. But for the most part the
old life of the palace and the tent, the market-place and the field, went
on as before; war took its choice of every generation, and slavery con-
tinued to be the lot of the alien; the merchant cheated with his scales,114
and tried to atone with sacrifice and prayer.
It was upon the Judaism of post-Exilic days, and upon the world
through Judaism and Christianity, that the Prophets left their deepest
mark. In Amos and Isaiah is the beginning of both Christianity and
socialism, the spring from which has flowed a stream of Utopias wherein
320 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
no poverty or war shall disturb human brotherhood and peace; they are
the source of the early Jewish conception of a Messiah who would seize
the government, reestablish the temporal power of the Jews, and inaug-
urate a dictatorship of the dispossessed among mankind. Isaiah and Amos
began, in a military age, the exaltation of those virtues of simplicity and
gentleness, of cooperation and friendliness, which Jesus was to make a
vital element in his creed. They were the first to undertake the heavy
task of reforming the God of Hosts into a God of Love; they conscripted
Yahveh for humanitarianism as the radicals of the nineteenth century
conscripted Christ for socialism. It was they who, when the Bible was
printed in Europe, fired the Germanic mind with a rejuvenated Chris-
tianity, and lighted the torch of the Reformation; it was their fierce and
intolerant virtue that formed the Puritans. Their moral philosophy was
based upon a theory that would bear better documentation— that the
righteous man will prosper, and the wicked will be struck down; but
even if that should be a delusion it is the failing of a noble miud. The
prophets had no conception of freedom, but they loved justice, and
called for an end to the tribal limitations of morality. They offered to
the unfortunate of the earth a vision of brotherhood that became the
precious and unforgotten heritage of many generations.
V. THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JERUSALEM
The birth of the Bible—The destruction of Jerusalem— The Baby-
lonian Captivity— Jeremiah— Ezekiel— The Second Isaiah—
The liberation of the Jews— The Second Tevnple
Their greatest contemporary influence was on the writing of the Bible.
As the people fell away from the worship of Yahveh to the adoration
of alien gods, the priests began to wonder whether the time had not come
to make a final stand against the disintegration of the national faith.
Taking a leaf from the Prophets, who attributed to Yahveh the passionate
convictions of their own souls, they resolved to issue to the people a com-
munication from God himself, a code of laws that would reinvigorate
the moral life of the nation, and would at the same time attract the
support of the Prophets by embodying the less extreme of their ideas.
They readily won King Josiah to their plan; and about the eighteenth
year of his reign the priest Hilkiah announced to the King that he had
"found" in the secret archives of the Temple an astonishing scroll in
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 321
which the great Moses himself, at the direct dictation of Yahveh, had
settled once for all those problems of history and conduct that were
being so hotly debated by prophets and priests. The discovery made a
great stir. Josiah called the elders of Judah to the Temple, and there read
to them the "Book of the Covenant" in the presence (we are told) of
thousands of people. Then he solemnly swore that he would henceforth
abide by the laws of this book; and "he caused all that were present to
stand to it."115
We do not know just what this "Book of the Covenant" was; it may
have been Exodus xx-xxiii, or it may have been Deuteronomy.11' We need
not suppose that it had been invented on the spur of the situation; it
merely formulated, and put into writing, decrees, demands and exhorta-
tions which for centuries had emanated from the prophets and the Temple.
In any event, those who heard the reading, and even those who only
heard of it, were deeply impressed. Josiah took advantage of this mood to
raid the altars of Yahveh's rivals in Judah; he cast "out of the temple of
the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal," he put down the
idolatrous priests, and "them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the
sun, and to the moon, and to the planets"; he "defiled Topheth, ....
that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire
to Molech"; and he smashed the altars that Solomon had built for Che-
mosh, Milcom and Astarte.1"
These reforms did not seem to propitiate Yahveh, or bring him to the
aid of his people. Nineveh fell as the Prophets had foretold, but only
to leave little Judah subject first to Egypt and then to Babylon. When
Pharaoh Necho, bound for Syria, tried to pass through Palestine, Josiah,
relying upon Yahveh, resisted him on the ancient battle-site of Megiddo—
only to be defeated and slain. A few years later Nebuchadrezzar over-
whelmed Necho at Carchemish, and made Judah a Babylonian depend-
ency. Josiah's successors sought by secret diplomacy to liberate them-
selves from the clutch of Babylon, and thought to bring Egypt to their
rescue; but the fiery Nebuchadrezzar, getting wind of it, poured his
soldiery into Palestine, captured Jerusalem, took King Jchoiakim prisoner,
put Zedckiah on the throne of Judah, and carried 10,000 Jews into bond-
age. But Zedekiah, too, loved liberty, or power, and rebelled against
Babylon. Thereupon Nebuchadrezzar returned, and— resolving to settle
the Jewish problem once and for all, as he thought— recaptured Jerusalem,
burned it to the ground, destroyed the Temple of Solomon, slew Zedc-
322 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
kiah's sons before his face, gouged out his eyes, and carried practically
all the population of the city into captivity in Babylonia."8 Later a Jewish
poet sang one of the world's great songs about that unhappy caravan:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when
we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one
of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thec, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.uo
In all this crisis the bitterest and most eloquent of the Prophets defended
Babylon as a scourge in the hands of God, denounced the rulers of Judah
as obstinate fools, and advised such complete surrender to Nebuchadrezzar
that the modern reader is tempted to wonder could Jeremiah have been
a paid agent of Babylonia. "I have made the earth, the man and the
beast that arc upon the ground," says Jeremiah's God, . . . "and now have
I given all those lands into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, the King of
Babylon, my servant. . . . And all nations shall serve him. And it shall
come to pass, that the nation and kingdom which will not serve the
same Nebuchadrezzar, the King of Babylon, and that will not put their
neck under the yoke of the King of Babylon, that nation will I punish,
saith the Lord, with the sword, and with the famine, and with the pesti-
lence, until I have consumed them by his hand."120
He may have been a traitor, but the book of his prophecies, supposedly
taken down by his disciple Baruch, is not only one of the most passion-
ately eloquent writings in all literature, as rich in vivid imagery as in
merciless abuse, but it is marked with a sincerity that begins as a diffident
self-questioning, and ends with honest doubts about his own course and
all human life. "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man
of strife, and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent
on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth
curse me. . . . Cursed be the day wherein I was born."131 A flame of in-
dignation burned in him at the sight of moral depravity and political folly
in his people and its leaders; he felt inwardly compelled to stand in the
CHAP.XIl) JUDEA 323
gate and call Israel to repentance. All this national decay, all this weak-
ening of the state, this obviously imminent subjection of Judah to Babylon,
were, it seemed to Jeremiah, Yahveh's hand laid upon the Jews in punish-
ment for their sins. "Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,
and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can
find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the
truth; and I will pardon it."1*5 Everywhere iniquity ruled, and sex ran
riot; men "were as fed horses in the morning; every one neighed after
his neighbor's wife."183 When the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem the
rich men of the city, to propitiate Yahveh, released their Hebrew slaves;
but when for a time the siege was raised, and the danger seemed past,
the rich apprehended their former slaves, and forced them into their old
bondage: it was a summary of human history that Jeremiah could not
bear silently.134 Like the other Prophets, he denounced those hypocrites
who with pious faces brought to the Temple some part of the gains they
had made from grinding the faces of the poor; the Lord, he reminded
them, in the eternal lesson of all finer religion, asked not for sacrifice but
for justice.185 The priests and the prophets, he thinks, are almost as false
and corrupt as the merchants; they, too, like the people, need to be
morally reborn, to be (in Jeremiah's strange phrase) circumcised in the
spirit as well as in the flesh. "Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take
away the foreskins of your heart."120
Against these abuses the Prophet preached with a fury rivaled only
by the stern saints of Geneva, Scotland and England. Jeremiah cursed
the Jews savagely, and took some delight in picturing the ruin of all who
would not heed him.127 Time and again he predicted the destruction
of Jerusalem and the captivity in Babylon, and wept over the doomed
city (whom he called the daughter of Zion) in terms anticipatory of
Christ: "Oh, that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of
tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of
my people!"1*8
To the "princes" of Zedekiah's court all this seemed sheer treason;
it was dividing the Jews in counsel and spirit in the very hour of war.
Jeremiah tantalized them by carrying a wooden yoke around his neck, ex-
plaining that all Judah must submit— the more peaceably the better— to
the yoke of Babylon; and when Ilananiah tore this yoke away Jeremiah
cried out that Yahveh would make yokes of iron for all the Jews. The
priests tried to stop him by putting his head into the stocks; but from
324 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
even that position he continued to denounce them. They arraigned him
in the Temple, and wished to kill him, but through some friend among the
priests he escaped. Then the princes arrested him, and lowered him by
ropes into a dungeon filled with mire; but Zedekiah had him raised to
milder imprisonment in the palace court. There the Babylonians found
him when Jerusalem fell. On Nebuchadrezzar's orders they treated him
well, and exempted him from the general exile. In his old age, says ortho-
dox tradition,1381 he wrote his "Lamentations," the most eloquent of all the
books of the Old Testament. He mourned now the completeness of his
triumph and the desolation of Jerusalem, and raised to heaven the un-
answerable questions of Job:
How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! how she is
become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and
princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! . . .
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there
be any sorrow like unto my sorrow. . . . Righteous art thou, O
Lord, when I plead with dice: yet let us talk with dice of thy
judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?
Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?13"
Meanwhile, in Babylon, another preacher was taking up the burden of
prophecy. Ezekicl belonged to a priestly family that had been driven
to Babylon in the first deportation from Jerusalem. He began his preach-
ing, like the First Isaiah and Jeremiah, with fierce denunciations of idol-
atry and corruption in Jerusalem. At great length he compared Jerusa-
lem to a harlot, because she sold the favors of her worship to strange
gods;110 he described Samaria and Jerusalem as twin whores; this word was
as popular with him as with the dramatists of the Stuart Restoration. He
made long lists of the sins of Jerusalem, and then condemned her to cap-
ture and destruction. Like Isaiah, he doomed the nations impartially, and
announced the sins and fall of Moab, Tyre, Egypt, Assyria, even of the
mysterious kingdom of Magog."1 But he was not as bitter as Jeremiah; in
the end he relented, declared that the Lord would save "a remnant" of the
Jews, and foretold the resurrection of their city;133 he described in vision
the new Temple that would be built there, and outlined a Utopia in which
the priests would be supreme, and in which Yahveh would dwell among
his people forever.
CHAP.XIl) JUDEA 325
He hoped, with this happy ending, to keep up the spirits of the exiles,
and to retard their assimilation into the Babylonian culture and blood.
Then as now it seemed that this process of absorption would destroy the
unity, even the identity, of the Jews. They flourished on Mesopotamia's
rich soil, they enjoyed considerable freedom of custom and worship, they
grew rapidly in numbers and wealth, and prospered in the unwonted
tranquillity and harmony which their subjection had brought to them. An
ever-rising proportion of them accepted the gods of Babylon, and the
epicurean ways of the old metropolis. When the second generation of
exiles grew up, Jerusalem was almost forgotten.
It was the function of the unknown author who undertook to complete
the Book of Isaiah to restate the religion of Israel for this backsliding gen-
eration; and it was his distinction, in restating it, to lift it to the loftiest
plane that any religion had yet reached amid all the faiths of the Near
East.* While Buddha in India was preaching the death of desire, and
Confucius in China was formulating wisdom for his people, this "Sec-
ond Isaiah," in majestic and luminous prose, announced to the exiled Jews
the first clear revelation of monotheism, and offered them a new god, in-
finitely richer in "lovingkindness" and tender mercy than the bitter Yah-
veh even of the First Isaiah. In words that a later gospel was to choose
as spurring on the young Christ, this greatest of Prophets announced his
mission— no longer to curse the people for their sins, but to bring them
hope in their bondage. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because
the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath
sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound."13"1 For he has dis-
covered that Yah veh is not a god of war and vengeance, but a loving
father; the discovery fills him with happiness, and inspires him to mag-
nificent songs. He predicts the coming of the new god to rescue his
people:
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the
way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our
God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill
* We know nothing of the history of this writer, who, by a literary device and license
common to his time, chose to speak in the name of Isaiah. We merely guess that he
wrote shortly before or after Cyrus liberated the Jews. Biblical scholarship assigns to him
chapters xl-lv, and to another and later unknown, or unknowns, chapters Ivi-lxvi."9*
326 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the
rough places plain.* . . . Behold, the Lord God will come with
strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him. . . . He shall feed
his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm,
and carry them in his bosom and shall gently lead those that are
with young.
The prophet then lifts the Messianic hope to a place among the ruling
ideas of his people, and describes- the "Servant" who will redeem Israel
by vicarious sacrifice:
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and ac-
quainted with grief; ... he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we
did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was
wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities;
the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes
we are healed. . . . The -Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us
all.t184
Persia, the Second Isaiah predicts, will be the instrument of this lib-
eration. Cyrus is invincible; he will take Babylon, and will free the Jews
from their captivity. They will return to Jerusalem and build a new
Temple, a new city, a very paradise: "the wolf and the lamb shall feed
together, and the lion shall eat straw like a bullock; and dust shall be the
serpent's meat. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,
saith the Lord."135 Perhaps it was the rise of Persia, and the spread of its
power, subjecting all the states of the Near East in an imperial unity
vaster and better governed than any social organization men had yet
known, that suggested to the Prophet the conception of one universal
deity. No longer does his god say, like the Yahveh of Moses, "I am the
Lord thy God; . . . thou shah not have strange gods before me"; now it
is written: "I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no god besides
me."13a The prophet-poet describes this universal deity in one of the great
passages of the Bible:
Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and
meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of
• Referring, presumably, to the road from Babylon to Jerusalem.
t Modern research does not regard the "Servant" as the prophetic portrayal of Jesus.1*4*
CHAP. Xlj) JUDEA 327
the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and
the hills in a balance? Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket,
and are counted as the small dust of the balance; behold, he taketh
up the isles as a very little thing. All nations before him are as
nothing, and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.
To whom, then, will ye liken God, or what likeness will ye com-
pare with him? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and
the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the
heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.
Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these
things.m
It was a dramatic hour in the history of Israel when at last Cyrus entered
Babylon as a world-conqueror, and gave to the exiled Jews full freedom
to return to Jerusalem. He disappointed some of the Prophets, and
showed his superior civilization, by leaving Babylon and its population
unhurt, and offering a sceptical obeisance to its gods. He restored to the
Jews what remained in the Babylonian treasury of the gold and silver
taken by Nebuchadrezzar from the Temple, and instructed the communi-
ties in which the exiles lived to furnish them with funds for their long
journey home. The younger Jews were not enthusiastic at this libera-
tion; many of them had sunk strong roots into Babylonian soil, and
hesitated to abandon their fertile fields and their flourishing trade for the
desolate ruins of the Holy City. It was not until two years after Cyrus*
coming that the first detachment of zealots set out on the long three
months' journey back to the land which their fathers had left half a
century before.138
They found themselves, then as now, not entirely welcome in their
ancient home. For meanwhile other Semites had settled there, and had
made the soil their own by occupation and toil; and these tribes looked
with hatred upon the apparent invaders of what seemed to them their
native fields. The returning Jews could not possibly have established them-
selves had it not been for the strong and friendly empire that protected
them. The prince Zerubbabel won permission from the Persian king,
Darius I, to rebuild the Temple; and though the immigrants were small in
number and resources, and the work was hindered at every step by the
attacks and conspiracies of a hostile population, it was carried to com-
pletion within some twenty-two years after the return. Slowly Jerusalem
became again a Jewish city, and the Temple resounded with the psalms of
328 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
a rescued remnant resolved to make Judea strong again. It was a great
triumph, surpassed only by that which we have seen in our own historic
time.
VI. THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
The "Book of the Law"— The composition of the Pentateuch—
The myths of "Genesis"-The Mosaic Code-The Ten Com-
mandments — The Idea of God — The sabbath — The
Jewish family— Estimate of the Mosaic legislation
To build a military state was impossible, Judea had neither the num-
bers nor the wealth for such an enterprise. Since some system of order
was needed that, while recognizing the sovereignty of Persia, would give
the Jews a natural discipline and a national unity, the clergy undertook
to provide a theocratic rule based, like Josiah's, on priestly traditions and
laws promulgated as divine commands. About the year 444 B.C. Ezra, a
learned priest, called the Jews together in solemn assembly, and read to
them, from morn to midday, the "Book of the Law of Moses." For seven
days he and his fellow Levites read from these scrolls; at the end the
priests and the leaders of the people pledged themselves to accept this
body of legislation as their constitution and their conscience, and to
obey it forever.180 From those troubled times till ours that Law has been
the central fact in the life of the Jews; and their loyalty to it through all
wanderings and tribulations has been one of the impressive phenomena of
history.
What was this "Book of the Law of Moses"? Not quite the same as
that "Book of the Covenant" which Josiah had read; for the latter had
admitted of being completely read twice in a day, while the other needed
a week.140 We can only guess that the larger scroll constituted a substan-
tial part of those first five books of the Old Testament which the Jews
call Torah or the Law, and which others call the Pentateuch.141* How,
when, and where had these books been written? This is an innocent ques-
tion which has caused the writing of fifty thousand volumes, and must
here be left unanswered in a paragraph.
The consensus of scholarship is that the oldest elements in the Bible are
those distinct and yet similar legends of Genesis which are called "J" and
* Torah is Hebrew for Direction, Guidance; Pentateuch is Greek for Five Rolls.
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 329
"E" respectively because one speaks of the Creator as Jehovah (Yahveh),
while the other speaks of him as Elohim.* It is believed that the Yahvist
narrative was written in Judah, the Elohist in Ephraim, and that the two
stories fused into one after the fall of Samaria. A third element, known as
"D," and embodying the Deuteronomic Code, is probably by a distinct au-
thor or group of authors. A fourth clement, "P," is composed of sections
later inserted by the priests; this "Priestly Code" is probably the substance
of the "Book of the Law" promulgated by Ezra.1420 The four compositions
appear to have taken their present form about 300 B.C.148
These delightful tales of the Creation, the Temptation and the Flood
were drawn from a storehouse of Mcsopotamian legend as old as 3000 B.C.;
we have seen some early forms of them in the course of this history. It is
possible that the Jews appropriated some of these myths from Babylonian
literature during the Captivity;144 it is more likely that they had adopted
them long before, from ancient Semitic and Sumerian sources common to
all the Near East. The Persian and the Talmudic forms of the Creation
myth represent God as first making a two-scxcd being— a male and a female
joined at the back like Siamese twins— and then dividing it as an after-
thought. We are reminded of a strange sentence in Genesis (v, 2): "Male
and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam":
i.e., our first parent was originally both male and female— which seems to
have escaped all theologians except Aristophanes.t
The legend of Paradise appears in almost all folklore— in Egypt, India,
Tibet, Babylonia, Persia, Greece,^ Polynesia, Mexico, etc.145 Most of these
Edens had forbidden trees, and were supplied with serpents or dragons that
stole immortality from men, or otherwise poisoned Paradise.147 Both the
serpent and the fig were probably phallic symbols; behind the myth is the
thought that sex and knowledge destroy innocence and happiness, and are
the origin of evil; we shall find this same idea at the end of the Old Testa-
ment in Ecclcsiastes as here at the beginning. In most of these stories
* A distinction first pointed out by Jean Astruc in 1753. Passages generally ascribed to
the "Yahvist" account: Gen. ii, 4 to in, 24, iv, vi-vni, xi, 1-9, xii-xiii, xviii-xix, xxiv, xxvii,
1-45, xxxii, xliii-xliv; Exod. iv-v, viii, 20 to ix, 7, x-xi, xxxiii, 12 to xxxiv, 26; Numb, x,
29-36, xi, etc. Distinctly "Elohist" passages: Gen. xi, 10-32, xx, 1-17, xxi, 8-32, xxii, 1-14,
xl-xlii, xlv; Exod. xviii, 20-23, xx-xxii, xxxiii, 7-11; Numb, xii, xxii-xxiv, etc.143
tCf. Plato's Symposium.
£Cf. the Greek poet Hesiod (ca. 75on.c.), in Works and Days: "Men lived like gods,
without vices or passions, vexations or toil. In happy companionship with divine beings
they passed their days in tranquillity and joy. ... The earth was more beautiful then than
now, and spontaneously yielded an abundant variety of fruits. . . . Men were considered
mere boys at one hundred years old."14*
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
woman was the lovely-evil agent of the serpent or the devil, whether as
Eve, or Pandora, or the Poo See of Chinese legend. "All things," says the
Shi-ching, "were at first subject to man, but a woman threw us into
slavery. Our misery came not from heaven but from woman; she lost the
human race. Ah, unhappy Poo See! Thou kindled the fire that consumes
us, and which is every day increasing. . . . The world is lost. Vice over-
flows all things."
Even more universal was the story of the Flood; hardly an ancient people
went without it, and hardly a mountain in Asia but had given perch to some
water-wearied Noah or Shamash-napishtim.148 Usually these legends were the
popular vehicle or allegory of a philosophical judgment or a moral attitude
summarizing long racial experience— that sex and knowledge bring more
grief than joy, and that human life is periodically threatened by floods,— i.e.,
ruinous inundations of the great rivers whose waters made possible the earliest
known civilizations. To ask whether these stories are true or false, whether
they "really happened," would be to put a trivial and superficial question;
their substance; of course, is not the tales they tell but the judgments they
convey. Meanwhile it would be unwise not to enjoy their disarming sim-
plicity, and the vivid swiftness of their narratives.
The books which Josiah and Ezra caused to be read to the people
formulated that "Mosaic" Code on which all later Jewish life was to be
built. Of this legislation the cautious Sarton writes: "Its importance in
the history of institutions and of law cannot be overestimated."148 It was
the most thoroughgoing attempt in history to use religion as a basis of
statesmanship, and as a regulator of every detail of life; the Law became,
says Renan, "the tightest garment into which life was ever laced."1110 Diet,*
medicine, personal, menstrual and natal hygiene, public sanitation, sexual
inversion and bestiality169— all are made subjects of divine ordinance and
guidance; again we observe how slowly the doctor was differentiated
from the priest1"— to become in time his greatest enemy. Leviticus (xiii-
xv) legislates carefully for the treatment of venereal disease, even to the
most definite directions for segregation, disinfection, fumigation and, if
necessary, the complete burning of the house in which the disease has run
*Cf. Dcut. xiv. Reinach, Roberston Smith and Sir James Frazer have attributed the
avoidance of pork not to hygienic knowledge and precaution but to the totemic worship
of the pig (or wild boar) by the ancestors of the Jews.1*1 The "worship" of the wild
boar, however, may have been merely a priestly means of making it tabu in the sense of
"unclean." The great number of wise hygienic rules in the Mosaic Code warrant a
humble scepticism of Reinach's interpretation.
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 331
its course."4* "The ancient Hebrews were the founders of prophy-
laxis,"188 but they seem to have had no surgery beyond circumcision. This
rite— common among ancient Egyptians and modern Semites— was not
only a sacrifice to God and a compulsion to racial loyalty, t it was a
hygienic precaution against sexual uncleanliness.1™ Perhaps it was this
Code of Cleanliness that helped to preserve the Jews through their long
Odyssey of dispersion and suffering.
For the rest the Code centered about those Ten Commandments (Exodus,
xx, 1-17) which were destined to receive the lip-service of half the world.J
The first laid the foundation of the new theocratic community, which was to
rest not upon any civil law, but upon the idea of God; he was the Invisible
King who dictated every law and meted out every penalty; and his people
were to be called Israel, as meaning the Defenders of God. The Hebrew
state was dead, but the Temple remained; the priests of Judea, like the Popes
of Rome, would try to restore what the kings had failed to save. Hence the
explicitness and reiteration of the First Commandment: heresy or blasphemy
must be punished with death, even if the heretic should be one's closest kin.181
The priestly authors of the Code, like the pious Inquisitors, believed that re-
ligious unity was an indispensable condition of social organization and soli-
darity. It was this intolerance, and their racial pride, that embroiled and
preserved the Jews.
The Second Commandment elevated the national conception of God at
the expense of art: no graven images were ever to be made of him. It as-
sumed a high intellectual level among the Jews, for it rejected superstition
* The procedure recommended by Leviticus (xiii-xiv) in cases of leprosy was practised
in Europe to the end of the Middle Ages.1*5
fBy making race ultimately unconcealablc. "The Jewish rite," says Briffault, "did not
assume its present form until so late a period as that of the Maccabees (167 B.C.). At that
date it was still performed in such a manner that the jibes of Gentile women could be
evaded, little trace of the operation being perceptible. The nationalistic priesthood there-
fore enacted that the prepuce should be completely removed."1"
:}: It was the usual thing for ancient law-codes to be bf divine origin. We have seen
how the laws of Egypt were given it by the god Thoth, and how the sun-god Shamash
begot Hammurabi's code. In like manner a deity gave to King Minos on Mt. Dicta the
laws that were to govern Crete; the Greeks represented Dionysus, whom they also called
"The Lawgiver," with two tables of stone on which laws were inscribed; and the pious
Persians tell how, one day, as Zoroaster prayed on a high mountain, Ah ura -Mazda ap-
peared to him amid thunder and lightning, and delivered to him "The Book of the
Law."w "They did all this," says Diodorus, "because they believed that a conception
which would help humanity was marvelous and wholly divine; or because they held that
the common crowd would be more likely to obey the laws if their gaze were directed
towards the majesty and power of those to whom their laws were ascribed."1*
332 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
and anthropomorphism, and— despite the all-too-human quality of the Penta-
teuch Yahvch— tried to conceive of God as beyond every form and image.
It conscripted Hebrew devotion for religion, and left nothing, in ancient days,
for science and art; even astronomy was neglected, lest corrupt diviners
should multiply, or the stars be worshiped as divinities. In Solomon's Temple
there had been an almost heathen abundance of imagery;108 in the new Temple
there was none. The old images had been carried off to Babylon, and ap-
parently had not been returned along with utensils of silver and gold.104 Hence
we find no sculpture, painting or bas-relief after the Captivity, and very little
before it except under the almost alien Solomon; architecture and music were
the only arts that the priests would allow. Song and Temple ritual redeemed
the life of the people from gloom; an orchestra of several instruments joined
"as one to make one sound" with a great choir of voices to sing the psalms
that glorified the Temple and its God.1" "David and all the house of Israel
played before the Lord on harps, psalteries, timbrels, cornets and cymbals."16"
The Third Commandment typified the intense piety of the Jew. Not only
would he not "take the name of the Lord God in vain"; he would never pro-
nounce it; even when he came upon the name of Yahveh in his prayers he
would substitute for it Adonai—Lord* Only the Hindus would rival this
piety.
The Fourth Commandment sanctified the weekly day of rest as a Sabbath,
and passed it down as one of the strongest institutions of mankind. The name,
—and perhaps the custom— came from Babylon; shabattu was applied by the
Babylonians to "tabu" days of abstinence and propitiation.188 Besides this week-
ly holyday there were great festivals— once Canaanitc vegetation rites remi-
niscent of sowing and harvesting, and the cycles of moon and sun: Mazzoth
originally celebrated the beginning of the barley harvest; Shabuoth, later
called Pentecost, celebrated the end of the wheat harvest; Sukkoth com-
memorated the vintage; Pesachy or Passover, was the feast of the first fruits
of the flock; Rosh-ha-shanah announced the New Year; only later were these
festivals adapted to commemorate vital events in the history of the Jews.lfl8a
On the first day of the Passover a lamb or kid was sacrificed and eaten, and
its blood was sprinkled upon the doors as the portion of the god; later the
priests attached this custom to the story of Yahveh's slaughter of the first-
born of the Egyptians. The lamb was once a totem of a Canaanite clan; the
* In Hebrew Yahveh is written as Jhvh; this was erroneously translated into Jehovah
because the vowels a-o-a had been placed over Jhvh in the original, to indicate that
Adonai was to be pronounced in place of Yahveh; and the theologians of the Renaissance
and the Reformation wrongly supposed that these vowels were to be placed between the
consonants of Jhvb™
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 333
Passover, among the Canaanites, was the oblation of a lamb to the local god.*
As we read (Exod., xi) the story of the establishment of the Passover rite,
and see the Jews celebrating that same rite steadfastly today, we feel again
the venerable antiquity of their worship, and the strength and tenacity of
their race.
The Fifth Commandment sanctified the family, as second only to the
Temple in the structure of Jewish society; the ideals then stamped upon
the institution marked it throughout medieval and modern European
history until our own disintegrative Industrial Revolution. The Hebrew
patriarchal family was a vast economic and political organization, com-
posed of the oldest married male, his wives, his unmarried children, his
married sons with their wives and children, and perhaps some slaves.
The economic basis of the institution was its convenience for cultivating
the soil; its political value lay in its providing a system of social order so
strong that it made the state—except in war— almost superfluous. The
father's authority was practically unlimited; the land was his, and his chil-
dren could survive only by obedience to him; he was the state. If he was
poor he could sell his daughter, before her puberty, as a bondservant; and
though occasionally he condescended to ask her consent, he had full
right to dispose of her in marriage as he wished.1"8 Boys were supposed
to be products of the right testicle, girls of the left— which was believed
to be smaller and weaker than the right.170 At first marriage was matrilocal;
the man had to "leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife" in her
clan; but this custom gradually died out after the establishment of the
monarchy. Yahveh's instructions to the wife were: "Thy desire shall be
to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Though technically sub-
ject, the woman was often a person of high authority and dignity; the
history of the Jews shines with such names as Sarah, Rachel, Miriam and
Esther; Deborah was one of the judges of Israel,1" and it was the prophet-
ess Huldah whom Josiah consulted about the Book which the priests had
found in the Temple.173 The mother of many children was certain of
security and honor. For the little nation longed to increase and multiply,
feeling, as in Palestine today, its dangerous numerical inferiority to the
peoples surrounding it; therefore it exalted motherhood, branded celibacy
as a sin and a crime, made marriage compulsory after twenty, even in
* Later this gentle and ancient totem became the Paschal Lamb of Christianity, iden-
tified with the dead Christ.
334 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
priests, abhorred marriageable virgins and childless women, and looked
upon abortion, infanticide and other means of limiting population as
heathen abominations that stank in the nostrils of the Lord.174 "And when
Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister;
and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die."17* The perfect wife
was one who labored constantly in and about her home, and had no
thought except in her husband and her children. The last chapter of
Proverbs states the male ideal of woman completely:
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above
rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he
shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all
the days of her life. She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh will-
ingly with her hands. She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth
her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth
meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She consider-
eth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a
vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengthened! her
arms. She perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth
not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands
hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she
reachcth forth her hands to the needy. . . . She makcth herself cover-
ings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. Her husband is
known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivered! girdles unto the
merchant. Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall re-
joice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in
her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of
her household, and eatcth not the bread of idleness. Her children
arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
. . . Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise
her in the gates.*
The Sixth Commandment was a counsel of perfection; nowhere is
there so much killing as in the Old Testament; its chapters oscillate be-
* This, of course, was the man's ideal; if we may believe Isaiah (iii, 16-23), the real
women of Jerusalem were very much of this world, loving fine raiment and ornament,
and leading the men a merry chase. "The daughters of Zion arc haughty, and walk with
stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, . . . mincing as they go, and making a tinkling
with their feet," etc. Perhaps the historians have always deceived us about women?
CHAP. XII J JUDEA 335
tween slaughter and compensatory reproduction. Tribal quarrels, internal
factions and hereditary vendettas broke the monotony of intermittent
peace.176 Despite a magnificent verse about ploughshares and pruning-
hooks, the Prophets were not pacifists, and the priests— if we may judge
from the speeches which they put into the mouth of Yahveh— were almost
as fond of war as of preaching. Among nineteen kings of Israel eight were
assassinated.1" Captured cities were usually destroyed, the males put to
the sword, and the soil deliberately ruined— in the fashion of the times.171
Perhaps the figures exaggerate the killing; it is unbelievable that, entirely
without modern inventions, "the children of Israel slew of the Syrians one
hundred thousand footmen in one day."179 Belief in themselves as the
chosen people180 intensified the pride natural in a nation conscious of
superior abilities; it accentuated their disposition to segregate thertiselves
maritally and mentally from other peoples, and deprived them of the in-
ternational perspective that their descendants were to attain. But they
had in high degree the virtues of their qualities. Their violence came of
unmanageable vitality, their separatism came of their piety, their quarrel-
someness and qucrulousness came of a passionate sensitivity that produced
the greatest literature of the Near East; their racial pride was the indis-
pensable prop of their courage through centuries of suffering. Men are
what they have had to be.
The Seventh Commandment recognized marriage as the basis of the
family, as the Fifth had recognized the family as the basis of society; and
it offered to marriage all the support of religion. It said nothing about sex
relations before marriage, but other regulations laid upon the bride the
obligation, under pain of death by stoning, to prove her virginity on the
day of her marriage.181 Nevertheless prostitution was common and ped-
erasty apparently survived the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.181
As the Law did not seem to prohibit relations with foreign harlots, Syrian,
Moabite, Midianite and other "strange women" flourished along the high-
ways, where they lived in booths and tents, and combined the trades of
peddler and prostitute. Solomon, who had no violent prejudices in these
matters, relaxed the laws that had kept such women out of Jerusalem; in
time they multiplied so rapidly there that in the days of the Maccabees
the Temple itself was described by an indignant reformer as full of forni-
cation and harlotry.183
Love affairs probably occurred, for there was much tenderness between
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
the sexes; "Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed unto
him but a few days for the love he had to her."184 But love played a very
small role in the choice of mates. Before the Exile marriage was com-
pletely secular, arranged by the parents, or by the suitor with the parents
of the bride. Vestiges of capture-marriage are found in the Old Testa-
ment; Yahveh approves of it in war;186 and the elders, on the occasion of
a shortage of women, "commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go
and lie in wait in the vineyards; and see and behold if the daughters of
Shiloh come out to dance in dances; then come ye out of the vineyards,
and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to
the land of Benjamin."186 But this was exceptional; usually the marriage
was by purchase; Jacob purchased Leah and Rachel by his toil, the gentle
Ruth was quite simply bought by Boaz, and the prophet Hosea regretted
exceedingly that he had given fifty shekels for his wife.187 The word for
wife, beulah, meant owned.1"7* The father of the bride reciprocated by
giving his daughter a dowry-an institution admirably adapted to diminish
the socially disruptive gap between the sexual and the economic matur-
ity of children in an urban civilization.
If the man was well-to-do, he might practise polygamy; if the wife
was barren, like Sarah, she might encourage her husband to take a con-
cubine. The purpose of these arrangements was prolific reproduction; it
was taken as a matter of course that after Rachel and Leah had given
Jacob all the children they were capable of bearing, they should offer
him their maids, who would also bear him children.1™ A woman was not
allowed to remain idle in this matter of reproduction; if a husband died,
his brother, however many wives he might already have, was obliged to
marry her; or, if the husband had no brother, the obligation fell upon
his nearest surviving male kin.180 Since private property was the core of
Jewish economy, the double standard prevailed: the man might have
many wives, but the woman was confined to one man. Adultery meant
relations with a woman who had been bought and paid for by another
man; it was a violation of the law of property, and was punished with
death for both parties.190 Fornication was forbidden to women, but was
looked upon as a venial offense in men.1"1 Divorce was free to the man, but
extremely difficult for the woman, until Talmudic days.1"3 The husband
does not seem to have abused his privileges unduly; he is pictured to us,
all in all, as zealously devoted to his wife and his children. And though
CHAP.XIl) JUDEA 337
love did not determine marriage, it often flowered out of it. "Isaac took
Rebecca, and she became his wife; and he loved her; and Isaac was com-
forted after" his mother's death."194 Probably in no other people outside of
the Far East has family life reached so high a level as among the Jews.
The Eighth Commandment sanctified private property,* and bound it up
with religion and the family as one of the three bases of Hebrew society.
Property was almost entirely in land; until the days of Solomon there was
little industry beyond that of the potter and the smith. Even agriculture was
not completely developed; the bulk of the population devoted itself to rear-
ing sheep and cattle, and tending the vine, the olive and the fig. They lived
in tents rather than houses, in order to move more easily to fresh pastures.
In time their growing economic surplus generated trade, and the Jewish mer-
chants, by their tenacity and their skill, began to flourish in Damascus, Tyre
and Sidon, and in the precincts of the Temple itself. There was no coinage
till near the time of the Captivity, but gold and silver, weighed in each trans-
action, became a medium of exchange, and bankers appeared in great numbers
to finance commerce and enterprise. It was nothing strange that these
"money-lenders" should use the courts of the Temple; it was a custom gen-
eral in the Near East, and survives there in many places to this day.1*9 Yahveh
beamed upon the growing power of the Hebrew financiers; "thou shalt lend
unto many nations," he said, "but thou shalt not borrow"1"7— a generous phil-
osophy that has made great fortunes, though it has not seemed, in our cen-
tury, to be divinely inspired.
As in the other countries of the Near East, war captives and convicts were
used as slaves, and hundreds of thousands of them toiled in cutting timber
and transporting materials for such public works as Solomon's Temple and
palace. But the owner had no power of life and death over his slaves, and the
slave might acquire property and buy his liberty.108 Men could be sold as
bondservants for unpaid debts, or could sell their children in their place; and
this continued to the days of Christ.100 These typical institutions of the Near
East were mitigated in Judea by generous charity, and a vigorous campaign,
by priest and prophet, against exploitation. The Code laid it down hopefully
that "ye shall not oppress one another" j200 it asked that Hebrew bondservants
should be released, and debts among Jews canceled, every seventh year;5"1 and
when this was found too idealistic for the masters, the Law proclaimed the
institution of the Jubilee, by which, every fifty years, all slaves and debtors
should be freed. "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty
* Theoretically the land belonged to Yahveh.1"6
338 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a Jubilee
unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall re-
turn every man unto his family."101
We have no evidence that this fine edict was obeyed, but we must give
credit to the priests for leaving no lesson in charity untaught. "If there be
among you a poor man of one of thy brethren, . . . thou shalt open thine
hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need"; and
"take thou no usury" (i.e., interest) "of him."308 The Sabbath rest was to be
extended to every employee, even to animals; stray sheaves and fruits were to
be left in the fields and orchards for the poor to glean.10* And though these
charities were largely for fellow Jews, "the stranger in the gates" was also to
be treated with kindness; the sojourner was to be sheltered and fed, and dealt
with honorably. At all times the Jews were bidden to remember that they,
too, had once been homeless, even bondservants, in a foreign land.
The Ninth Commandment, by demanding absolute honesty of witnesses,
put the prop of religion under the whole structure of Jewish law. An oath
was to be a religious ceremony: not merely was a man, in swearing, to place
his hand on the genitals of him to whom he swore, as in the old custom;** he
was now to be taking God himself as his witness and his judge. False wit-
nesses, according to the Code, were to receive the same punishment that their
testimony had sought to bring upon their victims.208 Religious law was the
sole law of Israel; the priests and the temples were the judges and the courts;
and those who refused to accept the decision of the priests were to be put to
death.807 Ordeal by the drinking of poisonous water was prescribed in certain
cases of doubtful guilt.3"8 There was no other than religious machinery for
enforcing the law; it had to be left to personal conscience, and public opinion.
Minor crimes might be atoned for by confession and compensation.5** Capital
punishment was decreed, by Yahveh's instructions, for murder, kidnaping,
idolatry, adultery, striking or cursing a parent, stealing a slave, or "lying with
a beast," but not for the killing of a servant;"0 and "thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live."211 Yahveh was quite satisfied to have the individual take the
law into his own hands in case of murder: "The revenger of blood, himself
shall slay the murderer; when he mecteth him, he shall slay him."212 Certain
cities, however, were to be set apart, to which a criminal might flee, and in
which the avenger must stay his revenge.213 In general the principle of punish-
ment was the lex talionis: "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for
hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, stripe for stripe"214— we trust that
this was a counsel of perfection, never quite realized. The Mosaic Code,
though written down at least fifteen hundred years later, shows no advance,
in criminal legislation, upon the Code of Hammurabi; in legal organization it
shows an archaic retrogression to primitive ecclesiastical control.
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 339
The Tenth Commandment reveals how clearly woman was conceived
under the rubric of property. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house,
thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maid-
servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.""* Never-
theless, it was an admirable precept; could men follow it, half the fever and
anxiety of our life would be removed. Strange to say, the greatest of the
commandments is not listed among the Ten, though it is part of the "Law."
It occurs in Leviticus, xix, 18, lost amid "a repetition of sundry laws," and
reads very simply: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
In general it was a lofty code, sharing its defects with its age, and
rising to virtues characteristically its own. We must remember that it
was only a law— indeed, only a "priestly Utopia"*8— rather than a descrip-
tion of Jewish life; like other codes, it was honored plentifully in the
breach, and won new praise with every violation. But its influence upon
the conduct of the people was at least as great as that of most legal
or moral codes. It gave to the Jews, through the two thousand years of
wandering which they were soon to begin, a "portable Fatherland," as
Heine was to call it, an intangible and spirtual state; it kept them united
despite every dispersion, proud despite every defeat, and brought them
across the centuries to our own time, a strong and apparently indestructi-
ble people.
VII. THE LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE
History— Fiction— Poetry— The Psalms— The Song of Songs—
Proverbs— Job— The idea of immortality— The pessimism of
Ecclesiastes—The advent of Alexander
The Old Testament is not only law; it is history, poetry and philos-
ophy of the highest order. After making every deduction for primitive
legend and pious fraud, after admitting that the historical books are not
quite as accurate or as ancient as our forefathers supposed, we find in
them, nevertheless, not merely some of the oldest historical writing known
to us, but some of the best. The books of Judges, Samuel and Kings may,
as some scholars believe,217 have been put together hastily during or
shortly after the Exile to collect and preserve the national traditions of a
scattered and broken people; nevertheless the stories of Saul, David and
Solomon are immeasurably finer in structure and style than the other his-
torical writing of the ancient Near East. Even Genesis, if we read it with
some understanding of the function of legend, is (barring its genealogies)
340 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
an admirable story, told without frill or ornament, with simplicity, vivid-
ness and force. And in a sense we have here not mere history, but philos-
ophy of history; this is the first recorded effort of man to reduce the
multiplicity of past events to a measure of unity by seeking in them some
pervading purpose and significance, some law of sequence and causation,
some illumination for the present and the future. The conception of his-
tory promulgated by the Prophets and the priestly authors of the Penta-
teuch survived a thousand years of Greece and Rome to become the
world-view of European thinkers from Boethius to Bossuet.
Midway between the history and the poetry are the fascinating ro-
mances of the Bible. There is nothing more perfect in the realm of prose
than the story of Ruth; only less excellent are the tales of Isaac and Re-
becca, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin, Samson and Delilah,
Esther, Judith and Daniel. The poetical literature begins with the "Song
of Moses" (Exod. xv) and the "Song of Deborah" (Judges v), and
reaches finally to the heights of the Psalms. The "penitential" hymns of
the Babylonians had prepared for these, and perhaps had given them
material as well as form; Ikhnaton's ode to the sun seems to have contrib-
uted to Psalm CIV; and the majority of the Psalms, instead of being the
impressively united work of David, are probably the compositions of
several poets writing long after the Captivity, probably in the third cen-
tury before Christ.218 But all this is as irrelevant as the name or sources of
Shakespeare; what matters is that the Psalms are at the head of the world's
lyric poetry. They were not meant to be read at a sitting, or in a Higher
Critic's mood; they are at their best as expressing moments of pious ecstasy
and stimulating faith. They are marred for us by bitter imprecations, tire-
some "groanings" and complaints, and endless adulation of a Yahveh who,
with all his "lovingkindncss," "longsuffering" and "compassion," pours
"smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth" (VIII), promises
that "the wicked shall be turned into hell" (IX), laps up flattery,* and
threatens to "cut off all flattering lips" (XII). The Psalms are full of
military ardor, hardly Christian, but very Pilgrim. Some of them, how-
ever, are jewels of tenderness, or cameos of humility. "Verily every
man at his best state is altogether vanity. ... As for man, his days are
as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth
over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more"
*Psalm is a Greek word, meaning "song of praise."
CHAP. XIl) JUDEA 341
(XXIX, CIII) . In these songs we feel the antistrophic rhythm of ancient
Oriental poetry, and almost hear the voices of majestic choirs in alternate
answering. No poetry has ever excelled this in revealing metaphor or
living imagery; never has religious feeling been more intensely or vividly
expressed. These poems touch us more deeply than any lyric of love;
they move even the sceptical soul, for they give passionate form to the
final longing of the developed mind— for some perfection to which it may
dedicate its striving. Here and there, in the King James' Version, are
pithy phrases that have become almost words in our language— "out of
the mouths of babes" (VIII), "the apple of the eye" (XVII), "put not
your trust in princes" (CXLVI); and everywhere, in the original, are
similes that have never been surpassed: "The rising sun is as a bridegroom
coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race"
(XIX). We can only imagine what majesty and beauty must clothe these
songs in the sonorous language of their origin.*
When, beside these Psalms, we place in contrast the "Song of Solo-
mon," we get a glimpse of that sensual and terrestrial element in Jewish
life which the Old Testament, written almost entirely by prophets and
priests, has perhaps concealed from us— just as Ecclcsiastcs reveals a scepti-
cism not otherwise discernible in the carefully selected and edited litera-
ture of the ancient Jews. This strangely amorous composition is an open
field for surmise: it may be a collection of songs of Babylonian origin,
celebrating the love of Ishtar and Tammux; it may be (since it contains
words borrowed from the Greek) the work of several Hebrew Anacreons
touched by the Hellenistic spirit that entered Judea with Alexander; or
(since the lovers address each other as brother and sister in the Egyptian
manner) it may be a flower of Alexandrian Jewry, plucked by some
quite emancipated soul from the banks of the Nile. In any case its pres-
ence in the Bible is a charming mystery: by what winking— or hood-
winking—of the theologians did these songs of lusty passion find room
between Isaiah and the Preacher?
A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night
betwixt my breasts.
My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of
Engedi.
*A selection of the best Psalms would probably include VIII, XXIII, LI, CIV,
CXXXVII and CXXXIX. The last is strangely like Whitman's pxan to evolution.**
34* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XII
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast dove's
eyes.
Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant; also our bed is
green. ... -|
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. . . .
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of
love. . . .
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, or by the
hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he
please. . . .
My beloved is mine, and I am his; he feedeth among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved,
and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of
Bether. . . .
Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field, let us lodge in the
villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish,
whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth;
there will I give thee my loves."0
This is the voice of youth, and that of the Proverbs is the voice of old
age. Men look to love and life for everything; they receive a little less
than that; they imagine that they have received nothing: these are the
three stages of the pessimist. So this legendary Solomon* warns youth
against the evil woman, "for she hath cast down many wounded; yea,
many strong men have been slain by her. . . . Whoso committeth adultery
with a woman lacketh understanding. . . . There be three things which
are wonderful to me; yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle
in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the
midst of the sea, and the way of a man with a maid."821 He agrees with
St. Paul that it is better to marry than to burn. "Rejoice with the wife
of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and the pleasant roe; let her
breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her
love. . . . Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox with
hatred therewith."" Can these be the words of the husband of seven
hundred wives?
• The Proverbs, of course, are not the work of Solomon, though several of them may
hive come from him; they owe something to Egyptian literature and Greek philosophy,
and were probably put together in the third or second century B.C. by some Hellenized
Alexandrian Jew.
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 343
Next to unchastity, in the way from wisdom, is sloth: "Go to the ant,
thou sluggard. . . . How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard?""* "Seest thou
a man diligent in his business?— he shall stand before kings."*4 Yet will
the Philosopher not brook crass ambition. "He that maketh haste to be
rich shall not be innocent"; and "the prosperity of fools shall destroy
them."2"5 Work is wisdom, words are mere folly. "In all labor there
is profit, but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury. ... A fool
uttereth all his mind, but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards; . . .
even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise."*" The lesson
which the Sage never tires of repeating is an almost Socratic identification
of virtue and wisdom, redolent of those schools of Alexandria in which
Hebrew theology was mating with Greek philosophy to form the intellect
of Europe. "Understanding is a well-spring of life unto him that hath
it; but the instruction of fools is folly. . . . Happy is the man that
findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding; for the mer-
chandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof
than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies; and all things thou
canst desire are not to be compared with her. Length of days is in her
right hand; and in her left hand riches and honor. Her ways are ways
of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace."137
Job is earlier than Proverbs; perhaps it was written during the Exile,
and described by allegory the captives of Babylon.* "I call it," says the
perfervid Carlyle, "one of the grandest things ever written with a pen.
... A noble book; all* men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the
never-ending problem— man's destiny, and God's ways with him here on
this earth. . . . There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of
it, of equal literary merit."380' The problem arose out of the Hebrew
emphasis on this world. Since there was no Heaven in ancient Jewish
theology,231 virtue had to be rewarded here or never. But often it seemed
that only the wicked prospered, and that the choicest sufferings are re-
served for the good man. Why, as the Psalmist complained, did the "un-
godly prosper in the world? "asa Why did God hide himself, instead of
* Scholarship assigns it tentatively to the fifth century B.C.** Its text is corrupt beyond
even the custom of sacred scriptures everywhere. Jastrow accepts only chapters iii-xxxi,
considers the rest to be edifying emendations, and suspects many interpolations and mis-
translations in the accepted chapters. E.g., "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him"
(xiii, 5) should be, "Yet I tremble not," or "Yet I have no hope."2* Kallcn and others have
found in the book the likeness of a Greek tragedy, written on the model of Euripides.*0
Chapters iii-xli are cast in the typical antistrophic form of Hebrew poetry.
344 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
punishing the evil and rewarding the good?*33 The author of Job now
asked the same questions more resolutely, and offered his hero, perhaps,
as a symbol for his people. All Israel had worshiped Yahveh (fitfully),
as Job had done; Babylon had ignored and blasphemed Yahveh; and yet
Babylon flourished, and Israel ate the dust and wore the sackcloth of
desolation and captivity. What could one say of such a god?
In a prologue in heaven, which some clever scribe may have inserted
to take the scandal out of the book, Satan suggests to Yahveh that Job
is "perfect and upright" only because he is fortunate; would he retain
his piety in adversity? Yahveh permits Satan to heap a variety of calami-
ties upon Job's head. For a time the hero is as patient as Job; but at last
his fortitude breaks, he ponders suicide, and bitterly reproaches his god
for forsaking him. Zophar, who has come out to enjoy the sufferings of
his friend, insists that God is just, and will yet reward the good man,
even on earth; but Job shuts him up sharply:
No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.
But I have understanding as well as you; . . . yea, who knoweth not
these things? . . . The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that
provoke God are secure; into whose hand God bringeth abundantly.
.... Lo, mine eye hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard and
understood it. ... But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of
no value. Oh, that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it
should be your wisdom.884
He reflects on the brevity of life, and the length of death:
Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he flceth also as
a shadow, and continued! not. . . . For there is hope of a tree,
if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender
branch thereof will not cease. . . . But man dieth, and wasteth
away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the
waters fall from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so
man lieth down, and riseth not. ... If a man die, shall he live
again?*35
The debate continues vigorously, and Job becomes more and more
sceptical of his God, until he calls him "Adversary," and wishes that this
Adversary would destroy himself by writing a book***— perhaps some
CHAP.XH) JUDEA 345
Leibnitzian theodicy. The concluding words of this chapter— <cThe words
of Job are ended"— suggest that this was the original termination of a
discourse which, like that of Ecclesiates, represented a strong heretical
minority among the Jews.* But a fresh philosopher enters at this point—
Elihu— who demonstrates, in one hundred and sixty-five verses, the justice
of God's ways with men. Finally, in one of the most majestic passages
in the Bible, a voice comes down out of the clouds:
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said:
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and
answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of
the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the
measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched his line
upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or
who laid the cornerstone thereof; when the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut
up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out
of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and
thick darkness a swaddling band for it, and brake up for it my de-
creed place, and set bars and doors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou
come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?
Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the
dayspring to know his place? . . . Hast thou entered into the
springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?
Have the gates of death been opened unto thcc? or hast thou seen
the doors of the shadow of death? Hast thou perceived the breath
of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all. ... Hast thou entered
into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of
the hail? . . . Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades,
or loose the bands of Orion? . . . Knowest thou the ordinances of
heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? . . .
Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts, or who hath given
understanding to the heart? . . .
* "The sceptic," wrote that prolific sceptic, Rcnan, "writes little, and there are many
chances that his writings will be lost. The destiny of the Jewish people having been ex-
clusively religious, the secular part of its literature had to be sacrificed."286 The repetition
of "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" in the Psalms (XIV, i; LIII, i),
indicates that such fools were sufficiently numerous to create some stir in Israel. There is
apparently a reference to this minority in Zephaniah, i, 12.
34$ THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that
reproveth God, let him answer it.*7
Job humbles himself in terror before this apparition. Yahveh, appeased,
forgives him, accepts his sacrifice, denounces Job's friends for their feeble
arguments,*8 and gives Job fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels,
a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand she-asses, seven sons, three daughters,
and one hundred and forty years. It is a lame but happy ending; Job
receives everything but an answer to his questions. The problem re-
mained; and it was to have profound effects upon later Jewish thought. In
the days of Daniel (ca. 167 B.C.) it was to be abandoned as insoluble in terms
of this world; no answer could be given— Daniel and Enoch (and Kant)
would say— unless one believed in some other life, beyond the grave, in
, which all wrongs would be righted, the wicked would be punished, and
the just would inherit infinite reward. This was one of the varied currents
of thought that flowed into Christianity, and carried it to victory.
In Ecclesiastes* the problem is given a pessimistic reply; prosperity
and misfortune have nothing to do with virtue and vice.
All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just
man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man
that prolongcth his life in his wickedness. ... So I returned, and
considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and be-
held the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no com-
forter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power. . . .
If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of
judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter, . . .
for there be higher than they.341
It is not virtue and vice that determine a man's lot, but blind and merciless
chance. "I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men
of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance
happeneth to them all."*41 Even wealth is insecure, and does not long
bring happiness. "He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver;
nor he that loveth abundance, with increase: this is also vanity. . . . The
* The authorship and date of the book are quite unknown. Sarton attributes it to the
period between 250 and 168 B.C.** The author calls himself, by a confusing literary fiction,
both "Koheleth" and "the son of David, king in Jerusalem"-i.e., Solomon.*40
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 347
sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much; but the
abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep."84* Remembering his
relatives, he formulates Malthus in a line: "When goods are increased,
they are increased that eat them."** Nor can he be soothed by any legend
of a Golden Past, or a Utopia to come: things have always been as they
are now, and so they will always be. "Say not thou, What is the cause
that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire
wisely concerning this";**5 one must choose his historians carefully. And
"the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done
is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is
there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been
already of old time, which was before us."8*0 Progress, he thinks, is a
delusion; civilizations have been forgotten, and will be again.9*7
In general he feels that life is a sorry business, and might well be dis-
pensed with; it is aimless and circuitous motion without permanent result,
and ends where it began; it is a futile struggle, in which nothing is certain
except defeat.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is
vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh
under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation
cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the
wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it
whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according
to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not
full; unto the place from whence the rivers came, thither they re-
turn again. . . . Wherefore I praised the dead which are already
dead, more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he,
than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the
evil work that is done under the sun. ... A good name is better
than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one's
birth.848
For a time he seeks the answer to the riddle of life in abandonment to
pleasure. "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better
thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry." But
"behold, this also is vanity.""9 The difficulty with pleasure is woman,
from whom the Preacher seems to have received some unforgettable sting.
"One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those
348 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XII
have I not found. ... I find more bitter than death the woman whose
heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands; whoso pleaseth God shall
escape her."*1 He concludes his digression into this most obscure realm
of philosophy by reverting to the advice of Solomon and Voltaire, who
did not practise it: "Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest, all
the days of the life of thy vanity which God hath given thee under the
sun."*8
Even wisdom is a questionable thing; he lauds it generously, but he
suspects that anything more than a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Of making many books," he writes, with uncanny foresight, "there is
no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."3*3 It might be wise
to seek wisdom if God had given it a better income; "wisdom is good,
with an inheritance"; otherwise it is a snare, and is apt to destroy its
lovers.354 (Truth is like Yahveh, who said to Moses: "Thou canst not see
my face; for there shall no man see me and live."3156) In the end the wise
man dies as thoroughly as the fool, and both come to the same odor.
And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom con-
cerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath
God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. I have
seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is
vanity and a chasing after the wind. ... I communed with mine
own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten
more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jeru-
salem; yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowl-
edge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness
and folly; I perceived that this also is a chasing after the wind. For
in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increased! knowledge
increased! sorrow.986
All these darts of outrageous fortune might be borne with hope and
courage if the just man could look forward to some happiness beyond
the grave. But that, too, Ecclesiastes feels, is a myth; man is an animal,
and dies like any other beast.
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even
one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea,
they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence over a
beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place: all are of the dust,
CHAP. XIl) J U D E A 349
and all turn to dust again. . . . Wherefore I perceive that there is
nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works;
for that is his portion; for who shall bring him to see what shall be
after him? . . . Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom
in the grave, whither thou goest.*7
What a commentary on the wisdom so lauded in the Proverbs! Here,
evidently, civilization had for a time gone to seed. The vitality of Israel's
youth had been exhausted by her struggles against the empires that
surrounded her. The Yahveh in whom she had trusted had not come
to her aid; and in her desolation and dispersion she raised to the skies this
bitterest of all voices in literature to express the profoundest doubts that
ever come to the human soul.
Jerusalem had been restored, but not as the citadel of an unconquerable
god; it was a vassal city ruled now by Persia, now by Greece. In 334
B.C. the young Alexander stood at its gates, and demanded the surrender
of the capital. The high-priest at first refused; but the next morning,
having had a dream, he consented. He ordered the clergy to put on their
most impressive vestments, and the people to garb themselves in immac-
ulate white; then he led the population pacifically out through the gates
to solicit peace. Alexander bowed to the high-priest, expressed his ad-
miration for the people and their god, and accepted Jerusalem.858
It was not the end of Judea. Only the first act had been played in this
strange drama that binds forty centuries. Christ would be the second,
Ahasuerus the third; today another act is played, but it is not the last.
Destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt, Jerusalem rises again, symbol
of the vitality and pertinacity of an heroic race. The Jews, who are as
old as history, may be as lasting as civilization.
CHAPTER XIII
Persia
I. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MEDES
Their origins— Rulers—The blood treaty of Sardis— Degeneration
WHO were the Medes that had played so vital a role in the destruc-
tion of Assyria? Their origin, of course, eludes us; history is a
book that one must begin in the middle. The first mention we have of them
is on a tablet recording the expedition of Shalmaneser III into a country
called Parsua, in the mountains of Kurdistan (837 B.C.); there, it seems,
twenty-seven chieftain-kings ruled over twenty-seven states thinly popu-
lated by a people called Amadai, Madai, Medes. As Indo-Europeans they
had probably come into western Asia about a thousand years before
Christ, from the shores of the Caspian Sea. The Zend-Avesta, sacred
scriptures of the Persians, idealized the racial memory of this ancient
home-land, and described it as a paradise: the scenes of our youth, like
the past, are always beautiful if we do not have to live in them again.
The Medes appear to have wandered through the region of Bokhara and
Samarkand, and to have migrated farther and farther south, at last reach-
ing Persia.1 They found copper, iron, lead, gold and silver, marble and
precious stones, in the mountains in which they made their new home;*
and being a simple and vigorous people they developed a prosperous agri-
culture on the plains and the slopes of the hills.
At Ecbatana*— i.e., "a meeting-place of many ways"— in a picturesque
valley made fertile by the melting snows of the highlands, their first
king, Deioces, founded their first capital, adorning and dominating it with
a royal palace spread over an area two-thirds of a mile square. According
to an uncorroborated passage in Herodotus, Deioces achieved power by
acquiring a reputation for justice, and having achieved power, became
a despot. He issued regulations "that no man should be admitted to the
King's presence, but every one should consult him by means of messen-
gers; and moreover, that it should be accounted indecency for any one
* Probably the modern Hamadan.
350
CHAP.Xm) PERSIA 351
to laugh or spit before him. He established such ceremony about his
person for this reason, . . . that he might appear to be of a different
nature to them who did not see him."1 Under his leadership the Medes,
strengthened by their natural and frugal life, and hardened by custom
and environment to the necessities of war, became a threat to the power
of Assyria— which repeatedly invaded Media, thought it most instructively
defeated, and found it in fact never tired of fighting for its liberty. The
greatest of the Median kings, Cyaxares, settled the matter by destroying
Nineveh. Inspired by this victory, his army swept through western Asia
to the very gates of Sardis, only to be turned back by an eclipse of the
sun. The opposing leaders, frightened by this apparent warning from
/ the skies, signed a treaty of peace, and sealed it by drinking each other's
blood.4 In the next year Cyaxares died, having in the course of one reign
expanded his kingdom from a subject province into an empire embracing
Assyria, Media and Persia. Within a generation after his death this
empire came to an end.
Its tenure was too brief to permit of any substantial contribution to
civilization, except in so far as it prepared for the culture of Persia. To
Persia the Medes gave their Aryan language, their alphabet of thirty-six
characters, their replacement of clay with parchment and pen as writing
materials,8 their extensive use of the column in architecture, their moral
code of conscientious husbandry in time of peace and limitless bravery
in time of war, their Zoroastrian religion of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman,
their patriarchal family and polygamous marriage, and a body of law
sufficiently like that of the later empire to be united with it in the famous
phrase of Daniel about "the law of the Medes and the Persians, which
altereth not."6 Of their literature and their art not a stone or a letter
remains.
Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages,
} who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a
I gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied.
He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy
it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways;
wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes
became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered
trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry,
the very horses were often caparisoned in gold.T These once simple and
pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with
352 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIII
wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees,8 now rode in expensive
chariots from feast to feast. The early kings had prided themselves on
justice; but Astyages, being displeased with Harpagus, served up to him
the dismembered and headless body of his own son, and forced him to
eat of it." Harpagus ate, saying that whatever a king did was agreeable
to him; but he revenged himself by helping Cyrus to depose Astyages.
When Cyrus, the brilliant young ruler of the Median dependency of
Anshan, in Persia, rebelled against the effeminate despot of Ecbatana, the
Medes themselves welcomed Cyrus' victory, and accepted him, almost
without protest, as their king. By one engagement Media ceased to be the
master of Persia, Persia became the master of Media, and prepared to
become master of the whole Near Eastern world.
II. THE GREAT KINGS
The romantic Cyrus— His enlightened policies— Cambyses— Darius
the Great—The invasion of Greece
Cyrus was one of those natural rulers at whose coronation, as Emerson
said, all men rejoice. Royal in spirit and action, capable of wise adminis-
tration as well as of dramatic conquest, generous to the defeated and
loved by those who had been his enemies— no wonder the Greeks made
him the subject of innumerable romances, and— to their minds— the
greatest hero before Alexander. It is a disappointment to us that we
cannot draw a reliable picture of him from either Herodotus or Xeno-
phon. The former has mingled many fables with his history,10 while the
other has made the Cyroptfdia an essay on the military art, with incidental
lectures on education and philosophy; at times Xenophon confuses Cyrus
and Socrates. These delightful stories being put aside, the figure of Cyrus
becomes merely an attractive ghost. We can only say that he was hand-
some—since the Persians made him their model of physical beauty to the
end of their ancient art;11 that he established the Achaemenid Dynasty of
"Great Kings," which ruled Persia through the most famous period of
its history; that he organized the soldiery of Media and Persia into an
invincible army, captured Sardis and Babylon, ended for a thousand
years the rule of the Semites in western Asia, and absorbed the former
realms of Assyria, Babylonia, Lydia and Asia Minor into the Persian
Empire, the largest political organization of pre-Roman antiquity, and
one of the best-governed in history.
CHAP, xm) PERSIA 353
So far as we can visualize him through the haze of legend, he was the
most amiable of conquerors, and founded his empire upon generosity.
His enemies knew that he was lenient, and they did not fight him with
that desperate courage which men show when their only choice is to
kill or die. We have seen how, according to Herodotus, he rescued
Croesus from the funeral pyre at Sardis, and made him one of his most
honored counselors; and we have seen how magnanimously he treated the
Jews. The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his
empire should be left free in their religious worship- and beliefs, for he
fully understood the first principle of statesmanship— that religion is
stronger than the state. Instead of sacking cities and wrecking temples
he showed a courteous respect for the deities of the conquered, and con-
tributed to maintain their shrines; even the Babylonians, who had resisted
him so long, warmed towards him when they found him preserving their
sanctuaries and honoring their pantheon. Wherever he went in his un-
precedented career he offered pious sacrifice to the local divinities. Like
Napoleon he accepted indifferently all religions, and— with much better
' grace— humored all the gods.
Like Napoleon, too, he died of excessive ambition. Having won all
the Near East, he began a series of campaigns aimed to free Media and
Persia from the inroads of central Asia's nomadic barbarians. He seems to
have carried these excursions as far as the Jaxartes on the north and India
on the east. Suddenly, at the height of his curve, he was slain in battle with
the Massagetx, an obscure tribe that peopled the southern shores of the
Caspian Sea. Like Alexander he conquered an empire, but did not live
to organize it.
One great defect had sullied his character— occasional and incalculable
cruelty. It was inherited, unmixed with Cyrus' generosity, by his half-
mad son. Cambyses began by putting to death his brother and rival,
Smerdis; then, lured by the accumulated wealth of Egypt, he set forth
to extend the Persian Empire to the Nile. He succeeded, but apparently
at the cost of his sanity. Memphis was captured easily, but an army of
fifty thousand Persians sent to annex the Oasis of Ammon perished in
the desert, and an expedition to Carthage failed because the Phoenician
crews of the Persian fleet refused to attack a Phoenician colony. Cambyses
lost his head, and abandoned the wise clemency and tolerance of his
father. He publicly scoffed at the Egyptian religion, and plunged his
dagger derisively into the bull revered by the Egyptians as the god Apis;
354 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIII
he exhumed mummies and pried into royal tombs regardless of ancient
curses; he profaned the temples and ordered their idols to be burned.
He thought in this way to cure the Egyptians of superstition; but when
he was stricken with illness— apparently epileptic convulsions— the
Egyptians were certain that their gods had punished him, and that their
theology was now confirmed beyond dispute. As if again to illustrate
the inconveniences of monarchy, Cambyses, with a Napoleonic kick in
the stomach, killed his sister and wife Roxana, slew his son Prexaspes
with an arrow, buried twelve noble Persians alive, condemned Croesus
to death, repented, rejoiced to learn that the sentence had not been
carried out, and punished the officers who had delayed in executing it."
On his way back to Persia he learned that a usurper had seized the throne
and was being supported by widespread revolution. From that moment
he disappears from history; tradition has it that he killed himself.1*
The usurper had pretended to be Smerdis, miraculously preserved from
Cambyses' fratricidal jealousy; in reality he was a religious fanatic, a
devotee of the early Magian faith who was bent upon destroying
Zoroastrianism, the official religion of the Persian state. Another revolu-
tion soon deposed him, and the seven aristocrats who had organized it
raised one of their number, Darius, son of Hystaspes, to the throne.
In this bloody way began the reign of Persia's greatest king.
Succession to the throne, in Oriental monarchies, was marked not only
by palace revolutions in strife for the royal power, but by uprisings in
subject colonies that grasped the chance of chaos, or an inexperienced
ruler, to reclaim their liberty. The usurpation and assassination of
"Smerdis" gave to Persia's vassals an excellent opportunity: the governors
of Egypt and Lydia refused submission, and the provinces of Susiana,
Babylonia, Media, Assyria, Armenia, Sacia and others rose in simultaneous
revolt. Darius subdued them with a ruthless hand. Taking Babylon after
a long siege, he crucified three thousand of its leading citizens as an induce-
ment to obedience in the rest; and in a series of swift campaigns he
"pacified" one after another of the rebellious states. Then, perceiving
how easily the vast empire might in any crisis fall to pieces, he put off
the armor of war, became one of the wisest administrators in history, and
set himself to reestablish his realm in a way that became a model of
imperial organization till the fall of Rome. His rule gave western Asia
a generation of such order and prosperity as that quarrelsome region had
never known before.
CHAP, xm) PERSIA 355
He had hoped to govern in peace, but it is the fatality of empire to
breed repeated war. For the conquered must be periodically reconquered,
and the conquerors must keep the arts and habits of camp and battle-
field; and at any moment the kaleidoscope of change may throw up a
new empire to challenge the old. In such a situation wars must be invented
if they do not arise of their own accord; each generation must be inured
to the rigors of campaigns, and taught by practice the sweet decorum
of dying for one's country.
Perhaps it was in part for this reason that Darius led his armies into
southern Russia, across the Bosphorus and the Danube to the Volga, to
chastise the marauding Scythians; and again across Afghanistan and a
hundred mountain ranges into the valley of the Indus, adding thereby
extensive regions and millions of souls and rupees to his realm. More
substantial reasons must be sought for his expedition into Greece. Herod-
otus would have us believe that Darius entered upon this historic f aux pas
because one of his wives, Atossa, teased him into it in bed;1* but it is more
dignified to believe that the King recognized in the Greek city-states
and their colonies a potential empire, or an actual confederacy, dangerous
to the Persian mastery of western Asia. When Ionia revolted and received
aid from Sparta and Athens, Darius reconciled himself reluctantly to war.
All the world knows the story of his passage across the ^Egean, the defeat
of his army at Marathon, and his gloomy return to Persia. There, amid
far-flung preparations for another attempt upon Greece, he suddenly
grew weak, and died.
III. PERSIAN LIFE AND INDUSTRY
The empire— The people— The language— The peasants— The im-
perial highways— Trade and finance
At its greatest extent, under Darius, the Persian Empire included twenty
provinces or "satrapies," embracing Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia,
Lydia, Phrygia, Ionia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Armenia, Assyria, the Cau-
casus, Babylonia, Media, Persia, the modern Afghanistan and Baluchistan,
India west of the Indus, Sogdiana, Bactria, and the regions of the Massa-
getae and other central Asiatic tribes. Never before had history recorded
so extensive an area brought under one government.
Persia itself, which was to rule these forty million souls for two hun-
dred years, was not at that time the country now known to us as Persia^
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
and to its inhabitants as Iran; it was that smaller tract, immediately east of
the Persian Gulf, known to the ancient Persians as Pars, and to the modern
Persians as Pars or Farsistan.™ Composed almost entirely of mountains and
deserts, poor in rivers, subject to severe winters and hot, arid summers,*
it could support its two million inhabitants17 only through such external
contributions as trade or conquest might bring. Its race of hardy moun-
taineers came, like the Medes, of Indo-European stock perhaps from South
Russia; and its language and early religion reveal its close kinship with those
Aryans who crossed Afghanistan to become the ruling caste of northern
India. Darius I, in an inscription at Naksh-i-Rustam, described himself as
"a Persian, the son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan descent." The Zoro-
astrians spoke of their primitive land as Airy ana-vaejo— "the Aryan home."t
Strabo applied the name Ariana to what is now called by essentially the
same word— Iran™
The Persians were apparently the handsomest people of the ancient Near
East. The monuments picture them as erect and vigorous, made hardy by
their mountains and yet refined by their wealth, with a pleasing symmetry
of features, an almost Greek straightness of nose, and a certain nobility of
countenance and carriage. They adopted for the most part the Median
dress, and later the Median ornaments. They considered it indecent to re-
veal more than the face; clothing covered them from turban, fillet or cap
to sandals or leather shoes. Triple drawers, a white under-garment of linen,
a double tunic, with sleeves hiding the hands, and a girdle at the waist, kept
the population warm in winter and hot in summer. The king distinguished
himself with embroidered trousers of a crimson hue, and saffron-buttoned
shoes. The dress of the women differed from that of the men only in a
slit at the breast. The men wore long beards and hung their hair in curls,
or, later, covered it with wigs.10 In the wealthier days of the empire men
as well as women made much use of cosmetics; creams were employed to
improve the complexion, and coloring matter was applied to the eyelids to
increase the apparent size and brilliance of the eyes. A special class of
"adorners," called kosmctai by the Greeks, arose as beauty experts to the
aristocracy. The Persians were connoisseurs in scents, and were believed by
the ancients to have invented cosmetic creams. The king never went to
war without a case of costly unguents to ensure his fragrance in victory or
defeat.80
Many languages have been used in the long history of Persia. The speech
of the court and the nobility in the days of Darius I was Old Persian— so
* At Susa, says Strabo, the summer heat was so intense that snakes and lizards could not
cross the streets quickly enough to escape being burned to death by the sun."
t Generally identified with the district of Arran on the river Araxes.
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 357
closely related to Sanskrit that evidently both were once dialects of an older
tongue, and were cousins to our own.* Old Persian developed on the one
hand into Zend— the language of the Zend-Avesta— and on the other hand into
Pahlavi, a Hindu tongue from which has come the Persian language of to-
day." When the Persians took to writing they adopted the Babylonian
cuneiform for their inscriptions, and the Aramaic alphabetic script for their
documents.28 They simplified the unwieldly syllabary of the Babylonians
from three hundred characters to thirty-six signs which gradually became
letters instead of syllables, and constituted a cuneiform alphabet.1* Writing,
however, seemed to the Persians an effeminate amusement, for which they
could spare little time from love, war and the chase. They did not con-
descend to produce literature.
The common man was contentedly illiterate, and gave himself com-
pletely to the culture of the soil. The Zend-Avesta exalted agriculture as
the basic and noblest occupation of mankind, pleasing above all other
labors to Ahura-Mazda, the supreme god. Some of the land was tilled by
peasant proprietors, who occasionally joined several families in agricultural
cooperatives to work extensive areas together.20 Part of the land was owned
by feudal barons, and cultivated by tenants in return for a share of the
crop; part of it was tilled by foreign (never Persian) slaves. Oxen pulled a
plough of wood armed with a metal point. Artificial irrigation drew water
from the mountains to the fields. Barley and wheat were the staple crops
and foods, but much meat was eaten and much wine drunk. Cyrus served
wine to his army,20 and Persian councils never undertook serious discussions ,
of policy when sobert— though they took care to revise their decisions the
next morning. One intoxicating drink, the haoma, was offered as a pleasant
sacrifice to the gods, and was believed to engender in its addicts not ex-
citement and anger, but righteousness and piety."8
Industry was poorly developed in Persia; she was content to let the na-
tions of the Near East practice the handicrafts while she bought their
* Some examples of the correlation:
Old Persian
Sanskrit
Greek
Latin
German
English
pitar
nama
pitar
nama
pater
onoma
pater
nomen
Vater
Nahmc
father
name
napat (grandson)
bar
napat
bhri
anepsios
fcrein
nepos
ferre
Neffe
fuhren
nephew
bear
matar
matar
meter
mater
Mutter
mother
bratar
eta
bhratar
stha
phrater
istemi
frater
sto
Brudcr
stchcn
brother
stand *
t"Thcy carry on their most important deliberations," Strabo reports, "when drinking
wine; and they regard decisions then made as more lasting than those made when they
are sober.""
358 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIH
products with their imperial tribute. She showed more originality in the
improvement of communications and transport. Engineers under the in-
structions of Darius I built great roads uniting the various capitals; one of
these highways, from Susa to Sardis, was fifteen hundred miles long. The
roads were accurately measured by parasangs (3.4 miles); and at every
fourth parasang, says Herodotus, "there are royal stations and excellent
inns, and the whole road is through an inhabited and safe country."" At
each station a fresh relay of horses stood ready to carry on the mail, so that,
though the ordinary traveler required ninety days to go from Susa to Sardis,
the royal mail moved over the distance as quickly as an automobile party does
now— that is, in a little less than a week. The larger rivers were crossed by
ferries, but the engineers could, when they wished, throw across the
Euphrates, even across the Hellespont, substantial bridges over which hun-
dreds of sceptical elephants could pass in safety. Other roads led through
the Afghanistan passes to India, and made Susa a half-way house to the al-
ready fabulous riches of the East. These roads were built primarily for mili-
tary and governmental purposes, to facilitate central control and admin-
istration; but they served also to stimulate commerce and the exchange of
customs, ideas, and the indispensable superstitions of mankind. Along these
roads, for example, angels and the Devil passed from Persian into Jewish
and Christian mythology.
Navigation was not so vigorously advanced as land transportation; the
Persians had no fleet of their own, but merely engaged or conscripted the
vessels of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Darius built a great canal uniting
Persia with the Mediterranean through the Red Sea and the Nile, but the
carelessness of his successors soon surrendered this achievement to the
shifting sands. When Xerxes royally commanded part of his naval forces to
circumnavigate Africa, it turned back in disgrace shortly after passing
through the Pillars of Hercules.80 Commerce was for the most part aban-
doned to foreigners— Babylonians, Phoenicians and Jews; the Persians despised
trade, and looked upon a market place as a breeding-ground of lies. The
wealthy classes took pride in supplying most of their wants directly from
their own fields and shops, not contaminating their fingers with either buy-
ing or selling.81 Payments, loans and interest were at first in the form of
goods, especially cattle and grain; coinage came later from Lydia. Darius
issued gold and silver "darics" stamped with his features,* and valued at a
gold-to-silver ratio of 13.5 to i. This was the origin of the bimetallic ratio
in modern currencies.88
* But having no relation with his name; dearie was from the Persian zariq— "a piece of
gold." The gold daric had a face value of $5.00. Three thousand gold darics made one
Persian talent."
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 359
IV. AN EXPERIMENT IN GOVERNMENT
The king—The nobles— The army—Law— A savage punishment—
The capitals— The satrapies— An achievement in administration
The life of Persia was political and military rather than economic; its
wealth was based not on industry but on power; it existed precariously
as a little governing isle in an immense and unnaturally subject sea. The
imperial organization that maintained this artefact was one of the most
unique and competent in history. At its head was the king, or Khshathra
—i.e., warrior;* the title indicates the military origin and character of the
Persian monarchy. Since lesser kings were vassal to him, the Persian
ruler entitled himself "King of Kings," and the ancient world made no
protest against his claim; the Greeks called him simply Basileus—Thc
King."4 His power was theoretically absolute; he could kill with a word,
without trial or reason given, after the manner of some very modern
dictator; and occasionally he delegated to his mother or his chief wife
this privilege of capricious slaughter." Few even of the greatest nobles
dared offer any criticism or rebuke, and public opinion was cautiously
impotent. The father whose innocent son had been shot before his eyes
by the king merely complimented the monarch on his excellent archery;
offenders bastinadoed by the royal order thanked His Majesty for keeping
them in mind.86 The king might rule as well as reign, if, like Cyrus and
the first Darius, he cared to bestir himself; but the later monarchs dele-
gated most of the cares of government to noble subordinates or imperial
eunuchs, and spent their time at love, dice or the chase." The court was
overrun with eunuchs who, from their coigns of vantage as guards of the
harem and pedagogues to the princes, stewed a poisonous brew of intrigue
in every reign, t" The king had the right to choose his successor from
among his sons, but ordinarily the succession was determined by assassina-
tion and revolution.
The royal power was limited in practice by the strength of the aristoc-
racy that mediated between the people and the throne. It was a matter
of custom that the six families of the men who had shared with Darius I
* The word survives in the present tide of the Persian king— Shah. Its stem appears also
in the Satraps or provincial officials of Persia, and in the Kshatriya or warrior caste of
India.
fFive hundred castrated boys came annually from Babylonia to act as "keepers of the
women" in the harems of Persia."
360 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
the dangers of the revolt against false Smerdis, should have exceptional
privileges and be consulted in all matters of vital interest. Many of the
nobles attended court, and served as a council for whose advice the
monarch usually showed the highest regard. Most members of the aris-
tocracy were attached to the throne by receiving their estates from the
king; in return they provided him with men and materials when he took
the field. Within their fiefs they had almost complete authority— levying
taxes, enacting laws, executing judgment, and maintaining their own
armed forces.40
The real basis of the royal power and imperial government was the army;
an empire exists only so long as it retains its superior capacity to kill. The
obligation to enlist on any declaration of war fell upon every able-bodied
male from fifteen to fifty years of age.41 When the father of three sons
petitioned Darius to exempt one of them from service, all three were put
to death; and when another father, having sent four sons to the battlefield,
begged Xerxes to permit the fifth son to stay behind and manage the
family estate, the body of this fifth son was cut in two by royal order and
placed on both sides of the road by which the army was to pass." The
troops marched off to war amid the blare of martial music and the plaudits
of citizens above the military age.
The spearhead of the army was the Royal Guard— two thousand horse-
men and two thousand infantry, all nobles— whose function it was to guard
the king. The standing army consisted exclusively of Persians and Alcdcs,
and from this permanent force came most of the garrisons stationed as centers
of persuasion at strategic points in the empire. The complete force consisted
of levies from every subject nation, each group with its own distinct lan-
guage, weapons and habits of war. Its equipment and retinue was as varied
as its origin: bows and arrows, scimitars, javelins, daggers, pikes, slings,
knives, shields, helmets, leather cuirasses, coats of mail, horses, elephants,
heralds, scribes, eunuchs, prostitutes, concubines, and chariots armed on
each hub with great steel scythes. The whole mass, though vast in number,
and amounting in the expedition of Xerxes to 1,800,000 men, never achieved
unity, and at the first sign of a reverse it became a disorderly mob. It con-
quered by mere force of numbers, by an elastic capacity for absorbing
casualties; it was destined to be overthrown as soon as it should encounter a
well-organized army speaking one speech and accepting one discipline. This
was the secret of Marathon and Plataea.
In such a state the only law was the will of the king and the power
of the army; no rights were sacred against these, and no precedents could
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 361
avail except an earlier decree of the king. For it was a proud boast of
Persia that its laws never changed, and that a royal promise or decree
was irrevocable. In his edicts and judgments the king was supposed to
be inspired by the god Ahura-Mazda himself; therefore the law of
the realm was the Divine Will, and any infraction of it was an offense
against the deity. The king was the supreme court, but it was his custom
to delegate this function to some learned elder in his retinue. Below him
was a High Court of Justice with seven members, and below this were
local courts scattered through the realm. The priests formulated the law,
and for a long time acted as judges; in later days laymen, even laywomen,
sat in judgment. Bail was accepted in all but the most important cases,
and a regular procedure of trial was followed. The court occasionally
decreed rewards as well as punishments, and in considering a crime
weighed against it the good record and services of the accused. The
law's delays were mitigated by fixing a time-limit for each case, and by
proposing to all disputants an arbitrator of their own choice who might
bring them to a peaceable settlement. As the law gathered precedents
and complexity a class of men arose called "speakers of the law," who
offered to explain it to litigants and help them conduct their cases.43
Oaths were taken, and use was occasionally made of the ordeal." Bribery '
was discouraged by making the tender or acceptance of it a capital
offense. Cambyses improved the integrity of the courts by causing an
unjust judge to be flayed alive, and using his skin to upholster the judicial
bench—to which he then appointed the dead judge's son."
Minor punishments took the form of flogging— from five to two hun-
dred blows with a horsewhip; the poisoning of a shepherd dog received
two hundred strokes, manslaughter ninety.40 The administration of the
law was partly financed by commuting stripes into fines, at the rate of
six rupees to a stripe.47 More serious crimes were punished with branding,
maiming, mutilation, blinding, imprisonment or death. The letter of the
law forbade any one, even the king, to sentence a man to death for a
simple crime; but it could be decreed for treason, rape, sodomy, murder,
"self-pollution," burning or burying the dead, intrusion upon the king's
privacy, approaching one of his concubines, accidentally sitting upon his
throne, or for any displeasure to the ruling house." Death was procured
in such cases by poisoning, impaling, crucifixion, hanging (usually with
the head down), stoning, burying the body up to the head, crushing
the head between huge stones, smothering the victim in hot ashes, or by
362 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIII
the incredibly cruel rite called "the boats."* Some of these barbarous
punishments were bequeathed to the invading Turks of a later age, and
passed down into the heritage of mankind."
With these laws and this army the king sought to govern his twenty
satrapies from his many capitals— originally Pasargadae, occasionally Per-
sepolis, in summer Ecbatana, usually Susa; here, in the ancient capital of
Elam, the history of the ancient Near East came full circle, binding the
beginning and the end. Susa had the advantage of inaccessibility, and
the disadvantages of distance; Alexander had to come two thousand miles
to take it, but it had to send its troops fifteen hundred miles to suppress
revolts in Lydia or Egypt. Ultimately the great roads merely paved the
way for the physical conquest of western Asia by Greece and Rome,
and the theological conquest of Greece and Rome by western Asia.
The empire was divided into provinces or satrapies for convenience
of administration and taxation. Each province was governed in the name
of the King of Kings, sometimes by a vassal prince, ordinarily by a
"satrap" (ruler) royally appointed for as long a time as he could retain
favor at the court. To keep the satraps in hand Darius sent to each
province a general to control its armed forces independently of the gov-
ernor; and to make matters trebly sure he appointed in each province a
secretary, independent of both satrap and general, to report their behavior
to the king. As a further precaution an intelligence service known as
"The King's Eyes and Ears" might appear at any moment to examine the
affairs, records and finances of the province. Sometimes the satrap was
* Because the soldier Mithridates, in his cups, blurted out the fact that it was he, and
not the king, who should have received credit for slaying Cyrus the Younger at the
battle of Cunaxa, Artaxcrxcs II, says Plutarch, "decreed that Mithridates should be put to
death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed
exactly to fit and answer each other, they lay down in one of them the malefactor that
suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that
the head, hands and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up
within, they offer him food, and if he refuse to eat it, they force him to do it by prick-
ing his eyes; then, after he has eaten, they drench him with a mixture of milk and honey,
pouring it not only into his mouth but all over his face. They then keep his face con-
tinually turned toward the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the
multitude of flies that settle upon it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat
and drink must do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption of the ex-
crement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man
is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and
swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards.
In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired."80
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 363
deposed without trial, sometimes he was quietly poisoned by his servants
at the order of the king. Underneath the satrap and the secretary was a
horde of clerks who carried on so much of the government as had no
direct need of force; this body of clerks carried over from one administra-
tion to another, even from reign to reign. The king dies, but the bureau-
cracy is immortal.
The salaries of these provincial officials were paid not by the king but
by the people whom they ruled. The remuneration was ample enough
to provide the satraps with palaces, harems, and extensive hunting parks
to which the Persians gave the historic name of paradise. In addition, each
satrapy was required to send the king, annually, a fixed amount of money
and goods by way of taxation: India sent 4680 talents, Assyria and Baby-
lonia 1000, Egypt 700, the four satrapies of Asia Minor 1760, etc., making
a total of some 14,560 talents—variously estimated as equivalent to from
$160,000,000 to $218,000,000 a year. Furthermore, each province was
expected to contribute to the king's needs in goods and supplies: Egypt
had to furnish corn annually for 120,000 men; the Medes provided
100,000 sheep, the Armenians 30,000 foals, the Babylonians five hundred
young eunuchs. Other sources of wealth swelled the central revenue to
such a point that when Alexander captured the Persian capitals after one
hundred and fifty years of Persian extravagance, after a hundred expensive
revolts and wars, and after Darius III had carried off 8000 talents with
him in his flight, he found 180,000 talents left in the royal treasuries-
some $2,700,000,000."
Despite these high charges for its services, the Persian Empire was the
most successful experiment in imperial government that the Mediter-
ranean world would know before the coming of Rome— which was des-
tined to inherit much of the earlier empire's political structure and ad-
ministrative forms. The cruelty and dissipation of the later monarchs,
the occasional barbarism of the laws, and the heavy burdens of taxation
were balanced, as human governments go, by such order and peace as
made the provinces rich despite these levies, and by such liberty as only
the most enlightened empires have accorded to subject states. Each
region retained its own language, laws, customs, morals, religion and coin-
age, and sometimes its native dynasty of kings. Many of the tributary
nations, like Babylonia, Phoenicia and Palestine, were well satisfied with
the situation, and suspected that their own generals and tax-gatherer
would have plucked them even more ferociously. Under Darii
364 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIII
Persian Empire was an achievement in political organization; only Trajan,
Hadrian and the Antonines would equal it.
V. ZARATHUSTRA
The coming of the Prophet— Persian religion before Zarathustra—
The Bible of Persia— Ahura-Mazda— The good and the evil
spirits— Their struggle for the possession of the 'world
Persian legend tells how, many hundreds of years before the birth of
Christ, a great prophet appeared in Airyana-vaejo, the ancient "home
of the Aryans." His people called him Zarathustra; but the Greeks, who
could never bear the orthography of the "barbarians" patiently, called
him Zoroastres. His conception was divine: his guardian angel entered
into an haoma plant, and passed with its juice into the body of a priest
as the latter offered divine sacrifice; at the same time a ray of heaven's
glory entered the bosom of a maid of noble lineage. The priest espoused
the maid, the imprisoned angel mingled with the imprisoned ray, and
Zarathustra began to be.M He laughed aloud on the very day of his birth,
and the evil spirits that gather around every life fled from him in tumult
and terror." Out of his great love for wisdom and righteousness he with-
drew from the society of men, and chose to live in a mountain wilderness
on cheese and the fruits of the soil. The Devil tempted him, but to no
avail. His breast was pierced with a sword, and his entrails were filled
with molten lead; he did not complain, but clung to his faith in Ahura-
Mazda— the Lord of Light— as supreme god. Ahura-Mazda appeared to
him and gave into his hands the Avesta, or Book of Knowledge and Wis-
dom, and bade him preach it to mankind. For a long time all the world
ridiculed and persecuted him; but at last a high prince of Iran— Vishtaspa
or Hystaspcs— heard him gladly, and promised to spread the new faith
among his people. Thus was the Zoroastrian religion born. Zarathustra
himself lived to a very old age, was consumed in a flash of lightning, and
ascended into heaven."
We cannot tell how much of his story is true; perhaps some Josiah
discovered him. The Greeks accepted him as historical, and honored
him with an antiquity of 5500 years before their time;M Berosus the
Babylonian brought him down to 2000 B.C.;07 modern historians, when
they believe in his existence, assign him to any century between the tenth
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 365
and the sixth before Christ.*58 When he appeared, among the ancestors
of the Medes and the Persians, he found his people worshiping animals,™
ancestors,90 the earth and the sun, in a religion having many elements and
deities in common with the Hindus of the Vedic age. The chief divinities
of this pre-Zoroastrian faith were Mithra, god of the sun, Anaita, goddess
of fertility and the earth, and Haoma the bull-god who, dying, rose
again, and gave mankind his blood as a drink that would confer immor-
tality; him the early Iranians worshiped by drinking the intoxicating juice
of the haama herb found on their mountain slopes.* Zarathustra was
shocked at these primitive deities and this Dionysian ritual; he rebelled against
the "Magi" or priests who prayed and sacrificed to them; and with all the
bravery of his contemporaries Amos and Isaiah he announced to the world
one God— here Ahura-Mazda, the Lord of Light and Heaven, of whom
all other gods were but manifestations and qualities. Perhaps Darius I,
who accepted the new doctrine, saw in it a faith that would both inspire
his people and strengthen his government. From the moment of his
accession he declared war upon the old cults and the Magian priesthood,
and made Zoroastrianism the religion of the state.
The Bible of the new faith was the collection of books in which the dis-
ciples of the Master had gathered his sayings and his prayers. Later follow-
ers called these books Avesta; by the error of a modern scholar they are
known to the Occidental world as the Zend-Avesta.^ The contemporary
non-Persian reader is terrified to find that the substantial volumes that sur-
vive, though much shorter than our Bible, are but a small fraction of the
revelation vouchsafed to Zarathustra by his god4 What remains is, to the
* If the Vishtaspa who promulgated him was the father of Darius I, the last of these
dates seems the most probable.
t Anquetil-Duperron (ca. 1771 A.D.) introduced the prefix Zend, which the Persians had
used to denote merely a translation and interpretation of the Avesta. The last is a word of
uncertain origin, probably derived, like Veda, from the Aryan root v id, to know.08
^Native tradition tells of a larger Avesta in twenty-one books called Nasks; these in
turn, we are told, were but part of the original Scriptures. One of the Nasks remains
intact— the Vendidad; the rest survive only in scattered fragments in such later compo-
sitions as the Dinkard and the Bundahish. Arab historians speak of the complete text
as having covered 12,000 cowhides. According to a sacred tradition, two copies of this
were made by Prince Vishtaspa; one of them was destroyed when Alexander burned
the royal palace at Persepolis; the other was taken by the victorious Greeks to their
own country, and being translated, provided the Greeks (according to the Persian;
authorities) with all their scientific knowledge. During the third century of the Christian
Era Vologesus V, a Parthian king of the Arsacid Dynasty, ordered the collection of all
366 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
foreign and provincial observer, a confused mass of prayers, songs, legends,
prescriptions, ritual and morals, brightened now and then by noble lan-
guage, fervent devotion, ethical elevation, or lyric piety. Like our Old
Testament it is a highly eclectic composition. The student discovers here
I and there the gods, the ideas, sometimes the very words and phrases of the
Rig-veda—to such an extent that some Indian scholars consider the Avesta
to have been inspired not by Ahura-Mazda but by the Vedas? at other
times one comes upon passages of ancient Babylonian provenance, such as
the creation of the world in six periods (the heavens, the waters, the earth,
plants, animals, man,) the descent of all men from two first parents, the
establishment of an earthly paradise,"8 the discontent of the Creator
with his creation, and his resolve to destroy all but a remnant of it
by a flood.87 But the specifically Iranian elements suffice abundantly to char-
acterize the whole: the world is conceived in dualistic terms as the stage
of a conflict, lasting twelve thousand years, between the god Ahura-Mazda
and the devil Ahriman; purity and honesty arc the greatest of the virtues,
and will lead to everlasting life; the dead must not be buried or burned, as
by the obscene Greeks or Hindus, but must be thrown to the dogs or to
birds of prey.08
The god of Zarathustra was first of all "the whole circle of the
heavens" themselves. Ahura-Mazda "clothes himself with the solid vault
of the firmament as his raiment; ... his body is the light and the sov-
ereign glory; the sun and the moon are his eyes." In later days, when
the religion passed from prophets to politicians, the great deity was pic-
tured as a gigantic king of imposing majesty. As creator and ruler of the
world he was assisted by a legion of lesser divinities, originally pictured
as forms and powers of nature— fire and water, sun and moon, wind and
fragments surviving cither in writing or in the memory of the faithful; this collection
was fixed in its present form as the Zoroastrian canon in the fourth century, and became
the official religion of the Persian state. The compilation so formed suffered further
ravages during the Moslem conquest of Persia in the seventh century."
The extant fragments may be divided into five parts:
(1) The Yasna— forty-five chapters of the liturgy recited by the Zoroastrian priests, and
twenty-seven chapters (chs. 28-54) called Gat has, containing, apparently in metric form,
the discourses and revelations of the Prophet;
(2) The Vispered— twenty-four additional chapters of liturgy;
(3) The Vend Wad—twenty-two chapters or far gar ds expounding the theology and
moral legislation of the Zoroastrians, and now forming the priestly code of the Parsees;
(4) The YashtSy i.e., songs of praise— twenty-one psalms to angels, interspersed with
legendary history and a prophecy of the end of the world; and
(5) The Khordah Avesta or Small Avesta— prayers for various occasions of life.*4
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 367
rain; but it was the achievement of Zarathustra that he conceived his god
as supreme over all things, in terms as noble as the Book of Job:
This I ask thee, tell me truly, O Ahura-Mazda: Who determined
the paths of suns and stars— who is it by whom the moon waxes and
wanes? . . . Who, from below, sustained the earth and the firmament
from falling—who sustained the waters and plants— who yoked
swiftness with the winds and the clouds— who, Ahura-Mazda, called
forth the Good Mind?*
This "Good Mind" meant not any human mind, but a divine wisdom,
almost a Logos* used by Ahura-Mazda as an intermediate agency of
creation. Zarathustra had interpreted Ahura-Mazda as having seven as-
pects or qualities: Light, Good Mind, Right, Dominion, Piety, Well-
being, and Immortality. His followers, habituated to polytheism, inter-
preted these attributes as persons (called by them amesha spenta, or im-
mortal holy ones) who, under the leadership of Ahura-Mazda, created
and managed the world; in this way the majestic monotheism of the
founder became— as in the case of Christianity— the polytheism of the
people. In addition to these holy spirits were the guardian angels, of
which Persian theology supplied one for every man, woman and child.
But just as these angels and the immortal holy ones helped men to virtue,
so, according to the pious Persian (influenced, presumably, by Babylonian
demonology), seven dtevas, or evil spirits, hovered in the air, always
tempting men to crime and sin, and forever engaged in a war upon Ahura-
Mazda and every form of righteousness. The leader of these devils was
Angro-Mainyus or Ahriman, Prince of Darkness and ruler of the nether
world, prototype of that busy Satan whom the Jews appear to have
adopted from Persia and bequeathed to Christianity. It was Ahriman, for
example, who had created serpents, vermin, locusts, ants, winter, darkness,
crime, sin, sodomy, menstruation, and the other plagues of life; and it
was these inventions of the Devil that had ruined the Paradise in which
Ahura-Mazda had placed the first progenitors of the human race.71 Zara-
thustra seems to have regarded these evil spirits as spurious deities, popular
and superstitious incarnations of the abstract forces that resist the progress
of man. His followers, however, found it easier to think of them as living
• Darmesteter believes the "Good Mind" to be a semi-Gnostic adaptation of Philo's
logos theios, or Divine Word, and therefore dates the Yasna about the first century B.C.*
368 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
beings, and personified them in such abundance that in after times the
devils of Persian theology were numbered in millions.™
As this system of belief came from Zarathustra it bordered upon
monotheism. Even with the intrusion of Ahriman and the evil spirits it
remained as monotheistic as Christianity was to be with its Satan, its
devils and its angels; indeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as
many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek
philosophy. The Zoroastrian conception of God might have satisfied
as particular a spirit as Matthew Arnold: Ahura-Mazda was the sum-total
of all those forces in the world that make for righteousness; and morality
lay in cooperation with those forces. Furthermore there was in this
dualism a certain justice to the contradictorincss and perversity of things,
which monotheism never provided; and though the Zoroastrian theolo-
gians, after the manner of Hindu mystics and Scholastic philosophers,
sometimes argued that evil was unreal,78 they offered, in effect, a theology
well adapted to dramatize for the average mind the moral issues of life.
The last act of the play, they promised, would be— for the just man— a
happy ending: after four epochs of three thousand years each, in which
Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman would alternately predominate, the forces
of evil would be finally destroyed; right would triumph everywhere, and
evil would forever cease to be. Then all good men would join Ahura-
Mazda in Paradise, and the wicked would fall into a gulf of outer dark-
ness, where they would feed on poison eternally.74
VI. ZOROASTRIAN ETHICS
Man as a battlefield— The Undying Fire— Hell, Purgatory and
Paradise— The cult of Mithra—The Magi— The Par sees
By picturing the world as the scene of a struggle between good and
evil, the Zoroastrians established in the popular imagination a powerful
supernatural stimulus and sanction for morals. The soul of man, like the
universe, was represented as a battleground of beneficent and maleficent
spirits; every man was a warrior, whether he liked it or not, in the army
of either the Lord or the Devil; every act or omission advanced the cause
of Ahura-Mazda or of Ahriman. It was an ethic even more admirable than
the theology— if men must have supernatural supports for their morality;
it gave to the common life a dignity and significance grander than any
that could come to it from a world-view that locked upon man (in medie-
CHAP. XIII ) PERSIA 369
val phrase) as a helpless worm or (in modern terms) as a mechanical au-
tomaton. Human beings were not, to Zarathustra's thinking, mere pawns
in this cosmic war; they had free will, since Ahura-Mazda wished them
to be personalities in their own right; they might freely choose whether
they would follow the Light or the Lie. For Ahriman was the Living
Lie, and every liar was his servant.
Out of this general conception emerged a detailed but simple code of
morals, centered about the Golden Rule. "That nature alone is good
which shall not do unto another whatever is not good unto its own
self."*76 Man's duty, says the Avesta, is three-fold: "To make him who is
an enemy a friend; to make him who is wicked righteous; and to make
him who is ignorant learned."70 The greatest virtue is piety; second only
to that is honor and honesty in action and speech. Interest was not to be
charged to Persians, but loans were to be looked upon as almost sacred.77
The worst sin of all (in the Avestan as in the Mosaic code) is unbelief.
We may judge from the severe punishments with which it was honored
that scepticism existed among the Persians; death was to be visited upon
the apostate without delay .7N The generosity and kindliness enjoined by
the Master did not apply, in practice, to infidels— i.e., foreigners; these
were inferior species of men, whom Ahura-Mazda had deluded into loving
their own countries only in order that they should not invade Persia. The
Persians, says Herodotus, "esteem themselves to be far the most excellent
of men in every respect"; they believe that other nations approach to
excellence according to their geographical proximity to Persia, "but that
they are the worst who live farthest from them."70 The words have a
contemporary ring, and a universal application.
Piety being the greatest virtue, the first duty of life was the worship
of God with purification, sacrifice and prayer. Zoroastrian Persia tolerated
neither temples nor idols; altars were erected on hill-tops, in palaces, or in
the center of the city, and fires were kindled upon them in honor of
Ahura-Mazda or some lesser divinity. Fire itself was worshiped as a god,
Atar, the very son of the Lord of Light. Every family centered round
the hearth; to keep the home fire burning, never to let it be extinguished,
was part of the ritual of faith. And the Undying Fire of the skies, the
Sun, was adored as the highest and most characteristic embodiment of
* But Yasna xlvi, 6 reads: "Wicked is he who is good to the wicked." Inspired works
arc seldom consistent.
370 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
Ahura-Mazda or Mithra, quite as Ikhnaton had worshiped it in Egypt.
"The morning Sun," said the Scriptures, "must be reverenced till mid-day,
and that of mid-day must be reverenced till the afternoon, and that of the
afternoon must be reverenced till evening. . . . While men reverence not
the Sun, the good works which they do that day are not their own."80 To
the sun, to fire, to Ahura-Mazda, sacrifice was offered of flowers, bread,
fruit, perfumes, oxen, sheep, camels, horses, asses and stags; anciently, as
elsewhere, human victims had been offered too." The gods received only
the odor; the edible portions were kept for the priests and the worshipers,
for as the Magi explained, the gods required only the soul of the victim.83
Though the Master abominated it, and there is no mention of it in the
Avesta, the old Aryan offering of the intoxicating haoma juice to the gods
continued far into Zoroastrian days; the priest drank part of the sacred
fluid, and divided the remainder among the faithful in holy communion.88
When people were too poor to offer such tasty sacrifices they made up
for it by adulatory prayer. Ahura-Mazda, like Yahveh, liked to sip his
praise, and made for the pious an imposing list of his accomplishments,
which became a favorite Persian litany.84
Given a life of piety and truth, the Persian might face death unafraid:
this, after all, is one of the secret purposes of religion. Astivihad, the god
of death, finds every one, no matter where; he is the confident seeker
from whom not one of mortal men can escape. Not those who
go down deep, like Afrasyab the Turk, who made himself an iron
palace under the earth, a thousand times the height of a man, with
a hundred columns; in that palace he made the stars, the moon and
the sun go round, making the light of day; in that palace he did
everything at his pleasure, and he lived the happiest life: with all
his strength and witchcraft he could not escape from Astivihad.
. . . Nor he who dug this wide, round earth, with extremities that
lie afar, like Dahak, who went from the east to the west searching
for immortality and did not find it: with all his strength and power
he could not escape from Astivihad. ... To every one comes the
unseen, deceiving Astivihad, who accepts neither compliments nor
bribes, who is no respecter of persons, and ruthlessly makes men
perish.18
And yet— for it is in the nature of religion to threaten and terrify as
well as to console— the Persian could not look upon death unafraid unless
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 371
he had been a faithful warrior in Ahura-Mazda's cause. Beyond that most
awful of all mysteries lay a hell and a purgatory as well as a paradise. All
dead souls would have to pass over a Sifting Bridge: the good soul would
come, on the other side, to the "Abode of Song," where it would be wel-
comed by a "young maiden radiant and strong, with well-developed bust,"
and would live in happiness with Ahura-Mazda to the end of time; but the
wicked soul, failing to get across, would fall into as deep a level of hell
as was adjusted to its degree of wickedness.80 This hell was no mere Hades
to which, as in earlier religions, all the dead descended, whether good or
bad; it was an abyss of darkness and terror in which condemned souls suf-
fered torments to the end of the world.87 If a man's virtues outweighed
his sins he would endure the cleansing of a temporary punishment; if he
had sinned much but had done good works, he would suffer for only
twelve thousand years, and then would rise into heaven.88 Already, the
good Zoroastrians tell us, the divine consummation of history approaches:
the birth of Zarathustra began the last world-epoch of three thousand
years; after three prophets of his seed have, at intervals, carried his doc-
trine throughout the world, the Last Judgment will be pronounced, the
Kingdom of Ahura-Mazda will come, and Ahriman and all the forces of
evil will be utterly destroyed. Then all good souls will begin life anew in
a world without evil, darkness or pain.80 "The dead shall rise, life shall
return to the bodies, and they shall breathe again; . . . the whole physical
world shall become free from old age and death, from corruption and
decay, forever and ever."00
Here again, as in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we hear the threat
of that awful Last Judgment which seems to have passed from Persian to
Jewish eschatology in the days of the Persian ascendancy in Palestine.
It was an admirable formula for frightening children into obeying their
parents; and since one function of religion is to ease the difficult and neces-
sary task of disciplining the young by the old, we must grant to the
Zoroastrian priests a fine professional skill in the brewing of theology.
All in all it was a splendid religion, less warlike and bloody, less idolatrous
and superstitious, than the other religions of its time; and it did not deserve
to die so soon.
For a while, under Darius I, it became the spiritual expression of a
nation at its height. But humanity loves poetry more than logic, and with-
out a myth the people perish. Underneath the official worship of Ahura-
Mazda the cult of Mithra and Anaita— god of the sun and goddess of
372 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
vegetation and fertility, generation and sex— continued to find devotees;
and in the days of Artaxerxcs II their names began to appear again in the
royal inscriptions. Thereafter Mithra grew powerfully in favor and
Ahura-Mazda faded away until, in the first centuries of our era, the cult
of Mithra as a divine youth of beautiful countenance— with a radiant
halo over his head as a symbol of his ancient identity with the sun— spread
throughout the Roman Empire, and shared in giving Christmas to Christian-
ity.* Zarathustra, had he been immortal, would have been scandalized to
find statues of Anaita, the Persian Aphrodite, set up in many cities of the
empire within a few centuries after his death.111 And surely it would not
have pleased him to find so many pages of his revelation devoted to magic
formulas for healing, divination and sorcery."2 After his death the old
priesthood of "Wise Men" or Magi conquered him as priesthoods conquer
in the end every vigorous rebel or heretic— by adopting and absorbing
him into their theology; they numbered him among the Magi and forgot
him.88 By an austere and monogamous life, by a thousand precise observ-
ances of sacred ritual and ceremonial cleanliness, by abstention from flesh
food, and by a simple and unpretentious dress, the Magi acquired, even
among the Greeks, a high reputation for wisdom, and among their own
people an almost boundless influence. The Persian kings themselves became
their pupils, and took no step of consequence without consulting them. The
higher ranks among them were sages, the lower were diviners and sorc-
erers, readers of stars and interpreters of dreams;M the very word magic
is taken from their name. Year by year the Zoroastrian elements in Persian
religion faded away; they were revived for a time under the Sassanid
Dynasty (226-651 A.D.), but were finally eliminated by the Moslem and
Tatar invasions of Persia. Zoroastrianism survives today only among small
communities in the province of Pars, and among the ninety thousand
Parsees of India. These devotedly preserve and study the ancient scrip-
tures, worship fire, earth, water and air as sacred, and expose their dead in
"Towers of Silence" to birds of prey lest burning or burial should defile
the holy elements. They are a people of excellent morals and character, a
living tribute to the civilizing effect of Zarathustra's doctrine upon man-
kind.
* Christmas was originally a solar festival, celebrating, at the winter solstice (about De-
cember 2 znd), the lengthening of the day and the triumph of the sun over his enemies.
It became a Mithraic, and finally a Christian, holy day.
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 373
VII. PERSIAN MANNERS AND MORALS
Violence and honor— The code of cleanliness— Sins of the flesh—
Virgins and bachelors— Marriage— Women— Children—
Persian ideas of education
Nevertheless it is surprising how much brutality remained in the Medes
and the Persians despite their religion. Darius I, their greatest king, writes
in the Behistun inscription: "Fravartish was seized and brought to me. I
cut off his nose and ears, and I cut out his tongue, and I put out his eyes.
At my court he was kept in chains; all the people saw him. Later I cruci-
fied him in Ecbatana. . . . Ahura-Mazda was my strong support; under the
protection of Ahura-Mazda my army 'utterly smote the rebellious army, and
they seized Citrankakhara and brought him to me. Then I cut off his nose
and ears and put out his eyes. He was kept in chains at my court; all the
people saw him. Afterwards I crucified him."86 The murders retailed in
Plutarch's life of Artaxerxes II offer a sanguinary specimen of the morals of
the later courts. Traitors were dealt with without sentiment: they and
their leaders were crucified, their followers were sold as slaves, their towns
were pillaged, their boys were castrated, their girls were sold into harems.90
But it would be unfair to judge the people from their kings; virtue is not
news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history. Even the
kings showed on occasion a fine generosity, and were known among the
faithless Greeks for their fidelity; a treaty made with them could be relied
upon, and it was their boast that they never broke their word.07 It is a tes-
timony to the character of the Persians that whereas any one could hire
Greeks to fight Greeks, it was rare indeed that a Persian could be hired
to fight Persians.*
Manners were milder than the blood and iron of history would suggest.
The Persians were free and open in speech, generous, warm-hearted and
hospitable.00 Etiquette was almost as punctilious among them as with the
Chinese. When equals met they embraced, and kissed each other on the
lips; to persons of higher rank they made a deep obeisance; to those of lower
rank they offered the cheek; to commoners they bowed.100 They thought it
unbecoming to eat or drink anything in the street, or publicly to spit or
blow the nose.101 Until the reign of Xerxes the people were abstemious in
food and drink, eating only one meal per day, and drinking nothing but
* When the Persians fought Alexander at the Granicus practically all the "Persian" in-
fantry were Greek mercenaries. At the battle of Issus 30,000 Greek mercenaries formed
the center of the Persian line.**
374 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIII
water."1 Cleanliness was rated as the greatest good after life itself. Good
works done with dirty hands were worthless; "for while one doth not ut-
terly destroy corruption" ("germs"?), "there is no coming of the angels to
his body.""" Severe penalties were decreed for those who spread con-
tagious diseases. On festal occasions the people gathered together all
clothed in white.104 The Avestan code, like the Brahman and the Mosaic,
heaped up ceremonial precautions and ablutions; great arid tracts of the
Zoroastrian Scriptures are given over to wearisome formulas for cleansing
the body and the soul.10" Parings of nails, cuttings of hair and exhalations
of the breath were marked out as unclean things, which the wise Persian
would avoid unless they had been purified.109
The code was again Judaically stern against the sins of the flesh. Onan-
ism was to be punished with flogging; and men and women guilty of sexual
promiscuity or prostitution "ought to be slain even more than gliding
serpents, than howling wolves."107 That practice kept its usual distance from
precept appears from an item in Herodotus: "To carry off women by
violence the Persians think is the act of wicked men; but to trouble one's
self about avenging them when so carried off is the act of foolish men; and
to pay no regard to them when carried off is the act of wise men; for it is
clear that if they had not been willing, they could not have been carried
off."10" He adds, elsewhere, that the Persians "have learnt from the Greeks a
passion for boys";10* and though we cannot always trust this supreme re-
porter, we scent some corroboration of him in the intensity with which the
Avesta excoriates sodomy; for that deed, it says, again and again, there is no
forgiveness; "nothing can wash it away.""0
Virgins and bachelors were not encouraged by the code, but polygamy
and concubinage were allowed; a military society has use for many children.
"The man who has a wife," says the Avesta, "is far above him who lives in
continence; he who keeps a house is far above him who has none; he who
has children is far above him who has none; he who has riches is far above
him who has none";m these are criteria of social standing fairly common
among the nations. The family is ranked as the holiest of all institutions.
"O Maker of the material world," Zarathustra asks Ahura-Mazda, "thou
Holy One, which is the second place where the earth feels most happy?"
And Ahura-Mazda answers him: "It is the place whereon one of the faith-
ful erects a house with a priest within, with cattle, with a wife, with chil-
dren, and good herds within; and wherein afterwards the cattle continue to
thrive, the wife to thrive, the child to thrive, the fire to thrive, and every
blessing of life to thrive."1" The animal— above all others the dog— was an
integral part of the family, as in the last commandment given to Moses.
The nearest family was enjoined to take in and care for any homeless
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 375
pregnant beast."* Severe penalties were prescribed for those who fed unfit
food to dogs, or served them their food too hot; and fourteen hundred
stripes were the punishment for "smiting a bitch which has been covered by
three dogs."m The bull was honored for his procreative powers, and prayer
and sacrifice were offered to the cow.m
Matches were arranged by the parents on the arrival of their children at
puberty. The range of choice was wide, for we hear of the marriage of
brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son.1" Concubines were
for the most part a luxury of the rich; the aristocracy never went to war
without them.n7 In the later days of the empire the king's harem contained
from 329 to 360 concubines, for it had become a custom that no woman
might share the royal couch twice unless she was overwhelmingly beauti-
ful.118
In the time of the Prophet the position of woman in Persia was high, as
ancient manners went: she moved in public freely and unveiled; she owned
and managed property, and could, like most modern women, direct the af-
fairs of her husband in his name, or through his pen. After Darius her
status declined, especially among the rich. The poorer women retained
their freedom of movement, because they had to work; but in other cases
the seclusion always enforced in the menstrual periods was extended to the
whole social life of woman, and laid the foundations of the Moslem insti-
tution of purdah. Upper-class women could not venture out except in cur-
tained litters, and were not permitted to mingle publicly with men; married
women were forbidden to see even their nearest male relatives, such as their
fathers or brothers. Women are never mentioned or represented in the
public inscriptions and monuments of ancient Persia. Concubines had
greater freedom, since they were employed to entertain their masters' guests.
Even in the later reigns women were powerful at the court, rivaling the
eunuchs in the persistence of their plotting and the kings in the refine-
ments of their cruelty.11**
Children as well as marriage were indispensable to respectability. Sons
were highly valued as economic assets to their parents and military assets
to the king; girls were regretted, for they had to be brought up for some
other man's home and profit. "Men do not pray for daughters," said the
Persians, "and angels do not reckon them among their gifts to mankind.""0
* Statira was a model queen to Artaxcrxcs II; but his mother, Parysatis, poisoned her out
of jealousy, encouraged the king to marry his own daughter Atossa, played dice with
him for the life of a eunuch, and, winning, had him flayed alive. When Artaxerxes
ordered the execution of a Carian soldier, Parysatis bettered his instructions by having
the man stretched upon the rack for ten days, his eyes torn out, and molten lead poured
into his ears until he died."**
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
The king annually sent gifts to every father of many sons, as if in advance
payment for their blood.m Fornication, even adultery, might be forgiven if
there was no abortion; abortion was a worse crime than the others, and
was to be punished with death."9 One of the ancient commentaries, the
Bundahish, specifies means for avoiding conception, but warns the people
against them. "On the nature of generation it is said in Revelation that a
woman when she cometh out from menstruation, during ten days and nights,
when they go near unto her, readily bccometh pregnant."123
The child remained under the care of the women till five, and under the
care of his father from five to seven; at seven he went to school. Educa-
tion was mostly confined to the sons of the well-to-do, and was usually ad-
ministered by priests. Classes met in the temple or the home of the priest;
it was a principle never to have a school meet near a market-place, lest the
atmosphere of lying, swearing and cheating that prevailed in the bazaars
should corrupt the young.134 The texts were the Avesta and its commen-
taries; the subjects were religion, medicine or law; the method of learning
was by commission to memory and by the rote recitation of long pas-
sages."5 Boys of the unpretentious classes were not spoiled with letters, but
were taught only three things—to ride a horse, to use the bow, and to speak
the truth.188 Higher education extended to the age of twenty or twenty-four
among the sons of the aristocracy; some were especially prepared for public
office or provincial administration; all were trained in the art of war. The
life in these higher schools was arduous: the students rose early, ran great
distances, rode difficult horses at high speed, swam, hunted, pursued thieves,
sowed farms, planted trees, made long marches under a hot sun or in bitter
cold, and learned to bear every change and rigor of climate, to subsist on
coarse foods, and to cross rivers while keeping their clothes and armor
dry.1" It was such a schooling as would have gladdened the heart of
Friedrich Nietzsche in those moments when he could forget the bright and
varied culture of ancient Greece.
Vin. SCIENCE AND ART
Medicine— Minor arts— The tombs of Cyrus and Darius—The
palaces of Persepolis — The Frieze of the Archers —
Estimate of Persian art
The Persians seem to have deliberately neglected to train their children
in any other art than that of life. Literature was a delicacy for which
they had small use; science was a commodity which they could import
from Babylon. They had a certain relish for poetry and romantic fiction,
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 377
but they left these arts to hirelings and inferiors, preferring the exhilara-
tion of keen-witted conversation to the quiet and solitary pleasures of
reading and research. Poetry was sung rather than read, and perished with
the singers.
Medicine was at first a function of the priests, who practised it on the
principle that the Devil had created 99,999 diseases, which should be
treated by a combination of magic and hygiene. They resorted more
frequently to spells than to drugs, on the ground that the spells, though
they might not cure the illness, would not kill the patient— which was
more than could be said for the drugs.128 Nevertheless lay medicine de-
veloped along with the growing wealth of Persia, and in the time of
Artaxerxes II there was a well-organized guild of physicians and surgeons,
whose fees were fixed by law— as in Hammurabi's code— according to the
social rank of the patient.129 Priests were to be treated free. And just as,
among ourselves, the medical novice practises for a year or two, as in-
terne, upon the bodies of the immigrant and the poor, so among the
Persians a young physician was expected to begin his career by treating
infidels and foreigners. The Lord of Light himself had decreed it:
O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One, if a worshiper of
God wish to practice the art of healing, on whom shall he first
prove his skill— on the worshipers of Ahura-Mazda, or on the wor-
shipers of the Daevas (the evil spirits)? Ahura-Mazda made answer
and said: On worshipers of the Daevas shall he prove himself, rather
than on worshipers of God. If he treat with the knife a worshiper
of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a second wor-
shiper of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a third
worshiper of the Daevas and he die, he is unfit forever and
ever; let him never attend any worshiper of God. ... If he treat
with the knife a worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; if he
treat with the knife a second worshiper of the Daevas and he re-
cover; if he treat with the knife a third worshiper of the Daevas
and he recover; then he is fit forever and ever; he may at his will
treat worshipers of God, and heal them with the knife.1*
Having dedicated themselves to empire, the Persians found their time
and energies taken up with war, and, like the Romans, depended largely
upon imports for their art. They had a taste for pretty things, but they
relied upon foreign or foreign-born artists to produce them, and upon
378 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
provincial revenues to pay for them. They had beautiful homes and lux-
uriant gardens, which sometimes became hunting-parks or zoological col-
lections; they had costly furniture— tables plated or inlaid with silver or
gold, couches spread with exotic coverlets, floors carpeted with rugs re-
silient in texture and rich in all the colors of earth and sky;111 they drank
from golden goblets, and adorned their tables or their shelves with vases
turned by foreign hands;* they liked song and dance, and the playing
of the harp, the flute, the drum and the tambourine. Jewelry abounded,
from tiaras and ear-rings to golden anklets and shoes; even the men
flaunted jewels on necks and ears and arms. Pearls, rubies, emeralds and
lapis lazuli came from abroad, but turquoise came from the Persian mines,
and contributed the customary material for the aristocrat's signet-ring.
Gems of monstrous and grotesque form copied the supposed features of
favorite devils. The king sat on a golden throne covered with golden
canopies upheld with pillars of gold.1*
Only in architecture did the Persians achieve a style of their own.
Under Cyrus, Darius I and Xerxes I they erected tombs and palaces which
archeology has very incompletely exhumed; and it may be that those
prying historians, the pick and the shovel, will in the near future raise
our estimate of Persian art.f At Pasargadae Alexander spared for us, with
characteristic graciousness, the tomb of Cyrus I. The caravan road now
crosses the bare platform that once bore the palaces of Cyrus and his
mad son; of these nothing survives except a few broken columns here
and there, or a door-jamb bearing the features of Cyrus in bas-relief. Near-
by, on the plain, is the tomb, showing the wear of twenty-four centuries:
a simple stone chapel, quite Greek in restraint and form, rising to some
thirty-five feet in height upon a terraced base. Once, surely, it was a
loftier monument, with some fitting pedestal; today it seems a little bare
and forlorn, having the shape but hardly the substance of beauty; the
cracked and ruined stones merely chasten us with the quiet permanence
of the inanimate. Far south, at Naksh-i-Rustam, near Persepolis, is the
tomb of Darius I, cut like some Hindu chapel into the face of the moun-
* One of these vases, shown at the International Exhibition of Persian An in London,
1931, bears an inscription testifying that it belonged to Artaxerxes II.1"
t An expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is now engaged
in excavating Persepolis under the direction of Dr. James H. Breasted. In January, 1931,
this expedition unearthed a mass of statuary equal in amount to all Persian sculptures pre-
viously known."*
CHAR, xm) PERSIA 379
tain rock. The entrance is carved to simulate a palace fafade, with four
slender columns about a modest portal; above it, as if on a roof, figures
representing the subject peoples of Persia support a dais on which the
King is shown worshiping Ahura-Mazda and the moon. It is conceived
and executed with aristocratic refinement and simplicity.
The rest of such Persian architecture as has survived the wars, raids,
thefts and weather of two millenniums is composed of palace ruins. At
Ecbatana the early kings built a royal residence of cedar and cypress,
plated with metal, which-still stood in the days of Polybius (ca. 150 B.C.),
but of which no sign remains. The most imposing relics of ancient Persia,
now rising day by day out of the grasping and secretive earth, are the
stone steps, platform and columns at Persepolis; for there each monarch
from Darius onward built a palace to defer the oblivion of his name. The
great external stairs that mounted from the plain to the elevation on which
the buildings rested were unlike anything else in architectural records; de-
rived, presumably, from the flights of steps that approached and encircled
the Mesopotamian ziggurats, they had nevertheless a character specifically
their own— so gradual in ascent and so spacious that ten horsemen could
mount them abreast*1* They must have formed a brilliant approach to
the vast platform, twenty to fifty feet high, fifteen hundred feet long and
one thousand feet wide, that bore the royal palaces, t Where the two
flights of steps, coming from either side, met at their summit, stood a gate-
way, or propyleum, flanked by winged and human-headed bulls in the
worst Assyrian style. At the right stood the masterpiece of Persian archi-
tecture—the Chehil Minar or Great Hall of Xerxes I, covering, with its
roomy antechambers, an area of more than a hundred thousand square
feet— vaster, if size mattered, than vast Karnak, or any European cathedral
except Milan's.188 Another flight of steps led to this Great Hall; these stairs
were flanked with ornamental parapets, and their supporting sides were
carved with the finest bas-reliefs yet discovered in Persia.1* Thirteen of
the once seventy-two columns of Xerxes' palace stand among the ruins,
like palm-trees in some desolate oasis; and these marble columns, though
mutilated, are among the nearly perfect works of man. They are slen-
derer than any columns of Egypt or Greece, and rise to the unusual height
• Fergusson pronounced them "the noblest example of a flight of stairs to be found in
any part of the world."""
t Underneath the platform ran a complicated system of drainage tunnels, six feet in
diameter, often drilled through the solid rock.UT
380 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
of sixty-four feet. Their shafts are fluted with forty-eight small grooves;
their bases resemble bells overlaid with inverted leaves; their capitals for
the most part take the form of floral— almost "Ionic" volutes, surmounted
by the forequarters of two bulls or unicorns upon whose necks, joined
back to back, rested the crossbeam or architrave. This was surely of
wood, for such fragile columns, so wide apart, could hardly have sup-
ported a stone entablature. The door-jambs and window-frames were of
ornamented black stone that shone like ebony; the walls were of brick,
but they were covered with enameled tiles painted in brilliant panels of
animals and flowers; the columns, pilasters and steps were of fine white
limestone or hard blue marble. Behind, or east of, this Chehil Minar rose
the "Hall of a Hundred Columns"; nothing remains of it but one pillar
and the outlines of the general plan. Possibly these palaces were the most
beautiful ever erected in the ancient or modern world.
At Susa the Artaxerxes I and II built palaces of which only the foundations
survive. They were constructed of brick, redeemed by the finest glazed
tiles known; from Susa comes the famous "Frieze of the Archers"— prob-
ably the faithful "Immortals" who guarded the king. The stately bow-
men seem dressed rather for court ceremony than for war; their tunics
resound with bright colors, their hair and beards are wondrously curled,
their hands bear proudly and stiffly their official staffs. In Susa, as in the
other capitals, painting and sculpture were dependent arts serving archi-
tecture, and the statuary was mostly the work of artists imported from
Assyria, Babylonia and Greece.140
One might say of Persian art, as perhaps of nearly every art, that all
the elements of it were borrowed. The tomb of Cyrus took its form from
Lydia, the slender stone columns improved upon the like pillars of
Assyria, the colonnades and bas-reliefs acknowledged their inspiration
from Egypt, the animal capitals were an infection from Nineveh and
Babylon. It was the ensemble that made Persian architecture individual
and different— an aristocratic taste that refined the overwhelming columns
of Egypt and the heavy masses of Mesopotamia into the brilliance and
elegance, the proportion and harmony of Persepolis. The Greeks would
hear with wonder and admiration of these halls and palaces; their busy
travelers and observant diplomats would bring them stimulating word of
the art and luxury of Persia. Soon they would transform the double
volutes and stiff-necked animals of these^graceful pillars into the smooth
lobes of the Ionic capital; and they would shorten and strengthen the
shafts to make them bear any entablature, whether of wood or of stone.
CHAP.XIIl) PERSIA 381
Architecturally there was but a step from Persepolis to Athens. All the
Near Eastern world, about to die for a thousand years, prepared to lay
its heritage at the feet of Greece.
IX. DECADENCE
How a nation may die— Xerxes— A paragraph of murders— Artax-
erxes II— Cyrus the Younger— Darius the Little— Causes of
decay: political, military, moral — Alexander conquers
Persia, and advances upon India
The empire of Darius lasted hardly a century. The moral as well as
the physical backbone of Persia was broken by Marathon, Salamis and
Plataea; the emperors exchanged Mars for Venus, and the nation descended
into corruption and apathy. The decline of Persia anticipated almost in
detail the decline of Rome: immorality and degeneration among the
people accompanied violence and negligence on the throne. The Persians,
like the Medes before them, passed from stoicism to epicureanism in a few
generations. Eating became the principal occupation of the aristocracy:
these men who had once made it a rule to eat but once a day now inter-
preted the rule to allow them one meal— prolonged from noon to night;
they stocked their larders with a thousand delicacies, and often served
entire animals to their guests; they stuffed themselves with rich rare meats,
and spent their genius upon new sauces and desserts.1400 A corrupt and
corrupting multitude of menials filled the houses of the wealthy, while
drunkenness became the common vice of every class.140b Cyrus and
Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.
Xerxes I was every inch a king— externally; tall and vigorous, he was
by royal consent the handsomest man in his empire.141 But there was never
yet a handsome man who was not vain, nor any physically vain man
whom some woman has not led by the nose. Xerxes was divided by many
mistresses, and became for his people an exemplar of sensuality. His
defeat at Salamis was in the nature of things; for he was great only in his
love of magnitude, not in his capacity to rise to a crisis or to be in fact
and need a king. After twenty years of sexual intrigue and administrative
indolence he was murdered by a courtier, Artabanus, and was buried
with regal pomp and general satisfaction.
Only the records of Rome after Tiberius could rival in bloodiness the
royal annals of Persia. The murderer of Xerxes was murdered by
382 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIII
Artaxerxes I, who, after a long reign, was succeeded by Xerxes II, who
was murdered a few weeks later by his half-brother Sogdianus, who was
murdered six months later by Darius II, who suppressed the revolt of
Terituchmes by having him slain, his wife cut into pieces, and his mother,
brothers and sisters buried alive. Darius II was followed by his son
Artaxerxes II, who at the battle of Cunaxa, had to fight to the death his
own brother, the younger Cyrus, when the youth tried to seize the royal
power. Artaxerxes II enjoyed a long reign, killed his son Darius for con-
spiracy, and died of a broken heart on finding that another son, Ochus,
was planning to assassinate him. Ochus ruled for twenty years, and was
poisoned by his general Bagoas. This iron-livered Warwick placed Arses,
son of Ochus, on the throne, assassinated Arses' brothers to make Arses
secure, then assassinated Arses and his infant children, and gave the sceptre
to Codomannus, a safely effeminate friend. Codomannus reigned for
eight years under the name of Darius III, and died in battle against Alex-
i ander at Arbela, in the final ruin of his country. Not even the democ-
i racies of our time have known such indiscriminate leadership.
It is in the nature of an empire to disintegrate soon, for the energy that
created it disappears from those who inherit it, at the very time that its
subject peoples are gathering strength to fight for their lost liberty.
Nor is it natural that nations diverse in language, religion, morals and
traditions should long remain united; there is nothing organic in such
a union, and compulsion must repeatedly be applied to maintain the
artificial bond. In its two hundred years of empire Persia did nothing to
lessen this heterogeneity, these centrifugal forces; she was content to
rule a mob of nations, and never thought of making them into a state.
Year by year the union became more difficult to preserve. As the vigor
of the emperors relaxed, the boldness and ambition of the satraps grew;
they purchased or intimidated the generals and secretaries who were
supposed to share and limit their power, they arbitrarily enlarged their
armies and revenues, and engaged in recurrent plots against the king.
The frequency of revolt and war exhausted the vitality of little Persia;
the braver stocks were slaughtered in battle after battle, until none but
the cautious survived; and when these were conscripted to face Alex-
ander they proved to be cowards almost to a man. No improvements
had been made in the training or equipment of the troops, or in the tactics
of the generals; these blundered childishly against Alexander, while their
disorderly ranks, armed mostly with darts, proved to be mere targets
CHAP. XIIl) PERSIA 383
for the long spears and solid phalanxes of the Macedonians.14* Alexander
frolicked, but only after the battle was won; the Persian leaders brought
their concubines with them, and had no ambition for war. The only real
soldiers in the Persian army were the Greeks.
From the day when Xerxes turned back defeated from Salamis, it be-
came evident that Greece would one day challenge the empire. Persia
controlled one end of the great trade route that bound western Asia with
the Mediterranean, Greece controlled the other; and the ancient acquisi-
tiveness and ambition of men made such a situation provocative of war.
As soon as Greece found a master who could give her unity, she would
attack.
Alexander crossed the Hellespont without opposition, having what
seemed to Asia a negligible force of 30,000 footmen and 5,000 cavalry.*
A Persian army of 40,000 troops tried to stop him at the Granicus; the
Greeks lost 115 men, the Persians 20,000."* Alexander marched south
and east, taking cities and receiving surrenders for a year. Meanwhile
Darius III gathered a horde of 600,000 soldiers and adventurers; five days »
were required to march them over a bridge of boats across the Euphrates; '
six hundred mules and three hundred camels were needed to carry the
royal purse.145 When the two armies met at Issus Alexander had no more
than 30,000 followers; but Darius, with all the stupidity that destiny could
require, had chosen a field in which only a small part of his multitude
could fight at one time. When the slaughter was over the Macedonians
had lost some 450, the Persians 1 10,000 men, most of these being slain in
wild retreat; Alexander, in reckless pursuit, crossed a stream on a bridge
of Persian corpses.1" Darius fled ignominiously, abandoning his mother,
a wife, two daughters, his chariot, and his luxuriously appointed tent.
Alexander treated the Persian ladies with a chivalry that surprised the
Greek historians, contenting himself with marrying one of the daughters.
If we may believe Quintus Curtius, the mother of Darius became so fond
of Alexander that after his death she put an end to her own life by volun-
tary starvation.147
The young conqueror turned aside now with what seemed foolhardy
leisureliness to establish his control over all of western Asia; he did not
wish to advance farther without organizing his conquests and building
a secure line of communications. The citizens of Babylon, like those of
* "All those that were in Asia," says Josephus, "were persuaded that the Macedonian*
would not so much as come to battle with the Persians, on account of their multitude.""'
384 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. Xlh
Jerusalem, came out en masse to welcome him, offering him their city
and their gold; he accepted these graciously, and pleased them by re-
storing the temples which the unwise Xerxes had destroyed. Darius
sent him a proposal of peace, saying that he would give Alexander ten
thousand talents* for the safe return of his mother, his wife and his
children, would offer him his daughter in marriage, and would acknowl-
edge his sovereignty over all Asia west of the Euphrates, if only Alexander
would end the war and become his friend. Parmenio, second in command
among the Greeks, said tliat if he were Alexander he would be glad to
accept such happy terms, and avoid with honor the hazard of some disas-
' trous defeat. Alexander remarked that he would do likewise— if he were
Parmenio. Being Alexander, he answered Darius that his offer meant
nothing, since he, Alexander, already possessed such parts of Asia as Darius
proposed to cede to him, and could marry the daughter of the emperor
when he pleased. Darius, despairing of peace with so reckless a logician,
turned unwillingly to the task of collecting another and larger force.
Meanwhile Alexander had taken Tyre, and annexed Egypt; now he
marched back across the great empire, straight to its distant capitals. In
twenty days from Babylon his army reached Susa, and took it without
resistance; thence it advanced so quickly to Persepolis that the guards of
the royal treasury had no time to secrete its funds. There Alexander
committed one of the most unworthy acts of his incredible career: against
the counsel of Parmenio, and (we are told) to please the courtesan Thai's,t
he burned the palaces of Persepolis to the ground, and permitted his
troops to loot the city. Then, having raised the spirits of his army with
booty and gifts, he turned north to meet Darius for the last time.
Darius had gathered, chiefly from his eastern provinces, a new army
of a million men148— Persians, Medes, Babylonians, Syrians, Armenians,
Cappadocians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Arachosians, Sacae and Hindus— and
had equipped them no longer with bows and arrows, but with javelins,
spears, shields, horses, elephants, and scythe-wielding chariots intended
to mow down the enemy like wheat; with this vast force old Asia would
make one more effort to preserve itself from adolescent Europe. Alex-
ander, with 7,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, met the motley mob at
* Probably ctjui\ alcnt to $60,000,000 in contemporary currencies.
t Plutarch, Quintus Curtius ami Diodorus agree on this tale, and it does not do violence
to Alexander's impetuous character; but one may meet the story with a certain scepticism
none the less.
CHAP. XIII ) PERSIA 385
Gaugamela,* and by superior weapons, generalship and courage de-
stroyed it in a day. Darius again chose the better part of valor, but his
generals, disgusted with this second flight, murdered him in his tent.
Alexander put to death such of the assassins as he could find, sent the
body of Darius in state to Persepolis, and ordered it to be buried in the
manner of the Achamenid kings. The Persian people flocked readily to
the standard of the conquerer, charmed by his generosity and his youth.
Alexander organized Persia into a province of the Macedonian Empire,
left a strong garrison to guard it, and marched on to India.
*A town sixty miles from the Arbela which gave die battle its name.
BOOK TWO
INDIA AND HER NEIGHBORS
"The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They
are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek. . . .
It is a man-making religion that we want. . . . Give up these
weakening mysticisms, and be strong. . . . For the next fifty
years. ... let all other gods disappear from our minds. This
is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His
hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers
everything. . . . The first of all worships is the worship of
those all around us. ... He alone serves God who serves all
other beings."
— Vivekananda.1
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF INDIAN HISTORY*
B.C.
4000:
2900:
l6oo:
IOOO-5OO:
800-500:
599-527:
563-483:
500:
500:
500:
329:
325:
322-185:
322-298:
302-298:
273-232:
A.D. 1 20:
1 20:
320-530:
320-330:
330-380:
380-413:
399-414:
100-700:
4OO:
455-500:
499:
505-587:
598-660:
606-648:
608-642:
629-645:
629-50:
630-800:
639:
712:
750:
750-780:
760:
788-820:
800-1300:
800-1400:
000:
973-1048:
993 =
997-1030:
Neolithic Culture in Mysore
Culture of Mohenjo-daro
Aryan invasion of India
Formation of the Vedas
The Upanishads
Mahavira, founder of Jainism
Buddha
Sushruta, physician
Kapila and the Sankhya Philos-
ophy
The earliest Furanas
Greek invasion of India
Alexander leaves India
The Maurya Dynasty
Chandragupta Maurya
Megasthencs at Pataliputra
Ashoka
Kanishka, Kushan King
Charaka, physician
The Gupta Dynasty
Chandragupta I
Samudragupta
Vikramaditya
Fa-Hien in India
Temples and frescoes of Ajanta
Kalidasa, poet and dramatist
Hun invasion of India
Aryabhata, mathematician
Varahamihira, astronomer
Brahmagupta, astronomer
King Harsha-Vardhana
Pulakeshin II, Chalukyan King
Yuan Chwang in India
Srong-tsan Gampo, King of
Tibet
Golden Age of Tibet
Srong-tsan Gampo founds Lhasa
Arab conquest of Sind
Rise of the Pallava Kingdom
Building of Borobudur, Java
The Kail ash a Temple
Shankara, Vedanta philosopher
Golden Age of Cambodia
Golden Age of of Rajputana
Rise of the Chola Kingdom
Alberuni, Arab scholar
Foundation of Delhi
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni
A.D.
1008: Mahmud invades India
1076-1126: Vikramaditya Chalukya
1114: Bhaskara, mathematician
1150: Building of Angkor Wat
1 1 86: Turkish invasion of India
1206-1526: The Sultanate of Delhi
1206-1210: Sultan Kutbu-d Din Aibak
1288-1293: Marco Polo in India
1296-1315: Sultan Alau-d-din
1303: Alau-d-din takes Chitor
1325-1351: Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak
.1336: Foundation of Vijayanagar
1336-1405: Timur (Tamerlane)
1351-1388: Sultan Firoz Shah
1398: Timur invades India
1440-1518: Kabir, poet
1469-1538: Baba Nanak, founder of the
Sikhs
1483-1530: Babur founds the Mogul
Dynasty
1483-1573: Sur Das, poet
1498: Vasco da Gama reaches India
1509-1529: Krishna deva Ray a rules
Vijayanagar
1510: Portugese occupy Goa
1530-1542: Humayun
1532-1624: Tulsi Das, poet
1542-1545: Sher Shah
1555-1556: Restoration and death of
Humayun
1560-1605: Akbar
1565: Fall of Vijayanagar at Talikota
1600: Foundation of East India Co.
1605-1627: Jehangir
1628-1658: Shah Jchan
1631: Death of Mumtaz Mahal
1632-1653: Building of the Taj Mahal
1658-1707: Aurangzeb
1674: The French found Pondicherry
1674-1680: Raja Shivaji
1690: The English found Calcutta
1756-1763: French-English War in India
1757: Battle of Plassey
1765-1767: Robert Clive, Gov. of Bengal
1772-1774: Warren Hastings, Gov. of Ben-
gal
1788-1795: Trial of Warren Hastings
* Dates before 1600 A.D. arc uncertain; dates before 329 B.C. arc guesswork.
389
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF INDIAN HISTORY
AD. AJ>.
i786-i793:_Lord Cornwallis, Gov. of Ben- 1863-1902: Vivekananda (Narendranath
gal Dutt)
1798-1805: Marquess Wellesley, Gov. of 1869: Birth of Mohandas Karamchand
Bengal Gandhi
1828-1835: Lord William Cavendish-Ben- 1875: Dayananda founds the Arya-
tinck, Governor-General of Somaj.
India 1880-1884: Marquess of Ripon, Viceroy
1828: Ram Mohun Roy founds the 1885: Foundation of India National
Brahma-Somaj Congress
1829: Abolition of suttee 1889-1905: Baron Curzon, Viceroy
1836-1886: Ramakrishna 1916-1921: Baron Chelmsford, Viceroy
1857: The Sepoy Mutiny 1919: Amritsar
A j>. 1858: India taken over by the British 1921-1926: Earl of Reading, Viceroy
Crown 1926-1931: Lord Irwin, Viceroy
1861: Birth of Rabindranath Tagore 1931- : Lord Willingdon, Viceroy
390
CHAPTER XIV
The Foundations of India
I. SCENE OF THE DRAMA
The rediscovery of India—A glance at the map—Climatic in-
fluences
NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the
recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is
a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large
as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain;
320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined,
or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of
development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier,
to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from bar-
barous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers
playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads
eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him;
scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning
Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable
antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and
Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer,
and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples
for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or
carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens— this
is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new in-
tellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought
civilization an exclusively European thing.*
*From the time of Megasthenes, who described India to Greece ca. 302 B.C., down to
the eighteenth century, India was all a marvel and a mystery to Europe. Marco Polo
(1254-1323 AJ>.) pictured its western fringe vaguely, Columbus blundered upon America
in trying to reach it, Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to rediscover it, and merchants
spoke rapaciously of "the wealth of the Indies." But scholars left the mine almost un-
tapped. A Dutch missionary to India, Abraham Roger, made a beginning with his Open
Door to the Hidden Heathendom (1651); Dry den showed his alertness by writing the
play Aurangzeb (1675); an(^ an Austrian monk, Fra Paolino de S. Bartolomeo, advanced
391
392 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
The scene of the history is a great triangle narrowing down from the ever-
lasting snows of the Himalayas to the eternal heat of Ceylon. In a corner at
the left lies Persia, close akin to Vedic India in people, language and gods.
Following the northern frontier eastward we strike Afghanistan; here is
Kandahar, the ancient Gandhara, where Greek and Hindu* sculpture fused
for a while, and then parted never to meet again; and north of it is Kabul,
from which the Moslems and the Moguls made those bloody raids that gave
them India for a thousand years. Within the Indian frontier, a short day's
ride from Kabul, is Peshawar, where the old northern habit of invading the
south still persists. Note how near to India Russia comes at the Pamirs and
the passes of the Hindu Kush; hereby will hang much politics. Directly at
the northern tip of India is the province of Kashmir, whose very name recalls
the ancient glory of India's textile crafts. South of it is the Punjab— i.e.,
"Land of the Five Rivers"— with the great city of Lahore, and Shimla, sum-
mer capital at the foot of the Himalayas ("Home of the Snow"). Through
the western Punjab runs the mighty river Indus, a thousand miles in length;
the matter with two Sanskrit grammars and a treatise on the Systema Erahmanicum
(i79i).la In 1789 Sir William Jones opened his career as one of the greatest of Indolo-
gists by translating Kalidasa's Shakuntala; this translation, rc-rcndercd into German in 1791,
profoundly affected Herder and Goethe, and— through the Schlegels— the entire Romantic
movement, which hoped to find in the East all the mysticism and mystery that seemed to
have died on the approach of science and Enlightenment in the West. Jones startled
the world of scholarship by declaring that Sanskrit was cousin to all the languages of
Europe, and an indication of our racial kinship with the Vedic Hindus; these announce-
ments almost created modern philology and ethnology. In 1805 Colcbrooke's essay On
the Vedas revealed to Europe the oldest product of Indian literature; and about the
same time Anquctil-Duperron's translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads
acquainted Schelling and Schopenhauer 'with what the latter called the profoundcst phi-
losophy that he had ever read.8 Buddhism was practically unknown as a system of
thought until Burnouf's Essai sur le Pali (1826)— i.e., on the language of the Buddhist
documents. Burnouf in France, and his pupil Max Miiller in England, roused scholars
and philanthropists to make possible a translation of all the "Sacred Books of the East";
and Rhys Davids furthered this task by a lifetime devoted to the exposition of the lit-
erature of Buddhism. Despite and because of these labors it has become clear that we
have merely begun to know India; our acquaintance with its literature is as limited as
Europe's knowledge of Greek and Roman literature in the days of Charlemagne. Today,
in the enthusiasm of our discovery, we exaggerate generously the value of the new revela-
tion; a European philosopher believes that "Indian wisdom is the profoundest that exists";
and a great novelist writes: "I have not found, in Europe or America, poets, thinkers or
popular leaders equal, or even comparable, to those of India today."3
* The word Indian will be used in this Book as applying to India in general; the word
Hindu, for variety's sake, will occasionally be used in the same sense, following the cus-
tom of the Persians and the Greeks; but \vhere any confusion might result, Hindu will be
used in its later and stricter sense, as referring only to those inhabitants of India who (as
distinct from Moslem Indians) accept one of the native faiths.
CHAP. XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 393
its name came from the native word for river, sindhu, which the Persians
(changing it to Hindu) applied to all northern India in their word Hindustan
— i.e., "Land of the Rivers." Out of this Persian term Hindu the invading
Greeks made for us the word India.
From the Punjab the Jumna and the Ganges flow leisurely to the south-
east; the Jumna waters the new capital at Delhi, and mirrors the Taj Mahal
at Agra; the Ganges broadens down to the Holy City, Benares, washes ten
million devotees daily, and fertilizes with its dozen mouths the province of
Bengal and the old British capital at Calcutta. Still farther east is Burma, with
the golden pagodas of Rangoon and the sunlit road to Mandalay. From
Mandalay back across India to the western airport at Karachi is almost as
long a flight as from New York to Los Angeles. South of the Indus, on
such a flight, one would pass over Rajputana, land of the heroic Rajputs, with
its famed cities of Gwalior and Chi tor, Jaipur, Ajmer and Udaipur. South
and west is the "Presidency" or province of Bombay, with teeming cities
at Surat, Ahmedabad, Bombay and Poona. East and south lie the progressive
native-ruled states of Hyderabad and Mysore, with picturesque capitals of the
same names. On the west coast is Goa, and on the eastern coast is Pondi-
chcrry, where the conquering British have left to the Portuguese and the
French respectively a few square miles of territorial consolation. Along the
Bay of Bengal the Madras Presidency runs, with the well-governed city of
Madras as its center, and the sublime and gloomy temples of Tan j ore, Trichi-
nopoly, Madura and Ramcshvaram adorning its southern boundaries. And
then "Adam's Bridge"— a reef of sunken islands— beckons us across the strait
to Ceylon, where civilization flourished sixteen hundred years ago. All these
are a little part of India.
We must conceive it, then, not as a nation, like Egypt, Babylonia, or
England, but as a continent as populous and polyglot as Europe, and
almost as varied in climate and race, in literature, philosophy and art.
The north is harassed by cold blasts from the Himalayas, and by the fogs
that form when these blasts meet the southern sun. In the Punjab the
rivers have created great alluvial plains of unsurpassed fertility;4 but south
of the river-valleys the sun rules as an unchecked despot, the plains are
dry and bare, and require for their fruitful tillage no mere husbandry
but an almost stupefying slavery.6 Englishmen do not stay in India more
than five years at a time; and if a hundred thousand of them rule three
thousand times their number of Hindus it is because they have not stayed
there long enough.
Here and there, constituting one-fifth of the land, the primitive jungle
remains, a breeding-place of tigers, leopards, wolves and snakes. In the
394 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
southern third, or Deccan,* the heat is drier, or is tempered with breezes
from the sea. But from Delhi to Ceylon the dominating fact in India is
heat: heat that has weakened the physique, shortened the youth, and
affected the quietist religion and philosophy of the inhabitants. The only
relief from this heat is to sit still, to do nothing, to desire nothing; or in
the summer months the monsoon wind may bring cooling moisture and
fertilizing rain from the sea. When the monsoon fails to blow, India
starves, and dreams of Nirvana.
II. THE OLDEST CIVILIZATION?
Prehistoric India— Mohenjo-daro— Its antiquity
In the days when historians supposed that history had begun with
Greece, Europe gladly believed that India had been a hotbed of barbarism
until the "Aryan" cousins of the European peoples had migrated from
the shores of the Caspian to bring the arts and sciences to a savage and
benighted peninsula. Recent researches have marred this comforting pic-
ture—as future researches will change the perspective of these pages. In
India, as elsewhere, the beginnings of civilization are buried in the earth,
and not all the spades of archeology will ever quite exhume them. Re-
mains of an Old Stone Age fill many cases in the museums of Calcutta,
Madras and Bombay; and neolithic objects have been found in nearly
every state.8 These, however, were cultures, not yet a civilization.
In 1924 the world of scholarship was again aroused by news from
India: Sir John Marshall announced that his Indian aides, R. D. Banerji
in particular, had discovered at Mohenjo-daro, on the western bank of the
lower Indus, remains of what seemed to be an older civilization than any
yet known to historians. There, and at Harappa, a few hundred miles
to the north, four or five superimposed cities were excavated, with hun-
dreds of solidly-built brick houses and shops, ranged along wide streets
as well as narrow lanes, and rising in many cases to several stories. Let
Sir John estimate the age of these remains:
These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost
province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the
fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and
* From dakshina, "right hand" (Latin dexter) ; secondarily meaning "south," since south-
ern India is on the right hand of a worshiper facing the rising sun.
CHAP. XIV ) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 395
the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well
as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the
citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that
prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur
the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those
of Mohenjo-daro.7
Among the finds at these sites were household utensils and toilet out-
fits; pottery painted and plain, hand-turned and turned on the wheel;
terracottas, dice and chess-men; coins older than any previously known;
over a thousand seals, most of them engraved, and inscribed in an un-
known pictographic script; faience work of excellent quality; stone carv-
ing superior to that of the Sumerians;8 copper weapons and implements,
and a copper model of a two-wheeled cart (one of our oldest examples of
a wheeled vehicle) ; gold and silver bangles, ear-ornaments, necklaces, and
other jewelry "so well finished and so highly polished," says Marshall,
"that they might have come out of a Bond Street jeweler's of today
rather than from a prehistoric house of 5,000 years ago."9
Strange to say, the lowest strata of these remains showed a more de-
veloped art than the upper layers— as if even the most ancient deposits
were from a civilization already hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years
old. Some of the implements were of stone, some of copper, some of
bronze, suggesting that this Indus culture had arisen in a Chalcolithic Age
—i.e., in a transition from stone to bronze as the material of tools." The
indications are that Mohenjo-daro was at its height when Cheops built
the first great pyramid; that it had commercial, religious and artistic
connections with Sumeria and Babylonia;* and that it survived over three
thousand years, until the third century before Christ, f" We cannot tell
* These connections are suggested by similar seals found at Mohenjo-daro and in
Sumeria (especially at Kish), and by the appearance of the Naga, or hooded serpent,
among the early Mesopotamian seals.u In 1932 Dr. Henri Frankfort unearthed, in the
ruins of a Babylonian-Elamite village at the modern Tell-Asmar (near Baghdad), pottery
seals and beads which in his judgment (Sir John Marshall concurring) were imported
from Mohenjo-daro ca. 2000 B.C."
t MacdoneU believes that this amazing civilization was derived from Sumeria;" Hall be-
lieves that the Sumerians derived their culture from India;" Woolley derives both the
Sumerians and the early Hindus from some common parent stock and culture in or near
Baluchistan.19 Investigators have been struck by the fact that similar seals found both in
Babylonia and in India belong to the earliest ("pre-Sumerian") phase of the Mesopo-
tamian culture, but to the latest phase of the Indus civilization17— which suggests the pri-
ority of India. Guide inclines to this conclusion: "By the end of the fourth millennium
396 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
yet whether, as Marshall believes, Mohenjo-daro represents the oldest
of all civilizations known. But the exhuming of prehistoric India has just
begun; only in our time has archeology turned from Egypt across Meso-
potamia to India. When the soil of India has been turned up like that
of Egypt we shall probably find there a civilization older than that which
flowered out of the mud of the Nile.*
III. THE INDO-ARYANS
The natives— The invaders—The village c O7inmmity —Caste—War-
riors—Priests— Merchants— Workers— Outcastes
Despite the continuity of the remains in Sind and Mysore, we feel that
between the heyday of Mohenjo-daro and the advent of the Aryans a
great gap stands in our knowledge; or rather that our knowledge of the
past is an occasional gap in our ignorance. Among the Indus relics is a
peculiar seal, composed of two serpent heads, which was the characteristic
symbol of the oldest historic people of India— those serpent-worshiping
Nagas whom the invading Aryans found in possession of the northern
provinces, and whose descendants still linger in the remoter hills.20 Farther
south the land was occupied by a dark-skinned, broad-nosed people whom,
without knowing the origin of the word, we call Dravidians. They were
already a civilized people when the Aryans broke down upon them;
their adventurous merchants sailed the sea even to Sumeria and Babylon,
and their cities knew many refinements and luxuries.21 It was from
them, apparently, that the Aryans took their village community and their
systems of land-tenure and taxation.23 To this day the Deccan is still
essentially Dravidian in stock and customs, in language, literature and arts.
B.C. the material culture of Abydos, Ur, or Mohenjo-daro would stand comparison with
that of Periclean Athens or of any medieval town. . . . Judging by the domestic architec-
ture, the seal-cutting, and the grace of the pottery, the Indus civilization was ahead of the
Babylonian at the beginning of the third millennium (ca. 3000 B.C.). But that was a late
phase of the Indian culture; it may have enjoyed no less lead in earlier times. Were then
the innovations and discoveries that characterize proto-Sumcrian civilization not native de-
velopments on Babylonian soil, but the results of Indian inspiration? If so, had the
Sumerians themselves come from the Indus, or at least from regions in its immediate
sphere of influence?"18 These fascinating questions cannot yet be answered; but they serve
to remind us that a history of civilization, because of our human ignorance, begins at
what was probably a late point in the actual development of culture.
* Recent excavations near Chitaldrug, in Mysore, revealed six levels of buried cultures,
rising from Stone Age implements and geometrically adorned pottery apparently as old as
4000 B.C., to remains as late as 1200 A.D."
CHAP. XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 397
The invasion and conquest of these flourishing tribes by the Aryans
was part of that ancient process whereby, periodically, the north has
swept down violently upon the settled and pacified south; this has been
one of the main streams of history, on which civilizations have risen and
fallen like epochal undulations. The Aryans poured down upon the
Dravidians, the Achaeans and Dorians upon the Cretans and ^geans, the
Germans upon the Romans, the Lombards upon the Italians, the English
upon the world. Forever the north produces rulers and warriors, the
south produces artists and saints, and the meek inherit heaven.
Who were these marauding Aryans? They themselves used the term
as meaning noblemen (Sanskrit arya, noble), but perhaps this patriotic
derivation is one of those after-thoughts which cast scandalous gleams
of humor into philology.* Very probably they came from that Caspian
region which their Persian cousins called Airyana-vaejo— "The Aryan
home."t About the same time that the Aryan Kassites overran Babylonia,
the Vedic Aryans began to enter India.
Like the Germans invading Italy, these Aryans were rather immigrants
than conquerors. But they brought with them strong physiques, a hearty
appetite in both solids and liquids, a ready brutality, a skill and courage
in war, which soon gave them the mastery of northern India. They fought
with bows and arrows, led by armored warriors in chariots, who wielded
battle-axes and hurled spears. They were too primitive to be hypocrites:
they subjugated India without pretending to elevate it. They wanted
land, and pasture for their cattle; their word for war said nothing about
national honor, but simply meant "a desire for more cows."90 Slowly they
made their way eastward along the Indus and the Ganges, until all Hin-
dustan:]: was under their control.
* Monicr-Williams derives Aryan from the Sanskrit root ri-ar, to plough;* cf. the Latin
aratrumy a plough, and area, an open space. On this theory the word Aryan originally
meant not nobleman but peasant.
fWe find such typically Vedic deities as Indra, Mitra and Varuna mentioned in a
treaty concluded by the Aryan Hittites and Mitannians at the beginning of the fourteenth
century B.C.;** and so characteristic a Vedic ritual as the drinking of the sacred soma juice
is repeated in the Persian ceremony of drinking the sap of the haoma plant. (Sanskrit s
corresponds regularly to Zend or Persian h: soma becomes haoma, as sindhu becomes
Hindu.*1) We conclude that the Mitannians, the Hittites, the Kassites, the Sogdians, the
Bactrians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Aryan invaders of India were branches of an
already heterogeneous "Indo-European" stock which spread out from the shores of the
Caspian Sea.
£A word applied by the ancient Persians to India north of the Narbada River.
398 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
As they passed from armed warfare to settled tillage their tribes grad-
ually coalesced into petty states. Each state was ruled by a king checked
by a council of warriors; each tribe was led by a raja or chieftain limited
in his power by a tribal council; each tribe was composed of comparatively
independent village communities governed by assemblies of family heads.
"Have you heard, Ananda," Buddha is represented as asking his St. John,
"that the Vajjians foregather often, and frequent public meetings of their
clans? ... So long, Ananda, as the Vajjians foregather thus often, and
frequent the public meetings of their clan, so long may they be expected
not to decline, but to prosper.""
Like all peoples, the Aryans had rules of endogamy and exogamy-
forbidding marriage outside the racial group or within near degrees of
kinship. From these rules came the most characteristic of Hindu institu-
tions. Outnumbered by a subject people whom they considered inferior
to themselves, the Aryans foresaw that without restrictions on inter-
marriage they would soon lose their racial identity; in a century or two
they would be assimilated and absorbed. The first caste division, there-
fore, was not by status but by color;* it divided long noses from broad
noses, Aryans from Nagas and Dravidians; it was merely the marriage
regulation of an endogamous group." In its later profusion of hereditary,
racial and occupational divisions the caste system hardly existed in Vedic
times." Among the Aryans themselves marriage (except of near kin)
was free, and status was not defined by birth.
As Vedic India (2000-1000 B.C.) passed into the "Heroic" age (1000-500
B.C.)— i-e., as India changed from the conditions pictured in the Vedas
into those described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana— occupations
became more specialized and hereditary, and caste divisions were more
rigidly defined. At the top were the Kshatriyas, or fighters, who held it
a sin to die in bed." Even the religious ceremonials were in the early days
performed by chieftains or kings, in the fashion of Caesar playing Pontifex;
the Brahmans or priests were then mere assistants at the sacrifice.81 In
the Ramayana a Kshatriya protests passionately against mating a "proud
and peerless bride" of warrior stock to "a prating priest and Brahman" ;**
the Jain books take for granted the leadership of the Kshatriyas, and the
Buddhist literature goes so far as to call the Brahmans "low-born."" Even
in India things change.
* The early Hindu word for caste is varna, color. This was translated by the Portu-
guese invaders as casta, from the Latin castus, pure.
CHAP. XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 399
But as war gradually gave way to peace—and as religion, being then
largely an aide to agriculture in the face of the incalculable elements,
grew in social importance and ritual complexity, and required expert in-
termediaries between men and gods— the Brahmans increased in number,
wealth and power. As educators of the young, and oral transmitters of
the race's history, literature and laws, they were able to recreate the past
and form the future in their own image, moulding each generation into
greater reverence for the priests, and. building for their caste a prestige
which would, in later centuries, give them the supreme place in Hindu
society. Already in Buddha's days they had begun to challenge the
supremacy of the Kshatriyas; they pronounced these warriors inferior,
even as the Kshatriyas pronounced the priests inferior;84 and Buddha felt
that there was much to be said for both points of view. Even in Buddha's
time, however, the Kshatriyas had not conceded intellectual leadership
to the Brahmans; and the Buddhist movement itself, founded by a Ksha-
triya noble, contested the religious hegemony of India with the Brahmans
for a thousand years.
Below these ruling minorities were the Vaisyas, merchants and free-
men hardly distinct as a caste before Buddha, the Shudras, or working-
men, who comprised most of the native population; and finally the Out-
castes or Pariahs— unconverted native tribes like the Chandalas, war cap-
tives, and men reduced to slavery as a punishment.85 Out of this originally
small group of casteless men grew the 40,000,000 "Untouchables" of
India today.
IV. INDO-ARYAN SOCIETY
Herders— Tillers of the soil— Craftsmen— Traders— Coinage and
credit— Morals— Marriage— Woman
How did these Aryan Indians live? At first by war and spoliation; then
by herding, tillage and industry in a rural routine not unlike that of
medieval Europe; for until the Industrial Revolution in which we live,
the basic economic and political life of man had remained essentially the
same since neolithic days. The Indo-Aryans raised cattle, used the cow
without considering it sacred, and ate meat when they could afford it,
having offered a morsel to priests or gods;8* Buddha, after nearly starving
himself in his ascetic youth, seems to have died from a hearty meal of
pork.87 They planted barley, but apparently knew nothing of rice in
Vedic times. The fields were divided by each village community among
400 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
its constituent families, but were irrigated in common; the land could
not be sold to an outsider, and could be bequeathed only to the family
heirs in direct male line. The majority of the people were yeomen owning
their own soil; the Aryans held it a disgrace to work for hire. There
were, we are assured, no landlords and no paupers, no millionaires and
no slums.88
In the towns handicrafts flourished among independent artisans and
apprentices, organized, half a thousand years before Christ, into powerful
guilds of metal-workers, wood-workers, stone-workers, leather-workers,
ivory-workers, basket-makers, house-painters, decorators, potters, dyers,
fishermen, sailors, hunters, trappers, butchers, confectioners, barbers,
shampooers, florists, cooks— the very list reveals the fulness and vari-
ety of Indo-Aryan life. The guilds settled intra-guild affairs, even
arbitrating difficulties between members and their wives. Prices were de-
termined, as among ourselves, not by supply and demand but by the
gullibility of the purchaser; in the palace of the king, however, was an
official Valuer who, like our secretive Bureau of Standards, tested goods
to be bought, and dictated terms to the makers.80
Trade and travel had advanced to the stage of horse and two-wheeled
wagon, but were still medievally difficult; caravans were held up by taxes
at every petty frontier, and as like as not by highwaymen at any turn.
Transport by river and sea was more developed: about 860 B.C. ships
with modest sails and hundreds of oars carried to Mesopotamia, Arabia
and Egypt such typical Indian products as perfumes and spices, cotton
and silk, shawls and muslins, pearls and rubies, ebony and precious stones,
and ornate brocades of silver and gold.40
Trade was stunted by clumsy methods of exchange— at first by barter,
then by the use of cattle as currency; brides like Homer's "oxen-bearing
maidens" were bought with cows.41 Later a heavy copper coinage was
issued, guaranteed, however, only by private individuals. There were
no banks; hoarded money was hidden in the house, or buried in the
ground, or deposited with a friend. Out of this, in Buddha's age, grew
a credit system: merchants in different towns facilitated trade by giving
one another letters of credit; loans could be obtained from such Roths-
childs at eighteen per cent,48 and there was much talk of promissory
notes. The coinage was not sufficiently inconvenient to discourage
gambling; already dice were essential to civilization. In many cases gam-
bling halls were provided for his subjects by the king, in the fashion, if
CHAP.XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 40!
not quite in the style, of Monaco; and a portion of the receipts went to
the royal treasury.48 It seems a scandalous arrangement to us, who are
not quite accustomed to having our gambling institutions contribute so
directly to the support of our public officials.
Commercial morality stood on a high level. The kings of Vedic India,
as of Homeric Greece, were not above lifting cattle from their neighbors;44
but the Greek historian of Alexander's campaigns describes the Hindus
as "remarkable for integrity, so reasonable as seldom to have recourse
to lawsuits, and so honest as to require neither locks to their doors nor
writings to bind their agreements; they are in the highest degree truth-
ful."45 The Rig-veda speaks of incest, seduction, prostitution, abortion and
adultery,46 and there are some signs of homosexuality;47 but the general
picture that we derive from the Vedas and the epics is one of high stand-
ards in the relations of the sexes and the life of the family.
Marriage might be entered into by forcible abduction of the bride, by
purchase of her, or by mutual consent. Marriage by consent, however,
was considered slightly disreputable; women thought it more honorable
to be bought and paid for, and a great compliment to be stolen.48 Polyg-
amy was permitted, and was encouraged among the great; it was an act
of merit to support several wives, and to transmit ability.40 The story of
Draupadi,50 who married five brothers at once, indicates the occasional
occurrence, in Epic days, of that strange polyandry— the marriage of
one woman to several men, usually brothers— which survived in Ceylon
till 1859, and still lingers in the mountain villages of Tibet.61 But polyg-
amy was usually the privilege of the male, who ruled the Aryan house-
hold with patriarchal omnipotence. He held the right of ownership over
his wives and his children, and might in certain cases sell them or cast
them out."
Nevertheless, woman enjoyed far greater freedom in the Vedic period
than in later India. She had more to say in the choice of her mate than
the forms of marriage might suggest. She appeared freely at feasts and
dances, and joined with men in religious sacrifice. She could study, and
might, like Gargi, engage in philosophic disputation.08 If she was left a
widow there were no restrictions upon her remarriage.54 In the Heroic
Age woman seems to have lost something of this liberty. She was dis-
couraged from mental pursuits, on the ground that "for a woman to study
the Vedas indicates confusion in the realm;"00 the remarriage of widows
became uncommon; purdah— the seclusion of women— began; and the
402 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
practice of suttee, almost unknown in Vedic times, increased.58 The ideal
woman was now typified in the heroine of the Ramayana— that faithful
Sita who follows and obeys her husband humbly, through every test of
fidelity and courage, until her death.
V. THE RELIGION OF THE VEDAS
Pre-Vedic religion— Vedic gods— Moral gods— The Vedic story
of Creation— Immortality— The horse sacrifice
The oldest known religion of India, which the invading Aryans found
among the Nagas, and which still survives in the ethnic nooks and crannies
of the great peninsula, was apparently an animistic and totemic worship
of multitudinous spirits dwelling in stones and animals, in trees and streams,
in mountains and stars. Snakes and serpents were divinities— idols and
ideals of virile reproductive power; and the sacred Bodhi tree of Buddha's
time was a vestige of the mystic but wholesome reverence for the quiet
majesty of trees." Naga, the dragon-god, Hanuman the monkey-god,
Nandi the divine bull, and the Yakshas or tree-gods passed down into the
religion of historic India." Since some of these spirits were good and some
evil, only great skill in magic could keep the body from being possessed
or tortured, in sickness or mania, by one or more of the innumerable
demons that filled the air. Hence the medley of incantations in the
Atharva-veda, or Book of the Knowledge of Magic; one must recite spells
to obtain children, to avoid abortion, to prolong life, to ward off evil, to
woo sleep, to destroy or harass enemies.*89
The earliest gods of the Vedas were the forces and elements of nature
herself— sky, sun, earth, fire, light, wind, water and sex.82 Dyaus (the
Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter) was at first the sky itself; and the Sans-
krit word deva, which later was to mean divine, originally meant only
bright. By that poetic license which makes so many deities, these natural
objects were personified; the sky, for example, became a father, Varuna;
the earth became a mother, Prithivi; and vegetation was the fruit of their
union through the rain." The rain was the god Parjanya, fire was Agni,
the wind was Vayu, the pestilential wind was Rudra, the storm was Indra,
*Cf. Atharva-veda, vi, 138, and vii, 35, 90, where incantations "bristling with hatred,"
and 'language of unbridled wildness" are used by women seeking to oust their rivals, or
to make them barren.00 In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (6-12) formulas are given for
raping a woman by incantation, and for "sinning without conceiving."*1
CHAP. XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 403
the dawn was Ushas, the furrow in the field was Sita, the sun was Surya,
Mitra, or Vishnu; and the sacred soma plant, whose juice was at once holy
and intoxicating to gods and men, was itself a god, a Hindu Dionysus,
inspiring man by its exhilarating essence to charity, insight and joy, and
even bestowing upon him eternal life.64 A nation, like an individual, begins
with poetry, and ends with prose. And as things became persons, so
qualities became objects, adjectives became nouns, epithets became deities.
The life-giving sun became a new sun-god, Savitar the Life-Giver; the
shining sun became Vivasvat, Shining God; the life-generating sun be-
came the great god Prajapati, Lord of all living things.*68
For a time the most important of the Vedic gods was Agni— fire; he
was the sacred flame that lifted the sacrifice to heaven, he was the lightning
that pranced through the sky, he was the fiery life and spirit of the world.
But the most popular figure in the pantheon was Indra, wielder of
thunder and storm. For Indra brought to the Indo-Aryans that precious
rain which seemed to them even more vital than the sun; therefore they
made him the greatest of the gods, invoked the aid of his thunderbolts
in their battles, and pictured him enviously as a gigantic hero feasting on
bulls by the hundred, and lapping up lakes of wine.68 His favorite enemy
was Krishna, who in the Vedas was as yet only the local god of the
Krishna tribe. Vishnu, the sun who covered the earth with his strides,
was also a subordinate god, unaware that the future belonged to him
and to Krishna, his avatar. This is one value of the Vedas to us, that
through them we see religion in the making, and can follow the birth,
growth and death of gods and beliefs from animism to philosophic panthe-
ism, and from the superstition of the Atharva-veda to the sublime monism
of the Upanishads.
These gods are human in figure, in motive, almost in ignorance. One
of them, besieged by prayers, ponders what he should give his devotee:
"This is what I will do— no, not that; I will give him a cow— or shall it
be a horse? I wonder if I have really had soma from him?"87 Some of
them, however, rose in later Vedic days to a majestic moral significance.
Varuna, who began as the encompassing heaven, whose breath was the
storm and whose garment was the sky, grew with the development of his
worshipers into the most ethical and ideal deity of the Vedas— watching
*An almost monotheistic devotion was accorded to Prajapati, until he was swallowed
up, in later theology, by the all-consuming figure of Brahma.
404 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIV
over the world through his great eye, the sun, punishing evil, rewarding
good, and forgiving the sins of those who petitioned him. In this aspect
Varuna was the custodian and executor of an eternal law called Rita; this
was at first the law that established and maintained the stars in their
courses; gradually it became also the law of right, the cosmic and moral
rhythm which every man must follow if he would not go astray and be
destroyed."
As the number of the gods increased, the question arose as to which of
them had created the world. This primal role was assigned now to
Agni, now to Indra, now to Soma, now to Prajapati. One of the Upani-
shads attributed the world to an irrepressible Pro-creator:
Verily, he had no delight; one alone had no delight; he desired a
second. He was, indeed, as large as a woman and a man closely cm-
braced. He caused that self to fall (v pat) into two pieces; there-
from arose a husband (pati) and a wife (patni). Therefore . . . one's
self is like a half fragment; . . . therefore this space is filled by a
wife. He copulated with her. Therefore human beings were pro-
duced. And she bethought herself: "How, now, does he copulate
with me after he has produced me just from himself? Come, let me
hide myself." She became a cow. He became a bull. With her he
did indeed copulate. Then cattle were born. She became a mare, he
a stallion. She became a female ass, he a male ass; with her he copu-
lated of a truth. Thence were born solid hoofed animals. She be-
came a she-goat, he a he-goat; she a ewe, he a ram. With her he did
verily copulate. Therefore were born goats and sheep. Thus indeed
he created all, whatever pairs there are, even down to the ants. He
knew: "I, indeed, am this creation, for I emitted it all from myself."
Thence arose creation.00
In this unique passage we have the germ of pantheism and transmigra-
tion: the Creator is one with his creation, and all things, all forms of
life, are one; every form was once another form, and is distinguished
from it only in the prejudice of perception and the superficial separateness
of time. This view, though formulated in the Upanishads, was not yet
in Vedic days a part of the popular creed; instead of transmigration the
Indo-Aryans, like the Aryans of Persia, accepted a simple belief in per-
sonal immortality. After death the soul entered into eternal punishment
or happiness; it was thrust by Varuna into a dark abyss, half Hades and
half hell, or was raised by Yama into a heaven where every earthly joy
CHAP. XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 405
was made endless and complete.70 "Like corn decays the mortal," said the
Katha Upanishad, "like corn is he born again."71
In the earlier Vedic religion there were, so far as the evidence goes,
no temples and no images;72 altars were put up anew for each sacrifice
as in Zoroastrian Persia, and sacred fire lifted the offering to heaven.
Vestiges of human sacrifice occur here,73 as at the outset of almost every
civilization; but they are few and uncertain. Again as in Persia, the horse
was sometimes burnt as an offering to the gods.74 The strangest ritual of
all was the Ashva?nedha, or Sacrifice of the Horse, in which the queen
of the tribe seems to have copulated with the sacred horse after it had
been killed.*70 The usual offering was a libation of soma juice, and the
pouring of liquid butter into the fire.77 The sacrifice was conceived for
the most part in magical terms; if it were properly performed it would
win its reward, regardless of the moral deserts of the worshiper.78 The
priests charged heavily for helping the pious in the ever more complicated
ritual of sacrifice: if no fee was at hand, the priest refused to recite the
necessary formulas; his payment had to come before that of the god.
Rules were laid down by the clergy as to what the remuneration should
be for each service—how many cows or horses, or how much gold; gold
was particularly efficacious in moving the priest or the god.70 The
Brahmanas, written by the Brahmans, instructed the priest how to turn
the prayer or sacrifice secretly to the hurt of those who had employed
him, if they had given him an inadequate ^ee.80 Other regulations were
issued, prescribing the proper ceremony and usage for almost every
occasion of life, and usually requiring priestly aid. Slowly the Brahmans
became a privileged hereditary caste, holding the mental and spiritual life
of India under a control that threatened to stifle all thought and change.81
VI. THE VEDAS AS LITERATURE
Sanskrit and' English-Writmg-The four "Vedas"-The "Rig-
veda"—A Hymn of Creation
The language of the Indo-Aryans should be of special interest to us,
for Sanskrit is one of the oldest in that "Indo-European" group of lan-
guages to which our own speech belongs. We feel for a moment a strange
sense of cultural continuity across great stretches of time and space when
* Ponebatque in gremium regina genitale victimae membrum.™
406 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
we observe the similarity— in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and English— of the
numerals, the family terms, and those insinuating little words that, by
some oversight of the moralists, have been called the copulative verb.*
It is quite unlikely that this ancient tongue, which Sir William Jones pro-
nounced "more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and
more exquisitely refined than either,"88 should have beea the spoken lan-
guage of the Aryan invaders. What that speech was we do not know;
we can only presume that it was a near relative of the early Persian dialect
in which the Avesta was composed. The Sanskrit of the Vedas and the
epics has already the earmarks of a classic and literary tongue, used only
by scholars and priests; the very word Sanskrit means "prepared, pure,
perfect, sacred." The language of the people in the Vedic age was not
one but many; each tribe had its own Aryan dialect.84 India has never had
one language.
The Vedas contain no hint that writing was known to their authors.
It was not until the eighth or ninth century B.C. that Hindu— probably
Dravidian— merchants brought from western Asia a Semitic script, akin
to the Phoenician; and from this "Brahma script," as it came to be called,
all the later alphabets of India were derived."6 For centuries writing seems
* Cf. English one, two, three, four, five with Sanskrit ek, dwee, tree, chatoor, panch;
Latin unus, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque; Greek heis, duo, tria, tettara, pente. (Quattuor
becomes four, as Latin quercus becomes fir.) Or cf. English am, art, is with Sanskrit
asmi, asi, asti; Latin sum, es, est; C -eek eimi, ei, esti. For family terms cf. p. 357 above.
Grimm's Law, which formulated ti.e changes effected in the consonants of a word through
the different vocal habits of separated peoples, has revealed to us more fully the surpris-
ing kinship o± Sanskrit with our own tongue. The law may be roughly summarized by
saying that in most cases (there are numerous exceptions) :
1. Sanskrit k (as in kratu, power) corresponds to Greek k (kartos, strength), Latin c
or qu (cornu, horn), German h, g or k (hart), and English h, g or f (hard);
2. Skt. g or j (as in jan, to beget), corresponds to Gk. g (genos, race), L. g (genus),
Ger. cb or k (kind, child), E. k (kin)-,
3. Skt. gb or h (as in by as, yesterday), corresponds to Gk. ch (chthes), L. h, f, g, or v
(heri), Ger. k or g (gestern), E. g or y (yesterday);
4. Skt. t (as in tar, to cross) corresponds to Gk. t (terma, end), L. t (ter-minus), Ger.
d (durch, through), E. tb or d (through);
5. Skt. d (as in das, ten) corresponds to Gk. d (deka), L. d (decent), Ger. z (zehn),
E. t (ten);
6. Skt. dh or h (as in dha, to place or put) corresponds to Gk. tb (ti-the-mi, I place),
L. fydorb (fa-cere, do), Ger. t (tun, do), E. d (do, deed);
7 Skt. p (as in patana, feather) corresponds to Gk. p (pteros, wing), L. p (penna,
feather), Ger. f or v (feder), E. f or b (feather);
8. Skt. bh (as in bhri, to bear) corresponds to Gk. ph (pherein), L. f or b (fero), Ger.
p, / or ph (fahren), E. b or p (bear, birth, brother, etc.).81
CHAP.XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 407
to have been confined to commercial and administrative purposes, with
little thought of using it for literature; "merchants, not priests, developed
this basic art."* Even the Buddhist canon does not appear to have been
written down before the third century B.C. The oldest extant inscriptions
in India are those of Ashoka." We who (until the air about us was filled
with words and music) were for centuries made eye-minded by writing
and print, find it hard to understand how contentedly India, long after
she had learned to write, clung to the old ways of transmitting history
and literature by recitation and memory. The Vedas and the epics were
songs that grew with the generations of those that recited them; they
were intended not for sight but for sound.* From this indifference to
writing comes our dearth of knowledge about early India.
What, then, were these Vedas from which nearly all our understanding
of primitive India is derived? The word Veda means knowledge;! a
Veda is literally a Book of Knowledge. Vedas is applied by the Hindus
to all the sacred lore of their early period; like our Bible it indicates a
literature rather than a book. Nothing could be more confused than the
arrangement and division of this collection. Of the many Vedas that once
existed, only four have survived:
I. The Rig-veda, or Knowledge of the Hymns of Praise;
II. The Sama-veda, or Knowledge of the Melodies;
III. The Yajur-veda, or Knowledge of the Sacrificial Formulas; and
IV. The Atharva-veday or Knowledge of the Magic Formulas.
Each of these four Vedas is divided into four sections:
1. The Mantras, or Hymns;
2. The Brahmanas, or manuals of ritual, prayer and incantation for
the priests;
3. The Aranyaka, or "forest-texts" for hermit saints; and
4. The Upanishads, or confidential conferences for philosophers.^
* Perhaps poetry will recover its ancient hold upon our people when it is again recited
rather than silently read.
t Greek (f)oida, Latin video, German weise, English wit and wisdom.
$This is but one of many possible divisions of the material. In addition to the "in-
spired" commentaries contained in the Brahmanas and Upanishads, Hindu scholars usually
include in the Vedas several collections of shorter commentaries in aphoristic form, called
Sutras (lit., threads, from Skt. sw9 to sew). These, while not directly inspired from
heaven, have the high authority of an ancient tradition. Many of them are brief to the
408 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
Only one of the Vedas belongs to literature rather than to religion, phil-
osophy or magic. The Rig-veda is a kind of religious anthology, composed
of 1028 hymns, or psalms of praise, to the various objects of Indo-Aryan
worship— sun, moon, sky, stars, wind, rain, fire, dawn, earth, etc.* Most of
the hymns are matter-of-fact petitions for herds, crops, and longevity; a
small minority of them rise to the level of literature; a few of them reach to
the eloquence and beauty of the Psalms.91 Some of them are simple and
natural poetry, like the unaffected wonder of a child. One hymn marvels
that white milk should come from red cows; another cannot understand why
the sun, once it begins to descend, does not fall precipitately to the earth;
another inquires how "the sparkling waters of all rivers flow into one ocean
without ever filling it." One is a funeral hymn, in the style of Thanatopsis,
over the body of a comrade fallen in battle:
From the dead hand I take the bow he wielded
To gain for us dominion, might and glory.
Thou there, we here, rich in heroic offspring,
Will vanquish all assaults of every foeman.
Approach the bosom of the earth, the mother,
This earth extending far and most propitious;
Young, soft as wool to bounteous givers, may she
Preserve thee from the lap of dissolution.
Open wide, O earth, press not heavily upon him,
Be easy of approach, hail him with kindly aid;
As with a robe a mother hides
Her son, so shroud this man, O earth.95
Another of the poems (Rv. x, 10) is a frank dialogue between the first
parents of mankind, the twin brother and sister, Yama and Yami. Yami
tempts her brother to cohabit with her despite the divine prohibition of
incest, and alleges that all that she desires is the continuance of the race. Yama
point of unintelligibility; they were convenient condensations of doctrine, mnemonic de-
vices for students who still relied upon memory rather than upon writing.
As to the authorship or date of this mass of poetry, myth, magic, ritual and philosophy,
no man can say. Pious Hindus believe every word of it to be divinely inspired, and tell
us that the great god Brahma wrote it with his own hand upon leaves of gold;89 and this
is a view which cannot easily be refuted. According to the fervor of their patriotism,
divers native authorities assign to the oldest hymns dates ranging from 6000 to 1000 B.C.90
The material was probably collected and arranged between 1000 and 500 B.C.*1
* They are composed in stanzas generally of four lines each. The lines are of 5, 8, 1 1
or 12 syllables, indifferent as to quantity, except that the last four syllables are usually
two trochees, or a trochee and a spondee.
CHAP. XIV ) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 409
resists her on high moral grounds. She uses every inducement, and as a last
weapon, calls him a weakling. The story as we have it is left unfinished, and
we may judge the issue only from circumstantial evidence. The loftiest of
the poems is an astonishing Creation Hymn, in which a subtle pantheism, even
a pious scepticism, appears in this oldest book of the most religious of
peoples:
Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright sky
Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above.
What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the water's fathomless abyss?
There was not death—yet was there naught immortal,
There was no confine betwixt day and night;
The Only One breathed breathless by itself;
Other than It there nothing since has been.
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound— an ocean without light—
The germ that still lay covered in the husk
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.
Then first came love upon it, the new spring
Of mind— yea, poets in their hearts discerned,
Pondering, this bond between created things
And uncreated. Comes this spark from earth
Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven?
Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose—
Nature below, and power and will above—
Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here,
Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?
The gods themselves came later into being—
Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
He from whom all this great creation came,
Whether his will created or was mute,
The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it— or perchance even He knows not.*4
It remained for the authors of the Upanishads to take up these problems,
and elaborate these hints, in the most typical, and perhaps the greatest,
product of the Hindu mind.
410 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS
The authors—Their theme— Intellect vs. intuition— Atman— Brah-
man—Their identity— A description of God—Salvation— In-
fluence of the "Upanishads"— Emerson on Brahma
"In the whole world," said Schopenhauer, "there is no study so bene-
ficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace
of my life—it will be the solace of my death."85 Here, excepting the moral
fragments of Ptah-hotep, are the oldest extant philosophy and psychology
of our race; the surprisingly subtle and patient effort of man to under-
stand the mind and the world, and their relation. The Upanishads are
as old as Homer, and as modern as Kant.
The word is composed of upa9 near, and shad, to sit. From "sitting
near" the teacher the term came to mean the secret or esoteric doctrine
confided by the master to his best and favorite pupils." There are one
hundred and eight of these discourses, composed by various saints and
sages between 800 and 500 B.C.97 They represent not a consistent system
of philosophy, but the opinions, apergus and lessons of many men, in
whom philosophy and religion were still fused in the attempt to -under-
stand—and reverently unite with— the simple and essential reality under-
lying the superficial multiplicity of things. They are full of absurdities \
and contradictions, and occasionally they anticipate all the wind of
Hegelian verbiage;0" sometimes they present formulas as weird as that
of Tom Sawyer for curing warts;" sometimes they impress us as the pro-
foundest thinking in the history of philosophy.
We know the names of many of the authors,100 but we know nothing
of their lives except what they occasionally reveal in their teachings.
The most vivid figures among them are Yajnavalkya, the man, aijd Gargi,
the woman who has the honor of being among the earliest of philosophers.
Of the two, Yajnavalkya has the sharper tongue. His fellow teachers
looked upon him as a dangerous innovator; his posterity made his doc-
trine the cornerstone of unchallengeable orthodoxy.101 He tells us how he
tried to leave his two wives in ord?r to become a hermit sage; and in the
plea of his wife Maitreyi that he should take her with him, we catch some
feeling of the intensity with which India has for thousands of years pur-
sued religion and philosophy.
CHAP. XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 411
And then Yajnavalkya was about to commence another mode of life.
"Maitreyi!" said Yajnavalkya, "lo, I am about to wander forth
from this state. Let me make a final settlement for you and that
Katyayani."
Then spake Maitreyi: "If, now, Sir, this whole earth filled with
wealth were mine, would I now thereby be immortal?"
"No, no!" said Yajnavalkya. "Of immortality there is no hope
through wealth."
Then spake Maitreyi: "What should I do with that through which
I may not be immortal? What you know, Sir— that, indeed, explain
to me."1"
The theme of the Upanishads is all the mystery of this unintelligible
world. "Whence are we born, where do we live, and whither do we go?
O ye who know Brahman, tell us at whose command we abide here. . . .
Should time, or nature, or necessity, or chance, or the elements be con-
sidered the cause, or he who is called Purusha"— the Supreme Spirit?108
India has had more than her share of men who wanted "not millions, but
answers to their questions." In the Maitri Upanishad we read of a king
abandoning his kingdom and going into the forest to practice austerities,
clear his mind for understanding, and solve the riddle of the universe.
After a thousand days of the king's penances a sage, "knower of the soul,"
came to him. "You are one who knows its true nature," says the king;
"do you tell us." "Choose other desires," warns the sage. But the king
insists; and in a passage that must have seemed Schopenhauerian to Scho-
penhauer, he voices that revulsion against life, that fear of being reborn,
which runs darkly through all Hindu thought:
"Sir, in this ill-smelling, unsubstantial body, which is a conglomer-
ate of bone, skin, muscle, marrow, flesh, semen, blood, mucus, tears,
rheum, feces, urine, wind, bile and phlegm, what is the good of en-
joyment of desire? In this body, which is afflicted with desire, anger,
covetousness, delusion, fear, despondency, envy, separation from the
desirable, union with the undesirable, hunger, thirst, senility, death,
disease, sorrow and the like, what is the good of enjoyment of
desires? And we see that this whole world is decaying like these
gnats, these mosquitoes, this grass, and these trees that arise and per-
ish. . . . Among other things there is the drying up of great oceans,
the falling-away of mountain-peaks, the deviation of the fixed pole-
412 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIV
star, ... the submergence of the earth. ... In this sort of cycle
of existence what is the good of enjoyment of desires, when, after
a man has fed upon them, there is seen repeatedly his return here to
the earth?"104
The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected
pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that
aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity
of which it is so transitory a fragment? Not that the intellect is useless;
it has its modest place, and serves us well when it deals with relations and
things; but how it falters before the eternal, the infinite, or the elementally
real! In the presence of that silent reality which supports all appearances,
and wells up in all consciousness, we need some other organ of perception
and understanding than these senses and this reason. "Not by learning
is the Atman (or Soul of the World) attained, not by genius and much
knowledge of books. . . . Let a Brahman renounce learning and become
as a child Let him not seek after many words, for that is mere weari-
ness of tongue."106 The highest understanding, as Spinoza was to say,
is direct perception, immediate insight; it is, as Bergson would say, in-
tuition, the inward seeing of the mind that has deliberately closed, as far
as it can, the portals of external sense. "The self-evident Brahman pierced
the openings of the senses so that they turned outwards; therefore man
looks outward, not inward into himself; some wise man, however, with
his eyes closed and wishing for immortality, saw the self behind."100
If, on looking inward, a man finds nothing at all, that may only prove
the accuracy of his introspection; for no man need expect to find the
eternal in himself if he is lost in the ephemeral and particular. Before
that inner reality can be felt one has to wash away from himself all evil
doing and thinking, all turbulence of body and soul.107 For a fortnight
one must fast, drinking only water;108 then the mind, so to speak, is starved
into tranquillity and silence, the senses are cleansed and stilled, the spirit
is left at peace to feel itself and that great ocean of soul of which it is
a part; at last the individual ceases to be, and Unity and Reality appear.
For it is not the individual self which the seer sees in this pure inward
seeing; that individual self is but a series of brain or mental states, it is
merely the body seen from within. What the seeker seeks is Atman* the
*The derivation of this word is uncertain. Apparently (as in Rig. x, 16), it originally
meant breath, like the Latin spiritus; then vital essence, then soul.109
CHAP. XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 413
Self of all selves, the Soul of all souls, the immaterial, formless Absolute in
which we bathe ourselves when we forget ourselves.
This, then, is the first step in the Secret Doctrine: that the essence of
our own self is not the body, or the mind, or the individual ego, but
the silent and formless depth of being within us, Atman. The second step
is Brahman,* the one pervading, neuter, t impersonal, all-embracing, under-
lying, intangible essence of the world, the "Real of the Real," "the unborn
Soul, undecaying, undying,""0 the Soul of all Things as Atman is the Soul
of all Souls; the one force that stands behind, beneath and above all
forces and all gods.
Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him. "How many gods are
there, Yajnavalkya?"
He answered, . . . "As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All
the Gods, namely, three hundred and three, and three thousand and
three."
"Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"Thirty-three."
"Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"Six."
"Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"Two."
"Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"One and a half."
"Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"
"One."m
The third step is the most important of all: Atman and "Brahman are
one. The (non-individual) soul or force within us is identical with the
impersonal Soul of the World. The Upanishads burn this doctrine into
the pupil's mind with untiring, tiring repetition. Behind all forms and
* Brahman as here used, meaning the impersonal Soul of the World, is to be distin-
guished from the more personal Brahma, member of the Hindu triad of gods (Brahma,
Vishnu, Shiva); and from Brahman as denoting a member of the priestly caste. The dis-
tinction, however, is not always carried out, and Brahma is sometimes used in the sense of
Brahman. Brahman as God will be distinguished in these pages from Brahman as priest
by being italicized.
fThe Hindu thinkers are the least anthropomorphic of all religious philosophers. Even
in the later hymns of the Rig-veda the Supreme Being is indifferently referred to as be
or it, to show that it is above sex."*
414 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIV
veils the subjective and the objective are one; we, in our de-individualized
reality, and God as the essence of all things, are one. A teacher expresses
it in a famous parable:
"Bring hither a fig from there."
"Here it is, Sir."
"Divide it."
"It is divided, Sir."
"What do you see there?"
"These rather fine seeds, Sir."
"Of these please divide one."
"It is divided, Sir."
"What do you see there?"
"Nothing at all, Sir."
"Verily, my dear one, that finest essence which you do not per-
ceive—verily from that finest essence this great tree thus arises. Be-
lieve me, my dear one, that which is the finest essence— this whole
world has that as its soul. That is Reality. That is Atman. Tat
tvam asi— that art thou, Shwetaketu."
"Do you, Sir, cause me to understand even more."
"So be it, my dear one."1"
This almost Hegelian dialectic of Atman, Brahman and their synthesis
is the essence of the Upanishads. Many other lessons are taught here, but
they are subordinate. We find already, in these discourses, the belief in
transmigration,* and the longing for release (Moksha) from this heavy
chain of reincarnations. Janaka, King of the Videhas, begs Yajnavalkya to
tell him how rebirth can be avoided. Yajnavalkya answers by expounding
Yoga: through the ascetic elimination of all personal desires one may
cease to be an individual fragment, unite himself in supreme bliss with the
Soul of the World, and so escape rebirth. Whereupon the king, meta-
physically overcome, says: "I will give you, noble Sir, the Videhas, and
myself also to be your slave.""* It is an abstruse heaven, however, that
Yajnavalkya promises the devotee, for in it there will be no individual
consciousness,"* there will only be absorption into Being, the reunion of
*It occurs first in the Satapatha Upanishad, where repeated births and deaths are
viewed as a punishment inflicted by the gods for evil living. Most primitive tribes be-
lieve that the soul can pass from a man to an animal and vice versa; probably this idea
became, in the pre-Aryan inhabitants of India, the basis of the transmigration creed.117
CHAP.XIV) THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIA 415
the temporarily separated part with the Whole. "As flowing rivers dis-
appear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from
name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all."1"
Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose re-
ligion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic
institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with aston-
ishing continuity. We shall find this philosophy of the Upanishads—this
monistic theology, this mystic and impersonal immortality— dominating
Hindu thought from Buddha to Gandhi, from Yajnavalkya to Tagore.
To our own day the Upanishads have remained to India what the New
Testament has been to Christendom— a noble creed occasionally practised
and generally revered. Even in Europe and America this wistful the-
osophy has won millions upon millions of followers, from lonely women
and tired men to Schopenhauer and Emerson. Who would have thought
that the great American philosopher of individualism would give perfect
expression to the Hindu conviction that individuality 'is a delusion?
Brahma
If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahman sings.
CHAPTER XV
Buddha
I. THE HERETICS
Sceptics— Nihilists— Sophists— Atheists—Materialists— Religions
'without a god
THAT there were doubters, even in the days of the Upanishads, ap-
pears from the Upanishads themselves. Sometimes the sages ridi-
culed the priests, as when the Chandogya Upanishad likens the orthodox
clergy of the time to«a procession of dogs each holding the tail of its prede-
cessor, and saying, piously, "Om, let us eat; Om, let us drink."1 The
Sivasanved Upanishad announces that there is no god, no heaven, no hell,
no reincarnation, no world; that the Vedas and Upanishads are the work
of conceited fools; that ideas are illusions, and all words untrue; that
people deluded by flowery speech cling to gods and temples and "holy
men," though in reality there is no difference between Vishnu and a dog."
And the story is told of Virocana, who lived as a pupil for thirty-two
years with the great god Prajapati Himself, received much instruction
about "the Self which is free from evil, ageless, deathless, sorrowless, hun-
gerless, thirstlcss, whose desire is the Real," and then suddenly returned
to earth and preached this highly scandalizing doctrine: "One's self is to
be made happy here on earth. One's self is to be waited upon. He who'
makes himself happy here on earth, who waits upon himself, obtains both
worlds, this world and the next."3 Perhaps the good Brahmans who have
preserved the history of their country have deceived us a little about the
unanimity of Hindu mysticism and piety.
Indeed, as scholarship unearths some of the less respectable figures in
Indian philosophy before Buddha, a picture takes form in which, along
with saints meditating on Brahman, we find a variety of persons who de-
spised all priests, doubted all gods, and bore without trepidition the name
of NastikSj No-sayers, Nihilists. Sangaya, the agnostic, would neither
admit nor deny life after death; he questioned the possibility of know!-
416
CHAP.XV) BUDDHA 417
edge, and limited philosophy to the pursuit of peace. Purana Kashyapa
refused to accept moral distinctions, and taught that the soul is a passive
slave to chance. Maskarin Gosala held that fate determines everything,
regardless of the merits of men. Ajita Kasakambalin reduced man to
earth, water, fire and wind, and said: "Fools and wise alike, on the dissolu-
tion of the body, are cut off, annihilated, and after death they are not."4
The author of the Ramayana draws a typical sceptic in Jabali, who ridi-
cules Rama for rejecting a kingdom in order to keep a vow.
Jabali, a learned Brahman and a Sophist skilled in word,
Questioned Faith and Law and Duty, spake to yojung Ayodhya's
lord:
"Wherefore, Rama, idle maxims cloud thy heart and warp thy mind,
Maxims which mislead the simple and the thoughtless human-
kind? . . .
Ah, I weep for erring mortals who, on erring duty bent,
Sacrifice this dear enjoyment till their barren life is spent,
Who to Gods and to the Fathers vainly still their offerings make.
Waste of food! for God nor Father doth our pious homage take!
And the food by one partaken, can it nourish other men?
Food bestowed upon a Brahman, can it serve our Fathers then?
Crafty priests have forged these maxims, and with selfish objects say,
"Make thy gifts and do thy penance, leave thy worldly wealth, and
pray!"
There is no hereafter, Rama, vain the hope and creed of men;
Seek the pleasures of the present, spurn illusions poor and vain."
When Buddha grew to manhood he found the halls, the streets, the
very woods of northern India ringing with philosophic disputation, mostly
of an atheistic and materialistic trend. The later Upanishads and the old-
est Buddhist books are full of references to these heretics." A large class of
traveling Sophists— the Paribbajaka, or Wanderers— spent the better part of
every year in passing from locality to locality, seeking pupils, or antago-
nists, in philosophy. Some of them taught logic as the art of proving any-
thing, and earned for themselves the titles of "Hair-splitters" and "Eel-
wrigglers"; others demonstrated the non-existence of God, and the inex-
pediency of virtue. Large audiences gathered to hear such lectures and de-
bates; great halls were built to accommodate them; and sometimes princes
418 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
offered rewards for those who should emerge victorious from these intel-
lectual jousts/ It was an age of amazingly free thought, and of a thou-
sand experiments in philosophy.
Not much has come down to us from these sceptics, and their memory
has been preserved almost exclusively through the diatribes of their
enemies.8 The oldest name among them is Brihaspati, but his nihilistic Sutras
have perished, and all that remains of him is a poem denouncing the
priests in language free from all metaphysical obscurity:
No heaven exists, no final liberation,
No soul, no other world, no rites of caste. . . .
The triple Veda, triple self-command,
And all the dust and ashes of repentance—
These yield a means of livelihood for men ^
Devoid of intellect and manliness. . . .
How can this body when reduced to dust
Revisit earth? And if a ghost can pass
To other worlds, why does not strong affection
For those he leaves behind attract him back?
The costly rites enjoined for those who die
Are but a means of livelihood devised
By sacerdotal cunning— nothing more. . . .
While life endures let life be spent in ease
And merriment; let a man borrow money
From all his friends, and feast on melted butter.*
Out of the aphorisms of Brihaspati came a whole school of Hindu ma-
terialists, named, after one of them, Charvakas. They laughed at the
notion that the Vedas were divinely revealed truth; truth, they argued,
can never be known, except through the senses. Even reason is not to
be trusted, for every inference depends for its validity not only upon ac-
curate observation and correct reasoning, but also upon the assumption
that the future will behave like the past; and of this, as Hume was to say,
there can be no certainty.10 What is not perceived by the senses, said the
Charvakas, does not exist; therefore the soul is a delusion, and Atman is
humbug. We do not observe, in experience or history, any interposition
of supernatural forces in the world. All phenomena are natural; only
simpletons trace them to demons or gods.u Matter is the one reality; the
body is a combination of atoms;" the mind is merely matter thinking; the
CHAP.XV) BUDDHA 419
body, not the soul, feels, sees, hears, thinks.11 "Who has seen the soul exist-
ing in a state separate from the body?" There is no immortality, no re-
birth. Religion is an aberration, a disease, or a chicanery; the hypothesis
of a god is useless for explaining or understanding the world. Men think
religion necessary only because, being accustomed to it, they feel a sense
of loss, and an uncomfortable void, when the growth of knowledge
destroys this faith." Morality, too, is natural; it is a social convention and
convenience, not a divine command. Nature is indifferent to good and
bad, virtue and vice, and lets the sun shine indiscriminately upon knaves
and saints; if nature has any ethical quality at all it is that of transcendent
immorality. There is no need to control instinct and passion, for these
are the instructions of nature to men. Virtue is a mistake; the purpose of
life is living, and the only wisdom is happiness.1*
This revolutionary philosophy of the Charvakas put an end to the age
of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It weakened the hold of the Brah-
mans on the mind of India, and left in Hindu society a vacuum which
almost compelled the growth of a new religion. But the materialists had
done their work so thoroughly that both of the new religions which
arose to replace the old Vedic faith were, anomalous though it may sound,
atheistic religions, devotions without a god. Both belonged to the Nastika
or Nihilistic movement; and both were originated not by the Brahman
priests but by members of the Kshatriya warrior caste, in a reaction
against sacerdotal ceremonialism and theology. With the coming of
Jainism and Buddhism a new epoch began in the history of India.
II. MAHAVIRA AND THE JAINS
The Great Hero— The Jain creed— Atheistic polytheism— Asceti-
cism—Salvation by suicide— Later history of the Jains
About the middle of the sixth century B.C. a boy was born to a wealthy
nobleman of the Lichchavi tribe in a suburb of the city of Vaishali, in what
is now the province of Bihar.* His parents, though wealthy, belonged to
a sect that looked upon rebirth as a curse, and upon suicide as a blessed
privilege. When their son had reached his thirty-first year they ended
their lives by voluntary starvation. The young man, moved to the depths
* Tradition gives Mahavlra's dates as 599-527 B.C.; but Jacob! believes that 549-477 B.C.
would be nearer the fact.1*
42O THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
of his soul, renounced the world and its ways, divested himself of all
clothing, and wandered through western Bengal as an ascetic, seeking self-
purification and understanding. After thirteen years of such self-denial,
he was hailed by a group of disciples as a Jina ("conqueror")* i-e., one
of the great teachers whom' fate, they believed, had ordained to appear at
regular intervals to enlighten the people of India. They rechristened their
leader Mahavira, or the Great Hero, and took to themselves, from their
most characteristic belief, the name of Jains. Mahavira organized a celibate
clergy and an order of nuns, and when he died, aged seventy-two, left be-
hind him fourteen thousand devotees.
Gradually this sect developed one of the strangest bodies of doctrine
in all the history of religion. They began with a realistic logic, in which
knowledge was described as confined to the relative and temporal. Noth-
ing is true, they taught, except from one point of view; from other points
of view it would probably be false. They were fond of quoting the story
of the six blind men who laid hands on different parts of an elephant; he
who held the ear thought that the elephant was a great winnowing fan; he
who held the leg said the animal was a big, round pillar." All judgments,
therefore, are limited and conditional; absolute truth comes only to the
periodic Redeemers or Jiwas. Nor can the Vedas help; they are not in-
spired by God, if only for the reason that there is no God. It is not neces-
sary, said the Jains, to assume a Creator or First Cause; any child can refute
that assumption by showing that an uncreated Creator, or a causeless
Cause, is just as hard to understand as an uncaused or uncreated world.
It is more logical to believe that the universe has existed from all eternity,
and that its infinite changes and revolutions are due to the inherent powers
of nature rather than to the intervention of a deity.18
But the climate of India does not lend itself to a persistently naturalistic
creed. The Jains, having emptied the sky of God, soon peopled it again
with the deified saints of Jain history and legend. These they worshiped
with devotion and ceremony, but even them they considered subject to
transmigration and decay, and not in any sense as the creators or rulers of
the world.19 Nor were the Jains materialists; they accepted a dualistic
distinction of mind and matter everywhere; in all things, even in stones
and metals, there were souls. Any soul that achieved a blameless life be-
came a Paramatwan, or supreme soul, and was spared reincarnation for a
while; when its reward had equaled its merit, however, it was born into
the flesh again. Only the highest and most perfect spirits could achieve
CHAP.XV) BUDDHA 421
complete "release"; these were the Arhats, or supreme lords, who lived like
Epicurus' deities in some distant and shadowy realm, impotent to affect the
affairs of men, but happily removed from all chances of rebirth.10
The road to release, said the Jains, was by ascetic penances and com-
plete ahimsa— abstinence from injury to any living thing. Every Jain as-
cetic must take five vows: not to kill anything, not to lie, not to take what
is not given, to preserve chastity, and to renounce pleasure in all external
things. Sense pleasure, they thought, is always a sin; the ideal is indiffer-
ence to pleasure and pain, and independence of all external objects. Agri-
culture is forbidden to the Jain, because it tears up the soil and crushes
insects or worms. The good Jain rejects honey as the life of the bee,
strains water lest he destroy creatures lurking in it when he drinks, veils
his mouth for fear of inhaling and killing the organisms of the air, screens
his lamp to protect insects from the flame, and sweeps the ground before
him as he walks lest his naked foot should trample out some life. The
Jain must never slaughter or sacrifice an animal; and if he is thorough-
going he establishes hospitals or asylums, as at Ahmedabad, for old or
injured beasts. The only life that he may kill is his own. His doctrine
highly approves of suicide, especially by slow starvation, for this is the
greatest victory of the spirit over the blind will to live. Many Jains have
died in this way; and the leaders of the sect are said to leave the world,
even today, by self -starvation.21
A religion based upon so profound a doubt and denial of life might
have found some popular support in a country where life has always
been hard; but even in India its extreme asceticism limited its appeal.
From the beginning the Jains were a select minority; and though Yuan
Chwang found them numerous and powerful in the seventh century,2*
it was a passing zenith in a quiet career. About 79 A.D. a great schism
divided them on the question of nudity; from that time on the Jains
have belonged either to the Shvoetambara— white-robed— sect, or to the
Digambaras— skyclad or nude. Today both sects wear the usual cloth-
ing of their place and time; only their saints go about the streets naked.
These sects have further sects to divide them: the Digambaras have
four, the Shwetambaras eighty-four;88 together they number only 1,300,-
ooo adherents out of a population of 320,000,000 souls.24 Gandhi has been
strongly influenced by the Jain sect, has accepted ahimsa as the basis of
his policy and his life, contents himself with a loin-cloth, and may starve
himself to death. The Jains may yet name him as one of their Jinas,
422 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
another incarnation of the great spirit that periodically is made flesh to
redeem the world.
III. THE LEGEND OF BUDDHA
The background of Buddhism— The miraculous birth— Youth—
The sorrows of life — Flight — Ascetic years — Enlighten-
ment—A vision of "Nirvana"
It is difficult to see, across 2,500 years, what were the economic, po-
litical and moral conditions that called forth religions so ascetic and
pessimistic as Jainism and Buddhism. Doubtless much material progress
had been made since the establishment of the Aryan rule in India: great
cities like Pataliputra and Vaishali had been built; industry and trade
had created wealth, wealth had generated leisure, leisure had devel-
, oped knowledge and culture. Probably it was the riches of India that
produced the epicureanism and materialism of the seventh and sixth
{ centuries before Christ. Religion does not prosper under prosperity; the
1 senses liberate themselves from pious restraints, and formulate philoso-
phies that will justify their liberation. As in the China of Confucius and
the Greece of Protagoras— not to speak of our own day— so in Buddha's
India the intellectual decay of the old religion had begotten ethical scep-
ticism and moral anarchy. Jainism and Buddhism, though impregnated
with the melancholy atheism of a disillusioned age, were religious reac-
tions against the hedonistic creeds of an "emancipated" and worldly leis-
sure class.*
Hindu tradition describes Buddha's father, Shuddhodhana, as a man of
the world, member of the Gautama clan of the proud Shakya tribe, and
prince or king of Kapilavastu, at the foot of the Himalayan range." In
truth, however, we know nothing certain about Buddha; and if we give
here the stories that have gathered about his name it is not because these
are history, but because they are an essential part of Hindu literature
and Asiatic religion. Scholarship assigns his birth to approximately 563
B.C., and can say no more; legend takes up the tale, and reveals to us in
* It has often been remarked that this period was distinguished by a shower of stars in
the history of genius: Mahavira and Buddha in India, Lao-tze and Confucius in China,
Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah in Judea, the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece, and
perhaps Zarathustra in Persia. Such a simultaneity of genius suggests more intercom-
munication and mutual influence among these ancient cultures than it is possible to trace
definitely today.
CHAP. XV) BUDDHA 423
what strange ways men may be conceived. At that time, says one of the
Jataka books,*
in the city of Kapilavastu the festival of the full moon . . . had
been proclaimed. Queen Maya from the seventh day before the full
moon celebrated the festival without intoxicants, and with abundance
of garlands and perfumes. Rising early on the seventh day she bathed
in scented water, and bestowed a great gift of four hundred thou-
sand pieces as alms. Fully adorned, she ate of choice food, took upon
herself the Uposatha vows,t entered her adorned state bed-chamber,
lay down on the bed, and falling asleep, dreamt this dream.
Four great kings, it seemed, raised her together with the bed, and
taking her to the Himalayas, set her on the Manosila table-land. . . .
Then their queens came and took her to the Anotatta Lake, bathed
her to remove human stain, robed her in heavenly clothing, anointed
her with perfumes, and bedecked her with divine flowers. Not far
away is a silver mountain, and thereon a golden mansion. There
they prepared a divine bed with head to the east, and laid her upon
it. Now the Bodhisattivaj. became a white elephant. Not far from
there is a golden mountain; and going there he descended from it,
alighted on the silver mountain, approaching it from the direction
of the north. In his trunk, which was like a silver rope, he held a
white lotus. Then, trumpeting, he entered the golden mansion, made
a rightwise circle three times around his mother's bed, smote her
right side, and appeared to enter her womb. Thus he received . . .
a new existence.
The next day the Queen awoke and told her dream to the King.
The King summoned sixty-four eminent Brahmans, showed them
honor, and satisfied them with excellent food and other presents.
Then, when they were satisfied with these pleasures, he caused the
dream to be told, and asked what would happen. The Brahmans
said: Be not anxious, O King; the Queen has conceived, a male not
a female, and thou shalt have a son; and if he dwells in a house he
* "Birth-stories" of Buddha, written about the fifth century A.D. Another legend, the
Lalitavistara, has been paraphrased by Sir Edwin Arnold in The Light of Asia.
t I.e., vows appropriate to the Uposatha, or four holy days of the month: the full
moon, the new moon, and the eighth day after either of them."*
$I.e., one destined to be a Buddha; here meaning the Buddha himself. Buddha, meaning
"Enlightened," is among the many titles given to the Master, whose personal name was
Siddhartha, and whose clan name was Gautama. He was also called Sbakya-muni, or
"Sage of the Shakyas," and Tathagata, "One Who Has Won the Truth." Buddha never
applied any of these titles to himself, so far as we know.9"
424 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
will become a king, a universal monarch; if he leaves his house and
goes forth from the world, he will become a Buddha, a remover,
in the world, of the veil (of ignorance). . . .
Queen Maya, bearing the Bodbisattwa for ten months like oil in a
bowl, when her time was come, desired to go to her relatives' house,
and addressed King Shuddhodhana: "I wish, O King, to go to Deva-
daha, the city of my family." The King approved, and caused the
road from Kapilavastu to Devadaha to be made smooth and adorned
with vessels filled with plantains, flags and banners; and seating her
in a golden palanquin borne by a thousand courtiers, sent her with a
great retinue. Between the two cities, and belonging to the inhabi-
tants of both, is a pleasure grove of Sal trees named the Lumbini
Grove. At that time, from the roots to the tips of the branches,
it was one mass of flowers. . . . When the Queen saw it, a desire
to sport in the grove arose. . . . She went to the foot of a great
Sal tree, and desired to seize a branch. The branch, like the tip of
a supple reed, bent down and came within reach of her hand.
Stretching out her hand she received the branch. Thereupon she
was shaken with the throes of birth. So the multitude set up a cur-
tain for her, and retired. Holding the branch, and even while stand-
ing, she was delivered. . . . And as other beings when born come
forth stained with impure matter, not so the Bodhisattiva. But the
Bodhisattwa, like a preacher of the Doctrine descending from the
seat of Doctrine, like a man descending stairs, stretched out his two
hands and feet, and standing unsoiled and unstained by any impurity,
shining like a jewel laid on Benares cloth, descended from his
mother."
It must further be understood that at Buddha's birth a great light ap-
peared in the sky, the deaf heard, the dumb spoke, the lame were made
straight, gods bent down from heaven to assist him, and kings came
from afar to welcome him. Legend paints a colorful picture of the splen-
dor and luxury that surrounded him in his youth. He dwelt as a happy
prince in three palaces "like a god," protected by his loving father from
all contact with the pain and grief of human life. Forty thousand danc-
ing girls entertained* him, and when he came of age five hundred ladies
were sent to him that he might choose one as his wife. As a member
of the Kshatriya caste, he received careful training in the military arts;
but also he sat at the feet of sages, and made himself master of all the
CHAP. XV) BUDDHA 425
philosophical theories current in his time." He married, became a happy
father, and lived in wealth, peace and good repute.
One day, says pious tradition, he went forth from his palace into the
streets among the people, and saw an old man; and on another day he
went forth and saw a sick man; and on a third day he went forth and saw
a dead man. He himself, in the holy books of his disciples, tells the talc
movingly:
Then, O monks, did I, endowed with such majesty and such ex-
cessive delicacy, think thus: "An ignorant, ordinary person, who is
himself subject to old age, not beyond the sphere of old age, on
seeing an old man, is troubled, ashamed and disgusted, extending the
thought to himself. I, too, am subject to old age, not beyond the
sphere of old age; and should I, who am subject to old age, . . .
on seeing an old man, be troubled, ashamed and disgusted?" This
seemed to me not fitting. As I thus reflected, all the elation in youth
suddenly disappeared. . . . Thus, O monks, before my enlightenment,
being myself subject to birth, I sought out the nature of birth; being
subject to old age I sought out the nature of old age, of sickness, of
sorrow, of impurity. Then I thought: "What if I, being myself
subject to birth, were to seek out the nature of birth, . . . and having
seen the wretchedness of the nature of birth, were to seek out the
unborn, the supreme peace of Nirvana?"80
I Death is the origin of all religions, and perhaps if there had been no
1 death there would have been no gods. To Buddha these sights were the
beginning of "enlightenment." Like one overcome with "conversion,"
he suddenly resolved to leave his father,* his wife and his newborn son,
and become an ascetic in the desert. During the night he stole into his
wife's room, and looked for the last time upon his son, Rahula. Just then,
say the Buddhist Scriptures, in a passage sacred to all followers of
Gautama,
a lamp of scented oil was burning. On the bed strewn with heaps of
jessamine and other flowers, the mother of Rahula was sleeping, with
her hand on her son's head. The Bodhisattiva, standing with his foot
on the threshold, looked, and thought, "If I move aside the Queen's
* His mother had died in giving him birth.
4*6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
hand and take my son, the Queen will awake, and this will be an
obstacle to my going. When I have become a Buddha I will come
back and see him." And he descended from the palace.*1
In the dark of the morning he rode out of the city on his horse Kan-
thaka, with his charioteer Chauna clinging desperately to the tail. Then
Mara, Prince of Evil, appeared to him and tempted him, offering him great
empires. But Buddha refused, and riding on, crossed a broad river with
one mighty leap. A desire to look again at his native city arose in him,
but he did not turn. Then the great earth turned round, so that he
might not have to look back.88
He stopped at a place called Uruvela. "There," he says, "I thought to
myself, truly this is a pleasant spot, and a beautiful forest. Clear flows
the river, and pleasant are the bathing-places; all around are meadows
and villages." Here he devoted himself to the severest forms of asceticism;
for six years he tried the ways of the Yogis who had already appeared on
the Indian scene. He lived on seeds and grass, and for one period he fed
on dung. Gradually he reduced his food to a grain of rice each day. He
wore hair cloth, plucked out his hair and beard for torture's sake, stood
for long hours, or lay upon thorns. He let the dust and dirt accumulate
upon his body until he looked like an old tree. He frequented a place
where human corpses were exposed to be eaten by birds and beasts, and
slept among the rotting carcasses. And again, he tells us,
I thought, what if now I set my teeth, press my tongue to my palate,
and restrain, crush and burn out my mind with my mind. (I did
so.) And sweat flowed from my arm-pits. . . . Then I thought, what
if I now practice trance without breathing. So I restrained breathing
in and out from mouth and nose. And as I did so there was a
violent sound of winds issuing from my ears. . . . Just as if a strong
man were to crush one's head with the point of a sword, even so did
violent winds disturb my head. . . . Then I thought, what if I were
to take food only in small amounts, as much as my hollowed palm
would hold, juices of beans, vetches, chick-peas, or pulse. . . . My
body became extremely lean. The mark of my seat was like a camel's
foot-print through the little food. The bones of my spine, when
bent and straightened, were like a row of spindles through the little
food. And as, in a deep well, the deep, low-lying sparkling of the
waters is seen, so in my eye-sockets was seen the deep, low-lying
CHAP. XV) BUDDHA 427
sparkling of my eyes through the little food. And as a bitter gourd,
cut off raw, is cracked and withered through rain and sun, so was
the skin of my head withered through the little food. When I
thought I would touch the skin of my stomach I actually took hold
of my spine. . . . When I thought I would ease myself I there-
upon fell prone through the little food. To relieve my body I
stroked my limbs with my hand, and as I did so the decayed hairs
fell from my body through the little food."
But one day the thought came to Buddha that self -mortification was not
the way. Perhaps he was unusually hungry on that day, or some mem-
ory of loveliness stirred within him. He perceived that no new enlight-
enment had come to him from these austerities. "By this severity I do
not attain superhuman— truly noble— knowledge and insight." On the
contrary, a certain pride in his self-torture had poisoned any holiness that
might have grown from it. He abandoned his asceticism, went to sit
under a shade-giving tree,* and remained there steadfast and motionless,
resolving never to leave that seat until enlightenment came to him. What,
he asked himself, was the source of human sorrow, suffering, sickness,
old age and death? Suddenly a vision came to him of the infinite succes-
sion of deaths and births in the stream of life: he saw every death frus-
trated with new birth, every peace and joy balanced with new desire
and discontent, new disappointment, new grief and pain. "Thus, with
mind concentrated, purified, cleansed, ... I directed my mind to the pass-
ing away and rebirth of beings. With divine, purified, superhuman vision
I saw beings passing away and being reborn, low and high, of good and
bad color, in happy or miserable existences, according to their karma"—
according to that universal law by which every act of good or of evil will
be rewarded or punished in this life, or in some later incarnation of the
soul.
It was the vision of this apparently ridiculous succession of deaths
and births that made Buddha scorn human life. Birth, he told himself, is
the origin of all evil. And yet birth continues endlessly, forever re-
plenishing the stream of human sorrow. If birth could be stopped. . . .
Why is birth not stopped? t Because the law of karma demands new rein-
carnations in which the soul may atone for evil done in past existences.
* The Bodhi-ttee of later Buddhist worship, still shown to tourists at Bodh-gaya.
fThe philosophy of Schopenhauer stems from this point.
428 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
If, however, a man could live a life of perfect justice, of unvarying
patience and kindness to all, if he could tie his thoughts to eternal things,
not binding his heart to those that begin and pass away— then, perhaps, he
would be spared rebirth, and for him the fountain of evil would run dry.
If one could still all desires for one's self, and seek only to do good, then
individuality, that first and worst delusion of mankind, might be over-
come, and the soul would merge at last with unconscious infinity. What
peace there would be in the heart that had cleansed itself of every per-
sonal desire! —and what heart that had not so cleansed itself could ever
know peace? Happiness is possible neither here, as paganism thinks, nor
hereafter, as many religions think. Only peace is possible, only the cool
quietude of craving ended, only Nirvana.
And so, after seven years of meditation, the Enlightened One, having
learned the cause of human suffering, went forth to the Holy City of
Benares, and there, in the deer-park at Sarnath, preached Nirvana to men.
IV. THE TEACHING OF BUDDHA*
Portrait of the Master— His methods— The Four Noble Truths—
The Eightfold Way— The Five Moral Rules— Buddha and
Christ— Buddha's agnosticism and anti-clericalism— His
Atheism — His soul-less psychology — The mean-
ing of "Nirvana"
Like the other teachers of his time, Buddha taught through conversa-
tion, lectures, and parables. Since it never occurred to him, any more
than to Socrates or Christ, to put his doctrine into writing, he summar-
ized it in sutras ("threads") designed to prompt the memory. As pre-
served for us in the remembrance of his followers these discourses un-
consciously portray for us the first distinct character in India's history: a
* The oldest extant documents purporting to be the teaching of Buddha are the Pitakas,
or "Baskets of the Law," prepared for the Buddhist Council of 241 B.C., accepted by it as
genuine, transmitted orally for four centuries from the death of Buddha, and finally put
into writing, in the Pali tongue, about 80 B.C. These Pitakas are divided into three groups:
the Sutta, or tales; the Vinaya, or discipline; and the Abbidhamma, or doctrine. The
Sutta-pitaka contains the dialogues of Buddha, which Rhys Davids ranks with those of
Plato.84 Strictly speaking, however, these writings give us the teaching not necessarily of
Buddha himself, but only of the Buddhist schools. "Though these narratives," says Sir
Charles Eliot, "are compilations which accepted new matter during several centuries, I
see no reason to doubt that the oldest stratum contains the recollections of those who had
seen and heard the master."35
CHAP. XV) BUDDHA 429
man of strong will, authoritative and proud, but of gentle manner and
speech, and of infinite benevolence. He claimed "enlightenment," but
not inspiration; he never pretended that a god was speaking through him.
In controversy he was more patient and considerate than any other of
the great teachers of mankind. His disciples, perhaps idealizing him, rep-
resented him as fully practising ahitnsa: "putting away the killing of
living things, Gautama the recluse holds aloof from the destruction of
life. He" (once a Kshatriya warrior) "has laid the cudgel and the sword
aside, and ashamed of roughness, and full of mercy, he dwells compassion-
ate and kind to all creatures that have life. . . . Putting away slander,
Gautama holds himself aloof from calumny. . . . Thus does he live as a
binder-together of those who are divided, an encourager of those who
are friends, a peacemaker, a lover of peace, impassioned for peace, a
speaker of words that make for peace."30 Like Lao-tze and Christ he
wished to return good for evil, love for hate; and he remained silent
under misunderstanding and abuse. "If a man foolishly does me wrong,
I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil
comes from him, the more good shall come from me." When a simple-
ton abused him, Buddha listened in silence; but when the man had fin-
ished, Buddha asked him: "Son, if a man declined to accept a present
made to him, to whom would it belong?" The man answered: "To
him who offered it." "My son," said Buddha, "I decline to accept your
abuse, and request you to keep it for yourself."37 Unlike most saints,
Buddha had a sense of humor, and knew that metaphysics without
laughter is immodesty.
His method of teaching was unique, though it owed something to the
Wanderers, or traveling Sophists, of his time. He walked from town to
town, accompanied by his favorite disciples, and followed by as many as
twelve hundred devotees. He took no thought for the morrow, but was
content to be fed by some local admirer; once he scandalized his follow-
ers by eating in the home of a courtesan.38 He stopped at the outskirts of
a village, and pitched camp in some garden or wood, or on some river-
bank. The afternoon he gave to meditation, the evening to instruction.
His discourses took the form of Socratic questioning, moral parables,
courteous controversy, or succinct formulas whereby he sought to com-
press his teaching into convenient brevity and order. His favorite sutra
was the "Four Noble Truths," in which he expounded his view that life is
pain, that pain is due to desire, and that wisdom lies in stilling all desire.
430 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
1. Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of pain: birth is painful,
sickness is painful, old age is painful, sorrow, lamentation, dejection
and despair are painful. . . .
2. Now, this, O monks, is the noble truth of the cause of pain:
that craving, which leads to rebirth, combined with pleasure and
lust, finding pleasure here and there, namely, the craving for passion,
the craving for existence, the craving for non-existence.
3. Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of pain:
the cessation, without a remainder, of that craving; abandonment,
forsaking, release, non-attachment.
4. Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of the way that leads to
the cessation of pain: this is the noble Eightfold Way: namely, right
views, right intention, right speech, right action, right living, right
effort, right mindfulness, right concentration."
Buddha was convinced that pain so overbalanced pleasure in human
life that it would be better never to have been born. More tears have
flowed, he tells us, than all the water that is in the four great oceans.40
Every pleasure seemed poisoned for him by its brevity. "Is that which is
impermanent, sorrow or joy?" he asks one of his disciples; and the answer
is, "Sorrow, Lord."" The basic evil, then, is tanha—r\ot all desire, but
selfish desire, desire directed to the advantage of the part rather than to
the good of the whole; above all, sexual desire, for that leads to reproduc-
tion, which stretches out the chain of life into new suffering aimlessly.
One of his disciples concluded that Buddha would approve of suicide, but
Buddha reproved him; suicide would be useless, since the soul, unpurified,
would be reborn in other incarnations until it achieved complete forget-
f ulness of self.
When his disciples asked him to define more clearly his conception of
right living, he formulated for their guidance "Five Moral Rules"— com-
mandments simple and brief, but "perhaps more comprehensive, and
harder to keep, than the Decalogue":48
1. Let not one kill any living being.
2. Let not one take what is not given to him.
3. Let not one speak falsely.
4. Let not one drink intoxicating drinks.
$. Let not one be unchaste.41
CHAP. XV ) BUDDHA 43 1
Elsewhere Buddha introduced elements into his teaching strangely
anticipatory of Christ. "Let a man overcome anger by kindness, evil by
good. . . . Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. . . . Never
in the world does hatred cease by hatred; hatred ceases by love."4* Like
Jesus he was uncomfortable in the presence of women, and hesitated long
before admitting them into the Buddhist order. His favorite disciple,
Ananda, once asked him:
"How are we to conduct ourselves, Lord, with regards to woman-
kind?"
"As not seeing them, Ananda."
"But if we should see them, what are we to do?"
"No talking, Ananda."
"But if they should speak to us, Lord, what are we to do?"
"Keep wide awake, Ananda."4*
His conception of religion was purely ethical; he cared everything about
conduct, nothing about ritual or worship, metaphysics or theology. When
a Brahman proposed to purify himself of his sins by bathing at Gaya,
Buddha said to him: "Have thy bath here, even here, O Brahman. Be
kind to all beings. If thou speakest not false, if thou killest not life, if
thou takest not what is not given to thce, secure in self-denial— what
wouldst thou gain by going to Gaya? Any water is Gaya to thee."4*
There is nothing stranger in the history of religion than the sight of
Buddha founding a worldwide religion, and yet refusing to be drawn
into any discussion about eternity, immortality, or God. The infinite is
a myth, he says, a fiction of philosophers who have not the modesty to
confess that an atom can never understand the cosmos. He smiles47 at the
debate over the finity or infinity of the universe, quite as if he foresaw the
futile astromythology of physicists and mathematicians who debate the
same question today. He refuses to express any opinion as to whether
the world had a beginning or will have an end; whether the soul is the
same as the body, or distinct from it; whether, even for the greatest saint,
there is to be any reward in any heaven. He calls such questions "the
jungle, the desert, the puppet-show, the writhing, the entanglement, of
speculation,"4" and will have nothing to do with them; they lead only to
feverish disputation, personal resentments, and sorrow; they never lead
to wisdom and peacer. Saintliness and content lie not in knowledge of the
43* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
universe and God, but simply in selfless and beneficent living.49 And then,
with scandalous humor, he suggests that the gods themselves, if they ex-
isted, could not answer these questions.
Once upon a time, Kevaddha, there occurred to a certain brother
in this very company of the brethren a doubt on the following point:
"Where now do these four great elements—earth, water, fire and
wind— pass away, leaving no trace behind?" So that brother worked
himself up into such a state of ecstasy that the way leading to the
world of the Gods became clear to his ecstatic vision.
Then that brother, Kevaddha, went up to the realm of the Four
Great Kings, and said to the gods thereof: "Where, my friends, do
the four great elements— earth, water, fire and wind— cease, leaving
no trace behind?"
And when he had thus spoken the gods in the Heaven of the
Four Great Kings said to him: "We, brother, do not know that.
But there are the Four Great Kings, more potent and more glorious
than we. They will know it."
Then that brother, Kevaddha, went to the Four Great Kings (and
put the same question, and was sent on, by a similar reply, to the
Thirty-three, who sent him on to their king, Sakka; who sent him on
to the Yama gods, who sent him on to their king, Suyama; who sent
him on to the Tusita gods, who sent him on to their king, Santusita;
who sent him on to the Nimmana-rati gods, who sent him on to
their king, Sunimmita; who sent him on to the Para-nimmita Vasa-
vatti gods, who sent him on to their king, Vasavatti, who sent him
on to the gods of the Brahma-world).
Then that brother, Kevaddha, became so absorbed by self-concen-
tration that the way to the Brahma-world became clear to his mind
thus pacified. And he drew near to the gods of the retinue of
Brahma, and said: "Where, my friends, do the four great elements-
earth, water, fire and wind— cease, leaving no trace behind?"
And when he had thus spoken, the gods of the retinue of Brahma
replied: "We, brother, do not know that. But there is Brahma, the
great Brahma, the Supreme One, the Mighty One, the All-seeing
One, the Ruler, the Lord of all, the Controller, the Creator, the
Chief of all, . . . the Ancient of days, the Father of all that are and
are to be! He is more potent and more glorious than we. He will
know it."
"Where, then, is that great Brahma now?"
"We, brother, know not where Brahma is, nor why Brahma is,
CHAP. XV) BUDDHA 433
nor whence. But, brother, when the signs of his coming appear,
when the light ariseth, and the glory shineth, then will he be mani-
fest. For that is the portent of the manifestation of Brahma when
the light ariseth, and the glory shineth."
And it was not long, Kevaddha, before that great Brahma became
manifest. And that brother drew near to him, and said: "Where, my
friend, do the four great elements— earth, water, fire and wind— cease,
leaving no trace behind?"
And when he had thus spoken that great Brahma said to him: "I,
brother, am the great Brahma, the Supreme, the Mighty, the All-
seeing, the Ruler, the Lord of all, the Controller, the Creator, the
Chief of all, appointing to each his place, the Ancient of days, the
Father of all that are and are to be!"
Then that brother answered Brahma, and said: "I did not ask you,
friend, as to whether you were indeed all that you now say. But I
ask you where the four great elements— earth, water, fire and wind-
cease, leaving no trace behind?"
Then again, Kevaddha, Brahma gave the same reply. And that
brother yet a third time put to Brahma his question as before.
Then, Kevaddha, the great Brahma took that brother and led him
aside, and said: "These gods, the retinue of Brahma, hold me,
brother, to be such that there is nothing I cannot see, nothing I have
not understood, nothing I have not realized. Therefore I gave no
answer in their presence. I do not know, brother, where those four
great elements— earth, water, fire and wind— cease, leaving no trace
behind.""0
When some students remind him that the Brahmans claim to know the
solutions of these problems, he laughs them off: "There are, brethren,
some recluses and Brahmans who wriggle like eels; and when a question is
put to them on this or that they resort to equivocation, to eel-wriggling."51
If ever he is sharp it is against the priests of his time; he scorns their as-
sumption that the Vedas were inspired by the gods,52 and he scandalizes
the caste-proud Brahmans by accepting into his order the members of
any caste. He does not explicitly condemn the caste-system, but he tells his
disciples, plainly enough: "Go into all lands and preach this gospel. Tell
them that the poor and the lowly, the rich and the high, are all one, and
that all castes unite in this religion as do the rivers in the sea."88 He de-
nounces the notion of sacrificing to the gods, and looks with horror upon
the slaughter of animals for these rites;54 he rejects all cult and worship of
434 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
supernatural beings, all mantras and incantations, all asceticism and all
prayer." Quietly, and without controversy, he offers a religion absolutely
free of dogma and priestcraft, and proclaims a way of salvation open to
infidels and believers alike.
At times this most famous of Hindu saints passes from agnosticism to
outright atheism.** He does not go out of his way to deny deity, and
occasionally he speaks as if Brahma were a reality rather than an ideal;*
nor does he forbid the popular worship of the gods." But he smiles at
the notion of sending up prayers to the Unknowable; "it is foolish," he
says, "to suppose that another can cause us happiness or misery"60— these
are always the product of our own behavior and our own desires. Hef
refuses to rest his moral code upon supernatural sanctions of any kind; he i
offers no heaven, no purgatory, and no hell.81 He is too sensitive to the 1
suffering and killing involved in the biological process to suppose that
they have been consciously willed by a personal divinity; these cosmic
blunders, he thinks, outweigh the evidences of design.* In this scene of
order and confusion, of good and evil, he finds no principle of perma-
nence, no center of everlasting reality," but only a whirl and flux of
obstinate life, in which the one metaphysical ultimate is change.
As he proposes a theology without a deity, so he offers a psychology
without a soul; he repudiates animism in every form, even in the case of
man. He agrees with Heraclitus and Bergson about the world, and with
Hume about the mind. All that we know is our sensations; therefore, so
far as we can see, all matter is force, all substance is motion. Life is
change, a neutral stream of becoming and extinction; the "soul" is a myth
which, for the convenience of our weak brains, we unwarrantably posit
behind the flow of conscious states.64 This "transcendental unity of apper-
ception," this "mind" that weaves sensations and perceptions into thought,
is a ghost; all that exists is the sensations and perceptions themselves, fall-
ing automatically into memories and ideas." Even the precious "ego" is
not an entity distinct from these mental states; it is merely the continu-
ity of these states, the remembrance of earlier by later states, together
with the mental and moral habits, the dispositions and tendencies, of the
organism." The succession of these states is caused not by a mythical
"will" snperadded to them, but by the determinism of heredity, habit,
* In Buddha, sap Sir Charles Eliot, "the world is not thought of as the handiwork of a
divine personality, nor the moral law as his will. The fact that religion can exist without
these ideas is of capital importance."57
CHAP. XV ) BUDDHA 435
environment and circumstance." This fluid mind that is only mental
states, this soul or ego that is only a character or prejudice formed by
helpless inheritance and transient experience, can have no immortality in
any sense that implies the continuance of the individual." Even the saint,
even Buddha himself, will not, as a personality, survive death.*
But if this is so, how can there be rebirth? If there is no soul, how can
it pass into other existences, to be punished for the sins of this embodi-
ment? Here is the weakest point in Buddha's philosophy; he never quite
faces the contradiction between his rationalistic psychology and his
uncritical acceptance of reincarnation. This belief is so universal in India
that almost every Hindu accepts it as an axiom or assumption, and hardly
bothers to prove it; the brevity and multiplicity of the generations there
suggests irresistibly the transmigration of vital force, or— to speak theo-
logically—of the soul. Buddha received the notion along with the air he
breathed; it is the one thing that he seems never to have doubted.70 He
took the Wheel of Rebirth and the Law of Karma for granted; his one
thought was how to escape from that Wheel, how to achieve Nirvana
here, and annihilation hereafter.
But what is Nirvana? It is difficult to find an erroneous answer to this
question; for the Master left the point obscure, and his followers have
given the word every meaning under the sun. In general Sanskrit use it
meant "extinguished"— as of a lamp or fire. The Buddhist Scriptures use
it as signifying: ( i ) a state of happiness attainable in this life through the
complete elimination of selfish desires; (2) the liberation of the individual
from rebirth; (3) the annihilation of the individual consciousness; (4) the
union of the individual with God; (5) a heaven of happiness after death.
In the teaching of Buddha it seemed to mean the extinction of all indi-
vidual desire, and the reward of such selflessness— escape from rebirth.™
In Buddhist literature the term has often a terrestrial sense, for the Arhat,
or saint, is repeatedly described as achieving it in this life, by acquiring its
seven constituent parts: self-possession, investigation into the truth, en-
ergy, calm, joy, concentration, and magnanimity.71 These are its content,
but hardly its productive cause: the cause and source of Nirvana is the
extinction of selfish desire; and Nirvana, in most early contexts, comes to
mean the painless peace that rewards the moral annihilation of the self.74
"Now," says Buddha, "this is the noble truth as to the passing of pain.
Verily, it is the passing away so that no passion remains, the giving up,
the getting rid of, the emancipation from, the harboring no longer of, this
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XV
craving thirst"75— this fever of self-seeking desire. In the body of the
Master's teaching it is almost always synonymous with bliss,7' the quiet
content of the soul that no longer worries about itself. But complete
Nirvana includes annihilation: the reward of the highest saintliness is never
to be reborn.77
In the end, says Buddha, we perceive the absurdity of moral and psy-
chological individualism. Our fretting selves are not really separate beings
and powers, but passing ripples on the stream of life, little knots forming
and unraveling in the wind-blown mesh of fate. When we see ourselves as
parts of a whole, when we reform our selves and our desires in terms of
the whole, then our personal disappointments and defeats, our varied
suffering and inevitable death, no longer sadden us as bitterly as before;
they are lost in the amplitude of infinity. When we have learned to love
not our separate life, but all men and all living things, then at last we
shall find peace.
V. THE LAST DAYS OF BUDDHA
His miracles— He visits his father's house— The Buddhist
monks— Death
From this exalted philosophy we pass to the simple legends which are
all that we have concerning Buddha's later life and death. Despite his
scorn of miracles, his disciples brewed a thousand tales of the marvels that
he wrought. He wafted himself magically across the Ganges in a moment;
the tooth-pick he had let fall sprouted into a tree; at the end of one of his
sermons the "thousand-fold world-system shook."80 When his enemy
Devadatta sent a fierce elephant against him, Buddha "pervaded it with
love," and it was quite subdued."1 Arguing from such pleasantries Senart
and others have concluded that the legend of Buddha has been formed
on the basis of ancient sun myths.82 It is unimportant; Buddha means
for us the ideas attributed to Buddha in the Buddhist literature; and this
Buddha exists.
The Buddhist Scriptures paint a pleasing picture of him. Many dis-
ciples gathered around him, and his fame as a sage spread through the cities
of northern India. When his father heard that Buddha was near Kapila-
vastu he sent a messenger to him with an invitation to come and spend a
day in his boyhood home. He went, and his father, who had mourned
the loss of a prince, rejoiced, for a while, over the return of a saint.
CHAP. XV) BUDDHA 437
Buddha's wife, who had been faithful to him during all their separation,
fell down before him, clasped his ankles, placed his feet about her head,
and reverenced him as a god. Then King Shuddhodhana told Buddha of
her great love: "Lord, my daughter (in-law), when she heard that you
were wearing yellow robes (as a monk), put on yellow robes; when she
heard of your having one meal a day, herself took one meal; when she
knew that you had given up a large bed, she lay on a narrow couch; and
when she knew that you had given up garlands and scents, she gave them
up." Buddha blessed her, and went his way.88
But now his son, Rahula, came to him, and also loved him. "Pleasant
is your shadow, ascetic," he said. Though Rahula's mother had hoped
to see the youth made king, the Master accepted him into the Buddhist
order. Then another prince, Nanda, was called to be consecrated as heir-
apparent to the throne; but Nanda, as if in a trance, left the ceremony
unfinished, abandoned a kingdom, and going to Buddha, asked that he,
too, might be permitted to join the Order. When King Shuddhodhana
heard of this he was sad, and asked a boon of Buddha. "When the Lord
abandoned the world," he said, "it was no small pain to me; so when
Nanda went; and even more so with Rahula. The love of a. son cuts
through the skin, through the hide, the flesh, the sinew, the marrow.
Grant, Lord, that thy noble ones may not confer the ordination on a
son without the permission of his father and mother." Buddha consented,
and made such permission a prerequisite to ordination.84
Already, it seems, this religion without priestcraft had developed an
order of monks dangerously like the Hindu priests. Buddha would not
be long dead before they would surround themselves with all the para-
phernalia of the Brahmans. Indeed it was from the ranks of the Brah-
mans that the first converts came; and then from the richest youth of
Benares and the neighboring towns. These Bhikkhus, or monks, practised
in Buddha's days a simple rule. They saluted one another, and all those to
whom they spoke, with an admirable phrase: "Peace to all beings."* They
were not to kill any living thing; they were never to take anything save
what was given them; they were to avoid falsehood and slander; they
were to heal divisions and encourage concord; they were always to show
compassion for all men and all animals; they were to shun all amuse-
ments of sense or flesh, all music, nautch dances, shows, games, luxuries,
* Cf. the beautiful form of greeting used by the Jews: Shalom aleichem—"Pmcc be with
you." In the end men do not ask for happiness, but only for peace.
438 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XV
idle conversation, argument, or fortune-telling; they were to have nothing
to do with business, or with any form of buying or selling; above all, they
were to abandon incontinence, and live apart from women, in perfect
chastity." Yielding to many soft entreaties, Buddha allowed women to
enter the Order as nuns, but he never completely reconciled himself to
this move. "If, Ananda," he said, "women had not received permission to
enter the Order, the pure religion would have lasted long, the good law
would have stood fast a thousand years. But since they have received that
permission, it will now stand fast for only five hundred years."" He was
right. The great Order, or Sangha, has survived to our own time; but
it has long since corrupted the Master's doctrine with magic, polytheism,
and countless superstitions.
Towards the end of his long life his followers already began to deify
him, despite his challenge to them to doubt him and to think for them-
selves. Now, says one of the last Dialogues,
the venerable Sariputta came to the place where the Exalted One
was, and having saluted him, took his seat respectfully at his side,
and said:
"Lord, such faith have I in the Exalted One that methinks there
never has been, nor will there be, nor is there now, any other,
whether Wanderer or Brahman, who is greater and wiser than the
Exalted One ... as regards the higher wisdom."
"Grand and bold are the words of thy mouth, Sariputta" (an-
swered the Master); "verily, thou hast burst forth into a song of
ecstasy! Of course, then, thou hast known all the Exalted Ones of
the past, . . . comprehending their minds with yours, and aware
what their conduct was, what their wisdom, . . . and what the
emancipation they attained to?"
7 "Not so, O Lord!"
"Of course, then, thou hast perceived all the Exalted Ones of
the future, . . . comprehending their whole minds with yours?"
"Not so, O Lord!"
"But at least, then, O Sariputta, thou knowest me, . . . and hast
penetrated my mind?" . . .
"Not even that, O Lord."
"You see, then, Sariputta, that you know not the hearts of the
Able, Awakened Ones of the past and of the future. Why, there-
fore, are your words so grand and bold? Why do you burst forth
into such a song of ecstasy?""
CHAP. XV) BUDDHA 439
And to Ananda he taught his greatest and noblest lesson:
"And whosoever, Ananda, either now or after I am dead, shall be f
a lamp unto themselves, and a refuge unto themselves, shall betake /
themselves to no external refuge, but, holding fast to the Truth as
their lamp, . . . shall not look for refuge to any one besides them-
selves—it is they . . . who shall reach the very topmost height! But
they must be anxious to learn!"88
He died in 483 B.C., at the age of eighty. "Now then, O monks," he
said to them as his last words, "I address you. Subject to decay are com-
pound things. Strive with earnestness."89
CHAPTER XVI
From Alexander to Aurangzeb
I. CHANDRAGUPTA
Alexander in India— Chandragupta the liberator— The people—
The university of Taxila—The royal palace— A day in the life
of a king — An older" Machiavelli — Administration —
Law— Public health— Transport and roads— Munic-
ipal government
IN THE year 327 B.C. Alexander the Great, pushing on from Persia,
marched over the Hindu Kush and descended upon India. For a year
he campaigned among the northwestern states that had formed one of the
Persian Empire's richest provinces, exacting supplies for his troops and
gold for his treasury. Early in 326 B.C. he crossed the Indus, fought his
way slowly through Taxila and Rawalpindi to the south and east, en-
countered the army of King Porus, defeated 30,000 infantry, 4,000 cav-
alry, 300 chariots and 200 elephants, and slew 12,000 men. When Porus,
having fought to the last, surrendered, Alexander, admiring his courage,
stature and fine features, bade him say what treatment he wished to re-
ceive. "Treat me, AJexander," he answered, "in a kingly way." "For my
own sake," said Alexander, "thou shalt be so treated; for thine own sake
do thou demand what is pleasing to thee." But Porus said that every-
thing was included in what he had asked. Alexander was much pleased
with this reply; he made Porus king of all conquered India as a Mace-
donion tributary, and found him thereafter a faithful and energetic ally.1
Alexander wished then to advance even to the eastern sea, but his soldiers
protested. After much oratory and pouting he yielded to them, and led
them— through patriotically hostile tribes that made his wearied troops
fight almost every foot of the way— down the Hydaspes and up the coast
through Gedrosia to Baluchistan. When he arrived at Susa, twenty
months after turning back from his conquests, his army was but a miser-
able fragment of that which had crossed into India with him three years
before.
440
CHAP.XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 441
Seven years later all trace of Macedonian authority had already disap-
peared from India.1 The chief agent of its removal was one of the most
romantic figures in Indian history, a lesser warrior but a greater ruler
than Alexander. Chandragupta was a young Kshatriya noble exiled from
Magadha by the ruling Nanda family, to which he was related. Helped
by his subtle Machiavellian adviser, Kautilya Chanakya, the youth organ-
ized a small army, overcame the Macedonian garrisons, and declared
India free. Then he advanced upon Pataliputra,* capital of the Magadha
kingdom, fomented a revolution, seized the throne, and established that
Mauryan Dynasty which was to rule Hindustan and Afghanistan for one
hundred and thirty-seven years. Subordinating his courage to Kautilya's
unscrupulous wisdom, Chandragupta soon made his government the most
powerful then existing in the world. When Mcgasthenes came to Patali-
putra as ambassador from Selcncus Nicator, King of Syria, he was amazed
to find a civilization which he described to the incredulous Greeks—still
near their zenith— as entirely equal to their own.8
The Greek gave a pleasant, perhaps a lenient, account, of Hindu life
in his time. It struck him as a favorable contrast with his own nation
that there was no slavery in India;t and that though the population was
divided into castes according to occupations, it accepted these divisions
as natural and tolerable. "They live happily enough," the ambassador
reported,
being simple in their manners, and frugal. They never drink wine
except at sacrifice. . . . The simplicity of their laws and their con-
tracts is proved by the fact that they seldom go to law. They have
no suits about pledges and deposits, nor do they require either seals
or witnesses, but make their deposits and confide in each other. . . .
Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem. . . . The greater part of
the soil is under irrigation, and consequently bears two crops in
the course of the year. ... It is accordingly affirmed that famine has
never visited India, and that there has never been a general scarcity
in the supply of nourishing food.5
The oldest of the two thousand cities8 of northern India in Chandrag-
upta's time was Taxila, twenty miles northwest of the modern Rawal-
pindi. Arrian describes it as "a large and prosperous city"; Strabo says
* The modern Patna.
t"This is a great thing in India," says Arrian, "that all the inhabitants are free, not a
single Indian being a slave."4
442 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
it "is large, and has most excellent laws.'" It was both a military and a
university town, strategically situated on the main road to Western
Asia, and containing the most famous of the several universities possessed
by India at that time. Students flocked to Taxila as in the Middle Ages
they flocked to Paris; there all the arts and sciences could be studied under
eminent professors, and the medical school especially was held in high
repute throughout the Oriental world.*
Megasthenes describes Chandragupta's capital, Pataliputra, as nine miles
in length and almost two miles in width.10 The palace of the King was of
timber, but the Greek ambassador ranked it as excelling the royal resi-
dences of Susa and Ecbatana, being surpassed only by those at Persepolis.
Its pillars were plated with gold, and ornamented with designs of bird-
life and foliage; its interior was sumptuously furnished and adorned with
precious metals and stones.11 There was a certain Oriental ostentation in
this culture, as in the use of gold vessels six feet in diameter;" but an
English historian concludes, from the testimony of the literary, pictorial
and material remains, that "in the fourth and third centuries before Christ
the command of the Maurya monarch over luxuries of all kinds and
skilled craftsmanship in all the manual arts was not inferior to that en-
joyed by the Mogul emperors eighteen centuries later."1*
In this palace Chandragupta, having won the throne by violence, lived
for twenty-four years as in a gilded jail. Occasionally he appeared in
public, clad in fine muslin embroidered with purple and gold, and carried
in a golden palanquin or on a gorgeously accoutred elephant. Except
when he rode out to the hunt, or otherwise amused himself, he found his
time crowded with the business of his growing realm. His days were
divided into sixteen periods of ninety minutes each. In the first he arose,
and prepared himself by meditation; in the second he studied the reports
of his agents, and issued secret instructions; the third he spent with his
councillors in the Hall of Private Audience; in the fourth he attended to
state finances and national defense; in the fifth he heard the petitions and
suits of his subjects; in the sixth he bathed and dined, and read religious
literature; in the seventh he received taxes and tribute, and made official
* The excavations of Sir John Marshall on the site of Taxila have unearthed delicately
carved stones, highly polished statuary, coins as old as 600 B.C., and glassware of a fine
quality never bettered in later India.1 "It is manifest," says Vincent Smith, "that a high
degree of material civilization had been attained, and that all the arts and crafts incident
to the life of a wealthy, cultured city were familiar.'**
CHAP. XVI ) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 443
appointments; in the eighth he again met his Council, and heard the re-
ports of his spies, including the courtesans whom he used for this purpose;14
the ninth he devoted to relaxation and prayer, the tenth and eleventh to
military matters, the twelfth again to secret reports, the thirteenth to the
evening bath and repast, the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth to sleep.18
Perhaps the historian tells us what Chandragupta might have been, or how
Kautilya wished the people to picture him, rather than what he really
was. Truth does not often escape from palaces.
The actual direction of government was in the hands of the crafty
vizier. Kautilya was a Brahman who knew the political value of religion,
but took no moral guidance from it; like our modern dictators he be-
lieved that every means was justifiable if used in the service of the state.
He was unscrupulous and treacherous, but never to his King; he served
Chandragupta through exile, defeat, adventure, intrigue, murder and vic-
tory, and by his wily wisdom made the empire of his master the greatest
that India had ever known. Like the author of The Prince, Kautilya
saw fit to preserve in writing his formulas for warfare and diplomacy; tra-
dition ascribes to him the Arthashastra, the oldest book in extant Sanskrit
literature." As an example of its delicate realism we may take its list of
means for capturing a fort: "Intrigue, spies, winning over the enemy's
people, siege, and assault"17— a wise economy of physical effort.
The government made no pretense to democracy, and was probably
the most efficient that India has ever had." Akbar, greatest of the Moguls,
"had nothing like it, and it may be doubted if any of the ancient Greek
cities were better organized."1" It was based frankly upon military power.
Chandragupta, if we may trust Megasthenes (who should be as suspect as
any foreign correspondent) kept an army of 600,000 foot, 30,000 horse,
9,000 elephants, and an unnamed number of chariots." The peasantry and
the Brahmans were exempt from military service; and Strabo describes the
farmers tilling the soil in peace and security in the midst of war.11 The
power of the King was theoretically unlimited, but in practice it was re-
stricted by a Council which— sometimes with the King, sometimes in his
absence—initiated legislation, regulated national finances and foreign affairs,
and appointed all the more important officers of state. Megasthenes testifies
to the "high character and wisdom" of Chandragupta's councillors, and to
their effective power."
The government was organized into departments with well-defined duties
and a carefully graded hierarchy of officials, managing respectively revenue,
444 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
customs, frontiers, passports, communications, excise, mines, agriculture, cat-
tle, commerce, warehouses, navigation, forests, public games, prostitution,
and the mint. The Superintendent of Excise controlled the sale of drugs and
intoxicating drinks, restricted the number and location of taverns, and the
quantity of liquors which they might sell. The Superintendent of Mines
leased mining areas to private persons, who paid a fixed rent and a share of
the profits to the government; a similar system applied to agriculture, for all
the land was owned by the state. The Superintendent of Public Games
supervised the gambling halls, supplied dice, charged a fee for their use, and
gathered in for the treasury five per cent of all money taken in by the
"bank." The Superintendent of Prostitution looked after public women, con-
trolled their charges and expenditures, appropriated their earnings for two
days of each month, and kept two of them in the royal palace for entertain-
ment and intelligence service. Taxes fell upon every profession, occupation
and industry; and in addition rich men were from time to time persuaded
to make "benevolences" to the King. The government regulated prices and
periodically assayed weights and measures; it carried on some manufactures
in state factories, sold vegetables, and kept a monopoly of mines, salt, timber,
fine fabrics, horses and elephants.28
Law was administered in the village by local headmen, or by pancbayats
—village councils of five men; in towns, districts and provinces by inferior
and superior courts; at the capital by the royal council as a supreme court,
and by the King as a court of last appeal. Penalties were severe, and in-
cluded mutilation, torture and death, usually on the principle of lex talioms,
or equivalent retaliation. But the government was no mere engine of repres-
sion; it attended to sanitation and public health, maintained hospitals and
poor-relief stations, distributed in famine years the food kept in state ware-
houses for such emergencies, forced the rich to contribute to the assistance
of the destitute, and organized great public works to care for the unem-
ployed in depression years.84
The Department of Navigation regulated water transport, and protected
travelers on rivers and seas; it maintained bridges and harbors, and provided
government ferries in addition to those that were privately managed and
owned*"— an admirable arrangement whereby public competition could check
private plunder, and private competition could discourage official extrava-
gance. The Department of Communications built and repaired roads through-
out the empire, from the narrow wagon-tracks of the villages to trade
routes thirty-two feet, and royal roads sixty-four feet, wide. One of these
imperial highways extended twelve hundred miles from Pataliputra to the
northwestern frontier*— a distance equal to half the transcontinental spread
of the United States. At approximately every mile, says Alegasthenes, these
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 445
roads were marked with pillars indicating directions and distances to various
destinations." Shade-trees, wells, police-stations and hotels were provided at
regular intervals along the route.88 Transport was by chariots, palanquins,
bullock-carts, horses, camels, elephants, asses and men. Elephants were a
luxury usually confined to royalty and officialdom, and so highly valued that
a woman's virtue was thought a moderate price to pay for one of them.*
The same method of departmental administration was applied to the gov-
ernment of the cities. Pataliputra was ruled by a commission of thirty men,
divided into six groups. One group regulated industry; another supervised
strangers, assigning to them lodgings and attendants, and watching their
movements; another kept a record of births and deaths; another licensed mer-
chants, regulated the sale of produce, and tested measures and weights;
another controlled the sale of manufactured articles; another collected a tax
of ten per cent on all sales. "In short," says Havcll, "Pataliputra in the
fourth century B.C. seems to have been a thoroughly well-organized city,
and administered according to the best principles of social science."280 "The
perfection of the arrangements thus indicated," says Vincent Smith, "is
astonishing, even when exhibited in outline. Examination of the depart-
mental details increases our wonder that such an organization could have
been planned and efficiently operated in India in 300 B.c."Mb
The one defect of this government was autocracy, and therefore con-
tinual dependence upon force and spies. Like every autocrat, Chand-
ragupta held his power precariously, always fearing revolt and assassina-
tion. Every night he used a different bedroom, and always he was sur-
rounded by guards. Hindu tradition, accepted by European historians,
tells how, when a long famine (pace Megasthenes) came upon his king-
dom, Chandragupta, in despair at his helplessness, abdicated his throne,
lived for twelve years thereafter as a Jain ascetic, and then starved him-
self to death. "All things considered," said Voltaire, "the life of a gon-
dolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so
trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining."510
* "Their women, who arc very chaste, and would not go astray for any other reason,
on the receipt of an elephant have communion with the donor. The Indians do not think
it disgraceful to prostitute themselves for an elephant, and to the women it even seems ar
honor that their beauty should appear equal in value to an elephant."— Arrian, Indica, xvii.
446 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVI
II. THE PHILOSOPHER-KING
Ashoka— The Edict of Tolerance— Ashoka's ?nissionaries—Hir
failure—His success
Chandragupta's successor, Bindusara, was apparently a man of some
intellectual inclination. He is said to have asked Antiochos, King of
Syria, to make him a present of a Greek philosopher; for a real Greek
philosopher, wrote Bindusara, he would pay a high price.80 The proposal
could not be complied with, since Antiochos found no philosophers for
sale; but chance atoned by giving Bindusara a philosopher for his son.
Ashoka Vardhana mounted the throne in 273 B.C. He found himself
ruler of a vaster empire than any Indian monarch before him: Afghanis-
tan, Baluchistan, and all of modern India but the extreme south— Tamila-
kam, or Tamil Land. For a time he governed in the spirit of his grand-
father Chandragupta, cruelly but well. Yuan Chwang, a Chinese traveler
who spent many years in India in the seventh century A.D., tells us that
the prison maintained by Ashoka north of the capital was still remem-
bered in Hindu tradition as "Ashoka's Hell." There, said his informants,
all the tortures of any orthodox Inferno had been used in the punishment
of criminals; to which the King added an edict that no one who en-
tered that dungeon should ever come out of it alive. But one day a
Buddhist saint, imprisoned there without cause, and flung into a cauldron
of hot water, refused to boil. The jailer sent word to Ashoka, who came,
saw, and marveled. When the King turned to leave, the jailer reminded
him that according to his own edict he must not leave the prison alive.
The King admitted the force of the remark, and ordered the jailer to be
thrown into the cauldron.
On returning to his palace Ashoka, we are told, underwent a profound
conversion. He gave instructions that the prison should be demolished,
and that the penal code should be made more lenient. At the same time
he learned that his troops had won a great victory over the rebellious
Kalinga tribe, had slaughtered thousands of the rebels, and had taken
many prisoners. Ashoka was moved to remorse at the thought
of all this "violence, slaughter, and separation" of captives "from those
whom they love." He ordered the prisoners freed, restored their lands
to the Kalingas, and sent them a message of apology which had no prece-
dents and has had few imitations. Then he joined the Buddhist Order,
CHAP. XVI ) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 447
wore for a time the garb of a monk, gave up hunting and the eating of
meat, and entered upon the Eightfold Noble Way.*1
It is at present impossible to say how much of this is myth, and how
much is history; nor can we discern, at this distance, the motives of the
King. Perhaps he saw the growth of Buddhism, and thought that its code
of generosity and peace might provide a convenient regimen for his
people, saving countless policemen. In the eleventh year of his reign he
began to issue the most remarkable edicts in the history of government,
and commanded that they should be carved upon rocks and pillars in
simple phrase and local dialects, so that any literate Hindu might be able
to understand them. The Rock Edicts have been found in almost every
part of India; of the pillars ten remain in place, and the position of twenty
others has been determined. In these edicts we find the Emperor accept*
ing the Buddhist faith completely, and applying it resolutely throughout
the last sphere of human affairs in which we should have expected to
find it— statesmanship. It is as if some modern empire had suddenly
announced that henceforth it would practice Christianity.
Though these edicts are Buddhist they will not seem to us entirely
religious. They assume a future life, and thereby suggest how soon the
scepticism of Buddha had been replaced by the faith of his followers.
But they express no belief in, make no mention of, a personal God."
Neither is there any word in them about Buddha. The edicts are not
interested in theology: the Sarnath Edict asks for harmony within the
Church, and prescribes penalties for those who weaken it with schism;"
but other edicts repeatedly enjoin religious tolerance. One must give
alms to Brahmans as well as to Buddhist priests; one must not speak ill
of other men's faiths. The King announces that all his subjects are his
beloved children, and that he will not discriminate against any of them
because of their diverse creeds.*4 Rock Edict XII speaks with almost
contemporary pertinence:
His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King does reverence to men
of all sects, whether ascetics or householders, by gifts and various
forms of reverence.
His Sacred Majesty, however, cares not so much for gifts or
external reverence, as that there should be a growth of the essence
of the matter in all sects. The growth of the essence of the matter
assumes various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech; to
wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect, or disparage that
448 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
of another, without reason. Depreciation should be for specific rea-
sons only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for
some reason or another.
By thus acting a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time
does service to the sects of other people. By acting contrariwise a
man hurts his own sect, and does disservice to the sects of other
people. . . . Concord is meritorious.
"The essence of the matter" is explained more clearly in the Second
Pillar Edict. "The Law of Piety is excellent. But wherein consists the
Law of Piety? In these things: to wit, little impiety, many good deeds,
compassion, liberality, truthfulness, purity." To set an example Ashoka
ordered his officials everywhere to regard the people as his children, to
treat them without impatience or harshness, never to torture them, and
never to imprison them without good cause; and he commanded the
officials to read these instructions periodically to the people.86
Did these moral edicts have any result in improving the conduct of the
people? Perhaps they had something to do with spreading the idea of
ahiwsa, and encouraging abstinence from meat and alcoholic drinks among
the upper classes of India.36 Ashoka himself had all the confidence of a
reformer in the efficacy of his petrified sermons: in Rock Edict IV he
announces that marvelous results have already appeared; and his summary
gives us a clearer conception of his doctrine:
Now, by reason of the practice of piety by His Sacred and Graci-
ous Majesty the King, the reverberation of the war-drums has be-
come the reverberation of the Law. ... As for many years before
has not happened, now, by reason of the inculcation of the Law of
Piety by His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King, (there is)
increased abstention from the sacrificial slaughter of living creatures,
' abstention from the killing of animate beings, seemly behavior to
relatives, seemly behavior to Brahmans, hearkening to father and
mother, hearkening to elders. Thus, as in many other ways, the
practice of the Law (of Piety) has increased, and His Sacred and
Gracious Majesty the King will make such practice of the Law
increase further.
The sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of His Sacred and
Gracious Majesty the King will cause this practice of the Law to
increase until the eon of universal destruction.
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 449
The good King exaggerated the piety of men and the loyalty of sons.
He himself labored arduously for the new religion; he made himself head
of the Buddhist Church, lavished gifts upon it, built 84,000 monasteries
for it," and in its name established throughout his kingdom hospitals for
men and animals.88 He sent Buddhist missionaries to all parts of India
and Ceylon, even to Syria, Egypt and Greece,89 where, perhaps, they
helped to prepare for the ethics of Christ;40 and shortly after his death
missionaries left India to preach the gospel of Buddha in Tibet, China,
Mongolia and Japan. In addition to this activity in religion, Ashoka gave
himself zealously to the secular administration of his empire; his days of
labor were long, and he kept himself available to his aides for public
business at all hours.41
His outstanding fault was egotism; it is difficult to be at once modest
and a reformer. His self-respect shines out in every edict, and makes him
more completely the brother of Marcus Aurelius. He failed to perceive
that the Brahmans hated him and only bided their time to destroy him,
as the priests of Thebes had destroyed Ikhnaton a thousand years before.
Not only the Brahmans, who had been given to slaughtering animals for
themselves and their gods, but many thousands of hunters and fishermen
resented the edicts that set such severe limitations upon the taking of
animal life; even the peasants growled at the command that "chaff must
not be set on fire along with the living things in it."42 Half the empire
waited hopefully for Ashoka's death.
Yuan Chwang tells us that according to Buddhist tradition Ashoka in
his last years was deposed by his grandson, who acted with the aid of
court officials. Gradually all power was taken from the old King, and
his gifts to the Buddhist Church came to an end. Ashoka's own allowance
of goods, even of food, was cut down, until one day his whole portion
was half an wnalaka fruit. The King gazed upon it sadly, and then sent
it to his Buddhist brethren, as all that he had to give.4* But in truth we
know nothing of his later years, not even the year of his death. Within
a generation after his passing, his empire, like Ikhnaton's, crumbled to
pieces. As it became evident that the sovereignty of the Kingdom of
Magadha was maintained rather by the inertia of tradition than by the
organization of force, state after state renounced its adherence to the
King of Kings at Pataliputra. Descendants of Ashoka continued to rule
Magadha till the seventh century after Christ; but the Maurya Dynasty
that Chandragupta had founded came to an end when King Brihadratha
450 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
was assassinated. States are built not on the ideals but on the nature
of men.
In the political sense Ashoka had failed; in another sense he had accom-
plished one of the greatest tasks in history. Within two hundred years
after his death Buddhism had spread throughout India, and was entering
upon the bloodless conquest of Asia. If to this day, from Kandy in Ceylon
to Kamakura in Japan, the placid face of Gautama bids men be gentle to
one another and love peace, it is partly because a dreamer, perhaps a
saint, once held the throne of India.
III. THE GOLDEN AGE OF INDIA
An epoch of invasions— The Kus"han kings— The Gupta Empire—
The travels of Fa-Hien—The revival of letters— The Huns
in India— Marsha the generous— The travels of Yuan
Chivang
From the death of Ashoka to the empire of the Guptas— i.e., for a
period of almost six hundred years— Hindu inscriptions and documents
are so few that the history of this interval is lost in obscurity.44 It was
not necessarily a Dark Age; great universities like those at Taxila con-
tinued to function, and in the northwestern portion of India the influence
of Persia in architecture, and of Greece in sculpture, produced a flourish-
ing civilization in the wake of Alexander's invasion. In the first and second
centuries before Christ, Syrians, Greeks and Scythians poured down into
the Punjab, conquered it, and established there, for some three hundred
years, this Grcco-Bactrian culture. In the first century of what we so
provincially call the Christian Era the Kushans, a central Asian tribe
akin to the Turks, captured Kabul, and from that city as capital extended
their power throughout northwestern India and most of Central Asia.
In the reign of their greatest king, Kanishka, the arts and sciences pro-
gressed: Greco-Buddhist sculpture produced some of its fairest master-
pieces, fine buildings were reared in Peshawar, Taxila and Mathura,
Charaka advanced the art of medicine, and Nagarjuna and Ashvaghosha
laid the bases of that Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism which was
to help Gautama to win China and Japan. Kanishka tolerated many re-
ligions, and experimented with various gods; finally he chose the new
mythological Buddhism that had made Buddha into a deity and had filled
the skies with Bodhisatfwas and Arhats; he called a great council of
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANQZEB 45 1
Buddhist theologians to formulate this creed for his realms, and became
almost a second Ashoka in spreading the Buddhist faith. The Council
composed 300,000 sutras, lowered Buddha's philosophy to the emotional
needs of the common soul, and raised him to divinity.
Meanwhile Chandragupta I (quite distinct, despite his name and num-
ber, from Chandragupta Maurya) had established in Magadha the Gupta
Dynasty of native kings. His successor, Samudragupta, in a reign of
fifty years, made himself one of the foremost monarchs in India's long
history. He changed his capital from Pataliputra to Ayodhya, ancient
home of the legendary Rama; sent his conquering armies and tax-gatherers
into Bengal, Assam, Nepal, and southern India; and spent the treasure
brought to him from vassal states in promoting literature, science, religion
and the arts. He himself, in the interludes of war, achieved distinction as
a poet and a musician. His son, Vikramaditya ("Sun of Power"), ex-
tended these conquests of arms and the mind, supported the great dram-
atist Kalidasa, and gathered a brilliant circle of poets, philosophers,
artists, scientists and scholars about him in his capital at Ujjain. Under
these two kings India reached a height of development unsurpassed since
Buddha, and a political unity rivaled only under Ashoka and Akbar.
We discern some outline of Gupta civilization from the account that
Fa-Hien gave of his visit to India at the opening of the fifth century of
our era. He was one of many Buddhists who came from China to India
during this Golden Age; and these pilgrims were probably less numerous
than the merchants and ambassadors who, despite her mountain barriers,
now entered pacified India from East and West, even from distant Rome,
and brought to her a stimulating contact with foreign customs and ideas.
Fa-Hien, after risking his life in passing through western China, found
himself quite safe in India, traveling everywhere without encountering
molestation or thievery.4* His journal tells how he took six years in coming,
spent six years in India, and needed three years more for his return via
Ceylon and Java to his Chinese home.4* He describes with admiration
the wealth and prosperity, the virtue and happiness, of the Hindu people,
and the social and religious liberty which they enjoyed. He was aston-
ished at the number, size and population of the great cities, at the free
hospitals and other charitable institutions which dotted the land,* at the
number of students in the universities and monasteries, and at the impos-
* These antedated by three centuries the first hospital built in Europe— viz., the Maison
Dieu erected in Paris in the seventh century AJ>."
452 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
ing scale and splendor of the imperial palaces.48 His description is quite
Utopian, except for the matter of right hands:
The people are numerous and happy; they have not to register
their households, or attend to any magistrates or their rules; only
those who cultivate the royal land have to pay a portion of the
gain from it. If they want to go they go; if they want to stay
they stay. The king governs without decapitation or corporal pun-
ishments. Criminals are simply fined; . . . even in cases of repeated
attempts at wicked rebellion they only have their right hands cut
off. . . . Throughout the whole country the people do not kill any
living creature, nor eat onions or garlic. The only exception is that
of the Chandalas. ... In that country they do not keep pigs and
fowls, and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butchers'
shops, and no dealers in intoxicating drinks.49
Fa-Hien hardly noted that the Brahmans, who had been in disfavor
with the Mauryan dynasty since Ashoka, were growing again in wealth
and power under the tolerant rule of the Gupta kings. They had revived
the religious and literary traditions of prc-Buddhist days, and were de-
veloping Sanskrit into the Esperanto of scholars throughout India. It
was under their influence and the patronage of the court that the great
Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, were written down
into their present form.60 Under this dynasty, too, Buddhist art reached
its zenith in the frescoes of the Ajanta caves. In the judgment of a con-
temporary Hindu scholar, the "mere names of Kalidasa and Varahamihira,
Gunavarman and Vashubandu, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, arc sufficient
to mark this epoch as an apogee of Indian culture."51 "An impartial his-
torian," says Havell, "might well consider that thp greatest triumph of
British administration would be to restore to India all that she enjoyed
in the fifth century A.D."M
This heyday of native culture was interrupted by a wave of those Hun
invasions which now overran both Asia and Europe, ruining for a time
India as well as Rome. While Attila was raiding Europe, Toramana was
capturing Malwa, and the terrible Mihiragula was hurling the Gupta
rulers from their throne. For a century India relapsed into bondage and
chaos. Then a scion of the Gupta line, Harsha-Vardhana, recaptured
northern India, built a capital at Kanauj, and for forty-two years gave
peace and security to a wide realm, in which once more native arts and
CHAP. XVl) FROMALEXANDERTOAURANGZEB 453
letters flourished. We may conjecture the size, splendor and prosperity
of Kanauj from the one unbelievable item that when the Moslems sacked
it (1018 A.D.) they destroyed 10,000 temples." Its fine public gardens
and free bathing tanks were but a small part of the beneficence of the
new dynasty. Harsha himself was one of those rare kings who make
monarchy appear— for a time— the most admirable of all forms of govern-
ment. He was a man of personal charm and accomplishments, writing
poetry and dramas that are read in India to this day; but he did not allow
these foibles to interfere with the competent administration of his king-
dom. "He was indefatigable," says Yuan Chwang, "and the day was too
short for him; he forgot sleep in his devotion to good works."64 Having
begun as a worshiper of Shiva he was later converted to Buddhism, and
became another Ashoka in his pious benefactions. He forbade the eating
of animal food, established travelers' rests throughout his domain, and
erected thousands of topes, or Buddhist shrines, on the banks of the
Ganges.
Yuan Chwang, most famous of the Chinese Buddhists who visited
India, tells us that Harsha proclaimed, every five years, a great festival
of charity, to which he invited all officials of all religions, and all the
poor and needy of the realm. At this gathering it was his custom to give
away in public alms all the surplus brought into the state treasury since
the last quinquennial feast. Yuan was surprised to see a great quantity
of gold, silver, coins, jewelry, fine fabrics and delicate brocades piled up
in an open square, surrounded by a hundred pavilions each seating a
thousand persons. Three days were given to religious exercises; on the
fourth day (if we may believe the incredible pilgrim) the distribution
began. Ten thousand Buddhist monks were fed, and each received a
pearl, garments, flowers, perfumes, and one hundred pieces of gold. Then
the Brahmans were given alms almost as abundant; then the Jains; then
other sects; then all the poor and orphaned laity that had come from
every quarter of the kingdom. Sometimes the distribution lasted three or
four months. At the end Harsha divested himself of his costly robes and
jewelry, and added them to the alms.66
The memoirs of Yuan Chwang reveal a certain theological exhilaration
as the mental spirit of the age. It is a pleasant picture, and significant of
India's repute in other lands— fh is Chinese aristocrat leaving his comforts
and perquisites in far-off Ch'ang-an, passing across half-civilized western
China, through Tashkent and Samarkand (then a flourishing city), over
454 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVI
the Himalayas into India, and then studying zealously, for three years,
in the monastic university at Nalanda. His fame as a scholar and a man
of rank brought him many invitations from the princes of India. When
Harsha heard that Yuan was at the court of Kumara, King of Assam,
he summoned Kumara to come with Yuan to Kanauj. Kumara refused,
saying that Harsha could have his head, but not his guest. Harsha
answered: "I trouble you for your head," and Kumara came. Harsha
was fascinated by Yuan's learning and fine manners, and called a con-
vocation of Buddhist notables to hear Yuan expound the Mahayana doc-
trine. Yuan nailed his theses to the gateway of the pavilion in which the
discourse was to be held, and added a postscript in the manner of the
day: "If any one here can find a single wrong argument and can refute
it, I will let him cut off my head." The discussion lasted eighteen days,
but Yuan (Yuan reports) answered all objections and confounded all
heretics. (Another account has it that his opponents ended the conference
by setting fire to the pavilion.)"* After many adventures Yuan found his
way back to Chang-an, where an enlightened emperor enshrined in a rich
temple the Buddhist relics which this holy Polo had brought with him,
and gave him a corps of scholars to help translate the manuscripts that
he had purchased in India.*7
All the glory of Harsha's rule, however, was artificial and precarious,
for it depended upon the ability and generosity of a mortal king. When
he died a usurper seized the throne, and illustrated the nether side of
monarchy. Chaos ensued, and continued for almost a thousand years.
India, like Europe, now suffered her Middle Ages, was overrun by bar-
barians, was conquered, divided, and despoiled. Not until the great Akbar
would she know peace and unity again.
IV. ANNALS OF RAJPUTANA
The Samurai of India—The age of chivalry—The fall of Chitor
This Dark Age was lighted up for a moment by the epic of Rajputana.
Here, in the states of Mewar, Marwar, Amber, Bikaner and many others
of melodious name, a people half native in origin and half descended from
invading Scythians and Huns, had built a feudal civilization under the
government of warlike rajas who cared more for the art of life than
for the life of art. They began by acknowledging the suzerainty of the
Mauryas and the Guptas; they ended by defending their independence,
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 455
and all India, from the inroads of Moslem hordes. Their clans were dis-
tinguished by a military ardor and courage not usually associated with
India;* if we may trust their admiring historian, Tod, every man of
them was a dauntless Kshatriya, and every woman among them was a
heroine. Their very name, Rajputs, meant "sons of kings"; and if
sometimes they called their land Rajasthan, it was to designate it as "the
home of royalty."
All the nonsense and glamor— all the bravery, loyalty, beauty, feuds,
poisons, assassinations, wars, and subjection of woman— which our tradi-
tions attach to the Age of Chivalry can be found in the annals of these
plucky states. "The Rajput chieftains," says Tod, "were imbued with
all the kindred virtues of the western cavalier, and far his superior in
mental attainments."" They had lovely women for whom they did not
hesitate to die, and who thought it only a matter of courtesy to accom-
pany their husbands to the grave by the rite of suttee. Some of these
women were educated and refined; some of the rajas were poets, or
scientists; and for a while a delicate genre of water-color painting flour-
ished among them in the medieval Persian style. For four centuries they
grew in wealth, until they could spend $20,000,000 on the coronation of
Alewar's king.*
It was their pride and their tragedy that they enjoyed war as the highest
art of all, the only one befitting a Rajput gentleman. This military spirit
enabled them to defend themselves against the Moslems with historic
valor, t but it kept their little states so divided and weakened with strife
that not all their bravery could preserve them in the end. Tod's account
of the fall of Chitor, one of the Rajput capitals, is as romantic as any
legend of Arthur or Charlemagne; and indeed (since it is based solely upon
native historians too faithful to their fatherland to be in love with truth)
these marvelous Annals of Rajasthan may be as legendary as Le Morte
d* Arthur or Le Chanson de Roland. In this version the Mohammedan
invader, Alau-d-din, wanted not Chitor but the princess Pudmini— "a title
bestowed only on the superlatively fair." The Moslem chieftain pro-
posed to raise the siege if the regent of Chitor would surrender the princess.
Being refused, Alau-d-din agreed to withdraw if he were allowed to see
* But cf. Arrian on ancient India: "In war the Indians were by far the bravest of all
the races inhabiting Asia at that time.'"*
t"No place on earth," says Count Keyserling about Chitor, "has been the scene of
equal heroism, knightliness, or an equally noble readiness to die."81
456 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
Pudmini. Finally he consented to depart if he might see Pudmini in a
mirror; but this too was denied him. Instead, the women of Chitor
joined in defending their city; and when the Rajputs saw their wives and
daughters dying beside them they fought until every man of them was
dead. When Alau-d-din entered the capital he found no sign of human
life within its gates; all the males had died in battle, and their wives, in
the awful rite known as the Johur, had burned themselves to death.03
V. THE ZENITH OF THE SOUTH
The kingdoms of the Dec can— Vi 'jay anagar— Krishna Ray a—
A medieval Jiietropolis—Laivs— Arts— Religion— Tragedy
As the Moslems advanced into India native culture receded farther and
farther south; and towards the end of these Middle Ages the finest
achievements of Hindu civilization were those of the Deccan. For a time
the Chalyuka tribe maintained an independent kingdom reaching across
central India, and achieved, under Pulakeshin II, sufficient power and glory
to defeat Harsha, to attract Yuan Chwang, and to receive a respectful
embassy from Khosrou II of Persia. It was in Pulakeshin's reign and ter-
ritory that the greatest of Indian paintings— the frescoes of Ajanta— were
completed. Pulakeshin was overthrown by the king of the Pallavas, who for
a brief period became the supreme power in central India. In the extreme
south, and as early as the first century after Christ, the Pandyas established
a realm comprising Madura, Tinnevelly, and parts of Travancore; they
made Madura one of the finest of medieval Hindu cities, and adorned it
with a gigantic temple and a thousand lesser works of architectural art.
In their turn they too were overthrown, first by the Cholas, and then by
the Alohammcdans. The Cholas ruled the region between Madura and
Madras, and thence westward to Mysore. They were of great antiquity, be-
ing mentioned in the edicts of Ashoka; but we know nothing of them until
the ninth century, when they began a long career of conquest that brought
them tribute from all southern India, even from Ceylon. Then their power
waned, and they passed under the control of the greatest of the southern
states, Vi jay anagar.*
Vijayanagar— the name both of a kingdom and of its capital— is a melan-
choly instance of forgotten glory. In the years of its grandeur it com-
* In this medley of now almost forgotten kingdoms there were periods of literary and
artistic—above all, architectural—creation; there were wealthy capitals, luxurious palaces,
and mighty potentates; but so vast is India, and so long is its history, that in this con-
gested paragraph we must pass by, without so much as mentioning them, men who for a
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 457
prised all the present native states of the lower peninsula, together with
Mysore and the entire Presidency of Madras. We may judge of its power
and resources by considering that King Krishna Raya led forth to battle
at Talikota 703,000 foot, 32,600 horse, 551 elephants, and some hundred
thousand merchants, prostitutes and other camp followers such as were
then wont to accompany an army in its campaigns.03 The autocracy of
the king was softened by a measure of village autonomy, and by the
occasional appearance of an enlightened and human monarch on the
throne. Krishna Raya, who ruled Vijayanagar in the days of Henry
VIII, compares favorably with that constant lover. He led a life of justice
and courtesy, gave abounding alms, tolerated all Hindu faiths, enjoyed
and supported literature and the arts, forgave fallen enemies and spared
their cities, and devoted himself sedulously to the chores of administra-
tion. A Portuguese missionary, Domingos Pacs (1522), describes him as
the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be; cheerful
of disposition, and very merry; he is one that seeks to honor for-
eigners, and receives them kindly. . . . He is a great ruler, and a
man of much justice, but subject to sudden fits of rage. ... He is
by rank a greater lord than any, by reason of what he possesses
in armies and territories; but it seems that he has in fact nothing
compared to what a man like him ought to have, so gallant and per-
fect is he in all things.84*
The capital, founded in 1336, was probably the richest city that India
had yet known. Nicolo Conti, visiting it about 1420, estimated its circum-
ference at sixty miles; Pacs pronounced it "as large as Rome, and very
beautiful to the sight." There were, he added, "many groves of trees
within it, and many conduits of water"; for its engineers had constructed
a huge dam in the Tungabadra River, and had formed a reservoir from
which water was conveyed to the city by an aqueduct fifteen miles long,
cut for several miles out of the solid rock. Abdu-r Razzak, who saw the
city in 1443, reported it as "such that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, of
any place resembling it upon the whole earth." Paes considered it "the
time thought they dominated the earth. For example, Vikramaditya, who ruled the
Chalyukans for half a century (1076-1126), was so successful in war that (like Nictate),
he proposed to found a new chronological era, dividing all history into before hpn aflf}
after him. Today he is a footnote. /' r~~/
* Among these modest possessions were twelve thousand wives." t!++l/\]
458 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVI
best-provided city in tne world, . . . ror in this one everything abounds."
The houses, he tells us, numbered over a hundred thousand—implying
a population of half a million souls. He marvels at a palace in which one
room was built entirely of ivory; "it is so rich and beautiful that you
would hardly find anywhere another such."* When Firoz Shah, Sultan of
Delhi, married the daughter of Vijayanagar's king in the latter's capital,
the road was spread for six miles with velvet, satin, cloth of gold and other
costly stuffs.*1 However, every traveler is a liar.
Underneath this wealth a population of serfs and laborers lived in
poverty and superstition, subject to a code of laws that preserved some
commercial morality by a barbarous severity. Punishment ranged from
mutilation of hands or feet to casting a man to the elephants, cutting off
his head, impaling him alive by a stake thrust through his belly, or hang-
ing him on a hook under his chin until he died;"8 rape as well as large-
scale theft was punished in this last way. Prostitution was permitted,
regulated, and turned into royal revenue. "Opposite the mint," says
Abdu-r Razzak, "is the office of the prefect of the city, to which it is
said twelve thousand policemen are attached; and their pay ... is de-
rived from the proceeds of the brothels. The splendor of these houses,
the beauty of the heart-ravishers, their blandishments and ogles, are be-
yond all description."* Women were of subject status, and were expected
to kill themselves on the death of their husbands, sometimes by allowing
themselves to be buried alive.10
Under the Rayas or Kings of Vijayanagar literature prospered, both
in classical Sanskrit and in the Telugu dialect of the south. Krishna Raya
was himself a poet, as well as a liberal patron of letters; and his poet
laureate, Alasani-Peddana, is ranked among the highest of India's singers.
Painting and architecture flourished; enormous temples were built, and
almost every foot of their surface was carved into statuary or bas-relief.
Buddhism had lost its hold, and a form of Brahmanism that especially
honored Vishnu had become the faith of the people. The cow was holy
and was never killed; but many species of cattle and fowl were sacrificed
to the gods, and eaten by the people. Religion was brutal, and manners
were refined.
In one day all this power and luxury were destroyed. Slowly the
conquering Moslems had made their way south; now the sultans of
Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golkonda and Bidar united their forces to reduce
this last stronghold of the native Hindu kings. Their combined armies
CHAP. XVI ) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 459
met Rama Raja's half-million men at Talikota; the superior numbers of
the attackers prevailed; Rama Raja was captured and beheaded in the
sight of his followers, and these, losing courage, fled. Nearly a hundred
thousand of them were slain in the retreat, until all the streams were colored
with their blood. The conquering troops plundered the wealthy capital,
and found the booty so abundant "that every private man in the allied
army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses and slaves."71
For five months the plunder continued: the victors slaughtered the help-
less inhabitants in indiscriminate butchery, emptied the stores and shops,
smashed the temples and palaces, and labored at great pains to destroy
all the statuary and painting in the city; then they went through the
streets with flaming torches, and set fire to all that would burn. When at
last they retired, Vijayanagar was as completely ruined as if an earth-
quake had visited it and had left not a stone upon a stone. It was a de-
struction ferocious and absolute, typifying that terrible Moslem con-
quest of India which had begun a thousand years before, and was now
complete.
VI. THE MOSLEM CONQUEST
The 'weakening of India— Mabmud of Ghazni—The Sultanate of
Delhi— Its cultural asides— Its brutal policy— The lessson of
Indian history
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story
in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civiliza-
tion is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty,
culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading
from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their
strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted re-
ligions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks
of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their
frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the
hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India's
boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four
hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.
The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western
Punjab (664 A.D.) Similar raids occurred at the convenience of the in-
vaders during the next three centuries, with the result that the Moslems
460 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
established themselves in the Indus valley about the same time that
their Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle of Tours
(732 A.D.) for the mastery of Europe. But the real Moslem conquest of
India did not come till the turn of the first millennium after Christ.
In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became
sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew
that his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the border,
was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for
destroying Hindu idolatry, he swept across the frontier with a force in-
spired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus
at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their tem-
ples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning
to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying
"jewels and unbored pearls and rubies shining like sparks, or like wine
congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds
in size and weight like pomegranates."73 Each winter Mahmud descended
into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with
full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital
richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple
its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers
of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration
for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would
cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and
then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground.73
Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath,
killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni.
In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever
known. Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and
took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such
captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than
a few shillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud
knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. lie reigned
for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors,
Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and
one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.74
Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent
thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded
in bettering his instruction. In 1 1 86 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghan-
CHAP. XVl) FROMALEXANDERTOAURANGZEB 461
istan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples,
confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the
Sultanate of Delhi— an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for
three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first
of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of
his kind— fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan
historian tells us, "were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his
slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands." In one victory of
this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), "fifty thousand men
came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with
Hindus."75 Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by cast-
ing them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing
these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some
Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to
Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conqucrer of Chitor)
had all the males— from fifteen to thirty thousand of them— slaughtered
in one day. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by
murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer,
dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his
predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew
to the rebel's wife and children, ruined the country with reckless infla-
tion, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to
the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem
historian, "there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil
Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers
and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging" the vic-
tims "and putting them to death in crowds."70 In order to found a new
capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a
desert; and hearing that a blind man had stayed behind in Delhi, he ordered
him to be dragged from the old to the new capital, so that only a leg
remained of the wretch when his last journey was finished.77 The Sultan
complained that the people did not love him, or recognize his undeviating
justice. He ruled India for a quarter of a century, and died in bed. His
successor, Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu
head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and
died at the ripe age of eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days
whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one
day reached twenty thousand.71
462 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
These rulers were often men of ability, and their followers were gifted
with fierce courage and industry; only so can we understand how they
could have maintained their rule among a hostile people so overwhelm-
ingly outnumbering them. All of them were armed with a religion
militaristic in operation, but far superior in its stoical monotheism to any
of the popular cults of India; they concealed its attractiveness by making
the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving
them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots
had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged
artists and artisans— usually of Hindu origin— to build for them magnifi-
cent mosques and tombs; some of them were scholars, and delighted in
converse with historians, poets and scientists. One of the greatest scholars
of Asia, Alberuni, accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni to India, and wrote
a scientific survey of India comparable to Pliny's Natural History and
Humboldt's Cosmos. The Moslem historians were almost as numerous
as the generals, and yielded nothing to them in the enjoyment of blood-
shed and war. The Sultans drew from the people every rupee of tribute
that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straight-
forward robbery; but they stayed in India, spent their spoils in India,
and thereby turned them back into India's economic life. Nevertheless,
their terrorism and exploitation advanced that weakening of Hindu phy-
sique and morale which had been begun by an exhausting climate, an
inadequate diet, political disunity, and pessimistic religions.
The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din,
who required his advisers to draw up "rules and regulations for grinding
down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property
which fosters disaffection and rebellion."80 Half of the gross produce of
the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one-
sixth. "No Hindu," says a Moslem historian, "could hold up his head,
and in their houses no sign of gold or silver ... or of any superfluity
was to be seen. . . . Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and
chains, were all employed to enforce payment." When one of his own
advisers protested against this policy, Alau-d-din answered: "Oh, Doctor,
thou art a learned man, but thou hast no experience; I am an unlettered
man, but I have a great deal. Be assured, then, that the Hindus will never
become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have
therefore given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year
to year of corn, milk and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to
accumulate hoards and property."*1
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 463
This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened
by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all
power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations; it argued
that both mastery and slavery were superficial delusions, and concluded
that freedom of the body or the nation was hardly worth defending in
so brief a life. The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy
is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love
peace, but keep its powder dry.
VII. AKBAR THE GREAT
Tamerlane— Eabur—Humayun —Akbar — His government — His
character— His patronage of the arts— His passion for philoso-
phy—His friendship for Hinduism and Christianity— His
new religion— The last days of Akbar
It is in the nature of governments to degenerate; for power, as Shelley
said, poisons every hand that touches it.83 The excesses of the Delhi
Sultans lost them the support not only of the Hindu population, but of
their Moslem followers. When fresh invasions came from the north
these Sultans were defeated with the same ease with which they them-
selves had won India.
Their first conqueror was Tamerlane himself— more properly Timur-i-
lang— a Turk who had accepted Islam as an admirable weapon, and had
given himself a pedigree going back to Genghis Khan, in order to win the
support of his Mongol horde. Having attained the throne of Samarkand
and feeling the need of more gold, it dawned upon him that India was
still full of infidels. His generals, mindful of Moslem courage, demurred,
pointing out that the infidels who could be reached from Samarkand were
already under Mohammedan rule. Mullahs learned in the Koran decided
the matter by quoting an inspiring verse: "Oh Prophet, make war upon
infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with severity."83 Thereupon
Timur crossed the Indus (1398), massacred or enslaved such of the in-
habitants as could not flee from him, defeated the forces of Sultan Mahmud
Tughlak, occupied Delhi, slew a hundred thousand prisoners in cold
blood, plundered the city of all the wealth that the Afghan dynasty had
gathered there, and carried it off to Samarkand with a multitude of women
and slaves, leaving anarchy, famine and pestilence in his wake."
The Delhi Sultans remounted their throne, and taxed India for another
century before the real conqueror came. Babur, founder of the great
464 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
Mogul* Dynasty, was a man every whit as Drave and fascinating as Alex-
ander. Descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, he inherited all
the ability of these scourges of Asia without their brutality. He suffered
from a surplus of energy in body and mind; he fought, hunted and traveled
insatiably; it was nothing for him, single-handed, to kill five enemies in
five minutes.87 In two days he rode one hundred and sixty miles on horse-
back, and swam the Ganges twice in the bargain; and in his last years
he remarked that not since the age of eleven had he kept the fast of
Ramadan twice in the same place.88
"In the twelfth year of my age," he begins his Memoirs, "I became the
ruler in the country of Farghana."80 At fifteen he besieged and captured
Samarkand; lost it again when he could not pay his troops; nearly died
of illness; hid for a time in the mountains, and then recaptured the city
with two hundred and forty men; lost it again through treachery; hid
for two years in obscure poverty, and thought of retiring to a peasant
life in China; organized another force, and, by the contagion of his own
bravery, took Kabul in his twenty-second year; overwhelmed the one
hundred thousand soldiers of Sultan Ibrahim nt Panipat with twelve
thousand men and some fine horses, killed prisoners by the thousands,
captured Delhi, established there the greatest and most beneficent of the
foreign dynasties that have ruled India, enjoyed four years of peace,
composed excellent poems and memoirs, and died at the age of forty-
seven after living, in action and experience, a century.
His son, Humayun, was too weak and vacillating, and too addicted
to opium, to carry on Babur's work. Shcr Shah, an Afghan chief, de-
feated him in two bloody battles, and restored for a time the Afghan
power in India. Shcr Shah, though capable of slaughter in the best
Islamic style, rebuilt Delhi in fine architectural taste, and established
governmental reforms that prepared for the enlightened rule of Akbar.
Two minor Shahs held the power for a decade; then Humayun, after
twelve years of hardship and wandering, organized a force in Persia, re-
entered India, and recaptured the throne. Eight months later Humayun
fell from the terrace of his library, and died.
* Mogul is another form of Mongol. The Moguls were really Turks; but the Hindus
called— and still call— all northern Moslems (except the Afghans) Moguls.86 "Babur" was a
Mongol nickname, meaning lion; the real name of the first Mogul Emperor of India was
Zahiru-d din Muhammad8"
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 465
During his exile and poverty his wife had borne him a son whom he
had piously called Muhammad, but whom India was to call Akbar—
that is, "Very Great." No effort was spared to make him great; even his
ancestry had taken every precaution, for in his veins ran the blood
of Babur, Timur and Genghis Khan. Tutors were supplied him in
abundance, but he rejected them, and refused to learn how to read. In-
stead he educated himself for kingship by incessant and dangerous sport;
he became a perfect horseman, played polo royally, and knew the art
of controlling the most ferocious elephants; he was always ready to set
out on a lion or tiger hunt, to undergo any fatigue, and to face all dangers
in the first person. Like a good Turk he had no effeminate distaste for
human blood; when, at the age of fourteen, he was invited to win the
title of Ghazi— Slayer of the Infidel—by killing a Hindu prisoner, he cut
off the man's head at once with one stroke of his scimitar. These were
the barbarous beginnings of a man destined to become one of the wisest,
most humane and most cultured of all the kings known to history.*
At the age of eighteen he took over from the Regent the full direction
of affairs. His dominion then extended over an eighth of India— a belt
of territory some three hundred miles broad, running from the north-
west frontier at Multan to Benares in the East. He set out with the zeal
and voracity of his grandfather to extend these borders; and by a series
of ruthless wars he made himself ruler of all Hindustan except for the
little Rajput kingdom of Mcwar. Returning to Delhi he put aside his
armor, and devoted himself to re-organizing the administration of his
realm. His power was absolute, and all important offices, even in distant
provinces, were filled by his appointment. His principal aides were four:
a Prime Minister or Vakir; a Finance Minister, called sometimes Vazir
(Vizier), sometimes Divan; a Master of the Court, or Bakhshi; and a Pri-
mate or Sadr, who was head of the Mohammedan religion in India. As
his rule acquired tradition and prestige he depended less and less upon
military power, and contented himself with a standing army of some
twenty-five thousand men. In time of war this modest force was aug-
mented with troops recruited by the provincial military governors— a pre-
carious arrangement which had something to do with the fall of the
* Later he came to recognize the value of Looks, and— being still unable to read— listened
for hours while others read to him, often from abstruse and difficult volumes. In the end
he became an illiterate scholar, loving letters and art, and supporting them with royal
largesse.
466 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
Mogul Empire under Aurangzeb.* Bribery and embezzlement throve
among these governors and their subordinates, so that much of Akbar's
time was spent in checking corruption. He regulated with strict economy
the expenses of his court and household, fixing the prices of food and
materials bought for them, and the wages of labor engaged by the state.
When he died he left the equivalent of a billion dollars in the treasury,
and his empire was the most powerful on earth.*0
Both law and taxation were severe, but far less than before. From
one-sixth to one-third of the gross produce of the soil was taken from
the peasants, amounting to some $100,000,000 a year in land tax. The
Emperor was legislator, executive and judge; as supreme court he spent
many hours in giving audience to important litigants. His law forbade
child marriage and compulsory suttee, sanctioned the remarriage of
widows, abolished the slavery of captives and the slaughter of animals for
sacrifice, gave freedom to all religions, opened career to every talent of
whatever creed or race, and removed the head-tax that the Afghan
rulers had placed upon all Hindus unconverted to Islam.91 At the beginning
of his reign the law included such punishments as mutilation; at the end
it was probably the most enlightened code of any sixteenth-century gov-
ernment. Every state begins with violence, and (if it becomes secure)
mellows into liberty.
But the strength of a ruler is often the weakness of his government.
The system depended so much upon Akbar's superior qualities of mind
and character that obviously it would threaten to disintegrate at his death.
He had, of course, most of the virtues, since he engaged most of the
historians: he was the best athlete, the best horseman, the best swords-
man, one of the greatest architects, and by all odds the handsomest man
in the kingdom. Actually he had long arms, bow legs, narrow Mongoloid
eyes, a head drooping leftward, and a wart on his nose.1* He made him-
self presentable by neatness, dignity, serenity, and brilliant eyes that could
sparkle (says a contemporary) "like the sea in sunshine," or flare up in
a way to make the offender tremble with terror, like Vandamme before
Napoleon. He dressed simply, in brocaded cap, blouse and trousers, jewels
and bare feet. He cared little for meat, and gave it up almost entirely
* The army was supplied with the best ordnance yet seen in India, but inferior to that
then in use in Europe. Akbar's efforts to secure better guns failed; and this inferiority in
the instruments of slaughter cooperated with the degeneration of his descendants in de-
termining the European conquest of India.
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDERTO AURANGZEB 467
in his later years, saying that "it is not right that a man should make his
stomach the grave of animals." Nevertheless he was strong in body and
will, excelled in many active sports, and thought nothing of walking
thirty-six miles in a day. He liked polo so much that he invented a
luminous ball in order that the game might be played at night. He in-
herited the violent impulses of his family, and in his youth (like his Chris-
tian contemporaries) he was capable of solving problems by assassination.
Gradually he learned, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, to sit upon his own
volcano; and he rose far above his time in that spirit of fair play which
does not always distinguish Oriental rulers. "His clemency," says
Firishta, "was without bounds; this virtue he often carried beyond the
line of prudence.""* He was generous, expending vast sums in alms; he
was affable to all, but especially to the lowly; "their little offerings," says
a Jesuit missionary, "he used to accept with such a pleased look, handling
them and putting them in his bosom, as he did not do with the most
lavish gifts of the nobles." One of his contemporaries described him as
an epileptic; many said that melancholy possessed him to a morbid degree.
Perhaps to put a brighter color on reality, he drank liquor and took
opium, in moderation; his father and his children had similar habits, with-
out similar self-control.* He had a harem suitable to the size of his em-
pire; one gossip tells us that "the King hath in Agra and Fathpur-Sikri,
as they do credibly report, one thousand elephants, thirty horses, four-
teen hundred tame deer, eight hundred concubines." But he does not
seem to have had sensual ambitions or tastes. He married widely, but
politically; he pleased the Rajput princes by espousing their daughters,
and thereby bound them to the support of his throne; and from that time
the Mogul Dynasty was half native in blood. A Rajput became his lead-
ing general, and a raja rose to be his greatest minister. His dream was a
united India.*4
His mind was not quite as realistic and coldly accurate as Caesar's or
Napoleon's; he had a passion for metaphysics, and might, if deposed,
have become a mystic recluse. He thought constantly, and was forever
making inventions and suggesting improvements.96 Like Haroun-al-Rashid
he took nocturnal rambles in disguise, and came back bursting with re-
forms. In the midst of his complex activity he made time to collect a
great library, composed entirely of manuscripts beautifully written and
* Two of his children died in youth of chronic alcoholism.98
468 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVI
engraved by those skilful penmen whom he esteemed as artists fully
equal to the painters and architects that adorned his reign. He despised
print as a mechanical and impersonal thing, and soon disposed of the
choice specimens of European typography presented to him by his Jesuit
friends. The volumes in his library numbered only twenty-four thousand,
but they were valued at $3,500,000" by those who thought that such
hoards of the spirit could be estimated in material terms. He patronized
poets without stint, and loved one of them— the Hindu Birbal— so much
that he made him a court favorite, and finally a general; whereupon Birbal
made a mess of a campaign, and was slaughtered in no lyric flight.*98
Akbar had his literary aides render into Persian— which was the language
of his court— the masterpieces of Hindu literature, history and science,
and himself supervised the translation of the interminable Mahabharata.™
Every art flourished under his patronage and stimulation. Hindu music
and poetry had now one of their greatest periods; and painting, both
Persian and Hindu, reached its second zenith through his encourage-
ment.10' At Agra he directed the building of the famous Fort, and within
its walls erected (by proxy) five hundred buildings that his contem-
poraries considered to be among the most beautiful in the world. They
were torn down by the impetuous Shah Jehan, and can be judged only
by such remnants of Akbar's architecture as the tomb of Humayun at
Delhi, and the remains at Fathpur-Sikri, where the mausoleum of Akbar's
beloved friend, the ascetic Shaik Salim Chisti, is among the fairest struc-
tures in India.
Deeper than these interests was his penchant for speculation. This
well-nigh omnipotent emperor secretly yearned to be a philosopher-
much as philosophers long to be emperors, and cannot comprehend the
stupidity of Providence in withholding from them their rightful thrones.
After conquering the world, Akbar was unhappy because he could not
understand it. "Although," he said, "I am the master of so vast a kingdom,
and all the appliances of government are at my hand, yet since true great-
ness consists in doing the will of God, my mind is not at ease in this diver-
sity of sects and creeds; and apart from this outward pomp of circum-
stance, with what satisfaction, in this despondency, can I undertake the
sway of empire? I await the coming of some discreet man of principle
•The Moslems hated Birbal, and rejoiced at his death. One of them, the historian
Badaoni, recorded the incident with savage pleasure: "Birbal, who had fled from fear of
his life, was slain, and entered the row of the dogs in Hell."9*
CHAP. XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 469
who will resolve the difficulties of my conscience. . . . Discourses in
philosophy have such a charm for me that they distract me from all else,
and I forcibly restrain myself from listening to them lest the necessary
duties of the hour should be neglected."103 "Crowds of learned men from
all nations," says Badaoni, "and sages of various religions and sects, came
to the court and were honored with private conversations. After inquiries
and investigations, which were their only business and occupation day
and night, they would talk about profound points of science, the subtle-
ties of revelation, the curiosities of history, and the wonders of nature."103
"The superiority of man," said Akbar, "rests on the jewel of reason."104
As became a philosopher, he was profoundly interested in religion.
His careful reading of the Mababharctta, and his intimacy with Hindu
poets and sages, lured him into the study of Indian faiths. For a time, at
least, he accepted the theory of transmigration, and scandalized his Mos-
lem followers by appearing in public with Hindu religious marks on his
forehead. He had a flair for humoring all the creeds: he pleased the
Zoroastrians by wearing their sacred shirt and girdle under his clothes,
and allowed the Jains to persuade him to abandon hunting, and to prohibit,
on certain days, the killing of animals. When he learned of the new
religion called Christianity, which had come into India with the Portuguese
occupation of Goa, he despatched a message to the Paulist missionaries
there, inviting them to send two of their learned men to him. Later some
Jesuits came to Delhi and so interested him in Christ that he ordered his
scribes to translate the New Testament.100 He gave the Jesuits full free-
dom to make converts, and allowed them to bring up one of his sons.
While Catholics were murdering Protestants in France, and Protestants,
under Elizabeth, were murdering Catholics in England, and the Inquisi-
tion was killing and robbing Jews in Spain, and Bruno was being burned
at the stake in Italy, Akbar invited the representatives of all the religions
in his empire to a conference, pledged them to peace, issued edicts of
toleration for every cult and creed, and, as evidence of his own neutrality,
married wives from the Brahman, Buddhist, and Mohammedan faiths.
His greatest pleasure, after the fires of youth had cooled, was in the
free discussion of religious beliefs. lie had quite discarded the dogmas
of Islam, and to such an extent that his Moslem subjects fretted under his
impartial rule. "This king," St. Francis Xavicr reported with some ex-
aggeration, "has destroyed the false sect of Mohammed, and wholly dis-
credited it. In this city there is neither a mosque nor a Koran— the book
47<> THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVI
of their law; and the mosques that were there have been made stables
for horses, and storehouses." The King took no stock in revelations, and
would accept nothing that could not justify itself with science and
philosophy. It was not unusual for him to gather friends and prelates of
various sects together, and discuss religion with them from Thursday
evening to Friday noon. When the Moslem mullahs and the Christian
priests quarreled he reproved them both, saying that God should be wor-
shiped through the intellect, and not by a blind adherence to supposed
revelations. "Each person," he said, in the spirit— and perhaps through
the influence— of the Upanishads and Kabir, "according to his condition
gives the Supreme Being a name; but in reality to name the Unknowable
is vain." Certain Moslems suggested an ordeal by fire as a test of Chris-
tianity vs. Islam: a mullah holding the Koran and a priest holding one of
the Gospels were to enter a fire, and he who should come out unhurt
would be adjudged the teacher of truth. Akbar, who did not like the
mullah who was proposed for this experiment, warmly seconded the sug-
gestion, but the Jesuit rejected it as blasphemous and impious, not to say
dangerous. Gradually the rival groups of theologians shunned these con-
ferences, and left them to Akbar and his rationalist intimates.106
Harassed by the religious divisions in his kingdom, and disturbed by
the thought that they might disrupt it after his death, Akbar finally de-
cided to promulgate a new religion, containing in simple form the essen-
tials of the warring faiths. The Jesuit missionary Bartoli records the
matter thus:
He summoned a General Council, and invited to it all the mas-
ters of learning and the military commandants of the cities round
about, excluding only Father Ridolfo, whom it was vain to expect to
be other than hostile to his sacrilegious purpose. When he had them
all assembled in front of him, he spoke in a spirit of astute and
knavish policy, saying:
"For an empire ruled by one head it was a bad thing to have the
members divided among themselves and at variance one with the
other; . . . whence it came about that there are as many factions
as religions. We ought, therefore, to bring them all into one, but
in such fashion that they should be both 'one' and 'all'; with the
great advantage of not losing what is good in any one religion, while
gaining whatever is better in another. In that way honor would be
rendered to God, peace would be given to the people, and security
to the empire."107
CHAP.XVl) FROM ALEXANDER TO AURANGZEB 471
The Council perforce consenting, he issued a decree proclaiming him-
self the infallible head of the church; this was the chief contribution of
Christianity to the new religion. The creed was a pantheistic monotheism
in the best Hindu tradition, with a spark of sun and fire worship from
the Zoroastrians, and a semi-Jain recommendation to abstain from meat.
The slaughter of cows was made a capital offense: nothing could have
pleased the Hindus more, or the Moslems less. A later edict made vege-
tarianism compulsory on the entire population for at least a hundred
days in the year; and in further consideration of native ideas, garlic and
onions were prohibited. The building of mosques, the fast of Ramadan,
the pilgrimage to Mecca, and other Mohammedan customs were banned.
Many Moslems who resisted the edicts were exiled.108 In the center of
the Peace Court at Fathpur-Sikri a Temple of United Religion was built
(and still stands there) as a symbol of the Emperor's fond hope that now
all the inhabitants of India might be brothers, worshiping the same God.
As a religion the Din llahi never succeeded; Akbar found tradition too
strong for his infallibility. A few thousand rallied to the new cult, largely
as a means of securing official favor; the vast majority adhered to their in-
herited gods. Politically the stroke had some beneficent results. The
abolition of the head-tax and the pilgrim-tax on the Hindus, the freedom
granted to all religions,* the weakening of racial and religious fanaticism,
dogmatism and division, far outweighed the egotism and excesses of
Akbar's novel revelation. And it won him such loyalty from even the
Hindus who did not accept his creed that his prime purpose— political
unity— was largely achieved.
With his own fellow Moslems, however, the Din llahi was a source of
bitter resentment, leading at one time to open revolt, and stirring Prince
Jehangir into treacherous machinations against his father. The Prince
complained that Akbar had reigned forty years, and had so strong a con-
stitution that there was no prospect of his early death. Jehangir organized
an army of thirty thousand horsemen, killed Abu-1 Fazl, the King's court
historian and dearest friend, and proclaimed himself emperor. Akbar per-
suaded the youth to submit, and forgave him after a day; but the disloy-
alty of his son, added to the death of his mother and his friend, broke his
spirit, and left him an easy prey for the Great Enemy. In his last days
his children ignored him, and gave their energies to quarreling for his
throne. Only a few intimates were with him when he died— presumably
* With the exception of the transient persecution of Islam (1582-5).
472 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVI
of dysentery, perhaps of poisoning by Jehangir. Mullahs came to his
deathbed to reconvert him to Islam, but they failed; the King "passed
away without the benefit of the prayers of any church or sect."109 No
crowd followed his simple funeral; and the sons and courtiers who had
worn mourning for the event discarded it the same evening, and rejoiced
that they had inherited his kingdom. It was a bitter death for the justest
and wisest ruler that Asia has ever known.
VIII. THE DECLINE OF THE MOGULS
The children of great men— Jehangir— Shah Jehan—His mag-
nificence—His fall— Aurangzeb— His fanaticis7ti—His death—
The coming of the British
The children who had waited so impatiently for his death found it diffi-
cult to hold together the empire that had been created by his genius.
Why is it that great men so often have mediocrities for their offspring?
Is it because the gamble of the genes that produced them— the com-
mingling of ancestral traits and biological possibilities— was but a chance,
and could not be expected to recur? Or is it because the genius exhausts
in thought and toil the force that might have gone to parentage, and leaves
only his diluted blood to his heirs? Or is it that children decay under
ease, and early good fortune deprives them of the stimulus to ambition
and growth?
Jehangir was not so much a mediocrity as an able degenerate. Born
of a Turkish father and a Hindu princess, he enjoyed all the opportunities
of an heir apparent, indulged himself in alcohol and lechery, and gave
full vent to that sadistic joy in cruelty which had been a recessive char-
acter in Babur, Humayun and Akbar, but had always lurked in the
Tatar blood. He took delight in seeing men flayed alive, impaled, or
torn to pieces by elephants. In his Memoirs he tells how, because their
careless entrance upon the scene startled his quarry in a hunt, he had a
groom killed, and the groom's servants hamstrung— i.e., crippled for life
by severing the tendons behind the knees; having attended to this, he says,
"I continued hunting."110 When his son Khusru conspired against him he
had seven hundred supporters of the rebel impaled in a line along the
streets of Lahore; and he remarks with pleasure on the length of time
it took these men to die.111 His sexual life was attended to by a harem of
six thousand women,112 and graced by his later attachment to his favorite
CHAP. XVl) FROMALEXANDERTOAURANGZEB 473
wife, Nur Jehan*^whom he acquired by murdering her husband. His
administration of justice was impartial as well as severe, but the extrava-
gance of his expenditures laid a heavy burden upon a nation which had
become the most prosperous on the globe through the wise leadership of
Akbar and many years of peace.
Toward the end of his reign Jehangir took more and more to his cups,
and neglected the tasks of government. Inevitably conspiracies arose to
replace him; already in 1622 his son Jehan had tried to seize the throne.
When Jehangir died Jehan hurried up from the Deccan where he had
been hiding, proclaimed himself emperor, and murdered all his brothers
to ensure his peace of mind. His father passed on to him his habits of
extravagance, intemperance and cruelty. The expenses of Jehan's court,
and the high salaries of his innumerable officials, absorbed more and more
of the revenue produced by the thriving industry and commerce of the
people. The religious tolerance of Akbar and the indifference of Jehan-
gir were replaced by a return to the Moslem faith, the persecution of
Christians, and the ruthless and wholesale destruction of Hindu shrines.
Shah Jehan redeemed himself in some measure by his generosity to
his friends and the poor, his artistic taste and passion in adorning India
with the fairest architecture that it had ever seen, and his devotion to his
wife Aiumtaz Mahal— "Ornament of the Palace." He had married her in
his twenty-first year, when he had already had two children by an earlier
consort. Mumtaz gave her tireless husband fourteen children in eighteen
years, and died, at the age of thirty-nine, in bringing forth the last.
Shah Jehan built the immaculate Taj Mahal as a monument to her mem-
ory and her fertility, and relapsed into a scandalous licentiousness."3 The
most beautiful of all the world's tombs was but one of a hundred master-
pieces that Jehan erected, chiefly at Agra and in that new Delhi which
grew up under his planning. The costliness of these palaces, the luxurious-
ness of the court, the extravagant jewelry of the Peacock Throne,! would
* I.e., "Light of the World"; also called Nur Mahal— "Light of the Palace." Jehangir
means "Conqueror of the World"; Shah Jehan, of course, was "King of the World."
fThis throne, which required seven years for its completion, consisted entirely of
jewels, precious metals and stones. Four legs of gold supported the scat; twelve pillars
made of emeralds held up the enameled canopy; each pillar bore two peacocks encrusted
with gems; and between each pair of peacocks rose a tree covered with diamonds, emer-
alds, rubies and pearls. The total cost was over $7,000,000. The throne was captured and
carried off to Persia by Nadir Shah (1739), and was gradually dismembered to defray the
expenses of Persian royalty.114
474 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
suggest a rate of taxation ruinous to India. Nevertheless, though one of
the worst famines in India's history occurred in Shah Jehan's reign, his
thirty years of government marked the zenith of India's prosperity and
prestige. The lordly Shah was a capable ruler, and though he wasted
many lives in foreign war he gave his own land a full generation of peace.
As a great British administrator of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone,
wrote,
those who look on India in its present state may be inclined to sus-
pect the native writers of exaggerating its former prosperity; but
the deserted cities, ruined palaces and choked-up aqueducts which
we still see, with the great reservoirs and embankments in the midst
of jungles, and the decayed causeways, wells and caravanserais of
the royal roads, concur with the evidence of contemporary trav-
elers in convincing us that those historians had good grounds for
their commendation.1"
Jehan had begun his reign by killing his brothers; but he had neglected
to kill his sons, one of whom was destined to overthrow him. In 1657 the
ablest of these, Aurangzeb, led an insurrection from the Deccan. The
Shah, like David, gave instructions to his generals to defeat the rebel army,
but to spare, if possible, the life of his son. Aurangzcb overcame all the
forces sent against him, captured his father, and imprisoned him in the
Fort of Agra. For nine bitter years the deposed king lingered there, never
visited by his son, attended only by his faithful daughter Jahanara, and
spending his days looking from the Jasmine Tower of his prison across
the Jumna to where his once-beloved Mumtaz lay in her jeweled tomb.
The son who so ruthlessly deposed him was one of the greatest saints
in the history of Islam, and perhaps the most nearly unique of the Mogul
emperors. The wullahs who had educated him had so imbued him with
religion that at one time the young prince had thought of renouncing the
empire and the world, and becoming a religious recluse. Throughout his
life, despite his despotism, his subtle diplomacy, and a conception of
morals as applying only to his own sect, he remained a pious Moslem,
reading prayers at great length, memorizing the entire Koran, and warring
against infidelity. He spent hours in devotion, and days in fasts. For the
most part he practised his religion as earnestly as he professed it. It is
true that in politics he was cold and calculating, capable of lying cleverly
for his country and his god. But he was the least cruel of the Moguls, and
CHAP. XVl) FROMALEXANDERTOAURANGZEB 475
the mildest; slaughter abated in his reign, and he made hardly any use of
punishment in dealing with crime. He was consistently humble in deport-
ment, patient under provocation, and resigned in misfortune. He ab-
stained scrupulously from all food, drink or luxury forbidden by his
faith; though skilled in music, he abandoned it as a sensual pleasure; and
apparently he carried out his resolve to spend nothing upon himself save
what he had been able to earn by the labor of his hands.ua He was a St.
Augustine on the throne.
Shah Jehan had given half his revenues to the promotion of archi-
tecture and the other arts; Aurangzeb cared nothing for art, destroyed
its "heathen" monuments with coarse bigotry, and fought, through a reign
of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his
own. He issued orders to the provincial governors, and to his other sub-
ordinates,'to raze to the ground all the temples of either Hindus or Chris-
tians, to smash every idol, and to close every Hindu school. In one year
(1679-80) sixty-six temples were broken to pieces in Amber alone, sixty-
three at Chitor, one hundred and twenty-three at Udaipur;117 and over the
site of a Benares temple especially sacred to the Hindus he built, in de-
liberate insult, a Mohammedan mosque.118 He forbade all public worship
of the Hindu faiths, and laid upon every unconverted Hindu a heavy
capitation tax.11" As a result of his fanaticism, thousands of the temples
which had represented or housed the art of India through a millennium
were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what
grandeur and beauty she once possessed.
Aurangzeb converted a handful of timid Hindus to Islam, but he
wrecked his dynasty and his country. A few Moslems worshiped him as
a saint, but the mute and terrorized millions of India looked upon him
as a monster, fled from his tax-gatherers, and prayed for his death. Dur-
ing his reign the Mogul empire in India reached its height, extending into
the Deccan; but it was a power that had no foundation in the affection
of the people, and was doomed to fall at the first hostile and vigorous
touch. The Emperor himself, in his last years, began to realize that by
the very narrowness of his piety he had destroyed the heritage of his
fathers. His deathbed letters arc pitiful documents.
I know not who I am, where I shall go, or what will happen to
this sinner full of sins. . . . My years have gone by profitless. God
has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognized his
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVI
light. . . . There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is
gone, but only the skin is left. ... I have greatly sinned, and know
not what torments await me. . . . May the peace of God be upon
you."0
He left instructions that his funeral should be ascetically simple, and that
no money should be spent on his shroud except the four rupees that he
had made by sewing caps. The top of his coffin was to be covered with a
plain piece of canvas. To the poor he left three hundred rupees earned by
copying the Koran™1 He died at the age of eighty-nine, having long out-
stayed his welcome on the earth.
Within seventeen years of his death his empire was broken into frag-
ments. The support of the people, so wisely won by Akbar, had been
forfeited by the cruelty of Jehangir, the wastefulness of Jehan, and the
intolerance of Aurangzcb. The Moslem minority, already enervated by
India's heat, had lost the military ardor and physical vigor of their prime,
and no fresh recruits were coming from the north to buttress their de-
clining power. Meanwhile, far away in the west, a little island had sent
its traders to cull the riches of India. Soon it would send its guns, and take
over this immense empire in which Hindu and Moslem had joined to
build one of the great civilizations of history.
CHAPTER XVII
The Life of the People*
I. THE MAKERS OF WEALTH
The jungle background —Agriculture — Mining — Handicrafts —
Coi?nnerce— Money— Taxes— Famines— Poverty and wealth
THE soil of India had not lent itself willingly to civilization. A great
part of it was jungle, the jealously guarded home of lions, tigers, ele-
phants, serpents, and other individualists with a Rousseauian contempt for
civilization. The biological struggle to free the land from these enemies
had continued underneath all the surface dramas of economic and political
strife. Akbar shot tigers near Mathura, and captured wild elephants in
many places where none can be found today. In Vedic times the lion
might be met with anywhere in northwest or central India; now it is al-
most extinct throughout the peninsula. The serpent and the insect, how-
ever, still carry on the war: in 1926 some two thousand Hindus were
killed by wild animals (875 by marauding tigers); but twenty thousand
Hindus met death from the fangs of snakes.1
Gradually, as the soil was redeemed from the beast, it was turned to the
cultivation of rice, pulse, millet, vegetables and fruits. Through the greater
part of Indian history the majority of the population have lived abstemiously
on these natural foods, reserving flesh, fish and fowl for the Outcastes and
the rich.2t To render their diet more exciting, and perhaps to assist
Aphrodite,8 the Hindus have grown and consumed an unusual abundance
of curry, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and other spices. Europeans valued these
spices so highly that they stumbled upon a hemisphere in search for them;
who knows but that America was discovered for the sake of love? In
Vedic times the land belonged to the people,5 but from the days of Chan-
dragupta Maurya it became the habit of the kings to claim royal owncr-
* The following analysis will apply for the most part to post- Vedic and pre-British
India. The reader should remember that India is now in flux, and that institutions, morals
and manners once characteristic of her may be disappearing today.
t Vijayanagar \vas an exception; its people ate fowl and flesh (barring oxen and cows),
as well as lizards, rats and cats.4
477
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVII
ship of all the soil, and to let it out to, the tiller for an annual rental and
tax.' Irrigation was usually a governmental undertaking. One of the dams
raised by Chandragupta functioned till 150 A.D.; remains of the ancient
canals can be seen everywhere today; and signs still survive of the artificial
lake that Raj Sing, Rajput Rana of Mewar, built as an irrigation reservoir
(1661), and which he surrounded with a marble wall twelve miles in length.7
The Hindus seem to have been the first people to mine gold.1 Herodotus*
and Megasthenes" tell of the great "gold-digging ants, in size somewhat less
than dogs, but bigger than foxes," which helped the miners to find the metal
by turning it up in their scratching of the sand.* Much of the gold used in
the Persian Empire in the fifth century before Christ came from India. Silver,
copper, lead, tin, zinc and iron were also mined-iron as early as 1500 B.C.U
The art of tempering and casting iron developed in India long before its
known appearance in Europe; Vikramaditya, for example, erected at Delhi
(ca. 380 A.D.) an iron pillar that stands untarnished today after fifteen cen-
turies; and the quality of metal, or manner of treatment, which has pre-
served it from rust or decay is still a mystery to modern metallurgical
science." Before the European invasion the smelting of iron in small char-
coal furnaces was one of the major industries of India." The Industrial
Revolution taught Europe how to carry out these processes more cheaply on
a larger scale, and the Indian industry died under the competition. Only in
our own time are the rich mineral resources of India being again exploited
and explored.14
The growing of cotton appears earlier in India than elsewhere; apparently
it was used for cloth in Mohcnjo-daro.1* In our oldest classical reference
to cotton Herodotus says, with pleasing ignorance: "Certain wild trees there
bear 'wool instead of fruit, which in beauty and quality excels that of sheep;
and the Indians make their clothing from these trees."" It was their wars
in the Near East that acquainted the Romans with this tree-grown "wool.""
Arabian travelers in ninth-century India reported that "in this country they
make garments of such extraordinary perfection that nowhere else is their
like to be secn-sewed and woven to such a degree of fineness, they may be
drawn through a ring of moderate size."" The medieval Arabs took over
the art from India, and their word quttan gave us our word cotton.19
The name imislm was originally applied to fine cotton weaves made in
Mosul from Indian models; calico was so called because it came (first in
1631) from Calicut, on the southwestern shores of India. "Embroidery," says
Marco Polo, speaking of Gujarat in 1293 A.D., "is here performed with more
We do not know what these "ants" were; they were more probably anteaters than
ants.
CHAP. XVII) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 479
delicacy than in any other part of the world.""0 The shawls of Kashmir and
the rugs of India bear witness even today to the excellence of Indian weav-
ing in texture and design.* But weaving was only one of the many handi-
crafts of India, and the weavers were only one of the many craft and
merchant guilds that organized and regulated the industry of India. Europe
looked upon the Hindus as experts in almost every line of 77M72z/facture—
wood-work, ivory-work, metal-work, bleaching, dyeing, tanning, soap-mak-
ing, glass-blowing, gunpowder, fireworks, cement, etc.21 China imported
eyeglasses from India in 1260 A.D. Bernicr, traveling in India in the seven-
teenth century, described it as humming with industry. Fitch, in 1585, saw
a fleet of one hundred and eighty boats carrying a great variety of goods
down the river Jumna.
Internal trade flourished; every roadside was— and is— a bazaar. The for-
eign trade of India is as old as her history;82 objects found in Sumeria and
Egypt indicate a traffic between these countries and India as far back as
3000 B.C.88 Commerce between India and Babylon by the Persian Gulf flour-
ished from 700 to 480 B.C.; and perhaps the "ivory, apes and peacocks" of
Solomon came by the same route from the same source. India's ships sailed
the sea to Burma and China in Chandragupta's days; and Greek merchants,
called Yavana (lonians) by the Hindus, thronged the markets of Dravidian
India in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ.84 Rome, in her
epicurean days, depended upon India for spices, perfumes and unguents,
and paid great prices for Indian silks, brocades, muslins and cloth of gold;
Pliny condemned the extravagance which sent $5,000,000 yearly from
Rome to India for such luxuries. Indian cheetahs, tigers and elephants as-
sisted in the gladiatorial games and sacrificial rites of the Colosseum.95 The
Parthian wars were fought by Rome largely to keep open the trade route
to India. In the seventh century the Arabs captured Persia and Egypt, and
thereafter trade between Europe and Asia passed through Moslem hands;
hence the Crusades, and Columbus. Under the Moguls foreign commerce
rose again; the wealth of Venice, Genoa and other Italian cities grew
through their service as ports for European trade with India and the East;
the Renaissance owed more to the wealth derived from this trade than to the
manuscripts brought to Italy by the Greeks. Akbar had an admiralty which
supervised the building of ships and the regulation of ocean traffic; the
ports of Bengal and Sindh were famous for shipbuilding, and did their
work so well that the Sultan of Constantinople found it cheaper to have
his vessels built there than in Alexandria; even the East India Company had
many of its ships built in Bengal docks.*8
*Cf. the red rug, from seventeenth-century India, presented to the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of An (Room D 3) by Mr. J. P. Morgan.
480 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVII
The development of coinage to facilitate this trade took many centuries.
In Buddha's days rough rectangular coins were issued by various economic
and political authorities; but it was not until the fourth century before
Christ that India, under the influence of Persia and Greece, arrived at a coin-
age guaranteed by the state.87 Sher Shah issued well-designed pieces of
copper, silver and gold, and established the rupee as the basic coin of the
realm.38 Under Akbar and Jehangir the coinage of India was superior, in
artistic execution and purity of metal, to that of any modern European
state." As in medieval Europe, so in medieval India the growth of industry
and commerce was impeded by a religious antipathy to the taking of in-
terest. "The Indians," says Megasthenes, "neither put out money at usury"
(interest), "nor know how to borrow. It is contrary to established usage for
an Indian cither to do or to suffer wrong; and therefore they neither make
contracts nor require securities."80 When the Hindu could not invest his
savings in his own economic enterprises he preferred to hide them, or to buy
jewelry as conveniently hoardable wealth.81 Perhaps this failure to develop a
facile credit system aided the Industrial Revolution to establish the Euro-
pean domination of Asia. Slowly, however, despite the hostility of the
Brahmans, money-lending grew. The rates varied, according to the caste of
the borrower, from twelve to sixty per cent, usually ranging about twenty."
Bankruptcy was not permitted as a liquidation of debts; if a debtor died in-
solvent his descendants to the sixth generation continued to be responsible
for his obligations.33
Both agriculture and trade were heavily taxed to support the government.
The peasant had to surrender from one-sixth to one-half of his crop; and,
as in medieval and contemporary Europe, many tolls were laid upon the
flow and exchange of goods.34 Akbar raised the land-tax to one-third, but
abolished all other exactions.35 The land-tax was a bitter levy, but it had the
saving grace of rising with prosperity and falling with depression; and in
famine years the poor could at least die untaxed. For famines occurred, even
in Akbar's palmy days (1595-8); that of 1556 seems to have led to cannibal-
ism and widespread desolation. Roads were bad, transportation was slow, and
the surplus of one region could with difficulty be used to supply the dearth
of another.
As everywhere, there were extremes of poverty and wealth, but hardly
so great as in India or America today. At the bottom was a small minority
of slaves; above them the Shudras were not so much slaves as hired men,
though their status, like that of almost all Hindus, was hereditary. The
poverty described by Pcre Dubois (1820)* was the result of fifty years of
political chaos; under the Moguls the condition of the people had been rela-
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 481
tively prosperous."7 Wages were modest, ranging for manual workers from
three to nine cents a day in Akbar's reign; but prices were correspondingly
low. In 1600 a rupee (normally 32.5 cents) bought 194 pounds of wheat, or
278 pounds of barley; in 1901 it bought only 29 pounds of wheat, or 44
pounds of barley." An Englishman resident in India in 1616 described "the
plenty of all provisions" as "very great throughout the whole monarchy,"
and added that "every one there may eat bread without scarceness."*1 An-
other Englishman, touring India in the seventeenth century, found that his
expenses averaged four cents a day.40
The wealth of the country reached its two peaks under Chandragupta
Maurya and Shah Jehan. The riches of India under the Gupta kings
became a proverb throughout the world. Yuan Chwang pictured an
Indian city as beautified with gardens and pools, and adorned with insti-
tutes of letters and arts; "the inhabitants were well off, and there were
families with great wealth; fruit and flowers were abundant. . . . The
people had a refined appearance, and dressed in glossy silk attire; they
were . . . clear and suggestive in discourse; they were equally divided be-
tween orthodoxy and heterodoxy."41 "The Hindu kingdoms overthrown
by the Moslems," says Elphinstone, "were so wealthy that the historians
tire of telling of the immense loot of jewels and coin captured by the
invaders."" Nicolo Conti described the banks of the Ganges (ca. 1420)
as lined with one prosperous city after another, each well designed, rich
in gardens and orchards, silver and gold, commerce and industry." Shah
Jehan's treasury was so full that he kept two underground strong rooms,
each of some 150,000 cubic feet capacity, almost filled with silver and
gold/* "Contemporary testimonies," says Vincent Smith, "permit of no
doubt that the urban population of the more important cities was well
to do."45 Travelers described Agra and Fathpur-Sikri as each greater and
richer than London.4" Anquetil-Duperron, journeying through the Mah-
ratta districts in 1760, found himself "in the midst of the simplicity and
happiness of the Golden Age. . . . The people were cheerful, vigorous,
and in high health."47 Clive, visiting Murshidabad in 1759, reckoned that
ancient capital of Bengal as equal in extent, population and wealth to the ,'
London of his time, with palaces far greater than those of Europe, and J
men richer than any individual in London.48 India, said Clive, was "a
country of inexhaustible riches."4* Tried by Parliament for helping him-
482 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVII
self too readily to this wealth, Clive excused himself ingeniously: he
described the riches that he had found about him in India— opulent cities
'ready to offer him any bribe to escape indiscriminate plunder, bankers
throwing open to his grasp vaults piled high with jewels and gold; and he
concluded: "At this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation."80
II. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY
The monarchy— Law— The Code of "Manu"— Development of
the caste system— Rise of the Brahmans— Their privileges and
powers— Their obligations— In defense of caste
Because the roads were poor and communication difficult, it was
easier to conquer than to rule India. Its topography ordained that this
semi-continent would remain, until the coming of railways, a medley of
divided states. Under such conditions a government could have security
only through a competent army; and as the army required, in frequent
crises, a dictatorial leader immune to political eloquence, the form of gov-
ernment which developed in India was naturally monarchical. The people
enjoyed a considerable measure of liberty under the native dynasties,
partly through the autonomous communities in the villages and the trade
guilds in the towns, and partly through the* limitations that the Brah-
man aristocracy placed upon the authority of the king.61 The laws of
Manu, though they were more a code of ethics than a system of prac-
tised legislation, expressed the focal ideas of India about monarchy: that it
should be impartially rigorous, and paternally solicitous of the public
good.62 The Mohammedan rulers paid less attention than their Hindu
predecessors to these ideals and checks; they were a conquering minority,
and rested their rule frankly on the superiority of their guns. "The army,"
says a Moslem historian, with charming clarity, "is the source and means
of government.'"13 Akbar was an exception, for he relied chiefly upon
the good will of a people prospering under his mild and benevolent
despotism. Perhaps in the circumstances his was the best government pos-
sible. Its vital defect, as we have seen, lay in its dependence upon the
character of the king; the supreme centralized authority that proved
beneficent under Akbar proved ruinous under Aurangzeb. Having been
raised up by violence, the Afghan and Mogul rulers were always subject
CHAP.XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 483
to recall by assassination; and wars of succession were almost as ex-
pensive—though not as disturbing to economic life—as a modern election.*
Under the Moslems law was merely the will of the emperor or
sultan; under the Hindu kings it was a confused mixture of royal com-
mands, village traditions and caste rules. Judgment was given by the
head of the family, the head of the village, the headmen of the caste, the
court of the guild, the governor of the province, the minister of the king,
or the king himself.86 Litigation was brief, judgment swift; lawyers came
only with the British.60 Torture was used under every dynasty until
abolished by Firoz Shah.07 Death was the penalty for any of a great vari-
ety of crimes, such as housebreaking, damage to royal property, or theft
on a scale that would now make a man a very pillar of society. Punish-
ments were cruel, and included amputation of hands, feet, nose or ears,
tearing out of eyes, pouring molten lead into the throat, crushing the
bones of hands and feet with a mallet, burning the body with fire, driv-
ing nails into the hands, feet or bosom, cutting the sinews, sawing men
asunder, quartering them, impaling them, roasting them alive, letting them
be trampled to death by elephants, or giving them to wild and hungry
dogs.Mt
No code of laws applied to all India. In the ordinary affairs of life
the place of law was taken by the dbanna-shastras— metrical textbooks of
caste regulations and duties, composed by the Brahmans from a strictly
* The story of how Nasiru-d-din poisoned his father Ghiyasu-d-din, Sultan of Delhi
(1501), illustrates the Moslem conception of peaceable succession. Jehangir, who did his
best to depose his father Akbar, tells the story:
"After this I went to the building containing the tombs of the Khalji rulers. The grave
of Nasiru-d-din, \\hose face is blackened forever, was also there. It is well known that
that wretch advanced himself by the murder of his father. Twice he gave him poison,
and the father twice expelled it by means of a poison-antidote amulet he had on his arm.
The third time the son mixed poison in a cup of sherbet and gave it to his father with
his own hand. ... As his father understood what efforts the son was making in this
matter, he loosened the amulet from his arm and threw it before him; and then, turning
his face in humility and supplication towards the throne of the Creator, said: 'O Lord,
my age has arrived at eighty years, and I have passed this time in prosperity and happi-
ness such as has been attained by no king. Now as this is my last time, I hope that thou
wilt not seize Nasir for my murder, and that, reckoning my death as a thing decreed,
thou wilt not avenge it.' After he had spoken these words, he drank off that poisoned
cup of sherbet at a gulp, and delivered his soul to his Creator.
"When I went to his (Nasir's) tomb," adds the virtuous Jehangir, "I gave it several
kicks."54
t Still more sadistic refinements of penology may be found in Dubois, p. 659.
484 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
Brahman point of view. The oldest of these is the so-called "Code of
Alanu." Alanu was the mythical ancestor of the Manava tribe (or school)
of Brahmans near Delhi; he was represented as the son of a god, and as
receiving his laws from Brahma himself.511 This code of 2685 verses, once
assigned to 1200 B.C., is now referred vaguely to the first centuries of
our era.00 Originally intended as a handbook or guide to proper caste
behavior for these Manava Brahmans, it was gradually accepted as a code
of conduct by the entire Hindu community; and though never recognized
by the Moslem kings it acquired, within the caste system, all the force of
law. Its character will appear to some extent in the course of the follow-
ing analysis of Hindu society and morals. In general it was marked by a
superstitious acceptance of trial by ordeal,* a severe application of the lex
talionis, and an untiring inculcation of the virtues, rights and powers of
the Brahman caste.'" Its effect was to strengthen enormously the hold of
the caste system upon Hindu society.
This system had grown more rigid and complex since the Vedic period;
not only because it is in the nature of institutions to become stiff with
age, but because the instability of the political order, and the overrunning
of India by alien peoples and creeds, had intensified caste as a barrier to
the mixture of Moslem and Hindu blood. In Vedic days caste had
been varna, or color; in medieval India it became jati, or birth. Its essence
was twofold: the heredity of status, and the acceptance of dbarma—
i.e., the traditional duties and employments of one's native caste.
The head and chief beneficiaries of the system were the eight million
males of the Brahman caste.04 Weakened for a while by the rise of
Buddhism under Ashoka, the Brahmans, with that patient tenacity which
characterizes priesthoods, had bided their time, and had recaptured power
and leadership under the Gupta line. From the second century A.D. we
find records of great gifts, usually of land, to the Brahman caste."5! These
grants, like all Brahman property, were exempt from taxation until the
* Perc Dubois, \\lu>, though unsympathetic to India, is usually truthful, gives us a pic-
ture of the ordeals used in his time (1820). "There arc," he says, "several other kinds of
trial by ordeal. Amongst the number is that of boiling oil which is mixed with cow-dung,
and into which the accused must plunge his arm up to the elbow; and that of the snake,
which consists in shutting up some very poisonous snake in a basket in \\hich has been
placed a ring or a piece of money which the accused must find and bring out with his
eyes bandaged; if in the former case he is not scalded, and in the latter case is not bitten,
his innocence is completely provcd."OJ
t Fod belie\ es that some of these charters NV ere pious frauds.86
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 485
British came.*11 The Code of Manu warns the king never to tax a Brahman,
even when all other sources of revenue have failed; for a Brahman pro-
voked to anger can instantly destroy the king and all his army by reciting
curses and mystical texts." It was not the custom of Hindus to make wills,
since their traditions required that the property of the family should be
held in common, and automatically descend from the dying to the sur-
viving males;08* but when, under the influence of European individualism,
wills were introduced, they were greatly favored by the Brahmans, as an
occasional means of securing property for ecclesiastical purposes.70 The
most important element in any sacrifice to the gods was the fee paid to
the ministrant priest; the highest summit of piety was largesse in such
fees.71 Miracles and a thousand superstitions were another fertile source
of sacerdotal wealth. For a consideration a Brahman might render a bar-
ren woman fecund; oracles were manipulated for financial ends; men
were engaged to feign madness and to confess that their fate was a punish-
ment for parsimony to the priests. In every illness, lawsuit, bad omen,
unpleasant dream or new enterprise the advice of a Brahman was desir-
able, and the adviser was worthy of his hire.73
The power of the Brahmans was based upon a monopoly of knowledge.
They were the custodians and remakcrs of tradition, the educators of
children, the composers or editors of literature, the experts versed in the
inspired and infallible Vedas. If a Shudra listened to the reading of the
Scriptures his ears (according to the Brahmanical law books) were to be
filled with molten lead; if he recited it his tongue was to be split; if he
committed it to memory he was to be cut in two;73 such were the threats,
seldom enforced, with which the priests guarded their wisdom. Brahman-
ism thus became an exclusive cult, carefully hedged around against all
vulgar participation.75 According to the Code of Manu a Brahman was by
divine right at the head of all creatures;7" he did not, however, share in
all the powers and privileges of the order until, after many years of prep-
aration, he was made "twice-born" or regenerate by solemn investiture
with the triple cord.77 From that moment he became a holy being; his
person and property were inviolate; indeed, according to Manu, "all
that exists in this universe is the Brahman's property."78 Brahmans were
to be maintained by public and private gifts— not as charity, but as a
sacred obligation;7" hospitality to a Brahman was one of the highest re-
* Among the Dravidians, however, inheritance followed the female line."*
486 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
ligious duties, and a Brahman not hospitably received could walk away
with all the accumulated merits of the householder's good deeds.80* Even
if a Brahman committed every crime, he was not to be killed; the king
might exile him, but must allow him to keep his property.8* He who tried
to strike a Brahman would suffer in hell for a hundred years; he who
actually struck a Brahman would suffer in hell for a thousand years."
If a Shudra debauched the wife of a Brahman, the Shudra's property was
to be confiscated, and his genitals were to be cut off.88 A Shudra who
killed a Shudra might atone for his crime by giving ten cows to the
Brahmans; if he killed a Vaisya, he must give the Brahmans a hundred
cows; if he killed a Kshatriya, he must give the Brahmans a thousand
cows; if he killed a Brahman he must die; only the murder of a Brahman
was really murder.87
The functions and obligations that corresponded to these privileges
were numerous and burdensome. The Brahman not only acted as priest, t
but trained himself for the clerical, pedagogical and literary professions.
He was required to study law and learn the Vedas; every other duty was
subordinate to this;80 even to repeat the Vedas entitled the Brahman to
beatitude, regardless of rites or works;80 and if he memorized the Rig-Veda
he might destroy the world without incurring any guilt.91 He must not
marry outside his caste; if he married a Shudra his children were to be
pariahs;J for, said Manu, "the man who is good by birth becomes low by
low associations, but the man who is low by birth cannot become high
by high associations.""3 The Brahman had to bathe every day, and again
after being shaved by a barber of low caste; he had to purify with cow-
dung the place where he intended to sleep; and he had to follow a strict
hygienic ritual in attending to the duties of nature.03 He was to abstain from
all animal food, including eggs, and from onions, garlic, mushrooms and
leeks. He was to drink nothing but water, and it must have been drawn
and carried by a Brahman.04 He was to abstain from unguents, perfumes,
sensual pleasure, covcteousness, and wrath.85 If he touched an unclean
* Certain sexual perquisites seem to have belonged to some Brahman groups. The
Nambudri Brahmans exercised the ]us pri?n<c noctis over all brides in their territory; and
the Pushtimargiya priests of Bombay maintained this privilege until recent times.81 If we
may believe Pere Dubois, the priests of the Temple of Tirupati (in southeastern India)
offered to cure barrenness in all women who would spend a night at the temple."
t Not all priests were Brahmans, and latterly many Brahmans have not been priests. In
the United Provinces a large number of them arc cooks.88
J This word is from the Tamil pjrjiyan, meaning one of low caste.
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 487
thing, or the person of any foreigner (even the Governor-General of
India), he was to purify himself by ceremonial ablutions. If he committed
a crime he had to accept a heavier punishment than would fall upon a
lower caste: if, for example, a Shudra stole he was to be fined eightfold
the sum or value of his theft; if a Vaisya stole he was to be fined sixteen-
fold; a Kshatriya, thirty-twofold; a Brahman, sixty-fourfold.80 The
Brahman was never to injure any living thing."
Given a moderate observation of these rules, and a people too burdened
with the tillage of the fields, and therefore too subject to the apparently
personal whims of the elements, to rise out of superstition to education,
the power of the priests grew from generation to generation, and made
them the most enduring aristocracy in history. Nowhere else can we
find this astonishing phenomenon— so typical of the slow rate of change
in India— of an upper class maintaining its ascendancy and privileges
through all conquests, dynasties and governments for 2500 years. Only
the outcast Chandalas can rival them in perpetuity. The ancient Ksha-
triyas who had dominated the intellectual as well as the political field in
the days of Buddha disappeared after the Gupta age; and though the
Brahmans recognized the Rajput warriors as the later equivalent of the
old fighting caste, the Kshatriyas, after the fall of Rajputana, soon be-
came extinct. At last only two great divisions remained: the Brahmans as
the social and mental rulers of India, and beneath them three thousand
castes that were in reality industrial guilds.*
Much can be said in defense of what, after monogamy, must be the
most abused of all social institutions. The caste system had the eugenic
value of keeping the presumably finer strains from dilution and disappear-
ance through indiscriminate mixture; it established certain habits of diet
and cleanliness as a rule of honor which all might observe and emulate; it
gave order to the chaotic inequalities and differences of men, and spared
the soul the modern fever of climbing and gain; it gave order to every
life by prescribing for each man a dharma, or code of conduct for his
caste; it gave order to every trade and profession, elevated every occupa-
tion into a vocation not lightly to be changed, and, by making every in-
dustry a caste, provided its members with a means of united action
against exploitation and tyranny. It offered an escape from the plutoc-
racy or the military dictatorship which are apparently the only alterna-
* On the caste system in our time cf. Chap, xxii, Sect, iv, below.
488 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
tives to aristocracy; it gave to a country shorn of political stability by a
hundred invasions and revolutions a social, moral and cultural order
and continuity rivaled only by the Chinese. Amid a hundred anarchic
changes in the state, the Brahmans maintained, through the system of
caste, a stable society, and preserved, augmented and transmitted civili-
zation. The nation bore with them patiently, even proudly, because every
one knew that in the end they were the one indispensable government of
India.
III. MORALS AND MARRIAGE
"DfedfTWdf"— Children— Child marriage— The art of love— Prosti-
tution — Romantic love— Marriage — The family — Woman —
Her intellectual life — Her rights - "Purdah" - Suttee—
The Widow
When the caste system dies the moral life of India will undergo a
long transition of disorder, for there the moral code has been bound up
almost inseparably with caste. Morality was dharma— the rule of life for
each man as determined by his caste. To be a Hindu meant not so much
to accept a creed as to take a place in the caste system, and to accept
the dharma or duties attaching to that place by ancient tradition and reg-
ulation. Each post had its obligations, its limitations and its rights; with
them and within them the pious Hindu would lead his life, finding in them
a certain contentment of routine, and never thinking of stepping into
another caste. "Better thine own work is, though done with fault," said
the Bhagavad-Gita™ "than doing others' work, even excellently."
Dharma is to the individual what its normal development is to a seed—
the orderly fulfilment of an inherent nature and destiny .w So old is this
conception of morality that even today it is difficult for all, and impos-
sible for most, Hindus to think of themselves except as members of a spe-
cific caste, guided and bound by its rule. "Without caste," says an
English historian, "Hindu society is inconceivable."100
In addition to the dharma of each caste the Hindu recognized a gen-
eral dharma or obligation affecting all castes, and embracing chiefly re-
spect for Brahmans, and reverence for cows.101 Next to these duties was
that of bearing children. "Then only is a man a perfect man," says
Manu's code,10* "when he is three— himself, his wife, and his son." Not
only would children be economic assets to their parents, and support them
as a matter of course in old age, but they would carry on the household
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 489
worship of their ancestors, and would offer to them periodically the
food without which these ghosts would starve.108 Consequently there was
no birth control in India, and abortion was branded as a crime equal to
the murder of a Brahman.104 Infanticide occurred,106 but it was exceptional;
the father was glad to have children, and proud to have many. The ten-
derness of the old to the young is one of the fairest aspects of Hindu
civilization.106
The child was hardly born when the parents began to think of its
marriage. For marriage, in the Hindu system, was compulsory; an un-
married man was an outcast, without social status or consideration, and
prolonged virginity was a disgrace.107 Nor was marriage to be left to the
whim of individual choice or romantic love; it was a vital concern of
society and the race, and could not safely be entrusted to the myopia of
passion or the accidents of proximity;108 it must be arranged by the par-
ents before the fever of sex should have time to precipitate a union
doomed, in the Hindu view, to disillusionment and bitterness. Manu gave
the name of Gandbarva marriage to unions by mutual choice, and stigma-
tized them as born of desire; they were permissible, but hardly respectable.
The early maturity of the Hindu, making a girl of twelve as old as a
girl of fourteen or fifteen in America, created a difficult problem of moral
and social order.* Should marriage be arranged to coincide with sexual
maturity, or should it be postponed, as in America, until the male arrives
at economic maturity? The first solution apparently weakens the na-
tional physique,110 unduly accelerates the growth of population, and sac-
rifices the woman almost completely to reproduction; the second solution
leaves the problems of unnatural delay, sexual frustration, prostitution,
and venereal disease. The Hindus chose child marriage as the lesser evil,
and tried to mitigate its dangers by establishing, between the marriage and
its consummation, a period in which the bride should remain with her
parents until the coming of puberty.111 The institution was old, and
therefore holy; it had been rooted in the desire to prevent intercaste mar-
riage through casual sexual attraction;113 it was later encouraged by the
fact that the conquering and otherwise ruthless Moslems were restrained
* It should be added that Gandhi denies that this precocity has any physical basis. "I
loathe and detest child marriage," he writes. "I shudder to see a child widow. I have
never known a grosser superstition than that the Indian climate causes sexual precocity.
What does bring about untimely puberty is the mental and moral atmosphere surrounding
family life."109
490 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVII
by their religion from carrying away married women as slaves;"1 and
finally it took rigid form in the parental resolve to protect the girl from
the erotic sensibilities of the male.
That these were reasonably keen, and that the male might be trusted
to attend to his biological functions on the slightest provocation, appears
from the Hindu literature of love. The Kamasutra, or "Doctrine of
Desire," is the most famous in a long list of works revealing a certain pre-
occupation with the physical and mental technique of sex. It was com-
posed, the author assures us, "according to the precepts of Holy Writ,
for the benefit of the world, by Vatsyayana, while leading the life of a
religious student at Benares, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of
the Deity."114 "He who neglects a girl, thinking she is too bashful," says
this anchorite, "is despised by her as a beast ignorant of the working of
the female mind."m Vatsyayana gives a delightful picture of a girl in
love,11' but his wisdom is lavished chiefly upon the parental art of getting
her married away, and the husbandly art of keeping her physically
content.
We must not presume that the sexual sensitivity of the Hindu led
to any unusual license. Child marriage raised a barrier against premarital
relations, and the strong religious sanctions used in the inculcation of
wifely fidelity made adultery far more difficult and rare than in Europe
or America. Prostitution was for the most part confined to the temples.
In the south the needs of the esurient male were met by the providential
institution of dcvadasis— literally "servants of the gods," actually prosti-
tutes. Each Tamil temple had a troop of "sacred women," engaged at
first to dance and sing before the idols, and perhaps to entertain the
Brahmans. Some of them seem to have lived lives of almost conventual
seclusion; others were allowed to extend their services to all who could
pay, on condition that a part of their earnings should be contributed to the
clergy. Many of these temple courtesans, or nautch* girls, provided danc-
ing and singing in public functions and private gatherings, in the style of
the geishas of Japan; some of them learned to read, and, like the hetairai
of Greece, furnished cultured conversation in homes where the married
women were neither encouraged to read nor allowed to mingle with
guests. In 1004 A.D., as a sacred inscription informs us, the temple of the
Chola King Rajaraja at Tanjore had four hundred devadasis. The custom
* From the Hindu nach, dancer.
CHAP.XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 49!
acquired the sanctity of time, and no one seems to have considered it im-
moral; respectable women now and then dedicated a daughter to the pro-
fession of temple prostitute in much the same spirit in which a son might
be dedicated to the priesthood.117 Dubois, at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, described the temples of the south as in some cases "con-
vened into mere brothels"; the devadasis, whatever their original func-
tions, were frankly called harlots by the public, and were used as such.
If we may believe the old abbe, who had no reason to be prejudiced in
favor of India,
their official duties consist in dancing and singing within the
temples twice a day, . . . and also at all public ceremonies. The
first they execute with sufficient grace, although their attitudes are
lascivious and their gestures indecorous. As regards their singing,
it is almost always confined to obscene verses describing some licen-
tious episode in the history of their gods.118
Under these circumstances of temple prostitution and child marriage
little opportunity was given for what we call "romantic love." This ideal-
istic devotion of one sex to the other appears in Indian literature— for ex-
ample in the poems of Chandi Das and Jayadeva— but usually as a symbol
of the soul surrendering to God; while in actual life it took most often
the form of the complete devotion of the wife to her mate. The love
poetry is sometimes of the ethereal type depicted by the Tennysons and
Longfellows of our Puritan tradition; sometimes it is the full-bodied and
sensuous passion of the Elizabethan stage.1"' One writer unites religion
and love, and sees in either ecstasy a recognition of identity; another lists
the three hundred and sixty different emotions that fill the lover's heart,
and counts the patterns which his teeth have left on his beloved's flesh,
or shows him decorating her breasts with painted flowers of sandal
paste; and the author of the Nala and Damayanti episode in the Mahab-
harata describes the melancholy sighs and pale dyspepsia of the lovers
in the best style of the French troubadours.1"
Such whimsical passions were seldom permitted to determine marriage
in India. Manu allowed eight different forms of marriage, in which mar-
riage by capture and marriage "from affection" were ranked lowest in
the moral scale, and marriage by purchase was accepted as the sensible
way of arranging a union; in the long run, the Hindu legislator thought,
49^ THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
those marriages are most soundly based that rest upon an economic
foundation.111 In the days of Dubois "to marry" and "to buy a wife" were
"synonymous expressions in India."*"2 The wisest marriage was held to
be one arranged by the parents with full regard for the rules of endogamy
and exogamy: the youth must marry within his caste, and outside his
gotra or group.1* He might take several wives, but only one of his own
caste— who was to have precedence over the rest; preferably, said Manu,
he was to be monogamous, t184 The woman was to love her husband with
patient devotion; the husband was to give to his wife not romantic affec-
tion, but solicitous protection.129
The Hindu family was typically patriarchal, with the father full mas-
ter of his wife, his children, and his slaves.127 Woman was a lovely but
inferior being. In the beginning, says Hindu legend, when Twashtri, the
Divine Artificer, came to the creation of woman he found that he had ex-
hausted his materials in the making of man, and had no solid elements left.
In this dilemma he fashioned her eclectically out of the odds and ends
of creation:
He took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of creepers,
and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the
slenclcrness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness
of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances
of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety
of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the
winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock,
and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant,
and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the
warm glow of fire, and the coldness of snow, and the chattering of
jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane,
and the fidelity of the cbakravaka; and compounding all these to-
gether he made woman, and gave her to man.1*1
* Strabo (ca. 20 A.D.) , relying on Aristobulus, describes "some novel and unusual cus-
toms at Taxila: those who by reason of poverty arc unable to marry off their daughters,
lead them forth to the market place in the power of their age to the sound of both
trumpets and drums (precisely the instruments used to signal the call to battle), thus
assembling a crowd; and to any man who comes forward they first expose her rear parts
up to the shoulders, and then her front parts, and if she pleases him, and at the same time
allows herself to be persuaded, on approved terms, he marries her.""8
t Among the Rajputs, if we may believe Tod, it was usual for the prince to have
different wives for each day of the week.1*
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 493
Nevertheless, despite all this equipment, woman fared poorly in India.
Her high status in Vedic days was lost under priestly influence and
Mohammedan example. The Code of Manu set the tone against her in
phrases reminiscent of an early stage in Christian theology: "The source
of dishonor is woman; the source of strife is woman; the source of
earthly existence is woman; therefore avoid woman."180 "A female," says
another passage, "is able to draw from the right path in this life not a fool
only but even a sage, and can lead him in subjection to desire or to
wrath."131 The law laid it down that all through her life woman should
be in tutelage, first to her father, then to her husband, and finally to her
son.™ The wife addressed her husband humbly as "master," "lord," even
as "my god"; in public she walked some distance behind him, and seldom
received a word from him.183 She was expected to show her devotion by
the most minute service, preparing the meals, eating— after they had fin-
ished—the food left by her husband and her sons, and embracing her hus-
band's feet at bedtime.134 "A faithful wife," said Manu, "must serve
. . . her lord as if he were a god, and never do aught to pain him, whatso-
ever be his state, and even though devoid of every virtue."185 A wife
who disobeyed her husband would become a jackal in her next incar-
nation.134
Like their sisters in Europe and America before our own times, the
women of India received education only if they were ladies of high
degree, or temple prostitutes.137 The art of reading was considered inap-
propriate in a woman; her power over men could not be increased by it,
and her attractiveness would be diminished. Says Chitra in Tagore's
play: "When a woman is merely a woman— when she winds herself round
and round men's hearts with her smiles and sobs and services and caressing
endearments— then she is happy. Of what use to her are learning and
great achievements?"188 Knowledge of the Vedas was denied to her;1"
"for a woman to study the Vedas" says the Mababharata, "is a sign of
confusion in the realm."140* Megasthenes reported, in Chandragupta's
days, that "the Brahmans keep their wives— and they have many wives-
ignorant of all philosophy; for if women learned to look upon pleasure
and pain, life and death, philosophically, they would become depraved, or
else no longer remain in subjection."141
* We must compare this attitude not with our contemporary European or American
views, but with the reluctance of the medieval clergy to allow a general reading of the
Bible, or the intellectual education of woman.
494 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
In the Code of Manu three persons were ineligible to hold property:
a wife, a son, and a slave; whatever these might earn became the prop-
erty of their master.148 A wife, however, could retain as her own the
dowry and gifts that she had received at her nuptials; and the mother
of a prince might govern in his stead during his minority.148 The husband
could divorce his wife for unchastity; the woman could not divorce her
husband for any cause.144 A wife who drank liquor, or was diseased, or
rebellious, or wasteful, or quarrelsome, might at any time be (not divorced
but) superseded by another wife. Passages of the Code advocate an en-
lightened gentleness to women: they are not to be struck "even with
a flower"; they are not to be watched too strictly, for then their subtlety
will find a way to mischief; and if they like fine raiment it is wise to in-
dulge them, for "if the wife be not elegantly attired, she will not ex-
hilarate her husband," whereas when "a wife is gaily adorned, the whole
house is embellished."145 Way must be made for a woman, as for the
aged or a priest; and "pregnant women, brides, and damsels shall have food
before all other guests."140 Though woman could not rule as a wife, she
might rule as a mother; the greatest tenderness and respect was paid to
the mother of many children; and even the patriarchal code of Manu said,
"The mother exceedcth a thousand fathers in the right to reverence."147
Doubtless the influx of Islamic ideas had something to do with the
decline in the status of woman in India after Vedic days. The custom
of purdah (curtain)— the seclusion of married women— came into India
with the Persians and the Mohammedans, and has therefore been stronger
in the north than in the south. Partly to protect their wives from the
Moslems, Hindu husbands developed a system of purdah so rigid that a
respectable woman could show herself only to her husband and her sons,
and could move in public only under a heavy veil; even the doctor who
treated her and took her pulse had to do so through a curtain."8 In some
circles it was a breach of good manners to inquire after a man's wife,
or to speak, as a guest, to the ladies of the house.149
The custom of burning widows on their husbands' pyres was also an
importation into India. Herodotus describes it as practised by the ancient
Scythians and Thracians; if we may believe him, the wives of a Thracian
fought for the privilege of being slain over his grave.180 Probably the rite
came down from the almost world-wide primitive usage of immolating
one or more of the wives or concubines of a prince or rich man, along
with slaves and other perquisites, to take care of him in the Beyond.181 The
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 495
Atharva-veda speaks of it as an old custom, but the Rig-veda indicates
that in Vedic days it had been softened to the requirement that the widow
should lie on her husband's pyre for a moment before his cremation.18*
The Mahabharata shows the institution restored and unrepentant; it gives
several examples of suttee,* and lays down the rule that the chaste widow
does not wish to survive her husband, but enters proudly into the fire.188
The sacrifice was effected by burning the wife in a pit, or, among the
Telugus in the south, by burying her alive."4 Strabo reports that suttee
prevailed in India in the time of Alexander, and that the Kathaei, a Punjab
tribe, had made suttee a law in order to prevent wives from poisoning
their husbands.185 Manu makes no mention of the practice. The Brahmans
opposed it at first, then accepted it, and finally lent it a religious sanc-
tion by interpreting it as bound up with the eternity of marriage: a woman
once married to a man remained his forever, and would be rejoined
to him in his later lives.188 In Rajasthan the absolute possession of the
wife by the husband took the form of the johur, in which a Rajput, fac-
ing certain defeat, immolated his wives before advancing to his own
death in battle.187 The usage was widespread under the Moguls, despite
Moslem abhorrence; and even the powerful Akbar failed to dislodge it.
On one occasion Akbar himself tried to dissuade a Hindu bride who
wished to be burned on the pyre of her dead betrothed; but though the
Brahmans added their pleas to the king's, she insisted on the sacrifice; as
the flames reached her, and Akbar's son Daniyal continued to argue with
her, she replied, "Do not annoy, do not annoy." Another widow, re-
jecting similar pleas, held her finger in the flame of a lamp until the
finger was completely burned; giving no sign of pain, she indicated in
this way her scorn of those who advised her to refuse the rite.158 In
Vijayanagar suttee sometimes took a wholesale form; not one or a few but
all of the many wives of a prince or a captain followed him to death.
Conti reports that the Raya or King had selected three thousand of his
twelve thousand wives as favorites, "on condition that at his death they
should voluntarily burn themselves with him, which is considered to be
a great honor for them."189 It is difficult to say how thoroughly the
medieval Hindu widow was reconciled to suttee by religious inculcation
and belief, and the hope of reunion with her husband in another life.
Suttee became less and less popular as India developed contacts with
*More properly sati, pronounced suttee^ and meaning "devoted wife."
496 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
Europe; but the Hindu widow continued to suffer many disabilities.
Since marriage bound a woman eternally to her husband, her remarriage
after his death was a mortal offense, and was bound to create confusion
in his later existences. The widow was therefore required by Brahman-
ical law to remain unmarried, to shave her head, and live out her life (if
she did not prefer suttee) in the care of her children and in acts of private
charity.1" She was not left destitute; on the contrary she had a first lien
on her husband's estate for her maintenance.181 These rules were followed
only by the orthodox women of the middle and upper classes— i.e., by
some thirty per cent of the population; they were ignored by Moslems,
Sikhs, and the lower castes.108 Hindu opinion likened this second virginity
of the widow to the celibacy of nuns in Christendom; in either case
some women renounced marriage, and were set aside for charitable
ministrations.*
IV. MANNERS, CUSTOMS AND CHARACTER
Sexual modesty— Hygiene— Dress— Appearance— The gentle art
among the Hindus— Faults and virtues— Games-
Festivals— Death
It will seem incredible to the provincial mind that the same people
that tolerated such institutions as child marriage, temple prostitution and
suttee was also pre-eminent in gentleness, decency and courtesy. Aside
from a few devadasis, prostitutes were rare in India, and sexual propriety
was exceptionally high. "It must be admitted," says the unsympathetic
Dubois, "that the laws of etiquette and social politeness are much more
clearly laid down, and much better observed by all classes of Hindus, even
by the lowest, than they are by people of corresponding social position
in Europe."104 The leading role played by sex in Occidental conversation
and wit was quite alien to Hindu manners, which forbade any public
intimacy between men and women, and looked upon the physical contact
of the sexes in dancing as improper and obscene.100 A Hindu woman might
go anywhere in public without fear of molestation or insult;188 indeed the
* In considering alien customs we must continually remind ourselves that foreign prac-
tices cannot be judged intelligently by our own moral code. "The superficial observer
who applies his own standard to the customs of all nations," says Tod, "laments with
affected philanthropy the degraded condition of the Hindu female, in which sentiment he
would find her little disposed to join him."188 On contemporary changes in these customs
cf. Chapter XXII below.
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 497
risk, as the Oriental saw the matter, was all on the other side. Manu warns
men: "Woman is by nature ever inclined to tempt man; hence a man
should not sit in a secluded place even with his nearest female relative";
and he must never look higher than the ankles of a passing girl.107
Cleanliness was literally next to godliness in India; hygiene was not,
as Anatole France thought it, la seule morale, but it was made an essential
part of piety. Manu laid down, many centuries ago, an exacting code
of physical refinement. "Early in the morning," one instruction reads,
"let him" (the Brahman) "bathe, decorate his body, clean his teeth, apply
collyrium to his eyes, and worship the gods."108 The native schools made
good manners and personal cleanliness the first courses in the curriculum.
Every day the caste Hindu would bathe his body, and wash the simple
robe he was to wear; it seemed to him abominable to use the same gar-
ment, unwashed, for more than a day.10" "The Hindus," said Sir William
Huber, "stand out as examples of bodily cleanliness among Asiatic races,
and, we may add, among the races of the world. The ablutions of the
Hindu have passed into a proverb."170*
Yuan Chwang, 1300 years ago, described thus the eating habits of the
Hindus:
They are pure of themselves, and not from compulsion. Before
every meal they must have a wash; the fragments and remains are
not served up again; the food utensils are not passed on; those which
are of pottery or of wood must be thrown away after use, and those
which are of gold, silver, copper or iron get another polishing.
As soon as a meal is over they chew the tooth-stick and make them-
selves clean. Before they have finished ablutions they do not come
in contact with each other.172
The Brahman usually washed his hands, feet and teeth before and after
each meal; he ate with his fingers from food on a leaf, and thought it un-
clean to use twice a plate, a knife or a fork; and when finished he rinsed
his mouth seven times.173 The toothbrush was always new—a twig freshly
plucked from a tree; to the Hindu it seemed disreputable to brush the
teeth with the hair of an animal, or to use the same brush twice:174 so
many are the ways in which men may scorn one another. The Hindu
* A great Hindu, Lajpat Rai, reminded Europe that "long before the European nations
knew anything of hygiene, and long before they realized the value of tooth-brush and a
daily bath, the Hindus were, as a rule, given to both. Only twenty years ago London
houses had no bath-tubs, and the tooth-brush was a luxury."171
498 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
chewed almost incessantly the leaf of the betel plant, which blackened
the teeth in a manner disagreeable to Europeans, and agreeable to himself.
This and the occasional use of opium consoled him for his usual abstention
from tobacco and intoxicating drinks.
Hindu law books give explicit rules for menstrual hygiene,175 and for meet-
ing the demands of nature. Nothing could exceed in complexity or solemnity
the ritual for Brahman defecation."' The Twice-born must use only his
left hand in this rite, and must cleanse the parts with water; and he con-
sidered his house defiled by the very presence of Europeans who contented
themselves with paper.177 The Outcastes, however, and many Shudras, were
less particular, and might turn any roadside into a privy.178 In the quarters
occupied by these classes public sanitation was confined to an open sewer
line in the middle of the street.17*
In so warm a climate clothing was a superfluity, and beggars and saints
bridged the social scale in agreeing to do without it. One southern caste,
like the Canadian Doukhobors, threatened to migrate if its members were
compelled to wear clothing.180 Until the late eighteenth century it was
probably the custom in southern India (as still in Bali) for both sexes to go
naked above the waist.181 Children were dressed for the most part in beads
and rings. Most of the population went barefoot; if the orthodox Hindu
wore shoes they had to be of cloth, for under no circumstances would he use
shoes of leather. A large number of the men contented themselves with
loin cloths; when they needed more covering they bound some fabric about
the waist, and threw the loose end over the left shoulder. The Rajputs wore
trousers of every color and shape, with a tunic girdled by a ceinture, a
scarf at the neck, sandals or boots on the feet, and a turban on the head.
The turban had come in with the Moslems, and had been taken over by the
Hindus, who wound it carefully around the head in varying manner ac-
cording to caste, but always with the generosity of a magician unfurling
endless silk; sometimes one turban, unraveled, reached a length of seventy
feet.188 The women wore a flowing robe— colorful silk sari, or homespun
khaddar— which passed over both shoulders, clasped the waist tightly, and
then fell to the feet; often a few inches of bronze flesh were left bare below
the breast. Hair was oiled to guard it against the desiccating sun; men di-
vided theirs in the center and drew it together into a tuft behind the left
ear; women coiled a part of theirs upon their heads, but let the rest hang
free, often decorating it with flowers, or covering it with a scarf. The men
were handsome, the young women were beautiful and all presented a mag-
nificent carriage;118 an ordinary Hindu in a loin cloth often had more dignity
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 499
than a European diplomat completely equipped. Pierre Loti thought it "in-
contestable that the beauty of the Aryan race reaches its highest develop-
ment of perfection and refinement among the upper class" in India.184 Both
sexes were adept in cosmetics, and the women felt naked without jewelry.
A ring in the left nostril denoted marriage. On the forehead, in most cases,
was a painted symbol of religious faith.
It is difficult to go below these surface appearances and describe the
character of the Hindus, for every people harbors all virtues and all vices,
and witnesses tend to select such of these as will point their moral and adorn
their tale. "I think we may take as their greatest vice," says Pere Dubois,
"the untrustworthiness, deceit and double-dealing . . . which are common to
all Hindus. . . . Certain it is that there is no nation in the world which
thinks so lightly of an oath or of perjury.""5 "Lying," says Westermarck,
"has been called the national vice of the Hindus."188 "Hindus are wily and
deceitful," says Macaulay.187 According to the laws of Manu and the prac-
tice of the world a lie told for good motives is forgivable; if, for example,
the death of a priest would result from speaking the truth, falsehood is
justifiable."8 But Yuan Chwang tells us: "They do not practice deceit, and
they keep their sworn obligations. . . . They will not take anything wrong-
fully, and they yield more than fairness requires."180 Abu-1 Fazl, not preju-
diced in favor of India, reports the Hindus of the sixteenth century as "re-
ligious, affable, cheerful, lovers of justice, given to retirement, able in busi-
ness, admirers of truth, grateful, and of unbounded fidelity."190 "Their hon-
esty," said honest Keir Hardie, "is proverbial. They borrow and lend on
word of mouth, and the repudiation of a debt is almost unknown."181 "I
have had before me," says a British judge in India, "hundreds of cases in
which a man's property, liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie,
and he has refused to tell it."199 How shall we reconcile these conflicting tes-
timonies? Perhaps it is very simple: some Hindus are honest, and some are
not.
Again the Hindus are very cruel and gentle. The English language has
derived a short and ugly word from that strange secret society— almost a
caste— of Thugs which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries committed
thousands of atrocious murders in order (they said) to offer the victims as
sacrifices to the goddess Kali."* Vincent Smith writes of these Thugs (lit-
erally, "cheats") in terms not quite irrelevant to our time:
The gangs had little to fear, and enjoyed almost complete im-
munity; . . . they always had powerful protectors. The moral
feeling of the people had sunk so low that there were no signs of
general reprehension of the cold-blooded crimes committed by the
500 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
Thugs. They were accepted as part of the established order of
things; and until the secrets of the organization were given away,
... it was usually impossible to obtain evidence against even the
most notorious Thugs.198*
Nevertheless there is comparatively little crime in India, and little vio-
lence. By universal admission the Hindus are gentle to the point of timid-
ity;104 too worshipful and good-natured, too long broken upon the wheel of
conquest and alien despotisms, to be good fighters except in the sense that
they can bear pain with unequaled bravery.11* Their greatest faults are proba-
bly listlessness and laziness; but in the Hindus these are not faults but climatic
necessities and adaptations, like the dolce far niente of the Latin peoples, and
the economic fever of Americans. The Hindus are sensitive, emotional,
temperamental, imaginative; therefore they are better artists and poets than
rulers or executives. They can exploit their fellows with the same zest that
characterizes the entrepreneur everywhere; yet they are given to limitless
charity, and are the most hospitable hosts this side of barbarism.100 Even
their enemies admit their courtesy,1"7 and a generous Britisher sums up his
long experience by ascribing to the higher classes in Calcutta "polished man-
ners, clearness and comprehensiveness of understanding, liberality of feeling,
and independence of principle, that would have stamped them gentlemen in
any country in the world."1"8
The Hindu genius, to an outsider, seems sombre, and doubtless the Hindus
have not had much cause for laughter. The dialogues of Buddha indicate a
great variety of games, including one that strangely resembles chess;1""*
* Chess is so old that half the nations of antiquity claim its birthplace. The view gen-
erally accepted by archcologists of the game is that it arose in India; certainly we find
there its oldest indisputable appearance (ca. 750 A.D.). The word chess comes from the
Persian shah, king; and checkmate is originally shah-mat— "king dead." The Persians
called it shatraiij, and took both the word and the game, through the Arabs, from India,
where it was known as chaturanga, or "four angles"— elephants, horses, chariots and foot-
soldiers. The Arabs still call the bishop al-fil— i.e., elephant (from aleph-hind, Arabic for
"ox of India").800
The Hindus tell a delightful legend to account for the origin of the game. At the be-
ginning of the fifth century of our era (the story goes), a Hindu monarch offended his
Brahman and Kshatriya admirers by ignoring their counsels and forgetting that the love
of the people is the surest support of a throne. A Brahman, Sissa, undertook to open the
eyes of the young king by devising a game in which the piece that represented the
king, though highest in dignity and value (as in Oriental war), should be, alone, almost
helpless; hence came chess. The ruler liked the game so well that he invited Sissa to
name his reward. Sissa modestly asked for some grains of rice, the quantity to be de-
termined by placing one grain upon the first of the sixty-four squares of the chess-board,
and then doubling the number of grains with each succeeding square. The king agreed at
CHAP. XVIl) THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE 501
but neither these nor their successors exhibit the vivacity and joyousness of
Western games. Akbar, in the sixteenth century, introduced into India the
game of polo,* which had apparently come from Persia and was making its
way across Tibet to China and Japan;308 and it pleased him to play pachisi
(the modern "parchesi") on squares cut in the pavement of the palace
quadrangle at Agra, with pretty slave-girls as living pieces.908
Frequent religious festivals lent color to public life. Greatest of all
was the Durga-Puja, in honor of the great goddess-mother Kali. For
weeks before its approach the Hindus feasted and sang; but the culminat-
ing ceremonial was a procession in which every family carried an image
of the goddess to the Ganges, flung it into the river, and returned home-
ward with all merriness spent.204 The Holi festival celebrated in honor
of the goddess Vasanti took on a Saturnalian character: phallic emblems
were carried in parade, and were made to simulate the motions of coitus.800
In Chota Nagpur the harvest was the signal for general license; "men
set aside all conventions, women all modesty, and complete liberty was
given to the girls." The Parganait, a caste of peasants in the Rajmahal
Mills, held an annual agricultural festival in which the unmarried were
allowed to indulge freely in promiscuous relations.200 Doubtless we have
here again relics of vegetation magic, intended to promote the fertility of
families and the fields. More decorous were the wedding festivals that
marked the great event in the life of every Hindu; many a father brought
himself to ruin in providing a sumptuous feast for the marriage of his
daughter or his son.207
At the other end of life was the final ceremony— cremation. In Buddha's
days the Zoroastrian exposure of the corpse to birds of prey was the usual
mode of departure; but persons of distinction were burned, after death,
on a pyre, and their ashes were buried under a tope or stupa—i.^ a
memorial shrine.208 In later days cremation became the privilege of every
man; each night one might see fagots being brought together for the
burning of the dead. In Yuan Chwang's time it was not unusual for the
very old to take death by the forelock and have themselves rowed by
their children to the middle of the Ganges, where they threw themselves
once, but was soon surprised to find that he had promised away his kingdom. Sissa took
the opportunity to point out to his master how easily a monarch may be led astray when
he scorns his counsellors.*1 Credat qui wilt.
* From the Tibetan word pulu, Hindu Haiti dialect polo, meaning ball; cf. the Latin
pila.
502 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVII
into the saving stream."" Suicide under certain conditions has always
found more approval in the East than in the West; it was permitted under
the laws of Akbar to the old or the incurably diseased, and to those who
wished to offer themselves as sacrifices to the gods. Thousands of Hindus
have made their last oblation by starving themselves to death, or burying
themselves in snow, or covering themselves with cow-dung and setting
it on fire, or allowing crocodiles to devour them at the mouths of the
Ganges. Among the Brahmans a form of hara-kiri arose, by which suicide
was committed to avenge an injury or point a wrong. When one of the
Rajput kings levied a subsidy upon the priestly caste, several of the
wealthiest Brahmans stabbed themselves to death in his presence, laying
upon him the supposedly most terrible and effective curse of all— that
of a dying priest. The Brahmanical lawbooks required that he who had
resolved to die by his own hand should fast for three days; and that he
who attempted suicide and failed should perform the severest penances.*0
Life is a stage with one entrance, but many exits.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Paradise of the Gods
IN no other country is religion so powerful, or so important, as in India.
If the Hindus have permitted alien governments to be set over them
again and again it is partly because they did not care much who ruled
or exploited them— natives or foreigners; the crucial matter was religion,
not politics; the soul, not the body; endless later lives rather than this
passing one. When Ashoka became a saint, and Akbar almost adopted
Hinduism, the power of religion was revealed over even the strongest
men. In our century it is a saint, rather than a statesman, who for the
first time in history has unified all India.
I. THE LATER HISTORY OF BUDDHISM
The Zenith of Buddhism - The Two Vehicles - "Mahay ana" -
Buddhism, Stoicism and Christianity — The decay of Bud-
dhism—Its migrations: Ceylon, Burma, Turkestan, Tibet,
Cambodia, China, Japan
Two hundred years after Ashoka's death Buddhism reached the peak
of its curve in India. The period of Buddhist growth from Ashoka to
Harsha was in many ways the climax of Indian religion, education and
art. But the Buddhism that prevailed was not that of Buddha; we might
better describe it as that of his rebellious disciple Subhadda, who, on hear-
ing of the Master's death, said to the monks: "Enough, sirs! Weep not,
neither lament! We are well rid of the great Samana. We used to be
annoyed by being told, 'This beseems you, this beseems you not.' But
now we shall be able to do whatever we like; and what we do not like,
that we shall not have to do!"1
The first thing they did with their freedom was to split into sects.
Within two centuries of Buddha's death eighteen varieties of Buddhistic
doctrine had divided the Master's heritage. The Buddhists of south India
and Ceylon held fast for a time to the simpler and purer creed of the
Founder, which came to be called Hinayana, or the "Lesser Vehicle":
503
504 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVIII
they worshiped Buddha as a great teacher, but not as a god, and their
Scriptures were the Pali texts of the more ancient faith. But throughout
northern India, Tibet, Mongolia, China and Japan the Buddhism that
prevailed was the Mahay ana, or the "Greater Vehicle," defined and propa-
gated by Kanishka's Council; these (politically) inspired theologians
announced the divinity of Buddha, surrounded him with angels and
saints, adopted the Yoga asceticism of Patanjali, and issued in Sanskrit
a new set of Holy Writ which, though it lent itself readily to metaphysical
and scholastic refinements, proclaimed and certified a more popular re-
ligion than the austere pessimism of Shakya-muni.
The Mahay ana was Buddhism softened with Brahmanical deities, prac-
tices and myths, and adapted to the needs of the Kushan Tatars and
the Mongols of Tibet, over whom Kanishka had extended his rule. A
heaven was conceived in which there were many Buddhas, of whom
Amida Buddha, the Redeemer, came to be the best beloved by the
people; this heaven and a corresponding hell were to be the reward or
punishment of good or evil done on earth, and would thereby liberate
some of the King's militia for other services. The greatest of the saints,
in this new theology, were the Bodhisattivas, or future Buddhas, who
voluntarily refrained from achieving the Nirvana (here freedom from
rebirth) that was within their merit and power, in order to be reborn
into life after life, and to help others on earth to find the Way.* As in
Mediterranean Christianity, these saints became so popular that they
almost crowded out the head of the pantheon in worship and art. The
veneration of relics, the use of holy water, candles, incense, the rosary,
clerical vestments, a liturgical dead language, monks and nuns, monastic
tonsure and celibacy, confession, fast days, the canonization of saints,
purgatory and masses for the dead flourished in Buddhism as in medieval
Christianity, and seem to have appeared in Buddhism first, t Mahay ana
became to Hmayana or primitive Buddhism what Catholicism was to
Stoicism and primitive Christianity. Buddha, like Luther, had made
* In one of the Puranas there is a typical legend of the king who, though deserving
heaven, stays in hell to comfort the sufferers, and will not leave it until all the damned
are released.11
t"The Buddhists," says Fergusson, "kept five centuries in advance of the Roman
Church in the invention and use of all the ceremonies and forms common to both re-
ligions."3 Edmunds has shown in detail the astonishing parallelism between the Buddhist
and the Christian gospels.* However, our knowledge of the beginnings of these cus-
toms and beliefs is too vague to warrant positive conclusions as to priority.
CHAP. XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 505
the mistake of supposing that the drama of religious ritual could be
replaced with sermons and morality; and the victory of a Buddhism rich
in myths, miracles, ceremonies and intermediating saints corresponds to
the ancient and current triumph of a colorful and dramatic Catholicism
over the austere simplicity of early Christianity and modern Protestantism.
That same popular preference for polytheism, miracles and myths
which destroyed Buddha's Buddhism finally destroyed, in India, the
Buddhism of the Greater Vehicle itself. For— to speak with the hindsight
wisdom of the historian— if Buddhism was to take over so much of Hin-
duism, so many of its legends, its rites and its gods, soon very little would
remain to distinguish the two religions; and the one with the deeper
roots, the more popular appeal, and the richer economic resources and
political support would gradually absorb the other. Rapidly superstition,
which seems to be the very lifeblood of our race, poured over from the
older faith to the younger one, until even the phallic enthusiasms of the
Shakti sects found place in the ritual of Buddhism. Slowly the patient and
tenacious Brahmans recaptured influence and imperial patronage; and
the success of the youthful philosopher Shankara in restoring the authority
of the Vedas as the basis of Hindu thought put an end to the intellectual
leadership of the Buddhists in India.
The final blow came from without, and was in a sense invited by
Buddhism itself. The prestige of the Scmgba, or Buddhist Order, had,
after Ashoka, drawn the best blood of Magadha into a celibate and pacific
clergy; even in Buddha's time some patriots had complained that "the
monk Gautama causes fathers to beget no sons, and families to become
extinct."5 The growth of Buddhism and monasticism in the first year
of our era sapped the manhood of India, and conspired with political
division to leave India open to easy conquest. When the Arabs came,
pledged to spread a simple and stoic monotheism, they looked with scorn
upon the lazy, venal, miracle-mongering Buddhist monks; they smashed
the monasteries, killed thousands of monks, and made monasticism un-
popular with the cautious. The survivors were re-absorbed into the
Hinduism that had begotten them; the ancient orthodoxy received the
penitent heresy, and "Brahmanism killed Buddhism by a fraternal em-
brace."8 Brahmanism had always been tolerant; in all the history of the
rise and fall of Buddhism and a hundred other sects we find much dis-
putation, but no instance of persecution. On the contrary Brahmanism
eased the return of the prodigal by proclaiming Buddha a god (as an
506 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP.XVUI
avatar of Vishnu), ending animal sacrifice, and accepting into orthodox
practice the Buddhist doctrine of the sanctity of all animal life. Quietly
and peacefully, after half a thousand years of gradual decay, Buddhism
disappeared from India.*
Meanwhile it was winning nearly all the remainder of the Asiatic world.
Its ideas, its literature and its art spread to Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula
in the south, to Tibet and Turkestan in the north, to Burma, Siam, Cam-
bodia, China, Korea and Japan in the east; in this way all of these regions
except the Far East received as much civilization as they could digest,
precisely as western Europe and Russia received civilization from Roman
and Byzantine monks in the Middle Ages. The cultural zenith of most
of these nations came from the stimulus of Buddhism. From the time
of Ashoka to its decay in the ninth century, Anuradhapura, in Ceylon, was
one of the major cities of the Oriental world; the Bo-tree there has been
worshiped for two thousand years, and the temple on the heights of
Kandy is one of the Meccas of the 150,000,000 Buddhists of Asia.t The
Buddhism of Burma is probably the purest now extant, and its monks often
approach the ideal of Buddha; under their ministrations the 13,000,000 in-
habitants of Burma have reached a standard of living considerably higher
than that of India.7 Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Pelliot have unearthed
from the sands of Turkestan hundreds of Buddhist manuscripts, and other
evidences of a culture which flourished there from the time of Kanishka to
the thirteenth century A.D. In the seventh century of our era the enlight-
ened warrior, Srong-tsan Gampo, established an able government in Tibet,
annexed Nepal, built Lhasa as his capital, and made it rich as a halfway
house in Chinese-Indian trade. Having invited Buddhist monks to come
from India and spread Buddhism and education among his people, he retired
from rule for four years in order to learn how to read and write, and in-
augurated the Golden Age of Tibet. Thousands of monasteries were built
in the mountains and on the great plateau; and a voluminous Tibetan canon
of Buddhist books was published, in three hundred and thirty-three volumes,
which preserved for modern scholarship many works whose Hindu originals
* Today there are in India proper only 3,000,000 Buddhists— one per cent of the popu-
lation.
t The temple ax Kandy contains the famous "eye-tooth of Buddha"— two inches long and
an inch in diameter. It is enclosed in a jeweled casket, carefully guarded from the eyes
of the people, and carried periodically in a solemn procession which draws Buddhists from
every corner of the Orient. On the walls of the temple, frescoes show the gentle Buddha
killing sinners in hell. The lives of great men all remind us how helplessly they may be
transmogrified after their death.
CHAP. XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 507
have long been lost.' Here, eremitically sealed from the rest of the world,
Buddhism developed into a maze of superstitions, monasticism and ecclesi-
asricism rivaled only by early medieval Europe; and the Dalai Lama (or
"All-Embracing Priest"), hidden away in the great Potala monastery that
overlooks the city of Lhasa, is still believed by the good people of Tibet to
be the living incarnation of the Bodhisattwa Avalokiteshvara.* In Cambodia,
or Indo-China, Buddhism conspired with Hinduism to provide the religious
framework for one of the richest ages in the history of Oriental art. Budd-
hism, like Christianity, won its greatest triumphs outside the land of its
birth; and it won them without shedding a drop of blood.
II. THE NEW DIVINITIES
Hinduism— Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva— Krishna— Kali— Animal gods
—The sacred cow— Polytheism and monotheism
The "Hinduism" that now replaced Buddhism was not one religion,
nor was it only religion; it was a medley of faiths and ceremonies whose
practitioners had only four qualities in common: they recognized the
caste system and the leadership of the Brahmans, they reverenced the cow
as especially representative of divinity, they accepted the law of Karma
and the transmigration of souls, and they replaced with new gods the
deities of the Vedas. These faiths had in part antedated and survived
Vedic nature worship; in part they had grown from the connivance of
the Brahmans at rites, divinities and beliefs unknown to the Scriptures
and largely contrary to the Vedic spirit; they had boiled in the cauldron
of Hindu religious thought even while Buddhism maintained a passing
intellectual ascendancy.
The gods of Hinduism were characterized by a kind of anatomical
superabundance vaguely symbolizing extraordinary knowledge, activity
or power. The new Brahma had four faces, Kartikeya six; Shiva had
three eyes, Indra a thousand; and nearly every deity had four arms.10
At the head of this revised pantheon was Brahma, chivalrously neuter,
acknowledged master of the gods, but no more noticed in actual worship
than a constitutional monarch in modern Europe. Combined with him
and Shiva in a triad— not a trinity— of dominant deities was Vishnu, a
god of love who repeatedly became man in order to help mankind. His
greatest incarnation was Krishna; as such he was born in a prison, had
accomplished many marvels of heroism and romance, healed the deaf
and the blind, helped lepers, championed the poor, and raised men from
508 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVIII
the grave. He had a beloved disciple, Arjuna, before whom he was trans-
figured. He died, some say, by an arrow; others say by a crucifixion on
a tree. He descended into hell, rose to heaven, and will return on the last
day to judge the quick and the dead."
To the Hindu there are three chief processes in life and the universe:
creation, preservation and destruction. Hence divinity takes for him three
main forms: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the
Destroyer; these are the Trimurti, or "Three Shapes," which all Hindus
but the Jains adore.* Popular devotion is divided between Vaishnavism,
the religion of Vishnu, and Shivaism, the religion of Shiva. The two
cults are peaceful neighbors, and sometimes hold sacrifices in the same
temple;" and the wise Brahmans, followed by a majority of the people,
pay equal honor to both these gods. Pious Vaishnavites paint upon their
foreheads every morning with red clay the trident sign of Vishnu; pious
Shivaites trace horizontal lines across their brows with cow-dung ashes,
or wear the linga— symbol of the male organ— fastened on their arms or
hung from their necks.14
The worship of Shiva is one of the oldest, most profound and most
terrible elements in Hinduism. Sir John Marshall reports "unmistakable
evidence" of the cult of Shiva at Mohenjo-daro, partly in the form of a
three-headed Shiva, partly in the form of little stone columns which he
presumes to be as phallic as their modern counterparts. "Shivaism," he
concludes, "is therefore the most ancient living faith in the world." tr§
The name of the god is a euphemism; literally it means "propitious";
whereas Shiva himself is viewed chiefly as a god of cruelty and destruc-
tion, the personification of that cosmic force which destroys, one after
another, all the forms that reality takes— all cells, all organisms, all species,
all ideas, all works, all planets and all things. Never has another people
dared to face the impcrmanence of forms, and the impartiality of nature,
so frankly, or to recognize so clearly that evil balances good, that destruc-
tion goes step by step with creation, and that all birth is a capital crime,
punishable with death. The Hindu, tortured with a thousand misfortunes
and sufferings, sees in them the handiwork of a vivacious force that
* In the census of 1921 the religions of India divided the population as follows: Hindu-
ism, 216,261,000; Sikhs, 3,239,000; Jains, i, 1 78,000; Buddhists, 11,571,000 (nearly all in Burma
and Ceylon); Zoroastnans (Parsecs), 102,000; Moslems, 68,735,000; Jews, 22,000; Christians,
4,754,000 (chiefly Europeans).18
t Nevertheless the name of Shiva, like that of Brahman itself, cannot be found in the
Rig-vedz. Patanjali the grammarian mentions Shiva images and devotees ca. 150 B.C.W
CHAP. XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 509
appears to find pleasure in breaking down everything that Brahma— the
creative power in nature— has produced. Shiva dances to the tune of a
perpetually forming, dissolving and re-forming world.
Just as death is the penalty of birth, so birth is the frustration of death;
and the same god who symbolizes destruction represents also, for the
Hindu mind, that passion and torrent of reproduction which overrides
the death of the individual with the continuance of the race. In some
parts of India, particularly Bengal, this creative or reproductive energy
(Shakti) of Shiva or nature is personified in the figure of Shiva's wife,
Kali (Parvati, Uma, Durga), and is worshiped in one of the many Shakti
cults. Until the last century this worship was a bloody ritual, often in-
volving human sacrifice; latterly the goddess has been content with
goats." The deity is portrayed for the populace by a black figure with
gaping mouth and protruding tongue, adorned with snakes and dancing
upon a corpse; her earrings are dead men, her necklace is a string of
skulls, her face and breasts are smeared with blood.18 Two of her four
hands carry a sword and a severed head; the other two are extended in
blessing and protection. For Kali-Parvati is the goddess of motherhood
as well as the bride of destruction and death; she can be tender as well
as cruel, and can smile as well as kill; once, perhaps, she was a mother-
goddess in Sumeria, and was imported into India before she became so
terrible.10 Doubtless she and her lord arc made as horrible as possible in
order that timid worshipers may be frightened into decency, and perhaps
into generosity to the priests.*
These are the greater gods of Hinduism; but they are merely five of
thirty million deities in the Hindu pantheon; only to catalogue them
would take a hundred volumes. Some of them are more properly angels,
some arc what we should call devils, some are heavenly bodies like the
sun, some are mascots like Lakshmi (goddess of good luck), many of
them are beasts of the field or fowl of the air. To the Hindu mind there
was no real gap between animals and men; animals as well as men had souls,
and souls were perpetually passing from men into animals, and back again;
all these species were woven into one infinite web of Karma and reincar-
nation. The elephant, for example, became the god Ganesha, and was
recognized as Shiva's son;*1 he personified man's animal nature, and at the
same time his image served as a charm against evil fortune. Monkeys
* The priests of Shivaism, however, are seldom Brahmans; and the majority of the
Brahmans look with scorn and regret upon the Shakti cult."
510 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVIII
and snakes were terrible, and therefore divine. The cobra or naga, whose
bite causes almost immediate death, received especial veneration; annually
the people of many parts of India celebrated a religious feast in honor
of snakes, and made offerings of milk and plantains to the cobras at the
entrance to their holes." Temples have been erected in honor of snakes,
as in eastern Mysore; great numbers of reptiles take up their residence
in these buildings, and are fed and cared for by the priests.*8 Crocodiles,
tigers, peacocks, parrots, even rats, receive their meed of worship.84
Most sacred of all animals to a Hindu is the cow. Images of bulls, in
every material and size, appear in temples and homes, and in the city
squares; the cow itself is the most popular organism in India, and has full
freedom of the streets; its dung is used as fuel or a holy ointment; its urine
is a sacred wine that will wash away all inner or outer uncleanness. Under
no circumstances are these animals to be eaten by a Hindu, nor is their
flesh to be worn as clothing— headgear or gloves or shoes; and when they
die they are to be buried with the pomp of religious ritual.25 Perhaps
wise statesmanship once decreed this tabu in order to preserve agricultural
draft animals for the growing population of India;28 today, however, they
number almost one-fourth as many as the population.87 The Hindu view
is that it is no more unreasonable to feel a profound affection for cows,
and a profound revulsion at the thought of eating them, than it is to have
similar feelings in regard to domestic cats and dogs; the cynical view of
the matter is that the Brahmans believed that cows should never be
slaughtered, that insects should never be injured, and that widows should
be burned alive. The truth is that the worship of animals occurs in the
history of every people, and that if one must deify any animal, the kind
and placid cow seems entitled to her measure of devotion. We must not
be too haughtily shocked by the menagerie of Hindu gods; we too have
had our serpent-devil of Eden, our golden calf of the Old Testament, our
sacred fish of the catacombs, and our gracious Lamb of God.
The secret of polytheism is the inability of the simple mind to think
in impersonal terms; it can understand persons more readily than forces,
wills more easily than laws.28 The Hindu suspects that our human senses
see only the outside of the events that they report; behind the veil of
these phenomena, he thinks, there are countless superphysical beings whom,
in Kant's phrase, we can only conceive but never perceive. A certain
philosophical tolerance in the Brahmans has added to the teeming pantheon
of India; local or tribal gods have been received into the Hindu Valhalla
CHAP.XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 511
by adoption, usually by interpreting them as aspects or avatars of accepted
deities; every faith could get its credentials if it paid its dues. In the end
nearly every god became a phase, attribute or incarnation of another god,
until all these divinities, to adult Hindu minds, merged into one; poly-
theism became pantheism, almost monotheism, almost monism. Just as a
good Christian may pray to the Madonna or one of a thousand saints,
and yet be a monotheist in the sense that he recognizes one God as
supreme, so the Hindu prays to Kali or Rama or Krishma or Ganesha
without presuming for a moment that these are supreme deities.* Some
Hindus recognize Vishnu as supreme, and call Shiva merely a subordinate
divinity; some call Shiva supreme, and make Vishnu an angel; if only a
few worship Brahma it is because of its impersonality, its intangibility,
its distance, and for the same reason that most churches in Christendom
were erected to Mary or a saint, while Christianity waited for Voltaire
to raise a chapel to God.
III. BELIEFS
The "Puranas" — The reincarnations of the universe — The mi-
grations of the soul— "Karma"— Its philosophical aspects
—Life as evil— Release
Mingled with this complex theology is a complex mythology at once
superstitious and profound. The Vedas having died in the language in
which they were written, and the metaphysics of the Brahman schools
being beyond the comprehension of the people, Vyasa and others, over
a period of a thousand years (500 B.C.— 500 A.D.), composed eighteen
Pura?7as— "old stories"— in 400,000 couplets, expounding to the laity the
exact truth about the creation of the world, its periodical evolution and
dissolution, the genealogy of the gods, and the history of the heroic age.
These books made no pretense to literary form, logical order, or numer-
ical moderation; they insisted that the lovers Urvashi and Pururavas spent
61,000 years in pleasure and delight.80 But through the intelligibility of
their language, the attractiveness of their parables, and the orthodoxy of
their doctrine they became the second Bible of Hinduism, the grand
repository of its superstitions, its myths, even of its philosophy. Here,
for example, in the Vishnupurana, is the oldest and ever-recurrent theme
* Excerpt from the 1901 Census Report to the British Government of India: *'The gen-
eral result of my inquiries is that the great majority of Mind us have a firm belief in one
Supreme Being."21'
512 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVIII
of Hindu thought— that individual separateness is an illusion, and that all
life is one:
After a thousand years came Ribhu
To Nidagha's city, to impart further knowledge to him.
He saw him outside the city
Just as the King was about to enter with a great train of attendants,
Standing afar and holding himself apart from the crowd,
His neck wizened with fasting, returning from the wood with fuel
and grass.
When Ribhu saw him, he went to him and greeted him and said:
"O Brahman, why standcst thou here alone?"
Nidagha said: "Behold the crowd pressing about the King,
Who is just entering the city. That is why I stand alone."
Ribhu said: "Which of these is the King?
And who arc the others?
Tell me that, for thou seemest informed."
Nidagha said: "He who rides upon the fiery elephant, towering
like a mountain peak,
That is the King. The others are his attendants."
Ribhu said: "These two, the King and the elephant, are pointed out
by you
Without being separated by mark of distinction;
Give me the mark of distinction between them.
I would know, which is here the elephant and which the King."
Nidagha said: "The elephant is below, the King is above him;
Who docs not know the relationship of borne to bearer?"
Ribhu said: "That I may know, teach me.
What is that which is indicated by the word 'below', and what is
'above'?"
Straight Nidagha sprang upon the Guru* and said to him:
"Hear now, I will tell thee what thou demandest of me:
I am above like the King. You are below, like the elephant.
For thy instruction I give thee this example."
Ribhu said: "If you are in the position of the King, and I in that of
the elephant,
So tell me this still: Which of us is you, and which is I?"
Then swiftly Nidagha, falling down before him, clasped his feet
and spake:
'Teacher.
CHAP. XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 513
"Truly thou art Ribhu, my Master. . . .
By this I know that thou, my Guru, art come."
Ribhu said: "Yes, to give thee teaching,
Because of thy former willingness to serve me,
I, Ribhu by name, am come to thee.
And what I have just taught thee in short-
Heart of highest truth— that is complete non-duality."*
When he had thus spoken to Nidagha the Guru Ribhu departed
thence.
But forthwith Nidagha, taught by this symbolic teaching, turned his
mind completely to non-duality.
All beings from thenceforth he saw not distinct from himself.
And so he saw Brahman. And thus he achieved the highest sal-
vation.*1
In these Puranas, and kindred writings of medieval India, we find a very
modern theory of the universe. There is no creation in the sense of Genesis;
the world is perpetually evolving and dissolving, growing and decaying,
through cycle after cycle, like every plant in it, and every organism.
Brahma— or, as the Creator is more often called in this literature, Pra japan-
is the spiritual force that upholds this endless process. We do not know
how the universe began, if it did; perhaps, say the Puranas, Brahma laid
it as an egg and then hatched it by sitting on it; perhaps it is a passing error
of the Maker, or a little joke." Each cycle or Kalpa in the history of the
universe is divided into a thousand mabayugas, or great ages, of 4,320,000
years each; and each mahayuga contains four yugas or ages, in which the hu-
man race undergoes a gradual deterioration. In the present mahayuga
three ages have now passed, totaling 3,888,888 years; we live in the fourth
age, the Kali-yuga, or Age of Misery; 5035 years of this bitter era have
elapsed, but 426,965 remain. Then the world will suffer one of its periodical
deaths, and Brahma will begin another "day of Brahma," i.e., a Kalpa of
4,320,000,000 years. In each Kalpa cycle the universe develops by natural
means and processes, and by natural means and processes decays; the de-
struction of the whole world is as certain as the death of a mouse, and, to
the philosopher, not more important. There is no final purpose towards
which the whole creation moves; there is no "progress"; there is only end-
less repetition."
Through all these ages and great ages billions of souls have passed from
species to species, from body to body, from life to life, in weary trans-
* Advaitam; this is the central word of Hindu philosophy; cf. page 549 below.
514 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVIII
migration. An individual is not really an individual, he is a link in the
chain of life, a page in the chronicle of a soul; a species is not really a
separate species, for the souls in these flowers or fleas may yesterday have
been, or tomorrow may be, the spirits of men; all life is one. A man is
only partly a man, he is also an animal; shreds and echoes of past lower
existences linger in him, and make him more akin to the brute than to the
sage. Man is only a part of nature, not actually its center or master;*4 a
life is only a part of a soul's career, not the entirety; every form is transi-
tory, but every reality is continuous and one. The many reincarnations
of a soul are like years or days in a single life, and may bring the soul now
to growth, now to decay. How can the individual life, so brief in the
tropic torrent of generations, contain all the history of a soul, or give
it due punishment and reward for its evil and its good? And if the soul
is immortal, how could one short life determine its fate forever? *
Life can be understood, says the Hindu, only on the assumption that
each existence is bearing the penalty or enjoying the fruits of vice or
virtue in some antecedent life. No deed small or great, good or bad, can
be without effect; everything will out. This is the Law of Karma— the
Law of the Deed—the law of causality in the spiritual world; and it is the
highest and most terrible law of all. If a man does justice and kindness
without sin his reward cannot come in one mortal span; it is stretched
over other lives in which, if his virtue persists, he will be reborn into
loftier place and larger good fortune; but if he lives evilly he will be reborn
as an Outcaste, or a weasel, or a dog.Mt This law of Karma, like the Greek
Moira or Fate, is above both gods and men; even the gods do not change
its absolute operation; or, as the theologians put it, Karma and the will or
action of the gods are one.88 But Karma is not Fate; Fate implies the
helplessness of man to determine his own lot; Karma makes him (taking
all his lives as a whole) the creator of his own destiny. Nor do heaven
and hell end the work of Karma, or the chain of births and deaths; the
soul, after the death of the body, may go to hell for special punishment,
or to heaven for quick and special reward; but no soul stays in hell, and
few souls stay in heaven, forever; nearly every soul that enters them must
•When the Hindu is asked why we have no memory of our past incarnations, he
answers that likewise we have no memory of our infancy; and as we presume our infancy
to explain our maturity, so he presumes past existences to explain our place and fate in
our present life.
t A monk explained his appetite on the ground that in a previous existence he had been
an elephant, and Karma had forgotten to change the appetite with the body.88 A woman
of strong odor was believed to have been formerly a fish."
CHAP.XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 515
sooner or later return to earth, and live out its Karma in new incar-
nations."*
Biologically there was much truth in this doctrine. We are the rein-
carnations of our ancestors, and will be reincarnated in our children; and
the defects of the fathers are to some extent (though perhaps not as much
as good conservatives suppose) visited upon the children, even through
many generations. Karma was an excellent myth for dissuading the
human beast from murder, theft, procrastination, or offcrtorial parsimony;
furthermore, it extended the sense of moral unity and obligations to all
life, and gave the moral code an extent of application far greater, and
more logical, than in any other civilization. Good Hindus do not kill
insects if they can possibly avoid it; "even those whose aspirations to
virtue are modest treat animals as humble brethren rather than as lower
creatures over whom they have dominion by divine command."41 Philo-
sophically, Karma explained for India many facts otherwise obscure in
meaning or bitterly unjust. All those eternal inequalities among men which
so frustrate the eternal demands for equality and justice; all the diverse
forms of evil that blacken the earth and redden the stream of history;
all the suff cring that enters into human life with birth and accompanies it
unto death, seemed intelligible to the Hindu who accepted Karma; these
evils and injustices, these variations between idiocy and genius, poverty
and wealth, were the results of past existences, the inevitable working out
of a law unjust for a life or a moment, but perfectly just in the cnd.f
Karma is one of those many inventions by which men have sought to bear
* The Hindus believe in seven heavens, one of them on earth, the others rising in
gradations above it; there arc twenty-one hells, divided into seven sections. Punishment is
not eternal, but it is diversified. Perc Dubois' description of the Hindu hells rivals Dante's
account of Inferno, and illustrates, like it, the many fears, and the sadistic imagination, of
mankind. "Fire, steel, serpents, venomous insects, savage beasts, birds of prey, gall, poison,
stenches; in a word, everything possible is employed to torment the damned. Some have
a cord run through their nostrils, by which they are forever dragged over the edges of
extremely sharp knives; others arc condemned to pass through the eye of a needle; others
are placed between two flat rocks, which meet, and crush, without killing, them; others
have their eyes pecked incessantly by famished vultures; while millions of them continu-
ally swim and paddle in a pool filled with the urine of dogs or with the mucus from
men's nostrils."40 Such beliefs were probably the privilege of the lowest Hindus and the
strictest theologians. We shall find it easier to forgive them if we remember that our
own Hell, unlike that of India, was not only varied, but eternal.
fThe belief in Karma and transmigration is the greatest theoretical obstacle to the re-
moval of the caste system from India; for the orthodox Hindu presumes that caste dif-
ferences are decreed by the soul's conduct in past lives, and are part of a divine plan
which it would be sacrilegious to disturb.
5*6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVIII
evil patiently, and to face life with hope. To explain evil, and to find
for men some scheme in which they may accept it, if not with good cheer,
then with peace of mind-this is the task that most religions have at-
tempted to fulfill. Since the real problem of life is not suffering but un-
deserved suffering, the religion of India mitigates the human tragedy by
giving meaning and value to grief and pain. The soul, in Hindu theology,
has at least this consolation, that it must bear the consequences only of its
own acts; unless it questions all existence it can accept evil as a passing
punishment, and look forward to tangible rewards for virtue borne.
But in truth the Hindus do question all existence. Oppressed with an
enervating environment, national subjection and economic exploitation,
they have tended to look upon life as more a bitter punishment than an
opportunity or a reward. The Vedas, written by a hardy race coming
in from the north, were almost as optimistic as Whitman; Buddha, rep-
resenting the same stock five hundred years later, already denied the value
of life; the Puranas, five centuries later still, represented a view more pro-
foundly pessimistic than anything known in the West except in stray
moments of philosophic doubt.* The East, until reached by the Industrial
Revolution, could not understand the zest with which the Occident has
taken life; it saw only superficiality and childishness in our merciless
busyness, our discontented ambition, our nerve-racking labor-saving de-
vices, our progress and speed; it could no more comprehend this pro-
found immersion in the surface of things, this clever refusal to look ulti-
mates in the face, than the West can fathom the quiet inertia, the "stag-
nation" and "hopelessness" of the traditional East. Heat cannot under-
stand cold.
"What is the most wonderful thing m the world?" asks Yama of
Yudishthira; and Yudishthira replies: "Man after man dies; seeing this,
men still move about as if they were immortal."44 "By death the world is
afflicted," say the Mahabharata, "by age it is held Li bar, and the nights
*Schopenhaucr, like Buddha, reduced all suffering to the will to live and beget, and
advocated race suicide by voluntary sterility. Heine could hardly pen a stanza without
speaking of death, and could write, in Hindu strain,
Sweet is sleep, but death is better;
Best of all is never to be born.41
Kant, scorning the optimism of Leibnitz, asked: "Would any man of sound understanding
who has lived long enough, and has meditated on the worth of human existence, care to
go again through life's poor play, I do not say on the same conditions, but on any condi-
tions whatever? "*•
CHAP.XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 517
are the Unfailing Ones that are ever coming and going. When I know
that death cannot halt, what can I expect from walking in a cover of
lore?"46 And in the Ramayana Sita asks, as her reward for fidelity through
every temptation and trial, only death:
If in truth unto my husband I have proved a faithful wife,
Mother Earth, relieve thy Sita from the burden of this life!46
So the last word of Hindu religious thought is moksha, release— first
from desire, then from life. Nirvana may be one release or the other;
but it is fullest in both. The sage Bhartri-hari expresses the first:
Everything on earth gives cause for fear, and the only freedom
from fear is to be found in the renunciation of all desire. . . . Once
upon a time the days seemed long to me when my heart was sorely
wounded through asking favors from the rich; and yet again the
days seemed all too short for me when I sought to carry out all my
worldly desires and ends. But now as a philosopher I sit on a hard
stone in a cave on the mountainside, and time and again I laugh
when I think of my former life.47
Gandhi expresses the second form of release: "I do not want to be re-
born," he says.48 The highest and final aspiration of the Hindu is to escape
reincarnation, to lose that fever of ego which revives with each individual
body and birth. Salvation does not come by faith, nor yet by works; it
comes by such uninterrupted self-denial, by such selfless intuition of the
part-engulfing Whole, that at last the self is dead, and there is nothing
to be reborn. The hell of individuality passes into the haven and heaven
of unity, of complete and impersonal absorption into Brahman, the soul
or Force of the World.
IV. CURIOSITIES OF RELIGION
Superstitions — Astrology — Phallic 'worship — Ritual — Sacrifice
—Purification— The sacred waters
Amid all this theology of fear and suffering, superstition— first aid
from the supernatural for the minor ills of life—flourished with rank fer-
tility. Oblations, charms, exorcisms, astrology, oracles, incantations, vows,
518 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVIII
palmistry, divination, 2,728,812 priests, a million fortune-tellers, a hun-
dred thousand snake-charmers, a million fakirs, yogis and other holy men
—this is one part of the historic picture of India. For twelve hundred years
the Hindus have had a great number of Tantras (manuals) expounding
mysticism, witchcraft, divination and magic, and formulating the holy
mantras (spells) by which almost any purpose might be magically
attained. The Brahmans looked with silent contempt upon this religion
of magic; they tolerated it partly because they feared that superstition
among the people might be essential to their own power, partly, perhaps,
because they believed that superstition is indestructible, dying in one
form only to be reborn in another. No man of sense, they felt, would
quarrel with a force capable of so many reincarnations.
The simple Hindu, like many cultured Americans,* accepted astrology,
and took it for granted that every star exercised a special influence over
those born under its ascendancy.80 Menstruating women, like Ophelia,
were to keep out of the sunshine, for this might make them pregnant."
The secret of material prosperity, said the Kaushitaki Upanishad, is the
regular adoration of the new moon. Sorcerers, necromancers and sooth-
sayers, for a pittance, expounded the past and the future by studying
palms, ordure, dreams, signs in the sky, or holes eaten into cloth by mice.
Chanting the charms which only they knew how to recite, they laid
ghosts, bemused cobras, enthralled birds, and forced the gods themselves
to come to the aid of the contributor. Magicians, for the proper fee, in-
troduced a demon into one's enemy, or expelled it from one's self; they
caused the enemy's sudden death, or brought him down with an incurable
disease. Even a Brahman, when he yawned, snapped his fingers to right
and left to frighten away the evil spirits that might enter his mouth, t
At all times the Hindu, like many European peasants, was on his guard
against the evil eye; at any time he might be visited with misfortune, or
death, magically brought upon him by his enemies. Above all, the ma-
gician could restore sexual vitality, or inspire love in any one for any one,
or give children to barren women."
There was nothing, not even Nirvana, that the Hindu desired so in-
tensely as children. Hence, in part, his longing for sexual power, and his
* Cf . footnote to page 80 above.
t So the good European caps each sneeze with a benediction, originally to guard against
the soul being ejected by the force of the expiration.
CHAP.XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 519
ritual adoration of the symbols of reproduction and fertility. Phallic
worship, which has prevailed in most countries at one time or another,
has persisted in India from ancient times to the twentieth century. Shiva
was its deity, the phallus was its ikon, the Tantras were its Talmud. The
Shaktiy or energizing power, of Shiva was conceived sometimes as his
consort Kali, sometimes as a female element in Shiva's nature, which in-
cluded both male and female powers; and these two powers were repre-
sented by idols called linga or yoni, representing respectively the male
or the female organs of generation.88 Everywhere in India one sees signs
of this worship of sex: in the phallic figures on the Nepalese and other
temples in Benares; in the gigantic lingas that adorn or surround the
Shivaite temples of the south; in phallic processions and ceremonies, and
in the phallic images worn on the arm or about the neck. Linga stones
may be seen on the highways; Hindus break upon them the cocoanuts
which they are about to offer in sacrifice." At the Rameshvaram Temple
the linga stone is daily washed with Ganges water, which is afterwards
sold to the pious,55 as holy water or mesmerized water has been sold in
Europe. Usually the phallic ritual is simple and becoming; it consists in
anointing the stone with consecrated water or oil, and decorating it with
leaves."
Doubtless the lower orders in India derive some profane amusement
from phallic processions;57 but for the most part the people appear to find
no more obscene stimulus in the linga or the yoni than a Christian does
in the contemplation of the Madonna nursing her child; custom lends
propriety, and time lends sanctity, to anything. The sexual symbolism
of the objects seems long since to have been forgotten by the people; the
images are now merely the traditional and sacred ways of representing
the power of Shiva.58 Perhaps the difference between the European and
the Hindu conception of this matter arose from divergence in the age of
marriage; early marriage releases those impulses which, when long frus-
trated, turn in upon themselves and beget prurience as well as romantic
love. The sexual morals and manners of India are in general higher than
those of Europe and America, and far more decorous and restrained.
The worship of Shiva is one of the most austere and ascetic of all the
Hindu cults; and the devoutest worshipers of the linga are the Lingayats—
the most Puritanic sect in India.59 "It has remained for our Western
visitors," says Gandhi, "to acquaint us with the obscenity of many prac-
520 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XVIII
rices which we have hitherto innocently indulged in. It was in a missionary
book that I first learned that Shivalingain had any obscene significance
at all.""
The use of the linga and the yoni was but one of the myriad rituals
that seemed, to the passing and alien eye, not merely the form but half
the essence of Indian religion. Nearly every act of life, even to washing
and dressing, had its religious rite. In every pious home there were private
and special gods to be worshiped, and ancestors to be honored, every day;
indeed religion, to the Hindu, was a matter for domestic observances rather
than for temple ceremonies, which were reserved for holydays. But the
people rejoiced in the many feasts that marked the ecclesiastical year and
brought them in great processions or pilgrimages to their ancient shrines.
They could not understand the service there, for it was conducted in
Sanskrit, but they could understand the idol. They decked it with orna-
ments, covered it with paint, and encrusted it with jewels; sometimes
they treated it as a human being— awakened it, bathed it, dressed it,
fed it, scolded it, and put it to bed at the close of the day.01
The great public rite was sacrifice or offering; the great private rite was
purification. Sacrifice, to the Hindu, was no empty form; he believed
that if no food was offered them the gods would starve to death. M When
men were cannibals human sacrifices were offered in India as elsewhere;
Kali particularly had an appetite for men, but the Brahmans explained
that she would eat only men of the lower castes.03* As morals improved,
the gods had to content themselves with animals, of which great numbers
were offered them. The goat was especially favored for these ceremonies.
Buddhism, Jainism and ahimsa put an end to animal sacrifice in Hindu-
stan,67 but the replacement of Buddhism with Hinduism restored the cus-
tom, which survived, in diminishing extent, to our own time. It is to the
credit of the Brahmans that they refused to take part in any sacrifice that
involved the shedding of blood.08
Purification rites took many an hour of Hindu life, for fears of pollution
were as frequent in Indian religion as in modern hygiene. At any moment
the Hindu might be made unclean—by improper food, by offal, by the
touch of a Shudra, an Outcaste, a corpse, a menstruating woman, or in a
•Such human sacrifices were recorded as late as 1854.°* It was formerly believed that de-
votees had offered themselves as sacrifices, as in the case of fanatics supposed to have
thrown themselves under the wheels of the Juggernaut (Indian Jagannath) car;60 but it is
now held that the rare cases of such apparent self-sacrifice may have been accidents""
CHAP.XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 521
hundred other ways. The woman herself, of course, was defiled by men-
struation or childbirth; Brahmanical law required isolation in such cases,
and complex hygienic precautions.08 After all such pollutions—or, as we
should say, possible infections—the Hindu had to undergo ritual purifica-
tion: in minor cases by such simple ceremonies as being sprinkled with
holy water;70 in major cases by more complicated methods, culminating
in the terrible Panchagavia. This purification was decreed as punishment
for violating important caste laws (e.g., for leaving India), and consisted
in drinking a mixture of "five substances" from the sacred cow: milk,
curds, ghee, urine and dung.71*
A little more to our taste was the religious precept to bathe daily; here
again a hygienic measure, highly desirable in a scmitropical climate, was
clothed in a religious form for more successful inculcation. "Sacred"
pools and tanks were built, many rivers were called holy, and men were
told that if they bathed in these they would be purified in body and soul.
Already in the days of Yuan Chwang millions bathed in the Ganges every
morning;73 from that century to ours those waters have never seen the
sun rise without hearing the prayers of the bathers seeking purity and
release, lifting their arms to the holy orb, and calling out patiently,
"Om, Om, Om." Benares became the Holy City of India, the goal
of millions of pilgrims, the haven of old men and women come from
every part of the country to bathe in the river, and so to face death
sinless and clean. There is an element of awe, even of terror, in
the thought that such men have come to Benares for two thousand
years, and have gone down shivering into its waters in the winter dawn,
and smcllcd with misgiving the flesh of the dead on the burning ghats,
and uttered the same trusting prayers, century after century, to the
same silent deities. The unrcsponsiveness of a god is no obstacle to
his popularity; India believes as strongly today as ever in the gods that
have so long looked down with equanimity upon her poverty and her
desolation.
* Ghee is clarified butter. Urine, says the Abbe Dubois (1820), "is looked upon as
most efficacious for purifying any kind of unclcanncss. I have often seen superstitious
Hindus following the cows to pasture, waiting for the moment when they could collect
the precious liquid in vessels of brass, and carrying it away while still warm to their
houses. I have also seen them waiting to catch it in the hollow of their hands, drinking
some of it and rubbing their faces and heads with the rest."71 DC gustibus non dispu~
tandtan.
522 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVIII
V. SAINTS AND SCEPTICS
Methods of sanctity — Heretics — Toleration — General view of
Hindu Religion
Saints seem more abundant in India than elsewhere, so that at last the
visitor feels that they are a natural product of the country, like the poppy or
the snake. Hindu piety recognized three main avenues to sanctity: Jnana-
yoga, the Way of Meditation, Karma-yoga, the Way of Action, and
Bhakti-yogay the Way of Love. The Brahmans allowed for all three by their
rule of the four Ashramas, or stages of sanctity. The young Brahman was to
begin as a Brahmachari, vowed to premarital chastity, to piety, study, truth-
fulness, and loving service of his Guru or teacher. After marriage, which he
should not delay beyond his eighteenth year, he was to enter the second
stage of Brahmanical life as Grihastha, or householder, and beget sons for
the care and worship of himself and his ancestors. In the third stage (now
seldom practiced) the aspirant to sanctity retired with his wife to live as a
Vanaprastha, or jungle-dweller, accepting hard conditions gladly, and limit-
ing sexual relations to the begetting of children. Finally the Brahman who
wished to reach the highest stage might, in his old age, leave even his wife,
and become a Sannyasi, or "abandoner" of the world; giving up all prop-
erty, all money and all ties, he would keep only an antelope skin for his
body, a staff for his hand, and a gourd of water for his thirst. He must
smear his body with ashes every day, drink the Five Substances frequently,
and live entirely by alms. "He must," says the Brahmanical Rule, "regard all
men as equals. He must not be influenced by anything that happens, and
must be able to view with perfect equanimity even revolutions that over-
throw empires. His one object must be to acquire that measure of wisdom
and of spirituality which shall finally reunite him to the Supreme Divinity,
from which we are separated by our passions and our material surround-
ings."74*
In the midst of all this piety one comes occasionally upon a sceptical
voice stridently out of tune with the solemnity of the normal Hindu
note. Doubtless when India was wealthy, sceptics were numerous, for
humanity doubts its gods most when it prospers, and worships them most
when it is miserable. We have noted the Charvakas and other heretics of
Buddha's time. Almost as old is a work called, in the sesquipedalian
* Dubois, sceptical of everything but his own myth, adds: "The greater number of
these sonny asm arc looked upon as utter impostors, and that by the most enlightened of
their fellow-countrymen."7*
CHAP.XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 523
fashion of the Hindus, Shivasamvedyopanishad, which simplifies theology
into four propositions: (i) that there is no reincarnation, no god, no
heaven, no hell, and no world; (2) that all traditional religious literature
is the work of conceited fools; (3) that Nature the originator and Time
the destroyer are the rulers of all things, and take no account of virtue
or vice in awarding happiness or misery to men; and (4) that people,
deluded by flowery speech, cling to gods, temples and priests, when in
reality there is no difference between Vishnu and a dog.70 With all the
inconsistency of a Bible harboring Ecclesiastes, the Pali canon of Bud-
dhism offers us a remarkable treatise, probably as old as Christianity, called
"The Questions of King Milinda," in which the Buddhist teacher Naga-
sena is represented as giving very disturbing answers to the religious in-
quiries made of him by the Greco-Bactrian King Menandcr, who ruled
northern India at the turn of the first century before Christ. Religion,
says Nagasena, must not be made a mere way of escape for suffering men;
it should be an ascetic search for sanctity and wisdom without presuming
a heaven or a god; for in truth, this saint assures us, these do not exist."
The Mahabharata inveighs against doubters and atheists who, it tells us,
deny the reality of souls, and despise immortality; such men, it says,
"wander over the whole earth"; and it warns them of their future punish-
ment by the horrible example of a jackal who explains his species by
admitting that in a previous incarnation he had been "a rationalist, a
critic of the Vedas, ... a reviler and opposer of priests, ... an un-
believer, a doubter of all."78 The Bhagavad-Gita refers to heretics who
deny the existence of a god and describe the world as "none other than
a House of Lust."70 The Brahmans themselves were often sceptics, but
too completely so to attack the religion of the people. And though the
poets of India are as a rule assiduously pious, some of them, like Kabir
and Vemana, speak in defense of a very emancipated theism. Vemana, a
South Indian poet of the seventeenth century, writes scornfully of ascetic
hermits, pilgrimages, and caste:
The solitariness of a dog! the meditations of a crane! the chanting
of an ass! the bathing of a frog! . . . How are you the better for
smearing your body with ashes? Your thoughts should be set on
God alone; for the rest, an ass can wallow in dirt as well as you. . . .
The books called Vedas are like courtesans, deluding men, and
wholly unfathomable; but the hidden knowledge of God is like an
524 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XVIII
honorable wife. . . . Will the application of white ashes do away
with the smell of a wine-pot?— will a cord cast over your neck
make you twice-born? . . . Why should we constantly revile the
Pariah? Are not his flesh and blood the same as our own? And of
what caste is He who pervades the Pariah? ... He who says, "I
know nothing" is the shrewdest of all.80
It is worthy of note that pronouncements of this kind could be made
with impunity in a society mentally ruled by a priestly caste. Except
for foreign repressions (and perhaps because of alien rulers indifferent
to native theologies) India has enjoyed a freedom of thought far greater
than that of the medieval Europe to which its civilization corresponds;
and the Brahmans have exercised their authority with discrimination and
lenience. They relied upon the conservatism of the poor to preserve the
orthodox religion, and they were not disappointed. When heresies or
strange gods became dangerously popular they tolerated them, and then
absorbed them into the capacious caverns of Hindu belief; one god more
or less could not make much difference in India. Hence there has been
comparatively little sectarian animosity within the Hindu community,
though much between Hindus and Moslems; and no blood has been shed
for religion in India except by its invaders.81 Intolerance came with Islam
and Christianity; the Moslems proposed to buy Paradise with the blood of
"infidels," and the Portuguese, when they captured Goa, introduced the
Inquisition into India.83
If we look for common defining elements in this jungle of faiths, we
shall find them in the practical unanimity of the Hindus in worshiping
both Vishnu and Shiva, in reverencing the Vedas, the Brahmans, and the
cow, and in accepting the Mababbarata and the Ramayana as no mere
literary epics, but as the secondary scriptures of the race.83 It is significant
that the deities and dogmas of India today are not those of the Vedas;
in a sense Hinduism represents the triumph of aboriginal Dravidic India
over the Aryans of the Vcdic age. As the result of conquest, spoliation
and poverty, India has been injured in body and soul, and has sought
refuge from harsh terrestrial defeat in the easy victories of myth and
imagination. Despite its elements of nobility, Buddhism, like Stoicism,
was a slave philosophy, even if voiced by a prince; it meant that all desire
or struggle, even for personal or national freedom, should be abandoned,
and that the ideal was a desireless passivity; obviouslv the exhausting hear
CHAP. XVIIl) THE PARADISE OF THE GODS 525
of India spoke in this rationalization of fatigue. Hinduism continued the
weakening of India by binding itself, through the caste system, in per-
manent servitude to a priesthood; it conceived its gods in unmoral terms,
and maintained for centuries brutal customs, like human sacrifice and
suttee, which many nations had long since outgrown; it depicted life as
inevitably evil, and broke the courage and darkened the spirit of its de-
votees; it turned all earthly phenomena into illusion, and thereby destroyed
the distinction between freedom and slavery, good and evil, corruption
and betterment. In the words of a brave Hindu, "Hindu religion . . .
has now degenerated into an idol-worship and conventional ritualism,
in which the form is regarded as everything, and its substance as nothing."84
A nation ridden with priests and infested with saints, India awaits with
unformulated longing her Renaissance, her Reformation, and her En-
lightenment.
We must, however, keep our historical perspective in thinking of India;
we too were once in the Middle Ages, and preferred mysticism to science,
priestcraft to plutocracy—and may do likewise again. We cannot judge
these mystics, for our judgments in the West are usually based upon cor-
poreal experience and material results, which seem irrelevant and super-
ficial to the Hindu saint. What if wealth and power, war and conquest,
were only surface illusions, unworthy of a mature mind? What if this
science of hypothetical atoms and genes, of whimsical protons and cells,
of gases generating Shakcspeares and chemicals fusing into Christ, were
only one more -faith, and one of the strangest, most incredible and most
transitory of all? The East, resentful of subjection and poverty, may go
in for science and industry at the very time when the children of the West,
sick of machines that impoverish them and of sciences that disillusion
them, may destroy their cities and their machines in chaotic revolution
or war, go back, beaten, weary and starving, to the soil, and forge for
themselves another mystic faith to give them courage in the face of
hunger, cruelty, injustice and death. There is no humorist like history.
CHAPTER XIX
The Life of the Mind
I. HINDU SCIENCE
Its religious origins— Astronomers— Mathematicism— The "Ara-
bic" numerals— The decimal system— Algebra— Geometry-
Physics — Chemistry — Physiology — Vedic medicine-
Physicians— Surgeons — Anesthetics— Vaccination
—Hypnotism
INDIA'S work in science is both very old and very young: young as
an independent and secular pursuit, old as a subsidiary interest of her
priests. Religion being the core of Hindu life, those sciences were culti-
vated first that contributed to religion: astronomy grew out of the wor-
ship of the heavenly bodies, and the observation of their movements aimed
to fix the calendar of festival and sacrificial days; grammar and philology
developed out of the insistence that every prayer and formula, though
couched in a dead language, should be textually and phonetically cor-
rect.1 As in our Middle Ages, the scientists of India, for better and for
worse, were her priests.
Astronomy was an incidental offspring of astrology, and slowly emanci-
pated itself under Greek influence. The earliest astronomical treatises, the
Siddhantas (ca. 425 B.C.), were based on Greek science," and Varahamihira,
whose compendium was significantly entitled Complete System of Natural
Astrology, frankly acknowledged his dependence upon the Greeks. The
greatest of Hindu astronomers and mathematicians, Aryabhata, discussed in
verse such poetic subjects as quadratic equations, sines, and the value of TC;
he explained eclipses, solstices and equinoxes, announced the sphericity of the
earth and its diurnal revolution on its axis, and wrote, in daring anticipation
of Renaissance science: "The sphere of the stars is stationary, and the earth,
by its revolution, produces the daily rising and setting of planets and stars."*
His most famous successor, Brahmagupta, systematized the astronomic knowl-
edge of India, but obstructed its development by rejecting Aryabhata's the-
526
CHAP. XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 527
ory of the revolution of the earth. These men and their followers adapted
to Hindu usage the Babylonian division of the skies into zodiacal constella-
tions; they made a calendar of twelve months, each of thirty days, each ot
thirty hours, inserting an intercalary month every five years; they calculated
with remarkable accuracy the diameter of the moon, the eclipses of the moon
and the sun, the position of the poles, and the position and motion of the
major stars.8 They expounded the theory, though not the law, of gravity
when they wrote in the Siddhantas: "The earth, owing to its force of gravity,
draws all things to itself."6
To make these complex calculations the Hindus developed a system
of mathematics superior, in everything except geometry, to that of the
Greeks.7 Among the most vital parts of our Oriental heritage are the
"Arabic" numerals and the decimal system, both of which came to us,
through the Arabs, from India. The miscalled "Arabic" numerals are
found on the Rock Edicts of Ashoka (256 B.C.), a thousand years before
their occurrence in Arabic literature. Said the great and magnanimous
Laplace:
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all
numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well
as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears
so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very
simplicity, the great case which it has lent to all computations, puts
our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall
appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we re-
member that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius,
two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.8
The decimal system was known to Aryabhata and Brahmagupta long
before its appearance in the writings of the Arabs and the Syrians; it was
adopted by China from Buddhist missionaries; and Muhammad Ibn Musa
al-Khwarazmi, the greatest mathematician of his age (d. ca. 850 A.D.),
seems to have introduced it into Baghdad. The oldest known use of the
zero in Asia or Europe* is in an Arabic document dated 873 A.D., three
years sooner than its first known appearance in India; but by general con-
sent the Arabs borrowed this too from India,9 and the most modest and
most valuable of all numerals is one of the subtle gifts of India to mankind.
* It was used by the Mayas of America in the first century A.D.*» Dr. Breasted at-
tributes a knowledge of the place value of numerals to the ancient Babylonians (Saturday
Review of Literature, New York, July 13, 1935* P- >5>-
528 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIX
Algebra was developed in apparent independence by both the Hindus and
the Greeks;* but our adoption of its Arabic name (al-jabr, adjustment) in-
dicates that it came to western Europe from the Arabs— i.e., from India—
rather than from Greece.10 The great Hindu leaders in this field, as in as-
tronomy, were Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Bhaskara. The last (b. 1114
A.D.), appears to have invented the radical sign, and many algebraic symbols."
These men created the conception of a negative quantity, without which
algebra would have been impossible;" they formulated rules for finding
permutations and combinations; they found the square root of 2, and solved,
in the eighth century A.D., indeterminate equations of the second degree that
were unknown to Europe until the days of Euler a thousand years later.14
They expressed their science in poetic form, and gave to mathematical prob-
lems a grace characteristic of India's Golden Age. These two may serve as
examples of simpler Hindu algebra:
Out of a swarm of bees one-fifth part settled on a Kadamba blos-
som; one-third on a Silindhra flower; three times the difference of
those numbers flew to the bloom of a Kutaja. One bee, which re-
mained, hovered about in the air. Tell me, charming woman, the
number of bees. . . . Eight rubies, ten emeralds, and a hundred
pearls, which are in thy ear-ring, my beloved, were purchased by
me for thec at an equal amount; and the sum of the prices of the
three sorts of gems was three less than half a hundred; tell me the
price of each, auspicious woman/'
The Hindus were not so successful in geometry. In the measurement and
construction of altars the priests formulated the Pythagorean theorem (by
which the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the
sum of the squares of the other sides) several hundred years before the birth
of Christ.18 Aryabhata, probably influenced by the Greeks, found the area
of a triangle, a trapezium and a circle, and calculated the value of TT (the
relation of diameter to circumference in a circle) at 3.1416— a figure not
equaled in accuracy until the days of Purbach (1423-61) in Europe.17 Bhas-
kara crudely anticipated the differential calculus, Aryabhata drew up a
table of sines, and the Surya Siddhanta provided a system of trigonometry
more advanced than anything known to the Greeks.18
Two systems of Hindu thought propound physical theories suggestively
similar to those of Greece. Kanada, founder of the Vaisheshika philosophy,
held that the world was composed of atoms as many in kind as the various
* The first algebraist known to us, the Greek Diophantus (360 A.D.), antedates Aryab-
hatn by a century; but Cajori believes that he took his lead from India.11
CHAP. XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 529
elements. The Jains more nearly approximated to Democritus by teaching
that all atoms were of the same kind, producing different effects by diverse
modes of combination." Kanada believed light and heat to be varieties of the
same substance; Udayana taught that all heat comes from the sun; and
Vachaspati, like Newton, interpreted light as composed of minute particles
emitted by substances and striking the eye.80 Musical notes and intervals were
analyzed and mathematically calculated in the Hindu treatises on music;*
and the "Pythagorean Law" was formulated by which the number of vi-
brations, and therefore the pitch of the note, varies inversely as the length of
the string between the point of attachment and the point of touch.
There is some evidence that Hindu mariners of the first centuries A.D. used
a compass made by an iron fish floating in a vessel of oil and pointing north."
Chemistry developed from two sources— medicine and industry. Some-
thing has been said about the chemical excellence of cast iron in ancient
India, and about the high industrial development of Gupta times, when India
was looked to, even by Imperial Rome, as the most skilled of the nations in
such chemical industries as dyeing, tanning, soap-making, glass and cement.
As early as the second century B.C. Nagarjuna devoted an entire volume
to mercury. By the sixth century the Hindus were far ahead of Europe in
industrial chemistry; they were masters of calcination, distillation, sublimation,
steaming, fixation, the production of light without heat, the mixing of
anesthetic and soporific powders, and the preparation of metallic salts, com-
pounds and alloys. The tempering of steel was brought in ancient India to a
perfection unknown in Europe till our own times; King Porus is said to have
selected, as a specially valuable gift for Alexander, not gold or silver, but
thirty pounds of steel.28 The Moslems took much of this Hindu chemical
science and industry to the Near East and Europe; the secret of manufactur-
ing "Damascus" blades, for example, was taken by the Arabs from the Per-
sians, and by the Persians from India.82*
Anatomy and physiology, like some aspects of chemistry, were by-products
of Hindu medicine. As far back as the sixth century B.C. Hindu physicians
described ligaments, sutures, lymphatics, nerve plexus, fascia, adipose and
vascular tissues, mucous and synovial membranes, and many more muscles
than any modern cadaver is able to show.23 The doctors of pre-Christian
India shared Aristotle's mistaken conception of the heart as the seat and organ
of consciousness, and supposed that the nerves ascended to and descended
from the heart. But they understood remarkably well the processes of diges-
tion—the different functions of the gastric juices, the conversion of chyme
into chyle, and of this into blood.24 Anticipating Weismann by 2400 years,
*E.g., in The Ocean of Music (Samgita-ratnakard) of Sharamgadeva (1210-47).
53O THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIX
Atrcya (ca. 500 B.C.) held that the parental seed is independent of the parent's
body, and contains in itself, in miniature, the whole parental organism." Ex-
amination for virility was recommended as a prerequisite for marriage in men;
and the Code of Manu warned against marrying mates affected with tuber-
culosis, epilepsy, leprosy, chronic dyspepsia, piles, or loquacity.28 Birth con-
trol in the latest theological fashion was suggested by the Hindu medical
schools of 500 B.C. in the theory that during twelve days of the menstrual
cycle impregnation is impossible.87 Foetal development was described with
considerable accuracy; it was noted that the sex of the foetus remains for a
time undetermined, and it was claimed that in some cases the sex of the
embryo could be influenced by food or drugs.*8
The records of Hindu medicine begin with the Atharva-veda; here, em-
bedded in a mass of magic and incantations, is a list of diseases with their
symptoms. Medicine arose as an adjunct to magic: the healer studied and
used earthly means of cure to help his spiritual formulas; later he relied more
and more upon such secular methods, continuing the magic spell, like our
bedside manner, as a psychological aid. Appended to the Atharva-veda is the
Ajur-veda ("The Science of Longevity"). In this oldest system of Hindu
medicine illness is attributed to disorder in one of the four humors (air,
water, phlegm and blood), and treatment is recommended with herbs and
charms. Many of its diagnoses and cures are still used in India, with a success
that is sometimes the envy of Western physicians. The Rig-veda names over
a thousand such herbs, and advocates water as the best cure for most diseases.
Even in Vedic times physicians and surgeons were being differentiated from
magic doctors, and were living in houses surrounded by gardens in which
they cultivated medicinal plants."
The great names in Hindu medicine are those of Sushruta in the fifth
century before, and Charaka in the second century after Christ. Sushruta,
professor of medicine in the University of Benares, wrote down in San-
skrit a system of diagnosis and therapy whose elements had descended
to him from his teacher Dhanwantari. His book dealt at length with sur-
gery, obstetrics, diet, bathing, drugs, infant feeding and hygiene, and
medical education.80 Charaka composed a Samhita (or encyclopedia) of
medicine, which is still used in India,81 and gave to his followers an almost
Hippocratic conception of their calling: "Not for self, not for the ful-
filment of any earthly desire of gain, but solely for the good of suffering
humanity should you treat your patients, and so cxcell all."89 Only less
illustrious than these arc Vagbhata (625 A.D.), who prepared a medical
compendium in prose and verse, and Bhava Misra (1550 A.D.), whose
CHAP. XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 531
voluminous work on anatomy, physiology and medicine mentioned, a
hundred years before Harvey, the circulation of the blood, and pre-
scribed mercury for that novel disease, syphilis, which had recently been
brought in by the Portuguese as part of Europe's heritage to India.88
Sushruta described many surgical operations— cataract, hernia, lithot-
omy, Caesarian section, etc.— and 121 surgical instruments, including
lancets, sounds, forceps, catheters, and rectal and vaginal speculums.84
Despite Brahmanical prohibitions he advocated the dissection of dead
bodies as indispensable in the training of surgeons. He was the first to
graft upon a torn ear portions of skin taken from another part of the
body; and from him and his Hindu successors rhinoplasty— the surgical
reconstruction of the nose— descended into modern medicine.85 "The
ancient Hindus," says Garrison, "performed almost every major opera-
tion except ligation of the arteries."88 Limbs were amputated, abdominal
sections were performed, fractures were set, hemorrhoids and fistulas were
removed. Sushruta laid down elaborate rules for preparing an operation,
and his suggestion that the wound be sterilized by fumigation is one of
the earliest known efforts at antiseptic surgery.37 Both Sushruta and
Charaka mention the use of medicinal liquors to produce insensibility to
pain. In 927 A.D. two surgeons trepanned the skull of a Hindu king, and
made him insensitive to the operation by administering a drug called
Samohini***
For the detection of the 1120 diseases that he enumerated, Sushruta
recommended diagnosis by inspection, palpation, and auscultation.40 Tak-
ing of the pulse was described in a treatise dating 1300 A.D.° Urinalysis
was a favorite method of diagnosis; Tibetan physicians were reputed able
to cure any patient without having seen anything more of him than his
water.*8 In the time of Yuan Chwang Hindu medical treatment began
with a seven-day fast; in this interval the patient often recovered; if the
illness continued, drugs were at last employed.43 Even then drugs were
used very sparingly; reliance was placed largely upon diet, baths, enemas,
inhalations, urethral and vaginal injections, and blood-lettings by leeches
or cups.44 Hindu physicians were especially skilled in concocting anti-
dotes for poisons; they still excel European physicians in curing snake-
bites.4* Vaccination, unknown to Europe before the eighteenth century,
* Hospitals were erected in Ceylon as early as 427 B.C.. and in northern India as early
as 226 B.C.30
532 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIX
was known in India as early as 550 A.D., if we may judge from a text
attributed to Dhanwantari, one of the earliest Hindu physicians: "Take
the fluid of the pock on the udder of the cow . . . upon the point of a
lancet, and lance with it the arms between the shoulders and elbows until
the blood appears; then, mixing the fluid with the blood, the fever of the
small-pox will be produced."40 Modern European physicians believe that
caste separateness was prescribed because of the Brahman belief in invis-
ible agents transmitting disease; many of the laws of sanitation enjoined
by Sushruta and "Manu" seem to take for granted what we moderns, who
love new words for old things, call the germ theory of -disease/7 Hyp-
notism as therapy seems to have originated among the Hindus, who often
took their sick to the temples to be cured by hypnotic suggestion or
"temple-sleep," as in Egypt and Greece.48 The Englishmen who intro-
duced hypnotherapy into England—Braid. Fsdaile and Elliotson— "un-
doubtedly got their ideas, and some of their experience, from contact
with India."4*
The general picture of Indian medicine is one of rapid development
in the Vedic and Buddhist periods, followed by centuries of slow and
cautious improvement. How much Atreya, Dhanwantari and Sushruta
owed to Greece, and how much Greece owed to them, we do not know.
In the time of Alexander, says Garrison, "Hindu physicians and surgeons
enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for superior knowledge and skill," and
even Aristotle is believed by some students to have been indebted to
them.8" So too with the Persians and the Arabs: it is difficult to say how
much Indian medicine owed to the physicians of Baghdad, and through
them to the heritage of Babylonian medicine in the Near East; on the one
hand certain remedies, like opium and mercury, and some modes of diag-
nosis, like feeling the pulse, appear to have entered India from Persia; on
the other we find Persians and Arabs translating into their languages, in
the eighth century A.D., the thousand-year-old compendia of Sushruta and
Charaka.51 The great Caliph ITaroun-al-Rashid accepted the preeminence
of Indian medicine and scholarship, and imported Hindu physicians to
organize hospitals and medical schools in Baghdad.63 Lord Ampthill con-
cludes that medieval and modern Europe owes its system of medicine di-
rectly to the Arabs, and through them to India.53 Probably this noblest
and most uncertain of the sciences had an approximately equal antiquity,
and developed in contemporary contact and mutual influence, in Sumeria,
Egypt and India.
CHAP. XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 533
II. THE SIX SYSTEMS OF BRAHMANICAL PHILOSOPHY
The antiquity of Indian philosophy — Its prominent role — Its
scholars — Forms — Conception of orthodoxy — The as-
su?nptions of Hindu philosophy
The priority of India is clearer in philosophy than in medicine, though
here too origins are veiled, and every conclusion is an hypothesis. Some
Upanishads are older than any extant form of Greek philosophy, and
Pythagoras, Parmenides and Plato seem to have been influenced by Indian
metaphysics; but the speculations of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes,
Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Empedocles not only antedate the secular
philosophy of the Hindus, but bear a sceptical and physical stamp sug-
gesting any other origin than India. Victor Cousin believed that "we are
constrained to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the
highest philosophy."" It is more probable that no one of the civilizations
known to us was the originator of any of the elements of civilization.
But nowhere else has the lust for philosophy been so strong as in India.
It is, with the Hindus, not an ornament or a recreation, but a major interest
and practice of life itself; and sages receive in India the honor bestowed
in the West upon men of wealth or action. What other nation has ever
thought of celebrating festivals with gladiatorial debates between the lead-
ers of rival philosophical schools? We read in the Upanishads how the
King of the Videhas, as part of a religious feast, set one day apart for a
philosophical disputation among Yajnavalkya, Asvala, Artabhaga and
Gargi (the Aspasia of India) ; to the victor the King promised— and gave—
a reward of a thousand cows and many pieces of gold." It was the usual
course for a philosophical teacher in India to speak rather than to write;
instead of attacking his opponents through the safe medium of print, he
was expected to meet them in living debate, and to visit other schools in
order to submit himself to controversy and questioning; leading philoso-
phers like Shankara spent much of their time in such intellectual jour-
neys.67 Sometimes kings joined in these discussions with the modesty be-
coming a monarch in the presence of a philosopher— if we may credit the
reports of the philosophers. The victor in a vital debate was as great a
hero among his people as a general returning from the bloody triumphs
of war.68
In a Rajput painting of the eighteenth century150 we see a typical Indian
"School of Philosophy"— the teacher sits on a mat under a tree, and his
534 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP, xix
pupils squat on the grass before him. Such scenes were to be witnessed
everywhere, for teachers of philosophy were as numerous in India as mer-
chants in Babylonia. No other country has ever had so many schools of
thought. In one of Buddha's dialogues we learn that there were sixty-
two distinct theories of the soul among the philosophers of his time.90
"This philosophical nation par excellence" says Count Keyserling, "has
more Sanskrit words for philosophical and religious thought than are
found in Greek, Latin and German combined."01
Since Indian thought was transmitted rather by oral tradition than by writ-
ing, the oldest form in which the theories of the various schools have come
down to us is that of sutras— aphoristic "threads" which teacher or student
jotted down, not as a means of explaining his thought to another, but as an
aid to his own memory. These extant sutras are of varying age, some as old
as 200 A.D., some as recent as 1400; in all cases they are much younger than
the traditions of thought that they summarize, for the origin of these schools
of philosophy is as old as Buddha, and some of them, like the Sankhya, were
probably well-established when he was born.08
All systems of Indian philosophy are ranged by the Hindus in two
categories: Astika systems, which affirm, and Nastika systems, which
deny.* We have already studied the Nastika systems, which were chiefly
those of the Charvakas, the Buddhists, and the Jains. But, strange to say,
these systems were called Nastika, heterodox and nihilist, not because they
questioned or denied the existence of God (which they did), but because
they questioned, denied or ignored the authority of the Vedas. Many of
the Astika systems also doubted or denied God; they were nevertheless
called orthodox because they accepted the infallibility of the Scriptures,
and the institution of caste; and no hindrance was placed against the free
thought, however atheistic, of those schools- that acknowledged these
fundamentals of orthodox Hindu society. Since a wide latitude was al-
lowed in interpreting the holy books, and clever dialecticians could find
in the Vedas any doctrine which they sought, the only practical require-
ment for intellectual respectability was the recognition of caste; this being
the real government of India, rejection of it was treason, and acceptance
of it covered a multitude of sins. In effect, therefore, the philosophers of
India enjoyed far more liberty than their Scholastic analogues in Europe,
* Asti, it is; rfasti, it is not.
CHAP. XIX ) THELIFEOFTHEMIND 53.5
though less, perhaps, than the thinkers of Christendom under the enlight-
ened Popes of the Renaissance.
Of the "orthodox" systems or darshanas ("demonstrations"), six be-
came so prominent that in time every Hindu thinker who acknowledged
the authority of the Brahmans attached himself to one or another of these
schools. All six make certain assumptions which are the bases of Hindu
thought: that the Vedas are inspired; that reasoning is less reliable as a
guide to reality and truth than the direct perception and feeling of an
individual properly prepared for spiritual receptiveness and subtlety by
ascetic practices and years of obedient tutelage; that the purpose of
knowledge and philosophy is not control of the world so much as release
from it; and that the goal of thought is to find freedom from the suf-
fering of frustrated desire by achieving freedom from desire itself. These
are the philosophies to which men come when they tire of ambition,
struggle, wealth, "progress," and "success."
1. The Nyaya System
A Hindu logician
The first of the "Brahmanical" systems in the logical order of Indian
thought (for their chronological order is uncertain, and they are in all essen-
tials contemporary) is a body of logical theory extending over two millenni-
ums. Nyaya means an argument, a way of leading the mind to a conclusion. Its
most famous text is the Nyaya Sutra ascribed without surety to a Gautama
dated variously between the third century before, and the first century after,
Christ.03 Like all Hindu thinkers, Gautama announces, as the purpose of his
work, the achievement of Nirvana, or release from the tyranny of desire, here
to be reached by clear and consistent thinking; but we suspect that his simple
intent was to offer a guide to the perplexed wrestlers in India's philosophical
debates. He formulates for them the principles of argument, exposes the
tricks of controversy, and lists the common fallacies of thought. Like
another Aristotle, he seeks the structure of reasoning in the syllogism, and
finds the crux of argument in the middle term;* like another James or Dewey
he looks upon knowledge and thought as pragmatic tools and organs of
human need and will, to be tested by their ability to lead to successful ac-
tion.04 He is a realist, and will have nothing to do with the sublime idea that
the world ceases to exist when no one takes the precaution to perceive it.
* The Nyaya syllogism, however, has five propositions: theorem, reason, major premiss,
minor premiss and conclusion. E.g.: (i) Socrates is mortal, (2) for he is a man; (3) all
men are mortal; (4) Socrates is a man; (5) therefore Socrates is mortal.
536 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIX
Gautama's predecessors in Nyaya were apparently atheists; his successors be-
came epistemologists." His achievement was to give India an organon of in-
vestigation and thought, and a rich vocabulary of philosophical terms.
2. The Vaisheshika System
Democritus in India
As Gautama is the Aristotle of India, so Kanada is its Democritus. His
name, which means the "atom-eater," suggests that he may be a legendary
construct of the historical imagination. The date at which the Vaisheshika
system was formulated has not been fixed with excessive accuracy: we are
told that it was not before 300 B.C., and not after 800 A.D. Its name came
from vishesha, meaning particularity: the world, in Kanada's theory, is full of
a number of things, but they are all, in some form, mere combinations of
atoms; the forms change, but the atoms remain indestructible. Thoroughly
Democritean, Kanada announces that nothing exists but "atoms and the void,"
and that the atoms move not according to the will of an intelligent deity,
but through an impersonal force or law— Adrishta, "the invisible." Since there
is no conservative like the child of a radical, the later exponents of Vaishe-
shika, unable to see how a blind force could give order and unity to the
cosmos, placed a world of minute souls alongside the world of atoms, and
supervised both worlds with an intelligent God.00 So old is the "pre-estab-
lished harmony" of Leibnitz.
3. The Sankhya System
Its high repute — Metaphysics — Evolution — Atheism — Idealism
—Spirit— Body, mind and soul— The goal of philosophy
—Influence of the Sankhya
This, says a Hindu historian, "is the most significant system of philos-
ophy that India has produced."07 Professor Garbe, who devoted a large
part of his life to the study of the Sankhya, consoled himself with the
thought that "in Kapila's doctrine, for the first time in the history of the
world, the complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its
full confidence in its own powers, were exhibited."88 It is the oldest of
the six systems,*8 and perhaps the oldest philosophical system of all.* Of
* Its earliest extant literature, the Sankhya-karika of the commentator Ishvara Krishna,
dates back only to the fifth century A.D., and the Sankbya-sutras once attributed to Kapila
are not older than our fifteenth century; but the origins of the system apparently
antedate Buddhism itself.70 The Buddhist texts and the Mahabharata10* repeatedly refer to
it, and Winternitz finds its influence in Pythagoras.705
CHAP. XIX ) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 537
Kapila himself nothing is known, except that Hindu tradition, which has
a schoolboy's scorn for dates, credits him with founding the Sankhya
philosophy in the sixth century B.C.71
Kapila is at once a realist and a scholastic. He begins almost medically
by laying it down, in his first aphorism, that "the complete cessation of
pain ... is the complete goal of man." He rejects as inadequate the at-
tempt to elude suffering by physical means; he refutes, with much logical
prestidigitation, the views of all and sundry on the matter, and then pro-
ceeds to construct, in one unintelligibly abbreviated sutra after another,
his own metaphysical system. It derives its name from his enumeration
(for this is the meaning of sankhya) of the twenty-five Realities (Tattivas,
"Thatnesses") which, in Kapila's judgment, make up the world. He ar-
ranges these Realities in a complex relationship that may possibly be clari-
fied by the following scheme:
(1) A. SUBSTANCE (Prakriti, "Producer"), a universal physical principle
which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces
(2) I. Intellect (Buddhi), the power of perception;
which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces
i. The Five Subtle Elements, or Sensory Powers of the Internal
World:
(4) I- Sight,
(5) 2. Hearing,
(6) 3. Smell,
(7) 4. Taste, and
(8) 5. Touch; (Realities (i) to (8) cooperate to produce (10)
to (24) )
(9) ii. Mind (Manas), the power of conception;
iii. The Five Organs of Sense (corresponding with Realities (4)
to (8) ):
(10) i. Eye,
(u) 2. Ear,
(12) 3. Nose,
(13) 4. Tongue, and
(14) 5. Skin;
iv. The Five Organs of Action:
(15) i. Larynx,
(16) 2. Hands,
(17) 3. Feet,
(18) 4. Excretory organs, and
538 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIX
(19) 5. Generative organs;
v. The Five Gross Elements of the External World:
(20) i. Ether,
(21) 2. Air,
(22) 3. Fire and light,
(23) 4. Water, and
(24) 5. Earth.
(25) B. SPIRIT (Purusha, "Person"), a universal psychical principle which,
though unable to do anything of itself, animates and vitalizes Prakriti,
and stirs its evolutionary powers to all their activities.
At its outset this seems to be a purely materialistic system: the world
of mind and self as well as of body and matter appears entirely as an
evolution by natural means, a unity and continuity of elements in per-
petual development and decay from the lowest to the highest and back
again. There is a premonition of Lamarck in Kapila's thought: the need
of the organism (the "Self") generates the function (sight, hearing, smell,
taste and touch), and the function produces the organ (eye, ear, nose,
tongue and skin). There is no gap in the system, and no vital distinction
in any Hindu philosophy, between the inorganic and the organic, between
the vegetable and the animal, or between the animal and the human,
world; these are all links in one chain of life, spokes on the wheel of evo-
lution and dissolution, birth and death and birth. The course of evolution
is determined fatalistically by the three active qualities or powers (Gunas)
of Substance: purity, activity, and blind ignorance. These powers arc not
prejudiced in favor of development against decay; they produce the one
after the other in an endless cycle, like some stupid magician drawing an
infinity of contents from a hat, putting them back again, and repeating
the process forever. Every state of evolution contains in itself, as Herbert
Spencer was to say some time later, a tendency to lapse into dissolution as
its fated counterpart and end.
Kapila, like Laplace, saw no need of calling in a deity to explain crea-
tion or evolution;72 in this most religious and philosophical of nations it is
nothing unusual to find religions and philosophies without a god. Many
of the Sankhya texts explicitly deny the existence of a personal creator;
creation is inconceivable, for "a thing is not made out of nothing";78 creator
and created are one.74 Kapila contents himself with writing (precisely as
if he were Immanuel Kant) that a personal creator can never be demon-
strated by human reason. For whatever exists, says this subtle sceptic, must
CHAP. XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 539
be either bound or free, and God cannot be either. If God is perfect,
he had no need to create a world; if he is imperfect he is not God.
If God were good, and had divine powers, he could not possibly have
created so imperfect a world, so rich in suffering, so certain in death.76 It
is instructive to see with what calmness the Hindu thinkers discuss these
questions, seldom resorting to persecution or abuse, and keeping the
, debate upon a plane reached in our time only by the controversies of the
maturest scientists. Kapila protects himself by recognizing the authority
of the Vedas: "The Vedas" he says, simply, "are an authority, since the
author of them knew the established truth."78 After which he proceeds
without paying any attention to the Vedas.
But he is no materialist; on the contrary, he is an idealist and a spiritual-
ist, after his own unconventional fashion. He derives reality entirely from
perception; our sense organs and our thought give to the world all the
reality, form and significance which it can ever have for us; what the
world might be independently of them is an idle question that has no
meaning, and can never have an answer.77 Again, after listing twenty-four
Tattwas which belong, in his system, under physical evolution, he upsets
all his incipient materialism by introducing, as the last Reality, the strang-
est and perhaps the most important of them all— Purusha, "Person" or
Soul. It is not, like twenty-three other Tattivas, produced by Prakriti or
physical force; it is an independent psychical principle, omnipresent and
everlasting, incapable of acting by itself, but indispensable to every action.
For Prakrit! never develops, the G'imas never act, except through the in-
spiration of Purusha; the physical is animated, vitalized and stimulated to
evolve by the psychical principle everywhere.78 Here Kapila speaks like
Aristotle: "There is a ruling influence of the Spirit" (over Prakriti, or the
evolving world), "caused by their proximity, just as the loadstone (draws
iron to itself). That is, the proximity of Purusha to Prakriti impels the
latter to go through the steps of production. This sort of attraction be-
tween the two leads to creation, but in no other sense is Spirit an agent,
or concerned in creation at all."70*
Spirit is plural in the sense that it exists in each organism; but in all it
is alike, and does not share in individuality. Individuality is physical; we
are what we are, not because of our Spirit, but because of the origin,
* "The evolution of Prakriti" says one Hindu commentator on Kapila, "has no purpose
except to provide a spectacle for the soul."80 Perhaps, as Nietzsche suggested, the wisest
way to view the world is as an esthetic and dramatic spectacle.
54° THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XDC
evolution and experiences of our bodies and minds. In Sankhya the mind
is as much a part of the body as any other organ is. The secluded and
untouched Spirit within us is free, while the mind and body are bound by
the laws and Gunas or qualities of the physical world;81 it is not the Spirit
that acts and is determined, it is the body-mind. Nor is Spirit affected by
the decay and passing of the body and the personality; it is untouched by
the stream of birth and death. "Mind is perishable," says Kapila, "but not
Spirit";88 only the individual self, bound up with matter and body, is
born, dies, and is born again, in that tireless fluctuation of physical forms
which constitutes the history of the external world.88 Kapila, capable of
doubting everything else, never doubts transmigration.
Like most Hindu thinkers, he looks upon life as a very doubtful good,
if a good at all. "Few are these days of joy, few are these days of sorrow;
wealth is like a swollen river, youth is like the crumbling bank of a
swollen river, life is like a tree on the crumbling bank."84 Suffering is the
result of the fact that the individual self and mind are bound up with mat-
ter, caught in the blind forces of evolution. What escape is there from
this suffering? Only through philosophy, answers our philosopher; only
through understanding that all these pains and griefs, all this division and
turbulence of striving egos, are Maya, illusion, the insubstantial pageantry
of life and time. "Bondage arises from the error of not discriminating"85—
between the self that suffers and the Spirit that is immune, between the
surface that is disturbed and the basis that remains unvexed and unchanged.
To rise above these sufferings it is only necessary to realize that the es-
sence of us, which is Spirit, is safe beyond good and evil, joy and pain,
birth and death. These acts and struggles, these successes and defeats,
distress us only so long as we fail to see that they do not affect, or come
from, the Spirit; the enlightened man will look upon them as from out-
side them, like an impartial spectator witnessing a play. Let the soul
recognize its independence of things, and it will at once be free; by that
very act of understanding it will escape from the prison of space and time,
of pain and reincarnation."8 "Liberation obtained through knowledge of
the twenty-five Realities," says Kapila, "teaches the one only knowledge
—that neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor do I exist;"87 that is to say,
personal separateness is an illusion; all that exists is the vast evolving and
dissolving froth of matter and mind, of bodies and selves, on the one side,
and on the other the quiet eternity of the immutable and imperturbable
soul.
CHAP.XDC) THELIFEOFTHEMIND 541
Such a philosophy will bring no comfort to one who may find some
difficulty in separating himself from his aching flesh and his grieving
memory; but it $eems to have well expressed the mood of speculative
India. No other body of philosophic thought, barring the Vedanta, has
so profoundly affected the Hindu mind. In the atheism and epistemo-
logical idealism of Buddha, and his conception of Nirvana, we see the
influence of Kapila; we see it in the Mahabharata and the Code of Manu,
in the Puranas* and the Tantras— which transform Purusha and Prakriti
into the male and female principles of creation;88 above all in the system
of Yoga, which is merely a practical development of Sankhya, built upon
its theories and couched in its phrases. Kapila has few explicit adherents
today, since Shankara and the Vedanta have captured the Hindu mind;
but an old proverb still raises its voice occasionally in India: "There is no
knowledge equal to the Sankhya, and no power equal to the Yoga.'"*
4. The Yoga System
The Holy Men— The antiquity of "Yoga"— Its meaning— The
eight stages of discipline— The aim of "Yoga"— The
miracles of the "Yogi"-The sincerity of "Yoga"
In a fair, still spot
Having fixed his abode—not too much raised,
Nor yet too low— let him abide, his goods
A cloth, a deerskin, and the Kusha-grass.
There, setting hard his mind upon the One,
Restraining heart and senses, silent, calm,
Let him accomplish Yoga, and achieve
Purcness of soul, holding immovable
Body and neck and head, his gaze absorbed
Upon his nose-end, rapt from all around,
Tranquil in spirit, free of fear, intent
Upon his Brahmacharya vow, devout,
Musing on Me, lost in the thought of Me.t
On the bathing-ghats, scattered here and there among reverent Hindus,
indifferent Moslems and staring tourists, sit the Holy Men, or Yogis, in
* Cf. the poem quoted on page 512 above.
fThe Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold as The Song Celestial, London.
1925, bk. vi, p. 35. Brabmacaria is the vow of chastity taken by the ascetic student
"Me" is Krishna.
54* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIX
whom the religion and philosophy of India find their ultimate and strang-
est expression. In lesser numbers one comes upon them in the woods or on
the roadside, immovable and absorbed. Some are old, some are young;
some wear a rag over the shoulders, some a cloth over the loins; some are
clothed only in dust of ashes, sprinkled over the body and into the mottled
hair. They squat cross-legged and motionless, staring at their noses or
their navels. Some of them look squarely into the face of the sun hour
after hour, day after day, letting themselves go slowly blind; some sur-
round themselves with hot fires during the midday heat; some walk bare-
foot upon hot coals, or empty the coals upon their heads; some lie naked
for thirty-five years on beds of iron spikes; some roll their bodies thousands
of miles to a place of pilgrimage; some chain themselves to trees, or im-
prison themselves in cages, until they die; some bury themselves in the
earth up to their necks, and remain that way for years or for life; some
pass a wire through both cheeks, making it impossible to open the jaws,
and so condemning themselves to live on liquids; some keep their fists
clenched so long that their nails come through the back of the hand; some
hold up an arm or a leg until it is withered and dead. Many of them sit
quietly in one position, perhaps for years, eating leaves and nuts brought
to them by the people, deliberately dulling every sense, and concentrating
every thought, in the resolve to understand. Most of them avoid spec-
tacular methods, and pursue truth in the quiet retreat of their homes.
We have had such men in our Middle Ages, but we should have to
look for them today in the nooks and crannies of Europe and America.
India has had them for 2500 years—possibly from the prehistoric days
when, perhaps, they were the shamans of savage tribes. The system of
ascetic meditation known as Yoga existed in the time of the Vedas" the
Upanishads and the Mahabharata accepted it; it flourished in the age of
Buddha;01 and even Alexander, attracted by the ability of these "gymno-
sophists" to bear pain silently, stopped to study them, and invited one of
their number to come and live with him. The Yogi refused as firmly as
Diogenes, saying that he wanted nothing from Alexander, being content
with the nothing that he had. His fellow ascetics laughed at the Mace-
donian's boyish desire to conquer the earth when, as they told him, only a
few feet of it sufficed for any man, alive or dead. Another sage, Calanus
(326 B.C.), accompanied Alexander to Persia; growing ill there, he asked
permission to die, saying that he preferred death to illness; and calmly
CHAP.XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 543
mounting a funeral pyre, he allowed himself to be burned to death with-
out uttering a sound— to the astonishment of the Greeks, who had never
seen this unmurderous sort of bravery before.** Two centuries later (ca.
150 B.C.), Patanjali brought the practices and traditions of the system to-
gether in his famous Yoga-sutras, which are still used as a text in Yoga
centers from Benares to Los Angeles.01 Yuan Chwang, in the seventh cen-
tury A.D., described the system as having thousands of devotees;*4 Marco
Polo, about 1296, gave a vivid description of it;"5 today, after all these
centuries, its more extreme followers, numbering from one to three mil-
lion in India,80 still torture themselves to find the peace of understanding.
It is one of the most impressive and touching phenomena in the history
of man.
What is Yoga? Literally, a yoke: not so much a yoking or union of the
soul with the Supreme Being,07 as the yoke of ascetic discipline and absti-
nence which the aspirant puts upon himself in order to cleanse his spirit of
all material limitations, and achieve supernatural intelligence and powers.88
Matter is the root of ignorance and suffering; therefore Yoga seeks to free
the soul from all sense phenomena and all bodily attachment; it is an attempt
to attain supreme enlightenment and salvation in one life by atoning in
one existence for all the sins of the soul's past incarnations.8*
Such enlightenment cannot be won at a stroke; the aspirant must move
towards it step by step, and no stage of the process can be understood by
anyone who has not passed through the stages before it; one comes to
Yoga only by long and patient study and self-discipline. The stages of
Yoga are eight:
I. Yama, or the death of desire; here the soul accepts the restraints of
ahmsa and Brahmacharia, abandons all self-seeking, emancipates itself from all
material interests and pursuits, and wishes well to all things.100
II. Niyama, a faithful observance of certain preliminary rules for Yoga:
cleanliness, content, purification, study, and piety.
III. Asana, posture; the aim here is to still all movement as well as all
sensation; the best asana for this purpose is to place the right foot upon the
left thigh and the left foot upon the right thigh, to cross the hands and
grasp the two great toes, to bend the chin upon the chest, and direct the eyes
to the tip of the nose.101
IV. Pranayama, or regulation of the breath: by these exercises one may
forget everything but breathing, and in this way clear his mind for the pas-
544 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIX
sive emptiness that must precede absorption; at the same time one may learn
to live on a minimum of air, and may let himself, with impunity, be buried
in the earth for many days.
V. Pratyahara, abstraction; now the mind controls all the senses, and with-
draws itself from all sense objects.
VI. Dharana, or concentration— the identification or filling of the mind
and the senses with one idea or object to the exclusion of everything else.*
The fixation of any one object long enough will free the soul of all sensa-
tion, all specific thought, and all selfish desire; then the mind, abstracted from
things, will be left free to feel the immaterial essence of reality .t
VII. Dhyana, or meditation: this is an almost hypnotic condition, resulting
from Dharana; it may be produced, says Patanjali, by the persistent repeti-
tion of the sacred syllable Om. Finally, as the summit of Yoga, the ascetic
arrives at
VIII. Samadhi, or trance contemplation; even the last thought now dis-
appears from the mind; empty, the mind loses consciousness of itself as a
separate being;108 it is merged with totality, and achieves a blissful and god-
like comprehension of all things in One. No words can describe this condi-
tion to the uninitiatc; no intellect or reasoning can find or formulate it;
"through Yoga must Yoga be known."104
Nevertheless it is not God, or union with God, that the yogi seeks;
in the Yoga philosophy God (Ishvara) is not the creator or preserver of
the universe, or the rcwardcr and punisher of men, but merely one of
several objects on which the soul may meditate as a means of achieving con-
centration and enlightenment. The aim, frankly, is that dissociation of
the mind from the body, that removal of all material obstruction from the
spirit, which brings with it, in Yoga theory, supernatural understanding and
capacity.1116 If the soul is cleansed of all bodily subjection and involvement
it will not be united with Rrabwaii, it will be Brahwan; for Brahwan is
precisely that hidden spiritual base, that selfless and immaterial soul,
* Cf. Hobbcs: Semper idem sent ire idem est ac nihil sentlre: "always to feel the same
thing is the same as to feel nothing."
t Eliot compares, for the illumination of this stage, a passage from Schopenhauer, obvi-
ously inspired by his study of Hindu philosophy: "When some sudden cause or inward
disposition lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, the attention is no longer directed
to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and
thus observes them without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to
them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the
peace that we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of
die desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us."102
CHAP. XIX) THELIFEOFTHEMIND 545
which remains when all sense attachments have been exercised away. To
the extent to which the soul can free itself from its physical environment
and prison it becomes Brahman, and exercises Brahman's intelligence and
power. Here the magical basis of religion reappears, and almost threatens
the essence of religion itself —the worship of powers superior to man.
In the days of the Upanishads, Yoga was pure mysticism— an attempt to
realize the identity of the soul with God. In Hindu legend it is said that
in ancient days seven Wise Men, or Rishis, acquired, by penance and medi-
tation, complete knowledge of all things.100 In the later history of India
Yoga became corrupted with magic, and thought more of the power of
miracles than of the peace of understanding. The Yogi trusts that by
Yoga he will be able to anesthetize and control any part of his body by
concentrating upon it;107 he will be able at will to make himself invisible, or
to prevent his body from being moved, or to pass in a moment from any
part of the earth, or to live as long as he desires, or to know the past and
the future, and the most distant stars.108
The sceptic must admit that there is nothing impossible in all this; fools
can invent more hypotheses than philosophers can ever refute, and philoso-
phers often join them in the game. Ecstasy and hallucinations can be pro-
duced by fasting and self-mortification, concentration may make one
locally or generally insensitive to pain; and there is no telling what re-
serve energies and abilities lurk within the unknown mind. Many of the
Yogis, however, are mere beggars who go though their penances in the
supposedly Occidental hope of gold, or in the simple human hunger for
notice and applause.* Asceticism is the reciprocal of sensuality, or at best
an attempt to control it; but the attempt itself verges upon a masochistic
sensuality in which the ascetic takes an almost erotic delight in his pain.
The Brahmans have wisely abstained from such practices, and have coun-
seled their followers to seek sanctity through the conscientious perform-
ance of the normal duties of life.110
5. The Purva-Mimansa
To step from Yoga to the Purva-Mimansa is to pass from the most re-
nowned to the least known and least important of the six systems of Brah-
manical philosophy. And as Yoga is magic and mysticism rather than phil-
• The blunt Dubois describes them as "a tribe of vagabonds."10* The word fakir, some-
times applied to Yogis, is an Arab term, originally meaning "poor," and properly applied
only to members of Moslem religious orders vowed to poverty.
546 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIX
osophy, so this system is less philosophy than religion; it is an orthodox re-
action against the impious doctrines of the philosophers. Its author, Jaimini,
protested against the disposition of Kapila and Kanada to ignore, while
acknowledging, the authority of the Vedas. The human mind, said Jaimini,
is too frail an instrument to solve the problems of metaphysics and the-
ology; reason is a wanton who will serve any desire; it gives us not "science"
and "truth," but merely our own rationalized sensuality and pride. The
road to wisdom and peace lies not through the vain labyrinths of logic, but
in the modest acceptance of tradition and the humble performance of the
rituals prescribed in the Scriptures. For this, too, there is something to be
said: cela vous abetira.
6. The Vedanta System
Origin — Shankara — Logic — Epistemology — "Maya" — Psy-
chology—Theology— God— Ethics— Difficulties of the
system— Death of Shankara
The word Vedanta meant originally the end of the Vedas— that is, the
Upanishads. Today India applies it to that system of philosophy which
sought to give logical structure and support to the essential doctrine of the
Upanishads— the organ-point that sounds throughout Indian thought— that
God (Brahman) and the soul (Atman) arc one. The oldest known form
of this most widely accepted of all Hindu philosophies is the Brahma-sutra
of Badarayana (ca. 200 B.C.)— 555 aphorisms, of which the first announces
the purpose of all: "Now, then, a desire to know Brahman" Almost a
thousand years later Gaudapada wrote a commentary on these sutras, and
taught the esoteric doctrine of the system to Govinda, who taught it to
Shankara, who composed the most famous of Vedanta commentaries, and
made himself the greatest of Indian philosophers.
In his short life of thirty-two years Shankara achieved that union of
sage and saint, of wisdom and kindliness, which characterizes the loftiest
type of man produced in India. Born among the studious Nambudri
Brahmans of Malabar, he rejected the luxuries of the world, and while
still a youth became a sannyasi, worshiping unpretentiously the gods of
the Hindu pantheon, and yet mystically absorbed in a vision of an all-
embracing Brafonan. It seemed to him that the profoundest religion and
the profoundest philosophy were those of the Upanishads. He could pardon
the polytheism of the people, but not the atheism of Sankhya or the agnos-
ticism of Buddha. Arriving in the north as a delegate of the south, he
CHAP. XIX ) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 547
won such popularity at the University of Benares that it crowned him
with its highest honors, and sent him forth, with a retinue of disciples, to
champion Brahmanism in all the debating halls of India. At Benares, prob-
ably, he wrote his famous commentaries on the Upanishads and the
Bhagavad-Gita, in which he attacked with theological ardor and scholastic
subtlety all the heretics of India, and restored Brahmanism to that position
of intellectual leadership from which Buddha and Kapila had deposed it.
There is much metaphysical wind in these discourses, and arid deserts
of textual exposition; but they may be forgiven in a man who at the age
of thirty could be at once the Aquinas and the Kant of India. Like
Aquinas, Shankara accepts the full authority of his country's Scriptures
as a divine revelation, and then sallies forth to find proofs in experience and
reason for all Scriptural teachings. Unlike Aquinas, however, he does not
believe that reason can suffice for such a task; on the contrary he wonders
have we not exaggerated the power and role, the clarity and reliability, of
reason.111 Jaimini was right: reason is a lawyer, and will prove anything
we wish; for every argument it can find an equal and opposite argument,
and its upshot is a scepticism that weakens all force of character and under-
mines all values of life. It is not logic that we need, says Shan-
kara, it is insight, the faculty (akin to art) of grasping at once the essential
out of the irrelevant, the eternal out of the temporal, the whole out of
the part: this is the first prerequisite to philosophy. The second is a will-
ingness to observe, inquire and think for understanding's sake, not for the
sake of invention, wealth or power; it is a withdrawal of the spirit from
all the excitement, bias and fruits of action. Thirdly, the philosopher
must acquire self-restraint, patience, and tranquillity; he must learn to live
above physical temptation or material concerns. Finally there must burn,
deep in his soul, the desire for moksha, for liberation from ignorance, for
an end to all consciousness of a separate self, for a blissful absorption in the
Brahman of complete understanding and infinite unity.118 In a word, the
student needs not the logic of reason so much as a cleansing and deepening
discipline of the soul. This, perhaps, has been the secret of all profound
education.
Shankara establishes the source of his philosophy at a remote and subtle
point never quite clearly visioned again until, a thousand years later,
Immanuel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. How, he asks, is
knowledge possible? Apparently, all our knowledge comes from the
senses, and reveals not the external reality itself, but our sensory adapta-
548 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIX
tion— perhaps transformation— of that reality. By sense, then, we can never
quite know the "real"; we can know it only in that garb of space, time
and cause which may be a web created by our organs of sense and under-
standing, designed or evolved to catch and hold that fluent and elusive
reality whose existence we can surmise, but whose character we can never
objectively describe; our way of perceiving will forever be inextricably
mingled with the thing perceived.
This is not the airy subjectivism of the solipsist who thinks that he can
destroy the world by going to sleep. The world exists, but it is Maya—
not delusion, but phenomenon, an appearance created partly by our
thought. Our incapacity to perceive things except through the film of space
and time, or to think of them except in terms of cause and change, is an
innate limitation, an Avidya, or ignorance, which is bound up with our
very mode of perception, and to which, therefore, all flesh is heir. Maya
and Avidya are the subjective and objective sides of the great illusion by
which the intellect supposes that it knows the real; it is through Maya and
Avidya, through our birthright of ignoiance, that we see a multiplicity of
objects and a flux of change; in truth there is only one Being, and change
is "a mere name" for the superficial fluctuations of forms. Behind the
Maya or Veil of change and things, to be reached not by sensation or
intellect but only by the insight and intuition of the trained spirit, is the
one universal reality, Brahman.
This natural obscuration of sense and intellect by the organs and forms
of sensation and understanding bars us likewise from perceiving the one
unchanging Soul that stands beneath all individual souls and minds. Our
separate selves, visible to perception and thought, are as unreal as the
phantasmagoria of space and time; individual differences and distinct per-
sonalities are bound up with body and matter, they belong to the kaleido-
scopic world of change; and these merely phenomenal selves will pass away
with the material conditions of which they are a part. But the underlying
life which we feel in ourselves when we forget space and time, cause and
change, is the very essence and reality of us, that Annan which we share
with all selves and things, and which, undivided and omnipresent, is
identical with Brahman, God.111
But what is God? Just as there are two selves— the ego and Atman—
and two worlds— the phenomenal and the noumenal— so there are two
deities: an Ishvara or Creator worshiped by the people through the patterns
of space, cause, time and change; and a Brahman or Pure Being worshiped
CHAP. XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 549
by that philosophical piety which seeks and finds, behind all separate things
and selves, one universal reality, unchanging amid all changes, indivisible
amid all divisions, eternal despite all vicissitudes of form, all birth and
death. Polytheism, even theism, belongs to the world of Maya and Avidya;
they are forms of worship that correspond to the forms of perception
and thought; they are as necessary to our moral life as space, time and
cause are necessary to our intellectual life, but they have no absolute
validity or objective truth.Ui
To Shankara the existence of God is no problem, for he defines God
as existence, and identifies all real being with God. But of the existence of a
personal God, creator or redeemer, there may, he thinks, be some ques-
tion; such a deity, says this pre-plagiarist of Kant, cannot be proved by
reason, he can only be postulated as a practical necessity,1" offering peace
to our limited intellects, and encouragement to our fragile morality. The
philosopher, though he may worship in every temple and bow to every
god, will pass beyond these forgivable forms of popular faith; feeling the
illusoriness of plurality, and the monistic unity of all things,* he will adore,
as the Supreme Being, Being itself— indescribable, limitless, spaceless, time-
less, causeless, changeless Being, the source and substance of all reality. t
We may apply the adjectives "conscious," "intelligent," even "happy" to
Brahman, since Brahman includes all selves, and these may have such qual-
ities;110 but all other adjectives would be applicable to Brahman equally,
since It includes all qualities of all things. Essentially Brahman is neuter,
raised above personality and gender, beyond good and evil, above all moral
distinctions, all differences and attributes, all desires and ends. Brahman
is the cause and effect, the timeless and secret essence, of the world.
The goal of philosophy is to find that secret, and to lose the seeker in
the secret found. To be one with God means, for Shankara, to rise above—
or to sink beneath— the separatencss and brevity of the self, with all its
narrow purposes and interests; to become unconscious of all parts, divisions,
things; to be placidly at one, in a desircless Nirvana, with that great ocean
of Being in which there are no warring purposes, no competing selves, no
* Hence the name Advaha— non-dualism— often given to the Vedanta philosophy.
t Shankara and the Vedanta are not quite pantheistic: things considered as distinct
from one another are not Brafanan; they are Brahman only in their essential, indivisible
and changeless essence and reality. "Brahman? says Shankara, "resembles not the world,
and (yet) apart from Brahman there is naught; all that which seems to exist outside of
It (Brahman} cannot exist (in such fashion) save in an illusory manner, like the sem-
blance of water in the desert."1 ir>a
550 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XIX
parts, no change, no space, and no time.* To find this blissful peace
(Ananda) a man must renounce not merely the world but himself; he must
care nothing for possessions or goods, even for good or evil; he must look
upon suffering and death as Maya, surface incidents of body and matter,
time and change; and he must not think of his own personal quality and
fate; a single moment of self-interest or pride can destroy all his liberation.119
Good works cannot give a man salvation, for good works have no validity
or meaning except in the Maya world of space and time; only the knowl-
edge of the saintly seer can bring that salvation which is the recognition
of the identity of self and the universe, Atman and Brahman, soul and God,
and the absorption of the part in the whole.130 Only when this absorption
is complete does the wheel of reincarnation stop; for then it is seen that
the separate self and personality, to which reincarnation comes, is an illu-
sion.131 It is Ishvara, the Maya god, that gives rebirth to the self in punish-
ment and reward; but "when the identity" of Atman and Brahman "has
become known, then," says Shankara, "the soul's existence as wanderer,
and Brahmarfs existence as creator" (i.e., as Ishvara) "have vanished
away."128 Ishvara and Karma, like things and selves, belong to the exoteric
doctrine of Vedanta as adapted to the needs of the common man; in the
esoteric or secret doctrine soul and Brahman are one, never wandering,
never dying, never changed.123
It was thoughtful of Shankara to confine his esoteric doctrine to philos-
ophers; for as Voltaire believed that only a society of philosophers could
survive without laws, so only a society of supermen could live beyond
good and evil. Critics have complained that if good and evil are Maya,
*Cf. Blake:
"I will go down to self-annihilation and Eternal Death.
Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate,
And I be seized and given into the hands of my own Selfhood."117
Or Tennyson's "Ancient Sage":
"For more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs— the limbs
Were strange, not mine— and yet not shade of doubt
But utter clearness, and through loss of Self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were Sun to spark— unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow- world.""8
CHAP.XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 55!
part of the unreal world, then all moral distinctions fall away, and devils
are as good as saints. But these moral distinctions, Shankara cleverly re-
plies, are real 'within the world of space and time, and are binding for those
who live in the world. They are not binding upon the soul that has united
itself with Brahman; such a soul can do no wrong, since wrong implies
desire and action, and the liberated soul, by definition, does not move in
the sphere of desire and (self-considering) action. Whoever consciously
injures another lives on the plane of Maya, and is subject to its distinctions,
its morals and its laws. Only the philosopher is free, only wisdom is
liberty.*
It was a subtle and profound philosophy to be written by a lad in his
twenties. Shankara not only elaborated it in writing and defended it
successfully in debate, but he expressed snatches of it in some of the most
sensitive religious poetry of India. When all challenges had been met he
retired to a hermitage in the Himalayas, and, according to Hindu tradi-
tion, died at the age of thirty-two.15" Ten religious orders were founded
in his name, and many disciples accepted and developed his philosophy.
One of them— some say Shankara himself— wrote for the people a popular
exposition of the Vedanta— the Mohamudgara, or "Hammer of Folly"—
in which the essentials of the system were summed up with clarity and
force:
Fool! give up thy thirst for wealth, banish all desires from thy
heart. Let thy mind be satisfied with what is gained by thy Karma.
. . . Do not be proud of wealth, of friends, or of youth; time takes
all away in a moment. Leaving quickly all this, which is full of
illusion, enter into the place of Brahman. . . . Life is tremulous, like
a water-drop on a lotus-leaf. . . . Time is playing, life is waning—
yet the breath of hope never ceases. The body is wrinkled, the
hair grey, the mouth has become toothless, the stick in the hand
shakes, yet man leaves not the anchor of hope. . . . Preserve equa-
nimity always. ... In thee, in me and in others there dwells Vishnu
alone; it is useless to be angry with me, or impatient. See every
self in Self, and give up all thought of difference.1*
*We do not know how much Parmenidcs' insistence that the Many are unreal, and
that only the One exists, owed to the Upanishads, or contributed to Shankara; nor can
we establish any connection, of cause or suggestion, between Shankara and the astonish-
ingly similar philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
55* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIX
III. THE CONCLUSIONS OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY
Decadence— Summary— Criticism— Influence
The Mohammedan invasions put an end to the great age of Hindu
philosophy. The assaults of the Moslems, and later of the Christians, upon
the native faith drove it, for self-defense, into a timid unity that made
treason of all debate, and stifled creative heresy in a stagnant uniformity
of thought. By the twelfth century the system of the Vedanta, which in
Shankara had tried to be a religion for philosophers, was reinterpreted by
such saints as Ramanuja (ca. 1050) into an orthodox worship of Vishnu,
Rama and Krishna. Forbidden to think new thoughts, philosophy became
not only scholastic but barren; it accepted its dogmas from the priesthood,
and proved them laboriously by distinctions without difference, and logic
without reason.136
Nevertheless the Brahmans, in the solitude of their retreats and under
the protection of their unintclligibility, preserved the old systems carefully
in esoteric sutras and commentaries, and transmitted across generations and
centuries the conclusions of Hindu philosophy. In all these systems, Brah-
manical or other, the categories of the intellect are represented as helpless
or deceptive before a reality immediately felt or seen;* and all our eigh-
teenth-century rationalism appears to the Indian metaphysician as a vain
and superficial attempt to subject the incalculable universe to the concepts
of a salonniere. "Into blind darkness pass they who worship ignorance; into
still greater darkness they who are content with knowledge.""9 Hindu
philosophy begins where European philosophy ends—with an inquiry into
the nature of knowledge and the limitations of reason; it starts not with
the physics of Thales and Democritus, but with the epistemology of Locke
and Kant; it takes mind as that which is most immediately known, and
therefore refuses to resolve it into a matter known only mediately and
through mind. It accepts an external world, but does not believe that our
senses can ever know it as it is. All science is a charted ignorance, and
belongs to Maya; it formulates, in ever changing concepts and phrases, the
rationale of a world in which reason is but a part— one shifting current in
* "No Indian saint ever had anything but contempt for the knowledge gained by the
senses and the intellect."127 "Never have the Indian sages . . . fallen into our typical error
of taking any intellectual formation seriously in the metaphysical sense; these are no more
substantial than any Alaya formation."128
CHAP. XIX) THE LIFE OF THE MIND 553
an interminable sea. Even the person that reasons is Maya, illusion; what
is he but a temporary conjunction of events, a passing node in the curves
of matter and mind through space and time? —and what are his acts or his
thoughts but the fulfilment of forces far antedating his birth? Nothing
is real but Brahman, that vast ocean of Being in which every form is a
moment's wave, or a fleck of froth on the wave. Virtue is not the quiet
heroism of good works, nor any pious ecstasy; it is simply the recognition
of the identity of the self with every other self in Brahman; morality is
such living as comes from a sense of union with all things.* "He who
discerns all creatures in his Self, and his Self in all creatures, has no disquiet
thence. What delusion, what grief can he with him?"180
Certain characteristic qualities which would not seem to be defects from
the Hindu point of view have kept this philosophy from exercising a wider
influence in other civilizations. Its method, its scholastic terminology, and
its Vedic assumptions handicap it in finding sympathy among nations with
other assumptions or more secularized cultures. Its doctrine of Maya
gives little encouragement to morality or active virtue; its pessimism is a
confession that it has not, despite the theory of Karma, explained evil;
and part of the effect of these systems has been to exalt a stagnant quietism
in the face of evils that might conceivably have been corrected, or of work
that cried out to be done. None the less there is a depth in these medita-
tions which by comparison casts an air of superficiality upon the activistic
philosophies generated in more invigorating zones. Perhaps our Western
systems, so confident that "knowledge is power," are the voices of a once
lusty youth exaggerating human ability and tenure. As our energies tire
in the daily struggle against impartial Nature and hostile Time, we look
with more tolerance upon Oriental philosophies of surrender and peace.
Hence the influence of Indian thought upon other cultures has been greatest
in the days of their weakening or decay. While Greece was winning vic-
tories she paid little attention to Pythagoras or Parmenides; when Greece
was declining, Plato and the Orphic priests took up the doctrine of reincar-
nation, while Zeno the Oriental preached an almost Hindu fatalism and
resignation; and when Greece was dying, the Neo-Platonists and the Gnos-
tics drank deep at Indian wells. The impoverishment of Europe by the
* Cf. Spinoza: "The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has
with the whole of Nature."131 "The intellectual love of God" is a summary of Hindu
philosophy.
554 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XIX
fall of Rome, and the Moslem conquest of the routes between Europe and
India, seem to have obstructed, for a millennium, the direct interchange
of Oriental and Occidental ideas. But hardly had the British established
themselves in India before editions and translations of the Upanishads
began to stir Western thought. Fichte conceived an idealism strangely
like Shankara's;1** Schopenhauer almost incorporated Buddhism, the Upani-
shads and the Vedanta into his philosophy; and Schelling, in his old age,
thought the Upanishads the maturest wisdom of mankind. Nietzsche had
dwelt too long with Bismarck and the Greeks to care for India, but in the
end he valued above all other ideas his haunting notion of eternal recurrence
—a variant of reincarnation.
In our time Europe borrows more and more from the philosophy of
the East,* while the East borrows more and more from the science of the
West. Another world war might leave Europe open again (as the break-up
of Alexander's empire opened Greece, and the fall of the Roman Republic
opened Rome)— to an influx of Oriental philosophies and faiths. The
mounting insurrection of the Orient against the Occident, the loss of those
Asiatic markets that have sustained the industry and prosperity of the
West, the weakening of Europe by poverty, faction and revolution, might
make that divided continent ripe for a new religion of celestial hope and
earthly despair. Probably it is prejudice that makes such a denouement
seem inconceivable in America: quietism and resignation do not comport
with our electric atmosphere, or with the vitality born of rich resources
and a spacious terrain. Doubtless our weather will protect us in the end.
* Cf . Bergson, Keyserling, Christian Science, Theosophy.
CHAPTER XX
The Literature of India
I. THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA
Sanskrit— The vernaculars—Grammar
JUST as the philosophy and much of the literature of medieval Europe
were composed in a dead language unintelligible to the people, so the
philosophy and classic literature of India were written in a Sanskrit that
had long since passed out of common parlance, but had survived as the
Esperanto of scholars having no other common tongue. Divorced from
contact with the life of the nation, this literary language became a model
of scholasticism and refinement; new words were formed not by the spon-
taneous creations of the people, but by the needs of technical discourse in
the schools; until at last the Sanskrit of philosophy lost the virile simplicity
of the Vedic hymns, and became an artificial monster whose sesquipedalia
verba crawled like monstrous tapeworms across the page.*
Meanwhile the people of northern India, about the fifth century before
Christ, had transformed Sanskrit into Prakrit, very much as Italy was to
change Latin into Italian. Prakrit became for a time the language of Bud-
dhists and Jains, until it in turn was developed into Pali— the language of the
oldest extant Buddhist literature.3 By the end of the tenth century of our
era these "Middle Indian" languages had given birth to various vernaculars,
of which the chief was Hindi. In the twelfth century this in turn generated
Hindustani as the language of the northern half of India. Finally the invad-
ing Moslems filled Hindustani with Persian words, thereby creating a new
dialect, Urdu. All these were "Indo-Germanic" tongues, confined to Hin-
dustan; the Deccan kept its old Dravidian languages— Tamil, Tclugu, Kanarese
and Malay alam— and Tamil became the chief literary vehicle of the south.
In the nineteenth century Bengali replaced Sanskrit as the literary language
of Bengal; the novelist Chatter jee was its Boccaccio, the poet Tagorc was
its Petrarch. Even today India has a hundred languages, and the literature of
Swaraj^ uses the speech of the conquerors.
* Some examples of Sanskrit agglutination: citerapratisamkramayastadakarapattau, upada-
navisvamasattakakaruapattib.1
t The movement for self -rule.
5SS
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XX
At a very early date India began to trace the roots, history, relations and
combinations of words. By the fourth century B.C. she had created for
herself* the science of grammar, and produced probably the greatest of all
known grammarians, Panini. The studies of Panini, Patanjali (ca. 150 A.D.)
and Bhartrihari (ca. 650) laid the foundations of philology; and that fas-
cinating science of verbal genetics owed almost its life in modern times to
the rediscovery of Sanskrit.
Writing, as we have seen, was not popular in Vedic India. About the
fifth century B.C. the Kharosthi script was adapted from Semitic models, and
in the epics and the Buddhist literature we begin to hear of clerks." Palm-
leaves and bark served as writing material, and an iron stylus as a pen; the
bark was treated to make it less fragile, the pen scratched letters into it,
ink was smeared over the bark, and remained in the scratches when the rest
of it was wiped away.4 Paper was brought in by the Moslems (ca. 1000 *
A.D.), but did not finally replace bark till the seventeenth century. The j
bark pages were kept in order by stringing them upon a cord, and books of
such leaves were gathered in libraries which the Hindus termed "Treasure-
houses of the Goddess of Speech." Immense collections of this wooden
literature have survived the devastations of time and war.t
II. EDUCATION
Schools— Methods— Universities— Moslem education— An emperor
on education
Writing continued, even to the nineteenth century, to play a very small
part in Indian education. Perhaps it was not to the interest of the priests
that the sacred or scholastic texts should become an open secret to all.6
As far as we can trace Indian history we find a system of education,7
always in the hands of the clergy, open at first only to the sons of Brahmans,
then spreading its privileges from caste to caste until in our time it excludes
only the Untouchables. Every Hindu village had its schoolmaster, sup-
ported out of the public funds; in Bengal alone, before the coming of the
British, there were some eighty thousand native schools— one to every four
* The Babylonians had done likewise; cf. p. 250 above.
tOf printing there is no sign till the nineteenth century— possibly because, as in China,
the adjustment of movable type to the native scripts was too expensive, possibly because
printing was looked upon as a vulgar descent from the an of calligraphy. The printing
of newspapers and books was brought by the English to the Hindus, who bettered the
instruction; today there are 1,517 newspapers in India, 3,627 periodicals, and over 17,000
new books published in an average year.5
CHAP.XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 557
hundred population.8 The percentage of literacy under Ashoka was ap-
parently higher than in India today.9
Children went to the village school from September to February, enter-
ing at the age of five and leaving at the age of eight.10 Instruction was
chiefly of a religious character, no matter what the subject; rote memorizing
was the usual method, and the Vedas were the inevitable text. The three R's
were included, but were not the main business of education; character was
rated above intellect, and discipline was the essence of schooling. We do not
hear of flogging, or of other severe measures; but we find that stress was
laid above all upon the formation of wholesome and proper habits of life.11
At the age of eight the pupil passed to the more formal care of a Guru, or
personal teacher and guide, with whom the student was to live, preferably
till he was twenty. Services, sometimes menial, were required of him, and
he was pledged to continence, modesty, cleanliness, and a meatless diet.13
Instruction was now given him in the "Five Sbastras" or sciences: grammar,
arts and crafts, medicine, logic, and philosophy. Finally he was sent out into
the world with the wise admonition that education came only one-fourth
from the teacher, one-fourth from private study, one-fourth from one's fel-
lows, and one-fourth from life.18
From his Guru the student might pass, about the age of sixteen, to one
of the great universities that were the glory of ancient and medieval India:
Benares, Taxila, Vidarbha, Ajanta, Ujjain, or Nalanda. Benares was the
stronghold of orthodox Brahman learning in Buddha's days as in ours;
Taxila, at the time of Alexander's invasion, was known to all Asia as the
leading seat of Hindu scholarship, renowned above all for its medical
school; Ujjain was held in high repute for astronomy, Ajanta for the teach-
ing of art. The fagade of one of the ruined buildings at Ajanta suggests
the magnificence of these old universities.14 Nalanda, most famous of Bud-
dhist institutions for higher learning, had been founded shortly after the
Master's death, and the state had assigned for its support the revenues of
a hundred villages. It had ten thousand students, one hundred lecture-
rooms, great libraries, and six immense blocks of dormitories four stories
high; its observatories, said Yuan Chwang, "were lost in the vapors of the
morning, and the upper rooms towered above the clouds."16 The old
Chinese pilgrim loved the learned monks and shady groves of Nalanda so
well that he stayed there for five years. "Of those from abroad who wished
to enter the schools of discussion" at Nalanda, he tells us, "the majority,
558 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XX
beaten by the difficulties of the problem, withdrew; and those who were
deeply versed in old and modern learning were admitted, only two or three
out of ten succeeding."" The candidates who were fortunate enough to
gain admission were given free tuition, board and lodging, but they were
subjected to an almost monastic discipline. Students were not permitted
to talk to a woman, or to see one; even the desire to look upon a woman
was held a great sin, in the fashion of the hardest saying in the New Testa-
ment. The student guilty of sex relations had to wear, for a whole year,
the skin of an ass, with the tail turned upward, and had to go about begging
alms and declaring his sin. Every morning the entire student body was
required to bathe in the ten great swimming pools that belonged to the
university. The course of study lasted for twelve years, but some students
stayed thirty years, and some remained till death."
The Mohammedans destroyed nearly all the monasteries, Buddhist or
Brahman, in northern India. Nalanda was burned to the ground in 1197,
and all its monks were slaughtered; we can never estimate the abundant
life of ancient India from what these fanatics spared. Nevertheless, the
destroyers were not barbarians; they had a taste for beauty, and an almost
modern skill in using piety for the purposes of plunder. When the Moguls
ascended the throne they brought a high but narrow standard of culture
with them; they loved letters as much as the sword, and knew how to
combine a successful siege with poetry. Among the Moslems education
was mostly individual, through tutors engaged by prosperous fathers for
their sons. It was an aristocratic conception of education as an ornament-
occasionally an aid— to a man of affairs and power, but usually an irritant
and a public danger in one doomed to poverty or modest place. What the
methods of the tutors were we may judge from one of the great letters
of history— the reply of Aurangzeb to his former teacher, who was seeking
some sinecure and emolument from the King:
What is it you would have of me, Doctor? Can you reasonably
desire that I should make you one of the chief Omrahs of my
court? Let me tell you, if you had instructed me as you should have
done, nothing would be more just; for I am of this persuasion, that
a child well educated and instructed is as much, at least, obliged to
his master as to his father. But where are those good documents*
you have given me? In the first place, you have taught me that
* I.e.. instructions.
CHAP. XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 559
all Frangistan (so it seems they call Europe) was nothing but I
know not what little island, of which the greatest king was he of
Portugal, and next to him he of Holland, and after him he of Eng-
land: and as to the other kings, as those of France and Andalusia,
you have represented them to me as our petty rajas, telling me
that the kings of Indostan were far above them altogether, that
they (the kings of Indostan) were . . . the great ones, the con-
querors and kings of the world; and those of Persia and Usbec,
Kashgar, Tartary and Cathay, Pegu, China and Matchina did
tremble at the name of the kings of Indostan. Admirable geog-
raphy! You should rather have taught me exactly to distinguish
all those states of the world, and well to understand their strength,
their way of fighting, their customs, religions, governments, and
v interests; and by the pursual of solid history, to observe their rise,
progress, decay; and whence, how, and by what accidents and er-
rors those great changes and revolutions of empires and kingdoms
have happened. I have scarce learned of you the name of my grand-
sires, the famous founders of this empire; so far were you from
having taught me the history of their life, and what course they
took to make such great conquest. You had a mind to teach me
the Arabian tongue, to read and to write. I am much obliged, for- -
sooth, for having made me lose so much time upon a language that
requires ten or twelve years to attain to its perfection; as if the son
of a king should think it to be an honor to him to be a grammarian
or some doctor of the law, and to learn other languages than of his
neighbors when he can well be without them; he, to whom time is
so precious for so many weighty things, which he ought by times
to learn. As if there were any spirit that did not with some reluc-
tancy, and even with a kind of debasement, employ itself in so sad
and dry an exercise, so longsome and tedious, as is that of learning
words."
"Thus," says the contemporary Bernier, "did Aurangzeb resent the
pedantic instructions of his tutors; to which 'tis affirmed in that court that
... he added the following reproof";*
Know you not that childhood well governed, being a state which
is ordinarily accompanied with an happy memory, is capable of
• We cannot tell how much of the following (and perhaps of the preceding) quotation
is Bernier's, and how much Aurangzeb 's; we only know that it bears reprinting.
) THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XX
thousands of good precepts and instructions, which remain deeply
impressed the whole remainder of a man's life, and keep the mind
always raised for great actions? The law, prayers and sciences,
may they not as well be learned in our mother-tongue as in Ara-
bick? You told my father Shah Jehan that you would teach me
philosophy. 'Tis true, I remember very well, that you have en-
tertained me for many years with airy questions of things that af-
ford no satisfaction at all to the mind, and are of no use in humane
society, empty notions and mere fancies, that have only this in them,
that they are very hard to understand and very easy to forget. ... I
still remember that after you had thus amused me, I know not
how long, with your fine philosophy, all I retained of it was a mul-
titude of barbarous and dark words, proper to bewilder, perplex and
tire out the best wits, and only invented the better to cover the
vanity and ignorance of men like yourself, that would make us be-
lieve that they know all, and that under those obscure and am-
biguous words are hid great mysteries which they alone are capa-
ble to understand. If you had seasoned me with that philosophy
which formeth the mind to ratiocination, and insensibly accustoms
it to be satisfied with nothing but solid reasons, if you had given
me those excellent precepts and doctrines which raise the soul above
the assaults of fortune, and reduce her to an unshakable and always
equal temper, and permit her not to be lifted up by prosperity nor
debased by adversity; if you had taken care to give me the knowl-
edge of what we are and what are the first principles of things,
and had assisted me in forming in my mind a fit idea of the great-
ness of the universe, and of the admirable order and motion of the
parts thereof; if, I say, you had instilled into me this kind of phil-
osophy, I should think myself incomparably more obliged to you
than Alexander was to his Aristotle, and believe it my duty to
recompense you otherwise than he did him. Should you not, in-
stead of your flattery, have taught me somewhat of that point so
important to a king, which is, what the reciprocal duties are of a
sovereign to his subjects and those of subjects to their sovereigns;
and ought not you to have considered that one day I should be
obliged with the sword to dispute my life and my crown with my
brothers? . . . Have you ever taken any care to make me learn
what 'tis to besiege a town, or to set an army in array? For these
things I am obliged to others, not at all to you. Go, and return to
the village whence you are come, and let nobody know who you are
or what is become of you."
CHAP. XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 561
in. THE EPICS
The "Mahabharata"-lts story-Its form-The "Bhagavad-Gittf-
The metaphysics of war— The price of freedom— The "Ra-
mayana"—A forest idyl— The rape of Sita—The Hindu
epics and the Greek
The schools and the universities were only a part of the educational
system of India. Since writing was less highly valued than in other civili-
zations, and oral instruction preserved and disseminated the nation's his-
tory and poetry, the habit of public recitation spread among the people
the most precious portions of their cultural heritage. As nameless racon-
teurs among the Greeks transmitted and expanded the Iliad and the
Odyssey, so the reciters and declaimers of India carried down from
generation to generation, and from court to people, the ever-growing
epics into which the Brahmans crowded their legendary lore.
A Hindu scholar has rated the Mahabharata as "the greatest work of
imagination that Asia has produced";20 and Sir Charles Eliot has called
it "a greater poem than the Iliad"*1 In one sense there is no doubt about
the latter judgment. Beginning (ca. 500 B.C.) as a brief narrative poem
of reasonable length, the Mahabharata took on, with every century, addi-
tional episodes and homilies, and absorbed the Bhagavad-Gita as well as
parts of the story of Rama, until at last it measured 107,000 octameter
couplets— seven times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.
The name of the author was legion; "Vyasa," to whom tradition assigns
it, means "the arranger."29 A hundred poets wrote it, a thousand singers
moulded it, until, under the Gupta kings (ca. 400 A.D.), the Brahmans
poured their own religious and moral ideas into a work originally Ksha-
triyan, and gave the poem the gigantic form in which we find it today.
The central subject was not precisely adapted to religious instruction,
for it told a tale of violence, gambling and war. Book One presents the
fair Shakuntala (destined to be the heroine of India's most famous drama)
and her mighty son Bharata; from his loins come those "great Bharata"
(Maha-Bharata) tribes, the Kurus and the Pandavas, whose bloody strife
constitutes the oft-broken thread of the tale. Yudhishthira, King of the
Pandavas, gambles away his wealth, his army, his kingdom, his brothers,
at last his wife Dranpadi, in a game in which his Kuru enemy plays with
loaded dice. By agreement the Pandavas are to receive their kingdom
562 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XX
back after enduring a twelve-year banishment from their native soil. The
twelve years pass; the Pandavas call upon the Kurus to restore their land;
they receive no answer, and declare war. Allies are brought in on either
side, until almost all northern India is engaged.* The battle rages for
eighteen days and five books; all the Kurus are slain, and nearly all the
Pandavas; the heroic Bhishma alone slays 100,000 men in ten days; alto-
gether, the poet-statistician reports, the fallen numbered several hundred
million men.83 Amid this bloody scene of death Gandhari, queen consort
of the blind Kuru king, Dhrita-rashtra, wails with horror at the sight of
vultures hovering greedily over the corpse of Prince Duryodhan, her son.
Stainless Queen and stainless woman, ever righteous, ever good,
Stately in her mighty sorrow on the field Gandhari stood.
Strewn with skulls and clotted tresses, darkened by the stream of
gore,
With the limbs of countless warriors is the red field covered o'er. . . .
And the long-drawn howl of jackals o'er the scene of carnage rings,
And the vulture and the raven flap their dark and loathsome wings.
Feasting on the blood of warriors foul Pishachas fill the air,
Viewless forms of hungry Rakshas limb from limb the corpses tear.
Through this scene of death and carnage was the ancient monarch
led,
Kuru dames with faltering footsteps stepped amidst the countless
dead,
And a piercing wail of anguish burst upon the echoing plain,
As they saw their sons or fathers, brothers, lords, amidst the slain,
As they saw the wolves of jungle feed upon the destined prey,
Darksome wanderers of the midnight prowling in the light of day.
Shriek of pain and wail of anguish o'er the ghastly field resound,
And their feeble footsteps falter and they sink upon the ground,
Sense and life desert the mourners as they faint in common grief,
Death-like swoon succeeding sorrow yields a moment's short relief.
Then a mighty sigh of anguish from Gandhari's bosom broke,
Gazing on her anguished daughters unto Krishna thus she spoke:
"Mark my unconsoled daughters, widowed queens of Kuru's house,
* References in the Vedas to certain characters of the Mahabharata indicate that the
story of a great intertribal war in the second millennium B.C. is fundamentally historical.
CHAP.XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 563
Wailing for their dear departed, like the osprey for her spouse;
How each cold and fading feature wakes in them a woman's love,
How amidst the lifeless warriors still with restless steps they rove;
Mothers hug their slaughtered children all unconscious in their
sleep,
Widows bend upon their husbands and in ceaseless sorrow
weep. . . ."
Thus to Krishna Queen Gandhari strove her woeful thoughts to tell,
When, alas, her wandering vision on her son Duryodhan fell.
Sudden anguish smote her bosom, and her senses seemed to stray;
Like a tree by tempest shaken, senseless on the earth she lay.
Once again she waked in sorrow, once again she cast her eye
Where her son in blood empurpled slept beneath the open sky.
And she clasped her dear Duryodhan, held him close unto her breast,
Sobs convulsive shook her bosom as the lifeless form she prest,
And her tears like rains of summer fell and washed his noble head,
Decked with garlands still untarnished, graced with nishkas bright
and red.
" 'Mother,' said my dear Duryodhan, when he went unto the war,
'Wish me joy and wish me triumph as I mount the battle-car.'
'Son,' I said to dear Duryodhan, 'Heaven avert a cruel fate,
Yato dharma stato jay ah— triumph doth on virtue wait.'
But he set his heart on battle, by his valor wiped his sins;
Now he dwells in realms celestial which the faithful warrior wins.
And I weep not for Duryodhan, like a prince he fought and fell,
But my sorrow-stricken husband, who can his misfortunes tell? . . .
"Hark the loathsome cry of jackals, how the wolves their vigils
keep-
Maidens rich in song and beauty erst were wont to watch his sleep.
Hark the foul and blood-beaked vultures flap their wings upon the
dead-
Maidens waved their feathery pankhas round Duryodhan's royal
bed. . . .
Mark Duryodhan's noble widow, mother proud of Lakshman bold,
Queenly in her youth and beauty, like an altar of bright gold,
Torn from husband's sweet embraces, from her son's entwining
arms,
Doomed to life-long woe and anguish in her youth and in her
charms.
564 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XX
Rend my hard and stony bosom crushed beneath this cruel pain,
Should Gandhari live to witness noble son and grandson slain?
Mark again Duryodhan's widow, how she hugs his gory head,
How with gentle hands and tender softly holds him on his bed;
How from dear departed husband turns she to her dearest son,
And the tear-drops of the mother choke the widow's bitter groan;
Like the fibre of the lotus tender-golden is her frame.
O my lotus, O my daughter, Bharat's pride and Kuril's fame!
If the truth resides in Vedas, brave Duryodhan dwells above;
Wherefore linger we in sadness severed from his cherished love?
If the truth resides in Shastra, dwells in sky my hero son;
Wherefore linger we in sorrow since their earthly task is done?"**
Upon this theme of love and battle a thousand interpolations have been
hung. The god Krishna interrupts the slaughter for a canto to discourse
on the nobility of war and Krishna; the dying Bhishma postpones his
death to expound the laws of caste, bequest, marriage, gifts and funeral
rites, to explain the philosophy of the Sankhya and the Upanishads, to
narrate a mass of legends, traditions and myths, and to lecture Yudishthira
at great length on the duties of a king; dusty stretches of genealogy and
geography, of theology and metaphysics, separate the oases of drama and
action; fables and fairy-tales, love-stories and lives of the saints contribute
to give the Mahabharata a formlessness worse, and a body of thought
richer, than can be found in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. What was
evidently a Kshatriyan enthronement of action, heroism and war becomes,
in the hands of the Brahmans, a vehicle for teaching the people the laws
of Manu, the principles of Yoga, the precepts of morality, and the beauty
of Nirvana. The Golden Rule is expressed in many forms;* moral aphor-
isms of beauty and wisdom abound;t and pretty stories of marital fidelity
(Nala and Damayanti, Savitri) convey to women listeners the Brahman
ideal of the faithful and patient wife.
Embedded in the narrative of the great battle is the loftiest philosophical
poem in the world's literature— the Bhagavad-Gita, or Lord's Song. This
* E.g.: "Do naught to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain."" "Even if
the enemy seeks help, the good man will be ready to grant him aid."* "With meekness
conquer wrath, and ill with ruth; by giving niggards vanquish, lies with truth.""
tE.g.: "As in the great ocean one piece of wood meets another, and parts from it
again, such is the meeting of creatures."17
CHAP. XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 565
is the New Testament of India, revered next to the Vedas themselves, and
used in the law-courts, like our Bible or the Koran, for the administration
of oaths." Wilhelm von Humboldt pronounced it "the most beautiful,
perhaps the only true, philosophical song existing in any known tongue;
. . . perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show.""
Sharing the anonymity that India, careless of the individual and the par-
ticular, wraps around her creations, the Gita comes to us without the
author's name, and without date. It may be as old as 400 B.C.,* or as young
as 200 A.D.*
The mise-en-scene of the poem is the battle between the Kurus and
the Pandavas; the occasion is the reluctance of the Pandava warrior
Arjuna to attack in mortal combat his own near relatives in the opposing
force. To Lord Krishna, fighting by his side like some Homeric god,
Arjuna speaks the philosophy of Gandhi and Christ:
"As I behold— come here to shed
Their common blood— yon concourse of our kin,
My members fail, my tongue dries in my mouth. . . .
It is not good, O Keshav! Naught of good
Can spring from mutual slaughter! Lo, I hate
Triumph and domination, wealth and case
Thus sadly won! Alas, what victory
Can bring delight, Govinda, what rich spoils
Could profit, what rule recompense, what span
Of life itself seem sweet, bought with such blood? . . .
Thus if we slay
Kinsfolk and friends for love of earthly power,
Ahovat! what an evil fault it were!
Better I deem it, if my kinsmen strike,
To face them weaponless, and bare my breast
To shaft and spear, than answer blow with blow."*
Thereupon Krishna, whose divinity does not detract from his joy in
battle, explains, with all the authority of a son of Vishnu, that according
to the Scriptures, and the best orthodox opinion, it is meet and just to kill
one's relatives in war; that Arjuna's duty is to follow the rules of his
Kshatriya caste, to fight and slay with a good conscience and a good will;
that after all, only the body is slain, while the soul survives. And he ex-
566 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XX
pounds the imperishable Purusha of Sankhya, the unchanging Atman of
the Upanishads:
"Indestructible,
Learn thou, the Life is, spreading life through all;
It cannot anywhere, by any means,
Be anywise diminished, stayed or changed.
But for these fleeting frames which it informs
With spirit deathless, endless, infinite—
They perish. Let them perish, Prince, and fight!
He who shall say, *Lo, I have slain a man! '
He who shall think, 'Lo, I am slain!' those both
Know naught. Life cannot slay! Life is not slain!
Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless rcmaincth the spirit forever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it
seems."18
Krishna proceeds to instruct Arjuna in metaphysics, blending Sankhya
and Vedanta in the peculiar synthesis accepted by the Vaishnavite sect.
All things, he says, identifying himself with the Supreme Being,
"hang on me
As hangs a row of pearls upon its string.
I am the fresh taste of the water; I
The silver of the moon, the gold o' the sun,
The word of worship in the Veds, the thrill
That passeth in the ether, and the strength
Of man's shed seed. I am the good sweet smell
Of the moistened earth, I am the fire's red light,
The vital air moving in all which moves,
The holiness of hallowed souls, the root
Undying, whence hath sprung whatever is;
The wisdom of the wise, the intellect
Of the informed, the greatness of the great,
The splendor of the splendid. . . .
To him who wisely sees,
The Brahman with his scrolls and sanctities,
The cow, the elephant, the unclean dog,
The outcaste gorging dog's meat, all are one."14
CHAP. XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 567
It is a poem rich in complementary colors, in metaphysical and ethical
contradictions that reflect the contrariness and complexity of life. We;
are a little shocked to find the man taking what might seem to be the
higher moral stand, while the god argues for war and slaughter on the
shifty ground that life is unkillable and individuality unreal. What the
author had in mind to do, apparently, was to shake the Hindu soul out
of the enervating quietism of Buddhist piety into a willingness to fight
for India; it was the rebellion of a Kshatriya who felt that religion was
weakening his country, and who proudly reckoned that many things were
more precious than peace. All in all it was a good lesson which, if India
had learned it, might have kept her free.
The second of the Indian epics is the most famous and best beloved of
all Hindu books,35 and lends itself more readily than the Mahabharata to
Occidental understanding. The Ramayana is briefer, merely running to a
thousand pages of forty-eight lines each; and though it, too, grew by
accretion from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., the inter-
polations arc fewer, and do not much disturb the central theme. Tradition
attributes the poem to one Valmiki, who, like the supposed author of the
larger epic, appears as a character in the tale; but more probably it is the
product of many wayside bards like those who still recite these epics,
sometimes for ninety consecutive evenings, to fascinated audiences."5
As the Mahabharata resembles the Iliad in being the story of a great
war fought by gods and men, and partly occasioned by the loss of a beau-
tiful woman from one nation to another, so the Ramayana resembles the
Odyssey, and tells of a hero's hardships and wanderings, and of his wife's
patient waiting for reunion with him.*7 At the outset we get a picture of
a Golden Age, when Dasa-ratha, from his capital Ayodhya, ruled the king-
dom of Kosala (now Oudh).
Rich in royal worth and valor, rich in holy Vedic lore,
Dasa-ratha ruled his empire in the happy days of yore. . . .
Peaceful lived the righteous people, rich in wealth, in merit high;
Envy dwelt not in their bosoms, and their accents shaped no lie.
Fathers with their happy households owned their cattle, corn and
gold;
Galling penury and famine in Ayodhya had no hold."
568 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XX
Nearby was another happy kingdom, Videha, over which King Janak
ruled. He himself "held the plough and tilled the earth" like some doughty
Cincinnatus; and one day, at the touch of his plough, a lovely daughter,
Sita, sprang up from a furrow of the soil. Soon Sita had to be married, and
Janak held a contest for her suitors: he who could unbend Janak's bow
of war should win the bride. To the contest came the oldest son of Dasa-
ratha— Rama "lion-chested, mighty armed, lotus-eyed, stately as the jungle
tusker, with his crown of tresses tied."80 Only Rama bent the bow; and
Janak offered him his daughter with the characteristic formula of Hindu
marriage:
This is Sita, child of Janak, dearer unto him than life;
Henceforth sharer of thy virtue, be she, prince, thy faithful wife;
Of thy weal and woe partaker, be she thine in every land;
Cherish her in joy and sorrow, clasp her hand within thy hand;
As the shadow to the substance, to her lord is faithful wife,
And my Sita, best of women, follows thee in death or life."40
So Rama returns to Ayodhya with his princess-bride— "ivory brow and
lip of coral, sparkling teeth of pearly sheen"— and wins the love of the
Kosalas by his piety, his gentleness, and his generosity. Suddenly evil
enters into this Eden in the form of Dasa-ratha's second wife, Kaikeyi.
Dasa-ratha has promised her any boon she may ask; and now, jealous of
the first wife, whose son Rama is heir to the throne, she requires Dasa-ratha
to banish Rama from the kingdom for fourteen years. Dasa-ratha, with a
sense of honor which only a poet unacquainted with politics could con-
ceive, keeps his word, and, broken-hearted, exiles his favorite son. Rama
forgives him handsomely, and prepares to go and live in the forest, alone;
but Sita insists upon going with him. Her speech is part of the memory
of almost every Hindu bride:
"Car and steed and gilded palace, vain are these to woman's life;
Dearer is her husband's shadow to the loved and loving wife. . . .
Happier than in father's mansions, in the woods will Sita rove,
Waste no thought on home or kindred, nestling in her hus-
band's love. . . .
And the wild fruit she will gather from the fresh and fragrant
wood,
And the food by Rama tasted shall be Sita's cherished food."41
CHAP.XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 569
Even his brother Lakshman begs leave to accompany Rama:
"All alone with gentle Sita thou shalt trace thy darksome way;
Grant it that thy faithful Lakshman shall protect her night and day;
Grant it with his bow and quiver Lakshman shall all forests roam,
And his axe shall fell the jungle, and his hands shall rear the
home.""
The epic becomes at this point a sylvan idyl, telling how Rama, Sita
and Lakshman set out for the woods; how the population of Ayodhya,
mourning for them, travel with them all the first day; how the exiles steal
away from their solicitous company at night, abandon all their valuables
and princely raiment, dress themselves in bark and matted grass, clear a
way through the forest with their swords, and live on the fruits and nuts
of the trees.
Oft to Rama turned his consort, pleased and curious ever more,
Asked the name of tree or creeper, fruit or flower unseen before. . . .
Peacocks flew around them gayly, monkeys leapt on branches
bent. . . .
Rama plunged into the river 'neath the morning's crimson beam,
Sita softly sought the waters as the lily seeks the stream.4*
They build a hut beside the river, and learn to love their life in the
woods. But a southern princess, Surpa-nakha, wandering in the forest,
meets Rama, falls in love with him, resents his virtue, and instigates her
brother Ravan to come and kidnap Sita. He succeeds, snatches her away
to his distant castle, and tries in vain to seduce her. Since nothing is im-
possible to gods and authors, Rama raises a great army, invades Ravan's
realm, defeats him in battle, rescues Sita, and then (his years of exile having
ended) flies with her in an airplane back to Ayodhya, where another loyal'
brother gladly surrenders to him the Kosala throne.
In what is probably a later epilogue, Rama gives way to the sceptics
who will not believe that Sita could have been so long in Ravan's palace
without being occasionally in his arms. Though she passes through the
Ordeal of Fire to prove her innocence, he sends her away to a forest
hermitage with that bitter trick of heredity whereby one generation repeats
upon the next the sins and errors which it suffered from its elders in its
youth. In the woods Sita meets Valmiki, and bears two sons to Rama.
57° THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XX
Many years later these sons, as traveling minstrels, sing before the unhappy
Rama the epic composed about him by Valmiki from Sita's memories. He
recognizes the boys as his own, and sends a message begging Sita to return.
But Sita, broken-hearted over the suspicion to which she has been sub-
jected, disappears into the earth that was once her mother. Rama reigns
many years in loneliness and sorrow, and under his kindly sway Ayodhya
knows again the Utopia of Dasa-ratha's days:
And 'tis told by ancient sages, during Rama's happy reign,
Death untimely, dire diseases, came not to his subject men;
Widows wept not in their sorrow for their lords untimely lost,
Mothers wailed not in their anguish for their babes by Yama crost;
Robbers, cheats and gay deceivers tempted not with lying word,
Neighbor loved his righteous neighbor, and the people loved their
lord.
Trees their ample produce yielded as returning seasons went,
And the earth in grateful gladness never-failing harvest lent.
Rains descended in their season, never came the blighting gale,
Rich in crop and rich in pasture was each soft and smiling vale.
Loom and anvil gave their produce, and the tilled and fertile soil,
And the nation lived rejoicing in their old ancestral toil.44
It is a delightful story, which even a modern cynic can enjoy if he is
wise enough to yield himself now and then to romance and the lilt of song.
These poems, though perhaps inferior to the epics of Homer in literary
quality—in logic of structure, and splendor of language, in depth of por-
traiture and fidelity to the essence of things— are distinguished by fine
feeling, a lofty idealization of woman and man, and a vigorous— sometimes
realistic— representation of life. Rama and Sita are too good to be true,
but Draupadi and Yudhishthira, Dhrita-rashtra and Gandhari, are almost
as living as Achilles and Helen, Ulysses and Penelope. The Hindu would
rightly protest that no foreigner can judge these epics, or even understand
them. To him they are not mere stories, they are a gallery of ideal char-
acters upon whom he may mould his conduct; they are a repertory of the
traditions, philosophy and theology of his people; in a sense they are sacred
scriptures to be read as a Christian reads The Imitation of Christ or The
Lives of the Saints. The pious Hindu believes that Krishna and Rama were
incarnations of divinity, and still prays to them; and when he reads their
story in these epics he feels that he derives religious merit as well as literary
CHAP.XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 571
delight and moral exaltation. He trusts that if he reads the Ramayana he
will be cleansed of all sin, and will beget a son;45 and he accepts with
simple faith the proud conclusion of the Mahabharata:
If a man reads the Mahabharata and has faith in its doctrines, he
becomes free from all sin, and ascends to heaven after his death. . . .
As butter is to all other food, as Brahmans are to all other men,
... as the ocean is to a pool of water, as the cow is to all other
quadrupeds— so is the Mahabharata to all other histories. ... He
who attentively listens to the shlokas* of the Mahabharata^ and has
faith in them, enjoys a long life and solid reputation in this world,
and an eternal abode in the heavens in the next.48
IV. DRAMA
Origins— "The Clay Cart"— Characteristics of Hindu drama— Kali-
dasa — The story of "Shakimtala" — Estimate of Indian
drama
In one sense drama in India is as old as the Vedas, for at least the germ
of drama lies in the Upanlshads. Doubtless older than these Scriptures is a
more active source of the drama— the sacrificial and festival ceremonies and
processions of religion. A third origin was in the dance—no mere release
of energy, much less a substitute for coitus, but a serious ritual imitating
and suggesting actions and events vital to the tribe. Perhaps a fourth
source lay in the public and animated recitation of epic verse. These
factors cooperated to produce the Indian theatre, and gave it a religious
stamp that lingered throughout the classic agef in the serious nature of the
drama, the Vedic or epic source of its subjects, and the benediction that
always preceded the play.
Perhaps the final stimulus to drama came from the intercourse, established
by Alexander's invasion, between India and Greece. We have no evidence
of Hindu dramas before Ashoka, and only uncertain evidence during his
reign. The oldest extant Hindu plays are the palm-leaf manuscripts lately
discovered in Chinese Turkestan. Among them were three dramas, one of
which names as its author Ashvaghosha, a theological luminary at Kanishka's
court. The technical form of this play, and the resemblance of its buffoon
* Couplets.
tl.e., the age in which literature used Sanskrit as its medium.
572 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XX
to the type traditionally characteristic of the Hindu theatre, suggest that
drama was already old in India when Ashvaghosha was born.*7 In 1910
thirteen ancient Sanskrit plays were found in Travancore, which are dubi-
ously ascribed to Bhasa (ca. 350 A.D.), a dramatic predecessor much honored
by Kalidasa. In the prologue to his Malavika Kalidasa unconsciously but
admirably illustrates the relativity of time and adjectives: "Shall we," he
asks, "neglect the works of such renowned authors as Bhasa, Saumilla, and
Kaviputra? Can the audience feel any respect for the work of a modern
poet, a Kalidasa?"18
Until recently, the oldest Hindu play known to research was The Clay
Cart. The text, which need not be believed, names as author of the play
an obscure King Shudraka, who is described as an expert in the Vedas, in
mathematics, in the management of elephants, and in the art of love.40 In
any event he was an expert in the theatre. His play is by all means the
most interesting that has come to us from India— a clever combination of
melodrama and humor, with excellent passages of poetic fervor and de-
scription.
A synopsis of its plot will serve better than a volume of commentary to
illustrate the character of Indian drama. In Act I we meet Charu-datta, once
rich, now impoverished by generosity and bad fortune. His friend Maitreya,
a stupid Brahman, acts as jester in the play. Charu asks Maitreya to offer an
oblation to the gods, but the Brahman refuses, saying: "What's the use,
when the gods you have worshiped have done nothing for you?" Suddenly
a young Hindu woman, of high family and great wealth, rushes into
Ghana's courtyard, seeking refuge from a pursuer who turns out to be the
King's brother, Samsthanaka— as completely and incredibly evil as Charu is
completely and irrevocably good. Charu protects the girl, sends Samsthanaka
off, and scorns the lattcr's threat of vengeance. The girl, Vasanta-scna, asks
Charu to keep a casket of jewels in safe custody for her, lest her enemies
steal it from her, and lest she may have no excuse for revisiting her rescuer.
He agrees, takes the casket, and escorts her to her palatial home.
Act II is a comic interlude. A gambler, running away from two other
gamblers, takes refuge in a temple. When they enter he eludes them by pos-
ing as the idol of the shrine. The pursuing gamblers pinch him to see if he
is really a stone god, but he docs not move. They abandon their search, and
console themselves with a game of dice at the foot of the altar. The game
becomes so exciting that the "statue," unable to control himself, leaps off his
pedestal, and asks leave to take part. The others beat him; he again finds
CHAP. XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 573
help in his heels, and is saved by Vasanta-sena, who recognizes in him a
former servant of Charu-datta.
Act III shows Cham and Maitreya returning from a concert. A thief,
Sharvilaka, breaks in, and steals the casket. Charu, discovering the theft,
feels disgraced, and sends Vasanta-sena his last string of pearls as a substitute.
In Act IV Sharvilaka is seen offering the stolen casket to Vasanta-sena's
maid as a bribe for her love. Seeing that it is her mistress' casket, she berates
Sharvilaka as a thief. He answers her with Schopenhauerian acerbity:
A woman will for money smile or weep
According to your will; she makes a man
Put trust in her, but trusts him not herself.
Women are as inconstant as the waves
Of ocean, their affection is as fugitive
As streak of sunset glow upon a cloud.
They cling with eager fondness to the man
Who yields them wealth, which they squeeze out like sap
Out of a juicy plant, and then they leave him.
The maid refutes him by forgiving him, and Vasanta-sena by allowing them
to marry.
At the opening of Act V Vasanta-sena comes to Charu's house to return
both his jewels and her casket. While she is there a storm blows up, which
she describes in excellent Sanskrit.* The storm obligingly increases its fury,
and compels her, much according to her will, to spend the night under
Charu's roof.
Act VI shows Vasanta leaving Charu's house the next morning. By mis-
take she steps not into the carriage he has summoned for her, but into one
which belongs to the villainous Samsthanaka. Act VII is concerned with a
subordinate plot, inessential to the theme. Act VIII finds Vasanta deposited,
not in her palace as she had expected, but in the home, almost in the arms, of
her enemy. When she again spurns his love he chokes her, and buries her.
Then he goes to court and lodges against Charu a charge of nturdering
Vasanta for her jewels.
Act IX describes the trial, in which Maitreya unwittingly betrays his mas-
ter by letting Vasanta's jewels fall from his pocket. Charu is condemned to
death. In Act X Charu is seen on his way to execution. His child pleads
with the executioners to be allowed to take his place, but they refuse. At the
* An exceptional instance. Usually, in Hindu plays* the women speak Prakrit, on the
ground that it would be unbecoming in a lady to be familiar with a dead language.
574 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XX
last moment Vasanta herself appears. Sharvilaka had seen Samsthanaka bury
her; he had exhumed her in time, and had revived her. Now, while Vasanta
rescues Cham, Sharvilaka accuses the King's brother of murder. But Cham
refuses to support the charge, Samsthanaka is released, and everybody is
happy.*0
Since time is more plentiful in the East, where nearly all work is done
by human hands, than in the West, where there are so many labor-saving
devices, Hindu plays are twice as long as the European dramas of our day.
The acts vary from five to ten, and each act is unobtrusively divided into
scenes by the exit of one character and the entrance of another. There
are no unities of time or place, and no limits to imagination. Scenery is
scanty, but costumes are colorful. Sometimes living animals enliven the
play,61 and for a moment redeem the artificial with the natural. The per-
formance begins with a prologue, in which an actor or the manager dis-
cusses the play; Goethe seems to have taken from Kalidasa the idea of a
prologue for Faust. The prologue concludes by introducing the first
character, who marches into the middle of things. Coincidences arc in-
numerable, and supernatural influences often determine the course of
events. A love-story is indispensable; so is a jester. There is no tragedy in
the Indian theatre; happy endings are unavoidable; faithful love must
always triumph, virtue must always be rewarded, if only to balance
reality. Philosophical discourse, which obtrudes so often into Hindu
poetry, is excluded from Hindu drama; drama, like life, must teach only
by action, never by words.* Lyric poetry alternates with prose accord-
ing to the dignity of the topic, the character, and the action. Sanskrit is
spoken by the upper castes in the play, Prakrit by the women and the
lower castes. Descriptive passages excel, character delineation is poor.
The actors— who include women— do their work well, with no Occidental
haste, and with no Far-Eastern fustian. The play ends with an epilogue,
in which the favorite god of the author or the locality is importuned to
bring prosperity to India.
Ever since Sir William Jones translated it and Goethe praised it, the
most famous of Hindu dramas has been the Sbakuntala of Kalidasa.
Nevertheless we know Kalidasa only through three plays, and through
* The great Hindu theorist of the drama, Dhanamjaya (ca. 1000 A.D.), writes: "As for
any simple man of little intelligence who says that from dramas, which distil joy, the
gain is knowledge only— homage to him, for he has averted his face from what is delight-
fuL'1-
CHAP.XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 575
the legends that pious memory has hung upon his name. Apparently he
was one of the "Nine Gems"— poets, artists and philosophers— who were
cherished by King Vikramaditya (380-413 A.D.) in the Gupta capital at
Ujjain.
Shakuntala is in seven acts, written partly in prose, partly in vivid verse.
After a prologue in which the manager invites the audience to consider the
beauties of nature, the play opens upon a forest glade in which a hermit
dwells with his foster daughter Shakuntala. The peace of the scene is dis-
turbed by the noise of a chariot; its occupant, King Dushyanta, appears, and
falls in love with Shakuntala with literary speed. He marries her in the first
act, but is suddenly called back to his capital; he leaves her with the usual
promises to return at his earliest convenience. An ascetic tells the sorrowing
girl that the King will remember her as long as she keeps the ring Dushyanta
has given her; but she loses the ring while bathing. About to become a
mother, she journeys to the court, only to discover that the King has for-
gotten her after the manner of men to whom women have been generous.
She tries to refresh his memory.
Shakuntala. Do you not remember in the jasmine-bower,
One day, how you had poured the rain-water
That a lotus had collected in its cup
Into the hollow of your hand?
King. Tell on,
I am listening.
Shakuntala. Just then my adopted child,
The little fawn, ran up with long, soft eyes,
And you, before you quenched your own thirst^ gave
To the little creature, saying, "Drink you first,
Gentle fawn!" But she would not from strange hands.
And yet, immediately after, when
I took some water in my hand, she drank,
Absolute in her trust. Then, with a smile,
You said: "Each creature has faith in its own kind.
You are children both of the same wild wood, and each
Confides in the other, knowing where its trust is."
King. Sweet, fair and false! Such women entice fools. . . .
The female gift of cunning may be marked
In creatures of all kinds; in women most.
The cuckoo leaves her eggs for dupes to hatch,
Then flies away secure and triumphing."
576 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XX
Shakuntala, spurned and despondent, is miraculously lifted into the air
and carried off to another forest, where she bears her child— that great
Bharata whose progeny must fight all the battles of the Mahabharata.
Meanwhile a fisherman has found the ring, and seeing the King's seal on it,
has brought it to Dushyanta. His memory of Shakuntala is restored, and he
seeks her everywhere. Traveling in his airplane over the Himalayas, he
alights by dramatic providence at the very hermitage where Shakuntala is
pining away. He sees the boy Bharata playing before the cottage, and envies
his parents:
"Ah, happy father, happy mother, who,
Carrying their little son, are soiled with dust
Rubbed from his body; it nestles with fond faith
Into their lap, the refuge that he craves—
The white buds of his teeth just visible
When he breaks out into a causeless smile,
And he attempts sweet wordless sounds, . . .
Melting the heart more than any word."54
Shakuntala appears, the King begs her forgiveness, receives it, and makes
her his queen. The play ends with a strange but typical invocation:
"May kings reign only for their subjects' weal!
May the divine Saras vati, the source
Of speech, and goddess of dramatic art,
Be ever honored by the great and wise!
And may the purple, self-existent god,
Whose vital energy pervades all space,
From future transmigrations save my soul!"ra
Drama did not decline after Kalidasa, but it did not again pro-
duce a Shakuntala or a Clay Cart. King Harsha, if we may believe a
possibly inspired tradition, wrote three plays, which held the stage for
centuries. A hundred years after him Bhavabhuti, a Brahman of Berar,
wrote three romantic dramas which are ranked second only to Kalidasa's
in the history of the Indian stage. His style, however, was so elaborate
and obscure that he had to be-and of course protested that he was—
content with a narrow audience. "How little do they know," he wrote,
"who speak of us with censure. The entertainment is not for them.
Possibly some one exists or will exist, of similar tastes with myself; for
time is boundless, and the world is wide."80
CHAP. XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 577
We cannot rank the dramatic literature of India on a plane with that
of Greece or Elizabethan England; but it compares favorably with the
theatre of China or Japan. Nor need we look to India for the sophistica-
tion that marks the modern stage; that is an accident of time rather than
an eternal verity, and may pass away— even into its opposite. The super-
natural agencies of Indian drama are as alien to our taste as the deus ex
machina of the enlightened Euripides; but this, too, is a fashion of history.
The weaknesses of Hindu drama (if they may be listed diffidently by an
alien) are artificial diction disfigured with alliteration and verbal conceits,
monochromatic characterization in which each person is thoroughly good
or thoroughly bad, improbable plots turning upon unbelievable coinci-
dences, and an excess of description and discourse over that action which
is, almost by definition, the specific medium by which drama conveys
significance. Its virtues are its creative fancy, its tender sentiment, its
sensitive poetry, and its sympathetic evocation of nature's beauty and
terror. About national types of art there can be no disputation; we can
judge them only from the provincial standpoint of our own, and mostly
through the prism of translation. It is enough that Goethe, ablest of all
Europeans to transcend provincial and national barriers, found the reading
of Shakuntala among the profound experiences of his life, and wrote of
it gratefully:
Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms, and the fruits of its decline,
And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed;
Wouldst thou the Earth and Heaven itself in one sole name com-
bine?
I name thee, O Shakuntala! and all at once is said.87
V. PROSE AND POETRY
Their unity in India— Fables— History— Tales— Minor poets— Rise
of the vernacular literature— Chandi Das—Tulsi Das-
Poets of the south— Kabir
Prose is largely a recent phenomenon in Indian literature, and might
be termed an exotic corruption through contact with Europeans. To the
naturally poetic soul of the Hindu everything worth writing about had
a poetic content, and invited a poetic form. Since he felt that literature
should be read aloud, and knew that his work would spread and endure,
578 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XX
if at all, by oral rather than written dissemination, he chose to give to his
compositions a metric or aphoristic form that would lend itself to recita-
tion and memory. Consequently nearly all the literature of India is verse:
scientific, medical, legal and art treatises are, more often than not, pre-
sented in metre or rhyme or both; even grammars and dictionaries have
been turned into poetry. Fables and history, which in the West are con-
tent with prose, found in India a melodious poetic form.
Hindu literature is especially rich in fables; indeed, India is probably
responsible for most of the fables that have passed like an international
currency across the frontiers of the world.* Buddhism flourished best in
the days when the Jataka legends of Buddha's birth and youth were popular
among the people. The best-known book in India is the Panchatantra, or
"Five Headings" (ca. 500 A.D.); it is the source of many of the fables that
have pleased Europe as well as Asia. The Hitopadesha, or "Good Advice,"
is a selection and adaption of tales from the Panchatantra. Both, strange to
say, are classed by the Hindus under the rubric of Niti-shastra—i.e., instruc-
tions in politics or morals; every tale is told to point a moral, a principle of
conduct or government; usually these stories pretend to have been in-
vented by some wise Brahman for the instruction of a king's sons. Often
they turn the lowliest animals to the uses of the subtlest philosophy. The
fable of the monkey who tried to warm himself by the light of a glow-
worm, and slew the bird who pointed out his error, is a remarkably apt
illustration of the fate that awaits the scholar who exposes a popular delu-
sion.t
Historical literature did not succeed in rising above the level of either
bare chronicles or gorgeous romance. Perhaps through a scorn of the
Maya events of space and time, perhaps through a preference of oral to
written traditions, the Hindus neglected to compose works of history that
could bear comparison with Herodotus or Thucydides, Plutarch or Tacitus,
Gibbon or Voltaire. Details of place and date were so scantily recorded, even
in the case of famous men, that Hindu scholars assigned to their greatest
poet, Kalidasa, dates ranging over a millennium.150 Living to our own time in
an almost unchanging world of custom, morals and beliefs, the Hindu hardly
dreamed of progress, and never bothered about antiquities. He was content
* Sir William Jones reported that the Hindus laid claim to three inventions: chess, the
decimal system, and teaching by fables.
tA lively war rages in the fields of Oriental scholarship as to whether these fables
passed from India to Europe, or turn about; we leave the dispute to men of leisure. Per-
haps they passed to both India and Europe from Egypt, via Mesopotamia and Crete. The
influence of the Panchatantra upon the Arabian Nights, however, is beyond question."
CHAP. XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 579
to accept the epics as authentic history, and to let legend serve for biog-
raphy. When Ashvaghosha wrote his life of Buddha (the Buddha-charita),
it was legend rather than history; and when, five hundred years later, Bana
wrote his Harsha-charita, it was again an idealization rather than a reliable
portrait of the great king. The native chronicles of Rajputana appear to be
exercises in patriotism. Only one Hindu writer seems to have grasped the
function of the historian. Kalhana, author of the Rajatarangini, or "Stream
of Kings," expressed himself as follows: "That noble-minded poet alone
merits praise whose word, like the sentence of a judge, keeps free from
love or hatred in recording the past." Winternitz calls him "the only great
historian that India has produced."*
The Moslems were more acutely conscious of history, and left some ad-
mirable prose records of their doings in India. We have mentioned Alberuni's
ethnographical study of India, and Babur's Memoirs. Contemporary with
Akbar was an excellent historian, Muhammad Qazim Firishta, whose His-
tory of India is our most reliable guide to the events of the Moslem period.
Less impartial was Akbar's prime minister or general political factotum, Abu-1
Fazl, who put his master's administrative methods down for posterity in the
Ain-i Akbari, or "Institutes of Akbar," and told his master's life with for-
givable fondness in the Akbar Nama. The Emperor returned his affection;
and when the news came that Jchangir had slain the vizier, Akbar burst into
passionate grief, and cried out: "If Salim (Jehangir) wished to be emperor,
he might have slain me and spared Abu-1 Fazl.'m
Midway between fables and history were the vast collections of poetic
tales put together by industrious versifiers for the delectation of the roman-
tic Indian soul. As far back as the first century A.D. one Gunadhya wrote in
one hundred thousand couplets the Brihatkatha, or "Great Romance"; and
a thousand years later Somadeva composed the Kathasaritzagara, or "Ocean
of the Rivers of Story," a torrent 21,500 couplets long. In the same eleventh
century a clever story-teller of uncertain identity built a framework for his
Vetalapanchavimchatika ("The Twenty-five Stories of the Vampire") by
representing King Vikramaditya as receiving annually from an ascetic a fruit
containing a precious stone. The King inquires how he may prove his
gratitude; he is asked to bring to the yogi the corpse of a man hanging on
the gallows, but is warned not to speak if the corpse should address him.
The corpse is inhabited by a vampire who, as the King stumbles along, fas-
cinates him with a story; at the end of the story the vampire propounds a
question which the King, forgetting his instructions, answers. Twenty-five
times the King attempts the task of bringing a corpse to the ascetic and
holding his peace; twenty-four times he is so absorbed in the story that the
580 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XX
vampire tells him that he answers the question put to him at the end.68 It
was an excellent scaffold on which to hang a score of tales.
Meanwhile there was no dearth of poets writing what we should call
poetry. Abu-1 Fazl describes "thousands of poets" at Akbar's court; there
were hundreds at minor capitals, and doubtless dozens in every home.*
One of the earliest and greatest was Bhartrihari, monk, grammarian and
lover, who, before retiring into the arms of religion, instructed his soul with
amours. He has left us a record of them in his "Century of Love"— a Heine-
like sequence of a hundred poems. "Erstwhile," he writes to one of his
loves, "we twain deemed that thou wast I and I was thou; how comes it
now that thou are thou and I am I?" He did not care for reviewers, and
told them: "It is easy to satisfy one who is ignorant, even easier to satisfy
a connoisseur; but not the Creator himself can please the man who has just
a morsel of knowledge."03 In Jayadeva's Gita-Govinda, or "Song of the
Divine Cowherd," the amorousness of the Hindu turns to religion, and in-
tones the sensuous love of Radha and Krishna. It is a poem of full-bodied
passion, but India interprets it reverently as a mystic and symbolic por-
trayal of the souFs longing for God— an interpretation that would be intelligi-
ble to those immovable divines who composed such pious headings for the
Song of Songs.
In the eleventh century the vernaculars made inroads upon the classical
dead language as a medium of literary expression, as they were to do in
Europe a century later. The first major poet to use the living speech of
the people was Chand Bardai, who wrote in Hindi an immense historical
poem of sixty cantos, and was only persuaded to interrupt his work by
the call of death. Sur Das, the blind poet of Agra, composed 60,000 verses
on the life and adventures of Krishna; we arc told that he was helped
by the god himself, who became his amanuensis, and wrote faster than
the poet could dictate.04 Meanwhile a poor priest, Chandi Das, was
shocking Bengal by composing Dantean songs to a peasant Beatrice, ideal-
izing her with romantic passion, exalting her as a symbol of divinity, and
* Poetry tended now to be less objective than in the days of the epic, and gave itself
more and more to the interweaving of religion and love. Metre, which had been loose
and free in the epics, varying in the length of the line, and requiring regularity only in
the last four or five syllables, became at once stricter and more varied; a thousand com-
plications of prosody were introduced, which disappear in translation; artifices of letter
and phrase abounded, and rhyme appeared not only at the end but often in the middle of
the line. Rigid rules were composed for the poetic art, and the form became more pre-
cise as the content thinned.
CHAP. XX ) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 581
making his love an allegory of his desire for absorption in God; at the same
time he inaugurated the use of Bengali as a literary language. "I have
taken refuge at your feet, my beloved. When I do not sec you my mind
has no rest .... I cannot forget your grace and your charm,— and yet
there is no desire in my heart." Excommunicated by his fellow Brahmans
on the ground that he was scandalizing the public, he agreed to renounce
his love, Rami, in a public ceremony of recantation; but when, in the
course of this ritual, he saw Rami in the crowd, he withdrew his recanta-
tion, and going up to her, bowed before her with hands joined in adora-
tion.0411
The supreme poet of Hindi literature is Tulsi Das, almost a contem-
porary of Shakespeare. His parents exposed him because he had been
born under an unlucky star. He was adopted by a forest mystic, who
instructed him in the legendary lore of Rama. He married; but when his
son died, Tulsi Das retired to the woods to lead a life of penance and medi-
tation. There, and in Benares, he wrote his religious epic, the Rama-
charita-manasa, or "Lake of the Deeds of Rama," in which he told again
the story of Rama, and offered him to India as the supreme and only god.
"There is one God," says Tulsi Das; "it is Rama, creator of heaven and
earth, and redeemer of mankind. . . . For the sake of his faithful people
a very god, Lord Rama, became incarnate as a king, and for our sanctifica-
tion lived, as it were, the life of any ordinary man."06 Few Europeans
have been able to read the work in the now archaic Hindi original; one
of these considers that it establishes Tulsi Das as "the most important
figure in the whole of Indian literature."00 To the natives of Hindustan
the poem constitutes a popular Bible of theology and ethics. "I regard
the Rmnayana of Tulsi Das," says Gandhi, "as the greatest book in all
devotional literature."07
Meanwhile the Dcccan was also producing poetry. Tukaram composed
in the Mahrathi tongue 4600 religious songs which are as current in India
today as the Psalms of "David" are in Judaism or Christendom. His first
wife having died, he married a shrew and became a philosopher. "It is
not hard to win salvation," he wrote, "for it may readily be found in the
bundle on our back."08 As early as the second century A.D. Madura became
the capital of Tamil letters; a Sangam, or court of poets and critics, was
set up there under the patronage of the Pandya kings, and, like the
Academy, regulated the development of the language, c
and gave prizes.06 Tiruvallavar, an Outcaste weaver, wrote in
582 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XX
difficult of Tamil meters a religious and philosophical work— the Kurral—
expounding moral and political ideals. Tradition assures us that when the
members of the Sangam, who were all Brahmans, saw the success of this
Pariah's poetry, they drowned themselves to a man;70 but this is not to
be believed of any Academy.
We have kept for the last, though out of his chronological place, the
greatest lyric poet of medieval India. Kabir, a simple weaver of Benares,
prepared for his task of uniting Islam and Hinduism by having, we are
told, a Mohammedan for his father and a Brahman virgin for his mother.71
Fascinated by the preacher Ramananda, he became a devotee of Rama, en-
larged him (as Tulsi Das would also do) into a universal deity, and began
to write Hindi poems of rare beauty to explain a creed in which there
should be no temples, no mosques, no idols, no caste, no circumcision,
and but one god.* "Kabir," he says,
is a child of Ram and Allah, and accepteth all Gurus and Pirs. . . .
O God, whether Allah or Rama, I live by thy name. . . . Lifeless
are all the images of the gods; they cannot speak; I know it, for I
have called aloud to them. . . . What avails it to wash your mouth,
count your beads, bathe in holy streams, and bow in temples, if,
whilst you mutter your prayers or go on pilgrimages, deceitfulness
is in your hearts?7*
The Brahmans were shocked, and to refute him (the story runs) sent a
courtesan to tempt him; but he converted her to his creed. This was easy,
for he had no dogmas, but only profound religious feeling.
There is an endless world, O my brother,
And there is a nameless Being, of whom naught can be said;
Only he knows who has reached that region.
It is other than all that is heard or said.
No form, no body, no length, no breadth is seen there;
How can I tell you that which it is?
Kabir says: "It cannot be told by the words of the mouth, it can-
not be written on paper;
It is like a dumb person who tastes a sweet thing— how shall it be
explained?71
* Rabindranath Tagore has translated, with characteristic perfection, one hundred Songs
of Kabir, New York, 1915.
CHAP.XX) THE LITERATURE OF INDIA 583
He accepted the theory of reincarnation which was in the air about
him, and prayed, like a Hindu, to be released from the chain of re-
birth and redeath. But his ethic was the simplest in the world: live justly,
and look for happiness at your elbow.
I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty;
You do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from
forest to forest listlessly!
Here is the truth! Go where you will, to Benares or to Mathura,
if you do not find your soul, the world is unreal to you. . . .
To what shore would you cross, O my heart? There is no traveler
before you, there is no road. . . .
There there is neither body nor mind; and where is the place that
shall still the thirst of the soul? You shall find naught in the
emptiness.
Be strong, and enter into your own body; for there your foothold
is firm. Consider it well, O my heart! Go not elsewhere.
Kabir says: Put all imaginations away, and stand fast in that which
you are.7*
After his death, runs the legend, Hindus and Mohammedans contended
for his body, and disputed whether it should be buried or burned. But
while they disputed some one raised the cloth that covered the corpse, and
nothing could be seen but a mass of flowers. The Hindus burned a part
of the flowers in Benares, and the Moslems buried the rest.76 After his
death his songs passed from mouth to mouth among the people; Nanak
the Sikh was inspired by them to found his sturdy sect; others made the
poor weaver into a deity.78 Today two small sects, jealously separate, follow
the doctrine and worship the name of this poet who tried to unite Moslems
and Hindus. One sect is Hindu, the other is Moslem.
CHAPTER XXI
Indian Art
I. THE MINOR ARTS
The great age of Indian art—Its uniqueness— Its association with
industry— Pottery— Metal— Wood— Ivory— Jewelry-
Textiles
BEFORE Indian art, as before every phase of Indian civilization, we
stand in humble wonder at its age and its continuity. The ruins of
Mohenjo-daro are not all utilitarian; among them are limestone bearded
men (significantly like Sumerians), terra-cotta figures of women and
animals, beads and other ornaments of carnelian, and jewelry of finely
polished gold.1 One seal* shows in bas-relief a bull so vigorously and in-
cisively drawn that the observer almost leaps to the conclusion that art
does not progress, but only changes its form.
From that time to this, through the vicissitudes of five thousand years,
India has been creating its peculiar type of beauty in a hundred arts. The
record is broken and incomplete, not because India ever rested, but be-
cause war and the idol-smashing ecstasies of Moslems destroyed uncounted
masterpieces of building and statuary, and poverty neglected the preserva-
tion of others. We shall find it difficult to enjoy this art at first sight; its
music will seem weird, its painting obscure, its architecture confused, its
sculpture grotesque. We shall have to remind ourselves at every step that
our tastes are the fallible product of our local and limited traditions and
environments; and that we do ourselves and foreign nations injustice
when we judge them, or their arts, by standards and purposes natural to
our life and alien to their own.
In India the artist had not yet been separated from the artisan, making
art artificial and work a drudgery; as in our Middle Ages, so, in the India
that died at Plassey, every mature workman was a craftsman, giving form
and personality to the product of his skill and taste. Even today, when
584
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 585
factories replace handicrafts, and craftsmen degenerate into "hands," the
stalls and shops of every Hindu town show squatting artisans beating
metal, moulding jewelry, drawing designs, weaving delicate shawls and
embroideries, or carving ivory and wood. Probably no other nation
known to us has ever had so exuberant a variety of arts.8
Strange to say, pottery failed to rise from an industry to an art in India;
caste rules put so many limitations upon the repeated use of the same dish*
that there was small incentive to adorn with beauty the frail and transient
earthenware that came so rapidly from the potter's hand.4 If the vessel was
to be made of some precious metal, then artistry could spend itself upon it
without stint; witness the Tanjore silver vase in the Victoria Institute at
Madras, or the gold Betel Dish of Kandy.6 Brass was hammered into an
endless variety of lamps, bowls and containers; a black alloy (bidri) of zinc
was often used for boxes, basins and trays; and one metal was inlaid or
overlaid upon another, or encrusted with silver or gold." Wood was carved
with a profusion of plant and animal forms. Ivory was cut into everything
from deities to dice; doors and other objects of wood were inlaid with it;
and dainty receptacles were made of it for cosmetics and perfumes. Jew-
elry abounded, and was worn by rich and poor as ornament or hoard;
Jaipur excelled in firing enamel colors upon a gold background; clasps,
beads, pendants, knives and combs were moulded into tasteful shapes,
with floral, animal, or theological, designs; one Brahman pendant harbors
in its tiny space half a hundred gods.7 Textiles were woven with an
artistry never since excelled; from the days of Caesar to our own the fabrics
of India have been prized by all the world, t Sometimes, by the subtlest
and most painstaking of precalculated measurements, every thread of warp
and woof was dyed before being placed upon the loom; the design ap-
peared as the weaving progressed, and was identical on either side.* From
homespun khaddar to complex brocades flaming with gold, from pictur-
esque py jamas J to the invisibly-seamed shawls of Kashmir, § every gar-
ment woven in India has a beauty that comes only of a very ancient, and
now almost instinctive, art.
*Cf. p. 497 above.
t Perhaps the oldest printing of textiles from blocks was done in India,* though it never
grew there into the kindred art of block-printing books.
$ From the Hindu paijamas, meaning leg-clothing.
§ These fine woolen shawls are made of several strips, skilfully joined into what seems
to be a single fabric.1*
586 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXI
II. MUSIC
A concert in India—Music and the dance— Musicians— Scale and
forms— Themes— Music and philosophy
An American traveler, permitted to intrude upon a conceit in Madras,
found an audience of some two hundred Hindus, apparently all Brahmans,
seated some on benches, some on a carpeted floor, listening intently to a
small ensemble beside which our orchestral mobs would have seemed
designed to make themselves heard on the moon. The instruments were
unfamiliar to the visitor, and to his provincial eye they looked like the
strange and abnormal products of some neglected garden. There were
drums of many shapes and sizes, ornate flutes and serpentine horns, and a
variety of strings. Most of these pieces were wrought with minute work-
manship, and some were studded with gems. One drum, the mridanga,
was formed like a small barrel; both ends were covered with a parchment
whose pitch was changed by tightening or loosening it with little leather
thongs; one parchment head had been treated with manganese dust, boiled
rice and tamarind juice in order to elicit from it a peculiar tone. The
drummer used only his hands— sometimes the palm, sometimes the fingers,
sometimes the merest finger-tips. Another player had a tambura, or lute,
whose four long strings sounded continuously, as a deep and quiet back-
ground for the theme. One instrument, the vina, was especially sensitive
and eloquent; its strings, stretched over a slender metal plate from a parch-
ment-covered drum of wood at one end to a resounding hollow gourd at
the other, were kept vibrating with a plectrum, while the player's left
hand etched in the melody with fingers moving deftly from string to
string. The visitor listened humbly, and understood nothing.
Music in India has a history of at least three thousand years. The Vedic
hymns, like all Hindu poetry, were written to be sung; poetry and song,
music and dance, were made one art in the ancient ritual. The Hindu
dance, which, to the beam in the Occidental eye, seems as voluptuous and
obscene as Western dancing seems to Hindus, has been, through the
greater part of Indian history, a form of religious worship, a display of
beauty in motion and rhythm for the honor and edification of the gods;
only in modem times have the devadasis emerged from the temples in great
number to entertain the secular and profane. To the Hindu these dances
CHAP.XXl) INDIAN ART 587
were no mere display of flesh; they were, in one aspect, an imitation of
the rhythms and processes of the universe. Shiva himself was the god of
the dance, and the dance of Shiva symbolized the very movement of the
world.*
Musicians, singers and dancers, like all artists in India, belonged to the
lowest castes. The Brahman might like to sing in private, and accompany
himself on a vina or another stringed instrument; he might teach others to
play, or sing, or dance; but he would never think of playing for hire, or of
putting an instrument to his mouth. Public concerts were, until recently,
a rarity in India; secular music was either the spontaneous singing or
thrumming of the people, or it was performed, like the chamber music of
Europe, before small gatherings in aristocratic homes. Akbar, himself
skilled in music, had many musicians at his court; one of his singers, Tansen,
became popular and wealthy, and died of drink at the age of thirty-four."
There were no amateurs, there were only professionals; music was not
taught as a social accomplishment, and children were not beaten into
Beethovens. The function of the public was not to play poorly, but to
listen well."
For listening to music, in India, is itself an art, and requires long training
of ear and soul. The words may be no more intelligible to the Westerner
than the words of the operas which he feels it his class duty to enjoy; they
range, as everywhere, about the two subjects of religion and love; but the
words are of little moment in Hindu music, and the singer, as in our most
advanced literature, often replaces them with meaningless syllables. The
music is written in scales more subtle and minute than ours. To our scale
of twelve tones it adds ten "microtones," making a scale of twenty-two
quarter-tones in all. Hindu music may be written in a notation composed
of Sanskrit letters; usually it is neither written nor read, but is passed down
"by ear" from generation to generation, or from composer to learner. It is
not separated into bars, but glides in a continuous legato which frustrates
a listener accustomed to regular emphases or beats. It has no chords, and
does not deal in harmony; it confines itself to melody, with perhaps a back-
ground of undertones; in this sense it is much simpler and more primitive
* The secular Hindu dance has been revealed to Europe and America by the not quite
orthodox art of Shankar, in which every movement of the body, the hands, the fingers
and the eyes conveys a subtle and precise significance to the initiated spectator, and
carries an undulating grace, and a precise and corporeal poetry, unknown in the West-
ern dance since our democratic return to the African in art.
588 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXI
than European music, while it is more complex in scale and rhythm. The
melodies are both limited and infinite: they must all derive from one or an-
other of the thirty-six traditional modes or airs, but they may weave upon
these themes an endless and seamless web of variation. Each of these themes,
or ragas* consists of five, six or seven notes, to one of which the musician
constantly returns. Each raga is named from the mood that it wishes to sug-
gest—"Dawn," "Spring," "Evening Beauty," "Intoxication," etc.— and is as-
sociated with a specific time of the day or the year. Hindu legend ascribes
an occult power to these ragas; so it is said that a Bengal dancing-girl ended
a drought by singing, as a kind of "Rain-drop Prelude," the Megh mallar
raga, or rain-making theme." Their antiquity has given the ragas a sacred
character; he who plays them must observe them faithfully, as forms enacted
by Shiva himself. One player, Narada, having performed them carelessly,
was ushered into hell by Vishnu, and was shown men and women weeping
over their broken limbs; these, said the god, were the ragas and raginis dis-
torted and torn by Narada's reckless playing. Seeing which, we arc told,
Narada sought more humbly a greater perfection in his art.14
The Indian performer is not seriously hampered by the obligation to
remain faithful to the raga that he has chosen for his program, any more
than the Western composer of sonatas or symphonies is hampered by
adhering to his theme; in either case what is lost in liberty is gained in
access to coherence of structure and symmetry of form. The Hindu
musician is like the Hindu philosopher; he starts with the finite and "sends
his soul into the infinite"; he embroiders upon his theme until, through an
undulating stream of rhythm and recurrence, even through a hypnotizing
monotony of notes, he has created a kind of musical Yoga, a forgetfulness
of will and individuality, of matter, space and time; the soul is lifted into
an almost mystic union with something "deeply interfused," some pro-
found, immense and quiet Being, some primordial and pervasive reality
that smiles upon all striving wills, all change and death.
Probably we shall never care for Hindu music, and never comprehend
it, until we have abandoned striving for being, progress for permanence,
desire for acceptance, and motion for rest. This may come when Europe
again is subject, and Asia again is master. But then Asia will have tired of
being, permanence, acceptance and rest.
* More strictly speaking there are six ragas, or basic themes, each with five modifica-
tions called ragini. Raga means color, passion, mood; ragini is its feminine form.
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 589
III. PAINTING
Prehistoric — The frescoes of Ajanta — Rajput miniatures — The
Mogul school— The painters— The theorists
A provincial is a man who judges the world in terms of his parish, and
considers all unfamiliar things barbarous. It is told of the Emperor Je-
hangir— a man of taste and learning in the arts— that when he was shown a
European painting he rejected it summarily; being "in oyle, he liked it not.""
It is pleasant to know that even an emperor can be a provincial, and that it
was as difficult for Jehangir to enjoy the oil-painting of Europe as it is for us
to appreciate the minatures of India.
It is clear, from the drawings, in red pigment, of animals and a rhinoceros
hunt in the prehistoric caves of Singanpur and Mirzapur, that Indian paint-
ing has had a history of many thousands of years. Palettes with ground
colors ready for use abound among the remains of neolithic India.18 Great
gaps occur in the history of the art, because most of the early work was
ruined by the climate, and much of the remainder was destroyed by Moslem
"idol-breakers" from Mahmud to Aurangzeb." The Vinaya Pitaka (ca. 300
B.C.) refers to King Pasenada's palace as containing picture galleries, and
Fa-Hicn and Yuan Chwang describe many buildings as famous for the ex-
cellence of their murals;18 but no trace of these structures remains. One of the
oldest frescoes in Tibet shows an artist painting a portrait of Buddha;19 the
later artist took it for granted that painting was an established art in Buddha's
days.
The earliest dateable Indian painting is a group of Buddhist frescoes
(ca. 100 B.C.) found on the walls of a cave in Sirguya, in the Central
Provinces. From that time on the art of fresco painting— that is, painting
upon freshly laid plaster before it dries— progressed step by step until on the
walls of the caves at Ajanta* it reached a perfection never excelled even by
Giotto or Leonardo. These temples were carved out of the rocky face of a
mountain-side at various periods from the first to the seventh century A.D.
For centuries they were lost to history and human memory after the decay
of Buddhism; the jungle grew about them and almost buried them; bats,
snakes and other beasts made their home there, and a thousand varieties of
birds and insects fouled the paintings with their waste. In 1819 Europeans
stumbled into the ruins, and were amazed to find on the walls frescoes that
arc now ranked among the masterpieces of the world's art."
The temples have been called caves, for in most cases they are cut into
the mountains. Cave No. XVI, for example, is an excavation sixty-five feet
* Near the village of Fardapur, in the native state of Hyderabad.
59° THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXI
each way, upheld by twenty pillars; alongside the central hall are sixteen
monastic cells; a porticoed veranda adorns the front, and a sanctuary hides in
the back. Every wall is covered with frescoes. In 1879 sixteen of the
twenty-nine temples contained paintings; by 1910 the frescoes in ten of these
sixteen had been destroyed by exposure, and those in the remaining six had
been mutilated by inept attempts at restoration.11 Once these frescoes were
brilliant with red, green, blue and purple pigments; nothing survives of the
colors now except low-toned and blackened surfaces. Some of the paintings,
thus obscured by time and ignorance, seem coarse and grotesque to us, who
cannot read the Buddhist legends with Buddhist hearts; others are at once
powerful and graceful, a revelation of the skill of craftsmen whose names
perished long before their work.
Despite these depredations, Cave I is still rich in masterpieces. Here, on
one wall, is (probably) a Bodhisattwa—a Buddhist saint entitled to Nirvana,
but choosing, instead, repeated rebirths in order to minister to men. Never
has the sadness of understanding been more profoundly portrayed;* one
wonders which is finer or deeper—this, or Leonardo's kindred study of the
head of Christ.* On another wall of the same temple is a study of Shiva and
his wife Parvati, dressed in jewelry.28 Nearby is a painting of four deer,
tender with the Buddhist sympathy for animals; and on the ceiling is a de-
sign still alive with delicately drawn flowers and fowl.84 On a wall of Cave
XVII is a graceful representation, now half destroyed, of the god Vishnu,
with his retinue, flying down from heaven to attend some event in the life
of Buddha;15 on another wall is a schematic but colorful portrait of a prin-
cess and her maids.28 Mingled with these chef-d'ceuvres are crowded fres-
coes of apparently poor workmanship, describing the youth, flight and
temptation of Buddha.*7
But we cannot judge these works in their original form from what sur-
vives of them today; and doubtless there are clues to their appreciation that
are not revealed to alien souls. Even the Occidental, however, can admire
the nobility of the subject, the majestic scope of the plan, the unity of the
composition, the clearness, simplicity and decisiveness of the line, and—
among many details— the astonishing perfection of that bane of all artists,
the hands. Imagination can picture the artist-priestst who prayed in these
cells and perhaps painted these walls and ceilings with fond and pious art
while Europe lay buried in her early-medieval darkness. Here at Ajanta re-
ligious devotion fused architecture, sculpture and painting into a happy unity,
and produced one of the sovereign monuments of Hindu art.
* Among his preliminary sketches for The Last Supper.
t A supposition. We do not know who painted these frescoes.
CHAP.XXl) INDIAN ART 5pl
When their temples were closed or destroyed by Huns and Moslems the
Hindus turned their pictorial skill to lesser forms. Among the Rajputs a
school of painters arose who recorded in delicate miniatures the episodes of
the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and the heroic deeds of die Rajputana
chieftains; often they were mere outlines, but always they were instinct with
life, and perfect in design. There is, in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston,
a charming example of this style, symbolizing one of the ragas of music by
means of graceful women, a stately tower, and a lowering sky." Another
example, in the Art Institute of Detroit, represents with unique delicacy a
scene from the Gita-Govinda.*0 The human figures in these and other Hindu
paintings were rarely drawn from models; the artist visualized them out of
imagination and memory. He painted, usually, in brilliant tempera upon a
paper surface; he used fine brushes made from the most delicate hairs that he
could get from the squirrel, the camel, the goat or the mongoose;81 and he
achieved a refinement of line and decoration that delight even the foreign
and inexpert eye.
Similar work was done in other parts of India, especially in the state of
Kangra.88 Another variety of the same genre developed under the Moguls at
Delhi. Rising out of Persian calligraphy and the art of illuminating manu-
scripts, this style grew into a form of aristocratic portraiture corresponding,
in its refinement and cxclusivesness, to the chamber music that flourished at
the court. Like the Rajput school, the Mogul painters strove for delicacy of
line, sometimes using a brush made from a single hair; and they, too, rivaled
one another in the skilful portrayal of the hand. But they put more color
into their drawings, and less mysticism; they seldom touched religion or
mythology; they confined themselves to the earth, and were as realistic as
caution would permit. Their subjects were living men and women of im-
perial position and temper, not noted for humility; one after another these
dignitaries sat for their portraits, until the picture galleries of that royal
dilettante, Jehangir, were filled with the likenesses of every important ruler
or courtier since the coming of Akbar to the throne. Akbar was the first
of his dynasty to encourage painting; at the end of his reign, if we may
believe Abu-1 Fazl, there were a hundred masters in Delhi, and a thousand
amateurs." Jehangir's intelligent patronage developed the art, and widened its
field from portraiture to the representation of hunting scenes and other
natural backgrounds for the human figure— which still dominated the pic-
ture; one minature shows the Emperor himself almost in the claws of a lion
that has clambered upon the rump of the imperial elephant and is reaching
for the royal flesh, while an attendant realistically takes to his heels."
Under Shah Jehan the art reached its height, and began to decline; as in the
case of Japanese prints, the widened popularity of the form gave it at once a
592 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXI
wider audience and a less exacting taste." Aurangzeb, by restoring the
strict rule of Islam against images, completed the decay.
Through the intelligent beneficence of the Mogul kings Indian painters
enjoyed at Delhi a prosperity that they had not known for many centuries.
The guild of painters, which had kept itself alive from Buddhist times, re-
newed its youth, and some of its members escaped from the anonymity with
which time's forgetfulness, and Hindu negligence of the individual, cover
most Indian art. Out of seventeen artists considered preeminent in Akbar's
reign, thirteen were Hindus.80 The most favored of all the painters at the
great Mogul's court was Dasvanth, whose lowly origin as the son of a palan-
quin-bearer aroused no prejudice against him in the eyes of the Emperor.
The youth was eccentric, and insisted on drawing pictures wherever he
went, and on whatever surface he found at hand. Akbar recognized his
genius, and had his own drawing-master teach him. The boy became in time
the greatest master of his age; but at the height of his fame he stabbed him-
self to death.*7
Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them
how things should be done. The Hindus, whose philosophy did not exalt
logic, loved logic none the less, and delighted to formulate in the strictest
and most rational rules the subtle procedure of every art. So, early in our
era, the Sandanga, or "Six Limbs of Indian Painting," laid down, like a later
and perhaps imitative Chinese,* six canons of excellence in pictorial art:
(i) the knowledge of appearances; (2) correct perception, measure and
structure; (3) the action of feelings on forms; (4) the infusion of grace, or
artistic representation; (5) similitude; and (6) an artistic use of brush and
colors. Later an elaborate esthetic code appeared, the Sbilpa-sbastra, in
which the rules and traditions of each art were formulated for all time. The
artist, we are told, should be learned in the Vedas, "delighting in the wor-
ship of God, faithful to his wife, avoiding strange women, and piously ac-
quiring a knowledge of various sciences."38
We shall be helped in understanding Oriental painting if we remember,
first, that it seeks to represent not things but feelings, and not to represent
but to suggest; that it depends not on color but on line; that it aims to create
esthetic and religious emotion rather than to reproduce reality; that it is
interested in the "soul" or "spirit" of men and things, rather than in their
material forms. Try as we will, however, we shall hardly find in Indian
painting the technical development, or range and depth of significance, that
characterize the pictorial art of China and Japan. Certain Hindus explain
* Hsieh Ho, cf. p. 752 below. The Sandanga is of uncertain date, being known to us
through a thirteenth-century commentary.
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 593
this very fancifully: painting decayed among them, they tell us, because it
was too easy, it was not a sufficiently laborious gift to offer to the gods.38
Perhaps pictures, so mortally frail and transitory, did not quite satisfy the
craving of the Hindu for some lasting embodiment of his chosen deity.
Slowly, as Buddhism reconciled itself to imagery, and the Brahmanic shrines
increased and multiplied, painting was replaced by statuary, color and line
by lasting stone.
IV. SCULPTURE
Primitive— Buddhist— Gandhara— Gupta— "ColoniaF— Estimate
We cannot trace the history of Indian sculpture from the statuettes of
Mohenjo-daro to the age of Ashoka, but we may suspect that this is a gap
in our knowledge rather than in the art. Perhaps India, temporarily im-
poverished by the Aryan invasions, reverted from stone to wood for its
statuary; or perhaps the Aryans were too intent upon war to care for
art. The oldest stone figures surviving in India go back only to Ashoka;
but these show a skill so highly developed that we cannot doubt that the
art had then behind it many centuries in growth.40 Buddhism set up definite
obstacles to both painting and statuary in its aversion to idolatry and secular
imagery: Buddha forbade "imaginative drawings painted in figures of men
and women";41 and under this almost Mosaic prohibition pictorial and plas-
tic art suffered in India as it had done in Judca and was to do in Islam.
Gradually this Puritanism seems to have relaxed as Buddhism yielded its aus-
terity and partook more and more of the Dravidian passion for symbol and
myth. When the art of carving appears again (ca. 200 B.C.), in the stone
bas-reliefs on the "rails" enclosing the Buddhist "stupas" or burial mounds at
Bodh-gaya and Bharhut, it is as a component part of an architectural design
rather than as an independent art; and to the end of its history Indian
sculpture remained for the most part an accessory to architecture, and pre-
ferred relief to carving in the round.* In the Jain temples at Mathura, and
the Buddhist shrines at Amaravati and Ajanta, this art of relief reached a
high point of perfection. The rail at Amaravati, says a learned authority,
"is the most voluptuous and the most delicate flower of Indian sculpture."*8
Meanwhile, in the province of Gandhara in northwestern India, another
type of sculpture was developing under the patronage of the Kushan kings.
This mysterious dynasty, which came suddenly out of the north— probably
*An exception outweighing this generalization was the copper colossus of Buddha,
eighty feet high, which Yuan Chwang saw at Pataliputra; through Yuan and other Far
Eastern pilgrims to India this may have been one ancestor of the great Buddhas at Nara
and Kamakura in
594 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXI
from Hellenized Bactria— brought with it a tendency to imitate Greek forms.
The Mahay ana Buddhism that captured the council of Kanishka opened the
way by rescinding the prohibition of imagery. Under the tutelage of Greek
instructors Hindu sculpture took on for a time a smooth Hellenistic face;
Buddha was transformed into the likeness of Apollo, and became an aspirant
to Olympus; drapery began to flow about Hindu deities and saints in the
style of Pheidias' pediments, and pious Bodhisattivas rubbed elbows with jolly
drunken Sileni.4* Idealized and almost effeminate representations of the Mas-
ter and his disciples were offset with horrible examples of decadent Greek
realism, like the starving Buddha of Lahore, in which every rib and tendon is
shown underneath a feminine face with ladylike coiffure and masculine beard.44
This Greco-Buddhist art impressed Yuan Chwang, and through him and later
pilgrims found its way into China, Korea and Japan;45 but it had little influ-
ence upon the sculptural forms and methods of India itself. When, after some
centuries of flourishing activity, the Gandhara school passed away, Indian art
came to life again under Hindu rulers, took up the traditions left by the
native artists of Bharhut, Amaravati and Mathura, and paid scant attention to
the Greek interlude at Gandhara.
Sculpture, like nearly everything else in India, prospered under the Gupta
line. Buddhism had now forgotten its hostility to images; and a reinvigorated
Brahmanism encouraged symbolism and the adornment of religion with
every art. The Mathura Museum holds a highly finished stone Buddha, with
meditative eyes, sensual lips, too graceful a form, and clumsy Cubist feet. The
Sarnath Museum has another stone Buddha, in the seated pose that was des-
tined to dominate Buddhist sculpture; here the effect of peaceful contempla-
tion and a pious kindliness is perfectly revealed. At Karachi is a small bronze
Brahma, scandalously like Voltaire.49
Everywhere in India, in the millennium before the coming of the Moslems,
the art of the sculptor, though limited as well as inspired by its subservience
to architecture and religion, produced masterpieces. The pretty statue of
Vishnu from Sultanpur,47 the finely chiseled statue of Padmapani,48 the gigan-
tic three-faced Shiva (commonly called "Trimurti") carved in deep relief in
the caves at Elephanta,49 the almost Praxitelean stone statue worshiped at
Nokkas as the goddess Rukmini,00 the graceful dancing Shiva, or Nataraja,
cast in bronze by the Chola artist-artisans of Tanjore,81 the lovely stone deer
of Mamallapuram," and the handsome Shiva of Perur68— these are evidences of
the spread of the carver's art into every province of India.
The same motives and methods crossed the frontiers of India proper, and
produced masterpieces from Turkestan and Cambodia to Java and Ceylon.
The student will find examples in the stone head, apparently of a boy, dug
up from the sands of Khotan by Sir Aurel Stein's expedition;54 the head of
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 595
Buddha from Siam;85 the Egyptianly fine "Harihara" of Cambodia;" the mag-
nificent bronzes of Java;" the Gandhara-like head of Shiva from Prambanam;58
the supremely beautiful female figure ("Prajnaparamita") now in the Leyden
Museum; the perfect Bodhisattiva in the Glyptothek at Copenhagen;* the calm
and powerful Buddha,80 and the finely chiseled Avalokiteshvara ("The Lord
who looks down with pity upon all men"),81 both from the great Javanese
temple of Borobudur; or the massive primitive Buddha,8" and the lovely
"moonstone" doorstep,68 of Anuradhapura in Ceylon. This dull list of works
that must have cost the blood of many men in many centuries will suggest
the influence of Hindu genius on the cultural colonies of India.
We find it hard to like this sculpture at first sight; only profound and modest
minds can leave their environment behind them when they travel. We should
have to be Hindus, or citizens of those countries that accepted the cultural
leadership of India, to understand the symbolism of these statues, the complex
functions and superhuman powers denoted by these multiple arms and legs,
the terrible realism of these fanciful figures, expressing the Hindu sense of
supernatural forces irrationally creative, irrationally fertile and irrationally
destructive. It shocks us to find that everybody in Hindu villages is thin,
and everybody in Hindu sculpture is fat; we forget that the statues are
mostly of gods, who received the first fruits of the land. We are discon-
certed on discovering that the Hindus colored their statuary, whereby we
reveal our unawarcncss of the fact that the Greeks did likewise, and that
something of the classic nobility of the Pheidian deities is due to the acci-
dental disappearance of their paint. We are displeased at the comparative
paucity of female figures in the Indian gallery; we mourn over the subjec-
tion of women which this seems to indicate, and never reflect that the cult
of the nude female is not the indispensable basis of plastic art, that the pro-
foundest beauty of woman may be more in motherhood than in youth, more
in Demeter than in Aphrodite. Or we forget that the sculptor carved not
what he dreamed of so much as what the priests laid down; that every art,
in India, belonged to religion rather than to art, and was the handmaiden of
theology. Or we take too seriously figures intended by the sculptor to be
caricatures, or jests, or ogres designed to frighten away evil spirits; if we
turn away from them in horror we merely attest the fulfilment of their aim.
Nevertheless, the sculpture of India never quite acquired the grace of her
literature, or the sublimity of her architecture, or the depth of her philosophy;
it mirrored chiefly the confused and uncertain insight of her religions. It
excelled the sculpture of China and Japan, but it never equaled the cold per-
fection of Egyptian statuary, or the living and tempting beauty of Greek
marble. To understand even its assumptions we should have to renew in our
hearts the earnest and trusting piety of medieval days. In truth we ask too
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXI
much of sculpture, as of painting, in India; we judge them as if they had
been there, as here, independent arts, when in truth we have artificially
isolated them for treatment according to our traditional rubrics and norms.
If we could see them as the Hindu knows them, as integrated parts of the
unsurpassed architecture of his country, we should have made some modest
beginning towards understanding Indian art.
V. ARCHITECTURE
1. Hindu Architecture
Before Ashoka — Ashokan — Buddhist — Jain — The masterpieces
of the north — Their destruction — The southern style-
Monolithic temples — Structural temples
Nothing remains of Indian architecture before Ashoka's time. We have
the brick ruins of Mohcnjo-daro, but apparently the buildings of Vedic and
Buddhist India were of wood, and Ashoka seems to have been the first to
use stone for architectural purposes.6* We hear, in the literature, of seven-
storied structures,05 and of palaces of some magnificence, but not a trace of
them survives. Megasthencs describes the imperial residences of Chandragupta
as superior to anything in Persia except Persepolis, on whose model they seem
to have been designed.00 This Persian influence persisted till Ashoka's time;
it appears in the ground-plan of his palace, which corresponded with the
"Hall of a Hundred Columns" at Persepolis;07 and it shows again in the fine
pillar of Ashoka at Lauriya, crowned with a lion-capital.
With the conversion of Ashoka to Buddhism, Indian architecture began to
uirow off this alien influence, and to take its inspiration and it symbols from
the new religion. The transition is evident in the great capital which is all
that now remains of another Ashokan pillar, at Sarnath;08 here, in a composi-
tion of astonishing perfection, ranked by Sir John Marshall as equal to "any-
thing of its kind in the ancient world,"00 we have four powerful lions, stand-
ing back to back on guard, and thoroughly Persian in form and countenance;
but beneath them is a frieze of well-carved figures including so Indian a
favorite as the elephant, and so Indian a symbol as the Buddhist Wheel of the
Law; and under the frieze is a great stone lotus, formerly mistaken for a
Persian bell-capital, but now accepted as the most ancient, universal and char-
acteristic of all the symbols in Indian art.70 Represented upright, with the
petals turned down and the pistil or seed-vessel showing, it stood for the
womb of the world; or, as one of the fairest of nature's manifestations, it
served as the throne of a god. The lotus or water-lily symbol migrated with
Buddhism, and permeated the art of China and Japan. A like form, used as
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 597
a design for windows and doors, became the "horseshoe arch" of Ashokan
vaults and domes, originally derived from the "covered wagon" curvature of
Bengali thatched roofs supported by rods of bent bamboo.71
The religious architecture of Buddhist days has left us a few ruined tem-
ples and a large number -of "topes" and "rails." The "tope" or "stupa" was
in early days a burial mound; under Buddhism it became a memorial shrine,
usually housing the relics of a Buddhist saint. Most often the tope took the
form of a dome of brick, crowned with a spire, and surrounded with a stone
rail carved with bas-reliefs. One of the oldest topes is at Bharhut; but the
reliefs there are primitively coarse. The most ornate of the extant rails is
at Amaravati; here 17,000 square feet were covered with minute reliefs of a
workmanship so excellent that Fergusson judged this rail to be "probably the
most remarkable monument in India."73 The best known of the stupas is the
Sanchi tope, one of a group at Bhilsa in Bhopal. The stone gates apparently
imitate ancient wooden forms, and anticipate the pailus or torus that usually
mark the approach to the temples of the Far East. Every foot of space on
pillars, capitals, crosspieces and supports is cut into a wilderness of plant,
animal, human and divine forms. On a pillar of the eastern gateway is a
delicate carving of a perennial Buddhist symbol— the Bodhi-tree, scene of the
Master's enlightenment; on the same gateway, gracefully spanning a bracket,
is a sensuous goddess (a Yakshi) with heavy limbs, full hips, slim waist, and
abounding breasts.73
While the dead saints slept in the topes, the living monks cut into the
mountain rocks temples where they might live in isolation, sloth and peace,
secure from the elements and from the glare and heat of the sun. We may
judge the strength of the religious impulse in India by noting that over
twelve hundred of these cave-temples remain of the many thousands that
were built in the early centuries of our era, partly for Jains and Brahmans,
but mostly for Buddhist communities. Often the entrance of these viharas
(monasteries) was a simple portal in the form of a "horseshoe" or lotus arch;
sometimes, as at Nasik, it was an ornate facade of strong columns, animal
capitals, and patiently carved architrave; often it was adorned with pillars,
stone screens or porticoes of admirable design.74 The interior included a
chaitya or assembly hall, with colonnades dividing nave from aisles, cells for
the monks on either side, and an altar, bearing relics, at the inner end.* One
of the oldest of these cave-temples, and perhaps the finest now surviving, is
at Karle, between Poona and Bombay; here Hinayana Buddhism achieved its
chef-d'oeuvre.
*The correspondence of this interior with that of Christian churches has suggested a
possible influence of Hindu styles upon early Christian architecture.74*
598 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXI
The caves at Ajanta, besides being the hiding-place of the greatest of
Buddhist paintings, rank with Karle as examples of that composite art, half
architecture and half sculpture, which characterizes the temples of India.
Caves I and II have spacious assembly halls whose ceilings, cut and painted
in sober yet elegant designs, are held up by powerful fluted pillars square at
the base, round at the top, ornamented with flowery bands, and crowned with
majestic capitals;75 Cave XIX is distinguished by a fagade richly decorated
with adipose statuary and complex bas-relief s;7fl in Cave XXVI gigantic col-
umns rise to a frieze crowded with figures which only the greatest religious
and artistic zeal could have carved in such detail.77 Ajanta can hardly be
refused the title of one of the major works in the history of art.
Of other Buddhist temples still existing in India the most impressive is the
great tower at Bodh-gaya, significant for its thoroughly Gothic arches, and
yet dating, apparently, back to the first century A.D.78 All in all, the remains
of Buddhist architecture arc fragmentary, and their glory is more sculptural
than structural; a lingering Puritanism, perhaps, kept them externally forbid-
ding and bare. The Jains gave a more concentrated devotion to architecture,
and during the eleventh and twelfth centuries their temples were the finest
in India. They did not create a style of their own, being content to copy at
first (as at Elura) the Buddhist plan of excavating temples in the mountain
rocks, then the Vishnu or Shiva type of temples rising usually in a walled
group upon a hill. These, too, were externally simple, uut inwardly complex
and rich— a happy symbol of the modest life. Piety placed statue after statue
of Jain heroes in these shrines, until in the group at Shatrunjaya Fergusson
counted 6449 figures.79
The Jain temple at Aihole is built almost in Greek style, with rectangular
form, external colonnades, a portico, and a cell or central chamber within.80
At Khajuraho Jains, Vaishnavites and Shivaites, as if to illustrate Hindu toler-
ance, built in close proximity some twenty-eight temples; among them the
almost perfect Temple of Parshwanath81 rises in cone upon cone to a majes-
tic height, and shelters on its carved surfaces a veritable city of Jain saints.
On Mt. Abu, lifted four thousand feet above the desert, the Jains built many
temples, of which two survivors, the temples of Vimala and Tejahpala, are
the greatest achievement of this sect in the field of art. The dome of the
Tejahpala shrine is one of those overwhelming experiences which doom all
writing about art to impotence and futility.™ The Temple of Vimala, built
entirely of white marble, is a maze of irregular pillars, joined with fanciful
brackets to a more simple carved entablature; above is a marble dome too
opulent in statuary, but carved into a stone lacework of moving magnifi-
cence, "finished," says Fergusson, "with a delicacy of detail and appropriate-
ness of ornament which is probably unsurpassed by any similar example to
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 599
be found anywhere else. Those introduced by the Gothic architects in Henry
VIFs Chapel at Westminster, or at Oxford, are coarse and clumsy in com-
parison.""
In these Jain temples, and their contemporaries, we see the transition from
the circular form of the Buddhist shrine to the tower style of medieval India.
The nave, or pillar-enclosed interior, of the assembly hall is taken outdoors,
and made into a mandapam or porch; behind this is the cell; and above the
cell rises, in successively receding levels, the carved and complicated tower.
It was on this plan that the Hindu temples of the north were built. The
most impressive of these is the group at Bhuvaneshwara, in the province of
Orissa; and the finest of the group is the Rajarani Temple erected to Vishnu
in the eleventh century A.D. It is a gigantic tower formed of juxtaposed semi-
circular pillars covered with statuary and surmounted by receding layers of
stone, the whole inward-curving tower ending in a great circular crown and
a spire. Nearby is the Lingaraja Temple, larger than the Rajarani, but not so
beautiful; nevertheless every inch of the surface has felt the sculptor's chisel,
so that the cost of the carving has been reckoned at three times the cost of
the structure.8* The Hindu expressed his piety not merely by the imposing
grandeur of his temples, but by their patiently worked detail; nothing was
too good for the god.
It would be dull to list, without specific description and photographic repre-
sentation, the other masterpieces of Hindu building in the north. And yet no
record of Indian civilization could leave unnoticed the temples of Surya at
Kanarak and Mudhera, the tower of Jagannath Puri, the lovely gateway at
Vadnagar,85 the massive temples of Sas-Bahu and Teli-ka-Mandir at Gwalior,86
the palace of Rajah Man Sing, also at Gwalior,87 and the Tower of Victory
at Chitor.88 Standing out from the mass are the Shivaite temples at Khajuraho,
while in the same city the dome of the porch of the Khanwar Math Temple
shows again the masculine strength of Indian architecture, and the richness
and patience of Indian carving.89 Even in its ruins the Temple of Shiva at
Elephanta, with its massive fluted columns, its "mushroom" capitals, its un-
surpassed reliefs, and its powerful statuary,90 suggests to us an age of national
vigor and artistic skill of which hardly the memory lives today.
We shall never be able to do justice to Indian art, for ignorance and
fanaticism have destroyed its greatest achievements, and have half ruined
the rest. At Elephanta the Portuguese certified their piety by smashing
statuary and bas-reliefs in unrestrained barbarity; and almost everywhere
in the north the Moslems brought to the ground those triumphs of Indian
architecture, of the fifth and sixth centuries, which tradition ranks as far
60O THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXI
superior to the later works that arouse our wonder and admiration today.
The Moslems decapitated statues, and tore them limb from limb; they ap-
propriated for their mosques, and in great measure imitated, the graceful
pillars of the Jain temples.81 Time and fanaticism joined in the destruc-
tion, for the orthodox Hindus abandoned and neglected temples that had
been profaned by the touch of alien hands.1*
We may guess at the lost grandeur of north Indian architecture by the
powerful edifices that still survive in the south, where Moslem rule entered
only in minor degree, and after some habituation to India had softened
Mohammedan hatred of Hindu ways. Further, the great age of temple
architecture in the south came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
after Akbar had tamed the Moslems and taught them some appreciation
of Indian art. Consequently the south is rich in temples, usually superior
to those that remain standing in the north, and more massive and impres-
sive; Fcrgusson counted some thirty "Dravidian" or southern temples any
one of which, in his estimate, must have cost as much as an English
cathedral.88 The south adapted the styles of the north by prefacing the
mandapcnn or porch with a gopuram or gate, and supporting the porch
with a lavish multiplicity of pillars. It played fondly with a hundred
symbols, from the swastika* emblem of the sun and the wheel of life,
through a very menagerie of sacred animals. The snake, through its moult-
ing, symbolized reincarnation; the bull was the enviable paragon of pro-
creative power; the linga, or phallus, represented the generative excellence
of Shiva, and often determined the form of the temple itself.
Three elements composed the structural plan of these southern temples:
the gateway, the pillared porch, and the tower (vimand), which con-
tained the main assembly hall or cell. With occasional exceptions like
the palace of Tirumala Nayyak at Madura, all this south Indian architec-
ture was ecclesiastical. Men did not bother to build magnificently for
themselves, but gave their art to the priests and the gods; no circumstance
could better show how spontaneously theocratic was the real government
of India. Of the many buildings raised by the Chalukyan kings and their
people, nothing remains but temples. Only a Hindu pietist rich in words
could describe the lovely symmetry of the shrine at Ittagi, in Hydera-
* Swastika is a Sanskrit word, from sut well, and asti, being. This eternally recurring
symbol appears among a great variety of peoples, primitive and modern, usually as a sign
of well-being or good luck
CHAP.XXl) INDIAN ART 6oi
bad;94* or the temple at Somnathpur in Mysore,96 in which gigantic masses
of stone are carved with the delicacy of lace; or the Hoyshaleshwara Tem-
ple at Halebid,87 also in Mysore— "one of the buildings," says Fergusson,
"on which the advocate of Hindu architecture would desire to take his
stand." Here, he adds, "the artistic combination of horizontal with ver-
tical lines, and the play of outline and of light and shade, far surpass any-
thing in Gothic art. The effects are just what the medieval architects were
often aiming at, but which they never attained so perfectly as was done
at Halebid."98
If we marvel at the laborious piety that could carve eighteen hundred
feet of frieze in the Halebid temple, and could portray in them two
thousand elephants each different from all the rest,"0 what shall we say
of the patience and courage that could undertake to cut a complete temple
out of the solid rock? But this was a common achievement of the Hindu
artisans. At Mamallapuram, on the east coast near Madras, they carved
several rathas or pagodas, of which the fairest is the Dharma-raja-ratha, or
monastery for the highest discipline. At Elura, a place of religious pil-
grimage in Hyderabad, Buddhists, Jains and orthodox Hindus vied in ex-
cavating out of the mountain rock great monolithic temples of which
the supreme example is the Hindu shrine of Kailasha100— named after Shiva's
mythological paradise in the Himalayas. Here the tireless builders cut a
hundred feet down into the stone to isolate the block— 250 by 160 feet—
that was to be the temple; then they carved, the walls into powerful
pillars, statues and bas-reliefs; then they chiseled out the interior, and
lavished there the most amazing art: let the bold fresco of "The Lovers"101
serve as a specimen. Finally, their architectural passion still unspent, they
carved a series of chapels and monasteries deep into the rock on three sides
of the quarry.102 Some Hindus103 consider the Kailasha Temple equal to
any achievement in the history of art.
Such a structure, however, was a tour de force, like the Pyramids, and
must have cost the sweat and blood of many men. Either the guilds or the
masters never tired, for they scattered through every province of southern
India gigantic shrines so numerous that the bewildered student or traveler
loses their individual quality in the sum of their number and their power.
* Here, says Meadows Taylor, "the carving on some of the pillars, and of the lintels
and architraves of the doors, is quite beyond description. No chased work in silver or
gold could possibly be finer. By what tools this very hard, tough stone could have been
wrought and polished as it is, is not at all intelligible at the present day."*
602 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXI
At Pattadakal Queen Lokamahadevi, one of the wives of the Chalukyan
King Vikramaditya II, dedicated to Shiva the Virupaksha Temple, which
ranks high among the great fanes of India.104 At Tan j ore, south of Madras,
the Chola King Rajaraja the Great, after conquering all southern India
and Ceylon, shared his spoils with Shiva by raising to him a stately temple
designed to represent the generative symbol of the god.*100 Near Trich-
inopoly, west of Tanjore, the devotees of Vishnu erected on a lofty hill
the Shri Rangam Temple, whose distinctive feature was a many-pillared
mandapam in the form of a "Hall of a Thousand Columns," each column
a single block of granite, elaborately carved; the Hindu artisans were yet
at work completing the temple when they were scattered, and their labors
ended, by the bullets of Frenchmen and Englishmen fighting for the pos-
session of India.108 Nearby, at Madura, the brothers Muttu and Tiruma-
la Nayyak erected to Shiva a spacious shrine with another Hall of a
Thousand Columns, a Sacred Tank, and ten gopurams or gateways, of
which four rise to a great height and are carved into a wilderness of
statuary. These structures form together one of the most impressive
sights in India; we may judge from such fragmentary survivals the rich
and spacious architecture of the Vijayanagar kings. Finally, at Ramesh-
varam, amid the archipelago of isles that pave "Adam's Bridge" from India
to Ceylon, the Brahmans of the south reared through five centuries (izoo-j
1769 A.D.) a temple whose perimeter was graced with the most imposing!
of all corridors or porticoes— four thousand feet of double colonnades,
exquisitely carved, and designed to give cool shade, and inspiring vistas of
sun and sea, to the millions of pilgrims who to this day find their way
from distant cities to lay their hopes and griefs upon the knees of the care-
less gods.
2. "Colonial" Architecture
Ceylon— Java—Cambodia— The Khmers— Their religion— Angkor
—Fall of the Khmers— Siam— Burma
Meanwhile Indian art had accompanied Indian religion across straits
and frontiers into Ceylon, Java, Cambodia, Siam, Burma, Tibet, Khotan,
Turkestan, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan; "in Asia all roads lead
*The summit of the temple is a single block of stone twenty-five feet square, and
weighing some eighty tons. According to Hindu tradition it was raised into place by be-
ing drawn up an incline four miles long. Forced labor was probably employed in such
works, instead of "man-enslaving" machinery.
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 603
from India."™ Hindus from the Ganges valley settled Ceylon in the fifth
century before Christ; Ashoka, two hundred years later, sent a son and
a daughter to convert the population to Buddhism; and though the
teeming island had to fight for fifteen centuries against Tamil invasions,
it maintained a rich culture until it was taken over by the British in 1815.
Singhalese art began with dagobas— domed relic shrines like the stupas
of the Buddhist north; it passed to great temples like that whose ruins mark
the ancient capital, Anuradhapura; it produced some of the finest of the
Buddha statues,108 and a great variety of objets (Tart; and it came to an
end, for the time being, when the last great king of Ceylon, Kirti Shri
Raja Singha, built the "Temple of the Tooth" at Kandy. The loss of
independence has brought decadence to the upper classes, and the patron-
age and taste that provide a necessary stimulus and restraint for the
artist have disappeared from Ceylon.109
Strange to say, the greatest of Buddhist temples— some students would
call it the greatest of all temples anywhere110— is not in India but in Java.
In the eighth century the Shailendra dynasty of Sumatra conquered Java,
established Buddhism as the official religion, and financed the building of
the massive fane of Borobudur (i.e., "Many Buddhas").m The temple
proper is of moderate size, and of peculiar design— a small domical stupa
surrounded by seventy-two smaller topes arranged about it in concentric
circles. If this were all, Borobudur would be nothing; what constitutes the
grandeur of the structure is the pedestal, four hundred feet square, an
immense mastaba in seven receding stages. At every turn there are niches
for statuary; 436 times the sculptors of Borobudur thought fit to carve
the figure of Buddha. Still discontent, they cut into the walls of the
stages three miles of bas-reliefs, depicting the legendary birth, youth and
enlightenment of the Master, and with such skill that these reliefs are
among the finest in Asia.1" With this powerful Buddhist shrine, and the
Brahmanical temples nearby at Prambanam, Javanese architecture reached
its zenith, and quickly decayed. The island became for a time a maritime
power, rose to wealth and luxury, and supported many poets. But in 1479
the Moslems began to people this tropical Paradise, and from that time
it produced no art of consequence. The Dutch pounced upon it in 1595,
and consumed it, province by province during the following century,
until their control was complete.
Only one Hindu temple surpasses that of Borobudur, and it, too, is
far from India— lost, indeed, in a distant jungle that covered it for cen-
604 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXI
turies. In 1858 a French explorer, picking his way through the upper
valley of the Mekong River, caught a glimpse, through trees and brush,
of a sight that seemed to him miraculous: an enormous temple, incredibly
majestic in design, stood amid the forest, intertwined and almost covered
with shrubbery and foliage. That day he saw many temples, some of them
already overgrown or split apart by trees; it seemed that he had arrived
just in time to forestall the triumph of the wilderness over these works
of men. Other Europeans had to come and corroborate his tale before
Henri Mouhot was believed; then scientific expeditions descended upon
the once silent retreat, and a whole school at Paris (UEcole de f Extreme
Orient) devoted itself to charting and studying the find. Today Angkor
Wat is one of the wonders of the world.*
At the beginning of the Christian era Indo-China, or Cambodia, was
inhabited by a people essentially Chinese, partly Tibetan, called Kham-
bujas or Khmers. When Kublai Khan's ambassador, Tcheou-ta-Kouan,
visited the Khmer capital, Angkor Thorn, he found a strong government
ruling a nation that had drawn wealth out of its rice-paddies and its sweat.
The king, Tchcou reported, had five wives: "one special, and four others
for the cardinal points of the compass," with some four thousand concu-
bines for more precise readings.114 Gold and jewelry abounded; pleasure-
boats dotted the lake; the streets of the capital were filled with chariots,
curtained palanquins, elephants in rich caparison, and a population of al-
most a million souls. Hospitals were attached to the temples, and each had
its corps of nurses and physicians.11*
Though the people were Chinese, their culture was Hindu. Their re-
ligion was based upon a primitive worship of the serpent, Naga, whose
fanlike head appears everywhere in Cambodian art; then the great gods
of the Hindu triad— Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva— entered through Burma;
almost at the same time Buddha came, and was joined with Vishnu and
Shiva as a favorite divinity of the Khmers. Inscriptions tell of the enor-
mous quantity of rice, butter and rare oils contributed daily by the people
to the ministrants of the gods.uo
To Shiva the Khmers, toward the end of the ninth century, dedicated
the oldest of their surviving temples— the Bayon, now a forbidding ruin
half overgrown with tenacious vegetation. The stones, laid without
* In 1604 a Portuguese missionary told of hunters reporting sonic ruins in the jungle,
and another priest made a similar report in 1672; but no attention was paid to these state-
ments.111
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 605
cement, have drawn apart in the course of a thousand years, stretching
into ungodly grins the great faces of Brahma and Shiva which almost con-
stitute the towers. Three centuries later the slaves and war-captives of
the kings built Angkor Wat,117 a masterpiece equal to the finest archi-
tectural achievements of the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the cathedral-
builders of Europe. An enormous moat, twelve miles in length, sur-
rounds the temple; over the moat runs a paved bridge guarded by dissua-
sive Nagas in stone; then an ornate enclosing wall; then spacious galleries,
whose reliefs tell again the tales of the Mahabharata and the Rawayana;
then the stately edifice itself, rising upon a broad base, by level after level
of a terraced pyramid, to the sanctuary of the god, two hundred feet high.
Here magnitude does not detract from beauty, but helps it to an impos-
ing magnificence that startles the Western mind into some weak realiza-
tion of the ancient grandeur once possessed by Oriental civilization. One
sees in imagination the crowded population of the capital: the regimented
slaves cutting, pulling and raising the heavy stones; the artisans carving
reliefs and statuary as if time would never fail them; the priests deceiving
and consoling the people; the devadasis (still pictured on the granite) de-
ceiving the people and consoling the priests; the lordly aristocracy build-
ing palaces like the Phinean-Akas, with its spacious Terrace of Honor;
and, raised above all by the labor of all, the powerful and ruthless kings.
The kings, needing many slaves, waged many wars. Often they won;
but near the close of the thirteenth century— "in the middle of the way" of
Dante's life— the armies of Siam defeated the Khmers, sacked their cities,
and left their resplendent temples and palaces in ruins. Today a few
tourists prowl among the loosened stones, and observe how patiently the
trees have sunk their roots or insinuated their branches into the crevices
of the rocks, slowly tearing them apart because stones cannot desire and
grow. Tcheou-ta-Kouan speaks of the many books that were written by
the people of Angkor, but not a page of this literature remains; like our-
selves they wrote perishable thoughts upon perishable tissue, and all their
immortals are dead. The marvelous reliefs show men and women wearing
veils and nets to guard against mosquitoes and slimy, crawling things.
The men and women are gone, surviving only on the stones. The mos-
quitoes and the lizards remain.
Nearby, in Siam, a people half Tibetan and half Chinese had gradually
expelled the conquering Khmers, and had developed a civilization based upon
606 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXI
Hindu religion and art. After overcoming Cambodia the Siamese built a new
capital, Ayuthia, on the site of an ancient city of the Khmers. From this
scat they extended their sway until, about 1600, their empire included south-
ern Burma, Cambodia, and the Malay Peninsula. Their trade reached to China
on the east and to Europe on the west. Their artists made illuminated manu-
scripts, painted with lacquer on wood, fired porcelain in the Chinese style,
embroidered beautiful silks, and occasionally carved statues of unique ex-
cellence.* Then, in the impartial rhythm of history, the Burmese captured
Ayuthia, and destroyed it with all its art. In their new capital at Bangkok
the Siamese built a great pagoda, whose excess of ornament cannot quite
conceal the beauty of its design.
The Burmese were among the greatest builders in Asia. Coming down into
these fertile fields from Mongolia and Tibet, they fell under Hindu influences,
and from the fifth century onward produced an abundance of Buddhist,
Vaishnavite and Shivaite statuary, and great stupas that culminated in the
majestic temple of Ananda— one of the five thousand pagodas of their ancient
capital, Pagan. Pagan was sacked by Kublai Khan, and for five hundred years
the Burmese government vacillated from capital to capital. For a time Manda-
lay flourished as the center of Burma's life, and the home of artists who
achieved beauty in many fields from embroidery and jewelry to the royal
palace— which showed what they could do in the frail medium of wood."11
The English, displeased with the treatment of their missionaries and their
merchants, adopted Burma in 1886, and moved the capital to Rangoon, a city
amenable to the disciplinary influence of the Imperial Navy. There the
Burmese had built one of their finest shrines, the famous Shwe Dagon, that
Golden Pagoda which draws to its spire millions upon millions of Burmese
Buddhist pilgrims every year. For does not this temple contain the very
hairs of Shaky a-n ami's head?
3. Moslem Architecture in India
The Afghan style - The Mogul style - Delhi-Agra - The Taj
Mahal
The final triumph of Indian architecture came under the Moguls. The
followers of Mohammed had proved themselves master builders wher-
ever they had carried their arms— at Granada, at Cairo, at Jerusalem, at
Baghdad; it was to be expected that this vigorous stock, after establish-
ing itself securely in India, would raise upon the conquered soil mosques
* E.g., the lacquered stone Buddha in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
CHAP. XXl) INDIAN ART 607
as resplendent as Omar's at Jerusalem, as massive as Hassan's at Cairo, and
as delicate as the Alhambra. It is true that the "Afghan" dynasty used
Hindu artisans, copied Hindu themes, and even appropriated the pillars
of Hindu temples, for their architectural purposes, and that many mosques
were merely Hindu temples rebuilt for Moslem prayer;119 but this natural
imitation passed quickly into a style so typically Moorish that one is sur-
prised to find the Taj Mahal in India rather than in Persia, North Africa
or Spain.
The beautiful Kutb-Minar* exemplifies the transition. It was part of
a mosque begun at Old Delhi by Kutbu-d Din Aibak; it commemorated
the victories of that bloody Sultan over the Hindus, and twenty-seven
Hindu temples were dismembered to provide material for the mosque and
the tower.1* After withstanding the elements for seven centuries the
great minaret— 250 feet high, built of fine red sandstone, perfectly propor-
tioned, and crowned on its topmost stages with white marble— is still one
of the masterpieces of Indian technology and art. In general the Sultans
of Delhi were too busy with killing to have much time for architecture,
and such buildings as they have left us are mostly the tombs that they
raised during their own lifetime as reminders that even they would die.
The best example of these is the mausoleum of Sher Shah at Sasseram,
in Bihar;121 gigantic, solid, masculine, it was the last stage of the more
virile Moorish manner before it softened into the architectural jewelry of
the Mogul kings.
The tendency to unite the Mohammedan and the Hindu styles was
fostered by the eclectic impartiality of Akbar; and the masterpieces that
his artisans built for him wove Indian and Persian methods and motifs
into an exquisite harmony symbolizing the frail merger of native and
Moslem creeds in Akbar's synthetic faith. The first monument of his
reign, the tomb erected by him near Delhi for his father Humayun, is
already in a style of its own— simple in line, moderate in decoration, but
foreshadowing in its grace the fairer edifices of Shah Jehan. At Fath-
pur-Sikri his artists built a city in which all the strength of the early
Moguls merged with the refinement of the later emperors. A flight of
steps leads up to an imposing portal in red sandstone, through whose
lordly arch one passes into an enclosure filled with chef-d'oeuvres. The
* I.e., minaret, from the Arabic memarat, a lamp or lighthouse.
608 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXI
major building is a mosque, but the loveliest of the structures are the three
pavilions for the Emperor's favorite wives, and the marble tomb of his
friend, Salim Chisti the sage; here the artists of India began to show that
skill in embroidering stone which was to culminate in the screen of the
Taj Mahal.
Jehangir contributed little to the architectural history of his people,
but his son Shah Jehan made his name almost as bright as Akbar's by his
passion for beautiful building. He scattered money as lavishly among
his artists as Jehangir had scattered it among his wives. Like the kings
of northern Europe, he imported the surplus artists of Italy, and had
them instruct his own carvers in that art of pietra dura (i.e., of inlaying
marble with a mosaic of precious stones) which became one of the char-
acteristic elements of Indian adornment during his reign. Jehan was not
a very religious soul, but two of the fairest mosques in India rose under
his patronage: the Juma Masjid— or Friday Mosque— at Delhi, and the
Moti Masj id— or Pearl Mosque— at Agra.
Both at Delhi and at Agra Jehan built "forts"— i.e., groups of royal
edifices surrounded by a protective wall. At Delhi he tore down with
superior disdain the pink palaces of Akbar, and replaced them with
structures which at their worst are a kind of marble confectionery, and
at their best are the purest architectural beauty on the globe. Here is
the luxurious Hall of Public Audience, with panels of Florentine mosaic
on a black marble ground, and with ceilings, columns and arches carved
into stone lacery of frail but incredible beauty. Here, too, is the Hall of
Private Audience, whose ceiling is of silver and gold, whose columns are
of filigree marble, whose arches are a pointed semicircle composed of
smaller flowerlike semicircles, whose Peacock Throne became a legend
for the world, and whose wall still bears in precious inlay the proud
words of the Moslem poet: "If anywhere on earth there is a Paradise,
it is here, it is here, it is here." We gather again some faint conception of
"the riches of the Indies" in Mogul days when we find the greatest of
the historians of architecture describing the royal residence at Delhi as
covering twice the area of the vast Escorial near Madrid, and forming at
that time, and in its ensemble, "the most magnificent palace in the East—
perhaps in the world."*12"
* The Delhi Fort originally contained fifty-two palaces, but only twenty-seven remain.
A harassed British garrison took refuge there in the Sepoy Mutiny, and razed several of
the palaces to make room for their stores. Much looting occurred.
CHAP. XXI ) INDIAN ART 609
The Fort at Agra is in ruins,* and we can only guess at its original
magnificence. Here, amid many gardens, were the Pearl Mosque, the Gem
Mosque, the halls of Public and Private Audience, the Throne Palace,
the King's Baths, the Hall of Mirrors, the palaces of Jehangir and of
Shah Jehan, the Jasmine Palace of Nur Jehan, and that Jasmine Tower
from which the captive emperor, Shah Jehan, looked over the Jumna
upon the tomb that he had built for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
All the world knows that tomb by her shortened name as the Taj
Mahal. Many an architect has rated it as the most perfect of all buildings
standing on the earth today. Three artists designed it: a Persian, Ustad
Isa; an Italian, Gieronimo Veroneo; and a Frenchman, Austin dc Bordeaux.
No Hindu seems to have shared in its conception; it is utterly un-Hindu,
completely Mohammedan; even the skilled artisans were, in part, brought
in from Baghdad, Constantinople, and other centers of the Moslem faith.1*
For twenty-two years twenty-two thousand workmen were forced to
labor upon the Taj; and though the Maharaja of Jaipur sent the marble
- as a gift to Shah Jehan, the building and its surroundings cost $230,000,000
—then an enormous sum.1*!
Only St. Peter's has so fitting an approach. Passing through a high
battlemented wall, one comes suddenly upon the Taj— raised upon a
marble platform, and framed on either side by handsome mosques and
stately minarets. In the foreground spacious gardens enclose a pool in
whose waters the inverted palace becomes a quivering fascination. Every
portion of the structure is of white marble, precious metals, or costly
stones. The building is a complex figure of twelve sides, four of which
are portals; a slender minaret rises at each corner, and the roof is a massive
spired dome. The main entrance, once guarded with solid silver gates,
is a maze of marble embroidery; inlaid in the wall in jeweled script are
quotations from the Koran, one of which invites the "pure in heart" to
enter "the gardens of Paradise." The interior is simple; and perhaps it is
* Jt was a sad error of Shah Jehan's to make a fortress of these lovely palaces. When
the British besieged Agra (1803) they inevitably turned their guns upon the Fort. Seeing
the cannon-balls strike the Khass Mahal, or Hall of Private Audience, the Hindus sur-
rendered, thinking beauty more precious than victory. A little later Warren Hastings
tore up the bath of the palace to present it to George IV; and other portions of the
structure were sold by Lord William Bcntinck to help the revenues of India.123
tLord William Bentinck, one of the kindliest of the British governoxs of India, once
thought of selling the Taj for $150,000 to a Hindu contractor, who believed that better
use could be made of the material.1* Since Lord Curzon's administration the British Gov-
ernment of India has taken excellent care of these Mogul monuments.
6lO THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXI
just as well that native and European thieves cooperated in despoiling the
tomb of its superabundant jewels, and of the golden railing, encrusted
with precious stones, that once enclosed the sarcophagi of Jehan and his
Queen. For Aurangzeb replaced the railing with an octagonal screen of
almost transparent marble, carved into a miracle of alabaster lace; and
it has seemed to some visitors that of all the minor and partial products
of human art nothing has ever surpassed the beauty of this screen.
It is not the most sublime of all edifices, it is only the most beautiful. At
any distance that hides its delicate details it is not imposing, but merely
pleasing; only a nearer view reveals that its perfection has no proportion
to its size. When in our hurried time we see enormous structures of a
hundred stories raised in a year or two, and then consider how twenty-two
thousand men toiled for twenty-two years on this little tomb, hardly a
hundred feet high, we begin to sense the difference between industry and
art. Perhaps the act of will involved in conceiving a building like the Taj
Mahal was greater and profounder than the act of will of the greatest
conqueror. If time were intelligent it would destroy everything else before
the Taj, and would leave this evidence of man's alloyed nobility as the
last man's consolation.
4. Indian Architecture and Civilization
Decay of Indian art—Hindu and Moslem architecture compared
—General view of Indian civilization
Despite the screen, Aurangzeb was a misfortune for Mogul and Indian
art. Dedicated fanatically to an exclusive religion, he saw in art nothing
but idolatry and vanity. Already Shah Jehan had prohibited the erection
of Hindu temples;"7 Aurangzeb not only continued the ban, but gave so
economical a support to Moslem building that it, too, languished under
his reign. Indian art followed him to the grave.
When we think of Indian architecture in summary and retrospect we
find in it two themes, masculine and feminine, Hindu and Mohammedan,
about which the structural symphony revolves. As, in the most famous
of symphonies, the startling hammer-strokes of the opening bars are shortly
followed by a strain of infinite delicacy, so in Indian architecture the over-
powering monuments of the Hindu genius at Bodh-Gaya, Bhuvaneshwara,
Madura and Tanjore are followed by the grace and melody of the Mogul
style at Fathpur-Sikri, Delhi and Agra; and the two themes mingle in a
CHAP.XXl) INDIAN ART 6ll
confused elaboration to the end. It was said of the Moguls that they built
like giants and finished liked jewelers; but this epigram might better have
been applied to Indian architecture in general: the Hindus built like giants,
and the Moguls ended like jewelers. Hindu architecture impresses us in
its mass, Moorish architcture in its detail; the first had the sublimity of
strength, the other had the perfection of beauty; the Hindus had passion
and fertility, the Moors had taste and self-restraint. The Hindu covered
his buildings with such exuberant statuary that one hesitates whether to
class them as building or as sculpture; the Mohammedan abominated
images, and confined himself to floral or geometrical decoration. The
Hindus were the Gothic sculptor-architects of India's Middle Ages; the
Moslems were the expatriated artists of the exotic Renaissance. All in all,
the Hindu style reached greater heights, in proportion as sublimity excels
loveliness; on second thought we perceive that Delhi Fort and the Taj
Mahal, beside Angkor and Borobudur, are beautiful lyrics beside profound
dramas— Petrarch beside Dante, Keats beside Shakespeare, Sappho beside
Sophocles. One art is the graceful and partial expression of fortunate
individuals, the other is the complete and powerful expression of a race.
Hence this little survey must conclude as it began, by confessing that
none but a Hindu can quite appreciate the art of India, or write about
it f orgivably. To a European brought up on Greek and aristocratic canons
of moderation and simplicity, this popular art of profuse ornament and
wild complexity will seem at times almost primitive and barbarous. But that
last word is the very adjective with which the classically-minded Goethe
rejected Strasbourg's cathedral and the Gothic style; it is the reaction of
reason to feeling, of rationalism to religion. Only a native believer can
feel the majesty of the Hindu temples, for these were built to give not
merely a form to beauty but a stimulus to piety and a pedestal to faith.
Only our Middle Ages— only our Giottos and our Dantes— could under-
stand India.
It is in these terms that we must view all Indian civilization— as the ex-
pression of a "medieval" people to whom religion is profounder than
science, if only because religion accepts at the outset the eternity of
human ignorance and the vanity of human power. In this piety lie the
weakness and the strength of the Hindu: his superstition and his gentle-
ness, his introversion and his insight, his backwardness and his depth, his
weakness in war and his achievement in art. Doubtless his climate affected
his religion, and cooperated with it to enfeeble him; therefore he yielded
6l2 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXI
with fatalistic resignation to the Aryans, the Huns, the Moslems and the
Europeans. History punished him for neglecting science; and when Clive's
superior cannon slaughtered the native army at Plassey (1757), their roar
announced the Industrial Revolution. In our time that Revolution will
have its way with India, as it has written its will and character upon
England, America, Germany, Russia and Japan; India, too, will have her
capitalism and her socialism, her millionaires and her slums. The old
civilization of India is finished. It began to die when the British came.
CHAPTER XXII
A Christian Epilogue
I. THE JOLLY BUCCANEERS
The arrival of the Europeans— The British Conquest— The Sepoy
Mutiny— Advantages and disadvantages of British rule
IN many ways that civilization was already dead when Clive and Hast-
ings discovered the riches of India. The long and disruptive reign of
Aurangzcb, and the chaos and internal wars that followed it, left India
ripe for reconquest; and the only question open to "manifest destiny" was
as to which of the modernized powers of Europe should become its
instrument. The French tried, and failed; they lost India, as well as Can-
ada, at Rossbach and Waterloo. The English tried, and succeeded.
In 1498 Vasco da Gama, after a voyage of eleven months from Lisbon,
anchored off Calicut. He was well received by the Hindu Raja of Mala-
bar, who gave him a courteous letter to the King of Portugal: "Vasco da
Gama, a nobleman of your household, has visited my kingdom, and has
given me great pleasure. In my kingdom there is abundance of cinnamon,
cloves, pepper, and precious stones. What I seek from your country is
gold, silver, coral and scarlet." His Christian majesty answered by claim-
ing India as a Portuguese colony, for reasons which the Raja was too
backward to understand. To make matters clearer, Portugal sent a fleet
to India, with instructions to spread Christianity and wage war. In the
seventeenth century the Dutch arrived, and drove out the Portuguese; in
the eighteenth the French and English came, and drove out the Dutch.
Savage ordeals of battle decided which of them should civilize and tax
the Hindus.
The East India Company had been founded in London in 1600 to buy
cheap in India, and sell dear in Europe, the products of India and the
East Indies.* As early as 1686 it announced its intention "to establish a
large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to
come."1 It set up trading-posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, fortified
* Goods bought for $2,000,000 in India were sold for $10,000,000 in England.1 The stock
of the Company rose to $32,000 a share.*
614 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
them, imported troops, fought battles, gave and took bribes, and exercised
other functions of government. Clive gayly accepted "presents" amount-
ing to $170,000 from Hindu rulers dependent upon his guns; pocketed
from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140,000; appointed Mir
Jafar ruler of Bengal for $6,000,000; played one native prince against an-
other, and gradually annexed their territories as the property of the East
India Company; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Par-
liament, and killed himself (1774).* Warren Hastings, a man of courage,
learning and ability, exacted contributions as high as a quarter of a mil-
lion dollars from native princes to the coffers of the Company; accepted
bribes to exact no more, exacted more, and annexed the states that could
not pay; he occupied Oudh with his army, and sold the province to a
prince for $2, 50o,ooo8— conquered and conqueror rivaled each other in
venality. Such parts of India as were under the Company were subjected
to a land tax of fifty per cent of the produce, and to other requisitions so
numerous and severe that two-thirds of the population fled, while others
sold their children to meet the rising rates." "Enormous fortunes," says
Macaulay, "were rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions
of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They
had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny
like this."7
By 1857 the crimes of the Company had so impoverished northeastern
India that the natives broke out in desperate revolt. The British Govern-
ment stepped in, suppressed the "mutiny," took over the captured terri-
tories as a colony of the Crown, paid the Company handsomely, and
added the purchase price to the public debt of India.8 It was plain, blunt
conquest, not to be judged, perhaps, by Commandments recited west of
Suez, but to be understood in terms of Darwin and Nietzsche: a people
that has lost the ability to govern itself, or to develop its natural re-
sources, inevitably falls a prey to nations suffering from strength and
greed.
The conquest brought certain advantages to India. Men like Bentinck,
Canning, Munro, Elphinstone and Macaulay carried into the administra-
tion of the British provinces something of the generous liberalism that con-
trolled England in 1832. Lord William Bentinck, with the aid and stimu-
lus of native reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, put an end to suttee and
thuggery. The English, after fighting in wars in India, with Indian
money and troops,* to complete the conquest of India, established peace
CHAP. XXll) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 615
throughout the peninsula, built railways, factories and schools, opened
universities at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Lahore and Allahabad, brought
the science and technology of England to India, inspired the East with
the democratic ideals of the West, and played an important part in re-
vealing to the world the cultural wealth of India's past. The price of these
benefactions was a financial despotism by which a race of transient rulers
drained India's wealth year by year as they returned to the reinvigorating
north; an economic despotism that ruined India's industries, and threw
her millions of artisans back upon an inadequate soil; and a political des-
potism that, coming so soon after the narrow tyranny of Aurangzeb,
broke for a century the spirit of the Indian people.
II. LATTER-DAY SAINTS
Christianity in India—The "Brahma-Somaj"—Alohanimedanisin--
Rtimakrishna— Vivekananda
It was natural and characteristic that under these conditions India
should seek consolation in religion. For a time she gave a cordial welcome
to Christianity; she found in it many ethical ideals that she had honored
for thousands of years; and "before the character and behavior of Euro-
peans," says the blunt Abbe Dubois, "became well known to these people,
it seemed possible that Christianity might take root among them."10
Throughout the nineteenth century harassed missionaries tried to make the
voice of Christ audible above the roar of the conquering cannon; they
erected and equipped schools and hospitals, dispensed medicine and char-
ity as well as theology, and brought to the Untouchables the first recog-
nition of their humanity. But the contrast between Christian precept and
the practice of Christians left the Hindus sceptical and satirical. They
pointed out that the raising of Lazarus from the dead was unworthy of
remark; their own religion had many more interesting and astonishing
miracles than this; and any true Yogi could perform miracles today, while
those of Christianity were apparently finished.11 The Brahmans held their
ground proudly, and offered against the orthodoxies of the West a system
of thought quite as subtle, profound, and incredible. "The progress of
Christianity in India," says Sir Charles Eliot, "has been insignificant.""
Nevertheless, the fascinating figure of Christ has had far more influence
in India than may be measured by the fact that Christianity has converted
six per cent of the population in three hundred years. The first signs of
6l6 THE STORY OP CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
that influence appear in the Bhagavad-Gita;™ the latest are evident in
Gandhi and Tagore. The clearest instance is in the reform organization
known as the Brahma-Somaj,* founded in 1828 by Ram Mohun Roy. No
one could have approached the study of religion more conscientiously.
Roy learned Sanskrit to read the Vedas, Pali to read the Tripitaka of
Buddhism, Persian and Arabic to study Mohammedanism and the Koran,
Hebrew to master the Old Testament and Greek to understand the New.14
Then he took up English, and wrote it with such ease and grace that
Jeremy Bentham wished that James Mill might profit from the example.
In 1820 Roy published his Precepts of Jesus: a Guide to Peace and Happi-
ness, and announced: "I have found the doctrines of Christ more con-
ducive to moral principles, and better adapted for the use of rational
beings, than any other which have come to my knowledge."1* He pro-
posed to his scandalized countrymen a new religion, which should
abandon polytheism, polygamy, caste, child marriage, suttee and idolatry,
and should worship one god— Brahman. Like Akbar he dreamed that all
India might be united in so simple a faith; and like Akbar he underesti-
mated the popularity of superstition. The Brahma-Somaj, after a hun-
dred years of useful struggle, is now an extinct force in Indian life.f
The Moslems are the most powerful and interesting of the religious minor-
ities of India; but the study of their religion belongs to a later volume. It is
not astonishing that Mohammedanism, despite the zealous aid of Aurangzeb,
failed to win India to Islam; the miracle is that Mohammedanism in India
did not succumb to Hinduism. The survival of this simple and masculine
monotheism amid a jungle of polytheism attests the virility of the Moslem
mind; we need only recall the absorption of Buddhism by Brahmanism to
realize the vigor of this resistance, and the measure of this achievement. Allah
now has some 70,000,000 worshipers in India.
The Hindu has found little comfort in any alien faith; and the figures
that have most inspired his religious consciousness in the nineteenth cen-
* Literally, the "Brahma Society"; known more fully as "The Society of the Believers
in Brahman, the Supreme Spirit."
fit has today some 5,500 adherents.16 Another reform organization, the Arya-Somaj
(Aryan Society), founded by Swami Dyananda, and brilliantly carried forward by the
late Lala Lajpat Rai, denounced caste, polytheism, superstition, idolatry and Christianity,
and urged a return to the simpler religion of the Vedas. Its followers now number half a
million.17 A reverse influence, of Hinduism upon Christianity, appears in Thcosophy— a
mixture of Hindu mysticism and Christian morality, developed in India by two exotic
women: Mme. Helena Blavatsky (1878) and Mrs. Annie Besant (1893).
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 617
tury were those that rooted their doctrine and practice in the ancient
creeds of the people. Ramakrishna, a poor Brahman of Bengal, became
for a time a Christian, and felt the lure of Christ;* he became at another
time a Moslem, and joined in the austere ritual of Mohammedan prayer;
but soon his pious heart brought him back to Hinduism, even to the ter-
rible Kali whose priest he became, and whom he transformed into a
Mother-Goddess overflowing with tenderness and affection. He rejected
the ways of the intellect, and preached Bhakti-yoga—thc discipline and
union of love. "The knowledge of God," he said, "may be likened to a
man, while love of God is like a woman. Knowledge has entry only to
the outer rooms of God, and no one can enter into the inner mysteries of
God save a lover."1" Unlike Ram Mohun Roy, Ramakrishna took no
trouble to educate himself; he learned no Sanskrit and no English; he
wrote nothing, and shunned intellectual discourse. When a pompous
logician asked him, "What are knowledge, knower, and the object
known?" he answered, "Good man, I do not know all these niceties of
scholastic learning. I know only my Mother Divine, and that I am her
son."1" All religions are good, he taught his followers; each is a way to
God, or a stage on the way, adapted to the mind and heart of the seeker.
To be converted from one religion to another is foolishness; one need only
continue on his own way, and reach to the essence of his own faith. "All
rivers flow to the ocean. Flow, and let others flow, too!"10 He tolerated
sympathetically the polytheism of the people, and accepted humbly the
monism of the philosophers; but in his own living faith God was a spirit
incarnated in all men, and the only true worship of God was the loving
service of mankind.
Many fine souls, rich and poor, Brahman and Pariah, chose him as
Guru, and formed an order and mission in his name. The most vivid of
these followers was a proud young Kshatriya, Narendranath Dutt, who,
full of Spencer and Darwin, first presented himself to Ramakrishna as an
atheist unhappy in his atheism, but scornful of the myths and supersti-
tions with which he identified religion. Conquered by Ramakrishna's
patient kindliness, "Naren" became the young Master's most ardent dis-
ciple; he redefined God as "the totality of all souls,"81 and called upon his
fellow men to practise religion not through vain asceticism and meditation,
but through absolute devotion to men.
* To the end of his life he accepted the divinity of Christ, but insisted that Buddha,
Krishna and others were also incarnations of the one God. He himself, he assured Vive-
kananda, was a reincarnation of Rama and Krishna.17*
6l8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
Leave to the next life the reading of the Vedanta, and the practice
of meditation. Let this body which is here be put at the service of
others! . . . The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings.
They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek. He
alone serves God who serves all other beings!"
Changing his name to Vivekananda, he left India to seek funds abroad
for the Ramakrishna Mission. In 1893 he found himself lost and penni-
less in Chicago. A day later he appeared in the Parliament of Religions
at the World's Fair, addressed the meeting as a representative of Hindu-
ism, and captured everyone by his magnificent presence, his gospel of
the unity of all religions, and his simple ethics of human service as the
best worship of God; atheism became a noble religion under the inspira-
tion of his eloquence, and orthodox clergymen found themselves honor-
ing a "heathen" who said that there was no other God than the souls of
living things. Returning to India, he preached to his countrymen a more
virile creed than any Hindu had offered them since Vedic days:
It is a man-making religion that we want. . . . Give up these
weakening mysticisms, and be strong. . . . For the next fifty years
... let all other, vain gods disappear from our minds. This is the
only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, every-
where His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything. . . .
The first of all worship is the worship of those all around us. ...
These are all our gods— men and animals; and the first gods we have
to worship are our own countrymen."
It was but a step from this to Gandhi.
in. TAGORE
Science and art—A family of geniuses—Youth of Rabindranath—
His poetry— His politics— His school
Meanwhile, despite oppression, bitterness and poverty, India continued
to create science, literature and art. Professor Jagadis Chandra Bose has
won world-renown by his researches in electricity and the physiology of
plants; and the work of Professor Chandrasekhara Raman in the physics
of light has been crowned with the Nobel prize. In our own century a
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 619
new school of painting has arisen in Bengal, which merges the richness of
color in the Ajanta frescoes with the delicacy of line in the Rajput minia-
tures. The paintings of Abanindranath Tagore share modestly in the
voluptuous mysticism and the delicate artistry that brought the poetry of
his uncle to international fame.
The Tagores are one of the great families of history. Davendranath
Tagore (Bengali Thakur) was one of the organizers, and later the head,
of the Brahma-Somaj\ a man of wealth, culture and sanctity, he became
in his old age a heretic patriarch of Bengal. From him have descended
the artists Abanindranath and Gogonendranath, the philosopher Dwijen-
dranath, and the poet Rabindranath, Tagore— the last two being his sons.
Rabindranath was brought up in an atmosphere of comfort and refine-
ment, in which music, poetry and high discourse were the very air that he
breathed. He was a gentle spirit from birth, a Shelley who refused to die
young or to grow old; so affectionate that squirrels climbed upon his
knees, and birds perched upon his hands.** He was observant and recep-
tive, and felt the eddying overtones of experience with a mystic sensitiv-
ity. Sometimes he would stand for hours on a balcony, noting with literary
instinct the figure and features, the mannerisms and gait of each passer-by
in the street; sometimes, on a sofa in an inner room, he would spend half
a day silent with his memories and his dreams. He began to compose
verses on a slate, happy in the thought that errors could be so easily wiped
away." Soon he was writing songs full of tenderness for India— for the
beauty of her scenery, the loveliness of her women, and the sufferings of
her people; and he composed the music for these songs himself. All India
sang them, and the young poet thrilled to hear them on the lips of rough
peasants as he traveled, unknown, through distant villages.5* Here is one
of them, translated from the Bengali by the author himself; who else has
ever expressed with such sympathetic scepticism the divine nonsense of
romantic love?
Tell me if this be all true, my lover, tell me if this be true.
When these eyes flash their lightning the dark clouds in your breast
make stormy answer.
Is it true that my lips are sweet like the opening bud of the first
conscious love?
Do the memories of vanished months of May linger in my limbs?
Does the earth, like a harp, shiver into songs with the touch of my
feet?
620 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
/
Is it then true that the dewdrops fall from the eyes of night when I
am seen, and the morning light is glad when it wraps my body
round?
Is it true, is it true, that your love traveled alone through ages and
worlds in search of me?
That when you found me at last, your age-long desire found utter
peace in my gentle speech and my eyes and lips and flowing hair?
Is it then true that the mystery of the Infinite is written on this
little forehead of mine?
Tell me, my lover, if all this be true?"
There are many virtues in these poems*— an intense and yet sober
patriotism; a femininely subtle understanding of love and woman, nature
and man; a passionate penetration into the insight of India's philosophers;
and a Tennysonian delicacy of sentiment and phrase. If there is any fault
in them it is that they are too consistently beautiful, too monotonously
idealistic and tender. Every woman in them is lovely, and every man in
them is infatuated with woman, or death, or God; nature, though some-
times terrible, is always sublime, never bleak, or barren, or hideous, t
Perhaps the story of Chitra is Tagore's story: her lover Arjuna tires of her
in a year because she is completely and uninterruptedly beautiful; only
when she loses her beauty and, becoming strong, takes up the natural
labors of life, does the god love her again— a profound symbol of the
contented marriage.88 Tagore confesses his limitations with captivating
grace:
My love, once upon a time your poet launched a great epic in his
mind.
Alas, I was not careful, and it struck your ringing anklets and came
to grief.
It broke up into scraps of songs, and lay scattered at your feet."
Therefore he has sung lyrics to the end, and all the world except the
critics has heard him gladly. India was a little surprised when her poet
*The more important volumes are Gitanjali (1913), Chitra (1914), The Post-Office
(1914), The Gardener (1914), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and Red Oleanders (1925). The
poet's own My Reminiscences (1917) is a better guide to understanding him than E.
Thompson's R. Tagore ', Poet and Dramatist (Oxford, 1926).
tCf. his magnificent line: "When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that
what I have seen is unsurpassable."97
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 621
received the Nobel prize (1913); the Bengal reviewers had seen only his
faults, and the Calcutta professors had used his poems as examples of bad
Bengali.80 The young Nationalists disliked him because his condemnation
of the abuses in India's moral life was stronger than his cry for political
freedom; and when he was knighted it seemed to them a betrayal of
India. He did not hold the honor long; for when, by a tragic misunder-
standing, British soldiers fired into a religious gathering at Amritsar
(1919), Tagore returned his decorations to the Viceroy with a stinging
letter of renunciation. Today he is a solitary figure, perhaps the most im-
pressive of all men now on the earth: a reformer who has had the cour-
age to denounce the most basic of India's institutions— the caste system—
and the dearest of her beliefs-transmigration;81 a Nationalist who longs
for India's liberty, but has dared to protest against the chauvinism and
self-seeking that play a part in the Nationalist movement; an educator who
has tired of oratory and politics, and has retreated to his ashram and
hermitage at Shantiniketan, to teach some of the new generation his gospel
of moral self-liberation; a poet broken-hearted by the premature death of
his wife, and by the humiliation of his country; a philosopher steeped in
the Vedanta™ a mystic hesitating, like Chandi Das, between woman and
God, and yet shorn of the ancestral faith by the extent of his learning;
albver of Nature facing her messengers of death with no other consolation
than his unaging gift of song.
"Ah, poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning grey.
Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?"
"It is evening," the poet said, "and I am listening because some one
may call from the village, late though it be.
I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of
eager eyes beg for music to break their silence and speak for them.
Who is there to weave their passionate songs, if I sit on the shore
of life and contemplate death and the beyond? . . .
It is a trifle that my hair is turning grey.
I am ever as young or as old as the youngest and the oldest of this
village. . . .
They all have need for me, and I have no time to brood over the
after-life.
I am of an age with each; what matter if my hair turns grey?"1*
622 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXII
IV. EAST IS WEST
Changing India— Economic changes— Social— The decaying caste
system — Castes and guilds — Untouchables — The
emergence of 'woman
That a man unfamiliar with English till almost fifty should write
English so well is a sign of the ease with which some of the gaps can be
bridged between that East and that West whose mating another poet
has banned. For since the birth of Tagore the West has come to the
East in a hundred ways, and is changing every aspect of Oriental life.
Thirty thousand miles of railways have webbed the wastes and ghats of
India, and carried Western faces into every village; telegraph wires and
the printing press have brought to every student the news of a suggest-
ively changing world; English schools have taught British history with
a view to making British citizens, and have unwittingly inculcated English
ideas of democracy and liberty. Even the East now justifies Heraclitus.
Reduced to poverty in the nineteenth century by the superior machin-
ery of British looms and the higher calibre of British guns, India has
now turned her face reluctantly towards industrialization. Handicrafts
are dying, factories are growing. At Jamsetpur the Tata Iron and Steel
Company employs 45,000 men, and threatens the leadership of American
firms in the production of steel.*4 The coal production of India is mount-
ing rapidly; within a generation China and India may overtake Europe
and America in lifting out of the soil the basic fuels and materials of
industry. Not only will these native resources meet native needs, they
may compete with the West for the markets of the world, and the
conquerors of Asia may suddenly find their markets gone, and the
standards of living of their people at home severely reduced, by the com-
petition of low-wage labor in once docile and backward (i.e., agricul-
tural) lands. In Bombay there are factories in mid- Victorian style, with
old-fashioned wages that bring tears of envy to the eyes of Occidental
Tories.* Hindu employers have replaced the British in many of these
industries, and exploit their fellow men with the rapacity of Europeans
bearing the white man's burden.
* In 1922 there were eighty-three cotton factories in Bombay, with 180,000 employees,
and an average wage-scale of thirty-three cents a day. Of 33,000,000 Indians engaged in
industry, 51% are women, 14% are children under fourteen."
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 6l}
The economic basis of Indian society has not changed without affecting
the social institutions and moral customs of the people. The caste system
was conceived in terms of a static and agricultural society; it provided
order, but gave no opening to unpedigreed genius, no purchase to ambi-
tion and hope, no stimulus to invention and enterprise; it was doomed
when the Industrial Revolution reached India's shores. The machine does
not respect persons: in most of the factories men work side by side with-
out discrimination of caste, trains and trams give berth or standing-room
to all who can pay, cooperative societies and political parties bring all
grades together, and in the congestion of the urban theatre or street
Brahman and Pariah rub elbows in unexpected fellowship. A raja an-
nounces that every caste and creed will find reception at his court; a
Shudra becomes the enlightened ruler of Baroda; the Brahma-Somaj
denounces caste, and the Bengal Provincial Congress of the National
Congress advocates the abolition of all caste distinctions forthwith."
Slowly the machine lifts a new class to wealth and power, and brings the
most ancient of living aristocracies to an end.
Already the caste terms are losing significance. The word Vaisya is
used in books today, but has no application in actual life. Even the term
Shudra has disappeared from the north, while in the south it is a loose
designation for all non-Brahmans." The lower castes of older days have
in effect been replaced by over three thousand "castes" that are really
guilds: bankers, merchants, manufacturers, farmers, professors, engineers,
trackwalkers, college women, butchers, barbers, fishermen, actors, coal
miners, washermen, cabmen, shop-girls, bootblacks— these are organized
into occupational castes that differ from our trade-unions chiefly in the
loose expectation that sons will follow the trades of their fathers.
The great tragedy of the caste system is that it has multiplied, from
generation to generation, those Untouchables whose growing number and
rebelliousness undermine the institution that created them. The Outcastes
have received into their ranks all those who were enslaved by war or debt,
all the children of marriages between Brahmans and Shudras, and all those
unfortunates whose work, as scavengers, butchers, acrobats, conjurors or
executioners was stamped as degrading by Brahmanical law;* and they
have swollen their mass by the improvident fertility of those who have
nothing to lose. Their bitter poverty has made cleanliness of body, cloth-
ing or food an impossible luxury for them; and their fellows shun them
624 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
with every sense.* Therefore the laws of caste forbid an Untouchable to
approach nearer than twenty-four feet to a Shudra, or seventy-four feet
to a Brahman;40 if the shadow of a Pariah falls upon a man of caste, the
latter must remove the contamination by a purifying ablution. Whatever
the Outcaste touches is thereby defiled. t In many parts of India he must
not draw water from the public wells, or enter temples used by Brahmans,
or send his children to the Hindu schools.41 The British, whose policies
have in some degree contributed to the impoverishment of the Outcastes,
have brought them at least equality before the law, and equal access to all
British-controlled colleges and schools. The Nationalist movement, under
the inspiration of Gandhi, has done much to lessen the disabilities of the
Untouchables. Perhaps another generation will see them externally and
superficially free.
The coming of industry, and of Western ideas, is disturbing the ancient
mastery of the Hindu male. Industrialization defers the age of marriage,
and requires the "emancipation" of woman; that is to say, the woman can-
not be lured into the factory unless she is persuaded that home is a prison,
and is entitled by law to keep her earnings for herself. Many real reforms
have come as incidents to this emancipation. Child marriage has been
formally ended (1929) by raising the legal age of marriage to fourteen for
girls and to eighteen for men;48 suttee has disappeared, and the remarriage
of widows grows daily ;J polygamy is allowed, but few men practise
it;46 and tourists are disappointed to find that the temple dancers are
almost extinct. In no other country is moral reform progressing so
rapidly. Industrial city life is drawing women out of purdah; hardly six
per cent of the women of India accept such seclusion today.4* A number
of lively periodicals for women discuss the most up-to-date questions;
even a birth-control league has appeared,47 and has faced bravely the
gravest problem of India— indiscriminate fertility. In many of the prov-
inces women vote and hold political office; twice women have been presi-
* "People who abstain entirely from animal food acquire such an acute sense of smell
that they can perceive in a moment, from a person's breath, or from the exudation of the
skin, whether that person has eaten meat or not; and that after a lapse of twenty-four
hours."38
fin 1913 the child of a rich Hindu of Kohat fell into a fountain and was drowned.
No one was at hand but its mother and a passing Outcaste. The latter offered to plunge
into the water and rescue the child, but the mother refused; she preferred the death of
her child to the defilement of the fountain.41
Jin the year 1915 there were 15 remarriages of widows; in 1925 there were 2,263.**
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 625
dent of the Indian National Congress. Many of them have taken degrees
at the universities, and have become doctors, lawyers, or professors/8 Soon,
no doubt, the tables will be turned, and women will rule. Must not some
wild Western influence bear the guilt of this flaming appeal issued by a
subaltern of Gandhi to the women of India?—
Away with ancient purdah! Come out of the kitchens quick!
Fling the pots and pans rattling into the corners! Tear the cloth
from your eyes, and see the new world! Let your husbands and
brothers cook for themselves. There is much work to be done to
make India a nation!49
V. THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
The westernized students — The secularization of heaven — The
Indian National Congress
In 1923 there were over a thousand Hindus studying in England, pre-
sumably an equal number in America, perhaps an equal number elsewhere.
They marveled at the privileges enjoyed by the lowliest citizens of western
Europe and America; they studied the French and American Revolutions,
and read the literature of reform and revolt; they gloated over the Bill
of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, and the American Constitution; they went back to their coun-
tries as centers of infection for democratic ideas and the gospel of liberty.
The industrial and scientific advances of the West, and the victory of the
Allies in the War, gave to these ideas an irresistible prestige; soon every
student was shouting the battle-cry of freedom. In the schools of England
and America the Hindus learned to be free.
These Western-educated Orientals had not only taken on political
ideals in the course of their education abroad, they had shed religious
ideas; the two processes are usually associated, in biography and in history.
They came to Europe as pious youths, wedded to Krishna, Shiva, Vishnu,
Kali, Rama . . . ; they touched science, and their ancient faiths were
shattered as by some sudden catalytic shock. Shorn of religious belief,
which is the very spirit of India, the Westernized Hindus returned to their
country disillusioned and sad; a thousand gods had dropped dead from
the skies* Then, inevitably, Utopia filled the place of Heaven, democracy
*This does not apply to all. Some, in the significant phrase of Coomaraswamy, have
"returned from Europe to India."
626 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
became a substitute for Nirvana, liberty replaced God. What had gone
on in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century now went on in
the East.
Nevertheless the new ideas developed slowly. In 1885 a few Hindu
leaders met at Bombay and founded the "Indian National Congress," but
they do not seem to have dreamed then even of Home Rule. The effort
of Lord Curzon to partition Bengal (that is, to destroy the unity and
strength of the most powerful and politically conscious community in
India) roused the Nationalists to a more rebel mood; and at the Congress
of 1905 the uncompromising Tilak demanded Swaraj. He had created the
word* out of Sanskrit roots still visible in its English translation— "self-
rule." In that same eventful year Japan defeated Russia; and the East,
which for a century had been fearful of the West, began to lay plans for
the liberation of Asia. China followed Sun Yat Sen, took up the sword,
and fell into the arms of Japan. India, weaponless, accepted as her leader
one of the strangest figures in history, and gave to the world the unprece-
dented phenomenon of a revolution led by a saint, and waged without
a gun.
VI. MAHATMA GANDHI
Portrait of a saint— The ascetic— The Christian— The education of
Gandhi— In Africa— The Revolt of 1921— "/ am the man"—
Prison years— 'Young India"— The revolution of the
spinning-wheel— The achievements of Gandhi
Picture the ugliest, slightest, weakest man in Asia, with face and flesh
of bronze, close-cropped gray head, high cheek-bones, kindly little brown
eyes, a large and almost toothless mouth, larger cars, an enormous nose,
thin arms and legs, clad in a loin cloth, standing before an English judge
in India, on trial for preaching "non-cooperation" to his countrymen. Or
picture him seated on a small carpet in a bare room at his Satyagrahashram,
—School of Truth-Seekers— at Ahmedabad: his bony legs crossed under
him in yogi fashion, soles upward, his hands busy at a spinning-wheel, his
face lined with responsibility, his mind active with ready answers to every
questioner of freedom. From 1920 to 1935 this naked weaver was both
the spiritual and the political leader of 320,000,000 Indians. When he ap-
peared in public, crowds gathered round him to touch his clothing or to
kiss his feet.*1
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 627
Four hours a day he spun the coarse khaddar, hoping by his example
to persuade his countrymen to use this simple homespun instead of buying
the product of those British looms that had ruined the textile industry
of India. His only possessions were three rough cloths— two as his ward-
robe and one as his bed. Once a rich lawyer, he had given all his prop-
erty to the poor, and his wife, after some matronly hesitation, had fol-
lowed his example. He slept on the bare floor, or on the earth. He lived
on nuts, plantains, lemons, oranges, dates, rice, and goat's milk;" often for
months together he took nothing but milk and fruit; once in his life he
tasted meat; occasionally he ate nothing for weeks. "I can as well do with-
out my eyes as without fasts. What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts
are for the inner."88 As the blood thins, he felt, the mind clears, irrelevan-
cies fall away, and fundamental things— sometimes the very Soul of the
World— rise out of Maya like Everest through the clouds.
At the same time that he fasted to see divinity he kept one toe on the
earth, and advised his followers to take an enema daily when they
fasted, lest they be poisoned with the acid products of the body's self-
consumption just as they might be finding God.5* When the Moslems and
the Hindus killed one another in theological enthusiasm, and paid no
heed to his pleas for peace, he went without food for three weeks to move
them. He became so weak and frail through fasts and privations that
when he addressed the great audiences that gathered to hear him, he spoke
to them from an uplifted chair. He carried his asceticism into the field of
sex, and wished, like Tolstoi, to limit all physical intercourse to delib-
erate reproduction. He too, in his youth, had indulged the flesh too
much, and the news of his father's death had surprised him in the arms
of love. Now he returned with passionate remorse to the Erahmacharia
that had been preached to him in his boyhood— absolute abstention from
all sensual desire. He persuaded his wife to live with him only as sister
with brother; and "from that time," he tells us, "all dissension ceased.""
When he realized that India's basic need was birth-control, he adopted not
the methods of the West, but the theories of Malthus and Tolstoi.
Is it right for us, who know the situation, to bring forth children?
We only multiply slaves and weaklings if we continue the process
of procreation whilst we feel and remain helpless. . . . Not till India
has become a free nation . . . have we the right to bring forth
progeny. ... I have not a shadow of doubt that married people, if
628 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
they wish well to the country and want to see India become a nation
of strong and handsome, well-formed men and women, would prac-
tice self-restraint and cease to procreate for the time being."
Added to these elements in his character were qualities strangely like
those that, we are told, distinguished the Founder of Christianity. He did
not mouth the name of Christ, but he acted as if he accepted every word
of the Sermon on the Mount. Not since St. Francis of Assisi has any life
known to history been so marked by gentleness, disinterestedness, sim-
plicity, and forgiveness of enemies. It was to the credit of his opponents,
but still more to his own, that his undiscourageable courtesy to them won
a fine courtesy from them in return; the Government sent him to jail
with profuse apologies. He never showed rancor or resentment. Thrice
he was attacked by mobs, and beaten almost to death; not once did he
retaliate; and when one of his assailants was arrested he refused to enter
a charge. Shortly after the worst of all riots between Moslems and Hindus,
when the Moplah Mohammedans butchered hundreds of unarmed Hindus
and offered their prepuces as a covenant to Allah, these same Moslems
were stricken with famine; Gandhi collected funds for them from all
India, and, with no regard for the best precedents, forwarded every anna,
without deduction for "overhead," to the starving enemy.87
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869. His family be-
longed to the Vaisya caste, and to the Jain sect, and practised the ahimsa
principle of never injuring a living thing. His father was a capable admin-
istrator but an heretical financier; he lost place after place through hon-
esty, gave nearly all his wealth to charity, and left the rest to his family."
While still a boy Mohandas became an atheist, being displeased with the
adulterous gallantries of certain Hindu gods; and to make clear his ever-
lasting scorn for religion, he ate meat. The meat disagreed with him, and
he returned to religion.
At eight he was engaged, and at twelve he was married, to Kasturbai,
who remained loyal to him through all his adventures, riches, poverty,
imprisonments, and Brahmacharia. At eighteen he passed examinations for
the university, and went to London to study law. In his first year there he
read eighty books on Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount "went
straight to my heart on the first reading."* He took the counsel to return
good for evil, and to love even one's enemies, as the highest expression of
all human idealism; and he resolved rather to fail with these than to suc-
ceed without them.
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 629
Returning to India in 1891, he practised law for a time in Bombay, re-
fusing to prosecute for debt, and always reserving the right to abandon
a case which he had come to think unjust. One case led him to South
Africa; there he found his fellow-Hindus so maltreated that he forgot to
return to India, but gave himself completely, without remuneration, to
the cause of removing the disabilities of his countrymen in Africa. For
twenty years he fought this issue out until the Government yielded. Only
then did he return home.
Traveling through India he realized for the first time the complete
destitution of his people. He was horrified by the skeletons whom he saw
toiling in the fields, and the lowly Outcastes who did the menial work
of the towns. It seemed to him that the discriminations against his coun-
trymen abroad were merely one consequence of their poverty and sub-
jection at home. Nevertheless he supported England loyally in the War;
he even advocated the enlistment of Hindus who did not accept the prin-
ciple of non-violence. He did not, at that time, agree with those who
called for independence; he believed that British misgovernment in India
was an exception, and that British government in general was good; that
British government in India was bad just because it violated all the prin-
ciples of British government at home; and that if the English people
could be made to understand the case of the Hindus, it would soon accept
them in full brotherhood into a commonwealth of free dominions.00 He
trusted that when the War was over, and Britain counted India's sacrifice
for the Empire in men and wealth, it would no longer hesitate to give her
liberty.
But at the close of the War the agitation for Home Rule was met by
the Rowland Acts, which put an end to freedom of speech and press;
by the establishment of the impotent legislature of the Montagu-Chelms-
ford reforms; and finally by the slaughter at Amritsar. Gandhi was
shocked into decisive action. He returned to the Viceroy the decorations
which he had received at various times from British governments; and he
issued to India a call for active civil disobedience against the Government
of India. The people responded not with peaceful resistance, as he had
asked, but with bloodshed and violence; in Bombay, for example, they
killed fifty-three unsympathetic Parsees.81 Gandhi, vowed to ahimsa, sent
out a second message, in which he called upon the people to postpone the
campaign of civil disobedience, on the ground that it was degenerating
into mob rule. Seldom in history had a man shown more courage in
acting on principle, scorning expediency and popularity. The nation was
630 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
astonished at his decision; it had supposed itself near to success, and it did
not agree with Gandhi that the means might be as important as the end.
The reputation of the Mahatma sank to the lowest ebb.
It was just at this point (in March, 1922) that the Government deter-
mined upon his arrest. He made no resistance, declined to engage a lawyer,
and offered no defense. When the Prosecutor charged him with being
responsible, through his publications, for the violence that had marked
the outbreak of 1921, Gandhi replied in terms that lifted him at once to
nobility.
I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned Advocate-General
has thrown on my shoulder in connection with the incidents in Bom-
bay, Madras, and Chauri Chaura. Thinking over these deeply, and
sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible for me to
dissociate myself from these diabolical crimes. . . . The learned
Advocate-General is quite right when he says that as a man of
responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, . . .
I should have known the consequences of every one of my acts. I
knew that I was playing with fire, I ran the risk, and if I was set
free I would still do the same. I felt this morning that I would have
failed in my duty if I did not say what I say here just now.
I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Non-
violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of
my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to
a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my
country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting
forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that
my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it,
and I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the
highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any ex-
tenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit
to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law
is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty
of a citizen.6"
The Judge expressed his profound regret that he had to send to jail
one whom millions of his countrymen considered "a great patriot and a
great leader"; he admitted that even those who differed from Gandhi
looked upon him "as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly
life."* He sentenced him to prison for six years.
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 631
Gandhi was put under solitary confinement, but he did not complain.
"I do not see any of the other prisoners," he wrote, "though I really do
not see how my society could do them any harm." But "I feel happy.
My nature likes loneliness. I love quietness. And now I have opportunity
to engage in studies that I had to neglect in the outside world."94 He in-
structed himself sedulously in the writings of Bacon, Carlyle, Ruskin,
Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoi, and solaced long hours with Ben Jonson
and Walter Scott. He read and re-read the Bhagavad-Gita. He studied
Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu so that he might be able not only to write for
scholars but to speak to the multitude. He drew up a detailed schedule
of studies for the six years of his imprisonment, and pursued it faithfully
till accident intervened. "I used to sit down to my books with the delight
of a young man of twenty-four, and forgetting my four-and-fifty years
and my poor health."95
Appendicitis secured his release, and Occidental medicine, which he
had often denounced, secured his recovery. A vast crowd gathered at
the prison gates to greet him on his exit, and many kissed his coarse gar-
ment as he passed. But he shunned politics and the public eye, pled his
weakness and illness, and retired to his school at Ahmedabad, where he
lived for many years in quiet isolation with his students. From that re-
treat, however, he sent forth weekly, through his mouthpiece Young
India, editorials expounding his philosophy of revolution and life. He
begged his followers to shun violence, not only because it would be
suicidal, since India had no guns, but because it would only replace one
despotism with another. "History," he told them, "teaches one that those
who have, no doubt with honest motives, ousted the greedy by using
brute force against them, have in their turn become a prey to the disease
of the conquered. . . . My interest in India's freedom will cease if she
adopts violent means. For their fruit will be not freedom, but slavery."99
The second element in his creed was the resolute rejection of modern
industry, and a Rousseauian call for a return to the simple life of agri-
culture and domestic industry in the village. The confinement of men
and women in factories, making with machines owned by others fractions
of articles whose finished form they will never see, seemed to Gandhi
a roundabout way of burying humanity under a pyramid of shoddy
goods. Most machine products, he thought, are unnecessary; the labor
saved in using them is consumed in making and repairing them; or if
632 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXII
labor is really saved it is of no benefit to labor, but only to capital; labor
is thrown by its own productivity into a panic of "technological unem-
ployment."87 So he renewed the Swadeshi movement announced in 1905
by Tilak; self-production was to be added to Swaraj, self-rule. Gandhi
made the use of the charka, or spinning-wheel, a test of loyal adherence
to the Nationalist movement; he asked that every Hindu, even the richest,
should wear homespun, and boycott the alien and mechanical textiles of
Britain, so that the homes of India might hum once more, through the
dull winter, with the sound of the spinning-wheel.08
The response was not universal; it is difficult to stop history in its
course. But India tried. Hindu students everywhere dressed in khaddar;
highborn ladies abandoned their Japanese silk sans for coarse cloths
woven by themselves; prostitutes in brothels and convicts in prison began
to spin; and in many cities great Feasts of the Vanities were arranged, as
in Savonarola's day, at which wealthy Hindus and merchants brought
from their homes and warehouses all their imported cloth, and flung it
into the fire. In one day at Bombay. alone, 150,000 pieces were consumed
by the flames.*
The movement away from industry failed, but it gave India for a decade
a symbol of revolt, and helped to polarize her mute millions into a new
unity of political consciousness. India doubted the means, but honored
the purpose; and though it questioned Gandhi the statesman, it took to its
heart Gandhi the saint, and for a moment became one in reverencing him.
It was as Tagore said of him:
He stopped at the thresholds of the huts of the thousands of dis-
possessed, dressed like one of their own. He spoke to them in their
own language. Here was living truth at last, and not only quotations
from books. For this reason the Mahatma, the name given to him
by the people of India, is his real name. Who else has felt like him
that all Indians are his own flesh and blood? . . . When love came
to the door of India that door was opened wide. ... At Gandhi's
call India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before, in
earlier times, when Buddha proclaimed the truth of fellow-feeling
and compassion among all living creatures.10
It was Gandhi's task to unify India; and he accomplished it. Other
tasks await other men.
CHAP. XXIl) A CHRISTIAN EPILOGUE 633
VII. FAREWELL TO INDIA
One cannot conclude the history of India as one can conclude the
history of Egypt, or Babylonia, or Assyria; for that history is still being
made, that civilization is still creating. Culturally India has been reinvig-
orated by mental contact with the West, and her literature today is as
fertile and noble as any. Spiritually she is still struggling with superstition
and excess theological baggage, but there is no telling how quickly the
acids of modern science will dissolve these supernumerary gods. Politically
the last one hundred years have brought to India such unity as she has
seldom had before: partly the unity of one alien government, partly the
unity of one alien speech, but above all the unity of one welding aspiration
to liberty. Economically India is passing, for better and for worse, out
of medievalism into modern industry; her wealth and her trade will grow,
and before the end of the century she will doubtless be among the powers
of the earth.
We cannot claim for this civilization such direct gifts to our own as
we have traced to Egypt and the Near East; for these last were the im-
mediate ancestors of our own culture, while the history of India, China
and Japan flowed in another stream, and is only now beginning to touch
and influence the current of Occidental life. It is true that even across
the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such questionable gifts as
grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above
all, our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence
of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her
in the future. As invention, industry and trade bind the continents together,
or as they fling us into conflict with Asia, we shall study its civilizations
more closely, and shall absorb, even in enmity, some of its ways and
thoughts. Perhaps, in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India
will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet
content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit,
and a unifying, pacifying love for all living things.
BOOK THREE
THE FAR EAST
A. CHINA
An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to
make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth,
ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, stu-
dents to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill
and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to
find fault with everything.
—Address of the Duke of Shao to King Li-Wang,
ca. 845 B.C.1
CHRONOLOGY OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION*
B.C.
2852-2205: Legendary Rulers:
2852-2737: Fu Hsi
2737-2697: Shcn Nung
2697-2597: Huang Ti
2356-2255: Yao
2255-2205: Shun
2205-1766: Hsia Dynasty
2205-2197: Yii
1818-1766: Chich Kuci
1766-1123: Shang (and Yin) Dynasty
1766-1753: Tang
1198-1194: Wu Yin, the atheist emperor
1154-1123: Chou-Hsin, model of wicked-
ness
1122-255: Chou Dynasty
1122-1115: Wu-Wang
Fl. 1123: Wen Wang, author (?) of the
Book of Changes
1115-1078: Cheng Wang
1115-1079: Chou Kung, author (?) of the
Chou-li, or Laws of Chou
770-255: The Feudal Age
683-640: Kuang Chung, prime minister of
Ts'i
604-517: Lao-tze (?)
551-478: Confucius
501: Confucius Chief Magistrate of
Chung-tu
498: Confucius Acting Supt. of Pub-
lic Works in Duchy of Lu
497: Confucius Minister of Crime
496: Resignation of Confucius
496*483: Confucius' Wander-years
F1-45O: Mo Ti, philosopher
403-221: Period of the Contending States
FL 396: Yang Chu, philosopher
372-289: Mencius, philosopher
B. 370: Chuang-tze, philosopher
D. 350: Ch'u P'ing, poet
B. 305 : Hsiin-tze, philosopher
0.233: Han Fei, essayist
230-222: Conquest and unification of
China by Shih Huang-ti
255-206: Ctfin Dynasty
221-211: Shih Huang-ti, "First Emperor"
2o6n.c.-22i A.D.: Han Dynasty
179-15711.0.: Wen Ti
B. 145: Szuma Ch'ien, historian
140-87 B.C.: Wu Ti, reformer emperor
5-25 A.D.: Wang Mang, socialist emperor
67 A.D.: Coming of Buddhism to China
Ca. 100: First known manufacturer of
paper in China
200-400: Tartar invasions of China
221-264: Period of the Three Kingdoms
221-618: The Minor Dynasties
365-427: T'ao Ch'ien, poet
Fl. 364: Ku K'ai-chih, painter
490-640: Great Age of Buddhist Sculp-
ture
618-005: T'ang Dynasty
618-627: Kao Tsu
627-650: T'ai Tsung
651-716: Li Ssu-hsiin, painter
699-759: Wang Wei, painter
B. ca. 700: Wu Tao-tze, painter
705-762: Li Po, poet
712-770: Tu Fu, poet
713-756: Hsuan Tsung (Ming Huang)
755: Revolt of An Lu-shan
*A11 dates before 551 B.C. are approximate; all before 1800 AJ>. are uncertain.
636
CHRONOLOGY OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION
768-824: Han Yii, essayist
770: Oldest extant block prints
722-846: Po Chii-i, poet
868: Oldest extant printed book
907-960: Five "Little Dynasties"
932-953: Block printing of Chinese
Classics
950: First appearance of paper money
960-1127: Northern Sung Dynasty
960-976: T'ai Tsu
970: First great Chinese encyclopedia
1069-1076: Administration of Wang An-
shih, socialist prime minister
1040-1106: Li Lung-mien, painter
1041: Pi Shcng makes movable type
B. 1100: Kuo Hsi, painter
1101-1126: Hui Tsung, artist emperor
1126: Tatars sack Hui Tsung's capi-
tal, Pien Lang (K'aifeng); re-
moval of capital to Lin-an
(Hangchow)
1127-1279: Southern Sung Dynasty
1130-1200: Chu Hsi, philosopher
1161: First known use of gunpowder
in wnr
1162-1227: Genghis Khan
1212: Genghis Khan invades China
1260-1368: Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty
1269-1295: Kublai Khan
1269: Marco Polo leaves Venice for
China
1295: Marco Polo returns to Venice
1368-1644: Ming Dynasty
1368-1399: T'ai Tsu
1403-1425: Ch'eng Tsu (Yung Lo)
1517: Portugese at Canton
1571: Spanish take the Philippines
1573-1620: Shen Tsung (Wan Li)
1637: English traders at Canton
1644-1912: Cb'ing (Manchu) Dynasty
1662-1722: K'ang Hsi
1736-1796: Ch'icn Lung
1795: First prohibition of opium trade
1800: Second prohibition of opium trade
1823-1901: Li Hung-chang, statesman
1834-1908: T*zu Hsi, "Dowager Empress"
1839-1842: First "Opium War"
1850-1864: T'ai-p'ing Rebellion
1856-1860: Second "Opium War"
1858-1860: Russia seizes Chinese territory
north of the Amur River
1860: France seizes Indo-China
1866-1925: Sun Yat-scn
1875-1908: Kuang Hsu
1894: The Sino-Japanese War
1898: Germany takes Kiaochow; U. S. takes
the Philippines
1898: The reform edicts of Kuang Hsu
1900: The Boxer Uprising
1905. Abolition of the examination system
1911. The Chinese Revolution
1912: (Jan.-Mar.): Sun Yat-sen Provisional
President of the Chinese Re-
public
1912-1916: Yuan Shi-k'ai, President
1914: Japan takes Kiaochow
1915: The "Twenty-one Demands"
1920: Pei-Hua ("Plain Speech") adopted in
the Chinese schools; height of
the "New Tide"
1926 Chiang K'ai-shek and Borodin subdue
the north
1927 The anti-communist reaction
1931: The Japanese occupy Manchuria
637
CHAPTER XXIII
The Age of the Philosophers
I. THE BEGINNINGS
/. Estimates of the Chinese
THE intellectual discovery of China was one of the achievements of
the Enlightenment. "These peoples," Diderot wrote of the Chinese,
"are superior to all other Asiatics in antiquity, art, intellect, wisdom, pol-
icy, and in their taste for philosophy; nay, in the judgment of certain
authors, they dispute the palm in these matters with the most enlightened
peoples of Europe."1* "The body of this empire," said Voltaire, "has ex-
isted four thousand years, without having undergone any sensible altera-
tion in its laws, customs, language, or even in its fashions of apparel. . . .
The organization of this empire is in truth the best that the world has ever
seen."2 This respect of scholars has survived closer acquaintance, and in
some contemporary observers it has reached the pitch of humble admira-
tion. Count Keyserling, in one of the most instructive and imaginative
books of our time, concludes that
altogether the most perfect type of humanity as a normal phenom-
enon has been elaborated in ancient China . . . China has created the
highest universal culture of being hitherto known . . . The greatness
of China takes hold of and impresses me more and more . . . The
great men of this country stand on a higher level of culture than
ours do; . . . these gentlemen* . . . stand on an extraordinarily high
level as types; especially their superiority impresses me. . . . How
perfect the courtesy of the cultured Chinaman! . . . China's suprem-
acy of form is unquestionable in all circumstances. . . . The China-
man is perhaps the prof oundest of all men.'
The Chinese do not trouble to deny this; and until the present century
(there are now occasional exceptions) they were unanimous in regarding
the inhabitants of Europe and America as barbarians.4 It was the gentle
* The deposed Mandarins at Tang-tao.
639
640 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
custom of the Chinese, in official documents before 1860, to employ the
character for "barbarian" in rendering the term "foreigner"; and the bar-
barians had to stipulate by treaty that this translation should be improved.6*
Like most other peoples of the earth, "the Chinese consider themselves
the most polished and civilized of all nations."7 Perhaps they are right,
despite their political corruption and chaos, their backward science and
sweated industry, their odorous cities and offal-strewn fields, their floods
and famines, their apathy and cruelty, their poverty and superstition, their
reckless breeding and suicidal wars, their slaughters and ignominious de-
feats. For behind this dark surface that now appears to the alien eye is
one of the oldest and richest of living civilizations: a tradition of poetry
reaching as far back as 1700 B.C.; a long record of philosophy idealistic and
yet practical, profound and yet intelligible; a mastery of ceramics and
painting unequaled in their kind; an easy perfection, rivaled only by the
Japanese, in all the minor arts; the most effective morality to be found
among the peoples of any time; a social organization that has held together
more human beings, and has endured through more centuries, than any
other known to history; a form of government which, until the Revolu-
tion destroyed it, was almost the ideal of philosophers; a society that was
civilized when Greece was inhabited by barbarians, that saw the rise and
fall of Babylonia and Assyria, Persia and Judea, Athens and Rome, Venice
and Spain, and may yet survive when those Balkans called Europe have
reverted to darkness and savagery. What is the secret of this durability
of government, this artistry of hand, this poise and depth of soul?
2. The Middle Flowery Kingdom
Geography— Race— Prehistory
If we consider Russia as Asiatic— which it was till Peter, and may be
again—then Europe becomes only a jagged promontory of Asia, the in-
dustrial projection of an agricultural hinterland, the tentative fingers or
pseudopodia of a giant continent. Dominating that continent is China, as
spacious as Europe, and as populous. Hemmed in, through most of its his-
* The Chinese scholar who helped Dr. Giles to translate some of the extracts in Gems
of Chinese Literature, sent him, as a well-meant farewell, a poem in which occurred these
gracious lines:
From of old, literature has illumined the nation of nations;
And now its influence has gone forth to regenerate a barbarian official.0
CHAP.XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 641
tory, by the largest ocean, the highest mountains, and one of the most
extensive deserts in the world, China enjoyed an isolation that gave her
comparative security and permanence, immutability and stagnation. Hence
the Chinese called their country not China but Tien-hua— "Under the
Heavens"— or Sz-hai— "Within the Four Seas"— or Chung-kuo— "Middle
Kingdom"— or Chung-hwa-kuo— "Middle Flowery Kingdom"— or, by de-
cree of the Revolution, Chun-hiva-min-kuo— "Middle Flowery People's
Kingdom."8 Flowers it has in abundance, and all the varied natural scenery
that can come from sunshine and floating mists, perilous mountain crags,
majestic rivers, deep gorges, and swift waterfalls amid rugged hills.
Through the fertile south runs the Yang-tze River, three thousand miles
in length; farther north the Hoang-ho, or Yellow River, descends from
the western ranges amid plains of loess to carry its silt through vacillating
estuaries once to the Yellow Sea, now to the Gulf of Pechili, tomorrow,
possibly, to the Yellow Sea again. Along these and the Wei and other
broad streams* Chinese civilization began, driving back the beast and the
jungle, holding the surrounding barbarians at bay, clearing the soil of
brush and bramble, ridding it of destructive insects and corrosive deposits
like saltpetre, draining the marshes, fighting droughts and floods and
devastating changes in the courses of the rivers, drawing the water
patiently and wearily from these friendly enemies into a thousand canals,
and building day by day through centuries— huts and houses, temples
and schools, villages, cities and states. How long men have toiled to build
the civilizations that men so readily destroy!
No one knows whence the Chinese came, or what was their race, or
how old their civilization is. The remains of the "Peking Man"t suggest
the great antiquity of the human ape in China; and the researches of
Andrews have led him to conclude that Mongolia was thickly populated,
as far back as 20,000 B.C., by a race whose tools corresponded to the
"Azilian" development of mesolithic Europe, and whose descendants
spread into Siberia and China as southern Mongolia dried up and became the
Gobi Desert. The discoveries of Andersson and others in Honan and south
Manchuria indicate a neolithic culture one or two thousand years later
than similar stages in the prehistory of Egypt and Sumeria. Some of the
stone tools found in these neolothic deposits resemble exactly, in shape
* The Yang-tze near Shanghai is three miles wide.
fCf. p. 92 above.
642 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIH
and perforations, the iron knives now used in northern China to reap the
sorghum crop; and this circumstance, small though it is, reveals the prob-
ability that Chinese culture has an impressive continuity of seven thousand
years.10
We must not, through the blur of distance, exaggerate the homo-
geneity of this culture, or of the Chinese people. Some elements of their
early art and industry appear to have come from Mesopotamia and
Turkestan; for example, the neolithic pottery of Honan is almost identical
with that of Anau and Susa.u The present "Mongolian" type is a highly
complex mixture in which the primitive stock has been crossed and re-
crossed by a hundred invading or immigrating stocks from Mongolia,
southern Russia (the Scythians?), and central Asia." China, like India,
is to be compared with Europe as a whole rather than with any one nation
of Europe; it is not the united home of one people, but a medley of human
varieties different in origin, distinct in language, diverse in character and
art, and often hostile to one another in customs, morals and government.
3. The Unknown Centuries
The Creation according to China— The coming of culture— Wine
and chopsticks— The virtuous emperors— A royal atheist
China has been called "the paradise of historians." For centuries and
millenniums it has had official historiographers who recorded everything
that happened, and much besides. We cannot trust them further back
than 776 B.C.; but if we lend them a ready ear they will explain in detail
the history of China from 3000 B.C., and the more pious among them, like
our own seers, will describe the creation of the world. P'an Ku, the first
man (they tell us), after laboring on the task for eighteen thousand years,
hammered the universe into shape about 2,229,000 B.C. As he worked
his breath became the wind and the clouds, his voice became the thunder,
his veins the rivers, his flesh the earth, his hair the grass and trees, his
bones the metals, his sweat the rain; and the insects that clung to his body
became the human race." We have no evidence to disprove this ingenious
cosmology.
The earliest kings, says Chinese legend, reigned eighteen thousand
years each, and struggled hard to turn P'an Ku's lice into civilized men.
Before the arrival of these "Celestial Emperors," we are told, "the people
were like beasts, clothing themselves in skins, feeding on raw flesh, and
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 643
knowing their mothers but not their fathers"— a limitation which Strindberg
did not consider exclusively ancient or Chinese. Then came the emperor
Fu Hsi, in precisely 2852 B.C.; with the help of his enlightened Queen he
taught his people marriage, music, writing, painting, fishing with nets, the
domestication of animals, and the feeding of silkworms for the secretion of
silk. Dying, he appointed as his successor Shen Nung, who introduced agri-
culture, invented the wooden plough, established markets and trade, and
developed the science of medicine from the curative values of plants. So
legend, which loves personalities more than ideas, attributes to a few in-
dividuals the laborious advances of many generations. Then a vigorous
soldier-emperor, Huang-ti, in a reign of a mere century, gave China the
magnet and the wheel, appointed official historians, built the first brick
structures in China, erected an observatory for the study of the stars, cor-
rected the calendar, and redistributed the land. Yao ruled through another
century, and so well that Confucius, writing of him eighteen hundred years
later in what must have seemed a hectically "modern" age, mourned the
degeneration of China. The old sage, who was not above the pious fraud of
adorning a tale to point a moral, informs us that the Chinese people became
virtuous by merely looking at Yao. As first aid to reformers, Yao placed
outside his palace door a drum by which they might summon him to hear
their grievances, and a tablet upon which they might write their advice to
the government. "Now," says the famous Book of History,
concerning the good Yao it is said that he ruled Chung-kuo for one
hundred years, the years of his life being one hundred, ten and six.
He was kind and benevolent as Heaven, wise and discerning as the
gods. From afar his radiance was like a shining cloud, and approach-
ing near him he was as brilliant as the sun. Rich was he without
ostentation, and regal without luxuriousness. He wore a yellow cap
and a dark tunic and rode in a red chariot drawn by white horses.
The eaves of his thatch were not trimmed, and the rafters were un-
planed, while the beams of his house had no ornamental ends. His
principal food was soup, indifferently compounded, nor was he
choice in selecting his grain. He drank his broth of lentils from a
dish that was made of clay, using a wooden spoon. His person was
not adorned with jewels, and his clothes were without embroidery,
simple and without variety. He gave no attention to uncommon
things and strange happenings, nor did he value those things that
were rare and peculiar. He did not listen to songs of dalliance, his
644 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
chariot of state was not emblazoned. ... In summer he wore his
simple garb of cotton, and in winter he covered himself with skins
of the deer. Yet was he the richest, the wisest, the longest-lived
and most beloved of all that ever ruled Chung-kuo?
The last of these "Five Rulers" was Shun, the model of filially devoted
sons, the patient hero who fought the floods of the Hoang-ho, improved
the calendar, standardized weights and measures, and endeared himself
to scholastic posterity by reducing the size of the whip with which Chinese
children were educated. In his old age Shun (Chinese tradition tells us)
raised to a place beside himself on the throne the ablest of his aides, the
great engineer Yii, who had controlled the floods of nine rivers by cutting
through nine mountains and forming nine lakes; "but for Yii," say the
Chinese, "we should all have been fishes."16 In his reign, according to
sacred legend, rice wine was discovered, and was presented to the Emperor;
but Yii dashed it to the ground, predicting: "The day will come when
this thing will cost some one a kingdom." He banished the discoverer
and prohibited the new beverage; whereupon the Chinese, for the in-
struction of posterity, made wine the national beverage. Rejecting the
principle of succession by royal appointment, Yii established the Hsia
(i.e., "civilized") Dynasty by making the throne hereditary in his family,
so that idiots alternated with mediocrities and geniuses in the government
of China. The dynasty was brought to an end by the whimsical Emperor
Chieh, who amused himself and his wife by compelling three thousand
Chinese to jump to their euthanasy in a lake of wine.
We have no way of checking the accounts transmitted to us of the Hsia
Dynasty by the early Chinese historians. Astronomers claim to have verified
the solar eclipse mentioned by the records as occurring in the year 2165
B.C., but competent critics have challenged these calculations." Bones found
in Honan bear the names of rulers traditionally ascribed to the second or
Shang Dynasty; and some bronze vessels of great antiquity are tentatively
attributed to this period. For the rest we must rely on stories whose truth
may not be proportioned to their charm. According to ancient tradition
one of the Shang emperors, Wu Yi, was an atheist; he defied the gods, and
blasphemed the Spirit of Heaven; he played chess with it, ordered a court-
ier to make its moves, and derided it when it lost; having dedicated to it a
leathern bag, he filled the bag with blood, and amused himself by making it
a target for his arrows. The historians, more virtuous than history, assure
us that Wu Yi was struck dead with lightning.
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 645
Chou Hsin, royal inventor of chopsticks, brought the dynasty to an end
by his incredible wickedness. "I have heard," he said, "that a man's heart
has seven openings; I would fain make the experiment upon Pi Kan"— his
minister. Chou's wife Ta-ki was a model of licentiousness and cruelty: at her
court voluptuous dances were performed, and men and women gamboled
naked in her gardens. When public criticism rose she sought to still it with
novelties of torture: rebels were made to hold fiery metals in their hands,
or to walk greased poles over a pit of live charcoal; when victims fell into
the pit the Queen was much amused to see them roast." Chou Hsin was
overthrown by a conspiracy of rebels at home and invaders from the
western state of Chou, who set up the Chou Dynasty, the most enduring of
all the royal houses of China. The victorious leaders rewarded their aides
by making them almost independent rulers of the many provinces into which
the new realm was divided; in this way began that feudalism which proved
so dangerous to government and yet so stimulating to Chinese letters and
philosophy. The newcomers mingled their blood in marriage with the older
stocks, and the mixture provided a slow biological prelude to the first his-
toric civilization of the Far East.
4. The First Chinese Civilization
The Feudal Age in China— An able minister— The struggle be-
tween custom and law — Culture and anarchy — Love
lyrics from the "Book of Odes"
The feudal states that now provided for almost a thousand years what-
ever political order China was to enjoy, were not the creation of the con-
querors; they had grown out of the agricultural communities of primitive
days through the absorption of the weaker by the stronger, or the merger
of groups under a common chief for the defense of their fields against the
encompassing barbarians. At one time there were over seventeen hundred
of these principalities, ordinarily consisting of a walled town surrounded by
cultivated land, with smaller walled suburbs constituting a protective circum-
ference." Slowly these provinces coalesced into fifty-five, covering what is
now the district of Honan with neighboring portions of Shan-si, Shen-si
and Shantung. Of these fifty-five the most important were Ts'i, which laid
the bases of Chinese government, and Chin (or Tsin), which conquered all
the rest, established a unified empire, and gave to China the name by which
it is known to nearly all the world but itself.
The organizing genius of Ts'i was Kuan Chung, adviser to the Duke
Huan. Kuan began his career in history by supporting Huan's brother
646 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
against him in their competition for the control of Ts'i, and almost killed
Huan in battle. Huan won, captured Kuan, and appointed him chief min-
ister of the state. Kuan made his master powerful by replacing bronze with
iron weapons and tools, and by establishing governmental monopoly or
control of iron and salt. He taxed money, fish and salt, "in order to help
the poor and reward wise and able men."" During his long ministry Ts'i
became a well-ordered state, with a stabilized currency, an efficient admin-
istration, and a flourishing culture. Confucius, who praised politicians only
by epitaph, said of Kuan: "Down to the present day the people enjoy the
gifts which he conferred. But for Kuan Chung we should now be wear-
ing our hair disheveled, and the lappets of our coats buttoning on the left
side."*"
In the feudal courts was developed the characteristic courtesy of the
Chinese gentleman. Gradually a code of manners, ceremonies and honor was
established, which became so strict that it served as a substitute for religion
among the upper classes of society. The foundations of law were laid, and a
great struggle set in between the rule of custom as developed among the
people and the rule of law as formulated by the state. Codes of law were
issued by the duchies of Cheng and Chin (535, 512 B.C.), much to the
horror of the peasantry, who predicted divine punishment for such out-
rages; and indeed the capital of Cheng was soon afterward destroyed by
fire. The codes were partial to the aristocracy, who were exempted from the
regulations on condition that they should discipline themselves; gentlemen
murderers were allowed to commit suicide, and most of them did, in the
fashion later so popular in samurai Japan. The people protested that they,
too, could discipline themselves, and called for some Harmodius or Aristo-
giton to liberate them from this new tyranny of law. In the end the two
hostile forces, custom and law, arrived at a wholesome compromise: the
reach of law was narrowed to major or national issues, while the force of
custom continued in all minor matters; and since human affairs are mostly
minor matters, custom remained king.
As the organization of states proceeded, it found formulation in the
Chou-li, or Law of Chou, a volume traditionally but incredibly ascribed to
Chou-kung, uncle and prime minister of the second Duke of Chou. This
legislation, suspiciously infused with the spirit of Confucius and Mencius,
and therefore in all likelihood a product of the end rather than of the be-
ginning of the Chou Dynasty, set for two thousand years the Chinese con-
ception of government: an emperor ruling as the vicar and "Son of Heaven,"
•This is Confucius' gloomy way of indicating that but for Kuan the Chinese people
would still be barbarians; for the barbarians habitually buttoned their coats on the left
•ide"
CHAP. XXlIl) THE AGE OP THE PHILOSOPHERS ($47
and holding power through the possession of virtue and pietyj an aristocracy,
partly of birth and partly of training, administering the offices of the state;
a people dutifully tilling the soil, living in patriarchal families, enjoying civil
rights but having no voice in public affairs; and a cabinet of six ministries
controlling respectively the life and activities of the emperor, the welfare
and early marriage of the people, the ceremonies and divinations of religion,
the preparation and prosecution of war, the administration of justice, and
the organization of public works." It is an almost ideal code, more probably
sprung from the mind of some anonymous and irresponsible Plato than from
the practice of leaders sullied with actual power and dealing with actual men.
Since much deviltry can find room even in perfect constitutions, the polit-
ical history of China during the Feudal Age was the usual mixture of perse-
vering rascality with periodic reforms. As wealth increased, luxury and ex-
travagance corrupted the aristocracy, while musicians and assassins, courte-
sans and philosophers mingled at the courts, and later in the capital at Lo-
yang. Hardly a decade passed without some assault upon the new states by
the hungry barbarians ever pressing upon the frontiers.18 War became a
necessity of defense, and soon a method of offense; it graduated from a
game of die aristocracy to competitive slaughter among the people; heads
were cut off by tens of thousands. Within a little more than two cen-
turies, regicides disposed of thirty-six kings.** Anarchy grew, and the sages
despaired.
Over these ancient obstacles life made its plodding way. The peasant
sowed and reaped, occasionally for himself, usually for his feudal lord, to
whom both he and the land belonged; not until the end of the dynasty did
peasant proprietorship raise its head. The state— i.e., a loose association of
feudal barons faintly acknowledging one ducal sovereign— conscripted labor
for public works, and irrigated the fields with extensive canals; officials in-
structed the people in agriculture and arboriculture, and supervised the silk
industry in all its details. Fishing and the mining of salt were in many
provinces monopolized by the government.28 Domestic trade flourished in
the towns, and begot a small bourgeoisie possessed of almost modern com-
forts: they wore leather shoes, and dresses of homespun or silk; they rode
in carts or chariots, or traveled on the rivers by boat; they lived in well-
built houses, used tables and chairs, and ate their food from plates and dishes
of ornamented pottery;"8 their standard of living was probably higher than
that of their contemporaries in Solon's Greece, or Numa's Rome.
Amid conditions of disunity and apparent chaos the mental life of China
showed a vitality disturbing to the generalizations of historians. For in
this disorderly age were laid the bases of China's language, literature,
648 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
philosophy and art; the combination of a life made newly secure by eco-
nomic organization and provision, and a culture not yet forged into con-
formity by the tyranny of inescapable tradition and an imperial govern-
ment, served as the social framework for the most creative period in the
history of the Chinese mind. At every court, and in a thousand towns and
villages, poets sang, potters turned their wheels, founders cast stately
vessels, leisurely scribes formed into beauty the characters of the written
language, sophists taught to eager students the tricks of the intellect, and
philosophers pined over the imperfections of men and the decadence of
states.
We shall study the art and language later, in their more complete and
characteristic development; but the poetry and the philosophy belong
specifically to this age, and constitute the classic period of Chinese thought.
Most of the verse written before Confucius has disappeared; what remains
of it is chiefly his own stern selection of the more respectable samples,
gathered together in the Shi-Ching, or "Book of Odes," ranging over a
thousand years from ancient compositions of the Shang Dynasty to highly
modern poems as recent as Pythagoras. Its three hundred and five odes
celebrate with untranslatable brevity and suggestive imagery the piety
of religion, the hardships of war, and the solicitude of love. Hear the
timeless lament of soldiers torn from their homes and dedicated to un-
intelligible death:
How free are the wild geese on their wings,
And the rest they find on the bushy Yu trees!
But we, ceaseless toilers in the king's services,
Cannot even plant our millet and rice.
What will our parents have to rely on?
O thou distant and azure Heaven!
When shall all this end? . . .
What leaves have not turned purple?
What man is not torn from his wife?
Mercy be on us soldiers:—
Are we not also men?*
Though this age appears, to our ignorance, to have been almost the
barbaric infancy of China, love poetry abounds in the Odes, and plays
a gamut of many moods. In one of these poems, whispering to us across
CHAP. XXIII ) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 649
those buried centuries that seemed so model to Confucius, we hear the
voice of eternally rebellious youth, as if to say that nothing is so old-
fashioned as revolt:
I pray you, dear,
My little hamlet leave,
Nor break my willow-boughs;
'Tis not that I should grieve,
But I fear my sire to rouse.
Love pleads with passion disarrayed,—
"A sire's commands must be obeyed."
I pray you, dear,
Leap not across my wall,
Nor break my mulberry-boughs;
Not that I fear their fall,
But lest my brother's wrath should rouse,
Love pleads with passion disarrayed,—
"A brother's words must be obeyed."
I pray you, dear,
Steal not the garden down,
Nor break my sandal trees;
Not that I care for these,
But oh, I dread the talk of town.
Should lovers have their wilful way,
Whatever would the neighbors say?"
And another— the most nearly perfect, or the most excellently translated,
of all— reveals to us the ageless antiquity of sentiment:
The morning glory climbs above my head,
Pale flowers of white and purple, blue and red.
I am disquieted.
Down in the withered grasses something stirred;
I thought it was his footfall that I heard.
Then a grasshopper chirred.
I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed,
I saw him coming on the southern road,
My heart lays down its load."
650 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXHI
5. The Pre-Confucian Philosophers
The "Book of Changes"-The "yang" and the "yin"-The Chinese
Enlightenment— Teng Shih, the Socrates of China
The characteristic production of this epoch is philosophy. It is no
discredit to our species that in all ages its curiosity has outrun its wisdom,
and its ideals have set an impossible pace for its behavior. As far back
as 1250 B.C. we find Yu Tze sounding the keynote in a pithy fragment
then already stale, and now still fresh in counsel to laborious word-
mongers who do not know that all glory ends in bitterness: "He who
renounces fame has no sorrow"10— happy the man who has no history!
From that time until our own, China has produced philosophers.
As India is par excellence the land of metaphysics and religion, China
is by like preeminence the home of humanistic, or non-theological, phi-
losophy. Almost the only important work of metaphysics in its literature
is the strange document with which the recorded history of Chinese
thought begins— the I-Ching, or "Book of Changes." Tradition insists
that it was written in prison by one of the founders of the Chou Dynasty,
Wen Wang, and that its simplest origin went back as far as Fu Hsi: this
legendary emperor, we are told, invented the eight kua, or mystic tri-
grams, which Chinese metaphysics identifies with the laws and elements
of nature. Each trigram consisted of three lines— some continuous and
representing the male principle or yang, some broken and representing
the female principle or yin. In this mystic dualism the yang represented
also the positive, active, productive and celestial principle of light, heat
and life, while the yin represented the negative, passive and earthly prin-
ciple of darkness, cold and death. Wen Wang immortalized himself, and
racked the head of a billion Chinese, by doubling the number of strokes,
and thereby raising to sixty-four the number of possible combinations of
continuous and broken lines. To each of these arrangements some law
of nature corresponded. All science and history were contained in the
changeful interplay of the combinations; all wisdom lay hidden in the
sixty-four hsiangs, or ideas symbolically represented by the trigrams;
ultimately all reality could be reduced to the opposition and union of the
two basic factors in the universe— the male and the female principles, the
yang and the yin. The Chinese used the Book of Changes as a manual
of divination, and considered it the greatest of their classics; he who should
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 651
understand the combinations, we are told, would grasp all the laws of
nature. Confucius, who edited the volume and adorned it with commen-
taries, ranked it above all other writings, and wished that he might be
free to spend fifty years in its study.81
This strange volume, though congenial to the subtle occultism of the
Chinese soul, is alien to the positive and practical spirit of Chinese phi-
losophy. As far back as we can pry into the past of China we find
philosophers; but of those who preceded Lao-tze time has preserved only
an occasional fragment or an empty name. As in India, Persia, Judea and
Greece, the sixth and fifth centuries saw, in China, a brilliant outburst
of philosophical and literary genius; and as in Greece, it began with an
epoch of rationalist "enlightenment." An age of war and chaos opened
new roads to the advancement of unpedigreed talent, and established a
demand, among the people of the towns, for instructors skilled in impart-
ing the arts of the mind. These popular teachers soon discovered the
uncertainty of theology, the relativity of morals and the imperfections
of governments, and began to lay about them with Utopias; several of
them were put to death by authorities who found it more difficult to
answer than to kill. According to one Chinese tradition Confucius him-
self, during his tenure of office as Minister of Crime in the Duchy of Lu,
condemned to death a seditious officer on the ground that "he was capable
of gathering about him large crowds of men; that his arguments could
easily appeal to the mob and make perversity respectable; and that his
sophistry was sufficiently recalcitrant to take a stand against the accepted
judgments of right."" Szuma-Ch'ien accepts the story; some other Chinese
historians reject it;" let us hope that it is not true.
The most famous of these intellectual rebels was Teng Shih, who was
executed by the Duke of Cheng during the youth of Confucius. Teng,
says the Book of Lieh-tze, "taught the doctrines of the relativity of right
and wrong, and employed inexhaustible arguments."8* His enemies charged
him with being willing to prove one thing one day and its opposite the
next, if proper remuneration were forthcoming; he offered his services
to those who were trying their cases in court, and allowed no prejudice
to interfere with serviceability. A hostile Chinese historian tells a pretty
story of him:
A wealthy man of Teng's native state was drowned in the Wei
River, and his body was taken up by a man who demanded of the
652 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
bereaved family a large sum of money for its redemption. The dead
man's family sought Teng's counsel. "Wait," said the Sophist;
"no other family will pay for the body." The advice was followed,
and the man who held the corpse became anxious and also came to
Teng Shih for advice. The Sophist gave the same counsel: "Wait;
nowhere else can they obtain the body."*
Teng Shih composed a code of penology that proved too idealistic for the
government of Cheng. Annoyed by pamphlets in which Teng criticized
his policies, the prime minister prohibited the posting of pamphlets in
public places. Teng thereupon delivered his pamphlets in person. The
minister forbade the delivery of pamphlets. Teng smuggled them to his
readers by concealing them in other articles. The government ended the
argument by cutting off his head."
6. The Old Master
Lao-tze— The "Tao"—On intellectuals in government— The foolish-
ness of laws—A Rousseauian Utopia and a Christian ethic-
Portrait of a wise wan— The meeting of Lao-tze and
Confucius
Lao-tze, greatest of the pre-Confucian philosophers, was wiser than
Teng Shih; he knew the wisdom of silence, and lived, we may be sure,
to a ripe old age— though we are not sure that he lived at all. The Chinese
historian, Szuma Ch'ien, tells how Lao-tze, disgusted with the knavery of
politicians and tired of his work as curator of the Royal Library of
Chou, determined to leave China and seek some distant and secluded
countryside. "On reaching the frontier the warden, Yin Hsi, said to him:
'So you are going into retirement. I beg you to write a book for me.'
Thereupon Lao-tze wrote a book, in two parts, on Tao and TV, extending
to over five thousand words. He then went away, and no one knows
where he died."*1 Tradition, which knows everything, credits him with
living eighty-seven years. All that remains of him is his name and his book,
neither of which may have belonged to him. Lao-tze is a description,
meaning "The Old Master"; his real name, we are told, was Li— that is
to say, a plum. The book which is ascribed to him is of such doubtful
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 653
authenticity that scholars quarrel learnedly about its origin.* But all are
agreed that the Tao-Te-Ching—i.s.i the "Book of the Way and of Vir-
tue''-^ the most important text of that Taoist philosophy which, in the
opinion of Chinese students, existed long before Lao-tze, found many first-
rate defenders after him, and became the religion of a considerable minority
of the Chinese from his time to our own. The authorship of the Tao-Te-
Ching is a secondary matter; but its ideas are among the most fascinating in
the history of thought.
Tao means the Way: sometimes the Way of Nature, sometimes the
Taoist Way of wise living; literally, a road. Basically, it is a way of
thinking, or of refusing to think; for in the view of the Taoists thought is
a superficial affair, good only for argument, and more harmful than bene-
ficial to life; the Way is to be found by rejecting the intellect and all its
wares, and leading a modest life of retirement, rusticity, and quiet con-
templation of nature. Knowledge is not virtue; on the contrary, rascals
have increased since education spread. Knowledge is not wisdom, for
nothing is so far from a sage as an "intellectual." The worst conceivable
government would be by philosophers; they botch every natural process
with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is pre-
cisely the sign of their incapacity for action.
Those who are skilled do not dispute; the disputatious are not
skilled. . . . When we renounce learning we have no troubles. . . .
The sage constantly keeps men without knowledge and without
desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, keeps them
from presuming to act. . . . The ancients who showed their skill
in practising the Tao did so not to enlighten the people, but to make
them simple and ignorant. . . . The difficulty in governing the peo-
ple arises from their having too much knowledge. He who tries to
govern a state by his wisdom is a scourge to it, while he who does
not do so is a blessing.10
The intellectual man is a danger to the state because he thinks in terms
of regulations and laws; he wishes to construct a society like geometry,
and does not realize that such regulation destroys the living freedom and
* Professor Giles considers it a forgery composed after 200 B.C. by free pilfering from
the works of the essayist and critic, Han Fei;* Dr. Legge holds that the frequent refer-
ences to Lao (as "Lao Tan") in Chuang-tze and in Szuma Ch'ien warrant continued belief
in the authenticity of the Tao-Te-Ching"
654 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
vigor of the parts. The simpler man, who knows from his own experi-
ence the pleasure and efficacy of work conceived and carried out in lib-
erty, is less of a peril when he is in power, for he does not have to be told
that a law is a dangerous thing, and may injure more than it may help.41
Such a ruler regulates men as little as possible; if he guides the nation it
is away from all artifice and complexity towards a normal and artless
simplicity, in which life would follow the wisely thoughtless routine of
nature, and even writing would be put aside as an unnatural instrument
of bef uddlement and deviltry. Unhampered by regulations from the gov-
ernment, the spontaneous economic impulses of the people— their own
lust for bread and love— would move the wheels of life in a simple and
wholesome round. There would be few inventions, for these only add
to the wealth of the rich and the power of the strong; there would be
no books, no lawyers, no industries, and only village trade.
In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitions increases the
poverty of the people. The more implements to add to their profit
the people have, the greater disorder is there in the state and clan;
the more acts of crafty dexterity men possess, the more do strange
contrivances appear; the more display there is of legislation, the
more thieves and robbers there are. Therefore a sage has said:
"I will do nothing, and the people will be transformed of them-
selves; I will be fond of keeping still, and the people will of them-
selves be correct. I will take no trouble about it, and the people will
of themselves become rich; I will manifest no ambition, and the
people will of themselves attain to the primitive simplicity. . . .
In a little state with a small population I would so order it that
though there would be individuals in it with the abilities of ten or
a hundred men, there should be no employment for them; I would
make the people, while looking upon death as a grievous thing, yet
not remove elsewhere (to avoid it). Though they had boats and
carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though
they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no oc-
casion to don or use them. I would make the people return to the
use of knotted cords.* They should think their (coarse) food
sweet, their (plain) clothes beautiful, their (poor) dwellings places
of rest, and their common ways sources of enjoyment. There should
* A form of communication that preceded writing. The word make is rather un-
Laotzian.
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 655
be a neighboring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and
dogs should be heard all the way from it to us; but I would make
the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse
with it."a
But what is this nature which Lao-tze wishes to accept as his guide?
The Old Master draws as sharp a distinction between nature and civiliza-
tion as Rousseau was to do in that gallery of echoes called "modern
thought." Nature is natural activity, the silent flow of traditional events,
the majestic order of the seasons and the sky; it is the Tao, or Way, exem-
plified and embodied in every brook and rock and star; it is that impartial,
impersonal and yet rational law of things to which the law of conduct
must conform if men desire to live in wisdom and peace. This law of
things is the Tao or way of the universe, just as the law of conduct is the
Tao or way of life; in truth, thinks Lao-tze, both Taos are one, and
human life, in its essential and wholesome rhythm, is part of the rhythm
of the world. In that cosmic Tao all the laws of nature are united and
form together the Spinozistic substance of all reality; in it all natural forms
and varieties find a proper place, and all apparent diversities and contra-
dictions meet; it is the Absolute in which all particulars are resolved into
one Hegelian unity.48
In the ancient days, says Lao, nature made men and life simple and peace-
ful, and all the world was happy. But then men attained "knowledge,"
they complicated life with inventions, they lost all mental and moral inno-
cence, they moved from the fields to the cities, and began to write books;
hence all the misery of men, and the tears of the philosophers. The wise
man will shun this urban complexity, this corrupting and enervating maze
of law and civilization, and will hide himself in the lap of nature, far from
any town, or books, or venal officials, or vain reformers. The secret of
wisdom and of that quiet content which is the only lasting happiness that
man can find, is a Stoic obedience to nature, an abandonment of all artifice
and intellect, a trustful acceptance of nature's imperatives in instinct and
feeling, a modest imitation of nature's silent ways. Perhaps there is no
wiser passage in literature than this:
All things in nature work silently. They come into being and
possess nothing. They fulfil their function and make no claim. All
things alike do their work, and then we see them subside. When
they have reached their bloom each returns to its origin. Return-
656 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
ing to their origin means rest, or fulfilment of destiny. This re-
version is an eternal law. To know that law is wisdom.*4
Quiescence, a kind of philosophical inaction, a refusal to interfere with
the natural courses of things, is the mark of the wise man in every field.
If the state is in disorder, the proper thing to do is not to reform it, but to
make one's life an orderly performance of duty; if resistance is encoun-
tered, the wiser course is not to quarrel, fight, or make war, but to retire
silently, and to win, if at all, through yielding and patience; passivity has
its victories more often than action. Here Lao-tze talks almost with the
accents of Christ:
If you do not quarrel, no one on earth will be able to quarrel with
you. . . . Recompense injury with kindness. . . . To those who
are good I am good, and to those who are not good I am also
good; thus (all) get to be good. To those who are sincere I am sin-
cere, and to those who are not sincere I am also sincere; and thus
(all) get to be sincere. . . . The softest thing in the world dashes
against and overcomes the hardest. . . . There is nothing in the
world softer or weaker than water, and yet for attacking things
that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence
of it.*46
All these doctrines culminate in Lao's conception of the sage. It is char-
acteristic of Chinese thought that it speaks not of saints but of sages, not
so much of goodness as of wisdom; to the Chinese the ideal is not the pious
devotee but the mature and quiet mind, the man who, though fit to hold
high place in the world, retires to simplicity and silence. Silence is the
beginning of wisdom. Even of the Tao and wisdom the wise man does
not speak, for wisdom can be transmitted never by words, only by ex-
ample and experience. "He who knows (the Way) does not speak about
it; he who speaks about it does not know it. He (who knows it) will keep
his mouth shut and close the portals of his nostrils."47 The wise man is
modest, for at fiftyt one should have discovered the relativity of knowl-
edge and the frailty of wisdom; if the wise man knows more than other
men he tries to conceal it; "he will temper his brightness, and bring him-
* He adds, with reckless gallantry: "The female always overcomes the male by her
stillness."411
fThe Chinese think of the sage as reaching the maturity of his powers about the age
of fifty, and living, through quietude and wisdom, to a century.48
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 657
self into agreement with the obscurity (of others) ;tt he agrees with the
simple rather than with the learned, and does not suffer from the novice's
instinct of contradiction. He attaches no importance to riches or power,
but reduces his desires to an almost Buddhist minimum:
I have nothing that I value; I desire that my heart be completely
subdued, emptied to emptiness. . . . The state of emptiness should
be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with
unwearying vigor. . . . Such a man cannot be treated familiarly or
distantly; he is beyond all considerations of profit or injury, of
nobility or meanness; he is the noblest man under heaven.50
It is unnecessary to point out the detailed correspondence of these ideas
with those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the two men were coins of the same
mould and mint, however different in date. It is a philosophy that period-
ically reappears, for in every generation many men weary of the struggle,
cruelty, complexity and speed of city life, and write with more idealism
than knowledge about the joys of rustic routine: one must have a long
urban background in order to write rural poetry. "Nature" is a term
that may lend itself to any ethic and any theology; it fits the science of
Darwin and the unmorality of Nietzsche more snugly than the sweet rea-
sonableness of Lao-tze and Christ. If one follows nature and acts naturally
he is much more likely to murder and eat his enemies than to practise
philosophy; there is small chance of his being humble, and less of his being
silent. Even the painful tillage of the soil goes against the grain of a
species primordially wont to hunt and kill; agriculture is as "unnatural" as
industry.— And yet there is something medicinal in this philosophy; we
suspect that we, too, when our fires begin to burn low, shall see wisdom
in it, and shall want the healing peace of uncrowded mountains and spa-
cious fields. Life oscillates between Voltaire and Rousseau, Confucius and
Lao-tze, Socrates and Christ. After every idea has had its day with us
and we have fought for it not wisely or too well, we in our turn shall
tire of the battle, and pass on to the young our thinning fascicle of ideals.
Then we shall take to the woods with Jacques, Jean-Jacques and Lao-tze;
we shall make friends of the animals, and discourse more contentedly than
Machiavelli with simple peasant minds; we shall leave the world to stew in
its own deviltry, and shall take no further thought of its reform. Perhaps
we shall burn every book but one behind us, and find a summary of
wisdom in the Tao-Te-Ching.
658 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
We may imagine how irritating this philosophy must have been to Con-
fucius, who, at the immature age of thirty-four, came up to Lo-yang,
capital of Chou, and sought the Old Master's advice on some minutiae of
history.* Lao-tze, we are told, replied with harsh and cryptic brevity:
Those about whom you inquire have moulded with their bones
into dust. Nothing but their words remain. When the hour of
the great man has struck he rises to leadership; but before his time
has come he is hampered in all that he attempts. I have heard that
the successful merchant carefully conceals his wealth, and acts as
though he had nothing— that the great man, though abounding in
achievements, is simple in his manners and appearance. Get rid of
your pride and your many ambitions, your affectation and your ex-
travagant aims. Your character gains nothing for all these. This
is my advice to you.*1
The Chinese historian relates that Confucius sensed at once the wisdom
of these words, and took no offense from them; that on the contrary he
said to his pupils, on his return from the dying sage: "I know how birds
can fly, fishes swim, and animals run. But the runner may be snared, the
swimmer hooked, and the flyer shot by the arrow. But there is the dragon
—I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds, and rises
to heaven. Today I have seen Lao-tze, and can compare him only to the
dragon."8* Then the new master went forth to fulfil his own mission,
and to become the most influential philosopher in history.
II. CONFUCIUS
1. The Sage in Search of a State
Birth and youth — Marriage and divorce — Pupils and methods —
Appearance and character— The lady and the tiger— A defi-
nition of good government — Confucius in office —
Wander-years— The consolations of old age
K'ung-fu-tze— K'ung the Master, as his pupils called K'ung Ch'iu— was
born at Ch'ufu, in the then kingdom of Lu and the present province of
Shantung, in the year 551 B.C. Chinese legend, not to be outdone by any
* The story is told by the greatest of Chinese historians, Szuma Ch'ien,*1 but it may be
fiction. We are shocked to find Lao-tze in the busiest city of China in his eighty-seventh
year.
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 659
rival lore, tells how apparitions announced his illegitimate birth" to his
young mother, how dragons kept watch, and spirit-ladies perfumed the
air, as she was delivered of him in a cave. He had, we are informed, the
back of a dragon, the lips of an ox, and a mouth like the sea.64 He came of
the oldest family now in existence, for (the Chinese genealogists assure
us) he was derived in direct line from the great emperor Huang-ti, and
was destined to be the father of a long succession of K'ungs, unbroken to
this day. His descendants numbered eleven thousand males a century ago;
the town of his birth is still populated almost entirely by the fruit of his
loins—or those of his only son; and one of his progeny is Finance Minister
of the present Chinese Government at Nanking."
His father was seventy years old when K'ung was born,69 and died when
the boy was three. Confucius worked after school to help support his
mother, and took on in childhood, perhaps, that aged gravity which was
to mark nearly every step of his history. Nevertheless he had time to be-
come skilled in archery and music; to the latter he became so addicted
that once, hearing an especially delectable performance, he was moved
to the point of vegetarianism: for three months he did not eat meat.*7 He
did not immediately agree with Nietzsche about a certain incompatibility
between philosophy and marriage. He married at nineteen, divorced his
wife at twenty-three, and does not seem to have married again.
At twenty-two he began his career as a teacher, using his home as a
schoolhouse, and charging whatever modest fee his pupils could pay.
Three subjects formed the substance of his curriculum: history, poetry,
and the rules of propriety. "A man's character," he said, "is formed by
the Odes, developed by the Rites" (the rules of ceremony and courtesy),
"and perfected by music."88 Like Socrates he taught by word of mouth
rather than by writing, and we know his views chiefly through the unre-
liable reports of his disciples. He gave to philosophers an example seldom
heeded— to attack no other thinker, and waste no time in refutations. He
taught no strict logical method, but he sharpened the wits of his students
by gently exposing their fallacies, and making stern demands upon their
alertness of mind. "When a man is not (in the habit of) saying, 'What
shall I think of this? What shall I think of this?' I can indeed do nothing
with him."* "I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager, nor help
out any one who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented
one corner of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it learn the other
three, I do not repeat my lesson."10 He was confident that only the wisest
660 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
and the stupidest were beyond benefiting from instruction, and that no
one could sincerely study humanistic philosophy without being improved
in character as well as in mind. "It is not easy to find a man who has
learned for three years without coming to be good."71
He had at first only a few pupils, but soon the news went about that
behind the lips of an ox and the mouth like a sea there was a kindly heart
and a well-furnished mind, and in the end he could boast that three thou-
sand young men had studied under him, and had passed from his home to
important positions in the world. Some of the students—once as many as
seventy— lived with him like Hindu novices with their guru; and they de-
veloped an affection that often spoke out in their remonstrances against
his exposure of his person to danger, or of his good name to calumny.
Though always strict with them, he loved some of them more than his
own son, and wept without measure when Hwuy died. "There was Yen
Hwuy," he replied to Duke Gae, who had asked which of his pupils
learned best; "he loved to learn. ... I have not yet heard of any one who
loves to learn (as he did). . . . Hwuy gave me no assistance; there was
nothing that I said which did not give him delight. . . . He did not trans-
fer his anger; he did not repeat a fault. Unfortunately, his appointed time
was short, and he died; and now there is not (such another).'"3 Lazy
students avoided him, or received short shrift from him; for he was not
above instructing a sluggard with a blow of his staff, and sending him off
with merciless verity. "Hard is the case of him who will stuff himself
with food the whole day, without applying his mind to anything. ... In
youth not humble as befits a junior; in manhood doing nothing worthy of
being handed down; and living on to an old age— this is to be a pest."78
He must have made a queer picture as he stood in his rooms, or, with
nearly equal readiness, in the road, and taught his disciples history and
poetry, manners and philosophy. The portraits that Chinese painters
begot of him show him in his later years, with an almost hairless head
gnarled and knotted with experience, and a face whose terrifying serious-
ness gave no inkling of the occasional humor and tenderness, and the keen
esthetic sensitivity, that made him human despite his otherwise unbear-
able perfection. One of his music-teachers described him as he was in early
middle age:
I have observed about Chung-ni many marks of a sage. He has
river eyes and a dragon forehead— the very characteristics of Huang-
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 66 1
ti. His arms are long, his back is like a tortoise, and he is nine
(Chinese) feet six inches in height. . . . When he speaks he
praises the ancient kings. He moves along the path of humility and
courtesy. He has heard of every subject, and retains with a strong
memory. His knowledge of things seems inexhaustible. Have we
not in him the rising of a sage?74
Legend assigns to his figure "forty-nine remarkable peculiarities." Once,
when accident had separated him from his disciples during his wanderings,
they located him at once by the report of a traveler that he had seen a
monstrous-looking man with "the disconsolate appearance of a stray dog."
When they repeated this description to Confucius he was much amused.
"Capital! "he said, "capital!"75
He was an old-fashioned teacher, who believed that the maintenance of
distance was indispensable to pedagogy. He was nothing if not formal,
and the rules of etiquette and courtesy were his meat and drink. He tried
to check and balance the natural epicureanism of the instincts with the
puritanism and stoicism of his doctrine. At times he appears to have in-
dulged himself in self -appreciation. "In a hamlet of ten families," he said,
with some moderation, "there may be found one honorable and sincere as
I am, but not so fond of learning."70 "In letters I am perhaps equal to
other men, but (the character of) the higher man, carrying out in his con-
duct what he professes, is what I have not yet attained to."77 "If there
were any of the princes who would employ me, in the course of twelve
months I should have done something considerable. In three years (the
government) would be perfected."78 All in all, however, he bore his great-
ness with modesty. "There were four things," his disciples assure us,
"from which the Master was entirely free. He had no foregone conclu-
sions, no arbitrary predeterminations, no obstinacy, and no egoism."70 He
called himself "a transmitter and not a maker,"80 and pretended that he was
merely passing down what he had learned from the good emperors Yao
and Shun. He strongly desired fame and place, but he would make no
dishonorable compromises to secure or retain them; again and again he
refused appointments to high office from men whose government seemed
to him unjust. A man should say, he counseled his scholars, "I am not
concerned that I have no place; I am concerned how I may fit myself for
one. I am not concerned that I am not known; I seek to be worthy to
be known."11
662 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
Among his pupils were the sons of Mang He, one of the ministers of
the Duke of Lu. Through them Confucius was introduced to the Chou
court at Lo-yang; but he kept a modest distance from the officials, pre-
ferring, as we have seen, to visit the dying sage Lao-tze. Returning to Lu,
Confucius found his native province so disordered with civil strife that he
removed to the neighboring state of T'si, accompanied by several of his
pupils. Passing through rugged and deserted mountains on their way,
they were surprised to find an old woman weeping beside a grave. Con-
fucius sent Tsze-loo to inquire the cause of her grief. "My husband's
father," she answered, "was killed here by a tiger, and my husband also;
and now my son has met the same fate." When Confucius asked why she
persisted in living in so dangerous a place, she replied: "There is no op-
pressive government here." "My children," said Confucius to his students,
"remember this. Oppressive government is fiercer than a tiger."88
The Duke of Ts'i gave him audience, and was pleased with his answer
to a question about good government. "There is good government when
the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father,
and the son is son."88 The Duke offered him for his support the revenues
of the town of Lin-k'ew, but Confucius refused the gift, saying that he
had done nothing to deserve such remuneration. The Duke was minded
to insist on retaining him as an adviser, when his chief minister dissuaded
him. "These scholars," said Gan Ying, "are impractical, and cannot be
imitated. They are haughty and conceited of their own views, so that
they will not be content in inferior positions. . . . This Mr. K'ung has a
thousand peculiarities. It would take generations to exhaust all that he
knows about the ceremonies of going up and going down."84 Nothing
came of it, and Confucius returned to Lu, to teach his pupils for fifteen
years more before being called into public office.
His opportunity came when, at the turn of the century, he was made
chief magistrate of the town of Chung-tu. According to Chinese tradi-
tion a veritable epidemic of honesty swept through the city; articles of
value dropped in the street were left untouched, or returned to the
owner." Promoted by Duke Ting of Lu to be Acting Superintendent of
Public Works, Confucius directed a survey of the lands of the state, and
introduced many improvements in agriculture. Advanced again to be
Minister of Crime, his appointment, we are told, sufficed of itself to put
an end to crime. "Dishonesty and dissoluteness," say the Chinese records,
"were ashamed, and hid their heads. Loyaltv and good faith became the
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 663
characteristics of the men, and chastity and docility those of the women.
Strangers came in crowds from other states. Confucius became the idol
of the people."88
This is too good to be true, and in any case proved too good to endure.
Criminals put their hidden heads together, no doubt, and laid snares for
the Master's feet. Neighboring states, say the historian, grew jealous of
Lu, and fearful of its rising power. A wily minister of Ts'i suggested a
stratagem to alienate the Duke of Lu from Confucius. The Duke of Ts'i
sent to Ting a bevy of lovely "sing-song" girls, and one hundred and
twenty still more beautiful horses. The Duke of Lu was captivated, ig-
nored the disapproval of Confucius (who had taught him that the first
principle of good government is good example), and scandalously
neglected his ministers and the affairs of the state. "Master," said Tsze-loo,
"it is time for you to be going." Reluctantly Confucius resigned, left Lu,
and began thirteen years of homeless wandering. He remarked later that
he had never "seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty,"87 and indeed,
from some points of view, it is one of the most culpable oversights of
nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
The Master and a few faithful disciples, no longer welcome in his native
state, passed now from province to province, receiving courtesies in some,
undergoing dangers and privations in others. Twice they were attacked
by ruffians, and once they were reduced almost to starvation, so that even
Tsze-loo began to murmur that such a lot was hardly appropriate to the
"higher man." The Duke of Wei offered Confucius the leadership of his
government, but Confucius, disapproving of the Duke's principles, re-
fused.88 Once, as the little band was traveling through Ts'i, it came upon
two old men who, in disgust with the corruption of the age, had retired
like Lao-tze from public affairs and taken to a life of agricultural seclusion.
One of them recognized Confucius, and reproached Tsze-loo for follow-
ing him. "Disorder, like a swelling flood," said the recluse, "spreads over
the whole empire; and who is he that will change it for you? Rather
than follow one who withdraws from this state and that state, had you
not better follow those who withdraw from the world altogether?"8*
Confucius gave much thought to this rebuke, but persisted in hoping that
some state would again give him an opportunity to lead the way to reform
and peace.
At last, in the sixty-ninth year of Confucius, Duke Gae succeeded to
the throne of Lu, and sent three officers to the philosopher, bearing ap-
664 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
propriate presents and an invitation to return to his native state. During
the five years of life that remained to him Confucius lived in simplicity
and honor, often consulted by the leaders of Lu, but wisely retiring to a
literary seclusion, and devoting himself to the congenial work of editing
the classics, and writing the history, of his people. When the Duke of
Shi asked Tsze-loo about his master, and Tsze-loo did not answer him,
Confucius, hearing of it, said: "Why did you not say to him?— He is sim-
ply a man who, in his eager pursuit of knowledge, forgets his food; who
in the joy (of its attainment) forgets his sorrows; and who does not per-
ceive that old age is coming on."80 He consoled his solitude with poetry
and philosophy, and rejoiced that his instincts now accorded with his rea-
son. "At fifteen," he said, "I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty
I stood firm. At forty I was free from doubt. At fifty I knew the decrees
of Heaven. At sixty my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of
truth. At seventy I could follow what my heart desired without trans-
gressing what was right."91
He died at the age of seventy-two. Early one morning he was heard
singing a mournful song:
The great mountain must crumble,
The strong beam must break,
. And the wise man wither away like a plant.
When his pupil Tsze-kung came to him he said: "No intelligent monarch
arises; there is not one in the empire that will make me his master. My
time is come to die."w He took to his couch, and after seven days he
expired. His students buried him with pomp and ceremony befitting their
affection for him; and building huts by his grave they lived there for three
years, mourning for him as for a father. When all the others had gone
Tsze-kung, who had loved him even beyond the rest, remained three years
more, mourning alone by the Master's tomb."
2. The Nine Classics
He left behind him five volumes apparently written or edited by his own
hand, and therefore known to China as the "Five Ching? or Canonical
Books. First, he edited the Li-Chi, or Record of Rites, believing that these
ancient rules of propriety were subtle aides to the formation and mellowing
of character, and the maintenance of social order and peace. Second, he
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 665
wrote appendices and commentaries for the 1-Ching, or Book of Changes,
seeing in this the profoundest contribution yet made by China to that ob-
scure realm of metaphysics which he himself had sedulously avoided in his
philosophy. Third, he selected and arranged the Shi-Ching, or Book of Odes,
in order to illustrate the nature of human life and the principles of moral-
ity. Fourth, he wrote the Ch'un Ch'iu, or Spring and Autumn Annals, to
record with unadorned brevity the main events in the history of his own
state of Lu. Fifth, and above all, he sought to inspire his pupils by gather-
ing into a Shu-Ching, or Book of History, the most important and elevating
events or legends of the early reigns, when China had been in some measure
a unified empire, and its leaders, as Confucius thought, had been heroic and
unselfish civilizcrs of the race. He did not think of his function, in these
works, as that of an historian; rather he was a teacher, a moulder of youth;
and he deliberately selected from the past such items as would rather in-
spire than disillusion his pupils; we should do him injustice if we turned to
these volumes for an impartial and scientific account of Chinese history. He
added to the record imaginary speeches and stories into which he poured as
much as he could of his solicitude for morals and his admiration for wis-
dom. If he idealized the past of his country he did no more than we do with
our own less ancient past; if already our earliest presidents have become
sages and saints in hardly a century or two, surely to the historians of a
thousand years hence they will seem as virtuous and perfect as Yao and
Shun.
To these five Ching the Chinese add four Shu, or "Books" (of the
Philosophers), to constitute the "Nine Classics." First and most important
of these is the Lun Yu, or Discourses and Dialogues, known to the English
world, through a whim of Legge's, as the "Analects"— i.e., the collected
fragments— of Confucius. These pages are not from the Master's hand, but
record, with exemplary clarity and brevity, his opinions and pronounce-
ments as remembered by his followers. They were compiled within a few
decades of Confucius' death, perhaps by the disciples of his disciples,94 and
are the least unreliable guide that we have to his philosophy. The most in-
teresting and instructive of all statements in the Chinese Classics appears in
the fourth and fifth paragraphs* of the second Shu—z work known to the
Chinese as Ta Hsueh, or The Great Learning. The Confucian philosopher
and editor, Chu Hsi, attributed these paragraphs to Confucius, and the re-
mainder of the treatise to Tseng Ts'an, one of the younger disciples; Kea
Kwei, a scholar of the first century A.D., attributed the work to K'ung Chi,
grandson of Confucius; the sceptical scholars of today agree that the au-
* Quoted on p. 668 below.
666 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
thorship is unknown."* All students concur in ascribing to this grandson the
third philosophical classic of China, the Chung Yung, or Doctrine of the
Mean. The last of the Shu is the Book of Mencitis, of which we shall speak
presently. With this volume ends the classic literature, but not the classic
period, of Chinese thought. There were, as we shall see, rebels and heretics
of every kind to protest against that masterpiece of conservatism, the phil-
osophy of Confucius.
3. The Agnosticism of Confucius
A fragment of logic - The philosopher and the urchins - A
formula of 'wisdom
Let us try to do justice to this doctrine; it is the view of life that we
shall take when we round out our first half -century, and for all that we
know it may be wiser than the poetry of our youth. If we ourselves are
heretics and young, this is the philosophy that we must marry to our own
in order that our half-truths may beget some understanding.
We shall not find here a system of philosophy— i.e., a consistent struc-
ture of logic, metaphysics, ethics and politics dominated by one idea (like
the palaces of Nebuchadrezzar, which bore on every brick the name of
the ruler). Confucius taught the art of reasoning not through rules or
syllogisms, but by the perpetual play of his keen mind upon the opinions
of his pupils; when they went out from his school they knew nothing
about logic, but they could think clearly and to the point. Clarity and
honesty of thought and expression were the first lessons of the Master.
"The whole end of speech is to be understood"9*— a lesson not always re-
membered by philosophy. "When you know a thing, to hold that you
know it; and when you do not, to admit the fact— this is knowledge.""7
Obscurity of thought and insincere inaccuracy of speech seemed to him
national calamities. If a prince who was not in actual fact and power a
prince should cease to be called a prince, if a father who was not a
fatherly father should cease to be called a father, if an unfilial son should
cease to be called a son— then men might be stirred to reform abuses too
often covered up with words. Hence when Tsze-loo told Confucius,
"The prince of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to
administer the government; what will you consider the first thing to be
done?" he answered, to the astonishment of prince and pupil, "What is
necessary is to rectify names.""
CHAP.XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 667
Since his dominating passion was the application of philosophy to con-
duct and government, Confucius avoided metaphysics, and tried to turn
the minds of his followers from all recondite or celestial concerns. Though
he made occasional mention of "Heaven" and prayer," and counseled his
disciples to observe sedulously the traditional rites of ancestor worship
and national sacrifice,100 he was so negative in his answers to theological
questions that modern commentators agree in calling him an agnostic.101
When Tsze-kung asked him, "Do the dead have knowledge, or are they
without knowledge?" Confucius refused to make any definite reply.10*
When Ke Loo asked about "serving the spirits" (of the dead), the Master
responded: "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their
spirits?" Ke Loo asked: "I venture to ask about death?" and was an-
swered: "While you do not know life, how can you know about death?"10*
When Fan Ch'e inquired "what constituted wisdom?" Confucius said:
"To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respect-
ing spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom."104
His disciples tell us that "the subjects on which the Master did not talk
were extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual
beings."106 They were much disturbed by this philosophic modesty, and
doubtless wished that the Master would solve for them the mysteries of
heaven. The Book of Lieh-tze tells with glee the fable of the street-
urchins who ridiculed the Master when he confessed his inability to answer
their simple question— "Is the sun nearer to the earth at dawn, when it is
larger, or at noon, when it is hotter?"100 The only metaphysics that Con-
fucius would recognize was the search for unity in all phenomena, and the
effort to find some stabilizing harmony between the laws of right conduct
and the regularities of nature. "Tsze," he said to one of his favorites,
"you think, I suppose, that I am one who learns many things and keeps
them in his memory?" Tsze-kung replied, "Yes, but perhaps it is not so?"
"No," was the answer; "I seek unity, all-pervading."107 This, after all, is
the essence of philosophy.
His master passion was for morality. The chaos of his time seemed to
him a moral chaos, caused perhaps by the weakening of the ancient faith
and the spread of Sophist scepticism as to right and wrong; it was to be
cured not by a return to the old beliefs, but by an earnest search for more
complete knowledge, and a moral regeneration based upon a soundly
regulated family life. The Confucian program is expressed pithily and
profoundly in the famous paragraphs of The Great Learning:
668 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
The ancients who wished to illustrate the highest virtue through-
out the empire first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order
well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to reg-
ulate their families, they first cultivated their own selves. Wishing to
cultivate their own selves, they first rectified their hearts. Wish-
ing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their
thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first ex-
tended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowl-
edge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their
knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their
thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts
being rectified, their own selves were cultivated. Their own selves
being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being
regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being
rightly governed, the whole empire was made tranquil and happy.108
This is the keynote and substance of the Confucian philosophy; one
might forget all other words of the Master and his disciples, and yet carry
away with these "the essence of the matter," and a complete guide to life.
The world is at war, says Confucius, because its constituent states are im-
properly governed; these are improperly governed because no amount of
legislation can take the place of the natural social order provided by the
family; the family is in disorder, and fails to provide this natural social
order, because men forget that they cannot regulate their families if they
do not regulate themselves; they fail to regulate themselves because they
have not rectified their hearts— i.e., they have not cleansed their own souls
of disorderly desires; their hearts are not rectified because their thinking
is insincere, doing scant justice to reality and concealing rather than re-
vealing their own natures; their thinking is insincere because they let
their wishes discolor the facts and determine their conclusions, instead of
seeking to extend their knowledge to the utmost by impartially investi-
gating the nature of things. Let men seek impartial knowledge, and their
thinking will become sincere; let their thoughts be sincere and their hearts
will be cleansed of disorderly desires; let their hearts be so cleansed, and
their own selves will be regulated; let their own selves be regulated, and
their families will automatically be regulated— not by virtuous sermonizing
or passionate punishments, but by the silent power of example itself; let
the family be so regulated with knowledge, sincerity and example, and it
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 669
will give forth such spontaneous social order that successful government
will once more be a feasible thing; let the state maintain internal justice
and tranquillity, and all the world will be peaceful and happy.— It is a
counsel of perfection, and forgets that man is a beast of prey; but like
Christianity it offers us a goal to strike at, and a ladder to climb. It is one
of the golden texts of philosophy.
4. The Way of the Higher Man
Another portrait of the sage — Elements of character — The
Golden Rule
Wisdom, therefore, begins at home, and the foundation of society is
a disciplined individual in a disciplined family. Confucius agreed with
Goethe that self-development is the root of social development; and
when Tsze-loo asked him, "What constitutes the Higher Man?" he re-
plied, "The cultivation of himself with reverential care."100 Here and
there, throughout the dialogues, we find him putting together, piece by
piece, his picture of the ideal man— a union of philosopher and saint
producing the sage. The Superman of Confucius is composed of three
virtues severally selected as supreme by Socrates, Nietzsche and Christ:
intelligence, courage, and good will. "The Higher Man is anxious lest he
should not get truth; he is not anxious lest poverty should come upon
him. . . . He is catholic, not partisan. . . . He requires that in what he says
there should be nothing inaccurate."110 But he is no mere intellect, not
merely a scholar or a lover of knowledge; he has character as well as in-
telligence. "Where the solid qualities are in excess of accomplishments,
we have rusticity; where the accomplishments are in excess of the solid
qualities, we have the manners of a clerk. When the accomplishments and
solid qualities are equally blended, we then have the man of complete
virtue."1" Intelligence is intellect with its feet on the earth.
The foundation of character is sincerity. "Is it not just an entire sin-
cerity which marks the Higher Man?"m "He acts before he speaks, and
afterwards speaks according to his actions."11* "In archery we have some-
thing like the way of the Higher Man. When the archer misses the center
of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in him-
self."114 "What the Higher Man seeks is in himself; what the lower man
seeks is in others. . . . The Higher Man is distressed by his want of abjjjjjr
6jO THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
not ... by men's not knowing him"; and yet "he dislikes the thought of his
name not being mentioned after his death.""1 He "is modest in his speech,
but exceeds in his actions. ... He seldom speaks; when he does he is sure
to hit the point. . . . That wherein the Higher Man cannot be equaled is
simply this: his work, which other men cannot see.""8 He is moderate in
word and deed; in everything "the Higher Man conforms with the path of
the mean."117 For "there is no end of things by which man is affected; and
when his likings and dislikings are not subject to regulation, he is changed
into the nature of things as they come before him.""8* "The Higher Man
moves so as to make his movements in all generations a universal path; he
behaves so as to make his conduct in all generations a universal law; he
speaks so as to make his words in all generations a universal norm.""°t
He accepts completely the Golden Rule, which is here laid down explicitly
four centuries before Hillel and five centuries before Christ: "Chung-kung
asked about perfect virtue. The Master said, . . . *Not to do unto others as
you would not wish done unto yourself.' ""* The principle is stated again
and again, always negatively, and once in a single word. "Tsze-kung asked,
'Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's
life?' The Master said, 'Is not reciprocity such a word?' ""* Nevertheless he
did not wish, like Lao-tze, to return good for evil; and when one of his
pupils asked him, "What do you say concerning the principle that injury
should be recompensed with kindness?" he replied, more sharply than was
his custom: "With what, then, will you recompense kindness? Recompense
injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.""4
The very basis of the Higher Man's character is an overflowing sympathy
towards all men. He is not angered by the excellences of other men; when
he sees men of worth he thinks of equaling them; when he sees men of low
worth he turns inward and examines himself;"4* for there are few faults
that we do not share with our neighbors. He pays no attention to slander
or violent speech."*5 He is courteous and affable to all, but he does not gush
forth indiscriminate praise."5 He treats his inferiors without contempt, and
his superiors without seeking to court their favor."" He is grave in deport-
ment, since men will not take seriously one who is not serious with them; he
is slow in words and earnest in conduct; he is not quick with his tongue, or
given to clever repartee; he is earnest because he has work to do— and this
is the secret of his unaffected dignity."7 He is courteous even to his familiars,
but maintains his reserve towards all, even his son."8 Confucius sums up the
* Cf. Spinoza: "We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves
driven by contrary winds, we waver and arc unconscious of the issue and our fate."11'
t Cf. one of Kant's formulations of the "Categorical Imperative" of morals: "So to will
that the maxim of thy conduct can become a universal law."1*1
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 67 1
qualities of his "Higher Man"— so similar to the Megahpsychos, or "Great-
Minded Man," of Aristotle— in these words:
The Higher Man has nine things which are subjects with him of
thoughtful consideration. In regard to the use of his eyes he is
anxious to see clearly. ... In regard to his countenance he is anxious
that it should be benign. In regard to his demeanor he is anxious
that it should be respectful. In regard to his speech he is anxious
that it should be sincere. In regard to his doing of business he is
anxious that it should be reverently careful. In regard to what he
doubts about, he is anxious to question others. When he is angry
he thinks of the difficulties his anger may involve him in. When
he sees gain to be got he thinks of righteousness.1"
5. Confucian Politics
Popular sovereignty— Government by example—The decentrali-
zation of 'wealth — Music and manners — Socialism
and revolution
None but such men, in the judgment of Confucius, could restore the
family and redeem the state. Society rests upon the obedience of the
children to their parents, and of the wife to her husband; when these
go, chaos comes.130 Only one thing is higher than this law of obedience,
and that is the moral law. "In serving his parents (a son) may remon-
strate with them, but gently; when he sees that they do not incline to
follow (his advice), he shows an increased degree of reverence, but
does not abandon (his purpose). . . . When the command is wrong, a son
should resist his father, and a minister should resist his August Master."181
Here was one root of Mencius' doctrine of the divine right of revolution.
There was not much of the revolutionist in Confucius; perhaps he sus-
pected that the inheritors of a revolution are made of the same flesh as the
men whom it deposed. But he wrote bravely enough in the Book of Odes:
"Before the sovereigns of the Shang (Dynasty) had lost (the hearts of)
the people, they were the mates of God. Take warning from the house
of Shang. The great decree is not easily preserved.""8 The people are
the actual and proper source of political sovereignty, for any govern-
ment that does not retain their confidence sooner or later falls.
Tsze-kung asked about government. The Master said, "(The
requisites of government) are three: that there should be suffi-
672 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
cicncy of food, sufficiency of military equipment, and the confidence
of the people in their ruler." Tsze-kung said, "If it cannot be
helped, and one of these must be dispensed with, which of the three
should be foregone first?" "The military equipment," said the
Master. Tsze-kung asked again, "If it cannot be helped, and one of
the remaining two must be dispensed with, which of them should be
foregone?" The Master answered, "Part with the food. From of
old, death has been the lot of all men; but if the people have no
faith (in their rulers) there is no standing (for the state). '""
The first principle of government, in the view of Confucius, is as the
first principle of character— sincerity. Therefore the prime instrument
of government is good example: the ruler must be an eminence of model
behavior, from which, by prestige imitation, right conduct will pour down
upon his people.
Ke K'ang asked Confucius about government, saying, "What do
you say to killing the unprincipled for the good of the principled?"
Confucius replied, "Sir, in carrying on your government, why
should you use killing at all? Let your (evinced) desires be for
what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between
superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass.
The grass must bend when the wind blows across it. ... He who
exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to
the north polar star, which keeps its place, and all the stars turn
toward it. ... Ke K'ang asked how to cause the people to
reverence (their ruler), to be faithful to him, and to urge them-
selves to virtue. The Master said, "Let him preside over them
with gravity— then they will reverence him. Let him be filial and
kind to all— then they will be faithful to him. Let him advance the
good and teach the incompetent— then they will eagerly seek to
be virtuous."184
As good example is the first instrument of government, good appoint-
ments are the second. "Employ the upright and put aside the crooked:
in this way the crooked can be made to be upright."1* "The administra-
tion of government," says the Doctrine of the Mean, "lies in (getting
proper) men. Such men are to be got by means of (the ruler's) own
character."1* What would not a ministry of Higher Men do, even in
one generation, to cleanse the state and guide the people to a loftier
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 673
level of civilization? m First of all, they would avoid foreign relations as
much as possible, and seek to make their state so independent of out-
side supplies that it would never be tempted to war for them. They
would reduce the luxury of courts, and seek a wide distribution of wealth,
for "the centralization of wealth is the way to scatter the people, and
letting it be scattered among them is the way to collect the people."1*
They would decrease punishments, and increase public instruction; for
"there being instruction, there will be no distinction of classes."1" The
higher subjects would be forbidden to the mediocre, but music would
be taught to all. "When one has mastered music completely, and regu-
lates his heart and mind accordingly, the natural, correct, gentle and
sincere heart is easily developed, and joy attends its development. . . .
The best way to improve manners and customs is to ... pay attention to
the composition of the music played in the country.* . . . Manners and
music should not for a moment be neglected by any one. . . . Benevo-
lence is akin to music, and righteousness to good manners."140
Good manners, too, must be a care of the government, for when man-
ners decay the nation decays with them. Imperceptibly the rules of
propriety form at least the outward character,141 and add to the sage the
graciousness of the gentleman; we become what we do. Politically "the
usages of propriety serve as dykes for the people against evil excesses";
and "he who thinks the old embankments useless, and destroys them, is
sure to suffer from the desolation caused by overflowing water":14* one
almost hears the stern voice of the angry Master echoing those words
today from that Hall of the Classics where once all his words were en-
graved in stone, and which revolution has left desecrated and forlorn.
And yet Confucius too had his Utopias and dreams, and might have
sympathized at times with men who, convinced that the dynasty had
lost "the great decree" or "mandate of Heaven," dragged down one
system of order in the hope of rearing a better one on the ruins. In the
end he became a socialist, and gave his fancy rein:
When the Great Principle (of the Great Similarity) prevails,
the whole world becomes a republic; they elect men of talents,
virtue and ability; they talk about sincere agreement, and cultivate
universal peace. Thus men do not regard as their parents only their
• "Let me write the songs of a nation," said Daniel O'Connell, "and I care not who
makes its laws."
674 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
own parents, nor treat as their children only their own children.
A competent provision is secured for the aged till their death, em-
ployment for the middle-aged, and the means of growing up for
the young. The widowers, widows, orphans, childless men, and
those who are disabled by disease, arc all sufficiently maintained.
Each man has his rights, and each woman her individuality safe-
guarded. They produce wealth, disliking that it should be thrown
away upon the ground, but not wishing to keep it for their own
gratification. Disliking idleness they labor, but not alone with a view
to their own advantage. In this way selfish schemings are repressed
and find no way to arise. Robbers, filchers and rebellious traitors
do not exist. Hence the outer doors remain open, and are not shut.
This is the state of what I call the Great Similarity.1"
6. The Influence of Confucius
The Confucian scholars— Their victory over the Legalists— De-
fects of Confucianism— The contemporaneity of Confucius
The success of Confucius was posthumous, but complete. His philos-
ophy had struck a practical and political note that endeared it to the
Chinese after death had removed the possibility of his insisting upon its
realization. Since men of letters never quite reconcile themselves to being
men of letters, the literati of the centuries after Confucius attached them-
selves sedulously to his doctrine as a road to influence and public em-
ployment, and created a class of Confucian scholars destined to become
the most powerful group in the empire. Schools sprang up here and
there for the teaching of the Master's philosophy as handed down by his
disciples, developed by Mencius, and emended by a thousand pundits in
the course of time; and these schools, as the intellectual centers of China,
kept civilization alive during centuries of political collapse, much as the
monks preserved some measure of ancient culture, and some degree of
social order, during the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Rome.
A rival school, the "Legalists," disputed for a while this leadership of
Confucian thought in the political world, and occasionally moulded the
policy of the state. To make government depend upon the good ex-
ample of the governors and the inherent goodness of the governed, said
the Legalists, was to take a considerable risk; history had offered no
superabundance of precedents for the successful operation of these ideal-
istic principles. Not men but laws should rule, they argued; and laws
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 675
must be enforced until, becoming a second nature to a society, they are
obeyed without force. The people are not intelligent enough to rule
themselves well; they prosper best under an aristocracy. Even tradesmen
are not too intelligent, but pursue their interests very often to the detri-
ment of the state; perhaps, said some of the Legalists, it would be wiser
for the state to socialize capital, monopolize trade, and prevent the man-
ipulation of prices and the concentration of wealth.144 These were ideas
that were destined to appear again and again in the history of Chinese
government.
In the long run the philosophy of Confucius triumphed. We shall see
later how the mighty Shih Huang-ti, with a Legalist for his prime minister,
sought to end the influence of Confucius by ordering that all existing
Confucian literature should be burned. But the power of the word
proved stronger than that of the sword; the books which the "First
Emperor" sought to destroy became holy and precious through his
enmity, and men died as martyrs in the effort to preserve them. When
Shih Huang-ti and his brief dynasty had passed away, a wiser emperor,
Wu Ti, brought the Confucian literature out of hiding, gave office to
its students, and strengthened the Han Dynasty by introducing the ideas
and methods of Confucius into the education of Chinese youth and
statesmanship. Sacrifices were decreed in honor of Confucius; the texts of
the Classics were by imperial command engraved on stone, and became
the official religion of the state. Rivaled at times by the influence of
Taoism, and eclipsed for a while by Buddhism, Confucianism was re-
stored and exalted by the T'ang Dynasty, and the great T'ai Tsung
ordered that a temple should be erected to Confucius, and sacrifices
offered in it by scholars and officials, in every town and village of the
empire. During the Sung Dynasty a virile school of "Neo-Confucians"
arose, whose innumerable commentaries on the Classics spread the phil-
osophy of the Master, in varied dilutions, throughout the Far East, and
stimulated a philosophical development in Japan. From the rise of the
Han Dynasty to the fall of the Manchus— i.e., for two thousand years— the
doctrine of Confucius moulded and dominated the Chinese mind.
The history of China might be written in terms of that influence. For
generation after generation the writings of the Master were the texts of
the official schools, and nearly every lad who came through those schools
had learned those texts by heart. The stoic conservatism of the ancient
sage sank almost into the blood of the people, and gave to the nation, and
676 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
to its individuals, a dignity and profundity unequaled elsewhere in the
world or in history. With the help of this philosophy China developed
a harmonious community life, a zealous admiration for learning and wis-
dom, and a quiet and stable culture which made Chinese civilization strong
enough to survive every invasion, and to remould every invader in its
own image. Only in Christianity and in Buddhism can we find again
so heroic an effort to transmute into decency the natural brutality of men.
And today, as then, no better medicine could be prescribed for any people
suffering from the disorder generated by an intellectualist education, a
decadent moral code, and a weakened fibre of individual and national
character, than the absorption of the Confucian philosophy by the na-
tion's youth.
But that philosophy could not be a complete nourishment in itself. It
was well fitted to a nation struggling out of chaos and weakness into
order and strength, but it would prove a shackle upon a country com-
pelled by international competition to change and grow. The rules of
propriety, destined to form character and social order, became a strait-
jacket forcing almost every vital action into a prescribed and unaltered
mould. There was something prim and Puritan about Confucianism which
checked too thoroughly the natural and vigorous impulses of mankind;
its virtue was so complete as to bring sterility. No room was left in it for
pleasure and adventure, and little for friendship and love. It helped to
keep woman in supine debasement,148 and its cold perfection froze the
nation into a conservatism as hostile to progress as it was favorable to
peace.
We must not blame all this upon Confucius; one cannot be expected
to do the thinking of twenty centuries. We ask of a thinker only that,
as the result of a lifetime of thought, he shall in some way illuminate our
path to understanding. Few men have done this more certainly than
Confucius. As we read him, and perceive how little of him must be
erased today because of the growth of knowledge and the change of
circumstance, how soundly he offers us guidance even in our contem-
porary world, we forget his platitudes and his unbearable perfection, and
join his pious grandson, K'ung Chi in that superlative eulogy which be-
gan the deification of Confucius:
Chung-ni (Confucius) handed down the doctrines of Yao and
Shun as if they had been his ancestors, and elegantly displayed the
CHAP. XXIII ) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 677
regulations of Wen and Wu, taking them as his model. Above he
harmonized with the times of heaven, and below he was conformed
to the water and land.
He may be compared to heaven and earth in their supporting and
containing, their overshadowing and curtaining, all things. He may
be compared to the four seasons in their alternating progress, and to
the sun and moon in their successive shining. . . .
All-embracing and vast, he is like heaven. Deep and active as a
fountain, he is like the abyss. He is seen, and the people all rev-
erence him; he speaks, and the people all believe him; he acts, and
the people are all pleased with him.
Therefore his fame overspreads the Middle Kingdom, and extends
to all barbarous tribes. Wherever ships and carriages reach, wher-
ever the strength of man penetrates, wherever the heavens over-
shadow and the earth sustains, wherever the sun and moon shine,
wherever frosts and dews fall— all who have blood and breath un-
feignedly honor and love him. Hence it is said: "He is the equal
of Heaven."146
III. SOCIALISTS AND ANARCHISTS
The two hundred years that followed upon Confucius were centuries
of lively controversy and raging heresy. Having discovered the pleasures
of philosophy, some men, like Hui Sze and Kuntj Sun Lung, played witli
logic, and invented paradoxes of reasoning as varied and subtle as Zeno's.14i
Philosophers flocked to the city of Lo-yang as, in the same centuries, they
were flocking to Benares and Athens; and they enjoyed in the Chinese
capital all that freedom of speech and thought which made Athens the
intellectual center of the Mediterranean world. Sophists called Tsung-
heng-kia, or "Crisscross Philosophers," crowded the capital to teach all
and sundry the art of persuading any man to anything.148 To Lo-yang
came Mencius, inheritor of the mantle of Confucius, Chuang-tze, greatest
of Lao-tze's followers, Hsiin-tze, the apostle of original evil, and Mo Ti,
the prophet of universal love.
1. Mo Ti, Altruist
An early logician— Christian—and pacifist
"Mo Ti," said his enemy, Mencius, "loved all men, and would gladly
wear out his whole being from head to heel for the benefit of mankind.14"
678 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
He was a native of Lu, like Confucius, and flourished shortly after the
passing of the sage. He condemned the impracticality of Confucius'
thought, and offered to replace it by exhorting all men to love one an-
other. He was among the earliest of Chinese logicians, and the worst of
Chinese reasoners. He stated the problem of logic with great simplicity:
These are what I call the Three Laws of Reasoning:
1. Where to find the foundation. Find it in the study of the
experiences of the wisest men of the past.
2. How to take a general survey of it? Examine the facts of the
actual experience of the people.
3. How to apply it? Put it into law and governmental policy,
and see whether or not it is conducive to the welfare of the state
and the people.1*0
On this basis Mo Ti proceeded to prove that ghosts and spirits are real,
for many people have seen them. He objected strongly to Confucius'
coldly impersonal view of heaven, and argued for the personality of God.
Like Pascal, he thought religion a good wager: if the ancestors to whom
we sacrifice hear us, we have made a good bargain; if they are quite dead,
and unconscious of our offerings, the sacrifice gives us an opportunity to
"gather our relatives and neighbors and participate in the enjoyment of
the sacrificial victuals and drinks.""51
In the same manner, reasons Mo Ti, universal love is the only solution
of the social problem; for if it were applied there is no doubt that it would
bring Utopia. "Men in general loving one another, the strong would not
make prey of the weak, the many would not plunder the few, the rich
would not insult the poor, the noble would not be insolent to the mean,
and the deceitful would not impose upon the simple."153 Selfishness is the
source of all evil, from the acquisitiveness of the child to the conquest of
an empire. Mo Ti marvels that a man who steals a pig is universally con-
demned and generally punished, while a man who invades and appropriates
a kingdom is a hero to his people and a model to posterity .ws From this
pacifism Mo Ti advanced to such vigorous criticism of the state that his
doctrine verged on anarchism, and frightened the authorities.164 Once,
his biographers assure us, when the State Engineer of the Kingdom of
Chu was about to invade the state of Sung in order to test a new siege
ladder which he had invented, Mo Ti dissuaded him by preaching to him
his doctrine of universal love and peace. "Before I met you," said the
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS ($79
Engineer, "I had wanted to conquer the state of Sung. But since I have
seen you I would not have it even if it were given to me without resist-
ance but with no just cause." "If so," replied Mo Ti, "it is as if I had
already given you the state of Sung. Do persist in your righteous course,
and I will give you the whole world.""55
The Confucian scholars, as well as the politicians of Lo-yang, met these
amiable proposals with laughter.156 Nevertheless Mo Ti had his followers,
and for two centuries his views became the religion of a pacifistic sect.
Two of his disciples, Sung Ping and Kung Sun Lung, waged active cam-
paigns for disarmament.167 Han Fei, the greatest critic of his age, attacked
the movement from what we might call a Nietzchean standpoint, arguing
that until men had actually sprouted the wings of universal love, war
would continue to be the arbiter of nations. When Shih Huang-ti ordered
his famous "burning of the books," the literature of Mohism was cast into
the flames along with the volumes of Confucius; and unlike the writings
and doctrines of the Master, the new religion did not survive the con-
flagration.108
2. Yang Chu, Egoist
An epicurean determinist—The case for 'wickedness
Meanwhile a precisely opposite doctrine had found vigorous expression
among the Chinese. Yang Chu, of whom we know nothing except through
the mouths of his enemies,169 announced paradoxically that life is full of
suffering, and that its chief purpose is pleasure. There is no god, said
Yang, and no after-life; men are the helpless puppets of the blind natural
forces that made them, and that gave them their unchosen ancestry and
their inalienable character."0 The wise man will accept this fate without
complaint, but will not be fooled by all the nonsense of Confucius and
Mo Ti about inherent virtue, universal love, and a good name: morality is a
deception practised upon the simple by the clever; universal love is the
delusion of children who do not know the universal enmity that forms
the law of life; and a good name is a posthumous bauble which the fools
who paid so dearly for it cannot enjoy. In life the good suffer like the
bad, and the wicked seem to enjoy themselves more keenly than the good.181
The wisest men of antiquity were not moralists and rulers, as Confucius
supposed, but sensible sensualists who had the good fortune to antedate
the legislators and the philosophers, and who enjoyed the pleasures of
every impulse. It is true that the wicked sometimes leave a bad name
660 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIII
behind them, but this is a matter that does not disturb their bones. Con-
sider, says Yang Chu, the fate of the good and the evil:
All agree in considering Shun, Yii, Chou-kung and Confucius to
have been the most admirable of men, and Chieh and Chou the most
wicked.*
Now Shun had to plough the ground on the south of the Ho,
and to play the potter by the Lei lake. His four limbs had not
even a temporary rest; for his mouth and belly he could not even
find pleasant food and warm clothing. No love of his parents
rested upon him; no affection of his brothers and sisters. . . . When
Yao at length resigned to him the throne, he was advanced in age;
his wisdom was decayed; his son Shang-chun proved without ability;
and he had finally to resign the throne to Yii. Sorrowfully came
he to his death. Of all mortals never was one whose life was so
worn out and empoisoned as his. . . .
All the energies of Yii were spent on his labors with the land;
a child was born to him, but he could not foster it; he passed his
door without entering; his body became bent and withered; the skin
of his hands and feet became thick and callous. When at length
Shun resigned to him the throne, he lived in a low mean house,
though his sacrificial apron and cap were elegant. Sorrowfully
came he to his death. Of all mortals never was one whose life was
so saddened and embittered as his. . . .
Confucius understood the ways of the ancient sovereigns and
kings. He responded to the invitations of the princes of his time.
The tree was cut down over him in Sung; the traces of his foot-
steps were removed in Wei; he was reduced to extremity in Shang
and Chou; he was surrounded in Ch'an and Ts'i; ... he was dis-
graced by Yang Hu. Sorrowfully came he to his death. Of all
mortals never was one whose life was so agitated and hurried as
his.
These four sages, during their lives, had not a single day's joy.
Since their death they have had a fame that will last through myriads
of ages. But that fame is what no one who cares for what is real
would chose. Celebrate them— they do not know it. Reward
them— they do not know it. Their fame is no more to them than
to the trunk of a tree, or a clod of earth.
(On the other hand) Chieh came into the accumulated wealth of
* For Shun and Yii cf. page 644 above; for Chieh and Chou (Hsin) cf. pp. 644-5.
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 68 1
many generations; to him belonged the honor of the royal seat;
his wisdom was enough to enable him to set at defiance all below;
his power was enough to shake the world. He indulged the pleas-
ures to which his eyes and ears prompted him; he carried out what-
ever it came into his thoughts to do. Brightly came he to his death.
Of all mortals never was one whose life was so luxurious and
dissipated as his. Chou (Hsin) came into the accumulated wealth
of many generations; to him belonged the honor of the royal seat;
his power enabled him to do whatever he would; ... he indulged
his feelings in all his palaces; he gave the reins to his lusts through
the long night; he never made himself bitter by the thought of
propriety and righteousness. Brightly came he to his destruction.
Of all mortals never was one whose life was as abandoned as his.
These two villains, during their lives, had the joy of gratifying
their desires. Since their death, they have had the (evil) fame of
folly and tyranny. But the reality (of enjoyment) is what no fame
can give. Reproach them— they do not know it. Praise them— they
do not know it. Their (ill) fame is no more to them than the
trunk of a tree, or a clod of earth.1"
How different all this is from Confucius! Again we suspect that time,
who is a reactionary, has preserved for us the most respectable of Chinese
thinkers, and has swallowed nearly all the rest in the limbo of forgotten
souls. And perhaps time is right: humanity itself could not long survive
if many were of Yan Chu's mind. The only answer to him is that society
cannot exist if the individual does not cooperate with his followers in the
give and take, the bear and forbear, of moral restraints; and the developed
individual cannot exist without society; our life depends upon those very
limitations that constrain us. Some historians have found in the spread of
such egoist philosophies part cause of that disintegration which marked
Chinese society in the fourth and third centuries before Christ."" No
wonder that Mencius, the Dr. Johnson of his age, raised his voice in
scandalized protest against the epicureanism of Yang Chu, as well as
against the idealism of Mo Ti.
The words of Yang Chu and Mo Ti fill the world. If you listen
to people's discourses about it, you will find that they have adopted
the views of the one or the other. Now Yang's principle is, "Each
for himself"— which does not acknowledge the claims of the sov-
ereign. Mo's principle is, "To love all equally"— which does not
682 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
acknowledge the peculiar affection due to a father. To acknowledge
neither king nor father is to be in the state of a beast. If their
principles are not stopped, and the principles of Confucius set forth,
their perverse speaking will delude the people, and stop up the path
of benevolence and righteousness.
I am alarmed by these things, and address myself to the de-
fense of the doctrines of the former sages, and to oppose Yang and
Mo. I drive away their licentious expressions, so that such perverse
speakers may not be able to show themselves. When sages shall
rise up again, they will not change my words.1*4
3. Mencius, Mentor of Princes
A model mother — A philosopher among kings — Are men by
nature good?— Single tax— Mencius and the communists
—The profit-motive— The right of revolution
Mencius, destined to be second in fame to Confucius alone in the rich
annals of Chinese philosophy, belonged to the ancient family of Mang; his
name Mang Ko was changed by an imperial decree to Mang-tze— i.e., Mang
the Master or Philosopher; and the Latin-trained scholars of Europe trans-
formed him into Mencius, as they had changed K'ung-fu-tze into Con-
fucius.
We know the mother of Mencius almost as intimately as we know
him; for Chinese historians, who have made her famous as a model of
maternity, recount many pretty stories of her. Thrice, we are told, she
changed her residence on his account: once because they lived near a
cemetery, and the boy began to behave like an undertaker; another time
because they lived near a slaughterhouse, and the boy imitated too well
the cries of the slain animals; and again because they lived near a market
place, and the boy began to act the part of a tradesman; finally she found
a home near a school, and was satisfied. When the boy neglected his
studies she cut through, in his presence, the thread of her shuttle; and
when he asked why she did so destructive a thing, she explained that she
was but imitating his own negligence, and the lack of continuity in his
studies and his development. He became an assiduous student, married,
resisted the temptation to divorce his wife, opened a school of philosophy,
gathered a famous collection of students about him, and received invita-
tions from various princes to come and discuss with them his theories of
government. He hesitated to leave his mother in her old age, but she sent
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 683
him off with a speech that endeared her to all Chinese males, and may
have been composed by one of them.
It does not belong to a woman to determine anything of herself,
but she is subject to the rule of the three obediences. When young
she has to obey her parents; when married she has to obey her
husband; when a widow she has to obey her son. You are a man in
your full maturity, and I am old. Do you act as your conviction of
righteousness tells you you ought to do, and I will act according to
the rule which belongs to me. Why should you be anxious about
me?185
He went, for the itch to teach is a part of the itch to rule; scratch the
one and find the other. Like Voltaire, Mencius preferred monarchy to
democracy, on the ground that in democracy it is necessary to educate
all if the government is to succeed, while under monarchy it is only re-
quired that the philosopher should bring one man— the king— to wisdom,
in order to produce the perfect state. "Correct what is wrong in the
prince's mind. Once rectify the prince, and the kingdom will be settled."1"8
He went first to Ch'i, and tried to rectify its Prince Hsuan; he accepted
an honorary office, but refused the salary that went with it; and soon
finding that the Prince was not interested in philosophy, he withdrew to
the small principality of T'ang, whose ruler became a sincere but in-
effectual pupil. Mencius returned to Ch'i, and proved his growth in
wisdom and understanding by accepting a lucrative office from Prince
Hsuan. When, during these comfortable years, his mother died, he buried
her with such pomp that his pupils were scandalized; he explained to them
that it was only a sign of his filial devotion. Some years later Hsuan set
out upon a war of conquest, and, resenting Mencius' untimely pacifism,
terminated his employment. Hearing that the Prince of Sung had ex-
pressed his intention of ruling like a philosopher, Mencius journeyed to
his court, but found that the report had been exaggerated. Like the men
invited to an ancient wedding-feast, the various princes had many excuses
for not being rectified. "I have an infirmity," said one of them; "I love
valor." "I have an infirmity," said another; "I am fond of wealth."1*1
Mencius retired from public life, and gave his declining years to the in-
struction of students and the composition of a work in which he de-
scribed his conversations with the royalty of his time. We cannot tell
to what extent these should be classed with those of Walter Savage Landor;
684 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
nor do we know whether this composition was the work of Mencius him-
self, or of his pupils, or of neither, or of both.188 We can only say that the
Book of Mencius is one of the most highly honored of China's philosophical
classics.
His doctrine is as severely secular as that of Confucius. There is little
here about logic, or epistemology, or metaphysics; the Confucians left
such subtleties to the followers of Lao-tze, and confined themselves to
moral and political speculation. What interests Mencius is the charting
of the good life, and the establishment of government by good men. His
basic claim is that men are by nature good,199 and that the social problem
arises not out of the nature of men but out of the wickedness of govern-
ments. Hence philosophers must become kings, or the kings of this world
must become philosophers.
"Now, if your Majesty will institute a government whose action
will be benevolent, this will cause all the officers in the kingdom
to wish to stand in your Majesty's court, and all the farmers to
wish to plough in your Majesty's fields, and all the merchants to
wish to store their goods in your Majesty's market-places, and all
traveling strangers to wish to make their tours on your Majesty's
roads, and all throughout the Kingdom who feel aggrieved by
their rulers to wish to come and complain to your Majesty. And
when they are so bent, who will be able to keep them back?"
The King said, "I am stupid, and not able to advance to this."170
The good ruler would war not against other countries, but against the
common enemy— poverty, for it is out of poverty and ignorance that
crime and disorder come. To punish men for crimes committed as the
result of a lack of opportunities offered them for employment is a dastardly
trap to set for the people.171 A government is responsible for the welfare
of its people, and should regulate economic processes accordingly.17" It
should tax chiefly the ground itself, rather than what is built or done on
it;"" it should abolish all tariffs, and should develop universal and com-
pulsory education as the soundest basis of a civilized development; "good
laws are not equal to winning the people by good instruction."174 "That
whereby man differs from the lower animals is but small. Most people
throw it away; only superior men preserve it."178
We perceive how old are the political problems, attitudes and solutions
of our enlightened age when we learn that Mencius was rejected by the
CHAP. XXIll) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 685
princes for his radicalism, and was scorned for his conservatism by the
socialists and communists of his time. When the "shrike-tongued bar-
barian of the south," Hsu Hsing, raised the flag of the proletarian dictator-
ship, demanding that workingmen should be made the heads of the state
("The magistrates," said Hsu, "should be laboring men"), and many of
"The Learned," then as now, flocked to the new standard, Mencius re-
jected the idea scornfully, and argued that government should be in the
hands of educated men."178 But he denounced the profit-motive in human
society, and rebuked Sung K'ang for proposing to win the kings to
pacifism by persuading them, in modern style, of the unprofitableness
of war.
Your aim is great, but your argument is not good. If you, starting
from the point of profit, offer your persuasive counsels to the kings
of Ch'in and Ch'i, and if those kings are pleased with the consid-
eration of profit so as to stop the movements of their armies,
then all belonging to those armies will rejoice in the cessation (of
war), and will find their pleasures in (the pursuit of) profit. Min-
isters will serve the sovereign for the profit of which they cherish
the thought; sons will serve their fathers, and younger brothers will
serve their elder brothers, from the same consideration; and the is-
sue will be that, abandoning benevolence and righteousness, sovereign
and minister, father and son, younger brother and elder, will carry
on all their intercourse with this thought of profit cherished in their
breasts. But never has there been such a state (of society), with-
out ruin being the result of it.177
He recognized the right of revolution, and preached it in the face of
kings. He denounced war as a crime, and shocked the hero-worshipers
of his time by writing: "There are men who say: 'I am skilful at marshal- ,
ing troops, I am skilful at conducting a battle.' They are great criminals."178
"There has never been a good war," he said.1™ He condemned the luxury
of the courts, and sternly rebuked the king who fed his dogs and swine
while famine was consuming his people.180 When a king argued that he
could not prevent famine, Mencius told him that he should resign.181 "The
people," he taught, "are the most important element (in a nation); . . .
the sovereign is the lighest";1" and the people have the right to depose
their rulers, even, now and then, to kill them.
The King Hsuan asked about the high ministers. . . . Mencius
answered: "If the princes have great faults, they ought to remon-
686 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
strata with him; and if he do not listen to them after they have done
so again and again, they ought to dethrone him." . . . Mencius pro-
ceeded: "Suppose that the chief criminal judge could not regulate
the officers (under him), how would you deal with him?" The
King said, "Dismiss him." Mencius again said: "If within the four
borders (of your kingdom) there is not good government, what is
to be done?" The King looked to the right and left, and spoke of
other matters. . . . The King Hsuan asked, "Was it so that T'ang
banished Chieh, and that King Wu smote Chou (Hsin)?" Mencius
replied, "It is so in the records." The King said, "May a minister
put his sovereign to death?" Mencius said: "He who outrages the
benevolence (proper to his nature) is called a robber; he who out-
rages righteousness is called a ruffian. The robber and the ruffian
we call a mere fellow. I have heard of the cutting off of the fel-
low Chou, but I have not heard of putting a sovereign to death."183
It was brave doctrine, and had much to do with the establishment of the
principle, recognized by the kings as well as the people of China, that
a ruler who arouses the enmity of his people has lost the "mandate of
Heaven," and may be removed. It is not to be marveled at that Hung-wu,
founder of the Ming Dynasty, having read with great indignation the
conversations of Mencius with King Hsuan, ordered Mencius to be de-
graded from his place in the temple of Confucius, where a royal edict of
1084 had erected his tablet. But within a year the tablet was restored;
and until the Revolution of 1911 Mencius remained one of the heroes of
China, the second great name and influence in the history of Chinese
orthodox philosophy. To him and to Chu Hsi* Confucius owed his in-
tellectual leadership of China for more than two thousand years.
4. Hsun-tze, Realist
The evil nature of man— The necessity of law
There were many weaknesses in Mencius' philosophy, and his contem-
poraries exposed them with a fierce delight. Was it true that men were
by nature good, and were led to evil only by wicked institutions?— or
was human nature itself responsible for the ills of society? Here was an
early formulation of a conflict that has raged for some eons between re-
formers and conservatives. Does education diminish crime, increase virtue,
* Cf. p. 731 below.
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 687
and lead men into Utopia? Are philosophers fit to govern states, or do
their theories worse confound the confusion which they seek to cure?
The ablest and most hardheaded of Mencius' critics was a public official
who seems to have died at the age of seventy about the year 235 B.C. As
Mencius had believed human nature to be good in all men, so Hsiin-tze
believed it to be bad in all men; even Shun and Yao were savages at birth."4
Hsiin, in the fragment that remains of him, writes like another Hobbes:
The nature of man is evil; the good which it shows is factitious.*
There belongs to it, even at his birth, the love of gain; and as ac-
tions are in accordance with this, contentions and robberies grow
up, and self-denial and yielding to others are not to be found (by
nature); there belong to it envy and dislike, and as actions are in
accordance with these, violence and injuries spring up, and self-
devotedness and faith are not to be found; there belong to it the de-
sires of the ears and the eyes, leading to the love of sounds and
beauty, and as the actions are in accordance with these, lewdness
and disorder spring up, and righteousness and propriety, with their
various orderly displays, are not to be found. It thus appears that
to follow man's nature and yield obedience to its feelings will as-
suredly conduct to contentions and robberies, to the violation of
the duties belonging to every one's lot, and the confounding of all
distinctions, till the issue will be a state of savagery; and that there
must be the influence of teachers and laws, and the guidance of pro-
priety and righteousness, from which will spring self-denial, yielding
to others, and an observance of the well-ordered regulations of con-
duct, till the issue will be a state of good government. . . . The
sage kings of antiquity, understanding that the nature of man was
thus evil, ... set up the principles of righteousness and propriety,
and framed laws and regulations to straighten and ornament the
feelings of that nature and correct them, ... so that they might all
go forth in the way of moral government and in agreement with
reason.1"
Hsiin-tze concluded, like Turgcniev, that nature is not a temple but a
workshop; she provides the raw material, but intelligence must do the
rest. By proper training, he thought, these naturally evil men might be
transformed even into saints, if that should be desirable.1* Being also a poet,
he put Francis Bacon into doggerel:
* I.e., the good in man is not born but made—by institutions and education.
688 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
You glorify Nature and meditate on her;
Why not domesticate her and regulate her?
You obey Nature and sing her praise;
Why not control her course and use it?
You look upon the seasons with reverence, and await them;
Why not respond to them by seasonly activities?
You depend on things and marvel at them;
Why not unfold your own ability and transform them?m
5. Chuang-tze, Idealist
The Return to Nature— Governmentless society— The Way of
Nature— The limits of the intellect— The evolution of man—
The Button-Moulder— The influence of Chinese phi-
losophy in Europe
The "return to Nature," however, could not be so readily discouraged;
it found voice in this age as in every other, and by what might be called
a natural accident its exponent was the most eloquent writer of his time.
Chuang-tze, loving Nature as the only mistress who always welcomed
him, whatever his infidelities or his age, poured into his philosophy the
poetic sensitivity of a Rousseau, and yet sharpened it with the satiric wit
of a Voltaire. Who could imagine Mencius so far forgetting himself as
to describe a man as having "a large goitre like an earthenware jar?"188
Chuang belongs to literature as well as to philosophy.
He was born in the province of Sung, and held minor office for a time
in the city of Khi-yiian. He visited the same courts as Mencius, but
neither, in his extant writings, mentions the other's name; perhaps they
loved each other like contemporaries. Story has it that he refused high
office twice. When the Duke of Wei offered him the prime ministry he
dismissed the royal messengers with a curtness indicative of a writer's
dreams: "Go away quickly, and do not soil me with your presence. I
had rather amuse and enjoy myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to
the rules and restrictions in the court of a sovereign."18* While he was
fishing two great officers brought him a message from the King of Khu:
"I wish to trouble you with the charge of all my territories." Chuang,
Chuang tells us, answered without turning away from his fishing:
"I have heard that in Khu there is a spirit-like tortoise-shell, the
wearer of which died three thousand years ago, and which the
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OK THE PHILOSOPHERS 689
king keeps, in his ancestral temple, in a hamper covered with a
cloth. Was it better for the tortoise to die and leave its shell to
be thus honored? Or would it have been better for it to live, and
keep on dragging its tail after it over the mud?" The two officers
said, "It would have been better for it to live, and draw its tail after
it over the mud." "Go your ways," said Chuang; "I will keep on
drawing my tail after me through the mud.""0
His respect for governments equaled that of his spiritual ancestor,
Lao-tze. He took delight in pointing out how many qualities kings and
governors shared with thieves.191 If, by some negligence on his part, a
true philosopher should find himself in charge of a state, his proper course
would be to do nothing, and allow men in freedom to build their own
organs of self-government. "I have heard of letting the world be, and
exercising forbearance; I have not heard of governing the world."183 The
Golden Age, which preceded the earliest kings, had no government; and
Yao and Shun, instead of being so honored by China and Confucius,
should be charged with having destroyed the primitive happiness of man-
kind by introducing government. "In the age of perfect virtue men lived
in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all
creatures, as forming one family: how could they know among them-
selves the distinctions of superior men and small men?"10*
The wise man, thinks Chuang, will take to his heels at the first sign of
government, and will live as far as possible from both philosophers and
kings. He will court the peace and silence of the woods (here was a
theme that a thousand Chinese painters would seek to illustrate), and let
his whole being, without any impediment of artifice or thought, follow
the divine Tao— the law and flow of Nature's inexplicable life. He would
be sparing of words, for words mislead as often as they guide, and the
Tao— the Way and the Essence of Nature— can never be phrased in words
or formed in thought; it can only be felt by the blood. He would reject
the aid of machinery, preferring the older, more burdensome ways of
simpler men; for machinery makes complexity, turbulence and inequality,
and no man can live among machines and achieve peace.194 He would
avoid the ownership of property, and would find no use in his life for
gold; like Timon he would let the gold lie hidden in the hills, and the pearls
remain unsought in the deep. "His distinction is in understanding that
all things belong to the one treasury, and that death and life should be
690 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
viewed in the same way"1"0— as harmonious measures in the rhythm of
Nature, waves of one sea.
The center of Chuang's thought, as of the thought of that half -legendary
Lao-tze who seemed to him so much profoundcr than Confucius, was a
mystic vision of an impersonal unity, so strangely akin to the doctrines
of Buddha and the Upanishads that one is tempted to believe that Indian
metaphysics had found its way into China long before the recorded com-
ing of Buddhism four hundred years later. It is true that Chuang is an
agnostic, a fatalist, a determinist and a pessimist; but this does not prevent
him from being a kind of sceptical saint, a Tdr0-intoxicated man. He
expresses his scepticism characteristically in a story:
The Penumbra said to the Umbra:* "At one moment you move,
at another you arc at rest. At one moment you sit down, at another
you get up. Why this instability of purpose?" "I depend," replied the
Umbra, "upon something which causes me to do as I do; and that
something depends upon something else which causes it to do as it
does. . . . How can I tell why I do one thing or do not do an-
other?" . . . When the body is decomposed, the mind will be de-
composed along with it; must not the case be pronounced very
deplorable? . . . The change— the rise and dissolution— of all things
(continually) goes on, but we do not know who it is that main-
tains and continues the process. How do we know when any one
begins? How do we know when he will end? We have simply to
wait for it, and nothing more.186
These problems, Chuang suspects, are due less to the nature of things
than to the limits of our thought; it is not to be wondered at that the
effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they
are such minute particles should end in contradictions, "antinomies," and
befuddlement. This attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has
been a gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the ground of the amuse-
ment which it has caused; for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the
part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The
intellect, says Chuang-tze, can never avail to understand ultimate things,
or any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. "Disputation is a
proof of not seeing clearly," and in order to understand the Tao, one "must
* In an eclipse the penumbra is the partly illuminated space between the umbra (the
complete shadow) and the light. Perhaps, in Chuang's allegory, the complete shadow is
the body, interrogated by the partly illuminated mind.
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 691
sternly suppress one's knowledge";107 we have to forget our theories and
feel the fact. Education is of no help towards such understanding; sub-
mersion in the flow of nature is all-important.
What is the Tao that the rare and favored mystic sees? It is inexpressible
in words; weakly and with contradictions we describe it as the unity of
all things, their quiet flow from origin to fulfilment, and the law that gov-
erns that flow. "Before there were heaven and earth, from of old it was,
securely existing."188 In that cosmic unity all contradictions are resolved,
all distinctions fade, all opposites meet; within it and from its standpoint
there is no good or bad, no white or black, no beautiful or ugly,* no great
or small. "If one only knows that the universe is but (as small as) a tare
seed, and the tip of a hair is as large as a mountain, then one may be said
to have seen the relativity of things."900 In that vague entirety no form is
permanent, and none so unique that it cannot pass into another in the
leisurely cycle of evolution.
The seeds (of things) are multitudinous and minute. On the sur-
face of the water they form a membranous texture. When they reach
to where the land and water join they become the (lichens that
form the) clothes of frogs and oysters. Coming to life on mounds
and heights, they become the plantain; and receiving manure, ap-
pear as crows' feet. The roots of the crow's foot become grubs,
and its leaves, butterflies. This butterfly is changed into an insect,
and comes to life under a furnace. Then it has the form of a moth.
The mother after a thousand days becomes a bird. . . . The ying-
hsi uniting with a bamboo produces the khing-ning; this, the pan-
ther; the panther, the horse; and the horse the man. Man then en-
ters into the great Machinery (of Evolution), from which all things
come forth, and which they enter at death.901
It is not as clear as Darwin, but it will serve.
In this endless cycle man himself may pass into other forms; his present
shape is transient, and from the viewpoint of eternity may be only super-
ficially real— part of Maya's deceptive veil of difference.
Once upon a time I, Chuang-tze, dreamt I was a butterfly, flut-
tering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly.
I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was
* "Hsi Shih was a beautiful woman; but when her features were reflected in the water
the fish were frightened away.""*
692 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIII
unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and
there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then
a man dreaming that I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a
butterfly dreaming that I am a man.""
Death is therefore only a change of form, possibly for the better; it is,
as Ibsen was to say, the great Button-Moulder who fuses us again in the
furnace of change:
Tze Lai fell ill and lay gasping at the point of death, while his
wife and children stood around him weeping. Li went to ask for
him, and said to them: "Hush! Get out of the way! Do not disturb
him in his process of transformation." . . . Then, leaning against the
door, he spoke to (the dying man). Tze Lai said: "A man's rela-
tions with the Yin and the Yang is more than that to his parents.
If they are hastening my death, and I do not obey, I shall be con-
sidered unruly. There is the Great Mass (of Nature), that makes
me carry this body, labor with this life, relax in old age, and rest
in death. Therefore that which has taken care of my birth is that
which will take care of my death. Here is a great founder cast-
ing his metal. If the metal, dancing up and down, should say, 1
must be made into a Mo Yeh' (a famous old sword), the great
founder would surely consider this metal an evil one. So, if, merely
because one has once assumed the human form, one insists on being
a man, and a man only, the author of transformation will be sure to
consider this one an evil being. Let us now regard heaven and
earth as a great melting-pot, and the author of transformation as a
great founder; and wherever we go, shall we not be at home?
Quiet is our sleep, and calm is our awakening."101
When Chuang himself was about to die his disciples prepared for him
a ceremonious funeral. But he bade them desist. "With heaven and earth
for my coffin and shell, with the sun, moon and stars as my burial regalia,
and with all creation to escort me to the grave— are not my funeral para-
phernalia ready to hand?" The disciples protested that, unburied, he
would be eaten by the carrion birds of the air. To which Chuang
answered, with the smiling irony of all his words: "Above ground I shall
be food for kites; below I shall be food for mole-crickets and ants. Why
rob one to feed the other?"104
If we have spoken at such length of the ancient philosophers of China
it is partly because the insoluble problems of human life and destiny
CHAP. XXIIl) THE AGE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 693
irresistibly attract the inquisitive mind, and partly because the lore of
her philosophers is the most precious portion of China's gift to the world.
Long ago (in 1697) the cosmic-minded Leibnitz, after studying Chinese
philosophy, appealed for the mingling and cross-fertilization of East and
West. "The condition of affairs among ourselves," he wrote, in terms
which have been useful to every generation, "is such that in view of the
inordinate lengths to which the corruption of morals has advanced, I
almost think it necessary that Chinese missionaries should be sent to us
to teach us the aim and practice of national theology. . . . For I believe
that if a wise man were to be appointed judge ... of the goodness of
peoples, he would award the golden apple to the Chinese."305 He begged
Peter the Great to build a land route to China, and he promoted the
foundation of societies in Moscow and Berlin for the "opening up of
China and the interchange of civilizations between China and Europe."806
In 1721 Christian Wolff made an attempt in this direction by lecturing at
Halle "On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese." He was accused of
atheism, and dismissed; but when Frederick mounted the throne he called
him to Prussia, and restored him to honor.*"
The Enlightenment took up Chinese philosophy at the same time that
it carved out Chinese gardens and adorned its homes with chinoiseries.
The Physiocrats seem to have been influenced by Lao-tze and Chuang-tze
in their doctrine of laissez-faire;** and Rousseau at times talked so like the
Old Master* that we at once correlate him with Lao-tze and Chuang, as
we should correlate Voltaire with Confucius and Mencius, if these had
been blessed with wit. "I have read the books of Confucius with atten-
tion," said Voltaire; "I have made extracts from them; I have found in
them nothing but the purest morality, without the slightest tinge of
charlatanism."810 Goethe in 1770 recorded his resolution to read the philo-
sophical classics of China; and when the guns of half the world resounded
at Leipzig forty-three years later, the old sage paid no attention to them,
being absorbed in Chinese literature.*1
May this brief and superficial introduction lead the reader on to study
the Chinese philosophers themselves, as Goethe studied them, and Vol-
taire, and Tolstoi.
* E.g.: "Luxury, dissoluteness and slavery have always been the chastisement of the
ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in which Eternal
Wisdom had placed us." Professor (now Senator) Elbert Thomas, who quotes this pass-
age from the Discourse on the Progress of the Sciences and Arts, considers "Eternal Wis-
dom" an excellent translation of Lao-tze's "Eternal Tao."*"
CHAPTER XXIV
The Age of the Poets
i. CHINA'S BISMARCK
The Period of Contending States — The suicide of CVu P'ing—
Shih Huang-ti unifies China— The Great Wall— The "Burn-
ing °f the Books"— The failure of Shih Huang-ti
PRESUMABLY Confucius died an unhappy man, for philosophers
love unity, and the nation that he had sought to unite under some
powerful dynasty persisted in chaos, corruption and division. When the
great unifier finally appeared, and succeeded, by his military and admin-
istrative genius, in welding the states of China into one, he ordered that
all existing copies of Confucius' books should be burned.
We may judge the atmosphere of this "Period of the Contending
States" from the story of Ch'u P'ing. Having risen to promise as a poet
and to high place as an official, he found himself suddenly dismissed. He
retired to the countryside, and contemplated life and death beside a quiet
brook. Tell me, he asked an oracle,
whether I should steadily pursue the path of truth and loyalty, or
follow in the wake of a corrupt generation. Should I work in the
fields with spade and hoe, or seek advancement in the retinue of a
grandee? Should I court danger with outspoken words, or fawn
in false tones upon the rich and great? Should I rest content in the
cultivation of virtue, or practise the art of wheedling women in
order to secure success? Should I be pure and clean-handed in my
rectitude, or an oil-mouthed, slippery, time-serving sycophant?1
He dodged the dilemma by drowning himself (ca. 350 B.C.); and until our
own day the Chinese people celebrated his fame annually in the Dragon-
boat Festival, during which they searched for his body in every stream.
The man who unified China had the most disreputable origin that
the Chinese historians could devise. Shih Huang-ti, we are informed,
was the illegitimate son of the Queen of Ch'in (one of the western states)
694
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 695
by the noble minister Lii, who was wont to hang a thousand pieces of
gold at his gate as a reward to any man who should better his composi-
tions by so much as a single word.8 (His son did not inherit these literary
tastes.) Shih, reports Szuma Ch'ien, forced his father to suicide, persecuted
his mother, and ascended the ducal throne when he was twelve years of
age. When he was twenty-five he began to conquer and annex the petty
states into which China had so long been divided. In 230 B.C. he con-
quered Han; in 228, Chao; in 225, Wei; in 223, Ch'u; in 222, Yen; finally,
in 221, the important state of Ch'i. For the first time in many centuries,
perhaps for the first time in history, China was under one rule. The con-
queror took the title of Shih Huang-ti, and turned to the task of giving
the new empire a lasting constitution.
"A man with a very prominent nose, with large eyes, with the chest
of a bird of prey, with the voice of a jackal, without beneficence, and with
the heart of a tiger or a wolf"— this is the only description that the
Chinese historians have left us of their favorite enemy.8 He was a robust
and obstinate soul, recognizing no god but himself, and pledged, like some
Nietzschean Bismarck, to unify his country by blood and iron. Having
forged and mounted the throne of China, one of his first acts was to pro-
tect the country from the barbarians on the north by piecing together
and completing the walls already existing along the frontier; and he found
the multitude of his domestic opponents a convenient source of recruits
for this heroic symbol of Chinese grandeur and patience. The Great Wall,
1500 miles long, and adorned at intervals with massive gateways in the
Assyrian style, is the largest structure ever reared by man; beside it, said
Voltaire, "the pyramids of Egypt are only puerile and useless masses."4
It took ten years and countless men; "it was the ruin of one generation,"
say the Chinese, "and the salvation of many." It did not quite keep out
the barbarians, as we shall see; but it delayed and reduced their attacks.
The Huns, barred for a time from Chinese soil, moved west into Europe
and down into Italy; Rome fell because China built a wall.
Meanwhile Shih Fluang-ti, like Napoleon, turned with pleasure from
war to administration, and created the outlines of the future Chinese state.
He accepted the advice of his Legalist prime minister, Li Ssii, and re-
solved to base Chinese society not, as heretofore, upon custom and local
autonomy, but upon explicit law and a powerful central government.
He broke the power of the feudal barons, replaced them with a nobility
of functionaries appointed by the national ministry, placed in each district
696 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
a military force independent of the civil governor, introduced uniform
laws and regulations, simplified official ceremonies, issued a state coinage,
divided most of the feudal estates, prepared for the prosperity of China
by establishing peasant proprietorship of the soil, and paved the way
for a completer unity by building great highways in every direction from
his capital at Hien-yang. He embellished this city with many palaces,
and persuaded the 120,000 richest and most powerful families of the em-
pire to live under his observant eye. Traveling in disguise and unarmed,
he made note of abuses and disorders, and then Issued unmistakable orders
for their correction. He encouraged science and discouraged letters.6
For the men of letters— the poets, the critics, the philosophers, above
all the Confucian scholars—were his sworn foes. They fretted under his
dictatorial authority, and saw in the establishment of one supreme govern-
ment an end to that variety and liberty of thought and life which had
made literature flourish amid the wars and divisions of the Chou Dynasty.
When they protested to Shih Huang-ti against his ignoring of ancient
ceremonies, he sent them curtly about their business.' A commission of
mandarins, or official scholars, brought to him their unanimous suggestion
that he should restore the feudal system by giving fiefs to his relatives;
and they added: "For a person, in any matter, not to model himself on
antiquity, and yet to achieve duration— that, to our knowledge, has never
happened."7 The prime minister, Li Ssii, who was at that time engaged
in reforming the Chinese script, and establishing it approximately in the
form which it retained till our own time, met these criticisms with an
historic speech that did no service to Chinese letters:
The Five Sovereigns did not repeat each other's actions, the Three
Royal Dynasties did not imitate each other; . . . for the times had
changed. Now your Majesty has for the first time accomplished
a great work and has founded a glory which will last for ten thou-
sand generations. The stupid mandarins are incapable of under-
standing this. ... In ancient days China was divided up and trou-
bled; there was no one who could unify her. That is why all the
nobles flourished. In their discourses the mandarins all talk of the
ancient days, in order to blacken the present. . . . They encour-
age the people to forge calumnies. This being so, if they are not
opposed, among the upper classes the position of the sovereign will
be depreciated, while among the lower classes associations will
flourish. . . .
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 697
I suggest that the official histories, with the exception of the
Memoirs of CWin, be all burnt, and that those who attempt to hide
the Shi-Ching, the Shu-Ching* and the Discourses of the Hundred
Schools, be forced to bring them to the authorities to be burnt.'
The Emperor liked the idea considerably, &nd issued the order; the
books of the historians were everywhere brought to the flames, so that
the weight of the past should be removed from the present, and the his-
tory of China might begin with Shih Huang-ti. Scientific books, and the
works of Mencius, seem to have been excepted from the conflagration,
and many of the forbidden books were preserved in the Imperial Library,
where they might be consulted by such students as had obtained official
permission." Since books were then written on strips of bamboo fastened
with swivel pins, and a volume might be of some weight, the scholars who
sought to evade the order were put to many difficulties. A number of
them were detected; tradition says that many of them were sent to labor
on the Great Wall, and that four hundred and sixty were put to death.10
Nevertheless some of the literati memorized the complete works of Con-
fucius, and passed them on by word of mouth to equal memories. Soon
after the Emperor's death these volumes were freely circulated again,
though many errors, presumably, had crept into their texts. The only
permanent result was to lend an aroma of sanctity to the proscribed litera-
ture, and to make Shih Huang-ti unpopular with the Chinese historians.
For generations the people expressed their judgment of him by befouling
his grave."
The destruction of powerful families, and of freedom in writing and
speech, left Shih almost friendless in his declining years. Attempts were
made to assassinate him; he discovered them in time, and slew the assailants
with his own hand.13 He sat on his throne with a sword across his knees,
and let no man know in what room of his many palaces he would sleep."
Like Alexander he sought to strengthen his dynasty by spreading the
notion that he was a god; but as the comparison limped, he, like Alex-
ander, failed. He decreed that his dynastic successors should number
themselves from him as "First Emperor," down to the ten thousandth of
their line; but the line ended with his son. In his old age, if we credit the
historians who hated him, he became superstitious, and went to much
expense to find an elixir of immortality. When he died, his body was
* Cf . p. 665 below.
698 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
brought back secretly to his capital; and to conceal its smell it was con-
voyed by a caravan of decaying fish. Several hundred maidens (we are
told) were buried alive to keep him company; and his successor, grateful
for his death, lavished art and money upon the tomb. The roof was
studded with constellations, and a map of the empire was traced in quick-
silver on the floor of bronze. Machines were erected in the vault for the
automatic slaughter of intruders; and huge candles were lit in the hope
that they would for an indefinite period illuminate the doings of the dead
emperor and his queens. The workmen who brought the coffin into the
tomb were buried alive with their burden, lest they should live to reveal
the secret passage to the grave.14
II. EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIALISM
Chaos and poverty —The Han Dynasty— The reforms of Wu Ti—
The income tax— The planned economy of Wang Mang
—Its overthrow— The Tatar invasion
Disorder followed his death, as it has followed the passing of almost
every dictator in history; only an immortal can wisely take all power into
his hands. The people revolted against his son, killed him soon after he
had killed Li Ssii, and put an end to the Ch'in Dynasty within five years
after its founder's death. Rival princes established rival kingdoms, and
disorder ruled again. Then a clever condottiere, Kao-tsu, seized the throne
and founded the Han Dynasty, which, with some interruptions and a
change of capital,* lasted four hundred years. Wen Ti (179-57 B.C.)
restored freedom of speech and writing, revoked the edict by which Shih
Huang-ti had forbidden criticism of the government, pursued a policy
of peace, and inaugurated the Chinese custom of defeating a hostile gen-
eral with gifts."
The greatest of the Han emperors was Wu Ti. In a reign of over half
a century (140-87 B.C.) he pushed back the invading barbarians, and ex-
tended the rule of China over Korea, Manchuria, Annam, Indo-China and
Turkestan; now for the first time China acquired those vast dimensions
which we have been wont to associate with her name. Wu Ti experi-
mented with socialism by establishing national ownership of natural re-
• The "Western Han" Dynasty, 206 B.C.— 24 AJ>., had its capital at Lo-yang, now Honan-
fu; the "Eastern Han" Dynasty, 24-221 AJ>., had its capital at Ch'ang-an, now Sian-fu. The
Chinese still call themselves the "Sons of Han."
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 699
sources, to prevent private individuals from "reserving to their sole use
the riches of the mountains and the sea in order to gain a fortune, and
from putting the lower classes into subjection to themselves."16 The pro-
duction of salt and iron, and the manufacture and sale of fermented drinks,
were made state monopolies. To break the power of middlemen and
speculators— "those who buy on credit and make loans, those who buy to
heap up in the towns, those who accumulate all sorts of commodities"
as the contemporary historian, Szuma Ch'ien expressed it— Wu Ti estab-
lished a national system of transport and exchange, and sought to control
trade in such a way as to prevent sudden variations in price. State work-
ingmen made all the means of transportation and delivery in the empire.
The state stored surplus goods, selling them when prices were rising too
rapidly, buying them when prices were falling; in this way, says Szuma
Ch'ien, "the rich merchants and large shop-keepers would be prevented
from making big profits, . . . and prices would be regulated throughout
the empire."17 All incomes had to be registered with the government, and
had to pay an annual tax of five per cent. In order to facilitate the pur-
chase and consumption of commodities the Emperor enlarged the supply
of currency by issuing coins of silver alloyed with tin. Great public works
were undertaken in order to provide employment for the millions whom
private industry had failed to maintain; bridges were flung across China's
streams, and innumerable canals were cut to bind the rivers and irrigate
the fields."*
For a time the new system flourished. Trade grew in amount, variety
and extent, and bound China even with the distant nations of the Near
East.30 The capital, Lo-yang, increased in population and wealth, and the
coffers of the government were swollen with revenue. Scholarship flour-
ished, poetry abounded, and Chinese pottery began to be beautiful. In the
Imperial Library there were 3,123 volumes on the classics, 2,705 on
philosophy, 1,318 on poetry, 2,568 on mathematics, 868 on medicine, 790
on war.111 Only those who had passed the state examinations were eligible
* "The situation," says Granet, ". . . was revolutionary. If the Emperor Wu had had
some kindred spirit, he might have been able to profit by this and create, in a new order
of society, the Chinese State. . . . But the Emperor only saw the most urgent needs. He
seems only to have thought of using varied expedients from day to day— rejected when
they had yielded sufficient to appear worn out— and new men— sacrificed as soon as they
had succeeded well enough to assume a dangerous air of authority. The restlessness of
the despot and the short vision of the imperial law-makers made China miss the rarest
opportunity she had had to become a compact and organized state."19
700 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIV
to public office, and these examinations were open to all. China had never
prospered so before.
A combination of natural misfortunes with human deviltry put an end
to this brave experiment. Floods alternated with droughts, and raised
prices beyond control. Harassed by the high cost of food and clothing,
the people began to clamor for a return to the good old days of an
idealized past, and proposed that the inventor of the new system should
be boiled alive. Business men protested that state control had diminished
healthy initiative and competition, and they objected to paying, for the
support of these experiments, the high taxes levied upon them by the
government." Women entered the court, acquired a secret influence over
important functionaries, and became an element in a wave of official
corruption that spread far and wide after the death of the Emperor.38
Counterfeiters imitated the new currency so successfully that it had to
be withdrawn. The business of exploiting the weak was resumed under
a new management, and for a century the reforms of Wu Ti were for-
gotten or reviled.
At the beginning of our era— eighty-four years after Wu Ti's death
—another reformer ascended the throne of China, first as regent, and
then as emperor. Wang Mang was of the highest type of Chinese gentle-
man.* Though rich, he lived temperately, even frugally, and scattered
his income among his friends and the poor. Absorbed in the vital
struggle to reorganize the economic and political life of his country,
he found time nevertheless not only to patronize literature and scholar-
ship, but to become an accomplished scholar himself. On his accession to
power he surrounded himself not with the usual politicians, but with men
trained in letters and philosophy; to these men his enemies attributed his
failure, and his friends attributed his success.
Shocked by the development of slavery on the large estates of China,
Wang Mang, at the very outset of his reign, abolished both the slavery
and the estates by nationalizing the land. He divided the soil into equal
tracts and distributed it among the peasants; and, to prevent the renewed
concentration of wealth, he forbade the sale or purchase of land.* He
continued the state monopolies of salt and iron, and added to them state
ownership of mines and state control of the traffic in wine. Like Wu Ti
he tried to protect the cultivator and the consumer against the merchant
by fixing the prices of commodities. The state bought agricultural sur-
• Unless there is truth in the rumor circulated on the death of the boy emperor, in the
year 5 AJ>., that Wang Mang's family had poisoned him.**
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 7<H
pluses in time of plenty, and sold them in time of dearth. Loans were
made by the government, at low rates of interest, for any productive
enterprise.98
Wang had conceived his policies in economic terms, and had forgotten
the nature of man. He worked long hours, day and night, to devise
schemes that would make the nation rich and happy; and he was heart-
broken to find that social disorder mounted during his reign. Natural
calamities like drought and flood continued to disrupt his planned
economy, and all the groups whose greed had been clipped by his reforms
united to plot his fall. Revolts broke out, apparently among the people,
but probably financed from above; and while Wang, bewildered by such
ingratitude, struggled to control these insurrections, subject peoples weak-
ened his prestige by throwing off the Chinese yoke, and the Hsiung-nu
barbarians overran the northern provinces. The rich Liu family put
itself at the head of a general rebellion, captured Chang-an, slew Wang
Mang, and annulled his reforms. Everything was as before.
The Han line ended in a succession of weak emperors, and was fol-
lowed by a chaos of petty dynasties and divided states. Despite the Great
Wall the Tatars poured down into China, and conquered large areas of
the north. And as the Huns broke down the organization of the Roman
Empire, and helped to plunge Europe into a Dark Age for a hundred
years, so the inroads of these kindred Tatars disordered the life of China,
and put an end for a while to the growth of civilization. We may judge
the strength of the Chinese stock, character and culture from the fact that
this disturbance was much briefer and less profound than that which
ruined Rome. After an interlude of war and chaos, and racial mixture
with the invaders, Chinese civilization recovered, and enjoyed a brilliant
resurrection. The very blood of the Tatars served, perhaps, to reinvig-
orate a nation already old. The Chinese accepted the conquerprs, married
them, civilized them, and advanced to the zenith of their history.
III. THE GLORY OF T?ANG
The new dynasty— T^ai Tsung's method of reducing crime— An
age of prosperity— The "Brilliant Emperor"— The romance
of Yang Kwei-fei—The rebellion of An Lu-shan
The great age of China owed its coming partly to this new biological
mixture,* partly to the spiritual stimulation derived from the advent of
* Cf. Sir W. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization. London, n.d.
702 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
Buddhism, partly to the genius of one of China's greatest emperors, T'ai
Tsung (627-50 A.D.) At the age of twenty-one he was raised to the
throne by the abdication of his father, a second Kao-tsu, who had estab-
lished the T'ang Dynasty nine years before. He began unprepossessingly
by murdering the brothers who threatened to displace him; and then he
exercised his military abilities by pushing back the invading barbarians
into their native haunts, and reconquering those neighboring territories
which had thrown off Chinese rule after the fall of the Han. Suddenly
he grew tired of war, and returning to his capital, Ch'ang-an, gave him-
self to the ways of peace. He read and re-read the works of Confucius,
and had them published in a resplendent format, saying: "By using a
mirror of brass you may see to adjust your cap; by using antiquity as a
mirror you may learn to foresee the rise and fall of empires." He refused
all luxuries, and sent away the three thousand ladies who had been chosen
to entertain him. When his ministers recommended severe laws for the
repression of crime, he told them: "If I diminish expenses, lighten the
taxes, employ only honest officials, so that the people have clothing
enough, this will do more to abolish robbery than the employment of the
severest punishments."37
One day he visited the jails of Ch'ang-an, and saw two hundred and
ninety men who had been condemned to die. He sent them out to till
the fields, relying solely on their word of honor that they would return.
Every man came back; and T'ai Tsung was so well pleased that he set
them all free. He laid it down then that no emperor should ratify a death
sentence until he had fasted three days. He made his capital so beautiful
that tourists flocked to it from India and Europe. Buddhist monks arrived
in great numbers from India, and Chinese Buddhists, like Yuan Chwang,
traveled freely to India to study the new religion of China at its source.
Missionaries came to Ch'ang-an to preach Zoroastrianism and Nestorian
Christianity; the Emperor, like Akbar, welcomed them, gave them pro-
tection and freedom, and exempted their temples from taxation, at a time
when Europe was sunk in poverty, intellectual darkness, and theological
strife. He himself remained, without dogma or prejudice, a simple Con-
fucian. "When he died," says a brilliant historian, "the grief of the people
knew no bounds, and even the foreign envoys cut themselves with knives
and lancets and sprinkled the dead emperor's bier with their self -shed
blood""
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 703
He had paved the way for China's most creative age. Rich with fifty
years of comparative peace and stable government, she began to export her
surplus of rice, corn, silk, and spices, and spent her profits on unparalleled
luxury. Her lakes were filled with carved and painted pleasure-boats; her
rivers and canals were picturesque with commerce, and from her harbors
ships sailed to distant ports on the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf.
Never before had China known such wealth; never had she enjoyed such
abundant food, such comfortable houses, such exquisite clothing." While
silk was selling in Europe for its weight in gold,80 it was a routine article
of dress for half the population of the larger cities of China, and fur coats
were more frequent in eighth-century Ch'ang-an than in twentieth-century
New York. One village near the capital had silk factories employing a
hundred thousand men.11 "What hospitality!" exclaimed Li Po, "what
squandering of money! Red jade cups and rare dainty food on tables in-
laid with green gems!"82 Statues were carved out of rubies, and pretentious
corpses were buried on beds of pearl.88 The great race was suddenly
enamored of beauty, and lavished honors on those who could create it.
"At this age," says a Chinese critic, "whoever was a man was a poet."84
Emperors promoted poets and painters to high office, and "Sir John Man-
ville"* would have it that no one dared to address the Emperor save "it be
mynstrelles that singen and tellen gestcs."35 In the eighteenth century of
our era Manchu emperors ordered an anthology to be prepared of the
T'ang poets; the result was thirty volumes, containing 48,900 poems by
2,300 poets; so much had survived the criticism of time. The Imperial
Library had grown to 54,000 volumes. "At this time," says Murdoch,
"China undoubtedly stood in the very forefront of civilization. She was
then the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and
the best-governed, empire on the face of the globe.8* "It was the most
polished epoch that the world had ever seen."t
At the head and height of it was Ming Huang— i.e., "The Brilliant Em-
peror"—who ruled China, with certain intermissions, for some forty years
(713-56 A.D.). He was a man full of human contradictions: he wrote
poetry and made war upon distant lands, exacting tribute from Turkey,
* The assumed name of a French physician who in the fourteenth century composed a
volume of travels, mostly imaginary, occasionally illuminating, always fascinating.
t Arthur Waley." Cf. the Encyclopedia Britannica (i4th ed., xviii, 361): "In the "Fang
Dynasty . -China was without doubt the greatest and most civilized power in the world."
704 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
Persia and Samarkand; he abolished capital punishment and reformed the
administration of prisons and courts; he levied taxes mercilessly, suffered
poets, artists and scholars gladly, and established a college of music in his
"Pear Tree Garden." He began his reign like a Puritan, closing the silk
factories and forbidding the ladies of the palace to wear jewelry or em-
broidery; he ended it like an epicurean, enjoying every art and every
luxury, and at last sacrificing his throne for the smiles of Yang Kwei-fei.
When he met her he was sixty and she was twenty-seven; for ten years
she had been the concubine of his eighteenth son. She was corpulent and
wore false hair, but the Emperor loved her because she was obstinate,
capricious, domineering and insolent. She accepted his admiration gra-
ciously, introduced him to five families of her relatives, and permitted
him to find sinecures for them at the court. Ming called his lady "The
Great Pure One," and learned from her the gentle art of dissipation. The
Son of Heaven thought little now of the state and its affairs; he placed
all the powers of government in the hands of the Pure One's brother, the
corrupt and incapable Yang Kuo-chung; and while destruction gathered
under him he reveled through the days and nights.
An Lu-shan, a Tatar courtier, also loved Yang Kwci-fei. He won the
confidence of the Emperor, who promoted him to the post of provincial
governor in the north, and placed under his command the finest armies
in the realm. Suddenly An Lu-shan proclaimed himself emperor, and
turned his armies toward Ch'ang-an. The long-neglected defenses fell, and
Ming deserted his capital. The soldiers who escorted him rebelled, slew
Yang Kuo-chung and all the five families, and, snatching Yang Kwei-fei
from the monarch's hands, killed her before his eyes. Old and beaten, the
Emperor abdicated. An Lu-shan's barbaric hordes sacked Ch'ang-an, and
slaughtered the population indiscriminately.* Thirty-six million people
are said to have lost their lives in the rebellion.8" In the end it failed; An
Lu-shan was killed by his son, who was killed by a general, who was
killed by his son. By the year 762 A.D. the turmoil had worn itself out,
and Ming Huang returned, heart-broken, to his ruined capital. There, a
few months later, he died. In this framework of romance and tragedy
the poetry of China flourished as never before.
* "When the Tatars overthrew Ming Huang and sacked Chang-an," says Arthur Waley,
"it was as if Turks had ravaged Versailles in the time of Louis XIV."M
CHAP.XXIV) THEAGEOFTHEPOETS 705
IV. THE BANISHED ANGEL
An anecdote of Li Po—His youth, prowess and loves— On the
imperial barge — The gospel of the grape — War — The
Wanderings of Li Po—In prison— "Deathless Poetry"
One day, at the height of his reign, Ming Huang received ambassadors
from Korea, who brought him important messages written in a dialect
which none of his ministers could understand. "What!" exclaimed the
Emperor, "among so many magistrates, so many scholars and warriors,
cannot there be found a single one who knows enough to relieve us of
vexation in this affair? If in three days no one is able to decipher this
letter, every one of your appointments shall be suspended."
For a day the ministers consulted and fretted, fearing for their offices
and their heads. Then Minister Ho Chi-chang approached the throne and
said: "Your subject presumes to announce to your Majesty that there is
a poet of great merit, called Li, at his house, who is profoundly acquainted
with more than one science; command him to read this letter, for there
is nothing of which he is not capable." The Emperor ordered Li to present
himself at court immediately. But Li refused to come, saying that he could
not possibly be worthy of the task assigned him, since his essay had been
rejected by the mandarins at the last examination for public office. The
Emperor soothed him by conferring upon him the title and robes of
doctor of the first rank. Li came, found his examiners among the ministers,
forced them to take off his boots, and then translated the document, which
announced that Korea proposed to make war for the recovery of its free-
dom. Having read the message, Li dictated a learned and terrifying reply,
which the Emperor signed without hesitation, almost believing what Flo
whispered to him— that Li was an angel banished from heaven for some
impish deviltry.*0* The Koreans sent apologies and tribute, and the Em-
peror sent part of the tribute to Li. Li gave it to the innkeeper, for he
loved wine.
On the night of the poet's birth his mother— of the family of Li— had
dreamed of Tai-po Hsing, the Great White Star, which in the West is
called Venus. So the child was named Li, meaning plum, and sur-
named Tai-po, which is to say, The White Star. At ten he had mas-
tered all the books of Confucius, and was composing immortal poetry.
• It is * pretty talc, perhaps composed by Li Po.
706 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
At twelve he went to live like a philosopher in the mountains, and stayed
there for many years. He grew in health and strength, practised swords-
manship, and then announced his abilities to the world: "Though less than
seven (Chinese) feet in height, I am strong enough to meet ten thousand
men."41 ("Ten thousand" is Chinese for many.) Then he wandered leis-
urely about the earth, drinking the lore of love from varied lips. He sang
a song to the "Maid of Wu":
Wine of the grapes,
Goblets of gold—
And a pretty maid of Wu—
She comes on pony-back; she is fifteen.
Blue-painted eyebrows-
Shoes of pink brocade-
Inarticulate speech—
But she sings bewitchingly well.
So, feasting at the table,
Inlaid with tortoise-shell,
She gets drunk in my lap.
Ah, child, what caresses
Behind lily-broidered curtains!41
He married, but earned so little money that his wife left him, taking the
children with her. Was it to her, or to some less-wonted flame, that he
wrote his wistful lines?—
Fair one, when you were here, I filled the house with flowers.
Fair one, now you are gone— only an empty couch is left.
On the couch the embroidered quilt is rolled up; I cannot sleep.
It is three years since you went. The perfume you left behind
haunts me still.
The perfume strays about me forever; but where are you, Beloved?
I sigh— the yellow leaves fall from the branch;
I weep— the dew twinkles white on the green mosses.**
He consoled himself with wine, and became one of the "Six Idlers of
the Bamboo Grove," who took life without haste, and let their songs and
poems earn their uncertain bread. Hearing the wine of Niauchung highly
commended, Li set out at once for that city, three hundred miles away.44
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 707
In his wanderings he met Tu Fu, who was to be his rival for China's
poetic crown; they exchanged lyrics, went hand in hand like brothers, and
slept under the same coverlet until fame divided them. Everybody loved
them, for they were as harmless as saints, and spoke with the same pride
and friendliness to paupers and kings. Finally they entered Ch'ang-an;
and the jolly minister Ho loved Li's poetry so well that he sold gold orna-
ments to buy him drinks. Tu Fu describes him:
As for Li Po, give him a jugful,
He will write one hundred poems.
He dozes in a wine-shop
On a city-street of Chang-an;
And though his Sovereign calls,
He will not board the Imperial barge.
"Please, your Majesty," says he,
"I am a god of wine."
Those were merry days when the Emperor befriended him, and show-
ered him with gifts for singing the praises of the Pure One, Yang Kwei-
f ei. Once Ming held a royal Feast of the Peonies in the Pavilion of Aloes,
and sent for Li Po to come and make verses in honor of his mistress. Li
came, but too drunk for poetry; court attendants threw cold water upon
his amiable face, and soon the poet burst into song, celebrating the rivalry
of the peonies with Lady Yang:
The glory of trailing clouds is in her garments,
And the radiance of a flower on her face.
O heavenly apparition, found only far above
On the top of the Mountain of Many Jewels,
Or in the fairy Palace of Crystal when the moon is up!
Yet I sec her here in the earth's garden—
The spring wind softly sweeps the balustrade,
And the dew-drops glisten thickly. . . .
Vanquished are the endless longings of love
Borne into the heart on the winds of spring.4*
Who would not have been pleased to be the object of such song? And
yet the Lady Yang was persuaded that the poet had subtly satirized her;
and from that moment she bred suspicion of him in the heart of the King.
708 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
He presented Li Po with a purse, and let him go. Once again the poet
took to the open road, and consoled himself with wine. He joined those
"Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup" whose drinkings were the talk of
Ch'ang-an. He accepted the view of Liu Ling, who desired always to be
followed by two servants, one with wine, the other with a spade to bury
him where he fell; for, said Liu, "the affairs of this world are no more
than duckweed in the river."4* The poets of China were resolved to atone
for the Puritanism of Chinese philosophy. "To wash and rinse our souls
of their age-old sorrows," said Li Po, "we drained a hundred jugs of
wine."47 And he intones like Omar the gospel of the grape:
The swift stream pours into the sea and returns never more.
Do you not see high on yonder tower
A white-haired one sorrowing before his bright mirror?
In the morning those locks were like black silk,
In the evening they are all like snow.
Let us, while we may, taste the old delights,
And leave not the golden cask of wine
To stand alone in the moonlight. . . .
I desire only the long ecstasy of wine,
And desire not to awaken. . . .
Now let you and me buy wine today!
Why say we have not the price?
My horse spotted with fine flowers,
My fur coat worth a thousand pieces of gold,
These I will take out, and call my boy
To barter them for sweet wine,
And with you twain, let me forget
The sorrow of ten thousand ages!41
What were these sorrows? The agony of despised love? Hardly; for
though the Chinese take love as much to heart as we do, their poets do not
so frequently intone its pains. It was war and exile, An Lu-shan and
the taking of the capital, the flight of the Emperor and the death of
Yang, the return of Ming Huang to his desolated halls, that gave Li the
taste of human tragedy. "There is no end to war!" he mourns; and then
his heart goes out to the women who have lost their husbands to Mars.
CHAP.XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 709
Tis December. Lo, tne pensive maid of Yu-chow!
She will not sing, she will not smile; her moth eyebrows are di-
sheveled.
She stands by the gate and watches the wayfarers pass,
Remembering him who snatched his sword and went to save the
border-land,
Him who suffered bitterly in the cold beyond the Great Wall,
Him who fell in the battle, and will never come back.
In the tiger-striped gold case for her keeping
There remains a pair of white-feathered arrows
Amid the cobwebs and dust gathered of long years—
0 empty dreams of love, too sad to look upon!
She takes them out and burns them to ashes.
By building a dam one may stop the flow of the Yellow River,
But who can assuage the grief of her heart when it snows, and
the north wind blows?40
We picture him now wandering from city to city, from state to state,
much as Tsui Tsung-chi described him: "A knapsack on your back filled
with books, you go a thousand miles and more, a pilgrim. Under your
sleeves there is a dagger, and in your pocket a collection of poems."* In
these long wanderings his old friendship with nature gave him solace and
an unnamable peace; and through his lines we see his land of flowers,
and feel that urban civilization already lay heavy on the Chinese soul:
Why do I live among the green mountains?
1 laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.
The peach trees are in flower, and the water flows on."
Or again:
I saw the moonlight before my couch,
And wondered if it were not the frost on the ground.
I raised my head and looked out on the mountain-moon;
I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home."
710 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
Now, as his hair grew white, his heart was flooded with longing for
the scenes of his youth. How many times, in the artificial life of the
capital, he had pined for the natural simplicity of parentage and home!
In the land of Wu the mulberry leaves are green,
And thrice the silkworms have gone to sleep.
In East Luh, where my family stays,
I wonder who is sowing those fields of ours.
I cannot be back in time for the spring doings,
Yet I can help nothing, traveling on the river.
The south wind, blowing, wafts my homesick spirit
And carries it up to the front of our familiar tavern.
There I see a peach-tree on the east side of the house,
With thick leaves and branches waving in the blue mist.
It is the tree I planted before my parting three years ago.
The peach-tree has grown now as tall as the tavern-roof,
While I have wandered about without returning.
Ping-yang, my pretty daughter, I see you stand
By the peach-tree, and pluck a flowering branch.
You pluck the flowers, but I am not there-
How your tears flow like a stream of water!
My little son, Po-chin, grown up to your sister's shoulders,
You come out with her under the peach-tree;
But who is there to pat you on the back?
When I think of these things my senses fail,
And a sharp pain cuts my heart every day.
Now I tear off a piece of white silk to write this letter,
And send it to you with my love a long way up the river."*
His last years were bitter, for he had never stooped to make money,
and in the chaos of war and revolution he found no king to keep him from
starvation. Gladly he accepted the offer of Li-ling, Prince of Yung, to
join his staff; but Li-ling revolted against the successor of Ming Huang,
and when the revolt was suppressed, Li Po found himself in jail, con-
demned to death as a traitor to the state. Then Kuo Tsi-i, the general
who had put down the rebellion of An Lu-shan, begged that Li Po's
life might be ransomed by the forfeit of his own rank and title. The
Emperor commuted the sentence to perpetual banishment. Soon there-
CHAP. XXIV) THEAGEOFTHEPOETS 711
after a general amnesty was declared, and the poet turned his faltering
steps homeward. Three years later he sickened and died; and legend, dis-
content with an ordinary end for so rare a soul, told how he was drowned
in a river while attempting, in hilarious intoxication, to embrace the
water's reflection of the moon.
All in all, the thirty volumes of delicate and kindly verse which he left
behind him warrant his reputation as the greatest poet of China. "He
is the lofty peak of Tai," exclaims a Chinese critic, "towering above the
thousand mountains and hills; he is the sun in whose presence a million
stars of heaven lose their scintillating brilliance."64 Ming Huang and Lady
Yang are dead, but Li Po still sings.
My ship is built of spice-wood and has a rudder of mulan;*
Musicians sit at the two ends with jeweled bamboo flutes and pipes
of gold.
What a pleasure it is, with a cask of sweet wine
And singing girls beside me,
To drift on the water hither and thither with the waves!
I am happier than the fairy of the air,
Who rode on his yellow crane,
And free as die merman who followed the sea-gulls aimlessly.
Now with the strokes of my inspired pen I shake the Five Mountains.
My poem is done. I laugh, and my delight is vaster than the sea.
O deathless poetry! The songs of Ch'u P'ingt are ever glorious as
the sun and moon,
While the palaces and towers of the Chou kings have vanished from
the hills."
V. SOME QUALITIES OF CHINESE POETRY
"Free verse" — "Imagism" — "Every poem a picture and every
picture a poeirf — Sentimentality — Perfection of form
It is impossible to judge Chinese poetry from Li alone; to feel it (which
is better than judging) one must surrender himself unhurriedly to many
Chinese poets, and to the unique methods of their poetry. Certain subtle
qualities of it are hidden from us in translation: we do not see the pic-
turesque written characters, each a monosyllable, and yet expressing a
* A precious wood.
fCf. p. 694 above.
712 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIV
complex idea; we do not see the lines, running from top to bottom and
from right to left; we do not catch the meter and the rhyme, which adhere
with proud rigidity to ancient precedents and laws; we do not hear the
tones— the flats and sharps— that give a beat to Chinese verse; at least half
the art of the Far Eastern poet is lost when he is read by what we should
call a "foreigner." In the original a Chinese poem at its best is a form as
polished and precious as a hawthorn vase; to us it is only a bit of decep-
tively "free" or "imagist" verse, half caught and weakly rendered by some
earnest but alien mind.
What we do see is, above all, brevity. We are apt to think these
poems too slight, and feel an unreal disappointment at missing the majesty
and boredom of Milton and Homer. But the Chinese believe that all
poetry must be brief; that a long poem is a contradiction in terms— since
poetry, to them, is a moment's ecstasy, and dies when dragged out in epic
reams. Its mission is to see and paint a picture with a stroke, and write a
philosophy in a dozen lines; its ideal is infinite meaning in a little rhythm.
Since pictures are of the essence of poetry, and the essence of Chinese
writing is pictography, the written language of China is spontaneously
poetic; it lends itself to writing in pictures, and shuns abstractions that
cannot be phrased as things seen. Since abstractions multiply with civili-
zation, the Chinese language, in its written form, has become a secret code
of subtle suggestions; and in like manner, and perhaps for a like reason,
Chinese poetry combines suggestion with concentration, and aims to re-
veal, through the picture it draws, some deeper thing invisible. It does not
discuss, it intimates; it leaves out more than it says; and only an Oriental
can fill it in. "The men of old," say the Chinese, "reckoned it the highest
excellence in poetry that the meaning should be beyond the words, and
that the reader should have to think it out for himself."" Like Chinese
manners and art, Chinese poetry is a matter of infinite grace concealed
in a placid simplicity. It foregoes metaphor, comparison and allusion, but
relies on showing the thing itself, with a hint of its implications. It avoids '
exaggeration and passion, but appeals to the mature mind by understate-
ment and restraint; it is seldom romantically excited in form, but knows
how to express intense feeling in its own quietly classic way.
V
Men pass their lives apart like stars that move but never meet.
This eye, how blest it is that the same lamp gives light to both
of us!
CHAP. XXIV) THEAGEOFTHEPOETS 713
Brief is youth's day.
Our temples already tell of waning life.
Even now half of those we know are spirits.
I am moved in the depths of my soul.
We may tire, at times, of a certain sentimentality in these poems, a
vainly wistful mood of regret that time will not stop in its flight and let
men and states be young forever. We perceive that the civilization of
China was already old and weary in the days of Ming Huang, and that
its poets, like the artists of the Orient in general, were fond of repeating
old themes, and of spending their artistry on flawless form. But there is
nothing quite like this poetry elsewhere, nothing to match it in delicacy
of expression, in tenderness and yet moderation of feeling, in simplicity
and brevity of phrase clothing the most considered thought. We are told
that the poetry written under the T'ang emperors plays a large part in
the training of every Chinese youth, and that one cannot meet an intelli-
gent Chinese who does not know much of that poetry by heart. If this
is so, then Li Po and Tu Fu are part of the answer that we must give
to the question why almost every educated Chinese is an artist and a
philosopher.
VI. TUFU
T'ao CWien—Po Chii-i— Poems for malaria— Tu Fu and Li Po—
A vision of 'war— Prosperous days— Destitution— Death
Li Po is the Keats of China, but there are other singers almost as
fondly cherished by his countrymen. There is the simple and stoic T'ao
Ch'ien, who left a government position because, as he said, he was un-
able any longer to "crook the hinges of his back for five pecks of rice
a day"— that is, kow-tow* for his salary. Like many another public man
disgusted with the commercialism of official life, he went to live in the
woods, seeking there "length of years and depth of wine," and finding the
same solace and delight in the streams and mountains of China that her
painters would later express on silk.
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dawn of day;
* From the Chinese K*o T^ou—to knock the head on the ground in homage.
714 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIV
The flying birds two by two return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us. ...
What folly to spend one's life like a dropped leaf
Snared under the dust of streets!
But for thirteen years it was so I lived. . . .
For a long time I have lived in a cage;
Now I have returned.
For one must return
To fulfil one's nature.87
Po Chii-i took the other road, choosing public office and life in the
capital; he rose from place to place until he was governor of the great
city of Hangchow, and President of the Board of War. Nevertheless he
lived to the age of seventy-two, wrote four thousand poems, and tasted
Nature to his heart's content in interludes of exile.68 He knew the secret of
mingling solitude with crowds, and repose with an active life. He made
not too many friends, being, as he said, of middling accomplishment in
"calligraphy, painting, chess and gambling, which tend to bring men to-
gether in pleasurable intercourse."* He liked to talk with simple people,
and story has it that he would read his poems to an old peasant woman,
and simplify anything that she could not understand. Hence he became
the best-loved of the Chinese poets among the common people; his poetry
was inscribed everywhere, on the walls of schools and temples, and the
cabins of ships. "You must not think," said a "sing-song" girl to a cap-
tain whom she was entertaining, "that I am an ordinary dancing girl; I
can recite Master Po's "Everlasting Wrong."60*
We have kept for the last the profound and lovable Tu Fu. "English
writers on Chinese literature," says Arthur Waley, "are fond of announc-
ing that Li T'ai-po is China's greatest poet; the Chinese themselves, how-
ever, award this place to Tu Fu.'m We first hear of him at Chang-an; he
had come up to take the examinations for office, and had failed. He was
not dismayed, even though his failure had been specifically in the subject
of poetry; he announced to the public that his poems were a good cure
for malarial fever, and seems to have tried the cure himself ." Ming Huang
read some of his verses, gave him, personally, another examination,
• The most famous of China's many renditions of the infatuation of Ming Huang with
Yang Kwei-fei, her death in revolution, and Ming's misery in restoration. The poem is
not quite everlasting, but too long for quotation here.
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 715
marked him successful, and appointed him secretary to General Tsoa.
Emboldened, and forgetting for a moment his wife and children in their
distant village, Tu Fu settled down in the capital, exchanged songs with
Li Po, and studied the taverns, paying for his wine with poetry. He
writes of Li:
I love my Lord as younger brother loves elder brother,
In autumn, exhilarated by wine, we sleep under a single quilt;
Hand in hand, we daily walk together.**
Those were the days of the love of Ming for Yang Kwei-fei. Tu
celebrated it like the other poets; but when revolution burst forth, and
rival ambitions drenched China in blood, he turned his muse to sadder
themes, and pictured the human side of war:
Last night a government order came
To enlist boys who had reached eighteen.
They must help defend the capital. . . .
0 Mother! O Children, do not weep so!
Shedding such tears will injure you.
When tears stop flowing then bones come through,
Nor Heaven nor Earth has compassion then. . . .
Do you know that in Shantung there are two hundred counties
turned to the desert forlorn,
Thousands of villages, farms, covered only with bushes, the thorn?
Men are slain like dogs, women driven like hens along. . . .
If I had only known how bad is the fate of boys
1 would have had my children all girls. . . .
Boys are only born to be buried beneath tall grass.
Still the bones of the war-dead of long ago are beside the Blue Sea
when you pass.
They are wildly white and they lie exposed on the sand,
Both the little young ghosts and the old ghosts gather here to cry
in a band.
When the rains sweep down, and the autumn, and winds that chill,
Their voices are loud, so loud that I learn how grief can kill. . . .
716 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIV
Birds make love in their dreams while they drift on the tide,
For the dusk's path the fireflies must make their own light.
Why should man kill man just in order to live?
In vain I sigh in the passing night."*
For two years, during the revolutionary interlude, he wandered about
China, sharing his destitution with his wife and children, so poor that he
begged for bread, and so humbled that he knelt to pray for blessings upon
the man who took his family in and fed them for a while." He was saved
by the kindly general Yen Wu, who made him his secretary, put up with
his moods and pranks, established him in a cottage by Washing Flower
Stream, and required nothing more of him than that he should write
poetry.* He was happy now, and sang blissfully of rain and flowers,
mountains and the moon.
Of what use is a phrase or a fine stanza?
Before me but mountains, deep forests, too black.
I think I shall sell my art objects, my books,
And drink just of nature when pure at the source. . . .
When a place is so lovely
I walk slow. I long to let loveliness drown in my soul.
I like to touch bird-feathers.
I blow deep into them to find the soft hairs beneath.
I like to count stamens, too,
And even weigh their pollen-gold.
The grass is a delight to sit on.
I do not need wine here because the flowers intoxicate me so. ...
To the deep of my bones I love old trees, and the jade-blue waves
of the sea."
The good general liked him so that he disturbed his peace, raising him
to high office as a Censor in Ch'ang-an. Then suddenly the general died,
war raged around the poet, and, left only with his genius, he soon found
himself penniless again. His children, savage with hunger, sneered at him
for his helplessness. He passed into a bitter and lonely old age, "an ugly
thing now to the eye"; the roof of his cabin was torn away by the wind,
* A famous Chinese painting pictures "The Poet Tu Fu in the Thatched Cottage." It
may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of An, New York.
CHAP. XXIV) THEAGEOFTHEPOETS 717
and urchins robbed him of the straw of his bed while he looked on, too
physically weak to resist." Worst of all, he lost his taste for wine, and
could no longer solve the problems of life in the fashion of Li Po. At
last he turned to religion, and sought solace in Buddhism. Prematurely
senile at fifty-nine, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Huen Mountain to
visit a famous temple. There he was discovered by a magistrate who had
read his poetry. The official took the poet home, and ordered a banquet
to be served in his honor; hot beef smoked, and sweet wine abounded;
Tu Fu had not for many years seen such a feast. He ate hungrily. Then
at his host's request, he tried to compose and sing; but he fell down
exhausted. The next day he died.68
VII. PROSE
The abundance of Chinese literature — Romances — History —
Szuma Ch'ien— Essays— Han Yu on the bone of Buddha
The T'ang poets are but a part of Chinese poetry, and poetry is a small
part of China's literature. It is hard for us to realize the age and abund-
ance of this literature, or its wide circulation among the people. Lack of
copyright laws helped other factors to make printing cheap; and it was
nothing unusual, before the advent of western ideas, to find bound sets of
twenty volumes selling new at one dollar, encyclopedias in twenty volumes
selling new at four dollars, and all the Chinese Classics together obtainable
for two.* It is harder still for us to appreciate this literature, for the
Chinese value form and style far above contents in judging a book, and
form and style are betrayed by every translation. The Chinese pardonably
consider their literature superior to any other than that of Greece; and
perhaps the exception is due to Oriental courtesy.
Fiction, through which Occidental authors most readly rise to fame, is not
ranked as literature by the Chinese. It hardly existed in China before the
Mongols brought it in;70 and even today the best of Chinese novels are
classed by the literati as popular amusements unworthy of mention in a his-
tory of Chinese letters. The simple folk of the cities do not mind these
distinctions, but turn without prejudice from the songs of Po Chii-i and Li
Po to the anonymous interminable romances that, like the theatre, use the col-
loquial dialects of the people, and bring back to them vividly the dramatic
events of their historic past. For almost all the famous novels of China take
the form of historical fiction; few of them aim at realism, and fewer still
attempt such psychological or social analysis as lift The Brothers Karamazov
718 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIV
and The Magic Mountain, War and Peace and Les Miserable*, to the level
of great literature. One of the earliest Chinese novels is the Shui Hu Chuan,
or "Tale of the Water Margins," composed by a bevy of authors in the
fourteenth century;* one of the vastest is the Hung Lou Men (ca. 1650), a
twenty-four-volume "Dream of the Red Chamber"; one of the best is the
Liao Chai Chih I (ca. 1660), or "Strange Stories," much honored for the
beauty and terseness of its style; the most famous is the San Kuo Chih Yen
I, or "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," a twelve-hundred-page embellish-
ment, by Lo Kuan-chung (1260-1341), of the wars and intrigues that fol-
lowed the fall of the Han.t These expansive stories correspond to the
picaresque novels of eighteenth-century Europe; often (if one may report
mere hearsay in these matters) they combine the jolly portrayal of character
of Tom Jones with the lively narrative of Gil Bias. They are recommended
to the reader's leisurely old age.
The most respectable form of literature in China is history; and of all the
accepted forms it is also the most popular. No other nation has had so many
historians, certainly no other nation has written such extensive histories.
Even the early courts had their official scribes, who chronicled the achieve-
ments of their sovereigns and the portents of the time; and this office of
court historian, carried down to our own generation, has raised up in China
a mass of historical literature unequaled in length or dullness anywhere else
on the earth. The twenty-four official "Dynastic Histories" published in
1747 ran to 219 large volumes.71 From the Shu-Ching, or "Book of History,"
so edifyingly bowdlerized by Confucius, and the Tso-chuan, a commentary
written a century later to illustrate and vivify the book of the Master, and
the Annals of the Bamboo Books, found in the tomb of a king of Wei, his-
toriography advanced rapidly in China until, in the second century before
Christ, it produced a chef-d'oeuvre in the Historical Record painstakingly
put together by Szuma Ch'ien.
Succeeding to his father as court astrologer, Szuma first reformed the
calendar, and then devoted his life to a task which his father had begun, of
narrating the history of China from the first mythical dynasty to his own
day. He had no penchant for beauty of style, but aimed merely to make
his record complete. He divided his book into five parts: (i) Annals of the
Emperors; (2) Chronological Tables; (3) Eight chapters on rites, music, the
pitch-pipes, the calendar, astrology, imperial sacrifices, water courses, and
political economy; (4) Annals of the Feudal Nobles; and (5) Biographies
* It has been well translated by Mrs. Pearl Buck under the tide, All Men Are Brothers,
New York, 1933.
t Translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, 2 vols., Shanghai, 1925.
CHAP. XXIV) THEAGEOFTHEPOETS 719
of Eminent Men. The whole covered a period of nearly three thousand
years, and took the form of 526,000 Chinese characters patiently scratched
upon bamboo tablets with a style.™ Then Szuma Ch'ien, having given his life
to his book, sent his volumes to his emperor and the world with this modest
preface:
Your servant's physical strength is now relaxed; his eyes are short-
sighted and dim; of his teeth but a few remain. His memory is so
impaired that the events of the moment are forgotten as he turns
away from them, his energies having been wholly exhausted in pro-
duction of this book. He therefore hopes that your Majesty may
pardon his vain attempt for the sake of his loyal intention, and in
moments of leisure will deign to cast a sacred glance over this work,
so as to learn from the rise and fall of former dynasties the secret
of the successes and failures of the present hour. Then if such
knowledge shall be applied for the advantage of the Empire, even
though your servant may lay his bones in the Yellow Springs, the
aim and ambition of his life will be fulfilled.78
We shall find none of the brilliance of Taine in the pages of Szuma Ch'ien,
no charming gossip and anecdotes in the style of Herodotus, no sober con-
catenation of cause and effect as in Thucydides, no continental vision
pictured in music as in Gibbon; for history seldom rises, in China, from an
industry to an art. From Szuma Ch'ien to his namesake Szuma Kuang, who,
eleven hundred years later, attempted again a universal history of China, the
Chinese historians have labored to record faithfully— sometimes at the cost
of their income or their lives— the events of a dynasty or a reign; they have
spent their energies upon truth, and have left nothing for beauty. Perhaps
they were right, and history should be a science rather than an art; perhaps
the facts of the past are obscured when they come to us in the purple of
Gibbon or the sermons of Carlyle. But we, too, have dull historians, and
can match any nation in volumes dedicated to record— and gather— dust.
Livelier is the Chinese essay; for here art is not forbidden, and eloquence
has loose rein. Famous beyond the rest in this field is the great Han Yu,
whose books are so valued that tradition requires the reader to wash his
hands in rose-water before touching them. Born among the humblest, Han
Yii reached to the highest ranks in the service of the state, and fell from
grace only because he protested too intelligibly against the imperial con-
cessions to Buddhism. To Han the new religion was merely a Hindu super-
stition; and it offended him to his Confucian soul that the Emperor should
lend his sanction to the intoxication of his people with this enervating dream.
720 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIV
Therefore he submitted (803 A.D.) a memorial to the Emperor, from which
these lines may serve as an example of Chinese prose discolored even by
honest translation:
Your servant has now heard that instructions have been issued to
the priestly community to proceed to Fcng-hsiang and receive a
bone of Buddha, and that from a high tower your Majesty will
view its introduction into the Imperial Palace; also that orders have
been sent to the various temples, commanding that the relic be re-
ceived with the proper ceremonies. Now, foolish though your
servant may be, he is well aware that your Majesty does not do
this in the vain hope of deriving advantages therefrom; but that in
the fulness of our present plenty, and in the joy which reigns in the
heart of all, there is a desire to fall in with the wishes of the people
in the celebration at the capital of this delusive mummery. For
how could the wisdom of your Majesty stoop to participate in
such ridiculous beliefs? Still the people are slow of perception and
easily beguiled; and should they behold your Majesty thus earnestly
worshiping at the feet of Buddha, they would cry out, "See! the
Son of Heaven, the All-Wise, is a fervent believer; who arc we, his
people, that we should spare our bodies?" Then would ensue a
scorching of heads and burning of fingers; crowds would collect
together, and tearing off their clothes and scattering their money,
would spend their time from morn to eve in imitation of your
Majesty's example. The result would be that by and by young and
old, seized with the same enthusiasm, would totally neglect the busi-
ness of their lives; and should your Majesty not prohibit it, they
would be found flocking to the temples, ready to cut off an arm
or slice their bodies as an offering to the god. Thus would our
traditions and customs be seriously injured, and ourselves become a
laughing-stock on the face of the earth. . . .
Therefore your servant, overwhelmed with shame for the Cen-
sors,* implores your Majesty that these bones be handed over for
destruction by fire and water, whereby the root of this great evil
may be exterminated for all time, and the people know how much
the wisdom of your Majesty surpasses that of ordinary men. The
glory of such a deed will be beyond all praise. And should the
Lord Buddha have power to avenge this insult by the infliction of
some misfortune, then let the vials of his wrath be poured out upon
* On the function of the Censors cf. p. 798 below. Not one of them, Han Yu implies,
had protested against die plans of the Emperor Te Tsung to give his approval to Buddhism.
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 721
the person of your servant, who now calls Heaven to witness that
he will not repent him of his oath."
In a conflict between superstition and philosophy one may safely wager
on the victory of superstition, for the world wisely prefers happiness to
wisdom. Han was exiled to a village in Kuang-tung, where the people were
still simple barbarians. He did not complain, but set himself, after the teach-
ing of Confucius, to civilize them with his example; and he succeeded so
well that his picture today often bears the legend: "Wherever he passed,
he purified."75 He was finally recalled to the capital, served his state well,
and died loaded with honors. His memorial tablet was placed in the Temple
of Confucius— a place usually reserved for the disciples or greatest ex-
ponents of the Master— because he had defended the doctrines of Confucian-
ism so recklessly against the invasion of a once noble but now corrupted
faith.
VIII. THE STAGE
Its low repute in China — Origins — The play — The audience —
The actors— Music
It is difficult to classify Chinese drama, for it is not recognized by China
as either literature or art. Like many other elements of human life, its
repute is not proportioned to its popularity. The names of the dramatists
are seldom heard; and the actors, though they may give a lifetime to
preparation and accomplishment, and rise to a hectic fame, are looked
upon as members of an inferior order. Something of this odor, no doubt,
attached to actors in every civilization, above all in those medieval days
when drama was rcbelliously differentiating itself from the religious pan-
tomimes that had given it birth.
A similar origin is assigned to the Chinese theatre. Under the Chou
Dynasty religious ritual included certain dances performed with wands.
Tradition says that these dances were later forbidden, on the score that
they had become licentious; and it was apparently from this cleavage
that secular drama began.78 Ming Huang, patron of so many arts, helped
the development of an independent drama by gathering about him a
company of male and female actors whom he called "The Young Folk of
the Pear Garden"; but it was not till the reign of Kublai Khan that the
Chinese theatre took on the scope of a national institution. In the year
1031 K'ung Tao-fu, a descendant of Confucius, was sent as Chinese envoy
722 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIV
to the Mongol Kitans, and was welcomed with a celebration that included
a play. The buffoon, however, represented Confucius. K'ung Tao-fu
walked out in a huff, but when he and other Chinese travelers among the
Mongols returned to China they brought reports of a form of drama
more advanced than any that China had yet known. When the Mongols
conquered China they introduced to it both the novel and the theatre;
and the classic examples of Chinese drama are still the plays that were
written under the Mongol sway."
The art developed slowly, for neither the church nor the state would
support it. For the most part it was practised by strolling players, who
set up a platform in some vacant field and performed before a village
audience standing under the open sky. Occasionally mandarins engaged
actors to perform at private dinner-parties, and sometimes a guild would
produce a play. Theatres became more numerous during the nineteenth
century, but even at its close there were only two in the large city of
Nanking.78 The drama was a mixture of history, poetry and music; usually
some episode from an historical romance was the center of the plot; or
scenes might be played from different dramas on the same evening. There
was no limit to the length of the performance; it might be brief, or last
several days; ordinarily it took six or seven hours, as with the best of con-
temporary American plays. There was much swashbuckling and oratory,
much violence of blood and speech; but the denouement did its best to
atone for reality by making virtue triumph in the end. The drama be-
came an educational and ethical instrument, teaching the people some-
thing about their history, and inculcating the Confucian virtues— above
all, filial piety— with a demoralizing regularity.
The stage had little furnishing or scenery, and no exits; all the actors
in the cast, along with their supernumeraries, sat on the stage throughout
the play, rising when their roles demanded; occasionally attendants served
them tea. Other functionaries passed about among the audience selling to-
bacco, tea and refreshments, and providing hot towels for the wiping of
faces during summer evenings; drinking, eating and conversation were
now and then interrupted by some exceptionally fine or loud acting on
the stage. The actors had often to shout in order to be heard; and they
wore masks in order that their roles might be readily understood. As the
result of Ch'ien Lung's prohibition of woman players, female parts were
acted by men, and so well that when women were in our time again ad-
mitted to the stage, they had to imitate their imitators in order to sue-
CHAP. XXIV) THE AGE OF THE POETS 723
ceed. The actors were required to be experts in acrobatics and the dance,
for their parts often called for skilful manipulation of the limbs, and al-
most every action had to be performed according to some ritual of grace
in harmony with the music that accompanied the stage. Gestures were
symbolic, and had to be precise and true to old conventions; in such
accomplished actors as Mei Lan-fang the artistry of hands and body con-
stituted half the poetry of the play. It was not completely theatre, not
quite opera, not predominantly dance; it was a mixture almost medieval
in quality, but as perfect in its kind as Palestrina's music, or stained
glass."
Music was seldom an independent art, but belonged as a handmaiden
to religion and the stage. Tradition ascribed its origin, like so much else,
to the legendary emperor Fu Hsi. The Li-Chi, or "Book of Rites," dating
from before Confucius, contained or recorded several treatises on music;
and the Tso-chuan, a century after Confucius, described eloquently the
music to which the odes of Wei were sung. Already, by Kung-fu-tze's
time, musical standards were ancient, and innovations were disturbing
quiet souls; the sage complained of the lascivious airs that were in his day
supplanting the supposedly moral tunes of the past.80 Greco-Bactrian and
Mongolian influences entered, and left their mark upon the simple Chin-
ese scale. The Chinese knew of the division of the octave into twelve
semi-tones, but they preferred to write their music in a pentatonic scale,
corresponding roughly to our F, G, A, C, and D; to these whole tones they
gave the names "Emperor," "Prime Minister," "Subject People," "State
Affairs," and "Picture of the Universe." Harmony was understood, but
was seldom used except for tuning instruments. The latter included
such wind instruments as flutes, trumpets, oboes, whistles and gourds;
such string instruments as viols and lutes; and such percussion instruments
as tambourines and drums, bells and gongs, cymbals and castanets, and
musical plates of agate or jade.81 The effects were as weird and startling
to an Occidental ear as the Sonata Appassionata might seem to the Chinese;
nevertheless they lifted Confucius to a vegetarian ecstasy, and brought to
many hearers that escape from the strife of wills and ideas which comes
with the surrender to music well composed. The sages, said Han Yii,
"taught man music in order to dissipate the melancholy of his soul."" They
agreed with Nietzsche that life without music would be a mistake.
CHAPTER XXV
The Age of the Artists
I. THE SUNG RENAISSANCE
1. The Socialism of Wang An-shih
The Sung Dynasty— A radical premier— His cure for unemploy-
ment—The regulation of industry— Codes of 'wages and prices
— The nationalization of commerce — State insurance
against unemployment, poverty and old age— Ex-
aminations for public office— The defeat of
Wang An-shih
THE T'ang Dynasty never recovered from the revolution of An
Lu-shan. The emperors who followed Ming Huang were unable to
restore the imperial authority throughout the Empire; and after a cen-
tury of senile debility the dynasty came to an end. Five dynasties fol-
lowed in fifty-three years, but they were as feeble as they were brief.
As always in such cases a strong and brutal hand was needed to reestablish
order. One soldier emerged above the chaos, and set up the Sung Dynasty,
with himself as its first emperor under the name of T'ai Tsu. The bu-
reaucracy of Confucian officials was renewed, examinations for office
were resumed, and an attempt was made by an imperial councillor to
solve the problems of exploitation and poverty by an almost socialist con-
trol over the nation's economic life.
Wang An-shih (1021-86) is one of the many fascinating individuals
who enliven the lengthy annals of Chinese history. It is part of the bathos
of distance that our long removal from alien scenes obscures variety in
places and men, and submerges the most diverse personalities in a dull
uniformity of appearance and character. But even in the judgment of his
enemies— whose very number distinguished him— Wang stood out as a
man different from the rest, absorbed conscientiously in the enterprise of
government, devoted recklessly to the welfare of the people, leaving
himself no time for the care of his person or his clothes, rivaling the great
724
CHAP. XXV ) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 725
scholars of his age in learning and style, and fighting with mad courage
the rich and powerful conservatives of his age. By a trick of chance the
only great figure in the records of his country who resembled him was
his namesake Wang Mang; already the turbid stream of history had trav-
eled a thousand years since China's last outstanding experiment with social-
ist ideas.
On receiving the highest office in the command of the Emperor, Wang
An-shih laid it down as a general principle that the government must hold
itself responsible for the welfare of all its citizens. "The state," he said,
"should take the entire management of commerce, industry and agricul-
ture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes
and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich."1 He
began by abolishing the forced labor that had from time immemorial been
exacted from the Chinese people by the government, and had often taken
men from the fields at the very time when the sowing or the harvesting
needed them; and nevertheless he carried out great engineering works for
the prevention of floods. He rescued the peasants from the money-lenders
who had enslaved them, and lent them, at what were then low rates of
interest, funds for the planting of their crops. To the unemployed he
gave free seed and other aid in setting up homesteads, on condition that
they would repay the state out of the yield of their land. Boards were
appointed in every district to regulate the wages of labor and the prices
of the necessaries of life. Commerce was nationalized; the produce of
each locality was bought by the government, part of it was stored for
future local needs, and the rest was transported to be sold in state depots
throughout the realm. A budget system was established, a budget com-
mission submitted proposals and estimates of expenditure, and these esti-
mates were so strictly adhered to in administration that the state was
saved considerable sums which had previously fallen into those secret and
spacious pockets that cross the path of every governmental dollar. Pen-
sions were provided for the aged, the unemployed and the poor. Educa-
tion and the examination system were reformed; the tests were devised
to reveal acquaintance with facts rather than with words, and to shift
the emphasis from literary style to the application of Confucian principles
to current tasks; the role of formalism and rote memory in the training
of children was reduced, and for a time, says a Chinese historian, "even
the pupils at village schools threw away their text-books of rhetoric and
began to study primers of history, geography, and political economy."1
726 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXV
Why did this noble experiment fail? First, perhaps, because of certain
elements in it that were more practical than Utopian. Though most of
the taxes were taken from the incomes of the rich, part of the heavy
revenue needed for the enlarged expenses of the state was secured by ap-
propriating a portion of the produce of every field. Soon the poor joined
with the rich in complaining that taxes were too high; men are always
readier to extend governmental functions than to pay for them. Further,
Wang An-shih had reduced the standing army as a drain on the resources
of the people, but had, as a means of replacing it, decreed the universal
liability of every family of more than one male to provide a soldier in
time of war. He had presented many families with horses and fodder,
but on condition that the animals should be properly cared for, and be
placed at the service of the government in its military need. When it
turned out that invasion and revolution were multiplying the occasions
of war, these measures brought Wang An-shih's popularity to a rapid
end. Again, he had found it difficult to secure honest men to administer
his measures; corruption spread throughout the mammoth bureaucracy,
and China, like many nations since, saw itself faced with the ancient and
bitter choice between private plunder and public "graft."
Conservatives, led by Wang's own brother and by the historian Szuma
Kuang, denounced the experiment as inherently unsound; they argued
that human corruptibility and incompetence made governmental control
of industry impracticable, and that the best form of government was a
laissez-faire which would rely on the natural economic impulses of men
for the production of services and goods. The rich, stung by the high
taxation of their fortunes and the monopoly of commerce by the govern-
ment, poured out their resources in the resolve to discredit the measures
of Wang An-shih, to obstruct their enforcement, and to bring them to a
disgraceful end. The opposition, well organized, exerted pressure on the
Emperor; and when a succession of floods and droughts was capped by
the appearance of a terrifying comet in the sky, the Son of Heaven dis-
missed Wang from office, revoked his decrees, and called his enemies to
power. Once again everything was as before.*
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 727
2. The Revival of Learning
The growth of scholarship— Paper and ink in China— Steps in the
invention of printing — The oldest book — Paper money —
Movable type— Anthologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias
Meanwhile, through all wars and revolutions, through all administra-
tions and experiments, the life of the Chinese people flowed evenly on,
not much disturbed by events too distant to be heard of until long since
past. The Sung rule was overthrown in the north, but reestablished itself
in the south; the capital was moved from Pien Liang (now K'aifeng) to
Lin-an (now Hangchow); in the new capital, as in the old, luxury and
refinement grew, and traders came from many parts of the world to buy
the unmatched products of Chinese industry and art. Emperor Hui Tsung
( 1 101-25) set the fashion at Pien Liang by being an artist first and a ruler
afterward: he painted pictures while the barbarians marched upon his
capital, and founded an art academy that stimulated with exhibitions and
prizes the arts that were to be the chief claim of the Sung era to the re-
membrance of mankind. Inspiring collections were made of Chinese
bronzes, paintings, manuscripts and jades; great libraries were collected,
and some of them survived the glories of war. Scholars and artists crowded
the northern and southern capitals.
It was in this dynasty that printing entered like an imperceptibly com-
pleted revolution into the literary life of the Chinese. It had grown step
by step through many centuries; now it was ready in both its phases-
blocks to print whole pages, and movable type cast of metal in matrices—
as a thoroughly Chinese invention,' the greatest, after writing, in the his-
tory of our race.
The first step in the development had to be the discovery of some more
convenient writing material than the silk or bamboo that had contented the
ancient Chinese. Silk was expensive, and bamboo was heavy; Mo Ti needed
three carts to carry with him, in his travels, the bamboo books that were
his chief possession; and Shih Huang-ti had to go over one hundred and
twenty pounds of state documents every day." About 105 A.D. one Ts'ai Lun
informed the Emperor that he had invented a cheaper and lighter writing
material, made of tree bark, hemp, rags and fish-nets. Ts'ai was given a high
title and office by the Emperor, was involved in an intrigue with the Empress,
was detected, "went home, took a bath, combed his hair, put on his best
728 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
robes, and drank poison.'" The new art spread rapidly and far, for the
oldest existing paper, found by Sir Aurel Stein in a spur of the Great Wall,
is in the form of state documents pertaining to occurrences in the years
21-137 A.D., and apparently contemporary with the latest of those events; it
is dated, therefore, about 150 A.D., only half a century after Ts'ai Lun's
report of his invention.7 These early papers were of pure rag, essentially
like the paper used in our own day when durability is desired. The Chinese
developed paper almost to perfection by using a "sizing" of glue or gelatin,
and a base of starchy paste, to strengthen the fibres and accelerate their
absorption of ink. When the art was taught by the Chinese to the Arabs
in the eighth century, and by the Arabs to Europe in the thirteenth, it was
already complete.
Ink, too, came from the East; for though the Egyptian had made both ink
and paper in what might be called the most ancient antiquity, it was from
China that Europe learned the trick of mixing it out of lamp black; "India
ink" was originally Chinese.8 Red ink, made of sulphide of mercury, had
been used in China as far back as the Han Dynasty; black ink appeared
there in the fourth century, and henceforth the use of red ink was made an
imperial privilege. Black ink encouraged printing, for it was especially
adapted for use on wooden blocks, and enjoyed almost complete indelibility.
Blocks of paper have been found, in Central Asia, which had lain under
water so long as to become petrified; but the writing, in ink, could still be
clearly read.9
The use of seals in signatures was the unconscious origin of print; the
Chinese word for print is still the same as the word for seal. At first these
seals, as in the Near East, were impressed upon clay; about the fifth century
they were moistened with ink. Meanwhile, in the second century, the text
of the Classics had been cut in stone; and soon thereafter the custom arose
of making inked rubbings from these inscriptions. In the sixth century we
find large wooden seals used by the Taoists to print charms; a century later
the Buddhist missionaries experimented with various methods of duplication,
through seals, rubbings, stencils, and textile prints— the last an art of Indian
derivation. The earliest extant block prints are a million charms printed in
Japan about 770 A.D., in the Sanskrit language and the Chinese character—
an excellent instance of cultural interaction in Asia. Many block prints were
made during the T'ang Dynasty, but they were apparently destroyed or lost
in the chaos of revolution that followed Ming Huang.10
In 1907 Sir Aurel Stein persuaded the Taoist priests of Chinese Turkestan
to let him examine the "Caves of the Thousand Buddhas" at Tun-huang. In
one of these chambers, which had apparently been walled up about the
year 1035 A-D- an^ not opened again until 1900, lay 1130 bundles, each con-
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 729
taining a dozen or more manuscript rolls; the whole formed a library of
15,000 books, written on paper, and as well preserved as if they had been
inscribed the day before their modern discovery. It was among these manu-
scripts that the world's oldest printed book was found— the "Diamond Sutra"
—a roll ending with these words: "Printed on (the equivalent of) May 11, 868,
by Wang Chich, for free general distribution, in order in deep reverence to
perpetuate the memory of his parents."" Three other printed books were
found in the mass of manuscripts; one of them marked a new development,
for it was not a roll, like the "Diamond Sutra," but a tiny folded book, the
first known of its now multitudinous kind. As in late medieval Europe and
among primitive 'peoples in recent times, the first stimulus to printing came
from religion, which sought to spread its doctrines by sight as well as sound,
and to put its charms and prayers and legends into every hand. Almost as
old as these pious forms of print, however, are playing cards— which ap-
peared in China in 969 or sooner, and were introduced from China into
Europe near the end of the fourteenth century.1*
These early volumes had been printed with wooden blocks. In a Chinese
letter written about 870 A.D. we find the oldest known mention of such
work: "Once when I was in Szechuan I examined in a bookshop a school-
book printed from wood."13 Already, it seems, the art of printing had been
developed; and it is interesting to observe that this development seems to
have come first in western provinces like Szechuan and Turkestan, which
had been prodded on to civilization by Buddhist missionaries from India,
and had for a time enjoyed a culture independent of the eastern capitals.
Block-printing was introduced to eastern China early in the tenth century
when a prime minister, Feng Tao, persuaded the Emperor to provide funds
for the printing of the Chinese Classics. The work took twenty years and
filled one hundred and thirty volumes, for it included not only the texts but
the most famous commentaries. When it was completed it gave the Classics
a circulation that contributed vigorously to the revival of learning and the
strengthening of Confucianism under the Sung kings.
One of the earliest forms of block printing was the manufacture of
paper money. Appearing first in Szechuan in the tenth century, it became a
favorite occupation of Chinese governments, and led within a century to
experiments in inflation. In 1294 Persia imitated this new mode of creating
wealth; in 1297 Marco Polo described with wonder the respect which the
Chinese showed for these curious scraps of paper. It was not till 1656 that
Europe learned the trick, and issued its first paper currency."
Movable type was also a Chinese invention, but the absence of an al-
phabet, and the presence of 40,000 characters in written Chinese, made its
use an impossible luxury in the Far East. Pi Sheng formed movable type of
730 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
earthenware as early as 1041 A.D., but little use was found for the invention.
In 1403 the Koreans produced the first metal type known to history: models
were engraved in hard wood, moulds of porcelain paste were made from
these models, and from these moulds, baked in an oven, the metal type was
cast. The greatest of Korean emperors, T'ai Tsung, at once adopted the
invention as an aid to government and the preservation of civilization.
"Whoever is desirous of governing," said that enlightened monarch, "must
have a wide acquaintance with the laws and the Classics. Then he will be
able to act righteously without, and to maintain an upright character within,
and thus to bring peace and order to the land. Our eastern country lies
beyond the seas, and the number of books reaching us from China is small.
The books printed from blocks are often imperfect, and moreover it is
difficult to print in their entirety all the books that exist. I ordain there-
fore that characters be formed of bronze, and that everything without ex-
ception upon which I can lay my hands be printed, in order to pass on the
tradition of what these works contain. That will be a blessing to us to all
eternity. However, the costs shall not be taken from the people in taxes.
I and my family, and those ministers who so wish, will privately bear the
expense."11
From Korea the casting of movable type spread to Japan and back again
to China, but not, apparently, until after Gutenberg's belated discovery in
Europe. In Korea the use of movable type continued for two centuries and
then decayed; in China its use was only occasional until merchants and mis-
sionaries from the West, as if returning an ancient gift, brought to the East
the methods of European typography. From the days of Feng Tao to those
of Li Hung-chang the Chinese clung to block-printing as the most feasible
form for their language. Despite this limitation Chinese printers poured
out a great mass of books upon the people. Dynastic histories in hundreds
of volumes were issued between 994 and 1063; the entire Buddhist canon,
in five thousand volumes, was completed by 972." Writers found them-
selves armed with a weapon which they had never had before; their audi-
ence was widened from the aristocracy to the middle, even to part of the
lower, classes; literature took on a more democratic tinge, and a more varied
form. The art of block-printing was one of the sources of the Sung
Renaissance.
Stimulated with this liberating invention, Chinese literature now became
an unprecedented flood. All the glory of the Humanist revival in Italy
was anticipated by two hundred years. The ancient classics were honored
with a hundred editions and a thousand commentaries; the life of the past
was captured by scholarly historians, and put down for millions of readers
CHAP. XXV) THEAGEOFTHEARTISTS 731
in the new marvel of type; vast anthologies of literature were collected,
great dictionaries were compiled, and encyclopedias like mastodons made
their way through the land. The first of any moment was that of Wu
Shu (947-1002); for lack of an alphabet it was arranged under categories,
covering chiefly the physical world. In 977 A.D. the Sung Emperor T'ai
Tsung ordered the compilation of a larger encyclopedia; it ran to thirty-
two volumes, and consisted for the most part of selections from 1,690 pre-
existing books. Later, under the Ming Emperor Yung Lo (1403-25), an
encyclopedia was written in ten thousand volumes, and proved too ex-
pensive to be printed; of the one copy handed down to posterity all but
one hundred and sixty volumes were consumed by fire in the Boxer riots
of 1900." Never before had scholars so dominated a civilization.
3. The Rebirth of Philosophy
Chu Hsi—Wang Yang-wing— Beyond good and evil
These scholars were not all Confucians, for rival schools of thought had
grown up in the course of fifteen centuries, and now the intellectual life
of the exuberant race was stirred with much argument about it and about.
The seepage of Buddhism into the Chinese soul had reached even the
philosophers. Most of them now affected a habit of solitary meditation;
some of them went so far as to scorn Confucius for scorning metaphysics,
and to reject his method of approach to the problems of life and mind as
too external and crude. Introspection became an accepted method of ex-
ploring the universe, and epistemology made its first appearance among
the Chinese. Emperors took up Buddhism or Taoism as ways of promot-
ing their popularity or of disciplining the people; and at times it seemed
that the reign of Confucius over the Chinese mind was to end.
His saviour was Chu Hsi. Just as Shankara, in eighth-century India,
had brought into an intellectual system the scattered insights of the Upani-
shads, and had made the Vedanta philosophy supreme; and just as Aquinas,
in thirteenth-century Europe, was soon to weave Aristotle and St. Paul
into the victorious Scholastic philosophy; so Chu Hsi, in twelfth-
century China, took the loose apothegms of Confucius and built upon
them a system of philosophy orderly enough to satisfy the taste of a
scholarly age, and strong enough to preserve for seven centuries the lead-
ership of the Confucians in the political and intellectual life of the Chinese.
732 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXV
The essential philosophic controversy of the time centered upon the
interpretation of a passage in the Great Learning, attributed by both Chu
Hsi and his opponents to Confucius.* What was meant by the astonishing
demand that the ordering of states should be based upon the proper reg-
ulation of the family, that the regulation of the family should be based
upon the regulation of one's self, that the regulation of one's self depended
upon sincerity of thought, and that sincerity of thought arose from "the
utmost extension of knowledge" through "the investigation of things"?
Chu Hsi answered that this meant just what it said; that philosophy,
morals and statesmanship should begin with a modest study of realities.
He accepted without protest the positivistic bent of the Master's mind;
and though he labored over the problems of ontology at greater length
than Confucius might have approved, he arrived at a strange combination
of atheism and piety which might have interested the sage of Shantung.
Like the Book of Changes, which has always dominated the metaphysics
of the Chinese, Chu Hsi recognized a certain strident dualism in reality:
everywhere the Yang and the Yin— activity and passivity, motion and rest
—mingled like male and female principles, working on the five elements
of water, fire, earth, metal and wood to produce the phenomena of crea-
tion; and everywhere Li and Chi— Law and Matter— equally external,
cooperated to govern all things and give them form. But over all these
forms, and combining them, was Tai chi, the Absolute, the impersonal
Law of Laws, or structure of the world. Chu Hsi identified this Absolute
with the T'ien or Heaven of orthodox Confucianism; God, in his view,
was a rational process without personality or figurable form. "Nature
is nothing else than Law."1*
This Law of the universe is also, said Chu, the law of morals and of
politics. Morality is harmony with the laws of nature, and the highest
statesmanship is the application of the laws of morality to the conduct
of a state. Nature in every ultimate sense is good, and the nature of men
is good; to follow nature is the secret of wisdom and peace. "Choi Mao
Shu refrained from clearing away the grass from in front of his window,
'because,' he said, 'its impulse is just like my own.' "" One might con-
clude that the instincts are also good, and that one may follow them gayly;
but Chu Hsi denounces them as the expression of matter (Chi), and de-
mands their subjection to reason and law (Li).90 It is difficult to be at
once a moralist and a logician.
* The passage is quoted in full on page 668 above.
CHAP.XXV) THEAGEOFTHEARTISTS 733
There were contradictions in this philosophy, but these did not disturb
its leading opponent, the gentle and peculiar Wang Yang-ming. For
Wang was a saint as well as a philosopher; the meditative spirit and habits
of Mahay ana Buddhism had sunk deeply into his soul. It seemed to him
that the great error in Chu Hsi was not one of morals, but one of method;
the investigation of things, he felt, should begin not with the examination
of the external universe, but, as the Hindus had said, with the far pro-
founder and more revealing world of the inner self. Not all the physical
science of all the centuries would ever explain a bamboo shoot or a grain
of rice.
In former years I said to my friend Chien: "If, to be a sage or a
virtuous man, one must investigate everything under heaven, how
can at present any man possess such tremendous power?" Pointing
to the bamboos in front of the pavilion, I asked him to investigate
them and see. Both day and night Chien entered into an investiga-
tion of the principles of the bamboo. For three days he exhausted
his mind and thought, until his mental energy was tired out and he
took sick. At first I said that it was because his energy and strength
were insufficient. Therefore I myself undertook to carry on the
investigation. Day and night I was unable to understand the prin-
ciples of the bamboo, until after seven days I also became ill be-
cause of having wearied and burdened my thoughts. In consequence
we mutually sighed and said, "We cannot be either sages or virtu-
So Wang Yang-ming put aside the examination of things, and put aside
even the classics of antiquity; to read one's own heart and mind in solitary
contemplation seemed to him to promise more wisdom than all objects
and all books.88 Exiled to a mountainous wilderness inhabited by bar-
barians and infested with poisonous snakes, he made friends and disciples
of the criminals who had escaped to those parts; he taught them philoso-
phy, cooked for them, and sang them songs. Once, at the midnight watch,
he startled them by leaping from his cot and crying out ecstatically: "My
nature, of course, is sufficient. I was wrong in looking for principles in
things and affairs." His comrades were not sure that they followed him;
but slowly he led them on to his idealistic conclusion: "The mind itself
is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that
exists independent of the mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?"83
734 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXV
He did not infer from this that God was a figment of the imagination; on
the contrary he conceived of the Deity as a vague but omnipresent moral
force, too great to be merely a person, and yet capable of feeling sym-
pathy and anger toward men."4
From this idealistic starting-point he came to the same ethical principles
as Chu Hsi. "Nature is the highest good," and the highest excellence lies
in accepting the laws of Nature completely." When it was pointed out
to him that Nature seems to include snakes as well as philosophers, he
replied, with a touch of Aquinas, Spinoza and Nietzsche, that "good" and
"bad" are prejudices, terms applied to things according to their advantage
or injury to one's self or mankind; Nature itself, he taught, is beyond good
and evil, and ignores our egoistic terminology. A pupil reports, or invents,
a dialogue which might have been entitled Jenseits von Gut und Bose:
A little later he said: "This view of good and evil has its source
in the body, and is probably mistaken." I was not able to compre-
hend. The Teacher said: "The purpose of heaven in bringing forth
is even as in the instance of flowers and grass. In what way does it
distinguish between good and evil? If you, my disciple, take de-
light in seeing the flowers, then you will consider flowers good and
grass bad. If you desire to use the grass you will, in turn, con-
sider the grass good. This type of good and evil has its source in the
likes and dislikes of your mind. Therefore I know that you are mis-
taken."
I said: "In that case there is neither good nor evil, is there?"
The Teacher said: "The tranquillity resulting from the dominance
of natural law is a state in which no discrimination is made between
good and evil; while the stirring of the passion-nature is a state in
which both good and evil are present. If there are no stirrings of the
passion-nature, there is neither good nor evil, and this is what is
called the highest good." . . .
I said: "In that case good and evil are not at all present in
things?" He said: "They are only in your mind."*
It was well that Wang and Buddhism sounded this subtle note of an
idealist metaphysic in the halls of the correct and prim Confucians; for
though these scholars had the justest view of human nature and govern-
ment which philosophy had yet conceived, they were a trifle enamored
of their wisdom, and had become an intellectual bureaucracy irksome and
hostile to every free and creatively erring soul. If in the end the followers
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 735
of Chu Hsi won the day, if his tablet was placed with high honors in the
same hall with that of the Master himself, and his interpretations of the
Classics became a law to all orthodox thought for seven hundred years,
it was indeed a victory of sound and simple sense over the disturbing
subtleties of the metaphysical mind. But a nation, like an individual, can
be too sensible, too prosaically sane and unbearably right. It was partly
because Chu Hsi and Confucianism triumphed so completely that China
had to have her Revolution.
II. BRONZE, LACQUER AND JADE
The role of art in China— Textiles— Furniture— Jewelry— Fans—
The making of lacquer—The cutting of jade— Some master-
pieces in bronze— Chinese sculpture
The pursuit of wisdom and the passion for beauty are the two poles
of the Chinese mind, and China might loosely be defined as philosophy
and porcelain. As the pursuit of wisdom meant to China no airy meta-
physic but a positive philosophy aiming at individual development and
social order, so the passion for beauty was no esoteric estheticism, no
dilettante concoction of art forms irrelevant to human affairs, but an
earthly marriage of beauty and utility, a practical resolve to adorn the
objects and implements of daily life. Until it began to yield its own ideals
to Western influence, China refused to recognize any distinction between
the artist and the artisan, or between the artisan and the worker; nearly
all industry was 77/flm/facturc, and all manufacture was handicraft; in-
dustry, like art, was the expression of personality in things. Hence China,
while neglecting to provide its people, through large-scale industry, with
conveniences common in the West, excelled every country in artistic
taste and the multiplication of beautiful objects for daily use. From the
characters in which he wrote to the dishes from which he ate, the com-
fortable Chinese demanded that everything about him should have some
esthetic form, and evidence in its shape and texture the mature civilization
of which it was a symbol and a part.
It was during the Sung Dynasty that this movement to beautify the
person, the temple and the home reached its highest expression. It had
been a part of the excellence of T'ang life, and would remain and spread
under later dynasties; but now a long period of order and prosperity
nourished every art, and gave to Chinese living a grace and adornment
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXV
which it had never enjoyed before. In textiles and metalworking the
craftsmen of China, during and after the Sung era, reached a degree of
perfection never surpassed; in the cutting of jade and hard stones they
went beyond all rivals anywhere; and in the carving of wood and ivory
they were excelled only by their pupils in Japan.*7 Furniture was designed
in a variety of unique and uncomfortable forms; cabinet-makers, living on
a bowl of rice per day, sent forth one objet de verttt—one little piece of
perfection—after another; and these minor products of a careful art, taking
the place of expensive furniture and luxuries in homes, gave to their
owners a pleasure which in the Occident only connoisseurs can know.
Jewelry was not abundant, but it was admirably cut. Women and men
cooled themselves with ornate fans of feathers or bamboo, of painted
paper or silk; even beggars brandished elegant fans as they plied their
ancient trade.
The art of lacquer began in China, and came to its fullest perfection
in Japan. In the Far East lacquer is the natural product of a tree* in-
digenous to China, but now most sedulously cultivated by the Japanese.
The sap is drawn from trunk and branches, strained, and heated to remove
excess liquid; it is applied to thin wood, sometimes to metal or porcelain,
and is dried by exposure to moisture.88 Twenty or thirty coats, each slowly
dried and painstakingly polished, are laid on, the applications varying in
color and depth; then, in China, the finished lacquer is carved with a
sharp V-shaped tool, each incision reaching to such a layer as to expose
the color required by the design. The art grew slowly; it began as a
form of writing upon bamboo strips; the material was used in the Chou
Dynasty to decorate vessels, harness, carriages, etc.; in the second century
A.D. it was applied to buildings and musical instruments; under the Tang
many lacquered articles were exported to Japan; under the Sung all
branches of the .industry took their definite form, and shipped their
products to such distant ports as India and Arabia; under the Ming em-
perors the art was further perfected, and in some phases reached its
zenith;88 under the enlightened Manchu rulers K'ang-hsi and Ch'icn Lung
great factories were built and maintained by imperial decree, and made
such masterpieces as Ch'ien Lung's throne," or the lacquered screen that
K'ang-hsi presented to Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.*1
The art continued at its height until the nineteenth century, when the
• The Rhus vernicifera. Lacquer is from the French lacre, resin, which in turn derives
from tiie Latin lac. milk.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 737
wars brought on by European merchants, and the poor taste of European
importers and clients, caused the withdrawal of imperial support, lowered
the standards, debased the designs, and left the leadership in lacquer to
Japan.
Jade is as old as Chinese history, for it is found in the most ancient
graves. The earliest records attribute its use as a "sound-stone" to 2500
B.C.: jade was cut in the form of a fish or elsewise, and suspended by a
thong; when properly cut and struck it emitted a clear musical tone,
astonishingly long sustained. The word was derived through the French
jade from the Spanish ijada (Lat. ilia), meaning loins; the Spanish con-
querors of America found that the Mexicans used the stone, powdered
and mixed with water, as a cure for many internal disorders, and they
brought this new prescription back to Europe along with American gold.
The Chinese word for the stone is much more sensible; jun means soft like
the dew. * Two minerals provide jade: jadeite and nephrite—silicates in
the one case of aluminium and sodium, in the other of calcium and mag-
nesium. Both are tough; the pressure of fifty tons is sometimes required
to crush a one-inch cube; large pieces are usually broken by being sub-
jected in quick succession first to extreme heat and then to cold water.
The ingenuity of the Chinese artist is revealed in his ability to bring
lustrous colors of green, brown, black and white out of these naturally
colorless materials, and in the patient obstinacy with which he varies the
forms, so that in all the world's collections of jade (barring buttons) no
two pieces are alike. Examples begin to appear as far back as the Shang
Dynasty, in the shape of a jade toad used in divine sacrifice;*8 and forms
of great beauty were produced in the days of Confucius.114 While various
peoples used jadeite for axes, knives and other utensils, the Chinese held
the stone in such reverence that they kept it almost exclusivly for art; they
regarded it as more precious than silver or gold, or any jewelry;* they
valued some small jades, like the thumb rings worn by the mandarins,
at five thousand dollars, and some jade necklaces at $ioo,odo; collectors
spent years in search of a single piece. It has been estimated that an
assemblage of all existing Chinese jades would form a collection unrivaled
by any other material."
Bronze is almost as old as jade in the art of China, and even more exalted
in Chinese reverence. Legend tells how the ancient Emperor Yii, hero
of the Chinese flood, cast the metals sent him as tribute by the nine pro-
vinces of his empire into the form of three nine-legged cauldrons, possessed
738 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
of the magic power to ward off noxious influences, cause their contents
to boil without fire, and generate spontaneously every delicacy. They
became a sacred symbol of the imperial authority, were handed down
carefully from dynasty to dynasty, but disappeared mysteriously on the
fall of the Chou— a circumstance extremely injurious to the prestige of
Shih Huang-ti. The casting and decoration of bronze became one of the
fine arts of China, and produced collections that required forty-two
volumes to catalogue them.37 It made vessels for the religious ceremonies
of the government and the home, and transformed a thousand varieties
of utensils into works of art. Chinese bronzes are equaled only by the
work of the Italian Renaissance, and there, perhaps, only by those "Gates
of Paradise" which Ghiberti designed for the Baptistery of Florence.
The oldest existing pieces of Chinese bronze are sacrificial vessels re-
cently discovered in Honan; Chinese scholars assign them to the Shang
Dynasty, but European connoisseurs give them a later, though uncertain,
date. The earliest dated remains are from the period of the Chou; an ex-
cellent example of these is the set of ceremonial vessels in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. Most of the Chou bronzes were confiscated
by Shih Huang-ti, lest the people melt them down and recast them as
weapons. With the accumulated metal his artisans made twelve gigantic
statues, each fifty feet high;38 but not one foot of the fifty remains. Under
the Han many fine vessels were made, often inlaid with gold. Artists trained
in China cast several masterpieces for the Temple of Horiuji at Nara in
Japan, the loveliest being three Amida-Buddhas seated in lotus-beds ;3B there
is hardly anything finer than these figures in the history of bronze.* Under
the Sung the art reached its height, if not of excellence, certainly of fer-
tility; cauldrons, wine vessels, beakers, censers, weapons, mirrors, bells, drums,
vases, plaques and figurines filled the shelves of connoisseurs and found some
place in nearly every home. An attractive sample of Sung work is an in-
cense burner in the form of a water buffalo mounted by Lao-tze, who be-
strides it calmly in p;oof of the power of philosophy to tame the savage
breast.40 The casting is throughout of the thinness of paper, and the lapse of
time has given the piece a patina or coating of mottled green that lends it
the meretricious beauty of decay.t Under the Ming a slow deterioration
• Cf. p. 897 below.
t Patina (Latin for dish) is formed by the disintegration of the metal surface through
contact with moisture or earth. It is the fashion today to value bronzes partly according
to the green or black patina left on them by time—or by the acids used in the modern
production of "ancient" an.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 739
attacked the art; the size of the objects increased, the quality fell. Bronze,
which had been a miraculous novelty in the Chalcolithic Age of the Em-
peror Yii, became a commonplace, and yielded its popularity to porcelain.
Sculpture was not one of the major arts, not even a fine art, to the
Chinese.41 By an act of rare modesty the Far East refused to class the
human body under the rubric of beauty; its sculptors played a little with
drapery, and used the figures of men— seldom of women— to study or
represent certain types of consciousness; but they did not glorify the
body. For the most part they confined their portraits of humanity to
Buddhist saints and Taoist sages, ignoring the athletes and courtesans who
gave such inspiration to the artists of Greece. In the sculpture of China
animals were preferred even to philosophers and saints.
The earliest Chinese statues known to us arc the twelve bronze colossi
erected by Shih Huang-ti; they were melted by a Han ruler to make "small
cash." A few little animals in bronze remain from the Han Dynasty; but
nearly all the statuary of that epoch was destroyed by war or the negli-
gence of time. The only important Han remains arc the tomb-reliefs found
in Shantung; here again the human figures are rare, the scenes being domi-
nated by animals carved in thin relief. More akin to sculpture arc the
funerary statuettes of clay— mostly of animals, occasionally of servants or
wives— which were buried with male corpses as a convenient substitute for
suttee. Here and there animals in the round survive from this period, like
the marble tiger, all muscle and watchfulness, that guarded the temple of
Sniang-fu,'2 or the snarling bears in the Gardner collection at Boston, or the
winged and goitrous lions of the Nanking tombs.4'1 These animals, and the
proud horses of the tomb-reliefs, show a mixture of Greco-Bactrian, Assyrian
and Scythian influences; there is nothing about them distinctively Chinese.44
Meanwhile another influence was entering China, in the form of Buddhist
theology and art. It made a home for itself first in Turkestan, and built
there a civilization from which Stein and Pclliot have unearthed many tons
of ruined statuary; some of it45 seems equal to Hindu Buddhist art at its
best. The Chinese took over those Buddhist forms without much alteration,
and produced Buddhas as fair as any in Gandhara or India. The earliest of
these appear in the Yun Kan cave temples of Shansi (ca. 490 A.D.); among
the best are the figures in the Lung Men grottoes of Honan. Outside these
grottoes stand several colossi, of which the most unique is a graceful Bod-
hisattiua, and the most imposing is the "Vairochana" Buddha (ca. 672 A.D.),
destroyed at the base but still instructively serene.4* Farther east, in Shan-
740 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
tung, many cave temples have been found whose walls are carved with
mythology in Hindu fashion, with here and there a powerful Bodhisattwa
like that in the cave of Yun Men (ca. 600 A.D.).47 The Tang Dynasty con-
tinued the Buddhist tradition in sculpture, and carried it to perfection in
the seated stone Buddha (ca. 639) found in the province of Shensi.48 The
later dynasties produced in clay some massive Lohans— disciples of the
gentle Buddha who have the stern faces of financiers;* and some very
beautiful figures of the Mahayana deity Kuan-yin, almost in the process of
turning from a god into a goddess.49
After the T'ang Dynasty sculpture lost its religious inspiration, and took
on a secular, occasionally a sensuous, character; moralists complained, as in
Renaissance Italy, that the artists were making saints as graceful and supple
as women; and Buddhist priests laid down severe iconographic rules for-
bidding the individualization of character or the accentuation of the body.
Probably the strong moral bent of the Chinese impeded the development
of sculpture; when the religious motif lost its impelling force, and the attrac-
tiveness of physical beauty was not allowed to take its place, sculpture in
China decayed; religion destroyed what it could no longer inspire. Towards
the end of the T'ang the fount of sculptural creation began to run dry.
The Sung produced only a few extant pieces of distinction;' the Mongols
gave their energies to war; the Mings excelled for a passing moment in
bizarreries and such colossi as the stone monsters that stand before the tombs
of the Mings. Sculpture, choked by religious restrictions, gave up the ghost,
and left the field of Chinese art to porcelain and painting.
III. PAGODAS AND PALACES
Chinese architecture-The Porcelain Tower of Nanking-The Jade
Pagoda of Peking-The Temple of Confucius-The Temple
and Altar of Heaven-The palaces of Kublai Khan-
A Chinese home— The interior—Color and for?n
Architecture, too, has been a minor art in China. Such master-builders
as have labored there have hardly left a name behind them, and seem to
have been less admired than the great potters. Large structures have been
rare in China, even in honoring the gods; old buildings are seldom found,
and only a few pagodas date back beyond the sixteenth century. Sung
architects issued, in 1103 A.D., eight handsomely illustrated volumes on
The Method of Architecture; but the masterpieces that they pictured
* There are some examples of this style in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 741
were all of wood, and not a fragment of them survives. Drawings in the
National Library at Paris, purporting to represent the dwellings and
temples of Confucius' time, show that through its long history of over
twenty-three centuries Chinese architecture has been content with the
same designs, and the same modest proportions.60 Perhaps the very sensi-
tivity of the Chinese in matters of art and taste made them forego struc-
tures that might have seemed immodest and grandiose; and perhaps their
superiority in intellect has somewhat hindered the scope of their imagina-
tion. Above all, Chinese architecture suffered from the absence of three
institutions present in almost every other great nation of antiquity: an
hereditary aristocracy, a powerful priesthood," and a strong and wealthy
central government. These are the forces that in the past have paid for
the larger works of art— for the temples and palaces, the masses and operas,
the great frescoes and sculptured tombs. And China was fortunate and
unique: she had none of these institutions.
For a time the Buddhist faith captured the Chinese soul, and sufficient of
China's income to build the great temples whose ruins have been so lately
discovered in Turkestan." Buddhist temples of a certain middling majesty
survive throughout China, but they suffer severely when compared with the
religious architecture of India. Pleasant natural approaches lead to them,
usually up winding inclines marked by ornate gateways called p'ai-lus, and
apparently derived from the "rails" of the Hindu topes; sometimes the
entrance is spiritually barred by hideous images designed, in one sense or
another, to frighten foreign devils away. One of the best of the Chinese
Buddhist shrines is the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, near the Summer
Palace outside Peking; Fergusson called it "the finest architectural achieve-
ment in China.""
More characteristic of the Far East are the pagodas that dominate the
landscape of almost every Chinese town.* Like the Buddhism that inspired
them, these graceful edifices took over some of the superstitions of popular
Taoism, and became centers not only of religious ceremony, but of geomantic
divination— i.e., the discovery of the future by the study of lines and clefts
in the earth. Communities erected pagodas in the belief that such structures
could ward off wind and flood, propitiate evil spirits, and attract prosperity.
Usually they took the form of octagonal brick towers rising on a stone
foundation to five, seven, nine or thirteen stories, because even numbers
* Their origin, in name and fact, is in much dispute. The word may be taken from the
Hindu-Persian term but-kadak— "house of idols"; the form may be indigenous to China, as
some think," or may be derived from the spire that crowned some Hindu topes."
742 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXV
were unlucky.88 The oldest standing pagoda is at Sung Yiieh Ssu, built in
523 A.D. on the sacred mountain of Sung Shan in Honan; one of the loveliest
is the Pagoda of the Summer Palace; the most spectacular are the Jade
Pagoda at Peking and the "Flask Pagoda" at Wu-tai-shan; the most famous
was the Porcelain Tower of Nanking, built in 1412-31, distinguished by a
facing of porcelain over its bricks, and destroyed by the T'ai-p'ing Rebellion
in 1854.
The fairest temples of China are those dedicated to the official faith at
Peking. The Temple of Confucius is guarded by a magnificent p'ai-lu,
most delicately carved, but the temple itself is a monument to philosophy
rather than to art. Built in the thirteenth century, it has been remodeled
and restored many times since. On a wooden stand in an open niche is the
"Tablet of the Soul of the Most Holy Ancestral Teacher Confucius;" and
over the main altar is the dedication to "The Master and Model of Ten
Thousand Generations." Near the South Tatar Wall of Peking stand the
Temple of Heaven and the Altar of Heaven. The altar is an impressive
series of marble stairs and terraces, whose number and arrangement had a
magical significance; the temple is a modified pagoda of three stories, raised
upon a marble platform, and built of unprepossessing brick and tile. Here,
at three o'clock in the morning of the Chinese New Year, the Emperor
prayed for the success of his dynasty and the prosperity of his people, and
offered sacrifice to a neuter but, it was hoped, not neutral, Heaven. How-
ever, the temple was badly damaged by lightning in 1889."
More attractive than these stolid shrines are the frail and ornate palaces
that once housed princes and mandarins at Peking. A burst of architectural
genius during the reign of Ch'eng Tsu (1403-25) reared the Great Hall at
the tombs of the Ming Emperors, and raised a medley of royal residences
in an enclosure destined to become known as the "Forbidden City," on the
very site where Kublai Khan's palaces had amazed Marco Polo two centuries
before. Ogrish lions stand watch at either side of the marble balustrades
that lead to the marble terrace; hereon are official buildings with throne
rooms, reception rooms, banquet rooms, and the other needs of royalty; and
scattered about are the elaborate homes in which once lived the Imperial
Family, their children and relatives, their servants and retainers, their
eunuchs and concubines. The palaces hardly vary one from another; all
have the same slender columns, the same pretty lattices, the same carved or
lettered cornices, the same profusion of brilliant colors, the same upward-
curving eaves of the same massively tiled roofs. And like these forbidden
delicacies is the second Summer Palace, some miles away; perhaps more
completely perfect of its kind, more gracefully proportioned and fastidiously
carved, than the once royal homes of Peking.
CHAP. XXV ) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 743
If we try to express in brief compass the general characteristics of Chinese
architecture, we find as a first feature the unpleasant wall that hides the
main structures from the street. In the poorer sections these outer walls are
continuous from home to home, and betray an ancient insecurity of life.
Within the wall is a court, upon which open the doors and lattices of one
or several homes. The houses of the poor are gloomy tenements, with
narrow entrances and corridors, low ceilings, and floors of the good earth;
in many families pigs, dogs, hens, men and women live in one room. The
poorest of all live in rain-swept, wind-beaten huts of mud and straw. Those
with slightly better incomes cover the floor with mats, or pave it with tiles.
The well-to-do adorn the inner court with shrubs and flowers and pools, or
surround their mansions with gardens in which nature's wild variety and
playful sports find assiduous representation. Here are no primrose paths,
no avenues of tulip-beds, no squares or circles or octagons of grass or
flowers; instead, precarious footways wind casually through rock-laid gulleys
over devious rivulets, and among trees whose trunks or limbs have been
taught to take strange shapes to satisfy sophisticated souls. Here and there
dainty pavilions, half hidden by the foliage, offer the wanderer rest.
The home itself is not an imposing affair, even when it is a palace. It is
never more than one story in height; and if many rooms arc needed, the
tendency is to raise new edifices rather than to enlarge the old. Hence a
palatial dwelling is seldom one united structure; it is a group of buildings
of which the more important follow in a line from the entrance to the
enclosure, while the secondary buildings are placed at either side. The
favorite materials are wood and brick; stone rarely rises above the founda-
tion terrace; brick is usually confined to the outer walls, earthen tiles provide
the roof, and wood builds the decorative columns and the inner walls. Above
the brightly colored walls an ornamental cornice runs. Neither the walls
nor the columns support the roof; this, heavy though it is, rests only upon
the posts that form part of the wooden frame. The roof is the major part
of a Chinese temple or home. Built of glazed tiles— yellow if covering
imperial heads, otherwise green, purple, red or blue— the roof makes a pretty
picture in a natural surrounding, and even in the chaos of city streets. Per-
haps the projecting bamboos of ancient tent-tops gave the Far Eastern roof
its graceful upward curve at the eaves; but more probably this celebrated
form arose merely from the desire of the Chinese builder to protect his
structure from rain.M For there were few windows in China; Korean paper
or pretty lattices took their place, and lattices would not keep out the rain.
The main doorway is not at the gable end, but on the southern facade;
within the ornamented portal is usually a screen or wall, barring the visitor
from an immediate view of the interior, and offering some discouragement
744 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
to evil spirits, who must travel in a straight line. The hall and rooms are dim,
for most of the daylight is kept out by the latticed openings and the pro-
jecting eaves. There are seldom any arrangements for ventilation, and the
only heat supplied is from portable braziers, or brick beds built over a
smoky fire; there are no chimneys and no flues.56 Rich and poor suffer from
cold, and go to bed fully clothed.80 "Are you cold?" the traveler asks the
Chinese; and the answer is often "Of course.""1 The ceiling may be hung
with gaudy paper lanterns; the walls may be adorned with calligraphic
scrolls, or ink sketches, or silk hangings skilfully embroidered and painted
with rural scenes. The furniture is usually of heavy wood, stained to an
ebony black, and luxuriantly carved; the lighter pieces may be of brilliant
lacquer. The Chinese are the only Oriental nation that sits on chairs; and
even they prefer to recline or squat. On a special table or shelf are the
vessels used to offer sacrifice to the ancestral dead. In the rear are the apart-
ments of the women. Separate rooms or detached buildings may house a
library or a school.
The general impression left by Chinese architecture upon the foreign and
untechnical observer is one of charming frailty. Color dominates form, and
beauty here has to do without the aid of sublimity. The Chinese temple or
palace seeks not to dominate nature, but to cooperate with it in that perfect
harmony of the whole which depends upon the modesty of the parts. Those
qualities that give a structure strength, security and permanence are absent
here, as if the builders feared that earthquakes would stultify their pains.
These buildings hardly belong to the same art as that which raised its monu-
ments at Karnak and Pcrsepolis, and on the Acropolis; they are not architec-
ture as we of the Occident have known it, but rather the carving of wood,
the glazing of pottery and the sculpture of stone; they harmonize better
with porcelain and jade than with the ponderous edifices that a mixture of
engineering and architecture gave to India, Mesopotamia or Rome. If we
do not ask of them the grandeur and the solidity which their makers may
never have cared to give them, if we accept them willingly as architectural
cameos expressing the most delicate of tastes in the most fragile of structural
forms, then they take their place as a natural and appropriate variety of
Chinese art, and among the most gracious shapes ever fashioned by men.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 745
IV. PAINTING
1. Masters of Chinese Painting
Ku K'ai-ckhi, the "greatest painter, wit and fool"-Han Yu's
miniature— The classic and the romantic schools—Wang Wei
—Wu Tao-tze—Hui Tsung, the artist-emperor— Masters
of the Sung age
The Occident has been forgivably slow in acquainting itself with
Chinese painting, for almost every aspect and method of the art in the
East differed from its practice in the West. First, the paintings of the
Far East were never on canvas; occasionally they were wall frescoes, as
in the period of Buddhist influence; sometimes, as in later days, they were
on paper; but for the most part they were on silk, and the frailty of this
material shortened the life of every masterpiece, and left the history of
the art with mere memories and records of accomplishment. Further, the
paintings had an air of thinness and slightness; most of them were in
water-color, and lacked the full-bodied and sensuous tints of European
pictures in oil. The Chinese tried oil-painting, but seem to have abandoned
it as too coarse and heavy a method for their subtle purposes. To them
painting, at least in its earliest forms, was a branch of calligraphy, or
beautiful penmanship; the brush which they used for writing served them
also for painting; and many of their chef-d'oeuvres were drawn simply
with brush and ink.* Finally, their greatest achievements were uncon-
sciously hidden from Western travelers. For the Chinese do not flaunt
their pictures on public or private walls; they roll them up and store them
carefully away, and unfold them for occasional enjoyment as we take
down and read a book. Such scroll paintings were arranged in sequence
on a roll of paper or silk, and were "read" like a manuscript; smaller
pictures were hung on a wall, but were seldom framed; sometimes a series
* Though writing is in its origin a form of drawing or painting, the Chinese classify
painting as a form of writing, and consider calligraphy, or beautiful writing, as a major
an. Specimens of fine writing are hung on the walls in Chinese and Japanese homes; and
devotees of the art have pursued its masterpieces as modern collectors roam over conti-
nents to find a picture or a vase. The most famous of Chinese caliigraphers was Wang
Hsi-chih (ca. 400 A.D.); it was on the Chinese characters as formed by his graceful hand
that the characters were cut when block-printing began. The great T'ang emperor, Tai
Tsung, resorted to theft to get from Pien-tsai a scroll written by Wang Hsi-chih. There-
upon Pien-tsai, we arc told, lost appetite and died."1
746 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
of pictures was painted on a screen. By the time of the later Sung Dynasty
the art of painting had already developed thirteen "branches,"88 and
innumerable forms.
Painting is mentioned in Chinese literature as an established art several
centuries before Christ; and despite the interruptions of war it has con-
tinued in China to our own time. Tradition makes the first Chinese painter
a woman, Lei, sister of the pious Emperor Shun; "alas," cried a disgusted
critic, "that this divine an should have been invented by a woman!"04
Nothing survives of Chou painting; but that the art was then already
old appears from Confucius' report of how deeply he was affected by
the frescoes in the Grand Temple at Lo-yang.M During the early years
of the Han Dynasty a writer complained that a hero whom he admired
had not been sufficiently painted: "Good artists are many; why does not
one of them draw him?""0 The story is told of an artist virtuoso of the
time, Lich-I, who could draw a perfectly straight line one thousand feet
long, could etch a detailed map of China on a square inch of surface, and
could fill his mouth with colored water and spit it out in the form of
paintings; the phoenixes which he painted were so lifelike that people
wondered why they did not fly away.07 There are signs that Chinese
painting reached one of its zeniths at the beginning of our era,08 but war
and time have destroyed the evidence. From the days when the Ch'in
warriors sacked Lo-yang (ca. 249 B.C.), burning whatever they could not
use, down to the Boxer Uprising (1900 A.D.), when the soldiers of Tung
Cho employed the silk pictures of the Imperial Collection for wrapping
purposes, the victories of art and war have alternated in their ancient
conflict— destruction always certain, but creation never still.
As Christianity transformed Mediterranean culture and art in the third
and fourth centuries after Christ, so Buddhism, in the same centuries,
effected a theological and esthetic revolution in the life of China. While
Confucianism retained its political power, Buddhism, mingling with
Taoism, became the dominating force in art, and brought to the Chinese
a stimulating contact with Hindu motives, symbols, methods and forms.
The greatest genius of the Chinese Buddhist school of painting was Ku
K'ai-chih, a man of such unique and positive personality that a web of
anecdote or legend has meshed him in. He loved the girl next door, and
offered her his hand; but she, not knowing how famous he was to be,
refused him. He painted her form upon a wall, and stuck a thorn into the
heart, whereupon the girl began to die. He approached her again, and
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 747
she yielded; he removed the thorn from his picture, and forthwith the
girl grew well. When the Buddhists tried to raise money to build a
temple at Nanking he promised the fund one million "cash"; all China
laughed at the offer, for Ku was as poor as an artist. "Give me the use of a
wall," he asked. Having found a wall and secured privacy, he painted
there the Buddhist saint Uimala-Kirti. When it was finished he sent for
the priests, and explained to them how they might raise the million "cash."
"On the first day you must charge 100,000 'cash' for admission" to see
the picture; "on the second day, 50,000; on the third day let visitors sub-
scribe what they please." They did as he told them, and took in a million
"cash."00 Ku painted a long series of Buddhist pictures, and many others,
but nothing certainly his has come down to our day.* He wrote three
treatises on painting, of which some fragments survive. Men, he said,
were the most difficult things to paint; next came landscapes, then horses
and gods." He insisted on being a philosopher, too; under his portrait of
the emperor he wrote: "In Nature there is nothing high which is not soon
brought low. . . . When the sun has reached its noon, it begins to sink;
when the moon is full it begins to wane. To rise to glory is as hard as to
build a mountain out of grains of dust; to fall into calamity is as easy as
the rebound of a tense spring."78 His contemporaries ranked him as the
outstanding man of his time in three lines: in painting, in wit, and in fool-
ishness.74
Painting flourished at the T'ang court. "There are as many painters as
morning stars," said Tu Fu, "but artists are few."75 In the ninth century
Chang Yen-yuan wrote a book called Eminent Painters of All Ages, in
which he described the work of three hundred and seventy artists. A pic-
ture by a master, he tells us, brought in those days as much as twenty
thousand ounces of silver. But he warns us against rating art in monetary
terms; "good pictures," he writes, "are more priceless than gold or jade;
bad ones are not worth a potsherd."7" Of T'ang painters we still know
the names of two hundred and twenty; of their work hardly anything
remains, for the Tatar revolutionists who sacked Chang-an in 756 A.D. did
not care for painting. We catch something of the art atmosphere that
mingled with the poetry of the time, in the story of Han Yii, the famous
* The British Museum assigns to him a faded but lovely scroll of five pictures illustrat-
ing model family life;70 the Temple of Confucius at Chu-fu contains a stone engraving
purporting to follow a design of Ku; and the Freer Gallery at Washington contains two
excellent copies of compositions attributed to him.71
748 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
"Prince of Literature." One day he won, from a fellow lodger at an inn,
a precious miniature portraying, in the smallest compass, one hundred and
twenty-three human figures, eighty-three horses, thirty other animals,
three chariots, and two hundred and fifty-one articles. "I thought a great
deal of it, for I could not believe that it was the work of a single man,
uniting as it did in itself such a variety of excellences; and no sum would
have tempted me to part from it. Next year I left the city, and went to
Ho-yang; and there, one day, while discussing art with strangers, I pro-
duced the picture for them to see. Among them was a Mr. Chao, a
Censor,* a highly cultivated man, who, when he saw it, seemed rather
overcome, and at length said: 'That picture is a copy, made by me in my
youth, of a work from the Imperial Gallery. I lost it twenty years ago
while traveling in the province of Fukien.' " Han Yii at once presented
the miniature to Mr. Chao.
Just as in Chinese religion two schools had taken shape, Confucian and
Taoist-Buddhist— and just as two schools, led by Chu Hsi and Wang
Yang-ming, were soon to develop in philosophy, representing respectively
what we in the West would call the classic and the romantic types of
mind; so in Chinese painting the northern artists accepted a stern tradi-
tion of classical sobriety and restraint, while the south gave color and
form to feeling and imagination. The northern school set itself severely
to secure correct modeling of figure and full clarity of line; the southern
rebelled like Montmartre against such limitations, disdained a simple real-
ism, and tried to use objects merely as elements in a spiritual experience,
tones in a musical mood.77 Li Ssu-hsiin, painting at the court of Ming
Huang, found time, amid the fluctuations of political power and lonely
exile, to establish the northern school. He painted some of the first Chinese
landscapes, and achieved a degree of realism carried down in many a tale;
the Emperor said he could hear, at night, the splash of the water that Li
had painted upon an imperial screen; and a fish leaped to life out of an-
other of his pictures and was later found in a pool— every nation tells such
stories of its painters. The southern school sprouted out of the natural
innovations of art, and the genius of Wang Wei; in his impressionist style
a landscape became merely the symbol of a mood. A poet as well as a
painter, Wang sought to bind the two arts by making the picture express
a poem; it was of him that men first used the now trite phrase so applicable
* Cf . p. 798 below.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 749
to nearly all Chinese poetry and painting: "Every poem is a picture, and
every picture is a poem." (In many cases the poem is inscribed upon the
picture, and is itself a calligraphic work of art.) Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, we
are told, spent his whole life searching for a genuine Wang Wei.78*
The greatest painter of the T'ang epoch, and, by common consent, of
all the Far East, rose above distinctions of school, and belonged rather to
the Buddhist tradition of Chinese art. Wu Tao-tze deserved his name—
Wu, Master of the Tao or Way, for all those impressions and formless-
thoughts which Lao-tze and Chuang-tze had found too subtle for words
seemed to flow naturally into line and color under his brush. "A poverty-
stricken orphan," a Chinese historian describes him, "but endowed with
a divine nature, he had not assumed the cap of puberty ere he was already
a master artist, and had flooded Lo-yang with his works." Chinese tradi-
tion has it that he was fond of wine and feats of strength, and thought like
Poe that the spirit could work best under a little intoxication.81 He ex-
celled in every subject: men, gods, devils, Buddhas, birds, beasts, buildings,
landscapes— all seemed to come naturally to his exuberant art. He painted
with equal skill on silk, paper, and freshly-plastered walls; he made three
hundred frescoes for Buddhist edifices, and one of these, containing more
than a thousand figures, became as famous in China as "The Last Judg-
ment" or "The Last Supper" in Europe. Ninety-three of his paintings
were in the Imperial Gallery in the twelfth century, four hundred years
after his death; but none remains anywhere today. His Buddhas, we are
told, "fathomed the mysteries of life and death"; his picture of purgatory
frightened some of the butchers and fishmongers of China into abandoning
their scandalously un-Buddhistic trades; his representation of Ming
Huang's dream convinced the Emperor that Wu had had an identical
vision." When the monarch sent Wu to sketch the scenery along the
Chia-ling River in Szechuan he was piqued to see the artist return without
having sketched a line. "I have it all in my heart," said Wu; and isolating
himself in a room of the palace, he threw off, we are assured, a hundred
miles of landscape."t When General Pei wished his portrait painted, Wu
asked him not to pose, but to do a sword dance; after which the artist
painted a picture that contemporaries felt constrained to ascribe to divine
* Only copies remain: chiefly a "Waterfall" in the Temple of Chisakuin at Kyoto,7* and
a roll (in both the British Museum and the Freer Gallery) entitled "Scenery of the
Wang Ch'uan.""
tCf. Croce's view that an lies in the conception rather than in the execution.*4
750 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXV
inspiration. So great was his reputation that when he was finishing some
Buddhist figures at the Hsing-shan Temple, "the whole of Chang-an"
came to see him add the finishing touches. Surrounded by this assemblage,
says a Chinese historian of the ninth century, "he executed the haloes with
so violent a rush and swirl that it seemed as though a whirlwind possessed
his hand, and all who saw it cried that some god was helping him":80 the
lazy will always attribute genius to some "inspiration" that comes for mere
waiting. When Wu had lived long enough, says a pretty talc, he painted a
vast landscape, stepped into the mouth of a cave pictured in it, and was
never seen again.80 Never had art known such mastery and delicacy of
line.
Under the Sung emperors painting became a passion with the Chinese.
Emancipating itself from subserviency to Buddhist themes, it poured
forth an unprecedented number and variety of pictures. The Sung Em-
peror Hui Tsung was himself not the least of the eight hundred known
painters of the day. In a roll which is one of the treasures of the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston he portrayed with astonishing simplicity and clarity
the stages through which women carried the preparation of silk;87 he
founded an art museum richer in masterpieces than any collection that
China has ever again known;88 he elevated the Painting Academy from a
mere department of the Literary College into an independent institution of
the highest rank, substituted art tests for some of the literary exercises
traditionally used in the examinations for political office, and raised men
to the ministry for their excellence in art as often as for their skill in states-
manship.80 The Tatars, hearing of all this, invaded China, deposed the
Emperor, sacked the capital and destroyed nearly all of the paintings in
the Imperial Museum, whose catalogue had filled twenty volumes.00 The
artist-emperor was carried away by the invaders, and died in captivity
and disgrace.
Greater than this royal painter were Kuo Hsi and Li Lung-mien. "For
tall pines, huge trees, swirling streams, beetling crags, steep precipices,
mountain peaks, now lovely in the rising mist, now lost in an obscuring
pall, with all their thousand ten thousand shapes— critics allow that Kuo
Hsi strode across his generation."*01 Li Lung-mien was an artist, a scholar,
a successful official and a gentleman, honored by the Chinese as the per-
fect type of Chinese culture at its richest. He passed from the profession
* The Freer Gallery at Washington has a ''Landscape on the Hoang-ho" uncertainly
attributed to Kuo Hsi.w
CHAP. XXV) THEAGEOFTHEARTISTS 75!
of calligraphy to sketching and painting, and rarely used anything but
ink; he gloried in the strict traditions of the Northern School, and spent
himself upon accuracy and delicacy of line. He painted horses so well
that when six that he had painted died, it was charged that his picture had
stolen their vital principle from them. A Buddhist priest warned him that
he would become a horse if he painted horses so often and so intently; he
accepted the counsel of the monk, and painted five hundred Lobans. We
may judge of his repute by the fact that Hui Tsung's imperial gallery,
when it was sacked, contained one hundred and seven works by Li
Lung-mien.
Other masters crowded the Sung scene: Mi Fci, an eccentric genius
who was forever washing his hands or changing his clothes when he was
not collecting old masters or transforming landscape painting with his
"method of blobs"— daubs of ink laid on without the guidance of any con-
tour line;* Hsia Kuei, whose long roll of scenes from the Yang-tzc— its
modest sources, its passage through loess and gorges, its gaping mouth
filled with merchant ships and sampans— has led many students"8 to rank
him at the head of all landscape painters of Orient and Occident; Ma Yuan,
whose delicate landscapes and distant vistas adorn the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts;t Liang K'ai, with his stately portrait of Li Po; Mu-ch'i, with his
terrible tiger, his careless starling, and his morose but gentle Kuan-yin;
and others whose names strike no familiar chords in Occidental memories,
but are the tokens of a mind rich in the heritage of the East. "The Sung
culture," says Fenollosa, "was the ripest expression of Chinese genius."*
When we try to estimate the quality of Chinese painting in the heyday
of T'ang and Sung we are in the position of future historians who may try
to write of the Italian Renaissance when all the works of Raphael, Leo-
nardo and Michelangelo have been lost. After the ravages of barbaric
hosts had destroyed the masterpieces of Chinese painting, and interrupted
for centuries the continuity of Chinese development, painting seems to
have lost heart; and though the later dynasties, native and alien, produced
many artists of delicacy or power, none could rank with the men who
had known paradise for a time at the courts of Ming Huang and Hui
* A landscape attributed to Mi Fei may be seen in Room E 1 1 of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
t Particularly striking is "The Lady Ling-chao Standing in the Snow." The Lady (a
Buddhist mystic of the eighth century) is quite still in meditation, like Socrates in the
snow at Platza. The world (the artist seems to say) is nothing except to a mind; and
that mind can ignore it— for a while.
752 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
Tsung. When we think of the Chinese we must see them not merely as a
people now stricken with poverty, weakened with corruption, torn with
factions and disgraced with defeat, but as a nation that has had, in the long
vista of its history, ages that could compare with those of Pericles, Augustus
and the Medici, and may have such ages again.
2. Qualities of Chinese Painting
The rejection of perspective— Of realism— Line as nobler than
color — Form as rhythm — Representation by suggestion —
Conventions and restrictions— Sincerity of Chinese art
What is it that distinguishes Chinese painting, and makes it so completely
different from every other school of painting in history except its own
pupils in Japan? First, of course, its scroll or screen form. But this is an
external matter; far more intrinsic and fundamental is the Chinese scorn of
perspective and shadow. When two European painters accepted the invita-
tion of the Emperor K'ang-hsi to come and paint decorations for his palaces,
their work was rejected because they had made the farther columns in their
pictures shorter than the nearer ones; nothing could be more false and
artificial, argued the Chinese, than to represent distances where obviously
there were none.00 Neither party could understand the prejudice of the
other, for the Europeans had been taught to look at a scene from a level
with it, while the Chinese artists were accustomed to visualize it as seen
from above.97 Shadows, too, seemed to the Chinese to be out of place in a
form of art which, as they understod it, aimed not to imitate reality, but to
give pleasure, convey moods, and suggest ideas through the medium of per-
fect form.
The form was everything in these paintings, and it was sought not in
warmth or splendor of color, but in rhythm and accuracy of line. In the
early paintings color was sternly excluded, and in the masters it was rare;
black ink and a brush were enough, for a color had nothing to do with
form. Form, as the artist-theorist Hsieh Ho said, is rhythm: first in the
sense that a Chinese painting is the visible record of a rhythmic gesture, a
dance executed by the hand;8* and again in the sense that a significant form
reveals the "rhythm of the spirit," the essence and quiet movement of
reality." Finally, the body of rhythm is line— not as describing the actual
contours of things, but as building forms that, through suggestion or symbol,
express the soul. The skill of execution, as distinct from the power of per-
ception, feeling and imagination, lies— in Chinese painting— almost entirely in
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 753
accuracy and delicacy of line. The painter must observe with patient care,
possess intense feeling under strict control, conceive his purpose clearly, and
then, without the possibility of correction, transfer to the silk, with a few
continuous and easeful strokes, his representative imagination. The art of
line reached its apex in China and Japan, as the art of color touched its
zenith in Venice and the Netherlands.
Chinese painting never cared for realism, but sought rather to suggest
than to describe; it left "truth" to science, and gave itself to beauty. A
branch emerging nowhence, and bearing a few leaves or blossoms against a
clear sky, was sufficient subject for the greatest master; his handling and
proportion of the empty background were tests of his courage and his skill.
One of the subjects proposed to candidates for admission to Hui Tsung's
Painting Academy may serve to illustrate the Chinese emphasis on indirect
suggestion as against explicit representation: the contestants were asked to
illustrate by paintings a line of poetry— "The hoof of his steed comes back
heavily charged with the scent of the trampled flowers." The successful
competitor was an artist who painted a rider with a cluster of butterflies
following at the horse's heels.
As the form was everything, the subject might be anything. Men were
rarely the center or essence of the picture; when they appeared they were
almost always old, and nearly all alike. The Chinese painter, though he was
never visibly a pessimist, seldom looked at the world through the eyes of
youth. Portraits were painted, but indifferently well; the artist was not
interested in individuals. He loved flowers and animals, apparently, far more
than men, and spent himself upon them recklessly; Hui Tsung, with an
empire at his command, gave half his life to painting birds and flowers.
Sometimes the flowers or the animals were symbols, like the lotus or the
dragon; but for the most part they were drawn for their own sake, because
the charm and mystery of life appeared as completely in them as in a man.
The horse was especially loved, and artists like Han Kan did hardly any-
thing else but paint one form after another of that living embodiment of
artistic line.
It is true that painting suffered in China, first from religious conventions,
and then from academic restrictions; that the copying and imitation of old
masters became a retarding fetich in the training of students, and that the
artist was in many matters confined to a given number of permitted ways
of fashioning his material.100 "In my young days," said an eminent Sung
critic, "I praised the master whose pictures I liked; but as my judgment
matured I praised myself for liking what the masters had chosen to have
me like."101 It is astonishing how much vitality remained in this art despite
its conventions and canons; it was here as Hume thought it had been with
754 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
the censored writers of the French Enlightenment: the very limitations from
which the artist suffered compelled him to be brilliant.
What saved the Chinese painters from stagnation was the sincerity of their
feeling for nature. Taoism had taught it to them, and Buddhism had made
it stronger by teaching them that man and nature arc one in the flow and
change and unity of life. As the poets found in nature a retreat from urban
strife, and the philosophers sought in it a model of morals and a guide to life,
so the painters brooded by solitary streams, and lost themselves in deeply
wooded hills, feeling that in these speechless and lasting things the nameless
spirit had expressed itself more clearly than in the turbulent career and
thought of men.* Nature, which is so cruel in China, lavishing death with
cold and flood, was accepted stoically as the supreme god of the Chinese,
and received from them not merely religious sacrifice, but the worship of
their philosophy, their literature and their art. Let it serve as an indication
of the age and depth of culture in China that a thousand years before Claude
Lorraine, Rousseau, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand the Chinese made nature
a passion, and created a school of landscape painting whose work throughout
the Far East became one of the sovereign expressions of mankind.
V. PORCELAIN
The ceramic art— The waking of porcelain— Its early history—
"Celadon" - Enamels - ^The skill of Hao Shih-chiu -
"Cloisonne"— The age of K'mg-hsi—Of Ch'ien Lung
As we approach the most distinct art of China, in which her leadership
of the world is least open to dispute, we find ourselves harassed by our
tendency to class pottery as an industry. To us, accustomed to think of
"china" in terms of the kitchen, a pottery is a place where "china" is made;
it is a factory like any other, and its products do not arouse exalted asso-
ciations. But to the Chinese, pottery was a major art; it pleased their prac-
tical and yet esthetic souls by combining beauty with use; it gave to their
greatest national institution— the drinking of tea—utensils as lovely to the
finger-tips as to the eye; and it adorned their homes with shapes so fair that
even the poorest families might live in the presence of perfection. Pottery
is the sculpture of the Chinese.
Pottery is, first, the industry that bakes clay into usable forms, second,
the art that makes those forms beautiful, and third, the objects produced
* Landscape painting was called simply shan-sui—i.e., mountains and water.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 755
by that industry and that art. Porcelain is vitrified pottery; that is, it
is clay so mixed with minerals that when exposed to fire it melts or fuses
into a translucent, but not transparent, substance resembling glass.* The
Chinese made porcelain out of two minerals chiefly: kaolin— a pure white
clay formed from decomposed felspar of granite, and pe-tun-tse—a fusible
white quartz that gave the product its translucency. These materials were
ground into a powder, worked up into a paste with water, moulded by hand
or on the wheel, and subjected to high temperatures that fused the composi-
tion into a vitreous form, brilliant and durable. Sometimes the potters, not
content with this simple white porcelain, covered the "paste"— i.e., the vessel
formed but not yet fired— with a "glaze" or coating of fine glass, and then
placed the vessel in the kiln; sometimes they applied the glaze after baking
the paste into a "biscuit," and then placed the vessel over the fire again.
Usually the glaze was colored; but in many cases the paste was painted in
color before applying a transparent glaze, or colors were painted on the
fired glaze and fused upon it by re-firing. These "over-glaze" colors, which
we call enamels, were made of colored glass ground to powder and reduced
to a liquid applicable with the painter's slender brush. Life-trained specialists
painted the flowers, others the animals, others the landscapes, others the
saints or sages who meditated among the mountains or rode upon strange
beasts over the waves of the sea.
Chinese pottery is as old as the Stone Age; Professor Andcrsson has found
pottery, in Honan and Kansu, which "can hardly be later in time than
3000 B.C.";103 and the excellent form and finish of these vases assure us that
even at this early date the industry had long since become an art. Some of
the pieces resemble the pottery of Anau, and suggest a western origin for
Chinese civilization. Far inferior to these neolithic products are the fragments
of funerary pottery unearthed in Honan and ascribed to the declining years
of the Shang Dynasty. No remains of artistic value appear again before
the Han, when we find not only pottery, but the first known use of glass
in the Far East.t Under the T'ang emperors the growing popularity of
tea provided a creative stimulus for the ceramic art; genius or accident
revealed, about the ninth century, the possibility of producing a vessel vitri-
fied not only on the glazed surface (as under the Han and in other civiliza-
tions before this age) but throughout— i.e., true porcelain. In that century
* When porcelain was introduced into Europe it was named after the porcellanay or
cowrie shell, which in turn derived its name from its supposed resemblance to the rounded
back of a porcella, or little hog.103
fThe Egyptians had glazed pottery unknown centuries before Christ. The decorations
on the earliest glazed pottery of China indicate that China had learned the glazing process
from the Near East.104
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
a Moslem traveler, Suleiman, reported to his countrymen: "They have in
China a very fine clay with which they make vases as transparent as glass;
water is seen through them." Excavations have recently discovered, on a
ninth-century site at Samarra on the Tigris, pieces of porcelain of Chinese
manufacture. The next recorded appearance of the substance outside of
China was about 1171, when Saladin sent forty-one pieces of porcelain as
a precious gift to the Sultan of Damascus.105 The manufacture of porcelain
is not known to have begun in Europe before 1470; it is mentioned then as
an art which the Venetians had learned from the Arabs in the course of
the Crusades."0
Sung was the classic period of Chinese porcelain. Ceramists ascribe to
it both the oldest extant wares and the best; even the Ming potters of a
later age, who sometimes equaled them, spoke of Sung pottery in rever-
ential terms, and collectors treasured its masterpieces as beyond any price.
The great factories at Ching-te-chen, founded in the sixth century near
rich deposits of the minerals used for making and coloring earthenware,
were officially recognized by the imperial court, and began to pour out
upon China an unprecedented stream of porcelain plates, cups, bowls,
vases, beakers, jars, bottles, ewers, boxes, chess-boards, candlesticks, maps,
even enameled and gold-inlaid porcelain hat-racks.107 Now for the first
time appeared those jade-green pieces known as celadon* which it has
long been the highest ambition of the modern potter to produce, and of
the collector to acquire, f Specimens of it were sent to Lorenzo de' Medici
by the Sultan of Egypt in 1487. The Persians and the Turks valued it not
only for its incredibly smooth texture and rich lustre, but as a detector of
poisons; the vessels would change color, they believed, whenever poisonous
substances were placed in them.10* Pieces of celadon are handed down
from generation to generation as priceless heirlooms in the families of
connoisseurs.110
For almost three hundred years the workers of the Ming Dynasty
labored to keep the art of porcelain on the high level to which the Sung
potters had raised it, and they did not fall far short of success. Five hun-
• A term applied to them by the French of the seventeenth century from the name of
the hero of d'Urfe's novel I'Astrec, who, in the dramatization of the story, was always
dressed in green.10*
fFrom the Occidental point of view the one is as hard as the other; for the Japanese,
who have gathered in most of China's famous celadon, refuse to sell it at any price; and
no later potter has been able to rival the perfection of Sung artistry in this field.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 757
dred kilns burned at Ching-te-chen, and the imperial court alone used
96,000 pieces of chinaware to adorn its gardens, its tables and its rooms.111
Now appeared the first good enamels— colors fired over the glaze. Yel-
low monochromes and "egg-shell" blue and white porcelains reached per-
fection; the blue and white silver-mounted cup named from the Emperor
Wan-li (or Shen Tsung) is one of the world's masterpieces of the potter's
art. Among the experts of the Wan-li age was Hao Shih-chiu, who could
make wine-cups weighing less than one forty-eighth of an ounce. One
day, says a Chinese historian, Hao called at the home of a high official and
begged permission to examine a porcelain tripod owned by the statesman,
and numbered among the choicest of Sung wares. Hao felt the tripod
carefully with his hands, and secretly copied the form of its design on a
paper concealed in his sleeve. Siy months later he visited the official again,
and said: "Your Excellency is the possessor of a tripod censer of white
Ting-yao.* Here is a similar one of mine." Tang, the official, compared
the new tripod with his own, and could detect no difference; even the
stand and cover of the tripod fitted Hao's completely. Hao smilingly
admitted that his own piece was an imitation, and then sold it for sixty
pieces of silver to Tang, who sold it for fifteen hundred.1"
It was under the Mings that Chinese cloisonne attained its highest ex-
cellence. Both the word and the art came from outside: the word from the
French cloison (partition), the art from the Near East of Byzantine days; the
Chinese referred to its products occasionally as Kuei kuo yao— wares of the
devils' country.11* The art consists in cutting narrow strips of copper, silver
or gold, soldering them edgewise upon the lines of a design previously drawn
upon a metal object, filling the spaces between the cloisons (or wire lines)
with appropriately colored enamel, exposing the vessel repeatedly to fire,
grinding the hardened surface with pumice stone, polishing it with charcoal,
and gilding the visible edges of the cloisons. The earliest known Chinese ex-
amples are some mirrors imported into Nara, Japan, about the middle of the
eighth century. The oldest wares definitely marked belong to the end of the
Mongol or Yuan Dynasty; the best, to the reign of the Ming Emperor Ching
Ti. The last great period of Chinese cloisonne was under the great Manchu
emperors of the eighteenth century.
The factories at Ching-te-chen were destroyed in the wars that ended
the Ming Dynasty, and were not revived again until the accession of one
* The name given by the Chinese to an ivory-colored species of Sung porcelain.
758 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXV
of China's most enlightened rulers, K'ang-hsi, who, quite as much as his
contemporary Louis XIV, was every inch a king. The factories at Ching-
te-chcn were rebuilt under his direction, and soon three thousand furnaces
were in operation. Never had China, or any other country, seen such an
abundance of elegant pottery. The Kang-hsi workers thought their wares
inferior to those of Ming, but modern connoisseurs do not agree with
them. Old forms were imitated perfectly, and new forms were developed
in rich diversity. By coating a paste with a glaze of a different tempo of
fusibility the Manchu potters produced the prickly surface of "crackle"
ware; and by blowing bubbles of paint upon the glaze they turned out
souffle wares covered with little circles of color. They mastered the art of
monochrome, and issued peach-bloom, coral, ruby, vermilion, sang-de-
baeuf and Rosc-du-Barry reds; cucumber, apple, peacock, grass and cela-
don greens; "Mazarin," azure, lilac and turquoise (or "kingfisher") blues;
and yellows and whites of such velvet texture that one could only describe
them as smoothness made visible. They created ornate styles distinguished
by French collectors as Favrillc Rose, Fawille Verte, Famille Noir and
Fawille ] aune—rosc, green, black and yellow families.* In the field of poly-
chromes they developed the difficult art of subjecting a vessel, in the kiln,
to alternate draughts of clear and soot-laden air— the first providing, the
second withdrawing, oxygen— in such ways that the green glaze was trans-
formed into a flame of many colors, so that the French have called this
variety flawbe. They painted upon some of their wares high officials in
flowing queue and robes, and created the "Alandarin" style. They painted
flowers of the plum in white upon a blue (less often a black) background,
and gave to the world the grace and delicacy of the hawthorn vase.
The last great age of Chinese porcelain came in the long and prosperous
reign of Ch'icn Lung. Fertility was undiminished; and though the new
forms had something less than the success of the K'ang-hsi innovations, the
skill of the master-potters was still supreme. The Fawille Rose attained
its fullest perfection, and spread half the flowers and fruits of nature over
the most brilliant glaze, while cgg-shcll porcelain provided costly lamp-
shades for extravagant millionaires.114 Then, through fifteen bloody years
(1850-64), came the T'ai-p'ing Rebellion, ruining fifteen provinces, de-
stroying six hundred cities, killing twenty million men and women, and
* Excellent specimens of the last two groups may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art.
CHAP. XXV) THE AGE OF THE ARTISTS 759
so impoverishing the Manchu Dynasty that it withdrew its support from
the potteries, and allowed them to close their doors and scatter their crafts-
men into a disordered world.
The art of porcelain, in China, has not recovered from that devasta-
tion, and perhaps it never will. For other factors have reinforced the
destructiveness of war and the ending of imperial patronage. The growth
of the export trade tempted the artists to design such pieces as best satis-
fied the taste of European buyers, and as that taste was not as fine as
the Chinese, the bad pieces drove the good pieces out of circulation by a
ceramic variation of Grcsham's law. About the year 1840 English fac-
tories began to make inferior porcelain at Canton, exported it to Europe,
and gave it the name of "chinaware"; factories at Sevres in France, Meis-
sen in Germany, and Burslem in England imitated the work of the Chin-
ese, lowered the cost of production by installing machinery, and captured
yearly more and more of China's foreign ceramic trade.
What survives is the memory of an art perhaps as completely lost as
that of medieval stained glass; try as they will, the potters of Europe
have been unable to equal the subtler forms of Chinese porcelain. Con-
noisseurs raise with every decade their monetary estimate of the master-
pieces that survive; they ask five hundred dollars for a tea-cup, and receive
$23,600 for a hawthorn vase; as far back as 1767 two "turquoise" porce-
lain ''Dogs of Fo," at auction, brought five times as much as Guido Reni's
"Infant Jesus," and thrice as much as Raphael's "Holy Family.""6 But
any one who has felt, with eyes and fingers and every nerve, the loveli-
ness of Chinese porcelain will resent these valuations, and count them as
sacrilege; the \\ orld of beauty and the world of money never touch, even
when beautiful things are sold. It is enough to say that Chinese porcelain
is the summit and symbol of Chinese civilization, one of the noblest
things that men have done to make their species forgivable on the earth.
CHAPTER XXVI
The People and the State
I. HISTORICAL INTERLUDE
1. Marco Polo Visits Kublai Khan
The incredible travelers— Adventures of a Venetian in China— The
elegance and prosperity of Hangchoiv — The palaces of
Peking—The Mongol Conquest— Jenghiz Khan— Kublai
Khan — His character and policy — His harem —
"Marco Millions"
IN THE golden age of Venice, about the year 1295, two old men and
a man of middle age, worn with hardship, laden with bundles, dressed
in rags and covered with the dust of many roads, begged and then forced
their way into the home from which, they claimed, they had set forth
twenty-six years before. They had (they said) sailed many dangerous
seas, scaled high mountains and plateaus, crossed bandit-ridden deserts,
and passed four times through the Great Wall; they had stayed twenty
years in Cathay,* and had served the mightiest monarch in the world.
They told of an empire vaster, of cities more populous, and of a ruler far
richer, than any known to Europe; of stones that were used for heating,
of paper accepted in place of gold, and of nuts larger than a man's head;
of nations where virginity was an impediment to marriage, and of others
where strangers were entertained by the free use of the host's willing
daughters and wives.1 No man would believe them; and the people of Ven-
ice gave to the youngest and most garrulous of them the nickname "Marco
Millions," because his tale was full of numbers large and marvelous.*
Mark and his father and uncle accepted this fate with good cheer, for
they had brought back with them many precious stones from the distant
capital, and these gave them such wealth as maintained them in high place
in their city. When Venice went to war with Genoa in 1298, Marco
* An English form of the Russian name for China— Kitai, originally the name of a
Mongolian tribe.
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 761
Polo received command of a galley; and when his ship was captured, and
he was kept for a year in a Genoese jail, he consoled himself by dictating
to an amenuensis the most famous travel-book in literature. He told
with the charm of a simple and straightforward style how he, father Nic-
olo and uncle Maffeo had left Acre when Mark was but a boy of seventeen;
how they had climbed over the Lebanon ranges and found their way
through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, and thence through Persia,
Khorassan and Balkh to the Plateau of Pamir; how they had joined cara-
vans that slowly marched to Kashgar and Khotan, and across the Gobi
Desert to Tangut, and through the Wall to Shangtu, where the Great
Khan received them as humble emissaries from the youthful West.*
They had not thought that they would stay in China beyond a year or
two, but they found such lucrative service and commercial opportunities
under Kublai that they remained almost a quarter of a century. Marco
above all prospered, rising even to be governor of Hangchow. In fond
memory he describes it as far ahead of any European city in the excellence
of its building and bridges, the number of its public hospitals, the ele-
gance of its villas, the profusion of facilities for pleasure and vice, the
charm and beauty of its courtesans, the effective maintenance of public
order, and the manners and refinement of its people. The city, he tells
us, was a hundred miles in circuit.
Its streets and canals arc extensive, and of sufficient width to
allow of boats on the one, and carriages on the other, to pass easily
with articles necessary for the inhabitants. It is commonly said that
the number of bridges, of all sizes, amounts to twelve thousand.
Those which are thrown over the principal canals and are connected
with the main streets, have arches so high, and built with so much
skill, that vessels with their masts can pass under them. At the same
time carts and horses can pass over, so well is the slope from the
street graded to the height of the arch. . . . There are within the
city ten principal squares or market-places, besides innumerable shops
along the streets. Each side of these squares is half a mile in length,
and in front of them is the main street, forty paces in width, and
running in a direct line from one extremity of the city to the other.
In a direction parallel to that of the main street . . . runs a very
large canal, on the nearer bank of which capacious warehouses are
* "Shangtu" is Coleridge's "Xanadu." The central Asian regions described by Polo
were not explored again by Europeans (with one forgotten exception) until 1838..
762 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
built of stone, for the accommodation of the merchants who arrive
from India and other parts with their goods and effects. They are
thus conveniently situated with respect to the market-places. In
each of these, upon three days in every week, there is an assemblage
of from forty to fifty thousand persons. . . .
The streets are all paved with stone and bricks. . . . The main
street of the city is paved ... to the width of ten paces on each
side, the intermediate part being filled up with small gravel, and
provided with arched drains for carrying off the rain-water that
falls into the neighboring canals, so that it remains always dry.
On this gravel carriages continually pass and repass. They are of a
long shape, covered at the top, have curtains and cushions of silk,
and are capable of holding six persons. Both men and women who
feel disposed to take their pleasure are in the daily practice of hiring
them for that purpose. . . .
There is an abundant quantity of game of all kinds. . . . From the
sea, which is fifteen miles distant, there is daily brought up the
river, to the city, a vast quantity of fish. ... At the sight of such
an importation of fish, you would think it impossible that it could
be sold; and yet, in the course of a few hours, it is all taken off, so
great is the number of inhabitants. . . . The streets connected with
the market-squares arc numerous, and in some of them are many
cold baths, attended by servants of both sexes. The men and women
who frequent them have from their childhood been accustomed
at all times to wash in cold water, which they reckon conducive
to health. At these bathing places, however, they have apartments
provided with warm water, for the use of strangers, who cannot
bear the shock of the cold. All are in the daily practice of wash-
ing their persons, and especially before their meals. . . .
In other streets are the quarters of the courtesans, who are here
in such numbers as I dare not venture to report, . . . adorned with
much finery, highly perfumed, occupying well-furnished houses,
and attended by many female domestics. ... In other streets are
the dwellings of the physicians and the astrologers. ... On each
side of the principal street there are houses and mansions of great
size. . . . The men as well as the women have fair complexions,
and are handsome. The greater part of them are always clothed in
silk. . . . The women have much beauty, and are brought up with
delicate and languid habits. The costliness of their dresses, in silks
and jewelry, can scarcely be imagined.8
CHAP. XXVl) THEPEOPLEANDTHESTATE 763
Peking (or, as it was then called, Cambaluc) impressed Polo even more
than Hangchow; his millions fail him in describing its wealth and popula-
tion. The twelve suburbs were yet more beautiful than the city; for there
the business class had built many handsome homes.4 In the city proper
there were numerous hotels, and thousands of shops and booths. Food of
all kinds abounded, and every day a thousand loads of raw silk entered
the gates to be turned into clothing for the inhabitants. Though the Khan
had residences at Hangchow, Shangtu and other places, the most extensive
of his palaces was at Peking. A marble wall surrounded it, and marble
steps led up to it; the main building was so large that "dinners could be
served there to great multitudes of people." Marco admired the arrange-
ment of the chambers, the delicate and transparent glazing of the windows,
and the variety of colored tiles in the roof. He had never seen so opulent
a city, or so magnificent a king.0
Doubtless the young Venetian learned to speak and read Chinese; and
perhaps he learned from the official historians how Kublai and his Mongol
ancestors had conquered China. The gradual drying up of the regions
along the northwestern frontier into a desert land incapable of supporting
its hardy population had sent the Mongols (i.e., "the brave") out on des-
perate raids to win new fields; and their success had left them with such
a taste and aptitude for war that they never stopped until nearly all Asia,
and pans of Europe, had fallen before their arms. Story had it that their
fiery leader, Genghis Khan, had been born with a clot of blood in the
p-.ilm of his hand. From the age of thirteen he began to weld the Mongol
tribes into one, and terror was his instrument. He had prisoners nailed
to a wooden ass, or chopped to pieces, or boiled in cauldrons, or flayed
alive. When he received a letter from the Chinese Emperor Ning Tsung
demanding his submission, he spat in the direction of the Dragon Throne
and began at once his march across twelve hundred miles of the Gobi
desert into the western provinces of China. Ninety Chinese cities were
so completely destroyed that horsemen could ride over the devastated
areas in the dark without stumbling. For five years the "Emperor of Man-
kind" laid north China waste. Then, frightened by an unfavorable con-
junction of planets, he turned back towards his native village, and died
of illness on the way.8
His successors, Ogodai, Mangu and Kublai, continued the campaign
with barbaric energy; and the Chinese, who had for centuries given them-
764 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
selves to culture and neglected the arts of war, died with individual heroism
and national ignominy. At Juining-fu a local Chinese ruler held out until
all the aged and infirm had been killed and eaten by the beseiged, all the
able-bodied men had fallen, and only women remained to guard the walls;
then he set fire to the city and burned himself alive in his palace. The
armies of Kublai swept down through China until they stood before the
last retreat of the Sung Dynasty, Canton. Unable to resist, the Chinese
general, Lu Hsiu-fu, took the boy emperor on his back, and leaped to a
double death with him in the sea; and it is said that a hundred thousand
Chinese drowned themselves rather than yield to the Mongol conqueror.
Kublai gave the imperial corpse an honorable burial, and set himself to
establish that Yuan ("Original") or Mongol Dynasty which was to rule
China for less than a hundred years.
Kublai himself was no barbarian. The chief exception to this statement
was not his treacherous diplomacy, which was in the manner of his time,
but his treatment of the patriot and scholar, Wen T'icn-hsian, who, out
of loyalty to the Sung Dynasty, refused to acknowledge Kublai's rule.
He was imprisoned for three years, but would not yield. "My dungeon,"
he wrote, in one of the most famous passages in Chinese literature,
is lighted by the will-o'-the-wisp alone; no breath of spring cheers
the murky solitude in which I dwell. . . . Exposed to mist and dew,
I had many times thought to die; and yet, through the seasons of
two revolving years, disease hovered around me in vain. The dank,
unhealthy soil to me became paradise itself. For there was that
within me which misfortune could not steal away. And so I re-
mained firm, gazing at the white clouds floating over rny head, and
bearing in my heart a sorrow boundless as the sky-
At length Kublai summoned him into the imperial presence. "What is it
that you want?" asked the monarch. "By the grace of the Sung Emperor,"
answered Wen, "I became his Majesty's minister. I cannot serve two
masters. 1 only ask to die." Kublai consented; and as Wen awaited the sword
of the executioner upon his neck he made obeisance toward the south,
as though the Sung emperor were still reigning in the southern capital,
Nanking.7
Nevertheless, Kublai had the grace to recognize the civilized superiority
of the Chinese, and to merge the customs of his own people into theirs.
CHAP. XXVl) THEPEOPLEANDTHESTATE 765
Of necessity he abandoned the system of examinations for public office,
since that system would have given him a completely Chinese bureau-
cracy; he restricted most higher offices to his Mongol followers, and tried
for a time to introduce the Mongol alphabet. But for the greater part
he and his people accepted the culture of China, and were soon trans-
formed by it into Chinese. He tolerated the various religions philoso-
phically, and flirted with Christianity as an instrument of pacification and
rule. lie reconstructed the Grand Canal between Tientsin and Hang-
chow, improved the highways, and provided a rapid postal service through-
out a domain larger than any that has accepted the government of China
since his day. He built great public granaries to store the surplus of good
crops for public distribution in famine years, and remitted taxes to all
peasants who had suffered from drought, storms, or insect depredations;*
he organized a system of state care for aged scholars, orphans and the
infirm; and he patronized munificently education, letters and the arts.
Under him the calendar was revised, and the Imperial Academy was
opened.0 At Peking he reared a new capital, whose splendor and popula-
tion were the marvel of visitors from other lands. Great palaces were
built, and architecture flourished as never in China before.
"Now when all this happened," says Marco Polo, "Messer Polo was
on the spot."10 He became fairly intimate with the Khan, and describes
his amusements in fond detail. Besides four wives called empresses, the
Khan had many concubines, recruited from Ungut in Tatary, whose
ladies seemed especially fair to the royal eye. Every second year, says
Marco, officers of proved discrimination were sent to this region to enlist
for his Majesty's service a hundred young women, according to specifica-
tions carefully laid down by the king.
Upon their arrival in his presence, he causes a new examination to
be made by a different set of inspectors, and from amongst them a
further selection takes place, when thirty or forty are retained for
his own chamber. . . . These arc committed separately to the care
of certain elderly ladies of the palace, whose duty it is to observe
them attentively, during the course of the night, in order to ascer-
tain that they have not any concealed imperfections, that they sleep
* "Not a day passes," writes Marco Polo, "in which there are not distributed, by the
regular officers, twenty thousand vessels of rice, millet, and panicum. By reason of this
admirable and astonishing liberality which the Great Khan exercises towards the poor,
the people all adore him."'
766 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
tranquilly, do not snore, have sweet breath, and are free from
unpleasant scent in any part of the body. Having undergone this
rigorous scrutiny, they are divided into panics of five, each taking
turn for three days and three nights in his Majesty's interior apart-
ment, where they arc to perform every service that is required of
them, and he does with them as he likes. When this term is com-
pleted they are relieved by another party, and in this manner suc-
cessively, until the whole number have taken their turn; when the
first five recommence their attendance."
After remaining in China for twenty years, Marco Polo, with his father
and his uncle, took advantage of an embassy sent by the Khan to Persia,
to return to their native city with a minimum of danger and expense.
Kublai gave them a message to the Pope, and fitted them out with every
comfort then known to travelers. The voyage around the Malay Penin-
sula to India and Persia, the overland journey to Trcbi/ond on the Black
Sea, and the final voyage to Venice, took them three years; and when
they reached Europe they learned that both the Khan and the Pope were
dead.* Marco himself, with characteristic obstinacy, lived to the age of
seventy. On his deathbed his friends pleaded with him, for the salvation
of his soul, to retract the obviously dishonest statements that he had made
in his book; but he answered, stoutly: "I have not told half of what I saw."
Soon after his death a new comic figure became popular at the Venetian
carnivals. He was dressed like a clown, and amused the populace by his
gross exaggerations. His name was Marco Millions.13
2. The Ming and the Ch'ing
Fall of the Mongols— The Ming Dynasty—The Manchu invasion
—The CW'mg Dynasty—An enlightened monarch— CWien
Lung rejects the Occident
Not for four centuries was China to know again so brilliant an age. The
Yuan Dynasty quickly declined, for it was weakened by the collapse of
the Mongol power in Europe and western Asia, and by the sinification (if
so pedantic a convenience may be permitted for so repeated a phenome-
non) of the Mongols in China itself. Only in an era of railroads, telegraph
and print could so vast and artificial an empire, so divided by mountains,
* Kublai Khan had proved his conversion to civilization by developing gouc.u
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 767
deserts and seas, be held permanently under one rule. The Mongols
proved better warriors than administrators, and the successors of Kublai
were forced to restore the examination system and to utilize Chinese
capacity in government. The conquest produced in the end little change
in native customs or ideas, except that it introduced, perhaps, such new
forms as the novel and the drama into Chinese literature. Once more the
Chinese married their conquerors, civilized them, and overthrew them.
In 1368 an ex-Buddhist priest led a revolt, entered Peking in triumph,
and proclaimed himself the first emperor of the Ming ("Brilliant") Dy-
nasty. In the next generation an able monarch came to the throne, and
under Yung Lo China again enjoyed prosperity and contributed to the
arts. Nevertheless, the Brilliant Dynasty ended in a chaos of rebellion and
invasion; at the very time when the country was divided into hostile fac-
tions, a new horde of conquerors poured through the Great Wall and laid
seige to Peking.
The Manchus were a Tungusic people who had lived for many cen-
turies in what is now Manchukuo (i.e., the Kingdom of the Manchus).
I laving extended their power northward to the Amur River, they turned
hack southward, and marched upon the Chinese capital. The last Ming
emperor gathered his family about him, drank a toast to them, bade his
wife kill herself,* and then hanged himself with his girdle after writing
his last edict upon the lapel of his robe: "We, poor in virtue and of con-
temptible personality, have incurred the wrath of God on high. My
ministers have deceived me. I am ashamed to meet my ancestors. There-
fore 1 myself take off my crown, and with my hair covering my face
await dismemberment at the hands of the rebels. Do not hurt a single one
of my people."1* The Manchus buried him with honor, and established
the Ch'ing ("Unsullied") Dynasty that was to rule China until our own
revolutionary age.
They, too, soon became Chinese, and the second ruler of the Dynasty,
K'ang-hsi, gave China the most prosperous, peaceful and enlightened
reign in the nation's history. Mounting the throne at the age of seven,
K'ang-hsi took personal control, at the age of thirteen, of an empire
that included not only China proper but Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea,
Indo-China, Annam, Tibet and Turkestan; it was without doubt the
largest, richest and most populous empire of its time. K'ang-hsi ruled it
* She obeyed, and story has it that many concubines followed her example.14
768 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
with a wisdom and justice that filled with envy the educated subjects of
his contemporaries Aurangzeb and Louis XIV. He was a man energetic
in body and active in mind; he found health in a vigorous outdoor life,
and at the same time labored to make himself acquainted with the learning
and arts of his time. He traveled throughout his realm, corrected abuses
wherever he saw them, and reformed the penal code. He lived frugally,
cut down the expenses of administration, and took pride in the welfare of
the people." Under his generous patronage and discriminating apprecia-
tion literature and scholarship flourished, and the art of porcelain reached
one of the peaks of its career. I le tolerated all the religions, studied Latin
under the Jesuits, and put up patiently with the strange practices of
European merchants in his ports. When he died, after a long and benefi-
cent reign (1661-1722), he left these as his parting words: "There is cause
for apprehension lest, in the centuries or millenniums to come, China may
be endangered by collisions with the various nations of the West who
come hither from beyond the seas."17
These problems, arising out of the increasing commerce and contacts
of China with Europe came to the front again under another able
emperor of the Manchu line— Ch'ien Lung. Ch'ien Lung wrote 34,000
poems; one of them, on "Tea," came to the attention of Voltaire, who
sent his "compliments to the charming king of China."18 French mis-
sionaries painted his portrait, and inscribed under it these indifferent
verses:
Occupe sans rcldche a tous Ics soins divers
Uun gouvernement qu'on admire,
Le plus grand potentat qui soit dans funivers
Eft I? Mellleur lettre qui soit dans son Empire.*
He ruled China for two generations (1736-96), abdicated in his eighty-
fifth year, and continued to dominate the government until his death
(1799). During the last years of his reign an incident occurred which
might have led the thoughtful to recall the forebodings of K'ang-hsi.
England, which had aroused the Emperor's anger by importing opium
into China, sent, in 1792, a commission under Lord Macartney to negoti-
ate a commercial treaty with Ch'ien Lung. The commissioners explained
* "Occupied without rest in the diverse cares of a government which men admire, the
greatest monarch in the world is also the most lettered man in his empire."
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 769
to him the advantages of trading with England, and added that the treaty
which they sought would take for granted the equality of the British ruler
with the Chinese emperor. Ch'ien Lung dictated this reply to George HI:
I set no value on objects strange and ingenious, and have no use
for your country's manufactures. This, then, is my answer to your
request to appoint a representative at my court, a request contrary
to our dynastic usage, which could only result in inconvenience to
yourself. I have expounded my views in detail and have commanded
your tribute envoys to leave in peace on their homeward journeys.
It behooves you, O King, to respect my sentiments and to display
even greater devotion and loyalty in future, so that, by perpetual
submission to our throne, you may secure peace and prosperity for
your country hereafter."
In these proud words China tried to stave off the Industrial Revolution.
We shall see in the sequel how, nevertheless, that Revolution came. Mean-
while let us study the economic, political and moral elements of the
unique and instructive civilization which that Revolution seems destined
to destroy.
II. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE*
Population— Appearance— Dress— Peculiarities of Chinese speech—
Of Chinese writing
The first element in the picture is number: there are many Chinese.
Learned gucssers calculate that the population of the Chinese states in
280 B.C. was around 14,000,000; in 200 A.D., 28,000,000; in 726, 41,500,000;
in 1644, 89,000,000; in 1743, 150,000,000; in 1919, 330,000,000.*' In the
fourteenth century a European traveler counted in China "two hundred
cities all greater than Venice."* The Chinese census is obtained through a
registration law requiring every household to inscribe the names of its
occupants upon a tablet at the entrance;* we do not know how accurate
these tablets are, or the reports which purport to be based upon them. It
is probable that China now harbors some 400,000,000 souls.
•The following description of Chinese society will apply chiefly to the nineteenth
century; the changes brought on by contact with the West will be studied later. Every
description must be taken with reserve, since a civilization is never quite the same over a
long period of time or an extensive area of space.
770 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
The Chinese vary in stature, being shorter and weaker in the south, taller
and stronger in the north; in general they are the most vigorous people in
Asia. They show great physical stamina, magnificent courage in the bear-
ing of hardships and pain, exceptional resistance to disease, and a climatic
adaptability which has enabled them to prosper in almost every zone.
Neither opium nor inbreeding nor syphilis has been able to impair their
health, and the collapse of their social system has not been due to any visi-
ble deterioration in their biological or mental vitality.
The Chinese face is one of the most intelligent on earth, though not uni-
versally attractive. Some of the pauper class are incomparably ugly to our
Western prejudice, and some criminals have an evil leer admirably suited
to cinematic caricature; but the great majority have regular features calm
with the physiological accident of low eyelids, and the social accumulation
of centuries of civilization. The slant of the eyes is not so pronounced as
one had been led to expect, and the yellow skin is often a pleasant sun-
tanned brown. The women of the peasantry are almost as strong as the
men; the ladies of the upper strata arc delicate and pretty, starch themselves
with powder, rouge their lips and checks, blacken their eyebrows, and train
or thin them to resemble a willow leaf or the crescent moon.*1 The hair in
both sexes is coarse and vigorous, and never curls. The women wear theirs
in a tuft, usually adorned with flowers. Under the last dynasty the men,
to please their rulers, adopted the Manchu custom of shaving the fore half
of the head; in compensation they left the remainder uncut and gathered it
into a long ijueue, which became in time an instrument of correction and a
support of pride.24 Beards were small, and were always shaved, though sel-
dom by the owners thereof; barbers carried their shops about with them,
and throve.
The head was ordinarily left bare; when men covered it they used in
winter a cap of velvet or fur with a turncd-up rim, and in summer a conical
cap of finely woven filaments of bamboo, surmounted, in persons of any
rank, by a colored ball and a silken fringe. Women, when they could af-
ford it, clothed their heads with silk or cotton bands adorned with tinsel,
trinkets or artificial flowers. Shoes were usually of warm cloth; since the
floor was often of cold tile or earth, the Chinese carried a miniature carpet
with him under each foot. By a custom begun at the court of the Em-
peror Li Hou-chu (ca. 970 A.D.), the feet of girls, at the age of seven, were
compressed with tight bandages to prevent their further growth, so that the
mature lady might walk with a mincing step erotically pleasing to the men.
It was regarded as immodest to speak of a woman's foot, and as scandaious
to look at one; in the presence of a lady even the word for shoe was tabu."
The practice spread to all ranks and groups except the Manchus and Tatars,
CHAP.XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 771
and became so rigid that a deception about the size of the bride's foot suf-
ficed to annul an engagement or a marriage.1* K'ang-hsi tried to stop the
custom, but failed; today it is one of the happier casualties of the Revolu-
tion.
Men covered their nakedness with trousers and tunics, almost always
blue. In winter the trousers were overlaid with leggings, and additional
tunics, sometimes to the number of thirteen, were put on. These were
kept on night and day throughout u*e winter, and were removed one by one
with the progress of spring.17 The tunic fell variously to the loins, or the
knees, or the feet; it was buttoned closely up to the neck, and had immense
sleeves instead of pockets; China does not say that a man "pocketed" an
object, but that he "sleeved" it. Shirts and underwear were well-nigh un-
known." In the country women wore trousers like the men, since they were
accustomed to doing a man's work and more; in the towns they covered the
trousers with skirts. In the cities silk was almost as common as cotton.*1
No belt compressed the waist, and no corsets held in the breasts. In general
the Chinese dress was more sensible, healthy and convenient than the garb of
the modern West. No tyranny of fashion harassed or exalted the life of the
Chinese woman; all urban classes dressed alike, and nearly all generations; the
quality of the garment might differ, but not the form; and all ranks might
be sure that the fashion would last as long as the gown.
The language of the Chinese differed from the rest of the world even
more distinctly than their dress. It had no alphabet, no spelling, no gram-
mar, and no parts of speech; it is amazing how well and how long this
oldest and most populous nation on earth has managed without these
curses of Occidental youth. Perhaps in forgotten days there were inflec-
tions, declensions, conjugations, cases, numbers, tenses, moods; but the
language as far back as we can trace it shows none of them. Every word
in it may be a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb, according to its
context and its tone. Since the spoken dialects have only from four to
eight hundred monosyllabic word-sounds or vocables, and these must be
used to express the 40,000 characters of the written language, each vocable
has from four to nine "tones," so that its meaning is made to differ accord-
ing to the manner in which it is sung. Gestures and context eke out these
tones, and make each sound serve many purposes; so the vocable 7 may
mean any one of sixty-nine things, shi may mean fifty-nine, ku twenty-
nine.*1 No other language has been at once so complex, so subtle and so
brief.
77* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
The written language was even more unique than the spoken. The
objects exhumed in Honan, and tentatively dated back to the Shang
Dynasty, bear writing in characters substantially like those in use until
our own generation, so that— barring a few Copts who still speak ancient
Egyptian— Chinese is both the oldest and the most widespread language
spoken on the earth today. Originally, as we infer from a passage in
Lao-tze, the Chinese used knotted cords to communicate messages. Prob-
ably the needs of priests in tracing magic formulas, and of potters in
marking their vessels, led to the development of a pictorial script.81 These
primitive pictograms were the original form of the six hundred signs that
are now the fundamental characters in Chinese writing. Some two hun-
dred and fourteen of them have been named "radicals" because they
enter as elements into nearly all the characters of the current language.
The present characters are highly complex symbols, in which the primi-
tive pictorial element has been overlaid with additions designed to define
the term specifically, usually through some indication of its sound. Not
only every word, but every idea, has its own separate sign; one sign repre-
sents a horse, another sign "a bay horse with a white belly," another "a
horse with a white spot on his forehead." Some of the characters are still
relatively simple: a curve over a straight line (i.e., the sun over the
horizon) means "morning"; the sun and the moon together represent
"light"; a mouth and a bird together mean "singing"; a woman beneath a
roof means "peace"; a woman, a mouth and the sign for "crooked" con-
stitute the character for "dangerous"; a man and a woman together mean
"talkative"; "quarreling" is a woman with two mouths; "wife" is repre-
sented by signs for a woman, a broom and a storm."
From some points of view this is a primitive language that has by
supreme conservatism survived into "modern" times. Its difficulties are
more obvious than its virtues. We are told that the Chinese takes from
ten to fifty years to become acquainted with all the 40,000 characters in
his language; but when we realize that these characters are not letters but
ideas, and reflect on the length of time it would take us to master 40,000
ideas, or even a vocabularly of 40,000 words, we perceive that the terms
of the comparison are unfair to the Chinese; what we should say is that it
takes any one fifty years to master 40,000 ideas. In actual practice the
average Chinese gets along quite well with three or four thousand signs,
and learns these readily enough by finding their "radicals." The clearest
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 773
advantage of such a language— expressing not sounds but ideas— is that it
can be read by Koreans and Japanese as easily as by the Chinese, and pro-
vides the Far East with an international written language. Again it unites
in one system of writing all the inhabitants of China, whose dialects differ
to the point of mutual unintelligibility; the same character is read as dif-
ferent sounds or words in different localities. This advantage applies in
time as well as in space; since the written language has remained essentially
the same while the spoken language has diverged from it into a hundred
dialects, the literature of China, written for two thousand years in these
characters, can be read today by any literate Chinese, though we cannot
tell how the ancient writers pronounced the words, or spoke the ideas,
which the signs represent. This persistence of the same script amidst a
flux and diversity of speech made for the preservation of Chinese thought
and culture, and at the same time served as a powerful force for conserva-
tism; old ideas held the stage and formed the mind of youth. The char-
acter of Chinese civilization is symbolized in this phenomenon of its unique
script: its unity amid diversity and growth, its profound conservatism, and
its unrivaled continuity. This system of writing was in every sense a high
intellectual achievement; it classified the whole world— of objects, activi-
ties and qualities— under a few hundred root or "radical" signs, combined
with these signs some fifteen hundred distinguishing marks, and made them
represent, in their completed forms, all the ideas used in literature and life.
We must not be too sure that our own diverse modes of writing down
our thoughts are superior to this apparently primitive form. Leibnitz in
the seventeenth century, and Sir Donald Ross in our time, dreamed of a
system of written signs independent of spoken languages, free from their
nationalist diversity and their variations in space and time, and capable,
therefore, of expressing the ideas of different peoples in identical and
mutually intelligible ways. But precisely such a sign language, uniting a
hundred generations and a quarter of the earth's inhabitants, already exists
in the Far East. The conclusion of the Oriental is logical and terrible: the
rest of the world must learn to write Chinese.
774 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
III. THE PRACTICAL LIFE
1. In the Fields
The poverty of the peasant— Methods of husbandry— Crops— Tea
—Food— The stoicism of the village
All the varied literature of that language, all the subtleties of Chinese
thought and the luxuries of Chinese life, rested in the last analysis on the
fertility of the fields. Or rather on the toil of men— for fertile fields are not
born but made. Through many centuries the early inhabitants of China
must have fought against jungle and forest, beast and insect, drought and
flood, saltpetre and frost to turn this vast wilderness into fruitful soil. And
the victory had to be periodically rewon; a century of careless timber-
cutting left a desert,* and a few years of neglect allowed the jungle to
return. The struggle was bitter and perilous; at any moment the bar-
barians might rush in, and seize the slow growths of the cleared earth.
Therefore the peasants, for their protection, lived not in isolated home-
steads but in small communities, surrounded their villages with walls, went
out together to plant and cultivate the soil, and often slept through the
night on guard in their fields.
Their methods were simple, and yet they did not differ much from what
they are today. Sometimes they used ploughs— first of wood, then of stone,
then of iron; but more often they turned up their little plots patiently
with the hoe. They helped the soil with any natural fertilizer they could
find, and did not disdain to collect for this purpose the offal of dogs and
men. From the earliest times they dug innumerable canals to bring the
water of their many rivers to rice paddies or millet fields; deep channels
were cut through miles of solid rock to tap some elusive stream, or to
divert its course into a desiccated plain. Without rotation of crops or
artificial manures, and often without draft animals of any kind, the Chinese
have wrung two or three crops annually from at least half their soil, and
have won more nourishment from the earth than any other people in
history.8*
The cereals they grew were chiefly millet and rice, with wheat and
barley as lesser crops. The rice was turned into wine as well as food, but
* The denuded slopes and hills, unable to hold the rain-water that fell upon them, lost
their top-soil, became arid, and offered no obstacle to the flooding of the valleys by the
heavy rains.
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 775
the peasant never drank too much of it. His favorite drink, and next to
rice his largest crop, was tea. Used first as a medicine, it grew in popu-
larity until, in the days of the T'angs, it entered the realms of export and
poetry. By the fifteenth century all the Far East was esthetically intoxi-
cated with the ceremony of drinking tea; epicures searched for new varie-
ties, and drinking tournaments were held to determine whose tea was the
best.88 Added to these products were delicious vegetables, sustaining le-
gumes like the soy bean and its sprouts, doughty condiments like garlic
and the onion, and a thousand varieties of berries and fruits.89 Least of all
products of rural toil was meat; now and then oxen and buffalos were
used for ploughing, but stock-raising for food was confined to pigs and
fowl.87 A large part of the population lived by snaring fish from the streams
and the sea.
Dry rice, macaroni, vermicelli, a few vegetables, and a little fish formed
the diet of the poor; the well-to-do added pork and chicken, and the rich
indulged a passion for duck; the most pretentious of Peking dinners con-
sisted of a hundred courses of duck.88 Cow's milk was rare and eggs were
few and old, but the soy bean provided wholesome milk and cheese.
Cooking was developed into a fine art, and made use of everything; grasses
and seaweeds were plucked and birds' nests ravished to make tasty soups;
dainty dishes were concocted out of sharks' fins and fish intestines, locusts
and grasshoppers, grubs and silkworms, horses and mules, rats and water-
snakes, cats and dogs.40 The Chinese loved to eat; it was not unusual for a
rich man's dinner to have forty courses, and to require three or four hours
of gentlemanly absorption.
The poor man did not need so much time for his two meals a day. With
all his toil the peasant, with exceptions here and there, was never secure
from starvation until he was dead. The strong and clever accumulated
large estates, and concentrated the wealth of the country into a few hands;
occasionally, as under Shih Huang-ti, the soil was redivided among the
population, but the natural inequality of men soon concentrated wealth
again.41 The majority of the peasants owned land, but as the population
increased faster than the area under cultivation, the average holding be-
came smaller with every century. The result was a poverty equaled only
by destitute India: the typical family earned but $83 a year, many men
lived on two cents a day, and millions died of hunger in each year.48 For
twenty centuries China has had an average of one famine annually;48 partly
because the peasant was exploited to the verge of subsistence, partly be*
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
cause reproduction outran the fertility of the soil, and partly because trans-
port was so undeveloped that one region might starve while another had
more than it required. Finally, flood might destroy what the landlord and
the tax-collector had left; the Hoang-ho— which the people called "China's
Sorrow"— might change its course, swamp a thousand villages, and leave
another thousand with desiccated land.
The peasants bore these evils with stolid fortitude. "All that a man
needs in this transitory life," said one of their proverbs, "is a hat and a bowl
of rice."" They worked hard, but not fast; no complex machine hurried
them, or racked their nerves with its noise, its danger and its speed. There
were no weekends and no Sundays, but there were many holidays; peri-
odically some festival, like the Feast of the New Year, or the Feast of the
Lanterns, gave the worker some rest from his toil, and brightened with
myth and drama the duller seasons of the year. When the winter turned
away its scowling face, and the snow-nourished earth softened under the
spring rains, the peasants went out once more to plant their narrow fields,
and sang with good cheer the hopeful songs that had come down to them
from the immemorial past.
2. In the Shops
Handicrafts— Silk— Factories— Guilds— Men of burden— Roads and
canals— Merchants— Credit and coinage— Currency experi-
ments—Printing-press inflation
Meanwhile industry flourished as nowhere else on earth before our eight-
eenth century. As far back as we can delve into Chinese history we find
busy handicrafts in the home and thriving trade in the towns. The basic
industries were the weaving of textiles and the breeding of worms for the
secretion of silk; both were carried on by women in or near their cottages.
Silk-weaving was a very ancient art, whose beginnings in China went back
to the second millennium before Christ.*45 The Chinese fed the worms on
fresh-cut mulberry leaves, with startling results: on this diet a pound of
(700,000) worms increased in weight to 9,500 pounds in forty-two days.47
The adult worms were then placed in little tents of straw, around which
* The spinning of silk out of the cocoons of wild silkworms was known to the ancient
classical world; but the breeding of the worms and the gathering and weaving of the
silk as an industry were introduced into Europe from China by Nestorian monks about
552 Aj>.** The art was brought from Constantinople to Sicily in the twelfth century, and
to England in the fifteenth.
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 777
they wove their cocoons by emitting silk. The cocoons were dropped in
hot water, the silk came away from its shell, was treated and woven, and
was skilfully turned into a great variety of rich clothing, tapestries, em-
broideries and brocades for the upper classes of the world.* The raisers and
weavers of silk wore cotton.
Even in the centuries before Christ this domestic industry had been sup-
plemented with shops in the towns. As far back as 300 B.C. there had been
an urban proletariat, organized with its masters into industrial guilds.49 The
growth of this shop industry filled the towns with a busy population, mak-
ing the China of Kublai Khan quite the equal, industrially, of eighteenth-
century Europe. "There are a thousand workshops for each craft," wrote
Marco Polo, "and each furnishes employment for ten, fifteen, or twenty
workmen, and in a few instances as many as forty. . . . The opulent mas-
ters in these shops do not labor with their own hands, but on the contrary
assume airs of gentility and affect parade."80 These guilds, like codified
industries of our time, limited competition, and regulated wages, prices and
hours; many of them restricted output in order to maintain the prices of their
products; and perhaps their genial content with traditional ways must share
some of the responsibility for retarding the growth of science in China, and
obstructing the Industrial Revolution until all barriers and institutions are to-
day being broken down by its flood.
The guilds undertook many of the functions which the once proud
citizens of the West have surrendered to the state: they passed their own
laws, and administered them fairly; they made strikes infrequent by ar-
bitrating the disputes of employers and employees through mediation boards
representing each side equally; they served in general as a self-governing and
self-disciplining organization for industry, and provided an admirable escape
from the modern dilemma between laissez-faire and the servile state. These
guilds were formed not only by merchants, manufacturers and their work-
men, but by such less exalted trades as barbers, coolies and cooks; even the
beggars were united in a brotherhood that subjected its members to strict
laws.61 A small minority of town laborers were slaves, engaged for the most
part in domestic service, and usually bonded to their masters for a period of
years, or for life. In times of famine girls and orphans were exposed for
sale at the price of a few "cash," and a father might at any time sell his
daughters as bondservants. Such slavery, however, never reached the pro-
portions that it attained in Greece and Rome; the majority of the work-
ers were free agents or members of guilds, and the majority of the peasants
*It was not unusual for a Chinese host, when entertaining guests, to pass delicate
fabrics around among them,4* as another might exhibit porcelain or unravel his favorite
paintings or calligraphic- scrolls.
778 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
owned their land, and governed themselves in village communities largely
independent of national control.68
The products of labor were carried on the backs of men; even human
transport moved, for the most part, in sedan chairs raised upon the bruised
but calloused shoulders of uncomplaining coolies.* Heavy buckets or
enormous bundles were balanced on the ends of poles, and slung over the
shoulder. Sometimes dray-carts were drawn by donkeys, but more often
they were pulled by men. Muscle was so cheap that there was no en-
couragement to the development of animal or mechanical transport; and the
primitiveness of transportation offered no stimulus to the improvement of
roads. When European capital built the first Chinese railway (1876)— a
ten-mile line between Shanghai and Woosung— the people protested that it
would disturb and offend the spirit of the earth; and the opposition grew so
vigorous that the government bought the railroad and heaved its rolling
stock into the sea.03 In the days of Shih Huang-ti and Kublai Khan im-
perial highways existed, paved with stone; but only their outlines now re-
main. The city streets were mere alleys eight feet wide, designed with a
view to keeping out the sun. Bridges were numerous, and sometimes very
beautiful, like the marble bridge at the Summer Palace. Commerce and
travel used avenues of water almost as frequently as the land; 25,000 miles
of canals served as a leisurely substitute for railways; and the Grand Canal
between Hangchow and Tientsin, 650 miles long, begun about 300 A.D. and
completed by Kublai Khan was surpassed only by the Great Wall in the
modest list of China's engineering achievements. "Junks" and sampans plied
the rivers busily, and provided not only cheap transportation for goods, but
homes for millions of the poor.
The Chinese are natural merchants, and work many hours at the business
of bargaining. Chinese philosophy and officialdom agreed in despising
traders, and the Han emperors taxed them heavily, and forbade them to use
carriages or silk. The educated classes displayed long nails as Western women
wore French heels— to indicate their exemption from physical toil.64 It was
the custom to rank scholars, teachers and officials as the highest class,
farmers as the next, artisans as the third, merchants as the lowest; for, said
China, these last merely made profits by exchanging the fruits of other men's
toil. Nevertheless they prospered, carried the products of Chinese fields and
workshops to all corners of Asia, and became in the end the chief finan-
cial support of the government. Internal commerce was hindered by the
likin tax, and foreign trade was made hazardous by robbers on land and
pirates on the sea; but the merchants of China found a way, by sailing
* A word of Hindu origin, probably from the Tamil kuli, hired servant.
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 779
around the Malay Peninsula or plodding the caravan routes through Turk-
estan, to get their goods to India, Persia, Mesopotamia, at last even to
Rome." Silk and tea, porcelain and paper, peaches and apricots, gunpowder
and playing cards, were the staple exports; in return for which the world
sent to China alfalfa and glass, carrots and peanuts, tobacco and opium.
Trade was facilitated by an ancient system of credit and coinage.
Merchants lent to one another at high rates of interest, averaging some
thirty-six per cent— though this was no higher than in Greece and Rome.66
Money-lenders took great risks, charged commensurate fees, and were
popular only at borrowing time; "wholesale robbers," said an old Chinese
proverb, "start a bank."87 The oldest known currency of the country took
the form of shells, knives and silk; the first metal currency went back at
least to the fifth century. B.C.08 Under the Ch'in Dynasty gold was made
the standard of value by the government; but an alloy of copper and tin
served for the smaller coins, and gradually drove out the gold.* When
Wu Ti's experiment with a currency of silver alloyed with tin was ruined
by counterfeiters, the coins were replaced with leather strips a foot long,
which became the foster-parents of paper money. About the year 807, the
supply of copper having, like modern gold, become inadequate as com-
pared with the rising abundance of goods, the Emperor Hsien Tsung
ordered that all copper currency should be deposited with the govern-
ment, and issued in exchange for it certificates of indebtedness which re-
ceived the name of "flying money" from the Chinese, who appear to have
taken their fiscal troubles as good-naturedly as the Americans of 1933.
The practice was discontinued after the passing of the emergency; but the
invention of block-printing tempted the government to apply the new
art to the making of money, and about 935 A.D. the semi-independent pro-
vince of Szechuan, and in 970 the national government at Ch'ang-an, be-
gan the issuance of paper money. During the Sung Dynasty a fever of
printing-press inflation ruined many fortunes." "The Emperor's Mint,"
wrote Polo of Kublai's treasury, "is in the city of Cambaluc (Peking);
and the way it is wrought is such that you might say that he hath the
Secret of Alchemy in perfection, and you would be right. For he makes
his money after this fashion"— and he proceeded to arouse the incredulous
scorn of his countrymen by describing the process by which the bark
* Copper is still the dominant currency, in the form of the "cash"— worth a third or a
half of a cent— and the "tael," which is worth a thousand "cash."
780 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
of the mulberry tree was pressed into bits of paper accepted by the people
as the equivalent of gold.80 Such were the sources of that flood of paper
money which, ever since, has alternately accelerated and threatened the
economic life of the world.
3. Invention and Science
Gunpowder, fireworks and war—The compass— Poverty of indus-
trial invention— Geography —Mathematics— -Physics— "Feng
shui"— Astronomy— Medicine— Hygiene
The Chinese have been more facile in making inventions than in using
them. Gunpowder appeared under the T'angs, but was very sensibly re-
stricted to fireworks; not until the Sung Dynasty ( 1 1 61 A.D.) was it formed
into hand-grenades and employed in war. The Arabs became acquainted
with saltpetre— the main constituent of gunpowder—in the course of their
trade with China, and called it "Chinese snow"; they brought the secret
of gunpowder westward, the Saracens turned it to military use, and Roger
Bacon, the first European to mention it, may have learned of it through
his study of Arab lore or his acquaintance with the central Asiatic traveler,
De Rubruquis."1
The compass is of much greater antiquity. If we may believe Chinese
historians, it was invented by the Duke of Chou in the reign of the Em-
peror Cheng Wang (i 1 15-1078 B.C.) to guide certain foreign ambassadors
back to their home lands; the Duke, we are told, presented the embassy
with five chariots each equipped with a "south-pointing needle."02 Very
probably the magnetic properties of the lodestone were known to ancient
China, but the use of it was confined to orienting temples. The magnetic
needle was described in the Sung-shu, an historical work of the fifth cen-
tury A.D., and was attributed by the author to the astronomer Chang Heng
(d. 139 A.D.), who, however, had only rediscovered what China had
known before. The oldest mention of the needle as useful for mariners
occurs in a work of the early twelfth century, which ascribes this use of it
to foreign— probably Arab— navigators plying between Sumatra and Can-
ton.08 About 1190 we find the first known European notice of the com-
pass in a poem by Guyot de Provins.04
Despite the contribution of the compass and gunpowder, of paper and
silk, of printing and porcelain, we cannot speak of the Chinese as an in-
CHAP. XXVI ) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 781
dustrially inventive people. They were inventive in art, developing their
own forms, and reaching a degree of sensitive perfection not surpassed in
any other place or time; but before 1912 they were content with ancient
economic ways, and had a perhaps prophetic scorn of labor-saving devices
that hectically accelerate the pace of human toil and throw half the popu-
lation out of work in order to enrich the rest. They were among the first to
use coal for fuel, and mined it in small quantities as early as 122 B.C.;68 but
they developed no mechanisms to ease the slavery of mining, and left for the
most part unexplored the mineral resources of their soil. Though they
knew how to make glass they were satisfied to import it from the West.
They made no watches or clocks or screws, and only the coarsest nails.*8
Through the two thousand years that intervened between the rise of the
Han and the fall of the Manchus, industrial life remained substantially the
same in China— as it remained substantially the same in Europe from Pericles
to the Industrial Revolution.
In like manner China preferred the quiet and mannerly rule of tradition
and scholarship to the exciting and disturbing growth of science and plutoc-
racy. Of all the great civilizations it has been the poorest in contributions
to the material technique of life. It produced excellent textbooks of agri-
culture and sericulture two centuries before Christ, and excelled in treatises
on geography.87 Its centenarian mathematician, Chang Ts'ang (d. 152 B.C.),
left behind him a work on algebra and geometry, containing the first known
mention of a negative quantity. Tsu Ch'ung-chih calculated the correct
value of TT to six decimal places, improved the magnet or "south-pointing
vehicle," and is vaguely recorded to have experimented with a self-moving
vessel.68 Chang Heng invented a seismograph in 132 A.D.,* but for the most
part Chinese physics lost itself in the occultism of feng shui and the meta-
physics of the yang and the yin.\ Chinese mathematicians apparently derived
algebra from India, but developed geometry for themselves out of their need
for measuring the land.70 The astronomers of Confucius' time correctly cal-
culated eclipses, and laid the bases of the Chinese calendar— twelve hours a
day, and twelve months each beginning with the new moon; an extra month
was added periodically to bring this lunar calendar in accord with the seasons
and the sun.71 Life on earth was lived in harmony with life in the sky; the
* His machine consisted of eight copper dragons placed on delicate springs around a
bowl in whose center squatted a toad with open mouth. Each dragon held a copper
ball in its mouth. When an earthquake occurred, the dragon nearest its source dropped
its ball into the mouth of the toad. Once a dragon released its ball, though no shock
had been felt by the inhabitants. Chang Heng was ridiculed as a charlatan, until a
messenger arrived who told of an earthquake in a distant province.00
•fFeng shui (wind and water) was the art, very widespread in China, of adapting the
location of homes and graves to the currents of wind and water in the locality.
782 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
festivals of the year were regulated by sun and moon; the moral order of
society itself was based upon the regularity of the planets and the stars.
Medicine in China was a characteristic mixture of empirical wisdom and
popular superstition. It had its beginnings before recorded history, and pro-
duced great physicians long before Hippocrates. Already under the Chous
the state held yearly examinations for admission to medical practice, and
fixed the salaries of the successful applicants according to their showing in
the tests. In the fourth century before Christ a Chinese governor ordered a
careful dissection and anatomical study of forty beheaded criminals; but the
results were lost in theoretical discussion, and dissection stopped. Chang
Chung-ning, in the second century, wrote treatises on dietetics and fevers,
which remained standard texts for a thousand years. In the third cen-
tury Hua To wrote a volume on surgery, and made operations popular by
inventing a wine which produced a general anesthesia; it is one of the
stupidities of history that the formula for mixing this drink has been lost.
About 300 A.D. Wang Shu-ho wrote a celebrated treatise on the pulse."
Towards the beginning of the sixth century T'ao Hung-ching composed an
extensive description of the 730 drugs used in Chinese medicine; and a hun-
dred years later Ch'ao Yuan-fang wrote a classic on the diseases of women
and children. Medical encyclopedias were frequent under the T'angs, and
specialist monographs under the Sungs.73 A medical college was established
in the Sung Dynasty, but most medical education was through apprentice-
ship. Drugs were abundant and various; one store, three centuries ago, sold
a thousand dollars' worth every day.74 Diagnosis was pedantically detailed;
ten thousand varieties of fever were described, and twenty-four conditions
of the pulse were distinguished. Inoculation— not vaccination— was used, prob-
ably in imitation of India, in the treatment of small-pox; and mercury was
administered for syphilis. This disease seems to have appeared in China in
the later years of the Ming Dynasty, to have run wild through the popula-
tion, and to have left behind its course a comparative immunity to its more
serious effects. Public sanitation, preventive medicine, hygiene and surgery
made little progress in China; sewage and drainage systems were primitive,
or hardly existed;75 and some towns failed to solve the primary obligations
of an organized society— to secure good water, and to dispose of waste.
Soap was a rare luxury, but lice and vermin were easily secured. The
simpler Chinese learned to itch and scratch with Confucian equanimity.
Medical science made no ascertainable progress from Shih Huang-ti to the
Dowager; perhaps the same might be said of European medicine between
Hippocrates and Pasteur. European medicine invaded China as an annex to
Christianity; but the sick natives, until our own time, confined their use of it to
surgery, and for the rest preferred their own physicians and their ancient herbs.
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 783
IV. RELIGION WITHOUT A CHURCH
Superstition and scepticism— Animism— The worship of Heaven—
Ancestor-worship— Confucianisju— Taoism— The elixir of im-
mortality—Buddhism—Religious toleration and eclecti-
cism—Mohammedanism— Christianity— Causes of its
failure in China
Chinese society was built not on science but on a strange and unique
mixture of religion, morals and philosophy. History has known no people
more superstitious, and none more sceptical; no people more devoted to
piety, and none more rationalistic and secular; no nation so free from
clerical domination, and none but the Hindus so blessed and cursed with
gods. How shall we explain these contradictions, except by ascribing to
the philosophers of China a degree "of influence unparalleled in history,
and at the same time recognizing in the poverty of China an inexhausti-
ble fountain of hopeful fantasy?
The religion of the primitive inhabitants was not unlike the faith of
nature peoples generally: an animistic fear and worship of spirits lurking
anywhere, a poetic reverence for the impressive forms and reproductive
powers of the earth, and an awed adoration of a heaven whose energizing
sunlight and fertilizing rains were part of the mystic rapport between ter-
restrial life and the secret forces of the sky. Wind and thunder, trees
and mountains, dragons and snakes were worshiped; but the greater fes-
tivals celebrated above all the miracle of growth, and in the spring girls
and young men danced and mated in the fields to give example of fertility
to mother earth. Kings and priests were in those days near allied, and
the early monarchs of China, in the edifying accounts which tendentious
historians gave of them in later years, were statesmen-saints whose heroic
deeds were always prefaced with prayers, and aided by the gods.70
In this primitive theology heaven and earth were bound together as
two halves of a great cosmic unity, and were related very much as man
and woman, lord and vassal, yang and yin. The order of the heavens and
the moral behavior of mankind were kindred processes, parts of a uni-
versal and necessary rhythm called Tao— the heavenly way; morality, like
the law of the stars, was the cooperation of the part with the whole. The
Supreme God was this mighty heaven itself, this moral order, this divine
orderliness, that engulfed both men and things, dictating the right rela*
784 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
tionship of children to parents, of wives to husbands, of vassals to lords,
of lords to the emperor, and of the emperor to God. It was a confused
but noble conception, hovering between personality when the people
prayed to Tien— heaven as a deity— and impersonality when the philoso-
phers spoke of Tien as the just and beneficent, but hardly human or per-
sonal, sum of all those forces that ruled the sky, the earth, and men.
Gradually, as philosophy developed, the personal conception of "Heaven"
was confined to the masses of the people, and the impersonal conception
was accepted by the educated classes and in the official religion of the
state.77
Out of these beginnings grew the two elements of the orthodox re-
ligion of China: the nation-wide worship of ancestors, and the Confucian
worship of heaven and great men. Every day some modest offering—
usually of food— was made to the departed, and prayers were sent up to
their spirits; for the simple peasant t>r laborer believed that his parents
and other forbears still lived in some ill-defined realm, and could bring
him good or evil fortune. The educated Chinese offered similar sacrifice,
but he looked upon the ritual not as worship so much as commemoration;
it was wholesome for the soul and the race that these dead ones should
be remembered and revered, for then the ancient ways which they had
followed would also be revered, innovation would hesitate, and the empire
would be at peace. There were some inconveniences in this religion, for
it littered China with immense inviolable graves, impeding the construc-
tion of railroads and the tillage of the soil; but to the Chinese philosopher
these were trivial difficulties- when weighed in the balance against the
political stability and spiritual continuity which ancestor worship gave
to civilization. For through this profound institution the nation, which
was shut out from physical and spatial unity by great distances and the
poverty of transport, achieved a powerful spiritual unity in time; the
generations were bound together with the tough web of tradition, and
the individual life received an ennobling share and significance in a drama
of timeless majesty and scope.
The religion adopted by the scholars and the state was at once a widen-
ing and a narrowing of this popular faith. Slowly, by increments of rev-
erence from century to century, Confucius was lifted up, through imperial
decrees, to a place second only to that of Heaven itself; every school
raised a tablet, every city a temple, in his honor; and periodically the
emperor and the officials offered incense and sacrifice to his spirit or his
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 785
memory, as the greatest influence for good in all the rich memories of
the race. He was not, in the understanding of the intelligent, a god; on
the contrary he served for many Chinese as a substitute for a god; those
who attended the services in his honor might be agnostics or atheists, and
yet— if they honored him and their ancestors— they were accepted by their
communities as pious and religious souls. Officially, however, the faith
of the Confucians included a recognition of Shang-ti, the Supreme Ruling
Force of the world; and every year the emperor offered ceremonious
sacrifice, on the Altar of Heaven, to this impersonal divinity. Nothing
was said, in this official faith, of immortality.78 Heaven was not a place but
the will of God, or the order of the world.
This simple and almost rationalistic religion never quite satisfied the
people of China. Its doctrines gave too little room to the imagination of
men, too little answer to their hopes and dreams, too little encourage-
ment to the superstitions that enlivened their daily life. For the people,
here as everywhere, brightened the prose of reality with the poetry of
the supernatural; they felt a world of good or evil spirits hovering in the
air about them and the earth beneath, and longed to appease the enmity
or enlist the aid of these secret powers by magic incantation or prayer.
They paid diviners to read the future for them in the lines of the l-Ching,
or on the shells of tortoises, or in the movements of the stars; they hired
magicians to orient their dwellings and graves to wind and water, and
sorcerers to bring them sunshine or rain.™ They exposed to death such
children as were born to them on "unlucky" days,80 and fervent daughters
sometimes killed themselves to bring good or evil fortune to their parents."
In the south, particularly, the Chinese soul inclined to mysticism; it was
repelled by the frigid rationalism of the Confucian faith, and hungered
for a creed that would give China, like other nations, deathless conso-
lations.
Therefore some popular theologians took the misty doctrine of Lao-tze
and gradually transformed it into a religion. To the Old Master and to
Chuang-tze the Tao had been a way of life for the attainment of indi-
vidual peace on earth; they do not seem ever to have dreamed of it as a
deity, much less as a price to be paid here for a life beyond the grave."
But in the second century of our era these doctrines were improved upon
by men who claimed to have received, in direct line from Lao-tze, an
elixir that would confer immortality. This drink became so popular that
several emperors are said to have died from pious indulgence in it.M A
786 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
mystagogue in Szechuan (ca. 148 A.D.) offered to cure all diseases with
a simple talisman to be given in exchange for five packages of rice. Ap-
parently miraculous cures were effected, and those who were not cured
were told that their faith had been too weak.84 The people flocked to the
new religion, built temples for it, supported its priesthood generously, and
poured into the new faith some part of their inexhaustible superstitious
lore. Lao-tze was made a god, and was credited with a supernatural con-
ception; he had been born, the faithful believed, already old and wise,
having been in his mother's womb for eighty years.85 They peopled the
world with new devils and deities, frightened away the one with fire-
crackers exploding merrily in the temple courts, and with mighty gongs
called the others out of slumber to hear their importunate prayers.
For a thousand years the Taoist faith had millions of adherents, con-
verted many emperors, and fought long battles of intrigue to wrest from
the Confucians the divine right to tax and spend. In the end it was broken
down not by the logic of Confucius, but by the coming of a new religion
even better suited than itself to inspire and console the common man.
For the Buddhism that began its migration from India to China in the
first century after Christ was not the hard and gloomy doctrine that the
Enlightened One had preached five hundred years before; it was no
ascetic creed, but a bright and happy faith in helping deities and a flower-
ing paradise; it took the form, as time went on, of the Greater Vehicle,
or Mahay ana, which Kanishka's theologians had adapted to the emotional
needs of simple men; it presented China with freshly personal and humane
gods, like Amitabha, Ruler of Paradise, and Kuan-yin, god-then-goddess
of mercy; it filled the Chinese pantheon with Lohans or Arhats— eighteen
of the original disciples of Buddha— who stood ready at every turn to
give of their merits to help a bewildered and suffering mankind. When,
after the fall of the Han, China found itself torn with political chaos,
and life seemed lost in a welter of insecurity and war, the harassed nation
turned to Buddhism as the Roman world was at the same time turning to
Christianity. Taoism opened its arms to take in the new faith, and in time
became inextricably mingled with it in the Chinese soul. Emperors per-
secuted Buddhism, philosophers complained of its superstitions, statesmen
were concerned over the fact that some of the best blood of China was
being sterilized in monasteries; but in the end the government found again
that religion is stronger than the state; the emperors made treaties of
peace with the new gods; the Buddhist priests were allowed to collect alms
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 787
and raise temples, and the bureaucracy of officials and scholars was per-
force content to keep Confucianism as its own aristocratic creed. The
new religion took possession of many old shrines, placed its monks and
fanes along with those of the Taoists on the holy mountain Tai-shan,
aroused the people to many pious pilgrimages, contributed powerfully to
painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and the development of print-
ing, and brought a civilizing measure of gentleness into the Chinese soul.
Then, it, too, like Taoism, fell into decay; its clergy became corrupt, its
doctrine was permeated more and more by sinister deities and popular
superstitions, and its political power, never strong, was practically de-
stroyed by the renaissance of Confucianism under Chu Hsi. Today its
temples are neglected, its resources are exhausted, and its only devotees
are its impoverished priests.88
Nevertheless it has sunk into the national soul, and is still part of the
complex but informal religion of the simpler Chinese. For religions in
China are not mutually exclusive as in Europe and America, nor have
they ever precipitated the country into religious wars. Normally they tol-
erate one another not only in the state but in the same breast; and the
average Chinese is at once an animist, a Taoist, a Buddhist and a Confu-
cianist. He is a modest philosopher, and knows that nothing is certain;
perhaps, after all, the theologian may be right, and there may be a para-
dise; the best policy would be to humor all these creeds, and pay many
diverse priests to say prayers over one's grave. While fortune smiles,
however, the Chinese citizen does not pay much attention to the gods; he
honors his ancestors, but lets the Taoist and the Buddhist temples get
along with the attentions of the clergy and a few women. He is the most
secular spirit ever produced, as a type, in known history; this life absorbs
him; and when he prays he asks not for happiness in paradise, but for some
profit here on earth.87 If the god does not answer his prayers he may
overwhelm him with abuse, and end by throwing him into the river. "No
image-maker worships the gods," says a Chinese proverb; "he knows
what stuff they are made of."88
Hence the average Chinese has not taken passionately to Mohamme-
danism or Christianity; these offered him a heaven that Buddhism had
already promised, but what he really wanted was a guarantee of happi-
ness here. Most of the fifteen million Chinese Moslems are not really
Chinese, but people of foreign origin or parentage.89 Christianity entered
China with the Nestorians about 636 A.D. The Emperor Tai Tsung gave
788 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
it a sympathetic hearing, and protected its preachers from persecution.
In 781 the Nestorians of China raised a monument on which they recorded
their appreciation of this enlightened tolerance, and their hope that Chris-
tianity would soon win the whole land.80 Since then Jesuit missionaries
with heroic zeal and lofty learning, and Protestant missionaries backed
with great American fortunes, have labored to realize the hope of the
Nestorians. Today there are three million Christians in China; one per
cent of the population has been converted in a thousand years.*
V. THE RULE OF MORALS
The high place of morals in Chinese society—The family— Chil-
dren—Chastity—Prostitution— Premarital relations— Marriage
and love— Monogamy and polygamy— Concubinage-
Divorce— A Chinese empress— The patriarchal male—
The subjection of 'woman— The Chinese character
Confucianism and ancestor worship survived so many rivals and so
many attacks, during twenty centuries, because they were felt to be
indispensable to that intense and exalted moral tradition upon which China
had founded its life. As these were the religious sanctions, so the family
was the great vehicle, of this ethical heritage. From parents to children
the moral code was handed down across the generations, and became the
invisible government of Chinese society; a code so stable and strong that
that society maintained its order and discipline through nearly all the vicis-
situdes of the unsteady state. "What the Chinese," said Voltaire, "best
know, cultivate the most, and have brought to the greatest perfection, is
* Christianity lost its opportunity early in the eighteenth century, when a quarrel arose
between the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic orders in China. The Jesuits had, with
characteristic statesmanship, found formulas by which the essential elements of Chinese
piety— ancestor worship and the adoration of heaven— could be brought under Christian
forms without disrupting deep-rooted institutions or endangering the moral stability of
China; but the Dominicans and Franciscans demanded a stricter interpretation, and de-
nounced all Chinese theology and ritual as inventions of the devil. The enlightened
Emperor K'ang-hsi was highly sympathetic to Christianity; he entrusted his children to
Jesuit tutors, and offered on certain conditions to become a Christian. When the Church
officially adopted the rigid attitude of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, K'ang-hsi
withdrew his support of Christianity, and his successors decided to oppose it actively.91
In later days the greedy imperialism of the West weakened the persuasiveness of Chris-
tian preaching, and precipitated the passionate anti-Christianism of the revolutionary
Chinese.
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 789
morality."02 "By building the house on a sound foundation," Confucius had
said, "the world is made secure."03
The Chinese proceeded on the assumption that the purpose of a moral
code was to transform the chaos of sexual relations into an orderly insti-
tution for the rearing of children. The family's reason for being lay in
the child. There could not, from the viewpoint of China, be too many
children: a nation was always subject to attack, and needed defenders; the
soil was rich, and could support many millions; even if there should be
a bitter struggle for existence in large families and crowded communi-
ties, the weakest would be eliminated, and the ablest would survive and
multiply to be a support and an honor to their aging parents, and to tend
the ancestral graves religiously. Ancestor worship forged an endless chain
of reproduction, and gave it a double strength; the husband must beget
sons not only to sacrifice to him after his death, but to continue the sacri-
fices to his ancestors. "There are three things which are unfilial," said
Mencius; "and the greatest of them is to have no posterity."0*
Sons were prayed for, and mothers were shamed forever if they had
none; for sons could work better than girls in the fields, and could fight
better in war; and a regulation not unconscious of this had long since
decreed that only sons should be permitted to offer the ancestral sacri-
fice. Girls were a burden, for one had to rear them patiently only to see
them go off, at maturity, to their husbands' homes, to labor there, and
beget laborers, for another family. If too many daughters came, and
times were very hard, the infant girl might without sin be left exposed in
the furrows, to be killed by the night's frost or eaten by prowling swine."
Such progeny as survived the hazards and ailments of childhood were
brought up with the tendcrcst affection; example took the place of blows
in their education; and occasionally they were exchanged for a while for
the children of kindred families, so that they might not be spoiled by an
indulgent love.00 The children were kept in the women's division of the
home, and seldom mingled with the adult males until the age of seven.
Then the boys, if the family could afford it, were sent to school, and were
severely separated from the girls; from the age of ten they would be
limited in their choice of associates to men and courtesans; and the fre-
quency of homosexuality and male prostitution sometimes made this
choice unreal.07
Chastity was exalted and rigidly enforced in daughters, and was incul-
cated with such success that Chinese girls have been known to kill them-
79° THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
selves because they believed that they had been dishonored by the acci-
dental touch of a man." But no effort was made to maintain chastity in the
unmarried man; on the contrary, it was considered normal and legitimate
that he should visit brothels; sex (in the male) was an appetite like hunger,
and might be indulged in without any other disgrace than that which
would in any case attach to immoderation.98* The supply of women to
meet these demands had long since been an established institution in China;
the famous premier of T'si, Kuan Chung, had provided a lupanar where
traders from other states might leave their gains before departing for their
homes.101 Marco Polo described the courtesans of Kublai Khan's capital
as incredibly numerous and ravishingly beautiful. They were licensed,
regulated and segregated; and the most beautiful of them were supplied
without charge to the members of foreign embassies.108 In later times a
special variety of charmers was developed, known as "sing-song girls,"
who, if that were preferred, would provide educated conversation for
young men or for respectable husbands entertaining guests. Such girls
were often versed in literature and philosophy, as well as skilled in music
and the dance.108
Premarital relations were so free for men, and premarital association
with men was so restricted for respectable women, that small opportunity
was given for the growth of romantic love. A literature of such tender
affection appeared under the T'angs, and some indication of the sentiment
may be found as far back as the sixth century before Christ in the legend
of Wei Sheng, who, having promised to meet a girl under a bridge, waited
vainly for her there, though the water rose above his head and drowned
him.104 Doubtless Wei Sheng knew better than this, but it is significant
that the poets thought that he might not. In general, however, love as a
tender solicitude and attachment was more frequent between men than
between the sexes; in this matter the Chinese agreed with the Greeks.105
Marriage had little to do with love; since its purpose was to bring
healthy mates together for the rearing of abundant families, it could not,
the Chinese thought, be left to the arbitrament of passion. Hence the
sexes were kept apart while the parents sought eligible mates for their
children. It was considered immoral for a man not to marry; celibacy
was a crime against one's ancestors, the state and the race, and was never
* Men sometimes prepared themselves openly for a night in a brothel by pictures,
aphrodisiacs and songs.100 It should be added that this lenience towards marital deviations
is disappearing today.
CHAP.XXVl) THEPEOPLEANDTHESTATE 791
quite condoned even in the case of the clergy. In the ancient days a
special official was appointed to see to it that every man was married
by the age of thirty, and every woman by twenty."* With or without
the help of professional intermediaries (mei-ren, "go-betweens"), parents
arranged the betrothal of their children soon after puberty, sometimes
before puberty, sometimes before birth.m Certain endogamic and ex-
ogamic limits were placed on the choice: the mate had to be of a family
long known to the match-seeking parents, and yet sufficiently distant in
relationship to be outside the clan. The father of the boy usually sent a
substantial present to the father of the girl, but the girl in her turn was
expected to bring a considerable dowry, chiefly in the form of goods, to
her husband; and gifts of some value were ordinarily exchanged between
the families at the marriage. The girl was kept in strict seclusion until the
wedding. Her future mate could not see her except by stratagem—though
that was often managed; in many cases he saw her for the first time when
he removed her veil in the wedding ccrmony. This was a complex and
symbolic ritual, in which the essential matter was that the bridegroom
should be sufficiently wined to guard against the chance of a criminal
bashfulness on his part;"8 as for the girl, she had been trained to be at once
shy and obedient. After the marriage the bride lived with her husband
in or near the house of his father; there she labored in servitude to her
mate and his mother, until such time as the normal course of life and
death liberated her from this slavery and left her ready to impose it upon
the wives of her sons.
The poor were monogamous; but so eager was China for vigorous chil-
dren that such men as could afford it were permitted by custom to take
concubines, or "secondary wives." Polygamy was looked upon as eugenic,
on the ground that those who could bear its expense would on the average
be the abler men in their communities. If the first wife remained child-
less she would in most cases urge her husband to take an additional mate,
and would often adopt as her own the child of the concubine. There were
many instances in which wives, anxious to keep their husbands home,
suggested that they should marry the courtesans to whom they were giv-
ing their attention and their substance, and should bring them home as
secondary wives.109 The wife of the Emperor Chuang-tchu was much
praised in Chinese tradition because she was reported to have said: "I have
never ceased to send people to all the neighboring towns to look for beau-
tiful women in order that I might represent them as concubines to my
79* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
lord.""0 Families rivaled one another in seeking the honor of providing a
daughter for the royal harem. To guard the harem, and to attend to other
duties at his court, the emperor was entitled to three thousand eunuchs.
Most of these had been mutilated by their parents before the age of eight,
in order to ensure their livelihood.111
In this paradise of the male the secondary wives were practically slaves,
and the chief wife was merely the head of a reproductive establishment.
Her prestige depended almost entirely on the number and sex of her
children. Educated to accept her husband as a lord, she might win some
modest happiness by falling quietly into the routine expected of her; and
so adaptive is the human soul that the wife and husband, in these pre-
arranged unions, seem to have lived in a peace no more violent than that
which follows the happy endings of Western romantic love. The woman
could be divorced for almost any cause, from barrenness to loquacity;11*
she herself could never divorce her husband, but she might leave him and
return to her parents— though this was a matter of rare resort. Divorce
in any case was infrequent; partly because the lot of the divorced woman
was too unpleasant to be thought of, partly because the Chinese were
natural philosophers, and took suffering as the order of the day.
Very probably, in pre-Confucian times, the family had centered around
the mother as the source of its existence and its authority. In the earliest
period, as we have seen, the people "knew their mothers but not their
fathers"; and the character for a man's family name is still formed from
the radical for "woman."1" The word for "wife" meant "equal"; and the
wife preserved her own name after marriage. As late as the third century
of our era women held high administrative and executive positions in
China, even to ruling the state;1" the "Dowager Empress" merely followed
in the steps of that Empress Lu who ruled China so severely from 195
to 1 80 B.C. Lu, "hard and inflexible," killed and poisoned her rivals and
enemies with all the gusto of a Medicean; she chose and deposed kings,
and had her husband's favorite concubine shorn of ears and eyes and
thrown into a latrine.115 Though hardly one in ten thousand Chinese were
literate under the Manchus,11" education was customary among the women
of the upper classes in ancient days; many of them wrote poetry; and
Pan Chao, the gifted sister of the historian P'an Ku (ca. 100 A.D.), com-
pleted his history after his death, and won high recognition from the
emperor.1"
CHAP.XXVl) THEPEOPLEANDTHESTATE 793
Probably the establishment of the feudal system in China reduced the
political and economic status of woman, and brought with it an especially
rigorous form of the patriarchal family. Usually all the male descendants,
and their wives and children, lived with the oldest male; and though the
family owned its land in common, it acknowledged the complete authority
of the patriarch over both the family and its property. By the time of
Confucius the power of the father was almost absolute: he could sell his
wife or his children into servitude, though he did so only under great
need; and if he wished he could put his children to death with no other
restraint than public opinion.118 He ate his meals alone, not inviting either
his wife or his children to table with him except on rare occasions. When
he died his widow was expected to avoid remarriage; formerly she had
been required to commit suttee in his honor, and cases of this occurred in
China to the end of the nineteenth century .u' He was courteous to his
wife, as to everybody, but he maintained a severe distance, almost a separa-
tion of caste, between himself and his wife and children. The women lived
in distinct quarters of the home, and seldom mingled with the men; social
life was exclusively male, except for promiscuous women. The man
thought of his wife as the mother of his children; he honored her not for
her beauty or her culture, but for her fertility, her industry and her obe-
dience. In a celebrated treatise the Lady Pan Ho-pan, from the same eleva-
tion of aristocracy, wrote with edifying humility of the proper condition
of women:
We occupy the last place in the human species, we are the weaker
part of humanity; the basest functions are, and should be, our por-
tion. . . . Rightly and justly does the Book of the Laws of the
Sexes make use of these words: "If a woman has a husband after
her own heart, it is for her whole life; if a woman has a husband
against her heart, it is also for life.""0
And Fu Hsiian sang:
How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap.
Boys stand leaning at the door
Like gods fallen out of heaven.
Their hearts brave the Four Oceans,
The wind and dust of a thousand miles.
794 THE STORY OP CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
No one is glad when a girl is born:
By her the family sets no store.
When she grows up she hides in her room,
Afraid to look a man in the face.
No one cries when she leaves her home-
Sudden as clouds when the rain stops.
She bows her head and composes her face,
Her teeth are pressed on her red lips:
She bows and kneels countless times.m
Perhaps such quotations do injustice to the Chinese home. There was
rank subjection in it, and quarrels were frequent between man and woman,
and among the children; but there were also much kindness and affection,
much mutual helpfulness, and constant cooperation in the busy function-
ing of a natural home. Though economically subordinate the woman en-
joyed the franchise of the tongue, and might scold her man into fright or
flight in the best Occidental style. The patriarchal family could not be de-
mocratic, much less egalitarian, because the state left to the family the task
of maintaining social order; the home was at once a nursery, a school, a
workshop and a government. The relaxation of family discipline in Amer-
ica has been made possible only by the economic unimportance of the
urban home, and the appropriation of family functions by the school, the
factory and the state.
The type of character produced by these domestic institutions has won
the highest praise of many travelers. Allowing for the many exceptions
that weaken every social generalization, the average Chinese was a model
of filial obedience and devotion, of wholesome respect and willing care
for the old.* He accepted patiently the character-forming precepts of the
Li-chi or Book of Ceremonies, carried easily its heavy burden of etiquette,
regulated every phase of his life with its rules of passionless courtesy, and
acquired under it an ease and excellence of manners, a poise and dignity
of bearing, unknown to his compeers of the West— so that a coolie carry-
ing dung through the streets might show better breeding, and more self-
respect, than the alien merchant who sold him opium. The Chinese learned
the art of compromise, and graciously "saved the face" of his worsted
* Chinese legend illustrates this with characteristic humor by the story of Hakuga, who
was whipped daily by his mother, but never cried. One day, however, he cried as he
was being beaten; and being asked the cause of this unusual disturbance he answered
that he wept because his mother, now old and weak, was unable to hurt him with her
blows.1"
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 795
enemy. He was occasionally violent in speech and always loquacious,
often unclean and not invariably sober, given to gambling and gluttony,*
to petty peculation and courteous mendacity;1** he worshiped the God of
Wealth with too frank an idolatry,1* and was as hungry for gold as a
caricatured American; he was capable occasionally of cruelty and bru-
tality, and accumulating injustices sometimes provoked him to mass out-
breaks of pillage and slaughter. But in nearly all cases he was peaceable
and kindly, ready to help his neighbors, disdainful of criminals and war-
riors, thrifty and industrious, leisurely but steady at his work, simple and
unassuming in his mode of life, and comparatively honest in commerce
and finance. He was silent and patient under the whip of adversity, and
took good and evil fortune alike with a wise humility; he bore bereave-
ment and agony with fatalistic self-control, and showed little sympathy
for those who suffered them audibly; he mourned long and loyally for his
departed relatives, and (when all his compromises had failed to elude it)
faced his own death with philosophic calm. He was as sensitive to beauty
as he was insensitive to pain; he brightened his cities with colorful decora-
tion, and adorned his life with the maturest art.
If we wish to understand this civilization we must forget for a moment
the bitter chaos and helplessness into which it has been thrown by its own
internal weakness and by contact with the superior guns and machines of
the West; we must see it at any of its many apogees— under the Chou
princes, or Ming Huang, or Hui Tsung, or K'ang-hsi. For in those quiet
and beauty-loving days the Chinese represented without doubt the highest
civilization and the ripest culture that Asia, or perhaps any continent, had
yet achieved.
VI. A GOVERNMENT PRAISED BY VOLTAIRE""
The submergence of the individual— Self-government— The village
and the province— The laxity of the laiv—The severity of punish-
ment—The E?nperor—The Censor— Administrative boards-
Education for public office— Nomination by education— The
examination system— Its defects— Its virtues
The most impressive aspect of this civilization was its system of govern-
ment. If the ideal state is a combination of democracy and aristocracy,
the Chinese have had it for more than a thousand years; if the best gov-
* In many cities hucksters stood at the roadside with saucer, dice and cup in hand,
ready for the casual gambler."1
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
ernment is that which governs least, then the Chinese have had the best.
Never has a government governed so many people, or governed them so
little, or so long.
Not that individualism, or individual liberty, flourished in China; on
the contrary, the concept of the individual was weak, and lost him in the
groups to which he belonged. He was, first of all, a member of a family
and a passing unit in a stream of life between his ancestors and his pos-
terity; by law and custom he was responsible for the acts of the others
of his household, and they were responsible for his. Usually he belonged
to some secret society, and, in the town, to a guild; these limited his rights
to do as he pleased. A web of ancient custom bound him, and a powerful
public opinion threatened him with ostracism if he seriously violated the
morals or traditions of the group. It was precisely the strength of these
popular organizations, rising naturally out of the needs and voluntary
cooperation of the people, that made it possible for China to maintain
itself in order and stability despite the weakness of law and the state.
But within the framework of these spontaneous institutions of self-gov-
ernment the Chinese remained politically and economically free. The great
distances that separated one city from another, and all of them from the
imperial capital, the dividing effect of mountains, deserts, and unbridged
or unnavigable streams, the lack of transport and quick communication,
and the difficulty of supporting an army large enough to enforce some
central will upon four hundred million people, compelled the state to leave
to each district an almost complete autonomy.
The unit of local administration was the village, loosely ruled by the
family heads under the eye of a "headman" named by the government; a
group of villages gathered about a town constituted a hien, or county, of
which there were some thirteen hundred in China; two or more hien, ruled
together from a city, constituted a fu; two or more fu formed a tao, or
circuit; two or more tao made a sheng, or province; and eighteen provinces,
under the Manchus, made the empire. The state appointed a magistrate to act
as administrator, tax-collector and judge in each hien; a chief officer for
each fu and each tao; and a judge, a treasurer, a governor, and sometimes a
viceroy, for each province.1" But these officials normally contented them-
selves with collecting taxes and "squeezes," judging such cases as volun-
tary arbitration had failed to settle, and, for the rest, leaving the maintenance
of order to custom, the family, the clan and the guild. Each province was a
semi-independent state, free from imperial interference or central legislation
CHAP. XXVI ) THEPEOPLEANDTHESTATE 797
so long as it paid its tax-allotment and kept the peace. Lack of facilities for
communication made the central government more an idea than a reality.
The patriotic emotions of the people were spent upon their districts and
provinces, and seldom extended to the empire as a whole.
In this loose structure law was weak, unpopular, and diverse. The people
preferred to be ruled by custom, and to settle their disputes by face-sav-
ing compromises out of court. They expressed their view of litigation by
such pithy proverbs as "Sue a flea and catch a bite," or "Win your law-
suit, lose your money." In many towns of several thousand population
years passed without a case coming into the courts.1* The laws had been
codified under the T'ang emperors, but they dealt almost entirely with
crime, and attempted no formulation of a civil code. Trials were simple,
for no lawyer was allowed to argue a case in court, though licensed
notaries might occasionally prepare, and read to the magistrate, a state-
ment in behalf of a client.1" There were no juries, and there was scant
protection in the law against the sudden seizure and secret retention of a
person by the officers of the state. Suspects were finger-printed,130 and
confessions were sometimes elicited by tortures slightly more physical
than those now used for such purposes in the most enlightened cities.
Punishment was severe, but hardly as barbarous as in most other countries
of Asia; it began with cutting off the hair, and went on to flogging, ban-
ishment or death; if the criminal had exceptional merits or rank, he might
be allowed to kill himself ,m There were generous commutations of sen-
tences, and capital punishment could in normal times be imposed only by
the emperor. Theoretically, as with us, all persons were equal before the
law. These laws never availed to prevent brigandage on the highways or
corruption in office and the courts, but they cooperated modestly with
custom and the family to give China a degree of social order and personal
security not equaled by any other nation before our century.18"
Poised precariously above these teeming millions sat the emperor. In
theory he ruled by divine right; he was the "Son of Heaven," and repre-
sented the Supreme Being on earth.* By virtue of his godlike powers he
ruled the seasons and commanded men to coordinate their lives with the
divine order of the universe. His decrees were laws, and his judgments were
* Hence his realm was sometimes called Tien-Chan, the "heaven-ruled." Europeans
translated this into the "Celestial Kingdom," and spoke of the Chinese learnedly as
"Celestials."1"
798 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
the final court; he administered the state and was the head of its religion;
he appointed all officials, examined the highest contestants for office, and
chose his successor to the throne. Actually his powers were wholesomely
limited by custom and law. He was expected to rule without contraven-
ing the regulations that had come down from the sacred past; he might at
any moment be rebuked by a strange dignitary known as the Censor; he
was in effect imprisoned by a ring of counsellors and commissioners whose
advice it was usually expedient for him to accept; and if he ruled very un-
justly or unwell he lost, by common custom and consent, the "mandate
of Heaven," and might be violently deposed without offense to religion or
morality.
The Censor was head of a board whose function it was to inspect all
officials in the administration of their duties; and the emperor was not
exempt from this supervision. Several times in the course of history the
Censor has reproved the emperor himself. For example, the Censor Sung
respectfully suggested to the Emperor Chia Ch'ing (1796-1821 A.D.) a
moderation in his attachment to actors and strong drink. Chia Ch'ing
summoned Sung to his presence, and angrily asked him what punishment
was proper for so insolent an official. Sung answered, "Death by the slic-
ing process." Ordered to select a milder penalty, he answered, "Let me
be beheaded." Ordered to select a milder penalty, he recommended that
he be strangled. The Emperor, impressed by his courage and disturbed
by his propinquity, made him governor of the province of Hi.1**
The imperial government had come to be a highly complex administra-
tive machine. Nearest to the throne was the Grand Council, composed of
four "Great Ministers," usually headed by a prince of the royal blood; by
custom it met daily, in the early hours of the morning, to determine the
policies of the state. Superior in rank but inferior in influence was another
group of advisers called the "Inner Cabinet." The work of administration
was headed by "Six Boards": of Civil Office, of Revenue, of Ceremonies, of
War, of Punishments, and of Works. There was a Colonial Office, for
managing such distant territories as Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet; but there
was no Foreign Office: China recognized no other nations as its equals, and
made no provisions for dealing with them beyond arrangements for the re-
ception of tribute-bearing embassies.
The weakness of the government lay in its limited revenues, its inadequate
defenses, and its rejection of any instructive intercourse with the outside
world. It taxed the land, monopolized the sale of salt, and impeded the
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 799
development of commerce by levying, after 1852, a duty on the transit
of goods along the main routes of the country; but the poverty of the
people, the difficulty of collection, and the dishonesty of the collectors kept
the national revenue at too low a point to finance the naval and military
forces that might have saved China from invasion and shameful defeat.*
Perhaps the basic defect was in the personnel of the government; the ability
and honesty of its officials deteriorated throughout the nineteenth century,
and left the nation essentially leaderless when half the wealth and power of
the world wrcre joining in an assault upon its independence, its resources and
its institutions.
Nevertheless those officials had been chosen by the most unique, and
all in all the most admirable, method ever developed for the selection of
public servants. It was a method that would have interested Plato; and
despite its failure and abandonment today it still endears China to the
philosopher. Theoretically, the plan provided a perfect reconciliation of
aristocracy and democracy: all men were to have an equal opportunity to
make themselves fit for office, but office was to be open only to those who
had made themselves fit. Practically, the method produced good results
for a thousand years.
It began in the village schools— simple private institutions, often no
more than a room in a cottage— where an individual teacher, out of his own
meager remuneration, provided an elementary education for the sons of
the prosperous; the poorer half of the population remained illiterate.1*7
These schools were not financed by the state, nor were they conducted
by the clergy; education, like marriage, remained, in China, independent
of religion, except in so far as Confucianism was its creed. Hours were
long and discipline was severe in these modest schoolhouses: the children
reported to the teacher at sunrise, studied with him till ten, had breakfast,
resumed their studies till five, and then were free for the day. Vacations
were few and brief: there were no lessons after noon in the summer, but to
atone for this leisure to work in the fields there were school sessions in the
winter evenings. The chief instruments of instruction were the writings
* The imperial revenue towards the close of the last century averaged $75,000,000 a
year; the revenues collected for local purposes amounted to an additional $175,000,000."'
If these national receipts, essential to the maintenance of order, are compared with the
$150,000,000 exacted of China by Japan in 1894, and the $300,000,000 indemnity asked by
the Allies after the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of China becomes a mere matter of
bookkeeping.
800 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVI
of Confucius, the poetry of the T'ang, and a whip of clinging bamboo.
The method was memory: day after day the young students learned by
heart, and discussed with their teacher, the philosophy of K'ung the Mas-
ter, until almost every word of it had sunk into their memories, and some
of it into their hearts; China hoped that in this joyless and merciless way
even a peasant. lad might be turned into a philosopher and a gentleman.
The graduate emerged with little information and much understanding,
factually ignorant and mentally mature.*
It was on the basis of this education that China established— first tenta-
tively under the Han, then definitely under the T'ang, dynasties— its sys-
tem of examinations for public office. It is an evil for the people, said
China, that its rulers should learn to rule by ruling; as far as possible they
should learn to rule before ruling. It is an evil for the people that they
should have no access to office, and that government should be the privi-
lege of an hereditary few; but it is good for the people that office should
be confined to those who have been prepared for it by ability and training.
To offer to all men democratically an equal opportunity for such training,
and to restrict office aristocratically to those who proved themselves best,
was the solution that China proposed for the ancient and insoluble problem
of government.
Therefore it periodically arranged, in each district, a public examina-
tion to which all males of any age were eligible. It tested the applicant in
his memory and understanding of the writings of Confucius, in his knowl-
edge of Chinese poetry and history, and in his capacity to write intelli-
gently on the issues of moral and political life. Those who failed might
study more and try again; those who succeeded received the degree of
Hsiu tt'fl/, entitling them to membership in the literary class, and to pos-
sible appointment to minor local offices; but more important than this, they
became eligible— either at once or after further preparation— for the tri-
ennial provincial examinations, which offered similar but harder tests.
Those who failed here might try again, and many did, so that some men
passed these tests after eighty years of living and studying, and not a few
died in the midst of the examinations. Those who succeeded were eligi-
* From these local schools the children might go on to one of the rare and poorly-
equipped colleges of the empire; more frequently they studied with a tutor, or with a
few precious books, at home. Needy students were often financed through such school-
ing by men of means, on the understanding that they would return the loan with interest
on their appointment to office and their access to "squeeze.11
CHAP. XXVl) THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE 8oi
ble for appointment to minor positions in the national service; and at the
same time they were admitted to a final and especially severe examination
at Peking. There in the Examination Hall were ten thousand cells, in which
the contestants, cribbed and confined, lived with their own food and
bedding for three separate days, while they wrote essays or theses on sub-
jects announced to them after their imprisonment. The cells were un-
heated, uncomfortable, ill-lighted and unsanitary; only the spirit mattered!
Typical tests were the composition of a poem on the theme: "The sound
of the oars, and the green of the hills and water"; and the writing of an
essay on this passage from the Confucian Classics: "Tsang Tsze said, 'To
possess ability, and yet ask of those who do not; to know much, and yet
inquire of those who know little; to possess, and yet appear not to possess;
to be full, and yet appear empty.' " There was not a word in any of the
tests about science, business or industry; the object was to reveal not
knowledge but judgment and character. Those who survived the tests
were at last eligible for the higher offices in the state.
The defects of the plan grew in the course of time. Though dishonesty
in taking or judging the tests was sometimes punished with death, dis-
honesty found a way. The purchase of appointments became frequent
and flagrant in the nineteenth century;138 an inferior officer, for example,
sold twenty thousand forged diplomas before he was exposed.188 The form
of the trial essay came to be a matter of custom, and students prepared
themselves for it mechanically. The curriculum of studies tended to for-
malize culture and impede the progress of thought, for the ideas that cir-
culated in it had been standardized for hundreds of years. The graduates
became an official and intellectual bureaucracy, naturally arrogant and
humanly selfish, occasionally despotic and often corrupt, and yet immune
to public recall or control except through the desperate resort of the boy-
cott or the strike. In short, the system had the faults that might be ex-
pected of any governmental structure conceived and operated by men.
The faults of the system belonged to the men, not to the system; and no
other had less.*
The merits of the system were abundant. Here were no manipulated
nominations, no vulgar campaigns of misrepresentation and hypocrisy, no
* "Seldom," says Dr. Latourcttc, "has any large group of mankind been so prosperous
and so nearly contented as were the Chinese under this governmental machinery when
it was dominated by the ablest of the monarchs." This was likewise the opinion of the
learned Capt. Brinkley.14*
8O2 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVI
sham battles of twin parties, no noisy or corrupt elections, no ascent to
office through a meretricious popularity. It was a democracy in the best
sense of the term, as equality of opportunity for all in the competition for
leadership and place; and it was an aristocracy in its finest form, as a gov-
ernment by the ablest men, democratically selected from every rank in
every generation. By this system the national mind and ambition were
turned in the direction of study, and the national heroes and models were
men of culture rather than masters of wealth.* It was admirable that a
society should make the experiment of being ruled, socially and politically,
by men trained in philosophy and the humanities. It was an act of high
tragedy when that system, and the entire civilization of which it formed
the guiding part, were struck down and destroyed by the inexorable forces
of evolution and history.
* "The Chinese," said Sir Robert Hart, "worship talent; they delight in literature, and
everywhere they have their little clubs for learning, and for discussing each other's
essays and verses."
CHAPTER XXVII
Revolution and Renewal
I. THE WHITE PERIL
The conflict of Asia and Europe— The Portuguese— The Spanish—
The Dutch— The English— The opium trade— The Opium
Wars— The T'ai-p'ing Rebellion— The War 'with Japan
—The attempt to dismember China— The "Open
Door"— The Empress Dowager— The reforms
of Kuang Hsu— His removal from power
—The "Boxers"— The Indemnity
THOSE forces took the form of the Industrial Revolution. A Europe
vitalized and rejuvenated by the discovery of mechanical power and
its application to ever-multiplying machinery, found itself capable of pro-
ducing goods more cheaply than any nation or continent that still relied on
handicrafts; it was unable to dispose of all these machine products to its
own population, because it paid its workers somewhat less than the full
value of their labor; it was forced to seek foreign markets for the surplus,
and was driven, by imperialist necessity, to conquer the world. Under the
compulsions of invention and circumstance the nineteenth century became
a world-wide drama of conflict between the old, mature and fatigued
civilizations of handicraft Asia, and the young, jejune, and invigorated
civilizations of industrial Europe.
The Commercial Revolution of Columbus' time cleared the routes and
prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. Discoverers refound old
lands, opened up new ports, and brought to the ancient cultures the novel
products and ideas of the West. Early in the sixteenth century the ad-
venturous Portuguese, having established themselves in India, captured
Malacca, sailed around the Malay Peninsula, and arrived with their pic-
turesque ships and terrible guns at Canton (1517). "Truculent and law-
less, regarding all Eastern peoples as legitimate prey, they were little if any
better than . . . pirates";1 and the natives treated them as such. Their rep-
resentatives were imprisoned, their demands for free trade were refused,
and their settlements were periodically cleansed with massacres by the
803
804 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVII
frightened and infuriated Chinese. But in return for their aid against other
pirates, the Portuguese were rewarded in 1557 by receiving from Peking
full liberty to settle in Macao, and to govern it as their own. There they
built great opium factories, employing men, women and children; one fac-
tory alone paid to the Portuguese provincial government a revenue of
$1,560,000 per year."
Then came the Spanish, conquering the Philippines (1571), and setting
themselves up in the Chinese island of Formosa; then the Dutch; then, in
1637, five English vessels sailed up the river to Canton, silenced with su-
perior guns the batteries that opposed them, and disposed of their cargo.8
The Portuguese taught the Chinese to smoke and buy tobacco, and, early
in the eighteenth century, began the importation of opium from India into
China. The Chinese Government forbade its use by the people, but the
habit became so widespread that the annual consumption of the drug in
China had raised its import to 4,000 chests by the year 1795.* The Gov-
ernment prohibited its importation in that year, and reiterated the prohi-
bition in 1800, appealing to importers and population alike against the
weakening of national vitality by this powerful opiate. The trade pro-
ceeded briskly despite these discouragements; the Chinese were as anxious
to buy as the Europeans were eager to sell, and the local officials gratefully
pocketed the bribes connected with the trade.
In 1838 the Peking Government ordered the strict enforcement of the
edict against the importation of opium, and a vigorous official, Lin Tze-
hsii, commanded the foreign importers at Canton to surrender such quan-
tities as they held in their stores. When they refused he surrounded the
foreign quarters, forced them to turn over to him 20,000 chests of the drug,
and, in a kind of Canton Opium Party, destroyed the contents com-
pletely. The British withdrew to Hong Kong, and began the First "Opium
War." They protested that it was not an opium war; that their anger was
rather at the insolent pride with which the Chinese Government had re-
ceived-or refused to receive— their representatives, and at the impediments,
in the form of severe taxation and corrupt courts, which Chinese law and
custom had raised against an orderly import trade. They bombarded those
cities of China which they could reach from the coast, and compelled
peace by capturing control, at Chinkiang, of the Grand Canal. The Treaty
* The meaning of this may be felt by recalling that a vest-pocket package of opium
costs $30.*
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 805
of Nanking avoided all mention of opium, ceded the island of Hong Kong
to the British, forced Chinese tariffs down to five per cent, opened five
"treaty ports" (Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai) to
foreign trade, levied upon China an indemnity to cover the cost of the war
and the destroyed opium, and stipulated that British citizens in China, when
accused of violating laws, should be tried and judged only by British
courts.6 Other countries, including the United States and France, asked
and obtained the application of these "extra-territorial rights" to their
traders and nationals in China.
This war was the beginning of the disintegration of the ancient regime.
The Government had lost "face" in its dealings with Europeans; it had
first scorned, then defied, then yielded; and no courtly phrases could con-
ceal the facts from educated natives or gloating foreigners. At once the
authority of the Government was weakened wherever the news of its
defeat penetrated, and forces that might have held their peace broke out
now in open rebellion against Peking. In 1843 an enthusiast named Hung
Hsiu-ch'iian, after a brief acquaintance with Protestantism, and some vi-
sions, came to the conclusion that he had been chosen by God to rid China
of idolatry and convert it to Christianity. Beginning with this modest pur-
pose, Hung finally led a movement to overthrow the Manchus and estab-
lish a new dynasty— the T'ai P'/77g, or Great Peace. His followers, actuated
partly by religious fanaticism, partly by desire to reform China on West-
ern lines, fought valiantly, smashed idols, slaughtered Chinese, destroyed
many old libraries and academics and the porcelain works at Ching-te-
chen, captured Nanking, held it for twelve years (1853-65), marched on
Peking while their leader wallowed in luxury and safety behind them,
broke into disorder because of incompetent generalship, were defeated,
and fell back into the indiscriminate ocean of Chinese humanity.6
In the midst of this dangerous T'ai-p'ing Rebellion the Government was
called upon to defend itself against Europe in the Second "Opium War"
(1856-60). Great Britain, supported in varying degrees by France and
the United States, demanded the legalization of the opium traffic (which
had continued, despite prohibitions, between the wars), access to more
cities, and the honorable admission of Western envoys to the court at
Peking. When the Chinese refused, the French and English captured Can-
ton, sent its Viceroy in chains to India, took the forts at Tientsin, ad-
vanced upon the capital, and destroyed the Summer Palace in revenge for
806 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVII
the torture and execution of Allied emissaries in Peking. The victors
forced upon the defeated a treaty that opened ten new ports and the Yang-
tze River to foreign trade, arranged for the reception of European and
American ministers and ambassadors on terms of equality with China,
guaranteed toleration of missionaries and traders in every part of the
country, removed missionaries from the jurisdiction of Chinese officials,
further freed Western nationals from the operation of Chinese laws, ceded
to Great Britain a strip of the mainland opposite Hong Kong, legalized the
importation of opium, and charged China with an indemnity to pay for
the cost of her tuition in Occidental ways.
Encouraged by their easy victories, the European nations proceeded to
help themselves to one piece of China after another. Russia took the terri-
tory north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri River (1860); the French
revenged the death of a missionary by appropriating Indo-China (1885);
Japan pounced upon her neighbor and civilizer in a sudden war ( 1 894) ,
defeated her in a year, took Formosa, liberated Korea from China for later
(1910) absorption by Japan, and charged China an indemnity of $170,-
000,000 for causing so much trouble.7 On condition that China pay an
additional indemnity to Japan, Russia prevented Japan from also taking
the Liaotung Peninsula, which three years later Russia took over and forti-
fied as her own. The murder of two missionaries by Chinese enabled Ger-
many to seize the peninsula of Shantung (1898). The realm of the once
powerful government was divided into "spheres of influence," in which
one or another European power secured special privileges for mining and
trade. Alarmed by the prospects of an actual partition, Japan, foreseeing
her own later need of China, joined with America in a demand for an
"Open Door": that is, that while certain "spheres of interest" might be
recognized, all nations should be allowed to trade in China on equal terms
—tariffs and transport charges to be the same for all. To put herself in a
proper position for bargaining in these matters, the United States took over
the Philippines (1898), and declared by this act her intention to share in
the struggle for Chinese trade.
Meanwhile another and simultaneous act of the drama was being played
behind palace walls in Peking. When the Allies entered the capital in
triumph at the close of the Second "Opium War" (1860), the young em-
peror, Hsien Feng, fled to Jehol; there, a year later, he died, leaving the
throne to his five-year-old son. The secondary wife who had been the
mother of this boy took the reins of empire in her own hands, and as Tz'u
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 807
Hsi— known to the world as the "Dowager Empress"*— governed China
ruthlessly, cynically and well for a generation. In her youth she had ruled
by beauty; now she ruled by her wits and her will. When the son con-
veniently died on approaching his majority (1875), the Empress, careless
of precedent and objection, placed another minor— Kuang Hsu— on the
throne, and continued to rule. For a generation, with the help of clever
statesmen like Li Hung-chang, the doughty Empress kept China at peace
and won for it a certain respect from the predatory Powers. But the
sudden invasion of China by Japan, and the rapid series of renewed
spoliations by Europe after the triumph of the Japanese, caused a strong
movement to rise in the capital in favor of imitating Japan's imitation of
the West— i.e., for organizing a large army, building railroads and factories,
and striving to acquire the industrial wealth with which Japan and Europe
had financed their victories. The Empress and her advisers opposed this
tendency with all their influence, but it secretly won the adherence of
Kuang Hsu, who had now been permitted to ascend the throne as emperor
in his own right. Suddenly Kuang, without consulting "Old Buddha" (as
her court called the Empress), issued to the Chinese people (1898) a series
of astonishing decrees which, if they could have been accepted and en-
forced, would have advanced China vigorously and yet peaceably on the
road to Westernization, and might have averted the fall of the dynasty
and the collapse of the nation into chaos and misery. The young emperor
ordered the establishment of a new system of schools, to teach not only
the old Confucian Classics, but the scientific culture of the West; the
translation into Chinese of all the important works of Occidental science,
literature and technology; the encouragement of railroad building; and the
reform of the army and the navy with a definite view to meeting the
"crisis," as he put it, "where we are jbeset on all sides by powerful
neighbors who craftily seek advantage from us, and who are trying to
combine together in overpowering us."' The Dowager Empress, shocked
by what seemed to her the precipitate radicalism of these edicts, impris-
oned Kuang Hsu in one of the imperial palaces, annulled his decrees, and
made herself again the government of China.
A reaction now set in against all Western ideas, and the subtle Dow-
ager diverted it amiably to her purposes. An organization known as the
/ Ho CWuan— literally "Righteous Harmony Fists," historically the "Box-
* A dowager is a widow endowed— usually with a tide coming down to her from her
husband.
8o8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVII
ers"— had been formed by some rebels who wished to overthrow the
Empress and her dynasty. She persuaded its leaders to turn the fury of
their movement against invading foreigners rather than against herself.
The Boxers accepted the mission, called for the expulsion of all aliens
from China, and, in a frenzy of patriotic virtue, began to kill Christians
indiscriminately in many sections of the country (1900). Allied soldiers
again marched on Peking, this time to protect their nationals hiding in
terror in the narrow quarters of the foreign Legations. The Empress and
her court fled to Hsianfu, and the troops of England, France, Russia,
Germany, Japan and the United States sacked the city, killed many Chi-
nese in revenge, and looted or ruined valuable property.* The Allies im-
posed upon the broken Leviathan an indemnity of $330,000,000, to be col-
lected by European control of Chinese import customs and the salt mo-
nopoly. Considerable portions of this indemnity were later remitted to
China by the United States, Great Britain, Russia and Japan, usually
with the stipulation that the remitted sums be spent in educating students
from China in the universities of the remitting nation. It was a gesture of
generosity, which proved more effective in the undoing of old China
than almost any other single factor in this historic and tragic conflict of
East and West.
II. THE DEATH OF A CIVILIZATION
The Indenmity students—Their Westernization— Their disintegra-
tive effect in China— The role of the missionary— Sun Yat-sen, the
Christian— His youthful adventures— His meeting 'with Li Hung-
chang—His plans for a revolution— Their success— Yuan Shi-
k*ai—The death of Sun Yat-sen— Chaos and pillage— Com-
munism—'The north pacified"— Chiang Kai-shek— Japan
in Manchuria— At Shanghai
These "indemnity students" and thousands of others now left China
to explore the civilization of its conquerors. Many went to England, more
to Germany, more to America, more to Japan; every year hundreds of
them were graduated from the universities of America alone. They came
* Captain Brinkley writes: "It sends a thrill of horror through every white man's bosom
to learn that forty missionary women and twenty-five little children were butchered by
the Boxers. But in T'ungchow alone, a city where the Chinese made no resistance, and
where there was no fighting, five hundred and seventy-three Chinese women of the
upper classes committed suicide rather than survive the indignities they had suffered."*
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 809
at an early and impressionable age, before they had matured to the point
of understanding the depth and values of their own national culture.
They drank in with gratitude and admiration the novel education given in
the science, methods, history and ideas of the West; they were amazed at
the comforts and vigorous life they saw about them, the freedom of the
Western individual, and the enfranchisement of the people. They studied
Western philosophy, lost faith in the religion of their fathers, and enjoyed
the position of respectable radicals encouraged by their educators and
their new environment in their rebellion against all the elements in the
civilization of their native land. Year by year thousands of such deraci-
nated youths returned to China, fretted against the slow tempo and ma-
terial backwardness of their country, and sowed in every city the seeds
of inquiry and revolt.
An endless chain of circumstances helped them. For two generations
the merchants and missionaries who had conquered China from the West
had acted, willingly or not, as centers of foreign infection; they had lived
in a style, and with such comforts and conveniences, as made the young
Chinese about them anxious to adopt so promising a civilization; they had
undermined, in an active minority, the religious faith that had supported
the old moral code; they had set one generation against another by advo-
cating the abandonment of ancestor worship; and though they preached a
gentle Jesus meek and mild, they were protected in emergencies by guns
whose size and efficacy offered the dominating lesson of Europe to the
Orient. Christianity, which had been in its origin an uprising of the op-
pressed, became once more, in these Chinese converts, a ferment of revolu-
tion.
Among the converts was the leader of the Revolution. In 1866 a
tenant farmer near Canton fathered a troublesome boy whom the world,
with no conscious sarcasm, was to christen Sun Yat-sen — i.e., Sun,
the Fairy of Tranquillity.10 Sun became so Christian that he defaced the
images of the gods in the temple of his native village. An older brother,
who had migrated to Hawaii, brought the boy to Honolulu and placed him
in a school conducted by an Anglican bishop and offering a thoroughly
Occidental education.11 Returning to China, Sun entered the British Medical
College, and became its first Chinese graduate. Largely as a result of these
studies he lost all religious faith;1* and at the same time the indignities to
which he found himself and his fellow Chinese subjected at the foreign-
controlled customs offices and in the foreign quarters of the treaty ports
8lO THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVII
turned his thoughts to revolution. The inability of a corrupt and reaction-
ary government to prevent the defeat of great China by little Japan, or the
commercial partition of the country by European powers, filled him with
humiliation and resentment, and made him feel that the first step in the
liberation of China must be the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.
His first move was characteristic of his self-confidence, his idealism, and
his simplicity. He boarded a steamer and traveled sixteen hundred miles
north, at his own expense, to lay before Li Hung-chang, vice-regent of
the Empress Dowager, his plans for reforming the country and restoring
its prestige. Refused a hearing, Sun began a lifetime of adventure and
wandering in the quest of funds for a Chinese revolution. He won the
support of many mercantile guilds and powerful secret societies, whose
leaders were envious of the imperial aristocracy, and longed for a govern-
ment in which the new manufacturing and trading classes would play a
role commensurate with their rising wealth. Then he traveled overseas to
America and Europe, gathering modest sums from a million laundrymen
and a thousand Chinese merchants. In London the Chinese Legation il-
legally arrested him, and was about to send him secretly to China in chains
as a traitor to his government, when a missionary who had taught him in
his youth aroused the British Government to rescue him. For fifteen years
more he passed from city to city over the world, collecting all in all two
and a half million dollars for the Revolution; and apparently he spent
almost none of this money on himself. Suddenly, in the midst of his travels,
a message informed him that the revolutionary forces had won the south,
were winning the north, and had chosen him as Provisional President of the
Chinese Republic. A few weeks later he landed in triumph at Hong
Kong, where, twenty years back, he had been humiliated by the British
officials of the port.
The Empress Dowager had died in 1908, having arranged the death
of the imprisoned emperor Kuang Hsu the day before. She was suc-
ceeded by Kuang's nephew, P'u Yi, now Emperor of Manchukuo. In the
last years of the great Dowager and the first of her infant heir, many
reforms in the direction of modernizing China were effected by the Gov-
ernment: railways were built, chiefly with foreign capital and under for-
eign management; examinations for public office were abandoned; a new
system of schools was established, a National Assembly was called for
1910, and a nine-year program was laid down for the gradual establish-
ment of a constitutional monarchy, culminating in universal suffrage
growing step by step with universal education. The decree announcing
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 8ll
this program added: "Any impetuosity shown in introducing these re-
forms will, in the end, be so much labor lost."11 But the Revolution could
not be halted by this deathbed repentance of an ailing dynasty. On
February 12, 1912, the young Emperor, faced by revolt on every side and
finding no army willing to defend him, abdicated; and the Regent, Prince
Ch'nn, issued one of the most characteristic edicts in Chinese history:
Today the people of the whole Empire have their minds bent
upon a Republic The will of Providence is clear, and the people's
wishes are plain. How could I, for the sake of the glory and the
honor of one family, thwart the desire of teeming millions? Where-
fore I, with the Emperor, decide that the form of government in
China shall be a constitutional republic, to comfort the longing of all
within the Empire, and to act in harmony with the ancient sages,
who regarded the throne as a public heritage."
The Revolutionists behaved magnanimously to P'u Yi: they EHVC liim
his life, a comfortable palace, an ample annuity, and a concubine. The
Manchus had come in like lions, and had gone out like lambs.
The new republic paid for its peaceful birth with a stormy life. Yuan
Shi-kai, a diplomat of the old school, possessed an army that might have
impeded the Revolution. He demanded the presidency as the price of his
support; and Sun Yat-sen, only beginning to enjoy his office, yielded and
retired magnificently to private life. Yuan, encouraged by strong financial
groups native and foreign, plotted to make himself emperor and to found
a new dynasty, on the ground that only in this way could the incipient
break-up of China be stayed. Sun Yat-sen branded him as a traitor, and
called upon his followers to renew the Revolution; but before the issue
could come to battle Yuan took sick and died.
China has not known order or unity since. Sun Yat-sen proved too
idealistic, too good an orator and too poor a statesman, to take the reins
and guide his nation to peace. He passed from one plan and theory to an-
other, offended his middle-class supporters by his apparent acceptance of
communism, and retired to Canton to teach and inspire its youth and occa-
sionally to rule its people.* China, left without a government that all
sections would recognize, deprived of the unifying symbol of the mon-
archy, broken of its habit of obedience to custom and law, and weak
in the patriotism that attaches the soul not to a district but to the country
* He died at Peking in 1925, at the most opportune moment for his conservative ene-
mies.
8l2 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVII
as a whole, fell into an intermittent war of north against south, of sec-
tion against section, of property against hunger, of old against young.
Adventurers organized armies, ruled as tuchuns over isolated provinces,
levied their own taxes, raised their own opium,18 and sallied forth occa-
sionally to annex new victims to their subject population. Industry and
trade, taxed by one victorious general after another, fell into disorder
and despair; bandits exacted tribute, stole and killed, and no organized
force could control them. Men became soldiers or thieves lest they should
starve, and ravaged the fields of men who, so despoiled, became soldiers or
thieves lest they should starve. The savings of a lifetime or the modest
stores of a thrifty family were, as often as not, appropriated by a general
or looted by a robber band. In the province of Honan alone, in 193 1, there
were 400,000 bandits.1'
In the midst of this chaos (1922) Russia sent two of its ablest diplo-
mats, Karakhan and Joffe, with orders to bring China into the circle of
the Communist Revolution. Karakhan prepared -the way by surrendering
Russia's claims to "extra-territoriality," and by signing a treaty that rec-
ogni/ed the full authority and international status of the revolutionary
government. The subtle Joffe found little difficulty in converting Sun
Yat-sen to sympathy with communism, for Sun had been rebuffed by
every other power. In an incredibly short time, with the help of seventy
Soviet officers, a new Nationalist army was formed and trained. Under
command of Sun's former secretary Chiang Kai-shek, but guided largely
by a Russian adviser, Michael Borodin, this army marched northward
from Canton, conquered one city after another, and finally established its
power in Peking.* In the moment of victory the victors divided; Chiang
Kai-shek attacked the communist movement in Oriental style, and estab-
lished a military dictatorship realistically responsive to the will of business
and finance.
It is as difficult for a nation as for an individual to take no comfort from
a neighbor's misfortune. Japan, which in the plans of Sun Yat-sen, was to
be the friend and ally of China against the West, and which had stimu-
lated the Chinese revolt by her swift and successful imitation of Europe
in industry, diplomacy and war, saw in the disorder and weakness of her
• From that time on the city, whose name had meant "northern capital," was renamed
Peiping, i.e., "the north pacified"; while the Nationalist Government, in order to be near
its financial sources at Shanghai, maintained its headquarters at the "southern capital,"
Nanking.
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 813
ancient teacher an opportunity for solving the problems that had arisen
out of her very success. For Japan could not discourage the growth of
her population without endangering her capacity for self-defense against
obviously possible aggression; she could not support an increasing popu-
lation unless she developed industry and trade; she could not develop
industry without importing iron, coal and other resources in which her
own soil was deficient, nor could she develop trade profitably unless she
had a large share in the only great market left free by the European
colonization of the globe. But China was supposedly rich in iron and coal,
and offered, at Japan's door, potentially the greatest market in the world.
What nation, faced with the apparent choice between returning to agri-
culture and subjection, or advancing to industrial imperialism and con-
quest, could have resisted the temptation to snatch the prizes of pros-
trate China while the other imperial vultures were tearing one another's
throats on the fields of France?
So Japan, soon after the outbreak of the Great War, declared herself
at war with Germany, and pounced upon the Kiaochow territory which
Germany had "leased" from China sixteen years before. Then she pre-
sented to the government of Yuan Shi-kai "Twenty-One Demands" which
would have made China a political and economic colony of Japan; and
only the protest of the United States and the boycott of Japanese goods
in China under the leadership of its enraged students prevented these
commands from being enforced. Students wept in the streets, or killed
themselves, in shame at the humiliation of their country." The Japanese
listened with cynical humor to the moral indignation of a Europe that
had been gnawing at China for half a century, and waited patiently
for another opportunity. It came when Europe and America were en-
gulfed in the debacle of an imperialist industry that had depended upon
foreign markets for the absorption of "surplus" products unpurchasable
by their producers at home. Japan marched into Manchuria, set up the
former emperor of China, P'u Yi, first as president, then as emperor, of
the new state of Manchukuo, and by political alliance, economic penetra-
tion and military control, placed herself in a favored position for the
exploitation of Manchuria's natural resources, employable population and
commercial possibilities. The European world, which had proposed a
moratorium on robbery after it had gathered in all available spoils, joined
America feebly in protests against this candid plunder, but prepared, as
always, to accept victory as justification in the end.
814 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVII
The final humiliation came at Shanghai. Angered by the successful
boycott of her goods, Japan landed her undefeated troops at the richest
port in China, occupied and destroyed the district of Chapei, and de-
manded the restraint of the boycott associations by the Chinese Govern-
ment. The Chinese defended themselves with a new heroism, and the
Nineteenth Route Army from Canton, almost unaided, held the well-
equipped forces of Japan at bay for two months. The Nanking Govern-
ment offered a compromise, Japan withdrew from Shanghai, and China,
nursing its wounds, resolved to build from the bottom a new and more
vigorous civilization, capable of preserving and defending itself against
a rapacious world.
III. BEGINNINGS OF A NEW ORDER
Change in the village—In the town— The factories— Commerce— Labor
unions— W ages— The new government— Nationalism vs. Westernization
—The dethronement of Confucius— The reaction against religion— The
new morality— Marriage in transition— Birth control— Co-education—
The "New Tide" in literature and philosophy— The new language
of literature— Hu Shih— Elements of destruction— Elements of
renewal
Once everything changed except the East; now there is nothing in the
East that does not change. The most conservative nation in history has
suddenly become, after Russia, the most radical, and is destroying with a
will customs and institutions once held inviolate. It is not merely the end
of a dynasty, as in 1 644; it is the moulting of a civilization.
Change comes last and least to the village, for the slow sobriety of the
soil does not encourage innovation; even the new generation must plant
in order to reap. But now seven thousand miles of railroad traverse the
countryside; and though a decade of chaos and native management has
left them in bad repair, and war has conscripted them too often for its
purposes, yet they bind the eastern villages with the cities of the coast,
and daily bear their trickle of Western novelties into a million peasant
homes. Here one may find such foreign-devilish importations as kero-
sene, kerosene lamps, matches, cigarettes, even American wheat; for
sometimes, so poor is transport, it costs more to carry goods from the
Chinese interior to the marine provinces than it does to bring them to
these from Australia or the United States.1* It becomes clear that the
CHAP. XXVll) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 815
economic growth of a civilization depends upon transportation. Twenty
thousand miles of dirt roads have been built, over which, with Oriental
irregularity, six thousand buses travel, always full. When the gasoline
engine has bound these innumerable villages together it will have accom-
plished one of the greatest changes in Chinese history—the end of famine.
In the towns the triumph of the West goes on more rapidly. Handi-
crafts are dying under the competition of cheaply-transported machine-
made goods from abroad; millions of artisans flounder about in unemploy-
ment, and are drawn into the jaws of the factories that foreign and do-
mestic capital is building along the coast. The hand loom, still spinning
in the village, is silent in the city; imported cotton and cotton cloths flood
the country, and textile factories rise to induct impoverished Chinese into
the novel serfdom of the mill. Great blast-furnaces burn at Hankow,
as weird and horrible as any in the West. Canneries, bakeries, cement
works, chemical works, breweries, distilleries, power works, glass works,
shoe factories, paper mills, soap and candle factories, sugar refineries— all
of them have now been planted on Chinese soil, and slowly transform the
domestic artisan into a factory hand. The development of the new in-
dustries is retarded because investment hesitates in a world disordered by
permanent revolution; it is obstructed further by the difficulty and cost-
liness of transport, by the inadequacy of local raw materials, and by that
amiable Chinese habit which places the family above every other loyalty,
and turns every native office and factory into a nest of genial nepotism
and incompetence.1* Commerce, too, is impeded by inland tariffs and
coastal customs, and the universal demand for bribes or "squeeze";"0 but
it is growing more rapidly than industry, and plays the central role in
the economic transformation of China.*
The new industries have destroyed the guilds, and have thrown into
chaos the relations of employer and employee. The guilds had lived
by regulating wages and prices through agreements between owners and
workers whose products had no rivals in local trade; but as transport and
commerce increased, and brought distant goods to compete in every town
with the handiwork of the guilds, it was found impossible to control
prices or to regulate wages without surrendering to the dictates of foreign
* Once Great Britain dominated the import trade; now it accounts for 14%, the United
States for 17%, Japan for 27%;" and the Japanese leadership in this field mounts with
every year. Between 1910 and 1930 Chinese trade increased 600% to approximately
one and a half billion dollars.0
8l6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVII
competitors and capital. The guilds have therefore disintegrated and
divided into chambers of commerce on the one side and labor unions on
the other. The chambers discuss order, loyalty and economic liberty i and
the workers discuss starvation. Strikes and boycotts are frequent, but they
have been more successful in compelling foreign concessions to the Chin-
ese Government than in raising the remuneration of labor. In 1928 the
Department of Social Affairs of the Chinese Municipality of Shanghai
computed the average weekly wage of the textile-mill workers as varying
from $1.73 to $2.76 for men, and from $1.10 to $1.78 for women. In
flour mills the male weekly average pay was $1.96; in cement mills $1.72;
in glass works $1.84; in match-factories $2.1 1; among the skilled workers
of the electric power plants, $3.10; in the machine shops, $3.24; among
the printers, $4.5 5. * The wealth enjoyed by the printers was doubtless
due to their better organization, and the cost of suddenly replacing them.
The first unions were formed in 1919; they grew in number and power
until, in the days of Borodin, they proposed to take over the management
of China; they were repressed ruthlessly after Chiang Kai-shek's break
with Russia; today the laws against them are severe, but they multiply
nevertheless as the sole refuge of the workers against an industrial system
that has only begun to pass labor legislation, and has not yet begun to
enforce it.14 The bitter destitution of the city proletaircs, working twelve
hours a day, hovering on the margin of subsistence, and facing starvation
if employment should fail, is worse than the ancient poverty of the vil-
lage, where the poor could not see the rich, and accepted their lot as the
natural and immemorial fate of mankind.
Perhaps some of these evils might have been avoided if the politi-
cal transformation of eastern China had not been so rapid and com-
plete. The mandarin aristocracy, though it had lost vitality and was dis-
honored with corruption, might have held the new industrial forces in
check until China could accept them without chaos or slavery; and
then the growth of industry would have generated year by year a new
class that might have stepped peaceably into political power, as the man-
ufacturers had displaced the landed aristocracy of England. But the new
government found itself without an army, without experienced leaders,
and without funds; the Kuommtang^ or People's Party, established to liber-
ate a nation, found that it must stand by while foreign and domestic capital
subjugated it; conceived in democrary and baptized with the blood of
communism, it became dependent upon Shanghai bankers, abandoned
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 817
democracy for dictatorship, and tried to destroy the unions.* For the
Party depends upon the army, and the army upon money, and money
upon loans; until the Army is strong enough to conquer China the Gov-
ernment cannot tax China; and until it can tax China the Government
must take advice where it takes its funds. Even so it has accomplished
much. It has brought back to China full control over her tariffs and
—within the internationalism of finance—over her industries; it has or-
ganized, trained and equipped an Army which may some day be used
against others than Chinese; it has enlarged the area that acknowledges
its authority, and has reduced, in that area, the banditry that was stifling
the nation's economic life. It takes a day to make a revolution, and a
generation to make a government.
The disunity of China reflects and follows from the division that lies
in the Chinese soul. The most powerful feeling in China today is hatred
of foreigners; the most powerful process in China today is imitation of
foreigners. China knows that the West does not deserve this flattery, but
China is forced by the very spirit and impetus of the times to give it, for
the age offers to all nations the choice of industrialism or vassalage. So
the Chinese of the eastern cities pass from fields to factories, from robes
to trousers, from the simple melodies of the past to the saxophone sym-
phonies of the West; they surrender their own fine taste in dress and
furniture and art, adorn their walls with European paintings, and erect
office buildings in the least attractive of American styles. Their women
have ceased to compress their feet from north to south, and begin, in the
superior manner of the Occident, to compress them from east to west.f
Their philosophers abandon the unobtrusive and mannerly rationalism
of Confucius, and take up with Renaissance enthusiasm the pugnacious
rationalism of Moscow, London, Berlin, Paris and New York.
The dethronement of Confucius has something of the character of
both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; it is at once the overthrow
of the Chinese Aristotle, and the rejection of the racial gods. For a time
the new state persecuted Buddhism and the monastic orders; like the
Revolutionists of France, the Chinese rebels were freethinkers without
concealment, openly hostile to religion, and worshiping only reason. Con-
fucianism tolerated the popular faiths on the assumption, presumably, that
* In 1927 alone many thousands of workers were executed for belonging to labor
unions.35
t Some Chinese women pad their shoes to conceal the fact that their feet were bound."
8l8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XTVH
as long as there is poverty there will be gods; the Revolution, fondly be-
lieving that poverty can be destroyed, had no need of gods. Confucianism
took agriculture and the family for granted, and formulated an ethic de-
signed to maintain order and content within the circle of the home and
the field; the Revolution is bound for industry, and needs a new morality
to accord with urban and individual life. Confucianism endured because
access to political office and scholarly occupations demanded a knowledge
and acceptance of it; but the examinations are gone, and science takes the
place of ethical and political philosophy in the schools; man is now to be
moulded not to government but to industry. Confucianism was con-
servative, and checked the ideals of youth with the caution of old age;
the Revolution is made of youth, and will have none of these ancient
restraints; it smiles at the old sage's warning that "he who thinks the old
embankments useless and destroys them is sure to suffer from the desola-
tion caused by overflowing water."*27
The Revolution has, of course, put an end to official religion, and no
sacrifice mounts any longer from the Altar of Heaven to the impersonal
and silent Tien. Ancestor worship is tolerated, but visibly decays; more
and more the men tend to leave it to the women, who were once thought
unfit to officiate at these sacred rites. Half of the Revolutionary leaders
were educated in Christian schools; but the Revolution, despite the Meth-
odism of Chiang Kai-shek, is unfavorable to any supernatural faith, and
gives to its schoolbooks an atheistic tint.** The new religion, which tries
to fill the emotional void left by the departure of the gods, is nationalism,
as in Russia it is communism. Meanwhile this creed does not satisfy all;
many proletaires seek in the adventure of oracles and mediums a refuge
from the prose of their daily toil; and the people of the village still find
some solace from their poverty in the mystic quiet of the ancient shrines.
Shorn of its sanctions in government, religion and economic life, the
traditional moral code, which seemed a generation ago unchangeable,
disintegrates with geometrical acceleration. Next to the invasion of in-
dustry the most striking change in the China of today is the destruction
of the old family system, and its replacement with an individualism that
leaves every man free and alone to face the world. Loyalty to the fam-
ily, on which the old order was founded, is superseded in theory by
loyalty to the state; and as the novel loyalty has not yet graduated from
* P. 673 above. Latterly the "New Life" movement, let by Chiang Kai-shek, has at-
tempted, with some success, to restore Confucianism.
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 819
theory into practice, the new society lacks a moral base. Agriculture
favors the family because, before the coming of machinery, the land
could most economically be tilled by a group united by blood and paternal
authority; industry disrupts the family, because it offers its places and
rewards to individuals rather than to groups, does not always offer them
these rewards in the same place, and recognizes no obligation to aid the
weak out of the resources of the strong; the natural communism of the
family finds no support in the bitter competition of industry and trade.
The younger generation, always irked by the authority of the old, takes
with a will to the anonymity of the city and the individualism of the
"job." Perhaps the omnipotence of the father helped to precipitate the
Revolution; the reactionary is always to blame for the excesses of the
radical. So China has cut itself off from all roots, and no one knows
whether it can sink new roots in time to save its cultural life.
The old marriage forms disappear with the authority of the family.
The majority of marriages arc still arranged by the parents, but in the
city marriage by free choice of the young tends more and more to pre-
vail. The individual considers himself free not only to mate as he pleases,
but to make experiments in marriage which might shock the West.
Nietzsche thought Asia right about women, and considered their subjec-
tion the only alternative to their unchecked ascendancy; but Asia is choos-
ing Europe's way, not Nietzsche's. Polygamy diminishes, for the modern
wife objects to a concubine. Divorce is uncommon, but the road to it is
wider than ever before.* Co-education is the rule in the universities, and
the free mingling of the sexes is usual in the cities. Women have estab-
lished their own law and medical schools, even their own bank.81 Those of
them that are members of the Party have received the franchise, and
places have been found for them on the highest committees of both the
Party and the Government.38 They have turned their backs upon infanti-
cide, and are beginning to practise birth control. t Population has not
* The Revolution grants it where both parties ask for it; but where the husband is
under thirty, or the wife is under twenty-five, the consent of the parents is required for a
divorce. The old causes for which the husband may divorce his wife remain in force—
barrenness, infidelity, neglect of duty, loquacity, thievishness, jealousy, or serious dis-
ease; but these are not allowed to apply if the wife has mourned three years for her
husband's parents, or has no family to return to, or has been faithful to her husband
during his rise from poverty to wealth."
fThe frank display of contraceptive devices in Chinese drug-stores may suggest to the
West a convenient escape from the "Yellow Peril."
820 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVII
noticeably increased since the Revolution; perhaps the vast tide of Chinese
humanity has begun to ebb.88
Nevertheless fifty thousand new Chinese are born every day.14 They
are destined to be new in every way: new in the cut of their clothes
and their hair, new in education and occupation, in habits and manners,
in religion and philosophy. The queue is gone, and so are the graceful
manners of the older time; the hatreds of revolution have coarsened the
spirit, and radicals find it hard to be courteous to conservatives.88 The
phlegmatic quality of the ancient race is being changed by the speed of
industry into something more expressive and volatile; these stolid faces
conceal active and excitable souls. The love of peace that came to China
after centuries of war is being broken down by the contemplation of
national dismemberment and defeat; the schools are drilling every student
into a soldier, and the general is a hero once more.
The whole world of education has been transformed. The schools
have thrown Confucius out of the window, and taken science in. The
rejection was not quite necessary for the admission, since the doctrine
of Confucius accorded well with the spirit of science; but the conquest
of the logical by the psychological is the warp and woof of history.
Mathematics and mechanics are popular, for these can make machines;
machines can make wealth and guns, and guns may preserve liberty.
Medical education is progressing, largely as the result of the cosmopoli-
tan beneficence of the Rockefeller fortune.* Despite the impoverish-
ment of the country, new schools, high schools and colleges have multi-
plied rapidly, and the hope of Young China is that soon every child will
receive a free education, and that democracy may be widened as educa-
tion grows.
A revolution akin to that of the Renaissance has come to Chinese litera-
ture and philosophy. The importation of Western texts has had the fer-
tilizing influence that Greek manuscripts had upon the Italian mind. And
just as Italy, in her awakening, abandoned Latin to write in the vernacular,
so China, under the leadership of the brilliant Hu Shih, has turned the
popular "Mandarin" dialect into a literary language, the Pai HIM. Hu
* In 1932 the Union Medical College, a five-million dollar gift of John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., was opened to medical students of either sex. The China Medical Board, financed
by the Rockefeller Foundation, maintains nineteen hospitals, three medical schools, and
sixty-five scholarships."
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 8ll
Shih took his literary fate in his hands by writing in this "plain language"
a History of Chinese Philosophy (1919). His courage carried the day;
half a thousand periodicals adopted Pai Hua, and it was made the official
written language of the schools. Meanwhile the "Thousand Character
Movement" sought to reduce the 40,000 characters of the scholars to
some 1300 characters for common use. In these ways the Mandarin
speech is being rapidly spread throughout the provinces; and perhaps
within the century China will have one language, and be near to cultural
unity again.
Under the stimulus of a popular language and an eager people, litera-
ture flourishes. Novels, poems, histories and plays become almost as
numerous as the population. Newspapers and periodicals cover the land.
The literature of the West is being translated en masse, and American
motion pictures, expounded by a Chinese interpreter at the side of the
screen, are delighting the profound and simple Chinese soul. Philosophy
has returned to the great heretics of the past, has given them a new
hearing and exposition, and has taken on all the vigor and radicalism of
European thought in the sixteenth century. And as Italy, newly freed
from ecclesiastical leading-strings, admired the secularism of the Greek
mind, so the new China listens with especial eagerness to Western think-
ers like John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, whose independence of all
theology and respect for experience and experiment as the only logic,
accord completely with the mood of a nation that is trying to have its
Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Revolution in one gen-
eration.* Hu Shih scorns our praise of the "spiritual values" of Asia, and
finds more spiritual worth in the reorganization of industry and govern-
ment for the elimination of poverty than in all the "wisdom of the East."87
He describes Confucius as "a very old man," and suggests that a better
perspective of Chinese thought would appear if the heretical schools
of the fifth, fourth and third centuries B.C. were given their due place in
Chinese history.88 Nevertheless, in the midst of the swirling "New Tide"
of which he has been one of the most active leaders, he has kept suffi-
* Latterly, under the influence of Chiang Kai-skck's New Life movement, the ac-
ceptance of Western models in mind and morals has abated; China and Japan are begin-
ning to make their own motion-pictures; radicalism is giving way before a renewed
conservatism; and China is tending to join with Japan in a revolt against European and
American ideas and ways.
822 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVII
cient sanity to see the value even of old men, and he has formulated the
problem of his country perfectly:
It would surely be a great loss to mankind at large if the accep-
tance of this new civilization should take the form of abrupt dis-
placement instead of organic assimilation, thereby causing the -dis-
appearance of the old civilization. The real problem, therefore, may
be restated thus: How can we best assimilate modern civilization in
such a manner as to make it congenial and congruous and continu-
ous with the civilization of our own making?"
All the surface conditions of China today tempt the observer to con-
clude that China will not solve the problem. When one contemplates the
desolation of China's fields, blighted with drought or ruined with floods,
the waste of her timber, the stupor of her exhausted peasants, the high
mortality of her children, the unnerving toil of her factory-slaves, the
disease-ridden slums and tax-ridden homes of her cities, her bribe-in-
fested commerce and her foreign-dominated industry, the corruption of
her government, the weakness of her defenses and the bitter factionalism
of her people, one wonders for a moment whether China can ever be
great again, whether she can once more consume her conquerors and live
her own creative life. But under the surface, if we care to look, we may
see the factors of convalescence and renewal. This soil, so vast in extent
and so varied in form, is rich in the minerals that make a country indus-
trially great; not as rich as Richtofcn supposed, but almost certainly richer
than the tentative surveys of our day have revealed; as industry moves
inland it will come upon ores and fuels as unsuspected now as the mineral
and fuel wealth of America was undreamed of a century ago. This
nation, after three thousand years of grandeur and decay, of repeated
deaths and resurrections, exhibits today all the physical and mental vital-
ity that we find in its most creative periods; there is no people in the
world more vigorous or more intelligent, no other people so adaptable
to circumstance, so resistant to disease, so resilient after disaster and suf-
fering, so trained by history to calm endurance and patient recovery.
Imagination cannot describe the possibilities of a civilization mingling
the physical, labor and mental resources of such a people with the tech-
nological equipment of modern industry. Very probably such wealth will
be produced in China as even America has never known, and once again,
CHAP. XXVIl) REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL 823
as so often in the past, China will lead the world in luxury and the art
of life.
No victory of arms, or tyranny of alien finance, can long suppress a
nation so rich in resources and vitality. The invader will lose funds or
patience before the loins of China will lose virility; within a century
China will have absorbed and civilized her conquerors, and will have
learned all the technique of what transiently bears the name of modern
industry; roads and communications will give her unity, economy and
thrift will give her funds, and a strong government will give her order
and peace. Every chaos is a transition. In the end disorder cures and
balances itself with dictatorship; old obstacles are roughly cleared away,
and fresh growth is free. Revolution, like death and style, is the removal
of rubbish, the surgery of the superfluous; it comes only when there are
many things ready to die. China has died many times before; and many
times she has been reborn.
B. JAPAN
Great Yamato (Japan) is a divine country. It is only our
land whose foundations were first laid by the Divine Ancestor.
It alone has been transmitted by the Sun Goddess to a long
line of her descendants. There is nothing of this kind in
foreign countries. Therefore it is called the Divine Land.
—Chikafusa Kitabatake, 1334, in Murdoch,
History of Japan, i, 571.
CHRONOLOGY OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION-
I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
1. Primitive Japan:
Ca. 660 B.C.: Entrance of the Mongols
Ca. 660-585 B.C.: Jimmu, Emperor (?)
412-53 AJ>.: Inkyo, Emperor
522 A.D.: Buddhism enters Japan
592-621: Shotoku Taishi, Regent
593-628: Suiko, Empress
645: The Great Reform
2. Imperial Japan:
668-71: Tenchi Tcnno, Emperor
690-702: Jito, Empress
697-707: Mommu, Emperor
702: The Taiho Code of Laws
710-94: The Heijo Epoch: Nara the capital
724-56: Shomu, Emperor
749-59, 765-7o:Koken, Empress
704-1192: The Heian Epoch: Kyoto the
capital
877-949: Yozei, Emperor
898-930: Daigo, Emperor
901-22: The Period of Engi
3. Feudal Japan:
1 1 86-99 : Yoritomo
1203-19: Minamoto Sanctomo
1200-1333: The Kamakura Bakufu
ii go- 1 333: The Ho jo Regency
845-903: Sugawara Michizanc, Patron
of Letters
1. Poetry:
665-731: Tahito
D. 737: Hitomaro
724-56: Akahito
750: The Manyoshu
883-946: Tsurayaki
905: The Kokinshu
1118-90: Saigyo Hoshi
1234: The Hyaku-nin-isshu
1643-94: Matsura Basho
I7°3~75: Lady Kaga no-Chiyo
2. Drama:
1350-1650: The No plays
1653-1724: Chikamatsu Monzayemon
1222-82: Nichiren, founder of the Lotus
Sect
1291: Kublai Khan invades Japan
1318-39: Go Daigo, Emperor
1335-1573: The Ashikaga Shogunate
1387-95: Yoshimitsu
1436-80: Yoshimasa
1573-82: Nobunaga
1581-98: Hideyoshi
1592: Hideyoshi fails to conquer Korea
1597: Hideyoshi expels the priests
1600: Battle of Sckigahara
1603-1867: The Tokugaiva Shogunate
1603-16: lyeyasu
1605: Siege of Osaka
1614: lyeyasu's anti-Christian edict
1605-23: Hidetada
1623-51: lyemitsu
1657: The great fire of Tokyo
1680-1709: Tsunayoshi
1688-1703: The period of Genroku
1709-12: lyenobu
1716-45: Yoshimunc
1721: Yoshimunc codifies Japanese law
1787-1836: lycnari
1853-8: lycsada
1858-66: lycmochi
1866-8: Kciki
II. LITERATURE
Saint 3. Fiction:
978-1031?: Lady Murasaki no-Shikibu
1001-4: The Genji Monogatari
1761-1816: Santo Kiodcn
1767-1848: Kyokutei Bakin
0.1831: Jippcnsha Ikku
4. History and Scholarship:
712: The Kojiki
720: The Nihongi
1334: Kitabatake's Jmloshotoki
1622-1704: Mitsu-kuni
1630: Hayashi Razan founds University of
Tokyo
1657-1725: Arai Hakuseki
1697-1769: Mabuchi
1730-1801: Moto-ori Norinaga
* Dates of rulers are of their accession and their death. Several abdicated, or were
assassinated or deposed.
826
CHRONOLOGY OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION
5. The Essay:
Ca. 1000: Lady Sei Shonagon
1154-1216: Kamo no-Chomei
6. Philosophy:
1560-1619: Fujiwara Seigwa
1583-1657: Hayashi Razan
1608-48: Nakaye Toju
1630-1714: Kaibara Ekken
1 6 1 9-9 1 : Kumaza wa Banzan
1627-1705: Ito Jinsai
1666-1728: Ogyu Sorai
1670-1736: Ito Togai
1. Architecture:
Ca. 616: The temples of Horiuji
Ca. 1400: The palaces of Yoshimitsu
1543-90: Kano Yeitoku
Ca. 1630: The Mausoleum of lyeyasu
2. Sculpture:
747: The Nara Daibutsu
774-835: Kobo Daishi
1180-1220: Unkci
1252: The Kamakura Daibutsu
1594-1634: Ilidari Jingaro
3. Pottery:
Ca. 1229: Shirozemon
Ca. 1650: Kakiemon
Ca. 1655: Ninsei
1663-1743: Kenzan
Ca. 1664: Goto Saijiro
D. 1855: Zengoro Hozen
4. Painting:
Ca. 950: Kose no-Kanaoka
Ca. 10 10: Takayoshi
Ca. 1017: Yeishin Sozu
1053-1140: Toba Sojo
1146-1205: Fujiwara Takanobu
Ca. 1250: Kcion (?)
Ca. 1250: Tosa Gon-no-kumi
1351-1427: Cho Densu
Ca. 1400: Shubun
1420-1506: Scsshiu
D. 1400: Kano Masanobu
1476-1559: Kano Motonobu
Ca. 1600: Koyetsu
1578-1650: Ivvasa Matabci
1602-74: Kano Tanyu
1618-94: Hishikawa Moronobu
1661-1716: Korin
1718-70: Harunobu
*7 33-95'- Maruyaini Okyo
1742-1814: Kiyonaga
1747-1821: Mori Zozen
1753-1806: Utamaro
Ca. 1790: Sharaku
1760-1849: Hokusai
1797-1858: Hiroshige
IV. THE NEW JAPAN
1853: Admiral Perry enters Uraga Bay
1854: Admiral Perry's second visit
1854: Treaty of Kanagawa
1862: The Richardson Affair
1862: The bombardment of Kagoshima
1863: Ito and Inouye visit Europe
1868: Restoration of the imperial power
1868-1912: Meiji, Emperor
1870: Tokyo becomes the imperial capital
1871: Abolition of feudalism
1872: First Japanese railway
1877: The Satsuma Rebellion
1889: The new Constitution
1894: The War with China
1895: The annexation of Formosa
1902-22: The Anglo- Japanese Alliance
1904:
1910:
1912:
1912
1914
1915:
1917:
1922:
1924:
1925
1931
1932
1935
The War with Russia
The annexation of Korea
End of the Meiji Era
25: Taisho, Emperor
Capture of Tsingtao
The Twenty-one Demands
The Lansing-Ishii Agreement
The Washington Conference
The restriction of Japanese immigra-
tion into America
Hirohito, Emperor
The invasion of Manchuria
The attack at Shanghai
Notice given to terminate Washing-
ton Agreement in 1936
827
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Makers of Japan
history of Japan is an unfinished drama in which three acts have
JL been played. The first— barring the primitive and legendary centuries
—is classical Buddhist Japan (522-1603 A.D.), suddenly civilized by China
and Korea, refined and softened by religion, and creating the historic
masterpieces of Japanese literature and art. The second is the feudal and
peaceful Japan of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), isolated and self-
contained, seeking no alien territory and no external trade, content with
agriculture and wedded to art and philosophy. The third act is modern
Japan, opened up in 1853 by an American fleet, forced by conditions
within and without into trade and industry, seeking foreign materials
and markets, fighting wars of irrepressible expansion, imitating the im-
perialistic ardor and methods of the West, and threatening both the
ascendancy of the white race and the peace of the world. By every his-
torical precedent the next act will be war.
The Japanese have studied our civilization carefully, in order to absorb
its values and surpass it. Perhaps we should be wise to study their civili-
zation as patiently as they have studied ours, so that when the crisis comes
that must issue either in war or understanding, we may be capable of
understanding.
I. THE CHILDREN OF THE GODS
HOIV Japan 'was created— The role of earthquakes
In the beginning, says the oldest of Japanese histories,1 were the gods.
Male and female they were born, and died, until at last two of them,
Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, were commanded by the elder
deities to create Japan. So they stood on the floating bridge of heaven,
thrust down into the ocean a jeweled spear, and held it aloft in the sky.
The drops that fell from the spear became the Sacred Islands. By watch-
ing the tadpoles in the water the gods learned the secret of copulation;
Izanagi and Izanami mated, and gave birth to the Japanese race. From
Izanagi's left eye was born Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun, and from
829
830 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVIII
her grandson Ninigi sprang in divine and unbroken lineage all the em-
perors of Dai Nippon. From that day until this there has been but one
imperial dynasty in Japan.*
There were 4,223 drops from the jeweled spear, for there are that
number of islands in the archipelago called Japan, t Six hundred of them
are inhabited, but only five are of any considerable size. The largest-
Hondo or Honshu—is 1,130 miles long, averages some 73 miles in width,
and contains in its 81,000 square miles half the area of the islands. Their
situation, like their recent history, resembles that of England: the sur-
rounding seas have protected them from conquest, while their 13,000
miles of seacoast have made them a seafaring people, destined by geo-
graphical encouragement and commercial necessity to a widespread mas-
tery of the seas. Warm winds and currents from the south mingle with
the cool air of the mountain-tops to give Japan an English climate, rich
in rain and cloudy days,4 nourishing to short but rapid-running rivers,
and propitious to vegetation and scenery. Here, outside the cities and the
slums, half the land is an Eden in blossom-time; and the mountains arc no
tumbled heaps of rock and dirt, but artistic forms designed, like Fuji, in
almost perfect lines. J
Doubtless these isles were born of earthquakes rather than from drip-
ping spears.6 No other land—except, perhaps, South America— has suf-
fered so bitterly from convulsions of the soil. In the year 599 the earth
shook and swallowed villages in its laughter; meteors fell and comets
flashed, and snow whitened the streets in mid-July; drought and famine
followed, and millions of Japanese died. In 1703 an earthquake killed
32,000 in Tokyo alone. In 1885 the capital was wrecked again; great
clefts opened in the earth, and engulfed thousands; the dead were carried
away in cartloads and buried en masse. In 1923 earthquake, tidal wave
and fire took 100,000 lives in Tokyo, and 37,000 in Yokahama and near-
* If this account be questioned as improbable, the objection has long since been
answered by the most influential of Japanese critics, Moto-ori: "The very inconsistency
is the proof of the authenticity of the record; for who would have gone out of his way
to invent a story apparently so ridiculous and incredible?"8
fThe name Japan is probably a corruption of the Malay word for the islands— Japan%
or Japun; this is a rendering of the Japanese term Nippon, which in turn is a corrup-
tion of the Chinese name for "the place the sun comes from"— Jib-pen. The Japanese
usually prefix to Nippon the adjective Dai, meaning "Great."8
JFuji-san (less classically Fuji-yama), idol of artists and priests, approximates to a
gently sloping cone. Many thousands of pilgrims ascend its 12,365 feet in any year.
Fuji (Ainu for "fire") erupted last in 1707.'
CHAP. XXVIIl) THEMAKERSOFJAPAN 831
by; Kamakura, so kind to Buddha, was almost totally destroyed/ while
the benign colossus of the Hindu saint survived shaken but unperturbed
amid the ruins, as if to illustrate the chief lesson of history— that the
gods can be silent in many languages. The people were for a moment
puzzled by this abundance of disaster in a land divinely created and ruled;
at last they explained the agitations as due to a large subterranean fish,
which wriggled when its slumber was disturbed.* They do not seem to
have thought of abandoning this adventurous habitat; on the day after
the last great quake the school-children used bits of broken plaster for
pencils, and the tiles of their shattered homes for slates.* The nation bore
patiently these lashings of circumstance, and emerged from repeated ruin
undiscourageably industrious, and ominously brave.
II. PRIMITIVE JAPAN
Racial components — Early civilization — Religion — "Shinto"—
Buddhism—The beginnings of art— The "Great Reform"
Japanese origins, like all others, are lost in the cosmic nebula of theory.
Three elements appear to be mingled in the race: a primitive white strain
through the "Ainus" who seem to have entered Japan from the region of
the Amur River in neolithic times; a yellow, Mongol strain coming from
or through Korea about the seventh century before Christ; and a brown-
black, Malay and Indonesian strain filtering in from the islands of the
south. Here, as elsewhere, a mingling of diverse stocks preceded by many
hundreds of years the establishment of a new racial type speaking with a
new voice and creating a new civilization. That the mixture is not yet
complete may be seen in the contrast between the tall, slim, long-headed
aristocrat and the short, stout, broad-headed common man.
Chinese annals of the fourth century describe the Japanese as "dwarfs,"
and add that "they have neither oxen nor wild beasts; they tattoo their
faces in patterns varying with their rank; they wear garments woven in
one piece; they have spears, bows and arrows tipped with stone or iron.
They wear no shoes, are law-abiding and polygamous, addicted to strong
drink and long-lived. . . . The women smear their bodies with pink and
scarlet" paint.11 "There is no theft," these records state, "and litigation
is infrequent";" civilization had hardly begun. Lafcadio Heara, with
uxorious clairvoyance, painted this early age as an Eden unsullied with
exploitation or poverty; and Fenollosa pictured the peasantry as composed
832 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVIII
of independent soldier-gentlemen." Handicrafts came over from Korea
in the third century A.D., and were soon organized into guilds.14 Beneath
these free artisans was a considerable slave class, recruited from prisons
and battlefields." Social organization was partly feudal, partly tribal;
some peasants tilled the soil as vassals of landed barons, and each clan had
its well-nigh sovereign head.10 Government was primitively loose and
weak.
Animism and totemism, ancestor worship and sex worship'7 satisfied the
religious needs of the early Japanese. Spirits were everywhere— in the
planets and stars of the sky, in the plants and insects of the field, in trees and
beasts and men.18 Deities innumerable hovered over the home and its in-
mates, and danced in the flame and glow of the lamp.10 Divination was prac-
tised by burning the bones of a deer or the shell of a tortoise, and studying
with expert aid the marks and lines produced by the fire; by this means, say
the ancient Chinese chronicles, "they ascertain good and bad luck, and
whether or not to undertake journeys and voyages."30 The dead were
feared and worshiped, for their ill will might generate much mischief in the
world; to placate them precious objects were placed in their graves— for ex-
ample, a sword in the case of a man, a mirror in the case of a woman; and
prayers and delicacies were offered before their ancestral tablets every day.*1
Human sacrifices were resorted to now and then to stop excessive rain or to
ensure the stability of a building or a wall; and the retainers of a dead lord
were occasionally buried with him to defend him in his epilogue.82
Out of ancestor worship came the oldest living religion of Japan. Shinto,
the Way of the Gods, took three forms: the domestic cult of family an-
cestors, the communal cult of clan ancestors, and the state cult of the im-
perial ancestors and the founding gods. The divine progenitor of the im-
perial line was addressed with humble petitions, seven times a year, by the
emperor or his representatives; and special prayers were offered up to him
when the nation was embarking upon some particularly holy cause, like the
taking of Shantung (1914).* Shinto required no creed, no elaborate ritual,
no moral code; it had no special priesthood, and no consoling doctrine of
immortality and heaven; all that it asked of its devotees was an occasional
pilgrimage, and pious reverence for one's ancestors, the emperor, and the
past. It was for a time superseded because it was too modest in its rewards
and its demands.
In 522 Buddhism, which had entered China five hundred years before,
passed over from the continent, and began a rapid conquest of Japan. Two
Clements met to give it victory: the religious needs of the people, and the
CHAP. XXVIIl) THEMAKERSOFJAPAN 833
political needs of the state. For it was not Buddha's Buddhism that came,
agnostic, pessimistic and puritan, dreaming of blissful extinction; it was the
Mahay ana Buddhism of gentle gods like Amida and Kwannon, of cheerful
ceremonial, saving Bodhisattwas, and personal immortality. Better still, it in-
culcated, with irresistible grace, all those virtues of piety, peacefulness and
obedience which make a people amenable to government; it gave to the
oppressed such hopes and consolations as might reconcile them to content
with their simple lot; it redeemed the prose and routine of a laborious life
with the poetry of myth and prayer and the drama of colorful festival; and
it offered to the people *hat unity of feeling and belief which statesmen have
always welcomed as a source of social order and a pillar of national strength.
We do not know whether it was statesmanship or piety that brought
victory to Buddhism in Japan. When, in 586 A.D., the Emperor Yomei died,
the succession was contested in arms by two rival families, both of them
politically devoted to the new creed. Prince Shotoku Taishi, who had been
born, we are told, with a holy relic clasped in his infant hand, led the Bud-
dhist faction to victory, established the Empress Suiko on the throne, and for
twenty-nine years (592-621) ruled the Sacred Islands as Prince Imperial and
Regent. He lavished funds upon Buddhist temples, encouraged and supported
the Buddhist clergy, promulgated the Buddhist ethic in national decrees,
and became in general the Ashoka of Japanese Buddhism. He patronized
the arts and sciences, imported artists and artisans from Korea and China,
wrote history, painted pictures, and supervised the building of the Horiuji
Temple, the oldest extant masterpiece in the art history of Japan.
Despite the work of this versatile civilizer, and all the virtues inculcated or
preached by Buddhism, another violent crisis came to Japan within a genera-
tion after Shotoku's death. An ambitious aristocrat, Kamatari, arranged with
Prince Naka a palace revolution that marked so definite a change in the
political history of Nippon that native historians refer to it enthusiastically as
the "Great Reform" (645). The heir-apparent was assassinated, a senile pup-
pet was placed upon the throne, and Kamatari as chief minister, through
Prince Naka as heir-apparent and then as Emperor Tenchi, reconstructed the
Japanese government into an autocratic imperial power. The sovereign was
elevated from the leadership of the principal clan to paramount authority
over every official in Japan; all governors were to be appointed by him, all
taxes paid directly to him, all the land of the realm was declared his. Japan
graduated rapidly from a loose association of clans and semi-feudal chieftains
into a closely-knit monarchical state.
834 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVIII
m. THE IMPERIAL AGE
The emperors—The aristocracy—The influence of China— The
Golden Age of Kyoto—Decadence
From that time onward the emperor enjoyed impressive titles. Some-
times he was called Tenshi, or "Son of Heaven"; usually Tenno, or
"Heavenly King"; rarely Mikado, or "August Gateway." He had the
distinction of receiving a new appellation after his death, and of being
known in history by an individual name quite different from that which
he bore during his life. To ensure the continuity of the imperial line,
the emperor was allowed to have as many wives or consorts as he desired;
and the succession went not necessarily to his first son, but to any of
his progeny who seemed to him, or to the Warwicks of the time, most
likely to prove strongest, or weakest, on the throne. In the early days
of the Kyoto period the emperors inclined to piety; some of them abdi-
cated to become Buddhist monks, and one of them forbade fishing as an
insult to Buddha." Yozei was a troublesome exception who illustrated the
perils of active monarchy: he made people climb trees, and then shot
them down with bow and arrow; he seized maidens in the street, tied
them up with lute strings, and cast them into ponds; it pleased His Majesty
to ride through the capital and to belabor the citizens with his whip; at
last his subjects deposed him in an outbreak of political impiety rare in
the history of Japan.80 In 794 the headquarters of the government were
removed from Nara to Nagaoka, and shortly thereafter to Kyoto ("Capital
of Peace"); this remained the capital during those four centuries (794-
1192) which most historians agree in calling the Golden Age of Japan.
By 1190 Kyoto had a population of half a million, more than any Eu-
ropean city of the time except Constantinople and Cordova.17 One part
of the town was given over to the cottages and hovels of the populace,
which seems to have lived cheerfully in its humble poverty; another part,
discreetly secluded, contained the gardens and palaces of the aristocracy
and the Imperial Family. The people of the court were appropriately called
"Dwellers above the Clouds."" For here as elsewhere the progress of
civilization and technology had brought an increase in social distinctions;
the rough equality of pioneer days had given way to the inequality that
comes inevitably when increasing wealth is distributed among men ac
cording to their diverse capacity, character, and privilege. Great families
CHAP. XXVIIl) THS MAKERS OF JAPAN 835
arose like the Fujiwara, the Taira, the Minamoto and the Sugawara, who
made and unmade emperors, and fought with one another in the lusty
manner of the Italian Renaissance. Sugawara Michizane endeared him-
self to Japan by his patronage of literature, and is now worshiped as the
God of Letters, in whose honor a school holiday is declared on the twenty-
fifth day of every month; and the young Sbogun Minamoto Sanetomo dis-
tinguished himself by composing on the morning before his assassination
this simple stanza, in the chastest Japanese style:
If I should come no more,
Plum-tree beside my door,
Forget not thou the spring,
Faithfully blossoming."
Under the enlightened Daigo (898-930), greatest of the emperors set
up by the Fujiwara clan, Japan continued to absorb, and began to rival,
the culture and luxury of China, then flourishing at its height under the
T'ang. Having taken their religion from the Middle Kingdom, the Japa-
nese proceeded to take from the same source their dress and their sports,
their cooking and their writing, their poetry and their administrative
methods, their music and their arts, their gardens and their architecture;
even their handsome capitals, Nara and Kyoto, were laid out in imitation
of Ch'ang-an.80 Japan imported Chinese culture a thousand years ago as
it imported Europe and America in our own day: first with haste, then
with discrimination; jealously maintaining its own spirit and character,
zealously adapting the new ways to ancient and native ends.
Stimulated by its great neighbor, and protected by orderly and con-
tinuous government, Japan now entered that Engi period (901-922)
which is accounted the acme of the Golden Age.* Wealth accumulated,
and was centered in a fashionable life of luxury, refinement and culture
hardly equaled again until the courts of the Medici and the salons of the
French Enlightenment. Kyoto became the Paris and Versailles of France,
elegant in poetry and dress, practised in manners and arts, and setting for
all the nation the standards of learning and taste. Every appetite was full
* "This period named 'Engi,' " says the enthusiastic Fenollosa, "must doubtless be
reckoned the high-water mark of Japanese civilization, as Ming Huang's had been that
of China. Never again would either China or Japan be quite so rich, splendid, and full
of free genius. ... In general culture and luxurious refinement of a life which equally
ministered to mind and body, not only not in Japan, but perhaps not in the world was
there ever again anything quite so exquisite/"1
836 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVIII
and free; the cuisine invented novelties for the palate and heaped up
feasts for gourmands and gourmets; and fornication or adultery was
winked at as a very venial sin." Silks of fine texture clothed every lord
and lady, and harmonies of color wavered on every sleeve. Music and
the dance adorned the life of temple and court, and graced aristocratic
homes attractively landscaped without, and luxuriously finished with in-
teriors of bronze or pearl, ivory or gold, or wood most delicately carved."
Literature flourished, and morals decayed.
Such epochs of glittering refinement tend to be brief, for they rest
insecurely upon concentrated wealth that may at any moment be de-
stroyed by the fluctuations of trade, the impatience of the exploited, or
the fortunes of war. The extravagance of the court finally ruined the
solvency of the state; the exaltation of culture above ability filled admin-
istrative posts with incompetent poetasters, under whose scented noses
corruption multiplied unnoticed; at last offices were sold to the highest
bidder.84 Crime rose among the poor as luxury mounted among the rich;
brigands and pirates infested the roads and the seas, and preyed impar-
tially upon the people and the emperor; tax-gatherers were robbed as they
brought their revenues to the court. Gangs of bandits were organized in the
provinces, and even in the capital itself; for a time Japan's most notorious
criminal, like ours, lived in open splendor, too powerful to be arrested
or annoyed." The neglect of martial habits and virtues, or military or-
ganization and defense, left the government exposed to assault from any
ruthless buccaneer. The great families raised their own armies, and began
an epoch of civil war in which they contended chaotically for the right
to name the emperor. The emperor himself was every day more helpless,
while the heads of the clans became again almost independent lords. Once
more history moved in its ancient oscillation between a powerful central
government and a feudal decentralized regime.
IV. THE DICTATORS
The "shoguns"-The Kamakura "Bakufu"-The Hojo Regency-
Kublai Khan's invasion — The Ashikaga Shogunate — The
three buccaneers
Tempted by this situation, a class of military dictators arose, who as-
sumed full authority over various sections of the archipelago, and recog-
nized the emperor merely as the divine facade of Japan, to be maintained
CHAP. XXVIIl) THE MAKERS OF JAPAN 837
at a minimum of expense. The peasants, no longer protected from bandits
by imperial armies or police, paid taxes to the shoguns, or generals, instead
of to the emperor, for only the shoguns were able to safeguard them from
robbery.88 The feudal system triumphed in Japan for the same reason
that it had triumphed in Europe: local sources of authority grew in power
as a central and distant government failed to maintain security and order.
About the year 1 192 a member of the Minamoto clan, Yoritomo, gath-
ered about him an army of soldiers and vassals, and established an inde-
pendent authority which, from its seat, acquired the name of the "Kama-
kura Bakufu." The very word bakufu meant a military office, and indi-
cated bluntly the nature of the new regime. The great Yoritomo died
suddenly in 1 198,* and was succeeded by his weakling sons; for, says a
Japanese proverb, "the great man has no seed."88 A rival family set up
in 1199 the "Hojo Regency," which for 134 years ruled the shoguns
who ruled the emperors. Kublai Khan took advantage of this trinitarian
government to attempt the conquest of Japan, for clever Koreans, fearful
of it, had described it to him as desirably rich. Kublai ordered from his
ship-builders so vast a fleet that Chinese poets represented the hills as
mourning for their denuded forests.89 The Japanese, in heroic retrospect,
reckoned the vessels at 70,000, but less patriotic historians are content
with 3,500 ships and 100,000 men. This gigantic armada appeared off
the coast of Japan late in the year 1291. The brave islanders sailed out
to meet it in an improvised and comparatively tiny fleet; but, as in the
case of a smaller but more famous Armada, t a "Great Wind," renowned
in thankful memory, arose, smashed the ships of the mighty Khan upon
the rocks, drowned 70,000 of his sailors, and saved the others for a life
of slavery in Japan.
The turn of the Hojos came in 1333. For they, too, had been poisoned
by power, and hereditary rule had passed in time from scoundrels and
geniuses to cowards and fools. Takatoki, last of the line, had a passion
for dogs; he accepted them in lieu of taxes, and collected from four to
five thousand of them; he kept them in kennels with gold and silver
decorations, fed them on fish and fowl, and had them carried in palan-
* Both rider and horse, we are told, were thrown into a panic by seeing the ghost of
the brother whom Yoritomo had murdered; the horse stumbled, the rider fell, and
Yoritomo died some months later, at the age of fifty-three.87 The story is vouched for
by his enemies.
tThe Spanish Armada of 1588, on its arrival in the English Channel, had some 120
ships, with 24,000 men.**
838 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVIII
quins to take the air. The contemporary emperor, Go Daigo, saw in the
degeneration of his keepers an opportunity to reassert the imperial power.
The Minamoto and Ashikaga clans rallied to him, and led his forces, after
many defeats, to victory over the Regency. Takatoki and 870 of his vas-
sals and generals retired to a temple, drank a last cup of sake, and com-
mitted hara-kiri. "This," said one of them as he pulled out his intestines
with his own hand, "gives a fine relish to the wine."40
Ashikaga Takauji turned against the Emperor whom he had helped to
restore, fought with successful stratagem and treachery the armies sent
to subdue him, replaced Go Daigo with the puppet emperor Kogon, and
set up at Kyoto that Ashikaga Shogunate which was to rule Japan through
250 years of chaos and intermittent civil war. It must be admitted that
part of this disorder was due to the nobler side of the Ashikaga dictators
—their love and patronage of art. Yoshimitsu, tired of strife, turned his
hand to painting, and became not the least artist of his time; Yoshimasa be-
friended many painters, subsidized a dozen arts, and grew into so refined
a connoisseur that the pieces selected by him and his associates are
the most coveted prizes of collectors today.41 Meanwhile, however, the
prosaic tasks of organization were neglected, and neither the rich shoguns
nor the impoverished emperors seemed able to maintain public security or
peace.
It was this very chaos and looseness of life, and the call of the nation
for leaders who would give it order, that produced a trio of buccaneers
famous in Japanese history. In their youth, says tradition, Nobunaga,
Hideyoshi and lyeyasu resolved together to restore unity to their country,
and each took a solemn oath that he would obey as vassal whichever of
the others should win the imperial consent to administer Japan.42 Nobunaga
tried first, and failed; Hideyoshi tried second, and died just short of suc-
cess; lyeyasu bided his time, tried last of all, founded the Tokugawa
Shogunate, and inaugurated one of the longest periods of peace, and one
of the richest epochs of art, in human history.
V. GREAT MONKEY-FACE
The rise of Hideyoshi— The attack upon Korea— The conflict
'with Christianity
Queen Elizabeth and Akbar, as the Japanese would instructively put it,
were contemporaries of the great Hideyoshi. He was a peasant's son,
CHAP. XXVIIl) THE MAKERS OF JAPAN 839
known to his friends, and later to his subjects, as Sarumen Kanja—"Mon-
key-Face"; for not even Confucius could rival him in ugliness. Unable to
discipline him, his parents sent him to a monastic school; but Hideyoshi
made such fun of the Buddhist priests, and raised such turmoil and in-
surrections, that he was expelled. He was apprenticed to various trades,
and was discharged thirty-seven times;48 he became a bandit, decided that
more could be stolen by law than against it, joined the service of a Samu-
rai (i.e., a "sword-bearing man"), saved his master's life, and was there-
after allowed to carry a sword. He joined Nobunaga, helped him with
brains as well as courage, and, when Nobunaga died (1582), took the
lead of the lawless rebels who had set out to conquer their native land.
Within three years Hideyoshi had made himself ruler of half the empire,
had won the admiration of the impotent emperor, and felt strong enough
to digest Korea and China. "With Korean troops," he modestly an-
nounced to the Son of Heaven, "aided by your illustrious influence, I
intend to bring the whole of China under my sway. When that is ef-
fected, the three countries (China, Korea and Japan) will be one. I shall
do it as easily as a man rolls up a piece of matting and carries it away
under his arm."44 He tried hard; but a villainous Korean invented a metal
war-boat— a pre-plagiarism of the Monitor and the Merrimac— and de-
stroyed one after another of the troop-laden ships that Hideyoshi had dis-
patched to Korea (1592). Seventy-two vessels were sunk in one day, and
the very sea ran blood; forty-eight other vessels were beached and de-
serted by the Japanese, and burned to the water by the victors. After an
indecisive alternation of successes and defeats the attempt to conquer
Korea and China was postponed until the twentieth century. Hideyoshi,
said the Korean king, had tried to "measure the ocean in a cockle-shell."4"
Meanwhile Hideyoshi had settled down to enjoy and administer the
Regency that he had established. He provided himself with three hun-
dred concubines, but he bestowed a substantial sum upon the peasant wife
whom he had long ago divorced. He looked up one of his old employers,
and returned to him with interest the money that he had stolen from
him in apprentice days. He did not dare ask the Emperor's consent to
his assumption of the title of Shogun; but his contemporaries gave him,
in compensation, the name of Taiko, or "Great Sovereign," which, by
one of those strange verbal Odysseys that characterize philology, is now
entering our language as tycoon. "Cunning and crafty beyond belief,"
as a missionary described him,46 he subtly disarmed the people by order-
840 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVIII
ing all metal weapons to be contributed as material for a colossal statue
—the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, of Kyoto. He appears to have had
no religious beliefs, but he was not above making use of religion for the
purposes of ambition or statesmanship.
Christianity had come to Japan in 1549 in the person of one of the
first and noblest of Jesuits, St. Francis Xavier. The little community
which he established grew so rapidly that within a generation after his
coming there were seventy Jesuits and 150,000 converts in the empire.47
They were so numerous in Nagasaki that they made that trading port a
Christian city, and persuaded its local ruler, Omura, to use direct action
in spreading the new faith.48 "Within Nagasaki territory," says Lafcadio
Hearn, "Buddhism was totally suppressed— its priests being persecuted
and driven away."** Alarmed at this spiritual invasion, and suspecting
it of political designs, Hideyoshi sent a messenger to the Vice-Provincial
of the Jesuits in Japan, armed with five peremptory questions:
1. Why, and by what authority, he (the Vice-Provincial) and his
religieux (members of religious orders) constrained Hideyoshi's sub-
jects to become Christians?
2. Why they induced their disciples and their sectaries to over-
throw temples?
3. Why they persecuted the Buddhist priests?
4. Why they and the other Portuguese ate animals useful to man,
such as oxen and cows?
5. Why he allowed the merchants of his nation to buy Japanese
and make slaves of them in the Indies?80
Not satisfied with the replies, Hideyoshi issued, in 1587, the follow-
ing edict:
Having learned from our faithful councillors that foreign religieux
have come into our realm, where they preach a law contrary to that
of Japan, and that they have even had the audacity to destroy temples
dedicated to our (native gods) Kami and Hotokc; although this out-
rage merits the severest punishment, wishing nevertheless to show
them mercy, we order them under pain of death to quit Japan
within twenty days. During that space no harm or hurt will come
to them. But at the expiration of that term, we order that if any of
them be found in our States, they shall be seized and punished as the
greatest criminals.81
CHAP. XXVIIl) THEMAKERSOFJAPAN 841
Amid all these alarms the great buccaneer found time to encourage
artists, to take part in No plays, and to support Rikyu in making the tea
ceremony a stimulant to Japanese pottery and an essential adornment of
Japanese life. He died in 1598, having exacted from lyeyasu a promise
to build a new capital at Yedo (now Tokyo), and to recognize Hide-
yoshi's son Hideyori as heir to the Regency in Japan.
VI. THE GREAT SHOGUN
The accession of lyeyasu— His philosophy— lyeyasu and Christi-
anity—Death of lyeyasu— The Tokugaiva Shogunate
Hideyoshi being dead, lyeyasu pointed out that he had drawn the
blood for his oath not from his finger or his gums, as the code of the
Samurai required, but from a scratch behind his ear; hence the oath was
not binding.59 He overwhelmed the forces of certain rival leaders at
Sekigahara in a battle that left 40,000 dead. He tolerated Hideyori till his
coming of age made him dangerous, and then suggested to him the wis-
dom of submission. Rebuked, he besieged the gigantic Castle of Osaka
where Hideyori was established, captured it while the youth committed
hara-kiri, and ensured his hold upon power by killing all of Hideyori's
children, legitimate and illegitimate. Then lyeyasu organized peace as
ably and ruthlessly as he had organized war, and administered Japan so
well that it was content to be ruled by his posterity and his principles for
eight generations.
He was a man of his own ideas, and made his morals as he went along.
When a very presentable woman came to him with the complaint that
one of his officials had killed her husband in order to possess her, lyeyasu
ordered the official to disembowel himself, and made the lady his con-
cubine.53 Like Socrates he ranked wisdom as the only virtue, and charted
some of its paths in that strange "Legacy," or intellectual testament, which
he bequeathed to his family at his death.
Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy burden. Let thy step
be slow and steady, that thou stumble not. Persuade thyself that im-
perfection and inconvenience is the natural lot of mortals, and there
will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. When ambitious
desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of extremity thou hast
passed through. Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance
842 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXVIII
forever. Look upon wrath as thy enemy. If thou knowest only
what it is to conquer, and knowest not what it is to be defeated, woe
unto thee; it will fare ill with thee. Find fault with thyself rather
than with others.*4
Having captured power by arms, he decided that Japan had no need
of further war, and devoted himself to furthering the ways and virtues
of peace. To win the Samurai from the habits of the sword he encouraged
them to study literature and philosophy, and to contribute to the arts; and
under the rule which he established, culture flourished in Japan and mili-
tarism decayed. "The people," he wrote, "are the foundation of the
Empire,"" and he invoked the "special commiseration" of his successors
for the "widower, the widowed, the orphaned and the lonely." But he
had no democratic predispositions: the greatest of all crimes, he thought,
was insubordination; a "fellow" who stepped out of his rank was to be
cut down on the spot; and the entire family of a rebel should be put to
death.80 The feudal order, in his judgment, was the best that could be
devised for actual human beings; it provided a rational balance between
central and local power, it established a natural and hereditary system of
social and economic organization, and it preserved the continuity of a
society without subjecting it to despotic authority. It must be admitted
that lyeyasu organized the most perfect form of feudal government ever
known.1"
Like most statesmen he thought of religion chiefly as an organ of
social discipline, and regretted that the variety of human beliefs canceled
half this good by the disorder of hostile creeds. To his completely polit-
ical mind the traditional faith of the Japanese people—a careless mixture
of Shintoism and Buddhism— was an invaluable bond cementing the race
into spiritual unity, moral order and patriotic devotion; and though at
first he approached Christianity with the lenient eye and broad intelli-
gence of Akbar, and refrained from enforcing against it the angry edicts
of Hideyoshi, he was disturbed by its intolerance, its bitter denunciation
of the native faith as idolatry, and the discord which its passionate dog-
matism aroused not only between the converts and the nation, but among
the neophytes themselves. Finally his resentment was stirred by the dis-
covery that missionaries sometimes allowed themselves to be used as van-
guards for conquerors, and were, here and there, conspiring against the
CHAP. XXVIIl) THE MAKERS OF JAPAN 843
Japanese state."* In 1614 he forbade the practice or preaching of the
Christian religion in Japan, and ordered all converts either to depart from
the country or to renounce their new beliefs. Many priests evaded the
decree, and some of them were arrested. None was executed during the
lifetime of lyeyasu; but after his death the fury of the bureaucrats was
turned against the Christians, and a violent and brutal persecution ensued
which practically stamped Christianity out of Japan. In 1638 the remaining
Christians gathered to the number of 37,000 on the peninsula of Shima-
bara, fortified it, and made a last stand for the freedom of worship,
lyemitsu, grandson of lyeyasu, sent a large armed force to subdue them.
When, after a three months' siege, their stronghold was taken, all but one
hundred and five of the survivors were massacred in the streets.
lyeyasu and Shakespeare were contemporaries in death. The doughty
Shogun left his power to his son Hidetada, with a simple admonition:
"Take care of the people. Strive to be virtuous. Never neglect to protect
the country." And to the nobles who stood at his deathbed he left advice
in the best tradition of Confucius and Mencius: "My son has now come
of age. I feel no anxiety for the future of the state. But should my suc-
cessor commit any grave fault in his administration, do you administer
affairs yourselves. The country is not the country of one man, but the
country of the nation. If my descendants lose their power because of their
misdeeds, I shall not regret it."80
His descendants conducted themselves much better than monarchs can
usually be expected to behave over a great length of time. Hidetada was
a harmless mediocrity; lyemitsu represented a stronger mood of the stock,
and sternly suppressed a movement to restore to actual power the still
reigning but not ruling emperors. Tsunayoshi lavished patronage upon
men of letters, and on the great rival schools of painting, Kano and Tosa,
that embellished the Genroku age (1688-1703). Yoshimune set himself
* In 1596 a Spanish galleon was forced into a Japanese harbor by Japanese boats, was
purposely driven by them upon a reef that broke it in two, and then was pillaged by
the local governor on the ground that Japanese law permitted the authorities to appro-
priate all vessels stranded on their shores. The outraged pilot, Landecho, protested to
Hideyoshi's Minister of Works, Masuda. Masuda asked how it was that the Christian
Church had won so many lands to be subject to one man; and Landecho, being a seaman
rather than a diplomat, answered: "Our kings begin by sending, into the countries
they wish to conquer, religieux who induce the people to embrace our religion; and
when they have made considerable progress, troops are sent who combine with the new
Christians; and then our kings have not much trouble in accomplishing the rest."*
844 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXVIII
to the ever-recurrent purpose of abolishing poverty, at the very rime
when his treasury faced an unusual deficit. He borrowed extensively from
the merchant class, attacked the extravagance of the rich, and stoically re-
duced the expenditures of his government, even to the extent of dismissing
the fifty fairest ladies of the court. He dressed in cotton cloth, slept on a
peasant's pallet, and dined on the simplest fare. He had a complaint box
placed before the palace of the Supreme Court, and invited the people to
submit criticisms of any governmental policy or official. When one Yama-
shita sent in a caustic indictment of his whole administration Yoshimune
had the document read aloud in public, and rewarded the author for his
candor with a substantial gift.*11
It was the judgment of Lafcadio Hearn that "the Tokugawa period was
the happiest in the long life of the nation."09 History, though it can never
quite know the past, inclines tentatively to the same conclusion. How
could one, seeing Japan today, suspect that on those now excited islands,
only a century ago, lived a people poor but content, enjoying a long epoch
of peace under the rule of a military class, and pursuing in quiet isolation
the highest aims of literature and art?
CHAPTER XXIX
The Political and Moral Foundations
A tentative approach
IF, NOW, we try to picture the Japan that died in 1853, we should
remember that it may be as hard to understand, as it might be to fight,
a people five thousand miles distant, and differing from us in color and
language, government and religion, manners and morals, character and
ideals, literature and art. Hearn was more intimate with Japan than any
other Western writer of his time, and yet he spoke of "the immense diffi-
culty of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of Japa-
nese life."1 "Your information about us," a genial Japanese essayist re-
minds the Occident, "is based on the meagre translations of our immense
literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travelers. . . . We
Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which
has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume
of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches."* What follows, therefore, is
a tentative approach— based upon the briefest direct acquaintance— to Jap-
anese civilization and character; each student must correct it by long and
personal experience. The first lesson of philosophy is that we may all be
mistaken.
I. THE SAMURAI
The powerless emperor—The powers of the "shogun"—The sword
of the "Samurai"-The code of the "Samurai"-"Hara-kiri"-
The Forty-seven "Ronin"—A commuted sentence
Theoretically at the head of the nation was the divine emperor. The
actually ruling house— the hereditary shogunate— allowed the emperor and
his court $25,000 a year for maintaining the impressive and useful fiction
of uninterrupted rule.* Many people of the court practised some domestic
handicraft to sustain themselves: some made umbrellas, others made chop-
* This sum, however, was probably equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars in
current American money.
845
846 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
sticks, or toothpicks, or playing cards. The Tokugawa shoguns made it a
principle to leave the emperor no authority whatever, to seclude him from
the people, to surround him with women, and to weaken him with effem-
inacy and idleness. The imperial family yielded its powers gracefully, and
contented itself with dictating the fashions of aristocratic dress."
Meanwhile the shogun luxuriated in the slowly growing wealth of
Japan, and assumed prerogatives normally belonging to the emperor.
When he was borne through the streets in his ox-carriage or palanquin
the police required every house along the route, and all the shutters of
upper windows, to be closed; all fires were to be extinguished, all dogs and
cats were to be locked up, and the people themselves were to kneel by the
roadside with their heads upon their hands and their hands upon the
ground.4 The shogun had a large personal retinue, including four jesters,
and eight cultured ladies dedicated to entertain him without reserve.5 He
was advised by a cabinet of twelve members: a "Great Senior," five
"Seniors" or ministers, and six "Sub-Elders" who formed a junior council.
As in China, a Board of Censors supervised all administrative offices, and
kept watch upon the feudal lords. These lords, or Daimyo ("Great
Name"), formally acknowledged allegiance only to the emperor; and some
of them, like the Shimadzu family that ruled Satsuma, successfully limited
the shogun's authority, and finally overthrew it.
Below the lords were the baronets, and below these the squires; and
serving the lords were a million or more Samurai— sword-bearing guards-
men. The basic principle of Japanese feudal society was that every gentle-
man was a soldier, and every soldier a gentleman;8 here lay the sharpest
difference between Japan and that pacific China which thought that every
gentleman should be a scholar rather than a warrior. Though they loved,
and partly formed themselves on, such swashbuckling novels as the Chin-
ese Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Samurai scorned mere learning,
and called the literary savant a book-smelling sot.T They had many privi-
leges: they were exempt from taxation, received a regular stipend of rice
from the baron whom they served, and performed no labor except occa-
sionally to die for their country. They looked down upon love as a
graceful game, and preferred Greek friendship; they made a business of
gambling and brawling, and kept their swords in condition by paying the
executioner to let them cut off condemned heads.* His sword, in lyeyasu's
famous phrase, was "the soul of the Samurai" and found remarkably fre-
quent expression despite prolonged national peace. He had the right, ac-
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 847
cording to lyeyasu," to cut down at once any member of the lower classes
who offended him; and when his steel was new and he wished to make
trial of it, he was as likely to try it on a beggar as on a dog." "A famous
swordsman having obtained a new sword," says Longford, "took up his
place by the Nihon Bashi (the central bridge of Yedo) to await a chance
of testing it. By and by a fat peasant came along, merrily drunk, and the
swordsman dealt him the Nashi-ewari (pear-splitter) so effectively that he
cut him right through from the top of his head down to the fork. The
peasant continued on his way, not knowing that anything had happened
to him, till he stumbled against a coolie, and fell in two neatly severed
pieces."11 Of such trivial consequence is the difference, so troublesome to
philosophers, between the One and the Many.
The Samurai had other graces than this jolly despatch with which they
transformed time into eternity. They accepted a stern code of honor—
Bushido,* or the Way of the Knight— whose central theory was its defini-
tion of virtue: "the power of deciding upon a certain course of conduct
in accordance with reason, without wavering; to die when it is right to
die, to strike when it is right to strike."12 They were tried by their own
code, but it was more severe than the common law." They despised all
material enterprise and gain, and refused to lend, borrow or count money;
they seldom broke a promise, and they risked their lives readily for any-
one who appealed to them for just aid. They made a principle of hard
and frugal living; they limited themselves to one meal a day, and accus-
tomed themselves to eat any food that came to hand, and to hold it. They
bore all suffering silently, and suppressed every display of emotion; their
women were taught to rejoice when informed that their husbands had
been killed on the battlefield.14 They recognized no obligation except that
of loyalty to their superiors; this was, in their code, a higher law than
parental or filial love. It was a common thing for a Samurai to disembowel
himself on the death of his lord, in order to serve and protect him in the
other world. When the Shogun lycmitsu was dying in 1651 he reminded
his prime minister, Hotto, of this duty of junshi, or "following in death";
Hotto killed himself without a word, and several subordinates imitated
him.15 When the Emperor Mutsuhito went to his ancestors in 1912 Gen-
eral Nogi and his wife committed suicide in loyalty to him.18 Not even the
traditions of Rome's finest soldiers bred greater courage, asceticism and
self-control than were demanded by the code of the Samurai.
*A word coined by the late Inazo Nitobe.
848 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIX
The final law of Bushido was hara-kiri— suicide by disembowelment.
The occasions when this would be expected of a Samurai were almost be-
yond count, and the practice of it so frequent that little notice was taken
of it. If a man of rank had been condemned to death he was allowed, as an
expression of the emperor's esteem, to cut through his abdomen from left
to right and then down to the pelvis with the small sword which he always
carried for this purpose. If he had been defeated in battle, or had been com-
pelled to surrender, he was as like as not to rip open his belly. (Hara-kiri
means belly-cutting; it is a vulgar word seldom used by the Japanese, who
prefer to call it seppuku.) When, in 1895, JaPan yielded to European pres-
sure and abandoned Liaotung, forty military men committed hara-kiri in
protest. During the war of 1905 many officers and men in the Japanese
navy killed themselves rather than be captured by the Russians. If his su-
perior did something offensive to him, the good Samurai might gash himself
to death at his master's gate. The art of seppuku— the precise ritual of rip-
ping—was one of the first items in the education of Samurai youth; and the
last tribute of affection that could be paid to a friend was to stand by him
and cut off his head as soon as he had carved his paunch." Out of this train-
ing, and the traditions bound up with it, has come some part of the Japa-
nese soldier's comparative fearlessness of death.*
Murder, like suicide, was allowed occasionally to replace the law.
Feudal Japan economized on policemen not only by having many bonzes,
but by allowing the son or brother of a murdered man to take the law into
his own hand; and this recognition of the right of revenge, though it begot
half the novels and plays of Japanese literature, intercepted many crimes.
The Samurai, however, usually felt called upon to commit hara-kiri after
exercising this privilege of personal revenge. When the famous Forty-
seven Ronin ("Wave Men"— i.e., unattached Samurai), to avenge a death,
had cut off the head of Kotsuke no Suke with supreme courtesy and the
most refined apologies, they retired in dignity to estates named by the
Shogun, and neatly killed themselves (1703). Priests returned Kotsuke's
head to his retainers, who gave them this simple receipt:
* Hara-kiri was forbidden to women and plebeians; but women were allowed to com-
mit jigaki— i.eM they were permitted, as a protest against an offense, to pierce the throat
with a dagger, and to sever the arteries by a single thrust. Every woman of quality re-
ceived technical training in the art of cutting her throat, and was taught to bind her
lower limbs together before killing herself, lest her corpse should be found in an im-
modest position.18
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 849
Memorandum:
Item: One head.
Item: One paper parcel.
The above articles are acknowledged to have been received.
(Signed) Sayada Mogobai
Saito Kunai
This is probably the most famous and typical event in the history of Japan,
and one of the most significant for the understanding of Japanese char-
acter. Its protagonists are still, in the popular view, heroes and saints; to
this day pious hands deck their graves, and incense never ceases to rise
before their resting place.10
Towards the end of lyeyasu's regency two brothers, Sakon and Naiki,
twenty-four and seventeen years of age respectively, tried to kill him be-
cause of wrongs which they felt that he had inflicted upon their father.
They were caught as they entered the camp, and were sentenced to death,
lyeyasu was so moved by their courage that he commuted their sentences
to self-disembowelmcnt; and in accord with the customs of the time he
included their younger brother, the eight-year-old Hachimaro, in this
merciful decree. The physician who attended the boys has left us a de-
scription of the scene:
When they were all seated in a row for final despatch, Sakon turned
to the youngest and said— "Go thou first, for I wish to be sure that
thou doest it right." Upon the little one's replying that, as he had
never seen seppuku performed, he would like to sec his brothers do
it, and then he could follow them, the older brothers smiled between
their tears:— "Well said, little fellow. So canst thou well boast of
being our father's child." When they had placed him between them,
Sakon thrust the dagger into the left side of his abdomen and said—
"Look, brother! Dost understand now? Only, don't push the
dagger too far, lest thou fall back. Lean forward, rather, and keep
thy knees well composed." Naiki did likewise, and said to the boy—
"Keep thine eyes open, or else thou mayst look like a dying woman.
If thy dagger feels anything within and thy strength fails, take cour-
age, and double thy effort to cut across." The child looked from
one to the other, and when both had expired, he calmly half
nuded himself and followed the example set him on either hands?* ,„
^:
850 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
II. THE LAW
The first code— Group responsibility —Punishments
The legal system of Japan was a vigorous supplement to private assassi-
nation and revenge. It had its origins partly in the ancient usages of the
people, partly in the Chinese codes of the seventh century; law accom-
panied religion in the migration of culture from China to Japan.*1 Tenchi
Tenno began the formulation of a system of laws which was completed
and promulgated under the boy Emperor Mommu in 702. In the feudal
epoch this and other codes of the imperial age fell into disuse, and each
fief legislated independently; the Samurai recognized no law beyond the
will and decrees of his Daimyo*
Until 1721 it was the custom of Japan to hold the entire family re-
sponsible for the good behavior of each member, and, in most localities,
to charge each family in a group of five with responsibility for all. The
grown sons of an adult who had been condemned to be crucified or
burned were executed with him, and his younger sons, on coming of
age, were banished.98 Ordeal was used in medieval trials, and torture re-
mained popular, in its milder forms, till modern times. The Japanese used
the rack on some Christians, in vengeful imitation of the Inquisition; but
more often their subtle minds were content to bind a man with ropes into
a constrained position that became more agonizing with every minute.*4
Whippings for trifling offenses were frequent, and death could be earned
by any one of a great variety of crimes. The Emperor Shomu (724-56)
abolished capital punishment and made compassion the rule of govern-
ment; but crime increased after his death, and the Emperor Konin (770-
81) not only restored the death penalty, but decreed that thieves should
be publicly scourged until they died.85 Capital punishment also took the
form of strangling, beheading, crucifixion, quartering, burning, or boiling
in oil.88 lyeyasu put an end to the old custom of pulling a condemned
man in two between oxen, or binding him to a public post and inviting
each passer-by to take a turn in cutting through him, from shoulder to
crotch, with a saw.81 lyeyasu laid it down that the frequent resort to
severe punishments proved not the criminality of the people so much as
the corruption and incompetence of the officials.88 Yoshimune was dis-
gusted to find that the prisons of his time had no sanitary arrangements,
and that among the prisoners were several whose trials, though begun
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 85!
sixteen years back, were still unfinished, so that the accusations against
them were forgotten, and the witnesses were dead.80 This most enlightened
of the shoguns reformed the prisons, improved and accelerated judicial
procedure, abolished family responsibility, and labored sedulously for years
to formulate the first unified code of Japanese feudal law (1721).
III. THE TOILERS
Castes— An experiment in the nationalization of land— State fixing
of wages— A famine— Handicrafts— Artisans and guilds
In the imperial age society had been divided into eight set or castes; in
the feudal epoch these were softened into four classes: Samurai, artisans,
peasants, and merchants— the last being also, in social ranking, least. Be-
neath these classes was a large body of slaves, numbering some five per
cent of the population, and composed of criminals, war-captives, or chil-
dren seized and sold by kidnappers, or children sold into slavery by their
parents.*80 Lower even than these slaves was a caste of pariahs known as
Eta, considered despicable and unclean by Buddhist Japan because they
acted as butchers, tanners and scavengers.83
The great bulk of the population (which numbered in Yoshimune's
days some thirty millions), was composed of peasant proprietors, intensive-
ly cultivating that one-eighth of Japan's mountainous soil which lends it-
self to tillage, t In the Nara period the state nationalized the land, and
rented it to the peasant for six years or, at most, till death; but the govern-
ment discovered that men did not care to improve or properly care for
land that might in a short time be assigned to others; and the experiment
ended in a restoration of private ownership, with state provision of funds
in the spring to finance the planting and reaping of the crops.88 Despite
this aid, the life of the peasant was not one of degenerative ease. His farm
was a tiny tract, for even in feudal days one square mile had to support
two thousand men.8* He had to contribute annually to the state thirty
days of forced labor, during which death by a spear-thrust might be the
penalty of a moment's idleness.f" The government took from him, in
* This practice was forbidden in 16995
fThe arable exceptions were— and are— fertilized with human waste.
t During the months of July and August a siesta was permitted from noon till four
o'clock. Sick workers were fed by the state, and free coffins were provided for those
who died during the corutc™
852 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
taxes and levies of many kinds, 6% of his product in the seventh century,
72% in the twelfth, and 40% in the nineteenth.17 His tools were of the
simplest sort; his clothing was poor and slight in the winter, and usually
nothing at all in the summer; his furniture was a rice-pot, a few bowls, and
some chopsticks; his home was a hut so flimsy that half a week sufficed to
build it."8 Every now and then earthquakes leveled his cottage, or famine
emptied his frame. If he worked for another man his wages, like all wages
in Tokugawa Japan, were fixed by the government;89 but this did not pre-
vent them from being cruelly low. In one of the most famous works of
Japanese literature — Kamo Chomei's Hojoki — the author describes, as
crowded into the eight years between 1177 and 1185, an earthquake, a
famine, and a fire that almost destroyed Kyoto.* His eyewitness account
of the famine of 1 1 8 1 is one of the classic examples of Japanese prose:
In all the provinces people left their lands and sought other parts,
or, forgetting their homes, went to live among the hills. All kinds of
prayers were begun, and even religious practices which were un-
usual in ordinary times were revived, but to no purpose whatever.
. . . The inhabitants of the capital offered to sacrifice their valuables
of all kinds, one after another (for food), but nobody cared to look
at them. . . . Beggars swarmed by the roadsides, and our ears were
filled with the sound of their lamentations. . . . Everybody was
dying of hunger; and as time went on our condition became as des-
perate as that of the fish in the small pool of the story. At last even
respectable-looking people wearing hats, and with their feet covered,
might be seen begging importunately from door to door. Some-
times, while you wondered how such utterly wretched creatures
could walk at all, they fell down before your eyes. By garden walls
or on the roadsides countless persons died of famine, and as their
bodies were not removed, the world was filled with evil odors. As
their bodies changed there were many sights which the eyes could
not endure to see. . . . People who had no means pulled down their
houses and sold the materials in the market. It was said that a load
for one man was not enough to provide him with sustenance for a
single day. It was strange to see, among this firewood, pieces
adorned in places with vermilion, or silver, or gold leaf. . . . Another
very pitiable thing was that when there were a man and a woman
*Thc worst of the many fires in Japanese history was that which completely wiped
out Yedo (Tokyo) in 1657, with the loss of 100,000 lives.
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 853
who were strongly attached to each other, the one whose love was
the greater, and whose devotion was the more profound, always died
first. The reason was that they put themselves last, and, whether
man or woman, gave up to the dearly beloved one anything which
they might chance to have begged. As a matter of course, parents
died before their children. Again, infants might be seen clinging to
the breast of their mother, not knowing that she was already dead.
. . . The number of those who died in central Kyoto during the
fourth and fifth months alone was 42,300.*°
Contrast with this brutal interlude in the growth of the soil Kaempfer's
bright picture of Japanese handicrafts as he saw them in the Kyoto of
1691:
Kyoto is the great magazine of all Japanese manufactures and
commodities, and the chief mercantile town in the Empire. There is
scarce a house in this large capital where there is not something
made or sold. Here they refine copper, coin money, print books,
weave the richest stuffs with gold and silver flowers. The best and
scarcest dyes, the most artful carvings, all sorts of musical instru-
ments, pictures, japanned cabinets, all sorts of things wrought in
gold and other metals, particularly in steel, as the best tempered
blades and other arms, are made here in the utmost perfection, as are
also the richest dresses, and after the best fashion; all sorts of toys,
puppets moving their heads of themselves, and numberless other
things too numerous to be mentioned here. In short, there is noth-
ing that can be thought of but what may be found at Kyoto, and
nothing, though ever so neatly wrought, can be imported from
abroad but what some artist or other in this capital will undertake
to imitate. . . . There are but few houses in all the chief streets
where there is not something to be sold, and for my part I could
not help admiring whence they can have customers enough for such
an immense quantity of goods.41
All the arts and industries of China had long since been imported into
Japan; and as today Japan begins to excel her Western instructors in
economy and efficiency of mechanical production," so during the Toku-
gawa Shogunate her handicraftsmen began to rival, and sometimes to excel,
the Chinese and Koreans from whom they had learned their art. Most of
the work, in the manner of medieval Europe, was done in the home by
families who passed down their occupation and their skill from father to
854 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
son, and often took the name of their craft; and, again as in our Middle
Ages, great guilds were formed, not so much of simple workers as of
masters who mercilessly exploited the artisans, and zealously restricted the
admission of new members to the guilds.48 One of the most powerful of
the guilds was that of the money-changers, who accepted deposits, issued
vouchers and promissory notes, made loans to commerce, industry and
government, and (by 1636) performed all the major functions of finance.44
Rich merchants and financiers rose to prominence in the cities, and began
to look with jealous eye upon the exclusive political power of a feudal aris-
tocracy that angered them by scorning the pursuit of gold. Slowly,
throughout the Tokugawa era, the mercantile wealth of the nation grew,
until at last it was ready to cooperate with American gifts and European
guns in bursting the shell of the old Japan.
IV. THE PEOPLE
Stature — Cosmetics — Costume —Diet— Etiquette— "Sake"— The tea
ceremony— The flower ceremony— Love of nature-
Gardens— Homes
This most important people in the contemporary political world is
modest in stature, averaging five feet thrcc-and-a-half inches for the men,
four feet ten-and-a-half inches for the women. One of their great warriors,
Tamura Maro, was described as "a man of very fine figure, . . . five feet
five inches tall."46 Some dieticians believe that this brevity is due to in-
sufficiency of lime in the Japanese diet, due in turn to lack of milk, and
this to the expensiveness of grazing areas in so crowded a land;46 but such
a theory, like everything in dietetics, must be looked upon as highly hy-
pothetical. The women seem fragile and weak, but probably their energy,
like that of the men, is one of nervous courage rather than of physical
strength, and cannot be seen outside of emergencies. Their beauty is a
matter of expression and carriage as well as of feature; their dainty grace
is a typical product of Japanese art.
Cosmetics are popular and ancient in Japan as elsewhere; even in the
early days of Kyoto's leadership every male of quality rouged his cheeks,
powdered his face, sprinkled his clothes with perfume, and carried a
mirror with him wherever he went. 4T Powder has been for centuries the
female complexion of Japan; the Lady Sei Shonagon, in her Pillow Sketches
(ca. 991 A.D.), says demurely: "I bent my head down and hid my face
with my sleeve at the risk of brushing off my powder and appearing with
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 855
a spotted face."*" Fashionable ladies rouged their cheeks, colored their
nails, and occasionally gilded the lower lip; to complete their toilette six-
teen articles were required in the seventeenth century, and twenty in the
eighteenth. They recognized fifteen styles of front hair and twelve styles of
back hair; they shaved their eyebrows, painted "crescent moons" or other
forms in their place, or substituted for them two little black spots high up
on the forehead, to match their artificially blackened teeth. To construct
the architecture of a woman's hair was a task that took from two to six
hours of expert labor. In the Heian epoch the majority of the men shaved
the crown of the head, gathered the rest in a queue, and laid the queue
athwart the crown so as to divide it into equal halves. Beards, though
sparse, were a necessity; those who had none by nature wore false ones,
and a pair of tweezers for the care of the beard was furnished to every
guest at any fashionable house.4*
Japanese costume, in the Nara age, imitated the Chinese, with tunic and
trousers covered by a tight robe. In the Kyoto period the robe became looser
and multiple; men as well as women wore from two to twenty superimposed
robes, whose colors were determined by the rank of the wearer, and provided
many prismatic displays at the edges of the sleeves. At one time the lady's
sleeves reached below her knees, and bore, each of them, a little bell that
tinkled as she walked. On days when the streets were wet from rain or snow
they walked on wooden slippers raised by wooden cleats an inch or so above
the earth. In the Tokugawa era dress became so extravagant that the shoguns,
careless of history, tried to check it by sumptuary laws; silk-lined and em-
broidered breeches and socks were outlawed, beards were forbidden, certain
ways of wearing the hair were proscribed, and at times the police were in-
structed to arrest anyone wearing fine garments in the street. Occasionally
these laws were obeyed; for the most part they were circumvented by the in-
genuity of human folly.80 In time the rage for plural robes abated, and the
Japanese became one of the most simply, modestly and tastefully dressed of
peoples.
Nor did they yield to any other nation in habits of cleanliness. Among
those who could afford it clothes were changed three times a day; and poor
as well as rich bathed the body daily."1* In the villages the people bathed in
tubs outside their doors in summer, while gossiping industriously with their
neighbors.88 Hot baths at no degrees Fahrenheit were used as a method of
keeping warm in winter. Diet was simple and wholesome until luxury came;
•In 1905 Tokyo had noo public baths, in which 500,000 persons bathed daily for
i% cents."
856 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIX
the early Chinese descriptions of the Japanese noted that "they are a long-
lived race, and persons who have reached one hundred years are very com-
mon."84 The staple food of the people was rice, to which were added fish,
vegetables, sea-weed, fruit and meat according to income. Meat was a rare
dish except among the aristocracy and the soldiery. On a regimen of rice, a
little fish and no meat, the coolie developed good lungs and tough muscles,
and could run from fifty to eighty miles in twenty-four hours without dis-
tress; when he added meat he lost this capacity."* The emperors of the
Kyoto period made pious efforts to enforce Buddhist dietary laws by forbid-
ding the slaughter or eating of animals; but when the people found that the
priests themselves clandestinely violated these laws, they took to meat as a
delicacy, and used it to excess whenever their means permitted."
To the Japanese, as to the Chinese and the French, fine cooking was an
essential grace of civilization. Its practitioners, like artists and philosophers,
divided into warring schools, and fought one another with recipes. Table
manners became at least as important as religion; elaborate enactments pre-
scribed the order and quantity of bites, and the posture of the body at each
stage of the meal. Ladies were forbidden to make a sound while eating or
drinking; but men were expected to indicate their appreciation of a host's
generosity by a little grateful belching.68 The diners sat on one or two heels
on mats, at a table raised but a few inches above the floor; or the food might be
laid upon the mat, without any table at all. Usually the meal was begun with
a hot drink of rice-wine; for had not the poet Tahito declared, far back in
the seventh century, that sake was the one solution for all the problems of
life?
That which the seven sages sought,
Those men of olden times,
Was sake, beyond all doubt.
Instead of holding forth
Wisely, with grave mien,
How much better to drink sake,
To get drunk, and to shout aloud.
Since it is true
That death comes at last for all,
Let us be joyful
While we are alive.
* On the other hand those Japanese who have adopted a non-physical life while con-
tinuing to eat large quantities of rice are succumbing to digestive disorders.18
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 857
Even the jewel that sparkles in the night
Is less to us than the uplifting of the heart
Which comes by drinking sake"
More sacred than sake, to the aristocracy, was tea. This gracious remedy
for the tastelessness of boiled water was introduced from China into Japan,
unsuccessfully in 805, successfully in 1191. At first the people shunned
the leaf as a poison, and would have nothing to do with it; but when a few
cups of the outlandish beverage quickly cleared the head of a shogun who
had drunk too much sake the night before, the Japanese recognized the
utility of tea. Its costliness added to its charm: tiny jars of it were given as
precious gifts, even to reward warriors for mighty deeds of valor, and the
fortunate possessors gathered their friends about them to share the royal
drink. The Japanese made a graceful and complex ceremony out of tea-
drinking, and Rikyu established for it six inviolable rules that raised it to a
cult. The signal bidding the guests to enter the tea pavilion, said Rikyu,
must be given by wooden clappers; the ablution bowl must be kept con-
stantly filled with pure water; any guest conscious of inadequacy or inele-
gance in the furniture or the surroundings must leave at once, and as
quietly as possible; no trivial gossip was to be indulged in, but only matters
of noble and serious import were to be discussed; no word of deceit or
flattery should pass any lip; and the affair should not last beyond four
hours. No tea-pot was used at such Cha-no-yu ("hot water for tea")
reunions; powdered tea was placed in a cup of choice design, hot water
was added, and the cup was passed from guest to guest, each wiping its
rim carefully with a napkin. When the last drinker had consumed the last
drop the cup was passed around again, to be critically examined as a work
of ceramic art.60 In this way the tea-ceremony stimulated the potters to
produce ever lovelier cups and bowls, and helped to form the manners of
the Japanese into tranquillity, courtesy and charm.*
Flowers, too, became a cult in Japan, and the same Rikyu who formu-
lated the ritual of tea valued his flowers as much as his cups. When he
heard that Hideyoshi was coming to see his famous collection of chrysan-
themums, Rikyu destroyed all the blossoms in his garden but one, so that
* The tea-crop, of course, is now one of the important products of Japan. The Dutch
Blast India Co. appears to have brought Europe its first tea in 1610, and to have sold it
at some $4.00 a pound. Jonas Hanway, in 1756, argued that European men were losing
their stature, and women their beauty, through the drinking* of tea; and reformers de-
nounced the custom as a filthy barbarism."1
858 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
this might shine unrivaled before the terrible shogun.*" The art of flower-
arrangement grew step by step with "Teaism" in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, and became in the seventeenth an independent devotion.
"Flower-masters" arose who taught men and women how flowers should
be grown in the garden and placed in the home; it was not enough, they
said, to admire the blossoms, but one must learn to see as much loveliness
in the leaf, the bough or the stalk as in the flower, as much beauty in one
flower as in a thousand; and one must arrange them with a view not merely
to color but to grouping and line.64 Tea, flowers, poetry, and the dance
became requisites of womanhood among the aristocracy of Japan.
Flowers are the religion of the Japanese; they worship them with sacri-
ficial fervor and national accord. They watch for the blossoms appropri-
ate to each season; and when, for a week or two in early April, the cherry-
tree blooms, all Japan seems to leave its work to gaze at it, or even to make
pilgrimages to places where the miracle is most abundant and complete, f
The cherry-tree is cultivated not for any fruit but for its blossom— the
emblem of the faithful warrior ready to die for his country at the moment
of his fullest life.65 Criminals en route to execution will sometimes ask for a
flower." The Lady Chiyo, in a famous poem, tells of a girl who came to
draw water from a well, but, finding bucket and rope entwined with con-
volvuli, went elsewhere for water rather than break the tendrils.67 "The
heart of man," says Tsurayuki, "can never be understood; but in my native
village the flowers give forth their perfume as before."68 These simple
lines are among the greatest of Japanese poems, for they express in perfect
and irreducible form a profound characteristic of a race, and one of the
rare conclusions of philosophy. Never has another people shown such
love of nature as one finds in Japan; nowhere else have men and women
accepted so completely all natural moods of earth, sky and sea; nowhere
else have men so carefully cultivated gardens, or nourished plants in their
growth, or tended them in the home. Japan did not have to wait for a
Rousseau or a Wordsworth to tell it that mountains were sublime, or that
lakes might be beautiful. There is hardly a dwelling in Japan without a
vase of flowers in it, and hardly a poem in Japanese literature without a
landscape in its lines. As Oscar Wilde thought that England should
* The Taiko and the Tea-Master loved each other like geniuses. The first accused the
other of dishonesty, and wgs accused in turn of seducing Rikyu's daughter. In the end
Rikyu committed hara-kiri*
t Similar pilgrimages are made to see the maple leaves turning in the fall.
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 859
not fight France because the French wrote perfect prose, so America might
seek peace to the end with a nation that thirsts for beauty almost as pas-
sionately as it hungers for power.
The art of gardening was imported from China along with Buddhism
and tea; but here again the Japanese transformed creatively what they had
absorbed through imitation. They found an esthetic value in asymmetry,
a new charm in the surprises of unhackneyed forms; they dwarfed trees
and shrubs by confining their roots in pots, and with impish humor and
tyrannical affection trained them into shapes that might within a garden
wall represent the wind-twisted trees of stormy Japan; they searched the
craters of their volcanoes and the most precipitous shores of their seas to
find rocks fused into metal by hidden fires, or moulded by patient breakers
into quaint and gnarled forms; they dug little lakes, channeled roving
rivulets, and crossed them with bridges that seemed to spring from the
natural growth of the woods; and through all these varied formations they
wore, with imperceptible design, footpaths that would lead now to star-
tling novelties and now to cool and silent retreats.
Where space and means allowed they attached their homes to their
gardens rather than their gardens to their homes. Their houses were frail
but pretty; earthquakes made tall buildings dangerous, but the carpenter
and woodworker knew how to bind eaves, gables and lattices into a dwell-
ing ascetically simple, esthetically perfect, and architecturally unique.
Here were no curtains, sofas, beds, tables or chairs, no obtrusive display of
the dweller's wealth and luxury, no museum of pictures, statuary or bric-a-
brac; but in some alcove a blossoming branch, on the wall a silk or paper
painting or specimen of calligraphy, on the matted floor a cushion fronted
by a lectern and flanked by a bookcase on one side and an arm-rest on the
other, and, hidden in a cupboard, mattresses and coverings to be spread on
the floor when the time "should come to sleep. Within such modest quarters,
or in the peasant's fragile hut, the Japanese family lived, and through all
storms of war and revolution, of political corruption and religious strife,
carried on the life and civilization of the Sacred Isles.
860 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
V. THE FAMILY
The paternal autocrat—The status of woman— Children— Sexual
morality— The "geisha"— Love
For the real source of social order, in the Orient even more than in the
West, was the family; and the omnipotence of the father, in Japan as
throughout the East, expressed not a backward condition of society but a
preference for familial rather than political government. The individual
was less important in the East than in the Occident because the state was
weaker, and required a strongly organized and disciplined family to take
the place of a far-reaching and pervasive central authority. Freedom was
conceived in terms of the family rather than of the individual; for (the
family being the economic unit of production as well as the social unit of
order) success or failure, survival or death, came not to the separate per-
son but to the family. The power of the father was tyrannical, but it
had the painless grace of seeming natural, necessary, and human. He could
dismiss a son-in-law or a daughter-in-law from the patriarchal household,
while keeping the grandchildren with him; he could kill a child convicted
of unchastity or a serious crime; he could sell his children into slavery or
prostitution;* and he could divorce his wife with a word.70 If he was a
simple commoner he was expected to be monogamous; but if he belonged
to the higher classes he was entitled to keep concubines, and no notice
was to be taken of his occasional infidelities.71 When Christianity entered
Japan, native writers complained that it disturbed the peace of families by
insinuating that concubinage and adultery were sins.7*
As in China, the position of woman was higher in the earlier than in the
later stages of the civilization. Six empresses appear among the rulers of
the imperial age; and at Kyoto women played an important, indeed a lead-
ing, role in the social and literary life of the nation. In that heyday of
Japanese culture, if we may hazard hypotheses in such esoteric fields, the
wives outstripped their husbands in adultery, and sold their virtue for an
epigram.71 The Lady Sei Shonagon describes a youth about to send a love-
note to his mistress, but interrupting it to make love to a passing girl; and
this amiable essayist adds: "I wonder if, when this lover sent his letter, tied
with a dewy spray of hagi flower, his messenger hesitated to present it to
the lady because she also had a guest?"7* Under the influence of feudal
militarism, and in the natural and historical alternation of laxity and re-
* This was done only in the lower classes, and in extreme need.**
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 86l
straint, the Chinese theory of the subjection of woman to man won a
wide influence, "society" became predominantly male, and women were
dedicated to the "Three Obediences"— to father, husband and son. Edu-
cation, except in etiquette, was rarely wasted upon them, and fidelity was
exacted on penalty of death. If a husband caught his wife in adultery he
was authorized to kill her and her paramour at once; to which the subtle
lyeyasu added that if he killed the woman but spared the man he was him-
self to be put to death.76 The philosopher Ekken advised the husband to
divorce his wife if she talked too loudly or too long; but if the husband
happened to be dissolute and brutal, said Ekken, the wife should treat him
with doubled kindness and gentleness. Under this rigorous and long-con-
tinued training the Japanese woman became the most industrious, faithful
and obedient of wives, and harassed travelers began to wonder whether a
system that had produced such gracious results should not be adopted in
the West.77
Contrary to the most ancient and sacred customs of Oriental society,
fertility was not encouraged in Samurai Japan. As the population grew
the little islands felt themselves crowded, and it became a matter of good
repute in a Samurai not to marry before thirty, and not to have more chil-
dren than two.78 Nevertheless every man was expected to marry and beget
children. If his wife proved barren he could divorce her; and if she gave
him only daughters he was admonished to adopt a son, lest his name and
property perish; for daughters could not inherit.78 Children were trained
in the Chinese virtues and literature of filial piety, for on this, as the source
of family order, rested the discipline and security of the state. The
Empress Koken, in the eighth century, ordered every Japanese household
to provide itself with a copy of the "Classic of Filial Piety," and every
student in the provincial schools or the universities was required to become
a master of it. Except for the Samurai, whose loyalty to his lord was his
highest obligation, filial piety was the basic and supreme virtue of the
Japanese; even his relation to the emperor was to be one of filial affection
and obedience. Until the West came, with its disruptive ideas of individual
freedom, this cardinal virtue constituted nearly all the moral code of the
commoner in Japan. The conversion of the islands to Christianity was
made almost impossible by the Biblical command that a man should leave
his father and his mother and cleave to his wife."0
Other virtues than obedience and loyalty were less emphasized than in
contemporary Europe. Chastity was desirable, and some higher-class
women killed themselves when their virginity was threatened;*1 but a single
862 THE STORY OP CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
lapse was not synonymous with ruin. The most famous of Japanese novels,
the Genji Monogatari, is an epic of aristocratic seduction; and the most
famous of Japanese essays, the Pillow Sketches of the Lady Sei Shonagon,
reads in places like a treatise on the etiquette of sin." The desires of the
flesh were looked upon as natural, like hunger and thirst, and thousands
of men, many of them respectable husbands, crowded, at night, the Yoshi-
ivara, or "Flower District," of Tokyo. There, in the most orderly dis-
orderly houses in the world, fifteen thousand trained and licensed cour-
tesans sat of an evening behind their lattices, gorgeously attired and
powder-white, ready to provide song, dance and venery for unmated or
ill-mated men.88
The best educated of the courtesans were the geisha girls, whose very
name indicated that they were persons (sha) capable of an artistic per-
formance (gei). Like the hetairai of Greece they affected literature as
well as love, and seasoned their promiscuity with poetry. The Shogun
lyenari (1787-1836), who had already (1791) forbidden mixed bathing as
occasionally encouraging immorality,84 issued a rigorous edict against
the geisha in 1822, describing her as "a female singer who, magnificently
appareled, hires herself out to amuse guests at restaurants, ostensibly by
dancing and singing, but really by practices of a very different char-
acter."* These women were henceforth to be classed as prostitutes, along
with those "numberless wenches" who, in Kaempfer's day, filled every
tea-shop in the village and every inn on the road.8* Nevertheless, parties
and families continued to invite the geisha to provide entertainment at
social affairs; finishing schools were established where older geisha trained
young apprentices in their varied arts; and periodically, at the Kaburenjo,
teachers and pupils served ceremonial tea, and gave a public performance
of their more presentable accomplishments. Parents hard put to support
their daughters sometimes, with their manipulated "consent," apprenticed
them to the geisha for a consideration; and a thousand Japanese novels
have told tales of girls who sold themselves to the trade to save their
families from starvation."
These customs, however startling, do not differ essentially from the
habits and institutions of the Occident, except perhaps in candor, refine-
ment and grace. The vast majority of Japanese girls, we are assured, re-
mained as chaste as the virgins of the West." Despite such frank arrange-
ments the Japanese managed to live lives of comparative order and
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 863
decency, and though they did not often allow love to determine marriage
for life, they were capable of the tendercst affection for the objects of
their desire. Instances are frequent, in the current history as well as in the
imaginative literature of Japan, where young men and women have killed
themselves in the hope of enjoying in eternity the unity forbidden them
by their parents on earth.89 Love is not the major theme of Japanese
poetry, but here and there its note is struck with unmatched simplicity,
sincerity and depth.
Oh! that the white waves far out
On the Sea of Isc
Were but flowers,
That I might gather them
And bring them as a gift to my love.90
And, again with characteristic mingling of nature and feeling, the great
Tsurayuki tells in four lines the story of his rejected love:
Naught is so fleeting as the cherry-flower,
You say . . . yet I remember well the hour
When life's bloom withered at one spoken word—
And not a breath of wind had stirred.1*1
VI. THE SAINTS
Religion in Japan — The transformation of Buddhism — The
priests — Sceptics
That same devotion which speaks in patriotism and love, in affection
for parents, children, mate and fatherland, inevitably sought in the uni-
verse as a whole some central power to which it might attach itself in
loyalty, and through which it might derive some value and significance
larger than one person, and more lasting than one life. The Japanese are
only a moderately religious people— not profoundly and overwhelmingly
religious like the Hindus, nor passionately and fanatically religious like
the tortured saints of medieval Catholicism or the warring saints of the
Reformation; and yet they are distinctly more given to piety and prayer,
and a happy-ending philosophy, than their sceptical cousins across the
Yellow Sea.
864 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
Buddhism came from its founder a cloud of pessimistic exhortation,
inviting men to death; but under the skies of Japan it was soon trans-
formed into a cult of protecting deities, pleasant ceremonies, joyful
festivals, Rousscauian pilgrimages, and a consoling paradise. It is true
that there were hells too in Japanese Buddhism— indeed, one hundred and
twenty-eight of them, designed for every purpose and enemy. There was
a world of demons as well as of saints, and a personal Devil (Oni) with
horns, flat nose, claws and fangs; he lived in some dark, northeastern realm,
to which he would, now and then, lure women to give him pleasure, or
men to provide him with proteins.02 But on the other hand there were
Bodhisatfwas ready to transfer to human beings a portion of the grace
they had accumulated by many incarnations of virtuous living; and there
were gracious deities, like Our Lady Kwannon and the Christlike Jizo,
who were the very essence of divine tenderness. Worship was only partly
by prayer at the household altars and the temple shrines; a large part of
it consisted of merry processions in which religion was subordinated to
gaycty, and piety took the form of feminine fashion-displays and mascu-
line revelry. The more serious devotee might cleanse his spirit by praying
for a quarter of an hour under a waterfall in the depth of winter; or he
might go on pilgrimages from shrine to shrine of his sect, meanwhile feast-
ing his soul on the beauty of his native land. For the Japanese could
choose among many varieties of Buddhism: he might seek self-realization
and bliss through the quiet practices of Zen ("meditation"); he might
follow the fiery Nichircn into the Lotus Sect, and find salvation through
learning the "Lotus Law"; he might join the Spirit Sect, and fast and
pray until Buddha appeared to him in the flesh; he might be comforted
by the Sect of the Pure Land, and be saved by faith alone; or he might
find his way in patient pilgrimage to the monastery of Koyasan, and
attain paradise by being buried in ground made holy by the bones of
Kobo Daishi, the great scholar, saint and artist who, in the ninth century,
had founded Sh'mgon, the Sect of the True Word.
All in all, Japanese Buddhism was one of the pleasantest of man's myths.
It conquered Japan peacefully, and complaisantly found room, within
its theology and its pantheon, for the doctrines and deities of Shinto:
Buddha was amalgamated with Amaterasu, and a modest place was set
apart, in Buddhist temples, for a Shinto shrine. The Buddhist priests of the
earlier centuries were men of devotion, learning and kindliness, who pro-
foundly influenced and advanced Japanese letters and arts; some of them
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 865
were great painters or sculptors, and some were scholars whose painstak-
ing translation of Buddhist and Chinese literature proved a fertile stimulus
to the cultural development of Japan. Success, however, ruined the later
priests; many became lazy and greedy (note the jolly caricatures so often
made of them by Japanese carvers in ivory or wood) ; and some traveled
so far from Buddha as to organize their own armies for the establishment
or maintenance of political power.03 Since they were providing the first
necessity of life— a consolatory hope— their industry flourished even when
others decayed; their wealth grew from century to century, while the
poverty of the people remained."4 The priests assured the faithful that a
man of forty could purchase another decade of life by paying forty temples
to say masses in his name; at fifty he could buy ten years more by engaging
fifty temples; at sixty years sixty temples— and so till, through insufficient
piety, he died.*00 Under the Tokugawa regime the monks drank bibu-
lously, kept mistresses candidly, practised pcdcrasty,f and sold the cozier
places in the hierarchy to the highest bidders.8"
During the eighteenth century Buddhism seems to have lost its hold
upon the nation; the shoguns went over to Confucianism, Mabuchi and
Moto-ori led a movement for the restoration of Shinto, and scholars like
Ichikawa and Arai Hakuseki attempted a rationalist critique of religious
belief. Ichikawa argued boldly that verbal tradition could never be quite
as trustworthy as written record; that writing had not come to Japan until
almost a thousand years after the supposed origin of the islands and their
inhabitants from the spear-drops and loins of the gods; that the claim of
the imperial family to divine origin was merely a political device; and that
if the ancestors of men were not human beings they were much more
likely to have been animals than gods.00 The civilization of the old Japan,
like so many others, had begun with religion and was ending with phi-
losophy.
* "It was mainly in seasons when people were starving," says Murdoch, "or dying in
tens of thousands from pestilence, that the monks in the great Kyoto and Nara monas-
teries fared most sumptuously; for it was in times like these that believers were most
lavish in their gifts and benefactions."80
t"In 1454 . . . boys were often sold to the priests, who shaved their eyebrows,
powdered their faces, dressed them in female garb, and put them to the vilest of uses;
for since the days of Yoshimitsu, who had set an evil example in this as in so many
other matters, the practice of pederasty had become very common, especially in the
monasteries, although it was by no means confined to them."97
866 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIX
VII. THE THINKERS
Confucius reaches Japan— A critic of religion— The religion of
scholarship— Kaibara Ekken—On education— On pleasure—
The rival schools — A Japanese Spinoza — ho Jinsai—
ho Togai—Ogyu Sorai—The 'war of the scholars—
Mabuchi—Moto-ori
Philosophy, like religion, came to Japan from China. And as Buddhism
had reached Nippon six hundred years after its entrance into the Middle
Flowery People's Kingdom, so philosophy, in the form of Sung Con-
fucianism, awoke to consciousness in Japan almost four hundred years
after China had given it a second birth. About the middle of the sixteenth
century a scion of Japan's most famous family, Fujiwara Seigwa, discon-
tent with the knowledge that he had received as a monk, and having heard
of great sages in China, resolved to go and study there. Intercourse with
China having been forbidden in 1552, the young priest made plans to cross
the water in a smuggling vessel. While waiting in an inn at the port he
overheard a student reading aloud, in Japanese, from a Chinese volume on
Confucius. Seigwa was overjoyed to find that the book was Chu Hsi's
commentary on "The Great Learning." "This," he exclaimed, "is what I
have so long desired." By sedulous searching he obtained a copy of this
and other products of Sung philosophy, and became so absorbed in their
discussions that he forgot to go to China. Within a few years he had gath-
ered about him a group of young scholars, who looked upon the Chinese
philosophers as the revelation of a brave new world of secular thought,
lyeyasu heard of these developments, and asked Seigwa to come and ex-
pound to him the Confucian classics; but the proud priest, preferring the
quiet of his study, sent a brilliant pupil in his place. Nevertheless the more
active-minded youths of his time made a pathway to his door, and his lec-
tures attracted so much attention that the Buddhist monks of Kyoto com-
plained, saying it was an outrage that anyone but an orthodox and practis-
ing priest should deliver public lectures or teach the people.100 The matter
was simplified by Seigwa's sudden death (1619).
The pupil whom he had sent to lyeyasu soon outranked him in fame and
influence. The first Tokugawa shoguns took a fancy to Hayashi Kazan,
and made him their counsellor and the fonnulator of their public pro-
nouncements, lyemitsu set a fashion for the nobility by attending
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 867
Hayashi's lectures in 1630; and soon the young Confucian had so filled his
hearers with enthusiasm for Chinese philosophy that he had no trouble in
winning them from both Buddhism and Christianity to the simple moral
creed bequeathed to the Far East by the sage of Shantung. Christian theol-
ogy, he told them, was a medley of incredible fancies, while Buddhism was
a degenerative doctrine that threatened to weaken the fibre and morale of
the Japanese nation. "You priests," said Kazan, "maintain that this world
is impermanent and ephemeral. By your enchantments you cause people
to forget the social relations; you make an end of all the duties and all the
proprieties. Then you proclaim: 'Man's path is full of sins; leave your
father and mother, leave your master, leave your children, and seek for
salvation.' Now I tell you that I have studied much; but I have nowhere
found that there was a path for a man apart from loyalty to one's lord, and
of filial piety towards one's parents."101 Hayashi was enjoying an old age
of quiet renown when the great fire of Tokyo, in 1657, included him
among its hundred thousand casualties. His disciples ran to warn him of
the danger, but he merely nodded his head, and turned back to his book.
When the flames were actually around him he ordered a palanquin, and
was carried away in it while still reading his book. Like countless others,
he passed that night under the stars; and three days later he died of the
cold that he had caught during the conflagration.
Nature sought to atone for his death by giving Japan, in the following
year, one of the most enthusiastic of Confucians. Muro Kyuso chose as his
patron deity the God of Learning. Before Michi/ane's shrine he spent, in
his youth, an entire night in prayer; and then he dedicated himself to
knowledge with youthful resolutions strangely akin to those of his con-
temporary, Spinoza.*
I will arise every morning at six o'clock and retire each evening at
twelve o'clock.
Except when prevented by guests, sickness or other unavoidable
circumstances, I will not be idle. . . .
I will not speak falsehoods.
I will avoid useless words, even with inferiors.
I will be temperate in eating and drinking.
If lustful desires arise I will destroy them at once, without nour-
ishing them at all.
*Cf. die opening pages of De Intellects Emendatione.
868 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
Wandering thought destroys the value of reading. I will be care-
ful to guard against lack of concentration, and over-haste.
I will seek self-culture, not allowing my mind to be disturbed by
the desire for fame or gain.
Engraving these rules on my heart I will attempt to follow them.
The gods be my witness.101
Nevertheless, Kyuso did not preach a scholastic seclusion, but with the
broad-mindedness of a Goethe directed character into the stream of the
world:
Seclusion is one method, and is good; but a superior man rejoices
when his friends come. A man polishes himself by association with
others. Every man who desires learning should seek to be polished
in this way. But if he shuts himself away from everything and
everybody, he is guilty of violating the great way. . . . The Way of
the Sages is not sundered from matters of everyday life. . . . Though
the Buddhists withdraw themselves from human relations, cutting
out the relation of master and subject, parent and child, they are
not able to cut out love from themselves. ... It is selfishness to seek
happiness in the future world. . . . Think not that God is something
distant, but seek for him in your own hearts; for the heart is the
abode of God.108
The most attractive of these early Japanese Confucians is not usually
classed among the philosophers, for like Goethe and Emerson he had the
skill to phrase his wisdom gracefully, and jealous literature claims him for
her own. Like Aristotle Kaibara Ekken was the son of a physician, and
passed from medicine to a cautious empirical philosophy. Despite a busy
public career, including many official posts, he found time to become the
greatest scholar of his day. His books numbered more than a hundred,
and made him known throughout Japan; for they were written not in Chi-
nese (then the language of his fellow philosophers) but in such simple
Japanese that any literate person might understand them. Despite his learn-
ing and renown he had, along with the vanity of every writer, the humility
of every sage. Once, says tradition, a passenger on a vessel plying along
the Japanese coast undertook to lecture to his fellow travelers on the ethics
of Confucius. At first every one attended with typical Japanese curiosity
and eagerness to learn; but as the speaker went on his audience, finding
him a bore who had no nose for distinguishing a live fact from a dead one,
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 869
melted swiftly away, until only one listener remained. This solitary audi-
tor, however, followed the discourse with such devout concentration that
the lecturer, having finished, inquired his name. "Kaibara Ekken," was the
quiet reply. The orator was abashed to discover that for an hour or more
he had been attempting to instruct in Confucianism the most celebrated
Confucian master of the age.104
Ekken's philosophy was as free from theology as K'ung's, and clung
agnostically to the earth. "Foolish men, while doing crooked things, offer
their prayers to questionable gods, striving to obtain happiness."105 With
him philosophy was an effort to unify experience into wisdom, and desire
into character; and it seemed to him more pressing and important to unify
character than to unify knowledge. He speaks with strangely contempo-
rary pertinence:
The aim of learning is not merely to widen knowledge but to
form character. Its object is to make us true men, rather than learned
men. . . . The moral teaching which was regarded as the trunk of
all learning in the schools of the olden days is hardly studied in our
schools today, because of the numerous branches of study required.
No longer do men deem it worth while to listen to the teachings of
the hoary sages of the past. Consequently the amiable relations be-
tween master and servant, superior and inferior, older and younger
are sacrificed on the altar of the god called "Individual Right." . . .
The chief reason why the teachings of the sages are not more appre-
ciated by the people is because scholars endeavor to show off their
learning, rather than to make it their endeavor to live up to the
teachings of the sages.108
The young men of his time seem to have reproved him for his conserva-
tism, for he flings at them a lesson which every vigorous generation has to
relearn.
Children, you may think an old man's words wearisome; yet,
when your father or grandfather teaches, do not turn your head
away, but listen. Though you may think the tradition of your
family stupid, do not break it into pieces, for it is the embodiment
of the wisdom of your fathers.107
Perhaps he deserved reproof, for the most famous of his books, the Onna
j or "The Great Learning for Women," had a strong reactionary
870 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXIX
influence on the position of women in Japan. But he was no gloomy
preacher intent on finding sin in every delight; he knew that one task of
the educator is to teach us how to enjoy our environment, as well as (if we
can) to understand and control it.
Do not let a day slip by without enjoyment. ... Do not allow
yourself to be tormented by the stupidity of others. . . . Remember
that from its earliest beginnings the world has never been free from
fools. . . . Let us not then distress ourselves, nor lose our pleasure,
even though our own children, brothers and relations, happen to be
selfish, ignoring our best efforts to make them otherwise. . , . Sake is
the beautiful gift of Heaven. Drunk in small quantities it expands
the heart, lifts the downcast spirit, drowns cares, and improves the
health. Thus it helps a man and also his friends to enjoy pleasures.
But he who drinks too much loses his respectability, becomes over-
talkative, and utters abusive words like a madman. . . . Enjoy sake by
drinking just enough to give you a slight exhilaration, and thus enjoy
seeing flowers when they arc just bursting into bloom. To drink too
much and spoil this great gift of Heaven is foolish.108
Like most philosophers, he found the last refuge of his happiness in nature.
If we make our heart the fountain-head of pleasure, our eyes and
ears the gates of pleasure, and keep away base desires, then our
pleasure shall be plentiful; for we can then become the master of
mountains, water, moon and flowers. We do not need to ask any
man for them, neither, to obtain them, need we pay a single sen;
they have no specified owner. Those who can enjoy the beauty in
the Heaven above and the Earth beneath need not envy the luxury
of the rich, for they arc richer than the richest. . . . The scenery is
constantly changing. No two mornings or two evenings are quite
alike. ... At this moment one feels as if all the beauty of the world
had gone. But then the snow begins to fall, and one awakens the
next morning to find the village and the mountains transformed into
silver, while the once bare trees seem alive with flowers. . . . Winter
resembles the night's sleep, which restores our strength and energy. . . .
Loving flowers, I rise early;
Loving the moon, I retire late. . . .
Men come and go like passing streams;
But the moon remains throughout the ages.100
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 871
In Japan, even more than in China, the influence of Confucius on philo-
sophic thought overwhelmed all the resistance of unplaced rebels on the
one hand, and mystic idealists on the other. The Shushi school of Seigwa,
Razan and Ekken took its name from Chu Hsi, and followed his orthodox
and conservative interpretation of the Chinese classics. For a time it was
opposed by the Oyomei school, which took its lead from Wang Yang-
ming,* known to Nippon as Oyomei. Like Wang, the Japanese philosophers
of Oyomei sought to deduce right and wrong from the conscience of the
individual rather than from the traditions of society and the teachings of
the ancient sages. "I had for many years been a devout believer in Shiishi"
says Nakaye Toju (1608-48), "when, by the mercy of Heaven, the col-
lected works of Oyomei were brought for the first time to Japan. Had it
not been for the aid of their teaching, my life would have been empty and
barren.""0 So Nakaye devoted himself to expounding an idealist monism,
in which the world was a unity of kl and n— of things (or "modes") and
reason or law. God and this unity were one; the world of things was his
body, the universal law was his soul.111 Like Spinoza, Wang Yang-ming
and the Scholastics of Europe, Nakaye accepted this universal law with a
kind of amor dci intellectualis, and accounted good and evil as human
terms and prejudices describing no objective entities; and, again strangely
like Spinoza, he found a certain immortality in the contemplative union of
the individual spirit with the timeless laws or reason of the world.
Man's mind is the mind of the sensible world, but we have another
mind which is called conscience. This is reason itself, and docs not
belong to form (or "mode"). It is infinite and eternal. As our con-
science is one with (the divine or universal) reason, it has no begin-
ning or end. If we act in accord with (such) reason or conscience,
we arc ourselves the incarnations of the infinite and eternal, and have
eternal life."*
Nakaye was a man of saintly sincerity, but his philosophy pleased neither
the people nor the government. The Shogunate trembled at the notion
that every man might judge for himself what was right and what was
wrong. When another exponent of Oyomei, Kumazawa Banzan, passed
from metaphysics to politics, and criticized the ignorance and idleness of
the Samurai, an order was sent out for his arrest. Kumazawa, recognizing
* Cf. page 73 3 above.
872 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
the importance of the heels as especially philosophical organs, fled to the
mountains, and passed most of his remaining years in sylvan obscurity.1151
In 1795 an edict went forth against the further teaching of the Oyomei
philosophy; and so docile was the mind of Japan that from that time on
Oyomei concealed itself within the phrases of Confucianism, or entered as
a modest component into that military Zen which, by a typical paradox of
history, transformed the pacific faith of Buddha into the inspiration of
patriotic warriors.
As Japanese scholarship developed, and became directly acquainted
with the writings of Confucius rather than merely with his Sung inter-
preters, men like Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai established the Classical School
of Japanese thought, which insisted on going over the heads of all com-
mentators to the great K'ung himself. Ito Jinsai's family did not agree with
him about the value of Confucius; they taunted him with the impractica-
bility of his studies, and predicted that he would die in poverty. "Scholar-
ship," they told him, "belongs to the Chinese. It is useless in Japan. Even
though you obtain it you cannot sell it. Far better become a physician
and make money." The young student listened without hearing; he forgot
the rank and wealth of his family, put aside all material ambition, gave his
house and property to a younger brother, and went to live in solitude so
that he might study without distraction. He was handsome, and was some-
times mistaken for a prince; but he dressed like a peasant and shunned the
public eye. "Jinsai," says a Japanese historian,
was very poor, so poor that at the end of the year he could not
make New Year's rice cakes; but he was very calm about it. His
wife came, and kneeling down before him said: "I will do the house-
work under any circumstances; but there is one thing that is unbear-
able. Our boy Genso does not understand the meaning of our
poverty; he envies the neighbor's children their rice cakes. I scold
him, but my heart is torn in two." Jinsai continued to pore over his
books without making any reply. Then, taking off his garnet ring,
he handed it to his wife, as much as to say, "Sell this, and buy some
rice cakes."114
At Kyoto Jinsai opened a private school, and lectured there for forty years,
training, all in all, some three thousand students in philosophy. He spoke
occasionally of metaphysics, and described the universe as a living organ-
ism in which life always overrode death; but like Confucius he had a warm
prejudice in favor of the terrestrial practical.
CHAP. XXIX) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 873
That which is useless in governing the state, or in walking in the
way of human relations, is useless. . . . Learning must be active and
living; learning must not be mere dead theory or speculation. . . .
Those who know the way seek it in their daily life. ... If apart
from human relations we hope to find the way, it is like trying to
catch the wind. . . . The ordinary way is excellent; there is no more
excellent in the world."*
After the death of Jinsai his school and work were carried on by his son,
Ito Togai. Togai laughed at fame, and said: "How can you help calling a
man, whose name is forgotten as soon as he dies, an animal or sand? But is
it not a mistake for man to be eager to make books, or construct sentences,
in order that his name may be admired, and may not be forgotten?"110 He
wrote two hundred and forty-two volumes; but for the rest he lived
a life of modesty and wisdom. The critics complained that these books
were strong in what Moliere called virtus dorviitiva; nevertheless Togai's
pupils pointed out that he had written two hundred and forty-two books
without saying an unkind word of any other philosopher. When he died
they placed this enviable epitaph upon his tomb:
He did not talk about the faults of others. . . .
He cared for nothing but books.
His life was uneventful.1"
The greatest of these later Confucians was Ogyu Sorai; as he himself put
the matter, "From the time of Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan, how few
scholars have been my equal!" Unlike Togai he enjoyed controversy, and
spoke his mind violently about philosophers living or dead. When an in-
quiring young man asked him, "What do you like besides reading?" he
answered, "There is nothing better than eating burnt beans and criticizing
the great men of Japan." "Sorai," said Namikawa Tenjin, "is a very great
man, but he thinks that he knows all that there is to be known. This is a
bad habit."118 Ogyu could be modest when he wished: all the Japanese, he
said, explicitly including himself, were barbarians'; only the Chinese were
civilized; and "if there is anything that ought to be said, it has already been
said by the ancient kings or Confucius. "Uf The Samurai and the scholars
raged at him, but the reformer shogun, Yoshimune, enjoyed his courage,
and protected him against the intellectual mob. Sorai set up his rostrum at
Yedo, and like Hsiin-tze denouncing the sentimentality of Mo Ti, or
874 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXIX
Hobbes refuting Rousseau before Rousseau's birth, flung his laughing logic
at Jinsai, who had announced that man is naturally good. On the contrary,
said Sorai, man is a natural villain, and grasps whatever he can reach; only
artificial morals and laws, and merciless education, turn him into a tolerable
citizen.
As soon as men are born, desires spring up. When we cannot
realize our desires, which are unlimited, struggle arises; when
struggle arises, confusion follows. As the ancient kings hated con-
fusion, they founded propriety and righteousness, and with these
governed the desires of the people. . . . Morality is nothing but the
necessary means for controlling the subjects of the Empire. It did
not originate with nature, nor with the impulses of man's heart, but
it was devised by the superior intelligence of certain sages, and
authority was given to it by the state."0
As if to confirm the pessimism of Sorai, Japanese thought in the century
that followed him fell even from the modest level to which its imitation of
Confucius had raised it, and lost itself in a bitter ink-shedding war between
the idolaters of China and the worshipers of Japan. In this battle of the
ancients against the moderns the moderns won by their superior admira-
tion of antiquity. The Kangakusha, or (pro-) Chinese scholars, called their
own country barbarous, argued that all wisdom was Chinese, and con-
tented themselves with translating and commenting upon Chinese litera-
ture and philosophy. The Wagakusha, or (pro-) Japanese scholars, de-
nounced this attitude as obscurantist and unpatriotic, and called upon the
nation to turn its back upon China and renew its strength at the sources of
its own poetry and history. Mabuchi attacked the Chinese as an inherently
vicious people, exalted the Japanese as naturally good, and attributed the
lack of early or native Japanese literature and philosophy to the fact that
the Japanese did not need instruction in virtue or intelligence.*
Inspired by a visit to Mabuchi, a young physician by the name of Moto-
ori Norinaga devoted thirty-four years to writing a forty-four-volume
commentary on the Kojiki, or "Records of Ancient Events"— the classical
* From Sir E. Satow's paraphrase of Mabuchi's teaching: "In ancient times, when men's
dispositions were straightforward, a complicated system of morals was unnecessary1 ....
In those days it was unnecessary to have a doctrine of right and wrong. But the
Chinese, being bad at heart . . . were only good on the outside, and their bad acts
became of such magnitude that society was thrown into disorder. The Japanese, being
straightforward, could do without teaching.121
CHAP. XXIX ) POLITICAL AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS 875
repository of Japanese, especially of Shinto, legends. This commentary,
the Kojiki-den, was a virorous assault upon everything Chinese, in or out
of Japan. It boldly upheld the literal truth of the primitive stories that re-
counted the divine origin of the Japanese islands, emperors and people; and
under the very eyes of the Tokugawa regents it stimulated among the in-
tellectuals of Japan that movement back to their own language, ways and
traditions which was ultimately to revive Shinto as against Buddhism, and
restore the supremacy of the emperors over the shoguns. "Japan," wrote
Moto-ori, "is the country which gave birth to the Goddess of the Sun,
Amaterasu; and this fact proves its superiority over all other countries."128
His pupil Hirata carried on the argument after Moto-ori's death:
It is most lamentable that so much ignorance should prevail as to
the evidences of the two fundamental doctrines that Japan is the
country of the gods, and her inhabitants the descendants of the
gods. Between the Japanese people and the Chinese, Hindus, Rus-
sians, Dutch, Siamese, Cambodians, and other nations of the world,
there is a difference of kind rather than of degree. It was not out of
vainglory that the inhabitants of this country called it the land of
the gods. The gods who created all countries belonged, without ex-
ception, to the Divine Age, and were all born in Japan, so that
Japan is their native country, and all the world acknowledges the
appropriateness of the title. The Koreans were the first to become
acquainted with this truth, and from them it was gradually diffused
through the globe, and accepted by everyone. . . . Foreign countries
were of course produced by the power of the creator gods, but they
were not begotten by Izanagi and Izanami, nor did they give birth
to the Goddess of the Sun, which is the cause of their inferiority.1*
Such were the men and the opinions that established the Sonno Jo-i
movement to "honor the Emperor and expel the foreign barbarians." In
the nineteenth century that movement inspired the Japanese people to
overthrow the Shogunate and reestablish the supremacy of the Divine
House. In the twentieth it plays a living role in nourishing that fiery
patriotism which will not be content until the Son of Heaven rules all the
fertile millions of the resurrected East.
CHAPTER XXX
The Mind and Art of Old Japan
I. LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION
The language— Writing— Education
MEANWHILE the Japanese had borrowed their systems of writing and
education from the barbarian Chinese. Their language was peculiarly
their own, presumably Mongolian and akin to the Korean, but not demon-
strably derived from this or any other known tongue. It differed especially
from the Chinese in being polysyllabic and agglutinative, and yet simple; it
had few aspirates, no gutturals, no compound or final consonants (except 72);
and almost every vowel was melodiously long. The grammar, too, was a
natural and easy system; it dispensed with number and gender in its nouns,
with degrees of comparison in its adjectives, and with personal inflections in
its verbs; it had few personal pronouns, and no relative pronouns at all. On
the other hand there were inflections of negation and mood in adjectives and
verbs; troublesome "postpositions"— modifying suffixes— were used instead of
prepositions; and complex honorifics like "Your humble servant" and "Your
Excellency" took the place of the. first and second personal pronouns.
The language dispensed even with writing, apparently, until Koreans and
Chinese brought the art to Japan in the early centuries of our era; and then
the Japanese were content for hundreds of years to express their Italianly
beautiful speech in the ideographs of the Middle Kingdom. Since a complete
Chinese character had to be used for each syllable of a Japanese word,
Japanese writing, in the Nara age, was very nearly the most laborious ever
known. During the ninth century that law of economy which determines so
much of philology brought to the relief of Japan two simplified forms of
writing. In each of them a Chinese character, shortened into cursive form,
was used to represent one of the forty-seven syllables that constitute the
spoken speech of Japan; and this syllabary of forty -seven characters served
instead of an alphabet.* Since a large part of Japanese literature is in Chinese,
and most of the remainder is written not in the popular syllabary but in a
combination of Chinese characters and native alphabets, few Western scholars
* The katakana script reduced these syllabic symbols to straight lines— as in the "tab-
loid" press, the larger billboards, and the illuminated signs of modern Japan.1
876
CHAP. XXX ) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 877
have been able to master it in the original. Our knowledge of Japanese litera-
ture is consequently fragmentary and deceptive, and our judgments of it can
be of little worth. The Jesuits, harassed with these linguistic barriers, reported
that the language of the islands had been invented by the Devil to prevent the
preaching of the Gospel to the Japanese.*8
Writing remained for a long time a luxury of the higher classes; until the
latter part of the nineteenth century no pretense was made of spreading the
art among the people. In the Kyoto age the rich families maintained schools
for their children; and the emperors Tenchi and Mommu, at the beginning of
the eighth century, established at Kyoto the first Japanese university. Gradu-
ally a system of provincial schools was developed under governmental con-
trol; their graduates were eligible to enter the university, and those graduates
of the university who passed the required tests became eligible for public
office. The civil wars of the early feudal period broke down this educa-
tional progress, and Japan neglected the arts of the mind until the Tokugawa
Shogunate reorganized peace and encouraged learning and literature. lyeyasu
was scandalized to find that ninety per cent of the Samurai could not read or
write.5 In 1630 Hayashi Kazan established at Yedo a training-school in public
administration and Confucian philosophy, which later developed into the
University of Tokyo; and Kumazawa, in 1666, founded at Shizutani the first
provincial college. By allowing teachers to wear the sword and boast the
rank of the Samurai, the government induced students, doctors and priests to
set up private schools in homes or temples for the provision of elementary
education; in 1750 there were eight hundred such schools, with some forty
thousand students. All these institutions were for the sons of the Samurai;
merchants and peasants had to be content with popular lecturers, and only
prosperous women received any formal education. Universal education, in
Japan as in Europe, had to wait for the needs and compulsions of an industrial
life.6
* Printing, like writing, came from China as part of Buddhist lore; the oldest extant
examples of printing in the world are some Buddhist charms block-printed at the com-
mand of the Empress Shotoku in the year 770 A.D.* Movable type entered from Korea
about 1596, but the expense involved in printing a language still composed of thousands
of characters kept its use from spreading until the Restoration of 1858 opened the doors
to European influence. Even today a Japanese newspaper requires a font of several
thousand characters.4 Japanese typography, despite these difficulties, is one of the most
attractive forms of printing in our rime.
878 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
II. POETRY
The " Many oshu"— The "Kokinshu"— Characteristics of Japanese
poetry— Examples— The game of poetry—
The "hokka"-gamblers
The earliest Japanese literature that has come down to us is poetry, and
the earliest Japanese poetry is by native scholars accounted the best. One
of the oldest and most famous of Japanese books is the Many oshu, or
"Book of Ten Thousand Leaves," in which two editors -collected into
twenty volumes some 4,500 poems composed during the preceding four
centuries. Here in particular appeared the work of Hitomaro and Akahito,
the chief poetic glories of the Nara age. When his beloved died, and the
smoke from the funeral pyre ascended into the hills, Hitomaro wrote an
elegy briefer than In Memoriam:
Oh, is it my beloved, the cloud that wanders
In the ravine
Of the deep secluded Hatsuse Mountain?7
A further effort to preserve Japanese poetry from time's mortality was
made by the Emperor Daigo, who brought together eleven hundred poems
of the preceding one hundred and fifty years into an anthology known as
the Kokiushu— "Poems Ancient and Modern." His chief aide was the
poet-scholar Tsurayuki whose preface seems more interesting to us today
than the fragments which the book has brought down to us from his
laconic muse:
The poetry of Japan, as a seed, springs from the heart of man
creating countless leaves of language. ... In a world full of things
man strives to find words to express the impression left on his heart
by sight and sound. . . . And so the heart of man came to find ex-
pression in words for his joy in the beauty of blossoms, his wonder
at the song of birds, and his tender welcome of the mists that bathe
the landscapes, as well as his mournful sympathy with the evanescent
morning dew. . . . To verse the poets were moved when they saw
the ground white with snowy showers of fallen cherry blossoms on
spring mornings, or heard on autumn evenings the rustle of falling
leaves; or year after year gazed upon the mirror's doleful reflections
of the ravages of time, ... or trembled as they watched the ephem-
eral dewdrop quivering on the beaded grass.8
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 879
Tsurayuki well expressed the recurrent theme of Japanese poetry— the
moods and phases, the blossoming and decay, of nature in isles made scenic
by volcanoes, and verdant with abundant rain. The poets of Japan delight
in the less hackneyed aspects of field and woods and sea— trout splashing
in mountain brooks, frogs leaping suddenly into noiseless pools, shores
without tides, hills cut with motionless mists, or a drop of rain nestling like
a gem in a folded blade of grass. Often they interweave a song of love
with their worship of the growing world, or mourn elegiacally the brevity
of flowers, love and life. Seldom, however, does this nation of warriors
sing of war, and only now and then does its poetry lift the heart in hymns.
After the Nara period the great majority of the poems were brief; out of
eleven hundred in the Kokinshu all but five were in the pithy tanka form-
five lines of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables. In these poems
there is no rhyme, for the almost invariable vowel ending of Japanese
words would have left too narrow a variety for the poet's choice; nor is
there any accent, tone or quantity. There are strange tricks of speech:
"pillow words," or meaningless prefixes added for the sake of euphony;
"prefaces," or sentences prefixed to a poem to round out its form rather
than to develop its ideas; and "pivot words" used punningly in startling
diversities of sense to bind one sentence with the next. These, to the Japa-
nese, are devices sanctified by time, like alliteration or rhyme to the En-
glish; and their popular appeal does not draw the poet into vulgarity. On
the contrary these classic poems are essentially aristocratic in thought and
form. Born in a courtly atmosphere, they arc fashioned with an almost
haughty restraint; they seek perfection of modeling rather than novelty of
meaning; they suppress rather than express emotion; and they are too
proud to be anything but brief. Nowhere else have writers been so ex-
pressively reticent; it is as if the poets of Japan had had a mind to atone by
their modesty for the braggadocio of her historians. To write three pages
about the west wind, say the Japanese, is to show a plebeian verbosity; the
real artist must not so much think for the reader as lure him into active
thought; he must seek and find one fresh perception that will arouse in
him all the ideas and all the feelings which the Occidental poet insists on
working out in self-centered and monopolistic detail. Each poem, to the
Japanese, must be the quiet record of one moment's inspiration.
So we shall be misled if we seek in these anthologies, or in that Golden
Treasury of Japan, the Hyakzi-nin-isshu— "Single Verses by a Hundred
People"— any heroic or epic strain, any sustained or lyric flight; these poets,
880 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
like the rash wits of the Mermaid Tavern, were willing to hang their lives
on a line. So when Saigyo Hoshi, having lost his dearest friend, became a
monk, and mystically found in the shrines at Ise the solace he was seeking,
he wrote no Adonais, nor even a Lycidas, but these simple lines:
What it is
That dwelleth here
I know not;
Yet my heart is full of gratitude,
And the tears trickle down."
And when the Lady Kaga no Chiyo lost her husband she wrote, merely:
All things that seem
Are but
One dreamer's dream
I sleep 1 wake
How wide
The bed with none beside."
Then, having lost also her child, she added two lines:
Today, how far may he have wandered,
The brave hunter of dragon-flies! u
In the imperial circles at Nara and Kyoto the composition of tankas be-
came an aristocratic sport; female chastity, which in ancient India had re-
quired an elephant as its price, was often satisfied, at these courts, with
thirty-one syllables of poetry cleverly turned." It was a usual thing for the
emperor to entertain his guests by handing them words with which to
fashion a poem;18 and the literature of the time refers casually to people
conversing with one another in acrostic poetry, or reciting tankas as they
walked in the streets.14 Periodically, at the height of the Heian age, the
emperor arranged a poetry contest or tournament, in which as many as
fifteen hundred candidates competed before learned judges in the making
of tanka epigrams. In 95 1 a special Poetry Bureau was established for the
management of these jousts, and the winning pieces in each contest were
deposited in the archives of the institution.
In the sixteenth century Japanese poetry felt guilty of long-windedness,
and decided to shorten the tanka— originally the completion, by one person,
CHAP. XXX) THEMINDANDARTOFOLDJAPAN 88l
of a poem begun by another— into the hokku— * "single utterance" of
three lines, boasting of five, seven and five syllables, or seventeen in all. In
the Genroku age (1688-1704) the composition of these hokku became first
a fashion, then a craze; for the Japanese people resembles the American in
an emotional-intellectual sensitivity that makes for the rapid rise and fall of
mental styles. Men and women, merchants and warriors, artisans and
peasants neglected the affairs of life to match hokku epigrams, con-
structed at a moment's warning. The Japanese, with whom gambling is a
favorite passion, wagered so much money in hokku-composing contests
that some enterprising souls made a business of conducting them, fleecing
thousands of devotees daily, until at last the government was forced to
raid these poetical resorts and prohibit this new mercenary art." The most
distinguished master of the hokku was Matsura Basho (1643-94), whose
birth, it seemed to Yone Noguchi, "was the greatest happening in our
Japanese annals."1" Basho, a young Saimtrai, was so deeply moved by the
death of his lord and teacher that he abandoned the life of the court, re-
nounced all physical pleasures, gave himself to wandering, meditation and
teaching, and expressed his quiet philosophy in fragments of nature poetry
highly revered by Japanese literati as perfect examples of concentrated
suggestion:
The old pond,
Aye, and the sound of a frog leaping into the water.
Or
A stem of grass, whereon
A dragon-fly essayed to light."
III. PROSE
1. Fiction
Lady Murasaki—The "Tale of Genji"—hs excellence—Later
Japanese fiction—A humorist
If Japanese poems are too brief for the taste of the Western mind, we
may console ourselves with the Japanese novel, whose masterpieces run
into twenty, sometimes thirty, volumes.18 The most highly regarded of
them is the Genji Monogatari (literallv and undeniably "Gossip about
882 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
Genji"), which in one edition fills 4,234 pages.19 This delightful romance
was composed about the year 1001 A.D. by the Lady Murasaki no-Shikibu.
A Fujiwara of ancient blood, she married another Fujiwara in 997, but was
left a widow four years later. She dulled her sorrow by writing an his-
torical novel in fifty-four books. After filling all the paper she could find,
she laid sacrilegious hands upon the sacred sutras of a Buddhist temple, and
used them for manuscript;* even paper was once a luxury.
The hero of the tale is the son of an emperor by his favorite concubine
Kiritsubo, who is so beautiful that all the other concubines are jealous of
her, and actually tease her to death. Murasaki, perhaps exaggerating the
male's capacity for devotion, represents the Emperor as inconsolable.
As the years went by, the Emperor did not forget his lost lady;
and though many women were brought to the palace in the hope
that he might take pleasure in them, he turned from them all, believ-
ing that there was not anyone in the world like her whom he had
lost. . . . Continually he pined that fate should not have allowed
them to fulfil the vow which morning and evening was ever talked
of between them, the vow that their lives should be as the twin
birds that share a wing, the twin trees that share a bough.21
Genji grows up to be a dashing prince, with more looks than morals; he
passes from one mistress to another with the versatility of Tom Jones, and
cptmodes that conventional hero by his indifference to gender. He is a
woman's idea of a man— all sentiment and seduction, always brooding and
languishing over one woman or the next. Occasionally, "in great unhappi-
ness he returned to his wife's house."215 The Lady Murasaki retails his ad-
ventures gaily, and excuses him and herself with irresistible grace:
The young Prince would be thought to be positively neglecting
his duty if he did not indulge in a few escapades; and every one
would regard his conduct as perfectly natural and proper even when
it was such as they would not have dreamed of permitting to ordi-
nary people. ... I should indeed be very loath to recount in all their
detail matters which he took so much trouble to conceal, did I not
know that if you found that I had omitted anything you would at
once ask why, just because he was supposed to be an emperor's son,
I must needs put a favorable showing on his conduct by leaving out
CHAP. XXX) THEMINDANDARTOFOLDJAPAN 883
all his indiscretions; and you would soon be saying that this was no
history but a mere made-up tale designed to influence the judgment
of posterity. As it is, I shall be called a scandal-monger; but that I
cannot help."
In the course of his amours Genji falls ill, repents him of his adventures,
and visits a monastery for pious converse with a priest. But there he sees a
lovely princess (modestly named Murasaki), and thoughts of her distract
him as the priest rebukes him for his sins.
The priest began to tell stories about the uncertainty of this life
and the retributions of the life to come. Genji was appalled to think
how heavy his own sins had already been. It was bad enough to
think that he would have them on his conscience for the rest of his
present life. But then there was also the life to conic. What terrible
punishments he had to look forward to! And all the while the priest
was speaking Genji thought of his own wickedness. What a good
idea it would be to turn hermit, and live in some such place! . . .
But immediately his thoughts strayed to the lovely face which he
had seen that afternoon; and longing to know more of her he asked,
"Who lives with you here?"24
By the cooperation of the author Genji's first wife dies in childbirth, and
he is left free to give first place in his home to his new princess, Murasaki.*
It may be that the excellence of the translation gives this book an ex-
traneous advantage over other Japanese masterpieces that have been
rendered into English; perhaps Mr. Waley, like Fitzgerald, has improved
upon his original. If, for the occasion, we can forget our own moral code,
and fall in with one that permits men and women, as Wordsworth said of
those in Wilhelm Meister, to "mate like flies in the air," we shall derive
from this Tale of Genji the most attractive glimpse yet opened to us of the
beauties hidden in Japanese literature. Murasaki writes with a naturalness
and ease that soon turn her pages into the charming gossip of a cultured
friend. The men and women, above all the children, who move through
her leisurely pages are ingratiatingly real; and the world which she dc-
*The present writer regrets that the brevity of life has prevented his reading more
than the first of the four volumes into which Arthur Waley has so perfectly translated
Murasaki's talc.
884 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
scribes, though it is confined for the most part to imperial palaces and
palatial homes, has all the color of a life actually lived or seen.* It is an
aristocratic life, not much concerned with the cost of bread and love;
but within that limitation it is described without sensational resort to
exceptional characters or events. As Lady Murasaki makes Uma no-Kami
say of certain realistic painters:
Ordinary hills and rivers, just as they are, houses such as you may
see everywhere, with all their real beauty of harmony and form-
quietly to draw such scenes as this, or to show what lies behind
some intimate hedge that is folded away far from the world, and
thick trees upon some unheroic hill, and all this with befitting care
for composition, proportion and the life— such works demand the
highest master's utmost skill, and must needs draw the common
craftsman into a thousand blunders.28
No later Japanese novel has reached the excellence of Genji, or has had
so profound an influence upon the literary development of the language.27
During the eighteenth century fiction had another zenith, and various
novelists succeeded in surpassing the Lady Murasaki in the length of their
tales, or the freedom of their pornography.88 Santo Kioden published in
1791 an Edifying Story Book, but it proved so little to its purpose that the
authorities, under the law prohibiting indecency, sentenced him to be
handcuffed for fifty days in his own home. Santo was a vendor of tobacco-
pouches and quack medicines; he married a harlot, and made his first repu-
tation by a volume on the brothels of Tokyo. He gradually reformed the
morals of his pen, but could not unteach his public the habit of buying
great quantities of his books. Encouraged, he violated all precedents in the
history of Japanese fiction by demanding payment from the men who pub-
lished his works; his predecessors, it seemed, had been content with an in-
*Even into the ordinary home our Lady enters with understanding, and makes Uma
no-Kami express, about the year 1000, a modernistic plea for feminine education: "Then
there is the zealous housewife, who, regardless of her appearance, twists her hair behind
her ears, and devotes herself entirely to the details of our domestic welfare. The hus-
band, in his comings and goings about the world, is certain to see and hear many
things which he cannot discuss with strangers, but would gladly talk over with an
intimate who could listen with sympathy and understanding, some one who could laugh
with him or weep, as need be. It often happens, too, that some political event will
greatly perturb or amuse him, and he sits apart longing to tell some one about it. But
the wife only says, lightly, *What is the matter?' and shows no interest. This is apt
to be very trying."85
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 885
vitation to dinner. Most of the fiction writers were poor Bohemians,
whom the people classed with actors among the lowest ranks of society.2"
Less sensational and more ably written than Kioden's were the novels of
Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848), who, like Scott and Dumas, transformed
history into vivid romance. His readers grew so fond of him that he un-
wound one of his stories into a hundred volumes. Hokusai illustrated some
of Bakin's novels until, being geniuses, they quarreled and parted.
The j oiliest of these later novelists was Jippensha Ikku (d. 1831), the
Le Sage and Dickens of Japan. Ikku began his adult life with three mar-
riages, of which two were quickly ended by fathers-in-law who could not
understand his literary habits. He accepted poverty with good humor,
and, having no furniture, hung his bare walls with paintings of the furni-
ture he might have had. On holidays he sacrified to the gods with pictures
of excellent offerings. Being presented with a bathtub in the common
interest, he carried it home inverted on his head, and overthrew with ready
wit the pedestrians who fell in his way. When his publisher came to sec
him he invited him to take a bath; and while his invitation was being ac-
cepted he decked himself in the publisher's clothes, and paid his New
Year's Day calls in proper ceremonial costume. His masterpiece, the
Hizakurige, was published in twelve parts between 1802 and 1822, and
told a rollicking tale in the vein of The Posthumous Papers' of the Pick-
wick Club— Aston calls it "the most humorous and entertaining book in
the Japanese language."" On his deathbed Ikku enjoined his pupils to
place upon his corpse, before the cremation then usual in Japan, certain
packets which he solemnly entrusted to them. At his funeral, prayers hav-
ing been said, the pyre was lighted, whereupon it turned out that the
packets were full of firecrackers, which exploded merrily. Ikku had kept
his youthful promise that his life would be full of surprises, even after his
death.
2. History
The historians— Arai Hakuseki
We shall not find Japanese historiography so interesting as its fiction,
though we may have some difficulty in distinguishing them. The oldest sur-
viving work in Japanese literature is the Kojiki, or "Record of Ancient
Things," written in Chinese characters by Yasumaro in 712; here legend so
often takes the place of fact that the highest Shinto loyalty would be needed
to accept it as history.11 After the Great Reform of 645 the government
886 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
thought it advisable to transform the past again; and about 720 a new history
appeared, the Nihongi, or "Record of Nippon," written in the Chinese lan-
guage, and adorned with passages bravely stolen from Chinese works and
sometimes placed, without any fetichism of chronology, in the mouths of
ancient Japanese. Nevertheless the book was a more serious attempt to record
the facts than the Kojiki had been, and it provided the foundation for most
later histories of early Japan. From that time to this there have been many
histories of the country, each more patriotic than the last. In 1334 Kitabatake
wrote a "History of the True Succession of the Divine Monarchs"— the
Jintoshotoki—on this modest and now familiar note:
Great Yamato (Japan) is a divine country. It is only our land
whose foundations were first laid by the Divine Ancestor. It alone
has been transmitted by the Sun Goddess to a long line of her
descendants. There is nothing of this kind in foreign countries.
Therefore it is called the Divine Land.82
First printed in 1649, this work began that movement for the restoration of
the ancient faith and state which culminated in the passionate polemics of
Moto-ori. The very grandson of lycyasu, Mitsu-kuni, by his Dai Nihonshi
("The Great History of Japan," i85i)-a 24o-volume picture of the imperial
and feudal past—played a posthumous part in preparing his countrymen to
overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Perhaps the most scholarly and impartial of Japanese historians was Arai
Hakuseki, whose learning dominated the intellectual life of Yedo in the
second half of the seventeenth century. Arai smiled at the theology of the
orthodox Christian missionaries as "very childish,"33 but he was bold enough
to ridicule also some of the legends which his own people mistook for his-
tory.84 His greatest work, the Haiikampu, a thirty-volume history of the
Daimyo, is one of the marvels of literature; for though it must have required
much research, it appears to have been composed within a few months."
Arai derived something of his learning and judgment from his study of the
Chinese philosophers. When he lectured on the Confucian classics the Shogun
lyenobu, we are told, listened with rapt and reverent attention, in summer
refraining from brushing the mosquitoes from his head, in winter turning his
head away from the speaker before wiping his running nose.80 In his auto-
biography Arai paints a devout picture of his father, and shows the Japanese
citizen at his simplest and best:
Ever since I came to understand the heart of things, my memory
is that the daily routine of his life was exactly the same. He never
failed to get up an hour before daybreak. He then had a cold bath,
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 887
and did his hair himself. In cold weather the woman who was my
mother would propose to order hot water for him, but this he would
not allow, as he wished to avoid giving the servants trouble. When
he was over seventy, and my mother also was advanced in years,
sometimes, when the cold weather was unendurable, a lighted
brazier was brought in, and they lay down to sleep with their feet
against it. Beside the fire was placed a kettle with hot water, which
my father drank when he got up. Both of them honored the way
of Buddha. My father, when he had arranged his hair and adjusted
his clothing, never neglected to make obeisance to Buddha. . . .
After he was dressed he waited quietly for the dawn, and then went
out to his official duty. . . . He was never known to betray anger,
nor do I remember that, even when he laughed, he gave way to
boisterous mirth. Much less did he ever descend to violent language
when he had occasion to reprimand anyone. In his conversation he
used as few words as possible. His demeanor was grave. I have
never seen him startled, flurried, or impatient. . . . The room he
usually occupied he kept cleanly swept, had an old picture hung on
the wall, and a few flowers which were in season were set out in a
vase. He would spend the day looking at them. He painted a little
in black and white, not being fond of colors. When in good health
he never troubled the servant, but did everything for himself."
3. The Essay
The Lady Sei Shonagon—Kamo no-Chomei
Arai was an essayist as well as an historian, and made brilliant contribu-
tions to what is perhaps the most delightful department of Japanese litera-
ture. Here, as in fiction, a woman stands at the top; for Lady Sei Shona-
gon's "Pillow Sketches" (Makura Zoshi) is usually accorded the highest as
well as the earliest place in this field. Brought up in the same court and
generation as Lady Murasaki, she chose to describe the refined and scan-
dalous life about her in casual sketches whose excellence in the original
can only be guessed at by us from the charm that survives in translation.
Born a Fujiwara, she rose to be a lady in waiting to the Empress. On the
latter's death Lady Sei retired, some say to a convent, others say to poverty.
Her book shows no touch of either. She takes the easy morals of her time
according to the easy judgment of her time, and does not think too highly
of spoil-sport ecclesiastics.
888 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
A preacher ought to be a good-looking man. It is then easier to
keep your eyes fixed on his face, without v/hich it is impossible to
benefit by his discourse. Otherwise the eyes wander and you forget
to listen. Ugly preachers have therefore a grave responsibility. . . .
If preachers were of a more suitable age I should have pleasure in
giving a more favorable judgment. As matters actually stand, their
sins are too fearful to think of.88
She adds little lists of her likes and dislikes:
Cheerful things:
Coming home from an excursion with the carriages full to over-
flowing;
To have lots of footmen who make the oxen and the carriages
speed along;
A river-boat going down stream;
Teeth nicely blackened. . . .
Dreary things:
A nursery where a child has died;
A brazier with the fire gone out;
A coachman who is hated by his ox;
The birth of a succession of female children in the house of a
scholar.
Detestable things:
People who, when you are telling a story, break in with uOh,
I know," and give quite a different version from your
own. . . .
While on friendly terms with a man, to hear him sound the
praises of a woman whom he has known. . . .
A visitor who tells a long story when you are in a hurry. . . .
The snoring of a man whom you are trying to conceal, and
who has gone to sleep in a place where he has no busi-
ness. . . .
Fleas."
The Lady's only rival for the highest place in the Japanese essay is Kamo
no-Chomei. Being refused the succession to his father as the superior
guardian of the Shinto shrine of Kamo at Kyoto, Chomei became a Bud-
dhist monk, and at fifty retired to a contemplative life in a mountain hermit-
age. There he wrote his farewell to the busy world under the title of
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN
Hojoki (1212)— i.e., "The Record of Ten Feet Square." After describing
the difficulties and annoyances of city life, and the great famine of 1 181,*
he tells how he built himself a hut ten feet square and seven feet high, and
settled down contentedly to undisturbed philosophy and a quiet comrade-
ship with natural things. An American, reading him, hears the voice of
Thoreau in thirteenth-century Japan. Apparently every generation has
had its Walden Pond.
IV. THE DRAMA
The "No" plays — Their character — The popular stage — The
Japanese Shakespeare— Summary judgment
Last of all, and hardest to understand, is the Japanese drama. Brought
up in our English tradition of the theatre, from Henry IV to Mary of
Scotland, how shall we ever attune ourselves to tolerate what must seem to
us the fustian and pantomime of the No plays of Japan? We must forget
Shakespeare and go back to Everyman, and even farther to the religious)
origins of Greek and modern European drama; then we shall be oriented
to watch the development of the ancient Shinto pantomime, the ecclesias-
tical kagura dance, into that illumination of pantomime by dialogue which
constitutes the No (or lyrical) form of Japanese play. About the four-
teenth century Buddhist priests added choral songs to their processional
pantomimes; then they added individual characters, contrived a plot to give
them action as well as speech, and the drama was born.40
These plays, like the Greek, were performed in trilogies; and occasion-
ally Kyogcn, or farces ("mad words"), were acted in the intervals, to re-
lieve and facilitate the tension of emotion and thought. The first part of
the trilogy was devoted to propitiating the gods, and was hardly more
than a religious pantomime; the second was performed in full armor,
and was designed to frighten all evil spirits away; the third was of a
milder mood, and sought to portray some charming aspect of nature, or
some delightful phase of Japanese life.41 The lines were written for the
most part in blank verse of twelve syllables. The actors were men of stand-
ing, even among the aristocracy; a playbill survives which indicates that
Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and lyeyasu all participated as actors in a No play
about 1 5 So.43 Each actor wore a mask, carved out of wood with an artistry
that makes such masks a prize for the art collector of today. Scenery was
* His description of this has been quoted above, p. 852.
890 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
meagre; the passionate imagination of the audience could be relied upon
to create the background of the action. The stories were of the simplest,
and did not matter much: one of the most popular told of the impover-
ished Samurai who, to warm a wandering monk, cut down his most cher-
ished plants to make a fire; whereupon the monk turned out to be the
Regent, and gave the knight a goodly reward. But as we in the West may
go again and again to hear an opera whose story is old and perhaps ridicu-
lous, so the Japanese, even today, weep over this oft-told tale," because the
excellence of the acting renews on each occasion the power and sig-
nificance of the play. To the hasty and businesslike visitor such perform-
ances as he may find of these dramatized lyrics are rather amusing than im-
pressive; nevertheless a Japanese poet says of them: "Oh, what a tragedy
and beauty in the No stage! I always think that it would certainly be a
great thing if the No drama could be properly introduced into the West.
The result would be no small protest against the Western stage. It would
mean a revelation."44 Japan itself, however, has not composed such plays
since the seventeenth century, though it acts them devotedly today.
The history of the drama, in most countries, is a gradual change from
the predominance of the chorus to the supremacy of some individual role
—at which point, in most such sequences, development ends. As the his-
trionic art advanced in tradition and excellence in Japan it created popular
personalities who subordinated the play to themselves. Finally panto-
mime and religion sank to a subordinate role, and the drama became a
war of individuals, full of violence and romance. So was born the kabuki
sbibai, or popular theatre, of Japan. The first such theatre was established
about the year 1600 by a nun who, tired of convent walls, set up a stage at
Osaka, and practised dancing for a livelihood.45 As in England and France,
the presence of women on the stage seemed revolting and was forbidden;
and since the upper classes (except in safe disguise) shunned these per-
formances, the actors became almost a pariah caste, with no social incen-
tive to keep their profession from immorality and corruption. Men per-
force took the parts of women, and carried their imitation to such a point as
to deceive not only their audiences but themselves; many of these actors of
female roles remained women off the stage." Perhaps because lighting was
poor, the actors painted their faces with vivid colors, and wore robes of
gorgeous designs to indicate and dignify their roles. Back of the stage and
about it, usually, were choral and individual reciters, who sometimes car-
ried on the vocal parts while the actors confined themselves to pantomime.
The audience sat on the matted floor, or in tiers of boxes at either side.47
CHAP. XXX)' THEMINDANDARTOFOLDJAPAN 89!
The most famous name in the popular drama of Japan is Chikamatsu
Monzayemon (1653-1724). His countrymen compare him with Shake-
speare; English critics, resenting the comparison, accuse Chikamatsu of
violence, extravagance, bombast, and improbable plots, while granting him
"a certain barbaric vigor and luxuriance";48 apparently the similarity is
complete. Such foreign plays seem mere melodrama to us, because either
the meaning or the nuances of the language are concealed from us; but this
would probably be the effect of a Shakespearean play upon one unable to
appreciate its language or follow its thought. Chikamatsu seems to have
made undue use of lovers' suicides to cap his climaxes, in the style of
Romeo and Juliet; but perhaps with this excuse, that suicide was almost as
popular in Japanese life as on the stage.
A foreign historian, in these matters, can only report, but cannot judge.
Japanese acting, to a transient observer, seems less complex and mature, but
more vigorous and exalting than the European; Japanese plays seem more
plebeianly melodramatic, but less emasculated with superficial intellectual-
ism, than the plays of France, England and America today. So, reversely,
Japanese poetry seems slight and bloodless, and too aristocratically refined,
to us whose appetite has taken in lyrics of almost epic length (like Maud),
and epics of such dulness that doubtless Homer himself would nod if he
were compelled to read the accumulated Iliad. The Japanese novel seems
sensational and sentimental; and yet two of the supreme masterpieces of
English fiction— Tom Jones and Pickwick Papers— have apparently their
equal counterparts in the Genji Monogatari and the Hizakurige, and per-
haps Lady Murasaki excels in subtlety, grace and understanding even the
great Fielding himself. All things are dull that are remote and obscure; and
things Japanese will remain obscure to us until we can completely forget
our Western heritage and completely absorb Japan's.
V. THE ART OF LITTLE THINGS
Creative imitation— Music and the dance— "Inro" and "netsuke"—
Hidari Jingaro— Lacquer
The outward forms of Japanese art, like almost every external feature
of Japanese life, came from China; the inner force and spirit, like every-
thing essential in Japan, came from the people themselves. It is true that
the wave of ideas and immigration that brought Buddhism to Japan in the
seventh century brought also, from China and Korea, art forms and im-
892 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
pulses bound up with that faith, and no more original with China and
Korea than with Japan; it is true, even, that cultural elements entered not
only from China and India, but from Assyria and Greece— the features of
the Kamakura Buddha, for example, are more Grcco-Bactrian than Japa-
nese. But such foreign stimuli were used creatively in Japan; its people
learned quickly to distinguish beauty from ugliness; its rich men sometimes
prized objects of art more than land or gold,* and its artists labored with
self-effacing devotion. These men, though arduously trained through a
long apprenticeship, seldom received more than an artisan's wage; if for a
moment wealth came to them they gave it away with Bohemian reckless-
ness, and soon relapsed into a natural and comfortable poverty.60 But only
the artist-artisans of ancient Egypt and Greece, or of medieval China,
could rival their industry, taste and skill.
The very life of the people was instinct with art— in the neatness of their
homes, the beauty of their clothing, the refinements of their ornaments,
and their spontaneous addiction to song and dance. For music, like life,
had come to Japan from the gods themselves; had not Izanagi and Izanami
sung in choruses at the creation of the earth? A thousand years later the
Emperor Inkyo, we read, played on a wagon (a kind of zither), and his
Empress danced, at an imperial banquet given in 419 to signalize the open-
ing of a new palace. When Inkyo died a Korean king sent eighty musicians
to attend the funeral; and these players taught the Japanese new instru-
ments and new modes— some from Korea, some from China, some from
India. When the Daibutsu was installed in the temple of Todaiji at Nara
(752), music from T'ang Chinese masters was played in the ceremony;
and the Shoso-in, or Imperial Treasure-house, at Nara still shows the varied
instruments used in those ancient days. Singing and recitative, court music
and monastic dance music, formed the classical modes, while popular airs
were strummed on the biiva—a lute— or the saimscn—z three-stringed
banjo.51 The Japanese had no great composers, and wrote no books about
music; their simple compositions, played in five notes of the harmonic
minor scale, had no harmony, and no distinction of major and minor keys;
but almost every Japanese could play some one of the twenty instruments
which had come over from the continent; and any one of these, when
properly played, said the Japanese, would make the very dust on the ceil-
* Hideyoshi's generals, after successful campaigns, seem to have been content— occa-
sionally—to be rewarded not with new areas and revenues, but with rare pieces of
pottery or porcelain.4*
CHAP. XXX) THEMINDANDARTOFOLDJAPAN 893
ing dance.0 The dance itself enjoyed "a vogue unparalleled in any other
country""— not so much as an appendage to love as in the service of re-
ligious or communal ceremony; sometimes a whole village turned out in
costume to celebrate a joyful occasion with a universal dance. Professional
dancers entertained great audiences with their skill; and men as well as
women, even in the highest circles, gave much time to the art. When
Prince Genji, says the Lady Murasaki, danced the "Waves of the Blue
Sea" with his friend To no-Chujo, everyone was moved. "Never had the
onlookers seen feet tread so delicately, nor heads so exquisitely poised. . . .
So moving and beautiful was this dance that at the end of it the Emperor'g
eyes were wet, and all the princes and great gentlemen wept aloud."*4
Meanwhile all who could afford it adorned their persons not only with
fine brocades and painted silks, but with delicate objects characteristic, al-
most definitive, of the old Japan. Shrinking ladies flirted from behind fans
of alluring loveliness, while men flaunted netsuke, inro and expensively4
carved swords. The inro was a little box attached to the belt by a cord; it
was usually composed of several infolding cases carefully carved in ivory
or wood, and contained tobacco, coins, writing materials, or other casual
necessities. To keep the cord from slipping under the belt, it was bound at
the other end to a tiny toggle or netsuke (from ?ze, end, and tsuke, to
fasten), upon whose cramped surface some artist had fashioned, with lav-
ish care, the forms of deities or demons, philosophers or fairies, birds or
reptiles, fishes or insects, flowers or leaves, or scenes from the life of the
people. Here that impish humor in which Japanese art so far excels all others
found free and yet modest play. Only the most careful examination can
reveal the full subtlety and significance of these representations; but even
a glance at this microcosm of fat women and priests, of agile monkeys and
delightful bugs, cut upon less than a cubic inch of ivory or wood, brings
home to the student the unique and passionately artistic quality of the
Japanese people.*
Hidari (i.e., "left-handed") Jingaro was the most famous of Japanese
sculptors in wood. Legend told how he had lost an arm and gotten a
name: when an offended conqueror demanded of Jingaro's Daimyo the
life of his daughter, Jingaro carved a severed head so realistically that the
conqueror ordered the artist's left hand to be cut off as punishment for
killing the daughter of his lord." It was Jingaro whose chisel formed the
* The author is indebted to Mr. Adolf Kroch of Chicago for permission to examine
his fine* collection of netsuke and into.
894 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
elephants and the sleeping cat at the shrine of lyeyasu at Nikko, and the
"Gate of the Imperial Envoy" at the Nishi-Hongwan Temple in Kyoto.
On the inner panels of this gate the artist told the story of the Chinese sage
who washed his ear because it had been contaminated by a proposal that
he should accept the throne of his country, and the austere cowherd who
quarreled with the sage for thus defiling the river.60 But Jingaro was merely
the most characterful of the now nameless artists who adorned a thousand
structures with lovingly carved or lacquered wood. The lacquer tree
found in the islands a peculiarly congenial habitat, and was nourished with
skilful care. The artisans sometimes covered with successive coats of
lacquer, cotton and lacquer a form chiseled in wood; but more often they
went to the pains of modeling a statue in clay, making from this a hollow
mould, and then pouring into the mould several layers of lacquer, each
thicker than before." The Japanese carver lifted wood to a full equality
with marble as a material for art, and filled shrines, mausolca and palaces
with the fairest wood-decoration known in Asia.
VI. ARCHITECTURE
Temples— Palaces— The shrine of lyeyasu— Howes
In the year 594 the Empress Suiko, being convinced of the truth or
utility of Buddhism, ordered the building of Buddhist temples throughout
her realm. Prince Shotoku, who was entrusted with carrying out this edict,
brought in from Korea priests, architects, wood-carvers, bronze found-
ers, clay modelers, masons, gilders, tile-makers, weavers, and other skilled
artisans.58 This vast cultural importation was almost the beginning of art
in Japan, for Shinto had frowned upon ornate edifices and had counte-
nanced no figures to misrepresent the gods. From that moment Buddhist
shrines and statuary filled the land. The temples were essentially like
those of China, but more richly ornamented and more delicately carved.
Here, too, majestic torii, or gateways, marked the ascent or approach
to the sacred retreat; bright colors adorned the wooden walls, great beams
held up a tiled roof gleaming under the sun, and minor structures— a drum-
tower, e. g., or a pagoda— mediated between the central sanctuary and the
surrounding trees. The greatest achievements of the foreign artists was
the group of temples at Horiuji, raised under the guidance of Prince
Shotoku near Nara about the year 616. It stands to the credit of the most
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 895
living of building materials that one of these wooden edifices has survived
unnumbered earthquakes and outlasted a hundred thousand temples of
stone; and it stands to the glory of the builders that nothing erected in
later Japan has surpassed the simple majesty of this oldest shrine. Per-
haps as beautiful, and only slightly younger, are the temples of Nara
itself, above all the perfectly proportioned Golden Hall of the Todaiji
Temple there; Nara, says Ralph Adams Cram, contains "the most precious
architecture in all Asia."00
The next zenith of building in Japan came under the Ashikaga Sho-
gunate. Yoshimitsu, resolved to make Kyoto the fairest capital on earth,
built for the gods a pagoda 360 feet high; for his mother the Takakura
Palace, of which a single door cost 20,000 pieces of gold ($150,000); for
himself a Flower Palace, that consumed $5,000,000; and the Golden
Pavilion of Kinkakuji for the glory of all.00 Hideyoshi too tried to rival
Kublai Khan, and built at Momoyama a "Palace of Pleasure" which his
whim tore down again a few years after its completion; we may judge
its magnificence from the "day long portal" removed from it to adorn
the temple of Nishi-Hongwan; all day long, said its admirers, one might
gaze at that carved portal without exhausting its excellence. Kano Yeitoku
played Ictinus and Pheidias to Hideyoshi, but adorned his buildings with
Venetian splendor rather than with Attic restraint; never had Japan, or
Asia, seen such abounding decoration before. Under Hideyoshi, too, the
gloomy Castle of Osaka took form, to dominate the Pittsburgh of Japan,
and become the death-place of his son.
lyeyasu inclined rather to philosophy and letters than to art; but after
his death his grandson, lycmitsu, content himself with a wooden shanty
for his palace, lavished the resources of Japanese wealth and art to build
around the ashes of lyeyasu at Nikko the fairest memorial ever raised to
any individual in the Far East. I lere, ninety miles from Tokyo, on a quiet
hill reached by a shaded avenue of stately cryptomerias, the architects of
the Shogun laid down first a series of spacious and gradual approaches,
then an ornate but lovely Yo-mci-mon Gate, then, by a brook crossed
with a sacred and untouchable bridge, a scries of rnausolea and temples in
lacquered wood, femininely beautiful and frail. The decoration is extrava-
gant, the construction is weak, the omnipresent red paint flares like a
hectic rouge amid the modest green of the trees; and yet a country in-
carnadined with blossoms every spring may need brighter colors to express
its spirit than those that might serve and please a less impassioned race.
896 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
We cannot quite call this architecture great, for the demon of earth-
quake has willed that Japan should build on a timid scale, and not pile
stones into the sky to crash destructively when the planet wrinkles its
skin. Hence the homes are of wood and seldom rise beyond a story or
two; only the repeated experience of fire and the reiterated commands of
the government prevailed upon the citizens of the cities, when they could
afford it, to cover their wooden cottages and palaces with roofs of tile.
The aristocracy, unable to raise their mansions into the clouds, spread
them spaciously over the earth, despite an imperial edict limiting the size
of a dwelling to 240 yards square. A palace, was rarely one building;
usually it was a main structure connected by covered walks with sub-
ordinate edifices for various groups in the family. There was no distinction
of dining-room, living-room or bedroom; the same chamber could serve
any purpose, for at a moment's notice a table might be laid down upon
the matted floor, or the rolled up bedding might be taken from its hiding-
place and spread out for the night. Sliding panels or removable partitions
separated or united the rooms, and even the latticed or windowed walls
were easily folded up to give full play to the sun, or the cooling evening
air. Pretty blinds of split bamboo offered shade and privacy. Windows
were a luxury; in the poorer homes the summer light found many open-
ings, which in winter were blocked up with oiled paper to keep out the
cold. Japanese architecture gives the appearance of having been born in
the tropics, and of having been transported too recklesssly into islands that
stretch up their necks to shivering Kamchatka. In the more southern towns
these fragile and simple homes have a style and beauty of their own, and
offer appropriate dwellings for the once gay children of the sun.
VII. METALS AND STATUES
Swords— Mirrors—The Trinity of Horiuji— Colossi— Religion
and sculpture
The sword of the Samurai was stronger than his dwelling, for the metal-
workers of Japan spent themselves on making blades superior to those of
Damascus or Toledo,'1 sharp enough to sever a man from shoulder to
thigh at a blow, and ornamented with guards and handles so highly deco-
rated, or so heavily inlaid with gems, that they were not always perfectly
adapted to homicide. Other workers in metal made bronze mirrors so
CHAP. XXX) THE MINDANDARTOFOLDJAPAN 897
brilliant that legends arose to commemorate their perfection. So a peasant,
having bought a mirror for the first time, thought that he recognized in it
the face of his dead father; he hid it as a great treasure, but so often con-
sulted it that his suspicious wife ferreted it out, and was horrified to find
in it the picture of a woman about her own age, who was apparently her
husband's mistress.02 Still other artisans cast tremendous bells, like the
forty-nine-ton monster at Nara (732 A.D.), and brought from them a
sweeter tone than our clanging metal clappers elicit in the West, by strik-
ing a boss on the outer surface of the bell with a swinging beam of wood.
The sculptors used wood or metal rather than stone, since their soil
was poor in granite and marble; and yet, despite all difficulties of material,
they came to surpass their Chinese and Korean teachers in this most
definitive of all the arts— for every other art secretly emulates sculpture's
patient removal of the inappropriate. Almost the earliest, and perhaps the
greatest, masterpiece of sculpture in Japan is the bronze Trinity at Horiuji
—a Buddha seated on a lotus bud between two BodbisatFivas, before a
screen and halo of bronze only less beautiful than the stone lacery of
Aurangzeb's screen in the Taj Mahal. We do not know whose hands
reared these temples and built this statuary; we may admit Korean teachers,
Chinese examples, Indian motives, even Greek influences coming down
from far Ionia across a thousand years; but we are sure that this Trinity
is among the most signal accomplishments in the history of art.*
Possibly because their stature was short, and their bodies could hardly
contain all the ambitions and capacities of their souls, the Japanese took
pleasure in building colossi, and had better success in this questionable
art than even the Egyptians. In the year 747, an epidemic of smallpox
having broken out in Japan, the Emperor Shomu commissioned Kimimaro
to cast a gigantic Buddha in propitiation of the gods. For this purpose
Kimimaro used 437 tons of bronze, 288 pounds of gold, 165 pounds of
* Perhaps the great Shotoku Taishi, statesman and artist, had something to do with
this achievement, for we know that he plied the chisel, and cut many statues in wood.6*
Kobo Daishi (ca. 816) was a sculptor as well as a painter, a scholar and a saint;
Hokusai, to suggest his versatility, pictured him wielding five brushes at once, with
hands and feet and mouth.*4 Unkei (1180-1220) made characterful portrait-busts of him-
relf and many priests, and carved delightfully terrible figures of Hell's Supreme Court,
;»nd those snarling gods whose function it was to frighten away, with the ugliness of
their faces, all spirits of evil. His father Kokei, his son Jokci, and his pupil Jokakr.
him to make the Japanese supreme in the art of sculpturing wood.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
mercury, seven tons of vegetable wax, and several tons of charcoal. Two
years and seven attempts were required for the work. The head was
cast in a single mould, but the body was formed of several metal plates
soldered together and thickly covered with gold. More impressive to the
foreign eye than this saturnine countenance at Nara is the Daibutsu of
Kamakura, cast of bronze in 1252 by Ono Goroyemon; here, perhaps be-
cause the colossus sits on an elevation in the open air, within a pleasant
entourage of trees, the size seems to accord with the purpose, and the artist
has expressed with remarkable simplicity the spirit of Buddhist contempla-
tion and peace. Once a temple housed the figure, as still is the case at Nara;
but in 1495 a great tidal wave destroyed both the temple and the town,
leaving the bronze philosopher serene amid widespread destruction, suffer-
ing and death. Hidcyoshi too built a colossus at Kyoto; for five years fifty
thousand men labored at this Buddha, and the great Taiko himself, clad
in the garb of a common laborer, sometimes helped them conspicuously at
their task. But hardly had it been erected when, in 1596, an earthquake
threw it down, and scattered the wreckage of its sheltering sanctuary about
its head. Hidcyoshi, says Japanese story, shot an arrow at the fallen idol,
saying, scornfully, "I placed you here at great expense, and you cannot
even defend your own temple."00
From such colossi to dangling netsuke Japanese sculpture ran the range
of every figure and every size. Sometimes its masters, like Takamura to-
day, gave years of labor to figures hardly a foot tall, and took delight in
representing gnarled octogenarians, jolly gourmands and philosophic friars.
It was good that humor sustained them, for most of the gains that came
from their toil went to their subtle employers rather than to themselves,
and in their larger works they were much harassed by conventions of sub-
ject and treatment laid upon them by the priests. The priests wanted gods,
not courtesans, from the sculptors; they wished to inspire the people to
piety, or to fashion their virtues with fear, rather than to arouse in them
the sense and ecstasy of beauty. Bound hand and soul to religion, sculp-
ture decayed when faith lost its warmth and power; and, as in Egypt, the
stiffness of conventions, when piety had fled, became the rigor of death.
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 899
VIII. POTTERY
The Chinese stimulus— The potters of Hizen— Pottery and tea—
HOIV Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain fro?n Hizen
to Kaga—The nineteenth century
In a sense it is not quite just to Japan to speak of her importing civiliza-
tion from Korea and China, except in the sense in which northwestern
Europe took its civilization from Greece and Rome. We might also view all
the peoples of the Far East as one ethnic and cultural unity, in which each
part, like the provinces of one country, produced in its time and place an art
and culture akin to and dependent upon the art and culture of the rest. So
Japanese pottery is a part and phase of Far Eastern ceramics, fundamentally
like the Chinese, and yet stamped with the characteristic delicacy and fineness
of all Japanese work. Until the coming of the Korean artisans in the seventh
century, Japanese pottery was merely an industry, moulding crude materials
for common use; there was, apparently, no glazed pottery in the Far East be-
fore the eighth century, much less any porcelain.0" The industry became an
art largely as a result of the entrance of tea in the thirteenth century. Chinese
tea-cups of Sung design came in with tea, and aroused the admiration of the
Japanese. In the year 1223 Kato Shirozemon, a Japanese potter, made his
way perilously to China, studied ceramics there for six years, returned to set
up his own factory at Seto, and so far surpassed all preceding pottery in the
islands that Seto-monoy or Seto-ivarc, became a generic name for all Japanese
pottery, just as chinaivare, in the seventeenth century, became the English
term for porcelain. The Shogun Yoritomo made Shirozcmon's future by
setting the fashion of rewarding minor services with presents of Shirozemon's
tea-jars, filled with the new marvel of powdered tea. Today the surviving
specimens of this Toshiro-yaki* are accounted almost beyond price; they arc
swathed in costly brocade, and kept in boxes of the finest lacquer, while their
owners are spoken of with bated breath as the aristocracy of connoisseurs."
Three hundred years later another Japanese, Shonzui, was lured to China to
study its famous potteries. On his return he established a factory at Arita,
in the province of Hizen. He was harassed, however, by the difficulty of
finding in the soil of his country minerals as well adapted as those of China
to make a fine pate; and it was said of his products that one of their main
ingredients was the bones of his artisans. Nevertheless Shonzui's wares of
Mohammedan blue were so excellent that the Chinese potters of the eight-
eenth century did their best to imitate them for export under his counter-
•Toshiro was another name for Shirozemon; yaki means ware.
900 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
feited name; and the extant examples of his work are now as highly valued as
the rarest paintings of Japan's greatest masters of the brush." About 1605 a
Korean, Risampei, discovered at Izumi-yama, in the Arita district, immense
deposits of porcelain stone; and from that moment Hizcn became the center
of the ceramic industry in Japan. In Arita, too, labored the famous Kakiemon,
who, after learning the art of enameling from a Chinese ship-master, made his
name almost synonymous with delicately decorated enameled porcelain.
Dutch merchants shipped large quantities of Hizen products to Europe from
the port of Arita at Imari; 44,943 pieces went to Holland alone in the year
1664. This brilliant Imari-yaki became the rage in Europe, and inspired
Aebrcgt de Keiser to inaugurate the golden age of Dutch ceramics in his
factories at Delft.
Meanwhile the rise of the tea ceremony had stimulated a further develop-
ment in Japan. In 1578 Nobunaga, at the suggestion of the tea-master Rikyu,
gave a large order for cups and other tea utensils to a family of Korean
potters at Kyoto. A few years later Hideyoshi rewarded the family with a
gold seal, and made its wares, the Raku-yaki, almost de rigueur for the ritual
of drinking tea. Hideyoshi's generals returned from their unsuccessful in-
vasion of Korea with numerous captives, among whom, by a discrimination
unusual in warriors, were many artists. In 1596 Shimazu Yoshihiro brought
to Satsuma a hundred skilled Koreans, including seventeen potters; and these
men, with their successors, established throughout the world the high repu-
tation of Satsuma for that richly colored glazed ware to which an Italian
town has given our name of faience. But the greatest Japanese master in this
branch of the art was the Kyoto potter Ninsci. Not only did he originate
enameled faience, but he gave to his products a grace and proud restraint
that have made them precious to collectors ever since, so that his mark has
been more often counterfeited than that of any other artist in Japan.80 Be-
cause of his work, decorated faience mounted to the intensity of a craze in
the capital, and in some quarters of Kyoto every second house was turned
into a miniature pottery.70 Only less famous than Ninsei was Kenzan, older
brother of the painter Korin.
The romance that so often lurks behind ceramics appears in the story of
how Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga. An
excellent bed of potter's stone having been discovered near the village of
Kutani, the feudal lord of the province resolved to establish a porcelain in-
dustry there; and Goto was sent to Hizen to study its methods of firing and
design. But the secrets of the potters were so carefully concealed from out-
siders that Goto for a while was baffled. Finally he disguised himself as a
servant, and accepted a menial place in the household of a potter. After three
years his master admitted him to a pottery, and there Goto worked for four
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 90 1
years more. Then he deserted the wife whom he had married at Hizen and
the children whom she had borne to him, and fled to Kaga, where he gave
his lord a full report of the methods he had learned. From that time on
(1664) the potters of Kutani became masters, and Kutani-yaki rivaled the
best wares of Japan.71
The Hizcn potteries retained their leadership throughout the eighteenth
century, largely as a result of the benevolent care which the feudal lord of
Hiraclo lavished upon the workmen in his factories; for a century (1750-
1843) the blue Michawaki wares of Hirado stood at the head of Japanese
porcelains. In the nineteenth century Zcngoro Hozen brought the leadership
to Kyoto by clever imitations that often surpassed his models, so that some-
times it became impossible to decide which was the original and which was
the copy. In the final quarter of the century Japan developed cloisonne
enameling from the crude condition in which it had remained since its entry
from China, and took the lead of the world in this field of ceramics.™ Other
branches deteriorated during the same period, for the rising demand of
Europe for Japanese pottery led to a style of exaggerated decoration alien to
the native taste, and the habits engendered in meeting these foreign orders
affected the skill and weakened the traditions of the art. Here, as every-
where, the coming of industry has been for a while a blight; mass produc-
tion has taken the place of quality, and mass consumption has replaced dis-
criminating taste. Perhaps, after invention has run its fertile course, and social
organization and experience have spread the gift of leisure and taught its
creative use, the curse may be turned into a blessing; industry may lavish
comforts upon the majority of men, while the worker, after paying his
lowered tribute of hours to the machine, may once again become an artisan,
and turn the mechanical product, by loving individual treatment, into a work
of personality and art.
IX. PAINTING
Difficulties of the subject— Methods and materials—Forms and
ideals— Korean origins and Buddhist inspiration— The Tosa
School— The return to China— Sesshiu— The Kano School
—Koyetsu and Korin—The Realistic School
Japanese painting, even more than the other topics that have demanded
a place in these pages, is a subject that only specialists should touch; and if
it is included here, along with other esoteric realms wherein angels have
feared to tread, it is in the hope that through this veil of errors some
glimpse may come, to the reader, of the fulness and quality of Japanese
Q02 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
civilization. The masterpieces of Japanese painting cover a period of
twelve hundred years, are divided amongst a complex multiplicity of
schools, have been lost or injured in the flow of time, and are nearly
all hidden away in private collections in Japan.* Those few chef-d'oeuvres
that are open to alien study arc so different in form, method, style and
material from Western pictures that no competent judgment can be passed
upon them by the Occidental mind.
First of all, like their models in China, the paintings of Japan were once
made with the same brush that was used in writing, and, as in Greece, the
word for writing and for painting was originally one; painting was a
graphic art. This initial fact has determined half the characteristics of Far
Eastern painting, from the materials used to the subordination of color to
line. The materials are simple: ink or water-colors, a brush, and absorbent
paper or silk. The labor is difficult: the artist works not erect but on his
knees, bending over the silk or paper on the floor; and he must learn to con-
trol his stroke so as to make seventy-one different degrees or styles of
touch." In the earlier centuries, when Buddhism ruled the art of Japan,
frescoes were painted, much in the manner of Ajanta or Turkestan; but
nearly all the extant works of high repute take the form either of makimono
(scrolls), kakemono (hangings), or screens. These pictures were made
not to be arranged indigestibly in picture galleries— for there are no such
galleries in Japan—but to be viewed in private by the owner and his
friends, or to form a part of some decorative scheme in a temple, a palace
or a home. They were vciy seldom portraits of specific personalities; us-
ually they were glimpses of nature, or scenes of martial action, or strokes
of humorous or satirical observation of the ways of animals, women and
men.
They were poems of feeling rather than representations of things, and
were closer to philosophy than to photography. The Japanese artist let
realism alone, and rarely tried to imitate the external form of reality. He
scornfully left out shadows as irrelevant to essences, preferring to paint in
plain air, with no modeling play of light and shade; and he smiled at West-
ern insistence on the perspective reduction of distant things. "In Japanese
painting," said Ilokusai, with philosophic tolerance, "form and color are
represented without any attempt at relief, but in European methods relief
and illusion are sought for.'"4 The Japanese artist wished to convey a feel-
* Perhaps the best of all collections of the Kano School— Mr. Bcppu's at Tokyo— was
almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of 1923.
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 903
ing rather than an object, to suggest rather than to represent; it was un-
necessary, in his judgment, to show more than a few significant elements
in a scene; as in a Japanese poem, only so much should be shown as would
arouse the appreciative mind to contribute to the esthetic result by its
own imagination. The painter too was a poet, and valued the rhythm
of line and the music of forms infinitely more than the haphazard shape
and structure of things. And like the poet he felt that if he were true to
his own feeling it would be realism enough.
It was probably Korea that brought painting to the restless empire that
now has conquered her. Korean artists, presumably, painted the flowing and
colorful frescoes of the Horiuji Temple, for there is nothing in the known
history of Japan before the seventh century that could explain the sudden
native achievement of such faultless excellence. The next stimulus came
directly from China, through the studies there of the Japanese priests Kobo
Daishi and Dengyo Daishi; on his return to Japan in 806 Kobo Daishi gn\<
himself to painting as well as to sculpture, literature and piety, and sonic of
the oldest masterpieces are from his many-sided brush. Buddhism stimulated
art in Japan, as it had done in China; the Zen practice of meditation lent it-
self to brooding crcntiveness in color and form almost as readily as in philoso-
phy and poetry; and visions of Amida Buddha became as frequent in Japa-
nese art as Annunciations and Crucifixions on the walls and canvases of the
Renaissance. The priest Ycishin Sozu (d. 1017) was the Fra Angclico and El
Greco of this age, whose risings and desccndings of Amida made him the
greatest religious painter in the history of Japan. By this time, however,
Kosc no-Kanaoka (fl. ca. 950) had begun the secularization of Japanese paint-
ing; birds, flowers and animals began to rival gods and saints on the scrolls.
But Kosc's brush still thought in Chinese terms, and moved along Chinese
lines. It was not till the suspension of intercourse with China in the ninth
century had given Japan the first of five centuries of isolation that she began
to paint her own scenery and subjects in her own way. About 1 1 50, under
the patronage of imperial and aristocratic circles at Kyoto, a national school
of painting arose which protested against imported motives and styles, and
set itself to decorate the luxurious homes of the capital with the flowers and
landscapes of Japan. The school had almost as many names as it had masters:
Yamato-riu, or Japanese Style; Waga-riu, again meaning Japanese Style;
Kasuga, after its reputed founder; and finally the Tosa School, after its prin-
cipal representative in the thirteenth century, Tosa Gon-no-kumi; thereafter
to the end of its history the name Tosa was borne by all the artists of the
line. They deserved their nationalist name, for there is nothing in Chinese
904 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
art that corresponds to the ardor and dash, the variety and humor, of the
narrative scrolls of love and war which came from the brushes of this group.
Takayoshi, about 1010, painted in colors gorgeous illustrations of the seduc-
tive tale of Genji; Toba Sojo amused himself by drawing lively satires of the
priestly and other scoundrels of his time, under the guise of monkeys and
frogs; Fujiwara Takanobu, towards the end of the twelfth century, finding
his high lineage worthless in terms of rice and sake, turned to the brush for a
living, and drew great portraits of Yoritomo and others, quite unlike any-
thing yet done in China; his son Fujiwara Nobuzane patiently painted the
portraits of thirty-six poets; and in the thirteenth century Kasuga's son,
Keion, or someone else, drew those animated scrolls which are among the
world's most brilliant achievements in the field of draughtsmanship.
Slowly these native sources of inspiration seemed to dry up into conven-
tional forms and styles, and Japanese art turned once more for nourishment
to the new schools of painting that had arisen in the China of the Sung
Renaissance. The impulse to imitation was for a time uncontrolled; Japanese
artists who had never seen the Middle Kingdom spent their lives in painting
Chinese characters and scenes. Cho Dcnsu painted sixteen Rakan (Lohans,
Arhats, Buddhist saints), now among the treasures of the Freer Gallery in
Washington; Shubun took the precaution of being born and reared in China,
so that, on coming to live in Japan, he could paint Chinese landscapes from
memory as well as from imagination.
It was during this second Chinese mood of Japanese painting that the
greatest figure in all the pictorial art of Japan appeared. Sesshiu was a
Zen priest at Sokokuji, one of the several art schools established by Yosh-
imitsu, the Ashikaga Shogim. Even as a youth he astonished his townsmen
with his draughtsmanship; and legend, not knowing how to express its
awe, told how, when he was tied to a post for misbehavior, he had drawn
with his toes such realistic mice that they came to life and bit through the
cords that bound him.76 Hungry to know the masters of Ming China at
first hand, he secured credentials from his religious superiors as well as
from the Sbogun, and sailed across the sea. lie was disappointed to find
that Chinese painting was in decay, but he consoled himself with the
varied life and culture of the great kingdom, and went back to his own
land filled and inspired with a thousand ideas. The artists and nobles of
China, says a pretty tale, accompanied him to the vessel which was to take
him back to Japan, and showered white paper upon him with requests
that he should paint a few strokes, if no more, upon them and send them
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 905
back; hence, according to this story, his pen name Sesshiu, meaning "Ship
of Snow."79 Arrived in Japan, he seems to have been welcomed as a prince,
and to have been offered many emoluments by the Shogun Yoshimasa;
but (if we may believe what we read) he refused these favors, and retired
to his country parish in Choshu. Now he threw off, as if each were a mo-
ment's trifle, one masterpiece after another, until nearly every phase of
Chinese scenery and life had taken lasting form under his brush. Seldom
had China, never had Japan, seen paintings so various in scope, so vigorous
in conception and execution, so decisive in line. In his old age the artists
of Japan made a path to his door and honored him, even before his death,
as a supreme artist. Today a picture of Sesshiu is to a Japanese collector
what a Leonardo is to a European; and legend, which transforms in-
tangible opinions into pretty tales, tells how one possessor of a Sesshiu,
finding himself caught in a conflagration beyond possibility of escape,
slashed open his body with his sword, and plunged into his abdomen the
priceless scroll— which was later found unharmed within his half -consumed
corpse.77
The ascendancy of Chinese influence continued among the many artists
patronized by the feudal lords of the Ashikaga and Tokugawa Shogunatcs.
Each baronial court had its official painter, who was commissioned to train
hundreds of young artists who might be turned, at a moment's notice, to the
decoration of a palace. The temples now were almost ignored, for art was
being secularized in proportion as wealth increased. Towards the end of the
fifteenth century Kano Masanobu established at Kyoto, under Ashikaga
patronage, a school of secular painters known from his first name, and de-
voted to upholding the severely classical and Chinese traditions in Japanese
art. His son, Kano Motonobu, reached in this direction a mastery second
only to that of Sesshiu himself. A story told of him illustrates admirably the
concentration of mind and purpose that constitutes the greater part of genius.
Having been commissioned to paint a series of cranes, Motonobu was dis-
covered, evening after evening, walking and behaving like a crane. It turned
out that he imitated, each night, the crane that he planned to paint the fol-
lowing day. A man must go to bed with his purpose in order to wake up to
fame. Motonobu's grandson, Kano Ycitoku, though a scion of the Kano line,
developed under the protection of Hideyoshi an ornate style all the world
away from the restrained classicism of his progenitors. Tanyu transferred the
seat of the school from Kyoto to Yedo, took service under the Tokugawas,
and helped to decorate the mausoleum of lyeyasu at Nikko. Gradually,
906 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
despite these adaptations to the spirit of the times, the Kano dynasty ex-
hausted its impetus, and Japan turned to other masters for fresh beginnings.
About 1660 a new group of painters arrived on the scene, named, from its
leaders, the Koyetsu-Korin School. In the natural oscillation of philosophies
and styles, the Chinese manners and subjects of Sesshiu and Kano seemed now
conservative and worn out; and the new artists turned to domestic scenes and
motives for their subject-matter and inspiration. Koyetsu was a man of such
diverse talents as bring to mind Carlyle's jealous claim that he had never
known any great man who could not have been any sort of a great man; for
he was distinguished as a calligrapher, a painter, and a designer in metal, lac-
quer and wood. Like William Morris he inaugurated a revival of fine print-
ing, and supervised a village in which his craftsmen pursued their varied arts
under his direction.78 His only rival for the first place among the painters of
the Tokugawa age was Korin, that astonishing master of trees and flowers,
who, his contemporaries tell us, could with one stroke of his brush place a
leaf of iris upon the silk and make it live.™ No other painter has been so
purely and completely Japanese, or so typically Japanese in the taste and
delicacy of his work.*
The last of the historic schools of Japanese painting in the strictest sense
was founded at Kyoto in the eighteenth century by Maniyami Okyo. A man
of the people, Okyo, stimulated by some knowledge of European painting,
resolved to abandon the now thinned-out idealism and impressionism of the
older style, and to attempt a realistic description of simple scenes from every-
day life. He became especially fond of drawing animals, and kept many
species of them about him as objects of his brush. Having painted a wild
boar, he showed his work to hunters, and was disappointed to find that they
thought his pictured boar was dead. He tried again and again, until at last
they admitted that the boar might not be dead but merely asleep.81 Since the
aristocracy at Kyoto was penniless, Okyo had to sell his pictures to the
middle classes; and this economic compulsion had much to do with turning
him to popular subjects, even to the painting of some Kyoto belles. The
older artists were horrified, but Okyo persisted in his unconventional ways.
Mori Sosen accepted Okyo's naturalistic lead, turned and lived with the
animals in order to portray them faithfully, and became Japan's greatest
painter of monkeys and deer. By the time Okyo died (1795) the realists had
won all along the line, and a completely popular school had captured the
attention not only of Japan but of the world.
* The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a Korin "Wave-
Screen," which Ledoux pronounced to be "one of the greatest works of this type that
has ever been permitted to leave Japan."80
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 907
X. PRINTS
The "Ukiyoye" School — Its founders — Its masters — Hokusri
—Hiroshige
It is another jest of history that Japanese an should be most widely
known and influential in the West through that one of all its forms which
is least honored in Japan. About the middle of the eighteenth century the
art of engraving, which had come to Japan in the luggage of Buddhism
half a millennium before, was turned to the illustration of books and the life
of the people. The old subjects and methods had lost the tang of novelty
and interest; men were surfeited with Buddhist saints, Chinese philoso-
phers, meditative animals and immaculate flowers; the new classes that
were slowly rising to prominence looked to art for some reflection of their
own affairs, and began to produce artists willing to meet these demands.
Since painting required leisure and expense, and produced but one picture
at a time, the new artists adapted engraving to their purposes, cut their
pictures into wood, and made as many cheap prints from the blocks as
their democratic purchasers required. These prints were at first colored
by hand. Then, about 1740, three blocks were made: one uncolored,
another partly colored rose-red, the third colored here and there in green;
and the paper was impressed upon each block in turn. Finally, in 1764,
Harunobu made the first polychrome prints, and paved the way for those
vivid sketches, by Hokusai and Hiroshige, which proved so suggestive
and stimulating to culture-weary Europeans thirsting for novelty. So was
born the Ukiyoye School of "Pictures of the Passing World."
Its painters were not the first who had taken the untitled man as the
object of their art. Iwasa Matabei, early in the seventeenth century, had
shocked the Samurai by depicting, on a six-panel screen, men, women and
children in the unrestrained attitudes of common life; in 1900 this screen
(the Hikone Biobu) was chosen by the Japanese Government for exhibi-
tion in Paris, and was insured on its voyage for 30,000 yen ($15,000)."
About 1660 Hishikawa Moronobu, a designer of Kyoto dress patterns,
made the earliest block prints, first for the illustration of books, then as
broadsheets scattered among the people, almost like picture postcards
among ourselves today. About 1687 Toru Kujomoto, designer of posters
for the Osaka theatres, moved to Yedo, and taught the Ukiyoye School
(which belonged entirely to the capital) how profitable it might be to
908 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
make prints of the famous actors of the day. From the stage the new ar-
tists passed to the brothels of the Yoshiwara, and gave to many a fragile
beauty a taste of immortality. Bare breasts and gleaming limbs entered
with disarming coyness into the once religious and philosophical sanctu-
aries of Japanese painting.
The masters of the developed art appeared towards the middle of the
eighteenth century. Harunobu made prints of twelve or even fifteen colors
from as many blocks, and, remorseful over his early pictures for the stage,
painted with typical Japanese delicacy the graceful world of happy
youth. Kiyonaga reached the first zenith of artistry in this school, and
wove color and line into the swaying and yet erect figures of aristocratic
women. Sharaku seems to have given only two years of his life to design-
ing prints; but in this short time he lifted himself to the top of his tribe by
his portraits of the Forty-seven Ronin, and his savagely ironic pictures of
the stage's shooting "stars." Utamaro, rich in versatility and genius, mas-
ter of line and design, etched the whole range of life from insects to
courtesans; he spent half his career in the Yoshiwara, exhausted himself
in pleasure and work, and earned a year in jail (1804) by picturing
Hideyoshi with five concubines.83 Wearied of normal people in normal at-
titudes, Utamaro portrayed his refined and complaisant ladies in almost
spiritual slenderness, with tilted heads, elongated and slanting eyes, length-
ened faces, and mysterious figures wrapped in flowing and multitudinous
robes. A degenerating taste exalted this style into a bizarre mannerism,
and was bringing the Ukiyoye School close to corruption and decay, when
its two most famous masters arose to give it another half -century of life.
"The Old Man Mad with Painting," as Hokusai called himself, lived
almost four-score years and ten, but mourned the tardiness of perfection
and the brevity of life.
From my sixth year onwards a peculiar mania for drawing all
sorts of things took possession of me. At my fiftieth year I had pub-
lished quite a number of works of every possible description, but
none were to my satisfaction. Real work began with me only in my
seventieth year. Now at seventy-five the real appreciation of nature
awakens within me. I therefore hope that at eighty I may have
arrived at a certain power of intuition which will develop further to
my ninetieth year, so that at the age of a hundred I can probably
assert that my intuition is thoroughly artistic. And should it be
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 909
granted to me to live a hundred and ten years, I hope that a vital
and true comprehension of nature may radiate from every one of
my lines and dots. ... I invite those who are going to live as long
as I to convince themselves whether I shall keep my word. Written
at the age of seventy-five years by me, formerly Hokusai, now called
the Old Man Mad with Painting.84
Like most of the Ukiyoye artists he was born of the artisan class, the
son of a mirror-maker. Apprenticed to the artist Shunso, he was expelled
for originality, and went back to his family to live in poverty and hard-
ship throughout his long life. Unable to live by painting, he peddled food
and almanacs. When his house burned down he merely composed a
hokka:
It has burned down;
How serene the flowers in their falling!8*
When, at the age of eighty-nine, he was discovered by death, he sur-
rendered reluctantly, saying: "If the gods had given me only ten years
more I could have become a really great painter."88
He left behind him five hundred volumes of thirty thousand drawings.
Intoxicated with the unconscious artistry of natural forms, he pictured in
loving and varied repetition mountains, rocks, rivers, bridges, waterfalls
and the sea. Having issued a book of "Thirty-six Views of Fuji," he went
back, like the fascinated priest of Buddhist legend,* to sit at the foot of
the sacred mount again, and draw "One Hundred Views of Fuji." In a
series named "The Imagery of the Poets" he returned to the loftier sub-
jects of Japanese art, and showed, among others, the great Li Po beside
the chasm and cascade of Lu. In 1 8 1 2 he issued the first of fifteen volumes
called Mangwa—z scries of realistic drawings of the homeliest details of
common life, piquant with humor and scandalous with burlesque. These
he flung off without care or effort, a dozen a day, until he had illustrated
every nook and cranny of plebeian Japan. Never had the nation seen
such fertility, such swift and penetrating conception, such reckless vitality
of execution. As American critics looked down upon Whitman, so Japa-
nese critics and art circles looked down upon Hokusai, seeing only the
turbulence of his brush and the occasional vulgarity of his mind. But
* Who, having been exiled from Japan, sailed every day across the sea to gaze upon
the Holy Mountain.
910 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXX
when he died his neighbors— who had not known that Whistler, in a mod-
est moment, would rank him as the greatest painter since Velasquez87—
marveled to see so long a funeral issue from so simple a home.
Less famous in the West but more respected in the East was the last
great figure of the Ukiyoye School— Hiroshige (1796-1858). The hun-
dred thousand distinct prints that claim his parentage picture the land-
scapes of his country more faithfully than Hokusai's, and with an art
that has earned Hiroshige rank as probably the greatest landscape painter
of Japan. Hokusai, standing before nature, drew not the scene but some
airy fantasy suggested by it to his imagination; Hiroshige loved the world
itself in all its forms, and drew these so loyally that the traveler may still
recognize the objects and contours that inspired him. About 1830 he set
out along the Tokaido or post road from Tokyo to Kyoto, and, like a
true poet, thought less of his goal than of the diverting and significant
scenes which he met on his way. When at last his trip was finished, he
gathered his impressions together in his most famous work— "The Fifty-
three Stations of the Tokaido" (1834). He liked to picture rain and the
night in all their mystic forms, and the only man who surpassed him in
this— Whistler— modeled his nocturnes upon Hiroshige's.88 He too loved
Fuji, and made "Thirty-six Views" of the mountain; but also he loved his
native Tokyo, and made "One Hundred Views of Yedo" shortly before
he died. He lived less years than Hokusai, but yielded up the torch with
more content:
I leave my brush at Azuma
And go on the journey to the Holy West,
To visit the famous scenery there.*8"
XI. JAPANESE ART AND CIVILIZATION
A retrospect— Contrasts— An estimate— The doovi of ibc old Japan
The Japanese print was almost the last phase of that subtle and delicate
civilization which crumbled under the impact of Occidental industry, just
as the cynical pessimism of the Western mind today may be the final
aspect of a civilization doomed to die under the heel of Oriental industry.
Because that medieval Japan which survived till 1853 was harmless to us,
*An excellent collection of Hiroshige's prints may be seen in the Boston Museum.
CHAP. XXX) 1HE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 91 1
we can appreciate its beauty patronizingly; and it will be hard to find
in a Japan of competing factories and threatening guns the charm that
lures us in the selected loveliness of the past. We know, in our prosaic
moments, that there was much cruelty in that old Japan, that peasants
were poor and workers were oppressed, that women were slaves there,
and might in hard times be sold into promiscuity, that life was cheap, and
that in the end there was no law for the common man but the sword
of the Samurai. But in Europe too men were cruel and women were a
subject class, peasants were poor and workers were oppressed, life was
hard and thought was dangerous, and in the end there was no law but the
will of the lord or the king.
And as we can feel some affection for that old Europe because, in the
midst of poverty, exploitation and bigotry, men built cathedrals in which
every stone was carved in beauty, or martyred themselves to earn for their
successors the right to think, or fought for justice until they created
those civil liberties which are the most precious and precarious portion
of our inheritance, so behind the bluster of the Scmmrai we honor the
bravery that still gives to Japan a power above its numbers and its wealth;
behind the lazy monks we sense the poetry of Buddhism, and acknowl-
edge its endless incentives to poetry and art; behind the sharp blow of
cruelty, and the seeming rudeness of the strong to the weak, we recognize
the courtliest manners, the most pleasant ceremonies, and an unrivaled de-
votion to nature's beauty in all her forms. Behind the enslavement of
women we see their beauty, their tenderness, and their incomparable grace;
and amid the despotism of the family we hear the happiness of children
playing in the garden of the East.
We are not much moved today by the restrained brevity and untrans-
latable suggestiveness of Japanese poetry; and yet it was this poetry, as
well as the Chinese, that suggested the "free verse" and "imagism" of our
time. There is scant originality in Japan's philosophers, and in her his-
torians a dearth of the high impartiality that we expect of those whose
books arc not an annex to their country's armed or diplomatic force. But
these were minor things in the life of Japan; she gave herself wisely to
the creation of beauty rather than to the pursuit of truth. The soil she
lived on was too treacherous to encourage sublime architecture, and yet
the houses she built "are, from the esthetic point of view, the most perfect
ever designed."90 No country in modern times has rivaled her in the grace
and loveliness of little things— the clothing of the women, the artistry of
912 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXX
fans and parasols, of cups and toys, of inro and netsuke, the splendor of
lacquer and the exquisite carving of wood. No other modern people has
quite equaled the Japanese in restraint and delicacy of decoration, or in
widespread refinement and sureness of taste. It is true that Japanese
porcelain is less highly Valued, even by the Japanese, than that of Sung
and Ming; but if only the Chinese product surpasses it, the work of the
Japanese potter still ranks above that of the modern European. And
though Japanese painting lacks the strength and depth of Chinese, and
Japanese prints are mere poster art at their worst, and at their best the
transient redemption of hurried trivialities with a national perfection of
grace and line, nevertheless it was Japanese rather than Chinese painting,
and Japanese prints rather than Japanese water-colors, that revolutionized
pictorial art in the nineteenth century, and gave the stimulus to a hundred
experiments in fresh creative forms. These prints, sweeping into Europe
in the wake of reopened trade after 1860, profoundly affected Monet,
Manet, Degas and Whistler; they put an end to the "brown sauce" that
had been served with almost every European painting from Leonardo to
Millet; they filled the canvases of Europe with sunshine, and encouraged
the painter to be a poet rather than a photographer. "The story of the
beautiful," said Whistler, with the swagger that made all but his con-
temporaries love him, "is already complete— hewn in the marbles of the
Parthenon, and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai— at the
foot of Fuji-yama."01
We hope that this is not quite true; but it was unconsciously true for the
old Japan. She died four years after Hokusai. In the comfort and peace
of her isolation she had forgotten that a nation must keep abreast of the
world if it does not wish to be enslaved. While Japan carved her inro
and flourished her fans, Europe was establishing a science that was almost
entirely unknown to the East; and that science, built up year by year in
laboratories apparently far removed from the stream of the world's affairs,
at last gave Europe the mechanized industries that enabled her to make
the goods of life more cheaply— however less beautifully— than Asia's
skilful artisans could turn them out by hand. Sooner or later those cheaper
goods would win the markets of Asia, ruining the economic and changing
the political life of countries pleasantly becalmed in the handicraft stage.
Worse than that, science made explosives, battleships and guns that could
kill a little more completely than the sword of the most heroic Samurai;
CHAP. XXX) THE MIND AND ART OF OLD JAPAN 913
of what use was the bravery of a knight against the dastardly anonymity
of a shell?
There is no more amazing or portentous phenomenon in modern his-
tory than the way in which sleeping Japan, roughly awakened by the can-
non of the West, leaped to the lesson, bettered the instruction, accepted
science, industry and war, defeated all her competitors either in battle or
in trade, and became, within two generations, the most aggressive nation
in the contemporary world.
CHAPTER XXXI
The New Japan
I. THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION
The decay of the Shogunate— America knocks at the door— The
Restoration— The Westernization of Japan— Political recon-
struction — The new constitution — Law — The army —
The war with Russia— Its political results
THE death of a civilization seldom comes from 'without; internal decay
must weaken the fibre of a society before external influences or at-
tacks can change its essential structure, or bring it to an end. A ruling fam-
ily rarely contains within itself that persistent vitality and subtle adaptability
which enduring domination requires; the founder exhausts half the strength
of the stock, and leaves to mediocrity the burdens that only genius could
bear. The Tokugawas after lyeyasu governed moderately well, but, bar-
ring Yoshimune, they numbered no positive personalities in their line.
Within eight generations after lyeyasu's death the feudal barons were
disturbing the Shogunnte with sporadic revolts; taxes were delayed or
withheld, and the Ycdo treasury, despite desperate economies, became
inadequate to finance national security or defense.1 Two centuries and
more of peace had softened the Samurai^ and had disaccustomed the people
to the hardships and sacrifices of war; epicurean habits had displaced the
stoic simplicity of Hideyoshi's days, and the country, suddenly called upon
to protect its sovereignty, found itself physically and morally unarmed.
The Japanese intellect fretted under the exclusion of foreign intercourse,
and heard with restless curiosity of the rising wealth and varied civilization
of Europe and America; it studied Mabuchi and Moto-ori, and secretly
branded the shoguns as usurpers who had violated the continuity of the
Imperial dynasty; it could not reconcile the divine descent of the Em-
peror with the impotent poverty to which the Tokugawas had condemned
him. From their hiding-places in the Yoshiwara and elsewhere, subter-
ranean pamphleteers began to flood the cities with passionate appeals for
the overthrow of the Shogunate, and the restoration of the Imperial power.
914
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 915
Upon this harassed and resourceless Government the news burst in
1853 that an American fleet, ignoring Japanese prohibitions, had entered
Uraga Bay, and that its commander insisted upon seeing the supreme
authority in Japan. Commodore Perry had four ships of war and 560
men; but instead of making a display of even this modest force, he sent a
courteous note to the Shogun lyeyoshi, assuring him that the American
Government asked nothing more than the opening of a few Japanese
ports to American trade, and some arrangements for the protection of
such American seamen as might be shipwrecked on Japanese shores. The
T'ai-p'ing Rebellion called Perry back to his base in Chinese waters; but
in 1854 he returned to Japan armed with a larger squadron and a persua-
sive variety of gifts—perfumes, clocks, stoves, whiskey . . . —for the
Emperor, the Empresses, and the princes of the blood. The new Shognn,
lyesada, neglected to transmit these presents to the royal family, but con-
sented to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa, which conceded in effect all the
American demands. Perry praised the courtesy of the islanders, and an-
nounced, with imperfect foresight, that "if the Japanese came to the
United States they would find the navigable waters of the country free
to them, and that they would not be debarred even from the gold-fields of
California."2 By this and later treaties the major ports of Japan were open
to commerce from abroad, tariffs were specified and limited, and Japan
agreed that Europeans and Americans accused of crime in the islands
should be tried by their own consular courts. Stipulations were made and
accepted that all persecution of Christianity should cease in the Empire;
and at the same time the United States offered to sell to Japan such arms
and battleships as she might need, and to lend officers and craftsmen for the
instruction of this absurdly pacific nation in the arts of war.8
The Japanese people suffered keenly from the humiliation of these trea-
ties, though later they acknowledged them as the impartial instruments of
evolution and destiny. Some of them wished to fight the foreigners at any
cost, to expel them all, and restore a self-contained agricultural and feudal
regime. Others saw the necessity of imitating rather than expelling the
West; the only course by which Japan could avoid the repeated defeats
and the economic subjection which Europe was then imposing upon
China was by learning as rapidly as possible the methods of Western in-
dustry, and the technique of modern war. With astonishing finesse the
Westernizing leaders used the baronial lords as aides in overthrowing the
Shogunate and restoring the Emperor, and then used the Imperial au-
916 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXXI
thority to overthrow feudalism and introduce Occidental industry. So
in 1867 the feudal lords persuaded the last of the shoguns, Keiki, to abdi-
cate. "Almost all the acts of the administration," said Keiki, "are far
from perfect, and I confess it with shame that the present unsatisfactory
condition of affairs is due to my shortcomings and incompetence. Now
that foreign intercourse becomes daily more extensive, unless the govern-
ment is directed from one central authority, the foundations of the state
will fall to pieces."4 The Emperor Meiji replied tersely that "Tokugawa
Keiki's proposal to restore the administrative authority to the Imperial
Court is accepted"; and on January i, 1868 the new "Era of Meiji" was
officially begun. The old religion of Shinto was revised, and an intensive
propaganda convinced the people that the restored emperor was divine in
lineage and wisdom, and that his decrees were to be accepted as the edicts
of the gods.
Armed with this new power, the Westernizers achieved almost a mir-
acle in the rapid transformation of their country. Ito and Inouye braved
their way through every prohibition and obstacle to Europe, studied its
industries and institutions, marveled at the railroad, the steamship, the tele-
graph and the battleship, and came back inflamed with a patriotic resolve
to Europeanize Japan. Englishmen were brought in to superintend the
construction of railways, the erection of telegraphs, and the building of a
navy; Frenchmen were commissioned to recast the laws and train the
army; Germans were assigned to the organization of medicine and public
health; Americans were engaged to establish a system of universal educa-
tion; and to make matters complete, Italians were imported to instruct the
Japanese in sculpture and painting.5 There were temporary, even bloody,
reactions, and at times the spirit of Japan rebelled against this hectic and
artificial metamorphosis; but in the end the machine had its way, and the
Industrial Revolution added Japan to its realm.
Of necessity that Revolution (the only real revolution in modern his-
tory) lifted to wealth and economic power a new class of men— manu-
facturers, merchants and financiers— who in the old Japan had been
ranked at the very bottom of the social scale. This rising bourgeoisie
quietly used its means and influence first to destroy feudalism, and then to
reduce to an imposing pretense the restored authority of the throne. In
1871 the Government persuaded the barons to surrender their ancient
privileges, and consoled them with government bonds in exchange for
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 917
their lands.* Bound by ties of interest to the new society, the old aris-
tocracy gave its services loyally to the Government, and enabled it to ef-
fect with bloodless ease the transition from a medieval to a modern state.
Ito Hirobumi, recently returned from a second visit to Europe, created,
in imitation of Germany, a new nobility of five orders— princes, marquises,
counts, viscounts and barons; but these men were the rewarded servants,
not the feudal enemies, of the industrial regime.
Modestly and tirelessly Ito labored to give his country a form of gov-
ernment that would avoid what seemed to him the excesses of democracy,
and yet enlist and encourage the talent of every class for a rapid economic
development. Under his leadership Japan promulgated, in 1889, its first
constitution. At the top of the legal structure was the emperor, tech-
nically supreme, owning all land in fee simple, commander of an army and
a navy responsible to him alone, and giving to the Empire the strength
of unity, continuity, and regal prestige. Graciously he consented to dele-
gate his law-making power, so long as it pleased him, to a Diet of two
chambers— a House of Peers and a House of Representatives; but the min-
isters of state were to be appointed by him, and to be accountable to him
rather than to the Diet. Underneath was a small electorate of some 460,-
ooo voters, severely limited by a property qualification; successive liberal-
izations of the franchise raised the number of voters to 1 3,000,000 by 1928.
Corruption in office has kept pace with the extension of democracy.0
Along with these political developments went a new system of law
(1881), based largely upon the Napoleonic Code, and representing a
courageous advance on the medieval legislation of the feudal age. Civil
rights were liberally granted—freedom of speech, press, assembly and wor-
ship, inviolability of correspondence and domicile, and security from arrest
or punishment except by due process of law.t Torture and ordeal were
abolished, the Eta were freed from their caste disabilities, and all classes
were made theoretically equal before the law. Prisons were improved,
prisoners were paid for their work, and on their liberation they? were
equipped with some modest capital to set them up in agriculture or trade.
Despite the lenience of the code, crime remained rare;7 and if an orderly
* This process corresponded essentially to the abolition of feudalism, serfdom or slavery
in France in 1789, in Russia in 1862, and in the United States in 1863.
t These rights have been narrowly restricted by the war fever of the Manchurian ad-
venture.
9 1 8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXXI
acceptance of law is a mark of civilization, Japan (allowing for a few as-
sassinations) must stand in the first rank of modern states.
Perhaps the most significant feature of the new Constitution was the
exemption of the army and the navy from any superior except the Em-
peror. Never forgetting the humiliation of 1853, Japan resolved to build
an armed force that would make her master of her own destiny, and ul-
timately lord of the East. Not only did she establish conscription; she
made every school in the land a military training camp and a nursery of
nationalist ardor. With an amazing aptitude for organization and dis-
cipline, she soon brought her armed power to a point where she could
speak to the "foreign barbarians" on equal terms, and might undertake
that gradual absorption of China which Europe had contemplated but
never achieved. In 1894, resenting the despatch of Chinese troops to put
down an insurrection in Korea, and China's persistent reference to Korea
as a tributary state under Chinese suzerainty, Japan declared war upon her
ancient tutor, surprised the world with the speed of her victory, and ex-
acted from China the acknowledgment of Korea's independence, the ces-
sion of Formosa and Port Arthur (at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula) ,
and an indemnity of 200,000,000 taels. Germany and France supported
Russia in "advising" Japan to withdraw from Port Arthur on condition
of receiving an additional indemnity of 30,000,000 taels (from China).
Japan yielded, but kept the rebuff in bitter memory while she waited for
revenge.
From that hour Japan prepared herself grimly for that conflict with
Russia which imperialistic expansion in both empires made apparently
inevitable. Availing herself of England's fear that Russia might advance
into India, Japan concluded with the mistress of the seas an alliance (1902-
22) by which each party contracted to come to the aid of its ally in case
either should go to war with a third power, and another power should in-
tervene. Seldom had England's diplomats signed away so much of Eng-
land's liberty. When, in 1904, the war with Russia began, English and
American bankers lent Japan huge sums to finance her victories against
the Tsar.8 Nogi captured Port Arthur, and moved his army north in time
to turn the scales in the slaughter of Mukden— the bloodiest battle in his-
tory before our own incomparable Great War. Germany and France seem
to have contemplated coming to the aid of Russia by diplomacy or arms;
but President Roosevelt made it known that in such case he would
"promptlv side with Japan."* Meanwhile a Russian squadron of twenty-
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 919
nine ships had gallantly sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, in the
longest war-voyage ever made by a modern fleet, to face the Japanese in
their own waters. Admiral Togo, making the first known naval use of
radio, kept himself informed of the Russian flotilla's course, and pounced
upon it in the Straits of Tsushima on May 27, 1905. To all his commanders
Togo flashed a characteristic message: "The rise or fall of the Empire de-
pends on this battle."10 The Japanese lost 1 16 killed and 538 wounded; the
Russians lost 4000 dead and 7000 prisoners, and all but three of their ships
were captured or sunk.
The "Battle of the Sea of Japan" was a turning point in modern history.
Not only did it end the expansion of Russia into Chinese territory; it
ended also the rule of Europe in the East, and began that resurrection of
Asia which promises to be the central political process of our century.
All Asia took heart at the sight of the little island empire defeating the
most populous power in Europe; China plotted her revolution, and India
began to dream of freedom. As for Japan, it thought not of extending
liberty but of capturing power. It secured from Russsia an acknowledg-
ment of Japan's paramount position in Korea, and then, in 1910, formally
annexed that ancient and once highly civili/ed kingdom. When the Em-
peror Meiji died, in 1912, after a long and benevolent career as rulerv
artist and poet, he could take to the progenitor gods of Japan the message
that the nation which they had created, and which at the outset of his
reign had been a plaything in the hands of the impious West, was now
supreme in the Orient, and was well on its way to becoming the pivot
of history.
II. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Industrialization— Factories— Wages— Strikes— Poverty—The
Japanese point of view
Meanwhile, in the course of half a century, Japan had changed every
aspect of its life. The peasant, though poor, was free; he could own a
modest parcel of land by paying an annual tax or rental to the state; and
no lord could hinder him if he chose to leave the fields and seek his
fortune in the cities. For there were great cities now along the coast:
Tokyo (i.e., the "Eastern Capital"), with its royal and aristocratic palaces,
its spacious parks and crowded baths, and a population second only to that
of London and New York; Osaka, once a fishing village and a castle, now
a dark abyss of hovels, factories and skyscrapers, the center of the indus-
9*0 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (CHAP. XXXI
tries of Japan; and Yokohama and Kobe, from whose gigantic wharves,
equipped with every modern mechanism, those industries despatched to a
thousand ports the second largest merchant marine in the world.*
The leap from feudalism to capitalism was eased by an unprecedented
use of every aid. Foreign experts were brought in, and Japanese assistants
obeyed their instructions eagerly; within fifteen years the clever learners
had made such progress that the foreign specialists were paid off and
courteously sent home. Following the lead of Germany the Government
took over posts, railroads, telegraphs and telephones; but at the same time
it made generous loans to private industries, and protected them with high
tariffs from the competition of factories abroad. The indemnity paid by
the Chinese after the war of 1 894 financed and stimulated the industriali-
zation of Japan precisely as the French indemnity of 1871 had accelerated
the industrialization of Germany. Japan, like the Germany of a genera-
tion before, was able to begin with modern equipment and feudal dis-
cipline, while their long-established competitors struggled with obsolescent
machinery and rebellious workingmen. Power was cheap in Japan, and
wages were low; laborers were loyally submissive to their chiefs; factory
laws came late, and were leniently enforced.19 In 1933 the new Osaka
spindles needed one girl for twenty-five machines; the old Lancashire
spindles required one man for six.18
The number of factories doubled from 1908 to 1918, and again from
1918 to 1924; by 1931 they had increased by fifty per cent more,14 while
industry in the West plumbed the depths of depression. In 1933 Japan
took first place as an exporter of textile products, sending out two of the
five-and-a-half billion yards of cotton goods consumed in that year by the
world.16 By abandoning the gold standard in 1931, and allowing the yen
to fall to forty per cent of its former value in international exchange,
Japan increased her foreign sales fifty per cent from 1932 to i933-ie
Domestic as well as foreign commerce flourished, and great merchant
families, like the Mitsui and the Mitsubishi, amassed such fortunes that
the military joined the wage-earning classes in meditating governmental
absorption or control of industry and trade, t
* By the last official census Yokohama had 620,000 population, Kobe 787,000, Osaka
2,114,804, and Greater Tokyo 5,311,000.
t Transport by land did not grow as rapidly as marine trade, for the mountainous
backbone of the islands made commerce prefer the sea. Roads remained poor by com-
parison \\ith the West; and automobiles have only recently begun to be a peril in Japan.
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 92 1
While the growth of commerce generated a new and prosperous mid-
dle class, the manual workers bore the brunt of the low production costs
through which Japan undersold her competitors in the markets of the
world. The average wage of the men in 1931 was $1.17 a day; of the
women, 48 cents a day; 5 1 per cent of the industrial workers were women,
and twelve per cent were under sixteen years of age.1'* Strikes were
frequent and communism was growing when the war spirit of 193 1 turned
the nation to patriotic cooperation and conformity; "dangerous thoughts"
were made illegal, and labor unions, never strong in Japan, were sub-
jected to severe restrictions.310 Great slums developed in Osaka, Kobe and
Tokyo; in those of Tokyo a family of five occupied an average room
space of from eight to ten square feet— a trifle more than the area covered
by a double bed; in those of Kobe twenty thousand paupers, criminals,
defectives and prostitutes lived in such filth that each year epidemics
decimated them, and infant mortality rose to four times its average for
the remainder of Japan.*1 Communists like Katayama and Christian So-
cialists like Kagavva fought violently or peaceably against these conditions,
until at last the Government undertook the greatest slum-clearing project
in history.
A generation ago Lafcadio Hearn expressed a bitter judgment upon the
modern regime in Japan:
Under the new order of things forms of social misery never be-
fore known in the history of the race are being developed. Some
idea of this misery may be obtained from the fact that the number
of poor people in Tokyo unable to pay their residence tax is upward
of 50,000; yet the amount of the tax is only about twenty sen, or ten
cents in American money. Prior to the accumulation of wealth in
the hands of the minority there was never any such want in any part
of Japan— except, of course, as a temporary consequence of war.81
Already, howcxer, the jinricksha, or "man-powcr-vchicle," traditionally ascribed to an in-
ventive American missionary in the early eighties," is disappearing before American
and domestic motor cars and 200,000 miles of highway have been paved. Tokyo has a
subway which compares favorably with those of Europe and America. The first Japa-
nese railway was built in 1872, over a brave stretch of eighteen miles; -by 1932 the nar-
row islands had 13,734 miles of iron roads. The new express from Daircn (near Port
Arthur) to Hsinking (formerly Changchun), the capital of Manchuria, makes the 700
kilometers at the rate of 120 kilometers (approximately 75 miles) per hour.1*
* The low remuneration of women is partly due to the expensively high turn-over
among the women workers, who usually leave industry when they have amassed a mar-
riage dowry.
922 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXXI
The "accumulation of wealth in the hands of the minority" is, no doubt, a
universal and apparently unfailing concomitant of civilization. Japanese
employers believe that the wages which they pay are not too low in rela-
tion to the comparative inefficiency of Japanese labor, and the low cost
of living in Japan." Low wages, thinks Japan, are necessary for low costs;
low costs are necessary for the capture of foreign markets; foreign markets
are necessary for an industry dependent upon imported fuels and minerals;
industry is necessary for the support of a growing population in islands
only twelve per cent of whose soil permits cultivation; and industry is
necessary to that wealth and armament without which Japan could not
defend herself against the rapacious West.
III. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Changes in dress— In manners— The Japanese character— Morals
and marriage in transition — Religion — Science — Japanese
medicine — Art and taste — Language and education —
Naturalistic fiction— -New forms of poetry
Have the people themselves been changed by their Industrial Revolu-
tion? Certain external innovations catch the eye: the lugubrious bifurcate
costume of the European man has captured and enclosed most urban
males; but the women continue to clothe themselves in loose and colorful
robes, bound at the waist with brocaded bands that meet in a spacious bow
at the back.* Shoes are replacing wooden clogs as roads improve; but a
large proportion of both sexes still move about in bare and undcformed
feet. In the greater cities one may find every variation and combination
of native and European dress, as if to symbolize a transformation hurried
and incomplete.
Manners are still a model of diplomatic courtesy, though men adhere
to their ancient custom of preceding women in entering or leaving a room
or in walking along the street. Language is deviously polite, and rarely
profane; a formal humility clothes a fierce self-respect, and etiquette
graces the most sincere hostility. The Japanese character, like that of man
everywhere, is a mosaic of contradictions; for life offers us diverse situa-
tions at divers times, and demands of us alternately force and gentleness,
levity and gravity, patience and courage, modesty and pride. Therefore
we must not be prejudiced against the Japanese because they are senti-
* Women engaged in teaching or industry wear uniforms of Occidental cut. Both
sexes, after working hours, relax into the traditional costumes.
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 923
mental and realistic, sensitive and stoical, expressive and reticent, excitable
and restrained; aboundingly cheerful, humorous and pleasure-loving, and
inclined to picturesque suicide; lovingly kind— often to animals, some-
times to women— and occasionally cruel to animals and men.* The
typical Japanese has all the qualities of the warrior— pugnacity and cour-
age, and an unrivaled readiness to die; and yet, very often, he has the soul
of an artist— sensuous, impressionable, and almost instinctively possessed of
taste. He is sober and unostentatious, frugal and industrious, curious and
studious, loyal and patient, with an heroic capacity for details; he is cun-
ning and supple, like most physically small persons; he has a nimble in-
telligence, not highly creative in the field of thought, but capable of quick
comprehension, adaptation, and practical achievement. The spirit and van-
ity of a Frenchman, the courage and narrowness of a Briton, the hot
temper and artistry of an Italian, the energy and commercialism of an
American, the sensitiveness and shrewdness of a Jew— all these have come
together to make the Japanese.
Contact and conflict with the West have altered in some ways the moral
life of Japan. The traditional honesty of its peoplet largely continues; but
the extension of the franchise and the keen competition of modern trade have
brought to Japan a proportionate share of democratic venality, industrial ruth-
lessness and financial legerdemain. Bushido survives here and there among the
higher soldiery, and offers a mild aristocratic check to commercial and polit-
ical deviltry. Despite the law-abiding patience of the common people assassi-
nation is frequent— not as a corrective of reactionary despotism but usually as
an encouragement to aggressive patriotism. The Black Dragon Society, led
by the apparently untouchable Toyama, has dedicated itself for over forty
years to promoting among Japanese officials a policy of conquest in Korea
and Manchuria;t and in the pursuit of this purpose it has given assassination a
popular role in the political machinery of Japan.38
•During the chaos that followed the earthquake of 1923 the Japanese of Yokohama,
while being fed by American relief ships, took advantage of the turmoil to slaughter
hundreds (some say thousands) of unarmed radicals and Koreans in the streets.84 Some
passionate patriot, it seems, had aroused the Japanese by announcing that the Koreans
(who were a mere handful) were planning to overthrow the Government and kill
the Emperor.
t"I have lived," said Lafcadio Hearn, "in districts where no case of theft had occurred
for hundreds of years— where the newly-built prisons of Meiji remained empty and use-
less."115
J Black Dragon is the Chinese name for the Amur River, which separates Manchuria
from Siberia. The Japanese look upon assassination as merely a dignified substitute
for exile.
924 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXXI
The Far East has paralleled the West in that moral disturbance which ac-
companies every profound change in the economic basis of life. The eternal
war of the generations— the revolt of over-eager youth against over-cautious
age— has been intensified by the growth of individualist industry, and the
weakening of religious faith. The transit from country to city, and the re-
placement of the family by the individual as the legal and responsible unit of
economic and political society, has undermined parental authority, and sub-
jected the customs and morals of centuries to the hasty judgment of adoles-
cence. In the larger centers the young rebel against marriages parentally
arranged; and the new couples, instead of taking up their residence in the
establishment of the bridegroom's father, tend increasingly to set up separate
and independent homes— or apartments. The rapid industrialization of women
has necessitated a loosening of the bonds that held them to domestic sub-
serviency. Divorce is as common as in America, and more convenient; it may
be had by signing a registration book and paying a fee of ten cents.27 Con-
cubinage has been made illegal, but in practice it is still permitted to those
who can afford to ignore the law.88
In Japan as elsewhere the machine is the enemy of the priest. Spencer and
Stuart Mill were imported along with English technology, and the reign of
Confucius in Japanese philosophy came to a sudden end. "The generation
now at school," said Chamberlain in 1905, "is distinctly Voltairean."20 By
the same token— through its modern alliance with the machine— science
prospered, and won a characteristic devotion, in Japan, from some of the
most brilliant investigators of our time.* Japanese medicine, though de-
pendent in most stages upon China or Korea, has made swift progress under
European— especially German— example and stimulus. The work of Tnkaminc
in the discovery of adrenalin and the study of vitamins; of Kitasato in tetanus
and pneumonia, and in the development of an anti-toxin for diphtheria; and,
most famous and brilliant of all, of Noguchi in syphilis and yellow fever—
these achievements indicate the rapidity with which the Japanese have ceased
to be pupils, and have become teachers, of the world.
Hideyo Noguchi was born in 1876 in one of the lesser islands, and in a
family so poor that his father deserted on learning that another child was
due. The neglected boy fell into a brazier; his left hand was burned to a
stump, and his right hand was injured almost to the point of uselessness.
* Such science as existed in Japan before 1853 was mostly an importation from the
parental mainland. The Japanese calendar, previously based upon the phases of the moon,
was readjusted to the solar year by a Korean priest about 604 A.D. In 680 A.D. Chinese
modifications were introduced, and Japan took over (and still retains) the Chinese
method of reckoning events by reference to the name and year of the reigning emperor.
The Gregorian calendar was adopted by Japan in 1873.
CHAP. XXXl) THENEWJAPAN 925
Shunned at school because of his scars and deformities, he was planning
to kill himself when a surgeon came to the village, treated the right hand
successfully, and so won Noguchi's gratitude that the lad there and then
dedicated himself to medicine. "I will be a Napoleon to save instead of to
kill," he announced; "I can already get along on four hours of sleep at
night."30 Penniless, he worked in a pharmacy until he had persuaded its
owner to advance him funds for the study of medicine. After graduat-
ing he came to the United States, and offered his services to the Medical
Corps of the Army at Washington in return for his expenses. The Rocke-
feller Foundation for Medical Research gave him a laboratory, and
Noguchi, literally single-handed, entered upon a fruitful career of ex-
periment and research. He produced the first pure culture of the syphi-
litic germ, discovered the syphilitic nature of general paralysis and loco-
motor ataxia, and finally (1918) isolated the yellow fever parasite. Made
famous and momentarily affluent, he went back to Japan, honored his old
mother, and knelt in gratitude to the kindly pharmacist who had paid for
his medical education. Then he went to Africa to study the yellow
fever that was raging along the Gold Coast, was himself infected with it,
and died (1928) at the pitifully early age of fifty-two.
The development of science, in Japan as in the West, has been accompanied
by a decay of the traditional arts. The overthrow of the old aristocracy
destroyed a nursery of taste, and left each generation to develop its own
norms of excellence anew. The influx of foreign money seeking native wares
led to rapid quantitative production, and debased the standards of Japanese
design. When the buyers turned to the quest for ancient works, the artisans
became forgers, and the manufacture of antiques became in Japan, as in
China, one of the most flourishing of modern arts. Cloisonne is probably the
only branch of ceramics that has progressed in Japan since the coming of the
West. The chaotic passage from handicraft to machinery, and the sudden
irruption of foreign tastes and ways clothed in the gaudy prestige of victory
and wealth, have unsettled the esthetic sense of Japan, and weakened the sure-
ness of her taste. Perhaps, now that Japan has chosen the sword, she is
destined to repeat the history of Rome— imitative in art, but masterly in ad-
ministration and war.*
A flattery of Occidental modes has marked for a generation the intellectual
life of the new empire. European words crowded into the language, news-
* The current fever of nationalism has brought with it a revival of native motifs
and styles.
926 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXXI
papers were organized in Western style, and a system of public schools was
established after American exemplars. Japan heroically resolved to make
itself the most literate nation on earth, and it succeeded; in 1925 99.4 per
cent of all Japanese children attended school,81 and in 1927, 93 per cent of the
people could read.88 Students took religiously to the new secular learning;
hundreds of them lost their health in their eagerness for knowledge,88 and the
Government was obliged to take active measures for the encouragement of
athletics, gymnastics and games of every kind from ju-jitsu to baseball. Edu-
cation was removed from religious auspices, and became more thoroughly
secularized in Japan than in most European nations. Five imperial universities
were supported, and forty-one other universities, only less imperial, gathered
in thousands of zealous students. By 1931 the Imperial University of Tokyo
had 8,064 students, and the University of Kyoto had 5,552.**
Japanese literature, in the last quarter of the century, lost itself in a
series of imitative fashions. English liberalism, Russian realism, Nietz-
schean individualism and American pragmatism swept the intelligentsia in
turn, until the spirit of nationalism reasserted itself, and Japanese writers
began to explore their native material in their native ways. A young
woman, Ichi-yo, before dying in 1 896 at the age of twenty-four, inaugur-
ated a naturalistic movement in fiction by presenting vividly the misery
and subjection of women in Japan.38 In 1906 the poet Toson brought this
movement to its height with a long novel— Hakai or "The Breaking of
the Pledge"— which told in poetic prose the story of a teacher who, hav-
ing promised his father never to reveal the fact that he was of Eta or
slave origin, worked his way by ability and education to a high position,
fell in love with a girl of refinement and social standing, and then, in a
burst of honesty, confessed his origin, surrendered his sweetheart and his
place, and left Japan forever. This novel contributed powerfully to the
agitation that finally ended the historic disabilities of the Eta class.
The tanka and the hokka were the last forms of Japanese culture to
yield to the influence of the West. For forty years after the Restoration
they continued to be the required modes of Japanese verse, and the poetic
spirit lost itself in miracles of ingenuity and artifice. Then, in 1897, Toson,
a young teacher of Sendai, sold to a publisher, for fifteen dollars, a volume
of poems whose individual length constituted a revolution almost as star-
tling as any that had shaken the fabric of the state. The public, tired of ele-
gant epigrams, responded gratefully, and made the publisher rich. Other
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 927
poets followed the path that Toson had explored, and the tonka and hokka
surrendered at last their thousand-year-old domination.86
Despite the new forms the old Imperial Poetry Contest still continues.
Every year the Emperor announces a theme, and sets an example by indit-
ing an ode to it; the Empress follows him; and then twenty-five thousand
Japanese, of every sort and condition, send in their compositions to the
Poetry Bureau at the Imperial Palace, to be judged by the highest bards
of the land. The ten poems accounted best are read to the Emperor and
the Empress, and are printed in the New Year's issue of the Japanese
press.07 It is an admirable custom, fit to turn the soul for a moment from
commercialism and war, and proving that Japanese literature is still a vital
part in the life of the most vital nation in the contemporary world.
IV. THE NEW EMPIRE
The precarious bases of the new civilization— Causes of Japanese
imperialism— The Twenty-one Demaiids—The Washington
Conference— The Immigration Act of 1924— The in-
vasion of Manchuria— The new kingdom— Japan
and Russia— Japan and Europe— Must America
fight Japan?
Despite its rapid growth in wealth and power the new Japan rested
upon precarious foundations. Its population had mounted from 3,000,-
ooo in the days of Shotoku Taishi to some 17,000,000 under Hideyoshi,
some 30,000,000 under Yoshimune, and over 55,000,000 at the end of
Meiji's reign (1912).* It had doubled in a century, and the mountain-
ribbed islands, so sparsely arable, contained with difficulty their multiply-
ing millions. An insular population half as great as that of the United
States had to support itself on an area one-twentieth as large.88 It could
maintain itself only by manufactures; and yet Japan was tragically poor
in the fuels and minerals indispensable to industry. Hydro-electric power
* In 1934 the population of the Japanese Empire (i.e., Japan, Korea, Formosa and some
minor possessions) totaled eighty millions. Should Japan succeed in reconciling the in-
habitants of Manchuria to Japanese rule, it will control, for industry and war, 110,000,000
people. As the population of Japan alone increases by a million a year, and that of the
United States is rapidly approaching a stationary condition, the two systems may soon
confront each other with approximately equal populations.
928 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXXI
lurked in the streams that flowed from the mountains to the sea, but the
full development of this resource would add only one-third to the power
already used," and could not be relied upon for the expanding needs of the
future. Coal was found here and there, in almost inaccessible veins, in the
islands of Kyushu and Hokkaido, and oil could be secured from Sakhalin;
but iron, the very bone and sinew of industry, was almost completely
absent from Japanese soil.40 Finally, the low standard of living to which
the nature of the strong and the costliness of materials and power had
condemned the masses of Japan made consumption lag more and more
behind production; every year, from factories ever better equipped, there
poured forth a mounting surplus of goods unpurchasable at home and
crying out for markets abroad.
Out of such conditions imperialism is born— that is, the effort of an
economic system to exercise control, through its agent the government,
over foreign regions upon which it is believed to depend for fuels, markets,
materials or dividends. Where could Japan find those opportunities and
those materials? She could not look to Indo-China, or India, or Australia,
or the Philippines; for these had been preempted by Western powers, and
their tariff walls favored their white masters against Japan. Clearly China
had been placed at Nippon's door as a providentially designed market
for Japanese goods; and Manchuria— rich in coal and iron, rich in the
wheat that the islands could not profitably grow, rich in human resources
for industry, taxation and war— Manchuria belonged by manifest destiny
to Japan. By what right? By the same right whereby England had taken
India and Australia, France Indo-China, Germany Shantung, Russia Port
Arthur, and America the Philippines— the right of the need of the strong.
In the long run no excuses would be necessary; all that was needed was
power and an opportunity. In the eyes of a Darwinian world success
would sanction every means.
Opportunity came generously— first with the Great War, then with
the breakdown of European and American economic life. The War did
not merely accelerate production in Japan (as in America) by giving to
industry an ideal foreign market— a continent at war; at the same time it
absorbed and weakened Europe, and left Japan with almost a free hand
in the East. Therefore she invaded Shantung in 1914; and a year later she
presented to China those "Twenty-one Demands" which, if they had
been enforced, would have made all China a gigantic colony of little Japan.
Group I of the Demands asked Chinese recognition of Japanese su-
zerainty in Shantung; Group II asked certain industrial privileges, and an
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 929
acknowledgment of Japan's special rights, in Manchuria and Eastern
Mongolia; Group III proposed that the greatest of mining companies on
the mainland should become a joint concern of China and Japan; Group
IV (aimed at America's request for a coaling station near Foochow)
stipulated that "no island, port or harbor along the coast shall be ceded to
any third Power." Group V modestly suggested that the Chinese should
hereafter employ Japanese advisers in their political, economic and mili-
tary affairs; that the police authority in the major cities of China should
be jointly administered by Chinese and Japanese; that China should pur-
chase at least fifty per cent of all her munitions from Japan; that Japan
should be allowed to build three important railways in China; and that
Japan should have the right freely to establish railways, mines and har-
bors in the Province of Fukien.41
The United States protested that some of these Demands violated the
territorial integrity of China, and the principle of the Open Door. Japan
withdrew Group V, modified the remaining Demands, and presented them
to China with an ultimatum on May 7, 1915. China accepted them on the
following day. A Chinese boycott of Japanese goods ensued; but Japan
proceeded on the historically correct assumption that boycotts are sooner
or later frustrated by the tendency of trade to follow the line of lowest
costs. In 1917 the suave Viscount Ishii explained the Japanese position
to the American people, and persuaded Secretary of State Lansing to sign
an agreement recognizing "that Japan has special interests in China, par-
ticularly in the part to which her possessions are contiguous." In 1922,
at the Washington Conference, Secretary of State Hughes prevailed upon
the Japanese to acknowledge the principle of the "Open Door" in China,
and to be content with a navy sixty per cent as large as England's or
America's.* At the close of the Conference Japan agreed to return to
China that part of Shantung (Tsingtao) which she had taken from Ger-
many during the War. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance died a silent death,
and America dreamed cozily of eternal peace.
Out of this youthful confidence in the future came one of the gravest
failures of American diplomacy. Finding the people of the Pacific Coast
troubled by the influx of Japanese into California, President Theodore
Roosevelt in 1907, with the good sense that hid behind his popular bluster,
quietly negotiated with the Japanese Government a "Gentlemen's Agree-
* The ratio of 5-5-3 was based upon the greater extent of coast-lines or possessions re-
quiring English or American defense, as compared with the limited and protected terri-
tory of Japan.
930 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXXI
ment" by which Japan promised to forbid the emigration of her laborers
to the United States. But the high birlh rate of those already admitted
continued to disturb the western states, and several of them enacted laws
preventing aliens from acquiring land. When, in 1924, the American
Congress decided to restrict immigration, it refused to apply to the races
of Asia that principle of quotas on which the reduced immigration of
European peoples was to be allowed;* instead it forbade the entrance of
Asiatics altogether. Approximately the same result would have been se-
cured by applying the quota to all races, without discrimination or name;
and Secretary Hughes protested "that the legislation would seem to be
quite unnecessary even for the purpose for which it is devised."43 But
hot-heads interpreted as a threat the warning uttered by the Japanese Am-
bassador of the "grave consequences" that might come from the act; and
in a fever of resentment the Immigration Bill was passed.
All Japan flared up at what appeared to be a deliberate insult. Meetings
were held, speeches were made, and a patriot committed hara-kiri at the
door of Viscount Inouye's home in order to express the national sense of
shame. The Japanese leaders, knowing that the country had been weak-
ened by the earthquake of 1923, held their peace and bided their time. In
the natural course of events America and Europe would some day be
weakened in turn; and then Japan would seize her second opportunity,
and take her delayed revenge.
When the greatest of all wars was followed by almost the greatest of
all depressions, Japan saw a long-awaited chance to establish her mastery
in the Far East. Announcing that her businessmen had been maltreated by
the Chinese authorities in Manchuria, and secretly fearful that her rail-
way and other investments there were threatened with ruin by the compe-
tition of the Chinese, Japan, in September, 1931, allowed her army, of its
own initiative, to advance into Manchuria. China, disordered with revolu-
tion, provincial separatism and purchasable politicians, could make no uni-
fied resistance except to resort again to the boycott of Japanese goods; and
when Japan, in alleged protest against boycott propaganda, invaded Shang-
hai (1932), only a fraction of China rose to repel the invasion. The ob-
jections of the United States were cautiously approved of "in principle"
by European powers too absorbed in their individual commercial interests
* By this principle the number of immigrants from any country was to bear the same
ratio to the total of permitted annual immigration as persons of that nationality had
borne to the total population of America in 1890.
CHAP. XXXl) THENEWJAPAN 931
to take decisive and united action against this dramatic termination of the
white man's brief authority in the distant East. The League of Nations ap-
pointed a commission under the Earl of Lytton, which made an apparently
thorough and impartial investigation and report; but Japan withdrew from
the League on the same ground on which America, in 1935, refused to join
in the World Court— that she did not care to be judged by a court of her
enemies. The boycott reduced Japanese imports into China by forty-
seven per cent between August, 1932, and May, 1933; but meanwhile
Japanese trade was ousting Chinese commerce in the Philippines, the Malay
States and South Seas, and, so soon as 1934, Japanese diplomats, with the
aid of Chinese statesmen, persuaded China to write a tariff law favoring
Japanese products as against those of the Western powers.43
In March, 1932, Japanese authority installed Henry P'u Yi, inheritor of
the Manchu throne in China, as Chief Executive of the new state of Man-
chukuo; and two years later it made him Emperor under the name of Kang
Teh. The officials were either Japanese or complaisant Chinese; but be-
hind every Chinese official was a Japanese adviser." While the "Open
Door" was technically maintained, ways were found to place Man-
chukuoan trade and resources in Japanese hands.45 Immigration from
Japan failed to develop, but Japanese capital poured in abundantly. Rail-
ways were built for commercial and military purposes, highways were
rapidly improved, and negotiations were begun for the purchase of the
Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet. The Japanese army, victorious
and competent, not only organized the new state, but dictated the policy
of the Government at Tokyo. It conquered the province of Jehol for
Pu-yi, advanced almost to Peiping, retreated magnanimously, and bided its
time.
Meanwhile Japanese representatives at Nanking strain every yen to win
from the Chinese Government an acceptance of Japanese leadership in
every economic and political aspect of Chinese life. When China has been
won, by conquest or by loans, Japan will be ready to deal with her ancient
enemy— once the Empire of all the Russias, now the Union of Soviet So-
cialist Republics. Up along Mongolia's caravan route through Kalgan and
Urga, or across the Manchukuoan border into Chita, or at any one of a
hundred vulnerable points where the Trans-Siberian Railway, still for the
most part single-tracked in the Far East, coils itself about the new state, the
Japanese army may strike and cut the spinal cord that binds China, Vladi-
vostok and Trans-Baikalia with the Russian capital. Feverishly, heroically,
93* THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION ( CHAP. XXXI
Russia prepares for the irrepressible conflict. At Kuznetzk and Magneto-
gorsk she develops great coal mines and steel factories, capable of being
transformed into giant munition plants; while at Vladivostok a host of
submarines arranges to entertain a Japanese fleet, and hundreds of bomb-
ing planes have their eyes on Japan's centers of production and transport,
and her cities of flimsy wood.
Behind this ominous foreground stand the tamed and frustrated Western
powers: Ajnerica chafing at the loss of Chinese markets, France wonder-
ing how long she can hold Indo-China, England disturbed about Australia
and India, and harassed by Japanese competition not only in China but
throughout her empire in the East. Nevertheless France prefers to help
finance Japan rather than to antagonize her; and canny Britain waits in
unprecedented patience, hoping that each of her great competitors in
Asiatic trade will destroy the other and leave the world to England again.
Every day the conflict of interest becomes more acute, and approaches
nearer to open strife. Japan insists that foreign companies selling oil to
Japan shall maintain on her soil a reserve of oil sufficient to supply the
islands for half a year in case of emergency. Manchukuo is closing her
doors to non-Japanese oil. Japan, over the protests of Americans, and
over the veto of the Uruguayan President, has won permission from the
legislature of Uruguay to build on the River Plate a free port for the duti-
less entry or manufacture of Japanese goods. From that strategic center
the commercial and financial penetration of Latin America will proceed
at a rate unequaled since Germany's rapid conquest of South American
trade helped to bring on the Great War, and America's participation in it.
As the memory of that war begins to fade, preparations for another be-
come the order of the day.
Must America fight Japan? Our economic system gives to the investing
class so generous a share of the wealth created by science, management and
labor that too little is left to the mass of producers to enable them to buy
back as much as they produce; a surplus of goods is created which cries
out for the conquest of foreign markets as the only alternative to inter-
rupting production— or spreading the power of consumption— at home.
But this is even truer of the Japanese economic system than of our own; it
too must conquer foreign markets, not only to maintain its centralized
wealth, but to secure the fuels and raw materials indispensable to her in-
dustries. By the sardonic irony of history that same Japan which America
awoke from peaceful agriculture in 1853, and prodded into industry and
CHAP. XXXl) THE NEW JAPAN 933
trade, now turns all her power and subtlety to winning by underselling,
and to controlling by conquest or diplomacy, precisely those Asiatic
markets upon which America has fixed her hopes as potentially the richest
outlet for her surplus goods. Usually in history, when two nations have
contested for the same markets, the nation that has lost in the economic
competition, if it is stronger in resources and armament, has made war upon
its enemy.
Such a war, of course, would be a bitter conclusion to America's open-
ing of Japan. But there is a tide in the affairs of states which, if uncon-
trolled before it gathers strength, sweeps a nation into circumstances where
its only choice is between humiliation and war; and men above military
age tend to prefer war to humiliation. The danger of a conflict with Japan
is not lessened by the apparent likelihood of war between Japan and
Russia; for if these nations throw down the gauntlet to each other again
we shall be sorely tempted to intervene on the ancient principle, so richly
illustrated in our time, that it is wiser to help destroy a competitor who is
already attacked than to wait for victory to strengthen him dangerously.
If we wish to resist that temptation we need only reflect that however
urgently Japan may need the markets of the East they are far from in-
dispensable to our own prosperity; and that to win them, either by a costly
war in distant waters or by a competitive lowering of our people's stand-
ard of living, would be an empty victory. It would be a boon to us, per-
haps, if our merchants should be compelled to find within their own fron-
tiers a market for their goods. Then we might realize that our happiness
lies not in conquering markets beyond the seas, but in so spreading the
fruits and profits of invention and industry that our own vast population
may be a sufficient market for our industries— even at the height of their
productive power. 3,738,000 square miles are enough.
Having taught Japan the ways of industry and war, we must be patient
with the destiny that has named her for the moment as the economic and
military mistress of the East. We need not grudge the Children of the Sun
their hour of power and glory, their fragile empire and their uncertain
wealth. There is room in the world for both of us; and, if we will it, the
seas are still broad enough to give us peace.
Envoi
OUR ORIENTAL HERITAGE
We have passed in unwilling haste through four thousand years of his-
tory, and over the richest civilizations of the largest continent. It is impossi-
ble that we have understood these civilizations, or done them justice; for
how can one mind, in one lifetime, comprehend or appraise the heritage of
a rice? The institutions, customs, arts and morals of a people represent the
natural selection of its countless trial-and-error experiments, the accumu-
lated and unformulable wisdom of all its generations; and neither the in-
telligence of a philosopher nor the intellect of a sophomore can suffice to
compass them understandingly, much less to judge them with justice.
Europe and America are the spoiled child and grandchild of Asia, and have
never quite realized the wealth of their pre-classical inheritance. But if,
now, we sum up those arts and ways which the West has derived from
the East, or which, to our current and limited knowledge, appear first in
the Orient, we shall find ourselves drawing up unconsciously an outline
of civilization.
The first clement of civilization is labor— tillage, industry, transport and
trade. In Egypt and Asia we meet with the oldest known cultivation of
the soil,* the oldest irrigation systems, and the firstf production of those
encouraging beverages without which, apparently, modern civilization
could hardly exist— beer and wine and tea. Handicrafts and engineering
were as highly developed in Egypt before Mosesi as in Europe before
Voltaire; building with bricks has a history at least as old as Sargon I; the
potter's wheel and the wagon wheel appear first in Elam, linen and glass
in Egypt, silk and gunpowder in China. The horse rides out of Central
Asia into Mesopotamia, Egypt and Europe; Phoenician vessels circum-
navigate Africa before the age of Pericles; the compass comes from China
and produces a commercial revolution in Europe. Sumeria shows us the
first business contracts, the first credit system, the first use of gold and
* It is possible that agriculture and the domestication of animals are as ancient in neo-
lithic Europe as in neolithic Asia; but it seems more likely that the New Stone Age
cultures of Europe were younger than those of Africa and Asia. Cf. Chapter VI above.
fin this and subsequent statements the word known is to be understood.
934
ENVOI 935
silver as standards of value; and China first accomplishes the miracle of
having paper accepted in place of silver or gold.
The second element of civilization is government— the organization and
protection of life and society through the clan and the family, law and the
state. The village community appears in India, and the city-state in
Sumeria and Assyria. Egypt takes a census, levies an income tax, and
maintains internal peace through many centuries with a model minimum
of force. Ur-Engur and Hammurabi formulate great codes of law, and
Darius organizes, with imperial army and post, one of the best administered
empires in the annals of government.
The third element of civilization is morality— customs and manners, con-
science and charity; a law built into the spirit, and generating at last that
sense of right and wrong, that order and discipline of desire, without
which a society disintegrates into individuals, and falls forfeit to some
coherent state. Courtesy came out of the ancient courts of Egypt, Meso-
potamia and Persia; even today the Far East might teach manners and
dignity to the brusque and impatient West. Monogamy appeared in Egypt,
and began a long struggle to prove itself and survive in competition with
the inequitable but eugenic polygamy of Asia. Out of Egypt came the
first cry for social justice; out of Judea the first pica for human brother-
hood, the first formulation of the moral consciousness of mankind.
The fourth element of civilization is religion— the use of man's super-
natural beliefs for the consolation of suffering, the elevation of character,
and the strengthening of social instincts and order. From Sumeria, Baby-
lonia and Judea the most cherished myths and traditions of Europe were
derived; in the soil of the Orient grew the stories of the Creation and the
Flood, the Fall and Redemption of man; and out of many mother goddesses
came at last "the fairest flower of all poesy," as Heine called Mary, the
Mother of God. Out of Palestine came monotheism, and the fairest songs
of love and praise in literature, and the loneliest, lowliest, and most im-
pressive figure in history.
The fifth element in civilization is science— clear seeing, exact recording,
impartial testing, and the slow accumulation of a knowledge objective
enough to generate prediction and control. Egypt develops arithmetic and
geometry, and establishes the calendar; Egyptian priests and physicians
practise medicine, explore diseases enematically, perform a hundred va-
rieties of surgical operation, and anticipate something of the Hippocratic
oath. Babylonia studies the stars, charts the zodiac, and gives us our di-
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
vision of the month into four weeks, of the clock into twelve hours, of
the hour into sixty minutes, of the minute into sixty seconds. India trans-
mits through the Arabs her simple numerals and magical decimals, and
teaches Europe the subtleties of hypnotism and the technique of vacci-
nation.
The sixth element of civilization is philosophy— the attempt of man to
capture something of that total perspective which in his modest intervals
he knows that only Infinity can possess; the brave and hopeless inquiry
into the first causes of things, and their final significance; the consideration
of truth and beauty, of virtue and justice, of ideal men and states. All this
appears in the Orient a little sooner than in Europe: the Egyptians and the
Babylonians ponder human nature and destiny, and the Jews write im-
mortal comments on life and death, while Europe tarries in barbarism; the
Hindus play with logic and epistcmology at least as early as Parmenides
and Zcno of Elea; the Upanishads delve into metaphysics, and Buddha
propounds a very modern psychology some centuries before Socrates is
born. And if India drowns philosophy in religion, and fails to emancipate
reason from hope, China resolutely secularizes her thought, and produces,
again before Socrates, a thinker whose sober wisdom needs hardly any
change to be a guide to our contemporary life, and an inspiration to those
who would honorably govern states.
The seventh clement of civilization is letters— the transmission of lan-
guage, the education of youth, the development of writing, the creation
of poetry and drama, the stimulus of romance, and the written remem-
brance of things past. The oldest schools known to us are those of Egypt
and Mesopotamia; even the oldest schools of government are Egyptian.
Out of Asia, apparently, came writing; out of Egypt the alphabet, paper
and ink; out of China, print. The Babylonians seem to have compiled the
oldest grammars and dictionaries, and to have collected the first libraries;
and it may well be that the universities of India preceded Plato's Academy.
The Assyrians polished chronicles into history, the Egyptians puffed up
history into the epic, and the Far East gave to the modern world those
delicate forms of poetry that rest all their excellence on subtle insights
phrased in a moment's imagery. Nabonidus and Ashurbanipal, whose relics
are exhumed by archeologists, were archeologists; and some of the fables
that amuse our children go back to ancient India.
The eighth element of civilization is art— the embellishment of life with
pleasing color, rhythm and form. In its simplest aspect— the adornment of
ENVOI 937
the body— we find elegant clothing, exquisite jewelry and scandalous cos-
metics in the early ages of Egyptian, Sumerian and Indian civilization.
Fine furniture, graceful pottery, and excellent carving in ivory and wood
fill the Egyptian tombs. Surely the Greeks must have learned something
of their skill in sculpture and architecture, in painting and bas-relief, not
only from Asia and Crete, but from the masterpieces that in their day still
gleamed in the mirror of the Nile. From Egypt and Mesopotamia Greece
took the models for her Doric and Ionic columns; from those same lands
came to us not merely the column but the arch, the vault, the clerestory
and the dome; and the ziggurats of the ancient Near East have had some
share in moulding the architecture of America today. Chinese painting
and Japanese prints changed the tone and current of nineteenth century
European an; and Chinese porcelain raised a new perfection for Europe
to emulate. The sombre splendor of the Gregorian chant goes back age
by age to the plaintive songs of exiled Jews gathering timidly in scattered
synagogues.
These are some of the elements of civilization, and a part of the legacy
of the East to the West.
Nevertheless much was left for the classic world to add to this rich in-
heritance. Crete would build a civilization almost as ancient as Egypt's,
and would serve as a bridge to bind the cultures of Asia, Africa and
Greece. Greece would transform art by seeking not size but perfection;
it would marry a feminine delicacy of form and finish to the masculine
architecture and statuary of Egypt, and would provide the scene for the
greatest age in the history of art. It would apply to all the realms of
literature the creative exuberance of the free mind; it would contribute
meandering epics, profound tragedies, hilarious comedies and fascinating
histories to the store of European letters. It would organize universities,
and establish for a brilliant interlude the secular independence of thought;
it would develop beyond any precedent the mathematics and astronomy,
the physics and medicine, bequeathed it by Egypt and the East; it would
originate the sciences of life, and the naturalistic view of man; it would
bring philosophy to consciousness and order, and would consider with
unaided rationality all the problems of our life; it would emancipate the
educated classes from ecclesiasticism and superstition, and would attempt
a morality independent of supernatural aid. It would conceive man as a
citizen rather than as a subject; it would give him political liberty, civil
938 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
rights, and an unparalleled measure of mental and moral freedom; it would
create democracy and invent the individual.
Rome would take over this abounding culture, spread it throughout the
Mediterranean world, protect it for half a millennium from barbarian as-
sault, and then transmit it, through Roman literature and the Latin lan-
guages, to northern Europe; it would lift woman to a power and splendor,
and a mental emancipation, which perhaps she had never known before;
it would give Europe a new calendar, and teach it the principles of political
organization and social security; it would establish the rights of the indi-
vidual in an orderly system of laws that would help to hold the continent
together through centuries of poverty, chaos and superstition.
Meanwhile the Near East and Egypt would blossom again under the
stimulus of Greek and Roman trade and thought. Carthage would revive
all the wealth and luxury of Sidon and Tyre; the Talmud would accumu-
late in the hands of dispersed but loyal Jews; science and philosophy
would flourish at Alexandria, and out of the mixture of European and
Oriental cultures would come a religion destined in part to destroy, in part
to preserve and augment, the civilization of Greece and Rome. Every-
thing was ready to produce the culminating epochs of classical antiquity:
Athens under Pericles, Rome under Augustus, and Jerusalem in the age of
Herod. The stage was set for the three-fold drama of Plato, Caesar, and
Christ.
Glossary
of foreign terms not immediately defined in the text
Ab initio (L)— from the outset.
Ahankara (H)— consciousness of self.
Amor del intellectualis (L)— intellectual love of God.
Anna (H)— an (Asiatic) Indian coin worth one-sixteenth of a rupee, or about
two cents.
Apercu (F)— a flash of insight.
Arbiter elegantiarum (L)— arbiter of elegance.
Arcana (L)— secret mysteries.
Arhat (H)— one who has earned Nirvana.
Asana (H)— the third stage of Yoga.
Ashram (a) (H)— a hermitage.
Ashvamedha (H)— the horse sacrifice.
A tergo (L)— from behind.
Bas-relief (F)— low relief; the partial carving of figures upon a background.
Bizarrerie (F) —something strange or queer.
Bod hi (H)— knowledge, illumination.
Bonze (F from J)— a Buddhist monk of the Far East.
Bourgeoisie (F)— literally, the townspeople; the middle classes.
Brahmachari (H)— a young student vowed to chastity.
Breccia (I)— a rock of angular fragments joined with cement.
Buddhi (H)-intellect.
Bushido (J)— the code of honor of the Samurai.
Ca. (circa) (L)— about.
Cela vous abetira (F)— that will dull your mind.
Chandala (H)— a group of Outcastes.
Charka (H)— a spinning wheel.
Chef-d'oeuvre (F)— masterpiece.
Chinois cries (F)— pieces of Chinese art.
Civitas (L)— city-state.
Condottiere (I)— bandit.
Corvee (F)— forced labor for the state.
Coup d'etat (F)— a violent but merely political revolution.
Coup d'oeil (F)— a glance of the eye.
Credat qui vult (F)— let who will believe it.
Cuisine (F)— kitchen; cooking.
*A=Arabic; C=Chinese; E=Egyptian; F=French; G=German; Gr=Grcek; He
=Hebrew; H=one of the Hindu languages; I=Italian; J=Japanese; L=Latin; S=Su-
merian; Sp— Spanish.
939
940 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
Daibutsu (J) —Great Buddha; usually applied to the colossi of Buddha.
Dalmyo (J)— lord.
De fontibus non disputandum (L)— there is no use disputing about origins.
Denouement (F)— issue; conclusion.
De rigueur (F)— rigorously required by convention.
Devadasi (H)— literally, a servant of the gods; usually, a temple courtesan in
India.
Dharana (H)— the sixth stage of Yoga.
Dharma (H)— duty.
Dhyana (H)— the seventh stage of Yoga.
Djinn (A)— spirits.
Dolce far niente (I)— (it is) sweet to do nothing.
Dramatis personae (L)— persons of the drama.
Dreckapothek ( G )— treatment by excrementitious drugs.
£77 masse (F)— in a mass.
Esprit (F) -spirit.
Ex tempore (L)— on the spur of the moment.
Faience (F)— richly colored glazed earthenware, named from the Italian town
of Faenza, formerly famed for sucli pottery.
Faux pas (F)— a false step.
Fellaheen (A)— peasants.
Fete des Fous (F)-Feast of Fools.
Fiacre (F)— an open cab.
Flagrantc delicto (L)— literally, while the crime is blazing; in the very act.
Flambe (F)— blazed.
Geisha (J)— an educated courtesan.
Genre (F)— class, kind.
Ghat (H)— a mountain-pass; a landing-place; steps leading down to water.
Glaucopis Athene (Gr)— owl-eyed Athene.
Gopuram (H)— gateway.
Gotra (H)— group.
Gunas (H)— active qualities.
Guru (H)— teacher.
Hara-kiri ( J ) — self-disembowelment.
Here boopis (Gr)— cow-eyed Here (Juno).
Hetairai (Gr)— the educated courtesans of Greece.
Ibid. (L)— in the same place.
Id. (L)— the same person or author.
Inro (J)— boxes worn at the girdle.
GLOSSARY 941
Jenseits von Gut und Bose (G) —beyond good and evil.
Jinricksha (J)— a man-drawn open cab.
Ju jitsu (J)— literally, the soft art; a Japanese method of self-defense without
weapons, by a variety of skilful physical artifices.
Junshi (J)— following in death; the suicide of a subordinate to serve his dead
lord in the other world.
Jus prim<e noctis (L)— the right of (possessing the bride on) the first night.
Kadamba (H)— an Indian flower.
Kakemono (J)— a pictorial or calligraphic hanging.
Karma (H)— deed; the law that every deed receives its reward or punishment
in this life or in a reincarnation.
Khaddar (H)— Indian homespun.
Kusha (H)— an Indian grass.
Kutaja (H)— an Indian flower.
Labia minor a (L)— the smaller folds of the vulva.
Laissez-faire (F)— literally, let it be; the theory or practice of leaving the eco-
nomic life of a society free from governmental control.
Lapis lazuli (L)— a stone of rich azure blue.
La politique rfa pas d'entrailles (F)— politics has no bowels (of mercy).
La seule morale (F)— the only morality.
Le chanson de Roland (F)—the Song of Roland.
UEcole*de V Extreme Orient— School of the Far East.
Legato (I)— smoothly; without breaks.
Les savants ne sont pas curieux (F)— scholars have no curiosity (Anatole France).
Lex talionis (L)— the law of retaliation.
Lingua franca (L)— a common tongue.
Lohan (C)— one who has earned Nirvana.
Mahatma (H)— great soul.
Manas (H)— mind.
Mandapam (H)— porch.
Mardi Gras (F)— literally, fat Tuesday, the last day of carnival before Mercredi
Maigre, Lean (fasting) Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.
Mastaba (A)— an oblong sloping tomb.
Mater dolor osa (L)— the sorrowful Mother.
Mina (L from Gr. from He)— a coin of the ancient Near East, worth (in
Babylonia) sixty shekels.
Mise-en scene (F)— the scenic situation.
Moksha (H) —deliverance.
Motif (F)— a characteristic feature or theme.
Mullah (A) -a Moslem scholar.
Muni (H)— saint.
942 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
Naga (H)— snake.
Nandi (H)— the benediction introducing a Hindu drama.
Nautch (H)— a Hindu temple dancer.
Netsuke (J)— carved knobs for holding a tassel.
Nishka (H)— a coin often used as an ornament.
Nom de plume (F)— a pen-name.
Nyama (H)— the second stage of Yoga.
Odium liter arium (L)— a mutual dislike occasionally noticeable among authors.
Objets d'art (L)— art objects.
Pace (L)— with peace; with all respect to.
Pankha (H)-a fan.
Parvenu (F)— one recently arrived at wealth or place.
Passim (L)— here and there.
Pdte (F)— the potter's vessel in its paste form.
Patesi (S)— the priest-magistrate of an early Mesopotamian state.
Penchant (F)— inclination.
Petite marmite (F)— a small pot.
Piece de resistance (F)— the main item.
Pishachas (H)— ghosts; goblins.
Plein air (F)— full air; a theory and school of painting which emphasized the
representation of scenes in the open air, as against studio painting.
Prakriti (H)— producer.
Pranayama (H)— the fourth stage of Yoga.
Pratyahara (H)— the fifth stage of Yoga.
Protege (F)— a person protected and aided by another.
Pro tempore (L)— for the time.
Purdah (A)— a screen or curtain; the seclusion of women.
Purusha (H)— person, spirit.
Quivive (F)— who lives; who goes there?; alert.
Raconteurs (F)— story-tellers.
Raga (H)— a musical motif or melody.
Raja (H)— king; Maharaja— great king.
Raksha (H)— a nocturnal demon.
Ramadan (A)— the ninth month of the Moslem year, during which no food
must be taken between sunrise and sunset.
Rapport (F)— intimate relation.
Religieux (F) —members of religious orders.
R*g (H)— a hymn.
Rishi (H)— a wise man.
Ronin (J)— an unattached Samurai.
Rupee (H)— an Indian coin worth about 32 cents.
GLOSSARY 943
Sake (J)— rice wine.
Salonniere (F)— a frequenter of a salon; usually referring to the French salons
or drawing-room receptions of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
Samadhi (H)— the eighth stage of Yoga.
Samaj (H)— assembly; society.
Samhita (H)— collection.
Samohini (H)— a drug.
Sang-de-boeuf (F)— (color of) bull's blood.
Sannyasi (H)— a hermit saint.
Sari (H)-a silk robe.
Sati (H)— suttee; devoted wife; the burial of a widow with her husband.
Savant (F)— scholar.
Sei (J) —caste.
Sen (J)— a Japanese coin, worth one-hundredth of a yen.
Se non e vero e ben trovato (1)— if it is not true it is well invented.
Seppuku (J)— ritual self-discmbowelment.
Sesquipcdalia verba (L)— six-footed words.
Shaduf (A)— a bucket swung on a pole to lift water.
Sbakhti (H)— the female energy of a god.
Shaman (H)— a magician, or miracle-working priest.
Shastra (H)— a text-book.
Shastra (H)— treatise.
Shekel (He)— a coin of the Near East, of varying value.
Shinto (J)— the Way of the Gods; the worship oT the national deities and the
emperor in Japan.
Shloka (H)— couplet.
Shogun (J)— general; military governor.
Siesta (Sp)— a short sleep or rest.
Silindhra (H)— an Indian flower.
Sine qua non (L)— an indispensable condition.
Souffle (F) -blown.
Swadeshi (H)— economic nationalism; the exclusive use of native products.
Swaraj (H)— self-rule.
Tantra (H)— rule or ritual.
Tatfwa (H)— reality.
Tempera (I)— distemper; painting in which the pigments are mixed or "tem-
pered" with an emulsion of egg, usually with the addition of "size"
(diluted glue) to secure adhesion.
Terracotta (I)— baked clay, coated with glaze.
Torii (J)— gateways.
Tour de force (F)— an act of sudden ability.
Ur<eus (L)— a serpent image symbolizing wisdom and life; usually worn by
the Egyptian kings.
944 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
Virtus dormitiva (L)— soporific power.
Yaki (J)— wares.
Yen (J)— a Japanese coin, normally worth about fifty cents.
Ziggurat (Assyrian-Babylonian)— a tower of superimposed and diminishing
stories, usually surrounded by external stairs.
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945
946 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
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JOYooD, ERNEST: An Englishman Defends Mother India. Madras, 1929.
WOOLLEY, C. LEONARD: The Sumerians. Oxford, 1928.
WORLD ALMANAC, 1935. New York, 1935.
Wu, CHAO-CHU: The Nationalist Program for China. Yale U. P., 1929.
XENOPHON: Anabasis. Loeb Classical Library.
XENOPHON: Cyropsedia. Loeb Classical Library.
YANGCHU: Garden of Pleasure. London, 1912.
ZIMAND, SAVEL: Living India. New York, 1928.
Notes'
i. Supplement to Essai sur les mosurs; quoted by Buckle, H. T., History of Civilization,
1,581.
CHAPTER I
i. Robinson, J. H., art. Civilization, Encyclopedia Britannic a, iqxh ed.
CHAPTER II
1. Spengler, O., The Decline of the West; 23.
The Hour of Decision. 24.
2. Hayes, Sociology, 494.
3. Lippcrt, J., Evolution of Culture, 38. 25.
4. Spencer, H., Principles of Sociology , i, 26.
60. 27.
5. Sumner and Keller, Science of Society, 28.
i, 51; Sumner, W. G., Folkways, 119- 29.
22; Rcnard, G., Life and Work in Pre- 30.
historic Times, 36; Mason, O. T., Ori- 303
gins of Invention, 298. 31.
6. Ibid., 316.
7. Sumner and Keller, i, 132.
8. Roth, H. L., in Thomas, W. I., Source 32.
Book for Social Origins, in. 33.
9. Ibid.; Mason, O. T., 190; Lippert, 165. 34.
10. Rcnard, 123.
11. Briffault, The Mothers, ii, 460. 35.
12. Renard, 35.
13. Sutherland, G. A., ed., A System of
Diet and Dietetics, 45.
14. Ibid., 33-4; Ratzel, F., History of Man- 36.
kind, i, 90. 37.
15. Sutherland, G. A., 43, 45; Miiller-Lyer, 38.
F., History of Social Development, 70. 39.
1 6. Ibid., 86. 40.
17. Sumner, Folkways, 329; Ratzel, 129; 41.
Rcnard, 40-2; Westcrmarck, E., Origin 42.
and Development of the Moral Ideas, 43.
i, 553-62-
1 8. Sumner and Keller, ii, 1234. 433
19. Sumner, Folkways, 329. 44.
20. Renard, 40-2.
21. Sumner and Keller, ii, 1230.
22. Briffault, ii, 399. 45.
Sumner and Keller, ii, 1234.
Cowan, A. R., Master Clues in World
History, 10.
Renard, 39.
Mason, O. T., 23.
Briffault, i, 461-5.
Mason, O. T., 224^
Miiller-Lyer, Social Development, 102.
Ibid., 144-6.
. Ibid., 167; Ratzel, 87.
Thomas, W. I., 113-7; Renard, 154-5;
Miiller-Lyer, 306; Sumner and Keller,
i, 150-3.
Sumner, Folkways, 142.
Mason, O. T., 71.
Miiller-Lycr, Social Development, 238-
9; Renard, i?8.
Sumner and Keller, i, 268-72, 300, 320;
Lubbock, Sir J., Origin of Civilization,
373-?; Campbell, Bishop R., in New
York Times, 1-11-33.
Biicher, K., Industrial Evolution, 57.
Kropotkin, Prince P., Mutual Aid, 90.
Mason, O. T., 27.
Sumner and Keller, i, 270-2.
Briffault, ii, 494-7.
Sumner and Keller, i, 3281". .
In Lippert, 39.
A Naturalist's Voyage Around the
World, 242, in Briffault, ii, 494.
. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 35-42.
Hobhouse, L. T., Morals in Evolution,
244-5; Cowan, A. R., Guide to World
History, 22; Sumner and Keller, i, 58.
Hobhouse, 272.
•The full title of a book is given only on it* first occurrence in these Notes; abbreviated later references
may be filled out by consulting the foregoing Bibliographical Guide to Books Referred to in the Text.
956
CHAP. IV)
NOTES
957
CHAPTER III
1. Sumncr and Keller, i, 16, 418, 461;
Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 195-8.
2. Sumner and Keller, i, 461.
3. Rivers, W. H. R., Social Organization, 30.
166.
4. Briffault, ii, 364, 494; Ratzel, 133; Sum-
ncr and Keller, 470-3. 31.
5. Ibid., 463, 473. 32.
6. Ibid., 370, 358.
7. Renard, 149; Westmarck, Moral Ideas,
ii, 836-9; Ratzel, 130; Hobhouse, 239; 33.
Sumner and Keller, i, 18, 372, 366, 392,
394> 7'3-
8. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 103.
9. American Journal of Sociology, March, 34.
1905.
10. Oppenhcimer, Franz, The State, 16.
11. In Ross, E. A., Social Control, 50. 35.
12. In Sumner and Keller, i, 704. 36.
13. Ibid., 709. 37.
14. Cowan, Guide to World History, i8f. 38.
15. Sumner and Keller, i, 486. 39.
1 6. Spencer, Sociology, iii, 316. 40.
17. Ibid, i, 66.
1 8. Melville, Typee, 222, in Briffault, «ii, 41.
356. 42.
19. Briffault, ibid. 43.
20. Sumncr and Keller, i, 687.
21. Lubbock, 330. 44.
22. Hobhouse, 73-101; Kropotkin, Mutual
Aid, 131; Thomas, W. I., 301. 45.
23. Sumner and Keller, i, 682-7. 46.
24. For examples cf. Westermarck, Moral 47.
Ideas, i, 14-5, 20. 48.
25. Lubbock, 363-7; Sumner and Keller, i,
454; Briffault, ii, 499; Maine, Sir H., 49.
Ancient Law, 109; Boas, Franz, An-
thropology and Modern Life, 221. 50.
26. Sutherland, A., Origin and Growth of 51.
the Moral Instincts, i, 4-5.
27. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1498; Lippert,
75. 659-
Sumner and Keller, iii, 1501.
Ibid., 1500; Renard, 198; Briffault, ii,
5'8, 434-
Vinogradoff, Sir P., Outlines of His-
torical Jurisprudence, i, 212; Briffault,
i, 5<>3» 5'3-
Sumner, Folkways, 364.
Briffault, i, 508-9; Sumner and Keller, i,
540; iii, 1949; Rivers, Social Organiza-
tion, 12.
Moret and Davy, From Tribe to Em-
pire, 40; Briffault, i, 308; Muller-Lyer,
The Family, i 24-7; Sumner and Kel-
ler, iii, 1939.
White, E. M., Woman in World His*
tory, 35; Briffault, i, 309; Lippert, 223;
Sumncr and Keller, iii, 1990.
Hobhouse, 170.
Muller-Lyer, Family, 118.
Ibid., 232.
Sumner and Keller, iii, 1733.
Lubbock, 5.
Miillcr-Lycr, Evolution of Modern
Marriage, 112.
Briffault, i, 460; Renard, 101.
Briffault, i, 466, 478, 484, 509.
Ellis, H., Man and Woman, 316; Sum-
ncr and Keller, i, 128.
Ibid., iii, 1763, 1843; Ratzel, 134; West-
crmarck, Moral Ideas, i, 235.
Lubbock, 67.
Lubbock in Thomas, W. I., 108.
Wcstcrmarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 420, 629.
Crawley, E., The Mystic Rose, in
Thomas, W. I., 515-7, 525.
Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 638-45;
Sumncr and Keller, iii, 1737.
Ibid., 1753.
Vinogradoff, i, 197; Muller-Lyer, So-
cial Development, 208.
CHAPTER IV
1. Darwin, C., Descent of Man, 110.
2. Ellis, H., Studies in the Psychology of
Sex, vi, 422.
3. Westermarck, E., History of Human
Marriage, i, 32, 35.
4. Briffault, ii, 154.
5. Sumner and Keller, iii, 15471". Further
examples of sexual communism may be
found in Briffault, i, 645; ii, 2-13; Lub-
bock, 68-9.
6. Muller-Lyer, Family, 55.
6a. Encyclopedia Britannic a, xiii, 206.
7. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1548.
8. Briffault, ii, 81.
9. Lubbock, 69.
10. Lippert, 67.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
958
n. Polo, Marco, Travels, 70. 39.
12. Letourneau, Marriage, in Sumner and 40.
Keller, iii, 1521.
13. Westermarck, Short History of Human 41.
Marriage, 265; Muller-Lyer, Family, 43.
49; Sumner and Keller, iii, 1563; Brif- 44.
fault, i, 629f.
14. Ibid., 649.
15. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1565.
16. Examples in Briffault, i, 7670; Sumner
and Keller iii, 1901; Lippert, 670.
17. Examples in Briffault, i, 6411", 663; Vin-
ogradoff, i, 173. 45-
Vinogradoff, i, 173.
1 8. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 387. 46.
19. Briffault, ii, 315; Hobhouse, 140. 47.
20. Miiller-Lycr, Modern Marriage, 34.
21. Spencer, Sociology, i, 722; Wester- 48.
marck, Moral Ideas, i, 388; Sumner,
Folkways, 265, 351; Sumner and Keller, 49.
i, 22; iii, 1863; Briffault, ii, 261, 267, 271.
22. Lowic, R. H., Are We Civilized?, 128. 50.
23. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1534, 1540; 51.
Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 399. 52.
24. Gen., xxix. Similar customs existed in 522
Africa, India and Australia; cf. Mullcr-
Lyer, Modern Marriage, 123.
25. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1625-6; Vino- 53.
gradoff, 209; further examples in Lub-
bock, 91; Muller-Lyer, Family, 86; 54.
Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 435. 55.
26. Briffault, i, 244^ 56.
i6a. Lippert, 295; Muller-Lyer, Social De- 57.
velopment, 270. 58.
27. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1631. Briffault 59.
interprets this wedding custom as a 60.
reminiscence of the transition from 61.
matrilocal to patriarchal marriage— i, 62.
240-50. 63.
28. Hobhouse, 158. 64.
29. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1629. 65.
30. Briffault, ii, 244. 66.
31. Muller-Lyer, Modern Marriage, 125. 67.
32. Hobhouse, 151; Westermarck, Moral
Ideas, i, 383; Sumner and Keller, 1650.
33. Ibid., 1648.
34. Ibid., 1649. Herodotus (I, 196) reported
a similar custom in the fifth century
B.C., and Burckhardt found it in Arabia
in the nineteenth century (Miillcr- 68.
Lyer, Modern Marriage, 127). 69.
35. Briffault, i, 219-21. 70.
36. Lowie, Are We Civilized?, 125. 71.
37. Briffault, ii, 215. 72.
38. Sumner and Keller, iii, 1658. 73.
(CHAP, iv
In Lubbock, 53.
Ibid., 54-7; Sumner and Keller, iii, 1503-
8; Briffault, ii, 141-3.
Muller-Lyer, Modern Marriage, 51.
Briffault, ii, 7of.
Briffault, ii, 2-13, 67, 70-2. Briffault has
gathered into a ten-page footnote the
evidence for the wide spread of pre-
marital sexual freedom in the primitive
world. Cf. also Lowie, Are We Civil-
ized?, 123; and Sumner and Keller, iii,
1553-7-
Ibid., 1556; Briffault, ii, 65; Wester-
marck, i, 441.
Lowie, 127.
Briffault, iii, 313; Miillcr-Lycr, 'Mo dern
Marriage, 32.
Briffault, ii, 222-3; Westermarck, Short
History, 13.
Sumner and Keller, iii, 1682; Sumncr,
Folkways, 358.
Ibid., 361; Sumncr and Keller, iii, 1674.
Ibid., 1554; Briffault, iii, 344.
S & K, iii, 1682.
, For examples cf . Westermarck, Human
Marriage, i, 530-45; or Muller-Lyer,
Modern Marriage, 39-41.
Muller-Lyer, Social Development, 132-
3; Sumner, Folkways, 439.
Briffault, iii, 26of.
Ibid, 307; Ratzel, 93.
Sumner, Folkways, 450.
Rcinach, Orpheus, 74.
cf. Briffault, ii, 112-7; Vinogradoff, 173.
S. & K., iii, 1528.
Ibid., 1771.
Ibid., 1677-8.
Ibid., 1831.
Quoted in Briffault, ii, 76.
Ibid., S & K, iii, 1831.
Muller-Lyer, Family, 102.
S & K, iii, 1890.
Ibid.; Sumner, Folkways, 314; Briffault,
ii, 71; Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii,
413; E. A. Rout, "Sex Hygiene of the
New Zealand Maori," in' The Medical
Journal and Record, Nov. 17, 1926;
The Birth Control Review, April, 1932,
p. 112.
Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 394-401.
Lowie, Are We Civilized?, 138.
Miillcr-Lycr, Family, 104.
S & K, i, 54.
Briffault, ii, 391.
Renard, 135.
CHAP. IV)
74. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 383.
75. Ibid., i, 290; Spencer, Sociology, i, 46.
76. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 88; S & K,
i, 336.
77. Kropotkin, 90.
78. Lowie, Are We Civilized?, 141.
79. Instances in Thomas, W. I., 108; White,
.E. M., 40; Briffault, i, 453; Ratzcl, 135.
80. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 422, 678.
81. Hobhouse, 79; Briffault, ii, 353.
82. Ibid., 185.
83. Thomas, W. I., 154.
84. Examples in S & K, i, 641-3.
85. Briffault, ii, 143-4.
86. Ibid., 500-1; Kropotkin, 101, 105; West-
ermarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 539-40; Lowie,
141.
87. Hobhouse, 29; Spencer, Sociology, i,
69; Kropotkin, oo-i.
88. Miiller-Lyer, Modern Marriage, 26;
Briffault, i, 636.
89. Ibid., 640.
90. Muller-Lyer, 31.
91. Lowie, 164.
92. Westcrmarck, Moral Ideas, i, 150-1;
Sumner, Folkways, 460.
93. Ibid, 454.
94. Ibid., 13; S & K, i, 358.
95. Kropotkin, 112-3; Briffault, ii, 357, 490;
S & K, i, 659; Wcstermarck, ii, 556.
06. Strabo, Geography, I, 2, 8.
o6a. S & K, ii, 1419.
o6b. Ibid.
o6c. Briffault, ii, 510.
o6d. Lippert, 6.
o6e. Briffault, ii, 503.
97. Williams, H. S., History of Science, i,
'5-
98. Briffault, ii, 645.
99. Ibid., 657.
100. S & K, ii, 859; Lippert, 115.
101. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, iv., 3;
Davids, T. W. Rhys, Buddhist India,
252; Deusscn, Paul, The Philosophy of
the Upanishads, 302.
102. Carpenter, Edward, Pagan and Chris-
tian Creeds, 80.
103. Powys, John Cowper, The Meaning of
Culture, 1 80.
104. Briffault, ii, 577, 583-92, 632.
105. Ibid., 147; Carpenter, 48.
106. Jung, C. G., Psychology of the Uncon-
scious, 173.
107. Allen, G., Evolution of the Idea of
God, 237.
NOTES 959
1 08. Briffault, ii, 508-9.
109. Frazcr, Sir J. G., The Golden Bough,
i-v cd., 112, 115.
no. De Morgan, Jacques, Prehistoric Man,
249.
in. Frazer, Golden Bough, 165-7.
112. Jung, 173.
113. Briffault, iii, 117.
114. Ibid., ii, 592.
115. Ibid., 481.
1 1 6. Reinach, 19.
117. Freud, S., Totem and Taboo. For a
criticism of the theory cf. Golden-
weiser, A. A., History, Psychology and
Culture, 201-8.
1 1 8. Durckheim, E., Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life.
119. Briffault, ii, 468.
120. Reinach, Orpheus, 1909 ed., 76, 81;
Tarde, G., Laws of Imitation, 273-5;
Murray, G., Aristophanes and the War
P^y, 23i 37-
121. Spencer, Sociology, i, 406; Frazer,
Golden Bough, vii.
122. Reinach, 1909 ed., 80.
123. Allen, 30.
124. Examples in Lippert, 103.
125. Smith, W. Robertson, The Religion of
the Semites, 42.
126. Hoernle, R. F. A., Studies in Contem-
porary Metaphysics, 181.
127. Reinach (1909), in.
128. Frazcr, Golden Bough, 13.
129. Frazcr, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 356.
130. Briffault, iii, 196.
131. Ibid., 199.
132. Frazer, Golden Bough, 337, 432; Allen,
246.
133. Georg, EM The Adventure of Mankind f
202.
134. S & K, ii, 1252.
13^. Ibid.
136. Sumner, Folkways, 336-9, 553-5.
H7. Ibid., 337; Frazer, Golden Bough, 489.
n8. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 373, 376,
563.
139. Ratzel, 45.
140. Reinach, 1930 ed., 23.
141. Ratzel, 133.
142. 2 Sam. vi, 4-7.
143. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History,
I, Ixxxiv.
144. Briffault, ii, 366, 387.
145. Sumner. Folkways, 511.
960
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
(CHAP.V
CHAPTER V
1. Ratzel, 34; Miiller-Lyer, Social De-
velopment, 50-3, 61.
2. Ibid., 46-9, 54; Rcnard, 57; Robinson,
J. H., 735, 740; France, A., M. Bergeret
a Paris.
3. Lubbock, 227, 339, 3421".
4. Miiller, Max, Lectures on the Science
of Language, i, 360.
5. Tylor, E. B., Anthropology, 125.
6. Miiller, Science of Language, i, 265,
303n; ii, 39.
7. Venkateswara, S. V., Indian Culture
through the Ages, Vol. I., Education
and the Propagation of Culture, 6; Rat-
zel, 31.
8. White, W. A., Mechanisms of Charac-
ter Formation, 83.
9. Lubbock, 353-4.
10. Briffault, i, 106.
n. Ibid., 107; Russell, B., Marriage and
Morals, 243.
12. S & K, i, 554.
13. Briffault, ii, 190.
14. Ibid., 192-3.
15. Lubbock, 35.
1 6. Maspero, G., Dawn of Civilization,
quoted in Mason, W. A., History of
the Art of Writing, 39.
17. Lubbock, 299.
18. Mason, W. A., ch. ii; Lubbock, 35.
19. Mason, W. A., 146-54.
20. Briffault, i, 18.
21. Spencer, Sociology, iii, 218-26.
22. Mason, W. A., 149; further examples in
Lowic, 202.
23. Spencer, Sociology, iii, 2471".
24. Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 243-8, 261,
266; Lubbock, 299.
25. Thoreau, H. D., Walden.
26. Briffault, ii, 601.
27. Mason, O. T., in Thomas, Source Book,
366.
28. Briffault, i, 485.
29. Examples in Lowie, Are We Civilized?,
250.
2oa. Matt., viii, 28.
30. Lowie, 250; S & K, ii, 979; Spencer, So-
ciology, iii, 194; Garrison, F. H., His-
tory of Medicine, 22, 33; Harding, T.
Swann, Fads, Frauds and Physicians,
148.
31. Garrison, 26.
32. Marett, H. R., Hibbert Journal, Oct.,
1918; Carpenter, Pagan and Christian
Creeds, 176.
33. Lowie, 247.
34. In Garrison, 45.
35. Briffault, ii, 157-8, 162-3.
36. Darwin, Descent of Man, 660.
37. Briffault, ii, 176.
38. Spencer, i, 65; Ratzel, 95.
39. Grossc, EM The Beginnings of Art, 55-
63; Pi joan, J., History of Art, i, 4.
40. Grossc, 58.
41. Rcnard, 91.
42. Lubbock, 45.
4V Ratzel, 105.
44. Lubbock, 51; Grossc, 80.
4?. In Thomas, Source Book, 555.
46. Grossc, 70; Lubbock, 46-50.
47. Gcorg, 104.
48. Grosse, 81.
49. Briffault, ii, 161.
50. Grosse, 83.
51. Ratzel, 95.
52. Mullcr-Lycr, Social Development, 142.
53. Grosse, 53.
54. Ibid.
55. Briffault, ii, 297.
56. Ratzel in Thomas, Source Book, 557.
57. Lowie, 80.
58. Sumncr, Folkways, 187.
59. Enc. Brit., xviii, 373.
60. Mason, O. T., 156, 164.
61. Ibid., 52.
62. Pijoan, i, 12.
63. Ibid., 8.
64. Spencer, iii, 294-304; Ratzel, 47.
65. Rcnard, 56.
66. Pratt, W. S., The History of Music,
26-31.
67. Grosse, E., in Thomas, Source Book,
586.
CHAP.Vl)
NOTES
961
CHAPTER VI
2. Osborn, H. F., Men of the Old Stone
Age, 23.
3. N. Y. Times, July 31 and Nov. 5, 1931.
4. Lull, The Evolution of Man, 26.
5. Sollas, W. J., Ancient Hunters, 438-42.
6. Keith, Sir AM N. Y. Times, Oct. 12,
1930.
7. De Morgan, J., Prehistoric Man, 57-8.
8. Pittard, Eugene, Race and History, 70.
9. Keith, I.e.
10. Pittard, 311; Childc, V. G., The Most
Ancient East, 26.
11. Andrews, R. C., On. the Trail of An-
cient Man, 309-12.
12. Skeat, W. M., An Etymological Dic-
tionary of the English Language, 252;
Lippert, 166.
14. Osborn, 270-1.
15. Lippert, 133.
1 6. Lowie, Are We Civilized?, 51.
17. Muller-Lycr, Social Development, 99;
Lippert, 130; S & K, i, 191.
1 8. Bulley, M., Ancient and Medieval Art,
14.
19. DC Morgan, 197.
20. Spearing, H. G., The Childhood of
Art, 92; Bulley, 12.
21. Osborn, fig. 166.
22. N. Y. Times, Jan. 22, 1934.
23. Bulley, 17.
24. Spearing, 45.
26. Rcnard, 86.
27. Rickard, T. A., Man and Metals, i, 67.
28. De Morgan, x.
29. Ibid., 169; Renard, 27.
30. DC Morgan, 172, fig. 94.
31. Pitkin, W. B., A Short Introduction to
the History of Human Stupidity, 53.
32. Carpenter, E., Pagan and Christian
Creeds, 74; Lowie, 58; Ratzcl in
Thomas, Source Book, 93.
33. Lowie, 60.
34. Febvre, L., A Geographical Introduc-
tion to History, 261.
35. Rickard, i, 81; Schneider, H., The His-
tory of World Civilization, i, 20.
36. Breasted, J. H., Ancient Times, 29.
37. Rcnard, 102.
38. De Morgan, 187.
39. Mason, O. T., Origins of Invention,
'54-
40. E.gM De Morgan, 226, fig. 135.
41. Renard, 79.
42. Lowie, 114; De Morgan, 269.
43. Renard, 112; Rickard, i, 77.
44. Georg, 105.
45. De Morgan, 235, 240; Renard, 27;
Childc, V. G., The Dawn of European
Civilization, 129-38; Georg, 89.
46. Schneider, H., i, 23-9.
47. Ibid, 30-1.
48. Garrison, History of Medicine, 28; Re-
nard, 190.
49. Rickard, i, 84.
50. Ibid., 109, 141.
51. Ibid., 114.
52. Ibid., 1 18.
53. Rostovtzeff, M., in Coomaraswamy, A.
K., History of Indian and Indonesian
Art, 3.
54. Cambridge Ancient History, i, 103.
55. De Morgan, 126.
56. Rickard, i, 169-70; De Morgan, 91.
57. Rickard, i, 85-6.
58. Ibid., 86.
59. Ibid., 141-8; Renard, 29-30.
60. Mason, W. A., History of Writing,
313-
6oa. CAH (Cafnbridge Ancient History),
i, 376.
61. Petrie, Sir W. F., The Formation of
the Alphabet, in Mason, W. A., 329.
62. Encyc. Brit., i, 680.
63. Tylor, Anthropology, 168.
64. DC Morgan, 257.
65. Breasted, Ancient Times, 42; Mason,
W. A., 210, 321.
66. Ibid., 331.
67. Encyc. Brit., i, 681.
68. Plato, Timaeus, 25; Critias, 113.
69. Georg, 223.
70. Childe, The Most Ancient East, 21-6.
71. Georg, 51.
72. Keith, Sir A., N. Y. Times, Oct. 12,
1930; Buxton, L. H. D., The Peoples of
Asia, 83.
73. CAH, i, 579.
74. Ibid., 86, oo-i, 362.
75. Keith, I.e.; Briffault, ii, 507; CAH, L
362; Coomaraswamy, History, 3.
76. CAH, i, 85-6.
96i
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
(CHAP, vii
CHAPTER VH
1. CAH, i, 86, 361; Chndc, The Most
Ancient East, 126; Keith in N. Y.
Times, April 3, 1932.
2. Breasted, J. H., Oriental Institute, 8.
3. Childe, 128, 146.
4. De Morgan, 208; CAH, i, 362, 578.
5. Moret, 199; CAH, i, 361, 579.
6. Woolley, C. L., The Sumerians, 189.
7. Jastrow, Morris, The Civilization of
Babylonia and Assyria, 101.
8. CAH, i, 127.
9. Pijoan, i, 104; Ball, C. J., in Parmelee,
M., Oriental and Occidental Culture,
18.
10. Childe, 160, 173; Maspcro, G., Dawn
of Civilization, 718-20; CAH, i, 364;
Woolley, 13.
n. CAH, i, 456.
12. Berosus in CAH, i, 150.
13. Maspero, Struggle of the Nations, iv.
14. Woolley, 69; CAH, i, 387.
15. Ibid., 388.
16. Woolley, 73; CAH, i, 403.
17. Harper, R. F., ed., Assyrian and Baby-
lonian Literature, i.
1 8. CAH, i, 405.
19. Woolley, 140; Maspero, Dawn, 637;
CAH, i, 427.
20. Ibid., i, 435.
21. Ibid., i, 472.
23. Jastrow, 7; Maspero, Dawn, 554;
Childe, Ancient East, 124; CAH, i, 463.
24. Woolley, 112-4.
25. Childe, 170.
26. Woolley, 13.
27. Delaporte, L., Mesopotamia, 112.
28. Woolley, 13; Delaporte, 172; CAH, i,
507; N. Y. Times, Aug. 2, 1932.
29. Childe, 147.
30. Ibid., 169; Encyc. Brit., ii, 845; Dela-
porte, 1 06.
31. Ibid.; Woolley, 117-8; CAH, i, 427.
32. Woolley, 92; Delaporte, 101.
33. Woolley, 126; CAH, i, 461.
34. Maspero, Dawn, 7091".
35. Ibid., 606-7, 722; Woolley, 79; CAH, i,
540.
36. Maspero, Dawn, 721-3.
37. CAH, i, 461.
38. Woolley, 93.
39. Maspero, 655.
40. CAH, i, 443-4, 448.
4*-
4*-
43-
44-
45-
46.
47-
48.
49-
50.
5i-
5*-
53-
54-
55-
56.
57-
58.
59-
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
?i-
72-
73-
74-
75-
76.
77-
78.
79-
80.
81.
82.
Jastrow, 277.
Woolley, 126.
Jastrow, 130.
Woolley, 13.
Ibid., 1 20.
CAH, i, 400.
Langdon, S., Babylonian Wisdom, 18-
21.
Woolley, 108-9.
Ibid., 13.
Jastrow, 466.
Woolley, 1 06.
CAH, i, 370-1; Woolley, 40, 43, 54.
Ibid., 92, 101.
CAH, i, 376.
Maspero, Dawn, 723-8; CAH, i, 371-2.
Maspero, Struggle, iv.
CAH, i, 550; iii, 226.
Woolley, 37.
Delaportc, 172.
Woolley, 37, 191.
Maspero, Dawn, 709-18.
Jastrow, 106; Woolley, 40, 144; Mas-
pero, 630.
Ibid., 60 1.
Schafer, H., and Andrae, W., Die
Kunst des Alien Orients, 469; Wool-
ley, 66.
CAH, i, 400.
Woolley, 46; N. Y. Times, April 13,
1934.
Schafer, 482.
Ibid., 485.
Woolley, 188; CAH, i, 463.
Moret, 164; Childe, Ancient East, 216.
Hall, H. R., in Encyc. Brit., viii, 45.
Maspero, Dawn, 46; CAH, i, 255.
Ibid., 372.
Ibid., 255, 263, 581; De Morgan, 102;
Hall, H. R., l.c.
Ibid., CAH, i, 579.
CAH, i, 263, 581.
CAH, i, 252, 581; Hall, l.c., 44-5.
De Morgan, 102.
Hall, l.c.; CAH, i, 581.
Such objects are pictured for compari-
son in De Morgan, 102.
Woolley, 187; Hall, l.c., 45.
Smith, G. Elliot, The Ancient Egyp-
tians and the Origin of Civilization,
CHAP. VIU)
NOTES
963
CHAPTER
1. Strabo, Geography, I, iii, 4.
2. Maspero, Dawn, 24.
3. Erman, A., Life in Ancient Egypt, 13;
CAH, i, 317.
4. Erman, 29.
5. Diodorus Siculus, I, Ixiv, 3. The face
value of the talent in the time of Dio-
dorus was $1,000 in gold, worth in pur-
chasing power some $10,000 today.
6. Encyc. Brit., viii, 42.
7. In Capart, J., Thebes, 40.
8. The Harris Papyrus in Capart, 237.
9. Capart, 27; Breasted, J. H., Ancient
Records of Egypt, ii, 131.
10. CAH, i, 116; ii, 100.
n. Breasted, Ancient Times, 97, 455; CAH,
i, 117.
12. Ibid., 116.
13. De Morgan, 25; CAH, i, 33-6; Keith
in N. Y. Times, Oct. 12, 1930; Moret,
14. Breasted in CAH, i, 86.
15. Encyc. Brit., viii, 42; Moret, 119; De
Morgan, 92.
16. Moret, 119; CAH, i, 270-1.
17. Smith, G. Elliot, Human History, 264;
Childe, Ancient East, 38.
1 8. Pittard, 419; CAH, i, 270-1; Smith, G.
Elliot, Ancient Egyptians, 50.
19. CAH, i, 372, 255, 263; De Morgan, 102.
20. Maspero, Dawn, 45; CAH, i, 244-5,
254-6; Pittard, 413; Moret, 158; Smith,
Ancient Egyptians, 24.
21. Maspero, Passing of the Empires, viii;
De Morgan, 101.
22. Diodorus, I, xciv, 2. Diodorus adds, by
way of comparison: "Among the Jews
Moyses referred his laws to the god
who is invoked as lao."
23. Ibid., I, xlv, i.
24. Encyc. Brit., viii, 45.
25. Schafer, 209.
26. Ibid., 247.
27. Ibid., 211.
28. Ibid., 228-9.
29. Herodotus, II, 124.
30. Capart, J., Lectures on Egyptian An,
08.
31. CAH, i, 335.
32. Maspero, Art in Egypt, 15.
33. Schafer, 248.
34. Herodotus, II, 86.
35. In Cotterill, History of Art, i, 10.
36. Breasted, J. H., Development of Re-
ligion and Thought in Ancient Egypt,
203.
37. CAH, i, 308.
38. Breasted, J. H., History of Egypt, 266-
7-
39. Breasted, Ancient Records, ii, 78-121;
Maspero, The Struggle of the Nations,
236-7.
40. Ibid., 237-9; Breasted, History, 273;
White, E. M., 49.
41. CAH, ii, 65.
42. Ibid., ch. iv.
43. Ibid., 79.
433. Breasted, History, 320.
44. Weigall, A., Life and Times of Akhna-
ton, 8.
45. Erman, 20.
46. So a stele of Amcnhotcp III expresses
it in Capart, Thebes, 182.
47. Ibid., 182, 197.
48. Diodorus, I, xxxi, 8.
49. Herodotus, II, 14.
50. Erman, 199.
51. Herodotus, II, 95.
52. Maspero, Dawn, 330.
53. Genesis, xlvii, 26.
54. Erman, 441.
55. Erman, A., Literature of the Ancient
Egyptians, 187.
56. Maspero, Dawn, 65; Lippert, 197.
57. Maspero, Dawn, 331-2.
58. Moret, 357.
59. Rickard, T. A., i, 192-203; De Morgan,
114.
60. Diodorus, HI, xii, tr. by Rickard, i,
209-10.
61. Erman, Life, 451-5.
62. Breasted, Ancient Times, 64; Maspero,
Struggle, 739.
63. Muller-Lyer, Social Development, 105.
64. Diodorus, I, Ixxiv, 6.
65. Ibid.
66. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, 283.
67. Erman, Life, 124-5.
68. Maspero, Struggle, 441.
69. Diodorus, I, lii; Rickard, i, 183.
70. N. Y. Times, April 16, 1933.
71. Herodotus, II, 124; Wilkinson in Raw-
linson's Herodotus, ii, zoon.
72. Capart, Thebes, 32.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
964
73. Erman, Life, 488-93; Borchardt and
Ricke, Egypt, p. v.
74. CAH, ii, 423.
75. Erman, Life, 494.
76. Maspero, Struggle, 109.
77. Ibid., 285, 289, 407, 582; CAH, ii, 79.
78. Maspcro, Dawn, 330; Schneider, H., i,
86.
79. CAH, ii, 212.
80. Diodorus, I, Ixxvii, 2.
81. Diodorus, I, Ixxv, 3.
82. Sumner, Folkways, 236.
83. Diodorus, I, Ixxviii, 3.
84. Hobhouse, 108; Maspero, Dawn, 337,
479-80; Erman, Life, 141.
85. Maspero, Dawn, 337.
86. Capart, Thebes, 161.
87. Breasted, J. H., Dawn of Conscience,
208-10.
88. Erman, Life, 67; Diodorus, I, Ixx.
89. Erman, Life, 121.
90. Morct, 124.
91. Erman, Literature, 27.
92. Maspero, Dawn, 278.
93. Breasted, History, 75.
94. Erman, Life, 153, Sumner, Folkways,
485-
95. Maspero, Dawn, 51.
96. Erman, Life, 76.
97. In Briffault, i, 384.
98. In White, E. M., 46.
99. Pctrie, Sir W. F., Egypt and Israel, 23.
100. Hobhouse, 187.
101. Ibid., 185.
102. Ibid., 186; Erman, Life, 185.
103. Petric, 23.
104. Frazcr, Adonis, 397.
105. Briffault, i, 384.
106. Diodorus, I, Ixxvii, 7; Ixxx, 3.
107. Maspero, Struggle, 272.
108. Briffault, ii, 174.
109. Ibid., 383.
no. Maspero, Struggle, 503; Erman, Life,
«55-
in. Ibid.; Sanger, W. W., History of Pros-
titution, 40-1; Georg, 172.
xi 2. Erman, Life, 2471".
113. Sumner, Folkways, 541; Maspero,
Struggle, 536.
114. Erman, Life, 387.
115. In Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, 324;
cf. Proverbs, xv, 16-7. For further cor-
respondence between the Egyptian and
the Jewish authors cf. Breasted, 372-7.
(CHAP, viii
1 1 6. Hobhouse, 247; Maspero, Dawn, 269;
Struggle, 228.
117. Strabo, XVII, i, 53.
1 1 8. Erman, Literature, xxix; 47.
119. Maspero, Dawn, 195; Encyc. Brit., vii,
329.
1 20. Spearing, 230.
121. Maspero, Dawn, 47-8, 271.
122. CAH, ii, 422.
123. Breasted, History, 27; Erman, Life,
229f; Downing, Dr. J. G., Cosmetics,
Past and Present, 2o88f.
124. CAH, ii, 421.
125. Maspero, Struggle, 504; Erman, Life,
212.
126. Schafer, 235.
127. Sumner, Folkways, 191; Maspero,
Struggle, 494; CAH, ii, 421.
128. Maspero, Dawn, 57, 4911".
129. CAH, ii, 421.
130. Diodorus, I, Ixxxi; Mencken, H. L.,
Treatise on the Gods, 117.
131. Spencer, Sociology, iii, 278.
132. Erman, Life, 328, 384.
133. Ibid., 256; Erman, Literature, xliii.
134. Ibid., 185.
135. Erman, Life, 256, 328.
136. Schneider, H., i, 94.
137. Erman, Life, 447; Breasted, History, 97.
138. Erman, Literature, xxxvii, xlii.
139. Maspero, Dawn, 46.
140. Erman, Literature, xxxvi-vii; Erman,
Life, 333f Breasted Ancient Times, 42;
Maspero, Dawn, 221-3; DC Morgan,
256.
141. Father Batin, address at Oriental Insti-
tute, Chicago, March 29, 1932; CAH, i,
189; Sprengling, M., The Alphabet,
passim.
1413. N. Y. Times, Oct. 18, 1934.
142. Maspero, Dawn, 398.
143. CAH, i, 121; Erman, Literature, i;
Breasted, Development, 178.
144. Breasted, J. H., Oriental Institute, 149^
145. Erman, Life, 370.
146. Erman, Literature, 30-1.
147. Ibid., 22-8.
148. Maspcro, Dawn, 438.
149. Maspero, Struggle, 499.
150. Maspero, Dawn, 497.
151. Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, 71.
152. Erman, Literature, 35-6.
153. CAH, ii, 225.
154. Ezs. in Erman, Literature, xxx-xxxiv.
CHAP. VIIl) N O T £ S
155. Erman, Life, 389. 185.
156. Schneider, H., i, 81.
157. Breasted, Ancient Records, i, 51. 186.
158. Schneider, H., i, 91-2. 187.
159. Erman, Literature, 109. 188.
1 60. Erman, Literature, xxv-vii; Maspcro,
Struggle, 494f.
161. Maspero, Dawn, 204. 189.
162. Hall, M. P., An Encyclopedic Outline 190.
of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and
Rosicrucian Symbolic Philosophy, 37. 191.
163. Sedgwick, W. T., and Tyler, H. W., 192.
A Short History of Science, 312.
164. Maspcro, Dawn, 328.
165. Sedgwick and Tyler, 29. 193.
1 66. Schneider, H., i, 85-6. 194.
167. CAH, ii, 216; Encyc. Brit., viii, 57. 195.
1 68. Sedgwick and Tyler, 30. 196.
169. Ibid., 89; Breasted, J. H., Conquest of 197.
Civilization, 88.
170. Williams, H. S., History of Science, i, 198.
4'- 199-
171. Ibid., i, 34. 200.
172. Spencer, Sociology, iii, 251. 201.
173. Tabouis, G. R., Nebuchadnezzar, 318; 202.
Breasted, Ancient Times, 91.
174. Strabo, XVII, i, 46; Diodorus, I, 1, 2.
175. Herodotus, II, 4; CAH, i, 248; Brcas- 203.
ted, History, 14, 33; Ancient Times,
45; Erman, Life, 10; Childe, Ancient 204.
East, 5; Williams, H. S., i, 38f; Mas-
pero, Dawn, 16-7, 205-9; Moret, 134; 205.
Schneider, H., i, 85; Sedgwick and Ty- 2o6,
ler, 33; Frazcr, Adonis, 280, 286-9; 207.
Encyc. Brit., iv, 576; v, 654. 208.
176. Ebcrs Papyrus, 99, if, in Erman, Life, 209.
357-8- 210.
177. Ibid., 353.
178. Garrison, 57. 211,
179. Herodotus, II, 84; III, i. 212,
180. Erman, Life, 362. 213.
181. Garrison, 55-9; Maspero, Dawn, 217; 214.
Breasted, Conquest of Civilization, 88. 215,
182. Smith, G. Elliot, The Ancient Egyp- 216.
tians, 57. 217,
i82a. Himes, Norman, Medical History of 218.
Contraception, Chap. II, §i. The sup- 219,
positories contained chemicals identical 220,
with those now used in contraceptive 221,
jellies. The matter, however, is not be- 222,
yond doubt. 223,
183. Erman, Life, 360; Maspero, Dawn, 219- 224,
20; Harding, T. Swann, Fads, 328.
184. Garrison, 53. 225,
965
Smith, G. EM Ancient Egyptians, 62;
Diodorus, I, xxviii, 3.
Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, 35 3n.
Diodorus, I, Ixxxii, 1-2.
Pliny, Historia Naturalis, VIII, in Tyr-
rell, Dr. C. A., Royal Road to Health,
57-
Herodotus, II, 77.
Erman, Life, 167-96; Capart, Thebes,
figs. 4 and 107-9.
Maspero, Art, 132.
Pi joan, i, 101; Fergusson, Jas., History
of Architecture in All Countries, i, 22;
Breasted, History, 100.
E.g., Maspero, Struggle, xi.
At Bcni-Hasan, Lisht, etc.
At Mcdinet-Habu.
Maspero, Art. 84.
Schafel, Tafel VI; Breasted, Dawn,
218.
Fry, R. E., Chinese Art, 13.
Schafer, 358; Capart, Lectures, fig. 176.
Maspero, Art, 174.
Schafer, 343; CAH, ii, 103.
Baikic, Jas., Amarna Age, 241, 256. All
three are in the State Museum at Ber-
lin.
Cairo Museum; Maspero, Art, fig. 461;
Schafer, 433.
Athens Museum; Maspero, Struggle,
535-
Schafer, 445.
Louvre; Schafcr, 190.
Cairo Museum; Schafer, 246-7.
Cairo Museum; Schafer, 254.
Capart, Thebes, 173^
Cairo Museum; Breasted, History, fig.
55; Maspero, Art, fig. 92.
Ibid., fig. 194.
Schafer, Tafel IX.
E.g., Schafer, 305, 418.
Maspero, Art, fig. 287.
Schafer, 367.
Ibid., Tafel XVI.
Maspcro, Art, 67.
Erman, Life, 448; CAH, ii, 422.
CAH, ii, 105; Erman, 250-1.
Breasted, Ancient Records, ii, 147.
Spencer, Sociology, iii, 299.
Cf. Plato, Tim*us, 228.
Maspero, Dawn, 399.
Brown, B., Wisdom of the Egyptians,
96-116; Breasted, Dawn, i$6f.
Ibid., 198.
966
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
(CHAP, ix
226. Breasted, Development, 215. 251.
227. Ibid., 188; Dawn of Conscience, 168.
228. Breasted, Development, 182.
229. Maspero, Dawn, 639. 252.
230. Ibid., 86. 253.
231. Ibid., 95, 92. 254.
232. Ibid., 156-8.
233. Ibid., 1 20-1. 255.
234. Renard, 121. 256.
235. Capart, Thebes, 66; Maspero, Dawn, 257.
119; Struggle, 536. 258.
236. Maspero, Dawn, 102-3. *58a
237. Briftault, iii, 187. 259.
238. Hommel in Maspero, Dawn, 45. 260.
239. Howard, Clifford, Sex Worship, 98. 261.
240. Diodorus, I, Ixxxviii, 1-3; Howard, C., 262.
79; Tod, Lt.-Col. Jas., Annals and An-
tiquities of Rajasthan, 570; Briffault, iii, 263.
205. 264.
241. Carpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds,
183.
242. Maspero, Dawn, no-i. 205-
243. Breasted, Development, 24-33; Frazer, 266.
Adonis, 269-75; 383. 2^7-
244. Diodorus, I, xiv, i. z68-
245. Frazer, Adonis, 346-50; Maspcro, Dawn, 2(59-
131-2; Macrobius, Saturnalia, I, 18, in
McCabe, Jos., Story of Religious Con- 270.
troversy, 169. 272.
246. Encyc. Brit., nth ed., ix, 52. 273.
247. Morct, 5; Maspero, Dawn, 265. 274.
248. Herodotus, II, 37. 275.
249. Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, 46, 83. 276.
250. Breasted, Development, 293; Brown, 277.
B., Wisdom of the Egyptians, 178;
Maspero, Dawn, 199. 278.
Translation by Robert Hillyer, in Van
Doren, Mark, Anthology of World
Poetry, 237.
In Maspero, Dawn, 189-90.
Breasted, Development, 291.
Erman, Life, 353; exs. in Erman, Lit-
erature, 39-43.
Maspero, Dawn, 282; Briffault, ii, 5x0.
Erman, Life, 352.
Herodotus, II, 82.
Breasted, Development, 296, 308.
>. Capart, Thebes, 95.
Ibid, 76.
In Weigall, Akhnaton, 86.
Breasted, Development, 315.
E.g., Breasted, Ancient Records, ii,
369.
Breasted, Development, 324^
The parallelisms are listed in Weigall,
Akhnaton, 134-6, and in Breasted,
Dawn of Conscience, iSzf.
Breasted, Development, 314.
Weigall, 102, 105.
Capart, Lectures, fig. 104.
Weigall, 103.
Petrie in Weigall, 178; Breasted, His-
tory, 378.
Weigall, 116; Baikie, 284.
Baikie, 435.
CAH, ii, 154; Breasted, History, 446.
Ibid., 491.
Capart, Thebes, 69.
Erman, Life, 129.
Weigall, A., Life and Times of Cleo-
patra.
Faure, Elie, History of Art, i, p. xlvii.
CHAPTER IX
1. Maspero, Passing of the Empires, 783.
2. CAH, i, 309.
3. The quotations arc from Heraclitus,
Fragments, and Mallock, W., Lucre-
tius on Life and Death.
4. Harper, R. F., Code of Hammurabi,
3-7-
5. Jastrow, M., Civilization of Babylonia
and Assyria, 283-4.
6. Sumner, Folkways, 504.
7. CAH, iii, 250.
8. Harper, Code, 99-100.
9. CAH, i, 489; Maspero, Struggle, 43-4.
10. Maspero, Dawn, 759; Rawlinson, Five
Great Monarchies of the Ancient East-
ern World, iii, 22-3; McCabe, 141-2;
Delaporte, 194-6.
n. CAH, ii, 429; iii, 101.
12. Harper, Assyrian and Babylonian Lit-
erature, 220.
13. Maspero, Passing, 567.
14. Jastrow, 466.
15. Daniel, iv, 30.
1 6. Rawlinson, ii, 510.
17. Herodotus, I, 178. Strabo, to prove his
moderation, says 44 (XVI, i, 5).
18. Tabouis, 306.
19. Rawlinson, ii, 514; Herodotus, I, 180.
20. Diodorus, II, ix, 2*
21. Tabouis, 307.
CHAP. IX)
NOTES
967
22. Herodotus, I, 181.
23. CAH, i, 503.
24. Diodorus, II, x, 6; Strabo, XVI, i, 5;
Maspero, Passing, 564, 782; CAH, i,
506-8; Rawlinson, ii, 517.
25. Maspero, Dawn, 761.
26. CAH, i, 541.
27. Berosus in Tabouis, 307.
28. Maspero, Dawn, 763-4; Delaporte, 107.
29. Maspero, Dawn, 556.
30. Strabo, XVI, i, 15. Attendants extin-
guished the flames with torrents of
water.
31. Layard, A. H., Ninevah and its Re-
mains, ii, 413.
32. Code of Hammurabi, sections 187-9;
Delaporte, 113.
33. Lowie, Are We Civilized?, 119; CAH,
i, 501.
34. Lowie, 60; Maspero, Dawn, 769; CAH,
i, 107, 501; ii, 227.
35. East India House Inscription in Ta-
bouis, 287.
36. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, V, iv, 33. The
probable invention of this letter by
Xenophon hardly lessens its pertinence.
37. Tabouis, 210.
38. Maspero, Dawn, 751-2.
38a. Jastrow, 292n.
39. Ibid., 326; CAH, i, 545; Maspero Dawn,
749, 761; Delaporte, 118, 126, 231; Ta-
bouis, 241.
40. Cf. e.g., Harper, Assyrian and Baby-
lonian Literature, xlviii-ix.
41. Encyc. Brit., ii, 863.
42. Code, 48.
43. CAH, i, 526; Maspero, Dawn, 760;
Delaporte, no; Jastrow, 299.
44. Delaporte, 122; Maspero, Dawn, 720.
45. CAH, i, 520-1; Maspero, Dawn, 742-4;
Jastrow, 326.
46. Maspero, 735.
47. Ibid., 708.
48. Olmstcad, A. T., History of Assyria,
525-8.
49. Code, 2, 132.
50. Delaporte, 134.
51. Code, 196.
52. 210.
53- 198.
54. Ibid.
55. 202-4.
56. 195.
57. 218.
58. 194.
59- '43-
60. CAH, i, 517-8.
61. Code, 228f.
62. Jastrow, 305, 362; Maspero, Dawn, 748;
CAH, i, 526.
63. Harper, Code, p. n.
64. Jastrow, 488; CAH, i, 513.
65. CAH, iii, 237.
66. Maspero, Dawn, 679, 750; CAH, i, 535.
67. Delaporte, 133-4.
68. Maspero, 636.
69. CAH, i, 529-32.
70. Maspero, 645-6.
71. Ibid., 644.
72. Ibid., 643, 650; Jastrow, 193.
73. Briffault, iii, 169.
74. CAH, i, 208, 530.
75. Ibid., 500.
76. Briffault, iii, 88.
77. Maspero, 537.
78. Cf. Langdon, Babylonian Wisdom, 18-21.
79. Maspero, 546.
80. Ibid., 566-72.
81. Jastrow, 453-9; Frazer, Adonis, 6-7;
Briffault, iii, oo; CAH, i, 461; iii, 232.
82. Briffault, iii, 90; Harper, Assyrian and
Babylonian Literature, liii.
83. Cf. e.g., Harper, 420-1.
84. Tabouis, 387.
85. Jastrow, 280; Maspero, 691-2.
86. Ibid, 687.
87. Ibid., 684-6.
88. Ibid., 689; Jastrow, 381; CAH, i, 531.
89. Jastrow, 249.
oo. Maspero, 692.
91. Tabouis, 159, 165, 351.
92. Briffault, iii, 94.
93. Woolley, 125.
94. CAH, iii, 216-7.
95. Harper, Literature, 433-9.
96. Maspero, 682.
97. Jastrow, 253-4; Maspero, 643; Harper,
lix.
98. Jastrow, 241-9.
99. Ibid., 267; Tabouis, 343-4, 374.
100. Williams, H. S., i, 74.
1 01. Tabouis, 365.
102. Herodotus, I, 199; Strabo, XVI, i, 20.
103. "This view is now generally dis-
credited."—Briffault, iii, 203.
104. So Farnell thinks-Sumncr, Folkways,
541. Frazer (Adonis, 50) rejects this in-
terpretation.
968
I05.
106.
107.
108.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
Frazcr, 53. 140-
Briffault, iii, 203. 141.
Amos, ii, 7; Stunner and Keller, ii, 1273. 142.
Frazer, 52; Lacroix, Paul, History of 143.
Prostitution, i, 21-4, 109.
109. Briffault, iii, 220.
no. Jastrow, 309. 144.
in. Maspcro, 738-9.
112. Schneider, H., i, 155. 145.
113. CAH, i, 547.
114. Ibid., 522-3; Hobhousc, 180; Maspero,
734. 146.
115. Ibid. 147-
1 1 6. Herodotus, I, 196. Several writers, 148.
however, described the custom as flour- 149.
ishing 400 years after Herodotus; cf.
Rawlinson's Herodotus, i, 271. 150.
117. Maspero, 737.
n 8. Section 132. 151.
119. Sumner, Folkways, 378.
120. 141-2; Jastrow, 302-3.
121. 143. 152-
122. CAH, i, 524; Maspero, 735-7; Code, 153.
142. 154-
123. Encyc. Brit., ii, 863. 155.
124. Maspero, 739. 156.
125. Harper, Literature, xlviii; CAH, i, 520. 157.
126. Woollcy, 118; White, E. M., 71-5. 158.
127. Maspero, 739. 159.
128. Ibid., 735-8. 160.
129. Ill, 159. 161.
130. Layard, ii, 411; Sanger, 42. 162.
131. Herodotus, I, 196. 163.
132. V, 1, in Tabouis, 366. 164.
133. Delaportc, 199. 165.
134. Jastrow, 31, 69-97; Mason, W. A., 266; 166.
CAH, i, 124-5. 167.
135. Jastrow, 275-6; Delaporte, 198; Schnei- 168.
dcr, H., i, 18 1 ; Breasted, Conquest of 169.
Civilization, 152. 170.
136. Schneider, i, 168.
137. Maspero, 564; CAH, i, 150.
138. Leonard, W. E., Gilgamesh, 3.
139. Ibid., 8. 171.
(CHAP, x
Maspero,
Delaporte, ix.
Jastrow, 415.
Pratt, History of Music, 45; Rawlinson,
iii, 20; Schneider, i, 168; Tabouis, 354;
CAH, i, 533.
Perrot and Chipiez, History of Art in
Chaldea and Assyria, ii, 292.
Cf. "The Lion of Babylon," Jastrow
Plate XVIII, a work of glazed tile from
the reign of Nebuchadrezzar II.
Herodotus, I, 180.
Tabouis, 313.
Jastrow, 10; Maspero, 624-7.
Jastrow, 258, 261, 492; Maspero, 778-80;
Strabo, XVI, i, 6; Rawlinson, ii, 580.
Sarton, Gco., Introduction to the His-
tory of Science, 71.
Rawlinson, ii, 575; Schneider, i, 171-5;
Lowie, 268; Sedgwick and Tyler, 29;
CAH, iii, 238f.
Tabouis, 47, 317.
Schneider, i, 171-5.
Maspero, 545.
Tabouis, 204, 366.
New Orleans States, Feb. 24, 1932.
Code, 215-7.
218.
Maspcro, 78of; Jastrow, 25of.
Ibid.; Tabouis, 294, 393.
Herodotus, I, 197; Strabo, XVI, i, 20.
Schneider, i, 166.
Jastrow, 475-83; Langdon, If, 35-6.
Ibid., i.
Jastrow, 461-3.
Tabouis, 254, 382.
Daniel, iv, 33.
Tabouis, 230, 264, 383.
Maspcro, Passing, 626.
CAH, iii, 208. Jastrow, 184, believes
that it was the priestly party which,
disgusted with the heresies of Nabon-
idus, admitted Alexander.
Jastrow, 185; CAH, i, 568.
CHAPTER X
1. CAH, i, 468.
2. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1932.
3. CAH, ii, 429.
4. Olmstead, 16; CAH, i, 126.
43. N. Y. Times, Feb. 24, 1933; Mar. 20,
1934.
5. CAH, ii, 248.
6. Harper, Literature, 16-7.
7. Jastrow, 166-7; Maspero, Struggle, 663-
4-.
8. Ibid., 50-2; Maspero, Passing, 27, 50.
9. Ibid., 85, 94-5; CAH, iii, 25.
10. Diodorus, II, vi-xx; Maspero, Struggle,
617; CAH, iii, 27.
CHAP. Xl)
n. Maspero, Passing, 243.
12. Olmstead, 309.
13. Maspero, Passing, 275-6.
14. Ibid., 345; CAH, iii, 79.
15. Harper, Literature, 94-127.
1 6. Delaporte, 343-4.
17. Maspero, Passing, 41 2f.
1 8. Olmstead, 488, 494; CAH, iii, 88, 127;
Jastrow, 182; Delaporte, 223.
19. Diodorus, II, xxiii, 1-2.
20. Olmstead, 519, 525^ 531; Maspero,
Passing, 401-2.
21. Rawlinson, ii, 235.
22. CAH, iii, 100.
23. Maspero, Passing, 7.
24. Ibid., 9-10.
25. Rawlinson, i, 474.
26. Ibid., 467.
27. Maspero, Struggle, 627-38.
28. CAH, iii, 104-7; Rawlinson, i, 477-9.
29. CAH, l.c.
30. Encyc. Brit., ii, 865.
31. Ibid., 863.
32. Maspero, Passing, 422-3.
33. Olmstead, 510, 531.
34. Ibid., 522-3, 558.
35. CAH, iii, 186.
353. Olmstead, 331.
36. Rawlinson, i, 405.
37. Olmstead, 537.
38* Ibid., 518; Maspero, Passing, 317-9;
CAH, iii, 76, 96-7; Delaporte, 353;
Rawlinson, i, 401-2.
39. CAH, iii, 107.
40. Ibid.; Dclaportc, 285, 352.
403. Olmstead, 624.
41. Maspero, Passing, 269.
42. Delaportc, 282; CAH, iii, 104-7.
43. Maspcro, Passing, 91, 262.
44. Olmstead, 87.
45. CAH, iii, 13.
46. Delaporte, vii.
47. Faure, i, 90.
N O T £ 6 969
48. Maspero, 545-6.
49. CAH, iii, 90-1.
50. Ibid., 89-90.
51. Delaporte, 354.
52. CAH, iii, 102, 241, 249.
53. Breasted, Ancient Times, 161; Jastrow,
21.
54. Maspcro, 461-3.
55. Encyc. Brit., ii, 851.
56. Rawlinson, i, 277; Delaporte, 338; Jas-
trow, 407; CAH, iii, 109.
57. Schafer, 555; now in the British Mu-
seum.
58. Schafer, 531.
59. Ibid., 546; in the British Museum.
60. Oriental Institute, Chicago.
61. British Museum.
62. Schafer, Tafel XXXIV.
63. Ibid., 537, 558-9; Jastrow, f. p. 24.
64. Faure, i, 91; Br. Mus.
69. Rawlinson, i, 509.
66. Schafcr, 656.
67. E.g., Baikie, f. p. 213; and Pijoan, i,
figs. 175-6.
68. Fergusson, History of Architecture, i,
35, 174-6, 205.
69. Rawlinson, i, 299.
70. Layard, ii, 262f.
71. Jastrow, 374; translation slightly im-
proved.
72. Br. Mus.
73. Rawlinson, i, 284.
74. CAM, iii, 16, 75-7; Maspero, Passing,
45, 260-8, 310-4, 376; Pijoan, i, 121, 111-
8; Jastrow, 415; Schafer, 542-3.
75. Maspcro, Passing, 460.
76. Harper, Literature, 125-6.
77. CAH, iii, 127.
78. Diodorus, ii, xxiii, 3.
79. Preserved in Diodorus, II, xxvii, 2. Cf.
Maspero, Passing, 448.
80. Nahum, iii, i.
CHAPTER XI
1. Cowan, A. R., Master-clues in World-
History, 311; Petrie, Egypt and Israel,
26.
2. Breasted, Conquest of Civilization, igin.
3. Encyc. Brit., xi, 600-1.
4. Hrozny, F., ibid., 603.
43. New York World-Telegram, Mar. 16,
1935-
5. Ibid., 606. Certain archeologists (e.g.,
Hrozny) have been especially moved
by the lenience of the Hittite code
with sexual perversions.
6. CAH, iii, 200.
7. Herodotus, IV, 64.
8. Maspero, Passing, 479^ Hippocrates,
Airs, Waters, Places, xvii-xxii.
970
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
(CHAP, xxii
9. Ibid., xvii.
10. Frazer, Adonis, 2191".
11. Ibid.; Maspero, Passing, 333.
12. Frazer, 34, 219-24; Hall, M. P., An En-
cyclopedic Outline of Masonic Philos-
ophy, 36.
13. Herodotus, I, 93.
14. Ibid., I, 87.
15. Febvrc, L., Geographical Introduction
to History, 322.
1 6. Moret, 350.
17. Herodotus, II, 44.
18. Strabo, XVI, ii, 23.
19. Diodorus Siculus V, xxxv; Rickard, i,
276.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-
pire, ed. 1903, i, 296, in Rickard, i, 278.
Maspero, Struggle, lyif, 203, 585; Day,
Clive, A History of Commerce, 12-14;
BrifFault, i, 463; Sedgwick and Tyler,
14.
22. Rickard, i, 283.
23. Herodotus, IV, 42.
24. Maspero, Struggle, 109, 740-1.
25. Arrian, II, xv.
26. Ibid., VI, 220.
27. Zechariah, ix, 3.
28. XV, ii, 23.
29. Frazer, Adonis, 183-4; Maspero, Strug-
gle, 174-9; Bebel, A., Woman under
Socialism, 39; BrifFault, iii, 220; Sanger,
The History of Prostitution,,^.
30. Sedgwick and Tyler, 15; Doane, T. W.,
Bible Myths, 41.
31. E.g., Herodotus, V, 58.
32. Dussaud, in Venkateswara, 328.
33. CAH, i, 189.
34. Maspero, Struggle, 5721".
35. Proceedings of the Oriental Institute,
Chicago, March 29, 1932.
36. New York Times, Aug. 8, 1930.
37. Ward, C. O., The Ancient Lowly, ii,
83, 85.
38. CAH, ii, 328-9.
39. Frazcr, Adonis, 32-5.
40. Ibid., 225-7; Maspero, Struggle, 154-9.
41. Ibid., 1 60- 1.
42. Deut., xviii, 10; 2 Kings, xxiii, 10; Sum-
ner, Folkways, 554.
43. Frazcr, 84; Maspero, Passing, 80; CAH,
iii. 372.
44. Mason, W. A., History of the Art of
Writing, 306; Maspero, Passing, 35;
Rivers, W. H., Instinct and the Un-
conscious, 132.
CHAPTER XII
1. Exod. iii, 8; Numb, xiv, 8; Deut. xxvi,
15, etc.
2. Quoted in Huntingdon, E., The Pulse
of Asia, 368.
3. New York Times, Jan. 20, 1932; May
17, 1932.
4. CAH, ii, 7i9n; Encyc. Brit., xiii, 42.
5. Gen. xi, 31.
6. Petric, Egypt and Israel, 17.
7. CAH, ii, 356.
8. Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, 349.
9. Maspero, Struggle, 70-1, 442-3.
10. Exod. xii, 40; Petrie, 38.
11. Exod. i; Deut. x, 22.
12. Exod. i, 12.
13. Joscphus, Works, ii, 466; Contra Ap-
ion, i.
14. Strabo, XVI, ii, 35; Tacitus, Histories.
V, iii, tr'n Murphy, London, 1930, 498.
15. Exod, v, 4-5; Ward, Ancient Lowly,
ii, 76.
16. Schneider, i, 285.
17. United Press Dispatch from London,
Jan. 25, 1932.
1 8. New York Times, April 18, 1932.
19. Numb, xxxi, 1-18; Deut. vii, 16, xx, 13-
17; Joshua viii, 26, x, 2$, xii.
20. Ibid., xi, 23; Judges v, 31.
21. CAH, iii, 363; Maspero, Passing, 127;
Struggle, 752; Buxton, Peoples of Asia,
97-
22. Renan, History of the People of Israel,
i, 86.
23. Schneider, i, 300; Mason, Art of Writ-
ing, 289.
233. N. Y. Times, Oct. 18, 1934.
24. Maspero, Struggle, 684.
25. Judges xvii, 6.
26. i Sam. viii, 10-20; cf. Deut. xvii, 14-20.
27. Judges xiii-xvi; xv, 15.
28. 2 Sam. vi, 14.
29. i Kings ii, 9.
30. 2 Sam. xi.
31. 2 Sam. xviii, 33.
32. i Kings iii, 12.
33. i Kings iv, 32.
34. i Kings ix, 26-8.
35. Ibid.
CHAP. XIl)
36. i Kings x. 79.
37. Ibid., x, 14. 80.
38. Jewish Encyclopedia, ix, 350; Graetz, 81.
H., Popular History of the Jews, i, 82.
271. 83.
39. Renan, ii, 100. 84.
40. 2 Chron. ix, 21. 85.
41. Maspero, Struggle, 737-40. 86.
42. Josephus, Antiquities, VIII, 7. 87.
43. i Kings iii, 2. 88.
44. i Chron. xxix, 2-8. 90.
45. CAH, iii, 347. 9i.
46. Ibid.
47. 2 Chron. iii, 4-7; iv, passim.
48. 2 Chron. ii, 7-10, 16; i Kings v, 6. 92.
49. 2 Chron. ii, 17-18. 93.
50. Cf. i Kings vi, i, with vii, 2. 94.
51. Fcrgusson, History of Architecture, i, 95.
209-11. 96.
52. Shotwell, J., The Religious Revolution 97.
of Today, 30.
53. Josephus, VIII, 13.
54. CAH, iii, 428. 98.
55. Numb, xxi, 8-9; 2 Kings xviii, 4. 99.
56. Allen, G., Evolution of the Idea of 100.
God, i92f; Howard, C, Sex Worship, 101.
154-5- 102.
57. Smith, W. Robertson, Religion of the 103.
Ancient Semites, 101. 104.
58. Reinach, History of Religions (1930), I05-
176-7. 1 06.
59. Exod. vii. 107-
60. New York Times, May 9, 1931. lo8-
61. Fxod. xii, 7, 13. I09-
62. Exod. xxxiii, 19. 1 10.
63. Gen. xxxi, ii-i2. i"-
64. Exod. xxxiii, 23. 1I2-
65. i Kings xx, 23. 113-
66. Exod. xv, 3.
67. 2 Sam. xxii, 35. 114-
68. Exod. xxiii, 27-30. 115.
69. Lev. xxv, 23.
70. Exod. xiv, 1 8. 1 1 6.
71. Numb, xxv, 4. 117.
72. Exod. xx, 5-6. 118.
73. Ibid., xxxii, 11-14. I!9«
74. Numb, xiv, 13-18. 120.
75. Gen. xviii. 121.
76. Deut. xxviii, 16-28, 61. Cf. the form- 122.
ula of excommunication in the case 123.
of Spinoza, in Willis, Benedict de 124.
Spinoza, 34. 125.
77. Exod. xx, 5; xxxiv, 14; xxiii, 24. 126.
78. Ruth i, 15; Judges xi, 24. 127.
NOTES 97 1
Exod, xv, 1 1; xviii, ii.
2 Chron. ii, 5.
Ezek. viii, 14.
Jer. ii, 28; xxxii, 35.
2 Kings y, 15.
2 Sam. vi, 7; i Chron. xiii, 10.
Sumner, Folkways, 554.
CAH, iii, 45 if.
Numb, xviii, 23.
Ezra vii, 24.
Numb, xviii, 9f.
Isaiah xxviii, 7; Judges viii, 33; ix, 27;
2 Kings xvii, 9-12, 16-17; xxiii, 10-13;
Lamentations ii, 7.
Ezck. xvi, 21 ; xxiii, 37; Isaiah, Ivii, 5.
Amos ii, 6.
CAH, iii, 458-9; Frazcr, Adonis, 66.
Jer. xxix, 26.
Maspero, Passing, 783.
Applied by G. B. Shaw to Christ in
"The Revolutionist's Handbook," ap-
pended to Man and Superman.
CAH, vi, 1 88.
Like Isaiah xl-lxvi.
CAH, iii, 462.
Amos v-vi.
Ibid., iii, 12, 15.
New York Times, Jan. 7, 1934.
Hosca viii, 6-7.
2 Kings xviii, 27; Isaiah xxxv, 12.
Maspero, Passing, 290; CAH, iii, 390.
Sarton, 58.
Isaiah vii, 8.
Ibid., xvi, 7.
Ill, 14-15; v, 8; x, if.
I, i if.
Amos ix, 14-15.
Isaiah vii, 14; ix, 6; xi, 1-6; ii, 4. The
final passage is repeated in Micah iv, 3.
Hosca xii, 7.
2 Kings xxii, 8; xxiii, 2; 2 Chron. xxxiv,
15, 31-2.
Sarton, 63; CAH, iii, 482.
2 Kings xxiii, 2, 4, 10, 13.
2 Kings xxv, 7.
Psalm CXXXVII.
Jer. xxvii, 6-8.
XV, 10; xx, 14.
V, i.
V, 8.
XXXIV, 8f.
VII, 22-3.
XXIII, ii; v, 31; iv, 4; ix, 26.
XVIII, 23.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
972
128. IV, 20-31; v, 19; ix, i.
1283. Arguments for doubting Jeremiah's
authorship of Lamentations may be
found in the Jew. Encyc., vii, 598.
129. Lam. i, 12; iii, 38f; Jcr. xii, i.
130. Ezck. xvi, xxiii.
131. Ibid., xxii, xxxviii, 2.
132. Ibid., xxxvi.
1323. CAH, vi, 183; Enc. Brit., iii, 503.
133. Isaiah Ixi, i.
134. Ibid., xl, 3, 10-11; liii, 3-6.
1343. CAH, iii, 498.
135. LXV, 25.
136. XLV, 5.
137. XL, 12, 15, 17, 18, 22, 26.
138. Ezra i, 7-11; Maspcro, Struggle, 638f;
Passing, 784.
139. Nchemiah x, 29.
140. 2 Kings xxii, 10; xxiii, 2; Nehem. viii,
1 8.
141. CAH, vi, 175.
142. Enc. Brit., iii, 702.
1423. Jew. Encyc., v, 322.
143. Ibid.; Sarton, 108; Maspero, Passing,
131-2.
144. CAH, iii, 481.
145. Doane, Bible Myths, chapter i, passim.
146. Ibid., 10.
147. Ibid., ch. i.
148. Cf. Doane, 18-48.
149. Sarton, 63.
150. Renan, iv, 163.
151. Rcinach (1930), 19; Frazer, Sir J. G.,
The Golden Bough, 472.
152. Exod. xxi-ii; Lev. xviii.
153. Spencer, Sociology, iii, 189.
154. Garrison, History of Medicine, 67.
155. Ibid.
156. Ibid.
157. Briffault, iii, 331.
158. Renan, i, 105.
159. Diodorus Siculus I, xciv, 1-2; Doane,
59-61.
1 60. Diodorus, ibid.
161. Lev. xxiv, 11-16; Deut. vii, xiii, xvii, 2-5.
163. Petrie, Egypt and Israel, 60-1; CAH,
iii, 427-8.
164. Ezra i, 7-11.
165. 2 Chron. v, 13.
1 66. 2 Sam. vi, 6.
167. Enc. Brit., nth ed., xv, 311; Jew.
Encyc., vii, 88.
(CHAP. XXII
168. Briffault, ii, 433; Sumner and Keller, ii,
1113.
i68a. Rcinach (1930), 195; Jew. Encyc., v.
377-
169. Gen. xxiv, 58; Judges i, 12.
170. Howard, 58.
172. Judges iv, 4.
173. 2 Kings xxii, 14.
174. Briffault, iii, 362; Howard, 49; Dubcis,
212; Sumner, Folkways, 316, 321.
175. Gen. xxx, i.
176. Cf. Maspcro, Struggle, 733, 776;CAH,
•ii, 373-
177. Maspcro, ibid.
178. Cf. 2 Kings iii, 18-19; Joshua vi, 21,
24.
179. i Kings xx, 29.
180. Dcut. vii, 6; xiv, 2; 2 Sam. vii, 23, etc.
1 8 1. Sangcr, History of Prostitution, 36.
182. Ibid., 35; Gen. xix, 24-5.
183. Sangcr, 37-9.
184. Gen. xxix, 20.
185. Deut. xxi, 10-14.
186. Judges xxi, 20-1.
187. Gen. xxxi, 15; Ruth iv, 10; Hobhouse,
Morals in Evolution, 197^ BrifTault, ii,
212; Lippcrt, 310.
1873. Westcrmarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 609;
White, E. M., Woman in World His-
tory, 169$.
1 88. Gen. xxx.
189. Deut. xxv, 5.
190. Lev. xx, 10; Deut. xxii, 22.
191. Westcrmarck, i, 427.
193. Deut. xxiv, i; Wcstermarck, ii, 649;
Hobhouse, 197^
194. Gen. xxiv, 67.
195. Lev. xxv, 23.
196. Rcnard, 160; CAH, i, 201.
197. Dcut. xv, 6; xxviii, 12.
198. Sunmer, Folkways, 276.
199. 2 Kings iv, i; Matt, xviii, 25.
200. Lev. xxv, 14, 17.
201. Exod. xxi, 2; Dcut. xv, 12-14.
202. Lev. xxv, 10.
203. Dcut. xv, 7-8; Lev. xxv, 36.
204. Exod. xxi, 10; Deut. xxiv, 19-20.
205. Gen. xxiv, 2-3.
206. Graetz, i, 173.
207. Deut. xvii, 8-12.
208. Numb, v, 27-9.
209. Ibid., 6-8.
210. Exod. xxi, 15-21; xxii, 19.
211. Exod. xxii, 18.
CHAP. XIIl)
212. Numb, xxxv, 19.
213. Deut. xix.
214. Exod. xxi, 23-5; Lev. xxiv, 9-20.
215. Exod. xx, 17.
216. Rcnan, ii, 307.
217. Jew Encyc.) vii, 381; Gractz, i, 224.
218. Enc. Brit., iii, 504. The Psalms seem
to have been collected in their present
form ca. 150 B.C.— Ibid., xxii, 539.
In the poem entitled "Walt Whitman,"
sect. 44; Leaves of Grass, 84-5.
. The Jew Encyc., xi, 467, assigns its
composition to 200-100 B.C.
Song of Solomon i, 13-16; ii, i, 5, 7,
16, 17; vii, ii, 12.
221. Prov. vii, 26; vi, 32; xxx, 18-19.
222. Ibid., v, 18-19; xv* X7-
223. Ibid., vi, 6, 9.
224. XXII, 29.
225. I, 32; xxviii, 20.
226. XIV, 23; xxviii, n, xvii, 28.
227. XVI, 22; iii., 13-17.
228. Enc. Brit., iii, 504.
229. Jastrow, Al., Book of Job, 121.
230. Kallcn, H., Book of Job as a Greek
Tragedy, Introduction.
23oa. Carl vie, Thos., Complete Works, Vol.
i, Heroes and Hero-Worship, p. 280,
Lect. II.
231. Job vii, 9-10; xiv, 12.
2} 2. Psalm LXXII1, 12.
233. Psalms XLII, XLIII, 23; LXXIV, 22;
LXXXIX, 46; CXV, 2.
NOTES 973
234. Job xii, 2-3, 6; xiii, i, 4-5.
235. XXXI, 35.
236. Renan, v, 148; Jastrow, Job, 180.
237. Job xxxviii, i— xl, 2. It has been
argued that these chapters: are an in-
dependent "nature-poem," artificially
attached to the Book of Job.
238. Job xlii, 7-8.
239. Sarton, 180.
240. Eccles. i, i.
241. Ibid., vii, 15; iv, i; v, 8.
242. IX, ii.
243. V, 10, 12.
244. V, u.
245. VII, 10.
246. I, 9-10.
247. I, ii.
248. I, 2-7; iv, 2-3; vii, i.
250. VIII, 15; ii, 24; v, 18; ii, i.
251. VII, 28, 26.
252. IX, 8.
253. XII, 12.
254. VII, ii, 16.
255. Exod. xxxiii, 20.
256. Eccles. i, 13-18.
257. Ill, 19, 22; viii, 10. For the Talmudic
interpretation of the final chapter of
Ecclesiastes, cf. Jastrow, M., A Gentle
Cynic, ityf.
258. Josephus, Antiquities, XI, 8; Works, i,
417. The account is questioned by some
critics— cf. Jew. Encyc., i, 342.
CHAPTFR XITI
1. Huart, C., Ancient Persian and Iranian
Civilization, 25-6.
2. Alaspcro, Passing, 452.
3. Herodotus, I, 99.
4. Ibid., i, 74.^
5. Rawlinson, ii, 370.
6. Daniel, vi, 8.
7. Rawlinson, ii, 316-7.
8. Huart, 27.
9. Herodotus, I, 119.
10. Encyc. Brit., xvii, 571.
n. Rawlinson, iii, 389.
12. Maspcro, 668-71.
13. Rawlinson, iii, 398.
14. Herodotus, III, 134.
15. Sykes, Sir P., Persia, 6.
16. XV, iii, 10.
17. The population estimates are those of
Rawlinson, iii, 422, 241.
1 8. Strabo, XV, ii, 8; Rawlinson, ii, 306;
iii, 164; Maspero, 452.
19. Dhalla, M. N., Zoroastrian Civiliza-
tion, 211, 222, 259; Rawlinson, iii, 202-
4; Kohler, Carl, History of Costume,
75-6.
20. Rawlinson, iii, 211, 243.
21. Adapted from Rawlinson, iii, 250-1*
22. Huart, 22.
23. Schneider, i, 350.
24. Mason, W. A., 264.
25. Dhalla, 141-2.
26. Herodotus, I, 126.
27. Strabo, XV, iii, 20; Herodotus, I, 133.
28. Dhalla, 187-8.
29. Herodotus, V, 52.
30. CAH, iv, 200.
31. Dhalla, 218.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
974
32. Ibid., 144, 257; Muller, Max, India:
What Can It Teach Us?, 19.
33. Rawlinson, iii, 427.
34. CAH, iv, 185-6.
35. Rawlinson, iii, 245.
36. Ibid., 171-2.
37. Ibid., 228; Plutarch, Life of Artaxerxes,
chs. 5-17.
38. Rawlinson, iii, 221.
39. Dhalla, 237.
40. Ibid., 89.
41. Rawlinson, iii, 241.
42. Herodotus, VII, 39. But perhaps Herod-
otus had been listening to old wives'
talcs.
43. Dhalla, 95-9.
44. Ibid., 1 06.
45. Herodotus, V, 25.
46. Darmestcter, J., The Zend-Avesta, i,
p. Ixxxiiif.
47. Ibid.
48. Huart, 78; Darmcstcter, Ixxxvii; Raw-
linson, iii, 246.
49. Ibid.; Sumner, Folkways, 236.
50. Plutarch, Artaxerxes, in Lives, iii, 464.
51. Rawlinson, iii, 427; Herodotus, III, 95;
Maspcro, Passing, 6oof; CAH, iv, 1981".
53. Maspcro, 57 if.
54. Vendidad, XIX, vi, 45.
55. Darniestetcr, i, xxxvii; Encyc. Brit.,
xxiii, 987.
56. Dawson, M. M., Ethical Religion of
Zoroaster, xiv.
57. Rawlinson, ii, 323.
58. Edouard Meyer dates Zarathustra
about 1000 B.C.; so also Duncker and
Hummel (Encyc. Brit., xxiii, 987; Daw-
son, xv ); A. V. W. Jackson places him
about 660-583 B.C. (Sarton, 61).
59. Briffault, iii, 191.
60. Dhalla, 72.
61. Schneider, i, 333; CAH, iv, 21 of; Rawl-
inson, ii, 323.
62. Encyc. Brit., xxiii, 942-3; Rawlinson,
ii, 322; Dhalla, 381".
63. Ibid., 40-2; Encyc. Brit., xxiii, 042-3;
Maspcro, Passing, 575-6; Huart, xviii;
CAH, iv, 207.
64. Encyc. Brit., l.c.
65. Darmesteter, xxvii, GOUT, Sir Hari
Singh, Spirit of Buddhism, 12.
66. Vend. II, 4, 29, 41.
67. Ibid., 22-43.
68. Darmesteter, bdii-iv.
(CHAP, xiii
69. Yasna, xliv, 4.
70. Darmesteter, Iv, Ixv.
71. Dawson, 5 if.
72. Encyc. Brit., xxiii, 988.
73. Dawson, 46.
74. Maspero, Passing, 583-4; Schneider, i,
336; Rawlinson, ii, 340.
75. Dawson, 125.
76. Shayast-la-Shayast, XX, 6, in Dawson,
131.
77. Vend. IV, i.
78. Ibid., XVI, iii, 18.
79. Herdotous, I, 134.
80. Shayast-la-Shayast, VII, 6, 7, i, in
Dawson, 36-7.
81. Westermarck, Morals, ii, 434; Herod-
otus, VII, 114; Rawlinson, iii, 35on.
82. Strabo, XV, iii, 13; Maspero, 592-4.
83. Reinach (1930), 73; Rawlinson, ii, 338.
84. The "Ormuzd" Yast, in Darmesteter, ii,
21.
85. Nask VHI, 58-73, in Darmesteter, i,
380-1.
86. Vend., XIX, v, 27-34; Yast 22; Yasna
LI, 15; Maspcro, 590.
87. Yasna XLV, 7.
88. Dawson, 246-7.
89. Ibid., 256f.
oo. Ibid., 250-3.
91. CAH, iv, 2ii.
92. Cf., e.g., Darmesteter, i, pp. Ixxii-iii.
93. CAH, iv, 209.
94. Dhalla, 201, 218; Maspcro, 595.
95. Harper, Literature, 181.
96. Dhalla, 250-1.
97. Herodotus, IX, 109; Rawlinson, iii, 170.
98. Ibid., iii, 518, 524.
99. Ibid., 170.
100. Strabo, XV, iii, 20.
101. Dhalla, 221.
102. Herodotus, I, 80; Xenophon, Cyro-
paedia, I, ii, 8; VIII, viii, 9; Strabo, XV,
iii, 1 8; Rawlinson, iii, 236.
103. Dhalla, 155; Dawson, 36-7.
104. Dhalla, 119, 190-1.
105. E.g., Vend. DC.
1 06. Darmesteter, i, p. IxxviiL
107. Vend. VIII, 61-5.
108. I, 4.
109. I, 135.
no. Vend. VIII, v, 32; vi, 27.
in. Strabo, XV, iii, 17; Vend. IV, iii, 47.
112. Ibid., iii, i.
113. XV, ii, 2of.
CHAP. XIV)
114. XX, i, 4; XV, iv, 50-1.
115. XXI, i, i.
116. Maspero, 588. These cases were ap-
parently confined to the Magi.
117. Herodotus, VII, 83; IX, 76; Rawlin-
son, iii, 238.
1 1 8. Esther, ii, 14; Rawlinson, iii, 219.
119. Dhalla, 74-6, 219; Rawlinson, iii, 222,
1193. Plutarch, Artaxerxes, Lives, iii, 463-6.
120. Dhalla, 70-1.
121. Herodotus, I, 139; Dhalla, 219.
122. Vend. XV, 9-12; XVI, 1-2.
123. Bundahis, XVI, i, 2, in Dawson, 156.
124. Venkateswara, 177; Dhalla, 225.
125. Ibid., 83-5; Dawson, 151.
126. Herodotus, I, 136.
127. Strabo, XV, iii, 18.
128. Darmesteter, i, p. Ixxx.
129. Vend. VII, vii, 41 f.
130. Ibid., 36-40.
131. Rawlinson, iii, 235.
132. N. Y. Times, Jan. 6, 1931.
NOTES 975
133. Dhalla, 176, 195, 256; Rawlinson, iii,
234.
134. N. Y. Times, Jan. 23, 1933.
135. Dhalla, 253-4.
136. Rawlinson, iii, 278.
137. N. Y. Times, July 28, 1932.
138. Fergusson, History of Architecture, i,
198-9; Rawlinson, iii, 298.
139. Breasted in N. Y. Times, March 9,
1932.
140. CAH, iv, 204.
1403. Dhalla, 260-1.
i4ob. Rawlinson, iii, 244, 400.
141. Maspero, 715.
142. Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, I, 15.
143. Josephus, Antiquities, XI, viii, 3.
144. Arrian, I, 16.
145. Quintus Curtius, III, 17.
146. Arrian, II, n, 13; Plutarch, Life of
Alexander, ch. 20.
147. Quintus Curtius, X, 17; CAH, vi, 169.
148. Plutarch, Alexander, ch. 31; Arrian,
III, 8.
CHAPTER XIV
1. In Rolland, R., Prophets of the New
India, 395, 449-5°-
i a. Winternitz, M., A History of Indian
Literature, i, 8.
2. Ibid., 18-21.
3. Keyserling, Count H., Travel Diary of
a Philosopher, 265.
4. Chirol, Sir Valentine, India, 4.
5. Dubois, Abbe J. A., Hindu Manners,
Customs and Ceremonies, 95, 321.
6. Smith, Vincent, Oxford History of
India, 2; Childe, V. G., The Most An-
cient East, 202; Pittard, Race and His-
tory, 388; Coomaraswamy, History of
Indian and Indonesian Art, 6; Par-
melee, M., Oriental and Occidental
Culture, 23-4.
7. Marshall, Sir John, The Prehistoric
Civilization of the Indus, Illustrated
London Nevus, Jan. 7, 1928, i.
8. Childe, 209.
9. In Muthu, D. C, The Antiquity of
Hindu Medicine, 2.
10. Sir John Marshall in The Modern Re-
view, Calcutta, April 1932, 367.
11. Coomaraswamy in Encyclopedia Bri-
tamica, xii, 211-12.
12. New York Times, Aug. 2, 1932.
13. Macdonell, A. A., India's Past, 9.
14. Ibid.
15. Childe, 211.
16. Woolley, 8.
17. Childe, 202.
1 8. Ibid, 220, 211.
19. New York Times, April 8, 1932.
20. Gour, Spirit of Buddhism, 524; Radha-
krishnan, S., Indian Philosophy, 75.
21. Smith, Oxford History, 14.
22. Davids, T. W. Rhys, Dialogues of the
Buddha, being vols. ii-iv of Sacred
Books of the Buddhists, ii, 97; Ven-
kateswara, 10.
23. Monicr-Williams, Sir M., Indian Wis-
dom, 227.
24. Wintcrnitz, 304.
25. Jastrow, 85.
26. Winternitz, 64.
27. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 216,
222; Havcll, E. B., History of Aryan
Rule in India, 35; Davids, Buddhist
India, 51; Dialogues of the Buddha,
iii, 79-
28. Buxton, The Peoples of Asia, 121.
29. Davids, Buddhist India, 56, 62; Smith,
Oxford History, 37.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
976
30. Sidhanta, N. K., The* Heroic Age of 65.
India, 206; Mahabharata, IX, v, 30. 66.
31. Havell, 33. 67.
32. Dutt, R. G, tr., The Ramayana and 68.
Mahabharata, Everyman Library, 189. 69.
33. Davids, Buddhist India, 60.
34. Davids, Dialogues, ii, 114, 128. 70.
35. Dutt, R. C., The Civilization of India, 71.
21 ; Davids, Buddhist India, 55.
36. Macdonell, India's Past, 39.
37. Gray, R. M. and Parekh, M. C, Ma- 72.
hatma Gandhi, 37.
38. Buddhist India, 46, 51, 101-2; Wint- 73.
ernitz, 64. 74.
39. Buddhist India, 90, 96, 70, 101.
40. Ibid., 70, 98; Winternitz, 65; Havell, 75.
History, 129; Muthu, u.
41. Winternitz, 212. 76.
42. Buddhist India, 100-1. 77.
43. Ibid., 72. 78.
44. Dutt, Ramayana, 231. 79.
45. Arrian, quoted in Sundcrland, Jabez 80.
T., India in Bondage, 178; Strabo, XV, 81.
i, 53- . 8*-
46. Winternitz, 66-7.
47. Venkatcswara, 140.
48. Sidhanta, 149; Tagore in Keyserling,
The Book of Marriage, 108. 83.
49. Sidhanta, 153.
50. Dutt, Ramayana, 192. 84.
51. Smith, Oxford History, 7; Barnett, 85.
L. D., Antiquities of India, 116.
52. Havell, History, 14; Barnett, 109. 86.
53. Monier-Williams, 439; Winternitz, 66. 87.
54. Lajpat Rai, L., Unhappy India, 151,
176.
55. Mahabharata, III, xxxiii, 8?; Sidhanta, 89.
1 60. 90.
56. Sidhanta, 165, 168; Barnett, 119; Brif- 91.
fault, i, 346. 92.
57. Radhakrishnan, i, 119; Eliot, Sir Charles,
Hinduism and Buddhism, i, 6; Buddhist 93.
India, 226; Smith, 70; Das Gupta, Su-
rendranath, A History of Indian Phil- 94.
osophy, 25.
58. Buddhist India, 220-4; Radhakrishnan, 95.
i, 483. 96.
59. Ibid., 117.
60. Winternitz, 140.
61. Hume, R. E., The Thirteen Principal 97.
Upanishads, 169. 98.
62. Das Gupta, 6.
63. Radhakrishnan, i, 76. 99.
64. Eliot, i, 58; Macdonell, 32-3.
(CHAP. XIV
Eliot, i, 62; Winternitz, 76.
Eliot, i, 59.
Radhakrishnan, i, 105.
Ibid., 78.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, i, 4; Hume
81.
Radhakrishnan, i, 114-5.
Katha Upanishad, i, 8; Radhakrish-
nan, i, 250; Muller, Max, Six Systejns
of Hindu Philosophy, 131.
Eliot, i, xv; Buddhist India, 241; Rad-
hakrishnan, i, 1 08.
Ibid., 107; Wintcrnitz, 215; GOUT, 5.
Frazer, R. W., A Literary History of
India, 243.
Dutt, Ramayana, 318; Briffault, i, 346,
iii, 1 88.
Ibid.
Macdonell, 24.
Winternitz, 208; Das Gupta 21.
Buddhist India, 241.
Winternitz, 207.
Dutt, Civilization of India, 33.
Muller, Max, Lectures on the Science
of Language, ii, 234-7, 276; Skeat, W.
W., Etymological Dictionary of the
English Language, 7291".
In Elphinstone, M., History of In-
dia, 161.
Buddhist India, 153; Winternitz 41-4.
Ibid., 31-2; Macdonell, 7; Buddhist
India, 114.
Ibid, 1 20.
Miillcr, Max, India: What Can It
Teach Us?, London, 1919, 206; Wint-
nitz, 32.
Dubois, 425.
Radhakrishnan, i, 67; Eliot, i, 51.
Ibid., i, 53.
Winternitz, 69, 79; Miillcr, India, 97;
Macdonell, 35.
Tr. by Macdonell in Tietjens, Eunice,
Poetry of the Orient, 248.
Tr. by Max Miillcr in Smith, Oxford
History, 20.
In Muller, India, 254.
Wintcrnitz, 243; Radhakrishnan, i, 137;
Deusscn, Paul, The Philosophy of the
Upanishads, 13.
Eliot, i, 51; Radhakrishnan, i, 141.
Cf., e.g., a passage in Chatterji, J. C.,
India's Outlook on Life, 42.
E.g., Chandogya Upanishad, v, 2;
Hume 229.
CHAP. XV)
NOTES
977
100. They are listed in Radhakrishnan, 143.
101. Eliot, i, 93.
102. Hume, 144.
103. Shvetashvatara Upanishad, i, i; Rad-
hakrishnan, i, 150.
104. Hume, 4:2.
105. Katha Upanishad, ii, 23; Brihadaranya-
ka Upanishad, iii, 5, iv, 4; Radhakrish-
nan, i, 177.
1 06. Katha Up an., iv, i; Radhakrishnan, i,
145.
107. Katha Up an., ii, 24.
1 08. Chandogya Upon., vi, 7.
109. Radhakrishnan, i, 151.
no. Brih. Upan., ii, 2, iv, 4.
in. Ibid., iii, 9.
112. Chand. Upon., vi, 12.
113. Radhakrishnan, i, 94, 96.
117. Radhakrishnan, i, 249-51; Macdonell*
48.
1 1 8. Brih. Upan., iv, 4.
119. Radhakrishnan, ir 239.
120. Mundaka Upon., iii, 2; Radhakrish-
nan, i, 236.
CHAPTER XV
1. Chand. Upan., i, 12; Radhakrishnan, i.
149.
2. Ibid., 278.
3. In Hume, 65.
4. Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, ii,
73-5; Radhakrishnan, i, 274.
5. Dutt, Ramayana, 60-1.
6. Muller, Six Systems, 17; Radhak., i,
278.
7. Eliot, i, xix; Muller, Six Systems, 23;
Davids, Buddhist India, 141.
8. Radhak., i, 278.
9. M on ier- Williams, 120-2.
10. Das Gupta, 78; Radhak., i, 279.
n. Ibid., 281.
12. Das Gupta, 79.
13. Monier- Williams, 120; Aluller, Six Sys-
tems, 100.
14. Radhak., i, 280.
15. Ibid., 281-2.
16. Ibid., 287; Smith, Oxford History, 50.
17. Radhak., i, 301.
1 8. Ibid., 329; Eliot, i, 106.
19. Ibid.
20. Radhak, i, 331, 293.
21. Ibid., 327; Eliot, i, no, 113, 115; Smith,
Oxford History, $v» Smith, Vincent,
Akbar, 167; Dubois, 521.
22. Smith, Oxford History, 210.
23. Eliot., i, 112.
24. Ibid., 115.
25. Thomas, E. J., The Life o\ Buddha as
Legend and History, 20.
26. Eliot, i, 244n.
27. Gour, in trod.; Davids, Dialogues, ii,
117; Radhak., i, 347, 351; Eliot, i, 133,
'73-
28. Thomas, E. J., 31-3.
29. Eliot, i, 131; Venkateswara, 169; Hav-
ell, History, 49.
30. Thomas, 50-1.
31. Ibid., 54.
32. Ibid., 55.
33. Ibid., 65.
34. Radhak., i, 343-5.
35. Eliot, i, 129.
36. Dialogues, ii, 5.
37. Gour, 405.
38. Dialogues, iii, 102.
39. Thomas, 87.
40. Radhak., i, 363.
41. Eliot, i, 203.
42. Ibid., 250.
43. Dutt, Civilization of India, 44.
44. Radhak., i, 475.
45. Dialogues, iii, 154.
46. Radhak., i, 421.
47. Dialogues, ii, 35.
48. Ibid., 1 86.
49. Ibid., 254.
50. Ibid., 280-2.
51. Ibid., 37.
52. Radhak., i, 356; Gour, 10.
53. Radhak., i, 438, 475; Dialogues, ii,
123; Eliot, i, xxii.
54. Radhak., i, 354.
55. Ibid., 424; Gour, 10; Elliot, i, 247.
56. Gour, 542; Radhak., i, 465.
57. Eliot, i, xcv.
58. Gour, 280-4.
59. Eliot, i, xxii.
60. Gour, 392-4; Radhak., i, 355.
61. Thomas, 208.
62. Radhak, i, 456.
63. Ibid., 375.
64. Ibid., 369, 385, 392; Buddhist India, 188,
257; Thomas, 88.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
978
65. Das Gupta, 240; Gour, 335.
66. Eliot, i, 191; Dialogues, ii, 188.
67. Eliot, i, 210; Dialogues, ii, 71.
68. Eliot, i, 227; Radhak, i, 389.
69. Thomas, 189.
70. Macdonell, 48; Radhak., i, 444; Eliot, i,
xxi.
71. Gour, 312-4, 333.
73. Dialogues, ii, 190.
74. Eliot, i, 224; Miiller, Six Systems, 373;
Thomas, 187.
75. Radhak., i, 446.
76. Eliot, i, 224.
(CHAP, xvi
77. Ibid., i, 227; Thomas, 145.
80. Dialogues, ii, 55, iii, 94; Watters, Thos.
On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India,
i, 374-
81. Thomas, 134.
82. Buddhist India, 300; Radhak, i, 391.
83. Thomas, 100.
84. Ibid., 100-2.
85. Dialogues, ii, 1-26.
86. Eliot, i, 160.
87. Dialogues, iii, 87.
88. Ibid., 1 08.
89. Thomas, 153.
CHAPTER XVI
1. Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, V, 19, 31.
VI, 2.
2. Smith, Oxford History, 66. 32.
3. Kohn, H., History of Natonalirm in
the East, 350. 33.
4. Arrian, Indica, X. 34.
5. In Dutt, Civilization of India, 50. 35.
6. Arrian, Anabasis, VI, 2. 36.
7. Ibid., V, 8; Strabo, XV, i, 28. 37.
8. EJJC. Brit., xii, 212. 38,
9. Smith, Oxford History, 62. 39.
10. Arrian, Indie a, X. 40.
11. Havell, 75.
12. Smith, Oxford History, 77.
13. Ibid., 114. 41.
14. Ibid., 79. 42.
if. Havcll, History, 82-3. 43.
1 6. It is of uncertain authenticity. Sarton 44.
(147) accepts it as Kautilya's, but Mac-
donell (hidia's Past, 170) considers it 4f.
the work of a later writer. 46.
17. In Smith, Oxford History, 84. 47.
1 8. Smith, Akbar, 396. 48.
19. Smith, Oxford History, 76, 87. 49.
20. Ibid., 311.
21. Strabo, XV, i, 40. 50,
22. Havcll,* 82. 51.
23. Barnctt, 99-100; Havell, 82. 52.
24. Ibid., 69, 80.
25. Ibid., 74. 53,
26. Ibid., 7 if; Barnett, 107. 54.
27. Davids, Buddhist India, 264; Havell, 55.
ibid. 56.
28. Strabo, XV, i, 51. 57.
28a. Havell, 78.
28b. Smith, Oxford History, 87. 58.
29. Candide. 59.
30. Havcll, 88.
Ibid., 91-2; Smith, Oxford History,
101.
Smith, V., Asoka, 67; Davids, Buddhist
India, 297.
Smith, Asoka, 92.
Ibid., 60.
Provincial Edict I; Havcll, 93.
Havell, ioo; Smith, Asoka, 67.
Watters, ii, 91.
Muthu, 35.
Rock Edict XIII.
Havcll, i oo; Smith, Oxford History,
135; Melamed, S. M., Spinoza and
Buddha, 302-3, 308.
Rock Edict VI.
Pillar Edict V.
Watters, 99.
Davids, Buddhist India, 308; Smith, Ox-
ford History, 126.
Ibid., iff.
Nag, Kalidas, Greater India, 27.
Besant, Annie, India, 15.
Smith, Ox. H., 154.
Tr. by James Lcgge, in Gowen, In-
dian Literature, 336.
Havell, 158.
Nag, 25.
Havcll, E. B., The Ancient and Medie-
val Architecture of India, xxv.
Ibid., 207.
Watters, i, 344.
Havell, History, 204.
Watters, ii, 348-9; Havell, 203-4.
Fenollosa, E. F., Epochs of Chinese
and Japanese Art, i, 85.
Arrian, Anabasis, V, 4.
Tod, Lt.-Col. James, Annals and An-
tiquities of Rajasthan, ii, 115.
CHAP. XVIl)
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
72-
73-
74-
75-
76.
77-
78.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
Tod, i, 209.
Keyserling, Travel Diary, i, 184.
Tod, i, 2445.
Smith, Ox. H., 311.
Ibid., 304.
Ibid., 309.
Ibid., 308; Havell, History, 402.
Smith, Ox. H., 308-10.
Ibid., 312-13.
Ibid., 314.
Ibid., 309.
Sewcll, Robert, A Forgotten Empire,
Vijayanagar, in Smith, Ox. H., 306.
From an ancient Moslem chronicle,
Tabakat-i-Nasiri, in Smith, Ox. H.,
192.
Havell, History, 286.
Elphinstone, Mountstuart, History of
India, 3^, 337-8.
Tabakat-i-Nasiri, in Smith, Ox. H.,
222-3.
Smith, 226, 232, 245.
Ibn Batuta, in Smith, 240.
Smith, 303.
In Smith, 234.
Ibid.
Queen Mab.
Havell, History, 368.
Ibid.; Smith, 252.
Elphinstone, 415; Smith, Akbar, 10.
Smith, Ox. H., 321.
Firishtah, Muhammad Qasim, History
of Hindustan, ii, 188.
Elphinstone, 430.
Babur, Memoirs, i.
Smith, Akbar, 98, 148, 358; Havell,
History, 479.
Smith, Akbar, 226, 379, 383; Bcsant, 23.
NOTES 979
92. Smith, Akbar, 333.
93. Firishtah, 309.
94. Smith, Akbar, 333-6, 65, 77, 343, 115,
1 60, 1 08; Smith, Ox. H., 311; Besant,
India, 23.
95. Havell, History, 478.
96. Smith, Akbar, 406.
97. Ibid., 424-5.
98. Ibid., 235-7.
99. In Frazer, History of Indian Litera-
ture, 358.
100. Havell, History, 409.
101. Brown, Percy, Indian Painting, 49;
Smith, Akbar', 421-2.
102. Ibid., 3?o; Havell, History, 493-4.
103. Ibid., 494.
104. Ibid., 493.
i of. Frazer, 357.
106. Smith, Akbar, 133, 176, 181, 257, 350;
Havell, History, 493, 510.
107. Smith, Akbar, 212.
1 08. Ibid., 216-21.
109. Smith, Akbar, 301, 323, 325.
1 10. Smith, Ox. H., 387.
in. Elphinstone, 540.
112. Lorcnz, D. E., 'Round the World
Traveler, 373.
113. Smith, Ox. H., 395.
114. Ibid., 393.
115. Elphinstone, 586.
116. Ibid., 577; Smith, Ox. H., 445-7.
117. Ibid., 439.
1 1 8. Fcrgusson, Jas., History of Indian and
Eastern Architecture, ii, 88.
119. Tod, i, 349.
120. Smith, Ox. H., 448.
121. Ibid., 446.
CHAPTER XVII
1. Smith, Akbar, 401; Indian Year Bjok,
Bombay, 1929, 563; Minney, R. J.,
Shiva: or The Future of India, 50.
2. Havell, History, 160; Eliot, ii, 171;
Dubois, 190.
3. Parmelee, i48n.
4. Smith, Ox. H., 315.
5. Havell, 80, 261.
6. Strabo, XV, i, 40; Siddhanta, 180; Du-
bois, 57.
7. Barnett, 107; Havell, Ancient and Me-
dieval Architecture, 208; Tod, i, 362.
8. Sarkar, B. K., Hindu Achievements in
Exact Science, 68.
9. Ill, 102.
10. In Strabo, XV, i, 44.
11. Sarkar, 68; Lajpat Rai, L., England's
Debt to India, 176.
12. Havell, Architecture, 129; Fcrgusson,
Indian Architecture, ii, 208.
13. Lajpat Rai, England's Debt, ibid.
14. Moon, P. T., Imperialism and World
Politics, 292.
15. Lajpat Rai, England's Debt, 121.
16. Ill, 106.
17. Sarton, 535.
1 8. Lajpat Rai, England's Debt, 123.
19. Ibid.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
980
20. Polo, Travels, 307.
21. Muthu, 100.
22. Venkateswara, n; Smith, Ox. H., 15.
23. Lajpat Rai, England's Debt, 162-3.
24. Havell, History, 75, 130.
25. Ibid., 140.
26. Lajpat Rai, England's Debt, 165.
27. Barnett, 211-15.
28. Macdonell, 265-70.
29. Smith, Akbar, 157.
30. Fragment XXVII B in McCrindle, J.
W., Ancient India as Described by
Megasthenes and Arrian, 73.
31. Monicr- Williams, 263; Minney, 75.
32. Barnett, 130; Monier-Williams, 264.
33. Dubois, 657.
34. Sidhanta, 178; Havell, History, 234;
Smith, Ox. H., 312.
35. Besant, 23; Dutt, Civilization of India,
121.
36. Dubois, 81-7.
37. Lajpat Rai, England's Debt, 12.
38. Smith, Akbar, 389-91.
39. Ibid., 393.
40. Ibid., 392.
41. Watters, i, 340.
42. Elphinstonc, 329; cf. Smith, Ox. H.,
257-
43. Elphinstonc, 477.
44. Smith, Ox. H., 392.
45. Smith, Akbar, 395.
46. Ibid., 1 08.
47. Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 315.
48. Minncy, 72.
49. Lajpat Rai, England's Debt, 25.
50. Macaulay, T. B., Essay on Clivc, in
Critical and Historical Essays, i, 544.
51. Havell, History, 235; Havell, Archi-
tecture, xxvi. This liberty, of course,
was at its minimum under Chandra-
gupta Maurya.
52. Laws of Manu, vii, 15, 20-4, 218, in
Monicr- Williams, 256, 285.
53. Smith, Ox. H., 229.
54. Ibid., 266.
55. Barnett, 124; Dubois, 654; Smith, Ox.
H., 109.
56. Dubois, 654.
57. Smith, p*. H., 249.
58. Ibid., 249, 313; Barnett, 122.
59. Monier- Williams, 204-6.
60. Max Miiller, India, 12.
62. Dubois, 722; cf. also 66 1 and 717.
63. Monicr- Williams, 203, 233, 268.
(CHAP, xvii
64. Simon, Sir John, Chairman, Report of
the Indian Statutory Commission, i, 35.
65. Davids, Buddhist India, 150.
66. Tod, i, 479; Ilallam, Henry, View of
the State of Europe during the Middle
Ages, ch. vii, p. 263.
66a. Barnett, 106; Dubois, 177.
67. Manu xix, 313; Monier-Williams, 234.
68. Maine, Ancient Law, 165;, Monicr-
Williams, 266.
69. Barnett, 112.
70. Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, 379.
71. Winternitz, 147; Radhak., i, 356; Mo-
nicr-Williams, 236.
72. Dubois, 590-2.
73. Barnett, 123; Davids, Dialogues, ii, 285.
75. Havell, History, 50.
76. Monier-Williams, 233.
77. Dubois, 98, 169.
78. Manu, i, 100; Monier-Williams, 237.
79. Dubois, 176.
Ho. Manu, iii, 100.
81. Barnctt, 114.
82. Dubois, 593.
83. Manu, viii, 380-1.
85. Manu, xi, 206.
86. Barnett, 123.
87. Ibid., 121; Winternitz, 198.
88. Eliot, i, 37; Simon, i, 35.
89. Manu, iv, 147.
90. Ibid., ii, 87.
91. XI, 261.
92. IV, 27-8.
93. Dubois, 165, 237, 249.
94. Ibid., 187.
95. Manu, ii, 177-8.
96. VIII, 336-8.
97- n, 179.
98. Book xviii; Arnold, Sir Edwin, The
Song Celestial, 107.
99. Tagorc, R., Sadhana, 127.
100. Smith, Ox. H., 42.
101. Ibid., 34.
102. IX, 45.
103. Barnett, 117.
104. Sumncr, Folkways, 315.
105. Tod, i, 602; Smith, O#. H., 690.
1 06. Wood, Ernest, An EnglisJrman De-
fends Mother India, 103.
107. Dubois, 205; Havell, E. B., The Ideals
of Indian Art, 93.
1 08. Tagorc in Kcyserling, The Book of
Marriage, 104, 108
CHAP. XVIl)
109. Hall, Josef ("Upton Close"), Eminent
Asians, 505.
no. Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 186.
in. Dubois, 231; Census of India, 1921, i,
151; Mukerji, D. G., A Son of Mother
India Answers, 19.
112. Barnect, 115.
113. Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 159.
114. Robie, W. F., The Art of Love, i8f;
Macdonell, 174.
115. Robie, 36.
1 1 6. Ibid., 32.
117. Frazer, Adonis, 54-5; Curtis, W. E.,
Modern India, 284-5.
1 1 8. Dubois, 585.
119. Cf., e.g., the "Fifty Stanzas" of Bil-
hana, in Tictjcns, 303-6.
120. Coomaraswamy, A. K., Dance of
Shiva, 103, 1 08.
121. Monier- Williams, 244.
122. Dubois, 214.
123. Strabo, 1, i, 62.
124. Manu, 111, 12-15, *x» 45* 85, IOIi Mon-
icr- Williams, 243.
125. Tod, i, 284^
126. Nivedita, Sister (Margaret E. Noble),
The Web of Indian Life, 40.
127. Barnett, 109.
128. XV, i, 62.
129. Havell, Ideals, 91.
130. In Bebel, Woman under Socialism, 52.
131. In Tod, i, 604.
132. Barnett, 109.
133. Dubois, 339-40.
134. Manu, iv, 43; Barnett, no.
135. Manu, v, 154-6.
136. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, ii, 650.
137. Dubois, 337.
138. Tagore, R., Chitra, 45.
139. Manu, ix, 18.
140. Ill, 33, 82; Sidhanta, 160.
141. Frazcr, R. W., 179.
142. VIII, 416.
143. Monicr-Williams, 267; Tod, i, 605.
144. Barnctt, 116; Westermarck, ii, 650.
145. Manu, ix, 2, 12, iii, 57, 60-3.
146. Tod, i, 604.
147. II, 145; Wood, 27.
148. Tod, i, 59on; Zimand, S., Living India,
124-5.
149. Dubois, 313.
150. Herodotus, IV, 71, V, 5.
151. Enc. Brit., xxi, 624.
152. Rig-veda, x, 18; Sidhanta, i65n.
NOTES 981
153. I, 125, xv, 33, xvi, 7, xii, 149; Sidhanta,
165.
154. Smith, Ox. H., 309.
155. XV, i, 30, 62.
156. Enc. Brit., xxi, 625.
157. Tod, i, 604; Smith, Ox. H.9 233.
158. Coomaraswamy, Dance of Shiva, 93.
159. Smith, Ox. H., 309.
160. Manu, v, 162, ix, 47, 65; Parmclee, 114.
161. Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 198.
162. Ibid., 192, 196.
163. Tod, i, 575.
164. Dubois, 331.
165. Ibid., 78, 337, 355, 587; Sumncr, Folk-
ways, 457.
1 66. Dubois, 340; Coomaraswamy, Dance,
94-
167. Bcbcl, 52; Sumncr, 457.
168. IV, 203.
169. Wood, 292, 195.
170. Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 284.
171. Ibid., 280.
172. Wattcrs, i, 152.
173. Dubois, 184, 248; Wood, 196.
174. Sumncr, 457.
175. Dubois, 708-10.
176. The scatophilic student will find these
matters piously detailed by the Abbe
Dubois, 237^
177. Sumncr, 457; Wood, 343.
178. Wood, 286.
179. Dubois, 325.
180. Ibid., 78.
181. Ibid., 341; Coomaraswamy, History,
210.
182. Dubois, 324.
183. Loti, Pierre, India, 113; Parmelee, 138.
184. Loti, 210.
185. Dubois, 662.
1 86. Westermarck, i, 89.
187. Macaulay, Essays, i, 562.
188. Manu, viii, 103-4; Monier-Williams,
273-
189. Watters, i, 171.
190. Miillcr, India, 57.
191. Hardie, J. Keir, India, 60.
192. Mukerji, A Son, 43.
193. Smith, Ox. H., 666f.
194. Dubois, 1 20.
195. Examples of the latter quality will bti
found in Dubois, 660, or in almost any
account of the recent revolts.
196. Frazer, R. W., 163; Dubois, 509.
197. Simon, i, 48.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
982
198. Miillcr, India, 41.
199. Davids, Dialogues, ii, 9-11.
200. Skeat, s.v. check; Enc. Brit., art,
"Chess."
201. Dubois, 670.
202. Enc. Brit., viii, 175.
203. Ha veil, History, 477.
(CHAP, xviii
204. Nivcdita, nf.
205. Dubois, 595.
206. Briffault, iii, 198.
207. Gandhi, M. K., His Own Story, 45.
208. Davids, Buddhist India, 78.
209. Watters, i, 175.
210. Wcstermarck, i, 244-6.
CHAPTER XVIII
Davids, Dialogues, iii, 184.
Wintcrnitz, 562.
Fcrgusson, i, 174.
Edmunds, A. J., Buddhistic and Chris-
tlan Gospels, Philadelphia, 1908, 2V.
Havell, History, 101; Eliot, i, 147.
Eliot, ii, no.
Ibid., i, xciii; Simon, i, 79.
Sarton, 367, 428; Smith, Ox. //., 174;
Fcnnllosa, ii, 213, i, 82; Nag, 34-5.
Fcrgusson, i, 292.
M on icr- Williams, 429.
Dubois, 626; Donne, Bible Myths,
278f; Carpenter, Edward, Pagan and
Christian Creeds, 24.
Indian Year Book, 1929, 21.
Eliot, ii, 222.
Loren/, 3^; Dubois, 112.
Modern Review, Calcutta, April, 19^2,
p. 367; Childe, The Most Ancient East,
209.
Rawlmson, Five Great Monarchies, ii,
i.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
H.
9.
H).
n.
14.
15.
1 6.
17. Eliot, ii, 288; Kohn, 380.
1 8. Eliot, ii, 287.
19. Modern Review, June, 1931, p. 713.
20. Eliot, ii, 282.
21. Ibid., 145.
22. Dubois, $71, 641.
23. Ibid.; Coomaraswamy, History, 68, 181.
24. Lorenz, 333- '
25. Wood, 204; Dubois, 43, 182, 638-9.
26. Zimand, 132.
27. Wood, 208.
28. Eliot, i, 2ii.
29. Havell, Architecture, xxxv.
30. Winternitz, 529. m
31. Vishnupurana, z, 16, in Otto, Rudolf,
Mysticism, East and West, 55-6.
32. Dubois, 54*; Eliot, i, 46.
33. Monier- Williams, 178, 331; Dubois,
415; Eliot, i, Ixviii, 46.
34. Eliot, i, Ixvi; Fiilop-Miller, R., Lenin
and Gandhi, 248.
35. Manu, xii, 62; Monier-Williams, 55,
276; Radhak., i, 250.
36. Watters, i, 281.
37. Dubois, 562.
38. Ibid., 248.
39. Eliot, i, Ixxvii; Monicr- Williams, 55;
Mahabharata, XII, 2798; Manu, iv, 88-
oo, xii, 75-77, iv, 182, 260, vi, 32, ii, 244.
40. Dubois, 565.
41. Eliot, i, Ixvi.
42. Quoted by Winternitz, 7.
43. Article on "The Failure of Every
Philosophical Attempt in Thcodicy,K
1791, in Radhak., i, 364.
44. From the Mahabharata; reference lost.
45. In Brown, Brian, Wisdom of the Hin^
dus, 32.
46. Ra?f?ayana, etc., 152.
47. Brown, B., Hindus, 222f.
48. Rolland, R., Prophets of the New In-
dia, 49.
50. Dubois, 379f.
51. Briffault, ii, 451.
52. Davids, Buddhist India, 216; Dubois,
149, 329, ^82f.
53. Sumner, Folkways, 547; Eliot, ii, 143;
Dubois, 629; Monier-Williams, 522-3.
54. Dubois, 541, 631.
5?. Murray's India, London, 1905, 434.
56. Eliot, ii, 173.
57. Dubois, 595.
58. Yivekananda in Wood, 156.
59. Havell, Architecture, 107; Eliot, ii, 225.
60. In Wood, 154.
61. Simon, i, 24; Lorenz, 332; Eliot, ii,
173; Dubois, 296.
62. Monier-Williams, 430.
63. Dubois, 647.
64. Wintcrnitz, 565; Smith, Ox. H., 690.
65. Dubois, 597.
66. Enc. Brit., xiii, 175.
67. Smith, Ox. H., 155, 315.
68. Dubois, no.
69. Ibid., 180-1.
CHAP. XIX)
70. Eliot, ill, 422.
71. Dubois, 43; Wood, 205.
72. Dubois, 43.
73. Watters, i, 319.
74. Dubois, 500-9, 523^
75. Ibid., 206.
76. Eliot, ii, 322.
77. Radhak., i, 345.
78. Ibid., 484.
NOTES
983
79. Arnold, The Song Celestial, 94.
80. Brown, B., Hindus, 218-20; Barnctt,
The Heart of India, 112.
81. Elphinstone, 476; Loti, 34; Elliot, i,
xxxvii, 40-1; Radhak., i, 27; Dubois,
upn.
82. Kohn, 352.
83. Smith, Ox. H., x.
84. GOUT, 9.
CHAPTER XIX
i. Spencer, Sociology, iii, 248.
3. Sarton, 378.
4. Ibid., 409, 428; Sedgwick and Tyler,
160.
5. Barnett, 188-00.
6. Muthu, 97.
7. De Morgan in Sarkar, 8.
8. Reference lost.
8a. Journal of the American Oriental So-
ciety, Vol. 51, No. i, p. 51.
9. Sarton, 60 1.
10. Monicr- Williams, 174; Sedgwick 159;
Sarkar, 12.
n. Ibid.
12. Muthu, 92; Sedgwick, 1571".
13. Ibid.; Lowie, R. H., Are We Civil-
ized?, 269; Sarkar, 14.
14. Muthu, 92; Sarkar, 14-15.
15. Monier-Williams, 183-4.
1 6. Sedgwick, 157.
17. Sarkar, 17.
18. Sedgwick, 157; Muthu, 94; Sarkar, 23-4.
19. Muthu, 97; Radhak., i, 317-8.
20. Sarkar, 36f.
21. Ibid., 37-8.
22. Muthu, 104; Sarkar, 39-46.
223. Ibid., 45.
23. Garrison, 71; Sarkar, 56.
24. Sarkar, 57-9.
25. Ibid., 63.
26. Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 163-4.
27. Sarkar, 63.
28. Ibid., 65.
29. Muthu, 14.
30. Sarton, 77; Garrison, 71.
31. Barnett, 220.
32. Muthu, 50.
33. Ibid., 39; Barnett, 221; Sarton, 480.
34. Sarton, 77; Garrison, 72.
35. Muthu, 26; Macdoncll, 180.
36. Garrison, 29.
37. Muthu, 26.
38. Ibid., 27.
39. Garrison, 70.
40. Ibid., 71.
41. Macdoncll, 179.
42. Harding, T. Swann, Fads, Frauds and
Physicians, 147.
43. Watters, i, 174; Venkateswara, 193.
44. Barnctt, 224; Garrison, 71.
45. Ibid.; Muthu, 33.
46. Garrison, 71; Lajpat Rai, Unhappy In-
dia, 286.
47. Eliot, i, Ixxxix; Lajpat Rai, 285.
48. Muthu, 44.
49. Garrison, 73.
50. Ibid., 72.
51. Macdoncll, 180.
52. Havcll, History, 255.
53. Lajpat Rai, 287.
54. Radhak, i, 55.
56. Mullcr, Six Systems, n; Havell, His-
tory, 412.
57. Das Gupta, 406.
58. Havcll, History, 208.
59. Coomaraswamy, Dance, f. p. 130.
60. Davidj, Dialogues, ii, 26f; Miiller, Six
Systems, 17; Radhak, i, 483.
61. Kevscrling, Travel Diary, i, 106; £1,157.
62. Mullcr, Six Systems, 219, 235; Radhak.,
i, 57, 276, ii, 23; Das Gupta, 8.
63. Radhak., ii, 36, 43.
64. Ibid., 34, 127, 17 j; Miiller, 427.
65. Radhak., i, 281, ii, 42, 134.
66. Gowcn, Indian Literature, 127; Rad-
hak, ii, 29, 197, 202, 227; Dutt, Civiliza-
tion of India, 3?; Mullcr, 438; Chat-
ter ji, J. C., The Hindu Realism, 20, 22.
67. Radhak., ii, 249.
68. Ibid.
69. Gowen, 128.
70. Ibid., 30; Monier-Williams, 78; Miiller,
84, 2i9f.
7oa. E.g., XII, 13703.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
984
7ob. Radhak., ii, 249.
71. Macdoncll, 93.
72. Miiller, x.
73. Kapila, The Aphorisms of the Sankhya
Philosophy, Aph. 79.
74. Gour, 23.
75. Eliot, ii, 302; Monier- Williams, 88.
76. Kapila, Aph. 98.
77. Monier- Williams, 84.
78. Mullcr, xi.
79. Kapila, Aph. 100; Monier-Williams, 88.
80. Kapila, p. 75, Aph. 67.
81. Radhak., i, 279.
82. In Brown, B., Hindus, 212.
83. Eliot, ii, 301.
84. Kapila in Brown, B., Hindus, 213.
85. Kapila, Aph. 56.
86. Ibid., Aphs. 83-4.
87. In Brown, B., 211.
88. Monier-Williams, 90-1.
89. Ibid., 92.
90. Rig-vcda x, 136.3; Radhak., i, in.
91. Eliot, i, 303.
92. Arrian, Anabasis, VII, $.
93. Some authorities, however, attribute
the Yoga-sutra to the fourth century
A.D.— Radhak., ii, 340.
94. Watters, i, 148.
95. Polo, 300.
96. Lorenz, 356.
97. Chatter ji, India's Outlook on Life, 6in;
Radhak., i, 337.
98. Mullcr, Six Systems, 324-5.
99. Coomaraswamy, Dance, 50; Rndhak.,
ii, 344; Das Gupta, S., Yoga as Philos-
ophy and Religion, vii; Parmelee, 64;
Eliot, i, 303-4; Davids, Buddhist India,
242.
100. Chatter ji, India's Outlook, 65.
101. Aliillcr, Six Systems, 349.
102. The World as Will and Idea, tr. Hal-
dane and Kemp, iii, 254; Eliot, i, 309.
103. Radhak., ii, 360.
104. Vyasa in Radhak., ii, 362.
(CHAP, xx
105. Eliot, i, 305; Radhak., ii, 371; Miiller,
308-10, 324-5.
1 06. Chatter ji, Realism, 6; Dubois, 98.
107. Patanjali in Brown, B., Hindus, 183;
Radhak., i, 366.
108. Das Gupta, Yoga, 157; Eliot, i, 319;
Chatter ji, India's Outlook, 40.
109. Dubois, 529, 60 1.
110. Eliot, ii, 295.
in. Radhak., ii, 494; Das Gupta, History,
434-
112. Radhak., i, 45-6.
113. Radhak., ii, 528-31, 565-87; Deussen,
Paul, System of the Vcdanta, 241-4;
Macdoncll, 47; Radhakrishnan, S., The
Hindu View of Life, 65-6; Otto, 3.
114. Eliot, i, xlii-iii; Deussen, Vedanta, 272,
458.
115. Radhak., ii, 544^
1153. Gucnon, Rene, Man and His Becom-
ing, 259.
1 1 6. Deussen, 39, 126, 139, 212.
117. Coomaraswamy, Dance, 113.
1 1 8. Miiller, Six Systems, 194.
119. Eliot, ii, 312; Deussen, 255, 300, 477;
Radhak., ii, 633, 643.
120. Deussen, 402-10, 457.
121. Eliot, ii, 40.
122. In Deussen, 106.
123. Ibid., 286.
124. Radhnk., ii, 448.
12?. In Muller, Six Systems, 181.
126. Radhak., ii, 771.
127. Dickinson, G. Lowes, An Essay on the
Civilizations of India, China and Japan,
33-
128. Keyserling, Travel Diary, i, 257.
129. Isavasya Upanishad, in Brown, B.,
Hindus, 159.
130. Ibid.
131. De Intellectus Emendatione.
132. Cf. Otto, 210-32. Mclamcd, S. M., in
Spinoza and Buddha, has tried to trace
the influence of Hindu pantheism
upon the great Jew of Amsterdam.
CHAPTER XX
1. Das Gupta, Yoga* 16; Radhak., ii, 570.
2. Macdonell, 61; Winternitz, 46-7.
3. Mahabharata, II, 5; Davids, Buddhist
India, 108. Rhys Davids dates the old-
est extant Indian (bark) MS. about
the beginning of the Christian era.
(Ibid., 124.)
4. Ibid., 1 1 8.
5. Indian Year Book, 1929, 633.
6. Winternitz, 33, 35.
7. Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 18, 27.
8. Vcnknteswara, 83; Max Muller in
Hardie, 5.
9. Smith, Ox. H., 114.
CHAP. XXl)
NOTES
985
10. Vcnkateswara, 83; Havell, Hist ory, 409.
11. Vcnkateswara, 85, 100, 239.
12. Ibid., 114, 84; Frazer, R. W., 161.
13. Vcnkateswara, 148.
14. Havell, History, Plate XLI.
15. Venkatcswara, 231-2; Smith, Ox. H.,
61; Havell, History, 140; Muthu, 32,
74; Modern Review, March, 1915, 334.
1 6. Waiters, ii, 164-5.
17. Vcnkateswara, 239, 140, 121, 82; Muthu,
77-
1 8. Tod, i, 348n.
19. Ibid.
20. Rcnnayana, etc., 324.
21. Eliot, i, xc.
22. Tietjcns, 246.
23. VI, 13, 50.
233. Rcnnayana, etc., 303-7.
24. V, 1517; Monier-Williams, 448.
25. In Brown, B., Hindus, 41.
26. In Winternitz, 441.
27. In Brown, B., 27.
28. Eliot, ii, 200.
29. Radhak., i, 519; Winternitz, 17.
30. Professor Bhandakar in Radhak., i, 524.
31. Richard Garbe, ibid.
32. Arnold, The Song Celestial, 4-5.
33. Ibid., 9.
34. Ibid., 41, 31.
35. Macdonell, 91.
36. Gowen, 251; Miiller, India, 81.
37. Arthur Lillie, in Rama and Homer,
has tried to show that Homer bor-
rowed both his subjects from the In-
dian epics; but there seems hardly any
question that the latter arc younger
than the Iliad and the Odyssey.
38. Dutt, Rcnnayana, etc., 1-2.
39. Ibid., 77.
40. Ibid., 10.
41. Ibid., 34.
42. Ibid., 36.
43. Ibid., 47, 75.
44. Ibid., 145.
45. Gowen, Indian Literature, 203.
46. Ibid., 219.
47. Macdonell, 97-106.
48. In Gowen, 361.
49. Ibid., 363.
50. Monier-Williams, 476-94.
51. Gowen, 358-9.
52. Coonmraswamy, Dance, 33.
53. Kalidasa, Shakuntala, 101-3.
54. Ibid., 139-40.
55. Tr. by Monier-Williams, in Gowen,
3i7-
56. Frazcr, R. W., 288.
57. Kalidasa, xiii.
58. Macdonell, 123-9.
59. Macdonell in Tietjcns, 24-5.
60. In Gowen, 407-8.
61. Ibid., 504.
62. Ibid., 437-42.
63. Tietjcns, 301; Gowen, 411-13; Barnett,
Hart of India, 121.
64. Frazer, R. W., 36?; Gowen, 487.
643. Coomaraswamy, Dance, 105; Rolland,
Prophets, 611.
65. Barnctt, Heart, 54.
66. Sir George Gricrson in Smith, Akbar,
420.
67. Macdonell, 226; Winternitz, 476; Gan-
dhi, His Own Story, 71.
68. Barnctt, Heart, 63.
69. Vcnkatcswara, 246, 249; Havell, His-
tory, 237.
70. Frazer, R. W., 3i8n.
71. Ibid., 345.
72. Eliot, ii, 263; Gowen, 491; Dutt, 101.
73. Tr. by Tagore.
74. Kabir, Songs of Kabir, tr. by R. Tag-
ore, 91, 69.
75. Eliot, ii, 262.
76. Ibid., 265.
CHAPTER XXI
1. Coomaraswamy, History, 4.
2. Ibid., Plate II, 2.
3. Fergusson, i, 4.
4. Smith, Akbar, 412.
5. Coomaraswamy, fig. 381.
6. Ibid., 134.
7. Ibid., figs. 368-78.
8. Ibid., 139.
9. Ibid., 137.
10. Ibid., 138.
11. Smith, Akbar, 422.
12. Coomaraswamy, Dance, 73.
13. Program of dances by Shankar, New
York, 1933.
14. Coomaraswamy, Dance, 7$, 78.
15. Brown, Percy, Indian Painting, 121.
1 6. Childe, Ancient East, 37; Brown, P.,
15, in.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
986
17. Havcll, Ideals, 132; Brown, P., 17.
1 8. Ibid., 38.
19. Ibid., 20.
20. E.g., by Faure, History of Art, ii, 26;
and Havell, Architecture, 150.
21. Brown, P., 20-30.
22. Havell, Architecture, Plate XLIV; Fis-
cher, Otto, Die Kunst Indiens, Chinas
und Japans, 200.
23. Havell, Architecture, 149.
24. Coomaraswamy, History, figs. 7 and
185.
25. Havell, Architecture, PI. XLV.
26. Fischer, Ta/>/ VI.
27. Ibid., 188-94.
29. Coomaraswamy, Dance, PI. XVIII.
30. Coomaraswamy, History, fig. 269.
31. Brown, P., 120.
32. Cf. a charming example in Fischer, 273.
33. Brown, P., 8, 47, 50, 100; Smith, Ox.
H., 128; Smith, Akbar, 428-30.
34. Brown, P., 85.
35. Ibid., 06.
36. Ibid., 89; Smith, Akbar, 429.
37. Ibid., 226.
38. Coomaraswamy, Dance, 26.
39. Havcll, Ideals, 46.
40. Fcnollnsii, i, 30; Fcrgusson, i, 52; Smith,
Ox. H., in.
41. Gour, 530; Havell, History, in.
42. Coomaraswamy, History, 70.
43. Fcnollosa, i, 4, 81; Thomas, K. J., 221;
Coomaraswamy, Dance, 52; Eliot, i,
xxxi; Smith, Ox. H., 67.
44. Fischer, 168; Central Museum, Lahore.
45. Fcnollosa, i, 81.
46. Coomaraswamy, History, fig. 168.
47. C:i. 950 A.D.; Coomaraswamy, History,
fig. 222; Lucknow Museum.
48. Ca. 1050 A.D.; Coomaraswamy, History,
fig. 223; Lucknow Museum.
49. Ca. 750 A.D.; Havcll, History, f. p. 204.
50. Ca. 9^0 A.D.; Coomaraswamy, History,
PI. LXX.
51. Ca. 700; Havcll, History, f. 244; a vari-
ant, in copper, from the i7th century,
is in the British Museum.
52. Ca. 750; Coomaraswamy, Dance, p. 26.
53. Ca. 1650; Coomaraswamy, History, fig.
248.
54. Fenollosa, i, f. 84.
55. Fischer, Tafel XVI; Coomaraswamy,
History, cvi; Boston Museum of Fine
Arts.
(CHAP, xxi
56. Coomaraswamy, fig. 333.
57. Gangoly, O. G, Indian Architecture,
xxxiv-viii.
58. Ibid., frontispiece.
59. Havcll, Ideals, f. 168.
60. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City; Coomaraswamy, History,
fig. 101.
61. Havell, Ideals, f. 34.
62. Ca. 100 A.D.; Coomaraswamy, XCVIII.
63. Ibid., xcv.
64. Havell, History, 104; Fergusson, i, 51.
65. Davids, Buddhist India, 70.
66. Havell, Architecture, 2; Smith, Ox. H.,
in; Eliot, iii, 450; Coomaraswamy,
History, 22.
67. Spooncr, D. B., in Gowen, 270.
68. Fischer, 144-5.
69. In Smith, Ox. H., 112.
70. Havcll, History, 106; Coomaraswamy,
History, 17.
71. Havcll, Architecture, 55.
72. Fergusson, i, 119.
73. Coomaraswamy, History, fig. 54.
74. Ibid., fig. 31.
74a. Fcrgusson, i, 55; Coomaraswamy, 19.
75. Fischer, 186.
76. Ibid., Tafel IV.
77. Ibid., 175.
78. Havcll, Architecture, 98, and PI. XXV.
79. Fergusson, ii, 26.
80. Havcll, Architecture, PL XIV.
81. Fcrgusson, ii, frontispiece.
82. Coomaraswamy, LXVIII.
83. Fcrgusson, ii, 41 and PL XX.
84. Ibid., 101.
85. Fcrgusson, ii, PL XXIV.
86. Ibid., n8-9.
87. Coomaraswamy, History, fig. 252.
88. Havcll, History, f. p. 344.
89. Havell, Architecture, Plates LXXIV-
VI.
90. Fischer, 214-5.
91. Loti, 168; Fergusson, ii, 7, 32, 87.
92. E.g., the temple at Baroli, Fergusson,
ii, 133.
93. Fergusson, i, 352.
94. Ibid., PL XII, p. 424.
95. Ibid.
96. Gangoly, PL LXXIV.
97. Coomaraswamy, History, fig. 211;
Fischer, 251.
98. Fergusson, i, 448.
99. Macdoncll, 83.
CHAP. XXIl)
100. Coomaraswamy, History, fig. 192;
Fischer, 221.
101. Ibid., 222.
102. Ha veil, Architecture, 195; Fergusson,
103. E.g., Mukerji, D. G., Visit India with
Ale, New York, 1929, 12.
104. Coomaraswamy, History, 95, PI. LII.
105. Fischer, 248-9; Fcrgusson, i, 362-6.
106. Ibid., 368-72.
107. Dr. Coomaraswamy.
1 08. Coomaraswamy, History, XCVI.
109. Ibid., 169.
no. Gangoly, 29.
in. Coomaraswamy, History, fig. 349;
Gangoly, xi.
112. Exs. in Gangoly, xii-xv.
N O T E S 987
113. Candee, Helen C., Angkor the Mag-
nificent, 302.
114. Ibid., 1 86.
115. 131, 257, 294.
116. 258.
117. Fischer, 280.
118. Coomaraswamy, History, 173.
119. Havell, History, 327, 296, 376; Archi-
tecture, 207; Fergusson, ii, 87, 7.
120. Smith, Ox. H., 223; Frazer, R. W., 363.
121. Smith, f. 329.
122. Fergusson, ii, 309.
123. Ibid., 3o8n.
124. Lorcnz, 376.
125. Chirol, India, 54.
126. Lorcnz, 379.
127. Smith, Ox. H., 421.
CHAPTER XXII
1. Zimand, 31. 25.
2. Smith, Ox. H., 502.
3. In Zimand, 32. 26.
4. Ibid., 31-4; Smith, 505; Macauley, i, 27.
504, 580; Dutt, R. C., The Economic 28.
History of India in the Victorian Age, 29.
18-23, ^2-3. 30.
5. Macaulay, i, 568-70, 603. 31.
6. Dutt, Economic History, 67, 76, 375;
Macaulay, i, 529. 32.
7. Ibid., 528. 33-
8. Dutt, xiii, 399, 417. 34.
9. Sundcrland, 135; Lajpat Rai, Unhappy 35.
India, 343.
10. Dubois, 300. 36.
11. Ibid., 607.
12. Eliot, iii, 409.
13. Monicr-Williams, 126. 37.
14. Frazer, R. W., 397. 38.
15. Ibid., 395. 39-
1 6. Eliot, i, xlvi. 40.
17. Rolland, Prophets, 119; Zimand, 85-6; 41.
Wood, 327; Eliot, i, xlviii; Under- 42.
wood, A. C., Contemporary Thought 43.
of India, 13 71".
173. Rolland, 61, 260.
1 8. Ibid., xxvi; Eliot, ii, 162.
19. Brown, B., Hindus, 269. 44.
20. Rolland, 160, 243; Brown, B., 264-5. 45.
21. Rolland, 427. 46-
22. Ibid., 251, 293, 449-50- 47-
23. Ibid., 395. 48-
24. Tagorc, R., Gitanjali, New York, 1928,
xvii; My Reminiscences, 15, 201, 215. 49.
Thompson, E. J., Rabindranath Tag-
ore, 82.
Tagorc, R., The Gardener, 74-5.
Tagorc, Gitanjali, 88.
Tagorc, Chitra, esp. pp. 57-8.
'Tagorc, The Gardener, 84.
Thompson, F.. J., 43.
Ibid., 94, 99; Fulop-Miller, 246; Under-
wood, A. C., 152.
Tagorc, R., Sadhana, 25, 64.
The Gardener, 13-15.
Kohn, 105.
Zimand, 181; Lorcnz, 402; Indian Year
Book, 1929, 29.
"Close, Upton" (Josef Washington
Hall), The Revolt of Asia, 235; Sun-
derland, 204; Underwood, 153.
Smith, O*. //., 3?.
Simon, i, 37; Dubois, 73.
Ibid., 1 90.
Havell, History, 165; Lorenz, 327.
Kohn, 426.
Simon, i, 38.
Lajnat Rai, Unhappy India, Iviii, 191;
Mukcrji, A Son, 27; Sundcrland, 247;
New York Times, Sept. 24, 1929, Dec.
31, 1931.
Wood, in; Sunderland, 248.
Indian Year Book, 23.
Wood, 117.
Kohn, 425.
Prof. Sudhindra Bose, in The Nation,
New York, June 19, 1929.
New York Times, June 16, 1930.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
50. Hall, J. WM 427; Fiilop-Miller, 272.
51. Ibid., 171.
52. Ibid., 174-6.
53. Gandhi, M. K., Young India, 123.
54. Ibid., 133.
55. Hall, 408.
56. Fiilop-Miller, 202-3.
57. Ganadhi, Young India, 21.
58. Holland, Maharma Gandhi, 7.
59. Ibid., 40; Hall, 400.
60. Gray and Parekh, Mahatma Gandhi,
27; Pannelee, 302.
(CHAP, xxiii
61. Simon, i, 249.
62. Fiilop-Millcr, 299; Holland, Gandhi,
220; Kohn, 410-12.
63. Fiilop-Miller, 177.
64. Ibid., 315.
65. Ibid., 1 86.
66. Gandhi, Young India, 869, 2.
67. Hall, 506; Fiilop-Miller, 227.
68. Zimand, 220.
69. Fiilop-Miller, 171-2.
70. Ibid., 207, 162.
CHAPTER XXIII
1. I am indebted for this quotation from
the Book of Rites to Upton Close. Cf.
Gowcn and Hall, Outline History of
China, 50; Hirth, F., Ancient History
of China, 155.
la. Reichwcin, A., China and Europe: In-
tellectual and Artistic Contacts in the
Eighteenth Century, 92.
2. Ibid., 891".; Voltaire, Works, New
York, 1927, xiii, 19.
3. Kcyscrling, Creative Understanding,
122, 203; Travel Diary, ii, 67, 58, 50,
57* 48> <58.
4. Lippert, 91; Keyserling, Travel Diary,
", 5*
5. Smith, A. H., Chinese Characteristics,
98.
6. Giles, H. A., Gems of Chinese Litera-
ture: Prose, 119.
7. Williams, S. Wells, Middle Kinigdom,
i, 5; Brinklcy, Capt. F., China: Its His-
tory, Arts and Literature, x, 3.
8. Ibid., 2; Hall, J. W., Eminent Asians,
41.
10. Pitta rd, 397; Buxton, 153; Granet, Chi-
nese Civilization , New York, 1930, 63;
Latourcttc, K. S., The Chinese-. Their
History and Culture, 35-6; New York
Times, Feb. 15, 19^3.
n. Lowic, 182; Fcrgusson, JM History of
Indian and Eastern Architecture, ii,
468; Lcgcndrc, A. F., Modern Chinese
Civilization, 234; Granet, 64.
12. Ibid., 215, 230.
13. Gowen and Hall, 26-7.
14. Confucius (?), Book of History, ren-
dered and compiled by W. G. Old,
20-1.
15. Giles, Gems, 72.
1 6. Hirth, 40.
17. Ibid., 53-7.
1 8. Wilhclm, R., Short History of Chinese
Civilization', 124; Granet, 86.
19. Ibid., 87.
20. Confucius, Analects, XIV, xviii, 2, in
Lcggc, Jas., Chinese Classics, Vol. I:
Life and Teachings of Confucius.
21. Lcgge, 2i3n.
22. Hirth, 107-8; Latourcttc, i, 57; Gowcn
and Hall, 64; Schneider, H., ii, 796-8.
23. Granet, 78.
24. Ibid., 32-3; Hu Shih, Development of
the Logical Method in Ancient China,
22; Latourette, ii, 52.
25. Ibid., 58-9; Granet, 87-8; Hirth, no.
26. Giles, H. A., History of Chinese Lit-
erature, 5.
27. Book of Odes, I, x, 8, and xii, 10,
in Hu Shih, Pt. I, p. 4.
28. Cranmcr-Byng, L., The Book of Odes,
5i-
29. Tr. by Helen Waddell in Van Dorcn,
Anthology of World Poetry, i.
30. In Yang Chu's Garden of Pleasure, 64.
31. Fenollosa, E. F., Epochs of Chinese
and Japanese Art, 14; Hirth, 59-62; Hu
Shih, 28f; Suzuki, D. T., Brief History
of Early Chinese Philosophy, 14; Aiur-
doch, Jas., History of Japan, iii, 108.
32. Hu Shih, 12.
33- Lcgge, 75".
34. In Hu Shih, 12.
35. Ibid., 13.
36. Ibid., 12.
37. Giles, History, 57; Legge, Jas., The
Texts of Taoism, i, 4-5.
38. Giles, History, 57; Giles, Gems, 55.
39. Lcggc, Texts of Taoism, i, 4f.
CHAP. XXIIl)
40. II, Ixxxi, 3; I, Ixv, 1-2.
41. In Suzuki, 81.
42. II, Ivii, 2-3; Ixxx. Parenthetical pas-
sages, in this and other quotations, are
usually explanatory interpolations, near-
ly always of the translator.
43. Yang Chu, 16, 19; Schneider, ii, 810;
Hu Shih, 14; Wilhelm, Short History,
247.
44. I, xvi, 1-2.
45. I, xliii, i; xlix, 2; Ixi, 2; Ixiii, i; Ixxviii,
i; Ixxxi, i; Giles, History, 73.
46. II, Ixi, 2.
47. II, Ivi, 1-2.
48. Granet, 55.
49. II, Ivi, 2.
50. I, xvi, i; II, Ivi, 3; Parmelee, 43.
51. Legge, Texts of Taoism, 34; Life and
Teachings of Confucius, 64.
61. Lcgge, Texts, 34.
62. Ibid.
63. Szuma Ch'ien in Lcgge, Life, 58n.
64. Ibid.
65. Legge, Life, 55-8; Wilhelm, R., Soul
of China, 104.
66. Hirth, 229.
67. Analects, VII, xiii.
68. VIII, viii.
69. XV, xv.
70. VII, viii.
71. VII, xii.
72. VI, ii, XI, iii.
73. XVII, xxii; XIV; xlvi.
74. Legge, Life, 65.
75. Ibid., 79.
76. V, xxvii.
77. VII, xxxii.
78. XIII, x.
79. IX, iv.
80. VII, i.
81. IV, xiv.
82. Lcgge, Life, 67.
83. XII, xi.
84. Lcgge, Life, 68.
85. Ibid., 72.
86. Ibid., 75.
87. IX, xvii.
88. Lepge, 83.
89. Ibid., 82.
90. XV, xviii.
91. II, iv.
92. Legge, 82.
93. Mencius, Works of, tr. by Legge, III,
\ iv, 13-
Giles, History, 33;
NOTES 989
04. Wilhelm, Short History, 143; Legge,
Life, 1 6.
95. Ibid., 267, 27; Hu Shih, 4.
96. XV, 40.
97. II, xvii.
98. XIII, iii.
99. Ill, xiii, 2.
100. IX, xv.
10 1. Lcgge, Life, 101;
Suzuki, 20.
102. Legge, 101.
103. XI, xi.
104. VI, 20.
105. VII, 20.
1 06. Giles, History, 69.
107. XV, ii.
1 08. Great Learning, I, 4-5, in Legge, Life,
266. I have ventured to change "illus-
trate illustrious virtue" in Lcggc's trans-
lation, to "illustrate the highest vir-
tue"; and the words "own selves" have
been substititucd for "persons," since
"the cultivation of the person" has now
a misleading connotation.
109. XIV, xlv.
1 10. XV, xxxi; II, xiv; XIII, iii, 7.
in. VI, xvi.
1 1 2. Doctrine of the Mean, XII, 4, in Legge.
113. Analects, II, xiii.
114. Doctrine of the Mean, XIV, 5.
115. XV, xviii-xx.
116. XIV, xxix; XI, xiii, 3; D. of M.,
XXXIII, 2.
117. Ibid., XI, 3.
1 1 8. Li-chi, XVII, i, 11-2.
119. Spinoza, Ethics, Bk. Ill, Prop. 59.
120. D. of M., XXIX, tr. by Suzuki, 64.
121. Suzuki, 63.
122. Analects, XII, ii; V, xvi.
123. XV, xxiii.
124. XIV, xxxvi, 1-2.
1243. IV, xvii.
i24b. XII, vi.
125. XIII, xxiii.
126. D. of M., XIV, 3.
127. IV, xxiv; V, iii, 2; XVII, vi; XV, xxL
128. V, xvi; XVI, xiii, 5.
129. XVI, 10.
130. I, ii, 2; Legge, Life, 106.
131. IV, xviii; Li-chi, XII, i, 15; Brown, B-
Story of Confucius, 183.
132. Great Learning, X, 5.
133. Analects, XII, vii.
134. XII, xix; II, ii, xx.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
990
135. XII, xxiii, 3.
136. D. of M., XX, 4.
137. Analects, XIII, x-xii.
138. Great Learning, X, 9.
139. Analects, XII, xix; XV, xxxviii.
140. Li-chi, XVII, i, 28; iii, 23; Brown,
Story of Confucius, 181.
141. Analects, XX, iii, 3.
142. Li-chi, XXVII, 33; XXIII, 7-8.
143. Ibid., VII. i. 2-3, quoted in Dawson,
Ethics of Confucius, 209, from Chen
Huang-chang, The Economic Prin-
ciples of Confucius and His School.
144. Latourette, i, 80- 1.
145. Leggc, Life, 106.
146. D. of M., XXX-XXXI.
147. Hu Shih, itxpf.
148. Hirth, 307.
149. Mencus, VII, i, 26, in Hu Shih, 58.
150. Hu Shih, 72.
151. Ibid., 57, 75; Latourette, i, 78.
152. In Hirth, 281.
153. Hu Shih, 60-70.
154. Thomas, E. D., Chinese Political
Thought, 29-30.
155. Hu Shih, 58.'
156. Mcncius, Introd., in.
157. Wilhelm, Short History, 150; Hu Shih
no.
158. Hu Shih, 62.
ifo. Mencius, Introd., 9-?.
160. Yang Chu, 10, 51; Latourette, i, 80.
161. Mcncius, Introd., 9^; Yang Chu, 57.
162. Mcncius, Introd., 96-7.
163. Hirth, 27-Q.
164. Mcncius, III, ii, 9.
165. Mrncius, Introd., 14-18.
1 66. Ibid., 42.
167. Ibid., I, ii, 3; ii, 5; pp. 156, 162.
1 68. Ibid., 12.
169. VI, i, 2.
170. I, i, 7.
(CHAP, xxiv
171. Ill, i, 3.
172. I, i, 3.
173. II, i, 5.
174. Thomas, E. D., 37; Williams, S. Wells,
i, 670.
175. IV, ii, 19.
176. Mencius, Introd., 30-1.
177. VI, ii, 4.
178. VII, ii, 4.
179. Quoted in Thomas, E. D., 37.
180. I, i, 3.
181. II, ii, 4.
182. VII, ii, 14.
183. V, ii, 9; I, ii, 6-8.
184. Mcncius., Introd., 84.
185. Ibid., 79-80.
1 86. Ibid., 86.
187. In Hu Shih, 152.
1 88. Legge, Texts of Taoism, V, 5.
189. Ibid., Introd., 37.
190. XVII, u.
191. In Thomas, E. D., 100.
192. XT, i.
193. XVI, 2; IX, 2.
194. XII, n.
195. XII, 2.
196. II, 2; XX, 7; Giles, Gems, 32.
197. II, 7; XXII, 5.
198. VI, 7.
199. In Su/uki, 36.
200. XVII, 4; Hu Shih, 146.
201. XVIII, 6.
202. II, n; tr. by Giles, History ', 63.
203. VI, 10; tr. by Suzuki, 181-2.
204. In Giles, History, 68.
20^. In Rcichwein, 791".
206. Ibid.
207. Ibid., 84.
208. AVilhelm, Soul of China, 233.
209. Thomas, E. D., 25.
210. Voltaire, Works, iv, 82.
211. Reichwein, 131; Hirth, vii.
CHAPTER
i Giles, Gems, 33.
2. Granct, 37; Gowcn and Hall, 84; Giles,
Historyj 78.
3. Granct, 41.
4. Voltaire, Works, iv. 82.
5. Granet, 37, 97-8, 101-3; Boulgcr, D. C.,
History of China* i, 68-70; Wilhelm,
Short History, 157.
6. Boulger, i, 71.
7. Granet, 38.
8. Ibid.
XXIV
9. Ibid., 103; Schneider, ii, 700; Wilhelm,
Short History, 160-1; Lautourette, i, 96.
10. Gowen and Hall, 84f; Giles, History,
78.
11. Hall, J. W., Eminent Asians, 6.
12. Boulger, i, 64.
13. Ibid., 62; Latourette, i, 09.
14. Granct, 38-40; Boulger, i, 77; Giles in
G(owen) & H(all), 92.
15. Boulger, i, 106; Granet, 44.
16. Szuma Ch'ien in Granet, 113.
CHAP. XXV)
NOTES 991
17.
1 8.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49,
50.
51,
Ibid.
Granet, 112-3.
Ibid., 1 1 8.
Fcnollosa, i, 77.
Waley, Arthur, Introduction to the
Study of Chinese Painting, 27; G & H,
102.
Granet, 113-5.
Wilhclm, Short History, 186, 194.
Lautourette, i, 121.
Ibid., 120-2.
Ibid., 122.
G & H, 118.
Ibid., 117-21.
FcnolloSii, i, 117.
Voltaire, Works, xiii, 26.
Tu Fu, Poems, tr. by Edna W. Under-
wood, xli.
Li-Po, Works, done into English
Verse by Shigeyoshi Obata, 91.
Tu Fu, xlviii.
In Li-Po, i.
In Tu Fu, xli.
Murdoch, Hi\torv o\ Japan, i, 146.
Waley, Chinese Fainting 142.
Ibid.," 07.
\Vilhdm, Short History, 224.
Williams, S. Wells, i, 6961".
Li-Po, 20.
Ibid., QV
Ibid., }(>.
Williams, S. Wells, i, 697.
Li-Po, 31.
G & II, 113.
Li-Po, 100.
Ibid., 84.
138.
191.
71.
52- 55-
53- 97-
54. Ibid., ii.
5?. Ibid., 25.
^6. Giles, History, 50.
$7. Translations by Arthur Waley, Amy
Lowell and Florence Axscough, in
Van Dorcn, Anthology \ 18-20.
58. Waley, Arthur, 170 Chinese Poems,
1 06-8.
59. Ibid., 162.
60. Ibid., 1 68.
61. In Van Dorcn, 24.
62. Giles, History, 1^6; Ayscough, Flor-
ence, 'lu Fu. The Autobiography of a
Chinese Poet, 105.
6$. Ibid., 7<?.
64. Tu Fu, Poems, 118, 184, 154.
6?. Ibid., 95.
66. 30, 7, 132.
67. 137.
68. 72, 133, and introd.
69. Williams, S. Wells, i, 602.
70. Giles, History, 276.
71. Ibkl., 102.
72. Ibid.
7$. Thomas, E. D., 5.
74. Giles, History, 200-3.
75. Ibid., 1 60.
76. G & II, 156.
77. Wilhelm, Short History, 2<?{; Giles,
History, 2^8.
78. Williams, S. Wells, i, 820; Latourettc,
ii, 220.
79. Ibid., 221.
80. Wilhelm, 141.
81. Pratt, History of Music, 32-5.
82. Giles, Gems, 117.
CHAPTER XXV
1. G & H, 142.
2. Ibid., 141.
3. Ibid., 140-3; Latourcttc, i, 2^2-7; Wil-
helm, 237-8; Murdoch, iii, io6f; Fcnol-
losa, ii, 33, 57.
4. G & H, 133, quoting Walter T. Swin-
gle, Librarian of the U. S. Dcpt. of
Agriculture.
5. Carter, Invention of Printing 2.
6. Ibid., 3.
7. Ibid., 96.
8. Sarton, 369.
9. Carter, 25.
10. Ibid., 145; Sarton, 512.
n. Carter, 41.
12. Ibid., 43, 183.
13. G & II, 133.
14. Carter, 250.
i<j. Ibid., 178, 171.
16. Ibid., 177-8; Sarton, 663.
17. Ibid., G & II, 164; Giles, History, 296.
1 8. Chu Ilsi, Philosophy of Human Na-
ture, 75; Bryan, J. J., Liieraiure of
/apan, 122; Latourcttc, i, 262-3; Wil-
liams, S. Wells, i, 68?; Wilhelm, Short
History, 249-50; Aston, W. G., His-
tory of Japanese Literature, 226-7.
992
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
(CHAP, xxv
19. Chu Hsi, 68. 54.
20. Wilhclm, 249-50. 55.
21. Wang Yang-ming, Philosophy, tr. by 56.
Frcdk. G. Hcnke, 177-8. 57.
22. Armstrong, R. C., Light from the 58.
East: Studies in Japanese Confucian- 59.
ism, 121 ; Brinklcy, Capt. F., Japan: Its 60.
History, Arts and Literature, iv, 125. 61.
23. Wang Yang-Ming, 8, 12, 50, 59. 62.
24. Brinklcy, Japan, iv, 125. 63.
25. Wang Yang-ming, 106, 52.
26. Ibid., 115-6. 64.
27. Hobson, R. L., Chinese Art, 14.
28. Encyc. Brit., xiii, 575. 65.
29. Cf. the imperial marriage-table in 66.
Hobson, R. L., PI. LXXXIII. 67.
30. Ibid., XCI. 68.
31. Illustrated in Encyc. Brit., xiii, f. p. 69.
576. 70.
32. Ferguson, J. C., Outlines of Chinese
Art, 67. 7,.
33. Hobson, R. L., LXXVIII. ?2
34. Ibid., LXXVII, i. 73.
35. Lorcnz, 'Round the World Traveler, 74.
'97- 7*.
36. Encyc. Brit., xii, 864. 76.
37. Fry, R. I1'.., Chinese Art, 31; Granct, 37, 77.
Encyc. Brit., iv, 245. 78.
38. Chinese Art, 33. 7q.
39. Fischer, Otto, 374. 80.
40. Encyc. Brit., PL XIV, f. p. 246; collcc- 81.
tion of Mr. Warren E. Cox. 82.
41. Chinese Art, 47.
42. Faurc, History of Art, ii, 55. 8;.
43. Encyc. Brit., v, f. p. ^81. 84.
44. Siren, O., in Encyc. Brit., \, 581; Chi- 85.
nese Art, 48. 86.
45. Stein, Sir Aurcl, Innermost Asia. Vol. 87.
i, Plates V11I, XI, XIX and XXIV.
46. Encyc. Brit., v. f. p. 586, Plate X, 2; 88.
Fischer, 366. 89.
47. Encyc. Brit., v. f. p. 584, PI. VII, 4. 90.
48. Ibid!, f. p. $*<>, PL VIII, 2. 91.
49. Ibid., f. p. 586, PL XI, 2 and 3.
50. Fcrgusson, Jas., History of Indian and 92.
Eastern Architecture, ii, 454. 93.
51. Fcrgusson, Jas., in Williams, S. Wells, 95.
i, 727. 96.
52. Cf. the decorative design reproduced
in Stein, Sir A., Innenuost Asia, Vol. 97.
iii, PL XXV; and the patiently carved 98.
and ornamental ceiling shown in Pel- 99.
liot, Vol. iv, PL CCXXV.
53. Fergusson, op. cit., ii, 464. 100.
Coomarasvvamy, History, 152.
Williams, S. Wells, i, 744.
Lorenz, 203.
Cook's, Guide to Peking, 28, 30.
Fergusson, ii, 481.
Lcgendre, 79.
Ibid., 156.
Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 134.
Walcy, Chinese Painting, 69-70.
Siren, Osvald, Chinese Paintings in
American Collections, i, 36.
Giles, H. A., Introduction to the His-
tory of Chinese Pictorial Art, 2.
Wilhclm, Short History, 38.
Giles, Pictorial Art, 3.
Ibid.; Walcy, Chinese Painting, 32.
Fcnollosa, ii, p. xxx.
Wale)% Chinese Painting, 45.
Encyc. Brit., art. on "Chinese Paint-
ing," PL II, 6.
Fischer, 325-31.
Walcy, 49.
Ibid./ 51.
Giles, Pictorial Art, 21.
Tn Fu, 97; cf. 175 and 187.
Giles, Pictorial Art, 79.
Wilhclm, 244.
Walcv, 183.
Fcnollosa, i. f. p. 120; Fischer, 490.
Ibid., 424.
Giles, 47-8.
Ibid., 50; Binyon, L., Flight of the
Dragon, 43.
Giles, 47.
Crocc, Benedetto, Esthetic, 50.
In Walcy, 117.
Binyon, in.
Siren, i, Plates 5-8; Encyc. Brit., "Chi-
nese Painting," PL II, 4.
Fcnollosa, ii, 27.
A Vale v, 177.
G & II, 146.
A Chinese writer in Giles, Pictorial
Art, 115.
Fischer, 492.
F.g., Fcnollosa, ii, 42.
Ibid., 62.
Gull and, W. G., Chinese Porcelain, i,
1 6.
Chinese Art, ii.
Ibid., 2.
Hsieh Ho in Coomaraswamy, Dance
of S/Vj, 43.
Binyon, 65-8; Chinese Art, 47.
CHAP. XXVl)
NOTES
993
10 1. In Okakura-Kakuso, The Book of Tea,
1 08.
102. Gulland, i, 3.
103. Encyc. Brit., xviii, 361.
104. Ibid.; Lcgcndre, 233.
105. Encyc. Brit., xviii, 362; Carter, 93.
106. Ibid., I.e.
107. Brinkley, China, ix, 229.
1 08. Ibid., 62.
109. Ibid., 87; Gulland, 139.
no. Brinklcy, 75.
in. G & H, 165.
112. Brinkley, China, ix, 256.
113. Encyc. Brit., viii, 419.
114. Brinkley, China, i\, 210, 215.
115. Ibid., 376, 554; Encyc. Brit., art. "Cera-
mics."
CHAPTER XXVI
1. Polo, Travels, 78, 188. 3?.
2. Ibid., v-vii; a perfect introduction, to 36.
which the present account is much in- 37.
debtcd. 38.
3. Polo, 232-40. 40.
4. 152.
5. 129.
6. G & H, i35f. 41.
7. Giles, History, 248-9. 42.
8. Polo, 172. 43.
9. Giles, 247.
10. Polo, 158. 44.
11. Ibid., 125. 45.
12. 149. 46.
13. P. x\iv of KomrofFs Introduction. 47.
14. G & H, 172.
15. Ibid. 48.
16. Latourctte, i, 330; Wilhclm, Short His- 49.
tory, 260; G & H, 195; Giles, History,
291; Gulland, W. G., ii, 288. 50.
17. G & II, 209. 51.
18. Ibid., 227.
19. Quoted in Pnrmelee, 218, and in Bis-
land, Elizabeth, Three Wise Men of 52.
the East, 125.
20. Wilhelm, 204; Latourettc, i, 203; G & 53.
II, 1 86; Brinkley, China, x, 4. 54.
21. Latourctte, i, 289. 55.
22. Brinklcy, I.e., 12. 56.
2}. Williams, S. Wells, i, 770. 57.
24. Ibid., 762. 58.
25. Wilhelm in Kcyscrling, Book of Mar-
riage, 133; Walcy, Chinese Painting, 59.
165. 60.
26. Lcgendrc, 23. 61.
27. Ibid., 75; Park, No Yong, Making a 6z.
New China, 122. 63.
28. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 127. 64.
29. Polo, 236. 65.
30. Pitkin, Short Introduction, 182. 66.
32. Wilhelm, Short History, 64. 67.
33. Mason, Art of Writing, 154-79. 68.
34. Legendre, 67, 113. 69.
Okakura, 3, 36.
Granet, 144-5.
Legcndrc, 114.
Wilhelm, Soul of China, 339.
Smith, Characteristics, 21; Park, No
Yong, 123; Lcgendrc, 86; Williams, S.
Wells, i, "775-80.
Latourctte, i, 225.
Park, 121; Smith, Characteristics, 19.
Eddy, Shcr\\ood, Challenge of the
East, 81.
Giles, Gents, 285.
Murdoch, iii, 262.
Sarton, 452.
National Geographical Magazine, April,
19^2, p. 511.
Sumner and Keller, iii, 200^.
Wilhelm, Short History, 1^4; Wilhelm,
Soul of China, 361-2; G & 11, 59.
Polo, 236.
Peffer, N., China the Collapse of a
Civilization, 25-32; Parmelee, 101; Lc-
gendrc, 57.
Williams, S. Wells, i, 413; Wilhelm,
Short History, n.
Park, 89; G & II, 290.
Park, 67.
Latourettc, ii, 206; G & H, 2-3.
Rcnard, 161.
Park, 92.
Sumncr, Folkways, 153; Latourette, i,
63.
Ibid., 252.
Polo, 159; Carter, 77.
Carter, 92.
Hirth, i26f.
Ibid.
Carter, 93.
Polo, i7on.
Legendre, 107-10.
Sarton, 371, 676; Schneider, ii, 860.
Sarton, 183, 410.
Waley, Chinese Painting, 30.
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
994
70. Schneider, ii, 837.
71. Voltaire, Works, iv, 82; Hirth, 119;
Wilhclm, Soul, 306.
72. Garrison, 73; Schneider, ii, 859; Sarton,
310, 325, 342.
73. Ibid., 436, 481; Garrison, 73.
74. Latourcttc, 313; Garrison, 75.
75. Williams, S. Wells, i, 738; Legendre,
5*
76. Wilhclm, Short History, 79, 81; Smith,
Characteristics, 290, 297; Spenglcr, O.,
Decline of the West, ii, 286; Granct,
16} ; Latourettc, ii, 163-5.
77. Smith, Characteristics, 292; Suzuki, 47,
112, 139; Wilhclm, Short History, 69.
78. Hirth," Hi.
79. Ibid., 1 18; Smith, 164, 331.
80. Granct, 321.
81. Wilhclm, Smtl, 125.
82. Lcggc, Tcrt\ of Taois?n, i, 41.
83. Su/.uki, 72; Wilhclm, Short History,
248.
84. Walcy, Chinese Painting, 28.
85. Potter, Ch.is. V., Story of Religion,
.98.
86. Wilhclm, Saul, 357; Murdoch, iii, 104;
Walcy, 33-4, 79; Stirton, 470, ^52; Car-
ter, 32; Gulland, 27; Latourcttc, i, 171,
214; ii, 154-5; G & II, 104; Schneider,
ii, 803.
87. Smith, Characteristics, 89; Latourcttc,
11, 129; Parmclcc, 81.
88. Smith, 304; Lcgcndrc, 197.
89. Wilhclm, Short History, 224; Lorcnz,
202.
90. G & H, 118, 527.
91. Fcnollosa, ii, 149.
92. Volt.nrc, H*«j£ff \iii, 29.
93. Quoted bv Wilhclm in Kcyscrling,
Hook of Marriage, 137.
94. Alcncius, IV, i, 26.
95. Latourcttc, ii, 197; Grancr, 321; Wil-
liams, S. Wells, i, 836; Lcgcndrc, 26.
96. Wilhclm in Kcyserling, 137*; Wilhclm,
Soul, 22; Wilhclm, Short H story, 104;
Smith, 213.
97. Granct, 345; Williams, S. Wells, i, 836;
Wcstermarck, Mora! Ideas, i, 462; Kllis,
H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
vol. ii. Sexual Inversion, 6f.
98. BrifTault, iii, 346.
99. Ibid.; Wilhclm in Keyserling, 126.
(CHAP, xxvi
127.
128.
129.
no.
131.
132.
134.
136.
137.
138.
140.
Williams, S. Wells, i, 834.
Brinklcy, China, x, 101.
Polo, 134, 152, 235.
Parmclcc, 182; Bnffault, ii, 333.
Li-Po, 152.
Walcv, 170 Chinese Poems, 19; Key-
scrling, Travel Diary, ii, 97.
Hirth, 1 1 6.
Williams, S. Wells, 785.
Ibid., 787-90.
Wilhclm, in Keyserling, Book of Mar-
riage, 134.
Briffault, ii, 263.
Williams, S. AVclls, i, 407-8.
Park, 133.
Wilhclm, Short History, 59; Wilhclm,
in Keyserling, 123; Bnffault, i, ^faf.
Thomas, K. D., 134; BrifTault, i, 368.
Granct, 43.
BrifFault, ii, 331.
Cranmer-Byng, The Hook of Odes, 11;
Giles, History, 108, 274.
Smith, 194, Sumncr and Keller, iii,
1754, Lcpvndrc, 18.
Li-chi, IX, iii, 7; Smith, 215; Sumncr
and Keller, iii, 1844.
In BrifTault, ii, 331.
W.ilcv, 170 Chinese Poems, 94.
Armstrong, 56.
Williams, S. Wells, i, 825.
Wcsiermarck, Mora! Ideas, i, 89, Kcv-
scrlmg. Travel Diary, ii, 65; Smith,
192, Legendre, 122.
Wilhclm, SonJ, 309.
Voltaire, W'orks, xiii, 19.
Brinklcy, China, x, 37, 44, 49.
Smith, 225.
Thomas, E. D., 236; Williams, S.
Wells, i, 504; Latourettc, ii, 46.
Garrison, 75.
Williams, i, 391-2; Latourctte, ii, 46.
Williams, ii, 512; Hirth, 123; Wilhclm,
Soul, 19.
Brinklcy, I.e., 3.
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 92.
Williams, i, 544.
Legendre, 158; Hall, J. W., Eminent
Asians, 35.
Williams, i, 569.
Latourette, ii, 21; Brinklcy, China, x,
86.
CHAP. XXVIII)
NOTES
995
CHAPTER XXVII
1. Latourette, i, 313. 20.
2. Lorcn/., 248. 21.
3. Latourctte, i, 314. 22.
4. Lorcnz, 248; G & II, 238. 23.
5. Norton, H. K., China and the Powers, 24.
55; Latourettc, i, 367; PcfFcr, 57. 25.
6. .Latourettc, i, 376, 385; Norton, 56. 26.
7. Park, 149. 27.
8. PcfTcr, 88f; Latourettc, i, 413. 29.
9. G & H, 306. 30.
10. Hall, Eminem Asians, 17; PerTer, 151. 31.
11. Latourettc, i, 411. 32.
12. Hall, 33.
13. PcflFer, 93. 3}.
14. G & H, 314. 34.
15. N. Y. Times, Feb. n, 19^4. 35.
1 6. Fddy, Challenge of the East, 73. 36.
18. Park, 86. 38.
19. Latourettc, ii, 93-6. 39.
Eddy, 74.
Park, 89.
Eddy, 89.
PcfTcr, 241.
PcfFcr, 251.
Modern Review, Calcutta, May 1,1931.
PcfFcr, 185.
Latourettc, ii 174.
Tbid. 176.
Parniclcc 94.
Park, 135; Lnrcnz, 192.
\Vu, Chao-chu, The Nationalist: Pro-
gram for China, 28.
Lcgcndrc, 240.
Park, 114.
Close, Upton, Revolt of Asia, 245.
Lorcn/, 250.
Hu Shih, 8.
Ibid., 7.
CHAPTER XXVIII
1. The Kojiki (681-711), in Murdoch, i, 22.
59f, and Gowcn, II. II., Outline His- 23,
tory of Japan, ^f. 2?.
2. Murdoch, iii, 483. 26.
3. Gcwcn, Japaih n; Chamberlain, B. 27.
H., Things Japanese \ 249.
4. Go\\cn, 25, reports three days of rain
or snow in the average week.
5. Go\\cn, 17, 21; Chamberlain, B. II.,
ig^; Redesdale, Lord, Talcs of Old 30.
Japan, 2.
6. Chambcrl.iin, B. H., 127.
7. Gowcn, 90; Murdoch, iii, 211, 395-7; 31.
Chamberlain, 130. 32.
8. Tbid., 128. 33.
9. I-Iearn, Lafcadio, Japan: An Inter pre- 34.
tation, 455. 3*.
n. Gowcn, 61; Murdoch, i, 38. 36.
12. Ibid. 37-
H. Hcarn, 448; Fcnollosa, ii, 159. 38.
14. Fcnollosa, i, 64; Murdoch, i, 98-9. 383
15. Gowcn, 64. 39.
1 6. Murdoch, i, 94, 97. 40.
17. Armstrong, 5, 18.
18. Ibid., 2. 41.
19. I learn, 53. 42.
20. Murdoch, i, 39. 43-
21. Brinkley, Capt. F., Japan Jtt History, 44.
Arts and Literature, v, 118- Hearn, 45, 45.
51- 46-
Gowcn, 67.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 118.
Murdoch, i, 240-1.
Ibid., i, 377-8; Gowcn, 116.
Mur.isaki, Lady, Talc of Genji, 27.
Tietjens, i?6; tr. ("urns Hidden Page,
Some authors attribute the poem to
Michi/anc (Gowcn, 119).
Close, Upton, Challenge: Behind the
Face of Japan, 28, Go wen, 105; La-
tourette, i, 226.
Fcnollosa, i, 149.
Br inkle v Japan iv, 148.
Fcnollosa i, 153.
Murdoch, i, 279.
Brinklcv, i, 230.
Murdoch, i, 228-30.
Go wen, 147.
Murdoch, ii 711.
. Close, Challenge, 54.
Gowcn, 156.
Ibid., 161-2; Murdoch, i, 545; Brinkley,
ii, 190.
Ibid., ii, 108; viii, 17.
Close, 33.
Ibid., 34.
Murdoch, ii, 305.
Ibid., ii, vi-
Frocz in Murdoch, ii, 369.
996
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
(CHAP, xxix
47. Gowcn, 191.
48. Murdoch, n. 89, 90, 238; Hearn, 365;
Gowcn, 191.
49. Hcarn, 365.
50. Murdoch, ii, 241
51. Ibid., 243.
52. Close, 44.
53. Brinkley, ii, 219.
54. Armstrong, 35.
55. Close, 56.
56. Ibid., 57-8.
57. Aston, 218-9; Bryan, 117.
58. Murdoch, ii, 492^
59. Ibid., ii, 288.
60. Brinkley, ii, 205.
61. Murdoch, iii, 315-30.
62. Hearn, 390.
CHAPTER XXIX
1. Hearn, 3.
2. Okakura, 10, 8.
3. Brinkley, iv, 6-7, 134; Murdoch, iii,
171.
4. Brinkley, ii, 115; iv, 172.
5. Ibid., iv, 36.
6. Chamberlain, B. II., 415.
7. Nitobe, Inazo, Bushido, the Soul of
Japan, 18.
8. Brinkley, iv, 147, 217; Rcdcsdalc, 40.
9. Section 4? of lycyasu's "Legacy," in
Hcarn, 193; Murdoch, iii, 40.
10. Ibid.
11. J. II. Longford, in Murdoch, iii, 4on.
Longford adds, Se non e vero e ben
trovato.
12. Nitobe, 23.
H. Brinkley, iv, 56.
14. Ibid., 142, 109.
if. Hcarn, ^n; Gowcn, 251.
1 6. Ibid., 364.
17. Murdoch, iii, 221; Aston, 231; Cham-
bcrlain, Things Japanese, 220-1; Hearn,
318.
1 8. Close, 59; Nitobe, 141.
19. Rcdcsdalc, 13, 16-7, 272; Aston, 230;
Murdoch, iii, 235.
20. Nitobe, 121.
21. Murdoch, i, 188-9.
22. Brinklcv, Japan, iv, ^; Ilcarn 328.
23. Brinkley, iv. 55, 92; Close, 58.
24. Brinkley, iv, 61.
2{. Ibid., 63.
26. Hcarn, 195.
27. Close, 58.
28. Hearn, 378.
29. Murdoch, iii. 336; Brinkley, iv, 67.
30. Hearn, 260, 25^; Murdoch, i, 172;
Brinklcy, i, 238, 241; iv, in.
31. Gowcn, 97.
32. Chamberlain, 150; Redesdale, 116;
Armstrong, 19.
33- Brinklcy, i, 133.
34. Murdoch, i, 17.
35. Brinklcy, v, 195; ii, 118.
36. Gowcn, 98.
37. Brinklcy, ii, 118; v, i; Murdoch, i, 603.
38. Ibid.
39. Close, 341.
40. In Aston, 149-50.
41. History of Japan, iii, 21, in Murdoch,
iii, 171.
42. Cf. Close, 369.
43. Murdoch, iii, 446-50.
44. Encyc. Brit., viii, 910.
45. Gowen, 115.
46. Sansum, W. D., M.D., Nnnnal Diet,
47. Brinklcy, i, 209, 213.
48. Shonngon, Lady Sci, Sketch Book, 29.
49. Brinklcy, iv, 176-81; ii, 92, 104; Hearn,
257; Holland, Clivc, Things Seen in
Japan, 172.
50. Brinkley, i, 139, 209-10; iv, 160, 175,
1 80.
51. Brinklcy, iv, 176.
52. Chamberlain, 60.
53. Ibid.
54. Murdoch, i, 40.
55. Brinklcy, iv, 164.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., i, 146; ii, 106.
58. Ibid., ii, 1 1 1-2.
59. Gatcnby, E. V., Cloud Men of Yamato,
60. Brinklcy, ii, 258-66.
61. Okakura, 15.
62. Gowcn, 213.
63. Ibid.
64. Okakura, 139; Brinklcy, iii, 9.
65. Walsh, Clara, Muster-Singers of Japan,
1 08.
66. Gowen, 23.
67. Binyon, 30.
CHAP. XXX)
68. Gatenby, 25.
69. Hearn, 85.
70. Ibid., 75, 80-1, 89; Murdoch, iii, 75.
71. Aston, 232; Hearn, 78; Rcdcsdalc, 92;
Brinklcy, i, 149.
72. Armstrong, 55.
73. Brinklcy, i, 188.
74. Shonagon, 50.
76. Brinklcy, iv, 142 Close, 62; Chamber-
lain, 504.
77. Ibid., 501; Keyserling, Travel Diary,
ii, 171.
78. Close, 61.
79. Hearn, 68, 83.
80. Genesis, ii, 24; Chamberlain, 166.
8 1. Nitobe, 141.
82. Cf., e.g., the passage quoted in Bryan,
88.
83. Rcdesdalc, 37; Fickc, A. D., Chats on
Japanese Pr/7//r, 210; Chamberlain, 525;
Kcvscrling, Travel Diary, ii, 200.
84. Brinklcy, iv., 116.
85. Ibid., 120.
86. Murdoch, iii, 216.
87. Brinklcy, ii, 49.
88. Rcdcsdalc, 34.
89. Brinklcv, v, 257
90. By Prince Aki, 740 A n , in Gatenby,
91. Tr. by Curtis Hidden Page, in Tiet-
jcns, 144.
92. Brinklcy, v, 207; Murdock, iii, 112.
93. Ibid., ii, 18-9.
NOTES 997
94. Ibid., ii, 1 8; Brinkley, i, 181.
95. Ibid., i, 182.
96. Murdoch, i, 489.
97. Ibid., 603.
98. Ibid., 605; Armstrong, 171.
99. Brinklcy, v, 254.
100. Murdoch, iii, 101, 113.
101. Ibid., 115-9.
102. Armstrong, 65^
103. Ibid., 76, 78; Aston, 263-4.
104. Ekkcn, Kaibara, Way of Contentment,
tr. by K. Hoshino, 7f.
105. Ibid., 90.
106. 24, 17.
107.
108. 39, 43.
109. _,_,, 44, 59, 61, 49, 54. I have ventured
to print the last two lines as poetry,
though the text gives them as prose.
1 10. Murdoch, iii, 127.
in. Armstrong, 133.
112. Ibid.
113. Murdoch, iii, 129!".
114. In Armstrong, 222.
115. Ibid., 236^ 226.
1 1 6. 263-4.
117. 261.
1 1 8. 24 if.
119. 25^; Murdoch, iii, 481.
1 20. Ibid., iii, 343-4.
121. Ibid. 474.
122. Ibid., 476f, 485; Aston, 319-32.
123. Murdoch, iii, 491-2.
CHAPTER XXX
1. Close, 28.
2. Bryan, 13-15; Aston, 56-7; Gowen, 125.
3. Carter, 35.
4. Ibid., 178.
5. Close, 77.
6. Brinklcy, i, 229; iv, 136.
7. Gatenby, 27.
8. Bryan, 54, 74.
9. Aston, 263.
10. Tr. by Curtis Hidden Page, in Tiet-
jens, 162.
11. Tictjcns, 163.
12. Murdoch, i, 515,
13. Murasaki, Lady, 239.
14. Ibid., 149, 235; Shonagon, 51.
15. Murdoch, iii, 326.
1 6. Noguchi, Yone, Spirit of Japanese
Poetry, n.
17. Gatenby, 97-102; Tietjens, 159.
1 8. Holland, 157.
19. Murdoch, iii, 470.
20. Gowen, 128.
21. Murasaki, 33, 29.
22. Ibid., 75.
23. 98, 134.
24. 144.
25. 46.
26. 50.
27. Bryan, 65; Gowen, 128.
28. Holland, 137; Aston, 56.
29. Ibid., 346-8, 391.
30. Ibid., 269-71.
31. Ibid., 392.
32. Murdoch, i, 571.
33. Aston, 255.
34. Brinklcy, v, 112.
998
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
56.
57.
60.
61.
62.
i.
2.
3.
4.
^.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
12.
13.
14.
if.
16.
18.
it).
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
(CHAP, xxxi
Aston, 249.
Gowen, 268.
Murdoch, iii, 240.
Aston, 116.
Ibid., ii4f. I have changed the order
of the last five items.
Aston, 197-9; Bryan, 100.
Kedcsdalc, 84.
Close, 65.
Qkakura, 132.
Noguchi, ii.
Bryan, 136.
Brinklcy, iv, no.
Ibid., vi, 113-5.
Aston, 279.
Okakurn, 112; Brinklcy, viii, 29.
Brinklcy, vii, yg.
Eucyc. II r/>., vii, 960.
Brinklcy, i, 219; iv, 156; Chamberlain,
Brinklcy, iv, 78.
Murasaki, 212.
Chamberlain, 84.
Brinklcv, vii, 157.
Ibid., vii, 84.
Fcnollos.i, i, 56.
Gnu en, i<>v
Murdoch, i, ^93.
Lcdoux, L. V., Art of Japan, 62.
Armstrong, 9.
Brinklcy, \ii, 77.
64. Gowcn, 124.
65. Ibid., 213.
66. Brinkley, viii, n.
67. Ibid., 265.
68. 25.
69. 1 80.
70. 185.
71. 236.
72. Brinklcy, vii, 339.
73. Ibid., 9.
74. Binyon, 53.
75. Ibid., 20.
76. Fcnollosa, ii, 81.
77. Okakura, 1 13.
78. Eucyc. Brit., vii, 964.
79. Lcdoux, 26.
80. Ibid., 28.
81. Co\\cn, 284.
82. Fcnollosa, ii, 183. It should be added
that in the opinion of some critics
Alatnbci is a niythic.il personage.
83. Ficke, 282-94.
84. Co\\cn, 285; Fickc, 363.
8$. Noguchi, 27.
86. Fickc, 363.
87. Gowcn, 284.
8K. Fcnollosa, ii, 204.
89. Gowcn, 286.
90. Dickinson, G. T.owcs, 65.
91. Ten O* Clock, sub fine.
CHAPTER XXXI
Murdoch, iii, 456; Gowcn, 287. 20.
Ibid., 298-9. 21.
300. 22.
312. 23.
Brinklcy, iv, 217.
Ibid., 8'i, 256.
Close, 325.
Ibid., 165.
Gowcn, 349. 24.
Close, 149.
Gowcn, 376. 26.
Close, 372. 7.
World Almanac, 19^, p. 667. 8.
Close, 39 >. 9-
//////j//jr, 66S; Close, 30 1 ; N. Y. Times, o.
April i^, 19^4. i.
Ciowcn, 141. 2.
Close, 289. 3.
I'ddv, ii<); Park. 2^0; Tlolhnd, 1.18-52; }.
Barnes, Jos., cd.. Empire in the East, $.
Eddy, i24f.
Ibid.*, 1 1 8, 136.
llcarn, 488.
Barnes, 69; Close, 373. The Maurettc
Report, of June i, 1954, to the Inter-
national Labor Office, accepts this ex-
planation of the low wage -level in
Japan.
Close, 344.
Hc.irn, 17.
(Hose, 134-42.
Ch.inibcrKiin, 314; Close, 302.
Ibid., 198.
Chamberlain, 447.
Close, i77f.
Eddy, .27.
Ahwnac, 669.
Brinklcy, v, 83.
/////;./// Jr, 669.
Tsurumi, Y., Frcscnt-Djy Japan, 68f
\\Talsh, 116; Br\an, 40, 194.
CHAP. XXXl) NOTES
37. Tsurumi, 59. 42. Ibid., 402.
38. Gowen, 416. 43. Barnes, 75; dose, 377.
39. Barnes, 51. 44. Almanac, 674.
40. Ibid., 48-50, 197. 45. Barnes, 62.
41. Gowen, 369-70.
999
Index
I am indebted for this index to the careful and scholarly work of Mr. Wallace Brockway.
Dates arc gi\ en \\herc obtainable, except in the case of li\ ing persons \\ho are only inci-
dentally mentioned in the text. The pronunciation of Oriental words is indicated by the
system of diacritical marks used in the Mcrriam-Wcbstcr Dictionary, but here considerably
simplified.* '1 he Indian pronunciations have been supplied by Dr. A. K. Coomaraswaim ;
Chinese words follou for the most part the pronunciations given in Gowen and I lall's
Outline History of China. Japanese words, and most Chinese words, have no accent. In
the case of ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern \\ords there is no agreement among the
learned; and the pronunciations here offered are merely the present untcr's unauihonta-
tive suggestions. W. D.
* The diacritical marks used in this index will indicate that the letters so marked arc to
be sounded approximately like the italicized letters in the following words- die, care, tfdd,
arm, sofa (a like n in 777^); chair-, eve, events, maker; go; ?cc, ill; K like ch in German lcb\
#rb, odd; food; ioo\.\ o/l, oz/t; rmite, 7/p, men//, short //, when italicized, will be as in circus.
IQOI
1002
INDEX
Aaron (a'ron), 12, 302*, 309
Abacus, 79
Abbeville, 90
Abdu-r Razzak (abd-er-raz-zak'), Persian
traveler (1413-1475?), 457, 458
Abhidhamma (a-bi-dam'-ma), 428*
Abipones, 50, 56
Abortion, in primitive societies, 49-50; in
Assyria, 275; in Judca, 334; in Persia, 376;
in India, 489
Abraham, 66, 173, 179, 297, 300, 311
Absalom (ab'-sa-lum), son of Solomon (ca.
950 B.C.K 305
Abu (a-boo'), 127
Abu Shahrein (a'-bdb sharin') see Eridu
Abu Simbcl (a'-bdb-simbl), i?S 213, 214
Abu-1 Fazl (ab'-obl-faz-l), Indian statesman
and historian (ca. 1550-1600), 471, 579, 580,
591
Abusir (ab'-oo-ser), 189
Abydos (a-bi'-dos), 152, 189, 395t
Ab}rssinians, 27, 46, 62
Achxans, 215, 397
Acha:menid (a-kem'-e-md) Dynasty, 352, 385
Achculean (a-shu'-le-an) Culture, 93
Achilles, 570
Acre (a'-ker), 154*, 761
Adam, 310, 329
Adam's Bridge, 393, 602
Adapa (a'-da-pa), 128
Aden (a'-dcn), 291
Admonitions of Ipuwer (I'-pu-wer), 194-195
Adonai (a-do-ni'), 332
Adondis (a-do-na'-is) , 880
Adoni (a-do'-m), 295, 297
Adonis, 120, 206
Adultery, in primitive societies, 48; in Su-
meria, 130; in Egypt, 164; in Babylonia,
246, 247; in Assyria, 275, 276; in Judca, 335,
336; in India, 490; in China, 788; in Japan,
86 1
Advalta (ad-vi'-ta), 513, 549*
^Egean Sea, 104, 215, 286, 355
/Eschylus, Greek dramatist (525-456 B.c.),95
jEsop, Greek fabulist (619-564 B.C.), 175
Afghanistan (af-gan-is-tan'), 116, 355, 356,
358, 392, 44i» 446, 459, 460
Africa, circumnavigation of, 293
Agade (a'-ga-d£), 118, 121
Agamemnon, 297
Agni (ag'-nl), 402, 403
Agra (a'-gra), 393, 467, 468, 473, 474, 481,
501, 580, 608, 609, 610.
Agriculture, 135, 934; in primitive societies,
8-9, 24, 33; in prehistoric cultures, 99; in
Sumeria, 124, 135, 136*; in Egypt, 135,
136*, 145-146, 156-157; in Babylonia, 226;
in Assyria, 274; in Persia, 357; in India,
399-400, 477-478; in China, 774; in Japan,
851
Ahab (a'-hab), King of Israel (ca. 875-850
B.C.), 309*, 314, 317*
Ahasuerus (a-haz-u-e'-rus), the Wandering
Jew, 349
Ahaz (a'-haz), King of Judah (ca. 700 B.C.),
Ahimsa (a-him'-za), 421, 520, 543, 628, 629
Ahmad Shah (aK'-mad shah), Sultan of Del-
hi (1422-1435), 461
Ahmadnagar (aK-mad-na'-gar), 458
Ahmasi (ah'-ma-si), Egyptian queen (ca.
1500 B.C.), 153
Ahmedabad (aK'-mcd-a-bad'), 393, 626, 631
Ahmcs (ah'-mcz), Papyrus, 180
Ahriman (ah'-ri-man), 351, 366, 367, 368, 369
Ahura-Alazda (a'-hob-ra-maz'-da), 60, 331,
35 J, 357, 361, 364, 365, 366-367, 368, 369-
370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 379
Aiholc (I-h6T), 598
Ain-i Akbari (I-nl ak'-bari), 579
Ainus (I-nobz), 831
Ajanta (a-jan'-ta), 452, 456, 557, 589-59°, 593,
597, 619, 902
Ajita Kasakambalin (a'-ji-ta ka-sa-kam'-ba-
lin), Indian sceptic, 417
A"]mcr (aj'-mar), 393
Ajur-veda (a'-yoor-va'-da) , 530
Akahito (a-ka-he-to), Japanese poet (724-
756), 878
Akbar (ak'-bar), Alogul emperor (1560-
1605), 206, 222* 391, 443, 446-450, 451, 454,
465-472, 473, 477, 479, 480, 482, 483, 495,
501, 503, 579, 591, 600, 607-608, 702, 838,
842
Akbar Ncnna, 579
Akerblad, Johan David, Baron, Swedish
Orientalist and diplomat (1760-1819), 145*
Akhctaton (ak'-a-ta'-ton), 210
Akkad, (ak'-ad), 118, 121, 124, 126, 127, 135,
218, 219, 249, 265, 266
Alasani-Peddana (a-Ia-sa-ni-ped'-da-na), In-
dian poet (fl. 1520), 458
Alau-d-din (a-la'-6b-den'), Sultan of Delhi
(1296-1315), 455-456, 461, 462
Alberuni (al-ba-roo'-ni), Arabian scholar
(997-1030), 462, 579
Aleutian Islands, 13, 26, 32
Alexander the Great, King of Macedon
(336-323 B-c-)i I04» I2°i H7i M2, 215-216,
244, 263, 270, 271, 288*, 294, 341, 349, 352,
353> 362, 363» 365*, 3?8, 382-3&5» 4OI» 44°>
44'i 45°, 495» 529i 532» 542> 554* 5&>t 57'»
697
Alexandria, 137, 181, 216, 294, 341, 343, 479
Algebra, 527-528, 781
Algiers (al-jerz'),94
Algonquin Indians, 43, 77
Alhambra, 606
Alighicri, Dante, Italian poet (1265-1321),
174, 178, 518,605, 611
All Men Are Brothers, 718*
Allahabad (al'-la-ha-bad'),6i4
Allat (al-laf),24o
Allenby, Edmund Henry, Viscount, British
general (1861- ), 154
Alphabets, 105, 106, 172, 295-296, 357
Alps, 91
Altamira, 94, 96
Aniadai (a'-ma-dl), see Medes
Amara (a-ma'-ra), 117
Amaravati (a-ma-ra'-va-te), 593, 594, 597
Amarna (a-mar'-na) Letters, 222, 300, 3058
Amarpal (a-mar'-pal), father of Hammurabi
(ca. 2150 B.C.), 301
Amaterasu (a-ma-te-ra-sdo), 829, 864, 875
Amber (am'-bar), 454, 475
Amboyna (am-boi'-na), 60
Amcnemhet (a'-men-cm'-het) I, King of
Egypt (2212-2192 B.C.), 151-152, 174
Anienemhet III, King of Egypt (2061-2013
B.C.). 152, 187
Amcnhotcp (a'-men-ho'tep), Egyptian sculp-
tor (ca. 1400 B.C.), 192
Amcnhotep II, King of Egypt (1447-1420
B.C.), 155
Amenhotcp III, King of Egypt (1412-1376
B.C.), 141, 142, 155, 164, 185, 188, 191, 192,
205, 206, 223, 235
Amenhotep IV, King of Egypt (1380-1362
B.C.), 128, 164, 168, 178, 179, 1 88, 192, 205-
212, 213, 223, 340, 370, 449
Ameni (a'-ma-ne), 190
Amida (a-ml-da), 504, 738, 838, 903; see
Buddha
Amitabha (a-mc-ta-ba),786
Ammon (city), 312
Aninion (oasis), 353
Ammonites, 285, 299
Amon (a'-mon), 142, 153, 155, 167, 199, 201,
206, 210, 214
Amon-Ra (a-mon-ra'), 206*
INDEX 1003
Amoritcs (a'-mor-itz), 123, 285, 298
Amos (a'-mos), Hebrew prophet (fl. 800
B.C.), 262, 301, 315, 316-317, 319, 320, 365
Amoy (a-moi') River, 767, 806
Ampthill, Odo William Leopold Russell,
Baron, British statesman (1829-1884), 532
Amraphacl, see Amarpal
Amritsar (am'-rit-sar), 621
Amur (a-mdbr'), River, 831, 923!
Amurru (a-mdb'-roo), 298
An Lu-shan (an loo-shan'), Chinese rebel
(fl- 755 ). 704» 7o8, 710, 714
Anacharsis, Scythian philosopher (6th cen-
tury B.C.), 47
Anacreon, Greek poet (560-475 B.C.), 341
Anaita (a-na-e'-ta), 365, 371-372
Analects, 665
Ananda (a'-nan-da), the St. John of Bud-
dhism (ca. 500 B.C.), 398, 431, 438, 439
Ananda, 550, 606
Anatomy, in Egypt, 181-182; in India, 529;
in China, 782
Anau (an'-ou), 108, 117*, 642, 755
Anaxagoras, Greek philosopher (500-428
B-C-K 59, 533
Anaximandcr, Greek philosopher (ca. 610-
546 B.C.), 533
Anaximencs, Greek philosopher, (fl. 500
B.C.), 533
Ancestor worship, 63, 64; in Persia, 365; in
China, 63, 784; in [apan, 63, 832
Ancyra (an-sl'-ra), 286f
Andaman Islands, 45, 87
Andcrsson, Johan, 641, 755
Andrews, Roy Chapman, 94, 641
Angelico (Giovanni da Ficsolc), Fra, Italian
painter (1387-1455), 903
Angkor Thorn (ang'-kor torn), 604
Angkor Wat (wat), 90, 603-604, 605, 61 1
Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 929
Angola (an-gcY-la), 40
Angora (ang-gor'-a), 286f
Angro-Mainyus, sec Ahriman
Animal worship, 61; in Egypt, 198-199; in
Judca, 314; in Persia, 365; in India, 509-
510; in Japan, 832
Animism, 58-59, 67
Annals of the Bamboo Books, 718
Annals of Rajasthan, Tod's, 455
Annam (an'-nam), 697, 757
Anquctil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe,
French Orientalist (1731-1805), 365* 391*,
481
Anshan (an-shan'), 352
1 004
INDEX
Antigone, 31
Anriochus I Soter (an-tl'-o-kus so'-tar),King
of Syria and Babylonia (280-261 B.C.), 446
Antomncs, 3, 364
Anu (an-ob), 234
Anubis (a-nu'-bis), 201
Anupu (an-u'-pob) 175-176
Anuradhapura (a-ndb'-rad-ha-pob'-ra), 506
595> 6°3
Aphrodite, 60, 127, 235, 372, 595
Apis (a'-pis), 353
Apollo Belvedere, 280
Apollonius of Perga, Greek geometer (fl.
222-205 B-C.), 527
Apsu, 236
Aqueducts, 274
Aquinas, St. Thomas, Italian Scholastic (1225-
I274>,547»73''734
Arabia, 109, 135, 140, 158, 228, 290, 291, 306,
400, 736
Arabian Nights' Entertainments, 5781
Arabs, 24*, 47, 139, 169, 216, 218, 298, 460,
479. 5°fi 527j 529, 532< 75<5, 78°
Aralu (a'-ra-loo), 238, 239, 240
Ar.imx.ins, 298, 299
Aramaic alphabet, 106, 357
Aranyaka U-ran'-ya-ka), 407
Arapaho Indians, 73
Ararat (ar'-a-riit), 287; we Armenia
Araru (a'-ra-roo), 251
Araxes (a-rax'-cz) River, 356*
Arbela (ar-bc'-lj), 265, 385*
Archimedes, Greek scientist (287-212 B.C.),
W
Architecture, 136; in primitive societies, 14,
87; in prehistoric cultures, 101, 102; in
Sumeria, 124, 132-133; in Egypt, 136, 184-
18$; in Babylonia, 136, 224-225, 227, 255-
256; in Assyria, 280-282; in Judea, 307-
308; in Persia, 378-381; in India, 596-612;
in China, 740-744; in Japan, 894-896
Argistis II, King of Armenia (ca. 708 B.C.),
287
Arhats (a'r'-hats), 421, 435, 450
Ariana (a-rc-a'-na), 356
Aricgc, 97
Aristobulus, Greek historian (fl. 330 B.C.),
492*
Aristogiton, Athenian patriot (ca. 525 B.C.),
646
Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384-322 B.C.),
20, 107, 529, 532, 535, 536, 539, 560, 671,
731, 868
Arita (ar-e-ta), 900
Arjuna (ar'-joo-na), 508, 565, 566, 620
Ark of the Covenant, 69, 307, 313
Armada, Invincible, 837
Armageddon, 154
Armenia, 119, 266, 269, 270, 286, 354, 355, 363
Annies, Surnerian, 126; Assyrian, 270-271;
Persian, 360; Indian, 443, 465-466; Japa-
nese, see Samurai
Arnold, Sir Kdwin, English poet and Orien-
talist (1832-1904), 423*, 54if
Arnold, Matthew, English poet and critic
(1822-1888), 368
Arran, 356
Arrian (Flavins Arrianus), Greek historian,
44it, 442, 445*, 455*
Arsacid (ar-sas'-id) Dynasty, 365*
Arses (ar'-scz), King of Persia, (339-336
B.C.), 382
Arsmoc, 164
Art, 83, 936-937; in Sumeria, 132-134; in
Egypt, 184-193; in Babylonia, 254-256; in
Assyria, 278-281; in Persia, 377-381; in In-
dia, 584-612; in China, 724-759; in Japan,
893-913
Artabhaga (ar-ta-bha'-ga), 533
Artaxcrxcs I (ar-ta-zcrx'-cz), King of Per-
sia (464-423 B.C.), 380, 382
Artaxcrxcs II, King of Persia (404-359 B.C.),
362, 372, 373, 375*, 377, 378*, 380
Artaxerxcs III Ochus, King of Persia (359-
3^8 B.r.), 382
Arthashastra (ar-ta-shas'-tra), 443
Arthur, semi-fabulous British prince (ca.
f°o), 455
Aryabhata (a-rya-bha'-ta), Indian mathema-
tician (ca. 49j>), 452, 526, 527, 528
Aryans, 73*, fi6, 286*, 287, 356, 363, 394,
396, 397i W8i 399-4°o
Arya-SoiHaj (a'-rya-so-maj'), 6i6t
Asana (a'-sa-nn), 543
Ashikaga (a-shc-ka-ga) Shogunatc, 838, 895,
90^
Ashikaga Takauji (ta-kou-je), Japanese
statesman and shogun (fl. 1340), 838
Ashkanians, 285
Ashoka (a-sho'-ka), Indian religious teacher
(273-232 B.C.), 391, 407, 446-450, 451, 453,
456, 484, 503, 505, 506, 571, 593, 596, 603,
833
Asbramas (a'-shra-maz), 522
Ashtorcth (ash'-to-reth), 235
Ashur (a'-shobr) (city), 119, 135, 265, 272,
2/8, 311
Ashur (god), 265, 268, 276, 277
INDEX
Ashurbanipal (a'-shoor-ban'-e-pal), King of
Assyria (669-626 B.C.), 117, 237*, 243, 249,
250, 266, 268-269, 270, 272, 275, 277, 278,
279, 281-283, 311
Ashurnasirpal (a'-shoor-na'-zer-paT) II, King
of Assyria (884-859 B.C.), 267, 271, 278,
z?9» 280 ^
Ashurnirari (a'-shoor-ne-ra'-re), King of
Assyria (753-746 B.C.), 266*
Ashvaghosha (ash-va-go'-sha), Indian re-
ligion teacher (ca. 120), 450, 571-572, 579
Ashvamcdha (ash-va-ma'-da), 405
Asia Minor, 227, 264, 286, 287, 299, 352, 363
Assam (as-sam'), 32, 45, 451, 454
Assuan (as-swan), 185
Assumption (El Greco), 97
Assyria, 24*, 61, 117, 123, 124, 135, 215, 223,
226, 237*, 248, 265-284, 285, 287, 288, 289,
290, 296, 299, 302, 307, 317, 318, 324, 350,
35*> 352» 354* 355. 3<>3. 3«°> 633> 892
Astartc (as-tar'-tc), 235, 294-295, 296-297,
3'4. 321
Astika (as'-tc-ka) philosophies, 534
Aston, W. G., 885
Astrology, 79; in Babylonia, 257, 276; in As-
syria, 276; in India, 518, 526; in modern
times, 80*
Astronomy, origins of, 79-80; in Egypt, 180-
181; in Babylonia, 256-257, 276; in As-
syria, 276; in India, 526-527; in China,
644, 781-782
Astruc (a-striik') Jean, French medical
writer (1684-1766), 329*
Astyages (as-ti'-a-jez), King of the Mcdes
(ca. 560 B.C.), 351-352
Asvala (ash'-va-la) , 533
Atar, 369
Atharva-veda (a-tar'-va va'-da), 402, 407,
495; 530.
Atheism, in primitive societies, 56-57
Athene, 62
Athens, i, 167, 355, 381, 395!, 640, 677
Atlantis, 107
Atinan (aV-man), 412-413, 414, 418, 546, 548,
550, 566
Aton (a'-ton), 206-210, 211, 212, 213
Atossa (a-tos'-sa), wife of Darius I (ca. 500
B.C.), 355
Atossa, daughter and wife of Artaxerxes II
(ca. 375 B.C.), 375*
Atreya (a-tra'-ya), Indian physiologist (ca.
500 B.G.), 530, 532
Attila, King of the Huns (ca. 400-454), 452
Atys (a-tis), 288
Augustine, St., Bishop of Hippo, Latin
writer and Father of the Church (354-
430), 475
Augustus (Caius Caesar Julius Octavianus),
Roman emperor (31 B.C.- 14 A.D.), 752
Aurangzeb (o'-rang-zab) , Mogul emperor
(1658-1707), 391*, 466, 474-476, 482, 558,
589, 592, 610, 613, 615, 616, 768^ 897
Aurclius Antoninus, IVIarcus, Roman em-
peror (161-180), 449
Aurignacian Culture, 93, 94, 97
Australians, 6, 7, 8, 21, 32, 43, 52, 62, 74, 84,
88-89, '03. 245
Auta (ou'-ta), Egyptian artist (about 1370
B.C.), 211
Avalokiteshvara (a'-va-lo'-ke-tash'-va-ra) ,
?°7. 595
Avidya (a-ved'-ya), 548, 549
Ayodhya (a-yo'-dya), 451, 567, 568, 569, 570
Ayuthia (a-ydb'-ti-ya), 606
Azilian Culture, 641
A /tecs, 9
B
Baal (ba'-al), 294, 297, 309, 312, 314, 321;
also sec Bel
Baalzebub (ba'-al -zc-bub), 312
Babar (ba'-bar) Archipelago, 64
Babel (ba'-bl), Tower of, 225*; also s?c
Babylon
Babur' (ba'-ber), Mogul emperor (1483-
1530), 464, 465, 472, 579
Babur-nawa, 579
Babylon, i, 2, 14, 37, 104, 118, 120, 135, 215,
219, 221-222, 223, 224-225, 227, 228, 2}2,
235, 248, 250, 263, 266, 267, 268, 272, 283,
295, 296, 303, 306, 307, 312, 314, 318, 323,
324, 326, 327, 332, 343, 352, 354, 376, 384,
479' 633i Hanging Gardens, 218, 225;
Kasr, 225; Ishtar Gate, 225; Sacred Way,
225; Temple of Marduk, 225; Tower of
Babel, 224, 225
Babylonia, 61, 116, 117, 119*, 120, 123, 124,
131, 132, 135, 136, 152, 171, 176, 215, 218-
264, 265, 266, 267-268, 270, 272, 274, 275,
276, 278, 283, 285, 286, 289, 291, 299, 301,
321, 322, 323, 329, 352, 354, 355, 359*, 363,
380, 393. 395i 397. 534. 640
Bacchus (bak-us), 65
Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans, English
philosopher and statesman (1561-1626),
107, 631, 687, 780
Bactra, 108
Bactria, 355, 397!, 593
ioo6
INDEX
Badaoni (ba-da'-6-ne) , Indian historian (fl.
1600), 469
Badarayana (ba-da-ra'-ya-na), Vcdanta phil-
osopher (ca. 200 B.C.), 546
Badarians, 103, 145
Baganda (ba-gan'-da), 25
Baghdad (bag-dad' or bag-dad')* 395** 527,
532, 606
Bagoas (ba-go'-as), Persian eunuch and gen-
eral (executed 336 B.C.), 382
Baila (bi'-la),38
Bakin, Kyokutci (ba-kin, kyo-kob-ta), Jap-
anese novelist (1767-1848), 885
Bakufu (ba-kdb-fdb), 837
Balawat (bii'-la-wat'), 278, 280
Balban-Gheias-cd-dm (bal'-ban-gi'-as-ed-
dcn'), Sultan of Delhi (1265-1286), 461
Bali (ba'-le), 47
Balkh (balk), 761
Balonda, Queen of the, 46
Balta-atrua (bal'-tra-a'-troo-a), 259, 260
Baluchistan (ba-lob'-chi-stan'), 355, 395!,
440, 446
Bana (ba'-na), Indian historian (ca. 650),
749
Banerji (ban-er-je), R. D., 394
B.mgcrjngs, 50
Bangkok (bang-kok'), 606
Bantus (ban'-tobz), 65, 67
B.iroda (ba-ro'-da), 623
Baronga, 87
Bartoh, Danielc, Italian Jesuit, traveler, and
writer (1608-1685), 471
Baruch (bar'-uk), Hebrew minor prophet
(ca. 600 H.C.), 322
Bas-relief, in Sumcria, 133; in Egypt, 189-
190; in Babylonia, 254-255; in Assyria,
278-279; in Persia, 379-380; in India, 593;
in China, 739
Bathsheba (bath-she'-ba), 303*, 305
Bau (bou), 129
Bay on (ba'-yon), 604-605
Beaumarchais, Pierre Auguste Caron de,
French dramatist (1732-1799), 45
Beautiful Joyous Songs, etc., 176-177
Bedouins (bed'-6b-mz), 2, 229, 291, 303, 309
Bccrshcba (ber-shc'-ba), 299
Begouen, Louis, French archeologist, 97
Behistun (ba-his-tdbn'), 249, 373
Bek (bek), Egyptian sculptor (ca. 1370
B.C.), 192, 211
Bel (bal), 232, 234
Belgium, 92
Bcht (ba'-lit), 277
Bcl-Marduk (bal-maV-dobk) , 235
Benares (ben-ar'-es), 393, 428, 437, 465, 490,
521, 543, 547, 557, 582, 583, 677
Benares, University of, 530, 547
Bengal (ben-goP), 29, 393, 420, 451, 461, 479,
481, 509, 581, 614, 621
Bengal, Bay of, 393
Bengal Provincial Council of the National
Congress, 623
Beni-Hasan (be'-nc-ha'-san), 185, 190
Benjamin, son of Jacob, 336, 340
Bcntham, Jeremy, English political econo-
mist (1748-1832), 616
Bcntinck, Lord William Charles Cavcnish,
Governor General of India (1774-1839),
6o9*t, 614
Beppu Collection, Tokyo, 902*
Bcrar (ba-rar'), 576
Bergson, Henri, French philosopher (1859-
>» 434* 554*
Berlin, 286!, 693, 817
Berlin Museum, 181, 189
Bcrnicr, Francois, French traveler and phy-
sician (1625-1688), 479, 559
Berosus (bc-ro'-soos), Babylonian historian
(4th century B.C.), 118*, 250, 364
Besant, Annie, English thcosophist (1847-
1933), 6i6f
Bhakti-yoga (bak'-ti-yo'-ga), 522, 617
Bharata (ba'-ra-ta), 561, 576
Bharhut (bar'-hcmt), 593, 594, 597
Bhartri-han (bar'-tri-ha-ri), Indian sage (ca.
Bhasa (ba'-sa), Indian dramatist (ca. 350),
572
Bhaskara (bas'-ka-ra), Indian mathematician
(fl. 1114), 528
Bhava Alisra (bnv'-a mes'-ra), Indian med-
ical encyclopedist (ca. 1550), 530-531
Bhavabhuti (ba'-va-bob'-tl) , Indian drama-
tist (ca. 500), 576
Bhavagad-Gita (ba'-ga-vad-gc'-ta'), 488, 523,
54if, 547. 56i> ^-5^7^ 616, 631
Bbikkhus (bik'-kooz), 437
Bhilsa (beT-sa'), 597
Bhimnagar (bem'na-gar) , 460
Bhishma (besh'-ma), 562, 564
Bhopal (bo-pal'), 597
Bhuvaneshwara (bdb'-van-ash-wa-ra) , 599,
610
Bible, 294, 299, 301*, 305, 320, 328, 339~349»
565
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, 741
Bidar (bi-dar'). 458
Bihar (bi-harO, 419, 607
Bijapur (be'-ja-pobr), 458
Bikaner (bi-ka-nar'), 454
Bill of Rights, 625
Bindusara (bm-dob-sa'-ra), Indian king
(298-273 B.C.), 446
Birbal (ber-baT), Indian poet (fl. 1600), 468
Birth control, 71*
Bismarck-Schonhauscn, Otto Eduard Leo-
pold, Prince von, Prussian statesman
(1815-1904), 554, 695
Bithynians, 285, 358
Bitiu (bi-tu'), 175-176
Black Death, 3
Black Dragon Society, 923
Black Sea, 116, 215, 226, 286, 287, 292, 766
Blake, William, English artist and poet
(17*7-1828), 550*
Blavacsky, Helena Pctrovna, Russian mystic
(1831-1891), 6i6t
Boaz, 336
Boccaccio, Giovanni, Italian novelist (1313-
1375)» 555
Bodh-gaya (bod-ga-ya'), 427*, 431, 593, 597,
610
Bodhi tree, 402, 4271-, 506
Bodbisattiuas (bo-dc-sat'-waz), 423, 450, 504,
739, 833, 864
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Scverinus, Roman
philosopher and statesman (475-525), 340
Boghaz Keui (bo-gaz' ku'-c), 286
Bokhara (bo-ka'-ra), 350
Bombay, 393, 394, 486, 597, 613, 614, 629, 662,
630, 632
Bombay Presidency, 394
Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon I
Bond Street, 395
Bondei, 50
Bongos, 85
Bomvick, J., 84
Book of Ceremonies, 646, 659, 794
Book of Changes, 650-651, 665, 732
"Book of the Covenant," 321, 328
Book of the Dead, 203-204, 371
Book of History, 643, 665, 718
"Book of the Law of Moses," 328
Book of Lich-tze (le'-u-dzu), 651, 667
Book of Mencins (men'-shi-us), 666, 682
Book of Odes, 648-649, 659, 665, 671
Book of Rites, 664
Book of a Thousand Leaves, 878
Book of the Way and of Virtue, 653
Borneo, 8, 37»A46» 64, 99*^
Borobudur (bo-ro'-bob-door'), 595, 603, 611
INDEX 1007
Borodin, Mikhail, Russian Soviet general,
812, 816
Bororos, 81
Borsippa (bor-sip'-pa), 249, 255
Bosc, Sir Jagadis Chandra (bos, ja-ga-desh'
chan'-dra), Indian physicist and biologist
(1858- ), 618-619
Bosporus (bos'-por-us), 286, 355
Bossuct, Jacques Benigne, Bishop of Mcaux,
French preacher (1627-1704), 199, 340
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 591, 606*, 750,
75i
Boswell, James, Scotch biographer (1740-
1790, 2*
Botany, in Assyria, 276; in India, 530
Botocudos, 38, 85
Boucher dc Pcrthcs, Jacques, French arche-
ologist (1788-1868), 90
Boul.ik (boo'-lak) Papyrus, 165
Boxer Rebellion, 731, 746, 799*, 807-808
Brahma (braiv'-ma), 403*, 408, 409*, 413*,
507, 508, 509, 511, 594, 604, 605
Biatoua (poem), 415
"Brahma script," 406
Brabntacbari (braK-ma-cha'-rc), 522
Bralmracharia (braK-ma-cha'-rc-a), 541 1, 543,
627, 6:8
Brahmngupta (br.iK-ma-goop'-ta), Indian as-
tronomer (598-660), 4<?2, 526, 527, 528
Brahman (brak'-man), 411* 412, 413, 414,
416, 517, 544-545, 546, 547, 548-549, 550,
551, 553, 616
Brahinanas (bniK'-ma-naz), 405, 407
Brahmans, 28, 198, 399, 405, 419, 447, 449,
452, 480, 483-488, 490, 495, 502, 508, 509*,
510, 511, 518, 520, 522, 523, 524, 535, 552,
561, 564, 581, 582, 597, 602, 623, 624
Brah?t?a-So7uaj (braK-ma-s6-maj'), 615, 623
Brabina-sutra, 546
Braid, James, English surgeon and psychol-
ogist (1795-1861) 532
Brazil, 50, 73, 79, 81, 98
Breaking of the Pledge, 926
Breasted, James H., 117*, 136*, 143, 174*,
205, 218, 378!
Brcuil, Abbe Henri Edouard Prosper, 92
Brcwitt-Taylor, C. H., 7i8f
Briffault, Robert, 42*, 84, 331
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (bri-had-a-ran'-
ya-ka 6~6-pan'-i-shad') , 402*
Brihadratha (bri-had-ra'-ta), King of Ma-
gadha (d. 185 B.C.), 449-450
Brihaspati (bri-has'-pa-ti) , Indian sceptic,
418
ioo8
INDEX
Brihatkatha (bri-hat'-ka-ta), Indian poet
(ist century), 579
Brinklcy, Frank, 801*, 808*
Brinton, Daniel Garrison, American ethnol-
ogist (1837-1899), 26
British Guiana, 70
British Medical College, Hong Hong, 809
British Museum, 145*, 155, 159, 161, 167,
188, 206*, 279, 747*, 749*
Bron7c Age, 103-104
Brothers Karatnazov^ 717
Bruno, Giordano, Italian philosopher (1550-
1600), 469
Buck, Pearl, 718*, 754
Buckle, Henry Thomas, English historian
(1822-1862), 299
Buddha (bood'-da), Indian religions teacher
563-48? B.C.), 193, 325, 398, 399, 400, 41?,
416, 417, 422-439, 449, 480, 501, 503, 504-
505, fo6, 516, 522, 534* 53?, 536, <?4i, 542,
546, 547, 578, 579, 589, 590, 593*, 594, 595,
603, 604, 617*, 690, 720, 830, 834, 864, 886,
887, 892, 897-898
Buddha-charila (IxTod-da-cha'-rc-ta), 579
Buddhism, 419, 428-439, 447-450, 453, 454,
458, 4™, 484, ^03-507, 508*, 520, 534, 554,
5**9» 593* 5'A &»*i <>57. 675i M* 7«i-702»
719-720, 731, 733, 7*4-7*5* 7*9-74". 74".
746, 748, 750, 786, 818, 829, 832-853, 834,
842, 856, 859, 864-865, 866, 872, 891, 894,
911 ~
Bnndahi\h (boon'-da-hish), 365:!:, 376
Burial, in Sumcria, 128; in Egypt, 148-150;
in Babylonia, 240; in Persia, 372-, in India,
{01-502
Burma (bur'-ma), 32, 45, 46, 393, 479, 506,
602, 606
Burnouf, Eugene, French Orientalist (1801-
1852), 391*
Burrahuriash (boo-ra-boo'-rc-ash) II, King
of Karduniash (ca. 1400 B.C.), 223*
Burslem, 7^9
Busbido (boo-she-do'), 847-848, 923
Bushmen, 6, 14, 21, 45
By bios (bib'-los), 106, 294, 295
B\ron, George Gordon Noel, Baron, En-
"ghsh poet (1788-1824), 269, 283
Cadi/., 239
Caesar, Cains Julius, Roman general, states-
man and historian (100-44 B.C.), 39, 137,
139, 1 8 1, 216, 246, 271, 305, 398, 467, 585
Cxsars, 216*
Caille, Rene, French traveler (1799-1838), 43
Cairo, 138-139, 140, 145, 216, 606
Cairo Museum, 148, 152, 186, 187, 188
Cajori, Flonan, 528*
Calanus (ka-la'-nus), Indian philosopher
(ca. 542-543)
Calculus, 79
Calcutta, 393, 394, 500, 613, 614, 621
Calendar, origins of, 79-80; in Sumcria, 125;
in Egypt, 180-181; in Babylonia, 258; in
India, 527; in China, 781
Calicut, 478, 613
California, 915, 929
California Indians, 48
Cambaluc (kam'-ba-look), 763, 779; also see
Peking
Cambodia, 391, 506, 507, 594, 595, 602, 603-
605, 606
Cambridge Ancle in History, 181*
Cambyses (kam-bi'-sez), King of Persia
529-522 B.C.), 215, 353-354> 361
Cameroons, 56, 65
Canaan (ka-'nan), 285, 298, 300, 301, 302,
310
Canada, 94, 613
Canals, 3*^8, 765
Canneh (kan'-nii), 291
Cannibalism, in primitive societies, 10-11; in
later agc-s, 10
(banning, Charles John, Viscount, Governor
General of Indu (1812-1862), 614
Canton (Lin'-ton), 759, 764, 780, 803, 804,
8os, 809, 811, 814
Canton Opium Party, 804
Capart, Jean, 143
Cappadocia, 285, 355
Carchcrnish (kar'-kc-mish), 153, 224, 227,
287, 290, 321
Canans, 285
Caribs, ^4
Carlyle, Thomas, British essayist, historian,
and philosopher (1795-1881), 343, 631,
719, 906
Caroline Islands, 77
Carter, Ho\\ard, English archeologist (1873-
), "43
Carthage, i, 66, 90, 215, 293, 295, 353
Cartier, Jacques, French explorer (1494-
1536), 81
Caruso, Enrico, Italian operatic tenor (1868-
1921), 192
Carver, T. N., 17
Casanova de Semg.ilt, Giovanni Giacomo,
Italian adventurer (1725-1803), 62
1 NDEX
1009
Caspian Sea, 286*, 350, 353, 394,
Castes, origins of, 20; in Sumena, 125; in
Egypt, 159; in Assyria, 274-275; in India,
398, 484-489, 623-624; in Japan, 851
Cathay, 760
Caucasus, 119, 266, 283, 286, 355
Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, 728-729
Celestial Kingdom, 797*
Ccnsorinus, Latin grammarian (fl. 238), 181
Censors, 798
Central America, 42, 54
Century of Love, 580
Ceramics, in primitive societies, 87; in pre-
historic cultures, 101; Sumcnan, 117, 133-
134; Egyptian, 191; Babylonian, 227; As-
syrian, 278; Indian, 585; Chinese, 754-759;
Japanese, 899-901
Ceres, 60, 200
Ceylon (sc-16n'), 14, 21, 56, 391, 392, 393,
394, 401, 449, 450, 451, 456, 503, 506, 531*,
594, 595, 602, 603
Chaco, Gran, 50
Chaldxa (kiil-dc'-a), 179. Also sec Meso-
potamia, Babylonia
Chalons-&ur- A larnc, 72
Chalukya (cha'-look-ya), 456, 600
Chamberlain, B. 11., 924
Champollion, Jean-Franc,ois, French arche-
ologist (1790-1X32), 91, 142, 144-145
Ch'an (clun) (state), 680
Chand Bardei (chand bar-dl'), Indian poet,
580
Chandalas (chan-da'-la/J, 309, 452, 487
Chandi Das (chan'-de-das'), Indian poet
(ca. 1400), 491, 580-^81, 621
Chandogya Upaimhad (chan-do'-gya oo-
pan'-I-shad'), 416
Chandragupta Maurya (chan'-dra-goop'-ta
maw'-re-ya), King of Magadha (322-298
B.C.), 441-445, 477> 478» 48l» 493» 5</>
Chandragupta I, King of Magadha (320-
33°)* 4?1
Chang Heng (Jang hung), Chinese astrono-
mer (fl. 139), 780, 781
Chang Ts'ang (jang tsang), Chinese mathe-
matician (died 152 B.C.), 781
Chang Yen-yuan (jang yan-u-wan'), Chi-
nese historian of art (9th century), 747
Ch'ang-an (chang-im), 453, 454, 698*, 701,
702, 703, 704, 707^708, 714, 747, 779, 83.5
Changchun (jang-]6"6n),
Chanson de Roland, 455
Chao (jou) (state), 695
Chapci (ja-pa),8i4
Charaka (cha'-ra-ka), Indian physician, (fl.
120), 450, 530, 5^1, 5^2
Charlemagne, sec Charles I
Charles 1, King of France and Emperor of
the West (742-814), 151, 391*, 455
Charon, 202
Chartres, 307
Chanakas (char'-va-kaz), 418-419, 522, 534
Chastity, in primitive society, 45-46
Chateaubriand, Franc, nib Augusrc, Viscount
de, Frenchman of letters (1768-1848), 754
Chattcrjec, Bankim Chandra (chat-cr-jc',
ban'-kim chan'-dra), Indian novelist (1838-
Chaucer, Geoffrey, English poet (1328-
1400), 178
Chauna (chou'-na) Buddha's charioteer, 426
Chauri Chaura (chou'-re chou-ra), 630
Chehil Mmar (cha-hil me-nar'), 379-380
Chellean Culture, 93
Chclmsford, Frederick John Napier Thc-
siger, Viscount (1863-1953), 621
Chemistry, 529
Chemosh (kC-'-mosh), national god of the
Moabitcs, 312, ^21
CSicng ( ) ung) (duchy), 646
Ch'eng \\',injr (cluing \vang), (Chinese em-
pi-ror (1115-1078 uc.), 780
Cheops (kc'-oj)s) sec Khufii
Chcphrcn (ke'-fien), sec Khafre
('heroKec Indians, 49
Chess, 5(H)
Cheyenne1 Indians, 49
Chi Cjc), Ouke of (ca. 480 B.C.), 664
Ch'i (die) (state), 64^, 646, 662, 663, 680,
6Sj, 685, 790
Clfi, Duke of (ca. 520 i».c ), 662, 663
Chia Cli'ing (je-:iir ching), Chinese em-
peror (1796-1820,798
Clua-ling (je-ah'-Iing) Kivcr, 749
Chiang Kai-shek (je-ai)g' kl-shek'), Chinese
dictator (1888- ), 812, 816, 818
Chibchas, 15
Chicago, 61 8
Chicago, University of, Iraq Expedition,
274*
Chieh Kuci (je'-u gwfu, Chinese emperor
(1818-1766 u.r..), 644, 680-681, 686
Ch'ien Lung (chc-an' If^ng), Chinese em-
peror (1736-1796), 722, 736, 758, 768-769
Chikamatsu Alonzaycmon (chik-a-mat-soT)
mon-/a-ya-mon), Japanese dramatist (1653-
1724), 891
Childc, V. Gordon, 395!
IOIO
INDEX
Childhood, in primitive societies, 50-51
Ch'in (chin) (province), 645-6, 685, 694
Ch'in (chin) Dynasty, 779
Ch'in, Queen of, mother of Shih Huang-ti
(ca. 250 B.C.), 694
China, 13, 42, 60, 93, 94, 108, 144, 162, 191,
222*, 312*, 422, 449, 451, 453, 464, 479, 501,
504, 506, 527, 594, 595, 596, 602, 606, 622,
626, 628, 633, 639-823, 829, 833, 8^5, 839,
846, 853, 857, 859, 860, 861, 866, 872, 874,
875, 876, 877*, 891, 892, 903, 912, 918, 919,
920, 924, 925, 928-929, 930, 931, 932
China Medical Board, 820*
Chinese I '.astern Railroad, 931
Chinese Revolution, 641, 642, 686, 810-811,
818, 819
Chiug (jing), Five, 664-665
Ching Ti (jing de), Chinese emperor (1450-
M57), 757
Ch'ing (ching) Dynasty, 767; also sec Man-
cliu Dynasty
Ching-tc-chcn (jmg-da-jiin'), 757, 758, 805
Chinkiang (jin-jc-ang'), 804
Chippcwa Indians, 33
Clut.i (chc-ta'), 9^1
Clntaldrug (chit-al-dmog'), 396*
Chitor (chi-tor'), 393, 455-456, 461, 475
Chitra (chi'-tra), 620*
Chittagong (chit'-a-gong) Hill tribes, 16
Choct.uv Indians, 74
Cholas (cho-laz), 456, 490
Choshn (flio-shoo), 905
('hot a Nagpur (chcY-ta nag'-pdor), 501
Chou (jo) (state), 645, 652, 658, 662, 680
Chou, Duke of, 646, 780
Chou Dynasty, 645, 650, 696, 721, 736, 738,
782
Chou llsin (jo sin), Chinese Nero (1154-
112? B.C.), 645, 680, 681, 686
Chou kou 1 ien (jo go tc-an'), 90, 92
Cliou-kung (jo-goong), Chinese statesman
and legislator (1115-1079 B.C.), 646, 680
Chou-li (ju-le), 646
Christ, 305, 310, 317, }i8, 319, 320, 323, 325,
Wt, W« >49> 42fi» 429i 4*1* 44"» 565> 59°»
614, 617, 656, 657, 669, 670
Christianity, 62, 201, 202, 240, 319, 367, 368,
469, 470, 471, 504, 505, 508*, 524, 613, 615,
676, 746, 787-788, 840, 842-843, 861
Christians, Karly, 242
Christian Science, 544*
Christmas, 372
Chrysostom, St. John, Greek Christian
Father (347? -407), 17
Ch'u (choo) (kingdom), 678, 695
Chu Hsi (joo she), Confucian philosopher
(1130-1200), 665, 686, 73i-732» 735i 74^
787, 866, 871
Ch'u Ping (choo bing), Chinese poet (died
ca. 350 B.C.), 694
Chuang-tzc (jvvang-dzii), Chinese philoso-
pher (born 370 B.C.), 653*, 677, 688-692,
69?, 785
Chu-fu (chu-foo), 658, 747
Ch7i7Jg-hiL\i-wh?-kno ( jcTong-wha-min-gwo) ,
China's name for China, 641
Chung-kung (joong-goong), Confucian dis-
ciple (ca. 500 B.C.), 670
Chnin*-kuo, or Middle Kingdom, 643-644
Chung-tu ()oc)ng-doo), 662
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Roman orator and
man of letters (106-43 B.C.), 27*
Cilicia, 355
(jlicians, 285
Cimbri, 86
Cimmerians, 267, 273, 285
Cmcinnatus, Lucius Quinctius, Roman dic-
tator (ca. 520-440 B.C.), 568
Cinderella, 175
Circumcision, 313, 331
Circus Maximus, 275
City of the Dead, 141
Ci\ il service examinations, 800-802
Civili/atiun, a young \\ord, 2*; defined, 1,5*
Clan, 21-22, 29
Clnsses, sec caste system
Classic of Filial Piety, 86 1
Clay Cart, 572-574, 576
Cleopatra, Queen of Eg\pt (51-30 B.C..), 140,
144, 165, 216
Clixe, Robert, B.iron, Fnglish general and
statesman (1725-1774), 481-482, 612, 613,
*i4
Clothing, in primitive societies, 47, 85-86
Code Napoleon, 917
''Coffin Texts," 174
Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, English Orien-
talist (1765-18^7), 391*
Coleridge, Samuel Ta\lor, English poet and
critic (1772-1834), 761*
Colombia, 15
Colonisation, 293
Colosseum, 479
Columbus, Christopher, Italian explorer
(1451-1506), 104, 391*, 479, 803
Comba relics, 97*
Compass, 780
Complete System of Natural Astrology, 526
INDEX
ion
Concubinage, 41
Confucius (kon-fu-shi-us), Chinese philoso-
pher (551-479 B.C.), 193, 325, 422, 643, 646,
648, 649, 651, 657, 658-677, 678, 679, 680,
681, 68?, 684, 686, 689, 690, 693, 694, 697,
702, 705, 718, 721, 722, 723, 731, 732, 737,
747*, 784-785, ?86, 789, 793, 800, 817, 818,
820, 821, 839, 866, 867, 868-869, 870, 872,
873> 9H
Congo, 10, 65, 75
Congo River, 86
Conquistadores, 9
Constantinc the Great, Roman emperor
(306-337), 246
Constantinople, 776*, 834
Constitution of the United States, 625
Conti, Niccolo, Italian traveler (fl. 1419-
!444)» 457i 48l> 495
Cook, Captain James, Fnglish circumnaviga-
tor (1728-1779), 84, 86, 104
Cooking, in primitive societies, 9-10; in pre-
historic cultures, 9$; Babylonian, 226; In-
dian, 477; Chinese, 77 f, Japanese, 836, 856
Coomaraswamy (kcwm-.i-ra-swam'-c), Anan-
daK.,625*
Copenhagen, Glyptothck at, 595
Copper, 102-103, 136
Copts, 772
Cordova, 834
Corsica, 293
Cosmetics, in primitive societies, 84-85; in
Sumeria, MO; in Fgvpt, 168-160.; in
Bab\loma, 248; in Judea, 30}; in Persia,
356; in India, 499; in Chin.i, 770; in Japan,
854-8*5
Coymos (Von Humboldt), 462
Costume, Sumcnan, 119, Egyptian, 169;
Babylonian, 222; in Judea, 303, Persian,
356, Indian, 498, Chinese, 770-771; Japa-
nese, 836, 8^5, 922
Counting, 78-79
CoHp-dc-porng, 93, 95
Courts, in primitive societies, 28
Cousin, Victor, French philosopher (1792-
1867), 53
Cram, Ralph Adams, 895
Creation, in Sumenan legend, 134; in Baby-
lonian legend, 236, 237*; in the Old Testa-
ment, 329-330; in the Vedas, 409
Crespigny, C. de, 37
Cretans, 217
Crete, 97, 106, 107, 116, 141, 160, 215, 218,
254, 286-287, 293, 295, 334, 397,
Crime, in primitive societies, 52-53
Critique of Pure Reason, 547
Croce, Benedetto, 749f
Croesus (kre'-zoos), King of Lydia (570-
546 B.C.), 289-290, 353, 354
Cro-Magnons, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97
Croo, 42
Crusaders, 120
Crusades, 479, 756
Crux aiisata, 199
Ctesias, Greek historian and physician (fl.
400 B.C.), 283
Culture, defined, 5*
Cultures, primitive, sec under Achculean
Culture, Aurignacian Culture, etc.
Cunaxa (ku-naV-a), 362*, 382
Cur/on, George Nathaniel, Marquess Cur-
?.on of Kedlestcm, Viceroy of India (1859-
1920, 626
Custom, 26-27
Cyaxarcs (sl-ax'-a-rcv). King of the Modes
(640-584 B.C.), 225, 283, 351
Cybelc (sib'-e-le), 60, 200, 288, 296
Cyprus, 24$, 292, 293, 2c;<j
Cyril, St., Archbishop of Alexandria (376?-
"444), 216
CyroftA'dia, 352
Cyrus the Great, King of the Mcdes and
the Persians ({{{-529 B.C.), 120, 182, 227,
263, 287, 200, 325*, 326, 3271 3^-3^3, 357*
359, 378, 380, 381
Cyrus the Younger, Persian prince (424?-
401 B.C.), 362*
Czechoslovakia, 94, 97
D
Dacvas, 367
Daibutiu (dT-hrio-tsoo), 840, 897-898
Daigo (dl-go), Kmperor of Japan (898-930),
«35, «7»
Darniy o (dl-myo), 846, 850, 886, 893
Daircn (di-ren'),92of
Dalai Lama (da-li la-ma), 507
Damaras, 38, 79
Damascus, 267, 296, 303, 317, 337, 756, 896
"Damascus" steel, 529
Damayanti (da-ma-yan-te'), 491, 564
Dan, 299
Dananu (da'-na-ndb), Elamitc general (ca.
650 n.c.), 269
Dance, origins of, 88; in Egypt, 166; in In-
dia, 586-587; in China, 721, 723; in Japan,
893
Danes, 10
Daniel, 223, 263, 340, 346, 351
1012
INDEX
Daniyal (dan'-e-yal), son of Akbar (ca.
1600), 495
Dante, see Alighieri
Danube River, 355
Doric, 358*
Darius (da-ri'-us) I Hystaspes, King of Per-
sia (521-485 B.C.), 31, 249, 291, 327, 354-
355i 35<*» 358, 359-3^ 362, 364, 365, 37>i
373. 375, 378-379i 381
Darius II Ochus, King of Persia (423-404
B.C.), 382
Darius III Codomannus, King of Persia
($38-330 B.C.), 363, 382-385
Darmcstcter, James, French critic (1849-
1894), 367*
Darwin, Charles Robert, English naturalist
(1809-1882), 17, K4, 86, 95, 617, 657, 691
Dasa-ratha (da-sha-ra'-ta), 567, 568, 570
Daulatabnd (dou-la-ta'-biid), 461
David, King of the Jews (1010-974 B.C.),
241, 259, 304-305, 306, 310, 312, 332, 339,
34°> 374^81
Davids, 1". W. Rhys, English Orientalist
(1843-1922), 391*, 428*
Dawn Alan, sec Piltdown Man
Dawson, Charles, 92
Davvson, Christopher, 222*
DC Intellects Emendntionc, 867*
Deborah (dcb'6-ra), Hebrew prophetess
(i^th century B.C.), 333, 340
Deccan (dck'-kan), 394, 396, 456, 473, 475,
555, 58i
Decimal system, 180, 527, 781
Declaration of Independence, 625
Declaration of the Rights of Man, 625
Degas, Edgar, French painter (1834-1917),
9/2
Dcioccs (di'-o-scz), King of the Mcdcs (fl.
709 B.C.), ^40
Delaware Indians, 22
Delft, 900
Delhi (del'i), 2, 393, 394, 460-461, 463, 464,
465, 468, 469, 478, 484, 591, 592, 607, 608,
610
Delhi Sultanate, 460-464
Delilah (dc-H'-la), 340
Delphic oracle, 77
Delta of the Nile, 137-138, 287
Dcmetcr, 60, 127, 200, 235, 238, 595
Democritus, Greek philosopher (40o?-357?
B.C.), 529, 536, 552
De A 1 organ, Jacques, French archeologist
1857-1924), 94, 117*, 122
Denderah (den'-dcr-a), 185
Dengyo Daishi (den-gyo di-she), Japanese
painter (loth century), 903
Denmark, 98
Der-el-Bahri (dar-el-ba'-re), 154, 185, 188,
189
Description de VEgypte, 144
Desmoulins, Camille, French revolutionary
(1762-1794), 24
Detroit Museum of Fine Arts, 591
Deuteronomy, 321-329
Devadasis (da-va-da'-scz), 400-491, 406, 586
Dcvadatta (da-va-dat'-ta), 436
Dcwey, John, 535, 821
Dhanamjaya (da'-nam-ja-ya'), Indian dra-
matic theorist (ca. 1000), 574*
Dhanwantari (dan-wan-ta-re'), Indian phy-
sician (ca. 525 B.C.), 530, 532
Dharana (dar'-a-na), 544
Dhanna (dar'-ma), 484, 487, 488
Dharma-shastras (dar'-ma-shas'-traz), 483-484
Dhrita-rashtra (dri'-ta-rash'-tra), 562, 570
Dbyana (dya'-na), 544
Dialogue of a Misanthrope, 195-196
"Diamond Sutra," 729
Dickens, Charles, English novelist (1812-
1870), 885
Dicta, Alt., 391 J
Diderot, Denis, French encyclopedist (1713-
1784), 639
Dingiraddamu (din-ge-rad'-da-noo), Sumer-
ian poet (ca. 2800 B.C.), 121
Din llabi (din i-la'-hi), 470-471
Dinkard, 365
Dinkas, 60, 86
Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian (ist cen-
tury B.C.), 69, 139*, 147, 158, 159*, 165,
166, 183, 224*, 267, 269, 283*, 331$, 384*
Diogenes, Greek cynic philosopher (ca. 413-
323 B.C.), 542
Diomedes, 16
Dionysus, 33 if, 403
Diophantus, Greek mathematician (fl. 360),
528*
Discourse on the Progress of the Sciences
and Arts, 693*
Discourses and Dialogues, 665
Dishonesty, in primitive societies, 52
Divorce, in primitive societies, 49; in Su-
meria, 130; in Egypt, 166; in Babylonia,
247; in Judea, 336; in India, 494; in China,
792; in Japan, 924
Doctrine of the Mean^ 666, 672
Dog island, 104
"Dogs of Fo," 7$9
INDEX
IOI3
Domestication of animals, 135; in primitive
societies, 8; in prehistoric cultures, 99-100;
in Sumeria, 125, 135; in Egypt, 135; in
China, 774
Dominicans, 788*
Dordogne, 92
Dorians, 215, 397
"Double standard," origins of, 34-35
Doukhobors, 498
Dowager Empress, sec T'zu Hsi
Drama, in India, 571-577; in China, 721-723;
in Japan, 889-891
Draupadi (drou'-pa-de), 401, 561, 570
Dravidians, 61-62, 396, 397, 398, 406, 479,
485*, 593, 600
Dream of the Red Chamber, 718
Dreams, 57-58
Druids, 60
Dryden, John, English poet and dramatist
(1631-1700), 391*
Dubois, Jean Antoine, French missionary
(1765-1848), 199*, 480, 484*, 486*, 491,
4(A ,499. .5i5*. 52i*, 522*, 545*i 6l5
Duel, in primitive societies, 28
Dumas, Alexandrc, pcre, French novelist
(1803-1870), 885
Dungi (ddbn'-gc), King of Ur (ca. 2400
B.C.), 123, 127, 135
Duodecimal system, 79
Durga (dobr-ga'), 509; also see Kali
Durga-Puja (dobr-ga'-pob-ja'), 501
Durkheim, Emilc, 62*
Dur-Sharrukin (dobr-shar'-robk-m) , see
Khorsabad
Duryodhan, i.e., Duryodhana (ddbr-yo'-da-
na), 562
Dushyanti (dobsh'-yan-te), 575, 576
Diisseldorf , 94
Dutch, 603, 613, 804
Dutch East India Company, 857*
Dutt, Narendranath (dut, na-ren'-dra-nat) ,
see Vivekananda
Dyaks (di'-akz), 15, 22, 53, 54, 64
Dyananda, Sarasvaty (da-ya'-nan-da, sa-
ras'-va-te), Indian reformer (1824-1883),
6i6t
Dyaus pitar (dyous pi-tar'), 60, 401
Ea (e'-a), 128, 237, 238
Eannatum (£-an'-na-tobm), King of Lagash
(ca. 2800 B.C.), 133
Earth worship, 60-6 1
East India Company, 479, 613-614
Easter, 79
Easter Island, 77, 78, 107
Eastern Archipelago, 77, 78, 87
Eastern Han Dynasty, 698*
Ebers Papyrus, 182, 183
Ecbatana (ek-bat'-a-na), 227, 350, 352, 362,
379, 442
Ecclcsiastes, 259, 261. 262*. 329, 345, 346-
349, 523
£cole de f extreme Orient, 604
Eden, 61, 219
Edifying Story Book, 884
Edmunds, J. A., 504^
Edomites, 285, 298, 299
Education in primitive societies, 74-75; in
Sumeria, 129; in Egypt, 170-171; in Persia,
376; in India, 485, 556-560; in China, 661-
662, 799-800, 819-820; in Japan, 877, 926
Egypt, 24*, 47, 61, 68, 94, 97, 103, 104, 105,
106, 107, 108, 109, 116, 117, 119, 125, 133,
135, J36, '37-2*7, 218, 222, 223-224, 226,
227, 228, 247, 248, 254, 263, 265, 266, 267,
268, 270, 285, 288, 289, 293, 295, 296, 298,
300, 301, 306, 307, 310, 313, 318, 321, 324,
329, 334, 353, 354, 362, 363, 370, 379, 384,
393, 395, 4<J«, 449, 479, 532, 57^1, 633, 641,
728, 755t, 892
Egypt and Israel, 300*
"Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup," 708
Eighteenth Dynasty, 152, 160, 170
Eightfold Way, 430, 447
Ekkcn, Kaibara (kl-ba-ra ek-kcn), Japanese
philosopher (1630-1714), 86 1, 868-870, 871
Ekron (ek-ron), 312
El (el), 294, 297
Elam (e-lam), 102, 105, 106, 108, 117, 121,
123, 126, 133, 219, 252, 265, 268, 270, 362
Elamites, 117, 123
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,
223
Elephanta (e-lc-fan'-ta), 594, 599
Elephantine (cl-c-fan-tl'ne), 185
Eleventh Dynasty (Egypt), 183
Elihu (c-li'-u), 345
Elijah (c-H'-ja), the Tishbite, Hebrew
prophet translated to heaven (ca. 895
B.C.), 313, 314, 315
Eliot, Sir Charles, 428*, 434*, 544^ 561, 615
Elisha (fi-li'-sha), Hebrew prophet (ca. 890-
840 B.C.), 312*, 314
Elizabeth, Queen of England (1558-1603),
469, 838
EUiotson, John, English physician (1791-
1868), 532
ioi4
INDEX
Elohim (6-lo'-him), 297, 329
Elphinstone, Mountstuart, British Colonial
administrator (1779-1859), 474, 481, 614
Elura (e-lob'-ra), 598, 601
Elysian Fields, 202
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, American philos-
opher and poet (1803-1882), 352, 415, 631
Eminent Painters of All Ages, 747
Empcdocles, Greek philosopher (fl. 500
B.C.), 533
Empire (Egypt), 151% 154, 169, 170, 190,
191
Encyclopedia Britannica (i$h edition),
7<>3t
Engi (en-ge) Period (in Japan), 835
Engidu (en'-gi-ddb), 251-254
Engineering, in Sumcria, 124, 133; in Egypt,
159-160; in Babylonia, 224!, 225, 226; in
Assyria, 274; in Persia, 358; in India, 478,
601; in China, 695, 696, 774, 778
England, 3, 24*, 247, 292, 293, 323, 393, 409,
554, 576, 606, 612, 613, 629, 804, 808, 810,
815*, 817, 830, 890, 891, 918, 928, 932
English (language), 406, 622
English (race), 500
Enlil (cn'-lfl), 127
Enlil-nadin-apli (cn'-lil-na-dcn'-a-ple), King
of Babylonia (1122-1116 B.C.), 223*
Enoch (e'-nuk), 313, 346
Enquiries into Religion and Culture, 222*
Entcmenu (en-t6-mc'-mob), 134*
Eoanthropus, see Piltdown Man
Ephraim (e'-fra-im) (kingdom), 315, 317,
3^9
Epicureanism, 195
Epicurus, Greek philosopher (340-270 B.C.),
56, 421
Ercch (e'-rek), see Uruk
Ereshkigal (6-resh'-k6-gal), 238
Eridu (cr'-i-doo), 118, 119, 128, 133
Esarhaddon (e-sar-had'-don), King of As-
syria (681-699 B.C.), 268, 278, 281
Eschatology, Sumerian, 128-129; Egyptian,
148, 149, 150, 202-204; Babylonian, 240;
Persian, 370-37"; Indian, 413-4*4, 5H-5I7;
Chinese, 784, 785; Japanese, 864
Escorial, 604
Esdaile, James, British psychologist (1808-
1859), 53*
Eskimos, 6, 13, 17, 22, 32, 52, 53, 54, 57, 88
Essai sur le Pali, 391*
Essays, Chinese, 719-721; Japanese, 887-889
Esther, 303*, 333, 340
Eta (e-ta), 851, 926
Ethiopia, 269, 318
Ethiopians, 24*, 146, 215
Euclid, Greek geometer (fl. 300 B.C.), 240
Euler, Leonard, Swiss mathematician (1707-
1783)1 528
Euphrates River, 118, 119, 123, 124, 136, 154-
160, 218, 219*, 221, 226, 227, 228, 268, 299,
35.8, 394
Euripides, Greek dramatist (480-406 B.C.),
34' *. 577
Eve, 330
Everyman, 889
Exodus, the, 214, 301*, 302
Exogamy, 4 1 -42
Ezekicl (e-ze'-kyel), (ca. 580 B.C.), 312, 324-
325
Ezra (ez'-ra), Hebrew scribe and reformer
(fl. 444 B.C.), 328, 329
Fables, Egyptian, 175; Babylonian, 250; In-
dian, 578
Fa-Hien (fa-hc'-an), Chinese traveler (fl.
399-414), 451-452, 589
Fakir (fa-ker'), 545*
Family, 29-35; m Sumcria, 130; in Egypt,
164-166; in Babylonia, 247; in Assyria, 275;
in Judea, 303, 333-334* 335-337; in Persia,
374, 375; in India, 492; in China, 789, 791,
792, 793, 794, 819; in Japan, 860-861
Fardapur (far-da-poorO, 589*
Farghana (far-ga'-na), 464
Fars (farz), 356, 372
Farsistan (far-sis-tan'), see Fars
Father, the, in primitive societies, 30-32, 34
Fathpur-Sikri (f at-pobr-sik'-re) , 467, 468,
471, 481, 607-608, 610
Faurc, £lie, 217
Faust (Goethe), 574
Fayum (fa-yobm'), 94, 159
Fcllatah (fel'-a-ta), 85
Feng Tao (fung dou), Chinese statesman
and patron of printing (ca. 932), 729, 730
Fenollosa, Ernest, 751, 831, 853*
Fcrgusson, James, Scotch architect and his-
torian of architecture (1808-1886), 5041-,
597, 598-599, 600, 6oi» 741
Fete des fous, 66
Fetishism, 67
Fichtc, Johann Gottlieb, German philos-
opher (1762-1810), 554
Fiction, Egyptian, 175; Hebrew, 340; In-
dian, 579-580; Chinese, 717-718; Japanese,
881-885, 926
Fielding, Henry, English novelist (1707-
i?54)» 891
Fifth Dynasty (Egypt), 161, 189
Fjjj» 34' 35. 77
Fijians, 10, 27, 60
Finance, in Sumeria, 125, 126; in Egypt, 160-
161; in Babylonia, 228-229; in Assyria,
274; in Lydia, 289; in Phoenicia, 295; in
Persia, 358; in India, 395, 400-401, 480; in
China, 779-780; in Japan, 934
Fines, in primitive societies, 27-28; in Baby-
lonia, 230-232; in India, 487
Finland, 103
Fire, in primitive societies, 10, 11-12; in pre-
historic cultures, 95-96
Firishta, Muhammad Qasim (fe-rcsh'-ta,
moo-ham'-mat ka'-zim), Moslem historian
(ca. 1610), 467, 579
Firoz Shah (fe-roz' sha), Sultan of Delhi
(1351-1388), 458, 461, 483
Fishing, in primitive societies, 6-7; in Egypt,
156; in Babylonia, 226-227; in China, 647
FitzGcrald, Edward, English poet (1809-
1883), 883
Five Ching (jing), 664-665
"Five Rulers," 643-644
Flood, 330; in Sumerian legend, 119-120,
134; in the Bible, 330
Florence, i, 3, 738
"Flower District," Tokyo, 862
Flowers, see gardens
Font de Gaumc, 97*
Foochow (foo-chou), 805, 929
Food, in primitive societies, 5-11; in Su-
meria, 128; in Egypt, 156; in Babylonia,
226-227; m Assyria, 274*; in Judca, 330;
in Persia, 357; in India, 497; in China,
774-775; in Japan, 855-856
"Forbidden City," 742
Formosa (for-mo'-sa), 804, 806, 918, 927*
Fort Sargon, see Khorsabad
Fouche, Joseph, Duke of Otranto, French
statesman (1763-1820), 151
Four Shu (shoo), 665-666
Fourth Dynasty (Egypt), 135, 140, 147, 173,
181
France, 19*, 24, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99*,
613, 695, 805, 806, 808, 813, 800, 891, 917*,
918, 920, 928, 932
France, Anatolc (Jacques Thibault) French
author (1844-1924), 47, 497
Francis of Assisi, St., Italian mystic (1182-
1230), 628
Franciscans, 788*
INDEX 1015
Frankfort, Henri, 395*
Franklin, Benjamin, American author and
statesman (1706-1790), 12, 83
Frazcr, Sir James George, 96, 330*
Frederick II the Great, King of Prussia
(1712-1786), 219, 693
Freer Art Gallery, Washington, D. C., 747*,
750*
French Academy, 144, 581
French Revolution, 24
Freud, Sigmund, 62*, 88
Freya, 60
Fruit-Gathering, 620*
Fu Hsi (fob-she), Chinese semi-mythical
emperor (2852-2737 B.C.), 643, 650, 723
Fu Hsiian (foo shwan), Chinese poet, 793-
794
Fuegians, 10, 18, 21, 53, 86
Fuji-san (foo-je-san), 830 J see Fuji-yama
Fujiwara (fdo-je-wa-ra) family, 835, 882,
887
Fujiwara Scigwa (sig-wa), Japanese phil-
osopher (1560-1619), 866, 871
Fujiwara Takanobu (ta-ka-no-bob), Japa-
nese painter ( 1 1 46- 1 205 ) , 904
Fuji-yama (fob-je-ya-ma), 830, 909, 910,
912
Fukicn (foo-jc-an'), 748, 929
Furniture, in Sumeria, 133; in Egypt, 184,
191; in Babylonia, 254; in Assyria, 278;
in Persia, 378; in China, 736; in Japan, 859
Futuna, 37, 53
Gae (ga), Duke of Lu (loo) (fl. 480 B.C.),
660, 663-664
Gxa (ge'-a), 58
Gadarene swine, 80
Galilee, Sea of, 92, 300
Gallas, 62, 86
Galton, Sir Francis, English scientist (1822-
1911), 38
Gama, Vasco da, Portuguese navigator
1469-1524), 293, 391*, 613
Games, in Egypt, 168; in Persia, 359; in
India, 400, 444, 500-501
Gan Ying (ga'n ying), Chinese statesman
(ca. 500 B.C.), 662 ^*.
Gandhara (gan-da'-ra), 392, 593-594*75^ "
Gandhari (gan'-da-re), 562, 570 . v \ ;y
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (pjm'-de,
mo'-han-das ka-ram-chand'), "Indian re-
former (1869- ), 391, 415, 421-422,
489*, 517, 519, 565, 581, 618, 614, 626-43*
I0l6 INDEX
Ganesha (ga-na'-sha), 509, 511
Ganges (gan'-jez) River, 393, 397, 436, 453,
464* 5°'» 5°*» 5". 603
Garbc, Richard, 536
Gardener, The, 620*
Gardens, in Egypt, 184; in Babylonia, 225;
in Persia, 378; in India, 481; in China, 641;
in Japan, 857-858, 859
Gardner Collection, Boston, 739
Gargi (gar'-gi), 401, 410, 533
Garrison, F. H., 531, 532
Garstang, John, 300, 302*
Gasur (ga-sobr'), 258*
"Gates of Paradise," 738
Gaudapada (gou'-da-pa-da), Indian religi-
ous commentator (ca. 780), 546
Gaugamela (gou-ga-me'-la), 385
Gauls, 60, 152
Gautama (gou'-ta-ma), see Buddha
Gautama (clan), 422
Gautier, Theophilc, French critic and man
of letters (1810-1872), 85, 96, 192
Gaza (ga'-za), 154, 160
Gcbel-cl-Arak (ga'-bel-el-a-rak'), 136, 146
Gcdrosia (g6-dro'-ze-a), 440
Geisha (ga-sha), 400, 862
Genesis, 219*, 300*, 301, 328, 329, 339-34°
Geneva, 323
Genghis Khan (jen'-giz kan'), Tartar con-
queror (1164-1227), 463, 464, 465, 763
Genjl (gcn-jc), Tale of, 862, 881-884, 891,
893
Genoa, 479, 760, 761^
Genroku (gcn-ro-kdo) Period (in Japan),
843, 88 1
Geography, in Babylonia, 258*; in China,
78i
Geometry, in Egypt, 179; in Babylonia,
256; in India, 528; in China, 781
Gcorg, Eugcn, 85
George III, King of Great Britain (1760-
1820), 769
George IV, King of Great Britain (1820-
1830), 609*
Gerar (je-rarO, 104
Germans, 58
Germany, 24, 92, 397, 806, 808, 809, 813, 917,
918, 920, 928
Ghazni (guz'-nd), 460
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, Italian sculptor (1378-
i455)> 738
Ghiyosu-d-din (ge-yo'-sddd-den'), Sultan of
Delhi (murdered 1501), 483*
Ghost worship, 63
Ghuri (gdo'-re), 460-461
Gibbon, Edward, English historian (1737-
1794), 292*, 578, 719
Gibraltar, 293, 358
Gideon, Judge of Israel (died ca. 1236 B.C.),
302
Gil Bias, 718
Gileah (giT-e-a), 304
Giles, H. A., English Sinologist (1846-1935),
640*, 653*
Gilgamesh (gil'-ga-mesh), 120, 235, 250-254,
261
Gilgamesh, epic of, 120, 132, 250-254, 261
Giotto (nickname of Angiolotto di Bon-
done), Italian painter (1276-1336), 589,
611
Gippsland, 85
Gita-Govinda (ge'-ta-go'-vm-da), 580, 591
Gitanjali (ge-tan'-ja-le), 620*
Gizch (gc'-ze), 140, 147
Gnosticism, 553
Go Daigo (go dl-go), Emperor of Japan
(1318-1339), 838
Goa (go'-a), 393, 469, 524
Gobi (go'-bc) Desert, 641, 761
God the Father, 64
Gods, multiplicity of, 59-64
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, German
poet (1749-1832), 141, 391*, 574, 577, 61 1,
669, 693, 868
Gold Coast, 43, 83, 925
Golden Calf, 309, 311
Golden Rule, 564, 670
Goliath (go-H'-ath), 305
Golkonda (gdl-kon'-da), 458
Gomorrah (go-ma'-ra), 311, 335
Good Hope, Cape of, 293, 919
"Good Mind," 367
"Gordian knot," 288*
Gordios, 288
Gorki, Alaxim (pen name of Aleksei Max-
imovich Pyeshkov), Russian novelist (1868-
),3!°
Gothic architecture, 509
Goto Saijiro (go-to sl-je-ro), Japanese pot-
ter (ca. 1664), 900-901
Gottingen, 249
Government, origins of, 21-23, 69; in Su-
meria, 126-127; in Egypt, 161-164; in
Babylonia, 230; in Assyria, 270-274; in
Judea, 306; in Persia, 359-364; in India,
443-445, 465-466; in China, 672-674, 684,
689, 695-697, 698-699, 700-701, 7:4-726,
795-802, 817; in Japan, 842, 846, 917-918,
935
INDEX
IOI7
Governor General of India, 487
Govinda (go'-vm-da) , Indian religious com-
mentator (ca. 800), 546
Gracchi, 19*
Grammar, 250, 556, 578
Granada, 606
Grand Canal (Tientsin-Hangchow), 765,
778
Granet, Marcel, 699*
Granicus (gra-ni'-cus), battle of the (334
B.C.), 373*, 383
Gray, Thomas, English poet (1716-1771),
«3
Great Britain, i, 391
Great Learning, 665, 667-668, 732, 866
Great Learning for Women, 869-870
Great Mother, 60, 288
Great Reform (in Japan), 833, 885
Great Spirit, 54
Great Wall, 695, 697, 701, 760, 761, 767, 778
Greater Vehicle, see Mahay ana Buddhism
Greco, El (Domcnico Theotocopuli), Greek
painter (1548-1625), 97, 903
Greco-Buddhist art, 593-594
Greece, 24*, 33, 61, 116, 117, 136, 137, 140,
141, 144, 152, 172, 185, 190, 197, 200, 215,
218, 226, 227, 264, 265, 288, 290, 293, 295,
299, 312, 329, 340, 349, 355, 362, 376, 379,
380, 383, 391*, 394, 400, 422, 449, 480, 532,
571, 647, 651, 739, 777, 892, 899
Greed, in primitive societies, 51-52
Greek (language), 406
Greeks, 47, 58, 60, 63, 64, 70, 85, 97, 106,
118*, 128, 159, 166, 179, 183, 193, 217, 218,
225, 240, 245*, 248, 256, 263, 269, 276, 279,
280, 287, 288, 293, 295, 358, 364, 365*, 366,
373, 380, 383, 384, 441, 450, 526, 527, 554,
561, 574
Greenland, 54, 85, 93
Gregorian calendar, 181
Gregory XIII (Ugo Buoncompagni), Pope
(1572-1585), 181
Grcsham's law, 759
Grihastha (grl-has'-ta), 522
Grimm's Law, 406*
Grotefend, Georg Friedrich, German schol-
ar (1775-1853). 249
Guaranis, 79
Guayaquil Indians, 66
Guaycurus, 50
Gubarrru (goo-bar'-roo), Babylonian hero,
262
Gudea (gob-da'-a), King of Lagash (ca.
2600 B.C.), 122. 128, 131, 134, 291
Guilds, in Assyria, 274; in Syria, 296; in
Persia, 377; in China, 777, 816; in Japan,
854
Gujarat (gob'-ja-raf), 478-479
Gumplowicz, Ludwik, Polish sociologist
(1838-1909), 23-24
Gunadhya (gob-na'-dya), Indian poet (ist
century), 579
Gunavarman (gob-na-var'-man), Indian sci-
entist, 45 2
Gupta (gobp'-ta) Dynasty, 450, 451, 452,
454, 481, 484, 487, 529, 575
Guru (gob'-rob), 522, 557, 660
Gutenberg, Johann, German "inventor" of
printing (i40o?-i468), 730
Gwalior (gwa'-lyar), 393, 599
Gyges (gi'-gez), King of Lydia (ca. 652
B.C.), 289
H
Habiru (ha-bc'-rob), 300; also see Jews
Hachimaro (ha-che-ma'-ro), youthful Japa-
nese hero (ca 1615), 849
Hadrian (Hadrianus Publius ^Elius), Roman
emperor (117-138), 364
Haifa (hi'-fa), 300
Hakai (ha-ki), 926
Hakuga (ha-kob-ga), 794*
Hakuseki Arai (ha-kdb-za-ke a'-ri), Japa-
nese scholar and historian (1657-1725),
865, 886-887
Halebid (ha'-la-bcd), 601
Halle, University of, 693
Hallstatt, 104
Halo, 59
Halys (hal-is) River, 286t
Hamadan (ha-ma-dan'), 350*
Hammer of Folly, 551
Hammurabi (ha-mdbr-a'-bc),King of Baby-
lonia (2123-2081 B.C.), 27, 28, 104, 120, 127,
219, 220, 221, 227, 228, 230, 232, 233, 246,
258, 270, 291, 301
Hammurabi, Code of, 27, 28, 127, 135, 219-
221, 230-232, 246-247, 264, 272, 286, 334,
338, 377
Han (han) (state), 695
Han Dynasty, 675, 698, 702, 728, 738, 739,
746. 755, 781, 786, 800
Han Fei (han fa), Chinese critic and essay-
ist (died 233 B.C.), 653*, 679
Han Kan (han kan), Chinese artist (ca.
73o), 753
Han Yii (han yii), Chinese essayist (768*
824), 7I9-72I» 7*3. 747-748
ioi8
INDEX
Hananiah (han-a-nT-a), Hebrew prophet
ca. 600 B.C.), 323
Hangchow (hang-chou'), 727, 761-762, 763,
765, 778, 815
Hanging Gardens, see Babylon
Hankampu (han-kam-pod), 886
Hanuman (ha'-noo-man), 402
Hanway, Jonas, English traveler (1712-
1786), 857*
Hao Shih-chiu (hou shi-je-oo'), Chinese
ceramic artist (ca. 1600), 757
Haoma (ho'-ma), 364
Hapuseneb (ha-pdo'-s6-neb), Egyptian archi-
tect (ca. 1500 B.C.), 192
Hara-kiri (ha-ra-ke-re) , 53, 502, 848-849
Harappa (ha-rap'-pa), 394
Hardie, James Keir, Scotch labor leader
(1856-1915), 499
Harem, in Egypt, 164!; in Babylonia, 225;
in Assyria, 275; in Judea, 300; in Persia,
374, 375; in India, 467, 472, 494; in China,
79^
Har-Megiddo (har-me-gid'-do) , 154, 321
Harmhab (harm'-hab), King of Egypt
(1346-1322 B.C.), 213
Harmodius, Athenian patriot (ca. 525 B.C.),
646
Haroun-al-Rashid (ha-rddn-ar-ra-shed), Ca-
liph of Bagdhad (786-809), 467, 532
Harpagus (har'-pa-gus) , Median general
(ca. 555 B.C.), 35*
Harri (ha'-rc), 286*
Harris Papyrus, 177
Harsha-charita (har'-sha-char'-i-ta), 579
Harsha-Vardhana (har'-sha-var'-da-na), In-
dian king (606-648), 452-453* 454» 5°3» 576
Hart, Sir Robert, Irish statesman in China
1835-1911), 802*
Harunobu Suzuki (ha-rob-no-boo sdo-zdb-
ke), Japanese engraver (1718-1770), 907,
908
Harvard Library Expedition, 317*
Harvest festivals, 65-66
Harvey, William, English anatomist (1578-
1657), 182, 531
Hassan (has-san'). mosque of, Cairo, 607
Hastings, Warren, Governor General of
India (1732-1818), 609*, 613, 614
Hathor (hath'-6r), 185, 198 199
Hatshepsut (ha-chep'-sut), Queen of Egypt
(1501-1479 B.C.), 140, 141, 143, I53-I54*
165, 185, 188, 189-190, 300, 302*
Havell, E. B., 415, 452
Hawaii, 37, 38, 809
Hayashi Kazan (ha-ya-she ra-zan), Japanese
essayist (1583-1657), 866-867, 871, 877
Hearn, Lafcadio, Irish author and educator
(1850-1904), 831, 840, 844, 845, 921, 9231
Hebrew language, 73
Hebrews, 300; see Jews
Hedin, Sven Anders, 506
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, German
philosopher (1770-1831), 410
Heian (ha'yan) Epoch (in Japan), 834, 855
Heidelberg, 92
Heine, Hcinrich, German poet (1799-1856),
339» 5'6*
Helen of Troy, 570
Heliopolis, 152, 162, 203*
Hellespont, 286, 358, 383
Henothcism, 312
Henry IV, 889
Henry VIFs Chapel, Westminster Abbey,
599
Henry VIII, King of England (1509-1547),
457
Hcpat (ha-paf), 286f
Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (576-4808.0.),
434» 533* 622
Herat (hcr-af), 227
Hercules, 294
Herder, Johann Gottfried vont German
philosopher and man of letters (1744-
1803), 391*
Herding, in primitive societies, 8, 24, 34;
in Egypt, 156; in India, 399
Here, 62
Hermes, 179*, 277*
Hermes Trismcgistus, 179*; see Thoth
Herodotus, Greek historian (ca. 484-425
B.C.), 118*, 138, 139, 147-148, 150, 160, 184,
20I-2O2, 204-205, 224, 244-245, 246, 248,
289-290, 292, 293, 350, 352, 353, 358, 369,
374, 478, 494, 578, 719
Hesiod, Greek poet (ca. 800 B.C.), 329^:
Hesire (he-zi'-ra), Egyptian prince, 189
Hetairai, 490, 862
Hezekiah (he-ze-ki'-a) , King of Judah (ca.
720 B.C.), 309, 317
Hidari Jingaro (he-da-re jing-a-ro), Japan-
ese sculptor (1594-1634), 893-894
Hidetada (he-da-ta-da), Japanese shogun
(1605-1623), 843
Hideyori (he-de-yor-e), Japanese shogun
(ca. 1600), 841
Hideyoshi (hl-de-yo-she), Japanese sbogun
(1581-1598), 838-841, 889, 895, 898, 908,
INDEX
Hien-yang (he-an-yangO, 696
Hierapolis (hl-er-ap'-o-lis), 297
Hieroglyphics, 144-145, 172-173
Highways, in Egypt, 160; in Babylonia, 227,
228; in Persia, 358; in India, 444-445, 480,
77?
Hilkiah (hfl-ki'-a) , Hebrew religious teacher
(ca. 620 B.C.) » 320
Hillel (hfl'-el), Jewish Rabbi and Talmudist
(ca. no B.C.), 310, 670
Himalayas (hi-ma'-la-yaz) , 91, 392, 393, 454,
55*» 576
Hinayana (he-na-ya'-na) Buddhism, 503,
5°4* 597
Hincks, Edward, Irish Egyptologist (1791-
1866), 118*
Hindi (hin'de), 555
Hindu, meaning of, 392*
Hindu Rush (hm'-doo kdosh'), 392, 440
Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies,
'99*
Hinduism, 507-525
Hindus, 193, 286*, 365, 366, 391-633
Hindustan (hm-ddo-stan') , meaning of, 393
Hippocrates, Greek physician (460-357 B.C.),
287*, 782
Hippocratic oath, 182
Hirado (he-ra-do), 90 1
Hiram, King of Tyre (fl. 950 B.C.), 294, 295,
306
Hirata (he-ra-ta), Japanese scholar (ca.
1810), 875
Hiroshigc (he-ro-she-ge), Japanese engraver
1797-1858), 907, 910
Hishikawa Moronobu (hc-she-ka-wa mo-ro-
no-bob), Japanese painter (1618-1694) ,907
Historical Record, 718
History, in Sumcria, 132; in Egypt, 178; in
Babylonia, 250; in Assyria, 277; in Judea,
339-340; in India, 578-579; in China, 718-
719; in Japan, 885-887
History of Chinese Philosophy, 821
History of India, 579
History of the True Succession of the Di-
vine Monarchs, 886
Hitomaro (hc-to-ma-ro), Japanese poet
(died 737), 878
Hitopadesha (hi-to-pa-da'-sha), 578
Hittites, 158, 212, 266, 286-287, 288, 310, 397t
Hiung-nu, see Hsiung-nu
Hivitcs, 310
Hizakurige (he-za-kdb-re-ge), 885, 891
Hizen (he-zcn), ooo, opi
Ho Chi-chang (ho je-jang), Chinese states-
man (fl. 725), 705
Hoang-ho (hwang-ho) River, 641, 776
Hobbcs, Thomas, English philosopher
(1588-1679), 544*, 687, 874
Hojo (ho-jo) Regency (in Japan), 837-838
Hojoki (ho-jo-kc), 852-889
Hokkaido (hok-kl-do), 928
Hokku (hok-koo), 880, 881, 926
Hokusai, Katsuhika (hok-66-sa-e\ kat-soo-
he-ka), Japanese engraver (1760-1849),
885, 902, 907, 908-910, 912
Holi (ho'-lc), 501
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, M.D., American
writer (1809-1894), 81
Holy Family (Raphael), 759
Holy Sepulchre, 120
Homer, 16, 62, 106, 391, 400, 410, 712
Honan (ho-nan), 641, 642, 645, 698, 738, 739,
755' 772
Hongkong (hong-kong), 804, 805, 806, 809,
810
Honjo (hon-jo), 830
Honolulu, 809
Hor, Egyptian architect (ca. 1400 B.C.), 206*
Horiuji (hor-e-do-je), 738, 833, 894-895, 897,
903
Horus (hor-us), 198, 200-201
Hosea (ho-ze'-a or ho-za'-a), Hebrew proph-
et (ca. 785-725 B.C.), 317, 336
Hospitality, in primitive societies, 54
Hotcl-Dieu (Paris), 81
Hotoke (ho-to-ka), 840
Hottentots, 6, 42, 43, 52, 65, 85
Hotto (hot-to), Japanese statesman (died
1651), 847
Hoyshaleshwara (hoi-shal-ash'-wa-ra) Tem-
ple, 60 1
Hrozny, Frederic, 286
Hsia (shc-ah') Dynasty, 644
Hsia Kuci (shc-ah' gway), Chinese artist
(1180-1230), 751
Hsianfu (she-an'-foo), 808
Hsieh Ho (shc-a-ho), art theorist (6th cen-
tury), 592*, 752
Hsien Feng (she-an fung), Chinese emperor
(1851-1862), 806
Hsien Tsung (she-an dzoong), Chinese em-
peror (806-821), 779
Hsing-shan (shing-shan) Temple, 750
Hsinking (shin-jing), 920!
Hsiung-nu (she-oong-nob), 701
Hsu Hsing (shoo shing), Chinese radical
(ca. 300 B.C.), 685
Hsuan (shwan), King of Ch*i, 683, 685-686
IO2O
INDEX
Hsuan Tsung (shwan dzoong), see Ming
Huang
Hsiin-tze (shiin-dzu), apostle of evil (ca.
305-235 B.C.), 687-688
Hu Shih (hdo-shi), Chinese literary re-
former (1891- ), 821-822
Hua To (hwa do), Chinese medical writer
(3rd century,) 782
Huan (hwan), Duke of Ch'i (685-643 B.C.),
645-646
Huang Ti (hwang de), Chinese emperor
(2697-2597 B.C.), 643, 659, 660-661
Huber, Sir William, British judge in India
(early i9th century), 497
Huen (hwan) Mountain, 717
Hughes, Charles Evans, American statesman
and jurist (1862- ), 929, 930
Hui Sze (wha-dzu), Chinese philosopher
(3rd century), 677
Hui Tsung ( wha dzoong) , Chinese emperor
(1101-1125), 727, 750, 751, 752, 753, 795
Huldah (hobl'-da), Hebrew prophetess (ca.
625 B.C.), 333
Human sacrifice, 66-67; in Sumeria, 128; in
Assyria, 272; in Phoenicia, 295; in Syria,
297; in Judea, 311, 315
Humanism, 730
Humayun (hob-ma-ydon'), Mogul emperor
(1530-1542; i555-!556). 464. 468. 472. 607
Humboldt, Fricdrich Heinrich Alexander,
Baron von, German scholar and traveler
(1769- 1 859), 462
Humboldr, Karl Wilhclm, Baron von, Ger-
man statesman and philologist (1767-1835),
565
Hume, David, Scotch philosopher and his-
torian (1711-1776), 418, 434
Hung Hsiu-ch'iian (hoong sc-db chwan),
T'ai-p'ing leader (died 1864), 805
Hung Wu (hoong woo), Chinese emperor
(1386-1309), 686
Huns, 152, 452, 454. 459. 59'. 695. 7™
Hunting, in primitive societies, 6-7, 24, 30,
33; in Babylonia, 226; in Assyria, 226, 229,
278, 279; in Persia, 378; in India, 477
Hyaku-nin-isshu (hya-kdo-nm-ish-ob), 870-
880
Hydaspes (hl-das'-pez) River, 440
Hyderabad (hi'-dcr-abad), (city), 393
Hyderabad (state), .589, 600-601
Hygiene, in Egypt, 183-184; in Judea, 331;
in Persia, 373-374; »" India, 497, 498, 521;
in China, 782, 855
Hyksos (hik'-sos), the, 24*, 152, 154, 160,
166, 177, 123, 227, 300, 301
Hymn to the Sun, 178, 206-210
Hypatia, Greek philosopher and mathema-
tician (.3-415) , 216
Hypnotism, 532
Hystaspes (his-tas'-pez), father of Darius I
(ca. 550 B.C.), 364, 365*
lamblichus (I-am'-bli-kws), Syrian philoso-
pher (fl. 325), 179*
Iberians, 10
Ibrahim (ib'-ra-hem') II, Sultan of Delhi
(1517-1526), 464
Ibsen, Henrik, Norwegian poet and drama-
tist (1828-1906), 58, 692
Ice Age, 91*
Iceland, 107
Ichikawa (cch-e-ka-wa), Japanese philoso-
pher (i7th century), 865
l-Ching (e-jing), 650-651, 665, 785
Ictinus, Greek architect (fl. 450 B.C.), 141,
895
Igorots, 45
Ikhnaton (ik'-na-ton), see Amenhotcp IV
Hi (e-le), 798
Iliad, 250, 310, 561, 564, 891
Imari-yaki (e-ma'-re-ya-kc), ooo
Imhotcp (Im-ho'-tep), Egyptian physician,
architect, and statesman (ca. 3150 B.C.),
'47. 192
Imitation of Christ, 570
In Memoriam, 878
Inana-yoga (in-a'-na-yo'-ga), 522
Inazo Nitobe (i-na-tso ne-to-be), Japanese
publicist (died 1933), 847*
Incas, 41
Incest, in Egypt, 164; in Babylonia, 231; in
India, 401
India, 34, 47, 60, 61, 93, 94, 09*, 103, 104,
108, 116, 117, 125, 144, 159, 199*, 206, 222*,
227, 247, 274*, 286, 292, 312*, 329, 353,
355. 358, 359*. 3<53. 372. 385. 391-633. 642,
65*t 736» 744. 779. 786. 8°4. 8°5. 875, 892,
928
Indian, meaning of, 392*
Indian National Congress, 623, 625, 626
Indian Ocean, 703
Indians, American, 2, 5-6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 22, 23, 27, 32, 33, 35, 41, 42, 45, 48,
49. 53.. 54. 56, 60, 61,73, 77, 83
Indo-China, 604, 698, 767, 806, 928
Indo-Europeans, 285, 286*, 291, 350, 397$
Indra (m'-dra), 285, 397!, 402, 403, 507
Indus (in'-dus) River, 355, 393, 397$, 440,
463
INDEX
102 1
Industrial Revolution, 20*, 70, 94, 96, 150,
274. 333. 4?8» 480, 516. 612, 623, 769, 803,
916-922
Industry, 11-16, 934; in Sumcria, 124-125; in
Egypt, 157-161; in Babylonia, 227; in As-
syria, 274; in Persia, 357-358; in India, 400,
479; in China, 776-778, 815; in Japan, 919-
920
Ineni (i-na-ne), Egyptian architect (ca. 1530
B.C.), 192
Infant Jesus (Rcni), 759
Infanticide, in primitive societies, 50
Initiation rites, 75
Ink, 171
Inkyo (m'-kyo), Emperor of Japan (412-
453), 892
Innini (m'-nm-c), 127
Inouye, Marquis Kaoru (in-6b-ye, ka-6-
rob), Japanese statesman (1839-1915), 916,
930
Inquisition, Holy, 469, 524
Inro (in-ro), 893
Instructions of Ptah-hotep, 193-194
Intcrglacinl Stages, 91*
International Exposition of Persian Art,
London (1931), 378*
Ionia, 264, 290, 355
lonians, 479
Iphigenia, 66, 297
Ipuwer (ip'-u-wer), 194, 195
Iran (c-ra'n'), 356; see Persia
Iranian Plateau, 117
Iraq (S-rak') 117
Iraq Expedition of the University of Chi-
cago, 274*
Iraq Museum, Baghdad, 134*
Ireland, 58
Irish, 10
Iron Age, 104
Iroquois Indians, 14, 22, 32, 62
Isaac, Hebrew patriarch, 66, 297, 337
Isaiah (I-za'-a), Hebrew prophet (fl. 720
B.C.), 210, 235, 262, 301, 312, 317-320, 324,
325-327, 334% 34'» 3^5. 4"*
Ise (I-se), 880
Ishii, Viscount Kikujiro (e-she'-e, ke-kdo-
je-ro), Japanese statesman (1866- ),
929
Ishtar (ish'-tar), 60, 123, 127, 200, 234, 235-
236, 238-239, 247, 251, 253, 256, 266, 294-
295» 34i
Ishvara (esh'-va-ra) , 548, 550
Ishvara Krishna (csh'-va-ra krish'-na), In-
dian religious teacher (5th century), 536*
Isin (e'-z!n), 123
Isis (i'-sis), 185, 200-20 1
Islam (is-lam'), 35. 39» *47» 4^3. 4^9-470, 524
Israel (iz'-ra-el), 315*; also see Jews
Issus (is-sus), 373*, 383
Italians, 279, 397
Italy, 92, 97, 99*, 108, 152, 215, 293, 555, 695,
730, 821
Ito, Marquis Hirobumi (e-to, fte-ro-bdb-
me), Japanese statesman (1840-1909), 916,
9*7
Ito Jinsai (e-to jm-si), Japanese philosopher
(1627-1705), 872-873
Ito Togai (e-to to-gi), Japanese philosopher
(1670-1736), 873
Ittagi (it-ta-ge), 600-601
lus prima noctis (yws pre'-ml nok'tis), 38,
245, 486*
Iwasa Matabci (e-wa-sa ma-ta-ba), Japanese
painter (1578-1650), 907
lyemitsu (^-ye-mit-sdo), Japanese shogun
(1623-1650,843,847,895
lyenari (e-ye-na-re), Japanese shogun (1787-
1836), 862
lyenobu (e-ye-no-boo), Japanese shogun
(1709-1712), 886
lyesada (e-ye-sa-da), Japanese shogun
(1853-1858), 915
lyeyasu (e-y6-ya-soo), Japanese shogun
(1603-1616), 838, 841-843, 846-847, 849,
850, 866, 877, 886, 889, 894, 895, 905, 914
lyeyoshi (e-ye'-yosh-e), Japanese shogun
(1837-1852), 915
Izanagi (e-za-na-ge) , 829, 875, 892
Izanami (e-za-na-me), 829, 875, 892
Jabali (ja'-ba-le), 461
Jacob, Hebrew patriarch, 41, 310, 314*, 334,
33<$, 34<>
Jacobi, H., 419*
Jacobins, 19*
Jade, 737
Jagannath Puri (ja'-gan-nat-poor'i), 599
Jahanara (ja'-ha-nar'-a), daughter of Shah
Jehan (ca. 1658), 474
Jaimini (ji'-min-i), Indian religious teacher
(4th century, B.C. ?), 545-546
Jainism (jin'-ism), 419, 420-422, 459, 469,471,
508*, 520, 529, 534, 597, 598, 599, 600, 601,
626
Jaipur (jl'-poor), 393, 585
James I, King of England and VI of Scot-
land d567[S], i6o3[E]-i625), 317
IO22
INDEX
James, William, American psychologist
(1842-1910), 535
Jamsetpur (jam-shed-poor*), 622
Janak(a) (ja'-na-ka), 414, 567-568
Japan, 3, 42, 98, 103, 162, 166, 184, 192, 312*,
449, 450, 501, 504, 506, 577, 594, 595, 596,
602, 626, 633, 646, 730, 736, 738, 752, 753,
757. 773. 799% 806, 807, 808, 809, 810, 813,
814, 815*, 829-933
Japan, Emperor of, 59
Japanese, 53, 640
Jastrow, Morris, 343*
Jataka (ja'-ta-ka) books, 423, 578
Java, 65, 92, 391, 451, 594, 595, 602, 603
Jaxartes (jax-ar'-tez) River, 353
Jayadeva (ja-ya-da'-va), Indian poet 491,
580
Jefferson, Thomas, President of the United
States (1743-1826), 304
Jehangir (ja-han'-ger), Mogul emperor
(1605-1627), 471-473. 48°. 4&3*. 579. 59".
608, 609
Jehoiakim (j£-hoi'-a-kim), King of Judah
(608-597 B.C.), 321
Jehol (reh-ho[l]), 806, 931
Jehovah (j6-ho'-va), see Yahveh
Jenghiz Khan, see Genghis Khan
Jeremiah, Hebrew prophet (fl. 600), 312,
315, 322-324, 422*
Jericho, 300, 302*
Jerusalem, 267, 298, 305-306, 307, 314, 315,
316, 317, 321, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327-328.
334*, 348, 384, 606
Jesuits, 94, 469, 768, 788, 840, 877
Jewelry, in primitive societies, 86; in Su-
meria, 119, 130; in Egypt, 169-170, 191-192;
in Babylonia, 254; in Assyria, 265, 278; in
Persia, 378; in India, 499, 585; in China,
736, 737
Jewish Encyclopedia, 306*
Jews, 62, 117, 118, 213, 217, 218, 234, 235,
236, 242, 245, 263, 267, 268, 284, 287, 297,
298, 299-349, 358, 367, 469, 508*
Jezebel (jez'-S-bel), wife of King Ahab, (ca.
875-850 B.C.), 317*
Jimmu (jim-mob), emperor of Japan (660-
585 B.C.), 873
Jmas (ji'-nas),420
Jmtoshotoki (jin-to-sho-to-ke), 886
Jippensha Ikku (jdp-pen-sha Ik-do), Japan-
ese novelist (died 1831), 885
Jizo (je-zo), 864
Job (job), 259, 261, 343-34*. 3*7
Joffe (ydf-fa), A., Russian diplomat (died
ca. 1928), 812
Johnson, Samuel, English author and lex-
icographer (1709-1784), 2*, 681
Johur (j6'-hdor)L456, 495
Jojaku (jo-ka-koo), Japanese woodcarver
(i3th century), 897*
Jokai (jo-kl), Japanese woodcarver (i3th
century), 897*
Jonathan, son of King Saul (ca. 1010 B.C.),
304-305
Jones, Sir William, English Orientalist
(1746-1794), 391*, 406, 574, 578*
Jonson, Ben, English poet and dramatist
(1574-1637), 631
Jordan River, 298
Joseph, Hebrew patriarch (ca. 1900 B.C.),
340
Josephine, Empress of the French (1763-
1814), 246
Josephus, Flavius, Jewish historian (37-96?),
'79. 299, 30't, 307. 383
Joshua (josh'-u-a), Hebrew leader (died ca.
1425 B.C.), 302
Josiah (jo-sl'-a), King of the Jews (641-610
B.C.), 203*, 320-321, 328, 333, 364
Juangs, 8
Jubilee, 337-338
Judah (kingdom), 315, 317, 321, 322, 323,
329
Judca, 68, 218, 299-349, 422*, 640, 651
Judges (of Israel), 304
Juggernaut, 520*
Julian calendar, 181
Juma Masjid (ja'-me mas'-jed), 608
Jumna (jum'-na) River, 393, 460, 474, 479,
521
Jupiter, 402
Ka (ka), 148, 149,^150, 202
Kaapiru (ka'-pe-roo), Egyptian official, 186;
also see Sheik-el-Beled
Kabir (ka-bcr'), Indian poet (1440-1518),
470, 523, 582-583
Kabuki Shibai (ka-boo-ke she-bi), 890-891
Kabul (ka'-bdol), 227, 392, 450, 464
Kadesh (ka'-desh), 213
Kaempfer, Engelbrecht, German botanist
and traveler (1651-1716), 853, 862
Kaffirs, 35, 42, 45, 53, 64, 65, 75
Kaga (ka-ga), 900, 901
Kaga no-Chiyo (ka-ga no-che-yo), Lady,
Japanese poet (1703-1775), 858, 880
Kagawa, Toyohiko (ka-ga-wa to-yo-he-ko),
Japanese socialist, 921
K'aifeng (ki-fung), 727
Kaikcyi (kl'-ka-e), 568
Kailasha (ki-lash'-a) Temple, 601
Kakiemon (ka-ke-ya-mon), Japanese potter
(ca. 1650), 900
Kala-at-Shcrghat (ka-lat'-shar'-gat), see
Ashur (city)
Kalakh (ka-lakh'), 265, 266, 278, 279, 280
Kalgan (kal-gan), 931
Kaihana (kai'-ha-na) , Indian historian, 579
Kali (ka'-le), 200, 499, 501, 509, 511, 519,
520, 617, 625
Kalidasa (ka-le-da'-sa) , Indian poet (ca.
400), 391*, 451, 452, 572, 574-576, 578
Kalingas (ka'-lm-gaz), 446
Kali-yuga (ka'-le-ydo'-ga), 513
Kallcn, Horace M., 343*
Kalpa (kal'-pa), 513
Kamakura (ka-ma-kdo-ra), 450, 830, 837,
892, 804, 895, 898, 905
Kamakura Bakufu, 837
Kamasutra (ka-ma-s<56'-tra), 490
Kamatari (ka-ma-ta-re), Japanese statesman
(fl. 645), 833
Kambinana, 57
Kamchadals (kam'-cha-dalz) , 45, 50
Kamchatka (kam-chat'-ka), 896
Kami (ka-me), 840
Kamo no-Chomei (ka-mo no-cho-ma), Jap-
anese essayist (1154-1216), 852, 888-889
Kamo (ka-mo) Temple, 888
Kanada (ka'-na-da), Indian philosopher
(date unknown), 528, 529, 536, 546
Kanarak (ka-nar'-ak), 599
Kanarese (ka'-na-rcz), 555
Kanauj (ka-nouj'), 4521 453
Kandahar (kan'-da-har) , 392
Kandy (kan'-de), 450, 506, 585, 603
Kang Teh (ka'ng da), 931; also see P'u Yi
Kangakusha (kan-ga-koo'-sha) scholars, 874
K'ang-hsi (kang-she), Chinese emperor
(1662-1722), 736, 752, 758, 767-768, 771,
788% 795
Kangra (kang-ra), 591
Kamshka (kan'-ish-ka),Kingof the Kushans
(ca. 120), 450-451, 504, 506, 571, 594, j86
Kano Masanobu (ka-no ma-sa-no-boo),
Japanese painter (died 1490), 905
Kano Motonobu (ka-no mo-to-no-boo),
Japanese painter (1476-1559), 005
Kano School (of Japanese painting), 843,
902*, 005-906
Kano Tanyu (tan-yob), Japanese painter
1602-1674), 905
Kano Yeitoku (ya-to-koo), Japanese archi-
tect (1543-1590), 905
INDEX 1023
Kansu (gan-sob), 755
Kant, Immanuel, German philosopher (1724-
1804), 346, 410, 510, 516", 538, 547, 549,
55i*. 55*. 67°
Kantara (kan'-ta-ra), 154
Kanthaka (kan'-ta-ka), 426
Kao Tsu (gou dzoo), Chinese emperor
(206-194 B.C.), 698
Kao Tsu, Chinese Emperor (618-627), 702
Kapila (ka'-pi-la), Indian Sankhya philoso-
pher (ca. 500 B.C.), 53?H>4i» 54$, 547
Kapilavastu (ka'-pi-la-vas'-too), 422, 423, 436
Karachi (ka-ra'-che), 393, 594
Karakhan (ka-ra-kanOf Leo, Russian diplo-
mat, 812
Karduniash (kar-ddb'-ne'-ash), 223*
Karle (kar'-U), 597, 598
Karma (kar'-ma), 427, 435, 509, 514-516,
550, 553
Karma-yoga (kar'-ma yo'-ga), 522
Karnak (kaV-nak), 140, 142-143, 144, 145,
152, 153, 185, 189, 191, 206, 214, 379, 744;
buildings at: Festival Hall of Thutmose
III, 143, 145; Hypostyle Hall, 143, 213;
obelisks of Queen Hatshepsut, 143, 153;
Promenade of Thutmose III, 143, 155;
Temple of Amon, 142; Temple of Ptah,
'43
Kartikeya (kar-ti-ka'-ya), 507
Kashgar (kash'-gar'), 761
Kashmir (kash'-mer'), 392, 479, 585
Kassitcs (kas'-sits), 152, 222, 223, 227, 248,
257, 266, 397
Kasturbai (kas-toor'-bi), wife of M. K.
Gandhi, 628
Katakana (ka-ta-ka-na) script, 876*
Katayama, Sen (ka-ta-ya-ma, sen), Japanese
communist (died 1933), 921
Katha Upanishad (ka-ta' db-pan'-i-shad),
405
Kathxi (ka-te'-i), 495
Kathasaritzagara (ka-ta'-sa-rit-sa'-ga-ra), 579
Kaushitaki (kou'-shi-ta-ki) U pants had, 518
Kautilya Chanakya (kou'-tH-ya cha-nak'-
ya), Indian statesman (ca. 322-298 B.C.),
44^.443
Ke K'ang (ka ka'ng), Confucian disciple
(ca. 500 B.C.), 672
Ke Loo (ka loo), Confucian disciple (ca.
500 B.C.), 667
Kea Kwei (ka-ya kwa), Chinese scholar (ist
century), 665
Keats, John, English poet (1795-1821), 611,
7«3
IO24 INDEX
Kciki (ka-k£), last of the Tokugawa sho-
guns (1866-1868), 916
Keion (ki-on), Japanese painter, (ca. 1250),
904
Keiser, Aabregt de, Dutch ceramic artist
dyth century), 900
Keith, Sir Arthur, 99
Kenzan (ken-zan), Japanese potter (1663-
1743), 900
Kepler, Johann, German astronomer (1571-
1630), 60
Keriya (ka'-rS-ya),- see Peyn
Ket (ket), 201
Keyserling, Count Hermann, 455!, 534, 554*,
639
Khafre (ka'-fra), King of Egypt (3067-3011
B.C.), 148, 150, 1 86, 187
Kharosthi (ka-rosh'-te) script, 556
Khekheperre-Sonbu (ke-ke-par'-rc son-boo),
Egyptian scholar (ca. 2150 B.C.)* 178
Khi-yiian (ke-e-an), 688
Khmers (kmarz), 604-605, 606
Khnum (knoom), 185
Khnumhotep (knobm-ho'-tep), King of
Egypt (ca. 2180 B.C.), 185, 190
Khorassan (ko-ras-san'), 761
Khordah Avesta (kor'-da a-vcs'-ta), 365^
Khorsabad (kor-sa-bad') , 266*, 279, 280
Khotan (ko-tan'), 594, 602, 761
Khu (kdb), 688-9
Khosrou (kos-rdo') II, King of Persia (590-
628), 456
Khufu (kdo'-fdo), King of Egypt (3098-
3075 B.C.), 147, 149, 150, 291, 395
Khusru (kus-rob) , son of Jehangir (ca.
1620), 472
Kiaochow (jyou-jo'), 806
Kimimaro (ke-me-ma-ro), Japanese sculptor
(fl. 747), 897-898
King James Version, 317, 341
Kings (book), 339
Kingship, 22; in Sumeria, 126; in Egypt,
163-164; in Babylonia, 230, 232-233, 234; in
Assyria, 266, 273; in Persia, 360-361; in
India, 442-443, 482-483; in China, 797-79®;
in Japan, 834
Kiritsubo (ke-rSt-sob-bo) , 882
Kirti Shri Raja Singha (ker'-ti shre ra'-ja
singMia), King of Ceylon (i8th century),
603
Kish (kish), 118, 120, 125, 127, 221, 395*
Kitabatake (kit-a-ba-ta-ka), Japanese schol-
ar and historian (fl. 1334), 886
Kitans (W-tanz'), 721-722, 760*
Kitasato, Baron Shibasaburo (kit-a-sa-to,
she-ba-sa-bdo-ro), Japanese scientist (1856-
), 924
Kitchen middens, 98, 101
Kiyonaga (ke-yo-na-ga), Japanese engraver
(1742-1814), 908
Knemhotep (knem-ho'-tep) , Egyptian dwarf,
i87
Kobe (ko-ba), 920, 921
Kobo Daishi (ko-bo dl-she), Japanese saint
and artist, founder of Shintoism (9th cen-
tury), 864, 897*, 903
Kohat (ko-haf), 624t
Koheleth (ko-hcT-eth), 346*
Kohl, 169
Kojiki (ko-je-ke), 874-875, 885
Kokei (ko-ka), Japanese woodcarver (i2th
century), 897*
Koken (ko-kcn), Empress of Japan (749-
759J 7<55-77o), 861
Kokinshu (ko-km-sh(K)), 87»t, 879
Kolben, Peter, German naturalist (1675-
1726), 52
Konin (ko-mn), Emperor of Japan (770-
781), 850
Koran (kor-an'), 463, 469, 470, 474, 476,
565, 609, 616
Korea (kor-c'-a), 506, 594, 602, 698, 705,
73<>> 767, 773* 806, 829, 831, 832, 833, 839,
853> 875, 877*, 892, 894, 899, 903, 918, 919,
923, 924, 927*
Korin, Ogata (ko-rm 6-ga-ta), Japanese
painter (1661-1716), 900, 906
Korvouva, 57
Kosala (ko'-sa-la), 567, 568, 569; also see
Oudh
Kose no-Kanaoka (ko-sa no-ka-na-6-ka) ,
Japanese painter (ca. 950), 903
Kotsukc no Suke (kot-sob-ka no sdb-ka),
Japanese noble (died 1703), 848-849
Kow-tow, 713
Koyetsu (ko-yet-soo), Japanese painter (ca.
1600), 906
Koyetsu-Korin School (of Japanese paint-
ing), 906
Koyosan (ko-yo-san), 864
Krishna (krish'-na) (god), 403, 507-508, 511,
552, 564, 565-566, 570, 580, 617*, 625
Krishna (tribe), 403
Krishna deva Raya (krish'-na da'-va ra'-ya),
King of Viiayanagar (1509-1529), 457, 458
Kroch, Adolf, 893*
Kshatriyas (ksha'-tri-yaz), 359*, 398, 399,
419, 424, 455, 487, 565, 567
INDEX
IO25
Kuan Ching (gwan jing), Prime Minister
of Ts'i (fl. 683-640 B.C.), 645-646, 790
Kuang Hsu (gwang shoo), Chinese emperor
(1875-1908), 807, 810
Kuan-yin (gwan-yin), 740, 751, 786
Kublai Khan (kob'bli khan), Chinese em-
peror (1269-1295), 604, 606, 721, 742, 761,
763-766, 767, 777, 778, 779, 790, 837, 895
Kubus, 21
Kukis, 67
Kumara (koo-ma'-ra), King of Assam (ca.
630), 454
Kumazawa Banzan (koo-ma-za-wa ban-zan) ,
Japanese philosopher (1619-1691), 871-872,
877
K'ung (koong) (family), 659
K'ung Chi (kobng je), Chinese sage, grand-
son of Confucius (ca. 470 B.C.), 665-666,
676-677
K'ung Ch'iu (koong che-oo'), see Con-
fucius
Kung Sun Lung (goong soon lobng), Chi-
nese sage (ca. 425 B.C.), 677, 679
K'ung Tao-fu (kdong dou foo), Chinese
diplomat (fl. 1031), 721-722
K'ung-fu-tze (kobng-foo-dzu), see Con-
fucius
Kuo Hsi (gwo-she), Chinese painter (born
iioo), 750
Kuo K'ai-chih (gwo-kl-jih), Chinese painter
(fl. 364), 746-747
Kuo Tsi-i (gwo dze-e), Chinese general (fl.
Knowintang (gwo-mm-dang) , 817
Kurdistan (koor-di-stan'), 350
Kurds (koordz), 266
Kurna (kobr'-na), 118
Kurral (kobr'-ral), 581-582
Kurus (kob'-rooz), 561-562, 565
Kushans (kdo'-shanz), 450, 504
Kutani (koo-ta-nc), 900, 901
Kutb-d Din Aibak (koof-oob-ood den
I'bak), Sultan of Delhi (1206-1210), 461,
607
Kutb-Minar (koot'-oob ml-nar'), 607
Kuyunjik (kob-ydon'- jik) , see Nineveh
Kuznctzk (kobz-nyetsk'), 932
Kwannon (kwan-non), 833, 864
Kyogen (kyo-gen), 889
Kyoto (kyo-to), 749*, 834, 835, 840, 852-
853, 855, 860, 865*, 866, 872, 877, 880, 888,
894, 895, 898, 900, 902, 903, 905, 906, 910
Kyoto, University of, 926
Kyushu (kyoo-shdb), 928
La Fontaine (la f6n-ten), Jean de, French
fabulist (1621-1695), 175
La Tene, 104
Laban (la'-ban), Jacob's father-in-law, 41,
310
Lacquer, 73*737. «94
Lagash (la'-gash), 118, 120, 121, 122, 127,
129
Lahore (la-hor'), 392, 472, 594, 614
Lake dwellers, the, 98-99, 101, 103
Lake of the Deeds of Rama, 581
Lakshman (laksh'-man), 569
Lakshmi (laksh-me'), 509
Lalitavistara (la'-le-ta-vis'-ta-ra), 423*
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste dc Monet, Chevalier
de, French naturalist (1744-1829), 538
Lamentations, 324
Lancashire, 920
Landecho, Spanish sailor (fl. 1506), 843*
Lander, Richard, English traveler (1804-
I835>. 43
Landor, Walter Savage, English man of let-
ters (1775-1864), 683-684
Language, 72-73; in primitive societies, 74;
in Sumeria, 118*; in Egypt, 145, 172-173;
in Babylonia, 249-250; in Assyria, 266; in
Judea, 303; in Persia, 356-357; in India,
39i*i 4°5-4°6» 555-556; in China, 74, 771-
773; in Japan, 876-877
Lansing, Robert, American statesman (1864-
1928), 929
Lao-tse (lou'-dzu), Chinese sage (604-517
B.C.), 77, 422*, 429, 651, 652-658, 662, 663,
670, 677, 684, 689, 690-693, 772, 785, 786
Laplace, Pierre Simon, French astronomer
and mathematician (1749-1827), 527, 538
Larsa (lar'-sa), 118, 123, 234
Last Judgment (Michelangelo), 749
Last Supper (Da Vinci), 97, 590% 749
Latin (language), 406
Latourette, K. S., 801*
Lauriya (16r'-£-ya), 596
Laussel, 97
Law, 135; in primitive societies, 25-29; in
Sumeria, 120-121, 127; in Egypt, 161-162;
in Babylonia, 135, 219, 220-221, 230-232;
in Assyria, 272; in the Hittite Empire,
287; in Judea, 3*8-339; in Persia, 361, 374;
in India, 444, 483-488, 494, 495; in China,
646-647, 7p7
Lazarus, 6 14
Le Sage, Alain Rene, French novelist and
dramatist (1668-1747), 885
1026
INDEX
League of Nations, 22, 931
League of the Iroquois, 22
Leah (le'-a), one of Jacob's wives, 41, 336
Lebanon (leb'-a-nun), 154, 292, 296, 761
Ledoux, L. V., 906*
Legalists, 674-675
Legge, James, British orientalist (1815-1897),
653*, 665
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Baron von,
German philosopher and mathematician
(1646-1716), 345, 516*, 536, 693, 773
Leipzig, 693
Lemnos, 95
Lenguas, 50
Lenin nom de guerre of Vladimir Ulyanov,
Russian Soviet leader (1870-1924), 314
Leonardo, see Vinci, Leonardo da
Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor (1658-
Lepsius, Karl Richard, German philologist
(1813-1884), 203*
Les Eyzies, 97*
Lesser Vehicle, see Hinayana Buddhism
Letourneau, C, 38
Levi (le'-vi), Hebrew patriarch (ca. 1700
B.C.), 3 '4
Levirate, 39
Levites, 309, 314, 328
Leviticus, 330, 331*
Lex talionis (lex ta-ld-6'-nis), 27, 230-231,
338
Leyden Museum, 157, 595
Lhasa (la'-sa), 506, 507
Li (Ic), Lao-tze's real name, 652
Li and Chi (le, je), 732
Li Hou-chu (le-ho-job), Chinese emperor
(ca. 970), 770
Li Hung-chang (le hoong jang), Chinese
statesman (1823-1901), 730, 807, 810
Li Lung-mien (le lobng me-an'), Chinese
painter (1040-1106), 750-751
Li Po (Ic bo), Chinese poet (705-762), 703,
705-711, 713, 714, 717* 75»» 909
Li Ssu (Ic sii), Chinese statesman (fl. 215
B.C.), 695, 696
Li Ssu-hsiin (le soo-shiin), Chinese painter
(651-716), 748
Liang K'ai (le-ang' ki), Chinese painter (ca.
750), 75 i
Liao Cbai Chih 1 (lyou ji jc e), 718
Liaotung (lyou'-doong), 806, 848, 918
Liberia, 16
Libraries, in Sumcria, 131-132; in Egypt,
174; in Babylonia, 249; in Assyria, 237*,
243, 249, 250, 266*, 269, 277; in India,
468, 556; in China, 697, 699, 727
Libya, 215
Libyans, 184, 215
Lichchavi (lich'-cha-ve) , 419
Li-Chi (le je), 664, 723, 794
Lieh-1 (le'-u-e), Chinese painter (ist cen-
tury), 746
Light of Asia, 423*
Li-ling (lc-ling), Prince of Yung (ca. 756),
710
Lin Tze-hsii (lin dzu-shii), Chinese states-
man (ca. 1838), 804
Lin-an (le-nan'), 727
Linga (lin-ga), 519, 520
Lingaraja (in-ga-ra'-ja) Temple, 599
Lingayats (Hn'-ga-yats) , 519
Ling-chao (ling jou), Lady, Chinese Bud-
dhist mystic (8th century), 75 it
Lin-k'ew (lin-che-db'), 662
Lippert, Julius, German sociologist (1850-
1909), 42*
Literature, 936; Sumcrian, 132; Egyptian,
I73~I79i Babylonian, 176-178, 241-243, 250-
254; Assyrian, 277; Hebrew, 316, 318, 320,
322, 324, 325-327, 329-330, 339-349 (also
see Prophets, Bible, Old Testament, New
Testament, etc.); Persian, see Zend-
Avesta; Indian, 407-409, 458, 555-583; Chi-
nese, 648-649, 664-666, 705-723, 821; Japa-
nese, 878-891, 926-927
Liturgy, in Babylonia, 242-243
Liu Ling (lc-oo' ling), Chinese poet (third
century), 708
Lives of the Saints, 570
Locke, John, English philosopher (1632-
1704), 552
Loire River, 226
Lokamahadevi (lo'-ka-ma-ha-da'-ve) , wife
of Vikramaditya Chalukya (ca. 1100), 602
Lombards, 397
London, 2, 17, 481, 613, 810, 817
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, American
poet (1807-1882), 491
Longford, J., 847
Lorraine, Claude (nickname of Claude
Gelee), French painter (1600-1682), 754
Los Angeles, 393, 543
Lori, Pierre (Julien Viaud), French author
1850-1923), 499
Lotus Sect, 864
INDEX
1027
Louis XIV, King of France (1643-1715), 163,
704*, 758, 768
Louvre, 122, 134, 161, 186, 188, 219!, 289, 295
Lower California Indians, 27
Lo-yang (16-yangO, 647, 658, 662, 677, 679,
698*, 699, 746, 750
Lu (loo), Chinese empress (195-180 B.C.),
792
Lu (state), 651, 658, 662, 663, 664, 678, 909
Lu (lu), father of Shih Huang-ti (ca. 222
B.C.), 695
Lu Hsiu-fu (loo sh6-do'-f66), Chinese hero
(died 1260), 764
Lubari, 60
Lucretius Cams, Titus, Roman poet (95-53
B.C.), 57
Lucullus, Lucius Lincinius, Roman general
(110-56? B.C.), 226
Lugal-zaggisi (loo-gal-za-ge'-ze1), Sumerian
king, 121
Lun Yii (Iwen ii), 665
Lung Men (loong mun), 739
Luther, Martin, German religious reformer
(1483-1546), 504-505
Luxor (luk'-sor), 140, 142, 144, 178, 214
Lycaonians (li-ka-6'-ne-anz), 285
Lycians (lis-yanz), 285
Lycidas, 880
Lydia (Hd'-ya), 245, 288, 289-290, 352, 355,
358» 36*, 38°
Lytton Report, 931
M
Ma (ma), Phrygian goddess, 288
Ma Yuan (ma yoo-an'), Chinese painter
(ca. 1200), 751
Mabuchi (ma-bdo-che), Japanese Shintoist
leader (1697-1769), 865, 874, 914
Macao (ma-kow), 804
Macartney, George, Earl of, British states-
man (1737-1806), 768
Macartney mission, 768-769
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord, Eng-
lish man of letters and statesman (1800-
1859). 499. 614
Maccabees (mac'-a-bez), 33 if, 335
Macdonell, A. A., 395!
Macedon, 216, 284, 385
Machiavelli, Nicold, Italian statesman and
author (1469-1527), 443
Macusis, 70
Mada^ascans, 8, 50
Madai (ma'-di), 350; see Medes
Madras (ma-draV), 393, 394, 456, 581, 586,
600, 601, 602, 613, 615, 630
Madras Presidency, 393, 457
Madrid, 608
Madura (ma'-dob-ra), 393, 456, 581, 600,
602, 610
Mxonians (me-), 285
Mafuie, 60
Magadha (ma'-ga-da), 441, 449, 451, 505
Magdalenian Culture, 94, 96, 97
Magi, 365, 372
Magic, 64-65, 67-68, 77; in Sumeria, 125; in
Egypt, 204-205; in Babylonia, 243-244; in
Assyria, 276; in Judea, 309; in India, 518
Magic Mountain, 718
Magnesia, 296
Magnetogorsk, 932
M agog ( ma-gog* ) , 3 24
Mahabharata (ma-ha-bha'-ra-ta), 398, 452,
468, 469, 491, 493, 495, 515, 517, 523, 524,
53<**» 54i» 542» 561-564, 57*» 5?6, 605
Mahavira (ma-ha'-ve'-ra), founder of Jain-
ism (599-527 B-C-)» 4I9~420» 4«*
Mahayana (ma-ha'-ya'-na) Buddhism, 450,
454, 504, 594, 733, 786, 833
Mahmud (ma-mood'), Sultan of Ghazni
(guz'-n6), (997-1030), 460, 462, 589
Mahmud Tughlak (toogh'-lak), Sultan of
Delhi (ca. 1398), 463
Mahrati (ma-ra'-te) (language), 581
Maison Dicu, Paris, 451*
Maitreyi (mi-tra'-y e ) , 4 1 0-4 1 1
Maitri Upanishad (mi'-tre db-pan'-i-shad'),
411
Makura Zoshi (ma-kdo-ra zo-she), 887
Malabar, 45, 613
Malacca, 38, 803
Malay Peninsula, 506, 606, 766, 779, 803
Malay States, 931
Malayan (language), 555
Malinowski, B., 31
Malta, 293
Malthus, Robert Thomas, English political
economist (1766-1834), 347, 627
Malwa (mal-wa'), 452
Mamallapuram (ma'-ma-la-poor'-am), 594,
601
Mamelukes, 186
Man, Age of, 102
Manava (ma'-na-va) Brahmans, 484
Manchu (man'-choo) Dynasty, 675, 736, 759,
768,781,792,796,805,811
Manchukuo (man-jd-gwd')t 767, 8n« 931-
932; see Manchuria
1028
INDEX
Manchuria (man-chdor'-i-a), 98, 108, 641,
698, 767, 770, 813, 917!, 92°t. 923» 927*»
928, 929, 930, 931, 932
Mandalay, 393, 606
Mandarin dialect, 821
"Mandeville, Sir John," French physician
and traveler (i4th century), 703
Manet, Edouard, French painter (1832-
1883), 912
Manetho (man'-e-tho) , Egyptian author and
priest (ca. 300-250 B.C.), 179*, 301 1
Mang (mang) family, 682
Mang He (mang ha), Chinese statesman
(ca. 500 B.C.), 662
Mangu (man'-gdo), Grand Khan of the
Mongols (1250-1259), 763
Mangwa (man-gwa), 009
Manish-tusu (ma-nlsh'-too-sdo?), King of
Akkad, 126
Mantras (man'-traz), 407, 518, 610
Manu (ma'-nob), semi-historical Indian
lawgiver, 484
Manu, Code of, 28*, 482, 484, 485-488, 489,
491-492, 493, 494, 495, 496-497, 499, 530,
54*. 5^4
Manuel I, King of Portugal (1495-1521), 613
Manufacture, in Sumeria, 124; in Egypt,
158-159; in Babylonia, 227; in Assyria, 274;
in India, 479; in China, 735, 777; in Japan,
853-854
Manyoshu (man-yo-shoo), 878
Maoris (ma'-o-rez), 42, 50
Mara (ma'-ra), 426
Maracaibo, Lake, 99*
Marathon, 355, 360, 381
"Marco Millions," 760, 766; see Polo, Marco
Mardi Gras, 37, 66
Marduk (maV-ddok), 221, 223, 225, 233, 235,
237, 240, 241, 256, 261, 268, 278
Marquesas (mar-ka'-zas) Islanders, 26
Marriage, in primitive societies, 36-44, 48;
in Sumeria, 129-130; in Egypt, 164; in
Babylonia, 246-247; in Assyria, 275; in
Judea, 335-337; in Persia, 374-375; in In-
dia, 401, 489-490, 49I-492; in China, 790-
792, 819; in Japan, 924
Marseilles, 293
Marshall, Sir John, 394"395» 39^ 442*. 5<*
596
Marston, Sir Charles, 173*
Marston Expedition of the University of
Liverpool, 302*
Maruyami Okyo (ma-rdo-ya-me 6-kyo),
Japanese painter d733-I795>« 906
Marwar (mar-way), 454
Mary, mother of Jesus, 247, 511
Mary of Scotland, 889
Mas-d'Azil,98
Maskarin Gosala (mas'-ka-rin go'-sa-la), In-
dian sceptic, 417
Mason, William A., 76-77
Maspero, Gaston, French Egyptologist (1846-
1916), 143, 145, 186-187, l88
Mass (ritual), 62
Massagetae (mas-sa-gc'-te), 353, 355
Masuda (ma-sob-da), Japanese statesman (£L
1596), 843*
Mathematics, in primitive societies, 78-79;
in Sumeria, 124; in Egypt, 179-180; in
Babylonia, 256; in India, 527-528; in China,
781
Mathura (ma'-tdo-ra), 450, 460, 477, 593, 594
Matsura Basho (mat-sob-ra ba-shd), Japa-
nese poet (1643-1694), 88 1
Maud, 891
Maurya (mor'-ya) Dynasty, 441, 454
May Day, 65, 66
May King and Queen, 65
Maya (ma'-ya), 540, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552,
553
Maya, Buddha's mother (died 563 B.C.), 423,
424» 425*
Mayas, 527*
Mazzoth (mat'-sat), 332
Measurement, standards of, 80
Mecca, 47 1
Mcdcs, 223, 283, 286*, 287, 350-352, 356, 363,
3<*5> 397t
Media (me'-dya), 269, 270, 350-352, 353, 354,
355
Medici, 155, 751, 835
Medici, Lorenzo de', Florentine statesman
and poet (1448-1492), 216, 756
Medicine, origins of, 80-81; in Sumeria, 125;
in Egypt, 182-184; in Babylonia, 258-259;
in Assyria, 276; in Persia, 377; in India,
530-532; in China, 782; in Japan, 924
Medinet-Habu (mc-de'-net-ha'bdb), 185
Mediterranean Signary, the, 105
Mediums of exchange, in primitive socie-
ties, 15-16; in Sumeria, 125; in Egypt, 160-
161; in Babylonia, 228; in Assyria, 274; in
Lydia, 289; in Judea, 306, 337; in Persia,
358; in India, 400, 480, 481; in China, 779-
780; in Japan, 854, 920
Medum (me-dobm'), 190
INDEX
1029
Megasthcnes (me-gas'-the'-nez) , Greek ge-
ographer (ca. 300 B.C.), 391*, 441, 443,
445, 478, 480, 493, 596
Mci Lan-fang (ma Ian-fang'), Chinese ac-
tor (zoth century), 723
Mciji (ma-je), sec Mutsuhito
Mciji Era (in Japan), 916
Meissen, 759
Alelancsians, 11, 16, 31, 42, 81, 84
Alclkarth (mel-karth) , 294
Alclos, 293
Melville, Herman, American novelist (1819-
1890,26
Mcmnon, colossi of, 141, 188
Memphis, 2, 140, 147, 151, 216, 248, 268, 353
Mcnander, King of Bacteria (ca. 100 B.C.),
523
Mencius (men-shi-us), Chinese philosopher
(372-289 B.C.), 646, 674, 677, 681, 682-686,
687, 688, 693, 697, 789, 843
Mendes, 199
Menes (rff&*-nez), possibly Egypt's first king
(ca. 3500 B.C.), 140, 147
Menkaure (men-kou'-re), King of Egypt
(3011-2988 B.C.), 150, 186
Menstruation, 70
Mcphiboshcth (me-fib'-6-sheth), Jewish pre-
tender (ca. 900 B.C.), 305
Mercury, 179*, 277*
Mermaid Tavern, 880
Merneptah (mer-nep'-ta) , King of Egypt
1233-1223 B.C.), 301
Mcsha (ma'-sha), King of Moab (ca. 840
B.C.), 295, 297
Mesopotamia, 103, 105, 108, 109, 118, 119,
121, 124, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 179, 218-
264, 295, 298, 299, 380, 395, 400, 578f, 641,
744; 779
Messiah, 319, 320, 325-326
Mcssianism, 195
Metals, Age of, 102-104
Metalwork, Sumerian, 133-134; Egyptian,
191, 192; Babylonian, 227, 254; Assyrian,
278; Lydian, 289; Indian, 585; Chinese,
737-739; Japanese, 896
Method of Architecture, 740-741
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
143*, 150*, 188, 190*, 479*, 716*, 738, 74ot,
75»% 906
Mcwar (ma-war'), 454, 455, 465
Mexico, 9, 66, 93, 292*, 329, 737
Mi Fei (me fa), Chinese painter (1051-
1107), 751
Michelangelo (Buanarotti) , Italian artist
(1474-1564), 751
Micronesia, 32
Midas (mi'-das), 288
Middle Flowery Kingdom, 641
Middle Flowery People's Kingdom, 641
Middle Kingdom (China), 643-644
Middle Kingdom (Egypt), 151*, 152, 169,
174*, 176, 178, 190, 191, 195
Mihiragula (nu-hi-ra'-goo-la), Hunnish king
(502-542), 452
Mikado (mi-ka'-do), 834
Milan cathedral, 379
Milcom (mfl'-kom), god of the Ammonites,
312, 321
Miletus, 218
Milinda, 523; see Mcnander
Mill, James, British historian and political
economist (1773-1836), 616
Mill, John Stuart, English philosopher and
economist (1806-1873), 924
Millet, Jean-Franjois, French painter (1815-
1875), 9"
Milton, John, English poet (1608-1684), 712
Minamoto (me-na-mo-to) family, 835, 837,
838
Minamoto Sanetomo (sa-na-to-mo), Japa-
nese shogun (1203-1219), 835
Ming Dynasty, 686, 724, 736, 738-739, 740,
74*i 757. 758, 7^7i 782, 904, 912
Ming Huang (ming hwang), Chinese em-
peror (713-756), 703-704, 705, 707-708, 711,
7i3» 7i4-7i5» 7*i* 728, 749» 795. 835*
Mining, in primitive cultures, 100, 103-104;
in Egypt, 157-158; in Babylonia, 227; in
Assyria, 274; in the Hittite Empire, 286;
in Armenia, 287; in India, m, 478; in
China, 647, 781
Minos, 90, 3311
Mir Jafar (mer ja'-far), Nawab of Bengal
(1757-1760; 1763-1765), 614
Miriam, sister of Moses, 333
Mirzapur (mer-za-pdbr'), 589
Miser ables, Les, 718
Mississippi River, 99
Mitanm (mi-tin'-nd) , 266, 285-i86f
Mithra (mith'-ra), 285, 365, 370, 371-372
Mithridates (mith-ri-da'-tcz) , Persian soldier
(ca. 400 B.C.), 362*
Mitra (mc'-tra), Hindu deity, 397!, 403
Mitsubishi (mit-sdb-be-she) family, 920
Mitsui (mit-sob-e) family, 920
Mitsu-kuni (mit-sdb-kdo-ne) , Japanese schol-
ar and historian (1622-1704), 886
1030
Mo Ti (mo de), philosopher of universal
love (ca. 450 B.C.), 677-679, 681, 682, 873
Moab (mo'-ab), 295, 297, 311, 318, 324
Moabites, 285, 298, 299, 303, 312
Modesty, in primitive societies, 46-48
Moeris (me'-ris) Lake, 159-160
Moguls (mo'-gulz), 391, 442, 464, 476, 480,
591, 611
Mohammed (mo-ham'-ed), Arabian religi-
ous leader (571-632), 39, 291
Mohamudgara (mo-ha'-mobd-ga-ra), 551
Mohenjo-daro (mo-han'-jo-da'-ro) , 90, 289*,
391, 394-396, 478, 5<>8, 5841 593, 596
Mohism, 678-679
Molicre (assumed name of Jean-Baptistc
Poquelin), French dramarist (1622-1673),
873
Moloch (mo'-lc5k), 66, 295, 312, 321
Molucca Islands, 60
Mommu (mo-mob), Emperor of Japan
(697-707), 850, 877
Momoyama (mo-mo-ya-ma), 895
Mona Lisa, 186
Monaco, 400
Monet, Claude, French painter (1840-1926),
912
Money, sec Mediums of exchange
Mongol Dynasty, 757, 764, 766
Mongolia, 94, 140, 449, 504, 602, 606, 641,
767
Mongols, 60, 119, 152, 763, 764-766, 798, 831
INDEX
Mori Zozen (mor-e z6-z5n), Japanese
painter (1747-1821), 906
Morocco, 140
Morris, William, English poet and artist
(1834-1896), 906
Mosaic Code, 219, 220*, 330-339, 374
Moscow, 693, 817
Moses, 12, 28, 219, 300, 301, 302, 303, 309,
310, 311, 312, 313, 321, 340, 348, 374
Moslems, 392, 453, 455, 456, 458, 460, 463,
471, 508*, 584, 599-600, 603
Mosul, (mo-sool'), 265, 478
Mother, the, in primitive societies, 30-32
Mother of God, 200, 201, 235
Mod Masjid (mo'-te mas'-jed), 608, 609
Moto-ori Norinaga (mo-to-o-re no-re-na-
ga), (1730-1801), Japanese historian of
Shinto legends, 830*, 865, 874-875, 914
Mouhot, Henri, French Orientalist (ca.
1858), 604
Mound Builders, 99, 103, 104
Mount Abu (a'-bdb), 598-599
Mousterinn Culture, 93, 94, 300
Mridanga (niri-dan'-ga) , 586
Mu-ch'i (mdo-chi), Chinese painter doth
century), 751
Mudhera (mob-da'-ra), 599
Muhammad bin Tughlak (mob-ham' mad
bin tobgh'-lak), Sultan of Delhi (1325-
1351), 461 _
Mukden (mook'-den), 918
Monier-Williams,' Si/Morier, English Ori- MijU0er» F™drich Max, English philologist
• • * _ _ ^ ° f i R •» i _ i /WA i if** ti^ ^rii*
entalist (1819-1899), 397*
Monitor and Merrimac, 839
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, French es-
sayist and philosopher (1533-1592), n
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron
dc, French man of letters (1689-1755), 299
Montmartrc, 748
Moon worship, 59, 60; in Egypt, 198
Moors, 216
Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, 629
Moplah (mo'-pla), 628
Morality, 935; defined, 47; in primitive so-
cieties, 44-56; in Sumeria, 129-130; in
Egypt, 166-167; in Babylonia, 244-248; in
Assyria, 275; in Judea, 331-339; in Persia,
374; in India, 401, 488-497; in China, 788-
795; in Japan, 923, 924
Morbihan, 102
Morgan, John Pierpont, 479*
Morgan, Lewis Henry, American ethnolo-
gist (1818-1881), 73
(1823-1900), 164, 312, 391*
Multan (mobl-tan'), 459, 465
Mummification, 150
Mumtaz Mahal (mobm'-taz ma-hal'), Shah
Jehan's wife (died 1631), 473, 474, 609
Miinchausen. Hieronymus Karl Fricdrich,
Baron, German teller of tale tales (1720-
i797>, 294
Munro, Sir Thomas, British general and
Colonial administrator (1761-1827), 614
Murasaki no-Shikibu (mdb-ra-sa-ke no-shik-
i-bdb), Lady, Japanese novelist (978-
1031?), 882, 883, 884, 891
Murdoch, James, 703, 865*
Muro Kyuso (mdb-ro ku-zo), Japanese
philosopher (fl. 1700), 867-868
Murray Islands, 45
Murray River tribes, 33
Murshidabad (moor-shed'-a-bad) , 481
Musa, Ibn (mdb'-za, ib-n), Arabian mathe-
matician (died ca. 850 B.C.), 527
INDEX
1031
Music, origins of, 88; in Egypt, 192; in
Babylonia, 254; in Persia, 378; in India,
586-588; in China, 723; in Japan, 892-893
Mussolini, Benico, Italian statesman (1883-
),69
Mutsuhito (moot-sdo-he-to), Emperor of
Japan (1868-1912), 846, 916, 919, 923, 927
Muttu Virappa Nayyak (moot'-tdb ve-rap'-
pa na'-yak), Prince of Madura (early i7th
century) , 602
My Reminiscences (Tagore), 620*
Mycerinus (mis-er-i'-us), see Menkaure
Mylitta (mi-lit'-ta), 37, 245*, 295; see Ishtar
Mysians, 285
Mysore (mi-sor') (city), 393, 456
Mysore (state), 396, 457, 510, 601
N
Nabonidus (nab-6-ni'-dus) , King of Baby-
lon (556-539 B.C.), 263
Nabopolassar (nab-6-po-las' er) , King of
Babylonia (ca. 625-605 B.C.), 223, 224, 283
Nabu (na'-bdo), 256, 277
Nadir Shah (na'-der sha), Persian con-
queror and ruler (1734-1747), 473*
Naga (na'-ga) (dragon god), 395,* 402, 604,
605
Nagaoka (na-ga-6'-ka) , 834
Nagarjuna (na'-gar-job'-na), Indian scientist
(znd century B.C.), 450, 529
Nagas (na'-gaz) (tribe), 396, 398
Nagasaki (na-ga-sa-ke), 840
Nagascna (na-ga-sa'-na), Indian sage (ca.
100 B.C.), 523
Naharina (na-ha-re'-na), 164
Naiki (nl-kc), Japanese hero (ca. 1615), 849
Nakaye Toju (na-ki-ye to-job), Japanese
philosopher (1608-1648), 871
Naksh-i-Rustam (nak'-she-rd6s-tam')» 356,
378
Nala (na'-la), 491, 564
Nalanda (na'-lan-da), 454, 557-558
Nambudri (nam-bob'-dri) Brahmans, 486*
Namikawa Tenjin (na-me-ka-wa ten-jen),
Japanese philosopher (ca. 1700), 873
Nana, 288f
Nanak (na'-nak), founder of the Sikhs (ca.
1468-1539), 583
Nanda (nan'-da) (family), 441
Nanda, Magadhan prince (ca. 523 B.C.), 437
Nandi (nan'-de), 402
Nanking (nan'-king, nan-Jing), 659, 722,739,
742. 747. 7^4, 805
Nanking, Treaty of, 804-805
Nanking Government, 812*, 814
Nannar (nan'-nar), 133, 234
Naomi (na'-6-me, na-6'-me), 312
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1804-
1815), 69, 91, 139, 141, 144, 145, 154*, 163,
164, 246, 270, 353, 466, 467, 695
Nara (na-ra), 738, 757, 834, 835, 851, 855,
865*, 876, 878, 879, 880, 892, 897-898
Narada (na'-ra-da), 588
Naram-sin (nar'-am-sm'), King of Sumeria
and Akkad (2795-2739 B.C.), 122, 133, 255
Narbada (nar-ba-da') River, 397$
Nasik (na'-sik),597
Nasiru-d-din (na'-scr-ood-den'), Sultan of
Delhi (fl. 1510), 483*
Nastika (nas'-ti-ka), philodophics, 534
Nastiks, 416-417
Nationalists (Indian), 621, 626, 629-630, 632
Naucratis (no'-kra-tis), 138
Nautch (noch) girls, 490
Neanderthal Man, 92, 93, 94, 95, 300
Near East, 93, 105, 116, 118*, 120, 132, 134-
135, 154-160, 174, 181, 212, 215, 223, 224,
226, 227, 255, 263, 265, 268, 270, 271, 273,
281, 284, 285, 288, 290, 292, 293, 295, 298,
303, 306, 326, 329, 335, 337, 339, 353, 356,
357, 362, 478, 728, 755t
Nebo (ne'-bo), 235
Nebraska, 94
Ncb-scnt (neb'-sent), Egyptian lady (ca.
3100 B.C.), 165
Nebuchadrezzar (neb'-uk-ad-rez'-er) II,
King of Babylon (605-562 B.C.), 223-224,
225, 227, 228, 229, 233, 241, 257, 262, 285,
298, 321, 322, 324, 327, 666
Necho (ne-ko), see Niku II
Negroes, American, 6
Neo-Confucianism, 675
Neolithic man, 98-102, 106, 117
Nco-Platonism, 553
Nepal (ne-pol'), 451, 506
Nephthys( ncf'-this), 201
Ncrgal (ner'-gal), 240, 256
Nero, Lucius Domitius, Roman emperoi
54-68), 269
Nestorianism, 702, 787-788
Netherlands, 753
Netsuke (net-sdo-ka), 893, 898
New Britain, 10, 46, 49, 57, 84
New Caledonia, 35, 77, 84
New Georgia, 45
New Guinea, 15, 32, 34, 42, 43, 45, 84, 99*
New Hanover, 84
New Hebrides, 34
1032 INDEX
New Holland, 79
"New Life" movement, 818*
New Mexico, 94
New South Wales, 14
New Testament, 415, 416, 616
"New Tide" movement, 821-822
New York, 133*, 393, 703
New Zealand, 29, 84
Newton, Sir Isaac, English scientist (1642-
1727)* 529
Nichiren (ni-che-ren), founder of the Lotus
Sect (1222-1282), 864
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, German
philosopher (1844-1900), 23, 177, 376, 457*,
539*. 554. 657, 659, 723, 734, 819
Nigeria, 45, 75
Nihongi (nyc-hong-gi), 886
Nikko (nyik-ko), 894
Nikon Bashi (nylk-6n ba-she) (Tokyo
bridge), 847
Niku (ne'-koo) II, King of Egypt (609-593
B.C.),32I
Nile River, 94*, 109, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141,
142, 144, 145, 146, 152, 156, 160, 161, 179,
180, 181, 183, 185, 190, 197, 200, 202, 214,
218, 299, 300, 358, 396
Nimnid (nim'-rood), see Kalakh
Nina (nc'-na), 266
Nineveh (nm'-e-ve), i, 14, 117, 135, 218,
223, 237*, 256, 265, 266, 268, 269, 274, 276,
278, 279, 281-282, 283, 284, 290, 303, 306,
307, 317, 321, 351, 380
Ning Tsung (ning dzoong), Emperor of
China (ca. 1212), 763
Ningirsu (nin-ger'-sdo), 117
Ninppo (nlng-po), 805
Nimgi (nin-i-ji), 830
Ninil (nin'-il), 256
Ninkarsag (nin-kar'-sag), 127
Ninlil (nin'-lll), 127
Ninsei (nm'-sa), Japanese potter (ca. 1655),
900
Nippon (nip-pon'), 830!; see Japan
Nippur (nip-poorO, 118, 120, 121, 123, 127,
i32
Nirvana (ner-va'-na), 394, 428, 435-436, 504,
517, 5*8. 535. 54»i 549. 5*4
Nishi-Hongwan (nish-e hong-wan) Temple,
894, 895
Nisin (ne-zin), 118
Niyama (ne-ya-ma), 543
No plays, 841, 889-890
Noah, 290*, 330
Nobel prizes, 391, 619, 621
Nobunaga (no-boo-na-ga), Japanese shogun
(1573-1582), 838, 839, 889, 900
Nofretete (no-fra-ta'-ta), wife of Amcn-
hotep IV (fl. 1380-1362 B.C.), 1 1 8, 212
Nofrit (no'-frit), wife of Rahotcp, 187
Nogi, Count Marcsuke (no-ge, ma-ra-sob-
ka), Japanese general (1849-1912), 846,
918
Noguchi, Hideyo (he-da-yo no-gob-che),
Japanese scientist (1876-1928), 924-925
Noguchi, Yone (yo-na), Japanese poet, 88 1
Nomarchs, 146
Nomcs, 146-147
North America, 99*, 103, 108, 391
North Star, 293
Nubia (nu'-bi-a), 46, 140, 158, 213
Numa Pompilius, 647
Nur Jehan (noor ja-han'), Jchangir's wife
(ca. 1625), 472-473, 609
Nut (noot), 198, 201
Nutmosc (ndot'-moz), Egyptian artist (ca.
1370 B. c.), 211
Nyaya (nya'-ya) philosophy, 535-536
Nyaya Sutra (sdb'-tra), 533
O
Cannes (6-an'-as), 118*, 237
Ocean of Music, 529*
Oceania, 14, 87, 104; also see Melanesians,
Polynesians
Ochus (cV-kiis), see Artaxcrxes III Ochus
O'Conncll, Daniel, Irish orator and politi-
cian (1775-1847), 673*
Odyssey, 561, 564, 567
Ogodai (6-go-di), Grand Khan of the
Mongols (1229-1241), 763
Ogyu Sorai (6g-ydb so-ri), Japanese phil-
osopher (1666-1728), 872, 873-874
Ojcda, Alonso dc, Spanish explorer (ca.
1470-1508), 99*
O)ibwa Indians, 61
Oklahoma, 94
Old Kingdom (Egypt), 142, 150*, 169, 176,
178, 184, 187, 189, 190, 194
Old Persian, 249, 356-357
Old Testament, 313, 318, 328, 329, 334, 339,
341, 510, 616
Omaha Indians, 16, 22, 75
Omar (o'-mar), mosque of, Jerusalem, 607
Omura (6-mdo-ra), Lord of Nagasaki (i6th
century), 840
Onan (o'-nan), biblical character, 39
Onna Dalkaku (on-na di-ka-kdb), 869-870
INDEX
1033
Ono Goroyemon ^6-no go-ro-ya-mon),
Japanese sculptor (ca. 1252), 898
Onomatopoeia, 73
"Open Door," 806, 929
Open Door to the Hidden Heathendom,
39i*
Ophelia, 518
Ophir (o'-fer), 306
Opium War, first, 804, 805
Opium War, second, 805
Oppcnhcim, Baron von, 286f
Oppcnheimer, Franz, 23
Oppert, Julius, German Orientalist (1825-
1905), n8*-H9*
Orang Sakai, 38
Ordeal, in primitive societies, 28
Oriental Museum (University of Chicago)
Expedition, 378!'
Orinoco Indians, 42, 86
Orion, 198
Orissa (6-rIs'-sa), 599
Orphism, 553
Osaka (6-sa-ka), 841, 890, 895, 919-920, 921
Osiris (o-si'-ris), 178, 199, 200, 202
Oudh (oud), 567, 614
Ouranos, 58
Outcastes, 399, 477, 489, 520, 623, 624
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Roman poet
(43 B.C.-A.D. 1 8), 62
Oxford, 211, 595
Oxford Field Expedition, 125
Oyomei (6-yo-ma), 871; see Wang Yang-
ming
Oyomei philosophy, 871-872
Pactolus (pac-to'-lus) River, 285
Padmapani (pad-ma-pa'-ne), 594
Pacs, Domingos, Portuguese missionary (fl.
1522), 457
Pahlavi (pa'-la-ve), 357
Painting, origins of, 87, 94, 96-97; Sumcrian,
132; Egyptian, 190-191; Babylonian, 255;
Assyrian, 278; Persian, 380; Indian, 589-
593; Chinese, 745-754; Japanese, 901-906
Paleolithic man, 90-98
Palestine, 94, 104, 109, 137, 152, 173, 224, 227,
248, 270, 298, 299, 300, 301, 305*, 307, 321,
333i 355» 3<53, 37'
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, Italian
composer (1524-1594), 723
Pali (pa'-lc), 555
Pallavas (pal'-la-vaz), 456
Pamirs (pa-mcrz'), 392, 393
Pamphylians (pam-ffl'-yanz), 285
Pan, 58
P'an Chao (pan jo), Chinese female scholar
(ca. 100), 792
Pan Ho-pan (pan ho-pa'n), Lady, Chinese
bluestocking, 793
P'an Ku (pan gob), the Chinese Adam, 642
P'an Ku, Chinese historian (ca. 100), 792
Panchagavia (pan-cha-ga'-vya), 521
Panchatamra (pan-cha-tan'-tra) , 578
Pandavas (pan'-da-vaz) , 561-562, 565
Pandora, 330
Pandyas (pan'-dyaz), 456
Panini (pa'-nl-ni), Indian grammarian (7th
century B.C.), 556
Panipat (pan'-i-pat) , 464
Paper, 171
Paphos (Cyprus), 293
Papuans, 32, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50
Paraguay, 50
Parchcsi, 501
Parganait (par'-ga-nlt) (caste of peasants),
501
Pariahs (pa-ri'-az), see Outcastes
Paribbajaka (pa-ri-ba'-ja-ka), 417
Paris, 442, 604, 817, 835
Par j any a, 402
Park, Mungo, Scotch explorer (1771-1805),
«3
Parmcnides, Greek philosopher (5th cen-
tury B.C.), 533, 551*, 553
Parmenio, Macedonian general (400-330
B.C.), 384
Parsccs, 372, 508*, 629
Parshwanath (par'-shwa-nat), 598
Parthenon, 307, 912
Parthia, 479
Parvati (par'-va-te) (an aspect of Kali), 509,
590
Parysatis (pa-ris'-a-tis), mother of Artax-
erxcs II (ca. 400 B.C.), 375*
Pasargada? (pa-sar'-ga-dc), 362, 378
Pascal, Blaisc, French mathematician and
philosopher (1623-1662), 678
Paschal Lamb, 333*
Pascnada or Pasenadi (pa-sa'-na-di) , 589
Pasteur, Louis, French scientist (1822-1895),
782
Patanjali (pa-tan'-ja-le) , Indian Yoga teachei
(ca. 150 B.C.), 504, 5o8f, 543, 544, 556
Patesis (pa-ta'-zez) , 126, 233, 266
Pataliputra (pa'-ta-li-pob'-tra), 422, 441, 442,
444, 445, 449, 451, 593*
Patna (pat'-na), 441* see Pataliputra
1034
INDEX
Pattadakal (paf-a-da-kal), 602
Paul, St., Apostle of the Gentiles (martyred
AJ>. 67), 20, 342, 731
Paulists, 469
Pawnee Indians, 66
Peacock Throne, 473, 608
"Pear Tree Garden," 704
Peary, Robert Edwin, American arctic ex-
plorer (1856-1920), 6
Pechili (ba-je'-le), Gulf of, 641
Pci (ba), Chinese general (ca. 700), 749
Pei, W. C., 92
Peiping (ba-bing), 2, 92, 94, 152, 8i2t; also
see Peking
Peking (ba-jing), 741, 742, 763, 767, 775,
779, 804, 805, 806, 812, 931
Peking Man, 92, 102, 641, 765
Pclew Islands, 32
Pclliot, P., 506, 739
Pclusium (pe-lu'-shi-um), 227, 267*
Penelope, 570
Penguin Island, 47
Pennsylvania, University of, 1 19*
Penology, see Punishment
Pentateuch, 299, 301, 310, 328, 340
Pentecost, 332
Pepi (pa'-pe) II, King of Egypt (2738-2644
B.C.), 151
Pericles, Athenian statesman (499-4*9 B-c-)»
i*3* >39i H1* 751* ?8i '
Persephone, 238
Pcrscpolis (per-scp-6-lis), oo, 128, 362, 365*,
378, 379-38o, 38i, 384. 3«5» 596» 744
Persia, 24*, 60, 108, 109, 117, 182, 189, 215,
222*, 226, 248, 249, 263, 270, 272, 278, 280,
284, 285, 286, 287, 290, 294, 299, 313, 326,
328, 329, 349, 350-^85, 392, 397, 405, 422*,
440, 450, 464, 473*, 478, 480, 501, 529, 596,
607, 640, 651, 703, 729, 766, 779
Persian Gulf, 117, 118, 119, 121, 221, 224, 228,
267, 290, 292, 356, 479, 703, 761
Peru, 2, 16, 292*
Pcrur (pa'-robr), 594
Peruvian Indians, 65, 77, 81
Pesach (pa-saK),332-333
Peschel, Oskar Ferdinand, German geogra-
pher (1826-1875), 159
Peshawar (pa-sha'-war) , 392, 450
Peter the Great, Czar of Russia (1682-1725),
314, 640, 693
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), Italian poet
(1304-1374), 555, 611
Petrie, Sir William Flinders, 104, 105, 143,
145, 166, 211, 212*, 296, 300*, 301, 701*
Petronius Arbiter, Roman author (died AJ>.
66), 155
Peyn (pan), 38
Phallic worship, 6x; in Egypt, 199; in Judea,
309; in India, 501, 518-520
Pharaohs, 41, 142, 148, 151, 156, 160, 162,
163-164, 178, 192, 201, 228
Pharos (fa'-ros), at Alexandria, 137
Phcidias, Greek sculptor (ca. 490-432 B.C.),
895
Philae (fl'-16), 185
Philistines (fi-lis'-tmz), 267, 285, 298, 299,
300, 304, 315
Philippine (fil'-i-pen) Islands, 45, 46, 53, 804,
806, 928, 931
Philo Judaeus (fi'-lo joo-de'-us), Greek
Jewish philosopher (20 B.C.-A.D. 50), 367*
Philosophy, 936; Egyptian, 193-197; Baby-
lonian, 259-263; Hebrew, 339, 343-349; In-
dian, 410-415, 416-419, 5i3-?i7, 533-5541
Chinese, 650-651, 653-658, 659-660, 661,
666-674, 675i 676, 677-682, 684-693, 73i-735»
783-788, 821; Japanese, 866-876
Phoenicia (fc-nlsh'-i-a), 66, 105, 106, 160,
172, 245, 250, 265, 270, 291-296, 298, 303,
306, 308, 355, 363
Phoenician Star, 293
Phoenicians, 215, 217
Phrygia (frij'-i-a), 245, 286f, 288-289, 296,
355
Physics, in India, 528-529; in China, 781
Physiocrats, 693
Physiology, in Egypt, 181-182; in India, 529-
530; in China, 782
Pi Kan (be gan), Chinese official (ca. 1140
B.C.), 645
Pi Shcng (be shung), Chinese printer (fl.
1041), 729-730
Pickwick Papers, 885, 891
Picts, 10
Pien Liang (byan le-angO, 727
Picn-tsai (byan-dzl), Chinese connoisseur
(ca. 640), 745*
Pillow Sketches, 854, 862, 887-888
Piltdown Man, 92
Pisidians, 285
Pitakas (pi'-ta-kaz),428*
Pittsburgh, 895
Plassey (plas'-se), 584, 612
Plata*, 360, 381, 751
Plate River, 932
Plato, Greek philosopher (427-347 B.C.), 107,
167, 329, 428*, 533, 553, 709
Playboy of the Western World, 53*
INDEX
1035
Pleistocene Epochs, 92, 93
Pliny the Elder (Caius Plinius Secundus),
Roman naturalist and encyclopedist (23-
79), 183, 462, 479
Plutarch, Greek historian (46? -120?), 199,
362% 373, 384% 578
Po Chti-i (bo jii-e), Chinese poet and states-
man (722-846), 714, 717
Poe, Edgar Allan, American man of letters
(1809-1849), 749
Poems Ancient and Modern, 878
Poetry, in primitive societies, 77-78; in Su-
mcria, 121-132; in Egypt, 176-178; in
Babylonia, 120, 132, 235-236, 241-243, 250-
254; in Judca, 340-342; in Persia, 377; in
India, 408-409, 56l-57!, 579-583, 619-621;
in China, 648-649, 705-717; in Japan, 878-
88 1, 926-927
Poetry Bureau (Japanese), 880, 927
Poland, 94
Polo, 501
Polo, Marco, Venetian traveler (1254-1324),
38, 391*, 478-479, 543, 729, 742» 7&>i 7***
7<>3i 765. 766* 777i 779, 79°
Polybius, Greek historian (ca. 206-128 B.C.),
379
Polygamy, in primitive societies, 39-41; in
Judea, 336; in Persia, 374; in India, 492;
in China, 791, 819
Polygyny, 39
Polynesians, 6, 10, 16, 45, 69, 77, 79-80, 103,
107, 329
Pompey the Great (Cneius Pompeius Mag-
nus), Roman general (106-48 B.C.), 137
Pondichcrry (pon-di-cher'-e), 393
Poo Sec (bob sa), 330
Poona (pob'-na), 393, 597
Popes, 331, 535
Population, of Egypt, 214; of India, 391; of
China, 769; of Japan, 851, 920*, 927
Porcelain, see Ceramics
Port Arthur, 918, 920!, 928
Portugal, 98, 599, 613, 803, 804
Porus (por'-us), Indian king (ca. 325 B.C.),
440, 529
Poseidon, 58
Postal service, in Egypt, 160
Postglacial Stage, 91*
Post-Office, 620*
Potala (po'-ta-la), 507
Potter's wheel, 117
Pottery, see ceramics
Prajapati (pra-ja'-pa-te), 403, 404, 416, 513
Prakrit (pra'-krit), 555, 574
Prakriti (pra'-kri-te), 537, 539, 541
Pranayama (pra'-na-ya-ma), 543
Prambanam (pram-ba'-nam), 603
Pretty abara (pra'-tya-ha'-ra), 543
Praxiteles, Greek sculptor (fl. 360 B.C.), 186
Precepts of Jesus, 616
Premarital relations, in primitive societies,
44-45
Prexaspes (prex-as'-pez) , son of Cambyses
(ca. 525 B.C.), 354
Priam, 90
Priests, 68; in Sumeria, 126, 128, 129; in
Egypt, 20 1, 202, 214-215; in Babylonia, 230,
232-234; in Assyria, 271-272; in Judea, 313-
314, 338; in Persia, 361, 377; in India, 399,
484-488 (also see Brahmans); in Japan,
864-865
Prince, w
Printing, in India, 468, 5561*, 585!; in China,
728-730; in Japan, 877*
Prints, 907-910
Prithivi (pri-ti-wc), 402
Prometheus, 95
Property, private, in primitive societies, 18-
20; in Egypt, 161; in Babylonia, 232; in
Judea, 337-338; in India, 483, 484
Prophets, 314-328, 340
Prostitution, in primitive societies, 45; in
Sumeria, 129; in Egypt, 166; in Babylonia,
37, 244-246; in Assyria, 275; in Lydia, 289;
in Judea, 335; in India, 444, 458, 490-491,
496; in China, 790; in Japan, 862
Protagoras, Greek philosopher (fl. 440 B.C.),
422
Proverbs, 167, 334, 342-343, 349
Provins, Guyot dc, medieval poet (ca. uoo),
780
Psalms, 210*, 242, 340-341, 343, 408, 581
Psamtik (psam'-tik) I, King of Egypt, Prince
of Sais (663-609 B.c.),2i5
Ptah (pta), 143, 201
Ptah-hotep (pta-ho'-tep), Egyptian official
(ca. 2880 B.C.), 165, 193, 194
Ptolemies, 41, 137, 142, 160, 166, 190, 216*
P'u Yi (pdb ye), now Kang Teh (kang
da), Emperor of Manchukuo, last Chinese
emperor (born 1006), 810, 811, 813, 931
Pudmini (pud'-mi-ne), Rajput princess (ca.
1303), 455-456
Pueblo Indians, 87
Pugct Sound, i
Pulakcshin (pob-la-ka'-shin) II, Chalukyan
king (608-642), 456
1036 INDEX
Pumpelly, Raphael, American geologist
(1837-1923), 108, 117*
Punishment, in primitive societies, 28-29; in
Egypt, 162; in Babylonia, 231; in Assyria,
272; in Judca, 338; in Persia, 361-362; in
India, 483, 486; in China, 797; in Japan,
850
Punjab (pan-jab'), 39*, 393, 394, 45°, 459, 495
Punt (poont), 153, 189-190
Purana Kashyapa (poo-ra'-na ka'-shya-pa),
Indian sceptic, 417
Puranas, 504*, 511-513, 5*6, 541
Purbach, Gcorg, German astronomer (1423-
1461), 528
Purdah (par'-da), 46, 286, 287, 375, 401, 494,
625
Pure Land, Sect of the, 864
Puritans, 242, 313
Purusha (poo'-roo-sha) , 411, 538, 539, 541,
566
Puruvaras (poo-roo'-ra-vaz) , 511
Purva-Mmiansa (pdbr'-va mc-man'-sa) phil-
osophy, 545-546
Pushtimargiya (poosh'-ti-marg'-ya) Brah-
mans, 486*
Puymre (pwim'-re), Egyptian architect (ca.
1500 B.C.), 192
Pygmies, 21, 37, 56
"Pyramid Texts," 174
Pyramids, 138, 139, 140, 144, 147, 148-149,
150, 151, 177, 179, 180, 181, 185, 191, 203*,
216, 308, 395
Pyrenees, 91
Pythagoras, Greek philosopher (6th century
B-C.), 533, 536*, 553* 648
"Pythagorean Law," 529
Questions of King Milinda, 523
Quintus Curtius Rufus, Roman historian
(fl. 41-54), 248, 383, 384*
Ra or Re (ra or ra), 198, 199, 201
Rab'mdranath Tagore (ra-bind'-ra-nat ta-
gor'): Poet and Dramatist (E. J. Thomp-
son), 620*
Rachel, Jacob's favorite wife, 41, 303*, 333,
334. 336, 340
Radha (ra'-da),58o
Ragas (ra'-gaz) , 588
Rahotep (ra-ho'-tep), Egyptian prince (ca.
3100 B.C.?), 149, 187
Rahula (ra'-hoo-la) , Buddha's son (ca. 523
B.C.), 425, 437
Rai, Lajpat (rl laj'-pat), Indian reformer,
497, 616*
Raj Sing (raj sing), Rana of Alcwar (fl.
1661), 478
Rajaraja, Chola king (fl. 1000), 490
Rajaram (rii-ja-ra'-ne) Temple, 599
Rajasthan (ra-ja-stan'), 495; *ee Rajputana
Rajatarangini (ra-ja-ta-ran'-gl-m), 579
Rajmahal (raj-ma-hal') Hills, 501
Rajputana (raj-poo-ta'-na), 454, 579
Rajputs (raj'-pobts), 393, 454-456, 467, 487,
4921% 498, 502, 591
Ram Mohun Roy (ram mo'-hun roi), In-
dian reformer and scholar (1772-1833),
614, 616, 617
Rama (ra'-ma), 417, 451, 511, 552, 561, 567-
570, 581, 617*, 625
Rarna Raja, Regent of Vijayanagar (fl. 1542-
1565), 459
Rama-charha-wanasa (ra'-ma-cha'-ri-ta-ma'-
na-sa),5«i
Ramadan (ram-a-dan'), 471
Ramakrishna (ra'-nia-krish'-na), Indian re-
ligious leader (1836-1886), 617
Ramakrtshna Alission, 618
Raman, Chandrasekhara (ra'-man, chan'-
dra-sha'-ka-ra), Indian physicist (1888-
), 391, 619
Ramananda (ra-ma'-nan-da), Indian preacher
(ca. 1460), 582
Ramanuja (ra-ma-nob'-ja), Indian saint and
sage (ca. 1050), 552
Ramayana (ra-ma'-ya-na), 398, 402, 417, 517,
524, 567-571, 605
Ramcses (ram'-e-sez) II, King of Egypt
(1300-1233 H.C.), 104, 141, 142, 178, 185,
1 88, 189, 213-214, 286, 306
Ramcses 111, King of Egypt (1204-1172 B.C.),
159,214
Rameses IV, King of Egypt (1172-1166
B.C.), 178
Rameshvaram (ram-ash'-va-ram), 393, 519,
602
Ramcsscum (ram-c-se'-um), 170, 185, 214
Rangoon (ran-goon'), 393* 606
Ranofcr (ran'-6-f er) , Egyptian high priest
(ca. 3040 B.C.), 169
Raphael Sanzio, Italian painter (1483-1520),
751,759
Ratzcnhofer, 23
Ravan(a) (ra'-van-[a]), 569
Ravenna, 2
INDEX
1037
Rawalpindi (ra'-wal-pm'-di) , 440, 441-442
Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke, English
Orientalist and official (1810-1895), 119*,
249
Rayas (ra'-yaz), 458
Re, see Ra
Rebecca, wife of Isaac, 303*, 337
Record of Nippon, 886
Record of Ten Feet Square, 889
Records of Ancient Events, 874-875, 885
Red Oleanders (Tagorc), 620*
Red Sea, 135, 152, 160, 190, 214, 306, 358
Reichard, 83
Rcinach, Salomon, French scholar (1858-
Rekh-mara (rekh-ma'-ra), Egyptian official
(ca. 1500 B.C.), 103
Religion, as an agent of morality, 55-56, 69-
71; sources of, 59; its objects of worship,
59-64; its methods, 64-68; in primitive so-
cieties, 56-71; in Sumcria, 127-129, 135; in
Egypt, 197-205, 206, 210; in Babylonia, 135,
232-244; m Assyria, 275; in Phrygia, 288;
in Phoenicia, 294-295; in Syria, 296-297;
in Judca, 308-314, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323,
325, 326, 327; in Persia, 364-372; in India,
402-405, 4:0-422, 428-439, 469-472, 503-525;
in China, 783-788, 818; in Japan, 832-833,
840-841, 842-843, 863-865, 898
Rc'mcry-Ptah (ra'-mcr-e pta), Egyptian
singer, 192
Rcnan, Joseph Ernest, French scholar (1823-
1892), 73, 30^, 330, 345*
Rcni, Guido, Italian painter (1575-1642), 759
Reszkc, Edouard de, Polish operatic tenor
(1856-1917), 192
Revelation, 376
Revenge, in primitive societies, 27
Revolutions of Civilization, 701*
Rhodes, 293
Rhodesia, 66, 94, 104
Richtofcn, Ferdinand, Baron von, German
geologist and Asiatic traveler (1833-1905),
822
Rig-veda (ng-va'-da), 366, 401, 407, 408-409,
4*3*1 43/N 495> 5°8t, 530
Rikyu (rik-u), tea master (ca. 1590), 841,
857-858, 900
Risampci (re-sam'-pa), Korean ceramic art-
ist (fl. 1605), 900
Rishis (rish'ez), 545
Rita (ri'-ta), 404
Rivers, W. H. R., 16
Robcnhauscn, 102
Robinson Crusoe, 174
Rock Edicts, 447-448, 527
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 820*
Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Re-
search, 820*, 925
Roger, Abraham, Dutch missionary (fl.
1650,391*
Roman Catholic Church, 242, 469, 504-505
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 718, 846
Romans, 16, 118*, 159, 179, 183, 217, 288,
377, 397i 478
Rome, 3, 19*, 24*, 61, 76, 116, 117, 136, 140,
152, 172, 185, 200, 216, 218, 226, 227, 247,
265, 272, 275, 284, 299, 315, 340, 354, 362,
363, 381-382, 451, 479, 529, 554, 640, 647,
695, 701, 744, 777, 778, 847, 899, 925
Rome (city), 155, 294, 457
Romeo and Juliet, 891
Ronin (ro'-nm), Forty-seven, 848-849, 908
Roosevelt, Theodore, President of the
United States (1858-1919), 918, 929-930
Rosctta (ro'-zet'-ta) Stone, the, 145
Rosh-ha-shanah (rosh ha-sha'-na), 332
Ross, Sir Donald, 773
Rossbach, 613
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, French philosopher
(1712-1778), 655, 657, 688, 693, 754, 858,
»73i 874
Rowland Acts, 629
Rowley, 11., 65
Roxana (rox-an'-a), wife and sister of Cam-
byses (ca. 525 B.C.), 354
Royal Asiatic Society, 249
Rubruquis, Guillaumc dc, medieval traveler
and missionary (fl. 1253), 780
Rudra (roo'-dra), 402
Rukmini (rook-mi-ni), 594
Ruskin, John, English critic (1819-1900),
188,631
Russell, Bertrand, Earl, 821
Russia, 19*, 26, 35, 37, 42, 09*, 103, 116, 355,
356, 392, 506, 626, 640, 642, 806, 808, 812,
814, 848, 875, 917*, 918-919, 928, 931, 932,
933
Ruth, 312, 336
Sabitu (sa'-bi-too), 253, 261
Sacia (sa'-sha), 354
Sacramento River Valley, 8
"Sacred Books of the East," 391*
Sahu (sa'-hdb), 198
Saigyo Hoshi (si-gyo ho-sh6), Japanese
poet (1118-1190), 880
1038 INDEX
Saint Peter's, Basilica of, Rome, 609
Sai's (sa-is), 138
Saite (sa'-it) Age (Egypt), 151*, 179, 188
Sake (sa-ke), 856-857
Sakhalin (saK'-a-len'),928
Sakkarah (sa-ka'-ra), 147, 186, 189
Sakon (sa-kon), Japanese hero (ca. 1615),
849
Saladin (sal'-a-din), Sultan of Egypt and
Syria (i 137-1 193), 756
Salamis, 381, 383
Salim Chisti (sa'-lim chis'-te), Indian states-
man and sage (ca. 1590), 468, 608
Samadhi (sa-ma'-di), 544
Samaria (sa-ma'-rl-a), 267, 298, 315, 317, 324,
329
Samarkand (sam-ar-kand'), 350, 453, 463,
464, 703
Samarra (sa-mar'-ra) , 135, 756
Sama-veda (sa'-ma-va'-da), 407
Samgita-ratnakara (san-ge'-ta-rat-na'-ka-ra) ,
529*
Sammuramat (sa-mobr'-a-mat) , Queen of
Assyria (811-808 B.C.), 267
Samoa, 16, 17, 22, 49, 60, 107
Samoycds, 32
Samson, Hebrew prophet and judge (ca.
1130 B.C.), 250, 305*, 340
Samudragupta (sa-mo6d-ra-go6p'-ta), King
of Magadha (330-380), 451
Samuel, Hebrew judge (ca. 1025 B.C.), 339
Samurais (sa'-moo-riz) , 839, 841, 842, 846-
849, 850, 861, 871, 873, 877, 911
San Bartolomeo, Fra Paolino da, Austrian
monk (i8th century), 301*
San Kuo Chih Yen 1 (san-gwo-je-yan-e),
7i8
Sandanga (san-dang'-a) , 592
Sangaya (san'-ga-ya), Indian agnostic, 416-
4»7
Sangha (san'-ga), 438, 505
Sankbya (san'-kya) philosophy, 534, 536-
541, 546, 564, 566
Sankhya-karika (san'-kya-ka'-ri-ka) , 536*
Sankhya-sutras (soo'-traz), 536*
Sannyasi (san-nya'-se), 522
Sanskrit, 356, 391*, 405-406, 452, 458, 520,
55<>
Santo Kioden (san-to kyo-den), Japanese
novelist (1761-1816), 884-885
Sappho, Greek poet (7th century B.C.), 611
Saracens, 120, 780
Sarah, wife of Abraham, 333, 336
Sardanapalus (sar'-da-na-pa'-ius) , see Ashur-
banipal
Sardinia, 98, 293
Sardis, 218, 227, 289, 290, 351, 352, 353, 358
Sargon I, King of Akkad and Sumeria
(2872-2817 B.C.), 120, 121-122, 250, 257
Sargon II, King of Assyria (722-705 B.C.),
266*, 272, 278, 279, 280-281, 298
Sarnath (saV-nat), 428, 447, 594, 596
Sarton, George, 330, 346*
Sarzac, Ernest de, 131
Sas-Bahu (shash-ba'-hoo), 599
Sassanid (sas'-sa-nid) Dynasty, 372
Sasseram (sas'-ser-am) , 607
Satan, 344, 367
Satapatha (sha'-ta-pa-ta) Upanishad, 414*
Satow, Sir Ernest Mason, British diplomat
and publicist (1843-1929), 874*
Satrapies, 355, 362-363
Satraps (sa'-traps), 359*
Satsuma (sat-soo-ma), 846, 900
Saturnalia, 37, 65-66
Saul, King of the Jews (1025-1010 B.C.),
3°4-305i 3io, 339
Sautuola, Marcclino de (sou-too-o'-la, mar-
thcl-e'-no du), Spanish archeologist, 96
Savage, T. S., 37
Savitar (sa'-vi-tar) , 403
Savitri (sa'-vi-tre), 564
Savonarola, Girolamo, Italian monk and re-
former (1452-1498), 632
Scarification, 85
Schclling, Friedrich Wilhelm von, German
philosopher (1775-1854), 391*, 554
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, German
philologist (1767-1845), 391*
Schlegel, Friedrich, German philosopher
and critic (1772-1829), 391*
Scliliemann, Hcinrich, German acheologist
(1822-1890), 91, 107
Schneider, Hermann, 102
Scholarship, in Babylonia, 248, 250; in
China, 727-731; in Japan, 874
Scholastics, 871
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, American eth-
nologist (1793-1864), 49
Schopenhauer, Arthur, German philosopher
(1788-1860), 194-195, 391*, 410, 411, 415,
427t, 516*, 544t, 554
Schweinfurth, Georg August, German-Rus-
sian traveler (1836- ), 135
Science, origins of, 67, 68, 78; in Sumeria,
125; in Egypt, 179-184; in Babylonia, 256-
259; in Assyria, 276; in Persia, 377; in In-
dia, 462, 526-532, 618-619; in China, 780-
782; in Japan, 924, 925, 935-93$
INDEX
1039
Scotland, 99*, 323
Scott, Sir Walter, Scotch novelist and poet
(1771-1832), 631, 885
Scribe (statue), 186, 187
Scribes, in Egypt, 161, 186, 187; in Baby-
lonia, 248; in Assyria, 271; in India, 556;
In China, 745*
Sculpture, origins of, 87; classical, 97; Egyp-
tian, 186-190; Babylonian, 255, 256; As-
syrian, 135, 279-280; Hebrew, 332; Persian,
378, 380; Indian, 593-596; Chinese, 739-740;
Japanese, 97, 897-898
Scythians (si'-thi-anz) , 273, 283, 287, 355,
450, 454, 459, 494, 642
Sea of Japan, battle of the, 919
Sebck (scb'-ek), 199
Sci Shonagon (sa sho-na-gon), Lady, Japan-
ese essayist (ca. 1000), 854, 860, 862, 887-
888
Selene, 58
Sclcucus Nicator (sc-lu'-cus ne-ka'-tor),
King of Syria (312-280 B.C.), 441
Semiramis (se-mir'-a-mis) , sec Sammuramat
Semites, 66, 118, 120, 127, 290-298
Seneca Indians, 32
Senart, 436
Scndai (sen-dl), 926
Senegalese, 43
Senkcreh (sen'-ker-a) , see Larsa
Senmut (sen-moot), Egyptian architect (ca.
1500 B.C.), 192
Sennacherib (sen-ak'-cr-ib), King of As-
syria (705-681 B.C.), 223, 267, 268, 273, 274,
275, 278, 279, 289*, 317
Senusrct (sen'-obs-ret) I, King of Egypt
(2192-2157 B.C.), 152, 188
Senusret II, King of Egypt (2115-2099 B.C.),
178
Senusret III, King of Egypt (2099-2061
B.C.), 152, 159-160, 187-188
Sepoy (se'-poi) Mutiny, 608*
Seppuku, 848; see hara-kiri
Serabit-el-khadim (scr-a'-bit-el-ka-dem'), 296
Serbia, 42
Sermon on the Mount, 628
Sesostris (s6-sos'-tris) , see Senusret I
Scsshiu (ses-shu), Japanese painter (1420-
1506), 904-905
Set (set), 178, 200
Seti (sa'-te) I, King of Egypt (1321-1300
B.C.), 185, 189, 213
Seti II, King of Egypt (1214-1210 B.C.),
Scto (sa-to), 809
Seton-Karr, W. H., 94
Seven Wonders of the World, 225
Sevres, 759
Sbabattu (sha'-bat-too) , 332
Shabuoth (sha'-vdb'-oth), 332
Shadufs (sha'-dobfs) , 226, 274
Shah (sha), 359*
Shah Jehan (ja-han'), Mogul emperor
(1628-1658), 468, 473-474, 475, 476, 48l»
560, 591, 607, 608, 609-610
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 173, 184,
HO, 581, 843, 889, 891
Shakti (shak'-tc) sects, 505, 509, 519
Shakuntala (sha-kobn'-ta-la) , 391*, 561, 574-
5?6, 577
Shakuntala, 561, 575-576
Shaky a-muni (sha'-kya-mob-ni), 423$; see
Buddha
Shakyas (sha'-kyaz), 422
Shalmaneser (shal-ma-ne'-ser) I, King of
Assyria (fl. 1267 B.C.), 266
Shalmaneser III, King of Assyria (859-824
H.C.), 267
Sha?nans (sha'-manz), 77, 542
Shamash (sha'-mash), 123, 127, 219, 234,256,
272,331$
Shamash -napishtim (sha'-mash-na-pish'-tim) ,
237, 250, 253, 330
Shamashnazir (sha'-mash-na-zcr') , Baby-
lonian daughter-merchant, 246
Shamash-shum-ukin (shobm-oo'-kin), broth-
er of Ashurbanipal (ca. 650 B.C.), 272
Shamsi-Adad (sham'-sc-a-dad) VII, King of
Assyria (824-811 B.C.), 278
Shang (shang) Dynasty, 644, 648, 671, 737,
738, 755, 772
Shang (state), 680
Shanghai, 641*, 728, 805, 812*, 814, 816, 930
Shangtu (shang-ddb), 761
Shankar (shan'-kar), Indian dancer, 587*
Shankara (shan'-ka-ra), Indian philosopher
(788-820), 505, 533, 541, 546-551, 552, 554,
73i.
Shansi (shan-sc), 645, 739
Shantinikctan (shan'-ti-ni-ka'-tan), 621
Shantung (shan tobng'; Chinese sha'n
dobng), 645, 739-740, 832, 928, 929
Sharaku (sha-ra-kob), Japanese engraver
(ca. 1790), 908
Sharamgadeva (sharam-ga-da'-va), Indian
musical theorist (1210-1247), 529*
Shat-Azalla (shat-a-zal'-la), 258*
Shatrunjaya (sha-trobn'-ja-ya), 598
Sheba (she'-ba), Queen of, 306
Sheik-cl-Bclcd (shak-el-ba'-led), 168, 186,
187
1040
INDEX
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, English poet (1792-
1822), 205, 211, 463
Shcm, 290*
Shen Nung (shun nobng), Chinese em-
peror (2737-2697 B.C.), 643
Shen Tsung (shun dzobng), Chinese em-
peror (1573-1620), 757
Shensi (shan-se; differs only in tone from
Shansi), 645
Shcol (shc'-ol), 313
Shepherd Kings, see Hyksos
Sher Shah (shar sha), Mogul emperor
(1542-1545), 464, 480, 607
Sheshonk (sha'-shonk) I, King of Egypt
(947-925 B-C-), 3 '5
Shi-Chins (shi-jing), 648-649, 665
Shih Huang-ti (shi hwang-de), Chinese em-
peror (221-211 B.C.), 675, 679, 694-698,
7^7» 73»» 739. 775, 778, 782
Shiloh (shl'-lo), 336
Shimabara (shim-a-ba-ra), 843
Shimadzu (shim-ad-zob) family, 846
Shimazu Yoshihiro (shim-ad-zob yo-shT-
he-ro), Japanese ceramic artist (fl. 1596),
900
Shimel (shim'-el), Hebrew warrior (died
ca. 974 B.C.), 305
Shimla (shim'-la), 392
Shilpa-shastra (shil'-pa-shas'-tra), 592
Shingon (shm-gon), 864; see Shintoism
Shintoism (shm'-to-izm), 832, 864, 865, 875,
885, 8Ho, 892, 894
Shippurla (ship-poor'-la), sec Lagash
Ships and shipbuilding, in Egypt, 160; in
Babylonia, 221-222, 228; in Phoenicia, 293;
in Persia, 358; in India, 400, 479; in China,
778
Shirozemon (she-ro-za-mon), Japanese pot-
ter (ca. 1229,) 899
Shiva (shi'-va), 413*, 453, 507, 508-509, 511,
519, 524, 587, 590, 594, 598, 599, 602, 604,
605, 625
Shivaitcs (shc'-va-itz) , 508, 519, 598, 606
Shizutani (she-7.c>b-ta-ne), 877
Shoguns (sho-gobnz), 837, 839, 846
Shomu (sho-mob). Emperor of Japan (724-
756), 850, 897
Shonzui (shon-zob-e1) , Japanese ceramic art-
ist (i6th century), 899-000
Shotoku (sho-to-kob), Empress of Japan
(ca. 77»), 877*
Shotuku Taishi (ti-she), Regent of Japan
(592-621), 8^, 894, 927
Shri Rangam (shrc rang'-am) Temple, 602
Shu (shoo), 201
Shub-ad (shobb'-ad), Sumerian queen (ca.
3500 B.C.), 130, 133
Shubun (shob-bobn), Japanese painter (ca.
1400), 904
Shu-Ching (shoo jmg), 643, 665, 718
Shuddhodhana (shobd'-6-da-na) , Buddha's
father (6th century B.C.), 422, 423, 424,
437
Shudraka (shoo'-dra-ka) , 572
Shudras (shoo'-draz) , 309, 480, 485-487,498,
520, 623, 624
Shut Hu Chuan (shwc hob jwa'n), 718
Shun (shwm), Chinese emperor (2255-2205
B.C.), 644, 66 1, 676, 680, 687, 689, 746
Shushan (shob-shan') , 117
Shushi (shdb-shc), 871; Japanese form of
Chu Hsi, q.v.
Shushi philosophers, 871
Shwasanved Upanishad (shwa-san'-vad 6b-
pan'-I-shad), 416, 523
Shwc Dagon (shwa da-gon'), 606
Siam, 46, 595, 602, 605-606
Sian-fu (se-an-fdb), 698*
Siberia, 38, 45, 94, 923$
Sibu (se'-boo), 198
Sicily, 293, 776*
Siddhantas (sid-dan'-taz) , 526, 527
Siddhartha (sid-da'r'-ta), 423$; see Buddha
Sidon (sl'-don), 106, 227, 294, 306, 308, 337
Sikhs (sex), 496, 508*
Sin (sin), Mesopotamia!! deity, 127-128, 256
Sinai (si'-ni), 140, 173, 302
Smbad the Sailor, 174
Smd (sind), 394, 396, 479
Singanpur (sm'-ga'n-pobr') , 589
Single Verses by a Hundred People, 879-
880
Sirguya (scr-g6T/-ya), 589
Sinkiang (sin-jc-ang'), 798
Sinuhc (sin-cw)-c), Egyptian official and
traveler (ca. 2180 B.C.), 174, 175
Sirius, 181
Sissa (sis'-sa), Brahman, reputed inventor of
chess (ca. 500), 500*
Sit, see Set
Sita (sc'-ta), 402, 403, 517, 568-570
"Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove," 706
Sixth Dynasty (Egypt), 292
Skcat, Walter William, English philologist
(1835-1912), 73
Sky worship, in Egypt, 197-198; in Baby-
lonia, 234; in India, 402, 403
INDEX
1041
Slavery, in primitive societies, 19-20; in Su-
meria, 125; in Egypt, 159; in Babylonia,
229; in Assyria, 275; in Phoenicia, 292-
293; in Judea, 337-338; in India, 466, 480
Slavs, 42
Sleeping Buddha Temple, 741
Smerdis (smar-dis), brother of Cambyscs
(ca. 525 B.C.), 353
"Smerdis," pretender to Persian throne
(521 B.C.), 354» 360
Smith, Sir Andrew, 84
Smith, Edwin, discoverer of the Edwin
Smith Papyrus (1822-1906), 182
Smith, Sir G. Elliot, 92, 136*
Smith, Vincent, 442*, 445, 481, 499-500
Smith, William Robertson, Scotch Oriental-
ist (1846-1894), 330*
Smith Papyrus, 182
Sncfrunofr (snef '-roo-no'-f er) , Egyptian
singer, 192
Socrates, Greek philosopher (469-399 B.C.),
193, 352, 428, 657, 659, 669, 75 it, 841
Sodum (sod'-um), 311, 355
Sogdiana (sog-de-a'-na) , 355
Sogdians, 397t
Sokokuji (so-ko-koo-jc), 904
Solomon, King of the Jews (974-937 B.C.),
3°4. 3<>5-308, 3°9*i 3I2> 3'4» 3»5» 332> 335»
337» 339> 342> 346*» 348, 479
Solomon Islands, 10, 34
Solon, Athenian lawgiver (640-558 B.C.), 2 90,
647
Solutrian Culture, 94
Soma (so'-ma), 403, 405
Soma, I lindu god, 403, 404
Somadcva (so-ma-da'va) , Indian poet (nth
century), 579
Somaliland, 46, 94, 189
Somalis, 42-43, 78
Soininc River, 90
Sonmath (som'-nai), 460
Somnathpur (som-nat-poor*), 601
"Son of Heaven," 797-798
Sonata Appassionata, 723
Song Celestial, 541!
Song of Solomon, 341-342, 580
Sonno Jo-i (son-no-jo-e), 875
Sopdit (sup'-dit), 198
Sophocles, Greek dramatic poet (495-406
B.C.), 611
Sostratus, Greek architect (fl. 300 B.C.), 137
Sothic (sii'-thik) cycle, 181*
Sothis (so'-this), see Sirius
South Africa, 38, 94, 103, 104, 629
South America, 830
South Pole, 107
South Sea Islanders, 16; also see Melanesians,
Polynesians
Soyots (so-yotz), 45
Spain, 92, 97, 105, 108, 215, 292, 293, 469,
607, 640, 737, 804
Sparta, 355
Spencer, Herbert, English philosopher
(1820-1903), 25, 78, 88, 538, 617, 924
Sphinx, 139, 172, 1 86
Spinoza, Baruch, Dutch Jewish philosopher
(1632-1677), 311, 412, 553*, 655, 670*, 734,
867,871
Spirit Sect, 864
Spring and Autumn Annals, 665
Srong-tsan Gampo (srong'-tsan gam'-po?).
King of Tibet (629-50), 506
State, origins of, 23-25
Statira (sta-ti'-ra), wife of Artaxcrxes II (ca.
380 B.C.), 375*
Stein, Sir M. Aurel, 506, 594, 728-729, 739
Still Bay Culture, 94
Stoicism, 195, 524
Stone Age, 102, 104; Old, 91, 93, 94, 104;
New, 91, 99, 100, 101, 104
Stonehcngc, 102
Story of Sinuhe, 174-175
Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor, 174
Strabo, Greek geographer (63? B.C.-A.D.
24?), 137*, 227, 3571, 294, 356, 357*, 442,
492 *t 495
Strange Stories, 718
Strasbourg cathedral, 6n
Strca-m of Kings, 579
Strindbcrg, August, Swedish dramatist and
man of letters (1849-1912), 643
Subhadda (sob-bad'-da), Buddhist radical
(ca. 480 B.C.), 503
Suez, 109, n?, 214, 215
Sugawara (soo-ga-wa-ra) family, 835
Sugawara Michizanc (mich-i-za-ne1) , patron
saint of Japanese literature (845-903), 835,
867
Suicide, in primitive societies, 53; in India,
502; in China, 646; in Japan, 53, 848-849
Suiko (sob-e-ko), Empress of Japan (593-
628), 833,^899
Sukkotb (sook'-kdth), 332
Suleiman (sob'-la-man') , Moslem traveler
(9th century), 756
Sultanpur (sool-ta'n'-pobr'), 589
Sumatra (soo-ma'-tra), 21, 64, 99*, 603, 780
1042
INDEX
Sunicria (soo me'-re-a), 104-105, 106, 107,
108, 116-136, 218, 226, 237*, 249, 250, 254,
255, 261, 262, 265, 270, 272, 300, 395, 479,
509, 532, 584, 641
Summer Palace, 741, 742, 778, 805
Sumner, William Graham, 17-18, 24
Sun worship, 59, 60; in Egypt, 198, 206-210,
212; in Babylonia, 234; in Persia, 365, 366,
369-370, 371 (also see Zoroastrianism) ; in
India, 402, 403
Sun Yat-scn (soon'-yat'-sen'; Chinese swun
yun), President of China (1866- 1925), 626,
809-812,813
Sung (soongj, Chinese censor (ca. 1800),
798
Sung (state), 678-679, 680, 688
Sung, Prince of (ca. 310 B.C.), 683
Sung Dynasty, 675, 724, 727, 735, 736, 740,
746, 751, 755, 756, 764, 779, 780, 782, 866,
872, 899, 904, 912
Sung K'ang (soong ka'ng), Chinese pacifist
(ca. 320 B.C.), 685
Sung Ping (bing), Chinese philosopher (ca.
425 H.C.), 679
Sung Shan (sha'n) (mountain), 742
Sung Yiich Ssu (c'-u-sob), 742
Siin^-slni (shoo), 780
Superior, Lake, 105
Sur D.is (s(>or das), Indian poet (1483-
Sunit (scio-riit') 393
Surgery, origins of, 81; in Egypt, 182; in
Italn Ionia, 2$K; in Jiulcii, 3*1; in India,
5?i; in China, 782
Surpa-nakha (soor'-pa-na-ka), $69
Sury,i (scMir'-ya), 403, 599
Surya SiJJhj/M, 528
Susa (soo'-sa), 105, 108, 117, 119, 121, 122,
219, 283, 356*, 358, 362, 380, 384, 440, 442,
642
Sushruta (soosh'-roo-ta), Indian physician
(ca. 500 B.C.), 5*0, 531, 532
Susi.ma (soo-sc-a'-na), 354
Suti (sob'-tc), Egyptian architect (ca. 1400
B.C.), 206*
Sutras (soot-ra/), 407*, 418, 428, 534
iVr/f/d, Pali form of tf/rrj, q r.
Suttee (sut-tc), 48, 149, 402, 494-496, 793
Swadeshi (swa-da'-she), 6^2
Siiwiij (swa-raj'), 555, 626, 632
Swastika (swa'-sti-ka), 600
Swift, Jonathan, Irish satirist and church-
man (1667-174?), u
Swinburne. Algernon Charles, English poet
(18*7-1909), 195
Switzerland, 92, 98, 99, 104
Synge, John Alillington, Irish dramatist
(1871-1909), 53*
Syria, 94, 153, 154, 155, 160, 188, 191, 206,
212, 214, 215, 222, 224, 245, 269, 286, 292,
296-297, 299, 300, 317, 318, 321, 355, 447,
450
Syrians, 217, 267
Systcma Brahmanicum (sis-ta'-ma bra-
man'-i-cuni), 391*
Szechuan (su-chwan') province, 729, 749,
779, 786
Szuma Ch'ien (soo'-ma che-an'), Chinese
historian (born 145 B.C.), 651, 652, 653*,
658% 695, 699, 718-719
Szuma Kuang (gwang), Chinese historian
(fl. 1076), 719, 726
Ta Hsueh (da shii'-uh), 665
Tabi-utul-Enlil (ta'-be-ob'-tool-en'-lH), King
of Nippur, 260-261
Tabus (ta-bobz'), 69-70
Tacitus, Caius Cornelius, Roman historian
(fl. 55-120), 578
Tagorc, Abanindranath (ta-gor', a-ba-nin'-
dra-nat), Indian artist, 619
Tagorc, Davcndranath (da-vcn'-dra-nat),
Indian reformer, 619
Tagorc, Dwijcndranath (dwe-jen'-dra-nat),
Indian philosopher, 619
Tagorc, Gogoncndranath (go-go-nen'-dra-
nat), Indian -artist, 619
Tagore, Rabindranath (ra-bin'-dra-nat), In-
dian poet (1861- ), 391, 415, 493, 582f,
619-621,622
Tagtug, 129
Tahiti, 6, 10, 32, 38, 45, 77, 107
Tahito (ta-he-td), Japanese poet (665-731),
856
T'ai Tsu (ti dzob), Chinese emperor (960-
976)i ,724
T'ai Tsung (ti dzot>ng), Chinese emperor
627-650), 675, 702, 782
T'ai Tsung, Chinese emperor (976-098), 731
T'ai Tsung, Korean emperor (i5th cen-
tury), 730
Taiko (ti-ko), 839
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828-1893),
French critic, 109, 719
T'ai-p'ing (ti-ping) Rebellion, 742, 758-759,
805,915
Taira (tl-ra) family, 835
Tai-shan (ti-shan) (mountain), 787
INDEX
1043
Taj Mahal (taj' ma-hal'), 473, 609-610, 611,
897
Takamine (ta-ka-me-ne) , Japanese scientist,
924
Takayoshi (ta-ka-yo-she), Japanese painter
(ca. 1010), 904
Ta-ki (ta-ke), wife of Chou Hsin (ca. 1135
Tale of the Water Margins, 718
Talent (money), 306*, 358*
Talikota (ta'-li-ko'-ta), 457, 459
Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice de,
Prince of Benevcnto, French statesman
and wit (1754-1838), 151
Talmud (tal'-mood), 329, 519
Tanibura (tarn-bob'-ra), 586
Tamerlane (tam'-er-lane), 463; see Timur-i-
lang
Tamil (ta'-nul) language, 555, 581
Tamils, 446, 490
Tammuz ((tam'-mobz), 120, 127, 238-239,
241*, 295, 312, 341
Tamura Maro (ta'-moo-ra ma-ro), Japanese
general (ca. 800), 854
T'ang (tang) D>-nasty, 675, 702, 703, 724,
728, 735, 736, 740. 745% 749* 751* 755* 775»
780, 782, 790, 797, 800, 835
T'ang (state), 683
Tangut (tan'-gobt), 761
Tanjore (tan-jor'), 393, 490, 585, 594, 602,
610
Tonka (tan-ka), 880, 926
Tantras (tan'-tras), 518, 519, 541
Tao (dou), 653, 689, 783
T'ao Ch'icn (dow chc-an'), Chinese poet
(365-427), 71^3-714
T'ao Hung-ching (dou hocmg jing), Chi-
nese writer (6th century), 782
Taoism (dou'-is-m) 653-658, 675, 728, 731,
741, 746, 748, 754, 786-787
Tao-Te-Ching (dou-da-jing), 653, 657
Tarahumaras, 7
Tashkent (tash-kent'),453
Tasmanians, 14, 21, 74, 79
Tata (ta-ta) Iron and Steel Company, 622
Tatars (ta'-terz), 701, 750, 770
Tattooing, 85
Tattwas (tat/twaz), 537-538, 539
Taxation, in Sumcria, 126; in Egypt, 160,
214; in Judea, 308; in Persia, 363; in India,
480; in China, 699; in Japan, 851-852
Taxila (ta'-ksi-la), 440, 441-442, 450, 492*,
557
Taylor, Meadows, 60 1*
Tcheou-ta-Kouan (che-oo'-ta-gwan), Chi-
nese diplomat (ca. 1275), 604, 605
Tecunas, 73
Tefnut (tcf-ndbf), 201
Tejahpala (ta'-ja-pa'-la) Temple, 598
Tekoschet (ta'-ko-shct), 189
Tell-Asmar (tel-as-mar'),395*
Tell-cl-Amarna (tel-cl-a-mar'-na), 188, 205,
211, 212*
Tell-el-Ubaid (tel-el-oob'-a-id), 133
Tell Halaf (tcl-ha-laf), 286
Tello(teTl6),i3i
Telugu (tel'-oo-gob) (dialect), 458, 555
Telugus (tribe), 495
Temple, 307-308, 309, 314, 315, 318, 321, 323,
324, 326, 327, 332, 333, 335, 337
Ten Commandments, 312, 331-339, 374
Ten Thousand (Xenophon's), 284
Tenchi (ten-die), 834
Tcnchi Tenno (ten-no), Emperor of Japan
(668-671), 833, 850, 877
Teng Shih (tung shi), Chinese radical (ca.
530 B.C.), 651-652
Tcngri, 60
Tennyson, Alfred, Baron, English poet
(1809-1892), 491, 550*, 620
Tcpe Gawra (ta'-pa-gor'-a), 265
Thai's, Athenian courtesan (4th century
B.C.), 82
Thalcs, Greek philosopher and scientist
(640-546 B.C.), 533, 552
Thames (tha'-mos), King of Egypt (myth-
ical), 76
Thanatopsis, 408
Thapsacus (thap'-sa-kus), 228
Thebes, 140, 151, 153, 154, 155, 167, 190, 191,
210, 213, 217*, 248, 307, 314, 449
Theodut, Father, 13
Theosophy, 554*, 6i6f
Third Dynasty (Egypt), 140, 147, 165
Thirteen, as an unlucky number, 79
Thomas, Elbcrt, 693*
Thoreau, Henry David, American writer
(1817-1862), 79,631,889
Thoth (thoth), 76, 147, 179, 199, 203*, 277*,
334
Thracians, 494
Thucydides, Greek historian (ca. 471-399
B.C.), 578, 719
Thugs, 499-500
Thutmose (thut'-moz), Egyptian artist (ca.
1370 B.C.), 1 88, 192
Thutmose I, King of Egypt (1545-1514
B.C.), 153, 154, 185
1044
INDEX
Thutmose II, King of Egypt (1514-1501),
153
Thutmose III, King of Egypt (1479-1447
B.C.), in, 142, 143, 153, i54-!55» l6o» *78»
181, 184, 185, 188, 189, 205, 210, 222, 270,
300, 302*
Thutmose IV, King of Egypt (1420-1412
B.C.), 155
Ti,6o
Tiamat (tya'-mat), 236-237, 278
Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar, Roman em-
peror (14-37), 381
Tibet (ti-bet), 38, 39, 45, 140, 329, 391, 401,
449, 501, 504, 506-507, 589, 602, 606, 767,
798
Tientsin (tint'-sm), 765, 778, 805
Tiglath-Pileser (tig'lath-pi-le'-zer) I, King
of Assyria (1115-1102 B.C.), 266-267, 280
Tiglath-Pileser III, King of Assyria (745-
727 B.C.), 267, 270
Tigris (ti'-gris) River, 117, 118, 119, 124,
135, 136, 218, 221, 265, 286f, 299, 756
Tilak (ti'-lak), Bai Gangadhar, Indian
Nationalist leader (1856-1920), 626, 632
Timbuktu, 3
Timon of Athens, 175, 689
Timur-i-lang (ti-mdor'-i-lang'), Turkish
conqueror (1336-1405), 463, 464, 465
Ting (ding), Duke of Lu (ca. 500 B.C.), 662,
663
Tinnevelly (tin'-ne-vel'-li) , 456
Tirumalai Nayyak (ti'-rdb-ma-li na'-yak),
Prince of Madura (1623-1659), 600, 602
Tiruvallaver (ti'-roo-val'-lob-var), Indian
poet (ca. 950), 581-582
Tiy (tc-6) mother of Amenhotep IV (ca.
1400 B.C.), 1 68
Tlingits, 6
To no-Chujo (to-no-chdb-jo) , 89^
Toba Sojo (to-ba so-jo), Japanese painter
(1053-1 140), 904
Tod, James, British army officer and Orien-
talist (1782-1835), 455, 492t, 406*
Todaiji (to-di-je) Temple, 892, 895
Todas, 39
Togo, Count Heihachiro (to-go, ha-ha-
che-ro), Japanese naval hero (1847-1934),
919
Tokugawa (to-kob-ga-wa) Shogunate, 829,
838, 844, 846, 852, 853, 855, 865, 866, 871,
875, 877, 886, 005, 006, 914
Tokyo (to-kyo), 830, 841, 847, 852*, 862,
867, 873, 877, 884, 886, 895, 905, 910, 914,
919, 920*, 921, 931
Tokyo, University of, 877, 926
Toledo, Spain, 806
Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolaievitch, Russian
writer and reformer (1828-1910), 627, 631,
693
Tom Jones, 718, 882, 891
Tom Sawyer, 410
Tomb of Nakht, 191
Tools, in primitive societies, 12-13; m Pre~
historic cultures, 93-95, 100-101, 103, 104;
in Sumcria, 124; in Egypt, 145; in Baby-
lonia, 227; in India, 395, 60 1*
Topheth (to'-fet), 321
Tor ah (to'-ra), 328
Toramana (to-ra-ma'-na), Hunnish King
(500-502), 452
Torres Straits, 85
Torture, in Egypt, 162; in Assyria, 272, 275-
276; in Persia, 361-362, 373; in India, 483;
in China, 797; in Japan, 850
Toru Kojomoto (to-roo ko-jo-mo-to), Japa-
nese engraver (fl. 1687), 907-908
Tosa Gon-no-kumi (to-sa gon-no-kdb-me),
Japanese painter (ca. 1250), 903
Tosa School (of Japanese painting), 843,
903-904
Toson (to-son), Japanese novelist and poet,
926-927
Totemism, 61-62, 76-77, 332
Tours, 460
"Towers of Silence," 372
Toyama, Mitsuru, Japanese nationalist leader
(1855- ), 923
Trade, in primitive societies, 15-16; in pre-
historic cultures, 101; in Sumeria, 125, 131,
135; in Egypt, 135, 160-161; in Babylonia,
228; in' Assyria, 274; in Phoenicia, 292-293;
in Judca, 306; in Persia, 358; in India, 400,
479; in China, 778-779, 815; in Japan, 932
Trajan, Marcus Ulpius, Roman emperor
(98-1 17), 364
Trans-Baikalia, 932
Transport, in primitive societies, 14-15; in
prehistoric cultures, 101; in Sumeria, 125;
in Egypt, 1 60; in Babylonia, 227; in Phoe-
nicia, 292-293; in Persia, 358; in India, 400,
444-445, 479; in China, 778; in Japan, 92ot,
934
Trans-Siberian Railroad, 931
Travancore (tra'-van-kor'), 456
Trebizond (treb'-i-zond'), 766
Tribe, the, 22
Trichinopoly (tri'-chi-nop'-o-li), 393, 602
Trobriand Islanders, 31, 54
Troubadours, 177
INDEX
I045
Troy, 91, 107, 215
Ts'ai Lun (tsi loon), inventor of paper (ca.
105), 727-728
Tseng Ts'an (dzung tsan), Confucian dis-
ciple (ca. 490 B.C.), 665
Ts'i (state), see Ch'i (state)
Ts'i, Duke of, see Ch'i, Duke of
Tsin, see Chin
Tsing-tao (ching dow), 639*, 929
Tsoa (tso-a), Chinese general (ca. 740), 715
Tso-chuan (dzo jwan), 718, 723
Tsu Ch'ung-chih (dzob chobng-je), Chinese
mathematician (430-501), 781
Tsunayoshi (tsob-na-yosh-e), Japanese sbo-
gun (1680-1709), 843
Tsurayaki (tsdb-ru-y a-ke) , Japanese poet
(883-946), 8j8, 863", 878-879
Tsushima (isoo-she-ma), 919
Tszc-kung (tsu-kobng), Confucian disciple
(ca. 500 B.C.), 664, 666, 670, 671-672
Tsze-loo (tsu-lob), Confucian disciple (ca.
500 B.C.), 662, 663, 664, 666, 669
Tuaregs, 46, 47
Tu Fu (dob fob), Chinese poet (712-770),
707, 713, 7H-7i7» 747
Tukaram (tob-ka-ram') , Indian poet (1608-
1649), 58 1
Tulsi Das (tobl'-sc das), Indian poet (1532-
1624), 581
Tung Cho (tobng jo), Boxer general, 746
Tungabadra (tobn'-ga-ba'-dra) River, 457
T'ungchow (tobng-jo), 808*
Tungus, 21
Tun-huang (toon hwa'ng,) 728
Tunis, 94
Turgcnicv, Ivan, Russian novelist and dra-
matist (1818-1883), 687
Turin Musucm, 188
Turkestan, 108, 140, 506, 571, 594, 606, 642,
728, 729, 739, 741, 767, 779, 902
Turkey, 703
Turks, 24*, 154, 286f, 362, 450, 459, 464*,
756
Tutenkhamon (tdbr/-angk-a'-men), King of
Egypt (1360-^350 B.C.), 141, 155, 191, 213
Tutenkhaton (tdbt-en-kha'-ton), see Tuten-
khamon
Twelfth Dynasty (Egypt), 151, 185, 187
Twenty-one Demands, 813, 928-929
Twenty -second Dynasty (Egypt,) 185
Twoshtri (twash'-tri) , 492
Tycoon, 839
Tyre (tlr), 106, 227, 228, 292, 294, 295, 303,
306, 308, 317, 318, 324, 337, 384
T*zu Hsi (tzu she"), Chinese dowager em-
press (1834-1908), 782, 806-808, 810
U
Udaipur (db-dl'-pobr), 393, 475
Udayana (db-da'-ya-na), Indian scientist
(ca. 975), ^29
Uganda, 45
Uimala-Kirti (66-e'-ma-la-ker-te), Buddhist
saint, 747
Ujjain (doj-jmO, 451, 557, 575
Ukiyoye (oo-kl-yo-yc) engravers, 907, 908,
910
Ulysses, 570
Uma (ob'-ma), aspect of Kali, 509
Uma no-Kami (db-ma-no-ka-me) , 884
Ungut (obn'-gdbt), 765
United Provinces, 486f
United States, 93, 391, 444-445, 737, 805, 806,
808, 809, 813, 815, 829, 835, 891, 915, 917*,
918, 928, 929-930, 93 1 > 932-933
United States Army Medical Corps, 925
United States Bureau of Standards, 400
Unkci (<K>n-ka), Japanese woodcarvcr
(1180-1220), 897*
Untouchables, see Outcastcs
Upanishads (ob-pan'-i-shfidz) , 58, 391, 401
407, 409, 410-415, 416, 417, 419, 470, 542,
545,_546, 547* 55**, 554> 5*4* 5^6, 571, 690
Ur (oor) 103, 1 18, 119, 120, 122-123, 132,
133-134^36, i79» 215-234, 300, 395
Urartu (oo-rar'-too), 287; see Armenia
Urdu (dbr'-d()b), 555
Ur-cngur (oor-en'-gdbr) , King of Ur (ca.
2450 B.C.), 122-123, I27i »35
Urfe, Honorc d\ French novelist (1568-
1626)^56*
Urga (oor'-ga), 931
Uriah (u-ri'-a), Hittite general (ca. 900
Ur-nina (6br-ne'-na), King of Lagash (3100
B.C.), 133
Uruguay, 93 2
Uruk (6br*-6bk), 118, 119, 120, 123, 127, 234,
250, 251, 252,^253
Urukagina (oor-obk-a-je'-na?), King of
Lagash (ca. 2900 B.C.), 120-121, 128, 129
Uruvela (dbr-db-va'-la), 426
Urvashi (obr-vash'-e), 511
Ushas (ob'-shaz), 403
Ussher, James, Archbishop of Armagh and
biblical chronologer (1581-1656), 300
Ussuri (obs-scTor'-e) River, 806
1 046 INDEX
Utnniaro (ob-ta-ma-ro), Japanese engraver
(175 3- 1 806), 908
Uzzah (uz'-za), 69, 313
Vaccination, 531-5
Vachaspati (va'-chas-pa'-ti) , Indian scientist
(850), 529
Vadnagar (vad-na'-gar) , 599
Vaghbata (vag'-bha-ta), Indian medical
writer (ca. 625), 530
Vaishali (vi'-sha-le), 419, 422
Vaisheshika (vf-sha'-shi-ka) philosophy, 528,
»6
Vaishnavites (vlsh'-na-vitz) , 508, 598, 606
Vaisyas (vl'-shyas), 399, 487, 623, 678
Vajjians (va'-je-ans), 398
Valley of the Kings, 154
Valmiki (val'-mc-ki), Indian poet (ca. 100
n.c.), 567, 570
Vanaprastha (va-na-pras'-ta), 522
Vandammc, Dominique-Rene, French gen-
eral (1770-1830), 466
Varahamihira (va-ra'-ha-rni'-hi-ra), Indian
astronomer (505-587), 452, 526
Vanina (va'-rob-na), 285, 397!, 402, 403-404
Vasanti (va-san'-tc), 501
Vashubandu (vash-ob-band'-ob), Buddhist
commentator (ca. 320-380), 452
Vatsyayana (vat-sya'-ya-na), 490
Vayu (va'-yob), 402
Vedtmla (va-dan'-ta) philosophy, 541, 546-
551, 552, 554, 618, 621, 731
Vcdas (va'-daz), 365*, 366, 398, 401, 403,
406-409, 416, 419, 420, 433, 48$, 486, 493,
5<>5. 5°7. 51'. 523. 534. 533. 542. 546> 553i
557, 562*, 565, 571, 572, 596, 616
Veddahs (vcd'-daz), 14, 21, $6
Vedic (ved'-ik) Age, 397-398, 309, 401, 406,
493. 494. 495. 524. 53°. 6l8
Vegetation rites, 65
Velasquez de Silva, Diego Rodriguez, Span-
ish painter (1599-1660,) 910
Vcmana (vc-ma'-na), Indian poet (i7th
century), 523~524
Vcndidad (ven'-di-dad), 365$
Venezuela, 99*
Venice, 2, 479, 640, 753, 760, 766, 769, 776
Venus, 60, 235, 238, 255
Venus (planet), 257
Versailles, 704*, 835
Victoria (Australia), 50
Victoria Institute, Madras, 585
Vidarbha (vi'-dar'-ba), 557
Videhas (vi-da'-haz) , 533, 567
Vijayanagar (ve'-ja-ya-na'-gar) (city), 456,
457-458,459
Vijayanagar (state), 456-459, 477!, 495. 6o2
Vikramaditya Chalukya (vi-kram-a'-dit-ya
cha'-16bk-ya), King of Magadha (1076-
1126), 457*, 602
Vikramaditya Gupta (vi-kram-a'-dit-ya
goop'-ta), King of Magadha (380-413),
451, 478, 576
Vimala (vj'-ma-la) Temple, 598-599
Vina (vc-na'), 586
Vinaya (vi'-na-ya), 428*
Vinaya Pitaka, 589
Vinci, Leonardo da, Italian artist (1452-
1519), 97, 182, 589, 590, 751, 905, 912
Virginity, in primitive societies, 45-46
Virocana (ve-ro-ka'-na), 416
Virupaksha (vi-rdb'-pak-sha) Temple, 602
Vishnu (vish'-nob), 402, 413*, 458, 506, 507,
508, 511, 523, 524, 552, 565, 588, 500, 594,
5Q8, 602, 604, 625
Vhbmipurana, 511-513
Vishtaspa (vish-tas'-pa), 364; see Hystaspes
Vispcrcd (vis'-pcr-ed), 365$
\7ivasvat (vi-vas'-vat) , 403
Vivckananda, Swami (ve-va-kan'-an-da,
swa'-mc) (Narcndranath Dutt), Indian
philosopher (1863-1002), 617*, 618
^rlzic^arc, in Egypt, 162-163
Vladivostok (vla-di-vos-tokO , 932
Volga River, 355
Vologesus (vol-6-je'-zus) V, King of Parthia
(209-222) 365$
Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet de),
French writer (1694-1778), 348, 445, 511,
5 S0. 578, 594. 639, 657, 683, 688, 693, 695,
768, 788-789
Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, 225!
Vyasa (vya'-sa), the Indian Homer, 511, 561
W
Wabunias, Queen of the, 86
Wagakusha (wa-ga-kob-sha) scholars, 874
Wages, in Egypt, 159, 214; in Babylonia,
231; in Persia, 363; in India, 481; in China,
816; in Japan, 852, 921
Wagner, Richard, German composer (1813-
1883), 58
Wagon- wheel, 14, 117
Wales, 92
Waley, Arthur, 703!, 7°4** 7'4. 883
Wallace, Alfred Russel, English biologist
and naturalist (1822-1913), 25-26
INDEX
1047
Wang An-shih (wang an-shi), Chinese so-
cialist statesman (fl. 1070), 724-726
Wang Chieh (wang je'-uh), Chinese printer
(fl. 868), 729
Wang Hsi-chih (wang she-ji), Chinese cal-
ligraphcr (ca. 400), 745*
Wang Mang (wang ma'ng), Chinese em-
peror (5-25), 700-701
Wang Shu-ho (wang shob-ho), Chinese
medical writer (ca. 300), 782
Wang Wei (wang wa), Chinese painter
Wang Yang-ming (wang yang-mmg), Chi-
nese philosopher (1472-1528), 733-735i748»
871
Wan-li (wan-le), see Shcn Tsing
War, in primitive societies, 22-23
War and Peace, 718
Ward, C. O., 302
Ward, Lester Frank, American sociologist
(1841-1913), 23
Warfare, Sumerian, 126; Assyrian, 270-271,
272-273; Persian, 360; Indian, 443; Chinese,
647; Japanese, 918 (see, also, Samurai)
Warka, see Uruk
Warwick, Richard Neville, Earl of ("The
King-Maker"), 834
Washington Conference (1922), 929
Waterloo, 613
Wealth, of Egypt, 214, 215; of Babylonia,
229; of Phoenicia, 294; of Judca, 306; of
Persia, 363; of India, 481-482; of China,
703, 763; of Japan, 920
Weaving, in primitive societies, 13; in pre-
historic cultures, 100-101; in Egypt, 191;
in Babylonia, 227; in India, 478-479, 585;
in China, 776-777
Wei (wa) (state), 663, 680, 695
Wei, Dukes of, 663, 666, 688
Wei River, 641, 651
Wei Shcng (wa shung), 790
Weigall, Arthur, British Egyptologist (1880-
i934)> J34
Weismann, August, German zoologist (1834-
1914), 529
Wen Ti (wun de), Chinese emperor (170-
157 B.C.), 698
Wen Ticn-hsian (wun te-an'she-ang) , Chi-
nese patriot and scholar (ca. 1260), 764
Wen Wang (wun wang), Chinese emperor
(fl. 1123 B.C.), 650
Westermarck, Edward, 499
Western Han Dynasty, 608*
Westminster Abbey (Henry VII's Chapel),
599
Whistler, James Abbott MacNeill, Ameri-
can etcher and painter (1834-1903), 009,
910,912
Whitman, Walt, American poet (1819-
1892), 341*, 516, 909
Whitsuntide, 65
Wilde, Oscar O'Flahertie Fingal Wills,
Irish poet and dramatist (1856-1900), 858-
859
Wilhelm Meister, 883
Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, President of
the United States (1856-1924), 467
Wincklcr, Hugo, German Assyriologist
(died 1913), 286
Winter Palace Hotel, at Luxor, 140
Winternitz, M., 536*, 579
Wisdom of Amenope, 167
Wolff, Christian, German philosopher and
mathematician (1679-1754), 693
Woman, position of, in primitive societies,
30-35, 69-70; in Sumeria, 129-130; in
Egypt, 164-167; in Babylonia, 247-248; in
Assyria, 275; in Judea, 333, 334, 339; in
Persia, 375; in India, 400-401, 493-496; in
China, 792, 819-820; in Japan, 860-861
Woodward, Sir Arthur Smith, 92
Woolley, C. Leonard, 119, 130, 395!
Woosung ( woo'-sobng) , 778
Wordsworth, William, English poet (1770-
1850), 754, 858, 883
Works and Days, 329$
World Court, 931
World's Columbian Expedition, 618
Writing, 135; origins of, 14, 76-77, 104-106;
in Sumeria, 118*, 130-131, 135; in Egypt,
131, 135, 144-145, 171-173; in Babylonia,
119*, 131, 248-249; in the Hittite Empire,
286-287; in Phoenicia, 295-296, 298; in
Persia, 357; in India, 406-407; in China,
76, 745*, 772-773; in Japan, 76, 877
Wu Shu (woo shoo), Chinese encyclopedist
(947-1002), 73 1
Wu Tao-tze (woo dow-dzu), Chinese
painter (born ca. 700), 740-750
Wu Ti (woo de), Chinese emperor (140-
87 B.C.), 675, 698-700, 779
Wu Wang, Chinese emperor (1122-1115
B.c.),686
Wu Yi (woo ye), Chinese emperor (1198-
1194 B.C.), 644,^677
Wu-tai-shan (woo-di-shan), 742
1048
INDEX
"Xanadu" (kan'-a-doo), 761*
Xanthippe, Greek, wife of Socrates (ca.
470-400 B.C.), 165
Xavier, St. Francis, Apostle of the Indies
(1506-1552), 469-471
Xcnophon, Greek historian and general
(445-355 B-c.), 284, 352
Xerxes (zerx'-ez) I, King of Persia (485-464
B.C.), 222*, 249, 294, 358, 360, 373, 378,
379, 381-382, 383, 384
Xerxes II, King of Persia (425 B.C.), 382
Yahu (ya'-hoo), 310; see Yahveh
Yahveh (ya'-va), 210, 211, 302, 305, 307,
309, 310-313, 318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325,
326, 329, 332, 333, 335, 336, 338, 340, 344,
345. 346. 348. 349. 37°
Yajnavalkya (yaj'-na-val-kya) , 410-411, 413,
4'4-4'5.533
Yajur-veda (yaj'-6br-va'-da), 407
Yakuts, 38, 52
Yama (ya'-ma), 405, 408-409, 516, 543
Yami (ya'-me), 408-409
Yang and yin (yang, yin), 650, 732, 783
Yang Chu (yang job), Chinese Epicurean
philosopher (fl. 390 B.C.), 679-682
Yang Kwci-fci (gwa-fa) (died 755), 704,
707, 708, 714*, 715
Yang-tzc (yang-dzu) River, 641*, 806
Yano Ycitoku (ya-no ya-to-kdb), Japanese
sculptor (ca. 1590), 895
Yao (you), Chinese emperor (2356-2255
B.C.), 643, 661, 676, 687, 689
Yariba, 43
Yashts (yash-t-s), 365$
Yama (yas'-na), 365$, 367
Yasumaro (ya-sob-ma-ro), Japanese his-
torian (ca. 712), 885
Ycdo (ya-do), 841; sec Tokyo
Yeishin Sozu (ya-shm so-zob), Japanese
painter (ca. 1017), 903
Yellow River, see Hoang-ho
Yellow Sea, 641, 863
Yemen (yem'-en), 135
Yen Hwuy (yan hwe), Confucian disciple
(ca. 500 B.C.), 660
Yoga (yo'-ga), 504, 541-545, 564
Yoga-sntras, 543
Yogis (yo'-gez), 541-542, 545, 614
Yokohama (yo-ko-ha-ma), 830, 9:0
Yomei (yo-ma), Emperor of Japan (died
586), 833
Yoni (yo'-ni), 519, 520
Yoritomo (yor-i-to-mo), Japanese dictator
(1186-1199), 837
Yoritomo, Japanese shogun dyh century),
899
Yoshimasa (yosh-i-ma-za), Japanese shogun
(1436-1480), 838, 905
Yoshimitsu (yosh-i-mit-soo) , Japanese sho-
gun (1387-1395), 838, 865t, 895, 904
Yoshimunc (yosh-i-moo-ne) , Japanese sho-
gun (1716-1745), 843-844, 850-851, 873,
Yoshiwara (yosh-I-wa-ra) , 862
"Young Folk of the Pear Garden," 721
Young India, 631
Young, Thomas, English philosopher and
scholar (1773-1829), 145*
Yozci (yo-za), Emperor of Japan (877-
949). «34
Yii (ii), Chinese emperor (2205-2197 B.C.),
644, 680, 737-738, 739
Yu Tze (yoo-dzu), Chinese philosopher
(ca. 1250 B.C.), 650
Yuan Chwang (yob-a'n' chwa'ng'), Chim-so
traveler in India (7th century), 421, 446,
449. 453-454* 45^ 48*. 497. 499. 5°i. 52^.
53N 557^5^. 593*. 594. 7«2
Yuan (yoo-an') Dynasty, 757; see Mongol
Dynasty
Yuan Shi-kai (yoo-an' shi-ki), President of
China (1848-1916), 811
Yucatan, 2, 90, 107
Yudishthira (ydo-dish-tc'-ra), 516, 561, 570
Yuga (ydo'-ga), 513
Yun Kan (iin kan), 739
Yun Men (yobn mun), 740
Yung Lo (yobng 16), Chinese emperor
1403-1425), 731, 742, 767
Zagros (za-gros) Mountains, 122
Zapouna (za-pdo'-na), 296
Zarathustra (za-ra-thus'-tra) , Median sage
(660-583 B.C.), 331$, 364-368, 370, 371, 372,
374. 375*» 4«*
Zechariah (zek-a-ri'-a), Hebrew prophet
(ca. 520 B.C.), 294
Zedekiah (zed-e-kl'-a), King of Judah 597-
586 B.C.), 321-322, 323, 324
2,en (zen), 864, 872, 903
Zend (language), 357,
INDEX
1049
Zend-Avesta (zend-a-ves'-ta) , 350, 357, 364,
365-366, 369, 370, 374, 376, 406
Zengoro Hozen (zen-go-ro ho-zen), Japa-
nese potter (died 1855), 901
Zeno, Greek philosopher (ca. 342-270 B.C.),
553
Zephaniah (zcf-a-ni'-a), Hebrew prophet
(ca. 630 B.C.), 345*
Zerubbabel (zer-ub'-a-bel) , Hebrew prince
(fl. 520 B.C.), 327
Zeus, 60, 402
Ziggurats (zig'-goo-ratz) , 133
Zophar (zo'-far), 344
Zoroaster (zo'-ro-as'-tcr) , see Zarathustra
Zoroastrianism, 351, 354, 364-372* 374» 4°5»
469, 471, 508*
Zoser (zo'-ser), King of Egypt (ca. 3150
B.C.), 147, 186, 189
Zulus, 48, 57
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Will Durant was born in 188$ at North Adams,
Mass. He received his education in the Catholic parochial
schools of North Adams, Mass., and Kearney, N. /.; at
St. Peter's (Jesuit) College, Jersey City; and at Columbia
University, Neiv York. For a summer he served as cub
reporter on the New York Journal, in 1907; but finding
the 'work too exciting for his temperament he contented
himself 'with teaching Latin, French, English and other
subjects at Seton Hall College, South Orange, N. J.
(1907-11). He entered the seminary there in 1909, but
rwithdrerw in 191 1, for reasons 'which he has described in
his book, TRANSITION. He passed from a seminary to the
radical circles in Ne'w York, and became the teacher of
the Ferrer School (1911-13), an experiment in libertarian
education. In 1912 he toured Europe at the expense of
Alden Freeman, 'who had befriended him and had under-
taken to broaden his borders. In 1913 he gave hi?nself
over to graduate studies at Columbia University, special-
izing in biology under Morgan and Calkins, and in phi-
losophy under Woodbridge and De'wey. He received the
Ph.D. degree there in 1917, and taught philosophy at
Columbia University for one year. In 1914 he began,
in a Presbyterian church at Fourteenth Street and Second
Avenue, Ne'w York, those lectures on the history of
philosophy and literature 'which prepared him for THE
STORY OF PHILOSOPHY and THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION;
for his audiences there 'were mostly 'workingmen and
'women, 'who demanded complete clarity, and some con-
temporary significance to all historical material consid-
ered 'worthy of study. In 1921 he organized the Labor
Temple School, 'which became one of the most successful
of recent experiments in adult education. He retired in
1927 to devote himself to THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION. He
toured Europe again in 1927; 'went around the 'world for
a study of Egypt, the Near East, India, China and Japan
in 1930; and circled the globe again in 1932 to visit Japan,
Manchuria, Siberia and Russia. During the next five years
he hopes to spend a year in Greece and Italy in prepara-
tion for the second volume of THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION.
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