Part 3

Now, you probably have never even heard of these rivers and seas, and yet they have been known longer than any other places in the world. One of these lines is the Tigris River, and the other is the Euphrates. They run along getting closer and closer together until at last they join each other and flow into what is called the Persian Gulf.

You might make these two rivers in the ground of your yard or garden or draw them on the floor if your mother will let you. Just for fun you might name your drinking-cup “Tigris” and your glass “Euphrates.” Then you might call your mouth, into which they both empty, the “Persian Gulf,” for you will hear a great many new names by and by, and as grown-up people give names to their houses and boats, to their horses and dogs, why shouldn’t you give names to things that belong to you? For instance, you might call your chair, your bed, your table, your comb and brush, even your hat and shoes, after these strange names.

Then, if we flew in our airplane to the west, we should see a country called Egypt, another river, the Nile, and a sea now named the Mediterranean. Mediterranean simply means “between the land,” for this sea is surrounded by land. It is, indeed, almost like a big lake. It is supposed that long, long ago in the Stone Age, there was no water at all where this sea now is, only a dry valley, and that people once lived there.

Along the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates were the only civilized nations living in the Bronze Age. The rest of the World people knew nothing about. There may have been Cave Men living in other parts of the World, but it is only of the people in these two places that we have any written history until after the Iron Age began.

All of the people who lived in the country of the Tigris and Euphrates were white. We don’t know how nor when nor where colored people first lived, though it is interesting to guess. There were, we think, just three different white families and from these three families all the white people in the world are descended. Yes, your family came from here, ’way, ’way, ’way, ’way, back. So you will want to know the names of these three families and which one was your own. They were:

The Indo-Europeans, often called Aryans, The Semites, and The Hamites.

Most of us belong to the Aryan family, some are Semites, but very few in this part of the World are Hamites.

If your name is Henry or Charles or William, you are probably an Aryan.

If it is Moses or Solomon, you are probably a Semite.

If it is Shufu or Rameses, you are probably a Hamite.

The Aryans came from higher up on the map than the other two families, we think. They were the first people to tame wild horses and to use them for riding and drawing carts. They also had tamed cows which they used for milk, and sheep for their wool.

5

Real History Begins or ’Way ’Way Back to the Time of the Gipsies

You can remember the big things that have happened in your own lifetime.

And you have of course heard your father tell about things that happened in his own life--how he fought the Germans in the Great War, perhaps.

And if your grandfather is still living, he can tell you still other stories of things that took place when he was a boy before even your father was born.

Perhaps your great, great, grandfather may have been living when Washington was President, and _his_ great, great, great, great, grandfather

may have been living when there were only wild Indians in this country.

Although these ancestors, as they are called, are dead long since, the story of what did happen in all their lifetimes ’way, ’way back has been written down in books and this story is history--“his story” one boy named it.

Christ was living in the Year 1--no, not the first year of the world, of course.

Do you know how many years ago that was?

You can tell if you know what year this is now.

If Christ were living to-day, how old would He be?

Nineteen hundred and more years may seem a long time. But perhaps you have seen or heard of a man or a woman who was a hundred years old. Have you?

Well, in nineteen hundred years only nineteen men each a hundred years old might have lived one after the other--nineteen men one after the other since the time of Christ--and that doesn’t seem so long after all!

Everything that happened _before_ Christ was born is called B.C., which you can guess are the initials of Before Christ, so B.C. stands for Before Christ. So much is easy.

Everything that has happened in the world _since_ the time of Christ is called A.D. This is not so easy for though A. might stand for After, we know D. is not the initial of Christ. As a matter of fact, A. D. are the initials of two Latin words, “Anno Domini.” Anno means “in the year,” Domini “of the Lord”; so that Anno Domini is “in the year, of the Lord,” which in ordinary, every-day language means of course “since the time of Christ.”

The things I have told you that I have had to guess at we call Before-History, or _Pre-History_--which means the same thing. But the things that have happened in the lifetime of people, who have written them down--the stories I don’t have to guess at--we call _History_.

The first history that we feel fairly sure is really true begins with the Hamite family. The Hamites, you remember, were one of the three families of the white race I have already told you about who lived by the Tigris and Euphrates. We think that they moved away from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and went down to Egypt long before history began.

Of course they didn’t pack all their furniture on a big wagon and move to Egypt, as you might move from the house where you now live to another. They lived in tents then and not in houses at all, and they only moved along a day’s journey at a time as campers or Gipsies might do. In fact, Gipsy is short for Egyptian. When they got tired of one place or had eaten up everything there was near-by, they rolled up their tents, packed them on camels, and moved a little farther along to a new place. And so camping here for a while, then gradually moving farther along to the next good place and camping there, they at last got as far off as the land we now call Egypt. When they finally reached Egypt they found it such a fine country in which to live that there they stayed for good and were called Egyptians.

Why do you suppose they found Egypt such a fine country in which to live? It was chiefly on account of a habit of the river Nile--a bad habit you might at first think it--a habit of flooding the country once every year.

It rains so hard in the spring that the water fills up the river Nile, overflows its banks, and spreads far out over the land, but not very deep. It is as if you had left a water-spigot turned on and the water running, or had begun to water your garden with a hose, and then you had gone off and forgotten it.

But the people know when the overflow is coming and they are glad for it to come, so they put banks around some of it so that it is stored up for watering the land during the rest of the year when there is no rain. After most of the water has dried up, it has left a layer of rich, dark, moist earth over the whole country. In this earth it is easy to grow dates, wheat, and other things which are good for food.

If it were not for this yearly overflow of the Nile, the country of Egypt would be a sandy desert in which no plant or living thing would grow--for all plants as well as animals must have water and will die without it. Egypt, without water, would be like the great Sahara Desert, which is not far away. It is the Nile, therefore, that makes the land so rich and Egypt such an easy and cheap country to live in, for food grows with little or no labor and costs almost nothing. Besides this, the climate is so warm that people need little clothing and do not have to buy coal or make fires to heat their houses. So it was to this country that the Hamites at last came, finally settled down, and were thereafter called Egyptians.

The first Egyptian king whose name we know was Menes, but we do not know much about him. We believe he built some kind of waterworks so that the people might better use the water of the Nile, and he probably lived about 3400 B. C. He may have lived either earlier or later, but as this is an easy date to remember, we shall take it for a starting-point. You might remember it by supposing it is a telephone number of a person you wanted to call up:

Menes, First Egyptian king . . 3400 B.C.

6

The Puzzle-Writers

People of the Stone Age had learned how to talk to each other, but they could not write, for there was no such thing as an alphabet or written words, and so they could not send notes or messages to one another or write stories. The Egyptians were the first people to think of a way to write what they wanted to say.

The Egyptians did not write with letters like ours, however, but with signs that looked like little pictures, a lion, a spear, a bird, a whip. This picture-writing was called hieroglyphics--see if you can say “Hi-e-ro-glyph-ics.” Perhaps you have seen, in the puzzle sections of a newspaper, stories written in pictures for you to guess the meaning. Well, hieroglyphics were something like that.

Here is the name of an Egyptian queen, whom you will hear about later--written in hieroglyphics; her name you would never guess from this funny writing. It is “Cleopatra.”

A king’s or queen’s name always had a line drawn around it, like the one you see around the above name in order to mark it more prominently and give it more importance. It was something like the square or circle your mother may put around her initials or monogram on her letter-paper.

But there was no paper in those days and so the Egyptians wrote on the leaves of a plant called papyrus that grew in the water. It is from this name “papyrus” that we get the name “paper.” Can you see that “paper” and “papyrus” look and sound something alike? The Egyptians’ books were written by hand, of course, but they had no pencils nor pens nor ink to write with. For a pen they used a reed, split at the end, and for ink a mixture of water and soot.

Their books were not made of separate pages like our books, but from a long sheet of papyrus-leaves pasted together. This was rolled up to form what was called a scroll, something like a roll of wall-paper, and was read as it was unrolled.

Stories of their kings and battles and great events in their history they used to write on the walls of their buildings and monuments. This writing they carved into the stone, so that it would last much longer than that on the papyrus-leaves.

All the old Egyptians, who wrote in hieroglyphics and knew how to read this writing, had died long since, and for a great many years no one knew what such writing meant. But a little over a hundred years ago a man found out by accident how to read and understand hieroglyphics once again. This is the way he happened to do so.

The Nile separates into different streams before it flows into the Mediterranean Sea. These separate streams are called mouths and one of these mouths has been given the name “Rosetta.”

One day a man was digging nearby this Rosetta Mouth when he dug up a stone something like a tombstone with several kinds of writing on it. The top writing was in pictures which we now call hieroglyphics, and no one understood what it meant. Below this was written what was supposed to be the same story in the Greek language, and a great many people do understand Greek. All one had to do, therefore, to find out the meaning of the hieroglyphics, was to compare the two writings. It was like reading secret writing when we know what the letters stand for. You may have tried to solve a puzzle in the back of your magazine, and this was just such an interesting puzzle, only there was no one to tell the answer in the next number.

The puzzle was not so easy as it sounds, however, for it took a man almost twenty years to solve it. That is a long time for any one to spend in trying to solve a puzzle, isn’t it? But after this “key” to the puzzle was found, men were able to read all of the hieroglyphics in Egypt and so to find out what happened in that country long before Christ was born.

This stone is called the Rosetta Stone, from the Rosetta Mouth of the Nile where it was found. It is now in the great British Museum in London and is very famous, because from it we were able to learn so much history which we otherwise would not have known.

Egypt was ruled over by a king who was called a Pharaoh. When he died his son became the Pharaoh and so on. All the other people were divided into classes, and the children in each class usually became just what their fathers had been. It was very unusual for an Egyptian to start at the bottom and work up to the top, as a poor boy in this country may do, though once in a great while this happened even in Egypt, as we shall see by and by.

The highest class of people were called priests. They were not like priests or ministers of the church nowadays, however, for there was no church at that time. The priests made the religion and rules, which every one had to obey as everybody does the laws of our land.

But the priests were not only priests; they were doctors and lawyers and engineers, as well. They were the best-educated class, and they were the only people who knew how to read and write, for it was very difficult, as you might suppose, to learn how to read and write hieroglyphics.

The next highest class to the priests were the soldiers, and below these were the lower classes--farmers, shepherds, shopkeepers, merchants, mechanics, and last of all the swineherds.

The Egyptians did not worship one God as we do. They believed in hundreds of gods and goddesses, and they had a special god for every sort of thing, who ruled over and had charge of that thing--a god of the farm, a god of the home, and so on. Some of their gods were good and some were bad, but the Egyptians prayed to them all.

Osiris was the chief god, and Isis was his wife. Osiris was the god of farming and judge of the dead. Their son Horus had the head of a hawk.

Many of their gods had bodies of men with heads of animals. Animals they thought sacred. The dog and the cat were sacred animals. The ibis, which was a bird like a stork, was another. Then there was the beetle, which was called a scarab. If any one killed a sacred animal he was put to death, for the Egyptians thought it much worse to kill a sacred and holy creature than to kill even a human being.

7

The Tomb-Builders

The Egyptians believed that when they died, their souls stayed near by their bodies. So when a person died they put in the tomb with him all sorts of things that he had used in daily life--things to eat and drink, furniture and dishes, toys and games. They thought the soul would return to its own body at the day of judgment. They wanted their bodies to be kept from decaying until judgment day, in order that the soul might then have a body to return to. So they pickled the bodies of the dead by soaking them in a kind of melted tar and wrapping them round and round and round with a cloth like a bandage. A dead body pickled in this way is called a mummy, and after thousands of years the mummies of the Egyptian kings may still be seen. Most of them are not, however, in the tombs where they were at first placed. They have been moved away and put in museums, and we may see them there now. Although they are yellow and dried up, they still look like

“Little old men All skin and bones.”

At first only kings or important people of the highest classes were made mummies, but after a while all the classes, except perhaps the lowest, were treated in the same way. Sacred animals from beetles to cows were also made into mummies.

When an Egyptian died his friends heaped up a few stones over his body just to cover it up decently and keep it from being stolen or destroyed by those wild animals that fed on dead bodies. But a king or a rich man wanted a bigger pile of stones over his body than just ordinary people had. So to make sure that his pile would be big enough, a king built it for himself before he died. Each king tried to make his pile larger than any one else’s until at last the pile of stones became so big it was a hill of rocks and called a pyramid. The pyramids therefore were tombs of the kings who built them while they were alive to be monuments to themselves when they were dead. In fact a king was much more interested in building a home for his dead body than he was in a home for his live body. So, instead of palaces, kings built pyramids. There are many of these pyramids built along the bank of the Nile, and most of them were built, we think, just after 3000 B.C.

When a building is being put up nowadays, men use derricks and cranes and engines to haul and raise heavy stones and beams. But the Egyptians had no such machinery, and though they used huge stones to build the pyramids, they had to drag these stones for many miles and raise them into place simply by pushing and pulling them. The three biggest of all the pyramids are near the city of Cairo. The largest one of them, which is called the Great Pyramid, was built by a king named Cheops. To remember when he lived, simply think of this as another telephone number:

Cheops 2900 B.C.

It is said that one hundred thousand men worked twenty years to build his pyramid. It is one of the largest buildings in the world, and some of the blocks of stone themselves are as big as a small house. I have been to the top of it, and it is like climbing a steep mountain with rocky sides. I have also been far inside to the cave-like room in the center where Cheop’s mummy was placed. There is nothing in there now, however, except bats that fly about in the darkness, for the mummy has disappeared--been stolen, perhaps.

Near the Pyramid of Cheops is the Sphinx. It is a huge statue of a lion with a man’s head. It is as big as a church, and though it is so big, it has been carved out of one single rock. The rock, however, was already there and so did not have to be carried. The Sphinx is a statue of the god of the morning, and the head is that of one of the Egyptian Pharaohs who built a pyramid near that of Cheops. The desert sand has covered the paws and most of the body. Though the sand has been dug away from time to time, the wind quickly covers the body with sand again.

The Egyptians carved other large statues of men and women out of rock. These figures are usually many times bigger than life-size, and sit or stand stiffly erect with both feet flat on the ground and hands close to the body in the position some children take when they “sit” for their photograph.

They built huge houses for their gods. These were called temples and took the place of our churches. These temples had gigantic--that’s the way it is spelled, though it means “giant-ic”--columns and pillars. Ordinary people standing beside them look like dwarfs. Here is one of these temples, and you can see how different it is from our churches:

They decorated their temples and pyramids, and the cases in which the mummies were put, with drawings and paintings. The pictures they made, however, looked something like those a young child might draw. For example, when they wanted to make a picture of water, they simply made a zigzag line to represent waves; when they tried to draw a row of men back of a row in front, they put those in the back _on top_ of those in front. To show that a man was a king, they made him several times larger than the other men in the picture. When they painted a picture they used any color they thought was pretty, usually blue or yellow or brown. Whether the person or thing was really that color or not made no difference.

8

A Rich Land Where There Was No Money

You have read in fairy-tales of a land where cakes and candy and sugar-plums grow on trees, where everything you want to eat or to play with can be had just by picking it. Well, long, long ago people used to think there had been really such a country, and where do you suppose they said it was? Somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers--those rivers with the strange names I asked you to learn--and they called this spot the Garden of Eden. We do not know exactly where it was, for there is no such place now quite as wonderful as the Garden of Eden was supposed to be.

Egypt was a land of one river, the Nile. The land of the Two Rivers had several names.

Let us suppose we are flying over the country in an airplane and looking down at the land between these two rivers. It is called Mesopotamia, which is two Greek words simply meaning “Between the Rivers.”

See the land over there by the upper Tigris. It is called _Assyria_.

See the land near where the rivers join each other. That is called _Babylonia_.

See the land near where they empty. That is called _Chaldea_.

And see over there is _Mount Ararat_, where it is supposed Noah’s Ark rested after the flood.

Here are a lot of new names. A young friend of mine had a train of toy cars. He had noticed that the Pullman cars on which he had ridden had names, and so he gave his toy cars names also. He called them:

ASSYRIA MESOPOTAMIA BABYLONIA ARARAT CHALDEA EUPHRATES

Babylonia was a very rich country, for the two rivers brought down and dropped great quantities of earth just as the Nile did in Egypt, and this made very rich soil. Wheat, from which we make bread, is called the staff of life. It is the most valuable of all foods which grow. It is supposed that wheat first grew in Babylonia. Dates in that part of the world are almost as important a food as wheat. Dates, too, grow there very plentifully. Now, you may think dates are something to be eaten almost like candy but in Babylonia dates took the place of oatmeal. In the rivers there were quantities of good fish, and as fishing was just fun, you see that the people who lived in Babylonia--the Babylonians, as they were called--had plenty of good food without having to do much work for it. No one had any money in those days; people had cows and sheep and goats, and a man was rich who had much of these “goods.” But if a man wanted to buy or sell, he had to buy or sell by trading something he had for something he wanted.

Somewhere in Babylonia the people built a great tower called the _Tower of Babel_, which you have probably heard about. It was more like a mountain than a tower. They built other towers, too. Some say the Tower of Babel and towers like it were built so that the people might have a high place to which they could climb in case of another flood. But others give a different reason. They say that the people who built these towers came to Babylonia from farther north where there were mountains. In this northern land they had always placed their altars on the top of a mountain, to be close to heaven. So when they moved to a flat country like Mesopotamia and Babylonia, where there were no mountains, they _built_ mountains in order to have a high place for the altar on top. To reach the top of these mountains or towers, they made, instead of a staircase on the inside, a slanting roadway that wound around the outside in somewhat the way a road winds around a mountain.