The greatest story in the world, period 1 (of 3)

The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is that it is really our own story. It is the...

I told you that one of the ways by which man, at different ages of the world, has been described is to speak of him in the Hunting stage, the Pastoral, and the Agricultural. Alt...

Talking, if you will carefully think of it, you will find to be just sending messages to one another by means of sounds. You learned to talk--that is to say, to send messages in...

If you will look at the map once more you will see that the Euphrates and the Tigris draw together near their outgoing into the Persian Gulf and flow together as one stream. It...

Those, then, were the two great powers on land in the very old days of the story of mankind. There was Egypt along the Nile, and Babylonia--for a thousand and more years, rather...

It rather looks as if the casting out of the Hyksos, the foreign "shepherd kings," made the Egyptians realise that they must combine and unite and not go on fighting among thems...

If you will take a look on the map at all this country of Palestine and Syria you will see how it is cut up by mountains, the Lebanon range and others running down along it. One...

The Persians are a people that up to this point come into the story hardly at all. Suddenly, out of the East, they come right into its very centre and are the principal actors i...

the Semites, found it very difficult to let their jealousy of each other die down and to unite together for defence against a foreign foe. The Spartans were the most warlike of...

It is amusing to stop now and then in the course of a story to wonder how it would have gone if one or other of the events in it had happened rather differently. Sometimes it se...

Carthage was one of the colonies founded by the Phœnicians. It was not one of the earliest, but it had the advantage of a good harbour for the protection of the ships of those d...

The country of Macedon, as you will see on the Greek map, lies northward of Greece. It was inhabited by tribes of the Slavs, or Slavonic people, who lived the agricultural and p...

I am afraid you will have suffered disappointment from time to time in the course of the telling of this greatest of great stories. I am afraid that I have been obliged to speak...

As we have seen, there was a moment in the Second Punic War, just after the Battle of Cannæ, when it seems marvellous that Rome escaped destruction. What is almost more marvello...

At first, you will remember, there were the two great empires warring, the Nile Valley empire and the empire of the Euphrates and Tigris. Then came the Persian. He overthrew the...

We have seen that in the year 190 B.C. a new thing happened in Asia Minor--Roman legions appeared there for the first time in history. It was an appearance which was a sign of w...

Seleucus and his Court were, practically, Grecian. Antioch, the capital of Syria (several of the Seleucid kings were called Antiochus), was practically a Greek city. The influen...

It is rather puzzling to find, now and again, in this greatest of all stories, that several different people are called by the same name, and also that the same person is called...

That is the point to which we have now brought the story, and that is the point at which I mean to leave it. It is a point at which most of the threads of the story come togethe...