Part 8 (1/2)
[62] Ezekiel viii. 14.
[63] Sayce, _Hibbert Lectures_.
Oppert regards the legend of Tammuz and Ishtar as a solar myth, and supposes that the story of Cain and Abel was based on it. But a family history of crime and sorrow is a much more real and probable thing as a basis for tradition than a solar myth, and naturalists at least will be disposed to invert the theory, and to believe that the simple Bible story was the foundation of all the varied cults and superst.i.tions that cl.u.s.tered round Ishtar and Tammuz, as well as personages like Osiris and Isis, who seem to have been later avatars, or revivals of the same tale.
It would be easy to show that the deluge story has intimate connections with other ancient myths and superst.i.tions, as well as with the results of modern archaeology and geology. But were this all, our inquiry, however interesting and curious, would have little practical value. It has two important bearings on the present time. Christianity bases itself, its founder Himself being witness, on the early chapters of Genesis, as history and prophecy, and the treatment which these ancient and inspired records have met with in modern times at the hands of destructive criticism is doing its worst in aid of the anti-*Christian tendencies of our time. To remove the doubts that have been cast on these old records is therefore a clear gain to the highest interests of humanity, and if theology and philology are unable to secure this benefit, natural science may well step forward to lend its aid. Another connection with present interests depends on the fact that, while superst.i.tions akin to that which deified the mother of the promised seed, and introduced the world-wide cults of Astarte and Aphrodite, still reign over great ma.s.ses of men, absolute materialism and desperate struggle for existence among men and nations are growing and extending themselves as never before since the antediluvian times, and are provoking a like signal and direful vengeance. In the midst of all this, Christians look forward to the second coming of Jesus Christ to destroy the powers of evil and to inaugurate a better time; and it was He who said, 'As it came to pa.s.s in the days of Noah, even so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.' Let us remember the old story of the flood of Noah lest those days come on us unawares.
CHAPTER XI
THE PREHISTORIC AND HISTORIC IN THE EAST
The term prehistoric was first used by my friend Sir Daniel Wilson in his _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_. It was intended to express 'the whole period disclosed to us by archaeological evidence as distinguished from what is known by written records.' As Wilson himself reminds us, the term has no definite chronological significance, since historic records, properly so-called, extend back in different places to very different times. With reference, for example, to the Chaldean and Hebrew peoples, if we take their written records as history, this extends back to the Deluge at least. Written history in Egypt reaches to at least 3000 years B.C., while in Britain it extends no farther than to the landing of Julius Caesar, and in America to the first voyage of Columbus.
In Palestine we possess written records back to the time of Abraham, but these relate mainly to the Hebrew people. Of the populations which preceded the Abrahamic immigration, those 'Canaanites who were already in the land,' we have little history before the Exodus, except the remarkable letters recently unearthed at Tel-el-Amarna, in Egypt. In Egypt we have very early records of the dwellers on the Nile, but of the Arabian and African peoples, whom they called Pun and Kesh, and the Asiatic peoples, whom they knew as Cheta and Hyksos, we have till lately known little more than their names and the representations of them on Egyptian monuments. In both countries there may be unsounded depths of unwritten history before the first Egyptian dynasty, and before the Abrahamic clan crossed the Jordan.
What, then, in Egypt and Palestine may be regarded as prehistoric? I would answer--(1) The geographical and other conditions of these countries immediately before the advent of man. (2) The evidence which they afford of the existence, habits, and history of man in periods altogether antecedent to any written history, except such notes as we have in the Bible and elsewhere as to the so-called antediluvian world.
(3) The facts gleaned by archaeological evidence as to tribes known to us by no records of their own, but only by occasional notices in the history or monuments of other peoples. In Egypt and Palestine such peoples as the Hyksos, the Anakim, the Amalekites, the Hitt.i.tes, and Amorites are of this kind, though contemporary with historic peoples.
Prehistoric annals may thus, in these countries, embrace a wide scope, and may introduce us to unexpected facts and questions respecting primitive humanity. I propose in the present chapter to direct attention to some points which may be regarded as definitely ascertained in so far as archaeological evidence can give any certainty, though I cannot pretend, in so limited a s.p.a.ce, to enter into details as to their evidence.
Before proceeding, I may refer by way of ill.u.s.tration to another instance brought into very prominent relief by the publication of Schuchardt's work on Schliemann's excavations. We all know how shadowy and unreal to our youthful minds were the Homeric stories of the heroic age of Greece, and our faith and certainty were not increased when we read in the works of learned German critics that the Homeric poems were composite productions of an age much later than that to which they were supposed to belong, and that their events were rather myths than history. How completely has all this been changed by the discoveries of Schliemann and his followers! Now we can stand on the very threshold over which Priam and Hector walked. We can see the jewels that may have adorned Helen or Andromache. We can see double-handled cups like that of old Nestor, and can recognise the inlaid work of the s.h.i.+eld of Achilles, and can walk in the halls of Agamemnon. Thus the old Homeric heroes become real men, as those of our time, and we can understand their political and commercial relations with other old peoples before quite as shadowy. Recent discoveries in Egypt take us still farther back. We now find that the 'Hanebu,' who invaded Egypt in the days of the Hebrew patriarchs, were prehistoric Greeks, already civilised, and probably possessing letters ages before the date of the Trojan War. So it is with the Bible history, when we see the contemporary pictures of the Egyptian slaves toiling at their bricks, or when we stand in the presence of the mummy of Rameses II. and know that we look on the face of the Pharaoh who enslaved the Hebrews, and from whose presence Moses fled.
Such discoveries give reality to history, and similar discoveries are daily carrying us back to old events, and to nations of whom there was no history whatever, and are making them like our daily friends and companions. A notable case is that of the children of Heth, known to us only incidentally by a few members of the nation who came in contact with the early Hebrews. Suddenly we found that these people were the great and formidable Kheta, or Khatti, who contended on equal terms with the Egyptians and a.s.syrians for the empire of Western Asia; and when we began to look for their remains, there appeared, one after another, stone monuments, seals, and engraved objects, recording their form and their greatness, till the tables have quite been turned, and there is danger that we may attach too much importance to their agency in times of which we have scarcely any written history. Thus, just as the quarry and the mine reveal to us the fossil remains of animals and plants great in their time, but long since pa.s.sed away, so do the spade and pick of the excavator constantly turn up for us the bones and the works of a fossil and prehistoric humanity.
Egypt may be said to have no prehistoric period, and our task with it will be limited to showing that its written history scarcely goes back as far as many Egyptologists suppose and confidently affirm, and that beyond this it has as yet afforded nothing. Egypt, in short, old though it seems, is really a new country. When its priests, according to Plato, taunted Solon with the newness of the Greeks and referred to the old western empire of Atlantis, they were probably trading on traditions of antediluvian times, which had no more relation to the actual history of the Egyptian people than to that of the Greeks.
The limestones and sandstones which bound the Nile valley, sometimes rising in precipitous cliffs from the bank of the stream, sometimes receding for many miles beyond the edge of the green alluvial plain, are rocks formed in cretaceous and early tertiary times under the sea, when all Northern Africa and Western Asia were beneath the ocean. When raised from the sea-bed to form land, they were variously bent and fractured, and the Nile valley occupies a rift or fault, which, lying between the hard ridges of the Arabian hills on the east and the more gentle elevations of the Nubian desert on the west, afforded an outlet for the waters of interior Africa and for the great floods which in the rainy season pour down from the mountains of Abyssinia.
This outlet has been available and has been in process of erosion by running water from a period long anterior to the advent of man, and with this early pre-human history belonging to the miocene and pliocene periods of geology we have no need to meddle, except to state that it was closed by a great subsidence, that of the pleistocene or glacial period, when the land of North Africa and Western Asia was depressed several hundred feet, when Africa was separated from Asia, when the Nile valley was an arm of the sea, and when sea-sh.e.l.ls were deposited on the rising grounds of Lower Egypt at a height of two hundred feet or more.[64] Such raised beaches are found not only in the Nile valley but on the sh.o.r.es of the Red Sea, and, as we shall see, along the coast of Palestine; but, so far as known, no remains of man have been found in connection with them. This great depression must, however, geologically speaking, have been not much earlier than the advent of man, since in many parts of the world we find human remains in deposits of the next succeeding era.
[64] Hull, _Geology of Palestine and adjacent Districts_, Palestine Exploration Fund. Dawson, _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, p. 311 and Appendix. References will be found in these works to the labours of Fraas, Schweinfurth, and others.
This next period, that known to geologists as the post-glacial or early modern, was characterised by an entire change of physical conditions.
The continents of the northern hemisphere were higher and wider than now. The details of this we have already considered, and have seen that at this time the Mediterranean was divided into two basins, and a broad fringe of low land, now submerged, lay around its eastern end. This was the age of those early palaeolithic or palaeocosmic men whose remains are found in the caverns and gravels of Europe and Asia. What was the condition of Egypt at this time? The Nile must have been flowing in its valley; but there was probably a waterfall or cataract at Silsilis in Upper Egypt, and rapids lower down, and the alluvial plain was much less extensive than now and forest-clad, while the river seems to have been unable to reach the Mediterranean and to have turned abruptly eastward, discharging into a lake where the Isthmus of Suez now is, and probably running thence into the Red Sea, so that at this time the waters of the Nile approached very near to those of the Jordan, a fact which accounts for that similarity of their modern fauna which has been remarked by so many naturalists. I have myself collected in the deposits of this old lake, near Ismailia, fresh-water sh.e.l.ls of kinds now living in the Upper Nile. If at this time men visited the Nile valley, they must have been only a few bold hunters in search of game, and having their permanent homes on the Mediterranean plains now submerged.
If they left any remains we should find these in caverns or rock shelters, or in the old gravels belonging to this period which here and there project through the alluvial plain. At one of these places, Jebel a.s.sart, near Thebes, General Pitt-Rivers has satisfied himself of the occurrence of flint chips which may have been of human workmans.h.i.+p;[65]
but after a day's collecting at the spot, I failed to convince myself that the numerous flint flakes in the gravel were other than accidental fragments. If they really are flint knives they are older than the period we are now considering, and must be much older than the first dynasty of the Egyptian historic kings.[66] These gravels were indeed, in early Egyptian times, so consolidated that tombs were excavated in them. Independently of this case, I know of no trustworthy evidence of the residence of the earliest men in Egypt. Yet we know that at this time rude hunting tribes had spread themselves over Western Asia, and over Europe as far as the Atlantic, and were slaying the mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the wild horse, and other animals now extinct. They were the so-called 'palaeolithic' or historically antediluvian men, belonging, like the animals they hunted, to extinct races, quite dissimilar physically from the historical Egyptians. And yet in a recent review of the late Miss Edwards's charming work, _Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers_, she was taken to task by an eminent Egyptologist for statements similar to the above. On the evidence of two additional finds of flint implements _on the surface_, he affirms the existence of man in Egypt at a time when 'the Arabian deserts were covered with verdure and intersected by numerous streams,' that is, geologically speaking, in the early pleistocene or pliocene period, or even in the miocene!
[65] _Journal of Archaeological Society_, 1881. Haynes's _Journal of the American Academy of Sciences_.
[66] Dawson, _Egypt and Syria_, p. 149.
Singularly enough, therefore, Egypt is to the prehistoric annalist not an old country--less old indeed than France and England, in both of which we find evidence of the residence of the palaeolithic cave men of the mammoth age. Thus, when we go beyond local history into the prehistoric past, our judgment as to the relative age of countries may be strangely reversed.
It is true that in Egypt, as in most other countries, flint flakes, or other worked flints, are common on the surface and in the superficial soil; but there is no good evidence that they did not belong to historic times. A vivid light has been thrown on this point by Petrie's discovery, in _debris_ attributed to the age of the twelfth dynasty, or approximately that of the Hebrew patriarchs, of a wooden sickle of the ordinary shape, but armed with flint fakes serrated at their edges,[67]
though the handle is beautifully curved in such a manner as to give a better and more convenient hold than with those now in use. This primitive implement presents to us the Egyptian farmer of that age reaping his fields of wheat and barley with implements similar to those of the palaeocosmic men. No doubt, at the same time, he used a harrow armed with rude flints, and may have used flint flakes for cutting wood or for pointing his arrows. Yet he was a member of a civilised and highly-organised nation, which could execute great works of ca.n.a.lisation and embankment, and could construct tombs and temples that have not since been surpa.s.sed. Can we doubt that the common people in Palestine and other neighbouring countries were equally in the flint age, or be surprised that, somewhat later, Joshua used flint knives to circ.u.mcise the Israelites?[68] How remarkable are these links of connection between early Eastern civilisation and the stone age! and they relate to mere flakes, such as if found separately might be styled 'palaeolithic.'