The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 | Page 6

dates,
events, persons, and places of historic importance. These are made
easily accessible by a careful and elaborate system of cross-references.
6. A separate and complete chronology of each nation of ancient,
mediæval, and modern times, with references to the volume and page
where each item is treated, either as an entire article or as part of one;
so that the history of any one nation may be read in its logical order and
in the language of its best historians.
Such, as the National Alumni regard it, are the general character, wide
scope, and earnest purpose of THE GREAT EVENTS BY FAMOUS
HISTORIANS. Let us end by saying, in the friendly fashion of the old
days when bookmakers and their readers were more intimate than now:
"Kind reader, if this our performance doth in aught fall short of promise,
blame not our good intent, but our unperfect wit."
THE NATIONAL ALUMNI.

AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND
CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS

A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN
RACE, ITS ADVANCE IN KNOWLEDGE AND CIVILIZATION,
AND THE BROAD WORLD MOVEMENTS WHICH HAVE
SHAPED ITS DESTINY
CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
CONTINUED THROUGH THE SUCCESSIVE VOLUMES AND
COVERING THE SUCCESSIVE PERIODS OF
THE GREAT EVENTS BY FAMOUS HISTORIANS

AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND
CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS
(FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE OVERTHROW OF THE
PERSIANS)
CHARLES F. HORNE
History, if we define it as the mere transcription of the written records
of former generations, can go no farther back than the time such
records were first made, no farther than the art of writing. But now that
we have come to recognize the great earth itself as a story-book, as a
keeper of records buried one beneath the other, confused and half
obliterated, yet not wholly beyond our comprehension, now the
historian may fairly be allowed to speak of a far earlier day.
For unmeasured and immeasurable centuries man lived on earth a
creature so little removed from "the beasts that die," so little superior to
them, that he has left no clearer record than they of his presence here.
From the dry bones of an extinct mammoth or a plesiosaur, Cuvier
reconstructed the entire animal and described its habits and its home.

So, too, looking on an ancient, strange, scarce human skull, dug from
the deeper strata beneath our feet, anatomists tell us that the owner was
a man indeed, but one little better than an ape. A few æons later this
creature leaves among his bones chipped flints that narrow to a point;
and the archæologist, taking up the tale, explains that man has become
tool-using, he has become intelligent beyond all the other animals of
earth. Physically he is but a mite amid the beast monsters that surround
him, but by value of his brain he conquers them. He has begun his
career of mastery.
If we delve amid more recent strata, we find the flint weapons have
become bronze. Their owner has learned to handle a ductile metal, to
draw it from the rocks and fuse it in the fire. Later still he has
discovered how to melt the harder and more useful iron. We say
roughly, therefore, that man passed through a stone age, a bronze age,
and then an iron age.
Somewhere, perhaps in the earliest of these, he began to build rude
houses. In the next, he drew pictures. During the latest, his pictures
grew into an alphabet of signs, his structures developed into vast and
enduring piles of brick or stone. Buildings and inscriptions became his
relics, more like to our own, more fully understandable, giving us a
sense of closer kinship with his race.
SOURCES OF EARLY KNOWLEDGE
There are three different lines along which we have succeeded in
securing some knowledge of these our distant ancestors, three
telephones from the past, over which they send to us confused and
feeble murmurings, whose fascination makes only more maddening the
vagueness of their speech.
First, we have the picture-writings, whether of Central America, of
Egypt, of Babylonia, or of other lands. These when translatable bring
us nearest of all to the heart of the great past. It is the mind, the thought,
the spoken word, of man that is most intimately he; not his face, nor his
figure, nor his clothes. Unfortunately, the translation of these writings
is no easy task. Those of Central America are still an unsolved riddle.

Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like a puzzle, a
puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able thought. Yet
they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had the luck to stumble
on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ancient writing fairly
clear.[1]