The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 | Page 7

[Footnote 1: See page 1 for an engraving and account of this famous
stone. It was found over a century ago and its value was instantly
recognized, but many years passed before its secrets were deciphered.
It contains an inscription repeated in three forms of writing: the early
Egyptian of the hieroglyphics, a later Egyptian (the demotic), and
Greek.]
Where this mode of communication fails, we turn to another which
carries us even farther into the past. The records which have been less
intentionally preserved, not only the buildings themselves, but their
decorations, the personal ornaments of men, idols, coins, every
imaginable fragment, chance escaped from the maw of time, has its
own story for our reading. In Egypt we have found deep-hidden, secret
tombs, and, intruding on their many centuries of silence, have reaped
rich harvests of knowledge from the garnered wealth. In Babylonia the
rank vegetation had covered whole cities underneath green hillocks,
and preserved them till our modern curiosity delved them out. To-day,
he who wills, may walk amid the halls of Sennacherib, may tread the
streets whence Abraham fled, ay, he may gaze upon the handiwork of
men who lived perhaps as far before Abraham as we ourselves do after
him.
Nor are our means of penetrating the past even thus exhausted. A third
chain yet more subtle and more marvellous has been found to link us to
an ancestry immeasurably remote. This unbroken chain consists of the
words from our own mouths. We speak as our fathers spoke; and they
did but follow the generations before. Occasional pronunciations have
altered, new words have been added, and old ones forgotten; but some
basal sounds of names, some root-thoughts of the heart, have proved as
immutable as the superficial elegancies are changeful. "Father" and
"mother" mean what they have meant for uncounted ages.

Comparative philology, the science which compares one language with
another to note the points of similarity between them, has discovered
that many of these root-sounds are alike in almost all the varied tongues
of Europe. The resemblance is too common to be the result of
coincidence, too deep-seated to be accounted for by mere
communication between the nations. We have gotten far beyond the
possibility of such explanations; and science says now with positive
confidence that there must have been a time when all these nations
were but one, that their languages are all but variations of the tongue
their distant ancestors once held in common.
Study has progressed beyond this point, can tell us far more intricate
and fainter facts. It argues that one by one the various tribes left their
common home and became completely separated; and that each
root-sound still used by all the nations represents an idea, an object,
they already possessed before their dispersal. Thus we can vaguely
reconstruct that ancient, aboriginal civilization. We can even guess
which tribes first broke away, and where again these wanderers
subdivided, and at what stage of progress. Surely a fascinating science
this! And in its infancy! If its later development shall justify present
promise, it has still strange tales to tell us in the future.
THE RACES OF MAN
Turn now from this tracing of our means of knowledge, to speak of the
facts they tell us. When our humankind first become clearly visible
they are already divided into races, which for convenience we speak of
as white, yellow, and black. Of these the whites had apparently
advanced farthest on the road to civilization; and the white race itself
had become divided into at least three varieties, so clearly marked as to
have persisted through all the modern centuries of communication and
intermarriage. Science is not even able to say positively that these
varieties or families had a common origin. She inclines to think so; but
when all these later ages have failed to obliterate the marks of
difference, what far longer period of separation must have been
required to establish them!
These three clearly outlined families of the whites are the Hamites, of

whom the Egyptians are the best-known type; the Semites, as
represented by ancient Babylonians and modern Jews and Arabs; and
the great Aryan or Indo-European family, once called the Japhites, and
including Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Latins, the modern Celtic and
Germanic races, and even the Slavs or Russians.
The Egyptians, when we first see them, are already well advanced
toward civilization.[2] To say that they were the first people to emerge
from barbarism is going much further than we dare. Their records are
the most ancient that have come clearly down to us; but there may
easily have been other social organisms, other races, to whom the
chances of time and nature have been less gentle. Cataclysms may have
engulfed more than one Atlantis; and few climates are so fitted