The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 | Page 9

the Assyrians, a rough and hardy folk who
had maintained themselves for centuries battling against tribes from the
surrounding mountains. It was like a return to barbarism when about
B.C. 880 the Assyrians swept over the various Semite lands. Loud were
the laments of the Hebrews; terrible the tales of cruelty; deep the scorn
with which the Babylonians submitted to the rude conquerors. We
approach here a clearer historic period; we can trace with plainness the
devastating track of war;[5] we can read the boastful triumph of the
Assyrian chiefs, can watch them step by step as they adopt the culture
and the vices of their new subjects, growing ever more graceful and
more enfeebled, until they too are overthrown by a new and hardier
race, the Persians, an Aryan folk.
[Footnote 5: See Rise and Fall of Assyria, page 105.]
Before turning to this last and most prominent family of humankind, let

us look for a moment at the other, darker races, seen vaguely as they
come in contact with the whites. The negroes, set sharply by
themselves in Africa, never seem to have created any progressive
civilization of their own, never seem to have advanced further than we
find the wild tribes in the interior of the country to-day. But the yellow
or Turanian races, the Chinese and Japanese, the Turks and the Tartars,
did not linger so helplessly behind. The Chinese, at least, established a
social world of their own, widely different from that of the whites, in
some respects perhaps superior to it. But the fatal weakness of the
yellow civilization was that it was not ennobling like the Egyptian, not
scientific like the Babylonian, not adventurous and progressive as we
shall find the Aryan.
This, of course, is speaking in general terms. Something somewhat
ennobling there may be in the contemplations of Confucius;[6] but no
man can favorably compare the Chinese character to-day with the
European, whether we regard either intensity of feeling, or variety,
range, subtlety, and beauty of emotion. So, also, the Chinese made
scientific discoveries--but knew not how to apply them or improve
them. So also they made conquests--and abandoned them; toiled--and
sank back into inertia.
[Footnote 6: See Rise of Confucius, page 270.]
The Japanese present a separate problem, as yet little understood in its
earlier stages.[7] As to the Tartars, wild and hardy horsemen roaming
over Northern Asia, they kept for ages their independent animal
strength and fierceness. They appear and disappear like flashes. They
seem to seek no civilization of their own; they threaten again and again
to destroy that of all the other races of the globe. Fitly, indeed, was
their leader Attila once termed "the Scourge of God."
[Footnote 7: See Prince Jimmu, page 140.]
THE ARYANS
Of our own progressive Aryan race, we have no monuments nor
inscriptions so old as those of the Hamites and the Semites. What

comparative philology tells is this: An early, if not the original, home
of the Aryans was in Asia, to the eastward of the Semites, probably in
the mountain district back of modern Persia. That is, they were not, like
the other whites, a people of the marsh lands and river valleys. They
lived in a higher, hardier, and more bracing atmosphere. Perhaps it was
here that their minds took a freer bent, their spirits caught a bolder tone.
Wherever they moved they came as conquerors among other races.
In their primeval home and probably before the year B.C. 3000, they
had already acquired a fair degree of civilization. They built houses,
ploughed the land, and ground grain into flour for their baking. The
family relations were established among them; they had some social
organization and simple form of government; they had learned to
worship a god, and to see in him a counterpart of their tribal ruler.
From their upland farms they must have looked eastward upon yet
higher mountains, rising impenetrable above the snowline; but to north
and south and west they might turn to lower regions; and by degrees,
perhaps as they grew too numerous for comfort, a few families
wandered off along the more inviting routes. Whichever way they
started, their adventurous spirit led them on. We find no trace of a
single case where hearts failed or strength grew weary and the
movement became retrograde, back toward the ancient home.
Spreading out, radiating in all directions, it is they who have explored
the earth, who have measured it and marked its bounds and penetrated
almost to its every corner. It is they who still pant to complete the work
so long ago begun.
Before B.C. 2000 one of these exuded swarms had penetrated India,
probably by way of the Indus River. In the course of a thousand years
or so, the intruders expanded and fought