الفصل الفصل 19 · A Summary

A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20

Thus far, from the top of our high tower we have been looking eastward.

But from this time on, the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia is going

to grow less interesting and I must take you to study the western

landscape.

Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to ourselves

what we have seen.

First of all I showed you prehistoric man—a creature very simple in

his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I told you how he was

the most defenceless of the many animals that roamed through the early

wilderness of the five continents, but being possessed of a larger and

better brain, he managed to hold his own.

Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold weather, and life

on this planet became so difficult that man was obliged to think three

times as hard as ever before if he wished to survive. Since, however,

that “wish to survive” was (and is) the mainspring which keeps every

living being going full tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain

of glacial man was set to work in all earnestness. Not only did these

hardy people manage to exist through the long cold spells which killed

many ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and comfortable

once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of things which gave

him such great advantages over his less intelligent neighbors that the

danger of extinction (a very serious one during the first half million

years of man’s residence upon this planet) became a very remote one.

I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly plodding

along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not well understood) the

people who lived in the valley of the Nile rushed ahead and almost over

night, created the first centre of civilisation.

Then I showed you Mesopotamia, “the land between the rivers,” which was

the second great school of the human race. And I made you a map of the

little island bridges of the Ægean Sea, which carried the knowledge and

the science of the old east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.

Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes, who

thousands of years before had left the heart of Asia and who had in

the eleventh century before our era pushed their way into the rocky

peninsula of Greece and who, since then, have been known to us as

the Greeks. And I told you the story of the little Greek cities that

were really states, where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was

transfigured (that is a big word, but you can “figure out” what it

means) into something quite new, something that was much nobler and

finer than anything that had gone before.

When you look at the map you will see how by this time civilisation has

described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt, and by way of Mesopotamia

and the Ægean Islands it moves westward until it reaches the European

continent. The first four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians

and Phoenicians and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember

that the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples) have

carried the torch that was to illuminate the world. They now hand it

over to the Indo-European Greeks, who become the teachers of another

Indo-European tribe, called the Romans. But meanwhile the Semites

have pushed westward along the northern coast of Africa and have made

themselves the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just

when the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession.

This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible conflict between

the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises the victorious

Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian-Mesopotamian-Greek

civilisation to the furthermost corners of the European continent,

where it serves as the foundation upon which our modern society is

based.

I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold of these

few principles, the rest of our history will become a great deal

simpler. The maps will make clear what the words fail to tell. And

after this short intermission, we go back to our story and give you an

account of the famous war between Carthage and Rome.