tablets of clay. Civilisation seems to spring up suddenly out of a night
of darkness, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

This is one of the chief lessons that have been taught us by Oriental
archaeology. Culture and civilisation are no new thing, at all events in
the East; long before the days of classical Greece, long before the days
even of Abraham, man was living in ease and comfort, surrounded by
objects of art and industry, acquainted with the art of writing, and
carrying on intercourse with distant lands. We must rid ourselves once
for all of the starveling ideas of chronology which a classical training
once encouraged, and of the belief that history, in the true sense of
the word, hardly goes back beyond the age of Darius or Periklês. The
civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt were already decrepid when the
ancestors of Periklês were still barbarians.

Another lesson is the danger of forming conclusions from imperfect
evidence. Apart from the earlier records of the Old Testament, there was
no literature which claimed a greater antiquity than the Homeric Poems
of ancient Greece; no history of older date than that of Hellas, unless
indeed the annals of China were to be included, which lay altogether
outside the stream of European history. Criticism, accordingly, deemed
itself competent to decide dogmatically on the character and credibility
of the literature and history of which it was in possession; to measure
the statements of the Old Testament writings by the rules of Greek and
Latin literature, and to argue from the history of Europe to that of the
East. Uncontrolled by external testimony, critical scepticism played
havoc with the historical narratives that had descended to it, and
starting from the assumption that the world of antiquity was illiterate,
refused to credit such records of the past as dwarfed the proportions of
Greek history, or could not be harmonised with the canons of the critic