by means of the modern Comparative and Historical Method, the establishment of which has been rightly termed by Mr. Freeman the noblest intellectual achievement of our time.* Think for a moment of some of the results which have been brought about by this Method. The old "classical" Philology has been swallowed up in Comparative Philology, out of which have arisen the kindred, and as yet infant, sciences of Comparative Mythology and Comparative Religion. Comparative Jurisprudence and Comparative Politics are further results of the new Method. The provinces of National and Prehistoric Archæology have been added to the old or "classical" Archæology. We have at last learnt that the so-called "classical" languages, literatures, and archæology of Greece and Rome are by no means the only ones worthy of man's study, and thus the new Method has broken down a sacred ring formed by the prejudices, ignorance, or indifference of centuries. It has established the new sciences of Ethnology, Sociology, and the as yet un-named Science of Culture or Civilisation, and has shown us that all of these are included in the new and comprehensive science of Anthropology; and, finally, that Anthropology itself, the natural history of man, is but the highest department of the great Science of Life in general, whose very name, Biology, only dates from the commencement of this century.t The establishment of the Comparative Sciences of Language and Religion has been mainly due to the study of the far East, which has shown us that there lies the home of our remote forefathers, and that we Englishmen are indeed an Oriental people, speaking an Oriental tongue. Moreover, in the East we actually see the Past in the Present, just as when we look at the stars we see them, not as they are at the moment, * Comparative Politics, p. 1; and see his Rede Lecture on The Unity of History. + Treviranus, Biologie, vol. 1, 1802. but as they were years before. This study of the East has resulted in the successive discovery and decipherment, during the present century, of three of the most ancient literatures of the world: (1) the Sanscrit, and its allied Buddhist literatures; (2) the Egyptian; and (3) the Assyro-Babylonian. It will help us to realise the antiquity of these three literatures if we remember that the Greek literature commences with the Homeric poems in the ninth century B.C., and that the oldest Greek manuscripts are some Egyptian papyri of about 160 B.C. Roman literature is of course later than the Greek; it may be said to commence with the Law of the Twelve Tables, 450 B.C., and the oldest MS. is probably the Vatican Virgil, of the fourth century A.D. There is but one Hebrew MS. older than the tenth century A.D., and (owing to the damp climate) very few Indian MSS. are more than five hundred years old.* (1) The real knowledge of the Sanscrit or ancient Indian literature may be said to date from the year 1808. The earliest period of the Vedic, or oldest portion of this literature, ends about the year 1000 B.C., and the language itself ceased to be spoken at least 300 B.C. In the third decade of this century, four complete and extensive Buddhist literatures were discovered, those of Ceylon, Nepal, Tibet, and Mongolia. The first, that of Ceylon, written in the ancient and extinct Pali or sacred language, a descendant of the Sanscrit, is interesting to us among other reasons, as containing the earliest known forms of many of those fables. which we are accustomed to attribute to Esop, and which, be it remembered, originally formed and still form part of the sacred literature of the Buddhists. The Buddha taught chiefly by fables or "birth-stories," which had a close resemblance to parables or allegories. The Tibetan literature is • Weber, History of Indian Literature, pp. 182, 318. + M. Müller, 'Chips,' vol. i., p. 194. See Rhys Davids' Buddhist Birth-Stories (Trübner, 1880). remarkable as containing the largest Bible in the world, the Tibetan sacred canon consisting of two collections; (a) the Kanjur, in 108 volumes folio, comprising 1083 distinct works; and (b) the Tanjur, in 225 folio volumes. (2) The still more ancient literature of the Egyptians was next deciphered, the complete key having been furnished by Champollion about the year 1822. The most venerable relic of this venerable literature is what is probably the most ancient book in the world, the Maxims of Ptahotep. This work dates from the age of the Pyramids, not later than 3000 B.C., and therefore 2000 years before the time of Solomon. Yet this, the oldest literary relic of humanity, itself appeals to the authority of antiquity. Ptahotep, its princely author, tells us that he writes in his old age for the benefit of the young, whom he desires to instruct in the wisdom of the past. The style is proverbial, much resembling that of the Bible Proverbs, written at least twenty centuries afterwards. The later or demotic period of the ancient Egyptian literature has been but recently investigated, and the curious fact is revealed to us that the wife held the chief place in the family, and that all the wealth of the middle and upper classes of the country was absolutely vested in the hands of the married women. When a man married, he literally and not figuratively endowed his wife with all his worldly goods, and she, during the marriage, had the fullest power of disposition over both her own and her husband's property. In those enlightened days men's, and not women's, rights must have been a burning subject. (8) Our knowledge of the contents of the wonderful clay libraries and literature of the library-cities of ancient Assyria and Babylonia dates from the exploration by Mr. Layard, in 1850, of the great clay library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh. Then was revealed to us an extensive and varied literature Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 76. 車 extending back to more than two thousand years before Christ, and the most deeply interesting and unexpected discovery was made, that a large proportion of the works consisted of translations from a still more ancient literature, originally written in Accadian, which was not a Semitic, but a Turanian language, closely allied to the Finnish, and which became extinct before the seventeenth century B.C. For the study of this dead language the ancient Babylonians were obliged to compile dictionaries, grammars, and readingbooks, just as we do now-a-days for our classical languages; and the Babylonian priests were compelled to recite their prayers and hymns in the original Accadian. The great library-cities or universities of Babylonia strangely remind us of our own modern civilisation. The free public libraries in these ancient haunts of learning on the banks of the Euphrates, four thousand years ago, were well arranged. Each tablet had its number and proper place, and in the catalogue of the astronomical library of Agane there is a direction to the student to write down the number of the tablet or book he is in need of, and the librarian will thereupon give it to him. The Assyrian political conquest of Babylonia was, like the subsequent political conquest of Greece by Rome, followed by the nobler intellectual conquest of the conquerors by the vanquished nation, and the Assyrians studied and preserved the literary treasures of Babylonia with as much interest and ardour as the Romans did those of the Greeks, and as we do those of the Greeks and Romans. Babylonia was the home of Semitic culture, and the birthplace of astronomy, mathematics, and the calendar. It possessed a great national work on astronomy, called the "Observations of Bel," in seventy-two books. The days of the week were called after the sun, moon, and five planets, and the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of each month were sab baths or days of rest. Every day of the year was sacred to some particular saint or deity. Natural history was not unknown at Nineveh. We have an Assyrian list of all the then known animals, scientifically classified after the Linnæan fashion in families, genera, and species.* The Accadians were eminently a literary people, and one of their creation legends commences by describing the primitive Chaos as a time when there was no writing. We have part of a set of Accadian laws, one of the oldest legal codes in the world. From this we learn that an oath to do justice was required every day from the judges, that the life and status of the slave were provided for, and that descent was traced through the mother and not through the father, the mother thus holding the chief place in the family. In the later Babylonian or Semitic times, and in the Babylonian translations of the primitive hymns, this order is reversed, for among the Semitic nations the woman was held to be inferior to the man, a notion which still survives in modern Europe. The Babylonians were great bankers, and we have the deeds and papers of a great banking firm which carried on business at Babylon for more than a century (from about 600-500 B.C.). The bank calendar is preserved, and we find recorded the succession of bank holidays, due perhaps to the efforts of some Sir John Lubbock of those days. THE MIGRATIONS OF THE GREAT RACES. For the Pre-literary period of Religion we must go back in imagination far into prehistoric times, to a period when the three greatest races of mankind, the Turanians, the Aryans, and the Semites, were still dwelling in their original homes in Bactria and the lands to the east of the Sea of Aral. The Turanians were the first to migrate, and they carried Lenormant, Ancient History of the East, i., 447. |