Chapter III: Introduction (1)

In common with all children of my age, I was brought up on American History and given no other history but American, year in and year out, year after year for eight or more years.

So far as I knew 1492 was the beginning of the world. Any events or characters before that time, reference to which I encountered by any chance, were put down in my mind in the same category with fairy-tales. Christ and His times, of which I heard only in Sunday-school, were to me mere fiction without reality. They were not mentioned in any history that I knew and therefore, so I thought, must belong _not_ to a realm in time and space, but to a spiritual realm.

To give an American child only American History is as provincial as to teach a Texas child only Texas History. Patriotism is usually given as the reason for such history teaching. It only promotes a narrow-mindedness and an absurd conceit, based on utter ignorance of any other peoples and any other times--an intolerant egotism without foundation in fact. Since the World War it has become increasingly more and more important that American children should have a knowledge of other countries and other peoples in order that their attitude may be intelligent and unprejudiced.

As young as nine years of age, a child is eagerly inquisitive as to what has taken place in the ages past and readily grasps a concept of World History. Therefore, for many years Calvert School nine-year-old pupils have been taught World History in spite of academic and parental skepticism and antagonism. But I have watched the gradual drift toward adoption of this plan of history teaching, and with it an ever-increasing demand for a text-book of general history for young children. I have found, however, that all existing text-books have to be largely abridged and also supplemented by a running explanation and comment, to make them intelligible to the young child.

The recent momentous studies into the native intelligence of children show us what the average child at different ages can understand and what he cannot understand--what dates, figures of speech, vocabulary, generalities, and abstractions he can comprehend and what he cannot comprehend--and in the future all text-books will have to be written with constant regard for these intelligence norms. Otherwise, such texts are very likely to be “over the child’s head.” They will be trying to teach him some things at least that, in the nature of the case, are beyond him.

In spite of the fact that the writer has been in constant contact with the child mind for a great many years, he has found that whatever was written in his study had to be revised and rewritten each time after the lesson had been tried out in the class-room. Even though the first writing was in what he considered the simplest language, he has found that each and every word and expression has had to be subjected again and again to this class-room test to determine what meaning is conveyed. The slightest inverted phraseology or possibility of double meaning has oftentimes been misconstrued or found confusing. For instance, the statement that “Rome was _on_ the Tiber River” has quite commonly been taken to mean that the city was literally built _on top_ of the river, and the child has had some sort of fantastic vision of houses built on piles in the river. A child of nine is still very young--he may still believe in Santa Claus--younger in ideas, in vocabulary and in understanding than most adults appreciate--even though they be parents or teachers--and new information can hardly be put too simply.

So the topics selected have not always been the most important--but the most important that can be understood and appreciated by a child. Most political, sociological, economic, or religious generalities are beyond a child’s comprehension, no matter how simply told. After all, this History is only a preliminary story.

Excellent biographies and stories from general history have been written. But biographies from history do not give an historic outline. They do not give any outline at all for future filling in; and, indeed, unless they themselves are fitted into such a general historical scheme, they are nothing more than so many disconnected tales floating about in the child’s mind with no associations of time or space.

The treatment of the subject in this book is, therefore, chronological--telling the story of what has happened century by century and epoch by epoch, not by nations. The story of one nation is interrupted to take up that of another as different plots in a novel are brought forward simultaneously. This is in line with the purpose, which is to give the pupil a continuous view or panorama of the ages, rather than Greek History from start to finish, then, retracing the steps of time, Roman History, and so on. The object is to sketch the whole picture in outline, leaving the details to be gradually filled in by later study, as the artist sketches the general scheme of his picture before filling in the details. Such a scheme is as necessary to orderly classification of historical knowledge as is a filing system in any office that can function properly or even at all.

The Staircase of Time is to give a visual idea of the extent of time and the progressive steps in the History of the World. Each “flight” represents a thousand years, and each “step” a hundred--a century. If you have a spare wall, either in the play-room, attic, or barn such a Staircase of Time on a large scale may be drawn upon it from floor to reaching height and made a feature if elaborated with pictures or drawings of people and events. If the wall faces the child’s bed so much the better, for when lying awake in the morning or at any other time, instead of imagining fantastic designs on the wall-paper, he may picture the crowded events on the Staircase of Time. At any rate, the child should constantly refer either to such a Staircase of Time or to the Time Table as each event is studied, until he has a mental image of the Ages past.

At first a child does not appreciate time values represented by numbers or the relative position of dates on a time line and will wildly say twenty-five hundred B. C. or twenty-five thousand B. C. or twenty-five million B. C. indiscriminately. Only by constantly referring dates to position on the Staircase of Time or the Time Table can a child come to visualize dates. You may be _amused_, but do not be _amazed_, if a child gives 776 thousand years A.D. as the date for the First Olympiad, or says that Italy is located in Athens, or that Abraham was a hero of the Trojan War.

If you have ever been introduced to a roomful of strangers at one time, you know how futile it is to attempt even to remember their names to say nothing of connecting names and faces. It is necessary to hear something interesting about each one before you can begin to recall names and faces. Likewise an introduction to World History, the characters and places in which are utterly unknown strangers to the child, must be something more than a mere name introduction, and there must be very few introductions given at a time or both names and faces will be instantly forgotten. It is also necessary to repeat new names constantly in order that the pupil may gradually become familiarized with them, for so many strange people and places are bewildering.

In order to serve the purpose of a basal outline, which in the future is to be filled in, it is necessary that the Time Table be made a permanent possession of the pupil. This Time Table, therefore, should be studied like the multiplication tables until it is known one hundred per cent and for “keeps,” and until the topic connected with each date can be elaborated as much as desired. The aim should be to have the pupil able to start with Primitive Man and give a summary of World History to the present time, with dates and chief events without prompting, questioning, hesitation, or mistake. Does this seem too much to expect? It is not as difficult as it may sound, if suggestions given in the text for connecting the various events into a sequence and for passing names and events in a condensed review are followed. Hundreds of Calvert children each year are successfully required to do this very thing.

The attitude, however, usually assumed by teachers, that “even if the pupil forgets it all, there will be left a valuable impression,” is too often an apology for superficial teaching and superficial learning. History may be made just as much a “mental discipline” as some other studies, but only if difficulties of dates and other abstractions are squarely met and overcome by hard study and learned to be remembered, not merely to be forgotten after the recitation. The story part the child will easily remember, but it is the “who and when and where and why” that are important, and this part is the serious study. Instead of, “A man, once upon a time,” he should say, “King John in 1215 at Runnymede because--”

This book, therefore, is not a supplementary reader but a basal history study. Just enough narrative is told to give the skeleton flesh and blood and make it living. The idea is not how much but how little can be told; to cut down one thousand pages to less than half of that number without leaving only dry bones.

No matter how the subject is presented it is necessary that the child do his part and put his own brain to work; and for this purpose he _should be required to retell each story after he has read it_ and should be repeatedly questioned on names and dates as well as stories, to make sure he is retaining and assimilating what he hears.

I recall how once upon a time a young chap, just out of college, taught his first class in history. With all the enthusiasm of a full-back who has just kicked a goal from field, he talked, he sang; he drew maps on the blackboard, on the floor, on the field; he drew pictures, he vaulted desks, and even stood on his head to illustrate points. His pupils attended spellbound, with their eyes wide open, their ears wide open, and their mouths wide open. They missed nothing. They drank in his flow of words with thirst unquenched; but, like Baron Munchausen, he had failed to look at the other end of the drinking horse that had been cut in half. At the end of a month his kindly principal suggested a test, and he gave it with perfect confidence.

There were only three questions:

(1) Tell all you can about Columbus.
(2) “ “ “ “ “ Jamestown.
(3) “ “ “ “ “ Plymouth.

And here are the three answers of one of the most interested pupils:

(1) He was a _grate_ man.
(2) “ “ “ “ “
(3) “ “ “ “ “ _to_.

Here is the

STAIRCASE OF TIME

It starts far, far, below the bottom of the pages and rises up, UP, UP to where we are NOW--each step a hundred years, each flight of steps a thousand. It will keep on up until it reaches high heaven. From where we are NOW let us look down the flights below us and listen to the Story of what has happened in the long years gone by.

TIME TABLE

with

DATES AND OTHER FOOD FOR THOUGHT

_Don’t devour these dates all at once, or they’ll make you sick, and you’ll never want to see one again._

_Take them piecemeal, only one or two at a time after each story, and be sure to digest them thoroughly._

PAGE
Beginning of the Earth 3
First Rain-storm 7
Plants 7
Mites 8
Insects 8
Fish 8
Frogs 8
Snakes 8
Birds 8
Animals 8
Monkeys 8
People 8
4000 B.C. Bronze Age Begins 16
3400 B.C. Menes 28
2900 B.C. Cheops 38
2300 B.C. Chaldean Eclipse 46
1900 B.C. Abraham Leaves Ur 49
1700 B.C. Israelites go to Egypt 51
1300 B.C. Exodus; Iron Age Begins 54
1200 B.C. Trojan War 64
1100 B.C. Samuel; Saul 70
1000 B.C. Homer; Solomon; Hiram 68, 71, 76
900 B.C. Lycurgus 79
776 B.C. First Olympiad 87
753 B.C. Founding of Rome 89
700 B.C. Nineveh at Top 96
612 B.C. Fall of Nineveh 98
Draco; Solon 114-115
538 B.C. Fall of Babylon 108
509 B.C. End of Kings at Rome 119
500 B.C. Brahmanism 111
Buddhism 112
Confucius 113
490 B.C. Marathon 127
480 B.C. Thermopylæ; 137
Salamis 140
480 B.C. Golden Age 143
430 B.C. Peloponnesian War 151
336 B.C. }
323 B.C. } Alexander the Great 159, 162
202 B.C. Zama 175
100 B.C. Birth of Julius Cæsar 184
55 B.C. }
54 B.C. } Conquest of Britain 186
44 B.C. Death of Julius Cæsar 190
27 B.C. Augustus and the Empire 191
4 B.C. Birth of Christ 197
Nero 203
Titus 206
79 A.D. Pompeii destroyed 208
179 A.D. Marcus Aurelius 210
323 A.D. Constantine 215
476 A.D. Downfall of Rome 227
622 A.D. The Hegira 244
732 A.D. Tours 249
800 A.D. Charlemagne 257
900 A.D. King Alfred the Great 264
1000 A.D. First Discovery of America 269
1066 A.D. William the Conqueror 286
1100 A.D. The Crusades 292
1215 A.D. King John; Magna Charta 311
1300 A.D. Marco Polo 318
1338 A.D. Beginning of One Hundred
Years’ War; Crécy; Black
Death; Joan of Arc 327
1440 A.D. Invention of Printing 333
1453 A.D. Fall of Constantinople 335
1492 A.D. Columbus; Discovery of
America 337
1497 A.D. Vasco da Gama 348
1500 A.D. The Renaissance 359
The Reformation 365
Charles V 367
King Henry VIII 369
Elizabeth 372
1588 A.D. Spanish Armada 375
1600 A.D. Shakspere 380
1640 A.D. Charles I and Oliver Cromwell 390
Cardinal Richelieu 395
Louis XIV 397
1700 A.D. Peter the Great 402
1750 A.D. Frederick the Great 407
1776 A.D. American Revolution 412
1789 A.D. French Revolution 420
1800 A.D. Napoleon 428
1861 A.D. Civil War 447
1914 A.D. }
1918 A.D. } The Great War 460

A CHILD’S HISTORY
OF THE WORLD

BEGINS HERE

1

How Things Started

Once upon a time there was a boy--

Just like me.

He had to stay in bed in the morning until seven o’clock until his father and mother were ready to get up;

So did I.

As he was always awake long before this time, he used to lie there and think about all sorts of curious things;

So did I.

One thing he used to wonder was this:

What would the world be like if there were--

No fathers and mothers,

No uncles and aunts,

No cousins or other children to play with,

_No people at all, except himself_ in the whole world!

Perhaps you have wondered the same thing;

So did I.

At last he used to get so lonely, just from thinking how dreadful such a world would be, that he could stand it no longer and would run to his mother’s room and jump into bed by her side just to get this terrible thought out of his mind;

So did I--for _I was the boy_.

Well, there _was_ a time long, long, long ago when there were no men or women or children, _NO PEOPLE_ of any kind in the whole world. Of course there were no houses, for there was no one to build them or to live in them, no towns or cities--nothing that people make. There were just wild animals--bears and wolves, birds and butterflies, frogs and snakes, turtles and fish. Can you think of such a world as that?

Then,
long, long, long

before that, there was a time when there were _NO PEOPLE_ and _NO ANIMALS_ of any sort in the whole world; there were just growing plants, trees and bushes, grass and flowers. Can you think of such a world as that?

Then,
long, long, long,
long, long, long

before that, there was a time when there were _NO PEOPLE, NO ANIMALS, NO PLANTS_, in the whole world; there was just bare rock and water everywhere. Can you think of such a world as that?

Then,
long, long, long
long, long, long--you might
keep on saying--
“long, long, long,” all day, and
to-morrow, and all
next week, and next
month, and next
year, and it would
not be long enough--

before this, there was a time when there was _NO WORLD AT ALL!_

There were only the Stars

Nothing else!

Now, real Stars are not things with points like those in the corner of a flag or the gold ones you put on a Christmas tree. The real stars in the sky have no points. They are huge burning coals of fire--coals of fire. Each star, however, is so huge that there is nothing in the world now anywhere nearly as big. One little bit, one little scrap of a star is bigger than our whole world--than our whole world.

One of these stars is our Sun--yes, our Sun. The other stars would look the same as the Sun if we could get as close to them. But at that time, so long, long ago, our Sun was not just a big, round, white, hot ball as we see it in the sky to-day. It was then more like the fireworks you may have seen on the Fourth of July. It was whirling and sputtering and throwing off sparks.

One of these sparks which the Sun threw far off got cool just as a spark from the crackling log in the fireplace gets cool, and this cooled-off spark was--

What do you suppose?
See if you can guess--
It was our World!--yes, the World
on which we now live.

At first, however, our World or Earth was nothing but a ball of rock. This ball of rock was wrapped around with steam, like a heavy fog.

Then the steam turned to rain and it rained on the World,

a a a
n n n
d d d

i i i
t t t

r r r
a a a
i i i
n n n
e e e
d d d

until it had filled up the hollows and made enormously big puddles. These puddles were the oceans. The dry places were bare _rock_.

Then, after this, came the first living things--_tiny plants_ that you could only have seen under a microscope. At first they grew only in the water, then along the water’s edge, then out on the rock.

Then dirt or soil, as people call it, formed all over the rock and made the rock into land, and the plants grew larger and spread farther over the land.

Then, after this, came the first _tiny animals_ in the water. They were wee _Mites_ like drops of jelly.

Then, after this, came things like _Insects_, some that live _in_ the water, some _on_ the water, some _on_ the land, and some _in_ the air.

Then, after this, came _Fish_, that live only in the water.

Then, after this, came _Frogs_, that live in the water and on the land, too.

Then, after this, came _Snakes_ and huge _lizards_ bigger than alligators, more like dragons; and they grew so big that at last they could not move and died because they could not get enough food to eat.

Then, after this, came _Birds_ that lay eggs and those _Animals_ like foxes and elephants and cows that nurse their babies when they are born.

Then, after this, came _Monkeys_.

Then, last of all, came--what do you suppose? Yes--_People_--men, women, and children.

Here are the steps; see if you can take them:

STAR, SUN;
SUN, SPARK;
SPARK, WORLD;
WORLD, STEAM;
STEAM, RAIN;
RAIN, OCEANS.

OCEANS, PLANTS;
PLANTS, MITES;
MITES, INSECTS;
INSECTS, FISH;
FISH, FROGS;
FROGS, SNAKES.

SNAKES, BIRDS;
BIRDS, ANIMALS;
ANIMALS, MONKEYS;
MONKEYS, PEOPLE;
And here we are!

What do you suppose will be next?

2

Umfa-Umfa and Itchy-Scratchy

How do you suppose I know about all these things that took place so long ago?

I don’t.

I’m only guessing about them.

But there are different kinds of guesses. If I hold out my two closed hands and ask you to guess which one has the penny in it, that is one kind of a guess. Your guess might be right or it might be wrong. It would be just luck.

But there is another kind of a guess. When there is snow on the ground and I see tracks of a boot in the snow, I guess that a man must have passed by, for boots don’t usually walk without some one in them. That kind of a guess is not just luck but common sense.

And so we can guess about a great many things that have taken place long ago, even though there was no one there at the time to see them or tell about them.

Men have dug down deep under the ground in different parts of the world and have found there--what do you suppose?

I don’t believe you would ever guess.

They have found the heads of arrows and spears and hatchets.

The peculiar thing about these arrows and spears and hatchets is that they are not made of iron or steel, as you might expect, but of stone.

Now, we are sure that only men could have made and used such things, for birds and fish or other animals do not use hatchets or spears. We are also sure that these men must have lived long, long years ago before iron and steel were known, because it must have taken long, long years for these things to have become covered up so deep by dust and dirt. We have also found the bones of the people themselves, who must have died thousands upon thousands of years ago, long before any one began to write down history. So we know that the people who were living on the earth then were working and playing, eating and fighting--doing many of the same things we are to-day--especially the fighting.

This time in the pre-history of the world, when people used such things made of stone, is therefore called THE STONE AGE.

These First Stone Age People we call _Primitive_, which simply means First as a Primer means First Reader. Primitive People were wild animals. Unlike other wild animals, however, they walked on their hind legs.

These First People had hair growing, not just on their heads, but all over their bodies, like some shaggy dogs. They had no houses of any sort in which to live. They simply lay down on the ground when night came. Later, when the earth became cold, they found caves in the rocks or in the hillsides where they could get away from the cold and storms and other wild animals. So men, women, and children of this time were called _Cave People_.

They spent their days hunting some animals and running and hiding from others. They caught animals by trapping them in a pit covered over with bushes, or they killed them with a club or a rock if they had a chance, or with stone-headed arrows or hatchets. They even drew pictures of these animals on the walls of their caves, scratching the picture with a pointed stone, and some of these pictures we can still see to-day.

They lived on berries and nuts and grass-seeds. They robbed the nests of birds for the eggs, which they ate raw, for they had no fire to cook with. They were blood-thirsty; they liked to drink the warm blood of animals they killed, as you would a glass of milk.

They talked to each other by some sort of grunts--

“Umfa, umfa, glug, glug.”

They made clothes of skins of animals they killed, for there was no such thing as cloth. And yet, although they were real men, they lived so much like wild animals that we call such people _savages_.

Primitive Men were not pleasant people. They were fearful and cruel creatures, who beat and killed and robbed whenever they had a chance.

A cave man got his wife by stealing a girl away from her own cave home, knocking her senseless, and dragging her off by her hair, if necessary. The men were fighters but not brave. They would kill other animals and other men if the others were weaker or if they could sneak upon them and catch them off their guard, but if others were stronger they would run and hide.

Their only rule of life was hurt and kill what you can, and run from what you can’t. This is what we call the first law of nature--every man for himself. They knew if they didn’t kill they would be killed, for there were no laws nor police to protect them.

These primitive cave people are our ancestors, and we get from them many of their wild ways. In spite of our religion and manners and education, there are many men still living who act in the same way when they get a chance.

Jails are made for such men.

Suppose you had been a boy or a girl in the Stone Age, with a name like Itchy-Scratchy. I wonder how you would have liked the life.

When you woke up in the morning, you would not have bathed or even washed your hands and face or brushed your teeth or combed your hair.

You ate with your fingers, for there were no knives or forks or spoons or cups or saucers, only one bowl--which your mother had made out of mud and dried in the sun to hold water to drink--no dishes to wash and put away, no chairs, no tables, no table manners.

There were no books, no paper, no pencils.

There was no Saturday or Sunday, January or July. Except that one day was warm and sunny or another cold and rainy, they were all alike. There was no school to go to. Every day was a holiday.

There was nothing to do all day long but make mud pies or pick berries or play tag with your brothers and sisters.

I wonder how you would like that kind of life!

“Fine!” do you think?--“a great life--just like camping out?”

But I have only told you part of the story.

The cave would have been cold and damp and dark, with only the bare ground or a pile of leaves for a bed. There would probably have been bats and big spiders sharing the cave with you.

You might have had on the skin of some animal your father had killed but as this only covered part of your body and as there was no fire, you would have felt cold in winter, and when it got very cold you might have frozen to death.

For breakfast you might have had some dried berries or grass-seed or a piece of raw meat, for dinner the same thing, for supper still the same thing.

You would never have had any bread or milk or griddle-cakes with syrup, or oatmeal with sugar on it, or apple pie or ice-cream.

There was nothing to do all day long but watch out for wild animals--bears and tigers; for there was no door with lock and key, and a tiger, if he found you out, could go wherever you went and “get you” even in your cave.

And then some day your father, who had left the cave in the morning to go hunting, would not return, and you would know he had been torn to pieces by some wild beast, and you would wonder how long before your turn would come next.

Do you think you would like to have lived then?

3

Fire! Fire!! Fire!!!

The first things are usually the most interesting--the first baby, the first tooth, the first step, the first word, the first spanking. This book will be chiefly the story of first things; those that came second or third or fourth or fifth you can read about and study later.

Primitive People did not at first know what fire was. They had no matches nor any way of making a light or a fire. They had no light at night. They had no fire to warm themselves by. They had no fire with which to cook their food. Somewhere and sometime, we do not know exactly when or how, they found out how to make and use fire.

If you rub your hands together rapidly, they become warm. Try it. If you rub them together still more rapidly, they become hot. If you rub two sticks together rapidly, they become warm. If you rub two sticks together very, very, very rapidly, they become hot and at last, if you keep it up long enough and fast enough, are set on fire. The Indians and boy scouts do this and make a fire by twisting one stick against another.

This was one of the first inventions, and this invention was as remarkable for them at that time as the invention of electric light in our own times.

People of the Stone Age had hair and beards that were never cut, because they had nothing to cut them with, even had they wanted them short, which they probably didn’t.

Their finger-nails grew like claws until they broke off.

They had no clothes made of cloth, for they had no cloth and nothing with which to cut and sew cloth if they had.

They had no saws to cut boards, no hammer or nails to fasten them together to make houses or furniture.

They had no forks nor spoons; no pots nor pans; no buckets nor shovels; no needles nor pins.

The People of the Stone Age had never seen or heard of such a thing as iron or steel or tin or brass or anything made of these metals. For thousands and thousands of years Primitive People got along without any of the things that are made of metal.

Then one day a Stone Age Man found out something by accident; a “discovery” we call it.

He was making a fire; and a fire, which is to us such a common, every-day thing, was still to him very wonderful. Round his fire he placed some rock to make a sort of camp-fire stove. Now, it happened that this particular rock was not ordinary rock but what we now call “ore,” for it had copper in it. The heat of the fire melted some of the copper out of the rock, and it ran out on the ground.

What were those bright, shining drops?

He examined them.

How pretty they were!

He heated some more of the same rock and got some more copper.

Thus was the first metal discovered.

At first people used the copper for beads and ornaments, it was so bright and shiny. But they soon found out that copper could be pounded into sharp blades and points, which were much better than the stone knives and arrow-heads they had used before.

But notice that it was not iron they discovered first, it was copper.

We think people next discovered tin in somewhat the same way. Then, after that, they found out that tin when mixed with copper made a still harder and better metal than either alone. This metal, made of tin and copper together, we now call bronze; and for two or three thousand years people made their tools and weapons out of bronze. And so we call the time when men used bronze tools, and bronze weapons for hunting and fighting, the Bronze Age.

At last some man discovered iron, and he soon saw that iron was better for most useful things than either copper or bronze. The Iron Age started with the discovery of iron, and we are still in the Iron Age.

As people who lived in the Bronze and Iron Ages were able, after the discovery of metal, to do many things they could not possibly have done before with only stone, and as they lived much more as we do now, we call people of the Bronze and Iron Ages “civilized.”

You may have heard in your mythology or fairy tales of a Golden Age also, but by this is meant something quite different. The Golden Age means a time when everything was beautiful and lovely and everybody wise and good. There have been times in the World’s History which have been called the Golden Age for this reason.

But I am afraid there never has been really a golden age--only in fairy-tales.

4

From an Airplane

People of the Bronze and Iron Ages thought the world was flat, and they knew only a little bit of the world, the small part where they lived; and they thought that if you went too far the world came to an end where you would

TU
M
B
L
E

O
F
F

The far-away land which nobody knew they called the Ultima Thule. This is a nice name to say--Ultima Thule, Ultima Thule--far-away Ultima Thule.

If we should go up in an airplane and look down on the world at the place where the first civilized people once lived, we should see two rivers, a sea and a gulf, and from so high up in the air they would look something like this:

Now, you probably have never even heard of these rivers and seas, and yet they have been known longer than any other places in the world. One of these lines is the Tigris River, and the other is the Euphrates. They run along getting closer and closer together until at last they join each other and flow into what is called the Persian Gulf.

You might make these two rivers in the ground of your yard or garden or draw them on the floor if your mother will let you. Just for fun you might name your drinking-cup “Tigris” and your glass “Euphrates.” Then you might call your mouth, into which they both empty, the “Persian Gulf,” for you will hear a great many new names by and by, and as grown-up people give names to their houses and boats, to their horses and dogs, why shouldn’t you give names to things that belong to you? For instance, you might call your chair, your bed, your table, your comb and brush, even your hat and shoes, after these strange names.

Then, if we flew in our airplane to the west, we should see a country called Egypt, another river, the Nile, and a sea now named the Mediterranean. Mediterranean simply means “between the land,” for this sea is surrounded by land. It is, indeed, almost like a big lake. It is supposed that long, long ago in the Stone Age, there was no water at all where this sea now is, only a dry valley, and that people once lived there.

Along the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates were the only civilized nations living in the Bronze Age. The rest of the World people knew nothing about. There may have been Cave Men living in other parts of the World, but it is only of the people in these two places that we have any written history until after the Iron Age began.

All of the people who lived in the country of the Tigris and Euphrates were white. We don’t know how nor when nor where colored people first lived, though it is interesting to guess. There were, we think, just three different white families and from these three families all the white people in the world are descended. Yes, your family came from here, ’way, ’way, ’way, ’way, back. So you will want to know the names of these three families and which one was your own. They were:

The Indo-Europeans, often called Aryans,
The Semites, and
The Hamites.

Most of us belong to the Aryan family, some are Semites, but very few in this part of the World are Hamites.

If your name is Henry or Charles or William, you are probably an Aryan.

If it is Moses or Solomon, you are probably a Semite.

If it is Shufu or Rameses, you are probably a Hamite.

The Aryans came from higher up on the map than the other two families, we think. They were the first people to tame wild horses and to use them for riding and drawing carts. They also had tamed cows which they used for milk, and sheep for their wool.

5

Real History Begins or ’Way ’Way Back to the Time of the Gipsies

You can remember the big things that have happened in your own lifetime.

And you have of course heard your father tell about things that happened in his own life--how he fought the Germans in the Great War, perhaps.

And if your grandfather is still living, he can tell you still other stories of things that took place when he was a boy before even your father was born.

Perhaps your
great,
great,
grandfather
may have been living when Washington was
President, and _his_
great,
great,
great,
great,
grandfather

may have been living when there were only wild Indians in this country.

Although these ancestors, as they are called, are dead long since, the story of what did happen in all their lifetimes ’way, ’way back has been written down in books and this story is history--“his story” one boy named it.

Christ was living in the Year 1--no, not the first year of the world, of course.

Do you know how many years ago that was?

You can tell if you know what year this is now.

If Christ were living to-day, how old would He be?

Nineteen hundred and more years may seem a long time. But perhaps you have seen or heard of a man or a woman who was a hundred years old. Have you?

Well, in nineteen hundred years only nineteen men each a hundred years old might have lived one after the other--nineteen men one after the other since the time of Christ--and that doesn’t seem so long after all!

Everything that happened _before_ Christ was born is called B.C., which you can guess are the initials of Before Christ, so B.C. stands for Before Christ. So much is easy.

Everything that has happened in the world _since_ the time of Christ is called A.D. This is not so easy for though A. might stand for After, we know D. is not the initial of Christ. As a matter of fact, A. D. are the initials of two Latin words, “Anno Domini.” Anno means “in the year,” Domini “of the Lord”; so that Anno Domini is “in the year, of the Lord,” which in ordinary, every-day language means of course “since the time of Christ.”

The things I have told you that I have had to guess at we call Before-History, or _Pre-History_--which means the same thing. But the things that have happened in the lifetime of people, who have written them down--the stories I don’t have to guess at--we call _History_.

The first history that we feel fairly sure is really true begins with the Hamite family. The Hamites, you remember, were one of the three families of the white race I have already told you about who lived by the Tigris and Euphrates. We think that they moved away from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and went down to Egypt long before history began.

Of course they didn’t pack all their furniture on a big wagon and move to Egypt, as you might move from the house where you now live to another. They lived in tents then and not in houses at all, and they only moved along a day’s journey at a time as campers or Gipsies might do. In fact, Gipsy is short for Egyptian. When they got tired of one place or had eaten up everything there was near-by, they rolled up their tents, packed them on camels, and moved a little farther along to a new place. And so camping here for a while, then gradually moving farther along to the next good place and camping there, they at last got as far off as the land we now call Egypt. When they finally reached Egypt they found it such a fine country in which to live that there they stayed for good and were called Egyptians.

Why do you suppose they found Egypt such a fine country in which to live? It was chiefly on account of a habit of the river Nile--a bad habit you might at first think it--a habit of flooding the country once every year.

It rains so hard in the spring that the water fills up the river Nile, overflows its banks, and spreads far out over the land, but not very deep. It is as if you had left a water-spigot turned on and the water running, or had begun to water your garden with a hose, and then you had gone off and forgotten it.

But the people know when the overflow is coming and they are glad for it to come, so they put banks around some of it so that it is stored up for watering the land during the rest of the year when there is no rain. After most of the water has dried up, it has left a layer of rich, dark, moist earth over the whole country. In this earth it is easy to grow dates, wheat, and other things which are good for food.

If it were not for this yearly overflow of the Nile, the country of Egypt would be a sandy desert in which no plant or living thing would grow--for all plants as well as animals must have water and will die without it. Egypt, without water, would be like the great Sahara Desert, which is not far away. It is the Nile, therefore, that makes the land so rich and Egypt such an easy and cheap country to live in, for food grows with little or no labor and costs almost nothing. Besides this, the climate is so warm that people need little clothing and do not have to buy coal or make fires to heat their houses. So it was to this country that the Hamites at last came, finally settled down, and were thereafter called Egyptians.

The first Egyptian king whose name we know was Menes, but we do not know much about him. We believe he built some kind of waterworks so that the people might better use the water of the Nile, and he probably lived about 3400 B. C. He may have lived either earlier or later, but as this is an easy date to remember, we shall take it for a starting-point. You might remember it by supposing it is a telephone number of a person you wanted to call up:

Menes, First Egyptian king . . 3400 B.C.

6

The Puzzle-Writers

People of the Stone Age had learned how to talk to each other, but they could not write, for there was no such thing as an alphabet or written words, and so they could not send notes or messages to one another or write stories. The Egyptians were the first people to think of a way to write what they wanted to say.

The Egyptians did not write with letters like ours, however, but with signs that looked like little pictures, a lion, a spear, a bird, a whip. This picture-writing was called hieroglyphics--see if you can say “Hi-e-ro-glyph-ics.” Perhaps you have seen, in the puzzle sections of a newspaper, stories written in pictures for you to guess the meaning. Well, hieroglyphics were something like that.

Here is the name of an Egyptian queen, whom you will hear about later--written in hieroglyphics; her name you would never guess from this funny writing. It is “Cleopatra.”

A king’s or queen’s name always had a line drawn around it, like the one you see around the above name in order to mark it more prominently and give it more importance. It was something like the square or circle your mother may put around her initials or monogram on her letter-paper.

But there was no paper in those days and so the Egyptians wrote on the leaves of a plant called papyrus that grew in the water. It is from this name “papyrus” that we get the name “paper.” Can you see that “paper” and “papyrus” look and sound something alike? The Egyptians’ books were written by hand, of course, but they had no pencils nor pens nor ink to write with. For a pen they used a reed, split at the end, and for ink a mixture of water and soot.

Their books were not made of separate pages like our books, but from a long sheet of papyrus-leaves pasted together. This was rolled up to form what was called a scroll, something like a roll of wall-paper, and was read as it was unrolled.

Stories of their kings and battles and great events in their history they used to write on the walls of their buildings and monuments. This writing they carved into the stone, so that it would last much longer than that on the papyrus-leaves.

All the old Egyptians, who wrote in hieroglyphics and knew how to read this writing, had died long since, and for a great many years no one knew what such writing meant. But a little over a hundred years ago a man found out by accident how to read and understand hieroglyphics once again. This is the way he happened to do so.

The Nile separates into different streams before it flows into the Mediterranean Sea. These separate streams are called mouths and one of these mouths has been given the name “Rosetta.”

One day a man was digging nearby this Rosetta Mouth when he dug up a stone something like a tombstone with several kinds of writing on it. The top writing was in pictures which we now call hieroglyphics, and no one understood what it meant. Below this was written what was supposed to be the same story in the Greek language, and a great many people do understand Greek. All one had to do, therefore, to find out the meaning of the hieroglyphics, was to compare the two writings. It was like reading secret writing when we know what the letters stand for. You may have tried to solve a puzzle in the back of your magazine, and this was just such an interesting puzzle, only there was no one to tell the answer in the next number.

The puzzle was not so easy as it sounds, however, for it took a man almost twenty years to solve it. That is a long time for any one to spend in trying to solve a puzzle, isn’t it? But after this “key” to the puzzle was found, men were able to read all of the hieroglyphics in Egypt and so to find out what happened in that country long before Christ was born.

This stone is called the Rosetta Stone, from the Rosetta Mouth of the Nile where it was found. It is now in the great British Museum in London and is very famous, because from it we were able to learn so much history which we otherwise would not have known.

Egypt was ruled over by a king who was called a Pharaoh. When he died his son became the Pharaoh and so on. All the other people were divided into classes, and the children in each class usually became just what their fathers had been. It was very unusual for an Egyptian to start at the bottom and work up to the top, as a poor boy in this country may do, though once in a great while this happened even in Egypt, as we shall see by and by.

The highest class of people were called priests. They were not like priests or ministers of the church nowadays, however, for there was no church at that time. The priests made the religion and rules, which every one had to obey as everybody does the laws of our land.

But the priests were not only priests; they were doctors and lawyers and engineers, as well. They were the best-educated class, and they were the only people who knew how to read and write, for it was very difficult, as you might suppose, to learn how to read and write hieroglyphics.

The next highest class to the priests were the soldiers, and below these were the lower classes--farmers, shepherds, shopkeepers, merchants, mechanics, and last of all the swineherds.

The Egyptians did not worship one God as we do. They believed in hundreds of gods and goddesses, and they had a special god for every sort of thing, who ruled over and had charge of that thing--a god of the farm, a god of the home, and so on. Some of their gods were good and some were bad, but the Egyptians prayed to them all.

Osiris was the chief god, and Isis was his wife. Osiris was the god of farming and judge of the dead. Their son Horus had the head of a hawk.

Many of their gods had bodies of men with heads of animals. Animals they thought sacred. The dog and the cat were sacred animals. The ibis, which was a bird like a stork, was another. Then there was the beetle, which was called a scarab. If any one killed a sacred animal he was put to death, for the Egyptians thought it much worse to kill a sacred and holy creature than to kill even a human being.

7

The Tomb-Builders

The Egyptians believed that when they died, their souls stayed near by their bodies. So when a person died they put in the tomb with him all sorts of things that he had used in daily life--things to eat and drink, furniture and dishes, toys and games. They thought the soul would return to its own body at the day of judgment. They wanted their bodies to be kept from decaying until judgment day, in order that the soul might then have a body to return to. So they pickled the bodies of the dead by soaking them in a kind of melted tar and wrapping them round and round and round with a cloth like a bandage. A dead body pickled in this way is called a mummy, and after thousands of years the mummies of the Egyptian kings may still be seen. Most of them are not, however, in the tombs where they were at first placed. They have been moved away and put in museums, and we may see them there now. Although they are yellow and dried up, they still look like

“Little old men
All skin and bones.”

At first only kings or important people of the highest classes were made mummies, but after a while all the classes, except perhaps the lowest, were treated in the same way. Sacred animals from beetles to cows were also made into mummies.

When an Egyptian died his friends heaped up a few stones over his body just to cover it up decently and keep it from being stolen or destroyed by those wild animals that fed on dead bodies. But a king or a rich man wanted a bigger pile of stones over his body than just ordinary people had. So to make sure that his pile would be big enough, a king built it for himself before he died. Each king tried to make his pile larger than any one else’s until at last the pile of stones became so big it was a hill of rocks and called a pyramid. The pyramids therefore were tombs of the kings who built them while they were alive to be monuments to themselves when they were dead. In fact a king was much more interested in building a home for his dead body than he was in a home for his live body. So, instead of palaces, kings built pyramids. There are many of these pyramids built along the bank of the Nile, and most of them were built, we think, just after 3000 B.C.

When a building is being put up nowadays, men use derricks and cranes and engines to haul and raise heavy stones and beams. But the Egyptians had no such machinery, and though they used huge stones to build the pyramids, they had to drag these stones for many miles and raise them into place simply by pushing and pulling them. The three biggest of all the pyramids are near the city of Cairo. The largest one of them, which is called the Great Pyramid, was built by a king named Cheops. To remember when he lived, simply think of this as another telephone number:

Cheops 2900 B.C.