Chapter IV: Introduction (2)

It is said that one hundred thousand men worked twenty years to build his pyramid. It is one of the largest buildings in the world, and some of the blocks of stone themselves are as big as a small house. I have been to the top of it, and it is like climbing a steep mountain with rocky sides. I have also been far inside to the cave-like room in the center where Cheop’s mummy was placed. There is nothing in there now, however, except bats that fly about in the darkness, for the mummy has disappeared--been stolen, perhaps.

Near the Pyramid of Cheops is the Sphinx. It is a huge statue of a lion with a man’s head. It is as big as a church, and though it is so big, it has been carved out of one single rock. The rock, however, was already there and so did not have to be carried. The Sphinx is a statue of the god of the morning, and the head is that of one of the Egyptian Pharaohs who built a pyramid near that of Cheops. The desert sand has covered the paws and most of the body. Though the sand has been dug away from time to time, the wind quickly covers the body with sand again.

The Egyptians carved other large statues of men and women out of rock. These figures are usually many times bigger than life-size, and sit or stand stiffly erect with both feet flat on the ground and hands close to the body in the position some children take when they “sit” for their photograph.

They built huge houses for their gods. These were called temples and took the place of our churches. These temples had gigantic--that’s the way it is spelled, though it means “giant-ic”--columns and pillars. Ordinary people standing beside them look like dwarfs. Here is one of these temples, and you can see how different it is from our churches:

They decorated their temples and pyramids, and the cases in which the mummies were put, with drawings and paintings. The pictures they made, however, looked something like those a young child might draw. For example, when they wanted to make a picture of water, they simply made a zigzag line to represent waves; when they tried to draw a row of men back of a row in front, they put those in the back _on top_ of those in front. To show that a man was a king, they made him several times larger than the other men in the picture. When they painted a picture they used any color they thought was pretty, usually blue or yellow or brown. Whether the person or thing was really that color or not made no difference.

8

A Rich Land Where There Was No Money

You have read in fairy-tales of a land where cakes and candy and sugar-plums grow on trees, where everything you want to eat or to play with can be had just by picking it. Well, long, long ago people used to think there had been really such a country, and where do you suppose they said it was? Somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers--those rivers with the strange names I asked you to learn--and they called this spot the Garden of Eden. We do not know exactly where it was, for there is no such place now quite as wonderful as the Garden of Eden was supposed to be.

Egypt was a land of one river, the Nile. The land of the Two Rivers had several names.

Let us suppose we are flying over the country in an airplane and looking down at the land between these two rivers. It is called Mesopotamia, which is two Greek words simply meaning “Between the Rivers.”

See the land over there by the upper Tigris. It is called _Assyria_.

See the land near where the rivers join each other. That is called _Babylonia_.

See the land near where they empty. That is called _Chaldea_.

And see over there is _Mount Ararat_, where it is supposed Noah’s Ark rested after the flood.

Here are a lot of new names. A young friend of mine had a train of toy cars. He had noticed that the Pullman cars on which he had ridden had names, and so he gave his toy cars names also. He called them:

ASSYRIA MESOPOTAMIA
BABYLONIA ARARAT
CHALDEA EUPHRATES

Babylonia was a very rich country, for the two rivers brought down and dropped great quantities of earth just as the Nile did in Egypt, and this made very rich soil. Wheat, from which we make bread, is called the staff of life. It is the most valuable of all foods which grow. It is supposed that wheat first grew in Babylonia. Dates in that part of the world are almost as important a food as wheat. Dates, too, grow there very plentifully. Now, you may think dates are something to be eaten almost like candy but in Babylonia dates took the place of oatmeal. In the rivers there were quantities of good fish, and as fishing was just fun, you see that the people who lived in Babylonia--the Babylonians, as they were called--had plenty of good food without having to do much work for it. No one had any money in those days; people had cows and sheep and goats, and a man was rich who had much of these “goods.” But if a man wanted to buy or sell, he had to buy or sell by trading something he had for something he wanted.

Somewhere in Babylonia the people built a great tower called the _Tower of Babel_, which you have probably heard about. It was more like a mountain than a tower. They built other towers, too. Some say the Tower of Babel and towers like it were built so that the people might have a high place to which they could climb in case of another flood. But others give a different reason. They say that the people who built these towers came to Babylonia from farther north where there were mountains. In this northern land they had always placed their altars on the top of a mountain, to be close to heaven. So when they moved to a flat country like Mesopotamia and Babylonia, where there were no mountains, they _built_ mountains in order to have a high place for the altar on top. To reach the top of these mountains or towers, they made, instead of a staircase on the inside, a slanting roadway that wound around the outside in somewhat the way a road winds around a mountain.

There was hardly any stone either in or near Babylonia as there was in Egypt, and so the Babylonians built their buildings of bricks, which were made of mud formed into blocks and dried in the sun. In the course of time, bricks of this sort crumble and turn back into dust again just as mud pies that you might make would do. This is the reason why all that is left of the Tower of Babel and the other buildings that were put up so long ago are now simply hills of clay into which the brick has turned.

The Egyptians wrote on papyrus or carved their history in stone, but the Babylonians had neither papyrus nor stone. All they had were bricks. So they wrote on bricks before they were dried, while they were still soft clay. This writing was made by punching marks into the clay with the end of a stick. It was called _cuneiform_, which means wedge-shaped, for it looked like little groups of wedge-shaped marks, like chicken-tracks, made in the mud. I have seen boys’ writing that looked more like cuneiform than it did like English.

The Babylonians as they watched their flocks by night and by day watched also the sun and the moon and the stars moving across the sky. So they came to know a great deal about these heavenly bodies.

Did you ever see the moon in the daytime?

Oh, yes, you can.

Well, every once in a great while the moon as it moves across the sky gets in front of the sun and shuts out its light--just as, if you should put a white plate in front of an electric light, the electric light would be darkened. It may be ten o’clock in the morning and broad daylight when suddenly the sun is covered up by the moon as by a white plate and it becomes night and the stars shine out and chickens, thinking it is night, go to roost. But in a few moments the moon passes by and the sun shines out once again. This is called an _eclipse_ of the sun.

Now you probably have never seen an eclipse of the sun, but some day you may. At that time, and even to-day when ignorant people see an eclipse of the sun, they think that something dreadful is going to happen--the end of the world, perhaps, just because they have never seen such a strange sight before and do not know that it is a thing that happens regularly and that no harm comes from it.

Well, nearly twenty-three hundred years before Christ, 2300 B. C., the Babylonians told beforehand just when there was going to be an eclipse of the sun. They had watched the moon moving across the sky and they had figured out how long it would be before it would catch up with the sun and cross directly over it. So you see how much the old Babylonians knew about such things. Men who study the stars and other heavenly bodies are called astronomers, and the Babylonians, therefore, were famous astronomers.

The Egyptians worshiped animals; but it was quite natural that the Babylonians should worship these wonderful heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars, and they did.

The first king of Babylonia whom we know much about--and that much is very little--was Sargon I, who may have lived about the same time that the pyramids were built in Egypt.

About 2100 B. C. Babylonia had a king known far and wide for the laws he made. His name was Hammurabi, and we still have the laws he made though we no longer obey them; for they were carved into a stone in cuneiform, and we have the stone. Sargon and Hammurabi are strange names like no one’s name you ever heard before, yet they are real names of real kings who ruled over real people.

9

The Wandering Jews

“You are” spells “Ur.” It is one of the shortest names I know. It is the name of a little place in that part of Babylonia called Chaldea. In this place--about nineteen hundred years B.C.--there lived a man named Abraham. Abraham had a very large family and though he had no money he was rich. He had large herds of sheep and goats, and these were the chief riches in those days. Now, Abraham believed in one God, as we do, while his neighbors, the Babylonians, worshiped idols and the heavenly bodies, such as the sun, moon, and stars, as I have just said. Abraham did not like his neighbors for this reason; and his neighbors didn’t like him, either, for they thought his ideas were peculiar or even crazy. So, about nineteen hundred years before Christ, Abraham took his large family, his flocks, and his herds and moved to a land called Canaan, far away on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

Abraham lived to be a very old man, and he had a large family. One of his grandsons named Jacob, who was also known by the name of Israel, had a son Joseph. You probably remember the Bible story of Jacob’s favorite son Joseph with the coat of many colors. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him, as boys and even dogs are apt to be jealous of any one who is liked better than they are. So they put Joseph into a well and then sold him as a slave to some Egyptians who were passing by. Then they told their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by wild animals. The Egyptians took Joseph to far-off Egypt--far away from Canaan.

But although Joseph was a slave in Egypt, and although, as I told you, it was very difficult for any one to work his way up out of his class to a higher class, he was so bright that at last he became one of the rulers in Egypt.

Now, at that time when he was ruler there came a famine in Canaan and there was no food. In Egypt, however, there was plenty of food stored up. So Joseph’s wicked brothers went down to Egypt to beg the rulers for bread. They probably thought by that time their brother was dead. They did not know that he had become such a great man and that he was now the ruler of whom they were begging food. You can imagine how surprised they were and how ashamed they must have felt when they found out that the great ruler was their own brother, whom they had planned to kill and then had sold as a slave.

Joseph might have let his brothers starve to death or put them in prison, or sent them back to Canaan without anything, if he had wanted to revenge himself on them. But instead of doing any of these things, he gave them not only all the food they wanted and more to take back home, but made them rich presents besides. Then he told them to go back and get the rest of his family and return with them to Egypt, and he promised to give them a piece of land called Goshen where there would be no famines and they might live happily. So they did as they were told, and Israel and his sons and all their families came down and settled in Goshen about 1700 B.C. They were called Israelites, which means of course the children of Israel, and they believed they were God’s chosen people. These are the people we now call the Jews.

After Joseph, who was of course an Israelite himself, died, the kings or Pharaohs of Egypt did not like these foreign people who belonged to the Semite family, and treated them very badly, as other peoples have always treated the Jews badly ever since. Though the Jews and their sons and sons’ sons lived in Egypt for about four hundred years, they were always hated by the Egyptians.

Now about four hundred years from the time the Jews first came into Egypt--400 from 1700 is 1300 B.C.--there was a ruler of Egypt called Rameses the Great.

Rameses so hated the Jews that finally he gave orders to have every Jewish boy baby killed. In this way he thought to get rid of these people. One little Jewish boy named Moses, however, was saved, and when he grew up he became the greatest leader of his people. Moses wanted to get the Jews out of this unfriendly country where the people worshiped false gods. And so at last he led all his people out of Egypt across the Red Sea. This was called the Exodus, and it took place about 1300 B.C.

After the Jews had left Egypt they first stopped at the foot of a mountain called Mount Sinai, while Moses went up to the top where he could be by himself and learn what God wanted him and the Jews to do. Moses spent forty days praying on top of the mountain. When he came down from the mountain-top, he brought with him the Ten Commandments, the same Ten Commandments you may have learned in Sunday-school. But Moses had been gone so long that when he came back again to his people he found them worshiping a golden calf as the Egyptians had done. They had lived in Egypt until they had come to think it was all right to worship idols.

Moses was very angry. It was high time, he thought, that they should get rid of the bad influence of their old Egyptian neighbors. And at last he succeeded in making them worship God again and gave them the Ten Commandments for their rule of life. So Moses is called a lawgiver and the founder of the Jewish religion. Then Moses died, and the Jews wandered from place to place for a great many years before they finally settled in Canaan.

The Jews had no kings. They were ruled by men called judges, but the judges lived very simply, just like every one else and not like kings in palaces with servants and fine robes and rich jewels. But the Jews wanted a real king as their enemies had and other nations who were their neighbors. Strange they wanted a king which so many countries have tried to get rid of--we should think they would have preferred a President as we have.

So at last a judge who was named Samuel said they should have a king, and Saul was chosen. Then Samuel poured olive-oil over Saul’s head. This may seem a queer thing to do, but it took the place of putting a crown on his head and was a sign that he was to be king. Samuel, therefore, was the last one of their judges, and Saul was their first king.

All other nations at that time believed as the Egyptians and Chaldeans did, in fairy-tale gods or idols. But the Jews alone believed in one God. They had a Holy Book which had been written by their prophets. This book is the Old Testament part of the Christian Bible.

So this is the story of the Wandering Jews who gave us the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments, and here is the way they wandered:

From Ur to Canaan--1900 B.C.

From Canaan to Egypt--1700 B.C.

From Egypt back to Canaan--1300 B.C.

10

Fairy-Tale Gods

There was once a man named Hellen--strange-sounding name for a man, isn’t it? He was not a Semite and not a Hamite. He was an Aryan. He had a great many children and children’s children, and they called themselves Hellenes. They lived in a little scrap of a country that juts out into the Mediterranean Sea, and they called their land Hellas. I once upset a bottle of ink on my desk, and the ink ran out into a wriggly spot that looked exactly as Hellas does on the map. Though Hellas is hardly any bigger than one of our States, its history is more famous than that of any other country of its size in the world. We call Hellas “Greece” and the people who lived there “Greeks.”

About the same time the Jews were leaving Egypt, about the time when people were beginning to use iron instead of bronze, that is, about 1300 B.C., we first begin to hear of Hellas and the Hellenes, of Greece and the Greeks.

The Greeks believed in many gods, not in one God as we do and as the Jews did, and their gods were more like people in fairy-tales than like divine beings. Many beautiful statues have been made of their different gods, and poems and stories have been written about them.

There were twelve--just a dozen--chief gods. They were supposed to live on Mount Olympus, which was the highest mountain in Greece. These gods were not always good, but often quarreled and cheated and did even worse things. The gods lived on a kind of food that was much more delicious than what we eat. It was called nectar and ambrosia, and the Greeks thought it made those who ate it immortal; that is, so that they would never die.

Let me introduce you to the family of the gods. I know you will be pleased to meet them. Most of them have two names.

_Jupiter or Zeus_ is the father of the gods and the the king who rules over all human beings. He sits on a throne and holds a zigzag flash of lightning called a thunderbolt in his hand. An eagle, the king of birds, is usually by his side.

_Juno or Hera_ is his wife and therefore queen. She carries a scepter, and her pet bird, the peacock, is often with her.

_Neptune or Poseidon_ is one of the brothers of Jupiter. He rules over the sea. He rides in a chariot drawn by sea-horses and carries in his hand a trident, which looks like a pitchfork with three points. He can make a storm at sea or quiet the waves simply by striking them with his trident.

_Vulcan or Hephæstus_ is the god of fire. He is a lame blacksmith and works at a forge. His forge is said to be in the cave of a mountain, and as smoke and fire come forth from some mountains they are called volcanoes after the god Vulcan inside.

_Apollo_ is the most beautiful of all the gods. He is the god of the sun and of song and music. Every morning--so the Greeks said--he drives his sun-chariot across the sky from the east to the west, and this makes the sun-lighted day.

_Diana or Artemis_ is the twin sister of Apollo. She is the goddess of the moon and of hunting.

_Mars or Ares_ is the terrible god of war, who is only happy when a war is going on--so that he is happy most of the time.

_Mercury or Hermes_ is the messenger of the gods. He has wings on his cap and on his sandals, and he carries in his hand a wonderful winged stick or wand, which, if placed between two people who are quarreling, will immediately make them friends. One day Mercury saw two snakes fighting and he put his wand between them, whereupon they twined around it as if in a loving hug, and ever since the snakes have remained entwined around it. This wand is called a _caduceus_.

_Minerva or Athene_ is the goddess of wisdom. She was born in a very strange way. One day Jupiter had a terrible headache--what we call a “splitting” headache. It got worse and worse, until at last he could stand it no longer, but he took a very strange way to cure it. He called Vulcan, the lame blacksmith, and told him to hit him on the head with his hammer. Though Vulcan must have thought this a funny request, of course he had to obey the father god. So he struck Jupiter a terrible blow on the head, whereupon there sprang forth Minerva in all her armor, and the headache, of which she had been the cause, had gone. So she was born from his brain, that is why she is the goddess of wisdom. Minerva’s Greek name is Athene, and she founded a great city in Greece and named it after herself, Athens. She is supposed to look out for this city as a mother does for her child.

_Venus or Aphrodite_ is the goddess of love and beauty. She is the most beautiful of the goddesses as Apollo is the most beautiful of the gods. She is said to have been born from the sea-foam. Cupid, her son, is a little chubby boy with a quiver of arrows on his back. He goes about shooting his invisible arrows into the hearts of human beings, but instead of dying when they are hit they at once fall in love with some one. That is why we put hearts with arrows through them on valentines.

_Vesta_ is the goddess of the home and fireside, who looks out for the family.

_Ceres or Demeter_ is the goddess of the farmer. These are the twelve gods of the Olympian family.

_Pluto_ is a brother of Jupiter. He rules the world underground and lives down there.

There are many other less important gods and goddesses as well as some gods that are half human, such as the three Fates and three Graces and the nine Muses.

Some of the planets in the sky which look like stars are still called by the names of these Greek gods. Jupiter is the name of the largest planet. Mars is the name of one that is reddish--the color of blood. Venus is the name of one that is very beautiful. There is also a Mercury and a Neptune.

It is hard for us to understand how the Greeks could have prayed to such gods as these, but they did. Their prayers, however, were not like ours. Instead of kneeling and closing their eyes as we do, they stood up and stretched their arms straight out before them. They did not pray to be forgiven for their sins and to be made better. They prayed for victory over their enemies or to be protected from harm.

When they prayed they often made the god an offering of animals, fruit, honey, or wine in order to please him so that he would grant their prayer. The wine they poured out on the ground, thinking the god would like to have them do this. The animals they killed and then burned by building a fire under them on an altar. This was called a sacrifice. Their idea seemed to be that even though the gods could not eat the meat of the animals nor drink the wine themselves, they liked to have something _given up_ for them. And so even to-day we say a person makes a sacrifice when he _gives up_ something for another.

When the Greeks were sacrificing they usually looked for some sign from the god to see whether he was pleased or not with the sacrifice and whether he would answer their prayer and do what they asked him or not. A flock of birds flying overhead, a flash of lightning, or any unusual happening they thought was a sign which meant something. Such signs were called “omens.” Some omens were good and showed that the god would do what he was asked, and some omens were bad and showed he would not. Omens were very much like some of the signs that people believe in even to-day when they say it is a good sign or good luck if you see the new moon over the right shoulder or a bad sign or bad luck if you spill the salt.

Not so very far from Athens is a mountain called Mount Parnassus. On the side of Mount Parnassus was a town called Delphi. In the town of Delphi there was a crack in the ground, from which gas came forth, somewhat as it does from cracks in a volcano. This gas was supposed to be the breath of the god Apollo, and there was a woman priest called a priestess who sat on a three-legged stool or tripod over the crack so as to breathe the gas. She would become delirious, as some people do when they are sick with fever and we say they are “out of their heads,” and when people asked her questions she would mutter strange things and a priest would tell what she meant. This place was called the Delphic Oracle, and people would go long distances to ask the oracle questions, for they thought Apollo was answering them.

The Greeks went to the oracle whenever they wanted to know what to do or what was going to happen, and they firmly believed in what the oracle told them. Usually, however, the answers of the oracle were like a riddle, so that they could be understood in more than one way. For instance, a king who was about to go to war with another king asked the oracle who would win. The oracle replied, “A great kingdom will fall.” What do you suppose the oracle meant? Such an answer, which you can understand in two or three ways, is still called “oracular.”

11

A Fairy-Tale War

The history of countries usually begins--and also ends--with war. The first great happening in the history of Greece was a war. It was called the Trojan War and was supposed to have taken place about twelve hundred years before Christ, or not long after the beginning of the Iron Age. But we are not only not sure of the date; we are not even sure that there ever was such a war, for a great deal of it, we know, is simply fairy-tale. This is the way the tale goes.

Once there was a wedding feast of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus, when suddenly a goddess who had not been invited threw a golden apple on the table. On the apple was written these words:

To the Fairest.

The goddess who had thrown the apple was the goddess of quarreling; and true to her name she _did_ start a quarrel, for each of the goddesses, like vain human beings, thought she was the fairest and should have the apple. At last they called in a shepherd boy named Paris to decide which was the fairest.

Each goddess offered Paris a present if he would choose her. Juno, the queen of the gods, offered to make him a king; Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, offered to make him wise; but Venus, the goddess of beauty, offered to give him the most beautiful girl in the world for his wife.

Now, Paris was not really a shepherd boy but the son of Priam, the king of Troy, which was a city on the sea-shore opposite Greece. Paris when a baby had been left on a mountain to die, but had been found by a shepherd and brought up by him as his own child.

Paris didn’t care about being wise; he didn’t care about being king; what he did want was to have the most beautiful girl in the world for his wife, and so he gave the apple to Venus.

Now the most beautiful girl in the world was named Helen, and she was already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. But in spite of that fact Venus told Paris to go to Sparta in Greece, where he would find Helen, and then run away with her. So Paris went to Sparta to visit King Menelaus and was royally entertained by him. And then Paris, although he had been treated so kindly and been trusted, one night stole Helen away and carried her off across the sea to Troy. Though this was in the Iron Age, it was the way a Cave Man of the Stone Age might have acted.

Menelaus and the Greeks were naturally very angry and immediately prepared for war and sailed off for Troy to get Helen back. Now, in ancient times all cities had walls built around them to protect them from the enemy. As there were no cannons nor guns nor deadly weapons such as are used in war nowadays, it was very hard to get into a walled city or capture it. Troy was protected in this way with walls; and though the Greeks tried for ten years to capture it, at the end of the ten years Troy was still unconquered.

So at last the Greeks decided to try a trick to get into the city. They built a huge horse of wood, and inside this wooden horse they put soldiers. They placed the horse in front of the city walls and then sailed away as if at last they were giving up the war. The Trojans were told by a spy that the horse was a gift of the gods and that they ought to take it into the city. A Trojan priest named La-oc-o-on, however, told his people not to have anything to do with the horse, for he suspected a trick. But people seldom take advice when told _not_ to do what they want to do.

Just then some huge snakes came out of the sea and attacked Laocoon and his two sons and, twining round them, strangled them to death. The Trojans thought this was a sign from the gods, or an omen as they would have said, that they should not believe Laocoon; so they determined to take the horse into the city against his advice. The horse was so big, however, that it would not go through the gates, and in order to get it inside of the walls they had to tear down part of the wall itself. When night fell, the Greek soldiers came out of the horse and opened the gates of the city. The other Greeks, who had been waiting just out of sight, returned and entered through the gates and the hole the Trojans had made in the wall. Troy was easily conquered then, and the city was burned to the ground, and Helen’s husband carried her back to Greece. For reason of this horse trick, we still have a saying, “Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts,” which is as much as to say, “Look out for an enemy who makes you a present.”

The story of the Trojan War was told in two long poems. Some people think they are the finest poems that were ever written. One of these poems is called the “Iliad,” from the name of the city of Troy, which was also known as Ilium. The “Iliad” describes the Trojan War itself. The other poem is called the “Odyssey” and describes the adventures of one of the Greek heroes on his way home after the war was over. This Greek hero’s name was Odysseus, which gives the name Odyssey to the book, but he was also called Ulysses. These poems, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” were composed by a blind Greek poet named Homer, who is supposed to have lived about two hundred years after the war; that is about 1000 B.C.

Homer was a bard; that is, a singing poet who went about from place to place and sang his poems to the people. Usually a bard played on the lyre as he sang, and the people gave him something to eat or a place to sleep to pay him for his songs. Nowadays, instead of a Homer singing the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” we have the organ-grinder and street piano playing their tunes in front of our houses.

Homer never wrote down his poems, for he was blind; but the people were very fond of hearing his songs, and they learned them by heart, and mothers taught them to their children after Homer had died. At last, many years later, another man wrote the poems down in Greek, and you may some day read them in Greek, if you study that language, or at least in an English translation.

Although the Greeks thought so much of Homer, he could hardly make a living, and he almost had to beg his daily bread. After his death however, the people of nine different cities each proudly said that Homer was born in their city. And so some one has made this rime:

Nine cities claimed blind Homer dead,
Through which, alive, he’d begged his bread.

Some people now doubt that there ever was a poet named Homer. Others think that instead of only one man there must have been several men, perhaps nine, who composed these poems, and this might explain how he could be born in nine different cities.

12

The Kings of the Jews

While the blind beggar Homer was singing his wonderful songs through the streets of Greece, a great king of the Jews was singing other wonderful songs in Canaan. This king was named David, and he wasn’t born a king. He was only a shepherd boy in King Saul’s army. This is the way he happened to become king.

At first, as you remember, the Jews had no kings; but they had asked for kings, and at last they were given one by the name of Saul.

David had killed the giant Goliath. We all love this Bible story because we are always glad when the skilful little chap beats the great, big, bragging bully.

Well, King Saul had a daughter, and she fell in love with this brave and athletic young David the Giant-Killer, and at last they were married.

So after Saul died David became king, and he was the greatest king the Jews ever had. Although Saul had been king he had lived in a tent, not in a palace, and he didn’t even have a capital city.

So David conquered a city in Canaan called Jerusalem and made this city the capital of the Jews.

But David was not only a brave warrior and a great king; he wrote beautiful songs as well.

The blind beggar Homer sang of his fairy-tale gods. The great King David sang of his one God.

These songs are the Psalms, which you hear read and sung in church.

Nowadays even a popular song is popular for only a few months, but the songs which David wrote almost three thousand years ago are still popular to-day! The Twenty-third Psalm, which starts, “The Lord is my shepherd,” is one of the most beautiful and a good one to learn by heart. David likens himself to a sheep and his Lord to a good shepherd who tenderly looks out for the comfort and safety of his sheep.

David’s son was named Solomon, and when David died Solomon became king.

If a good fairy had asked you what you would rather have than anything in the world, I wonder what you would have chosen. When Solomon became king, God is said to have appeared to him in a dream and asked him what he would rather have than anything else in the world. Instead of saying he wanted to be made rich or powerful, Solomon asked to be made wise, and God said He would make him the wisest man that ever lived. Here is a story that shows how wise he was.

Once upon a time two women came to Solomon with a baby, and each woman said the baby was her own child. Solomon called for a sword and said, “Cut the baby in two, and give each a half.” One of the women cried out to give the baby to the other rather than do this, and Solomon then knew who was the real mother and ordered the baby to be given to her.

Solomon built a magnificent temple made of cedar-wood from the famous forest of Lebanon, and of marble and gold and studded with jewels. Then he built himself a wonderful palace, which was so gorgeous and splendid that people came from all over the world to see it. The Bible tells us just how large this temple and palace were, not in feet but in cubits. A cubit was the distance from a man’s elbow to the end of his middle finger, which is about one foot and a half.

The queen of Sheba, among others, came a long distance across Arabia to hear the wise sayings of Solomon and see his palace and the temple he had built.

Although the palace and temple were considered extraordinarily magnificent at that time, you must remember that this was a thousand years before Christ.

Solomon’s temple and palace have disappeared long since, and there is left of them neither stick nor stone. But his wise sayings are preserved in every language and read by every people in every part of the world. There are thousands of buildings now in the world that would make his palace, if still standing, look like a child’s toy-house. But no one has ever been able to say any better the things he said. Do you think you could? Suppose you try. Here are some of them. They are called proverbs.

A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger.

What’s that mean?

A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches and loving favor rather than silver and gold.

What’s that mean?

Let another man praise thee and not thine own mouth.

What’s that mean?

Solomon was the last great king the Jews ever had. After he died the Jewish nation gradually broke up and went to pieces, and the great Jewish people are to-day without a king, without a capital, and without a country of their own, but are found in every other country of the world.

13

The People Who Made Our A B C’s

Long before people knew how to write, there lived a carpenter named Cadmus. One day he was at work on a house when he wanted a tool that he had left at home. Picking up a chip of wood, he wrote something on it and, handing it to his slave, told him to go to his home and give the chip to his wife, saying that it would tell her what he wanted. The slave, wondering, did as he was told. Cadmus’s wife looked at the chip, and without a word handed the tool to the amazed slave, who thought the chip in some mysterious way had spoken the message. When he returned to Cadmus with the tool, he begged for the remarkable chip, and when it was given him, hung it around his neck for a charm.

This is the story the Greeks told of the man they say invented the alphabet. We believe, however, that Cadmus was a mythical person, for the Greeks liked to make up such stories, and we think no _one_ man made the alphabet. But Cadmus was a Phenician and we do know that the Phenician people invented the alphabet. You probably call it your A B C’s, but the Greeks had much harder names for the letters. They called _A_ “alpha,” _B_ “beta,” and so on. So the Greek boy spoke of learning his “alpha beta,” and that is why we call it the “alphabet.”

You may never have heard of Phenicia or the Phenician people. Yet, if there had been no such country as Phenicia, you might now be learning at school to read and write in hieroglyphics or in cuneiform.

Up to this time, you know, people had very clumsy ways of writing. The Egyptians had to draw pictures, and the Babylonians made writing like chicken-tracks. The alphabet that the Phenicians invented had twenty-two letters, and from it we get the alphabet we use to-day.

Of course, we do not use just the same alphabet now that the Phenicians did, but some of the letters are almost, if not quite, like those we now have after three thousand years. For instance the

Phenician A was written on its side--(sideways A)
E “ “ backward--Ǝ
Z “ “ just the same--Z
O “ “ “ “ “ --O

The Phenicians lived next door to the Jews; in fact they belonged to the same family--the Semites. Their country was just north of the kingdom of the Jews; that is, above it on the map and lying along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Phenicians had a great king named Hiram who lived at the same time as Solomon. In fact, Hiram was a friend of Solomon and sent him some of his best workmen to help build a temple at Jerusalem. And yet Hiram himself and the Phenicians did not believe in the Jewish God.

The Phenicians worshiped idols, terrible monsters named Baal and Moloch, which they called gods of the sun. They also believed in a goddess of the moon named Astarte and made sacrifices of live children to her idol, Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum; this is a real story and not a fairy-tale. Just suppose you had been a child then!

The Jews, as we have learned, were very religious, but their neighbors, the Phenicians, though Semites and therefore relatives, were business people and thought of nothing but money, money, money--all the time. And they were not particular how they earned it, whether honestly or not. Nowadays, dealers know that they must be honest if they are to be very successful, but the Phenicians were usually tricky in their trading with people. They always drove a good bargain and sometimes even cheated when they had a chance.

The Phenicians made many things to sell, and then they went far and near to sell them.

They knew how to make beautiful cloth and glassware and objects in gold and silver and ivory.

They knew the secret of making a wonderful purple dye from the body of a little shell-fish that lived in the water near the city of Tyre. This dye was known as Tyrian purple from the name of that city, and it was so beautiful that kings’ robes were colored with it.

Tyre and Sidon were the two chief cities of Phenicia, and once upon a time they were two of the busiest cities in the world.

In order to find people to sell to, the Phenicians traveled in boats all over the Mediterranean Sea and even went outside this sea into the Great Ocean. This opening is now called the Strait of Gibraltar but was then known as the Pillars of Hercules. They went as far as the British Isles. Other people in those days had not dared to go so far in boats; they thought they would come to the edge of the ocean and tumble off. But the Phenicians had no such fear, and so they were the greatest sailors as well as the greatest traders of their times. Their ships were built from the cedar-trees that grew on the slopes of their hills, which were called Lebanon.

Wherever the Phenicians found good harbors for their boats, they started little towns where they traded with the natives, who at that time were almost savage. With ignorant savages they found they could drive a good bargain. For a few glass beads or a piece of purple dyed cloth worth very little they could get in return gold and silver and other things worth a great deal. On the African coast, one of these towns they started was called Carthage. Of Carthage we shall hear more by and by, for it grew to be so wealthy and important that--but wait until I come to that story.

14

Hard as Nails

Our story goes back again to Greece, the land of Homer and the fairy-tale gods and to Sparta, where Helen once lived.

About nine hundred years before Christ was born, there lived in Sparta a man named Lycurgus. That is a hard name, and when you hear about this man you may think he was hard, too. Lycurgus wanted his city to be the greatest in the world.

But first he had to find out what it was that made a city and a people great.

So he started off and traveled for years and years visiting all the chief countries of the world to see if he could learn what it was that made them great. And this is what he learned.

Wherever the people thought chiefly of fun and pleasure, of amusing themselves and having a good time--he found they were not much good, not much account--_not_ great.

Wherever the people thought chiefly of hard work and did what they ought, whether it was pleasant or not, he found they were usually good for something--some account--great.

So Lycurgus came back to his home Sparta and set to work to make a set of rules which he thought would make his people greater than all other people in the world. These rules were called a Code of Laws, and I think you’ll agree they were very hard, and they made the Spartans hard, too--as “hard as nails.” We shall see whether they made the Spartans really great, also.

To begin with, babies, as soon as they were born, were examined to see that they were strong and perfect. Whenever one was found that did not seem to be so, he was put out on the mountain-side and left to die. Lycurgus wanted no weaklings in Sparta.

When boys were seven years old, they were taken from their mothers and put in a school, which was more like a soldiers’ camp than a school, and they never lived anywhere else until they were sixty years old.

In this school they were not taught the things you are, but only the things that trained them to be good soldiers.

There were no such things as school-books then.

There were no spelling-books.

There were no arithmetics.

There were no geographies. No one knew enough about the world to write a geography.

There were no histories. No one knew much about things that had happened in the world before that time, and of course none of the history since then that you now study had taken place.

At certain times, the Spartan boy was whipped, not because he had done anything wrong, but just to teach him to suffer pain without whimpering. He would have been disgraced forever if he had cried, no matter how badly he was hurt.

He was exercised and drilled and worked until he was ready to drop. But still he was obliged to keep on, no matter how tired or hungry or sleepy or aching he might be, and he must never show by any sign how he felt.

He was made to eat the worst kind of food, to go hungry and thirsty for long periods of time, to go out in the bitter cold with little or no clothing, just to get used to such hardships and able to bear all sorts of discomforts. This kind of training, this kind of hardening, is therefore called “Spartan discipline.” How do you think you would have liked it?

The Spartans’ food, clothing, and lodging were all furnished them, though it was very poor food and poor clothing and poor lodging. They were not allowed good things to eat, soft beds to lie on, or fine clothing to wear. Such things were called luxuries, and luxuries, Lycurgus thought, would make people soft and weak, and he wanted his people hard and strong.

The Spartans were even taught to speak in a short and blunt manner; they were taught not to waste words; they must say what they had to say in as few words as possible. This manner of speaking we call “Laconic” from the name Laconia, the state in which Sparta was located.

Once a king wrote to the Spartans a threatening letter, saying that they had better do what he told them to, for _if_ he came and took their country, he would destroy their city and make them slaves.

The Spartans sent a messenger back with their answer, and when the letter was opened, it contained only one word:

“_IF!_”

Even to-day, we call such an answer, short but to the point, a Laconic answer.

Did all this hard training and hard work make the Spartans the greatest people in the world?

Lycurgus did make the Spartans the strongest and best fighters in the world--but--

The Spartans conquered all the peoples around about them, though there were ten times as many--but--

They made these people their slaves, who did all their farming and other work--but--

We shall see later whether Lycurgus’s idea was right.

North of Sparta was another great city of Greece called Athens. There were, of course, many other towns in Greece, but Sparta and Athens were the most important. In Athens the people lived and thought quite differently from those in Sparta.

The Athenians were just as fond of everything beautiful as the Spartans were of discipline and of everything military.

The Athenians loved athletic games of all sorts just as the Spartans did, but they also loved music and poetry and beautiful statues, paintings, vases, buildings, and such things that are known as the “arts.”

The Athenians believed in training the mind _as well_ as the body. The Spartans believed the training of the body was the all-important thing. Which do you like better, the Athenians’ idea or the Spartans’ idea?

Once at a big game a very old man was looking for a seat on the Athenians’ side. There was no seat empty, and no Athenian offered to give him one. Whereupon the Spartans called to the old man and gave him the best seat on their side. The Athenians cheered the Spartans to show how fine they thought this act. At this the Spartans said:

“The Athenians _know_ what is right but they don’t _do_ it.”

15

The Crown of Leaves

Greek boys and young men and even girls loved all sorts of outdoor sports.

They didn’t play football or baseball or basketball, but they ran and jumped and wrestled and boxed and threw the discus--a thing like a big, heavy dinner-plate of iron.

From time to time matches were held in different parts of Greece to see who was the best in these sports.

The Big Meet, however, took place only once every four years at a place called Olympia in southern Greece; and these Olympic games, as they were called, were the most important affairs held in Greece, for all the winners from different parts of the country were here matched against each other to see who should be the champion of all Greece.

The time when the games were held was a great national holiday, for the games were in honor of the head god Jupiter, or Zeus as the Greeks called him. People came from all over the known world to see the games much as they do now when a World’s Fair is held or a big football game.