A Short History of Ancient Peoples. By Robinson Souttar. (Hodder
and Stoughton. 12s.)—In the second edition of Dr. Robinson Souttar's useful compendium of ancient history atten- tion is rightly drawn to the extraordinary widening of our knowledge of the remote past which has been produced by the excavations of the last few years. It is not very long since recorded history was supposed to begin with the so-called "classics" of Greece and Rome, and no one recognised that civilisation had really existed ages before Plato, or even Homer, as there were brave men before Agamemnon, whose memory perished for want of an historian. "Beyond the limits of Greek classical history and the Old Testament records all was darkness and fable." Now all that is changed: the archaeologist has penetrated into the darkness of the past and revealed new worlds as startling as that which was reached by Columbus. We may quote a passage from the eloquent introduction which has been written by Professor Sayce, in which the moral of this change is well pointed :—
" The East is yielding up its dead, and we are beginning to learn that the ancient Oriental world was, after all, not so very unlike our own. We know now that Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria enjoyed a culture and civilisation of high order long centuries before Herodotus or even Homer, and that the elements of Greek culture itself were derived from the East. We can never return to the old complacent belief that Europe was the primal home and cradle of cultivated man, or that between the ancient Oriental world and the world of European thought and literature lies a deep and impassable gulf. If modern Oriental research has taught us nothing else, it has at least taught us that literary culture is immensely old in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. It has shown that the civilisation and culture of to-day are not the first the world has seen ; that in the days of Moses education and literary activity were as fully de- veloped as they were in the days of our immediate forefathers, and that in still earlier ages books were read and written, the law
was codified, libraries established, and the Arts and SCiett008 studied and known. The lesson our vanity has received at the hands of astronomy and geology has thus been enforced by Oriental archaeology : as man and his earth are not the centre of the lJniversa, for whom alone the orbs of heaven were made, and the animals and plants created, so, too, we of the nineteenth century are not the first and exclusive possessors of culture and science. The more we know of the civilisations of the past, the more are they seen to resemble our own ; whatever progress there may have been in certain branches of knowledge, and, above all, in their material application, in the general elements of culture, in the arts of life and the organisation of society we have made but little advance upon the educated classes of ancient Egypt or Babylonia."
Dr. Souttar's main intention has been to bring this revised history of mankind home to the popular imagination, and we welcome this new edition of his useful work, in which the latest discoveries of the spade in Crete and Egypt and elsewhere are made accessible.
HERALDS OF REVOLT.
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