* Cf. p. 193 below.

† The contributions of the Orient to our cultural heritage are summed up in the concluding pages of this volume.

* Carter, T. F., The Invention of Printing in China, and Its Spread Westward; New York, 1925, p. xviii.

* The reader will find, at the end of this volume, a glossary defining foreign terms, a bibliography with guidance for further reading, a pronouncing index, and a body of references corresponding to the superior figures in the text.

* The word civilization (Latin civilis—pertaining to the civis, citizen) is comparatively young. Despite Boswell’s suggestion Johnson refused to admit it to his Dictionary in 1772; he preferred to use the word civility.²

* Blood, as distinct from race, may affect a civilization in the sense that a nation may be retarded or advanced by breeding from the biologically (not racially) worse or better strains among the people.

* Despite recent high example to the contrary,¹ the word civilization will be used in this volume to mean social organization, moral order, and cultural activity; while culture will mean, according to the context, either the practice of manners and the arts, or the sum-total of a people’s institutions, customs and arts. It is in the latter sense that the word culture will be used in reference to primitive or prehistoric societies.

* Note the ultimate identity of the words provision, providence and prudence.

* Reduced type, unindented, will be used occasionally for technical or dispensable matter.

* The American Indians, content with this device, never used the wheel.

* Perhaps one reason why communism tends to appear chiefly at the beginning of civilizations is that it flourishes most readily in times of dearth, when the common danger of starvation fuses the individual into the group. When abundance comes, and the danger subsides, social cohesion is lessened, and individualism increases; communism ends where luxury begins. As the life of a society becomes more complex, and the division of labor differentiates men into diverse occupations and trades, it becomes more and more unlikely that all these services will be equally valuable to the group; inevitably those whose greater ability enables them to perform the more vital functions will take more than their equal share of the rising wealth of the group. Every growing civilization is a scene of multiplying inequalities; the natural differences of human endowment unite with differences of opportunity to produce artificial differences of wealth and power; and where no laws or despots suppress these artificial inequalities they reach at last a bursting point where the poor have nothing to lose by violence, and the chaos of revolution levels men again into a community of destitution.

Hence the dream of communism lurks in every modern society as a racial memory of a simpler and more equal life; and where inequality or insecurity rises beyond sufferance, men welcome a return to a condition which they idealize by recalling its equality and forgetting its poverty. Periodically the land gets itself redistributed, legally or not, whether by the Gracchi in Rome, the Jacobins in France, or the Communists in Russia; periodically wealth is redistributed, whether by the violent confiscation of property, or by confiscatory taxation of incomes and bequests. Then the race for wealth, goods and power begins again, and the pyramid of ability takes form once more; under whatever laws may be enacted the abler man manages somehow to get the richer soil, the better place, the lion’s share; soon he is strong enough to dominate the state and rewrite or interpret the laws; and in time the inequality is as great as before. In this aspect all economic history is the slow heart-beat of the social-organism, a vast systole and diastole of naturally concentrating wealth and naturally explosive revolution.

* So in our time that Mississippi of inventions which we call the Industrial Revolution has enormously intensified the natural inequality of men.

* It is a law that holds only for early societies, since under more complex conditions a variety of other factors—greater wealth, better weapons, higher intelligence—contribute to determine the issue. So Egypt was conquered not only by Hyksos, Ethiopian, Arab and Turkish nomads, but also by the settled civilizations of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and England—though not until these nations had become hunters and nomads on an imperialistic scale.

* Note how this word betrays the origin of the state.

* A phrase apparently invented by Cicero.

* Perhaps an exception should be made in the case of the Brahmans, who, by the Code of Manu (VIII, 336-8), were called upon to bear greater punishments for the same crime than members of lower castes; but this regulation was well honored in the breach.

† Some of our most modern cities are trying to revive this ancient time-saving institution.

* Cf. below, p. 245.

* Briffault thinks that marriage by capture was a transition from matrilocal to patriarchal marriage: the male, refusing to go and live with the tribe or family of his wife, forced her to come to his.²⁶ Lippert believed that exogamy arose as a peaceable substitute for capture;^26a theft again graduated into trade.

* This is half the theme of Synge’s drama, The Playboy of the Western World.

* However, the range within which the moral code is applied has narrowed since the Middle Ages, as the result of the rise of nationalism.

* Cf. Chap, XII, § vi below.

* Freud, with characteristic imaginativeness, believes that the totem was a transfigured symbol of the father, revered and hated for his omnipotence, and rebelliously murdered and eaten by his sons.¹¹⁷ Durkheim thought that the totem was a symbol of the clan, revered and hated (hence held “sacred” and “unclean”) by the individual for its omnipotence and irksome dictatorship; and that the religious attitude was originally the feeling of the individual toward the authoritarian group.¹¹⁸

* Relics of ancestor-worship may be found among ourselves in our care and visitation of graves, and our masses and prayers for the dead.

* From the Portuguese feitico, fabricated or factitious.

* Cf. the contemporary causation of birth control by urban industrialism, and the gradual acceptance of such control by the Church.

* Such onomatopoeia still remains a refuge in linguistic emergencies. The Englishman eating his first meal in China, and wishing to know the character of the meat he was eating, inquired, with Anglo-Saxon dignity and reserve, “Quack, quack?” To which the Chinaman, shaking his head, answered cheerfully, “Bow-wow.”⁴

† E.g., divine is from Latin divus, which is from deus, Greek theos, Sanskrit deva, meaning god; in the Gypsy tongue the word for god, by a strange prank, becomes devel. Historically goes back to the Sanskrit root vid, to know; Greek oida, Latin video (see), French voir (see), German wissen (know), English to wit; plus the suffixes tor (as in author, praetor, rhetor), ic, al, and ly (═ like). Again, the Sanskrit root ar, to plough, gives the Latin arare, Russian orati, English to ear the land, arable, art, oar, and perhaps the word Aryan—the ploughers.⁶

* Extract from an advertisement in the Town Hall (New York) program of March 5, 1934: “Horoscopes, by,—————————Astrologer to New York’s most distinguished social and professional clientele. Ten dollars an hour.”

* This word will be used as applying to all ages before historical records.

* Current geological theory places the First Ice Age about 500,000 B.C.; the First Interglacial Stage about 475,000 to 400,000 B.C.; the Second Ice Age about 400,000 B.C.; the Second Interglacial Stage about 375,000 to 175,000 B.C; the Third Ice Age about 175,000 B.C.; the Third Interglacial Stage about 150,000 to 50,000 B.C; the Fourth (and latest) Ice Age about 50,000 to 25,000 B.C² We are now in the Postglacial Stage, whose date of termination has not been accurately calculated. These and other details have been arranged more visibly in the table at the head of this chapter.

* An oasis west of the Middle Nile.

* Combarelles, Les Eyzies, Font de Gaume, etc.

* Remains of similar lake dwellings have been found in France, Italy, Scotland, Russia, North America, India, and elsewhere. Such villages still exist in Borneo, Sumatra, New Guinea, etc.²⁶ Venezuela owes its name (Little Venice) to the fact that when Alonso de Ojeda discovered it for Europe (1499) he found the natives living in pile-dwellings on Lake Maracaibo.²⁷

* If we accept “Peking Man” as early Pleistocene.

* A submarine plateau, from 2000 to 3000 metres below the surface, runs north and south through the mid-Atlantic, surrounded on both sides by “deeps” of 5000 to 6000 metres.

* Professor Breasted believes that the antiquity of this culture, and that of Anau, has been exaggerated by De Morgan, Pumpelly and other students.²

* The unearthing of this forgotten culture is one of the romances of archeology. To those whom, with a poor sense of the amplitude of time, we call “the ancients”—that is, to the Romans, the Greeks and the Jews—Sumeria was unknown. Herodotus apparently never heard of it; if he did, he ignored it, as something more ancient to him than he to us. Berosus, a Babylonian historian writing about 250 B.C., knew of Sumeria only through the veil of a legend. He described a race of monsters, led by one Oannes, coming out of the Persian Gulf, and introducing the arts of agriculture, metal-working, and writing; “all the things that make for the amelioration of life,” he declares, “were bequeathed to men by Oannes, and since that time no further inventions have been made.”⁶ Not till two thousand years after Berosus was Sumeria rediscovered. In 1850 Hincks recognized that cuneiform writing—made by pressing a wedge-pointed stylus upon soft clay, and used in the Semitic languages of the Near East—had been borrowed from an earlier people with a largely non-Semitic speech; and Oppert gave to this hypothetical people the name “Sumerian.”⁷ About the same time Rawlinson and his aides found, among Babylonian ruins, tablets containing vocabularies of this ancient tongue, with interlinear translations, in modern college style, from the older language into Babylonian.⁸ In 1854 two Englishmen uncovered the sites of Ur, Eridu and Uruk; at the end of the nineteenth century French explorers revealed the remains of Lagash, including tablets recording the history of the Sumerian kings; and in our own time Professor Woolley of the University of Pennsylvania, and many others, have exhumed the primeval city of Ur, where the Sumerians appear to have reached civilization by 4500 B.C. So the students of many nations have worked together on this chapter of that endless mystery story in which the detectives are archeologists and the prey is historic truth. Nevertheless, there has been as yet only a beginning of research in Sumeria; there is no telling what vistas of civilization and history will be opened up when the ground has been worked, and the material studied, as men have worked and studied in Egypt during the last one hundred years.

* Cf. above, p. 104.

* Such ziggurats have helped American architects to mould a new form for buildings forced by law to set back their upper stories lest they impede their neighbor’s light. History suddenly contracts into a brief coup d’œil when we contemplate in one glance the brick ziggurats of Sumeria 5000 years old, and the brick ziggurats of contemporary New York.

* The original is in the Iraq Museum at Baghdad.

* A great scholar, Elliot Smith, has tried to offset these considerations by pointing out that although barley, millet and wheat are not known in their natural state in Egypt, it is there that we find the oldest signs of their cultivation; and he believes that it was from Egypt that agriculture and civilization came to Sumeria.⁸² The greatest of American Egyptologists, Professor Breasted, is similarly unconvinced of the priority of Sumeria. Dr. Breasted believes that the wheel is at least as old in Egypt as in Sumeria, and rejects the hypothesis of Schweinfurth on the ground that cereals have been found in their native state in the highlands of Abyssinia.

* All dates are B.C., and are approximate before 663 B.C. In the case of rulers the dates are of their reigns, not of their lives.

* Even the ancient geographers (e.g., Strabo¹) believed that Egypt had once been under the waters of the Mediterranean, and that its deserts had been the bottom of the sea.

* Plural form of the Arabic fellah, peasant; from felaha, to plough.

* Diodorus Siculus, who must always be read sceptically, writes: “An inscription on the larger pyramid . . . sets forth that on vegetables and purgatives for the workmen there were paid out over 1600 talents”—i.e., $16,000,000.⁵

* A model of this can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

* On October 3, 1899, eleven columns at Karnak, loosened by the water, fell to the ground.

* Now in the British Museum.

† The Swedish diplomat Akerblad in 1802, and the versatile English physicist Thomas Young in 1814, had helped by partly deciphering the Rosetta Stone.¹²

* So called by the Greeks from their word for law (nomos).

* The “Cheops” of Herodotus, r. 3098-75 B.C.

* The “Chephren” of Herodotus, r. 3067-11 B.C.

† The word pyramid is apparently derived from the Egyptian word pi-re-mus, altitude, rather than from the Greek pyr, fire.

* A silicate of sodium and aluminum: Na₂Al₂Si₃O₁₀2H₂O.

† The “Mycerinus” of Herodotus, r. 3011-2988 B.C.

‡ Cf. the statues of Menkaure and his consort in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

* Historians have helped themselves by further grouping the dynasties into periods: (1) The Old Kingdom, Dynasties I-VI (3500-2631 B.C.), followed by an interlude of chaos; (2) The Middle Kingdom, Dynasties XI-XIV (2375-1800 B.C.), followed by another chaotic interlude; (3) The Empire, Dynasties XVIII-XX (1580-1100 B.C.), followed by a period of divided rule from rival capitals; and (4) The Saïte Age, Dynasty XXVI, 663-525. All these dates except the last are approximate, and Egyptologists amuse themselves by moving the earlier ones up and down by centuries.

* Allenby took twice as long to accomplish a similar result; Napoleon, attempting it at Acre, failed.

* The population of Egypt in the fourth century before Christ is estimated at some 7,000,000 souls.⁴⁸

* “If any artisan,” adds Diodorus, “takes part in public affairs he is severely beaten.”⁶⁵

† This word, when used in reference to rulers, must always be understood as a euphemism.

* Sir Charles Marston believes, from his recent researches in Palestine, that the alphabet was a Semitic invention, and credits it, on highly imaginative grounds, to Abraham himself.”^141a

* A later group of funerary inscriptions, written in ink upon the inner sides of the wooden coffins used to inter certain nobles and magnates of the Middle Kingdom, have been gathered together by Breasted and others under the name of “Coffin Texts.”¹⁴⁴

* So we are assured by Iamblichus (ca. 300 A.D.). Manetho, the Egyptian historian (ca. 300 B.C.), would have considered this estimate unjust to the god; the proper number of Thoth’s works, in his reckoning, was 36,000. The Greeks celebrated Thoth under the name of Hermes Trismegistus—Hermes (Mercury) the Thrice-Great.¹⁶²

* The clepsydra, or water-clock, was so old with the Egyptians that they attributed its invention to their handy god-of-all-trades, Thoth. The oldest clock in existence dates from Thutmose III, and is now in the Berlin Museum. It consists of a bar of wood, divided into six parts or hours, upon which a crosspiece was so placed that its shadow on the bar would indicate the time of the morning or the afternoon.¹⁷³

† Since the heliacal rising of Sirius occurred one day later, every four years, than the Egyptian calendar demanded, the error amounted to 365 days in 1460 years; on the completion of this “Sothic cycle” (as the Egyptians called it) the paper calendar and the celestial calendar again agreed. Since we know from the Latin author Censorius that the heliacal rising of Sirius coincided in 139 A.D. with the beginning of the Egyptian calendar year, we may presume that a similar coincidence occurred every 1460 years previously—i.e., in 1321 B.C., 2781 B.C., 4241 B.C., etc. And since the Egyptian calendar was apparently established in a year when the heliacal rising of Sirius took place on the first day of the first month, we conclude that that calendar came into operation in a year that opened a Sothic cycle. The earliest mention of the Egyptian calendar is in the religious texts inscribed in the pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty. Since this dynasty is unquestionably earlier than 1321 B.C., the calendar must have been established in 2781 B.C., or 4241 B.C., or still earlier. The older date, once acclaimed as the first definite date in history, has been disputed by Professor Scharff, and it is possible that we shall have to accept 2781 B.C. as the approximate birth-year of the Egyptian calendar. This would require a foreshortening, by three or four hundred years, of the dates assigned above for the early dynasties and the great Pyramids. As the matter is very much in dispute, the chronology of the Cambridge Ancient History has been adopted in these pages.

* Excavations reveal arrangements for the collection of rain-water and the disposal of sewage by a system of copper pipes.¹⁸⁴

† Even the earliest tombs give evidence of this practice.¹⁸⁶

‡ So old is the modern saw that we live on one-fourth of what we eat, and the doctors live on the rest.

* For the architecture of the Old Kingdom cf. sections I, 1 and 3 of this chapter.

* A clerestory is that portion of a building which, being above the roof of the surrounding parts, admits light to the edifice by a series of openings. An architrave is the lowest part of an entablature—which is a superstructure supported by a colonnade.

* Cf. p. 161 above. Other scribes adorn the Cairo Museum, and the State Museum at Berlin.

* There are important exceptions to this—e.g., the Sheik-el-Beled and the Scribe; obviously the convention was not due to incapacity or ignorance.

* One is reminded here of the remark of an Egyptian statesman, after visiting the galleries of Europe: “Que vous avez volé mon pays!—How you have raped my country!”¹⁹⁸

* Though the word sculpture includes all carved forms, we shall use it as meaning especially sculpture in the round; and shall segregate under the term bas-relief the partial carving of forms upon a background.

* A cast of this relief may be seen in the Twelfth Egyptian Room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York.

† Painting in which the pigments are mixed or tempered with egg-yolk, size (diluted glue), or egg-white.

* The lute was made by stretching a few strings along a narrow sounding-board; the sistrum was a group of small discs shaken on wires.

† Senmut was so honored by his sovereigns that he said of himself: “I was the greatest of the great in the whole land.”²²⁰ This is an opinion very commonly held, but not always so clearly expressed.

* “Civil war,” says Ipuwer, “pays no revenues.”²²⁹

* The curious reader will find again a similar custom in India; cf. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Oxford, 1928, p. 595.

* A modern title given by Lepsius to some two thousand papyrus rolls found in various tombs, and distinguished by containing formulas to guide the dead. The Egyptian title is Coming Forth (from death) by Day. They date from the Pyramids, but some are even older. The Egyptians believed that these texts had been composed by the god of wisdom, Thoth; chapter lxiv announced that the book had been found at Heliopolis, and was “in the very handwriting of the god.”²⁵⁰ Josiah made a similar discovery among the Jews; cf. Chap, XII, § v below.

* Under Amenhotep III the architects Suti and Hor had inscribed a monotheistic hymn to the sun upon a stele now in the British Museum.²⁶¹ It had long been the custom in Egypt to address the sun-god, Amon-Ra, as the greatest god,²⁶² but only as the god of Egypt.

* The obvious similarity of this hymn to Psalm CIV leaves little doubt of Egyptian influence upon the Hebrew poet.²⁶⁴

* In 1893 Sir William Flinders Petrie discovered at Tell-el-Amarna over three hundred and fifty cuneiform letter-tablets, most of which were appeals for aid addressed to Ikhnaton by the East.

* The history of classical Egyptian civilization under the Ptolemies and the Caesars belongs to a later volume.

* Thebes was finally destroyed by an earthquake in 27 B.C.

* The Euphrates is one of the four rivers which, according to Genesis (ii, 14), flowed through Paradise.

† It is now in the Louvre.

* The “Mosaic Code” apparently borrows from it, or derives with it from a common original. The habit of stamping a legal contract with an official seal goes back to Hammurabi.⁷

* “In all essentials Babylonia, in the time of Hammurabi, and even earlier, had reached a pitch of material civilization which has never since been surpassed in Asia.”—Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture, New York, 1933, p. 107. Perhaps we should except the ages of Xerxes I in Persia, Ming Huang in China, and Akbar in India.

* The Amarna letters are dreary reading, full of adulation, argument, entreaty and complaint. Hear, e.g., Burraburiash II, King of Karduniash (in Mesopotamia), writing to Amenhotep III about an exchange of royal gifts in which Burraburiash seems to have been worsted: “Ever since my mother and thy father sustained friendly relations with one another, they exchanged valuable presents; and the choicest desire, each of the other, they did not refuse. Now my brother (Amenhotep) has sent me as a present (only) two manehs of gold. But send me as much gold as thy father; and if it be less, let it be half of what thy father would send. Why didst thou send me only two manehs of gold?”¹²

† Marduk-shapik-zeri, Ninurta-nadin-sham, Enlil-nadin-apli, Itti-Marduk-balatu, Marduk-shapik-zer-mati, etc. Doubtless our own full names, linked with such hyphens, would make a like cacophony to alien ears.

* Probably this included not only the city proper but a large agricultural hinterland within the walls, designed to provide the teeming metropolis with sustenance in time of siege.

† If we may trust Diodorus Siculus, a tunnel fifteen feet wide and twelve feet high connected the two banks.²⁰

* Babel, however, does not mean confusion or babble, as the legend supposes; as used in the word Babylon it meant the Gate of God.²³

† A reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate can be seen in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin.

* The Babylonian story of creation consists of seven tablets (one for each day of creation) found in the ruins of Ashurbanipal’s library at Kuyunjik (Nineveh) in 1854; they are a copy of a legend that came down to Babylonia and Assyria from Sumeria.⁷⁸

* Therefore Tammuz was called “The Anointed.”⁹²

* “Assyrians” meant for the Greeks both Assyrians and Babylonians. “Mylitta” was one of the forms of Ishtar

* The snake was worshiped by many early peoples as a symbol of immortality, because of its apparent power to escape death by moulting its skin.

* To the Babylonians a planet was distinguished from the “fixed” stars by its observable motion or “wandering.” In modern astronomy a planet is defined as a heavenly body regularly revolving about the sun.

* From charting the skies the Babylonians turned to mapping the earth. The oldest maps of which we have any knowledge were those which the priests prepared of the roads and cities of Nebuchadrezzar’s empire.¹⁵⁵ A clay tablet found in the ruins of Gasur (two hundred miles north of Babylon), and dated back to 1600 B.C., contains, in a space hardly an inch square, a map of the province of Shat-Azalla; it represents mountains by rounded lines, water by tilting lines, rivers by parallel lines; the names of various towns are inscribed, and the direction of north and south is indicated in the margin.¹⁵⁶

* Parenthetical passages are guesses.

* It is probable that this composition, prototypes of which are found in Sumeria, influenced the author of the Book of Job.¹⁶⁴

* Cf. Ecclesiastes, ix, 7-9: “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest, all the days of the life of thy vanity.”

* A tablet recently found in the ruins of Sargon II’s library at Khorsabad contains an unbroken list of Assyrian kings from the twenty-third century B.C. to Ashurnirari (753-46 B.C.) .^4a

* Egyptian tradition attributed the escape of Egypt to discriminating field mice who ate up the quivers, bow-strings and shield-straps of the Assyrians encamped before Pelusium, so that the Egyptians were enabled to defeat the invaders easily the next day.¹²

* The oldest extant Assyrian laws are ninety articles contained on three tablets found at Ashur and dating ca. 1300 B.C.³¹

* Other products of Assyrian cultivation were olives, grapes, garlic, onions, lettuce, cress, beets, turnips, radishes, cucumbers, alfalfa, and licorice. Meat was rarely eaten by any but the aristocracy;³⁴ except for fish this war-like nation was largely vegetarian.

† A tablet of Sennacherib, ca. 700 B.C., contains the oldest known reference to cotton: “The tree that bore wool they clipped and shredded for cotton.”^35a It was probably imported from India.

‡ By the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

* The god of wisdom, corresponding to Thoth, Hermes and Mercury.

* Diodorus—how reliably we cannot say—pictures the King as rioting away his years in feminine comforts and genderless immorality, and credits him with composing his own reckless epitaph:

* The word Aryan first appears in the Harri, one of the tribes of Mitanni. In general it was the self-given appellation of peoples living near, or coming from, the shores of the Caspian Sea. The term is properly applied today chiefly to the Mitannians, Hittites, Medes, Persians, and Vedic Hindus—i.e., only to the eastern branch of the Indo-European peoples, whose western branch populated Europe.²

† East of the Halys River. Nearby, across the river, is Angora, capital of Turkey, and lineal descendant of Ancyra, the ancient metropolis of Phrygia. We may be helped to a cultural perspective by realizing that the Turks, whom we call “terrible,” note with pride the antiquity of their capital, and mourn the domination of Europe by barbaric infidels. Every point is the center of the world.

‡ Baron von Oppenheim unearthed at Tell Halaf and elsewhere many relics of Hittite art, which he has collected into his own museum, an abandoned factory in Berlin. Most of these remains are dated by their finder about 1200 B.C.; some of them he attributes precariously to the fourth millennium B.C. The collection includes a group of lions crudely but powerfully carved in stone, a bull in fine black stone, and figures of the Hittite triad of gods—the Sun-god, the Weather-god, and Hepat, the Hittite Ishtar. One of the most impressive of the figures is an ungainly Sphinx, before which is a stone vessel intended for offerings.

§ Cf., e.g., vadar, water; ezza, eat; uga, I (Latin ego); tug, thee; vesh, we; mu, me; kuish, who (Lat. quis); quit, what (Lat. quid), etc.³

* Hippocrates tells us that “their women, so long as they are virgins, ride, shoot, throw the javelin while mounted, and fight with their enemies. They do not lay aside their virginity until they have killed three of their enemies. . . . A woman who takes to herself a husband no longer rides, unless she is compelled to do so by a general expedition. They have no right breast; for while they are yet babies their mothers make red-hot a bronze instrument constructed for this very purpose and apply it to the right breast and cauterize it, so that its growth is arrested, and all its strength and bulk are diverted to the right shoulder and right arm.”⁹

* The oracle of Zeus had commanded the Phrygians to choose as king the first man who rode up to the temple in a wagon; hence the selection of Gordios. The new king dedicated his car to the god; and a new oracle predicted that the man who should succeed in untying the intricate bark knot that bound the yoke of the wagon to the pole would rule over all Asia. Alexander, story goes, cut the “Gordian knot” with a blow of his sword.

† Atys, we are informed, was miraculously born of the virgin-goddess Nana, who conceived him by placing a pomegranate between her breasts.¹⁰

* Older coins have been found at Mohenjo-daro, in India (2900 B.C.); and we have seen how Sennacherib (ca. 700 B.C.) minted half-shekel pieces.

* The term Semite is derived from Shem, legendary son of Noah, on the theory that Shem was the ancestor of all the Semitic peoples.

* Autran has argued that they were a branch of the Cretan civilization.¹⁶

† Copper and cypress took their names from Cyprus.

‡ Cf. Gibbon: “Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old world. The discovery of the rich western continent by the Phoenicians, and the oppression of the simple natives, who were compelled to labor in their own mines for the benefit of the strangers, form an exact type of the more recent history of Spanish America.”²⁰

* The Greeks, who for half a millennium were raiders and pirates, gave the name “Phoenician” to anyone addicted to sharp practices.²²

* The discoveries here summarized have restored considerable credit to those chapters of Genesis that record the early traditions of the Jews. In its outlines, and barring supernatural incidents, the story of the Jews as unfolded in the Old Testament has stood the test of criticism and archeology; every year adds corroboration from documents, monuments, or excavations. E.g., potsherds unearthed at Tel Ad-Duweir in 1935 bore Hebrew inscriptions confirming part of the narrative of the Books of Kings.^4a We must accept the Biblical account provisionally until it is disproved. Cf. Petrie, Egypt and Israel, London, 1925, p. 108.

* Perhaps they followed in the track of the Hyksos, whose Semitic rule in Egypt might have offered them some protection.⁹ Petrie, accepting the Bible figure of four hundred and thirty years for the stay of the Jews in Egypt, dates their arrival about 1650 B.C., their exit about 1220 B.C.¹⁰

† Manetho, an Egyptian historian of the third century B.C., as reported by Josephus, tells us that the Exodus was due to the desire of the Egyptians to protect themselves from a plague that had broken out among the destitute and enslaved Jews, and that Moses was an Egyptian priest who went as a missionary among the Jewish “lepers,” and gave them laws of cleanliness modeled upon those of the Egyptian clergy.¹³ Greek and Roman writers repeat this explanation of the Exodus;¹⁴ but their anti-Semitic inclinations make them unreliable guides. One verse of the Biblical account supports Ward’s interpretation of the Exodus as a labor strike: “And the king of Egypt said unto them, Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works? Get you unto your burdens.”¹⁵

Moses is an Egyptian rather than a Jewish name; perhaps it is a shorter form of Ahmose.¹⁶ Professor Garstang, of the Marston Expedition of the University of Liverpool, claims to have discovered, in the royal tombs of Jericho, evidence that Moses was rescued (precisely in 1527 B.C.) by the then Princess, later the great Queen, Hatshepsut; that he was brought up by her as a court favorite, and fled from Egypt upon the accession of her enemy, Thutmose III.¹⁷ He believes that the material found in these tombs confirms the story of the fall of Jericho (Joshua, vi); he dates this fall ca. 1400 B.C., and the Exodus ca. 1447 B.C.¹⁸ As this chronology rests upon the precarious dating of scarabs and pottery, it must be received with respectful scepticism.

* Cf. p. 287 above.

† Cf. the story of Esther, and the descriptions of Rebecca, Bathsheba, etc.

* Like the jolly story of Samson, who burned the crops of the Philistines by letting loose in them three hundred foxes with torches tied to their tails, and, in the manner of some orators, slew a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass.²⁷

† “He spake three thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five.”³³

‡ Taken from Shalom, meaning peace.

§ Mentioned in the Tell-el-Amarna tablets as Ursalimmu, or Urusalim.

* On the value of the talent in the ancient Near East cf. p. 228 above. The value varied from time to time; but we should not be exaggerating it if we rated the talent, in Solomon’s day, as having a purchasing power of over $10,000 in our contemporary money. Probably the Hebrew writer spoke in a literary way, and we must not take his figures too seriously. On the fluctuations of Hebrew currency cf. the Jewish Encyclopedia, articles “Numismatics” and “Shekel.” Coinage, as distinct from rings or ingots of silver or gold, does not appear in Palestine until about 650 B.C.³⁸

* It is likely that the site of the Temple was that which is now covered by the Moslem shrine El-haram-esh-sharif; but no remains of the Temple have been found.⁴⁵

* Other vestiges of animal worship among the ancient Hebrews may be found in 1 Kings, xii, 28, and Ezekiel, viii, 10. Ahab, King of Israel, worshiped heifers in the century after Solomon.⁵³

* Among some Bronze Age (3000 B.C.) ruins found in Canaan in 1931 were pieces of pottery bearing the name of a Canaanite deity, Yah or Yahu.⁶⁰

* A clumsy but useful word coined by Max Müller to designate the worship of a god as supreme, combined with the explicit (as in India) or tacit (as in Judea) admission of other gods.

† Elisha, however, as far back as the ninth century B.C., announced one God: “I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.”⁸³ It should be remembered that even modern monotheism is highly relative and incomplete. As the Jews worshiped a tribal god, so we worship a European god—or an English, or a German, or an Italian, god; no moment of modesty comes to remind us that the abounding millions of India, China and Japan—not to speak of the theologians of the jungle—do not yet recognize the God of our Fathers. Not until the machine weaves all the earth into one economic web, and forces all the nations under one rule, will there be one god—for the earth.

* One of the sons of Jacob.

* This kingdom often called itself “Israel”; but this word will be used, in these pages, to include all the Jews.

† Translated by the Greeks into pro-phe-tes, announcer.

* The reference is apparently to the room, made entirely of ivory, in the palace at Samaria where King Ahab lived with his “painted queen,” Jezebel (ca. 875-50 B.C.). Several fine ivories have been found by the Harvard Library Expedition in the ruins of a palace tentatively identified with Ahab’s.¹⁰³

† The book that bears his name is a collection of “prophecies” (i.e., sermons) by two or more authors ranging in time from 710 to 300 B.C.¹⁰⁷ Chapters i-xxxix are usually ascribed to the “First Isaiah,” who is here discussed.

* We know nothing of the history of this writer, who, by a literary device and license common to his time, chose to speak in the name of Isaiah. We merely guess that he wrote shortly before or after Cyrus liberated the Jews. Biblical scholarship assigns to him chapters xl-lv, and to another and later unknown, or unknowns, chapters lvi-lxvi.^132a

* Referring, presumably, to the road from Babylon to Jerusalem.

† Modern research does not regard the “Servant” as the prophetic portrayal of Jesus.^134a

* Torah is Hebrew for Direction, Guidance; Pentateuch is Greek for Five Rolls.

* A distinction first pointed out by Jean Astruc in 1753. Passages generally ascribed to the “Yahvist” account: Gen. ii, 4 to iii, 24, iv, vi-viii, xi, 1-9, xii-xiii, xviii-xix, xxiv, xxvii, 1-45, xxxii, xliii-xliv; Exod. iv-v, viii, 20 to ix, 7 x-xi, xxxiii, 12 to xxxiv, 26; Numb, x, 29-36, xi, etc. Distinctly “Elohist” passages: Gen. xi, 10-32, xx, 1-17, xxi, 8-32, xxii, 1-14, xl-xlii, xiv; Exod. xviii, 20-23, xx-xxii, xxxiii, 7-11; Numb, xii, xxii-xxiv, etc.¹⁴²

† Cf. Plato’s Symposium.

‡ Cf. the Greek poet Hesiod (ca. 750 B.C.), in Works and Days: “Men lived like gods, without vices or passions, vexations or toil. In happy companionship with divine beings they passed their days in tranquillity and joy. . . . The earth was more beautiful then than now, and spontaneously yielded an abundant variety of fruits. . . . Men were considered mere boys at one hundred years old.”¹⁴⁶

* Cf. Deut. xiv. Reinach, Roberston Smith and Sir James Frazer have attributed the avoidance of pork not to hygienic knowledge and precaution but to the totemic worship of the pig (or wild boar) by the ancestors of the Jews.¹⁵¹ The “worship” of the wild boar, however, may have been merely a priestly means of making it tabu in the sense of “unclean.” The great number of wise hygienic rules in the Mosaic Code warrant a humble scepticism of Reinach’s interpretation.

* The procedure recommended by Leviticus (xiii-xiv) in cases of leprosy was practised in Europe to the end of the Middle Ages.¹⁵⁵

† By making race ultimately unconcealable. “The Jewish rite,” says Briffault, “did not assume its present form until so late a period as that of the Maccabees (167 B.C.). At that date it was still performed in such a manner that the jibes of Gentile women could be evaded, little trace of the operation being perceptible. The nationalistic priesthood therefore enacted that the prepuce should be completely removed.”¹⁵⁷

‡ It was the usual thing for ancient law-codes to be of divine origin. We have seen how the laws of Egypt were given it by the god Thoth, and how the sun-god Shamash begot Hammurabi’s code. In like manner a deity gave to King Minos on Mt. Dicta the laws that were to govern Crete; the Greeks represented Dionysus, whom they also called “The Lawgiver,” with two tables of stone on which laws were inscribed; and the pious Persians tell how, one day, as Zoroaster prayed on a high mountain, Ahura-Mazda appeared to him amid thunder and lightning, and delivered to him “The Book of the Law.”¹⁵⁹ “They did all this,” says Diodorus, “because they believed that a conception which would help humanity was marvelous and wholly divine; or because they held that the common crowd would be more likely to obey the laws if their gaze were directed towards the majesty and power of those to whom their laws were ascribed.”¹⁶⁰

* In Hebrew Yahveh is written as Jhvh; this was erroneously translated into Jehovah because the vowels a-o-a had been placed over Jhvh in the original, to indicate that Adonai was to be pronounced in place of Yahveh; and the theologians of the Renaissance and the Reformation wrongly supposed that these vowels were to be placed between the consonants of Jhvh.¹⁶⁷

* Later this gentle and ancient totem became the Paschal Lamb of Christianity, identified with the dead Christ.

* This, of course, was the man’s ideal; if we may believe Isaiah (iii, 16-23), the real women of Jerusalem were very much of this world, loving fine raiment and ornament, and leading the men a merry chase. “The daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, . . . mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet,” etc. Perhaps the historians have always deceived us about women?

* Theoretically the land belonged to Yahveh.¹⁹⁵

* Psalm is a Greek word, meaning “song of praise.”

* A selection of the best Psalms would probably include VIII, XXIII, LI, CIV, CXXXVII and CXXXIX. The last is strangely like Whitman’s paean to evolution.²¹⁹

* The Proverbs, of course, are not the work of Solomon, though several of them may have come from him; they owe something to Egyptian literature and Greek philosophy, and were probably put together in the third or second century B.C. by some Hellenized Alexandrian Jew.

* Scholarship assigns it tentatively to the fifth century B.C.²²⁸ Its text is corrupt beyond even the custom of sacred scriptures everywhere. Jastrow accepts only chapters iii-xxxi, considers the rest to be edifying emendations, and suspects many interpolations and mistranslations in the accepted chapters. E.g., “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (xiii, 5) should be, “Yet I tremble not,” or “Yet I have no hope.”²²⁹ Kallen and others have found in the book the likeness of a Greek tragedy, written on the model of Euripides.²³⁰ Chapters iii-xli are cast in the typical antistrophic form of Hebrew poetry.

* “The sceptic,” wrote that prolific sceptic, Renan, “writes little, and there are many chances that his writings will be lost. The destiny of the Jewish people having been exclusively religious, the secular part of its literature had to be sacrificed.”²³⁶ The repetition of “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” in the Psalms (XIV, I; LIII, I), indicates that such fools were sufficiently numerous to create some stir in Israel. There is apparently a reference to this minority in Zephaniah, i, 12.

* The authorship and date of the book are quite unknown. Sarton attributes it to the period between 250 and 168 B.C.²³⁹ The author calls himself, by a confusing literary fiction, both “Koheleth” and “the son of David, king in Jerusalem”—i.e., Solomon.²⁴⁰

* Probably the modern Hamadan.

* At Susa, says Strabo, the summer heat was so intense that snakes and lizards could not cross the streets quickly enough to escape being burned to death by the sun.¹⁶

† Generally identified with the district of Arran on the river Araxes.

* Some examples of the correlation:

† “They carry on their most important deliberations,” Strabo reports, “when drinking wine; and they regard decisions then made as more lasting than those made when they are sober.”²⁷

* But having no relation with his name; daric was from the Persian zariq—“a piece of gold.” The gold daric had a face value of $5.00. Three thousand gold darics made one Persian talent.³²

* The word survives in the present title of the Persian king—Shah. Its stem appears also in the Satraps or provincial officials of Persia, and in the Kshatriya or warrior caste of India.

† Five hundred castrated boys came annually from Babylonia to act as “keepers of the women” in the harems of Persia.³⁹

* Because the soldier Mithridates, in his cups, blurted out the fact that it was he, and not the king, who should have received credit for slaying Cyrus the Younger at the battle of Cunaxa, Artaxerxes II, says Plutarch, “decreed that Mithridates should be put to death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lay down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, they offer him food, and if he refuse to eat it, they force him to do it by pricking his eyes; then, after he has eaten, they drench him with a mixture of milk and honey, pouring it not only into his mouth but all over his face. They then keep his face continually turned toward the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle upon it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards. In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired.”⁵⁰

* If the Vishtaspa who promulgated him was the father of Darius I, the last of these dates seems the most probable.

† Anquetil-Duperron (ca. 1771 A.D.) introduced the prefix Zend, which the Persians had used to denote merely a translation and interpretation of the Avesta. The last is a word of uncertain origin, probably derived, like Veda, from the Aryan root vid, to know.⁶²

‡ Native tradition tells of a larger Avesta in twenty-one books called Nasks; these in turn, we are told, were but part of the original Scriptures. One of the Nasks remains intact—the Vendidad; the rest survive only in scattered fragments in such later compositions as the Dinkard and the Bundahish. Arab historians speak of the complete text as having covered 12,000 cowhides. According to a sacred tradition, two copies of this were made by Prince Vishtaspa; one of them was destroyed when Alexander burned the royal palace at Persepolis; the other was taken by the victorious Greeks to their own country, and being translated, provided the Greeks (according to the Persian authorities) with all their scientific knowledge. During the third century of the Christian Era Vologesus V, a Parthian king of the Arsacid Dynasty, ordered the collection of all fragments surviving either in writing or in the memory of the faithful; this collection was fixed in its present form as the Zoroastrian canon in the fourth century, and became the official religion of the Persian state. The compilation so formed suffered further ravages during the Moslem conquest of Persia in the seventh century.⁶³

The extant fragments may be divided into five parts:

(1) The Yasna—forty-five chapters of the liturgy recited by the Zoroastrian priests, and twenty-seven chapters (chs. 28-54) called Gathas, containing, apparently in metric form, the discourses and revelations of the Prophet;

(2) The Vispered—twenty-four additional chapters of liturgy;

(3) The Vendidad—twenty-two chapters or fargards expounding the theology and moral legislation of the Zoroastrians, and now forming the priestly code of the Parsees;

(4) The Yashts i.e., songs of praise—twenty-one psalms to angels, interspersed with legendary history and a prophecy of the end of the world; and

(5) The Khordah Avesta or Small Avesta—prayers for various occasions of life.⁶⁴

* Darmesteter believes the “Good Mind” to be a semi-Gnostic adaptation of Philo’s logos tbeios, or Divine Word, and therefore dates the Yasna about the first century B.C.⁷⁰

* But Yasna xlvi, 6 reads: “Wicked is he who is good to the wicked.” Inspired works are seldom consistent.

* Christmas was originally a solar festival, celebrating, at the winter solstice (about December 22nd), the lengthening of the day and the triumph of the sun over his enemies. It became a Mithraic, and finally a Christian, holy day.

* When the Persians fought Alexander at the Granicus practically all the “Persian” infantry were Greek mercenaries. At the battle of Issus 30,000 Greek mercenaries formed the center of the Persian line.⁹⁸

* Statira was a model queen to Artaxerxes II; but his mother, Parysatis, poisoned her out of jealousy, encouraged the king to marry his own daughter Atossa, played dice with him for the life of a eunuch, and, winning, had him flayed alive. When Artaxerxes ordered the execution of a Carian soldier, Parysatis bettered his instructions by having the man stretched upon the rack for ten days, his eyes torn out, and molten lead poured into his ears until he died.^119a

* One of these vases, shown at the International Exhibition of Persian Art in London, 1931, bears an inscription testifying that it belonged to Artaxerxes II.¹³²

† An expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is now engaged in excavating Persepolis under the direction of Dr. James H. Breasted. In January, 1931, this expedition unearthed a mass of statuary equal in amount to all Persian sculptures previously known.¹³⁴

* Fergusson pronounced them “the noblest example of a flight of stairs to be found in any part of the world.”¹³⁶

† Underneath the platform ran a complicated system of drainage tunnels, six feet in diameter, often drilled through the solid rock.¹³⁷

* “All those that were in Asia,” says Josephus, “were persuaded that the Macedonians would not so much as come to battle with the Persians, on account of their multitude.”¹⁴³

* Probably equivalent to $60,000,000 in contemporary currencies.

† Plutarch, Quintus Curtius and Diodorus agree on this tale, and it does not do violence to Alexander’s impetuous character? but one may meet the story with a certain scepticism none the less.

* A town sixty miles from the Arbela which gave the battle its name.

* From the time of Megasthenes, who described India to Greece ca. 302 B.C., down to the eighteenth century, India was all a marvel and a mystery to Europe. Marco Polo (1254-1323 A.D.) pictured its western fringe vaguely, Columbus blundered upon America in trying to reach it, Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to rediscover it, and merchants spoke rapaciously of “the wealth of the Indies.” But scholars left the mine almost untapped. A Dutch missionary to India, Abraham Roger, made a beginning with his Open Door to the Hidden Heathendom (1651); Dry den showed his alertness by writing the play Aurangzeb (1675); and an Austrian monk, Fra Paolino de S. Bartolomeo, advanced the matter with two Sanskrit grammars and a treatise on the Systema Brahmanicum (1792).^1a In 1789 Sir William Jones opened his career as one of the greatest of Indologists by translating Kalidasa’s Shakuntala; this translation, re-rendered into German in 1791, profoundly affected Herder and Goethe, and—through the Schlegels—the entire Romantic movement, which hoped to find in the East all the mysticism and mystery that seemed to have died on the approach of science and Enlightenment in the West. Jones startled the world of scholarship by declaring that Sanskrit was cousin to all the languages of Europe, and an indication of our racial kinship with the Vedic Hindus; these announcements almost created modern philology and ethnology. In 1805 Colebrooke’s essay On the Vedas revealed to Europe the oldest product of Indian literature; and about the same time Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads acquainted Schelling and Schopenhauer with what the latter called the profoundest philosophy that he had ever read.² Buddhism was practically unknown as a system of thought until Burnouf’s Essai sur le Pali (1826)—i.e., on the language of the Buddhist documents. Burnouf in France, and his pupil Max Müller in England, roused scholars and philanthropists to make possible a translation of all the “Sacred Books of the East”; and Rhys Davids furthered this task by a lifetime devoted to the exposition of the literature of Buddhism. Despite and because of these labors it has become clear that we have merely begun to know India; our acquaintance with its literature is as limited as Europe’s knowledge of Greek and Roman literature in the days of Charlemagne. Today, in the enthusiasm of our discovery, we exaggerate generously the value of the new revelation; a European philosopher believes that “Indian wisdom is the profoundest that exists” and a great novelist writes: “I have not found, in Europe or America, poets, thinkers or popular leaders equal, or even comparable, to those of India today.”³

* The word Indian will be used in this Book as applying to India in general; the word Hindu, for variety’s sake, will occasionally be used in the same sense, following the custom of the Persians and the Greeks; but where any confusion might result, Hindu will be used in its later and stricter sense, as referring only to those inhabitants of India who (as distinct from Moslem Indians) accept one of the native faiths.

* From dakshina, “right hand” (Latin dexter); secondarily meaning “south,” since southern India is on the right hand of a worshiper facing the rising sun.

* These connections are suggested by similar seals found at Mohenjo-daro and in Sumeria (especially at Kish), and by the appearance of the Naga, or hooded serpent, among the early Mesopotamian seals.¹¹ In 1932 Dr. Henri Frankfort unearthed, in the ruins of a Babylonian-Elamite village at the modern Tell-Asmar (near Baghdad), pottery seals and beads which in his judgment (Sir John Marshall concurring) were imported from Mohenjo-daro ca. 2000 B.C.¹²

† Macdonell believes that this amazing civilization was derived from Sumeria;¹⁴ Hall believes that the Sumerians derived their culture from India;¹⁵ Woolley derives both the Sumerians and the early Hindus from some common parent stock and culture in or near Baluchistan.¹⁶ Investigators have been struck by the fact that similar seals found both in Babylonia and in India belong to the earliest (“pre-Sumerian”) phase of the Mesopotamian culture, but to the latest phase of the Indus civilization¹⁷—which suggests the priority of India. Childe inclines to this conclusion: “By the end of the fourth millennium B.C. the material culture of Abydos, Ur, or Mohenjo-daro would stand comparison with that of Periclean Athens or of any medieval town. . . . Judging by the domestic architecture, the seal-cutting, and the grace of the pottery, the Indus civilization was ahead of the Babylonian at the beginning of the third millennium (ca. 3000 B.C.). But that was a late phase of the Indian culture; it may have enjoyed no less lead in earlier times. Were then the innovations and discoveries that characterize proto-Sumerian civilization not native developments on Babylonian soil, but the results of Indian inspiration? If so, had the Sumerians themselves come from the Indus, or at least from regions in its immediate sphere of influence?”¹⁸ These fascinating questions cannot yet be answered; but they serve to remind us that a history of civilization, because of our human ignorance, begins at what was probably a late point in the actual development of culture.

* Recent excavations near Chitaldrug, in Mysore, revealed six levels of buried cultures, rising from Stone Age implements and geometrically adorned pottery apparently as old as 4000 B.C., to remains as late as 1200 A.D.¹⁹

* Monier-Williams derives Aryan from the Sanskrit root ri-ar, to plough;²³ cf. the Latin aratrum, a plough, and area, an open space. On this theory the word Aryan originally meant not nobleman but peasant.

† We find such typically Vedic deities as Indra, Mitra and Varuna mentioned in a treaty concluded by the Aryan Hittites and Mitannians at the beginning of the fourteenth century B.C.;²⁴ and so characteristic a Vedic ritual as the drinking of the sacred soma juice is repeated in the Persian ceremony of drinking the sap of the haoma plant. (Sanskrit s corresponds regularly to Zend or Persian h: soma becomes haoma, as sindhu becomes Hindu.²⁵) We conclude that the Mitannians, the Hittites, the Kassites, the Sogdians, the Bactrians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Aryan invaders of India were branches of an already heterogeneous “Indo-European” stock which spread out from the shores of the Caspian Sea.

‡ A word applied by the ancient Persians to India north of the Narbada River.

* The early Hindu word for caste is varna, color. This was translated by the Portuguese invaders as casta, from the Latin castus, pure.

* Cf. Atharva-veda, vi, 138, and vii, 35, 90, where incantations “bristling with hatred,” and “language of unbridled wildness” are used by women seeking to oust their rivals, or to make them barren.⁶⁰ In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (6-12) formulas are given for raping a woman by incantation, and for “sinning without conceiving.”⁶¹

* An almost monotheistic devotion was accorded to Prajapati, until he was swallowed up, in later theology, by the all-consuming figure of Brahma.

* Ponebatque in gremium regina genitale victimae membrum.⁷⁶

* Cf. English one, two, three, four, five with Sanskrit ek, dwee, tree, chatoor, panch; Latin unus, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque; Greek heis, duo, tria, tettara, pente. (Quattuor becomes four, as Latin quercus becomes fir.) Or cf. English am, art, is with Sanskrit asmi, asi, asti; Latin sum, es, est; Greek eimi, ei, esti. For family terms cf. p. 357 above. Grimm’s Law, which formulated the changes effected in the consonants of a word through the different vocal habits of separated peoples, has revealed to us more fully the surprising kinship of Sanskrit with our own tongue. The law may be roughly summarized by saying that in most cases (there are numerous exceptions):

1. Sanskrit k (as in kratu, power) corresponds to Greek k (kartos, strength), Latin c or qu (cornu, horn), German h, g or k (hart), and English h, g or f (hard);

2. Skt. g or j (as in jan, to beget), corresponds to Gk. g (genos, race), L. g (genus), Ger. ch or k (kind, child), E. k (kin);

3. Skt. gh or h (as in hyas, yesterday), corresponds to Gk. ch (chthes), L. h, f, g, or? (heri), Ger. k or g (gestern), E. g or y (yesterday);

4. Skt. t (as in tar, to cross) corresponds to Gk. t (terma, end), L. t (ter-minus), Ger. d (durch, through), E. th or d (through);

5. Skt. d (as in das, ten) corresponds to Gk. d (deka), L. d (decem), Ger.? (zehn), E. t (ten);

6. Skt. dh or h (as in dha, to place or put) corresponds to Gk. th (ti-the-mi, I place), L. f, d or b (fa-cere, do), Ger. t (tun, do), E. d (do, deed);

7 Skt. P (as in patana, feather) corresponds to Gk. p (pteros, wing), L. p (penna, feather), Ger. f or v (feder), E. f or b (feather);

8. Skt. bh (as in bhri, to bear) corresponds to Gk. ph (pherein), L. f or b (fero), Ger. p, f or ph (fahren), E. b or p (bear, birth, brother, etc.).⁸²

* Perhaps poetry will recover its ancient hold upon our people when it is again recited rather than silently read.

† Greek (f)oida, Latin video, German weise, English wit and wisdom.

‡ This is but one of many possible divisions of the material. In addition to the “inspired” commentaries contained in the Brahmanas and Upanishads, Hindu scholars usually include in the Vedas several collections of shorter commentaries in aphoristic form, called Sutras (lit., threads, from Skt. siv, to sew). These, while not directly inspired from heaven, have the high authority of an ancient tradition. Many of them are brief to the point of unintelligibility; they were convenient condensations of doctrine, mnemonic devices for students who still relied upon memory rather than upon writing.

As to the authorship or date of this mass of poetry, myth, magic, ritual and philosophy, no man can say. Pious Hindus believe every word of it to be divinely inspired, and tell us that the great god Brahma wrote it with his own hand upon leaves of gold;⁸⁹ and this is a view which cannot easily be refuted. According to the fervor of their patriotism, divers native authorities assign to the oldest hymns dates ranging from 6000 to 1000 B.C.⁹⁰ The material was probably collected and arranged between 1000 and 500 B.C.⁹¹

* They are composed in stanzas generally of four lines each. The lines are of 5, 8, 11 or 12 syllables, indifferent as to quantity, except that the last four syllables are usually two trochees, or a trochee and a spondee.

* The derivation of this word is uncertain. Apparently (as in Rig. x, 16), it originally meant breath, like the Latin spiritus; then vital essence, then soul.¹⁰⁹

* Brahman as here used, meaning the impersonal Soul of the World, is to be distinguished from the more personal Brahma, member of the Hindu triad of gods (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva); and from Brahman as denoting a member of the priestly caste. The distinction, however, is not always carried out, and Brahma is sometimes used in the sense of Brahman. Brahman as God will be distinguished in these pages from Brahman as priest by being italicized.

† The Hindu thinkers are the least anthropomorphic of all religious philosophers. Even in the later hymns of the Rig-veda the Supreme Being is indifferently referred to as be or it, to show that it is above sex.¹¹³

* It occurs first in the Satapatha Upanishad, where repeated births and deaths are viewed as a punishment inflicted by the gods for evil living. Most primitive tribes believe that the soul can pass from a man to an animal and vice versa; probably this idea became, in the pre-Aryan inhabitants of India, the basis of the transmigration creed.¹¹⁷

* Dates before 1600 A.D. are uncertain; dates before 329 B.C. are guesswork.

* Tradition gives Mahavira’s dates as 599-527 B.C.; but Jacobi believes that 549-477 B.C. would be nearer the fact.¹⁶

* It has often been remarked that this period was distinguished by a shower of stars in the history of genius: Mahavira and Buddha in India, Lao-tze and Confucius in China, Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah in Judea, the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece, and perhaps Zarathustra in Persia. Such a simultaneity of genius suggests more intercommunication and mutual influence among these ancient cultures than it is possible to trace definitely today.

* “Birth-stories” of Buddha, written about the fifth century A.D. Another legend, the Lalitavistara, has been paraphrased by Sir Edwin Arnold in The Light of Asia.

† I.e., vows appropriate to the Uposatha, or four holy days of the month: the full moon, the new moon, and the eighth day after either of them.²⁶

‡ I.e., one destined to be a Buddha; here meaning the Buddha himself. Buddha, meaning “Enlightened,” is among the many titles given to the Master, whose personal name was Siddhartha, and whose clan name was Gautama. He was also called Shakya-muni or “Sage of the Shakyas,” and Tathagata, “One Who Has Won the Truth.” Buddha never applied any of these titles to himself, so far as we know.²⁷

* His mother had died in giving him birth.

* The Bodhi-tree of later Buddhist worship, still shown to tourists at Bodh-gaya.

† The philosophy of Schopenhauer stems from this point.

* The oldest extant documents purporting to be the teaching of Buddha are the Pitakasy or “Baskets of the Law,” prepared for the Buddhist Council of 241 B.C., accepted by it as genuine, transmitted orally for four centuries from the death of Buddha, and finally put into writing, in the Pali tongue, about 80 B.C. These Pitakas are divided into three groups: the Sutta, or tales; the Vinaya, or discipline; and the Abhidhamma, or doctrine. The Sutta-pitaka contains the dialogues of Buddha, which Rhys Davids ranks with those of Plato.³⁴ Strictly speaking, however, these writings give us the teaching not necessarily of Buddha himself, but only of the Buddhist schools. “Though these narratives,” says Sir Charles Eliot, “are compilations which accepted new matter during several centuries, I see no reason to doubt that the oldest stratum contains the recollections of those who had seen and heard the master.”³⁵

* In Buddha, says Sir Charles Eliot, “the world is not thought of as the handiwork of a divine personality, nor the moral law as his will. The fact that religion can exist without these ideas is of capital importance.”⁵⁷

* Cf. the beautiful form of greeting used by the Jews: Shalom aleichem—“Peace be with you.” In the end men do not ask for happiness, but only for peace.

* The modern Patna.

† “This is a great thing in India,” says Arrian, “that all the inhabitants are free, not a single Indian being a slave.”⁴

* The excavations of Sir John Marshall on the site of Taxila have unearthed delicately carved stones, highly polished statuary, coins as old as 600 B.C., and glassware of a fine quality never bettered in later India.⁸ “It is manifest,” says Vincent Smith, “that a high degree of material civilization had been attained, and that all the arts and crafts incident to the life of a wealthy, cultured city were familiar.”⁹

* “Their women, who are very chaste, and would not go astray for any other reason, on the receipt of an elephant have communion with the donor. The Indians do not think it disgraceful to prostitute themselves for an elephant, and to the women it even seems ar honor that their beauty should appear equal in value to an elephant.”—Arrian, Indica, xvii.

* These antedated by three centuries the first hospital built in Europe—viz., the Maison Dieu erected in Paris in the seventh century A.D.⁴⁷

* But cf. Arrian on ancient India: “In war the Indians were by far the bravest of all the races inhabiting Asia at that time.”⁵⁸

† “No place on earth,” says Count Keyserling about Chitor, “has been the scene of equal heroism, knightliness, or an equally noble readiness to die.”⁶¹

* In this medley of now almost forgotten kingdoms there were periods of literary and artistic—above all, architectural—creation; there were wealthy capitals, luxurious palaces, and mighty potentates; but so vast is India, and so long is its history, that in this congested paragraph we must pass by, without so much as mentioning them, men who for a time thought they dominated the earth. For example, Vikramaditya, who ruled the Chalyukans for half a century (1076-1126), was so successful in war that (like Nietzsche) he proposed to found a new chronological era, dividing all history into before him and after him. Today he is a footnote.

* Among these modest possessions were twelve thousand wives.⁶⁵

* Mogul is another form of Mongol. The Moguls were really Turks; but the Hindus called—and still call—all northern Moslems (except the Afghans) Moguls.⁸⁵ “Babur” was a Mongol nickname, meaning lion; the real name of the first Mogul Emperor of India was Zahiru-d din Muhammad.⁸⁶

* Later he came to recognize the value of books, and—being still unable to read—listened for hours while others read to him, often from abstruse and difficult volumes. In the end he became an illiterate scholar, loving letters and art, and supporting them with royal largesse.

* The army was supplied with the best ordnance yet seen in India, but inferior to that then in use in Europe. Akbar’s efforts to secure better guns failed; and this inferiority in the instruments of slaughter coöperated with the degeneration of his descendants in determining the European conquest of India.

* Two of his children died in youth of chronic alcoholism.⁹⁶

* The Moslems hated Birbal, and rejoiced at his death. One of them, the historian Badaoni, recorded the incident with savage pleasure: “Birbal, who had fled from fear of his life, was slain, and entered the row of the dogs in Hell.”⁹⁹

* With the exception of the transient persecution of Islam (1582-5).

* I.e., “Light of the World”; also called Nur Mahal–“Light of the Palace.” Jehangir means “Conqueror of the World”; Shah Jehan, of course, was “King of the World.”

† This throne, which required seven years for its completion, consisted entirely of jewels, precious metals and stones. Four legs of gold supported the seat; twelve pillars made of emeralds held up the enameled canopy; each pillar bore two peacocks encrusted with gems; and between each pair of peacocks rose a tree covered with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and pearls. The total cost was over $7,000,000. The throne was captured and carried off to Persia by Nadir Shah (1739), and was gradually dismembered to defray the expenses of Persian royalty.¹¹⁴

* The following analysis will apply for the most part to post-Vedic and pre-British India. The reader should remember that India is now in flux, and that institutions, morals and manners once characteristic of her may be disappearing today.

† Vijayanagar was an exception; its people ate fowl and flesh (barring oxen and cows), as well as lizards, rats and cats.⁴

* We do not know what these “ants” were; they were more probably anteaters than ants.

* Cf. the red rug, from seventeenth-century India, presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Room D 3) by Mr. J. P. Morgan.

* The story of how Nasiru-d-din poisoned his father Ghiyasu-d-din, Sultan of Delhi (1501), illustrates the Moslem conception of peaceable succession. Jehangir, who did his best to depose his father Akbar, tells the story:

“After this I went to the building containing the tombs of the Khalji rulers. The grave of Nasiru-d-din, whose face is blackened forever, was also there. It is well known that that wretch advanced himself by the murder of his father. Twice he gave him poison, and the father twice expelled it by means of a poison-antidote amulet he had on his arm. The third time the son mixed poison in a cup of sherbet and gave it to his father with his own hand. . . . As his father understood what efforts the son was making in this matter, he loosened the amulet from his arm and threw it before him; and then, turning his face in humility and supplication towards the throne of the Creator, said: ‘O Lord, my age has arrived at eighty years, and I have passed this time in prosperity and happiness such as has been attained by no king. Now as this is my last time, I hope that thou wilt not seize Nasir for my murder, and that, reckoning my death as a thing decreed, thou wilt not avenge it.’ After he had spoken these words, he drank off that poisoned cup of sherbet at a gulp, and delivered his soul to his Creator.

“When I went to his (Nasir’s) tomb,” adds the virtuous Jehangir, “I gave it several kicks.”⁵⁴

† Still more sadistic refinements of penology may be found in Dubois, p. 659.

* Père Dubois, who, though unsympathetic to India, is usually truthful, gives us a picture of the ordeals used in his time (1820). “There are,” he says, “several other kinds of trial by ordeal. Amongst the number is that of boiling oil which is mixed with cow-dung, and into which the accused must plunge his arm up to the elbow; and that of the snake which consists in shutting up some very poisonous snake in a basket in which has been placed a ring or a piece of money which the accused must find and bring out with his eyes bandaged; if in the former case he is not scalded, and in the latter case is not bitten, his innocence is completely proved.”⁶²

† Tod believes that some of these charters were pious frauds.⁶⁶

* Among the Dravidians, however, inheritance followed the female line.⁶⁹

* Certain sexual perquisites seem to have belonged to some Brahman groups. The Nambudri Brahmans exercised the jus primœ noctis over all brides in their territory; and the Pushtimargiya priests of Bombay maintained this privilege until recent times.⁸¹ If we may believe Père Dubois, the priests of the Temple of Tirupati (in southeastern India) offered to cure barrenness in all women who would spend a night at the temple.⁸²

† Not all priests were Brahmans, and latterly many Brahmans have not been priests. In the United Provinces a large number of them are cooks.⁸⁸

‡ This word is from the Tamil paraiyan, meaning one of low caste.

* On the caste system in our time cf. Chap, XXII, Sect, iv, below.

* It should be added that Gandhi denies that this precocity has any physical basis. “I loathe and detest child marriage,” he writes. “I shudder to see a child widow. I have never known a grosser superstition than that the Indian climate causes sexual precocity. What does bring about untimely puberty is the mental and moral atmosphere surrounding family life.”¹⁰⁹

* From the Hindu nâch, dancer.

* Strabo (ca. 20 A.D.), relying on Aristobulus, describes “some novel and unusual customs at Taxila: those who by reason of poverty are unable to marry off their daughters, lead them forth to the market place in the power of their age to the sound of both trumpets and drums (precisely the instruments used to signal the call to battle), thus assembling a crowd; and to any man who comes forward they first expose her rear parts up to the shoulders, and then her front parts, and if she pleases him, and at the same time allows herself to be persuaded, on approved terms, he marries her.”¹²⁸

† Among the Rajputs, if we may believe Tod, it was usual for the prince to have different wives for each day of the week.¹²⁵

* We must compare this attitude not with our contemporary European or American views, but with the reluctance of the medieval clergy to allow a general reading of the Bible, or the intellectual education of woman.

* More properly sati, pronounced suttee, and meaning “devoted wife.”

* In considering alien customs we must continually remind ourselves that foreign practices cannot be judged intelligently by our own moral code. “The superficial observer who applies his own standard to the customs of all nations,” says Tod, “laments with affected philanthropy the degraded condition of the Hindu female, in which sentiment he would find her little disposed to join him.”¹⁶³ On contemporary changes in these customs cf. Chapter XXII below.

* A great Hindu, Lajpat Rai, reminded Europe that “long before the European nations knew anything of hygiene, and long before they realized the value of tooth-brush and a daily bath, the Hindus were, as a rule, given to both. Only twenty years ago London houses had no bath-tubs, and the tooth-brush was a luxury.”¹⁷¹

* Chess is so old that half the nations of antiquity claim its birthplace. The view generally accepted by archeologists of the game is that it arose in India; certainly we find there its oldest indisputable appearance (ca. 750 A.D.). The word chess comes from the Persian shah, king; and checkmate is originally shah-mat—“king dead.” The Persians called it shatranj, and took both the word and the game, through the Arabs, from India, where it was known as chaturanga, or “four angles”—elephants, horses, chariots and foot-soldiers. The Arabs still call the bishop al-fil—i.e., elephant (from aleph-hind, Arabic for “ox of India”).²⁰⁰

The Hindus tell a delightful legend to account for the origin of the game. At the beginning of the fifth century of our era (the story goes), a Hindu monarch offended his Brahman and Kshatriya admirers by ignoring their counsels and forgetting that the love of the people is the surest support of a throne. A Brahman, Sissa, undertook to open the eyes of the young king by devising a game in which the piece that represented the king, though highest in dignity and value (as in Oriental war), should be, alone, almost helpless; hence came chess. The ruler liked the game so well that he invited Sissa to name his reward. Sissa modestly asked for some grains of rice, the quantity to be determined by placing one grain upon the first of the sixty-four squares of the chess-board, and then doubling the number of grains with each succeeding square. The king agreed at once, but was soon surprised to find that he had promised away his kingdom. Sissa took the opportunity to point out to his master how easily a monarch may be led astray when he scorns his counsellors.²⁰¹ Credat qui vult.

* From the Tibetan word pulu, Hindu Balti dialect polo, meaning ball; cf. the Latin pila.

* In one of the Puranas there is a typical legend of the king who, though deserving heaven, stays in hell to comfort the sufferers, and will not leave it until all the damned are released.²

† “The Buddhists,” says Fergusson, “kept five centuries in advance of the Roman Church in the invention and use of all the ceremonies and forms common to both religions.”³ Edmunds has shown in detail the astonishing parallelism between the Buddhist and the Christian gospels.⁴ However, our knowledge of the beginnings of these customs and beliefs is too vague to warrant positive conclusions as to priority.

* Today there are in India proper only 3,000,000 Buddhists—one per cent of the population.

† The temple at Kandy contains the famous “eye-tooth of Buddha”—two inches long and an inch in diameter. It is enclosed in a jeweled casket, carefully guarded from the eyes of the people, and carried periodically in a solemn procession which draws Buddhists from every corner of the Orient. On the walls of the temple, frescoes show the gentle Buddha killing sinners in hell. The lives of great men all remind us how helplessly they may be transmogrified after their death.

* In the census of 1921 the religions of India divided the population as follows: Hinduism, 216,261,000; Sikhs, 3,239,000; Jains, 1,178,000; Buddhists, 11,571,000 (nearly all in Burma and Ceylon); Zoroastrians (Parsees), 102,000; Moslems, 68,735,000; Jews, 22,000; Christians, 4,754,000 (chiefly Europeans).¹²

† Nevertheless the name of Shiva, like that of Brahman itself, cannot be found in the Rig-veda. Patanjali the grammarian mentions Shiva images and devotees ca. 150 B.C.¹⁶

* The priests of Shivaism, however, are seldom Brahmans; and the majority of the Brahmans look with scorn and regret upon the Shakti cult.²⁶

* Excerpt from the 1901 Census Report to the British Government of India: “The general result of my inquiries is that the great majority of Hindus have a firm belief in one Supreme Being.”²⁹

* Teacher.

* Advaitam; this is the central word of Hindu philosophy; cf. page 549 below.

* When the Hindu is asked why we have no memory of our past incarnations, he answers that likewise we have no memory of our infancy; and as we presume our infancy to explain our maturity, so he presumes past existences to explain our place and fate in our present life.

† A monk explained his appetite on the ground that in a previous existence he had been an elephant, and Karma had forgotten to change the appetite with the body.³⁶ A woman of strong odor was believed to have been formerly a fish.³⁷

* The Hindus believe in seven heavens, one of them on earth, the others rising in gradations above it; there are twenty-one hells, divided into seven sections. Punishment is not eternal, but it is diversified. Père Dubois’ description of the Hindu hells rivals Dante’s account of Inferno, and illustrates, like it, the many fears, and the sadistic imagination, of mankind. “Fire, steel, serpents, venomous insects, savage beasts, birds of prey, gall, poison, stenches; in a word, everything possible is employed to torment the damned. Some have a cord run through their nostrils, by which they are forever dragged over the edges of extremely sharp knives; others are condemned to pass through the eye of a needle; others are placed between two flat rocks, which meet, and crush, without killing, them; others have their eyes pecked incessantly by famished vultures; while millions of them continually swim and paddle in a pool filled with the urine of dogs or with the mucus from men’s nostrils.”⁴⁰ Such beliefs were probably the privilege of the lowest Hindus and the strictest theologians. We shall find it easier to forgive them if we remember that our own Hell, unlike that of India, was not only varied, but eternal.

† The belief in Karma and transmigration is the greatest theoretical obstacle to the removal of the caste system from India; for the orthodox Hindu presumes that caste differences are decreed by the soul’s conduct in past lives, and are part of a divine plan which it would be sacrilegious to disturb.

* Schopenhauer, like Buddha, reduced all suffering to the will to live and beget, and advocated race suicide by voluntary sterility. Heine could hardly pen a stanza without speaking of death, and could write, in Hindu strain,

       Sweet is sleep, but death is better;

       Best of all is never to be born.⁴²
Kant, scorning the optimism of Leibnitz, asked: “Would any man of sound understanding who has lived long enough, and has meditated on the worth of human existence, care to go again through life’s poor play, I do not say on the same conditions, but on any conditions whatever?”⁴³

* Cf. footnote to page 80 above.

† So the good European caps each sneeze with a benediction, originally to guard against the soul being ejected by the force of the expiration.

* Such human sacrifices were recorded as late as 1854.⁶⁴ It was formerly believed that devotees had offered themselves as sacrifices, as in the case of fanatics supposed to have thrown themselves under the wheels of the Juggernaut (Indian Jagannath) car;⁶⁵ but it is now held that the rare cases of such apparent self-sacrifice may have been accidents⁶⁶

* Ghee is clarified butter. Urine, says the Abbé Dubois (1820), “is looked upon as most efficacious for purifying any kind of uncleanness. I have often seen superstitious Hindus following the cows to pasture, waiting for the moment when they could collect the precious liquid in vessels of brass, and carrying it away while still warm to their houses. I have also seen them waiting to catch it in the hollow of their hands, drinking some of it and rubbing their faces and heads with the rest.”⁷² De gustibus non disputandum.

* Dubois, sceptical of everything but his own myth, adds: “The greater number of these sannyasin are looked upon as utter impostors, and that by the most enlightened of their fellow-counuymen.”⁷⁵

* It was used by the Mayas of America in the first century A.D.^8a Dr. Breasted attributes a knowledge of the place value of numerals to the ancient Babylonians (Saturday Review of Literature, New York, July 13, 1935, P. 15).

* The first algebraist known to us, the Greek Diophantus (360 A.D.), antedates Aryabhata by a century; but Cajori believes that he took his lead from India.¹¹

* E.g., in The Ocean of Music (Samgita-ratnakara) of Sharamgadeva (1210-47).

* Hospitals were erected in Ceylon as early as 427 B.C. and in northern India as early as 226 B.C³⁹

* Asti, it is; n’asti, it is not.

* The Nyaya syllogism, however, has five propositions: theorem, reason, major premiss, minor premiss and conclusion. E.g.: (i) Socrates is mortal, (2) for he is a man; (3) all men are mortal; (4) Socrates is a man; (5) therefore Socrates is mortal.

* Its earliest extant literature, the Sankhya-karika of the commentator Ishvara Krishna, dates back only to the fifth century A.D., and the Sankhya-sutras once attributed to Kapila are not older than our fifteenth century; but the origins of the system apparendy antedate Buddhism itself.⁷⁰ The Buddhist texts and the Mahabharata^70a repeatedly refer to it, and Winternitz finds its influence in Pythagoras.^70b

* “The evolution of Prakriti” says one Hindu commentator on Kapila, “has no purpose except to provide a spectacle for the soul.”⁸⁰ Perhaps, as Nietzsche suggested, the wisest way to view the world is as an esthetic and dramatic spectacle.

* Cf. the poem quoted on page 512 above.

† The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold as The Song Celestial, London, 1925, bk. vi, p. 35. Brahmacaria is the vow of chastity taken by the ascetic student “Me” is Krishna.

* Cf. Hobbes: Semper idem sentire idem est ac nihil sentire: “always to feel the same thing is the same as to feel nothing.”

† Eliot compares, for the illumination of this stage, a passage from Schopenhauer, obviously inspired by his study of Hindu philosophy: “When some sudden cause or inward disposition lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace that we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us.”¹⁰²

* The blunt Dubois describes them as “a tribe of vagabonds.”¹⁰⁹ The word fakir, sometimes applied to Yogis, is an Arab term, originally meaning “poor,” and properly applied only to members of Moslem religious orders vowed to poverty.

* Hence the name Advaita—non-dualism—often given to the Vedanta philosophy.

† Shankara and the Vedanta are not quite pantheistic: things considered as distinct from one another are not Brahman; they are Brahman only in their essential, indivisible and changeless essence and reality. “Brahman,” says Shankara, “resembles not the world, and (yet) apart from Brahman there is naught; all that which seems to exist outside of It (Brahman) cannot exist (in such fashion) save in an illusory manner, like the semblance of water in the desert.”^115a

* Cf. Blake:

      “I will go down to self-annihilation and Eternal Death.

      Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate,

      And I be seized and given into the hands of my own Selfhood.”¹¹⁷

Or Tennyson’s “Ancient Sage”:

                  “For more than once when I

      Sat all alone, revolving in myself

      The word that is the symbol of myself,

      The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

      And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud

      Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs—the limbs

      Were strange, not mine—and yet not shade of doubt

      But utter clearness, and through loss of Self

      The gain of such large life as matched with ours

      Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,

      Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.”¹¹⁸

* We do not know how much Parmenides’ insistence that the Many are unreal, and that only the One exists, owed to the Upanishads, or contributed to Shankara; nor can we establish any connection, of cause or suggestion, between Shankara and the astonishingly similar philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

* “No Indian saint ever had anything but contempt for the knowledge gained by the senses and the intellect.”¹²⁷ “Never have the Indian sages . . . fallen into our typical error of taking any intellectual formation seriously in the metaphysical sense; these are no more substantial than any Maya formation.”¹²⁸

* Cf. Spinoza: “The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of Nature.”¹³¹ “The intellectual love of God” is a summary of Hindu philosophy.

* Cf. Bergson, Keyserling, Christian Science, Theosophy.

* Some examples of Sanskrit agglutination: citerapratisamkramayastadakarapattau, upadanavisvamasattakakaruapattih.¹

† The movement for self-rule.

* The Babylonians had done likewise; cf. p. 250 above.

† Of printing there is no sign till the nineteenth century—possibly because, as in China, the adjustment of movable type to the native scripts was too expensive, possibly because printing was looked upon as a vulgar descent from the art of calligraphy. The printing of newspapers and books was brought by the English to the Hindus, who bettered the instruction; today there are 1,517 newspapers in India, 3,627 periodicals, and over 17,000 new books published in an average year.⁵

* I.e., instructions.

* We cannot tell how much of the following (and perhaps of the preceding) quotation is Bernier’s, and how much Aurangzeb’s; we only know that it bears reprinting.

* References in the Vedas to certain characters of the Mahabharata indicate that the story of a great intertribal war in the second millennium B.C. is fundamentally historical.

* E.g.: “Do naught to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain.”²⁴ “Even if the enemy seeks help, the good man will be ready to grant him aid.”²⁵ “With meekness conquer wrath, and ill with ruth; by giving niggards vanquish, lies with truth.”²⁶

† E.g.: “As in the great ocean one piece of wood meets another, and parts from it again, such is the meeting of creatures.”²⁷

* Couplets.

† l.e., the age in which literature used Sanskrit as its medium.

* An exceptional instance. Usually, in Hindu plays, the women speak Prakrit, on the ground that it would be unbecoming in a lady to be familiar with a dead language.

* The great Hindu theorist of the drama, Dhanamjaya (ca. 1000 A.D.), writes: “As for any simple man of little intelligence who says that from dramas, which distil joy, the gain is knowledge only—homage to him, for he has averted his face from what is delightful.”⁵²

* Sir William Jones reported that the Hindus laid claim to three inventions: chess, the decimal system, and teaching by fables.

† A lively war rages in the fields of Oriental scholarship as to whether these fables passed from India to Europe, or turn about; we leave the dispute to men of leisure. Perhaps they passed to both India and Europe from Egypt, via Mesopotamia and Crete. The influence of the Panchatantra upon the Arabian Nights, however, is beyond question.⁵⁸

* Poetry tended now to be less objective than in the days of the epic, and gave itself more and more to the interweaving of religion and love. Metre, which had been loose and free in the epics, varying in the length of the line, and requiring regularity only in the last four or five syllables, became at once stricter and more varied; a thousand complications of prosody were introduced, which disappear in translation; artifices of letter and phrase abounded, and rhyme appeared not only at the end but often in the middle of the line. Rigid rules were composed for the poetic art, and the form became more precise as the content thinned.

* Rabindranath Tagore has translated, with characteristic perfection, one hundred Songs of Kabir, New York, 1915.

* Cf. p. 497 above.

† Perhaps the oldest printing of textiles from blocks was done in India,⁸ though it never grew there into the kindred art of block-printing books.

‡ From the Hindu paijamas, meaning leg-clothing.

§ These fine woolen shawls are made of several strips, skilfully joined into what seems to be a single fabric.¹⁰

* The secular Hindu dance has been revealed to Europe and America by the not quite orthodox art of Shankar, in which every movement of the body, the hands, the fingers and the eyes conveys a subtle and precise significance to the initiated spectator, and carries an undulating grace, and a precise and corporeal poetry, unknown in the Western dance since our democratic return to the African in art.

* More strictly speaking there are six ragas or basic themes, each with five modifications called ragini. Raga means color, passion, mood; ragini is its feminine form.

* Near the village of Fardapur, in the native state of Hyderabad.

* Among his preliminary sketches for The Last Supper.

† A supposition. We do not know who painted these frescoes.

* Hsieh Ho; cf. p. 752 below. The Sandanga is of uncertain date, being known to us through a thirteenth-century commentary.

* An exception outweighing this generalization was the copper colossus of Buddha, eighty feet high, which Yuan Chwang saw at Pataliputra; through Yuan and other Far Eastern pilgrims to India this may have been one ancestor of the great Buddhas at Nara and Kamakura in Japan.

* The correspondence of this interior with that of Christian churches has suggested a possible influence of Hindu styles upon early Christian architecture.^74a

* Swastika is a Sanskrit word, from su, well, and asti, being. This eternally recurring symbol appears among a great variety of peoples, primitive and modern, usually as a sign of well-being or good luck.

* Here, says Meadows Taylor, “the carving on some of the pillars, and of the lintels and architraves of the doors, is quite beyond description. No chased work in silver or gold could possibly be finer. By what tools this very hard, tough stone could have been wrought and polished as it is, is not at all intelligible at the present day.”⁹⁵

* The summit of the temple is a single block of stone twenty-five feet square, and weighing some eighty tons. According to Hindu tradition it was raised into place by being drawn up an incline four miles long. Forced labor was probably employed in such works, instead of “man-enslaving” machinery.

* In 1604 a Portuguese missionary told of hunters reporting some ruins in the jungle, and another priest made a similar report in 1672; but no attention was paid to these statements.¹¹³

* E.g., the lacquered stone Buddha in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

* I.e., minaret, from the Arabic manarat, a lamp or lighthouse.

* The Delhi Fort originally contained fifty-two palaces, but only twenty-seven remain. A harassed British garrison took refuge there in the Sepoy Mutiny, and razed several of the palaces to make room for their stores. Much looting occurred.

* It was a sad error of Shah Jehan’s to make a fortress of these lovely palaces. When the British besieged Agra (1803) they inevitably turned their guns upon the Fort. Seeing the cannon-balls strike the Khass Mahal, or Hall of Private Audience, the Hindus surrendered, thinking beauty more precious than victory. A little later Warren Hastings tore up the bath of the palace to present it to George IV; and other portions of the structure were sold by Lord William Bentinck to help the revenues of India.¹²³

† Lord William Bentinck, one of the kindliest of the British governors of India, once thought of selling the Taj for $150,000 to a Hindu contractor, who believed that better use could be made of the material.¹²⁶ Since Lord Curzon’s administration the British Government of India has taken excellent care of these Mogul monuments.

* Goods bought for $2,000,000 in India were sold for $10,000,000 in England.¹ The stock of the Company rose to $32,000 a share.²

* Literally, the “Brahma Society”; known more fully as “The Society of the Believers in Brahman, the Supreme Spirit.”

† It has today some 5,500 adherents.¹⁶ Another reform organization, the Arya-Somaj (Aryan Society), founded by Swami Dyananda, and brilliantly carried forward by the late Lala Lajpat Rai, denounced caste, polytheism, superstition, idolatry and Christianity, and urged a return to the simpler religion of the Vedas. Its followers now number half a million.¹⁷ A reverse influence, of Hinduism upon Christianity, appears in Theosophy—a mixture of Hindu mysticism and Christian morality, developed in India by two exotic women: Mme. Helena Blavatsky (1878) and Mrs. Annie Besant (1893).

* To the end of his life he accepted the divinity of Christ, but insisted that Buddha, Krishna and others were also incarnations of the one God. He himself, he assured Vivekananda, was a reincarnation of Rama and Krishna.^17a

* The more important volumes are Gitanjali (1913), Chitra (1914), The Post-Office (1914), The Gardener (1914), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and Red Oleanders (1925). The poet’s own My Reminiscences (1917) is a better guide to understanding him than E. Thompson’s R. Tagore, Poet and Dramatist (Oxford, 1926).

† Cf. his magnificent line: “When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.”²⁷

* In 1922 there were eighty-three cotton factories in Bombay, with 180,000 employees, and an average wage-scale of thirty-three cents a day. Of 33,000,000 Indians engaged in industry, 51% are women, 14% are children under fourteen.³⁵

* “People who abstain entirely from animal food acquire such an acute sense of smell that they can perceive in a moment, from a person’s breath, or from the exudation of the skin, whether that person has eaten meat or not; and that after a lapse of twenty-four hours.”³⁹

† In 1913 the child of a rich Hindu of Kohat fell into a fountain and was drowned. No one was at hand but its mother and a passing Outcaste. The latter offered to plunge into the water and rescue the child, but the mother refused; she preferred the death of her child to the defilement of the fountain.⁴¹

‡ In the year 1915 there were 15 remarriages of widows;, in 1925 there were 2,263.⁴⁴

* This does not apply to all. Some, in the significant phrase of Coomaraswamy, have “returned from Europe to India.”

* The deposed Mandarins at Tsing-tao.

* The Chinese scholar who helped Dr. Giles to translate some of the extracts in Gems of Chinese Literature, sent him, as a well-meant farewell, a poem in which occurred these gracious lines:

From of old, literature has illumined the nation of nations;

And now its influence has gone forth to regenerate a barbarian official.⁶

* The Yang-tze near Shanghai is three miles wide.

† Cf. p. 92 above.

* This is Confucius’ gloomy way of indicating that but for Kuan the Chinese people would still be barbarians; for the barbarians habitually buttoned their coats on the left side.²¹

* Professor Giles considers it a forgery composed after 200 B.C. by free pilfering from the works of the essayist and critic, Han Fei;³⁸ Dr. Legge holds that the frequent references to Lao (as “Lao Tan”) in Chuang-tze and in Szuma Ch’ien warrant continued belief in the authenticity of the Tao-Te-Ching.³⁹

* A form of communication that preceded writing. The word make is rather un-Laotzian.

* He adds, with reckless gallantry: “The female always overcomes the male by her stillness.”⁴⁶

† The Chinese think of the sage as reaching the maturity of his powers about the age of fifty, and living, through quietude and wisdom, to a century.⁴⁸

* The story is told by the greatest of Chinese historians, Szuma Ch’ien,⁵¹ but it may be fiction. We are shocked to find Lao-tze in the busiest city of China in his eighty-seventh year.

* Quoted on p. 668 below.

* Cf. Spinoza: “We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.”¹¹⁹

† Cf. one of Kant’s formulations of the “Categorical Imperative” of morals: “So to will that the maxim of thy conduct can become a universal law.”¹²¹

* “Let me write the songs of a nation,” said Daniel O’Connell, “and I care not who makes its laws.”

* For Shun and Yü cf. page 644 above; for Chieh and Chou (Hsin) cf. pp. 644-5.

* Cf. p. 731 below.

* I.e., the good in man is not born but made—by institutions and education.

* In an eclipse the penumbra is the partly illuminated space between the umbra (the complete shadow) and the light. Perhaps, in Chuang’s allegory, the complete shadow is the body, interrogated by the partly illuminated mind.

* “Hsi Shih was a beautiful woman; but when her features were reflected in the water the fish were frightened away.”¹⁹⁹

* E.g.: “Luxury, dissoluteness and slavery have always been the chastisement of the ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in which Eternal Wisdom had placed us.” Professor (now Senator) Elbert Thomas, who quotes this passage from the Discourse on the Progress of the Sciences and Arts, considers “Eternal Wisdom” an excellent translation of Lao-tze’s “Eternal Tao.”²⁰⁹

* All dates before 551 B.C. are approximate; all before 1800 A.D. are uncertain.

*Cf. p. 665 below.

* “The situation,” says Granet, “. . . was revolutionary. If the Emperor Wu had had some kindred spirit, he might have been able to profit by this and create, in a new order of society, the Chinese State. . . . But the Emperor only saw the most urgent needs. He seems only to have thought of using varied expedients from day to day—rejected when they had yielded sufficient to appear worn out—and new men—sacrificed as soon as they had succeeded well enough to assume a dangerous air of authority. The restlessness of the despot and the short vision of the imperial law-makers made China miss the rarest opportunity she had had to become a compact and organized state.”¹⁹

* The “Western Han” Dynasty, 206 B.C.—24 A.D., had its capital at Lo-yang, now Honan-fu; the “Eastern Han” Dynasty, 24-221 A.D., had its capital at Ch’ang-an, now Sian-fu. The Chinese still call themselves the “Sons of Han.”

* Unless there is truth in the rumor circulated on the death of the boy emperor, in the year 5 A.D., that Wang Mang’s family had poisoned him.²⁴

* Cf. Sir W. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization. London, n.d.

* The assumed name of a French physician who in the fourteenth century composed a volume of travels, mostly imaginary, occasionally illuminating, always fascinating.

† Arthur Waley.³⁷ Cf. the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th ed., xviii, 361): “In the T’ang Dynasty. China was without doubt the greatest and most civilized power in the world.”

* “When the Tatars overthrew Ming Huang and sacked Chang-an,” says Arthur Waley, “it was as if Turks had ravaged Versailles in the time of Louis XIV.”³⁸

* It is a pretty tale, perhaps composed by Li Po.

* A precious wood.

† Cf. p. 694 above.

* From the Chinese K’o T’ou—to knock the head on the ground in homage.

* The most famous of China’s many renditions of the infatuation of Ming Huang with Yang Kwei-fei, her death in revolution, and Ming’s misery in restoration. The poem is not quite everlasting, but too long for quotation here.

* A famous Chinese painting pictures “The Poet Tu Fu in the Thatched Cottage.” It may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

* It has been well translated by Mrs. Pearl Buck under the title, All Men Are Brothers, New York, 1933.

† Translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, 2 vols., Shanghai, 1925.

* On the function of the Censors cf. p. 798 below. Not one of them, Han Yü implies, had protested against the plans of the Emperor Te Tsung to give his approval to Buddhism.

* The passage is quoted in full on page 668 above.

* The Rhus vernicifera. Lacquer is from the French lacre, resin, which in turn derives from the Latin lac, milk.

* Cf. p. 897 below.

† Patina (Latin for dish) is formed by the disintegration of the metal surface through contact with moisture or earth. It is the fashion today to value bronzes partly according to the green or black patina left on them by time—or by the acids used in the modern production of “ancient” art.

* There are some examples of this style in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* Their origin, in name and fact, is in much dispute. The word may be taken from the Hindu-Persian term but-kadah—“house of idols”; the form may be indigenous to China, as some think,⁵⁴ or may be derived from the spire that crowned some Hindu topes.⁵⁵

* Though writing is in its origin a form of drawing or painting, the Chinese classify painting as a form of writing, and consider calligraphy, or beautiful writing, as a major art. Specimens of fine writing are hung on the walls in Chinese and Japanese homes; and devotees of the art have pursued its masterpieces as modern collectors roam over continents to find a picture or a vase. The most famous of Chinese calligraphers was Wang Hsi-chih (ca. 400 A.D.); it was on the Chinese characters as formed by his graceful hand that the characters were cut when block-printing began. The great T’ang emperor, T’ai Tsung, resorted to theft to get from Pien-tsai a scroll written by Wang Hsi-chih. Thereupon Pien-tsai, we are told, lost appetite and died.⁶²

* The British Museum assigns to him a faded but lovely scroll of five pictures illustrating model family life;⁷⁰ the Temple of Confucius at Chü-fu contains a stone engraving purporting to follow a design of Ku; and the Freer Gallery at Washington contains two excellent copies of compositions attributed to him.⁷¹

* Cf. p. 798 below.

* Only copies remain: chiefly a “Waterfall” in the Temple of Chisakuin at Kyoto,⁷⁹ and a roll (in both the British Museum and the Freer Gallery) entitled “Scenery of the Wang Ch’uan.”⁸⁰

† Cf. Croce’s view that art lies in the conception rather than in the execution.⁸⁴

* The Freer Gallery at Washington has a “Landscape on the Hoang-ho” uncertainly attributed to Kuo Hsi.⁹²

* A landscape attributed to Mi Fei may be seen in Room E 11 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

† Particularly striking is “The Lady Ling-chao Standing in the Snow.” The Lady (a Buddhist mystic of the eighth century) is quite still in meditation, like Socrates in the snow at Platæa. The world (the artist seems to say) is nothing except to a mind; and that mind can ignore it—for a while.

* Landscape painting was called simply shan-sui—i.e., mountains and water.

* When porcelain was introduced into Europe it was named after the porcellana, or cowrie shell, which in turn derived its name from its supposed resemblance to the rounded back of a porcella, or little hog.¹⁰²

† The Egyptians had glazed pottery unknown centuries before Christ. The decorations on the earliest glazed pottery of China indicate that China had learned the glazing process from the Near East.¹⁰⁴

* A term applied to them by the French of the seventeenth century from the name of the hero of d’Urfé’s novel l’Astrée, who, in the dramatization of the story, was always dressed in green.¹⁰⁸

† From the Occidental point of view the one is as hard as the other; for the Japanese, who have gathered in most of China’s famous céladon, refuse to sell it at any price; and no later potter has been able to rival the perfection of Sung artistry in this field.

* The name given by the Chinese to an ivory-colored species of Sung porcelain.

* Excellent specimens of the last two groups may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* An English form of the Russian name for China—Kitai, originally the name of a Mongolian tribe.

* “Shangtu” is Coleridge’s “Xanadu.” The central Asian regions described by Polo were not explored again by Europeans (with one forgotten exception) until 1838.

* “Not a day passes,” writes Marco Polo, “in which there are not distributed, by the regular officers, twenty thousand vessels of rice, millet, and panicum. By reason of this admirable and astonishing liberality which the Great Khan exercises towards the poor, the people all adore him.”⁸

* Kublai Khan had proved his conversion to civilization by developing gout.¹²

* She obeyed, and story has it that many concubines followed her example.¹⁴

* “Occupied without rest in the diverse cares of a government which men admire, the greatest monarch in the world is also the most lettered man in his empire.”

* The following description of Chinese society will apply chiefly to the nineteenth century; the changes brought on by contact with the West will be studied later. Every description must be taken with reserve, since a civilization is never quite the same over a long period of time or an extensive area of space.

* The denuded slopes and hills, unable to hold the rain-water that fell upon them, lost their top-soil, became arid, and offered no obstacle to the flooding of the valleys by the heavy rains.

* The spinning of silk out of the cocoons of wild silkworms was known to the ancient classical world; but the breeding of the worms and the gathering and weaving of the silk as an industry were introduced into Europe from China by Nestorian monks about 552 A.D.⁴⁶ The art was brought from Constantinople to Sicily in the twelfth century, and to England in the fifteenth.

* It was not unusual for a Chinese host, when entertaining guests, to pass delicate fabrics around among them,⁴⁸ as another might exhibit porcelain or unravel his favorite paintings or calligraphic scrolls.

* A word of Hindu origin, probably from the Tamil kuli, hired servant.

* Copper is still the dominant currency, in the form of the “cash”—worth a third or a half of a cent—and the “tael,” which is worth a thousand “cash.”

* His machine consisted of eight copper dragons placed on delicate springs around a bowl in whose center squatted a toad with open mouth. Each dragon held a copper ball in its mouth. When an earthquake occurred, the dragon nearest its source dropped its ball into the mouth of the toad. Once a dragon released its ball, though no shock had been felt by the inhabitants. Chang Heng was ridiculed as a charlatan, until a messenger arrived who told of an earthquake in a distant province.⁶⁹

† Feng shut (wind and water) was the art, very widespread in China, of adapting the location of homes and graves to the currents of wind and water in the locality.

* Christianity lost its opportunity early in the eighteenth century, when a quarrel arose between the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic orders in China. The Jesuits had, with characteristic statesmanship, found formulas by which the essential elements of Chinese piety—ancestor worship and the adoration of heaven—could be brought under Christian forms without disrupting deep-rooted institutions or endangering the moral stability of China; but the Dominicans and Franciscans demanded a stricter interpretation, and denounced all Chinese theology and ritual as inventions of the devil. The enlightened Emperor K’ang-hsi was highly sympathetic to Christianity; he entrusted his children to Jesuit tutors, and offered on certain conditions to become a Christian. When the Church officially adopted the rigid attitude of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, K’ang-hsi withdrew his support of Christianity, and his successors decided to oppose it actively.⁹¹ In later days the greedy imperialism of the West weakened the persuasiveness of Christian preaching, and precipitated the passionate anti-Christianism of the revolutionary Chinese.

* Men sometimes prepared themselves openly for a night in a brothel by pictures, aphrodisiacs and songs.¹⁰⁰ It should be added that this lenience towards marital deviations is disappearing today.

* Chinese legend illustrates this with characteristic humor by the story of Hakuga, who was whipped daily by his mother, but never cried. One day, however, he cried as he was being beaten; and being asked the cause of this unusual disturbance he answered that he wept because his mother, now old and weak, was unable to hurt him with her blows.¹²²

* In many cities hucksters stood at the roadside with saucer, dice and cup in hand, ready for the casual gambler.¹²³

* Hence his realm was sometimes called Tien-Chan, the “heaven-ruled.” Europeans translated this into the “Celestial Kingdom,” and spoke of the Chinese learnedly as “Celestials.”¹³³

* The imperial revenue towards the close of the last century averaged $75,000,000 a year; the revenues collected for local purposes amounted to an additional $i75,000,000.ia6 If these national receipts, essential to the maintenance of order, are compared with the $150,000,000 exacted of China by Japan in 1894, and the $300,000,000 indemnity asked by the Allies after the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of China becomes a mere matter of bookkeeping.

* From these local schools the children might go on to one of the rare and poorly-equipped colleges of the empire; more frequently they studied with a tutor, or with a few precious books, at home. Needy students were often financed through such schooling by men of means, on the understanding that they would return the loan with interest on their appointment to office and their access to “squeeze.”

* “Seldom,” says Dr. Latourette, “has any large group of mankind been so prosperous and so nearly contented as were the Chinese under this governmental machinery when it was dominated by the ablest of the monarchs.” This was likewise the opinion of the learned Capt. Brinkley.¹⁴⁰

* “The Chinese,” said Sir Robert Hart, “worship talent; they delight in literature, and everywhere they have their little clubs for learning, and for discussing each other’s essays and verses.”

*The meaning of this may be felt by recalling that a vest-pocket package of opium costs $30.⁴

* A dowager is a widow endowed—usually with a title coming down to her from her dead husband.

* Captain Brinkley writes: “It sends a thrill of horror through every white man’s bosom to learn that forty missionary women and twenty-five little children were butchered by the Boxers. But in T’ungchow alone, a city where the Chinese made no resistance, and where there was no fighting, five hundred and seventy-three Chinese women of the upper classes committed suicide rather than survive the indignities they had suffered.”⁹

*He died at Peking in 1925, at the most opportune moment for his conservative enemies.

* From that time on the city, whose name had meant “northern capital,” was renamed Peiping, i.e., “the north pacified”; while the Nationalist Government, in order to be near its financial sources at Shanghai, maintained its headquarters at the “southern capital,” Nanking.

* Once Great Britain dominated the import trade; now it accounts for 14%, the United States for 17%, Japan for 27%;²¹ and the Japanese leadership in this field mounts with every year. Between 1910 and 1930 Chinese trade increased 600% to approximately one and a half billion dollars.²²

*In 1927 alone many thousands of workers were executed for belonging to labor unions.²⁵

† Some Chinese women pad their shoes to conceal the fact that their feet were bound.²⁶

* P. 673 above. Latterly the “New Life” movement, let by Chiang Kai-shek, has attempted, with some success, to restore Confucianism.

*The Revolution grants it where both parties ask for it; but where the husband is under thirty, or the wife is under twenty-five, the consent of the parents is required for a divorce. The old causes for which the husband may divorce his wife remain in force—barrenness, infidelity, neglect of duty, loquacity, thievishness, jealousy, or serious disease; but these are not allowed to apply if the wife has mourned three years for her husband’s parents, or has no family to return to, or has been faithful to her husband during his rise from poverty to wealth.³⁰

† The frank display of contraceptive devices in Chinese drug-stores may suggest to the West a convenient escape from the “Yellow Peril.”

* In 1932 the Union Medical College, a five-million dollar gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was opened to medical students of either sex. The China Medical Board, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, maintains nineteen hospitals, three medical schools, and sixty-five scholarships.³⁶

* Latterly, under the influence of Chiang Kai-skek’s New Life movement, the acceptance of Western models in mind and morals has abated; China and Japan are beginning to make their own motion-pictures; radicalism is giving way before a renewed conservatism; and China is tending to join with Japan in a revolt against European and American ideas and ways.

* If this account be questioned as improbable, the objection has long since been answered by the most influential of Japanese critics, Moto-ori: “The very inconsistency is the proof of the authenticity of the record; for who would have gone out of his way to invent a story apparently so ridiculous and incredible?”²

† The name Japan is probably a corruption of the Malay word for the islands-Japang or Japun; this is a rendering of the Japanese term Nippon, which in turn is a corruption of the Chinese name for “the place the sun comes from”—Jih-pen. The Japanese usually prefix to Nippon the adjective Dai, meaning “Great.”³

‡ Fuji-san (less classically Fuji-yama), idol of artists and priests, approximates to a gently sloping cone. Many thousands of pilgrims ascend its 12,365 feet in any year. Fuji (Ainu for “fire”) erupted last in 1707.⁵

* “This period named ‘Engi,’” says the enthusiastic Fenollosa, “must doubtless be reckoned the high-water mark of Japanese civilization, as Ming Huang’s had been that of China. Never again would either China or Japan be quite so rich, splendid, and full of free genius. . . . In general culture and luxurious refinement of a life which equally ministered to mind and body, not only not in Japan, but perhaps not in the world was there ever again anything quite so exquisite.”³¹

* Both rider and horse, we are told, were thrown into a panic by seeing the ghost of the brother whom Yoritomo had murdered; the horse stumbled, the rider fell, and Yoritomo died some months later, at the age of fifty-three.³⁷ The story is vouched for by his enemies.

† The Spanish Armada of 1588, on its arrival in the English Channel, had some 120 ships, with 24,000 men.^38a

* In 1596 a Spanish galleon was forced into a Japanese harbor by Japanese boats, was purposely driven by them upon a reef that broke it in two, and then was pillaged by the local governor on the ground that Japanese law permitted the authorities to appropriate all vessels stranded on their shores. The outraged pilot, Landecho, protested to Hideyoshi’s Minister of Works, Masuda. Masuda asked how it was that the Christian Church had won so many lands to be subject to one man; and Landecho, being a seaman rather than a diplomat, answered: “Our kings begin by sending, into the countries they wish to conquer, religieux who induce the people to embrace our religion; and when they have made considerable progress, troops are sent who combine with the new Christians; and then our kings have not much trouble in accomplishing the rest.”⁵⁹

* Dates of rulers are of their accession and their assassinated or deposed death. Several abdicated, or were assassinated or deposed.

* This sum, however, was probably equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars in current American money.

* A word coined by the late Inazo Nitobe.

* Hara-kiri was forbidden to women and plebeians; but women were allowed to commit jigaki—i.e., they were permitted, as a protest against an offense, to pierce the throat with a dagger, and to sever the arteries by a single thrust. Every woman of quality received technical training in the art of cutting her throat, and was taught to bind her lower limbs together before killing herself, lest her corpse should be found in an immodest position.¹⁸

* This practice was forbidden in 1699.³¹

† The arable exceptions were—and are—fertilized with human waste.

‡ During the months of July and August a siesta was permitted from noon till four o’clock. Sick workers were fed by the state, and free coffins were provided for those who died during the corvée,³⁶

* The worst of the many fires in Japanese history was that which completely wiped out Yedo (Tokyo) in 1657, with the loss of 100,000 lives.

* In 1905 Tokyo had 1100 public baths, in which 500,000 persons bathed daily for 1¼ cents.⁵³

* On the other hand those Japanese who have adopted a non-physical life while continuing to eat large quantities of rice are succumbing to digestive disorders.⁵⁶

* The tea-crop, of course, is now one of the important products of Japan. The Dutch East India Co. appears to have brought Europe its first tea in 1610, and to have sold it at some $4.00 a pound. Jonas Hanway, in 1756, argued that European men were losing their stature, and women their beauty, through the drinking of tea; and reformers denounced the custom as a filthy barbarism.⁶¹

* The Taiko and the Tea-Master loved each other like geniuses. The first accused the other of dishonesty, and was accused in turn of seducing Rikyu’s daughter. In the end Rikyu committed hara-kiri.⁶³

† Similar pilgrimages are made to see the maple leaves turning in the fall.

* This was done only in the lower classes, and in extreme need.⁶⁹

* “It was mainly in seasons when people were starving,” says Murdoch, “or dying in tens of thousands from pestilence, that the monks in the great Kyoto and Nara monasteries fared most sumptuously; for it was in times like these that believers were most lavish in their gifts and benefactions.”⁹⁸

† “In 1454 . . . boys were often sold to the priests, who shaved their eyebrows, powdered their faces, dressed them in female garb, and put them to the vilest of uses; for since the days of Yoshimitsu, who had set an evil example in this as in so many other matters, the practice of pederasty had become very common, especially in the monasteries, although it was by no means confined to them.”⁹⁷

* Cf. the opening pages of De Intellectus Emendatione.

* Cf. page 733 above.

* From Sir E. Satow’s paraphrase of Mabuchi’s teaching: “In ancient times, when men’s dispositions were straightforward, a complicated system of morals was unnecessary . . . . In those days it was unnecessary to have a doctrine of right and wrong. But the Chinese, being bad at heart . . . were only good on the outside, and their bad acts became of such magnitude that society was thrown into disorder. The Japanese, being straightforward, could do without teaching.¹²¹

* The katakana script reduced these syllabic symbols to straight lines—as in the “tabloid” press, the larger billboards, and the illuminated signs of modern Japan.¹

* Printing, like writing, came from China as part of Buddhist lore; the oldest extant examples of printing in the world are some Buddhist charms block-printed at the command of the Empress Shotoku in the year 770 A.D.³ Movable type entered from Korea about 1596, but the expense involved in printing a language still composed of thousands of characters kept its use from spreading until the Restoration of 1858 opened the doors to European influence. Even today a Japanese newspaper requires a font of several thousand characters.⁴ Japanese typography, despite these difficulties, is one of the most attractive forms of printing in our time.

* The present writer regrets that the brevity of life has prevented his reading more than the first of the four volumes into which Arthur Waley has so perfectly translated Murasaki’s tale.

* Even into the ordinary home our Lady enters with understanding, and makes Uma no-Kami express, about the year 1000, a modernistic plea for feminine education: “Then there is the zealous housewife, who, regardless of her appearance, twists her hair behind her ears, and devotes herself entirely to the details of our domestic welfare. The husband, in his comings and goings about the world, is certain to see and hear many things which he cannot discuss with strangers, but would gladly talk over with an intimate who could listen with sympathy and understanding, some one who could laugh with him or weep, as need be. It often happens, too, that some political event will greatly perturb or amuse him, and he sits apart longing to tell some one about it. But the wife only says, lightly, ‘What is the matter?’ and shows no interest. This is apt to be very trying.”²⁵

* His description of this has been quoted above, p. 852.

* Hideyoshi’s generals, after successful campaigns, seem to have been content—occasionally—to be rewarded not with new areas and revenues, but with rare pieces of pottery or porcelain.⁴⁹

* The author is indebted to Mr. Adolf Kroch of Chicago for permission to examine his fine collection of netsuke and inro.

* Perhaps the great Shotoku Taishi, statesman and artist, had something to do with this achievement, for we know that he plied the chisel, and cut many statues in wood.⁶³ Kobo Daishi (ca. 816) was a sculptor as well as a painter, a scholar and a saint; Hokusai, to suggest his versatility, pictured him wielding five brushes at once, with hands and feet and mouth.⁶⁴ Unkei (1180-1220) made characterful portrait-busts of himself and many priests, and carved delightfully terrible figures of Hell’s Supreme Court, and those snarling gods whose function it was to frighten away, with the ugliness of their faces, all spirits of evil. His father Kokei, his son Jokei, and his pupil Jokaku helped him to make the Japanese supreme in the art of sculpturing wood.

* Toshiro was another name for Shirozemon; yaki means ware.

10 Perhaps the best of all collections of the Kano School—Mr. Beppu’s at Tokyo—was almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of 1923.

* The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a Korin “Wave-Screen,” which Ledoux pronounced to be “one of the greatest works of this type that has ever been permitted to leave Japan.”⁸⁰

* Who, having been exiled from Japan, sailed every day across the sea to gaze upon the Holy Mountain.

* An excellent collection of Hiroshige’s prints may be seen in the Boston Museum.

* This process corresponded essentially to the abolition of feudalism, serfdom or slavery in France in 1789, in Russia in 1862, and in the United States in 1863.

† These rights have been narrowly restricted by the war fever of the Manchurian ad venture.

* By the last official census Yokohama had 620,000 population, Kobe 787,000, Osaka 2,114,804, and Greater Tokyo 5,311,000.

† Transport by land did not grow as rapidly as marine trade, for the mountainous backbone of the islands made commerce prefer the sea. Roads remained poor by comparison with the West; and automobiles have only recently begun to be a peril in Japan. Already, however, the jinricksha, or “man-power-vehicle,” traditionally ascribed to an inventive American missionary in the early eighties,¹⁷ is disappearing before American and domestic motor cars and 200,000 miles of highway have been paved. Tokyo has a subway which compares favorably with those of Europe and America. The first Japanese railway was built in 1872, over a brave stretch of eighteen miles; by 1932 the narrow islands had 13,734 miles of iron roads. The new express from Dairen (near Por Arthur) to Hsinking (formerly Changchun), the capital of Manchuria, makes the 70a kilometers at the rate of 120 kilometers (approximately 75 miles) per hour.¹⁸

* The low remuneration of women is partly due to the expensively high turn-over among the women workers, who usually leave industry when they have amassed a marriage dowry.

* Women engaged in teaching or industry wear uniforms of Occidental cut. Both sexes, after working hours, relax into the traditional costumes.

* During the chaos that followed the earthquake of 1923 the Japanese of Yokohama, while being fed by American relief ships, took advantage of the turmoil to slaughter hundreds (some say thousands) of unarmed radicals and Koreans in the streets.²⁴ Some passionate patriot, it seems, had aroused the Japanese by announcing that the Koreans (who were a mere handful) were planning to overthrow the Government and kill the Emperor.

† “I have lived,” said Lafcadio Hearn, “in districts where no case of theft had occurred for hundreds of years—where the newly-built prisons of Meiji remained empty and useless.”²⁵

‡ Black Dragon is the Chinese name for the Amur River, which separates Manchuria from Siberia. The Japanese look upon assassination as merely a dignified substitute for exile.

* Such science as existed in Japan before 1853 was mostly an importation from the parental mainland. The Japanese calendar, previously based upon the phases of the moon, was readjusted to the solar year by a Korean priest about 604 A.D. In 680 A.D. Chinese modifications were introduced, and Japan took over (and still retains) the Chinese method of reckoning events by reference to the name and year of the reigning emperor. The Gregorian calendar was adopted by Japan in 1873.

* The current fever of nationalism has brought with it a revival of native motifs and styles.

* In 1934 the population of the Japanese Empire (i.e., Japan, Korea, Formosa and some minor possessions) totaled eighty millions. Should Japan succeed in reconciling the inhabitants of Manchuria to Japanese rule, it will control, for industry and war, 110,000,000 people. As the population of Japan alone increases by a million a year, and that of the United States is rapidly approaching a stationary condition, the two systems may soon confront each other with approximately equal populations.

* The ratio of 5-5-3 was based upon the greater extent of coast-lines or possessions requiring English or American defense, as compared with the limited and protected territory of Japan.

* By this principle the number of immigrants from any country was to bear the same ratio to the total of permitted annual immigration as persons of that nationality had borne to the total population of America in 1890.

* Written in 1934.

* It is possible that agriculture and the domestication of animals are as ancient in neolithic Europe as in neolithic Asia; but it seems more likely that the New Stone Age cultures of Europe were younger than those of Africa and Asia. Cf. Chapter VI above.

† In this and subsequent statements the word known is to be understood.

* A═Arabic; C═Chinese; E═Egyptian; F═French; G═German; Gr═Greek; He═Hebrew; H═one of the Hindu languages; I═Italian; J═Japanese; L═Latin; S═Sumerian; Sp═Spanish.

* Books starred are recommended for further study.

* The full title of a book is given only on its first occurrence in these Notes; abbreviated later references may be filled out by consulting the foregoing Bibliographical Guide to Books Referred to in the Text.

* The diacritical marks used in this index will indicate that the letters so marked are to be sounded approximately like the italicized letters in the following words: āle, câre, ădd, ärm, ; Chair; ēve, , makēr; go; īce, ; k like ch in German Ich; ôrb, ; oil, out; ūnite, ŭp, menü; short ŭ, when italicized, will be as in circus.