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Table of Contents

The dawn

of history.

When St. Paulinus came to preach Christianity to the people of Northumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) being minded to hear him, and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell; and one of the king’s thanes stood up and said, ‘Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where you, King, are sitting at supper in winter, while storms of rain and snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and straightway out again at another is, while within, safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So the life of man appears for a short space; but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are all ways ignorant.’[1] This wise and true saying of the Saxon thane holds good too for the human race as far as its progress is revealed to us by history. We can watch this progress through a brief interval—for the period over which real, continuous authentic history extends; and beyond that is a twilight space, wherein, amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or mythology, here and there an object or an event stands out more clearly, lit up by a gleam from the sources of more certain knowledge which we possess.

To draw with as much accuracy as may be the outline of these shapes out of the past is the business of the prehistoric student; and to assist him in his task, what has he? First, he has the Bible narrative, wherein some of the chief events of the world’s history are displayed, but at uncertain distances apart. Then we have the traditions preserved in other writings, in books, or on old temple stones—in these the truth has generally to be cleared from a mist of allegory, or at least of mythology. And, lastly, besides these conscious records of times gone by, we have other dumb memorials, old buildings—cities or temples—whose makers are long since forgotten, old tools or weapons, buried for thousands of years, to come to light in our days; and again, old words, old beliefs, old customs, old arts, old forms of civilization which have been unwittingly handed down to us, can all, if we know the art to interpret their language, be made to tell us histories of the antique world. It is, then, no uninteresting study by which we learn how to make these silent records speak. ‘Of man’s activity and attainment,’ Carlyle finely says, ‘the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in tradition only: such are his Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest on; his Customs or Fashions both of Cloth-habits and Soul-habits; much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired of manipulating nature—all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehicles from Father to Son; if you demand sight of them they are nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, even from Cain and Tubalcain downwards; but where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic and other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused? It transmits itself on the atmospheric air, on the sun’s rays (by Hearing and by Vision); it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual sort.’

How many of these intangible spiritual possessions must man have acquired before he has learned the art of writing history, and so of keeping a record of what had gone before: how much do we know that any individual race of men has learned before it brings itself forward with distinctness in this way! For as a first condition of all man must have learned to write; and writing, as we shall hereafter see, is a slowly developing art, which man acquired by ages of gradual experiment. His language, too, must ere this have reached a state of considerable cultivation; and it will be our object in the course of these pages to show through what a long history of its own the language of any nation must go before it becomes fit for the purposes of literature—through how many changes it passes, and what a story it reveals to us by every change. And then, again, before a nation can have a history it must be a nation, must have a national life to record; that is to say, the people who compose it must have left the simple condition of society which belongs to a primitive age, the state of a mere hunter or fisher, even the state of being a mere shepherd, the pastoral and nomadic life which precedes the knowledge of agriculture. He must have drawn closer the loose bonds which held men together under the conditions of patriarchal life, and have constituted a more permanent system of society. Whether under pressure from without, the pressure of hostile nationalities, or only from the growth of a higher conception of social life, the nation has had to rise from out of a mere collection of tribes, until the head of the family has become the king—the rude tents of early days have grown into houses and temples, and the pens of their sheepfolds grown into walled cities, such as Corinth or Athens or Rome. Such changes as these must be completed before history comes to be written; and with such changes as these, and with a thousand others, changes and growths in Art, in Poetry, in Manufactures, in Commerce, and in Laws, the pre-historical student has to deal. On all these subjects we shall have something to say.

Before, however, we enter upon any one of these it is right that we remind the reader—and remind him once for all—that our knowledge upon all these points is but partial and uncertain, and never of such a character as will allow us to speak with dogmatic assurance. Our information can necessarily never be direct; it can only be built upon inferences of a higher or lower degree of probability. It is, however, a necessity of our minds that from whatever information we possess we must form an unbroken panorama—imagination has no place for unfilled blanks; and we may form our picture freely and without danger of harm, so long as we are ready to modify or enlarge it when more knowledge is forthcoming. As the eye can in a moment supply the deficiencies of some incompleted picture, a landscape of which it gets only a partial glance, or a statue which has lost a feature, so the mind selects from its knowledge those facts which form a continuous story, and loses those which are known only as isolated fragments.

Set a practised and an unpractised draughtsman to draw a circle, and we may witness how differently they go to work. The second never takes his pencil off the paper, and produces his effect by one continuous line, which the eye has no choice but at once to condemn as incomplete. The wiser artist proceeds by a number of short consecutive strokes, splitting up, as it were, his divergence over the whole length of the figure he is drawing, and so allows the eye, or perhaps one should rather say the mind, by that faculty it has, to select the complete figure which it can conceive more easily than express. No one of the artist’s strokes is the true fraction of a circle, but the result is infinitely more satisfactory than if he had tried to make his pencil follow unswervingly the curve he wished to trace. Or again, notice how a skilful draughtsman will patch up by a number of small strokes any imperfect portion of a curve he is drawing, and we have another like instance of this selective faculty of the eye or of the mind. Just in the same way is it with memory. Our ideas must be carried on continuously, we cannot afford to remember lacunæ, mere blank spaces.

In the Bible narrative, for example, wherein, as has before been said, certain events of the world’s history are related with distinctness, but where as a rule nothing is said of the times which intervened between them, we are wont to make very insufficient allowance for these unmentioned periods, and form for ourselves a rather arbitrary picture of the real course of things, fitting two events on to one another which were really separated by long ages. To correct this view, to enlarge the series of known facts concerning the early history of the human race, comes in pre-historic inquiry; and again, to correct the picture we now form, doubtless fresh information will continue to pour in. All this is no reason why we should pronounce our present picture to be untrue; it is only incomplete. We must be always ready to enlarge it, and to fill in the outlines, but still we can only remember the facts which we have already acquired, if we look at them, not as fragments only, but as a complete whole.

In representing, therefore, throughout the following chapters, the advance of the human race in the discovery of all those arts and faculties which go to make up civilization in the light of a continuous progress, it will not be necessary to pause and remind the reader in every case that these steps of progress which seem to spread themselves out so clearly before us have been made in an uncertain manner, sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly and painfully, sometimes by immense strides, sometimes by continual haltings and goings backwards and forwards. It will be enough to say here, once for all, that our history must be thought of as a history of events rather than a strictly chronological one; just as the geological periods are not measured by days and years, but by the mutations through which our solid-seeming earth has passed.

The earliest

traces of man.

First we turn to what must needs be our earliest inquiry—the search after the oldest traces of man which have been found upon the earth. It has been said that one of the first fruits of knowledge is to show us our own ignorance; and certainly in the early history of the world and of man there is nothing which science points out so clearly as the vast silent periods whereof until recently we had no idea. It is difficult for us of the present age to remember how short a time it is since all our certain knowledge, touching the earth on which we live, lay around that brief period of its existence during which it had come under the notice and the care of man.

When all we knew of Europe, and especially of our own islands, belonged to the comparatively short time during which they have been known to history, we had in truth much to wonder at in the political changes these countries were seen to have undergone; and our imaginations could be busy with the contrast between the unchanged features of our lands and seas and the ever-varying character of those who dwelt upon or passed over them. It is interesting to think that on such a river bank or on such a shore Cæsar or Charlemagne have actually stood, and that perhaps the grass or flowers or shells under their feet looked just the same as they do now, that the waves beat upon the strand in the same cadence, or the water flowed by with the same trickling sound. But when we open the pages of geology, we have unrolled before us a history of the earth itself, extending over periods compared with which the longest epoch of what is commonly called history seems scarcely more than a day, and of mutations in the face of nature so grand and awful that as we reflect upon them, forgetting for an instant the enormous periods required to bring these changes about, they sound like the fantastic visions of some seer, telling in allegorical language the history of the creation and destruction of the world.

Of such changes, not the greatest, but the most interesting to the question we have at present in hand, were those vicissitudes of climate which followed upon the time when the formation of the crust of the earth had been practically completed. We learn of a time when, instead of the temperate climate which now favours our country, these islands, with the whole of the north of Europe, were wrapped in one impenetrable sheet of ice. The tops of our mountains, as well as of those of Scandinavia and the north of continental Europe, bear marks of the scraping of this enormous glacier, which must have risen to a height of two or three thousand feet. Not a single green thing, therefore, might be seen between our latitudes and the pole, while the ice-sheet, passing along the floor of the North Sea, united these islands with Scandinavia and spread far out into the deep waters of the Atlantic. For thousands of years such a state of things endured, but at last it slowly passed away. As century followed century the glacier began to decrease in size. From being colder than that of any explored portion of our hemisphere, the climate of northern Europe began to amend, until at last a little land became visible, which was covered first with lichens, then with thicker moss, and then with grass; then shrubs began to grow, and they expanded into trees and the trees into forests, while still the ice-sheet went on decreasing, until now the glaciers remained only in the hills. Animals returned from warmer climates to visit our shores. The birds and beasts and fishes of the land and sea were not much different from those which now inhabit there; the species were different, but the genera were for the most part the same. Everything seemed to have been preparing for the coming of man, and it is about this time that we find the earliest traces of his presence upon earth.[2]

We may try and imagine what was the appearance of the world, and especially of Europe—for it is in Europe that most of these earliest traces of our race have as yet been found, though all tradition and likelihood point out man’s first home to have been in Asia—when we suppose that man first appeared upon these western shores. At this time the continent of Europe stood at a higher level than it does now. The whole of the North Sea, even between Scotland and Denmark, is not more than fifty fathoms, or three hundred feet deep, while the Irish Sea is not more than sixty fathoms; and at this period undoubtedly the British Isles, besides being all joined together, formed part of the mainland, not by being united to France only, but by the presence of dry land all the way from Scotland to Denmark, over all that area now called the German Ocean. Our Thames and our other eastern rivers were then but tributaries of one large stream, which bore through this continent, and up into the northern seas, their waters united with those of the Rhine, and perhaps of the Weser and the Elbe. The same upheaval turned into land a portion of the Atlantic Ocean, all that bed probably which now extends from Spain and Africa as far as the Azores and the Canaries. The north of Africa was joined on to this continent and to Spain, for the narrow Straits of Gibraltar had not yet been formed; but a great sea stood where we now have the Great Sahara, and united the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, while a great Mediterranean Sea stood in Central Asia, and has left no more than traces in the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral.

We have to look at a map to see the effect of these changes in the appearance of Europe; and there were no doubt other internal changes in the appearances of the countries themselves. The climate still was much more extreme than it is now. The glaciers were not yet quite gone. And the melting of these and of the winter snows gave rise to enormous rivers which flowed from every hill. Our little river the Ouse, for instance, which flows out through Norfolk into the Wash, was, when swollen by these means, probably many miles broad. Vast forests grew upon the banks of the rivers, and have left their traces in our peat formations; and in these forests roamed animals unknown to us. Of these the most notable was the mammoth (Elephas primigenius, in the language of the naturalists), a huge, maned elephant, whose skeleton and gigantic tusks are conspicuous in some of our museums, and who has given his name to this the earliest age of man’s existence: it is called the Mammoth Age of man. With the mammoth, too, lived other species of animals, which are either now extinct, or have since been driven from our latitudes; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the cave bear, the Lithuanian bison, the urus, the reindeer, and the musk-ox. It is with the remains of these animals, near the ancient banks of these great rivers, that we find the earliest tools and weapons manufactured by human hands.

Implements of

the river drift.

The earliest of all the known remains of human-kind are the implements which are found deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. Now flooded by melting snow into huge lakes and now again drained off by the sudden bursting of a bound, it was natural that these great streams should often change their course, and often dig out huge areas of soil from the land upon their banks. In doing so they sometimes dug out the implements which earlier generations of men had left behind them on the surface of the soil, and which a few years would be enough to cover with mould and hide from sight. Then carrying along these implements of flint, they have deposited them in great beds of sand and gravel, somewhere in their ancient course.

We have no means of measuring the time which may have elapsed since these stone weapons and tools were made. And we need not speak here of the geological changes which must have passed over the surface of the earth since they were deposited upon it. All we know is that, after the great streams flowing through wide valleys have dug these implements from under the earth which time had heaped over them, carried them along and deposited them once more amid sand and pebbles in a bed upon some point of its course, the river must through long subsequent years have cut so much deeper into the valley through which it flowed, and at the same time probably so shrunk in its bed, that these river drifts, as they are called, stand in many cases fifty, eighty, a hundred feet above the level of the present stream. It is because they are found in the beds made by the ancient rivers, that the implements of this period are called drift implements.

The river Ouse, of which we spoke just now, which, though to-day a small river, drains a large and level country as it runs through the counties of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, has been one of the most prolific in this class of pre-historic remains. Another river which still better deserves to be remembered in this respect is the Somme in the north of France. For it was in the beds of this stream, by Abbeville and Amiens, that the drift implements were first discovered, or first recognized for what they really are, the earliest traces of human labour; and it was here that the foundation was laid for this branch of pre-historic study by M. Boucher de Perthes. This was forty-one years ago, in 1847.

These drift implements, then, form a class apart—apart even from all other stone implements made by man, and probably earlier than any other class. Very simple and rude are these drift implements. It would require a skilled eye to detect any difference between most of them and a flint which had only been chipped by natural means. But the first thing to remember is, that the makers of these implements had nothing but other still ruder materials to help them in this manufacture of theirs. Metals of all kinds were as yet utterly unknown to man.

We who are so habituated to the employment of metal, either in the manufacture or the composition of every article which meets our eye, can scarcely realize that man lived long ages on the earth before the metals and minerals, its hidden treasures, were revealed to him. This pen I write with is of metal, or, were it a quill, it would still have been shaped by the use of steel; the rags of which this paper is made up have been first cut by metal knives, then bleached by a mineral (chlorine), then torn on a metal cylinder, then thrown into a vat which was either itself of metal or had been shaped by metal tools, then drawn on a wire-cloth, etc. And so it is with everything which is made nowadays. We can scarcely think of any single manufacture in which is not traceable the paramount influence of man’s discoveries beneath the surface of the ground. But primitive man could profit by no such inherited knowledge, and had only begun to acquire some powers which he could transmit to his own descendants. For his tools he must look to the surface of the earth only; and the hardest substances he could find were stones. Not only during the period of which we are now speaking, but for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years lasted man’s ignorance of the metals, ignorance therefore of all that the metals could produce for him. The long age of this state of ignorance is distinguished in pre-history by the name of the Stone Age, because the hardest things then known to mankind were stones, and the most important of his implements and utensils had therefore to be made of stones.

There can be no harm if we so far anticipate our second chapter as to say that this Stone Age is distinguished by pre-historic students into two main periods: (1) the age in which all the stone implements were made exclusively by chipping, (2) the age in which grinding or polishing was brought in to supplement the use of chipping. Wherefore the first age is also called the Unpolished Stone Age, the second is called the Polished Stone Age. Not that by any means all the implements in the later age were made of polished stone; far from it. Only that, contemporaneously with the stone implements still made by chipping merely, others of polished stone were used. But of this more hereafter. Lastly, the two epochs are also distinguished more simply as the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age—or, turned into Greek, the Palæolithic Era and the Neolithic Era.

Now we go back to speak of the Palæolithic Era only. And in this we have as yet got no further than the implements of the river drifts. It is not to be supposed that at any time of his history man used implements of stone and no others; for wood and bone must have been always as ready to his hand as stone was, and for many purposes bone and wooden utensils would serve better than stone ones. But the stone implements would always deserve to be accounted the most important; because by means of them the others of softer material must have been shaped. As regards the drift deposits, here the remains of man’s work are exclusively stone implements, but probably only because all that were made of some softer substance have perished, or remain as yet undiscovered. And most primitive these stone tools or weapons are. By the rudeness and uniformity of their shapes as contrasted even with other classes of stone implements, they testify to the simplicity of those who manufactured them. They have for the most part only two or three distinctive types: they are either of a long, pear-shaped make, narrowed almost to a point at the thin end, and adapted, we may suppose, for boring holes, while the broad end of the pear was pressed against the palm of the hand; and secondly, of a sort of oval form, chipped all round the edge, capable of being fitted into a wooden haft, a cleft stick or whatever it might be, to form an implement which might be used for all sorts of cutting or scraping. A variety of this last implement, of rather a tongue-like shape, was called by the French workmen who worked under M. Boucher de Perthes, langue-de-chat. These might serve the purpose of spear-heads. Some have supposed that stones of this last form were used, as similar ones are used by the Esquimaux to this day, in cutting holes in the ice for the purpose of fishing: we must not forget that during at any rate a great part of the early stone age the conditions of life were those of arctic countries at the present time. A third variety of stone implements is made of thinner flakes, and capable of being used as a knife.[3]

We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man must have put his rude and ineffective weapons; we can only wonder that with such he was able to maintain his existence among the savage beasts by which he was surrounded; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of the way in which he got the better of their huge strength, as well as of his dwelling-place, his habits, and his appearance. Rude as his weapons are, and showing no trace of improvement, it seems as though man of the drift period must have lived through long ages of the world’s history. These implements are found associated with the remains of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally belonging to the arctic or semi-arctic climate which succeeded the glacial era; but like implements are found, associated with the remains of the bones of the lion, the tiger, and the hippopotamus, all of which, and the last especially, are rarely found outside the torrid zone. This would imply that the drift implements lasted through the change from a rigid to a torrid climate, and probably back again to a cold temperate one.