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Art. 10.-THEORIES OF CIVILISATION.

1. The Children of the Sun. By W. J. Perry. Methuen, 1923.

2. The Evolution of the Dragon. By G. Elliot Smith. Manchester University Press, 1919.

IT has been noticed that Herodotus tends to lower his standards of criticism when the subject under discussion is far away in place or time. He is not singular in this respect. All ages look for marvels in far countries; the ancients talked of one-eyed Arimaspians, blameless Ethiopians, and Hyperboreans equally irreproachable. Medieval writers have strange tales of the empire of Prester John, with its sagittarians and griffins, its fountains of milk and honey; and the myth of the noble savage persisted from Tacitus to the 18th century, nor is it wholly extinct to-day. This credulity extends also to things distant in time. Golden Ages of peace and plenty, ages when men lived for centuries, married with angels, or entertained gods, these have still their place, not only in the 'good old times' of the fairy story, but in the beliefs, conscious or unconscious, of a large number of people to-day. The idea of a Golden Age, before war was 'invented,' actually becomes explicit in the theories of Mr Perry, and the glowing picture of a 'merrie' mediæval England, full of faith and beer, with a Church that encouraged dancing and promoted the advance of knowledge, which is drawn for us by Mr Chesterton, is another variation of the same theme.

This distance-lent enchantment is the mythopoeic historian's opportunity. And there exist other factors which favour his enterprise. Prehistory is a new science; its criteria are by no means agreed upon. Anthropology and ethnology, upon which it largely relies for its data, are still battlegrounds where rival theories about the most fundamental principles join issue. Geology, ancient geography, and zoology are hardly in better case. Even archæology, though a longer-established science, can on occasions give ambiguous results. Another fact which helps to make prehistory the happy hunting-ground of the bold theorist is the great increase of specialisation in knowledge that has taken place. It is probable that

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in the 18th century, the century of Hume, Gibbon, and Voltaire, when a much smaller educated class, brought up on the classics, shared a traditional culture of literary elegance and logical thought; when the mass of human knowledge was practically within the compass of a single mind, and the data were more easily verifiable; when, above all, the experts were known and their judgment carried overwhelming weight, the conditions would have been impossible for many modern theories, which now float into the world in newspaper articles or cheaplyprinted books, fathered by journalists, lecturers, or novelists, some of whom have achieved fame and won an audience in other spheres. Side by side with this tendency may be set the growing appreciation of the public for the views of men and women who have, for some reason, become popular figures-actresses, divorcées, preachers, athletes-on art, politics, economics, and other subjects, for knowledge of which they are often professionally disqualified.

The history of certain periods is peculiarly liable to distortion by uncritical writers. Either the information which we have is too abundant, or it is too scanty. The historian of the last hundred years, for instance, must reduce to order, by a drastic process of evaluation and selection, a huge mass of material, economic, social, political, and so on. An able writer, making use only of authentic facts, may group them in such a way as to produce a synthesis which, consistent in itself, is a misleading, or at best an imperfect, account of the reality. In this manner he may use the history of the period to justify Roman Catholicism, or Socialism, or Nordic superiority, or simply as the corpus vile on which to demonstrate the brilliance of his technique and the novelty of his theories. On the other hand, many periods, especially the earlier ones, of human history offer great temptations to the uncontrolled imagination. Thus Greek legends have been considered a cycle of Solar Myths; early Greek communities modelled on AngloSaxon lines, and matriarchy made to stand where it ought not, in the interest of theoretical symmetry.

This desire for symmetry, the desire to imprison the unruly stream of history between strait banks, is the greatest temptation of all. It is in some ways a subtle

one; for every real historian must, if he is to present his work in an intelligible form, perceive some 'pattern in the carpet,' some unity in the multitude of facts with which he deals. And from perceiving this design to imposing one of his own making is but a short step. Instead of the sculptor releasing a statue from the block in which it potentially existed we find a Procrustes, cutting off inconvenient limbs to fit his victim to theno doubt admirable-proportions of his bed. Examples of the more obvious kind may be found in Orosius and Salvian, who wrote treatises to prove the divine governance of the world, with the result that their works are now negligible as history, though still valuable as sources for an obscure period. Salvian's methods have been criticised by Gibbon as follows: 'Salvian has attempted to explain the moral government of the Deity; a task which may be readily performed by supposing that the calamities of the wicked are judgements, and those of the righteous trials.'

From this point of view let us now examine a modern theory, which, if it can be maintained, certainly reduces prehistory to a very convenient and easily memorised formula. Dr Elliot Smith, Professor of Anatomy at University College, London, and Mr Perry, who is on the staff of the same institution, believe that the difficulties of the subject have been overestimated. 'As knowledge increases, the historical process becomes relatively simple.'* Further, what we call 'civilisation' is 'a thing in itself, with its own mode of development.' It is a definite 'complex,' a bundle of practices, customs, and beliefs, all of them easily recognisable, which can pass from people to people, from one end of the world to the other, and still remain practically unchanged. So that if in China, or Peru, we observe traces of all, or any, of these customs (they include such things as Irrigation, Love of Pearls and Precious Metals, Shipbuilding, Dualism of any kind in government or class, Megalithic Architecture, and Warfare), we can infer that the country in question was at some time in contact with the carriers of this precious bundle, the contents of which came originally from Egypt, the omphalos or hub of the civilisation of the whole world.

* W. J. Perry, 'The Growth of Civilisation,' preface.

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The methods pursued by these investigators can best be described in their own words. The probabilities against two communities having independently come to elaborate a culture that possesses, say, pottery-making, weaving, and agriculture are so tremendous that it can be assumed with confidence that this has never taken place.'* On the strength of this confident assumption, 'students are being forced more and more to believe in continuity, even where it cannot be demonstrated.' † Now, in order to be thoroughly symmetrical, we must assume that every community, with of course one exception, owes its culture to some other community. Hence, if the process be carried far enough, we shall 'find threads leading from all parts of the world to one centre, the source and fount of civilisation.' + What was this centre? Obviously Egypt, for these reasons:

1. It may be taken as a 'general theorem of practically universal application that the Egyptians invariably excelled all other ancient peoples in their skill in the manipulation of raw materials.' §

2. ' Egypt is the most likely place in all the world for men to have discovered irrigation.'

3. The Egyptians either invented or were the first known people to practise (the alternative is significant, in view of the gaps in our knowledge of the evolution of ancient arts and crafts) various fundamental arts and crafts,' among which 'elements of culture' are included pottery, gold, maces, polished stone implements, ships, weaving, ideas of immortality, and other items. As will be seen below, the evidence on most of these points will not stand examination.

The hypothesis proceeds as follows: The influence of Egypt, which had founded the civilisations of Crete, Sumer, and Elam' about the time of the First Egyptian Dynasty, 'became more and more potent until ultimately it spread across the world in a great wave that ultimately landed on the shores of America, and originated the civilisations of the Maya in Guatemala and Honduras, as well as those of Peru, of Costa Rica, and elsewhere.' Thus it can be said with confidence that the history

† Ibid.

W. J. Perry, 'The Growth of Civilisation,' p. 2.
§ Ibid, p. 21.

+ Ibid.

Il Ibid, p. 32.

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of the world in ancient times was but the reflexion of that of Egypt.

The wholesale nature of this theory naturally involves y the quotation of a vast number of facts and instances, selected from a corpus many times vaster, in support of it. Unfortunately for its upholders, the instances, and er in many cases the facts also, in practically every field run counter to those established by the experts in each particular department of research. Prehistoric Starchæology is not an easy science; long training and a we critical sense are needed to prevent the student from being led astray by false analogies. The interpretation of symbols may produce the most surprising results, as can be seen in a recent book, 'The Migration of Symbols,' dto by Mr Donald Mackenzie, who among other achievements, has, in the charming phrase of Mr Perry, 'accumulated a large mass of material, which shows how the idea of milk, so common in Egypt, has been carried round the world, and given rise to an immense in accumulation of symbolic thought, by its application to trees, shells, and so forth.'† Prof. Elliot Smith is also, like John Wellington Wells of Gibertian fame, a 'dealer in magic and spells.' According to Mr Perry, 'he has shown with considerable certainty (sic) that the beginnings of the ideas underlying magical and religious practice were bound up with shells. . . . One class of objects after another has been incorporated in the body of ideas concerning Givers of Life; so that, ultimately, vast categories are included in the scheme, all originally deriving their potency in thought from the homely cowrie shell.' We shall come later to these Givers of Life,' but it may be remarked in passing that the theory is helped on its way by a surprising use of etymology. "We know that the ancient Persian word for a pearl, "margan," "the giver of life," was adopted in all the Turanian languages.'§ This is an impossible derivation; and Prof. Elliot Smith's theory that the archaic civilisation' was spread largely by the search for pearls, which Mr Perry calls 'one of the most important generalisations

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* 'The Growth of Civilisation,' pp. 57, 61.

+ Children of the Sun,' p. 479.

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§ Encyclopædia Britannica,' 12th edition, s.v. 'Anthropology.' Haddon in 'Man,' December 1924.

Ibid, pp. 480-481.

Cf.

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