Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/186

 XXXI Rome Comes into History THE reader will note a general similarity in the history of all these civilizations in spite of the effectual separation caused by the great barriers of the Indian north-west frontier and of the mountain masses of Central Asia and further India. First for thousands of years the heliolithic culture spread over all the warm and fertile river valleys of the old world and developed a temple system and priest rulers about its sacrificial traditions. Apparently its first makers were always those brunette peoples we have spoken of as the central race of mankind. Then the nomads came in from the regions of seasonal grass and seasonal migrations and superposed their own characteristics and often their own language on the primitive civiliza- tion. They subjugated and stimulated it, and were stimulated to fresh developments and made it here one thing and here another. In Mesopotamia it was the Elamite and then the Semite, and at last the Nordic Medes and Persians and the Greeks who supplied the ferment ; over the region of the .^gean peoples it was the Greeks ; in India it was the Aryan-speakers ; in Egypt there was a thinner infusion of conquerors into a more intensely saturated priestly civilization ; in China, the Hun conquered and was absorbed and was followed by fresh Huns. China was Mongolized just as Greece and North India was Aryanized and Mesopotamia Semitized and Aryanized. Every- where the ncmads destroyed much, but everywhere they brought in a new spirit of free enquiry and moral innovation. They ques- tioned the beliefs of immemorial ages. They let daylight into the temples. They set up kings who were neither priests nor gods but mere leaders among their captains and companions. In the centuries following the sixth century b.c. we find every- where a great brealdng down of ancient traditions and a new spirit of moral and intellectual enquiry awake, a spirit never more to be altogether stUled in the great progressive movement of mankind i66