Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 01.djvu/16

vi what far distant epoch man first began to think for himself, we do not know. Those half-brutish minds of some long-forgotten "stone age" have left no trace of the vague first "Why?" with which they began mankind's eternal struggle to pierce the infinite. Feeble indeed must have been these earliest efforts of men to reach beyond immediate physical sensation, to understand themselves and the world around them, and the spiritual world which they felt expanding above them and beyond. So completely blank is the abyss of ignorance which our climbing forefathers have left behind them that, up to a century or so ago, mankind had scarcely a grain of knowledge of what had happened in the world three thousand years before.

Back of the Greek wars sung by Homer, we had almost no guide to earlier ages except in our Scriptures, the Old Testament account of the creation, so brief and so often isinterpreted and misunderstood. Beyond this one mighty Book of the past, with its attention centered on the Hebrew race, we possessed only a few loose references in old Greek authors, who mentioned Babylon and Egypt as fading lands of the past, in which the Greeks took little interest.

The nineteenth century changed this widely. The world of three thousand years ago is now almost as clear to us as yesterday's world. Moreover, we can look back twice as far, six thousand years perhaps, and know more of that distant date than our fathers knew of Homer's time. Even beyond six thousand years we have now well-defined glimpses of an earlier age, of races at least semi-civilized in an antiquity for which we have no measuring terms of years.

Whence has come this tremendous unfolding of the leaves of the past? It is one of the chief triumphs ever gained by human intellect. With wonderful patience and ability, our scientists have sought and compared and studied over all the scattered fragments of antiquity which they have found throughout Asia and North Africa. Not only Egypt and Babylonia, but India, China, Persia, and a score of