The first days of knowledge, as narrated quite simply for young readers

Front matter

Book_ l

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Thinkers.17

II The Wandering Tribes ... 24

Chapter I The Thinkers

Mother Nature and the Sun were looking down at the great round Earth.

“My little people are going ahead very fast now,” Mother Nature said. “So many of them are beginning to use their brains—to think.”

“I haven’t noticed that they are doing very much,” replied the Sun, glancing down his long, bright rays.

“That is because you haven’t been paying at¬ tention to them. The Earth is very small, I know, compared with some of the other worlds you shine on, but if you will watch the Earth

People carefully, you will see that what I have told you is true.”

So the Sun gazed down at the tiny Earth as it turned around and around every day in the sunshine, and this is what he saw.

The people who lived in the valley of the caves had long ago overflowed their first home, and wandering tribes of them had begun to spread all over the face of the earth.

This they had done because, as the years and the centuries went by, there was neither room nor food enough for them all in the valley, nor in the other valleys and hills which surrounded it, and so the strongest and bravest and most daring of them set out across mountains and rivers and plains and even the sea itself, to find new homes where food and game would be more plentiful, and easier to get.

Some of them settled on the shores of the ocean —the Great Water as they called it—and learned to make fish-hooks, and nets of twisted grass, and canoes, and even boats with sails.

Others found homes in fertile valleys, planting and raising grain and sweet roots for food, mak-

THE THINKERS ing jars and bowls of clay, burnt hard in the fire, taming animals to work for them and feed them with their milk.

Still others became nomads or shepherds, wandering over the wide grassy plains with their herds and flocks, living in tents, riding wild horses they had tamed, knowing nothing of the sea.

All these different tribes and peoples had learned a great deal. They had fire, and cooked their food over it. They knew how to make fine tools and weapons of flint, how to work in wood and carve stone, how to trap and fish, and hunt with spears and bows and arrows, tipped with flint or bone. And finally some of them discov¬ ered the metals, at first gold, and copper, and tin, and later on found out how to make bronze, and brass.

They had begun not only to gain knowledge, but to store it up, and it is this knowledge, stored up by the early peoples so many thousands of years ago that makes it possible for us to be civi¬ lised human beings to-day. We owe a great debt of thanks to these early thinkers for what they did for us. Had it not been for them, we would all be living like savages. It is to learn the things they discovered, that we go to school. How many children are there who think, when they read a sentence like this, printed on a page, that the minds of millions and millions of men have laboured, in the past, to work out and make pos¬ sible for us the simple little letters of the alphabet in which it is written? For thousands and thou¬ sands and thousands of years this has been going on, and everything we see and have about us we owe, in the beginning, to the work and the brains of these unknown women and men. It ought to make us see that the chance to learn what these forgotten thinkers worked out for us is something to be thankful for. We should not look on it as a task. Just suppose we had to work all these things out for ourselves!

These early peoples all over the world, in learn¬ ing about pottery, and boats, and cattle, and weaving, and glass, were, as we have seen, storing up knowledge for us, but for a long time this knowledge was in constant danger of being lost.

You can easily see that if one tribe found out how to raise grain and make it into bread, and an-

THE THINKERS

other tribe, wild and fierce, living on the flesh of animals, came along and attacked the first tribe and destroyed it, the tilings that the people of the first tribe had learned would be lost. And even when a tribe was able to live in peace there was no way for a long time for the older people of the tribe to hand down what they had learned to the younger ones, except by telling them. They could not write down what they had learned in books, as we do to-day, for others to read, because they knew nothing about writing, and such things as books had never been heard of. And in the beginning they did not even know how to speak, as we do now. They had a few words, of course, names for the sun, and fire, and water, and birds and animals, and other simple things of that sort, but they did not have words enough to tell any one how to do this, or that, and the only way the young ones learned how to do things, such as chipping flint or tanning leather, was to watch what the older men and women in the tribe did, and imitate them by doing the same.

So you can see that in the storing up of knowl¬ edge in those early days two things were very much needed. One—the first one—was a spoken language, words that people could use to tell other people about things, and which the other people could store up in their minds, and remem¬ ber, and carry away with them to still other people and tribes. For a very long time this was the only way in which the things the first men learned could be preserved and handed down from father to son, from one generation to an¬ other.

It was not, as you can see, a very good way. In such simple matters as pottery making, or weaving, or planting grain it was well enough, but when it came to more complicated things, to telling, for instance, of events that had hap¬ pened before, of what this or that leader or tribe or people had done, it was not good at all, for, as the years and hundreds of years rolled by, the stories that fathers told their sons got warped and twisted and changed, so that in the end they were quite different from what had really happened and not true at all. Some of these stories, or myths, as we call them, we can read even to-day. There is the story of Theseus and the Minotaur,

THE THINKERS for instance, or of Achilles, whose mother dipped him in the River Styx, or of Hercules and his labours. They seem nothing but fairy stories to us now, and yet, beneath most of them there must have been, long ago, some grain of truth.

So you can understand that in gaining, and particularly in preserving knowledge, the early men did not have an easy time of it, and it was not until the art of writing became known that true records of things could be kept, and handed down from one generation to another.

We are now going to read about some of the first big steps that the early men took in their search for knowledge, and because these first steps were nearly always taken by persons who used their brains, who thought about things, we can call them the Thinkers.

When we remember how much they have done for us, it ought to make us want to be thinkers too, in order to hand down something of value to those who come after us.

Chapter II

From the time of the early Stone Age, with its tools and weapons of roughly chipped flint, down to the days when Man began the use of bronze, many thousands and tens of thousands of years passed. All through this long period the differ¬ ent tribes of men were slowly spreading over the face of the earth, even to such distant lands as America, Australia and the Islands of the Pa¬ cific.

How they got to these far-off countries we do not know, but we do know that in those days the surface of the earth was very different from the way it is now. Many places now covered with water were then dry land. Huge glaciers of ice, spreading out thousands of miles from the poles, took a great deal of water from the ocean. Earth¬ quakes and volcanic explosions raised and sunk

I

continents. Scientists believe that the thousands of islands in the South Pacific are all that is left of a once great body of land extending from Aus¬ tralia to South America. Prehistoric men may have walked on foot around the world. Very, very long ago there were people—wild and sav¬ age people—in almost all the warmer parts of the earth.

But it was about the shores of the Mediter¬ ranean Sea that men began to take the first steps upward from a savage state. One of the earliest peoples of which we have any knowledge, the Cro-Magnons, roamed through Europe tens of thousands of years ago, hunting, killing wild horses for food, making rude pictures on the walls of their caves. After a time they dis¬ appeared, and it is thought that they wandered eastward into what is now Siberia, and may even have crossed to America by way of Bering Straits, to form the ancestors of the Indians, and of the Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico. Of this, however, we cannot be sure.

After them came a dark-haired, dark-skinned race which grew up around the shores of the

THE EARLY PEOPLES OF

EUROPE, ASIA AND AFRICA

Mediterranean and spread north through west¬ ern Europe as far as the British Isles, and east all the way to India and the Malay Peninsula.

Soon we find rising from the mists of the past three great civilisations, all beginning in coun¬ tries close to the Mediterranean Sea. The first and probably the oldest of these began in the clay country of Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, the country of the ancient city of Babylon, as you will see from the map. This far-off civilisation extends back some eight thou¬ sand years.

Not very much later, the Egyptians, that great people living along the banks of the Nile, in Africa, began to build a splendid civilisation of their own. Their history, too, as is shown by relics dug from the ruins of ancient cities and tombs, reaches many thousands of years back into the past.

A third great civilisation grew up on the Island of Crete, in the Mediterranean Sea. So far we do not know as much about it as we do of the other two, but enough has been found out to show that the people of Crete were very little if any behind the Egyptians in their knowledge of the arts and in their way of living. They were a rich and powerful nation, and spread their colonies all along the shores of the Mediter¬ ranean.

Later came the Phoenicians, a great trading and sea people, who built the ancient city of Tyre, and founded Carthage.

While all this was going on, there had begun to grow, in the forest country of Central Europe, a tribe of fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed people, who lived as barbarians, knowing nothing of the great civilisations to the south of them. Slowly they began to spread eastward, into the mountain country of western Asia, around the Black and Caspian Seas. Later on, as they grew stronger and stronger, they were to move both north and south, and finally form the great white race of to-day.

Upon the wide grassy plains of south Russia fierce nomads grazed their flocks. There were dark-skinned people in India, and Mongolians, with yellow skins, in China, with a very ancient civilisation about which we do not know very much. And in the jungles of Africa were the black races, which made no attempt to become civilised at all.

All these places and peoples of which we have spoken you will find clearly shown on the accom¬ panying map.

As you read the chapter about Tubal and his bronze sword, and the other chapters which follow it, you must not suppose that the things you read of all took place at the same time, or in the order in which you find them in this book. In writing about Man’s early discoveries in the field of knowledge it is impossible to say that this par¬ ticular thing was discovered first, and that one second, and so on, because thinking men were at work on almost all these things from the very earliest times, in many different countries and places. But while we do not know the order in which the first great steps in the gaining of knowledge were made, we do know that many thousands of years ago, perhaps four or five thou¬ sand years before Christ, men were beginning to write, to invent ways of measuring time, to ir¬ rigate their fields and gardens, to weave bright coloured rugs, to use metals, to make use of water wheels, and wheels for wagons, to build great temples to their gods, to carve splendid statues, to make music by means of wind and stringed instruments, to use weights and measures and numbers, and to do a great many other things which form the groundwork of our present-day civilisation.

Look at the map as you begin to read about Tubal and his bronze sword. Picture him com¬ ing down from the mountain country between the Black and the Caspian seas, cutting across the northern part of the clay country, and arriving at the Phoenician city of Tyre, then just a small village. When Tubal made his journey, civilisa¬ tion was well under way, not only in the southern part of the clay country, the land of Sumer, of which we shall read later, but also in Egypt, and in Crete. We have told of Tubal first, because the discovery of bronze was of such vast impor¬ tance to the world at that time.

In the chapter about the water clock we jump all the way to far-off China, a journey which in those days would have taken many months to make, if indeed it could have been made at all. Then we come back to the nomad tribes of west¬ ern Asia, to see how rugs were made.

Again we go back to China, and read about Silver Moon’s silk dress, because both the water clock, and the use of silk, we owe to the ancient Chinese.

Then we take a look at the savage, fair-skinned men who were growing up in the forests of Cen¬ tral Europe. They were just barbarians, then, far behind the dark-skinned peoples to the south and east.

Next we go down into the Valley of Clay, the earliest civilisation of all, and see how men began to use the water of rivers to make their gardens grow, and how they made the sun work for them. In the history of the clay country, too, we learn about battering rams, and other weapons of war, and about the beginning of the art of writing on tablets of clay.

After that we read of medicine, of ways of spreading the news, of the traders of Egypt, and Tyre, and Crete, of the sculptors of Egypt and other countries, carving great statues of kings, k

TILLING THE SOIL IN ANCIENT TIMES and gods, of music, and numbers, and many other things.

What you must bear in mind, as you read the different chapters, is not that these things took place one after the other, as you come to them, but that they were all going on at about the same time, some a thousand years earlier, some a thou¬ sand years later, but all, during that wonderful chapter in the Earth’s Story which extends from the dawn of civilisation down to the beginning of what we call history.

Remember, too, as you look at the map, that practically all knowledge of any importance was being gathered in the few countries you see marked upon it. The great outside world was in darkness, with the possible exception of some small tribes such as the Mayas, in eastern Mexico. It was from the peoples of the countries about the Mediterranean Sea that most of our knowledge has come.

Chapter III

Tubal the metal-worker stood beside his forge, a heavy stone hammer in his hand. The anvil at which he worked was also of stone, a great black¬ ened rock with a flat top.

He was a young man, broad-shouldered and strong. About his waist he wore a leather apron, but his arms and chest were bare.

Behind him was a forge, built of rough square stones, and the fire in it was made of charcoal. At one side was a bellows of skins, and when Tubal moved the handle of the bellows up and down, a strong blast of air was forced into the fire, making the charcoal glow with a fierce white heat.

Tubal put down his hammer and took from the anvil a mass of silver-white metal on which he had been beating. It was a lump of tin, and Tubal, after looking at it for a few moments, threw it on the ground in disgust. Then he sat down and began to eat some barley cakes and dried goat’s meat he took from a leather sack at his waist.

The reason for Tubal’s disgust was this. He was a famous worker in metals, and made knives, daggers, hammer and axe heads, and ornaments of many sorts out of copper, and silver, and gold. But try as he would he was not able to make a sword of copper which would satisfy his father and the other men of the tribe. The soft copper blades would bend, and even when ground to a sharp edge on a gritty stone, they would not stay sharp, but soon lost their edges and became dull and blunted.

Copper is a soft metal, and Tubal had never been able to find a way to toughen and harden it. So he was always on the lookout for some new metal, harder than the gold and silver and copper with which he worked.

Whenever travellers from far-off places came through the village he would ask them if they knew of any other metals, but they always shook their heads and told him they did not.

But the night before there had come to the vil¬ lage a traveller from the south, telling of strange sights he had seen—of dark men who sailed in ships, with oars along the sides, and sails of purple cloth, who lived in a wonderful island across the sea.

One of these men had bartered with him, the traveller said, giving him an armlet of strange white metal, in exchange for a woollen rug. He showed the armlet to Tubal, who bought it from him for a copper axe-head.

The next day Tubal took the bit of strange metal to his forge and began to beat on it with his great stone hammer, but he soon found, much to his disappointment, that the new metal was softer even than the copper with which he usually worked, and of no use at all for making such things as knives and swords. That was why he had thrown it down on the ground.

But as he ate his barley cakes and meat Tubal began to think. He had often, in the past, tried to make new metals out of the old ones, melting together gold and silver, or silver and copper, and forging from the mixtures bright chains and girdles, anklets, and handles for knives.

So, finding the lump of tin of no use for sword making, he took it from the ground where he had thrown it and tossed it into one of the tall narrow clay pots or crucibles he used in making and melt¬ ing up his various mixtures.

To the piece of tin, which was not bigger than the palm of his hand, he added four or five goodsized scraps of copper, and then buried the pot up to its neck in the red charcoal. This done, he began to pump his bellows, singing a queer, wild chant as he worked the bellows’ arm up and down.

The strong blast of air soon caused the bed of coals to blaze up. Tubal added fresh charcoal, pumping away until the clay pot began to turn first a deep red, then an orange, and, slowly, grew white hot.

The mixture of copper and tin softened, and soon began to bubble and blaze, giving off tiny flames of green, and yellow and blue. Then Tubal quickly made a little narrow mould in a bed of soft clay, after which he took a flat copper spoon and skimmed from the surface of the molten mixture the scum of dirt which had col¬ lected there.

When all was ready he lifted the pot from the fire by means of a pair of hooked tongs and poured the liquid metal into the little trench or mould he had made in the clay.

When the metal had cooled for a while, Tubal, eager to see how the new mixture looked, threw a bowl of water over it and presently lifted it from the mould. It was now a rough, narrow bar, about eighteen inches long and as thick through as his thumb. Tubal took it in his hands, holding it by each end, and tried to bend it, ex¬ pecting that, like the other mixtures he had made it would be soft and pliable. But, to his surprise, it would not bend the way a bar of copper would have done, but instead held its shape firmly.

Tubal was very much puzzled, for he had never seen a bar of metal like this before. And while he did not yet know it, he had discovered a new substance called bronze, which is made of a mix¬ ture of copper and tin. It is a strange fact, but none the less true, that two soft metals, such as copper and tin, when melted together, form bronze, which is much harder and tougher than either of them. This new metal, or alloy, as mix¬ tures of different metals are called, was later on to prove of great value to early men. Not only was it suited to making strong, sharp swords, spears and other weapons to be used in war, but it could be made into tools with which to work wood and stone, into arrow heads for the hunts¬ men, knives for all sorts of purposes, shields, hel¬ mets, bowls, cups, statues and ornaments. In fact, so useful was this new metal that the age in which it was used is often called the Age of Bronze, and came between the late Stone Age and the time when men discovered and began to use that greatest of all metals, iron. But we must not suppose that these different Ages came to all the peoples and nations of the earth at once. Some went ahead very quickly, from stone to copper and bronze, and then to iron, while others were still struggling along with their spears and axes of flint, just as some savage races of the earth are struggling even to-day.

Tubal took his bar of bronze and thrust it into the fire. Then he blew on the coals with his bel¬ lows, singing again the wild song he called the Song of the Sword. Tubal was happy. He felt that he had done a very wonderful thing, in find¬ ing out how to make this new metal, and so he sang joyously as he worked.

Presently he drew the glowing bar from the furnace, and holding one end of it in a thick scrap of leather, beat upon the white-hot metal with his hammer, shaping it into a sword.

All the rest of the day he worked, pumping at his bellows, heating and hammering, forging the bar into a flat, curved blade, pointing it roughly, bringing the edges down as fine and thin as his hammer would permit. At last, his work done, he thrust the blade into a jar of water to cool it, and then swung it about in his hand. Some young men of the tribe, returning home from the fields with their flocks, stopped to speak with him, but Tubal did not tell them anything about the new metal he had discovered. This, he felt, was a secret to be kept and guarded very carefully, and only to be handed down to others when he was

TUBAL BEAT THE WHITE-HOT BAR INTO A SWORD himself too old and feeble to work any longer at his forge.

The next day Tubal got some flat pieces of coarse, gritty stone and began to polish the weapon with them, working very carefully, first along the thicker, middle part of the blade, then out to the cutting edges, grinding and rubbing, hour after hour, until the sword was bright and clean from end to end, and so sharp that when he whirled it against the branch of a young tree the blade cut through the wood as though it had been soft clay. No copper sword would have done that, he knew, without the edge being turned and blunted, yet the blade of bronze was as keen and bright as before.

Tubal now forged about the upper end of the blade, where the bar had not been flattened, a ring of copper, and above this he fitted on each side a smooth piece of bone, held in place with copper rivets, to form a handle. Then, when all was done, he carried the sword to his father, Lamech, and placed it in his hands.

“For you, my father,” he said, “I have forged a sword the like of which no man hath seen before. With it shall you slay your enemies, and cause all men to fear you.”

Tubal’s father took the sword and looked at it carefully, and what he saw pleased him very much. He strode over to the fire where some of the women were about to kill a young sheep for the evening’s meal and told them to stand aside. Then with one sweep of the sword he cut the head from the sheep so cleanly that the animal’s body still stood on its four legs for an instant while the severed head fell to the ground. Lamech tested the keen edge of the blade with his thumb, then turned to Tubal.

“Tubal, my son,” he said, “from this day on shall you be called the greatest worker in metals among men, for you have done that which no man hath done before.”

And this is the story of Tubal, the metal worker, and of the first bronze sword.

Chapter IV

Hor, the head-man of Tubal’s tribe, was not pleased when he learned that Tubal’s father had a better sword than any he possessed himself. So he sent for the young smith, and received him sit¬ ting on a bench in front of his tent.

“Tubal,” he said, “make me a blade like the one you have made for your father, Lamech.”

Now Tubal was confused, for he knew that what Hor had asked of him was impossible.

“That I cannot do,” he replied, shaking his head.

“Why not?” The head-man scowled, for he did not think that Tubal was telling him the truth. “If you can forge one, why can you not forge another?”

Then Tubal told Hor about the magic metal he had bought from the traveller who came from the south, and explained how this metal, when melted with copper, made the copper tough and hard, but still Hor did not believe him, and thought that he wanted his father to have a better weapon than any one else in the tribe.

“Go you forth and search for this magic metal of which you speak,” the head-man said harshly, “and come not back before me without it, lest you die by the sword you have made.” Then he rose, with a black look, and went into his tent.

Tubal went away, greatly troubled, and sat be¬ side his forge, wondering what he should do. After a time there came to him his half brother Jubal.

“What troubles you, my brother?” Jubal asked.

Tubal told him the story of the sword. And Jubal listened eagerly, for he, too, had envied Lamech the keen blade, and wanted Tubal to make him one like it.

Now Jubal, who spent his days watching his brother Jabal’s cattle, had made for himself a pipe of reeds, on which he played sweet music, while alone in the fields, or in the evenings, when the men and girls of the tribe danced about the camp fires. And he thought a great deal about the strangers who sometimes came to the village, bringing with them ivory, and spices, and sweet perfumes in tiny bottles of glass, exchanging them for leather work, and carpets of wool, and shaggy ponies for their journeys. And when he heard their stories of far-off lands it seemed to him that nothing could be so fine as to go and see for himself all this new and wonderful world that lay beyond the snow-capped mountains to the south.