But in 1881 came discoveries which settled the question entirely. In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the Anthropological Institute, and J. F. Campbell, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England, found implements not only in alluvial deposits, associated with the bones of the zebra, hyena, and other animals which have since retreated farther south, but, at Djebel Assas, near Thebes, they found implements of chipped flint in the hard, stratified gravel, from six and a half to ten feet below the surface; relics evidently, as Mr. Campbell says, "beyond calculation older than the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs." They certainly proved that Egyptian civilization had not issued in its completeness, and all at once, from the hand of the Creator in the time of Mena. Nor was this all. Investigators of the highest character and ability—men like Hull and Flinders Petrie—revealed geological changes in Egypt requiring enormous periods of time, and traces of man's handiwork dating from a period when the waters in the Nile Valley extended hundreds of feet above the present level. Thus was ended the contention of Mr. Southall.
Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came from France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Oratory, published his Age of Stone and Primitive Man. He had been especially vexed at the arrangement of prehistoric implements by periods at the Paris Exposition of 1878; he bitterly complains of this as having an anti-Christian tendency, and rails at science as "the idol of the day." He attacks Mortillet, one of the leaders in French archaeology, with a great display of contempt; speaks of the "venom" in books on prehistoric man generally; complains that the Church is too mild and gentle with such monstrous doctrines; bewails the concessions made to science by some eminent preachers; and foretells his own martyrdom at the hands of men of science.
Efforts like this accomplished little, and a more legitimate attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology by showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming, and in Judea for circumcision, and that these flint knives might have had this later origin. But the argument against the conclusions drawn from this view was triple: First, as we have seen, not only stone knives, but axes and other implements of stone similar to those of a prehistoric period in western Europe were discovered; secondly, these implements were discovered in the hard gravel drift of a period evidently far earlier than that of Mena; and, thirdly, the use of stone implements in Egyptian and Jewish sacred functions within the historic period, so far from weakening the force of the arguments for the long and slow development of Egyptian civilization from the men who used rude flint implements to the men who built and adorned the great temples of the early dynasties, is really an argument in favour of that long evolution. A study of comparative ethnology has made it clear that the sacred stone knives and implements of the Egyptian and Jewish priestly ritual were natural survivals of that previous period. For sacrificial or ritual purposes, the knife of stone was considered more sacred than the knife of bronze or iron, simply because it was ancient; just as to-day, in India, Brahman priests kindle the sacred fire not with matches or flint and steel, but by a process found in the earliest, lowest stages of human culture—by violently boring a pointed stick into another piece of wood until a spark comes; and just as to-day, in Europe and America, the architecture of the Middle Ages survives as a special religious form in the erection of our most recent churches, and to such an extent that thousands on thousands of us feel that we can not worship fitly unless in the midst of windows, decorations, vessels, implements, vestments, and ornaments, no longer used for other purposes, but which have survived in sundry branches of the Christian Church, and derived a special sanctity from the fact that they are of ancient origin.
Taking, then, the whole mass of testimony together, even though a plausible or very strong argument against single evidences may be made here and there, the force of its combined mass remains, and leaves both the vast antiquity of man and the evolution of civilization from its lowest to its highest forms, as proved by the prehistoric remains of Egypt and so many other countries in all parts of the world, beyond a reasonable doubt. Most important of all, the recent discoveries in Assyria have thrown a new light upon the evolution of the dogma of "the fall of man." Reverent scholars like George Smith, Sayce, Delitzsch, Jensen, Schrader, and their compeers have found in the Ninevite records the undoubted source of that form of the fall legend which was adopted by the Hebrews and by them transmitted to Christianity.(193)
(193) For Mr. Southall's views, see his Recent Origin of Man, p. 20
and elsewhere. For Mr. Gosse'e views, see his Omphalos as cited in the
chapter on Geology in this work. For a summary of the work of Arcelin,
Hamy, Lenormant, Richard, Lubbock, Mook, and Haynes, see Mortillet, Le
Prehistorique, passim. As to Zittel's discovery, see Oscar Fraas's Aus
dem Orient, Stuttgart, 1878. As to the striking similarities of the stone
implements found in Egypt with those found in the drift and bone
caves, see Mook's monograph, Wurzburg, 1880, cited in the next chapter,
especially Plates IX, XI, XII. For even more striking reproductions
of photographs showing this remarkable similarity between Egyptian
and European chipped stone remains, see H. W. Haynes, Palaeolithic
Implements in Upper Egypt, Boston, 1881. See also Evans, Ancient Stone
Implements, chap. i, pp. 8, 9, 44, 102, 316, 329. As to stone implements
used by priests of Jehovah, priests of Baal, priests of Moloch, priests
of Odin, and Egyptian priests, as religious survivals, see Cartailhac,
as above, 6 and 7; also Lartet, in De Luynes, Expedition to the Dead
Sea; also Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, pp. 96, 97;
also Sayce, Herodotus, p. 171, note. For the discoveries by Pitt-Rivers,
see the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and
Ireland for 1882, vol. xi, pp. 382 et seq.; and for Campbell's decision
regarding them, see ibid., pp. 396, 397. For facts summed up in the
words, "It is most probable that Egypt at a remote period passed like
many other countries through its stone period," see Hilton Price, F. S.
A., F. G. S., paper in the Journal of the Archaeological Institute of
Great Britain and Ireland for 1884, p. 56. Specimens of Palaeolithic
implements from Egypt—knives, arrowheads, spearheads, flakes, and
the like, both of peculiar and ordinary forms—may be seen in various
museums, but especially in that of Prof. Haynes, of Boston. Some
interesting light is also thrown into the subject by the specimens
obtained by General Wilson and deposited in the Smithsonian Institution
at Washington. For Abbe Hamard's attack, see his L'Age de la Pierre et
L'Homme Primitif, Paris, 1883—especially his preface. For the stone
weapon found in the high drift behind Esneh, see Flinders Petrie,
History of Egypt, chap. i. Of these discoveries by Pitt-Rivers and
others, Maspero appears to know nothing.
CHAPTER IX. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY.
We have seen that, closely connected with the main lines of investigation in archaeology and anthropology, there were other researches throwing much light on the entire subject. In a previous chapter we saw especially that Lafitau and Jussieu were among the first to collect and compare facts bearing on the natural history of man, gathered by travellers in various parts of the earth, thus laying foundations for the science of comparative ethnology. It was soon seen that ethnology had most important bearings upon the question of the material, intellectual, moral, and religious evolution of the human race; in every civilized nation, therefore, appeared scholars who began to study the characteristics of various groups of men as ascertained from travellers, and to compare the results thus gained with each other and with those obtained by archaeology.
Thus, more and more clear became the evidences that the tendency of the race has been upward from low beginnings. It was found that groups of men still existed possessing characteristics of those in the early periods of development to whom the drift and caves and shell-heaps and pile-dwellings bear witness; groups of men using many of the same implements and weapons, building their houses in the same way, seeking their food by the same means, enjoying the same amusements, and going through the same general stages of culture; some being in a condition corresponding to the earlier, some to the later, of those early periods.
From all sides thus came evidence that we have still upon the earth examples of all the main stages in the development of human civilization; that from the period when man appears little above the brutes, and with little if any religion in any accepted sense of the word, these examples can be arranged in an ascending series leading to the highest planes which humanity has reached; that philosophic observers may among these examples study existing beliefs, usages, and institutions back through earlier and earlier forms, until, as a rule, the whole evolution can be easily divined if not fully seen. Moreover, the basis of the whole structure became more and more clear: the fact that "the lines of intelligence have always been what they are, and have always operated as they do now; that man has progressed from the simple to the complex, from the particular to the general."