And now let us note one other thing—the point where the stone age seems to approach most nearly to the borders of actual history. History begins in Egypt. For no continuous Biblical history exists for the days prior to Abraham. But in Egypt, for many centuries before Abraham, we have a continuous history, or at least continuous chronicles and dynastic lists, whose authenticity is admitted, and the remains of no mean civilization in the buildings contemporary with these earliest chronicles.

Egyptian history may be said to begin with the builders of the pyramids. But the pyramids themselves are nothing else than the children of the tumuli of the second stone age. We may call them a sort of crystallized tumuli—barrows of stone instead of earth. But, in truth, the earliest pyramids were probably not built of stone. It is generally believed that the stone pyramids which we see to-day at Gîza and Sakkara were preceded by pyramids of unbaked brick. And what are such buildings of unbaked brick save carefully raised mounds of earth? Here, then, we get the nearest meeting-point between the stone age and the age of history.

Again, the principle upon which were constructed the Egyptian tombs—of which the pyramids were only the most conspicuous forms—were precisely the same as the principles which governed the construction of the more elaborate barrows. These last had not only a chamber for the dead. This chamber was in many cases approached by a passage also made of stones covered with earth; and there can be no question that the mouth of the tomb was used as a sort of ante-room in which the relatives of the dead might hold their wake, or funeral feast. Here have been found the traces of fires, the remains of animals, fragments of vessels of pottery, etc., used or consumed in the feasts. We may believe that the ceremony was repeated at stated intervals. The very same principle governed the construction of the Egyptian tombs. These likewise (in their earliest known forms) consisted of an inner tomb and of an outer chamber; generally between the one and the other there was a passage. The outer chamber is that to which archæologists have given the name of mastaba. In it the relatives of the dead continued year after year to keep a funeral feast in his memory. Or we may say more than in memory of the dead—with the dead, we may say. For the essence of the feast, the fumes of the baked meats, was thought to penetrate along the passage and reach the mummy himself in his dark chamber.

Ages of bronze
and iron.

Thus we come to the end of the stone age or ages. The next great discovery which man made was that of the metals. Not iron at first; before iron was discovered there supervened the age known as the Bronze Age, when copper and tin were known but not iron, and all the most important implements were made of that mixture of copper and tin—bronze, the hardest substance then obtainable. In some countries the discovery of the metals was natural, and one age followed upon the other in gradual sequence. But in Europe it was not so. The men of the bronze age were a new race, sallying out of the East to dispossess the older inhabitants, and if in some places the bronze men and the stone men seem to have gone on for a time side by side, the general character of the change is that of a sudden break.

Therefore we do not now proceed to speak of the characteristic civilization of the bronze age. As will be seen hereafter, the bringers of the new weapons belonged to a race concerning whom we have much ampler means of information than is possessed for the first inhabitants of these lands; and we are spared the necessity of drawing all our knowledge from a scrutiny of their arms or tombs. But before we can satisfactorily show who were the successors of the stone-age men in Europe, and whence they came, we must turn aside towards another inquiry, viz. into the origin of language.

CHAPTER III.
THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE.

The growth of
language.

We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses which were ever made; we now turn aside and ask what were the first of those immaterial instruments, those ‘aëriform, mystic’ legacies which were handed down and gradually improved from the time of the earliest inhabitants of our globe? Foremost among these, long anterior to the ‘metallurgic and other manufacturing skill,’ comes language. With us, in whose minds thought and speech are so bound together as to be almost inseparable, the idea that language is an instrument which through long ages has been slowly improved to its present perfection, seems difficult of credit. We think of early man having the same ideas and expressing them as readily as we do now; but this he could not really have done. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to believe that there was a time when man had no language at all; but it seems certain that long ages were necessary before this instrument could be wrought to the fineness in which we find it, and to which, in all the languages with which we are likely to become acquainted, we are accustomed. A rude iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to make. But we know that before it could be made iron had to be discovered, and the art of extracting iron from the ore; and, as a matter of fact, we know that thousands of years passed before the iron spear-head was a possibility; thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons of stone, and passing on from them to the weapons of bronze. So, too, with language; simple as it seems at first sight to fit the word on to the idea, and early as we ourselves learn this art, a little thought about what language is will show us how much we owe to the ages which have gone before.

The two main
classes of words
‘significant’
and ‘insignificant.’