The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

Prehistoric
nationalities.

When we try and gather into one view the results of our inquiries upon the kindreds and nations of the old world, it must be confessed we are struck rather by the extent of our ignorance than of our knowledge. For all the light we are able to shed, the movements and the passage of the various races in this prehistoric time appear to the eye of the mind most like the movement of great hosts of men seen dimly through a mist. Or shall we say that we are in the position of persons living upon some one of many great military highways, while before their eyes pass continually bodies of troops in doubtful progress to and fro, affording to them, where they stand, no indication of the order of battle or the plan of the campaign? Still, to men in such a position there would be more or less of intelligence possible in the way in which they watched the steps of those who passed before them; and we, too, though we cannot attempt really to follow the track of mankind down from the earliest times, may yet gather some idea of the changing positions which from age to age have been occupied by the larger divisions of our race.

In the Bible narrative continuous history begins, at the earliest, not before the time of Abraham. In the earlier chapters of Genesis we find only scattered notices of individuals who dwelt in one particular corner of the world, nothing to indicate the general distribution of races, or the continuous lapse of time. It is, moreover, a fact that, owing partly to the associations of childhood, we are apt, by a too literal interpretation, to rob the narrative of some part of its historical value. Here, proper names, which we might be inclined to take for the names of single individuals, often stand for whole races, and sometimes for the countries which gave their names to the people dwelling in them. ‘Son of,’ too, must not be taken in its most literal meaning, but in the wider, and in old languages the perfectly natural, sense of ‘descended from.’ When nations kept the idea of a common ancestor before their minds, in a way with which we of the present day are quite unfamiliar, it was very customary to describe any one person of that people as the ‘son of’ the common ancestor. Thus a Greek who wished to bring before his hearers the common nationality of the Greek people—the Hellenes—would speak of them as being the sons of Hellen, of the Æolians or Ionians as sons of Æolus or Ion. In another way, again, an Athenian or Theban might speak of his fellow-citizens as sons of Athens or of Thebes. Such language among any ancient people is not poetical or hyperbolical language, but the usual speech of every day. It is in a similar fashion that in the Bible narrative, centuries are passed rapidly over. And if the remains of the stone ages lift a little the veil which hides man’s earliest doings upon earth, it must be confessed that the light which these can shed is but slight and partial. We catch sight of a portion of the human race making their rude implements of stone and bone, living in caves as hunters and fishers, without domestic animals and without agriculture, but not without faculties which raise them far above the level of the beasts by which they are surrounded. Yet of these early men we may say we know not whence they come or whither they go. We cannot tell whether the picture which we are able to form of man of the earliest time—of the first stone age—is a general or a partial picture; whether it represents the majority of his fellow-creatures, or only a particular race strayed from the first home of man.

Black,
yellow, red,
and white
races.

We must therefore be content to resign the hope of anything like a review of man’s life since the beginning. Before we see him clearly, he had probably spread far and wide over the earth, and already separated into the three or four most important divisions of the race. It is usual to divide the human race into four divisions named after, but not entirely founded upon, the colour of their skins. These divisions are the black, yellow, red, and white races. I do not propose to go into any elaborate description either of the peculiarities or the habitat of these four sections of humanity. The greater part of mankind have no place in history properly so called. We know them only in the present, their past is lost for ever. And the present volume being designed to open the door to history is really not concerned with races such as these. It will be enough very briefly to indicate the main characteristics of the four races of mankind, and to refer the reader for more information to the chapter in Mr. Tylor’s Anthropology dealing with the subject.

The Black
Races.

The black or negro race, then, consists of two divisions the negroes of Africa, and the negroes of certain among the islands of the Pacific bordering upon Australia and called Melanesia. This Melanesia, or ‘the negro islands’ as we might call them, include Tasmania, New Guinea, and a great number of smaller islands. But they do not include Australia and New Zealand, the inhabitants of both which countries have physical features differing from those of the genuine negro, though the Australian type approaches very near to his. The colour of the skin is not really the chief characteristic of this race, but far more so is the very crisp hair (what is called wool), the very flat and broadened nose, the broad lips, and the advanced under-jaw, or, as it is called, the prognathism of the face. This black race has never had anything that deserves to be called either a literature or a history.

The Red
Races.

The red race, which we will take next, is that which inhabits or, till the Europeans came, inhabited the whole of America, North and South, except the extreme North, the country of the Eskimo. We take these people next because they are almost as unknown to history as are the negroes. The peculiarities of the red races are their red skin, their high cheek-bones, the straight black hair which, exactly opposite to that of the negro, never curls.[40] This race has not been quite so stationary as the negro. Some of its members, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, did attain to a considerable civilization. But they had advanced no way in the art of writing or keeping records of their past, which is thus wholly lost to us; and we have no means of connecting the civilization of the red races with the civilization of that part of the world which has had a history.

We are therefore left to deal with the two remaining classes, the yellow and the white. The oldest, that is to say apparently the least changed, of these is the yellow