War among civilized nations differs from that of savage tribes in being carried on with better weapons and appliances, and by warriors being trained to fight in regular order. The superiority of a regular army to a straggling savage war-party may be well seen by looking at the pictures in Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, of troops marching in rank and step to sound of trumpet, especially noticing the solid phalanx of heavy infantry with spear and shield. The strength of such Egyptian solid squares of 10,000 men is described in the Cyropædia (probably with truth as to military tactics if not to actual history), how they could not be broken even by the victorious Persians, but amid the rout of man and horse the survivors still held out, sitting under their shields, till Cyrus granted them honourable surrender. An Egyptian army had its various corps divided into companies, and commanded by officers of regular grades. In battle the heavy immovable phalanx held the centre, the archers and light infantry in the wings acted in line or open order, there were bodies of slingers, and the noble warriors drove their chariots into the thick of the opposing host. This military efficiency was attained by having a standing army formed by a regular military class, trained from youth in the art of war, and maintained by eight acres of land assigned to every soldier. From an early time also we find the Egyptians employing foreign mercenary troops, whose peculiar costumes and faces are conspicuous in the battle-pictures. Thus also the Assyrian war-scenes show that their military system was on a level with that of Egypt. The rise of the science of war to a higher stage belongs to Greece, and the whole history of its growth is told in Greek literature. Beginning with the Iliad, the descriptions there show war and armies in a state more barbaric than in Egypt, with little discipline and less generalship, and encounters of Greek and Trojan champions with the armies looking on as savages would do. But when we come to later ages of Greek history, it is seen that they had by that time not only learnt what the older civilization had to teach, but had brought their own genius to develop it further. Their corps of all arms, archers, charioteers, cavalry, and the phalanx of spearmen, were disciplined and ranged in order of battle much after the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian manner. But whereas in old times a battle had been a trial of mere strength between two armies drawn up facing one another, the military historian Xenophon describes the change made in the art of war by the Theban leader, Epaminondas, when at Leuktra, with forces fewer than the Spartans, he charged with his men in column fifty deep against their twelve deep right wing, and by breaking them threw the whole line into disorder, and won the battle. At Mantineia, carrying out this plan yet more skilfully, he arranged his troops in a wedge-shaped body with the weaker divisions slanting off behind so as to come up when the enemy’s front was already broken. In such ways was developed the science of military tactics, which made skilful manœuvring as important as actual fighting. The Romans, a nation drilled to battle and conquest, came at last to rule the world by the mere force of military discipline. In the middle ages the introduction of gunpowder increased the killing-power of troops whose artillery from bows and arrows became muskets and heavy cannon. The reader’s attention has been already drawn to the military scenes of Egypt and Assyria. If now, fresh from watching the manœuvres of a modern army in sham fight, he will look at these pictures to see war as it was three or four thousand years ago, he will observe how substantially the new system is founded on the old, with developments due to two new ideas, namely, tactics and the use of fire-arms.
Somewhat the same lesson may be learnt by comparing the older and ruder kinds of fortification and siege with those of modern times. Tribes at the level of the Kamchatkans and the North American Indians knew how to fortify their villages with embankments and palisades. In ancient Egypt and Assyria and neighbouring countries, strong and high fortress-walls and towers were defended by archers and slingers, and attacked by storming-parties with scaling-ladders. Old sieges were unscientific, as is so curiously seen in the Homeric poems, where the Greeks encamp over against Troy, but seem to have no notion of regularly investing it, much less of attack by sap and trench. The Greeks and Romans came on to use higher art in fortification and siege, and there appear among them machines of war such as the ancient battering-ram, heavy and skilfully engineered, while contrivances of the nature of huge bows like the catapult led up to the cannon of later ages which superseded them.
Lastly, looking at the army system as it is in our modern world, one favourable change is to be noticed. The employment of foreign mercenary troops, which almost through the whole stretch of historical record has been a national evil alike in war and peace, is at last dying out. It is not so with the system of standing armies which drain the life and wealth of the world on a scale more enormous even than in past times, and stand as the great obstacle to harmony between nations. The student of politics can but hope that in time the pressure of vast armies kept on a war-footing may prove unbearable to the European nations which maintain them, and that the time may come when the standing army may shrink to a nucleus ready for the exigencies of actual war if it shall arise, while serving in peace time as a branch of the national police.
CHAPTER X.
ARTS OF LIFE—(continued).
Dwellings:—Caves, [229]—Huts, [230]—Tents, [231]—Houses, [231]—Stone and Brick Building, [232]—Arch, [235]—Development of Architecture, 235. Dress:—Painting skin, [236]—Tattooing, [237]—Deformation of Skull, &c., [240]—Ornaments, [241]—Clothing of Bark, Skin, &c., [244]—Mats, [246]—Spinning, Weaving, [246]—Sewing, [249]—Garments, 249. Navigation:—Floats, [252]—Boats, [253]—Rafts, [255]—Outriggers, [255]—Paddles and Oars, [256]—Sails, [256]—Galleys and Ships, [257].
We have next to examine the dwellings of mankind. Thinking of the nests of birds, the dams of beavers, the tree-platforms of apes, it can scarcely be supposed that man at any time was unable to build himself a shelter. That he does not always do so is mostly because while on the move from place to place he may be content to sleep in the open, or take to the natural shelter of a tree or rock. Thus in the Andaman Islands the roving savages have been noticed to resort to the sea-shore, where, under some overhanging cliff that kept off the wind, they would scoop themselves out each a hole in the sand to lie in. Rock-shelters under the cliffs were in Europe the resort of the ancient savages, as is proved by the bones and flint flakes and other remains that are found lying there in the ground. Caves are ready-made houses for beast or man. It has been already mentioned ([p. 31]) how in such countries as England and France, caverns were the abodes of the old tribes of the reindeer and mammoth period, and the Bushmen of South Africa are a modern example of rude tribes thus given to dwelling in caves in the rocks. But caverns are so convenient, that they are now and then still used in the civilized world, and most of us have seen some cave in a cliff forming the back of a fisherman’s cottage, or at least a storehouse. It is not so much with these natural dwellings that we are here concerned as with artificial structures, however rude, set up by man for his shelter.
In the depths of Brazilian forests, travellers have come upon the dwellings of the naked Puris, which are not even huts, only sloping screens made by setting up a row of huge palm-leaves some eight feet long, leaning against a cross-pole. Being put up to windward, this shelters the lazy Indian as he lolls in his hammock slung between two trees, and with the dense foliage overhead life is not comfortless on fine days, though in bad weather the family and dogs have to crouch defenceless round the wood fire on the ground. Even in these tropical forests, what is generally met with is a real hut, though it may be such a rude one as the Botocudos make with these same great palm-leaves, sticking a number of them with their stalks in the ground in a circle, and bringing their points together, so as to form a roof overhead. The Patachos go to work more artificially, bending together young growing trees and poles stuck in the ground, so that by binding their tops together they form a framework which is then thatched over with large leaves. Much the same lesson in primitive architecture may be learnt from the natives of Australia, among whom a party camping out will be content to set up a line of leafy boughs in the ground to form a screen or breakwind for the night; but when they take the pains to interlace such boughs overhead, the screen becomes a hut, and where they stay for a while they will make a regular framework of branches, covering them in with sheets of bark, or leaves and grass, and even laying on sods or daubing the outside with clay. The invention of the simple round hut is thus easily understood. It is plain, too, how a conical hut, when roving tribes like the American Indians carry from place to place its poles and skins or sheets of bark, becomes in fact a portable tent, and this shows how tents came to be invented. The more cultured herdsmen of the East carry for their tent-coverings sheets of felted hair or wool, and we ourselves use for temporary shelter tents of canvas. Indeed one has only to look at the common bell-tent of the soldier to see that it is a transformed savage hut. Now the circular hut, whether beehive or conical, is low to creep into and small to lie or crouch in. More room is often got by digging the earth out some feet deep within, but a greater improvement in construction is to raise the hut itself on posts or a wall, so that what was at first the whole house now becomes the roof. Thus is built the round hut with its side-posts filled in with wattle and mud, or its solid earthen wall carrying the thatched roof which may reach beyond in shady eaves. Such were in ancient times common peasants’ dwellings in Europe, as they still are in other quarters of the world, and indeed we perhaps keep up a memory of them in the round thatched summer-houses in our gardens, which are curiously like the real huts of barbarians. Next, as African travellers remark, one great sign of higher civilization is when people begin to build their houses square-cornered instead of round. The circular hut to be easily built must be small, and room is best gained by building the house oblong, with a ridge pole along the roof where the sloping poles from the sides meet. By being able to build to any required length, it became possible for many families, often twenty, to live together in village-houses as rude peoples often do. In barbaric countries spacious houses are built with the roofs carried on lofty posts with cross-timbers, or on solid wails of earth or stones; in fact they are constructed on much the same principles as our modern houses, though more rudely.
It does not seem difficult to make out how stone and brick architecture came into use. Where wood is scarce, men readily take to building wails of stones, turf, or earth. Thus the Australians are known to build shelters by heaping up loose stones as a wall, and roofing with sticks laid across. Rough stones, though they make good embankments and low walls, would be too unsteady for high walls, except slaty and stratified slabs which form natural building-stones. With mere stones out of the ground dwellings would hardly be built of a higher kind than the curious beehive-houses of the Hebrides, whose small rudely vaulted chambers are formed by the piled stones overlapping inwards till they almost meet above, and covered in with growing turf, so that they look like grassy hillocks with passages for the dwellers to creep in. This primitive building is very ancient, and though such houses are no longer made, the old ones still serve as shealings in summer. The ancient Scotch underground dwellings or “weems,” (i.e. caves) have chambers of rough stones, and remind antiquaries of Tacitus’ account of the caves dug by the ancient Germans and heaped over with dirt, where they stored their grain and took refuge themselves from the cold, and in time of war from the enemy. When the craft of the mason is brought in, buildings of a higher order begin. The stones may at first be merely trimmed to fit one another like the pieces of a mosaic, as in the so-called Cyclopean stone-work of old Etruscan and Roman walls. But the world soon adopts a higher way, not arranging the plan to suit the stones, but shaping the stones to fit the work, especially using rectangular blocks of stone to lay down in regular courses of masonry. In ancient Egypt, the masons hewed and smoothed even granite and porphyry to a finish which is envied by the architects of our own day, and the pyramids of Gizeh are as wonderful for the fine masonry of their slopes, chambers, and passages, as for their prodigious size. Our modern notion of a stone building is that the blocks of stone are to be fixed together with a layer of mortar to bind them, but in the old and beautiful architecture of Egypt and Greece the faced stone blocks lie on one another, having no cement to hold them, and needing none. Clamps of metal were used when required to hold the stones together. Cement or mortar (so called from the mortar or trough in which it was mixed) was also well known in the ancient world. The Roman builders not only used the common lime-and-sand mortar, which hardens by absorbing carbonic acid from the air, but they also knew how by adding volcanic ash or pozzolana to make a water-resisting cement, whence the name of “Roman cement” given to a composition used by our masons. Mention has been already made of the practice of coating the sides of the savage bough-hut with clay. The ancient people who built their settlements on piles out in the Swiss lakes used to do this, as is proved by bits of the clay coating which were accidentally baked when the huts were burnt down, and fell into the water, where they may still be found, showing the impressions of the long-perished reed cabins on which the moist clay was plastered. We still have something of the kind in what cottage-builders call “wattle and daub.” One also sees now and then in an English country lane a cottage or cowhouse which is a relic of another sort of primitive architecture, its walls being simply built of “cob”, that is, clay mixed with straw. Such hut-walls of clay or mud are very usual in dry climates such as Egypt, where they are cheaper and better than timber. This being so, there is no difficulty in understanding how sun-dried bricks came into use, these being simply convenient blocks of the same mud or loam mixed with straw which was used to build the cottage walls. These sun-dried bricks were used in the East from high antiquity. Some of the Egyptian pyramids still standing are built of them, and the pictures show how the clay was tempered and the large bricks formed in wooden moulds much as in modern brickfields. With these the architects of Nineveh built the palace walls ten or fifteen feet thick, which were panelled with the slabs of sculptured alabaster. For such sun-dried bricks, clay and water form a sufficient cement. Building with mud-bricks, which indeed suits the climate well, goes on in these countries as of old. They were used also in America, and to this day the traveller in such districts as Mexico will often find himself lodged in a house built of them. The sun-dried brick is there called adobe, a word which is actually their ancient Egyptian name tob, which when adopted into Arabic became with the article, at-tob, and thence was adopted into Spanish as adobe. Baked bricks seem to have been a later invention, easy enough to nations who baked earthen pots, but only wanted in more rainy climates. Thus the Romans, whom mere mud-bricks would not have suited, carried to great perfection the making of kiln-burnt bricks and tiles.