Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

"God shall enlarge Japhet, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem."—Genesis ix. 27.

PART FIRST.

PERICLES.—AGE OF ARTISTIC BEAUTY.

CHAPTER I.

LITERATURE.

Civilization is earth's central stream, and all literatures, arts, sciences, philosophies, and religions are but tributaries to swell its tide and increase its current. To indicate the successive sources, describe the multiform elements, and demonstrate the progressive aggregation and enrichment of this unity in diversity, is the object of the present work.

Much patient and critical research will be requisite at each remove, but the chief difficulty lies at the threshold of the undertaking. When and with what does authentic history, illustrated through human progress, begin? Geography, ethnology, and philology must be our chief oracles in reply.

Western Asia was doubtless the cradle of the earliest civilized communities, and the source of all authentic improvement. Mount Kylas gave the term koilon, heaven, to the Greeks, and is probably the highest eminence on earth. Moorcroft viewed it from a tableland more than seventeen thousand feet high, and describes its sides and craggy summits of still more tremendous altitude, apparently covered thickly with snow. At its base emerges the Indus, that mighty artery of western India, on the bank of which stands Attac, a name which the great civilizing race afterward applied to the fairest realm of their culture. Standing at this fountain-head, we find increased facilities for striking out the great historico-geographical outline which marks the progress of the patriarch bands of India, Egypt, and Europe. The intimate connection between the Nilitic valley, Greece, and the lands of the Indus, is rendered yet more evident by the geographical development of the colonization of eastern Europe, in which the ingenious people of Abu-Sin, Abyssinians, founded the mercantile and prosperous community of Corinthus. Cor-Indus, that is, mouth of the Indus, carried westward, became the classical Corinth. The distance from the Indian shore was not so great but that the sail which spread for Ceylon could waft to the Red Sea, where the fleets of Tyre, of Solomon and of Hiram were to be found. The ancient Institutes of Menu expressly refer to merchants who traffic beyond sea; and, moreover, that the Hindoos were westward navigators from the earliest ages, the vestiges of their religion in the Archipelago abundantly attest. From the same lofty regions descended the Parasoos, that is, warriors of the Axe, to penetrate and give name to Persia, while Colchis and Armenia became as distinctly the product and proof of Indian colonization. Down this central route came the Pilgrim Fathers of the first great civilizing nations, making the whole mass of authentic geography a venerable journal of emigration on the most gigantic scale.

Let us now briefly consider the progressive changes which have passed upon this great geographical chart of historical development, and observe their effects. Successive tribes of living beings have perished thereon, and been replaced with better and nobler races, until at last man came to be lord of earth, and to reap from it all the enjoyments increasing culture could bestow. From the beginning, progress has been maintained in and through convulsions, each succeeding tempest alternating with a sublimer calm. Relying on human traditions alone, we can acquaint ourselves with no primary people, no first seat of civilization, no original philosophy, or natural wisdom. Guided by a higher authority, it is necessary to penetrate the intervening mists of symbolical fables, and collect numerous scientific facts, in order to attain secure ground, whereon the first germ of humanity was planted, and whence it has perpetually developed itself under the control of unfaltering law. At the farthest horizon of the most venerable antiquity, several light points appear, the harbingers of civilization, radiating toward each other, and indicating a common point of union in the darkness behind. They resemble the superior lights among the stars of the firmament, whose brightness we perceive amid the eternal suns of the universe, but whose relative distances from our own planet it is impossible to ascertain. The dwelling of a divine spark in the human bosom has, even from the obscurest height of Caucasus, been recognized in the beautiful tradition of Prometheus; but the question of the first springing up of mankind can not be fully elucidated by mere antiquarian research. In the last result, that is a matter to be left to the disclosures of revelation and the exercise of faith.

The Mosaic narrative of creation is the primitive document of our race, and this commemorates the repeated convulsions and prodigious corruption of the world, previous to the Noachian flood. Of the earliest period, it says: "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Gen. i. 2. Of post-diluvian history, every thing was embraced in that last recorded fact of Noah's life, a prophecy delivered in the infancy of mankind, and which every succeeding development has only tended to illustrate and confirm. Gen. ix. 18, 19—"The sons of Noah that went forth from the ark, were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole (inhabited) earth overspread." On these three races distinct destinies were pronounced, they receiving a moral and physical nature accordant to their several allotments. The office of extension was given to Japhet, that of religion to Shem, and servitude to Ham.