CHAPTER VII
MOST ANCIENT NATION WAS KIND TO CHILDREN—ECONOMIC PRESSURE BROUGHT NO SPECIAL CRUELTY—PICTURE OF THE PROLETARIAT—ABJURATIONS OF THE OLDEST BOOK IN THE WORLD—EGYPTIANS AS SEEN BY DIODORUS SICULUS—DEGENERATING EFFECT OF GREEK SUPREMACY.
PLEISTOCENE man wandered from the Indo-Malaysia region into the northern part of Africa, and there, in the Nile valley, the Egyptian Hamites, as a truly autochthonous race, were evolved.
In a climate particularly favourable, great progress was made by these aboriginal people, especially in the New Stone Age, which was of unusually long duration, as can be seen from the beautiful flint knives plated with gold on which are carved animal figures.[145] That the actual beginnings of Egyptian culture are twice as long as the historic period is the statement of Keane, and Oppert claims that there are indications of a thoroughly established social and political organization as far back as 11,500 years B. C.
ISIS IN THE PAPYRUS SWAMPS, SUCKLING HORUS
(REPRODUCED FROM “THE GODS OF THE EGYPTIANS, OR STUDIES IN EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY”)
It is therefore not surprising that we find among the Egyptians, just as we find among the Sumerians and the Akkadians, who were contemporaneous in civilization about four and five thousand years before Christ, that the attitude toward children is settled, and apparently in the child’s favour; for aside from occasional sacrificial offerings in which the child is on a par at least with the slave or the servant about to be sacrificed, there is no evidence of the endeavour to do away with the children on the scale that we find in ancient Greece and Rome and later in India and China.
Had there been, however, less positive division of castes in Egypt, the infants of the higher class would not have been as well treated. The lives of the military and priestly castes were almost sacred[146]; it was on them that the king relied for support, and the rest of the population, whether nominally free or slave, were foreordained to a life of incessant toil. Maspero quotes from the Sellier Papyrus, a satiric poem, which goes to show the conditions in the earliest time among these workmen whose lives of hardship were only varied by the irregular visits of the tax-gatherers. These visits, though dreaded, were never prepared for and were always the occasions of several days of protestations, threats, beating, cries of pain from the tax-payers, lamentations from the women and children, the gathering up of the tax, the departure of the tax-collectors and then the calm with the resumption of labour until the next visit of the collectors.