[141] According to Winckler, Sargon II, unlike his son, was pro-priest, and his usurpation of the throne was the result of an intrigue of the Babylonian priests against the feudal Assyrian military system of Tiglath Pileser III.
[142] See the last two verses of the Second Book of Chronicles, and Ezra, ch. i.
[143] A book of the utmost interest and value here is Breasted’s Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt.
[144] See S. Sharpe’s Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity.
[145] Akhnaton lost some or all his father’s Syrian conquests.—G. W. B.
[146] Many authorities regard Alexander as a man with the ideas of a pushful nineteenth-century (A.D.) monarch, and consider this visit to Jupiter Ammon as a master-stroke of policy. He was, we are asked to believe, deliberately and cynically acquiring divinity as a “unifying idea.” The writer is totally unable to accept anything of the sort. For a discussion of the question, see Ferguson’s Greek Imperialism.
[147] “His reforming zeal made him unpopular with the upper classes. Schoolmen and pedants held up to the admiration of the people the heroes of the feudal times and the advantages of the system they administered. Seeing in this propaganda danger to the state, Shi Hwang-ti determined to break once and for all with the past. To this end he ordered the destruction of all books having reference to the past history of the empire, and many scholars were put to death for failing in obedience to it.”—The late Sir R. K. Douglas in the Encyclopædia Brit., article China.
Mr. L. Y. Chen does not agree with Sir R. K. Douglas here. He thinks that the motives of Shi Hwang-ti were obscurantist. His object was the intellectual slavery of the people. He collected a library for his own use.
[148] There were literary expressions of social discontent in Egypt before 2000 B.C. See “Social Forces and Religion” in Breasted’s Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt for some of the earliest complaints of the common man under the ancient civilizations.
[149] The student should compare with this J. J. Atkinson’s account (in his Primal Law) of the significance of marriage by capture and his theory of the origin of marriage.