I want you to take particular notice of these two great river-courses, those of the Nile and of the Euphrates with the Tigris. I say Euphrates "with Tigris," because the two are together the fertilisers and waterers of the country lying between and around them. The Nile does his business of watering his own valley by himself. It is most important that you should give your attention to these two great water-courses, because it is along them that arose the two greatest empires, the two strongest and most formidable powers, of which the early history of the world has anything to tell us.
You may easily understand how this should be so. Man, at first, from what we are able to learn about him, knew very little of farming. Such ideas as a "rotation of crops," or of manuring the fields were probably quite unknown to him for very many ages. The first men whom we are able to learn anything about seem to have depended on the hunting of other animals for their living. Then came a time when they began to live on their flocks and herds. Now, both for the hunting and for the living by keeping cattle and sheep, they had to be constantly on the move. They would kill out all the game in one district and therefore have to move on to another. Or their cows and sheep would eat up all the pasture in one place and so they had to be moved to fresh feeding-grounds. These two first stages, which all the scholars recognise, in man's story require that the people who lived in them should be always moving, or at least ready to move. The stages are called the Hunting Age and the Pastoral Age respectively. The next age is called the Agricultural Age, when man began to give "culture" to the "ager," or field. He was able to settle then. It was not necessary for him to be constantly on the move when he had begun to live by the crops which he grew. But he was not yet a very clever or scientific farmer. He could grow good crops only when Nature helped him very freely, only on the best soils, only in the river valleys or lands watered by the rivers, and in a favourable climate.
The soil of Mesopotamia is still considered the most t naturally rich in all the world: the Nile overflows its banks every year, and the overflow leaves a wonderfully rich mud behind it; the climate both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt is very favourable to the growth of vegetation. Therefore, it is not to be wondered at that when men began to lead a settled life they settled themselves down along the courses of these two great rivers—I write two, because I am regarding the Euphrates and Tigris as one, for the moment—and here formed themselves into communities and nations so many in number and so prosperous that they became stronger than any of their neighbours.
Earliest man
And now you are very likely to ask me, "What do we know about the early history of man on the earth, and how do we know it?"
The first thing that we know about man on the earth is what we know by finding the weapons or tools that show signs of his handiwork. It is one of the most distinguishing marks of man, setting him most clearly apart from all other animals, that he has been a maker of tools and weapons for an immense number of years. Intelligent though some dogs and monkeys and other animals are, not one of them has thought of doing this. The oldest sort of tools or weapons that we find are made of stone, generally of flint, chipped to a sharp edge or point, so as to make axe or spear-head. We know them to be older than any of the metal tools or weapons that we find, because we find them in a deeper layer, or stratum, of the earth—a stratum deposited before those which lie above it. And we find them in company with fossil remains of animals which are of less-developed species than those in the strata above.
Man's tools and weapons
After a while—an immensely long while—there can be little doubt that man discovered that the ore of metals, which is found in the ground, can be fused, that is to say, melted by fire; that it can be separated from its earthy surroundings, and so be made useful. Man then began to make weapons and implements of metal, and found them better than the weapons of stone. We may infer this from the fact that the stone implements, of sharp and shapen flint, become less numerous as we come to higher strata, or layers, in the ground, and the metal implements are more numerous.
The metal of which the earliest metal implements were made is either pure copper or bronze, which is a mixture of copper and tin. Copper is not a very hard metal. I suppose that the more tin that was put into the mixture, in comparison with the copper, the harder it would be. And then, after a while—again a very very long while—man discovered another, a harder, and therefore a better, kind of metal, that is to say iron. And he has never found a better metal in all the long years of his story since. Gold and platinum may be more precious, because they are less common; but iron is a great deal more useful to man. His weapons, his swords, bayonets, and cannons are made of it; so are his ships; and you hardly can open your eyes in a room without their resting on something made of iron. As soon as he had found out the hardness of iron we may suppose that man quickly gave up the use of the soft bronze, as he had formerly given up the use of the stone in favour of the bronze. Thus it comes that you may read of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. They refer to these three stages in man's history: first, when he was using stone implements, made of the chipped flint or the like hard stone; second, when he was using the bronze weapons and tools; and third, when he was using iron.
"But," you will say, "all this is hardly history. It is not man's story. We don't want to know so much what kind of tools and weapons man had; we want to know what he did with them. You are not telling us this."