"The falsehood of extremes."
Even the injunction to "take no thought for the morrow," is only an extreme way of stating that the active side of human life, strenuous effort, self-denial, and foresight, must not be pushed so far as to stifle all higher aspirations. Probably if the same concrete case of conduct had been submitted to an Egyptian, a Babylonian or Zoroastrian priest, and to the late Bishop of Peterborough, their verdicts would not have been different. Such a wide extension does the maxim take, "One touch of Nature makes the world akin," when we educate ourselves up to the culture which gives some general idea of how civilized man has everywhere felt and believed since the dawn of history very much as we ourselves do at the close of the nineteenth century.
[CHAPTER V.
ANCIENT SCIENCE AND ART.]
Evidence of Antiquity—Pyramids and Temples—Arithmetic—Decimal and Duodecimal Scales—Astronomy—Geometry reached in Egypt at earliest Dates—Great Pyramid—Piazzi Smyth and Pyramid-Religion—Pyramids formerly Royal Tombs, but built on Scientific Plans—Exact Orientation on Meridian—Centre in 30° N. Latitude—Tunnel points to Pole—Possible use as an Observatory—Procter—Probably Astrological—Planetary Influences—Signs of the Zodiac—Mathematical Coincidences of Great Pyramid—Chaldæan Astronomy—Ziggurats—Tower of Babel—Different Orientation from Egyptian Pyramids—Astronomical Treatise from Library of Sargon I., 3800 b.c.—Eclipses and Phases of Venus—Measures of Time from Old Chaldæan—Moon and Sun—Found among so many distant Races—Implies Commerce and Intercourse—Art and Industry—Embankment of Menes—Sphynx—Industrial Arts—Fine Arts—Sculpture and Painting—The Oldest Art the best—Chaldæan Art—De Sarzec's Find at Sirgalla—Statues and Works of Art—Imply long use of Bronze—Whence came the Copper and Tin—Phœnician and Etruscan Commerce—Bronze known 200 years earlier—Same Alloy everywhere—Possible Sources of Supply—Age of Copper—Names of Copper and Tin—Domestic Animals—Horse—Ox and Ass—Agriculture—All proves Extreme Antiquity.
The conclusion drawn from the religions of Egypt and Chaldæa, as to the existence of a very long period of advanced civilization prior to the historical era, is fully confirmed by the state of the arts and sciences at the commencement of the earliest records. A knowledge of astronomy implies a long series of observations and a certain amount of mathematical calculation. The construction of great works of hydraulic engineering, and of such buildings as temples and pyramids, also proves an advanced state of scientific knowledge. Such a building, for instance, as the Great Pyramid must have required a considerable acquaintance with geometry, and with the effects of strains and pressures; and the same is true of the early temples and ziggurats, or temple observatories of Chaldæa. There must have been regular schools of astronomers and architects, and books treating on scientific subjects, before such structures could have been possible.
The knowledge of science possessed by a nation affords a more definite test of its antecedent civilization than its religion. It is always possible to say that advanced religious ideas may have been derived from some supernatural revelation, but in the case of the exact sciences, such as arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, this is no longer possible, and their progress can be traced step by step by the development of human reason. Thus there are savage races, like the Australians at the present day, who cannot count beyond "one, two, and a great number"; and some philologists tell us that traces of this state can be discovered in the origin of civilized languages, from the prevalence of dual forms which seem to have preceded those of the plural.
The next stage is that of counting by the fingers, which gives rise to a natural system of decimal notation, as shown by such words as ten, which invariably means two hands; twenty, which is twice ten, and so on. Many existing races, who are a little more advanced than the Australians, use their fingers for counting, and can count up to five or ten, and even the chimpanzee Sally could count to five. But when we come to a duodecimal system we may feel certain that a considerable advance has been made, and arithmetic has come into existence as a science; for the number 12 has no natural basis of support like 10, and can only have been adopted because it was exactly divisible into whole numbers by 2, 3, 4, 6. The mere fact therefore of the existence of a duodecimal system shows that the nation which adopts it must have progressed a long way from the primitive "one, two, a great many," and acquired ideas both as to the relation of numbers, and a multitude of other things, such as the division of the circle, of days, months, and years, of weights and measures, and other matters, in which ready division into whole parts without fractions had become desirable. And at the very first in Egypt, Chaldæa, and among the Turanian races generally, we find this duodecimal system firmly established. The circle has 360 degrees, the year 360 days, the day 24 single or 12 double hours, and so on. But from this point the journey is a long one to calculations which imply a knowledge of geometry and mathematics, and observations of celestial bodies which imply a long antecedent science of astronomy, and accurate records of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, and of eclipses and other memorable events.
The earliest records, both of Egypt and Chaldæa, show that such an advanced state of science had been reached at the first dawn of the historical period, and we read of works on astronomy, geometry, medicine, and other sciences, written, or compiled from older treatises, by Egyptian kings of the old empire, and by Sargon I. of Accade from older Accadian works. But the monuments prove still more conclusively that such sciences must have been long known. Especially the Great Pyramid of Cheops affords a very definite proof of the progress which must have been made in geometrical, mechanical, and astronomical science at the time of its erection. If we were to believe Professor Piazzi Smyth, and the little knot of his followers who have founded what may be called a Pyramid-religion, this remarkable structure contains a revelation in stone for future ages, of almost all the material scientific facts which have been discovered since by 6000 years of painful research by the unaided human intellect. Its designers must have known and recorded, with an accuracy surpassing that of modern observation, such facts as the dimensions of the earth, the distance of the sun, the ratio of the area of a circle to its diameter, the precise determination of latitude and of a true meridian line, and the establishment of standards of measure taken, like the metre, from a definite division of the earth's circumference. It is argued that such facts as these could not have been discovered so accurately in the infancy of science, and without the aid of the telescope, and therefore that they must have been made known by revelation, and the Great Pyramid is looked upon therefore as a sort of Bible in stone, which is, in some not very intelligible way, to be taken as a confirmation of the inspiration of the Hebrew Bible, and read as a sort of supplement to it.
This is of course absurd. A supernatural revelation to teach a chosen people the worship of the one true God, is at any rate an intelligible proposition, but scarcely that of such a revelation to an idolatrous monarch and people, to teach details of abstruse sciences, which in point of fact were not taught, for the monument on which they were recorded was sealed up by a casing of polished stone almost directly after it was built, and its contents were only discovered by accident, long after the facts and figures which it is supposed to teach had been discovered elsewhere by human reason. The only thing approaching to a revelation of religious import which Piazzi Smyth professed to have discovered in the Pyramid was a prediction, which is now more than ten years overdue, of the advent of the millennium in 1881.