Human Origins

by S. Laing

THE VILLAGE SHEIK, A WOODEN STATUETTE.

For it is remarkable that this first school of art of the Old Empire is thoroughly naturalistic, and knows very little of the ideal or supernatural. And the tombs tell the same story. The statues and paintings represent natural objects and not theological conventions; the tombs are fac-simile representations of the house in which the deceased lived, with his mummy and those of his family, and pictures of his oxen, geese, and other belongings, but no gods, and few of those quotations from the Todtenbuch which are so universal in later ages. It would seem that at this early period of Egyptian history life was simple and cheerful, and both art and religion less fettered by superstitions and conventions than they were when despotism and priestcraft had been for centuries stereotyped institutions, and originality of any sort was little better than heresy. War also and warlike arms hardly appear on these earliest representations of Egyptian life, and wars were probably confined to frontier skirmishes with Bedouins and Libyans, such as we see commemorated on the tablet of Snefura at Wady Magerah.

In Chaldæa the evidence for great antiquity is derived less from architectural monuments and arts, and more from books, than in Egypt, for the obvious reason that stone was wanting and clay abundant in Mesopotamia. Where temples and palaces were built of sun-dried bricks, they rapidly crumbled into mounds of rubbish, and nothing was preserved but the baked clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. In like manner sculpture and wall-painting never flourished in a country devoid of stone, and the religious ideas of Chaldæa never took the Egyptian form of the continuance of ordinary life after death by the Ka or ghost requiring a house, a mummy, and representations of belongings. The bas-relief and fringes sculptured on slabs of alabaster brought home by Layard and others, belong mostly to the later period of the Assyrian Empire.

Accordingly, the oldest works of art from Chaldæa consist mainly of books and documents in the form of clay cylinders, and of gems, amulets, and other small articles of precious stones or metals. But the recent discovery of De Sarzec at Sirgalla shows that in the very earliest period of Chaldæan history the arts stood at a level which is fairly comparable to that of the Old Empire in Egypt. He found in the ruins of the very ancient Temple of the Sun nine statues of Patesi or priest-kings of Accadian race, who had ruled there prior to the consolidation of Sumir and Accad into one empire by Sargon I., somewhere about 3800 b.c. The remarkable thing about these statues is that they are of diorite, similar to that of the statue of Chephren, which is believed to be only found in the peninsula of Sinai, and is so hard that it must have taken excellent tools and great technical skill to carve it. The statues are much of the same size and in the same seated attitude as that of Chephren, and have the appearance of belonging to the same epoch and school of art. This is confirmed by the discovery along with the statues of a number of statuettes and small objects of art which are also in an excellent style, very similar to that of the Old Egyptian dynasty, and show great proficiency both in taste and in technical execution.

The discovery of these diorite statues at such a very early date both in Egypt and Chaldæa, raises a very interesting question as to the tools by which such an intractable material could be so finely wrought. Evidently these tools must have been of the very hardest bronze, and the construction of such works as the dyke of Menes and the Pyramids, shows that the art of masonry must have been long known and extensively practised. But this again implies a large stock of metals and long acquaintance with them since the close of the latest stone period.

Perhaps there is no test which is more conclusive of the state of prehistoric civilization and commerce than that which is afforded by the general knowledge and use of metals. It is true that a knowledge of some of the metals which are found in a native state, or in easily fusible ores, may coexist with very primitive barbarism. Some even of the cannibal tribes of Africa are well acquainted with iron, and know how to smelt its ores and manufacture tools and weapons. Gold also, which is so extensively found in the native state, could not fail to be known from the earliest times; and in certain districts pure copper presents itself as only a peculiar and malleable sort of stone. But when we come to metals which require great knowledge of mining to detect them in their ores, and to produce them in large quantities; and to alloys, which require a long practice of metallurgy to discover, and to mix in the proper proportions, the case is different, and the stone period must be already far behind. Still more is this the case when tools and weapons of such artificial alloys are found in universal use in countries where Nature has provided no metals, and where their presence can only be accounted for by the existence of an international commerce with distant metal-producing countries. Iron was no doubt known at a very early period, but it was extremely scarce, and even as late as Homer's time was so valuable that a lump of it constituted one of the principal prizes at the funeral games of Patroclus. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the art of making from it the best steel, which alone could have competed with bronze in cutting granite and diorite, had been discovered. It may be assumed, therefore, that bronze was the material universally used for the finer tools and weapons by the great civilized empires of Egypt and Chaldæa during the long interval between the neolithic stone age and the later adoption of iron.

Evidently then, both the Egyptians and the Chaldæans must have been well provided with bronze tools capable of hewing and polishing the hardest rocks. Now bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper is a common metal, easily reduced from its ores, and not infrequently occurring in a metallic state, as in the mines of Lake Superior, where the North American Indians hammered out blocks of it from the native metal. And we have proofs that the ancient Egyptians obtained copper at a very early date from the mines of Wady Magerah in the peninsula of Sinai, and probably also from Cyprus. But where did they get their tin, without which there is no bronze? Tin is a metal which is only found in a few localities, and in the form of a black oxide which requires a considerable knowledge of metallurgy to detect and to reduce. The only considerable sources of tin now known are those of Cornwall, Malacca, Banca, and Australia. Of these, the last was of course unknown to the ancient world, and it is hardly probable that its supplies were obtained from such remote sources as those of the extreme East. Not that it is at all impossible that it might have been brought from Malacca by prehistoric sea-routes to India, and thence to Egypt by the Red Sea and to Chaldæa by the Persian Gulf, and this is the conjecture of one of the latest authorities in a very interesting work just published on the Dawn of Ancient Art. But it seems highly improbable that, if such routes had been established, they should have been so completely abandoned as they certainly were when the supply of tin for the Eastern world was brought from the West. In fact, when we get the first authoritative information as to the commerce in tin, about 1000 b.c., we find that it was supplied mainly by Tyre, and came from the West beyond the Straits of Gibraltar; and in the Greek Periplus, written in the first century, it is distinctly stated that India was supplied with tin from Britain by way of Alexandria and the Red Sea, which is hardly consistent with the supposition that the tin of Malacca had been long known and worked.

In the celebrated 27th chapter of Ezekiel, which describes the commerce of Tyre when in the height of its glory, tin is only mentioned once as being imported along with silver, iron, and lead from Tarshish, i.e. from the emporium of Gades or Cadiz, to which it had doubtless been brought from Cornwall. The only other reference to tin is, that Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, i.e. the Ionians, and tribes of Asia Minor in the mountainous districts to the south of the Black Sea, traded with slaves and vessels of brass, and if brass meant bronze, this would imply a knowledge of tin. The only other considerable supply of tin which is certainly known came from the Etruscans, who worked extensive tin mines in Northern Italy. But the evidence of these does not go back farther than from 1000 to 1500 b.c., and it leaves untouched the question how Egypt and Chaldæa had obtained large stocks of bronze, certainly long before 5000 b.c.; and how they kept up these stocks for certainly more than 2000 years before the Phœnicians appeared on the scene to supply tin by maritime commerce. It is in some other direction that we must look, for it is certain that neither Egypt nor Chaldæa had any native sources of this metal. They must have imported, and that from a distance, either the manufactured bronze, or the tin with which to manufacture it themselves by alloying copper. The latter seems most probable, for the Egyptians worked the copper mines of Sinai from a very early date, and drew supplies of copper from Cyprus, which could only have been made useful by alloying it with tin, while if they imported all the immense quantity of bronze which they must have used, in the manufactured state, the pure copper would have been useless to them.

A remarkable fact is that the bronze found from the earliest monuments downwards, throughout most of the ancient world, including the dolmens, lake villages, and other prehistoric monuments in which metal begins to appear, is almost entirely of uniform composition, consisting of an alloy of 10 to 15 per cent. of tin to 85 or 90 per cent. of copper. That is for tools and weapons where great hardness was required, for objects of art and statuettes were often made of pure copper, or with a smaller alloy of tin, showing that the latter metal was too scarce and valuable to be wasted.[5] Evidently this alloy must have been discovered in some locality where tin and copper were both found, and trials could be made of the proportions which gave the best result, and the secret must have been communicated to other nations along with the tin which was necessary for the manufacture. Where could the sources have been which supplied this tin and this knowledge how to use it, to the two great civilized nations of Egypt and Chaldæa, where we can say with certainty that bronze was in common use prior to 5000 b.c.? If we exclude Britain and the extreme East, there are only two localities in which extensive remains of ancient workings for tin have been discovered; one in Georgia on the slopes of the Caucasus, and the other on the northern slope of the Hindoo-Kush in the neighbourhood of Bamian. And the knowledge both of bronze and of other metals, such as iron and gold, seems to have been universally diffused among the Turanian races who were the primitive inhabitants of Northern Asia. How could Egypt have got its tin even from the nearest known source? Consider the length of the caravan route; the number of beasts of burden required; the necessity for roads, depôts, and stations; the mountain ranges, rivers, and deserts to be traversed; such a journey is scarcely conceivable either through districts sparsely peopled and without resources, or infested by savage tribes and robbers. And yet if the tin did not come by land, it must have come for the greater part of the way by water, floating down the Euphrates or Tigris, and being shipped from Ur or Eridhu by way of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.