The walls of the tombs in Egypt form a great picture gallery of the vanished life of that country and are invaluable to the historian. This fragment from the British Museum shows how vividly the domestic figures were realised.
Unity of Universal History
Obviously, this difficulty is much increased when the canvas is widened to include all Europe, and when the aim is to give the reader a just impression of the general tendencies of a whole age, such an age as, for instance, the sixteenth century, over that vast area. If for a History of the World the old plan be adopted—that of telling the story of each nation separately, yet on lines generally similar, cross references and a copious use of chronological tables become helpful, for they enable the contemporaneity of events to be seen at a glance, and as the history of each nation is being written with a view to that of other nations, the tendencies at work in each can be explained and illustrated in a way which shows their parallelism, and gives to the whole that unity of meaning and tendency which a universal history must constantly endeavour to display. The connection between the progress or decline of different peoples is best understood by setting forth the various forms which similar tendencies take in each. To do this is a hard task when the historian is dealing with the ancient world, or with the world outside Europe even in mediæval and post-mediæval times. For the modern European nations it is easier, because, ever since the spread of Christianity made these nations parts of one great ecclesiastical community, similar forces have been at work upon each of them, and every intellectual movement which has told upon one has more or less told upon the others also.
THE MASTER-KEY TO THE HIEROGLYPHICS
The inscribed stone found at Rosetta, in the Nile delta, in 1799, now preserved in the British Museum. It gave the key to the hieroglyphic writings of Egypt. It is a decree of Ptolemy Epiphanes, promulgated at Memphis in B.C. 196, and as it is inscribed in hieroglyphic and in the script of the country as well as in Greek, it thus solved the long standing mystery of the hieroglyphics of the monuments, which before its discovery had been quite unintelligible.
Central Line of Human Development
Such a History of the World may be written on more than one plan, and in the light of more than one general theory of human progress. It might find the central line of human development in the increase of man’s knowledge, and in particular of his knowledge of Nature and his power of dealing with her. Or that which we call culture, the comprehensive unfolding and polishing of human faculty and of the power of intellectual creation and appreciation, might be taken as marking the most real and solid kind of progress, so that its growth would best represent the advance of man from a savage to a highly civilised condition. Or if the moral and political sphere were selected as that in which the onward march of man as a social being, made to live in a community, could best be studied, the idea of liberty might be made a pivot of the scheme; for in showing how the individual emerges from the family or the tribe, how first domestic and then also prædial slavery slowly disappears, how institutions are framed under which the will of one ruler or of a small group begins to be controlled, or replaced as a governing force, by the collective will of the members of the community, how the primordial rights of each human creature win their way to recognition—in tracing out all these things the history of human society is practically written, and the significance of all political changes is made clear. Another way, again, would be to take some concrete department of human activity, follow it down from its earliest to its latest stages, and group other departments round it. Thus one author might take religion, and in making the history of religion the main thread of his narrative might deal incidentally with the other phenomena which have influenced it or which it has influenced. Or, similarly, another author might take political institutions, or perhaps economic conditions—i.e., wealth, labour, capital, commerce, or, again, the fundamental social institutions, such as the family, and the relations of the ranks and classes in a community, and build up round one or other of these manifestations and embodiments of the creative energy of mankind the general story of man’s movement from barbarism to civilisation. Even art, even mechanical inventions, might be similarly handled, for both of these stand in a significant relation to all the rest of the life of each nation and of the world at large. Nevertheless, no one of these suggested lines on which a universal history might be constructed would quite meet the expectations which the name Universal History raises, because we have become accustomed to think of history as being primarily and pre-eminently a narrative of the growth and development of communities, nations, and states as organised political bodies, seeing that it is in their character as bodies so organised that they come into relation with other nations and states. It is therefore better to follow the familiar plan of dealing with the annals of each race and nation as a distinct entity, while endeavouring to show throughout the whole narrative the part which each fills in the general drama of human effort, conflict, and progress.