HISTORICAL HYSTERIA

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 17, 21 January 1924, Page 20

HISTORICAL HYSTERIA

SEARCH FOR ANTIQUITIES

FOOLISHNESS OF EXAGGERATED

IMPORTANCE

The discoveries made in the tomb of Tutankhamen have evoked a remarkable display of popular, as well as of specialist, interest. The world is always alert to appreciate new marvels and romance of Egypt and "Old Nile." Soms of this special curiosity may be due to early association with the story of Joseph and the Book of Exodus; some is certainly due to the peculiar sense of mystery which generations have felt in the presence of the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Discoveries in Mesopotamia or Crete, though no less far-reaching in their chastening lessons for modernity, have produced comparatively little effect upon the imagination of the average reader. One of the results, declares Professor Turken in the Melbourne "Argus," has been that the grandeur of IWpt and the relative antiquity of its civilisation have been falsely accentuated.' lnere are those who appear to take it for granted that the iVile Valley was the cradle of all human culture, and even reputable Egyptologists have been seducted by the glamour of their speciality into deriving all science, art, letters, and the commonest devices of life 4rom the inventive wisdom of Mizrain. The saner inquirer finds little justification for such a theory. He is content to recognise the simple fact that, everywhere alike, civilisation is no new thing, and that the deeper the explorer digs, the further he pushes back the alleged ' beginnings". of an organised and more or less refined society. The usual attitude towards any discovery of objects or customs 4000 or even 3000 years old is one of amazement. "Fancy those old felows being able to achieve things like that! Fancy their cutting, carrying, and • erecting, those huge monoliths, which the modern engineer, with all his machinery, finds it so puzzling to manipulate! And what stupendous notions of constructions!" lhese and the like exclamations not only spring to the lips of the ordinary untaught modern; they are actually encouraged by students who ought to know better. They are the outcome of a persistent delusion as to the antiquity of man and as to the rate and consistency of human progress, and of an equally prevalent delusion as to the comparative profundity of the modern intelect and its capacity for art and taste. The parson least likely to be amazed is the classicist. The Homeric poems were created 3000 years ago, the Parthenon nearly 2400, and the fundamental philosophy of Aristotle some 2300.. Twenty-five centuries ago the Romans were already working out many of the economic and constitutional ques tioiis which the "radical reformer" of to-day imagines to afford a fresh field for his "progressive" crudities. Doubtless the Greeks were specially endowed _for progress in pure thinking and pure art; doubtless the Romans possessed special gifts for social organisation; but neither of these peoples had grown a new brain all of a sudden; they did not spring into existence fully equipped, like Athena frum the head of Zeus; what they were and did was the outcome of an incalculably long evolution of their ancestry. WhpMier in Egyptj in Mesopotamia, on the Danube, or in China, we should, if we could get back 10,000 years instead of 4000, find human beings not essentially different from those earliest "ancients" at whom the excavator has so far arrived.

I pick up an illustrated paper > nd find a reproduction of "carvings (n bone -done by prehistoric man 25,000 years ago." They are often quite good and spirited drawings. The •■■mammoth and reindeer were then roaming in France, and. the artist was a simple troglodyte, but these memorials prove him to have had at least a very modernartistic eye and interest. Being of a cautious temperament, and having but little faith in the hasty calculations of alleged science. I feel no pronounced conviction as to the 25,000 years. But it is a nice round number, and it would not surprise, me if it were approximately correct. Science has thrust back the infancy of Homo Sapiens by an indefinite number of millennia, r,nd, if there is anything at all in evolution, it would be absurd to suppose that man's notions and social schemes remained entirely undeveloped for 50,000 or 100,000 years, and then burst inexplicably into an aloe blossom some 40 centuries ago. External appliances have little or nothing to do with his powers of brain or his tendencies to artistic play, just as they have nothing to do with his feeling or conscience. Because we have Parliament, aniline dyes, telephones, aeroplanes, and gramophones, we are not wiser than Solomon or Aristotle, better artists than Pheidias or Praxiteles, better moralists than Gautama or Confucius,1 Bolder designers than the Iharaoh or Shah Jehan. Nor was neolithic man necessarily a person of inferior reason and conceptions simply because he had to chop and scrape and rub with stones and to use man power where we use cranes and traction engines. He could at least erect and orientate a. Stonehenge, cut and polish and remove stones of a hundred tons in weight and compact them so that the proverbial knife-blade could not be inserted at the joints. And for undertaking such labours he had spiritual and social motives analogous to those which built the Pyramids, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Taj Mahal, or Westminster Abbey.

The error commonly committed is to confuse the 'fdawn of history" with the dawn of civilisation or even of humanity. The date from which we begin to know of things is not the date from which things themselves began. The proper view is that, whereas mankind has been gradually evolving its ir.etal and productive'possibilities for uitold ages, its records are ascertainable during only the latest fringe or that vast time. Doubtless, material creations and contrivances increased enormously after the discovery of the use of iron. But that says nothing for the inure mentality or artistic instincts of ure-iion man. Material creations and ' connivances have again increased en >nnously sirce the discovery of the use of steam and electricity, but the fact does.' not make us of the twentieth century conceive or build structures to surpass, or ovei to equal, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It does not make us vvUe better poetry than the pre-scgam Nhal" :i care or paint better pictures tl'an r.ie-elec-tricity Velasquez. If anything, it seems to have made us less capable of creating such glories and grandeurs. If the face of the civilised world were suddenly overwhelmed, to be all uncovered again by excavators in the year-5923, the remains of our cities and monuments of 1923 would probablly be taken as damning evidence that mankind had actually retrogressed in design, structural power, aspirations, and large conceptions since the days of Tutankhamen, or those of ■Pericles, or those of the cathedralbuilders.

But this article is headed "Historical Hysteria," and one form of this bys-

teria, most strongly to be deprecated, is the1 tendency of writers to describe all newly discovered antiquities whatsoever as being "consummate" or ''superb" or ''incomparable." Truth to tell, Tutankhamen's treasure comprises, along with much that is graceful and elegant, a proportion of objects which are crude and ugly. The enthusiast, in his ecstacies of surprise, appears to lose all command of his critical faculty. In the otherwise admirable production entitled "Wonders of the Past," the editorial notes to the illustrations teem with laudatory epithets which the illustrattions_ themselves are often sufficient to stultify: Huge but hideously inartistic structures of India, crude and formless sculptures of Mexico, rough choppings of the Hittites, receive adjectives which are fit only for the perfect mas-ter-works of Greece or at least for the sumptuous splendours of Kome or Karnak. Amazing bigness or impressiveness is not necessarily amazing- beauty, nor should the historian force himself to discover in some clumsy effort of barbarian _ art a "vigour" or "boldness" which is therein detected only because the imagination can detect nothing more complimentary to say. The truth revealed by all the discoveries so far made is that anything like faultless artistry belonged only to the neighbourhood of the Mediterranean, that it reached its purest form and completest reign only in Greece, that in Egypt it existed only in certain departments of creation, that as you went East it was found, under Greek influence, and that in Central America it did not exist at all. Lfit us by all means recognise that "ancient" man, in the more civilised parts of _ the world, was in many respects quite equal, and in some respects superior, to our noble selves, but do not let us make the mistake of imagining the whole world to have been peopled with marvellously gifted races, who have vanished under the attacks of the malarial mosquito or of such other agency as the scientific monomaniac chooses to settle upon.