Chapter II 

 THE HELIX OF HISTORY 



History involves the study of human progress. The record 

 of that progress is to be found on the earth itself— a frag- 

 mentary record of giaves and building stones, of broken tools 

 and potsherds— which can be interpreted to give the story of 

 the ascent of man. But the greater part of history as it is 

 written by historians is the history of written documents. 

 Indeed, many historians maintain that only w^ritten docu- 

 ments can supply trustworthy history and that evidence from 

 other sources is not really history but should be dealt wdth as 

 a separate science, the science of archaeology. The result is 

 that the historian often fails to give the reader a perspective 

 of human history as a whole because he finds it necessary to 

 devote practically all his space to discussions of the ^vTitten 

 evidence and the rewording of the ^vritings of his prede- 

 cessors. As Gordon Childe points out in his essay on the 

 writing of history, this is particularly unfortunate if we are 

 endeavoring to follow the development of science and tech- 

 nology through the ages.* Even those scientific discoveries 

 which are necessarily committed to writing— mathematical 

 calculations and formulae, for instance— have generally been 

 neglected by students who, as Childe says, ''were by training 

 inclined to prefer historical and mythological literature and 

 w^ere, in any case, hardly competent to appreciate the true 

 inwardness of the problems the ancient scribes were trying 

 to overcome." 



Most of our information on the technology of the ancients 

 is necessarily derived from the material objects discovered by 



* Gordon Childe, "The History of Civilization," Antiquity, XV, I 

 (1941). 



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