682 ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE PRESiENT CENTURV. 



Babylon, Assyria, Media, Persia, and India. Even Asia Minor formed 

 only a temporary bridge between East and West, which was drawn up 

 again when it had served its purpose. We ourselves have grown up so 

 entirely in the atmosphere of Greek thought that we hardly feel sur- 

 prised when we see nations such as the Pheniciaus and Persians, looked 

 upon by the Greeks as strangers and barbarians, though in ancient times 

 the former were far more advanced in civilization than the Greeks, and 

 though the latter spoke a language closely allied to the language of 

 Homer, and possessed a religion far more x^ire and elevated than that 

 of the Homeric Greeks, The Eomans were the heirs of the Greeks, and 

 the whole of Europe succeeded afterwards to the intellectual inherit- 

 ance of Eome and Greece. Nor can we disguise the fact that we our- 

 selves have inherited from them something of that feeling of strange- 

 ness between the West and the East, between the white and the dark 

 man, between the Aryan and the Semite, which ought never to have 

 arisen, and which is a disgrace to everybody who harbors it. Xo one 

 in these Darwinian days would ventnre to doubt the homogeneous- 

 ness of the human species, the brotherhood of the whole human race; 

 but there remains the fact that, as in ancient so in modern times, mem- 

 bers of that one human species, brothers of that one human family, look 

 upon each other, not as brothers, but as strangers, if not as enemies, 

 divided not only by language and religion, but also by what people call 

 blood, whatever they may mean by that term. 



I wish to point out that it constitutes one of tlie greatest achievements 

 of Oriental scholarship to have proved by irrefragable evidence that 

 the complete break between East and West did not exist from the begin- 

 ning; that in prehistoric times language formed really a bond of union 

 between the ancestors of many of the Eastern and Western nations, 

 while more recent discoveries have proved that in liistoric times also, 

 language, which seemed to separate the great nations of antiquity, 

 never separated the most important among them so conipletely as to 

 make all intellectual commerce and exchange between them impossible. 

 These two discoveries seem to me to form the highest glory of Oriental 

 scholarship during the present century. - - - 



I begin with the prehistoric world which has actually been brought 

 to light for the first time by Oriental scholarship. 



1 confess I do not like the expression lyrchhtonc. It is a vague term, 

 and almost withdraws itself from definition. If real history begins only 

 with the events of which we possess contemporaneous witnesses, then, 

 no doubt, the whole period of which we are now speaking, and many 

 later periods also would have to be called prehistoric. But if history 

 means, as it did originally, research and knowledge of real events based 

 on such research, then the events of which we are going to speak are 

 as real and as tridy historical as the battle of Waterloo. It is often 

 su]>posed that students of Oriental languages and of the Science of Lan- 

 guage deal with words only. We have learned by this tinie that there 



