414 ANNUAL. REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1924 



As we look back upon our earliest historical horizon, we now know 

 that the men w^ho stood there in the gray dawn of the age of writing, 

 were able to hear echoes of a remoter past, transmitted in the form of 

 oral tradition of which some portion was then committed to writing 

 and thus survived. In our modern effort to recover and reconstruct 

 the story of man's past career, we have thus rehabilitated a new 

 body of sources, however cautious it behooves us to be in making 

 use of them. Not credulity, but historical method demands that we 

 now recognize these traditions, or the nucleus of fact to be drawn 

 from them, as a body of sources now to be restored to their proper 

 chronological position in the succession of surviving evidences which 

 reveal to us the past career of man on earth. 



We are the first generation of men able to survey that career 

 without a serious break. As we marshal the evidence for its suc- 

 cessive stages, we humanists stand shoulder to shoulder with the 

 natural scientists; for as we look backward it is the materials and 

 the methods of the geologist which confront us first. The geologist 

 is succeeded by the paleontologist, the anthropologist, the anthro- 

 pogeographer and the archeologist. It is at this point, on the 

 border land between the investigations of the natural scientist and 

 those of the humanist that we must insert these long discarded 

 echoes from an age able to transmit only oral tradition, the true 

 value of which oriental research has now interpreted to us. The 

 Homeric songs of the Trojan War can no longer be regarded as ex- 

 clusively noble literature, of purely legendary content, and in the 

 presence of these earliest surviving monuments of science the Greek 

 tradition of substantial Egyptian contributions to knowledge must 

 not be rejected as baseless. There is every possibility that the tombs 

 of Egypt may yield us further scientific treatises like this great 

 Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus, and we still cherish the hope 

 that the thirty-five or forty chests, boxes, and caskets still lying in 

 the innermost chamber of the tomb of Tutenkhamon with their 

 seals unbroken, may contain written documents. 



