518 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 31 



have alluded at the beginning of my lecture, fell like a bombshell 

 upon an unbelieving world. I well remember the sensation it cre- 

 ated and the numerous criticisms and " replies " which it called 

 forth. But the historian comforted himself with the assurance that 

 the " man " of the geologist was not the civilized and literary man 

 with whom he had to deal, but merely a superior sort of ape. Civ- 

 ilized man was the man who had left books behind him which could 

 be criticized and fully explained by the modern writer of books. 



Medieval tradition had left yet another belief behind it which co- 

 existed with the belief in the brief duration of humanity and the 

 universe. It was the belief in the decline instead of the progress 

 of civilization and culture. The belief had been handed down from 

 the classical world which had looked back with regret upon " a 

 golden age," and it had been fostered by the manifest relapse into 

 barbarism which characterized medieval Europe. Travelers in 

 Egypt brought back stories of the marvelous monuments of a re- 

 mote past which were still to be found there; Roman culture had 

 been inferior to that of Greece, and the civilization of the Roman 

 Empire had been succeeded by the Dark Ages. Civilized man, in 

 short, had had but a brief existence, and it was accordingly evident 

 that documents which ascribed to him an earlier date were unworthy 

 of credence. It needed but little ingenuity on the part of the critic 

 to resolve the earlier narratives given in them into myths and inven- 

 tions and to lay down that literature in the true sense of the term 

 did not exist before the seventh century B. C. The heroes of the 

 old legends became solar myths and the " ancient empires of the 

 East " were stripped of their antiquity. 



A new era has dawned upon us. The scientific method, aided by 

 the spade, has opened up a new world and furnished us with facts 

 instead of theories. And the result is that the same story, as that 

 which geology had to tell us, is being retold. The age of civilized 

 man must be pushed back through the centuries like the age of un- 

 civilized man. Catastrophic theories are no more applicable to him 

 than they are to the human being who had not yet invented language 

 or learned how to cook his food. Art and culture did not spring 

 suddenly into existence like Athena from the head of Zeus. 



The last hundred years have, indeed, unfolded to us a new world, 

 that of the civilized past. It is difficult for me to realize to-day 

 how little we knew of it in the days when I was a boy. The in- 

 scriptions of Egypt and Assyria, it is true, were beginning to be 

 deciphered, but the historian still looked upon their interpretation 

 with suspicion, and some, like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, rejected 

 it altogether. So far as the ^gean was concerned, its history began 

 with the Ionic colonization of the Asiatic coast, and the " Homeric 



