ANTIQUITY OF MAN SAYCE 519 



age " was synonymous with the mythological period. When listen- 

 ing to a lecture last year by an eminent classical scholar upon the 

 successive naval hegemonies in the eastern basin of the Mediter- 

 ranean, to each of which he assigned a precise date, I could not but 

 think of the contrast with the orthodox attitude of mind in my 

 younger days toward what were then considered the inventions of 

 a later literature. .; It was then grudgingly admitted that libraries 

 might have existed in Greece in the fifth century before our era, but 

 even so, they would not have been libraries in our modern sense of 

 the word, in which the various branches of literature are represented 

 and students come to study them. 



It is true that there were some old-fashioned people who still be- 

 lieved that the earlier books of the Old Testament belonged to their 

 traditional date and that some of them were written by Moses him- 

 self. But this was the exception to the rule, so much the exception, 

 indeed, that a special revelation from above was called in to explain 

 it. And we of the younger generation, trained in the critical meth- 

 ods of Germany, were unable to accept the dogma ; it rested only on 

 unproved assertions and was contradicted by the character of the 

 documents themselves. If there were no libraries and literature in 

 early Greece, still less probable was it that they should have been 

 found in the Hebrew world. 



And where there was no literature to hand down the facts of his- 

 tory it was assumed to be unlikely that history could exist. Human 

 memory is notoriously defective and forgetful and the phantoms 

 of imagination take the place of sober facts. Instead of history we 

 should expect to have folklore and fairy tales. More especially 

 would this be the case in a literary community, such as that of mod- 

 ern Europe, to which the critics belonged; here the memory had 

 been weakened by centuries of literary tradition and the critics found 

 it difficult to believe the stories that were told of Indian scholars who 

 had handed down the Rig- Veda orally, or of Polynesians who pro- 

 fessed to remember the names and deeds of former chieftains for 

 numberless generations. The argument seemed unassailable; with- 

 out books and libraries there can be no history, and since books and 

 libraries could not be traced back beyond a few centuries before 

 our era, the earlier so-called history of the world, it was clear, must 

 be little more than myth. And from this it further followed that 

 where we have no history we can not assume that civilized man ex- 

 isted or could have existed for any considerable period of time. 



The historian is still largely under the spell of these preposses- 

 sions and beliefs. The purely archeological record naturally leaves 

 him untouched. He is content to let the archeologist discourse about 

 stone and bronze ages and assign to them long periods of time so 



