114 COSMOS. 



cumbent that we should begin our historical representation ot 

 the universe from some definite point of our terrestrial planet. 

 We Avill seJect for this purpose that sea basin around which 

 have dwelt those nations whose knowledge has formed the 

 basis of our western civilization, which alone has made an 

 almost uninterrupted progress. We may indicate the main 

 streams from which Western Europe has received the elements 

 of the cultivation and extended views of nature, but amid the 

 diversity of these streams we are unable to trace one primitive 

 source. A deep insight into the forces of nature and a recog- 

 nition of the unity of the Cosmos does not appertain to a so- 

 called primitive race : a term that has been applied, amid 

 the alternations of historical views, sometimes to a Semitic 

 race in Northern Chaldea Arpaxad (the Arrapachitis of 

 Ptolemy)* and sometimes to a race of Indians and Iranians, 

 in the ancient Zend, in the district surrounding the sources 

 of the Oxus and the Jaxartes.t History, as far as it is based 

 on human testimony, knows of no primitive race, no one prim- 

 itive seat of civilization, and no primitive physical natural 

 science whose glory has been dimmed by the destructive bar- 

 barism of later ages. The historical inquirer must penetrate 

 through many superimposed misty strata of symbolical myths 

 beibre he can reach that solid foundation where the earliest 

 germ of human culture has been developed in accordance 

 with natural laws. In the dimness of antiquity, which con- 

 stitutes, as it were, the extreme horizon of true historical 

 knowledge, we see many luminous points, or centers of civili- 

 zation, simultaneously blending their rays. Among these we 

 may reckon Egypt at least five thousand years before our 

 era.t Babylon, Nineveh, Kashmir, Iran, and also China, after 



* Ewald, GeschicJite des Volkes Israel, bd. i., 1843, s. 332-334; Lassen, 

 Lid. AllerthumsJcunde, bd. i., s. 528. Compare RSdiger, in the Zeit- 

 tchrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, bd. iii., s. 4, on Chaldeans and 

 Kurd.s, the latter of whom Strabo terms Kyrti. 



t Bordj, the water-shed of the Oraiuzd, neai'ly where the chain of the 

 Thiau-schan (or Celestial Mountains}, at its western termination, abuts 

 in veins against the Bolor (Belur-tagh), or rather intersects it, under the 

 name of the Asferah chain, north of the highland of Pamer (Upa-Meru, 

 or country above Meru). Compare Burnouf, Commentaire sur le Yacna, 

 t. i., p. 239, and Addit., p. clxxxv., with Hnmboldt, Asie Centrale, t. i., 

 p. 163 ; t. ii., p. 16, 377-390. 



t The principal chronological data for Egypt are as follows : " Menes, 

 3900 B.C. at least, and probably tolerably correct; 3430, commence- 

 ment of the fourth dynasty, which included the pyramid builders, Che- 

 phren-Schafra, Cheops-Chufu, and Mykerinos or Menkera ; 2200, inva- 

 sion of the Hyksos under the twelfth dynasty, to which belongs Ame- 

 nemha III., the builder of the original Labyrinth. A thousand years, 



