114 COSMOS 



cimiTjent that we should begin our historical representation ol 

 the universe Irom some definite point of our terrestrial planet. 

 We will select 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 

 before 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.4 Babylon, Nineveh, Kashmir, Iran, and also China, after 



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

 Ind. Alterthumskunde, bd. i., s. 528. Compare Rodiger, in the Zeit- 

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

 Kurds, the latter of whom Strabo terms Kyrti. 



t Bordj, the water-shed of the Ormuzd, nearly where the chain of the 

 Thian-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-M6ru, 

 or countiy above Meru). Compare Burnouf, Commentaire sur le Yagna, 

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

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



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

 3?'00 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- 

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

 oemha III., thg builder of the original Labyrinth. A thousand years, 



