sum-total of material that we have assembled for the law and economics of Egypt, India, and China[1] in comparison with the work that has been done on Greek and Roman law.
About 3000[2] after a long "Merovingian" period, which is still distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates. In these cases the distinctions between early and late periods have long ago been labelled as Old and Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Akkad. The outcome of the Egyptian feudal period marked by the establishment of a hereditary nobility and the decline (from Dynasty VI) of the older Kingship, presents so astounding a similarity with the course of events in the Chinese springtime from I-Wang (934-909) and that in the Western from the Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) that a unified comparative study of all three might well be risked. At the beginning of the Babylonian "Baroque" we see the figure of the great Sargon (2500), who pushed out to the Mediterranean coast, conquered Cyprus, and styled himself, like Justinian I and Charles V, "lord of the four parts of the earth." And in due course, about 1800 on the Nile and rather earlier in Sumer-Akkad, we perceive the beginnings of the first Civilizations. Of these the. Asiatic displayed immense expansive power. The "achievements of the Babylonian Civilization" (as the books say), many things and notions connected with measuring, numbering, and accounting, travelled probably as far as the North and the Yellow Seas. Many a Babylonian trademark upon a tool may have come to be
- ↑ Another blank is the history of the countryside or landscape (i.e., of the soil, with its plant-mantle and its weathering) in which man's history has been staged for five thousand years. And yet man has so painfully wrested himself from the history of the landscape, and withal is so held to it still by myriad fibres, that without it life, soul, and thought are inconceivable.
So far as concerns the South-European field, from the end of the Ice Age, a hitherto rank luxuriance gradually gave place in the plant-world to poverty. In the course of the successive Egyptian, Classical, Arabian, and Western Cultures, a climatic change developed all around the Mediterranean, which resulted in the peasant's being compelled to fight no longer against the plant-world, but for it — first against the primeval forest and then against the desert. In Hannibal's time the Sahara lay very far indeed to the south of Carthage, but today it already penetrates to northern Spain and Italy. Where was it in the days of the pyramid-builders, who depicted sylvan and hunting scenes in their reliefs? When the Spaniards expelled the Moriscos, their countryside of woods and ploughland, already only artificially maintained, lost its character altogether, and the towns became oases in the waste. In the Roman period such a result could not have ensued.
- ↑ The new method of comparative morphology affords us a safe test of the datings which have been arrived at by other means for the beginnings of past Cultures. The same kind of argument which would prevent us, even in the absence of positive information, from dating Goethe's birth more than a century earlier than the "Urfaust" or supposing the career of Alexander the Great to have been that of an elderly man, enables us to demonstrate, from the individual characteristics of their political life and the spirit of their art, thought, and religion, that the Egyptian Culture dawned somewhere about 3000 and the Chinese about 1400. The calculations of French investigators and more recently of Borchardt (Die Annalen und die zeitliche Festlegung des Alten Reiches, 1919) are as unsound intrinsically as those of Chinese historians for the legendary Hsia and Shang dynasties. Equally, it is impossible that the Egyptian calendar should have been introduced in 4241 B.C. As in every chronology we have to allow that evolution has been accompanied by radical calendar changes, the attempt to fix the exact starting-date a posteriori is objectless.
