Conquest of Mexico
his treatment of Mexican religion, though he had no full appreciation of its composite nature nor of the inner meaning of much of its ceremonial. To summarise, it is perhaps not a great exaggeration to say that Prescott, on the whole, drew little more, in the way of Anthropological criteria, from his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, than was afforded him by the combined works of Hesiod, Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo, and Lucretius.
Classical studies, limited practically to the field of Greek archæology, were in advance of Anthropology in 1843, but differed greatly both in extent and in kind from those studies as pursued to-day. For many years, even after Prescott's time, Greek art, Greek literature, Greek culture was regarded as something of itself, remote from the rest of humanity, a virgin birth, an Athena springing in full panoply from the brain of the Greek Zeus. Indeed, at any rate from the point of view of art, the Greek tradition became a tyranny, a Pope, an obsession. Emancipation from that obsession has come only in a very recent period; and it is only the growth of Anthropological knowledge which has opened the eyes of the Western world to the value of the artistic productions of the Orient, of Ancient America, of Africa, and Polynesia. In 1843 the range of Greek archæology was confined to the study of coins, which had been the subject of more or less systematic research since the time of Ekhel, to the descriptions of the remains of temples furnished by the accounts of travellers, to inscriptions discovered and copied by scholars, and to certain notable examples of Greek art, such as the sculptures from the Parthenon, from Egina, and from Bassae. Upon this material, combined with the identification of many sites by Leake, scholars such as Müller and Boeckh laid the foundation of Greek historical archæology. But it was after the publication of the Conquest of Mexico that Layard opened up a new era in archaeological investigation by his excavations at Nimroud, and though the researches of Newton and Wood advanced the science still further, it was not until the results of Schliemann's labours at Hissarlik (1871) were given to the world that our knowledge of the early ages of Greece began. It is true that Greek literature could furnish Prescott with details as to Greek manners and customs, religion and polity; but the prevailing trend of thought, which regarded the culture of Classical Greece as something apart, inhibited their full use as Anthropological parallels. It is only of quite recent
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