16.PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

16.PRIMITIVE NOMADIC PEOPLES

It was not only in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley that men were settling down to agriculture and the formation of city states in the centuries between 6000 and 8000 B.C. Wherever there were possibilities of irrigation and a steady all-the-year-round food supply men were exchanging the uncertainties and hardships of hunting and wandering for the routines of settlement. On the upper Tigris a people called the Assyrians were founding cities; in the valleys of Asia Minor and on the Mediterranean shores and islands, there were small communities growing up to civilization. Possibly parallel developments of human life were already going on in favourable regions of India, and China. In many parts of Europe where there were lakes well stocked with fish, little communities of men had long settled in dwellings built on piles over the water, and were eking out agriculture by fishing and hunting. But over much larger areas of the old world no such settlement was possible. The land was too harsh, too thickly wooded or too arid, or the seasons too uncertain for mankind, with only the implements and science of that age to take root. For settlement under the conditions of the primitive civilizations men needed a constant water supply and warmth and sunshine. Where these needs were not satisfied, man could live as a transient, as a hunter following his game, as a herdsman following the seasonal grass, but he could not settle. The transition from the hunting to the herding life may have been very gradual. From following herds of wild cattle or (in Asia) wild horses, men may have come to an idea of property in them, have learnt to pen them into valleys, have fought for them against wolves, wild dogs and other predatory beasts.

A CONTEMPORARY LAKE VILLAGE

These Borneo dwellings are practically counterparts of the homes of

European neolithic communities 6000 B.C.

So while the primitive civilizations of the cultivators were growing up

chiefly in the great river valleys, a different way of living, the

nomadic life, a life in constant movement to and fro from winter

pasture to summer pasture, was also growing up. The nomadic peoples

were on the whole hardier than the agriculturalists; they were less

prolific and numerous, they had no permanent temples and no highly

organized priesthood; they had less gear; but the reader must not

suppose that theirs was necessarily a less highly developed way of

living on that account. In many ways this free life was a fuller life

than that of the tillers of the soil. The individual was more

self-reliant; less of a unit in a crowd. The leader was more

important; the medicine man perhaps less so.

NOMADS IN EGYPT

NOMADS IN EGYPT

NOMADS IN EGYPT

Egyptian wall painting in a tomb near ancient Beni Hassan, middle

Egypt. It depicts the arrival of a tribe of Semitic Nomads in Egypt

about the year of 1895 B.C.

Moving over large stretches of country the nomad took a wider view of

life. He touched on the confines of this settled land and that. He

was used to the sight of strange faces. He had to scheme and treat for

pasture with competing tribes. He knew more of minerals than the folk

upon the plough lands because he went over mountain passes and into

rocky places. He may have been a better metallurgist. Possibly bronze

and much more probably iron smelting were nomadic discoveries. Some of

the earliest implements of iron reduced from its ores have been found

in Central Europe far away from the early civilizations.

On the other hand the settled folk had their textiles and their pottery

and made many desirable things. It was inevitable that as the two

sorts of life, the agricultural and the nomadic differentiated, a

certain amount of looting and trading should develop between the two.

In Sumeria particularly which had deserts and seasonal country on

either hand it must have been usual to have the nomads camping close to

the cultivated fields, trading and stealing and perhaps tinkering, as

gipsies do to this day. (But hens they would not steal, because the

domestic fowl—an Indian jungle fowl originally was not domesticated by

man until about 1000 B.C.) They would bring precious stones and things

of metal and leather. If they were hunters they would bring skins.

They would get in exchange pottery and beads and glass, garments and

suchlike manufactured things.

From an ancient and curiously painted model in the British Museum

Three main regions and three main kinds of wandering and imperfectly

settled people there were in those remote days of the first

civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in the forests of

Europe were the blonde Nordic peoples, hunters and herdsmen, a lowly

race. The primitive civilizations saw very little of this race before

1500 B.C. Away on the steppes of eastern Asia various Mongolian

tribes, the Hunnish peoples, were domesticating the horse and

developing a very wide sweeping habit of seasonal movement between

their summer and winter camping places. Possibly the Nordic and Hunnish

peoples were still separated from one another by the swamps of Russia

and the greater Caspian Sea of that time. For very much of Russia

there was swamp and lake. In the deserts, which were growing more arid

now, of Syria and Arabia, tribes of a dark white or brownish people,

the Semitic tribes, were driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses

from pasture to pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and certain

more negroid people from southern Persia, the Elamites, who were the

first nomads to come into close contact with the early civilizations.

They came as traders and as raiders. Finally there arose leaders among

them with bolder imaginations, and they became conquerors.

This monarch, son of Sargon I, was a great architecht as well as a

famous conqueror. Discovered in 1898 among the ruins of Susa, Persia

About 2750 B.C. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had conquered the whole

Sumerian land and was master of all the world from the Persian Gulf to

the Mediterranean Sea. He was an illiterate barbarian and his people,

the Akkadians, learnt the Sumerian writing and adopted the Sumerian

language as the speech of the officials and the learned. The empire he

founded decayed after two centuries, and after one inundation of

Elamites a fresh Semitic people, the Amorites, by degrees established

their rule over Sumeria. They made their capital in what had hitherto

been a small up-river town, Babylon, and their empire is called the

first Babylonian Empire. It was consolidated by a great king called

Hammurabi (circa 2100 B.C.) who made the earliest code of laws yet

known to history.

The narrow valley of the Nile lies less open to nomadic invasion than

Mesopotamia, but about the time of Hammurabi occurred a successful

Semitic invasion of Egypt and a line of Pharaohs was set up, the Hyksos

or “shepherd kings,” which lasted for several centuries. These Semitic

conquerors never assimilated themselves with the Egyptians; they were

always regarded with hostility as foreigners and barbarians; and they

were at last expelled by a popular uprising about 1600 B.C.

But the Semites had come into Sumeria for good and all, the two races

assimilated and the Babylonian Empire became Semitic in its language

and character.

15.SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS
15.SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING

The old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000 or 7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilized communities almost at the Peruvian level, appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile valley. At that time north Persia and western Turkestan and south Arabia were all more fertile than they are now, and there are traces of very early communities in these regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia however and in Egypt that there first appear cities, temples, systematic irrigation, and evidences of a social organization rising above the level of a mere barbaric village-town. In those days the Euphrates and Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf, and it was in the country between them that the Sumerians built their first cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the great history of Egypt was beginning.

These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with prominent

noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been deciphered, and

their language is now known. They had discovered the use of bronze and

they built great tower-like temples of sun-dried brick. The clay of

this country is very fine; they used it to write upon, and so it is

that their inscriptions have been preserved to us. They had cattle,

sheep, goats and asses, but no horses. They fought on foot, in close

formation, carrying spears and shields of skin. Their clothing was of

wool and they shaved their heads.

Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been an independent

state with a god of its own and priests of its own. But sometimes one

city would establish an ascendancy over others and exact tribute from

their population. A very ancient inscription at Nippur records the

“empire,” the first recorded empire, of the Sumerian city of Erech.

Its god and its priest-king claimed an authority from the Persian Gulf

to the Red Sea.

BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C.

BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C.

Note the cuneiform characters of the inscription, which records the

building of a temple to a Sun God

At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial record.

Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write. The Azilian

rock pictures to which we have already referred show the beginning of

the process. Many of them record hunts and expeditions, and in most of

these the human figures are plainly drawn. But in some the painter

would not bother with head and limbs; he just indicated men by a

vertical and one or two transverse strokes. From this to a

conventional condensed picture writing was an easy transition. In

Sumeria, where the writing was done on clay with a stick, the dabs of

the characters soon became unrecognizably unlike the things they stood

for, but in Egypt where men painted on walls and on strips of the

papyrus reed (the first paper) the likeness to the thing imitated

remained. From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria made

wedge-shaped marks, the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform (=

wedge-shaped).

EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY

EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY

Recovered from the Tombs at Abydos in 1921 by the British School of

Archæology. They give evidence of early form of block printing

An important step towards writing was made when pictures were used to

indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing. In the

rebus dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done to-day.

We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child is delighted to

guess that this is the Scotch name Campbell. The Sumerian language was

a language made up of accumulated syllables rather like some

contemporary Amerindian languages, and it lent itself very readily to

this syllabic method of writing words expressing ideas that could not

be conveyed by pictures directly. Egyptian writing underwent parallel

developments. Later on, when foreign peoples with less distinctly

syllabled methods of speech were to learn and use these picture scripts

they were to make those further modifications and simplifications that

developed at last into alphabetical writing. All the true alphabets of

the later world derived from a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and

the Egyptian hieroglyphic (priest writing). Later in China there was

to develop a conventionalized picture writing, but in China it never

got to the alphabetical stage.

The invention of writing was of very great importance in the

development of human societies. It put agreements, laws, commandments

on record. It made the growth of states larger than the old city

states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness

possible. The command of the priest or king and his seal could go far

beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. It is

interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals were greatly used. A

king or a nobleman or a merchant would have his seal often very

artistically carved, and would impress it on any clay document he

wished to authorize. So close had civilization got to printing six

thousand years ago. Then the clay was dried hard and became permanent.

For the reader must remember that in the land of Mesopotamia for

countless years, letters, records and accounts were all written on

comparatively indestructible tiles. To that fact we owe a great wealth

of recovered knowledge.

Bronze, copper, gold, silver and, as a precious rarity, meteoric iron

were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a very early stage.

Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have been

very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria. And except for the asses and

cattle in the streets it must have been not unlike the life in the Maya

cities of America three or four thousand years later. Most of the

people in peace time were busy with irrigation and cultivation—except

on days of religious festivity. They had no money and no need for it.

They managed their small occasional trades by barter. The princes and

rulers who alone had more than a few possessions used gold and silver

bars and precious stones for any incidental act of trade. The temple

dominated life; in Sumeria it was a great towering temple that went up

to a roof from which the stars were observed; in Egypt it was a massive

building with only a ground floor. In Sumeria the priest ruler was the

greatest, most splendid of beings. In Egypt however there was one who

was raised above the priests; he was the living incarnation of the

chief god of the land, the Pharaoh, the god king.

There were few changes in the world in those days; men’s days were

sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers came into the land and

such as did fared uncomfortably. The priest directed life according to

immemorial rules and watched the stars for seed time and marked the

omens of the sacrifices and interpreted the warnings of dreams. Men

worked and loved and died, not unhappily, forgetful of the savage past

of their race and heedless of its future. Sometimes the ruler was

benign. Such was Pepi II, who reigned in Egypt for ninety years.

Sometimes he was ambitious and took men’s sons to be soldiers and sent

them against neighbouring city states to war and plunder, or he made

them toil to build great buildings. Such were Cheops and Chephren and

Mycerinus, who built those vast sepulchral piles, the pyramids at

Gizeh. The largest of these is 450 feet high and the weight of stone in

it is 4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down the Nile in boats and

lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. Its erection must have

exhausted Egypt more than a great war would have done.

14.PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

14.PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS

About 10,000 B.C. the geography of the world was very similar in its general outline to that of the world to-day. It is probable that by that time the great barrier across the Straits of Gibraltar that had hitherto banked back the ocean waters from the Mediterranean valley had been eaten through, and that the Mediterranean was a sea following much the same coastlines as it does now. The Caspian Sea was probably still far more extensive than it is at present, and it may have been continuous with the Black Sea to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. About this great Central Asian sea lands that are now steppes and deserts were fertile and habitable. Generally it was a moister and more fertile world. European Russia was much more a land of swamp and lake than it is now, and there may still have been a land connexion between Asia and America at Behring Straits.

It would have been already possible at that time to have distinguished

the main racial divisions of mankind as we know them to-day. Across

the warm temperate regions of this rather warmer and better-wooded

world, and along the coasts, stretched the brownish peoples of the

Heliolithic culture, the ancestors of the bulk of the living

inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, of the Berbers, the Egyptians

and of much of the population of South and Eastern Asia. This great

race had of course a number of varieties. The Iberian or Mediterranean

or “dark-white” race of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coast, the

“Hamitic” peoples which include the Berbers and Egyptians, the

Dravidians; the darker people of India, a multitude of East Indian

people, many Polynesian races and the Maoris are all divisions of

various value of this great main mass of humanity. Its western

varieties are whiter than its eastern.

In the forests of central and northern Europe a more blonde variety of

men with blue eyes was becoming distinguishable, branching off from the

main mass of brownish people, a variety which many people now speak of

as the Nordic race. In the more open regions of northeastern Asia was

another differentiation of this brownish humanity in the direction of a

type with more oblique eyes, high cheek-bones, a yellowish skin, and

very straight black hair, the Mongolian peoples. In South Africa,

Australia, in many tropical islands in the south of Asia were remains

of the early negroid peoples. The central parts of Africa were already

a region of racial intermixture. Nearly all the coloured races of

Africa to-day seem to be blends of the brownish peoples of the north

with a negroid substratum.

A Diagrammatic Summary of Current Ideas of the Relationship of Human

Races

We have to remember that human races can all interbreed freely and that

they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds do. Human races do not

branch out like trees with branches that never come together again. It

is a thing we need to bear constantly in mind, this remingling of races

at any opportunity. It will save us from many cruel delusions and

prejudices if we do so. People will use such a word as race in the

loosest manner, and base the most preposterous generalizations upon it.

They will speak of a “British” race or of a “European” race. But

nearly all the European nations are confused mixtures of brownish,

dark-white, white and Mongolian elements.

It was at the Neolithic phase of human development that peoples of the

Mongolian breed first made their way into America. Apparently they

came by way of Behring Straits and spread southward. They found

caribou, the American reindeer, in the north and great herds of bison

in the south. When they reached South America there were still living

the Glyptodon, a gigantic armadillo, and the Megatherium, a monstrous

clumsy sloth as high as an elephant. They probably exterminated the

latter beast, which was as helpless as it was big.

The greater portion of these American tribes never rose above a hunting

nomadic Neolithic life. They never discovered the use of iron, and

their chief metal possessions were native gold and copper. But in

Mexico, Yucatan and Peru conditions existed favourable to settled

cultivation, and here about 1000 B.C. or so arose very interesting

civilizations of a parallel but different type from the old-world

civilization. Like the much earlier primitive civilizations of the old

world these communities displayed a great development of human

sacrifice about the processes of seed time and harvest; but while in

the old world, as we shall see, these primary ideas were ultimately

mitigated, complicated and overlaid by others, in America they

developed and were elaborated, to a very high degree of intensity.

These American civilized countries were essentially priest-ruled

countries; their war chiefs and rulers were under a rigorous rule of

law and omen.

These priests carried astronomical science to a high level of accuracy.

They knew their year better than the Babylonians of whom we shall

presently tell. In Yucatan they had a kind of writing, the Maya

writing, of the most curious and elaborate character. So far as we

have been able to decipher it, it was used mainly for keeping the exact

and complicated calendars upon which the priests expended their

intelligence. The art of the Maya civilization came to a climax about

700 or 800 A.D. The sculptured work of these people amazes the modern

observer by its great plastic power and its frequent beauty, and

perplexes him by a grotesqueness and by a sort of insane

conventionality and intricacy outside the circle of his ideas. There

is nothing quite like it in the old world. The nearest approach, and

that is a remote one, is found in archaic Indian carvings. Everywhere

there are woven feathers and serpents twine in and out. Many Maya

inscriptions resemble a certain sort of elaborate drawing made by

lunatics in European asylums, more than any other old-world work. It

is as if the Maya mind had developed upon a different line from the

old-world mind, had a different twist to its ideas, was not, by

old-world standards, a rational mind at all.

This linking of these aberrant American civilizations to the idea of a

general mental aberration finds support in their extraordinary

obsession by the shedding of human blood. The Mexican civilization in

particular ran blood; it offered thousands of human victims yearly.

The cutting open of living victims, the tearing out of the still

beating heart, was an act that dominated the minds and lives of these

strange priesthoods. The public life, the national festivities all

turned on this fantastically horrible act.

NEOLITHIC WARRIOR

Modelled from drawing by Prof. Rutot

The ordinary existence of the common people in these communities was

very like the ordinary existence of any other barbaric peasantry.

Their pottery, weaving and dyeing was very good. The Maya writing was

not only carven on stone but written and painted upon skins and the

like. The European and American museums contain many enigmatical Maya

manuscripts of which at present little has been deciphered except the

dates. In Peru there were beginnings of a similar writing but they

were superseded by a method of keeping records by knotting cords. A

similar method of mnemonics was in use in China thousands of years ago.

In the old world before 4000 or 5000 B.C., that is to say three or four

thousand years earlier, there were primitive civilizations not unlike

these American civilizations; civilizations based upon a temple, having

a vast quantity of blood sacrifices and with an intensely astronomical

priesthood. But in the old world the primitive civilizations reacted

upon one another and developed towards the conditions of our own world.

In America these primitive civilizations never progressed beyond this

primitive stage. Each of them was in a little world of its own.

Mexico it seems knew little or nothing of Peru, until the Europeans

came to America. The potato, which was the principal food stuff in

Peru, was unknown in Mexico.

Age by age these peoples lived and marvelled at their gods and made

their sacrifices and died. Maya art rose to high levels of decorative

beauty. Men made love and tribes made war. Drought and plenty,

pestilence and health, followed one another. The priests elaborated

their calendar and their sacrificial ritual through long centuries, but

made little progress in other directions.

13.THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

13.THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION

We are still very ignorant about the beginnings of cultivation and settlement in the world although a vast amount of research and speculation has been given to these matters in the last fifty years.

All that we can say with any confidence at present is that somewhen about 15,000 and 12,000 B.C. while the Azilian people were in the south of Spain and while the remnants of the earlier hunters were drifting northward and eastward, somewhere in North Africa or Western Asia or in that great Mediterranean valley that is now submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean sea, there were people who, age by age, were working out two vitally important things; they were beginning cultivation and they were domesticating animals. They were also beginning to make, in addition to the chipped implements of their hunter forebears, implements of polished stone. They had discovered the possibility of basketwork and roughly woven textiles of plant fibre, and they were beginning to make a rudely modelled pottery.

They were entering upon a new phase in human culture, the Neolithic

phase (New Stone Age) as distinguished from the Palæolithic (Old Stone)

phase of the Cro-Magnards, the Grimaldi people, the Azilians and their

like. [1] Slowly these Neolithic people spread over the warmer parts

of the world; and the arts they had mastered, the plants and animals

they had learnt to use, spread by imitation and acquisition even more

widely than they did. By 10,000 B.C., most of mankind was at the

Neolithic level.

Now the ploughing of land, the sowing of seed, the reaping of harvest,

threshing and grinding, may seem the most obviously reasonable steps to

a modern mind just as to a modern mind it is a commonplace that the

world is round. What else could you do? people will ask. What else

can it be? But to the primitive man of twenty thousand years ago

neither of the systems of action and reasoning that seem so sure and

manifest to us to-day were at all obvious. He felt his way to

effectual practice through a multitude of trials and misconceptions,

with fantastic and unnecessary elaborations and false interpretations

at every turn. Somewhere in the Mediterranean region, wheat grew wild;

and man may have learnt to pound and then grind up its seeds for food

long before he learnt to sow. He reaped before he sowed.

And it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world wherever

there is sowing and harvesting there is still traceable the vestiges of

a strong primitive association of the idea of sowing with the idea of a

blood sacrifice, and primarily of the sacrifice of a human being. The

study of the original entanglement of these two things is a profoundly

attractive one to the curious mind; the interested reader will find it

very fully developed in that monumental work, Sir J. G. Frazer’s

_Golden Bough_. It was an entanglement, we must remember, in the

childish, dreaming, myth-making primitive mind; no reasoned process

will explain it. But in that world of 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, it

would seem that whenever seed time came round to the Neolithic peoples

there was a human sacrifice. And it was not the sacrifice of any mean

or outcast person; it was the sacrifice usually of a chosen youth or

maiden, a youth more often who was treated with profound deference and

even worship up to the moment of his immolation. He was a sort of

sacrificial god-king, and all the details of his killing had become a

ritual directed by the old, knowing men and sanctioned by the

accumulated usage of ages.

NEOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS

At first primitive men, with only a very rough idea of the seasons,

must have found great difficulty in determining when was the propitious

moment for the seed-time sacrifice and the sowing. There is some

reason for supposing that there was an early stage in human experience

when men had no idea of a year. The first chronology was in lunar

months; it is supposed that the years of the Biblical patriarchs are

really moons, and the Babylonian calendar shows distinct traces of an

attempt to reckon seed time by taking thirteen lunar months to see it

round. This lunar influence upon the calendar reaches down to our own

days. If usage did not dull our sense of its strangeness we should

think it a very remarkable thing indeed that the Christian Church does

not commemorate the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ on the

proper anniversaries but on dates that vary year by year with the

phases of the moon.

It may be doubted whether the first agriculturalists made any

observation of the stars. It is more likely that stars were first

observed by migratory herdsmen, who found them a convenient mark of

direction. But once their use in determining seasons was realized,

their importance to agriculture became very great. The seed-time

sacrifice was linked up with the southing or northing of some prominent

star. A myth and worship of that star was for primitive man an almost

inevitable consequence.

It is easy to see how important the man of knowledge and experience,

the man who knew about the blood sacrifice and the stars, became in

this early Neolithic world.

The fear of uncleanness and pollution, and the methods of cleansing

that were advisable, constituted another source of power for the

knowledgeable men and women. For there have always been witches as well

as wizards, and priestesses as well as priests. The early priest was

really not so much a religious man as a man of applied science. His

science was generally empirical and often bad; he kept it secret from

the generality of men very jealously; but that does not alter the fact

that his primary function was knowledge and that his primary use was a

practical use.

Twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, in all the warm and fairly

well-watered parts of the Old World these Neolithic human communities,

with their class and tradition of priests and priestesses and their

cultivated fields and their development of villages and little walled

cities, were spreading. Age by age a drift and exchange of ideas went

on between these communities. Eliot Smith and Rivers have used the

term “Heliolithic culture” for the culture of these first agricultural

peoples. “Heliolithic” (Sun and Stone) is not perhaps the best

possible word to use for this, but until scientific men give us a

better one we shall have to use it. Originating somewhere in the

Mediterranean and western Asiatic area, it spread age by age eastward

and from island to island across the Pacific until it may even have

reached America and mingled with the more primitive ways of living of

the Mongoloid immigrants coming down from the North.

Wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture went they

took with them all or most of a certain group of curious ideas and

practices. Some of them are such queer ideas that they call for the

explanation of the mental expert. They made pyramids and great mounds,

and set up great circles of big stones, perhaps to facilitate the

astronomical observation of the priests; they made mummies of some or

all of their dead; they tattooed and circumcized; they had the old

custom, known as the _couvade_, of sending the _father_ to bed and rest

when a child was born, and they had as a luck symbol the well-known

Swastika.

If we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how far these

group practices have left their traces, we should make a belt along the

temperate and sub-tropical coasts of the world from Stonehenge and

Spain across the world to Mexico and Peru. But Africa below the

equator, north central Europe, and north Asia would show none of these

dottings; there lived races who were developing along practically

independent lines.

The term Palæolithic we may note is also used to cover the Neanderthaler and even the Eolithic implements. The pre-human age is called the “Older Palæolithic;” the age of true men using unpolished stones in the “Newer Palæolithic.”

12. PRIMITIVE THOUGHT | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

12. PRIMITIVE THOUGHT

And now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest began. Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions.

The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to

reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently the

science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which the

egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained,

suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social

life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the

history of primitive society; and another fruitful source of suggestion

has been the study of the ideas and customs of such contemporary

savages as still survive. Again there is a sort of mental

fossilization which we find in folk-lore and the deep-lying irrational

superstitions and prejudices that still survive among modern civilized

people. And finally we have in the increasingly numerous pictures,

statues, carvings, symbols and the like, as we draw near to our own

time, clearer and clearer indications of what man found interesting and

worthy of record and representation.

Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is to

say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up images or

images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in accordance

with the emotions they aroused. So a child or an uneducated person

does to-day. Systematic thinking is apparently a comparatively late

development in human experience; it has not played any great part in

human life until within the last three thousand years. And even to-day

those who really control and order their thoughts are but a small

minority of mankind. Most of the world still lives by imagination and

passion.

Probably the earliest human societies, in the opening stages of the

true human story, were small family groups. Just as the flocks and

herds of the earlier mammals arose out of families which remained

together and multiplied, so probably did the earliest tribes. But

before this could happen a certain restraint upon the primitive

egotisms of the individual had to be established. The fear of the

father and respect for the mother had to be extended into adult life,

and the natural jealousy of the old man of the group for the younger

males as they grew up had to be mitigated. The mother on the other

hand was the natural adviser and protector of the young. Human social

life grew up out of the reaction between the crude instinct of the

young to go off and pair by themselves as they grew up, on the one

hand, and the dangers and disadvantages of separation on the other. An

anthropological writer of great genius, J. J. Atkinson, in his _Primal

Law_, has shown how much of the customary law of savages, the _Tabus_,

that are so remarkable a fact in tribal life, can be ascribed to such a

mental adjustment of the needs of the primitive human animal to a

developing social life, and the later work of the psycho- analysts has

done much to confirm his interpretation of these possibilities.

Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect and fear of

the Old Man and the emotional reaction of the primitive savage to older

protective women, exaggerated in dreams and enriched by fanciful mental

play, played a large part in the beginnings of primitive religion and

in the conception of gods and goddesses. Associated with this respect

for powerful or helpful personalities was a dread and exaltation of

such personages after their deaths, due to their reappearance in

dreams. It was easy to believe they were not truly dead but only

fantastically transferred to a remoteness of greater power.

The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more vivid and

real than those of a modern adult, and primitive man was always

something of a child. He was nearer to the animals also, and he could

suppose them to have motives and reactions like his own. He could

imagine animal helpers, animal enemies, animal gods. One needs to have

been an imaginative child oneself to realize again how important,

significant, portentous or friendly, strangely shaped rocks, lumps of

wood, exceptional trees or the like may have appeared to the men of the

Old Stone Age, and how dream and fancy would create stories and legends

about such things that would become credible as they told them. Some

of these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again. The

women would tell them to the children and so establish a tradition. To

this day most imaginative children invent long stories in which some

favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-human being figures as

the hero, and primitive man probably did the same—with a much stronger

disposition to believe his hero real.

For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were probably

quite talkative beings. In that way they have differed from the

Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them. The Neanderthaler may

have been a dumb animal. Of course the primitive human speech was

probably a very scanty collection of names, and may have been eked out

with gestures and signs.

There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of

cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in his

associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an effect

with something quite wrong as its cause. “You do so and so,” he said,

“and so and so happens.” You give a child a poisonous berry and it

dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong.

There we have two bits of cause and effect association, one true one

false. We call the system of cause and effect in the mind of a savage,

Fetish; but Fetish is simply savage science. It differs from modern

science in that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more

frequently wrong.

In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect, in many

others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by experience; but there was

a large series of issues of very great importance to primitive man,

where he sought persistently for causes and found explanations that

were wrong but not sufficiently wrong nor so obviously wrong as to be

detected. It was a matter of great importance to him that game should

be abundant or fish plentiful and easily caught, and no doubt he tried

and believed in a thousand charms, incantations and omens to determine

these desirable results. Another great concern of his was illness and

death. Occasionally infections crept through the land and men died of

them. Occasionally men were stricken by illness and died or were

enfeebled without any manifest cause. This too must have given the

hasty, emotional mind of primitive man much feverish exercise. Dreams

and fantastic guesses made him blame this, or appeal for help to that

man or beast or thing. He had the child’s aptitude for fear and panic.

Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds sharing

the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more forceful than

the others, must have asserted themselves, to advise, to prescribe, to

command. This they declared unpropitious and that imperative, this an

omen of good and that an omen of evil. The expert in Fetish, the

Medicine Man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted

dreams, he warned, he performed the complicated hocus pocus that

brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive religion was not so much

what we now call religion as practice and observance, and the early

priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical

science.