Identifier: ridpathshistoryo01ridp (find matches)
Title: Ridpath's history of the world; being an account of the ethnic origin, primitive estate, early migrations, social conditions and present promise of the principal families of men ..
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Ridpath, John Clark, 1840-1900
Subjects: World history Ethnology
Publisher: New York, Merrill & Baker
Contributing Library: Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston University

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ore our era. We have al-ready discovered thebeginnings of such aliterature among- ourAryan ancestors, inthe valley of the In-dus, as far back asabout two thousandyears B. C. The his-torical remains of thevalley of the Eu-phrates and the Ti-gris reach back per-haps to the twenty-first century. Themonuments of Egyptbear unquestionableevidence of the exist-ence of historicalthought and expres-sion in that countrya bout twenty-fourcenturies before thecurrent era. As earlyas the eighth centurythe bards and proph-ets of Israel werewont to reduce theirutterances to poeticaland semihistoricalforms. We find theGreeks, in the personof Herodotus, invent-ing historical narra-tive proper at the be-ginning of the sixthcentury B. C, andafterwards, by the artof Thucydides, bring-ing that species ofcomposition to a per-fection which, so faras structure is concerned, has never beensurpassed. We thus see that in regions far remote from each other, among peoples as di-verse in ethnic life as any that are
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found on the earth at the present time, informs of speech as widely differentiatedas any dialects known to philology, there 134 GREAT RACES OE MANKIND. were at least the rudiments of historicallore at a date ranging from six to twen-wiiat the wide- ty-four centuries before theapart writings christian era. This fact of many races signify. 0f itself constitutes a pow- erful argument for the antiquity of thehuman race. Letters and the art ofwriting are among the later products ofprimeval man. Even when these havebeen invented, it requires another longperiod of development to bring the re-flective powers and the art of composi-tion to the level of historical narrative.We speak here not of philosophical his-tory, but of the first rude attempts ofthe human mind to make record of theevents of the past. To these considera-tions we must in the next place add athird period of great duration to coverthe time required in the development ofthe mind to this grade of activity inwide-apart localities

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