Hendrik Willem Van Loon

“ All this had been changed after they had become exposed to the civilization of Egypt. They had taken to the ways of the comfort-loving Egyptians. They had allowed another race to rule them and they had not cared to fight for their independence.
Instead of the old gods of the wind-swept desert they had begun to worship strange divinities who lived in the glimmering splendors of the dark Egyptian temples.
Moses felt that it was his duty to go forth and save his people from their fate and bring them back to the simple Truth of the olden days. ”

“ Until at last, the life of the future came to be regarded as more important than the life of the present and the people of Egypt turned their teeming land into one vast shrine for the worship of the dead.
And as most of the papyrus-rolls of the ancient valley tell stories of a religious nature we know with great accuracy just what gods the Egyptians revered and how they tried to assure all possible happiness and comfort to those who had entered upon the eternal sleep. In the beginning each little village had possessed a god of its own. ”

“ THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT
We often hear it said that "civilization travels westward." What we mean is that hardy pioneers have crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled along the shores of New England and New Netherland--that their children have crossed the vast prairies--that their great-grandchildren have moved into California--and that the present generation hopes to turn the vast Pacific into the most important sea of the ages.
As a matter of fact, "civilization" never remains long in the same spot. It is always going somewhere but it does not always move westward by any means. ”

“ There Moses lived for a long time and there he pondered upon many deep subjects. He had left the luxury and the comfort of the palace of Pharaoh to share the rough and simple life of a desert priest.
In the olden days, before the Jewish people had moved into Egypt, they too had been wanderers among the endless plains of Arabia. They had lived in tents and they had eaten plain food, but they had been honest men and faithful women, contented with few possessions but proud of the righteousness of their mind. ”

“ For almost thirty centuries Babylon had been the great spiritual and intellectual center of the Semitic world and a hundred generations had regarded the city as the most perfect expression of their people's genius. ”

“ Wherever we go we must carry our warm cloak of human sympathy and understanding for vast tracts of land will prove to be a sterile desert--swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could happen to any of us. ”

“ Forty thousand years ago when the world was on the point of freezing to death, an unkempt and unwashed cave-man, pulling the feathers out of a half-dead chicken with the help of his brown fingers and his big white teeth--throwing the feathers and the bones upon the same floor that served him and his family as a bed, felt just as happy and just as proud when he was taught how the hot cinders of a fire would change raw meat into a delicious meal. ”

“ After two or three hundred years, civilization seems to say, "Well, I have been keeping company with these particular people long enough," and it packs its books and its science and its art and its music, and wanders forth in search of new domains. But no one knows whither it is bound, and that is what makes life so interesting.
In the case of Egypt, the center of civilization moved northward and southward, along the banks of the Nile. First of all, as I told you, people from all over Africa and western Asia moved into the valley and settled down. ”

“ In those days, the Jews, like all other people, worshipped many gods. During their stay in Egypt they had even learned to do homage to those animals which the Egyptians held in such high honor that they built holy shrines for their special benefit. Moses on the other hand, during his long and lonely life amidst the sandy hills of the peninsula, had learned to revere the strength and the power of the great God of the Storm and the Thunder, who ruled the high heavens and upon whose good-will the wanderer in the desert depended for life and light and breath. ”

“ When he died he was buried in a small Pyramid, just as if he had been a member of the Royal Family, and a daughter of Pharaoh wept over his grave.
That is my story which begins somewhere along the banks of the Nile and which in the course of three generations lifts a farmer from the ranks of his own humble ancestors and drops him outside the gate but near the throne-room of the King's palace.
What happened to Fish, happened to a large number of equally energetic and resourceful men. ”

“ They traded with the Greeks of Crete and with the Arabs of western Asia and they got spices from the Indies and they imported gold and silk from China.
But all human institutions are subject to certain definite laws of progress and decline and a State or a dynasty is no exception. After four hundred years of prosperity, these mighty kings showed signs of growing tired. Rather than ride a camel at the head of their army, the rulers of the great Egyptian Empire stayed within the gates of their palace and listened to the music of the harp or the flute. ”

“ We understand a great deal about anatomy and chemistry and mineralogy and we are familiar with a thousand different branches of science of which the very name was unknown to the people of the past.
In one respect, however, we are quite as ignorant as the most primitive of men--we do not know where we came from. We do not know how or why or when the human race began its career upon this Earth. ”

“ The Philistines really had no business in Asia. They were Europeans, and their earliest home had been in the Isle of Crete. At what age they had settled along the shores of the Mediterranean is quite uncertain because we do not know when the Indo-European invaders had driven them from their island home. But even the Egyptians, who called them Purasati, had feared them greatly and when the Philistines (who wore a headdress of feathers just like our Indians) went upon the war-path, all the people of western Asia sent large armies to protect their frontiers. ”

“ Military nations, however, never last very long. The larger the empire, the more men are needed for its defense and the more men there are in the army, the fewer can stay at home to work the farms and attend to the demands of trade. Within a few years, the Egyptian state had become top-heavy and the army, which was meant to be a bulwark against foreign invasion, dragged the country into ruin from sheer lack of both men and money.
Without interruption, wild people from Asia were attacking those strong walls behind which Egypt was hoarding the riches of the entire civilized world. ”

“ Our modern alphabet is not a very satisfactory instrument for the purpose of reproducing our speech. Some day a genius will invent a new system of writing which shall give each one of our sounds a little picture of its own. But with all its many imperfections the letters of our modern alphabet perform their daily task quite nicely and fully as well as their very accurate and precise cousins, the numerals, who wandered into Europe from distant India, almost ten centuries after the first invasion of the alphabet. ”

“ A fierce tribe of desert wanderers, who murdered and pillaged in the name of their great God Assur, left Arabia and marched northward until they reached the slopes of the mountains. Then they turned eastward and along the banks of the Euphrates they built a city which they called Ninua, a name which has come down to us in the Greek form of Nineveh. At once these new-comers, who are generally known as the Assyrians, began a slow but terrible warfare upon all the other inhabitants of Mesopotamia. ”

“ One day, however, in distant Mesopotamia, there arose a new military empire which was called Assyria. It cared for neither art nor science, but it could fight. The Assyrians marched against the Egyptians and defeated them in battle. For more than twenty years they ruled the land of the Nile. To Egypt this meant the beginning of the end.
A few times, for short periods, the people managed to regain their independence. But they were an old race, and they were worn out by centuries of hard work. ”

“ In that case he does not return at all and the good neighbors shake their heads and say, "He got what he deserved. Why did he not stay at home like the rest of us?"
But the world needs such men and after they have been dead for many years and others have reaped the benefits of their discoveries, they always receive a statue with a fitting inscription.
More terrifying than the highest mountain is the thin line of the distant horizon. It seems to be the end of the world itself. Heaven have mercy upon those who pass beyond this meeting-place of sky and water, where all is black despair and death. ”

“ Once upon a time there must have been a man of genius who refused any longer to swing from tree to tree with the help of his long, curly tail (as all his people had done before him) and who began to walk on his feet.
But ancient man had lost sight of this fact and continued to use the wooden plow of his earliest ancestors and continued to believe in the same gods that had been worshipped ten thousand years before and taught his children to do likewise. ”

“ I have told you how in the summer of each year the greater part of the Nile valley and the Nile delta is turned into a vast inland sea. To derive the greatest benefit from this water and yet survive the flood, it had been necessary at certain points to build dykes and small islands which would offer shelter for man and beast during the months of August and September. The construction of these little artificial islands however had not been simple.
A single man or a single family or even a small tribe could not construct a river-dam without the help of others. ”

“ The ancient world which was dominated by Semitic peoples lasted almost forty centuries. In the fourth century before the birth of Christ it died of old age.
Western Asia and Egypt had been the teachers of the Indo-Europeans who had occupied Europe at an unknown date.
In the fourth century before Christ, the Indo-European pupils had so far surpassed their teachers that they could begin their conquest of the world.
The famous expedition of Alexander the Great in 330 B.C. made an end to the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia and established the supremacy of Greek (that is European) culture. ”

“ The Canaanites belonged to the Semitic race. Their ancestors, like those of the Jews and the Babylonians, had been a desert folk. But when the Jews entered Palestine, the Canaanites lived in towns and villages. They were no longer shepherds but traders. Indeed, in the Jewish language, Canaanite and merchant came to mean the same thing.
They had built themselves strong cities, surrounded by high walls and they did not allow the Jews to enter their gates, but they forced them to keep to the open country and make their home amidst the grassy lands of the valleys. ”