Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... 777. War and Religion in Fact: Period of Immediate Ancestors Section A--Bird's-Eye View of War in the First Part of the Period Breasted, in his "Ancient Times" says that the men of Stone Age Europe, after fifty thousand years of progress carried on by their own efforts, reached a point, about 3,000 B. C, where they could advance no farther. It is in the Orient, therefore, that he finds the beginning of civilization which is between five and six thousand years old. When Europe acquired the use of metals and writing from the Orient, it was then that civilized leadership both in peace and war shifted slowly from the Orient to Europe1. As Thomas waxed eloquent over the inventions of our Remote Ancestors, so Breasted writes enthusiastically about the discovery, by the Egyptians, of the art of writing. This discovery, he says, is "more important than all the battles ever fought and all the constitutions ever devised2." While Egypt was the first to develop highly the arts of peace, its evolution was, nevertheless, marked by internal and external warfare. The first general of history, the greatest of Egyptian conquerors, the Napoleon of Egypt, was Thutmose III, who, about 1500 B C, waged years of warfare and crushed the cities and kingdoms of Western Asia, solidifying them into an empire. At the same time his war fleet carried his power to the iEgean, and one of his generals became governor of the iEgean Islands3. But the palm for the first and highest development of the arts of war is awarded to the civilizations built on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris. War was the constant state of affairs in the early history of the Sumerians from about 3050 to 2750 B.C.4 And most bellicose were their successors, the Assyrians whose state was a...
