stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which

frightened him so terribly? Who made the River Nile rise
with such regularity that it was possible to base the calendar

upon the appearance and the disappearance of the annual
floods? Who was he, himself, a strange little creature surrounded

on all sides by death and sickness and yet happy and
full of laughter?

He asked these many questions and certain people obligingly
stepped forward to answer these inquiries to the best of

their ability. The Egyptians called them ``priests'' and they
became the guardians of his thoughts and gained great respect

in the community. They were highly learned men who were
entrusted with the sacred task of keeping the written records.

They understood that it is not good for man to think only of
his immediate advantage in this world and they drew his attention

to the days of the future when his soul would dwell
beyond the mountains of the west and must give an account

of his deeds to Osiris, the mighty God who was the Ruler of
the Living and the Dead and who judged the acts of men

according to their merits. Indeed, the priests made so much
of that future day in the realm of Isis and Osiris that the

Egyptians began to regard life merely as a short preparation
for the Hereafter and turned the teeming valley of the Nile

into a land devoted to the Dead.
In a strange way, the Egyptians had come to believe that

no soul could enter the realm of Osiris without the possession
of the body which had been its place of residence in this world.

Therefore as soon as a man was dead his relatives took his
corpse and had it embalmed. For weeks it was soaked in a

solution of natron and then it was filled with pitch. The
Persian word for pitch was ``Mumiai'' and the embalmed body

was called a ``Mummy.'' It was wrapped in yards and yards
of specially prepared linen and it was placed in a specially

prepared coffin ready to be removed to its final home. But
an Egyptian grave was a real home where the body was surrounded

by pieces of furniture and musical instruments (to
while away the dreary hours of waiting) and by little statues

of cooks and bakers and barbers (that the occupant of this
dark home might be decently provided with food and need not

go about unshaven).
Originally these graves had been dug into the rocks of the

western mountains but as the Egyptians moved northward
they were obliged to build their cemeteries in the desert. The

desert however is full of wild animals and equally wild robbers
and they broke into the graves and disturbed the mummy or

stole the jewelry that had been buried with the body. To prevent
such unholy desecration the Egyptians used to build small

mounds of stones on top of the graves. These little mounds
gradually grew in size, because the rich people built higher

mounds than the poor and there was a good deal of competition
to see who could make the highest hill of stones. The

record was made by King Khufu, whom the Greeks called
Cheops and who lived thirty centuries before our era. His

mound, which the Greeks called a pyramid (because the
Egyptian word for high was pir-em-us) was over five hundred

feet high.
It covered more than thirteen acres of desert which is three

times as much space as that occupied by the church of St.
Peter, the largest edifice of the Christian world.

During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were
busy carrying the necessary stones from the other side of the

river--ferrying them across the Nile (how they ever managed
to do this, we do not understand), dragging them in many instances

a long distance across the desert and finally hoisting
them into their correct position. But so well did the King's

architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow
passage-way which leads to the royal tomb in the heart of the

stone monster has never yet been pushed out of shape by the
weight of those thousands of tons of stone which press upon

it from all sides.
THE STORY OF EGYPT

THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT
THE river Nile was a kind friend but occasionally it was

a hard taskmaster. It taught the people who lived along its
banks the noble art of ``team-work.'' They depended upon

each other to build their irrigation trenches and keep their
dikes in repair. In this way they learned how to get along

with their neighbours and their mutual-benefit-association quite
easily developed into an organised state.

Then one man grew more powerful than most of his neighbours
and he became the leader of the community and their

commander-in-chief when the envious neighbours of western
Asia invaded the prosperousvalley. In due course of time

he became their King and ruled all the land from the Mediterranean
to the mountains of the west.

But these political adventures of the old Pharaohs (the
word meant ``the Man who lived in the Big House'') rarely

interested the patient and toiling peasant of the grain fields.
Provided he was not obliged to pay more taxes to his King

than he thought just, he accepted the rule of Pharaoh as he
accepted the rule of Mighty Osiris.

It was different however when a foreign invader came
and robbed him of his possessions. After twenty centuries of

independent life, a savage Arab tribe of shepherds, called the
Hyksos, attacked Egypt and for five hundred years they were

the masters of the valley of the Nile. They were highly un-
popular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who

came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long
wandering through the desert and who helped the foreign

usurper by acting as his tax-gatherers and his civil servants.
But shortly after the year 1700 B.C. the people of Thebes

began a revolution and after a long struggle the Hyksos were
driven out of the country and Egypt was free once more.

A thousand years later, when Assyria conquered all of
western Asia, Egypt became part of the empire of Sardanapalus.

In the seventh century B.C. it became once more an
independent state which obeyed the rule of a king who lived in

the city of Sais in the Delta of the Nile. But in the year 525
B.C., Cambyses, the king of the Persians, took possession of

Egypt and in the fourth century B.C., when Persia was conquered
by Alexander the Great, Egypt too became a Macedonian

province. It regained a semblance of independence
when one of Alexander's generals set himself up as king of a

new Egyptian state and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies,
who resided in the newly built city of Alexandria.

Finally, in the year 89 B.C., the Romans came. The last
Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, tried her best to save the country.

Her beauty and charm were more dangerous to the Roman
generals than half a dozen Egyptian army corps. Twice she

was successful in her attacks upon the hearts of her Roman
conquerors. But in the year 30 B.C., Augustus, the nephew

and heir of Caesar, landed in Alexandria. He did not share
his late uncle's admiration for the lovely princess. He destroyed

her armies, but spared her life that he might make her
march in his triumph as part of the spoils of war. When

Cleopatra heard of this plan, she killed herself by taking poison.
And Egypt became a Roman province.

MESOPOTAMIA
MESOPOTAMIA--THE SECOND CENTRE OF

EASTERN CIVILISATION
I AM going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid

and I am going to ask that you imagine yourself possessed
of the eyes of a hawk. Way, way off, in the distance, far

beyond the yellow sands of the desert, you will see something
green and shimmering. It is a valleysituated between two

rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the
land of mystery and wonder which the Greeks called Mesopotamia--

the ``country between the rivers.''
The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates (which the

Babylonians called the Purattu) and the Tigris (which was
known as the Diklat). They begin their course amidst the

snows of the mountains of Armenia where Noah's Ark found
a resting place and slowly they flow through the southern

plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian gulf.
They perform a very useful service. They turn the arid

regions of western Asia into a fertile garden.
The valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had

offered them food upon fairly easy terms. The ``land between
the rivers'' was popular for the same reason. It was a

country full of promise and both the inhabitants of the northern
mountains and the tribes which roamed through the

southern deserts tried to claim this territory as their own and
most exclusive possession. The constantrivalry between the

mountaineers and the desert-nomads led to endless warfare.
Only the strongest and the bravest could hope to survive and

that will explain why Mesopotamia became the home of a very
strong race of men who were capable of creating a civilisation

which was in every respect as important as that of Egypt.
THE SUMERIANS

THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY
TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF ASSYRIA

AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC
MELTING-POT

THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries.
Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Kathay and

stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Austrian
bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel eastward

and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a
voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not

visited by western men until a generation later. Meanwhile
a certain Venetian by the name of Barbero had explored the

ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most
curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of

the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of
baked clay.

But Europe was busy with many other things and it was
not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first

``cuneiform inscriptions'' (so-called because the letters were
wedge-shaped and wedge is called ``Cuneus'' in Latin) were

brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr.
Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-

master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four
letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian

King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by
until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous

inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-
writing of western Asia.

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings,
the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The

Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest
inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of

scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures
entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which

showed little connection with the pictures out of which they
had been developed. A few examples will show you what I

mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into
a brick looked as follows: {illust.} This sign however was too

cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of
``heaven'' was added to that of star the picture was simplified

in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle.
In the same way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.}

and a fish changed from {illust.} into {illust.} The sun
was originally" target="_blank" title="ad.本来；独创地">originally a plain circle {illust.} and became {illust.}

If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an
{illust.} look like {illust.}. This system of writing down our

ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries
it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and

the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races
which forced their way into the fertilevalley.

The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and
conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They

were a white People who had lived in the mountains. They
had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of

hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed artificial
little hills on top of which they built their altars. They

did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded
their towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers

have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad
stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to another.

We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumerians
but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-

sorbed by those races that entered the fertilevalley at a later
date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of

Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile
in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of BabIlli,

or towers of Babel.
In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had

entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-
powered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the

desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are
known as the ``Semites,'' because in the olden days people believed

them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the
three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians

were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another
Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built himself

a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who
gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state

the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the
Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-

ran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not
carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers

of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians