- A Menhir of the Neolithic Period
A Carved Statue (“Menhir”) of the Neolithic Period—a Contrast to the Freedom and Vigour of Palæolithic Art. - A Reindeer Age Masterpiece
These late Palæolithic people not only drew remarkably well for our information, and with an increasing skill as the centuries passed, but they have also left us other information about their lives in their graves. They buried. They buried their dead, often with ornaments, weapons, and food; they used a lot of colour in the burial, and evidently painted the body. From that one may infer that they painted their bodies during life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were inveterate painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white pigments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the caves of France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have shown so pictorial a disposition; the nearest approach to it has been among the American Indians. - Africa in the Middle of 19th Century
Africa in the Middle of 19th Century - Africa, 1914
Africa, 1914 - Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great (silver coin of Lysimachus, 321-281 B.C.) - American Colonies, 1760
American Colonies, 1760 - American Indian Picture-Writing
Specimens of American Indian picture-writing No. 1, painted on a rock on the shore of Lake Superior, records an expedition across the lake, in which five canoes took part. The upright strokes in each indicate the number of the crew, and the bird represents a chief, “The Kingfisher.” The three circles (suns) under the arch (of heaven) indicate that the voyage lasted three days, and the tortoise, a symbol of land, denotes a safe arrival. No. 2 is a petition sent to the United States Congress by a group of Indian tribes, asking for fishing rights in certain small lakes. The tribes are represented by their totems, martens, bear, manfish, and catfish, led by the crane. Lines running from the heart and eye of each animal to the heart and eye of the crane denote that they are all of one mind; and a line runs from the eye of the crane to the lakes, shown in the crude little “map” in the lower left-hand corner. - An Assyrian King and His Chief Minister
It was out of those two main weaknesses of all priesthoods, namely, the incapacity for efficient military leadership and their inevitable jealousy of all other religious cults, that the power of secular kingship arose. The foreign enemy either prevailed and set up a king over the people, or the priesthoods who would not give way to each other set up a common fighting captain, who retained more or less power in peace time. This secular king developed a group of officials about him and began, in relation to military organization, to take a share in the priestly administration of the people’s affairs. So, growing out of priestcraft and beside the priest, the king, the protagonist of the priest,appears upon the stage of human history, and a very large amount of the subsequent experiences of mankind is only to be understood as an elaboration, complication, and distortion of the struggle, unconscious or deliberate, between these two systems of human control, the temple and the palace. And it was in the original centres of civilization that this antagonism was most completely developed. - Arabia and Adjacent Countries
Arabia and Adjacent Countries - Archaic Horses and Chariots
Archaic Horses and Chariots (from an archaic Greek Vase) - Aryan-speaking Peoples 1000-500 B.C. (Map)
Aryan-speaking Peoples 1000-500 B.C. (Map) - Asia and Europe - Life of the Period (Map)
Asia and Europe - Life of the Period (Map) - Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia
Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia - Assyrian Warrior (temp. Sargon II)
Assyrian Warrior (temp. Sargon II) - Astronomical Variations Affecting Climate
Astronomical Variations Affecting Climate - Athene of the Parthenon
Goddess Athene of the Parthenon - Athenian Foot-soldier
Monument of Athenian foot soldier found near Marathon. - Australia and the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age
Australia and the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age - Australian Lung Fish
- Benjamin Franklin
It is hard to measure the men of one period of history with those in another. Some writers, even American writers, impressed by the artificial splendours of the European courts and by the tawdry and destructive exploits of a Frederick the Great or a Great Catherine, display a snobbish shame of something homespun about these makers of America. They feel that Benjamin Franklin at the court of Louis XVI, with his long hair, his plain clothes, and his pawky manner, was sadly lacking in aristocratic distinction. But stripped to their personalities, Louis XVI was hardly gifted enough or noble-minded enough to be Franklin’s valet. - Bismarck
Prussian affairs were then very much in the hands of a minister of the seventeenth-century type, Von Bismarck (count in 1865, prince in 1871), and he saw brilliant opportunities in this trouble. He became the champion of the German nationality in these duchies—it must be remembered that the King of Prussia had refused to undertake this rôle for democratic Germany in 1848—and he persuaded Austria to side with Prussia in a military intervention. Denmark had no chance against these Great Powers; she was easily beaten and obliged to relinquish the duchies. Then Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria for the possession of these two small states. So he brought about a needless and fratricidal war of Germans for the greater glory of Prussia and the ascendancy of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany. German writers of a romantic turn of mind represent Bismarck as a great statesman planning the unity of Germany; but indeed he was doing nothing of the kind. - Boats on Nile about 2500 B.C.
Boats on Nile about 2500 B.C. - Boston in 1775
Boston in 1775 - Brawl among Egyptian Boatmen (Pyramid Age)
Brawl among boatmen ... (From tomb of Ptah-hetep——Pyramid Age) - Break-up of Alexander’s Empire
- Britain, France, and Spain in America, 1750
Britain, France, and Spain in America, 1750 - Bronze Age Implements
Bronze Age Implements - Burning the Dead - Etruscan Ceremony
Etruscan painting of a Ceremonial Burning of the Dead - Bushwoman
Bushwoman - Campaigns of Alexander the Great
- Carthaginian coins
At her zenith Carthage probably had the hitherto unheard-of population of a million. This population was largely industrial, and her woven goods were universally famous. As well as a coasting trade, she had a considerable land trade with Central Africa,[126] and she sold negro slaves, ivory, metals, precious stones and the like, to all the Mediterranean people; she worked Spanish copper mines, and her ships went out into the Atlantic and coasted along Portugal and France northward as far as the Cassiterides (the Scilly Isles, or Cornwall, in England) to get tin. About 520 B.C. a certain Hanno made a voyage that is still one of the most notable in the world. This Hanno, if we may trust the Periplus of Hanno, the Greek translation of his account which still survives, followed the African coast southward from the Straits of Gibraltar as far as the confines of Liberia. He had sixty big ships, and his main task was to found or reinforce certain Carthaginian stations upon the Morocco coast - Caucasian Types
But it is this study of skull shapes which has led many ethnologists to divide the Caucasian race, not, as it was divided by Huxley, into two, the northern blonds and the Mediterranean and North African dark whites or brunets, but into three. They split his blonds into two classes. They distinguish a northern European type, blond and dolichocephalic, the Nordic; a Mediterranean or Iberian race, Huxley’s dark whites, which is dark-haired and dolichocephalic, and between these two they descry this third race, their brachycephalic race, the Alpine race. The opposite school would treat the alleged Alpine race simply as a number of local brachycephalic varieties of Nordic or Iberian peoples. The Iberian peoples were the Neolithic people of the long barrows, and seem at first to have pervaded most of Europe and western Asia. - Central Europe, 1648
Central Europe, 1648 - Charles V
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V Most of the figures that stand out in history, do so through some exceptional personal quality, good or bad, that makes them more significant than their fellows. But there was born at Ghent in Belgium in 1500 a man of commonplace abilities and melancholy temperament, the son of a mentally defective mother who had been married for reasons of state, who was, through no fault of his own, to become the focus of the accumulating stresses of Europe. The historian must give him a quite unmerited and accidental prominence side by side with such marked individualities as Alexander and Charlemagne and Frederick II. This was the Emperor Charles V. For a time he had an air of being the greatest monarch in Europe since Charlemagne. Both he and his illusory greatness were the results of the matrimonial statecraft of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I (born 1459, died 1519). - Chief Foreign Settlements in India, 17th Century
Chief Foreign Settlements in India, 17th Century - Chinese Empire, Tang Dynasty
- Chinese Image of Kuan-yin
China had a Taoist deity, the Holy Mother, the Queen of Heaven, who took on the name (originally a male name) of Kuan-yin and who came to resemble the Isis figure very closely. The Isis figures, we feel, must have influenced the treatment of Kuan-yin. Like Isis she was also Queen of the Seas, Stella Maris. In Japan she was called Kwannon. There seems to have been a constant exchange of the outer forms of religion between east and west. - Combat between Menelaus and Hector
Combat between Menelaus & Hector (in the Iliad) From a platter ascribed to the end of the seventh century in the British Museum. This is probably the earliest known vase bearing a Greek inscription. Greek writing was just beginning. Note the Swastika. - Comparative Maps of Asia under Different Projections
Comparative Maps of Asia (a) as part of hemisphere (b) on Mercators projection to show relative sizes of Asiatic Russia and India in the two cases. - Constantinople
- Cro-magnon Man
In the grotto of Cro-Magnon it was that complete skeletons of one main type of these Newer Palæolithic men, these true men, were first found, and so it is that they are spoken of as Cro-Magnards. - Diagram Showing the Duration of the Neolithic Period
Diagram Showing the Duration of the Neolithic Period - Diagram to Illustrate the Riddle of The Piltdown Sub-man.
Diagram to Illustrate the Riddle of The Piltdown Sub-man. - Early Latium
- Early Pleistocene Animals, Contemporary with Earliest Man
Geologists make certain main divisions of the Cainozoic period, and it will be convenient to name them here and to indicate their climate. First comes the Eocene (dawn of recent life), an age of exceptional warmth in the world’s history, subdivided into an older and newer Eocene; then the Oligocene (but little of recent life), in which the climate was still equable. The Miocene (with living species still in a minority) was the great age of mountain building, and the general temperature was falling. In the Pliocene (more living than extinct species), climate was very much at its present phase; but with the Pleistocene (a great majority of living species) there set in a long period of extreme conditions—it was the Great Ice Age. - Early Stone Implements
Early Stone Implements The Mousterian Age implements, and all above it, are those of Neanderthal men or, possibly in the case of the rostro-carinates, of sub-men. The lower row (Reindeer Age) are the work of true men. The student should compare this diagram with the time diagram attached to Chapter VII, § 6, and he should note the relatively large size of the pre-human implements. - Eastern Roman Empire
- Egyptian Gods—Set, Anubis, Typhon, Bes
In all these temples there was a shrine; dominating the shrine there was commonly a great figure, usually of some monstrous half-animal form, before which stood an altar for sacrifices. This figure was either regarded as the god or as the image or symbol of the god, for whose worship the temple existed. And connected with the temple there were a number, and often a considerable number, of priests or priestesses, and temple servants, generally wearing a distinctive costume and forming an important part of the city population. - Egyptian Gods—Thoth-lunus, Hathor, Chnemu
Egyptian Gods—Thoth-lunus, Hathor, Chnemu - Egyptian Peasants (Pyramid Age)
Egyptian peasants seized for non-payment of taxes ... (Pyramid Age) - Egyptian Ship on Red Sea, 1250 B.C
Because it developed in the comparatively warm and tranquil waters of the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the western horn of the Indian Ocean, the shipping of the ancient world retained throughout certain characteristics that make it differ very widely from the ocean-going sailing shipping, with its vast spread of canvas, of the last four hundred years. “The Mediterranean,” says Mr. Torr, “is a sea where a vessel with sails may lie becalmed for days together, while a vessel with oars would easily be traversing the smooth waters, with coasts and islands everywhere at hand to give her shelter in case of storm. In that sea, therefore, oars became the characteristic instruments of navigation, and the arrangement of oars the chief problem in shipbuilding. And so long as the Mediterranean nations dominated Western Europe, vessels of the southern type were built upon the northern coasts, though there generally was wind enough here for sails and too much wave for oars.... The art of rowing can first be discerned upon the Nile. Boats with oars are represented in the earliest pictorial monuments of Egypt, dating from about 2500 B.C.; - Egyptian Social Types (From Tombs)
Egyptian Social Types (From Tombs) - Emperor William II
By one of those accidents in history that personify and precipitate catastrophes, the ruler of Germany, the emperor William II, embodied the new education of his people and the Hohenzollern tradition in the completest form. He came to the throne in 1888 at the age of twenty-nine; his father, Frederick III, had succeeded his grandfather, William I, in the March, to die in the June of that year. William II was the grandson of Queen Victoria on his mother’s side, but his temperament showed no traces of the liberal German tradition that distinguished the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family. His head was full of the frothy stuff of the new imperialism. He signalized his accession by an address to his army and navy; his address to his people followed three days later. A high note of contempt for democracy was sounded: “The soldier and the army, not parliamentary majorities, have welded together the German Empire. My trust is placed in the army.” So the patient work of the German schoolmasters was disowned, and the Hohenzollern declared himself triumphant. - Empire of Jengis Khan, 1227
Empire of Jengis Khan, 1227 - Empire of Otto the Great
Empire of Otto the Great - Empire of Timurlane
Empire of Timurlane - England, 640 A.D.
England, 640 A.D. - England, 878 A.D
England, 878 A.D - Ephthalite Coin
The irruption of the Ephthalites is memorable not so much because of its permanent effects as because of the atrocities perpetrated by the invaders. These Ephthalites very closely resembled the Huns of Attila in their barbarism; they merely raided, they produced no such dynasty as the Kushan monarchy; and their chiefs retained their headquarters in Western Turkestan. Mihiragula, their most capable leader, has been called the Attila of India. One of his favourite amusements, we are told, was the expensive one of rolling elephants down precipitous places in order to watch their sufferings. His abominations roused his Indian tributary princes to revolt, and he was overthrown. But the final ending of the Ephthalite raids into India was effected not by Indians, but by the destruction of the central establishment of the Ephthalites on the Oxus (565) by the growing power of the Turks, working in alliance with the Persians. - Europe after the Congress of Vienna
Europe after the Congress of Vienna