Sumerian Warriors in Phalanx
Perhaps the earliest people to form real cities in this part of the world, or indeed in any part of the world, were a people of mysterious origin called the Sumerians. They were neither Semites nor Aryans, and whence they came we do not know. Whether they were dark whites of Iberian or Dravidian affinities is less certainly to be denied.[103] They used a kind of writing which they scratched upon clay, and their language has been deciphered.
Serapis
This trinity consisted of the god Serapis (= Osiris + Apis), the goddess Isis (= Hathor, the cow-moon goddess), and the child-god Horus. In one way or another almost every other god was identified with one or other of these three aspects of the one God, even the sun god Mithras of the Persians.
Seleucus I
Tetradrachm with head of Seleucus I
Scythian Types
Scythians ... as portrayed by a Greek artist.... One of the Few Existing Representations of the Ancient Scythians. From a Greek Electrum Vase.
Samnite Warriors
Samnite Warriors (From painted vases) The Romans completely beaten by the Samnites at the battle of the Caudine Forks
Rowers in an Athenian Warship, 400 B.C.
Rowers in an Athenian warship, about 400 B.C. (Fragment of relief found on the Acropolis)
Roman Power after the Samnite Wars
Roman Power after the Samnite Wars
Roman Coin Celebrating the Victory over Pyrrhus
Roman Coin Struck to Commemorate the Victory over Pyrrhus and His Elephants.
Roman As
Roman As (bronze, 4th Cent. B.C.)
Racial Types (after Champollion)
From Egyptian Tomb paintings
Philip of Macedon
When Philip became king of Macedonia in 359 B.C., his country was a little country without a seaport or industries or any considerable city. It had a peasant population, Greek almost in language and ready to be Greek in sympathies, but more purely Nordic in blood than any people to the south of it. Philip made this little barbaric state into a great one; he created the most efficient military organization the world had so far seen, and he had brought most of Greece into one confederacy under his leadership at the time of his death. And his extraordinary quality, his power of thinking out beyond the current ideas of his time, is shown not so much in those matters as in the care with which he had his son trained to carry on the policy he had created. He is one of the few monarchs in history who cared for his successor. Alexander was, as few other monarchs have ever been, a specially educated king; he was educated for empire. Aristotle was but one of the several able tutors his father chose for him. Philip confided his policy to him, and entrusted him with commands and authority by the time he was sixteen. He commanded the cavalry at Chæronea under his father’s eye. He was nursed into power—generously and unsuspiciously.
Pharaoh Rameses III as Osiris (Sarcophagus relief)
Ramses III as Osiris—between the goddesses Nephthys and Isis.... Relief on the cover of the sarcophagus (at Cambridge). After Sharpe. Inscription (round the edges of cover), as far as decipherable. “Osiris, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord of the two countries ... son of the Sun, beloved of the gods, lord of diadems, Rameses, prince of Heliopolis, triumphant! Thou art in the condition of a god, thou shalt arise as Usr, there is no enemy to thee, I give to thee triumph among them....” Budge, Catalogue, Egyptian Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Pharaoh Chephren
The earlier Pharaohs were not improbably regarded as incarnations of the dominant god. The falcon god Horus sits behind the head of the great statue of Chephren. It was Cheops and Chephren and Mycerinus of this IVth Dynasty who raised the vast piles of the great and the second and the third pyramids at Gizeh. These unmeaning sepulchral piles, of an almost incredible vastness, erected in an age when engineering science had scarcely begun, exhausted the resources of Egypt through three long reigns, and left her wasted as if by a war.
Pharaoh Akhnaton
Opinions upon Amenophis IV, or Akhnaton, differ very widely. There are those who regard him as the creature of his mother’s hatred of Ammon and the uxorious spouse of a beautiful wife. Certainly he loved his wife very passionately; he showed her great honour—Egypt honoured women, and was ruled at different times by several queens—and he was sculptured in one instance with his wife seated upon his knees, and in another in the act of kissing her in a chariot; but men who live under the sway of their womenkind do not sustain great empires in the face of the bitter hostility of the most influential organized bodies in their realm. Others write of him as a “gloomy fanatic.” Matrimonial bliss is rare in the cases of gloomy fanatics.
Persian Body-guard
Persian Body-guard (from Frieze at Susa)
Median and Second Babylonian Empires (in Nebuchadnezzar’s Reign)
Median and Second Babylonian Empires (in Nebuchadnezzar’s Reign)
Macedonian Warrior
Macedonian Warrior
Later State of Alexander’s Empire
Later State of Alexander’s Empire
Julius Cæsar
It is the custom of historians to treat these struggles with extreme respect. In particular the figure of Julius Cæsar is set up as if it were a star of supreme brightness and importance in the history of mankind. Yet a dispassionate consideration of the known facts fails altogether to justify this demi-god theory of Cæsar. Not even that precipitate wrecker of splendid possibilities, Alexander the Great, has been so magnified and dressed up for the admiration of careless and uncritical readers.
Italy after 275 B.C
Map of Italy after 275 BC
Isis and Horus
This trinity consisted of the god Serapis (= Osiris + Apis), the goddess Isis (= Hathor, the cow-moon goddess), and the child-god Horus. In one way or another almost every other god was identified with one or other of these three aspects of the one God, even the sun god Mithras of the Persians.
Greek Sea Fight, 550 B.C.
Greek Sea Fight, 550 B.C.
Gladiators
Gladiators (from a wall-painting at Pompeii) In 264 B.C., the very year in{v1-490} which Asoka began to reign and the First Punic War began, the first recorded gladiatorial combat took place in the forum at Rome, to celebrate the funeral of a member of the old Roman family of Brutus. This was a modest display of three couples, but soon gladiators were fighting by the hundred. The taste for these combats grew rapidly, and the wars supplied an abundance of captives. The old Roman moralists, who were so severe upon kissing and women’s ornaments and Greek philosophy, had nothing but good to say for this new development. So long as pain was inflicted, Roman morality, it would seem, was satisfied.
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.
Egyptian Social Types (From Tombs)
Egyptian Social Types (From Tombs)
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 Peasants (Pyramid Age)
Egyptian peasants seized for non-payment of taxes ... (Pyramid Age)
Egyptian Gods—Thoth-lunus, Hathor, Chnemu
Egyptian Gods—Thoth-lunus, Hathor, Chnemu
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.
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.
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
Burning the Dead - Etruscan Ceremony
Etruscan painting of a Ceremonial Burning of the Dead
Brawl among Egyptian Boatmen (Pyramid Age)
Brawl among boatmen ... (From tomb of Ptah-hetep——Pyramid Age)
Boats on Nile about 2500 B.C.
Boats on Nile about 2500 B.C.
Athenian Foot-soldier
Monument of Athenian foot soldier found near Marathon.
Athene of the Parthenon
Goddess Athene of the Parthenon
Assyrian Warrior (temp. Sargon II)
Assyrian Warrior (temp. Sargon II)
Archaic Horses and Chariots
Archaic Horses and Chariots (from an archaic Greek Vase)
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.
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great (silver coin of Lysimachus, 321-281 B.C.)