mains. The strange inheritance of this
Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek, part Persian, part Egyptian
and Babylonian) fell to the Roman conquerors. During the following
centuries, it got such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel
its influence in our own lives this very day.

A SUMMARY

A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20

THUS far, from the top of our high tower we have been looking eastward.
But from this time on, the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia is going
to grow less interesting and I must take you to study the western
landscape.

Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to ourselves what
we have seen.

First of all I showed you prehistoric man--a creature very simple in his
habits and very unattractive in his manners. I told you how he was
the most defenceless of the many animals that roamed through the early
wilderness of the five continents, but being possessed of a larger and
better brain, he managed to hold his own.

Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold weather, and life
on this planet became so difficult that man was obliged to think three
times as hard as ever before if he wished to survive. Since, however,
that "wish to survive" was (and is) the mainspring which keeps every
living being going full tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain
of glacial man was set to work in all earnestness. Not only did these
hardy people manage to exist through the long cold spells which killed
many ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and comfortable
once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of things which gave
him such great advantages over his less intelligent neighbors that the
danger of extinction (a very serious one during the first half million
years of man's residence upon this planet) became a very remote one.

I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly plodding
along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not well understood) the
people who lived in the valley of the Nile rushed ahead and almost over
night, created the first centre of civilisation.

Then I showed you Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers," which was
the second great school of the human race. And I made you a map of the
little island bridges of the AEgean Sea, which carried the knowledge and
the science of the old east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.

Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes, who
thousands of ye