ODD PAPERS

Southland Times, Issue 21193, 20 September 1930, Page 13

ODD PAPERS

THE LIMIT OF HISTORY

(By

“Q.R.S.”)

The reading of history has an irresistable lure. 4',. History alone, of all modes of thought, elevates the reader above his author. While the historian more or less diligently plods along his own narow path, every avenue is flung wide open to the imagination of those who read him. To them history may mean any thing than concerns man and that has a past; not politics alone, but art, and science, and music have had their birth and growth; not institutions alone, but narratives, legends and all the masterpieces of literature, reflect the clash of nations and the tragedies of great men. And perhaps it is just .because the reader is merely a reader that the full joy of history is open to him.

In all directions, in almost every branch of literature, history may be discovered, a multiform chameleon, and yet history does not really exist. No one has yet composed a record of humanity, and no one ever will for it is beyond man’s powers. Macaulay’s history covered 40 years; Gibbon, a giant among the moderns, succeeded in spanning ten centuries after a fashion, but has found no imitators. The truth is that there is no subject, save perhaps astronomy, that is quite so vast and quite so little known. Its outline, save in the sham history of - text books, is entirely wanting. Its details, where really known to strangers, are infinitely difficult to bring into relation. For this reason it may be worth while to attempt, in the space of one short essay, to coordinate the great epochs of history, from the earliest to the most recent times.

It must be remembered that the practical limit of history" extends over a period of 3000 years, goes back, in other words, to about 1000 B.C. Beyond that we possess mere scraps of archaeological evidence, names of pictures engraved on stone, to show that, in periods very remote, considerable monarchies flourished in Egypt, along the Euphrates, and in other directions. It was not these peoples who were to set their imprint on later ages, it was rather the then merely untutored and unknown wandering tribes of Aryans which, working their way through the great plains of the Volga, the Drieper, and the Danube, eventually forced themselves into the Balkan and the Italian peninsulas, There, with the sea barring their further progress, they took on more settled habits, and formed, at some distant epoch, cities, among which Athens and Rome were to rise to their greatest celebrity. And about the year 1000 8.C., or a little later, Greece emerges from obscurity with Homer. Just as Greece burst from her chrysalis, a Semetic people, the Jews, were producing their counterpart to Homer. In the Book of Joshua, they narrated, in the sober mood of their race, the conquest of Palestine by their 12 nomad tribes, and in the Pentatevch and later writings they recorded their law and their religion. From this starting point, Homer and Joshua follows the history’ of the Mediterranean and of the West.