Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] . MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1932. CIVILISED MAN.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 25 January 1932, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] . MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1932. CIVILISED MAN.

At wliat period in the world’s history. did man become civilised ? This’interesting question was discussed 'by Professor Sayce when he delivered the Huxley Anthropological Institute, says the London “Daily Telegraph.” The conclusion he has arrived at, as the •result" of recent discoveries, is that homo sapiens existed as far back as the age which hitherto has been associated with his semisimian predecessors. Pottery which has recently been unearthed in. the Rift Valley of Kenya , was mentioned by Professor Sayce as indicating that civilised man, with his art of pottery-mak-ing and the use of fire which it implies, could now definitely be traced to the beginning of the second major pluvial period, which may roughly correspond with the two last glacial epochs of Europe. He had already made the. greatest invention ever made by him —that of language. Of the evidences of antiquity laid bare by the spade the archaeologist, Professor Sayce, instanced the discovery of Saqqara under the shadow of the Step Pyramid (generally considered the earliest of the pyramids still existing), of buildings without parallel elsewhere in the country—stately avenues of fluted columns, indicating Avhence the Greeks, centuries later, derived their so-called lonic design, a record office of library, storage magazines, tombs, and temples, all surrounded by a vast wall 17 me-, tres thick, and faced on both sides with the finest masonry in Egypt. “It is, in fact, the masonry of modern Paris or London,” he said, “rather than that which we have been accustomed to associate with the Egypt of later days.” In Babylonia the discoveries of Mr Woolley at Ur had revealed art of the first order. Some of the inlaid designs, with their touches of modern humour, seemed tO' belong to the European world of to-day rather than to the Oriental world of the past. The tombs of Ur also, indicate a wide international!

trade, and the working of mines. Gold, silver, and lapis-lazuli are all found in them in profusion, as well as copper. The gold probably came from the shores of the Persian Gulf, but the silver, like that of the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty, found by Sir Flinders Petrie at Abydos, was probably brought from the mines of the Taurus, while the lapis-lazuli, we are now assured by the geologists, was derived, not from Northern Persia, but from North-western India. As an illustration of the extent and modern character of Babylonian commerce Professor Sayce mentioned that among a large number of trading and legal tablets brought to light at Kara Eyuk some were of the nature of cheques and bills of credit.