CURRENT LITERAT LIRE.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ANCIENT PEOPLES.
A Short History of Ancient Peoples. By Robinson Souttar, M.A., D.C.L. With an Introduction by the Rev. A. H. Sayce, M.A., D.D., Professor of Assyriology at Oxford. With Maps. (Hodder and Stoughton. 12s.)—This volume has the advantage of a flattering introductory passport from Professor Sayce, to whose works the author has accorded "preferential treatment" in handling certain portions of his vast subject. The annals of ten ancient peoples during four millenniums, as here compressed into seven hundred pages of small pica, testify to our author's scholarship, to his possession of the rare gift of picturesque narrative power, and to his absolute freedom from the influence of the overlord whose ghost still dominates the majority of our historians,—we mean Dr. Dryasdust. He does not deal with the guesses at race, dynastic rule, commerce, life and manners, based by some experts on a find of white Chinese jade or flint arrow-heads, or on the discovery of an ivory draught-board, or a dagger-blade scratched with a picture of an ichneumon swallowing a duck. If upbraided for such omissions, Dr. Souttar can generally shelter himself behind his adjective "Short." But he should have given us a glimpse of the explorations of the Mecklenburgh shopkeeper, Schliemann, who, with his helps, pulled down Bunarbasehi from its old coign of traditional vantage, and dug up the six or seven superimposed Troys of the hill of Hissarlik, afterwards making still more notable discoveries at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Orcho- manes. Not a word is said of the secrets of pre-heroic civilisation lately revealed by the excavations of Cnossos, which have enabled Mr. Arthur Evans to rehabilitate the Labyrinth, if not the Minotaur, and to show that the ladies of the "smart set" of Crete pinched in their waists and curled their hair in twentieth-century style. The author's precis of the successive inroads of the primitive races which peopled both sides of the Aegean are very cloudy, and should send the student to Professors Ridgeway and Bury. He is at his beat in descriptions of early, half-visible, topographic conditions: excellent, e.g., is his contrast of the civilised Babylon of remote Accadian dates, and its canals, rich harvests, temples, libraries, and elegancies of life, with the present barren, malaria-stricken deserts and morasses, rivers choked by sand and weeds, and peopled by vagabond and half-savage inhabitants as now controlled by "the unspeakable Turk." The" short" history of the Hebrews is mostly written on Biblical lines. Dr. Souttar boycotts the whole range of the critical controversies which may be summed up as Babel versus Bible, and his narrative would be accepted at Potsdam as entirely orthodox, except perhaps when, conformably to his way of illus- trating the old by the new, he compares the early government of the Chosen People with the Constitution of the United States. We may observe that Rameses II. and Meneptah are categorically called the Pharaohs of the Oppression and the Exodus, although recent scholarship has argued that Thotmes III. and Ameno- phis III. were the Egyptian rulers concerned. The volume opens with a delightful survey of Egypt, geographical, agricultural, animal, theological, political, which comes down to the modern crocodile and scorpion, and to the twenty European and American University Professors who are now lecturing on hieroglyphics. But the systematic historical view of "the old kingdom" starts from the Fourth Dynasty, thus taking a salto mortals over several Royal lines which preceded the pyramid times. The modern narrator who describes David's combat with Goliath, or the fall of Jezebel under John's chariot-wheels, is striving with the impossible : he can never rival the graphic touch of the sacred historians, and he accentuates his inferiority if, like Dr. Souttar, he makes long quotations from that model of artistic style, our Authorised Version. The personality of a Pericles or an Alexander is too large for adequate treatment on the medallion scale, and when our author comes to his Greeks and Romans, his portraiture, which is otherwise able, is insufficient. His drum-and-trumpet pages are good (see his Marathon, Thermopylae, and Pharsalia) : in this department he does justice to " Macedonia's madman," but is too much disposed to treat him as a mere fighter without morals, manners, culture, or political wisdom, a description which does not fit the friend of Aristotle. Of Augustus, with his new Roman War Office, Exchequer, and local government, with his police and fire-brigade, and his arrange- ments for cleaning up streets and sewers, we have a brilliant and sympathetic snapshot. Dr. Souttar has a proper respect for dates ; but he shirks side summaries, his contents are of ultra-micro- scopic dimensions, and his quotations are always anonymous. Into the pertinacious British contempt for bibliography he does not quite fall, but his beggarly catalogue of authorities is re- stricted to fifteen separate entries, each of which is strictly con- fined to the writer's naked name,—e.g., " Maspero," "Grote," " Sayce." As there was here plenty of waste room, the student might have been favoured with the mention of such pillars of the newer Greek and Assyrian science as Wilamovitz, Beloch, and Winckler. But, in spite of our criticisms, we shall gladly read the volumes of later history which Dr. Souttar appears to have in hand.
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