Real History Begins or ’Way ’Way Back
to the Time of the Gipsies
YOU can remember the big things that have happened in your own lifetime.
And you have of course heard your father tell about things that happened in his own life—how he fought the Germans in the Great War, perhaps.
And if your grandfather is still living, he can tell you still other stories of things that took place when he was a boy before even your father was born.
Perhaps your
great,
great,
grandfather
may have been living when Washington was President, and his
great,
great,
great,
great,
grandfather
may have been living when there were only wild Indians in this country.
Although these ancestors, as they are called, are dead long since, the story of what did happen in all their lifetimes ’way, ’way back has been written down in books and this story is history—“his story” one boy named it.
Christ was living in the Year 1—no, not the first year of the world, of course.
Do you know how many years ago that was?
You can tell if you know what year this is now.
If Christ were living to-day, how old would He be?
Nineteen hundred and more years may seem a long time. But perhaps you have seen or heard of a man or a woman who was a hundred years old. Have you?
Well, in nineteen hundred years only nineteen men each a hundred years old might have lived one after the other—nineteen men one after the other since the time of Christ—and that doesn’t seem so long after all!
Everything that happened before Christ was born is called B.C., which you can guess are the initials of Before Christ, so B.C. stands for Before Christ. So much is easy.
Everything that has happened in the world since the time of Christ is called A.D. This is not so easy for though A. might stand for After, we know D. is not the initial of Christ. As a matter of fact, A. D. are the initials of two Latin words, “Anno Domini.” Anno means “in the year,” Domini “of the Lord”; so that Anno Domini is “in the year, of the Lord,” which in ordinary, every-day language means of course “since the time of Christ.”
The things I have told you that I have had to guess at we call Before-History, or Pre-History—which means the same thing. But the things that have happened in the lifetime of people, who have written them down—the stories I don’t have to guess at—we call History.
The first history that we feel fairly sure is really true begins with the Hamite family. The Hamites, you remember, were one of the three families of the white race I have already told you about who lived by the Tigris and Euphrates. We think that they moved away from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and went down to Egypt long before history began.
Of course they didn’t pack all their furniture on a big wagon and move to Egypt, as you might move from the house where you now live to another. They lived in tents then and not in houses at all, and they only moved along a day’s journey at a time as campers or Gipsies might do. In fact, Gipsy is short for Egyptian. When they got tired of one place or had eaten up everything there was near-by, they rolled up their tents, packed them on camels, and moved a little farther along to a new place. And so camping here for a while, then gradually moving farther along to the next good place and camping there, they at last got as far off as the land we now call Egypt. When they finally reached Egypt they found it such a fine country in which to live that there they stayed for good and were called Egyptians.
Why do you suppose they found Egypt such a fine country in which to live? It was chiefly on account of a habit of the river Nile—a bad habit you might at first think it—a habit of flooding the country once every year.
It rains so hard in the spring that the water fills up the river Nile, overflows its banks, and spreads far out over the land, but not very deep. It is as if you had left a water-spigot turned on and the water running, or had begun to water your garden with a hose, and then you had gone off and forgotten it.
But the people know when the overflow is coming and they are glad for it to come, so they put banks around some of it so that it is stored up for watering the land during the rest of the year when there is no rain. After most of the water has dried up, it has left a layer of rich, dark, moist earth over the whole country. In this earth it is easy to grow dates, wheat, and other things which are good for food.
Menes, 3400 B. C.
If it were not for this yearly overflow of the Nile, the country of Egypt would be a sandy desert in which no plant or living thing would grow—for all plants as well as animals must have water and will die without it. Egypt, without water, would be like the great Sahara Desert, which is not far away. It is the Nile, therefore, that makes the land so rich and Egypt such an easy and cheap country to live in, for food grows with little or no labor and costs almost nothing. Besides this, the climate is so warm that people need little clothing and do not have to buy coal or make fires to heat their houses. So it was to this country that the Hamites at last came, finally settled down, and were thereafter called Egyptians.
The first Egyptian king whose name we know was Menes, but we do not know much about him. We believe he built some kind of waterworks so that the people might better use the water of the Nile, and he probably lived about 3400 B. C. He may have lived either earlier or later, but as this is an easy date to remember, we shall take it for a starting-point. You might remember it by supposing it is a telephone number of a person you wanted to call up:
Menes, First Egyptian king . . 3400 B.C.
