" Europe has no
very trustworthy history of her own vicissitudes and mutations, her
successive races and their doings. What with their savage wars, the
barbaric habits of the historic Goths, Huns, Franks, and other warrior
nations, and the interested literary Vandalism of the shaveling priests
who for centuries sat upon its intellectual life like a nightmare, an
antiquity could not exist for Europe. And, having no Past to record
themselves, the European critics, historians and archeologists have not
scrupled to deny one to others--whenever the concession excited a
sacrifice of biblical prestige.
No "traces of old civilizations" we are told! And what about the
Pelasgi--the direct forefathers of the Hellenes, according to Herodotus?
What about the Etruscans--the race mysterious and wonderful, if any, for
the historian, and whose origin is the most insoluble of problems? That
which is known of them only shows that could something more be known, a
whole series of prehistoric civilizations might be discovered. A people
described as are the Pelasgi--a highly intellectual, receptive, active
people, chiefly occupied with agriculture, warlike when necessary,
though preferring peace; a people who built canals as no one else,
subterranean water-works, dams, walls, and Cyclopean buildings of the
most astounding strength; who are even suspected of having been the
inventors of the so-called Cadmean or Phoenician writing characters from
which all European alphabets are derived--who were they? Could they be
shown by any possible means as the descendants of the biblical Peleg
(Gen.
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