x. 25) their high civilization would have been thereby
demonstrated, though their antiquity would still have to be dwarfed to
2247 "B.C.." And who were the Etruscans?
Shall the Easterns like the Westerns be made to believe that between the
high civilizations of the pre-Roman (and we say--prehistoric) Tursenoi
of the Greeks, with their twelve great cities known to history; their
Cyclopean buildings, their plastic and pictorial arts, and the time when
they were a nomadic tribe "first descended into Italy from their
northern latitudes"--only a few centuries elapsed? Shall it be still
urged that the Phoenicians with their Tyre 2750 "B.C." (a chronology,
accepted by Western history), their commerce, fleet, learning, arts, and
civilization, were only a few centuries before the building of Tyre but
"a small tribe of Semitic fishermen"? Or, that the Trojan war could not
have been earlier than 1184 B.C., and thus Magna Graecia must be fixed
somewhere between the eighth and the ninth Century "B.C.," and by no
means thousands of years before, as was claimed by Plato and Aristotle,
Homer and the Cyclic Poems, derived from, and based upon, other records
millenniums older? If the Christian historian, hampered by his
chronology, and the freethinker by lack of necessary data, feel bound to
stigmatize every non-Christian or non-Western chronology as "obviously
fanciful," "purely mythical," and "not worthy of a moment's
consideration," how shall one, wholly dependent upon Western guides get
at the truth? And if these incompetent builders of Universal History
can persuade their public to accept as authoritative their chronological
and ethnological reveries, why should the Eastern student, who has
access to quite different--and we make bold to say, more trustworthy--
materials, be expected to join in the blind belief of those who defend
Western historical infallibility? He believes--on the strength of the
documentary evidence, left by Yavanacharya (Pythagoras) 607 "B.
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