Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/435

Comparison between Egypt and Chaldaea. 397 triple translation, and that idea was that the world was created by natural forces, by the action of causes even now at work. The first dogma of the Babylonian religion was the spontaneous generation of things from the liquid element. 1 The first vague presentiment and rough sketch, as it were, of certain theories that have made a great noise in the world in our own day, may be traced, it is asserted, in the cosmogonie writings of ancient Chaldaea. Even the famous hypothesis of Darwin has been searched for and found, if we may believe the searchers. In any case it seems well established that the echo of these specula- tions reached the Ionian sages who were the fathers of Greek philosophy. Their traces are perceptible, some scholars declare, in the Theogony of Hesiod. Possibly it is so ; there are certainly some striking points of resemblance ; but where the influence of such ideas is really and clearly evident is in those philosophic poems that succeeded each other about the sixth century b.c., all under the same title : concerning nature (irepl $v(T6ù)s). 2 These poems are now lost, but judging from what we are told by men who read them in the original, the explanation they gave of the creation of the world and of the first appearance upon it of organized beings, differed only in its more abstract character from that proposed many centuries before, and under the form of a myth, by the priests of Chaldaea. If we may trust certain indications, these bold and ingenious doctrines crossed over from Ionia to the mainland of Greece, and reached the ears of such writers as Aristophanes and Plato. It does the greatest honour to Chaldaea that its bold speculations should have thus contributed to awaken the lofty intellectual ambitions and the scientific curiosity of Greece, and perhaps she may have rendered the latter country a still more signal service in teaching her those methods by whose use man draws himself clear of barbarism and starts on the road to civilization ; a single example of this will be sufficient. It is more than forty years since Bceckh, and Brandis after him, proved that all the measures of length, weight and capacity used by the ancients, were correlated in the same fashion and belonged to one scale. Whether we turn to Persia, 1 Soury, Theories naturalistes du Monde et de la Vie dans T Antiquité, cap. i. and ii. 2 Ibid. cap. iii.