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THE STORY OF THE WORLD
SCENES IN ROMAN LIFE, PAINTED BY A ROMAN ARTIST.
Made up from paintings which decorated the walls of one of the buried houses of Pompeii. The
painter has endeavoured to make every-day subjects more interesting by depicting the
workers as little cupids. At the top they are dyeing, in the middle, gathering orchard fruits,
and at the bottom, forging, casting, and working in metal.
THE
STORY OF THE WORLD
A Simple History for Boys and Girls
BY ELIZABETH O'NEILL, M.A.
rORMEBLY UNIVBRSITr FELLOW, JONES FELLOW, AND ASSISTANT
LECTURER IN HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AUTHOR OF ' A NURSERY HISTORY OF ENGLAND '
PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED
IN COLOUR AND BLACK AND WHITE
FROM AUTHENTIC SOURCES
NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
DEDICATORY LETTER
Dear Doris, — You were kind enough to read a small part
of this Story of the World, and to say that you liked it. I
hope you will like also the parts you did not read. I could
not tell you all the things which have ever happened in the
world, but 1 have tried to tell you shortly about all the most
important things from the very beginning, even before people
had come into the World at all, right down to our own
wonderful times. I have chosen the greatest men and
women to tell you about, and in reading their stories I hope
you will understand better something of what the times were
like in which they lived, and what the other people too were
like who were not so great and the kind of lives they led.
The pictures in the book are not like those in most of the
books you see and read, because most of them are not pictures
made by people who are ahve now, but they are copies of
pictures, and statues, and buildings made by the very people
you are reading about in the book. When you are reading
about the Egyptians you get a picture of a pyramid made by
the Egyptians themselves 6000 years ago. When you read
about the Greeks you find pictures of statues of great Greek
statesmen made by great Greek artists long ago, and so on.
In the * Middle Ages' you are given pictures from the
beautiful stained glass windows and the wonderful manu-
scripts which the people of the Middle Ages knew so well
how to make. Sometimes the drawing may seem a little
a 2 V
vi THE STORY OF THE WORLD
curious to you, but it is much more interesting for you to
have these pictures than imaginative pictures made by people
who are Hving now.^
Just as all the pictures are true so all the stories are true
too. Indeed, there were many tales I could have told you
which are often told to children as history, but are not true
at all. I hope you will like those I have told just as well,
for after all history should be true. Very affectionately I
dedicate the book to you.
ELIZABETH O'NEILL.
^ All the illustrations were chosen and arranged by Mr. S. G. Stubbs.
CONTENTS
I. THE COMING OF MAN
II, THE JEWS AND THE PH(ENICIANS
III. THE GREEKS
IV. THE ATHENS OF PERICLES AND SOCRATES
V. THE GREEK COLONIES IN THE WEST .
VI. THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR
VIL THE LAST DAYS OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE
VIII. GREECE AND MACEDONIA .
IX. THE RISE OF ROME .
X. ROME AND THE CELTS
XI. ROME MISTRESS OF ITALY
XII. ROME AND CARTHAGE
XIIL ROME AND THE EAST
XIV, LAST DAYS OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC .
XV. EARLY DAYS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE .
XVI, THE BARBARIANS AND THE EMPIRE .
XVII. THE NEW NATIONS ....
XVIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF MOHAMMEDANISM
XIX. CHARLES THE GREAT AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
XX. THE DAYS OF THE NORTHMEN
XXI. THE GREAT POPE HILDEBRAND
XXII. THE CRUSADES
XXIII. THE MONKS AND THE PEOPLE IN THE TIME OF THE
CRUSADES .......
PAGE
1
10
27
46
55
60
69
73
85
96
102
111
123
129
152
166
179
188
195
200
209
217
229
Vlll
THE STORY OF THE WORLD
CHAP.
XXIV. THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY .
XXV. ST. DOMINIC AND ST. FRANCIS
XXVI. THE BLACK DEATH
XXVII. THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES
XXVIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN TIMES
XXIX. A NEW WORLD .
XXX. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
XXXI. THE REFORMATION
XXXII. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION
XXXIII. ENGLAND AND SPAIN .
XXXIV. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
XXXV. THE PILGRIM FATHERS.
XXXVI. THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV.
XXXVII. THE EAST OF EUROPE IN THE
XXXVIII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
XXXIX. THE STORY OF INDIA .
XL. THE STORY OF CANADA
XLI. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
XLII. AUSTRALASIA
XLIII. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
XLIV. THE STORY OF NAPOLEON
XLV. THE REMAKING OF EUROPE
XLVI. AFRICA— THE LAND OF MYSTERY
XLVII. THE STORY OF CHINA AND JAPAN .
XLVIII. OUR WORLD TO-DAY .
INDEX
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
LIST OF PLATES
Scenes in Roman life, painted by a Roman artist, . . Frontispiece
AT PAGE
How the World began, ...... 8
How an Ancient Egyptian painted the coming of the Israelites
into Egypt, . . . . . . . 14
The Parthenon and the Acropolis of Athens as they probably
were in the days of Pericles, . . . .50
The Parthenon of Athens as it is to-day, . . . .50
Alexander the Great, the World Conqueror, . . . .80
The Roman Forum as it was, looking towards the Coliseum, . 134
The Roman Forum as it is, from the same point of view, . .134
Justinian the Great, Emperor and Law-giver of Byzantium, with
his Court, . . . . . . . 1 82
Scenes in the life of Harold, the last Saxon King of England, . 210
A Saracen army on the march against the Crusaders, . . 226
A great Gothic building : the Cathedral at Rheims, built in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, . . . 250
Methods of warfare during the Hundred Years' War, . . 272
The capture of Constantinople in 1453 by the Turks when the
last Emperor of Byzantium met his heroic death, . . 294
The man who began a new age in the world's history : Christopher
Columbus, discoverer of America, . . . .310
A great Church of the Renaissance : St. Peter's, Rome, . .318
X THE STORY OF THE WORLD
PAGE
King Henry viii. meeting the French King Francis at the famous
field of the Cloth of Gold, . . . . .324
A picture of London, Westminster and the Thames in 1547, . 330
Queen Elizabeth with the Lords and Commons in Parliament, . 352
The ' Sun' King Louis xiv. of France, with his brilliant Court, . 384
The great Emperor Akbar enters his city in state, . . . 410
The rapid growth of Canada — Winnipeg (Fort Garry) fifty years
ago — Winnipeg to-day, ..... 432
The proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia at Sydney on
January 1st, 1901, . . . . . .448
The solemn coronation of the Emperor Napoleon in the Cathedral
of Notre Dame at Paris in 1804, .... 476
Two great cities of old and new Africa — modern Cairo — Cape
Town, ....... 520
A great battle in Japanese history, painted by a Japanese artist, . 528
THE STORY OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
THE COMING OF MAN
Long before men came into the world the earth existed,
though it was very different from the earth as it is to-day.
Men of science who can read a story in the rocks which make
lip the surface of the earth tell us that at one time it was
so hot that nothing of any kind could li\'e on it. It was
a great round lump of melted stuff whirling round and round.
By degrees it got a little cooler. The outside cooled first, and
a crust was formed which broke and, perhaps, at first fell into
the melted part underneath. Later on it stopped falling
through and turned into a hard, cool skin, much like the earth
as it is now, except that at first there was no living thing on
it, not even the smallest flower or insect. But the inside of
the earth has not cooled altogether yet, and we find that if
we go down into it, for instance down a coal-mine, it grows
hotter the lower we go. Sixty feet below the surface a
thermometer would tell us that it is a degree hotter, another
sixty another degree, and so on.
Still the outside has cooled, and when it had become cool
enough for water to be on it then it was possible for plants
and animals to live. Now the first plants and animals began
to live so long ago that even the cleverest men cannot say
exactly when it was. It must have been, in any case,
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years ago. We do
not know even when the first man lived, and we do not know
where. In the Bible we are told that the first man was
A
THE STORY OF THE WORLD
Adam, and that he lived in a certain place which had four
rivers flowing through it. Many people have thought that
this place, the Garden of Eden, must be in Arabia, in the
valley of a river called the Euphrates, where the Assyrians
and Babylonians lived afterwards. But some of the greatest
men of science now say that probably the first man lived in
an island in the far East, which in those far-off days would
not be an island at all, but a part of Southern Asia. One of
the reasons for thinking this is that not many years ago a
skull was found there which is thought to be that of the very
first man. He must have been a very strange man. His
forehead sloped back sharply from his eyebrows instead of
going straight up and then gently back as ours do. His
head must have been smaller than that of any man now alive,
but it was larger than the head of a certain kind of monkey
called the ' Gibbon ' monkey, though it was very much like it
in shape. Learned men who think, as many of them do now,
that men are descended from monkeys, say that this was
probably the skull of
the very first man,
and would, there-
fore, naturally be
very much like that
of a monkey.
There are other
reasons why men of
science think that it
was in Java that the
first man was born,
and one of them is
that it could only be
in a warm, moist
climate such as we know existed there that man could first
grow. If this is so, of course, it might almost as well be in
the place where the Garden of Eden is supposed to have
been, except that no traces of these far-off men have been
THE SHAPE OF THE FIRST MAN's HEAD
(From the skull found in Java bj- Dr. Dubois).
THE COMING OF MAN 8
found there. But we really do not know anything certainly
about the first man, though we know a good deal about
men who lived many thousands of years ago.
There are some signs of the existence of the first men
even in Europe in far-olF ages, when the land was covered
with white glistening ice, and everything was dreadfully cold.
We do not know how these men came to Europe. Nor do
we know how many kinds of men there were at the time, but
traces have been found of three kinds at least. We shall
hear something of these presently.
Although we do not know where these first men came
from, we know a good deal about them. They were cave-
dwellers. They did not build houses as we do ; but they
moved about until they found some hole in the rocks which
would keep out the cold winds and the hail and snow, and
there they made their home — if they could. For sometimes
they would find huge animals in the caves, and would have
to fight for their lives. We think the elephant a very big
animal, but the elephants of those days were much bigger.
The elephants of to-day would look beside them as sheep
beside horses. There were also other huge animals of
different kinds with strange names and strange shapes.
Besides these there were giant bears, lions, and wolves.
These ancient men had very poor weapons to fight with.
They had not learned to make swords and spears of iron.
Stone was all they could think of to make their axes, spears,
knives, and swords. They would knock one piece of stone
against another until they had made a sharp edge, and then
after a long time it would look something like the head of an
axe. A favourite place for caves chosen as homes by these
wild men was the side of a steep cliff, or hill, probably because
the great wild animals could not reach them there very easily.
We know of several of these caves w^hich, because of the things
dug out of them, must have been the homes of wild, early men
like these.
They stained themselves different colours with the juice of
4 THE STORY OF THE WORLD
plants, just as the people did whom Julius Caesar found in
Britain. They wore skins of wild animals for clothes, and
they lived on the flesh of the animals they killed and on
roots which they dug out of the earth. We find not only
their rough stone weapons, but their bones lying side by side
with those of the great rhinoceros, which they seem to have
learned how to kill easily. They knew how to make fires, and
they kept the wild beasts away at night by building up great
fires made from the brushwood of the forests.
These men were not attractive to look at. Their fore-
heads went sharply back from their eyebrows, and these stood
out like a shield over their eyes. Their chins also went back
from their teeth instead of forward like ours. They were
short men, and as we have seen did not know many things as
yet. They must have been very cunning hunters, as that was
the work they lived by, and some of their weapons were
cleverly made. But at best they were not very different
from monkeys.
These ancient men are called by some people ' Neander '
men, because the first head of such a man was found in a cave
in Germany called the Neander cave.
The Reindeer Men
Long after the Neander men lived we know that there was
another sort of ancient men who are called 'Cromagnard' men,
because their skulls were first found at Cromagnan in France.
They are also sometimes called Reindeer men, because they
lived at the time when reindeer roamed over the south of
Europe. Now these Reindeer men, although, of course, they
were savage men who lived thousands and thousands of years
ago, must have been in some ways almost like the men of
to-day. The climate had changed very much from that
which the Neander men had had to put up with. It was
now cold and dry. The ice had disappeared, and the climate
was not very different from that in the north of Europe in
winter now.
THE COMING OF MAN 5
The Reindeer men were still cave-dwellers, and some of
their traces have been found in caves in Devon and Derby-
shire, But they had foreheads like those of men now, rising
fairly gently from the eyebrows. The whole head and face
of a Reindeer man must have been quite like those of men
we meet every day. The size of his head was about the same.
The only great difference was that the chin still went back-
wards from the teeth. They were tall men, too, with much
better figures than the Neander men. But this is not all.
Though they were hunters, and had only weapons of stone,
their weapons were more finely made, and, strange to say, the
Reindeer men were very fine artists. Curious, savage people
though they were, covering their bodies with yellow and red
paint, they could cut into ivory perfect little pictures of the
things they saw around them. You can almost see the deer
putting down its finely shaped legs when you look at some of
these scenes in ivory. They could paint too. In a cave in
the north of Spain there are painted on the walls in almost
natural colours and in natural positions, buffaloes, wild boars,
and horses. They were painted long ago by the Reindeer
men. Sometimes they tried sculpture, and at this too they
were very clever.
These paintings and sculptures and drawings are to be
found not in one cave only, but in many in the south of
France and in the north of Spain, so we cannot think they
were the work of one artist among a number of savages, just
like a genius among thousands of ordinary people to-day. They
were a real race of artists, clever men in many ways though so
savage in others. We know that they were clever in other
ways too. They got their flints and stones to make weapons
from mines from which they dug them with axes sometimes
made out of the horns of animals. We know, too, that they
made lamps for themselves. Altogether, they must have been
men whom we should have liked to know.
A strange thing about these Reindeer men is that we are
almost certain that they were not descended from the rougher
6 THE STORY OF THE WORLD
and ruder Neander men. It seems more probable that they
came to the western parts of Europe when the terrible
covering of ice had gone from it. But a still stranger thing
SPECIMENS OF THE WORK OF THE MOST ANCIENT OF THE WORLD S ARTISTS
(1) A buffalo painted on a wall of a cave at Altamira, North Spain, perhaps 50,000 years ago;
(2) Carvings on ivory by Reindeer men ; (3) A tool carved out of flint found at a great camp of
the New Stone Age in Sussex; (4) and (5) Beautifully carved flint arrow-heads of the same Age
found in Ireland ; (6) A flint pick found in the Thames ; (7) A flint knife from Denmark.
is that the bodies of another kind of men still have been found,
of the same sort as the negro of the present time. So here
we see there are three kinds of men found living at the same
THE COMING OF MAN 7
time ; the savage small Neander men, the artistic and clever
and finely built Reindeer men, and the Negro men. But we
know almost nothing about the Negro men. All these men
lived in a time which the people who study these things call
the 'Old Stone Age.' But the Reindeer men still lived in
the New Stone Age — a time which is nearer to the days when
real history begins.
The weather in the west of Europe was growing warmer
still, so that new and different kinds of animals could live
there. The reindeer had gone, but there was now the red
deer which long afterwards the Red King loved to hunt in
England.
The Lake- Dwellers
The Reindeer men disappeared with the reindeer. Where
they went to we do not know. Perhaps they just died out
because the weather did not suit them as it did other men
who now began to show themselves. So far as we know the
new people did not come from the Reindeer men. The men
of this new time began to build houses, sometimes of stone,
sometimes of wood. A favourite place for houses was the
middle of lakes. The men first drove heavy pieces of wood
into the water, and then built their houses upon them. Lake-
dwellers, as we call them, are known to have lived at Glaston-
bury in England. They began to collect herds of cattle and
kept them for food. They also tilled the land and grew things.
They built strange circles of stone, one of which may still be
seen at Stonehenge in the South of England. We know, too,
that they began to make pottery, but they could not draw
and paint like the Reindeer men who had lived perhaps
thousands of years before them. This seems a strange thing,
as the new men were so much more civilized in other ways.
The New Stone Age reaches the time of which real history
begins to speak. It lasted, until about four thousand years
ago in some parts of Europe, but in Egypt even about seven
thousand years ago the people had learned to make weapons
8 THE STORY OF THE WORLD
of bronze, and a little later of iron. It is with these people
that the most interesting part of the story of the world
commences. Of the earlier peoples we can never know very
much, and real history begins with the writing down of the
doings of men who were very different from these savages —
people who knew many things and wanted to know more, and
so people whom we understand better and like to hear about.
When people learned to make weapons of bronze and iron
instead of stone the wild animals were more frightened of
them, and fled before them. When all the animals in one
place had been killed or had run away the people moved on
to another place to find more animals ; so that in the very
early days people were always moving from place to place.
Families who were related to each other kept together and
moved with each other. We call a number of families
keeping together in this way a 'tribe.' Often two tribes
would want to go to the same place, and then they would
fight, and the tribe which won would have the land.
After many years men began to collect together sheep and
cows, from which they got nearly everything they wanted.
They killed some of them for meat to eat, and got milk from
the cows to drink, and they made themselves clothes from
the wool of the sheep. When there were so many animals
the grass was soon eaten up, and so again the tribes had to
move on to other places for fresh pasture land.
Sometimes when a tribe found land on which things grew
very easily they stayed there, and instead of keeping so many
sheep and cattle they kept only a few, and instead of letting
grass grow all over the land they gave up some of the land to
grow many other things. They built themselves houses to
live and sleep in instead of the tents which they had used
when they were always moving. So villages were made, and
some of these grew into towns, and instead of all the men
hunting or fishing or fighting or growing corn some began to
do one thing and some another. Some men made boots, and
others made weapons for the people who were looking after
HOW THE WORLD BEGAN.
The world probably began as a great mass of glowing gas whirling round and round, which gradu-
ally, after miUions of years, cooled down into solid matter. This photograph (taken through
the great telescope of Yerkes Observatory) shows the mass of glowing gas in the Milky Way
called the nebula of Andromeda, which is now in the state that our world was probably in at
the beginning.
THE COMING OF MAN 9
the land and had no time to do these things for themselves.
But always for thousands of years there were tribes still
moving, sometimes coming to fight the people who had
settled down, and taking their lands from them. Most of the
people in the hottest part of the earth had black skins and
black hair. Those farther north were brown or yellowy and
also had black or very dark hair. Then there were tribe upon
tribe of white people, and more and more of these were ever
pouring into Europe from Asia. We know most about the
people of Europe, Asia, and the north of Africa, and more
about some of these peoples than about others. With the
story of the people who lived on the banks of two great rivers
the Nile and the Euphrates, real history begins.
CHAPTER II
THE JEWS AND THE PHOENICIANS
The rich lands on which things grew easily and where men
first settled down to live without moving away were generally
found on the banks of great rivers. People cannot live
without water to drink, and the soil, too, must be watered
before it will bear fruit. For thousands of years, while tribes
were still swarming over Asia and passing into Europe,
lasting settlements had existed near two great rivers, the
river Nile in North Africa and the river Euphrates in Western
Asia. The country round the banks of the Nile was called
Egypt. The Egyptians were a brown people, with straight
black hair and curious long dark eyes. The country on the
right of the Euphrates was called Mesopotamia ; the people
there belonged to the lighter races.
In both these countries as the years went on the people
had learnt to do many wonderful things which would have
been impossible in earlier and wilder times. They learned to
know something about the sun and stars ; they could count
and do sums in arithmetic, and they learned to build not only
houses of brick, but great buildings of stone, and though they
did not write as we do, and had not paper and ink, they had
a picture-writing of their own which they scratched on stones
and the walls of their buildings. Many of these pictures
remain to this day, and clever men are able to read them and
tell us what they mean. In Egypt the most wonderful build-
ings of all were great, pointed stone monuments, which the
old Egyptians built over the graves of their dead kings to do
them honour, lest they should be forgotten. These Pyramids
were built nearly four thousand years before the Birth of Christ;
THE JEWS AND THE PHOENICIANS
11
and there they stand to this day, and people go. from far-off
countries to look at them as one of the wonders of the
world. They are so big and wonderful that the people of
to-day cannot imagine how they were built. The Egyptians,
too, made beautiful stone statues, and they must have been
very fond of beautiful things. But we must remember that
not all the people could enjoy these things, for many of them
were slaves and had to do all the work, and could be bought
THE PYRAMID TOMB OF KING KHUFU AND THE GREAT SPHINX AT GIZEHj EGYPT
This is the greatest of the Pyramids. It was built over 6500 years ago, and is 150 feet