Lost Civilizations

Persia is the land of mystery, and the source of modern civilization. It preserved knowledge through the Christian dark ages, and that knowledge preserved was used to catapult civilization into the industrial ages.

This work now recovers for us those epoch-making culture heroes who originated civilization, with their long-lost real names, personalities and authentic records of achievements and exploits, as truly historical kings of fixed dates, who have left us many of their actual contemporary inscribed monuments, along with full lists of their early kings and dynasties with their regnal years, extending continuously back to the rise of civilization; for they are disclosed as being already at that epoch a scientific people, accustomed to writing and calculation by calendar years and possessed of a keen historical sense.

This book is an application of the jigsaw system to certain archæological problems which under the ordinary detached methods of the Specialist have proved insoluble. My fragments of evidence are drawn as occasion warrants from History, Fairy-tale, Philosophy, Legend, Folklore-in fact from any quarter whence the required piece unmistakably fulfils the missing space. It is thus a mental medley with all the defects, and some, I trust, of the attractions, of a mosaic.

The Dorians derived their origin from those districts in which the Grecian nation bordered towards the north upon numerous and dissimilar races of barbarians. As to the tribes which dwelt beyond these boundaries we are indeed wholly destitute of information; nor is there the slightest trace of any memorial or tradition that the Greeks originally came from those quarters. On these frontiers, however, the events took place which effected an entire alteration in the internal condition of the whole Grecian people, and here were given many of those impulses, of which the effects were so long and generally experienced.

The Hebrew and Ghebers have both become lost races and lost civilizations. The Jews of today lay claim to the Hebrew religion and language, but not necessarily to the lost race. This book lays open other possibilities of the origin of the Hebrew people, other than Mesopotamia. Were the Ghebers the real progenitors of the Hebrew race?

The Great Pyramid has lent its name as a sort of by-word for paradoxes; and, as moths to a candle, so are theorisers attracted to it. The very fact that the subject was so generally familiar, and yet so little was accurately known about it, made it the more enticing; there were plenty of descriptions from which to choose, and yet most of them were so hazy that their support could be claimed for many varying theories.

Fifty years ago, the opinion was held by some that we could watch, in the tradition of the most ancient realms of the East, the first awkward steps in the childhood of the human race, while others believed that it was possible to discover there the remnants of an original wisdom, received by mankind at the beginning of their course immediately from the hand of heaven. The monuments of the East, subsequently discovered and investigated by the combined labour of English, German, and French scholars, have added an unexpected abundance of fresh information to the Hebrew Scriptures and the narratives of the Greeks, which, till then, were almost our only resource. No one can any longer be ignorant that Hither Asia at a very remote period was in possession of a rich and many-sided civilisation. The earliest stages of that civilisation in the valley of the Nile, of the Euphrates and the Tigris, on the coasts and in the interior of Syria are, it is true, entirely hidden from our knowledge; even the far more recent culture of the Aryan tribes we can only trace with the help of the Veda and the Avesta back to the point at which they were already acquainted with agriculture, and possessed considerable artistic skill.