I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly
plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not
well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile
rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of
civilisation.
Then I showed you Mesopotamia, ``the land between the
rivers,'' which was the second great school of the human race.
And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the AEgean
Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old
east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.
Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes,
who thousands of years before had left the heart of
Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed
their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since
then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I told
you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states,
where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured
(that is a big word, but you can ``figure out'' what it means)
into something quite new, something that was much nobler and
finer than anything that had gone before.
When you look at the map you will see how by this time
civilisation has described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt,
and by way of Mesopotamia and the AEgean Islands it moves
westward until it reaches the European continent.
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