Every science which deals with human phenomena is in a way an implement
in this great factory system, in which the past is welded together
again. Psychology has been drawn upon to interpret the movements of
revolutions or religions, anthropology and ethnology furnish a clue to
problems to which the key of documents has been lost. Genealogy,
heraldry and chronology run parallel with the wider subject. But the
real auxiliary sciences to history are those which deal with those
traces of the past that still exist, the science of language
(philology), of writing (palaeography), of documents (diplomatic), of
seals (sphragistics), of coins (numismatics), of weights and measures,
and archaeology in the widest sense of the word. These sciences underlie
the whole development of scientific history. Dictionaries and manuals
are the instruments of this industrial revolution. Without them the
literary remains of the race would still be as useless as Egyptian
inscriptions to the fellaheen. Archaeology itself remained but a minor
branch of art until the machinery was perfected which enabled it to
classify and interpret the remains of the "pre-historic" age.
This is the most remarkable chapter in the whole history of history--the
recovery of that past which had already been lost when our literary
history began. The perspective stretches out as far the other side of
Homer as we are this. The old "providential" scheme of history
disintegrates before a new interest in the "gentile" nations to whose
high culture Hebrew sources bore unwilling testimony. Biblical criticism
is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible
basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which
they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place
in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left
us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin or Hebrew sources, and now
fifty centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific
historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the
quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. There he can
reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look
back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona. His
discoveries, co-ordinated and arranged in vast _corpora inscriptionum_,
stand now alongside Herodotus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their
criticism. Medieval archaeology has, since Quicherat, revealed how men
were living while the monks wrote chronicles, and now cathedrals and
castles are studied as genuine historic documents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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