PICTURE-WRITING (A. KEARY) 280 CHAPTER XIII. PHONETIC WRITING (A. KEARY) 297 CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION (EDITOR) 313 APPENDIX--_Notes and Authorities_ 329 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. CHAPTER I. THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. [Sidenote: The dawn of history.] When St. Paulinus came to preach Christianity to the people of Northumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) being minded to hear him, and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell; and one of the king’s thanes stood up and said, ‘Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where you, King, are sitting at supper in winter, while storms of rain and snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and straightway out again at another is, while within, safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So the life of man appears for a short space; but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are all ways ignorant.’[1] This wise and true saying of the Saxon thane holds good too for the human race as far as its progress is revealed to us by history. We can watch this progress through a brief interval--for the period over which real, continuous authentic history extends; and beyond that is a twilight space, wherein, amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or mythology, here and there an object or an event stands out more clearly, lit up by a gleam from the sources of more certain knowledge which we possess.