TOMBS OF THE KINGS, VALLEY OF KEDRON, 268 JERUSALEM (from Wilson’s “Jerusalem”) SYMBOLS AND INSCRIPTIONS FROM JEWISH 310 CATACOMBS AND CEMETERIES IN ROME (from Garrucci) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTRODUCTION The civilization of Europe and America is composed of elements of many different kinds and of various origin. Most of the beginnings cannot be recovered within the limits of recorded history. We do not know where and when a great many of our fundamental institutions arose, and about them we are reduced to conjectures that are sometimes frankly improbable. But about a great many elements of our civilization, and precisely those upon which we base our claim to be called civilized—indeed, which give us the word and the concept of civic life—we know relatively a great deal, and we know that they originated on the eastern shores of the large landlocked sea known as the Mediterranean. We are beginning to be aware that the process of developing these elements was much longer than we had been accustomed to believe. Many races and several millennia seem to have elaborated slowly the institutions that older historians were prepared to regard as the conscious contrivance of a single epoch. But even if increasing archeological research shall render us more familiar than we are with Pelasgians, Myceneans, Minoans, Aegeans, it is not likely that the claims of two historic peoples to have founded European civilization will be seriously impugned. These are the Romans and the Greeks. To these must be added another people, the Jews, whose contribution to civilization was no less real and lasting. The Greeks and Romans have left descendants only in a qualified sense. There are no doubt thousands of individuals now living who are the actual descendants of the kinsmen and contemporaries of the great names in Greek and Roman history; but these individuals are widely scattered, and are united by national and racial bonds with thousands of individuals not so descended, from whom they have become wholly indistinguishable. We have documentary evidence of great masses of other races, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Semitic, entering into the territory occupied by Greeks and Romans and mingling with them, and to this evidence is added the confirmation of anthropological researches. This fact has made it possible to consider Greek and Roman history objectively. Only rarely can investigators be found who feel more than a very diluted pride in the achievements of peoples so dubiously connected with themselves. It is therefore with increasing clarity of vision that we are ordering the large body of facts we already know about Greeks and Romans, and are gathering them in constantly broadening categories.