[History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White]@TWC D-Link book
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

CHAPTER VI
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Mr.Lockyer, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, has recently convinced himself, after careful examination of various ruined temples at Thebes and elsewhere, that they were placed with reference to observations of stars.

To state his conclusion in his own words: "There seems a very high probability that three thousand, and possibly four thousand, years before Christ the Egyptians had among them men with some knowledge of astronomy, and that six thousand years ago the course of the sun through the year was practically very well known, and methods had been invented by means of which in time it might be better known; and that, not very long after that, they not only considered questions relating to the sun, but began to take up other questions relating to the position and movement of the stars." The same view of the antiquity of man in the Nile valley is confirmed by philologists.

To use the words of Max Duncker: "The oldest monuments of Egypt--and they are the oldest monuments in the world--exhibit the Egyptian in possession of the art of writing." It is found also, by the inscriptions of the early dynasties, that the Egyptian language had even at that early time been developed in all essential particulars to the highest point it ever attained.

What long periods it must have required for such a development every scholar in philology can imagine.
As regards medical science, we have the Berlin papyrus, which, although of a later period, refers with careful specification to a medical literature of the first dynasty.
As regards archaeology, the earliest known inscriptions point to still earlier events and buildings, indicating a long sequence in previous history.
As to all that pertains to the history of civilization, no man of fair and open mind can go into the museums of Cairo or the Louvre or the British Museum and look at the monuments of those earlier dynasties without seeing in them the results of a development in art, science, laws, customs, and language, which must have required a vast period before the time of Mena.

And this conclusion is forced upon us all the more invincibly when we consider the slow growth of ideas in the earlier stages of civilization as compared with the later--a slowness of growth which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that earliest civilization to this hour.


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