Note 42 — Chapter II · ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (B) THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

The new method of comparative morphology affords us a safe test of the datings which have been arrived at by other means for the beginnings of past Cultures. The same kind of argument which would prevent us, even in the absence of positive information, from dating Goethe’s birth more than a century earlier than the “Urfaust,” or supposing the career of Alexander the Great to have been that of an elderly man, enables us to demonstrate, from the individual characteristics of their political life and the spirit of their art, thought, and religion, that the Egyptian Culture dawned somewhere about 3000 and the Chinese about 1400. The calculations of French investigators and more recently of Borchardt (Die Annalen und die zeitliche Festlegung des Alten Reiches, 1919) are as unsound intrinsically as those of Chinese historians for the legendary Hsia and Shang dynasties. Equally, it is impossible that the Egyptian calendar should have been introduced in 4241 B.C. As in every chronology we have to allow that evolution has been accompanied by radical calendar changes, the attempt to fix the exact starting-date a posteriori is objectless.