The Greatest Story in the World, Period 1

The Greatest Story in the World, Period 1

Horace G. Hutchinson's "The Greatest Story in the World" opens by framing the entire history of mankind as centered on the Mediterranean Sea, arguing that events elsewhere in the ancient world—China, Peru, Mexico—mattered little to the larger course of human development compared to what happened around this one relatively small body of water. Period 1 traces civilization from its most primitive stages (Hunting, Pastoral, and Agricultural Ages, paralleled by Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages) through the rise of the earliest great river-valley civilizations along the Nile and the Euphrates-Tigris system, explaining why fertile, well-watered land allowed settled agricultural societies to outgrow their nomadic neighbors. The narrative examines ancient Egypt in depth: its geography bounded by desert, its dependence on the Nile's annual flood, its economy of grain farming and domesticated animals, its writing systems (hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic), and its dynastic history from the legendary unifier Menes through the Hyksos "Shepherd King" period to the militarily dominant Eighteenth Dynasty under Thothmes I and III. A separate chapter addresses Egyptian religion—its multiplicity of gods, animal worship, the Osiris-Isis-Horus-Seth myth cycle, sun worship, mummification, pyramid-building, and beliefs about judgment after death—alongside Egyptian dress, art, law, and the powerful priestly class. The story then shifts east to Babylonia, comparing it point by point with Egypt: similar reliance on irrigation, similar religious patterns (a supreme sun-god merged with a national deity, in a near-mirror of Egypt's Ra-Osiris fusion), cuneiform writing evolving from pictographs into phonetic signs, and Khammurabi's remarkably modern law code, roughly contemporary with Abraham's migration from Ur to Canaan. Babylonian myths of creation and the Flood are shown to closely parallel Genesis, establishing that Abraham carried Mesopotamian traditions with him into Palestine, though his descendants' beliefs grew purer and less superstitious. A third early power is introduced: the sea-based Minoan civilization of Crete, discovered through Sir Arthur Evans's excavations at Knossos. The Minoans were master architects, artists, and sailors—also pirates—whose influence spread throughout the Mediterranean until a catastrophic, still-unexplained collapse ended their dominance. Their legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth is interpreted as a distorted memory of real bull-fighting rituals and tribute demanded from Athens. Caught between the great land empires and the shifting sea-power lies the narrow "bridge" of Palestine and Syria, populated by Semitic tribes—including the Israelites—who are repeatedly crushed between Egyptian and Babylonian/Assyrian ambitions. The book follows the Israelites from their enslavement in Egypt's land of Goshen, through Moses's Exodus and Joshua's conquest of Canaan, the unification and later division of the kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon into Israel and Judah, and their long, precarious survival amid conquest by Assyria (the fall of Samaria), Egypt, and finally Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar (the fall of Jerusalem and the Exile). Hutchinson emphasizes that this small nation's endurance and its scriptures had a civilization-shaping importance far exceeding its military weakness, since Judaism became the root from which Christianity and Islam later grew. Military technology and siegecraft of the era—chariots, cavalry, bow and arrow, battle-axes, shields, walled-city assaults with towers and siege-mounds—are described in detail, alongside the perpetual, largely fratricidal warfare among Semitic-descended peoples. The narrative culminates in the sudden rise of Persia under Cyrus the Great, whose conquests—achieved partly through superior cavalry tactics and partly through unusually merciful, tolerant policies rooted in Zoroastrianism's ethical monotheism—unite Babylon, Egypt, and the Near East into history's largest empire yet, and who permits the exiled Jews to return and rebuild their Temple. Finally, the story turns to Greece: the probable economic (rather than romantic) causes of the Trojan War, the spread of Greek colonies and culture, and the Persian invasions repelled at Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Platea, and Mycale. The period closes by celebrating Greece's unmatched intellectual and artistic legacy—its philosophers, dramatists, orators, and sculptors—as a contribution to world history more enduring than any empire's territorial conquest, while noting that Greek religion, unlike that of its predecessors, played little practical role in daily life until Christianity later took root there.

By Horace G. Hutchinson · First published 1923 · Genre: World History, Educational Non-fiction, Narrative Non-fiction · 17 chapters · 90,809 words

First lines

The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the / Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is / that it is really our own story. It is the story of the doings of / mankind from the earliest date at which we know anything at all about / man; and it is the story of the doings which have made you and me / what we are to-day, and have made our lives what they are.

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historical nonfiction · British literature · early twentieth century · narrative prose · social commentary · cultural history · reflective writing · literary nonfiction · historical perspective · English-language book · period writing · public affairs

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