‘Once the Parisians see me three or four times,’ said Napoleon Bonaparte, then twenty-eight, after his victorious campaign in Italy, ‘not a soul will turn his head to look at me. They want to see deeds.’17 His next campaign, as we have seen, was in Egypt, where he took those 167 savants or scholars, who discovered and brought back to Europe the highlights of a fascinating early civilisation. These discoveries were soon built on by others, to make the early nineteenth century both the birth and the heroic age (in the West at least) of yet another new historical discipline, archaeology.
Archaeology, a term first used in the 1860s, amplified and deepened the work of philology, going beyond the texts and confirming that there was a more distant past for men, pre-history, from before writing. In 1802, the schoolmaster Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853) delivered three papers to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, in which he revealed that he had deciphered the Persepolis cuneiform script, which he achieved mainly by rearranging the groups of wedges (‘like birds’ feet in soft sand’) and putting spaces between groups of letters, and then relating their form to Sanskrit, as a (geographically) nearby language. He guessed that some of the inscriptions were king-lists, and the names of some kings were known.18 The other forms of cuneiform, including the Babylonian, were deciphered some years later. In the 1820s, Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphics, as we saw in Chapter 29, and in 1847 Sir Austen Layard excavated Nineveh and Nimrud, in what is now Iraq. There, he uncovered the wonderful palaces of Assurnasirpal II, king of Assyria (885–859 BC) and Sennacherib (704–681 BC). The great guardians of the gates that were uncovered, some half-bulls, some lions, far larger than life-size, created a sensation in Europe and did much to make archaeology popular. These excavations eventually led to the discovery of a cuneiform tablet on which was written the epic of Gilgamesh, notable for two reasons: that it was much older than either Homer or the Bible, and because several episodes in the narrative – such as a great flood – were reminiscent of the Old Testament.
Each of these discoveries pushed back the age of mankind and began to cast a new light on the scriptures. But, save for the Gilgamesh epic, there was nothing that was radical about the new dating: it did not fundamentally contradict the biblical chronology. All that began to change in 1856 when workers started clearing out a small cave in the side of the Neander valley (Neander Thal in German) through which the river Düssel flows into the Rhine. There, a skull was found, buried beneath more than a metre of mud, together with some other bones. The workmen who found the bones passed them to a local friend who, they felt, was educated enough to make something of them, and he passed them on to Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at Bonn University. Schaaffhausen identified the remains as the top part of a skull, two thigh-bones, parts of a left arm, part of a pelvis, and other smaller remains. In the paper he subsequently wrote on the discovery, Schaaffhausen drew attention to the thickness of the bones, the large size of the scars left by the muscles that were attached to them, the pronounced ridges above the eyes, and a low, narrow forehead. Importantly, Schaaffhausen concluded that the bones were not deformed, either because of where they had been kept over the years, or because of some pathological process. ‘Sufficient grounds exist,’ he wrote, ‘for the assumption that man co-existed with the animals found in the diluvium; and many a barbarous race may, before all historical time, have disappeared, together with animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organisation is improved have continued the genus.’ He concluded that his specimen ‘may probably be assigned to a barbarous, original people, which inhabited the north of Europe before the Germani’.19 This is not quite the same as what we mean today by Neanderthal but it was nonetheless a breakthrough. It didn’t immediately change attitudes to time because it was too controversial, but it formed part of the ‘background radiation’ of ideas in the late nineteenth century, against which the insights and discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, and others, discussed in the Prologue, took hold. One of the first outlines of pre-history, as we now understand it, was given by John Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilisation and The Primitive Condition of Man (1870): ‘The archaeological evidence revealed a steady improvement in technical ability from the earliest crude stone tools to the discovery of bronze and iron. In the absence of fossil evidence for the biological improvement of man, evolutionists seized on the evidence for cultural progress as at least indirect support for their claims. The great development of prehistoric archaeology that took place in the late nineteenth century allowed the construction of a sequence of cultural periods that were supposed to have succeeded one another as the human race progressed. Little thought was given to the possibility that different cultures might exist side by side in the same epoch.’20
By this time, the word ‘science’ had begun to acquire its modern meaning. (The term ‘scientist’ was coined by William Whewell in 1833.) Until the end of the eighteenth century, the phrases ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘natural history’ had been preferred. This was so because natural philosophy sounded softer, more humane and it was also a portmanteau term: many local ‘natural history’ societies ran lectures on, say, literary topics, the humanities, and philosophy. Gradually, as the various disciplines emerged, first in Germany and then elsewhere, and as specialisation proliferated, science began to be the preferred term for these new activities.
It may be difficult for us to understand now but, in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, when the philologists were attacking the very basics of Christianity, the men of science did not for the most part join in. For the most part biologists, chemists and physiologists remained devoutly religious. Linnaeus is a case in point. One of the main figures of the Enlightenment and one of the fathers of modern biology, who also formed part of the deep background to evolution, he was very different from, say, Voltaire. An early break with the Chain of Being had been made by John Ray, a naturalist who realised that every species – thousands of which were discovered in the New World and in Africa – could not all be graded on one meaningful hierarchy, that forms of life varied in many ways. Linnaeus therefore thought that reclassifying the organisms of the world might give him some idea of the divine plan. He didn’t claim to know the mind of God and freely confessed that his system of classification was an artificial one. But he thought it might produce some approximation of the Creator’s divine design. What turned out to be especially crucial was that in his own field, botany, he drew on R. J. Camerarius’ discovery (in 1694) of plant sexuality, which meant that Linnaeus made the reproductive organs the key characteristic on which to base his system.21 (At that time, sexual reproduction was variously believed to be due to spontaneous generation, to ‘germs’, to male and female semen ‘mixing’ in the womb, with these germs or seminal fluids containing ‘memories’ which ensured they ‘knew’ which forms to develop into.) Also, the binomial nomenclature that Linnaeus developed, in Species Plantarum (1753), Genera Plantarum (1754) and Systema Naturae (1758), drew attention to the systematic similarities between species, genera, families and so on. It became obvious from this that the Creator’s plan was not linear and led Buffon, in attacking Linnaeus, to his theory of ‘degeneration’, that for example all two hundred mammalian species known to him had been derived from thirty-eight ‘original’ forms. This was an early idea of evolution.22