“History & Chronology of the Myth Making Age” (excerpts vol. 01)

Herein, are some excerpts from a book entitled:

“History & Chronology of the Myth Making Age” (1901)
by: J.F. Hewitt, LATE COMMISSIONER OF CHUTIA NAGPUR.

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The Chota Nagpur Plateau is a plateau in eastern India, which covers much of Jharkhand state as well as adjacent parts of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, West Bengal and Bihar. The Indo-Gangetic plain lies to the north and east of the plateau, and the basin of the Mahanadi river lies to the south. The total area of the Chota Nagpur Plateau is approximately 65,000 square kilometres (25,000 sq mi).

more at original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chota_Nagpur_Plateau

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published by: JAMES PARKER and Co. | 31 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, LONDON AND 27 BROAD STREET, OXFORD.

from Preface page:
The Myth-Making Age, the history of which I have sketched in this book, comprises the whole period from the first dawn of civilization, and the initial efforts made in organizing self-governing communities of human beings, down to the time when the sun entered Taurus at the Vernal Equinox between 4000 and 5000 B.C.

…this closing event of the Myth-Making Age certainly fell between 4000 and 5000 B.C. It was then, as I show in Chapter IX., that it ceased to be a universally observed national custom to record history in the form of historic myths, and that national history began to pass out of the mythic stage into that of annalistic chronicles recording the events of the reigns of kings and the deeds of individual heroes, statesmen, and law-givers. These latter histories were, when formed into national historical records, always prefaced by a summary of the previous mythic narratives which were more often than not manipulated and distorted from their original form by the authors of what may be called the Individualist School of History.

from Preface page: x (10)…
These legends were, down to the days of Niebuhr and the introduction of the study of Comparative Philology and Mythology, generally believed to be based, as averred by those who cited them, on the biographies of individuals. Since this new school of investigators has proved that the heroes of the Mythic Age were not living men like the leading actors in modern histories…

…The real truth is that these myths in their original form are surviving relics of the genuine ancient history of the earliest ages of human culture…

…handing down to their successors a true account of the national progress of the nations…

…ignored and forgotten by the writers of Individualistic History.

from Preface page: xi (11)…
…taught to each rising generation by the national teachers, and the oblivion into which they fell is one of the great misfortunes inflicted on posterity by the Gotho-Celtic invaders from the North, who are now called Aryans. They, whose chroniclers were the family and tribal bards who celebrated the prowess of their foremost soldiers, broke up the organization of the communities of agriculturists, artisans, mariners and traders, who ruled Southern Asia and Europe, and introduced the epoch of military conquests made by nations whose leaders were ambitious warriors, who sought to substitute their own despotic personal rule…

from Preface page: xi (12)…
Consequently the supreme national God of the earliest organizers of society was the Maker and Measurer of time, the God who imparted the knowledge of its sequence to the animals pursued by the hunting races, who gave life, with its accompanying seasonal changes, to the trees and plants, and fitted the earth to receive the seeds sown, and to grow and ripen the crops reaped by the tillers of the soil.

from Preface page: xiii (13)…
…places of the parent-creating power, the soul of the ever-engendering germ of life, the Tao or creating year-path of the Chinese, as conceived in the creed of the theology…. This is the year-god called in Greek mythology, as will be shown in the course of this work, Odusseus, the God of the Path of Time, whose wife was the weaver of its web…

from Preface page: xxxii (32)…
During the first ages when the world was peopled by agricultural, hunting and fishing races, the separate confederacies into which they were divided generally lived at peace with each other, for war, except in the form of petty quarrels about boundaries, was almost unknown.

All people alike lived on the fruit of their exertions, and none of them had any surplus wealth to excite the cupidity of their neighbours. Their only possessions were the soil and its produce, the articles they made from stone, earth, wood, and animals’ bones, and certain minerals and shells they valued as ornaments. As crops were only grown for home consumption, the forcible robbery of the crops of prosperous neighbours only led to the starvation, retaliation or emigration of the victims, and left no future prey for the robbers. Hence this form of predatory warfare never became general among agricultural communities, and as military prowess had not yet become an avenue to personal distinction, the raids for heads and scalps made by savage tribes of the later fighting races had not yet begun to disturb the public peace. Wars of the predatory type first appear among the pastoral races, who frequently, when their flocks and herds were decimated by drought or murrain, replenished their exhausted stocks by seizing on the nearest herds which had not suffered from the same evils.

from Preface page: xxxiii (33)…
It was not till the invasion of the savage sheep and cow-feeding races of the North, who introduced human sacrifices and the three-years cycle-year described in Chapter V., that wars of conquest became frequent. But these were not like the later wars of the races who introduced the present form of history, accompanied by the enslavement of the subdued population. The introduction of these wars is marked by the grouping of the frontier provinces occupied by the de-fend-ing corps of the national army round the central province occupied by the king…

from Preface page: xxxvii (37)…
It was the members of the Southern sections of these trading guild brotherhoods, the worshippers of the Munda sun-bird, as distinguished from the sun Rā or Ragh of the Northern gnomon-stone and the stone-circles, who distributed over the maritime countries they visited in their commercial voyages the sign of the Su-astika, the symbol of their sun-divinity. It represented in its female 卍 and male 卐 forms, the annual circuits of the sun-bird round the heavens, going North as the hen-bird at the winter, and returning South as the sun-cock at the summer solstice, as described in pp. 98, 99. This symbol has been found in American graves in the Mississippi and Tennessee States, in Mexico, India, on the shores of the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic coasts as far North as Norway.