vol. xxx, no. 4 april 1926 universal brotherhood - a fact in nature

THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH
THE Berlin Museum has just placed on exhibition a very touching
collection of dolls and other articles from the tomb of a little girl who
died in the reign of Tiberius, about two thousand years ago. There is a
toy table with a tiny silver candelabrum, toy-bricks, and a cosmetic box
for the dolls! Writing materials buried with her show that the child
must have belonged to a cultured family.
But when we go back three thousand years before the Roman
empire, a similar story is told. In Mesopotamia, in the almost pre-
historic kingdom of Kish, Professor Langdon of the Field Museum,
Chicago, last year made marvelous discoveries proving the magnificence,
and, in many ways, the modernness of that civilization which flourished
at least five thousand years ago. His demonstration of the high pitch
to which architecture, and general culture had reached among the Su-
merians has proved a surprise. The splendid royal palace, covering three
acres, contained a great hall 70 ft. long by 30 ft. wide, containing a row
of massive columns. Among the numerous small objects found in the
ruins were copper tools, razors, magnificent inlaid pottery, vanity and
manicure cases, fish-hooks (a quite unexpected find), and children's toys,
including a rattle in the form of a hollow horse in which a loose pebble
was enclosed.
We are too apt to take our ideas of life in former ages from the
ruins of tombs, broken columns, and statues whose stony blank eyeballs
have no speculation in them, but of late a more intelligent appreciation
of the knowledge, abilities, and cultivation of many ancient races is dawn-
ing. TVe have even had to admit that the Old-Stone-Age people, in the
remote age when they hunted the terrible wild animals of early Europe,
had a well-marked culture and a highly advanced art capacity. It is
doubtful whether we should do better than they, if placed under the
same conditions.
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IT was a great, an amazing, revelation to find that ages before
Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a highly cultured and truly civilized
people, the Mayas, occupied large territories in America. Dr. H. J.
Spinden of Harvard, fixes the seventh century A. D. as the climax of the
Maya civilization, but his recent establishment of the fact that the
marvelously ingenious and accurate Calendar, based on the movement
of Venus, was in use in the sixth century B. c., shows that the Mayas
must have been very advanced even at that time in order to have pro-
duced a great mathematician or mathematical school, or that the wonderful
Venus-calendar had descended from some previous and higher culture -
from Atlantis perhaps! Dr. Spinden says: