James Henry Breasted Quotes

There is but little room for doubt that Egypt led the way in the creation of the earliest known group of civilizations which arose on both sides of the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia in the fourth millennium B.C.

Being in an area of the planet where scientists believe mankind started is quite amazing.

In every island of the Aegean Sea are found abundant traces of a vast prehistoric empire.

History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.

We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.

I became interested, through reading the works of some novelist, in Egyptology and made a study of the pyramids. It was just a hobby, but I had a desire to know all I could about everything I could.

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.

By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.

It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions.

Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern cultivation.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

It is a very poor thing, whether for nations or individuals, to advance the history of great deeds done in the past as an excuse for doing poorly in the present; but it is an excellent thing to study the history of the great deeds of the past, and of the great men who did them, with an earnest desire to profit thereby so as to render better service in the present.

I'd always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.

In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.

We must learn, and we are gradually learning, how to write history with the help of archaeology.

I studied archaeology.

In real life, I go to the North Shore with my kids for two weeks each summer, and it's a magical place for us. I feel restored there and connected to the ancient, pre - human world in a way that no place else on Earth does for me.

There seems to be an interest in connecting the history of the past to the present and asking whether things have really changed. Films like 'The Contender' and 'Bulworth' seem quaint compared with Trump!

Military history is essential to understanding any history and, moreover, is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature - for yes, to me, such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it.

I've been obsessed with Romans since I was a child.

The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.

We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.

It is from Shiith Ibn Adam that all humankind today is said to descend. It is also said that Balkh, the 'Mother of All Cities' as the first Arabs called it, a city once greater than Babylon and lovelier than Nineveh, is where Shiith died and was buried.

I can't see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.