And to put Menes back at 160,000 years ago—­what an amusing idea that will seem!—­But the truth is we must wage war against this mischievous foreshortening of history.  I have no doubt there have been empires going, from time to time, in Egypt, since before Atlantis fell; people have the empire-building instinct, and it is an eminently convenient place for empire-building.  I have no doubt there have been dozens of different Meneses—­that is, founders of Egyptian monarchies,—­with thousands of years between each two.  But I think probably the one that came from India to do it, came about the time when the fifth sub-race rose to supplant the fourth as that section of humanity in which evolution was chiefly interested.

Which last phrase in itself is rank heresy, and smacks of the ‘white man’s burden,’ and all such nonsense as that.  We might learn a lesson here.  Think:  since that time, during how many thousands of years, off and on, has not that old sub-race been the darling of evolution, the seat of the Crest-Wave, and place where all things were doing?  All the Setis, the grand Rameseses and Thothmeses came since then; all the historic might and glory of Egypt.  You never know rightly when to say that the life of a sub-race is ended; the two-hundred-and-ten-century period cannot, I imagine, include it from birth to death; but can only mark the time between the rise of one, and the rise of another.—­ But now to India.

We have no knowledge of the last time when Sanskrit was spoken:  it has always been, in historic or quasi-historic ages, what it is now—­literary language preserved by the high castes.  In the days of the Buddha it had long given place to various vernaculars grown out of it:  Pali, and what are called the Prakrits.—­We have lost memory of what I may call the archetypal languages of Europe:  the common ancestor of the Celtic group, for instance; or that Italian from which Latin and the lost Oscan and Savellian and the rest sprang.  No matter; they remain in the ideal world, and I doubt not in the course of our cyclic evolution we shall return to them, take them up, and pass through them again.  But it seems to me that in the land of Esoteric History, where Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved.  The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation:  they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages did not flow.  By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as we have not done with ours.  As if that which is to be preserved forever, must be preserved in secret; and silence were the only durable casket for truth.