Quotes from James Henry Breasted

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.

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

Man arose to high moral vision two thousand years before the Hebrew nation was born.

Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.

Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it.

But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.

We of America are especially fitted to visualize and to understand the marvellous transformation of a wilderness into a land of splendid cities.

Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.

the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.

Very often conditions are recorded as observable under thy fingers [...] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.

Speechlessness, however, affirmed in the diagnosis, is carefully based on the facts of the examination, as we see by rendering the statements concerned, just as they stand in examination and diagnosis: If thou examinest a man having a wound in the temple, ...; if thou ask of him concerning his malady and he speak not to thee; ...; thou shouldst say concerning him, 'One having a wound in his temple, ... (and) he is speechless'.

The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain.

the first physician who is known to have counted the pulse, Herophilos of Alexandria (born 300 B.C.), lived in Egypt.

the distinction between nerves and vessels was not demonstrated until the Third Century B.C., when it was made clear by Erasistratos.

The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for shuffle.

Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.

In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.

When the injured humerus is accompanied by a serious rupture of the overlying soft tissue the injury is regarded as fatal.

Here we see the word brain occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms fracture, compound fracture, and compound comminuted fracture, all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.

Not all the gods who appear in these tales and fancies became more than mythological figures. Many of them continued merely in this role, without temple or form of worship; they had but a folklore or finally a theological existence. Others became the great gods of Egypt.