Monday, November 12, 2007

A Glimpse of the Past - Introduction


For this month I am going to journey the past of man’s living. Starting from early civilization until the present.

I know the most of us are still students and still studying the most boring subject, HISTORY. Why is there need for study of man’s progress in the past as well as in the present? The history of the past is nothing than the story of man’s struggle for existence. We need to know how our forebears lived in the past and what they did to improve their living conditions. That struggle for existence is continuous to the present. And if it is interesting to know how man lived in the past, it is equally so today; for, knowing how progress has been attained through struggle, we would be able to appreciate the problem that man faces today.

History is just a record of what has done and what man is striving to do today. Man is a social being, and, as such, he lives in association with others in a social group. And history tells us how different human associations rose and fell, together with the causes of their rise and fall.

We know very little of the early human society and how it built its civilization, because of the scanty records left from the past. We learn of the early man only through traditions, relics, and writings handed down to us from the past. Stories transmitted to us by word of mouth; relics in the form of tool, weapons, and utensils, and written records consisting of edicts issued by rulers, treaties, laws, tablets, books, and documents – all these constitutes the bases of our knowledge of the men of the past.

We find that man has passed through different stages of development. The earliest and simplest stage resembled that form of life not much higher than that of the beasts. The earliest man depended on nature for both his food and shelter. Man depended on wild animals and plants for his food. He roamed the fields and forest far and wide for his living, and took refuge in caves for his shelter.

This is just a start of our journey.

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