James Henry Breasted quotes

James Henry Breasted was an American historian and archaeologist, renowned for his pioneering work in Egyptology and ancient Near Eastern studies. His research contributed significantly to our understanding of ancient civilizations and their histories. He founded the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, establishing a major center for archaeological and historical research. Here are 15 of his quotes:

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.

James Henry Breasted

It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.

James Henry Breasted

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.

James Henry Breasted

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

James Henry Breasted

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

James Henry Breasted

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.

James Henry Breasted

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.

James Henry Breasted

To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.

James Henry Breasted

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

James Henry Breasted

This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old.

James Henry Breasted

Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.

James Henry Breasted

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

James Henry Breasted

It is important to bear in mind the now commonly accepted fact that in its primitive stages, religion had nothing to do with morals as understood by us today.

James Henry Breasted