"We were glad to have seen that land which was the mother of civilization --which taught Greece her letters, and through Greece Rome, and through Rome the world, the land which could have humanized and civilized the hapless children of Israel, but allowed her to depart out of her borders little better than savages. We were glad to have seen the land which had an enlightened religion with future eternal rewards and punishment in it , while even Israel's religion contained no promise of a hereafter. We were glad to have seen the land which had glass three thousand years before England had it, and could paint upon it as none of us can paint now; that land which knew three thousand years ago, well nigh all medicine and surgery which science has 'discovered ' lately; which had all those curious surgical instruments which science had 'invented' recently ; which had in high excellence a thousand luxuries and necessities of an advanced civilization which we have gradually contrived and accumulated in modern times and claimed as things that were new under the sun ; that had paper untold centuries before we dreamt of it--and waterfalls before our women thought of them; that had a perfect system of common schools so long before we boasted of our achievements in that direction that it seems forever and forever ago; that so embalmed the dead that flesh was made almost immortal --which we cannot do; that built temples which mock at destroying time and smile grimly upon our lauded prodigies of architecture; that old land that knew all that we know now, perchance, and more; that walked in the broad highway of civilization in the gray dawn of creation, ages and ages before we were born; that left the impress of the exalted, cultivated Mind upon the eternal front of the Sphynx to confound all scoffers who, when all her other proofs have passed away, might seek to persuade the world that imperial Egypt, in the days of her high renown, groped in darkness."
P.505-506, THE INNOCENTS ABROAD by Mark Twain (1869, 1984)
