On the one hand, our an­ces­tors em­ployed speech for the needs of their day-to-day life, and for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with one an­other just as we do; but, on the other hand, we know to­day that they at­trib­uted an incom­para­tively higher value to the word that was thought within and to the word that was spo­ken out­side than we do to­day.

There­fore, the art of poetry was the high skill of our an­ces­tors, and it was so in­ti­mately in­ter­woven with the crea­tion of mu­sic that, from our pre­sent view, we can hardly sepa­rate the one from the other.

Cre­at­ing speech, cre­at­ing words, mas­tering the in­ner and outer proc­ess of ar­ticu­la­tion, self-re­ali­za­tion re­lated to it, self-con­trol, and fur­ther­more, mas­tery over the en­vi­ron­ment, were con­sid­ered high ideals by our an­ces­tors.

There­fore, our an­ces­tors were great crea­tors of lan­guage, and their poetry is the gi­gan­tic tes­ti­mony of this power. Their mas­tery over the proc­ess of self-cog­ni­tion as well as over the prin­ci­ples of form­ing lan­guage is clearly re­flected in the an­cient re­cords – no matter how incom­plete they may be pre­served.

De­spite the ravages of time enough is left of the an­cient re­cords that even to­day we may still retrace the en­tire knowl­edge layed out in this book, pro­vided we know how to read their sym­bols and in­ter­pret their ex­plana­tions.