The rise of the West: a history of the human community: with a retrospective essay 9780226561417, 9780226561615

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DRAWINGS BY BELA PETHEO

Chi &3 Lond

I seek to understand, and if I can To justify the ways of man to man.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS CONSTITUTING THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

1933-1963

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1963, 1991 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved Published 1963. Printed in the United States of America

10 09 08'07 06 05 04 03 02 OF 45678 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

NeNeill, William Hardy, 1917The rise of the West : a history of the human community ; with a retrospective

essay | by William H. McNeill ; drawing by Béla Petheo.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-56141-0

1. Civilization— History. 2. Civilization, Western. 1. Title. CB69.M34 1990

909 —dt20 QI-24224 CIP

“The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years” first appeared in the Journal of

World History 1 (1990): 1-21; © 1990 by University of Hawaii Press.

© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

List of Illustrations xl

Preface XXX]

“The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years” XV PART I THE ERA OF MIDDLE EASTERN DOMINANCE TO 500 B.C.

I. IN THE BEGINNING 3 Il. THe BREAKTHROUGH To CIVILIZATION IN MESOPOTAMIA 29

III. THe DirFusion or CivivizaATION: First PHASE 64

A. INTRODUCTION 64

TO 1700 B.C. 69 1. Ancient Egypt 69

B. THE CIVILIZATIONS OF THE NILE AND INDUS VALLEYS

2. The Indus Civilization 84 RAIN-WATERED LANDS 89

C. THE TRANSPLANTATION OF CIVILIZATION TO

1. Introductory 89 2. Asia Minor 93

3. Crete 94

D. THE IMPACT OF CIVILIZATION ON THE OUTER FRINGES

OF THE AGRICULTURAL WORLD 98

1. Megalithic Protocivilization 98

2. High Barbarism of the Eurasian Steppe 102 IV. Tue RIsE oF a COSMOPOLITAN CIVILIZATION IN THE

Mupp.e East, 1700-500 B.c. 110

A. INTRODUCTION 110

B. MILITARY-POLITICAL CHANGES 116 Vv

v1 Contents C. ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEMS 122

D. SOCIAL STRUCTURE 129

1. Babylonia 135 2. Egypt 138

E. CULTURAL CONSERVATION AND ADVANCE 135

3. The Intermediate Regions 144

4. Zoroastrianism and Judaism 152 V. THE FORMULATION OF PERIPHERAL CIVILIZATIONS IN INDIA,

GREECE, AND CHINA, 1700-500 B.c. 167

A. INTRODUCTION 167

B. THE FORMULATION OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION 170 C. THE FORMULATION OF GREEK CIVILIZATION 188

Art 208

and Social Development 189 2.1. Political Cultural Growth 206 Religion 206

Literature 211 Philosophy 211

D. THE BEGINNINGS OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION TO 500 B.C. 217

E. CHANGES IN THE BARBARIAN WORLD TO 500 B.C. 232

PART II EURASIAN CULTURAL BALANCE 500 B.C.-1500 A.D.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION 249 VI. THE ExpANSION OF HELLENISM, 500-146 B.c. 254

1. Introduction 255 2. Political Evolution 258

A. THE FLOWERING OF GREEK CULTURE, 500-336 B.C. 255

Tragedy 261 Philosophy 262

3. The Perfecting of Greek Cultural Forms 261

History and Rhetoric 267 Monumental Art 269

Summary 270

B. HELLENIC EXPANSION INTO BARBARIAN EUROPE 272 C. THE HELLENIZATION OF THE ORIENT, 500-146 B.C. 277

1. Military andCultural Political 286 277 2. Social and

Contents Vil VII. CrosurE oF THE EurRASIAN EcuMENE, 500 B.c.-200 A.p. 295

A. INTRODUCTION 295

1. India 298 2. China 304

B. EXPANSION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE NON-HFLLENIC

CIVILIZATIONS OF EURASIA, 500-100 B.C. 298

336-146 B.C. 312

3. The Far West: Rome and Western Europe,

Art 329 Religion 336

C. THF EURASIAN ECUMENF, 100 B.C.—200 A.D. 316

I. Political and Social Developments 316 2. Cultural Growth and Interchange 329 3. Other Aspects of the High Cultural Tradition

of Eurasia, 100 B.C.-200 A.D. 353

VIII. BarBARIAN ONSLAUGHT AND CIVILIZED RESPONSF, 200-600 A.D. 361

A. INTRODUCTION 361 B. THE FLOWERING OF INDIAN CULTURE 363

1. Political and Social Framework 363

2. Cultural Achievements 368

Language 368 Literature 369 Religion and Philosophy 372

Science 373 Art 374

Other Aspects of Indian Culture 376

C. THE EXPANSION OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION 377

1. Southeast Asia 377 2. Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, and Central Asia 379

3. China 382 D. THE NORTHERN FRONTIER: BARBARIAN BREAKTHROUGH AND

CIVILIZED REACTION 385 1. The Great Migrations 386

2. Consequences of the Migrations 390

Civilizing the Barbarians 391 Modification of Civilized Military and Political

Institutions in Western Eurasia 393

Cultural Changes in Persia and Rome 399

FE. THE OUTER FRINGES 412

Vill Contents IX. THE RESURGENCE OF THE Mipp.Le East, 600-1000 a.p. 417

A. INTRODUCTION 417 B. THE MOSLEM WORLD 420 C. CHRISTENDOM 441

D. INDIA 456

E. CHINA AND THE FAR EAST 462

F. THE OUTER FRINGES 480

X. STEPPF CONQUERORS AND THE EuROoPEAN Far West, 1000-1500 a.p. 484

A. INTRODUCTION 484 B. INFILTRATION AND CONQUEST FROM THE STEPPE 486 C. ISLAMIC REACTION TO THF PRESSURES FROM THE STEPPE 495

1. Political and Social 495 2. Cultural 501

2. India 509

D. INDIANS, CHRISTIANS, AND JEWS UNDER MOSLEM RULE 508

1. The Moslem Heartlands 508 3. Orthodox Christendom 512

E. THE FAR EAST 524 2. China’s Outliers 535 F. THE FAR WEST 538

1. China 524

1. Introductory 538 2. The Struggle for Political Order 540

3. The Expansion of Western Europe 545 4. Cultural Growth: The High Middle Ages 547 5. Unique Characteristics of West

European Civilization 558

G. THE FRINGES OF THE ECUMENE 559 PART III THE ERA OF WESTERN DOMINANCE, 1500 A.D. TO THE PRESENT

GENERAL INTRODUCTION 565 XI. THe Far WEst’s CHALLENGE TO THE Wor Lp, 1500-1700 a.p. 569

CONSEQUENCES 569

A. THE GREAT EUROPEAN EXPLORATIONS AND THEIR WORLD-WIDE

Contents ix 1. Politics 578 B. THE TRANSMUTATION OF EUROPE, 1500-1650 A.D, 578

2. Economics 583 3. Culture 585

1. The Americas 599 2. Russia 604

C, EUROPE’S OUTLIERS: THE AMERICAS AND RUSSIA, 1500-1650 A.D. 599

D. THE CHANGING BALANCE OF THE ECUMENE, 1500-1700 A.D. 611

1. The Moslem World 611

Islam 617 for Islam 618 World 633 3. China The Far East 640 640 Japan 645 The Iberian Crusade and Moslem Response 613 The Rise of Russia and Its Consequences for The Sunni-Shi’a Conflict and Its Consequences

2. The Subject Religious Communities in the Moslem

Hindu India and Buddhist Southeast Asia 633

Christians under Moslem Rule 637

Jews in Moslem Lands 639

4, Africa 650 E. CONCLUSION 652 Tibet, Mongolia, and the Central Asian Steppe 649

XII. THe Totrertnc Wor.tp BaLance, 1700-1850 a.p. 653

A. INTRODUCTION 653 B. THE OLD REGIMF OF EUROPE, 1650-1789 A.D. 654

1. European Expansion to New Ground 656 Exploration, Trade, and National Rivalries 656 Plantations and the Conscious Transformation

of Tropical and Subtropical Economies 659

The Spread of European Settlement 661 2. Acculturation in the Older Outliers of Europe: 664 America and Russia

Spanish America 665

Russia 670 Brazil and North America 667

x Contents 3. The Compromises of the Old Regime in the

European Heartlands 674 Political and Social Compromises 675

Intellectual Compromises 683 Compromises in the Arts 687 Elements of Instability in the Old Regime 690

C. MOSLEM CATALEPSY, 1700-1850 A.D. 693 1. Ottoman Reform and Christian Rebellion 695

2. Iran and Turkestan 700 3. Disintegration of the Mogul Empire in India 702

4, Islam in Africa and Southeast Asia 704 D. HINDU AND BUDDHIST ASIA, 1700-1850 A.D. 705

1. China 710 2. Japan 718

E. CREEPING CRISIS IN THE FAR EAST, 1700-1850 A.D. 710

F. THE RETREAT OF BARBARISM, 1700-1850 A.D. 722 XIII. THe Risk or tHE West: CosMOPOLITANISM ON A GLOBAL

SCALE, 1850-1950 aA.p. 726 A. INTRODUCTORY 726 B. THE WESTERN EXPLOSION, 1789-1917 A.D. 730

1. Territorial Expansion 730

2. The Industrialism 731 First or British Phase 732 The Second or German and American Phase 737

3. The Democratic Revolution 744

4. Artistic and Intellectual Aspects 752 C. THE NON-WESTERN WORLD, 1850-1950 A.D. 762 1. The Changing Shape and Style of the Ecumene 764

2. The Moslem World 772

3. Hindu India781 776 4, China 5. Japan 786 6. Other Parts of the World 792

CoNCLUSION 794 A. SCALE OF POLITICS 794

INDEX 809 B. SCOPE OF POLITICS 795

C. DILEMMAS OF POWER 800

[lustrations Maps

Agricultural Origins 27 Ancient Mesopotamia 42

Ancient Egypt | 70 The Seaways and Steppes, 3000-300 B.C. 106 The Middle East about 1700 B.C. 111 Ancient India 173 Ancient Greece 195

Ancient China, 1500-221 B.C. 220 Conditions of Primitive Migrations 242 The First Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene 317

The Diffusion of Hellenism 334

The Diffusion of World Religions 385 The Spread of Armored Cavalry 398

The Rise of Islam to 750 A.D. 425 Classical and Medieval Trade Patterns to 1000 A.D. 450

The Mongol Explosion to 1300 A.D. 49]

Moslem vs, kuropean Expansion, 1000-1700 A.D. 577

The Expansion of Europe, 1500-1850 A.D. 657

CuHarTs

The Circle of the Year 21 Shifts of Economic Roles between the Sexes 26 The Evolution of Mesopotamian Society 44

Hammurabrs Great Society 57 The Evolution of Egyptian Society 75 Growth of Civilization on Rain-watered Land 96 Xt

X11 Illustrations From Bronze to Iron 118

Local Economic Base Level of the Ancient Orient 132

The Development of Monotheism 164 Relations between Old World Civilizations 169 Indian Society and World Views 184 Evolution of Greek Society Greek vs. Oriental World Views204 213

The Hellenistic Age 284 Changes in the Hellenic World View 293 Chinese World Views 312 China and the Steppe 350 319 The World Religions

Evolution of Chinese Society, 1500 B.C.—220 A.D. 229

Islam 423

The Structure of Indian Society 366

Sassanian Persia 404

The Abbasid India and IslamCompromise to 1000 A.D. 433 461 The Structure of T’ang Society 467

The Structure of the Ottoman Empire 500

Byzantium in Decline 515 The Shifting Balance of Chinese Society 528

The European Far West in the Middle Ages 542

Politics of Western Christendom 544

The Christian World View 550

Demographic Consequences of Changing Patterns of Communication 572

European Culture, 1000-1700 A.D. 594 Family Patterns and Race Mixture 602

Sunni-Shva Split within Islam 620

The Revival of Hinduism 636 China under the Manchus 642

Japan, 1500-1650 A.D. 648 Alternatives of the Frontier 662 Russia under Peter the Great 670

The Old Regime in Theory and Practice 677 Intellectual Challenges to the Old Regime 688

Disruption of the Ottoman Empire 698

Indian World View, 1850 709 The Rise of the West 727 The Industrial Revolution 743

Ambiguities of the French Revolution 745

The Shrinking World 766

Illustrations X11 Democracy and Communism 77)

Gandhi's Message 780

Political Realignments, 1918-50 796

Government and Society since 1917 798 Theory and Practice of Modern Dictatorship 802

Paleolithic Hand Ax 7 Paleolithic Cave Painting 9

PLATES

Neolithic Painted Pot 17 Mesopotamian Priests or Deities 35

Cylinder Seal Impression 37 Alabaster Vase 39 Naram Sin as God and Conqueror 49

The Inquiring Goat 59 Stone Knife from Egypt 67 Sargon of Akkad and Hammurabi of Babylon 55

Rouge Palette of King Narmer-Menes 73

Khafre, Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt 77

Indus Statuettes 87 Hittite Bas-Relief 95

Seal Impressions from the Indus Civilization 83

The Sea and the Court of Minos 99

Three EuropeaninMegaliths 101 The Chariot Action 115 The Two Faces of Assyria 121 What Is Truth? 141

The Burden of Egypt 143 Kings of Men and Beasts 149 The Pillars Walls of ofPersepolis Babylon 151 The 153

The Phalanx 197

The Gateway to Mycenae 191] The Greek Apprenticeship 207 The Formulation of the Greek Style 209 The Emergence of the Chinese Art Style 221 Ancient Chinese Bronzes 225

The Cavalry Revolution 235 Chinese and Amerindian Art 241 Two Aspects of Classical Greece 271

The Expansion of Hellenism 278

The Hellenistic Age 291

XIV [llustrations Ashoka’s India 303 Hellenism’s High Tide, East and West 326

Gandharan and Chinese Sculptural Styles 331

The Great Stupa at Sanchi 333 Scythian and Chinese Animal Styles 335

The Art of Gupta India395 375 Sassanian Warriors A Roman Emperor of the Fourth (?) Century A.D. 407 The Empress Theodora 411 An Interior View of Hagia Sophia 413

An Early Mosque 427 An Irish Gospel 455

Hindu Temples 459 A Chinese Bodhisattva 471 The Pomp and Elegance of Imperial China 475 Dome of a Cairo Mosque 507 Dancing Shiva 513 Byzantine Warriors 517

Chinese Sages 532 The Holy Catholic Church 549 Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ 523

A Flemish Burgher 557 Portuguese in Japan 575 Renaissance and Reformation 586 New Heights and Depths 596 Two Views of the Cathedral of St. Basil, Moscow 609

Islam in the Seventeenth Century 624 A Persian Mosque and Madrasa 627 A Persian Carpet and an Indian Window 630

Upper and Lower Classes of the Old Regime 680

An Eighteenth-Century Aristocrat 715

Three Japanese Paintings 723 Europe’s New Regime 752 Angry Uncertainty of the Twentieth Century 753

Primordial Woman 763 The End and the Beginning 805

h® [he Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years

Historians approach their subject from the moving platform of their own times, with the result that the past changes shape continually. Anyone who lives to re-read his own work long afterward must therefore expect to recognize signs

and hallmarks of the inevitable displacement that time brings to historical understanding. This truism was brought home to me by a seminar devoted to my magnum opus, The Rise of the West, at Williams College, where I was visiting professor in 1988. It was the first time I had read the book in twenty-five years,

and the experience of revisiting an old friend—and incubus'—was both humbling and elevating. The book was a sudden, surprising success when it came out in 1963. Lavish praise from Hugh Trevor-Roper in the New York Times Book Review and the onset of the Christmas season briefly lifted it to the best-seller list; the book has remained in print ever since. A cheap paperback ($1.25 for 828 pages!) sold out of an initial printing within a year, and cumulative sales of the full-sized book amount by now to more than 75,000. In retrospect it seems obvious that The Rise of the West should be seen as

an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States. Its scope and conception is a form of intellectual imperialism, for it takes on the world as a whole, and it tries to understand global history on the basis of the con‘While writing The Rise of the West 1 walked home past an elm tree that had lost a large limb in a storm and was slowly covering its wound with an enormous weal of new growth. I used to wonder whether my book would be done before or after the elm tree healed itself. In fact, I got my manuscript to the printer a year before the tree died of Dutch elm disease, with its self-seal still incomplete, so I was never able to carry the completed book past the healed-over tree.

XU

XUI The Rise of the West after 25 Years cept of cultural diffusion developed among American anthropologists in the 1930's. In particular, The Rise of the West is built on the notion that the principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills. A corollary of this proposition is that cen-

ters of high skill (1.e., civilizations) tend to upset their neighbors by exposing them to attractive novelties. Less-skilled peoples round about are then impelled

to try to make those novelties their own so as to attain for themselves the wealth, power, truth, and beauty that civilized skills confer on their possessors. Yet such efforts provoke a painful ambivalence between the drive to imitate and an equally fervent desire to preserve the customs and institutions that distinguish the would-be borrowers from the corruptions and injustices that also inhere in civilized life. A second corollary of the proposition that contact with strangers is the major motor of social change is that contacts among contemporaneous civilizations ought to be of key concern to a world historian, for such contacts can be expected to alter the assortment and expression of high skills each civilization possesses, and thereby to affect the local skill-diffusion pattern described above. Moreover, whenever one civilization, through some apparent superiority of its skills, becomes able to influence everyone with whom it comes in contact, then the grain of world history begins to run in a single direction, so to speak; and so by observing the reception of new skills and ideas in distant parts a historian can give shape and meaning to the confusion of detail that otherwise makes world history—quite literally—inconceivable.

In the years 1954 to 1963, when the book was being written, the United States was, of course, passing through the apex of its postwar capacity to influence others thanks to its superior skills and wealth. It follows that my vision of the world’s past can be dismissed as being no more than a rationalization of American hegemony, retrojecting the situation of post-World War II decades upon the whole of the world’s past by claiming that analogous patterns of cultural dominance and diffusion had existed always. (Of course the obvious rebuttal is to point out that the post— World War II era was part and parcel of world history, and conformed to precedent in a way Americans were not aware of at the time.) No historian can deny that his views of the past reflect experiences of his own time, interacting with a tradition of learning that, in turn, bears all the marks of the times and places in which it grew. But I can at least say this: when I was

writing the book I was entirely unaware of the way in which my method of making sense of world history conformed to the temporary world experience of the United States. In retrospect, it seems the warmth with which the book was received in the early 1960’s did arise in large part from this congruence. But if so neither I nor the reviewers noticed it at the time. The hand-in-glove fit between my review of the whole of human history and the temporary world role played by the United States therefore operated, if it operated at all, entirely at a subconscious level for all concerned. In view of the way historiography has moved in the intervening twenty-five

The Rise of the West after 25 Years XVII years, a second reproach against my way of viewing the past seems even more obvious. The Rise of the West tends to march with big battalions, looking at history from the point of view of the winners—that is, of the skilled and privileged managers of society—and shows scant concern for the sufferings of the victims of historical change. ‘This no doubt reflects personal idiosyncracies— family, ethnic, class, and other identities and experiences—that led me to value the fruits of humankind’s accumulated capacity to control the natural and social environment and shape it to our wishes. Profiting from such skills, as everyone constantly does, including the poorest populations alive today, we must, I think, admire those who pioneered the enterprise and treat the human adventure on earth as an amazing success story, despite all the suffering entailed. The obvious ideal is a judicious balance in assessing the gains and losses inherent in each new human attainment. I did of course try to strike such a balance, but what seemed like a just balance to me is liable to strike others as a shabby sort of apologetics for those at the top (adult males) who ran things in each of the world’s great civilizations.

These general considerations scarcely came up in the Williams seminar. Instead, as I struggled through a chapter a week, variations in the quality of different chapters became rather painfully obvious. The low point came with chapter

4, entitled “The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Civilization in the Middle East, 1700-500 B.c.” After a brief introduction, this chapter undertakes to describe the military-political changes, administrative systems, social structure, and cultural conservation and advance across the twelve centuries and amongst the

dozens of peoples and scores of states concerned. The result is labored and fragmented, more confusing than illuminating, even for a persevering, patient reader. Chapter 4 made the fundamental mistake of abandoning a chronological fora topical ordering of the material at the wrong place. It lumped together two eras that ought to have been considered seriatim: the bronze age of chariot warriors and aristocratic rule on the one hand, and the iron age of democratized warriors and culture on the other. There is no excuse for this clumsiness. New data has not much altered what is knowable since I wrote. Nor has any sort of contemporary experience since 1963 altered sensibilities toward the emergent cosmopolitanism of the ancient Middle East. It is a plain case of defective organization, cutting against the grain of things and thereby disguising a simpler, truer, and

more adequate way of understanding the history in question. Moreover, the notion of successive bronze and iron ages was completely familiar in the existing literature; and in retrospect, [ cannot imagine why I did not use that ordering to

put the chapter together. Another deficiency helped to spoil the architectonic of this chapter—a deficiency which, I shall argue, was also apparent in the later parts of the book. For The Rise of the West assumes that separate civilizations form real and important human groupings and that their interactions constitute the main theme of world history. But in this chapter I had to deal with the merging together of what had

once been separate civilizations into a new cosmopolitanism that extended

XVIII The Rise of the West after 25 Years throughout the Middle East without erasing local differences. Those differences were very considerable, for after 2500 B.c., a cluster of interstitial and satellite societies, each possessing all the hallmarks of civilization, had arisen on the rainwatered lands around and between the flood plains of Egypt and Mesopotamia. As a result, as long as I thought mainly in terms of separate civilizations, the historical stage became excessively crowded. Not surprisingly, the fragmented, choppy character of this chapter arose from an effort to say something about how each culturally distinct people expressed or exemplified each of the themes I had chosen to emphasize. Firmer focus on the cosmopolitan process itself was called for. I needed to think more carefully about the new sorts of activities that were binding the peoples of the Middle East together, and I should have highlighted these more clearly. But that required new assumptions and concepts that I lacked at the time and have only haltingly explored subsequently. A second, less embarrassing but more important failure occurred in chapter 10, which treats world affairs between a.D. 1000 and 1500. In this case, new scholarship since 1963 has pointed the way to a firmer and better understanding of what was going on in the Eurasian world, and it is therefore obvious why I missed the centrality of China and Chinese civilization in these centuries. Instead I concentrated on the “Steppe Conquerors and the European Far West,” to quote the title of the chapter. My mistake is therefore entirely forgivable. All the same, it is clear in retrospect how emphasis on steppe conquerors and the rise of medieval Europe reflected the bias of my education. For the chapter looks at Eurasia from a naively Western viewpoint. Turks and Mongols come galloping

over the horizon from the East—suddenly, and, so to speak, mysteriously, though I did note the system of bureaucratic management that made Genghis Khan’s armies so formidable. Nonetheless, I failed to connect the remarkable upsurge of nomad power with the fact that the new bureaucratic methods of military administration that the Mongols employed were a straightforward borrowing from Chinese practice. As a result, I overlooked the ultimate disturber of world balances in the era itself: that is, an efflorescence of Chinese civilization that raised China’s culture, wealth, and power to a new level, far outstripping all the rest of the world for a period of four to five centuries.

Moreover, I gave undue attention to Latin Christendom, being eager to search out seeds and portents of Europe’s rise to world leadership after 1500. That is legitimate enough, but it would be better located as a preface to the next chapter. The scholarship in the 1950’s ought to have allowed me to see that, despite its vigorous new growth, western European civilization remained marginal to the ecumene and should have been given the same emphasis that I gave to the maturation of Japanese civilization in those same centuries. Instead, I treated Turkish and Mongol conquests and the rise of medieval Europe as of coordinate importance for world affairs. I even relegated China to second place among the civilized victims of nomad assault, treating the transformation of the Moslim world first and at greater length, largely because I knew more about it. In retrospect it is fascinating to see how some of the material for a proper appreciation of Chinese primacy between 4.D. 1000 and 1500 was available to me before 1963. In particular, I used Stefan Balazs’s articles on the economic

The Rise of the West after 25 Years XIX transformation of China in ‘T’ang times,’ and I had seen the first volumes of Joseph Needham’s monumental study of Science and Civilization in China as well.

But until Robert Hartwell showed the scale of ferrous metallurgy and the sophistication of economic management under the Sung,’ until Yoshinobu Shiba

provided a portrait of the Sung commercial economy as a whole,’ and until Mark Elvin set forth a bold and speculative interpretation of the entire Chinese past,’ the meaning of China’s transformation about the year a.D. 1000 quite escaped me. My excuse is that the historiography available a generation ago still reflected the traditional valuations of China’s past, so that a regime unable to control the northernmost provinces of historic China was, by definition, inferior to those

ages when China was intact and united under a properly virtuous emperor. Since the Sung dynasty (A.D. g60— 1279) never controlled the northern barbarians and lost China’s northernmost provinces to them almost from the start, it followed that their era was not one of China’s great periods, even though it had long been recognized that art and literature bloomed under the Sung as never before. But that did not compensate for political failure; and no one before Jacques Gernet® seems to have noticed how the ill-success that attended the Sung armies on the steppe frontier arose from the fact that Chinese skills were spreading beyond the country’s traditional borders, upsetting previous balances between China and its nomad neighbors and, as Genghis Khan’s career soon showed, throughout most of Eurasia as well. In view of the way The Rise of the West is put together, my failure to understand China’s primacy between a.p. 1000 and 1500 is particularly regrettable inasmuch as the book would have attained an elegant simplicity of structure if I had done so. As matters stand, the middle part of the book, entitled “Eurasian Cultural Balance, 500 B.c.—1500 A.D.,” is built around the idea that Mediterranean Hellenism (500 B.c.—A.D. 200), India (A.D. 200-600), and a reintegrated Middle East under the Moslims (a.p. 600— 1000) entered upon successive periods of cultural flowering that assured each of them a period of primacy among the peoples of the old world. To follow that simple structuring of the past with a Chinese Far Eastern (1000-1500) and a European Far Western (1500-2000 ?) efflorescence and era of ecumenical primacy has a tidiness and precision that the facts seem to sustain,’ but my ignorance (and residual Eurocentrism) hid this from me in 1963. *Stefan Balazs, “Beitrage zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der T’ang Zeit,” Mitteilugen des Seminars fur orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin, XXXIV: 21~25; XXXV (1932): 27-73.

*Robert Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and Structures of Enterprise in the Development of Eleventh Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of Economic History, XXVI (1966): 29-58. ° ‘Yoshinobu Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung China (Ann Arbor, 1970). ‘Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973). ‘Jacques Gernet, Le Monde Chinois (Paris, 1972).

‘Gunpowder, printing, and the compass, three critical factors in Europe’s ascension to world leadership after 1500, were Chinese inventions, and reached the Far West during the time when the political unification of northern Eurasia by the Mongols made movement back and forth across the

xx The Rise of the West after 25 Years This, indeed, is the central failure of the book. Of course there are many other passages where scholarship since 1963 makes the text obsolete, but these are almost always matters of detail. An exception is Africa, where the scholarship

of the past twenty-five years has revealed a far more complex interplay of peoples and cultures than was accessible when I wrote The Rise of the West. Yet sub-Saharan Africa never became the seat of a major civilization, and the continent therefore remained peripheral to the rest of the world, down to and including our own age. Hence while the brief passages touching on African history are now antiquated and inadequate, the defect does not distort the overall picture of the past as much as the failure in chapter 10 to recognize China’s era of world leadership.

In general, the assumption that reaction to contacts with strangers was the major motor of historical change still seems good to me, and the choices of what to emphasize, which derived from that assumption, still strike me as sound, with the exception of the failure to give China its due between 1000 and 1500. In that sense, therefore, revisiting The Rise of the West was an elevating, even exhilarating, experience. For all its defects, it is still a good book, and deserves to count

as an important way station in the development of a more genuinely global historiography.

Yet on another level, it seems to me now that the book is flawed simply because it assumes that discernibly separate civilizations were the autonomous social entities whose interactions defined history on a global scale. Just what the term “civilization” really means is left fuzzy, though I followed V. Gordon Childe® and others in equating civilization with a society in which occupational specialization allowed the emergence of high skills—administrative, military,

artisanal, literary, and artistic. That may be adequate to distinguish early civilizations from neolithic village societies, but it does not say much about geographical and social boundaries in subsequent eras when a multiplicity of civilizations arose, and when at least part-time occupational specialization extended very widely among peoples supplying raw materials to distant civilized consumers, yet who can scarcely be described as civilized in their own right.

This raises the question of who really belongs to a civilization. Newborn infants clearly do not earn membership until they learn their cultural roles. But what about the poor and unskilled, whose roles are limited at best? And what about those living at a distance, subjected, perhaps, to a superior force—at least occasionally—but otherwise alien? And how do all the different skills and habits and outlooks of sharers in a civilization fit together into a more or less coherent whole? I fell back on the expression “style of life” in affirming the reality of that cohesion. But this metaphor, borrowed from art history, is only a metaphor and is all but useless in actual practice, since stylistic affinities are not nearly as easy whole continent unusually safe, frequent, and easy. Joseph Needham, Sczence and Crvilization in China: The Gunpowder Epic (Cambridge, 1967), disposes of lingering notions of Europe’s equality with China in developing early gunpowder technologies and traces their westward diffusion with hew precision.

°V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth, 1943). :

The Rise of the West atter 25 Years XX1 to observe when one is comparing human habits and states of mind as when one is looking at works of art or other material objects. Perhaps a historian is not required to face these questions explicitly. If one insists on precise definitions of terms, discourse at once degenerates into epistemological debate, and is never likely to emerge from that labyrinth. Suffice it to say, therefore, that civilizations do seem real to me, and have in fact united many millions of human beings across millions of square miles and many centuries in significant ways. But they are not the only actors on a world historical scale; this I failed to emphasize sufficiently in The Rise of the West. Let me try to explain more fully my current view. A shared literary canon, and expectations about human behavior framed by

that canon, are probably central to what we mean by a civilization. But it is unheard of for all to have access to such a canon. An upper class, educated to revere a body of literature that sets forth rules about how human beings should behave, is what in practice therefore delimits a civilization. The less privileged share such ideas in varying degrees, and no one fully embodies them—not even the holiest moral athlete. Conventional expectations allow for both individual and group shortcomings, while the lower classes and peripheral members of the society adjust and adapt their own, more local, moral codes and customary practices to make room for the ways of the upper class—deferring and obeying where they must, reserving zones of privacy and difference where they can. But to keep a civilization together, there must also be a continual circulation of news and nuances of meaning, moving from city to city, region to region, and among diverse social classes and ethnic groups that make up the body social. Continual circulation of such messages is required to maintain sufficient cohesion across space and time to count as a single whole—a single civilization. Clearly there are degrees of cohesion, and shared characteristics shade off as one moves toward the frontier. Drawing precise boundaries on a map is nearly always arbitrary, but cultural slopes do exist, and when they become precipitous, the geographical limit to a given style of life may, indeed, become apparent enough for all practical purposes. Obviously, modes of transport and communication are crucial for the circulation of messages within an established civilization; as they change, the boundaries and reach of the civilization will alter. This assumes a new dimension when, with the improvement of communication, diverse civilizations begin to impinge on one another more and more often and in increasingly urgent ways, since under these circumstances the autonomy and independence of the separate civilizations begin to shrink, and a new cosmopolitan entity—what Wallerstein calls a world system’—may start to take over as the key factor in further historical development. This process is what I handled so clumsily in chapter 4 and omitted almost entirely when treating the millennia of the Christian era until after 1850. Thus, in addition to the problems in chapter 4, the central methodological weakness of my book is that while it emphasizes interaction across civilizational "Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York, 1974-1988).

XX The Rise of the West after 25 Years boundaries, it pays inadequate attention to the emergence of the ecumenical world system within which we live today. Instead of organizing the book solely around the notion of a series of efflorescences, first in one, then in another separate civilization, I should have made room for the ecumenical process. How this might be done remains to be seen. Somehow an appreciation of the autonomy of separate civilizations (and of all the other less massive and less skilled cultures of the earth) across the past two thousand years needs to be combined with the portrait of an emerging world system, connecting greater and greater numbers of persons across civilized boundaries. To make this a feasible enterprise, one needs a clear and distinct idea of the

emergent world system as manifested first in the ancient Middle East and a second time in the modern world, and then one must reflect on how these two systems intersected with the more local civilizational and cultural landscapes they impinged upon. It does not follow that the two world systems were the same. Clearly, insofar as each depended on an expanding network of transport and communications, the technical base differed very markedly. And since each world system somehow arose out of political, military, and economic behavior, it is worth remembering that the institutional heritage of the second and first millennia B.c. were very different from those of the first and second millennia A.D.

If one thinks of the world since about 1870, when instantaneous communications and mechanically powered transport started to manifest their influence on

a global basis, it is obvious that the modern world system rests on economic complementarities and exchanges in the first place, and secondarily on institutional arrangements—military-political primarily—and on flows of ideas, skills, and tastes that follow in the wake of changed economic and political behavior.

One may, perhaps, assume that a similar primacy for economic exchanges existed also in earlier times all the way back to the earliest beginnings of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, even though, for a long time, such exchanges were

marginal in the sense of being confined to strategic and luxury items. It could scarcely be otherwise, since as long as transport was sporadic and subject to frequent interruptions, people could not safely depend on goods from afar to supply daily needs. Nonetheless, cities constituted something of an exception to this generalization. All cities, of course, had to import food and often found it hard to find sufficient grain in the immediate hinterland. Long before a market system could be relied on to supply cities from afar, a few great capital cities depended on food coming from relatively great distances in the economically unrequited form of tribute and taxes. Thus, the Chinese canal system was initially used to

concentrate food and other commodities to support the court, the imperial army, and the hangers-on who clustered in the capital. Similarly, imperial Rome

subsidized its proletarians with tribute grain from Egypt and north Africa; Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam, also depended on grain subsidies from Egypt in the early days of the caliphate, and many other imperial and religious centers flourished and grew great on the strength of taxes and tribute in the form of food supplies coming from distant places.

The Rise of the West after 25 Years XX111 It is no exaggeration to say that the cultural splendor and military formidability of early civilizations depended on the concentration of food and other commodities at court and temple centers by dint of exercise of direct command. The very notion of separate, autonomous civilizations registers this early division of labor, whereby the many toiled in the fields while a priviliged few consumed the yield of rents and taxes and experimented with all the arts of civilization. Yet from the start, this simple polarity between taxpayers and tax consumers was complicated by a few outsiders, exempt from the burden of ordinary rents and taxes, who nonetheless had an important role to play as merchants, that is, as purveyors of desirable rarities that could not be secured by command because they originated beyond the reach of the established authorities. For those who wanted such goods, one possibility was to send armed expeditions in search of what was unavailable at home. Gilgamesh’s visit to the forests of Lebanon offers an early literary example of such an expedition, and Sargon of Akkad’s military campaigns (ca. 2350 B.c.) may have been aimed at capturing supplies of metal and other strategically valuable goods that were unavailable in alluvial Mesopotamia. But the direct exercise of force to collect strategic commodities from places lying beyond the reach of everyday administration and tax collection was a good deal less efficient than relying on exchange. In particular, accumulated stocks of luxury goods produced by specialized artisans for civilized temples and courts could be offered to distant potentates who could organize

local manpower to dig ore, cut timber, or raise grain needed at the civilized center. In this fashion each early civilization created around itself a periphery of trade partners, whose appetite for goods from civilized workshops was as elastic as was civilized appetite for raw materials and other rarities. Even in very early times, such connections ranged across many hundreds of miles. Regular use of animal caravans and of sailing ships for such long-distance trade dates back at

least to the third millennium B.c., as does the establishment of special legal status for the merchants who accompanied the goods, and whose travels necessarily carried them across political and cultural boundaries. As long as each civilization was thus surrounded by a network of suppliers who depended on sailing ships and animal caravans to carry rarities from where they were produced to where they were consumed, the notion of separate, autonomous civilizations provides an adequate model for historical understanding. Techniques and ideas were exchanged along with goods, of course, and from time to time barbarians from the periphery conquered civilized centers, since mistrust between rulers and ruled tended to counteract the superiority of numbers on which civilized peoples could always count. In the ancient Middle East, the resulting interactions among people living in different landscapes, with diverse languages and other outward signs of civilized diversity, led to the emergence of a cosmopolitan world system between 1700 and soo B.c. Unlike the world system of recent centuries, in the ancient Middle East the primacy of command was preserved within ever-widening boundaries of a succession of great empires—Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian. But the tax- and tribute-collecting bureaucracies that sustained these empires worked in symbiosis with caravan and shipping networks that antedated

XXIV The Rise of the West after 25 Years the political empires and whose zones of activity always extended beyond even the most far-flung political frontiers. Thus merchants flourished and sometimes

even grew great in the cracks and crannies left by the rent and tax systems, supplying wants, old and new, and making a profit on market sales. The result could be counted as a territorially enlarged version of the sort of separate civilization from which the evolution started. That is what I did in The Rise of the West. Yet that way of thinking overlooks the continued diversity of religions, languages, and moral systems that long survived the rise of new empires, and it minimizes the economic role of markets and of long-distance trade in holding the ancient Middle East together while connecting it with an ever-

widening and politically independent periphery. Market relations, insofar as they arose from uncoerced human choices, differed in a simple but important fashion from the older way of concentrating resources by rent and tax collection. People are more likely to work efficiently when they do so willingly. As a result, when they can buy and sell things at their own discretion, and satisfy at least some of their wants by doing so, the result is likely to be a general increase in wealth. This, it seems to me, was beginning to be discovered in the second millennium B.c. and became normal and expected in course of the next millennium, at least in the principal theater for this dawning of a commercially based world system, that is, in the increasingly cosmopolitan Middle East. This is all adumbrated in The Rise of the West but not pursued. For example, I used the phrase “the great society” to refer to the way trade and markets entered into symbiosis with taxes and rents in Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia; but this idea was not used to organize the history of subsequent centuries, and simply disappeared from the rest of the book. Being too much preoccupied by the notion of

civilization, I bungled by not giving the initial emergence of a trans-civilizational process the sustained emphasis it deserved. There is a sense, indeed, in which the rise of civilizations in the Aegean (later Mediterranean) coastlands and in India after 1500 B.c. were and remained part

of the emerging world system centered in the Middle East. Historians have always known that archaic Greeks borrowed wholesale from the more skilled peoples of Asia and Egypt. Something similar occurred also in northern India. All three regions and their peoples remained in close and uninterrupted contact throughout the classical era; and in due course Alexander’s armies overthrew the Persians and made Macedonians and Greeks into the rulers of the Middle East. Why, therefore, should the Greeks not be counted as one of the family of nations taking part in a common and increasingly cosmopolitan enterprise? No doubt the traditional answer to this question rests very largely on what hap-

pened later, and reflects the historic antagonism between Christendom and Islam, and between Hindu India and Mos!im rulers of that land—though in these subsequent ages, commercial and other relations across disputed cultural and religious frontiers always remained lively and tended to increase as time went on.

At any rate, without any real reflection about the choice, I conformed to precedent by organizing the history of western Eurasia in the first millennium

The Rise of the West after 25 Years XXUV B.c. around three separate and distinct civilizations: Middle Eastern, Indian, and Greek. Yet what happened might just as well have been described as the expan-

sion of the Middle Eastern “great society” to embrace new regions and fresh peoples, with variable cultural characteristics of their own. From this ecumenical point of view, even distant China began to tie into the system after 100 B.c., when caravans connecting Syria with China began to travel regularly along the so-called silk road. Moreover, sea voyaging supplemented caravans, linking the Mediterranean world with India and India with China at about the same time. This ancient world system met serious setback after only two to three centuries of expansion, owing mainly to the way lethal diseases spread along the new trade routes and provoked catastrophic losses of life, especially in the Roman and Chinese empires. Demographic decay invited or allowed barbarian invasion and the resulting onset of the dark ages of European history. Similar though perhaps less destructive disruption also took place in China after the overthrow of the Han dynasty in a.p. 220. Long-distance trade across Eurasia thereupon dwindled toward insignificance owing to the impoverishment and political insecurity that came to prevail at the two extremities of the ecumene. On the other hand, seafaring in the Indian Ocean and adjacent waters probably underwent no comparable decline, although information is so painfully scant that one cannot be sure. Despite the dark ages, and the disruption of the earliest world system that ensued, revival soon became apparent, and in much the same way that longrange contacts revived in the Middle East after iron age barbarian invasions had disrupted the incipient cosmopolitanism of the bronze age. Moreover, when revival got underway, the Middle East was, as before, the center; and it was helped by the fact that the domestication of camels had begun to put improved transport at the disposal of warriors and merchants alike. According to Richard Bulliet,'? domestication of camels was a long drawn-out process, beginning in southern Arabia, perhaps as early as 3000 B.c., but it attained decisive importance for the civilized world only between a.p. 300 and 500. During those centuries, camels displaced wheeled vehicles for transport purposes in the Middle East, and soon became the principal goods carriers in central Asia, north Africa, and adjacent regions as well. Camels could cross deserts that were otherwise impenetrable. ‘he geographical and cultural effect was analogous, on land, to the far better known opening of the oceans by European seamen after 1500. Places previously isolated now became accessible to camel caravans, and the reach of civilized trade nets extended accordingly. Arabia together with the oases and deserts of central Asia, the steppelands to their north, and sub-Saharan Africa were the regions most

powerfully affected by this upgrading of caravan transport. They were all brought into far more intimate contact with the established centers of civilized life—primarily with the Middle East and with China—than had been possible before. As a result, between about A.pD. 500 and 1000 an intensified ecumenical Richard Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

XXUI The Rise of the West after 25 Years world system began to nibble away at cultural autonomy—a process registered more sensibly than in any other fashion by the spread of Islam into the newly opened marginal regions of the old world. Indeed the rise of Islam and the revival of a world system reaching across

civilizational and other cultural boundaries went hand in hand, and perhaps should be thought of as two aspects of the same process. Assuredly, in the first Moslim centuries, the community of the faithful subscribing to Mohammad’s revelation was only one among a number of other religious communities that coexisted in the Middle East and adjacent regions. Religious and cultural pluralism was in fact institutionalized by the prescriptions of the Koran requiring Moslims to tolerate Christians and Jews. The civilization of the Islamic heart-

land therefore became a mosaic in which separate religious communities managed their own affairs within remarkably broad limits. Conquest and conversions after A.D. 1000, that carried Islam into India, southeast Asia, and across most of the Eurasian steppes, as well as into southeast Europe and a large part of sub-Saharan Africa, added far greater variety to this mosaic. Only at the extremes of the civilized world, in China, Japan, and northern and western Europe, did more old-fashioned social and cultural homogeneity prevail. Persistent cultural pluralism within the realm of Islam was matched by the special restraints on political authority that Islamic law imposed. This meant greater autonomy for trade and market behavior than had been common in preIslamic times. Merchant communities were seldom completely self-governing in the Moslim scheme of things; but they were respected and could usually count on protection from Moslim political authorities. After all, Mohammad had been a merchant before he became a prophet; and no higher endorsement of the mercantile mode of life could be imagined. The next landmark in the history of this rising commercial world system arose out of Chinese borrowings from India and the Middle East, operating in a different natural environment and making use of a new and more efficient transport system. What the Chinese borrowed from the Middle Easterners was the array of customs, practices, and moral attitudes that sustained local and longdistance trade nets. Buddhism, reaching China along the trade routes of central Asia, served as the main transfer agent, implanting habits of mind and moral rules that accorded well with life as a trader. (Confucianism, by comparison, remained disdainful of commerce, viewing merchants as social parasites, who made a living by buying cheap and selling dear, without adding anything to the goods they handled.) But what gave special importance to the spread of commercial habits and outlook to China was the fact that a canal network already existed, connecting the valley of the Yellow River with the even more extensive valley of the Yangtze.

Barges and canal boats could easily move to and fro on those canals, and with almost complete safety, while carrying comparatively enormous loads. China’s canals had been constructed for agricultural and tax collecting purposes across many centuries. Then in a.p. 605, when the Grand Canal linking the two great river basins was completed, China’s network of internal waterways became capable of connecting regions with contrasting and complementary resources. As

The Rise of the West after 25 Years XXVU a result, the scale and importance of trade and commerce could escalate within China far beyond anything possible in the Middle East or elsewhere. Old ceilings on interdependence and regional exchange were broken through. A new range for the market integration of human effort came on stream, whereby ordinary people, even poor villagers, could safely depend on buying and selling to pay their taxes and even to provide themselves with food and other items of everyday consumption. One must not exaggerate. Not all peasants bought rice so as to be able to specialize on raising silkworms, for example, and most of them still provided most or all of the food they consumed. Nonetheless, when specialization proved capable of paying off in the form of even slight improvement in standard of living, Chinese peasants and townsmen began to specialize on a scale never before approached by a civilized society. The result, of course, was improved skills and a great increase in wealth for society as a whole. One register was a near doubling of China’s population under the Sung dynasty. Another was the fact the Chinese artisanal skills began to surpass those of the rest of the world. Silk, porcelain, gunpowder, and shipbuilding were among the more important examples of Chinese superiority, but there were many others. Busy chaffering in innumerable marketplaces and an enormous flotilla of canal boats kept goods in circulation and allowed surpluses of one region to be exchanged for surpluses produced elsewhere with a reliability and efficiency that had never been possible before. The effects of China’s commercialization were never confined by political borders. Instead, caravan trade intensified across all of China’s land frontiers and a greatly magnified sea commerce soon developed as well, taking Chinese goods

to the Indian Ocean and across the sea to Japan in far greater quantity than before. The world system, previously centered in the great cities and bazaars of the Middle East, thus acquired a new and far more powerful productive center

and, not coincidentally, expanded its reach into remote western Europe and other previously marginal areas like Japan." Medievalists have long recognized the importance for Europe of the rise of towns after about A.p. 1000 and the role of the spice trade that tied European consumers with producers in islands of the distant Indies. But historians have not yet gotten used to the idea that this was only part of a larger phenomenon— the expansion and intensification of an emergent world system that now embraced almost all of Eurasia and much of Africa as well. Nor have European and Islamic historians yet realized that the rise of medieval European civilization after A.D. 1000 coincided with an eastward shift of the world system’s center from the Middle East to China. That is not surprising. Given the past preoccupation of our medievalists with the national histories of England and France— implicitly retrojecting upon the entire human past the circumstances of the late nineteenth century, when the French and British empires did cover most of the William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000

(Chicago, 1982). Chapter 2 sets forth my understanding of China’s commercialization and its leading world role between 1000 and 1500, with far fuller footnotes than I have reproduced here.

XVII The Rise of the West after 25 Years globe—it requires a real leap of the imagination to recognize China’s primacy, Marco Polo to the contrary notwithstanding. The next great chapter in the rise of the modern world system is, of course, far more familiar, and indeed, the scholar who made the phrase famous, Immanuel Wallerstein, once believed that it only began in about 1500 with the European oceanic discoveries and the rise of capitalism. The discoveries certainly did

change the pattern of world trade and world cultural relations, bringing the Americas and innumerable oceanic islands into the vortex of the expanding world system. Within surprisingly few decades, the most active center of innovative activity shifted from China to the Atlantic face of Europe. Before 1500, capitalists achieved remarkable autonomy within the walls of a few Italian and north European city-states; and even after that political framework decayed, some few of the new monarchies and emergent national states that supplanted urban sovereignties in Europe continued to give merchants and bankers almost unhampered scope for expansion of market activity, whereas in China, and also in most of the Moslim world, regimes unsympathetic to private capitalist accumulation prevailed. In the name of good government, Asian rulers effectively checked the rise of large-scale entrepreneurship by confiscatory taxation on the one hand, and by regulation of prices in the interest of consumers on the other. This left large-scale commercial enterprise, and presently also mining and plantation agriculture, more and more to the Europeans. Consequently, the rise of the West to its world hegemony of recent centuries got underway. Scholarly investigation of what happened in China and why the Ming dynasty chose to abandon overseas ventures after the 1430’s remains very slender by comparison with the abundant literature on European exploitation of the new worlds their navigation opened to them. Comparative study of the dynamics of Chinese and European expansion before and after the tip point that came about 1450 to 1500 offers an especially intriguing topic for historical inquiry today, poised as we are on the horizon of the twenty-first century, when, for all we know, the displacement of the Far East by the Far West that took place in the sixteenth century may be reversed. It is, nonetheless, worth noting that just as China’s rise after 4.D. 1000 had depended on prior borrowings from the Middle East, so Europe’s world success after 1500 also depended on prior borrowings from China. And if Japan’s postWorld War II economic record turns out to be the presage of further triumphs for the Pacific rim, it is no less clear that this success, too, will depend on prior borrowings of European (and American) skills. This looks like one of the clearest patterns in world history. It is also something to be expected inasmuch as no population can overtake and then surpass the rest of the world without using the most efficacious and powerful instruments known anywhere on earth; and by

definition such instruments are located at the world centers of wealth and

power—wherever they may be. Thus any geographical displacement of world leadership must be prefaced by successful borrowing from previously established centers of the highest prevailing skills. The fluctuating growth-of this sort of world system, with shifting centers and a great multiplicity of peoples and cultures caught within it, seems to me now to

The Rise of the West after 25 Years XNIX be a part of world history that largely escaped my attention when writing The Rise of the West. Even for the centuries after 1500 I was intent on using the civilizational envelope to organize my remarks; only after 1850 did I suggest that the autonomy of the separate civilizations of Asia had broken down, yielding to a new global cosmopolitanism. But autonomy had been eroding long before 1850,

long before 1500, and even long before 1000. The process, I now think, dated back to the very beginning of civilized history, and ought to have been presented as such, alongside the history of separate civilizations and their interactions. Exactly how a narrative could combine both aspects of the human past is not easy to specify. Only by making the attempt can the possibility be tested, and this ought now to become the agenda for serious world historians. Cultural pluralism and differentiation is a dominating feature of human history; yet beneath and behind that pluralism there is also an important commonality. That commonality found expression in the rise of a world system that transcended political and cultural boundaries because human beings desired to have the results of the operation of that system. In other words, they wanted access to rare and valuable goods that could not be found close at hand, and presently they also desired the enrichment that market exchanges helped to provoke and sustain by rewarding efficient producers. In proportion as more and more individuals spent more and more of their time on activities connected with market exchanges, the world system grew from its initial marginality toward the remarkable centrality it enjoys in our time. Yet this sort of interchange and interdependence remains entirely compatible with cultural diversity, and, at least so far, also with political

pluralism and rivalry. All three belong in a proper history of the world— somehow. Finally, there is another level of human experience that deserves historians’ attention: to wit, our encounters and collisions with all the other organisms that make up the earth’s ecosystem. Agriculture is one chapter in that story. So is the shifting incidence of disease. And the recent rise of scientific understanding and

the extended control that such understanding sometimes allows is yet a third dimension of this story. As hinted above, disease affected the history of the world system of exchange in the first Christian centuries, and again, more briefly, in the fourteenth, when the black death ravaged China, the Middle East, and Europe. More importantly, civilized diseases regularly acted to break down the cultural morale and independence of peoples newly exposed to their ravages. The disaster that struck native Americans after 1492, when they were suddenly exposed to European and then African diseases, is the most dramatic but by no means the only example of this phenomenon.” The spread of crops, of domesticated animals, and of unwanted pests and infestations is another side of ecological history about which historians are as yet quite ill informed." Yet these, too, William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (New York, 1976), is still the best general survey of the subject. A shorter essay, William H. McNeill, The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View

(Princeton, 1980) offers a preliminary overview of the intersection of ecology with history as more usually understood. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge, 1988) is a truly remarkable effort to overcome that ignorance, but constitutes only a beginning.

XX The Rise of the West after 25 Years clearly impinged on economic and political history in much the same way that epidemic diseases did, by allowing some populations to flourish while penalizing or even destroying others.

These dimensions of human history therefore also deserve a place in any really satisfactory account of the past; they, too, ought to be woven into the narrative of the rise and elaboration of separate civilizations and cultures and viewed as ecumenical processes comparable in importance with the rise of a world system of economic complementarity and cultural symbiosis. Such an agenda for world historians is perhaps daunting. Yet anything less is plainly inadequate to. the complexities of the human condition as we now understand it. Nor does it strike me as impossible—however ambitious. Data exist; what is needed is to gather and bring them to order and then construct a clear and elegant discourse with which to present the different facets and interacting flows of human history as we now understand them. Historians always face

exactly this task, even when writing about comparatively small numbers of people and limited periods of time. Information is almost always overabundant; intelligibility comes only with selection and ordering, somehow embodied in a flow of words to provoke a portrait of the past in readers’ minds. It is an art that historians have always cultivated, and we are now in a position to apply that art to the whole of the human past with a precision, richness, and accuracy beyond anything previously possible, simply because historical scholarship has explored the whole of the globe as never before, while the evolution of historical concepts has arrived at a level of sophistication that makes older efforts at world history, even one as recent as mine, seem fundamentally outmoded and obviously in need of replacement.

William H. McNeill University of Chicago Emeritus

Preface

This book was conceived in 1936, commenced in 1954, and completed in 1962. The footnotes list most of the works consulted in the course of its composition, but I have made no systematic effort to record the sources of ideas and information accumulated beforehand. The consequence is a lopsidedness

of citation, for the passages of the book which concern European history, where my professional interests have lain, almost entirely lack the apparatus of scholarship. A more serious lopsidedness inheres in the text itself, for I have assumed a decent familiarity with Western history and, in dealing with our own past, have chosen to emphasize matters which have been usually underrated, while passing over more familiar ground with a casual reference or even with no mention whatever. This unfits the book for schoolroom use and,

hopefully, keys it to the historically literate, adult public of the Western world. Heirs of other civilizations will also, I hope, find stimulus in the following pages but will probably discover passages of needlessly obvious exposition alternating with untoward obscurities. Discrepancies between the reader’s familiar knowledge and an author’s presuppositions will always introduce such disproportions, and a book that attempts to deal with so large a subject as the history of the world invites misunderstanding on an unusually massive scale. Yet 1t is only when others take aspects of what an author has thought and said in order to develop, twist, and reinterpret his ideas to fit their own predilections and answer their own problems that the cold type of a printed page leaps to life; and, if this happens often enough, a single book such as this may become a real force in the cultural history of mankind. Without irony, therefore, I hope my book may be richly and repeatedly misunderstood. The Rise of the West is designed to be like a three-legged stool, for the text, the photographs, and Béla Pethed’s maps and charts are intended to support and mutually reinforce one another. In principle, and perhaps also 1n

practice, an attentive perusal of any one of the three constituents of the XXX

XXXII Preface work should offer its own limited yet coherent insight into the history of the human community, whereas the combination of all three is designed to multiply the force and enrich the meaning of any one taken by itself.

*** In some sense, everyone I have met as well as all I have ever read enters into

this book. Those who have had a closer and more intimate relation with the pages that follow include the students who have served as my assistants during its composition: Hsio Yen Shih, Albert S. Hanser, George W. Smalley, and Jean A. Whitenack, to whose editorial eye and indefatigable typing I am particularly indebted. Colleagues and friends who have read and criticized all or part of the manuscript are: Robert M. Adams, Robert J. Braidwood, Michael Cherniavsky, Pinhas Delougaz, Mircea Eliade, Louis Gottschalk, Robert M. Grant, David Grene, Stephen Hay, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Bert F. Hoselitz, Walter Johnson, Donald Lach, Christian W. Mackauer, J. A. B. van Buitenen, Karl J. Weintraub, and John A. Wilson of the University of Chicago; Edward Bastian of Earlham College; Pratulchandra Gupta of Jodavpur University, Calcutta; Peter Hardy of London University; Bryce Lyon of the University of California; Walter Porges of Pierce College, California; Earl Pritchard of the University of Arizona; Arnold J. Toynbee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs; G. E. von Grunebaum of the University of California, Los Angeles; Y. C. Wang of the University of Kansas; Martin Wight of Sussex University; and my father, John T. McNeill of Union Theological Seminary, New York. All these have contributed in greater or lesser degree to the improvement of this volume, but none is in the least responsible for whatever errors of fact or of interpretation remain to disfigure its pages. A Ford Faculty Fellowship, 1954—55, allowed me leisure and gave me cour-

age to begin the composition of this book, and a munificent grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York permitted me to devote six months of each year from 1957 to 1962 to concentrated work upon the task. Without such help the book might never have been undertaken and could most certainly not yet have come to completion. Last, the University of Chicago provided the genial matrix within which my thoughts and investigations arose and have now taken tangible form, while the narrower circle of my family gracefully tolerated the cuckoo in the nest this book has been to them these eight years past. I am very grateful to both.

WiutiaM H. McNEILi September 25, 1962

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ln the Beginni

In the beginning human history is a great darkness. The fragments of manlike skeletons which have been discovered in widely scattered parts of the earth can tell us little about the ascent of man. Comparative anatomists and embryologists classify the animal species Homo sapiens among the primates with apes, monkeys, and baboons; but all details of human evolution are uncertain. Shaped stones, potsherds, and other archeological remains are sadly inadequate evidence of vanished human cultures, although comparison of styles and assemblages, together with the stratification of finds, allows experienced archeologists to infer a good deal about the gradual elaboration of man’s

tool kit and to deduce at least some of the characteristics of human life in times otherwise beyond our knowledge. But the picture emerging from these modes of investigation is still very tentative. Not surprisingly, experts disagree, and learned controversy is rather the rule than the exception. The various skulls and other bones which have been recovered from scat-

tered parts of the Old World make clear that not one but several hominid (manlike) forms of life emerged in the Pleistocene geological epoch.’ The use of wood and stone tools was not confined to the modern species of man, for unmistakable artifacts have been discovered in association with Peking man in China and, more doubtfully, with other hominid remains in Africa and 1 Classification based on the few skeletal fragments yet known is hazardous; but recent finds, especially in Africa, make plausible a threefold generic classification, as follows:

Early Pleistocene Australopithecine (1,000,000 to 500,000 years ago) Middle Pleistocene Pithecanthrop1

Late Pleistocene Homo (500,000 to 100,000 years ago)

(From 100,000 years ago)

Within these genera, subgenera and species occur: e.g., Homo subdivides into Homo neanderthalensts, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo sapiens, and others. Cf. John Grahame Douglas Clark, World Prehistory: An

Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 16-25; S. L. Washburn and F. Clark Howell, ‘“Human Evolution and Culture,” in Sol Tax (ed.), Evolution after Darwin (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1960), II, 35-46.

3

4 In the Beginning southeast Asia. Peking man also left traces of fire in the cave mouth where he lived, while in Europe, Neanderthal man knew both tools and fire.

Enough hominid and human remains have been discovered in Africa to suggest that the major cradle of mankind was in that continent.? The savanna which today lies in a great arc north and east of the rain forests of equatorial Africa offers the sort of natural environment in which our earliest human ancestors probably flourished. This is big-game country, with scattered clumps of trees set in a sea of grass and a climate immune from freezing cold. While weather patterns have certainly changed drastically in the past half-million years or so, it is probable that in the ages when glaciers covered parts of Eu-

rope, a shifting area of tropical savanna existed somewhere in Africa, and possibly also in Arabia and part of India. Such a land, where vegetable food could be supplemented by animal flesh, where trees offered refuge by night or in time of danger, and where the climate permitted human nakedness, was by all odds the most suitable for the first emergence of a species whose young

were so helpless at birth and so slow to mature as to constitute a weighty burden upon the adults. Indeed, the helplessness of human young must at first have been an extraordinary hazard to survival. But this handicap had compensations, which in the long run redounded in truly extraordinary fashion to the advantage of mankind. For it opened wide the gates to the possibility of cultural as against merely biological evolution. In due course, cultural evolution became the means

whereby the human animal, despite his unimpressive teeth and muscles, rose to undisputed pre-eminence among the beasts of prey. By permitting, indeed compelling, men to instruct their children in the arts of life, the prolonged period of infancy and childhood made it possible for human communities eventually to raise themselves above the animal level from which they began. For the arts of life proved susceptible of a truly extraordinary elaboration and accumulation, and in the fulness of time allowed men to master not only the animal, but also the vegetable and mineral resources of the earth, bending them more and more successfully to human purposes.

* %: % Cultural evolution must have begun among the prehuman ancestors of modern man, Rudimentary education of the young may be observed among many types of higher animals; and the closest of man’s animal relatives are all social in their mode of life and vocal in their habits. These traits presumably provided a basis upon which protohuman communities developed high skill as hunters. As the males learned to co-ordinate their activities more and more

effectively through language and the use of tools, they became able to kill large game regularly. Under these circumstances, we may imagine that, even after they had gorged themselves, some flesh was usually left over for the 2 Cf-John Desmond Clark, The Prehistory of Southern Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959), pp. 24-130 and passim; L. S. B. Leakey, ‘““The Origin of the Genus Homo,” Evolution after Darwin, II, 17-31; Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (London: Collins, 1961), offers a popular but wellinformed account.

In the Beginning >) females and children to eat. This made possible a new degree of specialization between the sexes. Males could afford to forego the incessant gathering of ber-

ries, grubs, roots, and other edibles which had formerly provided the main source of food and concentrate instead upon the arts of the hunt. Females, on the contrary, continued food-gathering as before; but, freed from the full rigor of self-nutrition, they could afford to devote more time and care to the protection and nurture of their infant children. Only in such a protohuman community, where skilled bands of hunters provided the principal food supply, was survival in the least likely for infants so helpless at birth and so slow to achieve independence as the first fully human mutants must have been.”

How modern types of men originated is one of the unsolved puzzles of archeology and physical anthropology. It is possible that the variety of modern races results from parallel evolution of hominid stocks toward full human status in widely separated and effectively isolated regions of the Old World;* but the very fragmentary evidence at hand may be interpreted equally well to support the alternative hypothesis that Hovzo sapiens arose in some single

center and underwent racial differentiation in the course of migration to diverse regions of the earth.’ Homo sapiens appeared in Europe only after the last great glacial ice sheets had begun to melt back northward, perhaps 30,000 years ago. There is reason to believe that he came from western Asia, following two routes, one south

and the other north of the Mediterranean.* The newcomers were skilled

hunters, no doubt attracted to European soil by the herds of reindeer, mammoths, horses, and other herbivores that pastured on the tundra and in the thin forests which then lay south of the retreating glaciers. Neanderthal man, who had lived in Europe earlier, disappeared as Homo sapiens advanced. Perhaps the newcomers hunted their predecessors to extinction; perhaps some other change—epidemic disease, for example—destroyed the Neanderthal popula3 Biologically considered, the distinguishing mark of humanity was systematic developmental retardation, making the human child infantile in comparison to the normal protohuman. Some adult human traits are also infantile when compared to those of an ape: e.g., the overdevelopment of brain size in relation to the rest of the body, underdevelopment of teeth and brow-ridges. But developmental retardation of course meant prolonged plasticity, so that learning could be lengthened. Thereby the range of cultural as against mere biological evolution widened enormously; and humanity launched itself upon a biologically as well as historically extraordinary career. 4 Cf. Wilhelm Volz, “‘Die geographischen Grundlagen der menschlichen Rassenbildung,’’ Saectilum, Il (1951), 10-45. The author distinguishes five great habitable regions of the Old World—Europe and western Asia, eastern Asia, Africa south of the Sahara, southeast Asia, and India—and suggests that in each of these major regions a distinct racial type arose during the last Ice Age. ’ Cf. Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1954), pp. 41, 73, 195-215; William W. Howells, ‘““The Distribution of Man,”’ Scientific American, CCIIL (September, 1960), 113-27. 6 Skeletons exhibiting a mixture of Neanderthal and modern characteristics have been discovered in caves on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Palestine. This may be interpreted to mean that the European type of modern man developed in the Middle East from Neanderthal-like types at a time when the ice sheets isolated the Neanderthal population of Europe from the rest of protomankind. Cf. F. Clark Howell, ““The Place of Neanderthal Man in Human Evolution,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology (n.s.), IX (1951), 409-12. But if one believes that modern men evolved earlier elsewhere, this same evidence may be considered as the result of interbreeding between sapiens and Neanderthal populations. The puzzle remains unsolved.

6 In the Beginning tions. Nor can one assume the absence of interbreeding, although skeletons showing mixed characteristics have not been found in Europe. In the Americas, by contrast, Homo sapiens appears to have entered a previously uninhabited land, although the date of his arrival (10000-7000 B.c.?) and even the skeletal characteristics of the first American immigrants remain unclear. In regions of the world where the glacial retreat brought less drastic ecological changes, there appears to have been almost no development of tool assemblages.’ Indeed, during the late Paleolithic era, human inventiveness may

in fact have been called into play mainly along the northern fringes of the Eurasian habitable world, especially in its more westerly portion.® Here a comparatively harsh climate and radically fluctuating flora and fauna presented men with conditions to challenge their adaptability. Therefore, the apparent pre-eminence of European Paleolithic materials may not be solely due to accidents of discovery. Seemingly from the date of their first arrival in Europe, Homo sapiens populations had a much enlarged variety of tools at their command. Implements

of bone, ivory, and antler supplemented those of flint (and presumably of wood) which Neanderthal men had used. Bone and antler could be given shapes impossible for flint. Such useful items as needles and harpoon heads could only be invented by exploiting the characteristics of softer and more resilient materials than flint. The secret of working bone and antler lay in the manufacture of special stone cutting tools. Tools to make tools were seemingly first invented by Homo sapiens; and possession of such tools offers a key to much of our species’ success in adapting itself to the conditions of subarctic Europe.° On the analogy of hunting peoples who have survived to the present, it 1s

likely that Paleolithic men lived in small groups of not more than twenty to sixty persons. Such communities may well have been migratory, returning to their caves or other fixed shelter for only part of the year. Very likely leadership in the hunt devolved upon a single individual whose personal skill and prowess won him authority. Probably there existed a network of relationships among hunting groups scattered over fairly wide areas or, at the least, a delimitation of hunting grounds between adjacent communities. Exogamous marriage arrangements and intergroup ceremonial associations may also have existed; and no doubt fighting sometimes broke out when one community trespassed upon the territory of another. There is also some evidence of longdistance trade,’° although it is often impossible to be sure whether an object 7 Hallam L. Movius, Jr., “Paleolithic Archaeology in Southern and Eastern Asia, Exclusive of India,”’ Cahiers d’ histoire mondiale, Il (1954-55), 257-82, 520-53; J. G. D. Clark, World Prehistory: An Outline, pp. 45-50.

8 In the Far East, the loess deposits of north China seem to have been laid down during the glacial ages and attest a long era of cold desert in that region. As long as such conditions prevailed, there was,

of course, insufficient moisture to maintain an abundant fauna such as that upon which European hunters of the late Paleolithic periods were able to prey. °Cf. C.S. Coon, The Story of Man, pp. 78-83. 10 J. G. D. Clark, Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (New York and London: Methuen & Co., 1952), pp. 241-81.

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§ In the Beginning brought from afar came to its resting place as a result of an exchange or had been picked up in the course of seasonal or other migrations. Rude sculpture, strange signs, and magnificent animal frescoes in the recesses of a few caves in France and Spain" offer almost the only surviving evidence of Paleolithic religious ideas and practices. Interpretation of the remains is uncertain. Ceremonies, very likely ritual dances in which the participants disguised themselves as animals, probably occurred in the dark depths. Perhaps the purpose of such ceremonies was to bring the hunters into intimate relation with their prospective quarry—to propitiate the animal spirits, and

perhaps to encourage their fecundity. Possibly caves were used for these rituals because the dark recesses seemed to permit access to the womb of Mother Earth, whence men and animals came and whither they returned; but this is merely speculation.” The prominence of animal figures in cave art may serve to remind us how precarious was the success of Paleolithic hunters. Their existence depended on game, which in turn depended on a shifting ecological balance. About ten thousand years ago, the glaciers, which for a million years had oscillated over the face of Europe and North America, began their most recent retreat. Open

tundra and sparse forest of birch and spruce followed the ice northward, while heavier deciduous forests began to invade western Europe. The herds followed their subarctic habitat northward, while new animals, which had to be hunted by different methods, arrived to inhabit the thick new forests. About 8000 B.c., therefore, a new style of human life began to prevail in western Europe.'* There is evidence of the arrival of new populations, presumably from the east. Whether these invaders mingled with their predecessors, or whether the older inhabitants followed their accustomed prey northward and eastward, leaving nearly uninhabited ground behind them, 1s not known." In any case, the newcomers brought to Europe some fundamental additions to the Paleolithic tool kit: bows and arrows, fish nets, dugout canoes, sleds, and skis, as well as domesticated dogs, used presumably as assistants in the hunt. The remains from this so-called Mesolithic period (ca. 8000-4500 B.c.) are on the whole less impressive than those of the Paleolithic age which had gone before. Flints are characteristically smaller; and rock paintings, found mostly in Spain, are less strikingly beautiful. Yet it would be wrong to assume 1 [zvestia, September 24, 1961, announced the discovery of animal frescoes like those of France and Spain in a cave in the Ural Mountains. : 12 Cf. Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn: A Study of the Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age and Their Influence upon European Thought (London: Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1948), pp. 3-70, for an inter-

esting attempt to elucidate the religion of the cave. 18 A similar shift occurred simultaneously and for the same reason in the eastern woodlands of North America: intrusive forests eliminated some old food resources and offered new ones, compelling human populations to change their style of life accordingly. Cf. Gordon R. Willey, ‘‘Historical Patterns and Evolution in Native New World Cultures,” Evolution after Darwin, IJ, 120. 4 Large parts of Siberia were inhabited, as late as the third millennium B.c., by men who resembled physically the Paleolithic hunters of western Europe. Cf. Karl Jettmar, “Zur Herkunft der turkischen Volkerschaften,” Archiv fiir Vélkerkunde, I (1948), 13. This suggests that some, at least, of the old population of western Europe followed the herds as the climate changed.

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142 Cosmopolitan Civilization in the Middle East, 1700-500 B.C. ly accessible to modern scholars. Probably the religious collision between adherents of Amon and of Aton involved also a fierce struggle between oligarchy and absolutism. The priests of Amon were closely linked with a number of great noble families, whose members had enjoyed a near monopoly of high state office for generations. In challenging Amon and his priesthood, [khnaton necessarily defied also the power and privileges of these families. His supporters seem to have been mainly social upstarts and soldiers, so that it 1s possible to interpret the Atonist movement as a struggle between army and priesthood for primacy in the state. Insofar as foreign elements dominated the

army and had a foothold in the Pharaonic household, the struggle lay also between “subversive” foreigners and privileged natives.** In another idiom, one may describe Ikhnaton’s reforms as a convulsive effort to bring Egyptian life and thought into tune with the emergent cosmopolitan

world of the Middle East. The illogic of traditional Egyptian religion, the stiff monumentality of Egyptian art, and the rigidities of Egyptian social structure were all bound to appear increasingly parochial and archaic to men who had experienced the variety of life and belief prevalent in the great world beyond Egyptian borders.

Yet, like the rationalizing Memphite theology of more than a thousand years before, the whole Atonist movement soon collapsed. Some efforts at compromise with the old order seem to have been made during Ikhnaton’s last years; and his successor Tutankhamon made still further concessions. But once the fanaticism of the Atonist reform had been abandoned, no compromise could stand; for the priests and nobles, whose privileges had been so rudely attacked, would not rest until all traces of what they viewed as

revolutionary foreign subversion had been eradicated from the land of Fgypt.*® The army appears to have made its peace with the reaction easily

enough. At any rate, when the army commander Haremhab usurped the throne (1349 B.c.), he devoted his attention to salvaging what he could of the empire in Asia and let home affairs fall entirely into the hands of the priests of Amon and their allies. Thenceforward, although the Pharaoh was still officially a god, he was a god in leading strings, and the priests of Amon held the strings. No important

enterprise could be undertaken without consulting the oracle of Amon, so that the priests, who interpreted the oracle, acquired enormous influence. The

army remained as a countervailing force in the state; and friction between priests and soldiers recurred from time to time. But on the whole it was the priests who prevailed. Official effort thenceforth successfully sought to preserve old forms and repress all innovations, particularly any that smacked of foreignness. 37 John A. Wilson, The Burden of Egypt, pp. 206-8. 38 New bands of stonecutters were dispatched to erase the name of Aton wherever it could be found, just as Amon’s name had earlier been obliterated. Ikhnaton’s palaces and temples were destroyed, and his new capital abandoned, never to be reoccupied. Thus archeologists had the great advantage of a relatively undisturbed site when they began to dig at Tel Amarna, where Ikhnaton’s capital once stood.

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144 Cosmopolitan Civilization in the Middle East, 1700-500 B.C. The cultural changes accompanying the Atonist upheaval could not be so easily eradicated; and perhaps the counterrevolutionaries who overthrew Atonism did not desire to eradicate them all. Extremism in art was abandoned;

and a partial return to the older conventions occurred. But something remained of the more varied and freer styles which had run riot under Ikhnaton;

and the “new” hieroglyphic continued in use for literary and monumental purposes. In general, the level of artistic achievement declined. Gigantism in statuary and architecture supplanted careful craftsmanship, especially in the age of Rameses II (1290-1223 B.c.), when the glories of empire were ostenta-

tiously revived, even though Egypt had now lost her former undisputed hegemony in Asia and had to share power with rival Hittite and Assyrian empires.

After the final loss of all imperial possessions in Asia (ca. 1165 B.c.), Egypt

underwent little perceptible change. As the country sank toward the status of a second-rate power and trade passed more and more into foreign hands, Egyptians increasingly turned in upon themselves and looked to the past. Archaism found expression in the deliberate (and sometimes very skilful) imitation of Old Kingdom styles in architecture, sculpture, and painting. Yet, less conspicuously—as it were beneath the surface—important changes did occur in Egyptian culture. Some surviving inscriptions suggest the rise of a more personal piety and express personal gratitude or penitence toward some par-

ticular god. Immortality was democratized, for the only prerequisite for a blissful afterlife came to be ready reference to suitable charms and magic formulae which, when written down and inclosed in a man’s coffin, provided the departed soul with all necessary protection from the perils of the underworld.* In these developments we may see analogues to the more individualistic outlook upon the world which simultaneously found expression in Babylonia. But traditional piety suffered far weaker challenge in Egypt than in Mesopotamia. Egyptian doctrine offered the consolation of blissful immortality for the world-weary, as Babylonian religion did not; and this hope sustained individual Egyptians even in difficult times. 3. THE INTERMEDIATE REGIONS

The period from 1700 to 1200 B.c.—the age of the charioteer and of feudal empires—saw a mingling of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Aegean cultural influences throughout the coastal regions of the Levant. This was an international age, when kings exchanged rich presents, sealed alliances by giving their daughters in marriage, and corresponded regularly with one another in Akkadian cuneiform. Even the haughty Egyptians conducted their diplomacy and maintained archives in Akkadian. Farther inland, where powerful royal courts provided lavish patronage, semi-autonomous art styles and literature arose. Excavations at the Hittite capital in Anatolia, for example, have revealed a distinctive, heavy-set, and slightly clumsy sculptural style, derived unmistakably from Mesopotamian prototypes. But Hittite sculptors never passed beyond the stage of a rude, 3° Cf. J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 34-36, 380-81.

Cultural Conservation and Advance 145 vigorous, and in its own way charming apprenticeship. They were still wres-

tling with the technical problems of stonecutting and had only begun to emancipate themselves from foreign models when the invasions of the twelfth

century B.c. destroyed the power of their royal patrons. Thereafter, Hittite art dissolved into inferior provincial styles.*” Hittite literature, too, was largely

dependent on Mesopotamian models for inspiration, and used cuneiform script. Yet Hittite scribes wrote in their own languages and recorded a number of myths pertaining to their native gods.* About the culture of Mitanni little can be said until the capital of that realm has been located and excavated; but a few admirable pieces of sculpture have been recovered which, especially in the realistic treatment of animals, show affinities with later Assyrian art.” No comparable stylistic independence manifested itself nearer the center of the Middle East. Syrian art of the second millennium B.c. offers a curiously disharmonious blend of Egyptian, Aegean, and Mesopotamian elements, in which neither skilful workmanship nor stylistic integrity is apparent.*? Syrian literature of the period attained rather more distinction. Inscribed tablets discovered at the site of ancient Ugarit (near modern Beirut) record epic cycles dealing with gods, kings, and heroes. These poems are reminiscent of certain

Mesopotamian myths; yet in details they show much that was peculiar to Syria, and their prosody anticipates many characteristics of later Hebrew psalmody.**

In the fourteenth century B.c., when these tablets were inscribed, the town of Ugarit was a cosmopolitan trading center. At least six foreign scripts were simultaneously in use: Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Hurrian, Egyptian, and Cypriote. Local scribes must have found it quite impossible to master the intricacies of so many styles of writing, each of which involved the use of several score or even several hundred signs. The need for a simplified system of writing was evident; and the scribes of Ugarit were favorably situated to invent one. Exposed to multiple foreign influences, and lacking any antique and well-consolidated local literary tradition, they were free to experiment with radical simplification when confronted with the humdrum task of recording commercial contracts and other utilitarian documents in the local Semitic tongue. As a result, the Ugaritic scribes reduced the repertory of signs required to record their native tongue to a mere thirty. This process was far #0 Cf. the convenient collection of photographs in Margarete Riemschneider, Die Welt der Hethiter (Stuttgart: Gustav Killper Verlag, 1954). 41 “Translation may be found in J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 120-28. #® Cf. Albrecht Gotze, Hethiter, Churriter, und Assyrer, pp. 183-85. 8 Cf. Henri Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, pp. 139-63. “4 The tablets discovered at Ugarit have a particular interest for modern scholars, because thev are the fullest—indeed almost the only—evidence for the nature of the Canaanite fertility religion, which in subsequent centuries competed with the worship of Yahweh among the Hebrews. For translations see J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 129-55; and Cyrus H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature: A Comprehensive Translation of the Poetic and Prose Texts (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1949). For discussion, cf. G. A. S. Kapelrud, Baal in the Ras Shamra Texts (Copenhagen: G. I. C. Gad, 1952).

146 Cosmopolitan Civilization in the Middle East, 1700-500 B.C. from unique to Ugarit, for throughout the middle length of the Fertile Crescent, similar systems of simplified writing were adapted to various languages during the same period.* Such simplified scripts made possible the spread of literacy among much wider segments of society than before. This was a fundamental change, involving important shifts in the structure and rigidity of society at large. As long as years of effort were required to master the art of writing, the success-

ful student was likely to cherish complexity as an end in itself. How else could the wisdom of the past be accurately preserved? How else keep interlopers from mastering the powerful secrets of things human and divine? Only the rarest graduate of such training could retain much capacity for freshness of thought or any desire to question the received ideas which were so inextricably bound up with the complicated signs he had spent years in mastering. None of these rigidities applied to men who acquired literacy with a comparatively modest expenditure of effort, as a useful tool in the transaction of everyday business. Like the ancient Sumerian cuneiform, which had begun as symbolic accountancy, the simplified scripts of the second millennium B.c. for a long period were used solely for commercial and other practical purposes. Until the tenth century B.c., texts with literary pretensions clung to the hallowed complexities of the older styles of writing. A second change in the mechanics of literacy became important toward the end of the second millennium B.c.—the use of papyrus sheets and animal skins, perhaps also of other perishable materials like wax tablets and wooden boards, as common materials upon which to write.** Egypt led the way in this devel-

opment. Papyrus sheets had been manufactured and used for writing from the time of the Old Kingdom;* and a special cursive form of hieroglyphic had been developed to suit the natural movements of a pen. The perishability of papyrus makes it difficult to judge how rapidly cursive scripts spread beyond Egypt. Nevertheless, chance inscriptions on bits of pottery show that by 1300 B.c., cursive writing in simplified scripts was familiarly employed in 45 Thirty signs could be mastered about as easily as a modern alphabet, the only difference being that vowels were not directly indicated, but had to be supplied by the reader from his knowledge of the language. This was not much more difficult than to interpret the vagaries of English spelling. In more outlying regions—Elam, northern Mesopotamia, and Anatolia—scripts also moved in the direction of simplification, eliminating many word signs and relying mainly upon syllabic symbols. Only in the heartlands of Mesopotamia and Egypt did the full complication of the older scripts survive.

Cf. Ignace J. Gelb, A Study of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 120-47. Efforts to pin down more exactly the place and time when the earliest “proto-Semitic alphabet’ was invented are still inconclusive. Cf. David Diringer, ‘‘Problems of the Present Day on the Origin of the Phoenician Alphabet,” Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, \V (1957), 40-58. Diringer considers Palestine or Syria during the Hyksos period (1730-1580 s.c.) as the most likely place of origin of the Semitic alphabet.

It has long been customary to regard these Semitic scripts as alphabetic. This view has been challenged by I. J. Gelb in A Study of Writing. Gelb believes that they were really syllabic and that a true alphabet was first invented by the Greeks. Cf. Marcel Cohen, La Grande invention de lécriture et son évolution (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1958), I, 138-43. 46 Clay tablets remained in use in Mesopotamia until the first century a.p.; but long before then, less bulky, but more perishable materials had come to predominate even in Mesopotamia itself and had completely displaced the incised cuneiform in regions peripheral to Mesopotamia. 47 Stephen R. K. Glanville, The Legacy of Egypt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. 137.

Cultural Conservation and Advance 147 Palestine and Syria. The casual use of potsherds to record entirely ordinary matters certainly suggests that literacy had percolated some distance down the | social scale.*®

But it would be wrong to suppose that in the second or even in the first millennium B.c., the simplification of writing abruptly transformed the life or thought of the Middle East. Phoenician and Aramaean merchants no doubt used writing in their affairs—but so had the Babylonians a thousand years before. For the most part, literacy continued to be the special preserve of con-

ventionally minded priests and scribes. Yet not entirely so; and in the long run, even a few exceptional cases were quite enough to alter fundamentally the cultural physiognomy of the Middle East. For when writing was used to record the thoughts of prophetic and rebellious individuals, whose minds ran far beyond established and authorized limits, a powerful and versatile enzyme was loosed within the body of traditional piety and learning. Prophecies and protests, criticism of prevailing customs, and radical assertion of new standards of righteousness could create only temporary and local disturbances so long as their impact was confined to the range of a man’s voice and the memory of his immediate hearers. But when such outpourings were reduced to writing, the fiery poetry of an Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah, or Zoroaster acquired an unimaginably reinforced vibrancy, capable of affecting the lives of untold millions all round the world in ways quite unforeseen and unintended by the men who preached and prophesied so vehemently. Had writing remained the monopoly of a privileged clique, the angry words of prophets who so freely attacked established practices would never have been written down. Hence the democratization of learning implicit in simplified scripts must be counted as one of the major turning points in the history of civilization.

* ae *

The barbarian invasions of the thirteenth to eleventh centuries B.c. brought few lasting changes to the cultural scene of the Middle East. Syria remained the melting pot of the region; and when the cities of Phoenicia arose to domi-

nate the sea trade of the Mediterranean, the workshops of Tyre and Sidon turned out metalwork showing a rather ill-digested assortment of motifs and styles differing little from those which had flourished on the same ground two or three centuries before. Just as in earlier times, the major new art styles were the products of royal courts. As early as the thirteenth century B.c., Assyrian art showed characteristics which were to endure throughout the later imperial period. A fine mastery of animal forms, especially of lions, and a free use of space between figures to concentrate attention on the protagonists may be seen in some early seal engravings. Later, when the Assyrian kings sought to celebrate their greatness by constructing vast palaces and even by founding entirely new cities, sculptors successfully transferred this miniature tradition to full-sized friezes, cut shallowly into stone. These friezes were a species of historical record. Occa48W. FE. Albright, From Stone Age to Christianity, pp. 192-93.

148 Cosmopolitan Civilization in the Middle East, 1700-500 B.C. sional inscriptions identified particular incidents from military campaigns or hunting expeditions; and unusual scenery served as a reminder of particular deeds the sculptor sought to celebrate. Some of the scenes effectively reproduced the fury and confusion of the battlefield; but the masterpieces of Assyrian art are portrayals of the hunt that marvelously convey both the pride of the hunter and the power and pathos of the wounded beasts. Assyrian palace sculpture was a secular art. As such, it was independent of old Mesopotamian religious tradition; no pious precedents or ancient models limited the artists’ achievements, which were, accordingly, of the very highest order.*® Yet the limits of Assyrian cultural innovation were very narrow. Literary records show that the mighty kings of the sculptured friezes were simultaneously prisoners of priests who, in their capacity as guardians of ancient ritual and interpreters of oracles, minutely circumscribed the monarchs’ daily actions.°® Indeed, Assyrian priests appear to have been nearly as powerful in the state as were their contemporaries in Babylonia and just as intent upon maintaining a past which, if not dead, was surely dying.”

Priestly authority was evidenced by the fact that the Assyrians, though builders of the most rationalized, powerful state the world had yet seen, none-

theless sought piously and faithfully to preserve every jot and tittle of the religion and learning they had inherited from Sumer and Babylonia. In fact, much of the literature and religious doctrine of these ancient lands is known to us only through Assyrian copies, which were systematically accumulated by royal scribes and librarians. New composition was scant. Only the royal annals, constituting an elementary sort of history, went beyond antique literary precedent, incidentally permitting modern scholars to reconstruct Assyrian

chronology with an exactitude not matched for earlier periods. For the rest, Assyrian literature, learning, and religion shared fully in the stark conservatism of contemporary Babylonia. When the Chaldaean rulers of Babylon shared with the Medes the lordship of the Middle East, that ancient capital enjoyed a brief period of renewed greatness. The city’s restored imperial power was faithfully reflected in art, for Nebuchadnezzar (604-562 B.c.), like his Assyrian predecessors, constructed monumental buildings on a lavish scale and built himself a magnificent palace. The lower courses of the walls of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, which alone survive, are decorated with colorful glazed tiles molded to form figures in low relief. How faithful these friezes may be to older Babylonian 49 Motifs from other art traditions—for example, the Egyptian winged sun-disk as an emblem of divinity—were used occasionally, though they were thoroughly absorbed into a new, vigorous, and realistic style. I have depended mainly on Henri Frankfort, Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, pp. 65-105, and my own eyes, for these remarks on Assyrian art.

6 Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp.

253-55,

51 In the imperial age, the worship of Ashur seems scarcely to have differed from the worship of Marduk and was clearly modeled on the Babylonian cult.

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The Non-Hellenic Civilizations of Eurasia, 300-100 B.C. 313 to the prosaic common sense and cool moderation of Confucianism. The same

individual might adhere to both philosophies with no sense of strain, since Confucianism was for public occasions, Taoism for private and personal moments. The anarchic, individualist emphasis of Taoism, which made a Taoist organization something of a contradiction in terms,*? meant that the Chinese expressed in private the sentiments which other civilized societies incorporated into organized religion; and this may explain how Chinese government was able to maintain itself for more than two millennia without more than sporadic support from a public and emotionally powerful religion. Thus despite the almost polar opposition of their emphases, Confucianism and Taoism fitted together into a whole, complementing and completing each other like the two halves of the Yin-Yang symbol. 3. THE FAR WEST: ROME AND WESTERN EUROPE, 336-146 B.C.

Westerners are so much accustomed to putting their own history in the foreground that it is perhaps well to underline the marginal character of Roman and European history between the fourth and second centuries B.c. It was only after 146 B.c. that Roman Italy or the western Mediterranean lands at large accepted more than a tincture of the civilization that was already old in the Hellenistic world; and when military conquest of the East, together with social differentiation at home, prepared the way for its reception, the grandeur of that foreign edifice was so overwhelming as to stifle independent Roman

culture—though not before Latin literature had added something to the Hellenistic symphony. The westward expansion of Hellenistic styles of life into barbarian or semibarbarian lands was exactly comparable to similar movements that occurred at roughly the same time on the margins of other civilized societies. Thus the civilization of northern India definitely took root in the south from about the

time of Ashoka (d. 232 8.c.); and in the immediately subsequent centuries, southern India showed rather more cultural independence and creativity than did western Europe. Similarly, the expansion of China southward after the establishment of the Ch’in dynasty (221 B.c.) brought vast new areas within the pale of Chinese civilization; while to the east, between the third and first centuries B.c., Korea and Japan began to construct their own variants upon Chinese cultural models. Even in the Middle East, where, civilization being older, the possibilities of expansion onto new ground were smaller, these centuries saw a significant spread of urbanization eastward into the Oxus and Jaxartes valleys—an expansion which, as we have already noted, occurred under Greek rulers and therefore bore a generally Hellenistic stamp.

Yet there was one great difference; for Rome conquered the core area of Hellenism and proceeded to overrun roughly half of the still older Oriental world as well. By comparison with the Hellenistic Far West, the Indian Far South and the Chinese Far East and Far South were politically passive. While Rome created a military power superior to all her Mediterranean rivals, the 40 ‘Taoist monasteries existed in China, but they arose only in response to the challenge to indigenous habits of thought offered by Buddhism in the early centuries of the Christian era.

314 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. converts to Indian and Chinese civilization on the Asian mainland were rela-

tively peaceful folk who, far from conquering their civilizers, were conquered by them.*? Thus, while each of the peripheral civilizations of Eurasia developed a duality between older heartland and new “colonial” region, the political dominance of the Hellenistic colonial area over its heartland gave the structure of that society a distinctive aspect. The early stages of the rise of Rome may be conceived as an instance of a successful native reaction against foreign pressures. Rome’s position on the margins between the centers of Greek and Etruscan power in Italy gave her a head start over a rival “native reaction” that developed among the Samnite tribes farther south. Even so, long and difficult wars with the Samnite con-

federacy (343-290 B.c.) formed the prelude to Roman supremacy in Italy. Defeat of the Samnites was followed by the subjugation of Etruria; and after these victories, the Romans found it comparatively easy to consolidate their control over the Greek cities of Italy, despite setbacks when they first encountered the full panoply of Hellenistic warfare, as exemplified by the armies of King Pyrrhus of Epirus (282-272 s.c.),. Asa result, by 265 B.c. all Italy south of the Apennines recognized Roman leadership. The conquest and political consolidation of Italy was the key to subsequent Roman victories. For Italy was densely populated by a hardy peasantry; and Italian society was morally united up and down the social scale in a fashion conspicuously absent from the Hellenistic East. Consequently, after winning

control of all Italy, Rome disposed of a dependable pool of military manpower far greater than any rival state could command. Even after the uproot-

ing of peasant proprietors during the Second Punic War against Carthage (218-202 B.c.) brought social strife to the peninsula, the numbers and hardihood of the Italian peasant soldiery continued to give Roman generals an easy superiority over their opponents.

The contrast between the inveterate particularism of Greek cities and the relative ease with which the Romans consolidated all of Italy into a web of alliances reflected the survival in Italy of loose and comparatively flexible cantonal and tribal federations. Sovereignty having never been sharply localized in definite territorial and institutional units, like the Greek city-states, but being rather dispersed between kinship, territorial, federal, religious, and mili-

tary associations, could be further consolidated into a superfederation controlled by the Senate and people of Rome without doing violence to any deep-seated Italian loyalties. The Greek cities of Italy, to be sure, could not so easily renounce their sovereign independence; and when Hannibal seemed to offer an alternative, not a few of them took the opportunity to abandon the 1The Chinese cultural frontier did, of course, also march with warrior peoples of the. steppe; and the Ch’in subdued all China by using military techniques perfected in frontier warfare against the steppe

peoples. The relation of Ch’in to the center of Chinese civilization was therefore very like that of Rome to the Hellenistic world; but the Ch’in empire did not outlast its founder. In Japan, too, Chinese culture came into contact with a people whose traditions (from whatever source) were quite as warlike as those of Europe. But not until the sixteenth century a.p. did Japan make any prolonged and serious effort to duplicate the Roman feat—at a time when the divergences between Chinese and Japanese cultures had become far more deeply fixed than was the case when rude Roman countrymen first gaped at the luxury of Corinth.

The Non-Helleme Civilizations of Eurasia, 300-100 B.C. 315 Roman allegiance. But when Carthage had ceased to be a serious rival to Rome (202 s.c.), the overpowering weight of the Italian populations massed together under Roman leadership gave the Italian Greeks no further opportunities to express their local discontents. The First and Second Punic Wars (264-202 b.c.) made Rome an empire. For the first time, the Romans annexed provinces overseas which were not admitted to the Italian system of alliances. The Second Punic War, moreover, worked decisive changes within Italian society. Years of interminable campaigning pried many peasant soldiers loose from their ancestral farms; and an idle urban proletariat, which subsequently played an important political role, began to drift into Rome. Simultaneously, senators and tax farmers who collected provincial revenues became rich beyond all Roman precedent. As Roman society thus underwent an extremely rapid economic differentiation, the upstart rich of the new capital of the Mediterranean world began to feel the attraction of the luxuries and refinements of Greece. To the horror of old-style Romans like Cato, Hellenistic urban styles began to seep into the city on the Tiber. The seepage became a flood after 146 B.c., when the spoils from the sack of Corinth—including numerous art objects—were brought home. Thus Rome, having won her first political successes as champion of a rude peasant reaction against the alien corruptions of civilization, was herself finally ensnared by the siren attractions of the selfsame civilization in its Hel-

lenistic form, Profound irony lay in the fact that Rome’s military success against the more civilized but socially and politically more divided peoples of

the eastern Mediterranean resulted in the rapid assimilation of the Roman social structure to that of the effete and abject East they so despised. Although the rise of Rome to empire was the dominating development in the Hellenistic Far West in this period, Rome was not the only expanding

power of the area. North of the Alps, from a dispersal area on the middle Danube, tribes of Celts continued sporadically to overrun weaker neighbors,

all the way from Asia Minor to the Atlantic face of Europe.*? Civilized peoples first felt the power of these barbarians when they burst into the Po Valley (fouth century s.c.) and ravaged the Balkans before settling in Asia Minor (third century s.c.). But for all their formidable impetus in battle, the Celts characteristically failed to create any stable, large-scale political-military organization, and as they settled down to an aristocratic ease, based upon the exploitation of conquered populations, they soon lost their primitive military

energy. Celtic mercenaries and allies serving with the Carthaginians constituted a formidable threat to Roman power as late as Hannibal’s day; but with his defeat, they ceased to be a serious menace to Italy. Caught between expanding German tribes to the north, whose poverty made cattle thieves into heroes, and Roman armies to the south, whose discipline made peasants into soldiers, the aristocratic Celtic warriors found the military balance tipped decisively against them by 150 B.c. This situation condemned Celtic culture to an early extinction, save along the westernmost Atlantic fringes of Europe, where Roman power and civili#2 Celtic conquests began in the eighth century and continued as late as the second.

316 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. zation never fully penetrated. Yet between the fourth and first centuries B.c., the Celts developed a protocivilization principally expressed in complex oral literature: partly secular, commemorating the deeds of ancient heroes; and partly sacerdotal, expounding cosmology, immortality, and other religious doctrines. Colleges of bards and priests transmitted and elaborated this literature and exercised judicial and augural functions as well. Maintaining close links across tribal boundaries, the colleges gave a degree of homogeneity to the higher aspects of Celtic culture in western Europe." The druids of Britain, Gaul, and Ireland presumably represented a fusion between Indo-European forms of worship and the older traditions of Bronze Age “megalithic” religion. A western European style of civilization might have arisen from these roots had not the civilization of the Mediterranean area been so near and so impressive. As it turned out, however, the Arthurian legends of medieval Brittany and the literary records left by the precocious Christian civilization of Ireland (fourth to seventh centuries a.p.) constitute the only surviving samples of the achievements of Celtic culture; and even these in the forms available today are much transformed by Mediterranean elements—Christianity chief among them.**

C. THE EURASIAN ECUMENE, 100 B.C.-200 A.D. I. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS

The establishment of a Chinese garrison in the Ferghana oasis in 101 B.c. almost bridged the geographical gap which had previously separated the Chinese from their civilized contemporaries in western Asia. Less than forty years later, the Roman frontier reached the upper Euphrates, which became an almost permanent, though much disputed frontier between Rome and Parthia thereafter. Then, in the first century a.p. (or perhaps earlier), the consolidation of a Kushan empire forged a final link between Parthia and China, completing a chain of civilized empires that extended all across Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Throughout its length this Eurasian civilized

belt confronted steppe nomads whose raids and migrations continued, like ocean waves, to break from time to time upon the fringes of civilized, sedentary societies. Indeed, the nomad challenge was sufficiently important that the 43 The druids of Gaul, for example, customarily went to Britain to study the more recondite aspects of their religion. Julius Caesar, Gallic War, VI, 13. 44 For these remarks on the Celts, I have consulted Henri Hubert, Les Celtes depuis l’époque de la Tene

(Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1932), pp. 223-26; J. A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911), pp. 293-318 and passim; T. D. Kendrick, The Druids: A Study in Celtic Prehistory (London: Methuen & Co., 1927), pp. 194-211 and passim; T. G. E. Powell, The Celts (London: Thames & Hudson, 1958). The parallel between early Aryan culture in north India and that of the Celts of western Europe is striking and has often been remarked. The resemblances cease to be so surprising if one remembers that north India and western Europe represented two extreme wings of the Bronze Age expansion of the steppe warriors. On-both these extreme flanks of the then civilized world, the Indo-European tribesmen overran archaic and in all probability priest-ruled societies—societies which in their turn had distant but real connections with the prime centers of early civilization in the Middle East. Druids and Brahmins may have resembled one another so closely because both arose from a fusion of Indo-European priesthoods with priestly traditions deriving from the megalithic and the Indus societies, respectively.

THE FIRST CLOSURE OF THE EURASIAN ECUMENLE

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political history of the ecumene may in large part be understood as the conse-

quence of shifting pressures brought from the steppes against the various segments of the civilized world.

***

As suitable pasture lands filled up with tribes of horse nomads, struggles for

pasture rights led to the formation of loose confederations among various tribal groups, united, when on campaign, by common obedience to a war leader, but otherwise dispersed over the grasslands with their herds.

At the close of the third century B.c., one such confederation, based in Mongolia, attained a size and cohesion that made it a worthy antagonist to the Chinese empire itself. Chinese historians knew this state as the empire of the Hsiung-nu.* The decisive event in its consolidation appears to have been 45 At its height, the ““ernpire”’ of the Hsiung-nu extended from Manchuria deep into central Asia and exercised a general suzerainty over oasis dwellers of the regions all the way from China to the Jaxartes, as well as over strictly nomad groups as far west as the Aral Sea. Many diverse linguistic and racial groups were embraced in the federation. The ruling group probably spoke a Turkish tongue and was probably related in some fashion to the Huns of later European history. This is an obscure and debated issue, however, for there is a large gap, both chronologically and geographically, between the last Chinese records of the Hsiung-nu, who departed for the West in the second century a.p., and the appearance of the Huns in southern Russia in the late fourth century a.p. Between these dates, there was ample opportunity for disintegration and reintegration of war bands and alliances among the small groups into which every nomad “state” dissolved when the time came to follow the herds over the steppe. The continuity between the political-military association known to the Chinese as Hsiung-nu and the similar confederation known to Europeans as Huns may thus have been very slight. Cf. William M. McGovern, The Early Empires of Central Asia, pp. 87-121, 467-70; E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford: University Press, 1948), pp. 43-46; Franz Altheim, Reich gegen Mitternacht: Asiens Weg nach Europa (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), pp. 27-29.

318 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. the attacks launched by the Ch'in emperor against China’s restless but politically divided nomad neighbors,*® for in 214 B.c., Shih Huang-ti drove the groups that became the kernel of the Hsiung-nu confederacy from Inner to Outer Mongolia. In their new home, the refugees developed a formidable military organization by accepting the principle of absolute obedience to an individual war leader and by subordinating traditional tribal antagonisms to the larger loyalty of the war confederation. No doubt their new military organization was first tested against the natives of Outer Mongolia; but with the outbreak of civil war in China after Shih Huang-ti’s death (208 B.c.), the Hsiung-nu promptly recovered their former pastures in Inner Mongolia and went on to raid far into China. After a difficult and almost disastrous campaign, the first Han emperor was forced to conclude a treaty relinquishing all Mongolia to the Hsiung-nu and agreeing to pay tribute to the new barbarian state."

The rise of a formidable war confederation in Mongolia constituted a serious threat to the steppe peoples farther west. The Hsiung-nu confronted no political or geographical obstacle to indefinite military expansion on the steppe itself, for a victory simply meant the addition either of new pasture lands or of new fighting men to the resources of the confederacy. Distance did set a certain limit, of course: in the absence of highly organized postal systems, the commands of a single war leader could not be effective thousands of miles away. Moreover, if a nomad empire were to achieve more than temporary cohesion, the habit of obedience to such commands could only be instilled by entrusting local leadership to men who owed their authority, not to traditional chieftainship of the tribe, but to appointment by the supreme war chief himself. These adjuncts to nomad empire developed to their fullest extent only in the thirteenth century a.p., when the Mongols not only succeeded in uniting almost all the Eurasian steppe but lapped over into the Chinese, Middle Eastern, and European agricultural zones as well. In the second century B.c., however, the “empire” of the Hsiung-nu was a much simpler and far more precarious structure. After the first burst of conquest—209-174 B.c.—successive war leaders found it difficult to control the allied tribes, whose 46 Cf. the putative barbarian reaction to Sargon of Akkad’s penetration of the Mesopotamian borderlands, mentioned above, pp. 91-92. 47 ‘The diplomatic arrangements thus concluded (200 B.c.) gave expression to what we may consider the normal relationship between China and the nomads. ‘To be sure, this relation was interrupted from time to time either by Chinese efforts to break up nomad power, or by nomad conquest of part or all of China. The ‘“‘normal’’ relationship, however, regularly reasserted itself. Efforts to unite the steppe and the Chinese agricultural world into a single political unit never won enduring success. One or the other half of such a composite state regularly broke away, as nomad conquerors became Sinicized and alienated their fellows who remained herdsmen, or as Chinese soldiers, compelled to live and fight like the nomads of the steppe, withdrew their obedience from a distant and alien imperial court.

The durability of this ‘‘normal’’ relationship was a measure of the advantages it offered to both sides. Tribute from China allowed the nomad war leader to maintain his court on princely scale and, perhaps more important, gave him the means wherewith to reward his chief followers with precious gifts—silks, metal goods, and other luxuries—and thus keep them loyal and obedient. From the Chinese viewpoint, such=“‘gifts’’” were a cheap form of insurance against incursions from the steppe. Cf. Owen Lattimore, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: American Geographical Society, 1940), for a detailed analysis of this secular relationship and its geographical determinants.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.—200 A.D. 319 leaders tended to obey commands only when it seemed locally advantageous to do so. Nonetheless, the mulitary power of this first great empire of the eastern steppe precipitated a far-ranging displacement of peoples: for the alternative to submission was flight. Many nomads submitted, but some preferred to flee

toward the richer and imperfectly defended lands to the west and south. Their movements started a wave of migration that affected all Eurasia. Thus,

for the first time, under the prick of Hsiung-nu political consolidation in Mongolia, the steppe gradient came fully into operation.

***

Iranian-speaking peoples were the protagonists of the resulting political disturbances; for Shakas and Kushans in Afghanistan and India, Parthians in Iran, and Sarmatians in southern Russia all appear to have spoken Iranian dialects. The flights of these peoples abandoned the central portions of the steppe

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320 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. to Turkish-speaking tribes;** while their conquests rolled Hellenistic political frontiers back to the Euphrates. Details and sometimes even the main outlines of these migrations and conquests are unfortunately obscure. Chronological uncertainty surrounds the

central fact in the whole drama: the consolidation of the Kushan empire,” which temporarily closed the Iranian aperture upon the steppe against further

nomad incursion and thereby created a propitious political climate for the caravan trade that came to link India, China, and the Middle East more closely than ever before. Yet the general pattern of events seems clear enough. On

the extreme flanks of the ecumene, neither Rome nor China was deeply affected by the military and political events of the steppes until near the end of the second century a.p. Their evolution, therefore, proceeded along lines dictated mainly by an internal balance of forces; and the striking resemblances between Han and Roman history may be attributed to resemblances in the social structures of the two empires. In the middle reaches of Eurasia, however, the disturbances generated by the Hsiung-nu empire were felt in drastic fashion between 165 and 128 B.c., when a massive irruption of Yueh-chi’® and Shaka tribesmen brought a new political regime to eastern Iran. A conspicuous casualty of this movement was the Greek kingdem of Bactria.”! Parthia survived the assault much more successfully. Although the initial shock of Shaka raids compelled the Parthian monarchs to loosen their grip on Mesopotamia (which they had but recently conquered from the Seleucids), under King Mithridates II (123-87 B.c.) this state staged a brilliant recovery. As a result, many of the Shaka princelings of eastern Iran recognized Parthian suzerainty, and on his western flank Mithri-

dates was able to build a powerful empire that united western [ran with Mesopotamia and Armenia. A century or more later, the Kushan empire emerged on the Parthians’ eastern flank. The consolidation of Kushan power dislodged Shaka bands from Bactria and drove them into India, where they 48 ‘The operation of the steppe gradient reversed a flow from west to east which had earlier led first peasant farmers, then charioteers, and lastly nomad horsemen across the oases and steppe lands of Asia. The linguistic drift which thus set in during the second century s.c. continued to operate for about 1600 years and brought first Turks and then Mongols far westward. The movement was then reversed again in modern times by Russian colonization and conquest of Siberia and central Asia. 49 Scholars have ranged all the way from 80 B.c. to 278 A.p. In their estimate of the beginning of the “Kushan era.” Cf. Louis de la Vallée Poussin, L’/nde aux temps des Mauryas et des barbares, Grecs, Scythes, Parthes, Yuetchi (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1930), pp. 343-74. The most recent study I have seen tentatively suggests that the consolidation of the empire dated from about 46 a.p.; but adequate evidence is still lacking. Roman Ghirshman, Bégram: Recherches archeologiques et historiques sur les Kouchans

(Cairo: Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale, 1946), pp. 118-24. 50 “[ribes known by this name to Chinese historians fled from the modern province of Kansu about 165 B.c. They settled first in the Ih River region of modern Kazakhstan and then trekked farther west into modern Afghanistan where, in all probability, elements among them constituted the core of the Kushan empire. No alternative name for the Yueh-chi has entered scholarly currency, although the Chinese term may be misleading when applied to an Iranian-speaking group. Cf. Berthold Laufer, The Language of the Ytie-chi or Indo-Scythians (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1917); Sten Konow, “On the Nationality of the Kusanas,” Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, LXV U1 (1914), 85-100.

51 A few Greek rulers maintained themselves for more than a century afterward south of Hindu Kush.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.-200 A.D. 32] established another series of petty states. The Kushans, however, soon pursued their defeated rivals southward and subdued a fairly wide stretch of territory in northwest India to add to their possessions north of the mountains.”” The consolidation of the Kushan empire had the effect of deflecting steppe

migration routes northward. In consequence, bands of Sarmatians, after debouching from the gap between the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains,

drove the partially Hellenized Scythians from the rich pasture lands of southern Russia and the lower Danube. As a result the Roman legions stationed on the Danube encountered Sarmatian practitioners of the fully developed style of steppe warfare for the first time in 172 a.p.”* But just before this first recorded clash between Roman and Sarmatian troops took place, the ultimate source of politico-military disturbance along the steppe itself disintegrated. For the empire of the Hsiung-nu, strained by long wars with the Chi-

nese and frayed from within by internal frictions, collapsed about 160 a.p. before another conqueror whose homeland lay north of Mongolia.”* But the newly victorious nomad war confederation failed to outlast its founder, and the tribes of the eastern steppe reverted to a condition of military atomization which offered their neighbors respite for more than a century.

***

Two aspects of the civilized response to these steppe migrations deserve emphasis. First, the retreat of Greek rule from Mesopotamia and Iran did not eradicate the impress of Hellenistic culture upon those regions. The Parthian court itself was at least superficially Hellenized;*’ and the kings continued to pursue a “philhellenic” policy toward the cities of their empire. Even the halfbarbarous Shakas, when obliged to govern a country in which city life and agriculture were firmly established, fell back upon Hellenistic precedent so far as their own rude background allowed.”" Second, the Parthians were able to withstand and then roll back nomad attack only because they had developed a new style of armament and tactics effective against the horse archers of the steppe. The key change was the development of a big, strong breed of horse, able to carry enough armor to 52 Great obscurities attend these struggles, and chronology is quite unsatisfactory. Parthian as well as Shaka strains seem to have been present among India’s invaders—perhaps because some of the Shakas continued to recognize Parthian suzerainty. Most of the Shaka states of India were later incorporated into the Kushan empire; but some outlying rulers (the ‘‘satraps of Ujjain’) outlasted the Kushans and probably never accepted outside control in any but the most nominal sense. Cf. Cambridge History of India, 1, 563-85; La Vallée Poussin, L’ Inde aux temps des Mauryas, pp. 261-328. 68 Cf. Michael I. Rostovtzeft, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, pp. 113-46.

64 This event in all probability marks the first eruption of Mongol tribes into history. Cf. René Grousset, L’ Empire des steppes (Paris: Payot, 1939), pp. 73, 93-94. 65> According to Plutarch, Life of Crassus, 33, the Parthian and Armenian kings, who had just concluded a marriage alliance, were watching a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae when Crassus’ head was thrown onto the stage by messengers from the field of Carrhae. Cf. Nelson C. Debevoise, A Political History of Parthia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 93.

66 Roman survivals in Merovingian Gaul provide a rough parallel to the situation of Bactria under.

Shaka rule.

322 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. make both horse and rider effectively arrow-proof.*’ A force of armored horsemen could stand quietly under the harassment of galloping steppe cavalry, exchanging shot for shot, until their assailants’ quivers and horses were both exhausted, when a final charge could be counted on to break the spirit and disperse the forces of the steppe raiders. Seldom could heavy armored cavalry overtake light steppe ponies; but a force of armored men could forbid any locality to the steppe bowmen and make their retreat uncomfortably hasty. The net effect, therefore, of the introduction of armored cavalry—or cataphracts, as the Byzantines later called them—was to establish a fairly exact balance between steppe and civilized warfare. Nomads could not imitate the

new civilized style of armament because the open steppe lacked sufhcient pasture to sustain great horses.°* Similarly, civilized horsemen could not pene-

trate deeply into the steppe, without themselves adopting (as the Chinese in

fact did) the nomad style of light cavalry. Hence a millennial stalemate ensued, each type of cavalry supreme in its own environment, but unable to penetrate the realm of its rival, save occasionally when the military organiza-

tion and social cohesion of one or the other party to the confrontation weakened.*® 67 Experiments with armor as protection against horse archery had been made soon after steppe light

cavalry tactics had been introduced. Herodotus reports, for instance, that the Massagetae, who inhabited very nearly the same region from which the Parthians later came, protected their horses with metal breastplates in 530 B.c. Cf. Herodotus, I, 215. What was new in the first century B.c. therefore was not the idea but the scale upon which armor was used and the strength of the horses which allowed armored cavalry to retain vital mobility even when burdened with a heavy defensive weight of metal. One theory is that the great horse of eastern Iran developed as a result of the crossing of blood strains. Cf. W. W. Tarn, Hellenistic Military and Naval Developments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), pp. 77-83. On the other hand, the discovery that horses could be fed on harvested alfalfa, and thus nourished adequately all through the year, seems quite adequate to account for the development of a breed of large, strong horses. And it is clear from Chinese records that the marvelous ‘‘blood sweating” horses of eastern Iran, which seemed so valuable to the emperor Wu-ti that he sent an expedition to Ferghana expressly in order to secure specimens of the new breed, ate alfalfa, which was accordingly imported into China (along with the grape) by the returned expedition (101 B.c.). Cf. W. P. Yetts, “The Horse: A Factor in Early Chinese History,” Eurasia Septentrionales Antiqua, 1X (1934), 231-55. 58 On the better-watered western portions of the steppe this was less of a limiting factor; and the Sarmatians did in fact maintain relatively large forces of the new style of cavalry. This was probably their main advantage over the Scythians. Farther east, too, the prestige (and beauty) of the big horses made them precious items, which a chief was willing to maintain even at very considerable cost. Thus, in the Altai, where unusual climatic conditions resulted in the deposition of permanent ice in their tombs, chieftains were buried both with little scrub steppe ponies and with great horses. Examination of the stomach contents of the great horses showed that they were fed on grain—human food!—and the condition of their hooves suggested that they had been kept stabled. Cf. Tamara Talbot Rice, The Scythians (London: Thames & Hudson, 1957), p. 71. 5° The full effectiveness of cataphracts depended on stirrups, to give the rider a firm seat on his horse and allow shock tactics. Cavalrymen who were able to charge with fixed lances (like the medieval knights of western Europe), putting the weight of horse and man behind the thrust, could break up any

opposing formation unless it resorted to the same tactics. This appears to have been the great medieval invention of western European warfare, where ancient prejudices against the bow continued to prevail until the time of Crecy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). Iranian and Byzantine cataphracts had no such prejudices and fought regularly with bows, resorting only occasionally to hand-to-hand combat. A Sassanian rock carving nevertheless proves that Iranian cataphracts jousted with lances. See p. 395. Perhaps, therefore, the European knight was not so

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.—200 A.D. 323 During the four centuries between 200 B.c. and 200 a.p., when the Parthians and Kushans took the lead in perfecting a civilized armament capable of coping with the military challenge offered by steppe horsemen, China enjoyed comparative stability. Despite Wu-ti’s delight in the “blood sweating’ horses of Iran, the Han emperors found the new style of heavy cavalry too expensive to maintain on a large scale, since the alfalfa that the great horses required could be grown only by diverting land from the production of human food. They preferred to carry the battle to the enemy by sending armies into the steppe, mounted on steppe ponies like the forces they opposed. Such border wars did not, however, deeply affect internal Chinese affairs.

The political unity of the country remained unbroken; and the political and social balance which had been struck under the first Han emperors continued without important modification until 9 a.p. In that year, an unusually energetic master of court intrigue, Wang Mang, exploited marriage ties with the imperial family to usurp the throne. He then undertook an antiquarian revolution, proclaiming a return to the real or supposed precedents of the Chou as against the corruptions of the more recent Ch’in and Han regimes, Yet under the guise of such doctrinaire Confucianism, Wang Mang did not scruple to tamper with old texts by correcting or “completing” them whenever it suited his interest to do so.*' His reforms had unexpected results; for in discrediting established institutions, he unleashed a widespread peasant rising directed against landlords, officials, and moneylenders. Before long, champions of social order and the old imperial dynasty took the field against him, and against the rebellious peasants as well. Wang Mang was quickly overthrown (22 a.p.);°* but fourteen years of civil war intervened before China was again united under the rule of a scion of the house of Han. much the result of a Western invention as of a Western failure to appropriate the entire panoply of cataphract warfare. The question of when and where stirrups were invented is quite unclear. Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), attributes the first use of stirrups to India; others (with very slender evidence) have attributed it to the steppe nomads. The only certain fact appears to be that stirrups first became common during the fifth—-sixth centuries A.p. in both China

and Europe. Cf. M. Rostovtzeff, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, p. 130; Tamara T. Rice, The Scythians, p. 50; E. H. Minns, The Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge University Press, 1913), p. 250; Charles Singer (ed.), A History of Technology, \1, 556-57. 60 Cf. Berthold Laufer, Chinese Clay Figures. Part 1: Prolegomena on the History of Defensive Warfare

(Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1914), pp. 218-34. As in any stubbornly contested borderland, a class of fighting men who had far more in common with one another than with civilians

in the rear developed on both sides of the Chinese-Hsiung-nu frontier. Cases of desertion back and forth were not uncommon, and famous military leaders could usually count on a warm reception in the enemy camp and renewed employment against their former friends if they so desired. A code of chivalry developed among the border fighters; and a bold leader, charging at the head of his men, won admira-

tion from both friend and foe. For incidents illustrating these points, cf. W. M. McGovern, The Early Empires of Central Asia, pp. 130-302. 61 The lasting effects of Wang Mang’s alterations of the Confucian texts is a matter for scholarly disagreement; but it probably left some traces upon the versions handed down in later times. . 62 He met his death sitting in full regalia upon the imperial throne, hoping perhaps (if he was, indeed, a convinced believer in Confucian doctrine) that the rude soldiers who cut off his head would be overawed by his august presence and by the correctness of his decorum.

324 Closure of the kurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.—200 A.D. Thus was inaugurated the Later Han Dynasty, which endured until 220 a. For the most part, the emperors of this period lacked the ability and energy which had distinguished the founders of the line; and intrigue and violence flourished in high places. After 184 a.p., the central administration increasingly lost control of the provinces. Rival generals manipulated puppet emperors and sought, with varying success, to build up personal power systems.

Widespread popular risings, led by Taoist adepts who claimed magical powers, added to the confusion and lent an element of ideological bitterness to the civil strife. The farce of imperial unity played itself out in 220 a.p., when the last of the Han emperors officially abdicated at the bidding of a general who had already kept him in custody for several years. Despite the intrigues which so often disfigured Han politics, and despite the miserable disorders prevailing toward the close of the dynasty, the constructive importance of the Han period as a whole can hardly be exaggerated. The

ideal of a united China, governed according to Confucian precept, was indelibly implanted in the Chinese mind by the nearly four centuries during which the Han emperors (at least theoretically) upheld this ideal. During the same period, the historic frontiers of China were effectively established. In the course of generations, soldiers, officials, and teachers brought the vast region

south of the Yangtze within the pale of Chinese culture; and the Han conquests in Korea, central Asia, and Mongolia directed a powerful stream of Chinese influence into these borderlands. In other words, under the Han China became China in the political and geographical sense; and to this day, the Chinese remember this fact in popular speech by calling themselves the “Sons of Han.’’®

***

, To a surprising degree, Roman imperial history resembles that of Han China. Roman conquests in western Europe, by which a genteel version of Hellenistic culture was extended into a vast and semi-barbarous area, bear comparison with the conversion of south China to Confucian decorum under the Han. Roman efforts to control Arabia, Armenia, the Caucasus region, and Mesopotamia resemble the rather more successfui undertakings of the Han emperors in central Asia. The northern barbarians with whom the Romans fought and traded, and whom they later hired as mercenaries and admitted as settlers within their borders, bore much the same relation to the Mediterranean world as did the Hsiung-nu to China, although the Romans never had to face a war confederacy as wide-reaching as that against which the Chinese emperors struggled. The parallels extend to internal affairs as well. Julius Caesar’s (d. 44 B.c.) extralegal and almost nakedly military hold on the Roman state closely resembled the position Shih Huang-ti had won in China almost two centuries 68 ‘These remarks on Han politics depend on W. Eberhard, A History of China (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 71-105; O. Franke, Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches, 1, 358-431; Pan Ku,

The History of the Former Han Dynasty, Homer H. Dubs (trans.), 3 vols. (Baltimore, Md.: Waverly Press, 1938-55).

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C. —200 A.D. 325 before. Moreover, both these upstarts set out to reorganize the power relations of their respective societies with scant regard for precedent or legal niceties,

and their successors, after renewed bouts of civil war, found it prudent to veil naked military despotism behind more decorous forms. Thus Augustus (d. 14 a.p.) deferred to the political pieties of Rome by “restoring the Republic” (27 B.c.) without, however, surrendering his own supreme military control of affairs; while the first Han emperors supplemented and sustained the victories of their armies by invoking the sanctions of Confucianism.

The Roman imperial bureaucracy under Augustus’ successors suffered from ills similar to those besetting the Han—palace intrigue, systematically oppressive tax collection, and an occasionally corrupt officialdom. The nostalgic classicism of the Antonine age (117-180 a.p.), with its reverence for ancient Greece, had a counterpart in China also, where Confucian scholars lavished uncritical admiration upon the Chou and still earlier dynasties. Finally, the rude militarism of Septimus Severus (197-211 a.p.), raised to the purple by civil war, resembled the regimes set up by Chinese warlords of the late Han period. Underlying such parallels was a significant likeness in social structure. Both in the Roman empire and in China, a class of genteel landowners, living upon rents from country estates, dominated society. In both empires, this class provided the leading personnel of public administration and exhibited a declining

enthusiasm for the rigors of a military career. Indeed, the way of life of a Roman gentleman of the second century a.p., residing in town, collecting taxes on behalf of the central government, entertaining at elegant banquets, dabbling perhaps in belles lettres or philosophy, and cultivating a taste for the fine arts—was astonishingly similar to that of his Chinese counterpart, if one overlooks the radical difference of the forms in which their respective cultural heritages found traditional expression. The status of peasants and townsmen— the former owing heavy rents to their social superiors, the latter catering to the tastes of wealthy landowners—was also very similar in the two empires. There were, of course, important differences as well. The Roman empire was culturally pluralistic. In the eastern Mediterranean lands, the dominant Greek tradition mingled with a massive Oriental inheritance which rose to renewed prominence as the é/az of Greco-Roman civilizatian decayed in the first centuries A.p.; while in the West, the Latin version of Hellenistic culture never entirely assimilated the complexities and corruptions of the Greekspeaking East. In Han China, on the contrary, a single high cultural tradition predominated throughout the empire; and regional variations had little importance.

Another vital difference concerned the role of the family. Loyalty to relatives, even of the second or third degree, stood high in the scale of Chinese virtues; and widely ramified family cliques formed the basis of much Chinese political activity. The Confucian emphasis on filial piety and on the importance of having sons to honor departed ancestors also exalted family ties and gave the Chinese gentry a comfortable social nexus in which to live. All this was absent from Roman society, where a comparatively radical individualism

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336 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. always, not to mechanical copying, but to metamorphosis—for as alien elements are incorporated into a new cultural environment, they inevitably acquire meanings and symbolic values different from those they had originally

borne.

***

The steppe zone, too, transmitted art motifs throughout Eurasia. From eastern Europe to eastern Siberia, all the steppe peoples participated in an “animal style,” which first appeared in the seventh or sixth century B.c., when steppe nomadry assumed its mature form. This animal style borrowed some elements from civilized traditions—e.g., the Sarmatians favored polychrome work, related to Iranian art, which in due course was communicated to European barbarians and became one of the sources of European medieval art.

Similarly, Chinese and nomad art interacted in limited respects across the eastern steppe frontier. But by the nature of steppe life, nomad art could find expression only in the decoration of easily portable small objects. Full-blown monumental art could not arise from such roots."

Reicion. The civilized peoples of western Eurasia, who lived under the political domination of the Roman, Parthian, and Kushan empires, remained for the most part quite satisfied with the cultural institutions and traditional ways of life that had been built up over the generations in their respective parts of the world. The Hellenized gentlemen of the Roman towns, the baronial aristocrats of the Iranian countryside, and the Aryan upper classes of India all had rich and intrinsically attractive ways of life to defend and maintain. Fach did so with general success. Yet, to other social strata, the civilized traditions of their societies meant far less. The peasant majority of each civilized community had small share in

the culture of their social superiors. But local village life and the age-old rhythm of the fields, together with magical precautions and festive observances, constitued a simpler but more stable cultural tradition than any known to the upper classes. No serious challenge to the high cultures of India, the Middle East, or Europe could come from the subject peasantries, although their exclusion from the arcana of each civilization did constitute a potential weakness.

Far more critical was the life of the cities, where large numbers of men, drawn from diverse regions, with differing social and cultural inheritances, came together. Particularly in regions where urban life was new, or newly expanded, city dwellers must often have found themselves emotionally adrift. lacking a firmly established pattern of conduct and belief to which they could

naturally and unconsciously adhere. Men in such a position obviously sloughed off many of the moral commitments that normally divide mankind into separate cultural communities. 74On Hsiung-nu art, cf. René Grousset, L’ Empire des steppes, pp. 59-62; on Sarmatian art, cf. Rostovtzeff, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, pp. 181-208, Rostovtzeff, The Animal Style in South Russia and China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1929).

The Eurasian Ecumenc, 100 B.C. -200 A.D. 337 The lost souls among the slaves and artisans of the Roman cities therefore formed part of a much larger mass of culturally dispossessed individuals, who found themselves psychologically alienated from established religious and cultural values. In this respect, inhabitants of the great trading cities of central Asia, India, Iran, and Mesopotamia, as well as of the emporia of the eastern Mediterranean and of Rome itself, were all in the same boat. Among such populations, to whom political and cultural frontiers were largely irrelevant, the great and truly world-shaking religious developments of the period found fertile ground. Another dimension to the cultural map of western Eurasia between 100 B.c. and 200 a.p. contributed decisively to religious history. In addition to the politically ascendant Greco-Roman, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan societies and cultures of the age, there were a number of politically submerged, yet still living cultural traditions, whose adherents found themselves in some measure assimilated to the condition of the uprooted populations of the great cities. Egyptians, Jews, and Syrians in the Roman empire; Jews, Babylonians, and Greeks in Parthia; and Greeks, together with the Dravidian, Munda, and other nonAryan populations of India, were all in some sense dispossessed by the political and social structures under which they lived. Members of such groups had the choice either of abandoning the cultural traditions of their forebears by conforming to alien ways or of experiencing the frustration of a life in which some of their most deeply held values could not find full expression. Reinterpretation and readjustment of their cultural inheritance, together with a complex process of cultural syncretism, was the inevitable response to such circumstances.

The Jews are the only politically submerged people about whom anything much is known. Yet it seems likely that the career of several other peoples during the same centuries bore a general likeness to the tribulations through which Jewry passed under the Roman and Parthian empires. To be sure, the Jews survived as a distinct people, owing to the uniqueness of their religious and literary heritage, and the extraordinary social discipline that kept Jewish communities cohesive in the midst of an alien and often hostile world. Nearly all the others sooner or later lost their separate identuity—but only after prolonged travail which found mainly religious expression. These peoples, together with the slave and artisan classes of the great cities of western Asia, provided the social setting for the extraordinary religious efflorescence of the period just before and just after the Christian era. Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism were, of course, the chief monuments of this efflorescence, but they did not stand alone. A wide variety of mystery religions flourished in the Roman empire. In India, religious sects and movements were even more various; for it was during these centuries that Hinduism began to emerge from the older Brahminism, through a revaluation of the immemorial multiplicity of local worships. Very imperfect information sug-

gests that similar religious seeking was prevalent also in Mesopotamia, although the main manifestations of religious invention in that ancient land date from a slightly later period (third to sixth centuries a.p.).

338 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. Like Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Orphism in earlier centuries, the new religious movements centered in regions where two or more cultural traditions met and overlapped. Thus Christianity took form in Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia, where Jewish, Greek, Iranian, and (more weakly) Indian cultures intermingled; Hinduism evolved with particular vigor in southern India, where intrusive Aryan and (much weaker) Greco-Roman cultures encountered indigenous Dravidian tradition, and Mahayana Buddhism assumed its mature form in northwest India, where Indian, Iranian, and Greek cultures met. Such multiplicity provided an ample stock of ideas and motifs of piety from which new religions might evolve. Important resemblances between Christianity, Mahayana Buddhism, and Hinduism may be attributed to borrowings back and forth among previously more or less independent and isolated religious traditions. But parallel invention should not be ruled out, for, if the social and psychological circumstances of the submerged peoples and urban lower classes were in fact approximately similar in all parts of western Asia, we should expect to find close parallels among the religious movements which arose and flourished in such milieux. This is in fact the case; for three fundamental features shared by the major religious movements of the age distinguished them from anything that had gone before. First, Christianity, Mahayana Buddhism, and Hinduism agreed in defining the goal of all human life as salvation. All three promised their adherents eternal life in a blissful afterworld,’’ although prerequisites for entry into such a blessed state, and theoretical descriptions of Heaven and of the mode of sur-

vival after death, differed substantially from one religion to another. The older concept of religion as necessary for maintaining cordial relations with the supernatural powers that ruled the world was not abandoned; but emphasis shifted from the short-term practical advantages that might be expected in this life to the eternal bliss of Heaven, where all the sorrows of the world would find redress.‘®

Second, all the new religions of western Asia were egalitarian in the sense that any ordinary man could perform the duties and participate in the rites which were held to be necessary for salvation. Even more important, women as well as men were admitted to full participation in religious services and deemed capable of salvation. This constituted a great source of strength; for women had almost invariably been excluded from equal franchise in earlier religious systems. The new forms of worship therefore offered them hope of escape from the inequalities and inequities under which they continued to la‘8 “This was nothing new, for Egyptian and Megalithic religion, not to mention Orphism, had held such hopes before their adherents for millennia. Yet ‘salvation’? was new in the sense that earlier religions had viewed the afterworld as essentially a continuation of life as lived on earth, perhaps with some inescapable diminution of its fulness. The new religions of salvation, on the contrary, held that life beyond the grave involved radical change and improvement of society, so that only purged and purified spirits could share in life eternal. 76 The psychological power of such a view of the human condition need not be emphasized. Everyone born into the tradition of one of these religions rejects only regretfully the comfort such an explanation of man’s place in the universe affords.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C. —200 A.D. 339 bor in daily life. Therefore it is scarcely surprising that the most pious and energetic adherents of the new faiths were women; and through their influence upon children, they were able to assure comparatively rapid propagation of the new doctrines. A third common feature was the concept of a savior God who was both a person and at the same time universal in his nature. Such a savior, 1t was held, conferred salvation upon his worshippers either by allowing them to become identified with him, thus directly sharing his power and immortality, or else by a transfer of merit or of power, more mechanically conceived, which was, however, completely adequate to assure the salvation of the recipient. The gap between universal, omnipotent, omniscient deity and the helpless human individual was bridged by the concept of a god-man, who of his own free will descended into human form to lead men toward salvation. Christ and Mithra, Vishnu and Shiva, and the innumerable Bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism all shared these characteristics. Logic may find it impossible to combine transcendent Deity with God Incarnate. Similarly, monotheism and polytheism may be logical antitheses. But in practice, such incompatibles fit well together. Christianity as well as Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism were monotheistic in the sense that they assigned all power and glory to God the Savior, Creator, and Sustainer; yet all three cults made room for the invocation and adoration of lesser beings— saints and angels in the Christian tradition, and local gods and spirits assigned to the retinue of one or another incarnation of the supreme deity in Indian lore. In general, the Christians, as heirs of the stricter and more intolerant monotheism of Judaism, were somewhat more cautious than Hindus or Buddhists in allowing subordinate objects of devotion to distract attention from the supreme Deity. Yet, despite the scruples of theologians, early Christian piety quickly plunged into a thicket of saint worship, essentially similar to the adoration of local deities which proliferated endlessly in both Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism. The difference, therefore, lay more in theory than in practice. But the theoretical difference did not lack important consequences,

for subsequent Christian history was distinguished by recurrent efforts to purify the faith by eradicating idolatrous excrescences, whereas the Indian religions, having accorded full theoretical sanction to any and every form of local worship, however crude or strange its rites, were exempted from such crises of conscience.’ A pervasive historicity of outlook also distinguished Christianity from its Indian contemporaries. Christians regarded the Creation, Incarnation, and Last Judgment as unique events which gave meaning and hope to ordinary terrestrial human life. Against this historical, trme-bound view, Buddhists and Hindus set a cosmological vision of innumerable worlds endlessly repeating a ‘7 The divergence went back a long way in time. Aryan priests, too, had perhaps once tried to eradictate the worships of the land. But Brahmins soon found it preferable to compromise with village pieties and presently justified such cults with the doctrine that some portion of abstract deity inhered in

every form of worship. Christian theology, on the other hand, inherited the ancient Hebrew tension between Yahweh and the baals of Canaan; and, like the Hebrews, Christians could neither exclude nor entirely approve the adoration of saints and other local cult practices.

340 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.—200 A.D. cyclical process of creation and destruction. Divine incarnations multiplied, becoming in fact infinite in number, so that no single divine event could have the unique significance for Hindus or Buddhists that Christians assigned to the coming of Christ. Finally, religions like Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism may be distinguished from numerous competing forms of worship by their emphasis upon ethics. Devotees of Serapis and Isis, for example, and of certain Hindu cults, were not expected to change their usual mode of life very significantly in order to qualify for salvation. Magical rites sufficed. But Buddhism and Christianity associated eternal salvation with an ethical code to be aspired after in this world and attained perfectly in the next. This ethical aspiration, together with effective ecclesiastical organizations, gave these two faiths a much firmer hold on their followers’ daily lives than any merely ritualistic religion could

have possibly achieved. This palpable imprint upon the everyday life of the community of believers, as much or more than any doctrinal superiority,

accounted for the extraordinary successes that came to Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism.

Christianity. In the strict sense, Christianity began with the preaching and death of Jesus af Nazareth, about 27-30 a.v. Yet much of Jesus’ gospel was no more than an emphatic assertion of ideas already familiar in the Judaism of his day. From the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-163 B.c.), who had stirred up revolt by trying to Hellenize Jewish worship, and of the Maccabees, who established an independent Jewish state in Palestine (168-42 B.c.), the expectation of a Messiah who would bring God’s kingdom to earth had excited vivid attention among the Jews. Just what the Messiah would be like was a matter for debate. Some expected a conquering monarch who would restore the kingdom of David; others awaited a supernatural being, arriving on wings of fire at the end of time, when the skies would open

to reveal God’s ineffable glory.”* Difficult conditions of life in Palestine (which came indirectly under Roman rule after 63 B.c.) convinced more and more Jews that God would not long permit such injustices to endure. Special communities arose, like that revealed by the Qumran Dead Sea scrolls, whose members held themselves in a constant state of readiness for the end of the world, seeking to avoid every form of defilement lest God should find them unworthy of his kingdom on the last day. Connected closely with these messianic visions was the idea, championed primarily by Pharisees, that the righteous might look forward either to personal immortality or to bodily resurrection on the Day of the Lord. This doctrine, smacking of Iranian and Hellenistic notions, was resisted by other Jews, who found no basis for such beliefs in the Law and the Prophets; but lack of traditional sanction did not prevent a doctrine so attractive to men in a troubled time from taking firm root in the Jewish community. 78 Iranian, and especially Zoroastrian, motifs were prominent in the imagery used to describe the end

of the world. The Jews of Babylon may have been particularly prominent in bringing this strand of thought into Judaism, since they were most closely in touch with Iranian religious speculation.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.—-200 A.D. 34] Jews living outside Palestine laid the groundwork for Christianity in quite another fashion. Living far away from Jerusalem, they could not regularly participate in the services at the Temple. Instead, they kept alive religious practices, first developed during the exile in Babylon, that could be pursued locally. In addition to family observances, which were of great importance, the Jews of the diaspora maintained the custom of meeting at weekly intervals

for public reading from the Scriptures, accompanied by exposition of the meaning of the texts. Special buildings—synagogues—housed such meetings

and became public centers for Jewish community activities. These synagogues provided the cells out of which the Christian churches were to grow. Apart from this institutional cradle, the Jewish diaspora also prepared the way for Christianity by initiating a generalized process of acculturation between Jew and Greek. The Jews of the diaspora were inevitably exposed to the ideas and habits of the Hellenized urban world. Many such Jews spoke Greek as their native language; and they admitted a fair number of pagan converts into their community. But even after accepting Judaism, such converts inevitably retained many of their old habits of thought and feeling. This situation and the over-all pressure of the environment gave many Jewish communities a semi-Hellenized character; and men were not wanting who, like

Philo of Alexandria (20 B.c.-50 a.p.), sought to interpret Judaic religious belief in terms of Greek philosophy. Such rapprochement between Jew and Greek smoothed the way for Christianity’s transition from the status of a Jewish sect to a religion that drew most of its converts from the pagan world. Yet, when these anticipations and preparations for the Christian revelation

have been duly taken into account, there remains a central spark that was unique. The spark was provided by a handful of very humbly situated Galileans—Jesus himself first and foremost, together with Peter and the other dis-

ciples. The personality of Jesus must have been extraordinarily vivid. His injunctions and personal example challenged his most devoted followers to live up to an utterly uncompromising ethical ideal—““Turn the other cheek”’; “Love thy neighbor as thyself”; “Do unto others as you would be done by” —proclaimed initially with all the high emotion generated by an eager antici-

pation of the imminent end of the world. Jesus’ message, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” certainly excited powerful emotions among his immediate followers and stirred the messianic hopes of a much wider group of hearers as well. Given the exacerbated state of public feeling endemic to Palestine at the time, it was not strange that Jesus’ preaching should

have occasioned a riot in Jerusalem, nor that he should have been arrested and crucified for blasphemy and sedition. The really remarkable thing was that his teachings survived his death. The account preserved in Acts of how a handful of Jesus’ most intimate followers gathered in an upstairs room and there suddenly felt the Holy Spirit descend upon them until they became absolutely convinced that their Master who had just died on the cross was with them still bears all the marks of authenticity.

It was, after all, an event no one present could possibly forget, and sufficiently miraculous to require no embroidery in retelling. After undergoing

342 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. such an emotional experience, which, moreover, was repeated subsequently, who could doubt that Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter’s son, was in truth the Messiah and would soon return in glory? And who, with such an experience behind him, could refrain from telling others, warning them of the Second Coming, helping them to prepare themselves for it, and explaining the signs and proofs of Jesus’ messiahship? By preaching and teaching, and by inviting

the Spirit through gatherings of the faithful, where scenes from Jesus the Messiah’s earlier appearance among men were recalled and marvelled at, the small kernel of Jesus’ followers that first rallied together after the crucifixion speedily began to add new members and to gain fresh confidence in their new understanding of all the shocking and wonderful experiences they had gone through together.” The next great turning point in Christian history focused around the career of St. Paul. Born in Asia Minor, in the Hellenistic city of Tarsus, Paul was a

man of the great world, not a simple Galilean like the twelve Apostles. A pious, educated, and energetic Jew, he was among the first to attack the ignorant and impious sectaries who had begun to preach the Risen Messiah in the streets of Jerusalem. Yet when journeying to Damascus to urge the local Jew-

ish community of that city not to tolerate the new doctrines in their midst, Paul saw Jesus Christ in a vision and was converted to the faith he had formerly attacked. Having seen Him, Paul preached the Risen Christ; and speaking in Greek to audiences accustomed to Greek habits of thought and turns of speech, he naturally brought a markedly Hellenistic element into his doctrine. The imminent end of the world, to be accomplished by the Second Coming of Christ, remained at the center of the Christian message; but what struck a still stronger chord in the minds of gentile hearers of the gospel was the proof that Paul offered, from his own experience, that Jesus Christ had really risen from the grave. Such a savior might indeed have the power to raise others from their graves if they believed firmly in him and served him faithfully. A question which immediately arose in the Christian communities outside Palestine was whether or not the Mosaic law remained binding. Paul’s answer

was that Christ had abrogated the Old Dispensation by opening a new path to salvation. Other followers of Christ held that traditional Jewish custom and law still remained in force. This issue provoked the first important doctrinal conflict in the Christian community, and, as with any dispute among men deeply convinced that they are in the right, neither Peter and James, the leaders in Jerusalem, nor Paul and Barnabas, who came from Antioch to discuss the question (40 a.p.2), could persuade the other party. Apparently it was agreed to let each group pursue the policy that seemed right to its leaders 79 In subsequent Christian history, sectarian groups have repeatedly reproduced most or all of the unusual psychic manifestations that bound the first Christian community together so powerfully. Men whose ordinary lives involve persistent frustrations easily fall into collective states of excitement. In

such circumstances, red-hot religion offers a surrogate for, and yet hovers on the verge of, mass violence. Popular persecutions of early Christianity and later Christian attacks upon pagans like Hypatia (d. 415) sufficiently attest the kinship between religious excitement and mob action in the Roman empire. More recent sectarian history, both medieval and modern, offers many similar cases.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C —200 A.D. 343 —which meant, in practice, that Paul and his associates found a fertile field for their preaching among the gentiles, whereas the Palestinian Christian community remained a minor Jewish sect. For among the Jews, the discrepancies between their grandiose messianic expectations and the actual accomplishments of Jesus’ life were too great to make the idea of Jesus’ messiahship convincing to anyone who had not already joined the community and felt the Spirit himself.

As the apostolic generation began to grow old and die, it became obvious that their memories of Jesus’ deeds and sayings should be written down. The Gospels evolved from such recollections, supplemented by pious invention designed to show how details of Jesus’ life did in fact fulfil the messianic prophecies and expectations. Christian communities also found a useful and

authoritative exposition of doctrine in Paul’s letters sent to some of the churches he had established. Other writings were added, chief among them the apocalyptic visions of the approaching end of the world that go by the name of the Book of Revelation, until by about 200 a.p., a standard collection of Scripture had been accepted by most or all Christian communities as divinely inspired. This was the New Testament, the reading of which became an important part of Christian worship. The Jewish sacred scriptures were also retained as part of the Christian inheritance, despite attacks upon them made by some speculatively minded converts who found the anthropomorphism and moral crudity of some passages in the Old Testament offensive.

In 66 a.p., a widespread revolt broke out in Palestine, stimulated by messianic hopes similar to those Jesus had himself stirred up. Rome sent troops to restore order; and in the stubborn and most bitter war which followed, Jerusalem was captured and the Temple destroyed (70 a.v.). This upheaval dispersed or destroyed the Christian community in Palestine, and its remnants either merged into the larger Christian community abroad or else returned to the fold of Judaism. The early links between Christianity and Judaism were thereby broken; and the new faith proceeded to make its way in the GrecoRoman world in rivalry, not only with pagan religions, but with Judaism as well.

Since converts inevitably brought their pagan mentality with them into the early Christian churches, Christianity came increasingly to resemble other Hellenized religions. Yet important hallmarks stemming from the Jewish cradle of the faith were never obliterated. An emphatic intolerance of all rival creeds and a closely-knit community were among the most important of these inheritances. Much of Christianity’s early success rested upon the systematic charities through which members helped one another and upon the

ritual weekly meetings for scripture reading, exhortation, and (at first) a common meal commemorating the Last Supper Jesus had taken with his disciples. These too were adaptations of the ordinary practice of the synagogue, adjusted to accommodate the new Christian message. The upshot was to create a cohesive community of believers who viewed the outside world as basically alien and evil, but within their own ranks enjoyed the fellowship, the

344 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. pervasive social discipline, and the burning hope for the future which had long characterized Judaism. Christianity combined these traits with a doctrine better attuned to Greek

minds, and rites freed from regulations and prohibitions which offended Greek feeling. None of the other mystery religions of the Roman empire had as much to offer. A noble ethic, sacred writings’popularly written, yet backed by the sanction of ancient prophecy, a warm emotional brotherhood among the faithful, the promise of eternal and blissful life topped by a vivid expectation of an early overthrow of worldly injustices on earth: all these made a powerful appeal to the poor and dispossessed of the great cities of the Roman world, and beyond Roman borders as well.*°

The birth of Christianity is one of the central dramas of human history. The enormous influence Jesus and a handful of humble Galilean country folk exercised upon subsequent human generations staggers the imagination. The disciples’ success in overcoming the apparent defeat of all their hopes upon the cross and in reinterpreting their experiences was extraordinary in itself, but far

more so in its tremendous consequences, and the new emphasis which the preaching of St. Paul gave to the Christian gospel was no less significant for the future. The actions, thoughts, and feelings of these few men profoundly affected the acts and thoughts and feelings of hundreds of millions. They continue to exercise vast influence to this day and will do so through foreseeable human time; for the living force of Christian faith, hope, and love, together with the no less powerful forces of Christian bigotry and superstition, are by no means yet exhausted.

Buddhism and Hinduism. he obscurities of early Christian history are as nothing compared to the uncertainties surrounding the evolution of Indian religions. Undoubtedly the central reason for this 1s the fundamental ahistoricity of all Indian thought: time and place become irrelevant to those who habitually dwell in the presence of the infinite. The first. generation of Buddha’s disciples preserved the memory of their master’s life and teachings, much as Jesus’ disciples were later to do. But the Buddhist canon of edifying writings was never closed, so that new ideas and modifications of old ones were accepted into the faith for more than a thousand years after Gautama had passed from the scene. The same was true of

Hinduism, with the difference that, having no identifiable founder, it was emancipated from history from the start. Indian sects were always numerous, but generally found it possible to live together peaceably, since there were

many ways to truth and no one in the Indian cultural context was inclined to assume that he alone possessed the key to salvation. The chronically intmate interplay that resulted among all the diverse religious groups of India enormously confused religious history. 80 Successful missionary activity in Mesopotamia, Armenia, Ethiopia, and India started very early, although some scholars doubt the dates which the legends of the churches in those regions assign to tieir origin. Cf. Johann Peter Kirsch, Die Kirche in der antiken griechisch-romischen Kulturwelt (Freiburg :

Herder & Co., 1930), I, 135-38; Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity. Vol. 1: The First Five Centuries (New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1937), pp. 100-108.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.—200 A.D. 345 Despite all uncertainties, it is clear that in the period 200 B.c. to 200 A.p., a

popular Hinduism began to emerge from an amalgamation between sacerdotal Brahminism, immemorial village rites, and a new element: the concept of God Incarnate, strong to save. Simultaneously, it became evident that Buddhism had failed to capture the loyalty of the Indian population as a whole. The decline of Indian Buddhism was centrally due to the fact that it never offered the Indian laity a complete religion. Early Buddhism knew no ceremonies for birth and death, marriage, illness, and other critical turns of pri-

vate life; and Buddhist observances for occasions of more public moment likewise failed to develop. Only for the community of monks did Buddhism provide a complete and well-defined way of life. Ordinary folk might adhere to the faith by contributing to the support of the monks or by engaging in solemn perambulation of stupas and other sacred spots in order to acquire

some tincture of the holiness inherent in these places. Rulers and men of wealth might build sacred structures or edify the public by commissioning sculptured monuments celebrating Buddha’s career. But Brahmins were needed for all the ordinary crises of life, ready with their rites and sacred formulas to ward off danger or minimize the damage. This elemental fact assured the survival of Brahminism in India, despite the vigorous attack upon sacrifice and priestly pretention which Buddhism and Jainism had launched in the sixth century B.c. Brahmins, in offering their services as ritual experts to the general public, gradually accommodated themselves to the views and attitudes of the people they served. The villages of India were inhabited, then as now, by peoples of many different tongues and variegated cultural backgrounds. From time immemorial, the villagers had preserved and elaborated the worship of a great variety of gods and spirits, some conceived in human and others in animal or other forms. By appropriately identifying local divinities with figures of the Vedic pantheon, the Brahmins reconciled these multiform cults with Vedic religion and grafted onto village piety some of the high metaphysical speculation that had developed from the original Aryan religion. In the course of time, two figures—the great gods Shiva and Vishnu—gathered to themselves a complex series of traits and stories, until they became rival, yet complementary supreme deities of Hinduism. It does not appear that

the myth cycles—linked together by the doctrine of avatars, according to which Vishnu and (probably only by imitation) Shiva were believed to have incarnated themselves repeatedly in various forms— took anything like canon1cal form until the fourth—sixth centuries a.p. The numerous deities designated

as avatars of the great gods had previously existed in their own right; and Indians worshipped dozens, if not hundreds of other divinities who never won a place in the Vaishnavite or Shaivite cults. Confronted by the practical task of ministering to populations who held so many and such various deities in awe, the Brahmins validated whatever they encountered by interpreting each lesser god as a partial manifestation of the ultimate spiritual reality, corporealized in

a manner suitable to the level of their worshippers’ understandings. This amalgam may be called Hinduism, although the term is perhaps best reserved

346 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.—-200 A.D. for a later age, when a more nearly systematic pantheon and a distinctive mystical cult had begun to give form to the pullulating confusion of local pieties.

**% In the long run, Buddhism failed to hold its own against the Hindu synthesis of high metaphysics and vulgar superstition. Nevertheless, before dissolv-

ing back into the variegated religiosity from which they had sprung, some Indian Buddhist sects underwent far-reaching changes, which adapted them to the emotional needs of laymen who could not or would not accept the more strenuous monastic regimen.

The ideal of early Buddhism had been a mental and physical discipline which culminated in mystic experience, defined as the dissolution of self, or mirvana. Individuals who had attained this blissful state were termed arhats and were believed to have escaped from the wheel of reincarnation. But during the two centuries or so after the beginning of the Christian era, a quite different conception of the highest goal of religious life won wide support among Buddhists. Certain teachers ‘held that instead of seeking the “selfish”’ goals of personal dissolution and the dignity of arhatship, holy men should

refrain from entering nirvana in order to help other, more sinful and misguided men to ascend the ladder of incarnation and ultimately escape from the suffering of existence. Such religious athletes were termed Bodbisattvas and were believed to inhabit a heaven of their own making, pending such time as they might find it suitable to make their own final incarnation and dissolve blissfully into nirvana. The exact steps by which this radical change in emphasis arose within Buddhism are far from clear. Pressure exerted by a laity unwilling or unable to undergo the discipline required of an arhat, but still longing for salvation,

must have been one element in the transformation. Probably another was competition offered by the rising cults of Vishnu and Shiva: certainly some details of the careers and powers later assigned to various of the Bodhisattvas

seem to have been borrowed from the mythology surrounding these two great Hindu deities. Speculative argument about the nature of the Buddha also helped to form the new doctrine. Supernatural and miraculous powers had early been attributed to Gautama Buddha, until, in time, the historical human figure of Gautama became almost unimportant. The term “Buddha” was used to designate the transcendent principle sustaining the cosmos; and Buddha-incarnations multiphed until the particular Buddha of the sixth century B.c. became only a trifling incident in a most complex Buddhology. Speculation about the kind of prior lives which might prepare a person for incarnation as a Buddha led to the concept of the Bodhisattva, or Buddha im potentia. Bodhisattvas in turn took on cosmic proportions, their number multiplied indefinitely, and elaborate mythologies grew up around some of them. Finally, a ritual of worship,

prayer, and self-dedication to one or another Bodhisattva was admitted to

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C -200 A.D. 347 Buddhist devotions. This remodeled form of Buddhism—termed the Mahayana, or Greater Vehicle—thus became a religion offering personal salvation, fully capable of competing with other forms of worship for the attention and devotion of ordinary laymen. Among the Mahayanists, the ideal of personal dissolution as the final aim of religious life tended to fade. To escape an embarrassing vacuum at the pinnacle of their ladder of incarnations, therefore, Mahayana theologians attributed multiple essences to incarnate Buddhas. While one essence might proceed to nirvana and dissolution in the old-fashioned way, others remained as cosmic principles to aid struggling mankind toward salvation. With typical Indian exuberance, Buddhist speculation postulated not one, but hundreds, thousands, and ultimately an infinite number of such saviors—as many as the sands of the Ganges, according to one text—whose merits might be shared by devout believers who invoked their help in prayer. Not only monks, but any

man, however weak and sinful, might hope eventually to enter upon the Buddha-path and, after a suitable number of incarnations, to become a Bo-

dhisattva and a Buddha himself. |

Some of the earliest exponents of Mahayana teachings seem to have lived in southern and eastern India; but the new doctrine found its greatest scope in the northwest. Very probably Kanishka, the imperial Kushan monarch of the second century A.D., patronized Mahayana Buddhism. Certainly the faith penetrated central Asia during the first post-Christian centuries, and from there spread along the Silk Road and into China.*! Despite the radical differences between the Mahayana and the more conservative Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) form of Buddhism, monks of either per-

suasion lived together quite peaceably, often in the same monastery. The divergent doctrines were not felt to be antipathetic to one another; and some Hinayana writings reached China in addition to the Mahayana flood. The success of the Mahayana was due, no doubt, to the warmer hope it extended to mere laymen—busy merchants or poor artisans—who, in their current incarnation, were only expected to pray for salvation and refrain from sinning whenever they could. In Ceylon and Burma, however, the older doctrine generally held the field, perhaps because in those comparatively remote regions the urbanization which elsewhere had created a rootless public thirsting for salvation had not yet advanced very far.

***

The transformation of Buddhism through the development of Mahayana doctrine was as radical as the change that came to Christianity when it left its Jewish cradle and launched itself upon the Greco-Roman world. Moreover, in each case the direction of the shift was the same: earlier emphases were supplemented and eventually superseded by a popular religion, offering high ethical prescripts for this world and the hope of salvation in the next. Bud8! The dates at which certain Mahayana texts were translated into Chinese alone supplies a terminus ad quem for the rise of the Mahayana in India.

348 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C. —200 A.D. dhology, for all its multiplication of saviors, bore a general resemblance to Christology: the idea of divine incarnation was central to both. Something more than the general similarity of social circumstances which existed in the areas where each religion took form seems needed to produce such parallelism. Nonetheless, most students of Buddhism pay only perfunctory attention to the question whether Iranian or Hellenistic ideas contributed in any important way to the rise of the Mahayana. To be sure, some details have caught scholarly attention: for example, the figure of the future Buddha, Maitreya, bears interesting resemblances to Mithra.*” One or two of the Bodhisattvas also have specifically Iranian attributes, indicating that the Buddhist writers whose stories gave a living personality to these particular figures probably borrowed epithets and incidents from Iranian religion. But such details are not much more significant than the appearance of Buddha, under the name of Barlaam, in Christian hagiography in the seventh century A.D.

The central idea of both Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism was the concept of a divine savior or saviors, who assumed human form in order to show mankind the way to blissful life after death. It has long been recognized that Christian soteriology stemmed largely from Greek speculation; it is possible that the same was true of Mahayana Buddhism. Ample opportunity for such intermingling of Greek with Indian thought existed. For example, one of the Greek kings of northwest India named Menander (second century B.c.) gained a reputation in Indian circles as a man of philosophical learning. This is evidenced by a Buddhist religio-philosophic dialogue in which he appears as a protagonist.*’ After Menander’s time, commercial contacts between Indian and the Hellenized cities of the eastern Mediterranean were close; and although merchants were not philosophers, they were fully capable of transmitting the sort of popular religious views which lay behind Christian soter1ology.** Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that Mahayana doctrines may

have been stimulated by Hellenistic notions in a really important way. But we are likely never to know for certain, since whatever communication across cultural frontiers did occur took place among persons of humble social station 82 ‘The whole idea of a savior destined to come at some future time may have percolated from Iranian sources into both Judaism and Buddhism. Eschatology, however, never played a great role in Buddhist thought, for men accustomed to dwell familiarly with an infinite number of worlds and saviors could not attach any unusual importance to the approaching dissolution of the particular world in which they happened to live, or even to the next Buddha in an infinitely extended series of Buddha-incarnations. 83 ‘The book is called Milindapanha, translated as The Questions of King Milinda (TY. W. Rhys Davids

[trans.]) in F. Max Miller, The Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890-94), Vols. XXXV-XXXVI. The holy man who answers Milinda’s questions, the monk Nagasena, was probably one of the principal figures who developed Mahayana doctrines. The historicity of the dialogue 1s, however, out of the question. 84 For a learned survey of the surprisingly extended traces left in Indian literature by “‘Yavanas,”’ or Greeks, see Sylvain Levi, ‘La Grece et |’Inde d’aprés les documents indiens,”’ Revue des études grecques,

IV (1891), 24-25. Cf. also Gauranga Nath Banerjee, Hellenism in Ancient India (2d ed.; Calcutta: the author, 1920); Eugene F. A. comte Goblet d’Alviella, Ce que I’ Inde doit a la Gréece (Paris: Leroux, 1897);

Richard Fick, ‘Die buddhistische Kultur und das Erbe Alexanders des Grossen,’’ Morgenland Darstellungen aus Geschichte und Kultur des Ostens, Heft 25, 1933; K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, ““Ancient Indian

Contacts with Western Lands,” Diogenes, No. 28 (1959), pp. 52-62.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.-200 A.D. 349 —merchants, sailors, caravan attendants, and the like~who made no written records of their conversations with strangers.®

The history of art lends support to the hypothesis that Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism perhaps share a Hellenistic soteriological strand. The Hellenistic imprint is definitely clearer upon Buddhist art than upon Buddhist

theology, for the earliest surviving portraits of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas derive directly from Hellenistic prototypes. Indeed, the Greek custom of portraying gods and heroes in human form must have served to popularize the concept of divine incarnation among uneducated and unsophisticated persons.

To a cultivated Greek or Roman of the second century a.p., a statue of Apollo might be merely a beautiful work of art; to an Indian, a similar statue must have required elaborate explanation: How could a god be a man? And when Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, too, came to be carved in human shapes, the speculation that had already turned Buddha into a cosmic principle must have required re-examination and re-explanation. Mahayana doctrine may in fact have arisen very largely from such an interplay of art traditions with theo-

logical speculation. .

The question must be left open, though it is worth noting that, if Hellenistic ideas did in fact play a formative role in the rise of the Mahayana, then the two major religions of our period were half-sisters, springing from Hellenistic seeds implanted in two different mothers, one Jewish, one Indian, while

a bit higher up the family tree lurked an Iranian father-in-law. To be sure, fertility of religious invention has seldom been lacking in India; and most of Mahayana mythology, the fundamental timelessness of the Buddhist outlook,

and the remarkable multiplicity of incarnate saviors surely derived from India alone. Greek ideas may have provided key stimuli to the development of the Mahayana concept of salvation; but its elaboration and definition took place in a predominantly Indian environment.*®

Iran and China. The state of Zoroastrianism under the Parthians, its relation to Mithraism and other Iranian cults, and the religious policy and belief of the Parthian rulers are simply not known." Certain coins suggest that *> Some of the principal figures in the development of Mahayana doctrine—Ashvaghosa, a poet, playwright, and Buddhist moralist; and Nagarjuna, a sophisticated Buddhist philosopher—are traditionally associated with the court of Kanishka. This court derived substantial income from dues levied on merchants traversing the kingdom, and the main trading centers must have seen a constant mixing of men of widely dispersed geographical origin. Cf. R. Ghirshman, Bégram, pp. 150-54. 86 For these remarks on the beginnings of Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, I have consulted the following: Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951); Edward J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought (2d ed.; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1951); Nalinaksha Dutt, Aspects of Mahayana Buddhism and Its Relation to Hinayana (London: Luzac & Co., 1930); A. Berriedale Keith, Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923); Helmut von Glasenapp, Die fuinf grossen Religionen (Dusseldorf-Cologne: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1951), Vol. I; Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1932); Emil Abegg, Der Messiasglaube in Indien und Iran (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1928); Paul Masson-Oursel et al., L’ Inde antique et la civilisation indienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951); Paul Levy, Buddhism: A “Mystery Religion”? (London: Athlone Press, 1957); A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India; Helmut von Glasenapp, Der Buddhismus in Indien und 1m Fernen Osten (Berlin, Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1936). *7 Roman Ghirshman, L’Iran des origines a l’Islam (Paris: Payot, 1951), pp. 228, 239-43; R. C.

Zachner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961).

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come among the Latin-speaking populations of the West. In the third and fourth centuries a.p., Mithraism in fact became Christianity’s most formidable rival in the Roman world.

In the form known to the Romans, Mithraism was a religion promising blessed immortality; and it retained Zoroastrian dualism by recognizing an evil

principle of the universe as well as a good. But Mesopotamian, Syrian, and Hellenistic motifs were added to the Iranian base of Mithraism—a syncretism that probably occurred in Anatolia in the first century B.c., about the time of the Roman conquest of that region. The greatest weakness of this religion was the exclusively masculine character of its religious brotherhood, well enough suited to a military camp, but ill-suited to society at large. Perhaps for *° Such alternation of policy probably reflected the tension between partially Hellenized towns and a more definitely Iranian countryside which had characterized Iran and parts of Mesopotamia ever since the Macedonian conquest. Kings who relied on town support against an always unruly Iranian aristocracy would normally patronize the still vaguely Hellenic town culture, whereas a monarch dependent directly on the support of the country squires of [ran would be likely to fall back upon Zoroastrianism or some modification of that ancient faith as sign of his Iranian identity. Similar tensions and fluctuations of royal policy became more extreme in the Sassanian period; and Sunni-Shi’a splits in Islam echoed similar social cleavages later still.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C. -200 A.D. 35] this reason, Mithraism ultimately failed to establish itself in Rome or anywhere else.

China’s case was different, for there the burst of religious creativity that distinguished the rest of civilized Eurasia between 100 b.c. and 200 a.p. was conspicuously lacking. During most of this period, the political and social structure of Han China remained intact; and Confucianism and Taoism presumably continued to meet the religious needs of the population. Under the Later Han, Confucianism expanded into a doctrine embracing physical and

metaphysical as well as moral teachings. The Sage came to be honored through official as well as family rituals; and Confucianism thus took on some aspects of a state religion.*® Yet these changes were scarcely new departures. They were rather in the nature of a consolidation, whereby a number of doctrines and ideas previously developed by other Chinese schools—mainly the Ying- Yang—were folded into official Confucianism. Only toward the end of the second century a.p., when the Han state began

to totter toward its dissolution, did signs of a deeper religious unsettlement become evident in China. Taoism, for example, became associated with popu-

lar movements directed against the authorities, although no particular doctrinal development seems to have accompanied this political manifestation. At the same time, Buddhism began to make progress in China. Its major successes, however, came only after the downfall of the Han, when barbarian invasion and internal disorder had broken down the older Chinese social system and prepared men’s. minds for a doctrine so utterly alien to earlier Chinese thought.*°

Summary. The religious travail of the submerged peoples and rootless populations of the cities of western Asia in the first centuries of the Chris-

tian era marks a profound change in human history. The rise of Christianity, Hinduism, and Mahayana Buddhism offered a view of the world that allowed men to face almost any sort of disaster with a modicum of cheerfulness, since, according to each of these faiths, this world was but the prelude to

another. The disruption of the imperial states that had permitted the closure of the ecumene actually forwarded the progress of these religions. They throve in times of trouble, for they stood ready to offer solace to an entire society, as in their infancy they had solaced the pains of the poor and downtrodden.

Societies in earlier times had never known anything quite like these rellgions of salvation. Perhaps the prophetic and ecstatic religious movements of

the tenth-eighth centuries B.c., as manifested in Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean lands, were a crudely comparable reaction to the breakdown of the civilized society of those times. But the parallel only underlines how much the civilized world had developed between the tenth and first centuries B.c., since, with the important exception of prophetic Judaism, such move89 Cf. Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, \1, 7-132; John K. Shryock, Origin and Develop-

ment of the State Cult of Confucius (New York: Appleton-Century, 1932).

” It was, after all, only under similar conditions that Christianity conquered the Roman empire.

352 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. ments in the earlier age did not succeed in giving birth to institutions with doctrines capable of affecting human lives over generations and centuries. Egyptian religion, with its gradual democratization of immortality, its priestly organization, and its mythological elaboration perhaps came closest to anticipating the emphases and organization of the higher religions; but the Egyptians conceived the afterlife as second best to life on earth; and the missionary impulse so characteristic both of Buddhism and of Christianity was utterly lacking. Instead, the idea that religion was tied to locality, the precious possession of a special people, gave Egyptian and nearly all other antique religions a profoundly parochial character that stood in diametrical opposition to the

emphatic universalism of the religions of salvation. . Christianity, Hinduism, and Mahayana Buddhism provided perhaps the first really satisfactory adjustment of human life to the impersonality and human indifference that prevails in large urban agglomerates. Nature religions, personifying the forces of earth and sky, could meet the psychological needs of village farmers whose social ties to their fellows were personal and close. State religions were adequate for the early civilized peoples, whose cul-

tural inheritance was nearly uniform and who maintained a close personal identification with the body social and politic. But when such uniformity and

cohesion in civilized society broke down, as was bound to happen as the civilized area increased and the complexity and variety of cultures and social systems enlarged, such official, state religions could not satisfy the growing number of deracinated individuals whose personal isolation from any larger community was barely tolerable at best. We have seen how Babylonian reli-

gion failed to meet such needs;** and Greco-Roman religion of the polis manifested the same deficiency when local city-states ceased to be cohesive, psychologically self-contained social universes. Something more than either nature religion or a religion of state was needed

for peace of mind in a great city, where strangers had to be dealt with daily, where rich and poor lived in different cultural worlds, and where impersonal forces like official compulsion or market changes impinged painfully and quite unpredictably upon daily life. Knowledge of a savior, who cared for and protected each human atom adrift in such mass communities, and confidence

in a future life where all evil and suffering of this world would be duly recompensed, certainly offered men a powerful help in the face of any hardship or disaster. In addition the religious community itself, united in a com-

mon faith and in good works, provided a vital substitute for the sort of primary community where all relations were personal, from which humankind had sprung and to which, in all probability, human instinct remains fundamentally attuned. Quite apart from any question of doctrinal truth or error, Christianity, Hinduism, and Mahayana Buddhism fitted men more suc-

cessfully than-ever before to the difficult task of living in a megalopolitan 91 Cf. also the Book of Job.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.-200 A.D. 353 civilization.” Perhaps, therefore, the epiphany of religions of salvation assured, as it certainly assisted, the survival and revival of megalopolitan society. 3. OTHER ASPECTS OF THE HIGH CULTURAL TRADITION OF EURASIA, 100 B.C.—200 A.D.

Despite the prevalence of religious innovation in the interstitial regions of the ecumene, the heartlands—China, India, and Rome—remained generally conservative. Foreign ideas and practices lacked all attraction for the learned men

of these civilizations, who already possessed a quite satisfactory cultural heritage of their own and could afford to neglect all that failed to conform to it.

The situation was otherwise in the Middle East. The cosmopolitan civilization of that region had suffered such blows from Alexander and his successors that it tended to fall apart into its old constituent elements—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Jewish, Iranian. Each of these cultures separately had to come to

terms with the attractive disruption of intrusive Hellenism. Neither Mesopotamian nor Egyptian priestly learning survived this shock. Berossus of Babylon (ca. 250 B.c.), who migrated to the Aegean island of Cos, where he translated the astronomical and historical wisdom of the priests of Bel Marduk into Greek, and Manetho of Egypt, who did the same for the historical traditions of his native land at about the same time, represent almost the last gasp of intellectual energy traceable to their respective priestly traditions. No longer viable in their own right, the age-old religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt began to undergo far-reaching changes, mingling with Greek ideas and forms to become Oriental mystery religions of the sort that inundated the Roman world from the first century B.c. onward. From Egypt came the cult of Isis and Serapis, Mesopotamia produced the “science” of astrology. In such disguised and modified forms, therefore, a part of the ancient learning of the

Middle East lived on; but the corporate identity of the two traditions was irretrievably lost.

On the other hand, the Jews were able to maintain the independence of their cultural tradition, even in the face of renewed political disaster. During the revolt of 66-70 a.p., Roman armies destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and the priesthood that served it; but the scattered synagogues proved able to maintain the faith even without the center in Jerusalem. The utter destruction of the Jewish peasantry in Judea, as a consequence of a second Palestinian revolt (132-135 a.p.), likewise failed to cripple Judaism, for the urban communities of the diaspora survived. In general, the messianic excitement which had set off the disastrous revolts of 66 and 132 a.p. subsided; the Messiah’s coming was no longer so imminently expected; and the high hopes of former °2 In time, of course, such religions spread far beyond urban bounds, since the answers they gave to the recurrent problems of human life were just as satisfying for men whose lives were less atomized than was the case in the cities where these religions first grew up. At the same time, the existence of the higher religions made subsequent urban growth easier, surer, stronger, by reducing social frictions and maintaining moral solidarity among all ranks and conditions of men (so long as they were of the same faith) at a higher level than could have been attained without such religions.

354 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. days hardened into learned legal, philological, and polemical exegesis of scripture. Rabbinical schools replaced the Temple as the master institution of

Judaism, for it was necessary to train experts in the Law and the Prophets who could expound and apply the Scriptures to the variegated circumstances of everyday life. The most important of these schools was in Galilee,** where the canonical text of the Hebrew Scriptures was defined during the second century a.pD. Thus Judaism remained a living faith; and, under the leadership

of learned rabbis, it proved quite able to resist both Hellenism and Christianity.°*

The Iranian case was intermediate. Certainly the Persian literary tradition retained a degree of continuity from the days of Zoroaster to the revival of national culture under the Sassanids after 226 a.p. Yet there was much syncretism, too, as evidenced by the utterly obscure literary and intellectual pedigree of the Avesta, the sacred scripture of Sassanid Zoroastrianism.”

In sum, the cosmopolitanism of the ancient Middle East broke apart culturally as well as politically during the period 100 B.c. to 200 a.p. Hellenic and Indian influences played upon the region; invaders from the steppe added a fresh barbarian strand to the mixture; and the resultant cultural syncretism found a primarily religious expression.

***

No such fragmentation occurred in the Roman world. There, the traditions of Greek and Hellenistic civilization were maintained, though often with diminished energy. Greek philosophy, rhetoric, historiography, and belles lettres all developed Latin counterparts; and in the process the Latin language acquired a learned vocabulary capable of conveying the high culture of the Greek East to the various peoples of the western Mediterranean. The major work of translating and adjusting Greek learning to the Latin tongue

and temperament was performed in the first century B.c. by Cicero (d. 43 B.c.), Lucretius (d. ca. 55 B.c.), and Catullus (d. ca. 54 B.c.). In the succeeding generation, Vergil (d. 19 B.c.), Horace (d. 8 B.c.), and Livy (d. 17 a.) brought Latin letters to their most perfect expression. Thereafter, the Roman

peace and the comfortable life of Roman gentlemen discouraged serious intellectual or artistic work. A dilettante and sometimes archaizing spirit prevailed, relieved only by the venomous involution of ‘Tacitus’ (d. ca. 117 a.p.) histories.

The second century a.p. saw a modest revival of Greek letters (e.g., Plutarch, d. ca. 120 a.p.), and a very influential codification of Greek science in the work of Galen (d. ca. 200 a.p.) for medicine and of Ptolemy (d. after %3The population of this region was not uprooted in the great war of 132-135 a.p. 94 Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (2d ed.; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication

Society, 1952), II, 89-128. 95 Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Ormazd et Ahriman, L’ Aventure dualiste dans lantiquité (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1953), pp. 55-134; H.S. Nyberg, “‘Die Religionen des alten Iran,” Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatische-aegyptischen Gesellschaft, Band 43 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1938); R. C. Zaehner, Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.-200 A.D. 355 161 a.p.) for astronomy and geography. The very perfection and mathematical elegance of Ptolemy’s astronomy, and the copious, yet systematic character of Galen’s medicine seemed to later generations incapable of improvement and thus played a part in checking further development of Greek science. A

shift of learned attention toward metaphysical and particularly theological questions contributed even more powerfully to the same result.

The laws of nature, as analyzed mathematically and descriptively by Ptolemy and Galen, bore an interesting, and perhaps not entirely accidental similarity to the law of nations and of nature, as discerned by a long succession of Roman jurists. Roman jurisprudence culminated in the work of such men as Ulpian and Papinian at the very end of the second century a.p. and the beginning of the third. The concept of an objective law applicable to human affairs, yet operating in accord with Nature and Reason and apart both from divine revelation and from human whim or passion, was peculiar to Rome and societies descended from the Roman. Other civilized peoples had laws and law codes, to be sure; but their laws were normally confined te criminal and public matters, leaving merely private relations to private or customary regulation.’® Roman law, as developed in the cosmopolitan milieu of the empire, attempted to bring regular classification and clear rules to bear upon the confusing multiplicity of both public and private concerns. Concepts of ownership, contract, and property—matters so intimate to our daily lives that we scarcely notice their existence—were more and more precisely defined, so that particular disputes could be reduced to a legal case and settled in accordance with a published rule through a judicial process. ‘To a complex, individualized, and urbanized society, the advantages of such a legal system

are enormous, for it tends to make dealings with strangers predictable and safe, even in the absence of any firm customary consensus. No other early civilization developed a legal system of such refinement and generality. Elsewhere, local custom, group mores, family traditions retained greater scope, while the personal discretion of officials and men of power enjoyed a much wider range. The value of the Roman law to subsequent European civilization would be

dificult to exaggerate. When urbanism began to develop afresh in western Furope after the eleventh century, the imposing corpus of Roman law lay ready at hand. The models it offered for reshaping the chaotic customary law

which had meanwhile grown up in Europe automatically facilitated, stabilized, and gave new scope to urban, market-oriented activity.” 96 ‘The inclusion of private relationships within the purview of Roman law was no doubt an inheritance from the totalitarianism of early polis organization, which had elevated the territorial state far above all other human ties. *7 Moreover, the relationship between human law, natural law, and scientific laws of nature was always Close. Minds accustomed to finding a law to govern one sort of activity were prone to look for laws operating elsewhere. Cf. the remarks above on Ionian speculation and polis law. Conversely, in societies where law enjoyed no such scope and dignity as it did in the Roman scheme of things, men were the less likely to expect or look for regularities in the behavior of inanimate nature. Hence it does not seem fantastic to suggest that modern science owes much to Roman law. Cf. the comparison of Chinese with European attitudes toward law, both human and scientific, in Needham, Science and Civilization in China, II, 518-83.

356 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. In India, the period 100 B.c. to 200 a.p. saw a vigorous development in art and literature, moving toward the “classical” expression attained in the age of the Gupta empire (320-535 a.p.). The two great epics of Indian literature, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, were probably nearing their final form by 200 a.p.; and literary Sanskrit, based upon the grammatical precepts of Panini, had already developed into a genuine if artificial literary medium. However, chronological uncertainty makes it impossible to assign most of the monuments of classical Sanskrit art and literature to any definite period, either before or after 200 a.p. It therefore seems best to reserve their discussion until the next chapter, despite the risk of unduly slighting the achievements of pre-Gupta times.

*** China, at least, offers few chronological difficulties; and with the Han a remarkably successful consolidation of the multiplicity of inherited Chinese traditions under the banner of Confucianism became official. Mathematical and astronomical knowledge increased as a by-product of calendrical disputation;** but literary and philological scholarship occupied the center of Chinese intellectual activity. For such scholarship, textual authenticity was of primary importance; and this question accordingly provoked a weighty dispute between the “New Text” and “Old Text” schools.®® Aside from minutiae of wording, the schools divided over the question of how freely to allow YingYang and related notions to color their interpretation of Confucianism. The “Old Text” scholars decried such travesty of the teachings of the Master; the “New Text” scholars tended to read between the lines, seeing hints and symbolic significances behind the superficial (and sometimes quite trivial) meanings of the classic texts themselves. Besides learned polemics, of which there

were many, this discussion led to the compilation of the first systematic Chinese dictionary, arranged, as Chinese dictionaries are still, according to the radicals of the characters.

Chinese historical writing also came to maturity under the Han. Ssu-ma Chrien’s (145-86 B.c.) many-volumed history of China (indeed of the whole world within Chinese ken) established the frame within which Chinese his-

tory continued to be written almost until the present day. Ssu-ma Ch’ien accepted and made canonical the theory that each dynasty began with an 8 Different calendrical systems became weapons in political struggles, especially at the time of Wang Mang’s usurpation (9 B.c. to 24 a.p.). As a result of these factional disputes, the Later Han instituted a new calendar that was astronomically less accurate than that Wang Mang had used. Cf. Wolfram Eberhard, “Contributions to the Astronomy of the Han Period, III,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 1 (1936), 194-241. For a detailed but confusingly technical and topically arranged anscussion of Chinese mathematical astronomy, cf. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China,

99 The first of these based their interpretation of the Confucian classics upon the texts that had been reconstructed in the early Han period after the Ch’in emperor’s ban upon Confucian books (213 B.c.) had been withdrawn; the Old Text scholars, on the other hand, claimed to base their views upon more

authentic versions, written in the old character style and dating from before the destruction of the OOKS.

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C.-200 A.D. 357 especially virtuous ruler and then gradually dissipated that virtue until Heaven lost patience and substituted a new dynasty 1n its place. This idea was very ancient in China; but Ssu-ma Ch’ien was the first to fit the facts of history into such a pattern; and his success made the scheme binding for subsequent historians. In addition to a political narrative organized on this principle, Ssu-ma Chrien’s history included treatises on such special subjects as music, sacrifices, waterworks, and military methods, describing how each had developed from

the beginning to the historian’s own time. Other treatises dealt with the careers of noble houses of ancient China, while the bulkiest section of the entire work comprised biographical essays about distinguished individuals. The work of Ssu-ma Ch’ien combined Herodotus’ scope with Thucydides’ exactness (in intention if not always in fact); and his example fixed the mold for subsequent Chinese historiography.’’ As a result, the second important historian of Han times, Pan Ku (32-92 a.p.) adhered exactly to his predecessor’s model in composing the history of the Former Han dynasty.*"’ We are much less well informed about the Han intellectual underworld. It was probably inhabited by Taoist sages who pursued chemical experiments intended to produce an elixir with the power to confer long life or even immortality upon those who drank it. Part of the terminology and conceptual framework of later Arabian and European alchemy seems to have originated in this way. But the diffusion of alchemy westward, like the movement of astrology eastward, became significant only in the centuries after 200 a.p. The conservatism of learning was such that, even when commercial intercourse had made intellectual contacts possible, little serious interchange took place until severe social stress had disturbed the even tenor of the times in China, India, and Europe.

***

Technology was a little, but only a little, less conservative. Significant migrations of useful plants and animals did occur; but artisan skills and trade secrets diffused less readily. Thus, for example, familiarity with cotton, sugar cane, and chickens, all first domesticated in India, spread to both China and

western Eurasia during this period, while China contributed apricots and peaches, perhaps also citrus fruits, cherries, and almonds to western Eurasia. In exchange, the Chinese imported alfalfa and a number of vegetable crops, as well as the Iranian great horses.’ 0 On Ssu-ma Ch’ien, see Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Chien: Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). Parts of his work have been translated by Edouard Chavannes, Les Memoires historiques de Ssuma-Ts ien (5 vols.; Paris: Leroux, 1895-1905). 101 Homer H. Dubs has translated the section of Pan Ku’s work treating the imperial annals. Pan Ku,

The History of the Former Han Dynasty, ans. Homer H. Dubs (3 vols.; Baltimore, Md.: Waverly Press, 1938-55). 102 Charles Singer et al., A History of Technology, 11, 199; Roman Ghirshman, L’/ran des origines a

1900)" p. 256; Alphonse de Candolle, The Origin of Cultivated Plants (New York: D. Appleton & Co.,

358 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C. -200 A.D. It was relatively easy for travelers to bring seeds of exotic plants back with them; but the skills and secrets of manufacture could not so easily be acquired

and transported. In any case, skilled artisans working for export, and merchants engaging in foreign trade, presumably had no desire to see the spread of technical information to new regions. As a result, industrial or proto-indus-

trial technology presents geographically a nearly static picture for this period.1%

Roman water mills and techniques of glass production seem to have been the best in the world. Indian steel attained a peculiar quality that commanded a market in the Roman empire, but could not be duplicated there; Chinese silk was exported to India, the Middle East, and Rome; but the secrets of its

manufacture did not reach the outer world until the sixth century a.p.1™ Roman military technology, especially siegecraft and fortification, commanded a considerable reputation in India, and perhaps even in China;’” and it is probable that Roman ships introduced a new level of marine architecture into Indian waters which made possible the remarkable overseas expansion of Indian culture in the early post-Christian centuries.'°°

In general, however, too little is known of the history of technology to permit a satisfactory over-all picture. Differences cannot have been very marked, the special skills and techniques of each of the civilized communities

being roughly equivalent. Handicraft methods of course prevailed everywhere, for the use of inanimate power was just beginning with the introduction of water mills, used mainly for grinding grain to flour. Everywhere in the civilized world, wealth depended primarily upon agriculture. An overwhelming majority of the population of civilized states were peasants; and perhaps the major economic demarcation lay between areas where water engineering made agriculture capable of sustaining a dense population and the more thinly populated areas of dry-land farming, where crops were at the mercy of an always erratic and sometimes excessive rainfall. Until western Europe had developed agricultural methods that could cope with waterlogged plains, farming there was perforce concentrated on hillsides and on especially well-drained subsoils (e.g., loess and chalk). Thus the far western

fringe of the ecumene lagged behind the agricultural wealth of the drier Mediterranean and Middle Eastern lands; and nowhere could farming in rain-

watered land approach the productivity of the irrigated valleys of China, India, and the Middle East. 103 Chinese technical inventions may have been both particularly important and particularly immobile. Cf. J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 1, 240-43.

104 Charles Singer et al., A History of Technology, I, 57, 322, 593-601; G. F. Hudson, Europe and China (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1931), pp. 68-102, 120-22. 105 Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, p. 160; Homer H. Dubs, A Roman City in Ancient China (London: China Society, 1957). 106 ‘This is hypothesis based upon praise of ‘‘the beautifully built ships of the Yavanas”’ (i.e., lonians,

or Greeks generally) in early Tamil poetry of south India. Cf. Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial

The Eurasian Ecumene, 100 B.C. -200 A.D. 359 All these exchanges of ideas and techniques depended on conscious human

action and were correspondingly inhibited by indifference, ignorance and inattention. No such obstacles hindered the diffusion of disease germs. Infections which in earlier times had been familiar only in one or another part of the Old World could be and undoubtedly were carried with merchant ships

and pack trains from one edge of Eurasia to the other and back again. But uncertainty prevails in these matters and no critical study of what information is available has been made. Hence any statements about either the history of diseases or the growth and decline of populations in the ancient world can only rest upon informed guesswork. Indian records, indeed, do not even allow sound guessing; but a survey of the ancient Mesopotamian canal system suggests that the peak of population in that important region came between the third and sixth centuries a.p.1°* Chinese and Roman records are comparatively well known and indicate an earlier population apogee, coming about the first century A.D. Severe pestilence was a major factor in the decay of both Roman and Chinese populations from the second century onward, and it is perhaps not surprising that these communities, situated on the extreme edges of the ecumene, should have suffered more seriously from new and unfamiliar diseases than did the Middle East, where traffic with the far reaches of the Old World was not new and the local populations may be presumed to have already established a degree of immunity to diseases which in the Far East and Far West were still capable of decimating biologically unprotected populations.'°8

Pestilential disease, resulting directly from the closure of the ecumene may therefore be held partially responsible’”® for the radical decay of population 107 ‘Thorkild Jacobsen and Robert M. Adams, “Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture,” Science, CXKXVIII (1958), 1251; Robert M. Adams, ‘Agriculture and Urban Life in Early Southwestern Iran,’’ Science, CXXXVI (April, 1962), 116-19. 108 The severity a new disease may have among a biologically defenseless population was repeatedly illustrated after the European closure of the global ecumene, when sailors and others introduced such diseases as measles or even the common cold among Amerindians, Eskimos, Polynesians, for example, only to see the victims die of an infection which for a European was comparatively trifling. Obviously, European (and Asian) populations acquired their immunities only by prior exposure to these diseases; and this biological process must have passed through one of its principal phases in the early Christian centuries. On epidemics, cf. Georg Sticker, Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte und Seuchenlehre,

Band I, erster Teil: Die Geschichte der Pest (Giessen: Alfred Topelman, 1908); W. H. S. Jones, Malaria: A Neglected Factor in the History of Greece and Rome (Cambridge: Macmillan & Bowes, 1907),

Benno von Hagen, Die Pest im Altertum (Jena: Gustav Fisher, 1939). On China, cf. K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh, History of Chinese Medicine (Shanghai: National Quarantine Service, 1936), pp. 53-138. None of these works, however, approaches the available data with the important questions in mind; and a really sophisticated survey of the history of pestilence among mankind still remains to be written. 109 Since theoretical grasp of population phenomena remains imperfect even for modern times, when fairly exact data about what does happen is available, it would be ridiculous to suggest that the rise and decay of ancient populations can be adequately understood. Other factors besides the new severity of

pestilence resulting from the wider circulation of infections incident to improved communications undoubtedly undermined Roman population. Various sexual perversions, together with the custom of bathing in very hot water (thus killing male sperm), perhaps do much to explain the failure of the upper classes to reproduce themselves in imperial Rome; and both economic and psychological conditions no doubt affected peasant and artisan reproduction rates. The relative importance and practical effect of these and still other factors simply cannot be determined.

360 Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D. which became a persistent problem in Roman imperial times and assumed catastrophic proportions in the third century 4.p.1’° Substantial decline of the Chinese population seems also to have occurred in the late Han period;'’* and the barbarian invasions which assumed major proportions in both the Far East

and Far West during the third and fourth centuries a.p. may in part be attributed to a disease-induced dearth of population behind both the Roman limes and the Chinese wall.’ 10 On the basic importance of population decay in Roman history, cf. the provocative remarks of Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, Ancient Economic History: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London (London: H. K. Lewis, 1948). 111 Cf, Hans Bielenstein, ““The Census of China during the Period 2-742 a.p.,’’ Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, Bulletin, XIX (1947), 125-63. 2 Drastic decline of population carried its own corrective, for the consequent decay of productivity checked when it did not halt long-distance trade, particularly since trade dealt fundamentally in luxuries. But as contacts with strange parts of the world decreased, the transmission of diseases, we may assume, correspondingly declined, thus checking one and perhaps the prime factor which earlier had decimated civilized populations at the extremes of the ecumene. The survivors, nevertheless, carried immunities in their bloodstreams which meant that renewed exposure to the diseases of distant parts of the Eurasian continent could never again have quite such lethal consequences as they probably had in the second—fourth centuries A.p.

CHAPTER Vi I |

Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Kesponse

A. INTRODUCTION By 200 a.p., Hellenism had lost almost all of its expansive energy. Neighbors and strangers no longer saw much to admire and found still less to imitate in the style of life prevailing among the genteel Greco-Roman heirs of that tra-

dition. The Confucian tradition of China also underwent a similar, though less drastic decay. Confucianism, too, was largely confined to a class of landowners and officials; and the cool moderation and decorous conservatism of Confucian gentility ill-suited the age of internal disorder and barbarian invasion that followed the collapse of the Han dynasty.

India, on the contrary, entered upon an age of remarkable cultural expansion both at home and abroad. Under the Gupta dynasty (ca. 320-535 A.D.) Indian art and letters achieved a golden age; simultaneously, the tran-

scendental religiosity long characteristic of Indian civilization exerted a powerful appeal among strangers. The spread of Mahayana Buddhism overland into central Asia, China, Korea, and ultimately to Japan was the most spectacular demonstration of the expansive power of Indian culture in this age. But an almost equally vast movement followed the seaways, for precisely during the centuries when Buddhism was winning its greatest victories north

of the Himalayas, Indian maritime enterprise planted a series of states in southeast Asia and Indonesia which drew their high culture directly from India. In Iran and the eastern Mediterranean, where rival religions held the 361

362 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. ground, Indian cultural models met far greater resistance. Yet even there, Neo-Platonic and Gnostic thought exhibited definite Indian affinities; Indian ascetic discipline may have contributed to the style of mysticism that established itself among Christian monks; and the vaguer but pervasive spirit of world renunciation characteristic of early Christianity and of some of its chief

rivals (e.g., Manichaeism) also owed something to the stimulus of Indian religious attitudes,

If one concentrates attention upon the movement of ideas and especially upon religious changes, India therefore appears to have played the leading role in the entire Eurasian world between 200 and 600 a.p. But if one thinks instead of military and political affairs, India’s role shrinks to trifling proportions, and a quite different geographical locus becomes critical—the long fron-

tier between civilized and barbarian peoples that ran all the way from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Amur. The balance of forces across that frontier changed decisively in the late fourth century, with the result that very considerable linguistic and population shifts occurred in widely separated parts of Eurasia. In the Far West, barbarian war bands and migrating hordes broke into the

Roman empire; and similar, though less numerous groups invaded north China. In both areas, the invaders set up a series of short-lived states and gradually acquired some of the culture of their subjects. By the sixth century, the initial impetus of these invasions had spent itself; and in China a restoration of imperial unity proved possible. But Justinian’s parallel effort in the

Roman West met only ephemeral success; and the empire he had partially reunited dissolved again before fresh waves of barbarian invasion. Only after

Latin Christendom (ninth century a.p.) adopted the Iranian type of heavy armored cavalry could the civilized or semi-civilized) peoples of the Far West halt the barbarian tide and begin a contrary movement of expansion (tenth-eleventh centuries A.p.). From the military and political point of view, Iran was therefore the key area of the ecumene. Long before 200 a.p., civilized Iranians had developed effective techniques of defensive cavalry warfare and had established socio-

political institutions capable of sustaining a formidable force of armored cavalrymen scattered out across the countryside, where they were perpetually ready to mount a formidable local defense against nomad attack. Slowly and

reluctantly, European societies adjusted their defenses and modified their social systems along the lines of the Iranian model. This institutional reorgani-

zation was what made Europe “medieval.” Eastward, Iran’s influence upon China was comparatively slight; but it was the effectiveness of the Iranian frontier guard against the steppe that secured India against invasion, thus contributing indirectly to the flowering of Indian culture in the Gupta age. The appearance of several new civilized styles of life in regions marginal to the older culture centers of Eurasia was an important feature of the period 200-600 a.p. Ireland, Ethiopia, and Japan all became the seats of new and (at least potentially) independent civilizations. The reason is plain: as commercial links among the major Eurasian civilizations weakened, outlying areas

The Flowering of Indian Culture 363 were thrown back more exclusively on their own resources. Interruption or drastic diminution of contacts with the outer world then allowed the local peoples to elaborate their own styles of life, while making use at will of civilized elements which had come to their attention during the earlier, more cosmopolitan, and better traveled age.’ In the same period, civilizations reminiscent of ancient Sumer arose in the New World. But whether the inhabitants of Peru and Central America, like those of Ireland, Ethiopia, and Japan, received valuable stimuli from the Old World cannot yet be determined with certainty.

* * %*

In view of the unusually complex pattern of world history between 200 and 600 a.p., orderly presentation becomes particularly difficult. This chapter arbitrarily divides Eurasia in two, treating first the flowering and expansion of Indian civilization and its impact upon southeast Asia and China, then considering the development of western Eurasia and the transformation of social organzation and culture that came to those parts under the pressure of barbarian attack. The chapter concludes with some remarks upon changes along the fringes of the civilized world. This tends perhaps to overemphasize the

division of the ecumene between Indian and Iranian fields of force and to minimize the links connecting India with the Mediterranean, and Iran with China. Nevertheless, this ordering of the subject seems the most likely to illumine, even while it distorts, reality.

B. THE FLOWERING OF INDIAN CULTURE, 200-600 A.D. Between the third and seventh centuries a.p., and particularly during the Gupta imperial age (320-570 a.p.), the culture of India achieved an elegant and complete expression which remained ideally normative for later generations. This age saw the definitive fusion between Aryan-Brahminical cultural traditions and elements derived from the pre-Aryan populations of the land. Simultaneously, Indians responded triumphantly to the cultural stimuli they had received during the preceding centuries from the Hellenized world and from Iran. Gupta times, therefore, remind one more of the mature strength of middle age than of youth’s reckless grace. It was India’s golden age. I. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL FRAMEWORK

The Kushan empire, which during the first and second centuries a.p. had constituted the keystone of the ecumene, did not long survive its own success. The vigorous military energy of Sassanid Persia (from 224 a.p.) compelled the Kushan lands north of Hindu Kush to recognize Persian suzerainty;

while in northwest India, Kushan power disintegrated. Perhaps the real 1 Classical Greek civilization took form under substantially the same circumstances, when the Iron Age invasions had broken down the earlier Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism that had extended at least marginally to include the Aegean.

364 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. changes were not very great: local rulers, who had long enjoyed most of the realities of sovereignty, simply withheld ceremonial deference and tribute payments from the Kushan kings. Elsewhere in India, similar political fragmentation prevailed in the third century 4.p. Yet the ideal of universal, imperial rule, as exemplified in the past by the Maurya state, remained alive—a fact which probably facilitated the rise of the Gupta empire in the following century. The kernel of the Gupta state lay in the lower Ganges plain, in or near Bengal. This region was still on the

frontier of Indian society when the first important Gupta ruler, Chandragupta I (320-30 a.p.),? like many another lord marcher before and since, exploited his strategic location to consolidate authority over most of the Ganges Valley states. His successors, Samudra-gupta (330-80 a.p.) and Chandra-gupta II (380-415 a.p.), between them brought all of northern India under Gupta sway, from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea and from the Himalayas to the Deccan. In most cases, these conquests did not involve the overthrow of pre-existing states and dynasties. The Gupta emperors usually left local rulers in office, but compelled them to attend the imperial court, pay tribute, and at least in some cases to accept an imperial agent as a sort of “resident.” Areas imme-

diately adjacent to the Gupta hereditary lands were directly incorporated into the imperial domain; but the Guptas did not attempt to extend their centralized administration beyond the middle reaches of the Ganges Valley. No doubt this mild policy toward defeated sovereigns facilitated the Gupta expansion. It had the additional advantage of conforming to the moral precepts of Brahminical political theory, which held that a righteous conqueror was bound to maintain his defeated enemy (or a member of the enemy’s family) in power.®

All details of the military operations that built the empire have been lost; but it is unlikely that the fighting was severe. Literature attests the growth of elaborate chivalric conventions, which may have made Indian warfare of the time almost harmless to noncombatants and not very dangerous to participants. Certainly the expansion of the Gupta power inaugurated a period of unusual peace in India. Save for a raid by a nomad people—the Ephthalite

Huns, who broke through the Iranian frontier guard and briefly ravaged northwest India about 460 4.p.—there is no surviving record of warfare until almost the end of the fifth century. The Deccan and southern India never became part of the Gupta dominions; but the half-dozen or so states into which

those regions were divided appear to have lived together without notable conflict; and all maintained trade and diplomatic relations with the Gupta empire in the north. Thus the fifth century a.p., which saw military disaster ? His name is identical in Sanskrit with that of the founder of the Maurya empire; but to minimize confusion it is conventional in English to hyphenate the name of the later imperial founder. The year 320 a.p. marks the first year of the Gupta era, as decreed by Chandra-gupta I, probably in commemoration of his own coronation. R. C. Majumdar et al. (eds.), The History and Culture of the Indian People (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1954), III, 2. 3A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954), p. 126.

The Flowering of Indian Culture 365 and unusual disorder in both Europe and China, was an age of extraordinary peace in India. Sheltered by this peace, the “classical” age of Indian culture came safely and confidently into bloom. The peacefulness of Gupta times appears strange when contrasted with the chronic violence accompanying the simultaneous fragmentation of political authority in Europe. India’s peacefulness may be attributed (1) to the final

taming of the fierce and barbarian war-band ethos which the Aryans had introduced into India nearly two thousand years before; and (2) to the rise of a compelling code of conduct and system of values presided over by Brahmins and conveniently called Hinduism. The two are really one, for the eclipse of the ancient warrior ideal was merely an aspect of the wider process of cultural synthesis that produced Brahminical Hinduism—a synthesis which involved the infusion of new meanings, drawn often from pre-Aryan sources, into Aryan languages and cultural forms.

A century of growingly chivalrous warfare, followed by about eighty years when chivalry sought its principal conquests in the boudoir rather than on the battlefield, is sufficiently rare in civilized history to deserve our admiration. Recognition of the fact that a major reason for this extraordinary limitation on violence was the wide dispersion of effective power within Indian society need not detract from that admiration. Who occupied which throne and paid deference and tribute to whom made remarkably little difference to the population at large, as long as barbarians like the Ephthalite Huns stayed north of the mountains. The social bonds regulating ordinary lives remained almost unaffected by the chivalry, pomp, and ceremony of kings and emperors, for the Guptas did not attempt to remake Indian political inst1tutions on the more totalitarian Iranian and Hellenistic model, as the Mauryas perhaps had done. Instead they tolerated all the immemorial diversity of Indian society. This meant acquiescence in the drastic diffusion of power inherent in all the variegated customary rigidities of caste, sect, and locality. The numerous self-regulating corporations which constituted the very tissue of Indian society set severe practical limits upon the authority of the central power. Indian villages usually enjoyed a wide autonomy and managed their affairs with little intervention from outside. Imperial officials taxed the harvest and sometimes obliged local populations to labor on public works; but villagers were often exempt from the control of local landlords.* A similarly broad autonomy made guilds, towns, monasteries, and temples immune from most outside control. The institution of caste, which apparently was fully

developed by Gupta times, provided a loose but effective co-ordination among the myriad of social groupings. Order of precedence among castes was precisely defined; and customary patterns of behavior both within and with‘The Chinese pilgrim, Fa-hsten, who visited Buddhist shrines and monasteries during the reign of Chandra-gupta II, was much surprised at the leniency and limited scope of the imperial administration and commented favorably upon the liberties and prosperity of the commoners: ‘““The people are numerous and happy; they have not to register their households or attend to any magistrates and their rules; .. . if they want to go, they go; if they want to stay on, thev stay.” J. H. Legge, Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms, Being an Account of the Chinese Monk Fa-hsien’s Travels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), pp. 42-43.

. 0 ( a STATE Rw ~@ WY TEMPLE ® a | * os cs : | a a ae : Gs bine ve & aN . os Peg TEE ae BS Poa Pic ) Rae Jp lee Mievaiegincanroniin ae a FE foo a . 4 ae,

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(6 1smeal; 7( R.C. Majumdar et al., History and Culture of the Indian People, \1, 254-57, 335-59; M. Winternitz, Geschichte der indischen Literatur (Leipzig: Amelangs Verlag, 1920), IJ], 479-504; Arthur Berriedale Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 439-48.

6 The morals of statecraft set out in the Dharma Shastras stand in sharp contrast to those expressed in the Arthashastra. Perhaps the amoral methods of maintaining power recommended in the ArthaShastra describe the real practices of Indian kings more accurately than do the prescriptions of the Dharma Shastras. Yoo little is known about the administration of the Indian states to warrant any generalization on this point.

368 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. 2. CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENTS

The literature, philosophy, religion, art, and science of the Gupta age set the mold for subsequent Indian efforts in each of these fields. Moreover, with the exception of philosophy, Gupta achievements are generally regarded, both by Indian and by foreign scholars, as constituting the highest peaks of the entire Indian cultural tradition. It is important to realize that, even in this age of cultural creativity, innovation was not really respectable. Learning took the form of commentary upon older texts, when it did not consist in making additions or adjustments to those texts, professing, of course, to restore the original meaning. Belles lettres could not avoid deliberate creation but did prefer a learned and largely artificial language, Sanskrit, to any of the Prakrits—the literary versions of the spoken languages of the day. Important and authoritative texts continued to be transmitted orally, for it was felt that genuine mastery could only pass from teacher to pupil by means of the spoken and memorized word. The body of written learning and literature therefore was merely an accretion upon the central core of orally transmitted truths, not something complete in itself.

Lancuace. In the age of Gautama Buddha and for several centuries thereafter, much Indian literary activity had been aimed at a popular audience. To be sure, the Brahmins’ oral treasures had never been lost, since some portion of the vast Sanskrit literature of the Vedas, Brabmanas, and Upam-

shads had always been studied and memorized by those who followed the priestly profession. But in addition, and in some sense in opposition, to the Brahmin Sanskrit tradition there had been Prakrit literatures. These were associated especially with Buddhists and Jains who wrote fables, sermons, and poems in languages close to popular speech.

Yet these forms of popular literature began to wither away after the second century a.p.‘ Sanskrit, once confined to the learned recesses of Brahminical society, made an extraordinary comeback, until even the Buddhists and Jains began to write their theological and philosophical works in their rivals’ ancient language. From the field of learning, Sanskrit spread to administra-

tion. Mauryan government had been conducted in one or more of the Prakrits; but Gupta inscriptions and coins used Sanskrit; and presumably the language of administration was the same archaic but widely understood speech.* 7 An exception must be made for Tamil, one of the Dravidian languages of south India. Tamil attained literary definition in the Gupta period and never ceased to be an important literary medium thereafter. In Tamil land generally, knowledge of Aryan India and of the Hellenistic Mediterranean had penetrated as equally alien but fascinating novelties during the preceding centuries. The subsequent efHorescence of Tamil literature and art was like the springtime of youth and did not much resemble the mature cultural synthesis of Sanskrit India; though as we shall see, the Tamils contributed important strands to the civilization and especially to the religion of the rest of India, especially during the centuries between 600 and 1000 a.p. when the local cultural autonomy of southern India was being overwhelmed by the greater magnitude and maturity of the northern achievement. Cf. the relationship of Irish Christianity to Latin Christendom during the same period of time. ’ Sanskrit literature always remained oral, so that the language had never ceased to be spoken by educated Brahmins. This meant that men who found each other’s daily speech quite unintelligible could

The Flowering of Indian Culture 369 The revival of Sanskrit after its six- or seven-hundred year banishment to the learned fringes of society was truly remarkable. It attested the prestige and weight of the Brahminical tradition and proved the effectiveness of the numerous educational institutions of the land, which trained, not only priests, but large numbers of lay folk to familiarity with the learned language of the Hindu scriptures. Perhaps not least, it reflected the gradual withdrawal of Buddhism behind monastic walls, leaving to the Brahmins the streets and byways where Gautama had taught. Only in Ceylon did Buddhist writers continue to use one of the Prakrits; but Pali was as much a learned vehicle in Ceylon as Sanskrit was in India. Partly for this reason, later Pali literature closely resembled the Sanskrit, taking the form of progressively more learned commentaries upon sacred texts.

Lirerarure. Many of the masterpieces of ancient Indian oral literature took final form in Gupta times. Foremost of these were the two great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Both of these poems ultimately derived from ancient balladry and heroic verse. At some time or other, recitation of such verses became part of religious sacrifices, so that Brahmin priests fell heir to a body of poetry which presumably had had its origin among secular bards and warriors. Various geographical and other references make clear that additions to the Mahabharata were made as late as 400 a.p.; but the great bulk of the poem is certainly much older; and some passages may descend intact from the second millennium B.c. Through a process perhaps analogous to that by which Greek heroic poetry coalesced around the Trojan War, the plot of this poem ostensibly crystallized around the tale of a struggle between rival claimants to the throne of a minor Indian kingdom. But the Mahabharata includes an extraordinary diversity of matter, most of which is only loosely attached to the central theme. Folk tales and primitive myths mingle with discourses on cosmology, theology, and the dignity of Brahmins; and from time to time, action 1s suspended indefinitely while lengthy narratives of events unrelated in time or space to the main story are dragged in to illustrate some particular point. Under such elaboration (the poem is roughly three-and-a-half times as long as the entire Bible) the main plot sometimes disappears from sight for hundreds of pages at a stretch. The total effect is reminiscent of one of the south Indian temples, where sculpture oozes from every crevice—utterly obscuring the structural lines of the building, but lending an eye-entrancing interest to each separate part. The looseness of its structure has not prevented the Mahabharata from attaining and maintaining an immense popularity in India down to the present day. As Homer did for the Greeks, the Mahabharata fixed the popular Hindu

conception of the gods and their mutual relations; but unlike the Homeric epics, which are structurally and theologically coherent, the Mahabharata offers incidents and ideas to fit every level of taste, from the crudest and most often converse in Sanskrit. Cf. the role of Latin in medieval Europe or the position of English in contemporary India.

370 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. naive of tales to the abstruse and paradoxical pantheism of the passage known as the Bhagavad Gita.° The Ramayana is shorter than the Mahabharata, though still a very lengthy

poem. It recounts the adventures and trials of the hero Rama and his wife Sita. It is comparatively coherent; indeed most of the Ramayana in its existing form may be the work of a single author. Like the Mahabharata, it is Vaishnavite, for Rama is portrayed as an avatar of that god. But explicit religious teachings and moral instruction are less important than the vibrant and very human portraits of the hero and his faithful wife. These have a universal appeal and have made the Ramayana as popular and nearly as influential as the Mahabharata among Indians.

The popularity of these two poems was such that epic verse became the usual form for almost all kinds of Indian didactic writing. The law books (Dharma Shastras) and the vast collections of legend and fable known as the Puranas were fixed in poetic form in Gupta times; and even so ruthlessly practical a treatise as the Arthashastra was rendered in the same medium.

For all these types of literature, a long process of oral transmission and transformation lay behind the versions that came to be fixed in the Gupta age.

The case was otherwise with Sanskrit drama and courtly poetry, most surviving examples of which have assignable, individual authors and appear to have been put in writing from the beginning. The origins of Sanskrit drama are unknown,’ though it 1s likely that Hellenistic influence was important in bringing this art form to maturity in India. In any case, certain technical terms of Greek provenance were employed in the Sanskrit theater; and traveling bands of mimes and dancers from Alex-

andria were sufficiently well known to have left several notices in Indian literature. But by the time when the earliest of the surviving plays were written, the conventions of Indian drama had been fixed and did not directly mirror Greek precedents." Dramatic performances in the third and fourth centuries were courtly affairs. Indeed, some of the Gupta kings are said to have composed plays themselves; and several reputedly royal compositions survive. The Mahabharata ® The Gita is a dialogue between Arjuna, the principal hero of the Mahabharata, and his charioteer, Krishna, in which the latter explains the whole nature of man and the universe, reveals himself to be an avatar of Vishnu, and promises Arjuna salvation. Even within the relatively small compass of the Gita, discordant doctrines find expression; but the mystic, devotional tone of the poem provides a unity which, according to its admirers, surpasses logic. Cf. Franklin Edgerton, The Bhagavad Gita, Translated and Interpreted (“Harvard Oriental Series,” Vols. XXXVIII-XXXIX }Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1944]). No satisfactory translation of the Mahabharata exists in English. Edward P. Rice, The Mahabharata: Analysis and Index (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), and S. C. Nott (ed.), The Mahabharata of Vyasa Krishna Dwaipayana: Selections (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), are, however, useful in providing samples of the whole. 10 The earliest surviving dramatic fragment, a Buddhist story of edification dealing with the conversion of two of Buddha’s disciples, apparently dates from about 100 a.p. The earliest Sanskrit plays to survive complete probably date from the fourth century A.p., just before the time of Kalidasa, the acknowledged master of Sanskrit dramaturgy and courtly poetry. 1 The nature and extent of Greek influence upon Sanskrit drama has been hotly disputed. Cf. the summary in A. Berriedale Keith, The Sanskrit Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 12-77.

The Flowering of Indian Culture 371 and the Ramayana provided Indian playwrights with the source of most of their plots; but the courtly circle for which they wrote is reflected in their choice of themes: love stories, cases of mistaken identity, and the like. Kalidasa, who seems to have been associated with the court of Chandra-gupta II (380-415 a.v.), brought the Sanskrit drama to its greatest excellence. His style was simple, yet elegant, with telling metaphors, skilful characterizations, and well-contrived, if trifling plots. His lyric poetry, some of which strikes home even in translation, exhibits the same traits. For example: I see your body in the sinuous creeper, your gaze in the startled eyes of deer, your cheeks in the moon, your hair in the plumage of peacocks, and in the tiny ripples of the river I see your sidelong glances, but alas, my dearest, nowhere do I see your whole likeness.’

Courtly poetry and plays continued to be written after Kalidasa’s time; but ornate and involuted language soon became an end in itself, so that some of the later Sanskrit poems were more akin to an acrostic puzzle than to ordinary discourse." Prose was cultivated in Gupta times in the form of romances, dealing usually with the loves and adventures of royalty. In the same period, the anony-

mous author of the Pancha Tantra developed the animal fable to a very polished art form. This collection of tales was translated into Persian in the sixth century and thence spread all over the Islamic and Christian worlds. In contrast to the courtly, polished Sanskrit literature of the Gupta age, Tamil poetry of the time was more popular and emotionally direct. ‘The earliest surviving Tamil poems were collected into anthologies about 500 a.p. but represent the precipitate of an older bardic tradition going back several centuries. The poems of these anthologies deal with the feelings of common people—villagers and merchants, fishermen and warriors—in a quite realistic and unadorned fashion. Devices like initial rhyme at first made Tamil prosody entirely different from the conventions of Sanskrit poetry; but, in the course of the sixth century, prosodic shifts in the direction of Sanskrit, as well as a heavy importation of Sanskrit words into the Tamil vocabulary, attested the penetration of the south by Brahmin learning. Epic poetry had such high prestige in the Sanskrit literary tradition that Tamil poets, as they became better acquainted with Sanskrit, were umpelled to create a considerable body of epic poetry in their own language. The Lay of the Anklet, a Tamil epic of royal injustice and personal tragedy, seems (at least in translation) far more powerful and infinitely better articulated than either of the famous Sanskrit epics which may in part have inspired 1t.”” 12 From Kalidasa’s most famous poem, ‘Cloud Messenger.” Translated by A. L. Basham in The Wonder That Was India, p. 420.

138 The poet Bhatti (seventh century A.p.) ended one of his works thus: ‘““This poem can be understood only by a comment; it suffices that it is a feast for the clever, and that the stupid come to grief in it as a result of my love of learning.”’ Quoted in A. B. Keith, History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 116. \4 “Tracing the transmission of these tales has been a chef d’euvre of comparative literary scholarship. For a summary of results, see Keith, History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 357-59.

Press. aa into English by V. R. R. Dikshitar, The Lay of the Anklet (Oxford: Oxford University

372 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. The most remarkable and widely influential Tamil poems were ecstatic hymns, composed by wandering holy men to glorify Vishnu or Shiva. Like Tamil epic poetry, these hymns arose from an intermixture of Hindu Sanskrit tradition with the Tamil bardic art. But although the gods that inspired these hymns had long been familiar to northern India, the Tamil rhapsodists voiced a distinctively new religious mood. Intense and reciprocal love between the deity and his devotee was the keynote. A sense of personal unworthiness, mingled with joyous wonder at divine grace and the bliss of the mystic vision of the Godhead, were themes of these poems that later spread from Tamil land through the rest of India and gave to mature Hinduism much of its emotional tone and vigor.’ RELIGION AND PuiLosopHy. ‘The Hindu religion, as expressed doctrinally in such works as the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Dharma Shastras, and reinforced emotionally by the ecstasy of the Tamil hymn writers, carried all

before it in the Gupta age. The emperors themselves were adherents and patrons of the revived and revised Brahmin faith, usually of the Vaishnavite persuasion. Apparently most ordinary Indians now also found a place for themselves in the capacious Hindu system, which readily accommodated the most crudely superstitious peasants as well as the most refined scholars within

itself.

As a result, even as it was winning its greatest victories abroad, in its own homeland Buddhism shrank to the status of a withdrawn, well-to-do sect. Comfortable life in richly endowed Buddhist monasteries presumably discouraged monks from preaching in public places, as Gautama and his early followers had done. Instead, if cne may judge from their extant literary products, the monks of the Gupta age devoted themselves to scholastic elaboration of doctrine and lengthy polemic against their Brahmin opponents. Such activity produced recondite theological expositions that had some importance in China, where enthusiastic converts translated many such texts into Chinese and accorded a semi-canonical status to the tangle of obscurities that resulted. But in India, Buddhism isolated itself more and more from a living relationship to the population at large.

The Jains, whose popular success had never been as great as that of the Buddhists, seem to have undergone a similar evolution, although Jainism never entirely disappeared from India. Down to the present day, it has remained a minor sect, supported principally by prosperous merchant groups.

During the Gupta age a number of recognized “schools” of philosophy arose in each of the three principal religious camps. Of these, only the six schools of Hindu philosophy proved enduring, for Jain philosophy soon withered and Buddhism disappeared. Hindu philosophers, however, had plenty to do in trying to bring some sort of intelligible order to the pullulat*6R,. C. Majumdar et al., History and Culture of the Indian People, Il, 326-40; cf. the sample translations in A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, pp. 330-31. The contribution of Tamil emotional-

ism to Hindu piety offers another instance of a submerged (or semi-submerged) culture exhibiting unusual religious creativity.

The Flowering of Indian Culture 373 ing confusion of popular cult practices. More particularly, the rising worship of Vishnu and Shiva accorded ill, at least on the surface, with the older Vedic pantheon, while the rarefied theism of the Upanishads had little in common with either. Various efforts were made at explaining the many discrepancies, but not until perhaps the eighth century, with the philosophy of Shankara, did something like a definitive reconciliation of the discordant elements of the Hindu heritage emerge. SCIENCE. [he most remarkable of the Indian sciences was grammar, together with related linguistic studies like lexicography and metrics. Sanskrit grammar grew out of the need for general rules to assist the Brahmins in remembering the sacred syllables of the Vedas. Panini (ca. fourth century B.c.) gave Sanskrit its classical form; but later grammarians continued to amplify and comment upon his text for a thousand years thereafter. As Sanskrit developed into a learned tongue, the study of grammar became the prerequisite for all advanced scholarship. By Gupta times, however, principles had been so well worked out that Sanskrit grammar was no longer susceptible of significant modification.’* Attention therefore shifted to other branches of the linguistic sciences, with the development of treatises on the meters of Sanskrit

poetry and the completion of a famous dictionary of the sacred language which became standard for later ages. Indian medicine, also, had very ancient roots. From Vedic times, incanta-

tion and magic as well as medicaments and surgery played a part in Hindu medical technique; whereas philosophical doctrines concerning body and soul, together with religious notions about cosmology, demons, and deities, dominated medical theory. Three classic treatises of Indian medicine survive, one

dating probably from the first century a.p., one from the fourth century, and one from the seventh or eighth. The earliest of these, by Charaka, 1s a rather confused and unsystematic catalogue of diseases and cures, put together from diverse and sometimes contradictory sources. Quite different was

the textbook of Susruta (fourth century a.p.)—a concise, well-organized manual, which set the pattern for all later medical writing in India. Unlike Galen, Susruta recognized surgery as belonging to the doctor’s art and even recommended the observation of corpses as a means of learning anatomy, although the demands of ritual purity prevented dissection.'® Although Indian and Greek medical ideas show certain parallels which may reflect early professional contact at the Achaemenid court, the general body of Indian medicine remained autonomous. This was not true of astronomy, however; for during the Gupta period, Greek mathematical astronomy (and the astrology associated with it) radically revolutionized Indian concepts in 17 "The two important grammars of the age‘were the work of a Buddhist and a Jain respectively, each of whom set out to produce a text from which objectionably Brahminical] illustrative examples would be absent. Cf. R. C. Majumdar et al., History and Culture of the Indian People, 111, 319-20. 18 Henry R. Zimmer, Hindu Medicine (Baltumore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), pp. 46-59, 175-76; Jean Filhiozat, La Doctrine classique de la médecine indienne, ses origines et ses paralléles grecques

(Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1949), pp. 199-215 and passim; A.B. Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 513-15.

374 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. these fields. Yet the new astronomy did not entirely supersede earlier animistic explanations of the heavenly movements, which remained incongruously juxtaposed to sophisticated mathematical computations in Indian astronomical texts.1?

Indian mathematics began with a body of rules for the construction of altars and similar adjuncts of sacrifice. But no continuity 1s apparent between texts that set forth such rules and later, more formally mathematical treatises. The earliest surviving Indian mathematical work was written by Aryabhata in the year 499 a.p. for use in astronomical calculations. Much of Aryabhata’s mathematics seems to have been borrowed from the Greeks, although he made some innovations of his own, e.g., a unique system of numerical notation. He also seems to have been familiar with the decimal place value system,

as perfected by a generalized use of the zero sign; but he did not use this

notation himself." In later centuries Arabs credited Indians with inventing the numerals Europeans term “‘arabic.” In the absence of any clear evidence to the contrary, it is likely that the Arab tradition is correct and that Indian mathematicians did in fact perfect the system of numerical notation used today all round the world. The earliest known reference to the use of such a system dates from 269~—70 a.p.7?

The long-term effects of this improvement, both in facilitating the everyday transactions of the market place and in forwarding the arcane pursuits of science, can scarcely be exaggerated. Indeed, the perfecting of the decimal place system of numerical notation, which made all ordinary arithmetical calculations so magnificently simple, may properly be bracketed with the invention of alphabetic writing as one of the major milestones of human intellectual achievement.

Art. The best surviving Gupta sculpture and painting are all of Buddhist inspiration. This may seem strange, in view of the decay of Buddhism which characterized the period. Yet it is not inexplicable, for artists commissioned 19 Tt was not the Ptolemaic astronomy of Alexandria that reached India, but earlier, less perfected, and more various calculations. Evidence suggests that the Sassanian court played the role of intermediarv. Cf. Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, pp. 160-61, 167-69, 178, 180.

0 A cryptic and highly condensed verse form makes the interpretation of Aryabhata’s meaning often a matter of uncertainty. Cf. the translation and commentary by Walter Eugene Clark, The Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930). 21 J owe this information to oral conversation with Dr. David Pingree (1962) whose forthcoming edition of the Yavanajataka of Sphujidhvaja will bring this date to the attention of the learned world. The earliest reference previously known was contained in Aryabhata’s treatise, dated 499 a.p. Cf. G. R. Kaye, Indian Mathematics (Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1915); A. B. Keith, History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 523-28.

It is worth remembering that the place value system was known to the Babylonians as early as the eighteenth century s.c. and had passed from them to Hellenistic mathematicians. Some Babylonian

texts even used a dot to indicate zero, but only in a medial, not a final position, 1.¢., 202 could be written unambiguously, but 220 could not. The final step, therefore, which seems to have been taken in India about the third century A.p., was merely to generalize the use of a zero sign, and at the same time to free decimal notation from an awkward intermixture with a sexagesimal number system. Mingling of decimal and sexagesimal number systems had been characteristic of both Babylonian and Hellenistic astronomy, and Western mathematicians still tolerate the same awkwardness when treating circular measurement. Cf. O. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, pp. 3-22.

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376 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. by the wealthy Buddhist monasteries had five full centuries of artistic tradition behind them upon which to draw and at the same time commanded very skilled techniques both of carving and painting. The conjunction of wealth, artistic tradition, and skill is always rare. In Gupta India it produced such masterpieces as the paintings of the Ajanta caves and the Buddha of Sarnath, not to mention the precise elegance of the Bodhisattva torso from Sanchi, which visually matches the courtly perfection of Kalidasa’s poetry. Hindu art achieved no such stylistic success, despite the fact that Hinduism commanded the allegiance of both court and countryside. Hindu iconography lacked any ancient tradition; and the polymorphism of Hindu gods must have presented artists with formidable problems. Some fumbling was perhaps inevitable, therefore, before plastic representations of Vishnu, Shiva, and other deities achieved really satisfactory definitions. The clumsy Hindu sculpture surviving from the Gupta period seems definitely to confirm such a view.~”

Temples played no part in early Brahminism. Aryan religious ceremonies took place out-of-doors at spots specially consecrated for the occasion, and Vedic aniconic traditions died slowly. Nevertheless, as their deities became more vividly personal, it was natural that Hindus should seek to visualize their gods through sculpture and to house such images in suitably magnificent dwellings. Hence arose temple architecture. Hindu sacred architecture bore no apparent relation to the circular ground plan characteristic of Buddhist stwpas.?* Instead, Hindu temples were built around a windowless rectangular cella where the cult image was housed, to which an entrance porch gave suitably impressive access.** Architects later added a spire, built on top of the cella, and in time obscured the simplicity of the original form with many subsidiary decorations. Nevertheless, as with so many other aspects of Indian culture, the general plan fixed upon in Gupta times remained basic to Hindu temple architecture thereafter. OrHER Aspecrs oF INDIAN Curtrure. Ancient Indians recognized three main goals for human endeavor: dharma or righteousness, artha or practical skills, and Rama or love.”> This account of classical Indian culture has dealt almost exclusively with matters pertaining to the first of these three categories. lo be sure, the polite literature of the Gupta age dealt with love; and special treatises were devoted to the subject. In daily life we may believe that 22 ‘The systematic iconoclasm of Moslem conquerors in northern India must always be borne in mind in considering Indian art history. It is possible, for example, that a more successful Hindu art existed in northern India in Gupta times than surviving monuments, mainly located in southern India, Suggest.

23 Cave temples, carved out of the living rock, antedate freestanding masonry temples in India. They are usually elongated in ground plan, with an apse at the farthest end. The resemblance to a Roman basilica is striking, but perhaps merely accidental, since the cave temples seem to have developed by uniting the circular ambulatory of a stupa with an entrance hall. Cf. Benjamin Rowland, The Art and Architecture of India, pp. 69-71. 24 Some of the earliest buildings strikingly resemble Greek temples in general design, e.g., Temple 17 at Sanchi; and it is possible that Greek architecture had some influence. 25 A B. Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 450.

The Expansion of Indian Civilization 377 the upper classes, and perhaps the whole population, practiced the arts of love

with fewer inhibitions and with at least as much absorption as the popular culture of contemporary Western society encourages today. Similarly, the practical skills of ancient India were highly developed, ranging from those of humble artisans to the subtleties of music, dancing, and government administration.

We should recognize that the practical and erotic sides of Indian culture were prominent and important parts of the whole, which was far less dominated by Brahminical and ascetic ideals than the surviving literature might suggest.*° In turning to the remarkable geographical expansion of Indian culture which occurred during the Gupta period, it is worth remembering that part of the appeal of Indian civilization rested upon the luxury, refinement, and overt sensuality of Indian life. Ascetic religious doctrine was not everything, though it has left far more abundant traces in literature.

C. THE EXPANSION OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION 200-600 A.D.

At a time when both the Roman and Chinese empires were suffering from the ravages of barbarian attack and inner convulsion and when [ran was hard-

pressed to hold back the steppe peoples, Indian civilization came into full flower. India’s cultural eminence in the Gupta age perhaps encouraged merchants and missionaries to exhibit far more energy in widening the sphere of Indian influence than they had done before or would ever do again. The result was a remarkable expansion of Indian civilization into southeast Asia and

a no less striking infiltration of Indian culture into central Asia and China. Even in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, Indian ideas and practices acquired a certain importance, despite the antipathy of the Christian church to Hindu and Buddhist religion. In one respect, the expansion of Indian culture was very different from the earlier expansion of Hellenism, Military conquest played almost no part: merchants and missionaries took the place of the armies of Macedon and Rome. Consequently, Indian expansion followed trade routes, particularly the sea route to southeast Asia and the islands of Indonesia, and the overland trail through the oases of central Asia to northwest China. I. SOUTHEAST ASIA

Communication between India and the lands of southeast Asia was very ancient. Common elements in prehistoric remains from both areas suggest that Indians and their neighbors across the Bay of Bengal had maintained distant °° Unbridled sensuality may in fact have been a major factor in provoking or sustaining Indian

asceticism, for extremes of indulgence and of revulsion against eroticism often go hand in hand. India)

temple sculpture adequately proves that remarkably free and explicit sexuality found recognition i public religion side by side with the asceticism so highly esteemed in literary records. The peculiar catholicity of Hinduism was illustrated by the success with which it enfolded undisguised sex into religion, in contrast to the emphatic puritanical emphases of the Christian, Moslem, and Confucian trations.

378 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. but real connections in pre-Aryan times.” The earliest evidence of more extensive contacts dates from the first centuries of the Christian era, when merchant ships from Indian ports”* began to visit the coasts of Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, Siam, and Indochina. At that time the populations of these areas were peaceable folk, acquainted with rice agriculture and familiar with boats and rafts, but without elaborate political organization or any very impressive cultural system that could withstand the blandishments of civilization. Such peoples were easily persuaded that the visitors, with their large and seaworthy vessels, their strange gods, and their practical skills, possessed a powerful magic which should be assimilated as rapidly as possible. Foundation legends of the Hinduized states of the area, which Chinese sources have sometimes preserved, suggest that Indian merchants or adventurers married into leading native families and from this vantage point readily established leadership over the native populations, Archeologists have discovered a fair number of Sanskrit inscriptions and a variety of Indian works of art in southeast Asia. The inscriptions make clear

that during the fourth and fifth centuries a.p., a series of states centering around courts whose culture and atmosphere were thoroughly Indian arose both on the mainland and in the islands. As the possibilities of winning wealth and honor in those regions became better known on the Indian mainland, not only the humbler merchant classes who had pioneered the movement, but Brahmins and warriors as well, began to migrate across the Bay of Bengal in significant numbers, and thus powerfully reinforced Indian influences in the courts and capitals of southeast Asia. Although Buddhists had been prominent in the earliest phases of Indian penetration of southeast Asia, most royal courts there had become Shaivite by the Gupta age. Probably the ritual and concepts of this branch of Hinduism accorded well with earlier autochthonous religious ideas. In addition, by emphasizing the magical role of the ruler in bringing fertility to the fields, Shaivism probably helped local kings to consolidate their power over tribal or village chieftains. Cult statues and other works of art were imported from India to body forth these new religious-political ideas and ideals. Only after about 600 a.p. did royalty patronize local sculpture and stonemasonry and thus stimulate the development of local variations upon the Indian heritage. Materials surviving from before that date suggest a thoroughly “colonial” atmosphere in the courts of southeast Asia, where kings and courtiers sought distinction, not by encouraging local arts, but by importing the best possible reproductions of the most authentic Indian originals. 27 G. Coedés, Les Etats hindouisés d’ Indochine et d’ Indonesie (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1948), pp. 23-28;

H. G. Quaritch Wales, The Making of Greater India (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1951), pp. 47-83. ?8 Some of the pioneering voyages from Indian ports may have been made by merchant adventurers hailing from the Mediterranean world. A few Roman objects have been found as far afield as Cochin China, dating from the second century a.p.; and a Chinese history records the visit of ‘“‘ambassadors”’ from Marcus Aurelius in the year 166 A.p., who had come by the southern sea route. Coedés, Les Etats hindouisés, p. 38. After the second century a.p., however, the trade between the eastern Mediterranean area and southern India declined with the general decline in the prosperity of the Roman world;

ar red io merchants speedily took over the eastward voyaging (if they had not themselves pto-

The Expansion of Indian Civilization 379 The great bulk of the population in southeast Asia was only indirectly affected by the Indian culture of the courts. Village life went on much as before, modified only by the growth of royal authority in matters such as taxation and corvée. But however superficial the spread of Indian styles may have been, we should nonetheless recognize that the geographical area involved—from Borneo to Sumatra and from Indochina to Burma—far exceeded

that of the European territories which the Roman empire had brought within the sphere of Hellenism in an almost equally superficial fashion. As the Indian culture-sphere expanded northward along the coastal plain of Indochina, the frontiers of Indian and Chinese civilization met for the first time. To be sure, this confrontation was short-lived; for when China recovered from the disruption following the fall of the Han and resumed imperial expansion into Annam, direct Indian influence had already begun to wane in the farthest reaches of the ‘““Greater India” which had been built overseas during the Gupta period. The reassertion of pre-Indian cultural traditions played a part in this change; in addition, Indian commercial vigor faded rapidly after

the seventh century, when Moslem competition began to drive Indian commerce from the southern seas. India’s withdrawal from southeast Asia therefore created a sort of buffer zone between the Indian and Chinese culture areas. This buffer still survives, but it does so only because the initial Indian penetration stimulated the peoples of southeast Asia to lift themselves to a level of culture almost equal to that of their more anciently civilized neighbors, thus partially filling what had before been a conspicuous sociopolitical vacuum.””

Indian ships undoubtedly explored and traded along the coast of Africa in Gupta times; and ethnologists have detected various traces of their presence there. Indeed, the peoples of Sudanic Africa, even as far west as the Guinea coast, seem to owe important staples of their agriculture to Indian or Indonesian ships and settlers who probably introduced such crops as yams, taro, and bananas to the African continent about the beginning of the Christian era.°? 2. EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN, IRAN, AND CENTRAL ASIA

Indian commercial and cultural penetration of southeast Asia coincided in time with a weakening of trade connections with Egypt. Impoverishment of *9 In addition to books cited separately, | have consulted: R. C. Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colontzation in South East Asia (Baroda: University of Baroda Press, 1955); Majumdar, The History and Culture of the Indian People, \1, 651-58, III, 631-44. % The fact that Madagascar is largely inhabited by people speaking an Indonesian language, whose ancestors must have migrated all the way across the Indian Ocean from Borneo or some other Indonesian island, is a striking demonstration of the capability of simphe ships to carry people long distances through the equable southern seas. Probably the migrants skirted the coasts of south Asia rather than sailing all the way across the open ocean; but no unmistakable traces of their way stations—if they existed—have been discovered. Cf. George Peter Murdock, Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 212-71; James Hornell, “Indonesian Influences on [ast African Culture,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, LXVV (1934), 325 and passim; G. W. B.

Huntingford, ‘““The Hagiolithic Cultures of Fast Africa,” Eastern Anthropologist, II (1950), 119-33.

380 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. the Roman world through plague and war may have been the principal factor in checking the Red Sea trade; but newly formed Arab and Ethiopian states also helped to choke this commerce by exacting extravagant tolls from merchant ships attempting to pass through the Straits of Aden.*? Yet, as direct commercial intercourse between India and the Mediterranean world declined, the learned community of Alexandria began to evince a much livelier interest in the wisdom and powers of the “gymnosophists” of India. Reasons for this at first surprising chronological displacement between the apogee of economic and of intellectual intercourse between India and the Mediterranean are not really very far to seek. The transcendental emphasis of Indian thought, and the ascetic disciplines whereby Indian holy men invited mystic visions, offered a world-view and pattern of life as coherent and impressive as anything advocated by the gentlemanly philosophers of the GrecoRoman world. In an age when violence and disease were disrupting the social universe of the Roman world, and when religions of salvation were competing for the allegiance of the populace, the optimistic rationalism of the Greek philosophic tradition seemed utterly inadequate to account for events. How could a reasonable man accept the Stoic doctrine of the supremacy of natural law, for example, when whim and chance so obviously dominated Roman politics—distracted as the empire was by civil war, multiple usurpations, and barbarian invasions? In such times, Indian mystical philosophy, directly validated by the suprarational vision of transcendent being—a vision which each individual adept could attain through a suitable course of training and selfdiscipline—seemed to offer a surer avenue to truth. A key figure in bringing Greek and Indian high intellectual traditions into contact with each other may have been Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), himself perhaps of Indian origin, and who probably taught both Plotinus (d. 270), the great renovator of pagan

philosophy, and Origen (d. 2542), the first systematic theologian of the Christian church. At any rate, many of Plotinus’ most important doctrines seem to echo the Upanishads; whereas the Platonic roots of his philosophy, while real, were nevertheless distant.*”

Within the Christian fold, traces of Indian influence are less apparent. A dogmatic religion, claiming a monopoly of truth through divine revelation, could not admit external influence. Nor is there any good evidence that Christian orthodoxy, as it slowly emerged from the doctrinal disputes of the first centuries a.p., borrowed anything of importance from Indian thought. Various of the other Oriental faiths prevalent in the Roman world—Gnosticism in particular—appear to have been much more open to Indian ideas, although the Iranian imprint upon Gnosticism was also very prominent.** 31 When tolls became too high, goods could be rerouted by caravan to the Persian Gulf. The rise of Palmyra in the third century a.p. was partly due to this deflection of trade routes; but its destruction in 273 a.p., and the long wars between Romans and Persians that followed, must have interrupted trade for long periods of time even more effectually than the parasitism of the states controlling the Straits of Aden. 32 Cf. Emile Bréhier, La Philosophie de Plotin (Paris: Boivin & Co., 1923), pp. 107-34; Jean Filhiozat, Les Relations extérieures de I’ Inde (Pondicherry: Institut Frangais d’Indologie, 1956), pp. 27-30, 51-38. 33 Until recently, authentic sources allowing scholars to study Gnosticism through something less opaque than Christian polemic were almost lacking. After World War II an impressive manuscript

The Expansion of Indian Civilization 38] On the other hand, what might be called a “style of holiness” that strongly resembled practices and preconceptions long familiar in India did establish 1tself as one of the fundamentals of Christianity. Extreme manifestations of the Christian pursuit of holiness, exemplified, for instance, in the pillar saints of Syria, reveal Indian affinities in details of ascetic conduct.** Far more important is the question whether Christian monasticism as a whole drew any sig-

nificant Inspiration from the ascetic traditions of India. Documentary acknowledgment of indebtedness is not to be expected; yet popular stories about the prowess of Indian holy men may well have provided the first Christian monks with hints they found helpful in their own pursuit of sanctity and the beatific vision.”

*** In Babylonia and Iran the first Sassanian monarchs (after 226 a.p.) patronized a revived Zoroastrianism as part of a self-conscious reassertion of Persian

cultural independence. As a result, Iran and Mesopotamia, unlike China, could not become flourishing Buddhist mission fields, for Persian pride would not accept Indian cultural models unless they first assumed an effective local disguise. This does nothing to clarify the cultural and religious history of Iran and Mesopotamia, which remains tantalizingly obscure, despite the efforts of modern scholars to reconstruct the tenets and organization of Sassanian Zoroastrianism and of such rival faiths as Manichaeism and Mazdakism. We may

surmise, nevertheless, that Indian motifs were probably a good deal more discovery in Egypt opened entirely new possibilities; but political and other obstacles prevented their full and immediate exploitation. Cf. Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics (New York:

Viking Press, 1960); Eva Meyerovitch, ““The Gnostic Manuscripts of Upper Egypt,’ Diogenes, No. 25 (1959), 84-117; Robert M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings

of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

44 Cf. Hippolyte Delehaye, Les saints stylites (Brussels: Societe des Bollandistes, 1923), pp. exciCXCV.

36 The importance of Indian influence upon monasticism and other aspects of Christian piety has been both uncritically exaggerated and unreasonably denied. Cf. the summary of learned opinions assembled by Henri de Lubac, La Rencontre du Buddhisme et de ! Occident (Paris: Aubier, 1952), pp. 9-27. Magnification of Indian contributions to Christianity was commoner fifty years ago than more recently. Cf. Richard Garbe, India and Christendom: The Historical Connections between Their Religions

(LaSalle, Il.: Open Court Publishing Co., 1959); Ernst Benz, “Indische Einfliisse auf frihchristliche Theologie,’”’? Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur (Mainz), Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, No. 3 (1951), pp. 172-202; Mircea Ehade, Le Yoga (Paris: Payot, 1954), p. 412; Karl Heussi, Der Ursprung des Monchtums: Geistesgeschichte des antiken Christentums

(Munich: Carl Beck Verlag, 1955), 1, 523-29. |

Jewish ascetic communities, such as that at Qumran, and biblical accounts of ancient prophets who dwelt in the wilderness obviously offered Christian monks another and very important model. But Jewish precedents, so far as I know, never recognized that the end of ascetic discipline was the beatific vision of God, as Indian ascetics long had held. Moreover, the psychic phenomena induced by fasting and other physical deprivations did not announce themselves unmistakably as visions of the Godhead. Indian precedents for interpreting such experiences in this theological and transcendental sense may therefore have been of absolutely key importance to-the first Christian mystics. In this somewhat loose, largely untraceable sense, Indian influences upon early Christianity seem to me to have probably been of great importance.

382 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. prominent in Sassanian lands than they were in Roman territory. Moreover, Buddhist monasteries continued to flourish in the eastern part of the Persian realm, as they had done under the Kushan empire and perhaps even earlier. Farther east along the Silk Road, in the oases of the Tarim Basin, Buddhism throve vigorously between 200 and 600 a.p. Under the aegis of Buddhist monasteries, a mixed culture, in which Indian elements kept the upper hand, spread across all of central Asia and lapped against the mighty mass of China itself °° 3. CHINA

In China the reception of Buddhism and of the Indian cultural impress that accompanied it was a complicated affair, extending across about four centuries of time and involving subtle reciprocities between Indian ideas and older Chinese traditions, particularly the Taoist. The basic circumstance that made the Chinese ready to take Buddhism seriously was’a distressing breakdown of Han institutions and the apparent futility of the Confucian way which had been so effectively wedded to those institutions during the Han period. When bitter factional strife around the throne gave way first to social revolt on the part of hard-pressed peasants (beginning 184 a.p.) and then to political fragmentation as usurpers, barbarian raiders, and local warlords disputed the imperial succession, Confucian precepts seemed more and more irrelevant to political reality. Restless minds began therefore to cast about for alternative modes of interpreting the universe.** Yet even when Chinese minds had been thus prepared for the reception of

a religion that preached withdrawal from family and society as the highest form of holiness and held forth the annihilation of the personality as the supreme end of religious striving—doctrines that could scarcely have been more antithetical to the familial values traditional to Chinese civilization—a difficult task of translation interposed itself between Indian originals and the wouldbe Chinese adept. The Chinese language lacked terms capable of conveying Buddhist meanings; and not until the fifth century did a handful of scholars become sufficiently at home in both Chinese and Indian learning to be able to translate Buddhist texts into Chinese with a modicum of adequacy.**

On the whole, it was the Mahayana form of Buddhist teaching that attracted Chinese converts; but the sectarian differences of Indian Buddhism never loomed very large in Chinese eyes. By the end of the fourth century 86 Roman Ghirshman, Bégram, p. 100; Sir Aurel Stein, On Central Asian Tracks (London: Mac-

hen & Co., 1933); Albert von LeCoq, Auf Hellas Spuren in Ostturkestan (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1926). 87 Various efforts to revitalize older Chinese schools of thought reflected the bankruptcy of Confucian orthodoxies of the Han even before Buddhism began to move into the vacuum that events had created within Chinese culture. Cf. the very penetrating analysis of Arthur F. Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 20-31. 38 As an example of the initial difficulties in domesticating Buddhist thought into China, Wright cites the fact that the Chinese term Tao (‘‘Way’’) was used indifferently to translate Dharma, Bodhi, and Yoga—Buddhist terms that may be rendered in English, approximately, as “‘righteousness,”’ ‘enlightenment,’ and “‘discipline.”” Arthur F. Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History, p. 36.

The Expansion of Indian Civilization 383 A.D., as they achieved an adequate mastery of the concepts and terms of Indian Buddhism, the Chinese began to develop schools of their own. These schools divided along lines having little relevance to Indian doctrinal disputes but did sometimes hark back to divergences present in pre-Buddhist Chinese thought. Buddhism, in short, was beginning to be thoroughly domesticated into the Chinese cultural scene. As this occurred, the novel and initially alien outlook of the Indian faith had somehow to come to terms with the various strands already woven into Chinese culture, ranging all the way from Confucian and Taoist learning to local sub-literate peasant magic. Buddhists were strikingly successful in penetrating all levels of Chinese society, from the stateliness of royal courts and the private meditations of local landowners to the humble rituals of peasants hoping merely to promote the fertility of their fields. But, while accommodating themselves to older Chinese expectations, Buddhist doctrine and practices simultaneously widened and redefined traditional Chinese sensibilities and aspirations. Art provides the most sensitive and accessible index of the interplay within Far Eastern Buddhism between intrusive Indian and autochthonous Chinese traits. The great prestige the Chinese initially attached to the Greco-Indian art style inspired pious pilgrims to return from India and central Asia with authentic images of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Mahayana mythology. By the sixth century a.p., however, a distinctively Chinese Buddhist art had arisen, in which figures with Chinese dress and Chinese faces nonetheless continued to conform to Indian conventions of gesture and ornament.*® The result was often very effective; and the synthesis thus achieved may be taken as indicative of a wider synthesis between Buddhist and pre-Buddhist cultural styles that began to emerge in China after about 500 a.p. The splendor and repose of Buddhist monasteries, the lengthy schooling of Confucian literati, the magical manipulations of Taoist recluses, the pomp of courtly life, the discipline of army camps, and the backbreaking labor of the peasantry all entered into this revised social and cultural equilibrium which found political expression in the reunification of China under the Sui dynasty in 589 a.p. Steppe barbarian conquerors also contributed some elements to the reorganized Chinese civilization of the sixth century a.p. The linguistically variegated tribes*® that overran northern China after 311 a.p. did not come bare

of cultural traditions, nor were they always eager to adopt Chinese ways. Indeed, in the fourth century, some of the rulers of north China perhaps patronized Buddhism as a palladium of their own cultural independence vis-avis the Chinese;*? but with the gradual accommodation between Buddhism and native Chinese tradition, this ceased to be possible. In any case, by the , 1936). 39 D Laurence Binyon, “Chinese Art and Buddhism,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII Mongolian, Tungusic, Turkish, and Tibetan languages were all represented among the invaders of north China; and not infrequently the same war confederation comprised groups of differing speech. Cf. O. Franke, Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches, I, 54-117, for a summary of the very confusing political history of the age. “ Arthur F. Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History, p. 57.

384 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. sixth century the barbarian rulers of the north had become thoroughly Sinified and no longer wished to keep culturally aloof from Chinese society. ‘There-

fore, the barbarian contribution to the new cultural balance within China

was limited to such subtle yet important matters as the habit of obedience to military superiors, a more autocratic definition of imperial power than Confuclan propriety of the Han period had really approved, and such externals as the use of stirrups for riding horseback.

China’s political fragmentation between 220 a.p. and 589 a.v. failed to prevent a substantial expansion of the geographical range of Chinese culture. ‘The withdrawal of Han garrisons from the oases of central Asia did not really

restrict China’s westward reach, since receptivity to the Buddhist currents flowing eastward through these same oases actually strengthened the cultural

ties between China and central Asia. Similarly, the various barbarian conquerors of northern China usually attempted to combine portions of the steppe and their new Chinese territories under one sovereignty. This, also, invited Chinese cultural penetration of the steppe on a scale at least as great as anything the Han armies had ever been able to impose. In southern China, a great work of colonization and acculturation proceeded steadily and almost unnoticed. It had the ultimate effect of bringing the Yangtze Valley for the first time fully abreast of the economic and cultural level of the north.

Eastward also, in Korea and Japan, the Chinese example began to find fertile ground as the political and social organization of those regions developed toward civilized complexity. Buddhist monks became the principal carriers of high Chinese culture to Korea and Japan; but local rulers were quick to understand that appropriation of Chinese civilized institutions might enhance their power and therefore made their courts into important centers of Sinification as well. Co-operation between rulers and missionaries therefore established Buddhism as a sort of state religion in each of the kingdoms of the Korean peninsula between 372 and 528 a.p. A similar process commenced in Japan in 552 a.p., when the first 1mportant Buddhist mission reached that archipelago. As Korea and Japan thus entered the circle of civilized peoples, they added significantly to the cultural variety of the Far East. The Chinese model, while of the utmost importance, never eclipsed the local differences that made Japan always and Korea sometimes so distinct from China as properly to constitute a separate civilization.

*** The full acculturation of Indian Buddhism to the Far East, and the revival of Chinese political and cultural aplomb that ensued, marked the end of Indian cultural expansion along the central Asian trade routes. The barbarian incursions into northwest India that damaged or destroyed some of the 1mportant centers of Buddhist missionary enterprise accelerated the reversal of cultural drift that began when the T’ang dynasty (618-907) undertook reconquest of central Asia. The internal transformation which reduced Indian

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412 Barbarian Onslaught and Civilized Response, 200-600 A.D. so drastic a remodeling after their first formulation.** Nor did Europe’s cultural instability end with the establishment of a Christian style of civilization, for modern Western culture and society are at least as different from the Christian world of the third—sixth centuries as that civilization was from its pagan predecessor. Unusual instability, arising out of a violent oscillation from one extreme to another, may in fact be the most distinctive and fateful characteristic of the European style of civilization.

E. THE OUTER FRINGES, 200-600 A.D. With the exception of Australia and the southern parts of the African interior, where Stone Age cultures prevailed and men continued to hunt in small bands as their ancestors had done from time immemorial, all the major habitable regions of the earth began to feel the force of civilized culture, however faintly, in the period 200-600 a.p. In east Africa, with the weakening of Roman commercial enterprise in the second century a.p., the kingdom of Ethiopia seized control of the Straits of Aden, and from this strategic position entered upon a period of commercial dominance of the trade of the Arabian and Red Seas. In the fourth century, the Ethiopians accepted Christianity; and their Nubian neighbors followed suit in the sixth. Southward along the African coast, an Indonesian immigrant population, surviving to the present in the Malagasy peoples of Madagascar, played an important trading and colonizing role; while on the other side of the continent, the kingdom of Ghana may have begun to arise in the western Sudan as early as the third or fourth century a.p. on the basis of an agricultural population and gold trade with the trans-Saharan north. Simultaneously, the rain forests of the Congo basin were in all probability being penetrated by Bantu speakers whose slash-and-burn style of cultivation depended in large part on crops derived from the tropical agriculture of distant Indonesia.*®

The migration of steppe art styles into Germany and Scandinavia attests a similar infiltration of civilized influence into the forest and tundra zones of northern Eurasia. Jewelry recovered from graves is the principal evidence of this development; but the value of such objects is itself sufficient evidence of the emergence of a high barbarism in those parts, with incipient social differentiation and the concomitant beginnings of political consolidation.”® In Siberia, too, grave finds at Minussinsk show that steppe art penetrated into forested country—a process which had begun centuries before, perhaps be88 The transformation of lusty Aryan warriors into the ascetics of the Upanishads may have been equally drastic; but this occurred before Indian styles of life had fully transcended the barbaric level. 89 Cf. George Peter Murdock, Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History (New York: McGrawHill, 1959), p. 45 and passim. Murdock’s method of tracing agricultural crops and other culture trait diffusion. is not perhaps infallible, but his book represents a great advance over earlier efforts to unravel the pre-Islamic history of Africa. Cf. Diedrich Westermann, Geschichte Afrikas: Staatenbildungen stidlich der Sahara (Cologne: Greven, 1925), 276-301 and passim; E. Wallace Budge, A History of Ethiopia (London: Methuen & Co., 1928), I, 52-103, 204-64. 9 M. 1. Rostovezeft, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, pp. 189-91, 206-8.

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around which classical civilization had centered, became a no-man’s zone, where Moslem and Christian (not to mention Moor and Egyptian, Frank and Greek) plundered and traded and in doing so began to intermix their diverse cultures. But while surrendering domination of the Mediterranean, Christendom found new and spacious ground for its future development in the north, a gain which in the long run more than compensated for its losses in the south. Up to the year 1000, Christendom’s displacement from the Mediterranean was less marked in the east, for the Byzantines were at no time entirely driven from the sea. Nevertheless, under the Macedonian dynasty (867-1054), social and military power shifted decisively away from the seaboard and toward the interior regions of Anatolia and the Balkans, Princely landowners arose, espe-

Christendom 45] cially in Asia Minor, whose obedience to the central government was precarious at best. Such landholders maintained armed retinues, equipped and trained in the best techniques of the day, 7.e., as heavy armored cavalry. As a result, the Macedonian emperors were able both to defend and to extend their

landward frontiers as Justinian had never been able to do. But the price of these successes, as earlier in the Parthian and Sassanian states, was an uncertain imperial control over the armed resources of the society as a whole. In his un-

tried youth, for example, Basil I, the “Bulgarslayer,” was twice nearly overthrown by armed rebellions organized by magnates of Anatolia; and after his death (1025) the erosion of the central power was painfully demonstrated in the course of a confused clash between rural and urban aristocracies, each of which sought to control the imperial government.

Under the Macedonian emperors, therefore, the structure of Byzantine society came closely to resemble that of Sassanian Iran. Cities and a money economy did not disappear from the Byzantine scene; yet the urban element underwent a comparative retrogression with the decay of naval power, while the dispersal of land forces throughout the countryside in effect magnified the power of the provincial aristocracy. Thus the vastly improved frontier guard

which permitted spectacular territorial expansion under the Macedonian dynasty depended on structural shifts within Byzantine society which in the end proved fatal to the imperial bureaucratic power. The geographical and social displacements within the Latin half of Christendom were far more radical. In the eighth century, the littoral of the North Sea and the English Channel replaced the Mediterranean region as the most active center of the Latin West, both politically and culturally. The conver-

sion of England, the rise of the Frankish state, and the severance of com-

mercial ties with the Levant all contributed to this result. In addition, notable improvements in European shipbuilding (e.g., the stern post rudder) *’ permitted navigators gradually to overcome the terrors of wind and tide which had made travel on the northern seas painfully precarious in Roman times. As this occurred, the northern and western face of Europe began to enjoy advantages comparable to those the Mediterranean had long conferred upon the south. Commerce and contact across long distances and among diverse regions

became easy and cheap. Indeed, the number of navigable rivers flowing northward across the European plain greatly extended the inland reach of sea commerce compared with anything possible in the Mediterranean regions, where only the Nile and the Russian rivers offered comparable inland access routes.

Before the year 1000, however, these geographical advantages were still largely potential. Economic life in northern Europe remained primitive; and the products of various regions differed too little from one another to offer any substantial inducement to trade. Moreover, the first fruit of these navigational improvements was the outbreak of wholesale piracy, in which the Scandinavian Vikings played the foremost part. Yet precisely during this period of 47 Lynn White, “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,”’ Speculum, XV (1940).

452 The Resurgence of the Middle East, 600-1000 A.D. cultural stagnation, political disintegration, and economic backwardness, techniques and institutions were created which in time produced the extraordinary upsurge of medieval Europe and gave the Latin West a character quite differ-

ent from that of classical or of Byzantine society. Three facets of this emergent social order deserve emphasis: (1) agricultural advance; (2) muilitary advance; and (3) the special role of piratical trade. 1) In Roman times, swamp and forest covered most of the north European plain, and farmers confined their cultivation to well-drained slopes and especially permeable soils. The wetness of the Atlantic climate and the poor natural drainage of the flat-lying plains kept the land waterlogged for so much of the year that the methods of tillage developed in the dry climate of the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean proved impractical, except on a few specially favored soils, mainly chalk and loess. The drainage problem was eventually solved by the use of a heavy moldboard plow, which in turning over the furrows created artificial ridges and hollows in even the flattest field and thus drained surplus water from lands otherwise unusable. A few Germans may have used such devices in Roman times; but heavy moldboard plows did not

come into widespread use until after the fifth century and were not generally established as the essential basis of west European agriculture until the tenth.*®

The long delay in the establishment of this type of plow, in spite of its obvious advantages on the wet and clayey soils which prevailed on the north European plain, was due to the fact that a team of four (or more) oxen was needed to pull it. Moreover, heavy moldboard plows could not work effectively in small, squarish fields such as were usual in the older agricultural parts of Europe. Few peasants could put a complete team into the field; and only a

pooling of draft animals (together, often, with a reorganization of field shapes and shift of land-ownership rights) could sustain the improved type of

cultivation. It was, therefore, in times when rapine and robbery destroyed established relationships on the land that men became willing to pool their resources and redistribute land rights according to new patterns. In circumstances such as these, the introduction of the more efficient plow and the establishment of co-operative tillage had everything to recommend them. Thus it was precisely in the ninth and tenth centuries, when northwestern Europe was most cruelly harried by Viking and Magyar raids, that the tvpe of agriculture known as “manorial” achieved the technical basis that soon made it possible for European peasants to produce a considerable grain surplus

on lands that had lain waste in earlier ages.*? The solid occupation of the ‘48 The principal evidence for these statements rests upon the study of field shapes; for the heavy moldboard plow was difficult to turn and could work well only in “long acre’’ fields. For details, cf. Marc Bloch, Les Caractéres originaux del histoire rurale francaise (Paris: A. Colin, 1952); Lynn White, ‘Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” 141-59; Cambridge Economic History of Europe, |, 127-32; Charles Singer (ed.), A History of Technology, Il, 86-93. *9 The fact that manorial history has usually been studied from a legal point of view has disguised the fundamental technical change that came to European agriculture in the ninth-tenth centuries. Relations of dependence upon a landlord descended from Roman times and were preserved in the new order; but instead of the cultivation of small fields by independent peasant householders, or exploitation

Christendom 453 north European plain by peasant farmers was thereby assured; and medieval Europe attained an agricultural base broad enough to sustain both a numerous military aristocracy and a vigorous town life.*° This conquest of the northern European plain, together with the conquest

of the northern seas, laid the economic basis for the rise of northwestern Europe to a level of wealth, power, and culture surpassing that of the older Mediterranean centers of civilization. The northward shift of the political and cultural center in the West thus proved, not a passing accident of the political

geography of the seventh to tenth centuries, but a permanent feature of European society.

2) The military advance of northwestern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries depended directly upon the agricultural surplus which the newly developed manorial system made possible. For it was dues and rents collected from the peasants that supported the rise of a formidable class of professional fighting men, equipped and trained for battle according to the best technical models of the time, 7.e., as heavy-armed cavalrymen. Because the tastes of this class were at first simple, and the new type of agriculture was comparatively very productive, even a thinly populated and commercially primitive Europe became able to support relatively large numbers of knights.

This social pattern was far from new in the world: Iran had developed a similar system for local defense against steppe raiders nearly a thousand years earlier; and we have just seen that, under the Macedonian dynasty, contem-

porary Byzantium moved in the same direction. Nevertheless, the rise of knighthood profoundly altered the position of Latin Christendom vis-a-vis its neighbors. When a hard crust of professional knights formed atop the agri-

cultural community of northwestern Europe, raiders and pirates soon lost their accustomed easy superiority. Their depredations consequently slackened and soon ceased. To be sure, bands of knights sometimes ravaged one anoth-

er’s lands; and this sort of local war became endemic as the feudal system of larger areas by gangs of slaves, the mature medieval manor had a quite different technical basis in the heavy moldboard plow, whose operation required a pooling of draft animals and the cultivation of long, narrow strips in open fields. My understanding of the technical basis of medieval manorialism is derived largely from the excellent and eminently sensible discussion in C. S. and C. S. Orwin, The Open Fields (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938). Cf. also Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, pp. 39 ff. *0 ‘The equable climate and moist summers of northwestern Europe—a gift of the Gulf Stream— permitted both fall and spring plantings of grain. This in turn meant that the markedly seasonal character of Mediterranean grain tillage could be mitigated. A Mediterranean farmer can plow during only three or four months of the year; a medieval plowman of northwestern Europe kept his plow running most of the year, halting only in winter when lack of adequate fodder for hi. animals weakened them for heavy work and frozen soils impeded work in the fields. In summer, when other fields were under crops, the fallow required plowing as preparation for the sowing of winter grain; in the fall and early spring the spring grain fields required the same attention. The result was to multiply the area an average peasant family could keep in tilth, from the five to ten acres estimated as average for an Athenian family of the fifth century B.c. to the thirty-acre virgate of medieval England. Moreover, because labor could now be applied more evenly throughout the year, a single peasant family could produce a far greater grain surplus than had been attainable in classical

times. Grain supply for towns and cities had always been a problem for the ancient Greeks and Romans; only in the event of local crop failure was provisioning of the towns a problem in medieval Europe. This permitted a far more intensive urbanization than had been possible in classical times.

454 The Resurgence of the Middle East, 600-1000 A.D. spread across western Europe from its locus of origin in northern France.” Even so, such local disorder was far less destructive than barbarian raids; and

before long, restless members of the knightly class found outlet for their prowess in foreign conquest and adventure. The expansion of Europe thus found a new and very effective basis in military technology, for European knights proved themselves on the whole superior to the military forces of every adjacent society.””

3) Obviously enough, piracy rapidly lost its charm when the intended victims developed means to resist or even overcome the attacker. But when it was no longer safe to seize valuables by main force, trade offered an alternative way of getting possession of foreign goods formerly acquired through piracy. Oscillation between raiding and trading has certainly occurred repeatedly in history’® and was all the easier because even successful pirates

seldom got the right assortment of booty for their own use and normally found it convenient to trade booty surpluses for such essentials as weapons or food.**

Hence, with the development of an effective local self-defense 1n western Europe, pirate ships and raiding parties predictably gave way to merchant shipping and pack trains. The important point here is the continuity of ethos between piratical raider of the ninth and European merchant of the tenth centuries. Undoubtedly, pirate-traders often shifted from one role to the other as

local circumstances suggested; but even when trading became prudent in more and more circumstances, bands of itinerant merchants still expected, like their piratical predecessors, to manage their own affairs and look after their

own defense. They also tended to treat peasants and lords of the land as strangers—potential victims of sharp practice, if no longer often of the sword. 51 The utter collapse of royal authority in this area in the ninth century facilitated the development of local systems of defense. The more or less fictional hierarchy of lord and vassal, descending downward from the king, gave a legal dress to what were at the time very brutal realities. Another reason

for the early development of feudalism in northern France was that here the peasantry, largely descended from Roman coloni, had long lost the habit of self-defense and had no tradition of tribal solidarity to hinder the acceptance of some strong-armed, and often self-appointed warrior as lord. In the purely German regions to the east, tribal solidarity was still close to the surface, tribesmen did not easily reconcile themselves to dependent and subordinate status; and it was correspondingly difficult for tribal dukes (or German kings) to find the means to support any numerically important body of knights. But peasant foot soldiery, of the style familiar in Charlemagne’s army, was little use against mobile striking forces—Magyar horsemen, Viking ships’ crews, or presently, French-style knights. Hence the “‘old-fashioned”’ military establishment of the Saxon emperors (919-1024) gradually gave way to enfeoffed knighthood. But the spread of feudalism into Germany also involved the disappearance of most of the effective power of the German kingdom, as had happened earlier in France. 52 This superiority was due to the unique manner in which Europeans exploited the shock potentialities of stirrups and lance, despising the bows which elsewhere continued to be the principal cavalry weapons. Cf. Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, 1-38. Frankish preference for the crushing blow and hand-to-hand combat carried forward into the high Middle Ages an antique bias of European warfare, extending back at least to the Mycenaeans. The necessity of fighting in terrain where trees were so numerous as to interfere with arrows may account for this otherwise inexplicable European disdain for missiles. See above, pp. 107, 237. 53 As an example of a contrary shift, cf. the career of Mohammed’s early followers, recruited from the fringes of a trading city, who initiated raids and conquest with conspicuous success. 64 For instructive remarks on Viking trade, cf. A. R. Lewis, The Northern Seas, pp. 282-86 ff.

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524 = Steppe Conquerors and the European Far West, 1000-1500 A.D. height of the Hellenic literary renaissance, a notably naturalistic stvle of painting appeared, attesting the abiding power of classical models. ‘Thereafter, a number of regional schools arose, among which may be counted the early Renaissance painters of Venice and Siena. Icon painting in Russia and Crete, church frescoes in Serbia, Macedonia, and Italy, as well as some secular painting and mosaics, gave vigor and variety to the art of the Orthodox world.

The Turkish conquest put an end to such activity in the Byzantine heartlands; but on the periphery, in Venetian Crete*’ and in Russia, a vigorous development continued into the sixteenth century.* Even more abrupt was the quietus the Turkish conquest brought to Byzantine literary activity and religious controversy. The learned officials and their hangers-on, who had constituted the literary class of Constantinople, ceased to exist; only the Church remained, and the Church was well content with its inheritance. The energy of the mystics waned even more rapidly than it had

mounted as the Orthodox communities of the Balkans settled down under

Ottoman rule. And the Russians, busy building and defending a vast state, had little energy either for literary and intellectual creation or for religious controversy. Thus save for an afterglow in the artistic field, the high culture of Orthodox Christendom dimmed until it could no longer hold its own against the vigorous upthrust of western European civilization. The strength of the Ottoman and Muscovite states commanded respect in the West; but after 1500 the culture of the Orthodox world, which in the early Middle Ages had so far surpassed that of the half-barbarous lands of Latin Christendom, could no longer exert a living influence upon its western neighbors.

Ek. THE FAR EAST I. CHINA

The traditional organization of Chinese history by dynasties fits awkwardly into the periodization of this chapter, for the years 1000 and 1500 of the Christian calendar both cut arbitrarily through important Chinese dynasties. To be sure, one of the main factors making the five centuries between 1000 and 1500 a.p. seem cohesive in the history of western Eurasia also affected the

Far East, for China was exposed to Turkish and Mongol conquest from the steppe just as were Islam, Orthodox Christendom, and (one degree removed) Hindustan. But China had been exposed to similar dangers ever since the fourth dynasty b.c.; and the fluctuations between native dynasties and dynasties from the steppe during the period 1000-1500 fitted into a long series of dynastic upheavals which had begun in Han times and continued into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the date 1000 a.p. appropriately symbolizes a deeply significant change in Chinese social history. For about that time, when the bureaucratic reorganization of the first Sung rulers had taken full effect, China’s 81 Domenicos Theotocopoulos (Fl Greco, d. 1614) was the most notable luminary trained in the Cretan school. ® Cf. O. M. Dalton, East Christian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), pp. 234-47 and passim; N. P. Kondakov, The Russian Icon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927).

The Far East 525 social and economic structure attained a new and, as it proved, lasting balance between rural and urban elements—that is, between officials, landlords, and peasants on the one hand and merchants and artisans on the other. Chinese social development during the ensuing centuries may be viewed as a sort of race between landed interests on the one hand and urban interests on the other. Townsmen had made conspicuous headway in the late T’ang period, when the central government had been chronically disorganized. But the whole weight of Chinese imperial tradition favored the landed and ofhcial classes; and after 960, the Sung restoration of centralized bureaucratic government greatly strengthened that side of the balance. Yet not until the Ming dynasty established itself firmly in all of China (ca. 1450) was the supremacy of a centralized, Confucian bureaucracy, recruited largely from the landowning class, definitely secured. Between 1000 and 1450, China’s social structure teetered on the verge of a fundamental change analogous to the rise of the bourgeoisie in medieval and early modern Europe. Yet the transformatlon never quite came off, and in the end the social order assigning predominance to the landed and official class, as organized under the Sung and restored by the Ming, became China’s modern system of society, lasting until the twentieth century. The first notable tremor in the balance between China’s commercial and landed interests occurred after the Sung emperors lost north China to Jurchen

invaders (1127). Thrown back upon the traditions and resources of the south, China in the later Sung period saw a notable development of riverine and maritime trade. Great cities arose on the south China coast and along the Yangtze; and growing numbers of merchant vessels set sail for southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.** The development of maritime commerce provoked and was in turn sustained by important improvements in naval architecture— cotton sails in place of bamboo slats, an adjustable centerboard keel, and a

notable increase in the size of vessels, together with the invention of the compass.*#

These improvements made oceanic voyages a reasonable risk even in foul weather and allowed Chinese vessels gradually to displace Moslem shipping,

which had long dominated the trade of the southern oceans. During their campaigns in south China, the Mongols (Yuan dynasty, 1260-1371) learned to appreciate Chinese naval potentialities, as their attempted invasions of Japan and Java prove. Moreover, the comparatively high status enjoyed by mer83 Cf. Jung-pang Lo, ‘‘China as a Sea Power,” Far Eastern Quarterly, XIV (1955), 489-503. The development of Chinese navigation between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries perhaps built upon ancient pre-Chinese maritime traditions of the south China coast. If so, the rise and fall of Chinese sea power may be viewed as an ultimately unsuccessful assertion of indigenous southern tradition against the more specifically Chinese, land-centered tradition of the north. 84 The compass is first mentioned in Chinese sources of the late eleventh century. The Chinese not only discovered the direction-finding properties of a magnetized needle but also developed a series of mountings, from a simple float in a dish of water to the pivoted compass mounted over a compass card.

Cf. Li Shu-hua, ‘The South-Pointing Carriage and the Mariner’s Compass,” Jsing-hua Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s., | (1956), 63-113. For Chinese compass cards, cf. W. Z. Mulder, “The Wau Pei Chih Charts,” T’oung Pao, XXXVII (1944), 1-14.

326 Steppe Conquerors and the European Far West, 1000-1500 A.D. chants in the Mongol scheme of things encouraged the shipowners of south China to develop a flourishing trade with southeast Asia and India. Official efforts to restrict this trade on the ground that it sent too much metal currency out of the country were apparently only sporadic and quite ineftectual.®

The Ming (1368-1663) established far stricter state control over sea trade. Between 1405 and 1433 a series of great maritime expeditions, led or directed by the court eunuch Cheng-ho, established Chinese hegemony over the key commercial centers of the Indian Ocean—the Malacca Straits, Ceylon, Calicut—and asserted a less definite suzerainty over Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Chinese fleets also visited the coast of east Africa.** Some 250 vessels and thousands of men participated in these expeditions—a truly imperial scale of operations that far eclipsed the first efforts of Europeans in the Americas and the Indies a century later. Nevertheless, despite the success of Cheng-ho’s expeditions in bringing back giraffes and similar wonders, and in forcing the rulers of Ceylon and other distant lands to pay him homage, the emperor in 1424 abruptly ordered the suspension of such enterprises.*” ‘There-

after, apparently as a by-product of intrigue at court, even the memory of these extraordinary expeditions was effectively suppressed. The government went so far as to forbid the construction of seagoing vessels, presumably because in private hands many of them indulged in piracy or smuggling and could not be properly controlled by a land-fast officialdom. The result was to deliver the coasts of China into the hands of Japanese and Malay pirates, who from the fifteenth century onward made the China Sea unsafe for peaceable commerce.

The Chinese certainly possessed the technical resources*® to have anticipated the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. World history would surely have taken a far different turn if Vasco da Gama had discovered a powerful Chinese overseas empire in possession of the principal ports and strategic gateways

of the Indian Ocean in 1498. If the mercantile communities of south China had been left to their own devices, still more if the imperial government had supported and encouraged their activities, such an empire might well have confronted the Portuguese explorer. But the Ming court lived far away from the south China coast whence the armadas of the early fifteenth century sailed and was far more concerned with the danger of a renewed Mongol attack on the northwest frontier than with any advantages which might have accrued

85 W. W. Rockhill, “Notes on the Relations and Trade of China with the Eastern Archipelago and the Coasts of the Indian Ocean during the Fourteenth Century,” T’oung Pao, XIV (1913), 473-76; XV

(1914), 419-47, Jung-pang Lo, “China as a Sea Power.’’ The rise of important Chinese mercantile and artisan communities in southeast Asia dates from Mongol times. 86 J. J. L. Duyvendak, ‘““The True Dates of the Chinese Maritime Expeditions in the Early Fifteenth Century,” T’oung Pao, XXXIV (1938), 341-412. 87 This order was subsequently modified to permit one last voyage. J. J. L. Duyvendak, “The True Dates of the Chinese Maritime Expeditions,” pp. 388-90. 88 In 1393 an imperial order prescribed that each naval vessel should carry four guns with “muzzles the size of rice bowls,’’ twenty guns of smaller caliber, ten bombs, twenty rockets, and a thousand rounds of shot. Jung-pang Lo, “‘China as a Sea Power,”’ p. 501.

The Far East 527 from a vigorous exploitation of the new techniques of seamanship. At the critical moment, therefore, the Chinese government not only abdicated from an active maritime role but actually prohibited private ventures on the sea. Another dimension of Chinese social evolution during these centuries goes far to explain how old values and a fundamentally agricultural frame of soci-

ety proved strong enough in Ming times to prevail so strikingly over the mercantile and urban interest. For agriculture, too, acquired vast new resources from the eleventh century onward. Nameless peasants discovered new

varieties of rice that ripened in sixty days or less, allowing two crops to be grown in a single season on the same land. Moreover, these early ripening varieties required less water than others, so that terraced hillsides where irrigation was possible only during the spring run-off could now successfully be turned into paddy fields. This permitted an enormous extension of the area under intensive cultivation, particularly in the hills of south China.°° The result was to multiply several times over the food-producing capacity of Chinese agriculture, permitting a great growth of rural population and a corresponding multiplication of landowners, who were therefore able to maintain or even to increase their weight in Chinese society as a whole.

This reinforcement of the landed interest meant that the gentry class, which from Han times had been the principal carrier of the Confucian tradition and the champion of everything distinctively Chinese, was more easily able to hold its own against merchants and other upstarts. The crisis came under the Mongols, who, like all nomads, traditionally assigned an honorable place in society to traders. Genghis Khan and his successors freely accorded special privileges and high ofhce to foreign merchants like Marco Polo. Many of these strangers combined mercantile activity with tax farming and other fiscal operations, none of which endeared them to the Chinese public at large. Hence when the Mongols were ejected from China in 1368, gentry officials had wide support for their effort to reassert the Confucian principle which classified merchants among the necessary evils of society. In practice this meant fastening close ofhcial supervision and control upon all mercantile ac89 Duyvendak, “The True Dates of the Chinese Maritime Expeditions,”’ pp. 395-99, attributes the defeat of a project to resume voyaging to the Indian Ocean, advanced sometime between 1465 and 1487, to the hostility of the mandarins of the court against eunuchs, who by virtue of Cheng-ho’s feats were identified with a forward policy on the seas. Cf. Jung-pang Lo, ““The Decline of the Early Ming Navy,’ Oriens Extremus, V (1958), 149-68. Clique rivalries may have been a major determinant of imperial policy, but the decision was not irrational, for the mandarins had good arguments against dissipating imperial resources overseas. In 1421

the Ming capital was moved north to Peking and the government launched a series of campaigns into Mongolta to forestall the rise of a new Mongol confederacy. Yet in 1449 the Mongols captured the emperor himself. Renewal of the age of Genghis Kahn seemed at hand. In face of such dangers, how could resources be spared for unnecessary ventures on the seas? For events across the Chinese-Mongol frontier, see D. Pokotilov, History of the Eastern Mongols during the Ming Dynasty from 1368 to 1634, Rudolf Loewenthal (trans.) (Chengtu: Chinese Cultural Studies Research Institute, 1947). % Ping-ti Ho, “Early Ripening Rice in Chinese History,” Economic History Review, 1X (1956-57),

200-218. The new varieties were apparently developed by cross-breeding with rice brought from Indochina because of its drought resistance. This foreign rice was first noticed by Chinese writers in 1012, when it was introduced into the lower Yangtze Valley from Fukien. Thereafter, this rice and the new early-ripening varicties derived from it spread gradually over most of China.

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588 The Far West's Challenge to the World, 1500-1700 A.D. and the pope, found in the pagan learning of the humanists one of their most effective tools of education. In such confusion and contrariety, perhaps all one can say by way of general summary is that both religion and secularism acquired a new energy from their mutual jostling. In a world full of intellectual novelties and inflamed by religious passions, casual lip service to Christianity or its easy repudiation became as difficult as the dogmatic conviction of the adequacy of Christian doctrine to guide men in all things whatsoever. When passions subsided after 1648, the intellectual novelties remained, but so did an enhanced and deepened popular commitment to one or another form

of Christian orthodoxy, a commitment which was sustained by much expanded and ecclesiastically controlled educational systems. The new climate of opinion which manifested itself during the second half of the seventeenth century in the most active centers of European culture allowed reason and faith to pursue gradually divergent ways. The ambition of discovering and imposing a total Truth, by force if need be, lost its hold on men’s minds and ceased to be a question of practical statecraft. Under these circumstances, a

growing autonomy of separate intellectual disciplines tended to dethrone theology from its accustomed primacy among the arts and sciences without ever directly challenging the traditional prerogatives of religion. This upshot of the tumultuous struggles of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was clearly contrary to the intention of almost all who took part in them. It was the failure of Europeans to agree upon the truths of religion, within as well as across state boundaries, that opened the door to secu-

larism and modern science. In states where the religious aspirations of the Reformation age came closer to success, i.e., where lay and ecclesiastical officials joined forces to impose an almost perfect religious conformity, something close to intellectual stagnation ensued—redeemed, sometimes, by artistic brilliance. Thus the political diversity of Europe thwarted the heart’s desire of nearly all the intellectually sensitive men of the time!? by making impossible the construction of a single authoritative, definitive, and (as almost everyone also desired) enforcible codification of Truth. Yet, ironically, the failure to construct a world-view commanding general

assent was the great achievement of the age. Europeans inherited from the passionate and anguished strivings of the sixteenth century a high seriousness in the pursuit both of knowledge and of salvation. They inherited also a range of unsolved problems and new questions which assured the continuance of rapid intellectual and artistic development. Neither the intellectual dilettant-

ism toward which the Italian Renaissance had tended to descend in the fifteenth century, nor the volcanic dogmatism of the Reformers of the sixteenth century, could cope with the problems each raised for the other. The collision and interaction of Renaissance and Reformation, by heightening the tensions between the incompatible inseparables at the core of European culture—the 19 Mathematically-minded rationalists like Descartes were quite as earnest as theologians in seeking for an absolute, unquestionable truth. Since they were in a tiny minority, I am not aware that any of them suggested use of state authority to enforce their Truth, however.

The Transmutation of Europe, 1500-1650 y89 Hellenic pagan and the Judaeo-Christian heritages—increased the variety, mul-

tiplied the potentialities, and raised the intellectual and moral energies of Europe to a new height.

***

It is easier to understand than to share the theological passions of the Reformation period. When human affairs conform more or less to common expectation, intellectual hypothesis and new doctrine may excite attention among a limited circle of professionals but will pass almost unnoticed by the great majority of the population. This had been the case in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when radical ecclesiastical reform programs had won only local and limited followings, when heretical notions about the nature of God and man had been freely promulgated in Italian intellectual circles, and when humanistic scholars had increasingly held scholastic theology and philosophy up to scorn. It ceased abruptly to be true in 1517, when an obscure friar in a remote German university town posted ninety-five theses on the door of the castle church of Wittenberg in the best tradition of medieval academic controversy. Instead, all Germany took fire. With explosive speed, preachers and printers promulgated the increasingly radical views of Martin Luther, until presently not only Germany but all of northern Europe was caught up in bitter religious controversy. A full generation elapsed before the rulers of the Catholic church in Rome took real heed of the Reformation challenge;

but once the Roman church had reorganized itself, the dedication of its agents, above all ot the Jesuits, equalled the religious fervor and surpassed the organized discipline of the Protestants. By 1648, a century of dubious battle had accomplished a lasting division of the continent between Catholic and Protestant states. Most of Germanic Europe became Protestant, but almost all of Latin Europe, together with the Slavic, Magyar, and Irish fringes of medieval Christendom, remained loyal to Rome. Complex doctrinal differences between Protestant and Catholic, and among the various Protestant churches, sprang to life in the tumultuous wake of the

Lutheran movement. Nuances of creed, such as precise definition of the essence and accidents of the Eucharist, or the evidences for infra- as against supralapsarianism, seemed absolutely vital at the time, though they no longer excite much attention. Yet the most fundamental point of difference between Protestants and Catholics, the question of the nature and sources of religious

authority, remains crucial. Luther, Calvin, and their followers taught the priesthood of all believers, thereby extending to all Christians religious func-

tions and powers which medieval theology had reserved for the professional caste of ordained clergy. These reformers held that clerical office implied special duties and responsibilities but did not confer special powers to dispense or withhold the saving grace of God. Grace descended instead directly from God himself to those whom he chose to save from the damnation

they deserved; and God’s own word, recorded in the Bible, was the sole authentic authority in matters of religion. The task of the clergy was to ex-

590 The Far West’s Challenge to the World, 1500-1700 A.D. pound and explain God’s word, to invite the faith of the laity, and await in hope the miracle of God’s grace.

To be sure, as Lutheran and Calvinist churches took form, the practical consequences of these beliefs ceased to be very apparent. The doctrines and ceremonies which Lutheran and Calvinist divines derived from the Bible differed in numerous details from the creed and liturgy of the Roman church. Yet all were doctrines expounded dogmatically by men who allowed themselves no doubts in theological matters and who were prepared to impose their views by force whenever political circumstance allowed. Nevertheless, in denying the professional clergy a monopoly of supernatural powers, Protestant theologians found themselves in a difficult position when others drew different conclusions from Holy Writ. Hence the multiplication of sects and schism, which was a pronounced characteristic of Protestantism from the beginning. And when a few men’s minds withdrew from the struggle after unassailable religious truth, preferring to study the world and its wonders with no very compelling theological presuppositions, Protestant clergymen might thunder from their pulpits against such divagation from man’s eternal concerns, but were, at least logically, in terms of their own definition of clerical powers, in no position to forbid it. In sum, the anarchic, personal, and private confrontation of the believer with his God which lay close to the heart of the Protestant movement at its beginning (1517-25) was quickly healed over by the establishment of orthodox Protestant churches that were as authoritarian as the Catholic hierarchy and in some respects more totalitarian in their demands upon the faithful. Yet an individualistic weakness remained beneath the surface of the Protestant establishments and appeared openly whenever Protestant minorities defied constituted religious authority on the basis of the same Bible to which all Protestants appealed. The dificulty of establishing consensus on a biblical basis tended therefore to widen the areas of tolerance within Protestant states. The scope for toleration was distinctly smaller in Catholic lands just because the supreme religious authorities—the pope and canon law—were less ambiguous than Protestantism’s Holy Writ.7° Whether or not the Reformation forwarded intellectual variety and toleration within Protestant states, there can be no doubt that by dividing Europe 20 The afhnity of sixteenth- or even seventeenth-century Protestantism with liberalism and individualism as they developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is easy to exaggerate. The German Protestant states remained bound to rigid orthodoxy at a time when Holland and England had both found room for divergent opinions; and conversely, France, for all the state’s Catholicism, was the seat of much religious and intellectual variety in the seventeenth century as later. Only where the Spanish and Jesuit imprint upon the Counter Reformation was allowed free scope, as in Italy, Austria, and Poland, did Catholicism become as rigid as my text suggests. In general, the regions where urban middle classes attained the greatest weight in society became the most diverse intellectually and religiously, and this, perhaps, goes farther to explain the evolution of Holland, England, and France than the religious alignments of their respective governments. Even the case of Italy, which seems best to illustrate the blighting power of the Counter Reformation upon free intellectual adventure, may also be accounted for as a reflection of prior decay of urban enterprise

in Italian towns. .

On the other hand, Max Weber’s famous thesis attributed the political and social rise of a middle class in transalpine Europe to the moral discipline of Calvinism.

The Transmutation of Europe, 1500-1650 59] Into Opposing camps, Protestantism promoted a new range of religious variety within the circle of European civilization. Such variety raised doubts as to the perfect adequacy of any particular religious or intellectual system, a situation far more challenging to further thought than any likely to arise as long as the fabric of the Church remained unbroken.

In the political sphere, both the Protestant and the Catholic Reformations contributed directly to the advance of the secular power at the expense of the papacy and of the empire. Protestant rulers confiscated much ecclesiastical property and often reduced the clergy to the status of salaried appointees of the state. Even in Catholic countries, where the Church retained most or all of its possessions, the papacy was forced to concede very extensive powers to local rulers in such matters as ecclesiastical appointments, taxing powers over Church property, and judicial authority over clergymen. As a result, fairly distinct national or state churches tended to form even within the universal frame of Catholicism. Although international agencies like the Jesuit order acted to check the fragmentation of the Church along national lines, even the Jesuits had to come to terms with secular rulers and as a matter of deliberate policy secured some of their most brilliant successes by winning the confidence of kings. Protestantism served also as a rallying cry for the resistance of German

princes to the efforts of the Hapsburg emperors to dominate Germany. Strictly religious alignments affected but did not really govern the alliances which succeeded in frustrating imperial ambitions in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). Thus Catholic France allied herself with heretics and Turks when common enmity to the Hapsburgs dictated such a move; and individual Protestant princes in Germany more than once chose the Hapsburg side for reasons of their own. By the close of the war, the territorial princes of Germany had become effectively sovereign, not so much because of their own local strength as owing to the intervention of Sweden, France, and other foreign powers against the Hapsburgs. Thus the definitive collapse of the medieval ideal of imperial unity (and incidentally the frustration of incipient German nationalism) no less than the disruption of the Church Universal may be attributed to the German Reformation.

***

The thundering voices of the Reformation and Counter Reformation contrast sharply with the slender siren song of the Renaissance. Yet the siren song was piercing, too. Even in the midst of the volcanic passions and violent upheavals provoked by religious strife, it could still be heard, tantalizmg many of those whom it could not win over. Beauty created by human imagination and skill for its own sake, and truth pursued by an unfettered human reason independent of all external authority, had a seductive charm even for men striving desperately after religious and moral certainty. Once such ideals had found clear and uncompromising expression, as occurred in Italy in the fif-

teenth and in northern Europe in the early sixteenth century, they could

never be dismissed. Individuals made their choice between such concerns and

592 The Far West's Challenge to the World, 1500-1700 A.D. the clamorous demands of religion, sometimes painfully, as in the cases of Erasmus (d. 1536), Pascal (d. 1662), or Milton (d. 1674), sometimes with a welcome sense of release, as in the cases of Loyola (d. 1556), Calvin (d. 1564), and Descartes (d. 1650), and sometimes without any apparent inner struggle, as in the cases of Shakespeare (d. 1616), Cervantes (d. 1616), and Francis Bacon (d. 1626). Perhaps because so many of the fundaments of older European society and civilization had been called into question, the age was amazingly fertile in arts and letters and gave birth to exact natural science. No subsequent time has een evel.more revolutionary, nor raised European culture so distinctly to a new

Cultural advance proceeded in two apparently contradictory directions. Art and letters tended to differentiate into distinct national schools, whereas the sciences and practical arts remained pan-European while manifesting a growing professional independence and intellectual autonomy. Both developments had the effect of insulating Europe’s cultural leaders from the dominion of any over-all philosophical-theological world-view, thus making explicit the innumerable discrepancies in the European cultural inheritance and achievement.

The vernacular languages of Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Germany all found lasting literary definition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cervantes (d. 1616) and Lope de Vega (d. 1635) in Spain, Camoens (d. 1580) in Portugal, Rabelais (d. 1553) and Montaigne (d. 1592) in France, Luther (d. 1546) in Germany, Shakespeare (d. 1616), Milton (d. 1674), and the translators of the King James (1611) Bible all gave their respective languages definitive literary form. In Italy, where the vernacular tongue had earlier achieved literary definition, these centuries were of only secondary

importance; whereas in central and eastern Europe, literary vernaculars withered when the Counter Reformation brought the full weight of Latin, German, and Italian letters to bear against the still tender and uncertain shoots put forth by the various local Slavic languages.

In the visual arts, language barriers could not operate to isolate national schools from one another; and the persuasive example of Italian styles in painting and architecture therefore had a wide influence beyond the Alps. Yet

here, too, painters in Holland, Germany, and Spain developed distinct national schools of their own, even though such magistral techniques as mathematical and aerial perspective, chiaroscuro, and the idea that painting should so imitate nature as to suggest an illusion gf optical experience—techniques and ideas that had originated or found their fullest flowering in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy—gave a general coherence to all the separate schools of European painting. Architecture in northern Europe was more conservative. The Italianate baroque was generally limited to Catholic lands; in Prot-

estant countries variations upon the older Gothic style persisted until the second half of the seventeenth century.

The evolution of science, technology, and the practical arts in Europe proceeded, not by regional or national differentiation, but by a process of

The Transmutation of Europe, 1500-1650 593 differentiation into special subject matters and skills. Nonetheless, borrowings and cross-stimuli among the emergent specialties were important. Mathematics in particular tended to rise to the place of queen among the sciences which had once been occupied by Aristotelian logic. Thus mathematical geography and cartography, mathematical physics, mathematical astronomy, and (with

Descartes) mathematical philosophy all made their appearance. Latin continued to be the usual language of scholarship, so that the republic of learning,

focused especially in Italy but with a strong secondary center in Holland, easily transcended national and local linguistic barriers.

The key to the rapid progress of the natural sciences in Europe lay very largely in a growing habit of testing theories against careful measurement, observation, and upon occasion, experiment. Such procedures implied a disrespect for the authority of inherited learning; and some of the manifestations

of the new spirit—e.g., dissection of the human body and practical experimentation in physics and optics—also defied a long-standing prejudice among the learned against dirtying their hands with anything but ink.” In an age when experimental method has achieved the dignity of dogma, it is worth emphasizing that astronomers and physicists undertook closer obser-

vations and more exact measurements only after Copernicus (d. 1543) had put an alternative to traditional Ptolemaic and Aristotelian theories before the learned world; and Copernicus did so, not on the basis of observations and measurements, but on grounds of logical simplicity and aesthetic symmetry.

His heliocentric hypothesis appears to have been suggested partly by the knowledge that some of the ancients, most notably Aristarchus, had advocated such an explanation of the celestial movements and partly by the vogue for Pythagorean number mysticism and “sun worship” which was prevalent in Italian intellectual circles during his student days at the University of Padua. Copernicus’ intellectual affinities were not mere individual eccentricities, for the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition influenced many, perhaps most, of the pioneers of modern mathematical science down at least to Newton’s (d. 1727) day. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that what opened the door in

seventeenth-century Europe for detailed measurements and observation of natural phenomena was friction between the scholastic orthodoxies of Aristotelian physics and the heterodoxies of a revived Pythagorean-Platonic mathematical mysticism. With alternative hypotheses in the field, careful measurements of the planetary motions and elaborate mathematical calculations based

upon such observations made sense as a means of deciding between rival theories. Moreover, because advocates of Pythagorean-Platonic ideas undertook to overthrow an established body of scientific doctrine, it was they who took the lead in gathering new data. Johannes Kepler (d. 1630), for example, was inspired to a lifetime of laborious computation by the hope of reducing 21 Accurate observation and ingenious experiment carried conviction to ordinary, uninstructed men, and to some men of learning also. Yet there were rigorous minds that stoutly resisted conclusions based

upon fallible sense impressions, on the ground that such conclusions lacked the logical certainty of theories carefully deduced from self-evident first principles. In cases of conflict, it seemed plain enough which sort of argument was to be preferred. The Italian astronomers who refused to sully their minds by looking through Galileo’s telescope were not therefore irrational—merely rigorously logical.

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vented ca. 1590), thermometer (invented ca. 1592), barometer (invented ca. 1643), and pendulum clock (invented ca. 1592) gave a new range and precision to observation and measurement of physical phenomena.”** The invention of new symbols for mathematical notation had a similar effect in facilitating

calculation. Even more important, increasingly generalized symbols often suggested new operations and new relationships that had been effectually hidden by the clumsiness of earlier notations or by the complication of earlier

methods of calculation. Similarly, the use of woodcuts and engravings to illustrate botanical, geographical, medical, and similar treatises made it possible to record and transmit the observations of a single man with an accuracy unattainable through mere words.

The habit of testing theories empirically, the use (and invention) of 1mproved instruments, and the mathematicizing mental bias derived from Pythag-

orean-Platonic tradition all came together in the person of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who more than any other single man deserves to be called the father of modern European science. Galileo’s laws of terrestrial motion, his striking telescopic discoveries (sunspots, the moons of Jupiter), his ingenious experiments and careful measurements, together with his ranging (and sometimes erroneous) theoretical explanations of what he found, launched European physical science on a path of discovery which has not yet been exhausted or abandoned. Despite the condemnation of his astronomy by the papal Inquisition, the European intellectual world was permanently transformed by his 22 Cf. A. Wolf, A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries (New

York: Macmillan Co., 1935), pp. 71-120.

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These miniatures were painted at the court of the Mogul emperor Jahangir (1605-27). On the left, Jahangir is shown embracing the Safav1 shah, while beneath their feet the lion and the lamb lie down together. The artist thus celebrated a politic and passing reconciliation of the Sunni-Shi’a, Indian-Iranian rivalries. On the right, the emperor 1s shown seated on his throne, receiving a book (the Koran?) from a Moslem man of religion in the presence of two Europeans and a Hindu. The prayerful attitude of the dark, bearded European indicates perhaps that he has come to scek permission to trade (or some other favor) from the mighty Moslem ruler of India.

626 The Far Wests Challenge to the World, 1500-1700 A.D. attained great influence over the people at large, until their opinions came to constitute a fairly effective check upon the actions of the shah himself.* Secular administration and military organization evolved more slowly. Not until the time of Shah Abbas the Great was the tribal basis of Ismail’s army

and government supplemented and counterbalanced by the creation of a standing army, recruited mainly from Georgian and Armenian converts to Islam on the model of the Ottoman Janissary corps.”

The drastic reforms carried out by the Safavids had no counterpart in either the Ottoman or the Mogul empires. Sunni orthodoxy had long reconciled itself to religious heterodoxy; and no popular movement of Sunni fanaticism arose to sustain a religious revolution such as that which transformed the Persian scene in the sixteenth century. Heterodox dervish orders were too

firmly interwoven with the fabric of the Ottoman state to be safely suppressed;® and after the revolt and massacres of 1514, the Shi’a, so far as they survived in Ottoman territories, took their traditional refuge by conforming outwardly to Sunni observances. With open provocation thus removed, the complaisant temper of the Sunni community made drastic counter-reformation

like that just starting in Catholic Europe out of the question. The Ottoman sultans, therefore, contented themselves with administrative precautions. Sulermman the Lawgiver (1520-66) perfected and extended the hierarchical organization of the wlema of the empire, subsidized Sunni educational institutions, and generally put the weight of the government squarely behind a more strictly conceived Sunni orthodoxy. As a result of his careful legislation, the religious and political institutions of the Ottoman empire attained a form which endured virtually unchanged for more than two centuries.” Mogul institutions attammed a comparable definition under the emperor

Akbar (1556-1605). Akbar organized his court and central administration along Persian lines but allowed local custom to prevail in village and town. He permitted some Hindu clan and territorial lords—the “Rajputs’—to exercise local jurisdiction; but Moslems remained heavily preponderant in the higher

administration. Religious diversity within the empire remained a delicate 65 Unless one discounts the language of his Turki poems, Ismail appears to have claimed that he was, as the Turkish tribesmen who rallied to his banners probably believed him to be, nothing less than God incarnate. This, however, was not the official ‘‘Twelver”’ view, which held that the Safavids were merely descendants of the seventh of the twelve legitimate imams, and as such presumptively a bit closer to God than ordinary men. Cf. Hans Robert Roemer, ‘‘Die Safawiden,” Saeculum, 1V (1953), 31-33. 66 Seven Turkish tribes from Azerbaijan constituted the core of the original force.

67 Sir Percy Sykes, A History of Persia (2d ed.; London: Macmillan & Co., 1921), HI, 175-76; Laurence Lockhart, The Fall of the Safgvi Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 195 8), pp. 18-22. Until Abbas’ time, the Persians had lacked artillery and infantry firearms; Abbas secured these advantages through the mediation of European merchants and adventurers, most notably a pair of Englishmen named Robert and Anthony Sherley.

68 The Janissaries, for example, could be counted upon to defend their spiritual advisers, the Bektashi dervishes; and other dervish orders had similarly strategic affiliations with urban guilds in the capital and with regional communities, especially in Anatolia. 69 A.H. Lybyer, The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1913). Despite the ttle, H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, offer by far the best analysis of Ottoman religious policy for this period with which I am acquainted.

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632 The Far West’s Challenge to the World, 1500-1700 A.D. during the seventeenth century, Moslems could legitimately feel that they had successfully weathered the storms that at the beginning of the sixteenth cen-

tury had threatened their society from within and from without. The result was sublime smugness vis-a-vis the world of unbelievers, European or otherwise, and at home an adamant conservatism bent upon discarding all novelties. The basically backward-looking character of Islamic law and piety certainly predisposed the Moslem world to such rigidity. Yet the harsh collision between Shi'a and Sunni in the sixteenth century may have fastened Moslem minds more strongly to ancient formulae of truth and encouraged the neglect of those elements in the Islamic intellectual heritage which might have permitted them more nearly to keep pace with Europe’s extraordinary series of cultural and economic revolutions.™ Something like the spirit of the Italian

Renaissance had been abroad in the courts of Mohammed the Conqueror” and Akbar; but Selim the Grim and Suleiman the Lawgiver undertook to suppress dangerous thoughts in the Ottoman empire; and Aurangzeb attempted to do the same in India. Suleiman was so far successful that no revival of the Inquiring, innovating spirit which in seventeenth-century Europe gave

birth to modern literature and science ever occurred in the Ottoman empire (or in any other Moslem state). Herein, far more than in the loss of middlemen’s profits from the spice trade, lay the central failure of Islam in modern times.

The social structure of the Islamic world contributed powerfully to this result. New notions found uncongenial soil in states built upon a small class of officials and soldiers raised far above a tax-burdened peasantry. The servility

of townsmen toward officials and landlords had been a persistent feature of Middle Eastern society from the second millennium s.c.; and the Ottoman and Mogul empires, by the very splendor of their imperial organization, confirmed this social pattern. Only in the Safavid empire, where propaganda on behalf of Shia doctrines brought a limited popular element into the political balance and where the survival of Turkish tribalism counterpoised the royal bureaucracy, did politics achieve a somewhat broader social base. The sixteenth-century religious split in Islam between Sunni and Shi'a did not create this dominant sociological character in Islam. Nonetheless, by impelling the sultans to a more vigorous espousal of Sunni orthodoxy, it may have

helped to widen the gap between rulers and townsmen. In the Ottoman em8 The dreadful abyss of religious uncertainty which had briefly confronted the Sunni community of Islam was escaped by institutional rather than intellectual invention. Having balked at meeting the intellectual challenge of heresy by anything more than bald reaffirmation of the past, a paralyzing precedent inhibited any more constructive response to subsequent intellectual challenges. More than that, most pious and educated Sunni Moslems came to feel that an uncritical acceptance of religious truth was the only safe intellectual posture—and the more uncritical the better. But in the absence of controversy, intellectual vigor rapidly died away in the Ottoman empire; and the ulema became less and less perfect masters even of their own intellectual inheritance. Such intellectual flabbiness was a high price to pay for the protection of Sanni orthodoxy against the challenge of heresy. Interestingly, Moslem intellectual energy remained distinctly higher in Persia and India, where religious controversy, particularly in India, remained strong. “Cf. Abdulah Adnan-Adwar, “Interaction of Islamic and Western Thought in Turkey,” in T. Cuvyler Young (ed.), Near Eastern Culture and Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 121-22.

The Changing Balance of the Ecumene 633 pire, at any ratc, artisans and tradesmen tended in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries toward various forms of religious heterodoxy; and the dervish orders, divorced as they were from state-endowed educational institutions and from Moslem higher learning, became more and more imbued with vulgar superstition and thaumaturgy.” By driving a wedge between the Sunni establishment and ordinary townsmen and commoners, the repression of the Shia revolution contributed to this result. Thus in this respect, as well as in its more immediate political and cultural consequences, the Shi’a-Sunni split constituted the central feature of Islamic history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By comparison, the collision with Europe remained merely marginal. 2. THE SUBJECT RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES IN THE MOSLEM WORLD

Hinpu [npia anp Bupputsr SourHeasr Asta. Despite the political eclipse of Hinduism in the sixteenth century, the overwhelming majority of Hindus remained faithful to their ancestral religion and way of life. Ordinary villagers and townsmen were scarcely affected by the Mogul conquest and simply treated the Moslems among them as one more caste. The royal government's principal point of contact with the populace—its revenue-collecting branch— was largely staffed by Hindus, who alone were familiar with the intricacies of traditional land systems and tax registers. Moreover, in many regions Hindu nobles retained their properties; and, as we have seen, the emperor Akbar even admited Rajputs into his official military and administrative hierarchy. Hence the Moslem political domination of India did not seriously interfere with the continuance of Hindu life in all its immemorial antiquity.

Nevertheless, the transfer of political power to an alien religious group tended to impoverish Hindu high culture. The construction of Hindu temples, for example, had been financed by state revenues and therefore came to a halt wherever Moslems took over the government. Only in the far south, where Moslem political control was never more than nominal, did some architectural

activity continue. Moreover, the Hindu upper classes tended to acquire a veneer of the Persianate culture of their Moslem overlords, even while remaining true to their own religion. Rajput painting was the most distinguished product of this cultural blending; for Persian artistic techniques applied to the portrayal of Hindu gods and heroes soon produced an art stylistically distinct from its prototype and endowed with a real charm of its own. As we have seen before, religious syncretism between the Hindu and the Moslem traditions long antedated the Mogul conquests. ‘The Sikhs, the most

important of the sects which sought to reconcile the two faiths in a higher revelation, underwent a remarkable transformation in the seventeenth century. Their canon of sacred writings was officially closed in 1604. Soon thereafter, the Sikh leaders fell afoul of the Mogul authorities; and the community took to arms with such effect that, as the imperial power disintegrated during the eighteenth century, the Sikhs emerged as the most important heir to the Moguls in the Punjab. Yet this success was dearly bought; for the transforma75 Gibb and Bowen, Islamic Society, 1, Part II], 179-206.

634 The Far West's Challenge to the World, 1500-1700 A.D. tion of the Sikh community into a warrior state meant in effect the renunciation of the universalist ambition of earlier Sikh teachers. The polymorphous piety of the Hindu tradition and the elaborate legal prescriptions of Islam could not be reduced to the slender thread of obedience to the Sikh gurus, no matter how impressively their teaching was validated by success in battle. Far more significant for the Hindu community at large were popular religious and literary movements that resisted doctrinal definition but induced a powerful emotional exaltation among their adherents. Before 1500, the vast variety of local Hindu observances had existed for the most part on a simple customary level, with little in the way of formal literary expression or definition. The ancient learning of the Brahmins, while never abandoned, had little meaning for the unlearned, to whom Sanskrit was unintelligible; and Brahmunical pretensions to social privilege, based upon the Sanskrit tradition, did not always win an easy acquiescence among the low-born castes. In the sixteenth century, however, Hinduism underwent a vital reformation. Holy men and poets not only relocated the foci of popular piety, but also brought the vernacular tongues of northern India to a literary expression and used these languages as vehicles for a vastly intensified religious aspiration. Hinduism thereby secured an emotional power which has assured its continued hold upon the loyalties of the great majority of Indians down to the present time. Three men stood out in this development: the saint and revivalist Chaitan-

ya (d. 1534), and the Hindi poets Tulsi Das (d. 1627) and Sur Das (d. 1563). The writings of the poets and the sect which gathered around the charismatic figure of Chaitanya agreed in concentrating a highly emotional devotion upon one particular divine incarnation, although they differed in their choices from among the myriad incarnations available in traditional Hindu mythology. Chaitanya was an unusual figure, even in the context of the Indian ascetic tradition. In early manhood, under the stress of extraordinary personal experience of the power and glory of Krishna, he abandoned the Brahminical life to which he had been born and became an itinerant holy man. His easy ecstasy and utter emotional abandon, expressed through violent physical contortions and endless ejaculations of praise, gave unfriendly critics good reason to think him mad; but the crowds which gathered in his presence saw instead a man who actually embodied the divinity he worshipped. God in the flesh was no common thing, even in India; and the religious excitement generated among Chaitanya’s followers wiped out caste and other social distinctions and imparted to them a poignant sense of the immediacy of divinity." 76 Chaitanya was active principally in Bengal, where in his time a variety of formerly primitive peoples were in process of being folded into the Indian body social. Such tribes were usually assigned places very near the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy, being ritually unclean in some of their customs. This had made possible the success of Islam in Bengal before Chaitanya’s time; but the movement that sprang up around him effectively stopped the progress of Islam in those parts. Men who had once experienced the emotional surge of crowd excitement when confronted by deity in the flesh were bound to find the ritual and creed of Islam, even in its Sufi forms, a pallid and unsatisfactory substitute. And because caste distinctions were vigorously repudiated among Chaitanya’s followers in the early phases of the movement, one of Islam’s chief appeals was radically undercut.

Cf. the manner in which the victory of monastic and popular piety in the Hesychast controversy within Orthodox Christianity checked the progress of Islam in the Balkans, discussed above, p. 522.

The Changing Balance of the Ecumene 635 The poet Tulsi Das, on the other hand, directed all his devotion to another divine incarnation, Rama, and wrote voluminously of the deeds and glories of his hero, Although he quarried most of his material from the Ramayana, his poems were far more than mere translations from Sanskrit into Hindi. He edited and elaborated the episodes he selected, always seeking to enhance the divine element in the God-man he glorified. The poems of Tulsi Das became widely popular and of enormous importance for the moral and religious education of later generations of Hindus. In a very simular manner, Sur Das took the myths of Krishna’s childhood, particularly the episodes of his youthful love-making among the milkmaids, and turned them into allegories of divine love for mankind. In later life, Sur Das enjoyed an entree to Akbar’s court; and his religious thought and feeling closely resembled the ambiguous interpenetration of divine and carnal love that had long pervaded Persian poetry and Sufi mysticism. Perhaps partly because of this foreign taint, his influence upon subsequent Hindu religious sensibility was less strong than that of Tulsi Das.

According to Hindu tradition, both Rama and Krishna were avatars of Vishnu; and Chaitanya was accepted by his followers as yet another incarna-

tion of the same deity. Thus the groups which arose under the influence of Chaitanya and the two great Hindi poets were doctrinally quite compatible; for each could assert that in fact they all worshipped the same divine reality though in different manifestations. Yet each group, by focusing almost exclu-

sive attention upon its chosen form of the deity, did in practice build up a distinct sect, with a liturgy and literature of its own, and relegated other dimensions of the variegated Hindu heritage to the background. Shiva lost some of his following; and the various Tantric magic spells and modes for | compelling divine assistance tended to melt away in the white heat of personal devotion to and identification with a very human, yet at the same time an utterly divine being, whether invoked by the name of Rama, Krishna, or Chaitanya.

To each of these sects, Brahminical learning and piety were largely irrelevant. Nonetheless, the ancient Sanskrit tradition persisted and was held in high respect by all except Chaitanya’s followers; and Brahmins were still employed for family ceremonies at birth, marriage, death, and all the other crises of ordinary life. Yet because the treasures of Sanskrit learning were closed to the great majority, Hinduism as a working religious system came to

center about the new vernacular devotional literature and around family ceremonies, public processions, and other festive manifestations of religious devotion. ‘‘

This evolution rendered popular Hinduism proof against the charms and criticisms of Islam. The warmth and color of a religion built around a God7 Cf. K. B. Jindal, A History of Hindi Literature (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1955), pp. 52-155; Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1911), pp. 398-565; F. E. Keay, A History of Hindi Literature (Calcutta: Association Press, 1920), pp. 19-72; Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922-55), IV, 384-95; Melville T. Kennedy, The Chaitanya Movement (Calcutta: Association Press, 1925).

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DISRUPTION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE T

Moslem Catalepsy 699 necessity of implementing such radical departures from Ottoman and Moslem traditions. Until after the Crimean War (1853-56), the reluctance or positive

hostility with which most Turks viewed any change whatever effectively nullified almost all the reforms initiated by the sultan. Insubordinate local despots were sometimes more successful in breaking through the cake of custom that so firmly bound Ottoman society. By very brutal methods, directly aimed at maximizing their military power, such war lords often became far more efficacious agents of Europeanization than the

sultan and the central government. The most spectacular and successful of these military adventurers was Mehemet Ali of Egypt (d. 1849). An Albanian who had risen by ruthless intrigue to be Ottoman governor of Egypt, Mehemet Ali in 1811 massacred the Mameluke military garrison and emerged as absolute master of the country, although he still remained nominally sub-

ject to Constantinople. He proceeded to Europeanize his army, reform the administration, and build up the commercial economy of Egypt. He employed numerous Europeans (especially Frenchmen) in his service and ruthlessly exploited the native Egyptians. Nor did his ambition stop at Egypt’s frontiers: he extended his control into Arabia (Wahhabi War, 1811-18), the Sudan (1820-22), Crete (1823), and Greece (1825-28). Combined British, French, and Russian naval forces interrupted this empire-building by destroying Mehemet All’s fleet in the harbor of Navarino (1827); and Western diplomats then compelled him to evacuate Greece, thus ensuring the success of the Greek war of independence. When he took Syria from the Ottoman sultan in 1832-33, the European powers once again snatched away the fruits

of victory, forcing him to settle for hereditary rule over Egypt and the

Sudan.*!

Intervention against Mehemet Ali stepped up the scale of European interference in Ottoman affairs; for the great powers of Europe had come to consider the preservation of the Ottoman empire as essential to the maintenance of the balance of power. In a sense, European support of the Ottoman regime

prepared the way for more thorough and effective internal reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet the mere fact that the sultan depended upon foreign diplomatic and military support tended to alienate spon-

taneous enthusiasm among Moslems for reform programs which appeared merely as devices for fastening European power more firmly upon the community of the faithful.** 37 Henry Herbert Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt: A Study of Mohammed Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931). Other war lords had similar though less spectacularly successful careers, as for instance Ali Pasha of Janina (d. 1822) and Ahmed Jezzar (d. 1804) of Acre. For a summary of the disturbed political history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire and penetrating observations about the social effects of private mercenary armies upon which the power of the local warlords depended, cf. H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. 1 Part I, pp. 200-234. 38 By 1841 the Ottoman empire had lost Algeria to the French, the Black Sea coast as far as the Pruth to the Russians, and the southern part of the Balkan peninsula to the independent kingdom of Greece, which enjoyed the protection of Britain, France, and Russia. In addition, Serbia was an autonomous principality, Egypt was independent in all but name; the Rumanian provinces had become autonomous principalities under Russian protection; while in the East, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Arabia

700 The Tottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. In view of the distressing political circumstances of the Ottoman empire, it is scarcely surprising that the sultan’s subjects were culturally uncreative. In language and literature, however, important changes were introduced, for by a striking coincidence, Turks, Greeks, and Serbs all developed new literary languages for themselves between 1750 and 1850. In the eighteenth century, Turkish poetry emancipated itself from Persian models, though it was perhaps impoverished and vulgarized in the process; and Turkish prose found a new

and simpler vocabulary and style with the work of Akif Pasha (17871847).** Literary Turkish has since been largely based upon Akif’s reformulation of the language. The Serbian and Greek languages underwent a parallel and even more selfconscious transformation. Dosite; Obradovich (d. 1811) and Vuk Karadjich (d. 1864) used the peasant dialect of Herzegovina*® as the basis for literary Serbian; and by the mid-nineteenth century, their creation had replaced the older literary standard based upon Church Slavonic. Similarly, Adamantios Korais (d. 1833) created a new Greek literary medium, designed to emphasize connections with the classical tongue and to purify common speech from

its heavy infiltration of Italian and Turkish words. These labors bore little fruit until after 1850. The new literary vehicles were shaped not by anything indigenous to Serbian or Greek culture but by philological and national ideas developed in western Europe, especially in Germany. Hence the appearance of the new languages in the early nineteenth century was more a manifesto for the future than an indication of local cultural achievement. Nevertheless, the old structure of Ottoman society, with its elaborate articulation between religious, occupational, and locally autonomous groupings,

was irremediably and definitively broken by 1850. The fact that Turks, Arabs, and Christians were all dissatisfied with the resultant confusion guaranteed further upheavals. 2. IRAN AND TURKESTAN

When the Safavid dynasty was finally snuffed out in 1736, a new conqueror, Nadir Shah (1736-47), supplanted Ismail’s heirs. Nadir had been the power behind the Persian throne for a decade before assuming the diadem, during which time his victories rescued Persia from the Afghans. After indecisive wars with the Turks, Nadir launched a spectacular invasion of India (1738were very imperfectly controlled from Constantinople. Yet the old core of the empire in Europe and Asia Minor, with an outlier in Syria, had been brought back under the administration of Constantinople through the elimination of a large number of insubordinate pashas and local warlords. In this sense, Ottoman reform did win real successes in the first half of the nineteenth century. 39 Cf. E. J. W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry (London: Luzac & Co., 1902-05), IV, 3-14 and passim.

*0 The choice of Herzegovina was designed to make it easy for the Serbian and Croatian languages to converge, thus opening Serbia more fully to the Western connection long enjoyed by Croatia. Unlike most such schemes, this one actually worked and made modern Yugoslavia a possibility. Alternative rapprochement between Serb and Bulgar around, e.g., the Macedonian dialect would have produced a very different national and cultural configuration among Balkan Slavs.

Moslem Catalepsy 701 39), defeated the Mogul army, and occupied: Delhi. Then, with the onset of

het weather, he unexpectedly reinstated the Mogul emperor and returned northward after demanding the cession of all territories north and west of the Indus. Victorious campaigns in Transoxiana in 1740 carried Nadir’s career to

its zenith; but revolts and renewed wars with the Turks soon began to disrupt the new empire. On his assassination in 1747, it shattered into fragments,*’ many of which were soon gathered up by a new Afghan conqueror, Ahmed Shah Durrani (1747-73). The empire of Ahmed Shah extended from the Aral Sea southward into India; but it likewise disintegrated shortly after the death of its founder. Yet the career of Ahmed Shah had considerable importance in Indian politics; for the battle he fought at Panipat in 1761 against the Maratha confederacy permanently weakened the Hindu armies and left India far more vulnerable than before to English encroachment.*” Unstable governments and chronic factional warfare built around ethnic rivalries between Afghans, Persians, and Turks continued to disturb the peace of Iran and central Asia after the disappearance of these two great conquerors. This perennial strife invited Chinese incursions into eastern Turkestan in the eighteenth century; and persistence of political disorder provoked comparably extensive Russian encroachments in the Caspian and Caucasus area in the nineteenth. In 1835 the Shah himself entered into close relation with Russia, to the dismay of the British, who in their more imaginative moments felt nervous for their position in India. To forestall the Russians, a British force

invaded Afghanistan (1839), only to be ignominiously driven back when supplies gave out. A second punitive expedition burnt the Afghan capital (1842) and then withdrew. In general, the ancient warlike tradition of Iran and Turkestan continued almost unchanged prior to 1850. But wild horsemen, however hardy and brave, were no longer a match for armies organized and equipped in either the European or the Chinese style. Consequently, China from the east, Russia from the north, and Britain from the south ineluctably restricted the former range of action of the Moslem cavalrymen. Subsidies and supplies of powder and shot sufficed to make or break local princes; and as European manufactures gained a wider market, the indigenous artisan and merchant classes lost ground. This economic decay correspondingly reduced whatever possibility remained of building a stable political regime upon local resources. Hence the old-fashioned society of Iran and Turkestan, despite its remoteness from Eu41 Nadir Shah’s religious policy was a curious one. On his accession he repudiated the Shi’a faith,

which since 1500 had deeply penetrated Persian life. He later attempted a crude assimilation of Shi’ism into Sunni Islam by trying to persuade or compel the Sunni doctors to admit Shi’ism as a fifth system of orthodox law. This policy was an utter failure, since neither Sunni nor Shi'a divines would agree to such a politic burying of their differences. Nadir perhaps was aiming at a pan-Islamic empire, hoping to unite Turkey and India into one gloriously restored caliphate; and he may have thought it necessary to reconcile the two hostile factions of Islam as an essential preparation for the achievement of this ideal. In personal life he appears to have been completely, almost naively, irreligious. Cf. L. Lockhart, Nadir Shah (London: Luzac & Co., 1938), pp. 99-100, 278-79.

2 Cf. W.K. Fraser-Tytler, Afghanistan (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 60-69.

702 The Tottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. rope, was as unable to cope with European military and economic power as was the geographically more exposed Ottoman empire. Cultural stagnation or outright retrogression accompanied such political and economic weakness.* 3. DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOGUL EMPIRE IN INDIA

Chronic revolt began to undermine Mogul power even during the reign of the emperor Aurangzeb (1658-1707). From the hill country southeast of Bombay, a group of Marathas led by Shivaji (d. 1680) began a career of pillage and guerrilla harassment which the emperor’s armies proved unable to prevent. Consciously championing the cause of Hinduism against Islam, the Marathas attracted into their ranks a wide variety of Hindu adventurers and eventually founded a state of their own. By the mid-eighteenth century, they had established a loose hegemony over all of central India and had clearly be-

come the leading contenders within India for succession to the weakened Mogul power.

Following Aurangzeb’s death (1707), the Sikhs of the Punjab likewise threw off Mogul and Moslem control and created their own state. In addition, rebellious Mogul governors set up a patchwork of independent principalities in various parts of India. The most stable such principality was Hyderabad in the Deccan, which derived an effective discipline from the need for constant defense against the neighboring Marathas. Finally, a series of invaders from Iran and Afghanistan, together with Gurkha raiders from Nepal, added to the confusion of Indian politics. The Mogul empire survived in name until 1858;

but a series of weak and debauched emperors made the imperial authority more often than not a fiction, even in the immediate environs of the capital. These political conditions increasingly forced the European trading companies in India upon their own resources. Like the provincial officials of the Mogul empire itself, local company agents gradually acquired a practical sovereignty, subject to no effective control from distant Paris or London. Military as well as commercial affairs came within the purview of the companies’ servants; for the raids and exactions of Indian warlords made necessary the erection of forts and an increase in the garrisons safeguarding the European establishments. Because native Indians could be employed more cheaply than Europeans, company agents filled the ranks of their armed forces with local recruits but put them under European command. By the eighteenth century, even small bodies of such “sepoys,” trained and equipped in European style, were able to overcome numerically much superior Indian forces.** This fact 43 Cf. W. Barthold, Histoire des Turcs d’ Asie centrale (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1945), pp. 188-97; Mary Holdsworth, ‘“‘Turkestan in the Nineteenth Century” (mimeographed; Central Asian Research Center, Oxford, 1959); Lockhart, Nadir Shah, pp. 276-78. A perceptible revival of Islamic studies in Bokhara, tending in the direction of Wahhabi fundamentalism, occurred toward the middle of the nineteenth century on the very eve of Russian conquest of the region. In addition, on the northwestermost fringes of Islam, Chinese Moslems underwent an ill-understood religious upheaval—a “‘New Teaching’’—which

first attracted the attention of Chinese officialdom in 1762 and led to open revolt against Chinese authority in 1781 and 1783. Cf. H. M. G. D’Ollone, Recherches sur les Musulmans chinois (Paris: Leroux, 1911). 4 Mogul troops had lost both mobility and discipline, and even the Marathas began to suffer from similar weaknesses, since luxurious living and factional quarrels among their leaders rapidly under-

Moslem Catalepsy 703 was not lost upon local Indian rulers, who began themselves to employ European adventurers in the hope of acquiring similarly formidable armies of their own. From the European viewpoint, this offered compelling reasons for intervening in local Indian politics, since a Frenchman in command of the armies of an Indian prince might be expected to favor the French company, and an Englishman could be counted on to do the same for English trade. Neither the French nor the English home companies were eager to pursue such adventures; for profits were likely to suffer from a too ambitious military policy. The obvious solution was to make military enterprise pay for itself by

conquering territory and using local tax income to pay military costs. The French under the leadership of Marquis Joseph Francois Dupleix pioneered this

policy in 1749, when in return for intervention in a local struggle, they received a substantial grant of territories near Pondicherry. The English soon followed the French example; and the outbreak of war between the two nations in 1756 gave impetus to their competition. The English had a decisive advantage against the French, for the British navy controlled the sea and could reinforce and transport British forces, while preventing the French from doing the same. Such strategic mobility, fully exploited by Robert Clive, allowed the British to drive their rivals from most of southern India and Bengal by 1757.*° The treaty which concluded the Seven Years’ War in 1763 sealed the French defeat in India, as well as in Europe and America.

This British victory in India almost coincided with the battle of Panipat (1761), when, as we have just seen, the Marathas suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of invading Afghans. Their speedy subsequent collapse in effect created a military and political vacuum in India. No native force could stand against the troops of the East India Company; and pretexts for intervention in Indian politics were easy to find. Indeed, once the Company had become a territorial sovereign, problems of border security and the need to forestall the rise of inimical neighboring princes conspired with the greed of the Company’s servants to extend the areas of India under British control very rapidly.

The directors of the East India Company continued to resist wholesale annexation of new territories; and public criticism of its servants’ rapacity and extortion in India may sometimes have retarded the Company’s territorial advance. But neither parliamentary objections, nor a series of administrative reforms which restricted the opportunities for individual enrichment at Indian expense, prevented sporadic involvement of British forces in the affairs of the various Indian states. Except in the northwest, where Afghan and other warmined their military qualities. Iranians and Afghans were far more formidable, as their successes in northern India showed; but the unstable political order of their homelands prevented them from establishing any sustained occupation of India. 48 The small size of the European units that fought and won decisive engagements in these wars 1s truly amazing. Clive had a force of 200 Europeans and 300 Indian sepoys for his march on Arcot in 1751, which destroyed the French position in the Madras-Pondicherry area. Similarly, by the standards of eighteenth century warfare, in Europe, the battle of Plassey (1757), which gave the British their first important territorial tochold in Bengal, was scarcely more than a skirmish.

704 The Tottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. like tribesmen offered stubborn resistance, the British military interventions met little opposition, until by 1818, when the Marathas were finally crushed, the East India Company attained unquestioned supremacy throughout the entire subcontinent. Yet even by that date, Company officials administered only a small part of India directly. The rest was controlled through alliances with local princes, whose policies were kept under surveillance by British residents appointed to their courts. Two facts help to account for the ease of the British conquest. First, the Moslem rulers of India were never able to unite against the English. Threatened by Afghan raids from without and by Hindu revolt from within, many of them considered English protection a good bargain. Second, the Moslem

rulers commanded no widespread support among their subjects, most of whom were Hindus. Even the Moslem lower classes felt no strong loyalty to their masters and contributed little to the struggle against the Europeans. Nevertheless, Indian Moslems did resent their loss of power and status. This found veiled expression in a reformed and revitalized Islam, approximating to the Wahhabi model,*® which won wide response and prepared the way for overt expression of Islamic discontent in the sepoy mutiny of 1857. The mutiny temporarily shook the British position in India, but ended with the defeat of the mutineers and the simultaneous abolition of the Mogul empire and of its heir, the East India Company.*’ 4. ISLAM IN AFRICA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Disorders within the old centers of Moslem civilization did not interrupt the

progress of Islam in Africa. On the contrary, the pace of Islamization increased, especially in the nineteenth century. Conversion was partly the work

of traders and holy men, partly of local conquerors who built their states around Islamic institutions. Partly too, the progressive breakup of tribal routines of life through the slave trade opened a door for Islam in previously pagan areas; for individuals deprived of older cultural traditions often found in Islam an attractive reordering of their mental and moral universe. Particularly in east Africa, the fierce effort toward religious purity characteristic of the Wahhabis of Arabia aroused strong echoes among pastoral and semipastoral populations. Elsewhere, looser forms of the faith, admitting saint worship and various compromises with pagan customs, were more in evidence.*8 ‘6 Cf. Murray T. Titus, Indian Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 178-93. 47 Remarks on the Moslem collapse in India are based on Cambridge History of India (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1929), IV, V; R. C. Majumdar ef al., An Advanced History of India (London: Macmillan & Co., 1958), pp. 645-783; Oxford History of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 455-672; Holden Furber, John Company at Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948). 48 Cf. John Spencer Trimingham: Islam in the Sudan (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 102-4; Islam in Ethiopia (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 104-17; History of Islam in West Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 155 ff.; J. N. D. Anderson, “Tropical Africa: Infilrration and Expanding Horizon,” in Gustav E. von Grunebaum (ed.), Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 261-83.

Hindu and Buddhist Asia TOS In southeast Asia, too, a doctrinally more strenuous assertion of Islamic principles made itself felt. Although collision with the English, Dutch, and Spaniards cost Moslems some crippling setbacks,” a gradual process of conversion of upcountry populations and more distant islands continued to widen Islam’s geographical range in that part of the world.

D. HINDU AND BUDDHIST ASIA, 1700-1850 A.D. From the eleventh century, the militancy of expanding Islam in India and southeast Asia together with the xenophobia of Neo-Confucianism in China and Japan had put Hindu and Buddhist cultures generally on the defensive. Hence the Hindus and Buddhists had already had long practice in withstanding alien cultural and political pressures before European power manifested itself in Asia. These precedents remained binding in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Hindus retained some of the mental flexibility and emotional vigor first evidenced in their response to Moslem pressure in the sixteenth century. Buddhists, on the contrary, retreated behind the safeguards of a hallowed routine, seeking to minimize all disturbing contacts with outsiders. The ostrich policy pursued by Buddhists everywhere could at best only stave off decline. In the Far East, increasing isolation behind monastic walls caused Chinese Buddhism to fade gradually in importance,”® while Japanese Buddhism underwent comparatively precipitous decay. In southeast Asia, matters were more complex. There Buddhism had become the palladium of both Burmese and Siamese ethnic identities, so that the fate of the religion was inextricably intertwined with the fate of these two nations. Burmese imperial ambitions provoked prolonged and bitter war with Siam that lasted throughout most of the second half of the eighteenth century; but except for an epi-

sodic Chinese intervention in northern Burma (1765-70), these struggles attracted little attention from outside. The policy first adopted in the seventeenth century of restricting foreign contacts kept Europeans at a safe distance—no great achievement when all available European energies and resources were employed in subjugating India. In the nineteenth century, however, as the East India Company climbed to paramountcy, British relations with India’s Buddhist neighbors took on a new

aspect. In Ceylon, frictions with the British’’ led to the destruction of the 49 Two Moslem revolts, inspired by fanatical revivalist movements, occurred in the East Indies— one in 1750 in Java and a second in the 1820’s in Sumatra. Both were defeated by the Dutch, not with-

out difficulty. Comparable movements in Africa met no check from European arms until the late nineteenth century; and the greater success of Islam in Africa is surely related to this fact. On Islamic movements in the Fast Indies, cf. B. H. M. Viekke, Nusantara, pp. 201, 263; G. W. J. Drewes, ‘Indonesia: Mysticism and Activism,” in G. EF. von Grunebaum (ed.), Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization, pp. 284-310. 50 A partial exception to this statement must be made for a variety of secret societies, some of them

tinged with Buddhist (and Taoist) ideas, which began to manifest active and sporadically formidable popular discontents in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cf. B. Favre, Les Sociétés secretes en Chine (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1933), pp. 89 fF 51 When the French overran Holland during the revolutionary wars, the British took over Dutch possessions in Cevlon and in the Indies. The peace treaties of 1815 returned only the latter to the Dutch.

706 The Llottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. Buddhist kingdom of Candy in 1815. Between 1768 and 1824, the British also infringed upon Siam’s sovereignty by acquiring a foothold in Malaya through treaty arrangements with local Moslem princes.” Even imperial Burma lost most of its seacoast to the same intruder after a war in 1824-25. Yet these demonstrations of British power did not lead Buddhist rulers or religious leaders of southeast Asia to attempt any serious readjustment of their traditional way of life. European contact was still too new and Buddhist cultural traditions too rigid to allow any such reaction. Like the Moslems, the Buddhists remained physically bruised but mentally almost unaffected by European expansion up to 1850.°*

***

The Hindu communities of India, and particularly of Bengal, showed themselves distinctly more resilient under European pressure. To be sure, the great mass of the population was but little concerned with the change from Moslem to Christian overlordship, even in those regions directly under British administration. Theistic devotionalism, which had found such impassioned expression in the sixteenth century, continued to attract nearly all Hindus; and the caste system allowed even the most pious and scrupulous to accommodate easily to the European presence in India. Ceremonial cleansing after contact with a European, as prescribed by immemorial custom, sufficed to make room for one more alien community in the midst of all the fisstparous Hindu castes. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, these time-tested methods of dealing with foreigners served the Hindus well enough. As the Turkish-Per-

sian-Afghan power sank, that of the English and French rose. From the Hindu viewpoint, one foreigner merely replaced another, as had often happened before. Until 1818 or even later, it seemed as though the European imprint upon India could be confined to the comparatively superficial levels reached by earlier invaders.” Following the decisive defeat of the Maratha power by the British in 1818,

all prospect of the emergence of a powerful Hindu state and of a coherent Hindu culture from the ruins of the Mogul empire disappeared. Instead, British officials confronted the task of ruling a vastly enlarged and remarkably variegated empire in India. Many of them were convinced that a mere hand52 When France annexed Holland during the Napoleonic period, the British occupied the East Indies to forestall the French. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles acted as Lieutenant Governor of Java and its dependencies from 1811 to 1816, where he introduced sweeping liberal reforms, hoping to attach the Javanese permanently to the British empire. His subsequent ventures in Malaya were, in a sense, a second-best substitute for the Indies, which had been returned to the Dutch in 1816. 63 These remarks on Buddhism in southeast Asia are based on D. G. E. Hall, A History of South East Asia (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1955), pp. 315-460; John F. Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 3-86; Lennox A. Mills, Ceylon under British Rule, 1795-1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 1-205. 54 Cf. Cambridge History of India, 1V, 426-27. The rise of independent and formidable Hindu states, like that of the Marathas, in the interstices between Mogul and European power seems to have afforded no important stimulus to Hindu culture. In secular affairs the Maratha leaders were in general content to imitate the luxuries and administrative forms of their Mogul predecessors, while conforming to traditional Hindu ritual observances in matters of religion.

Hindu and Buddhist Asia 707 ful of Britishers could control the vast subcontinent only by respecting and even promoting traditional Hindu and Moslem customs and institutions. Others held that British rule could be confirmed only by liberal reforms, designed to win the sympathy of the common people by offering them a higher level of justice than they had previously known. The conservative policy of main-

taining the customs of the land intact conformed to the will of the overwhelming majority of Indians; and, so long as the British hold upon India was insecure, this policy dominated British councils, subject only to such modification as military or financial stringencies might dictate. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a small number of Englishmen, of whom Sir William Jones (d. 1794) was the most eminent, began to investigate Indian languages and literature. Early in the next century, British authorities started to devote official funds to the patronage of such researches and to the training of Indians in both Moslem and Hindu educational institutions. Yet even while intending to preserve native learning, the alien hand of

men brought up in the traditions of European scholarship could not avoid transforming many familiar landmarks. For example, European scholars soon focused attention upon the earliest monuments of Hindu literature, largely because the philology of the day sought to determine the original forms of European speech through a study of Sanskrit. But such investigations pointed up innumerable discrepancies between. Vedic and contemporary religious practices and beliefs. Intellectually inclined Hindus therefore found it quite impossible to escape the question of how to reconcile popular pieties and superstitions with their ostensible Vedic base.°° Thus the idea that the Hindu religion required reformation gained telling

arguments from the very effort to inculcate and restore knowledge of its roots. This view, moreover, easily coalesced with the principles of English liberals, who demanded humanitarian modifications of Indian institutions and

customs. A further impetus toward reform was provided by Christian missionaries, who became increasingly numerous in India after 1813, when the act of parliament renewing the East India Company’s charter required their free admission to the country.°® Few Indians ever espoused Christianity; but the missionaries nevertheless played an important part in stimulating Indian response to Western civilization. Missionaries were the first Europeans to teach, preach, and publish in Indian vernaculars. They also established schools, in which secular subjects supplemented religious instruction; and thereby 55 Hindu efforts to master the origins of their religion may have had non-European roots also. Archaism is indeed a normal response for any threatened culture, and it is interesting to note that a precisely parallel reaction occurred among Indian Moslems, for whom the effort to return to the undefiled religion of the Koran meant an attack upon Sufi and Hindu practices. The Moslems did not need European stimulus here. The Wahhabis of Arabia, whom pilgrims to Mecca encountered, had attempted precisely this epuration without waiting upon Western scholarship. 56 The East India Company, having first established itself in India by coming to terms with Mogul authority, originally adopted a strict policy of forbidding Christian missionary work under the Company’s aegis. Nevertheless, with the evangelical revival in England, missionaries began to penetrate India from the last decade of the eighteenth century, operating at first either clandestinely or under the

protection of Danish trading stations.

708 The Tottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. they brought not only specifically Christian but also more generalized European ideas and knowledge to the attention of the literate Indian public. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, British liberal and missionary groups agreed in attacking various facets of Hindu custom and demanded legal prohibition of such practices as suttee—the custom of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. The issue did not, however, rest entirely with the British. A small but vocal group of Hindus, located chiefly in Calcutta, also began to press for reforms of the Hindu law and custom; and it was only after such radical views had been voiced by Indians themselves that the liberal, reforming policy won a clear predominance in official British circles.

The most distinguished of the Indian radicals was a Bengali Brahmin, Ram

Mohan Roy (d. 1833). Trained as a boy in both Hindu and Moslem learning,”’ he later acquired thorough familiarity with English and at least a smat-

tering of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as well.°* Such linguistic training allowed him to bridge the cultural gap that separated Indian from European civilization, as only a handful of European Orientalists had previously been able to do. After giving up an official career in the English service early in life, Ram Mohan Roy devoted his principal efforts to questions of religion. His investigations of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam led him to conclude that all three faiths conveyed essentially the same message—an ethical monotheism reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Unitarianism of Britain and America. From his world-encompassing point of view, details of ritual and divergences of doctrine sank to insignificance.

Such a radical reinterpretation of religion obviously challenged Christian as well as Hindu tradition. Ram Mohan Roy, therefore, engaged in polemics against both Christian missionaries and Hindu conservatives. He finally established a religious society of his own, the Brabma Samaj, through which he hoped to promote the spread of his ideas. Although his converts were few, Roy’s influence served to stimulate the reform of Hindu laws and institutions. He waged a literary campaign against suttee and urged the British authorities

to prohibit the custom a full decade before they actually did so (1829). Likewise, he petitioned the British to establish schools for Indians that would teach European sciences and learning. Nor was he content to wait for official action but devoted his own time and money to setting up schools privately for the propagation of his reforming ideas. In a sense, Ram Mohan Roy was an isolated forerunner of the Anglicized

upper-class Indians who were subsequently to play an important part in Indian history. Although the direct influence of the organizations he established was never widespread, some of his followers held strategic social posi57 Until 1835 the British continued to employ the Mogul language of administration, i.¢e., Persian. Any Indian aspiring to an official career had therefore to learn Persian and through that language was inevitably exposed to Moslem culture at large. 68 His native tongue was Bengali; and Ram Mohan Roy’s polemical writings in that language constitute a major landmark of Bengali literary development. He was the first to use Bengali as a medium for serious prose composition and gave it a form which later writers generally accepted. Cf. J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 98-115.

Hindu and Buddhist Asia 709 tions and were able to flatter British authorities into believing that the English

had a moral obligation to bring the benefits of European civilization and knowledge to the Indian peoples. The great landmark of this effort was the British decision (1835) to set up government schools teaching a European curriculum to Indian students in the English language. The establishment of such schools, and after 1857 of European-style universities as well, assured a supply of Indians who combined, as Ram Mohan Roy had done, a familiarity

with both Indian and European cultural traditions. The importance and attractiveness of such education increased enormously after 1844, when English became the language of administration, so that any young Indian hoping for government employment now had to learn English. The repercussions of this policy were felt mainly after 1850. Before that date only the groundwork for full-scale interaction between European and

Hindu cultures had been laid. The overwhelming majority of Indians remained firmly enmeshed in an immemorial round of custom, loyal to their traditional faiths, and disinclined to look beyond the limits of their hereditary castes.°° 691 have consulted R. C. Majumdar, Advanced History of India, pp. 812-26; Upendra Nath Ball, Rammohun Roy: A Study of His Life, Works, and Thoughts (Calcutta: U. Ray & Sons, 1933); Sophia

Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun ‘Roy (London: H. Collet, 1900); Sahitya Akademi, Contemporary Indian Literature, (2d ed.; Calcutta: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,

1959); J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (New York: Macmillan Co., 1915),

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710 The Tottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. fi. CREEPING CRISIS IN THE FAR EAST, 1700-1850 A.D. I. CHINA

Measured by any traditional yardstick, the eighteenth century was one of China’s great ages. Political stability at home and imperial expansion into the borderlands accompanied a striking growth of agriculture, trade, and population. Peace and prosperity sustained a massive scholarly and artistic effort and lent weight to the remarkable cultural impress of China upon such distant barbarians as the Europeans. The great imperial ages of Han and T’ang could alone compare with these Manchu achievements. Yet the very success with which Manchu policy reproduced the achievements of its ancient predecessors contained the seeds of the eventual and utter dissolution of the traditional Chinese social and political regime, when institutions and attitudes which had raised China high above the level of surround-

ing barbarians in earlier ages suddenly in the nineteenth century lost their efficacy against Europeans. Nevertheless, until the 1850’s the crisis of Chinese society remained primarily internal and, like all aspects of the Manchu polity, conformed closely to ancient patterns. Only after slow processes acting to increase bureaucratic corruption, peasant unrest, and military slackness had prepared the way for thoroughly traditional collapse did the Chinese really begin to feel the drastically disruptive effects of European civilization. Until that

time, China’s history continued to be only marginally affected by contact with Europeans. The K’ang Hsi emperor brilliantly consolidated Manchu rule over China

during his long reign (1662-1722). The great task of his successors was to chastise and regulate the outer barbarians. Accordingly, through a long series of difficult campaigns, Chinese administration was extended to Tibet, Mon-

golia, and Chinese Turkestan between 1688 and 1757. Following the last important Chinese victory in central Asia—the destruction of the Kalmuk confederacy (1757)—the Manchu government adopted the policy of sealing off the northwestern frontier, even to the extent of removing population from near the border.® China’s other frontiers had far less military significance. Diplomacy rarely had to be backed by military action (as in Burma, 1765— 70) in order to forestall threats from southeast Asia or Korea; and most of these states maintained a tributary relationship to China—i.e., a ceremonial recognition of dependence.” 60 China also frequently interrupted Russian trade, despite the provisions of the Treaty of Kiakhta (1727) which called for a triennial Russian caravan to Peking and regular trade at the border town of Kiakhta itself. After 1762, Russian caravans ceased to come to Peking; and until 1792, when more regular and amicable relations were again established, even the border trade was repeatedly suspended by the Chinese. On Chinese-Russian relations and Chinese policy in central Asia, see Michel N. Pavlovsky, Chinese-Russian Relations (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), pp. 18-40. 61 Since Chinese protocol classified any diplomatic or trading relationship as “‘tribute,”’ the term was very elastic. Burma continued to be officially regarded as tributary despite the Chinese military defeat of 1769; and Britain fell into the same class. The Russians alone, heirs to former empires on China’s northwest frontier with which the Chinese had been compelled to deal as equals, escaped this classification. As a corollary of this unique status, the Russians alone had the right of maintaining a permanent diplomatic and trade mission in Peking from 1727.

Creeping Crisis in the Far East 711 On the seaward frontier, European activities were restricted by rigid regulations which minimized direct contact between Chinese and foreigners and fixed responsibility for any untoward consequences of the European presence upon persons who were suitably at the mercy of local officials. Indeed, the court at Peking regarded relations with the European merchants as too trifling to be regulated by formal treaties and, consequently, allowed local officials to manage relations with the foreigners. Moreover, since direct involvement in commercial questions was deemed degrading to a Confucian mandarin, even the

local officials erected a barrier between themselves and the Europeans. This took the form of a Chinese merchant guild, which from 1720 had the responsibility of dealing with all European ships that came into Canton. In 1757, the

emperor declared Canton to be the sole port for such trade, confirming officially a monopoly which the city had enjoyed practically for some time before.™

Until 1834, when the British parliament terminated the East India Company’s exclusive right to trade between England and China, these arrangements worked quite smoothly, for both the Company and the merchant guild at Canton profited from their respective monopolistic positions. To be sure, the Chinese monopoly was far more secure than the Company’s: for other European nations as well as British interlopers competed for the Canton trade. On various occasions, Europeans sought to secure more favorable terms of trade for themselves by enlarging the Chinese merchant ring in Canton or by breaking its monopoly; but such efforts uniformly failed. European merchants therefore had recourse to smuggling in order to counterbalance the Chinese monopolists’ legal advantages. After 1800, when the Chinese govern-

ment forbade the importation of oprtum but proved unable to enforce its decree, this illegal trade became big business. As a result, the Canton trade in the nineteenth century lost the legal and carefully controlled character which the Chinese authorities had imposed upon it in the eighteenth; and the irregular and sporadically violent patterns typical of the earliest European mercantile operations on the China coast reasserted themselves. The importance of the foreign trade at Canton for the Chinese economy as a whole is impossible to estimate. Certainly it increased rapidly in scale. Tea became the largest single Chinese export; but silk, lacquered wares, porcelain, and various curios were also in great demand in Europe. Cotton cloth from

India was the principal Chinese import, until the habit of optum smoking took hold in China during the eighteenth century. Produced mainly in ® The British East India Company opened Canton to trade in 1699, as a supplement to the older Furopean foothold at Macao. Based largely upon the sale of Indian and southeast Asian goods in China, the British trade thereafter rapidly expanded, eclipsing older Portuguese and newer European rivals. Correspondingly, Canton outstripped Macao as the primary locus of Chinese-European contact. 68 Opium had long been known in China and elsewhere, but it was treated as a curative drug, taken internally. In 1689, the smoking of opium was mentioned by a Dutchman in Java where it was mixed with tobacco. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, optum smoking (omitting the tobacco) became widespread in China. Large quantities of the drug were produced in China itself, despite an imperial decree issued in 1729 which forbade its sale. Demand for opium developed so rapidly that the importation of the drug through Canton rose from 5,000 chests in 1821 to no less than 30,000 in 1839. Cf. L. C. Goodrich, A Short History of the Chinese People Gd ed.; New York: Harper & Bros., 1959), pp. 222-23.

712 Ihe Lottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. India, opium provided European merchants for the first time with a commodity which the Chinese were eager to have in quantity. As a result, the drain of specie from Europe to pay for Chinese goods diminished steadily, until

the balance of trade turned in favor of the Europeans and an outflow of Chinese silver began. In proportion as European trade came to center upon opium, any stimulating effects which an enlarged export of Chinese manufactures may have had upon the artisan and mercantile communities were counterbalanced by the social destructiveness of the opium habit. Moreover, it appears likely that various forms of “squeeze” siphoned off most of the profits of foreign trade into the hands of officials, who were always able to keep the Canton merchants and, through them, the artisan producers of export goods firmly under control. Christian missions constituted Europe’s other arm in China. Missionary influence decayed drastically in the eighteenth century, largely because of disputes among the missionaries themselves concerning the proper translation of Christian theological terms into Chinese and the extent to which Chinese converts might retain their ancestral customs. From the inception of their activity in China, the Jesuits had maintained that family rites honoring ancestors and public celebrations honoring Confucius were civil ceremonies which did not necessarily conflict with Christian belief. Other missionaries, particularly the Dominicans, considered that such accommodation to Chinese practice was inconsistent with Christian faith. National and personal frictions inflamed this “Rites Controversy”; and its complexities increased further when

the disputants appealed both to the pope and to the Chinese emperor for adjudication. After initial hesitation, the pope in 1715 decided against the Jesuits, to the intense indignation of the Son of Heaven, who had meanwhile endorsed the Jesuit position.*

This controversy had important effects both in China and in Europe. In 1708 the Chinese emperor decreed that all missionaries must accept the Jesuit view or leave the country; and when obedient Catholics could no longer sustain that position, Christian missions in China could only operate in defiance

of the law of the land. Missionaries did indeed continue to slip into China, and their congregations never entirely disappeared; but Christianity was reduced to the level of a secret society. As such, it appealed almost entirely to the poor and dispossessed, and suffered at best official neglect, at worst sporadic persecution.

The imperial court nevertheless allowed the Jesuits to remain at Peking; and the Ch’ien Lung emperor (1736-95) regularly employed them for such purposes as designing palaces and building water fountains, clocks, and other mechanical devices. Jesuits also retained official positions. as astronomers and

calendar makers until the pope dissolved their order in 1773, after which time the Lazarist Order assumed these duties. But any real meeting of minds ®{ Beginning as early as 1628, this controversy did not finally subside unul 1742, when a papal bull once again and most emphatically forbade Jesuit compromises with Chinese custom.

65 Chinese society was riddled with similar groaps, which characteristically clothed social discontents in religious garb.

Creeping Crisis in the Far East 713 or serious interest in European knowledge and civilization, of which there had been little enough in the seventeenth century, became less and less apparent in the eighteenth. The Chinese literati were too well assured of the success of Chinese institutions and too firmly convinced of the self-sufficiency

of their own cultural world to spare time and attention for the pursuit of

barbarian trifles.

In Europe, by contrast, the Rites Controversy provoked a vivid curiosity about China among broad circles of the intellectual elite. The fact that the Jesuits in France were deeply involved in disputes with Jansenists and Gallicans sharpened the debate over the legitimacy of Jesuit proceedings in China. Information about China was accordingly sought, not only for its own sake, but to provide ammunition for controversies having other origins and aims. Yet the knowledge of China which percolated into Europe as a by-product of the quarrel had significant side effects. Enthusiasm for chinoiserie flavored

the whole rococo art style that spread widely through Europe from about 1715. The picture of virtuous Chinese sages, whose morality did not depend upon revealed religion, appealed to deists; and such aspects of Chinese society as its civility (which Ricci in an earlier generation had despised), the absence of a hereditary aristocracy, and the principle of appointment to government office on the basis of public examination all chimed in with radical movements of thought that gathered way, especially in France, during the eight-

eenth century. China became, for Voltaire and some other philosophes, a model to be held up to Europe. After all, was not the Celestial Empire— whose Confucianism might be construed as a working and only slightly shop-

worn, model of rational religion—great, prosperous, and peaceful without benefit either of clergy or of hereditary aristocracy? Such partisan admiration for China, though arising from intellectual and artistic developments internal to Europe, nonetheless constituted a noteworthy departure from the dislike, fear, and disdain that normally prevail among men of differing civilizations. The handful of Europeans who explored the intricacies and elegancies of Chinese civilization in a sympathetic spirit in the eighteenth century were pioneers of a new and more open contact between cultures. Their attitude stood in striking contrast to the sublime disinterest in things foreign which prevailed among the corresponding intellectul circles of China.®° 66 The vogue for things Chinese faded out after about 1770 almost as suddenly as it had arisen. In the early nineteenth century, European merchants, soldiers, and missionaries on the China coast returned to a more normal disdain for ‘‘corrupt’’ Chinese ways; and their attitudes communicated themselves to Europe at large. Yet as European admiration for China faded, India tended to fill the gap, thanks to the exciting discovery of the Indo-European linguistic relationships and intitial exploration of the echoing vastnesses of ancient Indian philosophy and mysticism. What China had been to the philosophes of the eighteenth century, India became for the romantics of the early nineteenth. Thus European curiosity and sympathy for alien civilizations shifted focus but was never entirely intermitted from the time when Ricci in China and less famous Jesuit missionaries in India like Roberto de Nobile (d. 1656) first embarked upon the adventure of trying to understand another civilized tradition in its own terms. It is curious, though perhaps not surprising, that Europe’s closest neighbor and traditional rival, Islam, was the latest to receive serious European study; and even today, historians habitually treat Islamic development since 1256 primarily in terms of its relation to Christendom and modern Furope. Crusade and counter-crusade die hard just because European and Moslem civilizations have so much tn common.

714 Lhe Tottering World Balance, 1700-1850 A.D. Yet the very richness and variety of China’s literary and artistic heritage, the lifetime of effort required to master it, and the high rewards entailed by success on the provincial and imperial examinations adequately explain the Chinese indifference to foreign learning. Traditional forms of scholarship continued to flourish under the Manchus on a massive scale. Vast compilations, systematizations, and summaries of earlier knowledge were completed under oficial patronage. Carefully edited texts and authoritative commentaries crys-

tallized the long tradition of Chinese learning and provide most of the raw materials for modern Sinology. Poetic composition and essay writing remained part of the official examina-

tions and continued to be cultivated with pedestrian assiduity. Imaginative prose literature constituted a more impressive genre of Chinese belles-lettres,

for under the Manchus novels attained respectability despite their popular origin. The Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the late eighteenth century, remains by common consent the greatest Chinese novel,® though it was but one of many.® Chinese painting remained prolific, skilled, and various. Chinese taste of the age itself praised painters for their faithfulness to old masters, while modern Chinese and Western scholars tend to prize the artists’ individual accent and

stylistic innovation. There was much for both to admire in eighteenth-century Chinese painting; yet, rather ungratefully, both Chinese and Western critics of the twentieth century seem to agree that the real greatness of Chinese art lay in the past. Thus to all appearances, Chinese civilization and the Chinese state were flourishing in the eighteenth century. Yet the same mechanisms which had caused the downfall of earlier Chinese dynasties were already at work and manifested themselves in public events during the last quarter of the century. The basic problem was rising peasant distress. The growth of rural population caused excessive subdivision of land, until in a bad season the tiny farms which resulted could no longer sustain a family.® Hopeless peasant indebtedness and 67 The great length of this novel has discouraged translation; but cf. Tsao Chan, Dream of the Red Chamber, Chi-chen Wang (trans.) (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958), for a translation of the first chapter and summary of the rest. 68 Cf. Ou Itai, Le Roman chinois (Paris: Editions Vega, 1933). 69 Cf. Osvald Siren, A History of Later Chinese Painting, 11, 152-227; Laurence Sickman and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture of China, pp. 188-204. The low appreciation of the works of more recent painters seems to me to result from an undue tdolization of the antique, much of which in fact is known or inferred mainly through modern copies. Chinese painting, unlike Chinese literature of the eighteenth century, occasionally reacted to and experimented with Western techniques. In addition, individual Europeans, like the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (d. 1766), were accorded high honor as painters by the Ch’ien Lung emperor. Castiglione achieved his repute by bringing a Western naturalism to bear within a generally Chinese style of composition. A few Chinese followed his example, thus illustrating once again the comparative ease with which artistic motifs and techniques may diffuse from one culture to another, since linguistic barriers are largely irrelevant. 70 Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of Chinn, 1368-1953, ~p. 270-78, estimates that China’s population of about 150 million in 1700 rose to 313 million by 1794 and reached 430 million in 1850, on the eve of the vastly destructive Taiping rebellion. He suggests that ‘optimum conditions” under the technology of the time were reached between 1750 and 1775, after which time the continued growth of population led only to greater destitution and discontent.

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ANGRY UNCERTAINTY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Picasso's disjointed caricature of optical experience and Jackson Pollock’s abstract daubs of paint agree in an emphatic repudiation of the techniques and conventions of European art and share a restless violence of mood paralleled, if at all, in the European past only by the disturbed fancies of a painter like Hieronymus Bosch (p. 596). The experiences of the sixteenth century, when the European Far West emerged painfully into modernity, constituted the s arpest shock to Europe’s cultural order before the thoughts and deeds of the twentieth century dissolved so many old certainties into the torn and tangled web of doubt and fear, expressed visually by these two pictures.

( inf | ituted the sh hock

The Western kxplosion, 1789-1917 AD. 753 discover fresh working hypotheses, Europeans weakened or destroyed many of the old coherences which had organized and guided their art and thought for centuries or millennia. Or so it now seems from the perspective of the 1960's.

On the other hand, the cultural coherence of distant epochs may be partly Wlusory. Much variety and confusion is simply lost and forgotten, for, to survive at all, art and thought must always be filtered through meshes imposed by the tastes of later generations. Moreover, and more significantly, lengthenIng time perspectives often reduce the irreconcilabilities of an age to facets of a larger unity, much as the view from a high-flying plane, by blurring details, can turn the intricacies of a landscape into a map. Some centuries hence, therefore, the main lines of artistic and intellectual development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may appear as straightforward as those of any other epoch.

Lacking such perspective, it 1s easier to detect the disruption of familiar cohesions and values than to apprehend the emergence of new ones—if they are in fact emerging. Surely, the disruption of (or liberation from) the Western past is obvious enough. By 1917, leading painters had rejected the perspective frame within which European artistic vision had operated since the

fifteenth century. Physicists had modified the Newtonian laws of motion within which European scientific thought had moved since the seventeenth century. Even the special hallmark of nineteenth-century intellectual achievement—the evolutionary world-view—seemed, by undermining all traditional

moral and aesthetic standards, to reduce Western thought to the level of a wounded hyena, gnawing at its own exposed and grisly guts. Yet the explosive energies that went into such destruction were also liberating, though it remains to be seen whether and when new artistic, scientific, and philosophical styles comparable in power and persuasiveness to those rejected in the early twentieth century will emerge.

K *K * In painting, techniques of linear and aerial perspective for creating threedimensional illusion had been thoroughly explored long before 1789; and little that was vital or impressive—at least to current taste—came from the brushes of those who continued to uphold these conventions. Experiments with light and color gave the impressionists of the mid-nineteenth century a new technical range; but only in the following generation did Vincent van

Gogh (d. 1890), Paul Gauguin (d. 1903), Paul Cézanne (d. 1906) decisively break through the restrictions imposed by rules of perspective and naturalistic coloring. Full and explicit rejection of the Renaissance techniques for producing an illusion of three-dimensionality occurred in the next generation, just before World War I, when a few avant-garde artists in Paris abandoned well-established public visual conventions in favor of new, private angles of

vision, semi-intelligible even to the initiated, and often enough dependent upon nothing more important than momentary fad or playful experiment.

754 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. Nevertheless, as great art perhaps always does, painting in the decade before World War I created a remarkable visual symbolism of trends lying at the core of the cultural universe of Western man. The clearest case is offered by the handful of painters who in the decade before 1914 arbitrarily displaced fragments of visual experience from familiar contexts and then deliberately composed them into new patterns bearing no particular reference to any outer reality. But such fragmentation of familiarly ordered experience, re-

sulting in an arbitrary, often incongruous juxtaposition of dismembered parts, was exactly what happened in the lives of millions of men during and after World War I. It therefore seems as though a few unusually sensitive spirits had sensed in advance the impending breakup of the no longer New Regime of Western civilization in such a way as to symbolize the future in their art. In retrospect it now seems obvious that the institutional frame of Western society, as imperfectly readjusted during the nineteenth century to accommodate modern industrialism and democratic notions, had begun to heave and crack even before 1914. The war of 1914-18 set great chunks of habit and custom adrift like Arctic sea ice in the spring: each floe solid and recognizable in itself, like the wine bottles and guitars of a Picasso painting, and each one liable to drift—like the same wine bottles and guitars—into quite extraordinary juxtapositions with other shifting fragments of the distintegrating past. No new freeze has yet set in, nor soon seems likely; and the efforts of totalitarian dictatorships to reorganize a cultural universe by arbitrary force and deliberate fiat have so far met with only limited success. The arbitrary and deliberate efforts of twentieth-century painters to reorganize visual reality, though ever so exuberantly pursued, seem also as yet to have failed of any lasting stylistic success—in this too, perhaps, true to the society their art so mysteriously mirrors. Music stood at an opposite pole among the arts; yet its development between 1789 and 1917 bore some striking resemblances to the history of painting. When the period began, musicians had not yet exhausted the harmonic possibilities of the eight-tone scale as applied to a wide variety of instruments, capable of playing together in any number of combinations and themselves

undergoing rather rapid development. Ludwig van Beethoven (d. 1827), Johannes Brahms (d. 1897), and Richard Wagner (d. 1883), with many less famous names, exploited these possibilities brilliantly. Yet by the eve of World War I a few obscure European composers had begun to experiment with scales and harmonies beyond the domain of received convention; while in obscure American whore-houses, other musical experiments, bringing African rhythms and Western sound-making together, constituted an equally drastic, though rather less deliberate, break with the classical tradition of Western music. Atonality and jazz, though generated from opposed musical extremes of intellectuality and sensuality, nevertheless tended (like opposite ends of a straight line infinitely extended in non-Fuclidean space) to meet at a point in polar opposition to the rules of harmony and rhythm as defined in Europe early in the eighteenth century.

The Western Explosion, 1789-1917 A.D. 755 The various branches of belles-lettres and such other major arts as sculpture

and architecture fell somewhere between the extremes represented by the precocious enthusiasm with which painters abandoned old rules of their craft and the lofty unconcern with which nearly all European musicians viewed the pre-World War I experiments with jazz and atonality. Forerunners of radical departures are not difficult to find. It is enough to recall such literary monuments as Marcel Proust’s (d. 1922) novels, Arthur Schnitzler’s (d. 1932) plays, or Alexander Blok’s (d. 1921) poems, or to remember Auguste Rodin’s (d. 1917) rough-hewn statues and the drastically simplified forms of Constantine Brancusi’s (d. 1957) early sculpture. Similarly in architecture, the curvilinear fantasy of Antoni Gaudi’s (d. 1926) cast cement and the soaring loftiness of Louis Sullivan’s (d. 1926) steel-framed skyscrapers agreed, though in very different ways, in rejecting traditional limits which had been imposed partly by taste and partly by the technical nature of older building materials and methods. But until after World War I, such men remained exceptional. In the western European lands, the main stream of literature, sculp-

ture, and architecture continued to run within well-worn channels dating back for the most part to the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, when national literary languages and the repertory of Renaissance sculptural and architectural themes first became fixed.

In Russia, however, a very powerful literature, of which the first major luminary was Alexander Pushkin (d. 1837), came to maturity during the nineteenth century. Nearly all of the great Russian writers displayed a pro-

foundly ambivalent attitude toward the cultural traditions of western Europe.*° The fact that many Westerners since 1917 have begun to feel similar ambiguities toward their cultural inheritance means that nineteenth-century Russian writers (like Thucydides in fifth-century p.c. Athens) sometimes sound a strikingly contemporary note. Fédor Dostoevsky (d. 1881), for example, anticipated much that seems characteristic of the twentieth century. This is not so surprising as it first seems, for the breakdown of Russia’s cultural autonomy, resulting from (or expressed by) Peter the Great’s revolutionary reforms, put Russians psychologically ahead of Western nations, whose cultural certainties lasted longer. rence, at a time when few western Europeans doubted the intrinsic superiority of their cultural inheritance, Dostoevsky’s generation of Russian intellectuals found it impossible easily and automatically to accept any single cultural universe. Dostoevsky and many others like him wished to reject and yet to appropriate Western civili-

zation, while simultaneously prizing and despising the peculiarities that marked Russia off from the West. Such tensions could only be relieved by conscious efforts to put a cultural universe together, more or less arbitrarily. But deliberate affirmation after agonized choice—at best an unsatisfactory psychological surrogate for the unquestioning belief of an undisturbed cultural transmission—may nevertheless be extremely fertile of high art and deep thought. Russian letters of the nineteenth century reflected the advantages 20 The same was true, though in rather less acute form, of some American writers, e.g., Mark Twain (d. 1910).

756 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. and disadvantages of such a position and, from the similarities of their cultural

position with our own, anticipated many of the characteristics of Western literature in the twentieth century.

***

Western science was as restless as Western art. Between the French and Russian revolutions, physicists and their scientific associates elaborated a world-view of extraordinary power and austere beauty—a world-view which combined an enormous scope with a marvelous precision of detail and which was, moreover, validated by experiment and ratified in ever new technologies. The main lines of this scientific structure had been established in the seven-

teenth century, when modern physics, centering around careful measurements of matter in motion, first took its classical form. But during the nineteenth century, the range and power of this theoretical system were so enormously enlarged that men dreamed of making over all knowledge in its image.

Scientific knowledge expanded in two directions: (1) by recognizing new “laws” that made what had before seemed to be unrelated events into special cases of some larger uniformity; and (2) by applying already familiar laws of physics to new classes of phenomena. Under the first of these heads came such achievements as James Joule’s (d. 1889) recognition of the equivalency between heat and work, and the mathematical generalizations of James Clerk Maxwell (d. 1879), which united the various forms of radiant energy then known (light, radiant heat, etc.) into a continuum of electromagnetic radia-

tion. Under the second came the application of methods and concepts of experimental physics to such diverse sciences as chemistry, astronomy, biology, genetics, and geology—in each instance with conspicuous and convincing SUCCESS.

These achievements tended to reduce events to quantified occurrences within a mathematically constructed universe defined by four basic terms: matter, energy, space, and time. Until the publication of Albert Einstein’s (d. 1955) first paper on relativity in 1905, space and time remained the mathematically uniform and absolute entities assumed by Galileo and defined by

Newton. The concept of matter, on the other hand, underwent a notable elaboration, until toward the end of the nineteenth century it began, rather embarrassingly, to lose its solidity. Early in the nineteenth century, chemists distinguished molecules from atoms and, from about the middle of the century, learned how to analyze the atomic structure of molecules with growing

precision. Toward the end of the century, physicists and chemists joined forces to penetrate the atom, which had hitherto been defined as the ultimate, impenetrable constituent of matter. By the first decade of the twentieth century, electrons (“discovered” in 1897 by John Joseph Thompson [d. 1940]) had supplanted atoms as the ultimate building blocks of matter, while the erstwhile “‘solid” atoms had become miniature solar systems, with planetary electrons orbiting around a “solid” (or at least comparatively dense) nucleus.

The manner in which scientists of the nineteenth century dissipated ordi-

The Western Explosion, 1789-1917 A.D. 7357 nary, solid, common-sense matter into clouds of successively more minute and

always widely dispersed particles was matched by the way in which they made energy ever more solid. The term “energy” itself acquired quite new meanings. Careful measurements”! established energy equivalences between such apparently diverse events as chemical reactions, movements of sensible bodies, molecular and electron motions, heat, sound, light, magnetism, and newly discovered types of radiation like radio waves or X-rays. The principle of the conservation of energy through any and all changes of physical state was speculatively advanced by Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz

(d. 1894) as early as 1847. Every discovery during the next half-century seemed to confirm and add fresh instances to the principle.

The transmutations of an indestructible matter, which chemists had so successfully learned to control, seemed thus to parallel transmutations of an

equally indestructible something called energy, which had become the physicists’ special concern. The intersections of matter with energy in space and

time constituted the physical world of nineteenth-century science. It was a comfortable world intellectually, if a bit chilly to the emotions. Carefully defined terms and carefully performed measurements, mathematical reasoning and experimental verification of mathematically framed hypotheses were all elegantly articulated into a closed and logically self-consistent system, which neatly and adequately explained all physical events—with just a few, admittedly puzzling, exceptions.

Yet about the turn of the nineteenth century, these puzzling exceptions began to multiply and the very categories basic to the concepts of classical physics began to blur. Energy appeared in some contexts rather like an emission of particles, appearing only in fixed “quanta’’—a notion propounded by Max Planck (d. 1947) in 1900. Matter was discovered to disintegrate spontaneously in special cases and, in the process, to emit powerful radiation—a phenomenon first observed by Antoine Henri Becquerel (d. 1908) in 1896. Even more difficult for laymen and for not a few physicists to comprehend was the linkage of time and space into a space-time continuum. [his was first

proposed by Albert Einstein (d. 1955) in his special theory of relativity (1905) to account (among other things) for the uniform velocity with which light appeared to travel in any direction, even when measured from a rapidly moving platform of observation like a spot on the surface of the rotating and orbiting earth. This uniform velocity was observed as early as 1887 by Albert Michelson (d. 1931) and his colleague Edward Williams Morley (d. 1923). It seemed fundamentally incompatible with Newtonian conceptions of absolute space and time, for by all ordinary logic, light rays launched from the earth in the same direction as the earth’s own motion should travel faster through space than rays going in the opposite direction, since in one case the earth’s velocity should be added and in the other subtracted from the absolute speed of the rays. 21 Plus some purely metaphysical inventions like the “potential” energy assigned to a book poised casually on a mantelpiece in order to have something to draw upon to balance the energy equations if the book should happen to fall.

758 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. The unexpected upshot of these discrepancies, therefore, was to dissolve the elegant clarity of nineteenth-century physics. Matter, energy, time, and space, the four basic terms upon which the entire structure had rested, seemed no longer able to bear the burden classical physics had laid upon them. As a result, by the time World War I broke upon Europe, an imperfectly understood matter-energy system seemed to be mysteriously immersed in any one (or why not in more than one?) of several diverse space-time coordinates— Euclidean, hyperbolic, or spherical. Moreover, the ontological status of matter-energy was far from clear. The electron, born to science in 1897, rapidly spawned a brood of other subatomic particles; Planck’s energy-quanta were equally prolific; and the two merged Into one another as wave particles and particle waves in a manner that defied translation into any ordinary three-dimensional imagery. Even more doubtful was the applicability to the actual universe of mathematical coordinate nets designed to measure space-time, since the mode of measurement seemed likely a priori to affect (perhaps even to invent) what was being measured. To an outsider, therefore, it looked as though metaphysics and mysticism, having unobtrusively transferred their residence from the chancel to the laboratory, had deftly reasserted their ancient dominion over mathematics, Yet what looked to any sane layman like cabalistic nonsense, contradicting ev-

erything he intuitively knew about the material world, nevertheless continued to generate technological wonders. Here magic joined forces with mathematics, for what greater magic can be conceived than this: that the universe should obey the rules of human thought, as disciplined to the rigor of mathematical logic? **

A more extraordinary revolution in style of thought, passing from the rather smug finalities of late-nineteenth century physics to the confused uncertainties of the twentieth century, could scarcely be imagined, even though the new vistas opened up by physicists in the first decade of the twentieth century did not really overthrow classical theory but merely made it into a special case, applicable only within certain ranges of scale. Physical science was of course not the only active strand of intellectual

endeavor in the years between 1789 and 1917. Indeed, there is a sense in which the mathematical physicists’ style of thought was merely an unusually vigorous anachronism in the nineteenth century, for the presuppositions behind the scientists’ search for universal and eternal laws smacked strongly of 22 The notion common to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, that sense perception (sharpened by instruments for measuring, visually magnifying, or otherwise sensitizing human faculties) provided a check upon the free theorizing of scientists and tied theory to the real world, seems less and less applicable to recent scientific research. Experiments seeking to penetrate the subsensible and suprasensible realms of atomic physics and astronomy bring to human senses phenomena only remotely related to what may have occurred at the levels in which scientists are interested. A long and fragile chain of inference and assumption lies between a trace on a photographic plate, for example, and any “‘real’’ subatomic event it may be interpreted as having recorded. Even more to the point, what the scientist “‘sees’’ on his photographic plate is predetermined by the mathematical and other expectations he has already—expectations derived from a body of theory which more and more nearly approaches the biblical definition of Christian faith: “‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”’ (Hebrews 11:1).

The Western Explosion, 1789-1917 A.D. 759 the naive mathematical biases of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such presuppositions were scarcely compatible with the unique vision of reality that came sharply into focus for the first time in the nineteenth century itself and saw all things—whether laws of physics or of human societies—in process

of unending development. Yet the idea of development stimulated soaring philosophers as well as humbler historians to find in temporal sequences and successions an intellectual beauty, rather less shapely than the simple symmetries of physics, but also less austere, and for some minds all the more charming because of unexpected irregularities, disyunctures, and tangled continuities. History had, of course, been a recognized branch of European letters since the time of Herodotus. But history had traditionally concerned the deeds of men, and most historians had restricted themselves to political and military

affairs. Before the nineteenth century, men had seldom taken seriously the obvious proposition that all things in the universe, and the universe itself, for that matter, have a history. But early in the nineteenth century, this traditional limitation upon the domain of history was energetically discarded. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831) and other philosophers raised to the level of a cosmic principle the notion that development through time was unique, making some things possible at any given moment which had been impossible before and might (or might not) be impossible ever after. ‘This gave historians a new agenda—not merely to record the unusual event set against the basically unchanging human and natural order, as Gibbon, for example, had done, but to attempt to comprehend the entire evolution of human thought and society, being ever on the alert to detect new potentialities as they emerged in the course of time. Karl Marx (d. 1883) was the most influential social theorist who met the challenge of Hegel’s developmental philosophy by advancing a simple yet plausible schematization of human history and destiny. Marx’s vision of the stages of the human past and future—from slavery to serfdom to the financial exploitation of the free market and on to the perfect freedom of socialist and communist society—appealed both to the self-righteousness of industrial workers and to the rebellious idealism of intellectuals who found the confusion of

things as they were hard to bear. Marxism thus quickly became a religion, whose strongest appeal was to populations emerging abruptly from age-old rural routines into the uncertainties of urban and industrial living.

The historical point of view also had particularly explosive implications when applied to traditional religion. Juxtaposed to the mystery religions of the

Roman empire, Christianity lost some of its uniqueness; and the Bible, if subjected to the same critical canons which historians applied freely to other texts, ceased to be the word of God, dictated to a series of faithful amanuenses, and became instead a human product, replete with textual errors. The accuracy and adequacy of Christian doctrine had repeatedly been challenged in European history; so this in itself was nothing new. But by abandoning high

philosophical grounds and concentrating on textual details and particular historical events, the new “higher criticism” offered a more formidable antagonist than Christian theologians had ever before faced. Religious “modern-

760 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. ism,” which saw human comprehension of the divine and God’s self-revelation to man as complementary and progressive processes through time, represented one extreme reaction to the new spirit. Emphatic repudiation of the results of the “higher criticism” and reassertion of the plenary authority of traditional dogma represented the other. The fertility of the developmental-historical point of view was not limited

to the humanities and social sciences. Biology was revolutionized when Charles Darwin (d. 1882) brought together the scattered evidences for biological evolution which he and other naturalists had already accumulated and drew compelling conclusions from this data in his famous book, The Origin

of Species (1859). Darwin’s theories brought all living things within the scope of a single evolutionary process. Organic evolution of course required enormous spans of time; but geologists had already proposed such a terrestrial time scale to account for the deposition of sedimentary rocks; and paleontologists proceeded, both before and after the publication of Darwin’s book, to fill gaps in the enormous vista of earthly tme that now opened so awesomely beneath men’s feet. Human life and history were dwarfed by the immensity of geological and biological time; but it was not solely this uncomfortable shrinkage of the human universe that provoked controversy over Darwinian evolution. For Darwin’s picture of evolving biological species made no exception of man.** By reducing human beings to the level of other animals, subject to the same laws of natural selection and struggle for survival, Darwin seemed to have undermined, not only the very foundation of religion and of the social order, but all refinement of human culture as well. Nor were disciples lacking who drew conclusions from which Darwin himself refrained and

used the concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to justify both a rugged economic individualism at home and a ruthless collective imperialism abroad.

The historical vision, turned first upon man and his works, then extended to all living things and to the solid earth itself, thus brought profoundly disturbing issues to public attention. A crowning effort to apply the same point of view to the cosmos—an effort barely begun in 1917—had a force comparable

to the effect of the earlier Copernican revolution. For astronomers, seeking to comprehend the evolution of the universe, coolly presumed the formation and snufling out of innumerable stars, casually assumed the existence of innumerable replicas of the solar system in all stages of formation and dissolution, asserted without qualm the indefinite reduplication of the galaxy, and speculated freely upon superorderings that might unite clusters of galaxies or clusters of clusters into larger and larger wholes. Such an evolutionary view shrank sun, earth, life, and man—not to speak of the lives of individual persons—to proportions almost inconceivably minute and strained even a mind already attuned to the Copernican-Newtonian scale of being.”* Such a change 23 In his The Descent of Man, published in 1872, Darwin made explicit what had only been implicit in his first great work. 24G. J. Whitrow, The Structure and Evolution of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), provides the basis for much of this paragraph.

The Western Explosion, 1789-1917 AD. 761 of scale, imposed by the cumulative work of historians and archeologists, who had brought the ancient civilizations of the Middle East to life, of biologists, gcologists, and paleontologists who had set mankind against a panorama of

biological evolution, and of astronomers and mathematicians who moved familiarly with the all but infinite, put a new urgency into old questions about the value and significance of human affairs, under stars so unimaginably remote, on an carth so immemorially old, and among men whose bestial ancestors and primitive forebears appeared comparatively so very close.

Such macrocosmuc enormities were only one aspect of the crisis which confronted the evolutionary world-view toward the close of the nineteenth century. Like contemporary “classical” physics, the evolutionary viewpoint, which had been so confidently propounded at the beginning of the century, began just before World War I to suffer sharp microcosmic critique from philosophers and psychologists. Philosophers found it increasingly difficult to

persuade themselves that Kant had satisfactorily solved the problems of knowledge; but efforts to improve upon his anatomy of the powers and limitations of reason led merely to a growing obsession with epistemology and a tendency to deny the possibility of knowing anything at all. Scientists and historians, however, went blithely on their way, so that the philosophical dilemmas of the age remained more or less private to the profession. Not so the problems raised by psychologists, who employed both resolute reason and extravagant poetic imagination to challenge reason’s rule over the human faculties. Sigmund Freud (d. 1939) was by far the most influential pioneer. From study of behavior in abnormal states, Freud concluded that the ruling drives of mankind resided in an unconscious level of the mind. Consciousness accordingly became superficial, a distorting and distorted mirror of the reality beneath, its faculties and skills used as often to hide as to reveal the truth. Such views did indeed link men with beasts and lower forms of life, as Darwin had done. They collided frontally with the optimistic estimate of human nature and rationality which the Democratic Revolution had _proclaimed and assumed. They also raised from a somewhat different vantage point the simple question which was bothering philosophers: how can men know? For if the mind is fed, forced, and twisted about by instinctive drives, manifesting themselves sporadically as uncontrollable impulses, what remains of the capacity to seize upon external reality and hold it fast?

Freud was by no means the only contributor to the dethronement of reason. Social theorists as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), Georges Sorel (d. 1922), or Vilfredo Pareto (d. 1923) arrived quite independently at a similar denigration of rationality; and leaders of men—above all the officers of the more efficient European armies—had always known that the rule of reason had a very narrow scope when it came to human actions en masse. Painters, likewise, in reyecting the conventions of their art, were rejecting a remarkably rational system for reducing three dimensions to two; and the devices and conventions they substituted were redolent of the unconscious depths which Freud had tried to plumb, which politicians and soldiers had

762 Cosnio politanisi oi a Global Seale, 1850-1950 AD. long exploited, and which social theorists had barely begun to recognize as something more than pagan survivals or primitive traits to be outgrown with the progress of civilization.

**

A survey such as this is always liable to underestimate the enduring continuities and stabilities of the social scene and to overemphasize the elements of novelty and disruption. Yet even with this bias understood, and making due allowance for the millions upon millions of persons whose lives were entirely undisturbed by the technicalities of science and whose minds were quite

unencumbered by thought; recalling also the respectable multitudes who neither knew nor cared what a handful of disreputable artists were doing in run-down neighborhoods of Paris and other cities; remembering the ability of institutions and habits to survive divorce from the intellectual and social setting of their birth and even to thrive in an alien or apparently hostile environment—it still seems correct to believe that Western civilization had come to

an unusually critical pass in the first decade of the twentieth century, even before plunging into the open abyss of war and revolution. When art and thought, economics and politics simultaneously pressed so hard against familiar molds, the range of the possible began to display more of its enormous variety than ever before. The inertia of the millions who lived their lives by routine surely set a limit upon the virtuosity of political or economic ambition; but when the cultural leaders of Western civilization had so uniformly cut loose from old moorings, it was only a matter of time before popular inertia would be overcome and mass energies directed into new paths. World War I and the Russian Revolution perhaps accelerated but assuredly

did not create the crisis. The “New Regime” inaugurated by the French

Revolution had indeed become old. It remained to be seen what new reorder-

ing of Western (or more plausibly, of world) society and culture might emerge—or whether confusion and uncertainty would prevail indefinitely.

C. THE NON-WESTERN WORLD, 1850-1950 A.D. Disruption of traditional styles of life occurred almost simultaneously in the Moslem, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese worlds in the mid-nineteenth century.

In this respect, sub-Saharan Africa and the West itself lagged behind the Asian peoples by roughly half a century, for both tribal African and middleclass Western styles of life failed to confront a general crisis until the very end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. At least in the proximate sense, the initial disruption of each of the non-Western cultures was largely the work of Western technology. Only when the semi-1impervious shell of familiar custom and belief had been fractured, so that Asian and African minds became sensitive to alien winds of doctrine, did ideas from the West begin to rival technology as transformers of the local cultural scene. Institutions, being the embodiments of custom and crystallizations of tradition, were strongholds of conservatism and pillars of whatever stability ex-

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PRIMORDIAL WOMAN This reclining figure, carved by Henry Moore (b. 1898) in 1957, gives visual form to primordially primitive, inchoate dimensions of human femininity. Presumably the artist intended to penetrate beyond optical appearances in order to achieve an imagery capable of resonating within the observers’ subconsciousness. Artistic universality may thus seem within reach, for all men perhaps inherit a common core of subconscious propensities. Such an aim obviously emancipates the sculptor from Western and every other art tradition. It brings—or attempts to bring—the highest intellectual sophistication into direct touch with the dark hidden springs of human life underlying all the cultural variety of historical mankind. In such a statue, therefore, our twentieth-century scientific emancipation from the cultural parochialisms of the past finds concise visual embodiment.

764 Cosmo politamsm on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. isted in the disturbed social landscapes of the earth. But institutions were always local, so that their interactions with the cosmopolitan novelties of the

recent past must be studied region by region. Before undertaking this task, 1t seems appropriate to dwell upon the factors that affected all, or nearly

all, the world, constituting the net by which primitive cultures and ancient civilizations alike were caught up into the global cosmopolitanism of the years 1850-1950. I. THE CHANGING SHAPE AND STYLE OF THE ECUMENE

During the century 1850-1950, changes in mode of transport literally transformed the shape of the ecumene. Distances shrank, routes of travel and com-

munication altered, and the centers of real and potential political power shifted. This was of course only one aspect of the general technological revolution of the recent past, but it was of peculiar importance. By defining who neighbored whom, transport and communication have always provided the basic frame within which human societies must exist. Hence only the scale

was new. But scale can be decisively important, and with the enormously enhanced range of modern mechanical transport and instantaneous communication, the necessity, as well as the possibility, of global cosmopolitanism was created. Each improvement in mechanical transport meant shrinkage of effective distances between separate parts of the earth and also redistributed the culturally (and militarily) strategic regions of the globe. Thus, the development of power-driven ships, constructed first of iron and then of steel, reinforced the importance of the ocean lanes by making sea transport cheaper and more dependable than before. The great interoceanic canals across the isthmuses

of Suez (1869) and Panama (1914) worked in the same direction; but the ' canals also renewed the importance of old routes of travel.”” The Suez Canal in particular, by restoring to the Middle East much of its former importance as the pre-eminent crossroads of the Eastern Hemisphere, abruptly altered the

geopolitics of the Old World. The Panama Canal also affected the world balance, though less spectacularly, by strengthening the military posture of the United States.

Mechanically powered sea transport became a global reality after the 1870’s; but even before that time, the possibilities of long-distance mechanized land transport had become apparent. The mills that turned out plates for iron ships also supplied the materials to build the snorting horses of iron that began as early as 1869 to clang across whole continents. Nor were railroads the only new devices: telegraphic communication antedated rail transport by a decade or two in most parts of the earth; and, after the first big railroad boom in the 1850’s, further impovements in both transport and communication came thick

and fast: automobiles, trucks, and pipelines as well as telephone, radio, and television. 25 For all normal purposes, Spanish colonial administrators had preferred mule portage across the Isthmus to the long voyage around Cape Horn, just as caravan routes in the Middle East had connected the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean long before the Atlantic route around Africa had been discovered.

The Non-Western World 769 In the short run, improvements in land transport reinforced the primacy of western Europe within the ecumene. Most of the new devices were invented in Europe, where the technical and financial capacity to build and operate them also concentrated. The first users of the new means of transport

and communication, even in the extra-European parts of the world, were therefore often of European origin. Westerners thereby acquired a new and very powerful instrument for penetration inland from the seacoasts and ports where their earlier contacts with other peoples had usually centered.

On a longer view, however, the opening up of continental interiors to rapid, cheap, and dependable transport clearly tended to dethrone western Europe from its onetime primacy in the world. The rise of American and Russian power to their contemporary dimensions would have been inconceivable without the integration of large continental areas by a network of mechanically powered land transport. South Americans, Africans, and Asians

have not yet built a truly continental transport net. Political, financial, and geographical obstacles stand in the way of any such achievement, but the technical possibility is now clear. Should it ever be realized, Europe’s onetime

primacy over the earth and the recent pre-eminence of ocean traffic may come to seem as extraordinary in retrospect as they would have seemed incredible in prospect to a man of the Middle Ages. Air travel and transport, which came of age on a global scale only with improvements in aircraft design made during World War II, may in future offer a third alternative to the land-centered and ocean-centered ecumenes of the past. The ease with which airplanes surmount surface obstacles gives

Great Circle routes global, not merely oceanic importance. Furthermore, since the overwhelming majority of mankind lives in the Northern Hemisphere, all the major centers of population and power on earth are now interconnected with their most distant fellows by transarctic air routes. As a result, the strategic zones of the earth have migrated northward. The Arctic may therefore become what the Middle East has been through most of recorded history—the world’s principal crossroads. Changes in transport routes and corresponding shifts of strategic loci were perhaps less important than the over-all shrinkage of the globe, which made all peoples comparatively close neighbors. To be sure, interstices and refuge zones remained almost unaffected by the new conditions of transport; but

neither the jungle of New Guinea nor the desert of southwest Africa, the rain forest of the upper Amazon nor the tundra and sea ice of the Arctic shoreline seem in the least likely to sustain great human cultures. And if such

isolated and remote regions should in future become the seats of anything that seemed significant to the outer world, then the tentacles of modern trans-

port and communication would promptly and automatically close in upon them, engulfing their peoples inexorably into the cosmopolitanism of the age.

A second pervasive effect of modern technology has been to accelerate population growth in almost all parts of the earth. Numerical decay of primitive and semi-primitive populations when exposed to the weapons, germs, and psy chological-social disruption brought by civilized men was transitory. Such

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The Non-Western World 781 The emergence of India as a participant in twentieth-century cosmopolitanism has been but fitfully announced through the arts. Rabindranath Tagore (d. 1941), whose poetry mingled European, Sanskrit, and Bengali literary forms and ideas, was the single figure who achieved world reputation. It is not yet possible to tell whether the vogue for his work will subside or whether his literary reputation will maintain itself indefinitely.*° 4. CHINA

Developments in China from the outbreak of the Taiping rebellion in 1850 until the establishment of Communist control over the country in 1949 much resembled earlier transitions from one imperial dynasty to another. Many of the remoter dependencies of the Manchu empire broke away from the Chinese connection, while a long series of internal rebellions and successful foreign aggressions convulsed the heartlands of China proper. All this conformed closely to precedent. The foreign policies of the Chinese Communist government since 1949, involving the reassertion of Chinese influence in outlying regions like Tibet, Korea, and Annam also adhered to familiar imperial patterns. Moreover, the Communist hierarchies of party and government came close to duplicating the former Confucian hierarchies of scholars and officials, even to the manner in which they interpenetrated one another in the practical exercise of power. Indeed, totalitarian state socialism, as manifested in European countries since 1917 under both Marxian and Nazi banners, exhibited remarkable affinities with traditional Chinese bureaucratic practices, principles, and prejudices. The practice of entrusting broad discretionary powers to an educated and specially selected elite, the principle of using state power for the benefit of the people at large and of justifying even severe oppression thereby, together with prejudice against such assorted evils as profiteers, foreigners, and the superstitions of religion, were common to good Confucians, pious Communists, and dedicated Nazis. The other master institution of traditional Chinese society, the family, also

survived the century 1850-1950, just as it had survived many other periods of economic hardship and political upheaval. The vociferous repudiation of Confucian family pieties which became a prominent feature of the Chinese intellectual scene after 1917 induced unfilial conduct in large numbers of educated young Chinese; and in some regions of China, incipient industrialization 40 In addition to books cited separately, I have consulted the following in connection with these remarks upon recent Indian history: Abdullah Yusuf Ali, A Cultural History of India during British Rule

(Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons, 1940); Nirad C. Chauduri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (New York: Macmillan Co., 1951); Romesh Chunder Dutt, An Economic History of India in the Victorian Age (2d ed.; London: Kegan Paul, ‘Trench, Trubner & Co., 1929); J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (London: Macmillan & Co., 1929); Atulchandra Gupta, Studies in the Bengal Renaissance (Jadavpur : National Council of Education, Bengal, 1958); J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1948); Percival Griffiths, The British Impact on India (London: Macdonald, 1952); Percival Griffiths, Modern India (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1957); R. C. Majumdar et al., An Advanced History of India, pp. 829-1004; Lewis S. S. O'Malley, Modern India and the West (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); K. M. Panikkar, A Survey of Indian History (3d ed.; Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi, Madras: Asia Publishing House, 1956); William Theodore de Bary, Sources of Indian Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).

782 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. put more persistent, if less obvious, strains on old familial relationships.** Yet

the traditional attitudes and obligations, which continued to be instilled into the overwhelming majority of young Chinese even after 1917, were pecularly tough and elastic. Family ties often reasserted themselves even among those who had in youth explicitly rejected the Confucian formulation of filial duty. Nevertheless these impressive continuities do not justify the judgment that China merely passed through another of her traditional political cycles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since 1917, the Chinese educated minority has with increasing unanimity and energy repudiated the entire Confucian frame of life, with its age-old definitions of decorum in manners, morals, and politics. In the long run, the character of Chinese life is bound to be radically affected by so drastic a transfer of loyalties, all the more since the intellectual elite has been able to utilize ancient Chinese political institutions to further its new purposes. The ideals espoused by China’s educated classes in the twentieth century were all derived directly from the cosmopolitan culture of the West. Even in the nineteenth century, the Taiping rebellion (1850-64), which shook the Manchu empire to its core, proclaimed an ideal of Christian brotherhood, though Taoist and Buddhist elements mingled with Christian motifs from the start and became more prominent as the rebellion prospered.*” After China suffered humiliating military defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1895, a generation of revolutionary leaders, of whom Sun Yat-sen (d. 1925) was the most eminent, undertook an almost panic search for new talismans of power and national salvation. The obvious models were the world powers, for Western nations and now the Japanese had clearly been able to organize their societies far more successfully than the Chinese seemed to be doing. Accordingly, Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries quarried Western political and economic thought (often filtered through Japan) for suitable ideas. They did so with an indiscriminate naivete, showing themselves to be masters neither of the classical Chinese nor of the Western cultural tradition. After 1917, the Russian Revolution offered another and very attractive** source of alien in41 Cf. Hsiao-tung Fei, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtse Valley (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 233-35 and passim; Chow se-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 257-59. 42 Cf. Eugene Powers Boardman, Christian Influence upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion, 18 51-

64 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952). ‘8 The appeal of Marxist-Leninist doctrine in China was basically the same as the appeal of earlier heterodox religions to peoples emerging into civilization along the fringes of one or another of the established high cultures of the ecumene. Just as the Uighurs preferred Manichaeism or the Khazars Judaism to any of the orthodoxies of their civilized neighbors, so the Chinese and other proud neophytes in the contemporary West-centered cosmopolitanism might have been expected to prefer communism to any of the established orthodoxies of the West. Only so can the neophyte both defy his preceptors and acquire their skills. In proportion as communism has itself become an established orthodoxy, first in Russia and now in China, the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of course loses this advantage; for the uncommitted peoples of the world are no more anxious to be caught in a Communist than in a liberal-capitalist net. Intellectual as well as political independence has particular charms for peoples who feel themselves at a disadvantage.

The Non-Western World 783 spiration, and since 1949 Communist ideology has successfully asserted an intellectual and political monopoly in mainland China. Yet all this ideological volatility flourished against a backdrop of comparatively modest institutional change. Unul the turn of the century, the policy of the government and of the Confucian gentry, who provided social leadership in the Chinese countryside, was to minimize whatever changes the Western presence in China made necessary. After 1842, when British warships first compelled Chinese authorities to conform to foreign commercial and diplomatic practices, and still more emphatically after 1858-60, when renewed Western and Russian intervention in China enlarged foreign privileges, the rulers of China could no longer even pretend to confine the powerful barbarians to their proper tributary status. Yet most of the mandarins chose to overlook this gross breach of etiquette, for the naive ethnocentric universality of Confucianism prohibited the recognition of any alternative and equal— still less of a superior—system of society and civilization. The rigors of checking and then defeating the Taiping rebellion did indeed bring a handful of energetic and far-sighted reformers to key positions within the Chinese government. Some of these tried to equip China with the arsenals, armies, and navies which seemed to form the basis for Western power. Yet official reforms languished once the emergency of the Taiping rebellion had passed, partly because innovations raised suspicion in more conservative minds but mainly because the reformers themselves were half-hearted. Their whole purpose was to sustain the old order; and when innovation threatened that order, they opposed it. To give China the armies, armaments, industries,

and communications with which to defend herself adequatety would have _ required a greater modification of the existing Chinese social structure than the reformers of the 1860’s themselves desired.**

In the last years of the nineteenth century, therefore, events began once more to close in upon the tottering Confucian regime. Japanese victory in 1895, followed by the failure of the Boxer risings (1900-1901) and the imposition of additional humiliations upon China, convinced even those most reluctant to abandon the ancestral ways that drastic transformation was indeed required. Reform took many directions. Prolonged tampering with the machinery of government, both before and after the abdication of the last Manchu emperor in 1912, was usually hasty and, for a full half-century at least, was always ineffective in strengthening China. In education, however, change was both drastic and dramatically effective in transforming the whole

intellectual climate of the country. Abolition of the imperial examinations

based upon the Confucian classics in 1905 abruptly cut off the avenue through which the clique that had managed China for more than two millennia renewed itself. As a result, the ambitious young men who in any earlier age

would have studied the classics of ancient China all their lives suddenly flooded into institutions of Western learning. Ideological clamor and confu-

sion, wholly cut loose from any traditional anchor, inevitably ensued, as 44 Cf. Mary Clabaugh Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957).

784 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. thousands of Chinese whose childhood and early schooling had been thoroughly traditional found themselves plunged into a maelstrom of alien and often only half-understood ideas.** But for anyone who had experienced such profound discrepancies in youth, any moral, political, or intellectual commitments made in later life were bound to have a certain inner awkwardness and secret fragility. As a consequence, even the most emphatically expressed conviction could yield abruptly to new winds of doctrine if only the novelty promised speedier salvation from the tortures of indecision in thought and ineffectiveness in act. The bandwagon surge into the ranks of the Kuomintang in the 1920’s and the more recent Communist consolidation in China both were possible only because of this sort of intellectual volatility. But the Western origin of the ideas argued so passionately among Chinese intellectuals and politicians in the twentieth century easily obscures the comparative superficiality of the Western impact upon China before 1950. The great mass of the Chinese peasantry, some 80 per cent of the entire population, was like a great ocean into which rivulets of Western goods and streams of missionary exhortation flowed, without noticeably changing its level or much deflecting its waves and tides. The temporary success of the Taiping and other revolts; the persistent weakness of the Manchu regime; the rise and fall of the Kuomintang; and the success of the Communists in the 1930’s and 1940’s—all turned upon an axis of peasant disaffection against their rent-, tax-,

and interest-collecting social superiors, most of whom resided in towns for mutual edification and protection.*® But this was exactly the sort of thing that had happened in earlier Chinese history toward the end of each dynasty. The violence, famine, and disease which prevailed over wide regions of the Chinese countryside in the first half of the twentieth century was likewise noth-

ing more than the traditionally efficacious, if brutal, means of redressing accumulated disproportions between land, rent, taxes, and population. The availability of Western machine-made manufactures, e.g., cotton cloth and kerosene, may have exacerbated the woes of the peasantry in some parts of China by undercutting or destroying traditional handicrafts; and town artisans may have suffered as tastes of the wealthy few turned toward exotic Western manufactures. On the other hand, new or expanded trades, like the production of tung oil, tungsten, tea, and silk for Western and world markets, tended to enlarge the possibilities of livelihood for these same classes. Modern machine-power industry made a modest first appearance in China in the 1840’s but gained significant headway only after 1895, when a provi-

sion of the treaty ending the Sino-Japanese War allowed foreigners to erect factories on Chinese soil and still enjoy most of the trade privileges already 45 One calculation finds as many as 10 million Chinese exposed to some form of Westernized education by 1917. Cf. Chow Tse-tung, The May Fourth Movement, pp. 379-80. It is strange to think that a

man like Mao-tse Tung (b. 1893) began life in a completely Confucian environment and espoused Marxism only as a grown man of twenty-seven. Other leaders of the Chinese Communists also bridge the gap in their personal lives between the old and the new regimes, a fact which helps to guarantee a massive carry-over from the Chinese past into whatever future Chinese communism may create. 46 Cf. the emphatic but penetrating essays collected in M. P. Redfield (ed.), China’s Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations by Hsiao-tung Fei (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

The Non-Western World 785 conferred upon goods imported from abroad. World War I cut off European supplies and gave a temporary fillip to Chinese manufacture, especially of cotton cloth; but Japanese competition, together with financial and other instabilities of the interwar period, severely checked the advance of modern industry in China. Such great modern cities as Shanghai and ‘Tientsin did not become major industrial complexes but remained primarily mercantile and financial centers dominated in considerable degree by foreign businessmen. Railroads, likewise, played no such role in China as they did in India. Large-scale construction began only in the first decade of the twentieth century; and no coherent network spanning the whole country arose from the furious intrigues among the rival European financial interests which provided most of the capital required for railroad building in China. Moreover, even where railroads were built, they often operated only sporadically, owing to financial and administrative disorders and to recurrent military disturbances.*’

A really massive and sustained effort to create both modern industry and

modern transport in China had to await the appearance of a government strong enough to impose peace. This seemed about to happen in 1929, when

the Kuomintang emerged to authority in China, only to be confronted by fresh Japanese attack (1931) and renewed domestic broils. Peace came again only in 1949. Hence, until then the Industrial Revolution had touched only

the fringes of China. The fabric of older economic relationships in both village and town remained essentially intact. The Western presence in China had indeed provoked an unusual effervescence in the Chinese economy like

that which the Mongols had brought in the thirteenth century; but, for all this, there was as yet no fundamental transformation.

Only after China had completed the traditional cycle of transition from one strong political regime to another could the West-centered cosmopolitanism of the twentieth century really begin to confront traditional Chinese institutions on a massive scale. As long as traditional social disproportions within Chinese society provoked traditional responses of violence and disorder, the cutting edge of Western economic penetration was blunted; and all the heated debates among the educated minority—while thoroughly Western in outward form and profoundly important for China’s long-run future —had little immediate applicability. Really intimate and decisive confrontation between Chinese and Western civilizations therefore lies still in the future. It promises to generate the most important cultural interaction of the twentieth and perhaps of the twenty-first century. In an age of such sharp vicissitudes, when moral as well as economic and political standards were in flux, high and serene cultural creativity ought not to be expected. Important reforms, especially of literary conventions, were projected, for example Hu Shih’s movement (1919) to substitute a more nearly popular speech as a standard for writing or the more recent Communist proposal for alphabetizing written Chinese. The rigorous intellectual and scholarly tradition of the country facilitated the introduction of Western 47 Cf. E-tu Zen Sun, ‘“‘The Pattern of Railway Development in China,”’ Far Eastern Quarterly, XIV (1955), 179-99.

786 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. science and learning into China, partly through missionary efforts, partly by means of students sent abroad to study at Western universities. Especially in the field of Sinology, the cross-stimulation of Chinese with Western methods and presuppositions of scholarship often proved strikingly fertile. Yet measured against the greatness of the past, the century 1850-1950 clearly represented a low point in Chinese cultural achievement.** 5. JAPAN

Japanese civilization exhibited a remarkable duality under the Tokugawa shoguns, balancing itself precariously—one is tempted to say artificially—be-

tween contrary extremes. Thus the moral ideal of the warrior with all its spartan rigor confronted the unabashed sensuous indulgences of the “Floating World”; and no via media offered between these moral codes. Japan was officially closed to the outside world; yet lively curiosity about Dutch learning overcame enormous obstacles. Or again, the personal, hereditary ties of Japanese “feudalism” disguised but did not really hide the lineaments of bureaucratic administration in each of the sixty-odd “fiefs” or clan territories into which Japan was divided. Even more troublesome was the separation between

political and economic power, permitting despised merchants to prosper, while peasants and warriors—their superiors in the traditional scale of society —suffered recurrent want. Thus the strained, yet stabilized relationship between emperor and shogun aptly symbolized the duality that ran through all Japanese life. A holy and powerless sovereign, revered as the font of all authority and immured in a web of ritual, somehow tolerated and was tolerated by the heirs of an unusually successful swashbuckler of the early seventeenth century, the Tokugawa shoguns, who ruled Japan with heavy hand through a corps of officials, spies, and soldiers, artfully balancing man against man, class against class, and clan against clan. Only a sustained act of will emanating from the shogun’s palace sufficed to maintain equilibrium amid such seeming incompatibilities. When that will faltered, as it did in the 1850’s owing to conflicts among rival cliques over the succession to a childless ruler, even the relatively modest emergency created 48 In addition to books cited separately, I have consulted the following in connection with these remarks on China: George C. Allen and Audrey G. Donnithorne, Western Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development: China and Japan (London: Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1954); G. E. Hubbard, Eastern Industrialization and Its Effect on the West (London: Oxford University Press, 1938); Kuo-heng Shih, China Enters the Machine Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944); Li Chien-nung,

The Political History of China, 1840-1928 (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1956); E. R. Hughes, The Invasion of China by the Western World (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1937); Ssu-yu Teng, New

Light on the History of the Taiping Rebellion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); Siang-tseh Chiang, The Nien Rebellion (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1954); Meribeth E. Cameron, The Reform Movement in China, 1898-1912 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1931); Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); F.F. Liu, A Military History of Modern China, 1924-49 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956); Etienne Balasz, ‘“‘Les Aspects significatifs de la société chinoise,” Astatische Studien, V1 (1952), 77-87; Franz H. Michael and George E. Taylor, The Far East in the Modern World (New York: Henry Hole & Co., 1956); Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: Macmillan Co., 1929); Chiang Monlin, Tides from the West: A Chinese Autobiography (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947); Y. Chu Wang, ““The Intelligentsia in Changing China,” Foreign Affairs (1958), 315-29.

The Non-Western World 787 by the appearance of Commodore Perry’s “black ships” (1853-54) triggered far-ranging, deep-going transformations of Japanese society and civilization. Until World War II, Japan’s political and economic reorganization provided an unparalleled instance of successful response to Western stimuli—successful, that is, in terms of national capacity first to withstand and then to repel the Western nations whose ships and trade had precipitated the break-

down of the Tokugawa regime. Yet a policy that appropriated Western techniques so massively and rapidly did not escape internal contradictions and hidden tensions comparable to those which had characterized Tokugawa Japan. On the contrary, the success with which the Japanese borrowed aspects of Western civilization—especially its war-making and industrial techniques— depended upon yet another juggler’s feat of ingenious balancing between old and new elements. Briefly put, the survival, almost intact, of an old-fashioned, sharply graded, and distinctively Japanese social hierarchy, with appropriate deferential patterns of conduct between the separate ranks of society, allowed a small group of leaders within a single generation to carry through profound

changes in military and economic institutions and to remodel the political system of Japan along superficially Western lines.”

Severe psychological tensions, sometimes resulting in abrupt changes of conduct quite incomprehensible to an outsider, were built into Japanese life long before the ending of seclusion in 1854. [he eagerness with which Japanese first received and then repudiated the Portuguese, the far earlier enthusiasm with which the Japanese imperial court appropriated Chinese civilization in the sixth and subsequent centuries a.p., and the abrupt reversals of Japanese attitudes and actions toward the United States and other foreign nations in this century all seem of a piece and suggest that a capacity for radical and sudden changes of conduct has long been a latent feature of Japanese psychology.”” 49 China's ideological volatility against a background of comparatively great institutional stability was therefore the antithesis of the situation in Japan. Yet, paradoxically, Japan’s ideological stability was only preserved by the radical, organized instability of institutions that made the country strong and justified samurai Ieadership. Reciprocally, the rapidity of institutional change was itself possible only because traditional values and refurbished myths and symbols maintained social discipline. Cf. Furope’s radical revolutions of the Reformation period, carried through in the name of a restoration of ancient orthodoxies. 60 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1946) and Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1947) are two interesting efforts to apply different theoretical schemes to elucidate peculiarities of Japanese life that may “explain” the abruptnesses of Japanese history. In Western history the customs of the duel offer an illuminating parallel to recent Japanese national behavior. Recognition of the points of resemblance may even make the recent drastic fluctuations of Japanese conduct toward other nations more nearly intelligible. After all, duelling in early modern times was reduced to an unwritten but binding code of behavior by swordsmen whose traditional place im society was rapidly becoming otiose. The arbiters of manners who created the Code Ducllo in effect sought to adjust themselves and their fellow fighting men to an increasingly alien, urbanized, and organized world by reducing the emotional extremes of their situation to a ceremonial of quarre] and reconciliation. Japanese samurai, swordsmen too, faced equally or more severe readjustments of their mode of life during the past century. Unlike their European counterparts, however, they were able to carry

788 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. Quite apart from internal peculiarities of Japanese society, the fact that Japan had borrowed most of its higher culture and technical skills from China over a period of more than a thousand years greatly facilitated the acceptance

of Western ideas and techniques in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their forefathers had already acknowledged the fact of foreign superiority in some things, hence the discovery that Europeans had knowledge and skills superior to their own was no particular shock to Japanese self-esteem. Faithful conformity to the example set by their forefathers actually required the heirs of Sinophile Japanese to become enthusiastic Westernizers. Finally, certain congruences between Japanese and Western civilizations

facilitated the acceptance of Western models in Japan. By the nineteenth century, the raw, barbarian warlikeness both of the West and of Japan had been organized (and in Japan almost suppressed) by bureaucratic governments. But the Japanese way of the warrior, with its sense of honor and social precedence, had almost exact analogues in European life. What was perhaps even more decisive, in both societies the values and attitudes of the profes-

sional warriors were in considerable degree shared and admired by other | ranks and classes. Peasants and townsmen in Japan, like their counterparts in Europe, were more inclined to follow than to cringe from aristocratic specialists in violence. Japan therefore offers the interesting paradox of a land where ideological (and emotional) conservatism served as the principal instrument to organize radical institutional transformation. As a consequence, the Industrial and the Democratic revolutions of modern times had very different degrees of success there; for, although Japanese technology leaped ahead from about 1885, the Democratic Revolution scarcely affected traditional deference hierarchies of Japanese society before 1945, despite outward constitutional forms.

*** After a shaky start in the 1880's, mechanically powered industry and transport made it possible for Japanese manufactures to compete with European or American goods all over the Far East by the time of World War I. Between the wars, the Japanese extended their sphere of commercial operations still further and in the 1930’s found markets all over the world. Even more to the point, the industrial base required by modern armies, navies, and air forces

developed rapidly, both in Japan proper and in her newly won empire in Korea (1910) and Manchuria (1931-32). Japan’s industrialization did not follow European patterns. The state played a far more central and critical role than it had done in any European country. As a result, entrepreneurial decisions were always affected by the requirements of national military power. In these respects, Japanese industrialization the entire nation with them in adherence to a Japanese equivalent of the Code Duello. Perhaps the very

rapidity of Japanese emergence from a “‘feudal’’ to a cosmopolitan social environment made the samurai’s feat possible, whereas a slower evolution, like that of Europe, might have split Japanese society in such a way as to prevent all classes from accepting the samurai’s code for the nation as a whole.

The Non-Western World 789 interestingly foreshadowed Russian communism. But unlike later Communist

governments, the Japanese gave free rein to a multitude of small entrepreneurs who operated within traditional artisan and family relationships. Two changes were made to adjust these ancient patterns of industry to modern conditions. Light power tools, driven by electric motors, replaced or supplemented hand tools and vastly increased output. Second, the marketing of the product of small artisan shops and factories was usually entrusted to much larger firms—or to put the relationship the other way round, large marketing enterprises “put out” much or all of the work of production to small shops. Since they needed substantial loans to tide over the gap between purchase

and sale, such marketing organizations were in their turn caught up into a close network of really large-scale economic enterprises: banks, metallurgical and other heavy industries, mining enterprises, shipping companies, and a few

large-scale factories. These instruments of modernity were controlled by a rather narrow economic oligarchy which was a mirror image of the political oligarchy that controlled the Japanese government. Relations between the holders of economic and political power always remained close; and individuals often married across the lines of the two elites. Indeed, the great entrepreneurial families, like the Mitsui and Mitsubishi, acquired their importance in the latter decades of the nineteenth century by taking over the management of enterprises that had been launched by official action. Small or sometimes merely token payments were asked by the state for plants which had been very costly to build; but the new “private” owners maintained a

correspondingly close and continuing sense of responsibility toward the political leaders of the nation and considered it part of their duty to undertake new enterprises necessary or useful to the state.”’ As a result, the consoli-

dation of a powerful and wealthy economic oligarchy reduced the need for direct state economic action, although state arsenals continued to produce some types of armament, especially the newer or still experimental models. In sum, while the techniques of machine production were Western, the socio-economic organization which put the new machine technology to work was almost wholly Japanese. This meant, in particular, observing strict rules of probity and propriety as between superior and inferior in economic as in other social relationships. The Industrial Revolution in Japan therefore had a distinctive social character, which, at least in the short run, deprived modern industrialism of what students of European history often consider its “normal” partner, the Democratic Revolution.*? The survival of a strongly hierarchical social structure in Japan made an accumulation of capital for industrial investment comparatively easy. The government itself financed the first steps in industrial modernization by direct taxation, thereby in effect making the peasants pay for investment which could otherwise scarcely have originated from domestic Japanese sources. 5This was explicitly recognized in the house rules drawn up by the founder of the Mitsubishi fortune. Article 4 read: ‘‘Operate all enterprises with the national interest in mind.”’ Cf. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion, p. 187. 62 Cf. the interesting analysis in James C. Abegglen, The Japanese Factory: Aspects of Its Social Organ-

ization (Glencoe, II].: Free Press, 1958).

790 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. Later, when the financial-industrial] oligarchy had taken form under the guiding hand of government, monopolistic and oligopolistic prices at home and abroad concentrated substantial financial resources into a few hands. These monopolists were, however, eager entrepreneurs, who lived modestly themselves and thereby encouraged others to refrain from conspicuous consumption, thereby stimulating capital formation up and down the social scale.™

* * cS A democratic revolution in the Western sense never occurred in Japan. The lords and warriors who overthrew the Tokugawa regime in 1867 and “restored” the Emperor Meiji were certainly not advocates of popular government. Even when in 1889 the Japanese introduced a Western-type written constitution, complete with an elective diet, a cabinet of ministers, and an independent judiciary, the political weight of the rank and file was carefully curtailed by appropriate limitations upon the legal powers of the diet. Indeed, the realities of politics, turning as they did upon “clan” and other long-standing local and family solidarities, were even further removed from democratic practice than the outward legalities of the Meiji constitution revealed. With the passage of time, clan loyalties weakened and the traditional social hierarchy of Japan lost some of its rigidity. Hence, although the Meiji constitution survived until 1945, the inner realities of Japanese politics gradually became more complex. Universal male suffrage (1925) expanded the electorate

and allowed upstarts to rival old established families in the inner political leadership; and in the 1930’s, military cliques began to exert an independent influence upon government policy. Yet despite these challenges to their traditional primacy, rather narrow oligarchic circles continued to dominate Japanese politics from behind the scenes until 1945. After their defeat in World War II, the Japanese for a time were forced to yield control of their country to American occupation forces. The new Japa-

nese constitution promulgated under American auspices in 1947 was thoroughly democratic—United States style. Yet it remains doubtful whether Japanese conceptions of self, society, and status relationships, together with all the recognized proprieties of social conduct between unequals, really permit more than lip service to the egalitarian, individualistic, and fundamentally alien political ideals so carefully enshrined in that constitution.” 53’ The principal families of the economic oligarchy were of samurai origin and carried over into their economic management a generous dose of the spartan personal ethic of the samurai code. Making money, either as an end in itself or as a means to permitting some form of personal conspicuous waste,

was never an acceptable motive in Japan. The collective conspicuous waste of war was, of course, another matter. *4 Such a cavalier treatment of Japanese political evolution over the century 1850-1950 is scarcely adequate to its fascinating complexities. From the 1870’s there were always a few Japanese who advocated Western liberal ideas, and, in the first decade of their existence and again in the 1920’s, men of this persuasion played a limited role in affairs, if only the negative one of stimulating their opponents to more drastic, energetic, risky action. Marxism, in either its Russian Communist or Western socialist

forms, seems to have played a comparable role as agent provocateur since the end of the American occupation.

The Non-Western World 79] Although nothing plausibly resembling the Democratic Revolution of other nations occurred in Japan, two semi-revolutionary changes in the form of Japanese government did take place. The first of these, the “restoration” of the emperor, was ostensibly a reactionary coup d’etat, carried through by a

self-appointed group of young samurai, many of whom had started life in humble circumstances and some of whom had had official experience within local administrations before transferring their energies to the national stage. These were the men who, wishing to restore the emperor and evict the forelgner, initiated the industrial modernization of Japan. They also worked important administrative changes, uniting all the “fiefs” of Tokugawa Japan under the central government and eliminating the legal bases of “feudalism” by buying off the rights of lords and samurai with government bonds. In a real sense this simply carried to its logical fulfilment the incomplete bureaucratic centralization upon which the early Tokugawa shoguns had built their power and which their successors had allowed to stand almost unchanged for more than two centuries. Drastic reorganization of Japan’s military establishment constituted a very

Important aspect of the Meiji restoration. Haughty samurai, rude peasants, humble merchants, and even the former outcastes of Japanese society were all

conscripted into a new European-style army, where they were obliged to treat their officers with all the deference formerly reserved for local, hereditary social superiors. This transfer of deference from a traditional to an officeholding basis was remarkably successful. Whatever a man’s origin, once commissioned as an officer of the imperial army he acquired the nimbus of com-

mand which had been burnished through the centuries by the disciplined brutality lordly masters and warriors had exercised against the rest of Japanese society. The army, therefore, became a great social escalator, especially for peasants’ sons, who by dint of professional accomplishment were able to gain a status once reserved to hereditary samurai.” One result of this situation was that the junior officers of the army became a sounding board for hotheads and radicals who were dissatisfied with the government’s policies. Expressing the sentiments of large segments of the Japanese rural population, the army extremists constituted the one important group able to challenge the squabbling oligarchs who controlled party pol1tics. In this sense they represented a democratic element in Japanese politics.

Moreover, they were prepared to work outside of established social hierarchies in order to accomplish their purposes. The opposition of this military faction, backed by the threat of a popular uprising and expressed in assassina-

tion and similar deeds of violence, restricted the freedom of maneuver of Japanese politicians in the later 1930’s and played a great part in driving Japan into war with China and ultimately into World War II. This was perhaps the nearest Japan came to a democratic revolution before World War IL. The results of Japan’s second semi-revolution from the top, accomplished

between 1945 and 1952 by General Douglas MacArthur and his minions, both American and Japanese, cannot yet be foreseen. It seems unlikely that 55 The officer corps of the Japanese navy, by contrast, remained far more aristocratic.

792 Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale, 1850-1950 A.D. the hierarchical structure of Japanese society will disappear, although it may have crumpled a bit under the impact of the war experiences, the discredit which military defeat brought to the former regime, and the disruptive effects

of postwar American example and exhortation. It is also still uncertain whether the Japanese combination of Western technology with an almost unchanged social structure can strike a reasonably stable balance, or whether in the long run the Industrial Revolution will require a general and drastic reorganization of Japanese society. The question is whether indeed the Industrial and Democratic revolutions of Europe’s nineteenth and twentieth centuries are connected by some necessary inner relationship, or whether the two may

be effectually separated for an indefinite length of time, as the Japanese assuredly did separate them during the sixty years before 1945.

* * KE The social and psychological obstacles which disrupted traditional cultural

expression in China and among other non-Western peoples operated less strongly in Japan because the Japanese proved able to maintain their political

and spiritual independence of the West. The bulk of Japanese artistic and literary production therefore remained large. Yet the traditional arts of Japan tended either to fossilize into repetitious routine or else to decay; while imported novelties, whether architectural, scientific, or literary, did not, by the common judgment of our age, achieve real greatness. Japan, therefore, like most of the rest of the world, passed through a comparatively low period of cultural creativity between 1850 and 1950. Indeed, the Japanese achievement

appears to have differed from the cultural state of the less happily situated civilized peoples of Asia chiefly in the democratization of literary culture through genuinely universal literacy.°° 6. OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD

Of the several thousand culturally distinct human societies existing in the middle of the nineteenth century, a good many have since been destroyed or dis56 In addition to books cited separately, | have consulted the following in connection with these remarks on Japan: Hugh Borton: Japan’s Modern Century (New York: Ronald Press, 1955); George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan; Thomas C. Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Enterprise, 1868-18 80 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955); Walhiam W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan: Growth and Structural Change, 1868-1938 (Prince-

ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954); E. Herbert Norman, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), and Soldier and Peasant in Japan: The

Origins of Conscription (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1943); Jerome B. Cohen, Japanese Economy in War and Reconstruction (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1949); F.C. Jones, Japan's New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall, 1937-45 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954); Inazo Nitobe et al., Western Influences in Modern Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931); Fujii Jintaro, Outline of Japanese History in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Obunsha, 1958); Charles David Sheldon, ‘“SSome Economic Reasons for the Marked Contrast in Japanese and Chinese Modernization,” Kyoto University Economic Review, XXL (1953), 30-60; Yukio Yashiro, 2000 Years of Japanese Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1958); George M. Beckmann, The Making of the Meiji Constitution: The Oligarchs and the Constitutional Development of Japan, 1868-1891 (Lawrence,

Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1957); Shibusawa Keizo, Japanese Society in the Meri Era (Yokyo:

Obunsha, 1958); Irene B. Taeuber, The Population of Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958).

The Non-Western World 793 solved into larger groupings of mankind. Yet the total number of different societies remained large even in the middle of the twentieth century and embraced an enormous variety of institutions and attitudes. Each society, great or small, continued as in times past to respond in its own way to new stimuli, opportunities, and dangers. What made the years since about 1850 unusual

was the rough uniformity of critical outside stimuli encountered by each society; for the West-centered cosmopolitanism arising from the Industrial and Democratic revolutions left no important region of the earth untouched. Tremendous multiplicity, enough to delight the most eager anthropologist,

continues to variegate the life of mankind. The retreat of European (and American) colonial empires since World War II has made the variety of the

human social condition far more spectacularly obvious than it was when colonial administrative cadres gave an outward appearance of uniformity to wide areas of the globe. Twentieth-century revolutionary movements in some Latin American countries have also emphasized the continued existence of the Amerindians as a significant social entity. Indeed the Mexican artistic movement, stimulated by the revolution of 1911, mcorporated old Amerindian motifs into very sophisticated painting and architecture and thereby succeeded in injecting a New World primitivism into the repertory of contemporary cosmopolitan art.** But no other fusion between Western and local art or

thought seems yet to have attracted wide attention or been able to offer significant enrichment to the already perhaps overburdened cosmopolitanism of the twentieth century. 57 José Orozco (d. 1949) and Diego Rivera (1880-1957) at least liked to pretend to be the heirs of the Aztec

and Toltec as wellas of the European past. By contrast, Old World primitivism, primarily west African, was discovered” by Europeans just before World War I.

Conclusion

In the spring of 1917 the United States became a belligerent in World War I. In the fall of the same year, Bolsheviks overthrew the tsarist government in Russia and withdrew that country from the war. These events make the year 1917 a serviceable landmark from which to date a new phase in Western and world civilization, marked by the Communist transformation of Russia, the rise of the United States to world power, the eclipse of western Europe as undisputed center and arbiter of Western civilization, and by enormous advances in men’s ability to manipulate human as well as inanimate energies. The most obvious and perhaps also the most important changes associated with this landmark were in (1) the scale and (2) the scope of politics after 1917.

A. SCALE OF POLITICS Two superpowers, measured by the standard of western European nationstates, announced themselves in 1917 by proclaiming rival panaceas for the

ills of the corrupt, imperialist, and war-ridden world which Europe’s no longer “New Regime” had made. By 1945 both Wilsonism and Leninism had lost the dazzle of their new-minted brightness. But enhanced weight of metal,

by which measure the United States and the Soviet Union far eclipsed all rivals, amply compensated for a generation’s accumulation of ideological tarnish. At the close of World War II, only these two giants could sustain the elaborate panoply of modern war on the basis of their home resources. As armaments grow in complexity and expense, the possibility correspondingly decreases of restoring the sear and shrunken sovereignties of the separate nations of western Europe or of rendering the sovereignty of any small countries really secure. The rise of the United States and the Soviet Union to world pre-eminence since World War II was, indeed, only another instance of a familiar historical phenomenon: the migration of military-political power from more anciently civilized but less effectively organized heartlands to regions nearer the fron-

tier. Machine technology, which within recent memory carried western 194

Scope of Politics 795 Europe to the apex of its world domination, seems now, like Zeus of ancient fable, to have turned ruthlessly upon its parent. Since 1917, and more particularly since 1945, the extractive, transport, processing and distribution complexes of modern industrialism no longer fit easily within the narrow frontiers of the old west European nation-states. In 1945, the elbow room of half a continent gave both Russia and the United States a more or less satisfactory basis for military power; yet even this semicontinental scale is sure to become inadequate if any one center of power should succeed in effectively uniting the resources of still greater areas. Modern industrialism and transport, in short, have begun extravagantly to reward mere geographical extent. A logical terminus to this expansion of political scale would be the creation

of a single world sovereignty. Any world war fought in the near future, while only two superpowers are in the ring, would likely lead to such a settlement.' Certainly the technical means for asserting effective world sovereignty lie ready at hand. Monopolization of especially powerful “capital” weapons by an organized force obedient to a reliably united central authority would

suffice of itself to supersede organized warfare among separate political sovereignties. Such a development seems a distinct possibility, even within the near future. On the other hand, the shift in political scale from great powers the size of

France, Britain, or Germany to superpowers of semicontinental scale may provide a basis for a future balance of power like that of the European Old Regime. A new family of world powers may define itself, in which China and India and perhaps Brazil or some as yet unformed political units of semicontinental scale (e.g., a United Europe or, less plausibly, a United Middle East or

a United Africa) would share the leading roles with the two superpowers already on the scene.

B. SCOPE OF POLITICS The changed scope of politics which has emerged from the two world wars and from the Communist and other totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century seems as massive and irreversible a feature of the social landscape as is the expanded political scale. What the German General Staff contrived in 1917-18 as an emergency response to the multifold problems of bringing all possible resources to bear upon the tasks of waging war became, in effect, for Russian Communists a norm applicable indifferently to peace and to war. The 1 Total extermination of humanity and all higher forms of life through pollution of the atmosphere with radioactivity now is apparently a real possibility. On the other hand, even the most formidable modern weapons, despite their almost unimaginable destructive powers, have their own peculiar vulnerability. The more complex weaponry becomes, the more difficult supply and control also become. Armies and whole nations become more lable to sudden paralysis through failure of supply or of command. In other words, transport and communication are the Achilles’ heel of modern armed establishments; and total victory and total defeat would be likely to come, as they did in World War II, long before the population or the productive plant of the loser was entirely or perhaps even extensively destroyed. Modern armed power has to be purchased at a high cost in fragility, for the same reason that higher organisms and complicated machinery have to purchase their efficiency at the cost of vulnerability to all sorts of disorders that cannot afflict simpler structures whose functioning does not depend upon the exact co-ordination of so many parts.

796 Conclusion revolutionary conspirators who came to power in Russia in 1917 took over not merely the traditional apparatus of the state—army, police, and bureaucracy—but extended their control also to banks, factories, farms, and the various media of communication together with labor unions, political parties, and associations of every sort. The revolutionary state even resorted to forced labor when exhortation and wage inducements failed to distribute manpower as desired.

Economics thus dissolved back into politics, which, indeed, became almost

coterminal with human life itself, since, at least in principle, art, letters, thought, recreation, and family life were all harnessed to the pursuit of the Communist goal as defined through changing times and circumstances by appropriate and authoritative manipulations of the “party line.” Countries which escaped Communist revolutions did not experience quite so rapid and radical an expansion of the scope of politics, although in most European nations (and in Japan, too), socialist, nationalist, and fascist movements advanced rapidly in this direction during the interwar years. Hitler’s Germany lagged only slightly, if at all. behind Stalinist Russia in subordinatPOLITICAL REALIGNMENTS 1918-1950

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Scope of Politics 797 ing all human activity to political ends. During World War II, even the most conservative democracies, where liberal scruple traditionally hedged in the power of the state in time of peace, found it wise to subordinate economic and many other aspects of social activity to the war effort, 7.e., to the service

of politically defined goals not basically different in kind from those the German Nazis and Russian Communists were simultaneously pursuing by more violent, ruthless, and totalitarian means. Just as the nineteenth-century distinction between politics and economics has. collapsed in some countries and is blurring elsewhere, so also the much

older distinction between peace and war has everywhere lost its erstwhile clarity. The normal (2.e., peacetime and wartime) practices and organizational patterns developed by the Russian Communists and by the German Nazis strikingly resembled Anglo-American economic-political-military collaboration during World War II. Careful strategic and economic planning characterized all three power systems. Human engineering “machined” individuals and groups (the platoon, the division) into interchangeable parts, while industrial engineering turned out tanks and airplanes, proximity fuses and atabrine, trucks and K-rations according to priorities and production schedules keyed to a strategic over-all plan. Finally, an enveloping atmosphere of haste, emer-

gency, and crisis sustained a psychological buoyancy and sense of excited venture among the managers and manipulators of the newly found and furbished springs of power.’ Wartime patterns of social organization did not, of course, prevail in the United States after 1945-46, when the machinery of American mobilization

was dismantled. Yet the experience of World War II undoubtedly left important traces behind. Notions that would have seemed preposterous a decade before were accepted after the war as perfectly normal. Thus governmental responsibility for maintaining economic prosperity, for subsidizing scientific research, for developing atomic technology, and for assuring an adequate supply of engineers, was taken almost for granted. In each of these cases and in many more, government action inspired by military-political considerations encroached upon or entirely superseded the old sovereignty of the free market postulated by liberal economic theory. An enormous expansion in the

size of the United States’ armed forces and an extraordinary elaboration of

their equipment operated powerfully in the same direction, for with the growth of the armed services, principles of military hierarchy and _ fiscal 2 Cf. more extended remarks on this point in W. H. McNeill, America, Britain, and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941-46 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 747-68. Some, perhaps

most, of these observations apply to Japan as well as to the United States, Russia, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Germany and Great Britain. However, the Japanese war planning depended mainly upon careful preparation in advance—the Prussian formula for victory in 1866 and 1870—and upon a bulldog tenacity in holding what had been so secured. Shipping and other shortages from 1941 onward made even the maintenance of existing Japanese industry and armed forces difficult, so that Japanese planners and administrators scarcely had a chance to show what they could do. German war planning also shared some of the Japanese conservatism; for the German General Staff counted upon a short war, fought as in 1866 and 1870-71 with stocks on hand at the beginning of each new campaign. This lag offers an interesting example of how the heirs of a great past are prone to hesitate in changing their methods to accommodate changed conditions.

798 Conclusion bureaucratization have been fastened upon a significant segment of the population and a substantial portion of the economy.

After World War II, when even a conservative country like the United States rapidly extended the scope of political-military jurisdiction over its citizens, the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union perceptibly recoiled from the extreme revolutionary effort to regiment the whole variety of Russian thought and action. Autonomy for specialists, each free in his own field from more than lip service to the pieties of Marxism-Leninism, had advanced a long way within the Soviet Union even before Stalin’s death in 1953. Since GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY SINCE 1917

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Scope of Politics 799 that time, some gestures have also been made toward freeing writers and other artists from the shackles of the official party line. If such developments continue, as might be expected to follow from the growing wealth, complexity, and subtlety of Russian society, the second half of the twentieth century may see a gradual convergence between Russian and American social systems, each of them balancing a bit uneasily between the conflicting demands of welfare and warfare. Such an evolution would recapitulate the nineteenth-century interplay be-

tween the French Revolution and the European Old Regime. A gradual softening of doctrinal rigor must, indeed, be the fate of all successful revolutions; for human variety is always incommensurate over time and in detail with any single ideal. But it seems equally certain that the export of successful revolution can only be prevented by those who are ready and able to borrow from the revolutionaries at least some of the practical secrets of their power. This, surely, was the history of nineteenth-century Europe. The pattern of revolutionary challenge and conservative accommodation seems likely to be

century.” |

repeated within the larger circle of the Western world in the twentieth

There is a second sense in which the Russian Revolution resembled and, indeed, carried the logic of the French Revolution another step forward. The essence of the French Revolution was the sweeping away of ancient vested interests and corporate obstacles to the concentration of political power in the hands of the People, whose amorphous majesty of necessity delegated the practical exercise of authority, whether to a parliament, cabinet, committee, or dictator. Likewise, the essence of the Russian Revolution, it now appears, was the sweeping away of ancient vested interests and corporate obstacles to the concentration of a much wider range of power—political, economic, moral—into the hands of the same apotheosized abstraction, the Sovereign People. And as before, the People delegated power—or so their self-appointed leaders declared—to a corps of ideological and managerial technicians organized into a hieratic and hierarchic party. If the French Revolution proved that

political institutions and authorities were in truth man-made, the Russian Revolution seems to have demonstrated by the same unimpeachable logic of act that social and economic institutions were just as much man-made as political ones and might likewise undergo wholesale and deliberate reconstruction.

In remodeling Russian society, the Communists gleefully trampled upon eighteenth-century natural rights of property and ruthlessly suppressed nineteenth-century civil liberties as well. Yet the Nature in which liberal theorists had once put so much trust, abetted by the human nature of scores of mil3 The fact that a convergence between the internal social orders of the protagonists of the midcentury cold war cannot occur in a vacuum but will happen, if it happens ar all, in the midst of a world where numerous other peoples are simultaneously struggling for power, wealth, security, and in many instances for life itself, will complicate, but may hasten, the process. Hungry and aggrieved outsiders, the Chinese for example, may someday drive Russia and the Unired States into each other’s arms, as

the Germans did in World War II. This would create a potentially much more explosive political lineup, dividing the world along racial-cultural lines far more sharply than the Russo-American ideological polarity of the 1950’s ever did.

800 Conclusion lions of Russians, supinely yielded to Communist manipulations, much as divine-right monarchy had crumpled in revolutionary France a century and a quarter before.

Clearly, the Russian Revolution succeeded in concentrating power on a hitherto unexampled miulitary-political, economic-psychological scale, just as the French Revolution had done in its day. Yet in both cases there was room for disagreement as to whether the new conditions of life under revolutionary, rationalized, and arbitrarily created institutions were in fact more satisfying than they had been under the older, more various and idiosyncratic prerevolutionary regimes. In both cases also, old moral dilemmas achieved a poign-

ancy which had been unknown in former times, when the power at human disposal had been smaller and alternatives pressing upon human decision had been correspondingly less drastic.

C. DILEMMAS OF POWER Save in a loose and metaphorical sense, the people never really controlled “their” government in the United States or anywhere else, despite the fact that in the days of Jefferson and Jackson, official powers and duties were restricted and the recognized political alternatives were narrowly defined by nineteenth-century liberal principles. As for the administrative Molochs of the mid-twentieth century, they can with difficulty be controlled by full-time professionals. Even in countries where governmental monpoly of public communication does not exist, governments more often than not can lull or wheedle the public into acquiescence or whip it into enthusiasm for official acts and plans.

Yet the dependence of modern democratic governments upon skilful manipulation of public opinion nonetheless sets real and valuable limits upon tyrannical exercise of official authority. Not everyone, after all, can be persuaded to commit suicide. Official lethargy or uncertainty backed by public ignorance or indifference may sometimes result in a happy muddling through. But though a government fearful of offending special interests and pressure groups may indeed refrain from tyranny at home, it is also prone to be slow in settling upon any new course of action. Anything of importance which has

not been done before is sure to offend someone and to provoke overt or covert counterpressures. From the point of view of forthcoming elections, politicians may calculate quite correctly that it is not safe to override even quite small minorities. Under such circumstances, democratic political leaders are strongly tempted to settle for the path of least resistance, either by postponing action or by compromising, even illogically, between incompatible alternatives. As long as domestic institutions remain in good working order, masterly inactivity may often serve as a passable substitute for wisdom. But when real crisis looms, then the stalemates and postponements arising from the pulling

and hauling of the democratic process of government as developed in the United States and other liberal societies may become truly disastrous. Too

Dilemmas of Power 80] little and too late makes a sorry epitaph; yet one may hope all the same that

the very slowness and imprecision with which a loosely controlled and directed people responds to the prods of circumstances and of official, semiofficial, and unofhcial voices may preserve a saving flexibility and versatility in thought and act. A further dilemma of democratic government in our time arises from the fact that techniques for appealing to subrational and even to subconscious levels of human motivation are still in their infancy when applied to politics. Liberal democratic theory assumed human rationality and discounted the passions; but psychologists and social scientists no longer believe that men are ruled by reason, while advertisers and military men know they are not. The prospects of a royal road to power through clever and unscrupulous exploitation of the non-rational elements of human nature are far too bright to permit a facile optimism as to the future of democracy. Yet discrepancies between theory and fact, ideal and reality, also afflict Communist regimes, and perhaps in even more acute form. Marx and Lenin assumed that once the revolution had swept away private ownership of the means of production, human rationality and benevolence would take over automatically, after only a brief period of transition. Yet as the Russian Revolution approaches its fiftieth anniversary, the onset of the Communist idyll is not much in evidence. Instead, Communist governments have regularly defied popular wishes, repressed popular movements, and oppressed individual citizens, claiming all the while to know. better than the people themselves what was good, right, proper, and necessary. It is perhaps a Communist misfortune that Marxist-Leninist scriptures include rather more than their share of

ardent denunciation of oppression, together with magnificently utopian anticipations of a free, leisured, and abundant material future. Given the harsh realities of initial Communist practice—compulsory saving and high rates of investment requiring a ruthless exploitation of the peasantry in order to provide capital for industrial construction—the discrepancies between rosy dream and drab fact, between generous aspiration and ugly practice become peculiarly sharp, and difficult to sustain over prolonged periods of time. Clearly, the Russians already feel this strain. An aging and prospering revolution cannot indefinitely justify failures to attain the promised land of communism by pointing to the dangers of capitalist encirclement. Moral dilemmas such as these are aspects of basic questions of social hier-

archy and human purpose which haunt all men in an age when inherited institutions and customary relationships no longer appear natural, inevitable, immutable. Hierarchy and control remain as vital as ever, perhaps even more so; for the complex co-ordination of human effort required by modern industry, government, and warfare make it certain that some few men will have to manage, plan, and attempt to foresee, while a majority must obey, even if retaining some right to criticize or approve the acts of their superiors. But who has the right to manage whom? And toward what ends should human capacities be directed?

The wider the range of human activities that can be brought within the

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Dilemmas of Power S03 scope of deliberate management, the more fateful these questions become. Or perhaps a really tough-minded critic of twentieth-century society would have to say: The wider the range of human activities brought within the scope of deliberate management, the more irrelevant questions of social hierarchy and managerial goals become. Admittedly, as the managerial elite of any particu-

lar country gathers experience and expertise, reduces new areas of human activity to its control, and integrates partial plans into a national (or transnational) whole, the bureaucratic machine exercising such powers becomes increasingly automatic, with goals built into its very structure. [he administrative machine, like other specialized instruments, can only do what it was built

to do. Scientific personnel classification allows, nay, requires, interchangeability of parts in the bureaucracy; hence individual appointments and dismissals make remarkably little difference so long as they do not achieve too massive a scale or too rapid a rate. The administrative totality, its over-all structure and functioning, and even the general lines of policy remain almost unaffected by changes of elected officials. Even energetic reformers, placed in high ofhce and nominally put in charge of such vast bureaucratic hierarchies,

find it all but impossible to do more than slightly deflect the line of march. A really massive bureaucracy, such as those which now constitute every major modern government, becomes a vested interest greater and more strategically located than any “private” vested interest of the past. Such groupings

are characterized by a lively sense of corporate self-interest, expressed through elaborate rules and precedents, and procedures rising toward the semi-sacredness of holy ritual. These buttress a safe conservatism of routine and make modern bureaucracy potentially capable of throttling back even the riotous upthrust of social and technical change nurtured by modern science. Consequently, as the corporate entities of government bureaucracies grow and mesh their activities more and more perfectly one with another, both within and among the various “sovereign” states of our time, use and wont—the way things have “always” been done—may become, bit by bit, an adequate surrogate for social theory. By sustaining an unceasing action, administrative routine may make rational definition of the goals of human striving entirely superfluous.

If and when the possibility of international war ceases to agitate mankind and no longer spurs officialdom within the separate political sovereignties of the

earth to ever greater effort, we should expect a heavy weight of bureaucratic routine to fasten itself upon all parts of the globe. Within a comparatively short time, the unutterable but far from impracticable slogan: “Bureaucrats of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your jobs,” could be counted upon to set powerful brakes upon the dizzy pace of change which gives men vertigo today. The cautious principle: “Whatever is ts right—or at least convenient,” and the regulation that says: “This action requires a permit, filled out in triphcate on the proper form and can only be issued after a committee at the next higher level has reviewed the proposal,’ would everywhere come into effect, without requiring formal legislation. Under such a regime, the theoretical dilemmas and moral issues that trouble the mid-twentieth century would fade

SOF Conclusion

from men’s minds as the Cheshire cat faded from Alice in Wonderland’s sight. Much depends on how soon—if ever—stability through bureaucracy sets in.

Perhaps the next step beyond the level of social and human engineering already pioneered. by the Russian Revolution will be genetic tinkering with human germ plasm to produce suitably specialized subhuman and superhuman biological varieties. Present-day theoretical knowledge probably would allow this sort of management of human evolution. The potential results in enhanced efficiency and social discipline, thereby further increasing the possibil-

ity of concentrating power, seem enormous. Any revolution which made its way by rationalizing and accelerating human evolution might, therefore, like previous revolutions, compel others to imitate at least some of its techniques. If this should ever happen, men of the future may come to differ from those alive today as much as modern domestic animals differ from their wild ancestors; and such a posthuman population might itself become as specialized in function and various in type as the social insects are now. One may hope that some saving refractoriness of human nature and society —if not of human genetics—may make such a further extension of the realm of

deliberate management forever impossible. The fact that even the best laid plans for directing human affairs still often fail may turn out to be humanity’s saving grace, Alternatively, the period of grace may prove merely transitional, as human societies pass from their hitherto wild state into a future domesticated condition. Until men have been tamed, we cannot know for sure; for any failure in a first, second—or thousandth—attempt to rearrange human germ plasm according to plan would not prove that the feat was inherently impossible. ‘This sword of Damocles may therefore hang over humanity indefinitely. Like every other important new exercise of power, it raises the old questions Who? Whom? and Wherefore? to a new order of magnitude. After all, ““Who tames whom?” differs from the familiar ““Who controls whom?” only in the degree of distance assumed between the two parties to the relationship.

The two-edged nature of power is nothing new in human affairs. All important new inventions have both freed men from former weakness and deficiency and enslaved them to a new regimen. The hardy hunter surely despised the first farmers, bowed down by the heavy labor of the fields; and through long subsequent centuries barbarian freemen regularly scorned the servile habits of their civilized contemporaries. Yet these repugnances never for long arrested the spread of agriculture or of civilization. Civilized history,

likewise, as this book has tried to show, may be understood as a series of breakthroughs toward the realization of greater and greater power—including under this rubric the delicate but altogether real power of beauty in art and thought as well as power’s cruder, ruder forms.

It seems unlikely, therefore, that recent and prospective enlargement of human capacities to organize and exert power will be permanently arrested by scruples against its use. The brash adventurers who first make good an attempt to organize new springs of power can always confront even reluctant

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THE END AND THE BEGINNING The haunting witticisms of this headboard for a double bed (carved by Georges Lacombe in 1892) juxtapose the super-sophistication of European intellectual efforts to probe human subconsciousness with artful echoes of the Christian myth of Eden and original sin. Simultaneously, the artist chose to resort to forms reminiscent of primitive African art. Yet this multiple visual pun effectively expresses an important predicament of civilized men in the twentieth century. For the great snake, making a human face emerge from the contortions of his body as he writhes with the pain of feeding upon his own tail, is strangely like the intellectuals of our time who, having used their conscious and rational faculties to discover the dark realms of the unconscious psyche—realms that tie them willy-nilly to the primitive—can no longer trust rationality, but instead make reason feed upon itself by rationally arguing the helplessness of reason.

806 Conclusion neighbors with the choice of succumbing or of doing likewise. Power, in short, ingests weaker centers of power or stimulates rival centers to strengthen themselves. Uhis fact—and it amounts to no more than a definition of the term “power’’—has dominated the whole history of mankind. Politically, economically, socially—and perhaps, but let us hope not, also biologically—the elaboration of power structures seems in our time to be moving swiftly toward a climax. The globe 1s finite and if the rival political-social-economic power systems of our time coalesce under an overarching world sovereignty, the impetus now impelling men to develop new sources of power will largely cease.

Naturally, great tasks of social and economic betterment will remain, and delicate adjustments between population and developed resources will be required, all subsequent, perhaps, to extensive reconstruction of war damages. But for this, application of already familiar methods on sufficient scale and with a store of resolution and intelligence already well within human reach should suffice. And once these initial adjustments have successfully been made, a stalwart, more than Chinese bureaucratic immobility would, in all probability, soon define the daily life of cosmopolitan world society. More interesting and more promising for the remoter future are the unresolved, and in our time sometimes oppressively confused, problems of aesthetic power. So long as men remain within the human nature known to history, they may be expected to seek beauty in art and in thought. Even in the most efhciently bureaucratized world that a twentieth-century imagination can conceive, there would remain scope, perhaps even abundant scope, for imaginative and intellectual play. Religion, maybe wearing some new gulse as yet undreamed, might come into its own again as an agent sustaining personal security and promoting social solidarity. Fine art and belles-lettres might also flourish if a stabilized pattern of life allowed established meanings and sym-

bolisms to unite artists and writers with their audiences more closely than now seems to be the case. Science too might be expected to continue theoretical elaboration; but a stoutly conservative bureaucratized social order would be most unlikely to rush scientific discoveries into new technology. Technological and perhaps also scientific progress would proceed far more slowly, if

only because compelling motives for taking the trouble and provoking the dislocation caused by technological innovation would weaken or disappear. What such a vision of the future anticipates, in other words, is the eventual establishment of a world-wide cosmopolitanism, which, compared with the confusions and haste of our time, would enjoy a vastly greater stability. A suitable political frame for such a society might arise through sudden victory and defeat in war, or piecemeal through a more gradual encapsulation of a particular balance of world power within a growingly effective international bureaucracy. But no matter how it comes, the cosmopolitanism of the future will surely bear a Western imprint. At least in its initial stages, any world state will be an empire of the West. This would be the case even if non-Western-

ers should happen to hold the supreme controls of world-wide _politicalmilitary authority, for they could only do so by utilizing such originally Western traits as industrialism, science, and the public palliation of power

Dilemmas of Power 807 through advocacy of one or other of the democratic political faiths. Hence “The Rise of the West” may serve as a shorthand description of the upshot of the history of the human community to date.* Historical parallels to such a stabilization of a confused and chaotic social order are not far to seek. The Roman empire stabilized the violences and uncertainty of the Hellenistic world by monopolizing armed might in a single hand. The Han in ancient China likewise put a quietus upon the disorders of the warring states by erecting an imperial bureaucratic structure which endured, with occasional breakdown and modest amendment, almost to our

own day. The warring states of the twentieth century seem headed for a similar resolution of their conflicts, unless, of course, the chiliastic vision that

haunts our time really comes true and human history ends with a bang of hydrogen nuclei and a whimper from irradiated humanity.

*** The burden of present uncertainties and the drastic scope of alternative possibilities that have become apparent in our time oppress the minds of many sensitive people. Yet the unexampled plasticity of human affairs should also be exhilarating. Foresight, cautious resolution, sustained courage never before had such opportunities to shape our lives and those of subsequent generations. Good and wise men in all parts of the world have seldom counted for more; for they can hope to bring the facts of life more nearly into accord with the generous ideals proclaimed by all—or almost all—the world’s leaders. The fact that evil men and crass vices have precisely the same enhanced powers should not distract our minds. Rather we should recognize it as the inescapable complement of the enlarged scope for good. Great dangers alone

produce great victories; and without the possibility of failure, all human achievement would be savorless. Our world assuredly lacks neither dangers nor the possibility of failure. It also offers a theater for heroism such as has seldom or never been seen before in all history. Men some centuries from now will surely look back upon our time as a golden age of unparalleled technical, intellectual, institutional, and perhaps even of artistic creativity. Life in Demosthenes’ Athens, in Confucius’ China, and in Mohammed’s Arabia was violent, risky, and uncertain; hopes struggled with fears; greatness teetered perilously on the brim of disaster. We belong in this high company and should count ourselves fortunate to live in one of the great ages of the world. 4 The rise of the West, as intended by the ttle and meaning of this book, is only accelerated when one or another Asian or African people throws off European administration by making Western techniques, attitudes, and ideas sufficiently their own to permit them to do so.

Abbas the Great, Shah, 621, 626, 629 Agamemnon, 192 n., 215 n. Abbasids, 394n., 429, 431, 432, 434, 435, 438, Agincourt, 322 n. 439, 440, 441 n., 442, 444, 486 n., 495, 502, 515, Ahmad, A., 622 n., 623 n.

622 n., 694 Ahmed Shah Durrani, 701

Abdalmalik, 429 Ahura Mazda, 154, 155, 156

Abduh, Mohammed, 774 n. Ajanta caves, 376 Abegg, E., 349 n. Akbar, 622, 623 n., 626, 632, 633, 635

Abegglen, J. C., 789 n. Akif Pasha, 700

Abelard, Peter, 547, 548 Akkad, Akkadians, 43, 43 n., 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, Abraham, 16, 158, 159n., 421 54, 61, 113, 126, 136

Abu Bakr, 425, 426, 431, 618 al-Farabi, 438

Abu Zafar Navdi, Syed, 494 n. al-Ghazali, 502, 503 Abyssinia (see also Ethiopia), 233, 441 al-Khwarizmi, 438

Acarnania, 259 al-Mahdi, 432

Achaea, Achaeans, 97, 194 al-Mamun, 438

Achaemenids, 150, 154, 156, 237, 280, 285n., al-Mansur, 432, 438 n.

296 n., 399, 400 al-Masudi, 438

Achilles, 198 n., 795 al-Mina, 277 n.

Acre, 699 n. al-Razi, 438

Acton, Lord, 258 n. al-Tabari, 438

497 n. Albania, 499, 699

Adams, R. M., 29n., 30n., 48 n., 359n., 394n., Alaska, 659

Adcock, F. E., 273 n. Alberti, Leon Battista, 555 Addison, Joseph, 689 Albertus Magnus, 551

Aden, Straits of, 296, 380, 412 Alberuni (al-Biruni), 501 Adnan-Adwar, A., 499 n., 632 n. Albright, F. P., 94n. Adrianople, 243 Albright, W. F., 68n., 105n., 125 n., Adriatic, 442 n., 446 n., 494 157. n., 159n., 160 n., 162 n., 166 n.

147 n.,

Aegean, 94, 98, 100, 133, 144, 189, 192, 193, 249, Albuquerque, Alfonso de, 569 251, 255, 256, 259, 272, 276, 282, 287, 295, 298, Aleppo, 126

3§3, 363 n., 398, 399, 516, 546, 697 Aleutians, 659

Aeschylus, 261, 262 Alexander the Great, 129, 174, 243 n., 250, 272, Afghanistan, Afghans, 285, 319, 320n., 330n., 274, 275, 276, 277, 280-82, 286, 299, 304, 332,

490, 693, 700-704, 773 353, 400

Africa, 3, 4, 5n., 64, 76n., 98, 100, 102 n., 134, Alexander Nevsky, 519 n., 546 170, 233, 234, 250, 252, 276, 296, 328, 379, 388, Alexander, P. J., 446 n. 389, 396n., 405, 412, 419, 429, 440-42, 446, Alexandria, 280, 285, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293, 296, 447, 480, 481, 485, 486, 494 n., 495, 526, 559-61, 341, 370, 374n., 380, 406, 501, 607 565, 566, 570 n., 572, 574, 576, 577, 601, G11—13, Algeria, 614, 621, 699 n., 773 n. 617 n., 621, 650-51, 652, 653, 659, 660, 694, Ahi, 425 n., 428, 430, 431, 432, 434, 439, 440, 511, 704, 705 n., 724, 725, 731, 751 n., 762, 764, 765, 618

768, 773, 774n1., 793 n., 795, 807 Ali, A. Y., 781 n.

Index 809

Ali Pasha of Janina, 699 n. 135, 324, 329, 374, 419, 421, 424, 425, 426, 428Alice in Wonderland, 804 32, 448, 463, 468, 488, 560, 694, 695, 696, 699,

Alimen, H., 233 n. 704, 707 n., 724, 773, 775, 807

Allah, 421, 424, 425, 426, 428, 431n., 434, 439, Arabian Sea, 85, 135, 296, 364, 412, 571

488 Aral Sea, 317, 388, 487, 701

Allen, G. C., 786 n. Aramaeans, 114, 125, 127 Allen, W. E. D., 611 n., 664 n. Araucanians, 601 Almeida, 569 Arberry, A. J., 430n., 439n., 503 n., 775 n.

Almohades, 495, 501 Arcadia, 254

Almoravids, 495, 560 Archangel, 576 n., 606, 671 Alps, 315, 446, 547, 556, 592 Archimedes, 290 n.

Alsace, 751 n. Arcot, 703 Altai, 107, 239, 244, 322 n., 442 Arctic, 108, 559, 658, 659, 731, 754, 765 Altheim, F., 317 n. Ardashir, 386, 387, 394, 401, 402

Amazon, 572 n., 574, 652, 658, 765 Ardrey, R., 4n.

Amboina, 659 n. Argentina, 574, 603, 661, 662

Ambrose, Saint, 408 n. Argos, 270

Amenhotep IV (see Ikhnaton), 139 Aristarchus, 292 n., 593 America (see also North America; South Aristophanes, 264

America; United States), 6, 11, lln., 12n., Aristotle, 189, 257 n., 266, 267, 274, 402 n., 438,

233, 234, 238, 240, 242, 243, 363, 414, 416, 482- 501, 502 n., 509, 550, 551, 552 83, 486, 526, 561, 565, 566, 569, 574, 576, 585, Arjuna, 370n. 599-604, 605, 644, 651, 652, 656, 659, 660, 661, Arkwright, Richard, 738

664—70, 674, 676, 703, 724 Armenia, Armenians, 102, 285 n., 320, 324, 344,

Amerindians, 76n., 89n., 222n., 238, 240n., 410, 441, 449, 512, 775

243, 252, 359n., 416, 482-83, 547 n., 561-62, Arnakis, G. G., $22 n. 565, 571, 572 n., 578, 599-604, 605, 651, 652, Arnold, T. W., 441 n., 495 n., 506n., 622 n.,

661, 665, 666, 667, 669, 724, 768, 793 629 n.

Amon, 79, 139, 140, 142 Artaxerxes II, 156 Ammonius Saccas, 380 Aruni, King, 181 n.

Amorites, 51, 61 Aryabhata, 374 Amos, 147, 161 Aryans, 27, 88, 89, 108, 134, 170, 171 n., 172, 174,

Amur, 362, 492, 559, 658 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 183, 365 Anahita, 156 Asclepius, 264 Anatolia (see also Asia Mthor), 93, 96, 97, 104, Ashburn, P. M., 572 n. 113, 117, 118, 123, 129, 133, 144, 146n., 282, Ashby, E., 735 n. 338, 350, 351, 398, 417, 419n., 450, 451, 490, Ashoka, 299-304, 313, 332 492, 497, 504, 508, 522, 546, 573 n., 619, 626n., Ashur, 48n., 93, 133, 148n., 150

637, 656 Ashurbanipal, 138

Anawati, M. M., 436n., 502 n. Ashvaghosa, 349 n.

Anaximander, 213 Asia Minor (see also Anatolia), 89, 93, 94, 96, Anaximenes, 213 102, 107 n., 117, 152, 190, 193, 202, 233, 237,

Andalusia, 501, 504 256, 275, 277, 280, 282, 283, 286, 315, 342, 405, Anderson, E., 10 n. 408, 444, 446, 448, 451, 485, 494, 515, 518, 522, Anderson, J. N. D., 704n. 614n., 661, 700 n. Andersson, J. G., 23 n., 219 n. Assam, 175 n.

Andes, 415, 483 Assyria, Assyrians, 48n., 52, 94, 113, 114, 116, Andrae, T., 424n. 118, 120-22, 126-27, 128, 130, 133, 135, 136, Anesaki, M., 722 n. 148, 150, 161, 162, 198 n., 237, 281 Annam, 233, 251, 309, 379, 535, 559, 781 Astrakhan, 608, 617

Anselm, St., 547, 548 Athena, 206, 270

Antioch, 282, 285, 342, 406, 546, 607 Athens, 182 n., 189, 194, 196, 199, 200, 201, 202,

Antiochus III, 283 203, 205, 206, 216, 256-72, 286, 287, 288, 289,

Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 283, 286 n., 340 400, 405, 755, 807

Antonius, G., 775 n. Athos, Mount, 522

Anubis, 293 n. Atlantic, 12, 18, 98, 100, 103, 108, 134, 233 n.,, Anyang, 107 n., 219, 220, 222 240, 241, 251, 315, 389n., 419, 480, 547 n., 565, Apennines, 314 566, 569, 570, 571, 572 n., 579, 602, 603, 604,

Appalachians, 668 613, 656, 660, 668, 744, 764

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 551, 552 Aton, 139, 140, 142

Arabia, Arabs, 4, 12, 18, 68, 94n., 102n., 134, Attica, 193, 194n., 201, 256n., 257 n., 269

810 Index Attila the Hun, 252, 338, 392 Baratier, E., 556n. Augsburg, 584 Barbados, 661 Augustine of Canterbury, St.,.444 Barbary coast, 617 n.

Augustine of Hippo, St., 405, 409 Barkan, O. L., 519 n., 573 n.

Augustus, 325, 328, 393, 397 Barlaam, 348

Aurangzeb, 622, 623, 628, 632, 693, 702 Barnabas, 342

Aurelian, ‘387 Baron, S. W., 286n., 354n., 401 n.

Austen, Jane, 734n. Barthold, W., 487n., 492n., 493n., 503 n,, Australia, 233, 234, 252, 412, 481, 486, 559, 565, 702 n., 566, 578, 652, 653, 657, 659, 661, 663, 724, 731 Basham, A. L., 299n., 300n., 301 n., 349n., Austria, Austrians, 580, 590, 612 n., 613, 663, 664, 364n., 371 n., 372 n. 674, 675, 676, 678, 690, 693, 722, 727, 742, 746, Basil, Saint, 409

750 Basil I of Byzantium, 448

Avanti, 301 n. Basil II of Byzantium, 449, 450, 512, 515 Avars, 390, 420, 426, 442, 445 Basques, 104n. Averroes, 501, 502 n., 550 Basra, 429

Avicenna, 501 Baumann, H., 102 n. Avignon, 542 Bavarians, 445 Avvakum, 608 n. Baynes, N. F., 521n., 522 n.

Ayalon, D., 494n. Beckmann, G. M., 792 n. Azores, 240, 242 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 754 Azov, Sea of, 275, 672 Behistun, 302 n.

Azerbaijan, 493 n., 623, 626n. Becquerel, Antoine H., 757

Aztecs, 240 n., 561, 571, 574, 600, 605, 793 n. Beirut, 145 Bekmakhanov, E. B., 72 n.

Baal, 161 Belgians, 751

Babinger, F., 501 n. Belisarius, 396 n.

Babur, 622, 628 Bellah, R. N., 722 n., 787 n., 789 n.

Babylon, Babylonians, 40 n., 50, 51, 52, 54n., 56, Beloch, J., 256n. 58, 61, 62, 88, 114, 116, 123, 126, 128, 130, 133, Benedict, R., 787 n. 135-38, 144, 147, 148, 150, 162, 163, 164, 166, Benedict of Nursia, St., 187 n., 409 174, 228n., 280, 290, 337, 340n., 341, 353, Bengal, 364, 457, 511, 530n., 634n., 703, 706

374n., 381 Bengal, Bay of, 108, 250, 296, 364, 377, 615

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 690 Bennett, W. C., 483 n. Bachhofer, L., 218n., 222n., 224n., 225n., Bentham, Jeremy, 690

238n., 330n., 473 n. Benz, E., 381 n. Bacon, Roger, 552 Bergman, F., 24n., 107 n. Bacon, Francis, 592, 594, 691 Berbers, 406, 480, 495 n. Bactria, 283, 285, 299, 320, 321, 330, 388 n., 389, Bering, Vitus, 658, 659

396 n. Bering Strait, 11 n., 658 n. Baghdad, 432, 434, 436, 437, 440, 442, 444, 495, | Berossus, 353 502, 619 Beveridge, A. S., 628 n. Balasz, S., 465 n., 466 n., 468 n., 786 n. Bewer, J. A., 166n.

Baddeley, J. F., 617 n., 641 n., 650 n. Berkeley, Bishop George, 686

Bali, 636 Bhatti, 371 n.

Balkans, 189, 315, 388, 390, 408, 442, 443, 449, Bielenstein, H., 360 n., 465 n. 450, 494, 497, 512, 514, 518, 519, 524, 546, Bullington, J. H., 608 n.

554n., 634, 637-39, 676, 696-700 Binder, L., 775 n.

Balkash, Lake, 386, 477 Binyon, L., 383 n., 506 n.

Balkh, 330n. Bird, J. B., 483 n. Ball, U. N., 709 n. Birge, J. K., 498 n., 619 n.

Baluchistan, 88 n. Bishop, C. W., 23 n., 27 n., 218 n., 227 n., 234n. Baltic, 100, 387, 449, 519 n., 541 n.,-543, 545, 547, Bismarck, Otto von, 741, 750, 751

556, 675, 677 n. Bithynia, 275, 276, 282, 283 Banat, 664 Black Sea, 91, 103, 232, 233, 238, 244, 251, 256, Banda, 659 n. 275, 276, 387, 392, 397 n., 398, 399, 444; 445, Bandyopadhyaya, N., 171 n., 172 n., 174n. 446, 490 n., 512, 514, 516, 546, 612, 616, 674,

Banerjee, G. N., 348 n. 696, 697, 699 n. Banerjee, N. R., 102 n. Blegen, C. W., 94n.

Banti, L., 233 n. Bloch, M., 452 n.

Bantu, 412, 560, 561, 651, 725 Blok, Alexander, 755

Index 811 Boardman, E. P., 782 n. Bucharest, 697 Bobbio, 444 Buckle, F. W., 622 n. Bodde, D., 308 n., 309 n. Buddha, 116, 168, 174, 176, 177, 178, 182 n., 183, Boeotia, 194 185, 186, 187, 188, 214n., 232 n., 265, 266, 299,

Boers, 725 300, 301, 330, 334n., 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, Bohemia, 448, 520 n., 556 349, 368, 369, 370 n., 372, 402, 460, 473 n.

Bokhara, 503 n., 618, 702 n. Budge, E. W., 412 n.

Bolgary, 520n. Buffon, George de, 686

Bologna, 552 Bulgaria, Bulgars, 273, 390, 420, 443, 447, 448 n.,

Bolshakoff, S., 611 n. 449, 512, 578, 697, 700n.

Bombay, 460 n., 702, 777 n., 779 Burgundy, Burgundians, 389, 444, 558

Bonaventura, Saint, 502 n., 551 Burkitt, F. C., 402 n. Boniface, St., 445 Burma, 188, 233, 347, 377, 379, 419, 460, 477, 485, Boniface VIII, Pope, 542, 547, 552 492, 636, 637, 645 n., 652, 705, 706, 710

Bonne, A., 775 n. Burn, A. R., 192 n. Bonnet, H., 105 n. Burnet, J., 213 n. Borah, W., 601 n. Burns, Robert, 688

Borneo, 234n., 379, 612 n. Burton-Brown, T., 112 n.

Bornu, 612 Busch-Zantner, R., 515 n., 519 n., 638 n. Borovka, G., 222 n., 238 n., 244n. Bushmen, 651

Borton, H., 792 n. Bushnell, G. H. S., 414 n., 415 n., 483 n. Bose, N. K., 184n. Byzantium, Byzantines (see also Constan-

Bosnia, 499 tinople), 322, 386, 388, 389, 390, 393, 394, 398,

Bosphorus, 275, 390, 442, 521, 674, 697 399, 401, 405-12, 421, 426, 428, 430, 442-56,

Bossuet, Bishop Jacques, 685 485, 487, 489, 490, 498, 512-19, 521, 522, 538,

Bovill, E. W., 480 n., 561 n. 547, 616 n., 697

699 n. Cadiz, 666

Bowen, H., 616n., 622 n., 623 n., 626n., 633 n.,

Bowen, R. LeB., Jr., 94n. Cady, J. F., 706n. Boxer, C. R., 640 n., 642 n., 647 n., 667 n., 722n. Caesar, Julius, 316, 324 Brahms, Johannes, 754 Cahen, C., 490 n., 496 n.

Braidwood, R. J., 13 n. Cairo, 506

Brancusi, Constantine, 755 Calcutta, 708, 776 n., 777 n., 779

Brandenburg, 678 Calicut, 526 Braudel, F., 518n., 573 n., 614n., 616n., 621n. California, 659 Brazil, 570, 576, 656, 658, 660, 661, 662, 667, Calvin, John, 589, 590, 592 744 n., 795 128,667 255 Brazilia, 85Cambyses, Cameron,114, G. C.,

Breasted, J. H., 80n. Cameron, M. E., 786n. Bréhier, E., 380 n. Camoens, Luis de, 592 Briffault, R., 19 n. Campania, 275, 446 Brinton, C., 582 n. Campo Formio, 748

Bristol, 679 Camps, A., 622 n. Britain, British (see also England; Great Brit- Canaan, Canaanites, 94, 159, 160, 339

ain), 100, 134, 190, 250, 316, 388, 389n., 392, Canada (see also America, North America), 414, 444, 574n., 658, 659, 663, 667, 669, 670, 602, 659, 663, 669 675, 676, 677, 678-82, 693, 699, 701, 703, 704, Canary Islands, 100, 240 705, 706, 707, 708, 710n., 717, 721, 725, 727, Canberra, 85 728, 739, 744, 750n., 773, 776, 778, 783, 795, Candolle, A. de, 357 n.

797 Candy, 637, 706

British Columbia, 659 Canterbury, 444

Brittany, 316, 414 Canton, 457, 574, 640, 711, 712, 717 Brockelmann, C., 441 n. Canute, 541 n. Broomhall, M., 530 n., 718n. Capetians, 540 n. Brown, D. M., 646n. Capetown, 663 Brown, P., 506 n., 629 n. Cappadocia, 283 Browne, E. G., 441 n., 504n., 623 n. Carchemish, 126, 133 Bruce, J. P., 534n. Caribbean, 11 n., 497 n., 572 n., 576, 603, 660

Bruins, M. E. M., 62 n. Carlowitz, 693

Brusa, 499 Carmel, Mount, 5 n.

612 Index Caroe, O., 775 n. Chiang Siang-tseh, 786 n.

Carolingians, 445, 515 n., 541 n., 548 Chichen-Itza, 483, 561

Carpathians, 492 n., 614 Ch’ien-Lung, 712, 714 n. Carr-Saunders, A.M., 574 n. Chile, 574, 601 Cartagenia, 666 Ch’in, 238, 307, 308, 309, 310, 313, 314, 318, 323, Carter, G. F., 240 n., 482 n. 356 n., 393, 464

Carrhae, 321 n. Childe, V. G., 88n., 102 n., 103 n., 117 n.

Carter, T, F., 469 Nn., 531 n. China, 3, 6n., 23, 24, 27, 108, 116, 167, 168, 169, Carthage, Carthaginians, 200, 233n., 275, 282, 188, 214 n., 217-32, 234, 238, 239, 242, 244, 245,

314, 315, 328 n., 419 n. 250, 251, 252, 254, 265, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298,

Caspian, 238, 321, 458n., 463, 487, 514, 576n., 304-13, 314, 316, 317, 318, 320, 321, 322 n., 323,

619, 672, 701 324, 325, 328, 329, 330, 332, 334n., 347, 351, 353, Casson, S., 274 n. 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 365, 372, Castiglione, G., 714n. 377, 379, 381, 382-85, 386, 387, 389, 390, 391, Catherine II, the Great, 673, 674 393, 394, 401, 418, 419, 426n., 434, 437, 456,

Cato, 315 457, 462-80, 484, 485, 486 n., 487, 488, 489, 490, Caton-Thompson, G., 481 n. 492, 504n., 509, 520, 524-38, 544n., 566, 569, Catullus, 354 573, 574, 577, 583, 598, 599, 611, 612 n., 615, Caucasus, 102, 103, 104, 324, 393 n., 441, 443, 447, 628, 640-45, 646, 647, 649, 650, 652, 653, 659 n.,

493 n., 701, 731 701, 702 n., 705, 710-17, 718, 719, 721, 722, 726, Cavaignac, E., 94n. 727, 728, 730, 762, 773 n., 775, 780, 781-86, 787, Celts, 237, 251, 315, 316 788, 791, 792, 795, 799 n., 806, 807

Cephalonia, 637 n. China Sea, 526, 571 n., 617 n.

Cervantes, Miguel de, 592 Ch’ing dynasty (see also Manchuria), 641, 645 Ceylon, 188, 301, 347, 369, 460, 526, 560, 576, Choroes I of Persia, 400, 404, 405

636, 637, 705 Chou dynasty, 27, 223, 224, 227, 228, 238, 239, Chadwick, J., 98 n. Chow Tse-tung, 782 n., 784 n. Chaeronia, 270 Christ (see also Jesus), 265, 339, 342, 409 n., 410,

Cézanne, Paul, 753 305, 306, 307, 309, 323, 325 |

Chaitanya, 634, 635 446, 554, 585, 607, 684

Chalcedon, 408, 409 Christendom, 418, 437, 441-56, 490, 493, 498,

Chalcis, 198 n., 200 509, 512-24, 530n., 531n., 538-59, 605, 611,

Chaldaeans, 114, 125 613, 638, 674, 694, 773 Chalderan, 619 Christensen, A., 394n., 402 n., 404 n.

Chandra-gupta I, 364 Ch’u, 229

Chandragupta II, 364, 365 n., 371 Chu Hsi, 534

304 Cimmerians, 236 n., 237, 239

Chandragupta Maurya, 172 n., 176 n., 299, 302n., Cicero, 354

Chang, Chung-li, 716 n. Clapham, J. H., 743 n. Chang, Tien-tse, 642 n. Clark, J. D., 4n. Chang’an, 464, 469 Clark, J.G. D., 3 n.,6n., 13 n., 16n., 23 n.

Chang-k’ien, 295 Clark, W. E., 374 n.

Chao Meng-fu, 534n. Clarke, S., 76 n. Charaka, 373 Claudius Gothicus, 387 Charanis, P., 515 n. Clive, Robert, 703 Charlemagne, 445, 446, 454n., 540 n., 545 Clovis, 389, 392, 393, 443

Charles II of England, 674 Cluny, 541

Charles V, Emperor, 580, 613 Cochin China, 234, 378 n.

Charles XII of Sweden, 672 Codrus, 194 n.

Charles Martel, 428, 443 n., 444 n. Coedés, G., 234n., 378 n., 460 n., 476n., 477 n.,

Chaudur, N. C., 781 n. 560 n., 612 n.

Chavannes, E., 357 n. Cohen, J. B., 792 n. Chavrebie, C. de, 621 n. Cohen, M., 146 n.

Cheng Ch’eng Kung, 641 n. Cole, S., 233 n.

Cheng-ho, 526, 527 n., 529, 531 Collet, S. D., 709 n. Cheng Te-k’un, 24n,, 107n,, 219n., 220n,, Collier, J., 604n.

222 n., 227 Colombia, Cheshire, 804n.Columba, St.,574 414

Chi Ch’ao-ting, 465 n. Columban, St., 444

Chiang Monlin, 786 n. Columbus, 242 n., 565, 570n., 574

Index 913 Comneni, 518 Damascus, 126, 133, 342, 428, 429

Comte, August, 732 Dante, 552 408, 534, 712, 807 Danubians, 22

Confucius, 116, 168, 214n., 224, 226, 227, 229, Danube, 243, 254, 315, 321, 329n., 387, 388, 390, 230~—32, 265, 304, 305, 308, 309, 310, 311, 351, 393, 396 n., 408, 420, 443, 447, 494, 514n., 614

Congo, 412, 481, 561, 651 Dardanelles, 192

Constance, Lake, 444 Darius I of Persia, 127, 128, 134, 150, 156, 237,

521 Darius III, 280

Constantine, 388, 390, 396, 398, 399, 405, 441, 243, 255, 302 n.

Constantinople (see also Byzantium), 397, 401, | Darwin, Charles, 760, 761 406, 408, 409, 410, 441, 442, 445, 446, 447, 449, Dasgupta, S., 460n., 511 n., 635 n. 494 n., 499, 515, 516, 518, 521, 522, 524, 538, David, King of Israel, 125, 159, 160, 161 n., 164, 541 n., 546, 607, 608 n., 629, 695, 697, 699, 700 n. 340

Contenau, G., 134 n. Davis, R. H. C., 506 n.

Conybeare, F. C., 611 n. Davy, Humphrey, 735 Conze, E., 349 n., 458 n. Dawson, C., 508 n. Cook, Captain James, 658, 659 Dayal, H., 349 n.

Cook, S. F., 601 n. de Bary, W. T., 781 n.

Coomaraswamy, A. K., 330n. Debevois, N. C., 285 n., 321 n.

Coon, C. S., 5n., 6n. Deccan, 102, 364, 702

Copernicus, 593, 594 Decius, 387

Cordier, G., 773 n. Deevey, E.S., Jr., 13 n.

Cordier, H., 642 n., 717 n. Defoe, Daniel, 689

Corinth, 200, 203, 208, 276, 289, 295, 314, 315 de Graft-Johnson, J. C., 561 n.

Corneille, Pierre, 689 Delaporte, L., 66 n.

Cornford, F. M., 213 n., 268 n. Delahaye, H., 381 n.

Cus, 353 Delos, 287 n.

Cortez, Hernando, 561, 569, 571, 574 Delhi, 491, 492, 701

664, 670 Demaratus, 258 n.

Cossacks, 608, 610n., 611 n., 617, 641, 661, 663, Delphi, 42 n., 255

Cottrell, F., 218 n. Demosthenes, 260, 269, 807

Coupland, R., 481 n., 561 n. Denmark, Danes, 26, 541, 545, 707 n. Crassus, 321 n. Deonna, W., 208 n. Crawley, R., 259 n. Descartes, René, 588 n., 592, 593, 666, 683, 684 Crecy, 322 n. Dhalla, M.N., 157 n. Creel, H. G., 107 n., 219 n., 220 n., 222 n., 224n., Dhorme, E., 40n.

225 n., 230, 231 n., 645 n. Dhruva, K. H., 299 n.

Crete, 23 n., 51, 89, 94-98, 138n., 189, 190, 193, Diaz, Bartholomew, 570n.

210, 234n., 446, 449, 524, 612 n., 699 Diehl, C., 410 n. Crimea, 276, 444, 618 n., 663, 699, 728 Diez, E., 437 n., 506 n., 629 n.

Croatia, Croats, 663, 700 n. Difhe, B. W., 658 n., 666 n., 667 n.

Crompton, Samuel, 692 Dikshitar, V. R. R., 371 n.

Cromwell, Oliver, 582 n., 664 Dimand, M. S., 437 n., 506 n.

Cross, S. F., 448 n. Diocletian, 387, 398, 408

Croton, 215, 216 Diodorus Siculus, 302 n.

Ctesiphon, 400 Dionysus, 206, 261

Cuba, 660 n., 744 n. Diringer, D., 76 n., 146 n., 223 n.

Cumae, 275 Disselhoff, H. D., 416 n., 562 n.

Cumans, 489 n., 514-n. Diu, 571, 574

Curwen, E. C., 25 n., 27 n. Dixon, P., 190 n.

Cvijic, J., 638 n. Dnieper, 388, 447, 448 Cyprus, 190, 449 Dniepropetrovsk, 448 n. Cyril, St., 448, 449, 514 n. Dodwell, H. H., 699 n.

Cyrus the Great, 113, 114, 116, 128, 150, 156, D’Ollone, H. M. G., 702 n.

163, 237, 255 Don River, 244, 388

Cyrus the Younger, 259, 260 Dongson, 234n., 239 n.

Donnithorne, A. G., 786n.

Da Gama, Vasco, 526, 565, 570n., 574 Doresse, J., 381 n.

Dahomey, 560 Dorians, 114, 125, 192, 193, 194, 442 Dalton, O. M., 400 n., 410 n., 524 n. Dostoevsky, Fedor, 755

8 14 Index Dravidians, 337, 458 n. Eretria, 198 n., 200, 201

Drewes, G. W. J., 705 n. Erman, A., 78 n., 80 n., 119 n. Dubs, H. H., 308 n., 324n., 357 n., 358 n. Escarra, J., 307 n.

Duchesne-Guillemin, J., 354 n. Eskimos, 242, 359 n.

Dunlop, D. M., 443 n., 447 n. Ethiopia, 344, 362, 363, 393 n., 412, 414, 419, 561,

Duns Scotus, 552 613, 650 Dupleix, Marquis Joseph Francois, 703 Etruscans, 201, 233, 275, 276, 314 Dutch, 544, 576, 580, 582, 602, 603, 605, 614, 615, Euclid, 290, 501 616, 642 n., 647, 657, 659, 660, 663, 667 n., 705, Eudoxos, 290

706 n., 719 n., 725 Euphrates, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40, 43 n., 46, 48n., Dutt, N., 301 n., 349 n. 64, 66, 71n., 112, 113, 119, 133, 215 n., 286, Dutt, N. K., 176 n. 316, 319, 417 Dutt, R. C., 781 n. Euripides, 259, 261, 262, 263, 270, 274, 321 n.

Duyvendak, J. J. L., 297 n., 526n., 527 n. Eusebius, 399 n., 408 n.

Dvornik, F., 448 n., 489 n. Evans, A., 94n.

Evans, J. D., 100 n.

Fast Indies, 615, 656, 659, 660, 705 n., 706 n. Fyck, Jan van, 558 Eberhard, W., 23 n., 227 n., 234-n., 244n., 306n., Ezekiel, 163, 164

324n., 356 n., 389 n. Ezra, 164

Ecbatana, 133

Ecuador, 574 Fa-hsien, 365 n., 367

Edgerton, F., 370n. Fage, J. D., 480n., 724n. Edison, Thomas, 738 Fairbank, J. K., 718 n.

Edwards, E. D., 474n., 476 n. Falkenstein, A., 33n., 43n., 46n., 47n., 52n,, Egypt, Egyptians, 20, 24, 25, 26, 41, 51, 68, 69- 6l1n., 136n. 84, 85, 88, 89, 94, 97, 98, 100, 106, 110, 112, Fallmerayer, J. P., 442 n.

113, 114, 116, 118, 119-20, 122, 124, 126, 128, Faron, L., 604 n. 129, 130, 134, 135, 138-44, 146, 152, 158, 159, Farquhar, J. N., 709 n., 781 n. 160, 162, 166, 169, 190, 192, 212, 216n., 219, Fatima, 425 n., 431, 440 n. 223 n., 252, 255, 277, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, Fatimids, 440 286, 296, 302, 328, 337, 352, 353, 379, 381, 397, Favre, B., 705 n., 718 n. 398, 406, 409, 414n., 416, 417, 426, 440, 444, Fei Hsiao-tung, 782 n., 784n. 480, 490, 492, 493, 495 n., 497, 508, 614n., 621, Feng Chia-sheng, 469n., 479 n., 488n., 489 n.,

656, 695, 699, 773, 774n. 494 n. Filers, W., 54n. Ferdinand of Aragon, 579, 580 Einstein, Albert, 756, 757 Ferdinandy, M. de, 447 n.

El Greco, 524n. Ferghana, 316, 322 n. Elam, Elamites, 51, 66, 94, 146 n., 223 n. Fertile Crescent, 112, 113, 118, 146

Elbe, 251, 445, 545, 546 Fick, R., 174n., 176 n., 348 n. Eleusis, 206 Filaret, Patriarch, 610 Eliade, M., 381 n., 458 n. Filliozat, J., 88 n., 373 n., 380 n.

Elijah, 161 n. Finegan, J., 152 n., 158 n., 183 n.

Eliot, C., 88n., 179 n., 181 n., 188 n., 512 n. Finland, Gulf of, 671, 672

Emmanuel, I. S., 519 n. Finley, M. L., 193 n.

Empedocles, 216 Firdausi, 504

Engberg, R. M., 112 n. Fischel, W., 434 n.

Engelbach, R., 76n. Fisher, R. H., 610 n., 617 n., 658 n. England, English, 103 n., 176, 306n., 414, 444, Fleare, H. J., 102 n., 103 n. 451, 453 n., 540, 541, 542, 548, 556, 576, 580, Florence, 584, 607 581, 582, 590, 592, 602, 603, 604, 605, 610, 614, Florinsky, M. T., 611 n., 673 n.

615, 616, 657, 660, 667, 668, 674, 675, 678, 682, Forbes, R. J., 41 n., 103 n., 117 n.

685, 687, 689, 691, 692, 693, 703, 705, 707n., Ford, C. D., 102 n.

709, 711, 732, 734, 738, 777, 778 Ford, Henry, 738

English Channel, 451 Formosa, 641 n., 643 Engnell, L., 159 n. Forster, E. M., 461 n., 769 n.

Enlil, 40, 42 Foucher, A., 330n.

Ephesus, 401 n. Fox, George, 689 Ephthalites, 364, 365, 385, 386, 388, 389, 390, 391 Fox, G., 718 n.

Epirus, 259, 283, 314 France, French, 8, 100, 273, 454, 540, 541, 542,

Erasmus, 592 548, 552, 554n., 556, 573 n., 576, 580, 581, 582,

Index 815 590, 591, 592, 602, 603, 604, 610, 614, 615, 616, Ghana, 412, 480, 560

637 n., 654, 655, 657, 658, 659, 660, 667, 669, Ghirshman, R., 107n., 285 n., 320n., 349n., 670, 674, 675, 676, 678, 679, 685, 687, 689, 690, 357 n., 382n., 385 n., 388n., 390n., 391 n., 691, 693, 699, 703, 706n., 713, 721 n., 727, 733, 394n.

742, 744-51, 795, 800 Ghosh, J. C., 708 n., 781 n.

Francis of Assisi, St., 554 Ghuzz, 514n. Franco, M., 519 n. Gibb, E. J. W., 628n., 700 n.

Frank, T., 90n., 328 n. Gibb, H. A. R., 437 n., 441 n., 504n., 616n., Franke, H., 530n. 622 n., 623 n., 626 n., 633 n., 699n., 775 n. Franke, O., 220n., 307 n., 309n., 324n., 334n., Gibbon, Edward, 686, 759

383 n., 472 n., 476 n. Gibraltar, 22, 613

Frankfort, H., 38n., 40n., 42n., 52n., 78n., Gibson, C., 600 n.

137 n., 145 n., 148 n., 150 n. Giessen, 737 n.

Franklin, Benjamin, 668 Giles, H. A., 476 n., 534n. Franks, 329, 389, 390, 392, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, Glanville, S. R. K., 146n.

450, 456, 488 n., 512, 514, 546 Glasenapp, H. von, 349 n.

Fraser-Tytler, W. K., 701 n. Glasgow, 735, 736 Frederick II, the Great, 678 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 690 Frederick William, the Great Elector, 678 Glick, H., 629 n.

Free, J. P., 135 n. Goa, 574

Freud, Sigmund, 761 Gobi Desert, 488 Freyre, G., 667 n. Goblet d’Alviella, E. F. A., 348 n. Frisians, 445 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 689 Frye, R. N., 775 n. Goetz, H., 172 n., 629 n. Furer-Haimendorf, C. von, 102 n. Gortze, A., 112 n., 124n., 145 n.

Fukien, 527 n., 641 n. Gogh, Vincent van, 753 Fung Yu-lan, 309n. 310n., 311 n., 351n.,470n., | Goitein, S. D., 509 n.

534n., 704 645 n. n. Gomme, Goldziher, 441 n. Furber, A.I., W., 256n.

Good Hope, Cape of, 570 n., 650, 651, 725

Galen, 354, 355, 373, 438, 501, 594 Goodrich, L. C., 469n., 494n., 573 n., 711 n.,

Galilee. Galileans, 341, 342, 354 716 n.

Galileo, 593 n., 595, 598, 599, 756 Gordon, C. H., 145 n.

Gandhara, 330, 332, 334, 418 Gordon, D. H., 23 n., 86n., 171 n. Gandhi, Mohandas K., 177, 779 Goths, 387, 389, 392 Ganges, 171, 172, 174, 183, 249, 298, 299, 301n., Gouilly, A., 622 n., 774n.

347, 364, 477, 490 Granada, 501, 613 Gardafui, Cape, 233 n. Granicus, 277 n.

Garbe, R., 381 n. Granet, M., 306 n. Gardet, L., 436 n., 441 n., 502 n., 522 n. Grant, R. M., 381 n.

Gardiner, E. A., 270n. Great Britain (see also Britain; England), 668.

Gaudefroy-Demombynes, M., 441 n. 669, 682, 693, 728, 732-37

Gaudi, Antoni, 755 Great Lakes, 547 n., 657

Gauguin, Paul, 753 Greece, Greeks, 44, 62, 97, 98, 107 n., 116, 118, Gaul, 316, 321 n., 328, 329n., 388, 389, 390, 414, 122 n., 125, 128, 133, 134, 135, 146 n., 167, 169,

442, 443, 444, 445, 487 n., 661 171, 187, 188-217, 223, 232, 233, 237, 243, 244.

Gelb, I. J., 54n., 76n., 112 n., 146 n., 223 n. 254-94, 295, 310, 314, 315, 325, 328, 329, 330, Genoa, Genoese, 515, 530 n., 546, 584 332, 337, 348 n., 358 n., 369, 374, 392, 409, 426,

Galatia, 283 435, 442, 449, 453 n., 501, 512, 514n., 518, 521,

Genghis Khan, 252, 484, 488, 490, 491, 492, 493, 538, 544n., 578, 637, 656, 674, 689, 696-700,

520 n., 527, 622, 643 729, 775

George III of England, 682 Greenland, 242, 547 n.

Georgia, 668 Gregory the Great, Pope, 444, 456

Gepids, 442 Gregory Palamas, St., 522 Germany, Germans, 237, 315, 329, 386-92, 412, Gregory VII, Pope, 541 420, 443, 445, 449, 452, 454 n., 488 n., 540, 541, Grekov, B., 493 n., 520n. 542, 543, 545, 548, 556, 580, 584, 589, 590, 591, Grene, D., 265 n. 592, 605, 614, 678, 679, 685, 686, 687, 689, 691, Griffith, G. T., 287 n. 700, 732, 734, 735, 736n., 737, 739-44, 751, Griffiths, P., 781 n.

795, 796, 797, 799 n. Groseilliers, Médart C., 658

Gernet, J., 465 n., 466 n., 472 n. Grosse, R., 396 n.

816 Index

Grosseteste, Bishop Robert, 552 Hellenes (see Greece)

Grousset, R., 239n., 321 n., 336 n., 385 n., 390n., Helmholtz, Hermann L. F. von, 757

414n., 443 n., 488n., 493 n., 514n. Henry IV of France, 580, 581 n.

Grundy, G. B., 256n. Henry the Navigator, 565, 570 Gsell, S., 276 n., 296 n. Heraclitus, 212 Guatemala, 415, 482, 562 Heraclius, 397 n.

Guillaume, A., 441 n. Hermes, 270

Guinea, 379, 560 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 689 Guiscard, Robert, 541 n. Herodotus, 122n., 134n., 171n., 199n., 202, Gupta, A., 781 n. 237n., 244n., 256n., 258, 267, 268, 296n., Gurkhas, 702 322 n., 357, 521, 759 Gurney, O. R., 94n. Herrmann, A., 295 n.

Gutenberg, 531 n. Herzfeld, E., 103 n., 104n., 157 n.

Gutium, Gutians, 48, 50, 52 Herzegovina, 700 Hesiod, 58, 206, 211, 212 Habibulla, A. B. M., 510n. Heussi, K., 381 n.

Hadrovics, L., 697 n. Heyd, W., 546n. Hadrian, 396 n. Heyerdahl, T., 243 n., 482 n.

Hafiz, 504 Hideyoshi, 640, 646, 647, 648

Hagen, B. von, 359n. Hightower, J. R., 476n., 534n., 645 n., 718 n.

Hahn, E., 25 n. Hill, L. F., 667 n.

Haiti, 660 n. Himalayas, 171, 189, 361, 364, 457, 462, 490

Halicarnassus, 267 Hindu Kush, 243, 297, 320 n., 330, 363, 391, 456 Hall, D. G. E., 234n., 560n., 612n., 615n., Hindustan, 418, 437, 457, 490, 493, 524, 776

637 n., 706 n. Hipparchus, 292 Hamath, 126 Hiriyanna, M., 511 n. Hammurabi, 40n., 45 n., 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, Hitler, Adolf, 796

60, 61, 62, 110, 113, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129, 130, Hittites, 93, 94, 113, 114, 117, 118, 123-24, 126,

135, 136, 137 n., 228n. 190, 192, 223, 391 n.

Han, 168, 232, 234n., 304, 305, 308, 309, 310,311, Ho, Ping-ti, 468 n., 527 n., 529n., 643 n., 644 n., 318, 320, 323, 324, 325, 334, 351, 356, 357, 360, 714 n. 379, 382, 384, 393, 464, 469n., 472, 474, 524, Hobbes, Thomas, 683, 687

710, 807 Hodgson, M. G. S., 441 n., 490n., 511 n. Han Yu, 470n. Hodja Zada, 503 Hanéar, F., 104n., 105 n., 236n. Hoffman, H., 477 n. Hannibal, 314, 315 Hohenzollerns, 678

Hapsburgs, 274n., 580, 591, 612 n., 614, 621,676 Holdsworth, M., 702 n.

Harappa, 84, 85, 86 n., 88 Holland (see also Dutch), 580, 581, 590, 592,

Haremhab, 119, 142 593, 677, 679, 691, 705 n., 706 n.

Haring, C. H., 604 n., 666 n., 667 n. Hollister, J. N., 511 n., 623 n., 628 n.

Harran, 158, 438 n. Holm, D. C., 722 n.

Harsha, 386 Holy Roman Empire, 541 n. Hart, H. H., 570n. Homer, 58, 107 n., 171 n., 192, 203, 206, 210, 211, Hartmann, M., 773 n. 212, 213, 214, 215 n., 268, 270-n., 369, 410

Harvey, William, 594 Hong Kong, 717 Hasluck, F., 498 n. Horace, 294, 354 Haudricourt, A. G., 11 n. Hormuz, 526, 574 Haumont, E., 673 n. Horn, Cape, 764 Havell, E. B., 629 n. Hornell, J., 379 n.

Hawkes, C. F. C., 23 n., 97 n., 102 n., 103 n. Horus, 78, 79, 80 n.

Haydn, Franz Joseph, 690 Hosea, 161 Hayes, W.C., 80n., 82 n. Hottentots, 651 Haywood, R. M., 328 n. Hourani, A., 696 n.

Hebrews, 114, 125, 126, 145 n., 157-66 Hourani, G. F., 457 n.

Hecataeus, 211 Howell, F. C., 3 n., 5 n. Hedin, L., 11 n. Howells, W. W., 5 n. Hegel, Georg W. F., 759 Hsia dynasty, 219

Heichelheim, F. M., 125 n. Hsio Yen Shih, 296 n. Heine-Geldern, R., 102 n., 238n., 239n., 240n., Hsiung-nu, 192 n., 309, 310, 317, 318, 319, 320,

243 n. 321, 323 n., 324, 329, 336n.

Heliopolis, 78, 139 n. Hsuan-tsang, 473 n.

Index 817

) Hsuan Tsung, Emperor, 463 480, 481, 525, 526, 527 n., 529, 531, 559, 571 n.,

Hu Shih, 785, 786 n. 574, 576, 611, 613, 614, 616, 646, 660, 724, 764 ° Huart, C., 66n. Indians (see Amerindians) Hubbard, G. E., 786 n. Indies (see also East Indies; West Indies), 526

717 n. 774n.

Hubert, H., 237 n., 316 n. Indochina, 251, 378, 379, 477, 527 n.

Hudson, G. F., 244n., 297n., 419n., 569n., Indonesia, 234n., 250, 361, 377, 378, 412, 773,

Hudson's Bay, 656, 658 Indra, 88

Hughes, C., 25 n. Indus, 23, 28, 66, 68, 84-89, 97 n., 102, 108, 134, Hughes, E. R., 786 n. 167, 169, 172, 174, 178, 223 n., 249, 252, 298,

Hulbert, H. B., 478 n. 299, 304-n., 391 n., 416, 418 n., 456 n., 458, 477, Humavun, 622 510n., 701 Hume, David, 686 Ingholt, H., 330n.

Hummel, A. W., 642 n. Innocent III, Pope, 179 n., 502 n., 547, 554 Humphreys, R. A., 666 n. Ionia, Ionians, 116, 150, 193, 194n., 200, 213, Hungary (see also Magyars), 237, 388, 390, 442, 214, 215

445, 447, 492 n., 514n., 540, 541, 543, 545, 612. Ipek, 638 n.

662, 663, 676, 693, 696, 722, 733, 750 Iqbal, Mohammed, 774 n.

Hunger, J., 122 n. Iran, 23, 107, 108, 113, 114, 168, 171 n., 236, 237,

Huns, 236 n., 317, 388, 390, 392 277, 280, 282, 319-23, 337, 350, 361-63, 377, Huntingford, G. W.B., 379 n. 379, 381, 386, 387, 393, 394n., 396, 398-401,

Hurrians, 94, 111, 112 4177, 426, 432, 437, 451, 453, 477, 486, 489, 493, Husain, 428 n., 440 n. 495 n., 497, 501, 503 n., 612, 656, 700—702, 703,

Hutton, J. H., 175 n., 180 n. 774 n.

Hyde, W. W., 296 n. Iranian plateau, 64, 104, 129, 154n., 538, 619 Hyderabad, 702 Iraq, 48 n., 426, 428, 429, 430, 432, 437, 444, 490, Hyksos, 82, 89n., 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 119, 492, 497, 503 n., 508, 554n., 619, 621, 623, 694,

124, 138, 190, 285 n. 699 n.

Hypatia, 342 n, Ireland, 25 n., 240 n., 316, 362, 363, 414, 444, 456, 664 Iakoubovski, A., 493 n., 520n. Irnerius, 552 Iberia, [berians, 546, 613, 614, 622, 657 Isabella of Castile, 579 Ibn Batuta, 496 n., 504 Isaiah, 147, 161, 163, 164, 166

Ibn Khaldun, 495 n., 504 Isfahan, 629

Ibn Rushd, 501, 502, 503, 509, 550 Ishii, R., 719 n. Ibn Sa’ud, Abd al-Aziz, 696 n., 775 Isin, 51, 52 n.

Ibn Sina, 501, 503 Isis, 80n., 293 n., 353

Iceland, 240 n., 547 n. Islam (see also Moslems), 250, 418, 419, 420—41,

Ieyasu, 646, 647 442, 457, 461, 476, 485, 486, 487, 488, 490, 493, Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 592, 599 495-524, 530n., 531 n., 535, 545, 547, 550, 559, Ikhnaton, 119, 139, 140, 142, 144 561, 577, 611-33, 634, 635, 636, 637, 650, 651,

Ili River, 320 n., 618 n., 650 694, 701-5, 713 n., 772, 774

Incas, 414n., 561-62, 572, 574, 600, 605, 665n. Ismail, Shah, 613, 619, 621, 623, 626, 700 India, Indians, 4, 5n., 20, 23, 27, 51, 64, 68, 84, Isocrates, 269 88, 100, 102, 107, 108, 116, 134, 135, 167, 168, Israel, Israelites (see also Jews), 125, 126, 130, 169, 170-88, 189, 194, 214n., 215 n., 216, 217, 152, 159n., 160, 161, 162, 163, 166 232, 234, 243, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 266n., Italy, Italians, 44, 215, 216, 249, 251, 259, 263, 280, 282, 283, 294, 296, 297, 298-304, 306n., 273, 275, 276, 313, 314, 328, 329, 387, 388, 389, 310, 313, 316 n., 319, 320, 321, 323, 332, 334n.,, 390, 444, 445, 446, 469, 514n., 515, 516, 519, 336, 337, 338, 344, 345, 347, 348, 349, 353, 356, 524, 540, 541 n., 542, 543, 544, 546, 547, 548, 357, 358, 361-382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 389, 391, 552, 555, 558, 570, 578, 580, 584, 590, 591, 592, 400, 405, 418, 419, 434, 456-62, 463, 470, 473 n., 593, 604, 616 n., 686, 700 476, 477, 479, 484, 485, 490, 492, 493, 494, Ivan III of Moscow, 520, 521 n., 606, 617 496 n., 501, 503, 506, 509-12, 526, 536, 560, Ivan IV, the Terrible, 606, 608, 610, 671 566, 570 n., 572, 573, 574, 577, 598, 603 n., 611,

612, 615, 622, 623, 628, 629, 632, 633, 652, 653, Jackson, Andrew, 800 656, 659 n., 676, 693, 695, 700, 701, 702-4, 705, Jacobsen, T., 26n., 30n., 33 n., 38n., 40n., 42 n.,

706-9, 7li1n., 713 n., 726, 727, 730, 762, 773, 43n., 45n., 48n., 52n., 54n., 60n., 359n.,

775, 776-81, 785, 795 394 n., 497 n.

Indian Ocean, 102, 134n., 174, 296, 379n., 457, Jahangir, 622

§18 Index

Jains, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186 Kairawan, 429

James, St., 342 Kalidasa, 370 n., 371, 376

Janina, 699 n. Kalmuks, 192 n., 245, 618 n., 650, 710, 722, 724 n. Japan, Japanese, 134n., 188, 250, 251, 309, 313, Kamchatka, 658 314, 361, 362, 363, 384, 418, 472, 476, 478, 479, _K’ang Hsi, 710 484, 492, 525, 535, 536, 537, 558, 559, 566, 569, Kanishka, 347, 349n. 574, 582, 610, 612 n., 615, 640, 643, 645-49, 652, Kano, 612 653, 705, 718—22, 726, 727, 735, 752, 762, 782, Kansu, 223, 320n., 773 n.

783, 785, 786-92, 796, 797 Kant, Immanuel, 686, 687, 761

Jason, 286 n. Kantor, H. J., 68n., 190n.

Jassy, 697 Kao-tsu, 308, 309 Java, 485, 492, 525, 559, 576, 612, 615, 661, 705n., Kapelrud, G. A. S., 145 n. 706 n., 711 n. Karadjich, Vuk, 700

391 Karun River, 66

Jaxartes, 66, 68, 107, 223 n., 285 n., 295, 313, 317, Karakorum, 529

Jayne, K. G., 570n. Kashmir, 419, 457, 463 Jefferson, Thomas, 800 Kassites, 51, 94, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 123, Jeremiah, 147, 161 n. 133, 135, 136, 190

Jericho, 66 Katsh, A. I, 509 n.

Jerusalem, 159n., 160n., 162, 163, 164, 165, Kautilya, 302 n.

286 n., 341, 342, 343, 353, 421, 607 Kay, John, 692

Jesus (see also Christ), 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, Kaye, G. R., 374n.

401 n., 402, 421 Kazakhstan, Kazakhs, 23, 320n., 724n.

Jettmar, K., 8n., 18n., 23n., 104n,, 105n., Kazan, 608, 617 107 n., 223n,, 236n., 237n,, 238n., 239n., Keay, F. E., 635 n.

244 n. Keene, D., 721 n.

Jews (see also Israelites), 128, 163, 164, 165, 166, Kees, H., 71 n. 337, 340, 341, 342, 343, 353, 401, 420, 421, 422, Keith, A. B., 181 n., 302 n., 349n., 367 n., 370 n., 424, 430, 508 n., 509, 510, 519, 545 n., 639-40, 371n., 373 n., 374n., 376n.

775 Keizo, S., 792 n.

Jezzar, Ahmed, 699 n. Kelvin, Lord, 735 Jindal, K. B., 635 n. Kemal, Mustafa, 775

Jintaro, F., 792 n. Kendrick, T. D., 316 n.

John of Damascus, 512 n. Kennedy, M. T., 635 n.

Johnson, Samuel, 685, 688 Kent, 444

Johore, 615 n. Kenyon, K. M., 66n. Jonas, H., 381 n. Kepler, Johannes, 593

Jones, A. H. M., 260n., 289 n., 390 n., 561 n. Kerner, R. J., 617 n.

Jones, F. C., 792 n. Khalid ibn al-Walid, 417 Jones, W. H.S., 359 n. Khayyam, Omar, 504

Jordan, 66n. Khmers, 782 n.559 Jorga, N., 697

Jones, William, 707 Khazars, 420, 443, 447, 448, 477, 479, 650n.,

Joseph II of Austria, 690 Khurasan, 486 n., 487 n. Joshua, 160 Kiakhta, 641, 710 n. Josiah, 162, 163 Kiev, 512, 514, 520, 608

Joule, James, 756 Kingsnorth, G. W., 481 n., 725 n. Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 751 n. Kipchak Turks, 514 Juan-juan, 386, 388 n., 390 Kirchner, H.,,102 n. Judah, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166 Kirsch, J. P., 344 n.

Judea, 283, 353 Kirfel, W., 23 n. Julian the Apostate, 398 Kirk, G. E., 775 n. Junker, H., 78 n. Kish, 42, 43, 46 Jurchens, 489 n., 525 Kisselev, S. V., 107 n.

Justinian, 362, 389, 390, 393, 396, 397, 400, 408n., Kitai, 463, 478, 479 n., 489 n.

410, 450, 512, 552 Klima, O., 404 n. Knossos, 94, 97, 98, 190 n., 192, 272 Kaaba, 421, 422 Kluchevsky, V. O., $21 n.

Kabir, 511, 512 Kobad, 403, 404 Kabul, 463 Kolyma River, 658

Index 819 Kondakov, N. P., 398 n., 524n. Levy, G. R., 8n., 19 n.

Konow, S., 320 n. Levy, P., 349 n.

Koprulu, Mohammed, 612 Levy, R., 428 n., 486 n.

Korais, Adamantios, 700 Lewis, A. R., 397 n., 444n., 445 n., 447 n., 448 n., Korea, 251, 309, 313, 324, 330, 361, 384, 418, 463, 454n. 472, 476, 478, 479, 535, 640, 710, 781, 788 Lewis, B., 440 n., 441 n., 496 n., 698 n.

Kosala, 172 Lhasa, 650 Kossovo, 518, 639 Li Chi, 107 n., 219 n.

Koxinga, 641, 642 n., 643 Li Chien-nung, 786 n. Kracke, E. A., 465 n., 529 n. Li Po, 474 Kramer, S. N., 38n., 61 n. Li Shu-hua, 525 n. Kraus, F. R., 34n., 46n., 51 n., 52 n. Libyans, 69

Krickeberg, W., 243 n., 416n., 483 n., 562 n. Liebig, Justus von, 737 n.

Krishna, 370 n., 634, 635 Lima, 604 Krumbacher, K., 521 n. Lincoln, 552

Krishna, B., 616 n. Limpopo River, 651

Kuban Valley, 103 Linnaeus, 686 Kublai Khan, 493 n., 529, 530n., 534n., 535n. Lisbon, 85, 572

Kuchuk Kainard}j1, 696 Lithuania, 519 n., 521, 545, 607, 617

Kufa, 429 Liu, E. F., 786 n.

Kurdistan, Kurds, 699 n. Livonia, 546 Kushans, 294, 299, 316, 319, 320, 321, 323, 332, Livy, 354

336, 347, 363, 382, 391, 401 Lloyd, C., 658 n.

Kyushu, 648 Lo Jung-pang, 525 n., 526n., 527 n. Locke, John, 668, 686, 687

Lach, D. F., 718 n. Lockhart, L., 626 n., 701 n., 702 n. Lagash, 33, 43, 44, 52n. Lockwood, W. W., 792 n.

Landau, R., 775 n. Lods, A., 166 n.

Landes, D. S., 775 n. Lochr, M., 219 n.

Landsberger, B., 45 n. Lombards, 390, 442, 445, 446

Langdon, S. H., 60n. London, 85, 572, 667, 683, 685, 702, 732, 735,

Laplace, Pierre Simon, 686 776 Nn.

La Plata River, 662 Lope de Vega, 592

Laqueur, W. Z., 775 n. Lopez, R. S., 419 n., 445 n. Larsa, 51 Loukaris, Patriarch Cyril, 639 La Salle, Sieur de, 658 Louis VIII of France, 541

Latium, 90 n., 275 n. Louis XIII, 581 Latourette, K. S., 344 n., 645 n., 717 n., 786 n. Louis XIV, 637 n., 655, 674, 675, 682 Lattimore, O., 318n. Louis XVI, 693

Laufer, B., 320 n., 323 n. Low Countries (see also Holland), 556, 580,

La Vallée Poussin, L., 320n., 321 n. 584, 614 Laviosa-Zambotti, P., 19 n. Loyang, 223, 229, 464, 469

Lavoisier, Antoine, 686 Lubac, H. de, 381 n.

Leakey, L. S. B., 4n. Lucas, D. W., 261 n. Le Coq, A. von, 382 n. Lucretius, 354

Leemans, W. F., 46n., 56n. Lugalzaggisi, 45, 53 Leeward Islands, 660 Luther, Martin, 589, 590, 592, 599, 689 LeFevre de Noéttes, R., 105 n. Luxeuil, 444

Legge, J. H., 365 n. Luzon, 612 n.

Leibniz, Gottfried W., 666, 683 Lybyer, A. H., 501 n., 626n.

Lenin, Vladimir I., 801 Lycurgus, 199, 200

Lensen, G. A., 722 n. Lydia, Lydians, 130n., 133, 202

Lenzen, H. J., 38n. Lyon, B., 445 n. Leo the Great, Pope, 408

Leo III, the Isaurian, 398 n., 441 n., 446 Mabillon, Jean, 686

Lepanto, 614 Macao, 574, 640, 642 n., 647 n., 711 n.

Leser, P., 25 n. MacArthur, Douglas, 791

Leur, J. C. van, 560n., 616n. Macartney, C. A., 447 n.

Levant, 97, 144, 190, 192, 251, 277, 441, 445, 451, Maccabees, 283, 286 n., 340

490 n., 491, 508, 509, 518, 546, 616, 653 MacCulloch, J. A., 316n.

Levi, S., 348 n. Macedonia, 116, 243 n., 259, 270, 272, 273, 274,

820 Index 275, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 294, 377, 524,700n. Maspero, H., 220n., 228 n., 306n., 307 n.

Macedonian dynasty, 450, 451, 453, 521, 538 Massachusetts, 604, 669 McGovern, W., 237 n., 238 n., 317 n., 232 n. Massagetae, 322 n.

Machiavelli, 304 n., 555 Masson, P., 614n., 616 n.

Mackenzie, Alexander, 659 Masson-Oursel, P., 172 n., 349 n.

McKeon, R., 302 n. Matabele, 725

McNeill, W. H., 664 n., 797 n. Maurice, emperor of Byzantium, 397 Madagascar, 234n., 379n., 412 Maurvas, 299, 302, 304, 364, 365

Madeira Islands, 660 Maverick, L. A., 718 n.

Madras, 703, 777 n. Mavor, J., 611 n. Madrid, 604 Maxim the Greek, 607

Magadha, 172, 299, 304 Maxwell, James Clerk, 756

Magellan, 565 Maya, Mayans, 415, 416, 482, 483, 561-62 Magyars (see also Hungary), 447, 448, 449, Mayapan, 561

452, 454, 514n. Mayer, L. A., 629 n.

Mahavira, 183, 185, 188 Mazdak, 394, 404, 405

Mahmud of Ghazni, 490, 501, 510 Means, P. A., 604 n.

Maimonides, 509, 550 Mecca, 420, 421, 422, 424, 496, 560, 621, 707 n.

Maitreya, 348 Medes, 114, 148, 154, 156, 237

Majapahit, 559 Medina, 421, 422, 424, 426, 429, 430, 431, 434,

Majumdar, R. C., 88n., 134n., 170n., 171 n., 435, 496, 621 172n., 174n., 175n., 180n., 182n., 364n., Mediterranean, 5, 12, 12 n., 20, 22, 91, 94, 96, 97, 367 n., 372n., 373 n., 379n., 628n., 704n., 98, 100, 102, 127, 133, 135, 147, 178, 192 n., 201,

709 n., 781 n. 210, 232, 233, 243, 250, 253, 254, 256, 257, 275, Malabar coast, 177 276, 282, 287, 295, 296, 304, 313, 315, 316, 324, Malacca, 526, 560, 574, 576, 612 n., 615 n. 325, 330, 332, 334, 337, 348, 351, 354, 358, 361,

Malagasy, 412 363, 368n., 377, 379, 380, 386, 389n., 392, Malaya, 296, 377, 706 397 n., 399, 408, 414, 419, 441, 442, 444, 447, Maldive Islands, 496 n. 449, 450, 451, 452, 497, 530n., 540 n., 546, 547,

Mali, 560 570, 613, 614, 616, 656, 696, 697, 764 Malik Shah, 504 n. Medlin, W. K., 521 n.

Malta, 98 Megara, 200 n.

699 Mehemet Ali, 699

Marmelukes, 490, 491, 492, 493, 495 n., 497, 621, © Megasthenes, 176 n.

Manchester, 679, 735 Meij1, Emperor, 790

Manchuria, Manchus, 206, 317, 386, 477, 488n., Meissner, B., 42 n., 53 n., 122 n., 123 n., 127 n. 489 n., 535, 559, 577, 612 n., 640, 641, 642, 643, Meissner, M., 716n. 645 n., 710, 714, 716, 717, 781, 782, 783, 784, Mekong River, 476, 559

788 Melanesia, 481

Manetho, 353 Memphis, 78, 79, 134, 216 n. Mani, 394, 402, 403, 405 Menander, 348

Mantinea, 260 Menasce, P. J.311 de, 404 n. Manzikert, 490 Mencius,

Mao Tse-tung, 232 n., 784n. Menes, 69, 71 n., 81 n. Maoris, 768 Mercklin, E. von, 190n. Marathas, 701, 702, 703, 704, 706 Mesolithic, 8, 10, 12, 15 n., 19

Marcais, G., 437 n., 506n. Mesopotamia, 26, 29-34, 36, 38, 40-53, 56, 58, Marco Polo, 466, 494 n., 527, 530 60-64, 66, 71, 72, 74, 76, 81, 82, 84-86, 88, 93, Marcus Aurelius, 378 n. 94, 97, 98, 102, 104-6, 108, 110-13, 117, 118,

Marczali, H., 664 n. 120, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133-35, 144, 146n., Marduk, 40n., 52, 58, 60, 61, 128, 136, 137, 152, 154, 156, 162 n., 166, 169, 219, 234, 252,

148 n., 293, 353, 401 254, 258, 282, 284, 318, 320, 321, 324, 337, 344, Marmora, Sea of, 441 n. 410, 416, 417, 426, 438 n., 440, 441, 458 n., 480,

Mark Twain, 755 n. 350, 353, 381, 387, 394n., 398, 399, 401, 403,

Marquard, L., 725 n. 483 n., 497, 509, 656

Marsh, Z., 481 n., 725 n. Métaux, A., 600 n. Martin, H. D., 492 n. Methodius, St., 448, 514 n.

Marx, Karl, 311 n., 759, 801 Mexico, 239, 240, 243, 252, 414, 415, 482, 483, Mary, the Virgin, 401 n., 446 561, 565, 600, 601, 604, 659, 666, 667, 793

Masaccio, 555 Mexico City, 604, 667

Mason, J. A., 483 n., 562 n. Meyendorff, J., 522 n.

Index 821 Meyer, E., 154n., 166n. Montaigne, Michel de, 592 Meyerovitch, E., 381 n. Monteil, V., 775 n. Michael, F. H., 535 n., 786 n. Montesquieu, 676 Michael I of Russia, 606, 610 Montreal, 659 Michelson, Albert A., 757 Mookerji, R., 297 n.

Micronesia, 481 Moortgat, A., 40n., 43 n., 47 n., 52 n. Middle East, 5n., 11-24, 26, 28, 29, 64, 66, 68, Moravia, 449, 514n. 82, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 100, 103, 105, 106, 107, Moreland, W. H., 571 n., 616 n., 628 n. 110-64, 167, 168, 169, 171, 174n., 176n., 177, Morison, S. E., 242 n. 178, 183, 189, 192n., 194, 201, 202, 218, 219, Morley, Edward W., 757

223, 236, 237, 238, 239, 245, 249, 250, 252, 253, Morley, S. G., 416 n. 254, 255, 282, 286, 295, 299, 306n., 320, 336, Morocco, 496 n., 560, 612, 621, 622, 651, 773 353, 354, 358, 359, 390, 391 n., 417-83, 485, Morse, H. B., 718 n. 487, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 497, 505, 508, 529, Moscati, S., 45 n. 536, 538, 566, 573, 599, 612 n., 616, 653, 656, Moscow, 520, 521, 605, 606, 608, 610, 611, 617,

730, 761, 764, 795 670, 671

Mieli, A., 438n., 501 n. Moses, 158, 159, 160, 165

Milan, 408 n. Moslems, 250, 251, 390, 405, 420-41, 442, 443, Miletus, 200, 201, 212, 215 445, 446, 449, 450, 456, 460, 461, 463, 477, 479, Muilinda, 348 n. 488, 490, 498-524, 531 n., 538, 543, 546, 548, Mills, L. A., 706 n. 559, 565, 569, 577, 611-40, 650, 652, 653, 654,

Milton, John, 592, 687 660, 693-705, 706, 713 n., 730, 762, 772-75, 776

Milvian Bridge, 399 n. Mosley, P. E., 442 n.

Mindanao, 560, 612 n. Moss, H. St. L. B., 521 n., 522 n. Ming dynasty, 464, 489, 525, 526-34, 535, 640, Motten, C. G., 666 n.

641, 642, 643 Moulton, J. H., 88n., 152n., 154n., 157 n.

Ming-ti, 334n. Movius, H. L., Jr., 6n. Minns, E. H., 323 n. Mozambique, 724

391 n. Muawiya, 428 Minussinsk, 412 Miller, E. M., 348 n.

Minos, Minoans, 94, 96, 97, 134, 167, 189, 192, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 690

Mississippi River, 658 Mulder, W. Z., 525 n. Mitanni, 106, 112, 113, 123, 124, 145, 190 Munda, 337

Mithra, 156, 339, 348, 350 Munich, 737 n.

Mithridates II, 320 Murasaki, Lady, 479

Mitsubishi, 789 Murdock, G. P., 234n., 379n., 412 n., 480n.,

Mitsui, 789 481n., 561 n., 612 n., 651 n. Mode, H., 23 n., 85 n., 97 n. Murray, M. A., 458 n.

Moguls, 252, 577, 611, 615, 622, 623, 626, 628, Muscovy, Muscovites (see also Russia), 520,

632, 633, 693, 695, 701, 702—4, 706 524, 582, 604-11, 613, 617

Mohammed, 89n., 155n., 250, 252, 265, 419, Mutasim, 440, 486 n. 420-41, 454n., 462, 472 n., 498, 506, 511, 618 Mycenae, Mycenaeans, 107 n., 118, 134, 170,

694, 695, 696 n., 807 189, 190, 193, 194n., 206, 210, 215, 391n,,

Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, 694, 696 n. 454 n. Mohammed of Ghur, 510

632 Nadir Shah, 700-701

Mohammed II the Conqueror, 499, 503, 519, Nabonidus, 138

Mohenjo-daro, 84, 85, 86, 88 Nagarjuna, 349 n.

Moldavia, 612 n., 637 Nagasena, 348 n. Moliére, 689 Nan Chao, 530n. Mols, R., 573 n., 574n. Nanak, 512

Moluccas, Mombasa, 574 614 Nanking, n. Nantes,646, 655717

Mongolia, Mongols, 85 n., 105 n., 238, 244, 245, | Napoleon, 746, 747, 748, 749, 750 317, 318, 319, 320n., 321, 324, 385 n., 386, 420, Nara, 479, 535

442, 462, 484-94, 495, 497, 508, 512, 514n., Narain, A. K., 283 n. 519, 520, 525, 527, 529, 530, 531n., 534, 535, Naram Sin, 48, 50, 53, 105 n. 556 n., 640, 641, 643, 649, 650, 652, 694, 710, Narbada River, 85

724n. Narr, C. J., 14n.

Monomatapa, 651 Nasi, Joseph, 639

Monroe, E., 561 n. Nathan the Prophet, 125, 161 n.

822 Index

Naucratis, 134 Olmstead, A. T., 48n., 122n., 127 n., 128n.,,

Navarino, 699 130n., 134n., 157 n., 166 n. Nazareth, 340, 342 Olschki, L., 508 n. Nebuchadnezzar, 148, 150 n., 162, 401 Olympia, 208, 270

Needham, J., 227 n., 310 n., 311 n., 355 n., 356n., Olympus, Mount, 206, 211, 215 n.

358 n. O'Malley, L. S. S., 781 n.

Negroes, 174 n., 560, 601, 603, 622, 667, 724, 738 Oman, 724

Nehemiah, 164 Oman, C., 494 n. Nepal, 702 641 Oppenheim, A. L., 33 n. Nerchinsk, Origen, 380, 406 Nestorius, 401 n. Orinoco, 600 Neugebauer, O., 20n., 62n., 293 n., 374n. Orozco, Jose, 793 n. New Delhi, 777 n. Orpheus, 152

Nelson, M. F., 478 n., 535 n. Omar, 426, 428, 429, 430, 431, 488, 618

738 Osiris, 78, 79, 80n., 293

New England, 603, 604, 660, 661, 662, 668, 669, Orwin, C. S. and C. S., 453 n.

New Guinea, 765 Ostrogorsky, G., 515 n. New Hampshire, 668 Ostrogoths, 388, 392, 446 New Mexico, 601 Othman, 428, 430, 618 New Spain, 662, 667 n. Otto the Great, 449

New Zealand, 663, 731 Ottomans (see also Turks; Turkey), 252, 493,

Newcomen, Thomas, 692, 732 494, 499, 518, 519, 522, 524, 546, 547, 566, 591,

Newfoundland, 660 612-16, 617, 618, 619-26, 628, 632, 637, 638, Newton, Isaac, 593, 598, 666, 684, 685, 686, 756 639, 663, 672, 674, 693, 694, 695-700, 701, 702,

Nicaea, 292, 408, 499 727, 751, 773

Nicholson, R. A., 437 n., 503 n. Ou Itai, 714n.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 761 Owen, Robert, 732, 734n.

Niger, 724 Oxus, 66, 68, 107, 114, 223 n., 285 n., 295, 313, Nikam, N. A., 302 n. 388 n., 390, 391, 428, 462

Nikon, Patriarch, 607, 608, 645 n. Nile, 28, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 82, 85, 89n., 96, Pachomius, St., 409 102, 114, 120, 124, 134n., 138, 296, 451, 724 Pacific, 11, 100, 102, 108, 109, 134n., 234, 239,

Nilsson, M. P., 97 n., 193 n. 240, 242, 243 n., 415, 419, 480, 481, 482, 565, Nineveh, 114, 133, 152, 210 574, 617, 657, 658, 659, 724

Nippur, Padua, 593 Nish, 408 42 n. Page, D. L., 193 n.

Nitobe, I., 792 n. Pakistan, 285, 773, 775, 780

Nobile, Roberto de, 713 Palestine, 5 n., 110, 113, 114, 119, 124, 125, 135,

Nobunaga, 647 146n., 147, 158, 159, 164, 192 n., 283, 286 n., Nolde, B., 664 n. 338, 340, 341, 342, 343, 397, 417, 421 n., 426,

Nootka, 659 441

Norfolk, 679 Pallottino, M., 233 n. Norman, E. H., 722 n., 792 n. Palmer, R. R., 654 n. Normandy, Normans, 112n., 514, 541n., 546, Palmyra, 380 n. 547 n. Pan Ku, 296 n., 324 n., 357 North America, 8, 238, 547 n., 566, 578, 601-4, Panama, 764 652, 656, 657, 660, 662, 664, 667, 668, 669, Panikkar, K. M., 781 n.

728, 730, 734, 744 Panini, 299, 300, 356, 373

North Sea, 451, 543 Panipat, 701, 703

Northumbria, 444 Paracelsus, Papinian, 355 Norway, 541, 545 594 Novgorod, 605 Paraguay, 600, 667 n. Nubia, Nubians, 71, 74, 102, 113, 124, 233, 419, Pareto, Vilfredo, 761

441, 560, 561, 650 Pargiter, F.E., 171 n., 178 n., 180 n.

Nyberg, H.S., 157 n., 354n., 394 n. Paris (France), 85, 502n., 548, 667, 685, 702, 753, 762

Ob River, 617 Paris (of Troy), 107 n. Obradovich, Dositej, 700 Parke, H. W., 273 n., 277 n. Oceania, 242, 578, 659, 724, 731 Parmenides, 263 n.

Okhotsk, 617, 658 Parrot, A., 32 n., 38n., 45 n. Old Oligarch, 204 n. Parry, J. H., 659 n.

Index 823 | Parthia, Parthians, 152 n., 283, 285, 286, 294, 316, | Phoenicia, Phoenicians, 122n., 126, 127, 133, 319, 320, 321, 322 n., 323, 329, 336, 337, 349, 134, 233, 276, 656

350, 386, 393, 394, 451, 487 n., 515 n. Phrygians, 114, 117

Pasargadae, 133 Picasso, Pablo, 754 Pascal, Blaise, 592, 685 Pico della Mirandola, 555 Pataliputra, 302 Pierce, R. A., 775 n.

Patrick, St., 414 Piggott, S. W., 23 n., 27 n., 84n., 88 n. Paul, St., 342, 343, 344, 444 Pingree, D., 374n. Pausanius, 256 n. Pinot, V., 718 n. Pavlovsky, M. N., 641 n., 710n. Piraeus, 256

Peake, C. H., 645 n. Pirenne, H., 445 n.

Peake, H., 102 n., 103 n. Pittioni, M. R., 23 n. Pearl, R., 574 n. Pizarro, Francisco, 562, 569, 572, 574

Pechenegs, 447, 489 n., 514n. Planck, Max, 757, 758 Peet, T. E., 81 n. Plassey, 703 Peisistratus, 201, 206 Plataea, 116, 256 n., 258 n.

711, 712 267, 290

Peking, 3, 4, 520, 527 n., 529, 640, 641, 644, 710n., Plato, 182 n., 216, 231, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266,

Pelops, 190 Plotinus, 380 Pendlebury, J. D.S., 94 n. Plutarch, 80 n., 321 n., 354 Peloponnesus, 193, 194 n., 258, 260, 494, 696 Platonov, S., 611 n.

Pennsylvania, 738 Podolia, Po River,612 315 Penrose, R., 570n. n.

Pepin of Heristal, 443, 445 Pokotilov, D., 527 n., 535 n.

Pepin the Short, 445, 446 Poland, Polish, 492 n., 5319 n., 521, 540, 541, 543,

Percy, Bishop, 689 545, 582, 590 605, 607, 608, 611, 612 n., 617, Pergamum, 283, 288, 289 670, 674, 675, 676, 677, 678 Pericles, 258 n., 262 n., 288 Poliak, A. N., 490 n.

Perry, Commodore Matthew, 787 Polovtsi, 514 n.

Persepolis, 133, 150, 210, 296 n., 302, 400 Polybius, 283 n.

Persia, Persians, 52, 113, 114, 116, 122, 127-28, Polynai, K., 33 n., 58n. 133, 135, 150-57, 182n., 194n., 202, 208n., Polynesia, Polynesians, 234, 242, 243 n., 359n., 237, 243, 249, 255, 256, 258, 259, 275, 277, 280, 481, 482 281, 296n., 302, 363, 380n., 386 388n., 391, Pombal, Marquis de, 667 392, 393, 396, 397, 399-405, 410, 419n., 426, Pompey, 417 430, 468, 492, 493, 504, 508, 576n., 612, 618, Pondicherry, 332 n., 703 621, 623, 628, 632, 663, 672, 695, 701, 773,775 Pontus, 283 Persian Gulf, 31, 43 n., 66, 68, 129, 296, 380n., Pope, Alexander, 689

444 526, 574 Pope, A. U., 400 n., 506 n., 629 n.

Peru, 239, 240, 243, 252, 363, 414, 415, 416, 483, Porto Bello, 666

561, 562, 565, 572, 600, 604, 665 n., 666 Portugal, Portuguese, 526, 543, 565, 570, 571,

Petech, L., 718 n. 574, 576, 592, 603, 612, 613, 614, 615 n., 639, Peter, St., 341, 408 640, 642 n., 647, 648, 650, 651, 658, 662, 665,

755 Powell, T. G. E., 316 n.

Peter the Great, 582, 670-72, 673, 674, 678n., 667, 676, 711 n., 724, 787

Peter II of Russia, 672 Prajapati, 179 Petrarch, 514n. Praxiteles, 270 Pettazzoni, R., 206 n. Prester, John, 613

Pharoahs, 72, 74, 78, 79, 89 n., 119-20, 124, 138, Priestley, Joseph, 686

140 n., 142, 160, 192 n. Priestly, H. I, 604 n. Phaulcon, 637Pritchard, n. Priscus, Phidias, 270 E.,392 718 n.

Philby, H. St. J. B., 695 n. Pritchard, J. B., 60n., 138n., 144n., 145 n. Philip I of Spain, 580 Procopius, 396 n. Philip Augustus of France, 541 Protagoras, 263 Philip of Macedon, 272, 273, 274, 275, 281 Proust, Marcel, 755 Philip the Good of Burgundy, 558 Provence, 556n. Philippines, 250, 560, 574, 615, 644 Prussia, Prussians, 546, 675, 677, 678, 682, 739, Philistines, 114, 125, 159, 192 n. 740, 742, 744n., 746, 797

Phillips, D., 236 n. Pruth, Philo,E.341 Ptah, 78,699 79n.

. 824 Index Prolemies, 129, 281, 282, 283, 285, 293, 302 Riesenfeld, A., 102 n. Prolemy the astronomer, 354, 355, 438, 501 Rio del Oro, 233 n.

Ptolemy II Euergetes, 296 Rivera, Diego, 793 n.

Pueblos, 601 Robin, L., 262 n. Puech, H. C., 402 n. Rockefeller, John D., 739

Puerto Rico, 660 n. Rockhill, W. W., 508 n., 526 n. Pufendorf, Samuel, 689 Rocky Mountains, 659 Pugachev, Emilian, 676 Rodin, Auguste, 755

Pulleyblank, E. G., 463 n., 465 n., 466 n. Roebuck, C., 194 n.

Punjab, 174, 299, 485, 490, 492, 633, 702, 777 Roemer, H. R., 626n. Punt, 74 Romanovs, 606, 610, 670 Pushkin, Alexander, 755 Rome, Romans, 84, 122, 126, 250, 255, 259, 275,

Pyrenees, 104 n., 428, 445, 654, 665 282, 285, 286, 288, 298, 313-16, 320, 324-29,

Pyrrhus, 314 336, 337, 342 n., 343, 344, 350, 351, 353, 355, Pythagoras, 215, 216, 217, 263 n. 358, 359, 360, 362, 377, 379, 380 n., 387, 388, 389, 391, 392, 393, 396, 398, 400, 401, 405, 408,

Quaritch-Wales, H. G., 378 n., 460 n. 410, 414, 417, 426 n., 444, 445, 453 n., 514n.,,

Quebec, 657 $19 n., 521, 538, 542, 589, 598, 607, 608 n., 729,

Quintilian, 270 n. 750 n., 759, 807

Qumran, 340, 381 n. Rondot, P., 508 n. Rose, E., 458 n.

Rabelais, Francois, 592 Rosenblat, A., 601 n.

Racine, Jean, 689 Rosso, A. S., 718 n.

Radhakrishnan, S., 181 n., 188 n. Rostovtzeff, M. 1, 237 n., 238n,, 276n., 277 n.,

. Radisson, Pierre, 658 287 n., 321n., 323 n., 336n., 412 n. Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 706 n. Rostow, W. W., 733 n.

Ram Mohan Roy, 708-9, 779 Roth, C., 639 n. Rama, 370, 511, 635 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 687, 749

Ramananda, 511 Roux, J.-P., 774n.

Ramanuyja, 510 Rowbotham, A. H., 645 n., 718 n.

Rameses II, 144 Rowland, B., 330n., 376n.

Raphia, 285 n. Rowley, H. H., 159n. Ravenna, 446 Roychourdourl, M. L., 622 n. Ray, N., 302 n. Ruben, W., 172 n. Razin, Stenka, 676 Rumania, Rumanians, 637, 663, 696, 697, 699 n. Re, 78, 79, 139 n. Rumi, 504 Rathjens, C., 94n. Roy, Ram Mohan, 708-9, 779

Red Sea, 68, 134n., 296, 380, 412, 561, 614 Runciman, S., 397 n., 400 n., 408 n.

Redfield, M. P., 784 n. Rus, 446, 447, 448

Redfield, R., 91 n. Russell, J. C., 556 n.

Reichwein, A., 718 n. Russia, Russians, 23, 107, 116, 237, 238, 239, 245, Reichwein, F., 658 n. 250, 251, 273, 317 n., 319, 321, 414n., 442, 447, Reinhard, M. R., 574n. 449, 485, 489, 514, 519-24, 529, 546, 547, 559,

Renou, L., 88 n. 566, 576 n., 582 n., 604-11, 613, 617, 641, 642 n., Reshid Pasha, 698 645 n., 652, 656, 657, 658, 659, 662, 663, 664, Reuther, O., 400 n. 665, 670-74, 675, 676, 677 n., 678, 686, 693,

Reza Shah, 775 696, 697, 699, 701, 710, 722, 724n., 727, 735, Rhine River, 254, 329 n., 362, 387, 393, 420, 674 750, 751, 752, 755, 775, 782 n., 783, 794, 795,

Rhineland, 389, 392, 443, 444, 531 n. 796, 801

Rhodes, 288

Rhodes, H. T. F., 458 n. Sabbatai Sevi, 608 n., 639, 697 n.

Rhodesia, 481 n., 560 n. Sa’di, 504, 621

Rhys Davids, T. W., 172n, 174n,, 182n., | Save-Soderbergh, T., 112 n.

188 n., 348 n. Safavi, Safavids, 613, 619, 621 n., 622, 623, 626, Rice, E. P., 370 n. Sahara, 5n., 12, 98, 233, 242, 252, 412, 447, 480, Rice, T. T., 218n., 322 n., 323 n. 495 n., 559, 560, 611, 650, 652, 659, 724 Richelieu, Cardinal, 581 Sainéan, L., 697 n.

Ricci, Matteo, 569, 713 632, 693, 695, 700

Richter, G. A. M., 208 n., 276n., 290 n. St. Brendan’s Isle, 240 n.

Ridgeway, W., 236n. St. Gall, 444

Riemschneider, M., 94n., 145 n. St. George’s Channel, 664

Index 825 St. Lawrence River, 663 Seljuks (see also Turks, Ottomans), 490, 504 n., St. Petersburg, 671 514 Saint-Simon, Henri, 732 Semites, 32, 43, 111, 112

Saksena, R. B., 628 n. Sen, D. C., 635 n.

Saladin, 490550 Septimus Severus, 325 Salamanca, Serapis, 293, 353 Salamis, 116, 200 n., 256, 258n. Serbia, Serbs, 518, 524, 663, 696, 697, 699 n., 700 Salerno, 550 Shakas, 243, 283 n., 285, 294, 299, 319, 320, 321, Salerore, B. A., 510 n. 332 Salonika, 408 n., 447 n., 518 n. Shakespeare, William, 592, 689

Samarkand, 520 n. Shamasastry, R., 302 n.

Samnites, 314 Shamash, 60 Samothrace, 290 226, 227 Samudra-gupta, 364 Shanghai, 785

Samos, 215, 216n., 292 n. Shang dynasty, 107n., 219, 220, 222, 223, 224,

San Francisco, 659 Shankara, 373, 460, 511

Sanchi, 332, 376 Shantung Peninsula, 229

792 n. Shapur II, 388 n.

Sansom, G. B., 479n., 537n., 719n., 722n., Shapur I, 402, 403, 405

Sardinia, 97 n., 190 Sharma, S. R., 622 n.

Sardis, 133 Sharp, A., 242 n., 243 n., 482 n. Sargon of Akkad, 41, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 56, Shedd, W. H., 508 n.

8in., 86, 91, 112, 113, 318, 483 n. Sheldon, C. D., 792 n.

Sarkar J., 628n. Sherley, R. and A., 626n.

Sarmatians, 319, 321, 322 n., 329, 336, 387, 396n. Shih Huang-ti, 307, 308, 318, 325 Sarnath, 376 Shih Kuo-heng, 786 n. Sarton, G., 438n., 501 n. Shiloh, 125

Sassanians, 152 n., 354, 363, 381, 387, 388, 390, Shirras, G. F., 573 n. 391, 394, 396, 397, 399-405, 417, 421, 451, Shiva, 297, 339, 345, 346, 372, 373, 376, 635

487 n., 515 n. Shivaji, 702

Sastri, N., 216n., 266n., 297n., 302 n., 304n., Shryock, J. K., 311 n., 351 n.

348 n., 457 n., 458 n. Siam, 188, 378, 637, 645 n., 652, 705, 706 Sauer, C. O., 11 n. 320 n., 336, 412, 447, 477, 520, 566, 608, 610 n., Saudi Arabia (see also Arabia), 773, 775 Siberia, 8n., 14n., 23, 76n., 107, 218n., 244,

Saul, King of Israel, 125, 159, 160 611, 617, 641, 658, 661, 663, 731 Sava River, 494 Sibir, 617 Saxons, 445, 454, 545 Sicily, 190, 215, 249, 259, 275, 276, 446, 514, 550,

Scandinavia, Scandinavians, 234n., 251, 412, 656

647 n. Sicyon, 270 Schall, Adam von, 645 n. Sidhanta, N. K., 171 n.

420, 445, 448, 449, 456. 540, 543, 545 n., 547n., Sickman, L., 473 n., 714n.

Schiller, Friedrich von, 689 Sidon, 133, 147

Schmidtke, F., 45 n. Siena, 524

Schneider, A., 33 n. Silk Road, 168, 251, 295, 304, 332, 347, 382, 419

Schnitzler, Arthur, 755 Sinal, 74, 82, 158

Schraeder, H. H., 402 n. Sind, 418, 456, 457 Schrieke, B., 614 n. Singer, C., 71n., 106n., 285 n., 328n., 357n., Schroeder, E., 437 n. 358n., 452 n., 469 n., 571 n., 735 n., 736n.

Schunemann, K., 664 n. Siren, O., 222 n., 474 n., 534n., 645 n., 714-n.

Schurmann, H. F., 529 n. Sita, 370

Schurz, W. L., 604 n. Slavs, 390, 392, 420, 442, 443, 448, 449, 512, 514 n.,

Schwartzlose, F. W., 428 n. 545, 548, 637, 700 n.

Scotland, Scots, 242, 414, 444, 663 n., 664, 676, Smalley, G. W., 724n.

687, 692, 693 Smith, Adam, 687, 734

Scylax, 134n. Smith, C., 117 n. Scythia, Scythians, 114, 222n., 237, 238, 239, Smith, J. M. P., 166n. 243, 244, 245, 321, 322 n. Smith, M. W., 243 n.

Seele, K. C., 119 n. Smith, S., 45 n., 91 n.

Seleucids, 62, 243, 281, 282, 285, 320 Smith, T. C., 721n., 792 n.

Seleucus I, 299 n. Smith, V. A., 778 n.

Selim the Grim, 621, 632 Smith, W. C., 774n., 775 n.

826 Index

Smyrna, 193 n. Sumer, Sumerians, 20, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 34, 36, Socrates, 264, 265, 267 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54,

Soden, W. von, 52 n., 61n., 136 n. 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 76, 81n., 85,

Sofala, 480 88, 93, 97n., 103, 104, 126, 138, 148, 150n., Sogdians, 468 154n., 158, 160, 363, 415, 544n.

Sokolli, Mohammed, 638 n. Sun E-tu Zen, 785 n. Solomon, 125, 126, 160 Sun Yat-sen, 782 Solon, 200, 211 Sung dynasty, 464, 466, 470, 472, 476, 478, 479, Soper, A., 473 n., 714 n. 504n., 524-26, 531, 534 Sophocles, 261, 262, 270 Superior, Lake, 657 Sorel, Georges, 761 Sur Das, 634, 635 South Africa, 663, 731 Susa, 133, 152, 280, 282 South America (see also America), 566, 578, Susruta, 373 651, 656, 724, 731, 744, 765 Svetaketu, 181 n.

South Carolina, 667 Swann, P. C., 722 n.

Southeast Asia, 174, 234, 242, 361, 363, 377-79, Sweden, Swedes, 98, 106 n., 521, 541, 545, 591, 457, 460 n., 462, 525, 526, 559, 577, 611, 612 n., 608, 671, 672, 675, 676, 677, 678 n. 633, 636, 637, 694, 704-6, 7lln., 724, 731, Switzerland, Swiss, 544, 558, 582, 679, 751

774n. Sykes, P., 626 n.

Soviet Union (see also Russia), 794-800 Syracuse, 288, 290 n. Spain, Spaniards, 8, 190, 251, 328, 329n., 388, Syria, 23n., 45n., 74, 97 n., 106, 110, 113, 119, 389, 417, 428, 431 n., 437, 442, 447, 494n., 495, 123, 124, 125, 126, 133, 135, 145, 146n., 147, 501, 519n., 540, 543, 548, 562, 565, 574, 576, 277 n., 282, 286, 337, 338, 381, 397, 398, 401, 579, 580, 585, 590, 592, 599-605, 613, 614, 405, 409, 410, 417, 421 n., 426, 428, 429, 432, 616n., 621, 639, 654, 658, 659, 660, 662, 665, 437, 440, 444, 445 n., 449, 490, 492, 493, 497,

667, 675, 676, 705 508, 512, 614n., 621, 699, 700 n.

Sparta, Spartans, 189, 194, 199, 200, 202, 203, Szechuan, 239 205, 255, 256 n., 258, 259, 287, 289

Speiser, E. A., 112 n. Tabriz, 619

Sphujidhvaja, 374 n. Tacitus, 354, 387

Spiegel, J., 78n., 80n. Taeschner, F., 496 n. Spinka, M., 449 n. ‘Taeuber, I. B., 792 n. Spinoza, Baruch, 683 Tagore, Rabindranath, 781 Sprat, Bishop, 685 T’ai Tsung, 463 Sprockhoff, E., 102 n. Talas River, 456, 463

Spuler, B., 441 n., 495 n. Tamerlane, 493, 520, 611, 622 Srinivasan, K. P., 102 n. Tamils, 368 n., 371, 372, 510, 637 Srivijaya, 559 Tan, Duke of Chou, 230 Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 356, 357 T’ang dynasty, 384, 390, 394n., 418, 419, 463,

Stagira, 267 464, 465, 466, 468, 469, 470, 473, 474, 476, 478,

Stalin, Josef, 671, 798 479, 525, 531, 710

Stavrianos, L. S., 638 n., 697 n. Tarim basin, 108, 239n., 382, 472 n., 493

Steindorf, G., 119 n. Tarn, W. W., 283 n., 285 n., 287 n., 322 n., 330n. Stephen IT, Pope, 446, 541 n. Tarsus, 342, 444

Stephens, L. B., 601 n. Tartars, 514n., 520, 617, 663 Steward, J. H., 604n. Taylor, G. E., 786 n. Sticker, G., 359 n., 573 n. Tel Amarna, 142 n.

Scokl, G., 611 n. Teng Ssu-yu, 718 n., 786 n.

697 n. Ternate, 659 n.

Stoianovich, T., 6l6n., 638n., 640n., 673n., Tenochtitlan, 561, 571

Stonehenge, 103 n. Thais, 559, 560 Stradivari, Antonio, 690 Thales, 212, 213

Stuarts, 733 Thar Desert, 12 Subotai, 492 n. Thebes (Egypt), 79, 81, 89n., 134, 139n.

724764 Themistocles, 203444 n. Suez, Theodore of ‘Tarsus,

Sudan, 233, 379, 412, 419, 495 n., 612, 651, 699, Thebes (Greece), 259, 274, 289

Sui dynasty, 383, 390, 462, 463, 464 Theodosius, 408 n. Suleiman the Lawgiver, 614, 626, 632 Theophrastus, 267

Sullivan, Louis, 755 Theotocopoulos, D., 524n.

Sumatra, 379, 559 Theseus, 194 n.

Index 827 Thessaly, 254 ‘Twitchett, D., 466 n.

Thomas, E. J., 349 n. Tyre, 126, 133, 147

Thompson, E. A., 317 n., 392 n. Tyrtacus, 211 Thompson, J. E. S., 415 n., 483 n., 562 n.

Thomson, John Joseph, 756 Ugarit, 145, 146

Thrace, Thracians, 116, 243, 259, 275, 276 Uighurs, 420, 463, 468, 472, 477, 478, 479, 508, Thucydides, 97 n., 199n., 258n., 259, 263, 268, 529, 650n., 782 n.

269, 357, 521, 755 Ujjain, 321 n. Tiahuanaco, 483 664, 670, 696, 724 n.

Thuringians, 445 Ukraine, 24n., 239, 514, 607, 611, 617, 661, 663,

Tiber, 315 | Ulfilas, Bishop, 392 Tibet, 188, 251, 418, 419, 460, 463, 477, 479, 535, Ulm, 584

641, 649, 650, 652, 710, 724n., 781 Ulpian, 355 Tientsin, 785 Umma, 44, 45 Tiglath-Pilesar III, 126 Ummayads, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 434, 435, Tigris, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40, 43 n., 46, 48, 48 n., 440 n., 442, 444, 446, 447

64, 66, 71n., 91, 215 n., 400, 432 United States (see also America; North Amer-

Timbuctu, 612, 622 ica), 174n., 392, 483, 574, 601, 603 n., 668, Titicaca, Lake, 416 669, 670n., 708, 717, 732, 734, 737-39, 744,

Titus, M. T., 704 n. 764, 787, 790, 794-800 Toba, 386, 389 Ur, 16, 38, 50, 51, 52, 93, 158 Tokugawa, 646, 648, 649, 718-22, 726, 786, 787, | Ural River, 447

790, 791 Urals, 8n., 321,442, 617, 671 Toledo, 550 Uriah, 126 Tolstov, S. P., 66 n., 223 n. Urukagina, 43, 52 n.

Toltecs, 561, 793 n. Urwick, E. J., 266 n.

Torriani, L., 100 n. Uzbeks, 576, 611, 612 n., 618, 619, 622, 693 Tours, 428

Toynbee, A. J., 45n.,, 193n., 234n., 260n., Vath, A., 645 n.

529 n., 618 n. Vaillant, G. C., 483 n., 562 n.

Trajan, 396 n. van der Meer, P., 45 n. Transoxiana, 428, 463, 487 n., 503 n., 577, 611, Vasili II of Russia, 607

618 n., 619, 701 Vasiliev, A. A., 442n., 446n., 514n., 515 n., Transylvania, 612 n., 637 518 n., 522 n.

Trebizond, 444 Veblen, Thorstein, 743 n. Trimingham, J. S., 480n., 612 n., 651n., 704n. Venezuela, 574

Troeltsch, E., 585 n. Venice, Venetians, 272, 494, 514, 515, 524, 546,

Troy, Trojans, 94, 192 550, 584, 606, 614 Tsao Chan, 714n. Ventris, M., 98 n. Tschepe, P. A., 642 n. Vera Cruz, 666

Tsuchiya, T., 719 n. Vergil, 354, 410

Tu Fu, 474 520 n.670 n. Tudors, 306 n. Versailles, Tula, 606 Vesalius, 594

Tsuda, N., 722 n. Vernadsky, G., 244n., 447n., 448n., 492 n.,

Tulsi Das, 634, 635 Vienna, 274n., 612, 621n., 693 Tung Chung-shu, 309 n. Viet-Nam, 234, 238

Tungus, 484, 535 Vijayanagar, 494n., 510, 612

Tunis, 614, 773 Vikings, 234n., 240, 414, 448, 449, 451, 452, 454, Turkestan, 107, 239, 251, 612, 700-702, 710, 456, 547 n., 647 n.

773 n. Virginia, 661, 662, 667, 668

Turkey, Republic of, 773, 774n., 775 Vishnu, 297, 339, 345, 346, 370 n., 372, 373, 376, Turks (see also Ottoman Turks), 320n., 385 n., 460, 511, 635 390, 391, 420, 442, 462, 463, 466, 477, 484, 485, Visigoths, 388 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 493, 494n., 498, 499, Vladimuirtsov, B., 488 n., 491 n. 505, 508, 512, 514 n., 521, $22 n., 538, 611, 626, Viekke, B. H. M., 659 n., 661 n., 705 n.

628 Voegelin, E., 166 n.

Tutankhamon, 142 Volga, 443, 444, 447, 448, 492, 493, 514, 520, 576,

Tver, 520n. 617, 618 724n. Tweed, 254608, Voltaire, 687,n.,713

828 Index

Volz, W., 5 n. Wittvogel, K. A., 306n., 307 n., 479n., 488 n.,

von Grunebaum, G. E., 441 n., 704n., 705 n., 489 n.

774n. Wolfel, D. J., 100n., 233 n., 240n. Wolf, A., 595 n.

Waddell, L. A., 535 n. Wong, Chimin K., 359 n. Wadi Hammamat, 68 Wood, A. C., 616 n. Wagner, Richard, 754 Wood, W. A. R,, 637 n. Waldschmidt, E., 187 n. Woolley, C. L., 38n., 158n. Wales, Welsh, 414, 559 Wright, A. F., 382 n., 383 n. Waley, A., 229n., 230n., 474n., 479 n. Wright, M. C., 783 n.

Wallachia, 612 n., 637 Wu Lien-teh, 359 n. Walz, R., 135 n. Wu-tl, 396 n., 309, 322 n., 323

Wang Ling, 494 n. Wyclif, John, 556

Wang Mang, 323, 356n. Wyndham, H. A., 604 n. Wang Yu-Ch’uan, 716 n. Xavier, St. Francis, 647

Wang, Y. Chu, 786 n. . . Ware, C. F., 442 n. Xenophanes, 212

Warmington, E. H., 233 n., 276n., 296 n. Xenophon, 260, 264, 269, 296 n.

Warsaw, 617 Xerxes, 122 n., 128, 156, 171 n., 255, 258 Washburn, S. L., 3 n. Washington, D.C., 85 Yabuuchi, K., 473 n.

Washington, George, 669, 670 n. Yahweh, 126, 145 n., 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163,

Waterloo, 748 164, 165, 339 Watson, B., 357 n. Yangtze, 229, 324, 384, 394n., 464, 467, 525, Watt, James, 692, 734, 738 527 n., 646 Watt, W. M., 424n., 502 n. Yarmuk, 417

Weber, M., 590 n. Yashiro, Y., 792 n.

Wei dynasty, 386 Yavanas, 348 n. Wei River, 223, 307 n. Yellow River, 23, 107, 168, 217, 218, 220, 229, Wensinck, A. J., 441 n., 502 n. 309 n., 394n., 464, 477

West Indies, 617, 656, 660, 661, 679 Yenesei, 107, 414

Westermann, D., 233n., 412n., 480n., 481n., Yetts, W. P., 322n.

561 n., 651 n. Young, IT. C., 775 n.

Westphalia, 654 Yuan dynasty (see also Mongols), 525 Wheatstone, Charles, 735 Yucatan, 415 n., 483, 562 Wheeler, R. E. M., 23 n., 84n., 85n., 86n., Yueh-chi, 320 102 n., 296n., 332 n., 358n. Yugoslavia, 700 n.

Whitby, 444 Yunnan, 309, 418, 419, 463, 476, 477, 530, 535, White, L., 323n., 444n., 451n., 452n, 453n, 9 7730:

Whitraw, G. J., 760 n. Zaehner, R. C., 157 n., 349n,, 354n., 402 n.,

Wieschoff, H. A., 481 n. Freep Mountains. 12

-”nan ’ Zambesi, 560, 650 Willcox, W. F., 574n. 7 ; ammuit, T., 100 n. W illey, G. R,, 8 Ih., 414 N., 483 n. Zanzibar, 724

Wiesner, J., 105 n., 107 n. agtos Mountains, 12, 91, 102

William of Ockham, 552 Zeno, 263

Wiliams, E., 660 n. Zenta, 613 Willibrord, Saint, 445 Zeus, 211, 270, 293, 795

Wilson, J. A., 69n., 71n., 78n., 79n., 80n., Zimbabwe, 481, 560 n. 8l1n., 82n., 120n., 124n., 134n., 142 n. Zimmer, H. R., 373 n.

Windward Islands, 660 Zoroaster, 128, 147, 190-57, 158, 354, 401, 402,

367 n. Zossima, 521

Winternitz, M., 179n., 181n., 183 n., 188n., 460 n.

Wittek, P., 488n., 501 n. Zucker, A., 534n.

Wittenberg, 589 Zulu, 725