WE have already found that our own Western Society (or Civilization) is affiliated to a predecessor. The obvious method of pursuing our search for further societies of the same species will be to take the other existing examples, the Orthodox Christian, the Islamic, the Hindu and the Far Eastern, and see if we can discover ‘parents’ for them also. But before we set out on this search we must be clear what we are looking for: in other words, what are the tokens of apparentation-and-affiliation which we are to accept as valid evidence. What tokens of such relationship did we, in fact, find in the case of our own society’s affiliation to the Hellenic Society?
The first of these phenomena was a universal state 1 (the Roman Empire), incorporating the whole Hellenic Society in a single political community in the last phase of Hellenic history. This phenomenon is striking because it stands out in sharp contrast to the multiplicity of local states into which the Hellenic Society had been divided before the Roman Empire arose, and in equally sharp contrast to the multiplicity of local states into which our own Western Society has been divided hitherto. We found, further, that the Roman Empire was immediately preceded by a time of troubles, going back at least as far as the Hannibalic War, in which the Hellenic Society was no longer creative and was indeed patently in decline, a decline which the establishment of the Roman Empire arrested for a time but which proved in the end to be the symptom of an incurable disease destroying the Hellenic Society and the Roman Empire with it. Again, the Roman Empire’s fall was followed by a kind of interregnum between the disappearance of the Hellenic and the emergence of the Western Society.
This interregnum is filled with the activities of two institutions: the Christian Church, established within and surviving the Roman Empire, and a number of ephemeral successor states arising on the former territory of the Empire out of the so-called Volkerwanderung of the Barbarians from the no-man’s-land beyond the Imperial frontiers. We have already described these two forces as the internal proletariat and external proletariat of the Hellenic Society. Though differing in all else they agreed in their alienation from the dominant minority of the Hellenic Society, the leading classes of the old society who had lost their way and ceased to lead. In fact the Empire fell and the Church survived just because the Church gave leadership and enlisted loyalty whereas the Empire had long failed to do either the one or the other. Thus the Church, a survival from the dying society, became the womb from which in due course the new one was born.
What was the part played in the affiliation of our society by the other feature of the interregnum, the Volkerwanderung, in which the external proletariat came down in spate from beyond the frontiers of the old society—Germans and Slavs from the forests of Northern Europe, Sarmatians and Huns from the Eurasian Steppe, Saracens from the Arabian Peninsula, Berbers from the Atlas and the Sahara, whose ephemeral successor states shared with the Church the stage of history during an interregnum or heroic age? In comparison with the Church their contribution was negative and insignificant. Almost all of them perished by violence before the interregnum came to an end. The Vandals and Ostrogoths were overthrown by counter-attacks on the part of the Roman Empire itself. The last convulsive flicker of the Roman flame sufficed to burn these poor moths to cinders. Others were overthrown in fratricidal warfare: the Visigoths, for example, received the first blow from the Franks and the coup de grdce from the Arabs. The few survivors of this Ishmaelitish struggle for existence incontinently degenerated and then vegetated as faineants till extinguished by new political forces which possessed the indispensable germ of creative power. Thus the Merovingian and the Lombard dynasties were brushed aside by the architects of the Empire of Charlemagne. There are only two out of all the Barbarian ‘successor states’ of the Roman Empire that can be shown to have any lineal descendants among the nation states of Modern Europe, Charlemagne’s Frankish Austrasia and Alfred’s Wessex.
Thus the Volkerwanderung and its ephemeral products are tokens, like the Church and the Empire, of the affiliation of the Western Society to the Hellenic; but, like the Empire and unlike the Church, they are tokens and nothing more. When we turn from the study of symptoms to the study of causes we find that, whereas the Church belonged to the future as well as the past, the Barbarian successor states, as well as the Empire, belonged wholly to the past. Their rise was merely the obverse of the Empire’s fall, and that fall inexorably portended theirs.
This low estimate of the contribution of the Barbarians to our Western Society would have shocked our Western historians of the last generation (such as Freeman), who regarded the institution of responsible parliamentary government as a development of certain institutions of self-government which the Teutonic tribes were supposed to have brought with them from no-man’s-land. But these primitive Teutonic institutions, if they existed at all, were rudimentary institutions characteristic of primitive man at almost all times and places, and, such as they were, they did not survive the Volkerwanderung. The leaders of the barbarian war-bands were military adventurers and the constitution of the successor states, as of the Roman Empire itself at the time, was despotism tempered by revolution. The last of these barbaric despotisms was extinguished many centuries before the real beginning of the new growth which gradually produced what we call parliamentary institutions.
The prevalent over-estimate of the Barbarians’ contribution to the life of our Western Society can also be traced in part to the false belief that social progress is to be explained by the presence of certain inborn qualities of race. A false analogy from the phenomena that were being brought to light by physical science led our Western historians of the last generation to picture races as chemical ‘elements’ and their miscegenation as a chemical ‘reaction’ which released latent energies and produced effervescence and change where, before, there had been immobility and stagnation. Historians deluded themselves into supposing that the ‘infusion of new blood’, as they metaphorically described the racial effect of the Barbarian intrusion, could account for those long-subsequent manifestations of life and growth which constitute the history of the Western Society. It was suggested that these Barbarians were ‘pure races’ of conquerors whose blood still invigorated and ennobled the bodies of their supposed descendants.
In reality the Barbarians were not the authors of our spiritual being. They made their passage felt by being in at the death of the Hellenic Society, but they cannot even claim the distinction of having delivered the death-blow. By the time when they arrived on the scene the Hellenic Society was already dying of wounds self-inflicted in the time of troubles centuries before. They were merely the vultures feeding on the carrion or the maggots crawling on the carcass. Their heroic age is the epilogue to Hellenic history, not the prelude to ours.
Thus three factors mark the transition from the old to the new society: a universal state as the final stage of the old society; a church developed in the old society and in turn developing the new; and the chaotic intrusion of a barbarian heroic age. Of these factors the second is the most, and the third the least, significant.
One more symptom in the ‘apparentation-and-affiliation’ between the Hellenic and the Western Society may be noted before we proceed with our attempt to discover other apparented societies, namely the displacement of the cradle or original home of the new society from the original home of its predecessor. We have found that a frontier of the old society became, in the instance already examined, the centre of the new one; and we must be prepared for similar displacements in other cases.
The Orthodox Christian Society. A study of the origins of this society will not add to our list of specimens of the species, for it is clearly twin offspring, with our Western Society, of the Hellenic Society, its geographical displacement being north-eastwards instead of north-westwards. With its cradle or original home in Byzantine Anatolia, much cramped for many centuries by the rival expansion of the Islamic Society, it ultimately secured a vast expansion northwards and eastwards through Russia and Siberia, outflanking the Islamic World and impinging upon the Far East. The differentiation of Western and Orthodox Christendom into two separate societies can be traced in the schism of their common chrysalis, the Catholic Church, into two bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. The schism took rather more than three centuries to work itself out, beginning with the Iconoclastic controversy of the eighth century and ending with the final rupture on a point of theology in 1054. Meanwhile the churches of the rapidly differentiating societies had assumed sharply contrasted political characters. The Catholic Church in the West was being centralized under the independent authority of the medieval Papacy, whereas the Orthodox Church had become a docile department of the Byzantine state.
The Ironic and Arabic Societies and the Syriac Society. The next living society that we have to examine is Islam; and when we scan the background of the Islamic Society we discern there a universal state, a universal church and a Volkerwanderung which are not identical with those in the common background of Western and Orthodox Christendom but are unmistakably analogous to them. The Islamic universal state is the ‘Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. 1 The universal church is, of course, Islam itself. The Volkerwanderung which overran the domain of the Caliphate at its fall proceeded from the Turkish and Mongol nomads of the Eurasian Steppe, the Berber nomads of Northern Africa and the Arab nomads of the Arabian Peninsula. The interregnum occupied by this Völkerwanderung covers roughly the three centuries between A.D. 975 and A.D. 1275, and the latter date can be taken as that of the beginning of the Islamic Society as we find it in the world to-day.
So far all is plain, but further search brings us up against complications. The first is that the predecessor of the Islamic Society (not yet identified) proves to be the parent not of a single offspring but of twins, in this respect resembling the parental achievement of the Hellenic Society. The conduct of the pairs of twins has been, however, strikingly dissimilar; for, whereas the Western and the Orthodox Society have survived for over a thousand years side by side, one of the offspring of the parent society which we are seeking to identify swallowed up and incorporated the other. We shall call these twin Islamic societies the Iranic and the Arabic.
The differentiation among the offspring of the unidentified society was not, as was the schism among the offspring of the Hellenic Society, a matter of religion; for, though Islam bifurcated into the sects of the Sunnis and the Shi’is as the Christian Church bifurcated into the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, this religious schism in Islam never at any stage coincided with the division between the Iranic-Islamic and the Arabic-Islamic societies— though schism did eventually disrupt the Iranic-Islamic Society when the Shi’i sect of Islam became predominant in Persia in the first quarter of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era. Shi’ism thereby established itself in the very centre of the main axis of the Iranic-Islamic Society (which runs east and west from Afghanistan to Anatolia), leaving Sunnism predominant on either side of it in the two extremities of the Iranic World as well as in the Arabic countries to the south and west.
When we compare the pair of Islamic with our pair of Christian societies we see that the Islamic Society which emerged in what we may call the Perso-Turkish or Iranian zone bears a certain resemblance to our Western Society, while the other society which emerged in what we may call the Arabic zone bears a certain resemblance to Orthodox Christendom. For example, the ghost of the Baghdad Caliphate which was evoked by the Mamluks at Cairo in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era reminds us of the ghost of the Roman Empire which was evoked by Leo the Syrian at Constantinople in the eighth century. The Mamluks’ political construction, like Leo’s, was relatively modest, effective and durable by contrast with the empire of Timur in the neighbouring Iranian zone—a vast, vague, ephemeral shape which appeared and disappeared like the Empire of Charlemagne in the West. Again, the classical language which was the vehicle of culture in the Arabic zone was Arabic itself, which had been the language of culture in the ‘Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. In the Iranian zone the new culture found a new vehicle for itself in Persian—a language which had been cultivated by grafting it on to Arabic as Latin had been cultivated by grafting it on to Greek. Finally, the conquest and absorption of the Islamic Society of the Arabic zone by the Islamic Society of the Iranian zone, which occurred in the sixteenth century, had its parallel in the aggression of Western Christendom against Orthodox Christendom during the Crusades. When this aggression culminated in A.D. 1204 in the diversion of the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople, it looked for a moment as though Orthodox Christendom would be permanently conquered and absorbed by her sister society—a fate which overtook the Arabic Society some three centuries later, when the Mamluk power was overthrown and the ‘Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo was extinguished by the Ottoman Padishah Selim I in A.D. 1517.
We must now take up the question—what was the unidentified society in which the ‘Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad marked the final stage, analogous to that marked by the Roman Empire in the Hellenic Society? If we trace history backwards from the ‘Abbasid Caliphate, do we find phenomena analogous to the time of troubles which we found to be the penultimate stage of the Hellenic Society?
The answer is that we do not. Behind the ‘Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad we find the Ummayad Caliphate of Damascus, and behind that a thousand years of Hellenic intrusion, beginning with the career of Alexander of Macedon in the latter half of the fourth century B.C., followed by the Greek Seleucid monarchy in Syria, Pompey’s campaigns and the Roman conquest, and only ending with the Oriental revanche of the warriors of early Islam in the seventh century after Christ. The cataclysmic conquests of the primitive Muslim Arabs seem to respond antistrophically, in the rhythm of history, to the cataclysmic conquests of Alexander. Like these, they changed the face of the world in half a dozen years; but instead of changing it out of recognition, more Macedonia, they changed it back to a recognizable likeness of what it had been once before. As the Macedonian conquest, by breaking up the Achaemenian Empire (i.e. the Persian Empire of Cyrus and his successors), prepared the soil for the seed of Hellenism, so the Arab conquest opened the way for the Umayyads, and after them the ‘Abbasids, to reconstruct a universal state which was the equivalent of the Achaemenian Empire. If we superimpose the map of either empire upon the other we shall be struck by the closeness with which the outlines correspond; and we shall find that the correspondence is not simply geographical but extends to methods of administration and even to the more intimate phenomena of social and spiritual life. We may express the historical function of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate by describing it as a reintegration and resumption of the Achaemenian Empire—a reintegration of a political structure which had been broken up by the impact of an external force and the resumption of a phase of social life which had been interrupted by an alien intrusion. The ‘Abbasid Caliphate is to be regarded as a resumption of the universal state which was the last phase of the existence of our still unidentified society, the search for which is thus shifted back a thousand years.
We must now inspect the immediate antecedents of the Achaemenian Empire in search for the phenomenon which we failed to find in the antecedents of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate: namely a time of troubles resembling the time which in Hellenic history immediately preceded the establishment of the Roman Empire.
The general similarity between the genesis of the Achaemenian Empire and the genesis of the Roman Empire is unmistakable. The chief difference of detail is that the Hellenic universal state grew out of the very state which had been the principal agent of destruction in the foregoing time of troubles, whereas in the genesis of the Achaemenian Empire the successive destructive and constructive roles of Rome were played by different states. The destructive role was played by Assyria; but, just when Assyria was on the point of completing her work by establishing a universal state in the society of which she was the scourge, she brought destruction on herself by the excess of her own militarism. Just before the grand finale the protagonist was dramatically struck down (610 B.C.) and his role was unexpectedly assumed by an actor who had hitherto played a minor part. The Achaemenidae reaped where the Assyrians had sown; yet this substitution of one performer for another did not change the character of the plot.
Having thus discerned our time of troubles we can now perhaps at last identify the society we are seeking. Negatively, we can make out that it was not identical with that to which the Assyrians belonged. The Assyrians, like the Macedonians at a later stage of this long tangled history, played their part as intruders who came and went. In our unidentified society when it was united under the Achaemenian Empire we can trace the process of the peaceful ejection of the elements of culture intruded by Assyria in the gradual replacement of the Akkadian language and cuneiform script by the Aramaic language and Alphabet.
The Assyrians themselves, in their latter days, employed the Aramaic Alphabet for writing on parchment as a supplement to their traditional cuneiform script which they impressed on clay tablets or inscribed on stone. When they employed the Aramaic Alphabet they may be presumed to have used the Aramaic language. At any rate, after the destruction of the Assyrian state and of the short-lived neo-Babylonian Empire (i.e. Nebuchadnezzar’s empire) which followed it, the Aramaic Alphabet and language continuously gained ground until, in the last century B.C., the Akkadian language and cuneiform script had become extinct throughout their Mesopotamian homeland.
A corresponding change can be traced in the history of the Iranian language, which emerged suddenly from obscurity as the language of the ‘Medes and Persians’, the ruling peoples of the Achaemenian Empire. Confronted with the problem of making records in a language (the Iranian or Old Persian) which had evolved no script of its own, the Persians adopted the cuneiform script for inscriptions on stone and the Aramaic for records on parchment, but it was the Aramaic script that survived as the vehicle of the Persian language.
In fact two elements of culture, one from Syria and one from Iran, were asserting themselves contemporaneously and at the same time entering into closer association with one another. From the latter end of the time of troubles preceding the establishment of the Achaemenian Empire, when the conquered Aramaeans were beginning to captivate their Assyrian conquerors, the process was continuous. If we wish to discern it at an earlier stage we may look into the mirror of religion and perceive how the same time of troubles breathed the same inspiration into Zarathustra, the Prophet of Iran, and into the contemporary Prophets of Israel and Judah. On the whole the Aramaean or Syrian element, rather than the Iranian, may be regarded as the deeper influence, and, if we peer back behind the time of troubles, the Iranian element fades out and we catch a glimpse of a society in Syria, in the generation of King Solomon and his contemporary King Hiram, which was just discovering the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and had already discovered the Alphabet. Here at last we have identified the society to which the twin Islamic societies (subsequently combined in one) were affiliated, and we will call it the Syriac Society.
In the light of this identification let us look again at Islam, the universal church through which our Syriac Society came at long last to be apparented to the Iranic and Arabic societies. We can now observe an interesting difference between the development of Islam and that of Christianity. We have observed that the germ of creative power in Christianity was not of Hellenic but of alien origin (in fact of Syriac origin, as we can now identify it). By contrast we can observe that the creative germ of Islam was not alien from, but native to, the Syriac Society. The founder, Muhammad, drew his inspiration primarily from Judaism, a purely Syriac religion, and secondarily from Nestorianism, a form of Christianity in which the Syriac element had recovered its preponderance over the Hellenic. Of course a great institution like a universal church is never ‘pure bred’ from a single society. In Christianity we are aware of Hellenic elements, drawn from Hellenic mystery religions and Hellenic philosophy. Similarly, but to a much slighter extent, we can detect Hellenic influences in Islam. Broadly speaking, however, Christianity is a universal church originating in a germ that was alien to the society in which it played its part, while Islam originated in a germ that was indigenous.
Finally, we may measure the respective degrees of displacement of the original homes of the affiliated Iranic and Arabic societies from the original home of the apparented Syriac Society. The base line of the Iranic-Islamic Society, from Anatolia to India, shows a big displacement. On the other hand the homeland of the Arabic-Islamic Society in Syria and Egypt covers the whole area of the Syriac Society, and the displacement is relatively small.
The Indie Society. The next living society we have to examine is the Hindu, and here again we discern in the background our standard tokens of the existence of an earlier society beyond the horizon. The universal state in this case is the Empire of the Guptas (circa A.D. 375-475). The universal church is Hinduism, which attained supremacy in India in the Gupta Age, expelling and supplanting Buddhism after Buddhism had been dominant for about seven centuries in the sub-continent which was the common cradle of both religions. The Volkerwanderung which overran the Gupta Empire at its fall proceeded from the Huns of the Eurasian Steppe, who were assailing the Roman Empire at the same time. The interregnum occupied by their activities and by the lives of the successor states of the Gupta Empire lies approximately within the dates A.D. 475-775. Thereafter there began to emerge that Hindu Society which is still alive. Sankara, the father of Hindu philosophy, flourished about A.D. 800.
When we push farther back in our search for the older society to which the Hindu Society is affiliated we find, on a smaller scale, the same phenomenon that complicated our search for the Syriac Society, namely a Hellenic intrusion. In India this Hellenic intrusion did not begin as early as Alexander’s campaign, which, so far as influence on Indian culture is concerned, had no lasting consequences. The real Hellenic intrusion upon India begins with the invasion of Demetrius, the Greek king of Bactria, about 183-182 B.C., and ends with the destruction of the last of the partially Hellenized intruders in A.D. 390, which may be taken as the approximate date of the establishment of the Gupta Empire. Following the lines that put us on the track of the Syriac Society we must look in India, as we looked in South-Western Asia, for a pre-Hellenic universal state, of which the Gupta Empire can be regarded as a post-Hellenic resumption, and we find this here in the Empire of the Mauryas, established by Chandragupta in 323 B.C., made illustrious by the reign of the Emperor Acoka in the following century and extinguished by the usurper Pushya-mitra in 185 B.C. Behind this empire we find a time of troubles, full of destructive wars between local states, and covering in its span the lifetime of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha. Gautama’s life, and attitude towards life, are the best evidence that the society of which he was a member was in a bad way in his time; and this evidence is corroborated by the life and outlook of his contemporary Mahavira the founder of Jainism, and by the lives of others of the same generation in India who were turning away from This World and seeking to find the way to another through asceticism. In the farthest background of all, behind this time of troubles, we can make out a time of growth which has left its record in the Vedas. And so we have identified the society apparented to the Hindu Society; let us call it the Indie. The original home of the Indie Society lay in the Indus and Upper Ganges valleys, from which it spread over the whole sub-continent. Its geographical position is therefore virtually identical with that of its successor.
The Sinic Society. It remains to explore the background of the only remaining living society, which has its home in the Far East. Here the universal state is the empire, established in 221 B.C., of the successive Ts’in and Han dynasties. The universal church is the Mahayana, the variety of Buddhism which made its way into the Han Empire and so became the chrysalis of the present Far Eastern Society. The Volkerwanderung after the fall of the universal state proceeded from the nomads of the Eurasian Steppe who invaded the territory of the Han Empire round about A.D. 300, though the Han Empire itself had actually given way to an interregnum more than a hundred years earlier. When we turn to the antecedents of the Han Empire we find a clearly marked time of troubles, known in Chinese history as chan kwo, ‘the (period of) contending states’, and covering the two-and-a-half centuries following the death of Confucius in 479 B.C. The two marks of this age, suicidal statecraft and intellectual vitality directed towards the philosophy of practica’ life, recall the period of Hellenic history between the time of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and the battle of Actium which terminated the Hellenic time of troubles. Moreover in this case, as in that, these last centuries of the time of troubles were only the climax of a disorganization which had begun some time earlier. The flame of militarism which burnt itself out in the post-Confucian age was already alight before Confucius took his measure of human affairs. The mundane wisdom of that philosopher and the other-worldly quietism of his contemporary, Lao-tse, are proof that both realized that, in the history of their society, the age of growth already lay behind them. What name shall we give to the society upon whose past Confucius looked back with reverence, while Lao-tse turned his back on it like Christian leaving the City of Destruction? We may perhaps conveniently call this society the Sinic.
The Mahayana—the church through which this Sinic Society came to be apparented to the Far Eastern Society of to-day— resembles the Christian Church and differs from Islam and Hinduism inasmuch as the germ of life in which it originated was not indigenous to the society in which it played its part but was derived from elsewhere. The Mahayana appears to have been begotten in Indie territories which were subject to the Greek kings of Bactria and their semi-Hellenic successors, the Kushans, and it had undoubtedly taken root in the Kushan provinces in the Tarim Basin, where the Kushans were successors of the Prior Han dynasty, before these provinces were reconquered and re-annexed by the Posterior Han dynasty. Through this door the Mahayana entered the Sinic World and was then adapted by the Sinic proletariat to its own needs.
The original home of the Sinic Society was the basin of the Yellow River, from which it expanded to the basin of the Yangtse. Both basins were included in the original home of the Far Eastern Society, which expanded south-westwards along the Chinese coast and also north-eastward into Korea and Japan.
‘The Fossils’ (see p. 8). The information so far obtained by investigating the affiliations of the living societies will enable us to sort out the ‘fossils’ and assign them to the extinct societies to which they originally belonged. The Jews and Parsees are fossils of the Syriac Society as it was before the Hellenic intrusion upon the Syriac World. The Monophysite and Nestorian Christians are relics of the reaction of the Syriac Society against the Hellenic intrusion, successive and alternative protests against the Helleniza-tion of what had been in origin a Syriac religion. The Jains of India and the Hinayanian Buddhists of Ceylon, Burma, Siam and Cambodia are fossils of the Indie Society of the period of the Mauryan Empire, before the Hellenic intrusion upon the Indie World. The Lamaistic Mahayanian Buddhists of Tibet and Mongolia correspond to the Nestorians. They represent an unsuccessful reaction against the metamorphosis of Mahayanian Buddhism from its original Indie form to the later shape—moulded by Hellenic and Syriac influences—in which it was eventually adopted by the Sinic Society.
None of these fossils gives us a clue to making any further additions to our list of societies, but our resources are not exhausted. We may push farther back into the past and find ‘parents’ for some of the societies which we have identified as being themselves parents of living specimens.
The Minoan Society. In the background of the Hellenic Society certain tokens of the pre-existence of an earlier society stand out quite clearly. The universal state is the maritime empire, maintained by command of the Aegean Sea from a base in Crete, which left a name in Greek tradition as the thalassocracy (sea-power) of Minos, and a mark on the face of the earth in the topmost strata of the palaces recently excavated at Cnossos and Phaestus. The Volkerwanderung after this universal state can be viewed, much transmuted by the alchemy of traditional poetry, in the oldest monuments of Greek literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and we also catch a glimpse of it, which no doubt shows us something more like the historical facts, in the contemporary official records of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt. This Volkerwanderung seems to have begun with an irruption of barbarians—Achaeans and the like—from the European hinterland of the Aegean, who took to the sea and overcame the Cretan thalassocracy on its own element. The archaeological evidence of their handiwork is the destruction of the Cretan palaces at the end of the age which archaeologists call ‘Late Minoan II’. The movement culminated in a kind of human avalanche in which the Aegean peoples, victors and vanquished alike, overwhelmed the Empire of Khatti (the Hittites) in Anatolia and assailed, but failed to destroy, the ‘New Empire’ of Egypt. Scholars date the destruction of Cnossos at about 1400 B.C . and Egyptian records enable us to place the ‘human avalanche’ between 1230 and 1190 B.C . We may thus take 1425-1125 B.C . as the period within which this interregnum falls.
When we seek to trace the history of this older society we are handicapped by our inability to read the Cretan script, but archaeological evidence suggests that a material civilization evolved in Crete was suddenly propagated across the Aegean into the Argolid in the seventeenth century B.C. and from that point spread gradually into other parts of Continental Greece during the next two centuries. There is also evidence for the existence of the Cretan civilization extending backward to the Neolithic Age. We may call this society the Minoan.
But are we justified in treating the Minoan and the Hellenic societies as being related to one another in the same way as the Hellenic and Western or the other apparented-and-affiliated societies that we have identified? In these other cases the social link between two societies has been a universal church, which has been created by the internal proletariat of the old society and has afterwards served as a chrysalis within which the new society has taken shape. But there is nothing Minoan about the principal expression of Pan-Hellenism, namely the Olympian pantheon. This pantheon took its classical form in the Homeric epics, and here we see gods made in the image of the barbarians who descended upon the Minoan World in the Volkerwanderung which destroyed it. Zeus is an Achaean war-lord reigning on Olympus as a usurper who has supplanted his predecessor Cronos by force and has divided the spoils of the Universe, giving the waters and the earth to his brothers, Poseidon and Hades, and keeping the sky for himself. This pantheon is Achaean and post-Minoan through and through. We cannot even see a reflection of the Minoan religion in the dispossessed deities, for Cronos and the Titans are of the same order of being as Zeus and his war-band. We are reminded of the religion which had been abandoned by the majority of the Teutonic barbarians before their incursions into the Roman Empire began: a religion which was retained and refined by their kinsfolk in Scandinavia—to be abandoned by these in their turn in the course of their own Volkerwanderung (the raids of the ‘Northmen’) five or six centuries later. If anything in the nature of a universal church existed in the Minoan Society at the time when the barbarian avalanche descended upon it, it must have been something as different from the worship of the Olympians as Christianity was from the worship of Odin and Thor.
Did such a thing exist? There are faint indications that it did in the judgement of the greatest authority on the subject:
‘So far as it has been possible to read the evidences of the old Cretan worship we seem to discern not only a prevailing spiritual essence but something in its followers akin to the faith that for the last two millennia has moved the adherents of successive Oriental religions, Iranian, Christian and Islamic. It involves a dogmatic spirit in the worshipper far removed from the Hellenic standpoint. . . . Broadly comparing it with the religion of the Ancient Greeks, it may be said that it had a more spiritual essence. From another aspect, it had a more personal bearing. On the “Ring of Nestor”, where the symbols of resurgence are seen above her head in chrysalis and butterfly shape, she [the Goddess] has clearly the power of giving life beyond the grave to her worshippers. She is very near to her votaries. . . . She guarded her children even beyond the grave. . . . Greek religion had its Mysteries, but the Greek Gods of both sexes, more or less on a par, by no means stood in such a close personal relation as is indicated by the evidences of the Minoan cult. Their disunion, marked by family and clannish feuds, was as conspicuous as their multiplicity of forms and attributes. In contrast to this, throughout the Minoan World, what appears to be the same paramount goddess constantly reappears. . . . The general conclusion is that we are in the presence of a largely monotheistic cult, in which the female form of the deity held the supreme place.’ 1
There is also some evidence on the subject in Hellenic tradition. The Greeks preserved the legend of a ‘Zeus’ in Crete who really cannot be the same deity as the Zeus of Olympus. This Cretan Zeus is not the leader of a war-band who comes on the scene full grown and fully armed, to take his kingdom by force. He appears as a new-born babe. Perhaps he is identical with the child represented in Minoan art as held up for adoration by the Divine Mother. And he is not only born—he dies! Were his birth and death reproduced in the birth and death of Dionysus, the Thracian deity with whom the God of the Eleusinian Mysteries became identified? Were the Mysteries in Classical Greece, like witchcraft in Modern Europe, a survival from the religion of a submerged society?
If Christendom had succumbed to the Vikings—falling under their dominion and failing to convert them to its faith—we can imagine the Mass being celebrated mysteriously for centuries in the underworld of a new society in which the prevailing religion was the worship of the Aesir. We can imagine this new society, as it grew to full stature, failing to find satisfaction in the religion of the Scandinavian barbarians and seeking the bread of spiritual life in the soil on which the new society had come to rest. In such a spiritual famine the remnant of an older religion, instead of being stamped out as our Western Society stamped out witchcraft when it caught the attention of the Church, might have been rediscovered as a hidden treasure; and some religious genius might have met the needs of his age by an exotic combination of the submerged Christian rite with latter-day barbarian orgies derived from the Finns or the Magyars.
On this analogy we might reconstruct the actual religious history of the Hellenic World: the revival of the ancient and traditional Mysteries of Eleusis and the invention of Orphism—’a speculative religion, created by a religious genius’, according to Nilsson—out of a syncretism between the orgies of the Thracian Dionysus and the Minoan mysteries of the birth and death of the Cretan Zeus. Undoubtedly both the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic Church did provide the Hellenic Society in the Classical Age with a spiritual sustenance which it needed but could not find in the worship of the Olympians, an other-worldly spirit such as we should expect to find in a time of troubles, a spirit which we recognize as characteristic of the universal churches created by internal proletariats in their decline.
On these analogies it is not altogether fantastic to espy, in the Mysteries and Orphism, the ghost of a Minoan universal church. Yet even if this speculation hit the truth (and this is questioned in a later passage in this book in which the origins of Orphism are examined), 1 that would hardly warrant us in regarding the Hellenic Society as truly affiliated to its predecessor. For why should this church require raising from the dead unless it had been slain? And who will have been its slayers unless the barbarians who had overrun the Minoan World? In taking the pantheon of these murderous Achaeans, ‘sackers of cities’, for its own, the Hellenic Society proclaimed them its parents by adoption. It could not affiliate itself to the Minoan Society without taking the blood-guiltiness of the Achaeans upon its head and proclaiming itself a parricide.
If we now turn to the background of the Syriac Society we shall find what we have found in the background of the Hellenic, a universal state and a Volkerwanderung which turn out to be the same as those which appear in the last chapters of Minoan history. The final convulsion of the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung was a human avalanche of uprooted wanderers in search of new homes, driven pell-mell by the impetus of the last wave of barbarians from the north, the so-called Dorians. Repulsed from Egypt, some of these refugees settled on the north-eastern coast of the Egyptian Empire and are familiar to us as the Philistines of the Old Testament narratives. Here the Philistine refugees from the Minoan World encountered the Hebrew nomads who had been drifting into the Syrian dependencies of Egypt out of the no-man’s-land of Arabia. Farther north the mountain-range of Lebanon set a limit to the simultaneous infiltration of Aramaean nomads and gave shelter to the Phoenicians of the coast who had managed to survive the impact of the Philistines. Out of these elements a new society, the Syriac, emerged as the convulsion subsided.
So far as the Syriac Society was related to any older member of the species it was related to the Minoan, and this in the same degree as the Hellenic was related to the Minoan—neither more nor less. One heritage of the Syriac Society from the Minoan may have been the Alphabet (but this is uncertain); another may have been the taste for long-distance seafaring.
It is at first sight surprising that the Syriac Society should be derived from the Minoan. One would rather have expected to discover that the universal state in the background of the Syriac Society was the ‘New Empire’ of Egypt and that the monotheism of the Jews was a resurrection of the monotheism of Ikhnaton; but the evidence is against it. Nor is there any evidence to suggest the affiliation of the Syriac Society to either of the societies respectively represented by the Empire of Khatti (the Hittites) in Anatolia and by the Sumerian dynasty of Ur and its successor the Amorite dynasty of Babylon, societies which we shall now proceed to examine.
The Sumeric Society. When we turn to the background of the Indie Society, the first thing that strikes us is that the religion of the Vedas, like the worship of the Olympians, shows evidence of having arisen among barbarians in the course of a Völkerwanderung and bears none of the distinguishing marks of a religion that has been created during a time of troubles by the internal proletariat of a society in decline.
In this case the barbarians were the Aryas who appear in Northwestern India at the dawn of Indie history, just as at the dawn of Hellenic history the Achaeans appear in the Aegean. On the analogy of the relation in which we have found the Hellenic Society standing to the Minoan, we should expect to discover in the background of the Indie Society some universal state with a no-man’s-land beyond its frontier in which the ancestors of the Aryas were living as an external proletariat until the breakdown of the universal state let them in. Can that universal state be identified and that no-man’s-land located? We may perhaps obtain answers to these questions by first asking two others: Whence did the Aryas find their way to India? And did any of them, starting from the same centre, arrive at a different destination?
The Aryas spoke an Indo-European language; and the historical distribution of this group of languages—one group in Europe and the other in India and Iran—shows that the Aryas must have entered India from the Eurasian Steppe, along the routes followed by many successors down to the Turkish invaders, Mahmud of Ghaznah in the eleventh and Babur, the founder of the Mughal (Mogul) Empire, in the sixteenth century of our era. Now when we study the dispersion of the Turks we find some of them going south-east into India and others south-west into Anatolia and Syria. Contemporary, for example, with Mahmud of Ghaznah were the invasions of the Saljuq Turks which provoked the crusading counter-attack of our Western Society. The records of Ancient Egypt give evidence that within the period 2000-1500 B.C. the Aryas, breaking out of the Eurasian Steppe in the quarter where the Turks broke out three thousand years later, anticipated the Turks in their subsequent dispersion. While some, as we know from Indian sources, entered India, others overran Iran, ‘Iraq, Syria and finally Egypt, where they established in the seventeenth century B.C. a rule of barbarian war-lords known to Egyptian history as the Hyksos.
What caused the Volkerwanderung of the Aryas? We may reply by asking: What caused the Volkerwanderung of the Turks? The answer to this latter question is supplied by historical record: it was the breakdown of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate, and the Turks dispersed in both directions because the dying body of the ‘Abbasid Empire furnished prey both in its homelands and in its outlying dependency in the Indus Valley. Does this explanation give us a clue to the corresponding dispersion of the Aryas? It does; for, when we look at the political map of South-Western Asia about 2000-1900 B.C., we find it occupied by a universal state which, like the Caliphate of Baghdad, was governed from a capital in ‘Iraq, and whose territories extended in the same directions from the same centre.
This universal state was the Empire of Sumer and Akkad established circa 2298 B.C. by the Sumerian Ur-Engur of Ur and restored circa 1947 B.C. by the Amorite Hammurabi. The breakup of the empire after the death of Hammurabi ushered in the period of the Aryan Volkerwanderung. There is no direct evidence that the Empire of Sumer and Akkad extended to India, but the possibility is suggested by the recent unearthing, in the Indus Valley, of a culture (dating, on the two sites first explored, from circa 3250 to circa 2750 B.C.) which was very closely related to that of the Sumerians in ‘Iraq.
Can we identify the society in whose history the Empire of Sumer and Akkad was the universal state? Examining the antecedents of this empire we find evidence of a time of troubles in which the Akkadian militarist, Sargon of Agade, was a conspicuous figure. Farther back we find an age of growth and creation on which recent excavations at Ur have thrown light. How far back into or beyond the fourth millennium B.C. this age extended we do not know. The society now identified may be called the Sumeric.
The Hiitite and Babylonic Societies. Having identified the Sumeric Society we can go on to identify two others by proceeding, * this time, not from the later to the earlier but in the reverse order.
The Sumeric Civilization extended into the eastern part of the Anatolian Peninsula, later called Cappadocia. Clay tablets, impressed with business documents in cuneiform, which have been found by archaeologists in Cappadocia, are evidence for this fact. When, after the death of Hammurabi, the Sumeric universal state broke down, its Cappadocian provinces were occupied by barbarians from the north-west, and in about 1750 B.C. the ruler of the principal successor state in this quarter, King Mursil I of Khatti, raided and sacked Babylon itself. The raiders withdrew with their booty and other barbarians, the Kassites from Iran, established an ascendancy in ‘Iraq which lasted for six centuries. The Khatti Empire became the nucleus of a Hittite Society our fragmentary knowledge of which is mostly derived from the records of Egypt, with which the Hittites were constantly at war after Thothmes III (1480-1450 B.C.) had extended Egyptian rule into Syria. The destruction of the Hittite Empire by the same Volkerwanderung as overwhelmed the Cretan Empire has already been mentioned. The Hittites seem to have taken over the Sumerian system of divination, but they had a religion of their own and also a pictographic script in which at least five different Hittite languages were recorded.
Another society, also related to the Sumeric, comes to light, through the Egyptian records of the fifteenth century B.C., in the Sumeric Society’s homelands: Babylonia, where the Kassite ascendancy lingered on into the twelfth century B.C., Assyria and Elam. The institutions of this latter-day society on Sumeric ground resemble so closely in most respects those of the antecedent Sumeric Society itself that it is doubtful whether it ought to be regarded as a separate society or as an epilogue of the Sumeric. We will, however, give it the benefit of the doubt and call it the Babylonic Society. In its last phase, during the seventh century B.C., this society suffered grievously in a hundred years’ war, within its own bosom, between Babylonia and the military power of the Assyrians. The Babylonic Society survived the destruction of Assyria by seventy years and was finally swallowed up in the universal state of the Achaemenian Empire of Cyrus. These seventy years included the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the Jews, to whom Cyrus appeared as a heaven-sent deliverer.
The Egyptiac Society. This very notable society emerged in the lower valley of the Nile during the fourth millennium B.C. and became extinct in the fifth century of the Christian Era, after existing, from first to last, at least three times as long as our Western * Society has existed so far. It was without ‘parents’ and without offspring; no living society can claim it as an ancestor. All the more triumphant is the immortality that it has sought and found in stone. It seems probable that the Pyramids, which have already borne inanimate witness to the existence of their creators for nearly five thousand years, will survive for hundreds of thousands of years to come. It is not inconceivable that they may outlast man himself and that, in a world where there are no longer human minds to read their message, they will continue to testify: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’
These vast pyramidal tombs, however, typify the history of the Egyptiac Society in more ways than one. We spoke of this society as existing for some four thousand years, but for half that period the Egyptiac Society was not so much a living organism as an organism dead but unburied. More than half of Egyptiac history is a gigantic epilogue.
If we trace that history we find that a little more than a quarter of its span was a period of growth. The impetus which manifested itself first in the mastery of a peculiarly formidable physical environment—in the clearing, draining and cultivation of the jungle-swamp that originally occupied the lower valley and delta of the Nile to the exclusion of man—and which then displayed its increasing momentum in the precocious political unification of the Egyptiac World at the end of the so-called Pre-Dynastic Age, reached its climax in the stupendous material performances of the fourth dynasty. This dynasty marks the zenith in the characteristic achievement of the Egyptiac Society: the co-ordination of human labour in great engineering enterprises, ranging from the reclamation of the swamps to the construction of the Pyramids. It was also the zenith in political administration and in art. Even in the sphere of religion, where wisdom is proverbially born of suffering, the so-called ‘pyramid texts’ testify that this age likewise saw the creation, the collision and the first stage in the interaction of the two religious movements—the worship of the Sun and the worship of Osiris—which came to their maturity after the Egyptiac Society had gone into its decline.
The zenith was passed and the decline set in at the transition from the fifth dynasty to the sixth, circa 2424 B.C., and at this point we begin to recognize the familiar symptoms of decline in the order in which they have presented themselves to us in the histories of other societies. The break-up of the Egyptiac united kingdom into a number of small states constantly at war with one another bears the unmistakable stamp of a time of troubles. The Egyptiac time of troubles was followed in about 2070 B.C. by a universal state, founded by the local dynasty of Thebes and consolidated by the twelfth dynasty, circa 2000-1788 B.C. After the twelfth dynasty the universal state broke down, and the consequent interregnum brought its Volkerwanderung in the invasion of the Hyksos.
Here, then, might seem to be the end of this society. If we had followed our usual procedure of exploration and had worked backwards from the fifth century of the Christian Era, we should probably have paused at this point and said: ‘We have now traced Egyptiac history back, from its lasf fading foot-prints in the fifth century after Christ, for twenty-one centuries, and have struck on a Volkerwanderung following a universal state. We have traced the Egyptiac Society to its source and discern beyond its beginnings the latter end of an earlier society, which we will call “Nilotic”.’
We shall refuse to adopt this course, because, if we now resume our exploration in the forward direction, we shall not find a new society but something quite different. The barbarian ‘successor state’ is overthrown; the Hyksos are expelled; and the universal state with its capital at Thebes is restored, consciously and deliberately.
This restoration was, from our present standpoint, the sole significant event in Egyptiac history (except the abortive revolution of Ikhnaton) between the sixteenth century B.C. and the fifth century after Christ. The duration of this universal state, repeatedly overthrown and re-established, fills the whole of these two millennia. There is no new society. If we study the religious history of the Egyptiac Society we find that here, too, after the interregnum, a religion prevailed that had been taken over from the dominant minority of the preceding age of decline. Yet it did not prevail without a struggle, and it first secured its position by coming to terms with a universal church which had been created in the preceding age of decline by the Egyptiac internal proletariat out of the religion of Osiris.
The religion of Osiris came from the Delta, not from Upper Egypt, where the political history of the Egyptiac Society was made. The main thread of Egyptiac religious history is the rivalry between this god of terrestrial and subterranean nature—the spirit of vegetation that alternately appears above ground and disappears beneath it—and the sun god of Heaven, and this theological conflict was bound up with, and was indeed a theological expression of, the political and social conflict between the two sections of society in which the two worships arose. The worship of the sun god, *Re, was controlled by the priesthood of Heliopolis, and Re was conceived in the image of the Pharaoh, whereas the worship of Osiris was a popular religion. It was a conflict between an established state-church and a popular religion with an appeal to the individual believer.
The crucial difference between the two religions in their original forms was the difference in the prospects that they offered to their devotees after death. Osiris ruled the multitudes of the dead in a shadow world underground. Re—for a consideration—redeemed his devotees from death and raised them alive to the sky. But this apotheosis was reserved for those who could pay the price, a price which was constantly rising until solar immortality became virtually the monopoly of the Pharaoh and those members of his court to whose immortalization-equipment he chose to contribute. The Great Pyramids are the monuments of this endeavour to secure personal immortality by architectural extravagance.
Meanwhile the religion of Osiris gained ground. The immortality that it offered might be a poor thing compared with residence in Re’s sky-heaven, but it was the one consolation to which the masses could look forward under the grinding oppression to which they were subjected in this life in order to secure eternal bliss for their masters. The Egyptiac Society was splitting into a dominant minority and an internal proletariat. Confronted with this danger, the priesthood of Heliopolis sought to render Osiris innocuous by taking him into partnership, but in this transaction Osiris succeeded in taking far more than he gave. When he entered into the Pharaoh’s solar cult he captured the solar ritual of apotheosis for the mass of mankind. The monument of this religious syncretism is the so-called Book of the Dead—’an Everyman’s guide to Immortality’ which dominated the religious life of the Egyptiac Society throughout the two millennia of its ‘epilogue’. The idea that Re demanded righteousness rather than pyramids prevailed, and Osiris appears as a judge in the underworld, consigning the dead to the destinies that their lives on Earth have deserved.
Here, under the Egyptiac universal state, we discern the lineaments of a universal church created by an internal proletariat. What would have been the future of this Osirian church if the Egyptiac universal state had not been restored? Would it have become the chrysalis of a new society? First of all, we should have expected to see it captivate the Hyksos, as the Christian Church captivated the Barbarians. But it did not; hatred of the Hyksos led it to combine in an unnatural union with the dead religion of the dominant minority, and in this process the Osirian religion was perverted and degraded. Immortality was once again up for sale, though the price was no longer a pyramid but only a few texts on a roll of papyrus. We may conjecture that in this business as in others the mass production of a cheap article for a small margin of profit brought the manufacturer the best return. Thus the ‘restoration’ in the sixteenth century B.C. was something more than a rehabilitation of the universal state; it was an amalgamation of the living tissues of the Osirian Church with the dead tissues of the moribund Egyptiac Society in a single mass—a kind of social concrete that took two millennia to weather away.
The best proof that the restored Egyptiac Society was void of life was the complete failure of the one attempt to raise it from the dead. This time one man, the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, sought to repeat by an instantaneous gesture the act of religious creation that had been performed in vain by the Osirian Church of the internal proletariat during the centuries of the long-past time of troubles. By sheer genius Ikhnaton created a new conception of God and man, life and nature, and expressed it in a new art and poetry; but dead societies cannot thus be brought to life. His failure is the proof that we are justified in regarding the social phenomena of Egyptiac history from the sixteenth century B.C. onwards as an epilogue rather than as the history from cradle to grave of a new society.
The Andean, Yucatec, Mexic and Mayan Societies. America before the coming of the Spanish conquistadores yields the four societies here named. The Andean Society in Peru had already reached the condition of a universal state, the Inca Empire, when it was destroyed by Pizarro in 1530. The Mexic Society was approaching a similar condition, the predestined universal state being the Aztec Empire. At the time of Cortez’s expedition the city state of Tlaxcala was the only remaining independent Power of any importance, and the Tlaxcalans in consequence supported Cortez. The Yucatec Society in the peninsula of Yucatan had been absorbed by the Mexic Society some four hundred years earlier. Both the Mexic and the Yucatec societies were affiliated to an earlier society, the Mayan, which seems to have achieved a higher and more humane civilization than its successors. It came to a rapid and mysterious end in the seventh century after Christ, leaving as the record of its existence the ruins of its great cities in the rain-soaked forests of Yucatan. This society excelled in astronomy, turned to practical account in a system of chronology which was remarkably exact in its calculations. The horrible religious rites discovered by Cortez in Mexico appear to be a grossly barbarized version of the old religion of the Mayas.
Our researches have thus yielded us nineteen societies, most of them related as parent or offspring to one or more of the others: namely the Western, the Orthodox, the Iranic, the Arabic (these last two being now united in the Islamic), the Hindu, the Far Eastern, the Hellenic, the Syriac, the Indie, the Sinic, the Minoan, the Sumeric, the Hittite, the Babylonic, the Egyptiac, the Andean, the Mexic, the Yucatec and the Mayan. We have expressed doubt as to the separate existence of the Babylonic apart from the Sumeric, and some of the other pairs might perhaps be regarded as single societies with an ‘epilogue’ on the Egyptiac analogy. But we will respect their individualities until we find good reason for doing otherwise. Indeed it is probably desirable to divide the Orthodox Christian Society into an Orthodox-Byzantine and an Orthodox-Russian Society, and the Far Eastern into a Chinese and a Korean-Japanese Society. This would raise our numbers to twenty-one. Further explanation and defence of our proceedings must be reserved for the next chapter.