Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage opens a five-volume history of civilization, and it opens it in the East. Published in 1942 as Part One of The Story of Civilization, the book carries the subtitle “a history of civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan from the beginning to the present day, with an introduction on the nature and foundations of civilization.” That introduction is no brief formality: five chapters on the economic, political, moral and mental elements of civilization precede any narrative of a single people. From there the book moves through Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea and Persia, then across India from its foundations through Buddha, the Mogul emperors and the British, before turning to China and Japan. It is expository history on a vast scale, written for the general reader and dedicated “to Ariel.”
The Argument Behind the Chronology
Durant states his purpose plainly in the preface: to record, in as little space as possible, what genius and labor have contributed to mankind’s cultural heritage — invention, economic organization, experiments in government, religious aspiration, morals and manners, literature, science, philosophy and art, each traced through causes, character and effects. He knows the enterprise is absurd. Twenty years of work have brought it a fifth of the way home, and no single mind can compass the whole. His defense is philosophical: history written in separate longitudinal strips — economic, political, religious, artistic — does violence to the unity of human life, and the ideal historian would render the total complex of a nation’s culture in each period. Specialists will punish anyone who “sells his soul to synthesis,” and Durant accepts the risk, citing Ptah-hotep’s warning from five thousand years ago that a man may be opposed by an expert in council. He begins with Asia because Egypt and the Orient furnished the background of the Greek and Roman culture that Sir Henry Maine mistook for the whole source of the modern mind, and because a history that starts with Greece while the twentieth century turns toward the Pacific commits a possibly fatal failure of perspective.
The Preface and the Plan of a Lifetime
Will Durant opens by confessing that the book before the reader is only the first installment of an assignment he rashly set himself some twenty years earlier: to write a history of civilization. His aim is to tell, in as little space as possible, what genius and labor have contributed to mankind’s cultural heritage—invention, economic organization, experiments in government, religious aspiration, shifts in morals and manners, literature, science, philosophy, and art, each traced through cause, character, and effect. He calls the enterprise absurd and immodest; years of work have brought it only a fifth of the way home, and no single mind or lifetime can compass it. Yet he hopes it may help those driven by the passion for philosophy to see things whole, pursuing perspective and unity through history in time as others pursue them through science in space.
He argues that history written in separate longitudinal strips—economic, political, religious, literary—does violence to the unity of human life. Ideal historiography would portray, for each period, the total complex of a nation’s culture and ways; but accumulating knowledge has split history into a thousand specialties, and prudent scholars avoid any view of the whole, since error grows with scope. Anyone who sells his soul to synthesis becomes a target for the specialist. Durant cites Ptah-hotep’s warning from five thousand years ago that a man may be opposed by an expert in council, and grants that a history of civilization shares philosophy’s presumptuousness: a fragment expounding the whole, with no rational excuse—at best a brave stupidity.
The series is planned in five independent parts: this first volume on Egypt and the Near East to the death of Alexander, and on India, China, and Japan to the present, with an introduction on the nature and elements of civilization; then classical Greece and Rome; medieval Catholic and feudal Europe with Byzantine, Mohammedan, and Judaic culture and the Italian Renaissance; Europe from the Reformation to the French Revolution; and the modern world from Napoleon to the present.
Why the Story Begins in the Orient
Durant starts with Asia not merely because it held the oldest known civilizations, but because those civilizations formed the background of the Greek and Roman culture that Sir Henry Maine mistook for the whole source of the modern mind. Readers, he expects, will be surprised at how much of our indispensable inventions, our economic and political organization, science, literature, philosophy, and religion goes back to Egypt and the Orient. At this moment—European ascendancy ending, Asia swelling with resurrected life, the twentieth century destined to an all-embracing conflict of East and West—the old provincialism that began histories with Greece and summed up Asia in a line is a possibly fatal failure of perspective. The future faces the Pacific.
He doubts an Occidental mind can ever fully understand the Orient; eight years of study and travel only confirmed that a lifetime would not suffice. He anticipates offense: the orthodox Jew will need patience over the pages on Yahveh, the metaphysical Hindu will mourn the scratching of Indian philosophy, Chinese and Japanese sages will smile at his selections. He thanks Professor Harry Wolfson of Harvard for correcting the Judea chapter, Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy for painstakingly revising the India section, and Professors Gowen and Upton Close for checking errors on China and Japan, while taking responsibility for what remains. Quoting the thirteenth-century Tai T’ung, who said that were he to await perfection his history would never be finished, he signs the preface from Great Neck in March 1935, hoping Part Two may follow by autumn 1940 and the rest at five-year intervals. A note on use explains that technical passages are set in reduced type, that readers should attempt no more than a chapter at a time, and that raised numbers refer to endnotes.
Custom, Conscience, and the Regulation of Desire
The argument then turns to the foundations of social order. No society can exist without order, and no order without regulation; the power of custom varies inversely with the multiplicity of laws, as instinct varies inversely with thought. Durant distinguishes conventions, customs, and morals—customs the group holds vital to its welfare—and observes that in primitive societies without written law these vital customs regulate every sphere of existence. Long repetition makes custom second nature; violating it brings fear, discomfort, or shame, and from that comes conscience, which Darwin called the most impressive distinction between animals and men. In higher development conscience is social consciousness: the individual’s feeling of belonging to a group and owing it loyalty. Morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole, and civilization would be impossible without it.
The first task of moral custom is regulating the relations of the sexes. Marriage—the association of mates for the care of offspring—has passed through nearly every conceivable form, from care of offspring without association of mates to modern association of mates without care of offspring.
Hammurabi’s Voice and the Care of the Weak
The passage opens with Hammurabi speaking in his own voice, presenting his laws as a stable support and pure government for the land. He calls himself the guardian governor, says he carried the people of Sumer and Akkad in his bosom, and restrained them in his wisdom so the strong might not oppress the weak and justice be given to the orphan and the widow. Any oppressed man with a cause may come before his image, read the inscription, heed the weighty words, and be set at ease; Hammurabi is like a real father to his people, who established prosperity forever and gave a pure government to the land. He asks future kings to observe the words of righteousness written on his monument. A footnote suggests the Mosaic Code apparently borrows from Hammurabi’s code or derives with it from a common original, and that the habit of stamping a legal contract with an official seal goes back to Hammurabi.
The Canal and the Voice of Statesmanship
This unifying legislation was but one of his accomplishments. At his command a great canal was dug between Kish and the Persian Gulf, irrigating a large area and protecting southern cities from Tigris floods. In another inscription Hammurabi tells how he gave water, security, and government to many tribes; through the boasting—called an honest mannerism of the Orient—the text hears the voice of statesmanship. After Anu and Enlil gave him the lands of Sumer and Akkad and entrusted the sceptre to him, he dug the canal Hammurabi-nukhush-nishi, turned both banks into cultivated ground, heaped up grain, provided unfailing water, gathered the scattered people, provided pasturage and water, and settled them in peaceful dwellings.
Divine Approval and the Wealth of Babylon
Despite the secular quality of his laws, Hammurabi gilded his authority with divine approval: he built temples as well as forts, constructed at Babylon a gigantic sanctuary for Marduk and his wife, the national deities, and a massive granary to store wheat for gods and priests. These gifts are called an astute investment expected to yield steady returns in the awed obedience of the people. From taxes he financed law and order and beautified his capital; palaces and temples rose, a bridge spanned the Euphrates, and ships manned with ninety men plied the river. Two thousand years before Christ, Babylon was already one of the richest cities history had known. A footnote quotes Christopher Dawson that Babylonia in Hammurabi’s time and earlier had reached a pitch of material civilization never since surpassed in Asia, perhaps excepting ages of Xerxes I in Persia, Ming Huang in China, and Akbar in India.
Dress and Ornament
The people were of Semitic appearance, dark in hair and features, mostly masculinely bearded, occasionally bewigged. Both sexes wore the hair long; men sometimes dangled curls and, like women, used perfumes. The common dress was a white linen tunic to the feet, leaving one shoulder bare in women and augmented with mantle and robe in men. As wealth grew, people dyed garments blue on red or red on blue, in stripes, circles, checks, or dots. Bare feet gave way to sandals; men’s heads were swathed in turbans in Hammurabi’s time. Women wore necklaces, bracelets, amulets, and beads in coiffured hair; men carried walking-sticks with carved heads and prettily designed seals on their girdles for attesting letters and documents; priests wore tall conical caps to conceal their humanity.
The Kassite Invasions and the Racial Pendulum
It is almost a law of history that the same wealth generating a civilization announces its decay: wealth produces ease as well as art, softens a people to luxury and peace, and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths. On the eastern boundary, the hardy mountaineer tribe of the Kassites envied Babylon’s riches; light years after Hammurabi’s death they inundated, plundered, retreated, raided repeatedly, and finally settled as conquerors and rulers—called the normal origin of aristocracies. They were of non-Semitic stock, perhaps descendants of European immigrants from neolithic days; their victory over Semitic Babylon represented another swing of the racial pendulum in western Asia. For several centuries Babylonia lived in ethnic and political chaos that stopped the development of science and art. The Amarna letters show this disorder: kinglets of Babylonia and Syria, having sent modest tribute to imperial Egypt after Thutmose III’s victories, beg for aid against rebels and invaders and quarrel about the value of gifts exchanged with the disdainful Amenhotep III and the absorbed, negligent Ikhnaton. A footnote quotes Burraburiash II, King of Karduniash, complaining to Amenhotep III that he received only two manehs of gold and demanding as much as Amenhotep’s father sent.
The Sultanate of Delhi
Invaders swept down into India, seized Delhi, pulled down temples and carried off their wealth, and set up the Sultanate of Delhi—an alien despotism over northern India that lasted three centuries and was checked only by assassination and revolt. Its first sultan, Kutb-d Din Aibak, had himself been bought as a slave; a Mohammedan historian reports that his gifts and his slaughters alike ran into the hundreds of thousands, and after one victory fifty thousand men were enslaved, the plain turning “black as pitch with Hindus.” Balban punished rebels and brigands by casting them under elephants’ feet or skinning them and stuffing the skins with straw to hang from Delhi’s gates. Alau-d-din, conqueror of Chitor, slaughtered fifteen to thirty thousand Mongol converts to Islam in a single day after their attempted rising. Muhammad bin Tughlak won the throne by murdering his father, was a scholar and elegant writer versed in mathematics, physics, and Greek philosophy, and yet outdid his predecessors in bloodshed—feeding a rebel nephew’s flesh to the rebel’s wife and children, and ruining the country with inflation and pillage. To found a new capital at Daulatabad he emptied Delhi, ordering a blind man who remained to be dragged there, leaving only a leg. He complained that the people did not love him, ruled a quarter century, and died in bed. His successor Firoz Shah invaded Bengal, paying rewards for 180,000 Hindu heads, raided villages for slaves, and died at eighty. Ahmad Shah feasted three days whenever twenty thousand defenseless Hindus were slain in his territories in one day.
Able Men and Their Arts
These rulers were often able men with courageous, industrious followers—otherwise their rule over an overwhelming hostile majority would be inexplicable. Their militaristic religion was superior in stoical monotheism to Indian popular cults, and they concealed its attractiveness by making Hindu worship illegal, driving it deeper into the Hindu soul. Some despots patronized the arts, engaging usually Hindu artists to build mosques and tombs; some were scholars who delighted in historians, poets, and scientists. Alberuni accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni and wrote a scientific survey of India comparable to Pliny’s Natural History and Humboldt’s Cosmos. Moslem historians were nearly as numerous as generals. The sultans exacted every rupee through taxation and robbery, but spent their spoils in India, returning them to its economy; still, their terrorism advanced the weakening of Hindu physique and morale begun by climate, diet, political disunity, and pessimistic religions.
Grinding Down the Hindus
Alau-d-din’s policy required his advisers to draft rules for “grinding down the Hindus” and depriving them of the wealth that fostered rebellion; half the gross produce was collected, where native rulers had taken one-sixth. A Moslem historian reports that no Hindu could hold up his head and no gold or silver was visible in houses; blows, stocks, imprisonment, and chains enforced payment. When an adviser protested, Alau-d-din replied that the learned man lacked experience: Hindus would never become submissive until reduced to poverty, so only sufficient corn, milk, and curds should be left them, and no hoards permitted. The text calls this the secret of modern India’s political history: weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished, it lost the power of resistance and took refuge in supernatural consolations, arguing that mastery and slavery were delusions and that bodily or national freedom was hardly worth defending in so brief a life. The lesson drawn is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization—a nation must love peace but keep its powder dry.
Tamerlane
Governments degenerate, for power poisons every hand that touches it. The Delhi Sultans’ excesses lost them both Hindu and Moslem support, and fresh invasions from the north defeated them as easily as they had once won India. The first conqueror was Tamerlane, a Turk who accepted Islam as a weapon and fabricated a pedigree reaching back to Genghis Khan for Mongol support. Having attained the throne of Samarkand and needing gold, he noted that India was full of infidels; his generals demurred that the reachable infidels were already under Mohammedan rule, and the mullahs settled it by quoting the Koran: “Oh Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with severity.” Timur crossed the Indus in 1398, massacred or enslaved the inhabitants, defeated Sultan Mahmud Tughlak’s forces, occupied Delhi, slew a hundred thousand prisoners in cold blood, and carried the city’s wealth, with women and slaves, back to Samarkand, leaving anarchy, famine, and pestilence behind.
Babur
The Delhi Sultans remounted their throne and taxed India another century before the real conqueror came.
The Brilliant Emperor and His Fall
T’ai Tsung, raised to the throne at twenty-one, opened his reign by murdering the brothers who threatened him, then drove the barbarians back into their homelands and recovered the territories lost since the fall of the Han. Tiring of war, he returned to Ch’ang-an and gave himself to peace. He read and re-read Confucius, refused luxuries, dismissed three thousand ladies assembled for his amusement, and told ministers that lighter taxes and honest officials would abolish robbery better than severe laws. Visiting the jails, he sent 290 condemned men to till the fields on their word of honor; all returned, and he freed them. He decreed that no death sentence be ratified until the emperor had fasted three days. Buddhist monks, Zoroastrian and Nestorian missionaries all found welcome at his capital, their temples exempted from taxation while Europe lay in poverty and theological strife. At his death foreign envoys cut themselves with knives and sprinkled his bier with their blood.
Fifty years of peace let China export rice, silk, and spices and spend the profits on unparalleled luxury—painted pleasure-boats, silk sold in Europe for its weight in gold yet worn by half the population of the great cities. One village near the capital employed a hundred thousand men in silk factories. An eighteenth-century Manchu anthology gathered 48,900 poems by 2,300 poets into thirty volumes; the Imperial Library grew to 54,000 volumes. Contemporaries called China the most powerful, enlightened, and best-governed empire on earth.
Ming Huang ruled for some forty years, a bundle of contradictions: he wrote poetry, abolished capital punishment, reformed the courts, founded a college of music, and began like a Puritan, closing silk factories and forbidding the palace ladies jewelry. He ended like an epicurean. At sixty he met Yang Kwei-fei, twenty-seven and for ten years the concubine of his eighteenth son; corpulent and wearing false hair, she ruled him through caprice and insolence, installing five families of relatives in sinecures and placing power in the hands of her corrupt brother Yang Kuo-chung. The Tatar courtier An Lu-shan, who also loved her, was promoted to command the finest armies of the north, proclaimed himself emperor, and marched on Ch’ang-an. The emperor deserted his capital; the escorting soldiers mutinied, slew the Yang family, and killed Yang Kwei-fei before the monarch’s eyes. Ming abdicated; the rebels sacked Ch’ang-an and slaughtered its people, and thirty-six million are said to have died in the rebellion. An Lu-shan was killed by his son, who was killed by a general, who was killed by his son. By 762 the turmoil wore itself out; the broken emperor returned to his ruined capital and died a few months later.
Li Po and the Poets
When Korean ambassadors brought messages in a dialect no minister could read, and the emperor threatened to suspend all appointments unless they were deciphered within three days, a minister recommended “a poet of great merit, called Li.”
The Apparatus of a Great Work
The final stretch of the volume is not narrative at all but the scaffolding that holds the whole edifice together: the bibliography and the notes. Here the reader sees the immense range of reading behind the story — an alphabetical roll of authors and titles stretching from Carlyle and Edward Carpenter through the Chambers, Childe, Chirol, and the Chinese classics of Chu Hsi, Confucius, and Mencius, down through Darwin, Das Gupta, Deussen, and the Dhalla volume on Zoroastrian civilization. The list runs on through Frazer and Freud, Gandhi’s own story, the Chinese histories of Giles and Gowen and Granet, Herodotus and Hippocrates, the Egyptology of Erman and Maspero and Petrie, the Sanskrit scholarship of MacDonell and Monier-Williams and Max Muller, the Japanese studies of Murdoch and Nitobé, and the philosophy of Nietzsche, Plato, and Radhakrishnan. Each entry carries its author, title, and publication details, a quiet ledger of the sources from which the civilization was reconstructed.
Notes by Chapter
After the bibliography comes the second apparatus: chapter-by-chapter endnotes giving specific page references back into those works. This is the machinery of accountability, the place where every assertion in the preceding narrative can be traced to a printed page. The reader who has followed the story from the first cities to the modern age can here follow the author’s own footsteps through his library.
The Index
The volume closes with its index, and the index is itself a curious epitome of the whole enterprise. It opens with Abraham and Absalom, son of Solomon, and runs through Abu Shahrein and Abu Simbel, the Achaemenid dynasty and the Acheulean culture, Achilles and Adam’s Bridge, Adapa and the Admonitions of Ipuwer, Adonai and Adonis. Thematic headings gather the scattered evidence: Adultery is broken down by culture — primitive societies, Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea, India, China, Japan — and Agriculture is likewise subdivided from the primitive and prehistoric through Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, India, China, and Japan. So the index recapitulates in miniature the book’s method: the same human concerns tracked across every civilization it has surveyed.
From Ahab to Akbar
The roll of names continues: Ahab, king of Israel, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew; Ahimsa and Ahriman and Ahura-Mazda; the Ajanta caves and the Ajur-Veda; Akahito the Japanese poet and Akbar the Mogul emperor, with the Ain-i Akbari and the Akbar Nama following after. The entries march alphabetically toward the cutoff at Gandhi, Mohandas — the index breaking off mid-name, as indexes do, at the edge of the page. It is a fitting terminus: the story that began with the first cities of Sumer ends in an alphabetical list still pointing forward, the record of a civilization’s self-examination left open at the letter G.
What Holds the Whole Together
The introduction’s five elements function as the book’s working anatomy, and every later chapter is a test of them. Durant’s account of morals is the most compressed and the most revealing. Conventions are expedients; customs are conventions that survived generations of trial and error; morals are the customs a group considers vital to its welfare. In societies without written law these vital customs govern everything, and long repetition turns them into second nature — the fear and shame that become conscience, which Durant, following Darwin, calls the most impressive distinction between men and animals. Morality, on this account, is the cooperation of the part with the whole, and civilization is impossible without it. Marriage illustrates the method: Durant defines it as the association of mates for the care of offspring, notes that some birds practice divorceless monogamy and that orangutans and gorillas live in families, and concludes that marriage is older than man. He then walks through the experiments — temporary unions among the Bushmen and Damaras, the Hawaiian word for marriage meaning “to try,” group marriage in Tibet, the levirate — before arguing that individual marriage arose from property: the male’s wish for cheap slaves and for heirs of his own body.
The same unsentimental eye governs the political chapters. Durant treats the state as an organ of order that must be paid for, and he is candid about what the payment buys. Egyptian engineering, he says, surpassed the Greeks, the Romans and pre-industrial Europe, yet machinery stayed rare because muscle was cheap; eight hundred rowers in twenty-seven boats could draw a barge carrying two obelisks. The scribe, “whose food is paper and whose blood is ink,” consoles himself by writing essays on the hardships of manual labor. Hammurabi’s laws speak in the king’s own voice — the strong shall not oppress the weak, justice shall be given to the orphan and the widow — while the same king gilds his authority with temples and a granary for the gods, an investment Durant calls an astute one, expected to yield steady returns in awed obedience. And the Delhi sultans who ground India down are shown drafting rules for the purpose, collecting half the gross produce where native rulers took a sixth, on the theory that Hindus would never submit until reduced to poverty. Durant draws the lesson without flinching: eternal vigilance is the price of civilization.
A Historian’s Conscience
The book’s honesty about its own limits is part of its character. Durant doubts that an Occidental mind can ever fully understand the Orient; eight years of study and travel only convinced him that a lifetime would not suffice. He anticipates the orthodox Jew’s impatience with his pages on Yahveh, the Hindu metaphysician’s grief at his scratching of Indian philosophy, the Chinese and Japanese sage’s smile at his selections from Far Eastern literature. He names the scholars who corrected him — Harry Wolfson on Judea, Ananda Coomaraswamy on India, H. H. Gowen and Upton Close on China and Japan — and notes that Coomaraswamy revised the India section without endorsing its conclusions. He quotes the thirteenth-century Tai T’ung, who said that had he awaited perfection his History of Chinese Writing would never have been finished.
That humility sits beside real moral seriousness. The chapter on Judea finds the greatest commandment not among the Ten but buried in Leviticus — thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself — and calls the code a priestly Utopia rather than a description of Jewish life, yet credits it with giving the Jews, in Heine’s phrase, a portable fatherland through two thousand years of wandering. The reading of Job is exact and moving: a book written perhaps during the Exile, with a prologue in heaven added to take the scandal out, in which the patient man breaks, calls God his Adversary, and receives everything but an answer. Durant’s Assyria ends with Ashurbanipal’s last tablet, which asks of Ecclesiastes and Job why sickness and misery befall a king who did well by god and man, and with the reflection that Assyria’s vitality was drawn too rashly from abroad, its victories killing off the strongest and bravest while the infirm survived to multiply.
The Book’s Long Shadow
Our Oriental Heritage belongs to a genre that has largely vanished: the single-handed, multi-volume history of everything, written for readers rather than specialists. Its influence lies less in any single judgment than in the scale of the attempt and the temper behind it. Durant writes as a philosopher who happens to need facts, and he says so — the history of civilization shares philosophy’s presumptuousness, a fragment expounding the whole, having no rational excuse and at best a brave stupidity. Readers who came to the series over the following decades came, in large part, for that temper: the willingness to weigh Hammurabi’s justice against his propaganda, to admire Egyptian linen while noting the strikes of unpaid workmen, to see in the linga worship of Shiva a symbolism whose obscenity was largely in the eye of the Western visitor — Gandhi, Durant notes, first learned from a missionary book that the Shivalingam had any obscene significance at all. The series was conceived as an inheritance to be understood, and Durant hoped his contemporaries would grow old with him while learning, and that the volumes would help their children know what they had been given.
