The Penguin History of the World

It is too early to speak of the interplay of Asia and Europe, but there are few more striking examples of the interplay of reciprocal influences which marks the end of the ancient world. We can mark an epoch. Right across the Old World, Persia suddenly pulled peoples into a common experience. Indians, Medes, Babylonians, Lydians, Greeks, Jews, Phoenicians and Egyptians were for the first time all governed by one empire whose eclecticism showed how far civilization had already come. The era of civilization embodied in distinct historical entities was over in the Middle East. Too much had been shared, too much diffused for the direct successors of the first civilizations to be any longer the building blocks of world history. Indian mercenaries fought in the Persian armies; Greeks in those of Egypt. City-dwelling and literacy were widespread through the Middle East. Men lived in cities around much of the Mediterranean, too. Agricultural and metallurgical techniques stretched even beyond that area and were to be spread further as the Achaemenids transmitted the irrigation skill of Babylon to Central Asia and brought rice from India to be planted in the Middle East. When Asian Greeks came to adopt a currency, it would be based on the sexagesimal numeration of Babylon. The base of a future world civilization was in the making.

Book Three

  THE CLASSICAL AGE

Measured in years, more than half the story of civilization is over by about 500 BC. We are still nearer to that date than were the men who lived then to their first civilized predecessors. In the 3,000 or so years between them, humanity had come a long way; however imperceptibly slow the changes of daily life in them had been, there is an enormous qualitative gap between Sumer and Achaemenid Persia. By the sixth century BC, a great period of foundation and acceleration was already over. From the western Mediterranean to the coasts of China a variety of cultural traditions had established themselves. Distinct civilizations had taken root in them, some firmly and deeply enough to survive into our own era. Some of them lasted, moreover, in gradually evolving forms, for hundreds or even thousands of years. Virtually isolated, they contributed little to mankind’s shared life outside their own areas, but they are of great importance in showing the extent of the possible in human achievement.