A Study of History by ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE

Author:ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 1957-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

(iii) Tares and Wheat

Our survey of encounters between contemporaries1 has made us aware that the only fruitful results of these encounters are the works of peace, and most mournfully aware that these creatively peaceful interchanges are rare indeed by comparison with the stultifying and disastrous conflicts that are apt to arise when two or more diverse cultures come into conflict with one another.

If we scan the field once more, we shall observe in the intercourse between the Indic and the Sinic civilizations one instance of a peaceful interchange which seems as fruitful as it seems at first sight free from the blight of violence. The Mahāyāna was transmitted from the Indic to the Sinic world without the two societies ever falling into war with one another; and the peacefulness of the intercourse which produced this historic effect was advertised in the traffic of Buddhist missionaries from India to China and of Buddhist pilgrims from China to India both by the sea route through the Straits of Malacca and by the land route across the Tarim Basin from the fourth to the seventh century of the Christian Era. However, when we consider the land route, which was the more frequented of the two, we find that it was opened up, not by Indic or Sinic men of peace, but by Bactrian Greek pioneers of an intrusive Hellenic society and by these Greeks’ Kushan barbarian successors, and that it was created by these men of war for purposes of military aggression—by the Greeks against the Indic Mauryan Empire and by the Kushans against the Sinic Han Empire.

If we are in search of an instance of a spiritually fruitful encounter between contemporaries in which there is no evidence of any concomitant military conflict, we shall have to look farther back into the past than the age of the civilizations of the second generation to a time before the Egyptiac civilization had been galvanized by the shock of the Hyksos invasion into an unnatural prolongation of an already complete term of life. In that preceding age, from the turn of the twenty-second and twenty-first centuries to the turn of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries B.C., an Egyptiac universal state in the shape of the Middle Kingdom and a Sumeric universal state in the shape of the Empire of Sumer and Akkad had been living side by side, and alternating in the exercise of a control over the Syrian land-bridge between them, without, so far as is known, ever falling into a clash of arms. This apparently peaceful contact was, however, apparently also sterile, and we must peer farther back still to find what we are looking for.

In the investigation of so early a chapter in the histories of civilizations the knowledge accumulated by Modern Western archaeological discovery still left the twentieth-century historian groping in an historical twilight; yet, subject to this caution, we may recall our tentative finding that the worship of Isis and Osiris, which came to play so vital a part in

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