The Decline and Fall of Civilisations
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109 Stobaeus, iv, 24, 14.
110 Rodney Stark, 117.
111 Tenney Frank, 1916, 704-705.
112 Ibid.
113 H. Trevor-Roper, 47.
114 Richard Hodges and William Whitehouse, 40-42.
115 Rodney Stark, 156.
116 Ibid., 118.
117 Ibid., 119.
118 Ibid., 121.
119 Ibid., 121.
120 Ibid., 127.
121 A. M. Duff, 200-201.
122 Frank, 705.
123 Duff, 205-206.
124 C. Northcote Parkinson,), 100-101.
125 Ibid., 100.
126 Michael Bamshad, et al., 994–1004.
127 Ibid.
128 David Frawley, 261-62.
129 Bhagavad Gita, 18: 41-48.
130 Vyasa, Mahabharata “The Lonely Encounter”, 215.
131 Cox, 79.
132 A. Ghosh (ed.) An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology, Vol. 1 “Skeletal Remains”, 317-318.
133 S. S. Sarakar, “Aboriginal Races of India”, Bulletin of the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, 1964 (i), cited by Ghosh, 318.
134 Anthony Esler, 1992; William McNeill, 1997; 1989.
135 Navaratna S. Rajaram, 1995.
136 M. N. Vahia and N. Yadav, 2011, 27-28.
137 Ibid., 31.
138 Ghosh, 317.
139 Ibid., 318.
140 Kenneth R. Kennedy, “Skulls, Aryans, and Flowing Drains: The Interface of Archaeology and Skeletal Biology in the Study of the Harappan Civilization”, in Possehl, 291.
141 M. N. Vahia and N. Yadav.
142 Ibid., 38.
143 Ibid., 33.
144 Ibid., 38.
145 J. M. Kenoyer, 2008, 183-208.
146 M. N. Vahia and N. Yadav, op. cit., 33.
147 A. Khan and C. Lemmen, 5.
148 Ibid., 6.
149 Ibid., 7.
150 Ibid.
151 Ibid.
152 Sailendra Nath Sen, 148.
153 Ibid., 150.
154 Ibid., 158.
155 Ibid., 159-160.
156 Ibid., 166.
157 Ibid., 152.
158 Ibid., 154.
159 Ibid., 168.
160 Ibid., 171.
161 Ibid., 227.
162 Ibid., 209.
163 Ibid., 227.
164 Ibid., 241.
165 Emeritus Professor of History, University of Calcutta, Senior Research Fellow, Indian Council of Historical Research.
166 Sailendra Nath Sen, 223.
167 S. R. Goyal, A History of the Imperial Gupta (1967), 368, quoted by Sen, 223.
168 Ashvini Agrawal, 264.
169 P. N. Chopra, 174.
170 Matthias Krings, et al, 1173.
171 L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, et al, 1994.
172 Ana M. Gonzalez, et al., 8: 223.
173 Johanna Granville, 472.
174 Fayid Atiya, 2006.
175 R. K. Jones and J. Jerman, 2014, 46(1):3–14.
176 A. H. Gardiner, 9.
177 Ibid., 10.
178 Ibid., 11.
179 Ibid., 11.
180 Ibid/, 102.
181 Ibid., 13.
182 Ibid., 97.
183 Ibid., 8.
184 “The Prophesy of Nefer-rohu”, translated by John A. Wilson, 1973.
185 E. Esteban, et al., 2004, 31(2): 202–212.
186 Steven L. Danver, 23.
187 Stanley Lane-Poole, 1886, X.
188 Ibid.
189 Ibid., XI.
190 Ibid., XII.
191 Muhammad Ibn Khalud, The Muqaddimah, Franz Rosenthal, 24.
192 Julius Evola, 2003.
193 M. Ibn Khalud, 12.
194 Oswald Spengler, The Decline…, Vol. II, p. 184.
195 M. Ibn Khaldun, 366.
196 Ibid., 107.
197 Ibid.
198 Misbah Islam, 2008, 45.
199 Hadith 54: 13.
200 Exodus 18.
201 Deuteronomy 7.
202 Ibid., 20:14.
203 Ibid., 20:18.
204 Ibid., 21:10-14.
205 Jeremiah 1: 16.
206 Ibid., 2: 8-9.
207 Ibid., 5: 31.
208 Ibid., 6: 13-16.
209 Richard A. Diehl, 1989, 11.
210 Sarah C. Clayton, 2016, 107.
211 Richard A. Diehl, 14.
212 Ibid., 12.
213 Ibid., 13.
214 Ibid.
215 Ibid., 14.
216 Ibid., 16.
217 See for example, fig. 7 (c and q), “The Glyphic Corpus in the Cacaxtla Murals”, Janet Berlow, “Early Writing in Central Mexico”, in Richard A. Diehl, Teotihuacan during the Coyotlatelco Period, 24.
218 William T. Sanders et al, “Pre-Columbian Civilizations: Andean Civilization”.
219 Paul Barton, “Black Civilizations of Ancient America”.
220 Based on the genetic affinities between South American and Polynesian chickens, more recent DNA studies have shown the theory to be incorrect. Roff Smith, “Chick DNA Challenges Theory that Polynesians Beat Europeans to the Americas”, 2014.
221 Thor Heyerdahl, 1952.
222 Heyerdahl, plate XX: 1, “clay head from Tres Zapotes, Vera Cruz, Mexico.
223 William T. Sanders et al.
224 Ibid.
225 Ibid.
226 Ibid.
227 William T. Sanders (1926-2008), was pre-eminent in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. See: Joyce Marcus, 2011; http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/sanders-william-t.pdf
228 William T. Sanders et al, op cit.
229 Town merchants.
230 Ronald E. Dolan and Robert L. Worden, 1994, “Togukawa”.
231 Scholars of Dutch learning.
232 Dolan and Worden.
233 Ibid.
234 Ibid.
235 Ibid., “The Meiji Restoration”.
236 Ibid., “Foreign Relations”.
237 Ibid., “The Development of Representative Government”.
238 Ibid., “World War II and the Occupation”.
239 Ibid., “Values and Beliefs”.
240 Ibid.
241 Ibid., “The Public Sphere Order and Status”.
242 Ibid.
243 Amaury de Riencourt, 112.
244 Ibid.
245 D. T. Suzuki, Japanese Spirituality 18-19.
246 Alex Kerr, 2002, Chapter I.
247 K. R. Bolton, “Origins of the Japanese-Amercian War: A Conflict of Free Trade vs. Autarchy”.
248 J. A. Heese, 1971.
249 J.S. Bergh (ed.), R. T. J. Lombard, 1988.
250 M. J. Kotze, 2001.
251 For example, Dr. William L. Pierce, “The Black Man’s Gift to Portugal”, 1971.
252 Carleton S. Coon, 1939, XI: 15.
253 Charles Bloomberg, 1990, 221.
254 D. H. Akensen, 1992, 80.
255 Quoted by Akensen, 80.
256 Ibid.
257 Akensen, 303.
258 Ibid., 73.
259 Ibid., 308.
260 Ibid.
261 William Beinart, 2001, 190.
262 Christopher S. Wren, “A Secret Society of Afrikaners Helps to Dismantle Apartheid”, 1990.
263 E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, 1914, 17.
264 Empress Dowager.
265 First Manchu Emperor.
266 Backhouse and Bland, 18.
267 Ibid., 166-167.
268 Ibid., 169.
269 Ibid.
270 Ibid., 172.
271 Ibid., 232.
272 Ibid., 239.
273 Ibid., 249.
274 K’an Hsi, “Decree to the Nation”, Backhouse and Bland, 261.
275 Backhouse and Bland, 291.
276 Ibid., 310.
277 Ibid., 319.
278 Ibid.
279 Imperial Mandate of Ch’ien Lung to King George III [1], Backhouse and Bland, 324-325.
280 Imperial Mandate of Ch’ien L
ung to King George III [2], Ibid., 330.
281 Ibid.
282 Ibid., 330-331.
283 Ibid., 334-335.
284 Ibid., 390.
285 Ibid., 405.
286 Ibid., 406.
287 Ibid., 407.
288 Ibid., 409.
289 Ibid., 500-508.
290 Chiang Kai-shek, 1947, 42.
291 Ibid., 48.
292 Ibid., 49.
293 Ibid.
294 Ibid., 93.
295 Ibid., 93-94.
296 Ibid., 96-97.
297 Amaury de Riencourt, 139-146.
298 Chiang Kai-shek, 97.
299 Ibid., 98.
300 Ibid., 100.
301 Ibid., 92.
302 Jung Chang and Join Halliday, 2005, 342.
303 Ibid., 345.
304 Ibid.
305 Ibid., 540-541.
306 Ibid., 541.
307 Ibid., 542.
308 Amaury de Riencourt, 298-299.
309 Ibid., 300.
310 Louisa Lim, 2010.
311 “Preparing for China’s urban billion”, McKinsey Global Inst., 2009.
312 Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party Commentary 6.
313 Ibid.
314 Ibid.
315 Ibid.
316 From the Communist Internationale anthem. The Chinese translation literally means: “There has never been a saviour, and we do not rely on God either; to create human happiness, we rely entirely on ourselves.” Footnote 27, Ibid.
317 Nine Commentaries…, Commentary 6.
318 Ibid. Numerous examples are given of the destruction of temples, manuscripts and relics.
319 Ibid.
320 Ibid.
Birth of The West
In his study of Rome’s social history sociologist Rodney Stark wondered how the Empire survived as long as it did, and came to the conclusion that it did so only through the continual importation of barbarians and semi-barbarians. Far then from being a threat, the “barbarians” were seen as a means by which Rome might make good manpower shortages. The problem was that no sooner had the latter settled within the imperial frontiers than they adopted Roman vices. By the end of the first century, the only groups in the Empire that were increasing by normal demographic process were the Christians and the Jews, and these two were immune from the contagion of Roman decadence.1
Rome’s adoption of Christianity in the fourth century may have had as one of its major goals the halting of the Empire’s population decline. Christians had large families and were noted for their rejection of infanticide and abortion. In legalising Christianity Constantine may have hoped to reverse the population trend, where imperial decrees on marriage and children had not. Constantine was also recognising the inevitable. By the late third century Christians were a majority in areas of the East, particularly of Syria and Asia Minor, and with the Jews were the only groups registering an increase in many other areas. By the fourth century Jews formed up to one tenth of the Empire’s population. It would appear that regardless of Christianity’s legal status, Rome would inexorably become Christian.
Did Christianisation halt the decline of Rome? Many such as Nietzsche asserted that Christianity destroyed Rome. Christianity is said to have sapped the martial ethos of the Roman, with its doctrine of worldly renunciation and pacifism. Yet when was Christian Rome ever pacifistic and otherworldly? Rome had been in the process of moral decay for centuries, as we have seen. Christianisation was a symptom, not a cause. But did Christianisation as a symptom aggravate the fall of Rome, or place it again at the centre of a new culture that would become just as imperial, just as martial, and would surpass the Classical Roman in its learning, heroism, conquest, and arts, marching behind Constantine’s motto: “In hoc signo vinces”?
Although Rome was sacked by the Goths and by the Vandals, by 476 A.D. the Western Empire was officially dissolved, neither sought to destroy the culture they had found despite the connotations of the word “vandal”. By this time, over the course of a century, Germanic tribes comprised the majority of the Roman legions, the officer corps and many of Rome’s citizenry. Eroc (Crocus), chief of the Alamanni, put his formidable forces behind the proclamation of Constantine as Emperor. During the mid-6th century, two decades of war between Byzantines and Goths reduced Rome to ruins, and even the surrounding countryside was uninhabitable.
By 579 the Senate had ceased to function. Commerce had stopped. Rome “had become a village housed in the vast and crumbling ruins of antiquity, a village ministering to the wants of its bishop, the custodian of an immense historical museum living on the trade of pious tourists who, as the centuries wore on, began flocking to the eternal city from the wilds of the newborn West”.2 The Germanic Lombards settled in multitudes, and established a northern kingdom, while the Franks established their authority over Gaul. These would become the foundation for The West. Clovis, the King of the Franks, converted to Catholicism. In 751 Pepin’s claim to the throne of the Franks was recognised by Pope Boniface. He became the first “king of Europe”.
Already under Charles Martel (686-741) the Christian armies fighting the Arabs in 732 AD were being called “European” in the Chronicle of Isidore of Spain. The empire of Charlemagne (AD 768-814) is named “Europe” by the contemporary chroniclers. In 755 the priest Cathwulf praised Charlemagne as chosen by God, and ruling over “the glory of the empire of Europe”.3
In 799 Angilbert, Charlemagne’s son-in-law and the Court poet, described the Emperor as “the father of Europe” – Rex, pater Europae.4 The “Kingdom of Charles” was called “Europa” in the Annals of Fuld. Alcuin (735-804), master of the palace school, theologian and Court rhetorician, called this “the continent of faith”.
Christian Visigothic Spain became a centre of High Culture. Christianity provided the catalyst for a Romano-Gothic and Frankish synthesis from which emerged Western Culture. This Western Culture was not Roman or Jewish; it was a unique, self-contained, independently flowering culture-organism, fertilised on the prior Roman and Gothic landscape, but growing up as a new species.
Because of the fracturing of Western thinking during the Renaissance, since that time we have been taught that the “progress of man” has struggled to overcome the superstition of the so-called “Dark Ages”. The Western Medieval or “Gothic” era is regarded as a low-point in “human history”, overcome by the Enlightenment, thanks to Greek, Roman, Arab, and Chinese learning. Very little of merit is accorded to Western originality. Indeed, the “Gothic” era was so named during the Renaissance because the Goths were regarded as primitives. As we have seen, Giambattista Vico, writing during the “Age of Enlightenment”, pointed out that the “reasonable man” as he called the rationalist mentality emerging during his time, worshipped his “reason” at the expense of the imaginative that was the creative impulse in man. Hence, what is disparaged as the “Dark Age” of superstition was in reality the formative stage of the “Spring epoch”, the High Culture of The West, during which the imaginative impulse flourished.
Western Civilisation was synonymous with Christendom, as was “Europe”. The Faith defined one’s identity vis-à-vis “the other” – Jew, Mongol, Muslim. Any such concept as “Judaeo-Christianity” was an unthinkable blasphemy. As Hilaire Belloc wrote: “Europe is the faith”.5 The Christianity that leavened the tribes of Europe shaped a unique ethos, art, architecture, and science that is not a hybrid of anything. What was unique about all of this was that it aspires heavenward, its symbol pure, infinite space, described by Oswald Spengler as the Westerner’s “Faustian soul”: the spires of its Gothic Cathedrals, the soaring of its sacred organ music, the perspective of its landscape painting, its exploration, its astronomy, its calculus…
The figure of the Gothic Christ was not that of the “pale Galilean” of Swinburne’s imagination.6 He was a warrior-king. The warrior Christ was at the beginning of the Western culture-organism, depicted in the 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem “Dream of the Roo
d,” where the self-sacrificing hero hangs upon the “rood” (rod, crucifix or tree) Odin-like for the sake of others:
…The young hero stripped himself – he, God Almighty –
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.
I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth, fall to earth’s fields, but had to stand fast.
Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King,
Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.
With dark nails they drove me through: on me those sores are seen, open malice-wounds. I dared not scathe anyone.
They mocked us both, we two together.
All wet with blood I was, poured out from that Man’s side, after ghost he gave up.
Much have I born on that hill of fierce fate.
I saw the God of hosts harshly stretched out.
Darknesses had wound round with clouds the corpse of the Wielder, bright radiance; a shadow went forth, dark under heaven.
All creation wept,
King’s fall lamented. Christ was on rood. …
The following century the metamorphosis of Christianity had proceeded to the extent that the Gospels were placed in a European setting. The Galileans became the “Northern people”, the Jews of Jerusalem the evil “Southern people”. This was the Heliand, the earliest German epic, an account of the “Saxon saviour”. With Jesus as the son of a warrior chief, and his band of twelve warriors, Heliand, states the translator, Professor G. Ronald Murphy, “created a unique cultural synthesis between Christianity and Germanic warrior society - a synthesis that would plant the seed that would one day blossom in the full-blown culture of knighthood and become the foundation of medieval Europe”.7 Here the key word is synthesis in making the Gospels the “foundation of medieval Europe”; the Europe of Gothic High Culture. The Lord ’s Prayer in Heliand appeals to “good Chieftain”. The betrayal by Judas “is made more serious by making it an act of betraying one’s own family chieftain, to whom one was bound by blood and absolute loyalty”.8
Interpreting the Gospel of Luke on the taking of Jesus in Gethsemane by the Romans, Christ’s followers are warriors, willing to lay down their lives for their chieftain. However Jesus must fulfil his fate or wyrd. Simon Peter, a mighty, noble swordsman cannot restrain his anger at the “enemy clan” and strikes their priest:
“Christ’s warrior companions saw warriors coming up the mountain making a great din
Angry armed men. Judas the hate filled man was showing them the way.
The enemy clan, the Jews, were marching behind.