Our Oriental Heritage

Summary

Our Oriental Heritage is the first volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization, published by Simon & Schuster in 1935 after Durant's success with The Story of Philosophy had given him the means and the audience for a far larger project. Its title states the thesis that governs the whole series: Western civilization did not begin in Greece but inherited agriculture, writing, mathematics, astronomy, law, monotheism and much else from the older peoples of the Near East, and the civilizations of India, China and Japan deserve a place in any honest account of human achievement. The book opens with a long introduction on the establishment of civilization, in which Durant defines civilization as social order that makes cultural creation possible and then surveys its economic, political, moral and mental conditions, drawing on the anthropology of his day to describe hunting, herding, agriculture, property, the family, marriage customs, religion, magic and the beginnings of science and art among preliterate peoples. Book One turns to the Near East: Sumer, which Durant treats as the earliest known urban civilization; Egypt from the pyramid builders through Ikhnaton's religious revolution to the later dynasties; Babylonia under Hammurabi's code; Assyria as a state organized for war; Judea, with chapters on the Hebrew prophets and the literature of the Old Testament; and Persia under Cyrus, Darius and the teaching of Zarathustra. Book Two, on India, runs from the Indus cities and the Vedic age through the Upanishads, Buddha, Mahavira, the Maurya emperors and Ashoka, the Gupta age, the Mughals and Akbar, to Hindu philosophy, literature, art and the twentieth-century movement led by Gandhi. Book Three gives China a similar range, from the classical philosophers Lao-tze, Confucius, Mo Ti and Mencius through the Han, T'ang and Sung dynasties, the poets Li Po and Tu Fu, porcelain and painting, to the upheavals that followed contact with industrial Europe. Book Four treats Japan from its myths and early emperors through feudalism, the shogunates, Zen, the arts of the tea ceremony and print, and the rapid modernization after 1868. Durant writes as an admiring generalist who traveled in Asia while preparing the book and who wished to correct the narrowness of a Europe-centered schooling. His sympathy is wide, his summaries of religions and philosophies are generous, and his judgments are often epigrammatic. The volume also reflects the scholarship of the 1920s and early 1930s: much archaeology, Sinology and Indology has been revised since, and his naturalistic account of religion treats Israel's faith as one development among others. Read with primary texts such as Hammurabi's laws, Genesis, the Gita and the Analects, it gives students a single map of the ancient and classical East before the Greek volume begins.

Plot or Argument

• Introduction: the conditions of civilization

  Durant defines civilization and analyzes its economic, political, moral and mental elements, then sketches prehistoric cultures, using the comparative anthropology of the early twentieth century to describe property, marriage, religion and the first arts.

• Book One: Sumer, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent

  Chapters on Sumer, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, the smaller peoples of the region, Judea and Persia present the Near East as the source of writing, calendars, codified law, monumental building and ethical monotheism.

• Book Two: India from the Indus to Gandhi

  Durant follows Indian history from its earliest cities through Vedic religion, the Upanishads, Buddhism and Jainism, the great empires and the Mughal conquest, then devotes long chapters to Hindu thought, literature and art before closing with the national movement of his own day.

• Book Three: China from the sages to the Republic

  The Chinese section begins with the age of the philosophers, sets Confucius beside Lao-tze and Mencius, follows the dynasties and the poets of the T'ang, describes Chinese government, art and daily life, and ends with the empire's collapse under Western and internal pressure.

• Book Four: Japan from legend to modern power

  The last book traces Japan from its foundation myths and Chinese borrowings through feudal warriors, Buddhism and Zen, drama and painting, to the Meiji transformation and Durant's concern about the nation's direction in the 1930s.

Characters

• Will Durant, author and narrator-historian

  American philosopher turned popular historian whose genial, aphoristic voice and wish to widen Western readers' horizons shape the volume.

• Hammurabi, king of Babylon

  Lawgiver whose code Durant reads as evidence of an ordered commercial society with harsh but systematic justice.

• Ikhnaton (Akhenaten), Egyptian pharaoh

  Religious reformer whose worship of the sun disk Durant presents as a short-lived experiment in monotheism defeated by the priesthood.

• The Hebrew prophets, religious teachers of Israel and Judah

  Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah and others, whom Durant admires as moral reformers and treats as a high point of ancient ethical thought.

• Buddha, founder of Buddhism

  Teacher of the Middle Way whose renunciation and doctrine of release from craving Durant narrates from the traditional accounts.

• Ashoka, Maurya emperor

  Ruler who, after a bloody conquest, promoted Buddhist ethics through inscribed edicts; Durant holds him up as a rare example of a conscience-stricken king.

• Akbar, Mughal emperor

  Tolerant and inquisitive ruler of Hindustan whose court Durant describes at length.

• Confucius, Chinese teacher

  Moralist of family, ritual and government, given the central place in Durant's account of Chinese civilization.

• Lao-tze, traditional author of the Tao Te Ching

  Sage of quietism and the Way, set by Durant against Confucian order.

• Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian national movement

  Contemporary figure with whom Durant ends his Indian book, presented with marked admiration.

Lessons

• What a historian means by civilization

  Durant's opening chapters build a definition before telling any story: civilization needs economic provision, political order, moral tradition and the pursuit of knowledge and art, and it can perish when these fail. Students can test that definition against each society in the book and ask whether it leaves room for what the Hebrew prophets called righteousness.

  • Which of Durant's four elements of civilization does Sumer or Egypt display most clearly, and which least?
  • Does Durant's definition measure a people by its achievements or by its character, and should it do both?
  • Where in the book does a civilization begin to decay, according to Durant, and which element fails first?

• Israel among the empires

  Durant places Judea between Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia and shows a small, often conquered people producing the prophets and the Hebrew Scriptures. He writes as a naturalistic historian, so his account of how Israel's faith arose differs from the Bible's own account; students should state both accounts fairly before evaluating them.

  • What does Durant admire in the prophets, and what does he leave out of their message?
  • How does reading Judea after Assyria change the way the book of Isaiah or Jonah sounds?
  • Can a historian describe the origin of a faith without deciding whether it is true? Does Durant manage to?

• Sages of India and China compared

  The Indian and Chinese books each turn on a cluster of teachers who lived within a few centuries of one another: the Upanishadic sages and Buddha, Confucius and Lao-tze. Durant contrasts Indian concern with release from the world and Chinese concern with ordered life within it. That contrast is a generalization; students can weigh it against the texts themselves.

  • How does Durant describe the difference between the goals of Buddha and Confucius?
  • Which of these teachers speaks most directly to the duties of family life, and which to detachment from it?
  • Where would a Christian reader agree with Confucius on filial duty, and where would the Gospels ask more?

• Admiration and its limits in a survey

  Durant's sympathy for Asian civilizations was unusual in American popular writing of 1935, and it makes the book generous and readable. It also leads him at times to idealize, to rely on travelers and translators he could not check, and to compress centuries into a paragraph. Learning to profit from a guide while checking his claims is a skill students will use with every survey.

  • Choose one generalization Durant makes about India, China or Japan. What evidence would confirm or weaken it?
  • Why might a 1930s author writing on India's struggle with Britain or on Japan's rise write with particular urgency?
  • What is gained and what is lost when one author tries to tell the story of half the world in a single book?

Context

Our Oriental Heritage appeared in 1935, between the Great Depression's worst years and the Second World War, when Indian demands for self-rule, civil war in China and Japanese expansion in Manchuria were in the news. American schooling of the period generally began history with Greece and Rome, and Durant set out to correct that by starting his series in Sumer, Egypt and Asia. He drew on the archaeology of the preceding decades, including excavations at Ur and the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, and on English, French and German translations of Asian classics.

Composition

Durant began planning a history of civilization in the 1920s and traveled around the world in 1927 and again in 1930 while gathering material. His short polemical book The Case for India (1930) grew out of that second journey. Our Oriental Heritage was published by Simon & Schuster in 1935 as Volume I of The Story of Civilization, with Will Durant as sole named author; Ariel Durant's contributions were acknowledged later in the series and she was first credited on the title page of Volume VII (1961). The book remains in print and was reissued as an ebook in 2011.

Reception

The volume sold widely and established the format of the series: long, illustrated, footnoted, and addressed to general readers. Specialists in Assyriology, Indology and Sinology have regarded it as a well-written synthesis of older scholarship rather than original research, and many details have been superseded. It remains, for many readers, a first introduction to Asian history and thought and a reminder that its author read these civilizations through translation.

Comparisons

• The Code of Hammurabi

  Durant's Babylonian chapter summarizes the code's laws on commerce, marriage, physicians and builders; reading the laws themselves lets students check how fairly he characterizes their severity and their sense of proportion.

• The Epic of Gilgamesh

  Durant uses Mesopotamian literature, including the flood story, to illustrate Sumerian and Babylonian beliefs about death; the epic shows students what that literature says in its own voice about friendship and mortality.

• The Bible

  The Judean chapters treat the prophets, Job and Ecclesiastes as literature and moral teaching; comparing them with the Scriptures themselves separates Durant's historical reconstruction from the Bible's account of God's dealings with Israel.

• The Bhagavad Gita

  Durant presents the Gita as the crown of Hindu religious poetry within his survey of Indian literature; the poem lets students judge his summary of duty, devotion and detachment for themselves.

• The Art of War

  Sun Tzu belongs to the same age of competing states that produced the Chinese philosophers Durant describes; set beside the Confucian chapters it shows a different answer to how order is won.

• The Histories

  Herodotus described Egypt, Babylon and Persia as a Greek traveler, and Durant borrows many of his anecdotes; comparing them shows how a modern survey inherits, corrects and sometimes repeats ancient report.

• The Life of Greece

  The second volume picks up where this one leaves the Near East and argues that Greece built on Egyptian and Mesopotamian foundations, so the two books together carry Durant's thesis about the Eastern roots of the West.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The long introduction. Durant builds his definition of civilization from economic, political, moral and mental elements; keep a list and test each later society against it.
• Sumer and Egypt as firsts. Notice how often Durant claims that an invention or institution began in the Near East and what evidence he offers.
• The Judean chapters. Mark where Durant speaks as a historian of a people and where he passes judgment on the truth of their faith.
• Indian and Chinese sages. Compare the space and tone Durant gives to Buddha, Confucius and Lao-tze, and look for his generalizations about the Indian and Chinese mind.
• The modern endings. Note how the Indian, Chinese and Japanese books end in the 1920s and 1930s, and how the news of Durant's own day colors his conclusions.

Key terms and names

Civilization (Durant's sense)

An order of society secure enough to allow invention, art, learning and moral tradition to grow and be handed on.

Cuneiform

The wedge-shaped writing pressed into clay tablets by the Sumerians and adopted across Mesopotamia.

Ma'at

The Egyptian idea of cosmic and social order, truth and justice that the pharaoh was expected to uphold.

Upanishads

Indian philosophical dialogues on the relation of the self (atman) to ultimate reality (Brahman), which Durant treats as the source of later Hindu thought.

Li

In Confucian teaching, the ritual propriety and right conduct that govern family, court and society.

Shogunate

Rule by a hereditary military commander in Japan while the emperor remained a sacred but largely ceremonial figure.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Into which four regions does Durant divide the volume, and why does he begin with Sumer rather than with Egypt?
2. Comprehension What religious change did Ikhnaton attempt in Egypt, and why did it fail, according to Durant?
3. Comprehension What did Ashoka do after the conquest of Kalinga, and why does Durant single him out among Indian rulers?
4. Interpretation Durant calls the volume Our Oriental Heritage. What exactly does he think the West received from the East, and is the word 'heritage' fitting for India and China, which had little contact with ancient Greece?
5. Interpretation How does Durant explain the endurance of Chinese civilization through so many dynasties, and how persuasive is his emphasis on family and Confucian education?
6. Interpretation In the Judean chapters, how does Durant's description of the prophets differ from the way the prophets describe their own calling?
7. Big Question Durant measures peoples by their achievements in law, art and thought. Is that the right measure of a civilization, or must a Christian reader also ask what a people worshiped and how it treated the weak?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 11:1-9 (Scripture)

  The tower of Babel is set in the land of Shinar, the Sumer and Babylonia of Durant's first chapters, and offers a scriptural judgment on the pride of the first cities that students can set beside his admiration for them.

• Isaiah 10:5-19 (Scripture)

  Isaiah calls Assyria the rod of God's anger and then condemns its boasting; reading it beside Durant's chapter on the Assyrian war state shows the same empire seen by a historian and by a prophet.

• Acts 17:22-31 (Scripture)

  Paul's address at Athens grants that God made every nation and set the times of their dwelling, a frame for studying the many peoples in this book without either despising them or treating their gods as equal to the God who raised Christ.

• Matteo Ricci, journals of the China mission (ed. Nicolas Trigault, 1615) (Great Conversation)

  The Jesuit missionary's engagement with Confucian learning around 1600 is a historical example of a Christian reading Chinese moral teaching with respect while preaching the Gospel, which can be compared with Durant's purely secular admiration.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Civilization arises when economic security, political order, moral tradition and the pursuit of knowledge combine; these conditions first appeared in Sumer and Egypt and were developed by Babylon, Judea and Persia, from whom Greece and the West inherited; India, China and Japan built independent civilizations of comparable depth; therefore any account of human achievement that begins with Greece is incomplete, and Western readers should study the East with humility.

Rhetorical device: definition followed by illustration. Durant opens the volume by defining civilization and listing its conditions, then spends the rest of the book illustrating each condition with examples drawn from successive peoples, so that the introduction works as the major premise of the whole series.

Debate: Resolved: Durant is right that a history of civilization written for Western students should begin in the Near East and Asia rather than in Greece.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Durant admires both the Hebrew prophets and Confucius as moral teachers. Using his chapters and a short passage from each tradition, argue whether they teach the same thing about justice in government or something fundamentally different.

Comparison with The Code of Hammurabi: Read twenty laws from Hammurabi's code, including those on physicians and builders, and compare them with Durant's summary. Argue whether his description of Babylonian justice is accurate, too harsh, or too generous.

Medical Lens

Durant gives each major civilization a section on science, and medicine appears in most of them. He describes Egyptian medical papyri and specialist physicians, the regulation of surgeons' fees and penalties in Hammurabi's code alongside Mesopotamian belief in disease as demonic, Indian medicine with its surgical texts and herbal pharmacy, and Chinese medicine with its diagnosis by the pulse and its pharmacopoeia. Egyptian embalming and the Egyptian concern with the afterlife bear on the history of anatomy and of attitudes to death. The opium trade enters the Chinese narrative as part of the nineteenth-century collision with Britain. These are summaries of 1930s secondary scholarship; claims about ancient surgical achievements in particular should be checked against modern histories of medicine before citation, and the retrospective judgments are Durant's.

• Book One, Egypt, section on science and medicine

  Egyptian physicians and their specialties, the medical papyri, remedies mixing drugs and incantation, and embalming practice.

  Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors Death Dying
• Book One, Babylonia, sections on law and on science

  The code's schedule of fees and punishments for surgeons, and the Babylonian view of illness as possession treated by priestly exorcism and omens.

  Ancient Medicine Surgery Physicians Doctors
• Book Two, India, chapter on Indian science

  Classical Indian medicine, the surgical writings attributed to Sushruta, and the herbal and mineral remedies of the physicians.

  Ancient Medicine Surgery Pharmacology Poisons Humoral Medicine
• Book Three, China, sections on science and on the nineteenth-century crisis

  Chinese medicine and pharmacy, diagnosis by the pulse, and the opium trade and wars with Britain.

  Ancient Medicine Pharmacology Poisons Opium Laudanum

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Make a four-column chart for Egypt, Judea, India and China using Durant's four elements of civilization, filling each cell with one concrete example from the book and one from a primary text.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Confucius and a disciple of Buddha who meet on a road, each explaining what a good son owes his father and what a wise man owes the world.

• Essay

  Durant argues that the West owes its foundations to the East. Choose one inheritance he names, such as the alphabet, the calendar or written law, and assess how strong his evidence is.

• Fiction

  Tell the story of a scribe in Ikhnaton's new capital in the year the old priesthood returns to power, using details from Durant's Egyptian chapters.

Further Reading

• The Case for India, Will Durant

  Durant's 1930 polemic written after his journey through India.

• History Begins at Sumer, Samuel Noah Kramer

• Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, James B. Pritchard (ed.)

• The Wonder That Was India, A. L. Basham

• Sources of Chinese Tradition, Wm. Theodore de Bary (ed.)

• The Analects, Confucius