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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.