CHAPTER I
A.D. 600—The Middle East in Disintegration
THE POSITION that the Middle East occupies in history is
a unique one. It was there in all probability that Man,
having lived for perhaps one million years in complete
dependence on the wild vegetable and animal foods that he could
acquire by gathering and hunting, learnt by laborious trial and
error some 8,000 or so years ago to cultivate food-plants and to
domesticate certain useful animals, and so for the first time became
capable of advancing to a higher civilization. From between three
and two thousand years ago, as the map of that higher civilization
in the Middle East was beginning to burn lower, there sprang from
it two beams of dazzling light, the moral-intellectual beam of
Greek humanistic thought and the moral-spiritual beam of the
Judaeo-Christian awareness of God's Presence, which have con-
jointly illuminated Western civilization down to the present time.
There have been periods in which one of these twin lights has
shone more brightly than the other; but without the two of them
our own civilization could not have come into existence; and
where either of them is extinguished, as some men have thought to
extinguish them in the last thirty years, our witness is that the very
tissue of civilization degenerates by rapid and dreadful processes
into a malignant and swelling growth of barbarism.
Man's great step forward from food-gathering to agriculture,
his Response to a great Challenge1 presented by fundamental
changes in his natural environment, has been well set forth by
archaeologists in the last thirty years. So many learned and bril-
liant books have been written about the Greek genius, aad about
the origins and growth of our Christian Faith, that one would be
perplexed where to advise the enquiring reader to turn first for
enlightenment on these subjects. On the Silver Age of the Middle
East also, the age of the Islamic or so-called Arab Civilization,
1 cf. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, one vol. abridgement, part II,
especially 68 if.