n8 RENAISSANCES

though Elamite had no affinity with any previously known language,
living or dead; and bilingual texts in Asshurbanipal's library1 enabled
philologists who had already mastered a Semitic Akkadian language to
interpret a Sumerian language which, like Elamite, had no known
affinities, but which was of much greater historical importance than
Elamite, since it proved to be the mother tongue of the creators of a
Sumeric Civilization into whose heritage the speakers of Elamite and
Akkadian had entered belatedly as proselytes.

Perhaps the most remarkable of all the triumphs of a Modern Western
Archaeology was the disinterment of civilizations that had not only been
long since dead and buried but had fallen into complete oblivion. The
Minoan Civilization and the Indus Culture, both of which had been
disinterred within the present writer's lifetime in the Old World, and the
Mayan Civilization in the New World, were the most notable cases of
dead civilizations that had suffered this total eclipse; and the recapture
of the marvellously accurate but formidably complicated Mayan system
of chronological reckoning and notation was perhaps the greatest feat of
archaeological skill so far achieved.

The vividness of the life with which these dead, buried, and in some
cases entirely forgotten civilizations were endowed in the consciousness
of a latter-day Western Society that had succeeded in recapturing them
was piquantly illustrated by the vitality of Ikhnaton's ghost, which,
after a vitai pausa2 of more than thirty-two centuries' duration, aroused
the same controversially conflicting feelings of sympathy and antipathy
in Western academic circles in the nineteenth century of the Christian
Era that the Egyptiac records testified to his having aroused in the ilesh
in Egyptiac clerical circles when he was living, reigning, and innovating
in the fourteenth century B.C.

In thus establishing a third kind of contact between one civilization
and another, the Modern Western archaeologists had done contem-
porary Modern Western historians the invaluable service of raising the
number of known civilizations to a figure at which it had become just
feasible to make this species of human society a subject of comparative
study.a

(II) THE OCCASION OF THE DRAMA OF
RENAISSANCES

'Encounters in the flesh' may be precipitated by deliberate acts of will
—inspired by aggressiveness, piety, curiosity, or other incentives—on
the part of one or more of the parties. Curiosity, for example, was the
motive of Herodotus's, Marco Polo's, and Ibn Battutah*8 travels; piety
the motive of Goethe's and Byron's, as well as Fa Hsien'a and Arculf a,
pilgrimages; aggressiveness the motive of Alexander's, Dcmetrius'a, the
Cid's, and Chingis' conquests. It is also possible, however, for these en-
counters between contemporaries in the Space-dimension to come about
by accident. For example, contact between a Tari Furora Society and a

* See pp. 53-34, above.

* Lucretius: De Rerum Naturd, Book III, II, 860 and 930.
3 See pp. 305-6, below.