ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 21

to have done, their proper study had been magnificently advance
by their proxies the contemporary Western orientalists1 and archaec
legists.2

Since the days of the pioneer Western Sinologist Matteo Ricci (vivebt
A.D. 1552-1610) and the pioneer Western Arabist Edward Pococke
(vivebat A.D. 1604-91), Western orientalists had been making accessibl
to contemporary Western scholars,3 and hence also to future non
Western occidentalists, an effective knowledge of all the living non
Western civilizations and all those extinct civilizations of the precedin
generation to which one or other of the living non-Western civilization
happened to be affiliated. Meanwhile, since the 2nd July, 1798, which wa
the day on which Napoleon had landed in Egypt, a new-model army o
Western archaeologists had gone into action shoulder to shoulder wit]
the Western orientalists in an intellectual crusade against a parochial
minded native Western ignorance; and within the next 134 years the]
had not only brought into clear visibility, out of the twilight, a numbe:
of extinct civilizations—the Egyptiac, Babylonic, Mexic, Yucatec, anc
Andean—which had already lain just within the ken of Western scholar-
ship thanks to a few monuments still standing above ground and a fev
fragmentary and garbled references in the known literary records oj
other civilizations; the archaeologists had also brought to light—anc
this was the crowning glory of their rapid series of sensational successes
—a number of other extinct civilizations—the Sumeric, Hittite, Minoan,
and Mayan, not to speak of an Indus Culture and a Shang Culture—
whose oblivion had been so complete that, on the eve of the momenl
when they were thus brought back within the ken of the living by ringing
strokes of pick and spade that simulated in real life the mythical music oi
a Last Trump, there was no human scholar alive who was aware that
these miraculously resurgent forgotten civilizations had ever risen and
fallen.

By these veritable miracles of intellectual faith and works, the Western
archaeologists and the Western orientalists, between them, had in-
creased the number of civilizations known to Western scholars seven-
fold, from a trio to more than a score;4 and this immense enlargement of
the West's historical horizon which had been thus achieved by Western
intellectual pioneers had been won by them, not merely for the West it-
self, but for an oecumenical Republic of Letters which was a twentieth-
century offspring of the West's assault upon the World. How did this
revolutionary transformation of a traditional intellectual situation affect
the issue between the seeker after 'laws of Nature* in the history of Man

i See I. i. 345-6.

z See I. i. 129, n. i, and 157.

3 The alertness shown by both Voltaire and Gibbon in appreciating, mastering, and
turning to account the new datum that had been brought within Western ken by the
scholarship of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Jesuit Western Sinologists
has been noticed in I. i. 346. Gibbon also made good use of the work of the pioneer
Modern Western Arabists.

* In virtue of the archaeologists' contribution to Western knowledge of historical data
of a significantly high order of magnitude, twentieth-century Western scholars enjoyed
a still greater advantage over Gibbon and Voltaire than Voltaire and Gibbon, in their
day, had enjoyed over Bossuet or over Hartmann Schedel, the compiler of the Nurem-
berg Chronicle (see p. 178, n. 5, above).