708 RENAISSANCES

was a proficiency in the Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and
Latin classical languages and literatures.

The canonized dead language, which thus opens the door to a career in
the public service in the political life of a society which has taken to
cultivating this element of an extinct antecedent culture, may once have
served as an official language of the antecedent civilization's universal

by Ts'in She Hwang-ti had subsequently served as the official language
of the Empire of the Ts'in and Han before being given the status of a
classical language in a latter-day Far Eastern World. Latin and Ancient
Greek had served as the official languages of the Roman Empire before
Ancient Greek in Orthodox Christendom, and both Ancient Greek and
Latin in the Western World, were canonized and cultivated as classical.
Sumerian and Akkadian had served as the official languages of the
Empire of the Four Quarters, from the days of its Sumerian founder
Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur down to the days of its Amorite
restorer Hammurabi of Babylon, before becoming classical in the eyes of
a latter-day Babylonic Society. A Sanskrit that had been brought back
into currency in an Indie World by a feat of linguistic archaism1 had sub-
sequently served as the official language of the Guptan Empire before
being adopted as classical by a latter-day Hindu Society.

This use of a language as the official language of a universal state can
never overlap chronologically with its eventual apotheosis as a classical
language in the life of an affiliated society, since a universal state is
always carried to destruction in the final dissolution of the disintegrating
society that, in its last phase, has come to be embodied politically in an
oecumenical empire of this type,2 and therefore a language that has once
served as the official language of a universal state is bound to have lost
this function before gaining the status of a classical language as the result
of a linguistic and literary renaissance in the life of an affiliated society
that has come to birth eventually after a social interregnum. On the other
hand the use of a language as the liturgical language of a universal church
may well overlap chronologically with the use of the same language as a
classical language canonized in a renaissance, since a church, unlike a
universal state, is apt to survive the social interregnum between the dis-
solution of an old civilization and the emergence of a new one ;3 and there
are in fact a number of instances of the simultaneous cultivation of the
same language in these two different roles. Cases in point are the simul-
taneous currency of Sanskrit as the liturgical language of the Hindu
Church and as the classical language of the Hindu Civilization; of Arabic
as the liturgical language of the Islamic Church and as a classical lan-
guage of the Arabic and Iranic Muslim civilizations; of the standardized
visual form of Ancient Chinese as the liturgical language of the Taoist
and Far Eastern Mahayanian Buddhist churches and as the classical
language of the Far Eastern Civilization; of Ancient Greek as the litur-
gical language of the Greek Orthodox Christian Church and as the clas-
sical language of Modern-Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians; and of

1 See V. vi. 7S-77- 3 See I. i. 53 and VI. vii. 1-379.

3 See I. i. 56 and 59, and VII. vii. 392-419,