ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS 219

Western Civilization's steam plough galloping in the tracks of the
Islamic Civilization's harrow.

Sir Edward Creasy, in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World* gave
me my first notion of Universal History. In the Time-dimension the
book carries the reader's mind backward as far as 490 B.C. and forward as
far as A.D. 1815, while in the Space-dimension it carries him outwards,
within that span of 2,305 years, from the Basin of the Aegean Sea across
South-Western Asia to the Panjab, across the Black Sea to the Ukraine,
and across the Atlantic Ocean to North America. Out of the fifteen
battles in Creasy's canon of historical scripture, Arbela, Metaunis,
Chalons, and Tours were the most fascinating for me. As I read, I saw
Alexander, Hannibal, Attila, and 'Abd-ar-Rahman rise in turn above
my horizon; but, while my imagination was being stirred by these
titanic figures, my mind was being educated by the intervening synopses
of events in which the author had skilfully strung his fifteen great occa-
sions along one continuous chronological thread.

The authors of four volumes of The Story of the Nations2-—all four of
them on my table on this twenty-first day of February, 1951, fifty-three
years after they first came into my hands—suddenly revealed to me,
when I was eight or nine years old, the histories of the Egyptiac, Baby-
Ionic, and Syriac civilizations simultaneously, and thereby initiated me
into a synoptic view of History which has been illuminating my study of
History since then. These four volumes had belonged to my grand-
mother Harriet Toynbee (her bookplate is in each of them), and, after
her death in A.D. 1897, they were given to my Mother because she was
the historian in the family. I remember, as if it were yesterday, catching
sight, one morning after breakfast, of this batch of unfamiliar green and
brown volumes on a familiar book-shelf. Curiosity moved me to pull
them out, and, as soon as I opened them, I found them absorbing. They
revealed to me a vista that has been widening and lengthening ever
since. My first step towards enlarging it was to buy, with savings from
my pocket money, Z. A. Ragozin's Chaldea (5th ed., 1896),* to which
the same author's Assyria had been a sequel. 'Arnold J. Toynbee,
March 1899', is inscribed in this volume in my Mother's handwriting.

1 The copy which my Father gave me in A.D. 1898 was of the forty-first edition, pub-
lished in that year (London, Bentley).

a The series was published in London by Fisher Unwin. The four volumes that
were of momentous personal importance for me were George Rawlinson's Ancient
Egypt (2nd edition, 1887); Z. A. Ragozin's Assyria (1888); Ragozin's Media, Babylon,
and Persia (1889); Arthur Oilman's The Saracevts (1887).

3 The first edition of Chaldea had been published in JU5. 1886. Notwithstanding the
title of mis book, the subject of it was not the wanderings of the Chaldaean Nomad
barbarians who had filtered into the south-western fringes of the Land of Shinar out of
the North Arabian Steppe in a Ydlfcerwanderung circa 1425-1135 B.C.; it was the
genesis and growth of a civilization that, in this Study, has beeri labelled 'the Sumeric*
after the name of the Sumerian people who originated it. The Biblical terminology *Ur
of the Chakiees* (Genesis ad. 31} had kd the pioneer Modern Western discoverers of this
long buried and forgotten culture to jump to the mistaken conclusion that the Chaldaeans
|v^ been the earliest successors of the Sumeiiaos, irretfiKl of realizing that tfiey bad been
the latest comers before the Arabs.