Page 460 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Beginning of an Era 397

The millennium ends with the sound of nations warring in
the night, with a Dark Age following upon the enlightened im­
perial brilliance of the Bronze Age. There is little to suggest that
in less than five hundred years a Persian Empire will stretch
from the Dardanelles and the borders of Libya as far as India;
and in Greece sculpture and rhetoric, philosophy and architec­
ture and lyric poetry and dramatic art will be approaching
heights that have still not been surpassed; and in Palestine and
India and China three of the great living religions of the world
will already be flourishing. There is little to suggest it—but there
is something.
In China, for example, the Duke of Chou is, even as the
millennium ends, formulating a philosophy which Confucius
himself regarded as the foundation of his system of ethics, a
philosophy which for the first time suggests that man must look
in his own heart to know what he should do.
In India the Aryan invaders have by now settled down into
the clusters of warring principalities such as are portrayed in the
Mahabharata. It is not apparently a society conducive to philo­
sophical meditation. But already it is clear that the extrospec-
tive religion of the steppes, with its anthropomorphic gods, is giv­
ing way to another religion with other gods, which can hardly
have come from any source other than tire overwhelmed Indus
valley civilization. And this religion contains the idea of the
cycle of lives and a soul striving through many existences towards
an ill-defined perfection. It is a religion fraught with possibilities
for the future.
The Israelites have long been monotheists. They were in
Egypt in Akhenaten’s time, and his doomed experiment may
after all have influenced the future. The idea of a single, invisible,
and universal God is a new factor of quite incalculable potency.
North of Israel, at the end of the millennium the Phoeni­
cians on the Lebanese coast are beginning to reopen the sea­
ways to trade. Their ships are venturing out towards the west­
ern Mediterranean and the almost mythical Straits of Gibraltar,
which are the gateway to the outer world. And they are thinking
seriously of founding a colony at a place they will call Carthage,
on the coast of Tunisia. And they have invented that insignificant

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