Our Oriental Heritage

Key Takeaways

Highlights imported 2026-09-13 from Kyle’s hand-exported notes (305 highlights, 141 notes). Key takeaways and synthesis to come.

Connections

• The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time — Durant’s curated anthology of history’s pivotal ideas; a companion to the full Story of Civilization series that Our Oriental Heritage opens.
• The Lessons of History — Durant’s distillation of the patterns he found across the full eleven-volume series; the capstone argument that this first volume begins to build.
• History — tagged historical-futurism; Durant is a recurring anchor across Kyle’s reading (referenced in Read Old Books, Investing 101, and the essay-under-construction Super Uno Pluribus).

Highlights

• I have tried in this book to accomplish the first part of a pleasant assignment which I rashly laid upon myself some twenty years ago: to write a history of civilization. I wish to tell as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the contributions that genius and labor have made to the cultural heritage of mankind-to chronicle and contemplate, in their causes, character and effects, the advances of invention, the varieties of economic organization, the experiments in government, the aspirations of religion, the mutations of morals and manners, the masterpieces of literature, the development of science, the wisdom of philosophy, and the achievements of art. I do not need to be told how absurd this enterprise is, nor how immodest is its very conception; for many years of effort have brought it to but a fifth of its completion, and have made it clear that no one mind, and no single lifetime, can adequately compass this task. Nevertheless I have dreamed that despite the many errors inevitable in this undertaking, it may be of some use to those upon whom the passion for philosophy has laid the compulsion to try to see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and understanding through history in time, as well as to seek them through science in space.

  Kyle: Ballsy

• For the probability of error increases with the scope of the undertaking, and any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for a myriad merry darts of specialist critique.

  Kyle: We punish synthesis in pursuit of perfection.

• At this historic moment-when the ascendancy of Europe is so rapidly coming to an end, when Asia is swelling with resurrected life, and the theme of the twentieth century seems destined to be an all-embracing conflict between the East and the West-the provincialism of our traditional histories, which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line, has become no merely academic error, but a possibly fatal failure of perspective and intelligence. The future faces into the Pacific, and understanding must follow it there.

  Kyle: This was written in the 1930’s and yet… We’re STILL underestimating the importance of Asia.

• Meanwhile a weary author may sympathize with Tai T’ung, who in the thirteenth century issued his History of Chinese Writing with these words: “Were I to await perfection, my book would never be finished.”

  Kyle: Perfect is the enemy of good

• “I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.” (VOLTAIRE)
• Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
• It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security-a reliable supply of water and foodhe builds his huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and domesticates the dog, the ass, the pig, at last himself. He learns to work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of his race.

  Kyle: Agriculture = 1st culture

• There must be political order, even if it be so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every turn. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity. And finally there must be education-some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture.
• Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.
• It is is impossible to be scientific here; for in calling other human beings “savage” or “barbarous” we may be expressing no objective fact, but only our fierce fondness for ourselves, and our timid shyness in the presence of alien ways.
• The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears.
• With that realization man took one of the three steps that led from the beast to civilization-speech, agriculture, and writing.
• Our own words capital, chattel and cattle go back through the French to the Latin capitale, meaning property: and this in turn derives from caput, meaning head-i.e., of cattle.
• Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we, with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups.”

  Kyle: Struggle / competition = growth

• Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world.
• Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, coöperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.
• Property was the mother, war was the father, of the state.
• Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber’s grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.

  Kyle: We are loyal to the conveniences of yesterday, even romanticizing them.

• Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
• A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination-the family, the church, the school-to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for that docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the “subject”* sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the State.

  Kyle: Soft power systems

• In general the individual has fewer “rights” in natural society than under civilization. Everywhere man is born in chains: the chains of heredity, of environment, of custom, and of law. The primitive individual moves always within a web of regulations incredibly stringent and detailed; a thousand tabus restrict his action, a thousand terrors limit his will.

  Kyle: Man-made “rights”

• Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
• Marriage is older than man.
• Such love is reserved for developed civilizations, in which morals have raised barriers against desire, and the growth of wealth has enabled some men to afford, and some women to provide, the luxuries and delicacies of romance; primitive peoples are too poor to be romantic. One rarely finds love poetry in their songs. When the missionaries translated the Bible into the language of the Algonquins they could discover no native equivalent for the word love.
• Wherever, in the history of civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset in marriage, marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed with it.
• We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ according to time and place, and that it would be wise to show our historic learning by at once discarding the moral customs of our group. A little anthropology is a dangerous thing. It is substantially true that-as Anatole France ironically expressed the matter-”morality is the sum of the prejudices of a community”;” and that, as Anacharsis put it among the Greeks, if one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing would remain. But this does not prove the worthlessness of morals; it only shows in what varied ways social order has been preserved. Social order is none the less necessary; the game must still have rules in order to be played; men must know what to expect of one another in the ordinary circumstances of life.
• The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. We are warranted in concluding that morals are relative, and indispensable.
• Only with the dawn of history were a sufficient number of men and women freed from the burdens of hunger, reproduction and war to create the intangible values of leisure, culture and art.
• Part of the function of parentage is the transmission of a moral code. For the child is more animal than human; it has humanity thrust upon it day by day as it receives the moral and mental heritage of the race.
• Where food is dear life is cheap.
• To transmute greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civilization.
• The struggle for life encouraged communalism, but the struggle for property intensifies individualism.
• Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied. The morals of modern man are not unquestionably superior to those of primitive man, though the two groups of codes may differ considerably in content, practice and profession; but modern morals are, in normal times, extended-though with decreasing intensity-to a greater number of people than before.

  Kyle: Has our system of morals improved?

• Few societies have been content to rest their moral codes upon so frankly rational a basis as economic and political utility. For the individual is not endowed by nature with any disposition to subordinate his personal interests to those of the group, or to obey irksome regulations for which there are no visible means of enforcement. To provide, so to speak, an invisible watchman, to strengthen the social impulses against the individualistic by powerful hopes and fears, societies have not invented but made use of, religion.

  Kyle: Higher motivations.

• Such cases are exceptional, and the old belief that religion is universal is substantially correct. To the philosopher this is one of the outstanding facts of history and psychology; he is not content to know that all religions contain much nonsense, but rather he is fascinated by the problem of the antiquity and persistence of belief. What are the sources of the indestructible piety of mankind?

  Kyle: Something inherent in us WANTS to believe.

• From every planet and from every stone there emanates a presence that disturbs us with a sense of the multitudinousness of god-like powers, strong and feeble, great and little, moving between heaven and earth upon their secret purposes.

  Kyle: All things denote there is a good.

• Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science.
• Frazer has shown, with the exaggeration natural to a brilliant innovator, that the glories of science have their roots in the absurdities of magic. For since magic often failed, it became of advantage to the magician to discover natural operations by which he might help supernatural forces to produce the desired event. Slowly the natural means came to predominate, even though the magician, to preserve his standing with the people, concealed these natural means as well as he could, and gave the credit to supernatural magicmuch as our own people often credit natural cures to magical prescriptions and pills. In this way magic gave birth to the physician, the chemist, the metallurgist, and the astronomer.
• The priest did not create religion, he merely used it, as a statesman uses the impulses and customs of mankind; religion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of men. The priest did harm by tolerating superstition and monopolizing certain forms of knowledge; but he limited and often discouraged superstition, he gave the people the rudiments of education, he acted as a repository and vehicle for the growing cultural heritage of the race, he consoled the weak in their inevitable exploitation by the strong, and he became the agent through which religion nourished art and propped up with supernatural aid the precarious structure of human morality. If he had not existed the people would have invented him.
• Religion is not the basis of morals, but an aid to them; conceivably they could exist without it, and not infrequently they have progressed against its indifference or its obstinate resistance. In the earliest societies, and in some later ones, morals appear at times to be quite independent of religion; religion then concerns itself not with the ethics of conduct but with magic, ritual and sacrifice, and the good man is defined in terms of ceremonies dutifully performed and faithfully financed. As a rule religion sanctions not any absolute good (since there is none), but those norms of conduct which have established themselves by force of economic and social circumstance; like law it looks to the past for its judgments, and is apt to be left behind as conditions change and morals alter with them. So the Greeks learned to abhor incest while their mythologies still honored incestuous gods; the Christians practised monogamy while their Bible legalized polygamy; slavery was abolished while dominies sanctified it with unimpeachable Biblical authority; and in our own day the Church fights heroically for a moral code that the Industrial Revolution has obviously doomed. In the end terrestrial forces prevail; morals slowly adjust themselves to economic invention, and religion reluctantly adjusts itself to moral change.” The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather than to create new ones.
• In the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to individual objects or experiences sensorily-for the most part visually-remembered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of objects as distinct from their qualities. Without words as class names one might think of this man, or that man, or that man; one could not think of Man, for the eye sees not Man but only men, not classes but particular things.

  Kyle: “The limit of your language is your the limit of your world.”

• In many tribes there are no separate words for the color as distinct from the colored object; no words for such abstractions as tone, sex, species, space, spirit, instinct, reason, quantity, hope, fear, matter, consciousness, etc. Such abstract terms seem to grow in a reciprocal relation of cause and effect with the development of thought; they become the tools of subtlety and the symbols of civilization.
• They made not only for clearer thinking, but for better social organization; they cemented the generations mentally, by providing a better medium for education and the transmission of knowledge and the arts; they created a new organ of communication, by which one doctrine or belief could mold a people into homogeneous unity. They opened new roads for the transport and traffic of ideas, and immensely accelerated the tempo, and enlarged the range and content, of life. Has any other invention ever equaled, in power and glory, the common noun?
• Next to the enlargement of thought the greatest of these gifts of speech was education. Civilization is an accumulation, a treasure-house of arts and wisdom, manners and morals, from which the individual, in his development, draws nourishment for his mental life; without that periodical reacquisition of the racial heritage by each generation, civilization would die a sudden death. It owes its life to education.
• There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.
• In one sense all human history hinges upon two revolutions: the neolithic passage from hunting to agriculture, and the modern passage from agriculture to industry; no other revolutions have been quite as real or basic as these.
• This marks the appearance of one of the epochal inventions of history. Before agriculture the earth could have supported (in the rash estimate of Sir Arthur Keith) only some twenty million men, and the lives of these were shortened by the mortality of the chase and war;” now began that multiplication of mankind which definitely confirmed man’s mastery of the planet.
• We cannot properly estimate the achievements of prehistoric men, for we must guard against describing their life with imagination that transcends the evidence, while on the other hand we suspect that time has destroyed remains that would have narrowed the gap between primeval and modern man.
• Dating this end about 4000 B.C., we have a perspective in which the Age of Metals (and of writing and civilization) is a mere six thousand years appended to an Age of Stone lasting at least forty thousand years, and an Age of Man lasting a million years. So young is the subject of our history.
• Writing seems to be a product and convenience of commerce; here again culture may see how much it owes to trade. When the priests devised a system of pictures with which to write their magical, ceremonial and medical formulas, the secular and clerical strains in history, usually in conflict, merged for a moment to produce the greatest human invention since the coming of speech. The development of writing almost created civilization by providing a means for the recording and transmission of knowledge, the accumulation of science, the growth of literature, and the spread of peace and order among varied but communicating tribes brought by one language under a single state. The earliest appearance of writing marks that ever-receding point at which history begins.
• Certainly it is probable, as Aristotle thought, that many civilizations came, made great inventions and luxuries, were destroyed, and lapsed from human memory. History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved. We console ourselves with the thought that as the individual memory must forget the greater part of experience in order to be sane, so the race has preserved in its heritage only the most vivid and impressive-or is it only the best-recorded?-of its cultural experiments. Even if that racial heritage were but one tenth as rich as it is, no one could possibly absorb it all. We shall find the story full enough.
• “At that time the gods called me, Hammurabi, the servant whose deeds are pleasing, … . who helped his people in time of need, who brought about plenty and abundance, … . to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to enlighten the land and further the welfare of the people.’ (Code of Hammurabi, Prologue.)

  Kyle: Be such a man

• The “Aryans” did not establish civilization-they took it from Babylonia and Egypt. Greece did not begin civilization-it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization.
• When their civilization was already old-about 2300 B.C.-the poets and scholars of Sumeria tried to reconstruct its ancient history. The poets wrote legends of a creation, a primitive Paradise and a terrible flood that engulfed and destroyed it because of the sin of an ancient king.” This flood passed down into Babylonian and Hebrew tradition, and became part of the Christian creed. In 1929 Professor Woolley, digging into the ruins of Ur, discovered, at considerable depth, an eight-foot layer of silt and clay; this, if we are to believe him, was deposited during a catastrophic overflow of the Euphrates, which lingered in later memory as the Flood. Beneath that layer were the remains of a prediluvian culture that would later be pictured by the poets as a Golden Age.

  Kyle: Understanding this particular society leads to a great deal of understanding ourselves.

• One king, Urukagina of Lagash, was a royal reformer, an enlightened despot who issued decrees aimed at the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and of everybody by the priests.
• A system of credit existed by which goods, gold or silver might be borrowed, interest to be paid in the same material as the loan, and at rates ranging from 15 to 33% per annum.” Since the stability of a society may be partly measured by inverse relation with the rate of interest, we may suspect Sumerian business, like ours, lived in an atmosphere of economic and political uncertainty and doubt.
• Originally, it seems, the gods preferred human flesh; but as human morality improved they had to be content with animals. A liturgical tablet found in the Sumerian ruins says, with strange theological premonitions: “The lamb is the substitute for humanity; he hath given up a lamb for his life.”

  Kyle: Original lamb of God

• Since food and tools were placed in the graves with the dead, we may presume that the Sumerians believed in an after-life.” But like the Greeks they pictured the other world as a dark abode of miserable shadows, to which all the dead descended indiscriminately. They had not yet conceived heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment; they offered prayer and sacrifice not for “eternal life,” but for tangible advantages here on the earth.
• Another legend narrated how the gods had created man happy; how man, by his free will, had sinned, and been punished with a flood, from which but one man-Tagtug the weaver-had survived. Tagtug forfeited longevity and health by eating the fruit of a forbidden tree.
• Sumerian civilization may be summed up in this contrast between crude pottery and consummate jewelry; it was a synthesis of rough beginnings and occasional but brilliant mastery. Here, within the limits of our present knowledge, are the first states and empires, the first irrigation, the first use of gold and silver as standards of value, the first business contracts, the first credit system, the first code of law, the first extensive development of writing, the first stories of the Creation and the Flood, the first libraries and schools, the first literature and poetry, the first cosmetics and jewelry, the first sculpture and bas-relief, the first palaces and temples, the first ornamental metal and decorative themes, the first arch, column, vault and dome. Here, for the first known time on a large scale, appear some of the sins of civilization: slavery, despotism, ecclesiasticism, and imperialistic war. It was a life differentiated and subtle, abundant and complex. Already the natural inequality of men was producing a new degree of comfort and luxury for the strong, and a new routine of hard and disciplined labor for the rest. The theme was struck on which history would strum its myriad variations.

  Kyle: The grand contrast of civilization is all right here in embryo.

• Egypt could well afford to concede the priority of Sumeria. For whatever the Nile may have borrowed from the Tigris and the Euphrates, it soon flowered into a civilization specifically and uniquely its own; one of the richest and greatest, one of the most powerful and yet one of the most graceful, cultures in history. By its side Sumeria was but a crude beginning; and not even Greece or Rome would surpass it.
• The first real person in known history is not a conqueror or a king but an artist and a scientist-Imhotep, physician, architect and chief adviser of King Zoser (ca. 3150 B.C.). He did so much for Egyptian medicine that later generations worshiped him as a god of knowledge, author of their sciences and their arts; and at the same time he appears to have founded the school of architecture which provided the next dynasty with the first great builders in history.

  Kyle: The Primeval Polymath

• On his head is the falcon, symbol of the royal power; but even without that sign we should know that he was every inch a king. Proud, direct, fearless, piercing eyes; a powerful nose and a frame of reserved and quiet strength; it is evident that nature had long since learned how to make men, and art had long since learned how to represent them.
• When he died anarchy and dissolution ensued, the Pharaohs lost control, and feudal barons ruled the nomes independently: this alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history, as if men tired alternately of immoderate liberty and excessive order.
• Ancient civilizations were little isles in a sea of barbarism, prosperous settlements surrounded by hungry, envious and warlike hunters and herders; at any moment the wall of defense might be broken down. So the Kassites raided Babylonia, the Gauls attacked Greece and Rome, the Huns overran Italy, the Mongols came down upon Peking.
• This was the first of fifteen campaigns in which the irresistible Thutmose made Egypt master of the Mediterranean world. Not only did he conquer, but he organized; everywhere he left doughty garrisons and capable governors. The first man in known history to recognize the importance of sea power, he built a fleet that kept the Near East effectively in leash.
• Then the King retired from the battlefield, designed exquisite vases, and gave himself to internal administration. His vizier or prime minister said of him, as tired secretaries were to say of Napoleon: “Lo, His Majesty was one who knew what happened; there was nothing of which he was ignorant; he was the god of knowledge in everything; there was no matter that he did not carry out.”
• Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution; only our time has excelled it, and we may be mistaken.
• Every visitor to the Louvre has seen the statue of the Egyptian scribe, squatting on his haunches, almost completely nude, dressed with a pen behind the ear as reserve for the one he holds in his hand. He keeps record of work done and goods paid, of prices and costs, of profits and loss; he counts the cattle as they move to the slaughter, or corn as it is measured out in sale; he draws up contracts and wills, and makes out his master’s income-tax; verily there is nothing new under the sun. He is sedulously attentive and mechanically industrious; he has just enough intelligence not to be dangerous. His life is monotonous, but he consoles himself by writing essays on the hardships of the manual worker’s existence, and the princely dignity of those whose food is paper and whose blood is ink.

  Kyle: Sonnet of the Scribe

• We find no signs of any system of police; even the standing army-always small because of Egypt’s protected isolation between deserts and seas-was seldom used for internal discipline. Security of life and property, and the continuity of law and government, rested almost entirely on the prestige of the Pharaoh, maintained by the schools and the church. No other nation except China has ever dared to depend so largely upon psychological discipline.
• In this manner Egypt and Babylonia developed, more or less simultaneously, the earliest school-systems in history; not till the nineteenth century of our era was the public instruction of the young to be so well organized again.
• The stem of the papyrus plant was cut into strips, other strips were placed crosswise upon these, the sheet was pressed, and paper, the very stuff (and nonsense) of civilization, was made.
• Most of the literature that survives from ancient Egypt is written in hieratic script. Little of it remains, and we are forced to estimate it from the fragments that do it only the blind justice of chance; perhaps time destroyed the Shakespeares of Egypt, and preserved only the poets laureate.

  Kyle: How much genius has been destroyed by time and circumstance?

• O God, whosoever thou art, that didst ordain this flight, bring me again to the House (i.e., the Pharaoh). Peradventure thou wilt suffer me to see the place wherein mine heart dwelleth. What is a greater matter than that my corpse should be buried in the land wherein I was born? Come to mine aid! May good befall, may God show me mercy!

  Kyle: Home again, home again. America for me.

• Historiography, in Egypt, is as old as history; even the kings of the predynastic period kept historical records proudly. Official historians accompanied the Pharaohs on their expeditions, never saw their defeats, and recorded, or invented, the details of their victories; already the writing of history had become a cosmetic art.
• In time this language also became literary and formal, refined and precise, rigid and impeccable with conventions of word and phrase; once again the language of letters separated from the language of speech, and scholasticism flourished; the schools of Saite Egypt spent half their time studying and translating the “classics” of Ikhnaton’s day.” Similar transformations of the native tongue went on under the Greeks, under the Romans, under the Arabs; another is going on today. Panta rei-all things flow; only scholars never change.
• There are no signs of syphilis or cancer; but pyorrhea and dental caries, absent in the oldest mummies, become frequent in the later ones, indicating the progress of civilization. The atrophy and fusion of the bones of the small toe, often ascribed to the modern shoe, was common in ancient Egypt, where nearly all ages and ranks went barefoot.

  Kyle: No signs of cancer?!

• Diodorus Siculus tells us: In order to prevent sicknesses they look after the health of their body by means of drenches, fastings and emetics, sometimes every day, and sometimes at intervals of three or four days. For they say that the larger part of the food taken into the body is superfluous, and that it is from this superfluous part that diseases are engendered.
• So old is the modern saw that we live on one-fourth of what we eat, and the doctors live on the rest.

  Kyle: …is this true?

• Herodotus reports that the Egyptians “purge themselves every month, three days successively, seeking to preserve health by emetics and enemas; for they suppose that all diseases to which men are subject proceed from the food they use.” And this first historian of civilization ranks the Egyptians as, “next to the Libyans, the healthiest people in the world.”

  Kyle: Is this true / effective? Or just superstitious and weird?

• The Egyptians were the greatest builders in history.
• Religion offered motives, ideas and the inspiration; but it imposed con ventions and restraints which bound art so completely to the church that when sincere religion died among the artists, the arts that had lived on it died too. This is the tragedy of almost every civilization-that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.
• The oldest work of philosophy known to us is the “Instructions of Ptahhotep,” which apparently goes back to 2880 B.C.-2300 years before Confucius, Socrates and Buddha.
• This pessimism and scepticism were the result, it may be, of the broken spirit of a nation humiliated and subjected by the Hyksos invaders; they bear the same relation to Egypt that Stoicism and Epicureanism bear to a defeated and enslaved Greece.* In part such literature represents one of those interludes, like our own moral interregnum, in which thought has for a time overcome belief, and men no longer know how or why they should live. Such periods do not endure; hope soon wins the victory over thought; the intellect is put down to its customary menial place, and religion is born again, giving to men the imaginative stimulus apparently indispensable to life and work. We need not suppose that such poems expressed the views of any large number of Egyptians; behind and around the small but vital minority that pondered the problems of life and death in secular and naturalistic terms were millions of simple men and women who remained faithful to the gods, and never doubted that right would triumph, that every earthly pain and grief would be atoned for bountifully in a haven of happiness and peace.
• For the most part, however, Egyptian religion had little to say about morality; the priests were busier selling charms, mumbling incantations, and performing magic rites than inculcating ethical precepts. Even the Book of the Dead teaches the faithful that charms blessed by the clergy will overcome all the obstacles that the deceased soul may encounter on its way to salvation; and the emphasis is rather on reciting the prayers than on living the good life.
• In the end the connection between morality and religion tended to be forgotten; the road to eternal bliss led not through a good life, but through magic, ritual, and generosity to the priests. Let a great Egyptologist express the matter The dangers of the hereafter were now greatly multiplied, and o for every critical situation the priest was able to furnish the dead with an effective charm which would infallibly cure him. Besides many charms which enabled the dead to reach the world of the hereafter, there were those which prevented him from losing his mouth, his head, his heart; others which enabled him to remember his name, to breathe, eat, drink, avoid eating his own foulness, to prevent his drinking-water from turning into flame, to turn darkness into light, to ward off all serpents and other hostile monsters, and many others… . Thus the earliest moral development which we can trace in the ancient East was suddenly arrested, or at least checked, by the detestable devices of a corrupt priesthood eager for gain.” Such was the state of religion in Egypt when Ikhnaton, poet and heretic, came to the throne, and inaugurated the religious revolution that destroyed the Empire of Egypt.
• THE HERETIC KING

  Kyle: The sickest name.

• How manifold are thy works! They are hidden from before us, O sole god, whose powers no other possesseth. Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart While thou wast alone:

  Kyle: Awake my soul…

• This is not only one of the great poems of history, it is the first outstanding expression of monotheism-seven hundred years before Isaiah *The obvious similarity of this hymn to Psalm CIV leaves little doubt of Egyptian influence upon the Hebrew poet.
• So at last Aton grows by symbolism into a solicitous father, compassionate and tender; not, like Yahveh, a Lord of Hosts, but a god of gentleness and peace.

  Kyle: George A. Smith on Muhammad comparison?

• Had Ikhnaton been a mature mind he would have realized that the change which he had proposed from a superstitious polytheism deeply rooted in the needs and habits of the people to a naturalistic monotheism that subjected imagination to intelligence, was too profound to be effected in a little time; he would have made haste slowly, and softened the transition with intermediate steps. But he was a poet rather than a philosopher; like Shelley announcing the demise of Yahveh to the bishops of Oxford, he grasped for the Absolute, and brought the whole structure of Egypt down upon his head.

  Kyle: The body (man) rejects the spiritual again.

• Into this simple happiness came alarming messages from Syria.* The dependencies of Egypt in the Near East were being invaded by Hittites and other neighboring tribes; the governors appointed by Egypt pleaded for immediate reinforcements. Ikhnaton hesitated; he was not quite sure that the right of conquest warranted him in keeping these states in subjection to Egypt; and he was loath to send Egyptians to die on distant fields for so uncertain a cause. When the dependencies saw that they were dealing with a saint, they deposed their Egyptian governors, quietly stopped all payment of tribute, and became to all effects free. Almost in a moment Egypt ceased to be a vast Empire, and shrank back into a little state. Soon the Egyptian treasury, which had for a century depended upon foreign tribute as its mainstay, was empty; domestic taxation had fallen to a minimum, and the working of the gold mines had stopped. Internal administration was in chaos. Ikhnaton found himself penniless and friendless in a world that had seemed all his own. Every colony was in revolt, and every power in Egypt was arrayed against him, waiting for his fall. He was hardly thirty when, in 1362 B.C., he died, broken with the realization of his failure as a ruler, and the unworthiness of his race.

  Kyle: The fragility of vassal states

• Three years he gave to recovering Palestine; then he pushed on, met a great army of the Asiatic allies at Kadesh (1288 B.C.), and turned defeat into victory by his courage and leadership. It may have been as a result of these campaigns that a considerable number of Jews were brought into Egypt, as slaves or as immigrants; and Rameses II is believed by some to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

  Kyle: Moses?

• Only one human power in Egypt had excelled his, and that was the clergy: here, as everywhere in history, ran the endless struggle between church and state.
• Under such a policy it was only a matter of time before the kings would become the servants of the priests. In the reign of the last Ramessid king the High Priest of Amon usurped the throne and ruled as openly supreme; the Empire became a stagnant theocracy in which architecture and superstition flourished, and every other element in the national life decayed. Omens were manipulated to give a divine sanction to every decision of the clergy. The most vital forces of Egypt were sucked dry by the thirst of the gods at the very time when foreign invaders were preparing to sweep down upon all this concentrated wealth.
• The effect or remembrance of what Egypt accomplished at the very dawn of history has influence in every nation and every age. “It is even possible,” as Faure has said, “that Egypt, through the solidarity, the unity, and the disciplined variety of its artistic products, through the enormous duration and the sustained power of its effort, offers the spectacle of the greatest civilization that has yet appeared on the earth.” We shall do well to equal it.
• Through the abundance of the rivers and the toil of many generations of men, Babylonia became the Eden of Semitic legend, the garden and granary of Western Asia.

  Kyle: Geography shapes destiny.

• It is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay. For wealth produces ease as well as art; it softens a people to the ways of luxury and peace, and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths.

  Kyle: Weak men -> bad times -> strong men -> good times cycle

• Trades multiplied and became diversified and skilled, and as early as Hammurabi industry was organized into guilds (called “tribes”) of masters and apprentices.
• But for the most part the law was written with an eye to protecting property and preventing losses it was a principle of Babylonian law that no man had a right to borrow money unless he wished to be held completely responsible for its repayment; hence the creditor could seize the debtor’s slave or son as hostage for an unpaid debt, and could hold him for not more than three years. A plague of usury was the price that Babylonian industry, like our own, paid for the fertilizing activity of a complex credit system.
• What modern city is so well governed pay that it would dare to offer such reimbursements to the victims of its negligence? Has the law progressed since Hammurabi, or only increased and multiplied?
• The power of the king was limited not only by the law and the aristocracy, but by the clergy. Technically the king was merely the of the city god. Taxation was in the name of the god, and found its way directly or deviously into the temple treasuries. The king was not really king in the eyes of the people until he was invested with royal authority by the priests, “took the hands of Bel,” and conducted the image of Marduk in solemn procession through the streets. In these ceremonies the monarch was dressed as a priest, symbolizing the union of church and state, and perhaps the priestly origin of the kingship.

  Kyle: Separation of church and state was a break with standard operating procedure of recorded history.

• Perhaps the ancient poet meant to suggest that the only creation of which we can know anything is the replacement of chaos with order, for in the end this is the essence of art and civilization. We should remember, however, that the defeat of Chaos is only a myth.
• Having moved heaven and earth into place, Marduk undertook to knead earth with his blood and thereby make men for the service of the gods. Mesopotamian legends differed on the precise way in which this was done; they agreed in general that man was fashioned by the deity from a lump of clay.

  Kyle: Clay and God’s blood is a recurring theme.

• Nevertheless the Babylonian derived no satisfaction from the idea of personal immortality. His religion was terrestrially practical; when he prayed he asked not for celestial rewards but for earthly goods; he could not trust his gods beyond the grave. It is true that one text speaks of Marduk as he “who gives back life to the dead,” and the story of the flood represents its two survivors as living forever. But for the most part the Babylonian conception of another life was like that of the Greeks: dead men-saints and villains, geniuses and idiots, alike-went to a dark and shadowy realm within the bowels of the earth, and none of them saw the light again. There was a heaven, but only for the gods; the Aralu to which all men descended was a place frequently of punishment, never of joy; there the dead lay bound hand and foot forever, shivering with cold, and subject to hunger and thirst unless their children placed food periodically in their graves.
• The usual offering was food and drink, for these had the advantage that if they were not entirely consumed by the gods the surplus need not go to waste. A frequent sacrifice on Babylonian altars was the lamb; and an old Babylonian incantation strangely anticipates the symbolism of Judaism and Christianity: “The lamb as a substitute for a man, the lamb he gives for his life. Sacrifice was a complex ritual, requiring the expert services of a priest; every act and word of the ceremony was settled by sacred tradition, and any amateur deviation from these forms might mean that the gods would eat without listening.
• The priests carried from sanctuary to sanctuary the image of Marduk, and performed the sacred drama of his death and resurrection; to anoint the idols with sweet-scented oils. Therefore Tammuz was called “The Anointed.”
• And then, as if uncertain of the sex of the god: How long, my god,
• How long, my goddess, until thy face be turned to me?
• How long, known and unknown god, until the anger of thy heart shall be appeased?
• How long, known and unknown goddess, until thy unfriendly heart be appeased?
• Mankind is perverted, and has no judgment;
• Of all men who are alive, who knows anything? They do not know whether they do good or evil. O Lord, do not cast aside thy servant;
• He is cast into the mire; take his hand!
• The sin which I have sinned, turn to mercy!
• The iniquity which I have committed, let the wind carry away! My many transgressions tear off like a garment!
• My god, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins!
• My goddess, my sins are seven times seven; forgive my sins! … Forgive my sins, and I will humble myself before thee.
• May thy heart, as the heart of a mother who hath borne children, be glad;
• As a mother who hath borne children, as a father who hath begotten, may it be glad!

  Kyle: Nephi’s Psalm - Compare

• And just as a Catholic hymnal may juxtapose the Latin text to a vernacular translation, so some of the hymns that have come down to us from Mesopotamia have a Babylonian or Assyrian translation written between the lines of the “classic” Sumerian original, in the fashion of a contemporary schoolboy’s “interlinear.” And as the form of these hymns and rituals led to the Psalms of the Jews and the liturgy of the Roman Church, so their content presaged the pessimistic and sin-struck plaints of the Jews, the early Christians, and the modern Puritans.

  Kyle: Ideological family tree.

• Never was a civilization richer in superstitions. Every turn of chance from the anomalies of birth to the varieties of death received a popular, sometimes an official and sacerdotal, interpretation in magical or supernatural terms. Every movement of the rivers, every aspect of the stars, every dream, every unusual performance of man or beast, revealed the future to the properly instructed Babylonian. The fate of a king could be forecast by observing the movements of a dog,100 just as we foretell the length of the winter by spying upon the groundhog. The superstitions of Babylonia seem ridiculous to us, because they differ superficially from our own. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
• In general the position of woman in Babylonia was lower than in Egypt or Rome, and yet not worse than in classic Greece or medieval Europe.
• Morals grew lax when the temples grew rich; and the citizens of Babylon, wedded to delight, bore with equanimity the subjection of their city by the Kassites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks.
• Despite such aid, Babylonian architecture remained a heavy and prosaic thing, condemned to mediocrity by the material it used. The temples rose rapidly out of the earth which slave labor turned so readily into brick and cementing pitch; they did not require centuries for their erection, like the monumental structures of Egypt or medieval Europe. But they decayed almost as quickly as they rose; fifty years of neglect reduced them to the dust from which they had been made.
• Astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians, for which they were famous throughout the ancient world. Here again magic was the mother of science: the Babylonians studied the stars not so much to chart the courses of caravans and ships, as to divine the future fates of men; they were astrologers first and astronomers afterward.
• Reconstruction of the whole from a part is hazardous in history, and the writing of history is the reconstruction of the whole from a part.
• We must not be too sure of the ignorance of our ancestors.
• A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes.

  Kyle: Strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men.

• He advises Gubarru to do the will of the gods none the less. But Gubarru will have nothing to do with gods or priests who are always on the side of the biggest fortunes: They have offered lies and untruth without ceasing. They say in noble words what is in favor of the rich man. Is his wealth diminished? They come to his help. They ill-treat the weak man like a thief, ob dwgli O They destroy him in a tremor, they extinguish him like a flame.”

  Kyle: The (true) God is no respecter of persons.

• The marvel is that they were so long loyal to a religion that offered them so little consolation. Nothing could be known, said the priests, except by divine revelation; and this revelation came only through the priests. The last chapter of that revelation told how the dead soul, whether good or bad, descended into Aralu, or Hades, to spend there an eternity in darkness and suffering. Is it any wonder that Babylon gave itself to revelry, while Nebuchadrezzar, having all, understanding nothing, fearing everything, went mad?
• Within thirty years after his death his empire crumbled to pieces. Nabonidus, who held the throne for seventeen years, preferred archeology to government, and devoted himself to excavating the antiquities of Sumeria while his own realm was going to ruin. The army fell into disorder; business men forgot love of country in the sublime internationalism of finance; the people, busy with trade and pleasure, unlearned the arts of war. The priests usurped more and more of the royal power, and fattened their treasuries with wealth that tempted invasion and conquest.

  Kyle: How a nation dies

• In the end nothing is lost; for good or evil every event has effects forever.

  Kyle: No vacuum of history.

• For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.
• If we should admit the imperial principle-that it is good, for the sake of spreading law, security, commerce and peace, that many states should be brought, by persuasion or force, under the authority of one government-then we should have to concede to Assyria the distinction of having established in western Asia a larger measure and area of order and prosperity than that region of the earth had ever, to our knowledge, enjoyed before.
• No compunction seems to have been felt at this waste of human life; the birth rate would soon make up for it, and meanwhile it relieved the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence.” Probably it was in part by their reputation for mercy to prisoners of war that Alexander and Cæsar undermined the morale of the enemy, and conquered the Mediterranean world.

  Kyle: War begins BEFORE the fighting

• All in all, the Assyrian government was primarily an instrument of war. For war was often more profitable than peace; it cemented discipline, intensified patriotism, strengthened the royal power, and brought abundant spoils and slaves for the enrichment and service of the capital.
• The weakness of Oriental monarchies was bound up with this addiction to violence. Not only did the subject provinces repeatedly revolt, but within the royal palace or family itself violence again and again attempted to upset what violence had established and maintained. At or near the end of almost every reign some disturbance broke out over the succession to the throne; the aging monarch saw conspiracies forming around him, and in several cases he was hastened to his end by murder. The nations of the Near East preferred violent uprisings to corrupt elections, and their form of recall was assassination. Some of these wars were doubtless inevitable: barbarians prowled about every frontier, and one reign of weakness would see the Scythians, the Cimmerians, or some other horde, sweeping down upon the wealth of the Assyrian cities. And perhaps we exaggerate the frequency of war and violence in these Oriental states, through the accident that ancient monuments and modern chroniclers have preserved peace. the dramatic record of battles, and ignored the victories of Historians have been prejudiced in favor of bloodshed; they found it, or thought their readers would find it, more interesting than the quiet achievements of the mind. We think war less frequent today because we are conscious of the lucid intervals of peace, while history seems conscious only of the fevered crises of war.

  Kyle: Prevalence of violence throughout history.

• I did well unto god and man, to dead and living. Why have sickness and misery befallen me? I cannot do away with the strife in my country and the dissensions in my family; disturbing scandals oppress me always. Illness of mind and flesh bow me down; with cries of woe I bring my days to an end.

  Kyle: Even kings who considered themselves Gods could not escape the common toil of mortality and daily life.

• For the economic vitality of Assyria had been derived too rashly from abroad; it depended upon profitable conquests bringing in riches and trade; at any moment it could be ended with a decisive defeat. Gradually the qualities of body and character that had helped to make the Assyrian armies invincible were weakened by the very victories that they won; in each victory it was the strongest and bravest who died, while the infirm and cautious survived to multiply their kind; it was a dysgenic process that perhaps made for civilization by weeding out the more brutal types, but undermined the biological basis upon which Assyria had risen to power. The extent of her conquests had helped to weaken her; not only had they depopulated her fields to feed insatiate Mars, but they had brought into Assyria, as captives, millions of destitute aliens who bred with the fertility of the hopeless, destroyed all national unity of character and blood, and became by their growing numbers a hostile and disintegrating force in the very midst of the conquerors. More and more the army itself was filled by these men of other lands, while semi-barbarous marauders harassed every border, and exhausted the resources of the country in an endless defense of its unnatural frontiers.

  Kyle: A nation built on any mortal strength, like brute force, will fade with time, aided by population collapse and unchecked migration / cultural mixing without unification.

• Herodotus recounts how Croesus displayed his riches to Solon, and then asked him whom he considered the happiest of men. Solon, after naming three individuals who were all dead, refused to call Croesus happy, on the ground that there was no telling what misfortunes the morrow would bring him.

  Kyle: “No one is safe until the end.”

• Hammurabi and Darius I were separated by differences of blood and religion, and by almost as many centuries as those that divide us from Christ; nevertheless, when we examine the two great kings we perceive that they are essentially and profoundly akin.
• Like all early voyagers, and some old languages, they made scant distinction between trade and treachery, commerce and robbery; they stole from the weak, cheated the stupid, and were honest with the rest.
• Nevertheless the Phoenicians deserve some niche in the hall of civilized nations, for it was probably their merchants who taught the Egyptian alphabet to the nations of antiquity. Not the ecstasies of literature but the needs of commerce brought unity to the peoples of the Mediterranean; nothing could better illustrate a certain generative relation between commerce and culture.
• It is true that the fertile Aramæans, spreading everywhere, made their language the lingua franca of the Near East, and that the alphabetic script which they had learned either from the Egyptians or the Phoenicians replaced the cuneiform and syllabaries of Mesopotamia, first as a mercantile, then as a literary, medium, and became at last the tongue of Christ and the alphabet of the Arabs today.” But time preserves their names not so much because of their own accomplishments as because they played some part on the tragic stage of Palestine. We must study, in greater detail than their neighbors, these numerically and geographically insignificant Jews, who gave to the world one of its greatest literatures, two of its most influential religions, and so many of its profoundest men.
• Moses had been a patient statesman, but Joshua was only a plain, blunt warrior; Moses had ruled bloodlessly by inventing interviews with God, but Joshua ruled by the second law of nature-that the superior killer survives. In this realistic and unsentimental fashion the Jews took their Promised Land.

  Kyle: Moses = Joseph Smith; Joshua = Brigham Young

• Of their racial origin we can only say vaguely that they were Semites, not sharply distinct or different from the other Semites of western Asia; it was their history that made them, not they who made their history.

  Kyle: Our stories define us more than our blood. Connect to East of Eden; “choose ye.”

• In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” This incredibly Jeffersonian condition gave way under the needs of war; the threat of domination by the Philistines brought a temporary unity to the tribes, and persuaded them to appoint a king whose authority over them should be continuous. The prophet Samuel warned them against certain disadvantages in rule by one man: And Samuel said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint them captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take your 1071 menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day. 100 l as deblo Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay, but we shall have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

  Kyle: “If it were possible we could always have righteous kings.” Judges xvii, 6; 1 Sam. viii, 10-20, cf. Deut. xvii, 14-20

• Here, so early in literature, is a character fully drawn, real with all the contradictory passions of a living soul: as ruthless as his time, his tribe and his god, and yet as ready to pardon his enemies as Cæsar was, or Christ; putting captives to death wholesale, like any Assyrian monarch; charging his son Solomon to “bring down to the grave with blood” the “hoar head” of old Shimei who had cursed him many years before; taking Uriah’s wife into his harem incontinently, and sending Uriah into the front line of battle to get rid of him; accepting Nathan’s rebuke humbly, but keeping the lovely Bathsheba none the less; forgiving Saul almost seventy times seven, merely taking his shield when he might have taken his life; sparing and supporting Mephibosheth, a possible pretender to his throne; pardoning his ungrateful son Absalom, who had been caught in armed rebellion, and bitterly mourning that son’s death in treasonable battle against his father (“O my son Absalom! my son, my son, Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”)”-this is an authentic man, of full and varied elements, bearing within him all the vestiges of barbarism, and all the promise of civilization.
• Having established his kingdom, Solomon settled down to enjoy it. As his reign proceeded he paid less and less attention to religion and frequented his harem rather more than the Temple. The Biblical chroniclers reproach him bitterly for his gallantry in building altars to the exotic deities of his foreign wives, and cannot forgive his philosophical-or perhaps political-impartiality to the gods. The people admired his wisdom, but suspected in it a certain centripetal quality; the Temple and the palace had cost them much gold and blood, and were not more popular with them than the Pyramids had been with the workingmen of Egypt. The upkeep of these establishments required considerable taxation, and few governments have made taxation popular. When he died Israel was exhausted, and a discontented proletariat had been created whose labor found no steady employment, and whose sufferings were to transform the warlike cult of Yahveh into the almost socialistic religion of the prophets.

  Kyle: Solomon was a bummer and his fiscal policy basically re-wrote Jewish culture…

• The people seem to have looked upon Moses and Aaron as magicians, and to have patronized professional diviners and sorcerers. Divination was sought at times by shaking dice (Urim and Thummim) out of a box (ephod)-a ritual still used to ascertain the will of the gods. It is to the credit of the priests that they opposed these practices, and preached an exclusive reliance on the magic of sacrifice, prayer and contributions.

  Kyle: Need to understand ancient “magic”

• Apparently the conquering Jews took one of the gods of Canaan, Yahu,* and re-created him in their own image as a stern, warlike, “stiff-necked” deity, with almost lovable limitations.
• Never was there so thoroughly human a god.

  Kyle: “Made God in our own image.”

• The authors of the Pentateuch, to whom religion was an instrument of statesmanship, formed this Vulcan into Mars, so that in their energetic hands Yahveh became predominantly an imperialistic, expansionist God of Hosts, who fights for his people as fiercely as the gods of the Iliad. “The Lord is a man of war,” says “Moses”;” and David echoes him: “He teacheth my hands to war."" Yahveh promises to “destroy all the people to whom” the Jews “shall come,” and to drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite “by little and little”;” and he claims as his own all the territory conquered by the Jews.” He will have no pacifist nonsense; he knows that even a Promised Land can be won, and held, only by the sword; he is a god of war because he has to be; it will take centuries of military defeat, political subjugation, and moral development, to transform him into the gentle and loving Father of Hillel and Christ.

  Kyle: When God is a reflection of culture

• With the growth of political unity under David and Solomon, and the centering of worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, theology reflected history and politics, and Yahveh became the sole god of the Jews. Beyond this “henotheism”* they made no further progress towards monotheism until the Prophets.† Even in the Yahvistic stage the Hebraic religion came closer to monotheism than any other pre-Prophetic faith except the ephemeral sun-worship of Ikhnaton. At least equal as sentiment and poetry to the polytheism of Babylonia and Greece, Judaism was immensely superior to the other religions of the time in majesty and power, in philosophic unity and grasp, in moral fervor and influence.
• Despite the efforts of Solomon to beautify the cult of Yahveh with color and sound, the worship of this awful divinity remained for many centuries a religion of fear rather than of love. One wonders, in looking back upon these faiths, whether they brought as much consolation as terror to humanity. Religions of hope and love are a luxury of security and order; the need for striking fear into a subject or rebellious people made most primitive religions cults of mystery and dread

  Kyle: God’s character shifting in relation to circumstances strikes me as being more about the reflection of the people and their needs. God reveals what he can but we see what we want to see.

• Elisha, however, as far back as the ninth century B.C., announced one God: “I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.” It should be remembered that even modern monotheism is highly relative and incomplete. As the Jews worshiped a tribal god, so we worship a European god-or an English, or a German, or an Italian, god; no moment of modesty comes to remind us that the abounding millions of India, China and Japan-not to speak of the theologians of the jungle-do not yet recognize the God of our Fathers. Not until the machine weaves all the earth into one economic web, and forces all the nations under one rule, will there be one god-for the earth.

  Kyle: Monotheism as an economic and political contract. Could also be an evolution of the understanding of God.

• The Jews, however, made little reference to a life beyond the grave; their creed said nothing of personal immortality, and confined its rewards and punishments to this mundane life. Not until the Jews had lost hope of earthly triumph did they take over, probably from Persia and perhaps also from Egypt, the notion of personal resurrection. It was out of this spiritual dénouement that Christianity was born.
• Holy men like Elijah and Elisha arose who, without necessarily becoming priests, preached against these practices, and tried by the example of their lives to lead their people into righteousness. Out of these conditions and beginnings, and out of the rise of poverty and exploitation in Israel, came the supreme figures in Jewish religion-those passionate Prophets who purified and elevated the creed of the Jews, and prepared it for its vicarious conquest of the western world.

  Kyle: Radicals; kicking against the pricks of tradition.

• Since poverty is created by wealth, and never knows itself poor until riches stare it in the face, so it required the fabulous fortune of Solomon to mark the beginning of the class war in Israel.
• From this motley crowd of fakirs the Prophets developed into responsible and consistent critics of their age and their people, magnificent street-corner statesmen who were all “thorough-going anti-clericals,"" and “the most uncompromising of anti-Semites,” a cross between soothsayers and socialists. We misunderstand them if we take them as prophets in the weather sense; their predictions were hopes or threats, or pious interpolations, or prognostications after the event; the Prophets themselves did not pretend to foretell, so much as to speak out; they were eloquent members of the Opposition. In one phase they were Tolstoians incensed at industrial exploitation and ecclesiastical chicanery; they came up from the simple countryside, and hurled damnation at the corrupt wealth of
• the towns.
• But here, for the first time in the literature of Asia, the social conscience takes definite form, and pours into religion a content that lifts it from ceremony and flattery to a whip of morals and a call to nobility. With Amos begins the gospel of Jesus Christ.
• In Amos and Isaiah is the beginning of both Christianity and socialism, the spring from which has flowed a stream of Utopias wherein no poverty or war shall disturb human brotherhood and peace; they are the source of the early Jewish conception of a Messiah who would seize the government, reëstablish the temporal power of the Jews, and inaugurate a dictatorship of the dispossessed among mankind. Isaiah and Amos began, in a military age, the exaltation of those virtues of simplicity and gentleness, of coöperation and friendliness, which Jesus was to make a vital element in his creed. They were the first to undertake the heavy task of reforming the God of Hosts into a God of Love; they conscripted Yahveh for humanitarianism as the radicals of the nineteenth century conscripted Christ for socialism. It was they who, when the Bible was printed in Europe, fired the Germanic mind with a rejuvenated Christianity, and lighted the torch of the Reformation; it was their fierce and intolerant virtue that formed the Puritans. Their moral philosophy was based upon a theory that would bear better documentation-that the righteous man will prosper, and the wicked will be struck down; but even if that should be a delusion it is the failing of a noble mind. The prophets had no conception of freedom, but they loved justice, and called for an end to the tribal limitations of morality. They offered to the unfortunate of the earth a vision of brotherhood that became the precious and unforgotten heritage of many generations.
• Their greatest contemporary influence was on the writing of the Bible. As the people fell away from the worship of Yahveh to the adoration of alien gods, the priests began to wonder whether the time had not come to make a final stand against the disintegration of the national faith. Taking a leaf from the Prophets, who attributed to Yahveh the passionate convictions of their own souls, they resolved to issue to the people a communication from God himself, a code of laws that would reinvigorate the moral life of the nation, and would at the same time attract the support of the Prophets by embodying the less extreme of their ideas. They readily won King Josiah to their plan; and about the eighteenth year of his reign the priest Hilkiah announced to the King that he had “found” in the secret archives of the Temple an astonishing scroll in which the great Moses himself, at the direct dictation of Yahveh, had settled once for all those problems of history and conduct that were being so hotly debated by prophets and priests. The discovery made a stir. Josiah called the elders of Judah to the Temple, and there read great to them the “Book of the Covenant” in the presence (we are told) of thousands of people. Then he solemnly swore that he would henceforth abide by the laws of this book; and “he caused all that were present to stand to it.” We do not know just what this “Book of the Covenant” was; it may have been Exodus xx-xxiii, or it may have been Deuteronomy.” We need not suppose that it had been invented on the spur of the situation; it merely formulated, and put into writing, decrees, demands and exhortations which for centuries had emanated from the prophets and the Temple. In any event, those who heard the reading, and even those who only heard of it, were deeply impressed.

  Kyle: People make similar criticisms of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon addressing many of the “hot button” items of the day.

• While Buddha in India was preaching the death of desire, and Confucius in China was formulating wisdom for his people, this “Second Isaiah,” in majestic and luminous prose, announced to the exiled Jews the first clear revelation of monotheism, and offered them a new god, infinitely richer in “lovingkindness” and tender mercy than the bitter Yahveh even of the First Isaiah. In words that a later gospel was to choose as spurring on the young Christ, this greatest of Prophets announced his mission-no longer to curse the people for their sins, but to bring them hope in their bondage.
• The prophet then lifts the Messianic hope to a place among the ruling ideas of his people, and describes the “Servant” who will redeem Israel by vicarious sacrifice: He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;… he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed… . The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. Modern research does not regard the “Servant” as the prophetic portrayal of Jesus. Isaiah xl 3, 10-11; liii, 3-6. Cambridge Ancient History, iii, 498

  Kyle: Why not? Worth investigating.

• About the year 444 B.C. Ezra, a learned priest, called the Jews together in solemn assembly, and read to them, from morn to midday, the “Book of the Law of Moses.” For seven days he and his fellow Levites read from these scrolls; at the end the priests and the leaders of the people pledged themselves to accept this body of legislation as their constitution and their conscience, and to obey it forever.” From those troubled times till ours that Law has been the central fact in the life of the Jews; and their loyalty to it through all wanderings and tribulations has been one of the impressive phenomena of history. What was this “Book of the Law of Moses”? Not quite the same as that “Book of the Covenant” which Josiah had read; for the latter had admitted of being completely read twice in a day, while the other needed a week.” We can only guess that the larger scroll constituted a substantial part of those first five books of the Old Testament which the Jews call Torab or the Law, and which others call the Pentateuch. How, when, and where had these books been written? This is an innocent question which has caused the writing of fifty thousand volumes, and must here be left unanswered in a paragraph.

  Kyle: Most impressive adherence to law, especially when acknowledging how little is known about where it came from.

• The consensus of scholarship is that the oldest elements in the Bible are those distinct and yet similar legends of Genesis which are called “J” and “E” respectively because one speaks of the Creator as Jehovah (Yahveh), while the other speaks of him as Elohim.” It is believed that the Yahvist narrative was written in Judah, the Elohist in Ephraim, and that the two stories fused into one after the fall of Samaria.

  Kyle: Evolving dual nature of God. When did Elohim stop interacting with mankind directly?

• These delightful tales of the Creation, the Temptation and the Flood were drawn from a storehouse of Mesopotamian legend as old as 3000 B.C.; we have seen some early forms of them in the course of this history. It is possible that the Jews appropriated some of these myths from Babylonian literature during the Captivity; it is more likely that they had adopted them long before, from ancient Semitic and Sumerian sources common to all the Near East. The Persian and the Talmudic forms of the Creation myth represent God as first making a two-sexed being-a male and a female joined at the back like Siamese twins-and then dividing it as an afterthought. We are reminded of a strange sentence in Genesis (v, 2): “Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam”: i.e., our first parent was originally both male and female-which seems to have escaped all theologians except Aristophanes.+ +Cf. Plato’s Symposium.

  Kyle: Abstract nature of gender throughout creation myths.

• The legend of Paradise appears in almost all folklore-in Egypt, India, Tibet, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Polynesia, Mexico, etc. Most of these Edens had forbidden trees, and were supplied with serpents or dragons that stole immortality from men, or otherwise poisoned Paradise.” Both the serpent and the fig were probably phallic symbols; behind the myth is the thought that sex and knowledge destroy innocence and happiness, and are the origin of evil; we shall find this same idea at the end of the Old Testament in Ecclesiastes as here at the beginning.

  Kyle: People see the omnipresence of consistent mythologies as signs of fabrication, which is odd to me. If our relationship with God has been consistent, albeit interpreted through different cultures at different times, then you would expect to see common characteristics. Connect to The Perennial Philosophy

• To ask whether these stories are true or false, whether they “really happened,” would be to put a trivial and superficial question; their substance, of course, is not the tales they tell but the judgments they convey. Meanwhile it would be unwise not to enjoy their disarming simplicity, and the vivid swiftness of their narratives.
• The Third Commandment typified the intense piety of the Jew. Not only would he not “take the name of the Lord God in vain”; he would never pronounce it; even when he came upon the name of Yahveh in his prayers he would substitute for it Adonai-Lord.* Only the Hindus would rival this piety In Hebrew Yahweh is written as Jhvh; this was erroneously translated into Jehovah because the vowels a-o-a had been placed over Jhvh in the original, to indicate that Adonai was to be pronounced in place of Yahveh; and the theologians of the Renaissance and the Reformation wrongly supposed that these vowels were to be placed between the consonants of Jhuh.
• Passover, among the Canaanites, was the oblation of a lamb to the local god. As we read (Exod., xi) the story of the establishment of the Passover rite, and see the Jews celebrating that same rite steadfastly today, we feel again the venerable antiquity of their worship, and the strength and tenacity of their race. Later this gentle and ancient totem became the Paschal Lamb of Christianity, identified with the dead Christ.

  Kyle: Ideological Family Tree

• The Fifth Commandment sanctified the family, as second only to the Temple in the structure of Jewish society; the ideals then stamped upon the institution marked it throughout medieval and modern European history until our own disintegrative Industrial Revolution. The Hebrew patriarchal family was a vast economic and political organization, composed of the oldest married male, his wives, his unmarried children, his married sons with their wives and children, and perhaps some slaves. The economic basis of the institution was its convenience for cultivating the soil; its political value lay in its providing a system of social order so strong that it made the state-except in war-almost superfluous.

  Kyle: History of “the family.”

• Though technically subject, the woman was often a person of high authority and dignity; the history of the Jews shines with such names as Sarah, Rachel, Miriam and Esther; Deborah was one of the judges of Israel and it was the prophetess Huldah whom Josiah consulted about the Book which the priests had found in the Temple. Judges 4:4

  Kyle: Women’s role in biblical priesthood

• Despite a magnificent verse about ploughshares and pruninghooks, the Prophets were not pacifists, and the priests-if we may judge from the speeches which they put into the mouth of Yahveh-were almost as fond of war as of preaching. Among nineteen kings of Israel eight were assassinated."" Captured cities were usually destroyed, the males put to the sword, and the soil deliberately ruined-in the fashion of the times. Perhaps the figures exaggerate the killing; it is unbelievable that, entirely without modern inventions, “the children of Israel slew of the Syrians one hundred thousand footmen in one day.""" Belief in themselves as the chosen people intensified the pride natural in a nation conscious of superior abilities; it accentuated their disposition to segregate themselves maritally and mentally from other peoples, and deprived them of the international perspective that their descendants were to attain. But they had in high degree the virtues of their qualities. Their violence came of unmanageable vitality, their separatism came of their piety, their quarrelsomeness and querulousness came of a passionate sensitivity that produced the greatest literature of the Near East; their racial pride was the indispensable prop of their courage through centuries of suffering. Men are what they have had to be.

  Kyle: Cultural reflection of violence

• Vestiges of capture-marriage are found in the Old Testa ment; Yahveh approves of it in war; and the elders, on the occasion of a shortage of women, “commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; and see and behold if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances; then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin.

  Kyle: Priests of King Noah

• If the man was well-to-do, he might practise polygamy; if the wife was barren, like Sarah, she might encourage her husband to take a concubine. The purpose of these arrangements was prolific reproduction; it was taken as a matter of course that after Rachel and Leah had given Jacob all the children they were capable of bearing, they should offer him their maids, who would also bear him children. A woman was not allowed to remain idle in this matter of reproduction; if a husband died, his brother, however many wives he might already have, was obliged to marry her; or, if the husband had no brother, the obligation fell upon his nearest surviving male kin.”

  Kyle: Joseph Smith and Don Carlos. Restorationist polygamy.

• Probably in no other people outside of the Far East has family life reached so high a level as among the Jews.
• Religious law was the sole law of Israel; the priests and the temples were the judges and the courts; and those who refused to accept the decision of the priests were to be put to death.

  Kyle: Jesus knew the standard of judicial justice he was exposing himself to.

• In general the principle of punishment was the lex talionis: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, stripe for stripe”-we trust that this was a counsel of perfection, never quite realized. The Mosaic Code, though written down at least fifteen hundred years later, shows no advance, in criminal legislation, upon the Code of Hammurabi; in legal organization it shows an archaic retrogression to primitive ecclesiastical control.
• We must remember that it was only a law-indeed, only a “priestly Utopia”-rather than a description of Jewish life; like other codes, it was honored plentifully in the breach, and won new praise with every violation. But its influence upon the conduct of the people was at least as great as that of most legal or moral codes. It gave to the Jews, through the two thousand years of wandering which they were soon to begin, a “portable Fatherland,” as Heine was to call it, an intangible and spirtual state; it kept them united despite every dispersion, proud despite every defeat, and brought them across the centuries to our own time, a strong apparently indestructible people..
• The Old Testament is not only law; it is history, poetry and philosophy of the highest order. After making every deduction for primitive legend and pious fraud, after admitting that the historical books are not quite as accurate or as ancient as our forefathers supposed, we find in them, nevertheless, not merely some of the oldest historical writing known to us, but some of the best.
• And in a sense we have here not mere history, but philosophy of history; this is the first recorded effort of man to reduce the multiplicity of past events to a measure of unity by seeking in them some pervading purpose and significance, some law of sequence and causation, some illumination for the present and the future. The conception of history promulgated by the Prophets and the priestly authors of the Pentateuch survived a thousand years of Greece and Rome to become the world-view of European thinkers from Boëthius to Bossuet.
• *A selection of the best Psalms would probably include VIII, XXIII, LI, CIV, CXXXVII and CXXXIX. The last is strangely like Whitman’s pæan to evolution. In the poem entitled “Walt Whitman,” sect. 44; Leaves of Grass, 84-5

  Kyle: Look it up

• Job humbles himself in terror before this apparition. Yahveh, appeased, forgives him, accepts his sacrifice, denounces Job’s friends for their feeble arguments, and gives Job fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand she-asses, seven sons, three daughters, and one hundred and forty years. It is a lame but happy ending; Job receives everything but an answer to his questions. The problem remained; and it was to have profound effects upon later Jewish thought. In the days of Daniel (ca. 167 B.C.) it was to be abandoned as insoluble in terms of this world; no answer could be given-Daniel and Enoch (and Kant) would say-unless one believed in some other life, beyond the grave, in which all wrongs would be righted, the wicked would be punished, and the just would inherit infinite reward. This was one of the varied currents of thought that flowed into Christianity, and carried it to victory.
• It is not virtue and vice that determine a man’s lot, but blind and merciless chance. “I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Even wealth is insecure, and does not long bring happiness. “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance, with increase: this is also vanity… . The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.” Remembering his relatives, he formulates Malthus in a line: “When goods are increased, they are increased that eat them.""** Nor can he be soothed by any legend of a Golden Past, or a Utopia to come: things have always been as they are now, and so they will always be. “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this”;” one must choose his historians carefully. And “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been Progress, he thinks, is an already of old time, which was before us. delusion; civilizations have been forgotten, and will be again.

  Kyle: Pessimism

• All these darts of outrageous fortune might be borne with hope and courage if the just man could look forward to some happiness beyond the grave. But that, too, Ecclesiastes feels, is a myth; man is an animal, and dies like any other beast.

  Kyle: A lack of an afterlife really is a distinguishing characteristic of Judaism.

• Jerusalem had been restored, but not as the citadel of an unconquerable god; it was a vassal city ruled now by Persia, now by Greece. In 334 B.C. the young Alexander stood at its gates, and demanded the surrender of the capital. The high-priest at first refused; but the next morning, having had a dream, he consented. He ordered the clergy to put on their most impressive vestments, and the people to garb themselves in immaculate white; then he led the population pacifically out through the gates to solicit peace. Alexander bowed to the high-priest, expressed his admiration for the people and their god, and accepted Jerusalem.

  Kyle: President Grant seeing similarly-clad Mormon children in white in Utah - “I’ve been deceived.”

• History is a book that one must begin in the middle.
• The Zend-Avesta, sacred scriptures of the Persians, idealized the racial memory of this ancient home-land, and described it as a paradise: the scenes of our youth, like the past, are always beautiful if we do not have to live in them again.
• So far as we can visualize him through the haze of legend, he was the most amiable of conquerors, and founded his empire upon generosity. His enemies knew that he was lenient, and they did not fight him with that desperate courage which men show when their only choice is to kill or die.
• Like Alexander he conquered an empire, but did not live to organize it.
• He had hoped to govern in peace, but it is the fatality of empire to breed repeated war. For the conquered must be periodically reconquered, and the conquerors must keep the arts and habits of camp and battlefield; and at any moment the kaleidoscope of change may throw up a new empire to challenge the old. In such a situation wars must be invented if they do not arise of their own accord; each generation must be inured to the rigors of campaigns, and taught by practice the sweet decorum of dying for one’s country.

  Kyle: The American Empire = repeated war

• ” Writing, however, seemed to the Persians an effeminate amusement, for which they could spare little time from love, war and the chase. They did not condescend to produce literature. The common man was contentedly illiterate, and gave himself completely to the culture of the soil.

  Kyle: Way of Kings

• Commerce was for the most part abandoned to foreigners-Babylonians, Phoenicians and Jews; the Persians despised trade, and looked upon a market place as a breeding-ground of lies. The wealthy classes took pride in supplying most of their wants directly from their own fields and shops, not contaminating their fingers with either buying or selling.
• The life of Persia was political and military rather than economic; its wealth was based not on industry but on power; it existed precariously as a little governing isle in an immense and unnaturally subject sea. The imperial organization that maintained this artefact was one of the most unique and competent in history.

  Kyle: It’s interesting how many competent regimes there were in the world. Why do empires fall?

• The real basis of the royal power and imperial government was the army; an empire exists only so long as it retains its superior capacity to kill.
• The whole mass, though vast in number, and amounting in the expedition of Xerxes to 1,800,000 men, never achieved unity, and at the first sign of a reverse it became a disorderly mob. It conquered by mere force of numbers, by an elastic capacity for absorbing casualties; it was destined to be overthrown as soon as it should encounter a well-organized army speaking one speech and accepting one discipline.

  Kyle: Force vs capability. WWII was won by force (industry.)

• Ultimately the great roads merely paved the way for the physical conquest of western Asia by Greece and Rome, and the theological conquest of Greece and Rome by western Asia.
• Because the soldier Mithridates, in his cups, blurted out the fact that it was he, and not the king, who should have received credit for slaying Cyrus the Younger at the battle of Cunaxa, Artaxerxes II, says Plutarch, “decreed that Mithridates should be put to death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lay down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, they offer him food, and if he refuse to eat it, they force him to do it by pricking his eyes; then, after he has eaten, they drench him with a mixture of milk and honey, pouring it not only into his mouth but all over his face. They then keep his face continually turned toward the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle upon it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards. In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired.”

  Kyle: Adams / Hamilton vs Jefferson / Madison; Human Nature

• The default state of the world has always been violence. Not just militarily but judicially. And the same propensity for violence that existed in the hearts and minds of the ancients is just a stone’s throw away for the people alive today.
• Despite these high charges for its services, the Persian Empire was the most successful experiment in imperial government that the Mediterranean world would know before the coming of Rome-which was destined to inherit much of the earlier empire’s political structure and administrative forms. The cruelty and dissipation of the later monarchs, the occasional barbarism of the laws, and the heavy burdens of taxation were balanced, as human governments go, by such order and peace as made the provinces rich despite these levies, and by such liberty as only the most enlightened empires have accorded to subject states.

  Kyle: What made Persia so successful?

• He laughed aloud on the very day of his birth, and the evil spirits that gather around every life fled from him in tumult and terror.” Out of his great love for wisdom and righteousness he withdrew from the society of men, and chose to live in a mountain wilderness on cheese and the fruits of the soil. The Devil tempted him, but to no avail. His breast was pierced with a sword, and his entrails were filled with molten lead; he did not complain, but clung to his faith in AhuraMazda-the Lord of Light-as supreme god. Ahura-Mazda appeared to him and gave into his hands the Avesta, or Book of Knowledge and Wisdom, and bade him preach it to mankind. For a long time all the world ridiculed and persecuted him; but at last a high prince of Iran-Vishtaspa or Hystaspes-heard him gladly, and promised to spread the new faith among his people. Thus was the Zoroastrian religion born. Zarathustra himself lived to a very old age, was consumed in a flash of lightning, and ascended into heaven.”

  Kyle: Similarities to Christianity

• The chief divinities of this pre-Zoroastrian faith were Mithra, god of the sun, Anaita, goddess of fertility and the earth, and Haoma the buk-god who, dying, rose again, and gave mankind his blood as a drink that would confer immortality; him the early Iranians worshiped by drinking the intoxicating juice of the baoma herb found on their mountain slopes.”

  Kyle: Christ’s blood

• Perhaps Darius I, who accepted the new doctrine, saw in it a faith that would both inspire his people and strengthen his government. From the moment of his accession he declared war upon the old cults and the Magian priesthood, and made Zoroastrianism the religion of the state.

  Kyle: Constantine with Christianity

• Like our Old Testament it is a highly eclectic composition. The student discovers here and there the gods, the ideas, sometimes the very words and phrases of the Rig-veda-to such an extent that some Indian scholars consider the Avesta to have been inspired not by Ahura-Mazda but by the Vedas; at other times one comes upon passages of ancient Babylonian provenance, such as the creation of the world in six periods (the heavens, the waters, the earth, plants, animals, man,) the descent of all men from two first parents, the establishment of an earthly paradise,” the discontent of the Creator with his creation, and his resolve to destroy all but a remnant of it by a flood.”

  Kyle: Common myths across belief systems.

• Furthermore there was in this dualism a certain justice to the contradictoriness and perversity of things, which monotheism never provided; and though the Zoroastrian theologians, after the manner of Hindu mystics and Scholastic philosophers, sometimes argued that evil was unreal,” they offered, in effect, a theology well adapted to dramatize for the average mind the moral issues of life. The last act of the play, they promised, would be-for the just man-a happy ending: after four epochs of three thousand years each, in which Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman would alternately predominate, the forces of evil would be finally destroyed; right would triumph everywhere, and evil would forever cease to be. Then all good men would join AhuraMazda in Paradise, and the wicked would fall into a gulf of outer darkness, where they would feed on poison eternally.”

  Kyle: Similarities to Christianity

• Human beings were not, to Zarathustra’s thinking, mere pawns in this cosmic war; they had free will, since Ahura-Mazda wished them to be personalities in their own right; they might freely choose whether they would follow the Light or the Lie. For Ahriman was the Living Lie, and every liar was his servant. AbsM-ULA o oil orum orb Out of this general conception emerged a detailed but simple code of morals, centered about the Golden Rule. “That nature alone is good which shall not do unto another whatever is not good unto its own self.” “Man’s duty, says the Avesta, is three-fold: “To make him who is an enemy a friend; to make him who is wicked righteous; and to make him who is ignorant learned.”

  Kyle: Similarities to Christianity

• All in all it was a splendid religion, less warlike and bloody, less idolatrous and superstitious, than the other religions of its time; and it did not deserve to die so soon.
• After his death the old priesthood of “Wise Men” or Magi conquered him as priesthoods conquer in the end every vigorous rebel or heretic-by adopting and absorbing him into their theology; they numbered him among the Magi and forgot him.
• But it would be unfair to judge the people from their kings; virtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.
• Virgins and bachelors were not encouraged by the code, but polygamy and concubinage were allowed; a military society has use for many children. “The man who has a wife,” says the Avesta, “is far above him who lives in continence; he who keeps a house is far above him who has none; he who has children is far above him who has none; he who has riches is far above him who has none”, these are criteria of social standing fairly common among the nations. The family is ranked as the holiest of all institutions.
• Johoin
• The Persians seem to have deliberately neglected to train their children in any other art than that of life. Literature was a delicacy for which they had small use; science was a commodity which they could import from Babylon. They had a certain relish for poetry and romantic fiction, but they left these arts to hirelings and inferiors, preferring the exhilaration of keen-witted conversation to the quiet and solitary pleasures of reading and research. Poetry was sung rather than read, and perished with the singers.

  Kyle: Interesting to think about cultures that had a dramatically outsized cultural impact relative to their wealth / military power.

• The empire of Darius lasted hardly a century. The moral as well as the physical backbone of Persia was broken by Marathon, Salamis and Platea; the emperors exchanged Mars for Venus, and the nation descended into corruption and apathy. The decline of Persia anticipated almost in detail the decline of Rome: immorality and degeneration among the people accompanied violence and negligence on the throne. The Persians, like the Medes before them, passed from stoicism to epicureanism in a few generations. Eating became the principal occupation of the aristocracy: these men who had once made it a rule to eat but once a day now interpreted the rule to allow them one meal-prolonged from noon to night; they stocked their larders with a thousand delicacies, and often served entire animals to their guests; they stuffed themselves with rich rare meats, and spent their genius upon new sauces and desserts. A corrupt and corrupting multitude of menials filled the houses of the wealthy, while drunkenness became the common vice of every class. Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.

  Kyle: Decline

• It is in the nature of an empire to disintegrate soon, for the energy that created it disappears from those who inherit it, at the very time that its subject peoples are gathering strength to fight for their lost liberty. Nor is it natural that nations diverse in language, religion, morals and traditions should long remain united; there is nothing organic in such a union, and compulsion must repeatedly be applied to maintain the artificial bond. In its two hundred years of empire Persia did nothing to lessen this heterogeneity, these centrifugal forces; she was content to rule a mob of nations, and never thought of making them into a state. Year by year the union became more difficult to preserve.

  Kyle: Cultural unification doesn’t need to be racial unification, but it needs to be unifying.

• Parmenio, second in command among the Greeks, said that if he were Alexander he would be glad to accept such happy terms, and avoid with honor the hazard of some disastrous defeat. Alexander remarked that he would do likewise-if he were Parmenio. Being Alexander, he answered Darius that his offer meant nothing, since he, Alexander, already possessed such parts of Asia as Darius proposed to cede to him, and could marry the daughter of the emperor when he pleased. Darius, despairing of peace with so reckless a logician, turned unwillingly to the task of collecting another and larger force.

  Kyle: Savage

• “The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek. It is a man-making religion that we want… . Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong… . For the next fifty years… let all other gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything… The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us… . He alone serves God who serves all other beings.” (Vivekananda)

  Kyle: Andy Weir’s “The Egg”; Super Uno Pluribus

• Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India.
• Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens-this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.*
• In 1789 Sir William Jones opened his career as one of the greatest of Indologists by translating Kalidasa’s Shakuntala; this translation, re-rendered into German in 1791, profoundly affected Herder and Goethe, and-through the Schlegels-the entire Romantic movement, which hoped to find in the East all the mysticism and mystery that seemed to have died on the approach of science and Enlightenment in the West. Jones startled the world of scholarship by declaring that Sanskrit was cousin to all the languages of Europe, and an indication of our racial kinship with the Vedic Hindus; these announcements almost created modern philology and ethnology. In 1805 Colebrooke’s essay On the Vedas revealed to Europe the oldest product of Indian literature; and about the same time Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads acquainted Schelling and Schopenhauer with what the latter called the profoundest philosophy that he had ever read.
• We must conceive it, then, not as a nation, like Egypt, Babylonia, or England, but as a continent as populous and polyglot as Europe, and almost as varied in climate and race, in literature, philosophy and art.
• Recent researches have marred this comforting picture-as future researches will change the perspective of these pages In India, as elsewhere, the beginnings of civilization are buried in the earth, and not all the spades of archeology will ever quite exhume them. Remains of an Old Stone Age fill many cases in the museums of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay; and neolithic objects have been found in nearly every state. These, however, were cultures, not yet a civilization.

  Kyle: Good fiction; someone who lived through all human history. Kind of like Chris Stewart pre-earth life but mixing ancient and modern life. wiki/manuscripts

• The indications are that Mohenjo-daro was at its height when Cheops built the first great pyramid; that it had commercial, religious and artistic connections with Sumeria and Babylonia;* and that it survived over three thousand years, until the third century before Christ.
• These fascinating questions cannot yet be answered; but they serve to remind us that a history of civilization, because of our human ignorance, begins at what was probably a late point in the actual development of culture.

  Kyle: “Recorded” history is a fraction of humanity.

• The invasion and conquest of these flourishing tribes by the Aryans was part of that ancient process whereby, periodically, the north has swept down violently upon the settled and pacified south; this has been one of the main streams of history, on which civilizations have risen and fallen like epochal undulations. The Aryans poured down upon the Dravidians, the Achæans and Dorians upon the Cretans and Ægeans, the Germans upon the Romans, the Lombards upon the Italians, the English upon the world. Forever the north produces rulers and warriors, the south produces artists and saints, and the meek inherit heaven.

  Kyle: The role of climate in cultural temperament.

• A nation, like an individual, begins with poetry, and ends with prose. And as things became persons, so qualities became objects, adjectives became nouns, epithets became deities.
• This is one value of the Vedas to us, that through them we see religion in the making, and can follow the birth, growth and death of gods and beliefs from animism to philosophic pantheism, and from the superstition of the Atharva-veda to the sublime monism of the Upanishads.
• In this unique passage we have the germ of pantheism and transmigration: the Creator is one with his creation, and all things, all forms of life, are one; every form was once another form, and is distinguished from it only in the prejudice of perception and the superficial separateness of time.
• “Like corn decays the mortal,” said the Katha Upanishad, “like corn is he born again.”

  Kyle: Similarities to Christianity

• India has never had one language.
• For centuries writing seems to have been confined to commercial and administrative purposes, with little thought of using it for literature; “merchants, not priests, developed this basic art.’ Even the Buddhist canon does not appear to have been written down before the third century B.C. The oldest extant inscriptions in India are those of Ashoka.” We who (until the air about us was filled with words and music) were for centuries made eye-minded by writing and print, find it hard to understand how contentedly India, long after she had learned to write, clung to the old ways of transmitting history and literature by recitation and memory. The Vedas and the epics were songs that grew with the generations of those that recited them; they were intended not for sight but for sound.* From this indifference to writing comes our dearth of knowledge about early India.

  Kyle: Why are some cultures so drawn to write extensively while others are not?

• The word Veda means knowledge; a Veda is literally a Book of Knowledge.
• The Upanishads, or confidential conferences for philosophers. This is but one of many possible divisions of the material. In addition to the “inspired” commentaries contained in the Brahmanas and Upanishads, Hindu scholars usually include in the Vedas several collections of shorter commentaries in aphoristic form, called Sutras (lit., threads, from Skt. siv, to sew). These, while not directly inspired from heaven, have the high authority of an ancient tradition. Many of them are brief to the point of unintelligibility; they were convenient condensations of doctrine, mnemonic devices for students who still relied upon memory rather than upon writing. As to the authorship or date of this mass of poetry, myth, magic, ritual and philosophy, no man can say. Pious Hindus believe every word of it to be divinely inspired, and tell us that the great god Brahma wrote it with his own hand upon leaves of gold; and this is a view which cannot easily be refuted. According to the fervor of their patriotism, divers native authorities assign to the oldest hymns dates ranging from 6000 to 1000 B.C.00 The material was probably collected and arranged between 1000 and 500 B.C.”

  Kyle: Interesting how similar this is to what the Jews have with Torah / Tanak (scripture) and Talmud : Midrash (tradition and commentary).

• “In the whole world,” said Schopenhauer, “there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life-it will be the solace of my death.” Here, excepting the moral fragments of Ptah-hotep, are the oldest extant philosophy and psychology of our race; the surprisingly subtle and patient effort of man to understand the mind and the world, and their relation. The Upanishads are as old as Homer, and as modern as Kant. The word is composed of upa, near, and shad, to sit. From “sitting near” the teacher the term came to mean the secret or esoteric doctrine confided by the master to his best and favorite pupils.

  Kyle: Exclusive inaccessible illegible secrets.

• The theme of the Upanishads is all the mystery of this unintelligible world. “Whence are we born, where do we live, and whither do we go?”

  Kyle: Universal questions of the soul.

• After a thousand days of the king’s penances a sage, “knower of the soul,” came to him. “You are one who knows its true nature,” says the king; “do you tell us.” “Choose other desires,” warns the sage.

  Kyle: “Knower of the soul” is a sick title.

• “Sir, in this ill-smelling, unsubstantial body, which is a conglomerate of bone, skin, muscle, marrow, flesh, semen, blood, mucus, tears, rheum, feces, urine, wind, bile and phlegm, what is the good of enjoyment of desire? In this body, which is afflicted with desire, anger, covetousness, delusion, fear, despondency, envy, separation from the desirable, union with the undesirable, hunger, thirst, senility, death, disease, sorrow and the like, what is the good of enjoyment of desires? And we see that this whole world is decaying like these gnats, these mosquitoes, this grass, and these trees that arise and perish… Among other things there is the drying up of great oceans, the falling-away of mountain-peaks, the deviation of the fixed polestar,… the submergence of the earth… . In this sort of cycle of existence what is the good of enjoyment of desires, when, after a man has fed upon them, there is seen repeatedly his return here to the earth?”

  Kyle: The nihilism of mortality

• If, on looking inward, a man finds nothing at all, that may only prove the accuracy of his introspection; for no man need expect to find the eternal in himself if he is lost in the ephemeral and particular. Before that inner reality can be felt one has to wash away from himself all evil doing and thinking, all turbulence of body and soul.
• We find already, in these discourses, the belief in transmigration,* and the longing for release (Moksha) from this heavy chain of reincarnations. Janaka, King of the Videhas, begs Yajnavalkya to tell him how rebirth can be avoided. Yajnavalkya answers by expounding Yoga: through the ascetic elimination of all personal desires one may cease to be an individual fragment, unite himself in supreme bliss with the Soul of the World, and so escape rebirth. Whereupon the king, metaphysically overcome, says: “I will give you, noble Sir, the Videhas, and myself also to be your slave.” It is an abstruse heaven, however, that Yajnavalkya promises the devotee, for in it there will be no individual consciousness, there will only be absorption into Being, the reunion of the temporarily separated part with the Whole. “As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all.’ Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with astonishing continuity. We shall find this philosophy of the Upanishads-this monistic theology, this mystic and impersonal immortality-dominating Hindu thought from Buddha to Gandhi, from Yajnavalkya to Tagore. To our own day the Upanishads have remained to India what the New Testament has been to Christendom-a noble creed occasionally practised and generally revered. Even in Europe and America this wistful theosophy has won millions upon millions of followers, from lonely women and tired men to Schopenhauer and Emerson. Who would have thought that the great American philosopher of individualism would give perfect expression to the Hindu conviction that individuality is a delusion?

  Kyle: Super Uno Pluribus

• When Buddha grew to manhood he found the halls, the streets, the very woods of northern India ringing with philosophic disputation, mostly of an atheistic and materialistic trend. The later Upanishads and the oldest Buddhist books are full of references to these heretics.” A large class of traveling Sophists-the Paribbajaka, or Wanderers-spent the better part of every year in passing from locality to locality, seeking pupils, or antagonists, in philosophy. Some of them taught logic as the art of proving anything, and earned for themselves the titles of “Hair-splitters” and “Eelwrigglers”; others demonstrated the non-existence of God, and the inexpediency of virtue. Large audiences gathered to hear such lectures and debates; great halls were built to accommodate them; and sometimes princes offered rewards for those who should emerge victorious from these intellectual jousts.’ It was an age of amazingly free thought, and of a thousand experiments in philosophy.

  Kyle: Buddha had his own “burned over district.”

• Out of the aphorisms of Brihaspati came a whole school of Hindu materialists, named, after one of them, Charvakas. They laughed at the notion that the Vedas were divinely revealed truth; truth, they argued, can never be known, except through the senses. Even reason is not to be trusted, for every inference depends for its validity not only upon accurate observation and correct reasoning, but also upon the assumption that the future will behave like the past; and of this, as Hume was to say, there can be no certainty.” What is not perceived by the senses, said the Charvakas, does not exist; therefore the soul is a delusion, and Atman is humbug. We do not observe, in experience or history, any interposition of supernatural forces in the world. All phenomena are natural; only simpletons trace them to demons or gods.” Matter is the one reality; the body is a combination of atoms;” the mind is merely matter thinking; the body, not the soul, feels, sees, hears, thinks.” “Who has seen the soul existing in a state separate from the body?” There is no immortality, no rebirth. Religion is an aberration, a disease, or a chicanery; the hypothesis of a god is useless for explaining or understanding the world. Men think religion necessary only because, being accustomed to it, they feel a sense of loss, and an uncomfortable void, when the growth of knowledge destroys this faith.” Morality, too, is natural; it is a social convention and convenience, not a divine command. Nature is indifferent to good and bad, virtue and vice, and lets the sun shine indiscriminately upon knaves and saints; if nature has any ethical quality at all it is that of transcendent immorality. There is no need to control instinct and passion, for these are the instructions of nature to men. Virtue is a mistake; the purpose of life is living, and the only wisdom is happiness. This revolutionary philosophy of the Charvakas put an end to the age of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It weakened the hold of the Brahmans on the mind of India, and left in Hindu society a vacuum which almost compelled the growth of a new religion. But the materialists had done their work so thoroughly that both of the new religions which arose to replace the old Vedic faith were, anomalous though it may sound, atheistic religions, devotions without a god. Both belonged to the Nastika or Nihilistic movement; and both were originated not by the Brahman priests but by members of the Kshatriya warrior caste, in a reaction against sacerdotal ceremonialism and theology. With the coming of Jainism and Buddhism a new epoch began in the history of India.

  Kyle: Fascinating story of how effective atheistic Nihilism laid the foundations for not one, but TWO new belief systems.

• It is difficult to see, across 2,500 years, what were the economic, political and moral conditions that called forth religions so ascetic and pessimistic as Jainism and Buddhism. Doubtless much material progress had been made since the establishment of the Aryan rule in India: great cities like Pataliputra and Vaishali had been built; industry and trade had created wealth, wealth had generated leisure, leisure had developed knowledge and culture. Probably it was the riches of India that produced the epicureanism and materialism of the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ. Religion does not prosper under prosperity; the senses liberate themselves from pious restraints, and formulate philosophies that will justify their liberation. As in the China of Confucius and the Greece of Protagoras-not to speak of our own day-so in Buddha’s India the intellectual decay of the old religion had begotten ethical scepticism and moral anarchy. Jainism and Buddhism, though impregnated with the melancholy atheism of a disillusioned age, were religious reactions against the hedonistic creeds of an “emancipated” and worldly leissure class It has often been remarked that this period was distinguished by a shower of stars in the history of genius: Mahavira and Buddha in India, Lao-tze and Confucius in China, Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah in Judea, the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece, and perhaps Zarathustra in Persia. Such a simultaneity of genius suggests more intercommunication and mutual influence among these ancient cultures than it is possible to trace definitely today.

  Kyle: Fascinating… a Republic of Letters? Shared cultural / economic trauma?

• It must further be understood that at Buddha’s birth a great light appeared in the sky, the deaf heard, the dumb spoke, the lame were made straight, gods bent down from heaven to assist him, and kings came from afar to welcome him.

  Kyle: Similarities to Christianity

• In the dark of the morning he rode out of the city on his horse Kanthaka, with his charioteer Chauna clinging desperately to the tail. Then Mara, Prince of Evil, appeared to him and tempted him, offering him great empires. But Buddha refused, and riding on, crossed a broad river with one mighty leap. A desire to look again at his native city arose in him, but he did not turn. Then the great earth turned round, so that he might not have to look back.”

  Kyle: Similarities to Christianity

• If one could still all desires for one’s self, and seek only to do good, then individuality, that first and worst delusion of mankind, might be overcome, and the soul would merge at last with unconscious infinity. What peace there would be in the heart that had cleansed itself of every personal desire!-and what heart that had not so cleansed itself could ever know peace? Happiness is possible neither here, as paganism thinks, nor hereafter, as many religions think. Only peace is possible, only the cool quietude of craving ended, only Nirvana.

  Kyle: Super Uno Pluribus

• Like the other teachers of his time, Buddha taught through conversation, lectures, and parables. Since it never occurred to him, any more than to Socrates or Christ, to put his doctrine into writing, he summarized it in sutras (“threads”) designed to prompt the memory.

  Kyle: Atomic unit of ideas

• The oldest extant documents purporting to be the teaching of Buddha are the Pitakas, or “Baskets of the Law,” prepared for the Buddhist Council of 241 B.C., accepted by it as genuine, transmitted orally for four centuries from the death of Buddha, and finally put into writing, in the Pali tongue, about 80 B.C. These Pitakas are divided into three groups: the Sutta, or tales; the Vinaya, or discipline; and the Abhidhamma, or doctrine. The Sutta-pitaka contains the dialogues of Buddha, which Rhys Davids ranks with those of Plato. Strictly speaking, however, these writings give us the teaching not necessarily of Buddha himself, but only of the Buddhist schools. “Though these narratives,” says Sir Charles Eliot, “are compilations which accepted new matter during several centuries, I see no reason to doubt that the oldest stratum contains the recollections of those who had seen and heard the master.”

  Kyle: Interesting how much of central religious doctrine is a question mark of orally handed down tradition.

• “If a man foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall come from me.” When a simpleton abused him, Buddha listened in silence; but when the man had finished, Buddha asked him: “Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?” The man answered: “To him who offered it.” “My son,” said Buddha, “I decline to accept your abuse, and request you to keep it for yourself.” Unlike most saints, Buddha had a sense of humor, and knew that metaphysics without laughter is immodesty.

  Kyle: Reminds me of Joseph Smith

• His favorite sutra was the “Four Noble Truths,” in which he expounded his view that life is pain, that pain is due to desire, and that wisdom lies in stilling all desire.

  Kyle: Interpersonal problems = desire? You own your tasks, whether you like it or not. You can only desire what you don’t have (I.e. the tasks of others).

• Buddha was convinced that pain so overbalanced pleasure in human life that it would be better never to have been born. More tears have flowed, he tells us, than all the water that is in the four great oceans.” Every pleasure seemed poisoned for him by its brevity. “Is that which is impermanent, sorrow or joy?” he asks one of his disciples; and the answer is, “Sorrow, Lord.”

  Kyle: Nihilism

• There is nothing stranger in the history of religion than the sight of Buddha founding a worldwide religion, and yet refusing to be drawn into any discussion about eternity, immortality, or God. The infinite is a myth, he says, a fiction of philosophers who have not the modesty to confess that an atom can never understand the cosmos. He smiles” at the debate over the finity or infinity of the universe, quite as if he foresaw the futile astromythology of physicists and mathematicians who debate the same question today.
• He calls such questions “the jungle, the desert, the puppet-show, the writhing, the entanglement, of speculation,” and will have nothing to do with them; they lead only to feverish disputation, personal resentments, and sorrow; they never lead to wisdom and peace. Saintliness and content lie not in knowledge of the universe and God, but simply in selfless and beneficent living.

  Kyle: Something to be said about NOT focusing on the mysteries of God.

• When some students remind him that the Brahmans claim to know the solutions of these problems, he laughs them off: “There are, brethren, some recluses and Brahmans who wriggle like eels; and when a question is put to them on this or that they resort to equivocation, to eel-wriggling.

  Kyle: John the Baptist / Jesus calling the Pharisees snakes

• Tell them that the poor and the lowly, the rich and the high, are all one, and that all castes unite in this religion as do the rivers in the sea.

  Kyle: Christianity similarities

• Quietly, and without controversy, he offers a religion absolutely free of dogma and priestcraft, and proclaims a way of salvation open to infidels and believers alike.

  Kyle: Danger of dogma

• In the end, says Buddha, we perceive the absurdity of moral and psychological individualism. Our fretting selves are not really separate beings and powers, but passing ripples on the stream of life, little knots forming and unraveling in the wind-blown mesh of fate. When we see ourselves as parts of a whole, when we reform our selves and our desires in terms of the whole, then our personal disappointments and defeats, our varied suffering and inevitable death, no longer sadden us as bitterly as before; they are lost in the amplitude of infinity. When we have learned to love not our separate life, but all men and all living things, then at last we shall find peace.

  Kyle: Super Uno Pluribus

• He died in 483 B.C., at the age of eighty. “Now then, O monks,” he said to them as his last words, “I address you. Subject to decay are compound things. Strive with earnestness.”

  Kyle: Anything assembled from parts comes apart over time. Entropy?

• His days were divided into sixteen periods of ninety minutes each. In the first he arose, and prepared himself by meditation; in the second he studied the reports of his agents, and issued secret instructions; the third he spent with his councillors in the Hall of Private Audience; in the fourth he attended to state finances and national defense; in the fifth he heard the petitions and suits of his subjects; in the sixth he bathed and dined, and read religious literature; in the seventh he received taxes and tribute, and made official appointments; in the eighth he again met his Council, and heard the reports of his spies, including the courtesans whom he used for this purpose;” the ninth he devoted to relaxation and prayer, the tenth and eleventh to military matters, the twelfth again to secret reports, the thirteenth to the evening bath and repast, the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth to sleep.” Perhaps the historian tells us what Chandragupta might have been, or how Kautilya wished the people to picture him, rather than what he really was. Truth does not often escape from palaces.
• Like the author of The Prince, Kautilya saw fit to preserve in writing his formulas for warfare and diplomacy; tradition ascribes to him the Arthashastra, the oldest book in extant Sanskrit literature.” As an example of its delicate realism we may take its list of means for capturing a fort: “Intrigue, spies, winning over the enemy’s people, siege, and assault”—a wise economy of physical effort.

  Kyle: A more character rich version of Jafar

• Law was administered in the village by local headmen, or by panchayats -village councils of five men; in towns, districts and provinces by inferior and superior courts; at the capital by the royal council as a supreme court, and by the King as a court of last appeal. Penalties were severe, and included mutilation, torture and death, usually on the principle of lex talionis, or equivalent retaliation.

  Kyle: Government: a monopoly on violence

• The one defect of this government was autocracy, and therefore continual dependence upon force and spies. Like every autocrat, Chandragupta held his power precariously, always fearing revolt and assassination. Every night he used a different bedroom, and always he was surrounded by guards. Hindu tradition, accepted by European historians, tells how, when a long famine (pace Megasthenes) came upon his kingdom, Chandragupta, in despair at his helplessness, abdicated his throne, lived for twelve years thereafter as a Jain ascetic, and then starved himself to death. “All things considered,” said Voltaire, “the life of a gondolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining.”

  Kyle: Example of the virtue of “I teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves.” (Joseph Smith)

• It is at present impossible to say how much of this is myth, and how much is history; nor can we discern, at this distance, the motives of the King. Perhaps he saw the growth of Buddhism, and thought that its code of generosity and peace might provide a convenient regimen for his people, saving countless policemen. In the eleventh year of his reign he began to issue the most remarkable edicts in the history of government, and commanded that they should be carved upon rocks and pillars in simple phrase and local dialects, so that any literate Hindu might be able to understand them. The Rock Edicts have been found in almost every part of India; of the pillars ten remain in place, and the position of twenty others has been determined. In these edicts we find the Emperor accepting the Buddhist faith completely, and applying it resolutely throughout the last sphere of human affairs in which we should have expected to find it-statesmanship. It is as if some modern empire had suddenly announced that henceforth it would practice Christianity.
• His outstanding fault was egotism; it is difficult to be at once modest, and a reformer. His self-respect shines out in every edict, and makes him more completely the brother of Marcus Aurelius. He failed to perceive that the Brahmans hated him and only bided their time to destroy him, as the priests of Thebes had destroyed Ikhnaton a thousand years before.
• But in truth we know nothing of his later years, not even the year of his death. Within a generation after his passing, his empire, like Ikhnaton’s, crumbled to pieces. As it became evident that the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Magadha was maintained rather by the inertia of tradition than by the organization of force, state after state renounced its adherence to the King of Kings at Pataliputra.
• States are built not on the ideals but on the nature of men.
• From the death of Ashoka to the empire of the Guptas-i.e., for a period of almost six hundred years-Hindu inscriptions and documents are so few that the history of this interval is lost in obscurity.

  Kyle: How much of “recorded history” is still only sparsely recorded.

• He describes with admiration the wealth and prosperity, the virtue and happiness, of the Hindu people, and the social and religious liberty which they enjoyed. He was astonished at the number, size and population of the great cities, at the free hospitals and other charitable institutions which dotted the land,* at the number of students in the universities and monasteries, and at the imposing scale and splendor of the imperial palaces. These antedated by three centuries the first hospital built in Europe-viz., the Maison Dieu erected in Paris in the seventh century A.D.”

  Kyle: Example of Eastern cultures being ahead of Western cultures in surprising ways.

• “An impartial historian,” says Havell, “might well consider that the greatest triumph of British administration would be to restore to India all that she enjoyed in the fifth century A.D.
• Harsha was fascinated by Yuan’s learning and fine manners, and called a convocation of Buddhist notables to hear Yuan expound the Mahayana doctrine. Yuan nailed his theses to the gateway of the pavilion in which the discourse was to be held, and added a postscript in the manner of the day: “If any one here can find a single wrong argument and can refute it, I will let him cut off my head.” The discussion lasted eighteen days, but Yuan (Yuan reports) answered all objections and confounded all heretics. (Another account has it that his opponents ended the conference by setting fire to the pavilion.)”

  Kyle: It seems to be human nature that, when you can’t effectively argue with a certain perspective, you, instead, try to silence it.

• All the nonsense and glamor-all the bravery, loyalty, beauty, feuds, poisons, assassinations, wars, and subjection of woman-which our traditions attach to the Age of Chivalry can be found in the annals of these plucky states. “The Rajput chieftains,” says Tod, “were imbued with all the kindred virtues of the western cavalier, and far his superior in mental attainments.”
• Tod’s account of the fall of Chitor, one of the Rajput capitals, is as romantic as any legend of Arthur or Charlemagne; and indeed (since it is based solely upon native historians too faithful to their fatherland to be in love with truth) these marvelous Annals of Rajasthan may be as legendary as Le Morte d’Arthur or Le Chanson de Roland.

  Kyle: The epic takes that HAVEN’T been told ad naseum.

• For example, Vikramaditya, who ruled the Chalyukans for half a century (1076-1126), was so successful in war that (like Nietzsche) he proposed to found a new chronological era, dividing all history into before him and after him. Today he is a footnote.

  Kyle: How many epics throughout history have been lost, some not even as footnotes.

• However, every traveler is a liar.
• The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.
• This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations; it argued that both mastery and slavery were superficial delusions, and concluded that freedom of the body or the nation was hardly worth defending in so brief a life. The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.
• It is in the nature of governments to degenerate; for power, as Shelley said, poisons every hand that touches it.” The excesses of the Delhi Sultans lost them the support not only of the Hindu population, but of their Moslem followers. When fresh invasions came from the north these Sultans were defeated with the same ease with which they themselves had won India.

  Kyle: Interesting. Is this always true?

• Mogul Dynasty, was a man every whit as brave and fascinating as Alexander. Descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, he inherited all the ability of these scourges of Asia without their brutality. He suffered from a surplus of energy in body and mind; he fought, hunted and traveled insatiably; it was nothing for him, single-handed, to kill five enemies in five minutes.” In two days he rode one hundred and sixty miles on horseback, and swam the Ganges twice in the bargain; and in his last years he remarked that not since the age of eleven had he kept the fast of Ramadan twice in the same place.”

  Kyle: How many Alexander’s has history had?

• These were the barbarous beginnings of a man destined to become one of the wisest, most humane and most cultured of all the kings known to history.
• Later he came to recognize the value of books, and-being still unable to read-listened for hours while others read to him, often from abstruse and difficult volumes. In the end he became an illiterate scholar, loving letters and art, and supporting them with royal largesse.

  Kyle: Cosmere pattern of men not reading.

• His mind was not quite as realistic and coldly accurate as Cæsar’s or Napoleon’s; he had a passion for metaphysics, and might, if deposed, have become a mystic recluse. He thought constantly, and was forever making inventions and suggesting improvements.” Like Haroun-al-Rashid he took nocturnal rambles in disguise, and came back bursting with reforms.
• “The superiority of man,” said Akbar, “rests on the jewel of reason.
• While Catholics were murdering Protestants in France, and Protestants, under Elizabeth, were murdering Catholics in England, and the Inquisition was killing and robbing Jews in Spain, and Bruno was being burned at the stake in Italy, Akbar invited the representatives of all the religions in his empire to a conference, pledged them to peace, issued edicts of toleration for every cult and creed, and, as evidence of his own neutrality, married wives from the Brahman, Buddhist, and Mohammedan faiths.
• Mullahs came to his deathbed to reconvert him to Islam, but they failed; the King “passed away without the benefit of the prayers of any church or sect.” No crowd followed his simple funeral; and the sons and courtiers who had worn mourning for the event discarded it the same evening, and rejoiced that they had inherited his kingdom. It was a bitter death for the justest and wisest ruler that Asia has ever known.
• The children who had waited so impatiently for his death found it difficult to hold together the empire that had been created by his genius. Why is it that great men so often have mediocrities for their offspring? Is it because the gamble of the genes that produced them-the commingling of ancestral traits and biological possibilities-was but a chance, and could not be expected to recur? Or is it because the genius exhausts in thought and toil the force that might have gone to parentage, and leaves only his diluted blood to his heirs? Or is it that children decay under ease, and early good fortune deprives them of the stimulus to ambition and growth?
• As a great British administrator of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, wrote, those who look on India in its present state may be inclined to sus pect the native writers of exaggerating its former prosperity; but the deserted cities, ruined palaces and choked-up aqueducts which we still see, with the great reservoirs and embankments in the midst of jungles, and the decayed causeways, wells and caravanserais of the royal roads, concur with the evidence of contemporary travelers in convincing us that those historians had good grounds for their commendation.”
• It is true that in politics he was cold and calculating, capable of lying cleverly for his country and his god. But he was the least cruel of the Moguls, and the mildest; slaughter abated in his reign, and he made hardly any use of punishment in dealing with crime. He was consistently humble in deportment, patient under provocation, and resigned in misfortune. He abstained scrupulously from all food, drink or luxury forbidden by his faith; though skilled in music, he abandoned it as a sensual pleasure; and apparently he carried out his resolve to spend nothing upon himself save what he had been able to earn by the labor of his hands. He was a St. a Augustine on the throne

  Kyle: King Benjamin and Mosiah about righteous kings.

• As a result of his fanaticism, thousands of the temples which had represented or housed the art of India through a millennium were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty she once possessed.
• Within seventeen years of his death his empire was broken into fragments. The support of the people, so wisely won by Akbar, had been forfeited by the cruelty of Jehangir, the wastefulness of Jehan, and the intolerance of Aurangzeb. The Moslem minority, already enervated by India’s heat, had lost the military ardor and physical vigor of their prime, and no fresh recruits were coming from the north to buttress their declining power. Meanwhile, far away in the west, a little island had sent its traders to cull the riches of India. Soon it would send its guns, and take over this immense empire in which Hindu and Moslem had joined to build one of the great civilizations of history.

  Kyle: We talk about colonial wealth extraction of Africa, but boy did India get the treatment too.

• Europe looked upon the Hindus as experts in almost every line of manufacturewood-work, ivory-work, metal-work, bleaching, dyeing, tanning, soap-making, glass-blowing, gunpowder, fireworks, cement, etc.” China imported eyeglasses from India in 1260 A.D. Bernier, traveling in India in the seventeenth century, described it as humming with industry. Fitch, in 1585, saw a fleet of one hundred and eighty boats carrying a great variety of goods down the river Jumna.

  Kyle: Interesting to see how commerce and industrialism have shifted around the globe.

• “The Hindu kingdoms overthrown by the Moslems,” says Elphinstone, “were so wealthy that the historians tire of telling of the immense loot of jewels and coin captured by the invaders. Nicolo Conti described the banks of the Ganges (ca. 1420) as lined with one prosperous city after another, each well designed, rich in gardens and orchards, silver and gold, commerce and industry.” Shah Jehan’s treasury was so full that he kept two underground strong rooms, each of some 150,000 cubic feet capacity, almost filled with silver and gold.” “Contemporary testimonies,” says Vincent Smith, “permit of no doubt that the urban population of the more important cities was well to do.”

  Kyle: Crazy the wealth taken away

• The laws of Manu, though they were more a code of ethics than a system of practised legislation, expressed the focal ideas of India about monarchy: that it should be impartially rigorous, and paternally solicitous of the public good.” The Mohammedan rulers paid less attention than their Hindu predecessors to these ideals and checks; they were a conquering minority, and rested their rule frankly on the superiority of their guns. “The army,” says a Moslem historian, with charming clarity, “is the source and means of government.” Akbar was an exception, for he relied chiefly upon the good will of a people prospering under his mild and benevolent despotism. Perhaps in the circumstances his was the best government possible. Its vital defect, as we have seen, lay in its dependence upon the character of the king; the supreme centralized authority that proved beneficent under Akbar proved ruinous under Aurangzeb.

  Kyle: (1) Their own code of Hammurabi, (2) a monopoly on violence. King Mosiah, if we could always have righteous kings.

• This system had grown more rigid and complex since the Vedic period; not only because it is in the nature of institutions to become stiff with age, but because the instability of the political order, and the overrunning of India by alien peoples and creeds, had intensified caste as a barrier to the mixture of Moslem and Hindu blood. In Vedic days caste had been varna, or color; in medieval India it became jati, or birth. Its essence was twofold: the heredity of status, and the acceptance of dharmai.e., the traditional duties and employments of one’s native caste.

  Kyle: Hardening of any institution

• The power of the Brahmans was based upon a monopoly of knowledge. They were the custodians and remakers of tradition, the educators of children, the composers or editors of literature, the experts versed in the inspired and infallible Vedas.

  Kyle: Knowledge is power

• for, said Manu, “the man who is good by birth becomes low by low associations, but the man who is low by birth cannot become high by high associations.”
• Given a moderate observation of these rules, and a people too burdened with the tillage of the fields, and therefore too subject to the apparently personal whims of the elements, to rise out of superstition to education, the power of the priests grew from generation to generation, and made them the most enduring aristocracy in history. Nowhere else can we find this astonishing phenomenon-so typical of the slow rate of change in India-of an upper class maintaining its ascendancy and privileges through all conquests, dynasties and governments for 2500 years.

  Kyle: How aristocracies rise, fall, and are maintained.

• Much can be said in defense of what, after monogamy, must be the most abused of all social institutions. The caste system had the eugenic value of keeping the presumably finer strains from dilution and disappearance through indiscriminate mixture; it established certain habits of diet and cleanliness as a rule of honor which all might observe and emulate; it order to the chaotic inequalities and differences of men, and spared gave the soul the modern fever of climbing and gain; it gave order to every life by prescribing for each man a dharma, or code of conduct for his caste; it gave order to every trade and profession, elevated every occupa tion into a vocation not lightly to be changed, and, by making every industry a caste, provided its members with a means of united action against exploitation and tyranny. It offered an escape from the plutocracy or the military dictatorship which are apparently the only alternatives to aristocracy; it gave to a country shorn of political stability by a hundred invasions and revolutions a social, moral and cultural order and continuity rivaled only by the Chinese. Amid a hundred anarchic changes in the state, the Brahmans maintained, through the system of caste, a stable society, and preserved, augmented and transmitted civilization. The nation bore with them patiently, even proudly, because every one knew that in the end they were the one indispensable government of India.

  Kyle: Plutocracy or military dictatorship as the only alternatives to aristocracy. Defense of the caste system, despite how abused it was.

• “Better thine own work is, though done with fault,” said the Bhagavad-Gita,” “than doing others’ work, even excellently.”

  Kyle: Separations of tasks

• In considering alien customs we must continually remind ourselves that foreign practices cannot be judged intelligently by our own moral code. “The superficial observer who applies his own standard to the customs of all nations,” says Tod, “laments with affected philanthropy the degraded condition of the Hindu female, in which sentiment he would find her little disposed to join him.” On contemporary changes in these customs cf. Chapter XXII below.

  Kyle: Having a culturally contextualized standard for people.

• It is difficult to go below these surface appearances and describe the character of the Hindus, for every people harbors all virtues and all vices, and witnesses tend to select such of these as will point their moral and adorn their tale. “I think we may take as their greatest vice,” says Père Dubois, “the untrustworthiness, deceit and double-dealing… which are common to all Hindus… Certain it is that there is no nation in the world which thinks so lightly of an oath or of perjury.” “Lying,” says Westermarck, “has been called the national vice of the Hindus.” “Hindus are wily and deceitful,” says Macaulay.” According to the laws of Manu and the practice of the world a lie told for good motives is forgivable; if, for example, the death of a priest would result from speaking the truth, falsehood is justifiable. But Yuan Chwang tells us: “They do not practice deceit, and they keep their sworn obligations… They will not take anything wrongfully, and they yield more than fairness requires. Abu-l Fazl, not prejudiced in favor of India, reports the Hindus of the sixteenth century as “religious, affable, cheerful, lovers of justice, given to retirement, able in business, admirers of truth, grateful, and of unbounded fidelity.” “Their honesty,” said honest Keir Hardie, “is proverbial. They borrow and lend on word of mouth, and the repudiation of a debt is almost unknown.” “I have had before me,” says a British judge in India, “hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it. How shall we reconcile these conflicting testimonies? Perhaps it is very simple: some Hindus are honest, and some are not.
• Chess is so old that half the nations of antiquity claim its birthplace. The view generally accepted by archeologists of the game is that it arose in India; certainly we find there its oldest indisputable appearance (ca. 750 A.D.). The word chess comes from the Persian shah, king; and checkmate is originally shah-mat-”king dead.” The Persians called it shatranj, and took both the word and the game, through the Arabs, from India, where it was known as chaturanga, or “four angles”-elephants, horses, chariots and footsoldiers. The Arabs still call the bishop al-fil-i.e., elephant (from aleph-hind, Arabic for “ox of India”). The Hindus tell a delightful legend to account for the origin of the game. At the beginning of the fifth century of our era (the story goes), a Hindu monarch offended his Brahman and Kshatriya admirers by ignoring their counsels and forgetting that the love of the people is the surest support of a throne. A Brahman, Sissa, undertook to open the eyes of the young king by devising a game in which the piece that represented the king, though highest in dignity and value (as in Oriental war), should be, alone, almost helpless; hence came chess. The ruler liked the game so well that he invited Sissa to name his reward. Sissa modestly asked for some grains of rice, the quantity to be determined by placing one grain upon the first of the sixty-four squares of the chess-board, and then doubling the number of grains with each succeeding square. The king agreed at once, but was soon surprised to find that he had promised away his kingdom. Sissa took the opportunity to point out to his master how easily a monarch may be led astray when he scorns his counsellors. Credat qui vult.
• In no other country is religion so powerful, or so important, as in India. If the Hindus have permitted alien governments to be set over them again and again it is partly because they did not care much who ruled or exploited them-natives or foreigners; the crucial matter was religion, not politics; the soul, not the body; endless later lives rather than this passing one. When Ashoka became a saint, and Akbar almost adopted Hinduism, the power of religion was revealed over even the strongest men. In our century it is a saint, rather than a statesman, who for the first time in history has unified all India.
• But the Buddhism that prevailed was not that of Buddha; we might better describe it as that of his rebellious disciple Subhadda, who, on hearing of the Master’s death, said to the monks: “Enough, sirs! Weep not, neither lament! We are well rid of the great Samana. We used to be annoyed by being told, ‘This beseems you, this beseems you not.’ But now we shall be able to do whatever we like; and what we do not like, that we shall not have to do!""

  Kyle: I wonder if every religion has a “Paul”; a transformative secondary character who, while less famous, is much more impactful. Ashoka / Buddhaghosa -> Buddha; Constantine -> Christ