Our Oriental Heritage

The Story of Civilization #1

by Will Durant

Here is the first volume of this Story of Civilization, Our Oriental Heritage, complete in itself. Dr. Durant worked on it steadily from 1927 to 1932, & the book represents the third complete rewriting. Our Oriental Heritage deals first with the establishment of civilization, then takes up, not in rapid review but in richly fascinating detail, the colorful, complex dramas of the Near East, India & her neighbors, & the Far East. The story is carried up to mid-30s. The Story of Civilization represents the most comprehensive attempt in our times to embrace the vast panorama of human history & culture.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Ancient History, World History, Audiobook, China

961 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

William James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife Ariel and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for his book, The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which was considered "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

Reviews

[Luffy Sempai · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this incredibly glued together account of history. It was a privilege to read a history book from the eyes of a deceased scholar. I mean, when discussing India, Will Durant mentions Gandhi and includes him in his book when the latter is still alive!

This was a fascinating read. It was my longest slog. I began reading in early 2019 and finished it after what seemed a long time of shifting from civilization to civilisation.

I have never read a book like this. Nor will anyone. This tome lies alone as a work of science rendered into everyday language. I am giving it only 3 stars for petulant and childish reasons. My impatience with some repetitions have something to do with it. It doesn't matter. I loved reading about the lost and earliest civilisations with awe. What a show this was.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But a nation, like an individual, can be too sensible, too prosaically sane and unbearably right."
- Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage



I jumped into this series with not a small amount of skepticsm. How can you not be skeptical of a project that is basically 10,000 pages, in 11 volumes, totalling about 4 million words? But I was curious. This series is ubiquitous in used bookstores. I was more than curious. It almost seemed stupidly large. That was a selling point. It also seemed nearly (11/12) designed for a year-long big book quest. My worries increased when a friend of mine suggested I abandon my copy back to a "little free library or used bookstore". But I figured I'd give Vol 1 a shot. I was apprehensive because a History of Civilization written in 1935 is going to come from a completely different perspective than the one I'm used to from contemporary historians (academic or otherwise). But that same worry also made me curious. The fact that this series was published over forty years (Vol 1 = 1935; Vol 11 = 1975) made me interested to see if/how the Durant's approach to history changed from pre-WWII to post-Vietnam.

Vol 1: "Our Oriental Heritage" is 938 pages that span:

I. The Establishment of Civilization - pages 1 to 110
II. The Near East (Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Judea, Persia, etc) - 111 to 386
III. India and Her Neighbors - 387 t0 634
IV. The Far East - 635 to 824
V. Japan - 825 to 944

The introduction almost turned me off. Durant's almost causal use of "savage" and "primative" to discuss early man and civilization irritated me, and there were brief periods where I was worried Durant was going to emerge as a fangirl of eugenics. But I also had to remember this was written by an American, white male intellectual in the middle of the 30s, almost 80 years ago. It is also a book aimed at the general reader not the academic. I kept on reader, because once engaged I'm an indulgent reader. And... it got better. Actually, it became quite good. I enjoyed his style. I felt Durant was (as much as an outsider can be) fair to most of his subjects. I enjoyed his horde of historical truisms/maxims/aphorisms that he sprinkled willy-nilly throughout the volume. I felt, after reading Vol I, like I learned a lot. It was just ambitous enough, broad enough, and interesting enough to warrent me continuing to Vol II next month. There was plenty of fluff, and I'm sure academics in any of the areas he covered could shake up his views considerably, but like Durant said: "most of history is guessing, and the rest is predjudice"

Some of my other favorite of Durant's historical aphorisms in Vol I, Section 1 The Establishment of Civilization:

"Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace by the word, in crisis by the sword" (22).
"Time sanctifies everything" (24).
"Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization" (29).
"To transmute greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civilization" (53).
"men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science" (56).
"It is the tendency of gods to begin as ogres and to end as loving fathers" (63).
"In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like a body and soul, in a harmonious death" (71).
"Possibly every discovery is a rediscovery" (107).

[Peiman E iran · Rating 4 out of 5]

‎دوستانِ گرانقدر، «تاریخ تمدن» شاملِ 11 جلد میباشد... که این کتاب جلد اول آن است، از چیزی نزدیک به 1000 صفحه و 31 فصلِ گوناگون تشکیل شده است. به نظرم فصل هشتم که مربوط به "تمدن مصر باستان" بود و فصل 29 و 30 و 31 که مربوط به "تمدن ژاپن" بود، بسیار جذاب و برای تکمیل اطلاعاتِ تاریخی، مفید بود
‎عزیزانم، از «تاریخ تمدن»، موضوعِ «اعدام» را برایِ نوشتنِ ریویو انتخاب کردم که فکر میکنم برایتان جذابیت داشته باشد، بنابراین تکه تکه چکیده ای از هر بخش تهیه کردم و با اضافه نمودنِ اطلاعات دیگر، آن را کاملتر نمودم که در زیر برایِ شما بزرگواران مینویسم... در ریویوهایِ دیگر تلاش میکنم، بیشتر در موردِ "تاریخ تمدن" برایتان بنویسم
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‎قوانین در "بابل": در "بابل" قوانینِ «حمورابی» بر این قوم حاکمیت داشته است. در «قانون حمورابى»، مواردِ فراوانى از مجازات ھاىِ خشن به چشم مى خورد که از جمله آن ھا مجازاتِ اعدام است..حتی مجازاتِ اعدام براى برخى از اعمالى که ظاھراً اھمیت چندانى ندارد در آن دوران در نظر گرفته شده بود.این قوانین که مرکب از [282] ماده است به طریقى آمرانه و به صورتِ جملات شرطى نوشته شده است، بدین صورت که اگر کسی چنین کند چنان باید بشود
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‎قوانین "آشورى": مجازات ها و کیفرھاىِ قانونى در «قوانین آشور» درجاتِ گوناگونى داشت، از قبیلِ نمایش دادنِ شخصِ گناھکار در میانِ مردم، واداشتنِ وى به کارھاىِ دشوار، شلاق زدن از بیست تا صد ضربه، بریدنِ گوش یا بینی، خصی کردن یا اخته کردن، زبان بریدن، چشم در آوردن، شکم دریدن و سر بریدن... در قوانین «سارگن دوم» مجازات ھاىِ دیگرى از قبیلِ زھر خوراندن و سوزاندنِ پسر یا دخترِ شخصِ گناھکار در قربانگاهِ معبد نیز آمده است. ولى شواھدى در دست نیست که این قوانین در ھزارهٔ پایانیِ پیش از میلاد مسیح اجرا شده باشد. زنا، ھتک ناموس و بعضی از روش هایِ دزدى را معمولاً با اعدام مجازات مى کردند. گاھى نیز متهم را با داورىِ خدایان کیفر مى دادند یا گناھکار را پا بسته در آب می انداختند و سر نوشت وى را به دستِ آب مى سپردند
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‎دورانِ "هخامنشیان": در دورانِ "هخامنشیان" بعضى از مجازات ھاىِ بکار برده شده آن چنان عجیب و وحشتناک بوده که «ویل دورانت» میگوید: عقل نمى تواند آن را باور کند... یکى از روش ھاىِ مجازات اعدام در زمانِ ھخامنشیان، گذاشتنِ سرِ محکوم بر سنگ و خُرد کردن آن بوده است... برای مثال: در موردِ زنى خیانتکار که «استاتیرا» زنِ «اردشیر دوم» پادشاه ھخامنشی را مسموم کرده بود.. پاسدارانِ شاھى آن زن را گرفتند و طبقِ قوانینِ پارسی که براىِ زھر دھندگان مقرر شده بود، با زجر او را کشتند، یعنی سرش را روى سنگ گذاشته کوبیدند تا خرد شد و صورتش پهن گردید
‎یکى دیگر از روش هایِ اعدام، کندن پوست بود: «کمبوجیه» یکى از قاضی هایِ شاھى را که براىِ صدورِ یک حکمِ غیر عادلانه رشوه گرفته بود، با کندنِ پوست به قتل رساند.. «ویل دورانت» این موضوع را اینگونه بیان کرده است: مجازاتِ، دھنده و گیرندهٔ رشوه ھر دو اعدام بود. «کمبوجیه» فرمان داد تا زنده زنده پوستِ قاضیِ فاسد را کندند و همان پوستِ کنده شده را بر جاىِ نشستنِ قاضی در محکمه گستردند. آنگاه «کمبوجیه» فرزندِ ھمان قاضی را بر مسندِ قضا نشانید تا پیوسته داستانِ پدر را به خاطر داشته باشد و از راهِ راست منحرف نشود
‎گناهان و بزه هایِ کوچک را با شلاق زدن کیفر می دادند... گناهانِ بزرگتر را با داغ کردن، ناقص کردن عضو، دست و پا بریدن، چشم کندن یا به زندان افکندن و کشتن مجازات می کردند... ولى خیانت به میهن و سرزمین، ھتکِ ناموس، لواط، سوزاندنِ مردگان، تجاوز به حرمتِ کاخ شاھى، نزدیکی با کنیزهایِ شاه یا نشستن بر تختِ پادشاه یا بى ادبى به خاندانِ پادشاهی، مجازاتِ مرگ داشت. در اینگونه حالات گناھکار را ناچار می کردند که زھر بنوشد یا او را به چهار میخ مى کشیدند یا به دار مى آویختند - در زمانِ دار کشیدن معمولاً سرِ مجرم به طرف پایین بود - یا سنگسارش مى کردند یا جز سر، تمامِ بدن او را در خاک مى کردند یا سرش را میان دو سنگ بزرگ مى کوفتند و یا متهم را با مجازاتى عجیب که عقل نمى تواند آن را باور کند به نام مجازاتِ «دو کرجى» کیفر مى دادند
‎سربازى به نام «مهرداد» در حال مستی گفته بود که کشتنِ «کوروش کوچک» در جنگ "کوناکسا" کار وى بوده است و شاه را نرسد که این کارِ بزرگ را به خود نسبت بدھد. «اردشیر دوم» که این را شنید فرمان داد تا آن سرباز را با مجازات «دو کرجى» به این طریق اعدام کنند: دو کرجى چنان انتخاب شود که درست بر یکدیگر منطبق شود. گناھکار را که هدف شکنجه کردن اوست، در یکى از دو کرجى مى گذارند و کرجى دیگر را چنان بر وى قرار مى دھند که جز سر و دست ھا تمام بدن وى در میان آن دو کرجى بماند. آن گاه به وى خوراک مى دھند و اگر از خوردنِ آن خوددارى نمود با داخل کردنِ میخى به چشمِ وى او را به این کار وا مى دارند. چون خوراک خورد بر سر و صورت او مخلوطى از شیر و عسل مى پاشند و از ھمین شربت به وى مى نوشانند. در همین حال، کرجى ھا را چنان نگاه مى دارند که رویش به جانب خورشید باشد. به این ترتیب، مگسان بر وى ھجوم می آورند و او را در میان خود مى گیرند چون خوراک خورده ناچار کارى مى کند که ھمه کسانِ دیگر که میخورند و مى آشامند چنان مى کنند. از پلیدى ھاىِ وى حشرات و کرم ھایى تولید مى شود و به اندرونِ وى راه مى یابد و ھمه تن او را مى خورد. چون پس از چند روز دانستند که آن مرد گناھکار به راستی مرده است، کرجىِ بالایی را برمى دارند و در آن حال دیگر گوشتی بر تنِ وى دیده نمى شود زیراکه حشراتِ پلید که گویى از اندرونِ وى برخاسته اند ھمه جاىِ او را خورده اند... به این ترتیب بود که «مهرداد» پس از ھفده روز شکنجه دیدن جان داد
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‎دورانِ "ساسانیان": مجازات ھا و بویژه مجازاتِ اعدام در دوران "ساسانیان" نیز تفاوتِ چندانى با دوران "ھخامنشیان" نداشت، بلکه در مراحلى خشونت بارتر از زمان "ھخامنشیان" بود.. براىِ مثال، مجازات ھاىِ بدنىِ بسیار شدیدى از قبیل اعدام، کور کردن، حبس و تازیانه متداول بوده است؛ به ویژه در موردِ جرایمى که علیه پادشاه یا حکومت صورت مى گرفت، از قبیل جاسوسی و خیانت به کشور، مجازاتِ اعدام توام با شکنجه و آزارِ شدیدِ بدنى ھم چون بریدنِ بینی و گوش و زبان پیش از اجراى اعدام یا مثله کردن، به چهار میخ کشیدن، زنده به گور کردن و نظایرِ آن را در پى داشت. اگر کسی مرتکب تقصیر نسبت به خدا و دینِ پادشاه و کشور میشد مستحق اعدام بود... مجازاتِ اعدام با دار زدن، گردن زدن، سنگسار کردن، پوست کندن و بستنِ مجرم به اسبِ سرکش یا انداختن او به زیر پاىِ پیل (فیل) و امثال آن، انجام میشده است
‎دخترِ پادشاه "حران" که به پدرِ خود خیانت کرده و شهر را به «شاپور اول» تسلیم کرده بود، مجازاتش به این صورت بود که: دختر را به دستورِ شاه به جلاد سپردند. جلاد گیسوانِ دختر را به دمِ اسبِ سرکش بست و اسب را رھا کرد
‎مجازاتِ قتل عموماً با شمشیر انجام می گرفت. بعضى جنایات مانندِ خیانت به دولت یا دی�� را با دار زدن مجازات مى دادند. گاھى پس از مصلوب کردن براى عبرتِ ناظران، پوستِ مجرم را کنده و پُر از پَر و کاه میکردند و بر دروازهٔ شهر مى آویختند
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‎دورانِ حکومتِ کثیفِ عرب پرستانِ "صفویه": در این دوران، تنبیه و مجازاتِ متداولِ این بود که دو پاىِ راھزن را به چهار شتر میبستند و سینه و شکم وى را از بالا به پایین چاک مى زدند و براى عبرت بینندگان شتر را در تمام محلات و چھارسوى شهر مى گردانند و یا سر را در سوراخِ تنگِ دیوارى به در میکردند به طورى که سر در یک طرف و بدن در طرف دیگر دیوار بماند و قادر به حرکت نباشد و براى مسخره چُپقى در دھان او مى گذاشتند تا بدین ترتیب هم ادب شود و هم کشته شود... آدم خوارى در عهد "صفویه" براى کشتنِ گناھکاران و کسانى که به حق یا ناحق گرفتار آتش خشم امرا می شدند معمولى بود. که در ریویو مربوط به صفویان در موردِ آن توضیح داده بودم... سر بریدن، پوست کندن، در آتش سوزاندن، دست و پا و گوش و بینی بریدن و چشم کندن و در پوستِ گاو کشیدن و امثال این ھا جزو کیفرھاى معمولى بوده است... یکى دیگر از مجازات ھاى زمان "صفویه" این بود که: سوراخ کردن پاھاى محکوم و وارونه آویزان کردن وى بر درخت، به گونه اى که سرش به سوى زمین باشد تا بمیرد و چنانچه با این روش آن بیچاره کشته نمیشد، شکمش را با شمشیر می دریدند و او گرفتار یک مرگ تدریجى و دردناک مى شد، زیرا در این صورت روده ھاىِ او به طرز وحشتناکی بر صورتش مى ریخت و او مى بایست آن ھا را در شکم خود فرو میبرد و سرانجام با وضع فجیعى جان مى سپرد
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‎دوران کثیفِ حکومتِ عرب پرستانِ "قاجاریه": مجازات ھاىِ زمان "قاجاریه" در خشونت، کمتر از دوران "صفویه" نبود، بلکه با به کار بستنِ ابزار جدید، مجازات ھاىِ خشن ترى را نیز اعمال مى کردند. مجرمین را در دھانهٔ توپ مى گذاشتند، زنده به گور مى کردند، شِئ و وسیلهٔ تیزى به قسمتِ پایینِ بدن آنها فرو مى نمودند، مانند اسب به پاى آنها نعل مى کوبیدند و سرِ دو درخت که خم کرده بودند مى بستند و آنگاه درختان را رھا مى کردند تا به حالتِ فنرى و با فشارِ زیاد به وضع طبیعى خود برگردند و بدن متهم دریده شود، شمع آجین مى کردند و زنده زنده پوست مى کندند... مجازات ھایى دیگر از قبیلِ کور کردن، بریدن گوش و بینی، سر بریدن، شکم پاره کردن، مثله کردن، زنده در آب جوشان انداختن، زنده لاى دیوار دفن کردن و غیره از مجازات ھاى زمان "قاجاریه" است
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‎در کشور ژاپن: در این سرزمین تازیانه زدن کیفر تخلفات کوچک بود و مجازاتِ مرگ به جرایم بسیار تعلق مى گرفت. امپراطور «شومو» کیفر مرگ را از کار انداخت و آیینِ دادرسی را بر شفقت نهاد، ولی پس از او بر شمارِ جنایات افزوده شد و امپراطور «کونین» نه تنها کیفر مرگ را مجدداً برقرار ساخت بلکه دستور داد تا دزدان را در منظرِ عام چندان تازیانه بزنند که به ھلاکت برسند. مجازاتِ اعدام انواعى داشت: خفه کردن، سر بریدن، دار زدن، چهار شقه کردن، سوزاندن و در روغن جوشانیدن... «اى یه یاسو»، به لغو دو مجازات کهن سال فرمان داد: یکى این بود که محکوم را به دو گاو می بستند و با راندنِ گاوھا به دو سو بدن او را دو شقه مى کردند. مجازاتِ دیگر آن بود که محکوم را در منظرِ عام به تیر می بستند و از رھگذران میخواستند که به نوبت بدن او را ارّه کنند
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‎دوران "رنسانس" در اروپا: اعدام در این دوران ممکن بود فقط به وسیلهٔ عمل نسبتاً کم آزارِ قطع کردنِ سر، انجام بگیرد.. ولی این مجازات معمولاً امتیازى بود که به زنان و مردانِ نجیب زاده ارزانى میشد و مجازاتِ بیچاره ھاىِ بى سر و پا، چوبهٔ دار بود... بدعت گذارى و شوهرکشی را با تودهٔ آتش پاسخ مى دادند. «ھنرى ھشتم» در سالِ 1531 قانونى گذاشت که به موجبِ آن مى توانست براىِ تنبیهِ زندانیان، ایشان را در آب بجوشاند. یکى از شهردارھاىِ "سالزبورگ " فرمانى صادر کرد به این مضمون: کسی که جعلِ اسناد میکند، باید بر تودهٔ آتش بسوزد یا در آبِ جوش بمیرد و کسی که سوگندِ دروغ میخورد باید زبانش را از پشتِ گردنش بیرون آورد و نوکرى که با دختر یا ھمسر و یا خواھرِ اربابش زنا کند، باید سرش را قطع کنند یا به دارش بیاویزند... در ھمان شهر چندین تن را به گناه اینکه روزِ جمعه گوشت خورده و از توبه کردن نیز، سرباز زده بودند، سوزاندند!! و آن ھایى که توبه کرده بودند فقط به دار آویخته شدند.. معمولاً جسدِ مردگان را براى عبرتِ زندگان بر دار باقى می گذاردند تا آنکه کرکسان گوشتِ آنها را مى دریدند و مى خوردند
‎ مردم نیز از این کیفرھاىِ وحشیانه ترسی نداشتند و چه بسا که از شرکت در تماشاىِ اعدام ھا و شکنجه ھا لذت مى بردند و گاھى نیز دستِ کمک به سوى جلادان دراز می کردند. ھنگامى که «مونته کوکولى» در زیرِ شکنجه اعتراف کرد که به «فرانسوا» پسرِ عزیز کرده «فرانسواى اول» زهر داده یا قصد داشته به او زهر بدھد، دست و پاى او را به چهار اسب بستند و از چهار سو بدنش را شقه کردند. مردم بقایاىِ جسدش را ریز ریز کردند، دماغش را بریدند، چشم ھایش را از کاسه در آوردند، فک ھایش را خرد کردند و سرش را در گل و لاى کشیدند تا پیش از مرگش او را ھزار بار کشته باشند
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‎دورانِ "پس از رنسانس"، در اروپا: "پس از رنسانس" نه تنها از شدتِ مجازات ھا کاسته نشد، بلکه در مواردى و در بعضی از کشورھا وحشیانه تر از گذشته ادامه یافت... در انگلستان کیفرھاىِ وحشیانه در ملاء عام، مردم را درنده خو مى ساخت. به موجبِ قانونى که در سال 1790 لغو شد، زنى را که به خیانت یا کشتنِ شوھرش محکوم مى شد زنده زنده می سوزاندند. ولى عرف و عادت اجازه مى داد که پیش از سوزانده شدن خفه شود. شکمِ مردانى را که به جرمِ خیانت محکوم می شدند، ھنگامِ اعدام که ھنوز جان به تن داشتند مى دریدند و روده و اعضایِ داخلیِ بدن یا همان امعا و احشاىِ آنان را در برابرِ دیدگانشان مى سوزاندند. سپس آن ھا را سر مى بریدند و تکه تکه مى کردند. در ھمۀ محلاتِ لندن چوبه ھاىِ دار بر پا شده بود و بر بسیارى از آنها لاشه ھاىِ محکوم را می آویختند تا جان دھد. به محکومان براىِ آنکه کمتر درد کشند گاھى عرق مى نوشانیدند و مأمورِ اعدام اگر خوشخو بود! پاھاىِ آنان را میکشید تا زودتر بمیرند. این مجازات ھا که با خشونتِ کامل صورت میگرفت، در دیگر کشورھاىِ اروپایى نیز با ھمین شدت اجرا میشد.... بدنام کردنِ دیگران حتی اگر جز حقیقت نیز چیز دیگرى گفته نمیشد مجرم را مستوجبِ مجازات مرگ و ضبطِ اموالش میکرد. حملِ تپانچه به طور پنهانی داراىِ مجازات مشابهی بود، ولى در مواردى چند این قوانین به شدت اجرا می شدند. شخصی به جرمِ این که وانمود میکرد کشیش است به دار آویخته شد و یکى دیگر به جرمِ دزدیدنِ لباس کشیشی که آن را به مبلغِ یک و یک چهارم فرانک فروخت، به ھمان سرنوشت دچار شد. شخصِ دیگرى که نامه اى به «پاپ کلمنس یازدھم» نوشته و این دینفروشِ فاسد را متهم کرده بود که با «ماریا سوبسکا» روابطى دارد، سر از تنش جدا شد... حتی تا سال 1762 استخوان ھاىِ زندانیان روىِ چرخِ شکنجه خرد میشد یا محکومین به دُمِ یک اسبِ برانگیخته، بسته شده و روىِ زمین کشیده مى شدند
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‎دوستانِ گرامی و خردگرا، در جهتِ لغوِ قوانین وحشیانهٔ اعدام، مبارزات و فعالیت ھایِ زیادی در سراسر جهان انجام گرفته است. و این مجازات ها در چیزی حدودِ 100 کشورِ مختلف لغو شده است، ولی متأسفانه در برخی از کشورها همچون ایران و چین و کرهٔ شمالی و برخی از کشورهایِ آفریقایی و کشورهایِ عربی، مجازاتِ مرگ و اعدام به روش هایِ گوناگون به طور مستمر برایِ مجازات محکومان استفاده میشود
‎امیدوارم روزی برسد که دیگر شاهدِ اعدامِ هیچ انسانی در هیچ کجایِ این کرهٔ خاکی نباشیم
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‎امیدوارم که نوشتنِ این ریویو برایِ شما دوستانِ خوب و اهلِ کتاب، مفید بوده باشه
‎«پیروز باشید و ایرانی»

[فؤاد · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتاب رو تا نیمه خوندم، تا سر بخش هند. مدت های زیادی همین طور توی کارنتلی-ریدینگ ها بود، به این امید که بهش برگردم. ولی بعید می دونم فعلاً فرصت بشه. از اون جایی که یه مقدار حضور دائمش جلوی چشم آزارنده بود، علی الحساب می ذارمش توی ناتمام ها، تا یه وقت دیگه بهش برگردم.

با توجه به علایق من، این جلد جذاب ترین جلد این مجموعه است. مخصوصاً نصفه ای که خوندم، مربوط بود به آغاز تاریخ، و ادیان و اقوام بدوی، و نخستین تمدن ها (بین النهرین و مصر). تا جایی که تونستم ازش یادداشت برداری کردم و توی آپدیت ها گذاشتم. برای کسی که به مطالعات مردم شناسی و تاریخ ادیان علاقه داره، تجربۀ خیلی هیجان انگیزیه.

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two reasons why I found this book to be a pure joy. First and foremost it is always extremely enjoyable to read a book written by someone with both extraordinary clarity of mind and superior skill of written word. Second, 'Our Oriental Heritage' is very accessible introduction to history of China, India and Japan, topics that were previously unknown to me.

It must however be said, that this is not a history book in traditional meaning of that term. The aim of Will Durant, as he clearly states at the beginning of this book, is not to write only about politics, dynasties and wars, but also other areas that define a civilization, but which are often overlooked by traditional historians. Therefore, huge parts of 'Our Oriental Heritage' focus on religion, philosophy and arts. If those areas are not your cup of tea, then you may find yourself both a little bit bored and also overwhelmed by completely unfamiliar names and ideas.

It is clearly a silly idea to rate this sort of book – it is undeniably a classic work of literature and a labor of love of a man that was infinitely more intelligent that I can ever hope to become. At the same time, I have to be honest with myself and admit that much of ‘Our oriental heritage’ covered topics that don’t hold much interest for me.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this first volume of The Story of Civilization off and on for over a year. It was my first successful attempt at reading history and taught me how to do so. I have to thank Will Durant for that. Finishing it was a triumph for me as a student of literature, the world, and life.

We all probably remember doing a unit in Social Studies on the cradle of civilization, Babylonia and all that. Boring but some cool pictures. My theory on the study of history during childhood is that we have our whole lives ahead of us, we are interested in the future, not the past. So to that teacher who did her best with me, I can report that I finally learned what is so important about the cradle of civilization. Our Oriental Heritage even got me to read The Epic of Gilgamesh.

I felt enriched and full of learning. I had many ah ha moments and wish that I had taken notes. Most of all I learned (as if I did not already know) that the same insanities have been replayed over and over for thousands of years. It became true for me that though we have made great strides in learning to control and handle the material world, we lag in mental and emotional growth and have not brought about much more peace or security.

I grew to appreciate what a long and winding road mankind is traveling. If it is our destiny to evolve to any sort of higher state, it will not be happening anytime soon and attempts to predict such an evolution are laughable at best though entertaining to contemplate. And yet, knowing where we have come from and how it has gone has value. Our Oriental Heritage gave me hope. We are capable of much understanding, we can create and build amazing things, even while we are stupid, greedy and much too adept at destruction.

Durant takes the reader from the earliest evidences of civilization through ancient Sumeria, Egypt, and Babylonia and the countries of the Old Testament. He covers India, China, and Japan. As he says in the Preface, "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." He did do that in as readable a history as I have come across.

Note: This book was originally published in 1935 by Simon and Schuster, not 1997, as it says here at Goodreads.

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars for Our Oriental Heritage: Story of Civilization (audiobook) by Will Durant read by Robin Field.

Wow, this was an epic story. I think this is an amazing history of Asia. It’s a great overview for most of the countries there. It’s was a little jarring sometimes with the last 90 years of history missing from the book. Overall I’m glad I made it through to the end. It helped put some things into perspective.

[Ehsan'Shokraie' · Rating 5 out of 5]

تاریخ تمدن فراتر از تنها یک‌کتاب تاریخ می کوشد جنبه های مختلف تمدن ها و ملت ها به ننایش در اورد،در واقع هر قسمت تاریخ تمدن به قابل توجه ترین و منحصر به فرد ترین  ویژگی های هر یک از تمدن می پردازد..آنچنان گسترده و زیبا که اگر قصد داشته باشیم قسمت هایی از ان را انتخاب کنیم خود به تنهایی یک‌کتاب خواهد بود،در واقع تاریخ تمدن تنها یک کتاب تاریخ نیست بلکه منبعی ست غنی از تاریخ‌‌..هنر‌..و فلسفه بزرگترین تمدن ها...از تمدن هایی به قدمت ۶۰۰۰سال پیش تا به جهان امروز..
برای حواننده امروز اما تاریخ تمدن یک نقص بزرگ اما طبیعی دارد و ان اینکه کتاب در دهه ۳۰ و ۴۰ میلادی نوشته شده،و خوشبختانه از ان زمان تا کنون بسیار اطلاعات و یافته های جدید به دانش بشر از تاریخ باستان افزوده شده..از این رو خواندن همزمان تاریخ از مجموعه ای جدیدتر مثل مجموعه تاریخ جهان ققنوس مکمل فوق العاده است و همراهی لذت بخش برای سفر شگفت انگیز خواندن اثر بزرگ  تاریخ تمدن است
در اخرین صفحات این کتاب به کشمکش قدرت و تجارت در دهه ۳۰ می رسیم..زمانی که ژاپن،امریکا روسیه و اروپا در فضایی پر تنش در حال رقابتی هستند که شعله رخدادی ست که امروز ما آن را جنگ جهانی دوم می نامیم..

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

WARNING TO READERS CONSIDERING THIS BOOK: DO NOT READ THIS BOOK TO LEARN ABOUT HISTORY UNLESS YOU ARE SKILLED AT CRITICALLY EVALUATING DIDACTIC LITERATURE, FOLLOWING SOURCE CITATIONS AND RECOGNIZING WHAT IS FACT AND WHAT IS SPECULATION. AT LEAST HALF OF THIS BOOK IS COMPLETE GARBAGE.

There was certainly a great deal of valuable information in this tome, but it is extremely poorly documented and heavily peppered with supposition, speculation and littered with personal opinion loosely being passed as "history".

With a very lengthy introductory section on pre-history, Durant paints a vivid picture of what human life was like prior to written records. This is done with heavy doses of words and phrases like "surely", "presumably", "without a doubt", "certainly", etc. It appears that the rich picture of pre-historic humanity was virtually created out of thin air with the very rare mention of actual information followed by a massive leap of faith to what the author believes happened. One thing I found curious was that with the introduction of many early innovations of mankind, Durant cannot conceive that intelligent humans had original ideas and thoughts, but rather everything had to be copied from something they observed; often from the beasts around them.

Once the book entered the realm of recorded history, the information was marginally better with more references to real information, but there was a heavy undertone which left no question as to the personal opinions of the author on politics, religion and philosophy.

[Andrew Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

All I can say is wow, this book is extremely enlightening and eye opening. It covers the formation of civilization of the human race. which started in Africa and Asia.

It was published in 1935, so if you are looking for the latest archaeological find on Egypt you won't find it here. But that's not what this book is about, this book is about exploring the development of the civilizing influenced on humanity, how cultures have risen and fallen and how human civilization has changed.

I highly recommend this book to all human beings.

[Ghasem Safaeinejad · Rating 4 out of 5]

جلد اول کتاب تاریخ تمدن ویل دورانت در مورد «مشرق زمین» است که در آن به «تمدن و عوامل آن» و تمدن‌های زیر پرداخته شده است
سومر
مصر
بابل
آشور
یهود
پارس
هند
چین
ژاپن

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding work of historical synthesis. Written in the early 1930s, and thus bounded by the the political and scientific knowledge of its day, it sometimes gets downgraded for not being up to date. There are, admittedly, moments that are jarring to a modern reader, such as Gandhi being spoken of in the present tense and Piltdown Man not yet having been shown to be a forgery.

Don’t read it for its science, read it for its ability to bring ancient societies to life. Starting with the dawn of humankind and the first civilizations, then proceeding through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Judea, Persia, India, China, and Japan it sometimes seems that everything that was known about them when the book was written got included in these pages. There are 3282 citation footnotes, and another 455 explanatory notes. Herein are described wars, inventions, migrations, art, literature, religion, and the rise and fall of one empire after another.

If there is a single overarching theme of this book it is that civilization is ephemeral. Everywhere it is the same story: warriors arise, conquer, and become civilized. Great cities are founded, with magnificent architecture, sculpture and artworks. The rulers grow soft from wealth, luxury, and corruption, and fall before new conquerors, who murder or enslave the people, plunder and burn the cities, and start the cycle again. Sumer rises and then falls to Akkadia, which falls to Elam, and then come Hittites, Assyrians, Neo-Hittites, Babylonians, Egyptians, Mittani, Neo-Elamites, Urartians, Phrygians, Neo-Assryians, Neo-Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Alexander the Great, Parthians, Sassanids, Byzantines, and the Muslim conquests, and that’s just the in the Mesopotamian region; it is the same story everywhere. Sic transit gloria mundi indeed.

The study of history made Durant into something of a cynic; prolonged exposure to the follies of humanity will do that. The book has surprising moments of mordant humor, and he clearly believes that priests of all religions are more concerned with their own temporal well-being than with the needs of god or man.

Durant writes with a clear and engaging style, and has a remarkable ability to explain complicated situations and beliefs. He most assuredly has lessons that would be valuable for our own time, if we would only listen, but we won’t. Mankind never does, and our own vaunted civilizations will one day crumble to dust, perhaps sooner that we imagine.

I eventually highlighted 168 passages in this book, and it has spurred me to plan to read the other ten volumes of his Story of Civilization. Following are some of the passages that caused me to pause and consider the human condition.


• Quotes
◦ Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
◦ Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science.
◦ History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved.
◦ The radicals of one age are the reactionaries of the next.
◦ “All the world fears Time,” says an Arab proverb, “but Time fears the Pyramids.”
◦ 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.
◦ It is in the nature of governments to degenerate; for power, as Shelley said, poisons every hand that touches it.
◦ Religion destroyed what it could no longer inspire.
◦ 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.
• Humor and Cynicism
◦ The moulders of the world’s myths were unsuccessful husbands, for they agreed that woman was the root of all evil; this was a view sacred not only to Hebraic and Christian tradition, but to a hundred pagan mythologies.
◦ Nietzsche thought Asia right about women, and considered their subjection the only alternative to their unchecked ascendancy.
◦ In simple days men married for cheap labor, profitable parentage, and regular meals.
◦ When Kublai Khan’s ambassador, Tcheou-ta-Kouan, visited the Khmer capital, Angkor Thom, he found a strong government ruling a nation that had drawn wealth out of its rice-paddies and its sweat. The king, Tcheou reported, had five wives: “one special, and four others for the cardinal points of the compass,” with some four thousand concubines for more precise readings.
◦ Thutmose I not only consolidated the power of the new empire, but—on the ground that western Asia must be controlled to prevent further interruptions—invaded Syria, subjugated it from the coast to Carchemish, put it under guard and tribute, and returned to Thebes laden with spoils and the glory that always comes from the killing of men.
◦ Death was the penalty for any of a great variety of crimes, such as housebreaking, damage to royal property, or theft on a scale that would now make a man a very pillar of society.
◦ In a conflict between superstition and philosophy one may safely wager on the victory of superstition, for the world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
◦ Slowly, however, evolving morals changed even religious rites; the gods imitated the increasing gentleness of their worshipers, and resigned themselves to accepting animal instead of human meat; a hind took the place of Iphigenia, and a ram was substituted for Abraham’s son. In time the gods did not receive even the animal; the priests liked savory food, ate all the edible parts of the sacrificial victim themselves, and offered upon the alter only the entrails and the bones.
◦ Women were attached to every temple, some as domestics, some as concubines for the gods or their duly constituted representatives on earth.
◦ When men were cannibals human sacrifices were offered in India as elsewhere; Kali particularly had an appetite for men, but the Brahmans explained that she would eat only men of the lower castes.
◦ The priests assured the faithful that a man of forty could purchase another decade of life by paying forty temples to say masses in his name; at fifty he could buy ten years more by engaging fifty temples; at sixty years sixty temples—and so till, through insufficient piety, he died.
◦ [On Japan’s invasion of China] The European world, which had proposed a moratorium on robbery after it had gathered in all available spoils, joined America feebly in protests against this candid plunder, but prepared, as always, to accept victory as justification in the end.
◦ Manchuria belonged by manifest destiny to Japan. By what right? By the same right whereby England had taken India and Australia, France Indo-China, Germany Shantung, Russia Port Arthur, and America the Philippines—the right of the need of the strong. In the long run no excuses would be necessary; all that was needed was power and an opportunity. In the eyes of a Darwinian world success would sanction every means.
• Civilization
◦ a pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive revolutions, and financial exhaustion: these are some of the ways in which a civilization may die.
◦ 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.
◦ 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.
◦ 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.
◦ Weakened by division, [India] 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.
◦ At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance.
◦ Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome: the first created a civilization, the second developed it to its height, the third inherited it, added little to it, protected it, and transmitted it as a dying gift to the encompassing and victorious barbarians. 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.
◦ The world is dotted with areas where once civilization flourished, and where nomads roam again.
◦ Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle.
• Philosophy
◦ The goal of philosophy is to find that secret, and to lose the seeker in the secret found.
◦ Religion offered motives, ideas and the inspiration; but it imposed conventions 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.
◦ 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.
◦ The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment? Not that the intellect is useless; it has its modest place, and serves us well when it deals with relations and things; but how it falters before the eternal, the infinite, or the elementally real! In the presence of that silent reality which supports all appearances, and wells up in all consciousness, we need some other organ of perception and understanding than these senses and this reason.
◦ 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.
◦ While Greece was winning victories she paid little attention to Pythagoras or Parmenides; when Greece was declining, Plato and the Orphic priests took up the doctrine of reincarnation, while Zeno the Oriental preached an almost Hindu fatalism and resignation; and when Greece was dying, the Neo-Platonists and the Gnostics drank deep at Indian wells.
◦ It is characteristic of Chinese thought that it speaks not of saints but of sages, not so much of goodness as of wisdom; to the Chinese the ideal is not the pious devotee but the mature and quiet mind, the man who, though fit to hold high place in the world, retires to simplicity and silence. Silence is the beginning of wisdom.
• Religion
◦ Fear, as Lucretius said, was the first mother of the gods. Fear, above all, of death.
◦ Just as compulsion grew into conscience, so fear graduated into love; the ritual of ancestor-worship, probably generated by terror, later aroused the sentiment of awe, and finally developed piety and devotion. It is the tendency of gods to begin as ogres and to end as loving fathers; the idol passes into an ideal as the growing security, peacefulness and moral sense of the worshipers pacify and transform the features of their once ferocious deities. The slow progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.
◦ A man—or, in later and milder days, an animal—was sacrificed to the earth at sowing time, so that it might be fertilized by his blood. When the harvest came it was interpreted as the resurrection of the dead man; the victim was given, before and after his death, the honors of a god; and from this origin arose, in a thousand forms, the almost universal myth of a god dying for his people, and then returning triumphantly to life.
◦ 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.
◦ Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion.” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.
◦ [In Judaism,] 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.
◦ By picturing the world as the scene of a struggle between good and evil, the Zoroastrians established in the popular imagination a powerful supernatural stimulus and sanction for morals. The soul of man, like the universe, was represented as a battleground of beneficent and maleficent spirits; every man was a warrior, whether he liked it or not, in the army of either the Lord or the Devil; every act or omission advanced the cause of Ahura-Mazda or of Ahriman. It was an ethic even more admirable than the theology—if men must have supernatural supports for their morality; it gave to the common life a dignity and significance grander than any that could come to it from a world-view that locked upon man (in medieval phrase) as a helpless worm or (in modern terms) as a mechanical automaton.
◦ 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.
◦ The contrast between Christian precept and the practice of Christians left the Hindus skeptical and satirical. They pointed out that the raising of Lazarus from the dead was unworthy of remark; their own religion had many more interesting and astonishing miracles than this; and any true Yogi could perform miracles today, while those of Christianity were apparently finished.
◦ Despite its elements of nobility, Buddhism, like Stoicism, was a slave philosophy, even if voiced by a prince; it meant that all desire or struggle, even for personal or national freedom, should be abandoned, and that the ideal was a desireless passivity

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 2 out of 5]

One down, ten to go.

I've looked at this set (monumental, I believe, is the obligatory adjective when referring to it) for many, many years, always promising myself that someday, I would dive in. Over time, and one by one, I've picked up each volume until I had the entire series on my shelves, and though I probably never phrased it this way, my thoughts surely went along the lines of, 'gosh, if a feller read all that, he'd really know something.'

My goal is one book a month, and time off in December for good behavior. Initially, I had considered getting Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome--I felt like I had read a lot about different historical periods, but I didn't have the background to tie them all together in a narrative timeline. But before shelling out the cash for Bauer's book, I remembered I still had Durant on my shelves, unread. What better way to get a narrative timeline--or so I thought.

This first volume is a bit of an outlier, I think, in comparison with the rest of the series--actually, now that I've read it, I don't think it's mandatory to start here, though it isn't hurting anything if you do. And it also probably depends on the level of information you already have about the ancient Near East, as well as Indian, Chinese, and Japanese history. But first, Durant is going to take about 100 pages to talk about what makes a civilization, and what distinguishes it from what he calls 'nature people', which is a decent enough term for peoples who, for whatever reason, have either not pursued our brand of civilization, or, having once had it, have turned their backs on it.

This is all okay, I suppose, but it exposes, to my mind, some of the flaws in Durant's style and approach. (Although written in 1939, the problem isn't his view of 'the other': Durant is remarkably even-handed and fair in his estimations, even going out of his way on three separate occasions to reinforce the idea that race has nothing to do with the ability to create a civilization. With the date of 1939, I have to assume this is direct response to then-current ideologies of certain states.) My problem with this first section rests in its generality, coupled with a weltanschauung that often reminded me of a junior high school history textbook from...well, from 1939. This easygoing, conversational style might have its fans, but it wasn't what I was expecting or hoping for.

When Durant turns to the actual story of civilization, he's hampered by lack of hard data (which is a problem for any historian writing about this time, but, again, a lot of information has surfaced since 1939.) But it also becomes apparent rather quickly that Durant is not writing a narrative history, but a cultural one, which is great, if that's what you are interested in. In all actuality, this may have been a better choice: rather than a dry recitation of different dynasties, Durant probably does well to summarize the narrative of each empire he treats, and then explore what is known about their culture and habits. Unfortunately, because of the vast amount of time that he’s covering, much of this information is superficial. I can point to very few things in this section that I remember with any vividness, except for a little better understanding of the scope of Ancient Egyptian architecture, and that the Assyrians were some really bad dudes. Also that there are a lot of unpleasant ways of putting people to death.

So I had a lot more hope when the story turned to India, but again, the vastness of the area, the length of time, and the paucity of the record make it extremely difficult to do a comprehensive narrative history. Durant has scarcely enough time to hit the high points. That isn’t to say his accomplishments aren’t slight—I did find the final three sections (India, China, and Japan) to be the high point of the book. One thing to keep in mind—when Durant was writing the book, the British still controlled India, Chang Kai-Shek was still the head of the Nationalist government in China, and the Japanese were in the middle of creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. One of the last questions he leaves us with is whether or not it is inevitable that America and Japan go to war.

What I ended up appreciating the most from the book was the section on China, specifically the rise of Confucius. It really wasn’t a subject I was expecting to find there, though due to the cultural slant Durant took when writing, it played a huge part in his survey of China's development. Reading books like this, I hope to learn and retain at least some bit of new information, though with the size of this book, I feel a little shortchanged if, a week after finishing, I think back on it and most of what I remember is, ‘Egyptian architecture is more than the pyramids, the Assyrians were brutal, and I’d like to find out more about Confucius.’ Considering the time and area, this could never have been more than a generalist’s general survey, though it is still entirely readable and informative. The less familiarity the reader has with these subjects, the more he or she is going to appreciate it, and while time has probably revealed more about these ancient civilizations, I don’t think Durant leads us too far astray.

As a commentator, I think Durant was probably quite liberal for his time—as I mentioned before, he went out of his way to deny that race had anything to do with the ability to create a civilization, and, according to 1939 standards, I think he was fair to creeds and genders and beliefs. At the same time, I think it’s fairly easy to see some unconscious bias come out at times—to my mind, it’s easily forgiven (though other readers may not). As a writer, he’s easy to follow, occasionally witty. It’s interesting that I recently read Herodotus’ Histories--the two volumes remind me a lot of each other. When reading Herodotus, there were times when I would imagine some ancient Athenian, sitting by his fire, reading about the history and customs of people who lived at the ends of the Earth. Reading Durant, I imagine some pre-1950’s American, sitting by his fire, reading about the history and customs of people who lived at the ends of the Earth. It seems quaint to think of the world that way, now.

It will be interesting to see how the next volume--devoted exclusively to Greece--will compare. If I end up feeling about it the way I felt about this one, it will be hard for me to devote the time to reading the others. I still have high hopes, though.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the snowy days of late fall 1964, I was invited to the home of the U.S. consul in Tabriz for Thanksgiving. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran, I had spent that autumn working on development projects in Western Azerbaijani villages among Azeri Turks and Kurdish tribesmen. So, a couple of days in an American home during the holidays was a welcome respite. My host was Carlton Coon, Jr., son of the renowned anthropologist Carlton Coon of Massachusetts. We played board games like chess, backgammon, and Stalingrad after a sumputous repast. The other guests were comprised of a scattering of one or two consulate employees, an Iranian doctor and a mysterious Australian professor who resembled Santa Clause just in from witnessing Russians and Chinese skirmishing on their borders.

Listening to these conversations for hours that day and the next re-kindled my curiosity in history, which heretofore I had not had much time in which to indulge myself. I found out from our conversations that there was a USIS library in Tabriz albeit a small one. The day I was leaving by bus back to my village of Shahpur (now Salmas) I made a brief stop by the USIS library. They logged me in and the book that I first laid my hands on was Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant. I spent the next three months of my time in my small apartment during snow storms and lulls between assignments poring over and taking notes on chapters in this wonderful book.

Other histories have been written since then, but I believe that Durant's work is still a good introduction to world history.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume of Durant's Story of Civilization is distinctive for being the most cursory, his aim having been to cover all prehistory, ancient civilizations before the Greeks and Asian civilizations--quite a task for just over a thousand pages! Besides being a skimming of the surface, this volume is also the most painfully dated as it only goes up to the mid-thirties. I kept on thinking of the impending world war and of the independence of India thereafter.

It is unfortunate that anyone approaching the series may have a tendency to prefer to begin in the beginning. The subsequent volumes are far more detailed and focused, constituting a history of Western civilization with no real dependence on this initial, broader survey.

[taarak · Rating 5 out of 5]

My God . . . it's full of stars!

No really, this is one of the mandatory reads for anyone who wants to display affectations toward a liberal education. Incredible!

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beginning A Story of Civilisation seems like a monumental task, just from the page count alone. All 11 books combined equal 2.4 million plus words. That alone is a head-scratcher, but honestly, my main hesitation is the infamous first volume. It seems rather absurd to dedicate the largest continent in the world to a 1000-page book while devoting 12,000+ pages to Europe alone. There is a huge and enormous discrepancy, but I feel that as it went along, that was probably the smart decision, and a lot of the whys started to align.

Firstly, Will Durant was not good at predicting how many books he initially needed. According to the preface, he initially planned to complete his ambitious series in five books:

I. Our Oriental Heritage (which is correct)

II. Our Classical Heritage (Became Book 2-3)

III. III. Our Medieval Heritage (Became Books 4-5)

IV. IV. Our European Heritage (Became Books 6-10)

V. V. Our Modern Heritage: (Book 11 and only wrote up to Napoleon)


Obviously in hindsight, it didn’t come nearly to fruition, but it initially wasn’t meant to be such an uneven representation of the world. Secondly, Will Durant is hardly an expert on the subjects he discusses. His educational background was philosophy and not history. However, it’s obvious he was well educated, especially in European art and philosophy.

Thirdly, as I said, he was hardly a great resource in terms of reliability, so it’s better that it be shorter, serve as an introduction, and broaden your horizons elsewhere. The West’s perception of Asia has dramatically changed since 1935, as it is for a lot of ancient history. Egypt alone has dramatically changed in the past three decades with the introduction of DNA and the discovery of so many different sites that Durant didn’t have access to at all. Our understanding of Achaemenid has also dramatically changed in the past four decades, with research conducted by Pierre Briant being a magnum opus and the foundational text of Achaemenid Studies as a discipline. That said, it isn’t horrible and is fairer than writers during the time. Any of Will Durant's strong assertions when discussing the hunter gather shouldn’t even be acknowledged. In general, the Durant approach to the Near East should be approached with scepticism. He’s often at his best and most reliable when he’s directly quoting texts from that era, but less so with his analysis. Fourthly, he was working with not-so-great translations and resources, so it’s hard to blame him. That is extremely apparent with his views of China and Japan, having a lot of stereotypical viewings of both cultures.

Just to illustrate my point: Romance of the Three Kingdoms unabridged translation was done in 1925 but lack the sufficient supplementary material for western readers. Buck had the first full translation of Water Margin, which is notorious for its errors. Journey to the West wasn’t even translated (like the abridged version), and The Dream of the Red Chamber didn’t even have a full translation until 1980. Furthermore, the Terracotta Warriors were only discovered in 1974, one of the most important discoveries about Ancient China.

That said, one section of this book I do think is extremely valuable is Will Durant “Book 2” in India. Obviously, I’m biased as an Indian, however, it’s obvious that this is the best section of the book due to its length alone. It’s the longest section of the book, for good reason. Compared to Japan and China, there were just more translations of Indian texts. Considering the British colonised India, this may have been a contributing reason. The section on philosophy was incredible, and I loved seeing how he broke it down. Whenever Durant is able to discuss the arts or philosophy, it’s generally him at his best, as that’s the topic that most draws him.

Anyway, you can immediately tell that India fascinates him most compared to the other countries discussed here. From the offset, he wrote:

NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like 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

Though Durant is hardly an expert, you can tell he attempted doing his research and even more than he initially anticipated as he wrote for his small novel, The Case of India.

I went to India to help myself visualise a peoples whose cultural history I had been studying for The Story of Civilization. I did not expect to be attracted by the Hindus, or that I should be swept into a passionate interest in Indian politics. I merely hoped to add a little to my material to look with my own eyes upon certain works of art and then return to my historical studies, forgetting this commentary world.
…
I came away resolved to study living India as well as the India with the brilliant past; to learn more of this unique Revolution that fought with suffering accepted but never returned; to read the Gandhi of today as well as the Buddha of long ago. And the more I read the more I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the apparently conscious and deliberate bleeding of India by England throughout a hundred and fifty years. I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all history….’

There’s a lot to love, as I briefly mentioned above, though there’s obviously better resources out there even near its time. Just a decade later, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his famous The Discovery of India, which obviously captures the spirit of India a lot better. That said, it’s a valuable American perspective that was willing to understand a culture that a lot of people wouldn’t have glanced over, and this section of the British and Gandhi inspired Malcolm X.

Though this series seems absurdly Eurocentric in contemporary eyes (which it is), but rarely has a book provided such in-depth knowledge of Asia. Little was known by the general public, so it would have been an insightful read. It was a decently progressive book for its time, trying to understand cultures much different from those usually treated in the West at the time. Where Greece and if lucky, Egypt are often considered cornerstones of civilisation and other numerous civilisations not being mentioned (if they're not in the Bible). This is still an interesting piece of historiography—a sort of time capsule—written by an incredible wordsmith. I could discuss the issues of the term Orientalism, but it’s barely used nowadays, so I think as a people we have moved past that.

In Conclusion, it’s conceptually quite flawed, encompassing such a wide spectrum of topics in just 1000 pages compared to the rest of the series. It’s riddled with errors and dated information, which makes it hard to blame Durant on that end. It’s easy to scorn this book, but it’s a wonderful read. The section on India was great, and there’s a lot of beauty to this book. I do wish Durant was more focused as a whole, which the other volumes would most likely fix (as it would be 10 volumes of Europe). It’s the lack of focus that makes retaining a lot of information harder. As a whole, it’s a fundamentally flawed but earnest attempt by Durant to understand cultures much different from his own. I’m definitely excited to continue this series and fill the blanks of the East with other works.

6.5/10

[Xavier Patiño · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I began my quest to learn about the history of philosophy and its many famous thinkers, I was introduced to Will Durant and his fantastic writing style in his wonderful work The Story of Philosophy. I found his writing to be passionate and sincere; as one reads his words one can sense his excitement as it exudes from the pages; we see it as he explains Plato's Republic or how he responds with witty erudition to the many aphorisms of Schopenhauer.

And so with Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of eleven of Durants’ Story of Civilization series, we see that enthusiasm pour out as he gushes about the cultural achievements of the ancient Near East and the rest of Asia -- specifically India, China and Japan. Durant focuses on the art, poetry, literature, architectural achievements, economy, religions, and social structures of these timeworn countries.

Thanks to this work I was introduced to one of the oldest stories in the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which originated from Mesopotamia. After visiting Judea I leapt into the verses of the King James Bible; once Durant gave a wonderful tour of China, I couldn't help but read The Analects by Confucius, and I took to heart many of the Old Teacher's maxims.

Overall, this was an awesome book and I learned so much of the history and culture of Earths’ oldest and most venerable countries.

[Armita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This was a very informative read- even though it was first published in 1935 and we've learned a lot about our heritage since then. Knowing what happened during the Second World War, reading the final chapter about Japan had a weird, ominous feeling.
As someone who hasn't read that many historical books before, I thought I'd be bored by this book and drop it after only a few chapters, but Will Durant's narration was just TOO INTERESTING with specks of humor thrown in.
I took me a looooonggggg time to finish this (TWENTY DAYS, FOR FUCK'S SAKE). I spent hours every day reading it and making highlights and notes in the margins. This is my second most annotated book ever (the first being: East of Eden).
So all in all, it was a very enjoyable experience. I suggest you pick it up- but only if you have the time and patience to finish it.

[Yogeeswar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a massive one, starting from the dawn of humanity, discusses what it is required from us as a species to start a civilization. It talks about various civilizations starting from Sumeria, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt in the west to India, China and Japan in the east. From the origins of the people in each civilization, it discusses about various rulers who brought the kingdoms together, their polity, religion and policies. It dwells more on art, architecture, literature, science, philosophy, developed in the various civilizations at different periods of time.

[Ion · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book would've been way better if the author could avoid racism . The author will praise a civilization's wealth and advancement, then call those same people barbarians. He calls an Indian philosopher a pre-Kant plagiarist. What? Europe isn't special or original. The ancient east and African countries were contemplating death and suffering, calculating the circumference of the earth, when Rome was still mud

[R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading this book
I'd assumed that this is merely a history textbook
It'll have a story of some countries and tell how some king lived or died. Make no mistake, I was hoping that the writer had narrated this tale in such a grandiose style that the story would come to life

What I never imagined that I before telling us the story of civilization , the writer would start with teaching us what exactly is civilization
The introduction is a lecture in anthropology.

Then he goes on to teach us about Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea and Persia.
The writer was a professor of philosophy and it shows through his work.
He analyzes each civilization through not only the eyes of empires and wars but also through the eyes of philosophy and art and of religion and commerce.
He tells us about the interchange of culture that takes place between these civilization that in turn shape each other and in turn shape our current civilization as a whole.

Then he turns his eyes to India. Being an Indian, I was skeptic about this part but I've to say that I thoroughly enjoyed every word of it. It was such a delight to learn things about my own country. The amount of scholarship that must've gone in order to discuss the book in it's entirety must be enormous. And to think that there are 10 more such books.

There were things that he skipped about Indian history that some might consider important, but I'd argue that I've not read any other book that has so much "unbiased" information about India in one book. He already wrote more than enough.
Same as the civilizations before India, he analyzed India from all aspects and in such an unbiased manner that it was really refreshing

Then we go on to China and then to Japan. He makes us want to pack our bags and go out in that charming but scary oriental world. He makes us want to go and explore the lands, look at the wonders, see the various art.
He shows a picture of orient which is vivid with colors and at the same time shrouded in mystery

I beseech everyone to read these books at least once in their life. We really weren't taught history properly. The writer makes us fall in love with history
Because history is not just dates, it is a story of civilization

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely remarkable! Lengthy, exhaustive, and full of memorable anecdotes. The sometimes conceited and arrogant statements made me cringe as the book is a product of the early part of the previous century. Nevertheless, the breadth of knowledge, the lucid language, and the cynical sense of humor make this reading breeze by despite its heft. I only wish I could retain into memory half a percent of the incredible details included. The author covers every detail of civilization from Egypt to Japan across four millennia. Sure, you get Persia, India, and China but also included are dozens of other contributions to our heritage - the likes of Sumer, Assyria, Phoenicia, Kashmir, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Israel, Babylon - some for only a few pages and others for several chapters. EVERYTHING is considered: war, love, lunacy, theater, poetry, art, industry, oratory, politics, childbirth, feminism, slavery, written artifacts, geography, medicine, shopping, food, lunacy, curious characters, prophets and killers. How did Mr. Durant amass this information? How did he write it down? Who read his drafts? Who agreed to publish it? Who bought it and read all of it? And this is just the first volume of his and later his wife's The Story of Civilization. Incredible!

[William Mego · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durant is unmatched in the beauty and clarity of his prose, and in the piercing gaze through the mists of history. Yes, there are elements which are dated thanks to more recent research, and yes, his sections which close the book on China and Japan are probably best forgotten due to the poor availability of translations and understanding of cultures, especially from ancient China. But were I to engage in the silly game of "desert island" books, this single volume would contend for that honor.

No single book or author can encompass all knowledge or research. No one man can encapsulate all history without fault or sin. But page after page, Durant will stun the reader with profound and poetic passages. Forgive him his other trespasses. Frankly the section on India (a subject he was especially familiar with) is worth the price of admission alone.

I recommend this book as highly, and as strongly as anything ever shall be. Quite honestly, if you don't like it I won't want to hear about it. I don't mean that to be offensive, believe me! But this book approaches as near and as dear to my heart as any does.

[Hannibal · Rating 4 out of 5]

اولین جلد از مجموعه بزرگ ویل دورانت که به نوعی حاوی برداشت و شیوه گزارشگری او از تاریخ است.
از دید او تمدن فعالیت هایی است که بر روی کره زمین در فواصله بین دو یخبندان اتفاق می افتد و تمدنی که تا به امروز به درازا کشیده در بین النهرین و پس از آخرین عصر یخبندان آغاز می شود.
با توجه به گستردگی جزئیات، نویسنده تنها به برشمردن نکات اساسی هر تمدن اکتفا کرده و لذا علی رغم حجم بالای کتاب، ایجاز آن قابل توجه است.

[Ron Wroblewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the first of 11 books on the history of civilization. I have had these books for decades as a result of signing up for book of the month club. it is amazing how much detail was in each of the countries described in this book. as a teacher of world religion and philosophy, I wish I would have read these books while I was still teaching. but at least now I've begun to gain more knowledge about the history of the world. I probably won't read these books in order, but hope to finish all 11 eventually.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

All my life, I have heard about the brilliance of the Durant, but all my life, the thick volumes of the Durants books were too much for me, regardless of the brilliance.

BUT suddenly, Audible.com has brought out the 10 volume set of The History of Civilization, each volume of which is about 500 pages. Listening is about 50 hours per volume. As I'm bedbound, 50 hours is far more manageable than 500 pages.

But the brilliance I had heard about was definitely there. The lovely, easy use of language, his ability to view civilization as more than disparate disciplines, the delightful sense of humor that pops out at the least expected time ... He overwhelmed me. For each of the peoples he discussed, he shared the scientific knowledge, the economics, art, literature as well as the who did what when that is always part of history.

It's important to recognize that this book was written in the mid 30s. The progress we have made in civil liberties in the following decades can make reading uncomfortable. Recognize it for the artifact that it is and read on.

I'm going for the full ten volumes. That is my real rating!

[Sulaf Farhat · Rating 1 out of 5]

Biased and inaccurate. I'd like to get my information from sources that are way more scientifically written.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We have passed in unwilling haste through four thousand years of history, and over the richest civilization of the largest continent. It is impossible that we have understood these civilizations, or done them justice; for how can one mind, in one lifetime, comprehend or appraise the heritage of a race?"

Yep. I listened to this while getting my daily steps, using the hardbound books to flag a quote and for review. Frustration with my dim recall and the knowledge that I would never master this material dissolved into acceptance. This is the way things are. A little learning is better than none.

Durant covered:
• SUMERIA •EGYPT •BABYLONIA •ASSYRIA •JUDEA •PERSIA •INDIA •CHINA • JAPAN

Using the Velcro metaphor, many ideas and facts slipped right past me. I didn't have enough loops (familiarity with the subject) for the hooks (new information) to connect and to adhere.

Misc: India astonished me. My Christian beliefs don't align with Durant's interpretation of Biblical passages. I failed miserably to understand Buddhism and Hinduism. I was surprised at how prescient some of his commentary (especially on China) written in 1935 was. I was unfamiliar with Robin Field, who narrated the over 50 hours. Field's voice has a pleasant lilt, by which I mean his voice rises slightly at the end of a sentence. It has a fluid, springy quality — much preferred to stodgy.

Here is my abridgment of Will Durant's summary of the eight elements of civilization.

Elements of Civilization

1. Labor — tillage, industry, transport, trade

2. Government — the organization and protection of life and society through the clan and the family, law and state.

3. Morality — customs and manners, conscience and charity; a law built into the spirit, and generating at last that sense of right and wrong, that order and discipline of desire.

4. Religion — the use of man's supernatural beliefs for the consolation of suffering, the elevation of character, and the strengthening of social instincts and order.

5. Science — clear seeing, exact recording, impartial testing, and the slow accumulation of a knowledge objective enough to generate prediction and control.

6. Philosophy — the attempt of man to capture something of that total perspective which in his modest intervals he knows that only infinity can possess; the brave and hopeless inquiry into the first causes of things, and their final significance; the consideration of truth and beauty, of virtue and justice, of ideal men and states.

7. Letters — the transmission of language, the education of youth, the development of writing, the creation of poetry and drama, the stimulus of romance, and the written remembrance of things past.

8. Art — the embellishment of life with pleasing color, rhythm and form. In its simplest aspect - the adornment of the body - we find elegant clothing, exquisite jewelry and scandalous cosmetics.

A final quote to ponder: Europe and America are the spoiled child and grandchild of Asia, and have never quite realized the wealth of their pre-classical inheritance.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Several millennia of Middle Eastern history as well as all Indian, Chinese, and Japanese history up to the early 1930s in less than 1000 pages of text might sound impossible, but it was accomplished. Our Oriental Heritage is the first volume of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization series that focused on European (Western) history went from an expected five-volume series to 11.

The most glaring issue with Durant’s book is the Introduction in which he described the “building blocks” of culture and how humanity progressed to begin “civilization” by noting examples of “primitive” and “savage” peoples that Europeans had documented in the 19th Century of what had preceded the various Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. Though not surprised by the language Durant used in this section given the era he wrote this volume, it was still cringe-worthy reading that was big negative even though it covered only the first 110 pages of text. Durant’s survey of Egyptian and Middle Eastern history up to the time of Alexander the Great as well of all Indian, Chinese, and Japanese history up to the time of the 1930s is as best that could be hopeful in such a limited number of pages with the aim to show how all those “civilizations” contributed to changes in Western (European) history.

Overall, Our Oriental Heritage is a nice survey of millennia of history that Will Durant gives the reader before launching his series into European history in the next volume.