31.What Asia has Meant to the Rest of the World

EUROPE gave us our civilization but Asia gave us our religion. What is even more interesting, Asia gave the world the three great monotheistic religions which now dominate mankind.Judaism, Christianity and Mohamme-danism are all of Asiatic origin.It is curious to reflect that when the Inquisi-tioners were burning their Jews, both the executioners and their victims were appealing to deities of Asiatic origin;that when the Crusaders were killing the Mohammedans and vice versa, it was a conflict of two Asiatic creeds which bade them do murder upon each other;and that whenever a Christian missio-nary gets into a dispute with a follower of Confucius, the two are merely enga-ged in a purely Asiatic exchange of opinions.

But Asia did not only give us our religious beliefs. It also gave us the fundamentals upon which we have constructed the entire fabric of civilization.In the pride of our recent technical inventions, we may loudly boast of“our great western progress”(we occasionally do),but that much vaunted progress of the west is merely a continuation of the progress that was begun in the east.It is highly doubtful whether the west would have been able to do anything at all if it had not learned the rudiments of everything it knows in the schools of the east.

The knowledge of the Greeks was not the result of cerebral spontaneous combustion. Mathematics and astronomy and architecture and medicine did not, like Pallas Athene, jump forth from the head of Zeus, armed froth head to foot, ready for the glorious battle upon human stupidity.They were the result of slow and painful and deliberate growth, and the real pioneering work was done along the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

From Babylon the arts and sciences then travelled to Africa. Here the dark-skinned Egyptians took them in hand until the Greeks had at last reached a sufficiently high degree of civilization to appreciate the beauty of a geometrical problem and the loveliness of a perfectly balanced equation.From that moment on, we can speak of a truly“European”science.But that truly“European”science had had an Asiatic ancestor who had lived and prospered more than 2000 years before.

And Asia bestowed further blessings upon us. The domestic animals, the dog and the cat and the useful quadrupeds, the docile cow and the faithful horse, together with the sheep and the hog, were all of them of Asiatic origin.When we think of the role played by these useful creatures during the era before the invention of the steam-engine, we begin to realize the debt we owe to Asia.To which we must add the greater part of our bill-of-fare, for practically all of our fruits and vegetables, most of our flowers and practically all of our poultry is of Asiatic origin and was brought to Europe by the Greeks, the Romans or the Crusaders.

Asia, however, was not always a Lady Bountiful from the east, carrying rich blessings from the banks of the Ganges and the Yellow River to the poor barbarians of the west. Asia could also be a terrible task-master.The Huns, who during the fifth century ravaged central Europe, were of Asiatic origin.The Tartars, who followed them seven centuries later and turned Russia into an Asiatic dependency to the everlasting detriment of all the other European nations, hailed from the desert regions of central Asia.The Turks, who during five long centuries caused so much bloodshed and misery and made eastern Europe into what it is today were an Asiatic tribe.