The Chronological Borders of Civilisations
When in time does one civilisation end and the other begin
Can we be content, then, to declare that after the great migration of peoples, when written sources are becoming scarce and material culture is declining, when tribes migrate and peoples mix, when dust and peoples settle, and when conquerors and conquered find common ground, the birth of a new civilization takes place? It depends on the strength, numbers and vitality of the two societies, and indeed different situations may arise:
In the first case, the previous civilization may disappear completely under the onslaught of the conqueror, leaving only dim outlines and vague memories. Dramatic as this may sound, this scenario is unlikely to occur, as it would mean that the disappearing civilisation has failed to leave behind any legacy. It would mean that fathers would fail to pass on their experiences and wisdom to sons and mothers to daughters.
In the second case, the previous civilization is taken over by conquerors who give form to the new civilization and become the new elites, and the conquered population also silently shapes the contours of the new civilization, just as the language of the conquerors eventually adapts to the constructions and pronunciations of the substrate and the ways of the natives. And so the conquerors, in their forms and on the surface, prevail, but the legacy of the conquered remains inscribed into the land, into its depths. Thus we can understand the Doric conquests and the subjugation of the Achaeans.
In the third case, the conquerors are numerous, but find that they are not sufficient on their own and need to take in native elites, who in turn need to co-opt the conquerors. Thus both the one and the other mix and give rise to a new synthesis, as between the Germanic conquerors and the Romanized provincials, or between the Turkic conquerors and the settled Persians.
In the fourth case, the conquerors are few in number, and they are completely captivated by the splendour of the civilisation of which they have become the new masters. And so the question is whether they, the external barbarians, have conquered civilization, or civilization has conquered them. And they become its most ardent defenders and champions, like the Normans in France, the Kassites in Mesopotamia, or the Kushites in Egypt.
In the fifth case, one part of a mighty civilization comes under the domination of conquerors, while another part remains intact: when the Turkic and Mongol conquerors took possession of the whole of Dar al-Islam east of the course of the Euphrates, when Egypt and the Maghreb remained unconquered, when the Roman Empire was overrun by the Teutons in the west and left standing in the east, only to be forced to retreat still deeper after the brief Reconquista: Beyond the Taurus Mountains and into the fortified Balkan ports, or the remnants of Egyptian civilization continuing in Nubia long after the conquest of Egypt by the Persians, Greeks, and Romans.
And finally, in the sixth case, perhaps civilization itself falls for a time into the thrall of the invaders, but civilization manages to rise up to expel the invaders, much as Egypt expelled the Hyksos or the Ming Dynasty expelled the Mongols.
In which of these cases is it really necessary to speak of the extinction of one civilization and the emergence of a new one? The rare first case and the not very common second are clear signs of the end of continuity and the emergence of something entirely new. The third case is a clear, common and usual way of the emergence of a new civilization with its own unique and peculiar features. In the fourth case, there is a clear continuity in cultural forms and the only change is the replacement of the elites.
But how to decide in the last two cases? The Rhomaic Empire in 1453 was the direct successor of the empire before the 4th Crusade in 1204, which was one and the same state formation of the empire of Constantine and Augustus. However, few historians would rank them as one and the same civilization. Spengler ranked the Roman kingdom and later the Roman Republic with the same civilization as ancient Sparta or Athens. To rank Constantinople before the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade with the same civilization as Plato or Caesar would be absurd, and to try to explain its politics in comparison with the Greek poleis does not get us far. In the same way, then, one must approach the surviving core of Dar al-Islam west of the Euphrates, which was not conquered by the steppe peoples or the Nubian kingdom of Meroe in the 4th century
And what about the last case? How long are we to let civilization gather its champions and rebuke the foreign invaders? It took the Chinese a full century (from 1279 with the fall of the Song dynasty to 1368 with the establishment of the Ming dynasty) to rid themselves of Mongol rule. It took the Egyptians a similar period of roughly a century to repel the Hyksos. Arnold Toynbee took this tolerance to absurd proportions in his characterization of Syriac society, which he argues was formed in the Levant and culminated in the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which was conquered by Alexander the Great. Then, according to him, it hibernated for a thousand years as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus were restored as the Abbasid Caliphate[1]. This, he admits, is a bold claim. Allowing a thousand-year interregnum for a civilization to remain underground and patiently await the realization of its ultimate destiny makes little sense, especially when the life cycle of a single civilization usually lasts a millennium. Are we then to regard the societies that existed in between as purely ephemeral, without much significance in the holistic picture of history?
If so, then we might as well declare the developments in the region between 300 BCE and 600 CE to be irrelevant to world history. However, as Toynbee has made clear[2], it was precisely on the interaction of Hellenistic and "Syriac" civilizations that several world religions arose: Christianity, Manichaeism, Mithraism, and Islam, not counting Rabbinic Judaism and countless Gnostic sects. But are these not the achievements of a single civilization? Are we not dealing here with the meeting of two peoples, the Aramaic-speaking provincials and the Greek-speaking elite, just as we have discovered that the West is the joint project of the Romance-speaking provincials and the Germanic elite?
[1] TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph: A Study of History, volume 1, p. 77
[2] TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph: A Study of History, volume 1, p. 6-7