(Re)Centering Old World Civilization

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Notes

Notes

1. In fact the Mycenaean proto-Greeks’ Linear B script was adapted from the Linear A syllabary that the non-IE speakers of the older Minoan civilization based on Crete had developed. Moreover, Linear B has no relationship to the historical Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician characters, of which the roman letters you read here are further descendants.

2. In a different class is his puzzling question about where Portuguese traders who imported tigers to Japan can have bought them (p. 220, n. 47). Portugal had had a trading station on Sumatra since the early sixteenth century.

3. A third view is that of Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2005), who argues that the first Western “civilization” expired under barbarian onslaught nearly two centuries before Pirenne postulated; see my review in The European Legacy 12.1 (2007): 75–78.

4. By the Treaties of Nerchinsk (1698) and Khiakhta (1727). A rough analogue is the east-west division of South America by the Catholic kingdoms of Portugal and Spain by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), though in that case exploitation of as yet unknown resources rather than mercantile monopoly was at stake.

5. Or “Uyghurs,” as they are called in a recent feature story, “The Other Tibet,” National Geographic 216.6 (US/English edition; December 2009): 30–55. The article also appeared in several “foreign language” editions of that month—e.g., Czech and Dutch—though not all of them, nor in ‘major’ languages like French and German. Hardly in Chinese!