portion of the white man’s world from Baghdad to Cordova while Western
Europe groped through the Dark Ages (c. 565–c. 1095).
The ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome were evidently the
product of geographical opportunity and economic and political
development rather than of racial constitution, and much of their
civilization had an Oriental source.
Greece took its arts and letters from
Asia Minor, Crete, Phoenicia, and Egypt. In the second millennium B.C.
Greek culture was “Mycenaean,” partly derived from Crete, which had
probably learned from Asia Minor. When the “Nordic” Dorians came down
through the Balkans, toward 1100 B.C., they destroyed much of this proto-
Greek culture; and only after an interval of several centuries did the historic
Greek civilization emerge in the Sparta of “Lycurgus,” [Lycurgus (9th
century B.C.)] the Miletus of Thales [Thales of Miletus (fl. 600 B.C.)], the
Ephesus of Heracleitus [Heracleitus (6th-5th century B.C.)], the Lesbos of
Sappho [Sappho (b. 612? B.C.)], the Athens of Solon [Solon (638?-?558
B.C.)]. From the sixth century B.C. onward the Greeks spread their culture
along the Mediterranean at Durazzo, Taranto, Crotona, Reggio Calabria,
Syracuse, Naples, Nice, Monaco, Marseilles, Malaga. From the Greek
cities of south Italy, and from the probably Asiatic culture of Etruria, came
the civilization of ancient Rome; from Rome came the civilization of
Western Europe; from Western Europe came the civilization of North and
South America. In the third and following centuries of our era various
Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic
cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins
them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Attempts to relate civilization to race by measuring the relation of brain
to face or weight have shed little light on the problem. If the Negroes of
Africa have produced no great civilization it is probably because climatic
and geographical conditions frustrated them; would any of the white
“races” have done better in those environments? It is remarkable how many
