I grew up in a family with lots of books. All 11 volumes of The Story of Civilization stood tall on my parents' bookshelves from my earliest childhood recollections. At that time I was puzzled by the title of the first volume: "Our Oriental Heritage." How could that be correct? To my young mind the Orient was China, or Japan, the home of Joe Jitsu, an Oriental cartoon character who appeared on The Dick Tracy show on WIPX Channel 11 in the New York area in the early 1960s, hosted by "Chief" Joe Bolton.
But the Durant's story of civilization defines "oriental" in broader terms. They start with "the beginning of humanity, when some freak or crank, half animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain to invent the first common noun." Then they move on to The Stone Age. Written history began some 6,000 years ago, and for half of that period "the center of human affairs was in the Near East....The Aryans did not establish civilization - they took it from Babylon and Sumeria." Ah, now I understand.
Further support for an Oriental heritage: the ancient city of Susa, located in what is now Iran. There archaeologists found human remains dating back 20,000 years. Evidence of an advanced culture emerged around 4500 BC. Arabic numerals and the decimal system "came to us through the Arabs from India."The Durants' Orient includes India. This is when the book really caught my attention It explains not just Indian history, but a deep dive into Hindu philosophy and religion as well. Above the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses is Brahman, an ineffable concept "from which all existence proceeds, and to which everything returns, the cause of all that exists. Brahman is everywhere and inside each living being, and there is connected spiritual oneness in all existence."
To the Hindu, if we have not lived a good life, our essence returns to Brahman when we die. Then it is reincarnated in a new life. We have another opportunity to do better. The cycle of birth, death and reincarnation continues until we achieve perfection and become one with Brahman. The Durants note that Hindu religion is much more complex than this brief description, but those are the thoughts that I took from this part of the book.
As for "the life of the mind" (as the Durants call it), to the Hindu "the purpose of knowledge and philosophy is not control of the world so much as release from it...the goal of thought is to find freedom from the suffering of frustrated desire by achieving freedom from desire itself." The Durants magnanimously decline to judge such beliefs, "for our judgments in the West are usually based on corporeal experience and material results, which seem irrelevant and superficial to the Hindu saint."
Still ahead lies Chinese and Japanese history. And that's just in volume 1. Ahead are 10 more volumes of more familiar western European stuff, such as "Rousseau and Revolution" and "The Age of Napoleon." I hope I live long enough, and retain my eyesight long enough, to read them all.
N.B. "The Story of Civilization" was first published in 1934. and was revised and updated numerous times before both Durants died in 1981. The version before me is dated 1954, which happens to be the year I was born.
