In 851, four and a half centuries before Marco Polo, the anonymous author of a famous report on China and India (Akhbar as-Sin wal-Hind), availing himself of the information brought back by Arab merchants and sailors, gave so careful and meticulous a description of China that specialists even today find few inaccuracies. Yet the same subject is treated by most contemporary scholars with a light-hearted casualness that is confusing and disturbing.

This survey of Old-World prehistory may conveniently begin with the melting of the Pleistocene ice-sheets some 15,000 years ago; for the latest enlargement of our knowledge of the evolution of man and of his earliest cultures were very properly included in the ‘Panorama of Anthropology’ published in Diogenes 2. Even with that limitation of range, a survey cannot be a summary. Prehistorical archaeologists aspire to recover the history of preliterate societies all over the Old World during ten thousand years. But not even the history of England in a single century could usefully be condensed into twenty pages. Nor should our panorama be a descriptive catalogue of exciting new discoveries. Striking additions to our knowledge have of course been made during the last eight years both as a result of excavation and to reward less spectacular research in museums and libraries. (For instance, the first object, undeniably manufactured in and imported from Mycenaean Greece to be recognised in the British Isles or indeed anywhere north of the Alps was noticed in 1948 in a Cornish museum where it had been lying neglected for a hundred years since it had been dug from a barrow near Pelynt. Again the oldest metal helmet found north of the Alps has just been identified by searching through files of German newspapers of 1847!) Some of the finds in question no doubt have an immediate appeal as beautiful or bizarre. Many, including the scientifically most significant, can only be appreciated by specialists or after a tedious technical explanation. Yet some recent discoveries and publications have promoted, if not the final solution, at least the formulation in soluble form, of familiar problems that have preoccupied archaeologists and intrigued historians for nearly a century. I shall therefore try here, after indicating some modern general trends in research, to present the position of those old problems in the more definite and precise form which they have now assumed. Quite a number of new discoveries can then be mentioned in an intelligible context.

The Voices of Silence resembles a long monologue proceeding from affirmation to affirmation. With this work, André Malraux has finally concluded a meditation of twenty years. The proud assurance of his intelligence, reinforced by an extraordinary array of works left in his memory from travels and from reading, and by a brilliant mastery of his style, expects neither contradiction nor reply. Caught in the enchantment of his phrases, convinced by the choice and the scholarly relevance of the photographs, the reader has some difficulty in freeing himself from Malraux's reasoning. If anybody should nevertheless wish to answer, Bernard Berenson's last book offers the chance for a discussion. In a sort of impromptu conversation, in a tone at times lyric and at times peevish, Berenson challenges contemporary taste in those of its aspects which Malraux meant to justify: From a conviction formed by long familiarity with the works, he answers almost point by point Malraux's theses, which perhaps he does not know and which he does not mention.

The pioneers of European prehistory marched under a banner inscribed Ex Oriente Lux, assuming as an axiom that all the fundamental inventions and discoveries like farming and metallurgy were brought to Europe from the East. The Frenchman Salomon Reinach first challenged the dogma, branding it as le mirage orientale, and then the Germans set about inverting the roles of Europe and Asia till under Hitler it was seriously contended that conquering invaders from Europe had spread to the valleys of the Nile and of the Tigris in time to create there the Sumerian and Pharaonic civilisations! Only now is it really possible to test the conflicting claims of the opposing schools by reference to objective data.

At the library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the dissertations in the Humanities are arranged in chronological order. A single glance suffices to tell us that this classification by years coincides almost exactly with a classification by bulk. As we pass along through time, year by year, the volumes grow thicker; pamphlets merge imperceptibly into modest books, these into larger books, these in turn into weighty tomes; until finally we come across works embracing several volumes, each volume imposing in its own right. The explanation is simple: every author is normally led to consider the opinions of his predecessors in the same field or in neighbouring fields; these opinions he discusses, contests, approves, or amends; and finally this leads to the growth in bulk, gradual but unlimited, so evident on the shelves at the library.

It may be an exaggeration to say that a reappraisal of the concept of evolution is taking place. But it cannot be denied that in the last few years a number of extremely important studies have given new formulations to some of the fundamental questions concerning the rhythm, structure and meaning of biological evolution. It might be of interest, therefore, to discuss the present state of these problems and to indulge in some critical considerations regarding them.

According to G. Childe, the history of mankind is dominated by two great revolutions: the invention of agriculture and the birth of cities. From the same socio-historical point of view, R. Redfield is inclined to think that the consequences of the invention of agriculture have been less decisive than the urban revolution. Hence, he is led to classify all civilisations in two categories: the ‘pre-urban’, and those that have known a greater or lesser urban development.

Greek tragedy is still acted in the original and in translations; it has inspired such modern drama as The Family Reunion and La Machine Infernale; in Norway and France Sophocles’ Antigone helped to give hope to the resistance. Greek tragedy was produced originally at a religious festival by a poet who was poet, musician, producer, and sometimes actor too. The plays were meant to be seen; they had staging and costumes, dancing, and dramatic technique. They were meant to be remembered; they had language, style, and thoughts which the poet desired to communicate at that particular time. The poet himself knew well the leading artists, thinkers, and politicians of the small society in which he lived. Production, metre, technique, style, and thought are the chief elements which the scholar must study if he would make these ancient plays as intelligible as possible to modern readers.

These four volumes, reviewed together solely because of their respective publication dates and their vaguely related subject matter, represent, for the reader interested in myths and symbols, just so many exercises in style that are not equally commendable. In each we find a different lesson which, for the sake of simplification, we will designate respectively as a lesson in innocence, a lesson in impudence, a lesson in science, and a lesson in imagination. This is perhaps the proper order to follow, although we feel a slight uncertainty in regard to the relative position of the first two.

In the vocabulary of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance the term ‘humanist’ literature refers only to profane, as opposed to sacred, writings. However, the greatness of the ancient authors appeared such that a certain confusion was created between profane and classical writings. Thus the idea arose of what was much later called humanism, and the feeling of a mission ‘to revive dead things’ (in the words of Machiavelli) gained ground. Today we like to give a wider meaning to the word humanism: to be a ‘humanist’ is to have faith in Man, to believe in his eminent dignity and in the potentialities of his genius. Such humanism is of all times, but it seems (and this is no mere chance) that its golden age coincides with that of the renaissance of antiquity and that it has remained inextricably linked with classical culture—culture understood here in the two-fold sense of ‘knowledge’ and ‘cult’ of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The reason for this correspondence between certain ideas on the potentialities of Man and admiration for the ancients is founded not only on the fact that these latter were admirable because of their wisdom, their virtues and their arts, but also, and primarily, because in the eyes of the Christians (who had good cause to believe themselves their equals), these ancients, whether Latin or Greek, not having received the help of Revelation and Redemption, had to accept on their own account the authority of moral law and to procure for themselves all the benefits of a truth envisaged only imperfectly. How could such triumph of Man, incomplete though it might have been, be arrived at ? This was a crucial question, ever since the first centuries of Christianity, a question to which the Fathers of the Church, particularly the Greek Fathers, had found various answers. Some of them denied that the pagans had any knowledge whatever of Truth, others admitted that whatever they had learned or divined of Truth could be due merely to chance Hebraic influence or to the grace of partial revelation.

At the library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the dissertations in the Humanities are arranged in chronological order. A single glance suffices to tell us that this classification by years coincides almost exactly with a classification by bulk. As we pass along through time, year by year, the volumes grow thicker; pamphlets merge imperceptibly into modest books, these into larger books, these in turn into weighty tomes; until finally we come across works embracing several volumes, each volume imposing in its own right. The explanation is simple: every author is normally led to consider the opinions of his predecessors in the same field or in neighbouring fields; these opinions he discusses, contests, approves, or amends; and finally this leads to the growth in bulk, gradual but unlimited, so evident on the shelves at the library.

The great history of India conceived by K. M. Munshi, the first undertaking of this magnitude to be carried out entirely by Indian scholars, is continued with Vol. Ill, which covers roughly the period from 320 to 750. After an interval of about ten months, it follows Vol. II, The Age of Imperial Unity, which embraced the period between 600 before our era and 320 after; the first volume, which appeared in 1952, had, naturally, dealt with the sources (‘up to 600 b.c.’), or what is conventionally known as ‘the Vedic period’. As is well known, the scientific editor is the esteemed historian R. C. Majumdar. To him, in this volume, has fallen the all important task of compiling the chapters on dynastic history which occupy the first three hundred pages, with the exception of the history of the Deccan monarchies, which was entrusted to the epigraphist D. C. Sircar (who has undertaken also Ceylon and the Châlukyas), another exception being the period of the Pallavas and other kingdoms of the South, treated by R. Sathianathaier.

An original characteristic of the work is the important part—in this volume actually preponderant—occupied by the elements constituting Indian culture at the epoch under consideration: literature (G. V. Devasthali, H. D. Velankar, Srinivas Iyengar), political and juridical theory (U. N. Ghoshal), religion (Nalinaksha Dutt, A. D. Pusalker, A. M. Ghatage, D. C. Sircar and others), art (S. K. Saraswati, N. R. Ray), general social questions (U. N. Ghoshal). Finally R. C. Majumdar returns to describe India's exchanges with the outside world and adds a summary of the expansion of Indian culture in Asia.

Mrs. Langer is to be warmly congratulated on this monumental work on the philosophy of aesthetics, a sequel to her Philosophy in a New Key. She brings all the equipment of her trained and firstrate philosophical mind to bear upon the fundamental problems of art and the arts. In Part I she speaks generally of aesthetics. In Part II she writes of the ways in which aesthetic symbolism works out in visual arts, in music, in song, and opera, in dance, in poetry and other forms of literature, and in drama both comic and tragic. The book concludes (Part III) with a suggestive essay on ‘The Power of the Symbol’.

The manuals on Indian philosophy, very rare until about thirty years ago (you still had to rely on Deussen and Max Mueller at that time), have multiplied since then. The years between 1922 and 1925 saw the publication of the first volume of Dasgupta's study as well as of Radhakrishnan's, of the shorter treatises by Masson-Oursel, by Grousset, and by Otto Strauss. Slowly it became clear that philosophy was not the monopoly of the Greeks and their successors and that, since the beginning of historical time, India in particular had handled in its own way and most worthily the notions which form the nucleus of our own speculations. It will become increasingly more difficult to set aside the role of India when a worldwide picture of the facts is to be presented.

With the practically complete cessation of ethnological inquiries conducted in the field tinder the sponsorship of the French School of the Far East, monographs on South East Asia have become, since the end of the 1939-45 war, somewhat rare. Hence it is a pleasure to welcome the work of Mr. Evans on the religious life of the Dusuns of North Borneo. With its shortcomings and its merits, this book shows what can still be accomplished by the researcher who works alone, at a time when the fashion is team-research. Mr. Evans visited the Tempasuk Sub-District in 1910, as a Cadet of the Chartered Company. From 1912 to 1933, he was curator of the museum of Perak in Malaya, and after a period of retirement in England between 1933-1938, he returned to Borneo and began to gather up the materials of the present study. Interned by the Japanese during the war, he could not resume his work until he was sixty years old. In his previous books he had given some information on the peoples of Malaya which supplemented the thick and still classic volumes of Skeat and Blagden. The present work, which resumes and sometimes corrects the documentation furnished in his Studies in Religion, Folklore, and Custom in British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, is divided into three parts: I, General Beliefs; II, Ceremonies, i.e., agrarian rites (one of the parts of the book which will be most interesting to specialists) and communal rites for the village with, among others, some interesting data on head-hunting, which was formerly practiced and which, according to the author, may spring into activity again. This part also includes some individual and domestic ceremonies (for cases of illness, bad dreams, etc.). Many of the rites involve the exposure and the donation of a sacrificial animal to the evil spirits supposed to be gathered outside of the houses. Part III is ‘Folktales’, and contains sixty-five tales which are closely related to the other two parts of the book. In the appendix are texts in the sacred language used by the Priestesses, with attempts at translation, as well as detailed descriptions of these priestesses’ ordination rites, and the details of a fertility rite. The materials of the book are thus rich from a functional point of view. Having lived for the most part by himself and without access to a specialised library, Mr. Evans has not undertaken the comparative analysis of his material. To do so would have increased considerably the size of an already long book; but one cannot help thinking that a discussion of his manuscript with other specialists would have avoided a certain number of repetitions and curtailed some minute descriptions. The author is always careful to tell us what he did not see as well as what he did see, and must be praised for this procedure. We have here, in fact, a truly descriptive work: the reader does not find reference to odier works on Borneo in the European languages, besides those of the author. Within these limits, however, the book justifies its publishers’ claims: it constitutes one of the most detailed descriptions we have of the religious life of a Borneo people.

Treatises on Indian philosophy have multiplied in the last thirty years, in the “West as well as in India itself. And in spite of the demanding nature of this subject—it exacts, so to speak, a uniform presentation; it entails a whole succession of systems, each one of which is elaborated in a more or less independent manner—this abundance is nonetheless profitable. Each author makes his contribution in the detailed account of new views and strives to rejuvenate a somewhat refractory material, even if this involves the taking up of old views, discarded or neglected by the new generation of scholars.

The French School of the Far East has recently published under the above title an important study in comparative law, the conclusions of which go far beyond the juridical framework to which its tide and the author's background would appear to assign it. For this reason, it seemed necessary to call the work to the attention of readers of this journal, especially those who are interested in the problems of the relationships between the original indigenous infrastructure and the Indian and Chinese superstructures in South East Asia.