Not many of the answers, true enough, are known: what is really new in the study of recent African history—the two millenniums, let us say, before A.D. 1500—is not so much that the answers are being supplied as that the questions are being put. That in itself is something of a milestone. Few may have denied the eventual possibility of tracing firm outlines for that place and period; all but the merest handful have had other fish to fry. These fish have been, and are, extremely important—as important as the study of human origins through the slow millenniums of the Pleistocene or, at the other end of time, as the story of colonial beginnings through the scurried decades of the last century. It is no small thing that Dart, Breuil, Leakey, and their colleagues can now assert with solid evidence behind them that Homo sapiens first saw the light in Africa; while in another direction the astonishing continuity of the African story has acquired spectacular emphasis from the recovery in southeast African waters of coelacanth, a most ancient creature whose latest known fossils had occurred in rocks that are older than seventy million years. Compared with that majestic gap in time, the centuries before European preoccupation with Africa may have seemed small and unimportant; they were in any case, and for one reason or another, largely ignored.

Except for scholarly works dealing with well-defined problems, writings on Byzantine art rarely fail to arouse in the reader some disquiet, some perplexity, regarding the aggregate of this art—its distinctive characteristics and essential values. The following remarks, confined to painting, are designed solely to clarify the foregoing statement, to indicate why it is justifiable, and to retrace, if possible, the genesis of such a state of affairs.

Our knowledge of ancient history has been tremendously enlarged in the last hundred years. Ancient civilizations, formerly scarcely glimpsed or completely unknown, have emerged from the obscurity in which they were buried. In other domains, already more or less well known, the discovery of documents year after year has shed a clearer—sometimes even a harsh—light upon the great pages of the human past. These discoveries, which reveal to us what the man of earlier days was like and which enable us to achieve a better understanding of the man of today, have at times been due to the purest chance. The manuscripts we are discussing here as well as many others belong in this category.

African evolution in the south Sahara traces its origin to very ancient times; it began when the Negroes established friendly or hostile contact with representatives of the Mediterranean and then of the oriental civilizations. From the fifteenth century on, attempts at colonization or penetration helped to accelerate a movement that was to precipitate the two world wars. Thirty years ago, when the so-called colonial problem moved from the national to the international level, these conflicts and their consequences had already given rise overseas to imperious material needs demanding immediate satisfaction as well as to social and political aspirations calling for appropriate reforms. In half a century African evolution had reached the prerevolutionary stage.

The origins of the American mentality bear the imprint of a “tabula rasa pattern” which the Mayflowers Pilgrim Fathers brought with them to the shores of Massachusetts. To the Puritan conscience, the founding of English colonies on the virgin soil of North America seemed a complete departure, the first step in the establishment of a new society. It was an incredible experience, marked by infinite hope, and one toward which, according to one American historiographer, “the eyes of God, of the world, and of posterity were turned.” The dream and the hope recurred from generation to generation; during the course of the centuries millions of emigrants, settling between the Atlantic and the Pacific, sought a better world than they had known.

The theories about the origins of humanity contain, for the most part, a strange contradiction. For one thing, we acknowledge that the human mind is basically different from animal intelligence; indeed, there are few writers who question the revolutionary nature of the change that has occurred in the psychic makeup of living beings as a consequence of the advent of conceptual thought, of conscious reflection, and of objective knowledge of the world. “Human intelligence,” writes Le Roy, “presents a completely original, distinctive feature; there is something exceptional and unique about it that is not to be found anywhere else,” while Durkheim observes: “Man is not merely an animal with a few additional attributes, but quite another thing.” “Although the Infusoria are linked to the monkey by a whole series of intermediate stages, the monkey is separated from man by a hiatus,” insists Claparède, and, finally, a writer who is not a scholar expressed the following common-sense judgment on the subject: “We would know exactly what man is if we could accurately assess that insurmountable wall that separates the most ‘intelligent’ animal from the most primitive pygmy.”

The development in modern times of the scientific study of the languages and civilizations called “oriental” (actually those outside western and central Europe) has of necessity been followed by a division of research into disciplines essentially delimited by linguistic boundaries. Thus experts of classical Arabic and of spoken Arab dialects, whether they study these idioms for their own sake, for their spoken or written literature, or even, making use of Arabic texts, to elaborate the history of the peoples of Arabic language, their nations, or their culture, have found themselves tending to work more or less together and to consider themselves under the name of “Arabists” as the artisans of a common science. Likewise, the experts of classical or modern Chinese and of Chinese dialects—linguists, philologists, historians, ethnographers—are conscious of working in the same corps of studies, known as “Sinology.” In both cases the linguistic definition is reinforced by a fairly precise geographical definition; the Arab countries, or China, are easily found on the map, and the educated public understands without much difficulty the sphere of interests of the Arabist or the Sinologist.