Nomads, Peasants and Kings

Abstract

‘NOT in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.’ Such is the contention of a recent writer on the subject of man’s animal origins, as he presents evidence to show that man first emerged as man somewhere in the African highlands (Ardrey, 1961; 9). Whether mankind was born in innocence, and subsequently by some kind of ‘fall’ became sinful, or whether man evolved from a particularly murderous species of animal and is still in the process of evolution towards some ‘nobler’ form of existence, is a question on which religious traditions are divided, as we shall see later in our study. It is however fairly clear that wherever homo sapiens may first have emerged, it is in Asia that the roots of the present great civilisations of the world are to be found. Moreover, it is in the land mass which extends from the Atlantic eastwards to the Pacific, known for convenience as Eurasia, that three-quarters of the world’s present population is contained. Here the major religious and philosophical traditions of the world had their origins — Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist — and it is these which we are concerned to trace.