ABSTRACT
The purpose of the essays in the following section is not to present material that may be useful in introducing courses on Asian civilizations or on world history in the undergraduate curriculum, but rather to look at Western history and to note the times and places where the different Asian civilizations interacted with the West in some significant fashion. What we are suggesting here, then, is not so much the incorporation of Asian material into the curriculum, but rather a work of excavation, of discovering Asia within the existing framework of courses on European or Western civilization. The purpose of the essays is the enrichment of such courses by a deepening of knowledge of the intersection between European and Asian civilizations, with the emphasis more on their context in Western history than on the history of the Asian civilizations themselves. The complexity of relationships between Europe and Asia is pointed up in the first essay by Rhoads Murphey’s reminder that while Europe and Asia are one land mass, and while many of the ideas that we think of as “Western,” including all the major religions, came from regions that we now label “Asia,” the great centers of civilization in both Europe and Asia were separated from each other by formidable deserts, steppes, and mountains. As a number of the essays note, the oceans would eventually provide the most encompassing points of intersection.
