ABSTRACT
The Old World culture made history and remembered history; but the very qualities that so long preserved it, its tenacious memory, its delight in its accumulated treasures, also limited its achievements. Its priests and scholars spent so much time in the mere preservation of their possessions, cataloguing, ordering, dusting them, that too often they lacked the energy to add to them, or to venture forth over territory where no ancestral roads had been built. Old World culture throve, and dominated the earth, probably, because of its early technical superiority in domesticating plants, in working up metals and manufacturing simple machines and utilities, and in creating cultural artifacts like writing and record keeping, which organised and unified the actions of men. Olive trees might be cut down in war, or dams and aqueducts destroyed; but the essential sustenance for a life rich in human values, retrospective and prospective, remained.
