ABSTRACT
The great historians of the literate cultures in the ancient world have left a rich legacy of writings that illumine the times in which they lived. They wrote about the deeds of men they knew and the fortunes of nations as they observed them. According to the Hindus and the Buddhists, many worlds have come and gone, and many others are to follow in a timeless cycle of creation and destruction. Life on this earth is merely incidental to the cosmic order. Now history's beginning can perhaps recede to unknown depths without upsetting the modern historian's pattern of divided time, but each historic period must have a definite end before the next can be said to have begun. As the European scholars continued to clarify the antecedents of their own civilization and of those civilizations related to it, they began to correct the old approach to Europe's past and mankind's history.
