Britain and the Middle East

Abstract

WHEN discussing we discuss not the only Nfiddle problems East we but should people. remember They that we are discussing not only problems but people. They are people whose history goes back at least 6,000 years; and the first 5,000 years, of it at least are, in the broad sense, also the first 5,000 years of our own history; and the ancestors of these people whom we shall be discussing are also culturally our own ancestors. From the peoples inhabiting the Middle East during the last 6,000 years came the spiritual and philosophical and even technological foundations of our own civilization. Our alphabets originated in the Middle East. Our languages have with Persian and Sanskrit a common ancestor. Our religionsand indeed all the great religions in the world except those of the Far Eastare of purely Middle Eastern origin. And not only do our sciences go back to the Babylonians' interest in the movements of the heavens and the Egyptians' in the management of the Nile for agriculture, but even as recently as the latc Middle Ages the revival of medicine and what was called "natural philosophy" came to Europe at the hands of the Arabs. It was only from the European Renaissance onwards say the last five hundred years that Western Europe began unquestionably to outstrip the Middle East, and only in the last 150 years that the direction of the traffic in ideas, knowledge and invention was reversed, to flow from West to East after flowing for millennia from East to West.