The subdivision of history into “Ancient,” “Medieval” and “Modern” — an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme

Thanks to the subdivision of history into “Ancient,” “Medieval” and “Modern” — an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme, which has, however, entirely dominated our historical thinking — we have failed to perceive the true position in the general history of higher mankind, of the little part-world which has developed on West European10 soil from the time of the German-Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance and above all to estimate its direction. The Cultures that are to come will find it difficult to believe that the validity of such a scheme with its simple rectilinear progression and its meaningless proportions, becoming more and more preposterous with each century, incapable of bringing into itself the new fields of history as they successively come into the light of our knowledge, was, in spite of all, never wholeheartedly attacked. The criticisms that it has long been the fashion of historical researchers to level at the scheme mean nothing; they have only obliterated the one existing plan without substituting for it any other. To toy with phrases such as “the Greek Middle Ages” or “Germanic antiquity” does not in the least help us to form a clear and inwardly convincing picture in which China and Mexico, the empire of Axum and that of the Sassanids have their proper places. And the expedient of shifting the initial point of “modern history” from the Crusades to the Renaissance, or from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th Century, only goes to show that the scheme per se is regarded as unshakably sound.

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It is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of Athens, Florence or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or Pataliputra. But is it permissible to found a scheme of World history on estimates of such a sort? If so, then the Chinese historian is quite entitled to frame a World history in which the Crusades, the Renaissance, Caesar and Frederick the Great are passed over in silence as insignificant. How, from the morphological point of view, should our 18th Century be more important than any other of the sixty centuries that preceded it? Is it not ridiculous to oppose a “modern” history of a few centuries, and that history to all intents localized in West Europe, to an “ancient” history which covers as many millennia — incidentally dumping into that “ancient history” the whole mass of the pre-Hellenic cultures, unprobed and unordered, as mere appendix matter? This is no exaggeration. Do we not, for the sake of keeping the hoary scheme, dispose of Egypt and Babylon — each as an individual and self-contained history quite equal in the balance to our so-called “World history” from Charlemagne to the World War and well beyond it — as a prelude to classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes of Indian and Chinese culture to footnotes, with a gesture of embarrassment? As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not “fit in” (with what?), entirely ignore them?

The most appropriate designation for this current West European scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the presumed center of all world happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico — separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.

Oswald Spengler
The Decline of the West