The explorer who realizes that an island, a passage, an ocean for which he has been searching do not exist is compensated for his disappointment by an adjustment of the map to carry his name for all to appreciate; the ethnographer who pushed the platypodes and the triamatikoi over the brink into fable land had the satisfaction of a gain in the regularity and rationality of our world; but the historian who somewhere between analytical description and synthetic reconstruction discovers the non-existence, or better though less dramatically: the inappro-priateness and functional inoperativeness of his key concept, can do nothing to mask his discomfiture than to set forth his negative conclusion as stringently as he would have its opposite.

Let me begin by defining my subject geographically and chronologically. For the purpose of this paper, by “Mediterranean World,” I have understood, on the one hand, the Levant which included Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent with Egypt at its western terminus, Syria-Palestine forming its western band, and Assyria-Babylonia constituting its eastern bow, and, on the other, Greece and Rome. By India I mean the Indian subcontinent. I shall deal with my subject roughly in four chronological periods, which, for the sake of convenience, I shall designate as Indo-Mesopotamian period, Indo-Anatolian period, Indo-Hellenistic period, and Indo-Roman period.

At first sight, the situations of Venice and of Genoa seem to be almost as identical as mirror images. They are set at the head of the two deepest bays in the Mediterranean, both of them being virtually at the physical centre of that sea, and seemed fated by geography to act as rallying-points for East and West, and as bridge-heads for North and South. This, however, is not overly important: all countries, all nations are, in their own eyes, the physical centre of the Universe. The opportunity is always there, but it needs initiative to take advantage of it. For Venice, just as much as Genoa, had to overcome serious difficulties, both being almost cut off from their hinterland, Venice by the lagoons, Genoa by the mountains. Both cities were republics, and both ended up by having even the name of their supreme magistrate in common: the Doge. The merchandise that they exported and imported, the routes covered by their merchants, the currency, contracts, techniques, beliefs, and prejudices, only differed in a few details. The colonial empires were connected at several points. This made the wars between Venice and Genoa more fierce, but also made their ententes more intimate.

The great imperial or royal cities of the medieval Mediterranean world were, by their nature, active centres of commerce; in them all the different cultures of the maritime countries, and, often, of those from the ultramontane regions, or of countries beyond the deserts, met face to face. Thus, for example, flourished Cordova, Constantinople, and Palermo.

In Genoa, the consequences of the meetings of the different cultures were not dependent on political power, nor on the extent of empire, nor on the personality or vagaries of any particular sovereign. The town was not a great administrative centre, nor was it a centre of intellectual or religious activity. Although a beautiful town, well built in solid stone, and endowed with imposing palaces, Genoa was not even the centre of a particularly active artistic life. The cultures met because of the very nature of the city, its essential functions. Genoa is a merchants' city, open to distant cultures uniquely by virtue of trade.

In a book which appeared some thirty years ago under the title: The Future of Culture in Egypt, our learned friend Taha Husein put forward a seductive thesis which was as hard to accept in toto as it was to reject: the relation of the culture, literature and science of his country to the West, or more exactly to that Mediterranean culture which is the meeting-point of East and West. Ancient Egypt, the Hellenistic, even the Arab and the Moslem, all subscribed to this “Mediterraneanism,” to coin a phrase, instead of being linked purely and simply to the East, where a scholarly and traditional attitude delighted in classifying it. This abrupt turn to the West is quite justified as far as the Hellenistic period of the country is concerned; but with regard to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Fatimids and the Mamelukes, and without under-estimating its ties with the other Mediterranean countries, one cannot overlook all the aspects which linked it to the Near East, to Babylonian Mesopotamia, to the Arabia of Mahomet, and to the Persia of the Abbassids. But the merit of this paradoxical book, as is often the case in Taha Husein's work, is its vigourous insistence, albeit in a manner which is too rigid and exaggerated, on this undeniable fact: the unity of Mediterranean culture in Antiquity and even in the Middle Ages, although this is contrary to the opinions of Henri Pirenne, which, beyond the differences of religious creed and political allegiance, of language and custom, touches the intellectual heart of man, touches, as it were, his mental predicaments, touches a common spiritual patrimony. More than in literature and art, this “common” quality (or community) is well illustrated in the appreciation of knowledge, in the study and elaboration of knowledge down the centuries.

It is often said that religious disaffection is largely the result, not so much of intellectual doubts, as of the experiential sense of the world's suffering and injustice. Much of the Enlightenment polemic revolved around the problem of the theodicy and, according to a survey of the attitudes of German proletarians in 1906, the majority's religious disbelief appeared to stem from the failure of religious systems to cope adequately with the “‘injustice’ of the order of the world.”

In the same essay, however, Weber distinguishes three radical attempts to answer the problems posed by the world's imperfections. These, he claimed, “...give rationally satisfying answers for the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit, the Indian doctrine of Kharma, Zoroastrian dualism, the predestination decree of the deus absconditus. These solutions are rationally closed; in pure form, they are found only as exceptions.”

In an age when the interactions between East and West are multiplying and the once-dominant characteristics of Western life appear to be disintegrating, the search for some “principle of coherence” which characterizes a given civilization assumes special significance. None of the many explanations of the distinctive character of Western civilization which have been advanced by generations of scholars seem fully convincing when the latter is seen in both its structural and chronological aspects. Indeed, neither its devotion to technological innovation nor its Christian messianism can account for the kaleidoscopic elements in Western culture. It is also fruitless to attempt to find the underlying principle of unity in some unique world-view that would ostensibly be applicable at all times and in all social and geographical contexts—unless one would arbitrarily reduce the concept of civilization to the outlook or behavior of an educated elite, drawn from one or two relatively small social classes.

I term a group of texts “African philosophy”: to be precise, the group of texts written by Africans and defined as “philosophic” by the authors themselves.

This definition, let us note, involves no “petitio principii.” The sense of the adjective “philosophic” need not be reckoned with here, and even less the cogency of the adjective. All that matters is the fact of the adjective itself, the deliberate recourse to the word “philosophy” whatever, by the way, the sense or meaninglessness of the word may be. In other words, all that concerns us is the philosophic intention of the authors, not the extent (hard to evaluate) of its effective realisation.