Andrew Nedelchev’s Reviews > Our Oriental Heritage > Status Update

Listening to the audio version. I definitely miss the footnotes. Regardless of those, the sheer amount of examples in the initial chapters leads me to suspect that many of those may have been too hastily interpreted and lumped together. They are too diverse and I am not convinced that they were rightly understood within their original cultural context.

Nevertheless, this does not ruin the benefits of the book.

In the preface there is a quote from the Egyptian philosopher Ptah-hotep who wrote approximately five thousand years ago. I checked out some of what he wrote and there is a marked resemblanve to the biblical book of Proverbs written many centuries later.

In brief, a history of the world by a single person is bound to have serious shortcomings and will never reach its mark but it is better to have a few attempt it rather then despair and have none at all.

Durant's language is colourfull and his understanding sharp. I wonder though, have there been others attempting this more synthetic approach?

This leads to the more subjective reason, which is that "the probability of error increases with the scope of the undertaking, and any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for a myriad merry darts of specialist critique."

The objective has to do with "the accumulation of knowledge" that "has divided history, like science, into a thousand isolated specialties..." Therefore, "prudent scholars have refrained from attempting any view of the whole — whether of the material universe, or of the living past of our race."

...synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation's culture, institutions, adventures and ways." According to Durant then there is an objective and a subjective reason why such a synthetic historiographical approach is rarely - if ever - pursued.