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In that decade a manvantara of the race would seem to have begun, which lasted through the dynasties of Hia and Shang, and halfway through the Chow, ending about 850. During this period, then, I think presently we shall come to place the chief activities and civilization of the Celts.
What we may call a European manvantara or major cycle of activity the one that preceded this present one should have begun about 870 B. C. Its first age of splendor, of which we know anything, began in Greece about 390 years afterwards; we may conveniently take 478, the year Athens attained the hegemony, as the date of its inception.
What was Ts'in, now is Shensi Province, the very Heart of Han: the Shensi man today is the Son of Han, Ts'in Englished; but in Shensi, the old Ts'in, in their tenderest moods, they call it Han still, the proudest most patriotic name there is for it. Not at once was the Golden Age of Han to dawn: half a thirteen-decade cycle from the opening of the manvantara in the two-forties had to pass first.
Before that, while a European manvantara was in being, it was European, no less Roman than Italy; and before that again, while the Crest-Wave was in West Asia, it was West Asian, under Egypt and Phoenician colonies. So if Carthage had won then, things would only have been delayed a little; the course of history would have been much the same.
Under whom it was, and under the first Antonine, that the empire stood in its perfect and final form: neither growing nor decreasing; neither on the offensive nor actively on the defensive. Now remember the cycles: sixty-five years of manvantara under Augustus and Tiberius, B.C. 29 to A. D. 36. But why stop at 166, you ask. Had not Marcus Aurelius, the best of them all, until 180 to reign?
The Greeks of Homer's and Hesiod's time, before the European manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the unknown nations of the north or west already at that time awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese.
And having said all this, and reconsidering it, one feels that to attribute these three branches of literature to a single manvantara is a woeful foreshortening. I suppose the Rig-Veda is as old as the Aryan Sub-race, which, according to our calculations, must have begun some 160,000 years ago.
Thus: China seems to have been in manvantara from 2300 to 850 B. C.; West Asia, from 1890 to 390; Europe, from 870 B. C. to 630 A. D. So in the time of Alexander West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. It is an impetus, of which sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it travels, and sometimes we cannot.
That is all that is said; but it is enough to keep your imagination at work a long while. And then, the manvantara dies away in a dolphin glory of mystical colors in the many tales of wondrous voyages and islands in the Atlantic: such as the Voyage of Maelduin, of which Tennyson's version gives you some taste of the brightness, but none at all of the delicacy and mysterious beauty and grace.
The position of this Byzantine Empire was a curious one: European in origin, mainly West-Asian in location. Its situation permitted it to last on so long into the West-Asian manvantara; its origin doomed that long survival to be, for the most part, devoid of the best characteristics of life.
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