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“ ”During the deep sleep of the interval (circa A.D. 375-675) which, intervened between the break-up of the Roman Empire and the gradual emergence of our Western Society out of the chaos, a rib was taken, from the side of the older society and was fashioned into the backbone of a new creature of the same species.
About Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee (April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975) was a British historian and the nephew of Arnold Toynbee.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Arnold J. Toynbee
We have observed that the germ of creative power in Christianity was not of Hellenic but of alien origin (in fact of Syriac origin, as we can now identify it). By contrast we can observe that the creative germ of Islam was not alien from, but native to, the Syriac Society.
On the whole the Aramaean or Syrian element, rather than the Iranian, may be regarded as the deeper influence, and, if we peer back behind the time of troubles, the Iranian element fades out and we catch a glimpse of a society in Syria, in the generation of King Solomon and his contemporary King Hiram, which was just discovering the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and had already discovered the Alphabet. Here at last we have identified the society to which the twin Islamic societies (subsequently combined in one) were affiliated, and we call it the Syriac Society.
An individual’s adherence to a certain faith is often determined by the geographical accident of the locality of his birth-place.