Why are Greek and Latin ‘Classics’ and not Chinese? There is no real answer to this question, which popped out of some twittering I was doing just now with Dave Parry. It is hard to argue with Dave’s position which is that this represents a European cultural bias. If we redefine classics in world rather than European terms, what languages should we add in?
The case for Chinese is so obvious that it is surprising it hasn’t been made long ago. Up the the late 1400’s, it was a toss-up as to whether European or Chinese colonial expansion and technological development would dominate the age of exploration. Chinese has a literary culture going back as far as Europe, and was and still is the language of between 10% and 20% of the worlds population. Now that I see it, it seems pretty much a slam-dunk that any academic department that claims to be a department of Classics better find a Chinese classicist.
But is that enough? On twitter, Dave said “Heck I might even take Sanskrit, Arabic, or Classical Chinese over Greek and Latin” which is fair point. I’m not an expert, but it seems that given the significance of Arabic scholarship during what us Eurocentrics quaintly call the “Dark Ages”, it may have a claim. It may have crystallized as a language round the same time as Chinese (potential for a huge argument there, but let’s sweep past it for now), and has global significance in the history science and theology, and possibly other fields.
Classical Sanskrit apparently also dates from around the 4th Century CE, which makes it, like Chinese and Arabic, younger by a long stretch than Greek and Latin. However, like Chinese and Arabic, it still has a continous tradition of written literature in a range of genres and disciplines.
Chinese, Arabic and Sanskrit are, like Latin, parents to major groups of modern spoken languages.
If we were to move away from accepting Classics as being only Greek and Latin, and include Chinese, Arabic and Sanskrit, would this bring a new dimension to comparative classical scholarship? What challenges would this pose for the movement to get away from “Western Civ” in history to a “World History” perspective which seems to mire itself in a hopelessly egalitarian soup?
Oddly enough, I’m already using a textbook – Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons – which balances European, Middle Eastern and Chinese history in it’s period nicely, which may be why I’m happy to go along with the questions Dave asked, questions which may have been an interesting experiment in exploring the cultural biases of twitter users.
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