主题：青铜时代（一） -- 匿名

The Genesis of the High Cultures

Voegelin: I would like very much to draw your attention to a few points of Professor Dempf’s lecture that are of great importance for the genesis of certain institutions.

Two years ago, when I spoke with Dempf about matters regarding the genesis of those cultures that he likes to call the master high-cultures [Herrenhochkulturen], he was still of the opinion that they arose through shepherd peoples imposing themselves upon agricultural peoples. This idea concerning the genesis of high culture was maintained by liberal Marxists (most prominently, Oppenheimer) writing at about 1900. Since that time, ethnology and the history of ancient cultures have made progress.

Today one can say with certainty that there has never been an imposition of shepherd peoples upon agricultural peoples. And not only was there no such imposition: Good ethnologists like Mr. Baumann in Munich assure us that the horse-mounted peoples that play such a large role in the work of Alfred Weber and Rüstow never existed either. So now, the problem of how the institutions of the high cultures arose must be posed from another angle entirely. I do not know to what degree Dempf has returned to the sources here. According to the current state of archeology and ethnography, the thesis of a “tribal federation” that originates through a religiously and spiritually gifted personality appears to be the correct one. The genesis of the Indus civilization in particular can scarcely be explained in any other way. With cultures like the Chinese and Egyptian, we can still accept a gradual emergence of the institutions. But the geography of the Indus Valley,for climactic and territorial reasons, is of the type that can only be settled and organized by a planned undertaking and not by small tribes or groups. Thus, the only possibility consisted in the formation of this kind of tribal federation from the neighboring mountain tribes of the Iranian highlands. Then this was subordinated to a dynasty whose spiritual power could also create a new cult for the federation.

Similar processes can be observed in the genesis and decline of the empire of the Huns. Here, too, we find tribal federations that arise through a gifted, dynastic personality and disintegrate with the death of the dynasty. We can now form an approximate picture of how the so-called high cultures arose.

Added to this is the question of the external cause. Why does such a thing happen? And further, why does it take place everywhere at approximately the same time? Very interesting investigations by ethnologists at Princeton have revealed that external factors cause settlements to be made in river valleys or in similar locations that are very unsuited to settlement. The occasion for this having taken place is found in the desiccation of what has come to be called the Great Desert Belt. Under the pressure of this development the agricultural peoples leave entire large areas that are no longer inhabitable. Thus the federations are formed that settle in the still fruitful river valleys—in the Hoang Ho Valley, for example, or the Indus Valley, the Nile Valley, etc. This is the external pressure that works as a motivating force here. This seems to me to be very important for the problems of the institutional sphere.

Now how do things stand with the polis? We do not know how the polis actually arose; we can only make conjectures. One of the best seems to be the following: The poleis originated as the settlements of ship crews that fled in the face of the Doric migration. This dislocation appears to have been the organizational impulse to create new cultic units: namely, the poleis. Beginning in Anatolia, the polis expands to the border area of the Doric migration over the islands, into Italy; and only at the very end does it include the Greek mainland. Athens is the last to enter the sphere of the polis culture. This, therefore, would be one possible way in which, under external pressure, warrior groups and their ship crews formed settlement communities and developed new cults.Thus, the factor upon which Dempf places particular emphasis remains at the center—that the great foundations of community are always cultic and divine creations of some kind [ . . . ]——《The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1939-1985》P161-3