Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in n… - Arnold J. Toynbee

In every case the story opens with a perfect state of Yin. Faust is perfect in knowledge; Job is perfect in goodness and prosperity; Adam and Eve are perfect in innocence and ease; the Virgins — Gretchen, Danae and the rest — are perfect in purity and beauty. In the astronomer’s universe the Sun, a perfect orb, travels on its course intact and whole. When Yin is thus complete, it is ready to pass over into Yang.

So far as the Syriac society was related to any older member of the species it was related to the Minoan, and this in the same degree as the Hellenic was related to the Minoan-neither more nor less.

As the Macedonian conquest, by breaking up the Achaemenian Empire (i.e. the Persian Empire of Cyrus and his successors), prepared the soil for the seed of Hellenism, so the Arab conquest opened the way for the Umayyads, and after them the 'Abbasids, to reconstruct a universal state which was the equivalent of the Achaemenian Empire.