MAINSTREAM CIVILIZATIONS AND THE TRANSCONTINENTAL ISOTHERMAL ZONE – A FEW NOTES

Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – ”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair !

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

The question of number of civilizations in history is a highly debated matter. A recent overview was published in 2001 1). The thoughts underneath represent the preliminary opinion of CRG on this highly important question debated by civilizationists 2).

Mesopotamian

Egyptian

Judaic

Greco-Roman (Classical)

European

American

Russian

Mesoamerican (Mexican)

Andean

Chinese

Japanese

Indian

Notes

1. Mathew Melko, ”Mainstream Civilizations”, Comparative Civilizations Review, No. 44, Spring 2001, pp. 55-71.

2)   No worldwide recognized comparative civilizationists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway or Sweden exist. The leading  names in the field seem to be American, British, German, French or  Russian (also maybe Japanese, Spanish, Swiss, or Arab). When it comes to thinking in global terms two Swedish names could however be mentioned, but these were not historians, anthropologists, linguists, or sociologists.

The “father” of the term geopolitics was Swedish Political Scientist Professor Rudolf Kjellén (1864 – 1922). He developed a the idea of”planetary system”: six European great powers, one American and one Asian.

Kjellén once remarked that the hegemony of the Europeans was an historical aberration. Such an order could well be bound for decline, or even fall. In 1905 he greeted the slogan ”Asia for Asians” with understanding. His most successful book, The Great Powers (1905) was published in 22 editions in Germany.

 Kjellén saw the world divided into large continental power areas. There would be a balance of power on the oceans between these powers. At one stage he foresaw a three state system (an American, an Oriental and a Mediterranean). European colonialism was regarded by him as an unnatural formation, or a transgression.

Carl Jonas Love Almquist (1793 – 1866) a Swedish author with broad interests, started as a romanticist. In his multifaceted career he was a civil servant, teacher, and clergyman. Accused of forgery and suspected of murder he fled to the United States. After1865 he lived in Bremen, Germany, where he passed away.

In 1839 Almquist had published the first part of an unfinished work, ”Saga of the Human Family”. Here he pointed out the importance of  ”high Asia” in historical thinking. There was a landbased ”world body” and a seabased ”world island”. World history was a struggle between nomads and domiciled.

William Gilpin on the other hand is widely believed to have been America’s first geopolitician. This nineteenth century writer, politician, and landowner in the West was also a civilizationalist with the vision that America would link Europe and Asia in ideas and commerce. Spreading the dream of self government around the world America was the final civilization.

Gilpin, to some extent drawing upon Alexander von Humboldt’s multivolume work “Cosmos”, identified the “Isothermal Zodiac”. It was a belt across the globe with a width around the globe of thirty degrees across the Northern Hemisphere. It passed through the oceans at their narrowest, and the continents at their widest points. The zodiac was an “Axis of Intensity”. Within this axis had emerged the greatest cities and the highest civilizations. Gilpin believed that America would extend its democracy, its harmony, and its progress to the rest of the world.

The paper would also draw on the works of British geographer and explorer Vaughan Cornish (1862 – 1948), a contemporary of English geopolitician Sir Halford Mackinder. In his text “The Great Capitals (1923) Cornish noted that all great civilizations were located on roughly the same isotherms”.  

For rendition of the isothermal maps of William Gilpin see below the map webpage of David Rumsey. Especially valuable is the Gilpin map of the civilizational “serpentine” from East to West.

http://www.davidrumsey.com.

“Delineating the Isothermal Zodiac, the Isothermal Axis of Identity. short_title. Thermal Map of North America. Delineating the Isothermal Zodiac, the Isothermal Axis.”