Orientalism and the Collapse of Sacred Chronology

Prior to the eighteenth century, very few westerners questioned the historical accuracy of the Book of Genesis, which traced the descent of all of the peoples of the world from Adam and Eve, and set the age of the world at approximately six thousand years.  In the eighteenth century, however, sacred chronology came increasingly under attack from a variety of directions.  Philosophic rationalism and the skeptical, empirical approach of Descartes and Bayle challenged the authority of the Bible, while new advances in natural history, particularly the discovery of fossils and other traces of geological transformations, called its timeline into question.  Perhaps the most important factor in the collapse of sacred chronology, however, was increased cultural and scholarly contact with Asia.  As the result of missionary activity, expanded trade, advances in scholarship, and the beginnings of imperialist expansion, eighteenth-century Europeans came to know much more about the previously remote societies of India and China than had their predecessors, and also rediscovered the distant past of the more familiar Near East, particularly ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.  Scholarly engagement with Eastern cultures led to the realization that these civilizations were not only older than Europe, but had detailed historical records that antedated the Biblical Deluge, in which all of humanity except Noah and his family were believed to have perished.  This discovery led first to increasingly implausible efforts to incorporate Eastern civilizations into the Genesis historical narrative, and later to the abandonment of sacred chronology and to efforts by philosophers such as Voltaire to write new, secular universal histories incorporating both East and West.