英文原句(红色部分)及所在段落:
From its inception, therefore, Chinese civilization was much less affected by the Middle
Eastern model than were the civilizations of either India or Greece. In a sense, therefore, the
cultural development of Eurasia after 1500 B.C. was twofold rather than fourfold. Middle
Eastern, Indian, and Greek civilization constituted a single, loose geographical continuum, with
zones of transition between the three principal segments, while Chinese civilization stood
apart and isolated in the Far East. Yet in view of subsequent history, it seems best to regard
the styles of life which emerged in India and in Greece about 500 B.C. as distinct, though
interrelated civilizations, comparable in magnitude and historic importance to their Middle
Eastern prototype and to the distant Chinese offshoot.
Here we may see a double pulse beat of history on the largest scale. In the age of river
valley civilization, Mesopotamian stimulus had hastened the development of the Egyptian and
Indus civilizations until they arrived at an inner perfection and balance which inhibited further
borrowing from outside. There ensued about a thousand years of approximate equilibrium,
between roughly 2700 and 1700 B.C., during which time the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt,
and the Indus developed separately in accordance with their own inner momenta. This world
balance was slowly modified during the closing centuries of the third millennium B.C. and the
opening centuries of the second millennium B.C. by the rise of civilized communities on rain-
watered land, most notably in the lands bordering Mesopotamia. But the definitive upset of the
old river valley civilizations came only after 1700 B.C., when barbarians from the steppes, armed
with the latest technological improvements, burst upon the old centers of civilization.