Toward the Eastern Origins of Civilization
A Reframing of John Pickering’s 1843 Address
with
Integrated Historical and Cross-Cultural Sources
Beezone Introduction
For centuries, the connection between ancient India and Egypt has hovered in the background of historical memory—hinted at through myth, echoed in sacred texts, and occasionally acknowledged by early explorers and orientalists. Yet only in the past 150 years has Western academic scholarship taken even a modestly serious look at the possibility that the Nile Valley and the Indus River basin shared more than commerce—they may have shared culture, cosmology, and the very foundations of what we now call civilization.
This scholarly hesitation—if not outright neglect—has, in effect, ignored through its own ignorance. The slow pace of recognition is not simply a matter of missing a footnote in the story of the ancient world. It represents a deeper failure to see the unity of human development across geographical, racial, and doctrinal boundaries—a failure that has left the modern world trapped in its own silos of information, mythology, and identity.
Today, even in our so-called “postmodern” world—saturated as it is with digital knowledge, scientific progress, and social fragmentation—we remain sorely ignorant of the deeper, essential, and integrated wisdom that flowed between East and West. This wisdom—emerging from the luminous heart of ancient India and carried across the oceans and deserts into Egypt, the Levant, and beyond—is neither purely religious nor merely philosophical. It is a sane understanding of the human condition, rooted in harmony with nature, a cosmological vision of unity, and a moral imperative for truth.
These are the very qualities most absent from our current age—an age allegorized by mythic distraction, algorithmized by artificial intelligence, and paralyzed by archaic political and religious battles that continue to drive the world to what often feels like the eve of destruction.
It is in this light that Beezone presents the following work: a modern reframing of John Pickering’s 1843 address to the newly formed American Oriental Society, expanded and enriched with historical records, merchant accounts, sacred texts, and modern research—all pointing to the vital, living thread between India and Egypt.
This thread—once overlooked—may be one of the most important keys to rebalancing the story of humanity. Not by replacing one origin myth with another, but by illuminating the continuity of ancient wisdom that can, even now, offer something far more necessary than information: meaning.
GENTLEMEN OF THE AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY:
We may justly congratulate ourselves on the favorable circumstances under which our present Association has been formed. All the nations of the world, with whom we hope to be able to cooperate in the investigation of the history, literature, and science of the East, are now at peace with one another; the nations of the East itself, who have for ages been estranged in feeling, habit, and manner from their brethren in the European part of the continent, have become more willing than formerly to encourage free intercourse.
Modern science and art have lent their aid in affording extraordinary facilities of communication between the most distant countries; and the comparatively liberalized policy of some Eastern governments has ensured to the foreign traveler a greater degree of security than was previously attainable. All these advantages—combined with the deeper knowledge now possessed by scholars and travelers—enable us to accomplish, within the span of a few years, what it may have taken our predecessors many generations to achieve.
Without casting any unfavorable comparisons, it is enough to contrast the earliest Christian missionaries and travelers who ventured from Europe to the East two centuries ago with the actual knowledge now available to us—particularly from the intelligent and energetic American missionaries and scholars presently dispersed throughout some of the most vital regions of the civilized East.
It is in this spirit of revived inquiry and cross-cultural interest that we approach a field of study so vast and layered as to be nearly boundless. Our investigation spans the histories, languages, literatures, and deeper cultural patterns of peoples long grouped—sometimes too vaguely—under the title of “Oriental nations.” This designation refers not only to present-day populations of Asia, but also to those ancient peoples whose migrations carried their influence into Africa and Europe, yet who retained unmistakable traits of their Asiatic origin.
We also extend our attention to the island cultures of the Indian and Pacific Oceans—particularly those within the region historically known as Polynesia—peoples who lived in dynamic relationship with the continent of Asia and whose traditions remain vital to any global ethnographic account.
To responsibly survey such a wide terrain, we must elevate our vantage. At present, we can only trace the general outlines—broad contours from which more detailed insights will emerge in time. Yet even from this elevation, certain patterns already stand out with striking clarity.
Two civilizational centers—Egypt and India—command attention for their immense influence across centuries. Egypt, long revered as the progenitor of Mediterranean learning, extended its influence westward to Greece and Rome. India, just as profoundly, cast its light across the Eastern world. But the deeper question—who influenced whom, and when—remains alive.
Some scholars have argued for Egyptian primacy in the transmission of wisdom. Yet a growing body of research increasingly points to India as the elder culture, perhaps the source from which even Egypt drew.
The distinguished philologist Max Müller argued that Egyptian, Greek, and Assyrian mythologies all drew deeply from the Vedic tradition. Greek historian Eusebius claimed that the early Ethiopians had emigrated from the Indus Valley. Lt. Colonel Wilford, in his essay On Egypt from the Ancient Book of the Hindus, supported this claim with detailed textual comparisons. His insights would later guide John Hanning Speke in locating the Nile’s true source at Ripon Falls, based not on Egyptian knowledge—but on Hindu geographic memory.
Heinrich Karl Brugsch, in History of Egypt, declared that India may have sent a colony of advanced settlers to Egypt eight thousand years ago, bringing arts and sciences with them. The Egyptians themselves preserved memory of a land called Punt, situated along the shores of the Indian Ocean—a sacred homeland from which their gods, including Amon, Horus, and Hathor, were said to have come. Reliefs in the temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari depict Punt as a vibrant land whose trees, animals, and rulers bear unmistakable Indian characteristics.
This view is not limited to speculation. Edward Pococke, in India in Greece, traced the movements of ancient Indian seafarers who followed the coastlines from the Indus to Egypt, Nubia, and even Greece, where he believed they seeded early Mediterranean civilization. Arnold Heeren likewise argued for plausible Indian migrations into Africa, driven by trade, enterprise, and the diffusion of religious traditions.
These accounts are supported by the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a mid-1st-century CE Greek merchant’s manual documenting the Indian Ocean trade network. Likely written between 40–60 CE and preserved in manuscripts now in Heidelberg and the British Museum, the Periplus describes the trade routes connecting Roman Egypt with East Africa and India. This document, confirmed that trade between India and the Mediterranean was thriving well before Pliny’s Natural History, and likely influenced it.
Under Emperor Augustus, Roman trade with India increased dramatically. According to Strabo, 120 ships sailed annually from Egypt to India by his time—up from a mere handful in previous eras. This was not merely economic exchange but cultural transmission.
And herein lies one of the most profound undercurrents of the ancient world: the migration not only of goods and people but of ideas—ideas that would shape philosophy, spirituality, and the very frameworks of what we now call “Western” thought.
Recent Beezone research, drawn from a wide array of sources, emphasizes the depth and duration of Indo-Mediterranean cultural exchange, including possible influences on Jewish and early Christian philosophy. Ancient Indian texts such as the Skandha Purana reference Egypt as Sancha-Dvipa, and Indian merchants were said to have been active in Alexandria even in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, as well as early Christian thinkers like Clement of Alexandria, operated within this cosmopolitan intellectual atmosphere.
European scholars such as Peter von Bohlen and Klaus Klostermaier documented the extensive trade networks linking Muziris and Sopara in India to the Mediterranean. These ports not only moved goods—they carried ideas, sages, and texts. Indian influence may even stretch into early Judeo-Christian formulations of the soul, ethics, and divine law. Josephus, for example, described Jewish sages in dialogue with Greeks, and Clearchus of Soli claimed Aristotle himself spoke with a Jewish philosopher from Celesyria, whose wisdom left a deep impression.
When all of this is taken together—texts, traditions, trade, and memory—a broader, bolder picture begins to emerge: that India was not a remote recipient of civilization, but a radiant source. A source whose influence may have flowed not only to China and Southeast Asia, but westward—into the heart of Africa, into the scrolls of Alexandria, into the synagogues and academies of the Levant, and perhaps even into the philosophical vocabulary of Athens and Rome.
If true, this is not merely a matter of cultural pride or curiosity. It is a revolution in historical perspective—a call to see the origins of Western civilization not as isolated, but as deeply entangled with the wisdom traditions of the East.
We stand, then, at the threshold of a new understanding—one that sees the ancient world not as a set of silos, but as a single, breathing world, pulsing with migrations, exchanges, and revelations still waiting to be fully rediscovered.