The notion of the overall comparability of East and West, which much social theory denies or underplays, depends upon the idea that the major societies developed in parallel ways on the basis of their Bronze Age achievements. But it is also the case that they had common roots in Mesopotamia and continued to exchange goods and information, at different intensities over time varying with the particular historical circumstances.

The links between East and West clearly go back to the Mesopotamian world since it was there that many common features of Bronze Age civilisation such as the plough and the wheel had their source. Needham suggests that those features may also have included fundamental ideas such as the equatorial system of lunar mansions in astronomy or the general theory of pneumatic physiology in medicine, which were later developed by the Indians, the Chinese and the Greeks in different ways. In more specific ways ‘the essential unity of Europe and China’ from well before the Shang dynasty (1500 BCE) has been brought out in a number of papers by Janse.

Communication between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ was of course a feature of the Greek world from the end of the Dark Ages because their world, as that of the Mycenaeans beforehand, extended across the Aegean down the coast of Asia Minor.3 Indeed the great Ionian cities were located along the Anatolian coast, dating from the middle of the eighth century, and may have emerged out of Phoenician trading centres.