Time & Perspective Quote by James H. Breasted

Breasted is doing more than advocating for a broader syllabus; he is staking a claim for archaeology as the missing spine of modern historical consciousness. Calling history a "record of human experience" sounds modest, even humane, but it quietly demotes older, triumphalist historiography that treated the past as a parade of kings, wars, and official documents. If the unit of history is experience, then potsherds, burial practices, irrigation systems, and city ruins suddenly become as legitimate as treaties. That is the institutional argument smuggled in as a philosophical one.

The phrase "inevitably resulted" is the tell. It presents his conclusion as the natural outcome of intellectual progress rather than an agenda - useful when you are trying to win universities, museums, and the public over to a still-young discipline. He frames the "conquest of civilization" not as brute domination but as an achievement that must be "included" in a "complete human history", implying that previous histories were incomplete by design. The subtext is corrective and competitive: historians have been telling a partial story; archaeologists can finish it.

Context matters. Writing in an era when European and American institutions were busily collecting (and often extracting) antiquities from the Middle East and North Africa, Breasted’s universalist language doubles as justification. By describing ancient civilizations as part of a shared human record, he legitimizes their study on Western terms, even as he gestures toward a more capacious, less nation-bound narrative. The rhetoric is expansive; the power dynamics underneath are not.