Westerners have singularly narrowed the history of the world in grouping the little that they know about the expansion of the human race around the peoples of Israel, Greece and Rome. Thus have they ignored all those travelers and explorers who in their ships ploughed the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode the immensities of Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. In truth the larger part of the globe, containing cultures different from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans but no less civilized, has remained unknown to those who wrote the history of their little world under the impression that they were writing world history
Henri Cordier, French Sinologist quoted in The Adventures of Ibn Battuta
Whats worse is that we continue to propogate this and other myths (like the ‘aryan invasion’ one)
Like ethnic cleansing, post 1500, they had this history cleansing process where everything was to be written around the great voyagers of the Spanish or Portuguese or British empires. The British were a little bit more honest though in their approach.
That history would have amused the folks on the Malabar coast who after seeing Zheng He’s fleet would have likened Vasco da Gama’s three ships and 200 people as something ordinary.