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