" Nothing would be easier than to caricature China's golden water closets as symbols of a civilisation in decline.
Well-to-do Europeans started travelling south, mostly to Italy, to visit the sites of classical civilisation and buy up antiquities and paintings to take home.
"We think that this language was a stepping stone in civilisation which led to better co-ordination and co-operation that might have led us to expand," said Dr Quentin Atkinson, at the University of Auckland and Oxford University.
Wisdom of the ancients always served civilisation well.
Then it breeds in its votaries affections and exaggerations, as it did with the Brahmins in the time of the decadence of Indian civilisation, when the perception of the higher truth fell away and superstitions grew up unchecked.
