Your argument that a thousand years ago Baghdad was a city of greater eminence than Kaifeng strikes me as unanswerable, Derb. And anyway, eminence in the past has little enough bearing on eminence in the future, as witness Percy Bysshe Shelley’s meditation on Luxor, in Ozymandias, or, as we would name him today, Rameses II. (Any excuse to work poetry into the Corner, especially if by a poet on whose excellence Derb and I—and even Rick Broohiser—ought to be able to agree.)

Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.