I don't mean to "orientalize" medieval Europeans or promote a Victorian "dark ages" narrative—I just mean that even for the most worldly and inquisitive writers, the assumption that the Bible was the beginning and end of history was so deeply ingrained as to hardly be noticed.

And history—especially the earliest history—only began to be truly studied in its own right, not just in service to scriptural history, or taking scripture as a background assumption, in perhaps the mid-19th century. And the Islamic world never reached that point independently.