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  WHAT MAKES CIVILIZATION?

  WHAT MAKES CIVILIZATION?

  THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND THE FUTURE OF THE WEST

  DAVID WENCROW

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  CONTENTS

  List of Maps and Illustrations

  Chronology Chart

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  Introduction: A Clash of Civilizations?

  PART I THE CAULDRON OF CIVILIZATION

  1. Camouflaged Borrowings

  2. On the Trail of Blue-Haired Gods

  3. Neolithic Worlds

  4. The (First) Global Village

  5. Origin of Cities

  6. From the Ganges to the Danube: The Bronze Age

  7. Cosmology and Commerce

  8. The Labours of Kingship

  PART II FORGETTING THE OLD REGIME

  9. Enlightenment from a Dark Source

  10. Ruined Regimes: Egypt at the Revolution

  Conclusion: What Makes Civilization?

  Further Reading

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

  Maps (Created and Drawn by Mary Shepperson)

  1. The ancient Near East

  2. Probable locations of foreign lands, from Mesopotamian sources

  3. The lapis lazuli route, from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, c.2500 BC

  4. Prehistoric cooking traditions, and the spread of farming, c.10,000 to 5000 BC

  5. Major sites in Egypt and Mesopotamia, c.4000 to 2000 BC

  6. Metal-hoarding zones around the fringes of urban life in western Eurasia, c.2500 to 1800 BC

  Illustrations

  1. Gold casing of a cult statue with lapis lazuli inlays around the eyes, from Tell el-Farkha in northern Egypt, c.3200 BC (‘Late predynastic period’).

  2. Marble face of a composite figure, with shell and lapis lazuli inlays, from Mari, Syria, c.2500 BC.

  3. Monumental stone tower constructed around 9000 Bc (‘Pre-pottery Neolithic A period’) at the site of Jericho (Palestine), preserved to a height of around 9 metres.

  4. Human skull with features modelled in plaster, and eyes inlaid with Red Sea shells, c.7500 BC (‘Pre-pottery Neolithic B period’).

  5. Comb with bird ornament, c.3500 BC, from a grave at Ballas in Upper Egypt (‘Predynastic period’).

  6. Ceramic serving vessels of the sixth millennium BC (‘Halaf period’), from northern Iraq.

  7. Copper sceptres, mace-heads, and other ceremonial objects cast in the lost-wax technique, from a hoard discovered at Nahal Mishmar in the Judean Desert (Israel), dating to the late fifth or early fourth millennium BC.

  8. I mages impressed onto the clay sealings of storage vessels, and illustration of sealing mechanism (above: Ubaid-period stamp impressions, fifth millennium BC; below: Uruk-period cylinder impression, late fourth millennium BC).

  9. Tell Brak (ancient Nagar), in Syria, where urban life dates back to at least 4000 BC. Today its remains still stand over 40 metres above the Upper Khabur plain.

  10. Ceramic pouring vessel from the time of the ‘Uruk Expansion’, c.3200 BC, from Habuba Kabira, Syria.

  11. Cosmetic palette inscribed with the name of King Narmer, one of Egypt’s earliest rulers, c.3100 BC, obverse face.

  12. Early cuneiform account (damaged) of bread and beer from the site of Jemdet Nasr, southern Iraq, c.3000 BC.

  13. Stone plaque of Ur-Nanshe, ruler of Lagash, c.2500 BC.

  14. Monumental mud-brick architecture at the end of the fourth millennium BC: the ‘White Temple’ at Uruk, southern Iraq (above), and an elite tomb at Saqqara, northern Egypt (below).

  15. Relief carving of a seated statue in transit, receiving an offering of incense, from the tomb of Rashepses at Saqqara, Old Kingdom, c.2400 BC.

  16. Plan of the workers’ settlement near the pyramids of Giza, Old Kingdom, with adjoining towns and fortifications.

  17. Syrian bears and vessels arriving in Egypt. Painted limestone relief from the mortuary temple of Sahure at Abusir, c.2450 BC.

  18. Tympanum above the entrance to the Oriental Institute in Chicago.

  19. Bronze medallion commemorating the publication of Description de l’Égypte, 1826.

  20. ‘General Napoleon Bonaparte, before the pyramids, contemplates the mummy of a king’ (Egyptian Expedition 1798).

  Chronology Chart

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  When the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003, eight decades after its foundation by the British diplomat and archaeologist Gertrude Bell, our newspapers proclaimed ‘the death of history’. It is easy to see why. After the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago, the Middle East witnessed a series of startling transformations that were unprecedented in human history, and have shaped its course down to the present day. By 8000 BC the world’s first substantial and permanent settlements had been established there, accompanied by the earliest domestication of cereal crops and herd animals. Over successive millennia farming spread to neighbouring regions, including the Mediterranean and northern Europe. But in the Middle East itself, further developments unfolded that would remain alien to most of Europe for many thousands of years. By 4000 BC cities of great size and complexity had appeared along the rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, in what is today Iraq. The invention of the earliest known system of writing followed in that region (referred to by historians as ancient Mesopotamia) around 3300 BC, echoed to the wes
t along the Egyptian Nile, where a distinct group of scripts emerged at much the same time.

  This book provides a new account of these remarkable changes in human society and technology, and many others that accompanied them. But its main focus is upon the succeeding period, from around 3000 to 2300 BC, which witnessed the parallel rise of powerful kingdoms, centred upon what are now the countries of Egypt and Iraq, and taking markedly different forms in each. These were the first really large-scale political entities to emerge in human history, the superpowers of their day. It is their appearance that archaeologists and ancient historians, writing in a more innocent age, have referred to as ‘the birth of civilization in the ancient Near East’. And even if the grandeur of that particular phrase no longer appeals, our attachment to the ancient Near East as the ‘birthplace of civilization’, where the foundations of our own societies were laid, remains as strong today as it has ever been.

  Alongside such positive appraisals, however, there exists the memory of another kind of ‘ancient Near East’; an alien and sometimes bizarre world where we explore the discontents of modern civilization; where the allure of sacred kingship can still be felt, and the fate of humans is directed by the will of distant and unfathomable gods. Most people today are more likely to encounter ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia through the lens of Hollywood, or works of fiction such as William Blatty’s The Exorcist, than through the Greco-Roman and biblical literature that informed the views of an earlier generation. And much of this fiction—the world of walking mummies, possessive demons, and aristocratic vampires—shares a common theme: the invasion of bourgeois, Western bodies by disturbing forces from a dynastic, theocratic past. The consistency and appeal of such representations surely amount to more than just a fascination with the macabre, hinting at deeper insecurities about our modern way of life, and about the integrity of ‘the West’. But what is their source?

  In the second part of this book, which concerns the modern reception of the ancient Near East, I trace a cultural lineage for these familiar tropes, leading back to the demise of dynastic states and sacral kingship in revolutionary Europe. Much has already been written about the conceptual opposition between ‘East’ and ‘West’: its origins in classical antiquity, with the wars between ancient Persia and Greece, and its extension into the imperial agendas of more recent times. But the re-emergence of the ancient Near East in modern, Western consciousness also has another dimension, which I suggest has more to do with the internal needs of European societies at a time when republican hopes for the dawning of a new political age were threatened by the weighty legacy of dynastic authority.

  This process, which I call ‘forgetting the old regime’, can be detected in Isaac Newton’s writings on the origins of kingship along the Nile and the Euphrates, written in the aftermath of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, and later in the Comte de Volney’s (1791) meditations on the ‘ruins of the ancient Orient’ as an allegory for the fall of monarchy in Europe. Perhaps its most concrete expression is to be found in the early history of the Louvre, during its revolutionary transformation from royal palace into Europe’s first state museum. Mummified bodies from ancient Egypt had been a popular street scene in Paris since the seventeenth century, but who then could have envisaged their installation as a public spectacle in the former residence of the Bourbon monarchy, where subjects had once gathered to receive the miraculous healing power of the ‘royal touch’?

  If the effect of such displays and substitutions is to reassure us that we have passed beyond the threshold of ‘early civilization’ into some more ‘modern’ condition, then it becomes all the more important to go beneath the surface, and examine the true nature of those societies we have come to regard as so distant from our own. What follows, then, is both an investigation of the ancient Near Eastern past and a reflection on the present, and on the concept of ‘civilization’ itself.

  Civilizations, we are often told, are entities of vast scale and long duration, operating over and above individual nation-states. But it is nation-states that undertake wars in the name of civilization, and routinely demand sacrifices so that a familiar form of civilization—our way of life—will continue, and not be consigned to history. In the turmoil of such conflicts, it is difficult if not impossible to step away from the immediacy of our own circumstances and reflect upon what it is that is being defended. Are we talking about abstract values, such as freedom and democracy, or concrete realities, such as the way we present and clothe our bodies in everyday life, or the manner in which we cope with death?

  The answer, it seems, is always a mixture of the two. Abstract concepts do not travel or reveal themselves in abstract ways, but through concrete practices—ways of making and doing things—that have their own histories and modes of transmission. It has been argued before, with reference to early modern Europe, that everyday practices (styles of cooking, eating and drinking, forms of domesticity and bodily comportment, notions of what is pure or polluted) are the real ‘stuff’ out of which larger patterns of civilization are built. But in our assessment of early civilizations we tend to neglect this slow transformation of everyday behaviours, emphasizing instead the ‘miraculous’ character of technological innovations (such as literacy and complex metallurgy) or monumental achievements (such as royal pyramids and temples), while too often ignoring the wider social and technological milieu from which they emerged.

  A key argument to arise from the first part of this book (Chapters 1 to 8) concerns the extent of that social and technological milieu. The parallel development of Egypt and Mesopotamia cannot, I suggest, be adequately understood as that of two distinct and bounded ‘civilizations’. And here I take issue with claims to the contrary, which surfaced with surprising clarity in Samuel Huntington’s influential (1996) treatise on the ‘clash’ of (modern) civilizations, but are also symptomatic of a wider tendency to approach the ancient world as though isolation was the natural condition of past societies; as though the interactions between them were intermittent and exceptional—a series of mere ‘encounters’, rather than an integral part of their constitution. Instead I argue that both Egyptian and Mesopotamian society fed from a common ‘cauldron of civilization’. The choice of term reflects, in part, the importance of cooking practices (always a good barometer of social life) in my account. But it also evokes the close interdependence between ‘great kingdoms’ and the diverse groups on their peripheries, which constantly added new and crucial ingredients to the mix, supplying precious materials to the centre—metals, coloured stones, fine timber, and incense—so that the gods could be fed and appeased.

  Civilization, if we are to retain that term, should then refer to the historical outcomes of exchanges and borrowings between societies, rather than to processes or attributes that set one society apart from another. Following the trail of those interactions leads us from the remote highlands of Afghanistan to the walls of Troy, from the cities of the Indus Valley to the ports of the Persian Gulf, and into the inner sanctums of royal power on the floodplains of the Nile and the Euphrates. In ‘excavating’ and pursuing these connections from among the fragmented distributions of surviving objects, images, and texts, I have left aside the details of dynastic succession—the rise and fall of kings and royal lines—which are of secondary importance for the kind of history attempted here. I have, moreover, been struck by continuities in the unfolding pattern of civilization that transcend our conventional distinctions between prehistory and history (or non-literate and literate societies).

  To talk of ‘civilizations’, however, is not just to describe the past. It is also to reflect on what is different about the societies we live in, how they relate to one another and the extent to which their futures are bound up with traditions inherited from previous ages and from earlier forms of civilization. The concluding chapters (9 and 10) therefore continue the theme of cultural borrowings, but with an emphasis on the legacy of the ancient Near East, and its ambivalent reception in modern Europe. Dra
wing on historical evidence from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries AD, I consider why the material remains of ancient Egypt, in particular, have become such a prominent part of our modern cultural landscape. For commentators such as Huntington, ‘early civilizations’ are ‘dead’ and ‘buried in the sands of time’. But as these chapters show, they have also been surprisingly present—both in the minds of intellectuals and on the streets of our cities—at critical junctures in our recent past, and during some of the historical moments that have come to define our futures.

  Before going any further, some acknowledgements are in order. I am grateful to Katherine Reeve of Oxford University Press, who first suggested a book on the ancient Near East, and to Luciana O’Flaherty and above all Matthew Cotton, also of OUP, for guiding it through to completion. My thanks also go to the staff and students of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, many of whom—knowingly or not—helped me to formulate the ideas presented here. A number of individuals gave generously of their time in reading and commenting upon various drafts. I would particularly like to thank Susan Sherratt, Neal Ascherson, Stephen Quirke, Eleanor Robson, Harriet Crawford, Norman Yoffee, Andrew Bevan, Tim Schadla-Hall, Corinna Riva, and Stephen Shennan. All will recognize my continued debt to the work of Andrew Sherratt and Roger Moorey. Bleda Düring brought to my attention the writings of Kaiser Wilhelm on the origins of kingship, and Wendy Monkhouse those of Isaac Newton. Michael Rowlands, whose own interest in civilization coincided fortuitously with my own, went beyond the call of duty in helping me think through the purpose of the book, and his work with Dorian Fuller has been a direct inspiration. Mukulika Banerjee was a constant companion and source of ideas in the final stages of writing. Mary Shepperson worked hard to produce the maps, and help in obtaining other images was generously provided by Augusta McMahon, Wilma Wetterstrom, Mary-Anne Murray, Geoff Emberling, Chuck Jones, Stuart Laidlaw, and Krzysztof Cialowicz. I must also thank Ghilad Zuckermann for allowing me to borrow the phrase ‘camouflaged borrowings’ from his studies of language development. I am happy to expose the debt. Finally, Rinat Koren contributed to the production of this book in more ways than I can possible acknowledge. For her, no words can express my love and gratitude.