What Makes Civilization Page 13

  PART II

  FORGETTING THE OLD REGIME

  9

  ENLIGHTENMENT FROM A DARK SOURCE

  Who built Thebes of the seven gates?

  In the books you will read the names of kings.

  Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

  And Babylon, many times demolished,

  Who raised it up so many times?

  …So many reports.

  So many questions.

  Bertolt Brecht, Questions from a Worker who Reads (1947)

  Antiquity and modernity are cut from the same cloth. That is to say, our sense of things being ‘ancient’ is produced—both historically and in practice—by the sense that we ourselves are ‘modern’. Of course artefacts and other archaeological remains have an objective age, which can be measured in absolute terms, for instance by the rate at which radioactive isotopes decay in organic matter. But when we declare a particular institution, form of behaviour, artistic style, or belief system to be ‘ancient’ we are engaged in a measuring process of a quite different kind. It is our own distinctiveness, our difference from the past, that is being asserted.

  In previous chapters I have been concerned in various ways with the experience of distance in past societies: the distance between the sources of raw materials and their points of consumption, and the related distance between mortals and the gods with whom they seek communion. In this and the chapter that follows, my attention shifts to the perceived distance between antiquity and modernity, and more specifically between ‘ancient East’ and ‘modern West’. This does not signal a departure from concrete realities into the realms of theoretical abstraction. Rather I am concerned here with the curious double-life of ancient Near Eastern artefacts and images, as keys to the remote past and symbols of a changing present. In particular I want to suggest that our paradoxical understanding of the Near East—as both the birthplace of civilization and its cultural antithesis—is not just a distant legacy, tacitly passed down to us from ancient Greek and Roman sources. It is also a distinct product of modern Europe’s attempt to grapple with its own, more recent history of sacral kings and dynastic power.

  European Antiquity and the Problem of Kingship

  It is a common misconception that the professional discipline we now call archaeology has its roots in the romantic pursuits of amateur collectors and enthusiasts. The very term ‘antiquarian’ has become synonymous with this stereotypical figure of the imagination: a hobbyist whose engagement with the relics of a remote past is little more than an aimless search for oddities and aesthetic curios. We might spare a condescending smile for the hopelessly inaccurate attempts by former generations—working without the benefit of radiocarbon dating—to construct a chronology for the early phases of human development, or cast an admiring backward glance at those whose speculations appear to anticipate our current state of knowledge. Only rarely, however, do we reflect upon the political activism that motivated Europe’s early antiquaries—their close involvement in the constitutional crises of their day; and the intimate relationship between revolutionary political movements and the growth of the ‘archaeological imagination’.

  When sixteenth-century antiquarians like Henry Spelman and François Hotman delved into the pre-Roman past of Britain and France it was, as John Pocock (1957) has demonstrated, with political subversion in mind. Most were practicing lawyers, well aware that their reconstructions of prehistory—still largely based upon Roman sources—had direct implications in the field of constitutional law. The freedoms enshrined in the French ‘assembly of the nation’, the English ‘parliament’, and the Scandinavian riksrad all gained legal currency from their purported origins in a remote past. All were defended in terms of their customary status, as the products of a long evolutionary process extending back to a time before kings and written records. For (so went the logic) what kings had not created, they could not hope to suppress. ‘We may never know’, writes Pocock (1957: 191), ‘how much of our sense of history is due to the presence in Europe of systems of customary law, and to the idealization of the concept of custom which took place towards the end of the sixteenth century.’

  The movement was a relatively brief one, superseded in the seventeenth century by John Locke’s defence of political liberty as a preordained condition of Nature. But from the Danube to the Atlantic seaboard it ignited a new sense that history could be discovered, not just in royal annals, but in the slow development of customary practices. The unnumbered dead of antiquity were recognized as carriers of cultural wisdom and national identity, and an interest in recording their material remains—the enigmatic megaliths and tumuli that dotted the landscapes of northern Europe—became increasingly common, among both conservative and republican thinkers.

  If the study of European prehistory can be considered, to that extent, a legacy of republican idealism, then what we might ask were the social and ideological forces that fostered the scientific study of the ancient Near East: the proverbial birthplace of sacred kingship? How have those forces shaped and limited our perception of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and their place in world history? And, to echo Brecht’s enlightened artisan, we might also ask what alternative histories and connections do they mask?

  The Taint of Babel: Isaac Newton and the Ancient Near East

  The Original of Monarchies, written in the aftermath of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, is among the least well-known works of Sir Isaac Newton. For reasons unclear the essay was never completed, although fragments appear in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728). Much of the surviving text is devoted to constructing a reliable chronology for the earliest periods of human history, bringing the newly discovered laws of mathematics and astronomy to bear upon the writings of the Old Testament, Homer, and the Greco-Roman historians. Sifting and comparing the ancient sources in search of suggestive anomalies, Newton deposes the familiar heroes and deities of the ancient world from their local dominions over heaven and earth, forcing them to inhabit a shared universe, and to obey its rules of motion and change. Solomon and David tread the same earth as Priam and Hector. Cadmos, Europa, and the Argonauts follow the same stars as the Egyptian inventors of navigation described in Manetho’s Aegyptiaca. The same planets orbit the walls of Troy, the temples of Byblos and Paphos, and the pyramids of Memphis.

  Newton’s writings on early kingship also contain the germ of a hypothesis that later generations of scholars were to advance with much greater force: that the ‘arts of urban life’ were not discovered in Europe, but had been brought there from the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the lands on the Nile and the Euphrates. In Newton’s day this process of transmission was linked to the dispersal of humanity at the Tower of Babel, an ‘event’ then placed at 2400 BC, roughly midway between the creation of the world and the time of Christ. But Newton’s ancient Near East was not merely a font of technological innovations. It was also a source of cultural contamination, still carrying with it the moral taint of Babel. The scientific revolution of his own day may have had its remote beginnings in the technological achievements of the ancient Near East, but those achievements had been siphoned into a morbid and backward culture of mausoleums and wasteful luxury, ancestral to the absolute monarchies whose power in his native England had only recently been curbed. The earliest glimmers of Enlightenment had come from a dark source that produced—not only farming, literacy, astronomy, and navigation—but also sacred kingship and the dynastic cult of the dead. Only when exposed to the ‘new light’ of European learning could they be liberated, retrospectively, from that dark moon of superstition and intolerance, and redeemed as part of a new story of human progress, culminating in the rule of Reason and Law.

  By the end of the nineteenth century this ambivalent approach to the ancient Near East had become integral to the new academic disciplines which resulted from the decipherment of the hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts. The very names which they were given—Egyptology and Assyriology—distingui
shed these fields from the study of ancient Greece and Rome, reflecting their ambiguous status between the humanistic search for ‘self’ and the scientific study of the ‘other’. The tension is clearly evident in the pioneering works of scholars such as Breasted (e.g. The Dawn of Conscience, 1934) and V. Gordon Childe, whose popular syntheses of European and Near Eastern archaeology—among them New Light on the Most Ancient East (1934) and Man Makes Himself (1936)—set an intellectual agenda that remains influential today. Flowing through these, and many other foundational works on ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, we find a remarkably unified (yet in many ways paradoxical) vision of the journey taken by ‘civilization’ in what was by then perceived as its inexorable movement from ancient East to modern West.

  A Miraculous Conception? ‘Civilization’ between East and West

  What, then, did this meta-history of the human career consist of? A point of entry is provided by the tympanum which ornaments the entrance to the Oriental Institute in Chicago, founded in 1919 as a ‘laboratory for the study of the development of civilization’. Designed under the guidance of the Institute’s founder, James Henry Breasted, its relief decoration depicts the encounter between East and West. In the centre of the scene an ancient Egyptian scribe hands a fragment of a hieroglyphic inscription to a figural representation of the West. Each is flanked by a series of icons—some human, others architectural—which make clear their symbolic roles as representatives of two distinct cultural lineages. The personification of the West, in his role as recipient of the gift of writing, stands before three buildings: the Athenian Acropolis, a Gothic cathedral, and a modern skyscraper. He is in the company of Herodotus, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and a series of anonymous figures who personify more recent links between the histories of East and West: a crusader, an archaeologist, and a historian of art. The symbolic landscape inhabited by the Egyptian figure comprises the palace of Persepolis in western Iran (once the seat of Achaemenid kingship), the Sphinx, and the Pyramids of Giza. He stands at the head of a group of great kings, including Hammurabi the lawgiver, each drawn from a different segment of the ancient Near East, from Persia to Egypt.

  Through a further, more subtle, device—the foregrounding of the lion and buffalo as representative totems of East and West—the design places the distinction between these two lineages in the realm of nature rather than culture. East and West are presented as ‘species’ of a different kind, and their intercourse is made possible only under the supernatural and purifying glow of a divine sun-disc, copied from the temple reliefs of the Egyptian ruler Akhenaton, whose religious reforms are often equated with the origins of monotheism. The overall design is symmetrical, and hence the meeting of East and West appears to be one of equals. Yet the protagonists are not contemporaries. They occupy different spaces of time. Ancient Near East meets modern West, and civilization passes between them in a direct exchange that excludes altogether the more recent history of the Middle East. Modern civilization, in this scheme of representation, is a unique possession of the West, but one nevertheless built upon (ancient) Eastern foundations.

  Back to the Future

  On 15 April 2003, the distinguished American general Jay Montgomery Garner stood within sight of the ancient ziggurat of Ur in southern Iraq, forty centuries of history looking down upon him, and hailed the beginnings of ‘a free Iraq’ in ‘the birthplace of civilization’. For a brief moment the miraculous image depicted on the Chicago tympanum—civilization reborn through the harmonious intercourse of ancient East and modern West—took centre stage in the present. But the sentiment (not to mention the stage management) belonged more to the Napoleonic era than to our own. And as Edward Said (1978) has argued, it is above all to that era that we should look in order to grasp the origins of attitudes that ‘still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives’ on the ancient Near (and modern, Middle) East.

  In doing so, however, we should be wary of reducing European engagements with the ancient Near Eastern past to an exercise in cultural domination, and of reproducing timeless oppositions between the viewpoints of ‘East’ and ‘West’. Bonaparte’s ‘liberation’ of Egypt, to which the following chapter turns, was accompanied by a carefully coordinated scientific mission, laying institutional foundations for a systematic investigation and recovery of Egypt’s ancient past. Despite its military failures, the Napoleonic expedition provided a model, soon followed by other European powers, for extending the study of Western origins directly, and more widely, into the ancestral lands of the Near East, setting in motion the establishment of research centres, museums, and fieldwork schools—from Athens to Baghdad—that exist to this day.

  Recent military action in Iraq by America and Britain has, in only partial contrast, been accompanied by the looting of museums and the destruction of archaeological sites on an industrial scale: a tragedy often reported in the popular press—and with little sense of historical irony—as a savage attack by the Iraqi people upon the unguarded ‘cradle of civilization’. We might also recall that the Napoleonic encounter with the Near East unfolded at a crucial turning point in European history. For many ordinary ‘occidentals’ the French Revolution of 1789, following swiftly on the heels of the American War of Independence, meant more than the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy. It also promised the closure of a long chapter in human history: the end of the ‘dynastic realm’, for centuries the only imaginable system of government in much of Europe, and the dawn of a new political age.

  10

  RUINED REGIMES: EGYPT AT THE REVOLUTION

  Hail solitary ruins, holy sepulchres and silent walls! When the whole earth, in chains and silence, bowed the neck before its tyrants, you had already proclaimed the truths which they abhor; and, confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave, had announced to man the sacred dogma of Equality.

  Comte de Volney, Les ruines, ou Méditation sur les revolutions des empires (1791)

  That dead man is Old France, and that bier, the coffin of the Old Monarchy.

  Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française (1879–80)

  In her Festivals and the French Revolution (1988), Mona Ozouf evokes the republican ‘theatre state’ that commandeered the streets of Paris in the aftermath of the revolutionary Terror, which saw the brutal deposition of France’s ancien régime. Simulacra of royal and religious relics—statues, images, sceptres—were burned and broken, and at Morteau the ‘Burial of Monarchy’ was enacted, as if to speed it forcibly into an antiquarian domain of ruin and loss: ‘for although the legislator makes the laws for the people, festivals make the people for the laws’. Prominent within these remarkable performances was a range of imagery inspired by ancient Egypt.

  In 1792 the Conseil Géneral de la Commune ordered that a prominent statue of Louis XVI in the Place des Victoires be demolished and replaced by an obelisk (wrongly described in their directive as a ‘pyramid’) inscribed with the names of fallen revolutionary leaders. The same year witnessed a major festival in the Tuileries for the martyrs of the Revolution, at which the focal monument was an enormous wooden pyramid. A leaflet was distributed requiring each citizen to place a garland at its base in honor of those heroes ‘who helped us to vanquish the tyrants!’ One year later, a monumental statue of the goddess of Nature, bedecked in ancient Egyptian costume, was erected on the ruins of the Bastille for the Festival of Regeneration. Water spouted from her breasts into a basin below, where speeches were made celebrating the return of the people to an original state of innocence and freedom.

  The ideological background to this choice of imagery is found in the (1791) meditations of the Comte de Volney, a leading republican, on the ruins of the Orient. Published during the early stages of revolution in France, and swiftly translated into English, they relate the experiences of a traveller passing through the lands of the Near East, then still under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Resting among the remains of an ancient city on the Syrian steppe, he is confronted
by a ghostly apparition who reveals to him a terrifying vision: the banks of the Seine and the Thames have become a landscape of monumental ruins, like those of the Nile and the Euphrates through which he passes. Civilization and progress have passed by the gaudy palaces of Old Europe, moving along on their westward march to the newly liberated shores of the New World, where freedom flourishes unfettered by the burdens of history and monarchy. In a penetrating analysis of Les ruines, Peter Hughes (1995) detects a need to commemorate the pre-Revolutionary world of the Bourbon court, even as it was being condemned to oblivion. Ruins, he observes, offer ‘a way of overcoming the absence of the past when it is limited to paper and ink or condemned to fading memory’. Remembering Egypt, in Jan Assmann’s (1997:7–8) words, then becomes a ‘liberation from one’s own past which is no longer one’s own …Egypt must be remembered in order to know what lies in the past, and what must not be allowed to come back.’