What Makes Civilization Read online

  Revolutionary thought, in all times and places, requires a sense both of the naturalness of its own aims and of the unnaturalness of what it seeks to overthrow. The experience of the French Revolution, and the chronic social instability and periodic relapses into old forms of authority that followed, raised urgent new questions. How does a society function without rulers? What is the place and responsibility of the individual within the collective? Is secular knowledge adequate to replace the precepts of a hierocratic order? New ideas were needed to make the vision of a modern future understandable as part of a natural evolution from the past: ideas about the forces of cohesion and change that bind human beings together into stable ‘societies’, and which in time induce some of those societies to move through different ‘phases of civilization’, while others (as Samuel Huntington put it, more recently) ‘disappear and are buried in the sands of time’. Time itself, as Ozouf observes, ‘was not merely the formal framework within which the Revolution took place; it was also the raw material on which it obstinately worked’. And as a central requirement of the work of modernity the institution of kingship—together with all its antique trappings—had to be pushed to the margins of historical consciousness and rendered anomalous, exotic, and moribund: frozen in time.

  ‘Liberating’ Egypt and Forgetting the Ancien Régime

  These were among the social and ideological forces at play when Britain’s growing hold on Mughal India and the eastern trade prompted Napoleon Bonaparte to invade Egypt in 1798. With the embers of the French Revolution still burning on the streets of Paris, the chief servant of the Directory confronted the Ottoman Empire in the name of liberty, and in the process encountered the ancient kings of the Nile Valley. Faced with this spectacle, the general of the First Republic could not resist entombing himself briefly within the Great Pyramid. But the irony was short-lived. It was not to a pharaonic legacy that Napoleon appealed in his victorious address to the people of Alexandria, but to an idealized Islamic past of flourishing cities and trade, free from the yoke of Mameluke tyranny. And it was with his domestic subjects, rather than the people of Egypt, in mind that the 167 savants who accompanied the expedition were set to the task of documenting and appropriating the ancient monuments.

  The publication of the monumental Description de l’Égypte (1809–28) was commemorated by the striking of a bronze medallion designed by J. J. Barre. It shows a masculine personification of Roman Gaul unveiling ancient Egypt in the form of a suppliant woman, who fondles the muzzle of a crocodile upon which she reclines. She holds a sistrum to evoke the goddess Hathor, and hence female sexuality, whose temple at Dendera is faithfully depicted in the background. She is, in short, a carefully crafted antithesis to ‘Marianne’: the female embodiment of republican virtue and reason, whose vigorous form—a forerunner to the Statue of Liberty—came to symbolize the victory of ‘the people’ in the official iconography of the Revolution. Undoubtedly concerned with discovery and appropriation, the image is also a powerful allegory for the pacifying and feminizing of an alien power, represented by the pyramids which are visible behind the figure of Gaul. The motif of ‘unveiling Egypt’ further represents the end of Egypt’s special status as a source of esoteric wisdom, used since medieval times to bolster the authority of European dynasts.

  The reality of the French advance through Egypt was, naturally, a more prosaic and brutal one. We are fortunate in having a first-hand account—the diary of Capt. Joseph-Marie Moiret—to set against the official representations that emerged in later decades. At the Battle of the Pyramids, Moiret’s forces helped to overcome a Mameluke cavalry armed with sabres and guns supplied by the British government. ‘We burned to surpass the pagan heroes’, he wrote, ‘and to avenge the spilled blood of our Christian forefathers.’ In the event victory was decided, not by the heroic charge of the Gallic warrior—as later depicted on the frontispiece of the Description—but by the cold discipline of massed infantry. ‘No battle’, remarked General Berthier, ‘has ever shown more clearly the superiority of European tactics over the undisciplined courage of the Orient.’

  On a torch-lit September night, as the floodwaters of the Nile began their annual retreat, residents of Cairo were confronted with an unusual spectacle. French soldiers had gathered around a ‘pyramid’, specially constructed in the centre of Ezbekieh Square, and inscribed with the names of comrades fallen in the struggle against ‘Mameluke tyranny’. Encircling the monument were banners proclaiming ‘Hail the French Republic’, but also ‘God is God, and Muhammad his Prophet’. Soldiers had been instructed to win the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people, as well as their ports and cities. On that night they were celebrating the Festival of the Republic, which culminated in a public declaration—authored by Bonaparte—that the ‘era of democratic government’ was now upon Egypt, land of immemorial kingship. Yet democracy, it transpired, was far from secure in France itself, and the finer points of the speech were anyway lost on Moiret’s hungry and battle-worn troops, whose devotion ‘had always been to the fatherland, not to this or that form of government’.

  Almost a century later the acclaimed military artist Maurice Orange produced an image which captures the paradox of the Napoleonic encounter with Egypt. By 1895, the date of its composition, France had endured some four convulsive shifts between dynastic and republican forms of government. Orange’s Napoleon stands before the Great Pyramid: the chief servant of the Directory confronting the mummified body of an ancient Egyptian king, newly excavated from the ground. Its wrappings have begun to fall away, or have perhaps been deliberately removed, exposing a face unaffected by the passing of centuries. The painting may be taken to evoke timeless themes such as the transience of power; equally it could be read as a satirical commentary on Napoleon’s own imperial ambitions. Yet it also poses a distinctly modern dilemma, to which Orange’s generation was more alive than our own: how to commit the memory of kingship, once and for all, to the ground? How, as Jules Michelet put it in his impassioned history of the French Revolution, to ‘bury, and for ever, the dreams in which we once fondly trusted—paternal royalty, the government of grace, the clemency of the monarchy, and the charity of the priest; filial confidence, implicit belief in the gods here below’. For the dead king of Orange’s painting does not belong fully to the past. His whiskered face is unmistakably that of Louis-Napoléon, last ruler of France before the establishment of the Third Republic, and a historical counterpart—in that sense—to the unfortunate Kaiser Wilhelm, whose own strange relationship with the ancient Near East I have already touched on. Bonaparte’s true encounter is not, then, with a remote civilization, but with what Michelet called the ‘vampires’ of Europe’s own old regime, rising from the dead to lay claim to a future as yet unborn.

  The Cruel Museum and the Laughing People

  In 1793 the opening of the Palais du Louvre as a public institution, the Museum Central des Arts, signalled the democratization of ‘high culture’ in France. The former royal residence became a venue for the display of an extraordinary quantity of art objects confiscated by Bonaparte’s forces following their successful campaigns in Belgium (1794) and Italy (1796–9) and was renamed the Musée Napoleon in 1803. In a letter to Bonaparte the Commissioner of Art, André Thouin, expressed his view that ‘the French spoliation of Italy was the reward of military virtue over decadence and that this was strictly comparable with what the Greeks are supposed to have done to the Egyptians and the Romans in their turn to the Greeks’. As Cecil Gould (1965: 13, 40) put it, Europe’s first state museum ‘was born of three parents, republicanism, anti-clericalism, and successful aggressive war … The Revolution had set up an idol which itself demanded the offerings that were made to it.’

  Only in 1826, under the briefly restored monarchy of Charles X, was a section devoted to ancient Egypt. Its curator, Jean François Champollion, had recently announced his successful decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, heralding the foundation of Egyptology as a modern discipline. Two galleries
were set aside for royal funerary practices, one for precious items and materials, and a fourth for religious beliefs. The ceiling of the latter chamber was adorned with an allegorical painting portraying a transition from the decadence of tyranny to the rewards of enlightened government as L’Étude et le Génie des arts dévoilant l’Égypte à la Grèce. At the heart of the lavish salle funéraire stood a large platform on which were arranged the upper casings of elaborate sarcophagi, their lower casings—containing the miraculously preserved bodies of the Egyptian elite—placed unceremoniously on the floor beneath.

  Here any citizen could stand alongside royalty and measure their own being against the exposed figure of a divine king, while at the same time measuring the human size of the latter against that of his boastful monuments, a selection of which was also exhibited. On display to the people of Paris was not merely the fantastic ‘otherness’ of Oriental civilization, but also the very embodiment of dynastic rule, displaced onto the inscrutable remains of an ancient culture and located safely behind the threshold of modernity. The guillotine had given way to the intrusive public gaze as a means of unveiling and laying to rest the ghost of monarchy. In this sense the museum anticipated, in concrete form, the grand themes of Michelet’s (1879–80) Histoire de la Révolution française, and a new apprehension of the human past:

  Another thing which this History will clearly establish and holds true in every respect is that the people were usually more important than the leaders. The deeper I have excavated, the more surely I have satisfied myself that the best was underneath, in the obscure depths … To find the people again and put it back in its proper role, I have been obliged to reduce to their proportions the ambitious marionettes whose strings it manipulated and in whom hitherto we have looked for and thought to see the secret play of history.

  Looking back upon the Napoleonic era from our own perspective, we can recognize—more clearly than we otherwise might—the formation of those cultural lenses through which we now habitually view the remains of the ancient Near East. We have become accustomed to the cruelty of the modern state museum and its carnivallike parodies of sacred kingship. We have come to expect and even relish the sight of monumental gates leading nowhere, proud royal statues flanking nothing, once-hidden gods now revealed in transparent cases, and carefully preserved corpses exposed for inspection: the eviscerated ‘body politic’ rendered impotent, bizarre, even comical. And so we return to the theme of distance, and to the emotional distance between subjects and sacred kings which—with the fall of Old Regimes, from Boston Harbour and Paris to Shahyad Square in Tehran—has been gradually remoulded into new relationships between ‘society’ and various forms of ‘the state’. Antiquity and modernity, cut from the same cloth.

  CONCLUSION:

  WHAT MAKES CIVILIZATION?

  Our conventional image of the ancient Near East as the ‘cradle of Western civilization’ can no longer be taken for granted. Why, some scholars are asking, should the early achievements of Mesopotamia and Egypt be viewed as a mere prelude to ‘the rise of the West’, when there are other stories to be told, and other links between past and present to be explored? Yet in a different—and contradictory—vein, historians of the classical world have recently been chastised for failing to adequately acknowledge the cultural debt owed by Greece to the ancient Near East.

  Behind these scholarly debates lie hard political and economic realities. For many modern states in the Middle East, the pre-Islamic past represents a gateway for Western tourism; for secular forms of knowledge and identity; and for the world market. The ownership, protection, and representation of pre-Islamic cultures is now an intense focus of ideological struggle, affecting the everyday lives of communities throughout the region. As the remains of the past are drawn with increasing ferocity into the conflicts of the present, it is worth reflecting on the lessons we stand to learn from the ancient Near East. What conclusions can we draw from the myriad collections of artefacts and site reports accumulated over a century of research?

  If the parallel development of Mesopotamia and Egypt demonstrates anything, it is surely the deep attachment of human societies to the concepts they live by, and the inequalities they are prepared to endure in order to preserve those guiding principles. Certain basic notions of how the world should be made and ordered—by keeping the house beautiful or the body pure—remained constant (and constantly distinct) in these two regions for thousands of years, despite the interactions between them, and despite changes in almost every other field of life. The desire to realize this sense of order, and the sacrifices demanded in the process, produced astonishing flows of materials, transforming societies and reshaping environments from Afghanistan to Turkey, and from the forests of Lebanon to the deserts of Arabia.

  But the gods were never satisfied. Their work was never done. In contemplating yet another remaking of our own world order, there is surely something here for us to learn. Civilizations, from the perspective of history, are shown to be the outcome of mixtures and borrowings, often of quite arbitrary things, but always on a prodigious scale. Their study draws us into a grand narrative of the past, a story built from the ground up by routine human activities, surpassing the limited purview of any one society, and of such a magnitude as to worry the gods. Yet by elevating civilizations to the pinnacle of human achievement, or seeking to orientate our future around an idealized image of what they might become, are we not simply raising up new gods where old ones have fallen? The problem, it seems, is both as old as time and as fresh as our tomorrows.

  FURTHER READING

  To systematically compare the early development of Egyptian and Mesopotamian society, as Henri Frankfort so ably managed more than half a century ago in his The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (1951), would today require a study many times this length. Existing volumes, mostly dedicated to one or other region, provide systematic treatments of social institutions, architecture, settlement patterns, religion and ritual, artistic styles, and scripts, at a much finer resolution than has been possible here. Nor have I attempted to add to the many existing accounts of ‘great excavations’, or to assess the intellectual development of disciplines such as archaeology, Egyptology, and Assyriology: topics already covered by an extensive literature, some of which is referenced below. In such a short book, I have focused instead upon a number of core problems and questions, as laid out in the Preface and Introduction.

  What follows is a chapter-by-chapter commentary, giving the main sources upon which I have drawn. For purposes of brevity and accessibility I have concentrated upon the more readily available literature, and upon English-language texts, particularly those offering stepping stones to the more specialized studies contained in scholarly journals. The latter are omitted here except where they have a direct bearing upon points of argument in the chapters. At the end of each section I also supply a list of works referred to directly and, where appropriate, links to accredited websites carrying the results of current field excavations and other useful resources.

  For readers seeking more general overviews of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, a number can be mentioned at the outset. For Mesopotamia, the best general introduction is Nicholas Postgate’s Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (New York: Routledge, 1996), while more detailed discussion of the periods covered in this book is provided by Susan Pollock in her Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Barry Kemp’s Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2006) provides a stimulating and richly documented interpretation of dynastic society down to the end of the New Kingdom; David Wengrow’s The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) covers the prehistoric period and early dynasties with extensive references, and provides further background to some of the ideas explored in this book. Outstanding surveys of each region, with colour illustrations, are John Baines
and Jaromir Málek’s Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt, rev. edn (New York: Facts on File, 2000) and Michael Roaf’s Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (New York: Facts on File, 2000).

  Many aspects of Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture and society are expertly reviewed, with further references, in Jack M. Sasson et al. (eds.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995). This four-volume collection also contains informative essays on the historical reception and study of the ancient Near East in Europe, from antiquity to the twentieth century AD. Amélie Kuhrt’s The Ancient Near East, c.3000–330 BC, 2 vols (New York/London: Routledge, 1995) is the best general synthesis of historical sources from the earliest writing to the time of Alexander the Great. Another excellent survey, but more narrowly focused upon Mesopotamia, is Marc Van De Mieroop’s A History of’ the Ancient Near East, ca.3000–323 BC (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). For art and architecture, see Henri Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, 5th edn., with commentary by Michael Roaf and Donald Matthews (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1996); and William Stevenson Smith, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, 3rd edn., rev. William Kelly Simpson (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1998).

  Bruce Trigger’s Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) treats Egypt and Mesopotamia alongside Shang China, the Aztecs, and other ancient societies in the search for a general definition of ‘early civilization’. It may be contrasted with an essay by John Baines and Norman Yoffee, exploring the comparison between Egypt and Mesopotamia for the light it sheds on local sequences of social and political development: ‘Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia’, in Gary M. Feinman and Joyce Marcus (eds.), Archaic States (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1998). Both studies provide important perspectives on the themes addressed in this book, as well as much additional information.