What Makes Civilization Read online

  Preface

  Insofar as this book follows a particular methodology, it is contained in Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss’s programmatic ‘Note sur la notion de civilization’, Année sociologique 12 (1913): 46 -50. A translation, with commentary, is provided in Nathan Schlanger’s Marcel Mauss: Techniques, Technology and Civilization (New York/ Oxford: Durkheim Press; Berghahn Books, 2006). My approach also draws upon Norbert Elias’s analysis of The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990; German original, 1939) in late medieval Europe. An exhaustive review of the concept of ‘civilization’ in social and historical thought is provided by Jóhann P. Árnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical traditions (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003). The fate of the Iraq Museum in April of 2003 is the subject of Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster (eds.), The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Abrams, 2005).

  Introduction: A Clash of Civilizations?

  Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, 4th edn. (London: Penguin, 1995) remains essential background reading for the issues raised here. Equally fundamental is Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987), which argues that European views of the ancient Near East, and its contribution to Western culture, have been strongly distorted by racist and imperialist agendas since the eighteenth century. Bernal’s own, subsequent reconstructions of cultural interrelations in the Bronze Age Mediterranean have been widely criticized on empirical grounds, as has his implicit view that Egypt’s contribution to world history must be gauged in terms of its influence upon Greek civilization. For a representative range of responses, see Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers (eds.), Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Thomas Scheffler provides a lucid discussion of how modern geopolitics has shaped contemporary understandings of the ancient Near East: ‘Fertile Crescent, Orient, Middle East: The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia’, European Review of History 10 (2003): 253–72.

  Early to mid-twentieth-century essays on civilization by Lucien Febvre, Sigmund Freud, and others are brought together in John Rundell and Stephen Mennell (eds.), Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization (London: Routledge, 1998); and see also Franz Steiner’s 1944 essay ‘On the Process of Civilization’, in Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon (eds.), Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilization (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 1999). Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Penguin, 2009) assesses mid-twentieth-century fears over a looming crisis in Western civilization, drawing suggestive analogies with our current zeitgeist.

  Other works referred to include H. Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951); F. Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer 1989); John M. Headley, ‘Geography and Empire in the Late Renaissance: Botero’s Assignment, Western Univer-salism, and the Civilizing Process’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1119–55; S. P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22–49; idem, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); J. M. Lundquist, ‘Babylon in European Thought’, in Jack M. Sasson et al. (eds.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Scribner, 1995), 67–80; G. Maspero, The Struggle of the Nations: Egypt, Syria, and Assyria (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1896); C. Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1961); E. Said, ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, The Nation (22 October 2001); H. V. F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London: Barzan, 2004).

  Chapter 1. Camouflaged Borrowings

  Translations of the ‘The Report of Wenamun’ and the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ can be found in anthologies of Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature, such as William Kelly Simpson (ed.), The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003); and Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); see also Benjamin R. Foster, The Epic of Gilgamesh (New York/London: Norton, 2001). For the early history of Byblos, see Nina Jidejian, Byblos through the Ages, 2nd edn (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 2000); and also Claude Doumet-Serhal (ed.), Decade: A Decade of Archaeology and History in Lebanon (Beirut: Lebanese British Friends of the National Museum, 2004).

  Egyptian and Mesopotamian attitudes towards, and classifications of, the outside world, are critically discussed in Mario Liverani, Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near East ca.1600–1100 BC (Padova: Sargon, 1990); David O’Connor and Stephen Quirke (eds.), Mysterious Lands (London: UCL Press, 2003); and Timothy Potts, Mesopotamia and the East: An Archaeological and Historical Study of Foreign Relations ca.3400–2000 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1994). For the Ebla archives, and their historical implications, see Giovanni Pettinato, Ebla: A New Look at History, trans. C. Faith Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); but also the reservations expressed by Piotr Michalowski, ‘Third Millennium Contacts: Observations on the Relationships between Mari and Ebla’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985): 293–302.

  A global survey of the earliest known writing systems, their functions and development, can be found in A.-M. Christin (ed.), A History of Writing: From Hieroglyph to Multimedia (Paris: Flammarion, 2002). For more specialized, and often quite technical, discussions of the earliest scripts, see Stephen D. Houston (ed.), The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The interpretation of cuneiform texts is engagingly treated in Marc Van de Mieroop’s Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History (London/New York: Routledge, 1999). The invention and development of the Egyptian scripts is discussed from various perspectives in John Baines, Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  Evidence of prehistoric irrigation systems in Iraq and Iran is discussed in G. K. Gillmore et al., ‘Irrigation on the Tehran Plain, Iran: Tepe Pardis—The Site of a Possible Neolithic Irrigation Feature?’, Catena 79 (2009): 285–300; and for early urbanization in northern Syria see Joan Oates et al., ‘Early Mesopotamian Urbanism: A New View from the North’, Antiquity 81 (2007): 585–600. Ancient Near Eastern systems of land use are further discussed in Robert M. Adams, Heartland of Cities: Studies of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and Tony J. Wilkinson’s Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003); and in the Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture (Cambridge: Sumerian Agriculture Group, 1984–95). For agricultural practices in prehistoric and ancient Egypt, Karl W. Butzer’s Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) remains important; and see also Alan K. Bowman and Eugene L. Rogan (eds.), Agriculture in Egypt, from Pharaonic to Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999).

  Other works referred to include B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London/New York: Verso, 1991); K. Eckholm and J. Friedman, ‘Capital Imperialism and Exploitation in Ancient World Systems’, in M. T. Larsen (ed.), Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1979), 41–58; Marcel Mauss, ‘The Nation’ (1920), in Nathan Schlanger, Marcel Mauss: Techniques, Technology and Civilization (New York/Oxford: Durkheim Press; Berghahn Books, 2006), 41–8; K. A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT/ London: Yale University Press, 1957).

  Chapter 2. On the Trail of Blue-Haired Gods

  The Tell el-Farkha statue coverings are presented in Krzysztof M. Cialowicz, Ivory and Gold: Beginnings of Egyptian Art (Poznan: Poznan Prehistori
c Society, 2007) ; Tutankhamun’s funerary mask and the bracelets of Shoshenq are illustrated in Jaromír Málek, Egypt: 4000 Years of Art (London: Phaidon, 2003). Many other objects referred to in this chapter, including material from Mari and Ur, appear in Joan Aruz (ed.), Art of the First Cities (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003), which also contains expert summaries of regional developments from the Indus to the Mediterranean in the third millennium BC.

  Archaeological evidence for the manufacture of glass and faience is reviewed in Roger (P.R.S.) Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999) and in Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw (eds.), Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). These volumes provide authoritative and meticulously referenced overviews of Mesopotamian and Egyptian crafts, charting the changing uses of specific materials. For the use of lapis lazuli, glass, and faience in the Bronze Age Aegean, see Caroline M. Jackson and Emma C. Wagner (eds.), Vitreous Materials in the Late Bronze Age Aegean (Oxford: Oxbow, 2008).

  For broad overviews of interregional trade see also Shereen Ratnagar, Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age (New Delhi/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Victor Mair (ed.), Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Andrew Bevan, Stone Vessels and Values in the Bronze Age Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For lapis lazuli at Ebla, see Giovanni Pettinato, Ebla: A New Look at History, trans. C. Faith Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), and for comparisons between personal ornaments at Mohenjo-daro, Ur, and Troy, see Joan Aruz, op. cit. A detailed treatment of cultural and symbolic engagements with the mineral world in ancient Egypt is provided in Sydney Aufrère’s L’Univers minéral dans la pensée égyptienne (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1991).

  Other works referred to include R. D. Griffith, ‘Gods’ blue hair in Homer and Eighteenth-Dynasty Egypt’, Classical Quarterly 55 (2005): 329–34; D. T. Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations (London: Athlone Press, 1997); S. Sherratt, ‘Archaeological Contexts’, in J. M. Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).

  Chapter 3. Neolithic Worlds

  For the deliberate deposition of lapis lazuli and other materials in temple foundations, see Richard S. Ellis, Foundation Deposits in Ancient Mesopotamia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). Prehistoric burials from Tepe Gawra are reported in Mitchell S. Rothman, Tepe Gawra: The Evolution of a Small, Prehistoric Center in Northern Iraq (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2002). For the earliest appearances of lapis in Mesopotamia and Egypt, see Roger (P.R.S.) Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999) and also Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw (eds.), Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  The literature on trade and exchange in Neolithic societies is largely confined to specialist journals. For synthetic accounts dealing with the Near East, see David Wengrow, ‘The Changing Face of Clay: Continuity and Change in the Transition from Village to Urban Life in the Near East’, Antiquity 72 (1998): 783–95; idem, The Archaeology of Early Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and also Andrew G. Sherratt, ‘Cash-Crops before Cash: Organic Consumables and Trade’, in Chris Gosden and John G. Hather (eds.), The Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change (London: Routledge, 1999), 13–34. A number of Sher-ratt’s seminal essays on prehistoric trade are brought together in his Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe: Changing Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); and see also ‘Reviving the Grand Narrative: Archaeology and Long-Term Change’, Journal of European Archaeology 3 (1995): 1–33.

  Our understanding of the domestication of animals and plants in the ‘Fertile Crescent’, and of the subsequent spread of farming practices, is constantly shifting in the light of new data. Attempts at synthesis are often strongly conditioned by particular theoretical stances, with varying degrees of causality ascribed to social and environmental factors. Compare, for example, Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Peter Bellwood, The First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Much additional information can be found in David R. Harris (ed.), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (London: UCL Press, 1996) and in Sue Colledge and James Conolly (eds.), The Origins and Spread of Domestic Plants in Southwest Asia and Europe (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007). For early farming in Egypt and Sudan, see David Wengrow, op. cit. (2006); and also Peter Mitchell, African Connections: An Archaeological Perspective on Africa and the Wider World (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2005).

  Evidence for prehistoric maritime activity in the Eastern Mediterranean (including the spread of domesticates to Cyprus) and in the Persian Gulf is reviewed, respectively, by Cyprian Broodbank, ‘The Origins and Early Development of Mediterranean Maritime Activity’, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19 (2006): 199–230; and Nicole Boivin and Dorian Q. Fuller, ‘Shell Middens, Ships, and Seeds: Exploring Coastal Subsistence, Maritime Trade and the Dispersal of Domesticates in and around the Ancient Arabian Peninsula’, Journal of World Prehistory 22 (2009): 113–80; and see also Robert Carter, ‘Boat Remains and Maritime Trade in the Persian Gulf during the Sixth and Fifth Millennia BC’, Antiquity 80 (2006): 52–63. Evidence for Neolithic dairying is presented in R. P. Evershed et al., ‘Earliest Date for Milk Use in the Near East and Southeastern Europe Linked to Cattle Herding’, Nature 455 (2008): 528–31.

  For detailed discussion of Göbekli Tepe, see Klaus Schmidt, Sie bauten die ersten Tempel: Das rätselhafte Heiligtum der Steinzeitjäger (Munich: Beck, 2007); and for the role of ritual and ceremony in early farming societies, see Ian Hodder, Catalhöyük: The Leopard’s Tale; Revealing the Mysteries of Turkey’s Ancient ‘Town’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006). Similar themes are explored for Egypt and Sudan in David Wengrow (2006), op. cit. Dorian Fuller and Michael Rowlands’ innovative comparison of early food processing techniques across various parts of Africa and Asia (drawing upon primary research by Michèle Wollstonecroft) is germane to a number of the arguments presented in this book, and is to appear in a volume commemorating the work of Andrew Sherratt, as: ‘Ingestion and Food Technologies—Maintaining Differences over the Long-Term in West, South and East Asia’, in D. J. Bennet et al. (eds.), Interweaving Worlds: Systemic Interaction in Eurasia, 7th to 1st Millennia BC (Oxford: Oxbow Books, forthcoming).

  Other works referred to include D. Edwards, ‘Ancient Egypt in the Sudanese Middle Nile: A Case of Mistaken Identity?’, in D. O’Connor and A. Reid (eds.), Ancient Egypt in Africa (London: UCL Press, 2003), 137–50; R. Haaland, ‘Porridge and Pot, Bread and Oven: Food Ways and Symbolism in Africa and the Near East’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17 (2007): 165–82; I. Hodder, The Domestication of Europe (Oxford: Black-well, 1990); C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [Lapensée sauvage] (London: Facts on File, 1966). For interactions and exchanges between Neolithic societies, see also http://www.archatlas.dept.shef.ac.uk; for the site of Catalhoyiik, http://www.catalhoyuk.com; and for extensive object collections from prehistoric Egypt, and links to online learning resources, http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk

  Chapter 4. The (First) Global Village

  General overviews of the Ubaid period are provided in Petr Chárvat, Mesopotamia before History (London: Routledge, 2002); Peter M. M. G. Akkermans and Glenn Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria: From Complex Hunter-Gatherers to Early Urban Societies, c. 16,000-300 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and see also David Wengrow, ‘The Changing Face of Clay: Continuity and Change in the Transition from Village to Urban Life in the Near East’, Antiquity 72 (1998): 78
3–95; and Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia. The Eden That Never Was (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). A careful evaluation of Ubaid-period maritime trade is provided by Robert Carter, ‘Boat Remains and Maritime Trade in the Persian Gulf during the Sixth and Fifth Millennia BC’;, Antiquity 80 (2006): 52–63. For the ‘dark millennium’ in the Persian Gulf, see Adrian G. Parker and Andrew S. Goudie, ‘Development of the Bronze Age Landscape in the Southeastern Arabian Gulf: New Evidence from a Buried Shell Midden in the Eastern Extremity of the Rub’ al-Khali desert, Emirate of Ras al-Khaimah, U.A.E.’, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 18 (2007): 132–8; and for the formation of the Gulf waters since the end of the last Ice Age, see Kurt Lambeck, ‘Shoreline Reconstructions for the Persian Gulf since the Last Glacial Maximum’, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 142 (1996): 43–57.

  Archaeological evidence for the beginnings of metallurgy is surveyed in Vincent C. Pigott (ed.), The Archaeometallurgy of the Asian Old World (Philadelphia: Museum University of Pennsylvania, 1999); and see also Roger (P.R.S.) Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: The Archaeological Evidence (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999); Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw (eds.), Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Evgenyi N. Chernykh, Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR: The Early Metal Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Thomas E. Levy, Journey to the Copper Age (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Man, 2007); and for Degirmentepe see K. Aslihan Yener, The Domestication of Metals (Leiden: Brill, 2000). The dissemination of tree-crop horticulture and woollen textiles is discussed in Andrew G. Sherratt, ‘Cash-Crops before Cash: Organic Consumables and Trade’, in Chris Gosden and John G. Hather (eds.), The Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change (London: Routledge, 1999), 13–34; and see also Joy McCorriston, ‘The Fibre Revolution: Textile Extensification, Alienation, and Social Stratification in Ancient Mesopotamia’, Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 517–49. For tentative evidence of Neolithic fig domestication, see Mordechai Kislev et al., ‘Early Domesticated Fig in the Jordan valley’, Science 312 (5778): 1372–4, but also critical remarks by Simcha Lev-Yadun et al. in ibid. 314 (5806): 1683.