Download What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the by David Wengrow PDF
By David Wengrow
Popular archaeologist David Wengrow creates the following a shiny new account of the "birth of civilization" in old Egypt and Mesopotamia, bringing jointly inside a unified heritage the 1st countries the place humans created towns, kingdoms, and huge temples to the gods. yet civilization, Wengrow argues, isn't really solely approximately large-scale settlements and endeavors. simply as vital are the normal yet primary practices of way of life, resembling cooking, operating a house, and cleansing the physique. Tracing the improvement of such practices, from prehistoric occasions to the age of the pyramids, Wengrow finds unsuspected connections among far away areas and gives new insights into the workings of societies we've come to treat as distant from our personal. The publication obliges us to acknowledge that civilizations aren't shaped in isolation, yet in the course of the blending and borrowing of tradition among assorted societies. It concludes by means of drawing telling parallels among the traditional close to East and extra modern makes an attempt to reshape the area based on an awesome snapshot.
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Extra info for What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West
Sample text
2500 bc composed around the same time, it is the desire for blue stone to furnish the temple of the goddess Inanna that drives the rulers of Uruk into competition with the lord of Aratta: a mythical city beyond the eastern mountains, whose inhabitants are said to ‘cut the pure lapis lazuli from its block’ (Chapter 5). In Egyptian cosmology, the visual properties of this blue stone are closely linked to concepts of life force, organic growth, and regeneration; while in Mesopotamian literature, as the archaeologist Dan Potts (1997) points out, ‘lapis-like’ was a standard metaphor for great riches, ‘a synonym for all things bright and splendid, especially the beard or other features of heroes and deities’.
In assessing the significance of such long-distance transfers it is misleading to refer to metals, timber, coloured stone, tree resins, and aromatics as ‘exotica’ or ‘luxuries’. This diminishes their importance, implying that they were little more than ‘optional extras’ for elite groups whose power over their subordinates was otherwise assured. Such views may have been tenable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time it was widely believed that, in dry climates, the political structures of ‘despotic’ states were a direct outgrowth of their dominant mode of farming, using irrigation channels to water otherwise arid and infertile lands.
Marooned on the shores of Byblos, Wenamun was forced to learn a lesson that modern writers on the ancient world have often seen fit to ignore. We tend to portray ancient societies as existing rather like Shelley’s famous description of Ozymandias, in splendid but desolate isolation. Regional specialists are not averse to claiming some elevated status for their particular area of expertise; and the layout of modern museums often militates against an understanding of the relationships between societies.