From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject Rethinking “Civilization”
Date March 7, 2024 3:10 AM
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RETHINKING “CIVILIZATION”  
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Steven Poole
February 28, 2024
The Guardian
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_ A radical new history of the ancient world that challenges modern
chauvinism. _

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_How the World Made the West
A 4,000-Year History_
Josephine Quinn
Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 978-1526605184

Like the railway and the telegraph, western civilisation was invented
in the 19th century. It had located its noble roots in classical
Athens and Rome, and from then, so the story went, white Europeans
embarked on a smooth progression of gradual sophistication and
enlightenment that culminated, not coincidentally, in the glories of
the British empire.

That’s not quite how it all got started, argues ancient history
professor Josephine Quinn in this fascinating account of the cultural
and martial doings around the Mediterranean in the two millennia BC,
and thence up to the middle ages. For her, “civilisational
thinking” itself is the enemy, not only in historiography but in
modern geopolitics. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations
(1996), for example, notoriously predicted that future wars would
occur not between states but between monolithic and homogeneous
“civilisations” such as the “western”, “Islamic”,
“African” or “Sinic” (Chinese).

But “western civilisation” would not exist without its Islamic,
African, Indian and Chinese influences. To understand why, Quinn takes
us back in time, beginning at the bustling port of Byblos in Lebanon
in about 2000BC. It was the middle of the bronze age, which
“inaugurated a new era of regular long-distance exchange”. Carbon
dating techniques applied to recent archaeological findings provide
compelling evidence about just how “globalized” the Mediterranean
already was, 4,000 years ago. Welsh copper went to Scandinavia, and
Cornish tin as far as Germany, for the forging of bronze weapons.
Beads of Baltic amber, found in the graves of Mycenaean nobles, were
made in Britain. A thousand years later, trade up and down the
Atlantic seaboard meant that “Irish cauldrons became especially
popular in northern Portugal”.
With such relentless trade and travel comes, naturally, cultural
commingling. “Overseas exchange meant that Cretans could pick and
choose from different cultural options, and they did,” Quinn
remarks. Cultural appropriation was not yet an affront; indeed, it
could be a strength, as we learn later from Polybius’s remark about
the upstart Romans: “They are unusually willing to substitute their
own customs for better practice from elsewhere.”

The book is rich in marvellous detail, and succeeds in making the
pre-classical world come to life. There is something of the modern
wheedling teenager in the complaining minor royal who ends a letter
to the king of Egypt with the line “Send me much gold”. This is
one of the “Amarna” letters between the monarchs of Egypt, Cyprus,
Babylon et al, which Quinn says “reveal the importance of contact
and communication between what are usually seen as separate ancient
cultures or civilisations”.

But did anybody ever think that ancient cultures existed in hermetical
separation, with no contact between them? Here we get to the nub of
whether, if there are no monolithic “civilisations”, there are
still distinct “cultures”. Sometimes Quinn seems to deny that
there are. “Even liberal notions of ‘multiculturalism’,” she
complains, “assume the existence, indeed value, of individual
‘cultures’ as a starting point.” But then her own story of
continuous “cultural exchange” between peoples around the
Mediterranean only makes sense if there are different cultures to
begin with; otherwise everything is just a vast heterogeneous soup.

Quinn does elsewhere speak of “cultures” herself – for instance,
“early alphabetic cultures” in Egypt and elsewhere. “The idea
that the Mycenaeans and Minoans were _separate_ civilisations is less
than a century old,” she notes. “They were initially just rival
names for the same bronze age Aegean culture seen from different
perspectives.” This Aegean “culture”, she clarifies, was not
“a single Aegean civilisation” but rather comprised lots of small
populations competing and exchanging ideas. Isn’t that true, one
might wonder, of every broad “culture” or even “civilisation”?

It is plain, at any rate, that identity in that age was fluid and at
least partly a matter of choice. A fragment from a lost play by
Euripides describes Kadmos, the founder of the city of Thebes, thus:
“born Phoenician, he changed his stock to Greek”. (“Stock”
here translates the Greek _genos_, from which we have the word
“genes”.)

Culture itself, too, is never created _de novo_ but grows out of wider
influence. “There is no doubt,” Quinn shows in a fascinating
passage about Homeric echoes of earlier epics, “that the earliest
works of Greek literature preserve traces of encounters with a bigger
world of song in other languages.” Meanwhile, she writes: “Like
the Israelite Exodus from Egypt in the Hebrew Bible, the Iliad is a
story about a joint expedition in the distant past that brought a
people together as a community, told in a language they share.” It
doesn’t seem intellectually criminal, then, to describe “a people
brought together as a community”, with a shared language, as a
“culture”. Perhaps the argument is not that cultures don’t exist
but simply that they had to be invented; that they are socially
constructed. Well, yes: how else could they come into being?

Meanwhile, it didn’t take until the 19th century for the idea of
“the west” to arrive, as Quinn notes. The “earliest known
version of a binary polarity setting Europe against Asia”, she
observes, is found already in Herodotus’s tales of the Persian wars;
and Frankish Christians began thinking of themselves as “European”
in the wake of the Arab conquest.
Doubtless, though, those fusty 19th-century gentlemen historians were
blinkered, in the same way that we shall appear blinkered to
historians a century hence. Quinn makes this point beautifully when
discussing the “stories of warrior women in the Steppe” in the
first millennium BC, which were long dismissed as fantasy by scholars.
“There was no room in civilisational thinking for cultures run
aggressively and successfully by women,” she observes. “In recent
decades, however, more than one hundred women’s graves containing
axes, swords and occasionally armour have come to light in Russia and
Ukraine.”

If the strong version of Quinn’s thesis – that separate cultures
don’t even exist – is dubious, the weak version, that “there has
never been a single, pure western or European culture”, remains a
valuable point, and her book is full of little gem-like shifts of
perspective. Constantine, for example, is described as introducing
“an Asian god” (the Christian one) into the Roman empire. Of
classical Athens, she writes: “Like pederasty and public nudity,
democracy was a distinctive local practice that worked to distinguish
some Greek-speaking communities … ” Later, the Crusades, she
argues, were not a “clash of civilizations” but rather took place
in a world where “culture has no natural location”.

Most of all, this book triumphs as a brilliant and learned challenge
to modern western chauvinism. To the extent that we have inherited
classical culture, Quinn reminds us, it is in a rather perverted form.
(She thinks, and I agree with her, that we should adopt some
practices of Athenian democracy such as election by lottery, which
“undermined cynical populism”.)

In the end, readers might agree that it’s probably best not to speak
of “civilisations”, clashing or otherwise. Let’s use the word
only in the singular, to describe something that, as Gandhi once
said, would be a good idea.

 

 

* world history
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* European history
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* civilizations
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* ancient civilizations
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