History is written by the winners, or so the saying goes. But is it actually just written by the winners with the best public relations skills? If you grew up in the last century, many of us were fed the notion that “civilisation” started only with the Greeks and then the Romans, and that everything before that was pretty much cavemen grunting and some stuff from The Bible.
Oxford professor Josephine Quinn’s How The World Made The West, a thought-provoking reconsideration of ancient times, makes an authoritative case for how a broad tapestry of forgotten cultures stitched together over time led to what we now think of as “the Western world”.
As she puts it, “19th-century scholars decided, in the spirit of civilisational thinking, that ancient history happened first in the Greek Aegean and then moved west for a second act in Roman Italy.”
The theory was that Greeks and Romans “civilised” us, which ignores that Greek “democracy” was mostly for men or that Romans embraced slavery and public executions.
Quinn stakes her claim firmly at the outset, saying, “There has never been a single, pure Western or European culture.”
The monolith that has been called Western civilisation has a deeply ingrained tint of implied superiority, yet in her fast-paced and fact-filled gallop through 4000 years, Quinn lays out how Asia, Africa, the Middle East and India all contributed many of what we think of as solely “Western” inventions and systems.
“A narrative focused solely on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past, and impoverishes our understanding of our own world,” Quinn writes.
Quinn’s deep research fills a relatively compact text with a keen sense of the speedy currents of history. Starting with ancient cities in modern-day Lebanon and moving through cultures such as the Minoans, Babylon, Persia and Carthage, it’s often dizzying in its scope.
Quinn sees ancient history as an “era of entanglement”, with clashes and co-mingling happening in equal doses.
It’s all backed up by an awful lot of information, and a flood of places that armchair antiquity buffs may not be familiar with. Places like Ugarit, Massalia and Etruria. Quinn does a good job of guiding along the tangled path with a generous serving of maps as her narrative dances around long-gone European and Asian kingdoms.
The late Kenneth Clark’s popular 1969 television series and book Civilisation sets the tone for a lot of what Quinn calls “civilisational thinking”, focusing on mostly white men in mostly European settings as being the peak of cultural evolution.
But in Quinn’s view, endless talk of “civilisations” makes us “lose sight of the people who don’t fit the model”.
Her knowledge turns up fascinating nuggets, like the Massagetae, a culture on the Central Asian steppes ruled by a woman named Tomyris, circa 530BC. Graves recently found in Russia of female warriors buried with a cache of weapons may eventually show how this nomadic culture inspired the legends of the Amazons.
Even something we use every single day had to come from somewhere. We think of the alphabet as an elemental fact of life, but Quinn notes that while reading and writing in one’s spoken language may seem natural, “it is, however, an artificial choice … in antiquity it was unusual”.
Letters from the Phoenician city of Tyre were borrowed to write languages from Aramaic to Hebrew and Phrygian and taken in turn by the Greeks to inspire their own language and even eventually English.
“Cultural borrowings make change: they make things new again,” Quinn writes.
We see how shared stories flow, such as how the Iliad and Odyssey owe a debt to ancient Sumerian poems telling the story of Gilgamesh. The Greeks “preserve traces of encounters with a bigger world of song in other languages”. Many stories were passed along in oral retellings, slowly turning into what we pore over today.
Civilisational thinking encourages thinking of mankind as a series of islands, but cultures were never entirely cut off from each other. A rediscovered Viking grave at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk contained items from Constantinople, Egypt and India. There’s also the famed example of Greek Alexander the Great’s importation of elephants from Persia as weapons of war.
Even the Roman Empire comes off differently through Quinn’s perspective – less of a monolithic culture, more of an idea – echoing the “melting pot” the United States of America began to be seen as during the 20th century.
“Being ‘Roman’ was never an ethnic concept, but one based on citizenship … They helped to justify Roman Empire too: if Romans came from anywhere, everywhere belonged to Rome.”
It’s impossible to read How The World Made The West and not feel a few echoes of modern-day uncertainties. As history moved through what’s called “The Dark Ages”, an era of openness gradually collapsed into paranoia and isolation.
After the deadly Black Death plague devastated the world, “commerce and culture that had for millennia characterised the Mediterranean and drawn Western Europeans into larger networks of world trade and diplomacy fell away for a century or more, and increasing value was placed on the persecution and exclusion of the socially and culturally undesirable”.
The more things change the more they stay the same, perhaps.
“Civilisational thinking embeds an assumption of enduring and meaningful difference between human societies that does real damage,” she proclaims.
Quinn isn’t exactly making a head-spinning reinvention of how we think about history. The idea that history is more than just Greeks and Romans has been in vogue for decades with popular reads such as Guns, Germs and Steel and Sapiens.
How the World Made The West works best as a generous supplement to existing histories. The study of history can never be set in stone. Best not go looking for mind-blowing epiphanies about “the history you never learned in school”, but instead, approach Quinn’s impressive work as a testament to why history is far more than just being about the winners.
How The World Made The West: A 4000 Year History, by Josephine Quinn (Bloomsbury, $45), is out now.
