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sheenaghpugh
This is an introduction to twenty ancient civilisations that don’t get as much attention as some more famous ones, partly because there is less archaeological information on them, partly because they have not the initial glamour of ancient Greece or Egypt. Some are more obscure than others. I would guess many know at least something of the Cretan, Akkadian and Indus Valley cultures, while far fewer will be acquainted with those of Great Zimbabwe, the Lapita of Oceania, and the Moche of Peru (a bunch with whom you wouldn’t want to be at all closely acquainted, unless you had an unusual interest in torture and Toby jugs). And I certainly wasn’t aware there had ever been such a thing as a Mississippian civilisation.
Each section begins with an imagined and italicized reconstruction of a moment in the life of someone from the culture in question. I don’t mind these, since the italics make it clear that they are fictional. Then we get an overview of the particular civilisation: where its people came from, what marked them out as a culture, what caused their decline and what influences and achievements they left behind.
Surveying so many cultures in succession can be slightly overwhelming; one tends to merge into another. But there is a great advantage: it shows not only what individualises these civilisations but what they had in common. It becomes clear, for instance, that few things matter more to any urban or semi-urban culture than good management of water and sewage. Over and over, we find that societies which lasted for any length of time - the Hittites, the Minoans, the Nabateans - had engineers who could ensure a supply of pure water and the removal of waste. At Harappa in the Indus Valley, they “created water management and sanitation systems that were unheard of for their time, and not seen again until Roman times, two millennia later. Drains and sewage systems were built to help remove wastewater and other sewage from the city. They normally ran down the middle of the main streets”. This would have materially reduced death by disease, though in that way towns could become victims of their own success – at a later stage of Harappa’s existence, its population outstripped the infrastructure, “sewage overflowed onto streets and into houses, forcing the city’s inhabitants to raise the level of their doors and walls.”
One craft product which individualises any culture, and which fortunately for archaeologists tends to survive in the ground, is pottery, and here the variety is extraordinary, from the Minoans of Crete, who, almost alone in the Bronze Age, ignored the celebration of rulers and wars in their art, favouring instead flowing designs of sea creatures, to the Moche, who preferred depictions of sacrificial victims, or possibly just enemies, being tortured to death. They also, no kidding, seem to have invented the Toby jug: “the Moche created lifelike portrait vessels either in the form of a human head or of their full figure. These vessels were modelled with individual traits and features that evoke their personalities so well, that they appear to have been modelled after living people. These portraits are so detailed that researchers today have been able to identify individuals possessing infectious and neurological diseases, mutilation, and congenital disorders. People were masterfully sculpted with various conditions such as Down syndrome, extra toes, and cleft lips.” An odd lot, the Moche.
Another common factor that emerges is the way these cultures go into decline. She makes it clear that there is seldom or never one reason for this, rather a number of factors coming together, but one possible cause that crops up over and over is environmental. Sometimes it is in the form of climate change outside human control, like the Little Ice Age which may have put an end to the Thule Inuit. Sometimes it is down to over-use of natural resources: the wealth of Nubia was built on iron, but the smelting of iron requires huge amounts of charcoal, which entails burning wood. “Eventually, this caused mass deforestation and Meroë depleted its local wood supply. This, combined with overuse of their fields, led to the complete exhaustion of their environment.”
Downsides to this book. There are too many typos, at least in the Kindle edition, I can’t speak for the print version. There is no index, at least in the Kindle version. There are also infelicities of style. The chapter heading “A Return Back Home” is just an irritating tautology, and the sentence “The girl poked her head around the stable door, careful not to alert her father of her presence” is bad grammar; “of” should be “to”, but at least the meaning is clear. But this sentence; “To the European colonists, Great Zimbabwe was made by who they considered to be the great people of the ancient world, and centuries older than what it really was” is so clumsily phrased that I am not at all sure what it means. This is infuriating, as it occurs in the course of a fascinating and informative account. I was not surprised that early Europeans insisted on believing buildings, monuments and artefacts in Africa to have been made by ancient Phoenicians or Arabs; indeed most are aware that they did. But it was news to me that long after it became clear that this narrative was false, as late as the 1960s, “the ruling political party, the Rhodesian Front, even went as far as blocking books about Great Zimbabwe. Some archaeologists who refused to accept the narrative of the site’s biblical origins were imprisoned and deported.”
This book, then, has much to tell us, and while I don’t find the style always to my liking, I can’t deny the import. It does not claim to be anything but an introduction to all these cultures, there is a bibliography for those whose interest has been whetted by some chapter and who want to find out more (on the Akkadians, I can recommend "Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East" by Amanda H Podany).
