Steven Poole reviews, Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West (2024), in The Guardian. The opening paragraph:
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. [...]
But “western civilisation” would not exist without its Islamic, African, Indian and Chinese influences.
I agree. A bit later:
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”.
Still later, after this and that:
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.”
I've been making a similar argument for a long time. Although it has long been convention to trace "the West" back to ancient Greece and to Israel, and those genealogical connections are real, the idea that there this cultural entity, "the West," extends back into ancient times is more on the order of a founding myth than a summary history. It should be obvious on the face of it that if any contemporary citizen of a Western country were transported back in time to the ancient world, anywhere, they'd find themselves in a very strange culture that they do not at all recognize. For that matter, the England of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I would be barely recognizable as English by contemporary speakers of the language. The language would be difficult to understand and to speak, and the customs strange.
In "The Evolution of Cognition" David Hays and I point out that contemporary Western culture would have been impossible without arithmetic imported from the Arab world. In "Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century" I point out that the idea of a Western cultural identity is relatively recent and was preceded and facilitated by the idea of Christendom that emerged in Europe in the 16th century.
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