How the World Made the West

Highlights

Page 65

The predecessors of the Greeks and Romans may be interesting – even impressive – but they are not ‘ours’. Any contribution they make is trumped by that of Greece and Rome, held responsible for all manner of good things from philosophy and democracy to theatre and concrete. The neighbours of the Greeks and Romans are ignored altogether, along with later encounters between western Europeans and people to their north, south and east. You might think that as a classics professor I’d approve. I’ve found Greco-Roman studies rich and rewarding myself, and the place staked out for Greeks and Romans at the heart of ideas about ‘the West’ is one of the reasons my subject still exists. But three decades of teaching and research have convinced me that a narrative focused solely on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past, and impoverishes our understanding of our own world. The real story behind what is now called the West is much bigger and more interesting. For one thing, Greeks and Romans had their own histories, rooted in other places and older peoples, and they adapted most of their ideas and technologies from elsewhere: law codes and literature from Mesopotamia, stone sculpture from Egypt, irrigation from Assyria and the alphabet from the Levant. They knew this, and they celebrated it. Greeks were also well aware that they shared the Mediterranean with others – Carthaginians and Etruscans, Iberians and Israelites – and that they lived alongside more powerful empires to the east. Their legends link Greek heroes to the queens, kings and gods of foreign lands, both real and imagined: Phoenicians, Phrygians, Amazons. Rome’s foundation myth meanwhile made the city a place of asylum for refugees, while the Roman poet Catullus can imagine travelling with friends to India, Arabia, Parthia, Egypt and even to ‘the Britons on the edge of the world’.1 For another thing, Greeks and Romans rarely share what are now called Western values. In fact, much of what these ancients took for granted would seem unfamiliar today, or even unacceptable. Athenians practised democracy for men, who lauded the seduction of boys while their women went silent and veiled. Romans embraced slavery on a massive scale and they watched public executions for fun. Finally, there is no privileged connection between ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern ‘West’: the nation states of western Europe and their settler colonies overseas. The capital of the Roman empire moved in the mid-first millennium ce to Constantinople, and remained there for over a thousand years. Muslims in the meantime combined Greek learning with science from Persia, India and central Asia as new technologies streamed around Africa, Arabia and the Indian Ocean, while sailors on northern seas and riders on the Steppe channelled goods and ideas from China to Ireland. This is the huge world extending from the Pacific to the Atlantic that the rising nations of western Europe inherited in the fifteenth century ce, as…

Note: Well written intro. Accurate, based on what I know of Roman, Greek and Islamic history. Resonates deeply with me. Bodes well for this book.

Page 138

This exemplifies another aspect of European civilisational thinking: a search for indigenous cultural ancestors. Some, like Guizot, looked to Germany, Rome and the Roman Church. Others, encouraged by European ‘philhellenic’ support for the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Turks (1821–30), looked instead to the Greeks. This approach is neatly illustrated in a startling claim made by John Stuart Mill himself in 1846, that the Athenian defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Marathon was one of the most important events in English history: The true ancestors of the European nations (it has been well said) are not those from whose blood they are sprung, but those from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance. The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.14 Whatever their tastes in historical models, nineteenth-century European intellectuals focused increasingly on civilisations rather than civilisation, and on identifying and ranking individual societies’ inherent cultural traits rather than on their progress towards a shared human ideal. Cultures on this view were not only quite separate from one other, but had natural ceilings to their development. Over time, this helped to justify harsher forms of imperial rule over what were by that time perceived as irredeemably different and inferior peoples.15 Empire now had no natural end.

Note: Mills bad take spawned a million bad takes.

Page 157

The idea of a European civilisation could still be problematic. Many European settlers in the new United States saw the American Revolution as a distinct break with the Old World. Concerns about Russia loomed increasingly large meanwhile among those who stayed behind. One attractive alternative was ‘the West’, a more flexible notion that could be used alongside or instead of that of Europe. It could encompass as much of Europe as appealed, and could extend to European settler colonies overseas.17 This West operated alongside an equally flexible notion of ‘the East’. In the nineteenth century the boundary between the two often marked political divisions within Europe: in 1834 the British foreign secretary Viscount Palmerston described a coalition between Britain, France, Portugal and Spain as an ‘alliance among the constitutional states of the west’ and ‘a counterpoise to the Holy Alliance of the east’: Russia, Prussia and Austria. A similar contrast appears in internal Russian debates between ‘Westernisers’ and ‘Slavophiles’, and the Crimean War of 1854 strengthened the idea of a distinction between Russia (now operating alone) and the rest.18

Note: The West means whoever we want it to mean at any given moment. As long as England is always in it I guess? I only say that because as an English reader I only have access to works written in or translated to English.

Page 193

A generation later, the end of the Cold War saw a new lease of life for civilisational thinking. In 1996 the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington made a case for civilisations as the defining feature of a new era, arguing that the most important distinctions between people were now cultural and religious rather than political or economic. He identified nine contemporary civilisations with geographical and religious labels, including a ‘Western’ civilisation reaching to the old Iron Curtain, and beyond that ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Islamic’ ones. Most importantly for us, this state of affairs reflected for him a permanent human condition: ‘Human history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms.’ Furthermore, ‘during most of human existence, contacts between civilizations were intermittent or nonexistent’.26

Note: Intermittent or nonexistent - noteworthy that a writer writing so recently could be so wrong, or in other words, removed from 2024 orthodoxy.

Page 217

The old model of permanent, separate biological ‘races’ has finally been put to rest by genetic science.29 Human beings are all closely related to each other – more closely, for instance, than the world’s much smaller population of chimps. Genetic differences between groups of people living far apart do of course increase over time. But recent advances in the collection and study of ancient DNA have revealed that the denser genetic groupings you can map in the world today are completely different from those of even the relatively recent past. They are a single snapshot from an ongoing human process of connection and exchange. Our ancestors travelled often, they travelled long distances and they often encountered new people. Migration, mobility and mixing are hard-wired into human history. As the Harvard geneticist David Reich has put it, a tree ‘is a dangerous analogy for human populations. The genome revolution has taught us that great mixtures of highly divergent populations have occurred repeatedly. Instead of a tree, a better metaphor may be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past.’30 It is time to make a similar case for human culture. Civilisational thinking fundamentally misrepresents our story. It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one other. Human society is not a forest full of trees, with subcultures branching out from single trunks. It is more like a bed of flowers, in need of regular pollination to reseed and grow anew.31 Distinctive local cultures come and go, but they are created and sustained by interaction – and once contact is made, no land is an island. I will argue here that there has never been a single, pure Western or European culture. What are called Western values – freedom, rationality, justice and tolerance – are not only or originally western, and the West itself is in large part a product of long-standing links with a much larger network of societies, to south and north as well as east.32 The period covered by this book is instead an era of entanglement, in which individuals and societies act and react in relation to each other. These interactions are by no means always positive or peaceful. Indeed, the greatest transformations can occur at times of great upheaval and antagonism – migration, war and conquest – and people can learn the most from their most bitter rivals.

Note: Central thesis

Page 239

Nor is this a book about ‘influence’, a ubiquitous but meaningless concept that gets things the wrong way round: it gives the credit for cultural transfer to the model, not to its adopters. But the past does not act on the future: people choose to interpret, develop or adapt what they find there.34

Note: Very interesting idea. I think many people would disagree, but I’m intrigued.

Page 260

Like Mill, Guizot notes the special place of his own nation: ‘The situation in which we are placed, as Frenchmen, affords us a great advantage for entering upon the study of European civilization; for, without intending to flatter the country to which I am bound by so many ties, I cannot but regard France as the centre, as the focus, of the civilization of Europe … There is, indeed, in the genius of the French, something of a sociableness, of a sympathy, – something which spreads itself with more facility and energy, than in the genius of any other people.’

Note: Amusing to see every patriot think his country is uniquely amazing. Patriotism is one of those delusions that I think can be useful.

Page 306

As the global climate settled and warmed at the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, exchange became even more important in the so-called Fertile Crescent (which really looks more like a boomerang). There in the new temperate conditions abundant local game and wild plants prompted the first experiments in agriculture. Pioneers took local wild grasses with small, easily dispersed seeds and by careful and repeated selection they nudged them into producing fat, firmly attached grains, easier for humans to harvest, eat and process into flour but now in need of human intervention to reseed.6 Another form of selective breeding turned wild animals into human servants: dogs had long been bred from wolves for hunting companions, but now aurochs were transformed into cows, boars into pigs, and sheep were coaxed out of their natural aggression.7* Farming required a more sedentary lifestyle, but it still depended on contact and communication. Each domestication took place in a specific area of the Fertile Crescent – wheat, cattle and sheep in the northern hills, barley and pigs in different areas west of the Euphrates, and goats in what is now Iran. By around 7000 bce, however, all the new breeds are found throughout the region.8 This involved more than just swapping seeds and stock: people had to explain to each other how to sow, cultivate, harvest and cook the new plants, and how to breed, feed and care for the new animals. Farming a wider range of crops and animals considerably reduced the risks of the agricultural lifestyle, dependent as it was on the weather and the gods. Agriculture still won’t have appealed to everyone: it is harder work than hunting and foraging, and a sedentary workforce is a breeding ground for infectious disease. But the returns promote population growth, which encourages migration in search of new land. From the seventh millennium bce agriculture expanded across a vast swathe of the world. Farmers took their animals, seeds and skills south to Egypt, east to Iran and the Indus Valley, north to Anatolia, and from there west into Europe. They established themselves wherever they could sustain crops by good luck or human ingenuity, and at the expense of the people who used to hunt and herd across the new fields.

Note: At the expense of the hunter gatherers

Page 315

Words Are Windows (or They’re Walls) I feel so sentenced by your words, I feel so judged and sent away, Before I go I’ve got to know, Is that what you mean to say? Before I rise to my defense, Before I speak in hurt or fear, Before I build that wall of words, Tell me, did I really hear? Words are windows, or they’re walls, They sentence us, or set us free. When I speak and when I hear, Let the love light shine through me. There are things I need to say, Things that mean so much to me, If my words don’t make me clear, Will you help me to be free? If I seemed to put you down, If you felt I didn’t care, Try to listen through my words, To the feelings that we share. —Ruth Bebermeyer

Page 616

The remarkable rise of Crete in the early second millennium bce, the appearance of monumental buildings, the first towns and the first writing in the Aegean or anywhere further west, was undoubtedly fuelled in part by contact with new places and people; it exploited new ideas and increasingly specific technologies borrowed from overseas; but it continued to respond above all to local cultural practices and local needs.

Page 644

These working relationships brought Cretans closer to the Levant and the great kingdoms beyond, but they were still not blind mimics of what they heard and saw overseas. To take just one example, no matter how many Cretans travelled to west Asian cities full of sculptures covered in inscriptions, on Crete itself art and text remained entirely separate realms.55 The cultural isolation implied by civilisational thinking doesn’t work for these so-called Minoans, but models of cultural ‘diffusion’ from one region to another can be equally misleading: like the concept of ‘influence’, they get the action back to front. Overseas exchange meant that Cretans could now pick and choose from different cultural options, and they did.

Note: I’m warming to this influencer idea - “gets the action back to front”. It might be the coolest idea in the book.

Page 703

Hammurabi’s court also saw the flourishing of literature in Akkadian, a Semitic language spoken in ancient Akkad and other northern Mesopotamian cities that was now becoming the international lingua franca of western Asia. Works from this era include not only a full-length epic poem about King Gilgamesh, but also the story of Atrahasis, ‘Extra-Wise’, the only human to survive a great flood, along with his family and animals, with the help of a friendly god. Written down around 1700 bce, the story introduces us to a bickering set of senior gods who, after failing to palm off the difficult but necessary local work of canal digging on to a group of lesser gods, invent humans to do the work instead. Unfortunately they forget to invent natural death, so soon there are far too many humans, and they become very noisy. Attempts to mitigate the problem with plagues and famine fail, and the chief god Enlil decides to send a flood to get rid of these humans once and for all. The other gods are sworn to secrecy, but soft-hearted Enki tells his human friend Atrahasis what is going to happen, and how to escape on a boat with his family, birds, cattle and wild animals. When this glitch in their scheme comes to light, the other gods grumble but content themselves with imposing mortality and miscarriage on Atrahasis and his descendants, and leaving to them the hard work of irrigation.

Note: Noah

Page 782

The phylogenetically uber-ancient neurological machinery for processing pleasure and pain has remained largely intact throughout evolution and across species. It is perfectly adapted for a world of scarcity. Without pleasure we wouldn’t eat, drink, or reproduce. Without pain we wouldn’t protect ourselves from injury and death. By raising our neural set point with repeated pleasures, we become endless strivers, never satisfied with what we have, always looking for more. But herein lies the problem. Human beings, the ultimate seekers, have responded too well to the challenge of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. As a result, we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance. Our brains are not evolved for this world of plenty. As Dr. Tom Finucane, who studies diabetes in the setting of chronic sedentary feeding, said, “We are cacti in the rain forest.” And like cacti adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine. The net effect is that we now need more reward to feel pleasure, and less injury to feel pain. This recalibration is occurring not just at the level of the individual but also at the level of nations. Which invites the question: How do we survive and thrive in this new ecosystem? How do we raise our children? What new ways of thinking and acting will be required of us as denizens of the twenty-first century?

Note: We are cacti in a rain forest - fascinating.

Page 895

Exchange does not prompt mindless imitation.

Note: I think the author is going to give many examples of this point, to reinforce the other point that the influencee has agency. They decide where to get their influences and consciously choose which parts to pick and discard.

Page 949

Whether or not tin really travelled with amber all the way from Britain to Mycenae, it must have been very rare for people to make the whole journey. It would have taken several months by foot, river and sea. And even as commerce came to connect the edges of Europe, there is no evidence for meaningful cultural communication across such distances, any more than there is with the central Asian sources of the lapis lazuli that was also buried in the shaft graves. The way the amber beads were buried is a case in point. Amber left Britain in the form of necklaces, but these did not reach Greek tombs intact. Instead, the beads are found in different combinations, sometimes with beads of other materials, and often in positions that suggest they were recycled for sword belts. Glowing with vague impressions of faraway places cold, rich and strange, amber could act in the Aegean as a talisman against the enemy in a way quite alien to its connotations in Britain of pure luxury or its everyday familiarity in Scandinavia itself.40 Amber is still found only in the richest Mycenaean graves, nestling against other foreign imports from far to the north, south and east. Its faraway origins and mystery were what made it most valuable, advertising and emphasising these local families’ connections with distant realms along routes lit up by magic stones from the end of the world.41

Note: I like that the author isn’t overstating the case for connection, either trade or cultural. Yeah we find British beads in Mycenae but so few that it doesn’t indicate strong links.

Page 064

One enthusiast for this theory was the American archaeologist Carl Blegen, who directed excavations at Troy and Pylos, and dexterously combined his job as professor of archaeology at the University of Cincinnati with domestic life in an Athens townhouse with his wife, her lover and her lover’s husband.

Note: Wow

Page 363

At the same time new sailing technologies developed in the Levant did encourage longer and more difficult journeys. These included crows’ nests for better visibility, keels that helped keep ships steady even under heavy loads, and brail lines in sails that enabled the crew to control flutter when travelling into the wind, and so to sail much closer to it – especially useful when you need to make a swift escape.27

Note: Each of these took a long time to develop and diffuse. And of course later generations either took them for granted or forgot them only to rediscover them.

Page 382

Dramatic evidence for the level of exchange between the Aegean and the Amarna world as a whole in this era came to light in 1982, when a young Turkish sponge diver spotted a ‘metal biscuit with ears’ on the seabed. It turned out to be an oxhide-shaped copper ingot, and the first sign in 3,300 years of a twenty-ton, sixteen-metre-long single-mast sailing boat built of wood from Mount Lebanon which had sunk off Cape Uluburun on the south-western coast of Anatolia. A date in the late fourteenth century bce has been established by carbon-dating, the style of the pottery onboard and a scarab engraved with the royal cartouche of Akhenaten’s queen Nefertiti.31 This ship was about as big as they got in the Bronze Age, and the location of the wreck means that it must have been heading for the Aegean: to Rhodes, Crete or all the way to the Argolid. The hold was full of luxury goods straight out of the Amarna letters, in quantities that would not have been out of place on an Amarna dowry list. There is silver from Anatolia, saffron, nigella and sumac from Mesopotamia, gold, ebony and raw ivory – an elephant tusk and fourteen hippopotamus teeth – that must have come via Egypt, and ten tons of copper from Cyprus. Along with the ton of tin on board, which came from both central Asia (modern Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and the Turkish Taurus Mountains, this would have made more than 300 bronze suits of armour.32 In fact, the overlap with the gifts and goods discussed in the Amarna correspondence is so striking that some scholars have suggested this was an official mission between kings of the kind discussed in the letters.

Note: He numbers don’t look right. 10 tons of copper and 1 ton of tin could make 10-11 tons of bronze (88-12 ratio). I think suits of armour are going to be closer to 25kg rather than 33kg, based on Bret Devereaux’s writings. So maybe 400 suits? But there may be wastage.

Page 441

The name Ahhiyawa must lie behind Homer’s later ‘Achaeans’, the collective label usually used in the Iliad for the kingdoms that united under Agamemnon of Mycenae against Troy, and Attarissiya is tantalisingly similar to the Atreus whom later Greek legend made king of Mycenae and father to Agamemnon.

Note: This would be so cool though!

Page 459

In the fourteenth century walls were built around both Mycenae and the neighbouring citadel of Tiryns; according to Pausanias they were the work of the giant Cyclopes, but the circuit at Tiryns incorporates Hittite timber-frame construction techniques and corbelled vaulted galleries. The involvement of Hittite specialists would mirror the passing around of travelling experts between the Great Kings preserved in the Amarna letters, and advertise in itself the participation of local kings in a new and bigger world.51

Note: So interesting they were sharing knowledge by literally sending experts. But I guess it’s not so different from someone from one country setting up a factory in India or Vietnam in the 21st century.

Page 504

There was more to the Late Bronze Age than Great Big Men. In the Levant a patchwork of smaller vassal kingdoms provides a different perspective on change and exchange. Civilisational thinking promotes a notion of extensive shared cultures, distinct from their neighbours; the historical reality is that distinctiveness emerges on a smaller and more human scale, exploiting resources from elsewhere.

Page 523

Altogether we have more than 1,500 documents from thirteenth- and early twelfth-century Ugarit, in five scripts and eight languages: the old literary language of Sumerian, the Akkadian of foreign correspondence, Egyptian, Cypro-Minoan and the Anatolian languages of Hittite, Hurrian and Luwian, as well as Ugaritic itself. The Ugaritic documents in particular reveal new thinking about politics, administration and culture that distanced the city from the Great Kings who surrounded it. This shouldn’t be a surprise. New ideas rarely come from the centre of a system. Empires in particular are intrinsically conservative, and imperial coalitions all the more so. Petty complaints aside, the immense distances and slow speed of ancient communication meant that serious misunderstandings with subjects or brother rulers could be disastrous. The best way for the central authorities to avoid them was to maintain standard practices, long-standing relationships and conventional symbols of power in a traditional language. Innovation happens instead on the borders of larger structures, and in communication with people beyond their control. Contrary to the logic of ‘civilisations’ as self-contained bastions of self-improvement, it is people on the periphery, less set in their ways and with more to gain, who most easily make change. We have already seen this happen at Byblos and Mycenae, in the Carpathians and on Crete and Cyprus, and at Ugarit we see it again in unusual detail.

Note: “Innovation happens on the borders of larger structures.” This feels at once insightful and obvious. Good writing.

Page 540

All the same, Ugarit was no ordinary client kingdom. The city controlled a large and fertile territory along the coastal plain and its natural harbour was the most important port in the northern Levant, dominating the busy north–south shipping route from Hittite Anatolia to the Egyptian Delta. From there it was just a day’s sail to Enkomi on Cyprus, the main commercial hub for western metals: tin ingots from continental Europe and lead ingots from Sardinia found in thirteenth- to twelfth-century shipwrecks off the coast of modern Israel have markings in Cypro-Minoan, strongly suggesting that they passed through the island’s markets. The city of Ugarit itself meanwhile stood below a rare inland pass through the Alawi mountain chain on the overland route heading east to the trading depot of Emar on the Euphrates and central Asian tin beyond.6 Ugarit’s wealth and strategic position meant that direct orders from Hattusa were rare. Even when they did arrive, the king did not always obey them.

Note: This is really good placement. With Potato McWhiskey in charge Ugarit could have conquered the world.

Page 600

Inspiration does not necessarily lead to imitation, however, and one of the most interesting things about Ugarit is the distinctively local focus of much innovation in this era, starting with the fact that the atonement ritual itself is written in Ugaritic, a north-west Semitic language closely related to later Phoenician and Hebrew. Reading and writing in one’s own spoken language may seem natural today, especially to native English-speakers. It is however an artificial choice, and even in Europe a relatively recent one. In antiquity it was unusual. At Emar, for instance, Akkadian and Sumerian were the preferred languages of local literature and administration. When Ugarit’s scribes started to use their own language for almost all local business, politics and administration in the mid-thirteenth century, they created the world’s first written vernacular. It involved a deliberate decision to reject the bureaucratic norms and universal languages of Ugarit’s own Hittite overlords and the other Great Kings, and to emphasise the city’s local identity.22

Page 621

They did so by inventing a script for people who didn’t know how to write.25 That was the job of trained scribes, and for good reason: the cuneiform writing system borrowed by the Bronze Age Levantine kingdoms had close to a thousand signs altogether, each of which could represent a variety of different words, syllables or ‘determinatives’, silent signs that simply specify the category of what follows: ‘the next word should be read as a god’, for instance, or ‘a town’, or ‘a kind of duck’. The alphabet cut through this with a clever device. Each ‘letter’ was really a little picture, and it represented the first sound of the word for whatever was depicted. So the sign for ‘a’ was the head of a bull, alep in Levantine dialects, ‘b’ was a schematic house (bayit), ‘d’ was a door (dalet), and so on. You can still see this, just about, by rotating modern ‘Roman’ capitals 90 degrees to the left. Because the ‘letters’ of the alphabet represent sounds, not syllables, there were fewer of them to learn. But in fact you didn’t even have to learn the script to get the message, you just needed to know the language and the trick. Their new surroundings provided these Levantine workers with inspiration in fact as well as motivation. To create the new alphabet, they commandeered Egyptian signs used on the inscriptions they saw around them: all of the letters found in Sinai have models in the Egyptian hieroglyphic script or its simplified ‘hieratic’ version. Ignoring the way these signs operated in the Egyptian writing systems themselves – they probably didn’t know – the Levantine labourers treated them simply as images, using some of them back to front or upside down.26 Once again, appropriation and innovation are intertwined. The new script was not a roaring success back home. Although texts written on wood or papyrus will have vanished in the relatively damp climate of the Levant, the few examples of alphabetic writing found over the following centuries are still for the most part very short texts, with signs that become increasingly schematic.27 Perhaps this was the problem: the loss of the pictographic aspect would have made the letters harder to interpret without learning them first. Or perhaps the problem was the opposite: that alphabetic signs weren’t hard enough, and so lacked sufficient prestige. Levantine kings certainly preferred the more complex syllabic writing systems etched into clay tablets by specialist scribes for their literature, letters and bureaucratic records.

Page 717

All the same, there came a time when even Ugarit needed help from greater powers. Around 1190 bce, enemy ships were bearing down on the city. The king sent a plea for help to the king of Alashiya, who advised him to fortify his towns and gather his warriors and chariots within them.41 The king’s reply is desperate: ‘My father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my towns and have done harm to the land. Doesn’t my father know that all my infantry and [chariotry] are stationed in Hatti, and that all my ships are stationed in the land of Lukka [Lycia]?’ He suspects the worst is still to come: ‘Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us. Now if other ships of the enemy turn up, send me a report … so that I will know.’42 The second response, this time from the senior governor of Cyprus, is ominous: ‘the twenty ships which the enemy hadn’t yet launched in the mountainous areas have not stayed put. They left suddenly and we don’t know where they’ve turned up [?]. I’ve written to you to inform you, so that you can take defensive measures.’43 It was too late. The correspondence was baked in the blaze that destroyed the city, left behind with the arrowheads from the final attack.44 It wasn’t just Ugarit. Over a generation either side of the year 1200 BCE, cities up and down the east coast of the Mediterranean were destroyed by fire. Twelve hundred kilometres to the west, Mycenae succumbed. Over the course of just a few hours the conflagration spread across the citadel, from the Lion Gate to the busy artists’ quarter behind the palace, where blacksmiths, goldsmiths, painters and potters made the luxurious goods of everyday royal life. In the palace itself the bright wall paintings and heavy fabrics of the great throne room went up in flames; whether or not the fire itself was deliberate, the metalwork had already been looted. Everything was destroyed. The same happened at Tiryns, and at Pylos. Altogether more than thirty sites across the Aegean, Cyprus, Anatolia and the Levant were stripped of their valuables and then burnt. The world in which Ugarit made its peculiar mark largely ended with it.

Note: RIP. I wonder what made the Sea People so effective.

Page 736

It was not necessarily a more democratic form of communication. Although alphabets are obviously faster to learn than syllabic or ideographic scripts, the idea that a smaller number of signs makes alphabets inherently more egalitarian is hard to demonstrate: its use never brought about widespread literacy in the Greco-Roman world, and it still takes schoolchildren some time to learn to read and write an alphabetic language, while children in modern China or Japan do not tend to find their more complex writing systems an insuperable obstacle to literacy.

Note: This is true, hadn’t considered it. I will admit that I thought alphabetic system was superior, simply because that’s what I’m used to.

Page 108

The news was of the same type that Dukhi had heard evening after evening during his childhood; only the names were different. For walking on the upper-caste side of the street, Sita was stoned, though not to death – the stones had ceased at first blood. Gambhir was less fortunate; he had molten lead poured into his ears because he ventured within hearing range of the temple while prayers were in progress. Dayaram, reneging on an agreement to plough a landlord’s field, had been forced to eat the landlord’s excrement in the village square. Dhiraj tried to negotiate in advance with Pandit Ghanshyam the wages for chopping wood, instead of settling for the few sticks he could expect at the end of the day; the Pandit got upset, accused Dhiraj of poisoning his cows, and had him hanged.

Page 802

All the same, there is no doubt that these clay tablets – which survive in greatest quantity at Pylos – still describe a world in which the labour of many fed the mouths of a few, and in particular the king. One way or another, most people owed contributions to the palace in kind or in service (including military service), and many were repaid in food or land.10

Page 829

In perhaps the most striking change, literacy was abandoned at the end of the Bronze Age along with monarchy. There is no trace of writing anywhere in the Aegean for around 400 years. To a modern reader this may seem shocking, or even sad. But Linear B had been a language of accounting and bureaucracy above all, legible only to a few trained scribes. For most people its connotations would have been negative: it had been a tool of privilege if not subjection, the way the palaces counted the wheat, wool and oil owed to them, and controlled the service and labour they required. Linear B had never been used to record the kind of legends written down at Ugarit, Babylon or Egyptian Thebes, and as we shall see local stories survived its loss.

Page 915

Bronze swords were now however becoming vintage goods. As demand for bronze declined in western Asia along with the decline of the Brother Kingdoms, entrepreneurs began to explore new possibilities. Iron is quicker and simpler to produce than bronze, since it is derived from a single ore found in many more places than copper or tin. The problem is that it melts at a much higher temperature. In the Bronze Age the techniques necessary to smelt iron oxide – heating and reheating it with other agents to free it from its slag – had been the preserve of the Hittites. They probably added carbon to bring the melting point down to a feasible level, but they kept the details to themselves and produced the metal in tiny quantities as a rare luxury.35 However they got hold of the secret or solved the puzzle, by the eleventh century BCE Cypriot artisans had perfected the technology to produce iron and introduced it to the rest of the Mediterranean. The widespread availability of iron ore meant that it gradually became the metal of choice for knives, swords, daggers, axes and even agricultural tools.36 This dramatic technological development over a huge area would have been impossible without continuing contacts between distant societies, but in the Aegean it also brought them close to a halt. The new popularity of iron further reduced demand for the distant metals needed to make bronze, and contacts with both Cyprus and continental Europe wither by around 1050 bce. A century and a half after the Bronze Age palaces collapsed the people of the Aegean were largely cut off from the rest of the world, and most of their remaining towns disappeared.37 If the lights were not quite out at this point, they were turned down pretty low. How long this period of relative isolation actually lasted is difficult to tell: dating the re-emergence of sustained overseas contact usually depends on dating the style of any pottery exchanged, which in many cases depends on little more than a guess. Recent carbon-14 analysis from the northern Aegean and Sidon has however suggested a rather short hiatus, lasting just a couple of generations.38 Until this is confirmed by further studies, a prudent estimate would still put it at close to a century in many places.

Note: Interesting that the switch to iron reduced trade. I wonder which was the cause and which the effect.

Page 927

The new regime’s lightness of touch also showed itself in matters of administration. Roman coinage was used for several decades after the conquests alongside newly minted coins struck with familiar imagery and in long-established denominations;

Note: I don’t think you take existing currency out of circulation unless you’re Modi

Page 024

Zakerbaal points out to Wenamun that the sum he is offering for the cedar is only a fraction of what his predecessors had paid, gloats over how far Egypt has fallen and emphasises his own new power: ‘I am not your servant! Nor am I the servant of him who sent you!’2 The king then sends a demand for further payment to Egypt’s Delta kingdom, and receives in return more gold and silver, as well as linen, cowhides, rope, lentils and fish – a list that highlights how little we usually know about trade and exchange in the distant past: none of the goods that Wenamun brings with him on his journey, or that Zakerbaal later demands, would leave any trace for archaeologists today.

Note: Reminds me of the caveman thing. Only cave dwellings survived.

Page 055

It is not surprising that from a distance these ‘Phoenicians’ looked – or rather sounded – identical: they all spoke similar dialects of a north-west Semitic language very different from Greek.8 But as far as we know they did not see themselves as a group: on the surviving evidence – which includes over 10,000 inscriptions from these cities and their overseas settlements – no one ever calls themself a Phoenician in their own language, or uses any similar collective term.9 Instead, they describe themselves as ‘sons’ of their individual towns, in the regional tradition found earlier at Ugarit and Emar.10 The study of antiquity gives the lie to the idea that everyone is born with a natural, fixed ethnic identity, tied to specific other people by ancestry or ancestral territory. The concept is fundamentally incoherent anyway: at some level all humans share the same ancestry and territory, and decisions about where to draw lines across that shared heritage in time and space can only ever be arbitrary. But ethnic identification is also for the most part a relatively modern phenomenon, associated with modern levels of literacy, communication and mobility. Without these, communal identities tend to form on smaller scales. And despite their physical proximity to one another, links between the ‘Phoenician’ ports were relatively weak.11

Note: Fascinating. They didn’t see themselves as Phoenician because most would never meet someone who wasn’t Phoenician. That label only made sense to the Greeks.

Page 095

Byblos remained a famous centre of writing: Greek writers called papyrus rolls bybloi after the city, the origin of the modern word ‘bible’.

Note: And bibliography, bibliotheca etc. love me a good etymology!

Page 212

The mountains known since Plato’s time as the Pillars of Hercules – the Rock of Gibraltar on the Iberian side, Jebel Musa in Morocco – guard a strait which serves as a natural barrier between sea and ocean. The inbound current runs regularly at eleven kilometres an hour, more than enough to deter the casual explorer. On top of that there are strong winds and often fog. To negotiate it – and to make the journey that far in the first place – would have required sturdy, stable new ships, and we know what they were called: there are nine different references in the Hebrew Bible to Tyrian ‘ships of Tarshish’, the biblical name for south-western Iberia.7 Despite their name these vessels are not always found en route to the west: some run down the Red Sea to Ophir.8 But like ships of Byblos and ships of Keftiu before them, they must have been designed for a specific route: in this case, to cross the Mediterranean and come out the other side. The route required new skills as well. One traditional idea about ancient navigation is that sailors travelled from port to port along the coast, trying to stay in sight of land, and putting into harbour at dusk.9 But the fact that the earliest foreign pottery found at Huelva is from Tyre, and that there is no sign of these ceramics anywhere else in the western or central Mediterranean in this era, strongly suggests that the ships of Tarshish headed directly west. Their captains used their knowledge of stars, winds and currents to cross open sea for weeks at a time, often travelling out of sight of land and stopping, it seems, as little as possible.10

Note: That’s crazy, damn.

Page 290

It first appeared to be counterintuitive, but Dinges and Rosekind made a clever, biology-based prediction. They believed that by inserting a nap at the front end of an incoming bout of sleep deprivation, you could insert a buffer, albeit temporary and partial, that would protect the brain from suffering catastrophic lapses in concentration. They were right. Pilots suffered fewer microsleeps at the end stages of the flight if the naps were taken early that prior evening, versus if those same nap periods were taken in the middle of the night or later that next morning, when the attack of sleep deprivation was already well under way.

Note: should nap at the beginning of the flight to sf then

Page 346

Mining was difficult and dangerous work, and it was now being carried out in Tarshish on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, the relatively slow adoption of new technologies that could have made the process easier, from iron to the lathe, strongly suggests that the additional resources that made this possible were human.42 Local farming towns and villages cannot have supplied willing labourers in the numbers required, and the opportunity is unlikely to have appealed to volunteers from the Levant.

Note: Seems like a reasonable inference, especially because they say later that Tyrians are “enthusiastic slavers”

Page 355

Slavery in earlier periods and other places was smaller-scale and more opportunistic: a wealthy household might have a few slaves, a palace rather more, but they’d usually be doing the same kinds of jobs as paid workers might in other contexts – or other unpaid labourers like wives and daughters.46 There is no doubt however that it existed, nor that Tyrians in particular were enthusiastic slave traders. Homer’s heroes complain of Phoenicians selling the people they kidnap on their travels, and Hebrew prophets agree: Amos accuses Tyre of selling Israelite refugees to Edom, Joel accuses Tyrians and Sidonians of selling Judeans to Greeks, and Ezekiel specifically juxtaposes Tyrian imports of slaves from Anatolia and metals from Tarshish.47

Note: Good evidence.

Page 391

One new development found at Carthage is the sanctuary the settlers established close to the port to the god Baal Haamon, where they sacrificed infants before cremating and burying them.54 More than 20,000 burial urns were interred over the six or more centuries of the city’s existence, signalled above ground by more than 10,000 stone stelae, often carved with images and inscriptions, then plastered and painted in bright colours. It was these markers that originally led French colonial archaeologists to the site in 1921. They had been turning up on the antiquities market for a century before a misguided dealer offered one for sale to a public official at Tunis, who had him tailed back to the clandestine dig.55 Official excavations began within days, and scholars quickly made a connection between this strange graveyard and claims by more than thirty Greek and Roman authors that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children to their gods. The fourth-century bce Greek historian Kleitarchos, for instance, reported that the Phoenicians, and especially the Carthaginians, revered the god Kronos – the Greek name for Baal Haamon – and that ‘whenever they wish to make a real success of something, they vow one of their children, and if they get what they want, they sacrifice it to the god’.56

Note: How cool it would have been to confirm millennia old accusations. I bet loads of people over the years thought it was just slander.

Page 425

The Bible reports that this practice aroused disgust among many Israelites, and was eventually banned in Judah by King Josiah in the late seventh century.63* We hear of a similar change of heart at Tyre, though without a specific date: when Alexander the Great was besieging the city in 332 bce, a Roman historian reports an unsuccessful proposal to revive the old tradition of sacrificing a freeborn boy to Saturn (the Roman name for Baal Haamon).64 He doesn’t say when the tradition had fallen out of use there, but increasing opposition to it could explain why, like the Pilgrim Fathers, members of a dissident tradition sought religious freedom in the west.65 It might also explain why others joined them in the central Mediterranean, founding about ten more settlements over the next couple of centuries on and around Sicily, Sardinia, Malta and the Tunisian coast.66 These people didn’t come for the farmland: there is little evidence for large-scale agriculture around these sites for several more centuries.67 They all however have tophets, with the same infant burials, markers and inscriptions. These migrants must have been drawn to each other not only by language and cultural familiarity, but also by the unusual cult they shared. It allowed this distinctive group of settlements to maintain its distance not only from Tyre but also from other Levantine migrants further west, where no tophets have yet been found.

Note: That’s a killer theory

Page 508

Today those connections both real and imagined have for the most part been forgotten: they present an inconvenient obstacle to the modern idea that the Greeks themselves invented Western culture from whole cloth. The evidence from the ninth- and eighth-century Aegean suggests however that the legends of Agenor’s children got something important right: overseas contacts and borrowings were crucial components of what might otherwise seem a Greek miracle. In particular, the connections Greek-speakers made in this era with the people they called Phoenician transformed their own societies both at home and abroad. These connections not only fuelled Aegean commerce, they inspired changes in art, religion and politics that provide core ingredients in the modern myth of Classical Greece.11

Page 537

Greeks appropriated not only the idea of the alphabet but the whole system. The shapes of the earliest Greek letters derive directly from the letters used at contemporary Tyre, and they represent in most cases the same sounds, with the same names, written out in the same traditional order: aleph–bet–gimel became alpha–beta–gamma. In early Greek inscriptions they are usually written right to left as well, but the direction didn’t much matter, and it was not until the fifth century bce that Greek writers settled firmly on left to right. At the same time, the Greek alphabet was not simply a copy of the script used at Tyre, which was technically an abjad. Vowels are rarely essential for comprehension in Semitic languages. In modern Hebrew, for instance, they are usually marked only in religious texts and children’s books. In Greek, by contrast, vowels are very common, they are often the first letter of a word, and they are frequently added and changed to indicate different numbers, genders, persons and tenses. It would be hard to understand written Greek without them, and in that respect Phoenician letters posed a problem.

Page 596

It wasn’t only Phoenician letters that reached Greece in this era: words came too. Around a hundred Greek terms have Semitic roots, from animals and plants to foods and religious terminology.34 Above all they relate to trade.35 Goods that arrived on a gaulos or ship were carried in a sakkos (sack) to the makellon (market). For ordinary transactions Aegean merchants adopted the Semitic mina unit of weight, traditionally used for silver, which they counted in sixties like the Babylonians to make up a ‘talent’, a local measure already attested in Bronze Age Greece. Levantine entrepreneurs meanwhile introduced Greek-speakers to west Asian financial technologies such as deposit banking, marine insurance and bottomry, a high-risk system of financing maritime trade that remained common until the nineteenth century ce in which the ship itself is used as security for the loans that send it to sea.36

Page 622

Religious ideas adapted too. Universal polytheism made it easier to see equivalencies – or at least close associations – between one’s own deities and those of other people. And long before Romans mapped Greek Zeus and Hera on to their own Jupiter and Juno, Greeks did the same to Levantine gods: so Greek-speakers called the Tyrian god Melqart by the name of their own hero Herakles, while the Greek goddess of love ‘Heavenly’ Aphrodite was widely equated with Semitic Ashtart, the ‘queen of Heaven’, and was even thought by some Greek authors to have arrived in Greece from the Levant or Assyria.41

Page 742

It is much easier to see the links between the Aegean, the Levant and their overseas foundations that framed and fostered the institutions that distinguish Classical Greece in many minds today, from the alphabet to the colony to the citizen state. They too though are part of a bigger story and a much longer east–west axis across the Mediterranean in the shadow of greater power.

Page 779

Assyrian kings had the help of a huge army that specialised in chariotry, siege warfare and the battering ram. The soldiers were the state: every male citizen was liable to serve in the annual campaigns, which were often led by the king himself, and all state officials had military rank and title. Prudent monarchs from the ninth century on ensured that many of the leading officers in the army and state bureaucracy were also eunuchs – the ‘men of the head’, those closest to the king, as opposed to the ‘men of the beard’, an older governing class of urban noblemen.5 In return for the singular devotion of these castrated servants – who had no prospects outside his household – the king fed and clothed them, and paid for all their expenses, including their funerals. A new road system consolidated expansion: empires don’t need to hold the whole of their territory in constant and expensive occupation if they control the routes through it. This network also carried state communications that connected the king, his governors and his ambassadors at vassal courts in what was in effect a postal service, separating message from messenger for the first time.6 Couriers rode standard daily stages in and out of road stations equipped with accommodation, always travelling with a pair of mules in case one went lame en route.* It wasn’t only soldiers and couriers on the move: once new land was conquered, Assyrian imperial policy revolved around mass relocation.7 A total of 157 separate forced resettlements around Assyrian lands are recorded between the ninth and seventh centuries bce, involving well over a million individuals, and that cannot be the full account. This strategy allowed the Great King to bring labour and skill into new areas at the same time as he cut his subjects’ local ties and made them dependent on himself alone. It also reinforced an ideology of Assyrian empire as a single people under one ruler – a people the king was increasingly determined to extend westward.

Note: These are policies that would reduce the likelihood of rebellion substantially.

Page 182

Bowerman had died by the time the barefoot uprising was taking hold in 2002, so Nike went back to Bowerman’s old mentor to see if this shoeless stuff really had merit. “Of course!” Arthur Lydiard reportedly snorted. “You support an area, it gets weaker. Use it extensively, it gets stronger… . Run barefoot and you don’t have all those troubles. “Shoes that let your foot function like you’re barefoot—they’re the shoes for me,” Lydiard concluded. Nike followed up that blast with its own hard data. Jeff Pisciotta, the senior researcher at Nike Sports Research Lab, assembled twenty runners on a grassy field and filmed them running barefoot. When he zoomed in, he was startled by what he found: instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own—stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan. “It’s beautiful to watch,” a still spellbound Pisciotta later told me. “That made us start thinking that when you put a shoe on, it starts to take over some of the control.” He immediately deployed his team to gather film of every existing barefoot culture they could find. “We found pockets of people all over the globe who are still running barefoot, and what you find is that during propulsion and landing, they have far more range of motion in the foot and engage more of the toe. Their feet flex, spread, splay, and grip the surface, meaning you have less pronation and more distribution of pressure.”

Note: Ok I’m intrigued. I’ll try out barefoot running

Page 073

The version of the Iliad that has survived down to our own day was finalised around 700 bce: while it mentions temples and cult statues, which first appeared in Greece in the late eighth century, there are no signs of later cultural innovations or artistic developments.1 The obvious explanation for this halt to the process of oral recomposition is that the adoption of the alphabet meant that this version of the story was finally written down. And while we have already seen that elements in this ‘standard’ version go back to stories told in the Bronze Age Aegean, others relate to traditions from further east.2

Note: Interesting that adoption of alphabet crystallises the story. I wonder what the story might have been if they finalised it a few centuries later.

Page 079

In particular, the work is full of echoes of another poem with a relationship between men at its core: the devoted friendship between Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, and his companion the wild man Enkidu.3 This pair were first immortalised in Sumerian poems of the third millennium bce, and then in Akkadian works of the second; the latter were finally compiled around 1100 bce into a ‘Standard Babylonian’ version of the tale, which became in the first millennium bce a classic work of Mesopotamian literature, like Homer for Greek-speakers, or Shakespeare to Anglophones today. This poem is usually now called Gilgamesh, but like other Akkadian poems it was known to its original readers by its first words, ‘He who saw the deep’ (Sha naqba imuru). It relates the adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, a creature created by the gods to challenge the king’s arrogance who becomes his companion instead. The pair travel together to the Cedar Forest (probably Mount Lebanon) and slaughter its monstrous guardian Humbaba, but then unwisely kill the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar to destroy Gilgamesh for spurning her advances. The gods decide that Enkidu must pay the ultimate price, leaving Gilgamesh to journey on alone in search of immortality. The actual plots of Gilgamesh and the Iliad are completely different: Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight not foreign princes but gods and monsters, as well as each other. But like Achilles and Patroclus these heroes set out on a journey together and engage in heroic combats with mighty opponents. As in the Iliad, Enkidu dies at the whim of the gods, leaving Gilgamesh bereft. As in the Iliad, the men are not explicitly portrayed as lovers in a physical sense: all four of our heroes have sexual relationships with women, but in both works it is clear that they love each other beyond all others. And at the end of their respective poems we leave both Gilgamesh and Achilles tragic, lonely kings. Men who had hoped to live for ever face up to death. Some of the parallels between Gilgamesh and Achilles might be expected of any self-respecting hero: both can talk directly to gods, and both are themselves semi-divine. Others seem less likely to be coincidental: both of their mothers lament the risks they take, for instance, and the language used of them mourning their lost partner is very similar indeed: Achilles is compared to a grieving lion who has discovered that its cubs have been stolen by a hunter, while Gilgamesh is described as ‘like a lioness deprived of its cubs, pacing to and fro’.4 They are so distressed, in fact, that neither of them will let the corpse go before it begins to decompose: Achilles is concerned about flies laying eggs in Patroclus’ body so that worms cause his flesh to rot, while Gilgamesh admits, ‘I did not surrender his body for burial until a maggot dropped from his nostril.’5 The story of Gilgamesh also has distinct similarities with that of Homer’s other flawed hero, Odysseus, the king of the…

Note: Some of these seem stronger influences than others. That phrase is an unusual one, almost the likeliest evidence that the minstrels who performed the Iliad had heard versions of the other stories.

Page 126

Other Anatolian tales find their way into the work of an early seventh-century Boeotian poet named Hesiod, who composed a cosmological poem in epic hexameter, the Theogony, recounting the creation of the world and the story of how successive generations of gods overthrew their predecessors. As he tells the story, Ouranos (‘Sky’) keeps his children imprisoned in the womb of their mother Gaia (‘Earth’) through continuous intercourse until brave young Kronos castrates him with a sickle, severing heaven from earth. The offcuts land in the sea and give birth to Aphrodite. Learning from his father’s error, Kronos himself then eats his own children as soon as they are born, until one day their mother serves him a stone instead of a baby. The surviving child is the storm deity Zeus, who grows up to defeat his father, liberate his siblings and become king of the gods. The idea of a succession of divine generations starting with a sky god in which a god of storms or winds emerges victorious is found in both Mesopotamian and Hittite legends, but this story has particular parallels with a myth preserved in Hittite archives about the god Kumarbi.11 In this tale Kumarbi bites off and swallows the genitals of his father the sky god Anu, and as a result gives birth to various children. He attempts to eat one but eats a stone instead. The storm god Tessub is born from his body and overthrows him. This is not the same story, but it is built from similar ingredients.12

Page 244

Greek legends tend to ascribe inventions to the gods – Hephaistos, for example, is the first blacksmith. To have a mortal man as a ‘first inventor’ is a distinctive characteristic instead of Levantine myth: in the Hebrew Bible Cain and Abel were the first shepherd and farmer, and Noah the first vintner, while in the second century ce Philo of Byblos reports an ancient local origin myth in which mortal men introduce hunting, cattle raising, villages, justice and salt.35

Note: Evidence that the Hebrew bible is more Levantine than Greek, which is an interesting distinction.

Page 353

It was also at Ephesos that Greek-speakers first adopted the Lydian technology of dividing metal ingots for convenience into small discs or coins.15 First minted in Lydia around 650 bce, probably at Sardis itself, coinage spread quickly across the Aegean and beyond, reaching the central Mediterranean in the sixth century, and Iberia by the fifth.16

Page 382

There is no doubt that control of Naukratis was a great boon to sailors already operating at the intersection of routes from Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Aegean and the Steppe. But the pharaoh’s gift may have had a larger legacy, as the traders at Naukratis began to make dedications to ‘the gods of the Greeks’ in a sanctuary known – perhaps first by their Egyptian hosts – as the ‘Helleneion’.25 This is the first time in history we hear of ‘Greeks’, and for the most part people from Greek-speaking cities continued to identify themselves by their city, district or father instead. But it is not the only sign of a notion of collective ‘Hellenic’ identity emerging in the sixth century: literary accounts suggest that it was in this era that a set of fictive ancestral figures associated with the Ionian, Dorian and Aeolic dialects of Greek – Ion, Dorus and Aeolus – acquired a new ancestor called Hellen.26 As Greek-speakers travelled further around the Mediterranean, they began to see each other as more like themselves.

Page 521

Rome had grown fast over the previous century, acquiring walls built of great square tufa blocks that encompassed the seven hills and more than 350 hectares of land.60 It was now the largest settlement in central Italy, and across the Italian peninsula only the wealthy Greek-speaking ports of Tarentum and Sybaris on the south coast were larger.61 It was still however a relatively small player in the western Mediterranean when compared to the great harbours of Syracuse and Agrigentum on Sicily, or to Massalia and Carthage themselves. Today however ancient Carthage is much less familiar than Rome, while Massalia is positively obscure. The trouble is, their timing was all wrong. Nineteenth-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 traditional high points of each of these ‘civilisations’ in the fifth century bce and the first century ce respectively coincide with their imperial apogee as well as an outpouring of literary texts on topics – and in languages – easy to teach in the schoolroom.* Earlier powers in the western Mediterranean that do not fit into this neat binary scheme have been brushed under the carpet of the canon, along with ancient peoples beyond the Mediterranean to north and south. Even the great empires to the east are usually acknowledged only as backstory to the real business. They too however have stories of their own, and they had a strong impact on the Classical world.

Page 535

Looking from the opposite direction, Romans similarly called all Greeks ‘Graikoi’, originally the name of a small community on the north-western Greek mainland – which is why people who call themselves ‘Hellenes’ are now known as Greeks in many languages.

Page 639

Understandably enough, the Behistun inscriptions also emphasise the legitimacy of Darius’ own royal descent, claiming that both he and Cyrus were members of a larger clan descended from one Achaemenes. This ancestor had not been mentioned by previous kings, but Darius was able to put that right: as he completed Cyrus’ building projects at Pasargadae, he forged inscriptions there declaring: ‘I am Cyrus, the king, the Achaemenid.’16 In case any doubt remained, Darius married all the surviving women of Cyrus’ family: two daughters and a granddaughter.17 At the same time, Darius rejected Cyrus’ policy of borrowing the royal titulature of older Mesopotamian empires, resurrecting instead a title used only very rarely in the past: he was the Xsayathiya Xsayathiyanam, ‘the King of Kings’. He also makes what may be the first explicit claim in world literature to an ethnic identity related to a specific place and bloodline, calling himself ‘an Aryan of Aryan stock’.18 He calls the Persian language in which he writes ‘Aryan’ as well.19 This isn’t the first time people talk about ‘Aryans’. In the late second-millennium Indian Rigveda, however, the word had meant something like ‘noble’. It was these texts that prompted nineteenth-century scholars to reimagine the Aryans as a primal group of aristocratic Indo-European speakers who had emigrated in the distant past from somewhere in central Asia into Europe, India and Iran.20 This idea was then reimagined again in the twentieth century, in combination with the old notion of a ‘barbarian’ contribution to indigenous European culture, as a genetic link between at least some Europeans and an ancient white master race of ‘Aryans’ with a homeland in Scandinavia or Germany.21 Despite these fantasies, the idea that Aryans were white is entirely modern, and the ancient Indian and Iranian texts that name them never link them to Europe at all.

Page 709

Herodotus’ description of the Persian postal service, inherited from the Assyrians but now run on horsepower, became the motto of the United States Postal Service: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’: cf. Herodotus 8.98, with Xenophon, Cyropedia 8.6.17–18.

Page 717

The Persian Wars have long held a special place in ideas of Western history: we have already seen the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill call the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490 bce more important for English history than the Battle of Hastings. Nowadays more people embrace a Greek defeat: the Battle of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartans confronted the Persian army in a hopeless last stand. The futile bravery of the Greeks is encapsulated in the response the Spartan king is supposed to have made to the Persian king’s demand that his men surrender their weapons: Molon labe – ‘Come and take them’.1 (He did.) This slogan is now associated with neo-fascist activism, featuring on flags carried in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, where some rioters wore replica Spartan helmets to evoke the idea of resistance to totalitarianism.2 This is nothing new: an idea of the Spartans as unusually ascetic, rigorous and martial appealed to German Nazis, who used reports of the Spartan education system as a model for the Hitler Youth.3

Note: Great

Page 731

These ‘ancient freemen’ were soldiers who fought for the honour of their native land: the 300 Spartans who fought at Thermopylae, and three Romans who held off an attack by Etrurian Clusium in the late sixth century long enough for the bridge on which they fought to be destroyed, cutting their city off and so saving it. It was a profoundly sad song, especially in 1972. Greek victories over Persia at Salamis and Plataea are still remembered today; defeats have been quietly forgotten, along with the fact that the Persians sacked Athens not once but twice. The war with Persia has become a tipping point in European history, when Greek courage, democracy and freedom saved the day, and saved civilisation. From the Persian perspective things look rather different. What are now called the ‘Persian Wars’ of 490 and 480–479 bce were punishment expeditions against a few rogue states in their western borderlands, little known and soon forgotten. The Great Kings did not aim to conquer Greece, nor did they target Greeks as a whole; indeed most Greek-speakers allied with them. And these wars were, in the end, a success for Persia – qualified at the time, but later confirmed.

Page 780

believe you came to accuse me of something, Peter. Am I right?’ And while it is my turn to hesitate: ‘Was it for the things we did, would you say? Or why we did them at all?’ he enquired in the kindliest of tones. ‘Why did I do them, which is more to the point. You were a loyal foot soldier. It wasn’t your job to ask why the sun rose every morning.’ I might have questioned this, but I feared to interrupt the flow. ‘For world peace, whatever that is? Yes, yes, of course. There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say.’ He fell quiet, only to rally more vigorously: ‘Or was it all in the great name of capitalism? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again.’

Page 826

Ancient religions have not been the only ones that used fiction to cement cooperation. In more recent times, each nation has created its own national mythology, while movements such as communism, fascism and liberalism fashioned elaborate self-reinforcing credos. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro and perhaps the most accomplished media-wizard of the modern age, allegedly explained his method succinctly by stating that ‘A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.’7 In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’8 Can any present-day fake-news pedlar improve on that?

Page 847

Bonaparte, we know, hoped to gain the acquiescence of the Egyptians by promising them a constitution, which (as Mr Kinglake truly said*) was like a sportsman hoping to fill his game-bag by promising the partridges a House of Commons.

Page 931

The Peloponnesian War between these rival cities began in 431 BCE and would last almost three decades. In 423 Darius II of Persia confirmed an alliance with Athens; in 411 he switched his favour to Sparta after the Athenians rashly decided to back a Persian rebel satrap in western Anatolia.45 Sparta’s eventual victory in 404 was built on Persian cash. Athens lost its empire, and Sparta formally conceded the cities of Ionia to Persian authority in the ‘King’s Peace’ of 387 that ended a second round of fighting between Athens, Sparta and their allies. This treaty was negotiated at Susa and guaranteed by Artaxerxes II. The Persian Wars may have been a draw, but the Peloponnesian War was won by the King of Kings.

Page 101

Nor is Europe ranked above Asia on this theory, or treated as a focus of identity. Even for Greek writers who accepted the new continental system with more grace than Herodotus, Greece itself often stood outside the model, between Asia and Europe and better than both. We see this most clearly in the claim made by the philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BCE that Greece occupies an admirable middle ground between Europe and Asia, and its inhabitants therefore avoid the character defects brought on by the undesirable climate of either: Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic stock, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent.40 This means that Italians could be as bad as Persians, if not worse. The fourth-century Greek author Theopompus decries decadence among ‘all the barbarians living in the west’: Italian men and women, he claims, both remove their hair with pitch or by shaving, and there are even businesses that provide this service. This is again not a natural character flaw, but one introduced by the environment: even Greeks in Italy, he reports, have learnt this habit from their new neighbours.41

Note: Our people are the best. Everyone else is terrible.

Page 124

Philip may seem a strange standard bearer for Hellenism, given Macedon’s old alliance with Persia.43 Links between Persian and Macedonian nobility had remained warm, to the extent that Philip’s son Alexander tried to marry the daughter of the Carian satrap Pixodaros.44 The Athenian politician Isocrates nonetheless begged him in 339 to lead the Greeks against Persia: it was a shame, he said, ‘to let Asia thrive more than Europe, and the barbarians prosper more than the Greeks’.45 Isocrates not only resurrects here the Persian distinction between Asia and Europe more than a century after the Athenians first to our knowledge made use of it, but goes further: he now associates Greece with Europe as well as Persia with Asia, and suggests for the first time that just as Greeks are superior to barbarians, Europe is superior to Asia.46 Not everyone agreed. For Isocrates’ Athenian contemporary the orator Demosthenes, Philip himself was ‘not only not Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honour, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, from where you can’t even buy a decent slave’.47 Nonetheless, in 337 the Macedonian king announced that the Hellenic League’s next project would be a war of revenge on Persia for its attacks on Greek cities and temples during the Persian Wars 150 years earlier: the exact inverse of the justification the Persians had used for their own invasion of Greece, and an argument that turned continental thinking decisively against its first inventors.48 Within a year however Philip had been assassinated, and it was his son Alexander III who would lead the Greeks east on a mission that collapsed the distinction between Asia and Europe completely.

Page 238

It is equally unlikely that Alexander’s own actions were based on high-flown philosophical ideas about the unity of humankind, let alone about justice.26 For him as for many since, cosmopolitanism was more of a convenient lifestyle choice than a political ideal, one that appropriated foreign customs, symbols and resources for personal benefit.27 Even today it takes unusual privilege to live like this, and enjoying the products and practices of other cultures is a by-product of power. As Alexander knew, being a citizen of the world works best for those who rule it.

Page 296

Later reports traced the introduction to Greek thought of the way of the moon to a fifth-century scholar named Kleostratos from Tenedos, an island off the Anatolian coast. By the beginning of the second century it had reached Alexandria.39 Greek scholars called it the zodiakos kyklos or ‘cycle of little animals’ and several of the signs of the zodiac still maintain their original Babylonian identities today: Taurus is the Babylonian Bull of Heaven, Gemini the Great Twins, Cancer the Crab. By the Hellenistic period Greek scholars had borrowed the names of planets as well as stars from Babylon: the Star of Ishtar became the Star of Aphrodite (Roman Venus); the Star of Nabu became the Star of Hermes (Roman Mercury).40

Page 206

Some 5,780,000 people who had reached college age within the last decade, many of whom were still working in the countryside, took the test that fall, but there were then only 273,000 slots at the universities. In 1977 and 1978, then, only some 5.8 percent of those who took the examinations could actually be enrolled.61 For the first time since the Communists ruled China, class background was not a factor in selecting those to be admitted to university. Enrollment was entirely based on merit as measured by examination scores.

Page 416

All this would have surprised authors writing during the Punic Wars themselves. From their perspective, the two cities looked very similar: not so much chalk and cheese as Oxford and Cambridge. Our best eyes on the era are those of the Peloponnesian statesman Polybius, who spent almost two decades as a political prisoner in Rome in the middle of the second century bce. As a foreign dignitary he was well treated, and he used the time to write an account of the meteoric rise of Rome for his shell-shocked fellow Greeks. In it he regularly draws parallels between Rome and Carthage: both cities were unusually well governed, for instance, because their constitutions combined aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, so that all decisions were made by the people best placed to make them.5 Polybius also remarks of the Romans themselves that they are unusually willing to substitute their own customs for better practice from elsewhere.6 This had been going on for some time. A treaty agreed between Rome and Carthage in the late sixth century BCE illustrates the relative strengths of these cities at the time. It is preserved for us in a later Greek translation of an archaic Latin document found in the Roman archives.7 The original must itself have been a translation from Phoenician, as the format is quite unlike other early Roman (and Greek) alliances: it was probably one of a series Carthage struck with different cities.8 It is traditionally dated to the year 509 bce, in which the Romans deposed their kings and established a republic, a good moment for the Carthaginians to clarify relations. In this treaty Carthage recognises Roman control of parts of Latium, but lists much larger domains of its own in which Romans have restricted trading rights: Sardinia, western Sicily and the African coast in both directions.9 There is no doubt which is the greater power, but over the following centuries the Romans learnt a lot from their new ally. For one thing, Carthaginian models may have played a larger role in the emergence of Roman republican institutions than is usually acknowledged.10 The two consuls who were now elected at Rome each year as joint chief officers of state, for instance, echo the two annual magistrates who ruled Carthage, who were also elected by a citizen assembly. In some contexts the Roman consuls are even called ‘judges’ – a direct translation of the word used at Carthage, shofetim.11 Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but another example has a whiff of a cover-up. Roman law was written down for the first time in the mid-fifth century, on twelve bronze tables. Later Roman historians claimed that the project involved an embassy to Athens to find out how such things were done. The problem is that the scraps that survive of the ‘Twelve Tables’ in quotations bear no resemblance to Greek law, or for that matter to later Roman law either.12 Instead, they are surprisingly close in form and approach to west Asian law codes like those of…

Note: I don’t recall reading this theory from Richard Miles or Mary Beard. Beard went into some detail on those tablets too. Is Quinn overreaching?

Page 544

The stakes were higher than anyone realised at the time, and for reasons outside their control. The Battle of Zama took place near the beginning of what is now often called the ‘Roman Climate Optimum’, or, more informally, the ‘Roman Warm Period’. From c. 250 bce to c. 150 ce the Mediterranean and neighbouring lands enjoyed unusually warm and stable weather, with reliable rainfall and temperatures similar to those recorded for the period 1880–1960 ce.37

Note: First time I’ve heard this too. Fascinating.

Page 559

Until now, few Greeks had taken any notice of the Romans, a lack of interest that was not reciprocated. Looking back in the first century bce the Roman poet Horace famously claimed that ‘captive Greece captured her savage conqueror, and introduced the arts to rustic Latium’, but the turn to Greek culture at Rome happened some time before the Roman conquest of Greece itself.39 It was the product not of Greek but of Punic wars: it can’t be a coincidence that Romans began to watch Greek-style plays at their religious festivals and funerary games in 240 bce, the year after their first victory against Carthage.40 Before this, Roman audiences had preferred improvised shows based on mime, farce and striptease to the scripted tragedy and comedy pioneered in fifth-century Athens. Now however their new status as a Mediterranean power prompted a quest for new cultural cues that itself produced the first Latin literature, in the form of translations from Greek epic and drama, and the first history of Rome, written in Greek by a senator named Fabius Pictor.41

Page 578

Rome’s cultural turn to the east involved art and architecture too. Third-century Italian temples look increasingly similar to Greek ones, and the same is true of the gods themselves: this is when the familiar Greek ‘pantheon’ or family of gods finally arrives in Rome, a concept in itself quite alien to central Italian traditions, and a number of old Roman gods acquire the distinctive characteristics of Greek counterparts.43 These new notions weren’t universally popular. Cicero could still imagine a Roman statesman in the 70s bce urging his peers to reject the use of Greek myths about the gods and their origins because they are distorting traditional Roman religion.44

Page 648

The land around Carthage became Rome’s first province in Africa, where the Romans once again borrowed the existing Carthaginian tax system.58 The rest of Carthage’s territory went to African cities that had defected to Rome, and to the kings of Numidia, who also inherited Carthage’s library. The Romans kept back one work by the agricultural writer Mago, to be translated into Latin by a team headed by a bilingual senator: they knew they still had things to learn from their old enemy.59 As Rome confronted Carthage, conquered Greece and built an empire on the ideas and traditions of their new subjects, they took the strategies of imperial appropriation that we have already seen in Persia and the Hellenistic kingdoms to new heights.

Page 684

The opera is rarely performed these days. It’s long – four hours or so – and the arias are tough. Three of the seven roles were written for castrati. The music can be stunning though, and the Austrian composer can be forgiven for demanding a lot from his performers and his audience: Mozart was fourteen years old when he wrote his second full-length opera in the grand Italian style. At the time Mithridates’ reign was a popular subject for performances of all kinds. Mozart’s Italian opera was only one of eighteen composed on the topic, and it was adapted from a French play by Jean Racine that had been performed at Versailles in 1674 for Louis XIV. The Sun King was a great admirer of the Pontic monarch.1 That Mithridates of Pontus and his neighbours in Bithynia, Cappadocia and Armenia are no longer household names is due not only to the narrow focus of ‘ancient’ history today on the Greco-Roman world, but also to the sources we have for these kings. Their stories do not survive in the works of the canonical Classical authors that have formed the basis since the late eighteenth century of a curriculum designed to teach wealthy young men (for the most part) how to read and write ‘good’ Greek and Latin prose.2 Instead, we owe them to longer, later, messier and often much funnier works of history and biography that were widely read in translation for centuries before the invention of classics consigned them to the margins. Greek and Roman authors had wider horizons than many of their modern students, and these stories illuminate the world in which Rome now operated as it extended its territorial empire beyond the Mediterranean, first to the east and then to the west. They also highlight the disadvantages of an increasingly connected world, especially for the less powerful, which is visible above all in the level of resistance to Roman conquest in the first century bce.

Note: I think I agree with the author. While Greeks and Romans themselves were influenced by everyone, modern people think only virgil, cicero, aristotle and gang were any good.

Page 995

According to this legend Rome was from the start a city built on the twin strengths of immigration and imperial conquest. And this fitted in with another popular story about the foundation of Rome that had appeared even earlier, locating Rome in the expanding imaginary world of the Trojan War and ascribing its foundation to Aeneas, prince of Troy.8

Page 006

Such stories tell us nothing about Rome’s real beginnings, but they do reveal that later writers saw the city’s origins as mixed, and Roman society as not only open to but dependent upon outsiders.10 In the case of Aeneas the outsider is the founder. In the case of Romulus, it is the rest of the population. These stories also help to explain the nature of Roman identity. Being ‘Roman’ was never an ethnic concept, but one based on citizenship, which could be earned by service to the state – or, for the enslaved, to its citizens.11 This approach was very different to that taken in fifth-century Athens, for instance, where outsiders were unwelcome in the citizen body. One relevant difference is that real power was always restricted at Rome to a much smaller political class. They helped to justify Roman empire too: if Romans came from anywhere, everywhere belonged to Rome.

Page 104

Or we could head across the river to a new amphitheatre built especially to hold sea battles, where 3,000 gladiators in Greek and Persian costume are re-enacting the Battle of Salamis.34 The Persians stand in of course for Parthians.

Note: It makes sense that they’d replay that conflict, just as the English and Dutch did with the Punic wars

Page 113

The crocodiles aren’t the only foreigners we’ll see today. As in the Assyrian empire a millennium before, the extension of Roman power brought with it the movement of people, both voluntary and enforced, and plenty of them moved to Rome itself.36 Some had no choice in the matter: out of a total population of around a million people in the Augustan city, perhaps 300,000 were enslaved.37 There were however no restrictions, to our knowledge, on migration to the city, and in the 40s ce the philosopher Seneca claimed that the majority of the population were migrants; he himself came from Córdoba in Spain.38 Overall, a genome study of 127 individuals buried at twenty-nine different sites in and around Rome in the first to third centuries ce shows a very substantial shift in ancestry towards the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia.

Page 131

We shouldn’t exaggerate mobility in the Roman empire. People who moved generally moved relatively short distances. Women almost never moved any significant distance alone. People moved back and forth as well: seasonal migration would have been a significant phenomenon within Italy, especially during the summers and when major building projects attracted labourers to Rome and other big cities.42 At the same time, migration was not limited to the metropolis or even to Italy. It brought people from all over the empire and beyond to destinations as far as distant Britain.43*

Page 176

London remained a commercial centre as it became a political one, and later tombstones commemorate merchants from Antioch and Athens, and a ‘sailor’ (moritix) from Gaul.54 Migration occurred at all levels of society: lead isotopes preserved in the teeth of a very wealthy woman buried at Spitalfields may have come from the city of Rome itself.55 Studies of oxygen isotopes, which preserve the composition of the water that people drank as children, suggest that nineteen out of twenty-two people buried in a Southwark cemetery between the second and fourth century ce came from a Mediterranean-like climate.56 Analysis of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes meanwhile, which reflect recent diet, show that the same individuals had all been resident in London for years. This proportion of immigrants is unusual even in a British context, and they may have gathered in this district south of the river.

Page 195

Augustus had overseen a profound reorganisation of Rome’s military structures that turned a citizen militia into a professional standing army with standard pay, conditions and a sixteen-year term. It was open both to Roman citizens, who made up its legions, and to non-citizen ‘auxiliaries’, who served in separate units but could expect Roman citizenship on discharge from long service, and perhaps some land in a veteran colony as well.

Note: First fact I know not to be true. Marius did this first, not Augustus. Although Augustus did reform military service in many ways as well.

Page 201

Three Roman citizen legions were permanently stationed in Britain, along with about seventy-five auxiliary units, and three Roman colonies were established for veteran soldiers on the sites of old forts as the army moved north, at Colchester, Gloucester and Lincoln.60 Inscriptions at Britain’s northern border forts record cohorts from modern France, Basque-speaking Spain and the Balkan mountains, as well as a detachment of archers from Syria and a unit of Mauretanians.61

Note: It reminds me of the Indian Army policy to station region based units far from their home. So Punjab regiment being stationed in Jharkhand and Rajputana Rifles in Delhi etc.

Page 216

The Roman ‘emperor’ is a modern invention, with misleading connotations of formal power. It is confusing too, giving us two different ‘Roman empires’, one the actual empire built up during the Roman republican period, the other a shorthand for the period of monarchic government that followed it. In antiquity Augustus and his successors never used the military honorific imperator (‘commander’) to describe their political position, and the label augustus focused attention on the charisma of the individual, not the people he ruled. Strictly speaking I should refer throughout the rest of this book to the Roman ‘augustus’, if to do so would not distract unnecessarily from the story I want to tell.

Note: I have doubts about this

Page 282

In 1897 the Germans annexed the eastern naval base of Qingdao, where they established the brewery that still produces Tsingtao beer.

Note: Cool fun fact!

Page 291

Richthofen’s ‘Silk Road’ was however based on a misunderstanding: there is no suggestion in ancient sources that Marinos was recording a regular overland trade route. Indeed, there is every indication that his informants’ journey across central Asia was extremely unusual: these Macedonian merchants were of interest to Marinos precisely because they could provide him with unique information on routes and distances in the far east of Asia. Overland routes across Asia did exist, encouraged by the unification of large parts of India and China in the third century bce under the Mauryan and Qin empires respectively.5 They were highways of empire, however, not trade, and they rarely joined up.6 At the western end travel between the Parthian and Roman empires was frequently disrupted by friction on the border between them, where local nomadic populations had taken advantage of the collapse of Seleucid power in the late first millennium bce to take control of the Euphrates Valley.7 The ancient trade route along the Euphrates from the Mediterranean to the Gulf was now both dangerous and expensive for commercial travellers, subject to taxation by multiple small fiefdoms along the way.

Note: What she’s saying makes sense. But it does seem to contradict a lot of other scholarship.

Page 684

By now the Roman imperial economy depended heavily on African agriculture, manufacturing and trade, much of which was in the hands of Africans themselves. At the same time, local landowners attained great power and status in Rome: by the 180s ce nearly a third of Roman senators were of African origin.33

Page 935

Scholars have agreed since the sixth century that the final ‘fall of Rome’ to the barbarians should be dated to 476 ce, and that it was a catastrophe.32 It has become a landmark in the traditional story of Western Civilisation, marking the end of its first phase, and the beginning of a dark and dangerous period of medieval history before the hardy scholars of the Italian Renaissance shone a torch back through the gloom. This is again, however, civilisational myth-making. The Roman state didn’t fall in 476. Things were changing in the western Roman provinces, leading to different ways of life and government. But the Roman empire itself had already been based for a century at Constantinople, and it survived there until 1453. What happened in 476 was an exchange of power between men with northern roots that left Constantinople formally in charge. Odoacer was a Hunnic officer in the Roman army when he deposed the last western Augustus, Romulus, whose own family came from Pannonia. He took control of Italy in the name of the eastern Augustus, himself an Isaurian chieftain called Zeno who had served in his predecessor’s bodyguard and married his daughter. Odoacer ruled from Ravenna as ‘king’, but his gold coinage depicted Zeno, with his own portrait relegated to the silver. The consuls he appointed were approved by the Roman senate.

Page 982

Across western Europe these new administrations were forces for stability and calm after a period of great disorder, and then during one of increasing isolation. From the fifth century onwards the trans-Mediterranean economy withered away, maritime traffic decreased dramatically, factories were abandoned and the standard of living dropped across the old Roman west: houses became huts, pottery was now handmade, farms appeared in cities. We might see some of this in terms of simplification rather than collapse. People no longer needed surplus cash to support Roman taxation and the Roman army. Conversely, opportunities for trade or mercenary service with the Romans dried up. But climate change was a serious factor as well.40 As the Roman Warm Period receded, the weather became less predictable. Analyses of alluvial deposits in the Rhône Valley suggest a dramatic increase in rainfall from the late fourth century, and there is evidence for the advance of Alpine glaciers from the late third: Europe was becoming much wetter and colder in this era, and peasant farmers in particular will have suffered badly. In this light, the regionalisation of the late antique west starts to look less like passive decline than a sensible, forward-thinking reaction to an unpleasant turn of events.

Page 203

Abu Bakr (r. 632–4) completed the unification of Arabia. With raiding no longer an option in home territory, Caliph Umar (r. 634–44) took the Levant, including Jerusalem, from the Roman emperor. The Muslims (‘those who submit’) took over the existing administration, but imposed their own taxation regime on war booty, the wealthy and non-Muslims. Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians were allocated to a special category of dhimmi, or ‘protected person’, who paid a poll tax in return for political and religious toleration.41 The new rulers did not care for the most part what religion their subjects practised, as long as they paid their taxes; indeed, there was no benefit to the Caliphate in conversion, since non-Muslims paid more taxes. Christians, Jews and Muslims all worshipped the same God of Abraham, as far as Muslims were concerned, and Jews were now allowed to live in Jerusalem for the first time since the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce.

Page 303

The Ummayad regime pursued for the most part a policy of religious toleration that modern scholars have called convivencia. Al-Andalus had churches and synagogues as well as mosques and, as in the Levant, Jews and Christians were in general left to practise their rites as they wished. We shouldn’t be too romantic about this: the policy ensured a healthy return from taxes on non-Muslims, and it kept them at a reassuring distance from the Islamic religious and social community.6 No new churches were built in Iberia, the ringing of bells was forbidden and blasphemy against Islam was rewarded with decapitation. As in the east there was little pressure on anyone to convert, but intermarriage did its work, as did the attractions of taking a full part in the benefits of empire. With no extensive programme of settlement, therefore, most Muslims in al-Andalus were of local descent.7 All this made for lively exchange, especially in the arts. Arabic secular poetry thrived in Iberia, lively and experimental, mixing genres and registers, and often using colloquial forms of Arabic and other languages. The ninth-century Córdoban poet Paul Alvarus wrote with disapproval that his fellow Christians ‘love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs’, claiming that for every one who could write basic Latin there were a thousand with elegant Arabic.8

Page 423

One of these burials was excavated intact in 1939 after Tudor grave robbers missed it by a whisker; the best candidate for its occupant is Raedwald of the Wuffinga dynasty, king of East Anglia from c. 599 to 624. He is buried in a chamber set inside a twenty-seven-metre wooden boat that the mourners must have dragged up the steep slope. The acidic soil has now eaten it away, like the body inside, but the vessel is recognisable by its surviving iron rivets. The grave also contains drinking horns taken from the aurochs that still patrolled Scandinavia and central Europe, a beautiful silver bucket from Constantinople engraved with a lion hunt, a Coptic bowl from Egypt and metalwork decorated with garnets from India or Sri Lanka. Even the bitumen used to waterproof the ship must have been imported from Asia. Through the North Sea, the rulers of these small English kingdoms were already part of a very large world to the east.

Page 463

In the east of England viking place names are still common: a -by is a settlement; a -thorp is a dependent settlement; a -thwaite is a meadow or clearing.32 The legacy of the Danelaw is still clearly identifiable in wider English language and culture as well: the days of the week are named after Norse gods, and all sorts of English words are of Scandinavian origin, including ‘ill’, ‘sky’ and ‘window’.

Page 499

Marriages still took place with the court at Constantinople, and with Muslim courts as well: almost all the tenth-century emirs of al-Andalus had blond hair and blue eyes because their mothers came from northern Spain or Gaul. Abd al-Rahman III resorted to dyeing his beard black to emphasise his Arab heritage.

Page 532

In the eighth century ce the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad.1 This project started with the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur (‘the Conqueror’, r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations of important scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek and Syriac (a late form of Aramaic), and came into its own under al-Ma’mun (‘the Trusted One’, r. 813–33). The operation was lavishly funded by the caliph himself, as well as by members of his household, courtiers, merchants, bankers and military leaders. It reflects the prosperity of the era, as the Abbasids created a powerful centralised government based on a land tax, which as conversion became more common they pragmatically extended to Muslims as well as non-Muslims.2 The most important thing to understand about what is often now called the ‘Translation Movement’ is that it wasn’t primarily about translation. It was part of a wider commitment by Islamic scholars and political leaders to scientific investigation that also saw caliphs commission new works of science, geography, poetry, history and medicine. It is well known that classic works of Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic before they were translated into other European languages – including Latin. What is less well known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them. As links around the Mediterranean continued to increase, that Arabic scholarship began to reach western Europe, and to change the way people there thought.

Note: I wish everyone, but especially the people who think Islam is inherently backward and the anti-science Muslims would learn about this.

Page 554

The benefits for the Abbasid caliphs of engaging with Iranian traditions were not purely intellectual. It helped them establish roots for themselves in the old Sasanian territory of Mesopotamia that they now occupied; in a similar spirit they built Baghdad itself in 762 in the circular form characteristic of Sasanian cities. Incorporating the work of Greek thinkers into the Arabic canon was by contrast a declaration of cultural hegemony over the rump Roman empire at Constantinople, where older learning had been set aside in favour of Christian genres from sermons to saints’ lives, and where ancient science and philosophy now mouldered in archives and monasteries.5

Note: Dark ages for the Christians.

Page 619

The real legacy of the Arabic translations is the impetus they gave to further thought. As the Syriac patriarch Barhebraeus summed it up in the thirteenth century ce: there arose among [the Arabs] philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians, who surpassed all the ancients in subtlety of understanding. While they build on no foundations other than those of the Greeks, they constructed greater scientific edifices by means of a more elegant style and more studious researches, with the result that, although they had received the wisdom from us through translators … now we find it necessary to seek wisdom from them.22 His story is too neat: Greek texts were far from the only inspiration for Arabic science. But as western European monks and nuns laboriously copied Latin manuscripts in candlelit monasteries, the manipulation, criticism and sometimes outright rejection of foreign works by intellectuals working in the Islamic world catalysed a scientific revolution.23

Page 645

Indian mathematics meanwhile bequeathed to western Eurasia the numerals that are now called ‘Arabic’. Even in Arabic, however, which is otherwise written from right to left, these numerals are still written left to right as they once were in Sanskrit.

Note: Damn I never thought of that

Page 714

This is when Arabic science began to cross over into Christian Europe, above all in Catalonia, a borderland of Christian kingdoms. Here fashionable monastics could acquaint themselves with scientific developments in Córdoba, acquiring for example Latin accounts of Arabic astronomy as well as guides to the construction of the astrolabe.34 It wasn’t just the Greek texts that scholars were after, it was the scientific advances Arab scholars had built on them – and much else. From about 975 ce Latin manuscripts written in Spain begin to use Indian numerals.35 Indian chess, which had reached Islamic Iberia by the ninth century, is found in Catalonia by the tenth and the north Atlantic islands by the twelfth.36

Note: The enrichment of Europe

Page 804

The First Crusade was fought in the name of Christianity, ‘against the enemies of the Christian name’, but those enemies were vaguely construed: on their way to Anatolia expedition members massacred large numbers of Jews in the Rhineland.3 When they reached the shores of Asia the city of Nicaea surrendered to Alexios, and the Crusaders themselves marched on across Anatolia to capture Antioch in 1098. Then they carried the fight south to Jerusalem, took the city in July 1099 and massacred both the Jewish and Muslim populations.

Page 824

However much the Crusades may look like Holy War between opposing cultures, the Crusader era provides a very different perspective from that of modern civilisational thinking, the idea that separate and enduring cultures map on to different geographical regions: this is a world where culture has no natural location. At the same time contact, even between enemies, leads to entanglement, and the expansion of Christian rule in all directions led paradoxically to closer economic and cultural encounters over the twelfth century between Christians, Muslims and Jews at all social levels.

Note: This was the perspective missing from the Crusades Book

Page 828

Sea routes around the Mediterranean became denser and more complex as ships from Christian ports ferried warriors and pilgrims to and from the newly accessible Holy Land, and brought back from Islamic Egypt silk and spices, linen and paper. Words that entered Romance languages from Arabic in this era reflect the commercial nature of the connections involved: douane/dogana, tariff, traffic, risk, bazaar, cheque.7

Note: Love some etymology

Page 849

Meanwhile, a new breed of Tuscan bankers built on the expertise in commercial finance developed by Jewish merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Other technologies came west too, from glassmaking to glazed pottery.13 And tastes converged in a literal sense, as traders and Crusaders returned to Europe with a new appreciation for sugar, a Sanskrit word that reached European languages through Arabic. This reflected the earlier role of the Caliphate in bringing Indian sugarcane west to its own territories and above all to Egypt, which dominated the sugar trade until the late middle ages.14

Page 913

Although the new king made Sicily another centre for Latin translation from both Greek and Arabic, different literary genres continued to be written on the island in the different languages traditional to them: Greek was for liturgy, Latin for history and Arabic for poetry.24 Arabic was still the principal language of science as well, and Roger invited Arabic-speaking philosophers, doctors, mathematicians and poets to his court.

Page 946

Not all his information is reliable: his Norwegians for instance have no necks and live inside trees. All the same, the Book of Roger was by far the most sophisticated work of both cartography and human geography to date, building on mathematical Islamic mapping that was itself based on an Alexandrian Greek tradition to create an Arabic product in honour of a Norman king.

Note: How sure are we that he’s wrong about Norwegians?

Page 980

This trend towards cultural isolation in Europe is acknowledged around 1170 in the work of the Old French poet Chrétien de Troyes, whose Arthurian romances celebrate the social practices known as chivalry, from the French chevalrie or ‘cavalry’: courtesy, generosity and worldly accomplishments.36* He notes in the prologue to his romantic tale of the knight Cligès who falls in love with his uncle’s wife that ‘our books teach us … that Greece first had renown in chivalry and knowledge. Then came chivalry to Rome, and the whole of knowledge, which has now come into France. God grant that she may stay there.’37 Here, as in modern civilisational thinking, a culture can change its name and even within limits its location, but not its nature. Chrétien’s own views may have been more subtle: he goes on to make numerous references throughout the text to cities of Arab learning.

Note: Pretty much sums up the modern view

Page 996

As Latin Christendom was increasingly confined to Europe, it became increasingly powerful there, and increasingly intolerant of difference. In 1215 the pope convoked a general Church Council – ‘Lateran IV’ – that established clear and common criteria, beyond baptism, for membership of the Christian community: Christians should confess their sins to a priest at least once a year and take the Eucharist at least at Easter.40 It also barred Jews from public office and ordered that Jews and Muslims be distinguished from Christians by their dress; in 1218 Jews in England were legally obliged to wear a special badge.

Page 046

Over time the syllabus also focused increasingly on theological, scientific and philosophical training at the expense of the ‘lower’ arts. Al-Farabi’s description of an ideal scholarly curriculum was soon available in multiple Latin translations, and by the early thirteenth century its reading list of appropriate Greek and Arabic authorities was being incorporated into the standard European syllabus.51 Students read the new Muslim and Jewish scholarship alongside advanced ancient Greek works, all translated from Arabic into Latin – works like Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics, al-Khwarizmi’s Algebra, Euclid’s Elements of Mathematics, Ptolemy of Alexandria’s Almagest and Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, itself an integration of Greco-Roman and Islamic ideas that remained an important textbook on medicine from India to England until the nineteenth century.52 Aristotle became particularly popular in the thirteenth century, alongside his Arabic commentators, men like the twelfth-century Muslim Córdoban scholar Ibn Rushd (1126–98), known north of the Pyrenees as Averroes.

Page 062

The intellectual world of thirteenth-century western Europe is symbolised above all by the work of an Italian monk from Aquino named Thomas who studied at the University of Paris in the 1240s and went on to write works of philosophy and theology inspired by Ibn Rushd and his Jewish contemporary Moses ben Maimon, better known to Christian scholars as Maimonides. Thomas Aquinas drew on ancient Greek ideas, later Arabic commentary and the principles of his own theological tradition – just as the scholars of Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba had done before him.

Page 118

We are still a long way from modern civilisational thinking, but it is now becoming possible to carve off Christian Europe from the world.

Page 189

The limits of Mongol territory were largely dictated by the land, and in particular the availability of pasture: this army was almost entirely made up of cavalry and commanded half the horses in the world, with several replacements available to each soldier.

Page 276

In the Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna, a wise man called Bidpai counsels a tyrannical and self-indulgent Indian king with a series of educational fables. The first introduces a pair of jackals called Kalila and Dimna, brothers who serve at the court of a lion king. The ambitious Dimna becomes jealous of the king’s friendship with a bull named Schanzabeh. Against Kalila’s advice, he persuades the lion that Schanzabeh is plotting against him and should be killed, while persuading the bull that the lion intends to eat him. As a result the lion kills the bull and is badly wounded himself: an illustration of the danger of allowing a dishonest confidant to come between friends.

Note: I’ve read this in Amar Chitra katha

Page 287

Kalila wa-Dimna was translated into Greek in the early twelfth century, but it became known in western Europe through the Arabic tradition. In 1251 for instance it was one of the texts selected by Alfonso X ‘the Wise’ of Christian Castile for translation from Arabic into the local vernacular to raise the status of Castilian as a literary language, along with works on astronomy, optics, clockmaking, magic and veterinary science, and the rules of chess and backgammon.35

Note: I like learning about how dialects became “standard”.

Page 483

When plague arrived in Catalonia in the spring of 1348, for instance, twenty Jews were killed in the port of Barcelona, eighteen at Cervera and 300 at Tàrrega.20 Jews were then expelled from the whole of Hungary in 1360, from the whole of Austria in 1420, and they were massacred on Mallorca in 1435.

Page 489

The roots of what nineteenth-century scholars would label the ‘Renaissance’ lie in the Italian studia humanitatis. Humanism was a new educational curriculum that emphasised literary and historical studies over the science, medicine and law prized in medieval universities and adopted ancient pagans as models and guides.21 One of its early champions was Francesco Petrarca, the obsessive scholar, collector and poet from Arezzo in Tuscany to whom we owe the first glimmerings of a notion of an era of ‘darkness’ between the glories of the Classical world and their Italian rebirth.22 This reversed the standard Christian metaphor of the light of Christ that had finally illuminated a path out of the errors of pagan antiquity. In the middle of the fourteenth century it’s easy to understand why even a staunch Catholic like Petrarch might look for hope elsewhere. His son Giovanni died of the plague in 1361, at the age of twenty-four. Petrarch was also unusually keen both on the language of ‘Europe’ and on the notion of local roots to cultural tradition.23 For him and his fellow humanists in the fourteenth century antiquity meant the art and letters of ancient Rome, not the Greek science that had captivated earlier scholars via Arabic and then Latin translations.24 It was only in the following century that Greek literary manuscripts preserved in eastern Mediterranean cities began to arrive in western Europe in any number, and were finally translated by the few scholars who knew the language. Other ancient traditions from Egypt to Etruria also attracted attention in this era, but without the ability to read the languages scholars were unable to get much beyond antiquarian fascination. And the Christian humanists ignored entirely the literature and learning of the Islamic world.

Page 541

Despite this nostalgia for the pre-Reconquista culture, Europeans in general take little interest now in contemporary learning from beyond the Mediterranean, from advances in infinite-series calculus by fourteenth-century mathematicians in Kerala to the great work of universal history begun by the north African polymath Ibn Khaldun in 1377.34 Nor did they exploit new inventions. Coffee was first brewed in Yemen around 1400 by boiling beans from the Ethiopian ‘arabica’ plant, but although both coffee and coffee houses spread quickly around the Muslim world, the drink arrived in Christian ports only around 1600, and the first coffee house opened in Venice in 1615.35*

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The ‘Age of Exploration’, when western Europe first became the crossroads of world commerce linking new Atlantic routes to the Americas and India, is often celebrated as an important moment of connection between the world and the West. It is seen as a period of contact and convergence between civilisations that had developed until then in separate spheres.1 And there’s no doubt that the entanglement of cultures and economies intensified dramatically over the following centuries, as new ships crossed new seas to create the first truly global era.2 But I have argued throughout this book that exchange between people from different places and cultures is a much older story – indeed, that without it there wouldn’t be much of a story at all. Conversation, commerce and theft, sex, war and enslavement had for millennia been engines of change, and they all helped create what we now call the West.

Page 742

fascination with the foreign past continued: the first English translation of Kalila wa-Dimna was published in 1570 by Sir Thomas North, whose translations of Plutarch inspired several of Shakespeare’s plays. As an editor put it in 1888, it was ‘the English version of an Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of a Latin version of a Hebrew translation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi version of the Indian original’.6

Note: Impressive

Page 755

These seeds of civilisational thinking continued to germinate: the increasing popularity of the language of ‘Europe’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflects continued fear of the Turkish empire to the east and new distaste for the ‘savages’ encountered further west.8 By 1748 Montesquieu could contrast the ‘genius for liberty’ in Europe’s states with despotic Asia’s ‘spirit of servitude’.9

Note: Impressive that he would talk about liberty in Europe in 1748 but even then it is relative. Western European peasantry was better off compared to say, Russian peasants. Presumably peasants in turkey were similar.

Page 759

But it was only in the nineteenth century that scholars mapped shared cultures on to specific geographies that emerged and developed in isolation from each other. This is when they fused ideas of Europe, East and West, reinforced them with notions of civilisations and racial hierarchy, and invented ‘Western Civilisation’. The question we now face is not whether Western Civilisation is bad or good, but whether civilisational thinking helps explain much of anything at all. Understanding societies in terms of lonely trees and isolated islands is 200 years out of date and it is demonstrably, historically, wrong. It is time to find new ways to organise our common world.

Note: Agree, but I feel like the racists I encounter online aren’t going to be reading this book.

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