Saturday, June 10, 2017
Western Civilization does not stand apart from the rest of the world
RICHARD MILES – ANCIENT WORLDS, THE
SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION – ALLEN LANE – 2010
It is said on the front cover: this book only concerns
Western civilization, and thus it is Europe-centered and it would be wrong to
blame the author for it. Yet when he says “the story begins six thousand years
ago,” first I would have preferred “began,” and second six thousand years ago
(4,000 BCE) where did these people who were going to develop what we call today
Western civilization come from? What language or languages did they speak?
Those are not the first inhabitants of Europe since Europe was the target of a
vast Homo Sapiens migration sometime around 45,000 years ago, or even somewhat
earlier. These first settlers are part of the Western civilization since they
represent 75% of European DNA. Where did these old Europeans come from? What
languages did they speak? What was their civilization?
But this obsolescence is quite evident when he writes in
2010: “Homo Sapiens has existed for about 160,000 years, civilization for about
6,000 years” or “Western civilization is built on the bedrock of ancient Greece,
and Rome has remained an extraordinary powerful [idea].” In 2010 researchers
were speaking of at least 250,000 years ago for the emergence of Homo Sapiens
in Africa. Now we know things are even trickier since archaeologists have just
found Homo Sapiens remains in Morocco that are 300,000 years old. The author
could not know that in 2010 but his very conservative evaluation then is
definitely at least 100,000 years short. And his 6,000 years ago for the birth
of Western civilization attaches this birth to the invention of writing. This
is a very archaic vision of history that only starts with writing. Archaic and
absurd. The main tool of the emergence of Homo Sapiens is that some physical
and physiological mutations attached to their status of bipedal long distance
fast runners endowed this species with enhanced speaking characteristics and
Homo Sapiens invented articulated language, which opened them to the vast
competence of conceptualization and thus opened the door to religion,
technology, science, philosophy, hence mental constructions and thinking. But
that would go against the beliefs of creationists and the author keeps some
door unopened so that these creationists can inject their own beliefs in what
they are being told.
And by the way how could Homo Sapiens have invented writing
if articulated language did not exist in the first place? The invention and
development of articulated language is the fundamental tool of the emergence of
Homo Sapiens that developed his mind, a construct of the brain confronted to
real experience in the world, along and in proportion with the development of
this very articulated language, and that means we cannot study the emergence of
any particular human civilization if we do not found this study on the
phylogeny of language and then on the various migrations in and out of Africa.
If we do not consider what I said here then we cannot explain at all why this
Western civilization is centered on essentially Indo-European languages, and
not their cousins, Indo-Aryan languages, and certainly not Semitic languages
(in spite of the importance of Judaism in this Western civilization), nor
isolating character languages of the vast Asian family that includes among
others Chinese, Tibetan, South East Asian languages, Japanese, etc., nor
agglutinative Turkic languages in spite of the fact the first European Homo
Sapiens population only spoke these Turkic agglutinative languages.
The final opening remark I want to make here is that European
Indo-European languages developed along two lines, and two migrations from
Armenian to Greek and then the whole
Mediterranean Sea giving rise to romance languages, and from The Middle East
(Iran and Mesopotamia, Farsi and Kurdish) through the Caucasus (Ossetic is a
language left behind) and into the vast central European plains right through
to Ireland with three linguistic families developing from this migration,
Germanic languages, Slav languages and Celtic languages. If the author had
started from this he would not have told us a “story” but he would have been
able to tell us about human history in Europe, nearly all European populations
coming from the Middle East, first something like 30,000 years before the peak
of the Ice Age and then some time after the Ice Age when the water started to
rise around 17,000 BCE, a long and slow process that brings a minority
population (25% of European DNA) that integrates the local population (75% of European
DNA): both integrate the local population in the new culture the Indo-Europeans
were bringing, and integrate the Indo-Europeans into the local population to
the point of them shifting languages altogether.
This being said I will now go back to the book’s starting
point which is the Bronze Age and the invention of agriculture. “Agriculture
predates the first cities by thousands of years, but by about 5300 BC farming
techniques became more intensive, maximizing food production.” (page 5) He
justly speaks of “division of labor” but he does not consider the oldest and
first division of labor, the one imposed by the development of Homo Sapiens
into a migrating species, the fact that women were supposed to be pregnant
every eighteen months and from the age of thirteen onward always had a child in
their womb, a child on their hip and children all around to be able to bring to
procreation age at least three viable children. This leads us today to the
observation that this first division of labor also endowed women with the
ability to paint the rock face of the caves they lived in all over the world at
about the same time and the responsibility for this mental spiritual function
in their communities, hence the religious dimension of their civilization. He would
have understood then that the division of labor he speaks of can only come
after the first steps of some more intensive productive activity has started to
develop because men as well as women had to be able to spare some working time,
and energy, to start building cities like Gobekli Tepe in today’s Turkey
asserted as existing in 9,500 BCE. Erected monumental stones, carved with all
sorts of animals, and fulfilling three functions: religious (rituals),
commercial and survival (granary and storage) and burial (taking care of the
dead). We could and should also speak of living together inside this protected
construction, day and night, though they could have kept their living quarters
outside and in light temporary or transient contraptions. The author is right
to say agriculture predated the building of the cities, but he starts too late.
It started at least 6,000 years earlier. Then the concept of intensification
for agriculture could be replaced by the concept of slow development leading to
some quantitative and qualitative stage forward due to the connection of water
management techniques (irrigation and drainage); selection of more productive
seeds due to crossing and genetic sorting out; and better tools used by a
better organized population which leads to the invention of what will become
“slavery” and originally was only a work organization that enabled flexibility
and intensity in the various tasks to be performed with agriculture, and
herding that develops at the same time. Gobekli Tepe is part of our European
heritage, be it only because their round pattern of erected stones was used in
Europe by many branches of Indo-European people, like the Celts (Stonehenge for
example in the British Isles, and various stone circles like Cromlechs on the
continent). Such circle constructions can even be thought universal.
But he missed the shift from the women’s ritualistic
function in pre-agricultural society to the entirely male religious apparatus
that was to develop with Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three religions
arising in the Middle East after the inception of agriculture and herding, and
the development of agricultural and urban servitude. He indicates the triad of
gods and goddesses in the old Sumerian tradition (the inventors of writing) but
does not exploit it: An, the god of heaven; Ki, the goddess of earth; and Enki,
the god of fresh water. This “pagan” trilogy was rejected by Judaism with their
male “god and his spirit” in Genesis, hence a dual vision, the earth “adama”
being the root giving birth to the first man Adam, obviously derived from the
earth itself. Christianity reinstated the ternary nature of god with the Holy
Trinity, all entirely male, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Islam
concentrated the concept of God to a single unitary being, God himself, with
only a Prophet next to that God, a Prophet that does not preach but only
provides the believers with the words of God himself. If he had considered such
elements he would have understood the survival in Europe, in all European traditions,
of the triple goddess, the feminine dominance in pre-agricultural religion
being reduced to the very powerful but nevertheless marginal triple goddess.
That would have enabled him to show how it is
embodied in the Greek tradition and in other traditions like the Germanic
tradition (Ainbet, Gwerbet and Wilbet, often associated to three symbols like
in “Margaret with the worm, Barbara with the tower, Catherine with the wheel,
those are the holy three girls,” the worm in the earth, the tower to the sky
and the wheel to spin the thread of life on earth). But this ternary nature of
the female goddess is universal and in religious practices of the Bronze and
Iron ages the triad of gods and goddesses are either some male and some female,
or like in Hinduism the three basic gods are, at least two of them,
hermaphrodite, either male or female.
Richard Miles misses a lot
along that line including what it becomes in Shakespeare: The Triple Goddess or
the Thrice-Crowned Goddess on one hand in the Greek tradition, and the three
weird sisters, the three witches who are a downgraded form of the Germanic and
Celtic tradition. But that would have opened him on a universal development of
civilization and that universal development would have led him to considering
the fact that the Chinese Emperors are fully established with the Yellow
Emperor (2697-2597 BCE) at the time of his story of conquest and building of
evanescent empires before the Roman Empire, the only one that lasted, which
means the evolution of humanity towards some centralized civilization based on
cities of some sort, themselves based on the emergence of agriculture and
herding is universal and in fact more advanced in East Asia than in the Middle
East and of course Europe. By locking himself in what he calls “Western
civilization” the author misses the most important element: Homo Sapiens as a
species after the Ice Age when the migrations out of Africa are finished and
replaced by migrations outside Africa goes through all over the world a process
of development that leads to agriculture, herding and urban settlements. That
has to do with the climate change brought by the end of the Ice Age and by the
particular competence of Homo Sapiens based on his control of articulated
language: to sense, to perceive, to name, to experiment, to speculate, to
conceptualize. This complex shift from sensing with sensorial senses to
conceptualizing with mind and language is purely human and is universal because
all humans control the tool for it, articulated language that they develop as
much as it enables them to develop.
Then he does not understand
the value of the first writing system which is more or less a syllabary writing
system that is in no way representing anything, pure abstract and arbitrary
symbols dictated by the writing tool of the stylus. And he does not understand
the Phoenician alphabet is not a real alphabet since it is only consonantal
with one vowel, aleph when it is at the initial of a word. Otherwise vowels are
not written since Phoenician is a consonantal Semitic language, like Akkadian
by the way, showing that Sumerian is not because it has many words reduced to
one vowel and these vowel words are written as such. These letters of the
Phoenician consonantal alphabet are representative of objects stylized in the
letters. That would have then enabled him to develop the great invention of the
Greeks who actually devised the first consonantal and vocalic alphabet of
Indo-European languages. He could at the same time have made a note about the isolating
character languages of Eastern Asia. He could also have insisted on old Celtic
Ogham alphabet and old Germanic Runic alphabets, all of them developing from
respectively a set of trees and objects whose first sound is the letter
considered.
The author does quote the
problem of slavery but he neither explains how it developed except with a vague
connection to agriculture, nor really and systematically explains what slaves
were in the ancient world he is speaking of. He thus does not study the rebellions
of slaves. The only origin of slaves is war, with at times the fact that
slavery can be imposed for financial deficiency, to compensate for one’s debts
for example. The main source remains war and that enables him to totally
overlook the systematic import of black slaves from black Africa down the Nile
valley to Egypt and the Middle East, across the Sahara to Carthage and what is
today the Maghreb and Libya, and by sea up the eastern coast of Africa, up the Red
Sea or the Persian Gulf to Arabia and the Middle East. Slaves are clearly
identified in the Old Testament where they are often said to be Arab slaves.
But in the old tradition of Persia and its empire found in the Iranian “Shahnameh” and encountered by Alexander
when he conquered the Persian empire and probably encountered even earlier,
great number of slaves, both male and female, are common present from one lord
to another. Black slaves were systematically used for agriculture and some
mining in the Middle East with famous slave rebellions or upheavals, and as
soldiers in the Egyptian armed forces, to the point that some black Pharaohs (The black
Pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty ruled for
approximately eighty-nine years in Egypt, from 760 BC to 671 BC.) are attested as having seized power from their military
dominant position. That would have explained a lot about this systematic
exploitation of black Africa to provide the Mediterranean and Middle East world
with slaves in all forms, including eunuchs castrated down to the abdomen
(clean-cut: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21btwr/how_were_eunuchs_castrated/).
This is important because when Islam takes over slavery is banned among Muslims
and is only tolerated though never banned for non-Muslims and in some periods
or cases it may be encouraged. The tradition goes back to the development of
agriculture, cities and armed forces to practice the “art” of war.
Yet the author does allude to
slavery when he reduces them to “feudal slaves, helots” page 105, when he
explains how Plato and Aristotle based all their understanding of political and
social life on the existence of slavery for most heavy work and when he
explains that Plato in his Republic rejected anything like a general democracy.
He was heavily against democracy and advocated a very limited form for the
ruling elite of society; All other categories of people being out of this
political organization. That’s such philosophers, writings and references that
Calhoun used in the 19th century in the USA to justify slavery and
advocate a society that could live forever with the majority of its population
in slavery. Richard Miles says it, or rather alludes to this slavery vision of
society, but he does not get into details though he gets to slightly more when
dealing with Rome. He does say then slaves are the main laboring class and he
adds that they are also the sexual entertainment of free men and women who can
have their own sexual slaves and can take advantage of all the slaves around
them freely, starting at a very early age, let’s say 13. If you are a free
Roman citizen, or the son of one, you can take any slave anywhere the way you
want, though you can only kill or maim your own slaves, not your neighbor’s.
That is what being a slave meant in this Mediterranean world but Richard Milles
being short on the topic cannot explain how the invention – and that is only
one example – of the watermill in first century BCE was never used productively
because of the existence of slaves. Why invest in a “machine” when you have
quasi free labor at your disposal? Richard Miles actually mentions here and
there the common practice when conquering a city: you kill all soldiers, you
also kill most adult males and you only keep the females and the young children
to be sold at once as slaves. That’s how Carthage ended up. That’s how Troy
ended up. Genocidal massacres along with the enslaving of one fourth, one third
or one half of the conquered population to be exported straight away to the
Roman world and their industrial, construction or farming estates, plus the
multiple pleasure houses of the cities and even some in the legions or as
gladiators.
This leads the author to the
inability to explain why the slaves of Rome opened the gates of the city to the
Germanic army besieging it, except an allusion to the “outlawing of pagan
rituals” by Emperor Theodosius (page 280). Of course the author does not
mention that there were hardly any slaves in the Germanic – or Celtic –
traditions. That would have led him to starting to understand the
Christianization of Europe, the religious reform of the 9th century
and the Benedictine feudal revolution that ensued and that banned any idea of
slavery that had survived here and there from the old Roman estates.
But Richard Miles does not
right history, but tells us a story and that makes him often fall into
anachronism and provide us with anachronistic remarks. “Alexandria was not
simply some immaculate but lifeless monument to totalitarianism, an ancient
equivalent of some concrete Stalinist dream.” (page 167) Such a comparison has
nothing to do in a book that pretends at least to tell us the story of these
ancient worlds. “Totalitarianism” has
nothing to do there. This ancient world was a world of slavery first of all and
then total subservience among the elite or the free class. Look at what they
did to Socrates. And the mention of Stalin is just ridiculous. Why not Hitler
or Mussolini or Mao Zedong? This ancient world is a world of blood, killing,
exploitation, life and death rights for the elite, suffering, torturing, slow dying
for the enslaved under-class in the hands of any free man available at any time
on this free man’s only whim of the moment. Totalitarianism and Stalin are in
fact very civilized as compared to these ancient practices that are closer to
Hitler’s without the industrial method to get rid of some sections of society.
But even so, Sparta was a
fair example of such exploitation, the fate of “helos”:
“The helots served the Spartans as servants,
shield-carriers, potters, cooks, agricultural laborers and breeding machines.
They surrendered half of their harvest to the military elite, whose prime
objective was to keep them in subjection. They had no rights and were obliged
to wear dog-skin caps and animal skins, making them objects of mockery. To the
Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, the helots were ‘donkeys suffering under heavy loads’.
Every year Sparta declared war on their donkeys, allowing them to be killed
with impunity. Its trainee warriors waged a campaign of terror and
assassination against them, infiltrating their territory and striking at night
– the ancient equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.”
Note the final anachronistic
remark. During that period when the hunting season of helots was open it was a
fair game to kill helots not even as if they were some game to be eaten
afterwards since they would not be eaten but just left there to rot along the
road. Note the “breeding machines” meaning that female helots could be sexually
taken and impregnated by any free Spartan able to do it
And yet some of the allusions
to the fate of Christians in this ancient Roman world is definitely one small
instance of what that enslaved and mortiferous society was for the enslaved
precisely. Christians were not better dealt with than plain slaves, and often
worse, in spite of what Voltaire may say about it in his Treatise on Tolerance.
And of course he misses the
stake of the Christian revolution. He mentions the Council of Nicaea but he
does not mention the main stake of this Council: to stabilize the canonic
corpus of Christian sacred texts that was to become the New Testament. It is
true that this process was also performed and achieved with the extermination
of all those who did not abide by this canonical corpus. Bishop Irenaeus (130-202
AD), the Bishop of Lyons or Lugdunum, is famous for his treatise “Against Heresies” that is the fundamental
justification of the elimination of all those who fall into these categories. There
is a vague allusion to what happened in the upper regions of Egypt and how
whole Christian communities were deliberately exterminated by other Christians
because they did not abide by the rule. I must say too that his non-treatment
of James, Jesus’ brother, his reduced treatment of Jesus and his over-emphasized
treatment of Paul, ex-Saul, whose role in the persecution of Christians is not
even alluded to and whose role in the elimination of James and of the basic
rules of that early Jewish Christianity is not mentioned, all that makes the reference
dubious.
I must say that his allusion
to Augustine’s “The City of God” and
his impossibility to understand it is a very old concept coming from the Old
Testament, what is mostly referred to as the Messianic Jerusalem, is basic in
the canonical “Book of Revelation.” Can
we say the messianic Jerusalem is seen as an earthly city projected into heaven?
Maybe but then the model is not Rome, but definitely Babylon that has to be
defeated and destroyed for the messianic Jerusalem to be reached. One can say
this Babylon is nothing but an old name tagged onto the new Rome. Maybe, but it
would be better to note that this messianic Jerusalem is surrounded by high
walls with twelve doors or gates, but fortified nevertheless. Fortified against
what and who, since we are after the Apocalypse, after the end of the world? In
fact, Augustine or John of Patmos cannot conceive the salvation of humanity in
any other terms than collective and social. In fact, we have here a fundamental
Homo Sapiens characteristic: man cannot survive in this world hence in the
other world but by being socially organized and cooperative. The vision of the City
of God or the messianic Jerusalem is the only way man can see his future: as a
social organized collective group building the future with the help of god.
Richard Miles is a little bit short on Augustine. He should meditate the
following quotation from Isaiah:
Isaiah 9:6-7Authorized (King James)
Version (AKJV)
6 For unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his
name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting
Father, The Prince of Peace.
7 Of the increase of his government
and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and
upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with
justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
This is the Christian
tradition, deeply rooted in Judaism, and in fact in all religious or spiritual
production of the Middle East as far as our knowledge can go. The history of
Homo Sapiens has been all along social and collective with collective
settlements that will become cities after the Ice Age. Augustine is in this
tradition and he inherits the whole spiritual production of several millennia in
the Middle East and around the Mediterranean Sea. And that inheritance is only
the specific form a universal human inheritance takes in this region.
In conclusion we have here a
fairly detailed account of some aspects of these four or five millennia ending
more or less with the fall of Rome to the Germanic invaders. But it is
altogether a discourse that complies with the standard reading of Western
history and rejects by not mentioning them essential elements. That is
regrettable because that cuts the European civilization from the rest of the
world and because it does not capture the trajectory of the human species, of
Homo Sapiens in their conquest of the world to the present globalized version
of human development.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:54 AM 
