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| Jan 01, 1985
| 1985
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liked it
| 'The Unexplained File: Cult and Occult' arrived at an interesting period (the early 1980s) in the cultural exploration of 'occult matters', immediatel 'The Unexplained File: Cult and Occult' arrived at an interesting period (the early 1980s) in the cultural exploration of 'occult matters', immediately after the explosion of interest in the 1960s and 1970s but before the very different culture of paranoia that emerged in the wake of the X-Files. This collection of articles from the Orbis part work (1980-1983), edited by historian of the occult Francis King, shows its partial derivation from the slightly more serious 'Man, Myth and Magic' (1970) series produced by BPC. It is an interesting mix of the utterly credulous and the intelligently sceptical. In the early 1980s, a lot of early paranormal scientific investigation (now reasonably dismissed as pseudoscience) could in good faith be taken far more seriously than it can be today. We have here a rather good summation of Aleister Crowley (King infamously upset the nerdish O.T.O in 1973 with his revelation of its rituals) sitting alongside a rather breathless credulous appreciation of the hoaxes undoubtedly perpetrated in the name of Le Comte de Saint Germain and Fulcanelli. An excellent and fair account of the tragic Salem witch trials (as far as 1985 might settle the matter) can be found with accounts of the Nazi occult which tell us more about the world created by Sefton Delmer than they do about the national socialist political experiment. In short, the book is a snapshot of a point of time before the cross-checking allowed by the internet when many people were caught between the desire that there should be an occult condition of the world and access to the popular education that would qualify that belief. In fact, King remains intelligent. He allows a door to open on what it might mean to recognise occult phenomena that has not been shut today. His excessively trusting attitude to divination techniques (notably astrology and gematria) does not require babies to be thrown out with the bath water. He is balanced in his way, presenting material that is mostly survival from the pre-scientific age which appeals to something in our anxious human psychology. The credulity also does not extend to the claims of Gerald Gardner while there are other insights that are well worth noting. Where does that leave us? The book remains in the library with all its many flaws because of its snapshot value. This was what a commercial publishing company could get away with in 1980 in another world from ours. A bit like retaining Dennis Wheatley in the library. Despite its occasional insights and sound judgments, the bulk of the book may tell no lies but equally it tells few truths but it does open a door on a whole range of dubious occultisms as well as on ways of thinking that are not only persistent but have developed further since it was published. Both Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley have created working religions (Wicca and Thelema) which are now perfectly respectable and who is to say that the major religions we are supposed to reverence more than these did not have equally questionable origins. Similarly the human experience of the occult (regardless of any actual existence it may have) has to be explained. Anthropology, psychology, science and philosophy have still not cracked it. Something is going on here between the human mind and material reality. Far from embedding ourselves in scientific materialism of any sort, we are faced with new irrationalities (panpsychism springs to mind). The speculations around AI and its possibly emergent consciousness clearly trouble many people and suggest new mania to come. Quantum physics and cosmology keep throwing up ever more interesting challenges. The human mind seems more rather than less complex (vide the placebo and nocebo effects and mass hysteria in politics) forty years on. There is undoubtedly a human driving need to believe in something on the one hand (not an affliction this reviewer has ever suffered from) meeting up with phenomena that really are very difficult to explain (I have experienced a few myself) on the other. This intersection of human need and of the 'unexplained' results in strange fruit indeed. Much of it can be shown to be nonsense and charlatan behaviour as well as outright delusion but there are still the glitches in the matrix to explain. Simply shutting off one's mind to them is not 'truth'. Ideally one would abandon the impulse to believe and learn to be more coldly clinical about the 'unexplained', allowing for what we do not know to be as real as what we think we know. But we are human. Most humans need to fill in the gaps in knowing with imaginings ... and thus this book. ...more |
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| Jan 01, 2001
| Jan 01, 1999
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it was ok
| Published immediately before the Millennium by the New Age publishing house Element Books, any book that puts a quotation by Adolf Hitler right next t Published immediately before the Millennium by the New Age publishing house Element Books, any book that puts a quotation by Adolf Hitler right next to one by Jesus Christ in order to send a negative message about Messiah ideology ought to have something going for it. Unfortunately what starts out as an interesting critique of all forms of organised religion that are based on charismatic leadership eventually degenerates into a sales pitch for New Age alternatives in general and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh aka Osho in particular. The initial argument is not, in fact, a bad one. The book is even a useful compendium of selective quotations designed to prove his point but Hogue's mildly gonzo style of writing does not inspire confidence in his objectivity. Any sign of this being more than a polemic disappears by the end. There is an interesting question to be answered here and it is not one answered by an appeal to the right side of the brain - why is it that our species has to find unusual individuals as exemplars in order to build institutional systems that rely on visions of end times and apocalypse? What I would like to have seen is not an angry excoriation of such phenomena but rather an analysis that deploys historical and textual research, anthropology and sociology, neuroscience and psychology in order to help explain the repeated absurdity that is messianic religion. It would, of course, be a sub-set of a wider analysis of the apparent human need for religion and 'spirituality' with the question at hand being why so many religious leaders seem to repeat each other in adopting a negativity and pessimism about the future and making promises they cannot keep. From there we have to ask why so many people end up believing in often lurid apocalyptic nonsense cast in the most obscure and metaphorical terms. Hogue may identify the problem here only to fall into a new trap drawn from his interest in the Eastern religions. Instead of the present becoming worse and worse and ending up in terror and horror until the Messiah returns to save us all, the new gurus offered a general awfulness of the present which can only be resolved magically by a change of consciousness instigated by the gurus themselves. These two types of response to reality may look like opposites but are just variations on a theme of absurd human belief, merely a civil war within a world of minds yearning for their right hemispheres to become a true representation of reality instead of a limbic residue. We live in an age where, at the margin, expectations of the 12th Imam, Eretz Israel and the Rapture are all playing a walk-on role in the tragedy currently unfolding in the Middle East yet all the major Western religions and others contain apocalyptic and expectant seeds. But are the cultic Eastern modes much better when naive and lost individuals lose themselves in following canny gurus whose promise is that, if only they follow them, they will lose their Egos, become 'themselves' and change reality itself? Oh, give us a break! What seems to be going on is that great tranches of humanity have never been able to deal with the brute facts of having an evolved self-consciousness that is faced with both the inevitability of death and the reality of social and cultural impotence for the bulk of us for the bulk of our time. The Eastern religions tend to solve this by coming to terms with both problems by withdrawing from reality yet accepting it when it cannot be avoided while the Western religions seem to emphasise inventing new and magical realities that can create the illusion of potency and even immortality. There is much to say on this but not here. Suffice it to say I was not sorry to have read the book but it is on its way to the charity shop. It could have been so much better if it had been more disciplined in its analysis of the messiah complex (leadership and submission) at the heart of the human condition. Perhaps we are left with humanity as still no better than baboons with their petty hierarchies and urges to dominate and submit to which evolution has added an existential fear of the future and of the chaos of a world we do not understand. ...more |
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| 075253596X
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| 2.75
| 4
| Jan 01, 2000
| Jan 01, 2000
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liked it
| Part of a wholly unacademic pop cultural series on the 'Unxplained' (sic), 'Visionaries and Mystics' is better than expected, well written, without hy Part of a wholly unacademic pop cultural series on the 'Unxplained' (sic), 'Visionaries and Mystics' is better than expected, well written, without hysteria and quite sincere in its attempt to inform rather than excite. It should be read as an entertainment. This volume covers theories of the soul, various forms of prophecy including Nostradamus and Fatima, 'mystical places', astrology and the cycle of the mystic year and the folklore surrounding it and interpretations of classic myths and their links with the seasons and creation. It reads like the work of a very intelligent autodidact and Jamies Stokes turns out to be a highly competent jobbing writer who, it seems from his web presence, can turn his hand to almost any subject. ...more |
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liked it
| This classic 1958 account of the archaeology of the Low Countries (Belgium and Luxemburg) was not displaced as a primary text until the first decade o This classic 1958 account of the archaeology of the Low Countries (Belgium and Luxemburg) was not displaced as a primary text until the first decade of this century. Of course, it is now completely out-dated in interpretative terms but it still has library value for its data and illustrations. It is part of Glyn Daniel's 'Ancient People and Places' series for Thames & Hudson. These were always good value. It should be noted though that this area was very much a prehistoric back water so that much of the analysis is of the fringes of nearby cultures rather than of anything 'world-prehistorical'. What we see here is largely colonisation of the marginal, of which perhaps the most interesting example is the emergence of the proto-Frisian Iron Age 'terpen' culture. This might be seen to have persisted right until our own day as a distinctive solution to land that flooded too often. ...more |
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| 0747802343
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| Jan 01, 1994
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liked it
| A short but decently illustrated overview of the history of European swords by an experienced specialist curator. Part of the Shire stable of pamphlet A short but decently illustrated overview of the history of European swords by an experienced specialist curator. Part of the Shire stable of pamphlets. ...more |
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| Dec 05, 2019
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it was amazing
| This is a dense, academic but rewarding book in which a prominent scholar of classics (Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek) extends his range to compa This is a dense, academic but rewarding book in which a prominent scholar of classics (Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek) extends his range to compare and contrast the early development of philosophy in two apparently unconnected ancient cultures (Ancient India and Greece). He is not a Sanskrit scholar and is using Sanskrit texts in translation (whereas he is expert in Ancient Greek) but there is no reason to believe that his use of these and secondary texts is inadequate for the task he has set himself. I write 'unconnected' because Seaford is dismissive of any influence of one on the other, a position that is highly relevant to his thesis. I am a little less persuaded (see below) but the thesis is certainly exceptionally well argued and plausible. It is certainly not to be dismissed. Using both the presocratic philosophers and poets of ancient Greece and the Sanskrit writings of the Brahmin class and the later 'new religions' of ancient India that culminated in Buddhism as his sources, Seaford has one big hedgehog idea. This is that the rise of philosophical abstraction is intimately tied to the socio-economic process of monetisation. He is not an absolutist about this and he reasonably hedges a little towards the end but he is clear on his book's purpose - to make that link. The evidence he adduces - based on detailed textual analysis and considerable learning in two separate cultures - certainly seems powerful. The abstract mysterious nature of money (not exactly the same as coinage) helps create new thinking about reality, introduces philosophy. I am not going to try to repeat or rehearse his arguments here for two simple reasons. First, I am not qualified to do so. I am not professional philosopher enough to be a sound critic. Second, he does it in such a way that any summary would be inadequate. Let me leave it that the book probably will require a second reading and much slower study to be fully understood (which could be said about most good works of philosophy) and that it falls into that camp (mine too) that would say that thought cannot be abstracted from the human condition. It is wholly plausible that any generalised presentation of reality arises from the social and material position in the world of the thinker, whether as a personality type or as someone with a particular position in society. There is much evidence of the latter in Seaford's analysis. Money, debt, transactionalism, power and class all conform themselves (in his vision) from one state of being (or non-being in the case of money) to another and it is plausible to believe that, thinking being ideology as much as philosophy, thought would accommodate new social realities. His account of the link between Plato's thinking and his attitude to slaves or Parmenides' thought arising from his position as aristocrat is as helpful as his description of the synarchic relationship between Brahmins and Kshatriya or why Achilles was so upset at Agamemnon. The transformation of thought from a religion of gods and communal relations to one of individual relations with a reality presumed to be outside of communal relations or expressive of a new form of transactional communal relations is also plausible. So why do I still have doubts? Partly because I am always suspicious of any intellectual map being claimed for the territory that is life. I am suspicious of surviving texts within any set of particular class and power relations being truly representative of what people in general thought or were. Rather than speaking of religion or philosophy (although both are involved here), I tend to see this book as possibly a description of ideology and ideology is only dubiously to be accepted as reality. Ideology, in particular, is the often inaccurate map of a territory rather than the territory itself. Second, I have a smidgeon of doubt about influence between the cultures because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Seaford is absolutely right about the progress of the two cultures towards monetisation but he may underestimate the possibility of elite exchange of ideas. After all, merchant and traders may only write accounts but they are intelligent, curious and practical (entrepreneurial) and can be expected to be swift to learn neighbouring languages and exchange ideas with wealthy peers when doing the ancient equivalent of the business lunch. The first Greek philosophers were not accidentally practical men in a trading port. Some ideas put forward as independently generated seem very close to similar ideas far away that were perhaps merely transformed to meet local cultural and ideological conditions. Perhaps it was trade and exchange (rather than just monetisation) that drove both monetisation and a new ideology that created the space for coinage on the one hand and abstract philosophy on the other and if Greek coins could influence, why not Indian or Greek philosophy? The argument that there is no Persian philosophical tradition between Greece and India does not persuade because something can pass through a catalyst. All Persia had to provide was the route to the nodes of stable settlement on either side. This is not to say that I think there necessarily was a flow of trading influence but only that the evidence is insufficient to dismiss the idea and that the silences may hide a flow of ideas that became transformed into local ideologies to local taste. However, given what we know, a link between monetisation and the earliest philosophy in two cultural zones is highly plausible. Seaford argues his case exquisitely but I ended the book feeling that it was 'not proven', even that Seaford wanted his idea to be true so much that it became true. Putting the core argument aside, one of the great virtues of the book is the exposition of, first, the development of the thinking of the early Indian poets and philosophers and then of their Greek counterparts from Homer to Plato. Taken as a whole, Seaford analyses and categorises the different schools of thought and sets them in a sequence that shows the processes by which one type of society had the thought processes amongst part of its elite transformed into another set of ideas in another type of society. Each thinker or set of thinking is shown to be coherent and challenging to their predecessors and contemporaries and also to have some form of socio-political aspect to their thinking as they did. They become comprehensibly creatures of their time. This is where the thesis of monetisation as central to the creation of new ways of abstract thinking starts to become increasingly plausible. The process of moving from one way of thinking to another does seem to be perfectly analogical with specific socio-economic changes. The question is obviously whether correlation is causation and we all know that it need not be. Perhaps both processes are derivative of a third lost process where the philosopher and the monetiser are both creatures of some other change - trading or technological or of power relations. Our texts are still those of a very few philosophers and Brahmins made to stand for the many. Archaeology tells us little of thought (except as accounts and royal or aristocratic posturing) so we may be forgiven for wondering if we can ever know the truth of the matter. But if we cannot certainly know the truth, we can, with caution, go for the most reasonably plausible theory that covers all the facts that we do have. In which case, Seaford's book stands as the best probable thesis for lack of negative evidence. It will do. ...more |
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| 0140441123
| 9780140441123
| 0140441123
| 3.99
| 8,400
| -470
| Aug 30, 1961
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really liked it
| Aeschylus has only seven surviving plays to his name. One of those (Prometheus Unbound) is now heavily disputed to be his. Vellacott's translation is Aeschylus has only seven surviving plays to his name. One of those (Prometheus Unbound) is now heavily disputed to be his. Vellacott's translation is of the four that are not the only full surviving trilogy - the Oresteia - which has entered deep into Western culture in its own right. Self-evidently the survival of these plays, preceding the work of Sophocles and Euripides, testifies to the regard in which he was held but the lack of his other plays (which may have amounted to 90) and the non-survival of those of his rivals suggests that we are seeing only the tip of an iceberg. Aeschylus was not the only playwright of his time, his audience would have been demanding under conditions that were semi-sacred as well as popular and the dispute over 'Prometheus Unbound' indicates that others could probably reach high levels of attainment. Still, Aeschylus was clearly regarded as an innovator who reached heights of rhetoric and drama not achieved before, above all (it is said) introducing characters who related to each other and not just singly with the Chorus. These four non-Oresteian plays still stand up to scrutiny even if we need guidance in order to think our way into what it must have been like to be presented with performances that were as much a type of free form religious and political experience as theatre, at least as we understand it. Contemporary fashion tends to favour 'The Persians' both because of its unique references to contemporary events and because the modern mind favours what appears to be a transfer of empathy towards the defeated (the Persians) although I think this has been exaggerated. My favourite - the one that still moves me - is the heroic war poem-drama 'Seven Against Thebes' which seems to capture the barbarism of city-state conflict prior to the Athenian discovery of 'reason' in all its raw energy just as it introduces us to the civic morality of tragedy. Its masculinity is overt - there is a remarkable scene where King Eteocles upbraids the Theban women for destabilising the war effort through their inability to restrain their sentiments and their excess of religiosity. it is patriarchal but Eteocles has a strong point here. This heroic rawness is perhaps what Nietzsche had in mind in condemning what Socratic reasoning was to do to the ability of Greeks to maintain their ability to prosper as 'peak humans'. It is less comfortable for our culture to read than faux-empathy in the propaganda against the Persians. The other two plays read well in Vellacott's translation but they suffer more from being detached from the other plays in their trilogies. The Oresteia works for us today because it 'unfolds' with a form of thesis and antithesis resulting in a synthesis of more civic moral worth based on reason. The meaning of Greek tragic drama is too complex an issue to deal with in a brief GoodReads review but the religio-political aspects lie in 'squaring' our nature with social obligation especially when various obligations start to clash. Which is to win out? In 'Seven Against Thebes' King Eteocles is primarily honour bound to defend his City against raiders brought against it by his estranged brother Polyneices (whose lack of proper burial later will be the cause of another great tragedy by Sophocles in 'Antigone'). However, he is also bound not to spill the blood of his brother. Yet fate has decreed that he must fight him to the death at the seventh gate. The fate is written as part of a set of individual crimes with origins in breaching past taboo afflicting blood lines - the Oresteia is another such example. In this case, the taboos breached are all those surrounding Oedipus, father of both Eteocles and Polyneices by his own mother Jocasta and compounded by Oedipus' curse on his sons because of their rejection of him. Antigone is going to be just the next stage in a succession of horrors. Eteocles is actually given a choice by his own advisers, to send another hero against his brother or perhaps switch gates which a King could choose to do but Eteocles will not do this. The heroic lies in not avoiding an impossible moral choice with no good end if it is 'fated'. Once it has happened that the allocation of the seventh gate is to him and that the raider on that gate is his brother, the tragedy unfolds as inevitable ... not as a choice or a matter of rational calculation but as an 'ill-fated' moral necessity to do an evil thing less evil than another evil thing. Of course, the audience is seeing him put his City first but the avoidance of choice cannot have gone unnoticed nor its association with the legendary world's heroic barbarism. Tragedy is here truly cathartic, filled with a vicarious death instinct in which life is truly lived. The fourteen heroes, raiders and Thebans, are all totally disregarding of death, placing honour and glory ahead of a quiet life, much as we have come to expect from Homer. Perhaps the dramatists want all Athenians to be heroes when necessary ... but only when rationally necessary. In our own day, this brings us back to the legacy of Nietzsche but also to an awareness that just because God is dead does not mean civilisation is dead. Our general cultural incomprehension of Eteocles' decision-making possibly defines the full victory of 'reason' over 'life'. This play, set alongside the defiance of 'God' in 'Prometheus Unbound' and the brilliant exposition of girlish terror of quasi-incestuous rape and of social obligation in 'The Suppliants', shows a society living in a state of reason performatively exploring questions of sentiment and honour. We cannot honestly know what a Greek citizen thought of all this but the fact that such plays were far from unusual and highly regarded suggests that an entire society needed 'drama' in some way to 'square' the conflicts within itself and get debate going about right action. The gods too are 'real' although it is hard to get a fix on how an ancient actually felt about these capricious and often cruel creations. The overwhelming sense is of the gods, under all-father Zeus, maintaining right order in the world where right order was not always that of reason. If the city was based on reason among men, nature and society or rather natural social relations in family and tribe and in war were not. The gods, who spoke for right order outside men's rules, ruled this world of natural social relations, right behaviour and right ritual. 'Squaring' civil order with the natural order (including the justified sentiments of society and culture prior to the laws) must have been a constant process of civil and personal negotiation. Greek tragedy helped worked out the limits of the game and educate a populace about them. In 'The Suppliants'. Pelasgus King of Argos explores every 'reasonable' argument why he should not plunge his people into war to save the 'virtue' of 50 distant relatives threatened with rape by their Egyptian cousins. In the end, he accepts, having realised that a higher law answerable to the Gods requires that he protect the girls, that he must challenge the Egyptians despite the inevitable grim result. His people agree with him. This is community heroism and truly absurd in the existential sense. The sense we get is of the very real belief in a 'higher law' provided by the Gods (although this means within a framework laid out with strict justice and order by Zeus) whose breach must lead to tragedy often generations later and that reasoning is there to endorse this law not thwart it. None of this higher law is systematised as in the religions of the book. It is customary and oral - things everybody knows are right but which have to be policed with frequent reminders directed as much at the forgetful as at the young. Community survival is at stake. Doing the right thing (which is very different from the Judaeo-Christian faith-based 'being good') is not easy. The lesson of the tragedies is that not doing the right thing creates imbalances in the natural order that will be corrected in time - at the expense of your own blood line. Drama appears later to move more strongly not so much towards expressing the crisis of heroic sentiments and the tragic results of breaching taboo but more heavily towards civic society as the resolution of the crises created by the old way of doing things - but our evidence remains sparse. Greek Tragedy is complex and multi-layered, not easily analysed or summarised in secular terms, highly suggestive even while laying out its grim facts with crystal clarity. This is a shame and not a guilt culture. One should be shamed for soiling one's own blood line and 'fating' one's children. Vellacott is an old translation (1961) but highly readable and directed at credible performance. With minimal academic infrastructure, he points out corrupt texts where they matter and provides indications of the sort of metaphor and references relevant to understanding the plays. ...more |
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| 0198219121
| 9780198219125
| 0198219121
| 3.40
| 5
| Oct 29, 1987
| Oct 29, 1987
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really liked it
| Although half a century old (and so very much out of date in the detail), 'The Legacy of Egypt', part of a series of such books published by Oxford (C Although half a century old (and so very much out of date in the detail), 'The Legacy of Egypt', part of a series of such books published by Oxford (Clarendon Press) on the later influence of many of the ancient civilisations, remains a useful summary of the contribution of Egypt to Western culture. It is rather dry. Some chapters (each by a different academic) have too much of the air of the professor looking down from a lectern at rows of eager students who will all by now be moving into their seventies yet there are still things to be learned and appreciated. Three and a half thousand years of history (until the country was thoroughly Arabised) are not easy to evaluate in well under 500 pages, especially as two purposes are only variably served - to tell the story of the civilisation and to recount its influence on later civilisations. The overwhelming impression is that the traditional culture of Egypt was largely displaced by Greek colonisation and that it is Graeco-Egyptian or Hellenistic culture drawn from Egypt that had most influence on Western culture until the nineteenth century. Chapters review Egyptian calendars and chronology, mathematics and astronomy, the 'canonical' tradition in art, technology and material culture, hieroglyphs, language and writing and the law, often in ways only true specialists are going to understand or rather make the effort to understand. The image is one of a culture that was truly distinctive although not unconnected to surrounding cultures. It tended to import innovation rather than be innovative. Its ideas and modes of thinking (often shown through a Hellenistic lens) spread elsewhere far more than did anything material. Even then, taken away from its cultural roots, Egyptian 'canonical' forms in art would become embarrassingly debased as in the appalling statue of Antinous from Hadrian's villa at Tivoli and yet this cannot be said not to be an 'influence' on Western culture. It is the influence of ancient medicine, religious concepts (both ancient and Christian such as monasticism) and narrative forms in literature that seemed to be able to embed themselves in the Hellenistic world and so become part of the medieval and early modern world view. Ancient Egypt itself is rather lost to view until the rise of the professional egyptologist following Champollion's work on the Rosetta Stone except, that is, as a mystery in itself with ruins and signs that were consistently misinterpreted and usually a source of fantasy and the exotic. One chapter does, however, show us the debt of Israel and Jewish Biblical culture to Egypt (logical in view of the dynamic relationship between Egypt and Palestine) and another explores critically Ancient Egypt's influence on Africa (notably Meroe). There are in-depth studies of Graeco-Roman Egypt, the Greek Papyri, Christian and Coptic Egypt and Islamic Egypt (by Bernard Lewis) that only go to confirm that Ancient Egypt died as substance rather than form with the building of Alexandria and that Islam created something entirely new. In fact, Ancient Egypt took a long time to die, nearly a millenium. There are still small traces, beyond the monuments and the artefacts in tombs, in the Arabic of peasants but die it did except as a fantasy for many Westerners, a position it still holds for many today. Of course, a civilisation that lasted two and a half thousand years or more before its decline cannot be fixed 'in stone' (so to speak) at just one moment in that long period. Pre-Dynastic, Old Kingdom, Intermediate Periods, Middle and New Kingdom all had their distinctive cultures. Yet the book does indicate many continuities regardless of the shifting power relations which seemed to give us periods of individualism (women, for example, did have property rights) under an imperial religious monarchy and periods of exploitative quasi-feudalism and priestly theocracy. The periods when it seems to be a culture of individual rights are most interesting. After all, who would have thought that the Egyptians appear to have invented something like the first Soviet (workers' council) in the Theban necropolis. Anyone interested in the rise and fall of empires must be interested in Egypt. It fell to better organised outsiders several times in its history before the Greeks systematised its exploitation from their urban centres. The Greeks were the first to compete fully with the indigenous culture. It is more complicated than this, of course, but incursions previously appear to have left the core Egyptian system intact, imposing only political authority from above. Although the Ptolemies were careful to respect indigenous tradition, Hellenistic culture was to displace it in the cities. Socio-economic power lay in these cities, predominantly in Alexandria, and it tended to enforce an exploitative apartheid on the country that steadily degraded the older culture and eventually displaced it with an urban-based Judaeo-Christianity (to be replaced in turn by Islam). It was not a sudden death but a death by neglect with the useful intellectual ideas of Egypt (medicine, mysteries and literature) incorporated into the Greek urban milieu and then dispersed throughout the Hellenistic world by trade and the Library at Alexandria. It was post-Hellenistic Egypt that brought the Cult of Isis to Rome. Similar intellectual traditions spread in a decaying Roman Empire and thence into the culture of the West largely as the exotic. Egypt as more than a culture of the dead and of magical thinking is still quite new to us. ...more |
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| 4.26
| 565
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| Jan 01, 2006
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really liked it
| I am afraid I have only read the 1986 revision of the 1977 Second Edition. The Janson brand has been used subsequently to deliver new editions arising I am afraid I have only read the 1986 revision of the 1977 Second Edition. The Janson brand has been used subsequently to deliver new editions arising from an original 1962 version. By rights I should not 'review' this volume because the Editors would have long since moved on conceptually. Nevertheless, it might be useful to note the flaws and positives of the earlier text if only to test the past against the present and also see where Janson's successors may have 'guided' the text in the directions demanded of twenty-first century audience. I would hope the positives would be retained and the flaws corrected. I note straightaway that the latest edition refers to it being a history of the Western Tradition because one flaw in the original was the almost complete neglect of anything outside the classical world, Europe and the USA. Once it is positioned as a history solely of the flow of tradition from the pyramids to whatever is the latest iteration of art in the West then it stands up more than adequately. The luxurious Thames & Hudson hardbook certainly has plenty of very high quality illustration. However I found the US-centric approach (or rather Franco-US bias) somewhat tiresome so that the original sometimes reads like the sort of cultural tract you might expect the State Department to have been ecstatic about. Similarly Janson's temperament tends to be both a little patronising ('you really must understand that we experts know what we are talking about') and presumptuous in making judgements that make too many assumptions about what artists 'must have been' thinking as they created. Janson evidently wanted to construct a particular narrative of progress and liberal values as you might expect from an American of his generation. A lot gets shoe-horned into that model, although, to be fair, to tell 5,000 years of art history in nearly 800 pages is no mean feat. The pages are simply not enough for what he wants to do (especially when we note that perhaps 60% or more of the 800 pages are actually illustrations). He is forced into short hand and short hand cannot help but require some ideologisation of the subject matter. Having noted that concern, one of his virtues (given that he has to rattle through his history) is to make links between illustrations to show how art has reflected previous art in both content and form. It is only in the modern era that this process of linkage starts to look a little forced. The book covers art as most of us understand it but also photography and architecture. Indeed, the coverage of architecture is quite detailed and occasionally technical. The coverage of representation flows far more easily until things get complicated in the last two centuries. Forced to make tough choices (he does not include cinematography on the weak grounds that he cannot show moving images), he might have done well to dump the architecture and photography and produced a broader exposition of painting, sculpture and their collapse into concept today. For example, even in the 1986 revision, there is no mention of Joseph Beuys or Fluxus and the creation of Pop Art in the UK is dismissed in one line. On the other hand, there is inordinate coverage of American art in the post-war period. What is a clear flowing narrative up until the French impressionists then becomes fragmented. If socialist realism is not mentioned (no surprise) nor is much significant European art that is not related to an individual 'within the tradition'. There is no reference to Arte Povera for example. And this is where the judgments become to feel a bit dodgy as you realise that Janson's American individualism tends towards a rather old-fashioned but very American view of the artist as creative innovator if not genius working in relation to previous artists. 'Progress' is implied to be that process whereby craftsman directed by societies steadily mature into free individuals finding their way to come up with new forms of creativity, within the bounds of reasoning, feeling and imagination, that constantly push forward art's own boundaries. It is a mentality that places the long 5,000-year tradition as the background to innovation although it has led us to the point where anyone who screams a political or emotional slogan can claim to be an artist and frequently does. And he appreciates Claes Oldenburg while I think he is trivial. If the misery of the past was a world where craftsmen depended on socialisation, religion and rulers to enable them to experiment and innovate, perhaps today it is a world where experiments and innovators may not have to be even craftsmen to earn a living as an 'artist' in a free market. Perhaps they just have to invade a church in the cause of sexual politics. Or show a decent craftsmanlike skill in producing what are, in fact, large-scale single use jokes so that anyone who can make a joke that makes us 'think' in a certain direction is an artist. So, I don't entirely accept the argument of ineluctable progress rather than one of constant flux as technology and an open society permit change. Perhaps a totally open society eventually gets to the point where it is technology that dictates innovation - and so we have the NFT nonsense. From this perspective, the 'original' Janson looks like a critic surfing a 5,000-year old wave that was eventually going to crash to shore. He is aware of societal aspects - he starts the process, for example, of noting black and feminist artists - but it is the individual that matters to him. Still, the book that I had access to was valuable and lavish if frustrating. Although it did rather crash to shore in the fourth quarter of the last century, it still gives an excellent grounding in the 'great tradition' and must be recommended on that basis. The surfing proved quite fun. ...more |
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it was amazing
| [Lady] Antonia Fraser, married to the playwright Harold Pinter (now deceased) and so forming a formidable intellectual household, is a popular narrati [Lady] Antonia Fraser, married to the playwright Harold Pinter (now deceased) and so forming a formidable intellectual household, is a popular narrative historian who is always highly readable and never patronising. She entertains as she educates and never talks down to her reader. In this book, she looks at a theme rather than a period, centring the story of warrior queens in reality and in legend initially on a tale familar to the British, Boadicea (or Boudicca if you prefer), but extending her analysis to a series of strong women in history who meet her criteria. She moves effortlessly from first century AD Britain to such interesting characters as Zenobia of Palmyra, Matilda (or Maud) who fought for the throne of England with Stephen, Tamara of Georgia, Isabella of Castile and many others through to a comparison with Mrs Thatcher. She does not neglect other continents with chapters both on Jinga of the Ndongo in Africa and the Rani of Jhansi in the British Raj. She allows comparison and contrast - political successes like Elizabeth I with noble failures like Matilda of Tuscany and complete failures like Louise of Prussia. Fraser is one of those writers who might be called feminist if the term had not been destroyed as a positive one by a generation of grievance specialists and moral fanatics who sit as part of that exercise in group-think that purports to be the Western Left. She is to be regarded as a strong voice for the female point of view without a collapse into ideology. She sits alongside Simone de Beauvoir, Camille Paglia and, in my view, Virginie Despentes as someone who gives voice to women and makes men stop, think and, when necessary, change. Above all, she is an excellent historian. I cannot think of one occasion where I felt I had to dispute a judgement she makes on the evidence placed before her. She thinks in the round, able to see how her narrative relates to culture and society then and now (1988 in this case). When she points out the sometimes absurd manner in which a largely male culture has reconstructed these women - often too positively it might be said because of the chivalric impulse or the will to believe in a 'queen' or 'goddess'- she does so without moralising. It has some useful insights into male absurdity and is more useful in pointing out that women are capable of anything (should they choose to want to do anything) than all the dull or shrill tracts thrown at men in outrage or bitterness. I will be gifting this book to my daughter as an exemplar of good writing and sound historical sense but it is not just a feel-good book for women (which I hope it will be), it is also a book that any man can profit from reading. I recommend it on that basis alone. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Richard Fletcher's liberal-minded account of the christianisation of Europe from just before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (if it could be said Richard Fletcher's liberal-minded account of the christianisation of Europe from just before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (if it could be said to have fallen at all, given the continuing role of the Church of Rome) to the end of Lithuanian paganism is well worth reading. It is classic narrative history starting at the beginning and ending at the end with a couple of analytical chapters in the middle and end to give us some sense of what it may all have 'meant'. He writes fluently even if some readers are going to be boondoggled by the flow of obscure names. His judgements are generally wise ones although he almost lost a star with an excessively (almost sneering, quite unlike him) dismissal of Marxist cynicism. There are good reasons to be cynical about the motives behind the process of christianisation. He redeems himself somewhat by giving us sufficient evidence of the variety of political, social and economic motives for becoming at least ritualistically christian to allow us to make up our own minds while confirming that the churchmen involved were 'true believers'. There is no incompatibility involved in class interests aligning themselves with activist faith-based imagined worlds - after all, we are going through a similar phase of mixed faith and cynicism in the alignment of government and business with the green agenda of St. Greta of Thunberg, Historians, like philosophers, must be prepared to accept that it is possible for many impossible things not only to be thought before breakfast but subsequently aligned so that they appear to be coherent and logical in order to meet the practical needs of all sides. People are very clever. Fletcher's weakness perhaps is only in accepting this process as more good than it was insofar as the 'victims' of both activist faith-bringers and warrior and then kingly elites were always going to be the poor bloody sods who had to till the fields and do the dirty work. I found it heartening in his final chapter that so many of these poor sods still held onto their peasant magical thinking in preference to the magical thinking of intellectuals given that non-magical thinking (our own preferred mode of thinking) was still centuries away. Was this conversion process benign or malign? Neither probably, much as imperialism, whether Roman or British, cannot be simplified into good or evil. There are benefits of order and relief of poverty in having kings and monasteries. There are disbenefits of exploitation and social control. Certainly the character of the Church follows an age-old pattern repeated in many societies including ours today. The good tends to get shunted aside in favour of the bad as any form of possible alternative or dissent disappears. Fletcher is good on the early emergence of the Adelskirche (church as nobility) as warrior societies dumped their war band pseudo-egalitarianism in favour of anointings and fixed land-holding. Clever romanised bosses and intelligent warrior kings could use the church for their own ends. This is not to claim that the Church was ever just the creature of the aristocracy. This was a partnership that might even break down periodically. The Church had a lot going for it - soft power dominance, heirdom to Roman prestige, a core intellectual consistency, expertise. The 1,000 year process of turning Western Europe into Western Christendom is shown to have had its logic in this book. As Fletcher wisely points out, the point was that the christians were simply more organised than the pagans to the point where you end up feeling sorry for the latter. Christendom starts to turn nasty to the degree that its power becomes concentrated. The first major sign of what this may mean (although it was always implicit in Augustine's vicious attitude towards the Donatists) was the brutal treatment of the Saxon pagans by Charlemagne. However, this arose from the frustrations of power politics. As so often, the battered Saxons became more christian than the christians who worried about their treatment when it came to battering the Wends and other Slavs, a Germanic neurosis that would last in some form until 1945. The turn to evil (and that is what it must be called) takes place somewhere around the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries with the generalisation of a crusading impulse that turned Christian warriors into precisely the same sort of thugs as pagan warlords. It is a well-worn observation that children who are battered tend to batter their children and the behaviour of the Germans might be considered evidence in favour of that maxim when the evils of crusader ideology came home to roost in the Baltic. What is interesting about this process is the unthinking role of some fanatic Churchmen, very different in character from earlier generations, not so much fanatic as enthusiastic, who had constructed a missionary ideal in stages during the early middle ages. By the end of the book (the last half of the fourteenth century), we see a powerful and organised pagan kingdom in Lithuania, last man standing but too late to resist Christianity, undertaking highly skilled negotiations to ensure its political success by adopting the incoming religion. In essence, Christianity was the soft power survival of the massively prestigious and organised (superior even in collapse) world of 'Romanitas', the vehicle of both order and human exploitation in the interests of collaborating elites but also constraining those elites into right behaviour. By adopting the 'right behaviour' of a modified christian 'Romanitas', elites got prestige, social control (through family members) and rights to human exploitation in return for modifying their behaviours to maintain some semblance of order and reduce the effects of their inhuman instincts. So, neither entirely good not entirely bad, the christianisation process was simply how one set of humans in one part of the world managed themselves in a time of limited resources, controlling greed for plunder and employing the emotional and intellectual talents of a class of scribblers. It was progress of a kind for land owners, merchants and intellectuals though it simply shuffled the cards for the rest of humanity (the bulk of it) as they remained under the control of collaborating plunderers of land and souls. Older traditions and certainties and a lot of personal autonomy went out of the window although it is true that the Church would provide (at its best) relief from poverty and restraints on lordly behaviour (when it chose to exercise moral authority). As we say, neither good nor bad. From the point of view of many ordinary folk, the early middle ages under Roman christianity might seem like a golden age sandwiched between an age of predatory enslaving pirates and warlords and the utter lunacy of the Church Reformers, Reformation and Counter-Reformation. A well ordered and mostly sensitive and kind book with none of my sourness towards the utter absurdity of religious magical thinking, this is well worth reading if only because of its complete honesty in laying out the facts on which we can have our own opinion. ...more |
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really liked it
| This is one of three books in my library dating from the period 1987 to 1989, each offering entirely different views of the thorny problem on the orig This is one of three books in my library dating from the period 1987 to 1989, each offering entirely different views of the thorny problem on the origins of the Indo-Europeans (whether considered as a set of languages or a set of peoples). These questions remain unresolved to this day. This problem is one of those gifts to academics that never ceases to give. The general reader has to make some kind of existential commitment to a position on the data he or she is offered and then stick with that until someone argues the case better. The answer they give, even if wrong, is vitally important because beliefs about origins can dictate our contemporary political and ideological positions. For example, the idea of superior Aryans had its place in building the politics of the first half of the twentieth century. The reaction against the view that superior Aryans (white skinned and blue eyed) arose in the forests of Europe led to a post war instinct to position them far away on the steppes and turn them into less civilised barbarians. The racial issues have gone away if only because no one seriously thinks language and genetics are co-terminous but it may now be politically inconvenient to broadcast that European populations have been surprisingly genetically coherent for thousands of years. It is equally awkward to deal with the probability that much of what we admired in the past (such as the Roman Empire) were machines for brutal exploitation and that ideals of multiculturalism and 'universalism' were dependant for their success on that exploitation. As to my own understanding of the origin of the Indo-Europeans, I have only these three books to go on, combined with my awareness of the rapidly developing science of historical genetics and some common sense notions of how power is wielded and of the human condition. From this perspective, I find Drews most persuasive though not exclusively so. If he is right, he revives the importance of military technology and predation in history and the probability of genetic continuities being culturally determined by brute power. I have to admit I read Mallory's 'In Search of the Indo-Europeans' (1989) and Renfrew's 'Archaeology and Language' (1987) thirty years ago so memory is hazy. I am not a specialist but a quick refresher did not change my view of Drews very much. Mallory takes the traditional, perhaps still dominant, and I think romantic, view that the Proto-Indo-Europeans emerged on the steppelands of southern Eurasia, He concentrates on the Western Pontic region and puts his case well if you did not know any different. Renfrew was one of the first to connect with the then-recent scientific exploration of historical demographics and he put forward a highly plausible model of Indo-Europeanism that had little to do with horse cultures and a lot to do with the population effects of farming in the neolithic. He positioned Indo-Europeanism as arising out of Central Anatolia, spreading outwards with farming technique and diversifying with geography over time. He placed considerable emphasis on language and language change and rapid increases in farming populations. The reason I find Drews more plausible is because his model of warrior 'takeover' seems to be more pragmatically linked to what we know of human predatory behaviour. His case is well and systematically argued on detailed assessments of the invention and use of chariot warfare. This emphasis on warfare and the technology of military advantage sits well with another book of his (already reviewed by us) 'The End of the Bronze Age' (1993) where he proposes a change in power relations that were to allow new tactics and resources to destroy chariot power. Renfrew and Drews are not entirely incompatible. Both would have a PIE population in Anatolia but Renfrew seems to assume that language remains stronger than elite power at all times whereas Drews creates the possibility that incoming minorities can impose their language and culture. I do not know the answer to this. It is possible that the Pelasgians, prior to the Greeks, actually spoke a variant of Indo-European and so Renfrew's hypothesis stands but Drews gives us an alternative model where predatory chariot warriors used the sea lanes to conquer territory. Once conquered, populations would lose their language in two or three generations leaving the barest trace of a previous language except in perhaps dialect words (eventually lost) and place names. What little we know of the Pelasgians suggests they were not Indo-European. Instead of postulating huge mass migrations of people fully displacing natives along the late British and American imperial model (which may have influenced perceptions in the past), earlier exploitative conquerors, whether Celt, Roman or Anglo-Saxon would take the spoils and the labour. A significant percentage of the population might be classed as part of the ruling community but genetically they would rely on native women or relatively small settler communities, pushing out non-dominant elites and expropriating the local labour. The survival of English after the Norman conquest might prove the case wrong except that the Normans were much smaller in numbers relatively than earlier cross-Channel and North Sea invaders (who did bring more dependents) so that the final result became a hybrid language. These situations remain highly complex and subject to endless speculation but Drews argues in a detailed and plausible way that horses may have been a steppe phenomenon but the construction of chariots and the use of horses emerged on the margins of the Near Eastern empires. He argues that chariot warriors were skilled elites within a multicultural and multilinguistic community that did not recognise ethnicity and only recognised 'lands' over which was the divinely sanctioned (by might) of rulers. The gods favoured the most successful predator. As chariot warfare developed into a must-have for these rulers, the charioteer corps became an elites within ruling networks, accidentally (by dint of geography) making post-PIE ascendancy dominant and some of this warrior elite then set about raiding to acquire land and labour. Where these elites entered into already developed societies they retained their multicultural nature so Semites, Hassites, Hurrians or Indo-Europeans might well become petty chariot lords of the Levant or become the Hyksos of Egypt. The chariots were partially equivalent to Viking longships. Where these elites found their way to virgin territory without even the prospect of a matching military technology, they seized power as a 'superior' warrior and trading aristocracy and so we find ourselves with the Myceneans and, when they collapsed, a little later by the Dorians. Drews argues for Thessaly as the secondary organising centre for at least the Greek side of the story and it cannot be an accident that the plains of Thessaly were the main horse-breeding country of Greece: horses not being necessary for trade (that would need ships aand asses) but for war. The Greeks only appear three quarters of the way through the book. The bulk of the book lays the ground work for a theory of Greek origins and it has plausible things to say not only about the course of Near Eastern history but the later Indo-Iranian invasions to the East. The book is invaluable on two other grounds. In order to lay out his argument, Drews spends a great deal of time on the historiography of the issues about which he is to make his propositions and he does this in a fair and honourable way without polemic. This is worth reading. The other ground is his engagement with and extension of Piggott's ground-breaking work on wheeled transport in the ancient world, demonstrating broadly to my satisfaction the complex relationship between horse geography, chariot manufacture and chariot use. This is not to say that there are not problems. The Indo-Iranian side of the question is dealt with cursorily and his thesis is not demonstrated here as it is in the Near East and Aegean. And we are still left with the problem of the extent of Indo-European across Europe. Somehow it does not seem entirely plausible that Indo-European would extend so far to the West on the back of a chariot so a compromise position might be that PIE did follow the farmers westwards but by-passed Greece which was later Indo-Europeanised by raiding and war. Another model might be that of neolithic farmers pastoralising and moving on to the steppes without having anything to do with chariot warfare in the Near East. The mysterious Tocharians might merely be returning mercenaries who passed Near Eastern technology to the Chinese. Chariot warfare as agent of Indo-Europeanisation might be limited therefore to Greece and Thrace in the East and then be a technology passed on to inland pre-existing Indo-Europeans who then adopt the same approach themselves (as the incoming Greeks) in moving south into Italy. And so on and so forth - a thousand possibilities that mean that Drews strikes me as wholly reliable in describing an Aegean and Near Eastern phenomenon but that Renfrew may still be right about the language group as a whole. And Mallory may be completely off-beam (bar the Tocharians). Then there is the problem of genetics. Greeks do not seem to have many blonde and blue-eyed people in their heartland and neither do the North Indians so something (a technology) must have brought the language to new communities where intermarriage changed characteristics. The relationship between technology, power and language on populations that have remained (at least until the last quarter of the twentieth century) stubbornly genetically coherent is at the heart of this mystery and the mystery of all other major language 'conquests'. Renfrew takes one technology (farming) and Drews takes another (military technology). Substrate populations may remain the same while elites transform the 'means of production' and structures of power. Who decides the culture and language is a live issue for study even today. ...more |
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| Oct 08, 2019
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really liked it
| David Stuttard's approach to Roman mythology is sophisticated and complex and yet the presentation is simple and easy to read. In a succession of chap David Stuttard's approach to Roman mythology is sophisticated and complex and yet the presentation is simple and easy to read. In a succession of chapters following a strict format, he makes what is a jumble of ideas as coherent as it is possible to be by emphasising place. There are two separate mythological ideologies to deal with. There is the original part-folkloric, part legendary, part-derivative (of Etruria and of Hellenism) and part native to Latium belief system that underpinned what it meant to be a Roman under the Republic. Then there is the Virgilian version, based on the tale of Aeneas, in which Hellenistic culture is appropriated to provide a justification for the Augustan Imperial settlement - the Republican story re-engineered as propaganda on which our own perception of Rome has been built. Stuttard handles this by centring each early chapter on Aeneas' journey to Rome (Troy, Delos, Carthage, Eryx (Sicily), Cumae and Lavinium) telling the Imperial myth first and then going back further in history to tell the legendary story of Rome through sites in Latium and Eruria. Each chapter follows the same format. There is a quotation from classical literature, an evocative short account of what you will see if you go to the site today at the start and a history (not legend and mythology), a chronology and a recommendation of what to see at the end. The bulk of each chapter is a well told story. We get a coherent narrative out of something inherently incoherent, with often competing versions, so that we have some idea of what an educated Roman might have believed in the first century AD. The final chaper is set in the Gardens of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli and is used as an opportunity to tease us with the swan song of Roman self-belief as the new mystery religions (Mithras, Isis, Antinous) emerge. Christianity, which would destroy 'Romanitas', lurks in the background. 'Romanitas' dies long before the Roman Empire. The Imperial Augustan adaptation reinvigorates it for a while but the rot from the East sets in as cosmopolitanism crushes the identity of 'race' and place much as its liberal imperial version is crushing our sense of place today. Rome ceased to be capital of its own empire in 286. Rome became a backwater, later largely to be known as the capital of the mystery religion that had conquered it culturally. It had long since lost its rough and ready Republican 'virtue' to a class of slave-holding grandees and the migrant mob. The mythology would not survive long after the 'coup' against the old religion engineered by Constantine. The Republican role of Pontifex Maximus had already been transferred to the Imperial line by Augustus and it died as a pagan title with Gratian. Now the title is bestowed on the Pope. Roman culture as a living force committed suicide thanks to the allure of the oriental but it has survived as a noble ghost within the Western cultural tradition ever since, appropriated by its chief ideological rival and then by new empires, fascist and democratic alike. Now it is just a footnote, humiliated by the wokeness of contemporary academics and studied by others out of antiquarian interest rather than being a 'spiritual' infuence. Even the Church of Rome has long since abandoned Latin although it still squats on old Republican land. So, this book is welcome in making Roman mythology and legend available to a wider community on its own terms. Although far from all that could be said on Roman ideology, it makes an excellent introduction to a central element in the West's cultural heritage. Get it before some iconoclastic university nutter decides that Rome must now die completely because of its imperial strategies of exploitation and slave economy and before all future books on the subject have manuscripts hidden away in their vaults by frightened publishers. ...more |
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| 4.19
| 1,053
| 2019
| Apr 30, 2019
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really liked it
| This is a humane, scholarly but highly readable book by one of that diminishing breed, the sensitive British Arabist who is as much Arab as British an This is a humane, scholarly but highly readable book by one of that diminishing breed, the sensitive British Arabist who is as much Arab as British and who manages to be both detached in observation and engaged as a liberal who loves his adopted culture. He is based in Yemen. South Arabian and Yemeni examples and anecdotes pepper the book giving perhaps a slight bias against the Maghreb and Mashriq in favour of the complexities of the Arabian heartlands. But you can only do so much in 536 pages. Order has to be given to a tale of 3,000 years. Arab origins in the tension between 'badawah' and 'haradah' and the importance of the Arab poetic heritage are to be found in the Arabian Peninsular and are central to understanding what may be to be an 'Arab'. The bias is legitimate. I say 'what it may be to be an Arab' because being an Arab is an uncertain business (much as being a European is). Mackintosh-Smith does an excellent job in working through those uncertainties and the reinventions and variations on what 'being an Arab' means at any one point in history. He does two things that give perspective. First, he refuses to tell the tale as the same tale as the rise of Islam giving due weight to the 1,500 years before Muhammed as much as to the 1,450 or so since his arrival as unifier of the Peninsula under a particularly dynamic form of monotheism. The second thing he does is not define Arab by particular uses of the term 'arab as it shifts and changes over time but by its truly salient characteristic which is the use of an Arabic language derived from Arabian poetry (still a political force) and the Quran (a poetic book). I can express an interest here as not being an Arabist (deliberately so) but having worked with Arabs for a quarter of a century (as well as 'Zionists' for a decade before that) - Saudis and Syrians intimately, Moroccans, Iraqis and Emiratis seriously and many others tangentially. I can attest to the pecularities of the culture, its simultaneous unity and divisions, the effects of foreign empires, the continuing importance of rhetoric and the poetic phrase, the brutal realism, the intellectual melancholy and the ambiguities involved in truth-telling. Mackintosh-Smith brought it all together for me quite nicely and gave this experience context. It confirmed an intuition that cultures taken as a whole (whether English or Chinese, Arab or Persian) have deep roots where the use of language helps to frame the freedom of any individual. The book is not really a straight narrative so much as a chronological exploration of themes that becomes increasingly anecdotal towards the end. The last section (from 1800) is the weakest only because the anecdotes seem most disconnected and most affected by the author's sentiment. The author does something I do not usually forgive (as you will see in my other reviews) but will forgive in him - distract us in the final moments of the book with the current existential despair of the modern liberal trying to cope with the monstrosities in view. In this case, I forgive because his despair comes from having been at his post in war-torn Yemen, come under fire and stood his ground as long as he could in the tradition of many a medieval Arab intellectual and because he wears his liberal politics as lightly as his conscience permits. And I forgive him for the insights and the fundamentally sound and substantial weaving of a deep knowledge of the Arabic language and sympathy for the speakers of the language with the tough realism of the natural historian. He is also subtle enough (without abandoning his 'English' liberal values) to show respect for the possibility that the things that might make him despair about Arab political culture are a matter for Arabs to work through and not for outsiders. So, we have a strange situation by the end of the book where he is trying to square his anger at the cruelty of 'anarcharchs' and 'demonocracy' and the Arab world's uneven (to say the least) relationship to truth-telling with his acceptance of it as a unique and independent culture. My own experience and the book's solid exposition of the 'soul' of the Arab in history (slippery though the concept is through three thousand years of existence) could create a natural 'despair' that the culture will ever become 'good' like 'ours'. But is it really any of our business? Of course, 'ours' is not at all 'good'. It just has its own rhetoric and a different history that allows the 'bad' to be more limited in scope. Mackintosh-Smith rightly regrets the lack of institutional structures that allow Arabs to choose their own paths rather than submit to autocrats. But wishes are cheap. The blundering of neo-conservatives and, before that, of the insertion of Zionism like a wedge into the region (and imperialism before that) has not helped very much in creating the possibilities for organic institutional liberal democratic development. Arabs, in short, have an inchoate but very real and complex culture that is quite separate from Islam yet heavily inflected by it just as Europeans have a very real and complex culture heavily inflected by Christianity but quite separate from it - both with pagan pasts as well. The Arabs though are bound by a language constructed out of a book and tradition whereas, if Europe was also constructed out of a book and its competition with the classical tradition, Europe was to break into competitive languages that helped force through national institutional structures. The Arabic language is both a binder of peoples from Morocco to Oman and Iraq to Sudan and also a 'false friend' insofar as the dialects across the region can be almost unintelligible to each other and the 'high' language tends to bind intellectuals and elites rather than peoples. Arab nationalism (where one suspects the author has some sympathy, at least based on his account of Nasser) attempted to force the pace through radio and print rhetoric but such nationalisms can only be partially forced from above and then only over long periods of time on fertile ground. The messiness of the last half century comes from traditional order-maintaining national autocrats maintaining the fiction of 'Arab-ness' and also trying to manage Islamic sentiment when that sentiment, in fact, does not and cannot include all Arabs and has dissident variants itself. When 'Arab-ness' gets ideologised, it has a tendency to be closer to a form of soft fascism (in European terms) than anything more liberal - although one of the few areas of neglect in the book is the brief incursion of socialist ideas into the region in the last century. I tend to conservative pessimism on all this (basically Mackintosh-Smith's liberal pessimism but without the undercurrent of suppressed outrage) but I agree with him when he suggests that it is for Arabs and not outsiders to define themselves. The tide of Islamism now seems to have partially abated. This is probably as much to do with the passing of generations as to any 'counter-terrorist action'. But, as it recedes, the association of Arabism more firmly with Islam crowds out the very secular nationalisms that are its best hope. Mackintosh-Smith is bitter about Bashar Al-Assad (as many liberal Arabs must be) but, in the brutal context between even 'moderate' Political Islam and secular nationalism, the Baathist may be a last bulwark against an inappropriate Sunni appropriation of an entire linguistic culture. We might liken this to the neo-confucian appropriation of what it is to be Chinese by the Chinese Communist Party or the attempts (so far beaten off) to 'rediscover' Europe as a Christian entity by the emergent European populist Right. Being Chinese or European or Arab is not coterminous with being Neo-Confucian, Christian or Muslim. In the first case because China is a multiplicity of traditions in itself and in the last two because these religions are global and yet not everyone in either culture accepts them. Perhaps Nasser's main error was to construct out of very little a general Arab nationalism instead of accepting that there was the potential for many collaborating Arab nationalisms based on the many inheritances of the Arab conquests but where secularism had room for respected minorities. But that was then and this is now. The error was historically comprehensible. All Arab 'errors' are historically comprehensible and, thanks to this book , we cannot say we cannot comprehend them. President Nonsense bin Nonsense might have benefited from it had it existed in 2003. Ironically, the only modern Arab Leader who may be 'getting it' is MBS in Saudi Arabia, the heartland of the Arabs, who is busy building up a possibly viable Saudi nationalism as an ideology which permits greater difference within an historically determined Islamic framework. And yet the general view of the West has to be that MBS is the autocrat's autocrat at the moment and he is not even King yet. The methodology is that of Henry VIII and Francis I. Both monarchs were consolidators of national feeling into a viable nation state with the dynastic as means. So, all in all, for all the anecdotalism, an excellent guide to the creation and history of the Arab community that respects its subject and its readers and which I can strongly recommend. Incidentally, I also want to praise Yale for the attractive design and binding of this edition. ...more |
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liked it
| Part of the Royal Armouries' Arms and Armour Series, this is a sometimes technical but well illustrated introduction to Chinese weaponry and armour fr Part of the Royal Armouries' Arms and Armour Series, this is a sometimes technical but well illustrated introduction to Chinese weaponry and armour from the earliest times to the end of the Manchu (Qing) Dynasty. In fact, the illustrations are heavily dependent on the RA's Manchu era collection which we must assume arrived via visiting British Imperial military and diplomatic officials and perhaps missionaries and traders with a very few Eastern Zhou, Qin, Han, Yuan and Ming (and Korean) treasures. The ornateness and ceremonial nature of many of the Qing pieces that predominate may give a slightly false impression of the full range of Chinese historical militaria but the author is quite good at correcting this in the text. An interesting and useful basic reference text. ...more |
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| Aug 12, 2015
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really liked it
| The point of ploughing through this 1858 translation of Herodotus' 'world classic' is precisely to read the text that Victorian imperialists would hav The point of ploughing through this 1858 translation of Herodotus' 'world classic' is precisely to read the text that Victorian imperialists would have read. Go to a later translation with annotations if you want to hear the fully authentic voice of the Greek but this one will do. The book meets two needs. It is a geography (of the centres of power and civilisation in the fifth century BC) and a history, not only of those specific centres but of the massive clash between the hegemonic Persian Empire and the last nearby 'free' zone, that of the Greeks. Herodotus is, of course, writing as a Greek but a cosmopolitan one who has travelled to many of the places he describes. His achievement is remarkable. The slanderous 'father of lies' claim is grossly unfair ... he may take an absurd story at face value but he will also frequently question claims. The further away from Ionia he is, the more dodgy the data and the nearer, the more reliable, but, given the technology of travel and information transmission and preservation of the day, sneering strikes me as wholly inappropriate. It is not a religious text. We are all free to critique his claims. Truth to tell, the geography is much duller than the history. The micro-histories of provinces and the founding of empires is very much less interesting than the second half of the text (made up of nine books) which centres on the Persian Wars. If you can get through the first half, you will find (considering we are dealing with a text nearly 2,500 years old) some serious excitement as Darius and Xerxes build their forces, transport them around the Aegean and face off the mostly united Greek armies and navies. The battle of Marathon in the first invasion (490-492BC) and those of Salamis and Plataea during the second invasion (480-479BC) are events placed in their context, filled with detail (sometimes more than one account of a particular event) and written to thrill. If there is one section to read, it is the Spartan defence of the pass at Thermopylae which has become a by-word in Western culture for communitarian military sacrifice in defence of the homeland (Book VII) and has even inspired a contemporary comic book and film. There are gaps, of course, that we must regret. He rarely goes far West so, although we know something of the tyrants of Greek Italy and Sicily, he tells us nothing about Etruria, little about Carthage and virtually nothing useful about the Western Mediterranean or Central Europe. Nubia and Ethiopia are only palely reflected in relation to the Persian occupation of Egypt, Arabia, India and Central Asia are places of myth and legend and the South Russian steppes only interesting because of the peoples who harried civilisation. Later commentators often position the books as a morality tale about civilisation and oriental barbarism but this is self-serving by those wanting to be inheritors of Hellenic culture. It has created a myth about difference that has been exaggerated, It is a set of books about hegemony and the right of resistance. The Persians are representatives of imperial realpolitik rather than exporters of values. The Greeks have provoked them and the Persians find an irritating gap in control over the known world of consequence to them. The Greeks themselves are not a polity but a distinctive culture. It becomes clear that (just as many Britons would prefer to serve a hegemonic European Union than be free) many Greeks will submit to Persian lordship from vulnerability or for profit. The massive Persian forces also include many unstable Greek elements whose homelands are not being threatened with sack and massacre but who have thrown themselves in with the Persians either because they have little choice or, frankly, prefer mercantile stability to rebellion. Herodotus is not a theoretician, ideologue or social scientist. He just tells it like it is but the clues are there to mercantile interests who quite like access to the 'single market' built by the Persians but who are ready to switch sides at the drop of a hat if necessary. The Greeks who are defending their territory are an anarchic lot but they are able to sink their differences (Herodotus is good on the summits and councils where different interests are played out) to preserve their homelands. What is remarkable is the relative discipline, not based entirely on fear and shame but on consultation and interest. This is explained by factors alien to us today but they include a culture of shame and honour and a fatalistic but interpretative approach to oracles and the will of the gods. We are looking at a world both familiar to ourselves (in terms of interests, double-dealing, cynicism and political machination) and apparently unfamiliar (in terms of self-sacrifice, contempt for the cowardly, cultural coherence and shared religion). I say unfamiliar but this would not be quite so unfamiliar to our grandparents and to all the generations before them. World War I was fought in part on the basis of Hellenic virtue which brings us full circle to the 1858 edition and its role in creating an imperial honour culture. Herodotus can be read at many levels - as a source of data that would otherwise be lost, as a rattling narrative that reads as true history for the most part, as an incomplete picture of an Eastern Mediterranean civilisational zone and as exemplar. One gets the impression that Herodotus was keen to tell the story of the Persian Wars as a culturally patriotic tale but he is never dismissive of the enemy. Persians are always treated with respect as worthy opponents who are different from Greeks but not radically so. They come across 'just like us' as human beings (a theme to be brought out in Euripides 'The Persians') which is not incompatible with being triumphalist about victory. This is all about men against men with 'great men' (and the odd woman like Artemesia) on both sides. The victory is all the sweeter because the gods are fickle and because Greek heroism matched Persian organisational might. Indeed, in battle sections, it is clear that the Persians themselves are fine fighters and that both sides had wobbly and inexperienced allies. Similarly, the organisational structures of the two sides are central to the story. Both are capable organisers. Imperial might could bring vast numbers of men and material long distances. Hellenic fear could bring squabbling locals into one battle front that could hold a line. Men were defending their homelands (and would go back to warring with each other as soon as the danger was over) against 'imperialism' while quite happy to build empires if they could (as Athens and Macedon were to do). These wars are thus just one incident in the constant ebb and flow of raw power, organisation and morale where the ideology is merely culture - being a 'people' distinct from other people without necessarily wanting to exterminate them or not to trade or mate with them. Indeed, civilisation might be defined as conquest and expansion that utilises what it controls instead of destroying it. What is also heartening about Herodotus' world is that persuasion is just a tool for struggle and power - as in the references to the persuasive and cunning Athenian C-in-C Themistocles. There are no theorising philosophers trying to justify slaughter or getting in the way. The books are riddled with pagan virtue, less ritualised than in Homer and without the magical thinking of Plato. This was a culture of power defending itself against another culture of power that had miscalculated the organisational and cultural cohesion of its opponent on its home territory. ...more |
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really liked it
| This really is rather good although it loses a star for perhaps fiddling the reality of the effects of a pyroclastic flow in order to come out with a This really is rather good although it loses a star for perhaps fiddling the reality of the effects of a pyroclastic flow in order to come out with a crowd-pleasing result that really should not have been allowed. However, this is a small quibble. What we have here is a startlingly good evocation of the Roman Empire in the Bay of Naples in the first century AD - so good and so well researched that it would do no harm to have it on the syllabus of anyone studying the classics (if anyone does nowadays) at secondary school. It is also a solid thriller but the skill lies in the almost cinematic writing and clarity of style, the sign of an educated man trained as a journalist and abandoning any attempt to be self-consciously literary for a market of introverts. This is excellent writing for the educated element in the masses as we might have expected a hundred years ago from the likes of Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle. The set piece of the Roman fleet under a rain of pumice is a tour de force of imagination and tight writing. The characterisation is superb as well. He pulls off the difficult trick of presenting us with real human beings who do not know anything outside their era and who share the assumptions of that era but who have all the emotions that we might have. With only one romantic lapse, these are people who accept the social conditions of their era much as we do ours. There is no didacticism or moralising from a twenty-first century perspective - a rare pleasure nowadays. Harris imagines what it must have been like to be Roman brilliantly. Harris seems to specialise in fine popular writing set in history without allowing his stories to slip into the standard tropes of the historical novel. Most of his story-telling is set in the twentieth century and he has no problem with alternative history - most famously in 'Fatherland'. To have moved from territory he clearly knows well back in time two thousand years and come up with this book shows more than just the novelist and the journalist - it shows an author who could also have been, had he chosen, a very fine historian. A very good read. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Although now over a decade old, this rethinking of the origins of the inhabitants of the British Isles deserves to be widely read. I am not sure its r Although now over a decade old, this rethinking of the origins of the inhabitants of the British Isles deserves to be widely read. I am not sure its radical shattering of the standard view of our history has percolated far enough into the general public's vision of its own history. It was so radical that initially I thought I might have picked up something closer to Bauval and Hancock but, no, this gets endorsements from luminaries such as Renfrew and Gamble and it is clear that the author has undertaken his own research and engaged with other serious researchers. He terms it a book of 'popular science' but be warned that it is not a simple read and the art of 'skimming' a lot of technical genetic detail proved useful. And, of course, he is open about some of the speculative aspects of his work with another decade since to refine or refute by others. I am not expert but my understanding is that refining is precisely what has been going on and that there has not been a great deal of refutation. Rather than say what is regarded as true in 2018, it might be best to summarise what Oppenheimer proposed from the genetics of over ten years ago. The book is complex . My summary will not do it justice. I hope not to deter others from reading it and then following up with their own research. But here goes ... The core proposition is that the vast bulk of the British population is much older in origins, although there is a cut-off date because of climatic conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum, than widely believed. A key finding is that every historical political or military invasion (Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman and implicitly the migrations in the modern era) have had much less impact on the nature of the population in general than supposed by some archaeologists. This fits with the theses of those archaeologists who see continuities in population from their reading of the artefact record. They suggest that each invasion was more of an elite takeover than a mass movement of peoples. Oppenheimer endorses this general thrust, based on genetic evidence, suggesting that elite invasions tended to be takeovers of populations rather like themselves genetically. There were thus continuities of place as well as of time. So where did the bulk of the population come from? One interesting finding is that there is a natural difference between what we call Celts and what we call English in the very broadest sense - or rather between the population of the Western seaways and those coming from the continent. I think we are stuck with the terms Celts for political reasons even though it represents a wholly misguided nineteenth century origin legend but I would quite like to think of their rivals in these islands as 'Anglians'. We are stuck now with English. This difference is ultimately expressed as two genetic lines coming from two Ice Age refuges - one in North East Spain (of which the Basques are a relict) and one in the Ukraine and Balkans. As the ice melted populations expanded northwards. The Western line is actually the genetically dominant one, working its way up the seaways, so that perhaps two thirds of us British have ancestral origins in a settler community which expanded on the back of a neolithic culture (cardial ware) that was ultimately Mediterranean. This is the one that underpins the genetics of what we call Celts but here Oppenheimer has a card to play. Just as he diminishes the idea of ethnic cleansing by Saxons, Vikings and Normans so he does the same to another cherished myth - the Celtic homeland in Europe. He points out that language and culture are not genetics. Although cultural forms flowed into Britain from mainland Europe that we now link to Celticism, the culture that arrived amongst the 'Celts' (as we know them) was imported on a different genetic base. There is much that is more speculative in the book on the Indo-European languages of which the Celtic languages are a part. Oppenheimer seems to follow Renfrew in postulating that these language families flowed across Europe via the expansion of the Anatolian neolithic. However, it has to be said that the book was not easy to follow at this point (the depth of detail makes it easy to allow attention to lapse at times) so these sections might require a second reading - I won't try to summarise what I imperfectly understand. So, we have a largely neolithic (though there are mesolithic aspects of the case) settling the Western sea ways and moving up the South Coast where they then meet a separate settlement process coming from Europe linked back to the Linearbandkeramik of Germany. This latter takes over the North European plain and spreads north-westwards to meet the Cardial Ware settlers along the South Coast where it is no accident perhaps that Wessex, centred on Stonehenge, becomes prosperous on trade. Trade is what the British do after all. With the chains of mountains dividing West and East and cultures dependent on waterways and avoiding forests until absolutely necessary, a different genetic stock, perhaps a third of the British today, peoples Eastern England and Scotland. These are our 'Anglians'. There is a third wave linked back ultimately to the Ukrainian refuge which arrives, again along sea routes, from Northern Scandinavia to people the northern parts of the Western seaways - perhaps a reddish-haired strain moving down via the Orkneys and Shetlands. Everyone starts to get mixed up through further mutations, secondary settlements, slaving, trade and war as well as the imposition of warriors, traders and various hangers-on from elite struggles for booty and advantage but the core lines derive from these primary neolithic movements. The peoples who suffered under the Romans, Saxon warlords, Vikings and Normans were pretty well the same (genetically) as those who existed long before the Iron Age with the suggestion (beneath the later complexities) of two main genetic zones underpinning 'British' culture. These two genetic zones seem to have a surprising cultural continuity throughout history with the Celtic and English speaking zones following the pattern even today regardless of the vicissitudes of subsequent history. This raises the language question again because Oppenheimer is tempted to suggest that the peoples who pre-existed various warlord invaders might have had far more long term continuity in how they spoke than believed until recently. His suggestion is that warlords (at least in the earlier period) arrived in part because they were already culturally like a population and that Roman Britain for example was perhaps not 'Celtic' at all but either Belgic and Germanic (North Sea). The South Coast Saxons were in fact blood brothers to the Belgic and Frankish communities of Northern Gaul and North Sea Germany and the 'English' pre-existed as Anglians who were blood brothers to other North Sea peoples. Saxons were perhaps just later variants of Belgae. Furthermore (though this is very speculative) such people spoke languages close to those of their continental neighbours and it is in this that English originated. There are, of course, other speculations on the Picts but the speculations are always well argued and plausible. So, the British are divided naturally into their two halves, east and west, and then are further divided by geography within or just outside those categories north and south. Those divisions are very ancient and pre-date our historical records. This raises an interesting question about 'race' because genetics increasingly is being shown to be linked to personality characteristics and cultures may be built on such predispositions - perhaps the free-born Englishman really is psychologically pre-set in that direction! Oppenheimer is interesting on his own position. His name suggests German-Jewish ancestry and that is where it comes from but, in fact, his own Britishness represents by far the majority of his genetic code because incomers generally get overwhelmed by native genes as they marry in. He has also done what I have done - married into an entirely different East Asian genetic heritage so his children, like mine (though mine have genetic antecedents from Europe through colonisation), are genetically diverse but the Asian will attenuate over time as they reproduce. This raises interesting political questions about migration and Celt identity. Recent migration, for example from the Comonwealth and the EU, is not an invasion by warlords but a settlement process and these migrants often (though not invariably) reproduce within their community. What we have (in England) is a core people going back to neolithic time battered periodically by elites (nothing changes in that respect) being faced by a quantitatively different intrusion where the levels of integration are ambiguous and the new settlers are concentrated in particular areas. This might explain the unease of many English indigenes both about the fact of the matter and the lack of control or interest in their instinctive fears by elites (who, of course, see the majority around them as, basically, plunder, to all intents and purposes). The reality is not as alarming as nativists fear but cannot be swept under the carpet. Many migrants will simply be happily absorbed into Englishness (though it is called Britishness to keep the Celts on side in a United Kingdom) but others will create new sub-groups of localised genetic difference. This does not matter in the long run (though being identifiably different has caused problems in the past) but it does need managing. Successive Governments had and have an appalling record at matching sufficient cultural and linguistic integration with respect for indigenous concerns. We must remember that whiteness really is an unusual mutation from the 'norm' of humanity, one which has had enormous global success in spreading for whatever mysterious reasons. But it is a marker and as the new genetics spreads into the population, its 'factness' may re-emerge. We should be very wary of the new genetic history fuelling genuinely inappropriate interpretations of the data to suggest a 'white' community in danger. There is fortunately no sign of this at the moment but only because the English are notoriously easy-going and tolerant. We cannot deny a genetic base to 'whiteness' or that it has some cultural meaning and the determined attempt to remove all meaning from it while giving dramatic cultural meaning to blackness and brownness has proved dangerously counter-productive in recent years. Another political issue arises out of a debate about the Celts. The post-modern question is whether there is such a people as the Celts. The recent answer in archaeology has been in the negative but the genetics seem to suggest otherwise but within the revisionist framework. The trend in the last few decades had been to dismiss the very existence of the Celts except as modern nationalist creations because the archaeology has disposed of the link between the La Tene and Hallstatt cultures and Britain. La Tene and Hallstatt are now seen as elite cultural influences. The claim is that the people of the Western seaways were recipients of ideas but not linked with Central Europe's Iron Age Celts as described by the Romans. Oppenheimer suggests that we are dealing with a very red herring here. He accepts fully the disconnection of Iron Age Europe from the modern day Celts but his genetic work demonstrates the distinctiveness of the people of the Western seaways (even in looks) and suggests a language base that gives the Celts genuine reason to consider themselves a people. So we have two 'races' (to use an unpopular word), perhaps three if we take the Scandinavian neolithic entry into the north, who are biologically a little distinctive with different cultural attitudes formed by different environments. And if the 'Celts' exist then so do the 'Anglians'. Of course, racialising and politicising all this is nonsense except that the history of elite struggles over these islands is the story of the domination of the seaways peoples by the 'Anglians' and then one of the Anglian elites abandoning their own people to build an Empire. A gross over-simplification, to be sure, but there is a truth in it. The fraught politics of petty nationalism and the deep and growing resentments of the 'Anglians' who are not part of the elite within what is still an 'imperial' United Kingdom are derived from the working out of this history. The political dynamic is thus a little different from what we have been led to expect - one not of ethnic cleansing but of successive elite replacements. The moral link between elites and mass, lord and peasant, starts to weaken as genetics show not race but power relations in operation. Oppenheimer has an irritable introduction about ignorant media misinterpretation of his work and he is right to be concerned. The conclusion of the genetics is that difference is a fact but not a politically determinative one unless we allow it to be. If a population has been in one place for a very very long time and absorbed elite invaders and traders rather than been displaced by them it suggests a basic resilience and tolerance. It also suggests that history has treated it as a tool and resource for highly organised out-groups. This genetic work should be encouraged but it requires a determined effort to stop any nineteenth century racial interpretation emerging at the expense of one based on the political dynamic of native masses, uninterested in difference, being manipulated by cosmopolitan elites. I cannot resist bringing Brexit into the argument as a paradox. The ancient history shows the 'Anglians' as the people most linked to the Continent by cultural ties and genetics and the Celts as independent seafarers building their own unique trading culture covering the known world. Yet the position on the European Union has become the exact opposite because of the intrusion of imperial history. The English want out of the continental entanglement and the Celts equally tend to want immersion in it as guarantor of their own identity over and against the 'Anglians'. This shows us both that the genetic base lines are still quietly working their way through our history, that underlying differences can be quite intractable and that particular positions are merely occasions for difference based on more recent history. The book raises a question about the very concept of an elite-driven United Kingdom if it cannot balance the interests within it. The elite lost Ireland and may yet lose Scotland. The English often feel that they are culturally sucked dry for an empire. Neither side is very happy at the moment. We can overdo this interpretation but this book is an intelligent and humane contribution to the debate on who we British are, in a country where ancestry has become a national pastime. It is welcome and should be read more widely. Positive outcomes might be a renewed respect for the people we happen to have ended up calling Celts but also respect for the long-suffering English too, historically treated as cannon fodder in wars and milch cows for taxation. That worm may yet turn! ...more |
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it was amazing
| One of the mysteries of early human history is the near-complete collapse of Bronze Age civilisation in the West around 1200BC. The Mycenaean and Hitt One of the mysteries of early human history is the near-complete collapse of Bronze Age civilisation in the West around 1200BC. The Mycenaean and Hittite Empires collapsed, the Canaanite and Syrian cities were plundered, Egypt was severely threatened by hordes from the Libyan West and only Assyria survived intact. This would be like some upheaval destroying civilisation in Europe and Russia and forcing all world trade centres out of business, leaving only China standing and a weakened US. What caused this has been a puzzle for generations of archaeologists. Robert Drews, writing a quarter of a century ago, came up with a very plausible solution in this book, taking account of one simple problem - we cannot know very much about this era. In the end, his solutions seems the most plausible largely because all other solutions are less so. He takes us through all those formerly plausible scenarios that do not quite stand up to scrutiny - tectonic shifts causing devastating earthquakes, mass migrations of peoples (caused perhaps by, say, over-population), the arrival of ironworking, climatic change and general systems collapse. His solution is more brutally simple - changes in basic military technology which triggered a change in the relative power of 'primitives' in the hinterland, used to doing imperial dirty work or hungry for the goodies that the empires and cities held, to 'civilisation'. There is no point on over-simplifying his argument. The slim evidential base is nevertheless handled with skill to place a great deal of emphasis on the arrival of the slashing sword invented to the North and which gave tribes throughout the region a new edge against chariot warfare. His argument provides a plausible narrative in which mercenaries are hired and then become factors (as in Rome many centuries later) in disturbing the balance of power on which empires depend. Unlike the later barbarians, these 'primitives' were happy just to plunder and not to learn. Drew calls these events the Catastrophe but points out that it was these plundering tribes who eventually learned to cohere in the Iron Age into 'nations' that were the founding twin poles of later Western civilisation, Greece and Israel. There is much to ponder here (if one is so minded) on what may cause the collapse of civilisations. Eco-causes are fashionable on the left and migration pressures on the right but it may be that both are allowing ideology and prejudice to get in the way. Even new technology, the current favourite for renewed torment amongst the terminal pessimists, may not be the probable cause that we are told. Perhaps it is just going to be about the transfer of very specific tools to the 'damned of the earth', a simple shift in power relations. In 1200BC, the slashing sword and a few other highly specific innovations and new motivations in the hands of masses of men seem to have overcome the capital-intensive military technologies of the day - the chariot army and its logistics - surprisingly quickly and brutally. The masses of men were outsiders who had been brought into the system to act as mercenaries and seem to have learned of the weaknesses of their employers and enemies. Drews give some emphasis to the role of an attempted mass assault on Egypt by the Libyans as central to the learning process. I cannot quite see a modern analogy but we might be interested in looking for it. Who are the masses of persons today who are allowed to taste the system but not to own it? What tools are to hand that would give them the edge over the finely honed 'educated' and wealthier 'owners'? Perhaps then it was a struggle over brute force - the ability to thrust aside the other and plunder. Perhaps today civilisation is vulnerable not to such thuggery but to a simple withdrawal of an acceptance of elite legitimacy enabled by some new and forthcoming single techno-innovation. The pessimists always think that the collapse of civilisation is due at any time. They are usually wrong. However, Chinese and Western history have shown periodic periods of collapse and restoration. It is probably worth thinking about what could cause the next collapse if it ever came. ...more |
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| 1846143381
| 3.88
| 3,166
| Sep 01, 2011
| Sep 01, 2011
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liked it
| This was a disappointing book. Ostensibly telling the story of European history somewhat indirectly through fifteen case studies of States that had ul This was a disappointing book. Ostensibly telling the story of European history somewhat indirectly through fifteen case studies of States that had ultimately ceased to exist, this very long book ultimately collapses on the self-indulgent approach of the author. Let us start with the positive aspects of the book. The meat of each case study is solid and offers presumably reliable basic narrative history of the old school that will give any reader with a general education important and probably new insights into bits of history too often neglected. Davies rightly points out that a history that reads back from the winners is no history at all since it does not give you the full picture. He aims to correct this and does us a service in doing so. In essence, he fills in some of the gaps and give these lost States their due as a part of history. From Visigothic Tolosa in the fifth century AD to Litva and Borussia and thence to Eire under the British Crown after the Free State was formed, the stories are broadly well told and most of it will be new material to most readers. The maps and dynastic charts throughout are excellent. So what is wrong with the book? First, it is too long for the material. Each chapter is padded out with an introductory 'travelogue' that is mostly redundant while a closing mini-essay often seems to be pot-boiling to meet a deadline. In the end, you wonder what precisely you are learning here beyond 'one damned fact after another'. Anecdotes abound. There is plenty of detail. There are 'ah-ha' moments of real insight. But interpretation seems to be reserved for the business of meeting private prejudices. And these self-indulgent prejudices are worn on the sleeve. Davies is clearly an old style European conservative, romantic about small nations, with an inherent gut dislike of Russia and of the Soviet system that makes some sections read like the worst sort of Cold War propaganda. While his points are often fair, there is a lack of sophistication here. Some of the thinking seems muddled with personal moral judgements running through the text sotto voce like thin streams of ore in the rock of the narrative. Almost every case study in the book can reasonably be considered to be a 'vanished kingdom' insofar as some dynastic family business was involved but he stretches the point on Rusyn in 1939 while Byzantion seems stuck in there with little new to say just to permit space for an empire. But the final case study is little more than extended riff on the iniquities of Sovietism in relation to Estonia and other small nations. This East European specialist strikes me as just getting something off his chest. His account of the Soviet Union is unsubtle and grossly simplistic. The book seems to be little more at times that the dumping on the reader of extensive notes made for his earlier history of Europe (another very big book) to which he has then added some local colour and some of his regional small nation and romantic-dynastic prejudices. The book was thus a lot less enjoyable than it should have been. The very short theoretical chapter at the end, on the death of States, seemed to offer yet more potboiling with its rather unnecessary listing of the opinions of dead white luminaries from Aristotle to Rousseau. It stays in the library because the meat in the case studies remains valuable and some of the potboiling stuff, the bread surrounding the meat sandwich, could be entertaining on occasions but the overall experience was disheartening. One was left with a sense of intellectual laziness. What I wish had happened was a tough Editor cutting out the guff at the beginning and end of each case study, dropping the self-indulgent chapter on the Soviet Union and Rusyn (and the unnecessary discursion on Byzantion) and giving us 13 solid narrative case studies. If there had then been a more thoughtful review of the failure of these warlord and dynastic states in a final chapter (perhaps pulling together some of the material in the final sections of each chapter), he might have cut 120 pages and walked away with something more impressive. ...more |
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Jul 06, 2017
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Mar 09, 2024
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it was ok
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Feb 26, 2024
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| 2.75
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Feb 25, 2024
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Feb 24, 2024
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Aug 08, 2022
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| 3.88
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it was amazing
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Jul 09, 2022
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Dec 18, 2021
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| 3.40
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really liked it
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Nov 23, 2021
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| 4.26
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really liked it
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Aug 01, 2021
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| 3.71
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it was amazing
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Apr 17, 2021
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| 3.87
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it was amazing
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Apr 10, 2021
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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Jan 30, 2021
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| 3.83
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really liked it
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Aug 30, 2020
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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May 23, 2020
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Apr 17, 2020
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| 4.01
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really liked it
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Apr 22, 2019
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| 3.87
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really liked it
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Oct 14, 2018
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| 3.88
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it was amazing
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Jul 12, 2018
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| 3.95
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it was amazing
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Mar 12, 2018
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| 3.88
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liked it
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Jul 06, 2017
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