What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West

  • David Wengrow
Oxford University Press: 2010. 217 pp. £14.99, $24.95 9780192805805 | ISBN: 978-0-1928-0580-5

Every major war causes us to reflect on the meaning of the word civilization. The mayhem over the past decade in what was once Mesopotamia (now Iraq) is particularly provocative because the region is known as the historical birthplace of civilization. In What Makes Civilization?, archaeologist David Wengrow takes a 5,000-year perspective, comparing the first thousand years of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations to draw unsettling lessons about recent events.

The early glories of civilization developed in the third millennium BC (3000–2000 BC) in the 'Fertile Crescent' of the Middle East and beside the River Nile: city states such as Uruk and Ur in Mesopotamia, the pyramids at Giza and the development of sophisticated writing systems in cuneiform and hieroglyphics. Isaac Newton wrote in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (published posthumously in 1728) that ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt provided Europe with the earliest glimmers of the Enlightenment — farming, literacy, astronomy and navigation — as well as a darker heritage of sacred kingship and the dynastic cult of the dead.

Early Mesopotamian culture had little overlap with that of ancient Egypt, despite their proximity. Credit: C. ONIANS/AFP/GETTY

Archaeologists have always debated the importance of borrowing and diffusion of ideas versus that of independent invention and national identity. There is a current fashion for exploring the interconnectedness of ancient civilizations, yet most archaeologists continue to focus on single regions. They agree with the striking insight of French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who wrote in his 1920 essay 'The Nation', after the First World War: “Societies live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.”

Mesopotamia and Egypt, despite their geographical proximity and similar locations in the flood plains of great rivers, provide a fascinating example of Mauss's observation. For all the impressive scale and sophistication of these two early civilizations, they developed in very different ways. Egyptian pyramid building and the mortuary cult of the pharaoh — with its mummies, lavishly painted tombs and 'books of the dead' — have no obvious equivalent in Mesopotamia. Writing was invented in the two regions at about the same time — in Mesopotamia as cuneiform around 3300 BC, and in Egypt as hieroglyphics in about 3200 BC — yet the two scripts look entirely different and seem to have arisen independently.

Astonishingly, there is no written evidence that ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt were directly aware of each other during their first 1,000 years of existence. However, both civilizations undoubtedly traded with areas farther afield well before the third millennium. For example, precious lapis lazuli, which must have come overland and by sea from its nearest source in mountainous Afghanistan, is found in Egyptian burials dating back to the fourth millennium BC.

These differences lend support to the separatist argument of Mauss, rather than to the idea of the growth of civilization as a universal and multicultural phenomenon. Although What Makes Civilization? does not deny the importance of mixtures and borrowings, it convincingly concludes that the parallel development of Mesopotamia and Egypt demonstrates “the deep attachment of human societies to the concepts they live by, and the inequalities they are prepared to endure in order to preserve those guiding principles”. This finding does not bode well for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.