Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China (review)

Mu-chou Poo studied Egyptology at Brown University and took his Ph.D. in the field from Johns Hopkins University before assuming a position as research fellow at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. As he explains in the preface to his new book, his scholarly preoccupation with otherness did not arise accidentally: "My interest in the attitudes toward foreigners grew out of personal experience of being a foreign student in the United States. My subject of study, ancient Egypt, adds another layer of the feeling of foreignness: a foreigner in a foreign country studying a culture that was foreign to both" (p. xi). In fact, quite apart from his Egyptological expertise, Professor Poo has also written widely on the religious and cultural history of ancient China, so he is in an unusually strong position to offer solid comparative studies of ancient societies.

In the volume under review, Poo turns his attention to issues of identity in ancient times, and more particularly to views of foreigners in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. He holds that "each civilization is unique, yet within this uniqueness are some common themes of development" (p. 18). Generally speaking, he finds that geographical origins, language, religion, customs, lifestyle, and levels of social and economic development all influenced the formation and maintenance of cultural identities in his chosen societies. He argues specifically, however, that biological race played no role in those processes: ethnic identities rested on social and cultural foundations rather than biological origins, racial associations, or physical appearances. Yet even in the absence of racist constructions, observers in the powerful and prosperous societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China found abundant grounds for looking down on their less powerful and less prosperous neighbors. Poo shows that in all three societies foreigners commonly bore a reputation for being unsophisticated or dangerous (or both), but he recognizes also that they often figured also as friends or allies of the host society. His study develops a great deal of empirical data to flesh out these findings. In spite of the numerous political, military, social, economic, and cultural differences between ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, writings and graphic representations survive to show that foreigners to all three societies often fell under xenophobic clouds, bearing reputations as threatening enemies, animal-like brutes, or even demons. Military allies merited more respectful reputations, while luxury goods and exotic products from foreign lands often won appreciation for the merchants or brokers who were able to procure them.

Of course, not all foreigners inhabited foreign lands. Large numbers of aliens lived within Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese societies themselves. Some of them were war captives who often experienced cruelty and harsh treatment while working as laborers or slaves, but those with technical or craft skills frequently were able to find comfortable positions in foreign societies where there was respect for their talents. In a particularly interesting chapter of his book, Poo examines prospects for the assimilation of foreigners into the metropolitan societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. Foreigners frequently achieved assimilation in all three lands, of course, but Poo finds that very different environments conditioned processes of assimilation in the three lands. He uncovered no evidence of specific concern to integrate foreigners in Mesopotamia, perhaps because Mesopotamian society was itself a complex jumble of Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and others, who all seem to have maintained their inherited cultural traditions to some greater or lesser extent. In Egypt, too, Poo found little explicit sign of interest in foreigners, even though numerous Libyans and Nubians had integrated into Egyptian society from early times. He speculates that an Egyptian worldview, in which Maat provided order for the entire cosmos, obviated the need for concern about the assimilation of foreigners. In China, by contrast to both Mesopotamia and Egypt, the possibility of absorbing foreigners was a topic of high interest. While wary of the military threat posed...