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

Preface

xi Preface About ten years ago I was asked by my fellow graduate students at Johns Hopkins University to contribute an article in a Festschrift for my mentor, Hans Goedicke, a famous Egyptologist. After some thought, I decided to write something that is both Egyptological and Sinological, just to show my appreciation to my old professor for his generosity in helping a foreign student. He himself, by the way, was an immigrant from Vienna. The article, when it was published, was rather short, with the title “The Emergence of Cultural Consciousness in Ancient Egypt and China: A Comparative Perspective.” I was not very satisfied with the result, however, and therefore began to conduct a more extensive study that will include not only Egypt and China but also Mesopotamia, one of my subfields when I was studying Egyptology at Johns Hopkins. Looking back on the origin and process of this study, I recognized certain changes that occurred in my own understanding of the subject. 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. What is the relevance of my study to the contemporary society, a question that inevitably has to be asked for a student of humanity? The attitude toward foreigners, in light of Edward Said’s powerful assail of the phenomenon of Orientalism, seems to stand out glaringly. If Orientalism describes a kind of Western attitude toward foreigners in the modern Orient, and the analysis of this attitude leads to a reflection of the nature of modern Western hegemonic order, what can one say about the ancient Orient? Here, of course, the problem becomes very complicated. Are we talking about our attitude toward the ancient Oriental civilizations, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, as also xii Preface a form of reading “the other” according to our own preconceptions and implicit hegemonic or patronistic order? Are we talking about the ancient civilizations themselves, their attitude toward foreigners, and if or how they also espoused a form of Orientalism? Should we dig at the root of ancient studies—a form of intellectual, but also very political, pursuit of the “origin” of Western culture that could authenticate its hegemonic power—since the nineteenth century? Should I, a “Chinese” looking from the East with an eye trained in the West, take a look at the Chinese view of the West and talk about a form of Occidentalism ? Being unable to solve all these issues at once, I took up perhaps the easiest one and decided to engage in the ancient attitudes toward foreigners, and, being unable to resolve my own identity—a Chinese trained in the West on the subject of Oriental studies—I decided to venture into a comparative study. Thus the present book. When I began to investigate the issue of foreigners in the ancient world, I first adopted a positivist method in looking at the evidence. I examined textual and iconographic evidence and tried to detect the attitudes behind them. My intention was to investigate the nature of civilizations by looking at their attitudes toward others—as a reflection of the self. It seems straightforward enough, until I realized that, first, the concept of foreigner differs in each civilization, and that “foreign” is a relative and ambiguous term: one needs to delineate who are “we, the insiders,” and who are “they, the outsiders,” as the original meaning of “foreign” in Latin, forās, means “outside.” The problem is, what if the “we” is not a homogeneous group? What if the “self” itself is an unstable thing that changes through time? How to capture this change? I find it very difficult to conduct research when facing the evidence that purports to express a certain attitude toward “the others” while it is uncertain whether the one who left the evidence is really so different from “the others.” I then adopted a position that sees the construction of ethnic identity as a subjective choice, that the division between self and others was not necessarily based on any objective conditions such as race or culture, although these could have been the factors. From here I realized that the entire project of looking for foreigners might have been ill-conceived: as it was very much debated that the problem...