What Makes Civilization?: An Interview with David Wengrow
- What Makes Civilization?An Interview with David Wengrow
David Wengrow, a reader in comparative archaeology at the University of London's Institute of Archaeology, has recently written a book about the birth of civilization in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. In What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the World (Oxford University Press, 2010) he pursues two themes: the interconnectedness of ancient Near Eastern societies; and the paradoxical nature of our understanding of the ancient Near East as both the birthplace of civilization and its cultural antithesis—a remote and exotic world. Senior Editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Wengrow in late October 2010.
What are you trying to accomplish with your book?
I am trying to show that new findings about the ancient Near East, in which I include Egypt and Mesopotamia, pose important challenges to our contemporary notions of history and civilization. The recent destruction of antiquities and archaeological sites in Iraq should have prompted a debate about what has been lost, and why it still matters. It's not a matter of reasserting old ideas about "cradles of civilization" or pitting one civilization against another. As I am trying to show in the book, new research is transforming our image of the ancient Near East, and this has implications for understanding the place of the Middle East, and of Africa, in world history.
How has recent archaeological fieldwork altered our understanding of the ancient Near East?
The aspect that I focus on most strongly is interaction: cultural transfers and exchange over large areas, the extent of which—even before the first writing systems and cities—is still surprising to many historians and social scientists. New evidence for these networks and relationships is accumulating all the time. We can follow their growth through the flow of particular materials—metals, scented oils and woods, colored stone—and also particular practices from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean and beyond. Whole areas that were once blanks on the archaeological map—Turkmenistan, the Iranian Plateau, Arabia—are now filled with evidence of walled cities and complex societies. These were connected to the river-based societies of the Indus, the Nile, and the Tigris and Euphrates, which we've known about for much longer. And who knows what remains to be discovered around the Horn of Africa, or what is being drowned forever beneath the waters of hydraulic dams in Sudan or Turkey. Unfortunately, when archaeological sites and museums are looted and destroyed, we lose forever evidence of past connections between faraway regions and communities. These very old connections were often completely forgotten in later periods of antiquity, but they nevertheless formed part of the fabric of Middle Eastern and African societies from the earliest times.
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The capture of the city of Astartu by the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III, about 730-727 B.C., as depicted on a palace relief now kept on display at the British Museum. From Henry Smith Williams, The Historians' History of the World: Prolegomena, Egypt, Mesopotamia (The Outlook Company, 1904).
Why have these archaeological findings failed to penetrate our grand narratives of the past?
That's a very interesting question. Grand narratives have enjoyed a recent vogue—think of Jared Diamond's and Ian Morris's books. But they tend to neglect the Near East. Daniel Lord Smail's recent book On Deep History and the Brain seems particularly intent on downplaying the significance of the ancient Near East, which he thinks has been exaggerated because of a lingering attachment to a sacred (biblical) view of world history. As an archaeologist I have a lot of sympathy with his aim of promoting a unified account of the human past that puts prehistory and history on an equal footing. But for exactly the same reason I would argue that we have to look critically at the points of transition between nonliterate and literate societies, or between village-based communities and the first cities, or uncentralized and centralized political formations. These transitions must surely be part of the deep human history that he is advocating, and there is still a...
