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

1. Introduction

 The Question about The Others Agenre of fantastic stories circulated Medieval Europe that recounted strange or monstrous peoples who inhabited faraway countries—people with one foot, people with their face on their chests, people with long lips that could be used as an umbrella, and so on.¹ Not entirely created out of pure imagination, some of these stories had their origins in the works of Greek authors of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Travelers in late antiquity and the early Medieval period brought them back to Europe as fabulous and amusing tales about the never-never land outside the civilized world.² They were, however, more than amusing stories, since geography—that is, information about the natural and human environment in other places—was considered an essential part of the knowledge of the universe and a key component of “the truth” about the human condition.³ This knowledge of the monstrous races might be seen as a way to define one’s own existence; that is, by establishing a very different “other,” sometimes exotic, often grotesque and dangerous, one gains a positive and “normal” image for oneself.⁴ It was also a source that challenged people’s conceptions of what it means to be a human being, since there were so many incredible “variations” of mankind.⁵ 1 Introduction Now the other writers tell one about their (the Scythians) savagery , because they know that the terrible and the marvelous are startling, but one should tell the opposite facts too and make them patterns of conduct. —Ephoros, c. 405–333 BCE 2 Enemies of Civilization The monstrous races described in these stories remind us of the descriptions of foreign peoples found in the Shan-hai-jing (山海經), or Classic of Mountains and Seas, a Chinese text dated fourth century BCE. Comparable to the European stories, the Classic of Mountains and Seas presented the reader with fantastic foreign lands, one inhabited by people with holes in the chest, another inhabited by one-eyed people, yet another by people with one arm and one foot, and so on.⁶ While it is premature or unnecessary to suggest any connection between the Greek and the Chinese sources, these stories nevertheless show that similar modes of thinking regarding things foreign could have been developed in different cultures. When describing faraway places and peoples, although it was possible that in some cases the strange or monstrous figures might have originated from misunderstandings, exaggerations, or embellishment upon received traditions, it was also a natural tendency for the storytellers to let their imagination take the reins and create exotic stories. The medieval stories of monsters as well as those contained in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, though often relegated to the realm of folklore and sometimes used by modern scholars to reconstruct ancient geography or mythological traditions, are significant in another aspect: they hint at a deep-rooted cultural psychology that connects “the foreign” with “the monstrous and devilish ,” even “nonhuman” or “subhuman.” It is most likely that the stories are no less the productions of cultural consciousness that betrays the self-images of the storytellers than descriptions of “reality.” By cultural consciousness I mean conceptions of the characteristics of a culture commonly shared and employed by its people to distinguish themselves from people of other cultures. The importance of this sense of cultural identity in the formation and conflicts of peoples and countries cannot be overemphasized. The history of the modern world has provided ample evidence of the workings of cultural consciousness, such as the rise of nationalism.⁷ In the ancient world, cultural consciousness was no less a forceful factor in the formation and development of individual civilizations.⁸ The Greek attitude toward aliens and non-Greeks, for example, has been pointed to as the major factor in the formation of Christian civilization.⁹ The entire history of the Jewish community can be described as a continuous effort to maintain its cultural identity by stressing a specific Jewish cultural consciousness.¹⁰ Christian civilization, under the Roman Catholic Church, distinguished the “they-Pagan” from the “we-Christian,” and extended this distinction Introduction 3 to the moral issue of good and evil, that is, what is different from “us” is necessarily “evil.”¹¹ The above observation seems to agree with a commonly held opinion, that in order to form a group identity and help preserve the prosperity of the community, it was natural and necessary for people...