Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  In life Tutankhamen was not an especially important pharaoh. But his treasures and sumptuous tomb stimulated public interest in archaeology as never before, more even than had the discoveries at Machu Picchu. The high drama of the excavation, however, concealed a mystery. If the ancient Egyptians buried a seventeen-year-old monarch with such style, what might they have done for older, more accomplished kings? If such tombs haven’t been found – and they haven’t – does this mean they have been lost to plunderers? And at what cost to knowledge? If they are still there, how might they change our understanding of the way civilisations evolve?

  Much of the fascination in Middle Eastern archaeology, however, lay not in finding gold but in teasing out fact from myth. By the 1920s the biblical account of man’s origins had been called into question time and again. While it was clear that some of the Bible was based on fact, it was no less obvious that the Scriptures were wildly inaccurate in many places. A natural area of investigation was the birth of writing, as the earliest record of the past. But here too there was a mystery.

  The mystery arose from the complicated nature of cuneiform writing, a system of wedges cut in clay that existed in Mesopotamia, an area between the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. Cuneiform was believed to have developed out of pictograph script, spreading in time throughout Mesopotamia. The problem arose from the fact that cuneiform was a mixture of pictographic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts which could not have arisen, all by themselves, at one time and in one place. It followed that cuneiform must have evolved from an earlier entity – but what? And belonging to which people? Analysis of the language, the type of words that were common, the business transactions typically recorded, led philologists to the idea that cuneiform had not been invented by the Semitic Babylonians or Assyrians but by another people from the highlands to the east. This was pushing the ‘evidence’ further than it would go, but this theoretical group of ancestors had even been given a name. Because the earliest known rulers in the southern part of Mesopotamia had been called ‘Kings of Sumer and Akkad,’ they were called the Sumerians.26

  It was against this background that a Frenchman, Ernest de Sarzec, excavated a mound at Telloh, near Ur and Uruk, north of modern Basra in Iraq, and found a statue of a hitherto unknown type.27 This naturally sparked fresh interest in the ‘Sumerians,’ and other digs soon followed, carried out mainly by Americans and Germans. These unearthed among other things huge ziggurats, which confirmed that the ancient civilisation (then called Lagash) was sophisticated. The dating was provocative too: ‘It seemed almost as if its beginnings coincided with the times described in Genesis. The Sumerians might well be the same people, it was thought, who populated the earth after the punitive deluge that wiped out all humankind but Noah and his kin.’ These excavations revealed not only how early civilisations evolved but also how early man thought, which is why, in 1927, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig in the biblical Ur of Chaldea, the alleged home of Abraham, founder of the Jews.

  Woolley, born in 1880, was educated at Oxford. He was a friend and colleague of T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’); together they excavated Carchemish, where the Euphrates flows from modern Turkey into Syria. In World War I Woolley did intelligence work in Egypt but then spent two years as a prisoner of war in Turkey. He made three important discoveries at Ur: first, he found several royal tombs, including the grave of Queen Shub-ad, which contained almost as many gold and silver vessels as the tomb of Tutankhamen; second, he unearthed the so-called mosaic standard of Ur, which featured a cluster of chariots, showing that it was the Sumerians, at the end of the fourth millennium BC, who had introduced this device into warfare; and third, he discovered that the royal corpses in Ur were not alone.28 Alongside the king and queen, in one chamber, lay a company of soldiers (copper helmets and spears were found next to their bones). In another chamber were the skeletons of nine ladies of the court, still wearing elaborate gold headdresses.29 Not only were these very grisly practices, but more significant, no text had ever hinted at this collective sacrifice. Woolley therefore drew the conclusion that the sacrifice had taken place before writing had been invented to record such an event. In this way the sacrifices confirmed the Sumerians, at that stage, as the oldest civilisation in the world.

  It was only after these astounding discoveries that Woolley reached the forty-feet level. And here he came upon nothing.30 For more than eight feet there was just clay, completely free from shards and rubbish or artefacts of any kind. Now, for a deposit of clay eight feet thick to be laid down, a tremendous flood must at some time have inundated the land of Sumer. Was this, then, the deluge mentioned in the Bible?31 Like all classical archaeologists, Woolley was familiar with the Middle Eastern legend of Gilgamesh, half-man, half-god, who endured many trials and adventures, including a massive flood (‘the waters of death’).32 Were there other correspondences between the Sumerians and the early Bible? When he looked, Woolley found many of them. The most intriguing was the account in Genesis that between Adam and the Deluge there were ten ‘mighty forefathers which were old.’ The Sumerian literature also referred to their ‘primal kings,’ which were eight in number. Moreover, the Israelites boasted improbably long life spans. Adam, for example, who begot his first son at the age of 130, is said to have lived for 800 years. Woolley found that the life spans of the ancient Sumerians were supposed to have been even greater.33 According to one account, the reigns of eight ancestral kings stretched over 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king.34 The central point was this: the more he looked, the more Woolley found that the Sumerians overlapped with the early biblical account of Genesis, and that Sumer occupied a pivotal point in human development.35 For example, they boasted the first schools and were the first to use gardens to provide shade. The first library was theirs, and they had the concept of the ‘Resurrection’ long before the Bible. Their law was impressive and in some respects surprisingly modern.36 ‘The astounding thing about this legal code from a modern point of view, is the way it is governed by a clear and consistent concept of guilt.’37 The juristic approach was emphasised at all times, with a deliberate suppression of religious considerations. Vendettas, for example, were all but abolished in Sumer, the important point being that the state took over from the individual as the arbiter of justice. This justice was harsh but did its best to be objective. Medicine and mathematics were also highly regarded professions in Sumer, and the Sumerians appeared to have discovered the arch. Like we do, they polished apples before they ate them, and the idea that a black cat is unlucky comes from Sumer, as does the division of the clock face into twelve hours.38 Sumer was, then, a missing link in the evolution of civilisation. From what Woolley was able to deduce, the Sumerians were non-Semitic, a dark-haired people who displaced two other Semitic peoples in the Mesopotamian delta.39

  Though Woolley could go no further than this, more light was thrown on Hebrew origins, and on the evolution of writing, by discoveries made at Ras Shamra. Ras Shamra lies in northwestern Syria, near the Mediterranean bay of Alexandretta, at the angle between Syria and Asia Minor. Here, on a hill above a small harbour, was an ancient settlement excavated in 1929 by the French, led by Claude Schaeffer. They were able to construct a full chronology of the site, in which was embedded Ras Shamra’s written records, dating to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. This showed the site to have been named Ugarit, and that it was occupied by a Semitic people of the Amorite-Canaanite class.40 According to the Bible, this was the period when the Israelites were entering Palestine from the south and beginning to spread among Canaanites, kinsmen of the inhabitants of Ugarit. The library was discovered in a building that stood between the temples of Baal and Dagon. Belonging to the high priest, it consisted mainly of tablets with writing in a cuneiform style but adapted to an alphabetic script, comprising twenty-nine signs. This made it the earliest known alphabet.41

  The contents of the texts proved to be legal works, price lists, medical and veterinary trea
tises, and a huge number of religious writings. These showed that Ugarit’s supreme god was El, a very familiar name from the Old Testament as one of the names of the God of Israel. For example, in chapter 33, verse 20, of Genesis, Jacob erects his altar to E1, the God of Israel.’ In the Ras Shamra tablets, E1 is the king, the supreme judge, the father of years’ and ‘He reigns over all the other gods.’42 The land of Canaan is referred to as ‘the whole land of El.’ El has a wife, Asherat, with whom he has a son, Baal. El is often represented as a bull, and in one text Crete is described as the abode of El. Thus there are overlaps not only between Ras Shamra and Sumeria, Assyrian and Cretan ideas, but also with Hebrew concepts. Many of the writings describe Baal’s adventures – for example, his fights with Lotan, ‘the sinuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads,’ which recalls the Hebrew Leviathan, and whose seven heads remind us of the beast with seven heads in Revelation and in Job.43 In another set of writings, El gives Keret command of a huge army, called the ‘army of the Negeb.’ This is recognisable as the Negev Desert area in the extreme south of Palestine. Keret’s orders were to conquer some invaders who are called Terachites, immediately identified as the descendants of Terah, the father of Abraham – in other words the Israelites, who were at that time (according to the then generally accepted chronology) occupying the desert during their forty years’ wanderings.44 The Ras Shamra/Ugarit texts contained other parallels with the Old Testament and provide a strong if not entirely clear link between the bull cults dated to circa 2,000–4,000 BC throughout the Middle East, and religions as we recognise them today.

  The discoveries at Ras Shamra matter for two reasons. In the first place, in a country in which the existence of Palestine and then Israel highlights the differences between the Arabs and the Jews, Ras Shamra shows how Judaism grew out of – evolved from – Canaanite religion by a natural process that proves the ancient peoples of this small area, Canaanite and Israelite, to have been essentially the same. Second, the existence of writing – and an alphabet – so early, revolutionised thinking about the Bible. Until the excavation of Ugarit, the accepted view was that writing was unknown to the Hebrews before the ninth century BC and that it was unknown to the Greeks until the seventh. This implied that the Bible was handed down orally for several centuries, making its traditions unreliable and subject to embellishment. In fact, writing was half a millennium older than anyone thought.

  In classical archaeology, and in palaeontology, the traditional method of dating is stratigraphy. As common sense suggests, deeper layers are older than the layers above them. However, this only gives a relative chronology, helping to distinguish later from earlier. For absolute dates, some independent evidence is needed, like a king list with written dates, or coins with the date stamped on them, or reference in writings to some heavenly event, like an eclipse, the date of which can be calculated back from modern astronomical knowledge. Such information can then be matched to stratigraphie levels. This is of course not entirely satisfactory. Sites can be damaged, deliberately or accidentally, by man or nature. Tombs can be reused. Archaeologists, palaeontologists, and historians are therefore always on the lookout for other dating methods. The twentieth century offered several answers in this area, and the first came in 1929.

  In the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci there is a brief paragraph to the effect that dry and wet years can be traced in tree rings. The same observation was repeated in 1837 by Charles Babbage – more famous as the man who designed the first mechanical calculators, ancestors of the computer – but he added the notion that tree rings might also be related to other forms of dating. No one took this up for generations, but then an American physicist and astronomer, Dr Andrew Ellicott Douglass, director of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, made a breakthrough. His research interest was the effect of sunspots on the climate of the earth, and like other astronomers and climatologists he knew that, crudely speaking, every eleven years or so, when sunspot activity is at its height, the earth is racked by storms and rain, one consequence of which is that there is well above average moisture for plants and trees.45 In order to prove this link, Douglass needed to show that the pattern had been repeated far back into history. For such a project, the incomplete and occasional details about weather were woefully inadequate. It was then that Douglass remembered something he had noticed as a boy, an observation familiar to everyone brought up in the countryside. When a tree is sawn through and the top part carted away, leaving just the stump, we see row upon row of concentric rings. All woodmen, gardeners, and carpenters know, as part of the lore of their trade, that tree rings are annual rings. But what Douglass observed, which no one else had thought through, was that the rings are not of equal thickness. Some years there are narrow rings, other years the rings are broader. Could it be, Douglass wondered, that the broad rings represent ‘fat years’ (i.e., moist years), and the thin rings represent ‘lean years’ – in other words, dry years?46

  It was a simple but inspired idea, not least because it could be tested fairly easily. Douglass set about comparing the outer rings of a newly cut tree with weather reports from recent years. To his satisfaction he discovered that his assumption fitted the facts. Next he moved further back. Some trees in Arizona where he lived were three hundred years old; if he followed the rings all the way into the pith of the trunk, he should be able to re-create climate fluctuations for his region in past centuries. Every eleven years, coinciding with sunspot activity, there had been a ‘fat period,’ several years of broad rings. Douglass had proved his point that sunspot activity and weather are related. But now he saw other uses for his new technique. In Arizona, most of the trees were pine and didn’t go back earlier than 1450, just before the European invasion of America.47 At first Douglass obtained samples of trees cut by the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century to construct their missions. During his research, Douglass wrote to a number of archaeologists in the American Southwest, asking for core samples of the wood on their sites. Earl Morris, working amid the Aztec ruins fifty miles north of Pueblo Bonito, a prehistoric site in New Mexico, and Neil Judd, excavating Pueblo Bonito itself, both sent samples.48 These Aztec ‘great houses’ appeared to have been built at the same time, judging by their style and the objects excavated, but there had been no written calendar in North America, and so no one had been able to place an exact date on the pueblos. Some time after Douglass received his samples from Morris and Judd, he was able to thank them with a bombshell: ‘You might be interested to know,’ he said in a letter, ‘that the latest beam in the ceiling of the Aztec ruins was cut just exactly nine years before the latest beam from Bonito.’49

  A new science, dendrochronology, had been born, and Pueblo Bonito was the first classical problem it helped solve. Douglass’s research had begun in 1913, but not until 1928–9 did he feel able to announce his findings to the world. At that point, by overlapping trees of different ages felled at different times, he had an unbroken sequence of rings in southwest America going back first to ALL 1300, then to ALL 700.50 The sequence revealed that there had been a severe drought, which lasted from ALL 1276 to 1299 and explained why there had been a vast migration at that time by Pueblo Indians, a puzzle which had baffled archaeologists for centuries.

  These discoveries placed yet more of man’s history on an evolutionary ladder, with ever more specific time frames. The evolution of writing, of religions, of law, and even of building all began to slot into place in the 1920s, making history and prehistory more and more comprehensible as one linked story. Even the familiar events of the Bible appeared to fit into the emerging sequence of events. Such a view had its dangers, of course. Order could be imposed where there may have been none, and complex processes could be oversimplified. Many people were fascinated by scientific discovery and found the new narrative satisfying, but others were disturbed by what they took to be further ‘disenchantment’ of the world, the removal of mystery. That was one reason why a very short book, published in 1931, had the impact th
at it did.

  Herbert Butterfield was still only twenty-six when, as a young don at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he published The Whig Interpretation of History and made his reputation.51 Controversial as it was, and although he was not really concerned with evolution as such, his argument concerned ‘the friends and enemies of progress’ and was nonetheless therefore a useful corrective to the emerging consensus. Butterfield exploded the teleological view of history – that it is essentially a straight line leading to the present. To Butterfield, the idea of ‘progress’ was suspect, as was the notion that in any conflict there were always the good guys who won and the bad guys who lost. The particular example he used was the way the Renaissance led to the Reformation and then on to the contemporary world. The prevailing view, what he called the Whig view, was to see a straight line from the essentially Catholic Renaissance to the Protestant Reformation to the modern world with all its freedoms, as a result of which many attributed to Luther the intention of promoting greater liberty.52 Butterfield argued that this view assumed ‘a false continuity in events’: the Whig historian ‘likes to imagine religious liberty issuing beautifully out of Protestantism when in reality it emerges painfully and grudgingly out of something quite different, out of the tragedy of the post-Reformation world.’53

  The motive for this habit on the part of historians was, said Butterfield, contemporary politics – in its broadest sense. The present-day historian’s enthusiasm for democracy or freedom of thought or the liberal tradition led him to conclude that people in the past were working toward these goals.54 One consequence of this tendency, Butterfield thought, was that the Whig historian was overfond of making moral judgements on the past: ‘For him the voice of posterity is the voice of God and the historian is the voice of posterity. And it is typical of him that he tends to regard himself as the judge when by his methods and his equipment he is fitted only to be the detective.’55 This fashion for moral judgements leads the Whig historian into another mistake, that more evil is due to conscious sin than to unconscious error.56 Butterfield was uneasy with such a stance. He offered the alternative view – that all history could do was approach its subjects in more and more detail, and with less and less abridgement. No moral judgements are necessary for him because it is impossible to get within the minds of people of bygone ages and because the great quarrels of history have not been between two parties of which one was ‘good’ and the other ‘evil’ but between opposing groups (not necessarily two in number) who had rival ideas about where they wanted events, and society, to go. To judge backward from the present imposes a modern mindset on events which cannot be understood in that way.57