In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  A WORLD ELSEWHERE

  Until the thirteenth century, the ancient heartland of civilization embraced Islam, India and China. After the devastating Mongol attacks of that time, a series of new Islamic empires arose by the sixteenth century to rule from the gates of Vienna to the mouths of the Ganges: the Turks, the Safavids in Persia, and the Moghuls in India. Limited in land, people and resources, the countries of Western Europe were forced to look the other way, sidestepping the old powers of Asia. Again, we might be tempted to ask whether this was historical accident or destiny, but it was at a most fortuitous point in Asiatic history, at the end of the century which saw the eclipse of the Mongols, that the West ‘discovered’ the New World. As we understand it now, this was clearly the event on which the whole course of modern Western history rests, an event which opened unimaginable mental horizons and brought undreamed-of wealth flowing back to Europe; indeed perhaps it was, as Adam Smith called it, the greatest event in history. From Mexico to the Andes, the Europeans appropriated the almost limitless resources from the New World, enslaving its peoples and imposing on them its own gods. For the first time in history, one civilization set out deliberately to dismantle and destroy another. Indeed, in Peru and Central America, two of the six original and independent civilizations which had grown up on earth fell victim to the invaders from Europe and their one truth.

  With hindsight we can see now that 1492 was a landmark for all the native peoples of the world, for it marked the beginning of a systematic war waged against them by Western arms, religion, and ideology. It marked too, the beginning of their struggle to maintain their traditions, their beliefs and customs, their ways of seeing against the overwhelming impact of Western culture. And five hundred years on the struggle still continues. The conquest was accompanied by an unparalleled loss of life. In the century after Columbus over two-thirds of the native population of the Americas died through disease and violence. Columbus wrote to the Queen of Spain, ‘Our European civilization will bring light to the natives in their darkness, but for ourselves we will gain gold and with gold we will be able to do what we want in the world, and bring souls into paradise.’

  ENLIGHTENMENT

  The discovery of the New World shifted the centre of gravity of the West away from its old heartland in the Mediterranean to the seaboard of north-west Europe, to nations like Holland and England, Protestant and capitalist. The signs had been there, admittedly, long before. The difference between the northern European countries, which were never, or only superficially, Romanized, and the southern Mediterranean lands, is one of the most ancient divides in European history, in language, food, custom, art, religion and much else. With hindsight it was inevitable that the individualistic peoples of north-west Europe would break with the spiritual authority of Rome, and this they did in the Reformation: the Protestants in Britain, Calvinists in Holland, Lutherans in Germany, went their own way, and with that Rome finally lost its cultural leadership of the West, though in the New World and elsewhere in the Age of Exploration it was able to renew and extend its spiritual empire.

  At Maldon, a small port on the east coast of England, is a symbol of that Protestant, individualist age, the intact library of a seventeenth-century scholar, Thomas Plume, who endowed the Professorship of Astronomy at Cambridge. And here are more clues to the way the Western view of the world was changing under the influence of individualism and science. Plume’s seven thousand books enable us to step back into the intellectual world of the new, secular civilization of the West at the very point of its rise to world dominion. Here are translations of Greek and Arab science. There is Galileo’s vision of the cosmos and Descartes, anatomising the marvels of the human body. But the key figure in the new learning was Francis Bacon. For Bacon saw how science and technology would be used in the future to dispossess the other peoples of the planet and to control nature itself. ‘Bacon has acted in the field of learning like the political leaders of the greatest Empires,’ wrote the Italian philosopher Vico, ‘who, when they have attained supreme power in the human sphere, pit their great resources against nature itself.’ Bacon now looks like the prophet of our age, stepping out on the road which would eventually lead to world wars, nuclear bombs and environmental crisis.

  The fateful implications of this new science were understood by Bacon himself. For if it were true, as he said, that ‘henceforth in human affairs what is most useful in practice would also be the most correct in theory,’ then truth itself could be defined in terms of utility, not in terms of religion and morals. And so, ‘man could become a law unto himself,’ as Bacon said, and ‘depend no more on God.’ It is one of the founding ideas behind our modern, Western, scientific civilization which would go out and exploit and subdue the entire world in the name of that new science.

  Now for Westerners life could be seen as a series of phenomena capable of scientific explanation. The earth itself ceased to be sacred. It was subject now to Western definitions of space and time and mapped on a meridian based on Greenwich. When the Chinese were first shown a map of the whole world by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, they were shaken by the knowledge of these so-called ‘barbarians’. ‘Up till then,’ Ricci said, ‘they had printed maps of the world in which China was all,’ but when they saw the world so large and China only a corner of it they knew in truth that the world had changed.

  AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

  The first political expression of this new knowledge took place not in Europe but in America. Here the huge spaces and the relatively small indigenous population enabled the settler class easily to dispossess the natives and build their new society, their labour needs sustained by slaves from Africa. It is estimated that between the late seventeenth century and early nineteenth, over eleven million black people were shipped from Africa for this purpose, and to further the profits of European manufacturers. It was the greatest forcible movement of population in history. Bacon’s utilitarian vision had come about. Not unmindful of the injustice of slavery, Jefferson, Franklin and their fellows nevertheless had Bacon and Hobbes and the stars of the French Enlightenment in their libraries to justify their faith in reason and limited democracy to shape the future, and to bring all, as they hoped, certain inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was a seductive vision for the poor and downtrodden of Europe. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, millions of Europeans were able to escape the traditional limitations of their own space and freedom, and settle in other people’s lands in America and elsewhere in the globe, totally altering the balance of world history, demography and environment.

  In America, when Jefferson and the revolutionaries of 1776 devised the great seal for their new Republic, they put on it a motto from the imperial Roman poet Virgil announcing a new order on earth. You can still see it today on every US dollar bill. But the new order was actually based on older ideas. It was based on the possessive individualism which we have traced back to medieval England. It was based too, on the assumed preeminence of the white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon races. And those ideas in the hands of limited democracies, run by the property owners and the movers of money, would become the basis of the phenomenal success of the Western powers.

  INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WORLD COMMERCE

  Hitherto most of the great technological advances in history had come from Asia. In the seventeenth century the highest grade steel came from India; so too the best cotton and textile production. China had long been the leader in cast iron technology and many other forms of mass production. But during the eighteenth century the aggressive use of sea power by the maritime countries of north-west Europe enabled them to take over the world’s trade, backed up by industrial revolution at home. And a new form of international culture was born in which most of us still live today, manufacturing capitalism: a system sustained by empires and by the exploitation of what has come to be known as the Third World. The industrial city has since spread across the landscape of the world, from the plains of India to the Yell
ow River in China. The effects on human beings, on the environment and on the biosphere are still being counted. In the nineteenth century, foreign observers were deeply impressed by the heroic materialism of the new Europe. ‘This is an extraordinarily talented people,’ said a Chinese diplomat of the British. ‘How can we continue to call them barbarians, for they have taken on the mantle of civilization?’ Some outsiders even argued the spiritual merits of this new form of society. Hu Shih for example defended the materialistic West on the grounds that it was more spiritual than China; for its ideals were ‘built on the search for human happiness, and by increasing material well-being, it will also satisfy the spiritual needs of mankind. Through progress in philosophy, religion and ethics, it will overthrow the religions of superstition and bring the greatest happiness to the greater number of people!’ Hu Shih wrote in the 1920s, before the Second World War and the violent birth of a new China. But there is no question that his hope is still cherished everywhere in the West, from the corridors of power to the schoolroom. Perhaps he will be proved right.

  RECESSIONAL

  So now in the early twenty-first century where does Western history stand? Can we really speak of the triumph of Western values across the world, and even if we could, would it be a good thing? Five hundred years on from Columbus, the capital of the West, indeed the capital of the planet, is now in the New World, Washington, DC. The USA is the heir to the Western barbarians of the Dark Ages, sharing their language, culture and religion. The monuments of Washington, Egyptian obelisks, and Greek and Roman temples, proclaim it to be the inheritor of the legacy, not just of Europe but also of the ancient civilizations. Never in history has so much power resided in the hands of one nation. The ideals of this new order are noble ones as Hu Shih recognized. We need only think of the Lincoln memorial, inspired by the Parthenon in Athens, commemorating one who through a brutal civil war held onto the ideals of the European Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions, the belief that all are born equal, with equal rights to freedom and happiness.

  But there is another side to the triumph of the West. For the twentieth century saw warfare on an unparalleled scale, fought by Western powers right across the world, directly or by proxy. Most traumatic of all, between 1939 and 1945, in the very heartland of European culture, in the country where Western music and philosophy found its most sublime expression, there was a systematic attempt to exterminate millions of people, based on twisted theories of racial hegemony: an event so horrifying that it beggars belief or description; an event surely inconceivable to the people of the great civilizations of the past. Since then the smaller and poorer nations of the world have found themselves in the middle of the continued rivalry of the great powers; subject first to prolonged and violent assault and plunder, then to an equally prolonged and insistent attempt to sell them Western ideologies and commodities. And from Africa, the heartland of humanity, to Asia and the Americas, all the native cultures of the world have been turned upside down by the impact of the West, for good or ill. In the last forty years, the impact of civilization on the environment has become the greatest issue in history.

  If our troubled time has taught us anything, it is not to believe in utopias. But if talk of a ‘new order’ is to mean anything in this century then perhaps we should look afresh at our history, see it as others see it and question our collective myths and our cherished ideals, perhaps even our notion of freedom itself. Throughout the countries of the rich West there is a growing and profound disquiet: a feeling that the Western way of life itself is no longer supportable, morally or practically, because of pollution, environmental destruction, and the continuing exploitation of the mass of humanity. If that disquiet is justified, which surely it is, then the great question for the next generation is simple. Are the values of the West alone enough to guarantee the continuing health of the planet? Those values as we have seen, are writ large in Western history: individualistic, competitive, acquisitive, always pushing outwards, ‘never happy in an empty room,’ as Pascal said. And yet it is the bearers of that vision of life, the rulers of the West, who hold in their hands the future of the planet. But perhaps at the very moment of its triumph, the West has reached that point which comes to all civilizations when, to avoid disaster, it must transform itself by learning from others. The crisis of earth and spirit we now face was caused by one form of civilization, that of the West. Perhaps what is needed now is a dialogue with the other peoples and cultures of the world, a dialogue beyond anything seen before. There are signs that this is already happening. And if such a dialogue ever does take place in a real spirit of equality, we can be sure that it will centre on the same fundamental principles which were argued over so long ago in the Axis Age by Confucius, Buddha, and their contemporaries: the conflicting demands of freedom and equality, of the individual and the collective, of the rational and the spiritual.

  India, for example, taught long ago that the lust for possession will destroy us, and that life is sacred – all life not just that of humanity. Long ago too the Chinese believed that the basis of life was finding the right harmony between mankind and nature; that we must balance the needs of the individual and of society; that the individual must accept limits on space and desire in a world with finite resources. The civilization of Islam, though the object of much mistrust and little sympathy in the West, also has much to teach the world about the possibility of humanistic values and pluralism and spirituality in a modern society: the value of tradition. These great alternative traditions speak to us now with growing urgency in the aftermath of the destructive twentieth century. And they speak on behalf of the vast majority of the people of the planet; their insights as valuable to life as the rainforests, for these, we might say, are the rainforests of the spirit.

  ‘The goal of civilization,’ said the greatest of all historians, the Arab Ibn Khaldun, ‘is settled life and the achievement of luxury. But there is a limit which cannot be overstepped. When prosperity and luxury come to a people they are followed by excessive consumption and extravagance.’ With that, he says, ‘the human soul itself is undermined, both in its worldly well-being and in its spiritual life.’

  RETURN TO URUK

  There is one last journey in this search for the origins of civilization, a journey back to the starting point, to Southern Iraq, to the Garden of Eden, and to Uruk, the first city on earth. Here the great revolution happened five thousand years ago when people first began to live in cities, in a way of life which now shapes the lives of the mass of the population of the planet. Now Uruk is a lunar wilderness, its once fertile fields ruined by ecological catastrophe. Five thousand years on from the time when civilization first arose here in Iraq, we are still fascinated by the experience of these early people. Not only by their inventiveness, but also, I suspect, by their pessimistic reading of human history; by their struggle to contain war in human life; to find a workable moral law and social order; to preserve the earth. In our own time we have explored space, and the workings of the mind. But no more than they have we escaped the age-old contract with Mother Earth, which all so-called primitive societies take as granted. Five thousand years ago, with the advent of cities here in Iraq, a fundamental split began in the human psyche; a fundamental realignment of cosmology and technology; a transforming process which resulted in a civilization set apart from nature, run by economic necessities, which superseded older forms of behaviour. In the last hundred years, through the agency of the West, this conception has spread across the planet. Five thousand years on, right across the world, the problems civilization faces are just the same as at its beginning: archaic political institutions through which the few dominate the many; over-population; unequal distribution of the fruits of the earth between rich and poor, and grossly wasteful consumption of those resources by the rich; and the now stark anachronism of the sovereign independent nation state, an idea which seems destined soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

  The legacy of civilization, a hu
ndred and fifty generations on, is, as the ancient poet of Uruk, the author of the epic of Gilgamesh, dreamed, freeing our imaginations and, potentially, our lives. And yet our material success is now threatening the existence of the species as a whole, and indeed of all species, whose own rights now are beginning to assert themselves alongside those much-vaunted rights of man. And there is the conundrum we bequeath our children, and their children, in the twenty-first century.

  The ancient Sumerians, the creators of the first civilization, told a wonderful myth about its origins. It was, they said, a devil’s bargain. It offered the noblest ideals of humanity but it also brought violence, greed and destruction. All this is civilization, the Sumerian God of Wisdom tells Inanna of Uruk, who will take it back to her city, and thence give it to the world. And if you wish its benefits, he goes on, you must take all its qualities without argument:

  … The art of being mighty,

  the art of dissimulation,

  the art of being straightforward,

  the plundering of cities,