`A sharply original, beautifully written book which counters the surge of cultural pessimism that opened the 21st century.'---Neal Ascherson
This is the story of Ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Egypt: the `birthplace of civilization', where the foundations of our own societies were laid, including everything from farming, writing, and the birth of cities to familiar ways of cooking food and keeping our homes and bodies clean. But why have these ancient cultures, where so many features of modern life originated, come to symbolize the remote and the exotic? And are the sacrifices we now make in the name of `our' civilization really so different from those once made by the peoples of Mesopotamia and Egypt on the altars of the gods?
Our attachment to ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Egypt as the `birthplace of civilization, where the foundations of our own societies were laid, is as strong today as it has ever been. When the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003, our newspapers proclaimed `the death of history'. Yet the ancient Near East also remains a source of mystery: a space of the imagination where we explore the discontents of modern civilization.
In What Makes Civilization? archaeologist David Wengrow investigates the origins of farming, writing, and cities in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the connections between them. This is the story of how people first created kingdoms and monuments to the gods-and, just as importantly, how they adopted everyday practices that we might now take for granted, such as familiar ways of cooking food and keeping the house and body clean.
Why, he asks, have these ancient cultures, where so many features of modern life originated, come to symbolize the remote and the exotic? What challenge do they pose to our assumptions about power, progress, and civilization in human history? And are the sacrifices we now make in the name of `our' civilization really so different from those once made by the peoples of Mesopotamia and Egypt on the altars of the gods?
Renowned archaeologist David Wengrow creates here a vivid new account of the "birth of civilization" in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, bringing together within a unified history the first two nations where people created cities, kingdoms, and monumental temples to the gods. But civilization, Wengrow argues, is not exclusively about large-scale settlements and endeavors. Just as important are the ordinary but fundamental practices of everyday life, such as cooking, running a home, and cleaning the body. Tracing the development of such practices, from prehistoric times to the age of the pyramids, Wengrow reveals unsuspected connections between distant regions and provides new insights into the workings of societies we have come to regard as remote from our own. The book obliges us to recognize that civilizations are not formed in isolation, but through the mixing and borrowing of culture between different societies. It concludes by drawing telling parallels between the ancient Near East and more contemporary attempts to reshape the world according to an ideal image.
