history – Page 14 – Wis[s]e Words

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City – Gwendolyn Leick

Published on March 21, 2010

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City
Gwendolyn Leick
252 pages including index
published in 1993

Continuing with my interest in Bronze Age history, I got Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City from the library, about the only book on Mesopotamia actually present there at the time and not hopelessly (decades) out of date. I know little about Mesopotamia other than the stuff everybody knows, it being probably the oldest civilisation in the world, inventors of written language and the city, yaddayaddaya. All I knew about it I learned from my old childrens encyclopedias, long obsolete even when I read them some twenty years ago…

Gwendolyn Leick didn’t set out to write a general history, but more of an overview of the ten most important cities that made up the area: Eridu, Uruk, Shuruppak, Akkad, Ur, Sippar, Nippur, Ashur, Nineveh and Babylon. She does this in chronological order, with Eridu the oldest established and Babylon the youngest. Considering that Babylon was an old, old city when Rome yet had to be founded, you can imagine how old the earliest cities were, as far away in time from the founding of Rome as we are from its fall. Which is the most important point that I picked up from this book, how long Mesopotamia’s history was, that later cities might have had the same sort of relationship with the very first ones as we have with Rome and Greece.

The Trojans and their Neighbours – Trevor Bryce

Published on February 22, 2010

The Trojans and their Neighbours

The Trojans and their Neighbours
Trevor Bryce
225 pages including index
published in 2006

The cover looks like it should belong on the course book of a not particularly interesting IT certification course, but don’t let that fool you. Behind it hides one of the more engaging and interesting history books I’ve read in the past year or so. Which came as no surprise to me, as I had already read one of Trevor Bryce’s other history books, The Kingdom of the Hittites. The cover therefore couldn’t scare me off…

The subject itself helps as well of course. The story of Troy, the city at the heart of Homer’s Iliad, thought to be no more than a myth until Schliemann actually dug it up remains endlessly fascinating to anybody interested in ancient history. As Bryce mentions, even today the question of whether or not the Troy Schliemann dug up was the “real” Troy, Homer’s Troy is still hotly debated. But as Bryce argues, this is also the least interesting question you can ask about the actually existing Troy. Troy existed for several thousand years and was a flourishing community long before and after the Trojan War supposedly happened. With an emphasis on the Bronze Ages, The Trojans and their Neighbours attempts to put straight the real history and position of Troy — was it as important a city state as you would assume from Homer, or just another smallish Bronze Age settlement, and what were its relations with its neighbours?

MLK as plaster saint

Published on January 19, 20101 Comment

Nicky Kristol has some decent advice for the Palestinians:

“On Martin Luther King Day, I wish more Palestinians would absorb the lessons of King and Gandhi and use non-violent but confrontational approaches in challenging settlements, etc. Non-violence is not only morally superior to terrorism, it’s also more effective in challenging a democracy.”

I’m not sure which is worse, Kristol’s cluelessness on how MLK’s activism was recieved back in the day (not well) or his cluelessness about the Palestinian struggle (non-violence has been tried).

But don’t be fooled in thinking this cluelessness is anything but deliberate. MLK, like Gandhi before him, has long since been turned into a plaster saint, the perfect liberal idea of what a civil rights activist or freedom fighter has to be like, with all the more …controversial… parts filed off. It’s an old tactic, also used by people like Christopher Hitches to explain why they did support the Vietcong in their struggle against an US occupation, but not the Iraqi resistance. completely ahistorical of course, and the same people glorifying MLK today would’ve been the first to denounce him had they been there at the time, but in a media climate in which ignorance is king, it’s a tactic that works well. Just look at some of the comments at the post linked above.

Breskens, 11 September 1944

Published on September 11, 20091 Comment

Some of the destruction visited on Breskens on 11 September 1944

For one of the Netherlands’ best beloved football stars of the seventies, Willem van Hanegem, it was a close shave that day. It was only luck that he survived the bombardment of Breskens as a small child, as his father did not, dying on top of another small child whose life he saved this way. With van Hanegem’s father, another 183 Bressiaanders would die as allied planes bombarded the town in an attempt to cut off retreating German forces.

Antwerp had been liberated only days before, on September 4th, but the allied troops had not yet moved beyond the city towards the Schelde estuary. Caught between the advancing Allied troops and the river were still thousands of German soldiers and their equipment, who used the breathing space given to them to both reinforce their defensive positions on the south side of the river and evacuate to the north, from Breskens to Vlissingen, keeping the Schelde closed for allied traffic and hence preventing the use of Antwerp as a supply point much closer to the frontlines than the French ports they had been using until then. To use Antwerp then, the Allies had to move into Zeeland, taking control of both sides of the Schelde estuary, and the obvious first step towards that goal was to prevent the German forces still on the south side from escaping.

The town of Breskens, a small fishing village almost directly opposite the navy town of Vlissingen (or Flushing as English speakers know it better), was an obvious evacuation point, where thousands of German troops were ferried across. Its inhabitants had long become used to seeing Allied bombers flying over to attack Vlissingen with its dockyard and naval base, but had not yet been a target themselves. Which may explain why the bombardment of 11 September 1944 claimed so many victims. In military terms, this may have been a justifiable action, the many civilian victims a regretablle price to pay for making sure more German forces wouldn’t escape to fight on in Walcheren and Zuid-Beveland. But the price paid was heavy and still visible in the town today, a reminder of what happens even in ‘good’ wars.

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town – Mary Beard

Published on July 12, 20092 Comments

Cover of Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town
Mary Beard
360 pages including index
published in 2008

We think we know Pompeii. An ordinary Roman town like so many others in 79 CE, made extraordinary because it was overwhelmed without warning by the eruption of the Vesuvius, through its death granting us a rare glimpse of what daily life in the Roman Empire really was like. Under a metres thick layer of volcanic ashes Pompeii laid hidden for centuries, only discovered in the eighteenth century, its secrets kept intact, preserved by the very disaster that caused the death of the city. With the slow and careful excavation of the city those secrets are unlocked, giving up definitive answers to all kind of questions about how the Romans lived. This is the view of Pompeii that countless books, magazine articles and television specials have given us. Unfortunately, as Mary Beard explains in Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town, it’s wrong.

Or at least, not entirely accurate. As she explains, Pompeii wasn’t overwhelmed by an unforeseen catastrophe, as most likely its inhabitants had had at least several days warning before the actual eruption. Quite a few of them therefore had already left the town when it got buried, while many of the dead found under the lava had been overtaken in their flight, or while having sought shelter nearby or within the city itself. What’s more, the city wasn’t immediately abandonded after the disaster either, as all through the city evidence has been found of people coming back to their houses or businesses to rescue possessions – as well as of plunderers looking for easy riches. What’s more, once Pompeii was rediscovered, obviously things gut dug up, damaged, disappeared or just altered through being exposed to the elements again. All of which means that what we can see in Pompeii now is not entirely the city that the inhabitants would’ve known in 79 CE, that if we dig up a largely empty villa it doesn’t necessarily mean the Romans were great minimalists…