Part I

Continuity and change

New ways of surviving

1  Before ‘Europe’

Towards an agricultural and sedentary society

Beginnings in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, or the non-European origins of European culture

Already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European scholars were searching for the origins of man in a past far remote from and in developments more complex than the simple picture painted – and accepted by most of their contemporaries in – the Christian Bible. To most Europeans, the Holy Book was still the only touchstone of truth, teaching that the earth and man came into existence when God created the universe on the morning of a momentous day in the year 4004 BC.

In 1698, an English medical doctor, Edward Tyson, visited the docks in London – famous as a place where other worlds entered Europe – having heard that a chimpanzee was being displayed there. When the animal died, he asked permission to dissect it. He studied all its aspects and functions and compared these with those of humans. Observing many differences, he yet considered the number of similarities to be greater and more significant. His conclusion, in a book called Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, ‘Orang-Outang, or the Wild Wood Man’ (London 1699), was that a fundamental distinction between humans and certain simian types was scientifically untenable.1 Tyson scrupulously refrained from elaborating on the implications of his observations for the traditional view of man’s history as the final, most perfect stage of God’s creation. However, these cannot have escaped his more perspicacious readers.

In 1819, a young Dane, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865), was entrusted by the king with the task of classifying archaeological finds made in Denmark which by royal order were from now on to be sent to Copenhagen. Wondering how to comply with his instructions, Thomsen finally decided on a course of action that nowadays would be considered simple logic but at that time was not part of a European’s mental framework: archaeological objects were mainly judged on their aesthetic merits. Thomsen, however, divided his objects according to their material and functional aspects. On the basis of this classification he concluded that the three earliest stages of man’s history should be termed the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, reflecting both growing technological skills and cultural progress. He presented this development as historically significant in itself, thus establishing the study of material culture and of man’s past before the invention of writing as an object of scientific study rather than of aesthetics.2Some scholars were enthusiastic but the general public could not yet share Thomsen’s grand vision of man’s past, deeming the objects he had found too primitive to be considered proof of anything that could be termed European culture.

In 1847, the Frenchman Jean Boucher de Perthes published a book called Antiquités celtiques et antediluviennes (Paris 1847), in which he described the findings of his excavations at Abbeville, on the Somme river. Although some acclaimed him as an original scientist, the larger public derided his ideas: how could one possibly accept that remnants of ‘antediluvial man’ remained and, moreover, remained in Europe?

Indeed, until well into the nineteenth century such views and their implications were unacceptable, not to say repugnant, to most Europeans, even to the well educated. ‘Civilization’, ‘culture’ – these words and concepts referred to the temples and philosophy of the ancient Greeks, to the powerful, legal structures of the Romans, to the universal norms and values propagated by the Christians. Cave dwellers, whose features were more ape-like than human and who worked with ‘primitive’ stone tools, simply did not fit into the European self-image. Yet, the progress of archaeological research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries eventually forced Europe to drastically adjust its self-image, finally accepting even that man had come from Africa, the continent viewed so long as a world of darkness, a world without culture.

Obviously, the question of what distinguishes man from the chimpanzee, its nearest relative in the common ancestry, or pan-lineage, is much discussed, centring around such questions as what intelligence actually is, in relation to self-reflection, the ability to learn and to use that learning to improve one’s existence, etc.3 According to the latest findings and the interpretations that have been given to them, hominids, among them homo habilis, who may have been the first to craft stone tools and later may have been the first to master the art of making fire (and probably were also the first to engage in big game hunting), originated in Africa sometime between c.3,000,000 and 2,000,000 years ago, inhabiting large parts of the continent. Sometime around 1,700,000 years ago, homo ergastermoved out of the area in north-east Africa where, perhaps, his migrations in search of food and a better clime had brought him, and into Eurasia, where recent finds have shown traces of him in Georgia but also in northern China. At a much later date, perhaps some 800,000 years ago, a species of homo ergaster settled in present-day France and Italy. Yet, we know this only because of the worked stones they left behind: there is not a trace of these people themselves, not even genetically.4

Between 700,000 and 400,000 BC, some groups or perhaps only one group of homo ergaster evolved into homo heidelbergensis – where and when exactly is still under debate – who, in turn, moved to Europe too, as his name indicates. As late as c.250,000 BC, another type of homo ergaster/heidelbergensis called Neanderthal man entered the scene, named after the region near Düsseldorf, in Germany, where his remains were first found; he actually inhabited the wide stretch of Eurasia from France and Spain to Uzbekistan. Fossils give us an idea of his appearance: very robust and stocky, on average between 1.55 and 1.65 metres tall, with short legs and a long torso enabling him to cope with the dearth of food resources in winter, when he survived on fat reserves accumulated by gathering in seasons of relative plenty. Neanderthal man’s brain volume was, moreover, bigger than that of any other creature. He used these greater cranial capacities to develop a stone-based technology, consisting largely of prepared-core flaking, which indicates that he consciously planned his basic survival strategies.5

Influenced by the seasons, these earliest inhabitants of Europe travelled around their regions seeking semi-permanent shelter in caves. Gradually, ‘conscious’ habitation grew, especially with the coming of fire. But scholars are divided over the question of whether these Europeans already had a language; if not, they would have lacked the communicative capacity that can, for instance, organize a hunter society.

None of the genetic material of these more recent representatives of homo ergaster survives in the present population of the world; whether they became extinct through natural causes or because they could not compete with newer types of hominids is still discussed. For example, due to climate changes and the further development of the brain, homo sapiens had come into being c.200,000 years ago. Where and when did he originate?6 Also in (sub-)tropical Africa, from where groups of his species, too, started migrating in search of the kind of food that held the protein they now needed to become the ancestors of the modern world’s population. DNA research seems to show that small bands of them moved from present-day Eritrea to the Yemen – crossing the Red Sea, which at that time was partly dry land. From the Arab peninsula, men and women moved – gathering and now hunting too – into Asia, reaching southern Asia some 70,000 years ago. Adapting to the different climes they encountered, their skin colour might have taken on a lighter or, conversely, a darker hue and some of them might have grown taller or even become smaller; indeed, as recent as 2004 the remains of hominids of about 1 metre tall were discovered in Indonesia. Thus, man’s physical variety was the result of multiple mutations. Only some 40,000 years ago, the species called homo sapiens migrated into Europe as well. In Europe, he is often called Cro Magnon, named after the French site where he was first discovered. Anatomically and behaviourally, he basically resembled modern European man.

In retrospect, this was a turning point. Periodically, the climate on earth enters an ‘Ice Age’. Some 40,000 years ago, northern and western Europe as well as the regions around the Alps and the Pyrenees once again were in the grip of a harsher climate, with glaciers rapidly expanding from the principal mountain ranges. During the following millennia, this Ice Age came to a slow end, and the world gradually started to get warmer again; at this time the most recent variety of homo sapiens started to spread throughout Europe, via the Mediterranean and the Danube. Though there is an ongoing dispute about what occurred between the older inhabitants and the new ones, most scholars, taking into account genetic research, hold that the Neanderthals, by then the most numerous type of archaic man in Europe, turned out to be far less capable of surviving; they were displaced and, whether through natural causes or as a consequence of large-scale genocide at the hands of the newcomers, finally became extinct. However, when this occurred exactly and for how long the two species did, perhaps, live alongside one another and even interacted together is still being debated.

As proof of the changes that occurred in these millennia, archaeologists have found signs of a far more complex economy, society and culture. Hunting was clearly one of the principal strategies for survival, but long-distance trade, too, now seems to have become common; tools, both of stone and bone, and weaponry became more sophisticated: a more refined technology had developed. Also, these people looked for dwelling places other than caves: open-air encampments with substantial houses made of wood and bone have been discovered on the plains of Bohemia and southern Russia as well as in France.

Even more fascinating is that people started to create symbolic representations both of themselves and of the world around them.7 Paintings made with natural pigments – another technological innovation – have been found on the walls of caves, concentrated mainly in southern France and northern Spain. Until 1995, the most revealing were considered to be those discovered at Lascaux by a group of adventurous boys in the summer of 1940; others of the same kind are situated in the Pyrenees and at Spanish Altamira. In 1995, a new and even more spectacular find was made in the Ardèche: there, cave paintings depict all kinds of animals hitherto unknown about in early Europe; they seem to date as far back as 30,000 years. However, the discussion over the interpretation of these artefacts is not yet settled. Was it art for art’s sake, or a means to instruct the young men and women of the tribe in the seasonal stages of a hunting economy, with references to the male and female elements in man and society? Then again, the caves may have been used as religious centres, where shamanistic rituals were enacted and where the paintings reflected trance-like voyages into the world of the animals that were essential to the survival of man.8 The concentration of cave paintings in what, at that time, were apparently the most crowded areas of Europe may point to the need for ceremonial activities intended to integrate and coordinate the growing population. Besides paintings, representations of humans and animals were made in bone and ivory, splendid examples of which, created in c.35,000 BC, were found in caves in southern Germany. The many so-called ‘Venus’ figures are especially fascinating. These female figurines, both stylized and naturalistic, have been found all over central Europe. They may well point to the matrifocal character of these societies.

Did language already exist? As indicated above, the scholarly debate on the origins of language is fraught with vehemently expressed and often contradictory opinions.9 Theories diverge widely, placing this evolutionary development anywhere between 400,000 and 100,000 BC. As speech preceded writing, there will probably never be any evidence for the exact period of its genesis. Yet both the organization needed for hunting in a profitable way and the very complexity of the many artefacts or ‘art’ forms, pointing to a culture that used symbolic representation, intriguingly suggests the possibility of other, perhaps older, forms of communication beyond mere sounds and gestures.

It is also noteworthy that these cultures, precisely in the articulation of domestic structures and the various ‘art’ forms, already show their own regional identities, which may have resulted in the formation of separate, self-conscious ‘ethnic’ groups. For we should not forget that western and central Europe’s distinctive physical-geographical features must have favoured the genesis not only of culture in general – that, of course, came about everywhere – but also of incipiently diverse cultures. Unlike the vast steppes stretching from Russia to central Asia, these parts of Europe, a relatively small corner of the earth, showed an incredibly varied landscape: surrounded by seas on three of the four sides, criss-crossed by navigable rivers connecting the inland areas with those seas; it was a region with contrasting but congenial ecologies, with demanding and challenging climates, and with natural barriers that stimulated development through both seclusion and communication.

The advent of agriculture, temple and state

For hundreds of thousands of years, all humans were gatherers and, later, hunter-gatherers. So were the inhabitants of North Africa and the Near East until approximately 10,000 BC. In the Sahara, then not a desert but a humid and fertile region, living conditions were favourable and people continued to go on as they always had done, even developing the art of pottery. However, the Near East, the ‘land bridge’ that, when the Red Sea had become a sea again, still allowed African man to move into Europe and Asia, was climatically and geographically somewhat less favoured, as it had been left relatively arid after the last Ice Age. People there had to start collecting wild grasses and grind them to get edible seeds; the skeletons of women found there show the spinal distortion this created. When the seeds were sown, first by chance and soon deliberately, agriculture had been ‘invented’.10

The introduction of a cereal diet from c.9,000 BC onwards allowed for population growth and, in turn, for the intensification of agriculture. This occurred in the Levantine region (Israel, Palestine, the Lebanon and Syria), in south-eastern Turkey, in southern Russia and in present-day Iraq. Whether similar developments took place in other parts of the world or whether agriculture spread from this one region is another of early history’s great debates: many scholars hold that the ‘invention’ of agriculture occurred simultaneously in, for example, China though, on the other hand, it may have come to India from the Near East. Demonstrably, farming reached the western end of Eurasia from that region, first spreading to the coasts of the Black Sea, then still a fresh water lake. During the following millennia, it was taken up in the innumerable small coastal valleys of the eastern Mediterranean and by the Aegean islands, in fact in almost all places where streams, running down from the mountains, deposited their sediment and could be used to irrigate the fields. From the eastern Mediterranean and the Danube basin, agriculture spread into parts of Italy, Spain and France, and into central Europe.11

We have only archaeological evidence to document the slow transition to an agrarian economy and the changing lifestyles and new social and cultural forms that accompanied it. Still, the process can be reconstructed. It seems that soon after the introduction of agriculture in the Near East, both natural or artificial irrigation as a means to ensure higher yields and animal husbandry were developed there, with the domestication of a limited number of crops and animals,12 such as olives and vines, and woolly sheep. Certain nomadic or semi-nomadic groups now became sedentary, settling more or less permanently in villages, which they often surrounded by earthen or stone walls, if only to protect themselves against the hunter-gatherers, with whom they competed for the use of the land. Sometimes, these villages were quite large. Thus, for example, the ruins of Catalhöyük, in Anatolia, give evidence of what almost can be termed a town, built c.7000 BC by a people of neolithic cattle breeders; it housed a population of some 10,000 in small dwellings that were entered from the roof. Sculpture and gaily coloured frescos indicate that these people had thoughts that went far beyond mere physical survival. For reasons as yet unknown, the settlement was deserted some 2,000 years later. Another famous example of an early town is the walled city of Jericho, in Palestine, which probably also dates as far back; as people continue to live there even now, it is sometimes referred to as the ‘oldest inhabited town in the world’.

This settling process was often accompanied by a transition to institutionalized private ownership. Although this certainly did not lead to just and humane structures as we view them, from a purely economic perspective this form of production has proven the most successful throughout human history: only for his own gain man seems to be driven to produce a surplus that then becomes the basis for intricate social and cultural structures.

Indeed, where conditions for agriculture were particularly favourable, complex societies and specialized forms of organization did develop. The great river valleys led the way: Egypt, where the annual flooding of the Nile left a narrow strip of fertile mud in the desert from which farmers could reap a rich harvest; and Mesopotamia, the ‘Land between the two Rivers’, namely the Euphrates and the Tigris. The latter not only provided plenty of water for irrigation – artificial irrigation13 – but, perhaps even more important, allowed for transport between the two emerging food-producing areas of the Near East, northern Syria and the lower reaches of these two rivers. Soon, communities evolved which based their prosperity both on agriculture and on the manufacture of products not necessary for mere survival, such as beautifully worked tools and weapons, made of stone and later bronze, or finely crafted pottery for cooking and to store grain in. They also made added-value products that were ideologically important, to be bought and displayed by those who could afford to do so on the basis of their agriculturally produced surplus wealth: things such as costly textiles, artful metalwork and jewellery set with precious stones. Thus, trade networks developed in which rivers played a significant role, but also overland routes, along which the newly found forms of traction by camel and donkey could be used.

In these as yet mainly agricultural civilizations, which were extremely dependent on water and other natural resources, people were intensely interested in the heavenly bodies; determining night and day but, more importantly, governing the change of the seasons and the coming of the rains – and the floods; they held power over the land’s fertility. Indeed, natural forces could change the existing cultures and systems entirely. When, some 4,200 years ago, one of the recurring ‘small ice ages’ occurred, the level of the Nile sank and large parts of agricultural Egypt became deserts again; harvests failed year after year, people died and the so-called Old Dynasty that had ruled the country for many centuries lost its power, to be replaced by new rulers only when the situation improved after some 100 years of poverty and chaos. The forces behind such changes could not yet be interpreted in any scientific way, at least not according to science as it is now defined.14

In this situation, where the power of nature was felt to be a mystery both fascinating and tremendous, religions developed that worshipped the forces of nature and the heavenly bodies as magical, as divine. Soon, those who maintained they could make valid predictions of their movement or even claimed influence or power over them were especially honoured. Dedicating themselves to studying and explaining these phenomena, they became magi, mediating between the divine and the human world. Farmers gladly gave them some of their surplus products hoping they would gain the gods’ favour.15 Frequently, these mediators developed into a closed caste of priests, basing their power on hereditary claims, administering the religion in which people expressed their relationship to the incomprehensible or ineffable by creating gods. While the divine might keep its natural form – a river, a spring – it also came to be represented in man-made forms. While at first the gods were imagined as animals, reflecting the view of the world of a pastoralist-nomadic society, in the urban agricultural communities anthropomorphic images were made as well. These were worshipped in ever more elaborately built cult sites, often centred around mountains or mountain-like artificial structures to represent the idea that the gods lived on high, ruling both the skies and all that lived under them. To these sanctuaries, the faithful went with their gifts of grain or cattle. From these temples, the priests exercised a growing power over society.

In the most advanced agricultural civilizations the first divisions of time, calendars, were created, based on a thorough scrutiny of the heavens. In the Nile delta the year was invented, consisting of 365 days divided into 12 months, each made up of 30 days with leap days to even out the differences. Thousands of years later, the Romans took over this system. In 46 BC, Julius Caesar introduced an improved version of the Egyptian calendar that, with several adjustments in later centuries, is still used in Europe and the entire western world.

As some agricultural societies grew more complex, a more regulated form of administration became necessary, especially when non-working priests, no longer satisfied with periodical gifts, started asking farmers for regular contributions in kind or in money to finance the cost of religious services, of increasingly sumptuous temples and, of course, of the clergy themselves.16 Probably because of the bureaucratic needs of this kind of ‘taxation’ arising in these temple societies, the invention of some non-oral communication system to store or transmit data became a necessity. The Inca civilization of Peru developed its system of knotted strings. At a far earlier stage, the river civilizations of India as well as, perhaps, the cultures of early China developed writing, as did the societies of the Near East.

In the centuries between 3400 and 3200 BC complicated writing systems evolved both in Egypt and Mesopotamia, composed partly of simplified pictures (pictograms), partly of symbols (ideograms), partly of signs for syllables, and partly of one-letter signs. Egyptian ‘hieroglyphics’ – the Greek for ‘holy incisions’ – were written on papyrus or incised in stone or clay tablets; this, and Sumerian ‘cuneiform’, named after the wedge-like signs used in its scripture, became the means of communication in the eastern Mediterranean. Soon, it ceased to be only a ‘holy’ script; it was adapted to serve the needs of the trade that now came to connect the different agricultural civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and, quite probably, north-western India. As surplus production enabled people to specialize in all kinds of manufacture, trade networks that used rivers, the sea as well as overland routes brought agricultural products and other man-made wares to those who specifically lacked or desired them. At this time shipbuilding became one of the Mediterranean world’s great industries. But while ships were a means of transport, of commerce, they were also a major means of communicating other forms of culture. One of the earliest examples proving this is a vessel constructed some 3,300 years ago, recently discovered on the Turkish south coast: it was found to carry wares from Italy, but also ivory and rhinoceros teeth from Africa, copper and tin (to make bronze) from Cyprus and spices from Asia. Yet, in making the trip to all the ports supplying or selling these products, the people aboard must have carried tales as well, telling about the peoples and cultures they encountered.

Besides needing temples and priests to regulate relations between the natural and the supra-natural world, and some sort of scripture to record the obligations between mortals and gods and, soon, between men themselves, these societies also sought means to defend themselves against internal unrest or external attack. As the priests had done, those who took up military duties now also claimed part of the harvest and often appropriated land which tenant farmers – or more often slaves – had to work to ensure the livelihood and the military provisions of this new class. A new social group who did not work with their hands was now born; they developed into a class of ‘aristocrats’ or ‘nobles’. Soon, they competed with the priests over the exercise of power. Their leaders, sometimes turning into absolute monarchs, often drew their authority from the interface between religious and military power. Divine powers were often attributed to them as they, too, claimed to be able to comprehend and even predict the course of nature, more specifically the agricultural cycle and the prosperity it brought.

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Plate 1.1 Limestone statue of the scribe Heti with a papyrus scroll, showing traces of the original painting. It can be dated to Egypt’s 15th dynasty, i.e. c.3–2000 BC. Such statues proclaim the importance of a class of literate men for the functioning of the religious and secular bureaucracy of early temple-states of which pharaonic society was one.

Source: CKD RU Nijmegen

On the fertile borders of the Nile this priestly monarch was the pharaoh, worshipped as ‘son of the Sun’, who ruled over Upper and Lower Egypt, which had been united about 5,000 years ago. The authority of this god-king, who fused religious with military might, was such that – contrary to what was believed until recently – the peasantry built the enormous pyramids and temples erected in their name of their own free will: as paid labourers, well taken care of by the enormous organization and bureaucracy responsible for the operations on the Giza plateau.

In the many city-states that between them possessed the fertile lands of Mesopotamia, between the two rivers, the priest caste initially ruled all. On their initiative the gigantic, terraced temple-mountains were built of brick tiles, the local material: the traces of these adobe structures still dot the erstwhile rich countryside, much of it now returned to a desert state. In later centuries these priest-kings had to share their power with – or even completely relinquish it to – leaders emerging from the military caste who, however, nearly always induced or forced the priests to divinely legitimize their authority.

On the islands of the Aegean and all around its shores, royal civilizations also flourished: in the fertile valleys of Mycenae and Tiryns on the Peloponnese as well as on Crete where, besides agriculture, sea trade became an important source not only of income17but also of contact with other cultures, as witnessed by the Cretan-style frescos with the characteristic bull-fighting scenes found in some of Egypt’s palaces. Since the 1970s, Cretan civilization has become a hot topic again. When Arthur Evans discovered and ‘restored’ the ruins of the palace of Knossos in the 1930s, he reconstructed this city’s culture as one of peace and sun, of youthful, elegant men and women – perhaps unconsciously recasting them in the image he had of an ideal English society? Yet, there now seems to be evidence of another, rather different side to this culture: one wherein children were sacrificed and the followers of the various goddesses violently fought one another.

The further development of the structure we now know as ‘the state’ was made possible by two interconnected phenomena occurring within the partly agricultural, partly commercial temple-societies described above: the invention of writing – for example, the Cretans, too, developed their own script, known as ‘linear A’, which has not yet been deciphered – and the gradual extension of large-scale trade, together with the introduction of coinage. The former enabled the elaboration and, more important, the codification of law regulating disputes over property and inheritance. The latter soon demanded the creation of accounting and credit facilities. Together, these formed the basis for a fiscal system that could support large armies which, aided by good communication systems and proper logistics, helped the state to increase its power, both internally and externally, and thus to expand. But these states, whether pharaonic Egypt or the city-states of Mesopotamia and the Aegean, by their growing power and wealth increasingly attracted the unwelcome attention of outsiders, be they driven by hunger or greed.

Invasion, conquest and change: the first wave

Around 5000 BC, the region now comprising southern Ukraine and southern Russia, bounded by the Caspian Sea, was inhabited by tribal peoples; after the burial tumuli they built, they are named ‘Kurgan’ in Russian. Their language is lost now, but scholars have named it proto-Indo-European, as it was the origin of a number of languages spoken at later times both in Europe and in parts of the Near and Middle East – in present-day Turkey as well as in Iran (formerly Persia) – and in India. Linguists have discovered striking parallels between these languages, in the words used for such diverse fields of culture as kinship relations and agricultural practice, for pottery and for numerals. This may indicate that, over a very long period of time, successive groups from among the Kurgan peoples migrated west, east and southwards.18 Other scholars claim that people much like them in culture, but perhaps inhabiting a region slightly further south, in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq and Iran, were the ones to start these big migrations and the spread of the languages which resulted in the tongues now spoken in Europe and parts of Asia.19

These nomadic-pastoralist tribes were ruled by military elites who maintained their power by, among other things, the use of a new invention: their horse-drawn chariots, which altered the art of warfare. Although their economy included some agriculture and various forms of barter trade, it consisted mainly of cattle-grazing; consequently, they led a frugal life of near-subsistence on their vast tundra or steppe-like plains. Worshipping the sun and the sky gods, they were well aware how precarious their circumstances were though, of course, they did not know that a drop in long-term temperature, however minute, greatly affected their economic basis because the amount of pasture available for their herds was then reduced. As such climatic changes occurred regularly, these peoples were often forced to leave their homelands and move west, south or east in search of more equable climes. With their horses and wheeled vehicles, they were able easily to move their families and herds whenever natural conditions or their own inclinations drove them to do so.

Obviously, belligerence or hunger made the wealthy agricultural civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean and in Mesopotamia the favourite target of these nomads. These societies were not only threatened from the north – the horsemen from the Eurasian plains and the Bedouins from the Syrian and Arabian deserts were equally jealous of their neighbours. Egypt was relatively safe, as the deserts that bordered the Nile were inhospitable to man. However, the ‘fertile crescent’ – the area of the Euphrates, the Tigris and the coast of the Levant – as well as the river valleys of mainland Greece were frequently the target of successful attacks or outright invasions.

Indeed, in the decades after c.2200 BC, such tribes from central Eurasia, while moving into northern India and central Europe, also settled on the mainland around the Aegean, where ‘Kurgan’-like structures have been found dating from that time. Perhaps they also introduced the horse there. They spoke an Indo-European language from which Greek later developed. But the invasion by these ‘Greeks’ is only one manifestation of a process that was occurring continuously on the Eurasian landmass, resulting in intermittent crises in all the neighbouring worlds: there, indigenous societies would be uprooted by migrants turned invaders and conquerors; often, however, they merged with the cultures they encountered.

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Map 1.1 Migrations in western Eurasia, third to first millennium BC

It is believed, therefore, that in the two centuries after 2200 BC as well as, again, in the period between c.1500 and 1100 BC, nomad leaders gained control not only over the Peloponnese but also over the ‘Land between the two Rivers’. Many of them founded new states that, from a cultural perspective, always incorporated a mixture of existing ‘native’ and new ‘foreign’ elements. Indeed, it was not long before the foreign became native – showing that thinking in such terms can be dangerous.

Hammurápi (1792–1750 BC), the ruler of the city and state of Babylon, in Mesopotamia, descended from such nomads. He founded a vast empire and became famous as one of the first lawmakers of the western part of the world.20 A diorite stele, or column, more than 2 metres high shows him standing before the sun god Shamash, from whom he accepts the task of writing his ‘law code’. In this way he showed that his legal prescriptions were divinely sanctioned.

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Plate 1.2 A deer’s head in yellow, red, brown and black, from a cave painting at Niaux, France, dated c.20,000–10,000 BC. The artist has captured the animal with its head thrown back, its antlers thrust forward, preparing for attack – a scene which must have been part of prehistoric man’s daily life.

Source: Centre for Art Historical Documentation, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

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BABYLON, THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY BC: THE LAW CODE OF HAMMURÁPI

The pillar on which Hammurápi’s ‘law code’ is inscribed was discovered by French archaeologists in Susa, Iran, in 1901–2, and is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Its public function – indeed, one that, despite its differences from our own system, still appeals to us, as it did to its discoverers – was obviously to allow anyone who could read or be read to to invoke ‘the law’, ensuring that arbitrariness was to a certain extent abolished.

The text, divided into 282 articles, reveals the existence of a complex, definitely patriarchal society, characterized by a combination of agriculture and commerce. Intricate regulations establish the rights and duties of the upper class, the nobility, towards the state, the temple and the rest of the citizens who were not part of the nobility, mostly farmers and traders. The prescriptions primarily deal with land development and use but also address the problems of an already quite advanced trade system, heavily emphasizing the safeguarding of the rights of property. In a number of cases the punishment for offences committed by the nobility against commoners is noticeably less severe than for offences committed by people against others from their own class: equality before the law had not been realized, but some forms of public safety had, through the state’s monopoly on public violence.

Many of Hammurápi’s laws recur in the oldest laws of the Jews that, though written much later, especially in the Old Testament books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, show the influence of Mesopotamia on the societies of the Mediterranean coast.

1      If a seignior accused another seignior and brought a charge of murder against him, but has not proved it, his accuser shall be put to death.

2      If a seignior brought a charge of sorcery against another seignior, but has not proved it, the one against whom the charge of sorcery was brought, on going to the river [the Euphrates, regarded as god], shall throw himself into the river, and if the river has then overpowered him, his accuser shall take over his estate; if the river has shown that seignior to be innocent and he has accordingly come forth safe, the one who brought the charge of sorcery against him shall be put to death, while the one who threw himself into the river shall take over the estate of his accuser.

6      If a seignior stole the property of church or state, that seignior shall be put to death; also the one who received the stolen goods from his hand shall be put to death.

15    If a seignior has helped either a male slave of the state or a female slave of the state, or a male slave of a private citizen or a female slave of a private citizen to escape through the city-gate, he shall be put to death.

38    In no case may a soldier, a commissary, or a feudatory deed any of his field, orchard, or house belonging to his fief to his wife or daughter, and in no case may he assign them for an obligation of his.

39    He may deed to his wife or daughter any of the field, orchard, or house which he purchases and accordingly owns, and he may assign them for an obligation of his.

104  If a merchant lent grain, wool, oil, or any goods at all to a trader to retail, the trader shall write down the value and pay (it) back to the merchant, with the trader obtaining a sealed receipt for the money that he pays to the merchant.

106  If a trader borrowed money from a merchant and has then disputed (the fact) with his merchant, that merchant in the presence of god and witnesses shall prove that the trader borrowed the money and the trader shall pay to the merchant threefold the full amount of money that he borrowed.

142  If a woman so hated her husband that she has declared, ‘You may not have me’, her record shall be investigated at her city council, and if she was careful and not at fault, even though her husband has been going out and disparaging her greatly, that woman without incurring any blame at all, may take her dowry and return to her father’s house.

153  If a seignior’s wife has brought about the death of her husband because of another man, they shall impale that woman on stakes.

195  If a son has struck his father, they shall cut off his hand.

196  If a seignior has destroyed the eye of a member of the aristocracy, they shall destroy his eye.

198  If he has destroyed the eye of a commoner or broken the bone of a commoner, he shall pay one mina of silver.

264  If a shepherd, to whom cattle or sheep were given to pasture, being in receipt of his wages in full, to his satisfaction, has then let the cattle decrease, has let the sheep decrease, thus lessening the birthrate, he shall give increase and profit in accordance with the terms of his contract.

268  If a seignior hired an ox to thresh, twenty qu of grain shall be its hire.

269  If he hired an ass to thresh, ten qu of grain shall be its hire.

282  If a male slave has said to his master, ‘You are not my master’, his master shall prove him to be his slave and cut off his ear.21

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Beginnings in Europe: after the last Ice Age

As the climate in Europe started to get warmer again, and the ice cap covering it started melting, the continent assumed much of its present shape. The sea level rose, creating a Baltic Sea considerably larger than the present one, as well as the Zuiderzee – which the Dutch began reclaiming since the early years of our era until they finally converted the last part of it into farmland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

With the glaciers receding, north-western Europe also acquired its present contours of high ridges bordering low-lying plains. At the same time, however, the tremendous forces inside the earth continued to work, as they still do, for example in causing northern Scandinavia to rise by 1 metre per century. This can be seen from the fact that many early settlements which, according to archaeological data, were situated on the coast a thousand or more years ago have been unearthed in places now high and dry, inaccessible to any shipping. Meanwhile, south-western and southern Europe continued slowly to sink, as it still does. Over the last millennia, this has caused the flooding of large coastal plains and the continuous battle of man against water all along these coasts. Sometimes, the process has created huge coastal lakes, like the Marismas in southern Spain, or the Pontine Marshes south of Rome, which then became uninhabitable because of malaria. Yet again, in other areas the alluvial deposits brought to the sea by Europe’s rivers resulted in coastlines prograding steadily: the ancient port of imperial Rome, Ostia, once on the Tyrrhenian Sea, is now situated some 3 kilometres inland.22 Obviously, these processes, however slow, did deeply affect man’s life for many centuries; indeed, until well into the nineteenth century when some, though certainly not all, of them could be halted or even reversed by technological means.

Of more immediate impact to man was the ecological change brought about by the end of the last Ice Age: all over Europe, the tundra and steppe-like landscape turned into dense forests. This process was completed by about 10,000 BC. Consequently, the animal population decreased, forcing humans to adapt their behaviour to a sharply reduced food supply. This seems to have resulted in a different, generally less sophisticated pattern of economic and social organization, evinced by the decreasing production of symbolic forms. Hunting, the exploitation of aquatic resources and the gathering of plant foods, mostly hazelnuts, became the basis of subsistence.23

But by the seventh or sixth millennium BC, a new element slowly began entering this European environment from the Near East, dramatically changing people’s lives: agriculture and animal husbandry were adopted in Europe; staples not native to this region, such as wheat and barley, as well as sheep and goats, were now introduced. Farming and cattle breeding were slowly adopted by the inhabitants of the great plains of the central-western part of the continent. The process, a gradual revolution, beginning in the countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean, first affected Greece and the Balkans and then spread, by sea, to the islands of the Mediterranean and to Europe’s southern shores. By c.5000 BC, possibly via the Danube valley that enters deep into the heartland of Europe, it reached the central regions and began its voyage to the north-west. By this time, both the physical and the cultural landscape of Europe had changed forever.24

The limits set on food supply and, consequently, on demographic development, first by a hunter-gatherer and later by a nomadic-pastoralist way of life, were broken. In Europe’s new agricultural economy, a new way of life, a new culture evolved as well, based on the security and prosperity provided by agriculture, always in combination with hunting. As in the great river civilizations of the Near East, in Europe, too, agriculture and the surpluses of food and, hence, of wealth that came with it resulted not only in population increase but also in the development of more complex institutions both in the sociopolitical field and in the realm of religion.

Hamlets and villages, mostly palisaded, now covered the temperate woodlands. Houses were built – of stone and clay in the south-east, of timber in central and western Europe. Pottery was introduced, painted in red and white in the Aegean and in the Balkans, decorated in linear patterns in central Europe. People, though still donning leather clothing and grass capes, began to wear jewellery as well, made not only of shells but of the precious, very hard to work, obsidian.

Extensive burial sites have been discovered, with graves that were both formal and individual. Shamanistic rituals, including the smoking of narcotic weeds and human sacrifice, characterized religion. Fired clay figurines, mostly female – perhaps referring to woman’s prime role in creation and reproduction – have been found in and near many settlements.25 Culture in Europe, quite possibly a culture which continued to centre around a mother-goddess, became ever more recognizable.26

Thus, from the fifth millennium BC onwards, various developments slowly altered the area designated as Europe by researchers of prehistoric culture, that is, from Ireland to the Danube and the great rivers of Russia. The increasing abundance of archaeological findings allows us to chart better the changes, resulting in an ever more complex picture. Roughly three cultural regions can be distinguished: the north, the middle and the south of Europe.

For a very long time, in the cold, relatively unattractive and sparsely populated north the economic, social and political situation did not change much. The agricultural economy remained the principal means of existence; stone remained the primary raw material for tools and weapons, and the village remained the main form of settlement. Nevertheless, this culture was able to erect, first, huge wooden temples, like the one discovered in 1997 near Stanton Drew, in south-west England, dating from c.3000 BC – consisting of nine concentric circles made up of some 500 10-metre high, ornamented wooden poles. Hundreds of years later, this and comparable structures were built over with large stones, to form so-called megalithic monuments, also in circular form, like the great sanctuary at Stonehenge. Other examples of a new creativity are the Danish, Dutch and Breton oblong barrow graves. All in all though, society here was less affected by the great changes occurring in the middle and southern regions of Europe.

By c.5000 BC, agriculture had fully developed in the more temperate parts of Europe, with the introduction of the olive and the grape, as well as the woolly sheep and, perhaps a millennium later, the plough. From the south, viticulture eventually reached the frontiers of the temperate zone, in mid-England, the Netherlands, Germany, southern Poland and southern Russia. From a smoking culture, Europe became a drinking culture. Woolly sheep, bred in runs by the women, allowed for the manufacture of textiles; this in turn revolutionized clothing, which soon became a social sign as well. Moreover, the wheel and the horse revolutionized both military and economic life: the chariot and the cart, as well as long-distance overland trade, now became part of European culture.27

Quite probably, the chariot was introduced by the peoples who continued to ride in from the great Eurasian steppe. Not surprisingly, temperate Europe’s fertile fields held great attraction for these Indo-European migrants. As they did in the Near East and India, these people, trekking westward, also invaded the worlds of Europe’s older cultures, changing them, probably, from more matriarchal to more patriarchal societies, while, of course, being changed themselves by the contact – sometimes the conquest – as well.

Increased commerce may have been due to the proximity of these parts of Europe to the more complex economic and cultural centres of the eastern Mediterranean. There, the kingdoms and cities of the Aegean and the Near East developed a growing need for the mineral riches Europe could provide. For the chariot-driving peoples had also brought new techniques to the regions they entered. Around c.2500 BC, they had developed bronze casting in southern Russia and the northern Near East. This method required enclosed clay-lined furnaces driven by bellows. However, the basic metals of bronze – copper and tin – were not widely available around the Mediterranean and in Mesopotamia. This must have been one of the prime factors behind the development of long-distance trade within and soon also outside these regions. This trade, in turn, decisively changed the long-static economies and societies of western and central Europe.28

Complex trade routes began to connect the mineral resources of the Carpathians, Austria and southern Germany with the Aegean. This brought great wealth, resulting in a changing material culture that has left many traces. The previous existence or the genesis of substantial elites in these regions can now be proven. They ‘emerge’ from the rich grave-offerings that have been discovered: chieftains and their families were buried with their horses and bronze chariots, with carefully crafted drinking vessels and beautifully tooled and decorated weapons, all of which indicate prestige but also, of course, surplus wealth. Even in more northerly regions, where copper and tin were not available for exchange, skilfully worked bronze was sought; there, amber and fur were used as barter. By 1300–1100 BC, most of south and central Europe had entered into their ‘Bronze Age’.

Invasion, conquest and change: the second wave

The second great wave of invasions – others would say migrations – into the eastern Mediterranean occurred during the fifteenth and fourteenth century BC. It was particularly destructive. While scholarly opinion on this period is characterized by many conflicting interpretations, it seems likely that tribes probably coming from or through the Balkans and Italy penetrated into the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Wearing horned helmets and bearing large round shields and spears, these invaders seized power in many places.29 Called ‘sea raiders’ by the Egyptians, they even conquered the pharaonic kingdom, as is shown by the commemorative engravings depicting their attacks that cover the walls of the great temple of Medinet Habu, built by Pharaoh Rameses II a century later.

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Plate 1.3 Bronze chariot showing a procession of warriors and other people, some of them leading a (sacrificial?) deer, surrounding a figure (of a mother goddess?) carrying a shallow bowl in which offerings could be placed. From a grave from the seventh centuryBC found at Strettweg, Styria.

Source: Steiermärkisches Landesmuseum, Johanneum, Graz, Austria

Though many splendid monuments, like the royal palaces of Knossos, on Crete, were lost during these invasions, all sorts of culture, such as language, writing and religion, were retained by the new societies that now evolved, for the original inhabitants of the Aegean world soon mixed with the newcomers.30

In consequence of these changes, new developments took place all over the eastern Mediterranean. From a modern European point of view, the most interesting ones occurred mainly on the margins of the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

A ‘marginal’ culture? Religion and state formation in Israel

In about 1000 BC, trading cities – some of them merchant republics, others monarchical city-states – dominated the coastal area occupied by present-day Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Culturally, they fulfilled an ancient and important role as intermediaries between the civilizations of the Aegean, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Egypt.31

This region’s interior was mainly inhabited by semi-nomadic tribes. Some of these, the tribes of Israel, had created a religious system veering towards monotheism, with Yahweh as the only invisible God. Although forms of ‘henotheism’ did exist, in which one particular god was seen as the supreme creator – ‘Lord of Heaven and Earth, The Earth did not exist, You have created it’, says a text of one of the non-Israelite cultures – ‘pure’ monotheism as in Israel was an exception in the Near East. Rather, varieties of polytheism were the rule: every tribe usually worshipped several gods, represented in human or animal form.

The history of the Israelites, inextricably bound up with their religion, was recorded by a multitude of authors over hundreds of years, until it came to form the Old Testament part of the Bible, from the Greek word for ‘book’. Showing the long struggle of some Jewish groups to keep their faith with their chosen God – recent research has shown that other Jews frequently reverted to henotheism or even polytheism – it also shows the slow formation of a Judaic state out of a tribal community where physical survival in semi-arid areas was a constant concern, as affirmed by the Bible’s manifold food references: God rewarded those who served him well with plenteousness.

In an early period, war erupted between the interior and coastal societies and, according to tradition, a number of Jewish tribes united under kings anointed by priests in Yahweh’s name. A new kingdom thus came into being, which was given a governmental, ceremonial and religious centre when King David took the city of Jerusalem from a neighbouring tribe in about 990 BC. There, the Arc of the Covenant was now placed and Yahweh worshipped in a splendid temple built – or so the story goes – by David’s son and successor, Solomon.

However, tensions quickly surfaced. On the one hand, the ‘modern’ kings, aided by the priestly elite, strove for a kind of theocratic centralization though, at other times, they sought support from gods other than the unseen Yahweh. On the other hand, so-called prophets regularly strove to see the old, holy traditions maintained; acting as self-appointed protectors of the ordinary people, they created their own power base.32

When it came to ethics, precisely these prophets pressed the need to live righteously in Yahweh’s name. An essential part of this was showing mercy to the less fortunate. The powerful and rich had a duty to protect the poor, since they had virtually no rights shielding them from all sorts of exploitation and oppression. Thus, in the society of ancient Israel, justice was proclaimed to be a religious and moral duty, though certainly not a socially and politically enforceable right.

A ‘marginal’ culture? Trade and communication in Phoenicia

By several thousand years BC, trading cities had already flourished both along the coast of northern Syria and in Phoenicia, the name later given by the Greeks to, specifically, the narrow strip between the foothills of the Lebanese and Syrian mountains and the sea. The cities originated in the little pockets of arable land beside the streams running down from the mountains. Lack of further agricultural potential turned the people living there to the sea. Soon, they began to trade along the almost natural routes that, from east to west and north to south, crossed this land: for here, the Syrian and Palestinian coast and its flat, relatively fertile hinterland connected to the Mediterranean, and to Anatolia, present-day Iraq – and to the civilizations along the Indus River in north-western India – but also to Egypt. Although the Phoenician region never became politically united, these cities shared similar governmental structures. Moreover, their peoples spoke the same language and often worshipped the same gods.33

Prosperity increased in this region when, in somewhat later times, the Phoenicians discovered that many of their trading partners lacked raw materials like copper and tin, essential for manufacturing bronze weapons and tools, and wood. Thus, at an early stage, old cities like Jericho, in the Jordan valley, as well as new ones such as Byblos, Sidon, Tyrus and Ugarit, on the coast of present-day Lebanon and Syria, began to flourish. In 1975, a team of Italian archaeologists searching the plains of north-western Syria discovered the ruins of the once-great town of Ebla. In it, they found the remains of a huge archive containing tens of thousands of clay tablets covered in cuneiform script.34 Thanks to these, we now know a lot more about the economic, political and cultural aspects of these societies: their customs, their rituals, their food, and the way all aspects of life in this region developed through interaction with and between the other three main areas of civilization now existing in the Near East: Asia Minor including, soon, the Greek world around the Aegean, Mesopotamia and Egypt.

During the turbulent years between 1500 and 1100 BC, many of the great kingdoms and the city-states in the Near East were either weakened or even destroyed by the wave of invaders and migrants. When peace returned, some of the Phoenician cities took the opportunity to expand. They (re-)established contacts with the fertile and wealthy valleys around the Aegean but also with northern Africa – where slaves, ivory and gold were to be had, as well as all kinds of agricultural products – Italy, southern France and eastern Spain, the latter important for its silver deposits. Whenever possible, they even established settlements and colonies in these places, to allow part of their own population to emigrate. Thus, they exported many elements of eastern Mediterranean culture to regions that were not yet as technologically advanced.

Somewhere in the middle of the second millennium BC, in the Syrian city of Ugarit, the many hundreds of signs used for writing in Mesopotamia had been reduced to some 30. In around 1000 BC, the Phoenicians further developed this system, whereby each sign (‘letter’) came to stand for only one sound, usually the first sound of the object which the sign had originally been associated with: alef, from the first sound for ‘cow’, became the letter or sound ‘a’, and so on. This revolutionary discovery can, perhaps, be explained by the commercial milieu in which it was made. Whereas in the temple-states of Egypt and Mesopotamia, reading and writing the complicated sign system was deliberately restricted to a small group of highly educated and hence powerful people – though simplified systems did develop there later, for everyday use – such trading societies as Ugarit and the Phoenician cities needed a simple way of writing that would be easy to learn by a large group who could not afford to spend long years at school.

A ‘marginal’ culture? Democracy and its limitations in Greece

As indicated in the introduction, many Europeans look upon ancient Greece as one of the roots of their civilization. Yet, nowadays, their image of it is largely shaped by film and other forms of popular culture.35 If anything, these tend to romanticize the world of the Greeks and, also, make it less alien, more like a society that twenty-first century people can ‘relate’ to. It is, therefore, necessary to understand not only to what extent Greek culture was a precursor of the modern world, but also which aspects of it were indeed very different.

By the twelfth century BC, the Mycenaean and Cretan civilizations had disappeared from Greece. New Indo-European, so-called Dorian, tribes settled there between 1200 and 800 BC. While they did adopt some elements from the civilizations they conquered or merged with, they by and large maintained their own lifestyles.36 This new society was concentrated around military leaders, local ‘rulers’ who were, however, more like rustic gentleman farmers than the splendid kings of old who had lived a refined palace culture in great cities. Writing largely disappeared and bards became the bearers and transmitters of a mostly oral culture, singing the praises of their heroic ancestors in epic poems.

Two collections survive: the Iliad, which tells of the battle between a number of rulers from the Greek mainland and the king of Troy, a city which is now in north-western Turkey; and the Odyssey, which describes the subsequent fate of one of the heroes of the Trojan War, who manages to return home only after a long and perilous journey that takes him across the Mediterranean. While the existence of Troy has been debated among historians for more than a century after its discovery by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann – who, incidentally, set out to do so precisely to refute beliefs that the Iliad was romance rather than history – nowadays we do accept that it did exist. Situated in north-western Turkey, in a commercially and militarily strategic place, it was named Ilios, or Wilusa and it is quite likely that a war was fought over it between theAchai(w)oi, the Mycenean Greeks, and the city’s inhabitants.37 Both epics were and still are attributed to the poet Homer, who lived c.750 BC. While some scholars doubt his authorship altogether, others maintain that even if he was the writer, he was certainly not the only one. While he evidently composed his part of the text by codifying much older, anonymous, orally transferred traditions, it was in turn added to by later contributors, also anonymous.

From these poems a ‘romantic’ or rather chivalrous culture emerges, with valorous men who treated women both as objects of desire and as the spoils of war: in the Iliad, war breaks out when Helen, a princess, is captured and must be won back – it was a theme that resulted from the Indo-European stock of stories and would become one of the great topics of European literature. It was also an intensely competitive culture, which considered physical prowess to be a sign of power and might. Yet it was a culture which also displayed fascinating elements dating from the period before 1500–1100 BC and the following centuries.

Precisely the oldest elements in these tales have much to teach us about the situation at the end of the previous, second millennium: comparison of Homer’s text with the oldest stories from ancient Israel recorded in the first books of the Bible and with the epic poems from Egypt and Mesopotamia shows the fundamental unity shared by the cultures around the eastern Mediterranean, certainly until the invasions and migrations of 1500–1100 BC. They shared such spectacular stories as the tale of the Flood, which is found in the Noah episode of the Biblical book of Genesis and in the much older Babylonian epic of the hero Gilgamesh. It probably had its historical basis in the huge inundations caused by the breaking of the salt barrier between the Aegean and the great lake that became the Black Sea, in the fifth millennium BC. These cultures also shared more profound views on the creation of man and his relations with the divine.

Whereas some scholars think that in Greece this ‘oriental’ influence had effectively ended with the Dorian invasions, others hold that right down to the eighth century BC the military and economic expansion of the Near Eastern states was such that the eastern Mediterranean remained a cultural continuum – a continuum, however, that during the seventh and sixth centuries BC was slowly taken over by the Greeks.38

However that may be, even as Homer was recording stories from the Greeks’ distant and not so distant past, the society which he was part of was already changing. The populations of the Greek communities around the Aegean were growing; this necessitated not only agricultural expansion, but also a turn to trade, to provide an additional means of existence. In the process, the gap between rich and poor seems to have widened. Also, farming villages began to cooperate, creating a new structure called the polis – hence ‘politics’ as the all-inclusive word for the management of a community’s socio-administrative processes, including its legal and military aspects.

In most Greek poleis, the tribal monarchy gradually disappeared, to be replaced by government by nobles from the most powerful families who had also, in the past, been military leaders: those who called themselves the community’s best men, the aristoi. The rivalry between these families frequently led to chaos; sometimes a single person seized power and ruled as a tyrant; at other times efforts to achieve peace resulted in power sharing between several socio-economic groups.

This is what happened in Athens during the so-called classical age.39 When, at the beginning of the fifth century BC, Solon introduced reforms trying to establish the rule of law, factional strife was not eradicated. In the year 508 BC, after nearly 100 years of war between successive tyrants and aristocratic cliques, Kleisthenes, a nobleman, decided to broaden his power by incorporating the people, the demos, into his support base – hence, ‘democracy’. Men from more than 100 deme, or neighbourhoods, which comprised Athens were elected by lot to various administrative bodies, the most important of which was the Council of Five Hundred, or boule. However, the People’s Council had the last word – each adult male citizen, some 30,000 persons, having the right to vote.

We should be wary of idealizing this situation or comparing it to presentday representative democracy – if only because Athens was, by and large, a society based on a huge number of slaves who had no political rights whatsoever. Moreover, besides being a politically male-only system, attendance at the democratic meetings, which took place almost every week, meant the loss of a day’s work, especially for those men who did not come from the city centre. In practice this probably meant the wealthy citizens who lived in the centre were the ones who exercised their democratic rights. In addition, only the rich could be elected to the most senior positions, since they had the time and the education necessary to execute complex daily administrative tasks, as well as the prestige and financial means to ensure public support for their election. To put an end to the resulting corruption, it was decided that state subsidies would be made available to the poor to enable them to attend the People’s Council and various jury courts. This improved the situation though it still did not prevent the wealthy from frequently winning votes by a show of power, carefully selected charity and some plain bribery, allowing them to gain the offices and positions from which they could continue to exercise the same power. Also, the kind of communication that ensures well-informed decision-making among voters was mostly lacking. To start with, most Athenians knew how to read only rudimentarily, if at all.40 Moreover, while people may have discussed politics often, at decisive meetings the political leaders delivering their speeches simply could not be heard by everyone present during these large open-air meetings. Demagogy, or the capacity to somehow influence the deme and its voters by winning over, first, a small group – e.g. those sitting in the front rows – and through them collect the votes of the larger community, was widely used by various power seekers.

Since Athenian society knew no equality of property or income, the rich could afford to accept the theory and to a certain extent even some of the practice of political democracy. Thus, the freeborn poor were given legal equality and seem not to have suffered institutionalized tyranny and exploitation; also, they could at least partly benefit from the practice of consultation and control in the exercise of power. Yet it is not without significance that two of classical Greece’s most influential political thinkers, Plato (428/27–348/47 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC), held rather negative views of the democratic system. Plato, in his Politeia, sketches democracy as the regiment of unlimited freedom in which all desires exist together. The ensuing anarchy cannot but result in a subsequent phase of tyranny. According to Aristotle, in his Politika – part III, 1278–9 – democracy, far from being the ariste polis, the ‘best form of government for a city-state’, is the rule of the poor. Describing the state and its political-constitutional structure, he presupposed a polis of manageable proportions, necessary because in the Greek view democracy was immediate rather than representative. However, he also presupposed a system in which the citizens proper were relatively free from day-to-day toil because immigrant workers, the metoikoi – Aristotle himself came from this group – and even outright slaves, perform the heavy manual tasks.

Thus, while Greek thinkers have proposed fascinating theories about the various forms of political organization, we should not uncritically proclaim them the progenitors of western parliamentary democracy.41 Indeed, both theoretically and practically, their ideas diverged considerably from the ideas and practices that developed in Europe during a far later period. But the discussion their ideas engendered has definitely been fruitful.

Herodotus (c.485–425 BC), a merchant and traveller who has often been called the ‘father of history’ because of his Historiai, was born in Helikarnassos in Asia Minor but spent most of his life in Athens. In the third book of his ‘Histories’, he describes a discussion between three men about the best, or at least the most preferable, form of government. He uses three fictitious high-ranking Persians as his mouthpiece, yet it is clear that he presents a debate that had already been going on in Greece for decades. In its condemnation of monarchical government, his text was directed both against the Persians, the Greeks’ most dreaded enemy, and against those Greeks who showed monarchic tendencies themselves. Yet, Herodotus’ analysis is far from being an ode to democracy; rather, it is an outstanding description of the phases that government in many Greek poleis actually went through. It summarizes the arguments for and against democracy, oligarchy and monarchy, pointing out, for instance, the ease with which uneducated public opinion can be manipulated, the greed and self-interest of cliques and factions and the tyranny of a king. These arguments continue to be of vital interest in our own age and, as such, have lost none of their relevance:

The first speaker was Otanes, and his theme was to recommend the establishment in Persia of democratic government. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the time has passed for any man among us to have absolute power. Monarchy is neither pleasant nor good…. How can one fit monarchy into any sound system of ethics, when it allows a man to do whatever he likes without any responsibility or control? Even the best of men raised to such a position would be bound to change for the worse – he could not possibly see things as he used to do. The typical vices of a monarch are envy and pride; envy, because it is a natural human weakness, and pride because excessive wealth and power lead to the delusion that he is something more than a man. These two vices are the root cause of all wickedness: both lead to acts of savage and unnatural violence….

A king again, is the most inconsistent of men; show him reasonable respect, and he is angry because you do not abase yourself before his majesty; abase yourself, and he hates you for being a toady. But the worst of all remains to be said – he breaks up the structure of ancient tradition and law, forces women to serve his pleasure, and puts men to death without trial.

Contrast this with the rule of the people: first, it has the finest of all names to describe it – equality under law; and, secondly, the people in power do none of the things that monarchs do. Under a government of the people, a magistrate is appointed by lot and is held responsible for his conduct in office, and all questions are put up for open debate … the state and the people are synonymous terms.’

Megabyzus … recommended the principle of oligarchy in the following words: ‘In so far as Otanes spoke in favour of abolishing monarchy, I agree with him; but he is wrong in asking us to transfer political power to the people. The masses are a feckless lot – nowhere will you find more ignorance or irresponsibility or violence. It would be an intolerable thing to escape the murderous caprice of a king, only to be caught by the equally wanton brutality of the rabble. A king does at least act consciously and deliberately; but the mob does not. Indeed, how should it, when it has never been taught what is right and proper, and has no knowledge of its own about such things? The masses have not a thought in their head; all they can do is rush blindly into politics like a river in flood … let us ourselves choose a certain number of the best men in the country, and give them political power … it is only natural to suppose that the best men will produce the best policy.’

Darius was the third to speak. ‘I support,’ he said, ‘all Megabyzus said about the masses but I do not agree with what he said of oligarchy. Take the three forms of government we are considering – democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy – and suppose each of them to be the best of its kind; I maintain the third is greatly preferable to the other two. One ruler: it is impossible to improve upon that – provided he is the best. His judgment will be in keeping with his character; his control of the people will be beyond reproach; his measures against enemies and traitors will be kept secret more easily than under other forms of government. In an oligarchy, the fact that a number of men are competing for distinction in the public service cannot but lead to violent personal feuds; each of them wants to get to the top, and to see his own proposals carried; so they quarrel … and from that state of affairs the only way out is a return to monarchy – a clear proof that monarchy is best.

Again, in a democracy, malpractices are bound to occur; in this case, however, corrupt dealings in government services lead not to private feuds, but to close personal associations, the men responsible for them putting their heads together and mutually supporting one another. And so it goes on, until somebody or other comes forward as the people’s champion and breaks up the cliques which are out for their own interests. This wins him the admiration of the mob, and as a result he soon finds himself entrusted with absolute power, all of which is another proof that the best form of government is monarchy.’42

As noted above, although a number of Greek cities had created a democratic government, one should realize that in Athens, the city we know most about, not only the slaves but also half of the freeborn adults, namely all women, were excluded from politics as, indeed, they were from many other aspects of public life.43 For legally, too, women were considered unfit to speak or even act for themselves, and had to accept male guardianship all through their life, first of a father or a brother, later of a husband or a son. Their first duty was to bear children, preferably many, as only four in ten would survive infancy. While parents were required to educate their sons in preparation of at least a minimal participation in city affairs, they kept their daughters in close confinement at home. Even there, females were restricted to the women’s quarters. Of formal, literary education for girls, little evidence survives. Women took care of the household chores, preparing the meals that, with population growth and the conversion of precious soil from pasture into arable land, came to consist more and more of fish than of meat; incidentally, they were not supposed to eat with the male members of the family.

Lower-class women may have gone out to work, although in a slave society most menial jobs were taken already. Middle- and upper-class girls who went out into the streets never did so unaccompanied; they may even have worn a veil. It is doubtful whether women were allowed to visit the theatre, where the plays enacted, articulated and shaped much of the views and attitudes of the Athenians. Still, women did participate in the processions honouring some of the gods. In the so-called mystery cults, presided over by priestesses, they even found a domain partly outside immediate male control.

Yet, all in all, Athens and other Greek cities were largely male-dominated societies.44 Even Greek vase-painting seems to confirm this. Whenever women are depicted, both the freeborn and the slaves, they are shown serving the men, in the house, in the tavern or in the brothel. Men went out to the gymnasium, participating in the many sports that Greek culture set such store by precisely because they enhanced the virtues of manly valour. Men went out to the regular meetings of the fraternities that took care of funerals, organizing collections to allow the member-families to have a proper feast on the day of the burial. Men went out to dinner, drinking from cups painted with scenes representing sexuality in all possible forms, mostly objectifying the female role.

Outside marriage, free Athenian women were simply unavailable as sexual partners; slaves or foreign-born prostitutes took that role. Also, sexuality was not gender-structured, divided into heterosexuality and homosexuality. Rather, it was conceived as an act between an active and a passive participant, the active one mostly being male, older and of higher status, as opposed to the passive one, who could be either male or female. This resulted in a situation wherein it was quite common for men to practise what is now called homosexuality, a word the ancient Greeks themselves did not use. It was certainly not frowned upon or stigmatized, and practised only in an age-structured form, i.e. a younger man, eager for education in all fields of life, was sexually subservient to an older one. He himself would assume the role of mentor when he too came of age.45 Some scholars have argued that, at least among the elite, emotional and sexual relationships between adult and slightly younger men prevailed. But while it is true that marriage was more of a social and procreative norm than a sexual and emotive force excluding other attachments, the idea that bisexuality was actually practised widely throughout Greek society may very well reflect present-day wishful thinking in the search for past legitimation.

Indeed, there is ample material indicating that male–female sexuality was the norm. Even though marriages were always arranged, and the man, marrying at around age 30, was usually twice as old as the woman, partners often seem to have come to love each other. Yet it is also true that for a man, divorce was very easy indeed, a simple declaration before witnesses being sufficient. Women, on the contrary, could separate for only a few very grave causes and had to go through complex legal procedures.

Thus, the position of women in classical Greece much resembled that in traditional Islamic cultures. The Iliad and the Odyssey had summarized the female situation: Helen’s infidelity created chaos, while Penelope’s housebound faithfulness to her husband, presumed dead, restored order. However, the playwright Euripides showed that he was aware of the problems prevailing attitudes provoked among the female part of the population when he gave Medea, the heroine of his eponymous tragedy, the words: ‘Of all living, thinking beings, we women are the most unlucky’. Nor was the philosopher Plato unaware of the imbalance. He is supposed to have given thanks to nature, first because he was human rather than animal and, second, because he was a man rather than a woman – continuing the enumeration of his good fortunes by adding how lucky he was to be a Greek rather than a foreigner and, lastly, an Athenian citizen living at the same time as Socrates. In the later decades of the fifth century BC, however, Plato, among others, voiced ideas about female emancipation, but they were not implemented. Only in the third and second centuries BC did women acquire greater freedom, expressed, amongst other things, in and through the education that now became available to elite girls as well as to boys.

However, in dealing with all these questions, we should be aware that the evidence we have is overwhelmingly urban and, indeed, Athenian, as well as upper class. It is hard to judge if the situation was different in other cities and in the countryside. Even the ideas of female beauty may reflect this complex bias: we know that women who could afford to do so liked to wear a thick layer of white facial make-up, obviously to show they were not forced to go out to work for a living or, worse, labour in the fields as farmers and slaves did. Whether the lips, painted a bright red, and the hair, dyed a golden blond, also indicated a subconscious desire to emphasize a racial difference is difficult to say.

Political, social and cultural life in the city was mostly concentrated around a holy place, a shrine – generally located on the highest point of the polis, the akro-polis, easiest to defend and nearest to heaven – and a meeting place, agora, where the adult men from the polis gathered for communal affairs. Young men from the elite were educated not only in reading and writing and in the classical tales about gods and heroes, but also in rhetoric, a way of speaking and thinking specifically geared to public action and politics. Precisely this education both reflected and contributed to the further development of a standard Greek language and a specifically Greek cultural pattern.

Both in Greek and in other Mediterranean cultures, the gods were represented as humans, admittedly with more power than ordinary mortals but still with the same urges and desires, virtues and vices.46 This meant that, from the point of view of ethics, the norms people used to guide themselves in their lives, in society, were determined by social rather than religious or moral considerations. Honour and shame with respect to one’s own group were the dominant values, not guilt and atonement resulting from subjection and surrender to a morally superior or even perfect god. Indeed, it seems that in the classical era many Athenians spent a considerable amount of their time fighting those whom they thought to have blemished their honour – in court, however, rather than through blood feuds as in the archaic age.47

Yet there was little agreement with regard to the foundations of human actions in norms and values. In the fifth century BC, when the so-called Sophists dominated higher education, they argued that the application of a logical, rational way of thinking which enabled man to discover the rules which seemed to govern the structure of language and nature should also lead him to conclude there were no such things as absolute laws, regardless of whether these were given by the gods; rather, life and human action were based on conventions which men had agreed upon among themselves. A thinker like Socrates (469– 399 BC) opposed such views, maintaining that laws were solidly anchored in absolute moral norms which existed independent of man, time and place. It is an opposition that still fuels discussion about the validity of values in present-day society.

However, most people did relate their everyday experience to a larger order, as Greek thinking about life and society was embodied in a corpus of myths, in stories about the world of the gods and their relationship to the world of man. Myths were collectiverepresentations of man’s subconscious visions of the world of landscapes, of nature, but also of family structure and the community. Thus, myths came to be sources of great authoritative meaning in Greek society, up to the third and second centuries BC.48

Related to norm-describing myths, on the interface between the worlds of the gods and of man was the theatre. Attic drama, in its two forms of tragedy and comedy, developed from the festive celebrations for the fertility god Dionysus. Vying for the honour to be invited to write plays for such an event and thus instruct and please the public who attended it led to creative competition between, for example, the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides. Consequently, they and many others produced inspiring texts that still fascinate a twenty-first century audience. For despite their time-bound context, they often articulate problems modern Europeans also wrestle with.49

In tragedy, the relations between man and the gods was the central theme, while comedy developed as a form of political cabaret. Both were staged for the edification and enjoyment of the people but also were used to legitimize political ideas, and ideologically manipulate the electorate.50

Political, social and cultural structures comparable, in varying degrees, with those in Athens evolved in many Greek poleis. Yet, through its sociopolitical constellation as well as on its great wealth, Athens became one of the most powerful city-states in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. But although they repeatedly tried to do so, the Athenian leaders did not succeed in gaining control over the other Greek cities.51 Nevertheless, their town became an exemplary centre, attracting talent in diverse fields from all over the Greek world. Relative freedom, an educated people and an economy which had been functioning well for some time led to a vibrant intellectual climate in which many forms of culture developed and were then copied elsewhere in the Greek world.52 In this way, Athenian Greek culture gained a glory which far exceeded its relative political importance.

Even though the Greek cities had a common identity, not only in their language and in the organization of their polytheistic pantheon but also in the political and philosophical discussions that were central to the cultural life of the elite, the poleis jealously guarded their independence, as did the Phoenician city-states. Partly because policies of aggression and expansion within the Greek world itself were either briefly successful, or failed altogether, most cities had to find other ways of solving their internal problems, mostly economic and demographic. Colonization was one such option.

As a result of trade, the Greek and Phoenician cultures had already intersected in the tenth and ninth centuries BC. Perhaps the Phoenicians, expanding their power in the western part of the Mediterranean, were an example for the Greeks: from the seventh centuryBC, many poleis began settlements there, first as trading posts, but soon as colonies, too. Thus, the culture of these Greek cities spread to southern Italy, southern France and eastern Spain.53 One element deserves specific mention.

In the time of Homer, the Greeks had adopted Phoenician ‘alphabetic’ writing. Adding to it signs representing the vowels the Phoenician system lacked, they greatly facilitated scripture, making it more compact and less equivocal. Now, in southern Italy, dominated by the Greek colonies, first the Etruscans and later the Romans took over the new system. Thus the ‘alpha-bet’, this ‘Asian’ discovery, provided the origins for the system of writing that came to be used first in Europe and then throughout the whole of the western world.

Besides the alphabet, the Greeks have contributed one undisputedly advantageous element to the culture of Europe and, over time, of the West: their way of reasoning, of describing everything that exists and, then, of analysing and interpreting it by means of scientific conceptions. Obviously, the Greeks did not differ from a number of other cultures either in their basic cognitive capacities or in developing a logic to deal rationally with the questions raised by their observations of nature and culture. Indeed, the Chinese, for example, did reason by way of a logic perhaps as systematic and critical as that of, say, Aristotle. Yet, the Greeks showed a special interest in radical questioning and arguing perhaps because of their political experience, of violent debate both within and between the many city-states.54 The resulting rationality, soon adopted by the Romans and introduced by them into the education of their empire that subsequently became Christian and European, has deeply influenced western thinking over the past 2,000 years. Admittedly, however, it has not resulted in a single concept of science that can satisfactorily describe the many-dimensional nature of reality. Indeed, even some of the Greek ‘philosophers’ themselves already admitted that there might be more than one way to capture the truth, because each way is likely only to be able to describe part of the truth.

A ‘marginal’ culture? Tribal society in Celtic Europe

Meanwhile, in the first millennium BC, life in Europe, beyond the regions the Greeks knew about, had changed again precisely because, as in the eastern Mediterranean, new groups moving south and west from their homelands in Russia and central Asia made their influence felt. As always, archaeological finds provide evidence of the ensuing developments.

People continued to live in clans and tribes, dominated by aristocratic families who owed their power to their military leadership and the wealth produced by dependent farmers. Druids and sages, shamanistic medicine men, continued to control the contacts with the ‘other’ world through magic and various forms of ritual. Lentils were introduced, as well as broad beans and millet, which now became a staple, being strong and growing quickly. But villages made way for hill forts, large walled-in spaces, probably erected to protect against external attack,55 and burying the dead in graves was replaced by cremation and the preservation of ashes in funerary urns – hence the name ‘Urnfield culture’ given to this period. The new practice seems to reflect a deeper, spiritual change: rather than stressing the need to preserve the wholeness of the body for the afterlife, the corpse was now allowed to decay because it was valueless. In the visual arts, scenes depicted men – warriors – performing heroic deeds: action and glory are what remains for posterity, while the soul lives on, borne to another world by birds and boats, symbols that start to occur frequently, also in the boat-shaped stone settings for the buried urns.

This culture and society, which came to dominate the greater part of Europe for the next 1,000 years, has been named Celtic, simply because the Greek traveller and writer Herodotus had named the peoples living in these regions Keltoi.56 The Celts or Gauls truly were the builders of a ‘Europe before Europe’, the bearers – since c.1300–1100 BC – of the first civilization which encompassed the whole continent, from Brittany to the Balkans and the Baltic.57 However, it is a civilization which has left only material remains – enormous stone structures, magnificent gold jewellery and many other objects which are evidence of transcontinental trade.

The centres of Celtic culture were, roughly, eastern France, southern Germany and western Bohemia, with a definite core in the Hallstatt region, near the Salzkammergut, and the La Tène areas near Lake Neuchâtel. There, a number of chiefdoms ruled by military aristocracies controlled rich reserves of copper, silver and tin. They also controlled some of Europe’s main waterways – the Seine, Saône and Rhône, the Rhine and the Danube – stretching into the farthest corners of the continent. Their position was greatly strengthened when, once more in the eastern Mediterranean, men took metallurgical techniques one step further, going beyond the making of bronze to the melting of iron, for iron ore was abundantly available in these Celtic lands.58 This resulted in increasingly intricate trade networks, that soon came to include Spain as well: the great reserves of silver found there allowed the silver coins to be minted which were the motor of the growing economy of the eastern Mediterranean cultures.59

Indeed, iron and silver were among the main reasons why, by the ninth century BC, both the Greeks and the Phoenicians decided to settle in the western Mediterranean. The Greeks founded Massalia – Marseilles – which controlled the trade routes to the north, via the Rhône; they also settled in Ampurias, near present-day Barcelona, and traded with the Guadalquivir region, where the so-called ‘Tartessos kingdoms’ had become wealthy; these, however, were Phoenician foundations, as were the trading posts on Ibiza.

Actually, the whole of Europe now became a series of interlocking systems of trade, connecting Cadiz with the Shetland Islands: we know about this from documents like the Massaliote periplous, a sixth-century sailor’s manual about trade routes from Spain to Ireland. But the same systems also were linked to the Black Sea and the Danube, as well as to the shores of the Baltic Sea.

The fact that the climate in Europe deteriorated in these centuries may have influenced these changes as well. Northern Europe became far more humid, and huge tracts of arable land slowly turned into peat bogs in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. People had to find new ways to survive. From the sixth century BC, the Celts, driven by overpopulation in an agricultural society that had reached the limits of its productivity, began to expand to the south and south-east, over the Alps to the rich Italian peninsula and through the Balkans to the world of the Greeks and the empires in Asia Minor.

But if anything, these migratory movements strengthened the already complex trade area; cultural exchanges increased as shown, for example, by the magnificent krater found in a chieftain’s grave in Vix, France: it is a bronze drinking vessel, 1.68 metres high, clearly of Near Eastern, Greek-influenced workmanship. It is only one of many finds that tell us that Mediterranean influences slowly began to pervade Celtic culture, just as Celtic motifs turn up in Greek and, later, Roman art.60

Regrettably, we know little about the Celts. For although Celtic myths and legends such as, perhaps, the story of King Arthur and the romance of Tristan and Isolde have come down to us, transmitted orally for centuries and written down only at a far later stage, the Celts themselves did not write. Therefore, one can only speculate about the precise details of their life and culture, which was rediscovered only in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, viewed by Europeans who by that time had begun to look for their earliest roots – and were not always happy to have to do so in the Mediterranean and the ‘Asian’ Near East – Celtic civilization was increasingly romanticized as the ‘dawn of Europe’.61

The ‘birth of Europe’ and the Greek ‘world-view’, or how to define one’s own culture

Actually, one has to return to the early Greeks to see when the name of Europe originated and what those who conceived it meant by it.62 Europe first and foremost was a geographical term which came into use in Greece from the seventh century BC. The Greeks had but a very limited idea of the earth’s situation: they considered the Mediterranean to be, literally, the centre of all lands, or, as the sixth-century prose writer Hekataios of Miletos told in his ‘history’, the sea that divided the two known worlds: Asia, ‘the world of the rising sun’ – after an Assyrian word – which at first also included North Africa; and Europe, a name the Greeks had coined themselves.63 They held certain ideas about their own culture which reflected a mental mechanism found all over the world: most culturesdefine civilization – normality and identity – by describing certain peripheral areas and their inhabitants as not conforming to their own norms, branding them as foreign and even uncivilized; this enables people to define what is their ‘own’ and what is ‘another’s’.

The ancient Greeks felt that Africa, which was given its independent geographical status several centuries later in the writings of the widely travelled Herodotus, was black and uncivilized, with the exception of Egypt, whence came many of the arts prized by the Greeks.64 Asia they deemed more civilized but politically and militarily unsound; this, in fact, was wishful thinking rather than the truth, reflecting, actually, Greek fear of their most powerful neighbours. Europe, or rather the Greek sphere of influence – the first mention of Europe, in the seventh century, speaks of ‘the Peloponnese, Europe and the islands whose shores are lapped by the sea’65 – was the most civilized and consequently, it was thought, the strongest region. It was strong because civilization was concentrated in free, independent and – at least according to Greek political and cultural propaganda – democratic city-states which between them maintained a balance of power. These states, sharing the same language, Greek, and the same religious and cultural traditions, constituted Hellas, not a political structure nor, indeed, a specific geographical entity but a cultural community, a civilization. It celebrated its cohesion in such manifestations as the games held every fourth year near the great temple of Zeus at Olympia, in thePeloponnese, or in the pilgrimages made to the famous Pythia, the oracle at the sanctuary of Delphi, with its processional way climbing a mountain overlooking the Gulf of Corinth and lined with sumptuous monuments and statues presented by cities and private citizens alike. As a cultural community of independent states, the Greek cities differed greatly – though perhaps not as completely as the Greeks would have it – from the ‘other’ world, from Asia, where there were large political systems encompassing numerous communities and luxury-indulging despots who ruled these vast territorial unities with brutal force.

And yet, the name ‘Europe’ was coined in a mythical story about the rape of the maiden Europa, a Phoenician princess, who was abducted by the father of the gods, Zeus, and taken to Crete. Did the Greeks thus recognize and even honour their many cultural debts to the Near East, to Asia? Herodotus did not fail to mention that the alphabet had been a Phoenician invention. And, of course, Plato, who may have travelled south to see the other worlds, wrote admiringly about the religious and philosophical ideas of Egypt. Indeed, scholars during recent decades have found increasing evidence of Greek indebtedness to ‘Asian’ cultures, typically saying that even the Acropolis, considered by many the exemplary manifestation of Greek culture, would not have been built but for Greek knowledge of the great Persian palaces.

On a deeper level, the Greeks felt they could explain how their civilization had been shaped and why it was different. The prime cause was climate, which was so varied in Europe that four seasons followed each other in one year: the annual change of temperature, between cold and warmth, made people flexible and active, both physically and mentally. In Africa and Asia the situation was different: there, temperature was more even, and warmer, too, causing body and spirit to be less flexible and more sluggish; consequently, people in these parts were indolent and inactive, easily led by tyrannical kings and emperors. In short, they were different, foreign. This was expressed in their language, too: they spoke no Greek! They were ‘babblers’, ‘barbarians’. Whether this rather exclusive stance, implying a fairly negative view of most Africans and Asians, also entailed discriminatory practices based on race or skin colour, is a topic still debated by historians.66

Obviously, this geographical-cum-climatological approach and the characteristics attributed to various cultures on the basis of it were only a cover for a fascinating but certainly also biased political and cultural argument, one which not least was intended to support continued Greek independence against the constant threat posed to them by their neighbours, especially to the east.67 It is one of the first examples of the power which a geographical representation, a ‘mental’ map, can have over man and his ideas.68However, despite their intriguing arguments and also despite their conceit, the small Greek city-states in the long run proved to be not strong enough to effectively resist the expansionist politics of adjoining states.

For while the Greek poleis acquired their character as independent powers, a number of empires came into existence in Asia Minor which threatened that very independence. In particular, the Medes and the Persians who, in the sixth century BC, had their power base in present-day Iran, expanded their territory at the expense of the Greek cities that ruled the coast of Asia Minor. Their armies even marched to within a short distance of Athens. It is true that Greek coalitions knew how to halt the Persians – in 490 BC at Marathon and in 480/479 at Salamis and Plataiai – but this did not prevent Persian pressure being noticeably felt, especially in Greek Anatolia. Precisely in this context, the linguistic distinction between Greek and non-Greek gradually acquired political content, emphasizing the difference between ‘Greek freedom’ and ‘oriental despotism’, as made plain with dramatic power in Aeschylus’ famous political play The Persians. Thus, the cultural stereotypes developed in the Greek world as a result of the necessity to militarily confront the Persians greatly helped to create a ‘national’ Greek identity.

Still, in the end even the great alliances between the Greek city-states set up on Athens’ initiative were unable to withstand the force of events, the more so because time and time again the poleis’ mutual jealousy opened the way for foreign influences.

The world of Alexander the Great

In the fourth century BC, a young man ascended the throne of Macedonia, a somewhat rustic principality on the northern periphery of the Greek cultural world. Bringing the city-states under Macedonian control, he finally dealt the deathblow to Greek freedom. Yet at the same time, his actions were instrumental in diffusing Greek culture to an extent until then not realized.

Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) had been raised in the best traditions of ‘classical’ Athens by his teacher Aristotle. After succeeding to the throne, he followed in his father’s expansionist footsteps, conquering not only the whole of ‘Greece’ proper but also the Greek world of Asia Minor, the trading cities of the Levant, Egypt and large parts of the Persian empire. Much has been made of Alexander’s vision. He has even been presented as a proto-global ecumenicalist. However that may be, his dream – of heroic power, basically, and, perhaps, of a post-bellum utopia – came at a price: the carnage, unnecessary probably even considering the mores of his own times, of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians.69

Transversing Persia, Alexander reached the Indus River and thus the confines of the great civilizations of south Asia. When Plutarch, some 500 years later, wrote about Alexander’s campaigns, he took care to emphasize that Alexander had founded many cities there and, indeed, had brought the essence of civilization to these regions, giving them the Greek language and the values cherished by the Greeks, such as love for one’s parents. While thus defining Greece’s own culture by juxtaposing it with neighbouring ones, he and other Greek writers could not suppress their admiration for the Zoroastrian culture of Persia, with its vision of the world as a battlefield between good and evil, and man’s need to bring justice to all, especially the poor, as well as for the Hindu culture of India, with its accomplishments not only in the fields of religion, philosophy and cosmology, but also in the applied arts and in technology.

Alexander’s empire did not last. After his untimely death, his generals divided the spoils. Yet, in the various kingdoms into which the Alexandrian Near East was subsequently split, an intriguing mixture emerged of elements from Greek culture and the pre-existing traditions of those regions. This resulted in a civilization which has been called ‘Hellenistic’.70

Certainly, Hellenism was a veneer, laid over millions of unassimilated Mediterraneans and Asians who were now confronted with a new kind of kingship, theocratic, totalitarian – an inheritance that would affect Europe by way of the Romans. And yet, thousands of artists, intellectuals and scientists had followed Alexander on his travels to the east, eagerly absorbing new ideas. Through the stability he created, future generations would continue to travel. Thus, from the fourth century BC onwards, the life of the urban elites in the world around the eastern Mediterranean was altered. Many adopted both the Greek language and the Greek literary tradition as well as Greek art; combining these with their own Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian or Syrian heritage they produced a fascinating mosaic; sometimes, the result was a harmonious fusion, at other times one still sees the different parts existing side by side in art, religion, literature and the sciences. The world of the polis was past. The time of the ‘cosmo-politan’, the ‘citizen of the world’, had come. A new culture emerged.71

This culture became most strikingly manifest in one of the many cities founded by and named after Alexander. From its birth in 331 BC, Alexandria, in the Nile delta, became an international port, the most prosperous city in the Mediterranean, in western Eurasia even, where the sea routes from east to west and from south to north linked up with the land routes to and through East Africa, the Arabian peninsula and the rich world of east Asia.

Indeed, Alexandria probably owed much of its cultural standing to its economic function as the gateway through which the Mediterranean, and Europe, could reach the civilizations of Africa and even more of the Orient, of Asia. From the third century BC, trade from the Persian Gulf across the deserts of the Near East, but even more through the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea, brought the wealth of Asia to Alexandria: not only diamonds and pearls, pepper and sugar, ebony and sandalwood, ivory and silk, but also cotton and wool. From the Mediterranean world came slaves, and sesame seed, flax and wine, copper, lead and tin.72 But this trade also served as an exchange mechanism for all sorts of ideas perhaps even more than for actual objects, greatly facilitating a diffusion of knowledge and its applications in all fields of culture, in which the question of original invention is hardly ever to be answered, if not actually meaningless. Such high-tech gadgets as milometers, altimeters, earthquake detectors and armillaries, which explained the movements of the planets within our system, that could be found in Alexandria were to be found in India and China as well, showing the varied interests, especially, of the maritime and mercantile communities of the Near East and of Asia.

But in Alexandria, this ‘interface’ between cultures, in this cosmopolis, where great riches were stored, the phenomena known as libraries and museums first came into existence: cultural institutions that, much later, would become focal points of European civilization as well as centres of tradition and renewal. It was precisely the great ‘Museion’, museum, library and university at the same time, which became a fulcrum of science and learning. This was the milieu where the Homeric tradition was first researched and where Euclid (c.300 BC) wrote his textbook on mathematics,Elements. It was the place where Eratosthenes (280–200 BC), having put two sticks in the sand and observing the different length of the shadow they cast, decided the earth was not flat and went on to calculate the earth’s circumference at 40,000 kilometres – his fault margin later proved to be less than 100 kilometres. It was also the place where, later, Ptolemy (c.100–c.170 AD) developed the geocentric model of the cosmos as well as naming the continents of the earth and their various parts. It was the town where Archimedes, who hailed from Syracuse, on Greek Sicily, studied applied physics and engineering. It was also the town whose school of medicine was famous all over the Hellenistic world. At an earlier time, the Greeks, borrowing perhaps from Indian insights, had evolved a rational system of diagnosis and treatment; consequently such practitioners as Galen, who was a student at Alexandria in the second century AD, could become the first doctor to describe the circulation of the blood.

Image

Map 1.2 Extent of Greek influence in the ancient Mediterranean world, c.400–300 BC

Politically, this ‘Hellenistic world’ was soon threatened by the armies of the nascent Roman Empire which, starting in the second century BC, crossed the borders of the Italian peninsula and within two centuries conquered all lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.73

Yet despite the decline and fall of the independent Greek cities and the rise of hegemonic political structures, the concept of fostering individual spiritual development, of a citizen’s (i.e. a free man’s) civil rights as opposed to a powerful state, remained a powerful background thought. Admittedly, during the following 2,000 years of European and world history most peoples were not exactly granted much political freedom, at least not until the revolutions of the late eighteenth century AD drastically changed European society. However, the core of a theory about the political rights of citizens – whether or not within the context of the immediate but yet limited form of democracy that had been the practice of many Greek cities – was formulated by a number of Greek philosophers. Several centuries later this fundamental idea would be given additional strength in the legal systems devised by a number of Roman philosophers and jurists and embodied in the ‘legal state’ of Rome. If only for this reason, the role played by Rome in the history of Europe deserves closer attention.

Dossier: The human body

In 2009, after more than 30 years of squabbling, intrigue and financial malversation, a new museum was opened at the foot of the Acropolis, the ancient hill fortcum-temple mount of Athens, to exhibit some of the most spectacular remains of the civilization of this ancient site. To the everlasting chagrin of most Greeks, these do not include the famous or, as they would have it, infamous ‘Elgin Marbles’, those parts of the erstwhile sculpted frieze of the Parthenon temple that were transferred – the legality of the removal is heavily disputed – to England by the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, Lord Elgin, in 1801, and which are now displayed in the British Museum. However, what visitors can see are the parts of the frieze that have remained in Greece, presented in such a way – indeed, far better than those in London – that one gains a clear idea of what it looked like originally, the more so since the great expanses of glass in the museum direct one’s gaze to the remains of the actual temple on the hill.74

Arguably, few cultures have been so obsessed with visually representing the human body as the one called European. The strange thing is, of course, that this obsession started with the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose religion allowed them to glory in the body, and continued with the peoples of post-Roman Europe, whose conversion to Christianity gave them perhaps the most body-hating of all world religions.

But what is it about Greek sculpture, and, I should add, painting – although most of what is left of that is only on ceramic vessels – that is so striking, even today? Most would say it is that the human body is represented in a life-like form, which the artists achieved by showing it partly or completely nude. Of course this does not mean that the way the ancient Greek sculptors and painters – artists like Phidias, Praxiteles and Apelles – depicted men and women was what most Greek people actually looked like. From the very beginning, in admiring the apparently perfect physical form of these men and women, we have been part of the complex process of the cultural conceptualization of the body, including physical body-fashioning.

In ancient Greece – or so part of the scholarly community argues – not only were most temples and other public buildings not creamy-white, nor was the sculpture and painting that adorned it. If people were represented, their eyes were inlaid, their skin was painted, and their garments were gaudily or, to modern tastes, even garishly coloured. The paint was produced from natural pigments – vegetal and mineral – which came, along the roads of Greek international trade, from places as far away as Spain and Afghanistan.

More importantly, the human form as presented by these artists was, quite obviously, heavily idealized, with an emphasis both on youth and on a body that was given very specific proportions following philosophical notions of harmony. Yet though to the unschooled eye they look natural, they are actually not: the head usually is too small in relation to the rest, the men always have wide shoulders, narrow hips, a flat stomach and a rather small penis, while the women are shown with very small breasts and rather wide hips. The relationship, if any, between the cultural sexuality embodied in these female representations and in the ‘Venus’ figurines of paleolithic Europe, interpreted as both the earliest and a more naturalistic form of female depiction, is not clear, yet.

How did this ancient Greek view of the human body come to be the ideal type of Europe, and, by the late twentieth century, of the better part of the Westernized world?

The process started with the Romans, who adored and revered almost every aspect of Greek culture. They stage-managed its role as the epitome of civilization, conferring on it the status of a precious and normative legacy for the elites of their empire. In fact, research has shown that most statuary now presented as Greek in museums all over the world consists of copies – once coloured, too – made by Roman sculptors. Even in Roman times it was aesthetically and technically difficult to distinguish a newly-made Roman statue in the Greek style from an ‘original’.

This became nigh-on impossible when, from the fifteenth century onwards, the elites of Renaissance Italy started excavating, collecting and exhibiting ancient art. Given the prevailing reverence for the culture of the Ancients, their representation of the human body was now presented as the norm of contemporary physical beauty as well. Again, philosophical notions of harmonious proportions considered to be inherent in creation were projected on the body. This tendency was reinforced because contemporary artists – for example Michelangelo Buonarotti – began painting and sculpting in what they considered the antique manner. It also was strengthened by the fact that the new genre of anatomical drawing used by the medical profession to better understand the human body showed both male and female as perfectly proportioned in the way of the Ancients. Moreover, since the Roman and Greek statues had lost their original colour, many thought the whiteness they showed was part of the norms of proportion and purity.

From the late fifteenth century onwards, Europe’s ideal images of the human form – rather than, say, the many more life-like images presented in European portraiture – went through a number of phases, though the process mostly seems to have affected the female, who was represented far more often, and also more often represented in the nude, than the male. But whereas by and large the latter did retain his basically Classical, ideally proportioned guise, the former’s form fluctuated, as shown in sculpture and painting from the sixteenth till the early twentieth century.

During the Baroque period, the idealized female was shown with a rather more obvious stressing of breasts and hips, perhaps both to express the status-related notion that the middle and upper class woman was well-fed by her prosperous husband, and also to denote her sexual functions and attraction. Indeed, the depiction itself of the body – primarily the female body – served to help construct sex and gender identities.

Of course, the dictates of fashion – the outcome of status considerations that, certainly from the late eighteenth century onwards, became heavily commercialized – have always shown changes in representations of the clothed female form. Yet representations of her ideal nudity mostly followed the perceived Graeco-Roman example, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, when the Classicist style revived it. This has continued till the present day – although since the nineteenth century, a new ‘Naturalism’ has led many artists such as, to name but two, Pablo Picasso and Lucian Freud, to depict the human form – female and male – in all its varieties rather than moulding it to an artificial perfection.

Despite this ‘Naturalism’, and, also, despite the ever more rapid changes in fashion that, certainly since the Second World War, affect the clothed male almost as much as the clothed female, the idealized nude form of both still seems to follow the Ancient model, though the male is now represented either as an adolescent ephebe or as a more mature man.

Perhaps precisely because most people know they are not born with specifications that follow these or indeed any model aesthetics of proportion, they still want to attain them. Since the early twentieth century, the visual media, including film and heavy advertising, have been propagating such ideals amongst the masses. The fashion industry in particular, for purely profit-seeking reasons, has tried to introduce ever newer models – mostly for females – that do not necessarily adhere to the Ancient ideal type any more, starting with the ultra-thin ‘Twiggy’ look that came from Britain in the 1960s and that, in one way or another, continues to impose on the buying public a set of sometimes dangerously anorexic ideals.

Consequently, physical exercise today is less about the prolonging of health than about the preservation or restoration of an idealized youthful beauty. Moreover, all kinds of medical technologies assist people in these efforts to ‘correct’ what nature has given them but what they yet deem imperfect, precisely because they compare themselves with such ideals. Many people succumb to the promise of the happiness that is the pretended outcome of a ‘total makeover’ now broadcast in many popular TV shows, not only in the USA but in Europe as well. Thus, hair is transplanted, eyebrows are stylized, drooping eyelids are lifted, noses are straightened, penises lengthened, lips made fuller, breasts are enlarged or reduced and liposuction brings back the sleek contours people desire. This general trend, born from a complex combination of dissatisfaction with what one is and a narcissistic desire to become what one feels one should be presents real dangers, physically as well as psychologically – all the more so as dietary habits are becoming less healthy and obesity is an ever greater problem. Yet, nowadays, Europeans, Westerners in general and, it has to be said, increasingly the upper and middle classes of Asian peoples too, view the human body as an object they can ‘sculpt’ to make it conform to a perceived ideal.

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