Collected Writing on World History: 2012-2014
CANNIBALS & KINGS: THE ORIGINS OF CULTURE (1/13/12)
BOOK REVIEW
Cannibals & Kings: The Origins of Cultures
by Marvin Harris
Author of Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches: The Riddles of Culture
Random House New York
p. 1977
This book is an illustration of a fundamental critique of social sciences. That critique is best illustrated by R. P. Feynman's 2 minute video:
'They're not scientists."
This is a fair point. Social Science isn't actually science. It's interesting, and worth-while, but it is not Science. If you look at a Google Ngram of the major, specific, social sciences as defined by wikipedia, you can see a rise of usage in America that begins only after 1890. In the early 20th century, economics takes off in popularity in the period between 1910 and 1940. Only geography maintains an occurrence level of the same frequency in the 20th century.
In the next group of popular social sciences, you have sociology and anthropology and then linguistics slightly beneath. The relative popularity of Economics compared to the other social scienciology and Anthropology share the same category "Social Sciences." That's embarrassing, and it shows how little people give a shit about those two disciplinesarvin Harris was an Anthropologist who taught at Columbia University in the twentieth century (he died in 2001.) He was a guy who had some cross over hits. His biggest "hit" as far as the trade-paperback market was concerned is Cows, Pigs, Wars & Withces: The Riddles Of Culture. That's a book that has 30 reviews but ranks in the 30,000's in sales- and doesn't even reach a sub-chart of top 100 sellers...anywhere.
But as the Amazon reviews indicate, Harris is the best known advocate/originator of the "Cultural Materialism" theory of human developments: That all human activities are best explained as a response to their environment. He is an Author who did not cross disciplines, but very much developed a popular market for his academically based work.
Thus, his ideas retain some power, even though they might be "discredited" in the academic sphere. After all, general readers hardly care what the academic literature has to say about the role of Cultural Materialism in the context of contemporary discussions about Anthropology. In fact, people don't a shit about Anthropology generally, because, as the Google Ngrams show- it's not that popular- even among social sciences.
In Cannibals & Kings, Harris lines out his theory that the development of "pristine" civilizations was a function of environmental pressure created by, essentially, human success as hunters and gatherers. After the period where big game hunters depleted all of the appropriate animals, humans developed farming to replace the lost food. After the environment was degraded, humans clustered into groups where agricultural efforts could be intensified to provide food for a growing population. These locations were the original pristine states, which Harris describes as "Mesopotamia, Egypt, Harappa, China and Meso America." Of those civilizations, the main examples he uses are Meso-America, specifically the Aztec Empire and Mesopotamia and Egypt.
To call Harris' theory "bleak" is a mild understatement. He literally conjures up hundreds of thousands of skulls that the Aztecs kept to memorialize people they ate. His theory that the Aztecs amplified human sacrifice as, essentially, a way to feed a slowly starving population is provocative to say the least. Also provocative is his casual acceptance of a writer like Karl A. Wittfogel. Wittfogel is a uniquely 20th century type of guy, who is best known for his epic Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. Wittfogel's theory of "hydraulic society" i.e. that early states where dictators gathered the population to control the supply of water for raising crops. Anyway, at the time Wittfogel wrote Oriental Despotism he was a hard core German Marxist, and his work is in that tradition. "Cultural Materialism" is what many would call a deracinated American academic version of Marxism.
I happen to sympathetic with the attempt to de-stigmatize certain, non-controversial elements of Marxist thought, but I also agree with Feynman, waaaay to much of Cannibals & Kings is Harris just saying stuff- it's not science at all.
KEY FIGURES OF THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT (5/23/12)
Published 2/26/13
So hey what about my book review of The Kingdom of the Hittites by Trevor Bryce appearing in the "top posts" list over on the sidebar? (1) 128 page views in the past month? That's ridiculous because book reviews about ancient Near Eastern History rank just above "Comparative Philology" in the mental list I keep of "least popular subjects to blog about." But there you have it smack dab at #3 behind only 2013 Chart Leader, my book review of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and my post about the Statement split LP by Clandestine Records featuring Dirty Beaches, Ela Orleans and Slim Twig.
And sure, it's only 100 page views but if there is anything I've learned in 6 years of blogging is that the difference between 0 and 100 is harder to bridge then the difference between 100 and 10000. Not that the Kingdom of The Hittites by Trevor Bryce is going to clock 10000 page views.
If I had to guess "why" I would say it's the Neo Hittite Lion that I used as an illustration. That image obviously shows up on the first page of results when someone punches "Hittite" into Google Images.
But Hittite visual motifs aren't just about enormous stone lions.
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| This is an example of a Hittite rendering of a double headed Eagle. |
A second visual motif is the double headed Eagle and the depiction of the Eagle as shown above. The double headed Eagle is not an image specific to Hittite civilization. There are examples of double headed Eagles going back to the Babylonian Empire. There are also Eagles and double headed Eagles outside of the ancient Near East- the Ostrogoths. The Germans used the double headed Eagle in the 20th century. The Eagle with a single head but sharing the same posture as the double headed Eagle is widespread. If you look at the seal of the United States there is a visual continuity between that Eagle and the Hittite Eagle depicted above:
The spooky thing is that the Hittite civilization was unknown when the US seal was designed. The Hittites were only rediscovered in the late 19th century- they were forgotten.
The people who designed the US seal were of course familiar with the Eagle as a standard bearer for the Roman legion:
So it's pretty clear how the Eagle made it from Babylonia to Assyria to Hittites to Lydians to Greeks to Romans- that's a well documented history of conquest and domination. If you look at the shared iconography of the three Eagles separated by millennia- that is a stirring testament to the power of a specific visual image.
The Double Headed Eagle already has a long history in what we now call "popular culture." For example the use of the double headed eagle by the Masonic movement extends back to the 18th century:
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| Masonic Double Headed Eagle |
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| The upturned shoes of Hittite's as depicted by multiple artists of the ancient Near East. |
FOOTNOTE
(1) I think the money part of the Hittite history is their interaction with the Lydian/Luwian peoples who themselves interacted with the Greeks who founded "the West." The Hittites first encountered these Greek-related tribes of western Anatolia as conquerers- the art that remains is literally of the Hittites marching into the west in their snow shoes.
These Hittite conquered Greek-related tribes may have relocated West, and that is something that Bryce discuses. His theory is that the fall of the Hittite empire was triggered by a drought, and resulted in the migration of several central Indo European/Anatolian peoples to new locations in the Meditteranean basin, perhaps directly spawning the Etruscans in north-central Italy and creating whole tribes of Pirates who show up in Egypt, Crete and Mycenae as the so-called "Sea People."
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| This is a map of the Ancient Near East and it shows where the Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians during the 16th 14th century BC. |
Published 3/5/13
The Hittites: Story of A Forgotten Empire
by Archibald Sayce
p. 1890
It's a cliche that the internet makes everything available to everyone for free but this certainly is NOT true for graduate level monographs dealing with subjects in the humanities. You need to subscribe to JSTOR to access papers and most advanced subjects in history or english are super expensive on Amazon whether in Ebook or print format.
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| The Hittite Swastika was the most "western" of the Ancient Eastern uses of the symbol. I would argue that the transmission represents a shared Indo European cultural contact since the Indian Swastika is of Sanskritic vintage. If you look at the map above it's easy to see how both the Hittites and the Indo-Iranian speakers would have both come from "the north" |
Thus, if you are a lay person who, say, wants to learn about the Ancient Near East, there are a finite number of books on the subject that you can obtain without plunking down serious coin. Most of those are texts which have been used by college courses in the subject or older books that have been around long enough for the price to drop through multiple print editions. For example, the primary text that a curious reader can obtain on the Hittites is Trevor Bryce's The Kingdom of the Hittites from 1998. That's about it.
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| Hittite Warriors from the Battle of Kadesh (1300 BC) between the Hittites and the Egyptians in Syria/Palestine. It's important to understand the role that the centuries long conflict between Egypt and the Hittites played in allowing the Hebrews to settle in Palestine after their migration out of Egypt- Palestine was a war torn desiccated landscape with no central power. |
One of the other interesting aspects of the Hittite story (besides status as a bridge culture between Mesopotamia/Babylonia/Assyria and Greece) is the fact that the Hittites were only rediscovered in the mid 1870s by the author of The Hittites: Story of A Forgotten Empire, Archibald Sayce. This book is also the only free book on Hittite history that you can pick up on Amazon,
The story of the rediscovery of the Hittites is one that parallels the more well known story of Egypt and the discovery of the Rosetta stone that allowed Victorian scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sayce did manage to unravel the secret of the written Hittite language, but only had a few texts to work with- like single digits. Compare that state of affairs to what Bryce had to say circa 1998:
"Some 5000 or more clay tablets impressed with the cuneiform script have been unearthed in the Hittite capital Hattusa this century, in perhaps as many as 30,000 fragments." - Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, Appendix 2, Sources For Hittite History: An Overview.
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| Hittite Ritual Axe: The Hittites were known for their Iron weapons and their knowledge of how to make steel. They were also known for their horses, and their chariot building- all classically Indo-European skills: Chariots, Horses, Warriors. |
Sooo...Sayce just didn't have as much information but he did actually, concretely discover an ancient civilization, and a crucial one in terms of understanding how the Greeks became civilized and many of the forces that shaped immigration in and around the Mediterranean before the advent of the "Classical" World.
One major distinction that Sayce was writing too early to understand is the distinction between the original Hittite and the later Neo-Hittites- the difference between 1900-1800 BC and 1600-15000 BC. One of the most interesting things about the history of the Ancient Near East is that there are another 2000 years of written history BEFORE the Christian era begins. That's as much as we have on the other side.
Most of what Sayce knows about the Hittites is based on his personal "adventures" looking at remote archeological sites and then the rest is what he can glean from contemporary sources: The Bible, Babylonian and Assyrian written history and of course the Egyptians.
Sayce actually went on after discovering the Hittites to become an Egyptologist so he was on it in terms of looking at newly translated Egyptian texts that referenced the Hittites in terms that can be described as 'Ancient Near Eastern Power Politics': Wars between nations, blood shed, elaborate diplomatic treaties, dynastic marriages. Sayce argues from this that the Hittites were the second major "Northern" power during the specific period he was describing, but they were also pushed around by powers to the east: Assyria to be specific.
The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays
Edited by Thomas L. Haskell & Richard F. Teichgraeber III
Cambridge University Press
p. 1993
World War I seems like a good point to give literature a rest for a minute. I think the free Kindle books, but after a solid year of reading nothing but 19th century lit. I could use a gear shift. I bought this book simply because of the title/publisher combination. Love Cambridge University Press, and if I see one of their titles in a book store for less than ten bucks I'll buy it just for shits and giggles. Also, I'm interested in the culture of the market, any aspect, so this was a natural.
Unfortunately, The Culture of the Market is a compilation of grouped essays around the theme, rather than a soup to nuts exploration of the topic with a central thesis. As a result, The Culture of the Market is like a bunch of papers written for grad school or tenure, with little or no unifying theme.
Many of the included essays revolve around disproving existing ideas about what certain groups in the past thought about their relationship to "the market." One notable essay discusses the 18th century French nobility, a groups typically thought to be "outside" the market, and how they were in fact explicitly dealing with the market in pro active ways in their day to day lives. Other essays look at the treatment of the Market as a theme in specific works of literature- Balzac's Pere Goirot gets its own essay, as does the cotton market paintings of Degas.
It's the Degas essay that comes closest to real insight, since Degas was notable for his public statements about how he despised the role of the market in art- a classic 20th century/19th century romantic influenced posture, but in reality he was busy behind the scenes literally making paintings because he thought he could sell them to a wealthy cotton merchant.
Published 1/28/14
The Rise of Modern China
by Immanuel C.Y. Hsu
Oxford University Press
p. 1970
Considering the role that China plays in the modern world, my own ignorance of recent Chinese history is breath taking. Here is what I knew prior to reading The Rise of Modern China: The Communist party, led by Chairman Mao, came to power after World War II, and then, in the sixties there was a "cultural revolution" that was bloody and insane. Before that China was poorly governed and the Western powers treated China like a sort of semi-colony.
What I learned from The Rise of Modern China is that until about the 1850s, the Chinese made ZERO- ZERO effort to learn ANYTHING about the west because they felt it was beneath their dignity. Well into the 1890s knowledge of anything western was restricted to a small minority of educated scholars and students sent abroad. Under the Ch-ing Empire (which held onto power until the early 20th century), the Chinese were ruled by a different race, the Manchus (from Manchuria.) The Manchus had their own language and conquered the Ming dynasty in the early 18th century. Thus, the early modern period in Chinese history has a heavily racial element- with "foreign" Manchus ruling over, and discriminating against, the much larger Chinese population. This gave the Chinese little reason to support their own government during the increasingly chaotic 19th century, as Western powers imposed their will on the decrepit Ch'ing.
The racial element of the Ch'ing dynasty is, I think poorly understood in the conventional "the Chinese Empire was sad in decrepit in the 19th century" narrative. The fact is that it wasn't a Chinese empire at all- it was a Manchu emperor ruling over China, so their own royal family was about as foreign as the foreign invaders. The Manchu's obviously adopted Chinese customs and language to the point where the Manchu language essentially no longer exists, but they maintained their separate racial identity to the bitter end.
In terms of the 20th century power struggle between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists- what is clear is that the Chinese Nationalists were simply out maneuvered by a more intelligent opponent: Mao Tse Tung. Mao's decades long rise from library assistant to supreme ruler of China is obviously a story unto itself, but it is hard not to have an appreciation for what he accomplished, especially if you look at China post his death.
True, China lacks many of the cultural niceties of the West: a free press, freedom of speech, an impartial justice system, but China was never about being exactly like the West, and furthermore it is clear that they have never, ever had any ambitions to rule outside of their immediate sphere of influence, so my take is that we should give them whatever the fuck they want in Asia and just keep them at bay everywhere else (like in Africa.) Simple!
Published 1/30/14
A History of the Arab People
by Albert Hourani
Belknap Press at Harvard University
p. 1991
You want to get a sense of the American mind, walk into a book store and look at the history section. You've got like, 50 percent World War II/Civil War books, 25 percent American History and 25 percent "every other subject in history." What, exactly is the historical relevance of World War II and the Civil War relative to the histories of other cultures that are increasingly important to our own culture? I don't get it, but there you go. That makes it hard to learn the right away about subjects in "World History."
Also, it's expensive. So basically for world history subjects you are looking for cheap survey course level books that are aimed at a general subject. Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press. And it's ok if they are decades old, like A History of the Arab People because you don't exactly need to keep up on new trends in the history of the Abbaysid Caliphate because THERE AREN'T ANY NEW TRENDS.
The history of the Arab people begins, at least with this book, with the advent of Islam in the seventh century. After that, the history of the Arab people isn't exactly equivalent to the history of Islam, but only because Islam expanded into different ethnic groups: Persians and Turks specifically. They hey day of Islamic/Arab culture lasted through the European middle ages, and the Islamic/Arab conquests made it all the way to Spain, Central Asia and India before the Europeans got their shit together, and the Turks go their shit together, gradually creating a situation where the Arabs were largely under the domination of Turks and their elites until the Europeans took over in the 19th century.
The situation between the Arabs and the Turkish speaking Ottomans is roughly equivalent to the United States taking over England, or maybe closer even to the Aztecs conquering Spain. Throughout the History of the Arab People the major action is split between Egypt, Damascus and Lebanon up until the 20th century, when previously peripheral regions like the Arabian peninsula and Maghrib (Arab North Africa) begin to assume greater importance.
Published 3/11/14
Empires of Time
Calendars Clocks and Cultures
by Anthony Aveni
Horology is what you call the study of the measuring of time. My sense is that the bulk of horology is devoted to the mechanics of time measurement- "Watch and clock escapements," "Wheel and pinion cutting." Those kinds of subjects. The technical/mechanical aspects of time measurement.
Empires of Time is something different- grounded more in history, archaeology and anthropology than horology. Empires of Time is more about the why's of time, and why humans all over the world have learned to tell time as a necessary component of complex cultures and the resulting civilizations.
The clearest link between the keeping of time and the invention of complex civilization is the importance of the calendar in the timing of planting crops for agricultural purposes. Since agricultural and civilization basically appeared at the same time, the keeping of time was quickly adopted by whomever was in charge to buttress whatever claim they made to power. This happened among tribes people and ancient civilizations alike.
The measurement of time was very important to simply feeding large populations, but it was so important that it quickly gave rise to the use of time as a metaphor/symbol/etc. "Our" conception of time i.e. "Western" time is typically ascribed to the Greeks, but the Greeks themselves were privy to the developments in the East- where the Babylonians had created a complex study of astrology with religious significance.
Greek time keeping developed about the shared human interest in knowing when to plant crops. Aveni devotes ample space to Hesiod's Works and Days, which is itself one of the oldest written works in Greek. Works and Days is basically a farmers almanac written in verse. Aveni also devotes substantial time to the Mayans who are the sine qua non of time obsessed civilizations. Aveni also discusses the Incans and the Aztecs, and I found those portions of the narrative most compelling.
Aveni also weaves in examples from sub-civilization "cultures" like that of Islanders from the Indonesian archipelago and African tribesmen. My take away from Empires of Time is that there are DEFINITELY universal, human rhythms of time that are central to our commonality as a species. One excellent example is the day/night cycle, and the coming and going of the tides. For periods beyond the day you get into the difficulties of horology proper, specifically the issue of an accurate calendar. The irregularity of the "year" period as it related to days and months is basically THE question of calendar studies, and Aveni covers it for sure. Here, the Western solution is the "correct" one.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is simply how late in the day Arab peoples began to even notice Western cultures. Unfortunately, this was probably more attributable to the lack of literacy outside of the religious/intellectual elites until late in the 20th century. Outside of Cairo and perhaps Damascus, the modern aspects of life like mass communication and transport were also late in emerging.
_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) |
| The Tower of Babel by Bruegel the Elder |
Published 4/1/14
The Power of Babel- A Natural History of Language
by John McWhorter
p. 2003
Harper Perennial
I can't get enough of linguistics because... I want to understand the rules that underlay speech and communication on a macro/global level. It's not the same thing as being interested in learning foreign languages or being interested in a specific foreign language. I was terrible at my junior high, high school Spanish classes, and I've never made any kind of effort to get back to it (even though I have a job where it would come in handy), nor have I tried to learn another language like French or German, even though I read plenty of literature in both languages.
McWhorter's main thesis is that every language is always changing, so that any thoughts/ideas about "proper" English or any other language is based entirely on the subjective beliefs of humans embedded within specific cultures and does not reflect any underlying truth, and people are not bad or ignorant because they speak a language that differs from the norm.
There are many current examples with which a casual reader will recognize. The two main ones in America are "Ebonics" or "Black English" and "Spanglish" or "Spanish-English." Much of The Power of Babel revolves around discussions of the difference between a Pidgin and a Creole- one being not quite a language and the other being a new language (created out of other pre-existing languages.) An equal or greater amount of time is spent discussing the important point that all languages, high, low or whatever are essentially "dialects" it just so happens that certain languages, for example, Standard English happen to be situated in a place and time where they ride to power and are then preserved by a combination of status and writing systems.
It's linguistics 101 that writing a language down has a conservative impact on the changes that will occur in every language written or orally. Thus, the standard English spoken today was the dialect spoken in and around the London area around the time the printing press was disseminated in England. McWhorter repeatedly points out that while we can basically understand Shakespearean English, Shakespeare himself would be unable to comprehend the language spoken as "English" in 1000 AD, as would we.
There is also the obligatory paean to all the vanishing languages of the world, though not without the observation that many "separate" languages in less developed part of the world are so similar that they are mutually intelligible and simply represent the ways smaller units of humans self identify. He also makes the observation that so called separate languages in the First world are more often the result of political/cultural considerations. A good example he gives is Danish/Swedish/Norwegian. The Danes used to control Sweden and Norway and Swedish was simply "Eastern Danish" and Norwegian was "Northern Danish." Then Sweden became independent and the people began to speak "Swedish" all of a sudden.
Ultimately, one should be interested in ways of speaking not because of what your English teacher tells you in school, but because speaking a language properly is a key to upward mobility. As a lawyer, it is perhaps useful for me to be as comfortable with Spanglish or Ebonics to facilitate communication with my clients, but they hire me so that I can speak to Judges and Prosecutors (and Jurors) in a way that will create succesful outcomes.
Published 6/25/14
Distinguishing Ancient Mesopotamian Civilizations:
Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes & Persians
If you are like me, you are constantly confusing Ancient Mesopotamian Civilizations. It starts with the term "Mesopotamia" which is simply a geographic description of what we today call Iraq, but also describes peoples from present day locations like Syria, Iran and Turkey. So first, there is no "Mesopotamian" Empire or people. Rather there are Empires that started in Mesopotamia and expanded. The easiest way to keep them in order is chronologically, since they essentially succeed one another in dominating most of the surface area of the Middle East up until Alexander the Great conquered all of it in the 4th century BCE
SUMERIANS
Ethnicity: ???
Language: Sumerian
Still Around: No.
Came From: Far southern Iraq
Time Period: ??? BCE to 1700 BCE.
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| The Assyrian man headed flying lion is the most well known symbol. The Assyrians were conquerors and held sway over the entire Middle East. They are the reason that the Bible was written in Aramaic, because Aramaic was their language of Empire. Assyrians still exist today as a minority and are spread over the world. |
ASSYRIANS
Ethnicity: Semitic
Language: Aramaic (Semitic)
Still Around: Yes, but scattered around the globe.
Came From: Northern Iraq
Time Period: 2500 BCE to 605 BCE
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| Babylonians came after the Assyrians but before the Persians. They are best known for contributing Ishtar- the Goddess of the night to the larger Near East world- she would be called Aphrodite in Greece. |
BABYLONIANS
Ethncitiy: Semitic
Language: Akkadian (Semitic)
Came From: Central Iraq
Time Period: 1900 BCE to 539 BCE
PERSIANS
Ethnicity: Iranian (Indo-European)
Lanuage: Persian (Indo European)
Came From: mountains of Iran
Time Period: 550 BC- 313 BC
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| Map of the Seleucid Empire in Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey |
Published 7/22/14
The Land of the Elephant Kings (2014)
by Peter Kosmin
Published April 2014
Harvard University Press
(BUY IT)
I was in THE Harvard University book store in Boston a couple weeks ago and saw The Land of the Elephant Kings by Peter Kosmin sitting on the shelf. I don't mind confessing that I got pretty excited, but then picked up the slimmish volume and saw that the price was fifty bucks. Fifty bucks for an academic history of Seleucid Empire? I'm interested, but not fifty bucks interested. Returning to Southern California, I didn't forget about The Land of the Elephant Kings, rather I used the Inter Library Loan function at the San Diego Public Library to request it from the UCSD library.
As far as I know this is the first book length treatment of the Seleucid Empire in the modern era (I'm just guessing) so despite some substantial issues with readability, The Land of the Elephant Kings is a must for anyone who is seriously trying to get a grip on the history of the pre-Islamic Middle East. The Seleucid's were a dynasty that emerged in the aftermath of the untimely death of Alexander the Great. Selecus I Nicator was a contemporary of Alexander the Great, and his dynasty controlled the empire shown above from roughly 305 B.C. to 65 B.C., collapsing via excessive dynastic struggle.
The Seleucids have not been a favorite of modern historians, who prefer either the pre-Alexander empires or the post-Islamic period. The Seleucids were essentially foreign occupiers, and they didn't introduce a religion, nor did they represent any kind of "new era." All of this is freely admitted by Kosmin, who also repeatedly states that there is not much information of any kind to be found anywhere about the Seleucids. This gives The Land of the Elephant Kings both a fragmentary and elliptical feel, like a coloring book only half colored in.
The Land of the Elephant Kings is not a conventional narrative history, rather Kosmin embraces the "spatial turn" in social sciences, wherein historians use the metaphor of space to describe the behaviors of less conventional states and empires in history. Historically, The Seleucids were typically discounted as being a "weak" empire with little or no state structure, and the main thrust of Kosmin's argument is to demonstrate that in their own way the Seleucid monarchs were most active.
Mainly he does this by drawing on archaeology to point out how many colonies they founded. The Seleucids were nuts for founding colonies, and they put dozens down, many of them in the area of Syria. He also makes the case that the Selecuids were constantly "on the go" travelling in and around their Empire in a constant attempt to put down rebellions and "show the flag" to their vassals. Additionally, the made one limited but important contribution to wider world culture, being the first Kings to refer to time via their own era, judging each year as being part of the "Seleucid Era." This was picked up by Christians and other Near Eastern cultures and is responsible for our own use of "B.C." and "A.D." today.
Unfortunately there is little in The Land of the Elephant Kings to appeal to a non-specialists. That's a pity considering the paucity of other books on this same subject, but fully understandable considering the limitations of source material. Perhaps this book will serve as a stimulus for further advances in Seleucid studies.
Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane
by S. Frederick Starr
Published October 13th, 2013.
Princeton University Press, First Edition
(BUY IT)
You can't seriously be interested in the category of "world news" without realizing that "the Middle East" is one of the most consistently popular subjects within the world news rubric. As I write this right now, I would imagine that the number one subject in world news right now is the current Gaza Strip conflict between Israel and Hamas and that the number three subject is the expansion of ISIS across northern Syria and Iraq. Then you've probably got the Syrian civil war in the top 10, and also Afghanistan and then Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan are all top 20 countries of interest for various reasons.
The "Middle East" typically includes the areas of Arabia, Northern Africa/Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran. This definition of the Middle East excludes Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the countries of former Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Kirghistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In fact, these nations together with (arguably) Iran and Pakistan comprise a separate subject, "Central Asia." Because the present day states in Central Asia proper are so obscure, interest in the history of this region is weak.
That is a shame, because as S. Frederick Starr comprehensively demonstrates in his magisterial treatment of the history of this region in Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, the Central Asian enlightenment between 800-1300 A.D. is one of the Golden Ages of world civilization, on a par with the European Renaissance (thought preceding it) or the Graeco-Roman phosphorescence of the "Ancient World."
Lost Enlightenment exists to right a number of misunderstandings about Central Asia. Primary among those misunderstandings it the frequent characterization by Western scholars that Central Asian scientists that wrote in Arabic were in fact Arab. Thus, what we have historically referred to as scientific/artistic achievements of the Arab/Muslim Middle Ages were often neither Arab NOR Muslim in origination, simply written down in Arabic.
The second major misunderstanding about Central Asia that Starr confronts is the idea that the only interesting subject to modern scholars about the Central Asian civilization of the early middle ages is it's "decline and fall." This is a subject that is very much en vogue in the currents of "popular history." The primary exponent of this thesis is Jared Diamond.
To a lesser degree, Starr also explains in authoritative fashions the relationship between language and ethnicity in Central Asia during this period. The Golden Age of Central Asia typically starts after the Arab conquest only because everything could be written down in Arabic, and because classic Greek works were translated into Arabic. Crucial to understanding the history of Central Asia is understanding that the civilization PRE Arabic conquest was vital, being mostly Oases centered city-states run by different Iranic speaking native of the region. The two places that figure most prominently in this pre-Conquest narrative are Balkh (located in the far north of Afghanistan) and Samarkand (southern Uzbekistan.) These cities were the center of larger Iranic speaking ethnic/religious groups. The most well know of these are the Sogdians, who were centered around Samarkand.
Although conquered by the Arabs (more or less) in the 6th century, they had pre-existing relationships with India, and at the time of conquest there were Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Manichean, Christians and Jews. Generally speaking, the Buddhists and Manicheans were treated harshly, Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews held on for centuries, much as they did in other parts of the Islamic empire outside the Arab heartland.
After the Arab Conquest of Central Asia, Turkic speaking tribes play a long running roll, starting as barbaric nomads and ending up as conquerors with hybrid Turkic-Persianate Sunni and Shia Muslims ruling over the entire Middle East and most of India via the Ottomans, Savarids and Mughals. The role of actual Arabs in Central Asia after the conquest is analogous to the role that the Roman Empire played in Northern Europe: the people there aren't "Roman" in any way, but their development has been dramatically impacted by the Roman presence.
Other then literally explaining these very basic and true facts about a little-known region of the world, Starr sets out to explain the constituent elements of the Central Asian Golden Age by drawing biographies of the leading exponents and detailing their accomplishments in general-reader level detail. It isn't "pop history" but Starr leans towards making good footnotes and sparing the reader debates interesting only to academics in the field.
He also gingerly moves towards a conclusion about the "decline and fall" that is careful to avoid easy generalizations and takes into the account the utter lack of familiarity that most writers have about the actual facts and arguments of this period. This "decline and fall" links directly to the larger subject of "the Middle East" since it implicates the entire Arabic writing intellectual world and mirrors the actual debate about the "closing of the Arab mind" that happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth century.
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| Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058-1111): responsible for the phenomenon of "the closing of the Islamic mind." |
To this day the ideas of al-Ghazali remain unquestioned and it is quite easy to trace from al-Ghazali directly to al-Queda and it's affiliated groups and ideology. Starr also gently opines on the vexatious question of the failure of the Middle East to Modernize in the way of the West. Here he firmly lays blame at the foot of the Turkic/Persian influenced Empires of the early modern Period. These "gunpowder" Empires were essentially castes of Turkic speaking Calvary officers under the influence of Perisan-ate court culture who were quick on subjects like equipping an entire army with guns and artillery, but weak on adopting the printing press and subject to the restrictive Sunni Muslim ideology about rational thought and science.
Starr does not dwell at all on the depressing present of any of these nations. You can see the history of the region of the actual names of the countries. Tajikistan means "Persians" and they speak an Iranic language. Turkmenistan is Turks speaking Turkish, and the Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyistan represent different Turkic speaking tribes who arrived at different times in the area from the North and East.
In conclusion, Lost Enlightenment is a must read for anyone with a deeper than average interest in world news, let alone an active interest in world history. To my knowledge, this is the first comprehensive history of this time and place, and it is a welcome addition to any well compiled reading library in the subject area of World History or World News, for that matter.
Hattusha: The Capital of the Hittites
by Kurt Bittel
Oxford University Press, published 1970
If you are looking for a comprehensive archaeological/historical description of Hattusha, The Capital of the Hittites, you need look no further, because this book is just about it. Hattusha was pretty concretely excavated in the period before World War II and after, so it is a site where many photos have been taken and pottery measured. Since 1970 there has been more work done about the language and culture of the Hittites, and obviously this book doesn't draw on that corpus of knowledge.
Hattusha is located in the northern Anatolian(Turkey) heartland, it is currently a "ruin" though habitation both preceded and succeeded the temporal period where Hattusha was "The Capital of the Hittites." The chonological period of the Hittite Empire was 1600 B.C. to 1200 B.C. Prior to Hittite in-habitation, Hattusha was called Hatti and had been inhabited by a pre-Hittite Anatolian ethnic group(Hurrians?), with an Assyrian trading colony embedded in the habitation. This city was destroyed by a local rival group and lay dormant from some period before being inhabited by the Hittite monarchs. Hattusha proved to be a devastatingly easy target for local and non-local invaders over the centuries. In addition to the substantial pre-Hittie sacking and destruction, Bittel identifies at least two separate sackings within the Hittite period, seemingly demonstrating the insecure location on the northern border of the "Ancient Near East."
The main point from the pre/early Hattusha days is that the Hittites did not come as conquerors of that particular city, they just took it over because it had a good water supply, etc. It also may have been a location of homage, as the nearby rock art of Yazilikaya would seem to demonstrate. Yazilikaya is essentially a shrine to a local deity but the deities are Hurrian, not Hittite, so the art either was placed by the Hurrians themselves prior to Hittite arrival or the Hittites were emulating the Hurrian pantheon
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| Reconstruction of the shrine that would have encased the Yazilikaya shrine site near the Hittite city of Hattusa |
by Mogens Trolle Larsen
Routledge Press 2006
I've been trying to read this book since July 6th, 2009. Like many other books from my Amazon Wish List it's expensive- 150 USD new, 30 USD used. The ancient civilizations of the Middle East are interesting because they have a kind of a double history: Their actual history and then the "discovery" of that history by Western explorers and adventurers in the 19th century. The rediscovery of the ancient civilizations of the Near East: Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites, the Egyptians, proceeded along multiple tracks. First, there was the physical excavation of ruins and monuments prior to the creation of archaeology as a discipline. Second, there was linguistic/philological race to decipher the various languages and understand non-alphabetical forms of writing. Finally, there was the issue of confronting the fact that these discoveries related to text in the Bible, and had the potential to either 'prove' or 'disprove' Biblical text.
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| The Assyrian Empire ruled the middle east between 800 to 600 B.C.E. |
The primary figure in the The Conquest of Assyria was Austen Henry Layard, a young man with some education (but not an Oxford degree) who was supposed to be a lawyer but instead decided to set off, overland, to seek his fortune in India/Ceylon. He never made it. Instead, Layard became obsessed with the area we now know as Iraq/Iran, and was then part of the Ottoman empire. Initially, Layard traveled as far east as Baluchistan which was then, as now, extremely dangerous for anyone- including people who were actually from there, let alone outsiders.
While in Baluchistan he befriended a local sheikh type, who promptly ran afoul of the Ottoman pasha (territoriality governor) and long story short he ends up hooking up with marsh Arabs and raiding the Ottoman army. From there, he bounced around the Near East before ending up in Northern Iraq, where he was the first to excavate Nimrud and Nineveh.
Working prior to the point when we understood cuniform script or indeed before archeology existed, Layard was never more than an interested amateur, but he was also first, and it was his discoveries that essentially created the field. The great stone human headed lions he painfully had carted back from the desert still stand in a place of honor in the British museum. He also wrote Nineveh and its Remains: with an Account of a Visit to the Assyrians, and the Yezidis, and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians. This work did much to popularize Assyria and make the public aware that such a place existed outside the Bible. This was in 1848-49.
Layard was also involved in the deciphering of the cuneiform script. This story is less interesting then running around in the desert and digging up huge temples and mythological beasts, but is clearly a subject near and dear to the heart of the writer- a professor of Assyriology at a Danish university. For anyone looking to delve into the history of Assyriology, The Conquest of Assyria is an absolute must, even if it takes you five years to get your hands on a copy.
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| The Birth of the Modern World 1780- 1914 by C.A. Bayly |
The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914
by C.A. Bayly
Blackwell Publishing, 2004
The Birth of the Modern World is a global history of "the long nineteenth century;" a term that historians typically apply to the period between 1780 and the beginning of World War I .(August 1914- One hundred years ago!) The Birth of the Modern World is a work of synthesis, with the author summarizing a variety of more recent historians who have combined to create a broad alternative to the narrative of "Western Exceptionalism" that used to dominate world histories of this time period.
The idea that "the west won" the long nineteenth century still retains currency with the popular audience for history, and pop-historians like Jared Diamond have made an ample career out of explaining how and why "the west won." Bayly explicitly writes to rebut that perspective, weaving in a "multi-center" perspective that incorporates the Muslim Empires of the early modern period (Ottomans, Mughals, Savfids) and the Eastern polities of China, Japan and South East Asia and showing that many so-called "Western" attributes had parallel developments in non-Western societies.
The lack of original research gives The Birth of the Modern World a predictable structure, Bayly looks at the "conventional wisdom" of Western scholars on various issues related to the history of this time period, then he summarizes the work of non-Western and more recent Western scholars, then he draws measured conclusions that eschews the extreme interpretations of others.
A major point that Bayly argues is that many of the changes of this early Modern period were the result of religions, particularly non-western religions, responding to the challenge of the west. These non-western developments: the Wahhabi in Arabia and the reformers of East Asia in particular, are often excluded from "history" because of religious content, but really they are central to the discussion of the history of this period.
Certainly, anyone familiar with the last decade of world history could understand how the development of the Wahhabi in the deserts of Arabia, would, two hundred and fifty years later, be viewed as a central development of world history, rather then a regional scrap between a failing Empire (Ottoman) and an oppressed minority (Bedouin Sunni Muslims.)
One major point where Bayly seemingly agrees with past historians is that the pace of change did indeed intensify during the last two decades of this period (1884-1914.)
Congo: The Epic History of a People
by David Van Reybrouck
Ecco Press
Published in English translation March 25th, 2014.
If you read about world history, whether in newspapers, magazines or books, you will read a lot about failure, because success doesn't move copies. By that token, the history of the country formerly known as the Belgian Congo, formerly known as Zaire, and currently known as The Democratic Republic of the Congo represents a kind of gold standard of disaster. Any attempt to write a comprehensive history of this region bogs down simply because there is a dearth of any written history about this area.
Van Reybrouck gets around the lack of written history by actually talking to people who lived it. He even tracks down a guy who knew the original missionaries who settled at the mouth of the Congo river in the late 19th century. What comes before that point is not exactly shrouded in mystery: there were African run kingdoms in the west, and Arab-African trader states in the east, all of which made their coin through the slave trade. Northern Congo was an extension of greater Egypt, Eastern Congo was within the orbit of the Arab trading colony of Zanizbar, and Swahili was widely spoken in the east as a kind of lingua franca. Beneath these loosely organized economic entities were an even looser set of ethnic groups.
The initial impetus that pushed Congo to be placed under European control was a mixture of late nineteenth century imperialism, well-meaning attempts to eradicate the slave trade and the febrile imagination of King Leopold of Belgium. The acknowledged "history" begins with the Berlin Conference of 1885 deciding to turn over an area the size of Western Europe to...King Leopold...not as a colony, but as a personal fiefdom. When he obtained the Congo, there wasn't even a complete map of the area. The slave trade in the Congo was real. Even after it was eradicated in the west, Arab/African groups continued to ship slaves out to the East.
Due to the vagaries of 19th century European politics, The Congo was turned over to King Leopold PERSONALLY- it wasn't a Belgian colony, rather it was a personal possession of the King of Belgium. This was a terrible idea on a number of levels, and Van Reybrouck does a succinct job of summarizing why, but basically Leopold wasn't interested in building a state, only economic exploitation and during his period in control he did little to build anything in the way of a colonial state, and simply focused on extracting maximum value from the inhabitants with little regard for their well being.
The golden period came in the early 20th century when Leopold was forced to turn the Congo over to the Belgian state. Now the Belgian government was in control, and there were plenty of well-meaning Belgians who understood that colonialism didn't have to be a 100% shit show. Infrastructure was build, institutions were established, schools, health care. On the eve of independence the Belgian Congo was a fairly literate, healthy, successful European colony. Unfortunately for the people of the Congo, independence came quickly, and the subsequent flight of the entire Belgium colonizer class meant that this huge country was left with hardly any professionals- doctors, lawyers, soldiers, politicians, civil servants- almost 100% of those people had been white.
So while one certainly sympathizes with the reasons to push for a quick break with the colonizing powers(i.e. whatever positive impact they had on the Congo, they were a bunch of racist assholes (for the most part)); it is hard to shake the impression that indepdence was an utter disaster for everyone involved EXCEPT Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, the man who ruled the Congo for the better part of the second half of the 20th century. The Mobutu story is a familiar one- that of the mid 20th century third world strong-man. In Latin America, they call them "Caudillos." The main difference between the Latin American varieties and the African is that the Africans tended to have a strong socialist streak, whereas the Latin Americans tended to be right-leaning.
As it turned, out Mobutu had little personal ideology, being more focused on maintaining a strong grip on power and looting the country, giving rise to the term "klepotracy" to describe a state where theft was the pre-eminent value. Mobutu managed to stay in power for so long because he was a useful pawn in the Cold War struggles between East and West. At the dawn of independence, Russia had supported the first prime minster of independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba is a recognized martyr of the African independence movement, but to his credit Van Reybrouck isn't drinking the kool aid, showing him as an erratic and vainglorious demagogue.
Van Reybrouck doesn't shy away from the events of the last decade, which have involved the kind of ethnic warfare and horror that almost defy understanding. If you read Congo: The Epic History of a People you will have an understanding, but there are no answers, and the ending essentially abandons that part of the story for a somewhat uplifting close about the efforts of China to step in in place of the West, which has seemingly lost interest. Hopefully, the information of Congolese teaching themselves Chinese in a matter of months will drown out the story from the woman who was raped on the dismembered corpse of her husband, and whose two daughters were impregnated by the same soldiers who raped her.
A quote on the back suggests that if you read one book about Congo this year, make it this book. Of course, for most Americans, it's more like, "If you EVER read one book on the Congo in your entire lifetime, make it this one." I would agree.
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| Map of the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 5th & 6th century, A.D. |
Published 8/4/14
The Anglo-Saxon World
by Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan
Yale University Press
July 30th, 2013
Calling a book released over a year ago may be stretching the label of, "new release" to the breaking point, but in the world of Medieval History, I'd say a year old still counts as "new." Certainly it does for the San Diego Public Library, because I found The Anglo-Saxon World in their new non-fiction section. In the hard-cover edition I read The Anglo-Saxon World is an imposing 3.4 pounds with a 10" x 8" page lay out . I actually shied away from checking it out for a few months because it looked like either a "coffee table" book or a source book- neither of which seemed particularly interesting.
Once I actually took it off the shelf to give it a closer look, I quickly saw that The Anglo-Saxon World is neither of those things, rather it is a well illustrated, well mapped work of synthesis that seeks to incorporate recent developments in Anglo-Saxon studies, mostly an up-tick in archaeology within England, the advent of "paleo-genetics" to trace population movements and cross-disciplinary attempts to meld history with studies of the environment.
The Anglo-Saxon world- which is roughly the story of England from the withdrawal of the Roman Empire to the Norman conquest, has been long maligned by historians. It is the prototypical "Dark Ages" that struck fear into the hearts of school children and fed generations of popular fiction. The decline of importance of written sources compared to the Roman Period and the Norman Period put The Anglo-Saxon World at a disadvantage within the discipline of history itself, which for much of the last three centuries has relied on written sources for material.
The Anglo-Saxon invasion was the product of three tribes of Germanic speaking people: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. They conquered much of what we consider to be modern day England, and some of modern day Scotland, and established a multiplicity of Kingdoms, the most important of which were Wessex, in south-west England, and Mercia, in the are today known as "the mid lands."
One of the points made abundantly clear by the collation of archaeological findings from the last century is that while the is that settlement by actual Anglo/Saxon types was more intensive in the east. While the West was controlled by Anglo-Saxon monarchs, the actual population appears to maintain a greater connection to the Roman-British past. The existing British population was not incorporated wholly into the Anglo-Saxon world, rather they were a sort of sub-strate population, members of whom would integrate or disassociate themselves from the Anglo-Saxons depending on their personal preference.
Anglo-Saxon England "settled down" into five major Kingdoms: Northumbria, East Anglia, Wessex, Kent and Mercia. The whole idea of statehood was better developed in Wessex and Mercia. Northumbria was a kind of expansive borderland, and East Anglia and Kent were the Anglo-Saxon heartland, where the polities were weaker.
The Viking invasions of the next several hundred years did not come out of the blue, rather it was an increase in scope, and more importantly, the choice to stay over the winter, that changed the playing field in England. The Vikings, who possessed cosmopolitan armies composed of Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and Hiberno-Norse (Irish Vikings), overwhelmed the Kingdoms in the East, leaving Wessex and Mercia as the last men standing. The idea of a pre-Norman English identity was produced by the resistance of Edward, King of Wessex, to the Viking invaders, and his eventual subjugation of them, over multiple generations, and with the help of the Mercians.
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| The famous helmet found at Sutton Hoo |
Then, of course, you had the Norman invasion, which put an end to the high politics of the Anglo-Saxons and their kingdoms, but left a population that largely spoke English, and a political structure that the Normans simply adopted for their own purposes. Unlike the Anglo-Saxons, the Norman conquerors did not migrate in any large numbers, leaving the underlying population unchanged. Eventually, they would expand their domain to include the non-English people of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, forming the "Great Britain" of the present.
The Anglo-Saxon World is broken up between chronological chapters interspersed with shorter segments called "Sources and Issues" which address problems in historiography, recent archaeological finds and their significance to the larger picture, and important texts. The combination of these discrete hot topic portions and the ample illustrations and maps makes The Anglo-Saxon World eminently readable, not a coffee-table book at all, and a must for anyone looking for a recent summary of academic developments in this area, without actually having to read those sources.
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| This is a drawing of what Stephanie Dalley believes the Hanging Garden of Babylon, actually the Garden of Nineveh really looked like. |
Published 8/7/14
The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced
by Stephanie Dalley
Oxford University Press
Published August 1st, 2013
(BUY IT)
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were recognized by Greek and Roman writers as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. When the ancient population centers of Mesopotamia were rediscovered by western Archeologists/Adventurers in the mid to late 19th century, folks immediately started wondering when they would discover traces of this ancient wonder. After ancient Babylon was located, and no garden seemed to be forthcoming, attention turned to the now deciphered languages of this area. More shock when there seemed to be no mention of any such Hanging Garden in Babylon. This absence has been a source of much trouble for the author, a noted professor and expert in reading ancient cuneiform script, since any lecture she gives to a general audience about Babylon ends with people asking her "But what about the Hanging Garden of Babylon?"
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| Map Showing the Ancient Empires of the Near East: Egypt, Hittite, Assyria and Babylon |
Dalley set out to answer the mystery using her unique skill set as a reader of ancient languages and her over-all knowledge of the both the Ancient Near East AND the sources that interpreted this area to the west before the rediscovery of the ruins and language in the late 19th and early 20th century. Dalley uncovers confusion on several levels. First, writers, both ancient and modern, had a tendency to confuse Babylon with Assyria. Babylon was essentially "South Mesopotamia" and Assyria was "North Mesopotamia." This confusion was understandable: Both empires conquered the Middle East, both sacked Jerusalem, Assyria conquered Babylon, etc. And whereas the Babylonians had one capital city (Babylon) the Assyrians had several, eventually settling on Nineveh.
Babylon was an unlikely location for any kind of Hanging Garden, because it is located on a flat plain in the middle of a desert, whereas Nineveh is up in the mountains, and has a river running beneath. Dalley constructs her case carefully, arguing that the Hanging Garden of Babylon was in fact the Hanging Garden of Nineveh. Her argument is a mixture of reinterpretations of old ancient western sources, new interpretations of archeological discoveries in the mid to late 20th century and a deeper understanding of the cultural understandings of the ancient near east.
All these sources both explain why the West believed that the Hanging Garden was in Babylon, and why it was actually in Nineveh. The city of Babylon actually meant of "Gate of Gods" and the Assyrian monarchs (and others) would copy that design for their own cities, making other cities "A" Babylon (think of the way Las Vegas has an Eiffel Tower.) Over time, references to cities being "a" Babylon were confused with references to Babylon itself.
Dalley also corrects many misconceptions about what the Garden of Babylon looked like. The drawing at the beginning of the post is what she came up with (the actual drawing was done by a guy who specializes in such historical reconstructions.) This is in contrast to the many popular representations that show actual hanging plants, a garden planted on the ledges of ziggurats and more fanciful designs with little basis in any kind of reality.
Dalley also contends that there is no reason to think that the Nineveh and its garden abruptly disappeared after the conquest of Assyria by the Persians. Generations of scholars have relied on the apocalyptic language of the available post-destruction texts, but Dalley points out that such language was ritualistic and likely overstated the extent of the destruction. Thus, the idea that people could have actually seen the gardens or their remnants hundreds of years after the fall of Assyria is in no way fanciful or unrealistic.
Published 8/19/14
Indo-European Poetry and Myth
by M.L. West
Oxford University Press, 2007
This title has been on my Amazon wish list for half a decade. It's a cornerstone text in the field of Indo-European comparative linguistics. Considering the role that Indo-European languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Slavic, Armenian, Farsi, Hindu) have played in the development of comparative linguistics as a FIELD, that is almost like saying the field of comparative linguistics comparative linguistics. Most (if not all) of the concepts that describe the relationships of languages and families of languages is imported directly from studies of Indo-European languages.
Indo-European Poetry and Myth appears to follow directly in the path of How to Kill A Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics by Calvert Watkins. I'm guessing that West was a student of Watkins because much of Indo-European Poetry and Myth appears to be an academic strengthening of many of his observations via additional support in different literatures. Notably, West is seemingly familiar with the ins and outs of Ossetian Mythology, the Ossetians being an obscure Indo-European linguistic group from the Caucasian geographic region. West also expands the practice of using personal names from the Hittite world to illustrate that certain words or phrases exist across cultures, on the theory that people name themselves after specific things, and those words get imported into the name.
West also shows a much greater grasp of lesser known mythologies like those of the Slavs, "Old Russian" and the Baltics. The Baltics play an important role in Indo-European linguistics because they are "conservative" languages that have experienced less change over time. West is also not afraid to call something NON Indo European, which is a refreshing tendency in a field given to rampant over-speculation. Most notably, tales involving items like Chariots or Swords are always going to be NOT original Indo European because those things were invented after the initial dispersal of the people from their ancestral homeland, called "Euro-stan" by the author.
Since this is an academic book, you won't be able to really grasp the underlying arguments unless you can literally read the Greek alphabet, but his summaries of what are and aren't Indo European ideas is useful indeed.
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