Author: Scott

Chapter 8: Egypt

Durant devotes 80 pages to Egypt in this first volume. One wonders what richness he had to leave unwritten in this brief summary. Yet Durant himself warned us (and perhaps comforted himself) at the outset of this project that writing such a Story is bigger than the work of a lifetime, and that experts in each period and civilization would surely find fault in commission, omission, currency, and detail. As Durant himself would later note, in the first chapter (titled Hesitations) of his brilliant Lessons of History: “It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.”

Egypt as we remember her spans at least a third of those hundred centuries if we, as Durant, decide to count the dividing of Alexander’s empire amongst his generals and the awarding of Egypt to Ptolemy as her end. Doing so certainly opens one to argument, as one must uncomfortably end Egypt with the founding of one of her greatest cities – Alexandria. So it goes. Lines of demarcation, if they are ever obvious, are only so in retrospect.

She was a civilization measured not by kings, as with England, the names of whose rulers school children can recite; or by form of government, as with Rome; but measured by dynasty, a claim probably only approached by China. The dynasties are so numerous (no fewer than 26), that to unburden the memories of historians, they had to group them further into periods. Egypt is the grandest civilization we yet remember.

Geographically, there are two Egypts – the lower, being the Egypt of the Nile delta and the great Pyramids, and the upper being the Egypt of Memphis, Karnak, and Luxor. Politically, they started separate, merged, separated again. Ancient geographers believed that all of Egypt had once been under the sea; the delta having once been a great bay. Alexandria herself, at least the Alexandria founded by the great Macedonian, and the spot where Caesar was presented with the head of his great rival Pompey, has been rediscovered underwater by modern archaeologists. At that moment of Caesar’s dismay, Egypt was more ancient to Caesar than Caesar is to us.

You who after long years shall see these monuments, who shall speak of what I have done, you will say, “We do not know, we do not know how they can have made a whole mountain of gold.” … To gild them I have given gold measured by the bushel, as though it were sacks of grain… for I knew that Karnak is the celestial horizon of the earth.

Queen Hatshepsut, 1501-1479 BC, inscription on obelisks at Karnak

Indeed, it seems that the Egyptians themselves understood their place in history, even as they lived it. Or was it just an illusion, the Pharaoh as living God, transformed by lucky happenstance of time and the forgetting of other cultures, that has made it seem so? The former is certainly the more pleasing story. And since “most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice” (SoC, V1, 12), are we not richer for imagining it that way?

Our knowledge of Egypt is owed almost solely to Napoleon, who led an expedition there in 1798, and, convinced of his own historical greatness and immortality, saw fit to assemble a team of brilliant engineers and scholars to document their findings, producing the first study of Egypt. If any of these scholars can be deemed the most important, surely it is Champollion, who led a 20+ year effort to unlock the mysteries of Egypt’s carvings, culminating in the translation of the Rosetta stone and the deciphering of the hieroglyphs.

We knew in Durant’s time that Egypt had been settled since as far back as 10,000 BC, reflecting again the slow progression from rough to polished stone tools. Evidence of agriculture in the region is known to at least 4000 BC. With the obsession of the historian, Durant again asks where the first Egyptians came from, and guesses that they are a combination of people from adjoining and distant regions. More modern archaeology suggests a dual answer. We continually find remains that push back the dates of first settlement at nearly every geographically significant spot where a civilization might be supported, so on the one hand it seems that the best answer might be: they were always there. On the other hand, we also continue to discover evidence of trade, immigration, migration, and simple wanderlust going back just as far. So I must conclude that there are two factors at play in the establishment of any great civilization: people were always there; they were always mixing with neighbors near and far, in encounters both friendly and hostile; and that some spark caused by the collision of the old with the new serves to ignite the flame of a new civilization.

Whatever the spark, we count the beginning of Egypt as the beginning of the Old Kingdom. And we find already at the Temple of Zoser (~3150 BC) art forms fully developed in architecture and sculpture. History once again rhymes and we almost paradoxically find the highest levels of mastery in the oldest of art. In the pyramids of Khufu, we know already of man’s belief in and quest for immortality. In the sculpture of Khafre (3067-3011 BC), we are reminded that “nature had long since learned how to make men, and art had long since learned how to represent them.” (SoC, Vol 1, p 148) In the many pyramid burials we see all of human nature, along with its evolution, preserved for our eyes and transported nearly intact to the present. Early rulers had been buried with the wives, mistresses, servants, and animals (all alive) needed to care for them and appease the gods for eternity. As wives, mistresses, and servants became weary of the practice, artists substituted life-like representations carved in bas-relief, and priests cast blessings and spells to ensure the adequacy of the substitution. While engineers sought to ensure the tombs remained untouched through clever disguise and traps, man’s greed for objects with both inherent and symbolic value, along with perhaps his jealousy, resentment and need for retributive justice, propelled thieves and vandals, archaeologists and historians to outwit the engineers.

The Old Kingdom ended following the death of Pepi II (who ruled 94 years) when Egypt settled into four centuries of tumultuous local rule by feudal barons. “… this alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history, as if men tired alternatively of immoderate liberty and excessive order.” (SoC, V1, 151) The man who re-unified Egypt, Amenemhet, survived conspiracy and rebellion, and, exhausted by the effort, left this advice for his son:

Hearken to that which I say to thee…
harden thyself against all subordinates-
The people give heed to him who terrorizes them;
Approach them not alone.
Fill not thy heart with a brother,
Know not a friend…
When thou sleepest, guard for thyself thine own heart;
For a man hath no friend in the day of evil.”

Amenemhet I (2212-2192 BC) to his son, Senusret I

We can feel his immense burden across 42 centuries, yet the administrative changes he made endured for a five centuries. His son built a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, repelled more invaders, built temples at Heliopolis and Karnak. His descendent Senusret III annexed Palestine, drove back the Nubians, and erected a marker at the frontier to the south: “not from any desire that you should worship it, but that you should fight for it.” At the end of the period, Hyksos invaders conquered Egypt and ruled for 200 years as the “Shepherd kings.” I wonder what it was like to live during those 200 years, especially in the middle to late part of them. Did it seem that old Egypt was dead, and this was the ‘new normal?’ Or did they have a sense that conditions were temporary, but prolonged? What would we think if marauding invaders from the north had been ruling the US since, say, the end of the Lincoln Presidency? In the end (or the middle), the Hyksos grew fat and lazy and were overthrown from within, ushering in the Empire. History rhymes.

The Empire would give us what Durant describes as the Zenith of Egypt – the rule of Queen Hatshepsut, who pushed aside the designated successor to Thutmose II, assumed the mantle of King, determined her own gender and divinity, and “became one of the most successful and beneficent of Egypt’s many rulers. She maintained internal order without undue tyranny, and external peace without loss.” (SoC, V1). She restored temples damaged by the Hyksos, and on her death she established the Valley of the Kings.

When Hatshepsut died, Syria revolted, and her successor, Thutmose III, only 22 years old, launched a military campaign to put down the rebellion at a place called Har-Megiddo (Armageddon), where 3397 years later the British under Allenby would defeat the Turks (Thutmose was faster). Building on the internal stability secured by Hatshepsut and the momentum of Har-Megiddo, Thutmose III unleashed at least 15 campaigns on the Mediterranean world, and built a naval fleet to enforce his gains and help exact tribute. The riches he generated gave Egypt a new era of wealth, leisure, trade and the arts. Then Thutmose retired and set himself to the relative ease of administering his empire. “His Majesty was one who knew what happened; there was nothing of which he was ignorant; he was the god of knowledge in everything; there was no matter that he did not carry out.” (Vizier to Thuthmose III, quoted in SoC, V1, 155). I am reminded here of the brilliant scene between Alexander and Raj Porus in Pressfield’s The Virtues of War. In it, Alexander and Porus are treating on Porus’ barge in the middle of the Indus river. Alexander seeks passage across India, desiring above all to glimpse the sea at the end of the world. Between Alexander and his desire are a raging river and an Army that vastly outnumbers his own. The older Porus, greatly enjoying his conversation with Alexander and impressed with his youthful genius and energy, offers safe passage to the Macedonians. He asks in return only that Alexander take his most beautiful daughter as wife, and having become Porus’ son-in-law, that Alexander allow Porus to teach him how to be a King. Alexander is outraged! Does Porus not understand the magnitude of his conquest? Porus replies that there is a vast difference between conquering and ruling. In order to be a King, Alexander must learn how to rule. In his youthful arrogance, Alexander is enraged and hastily departs the treaty to prepare for battle. Porus has taken the measure of Alexander and found that he is not ready to rule. Might Thutmose III have been that rare ruler who successfully made the transition from conqueror to King? How amazing it would be to meet this rare man and hear his experience over a feast on the royal barge on the Nile? We can see his wise face still…

Having given us the briefest tour of the timeline of Egypt, Durant now falls back on his familiar themes Agriculture, Industry, Government, Manners, Letters, Literature, Science, Art, Philosophy, and Religion, before returning to the timeline with the Heretic King and the Decline and Fall. I shall try to explain… no there is too much, let me sum up.

Agriculture was well-developed in Egypt. Herodotus describes them in 450 BC: “They gather in the fruits of the earth with less labor than any other people.” (SoC, V1, 156). The coolest fact in this section: the ancient Egyptians trained apes to pick fruit from the trees!

Industry was as fully developed as it would become until the advent of steam power. Rivers were diverted, canals were dug, metals were alloyed, there was a modern postal service, taxes were collected, money was loaned, interest charged, and debts collected. Oddly, in an advanced economy with credit, there was no coinage.

Government was in most ways modern, and in some ways superior to modern practice. The oldest legal document known when Durant wrote was a legal brief regarding a complex inheritance case. All cases were made in writing; perjury was punishable by death. The Pharaoh was the final authority for appeal, and many government bureaucrats were sworn to office by an oath.

Morals. For the common people, monogamy was practiced widely. For the royal family, incest was common, as it would be in Europe until as late as the last century. Egypt in practice was largely matriarchal, with a husband’s property and future earnings being made over to his wife as part of the marriage agreement.

Manners. Durant describes the Egyptians as the Americans of antiquity (remember he wrote in about 1930): “enamored of size, given to gigantic engineering and majestic building, industrious and accumulative, practical even in the midst of many ultramundane superstitions.” (SoC, V1, 167)

Letters. Egypt and Babylon developed, more or less at the same time, the first school systems in history. Heiroglyphs developed slowly into alphabetic characters, first appearing between 2500-1500 BC, but never fully made the transition to completely alphabetic writing.

Literature. In Egypt we find the first known telling of the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor (Robinson Crusoe), the tale of a lone wanderer struggling to return to his homeland, the first known version of Cinderella, a set of fables that suggest Aesop, poetry, odes, love-poems, and historians who accompanied Pharaohs to document their triumphs. And we find the age-old lamentation that there is nothing new left to be said:

I wish that I had words that are unknown, utterances and sayings in a new language… that hasn’t already been said repeatedly– not an utterance that has grown stale, that the ancestors have already said.”

Khekheperre-Sonbu, ca 2150 BC

Science. Nearly all ancient historians credit Egypt with developing geometry; its pyramids, temples, Nile meters and great canals attest to it. They calculated pi as 3.16; within 1% of the true value. Their calculations of time seem to have started with the Nile rather than the sky, though they counted a year as 365 days, and they knew it was 365.25, over their millennia, they never bothered to correct the accumulated error. Medicine was well-developed and the importance of public sanitation was well-known. The people fasted regularly and avoided excessive consumption of food as contrary to good health.

Art. Durant calls the Egyptians the greatest builders in history, and credits them with giving the Greeks all they knew of architecture and statuary. Ceramics, especially tile, and painting were everywhere, including in the homes of common citizens. Textiles and jewelry were as fine as any other era in history.

Philosophy. Ptah-Hotep, in providing advice to his son, passes on wisdom found in many self-help books of today. Seek to learn from everyone, beware strange women, be kind, stick to the truth, value silence more than words… He seems a curious combination of the Stoic wisdom of Aurelius, with the sense of historic grandeur of the Pharaohs. Later, we find lamentations of a society gone to decadence and decay and wishing for a philosopher-king to redeem her. And from 2200 BC, we hear the admonition that life a short and that every day should be seized, for once it passes, it is gone forever.

Religion. Egypt was, but for one brief interlude, polytheistic throughout its history. Across her many centuries, we find local deities, eventually merging to become national ones. We find gods who act as men and men (and women) who become gods. We hear the tale of the Garden of Eden. We see man as fallen from perfection, and alternately as evolved from brute. We meet father sky (Ra) and mother earth (Isis), and encounter the first holy trinity, Ra, Amon, and Ptah. We see the concept of resurrection and meet the boatman who carries one across the river to the afterlife. We see the emergence of the priestly class, their gradual ascent to power, and their eventual corruption and control over nearly all aspects of life. The priests oversaw the temples and the donations to those temples were exempt from taxes. Frequently the largess went directly into the coffers of the priests, as did the fair women meant to be the courtesans of the gods go to the beds of the priests.

Heretic King. It was this corruption of the priests that, at least partially, drove Ikhnaton (Akhenaten) to announce that there was in fact only one god – Aton – and to take the name Ikhnaton, “Aton is pleased.” By all accounts Ikhnaton would have a been seen as a good and likable ruler, even by today’s standards. Faithfully devoted to his wife, against blood-sacrifices, and against the abuses of the priests. A young man who saw the world in black and white, and who grew up in the knowledge that he was a living god, he lacked the patience and subtlety to let change happen gradually. Instead he moved the capital from Thebes to the new city of Akhetaton, caused the word -Amon to be cut from every temple in the land, declared all other religions illegal, and closed the old temples. In a stroke, he angered and dispossessed the richest, most powerful class in Egypt. While they schemed behind his back, he remained faithfully devoted to his wife Nefertete, who bore him seven daughters and no sons. Breaking from tradition, Ikhnaton didn’t seek to produce a male heir through a concubine. Soon turmoil within the empire was sensed without, and the Hittites moved on Syria. Receiving their pleas for help, Ikhnaton hesitated, not wanting to be responsible for unnecessary bloodshed. When all of the dependencies of empire saw this, they ceased paying tribute to Egypt and started forming alliances closer to home. The treasury, dependent on tribute and foreign mines, quickly emptied. The man who envisioned himself as saving the empire from the corruption of its priestly class, “…found himself penniless and friendless in a world that had seemed all his own. Every colony was in revolt, and every power in Egypt was arrayed against him… He was hardly thirty when… he died, broken with the realization of his failure as a ruler, and the unworthiness of his race.” (SoC, V1, 212).

His successor, Tutenkhamon, did little in his reign, except to undo all of Ikhnaton’s changes (including removing all the ‘Aton’s and replacing them again with ‘Amon’s) and setting the stage for his general, Harmhab, to restore its external colonies. If one raids a tomb too soon after the death of its occupant, one is a thief or tomb-raider. If one waits enough centuries to do it, one becomes an archaeologist or historian. Tutenkhamon’s engineers and builders were good enough to allow the transition, and his tomb became perhaps the most famous archaeological discovery of all time.

Ramses II (probably the Pharaoh of the old testiment) was the last great ruler in Egypt. After him, Ramses III sought to appease the priests, giving more and more to the gods at the expense of less and less for the people, until finally, the kings were again less powerful than the priests. Assyria, Babylon, and Persia grew in power. The Phoenicians, Dorians, and Achaeans took control of the Mediterranean. Over the centuries Egypt was assaulted by Libya from the west, Ethiopia from the south, Assyria from the north, and Persia from the east, until finally in 332 BC Alexander made Egypt a province of Macedon.

Egypt continued to echo through the centuries, but her civilization (“social order promoting cultural creation”) had long since passed. She lives now in our collective memory as “the spectacle of the greatest civilization that has yet appeared on the earth.” (Faure)

“We shall do well to equal it.” (SoC, V1, 217)

What a queen, and what kings! Perhaps this first great civilization was the finest of all, and we have but begun to uncover its glory.

SoC, Vol 1, p 143

Chapter 4 (cont):
– Religion: Sources, Objects, Methods, Moral Function

Chapter 5: The Mental Elements of Civilization
– Letters
– Science
– Art

My closing thoughts on Will Durant’s introduction the The Story of Civilization

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Primitive people did not always have religion; even modern-day primitives are sometimes puzzled by the questions posed by researchers. Some modern primitives have no concept of deities at all, others recognized only malevolent gods, and didn’t even bother to try to appease them, for what good could it do? Some Native Americans believed in the concept of gods, but didn’t worship them, an approach also taken by Epicurus. The Abipone took the practical approach – contemplating only the practical tasks of life. As varied and universal across time and place the atheist views are, Durant classifies them as exceptions. The rule is that cultures for various reasons, and to various purposes (reasons and purposes being useful to distinguish) have almost always developed religion.

According to Lucretius, fear is the mother of the gods. According to Durant, fear of death most of all gives birth to religion, as do “wonder at the cause of chance events,… hope for divine aid… , and gratitude for good fortune.” The belief in a soul distinct from the body is inextricably bound with the fear or death. The extension of the concept of soul to all things leads to the first common form of religion – animism – the artifacts, and sometimes the facts, of which survive in modernity around the world, from the fairies of Ireland to the halos of Christian art.

Of the multitude of objects with souls available to worship, the first two were likely the moon and the sun. For the moon governed the cycles of fertility, both of our mothers and of the land, and formed the basis for our reckoning of time (again, into the modern day). We don’t know when sun-worship began, but it may have been tied again to the calendar and to the rise of agriculture. Every major religion had a sun god, whether the Mongol Tegri, Chinese Ti, Vedic India Dyaus pitar, Greek Zeus, or Persian Ahura. Today, we still beseech “heaven help us” and sports stars raise a finger to the sky for good luck and thanks. Likewise, with sky as the father, earth is the mother, and the creation story is almost universally the mating of earth to sky. Most early deities, being gods of earthly things, were female. The emergence of more male gods may have paralleled the emergence of patriarchal society.

There is hardly any superstition so old but it can be found flourishing somewhere today. Civilization is the precarious labor and luxury of a minority; the basic masses of mankind hardly change from millennium to millennium.

SoC, p. 59.

Relatively early in written history, we see religion treating poorly those with scientific theories about the world around us, as Anaxagoras was exiled from Greece in the 5th century BC for hypothesizing the the sun wasn’t a god, but just a big ball of fire. And in the time when Durant was writing this volume (1927-1932), most of Japan (the Land of the Rising Sun) believed that the Emperor was the living incarnation of the Sun God. Perhaps it is the arrogance of the present (an End of History fallacy writ large) that causes us to believe ourselves the exception to the cycle of history.

From the sky to the earth to the animals, the souls of the gods themselves seem to have been seen as the departed souls of dead men. The relationship is preserved even today in our language. Spirit in English means both soul and ghost. Cultures worldwide have prayed to their ancestors in much the same way that modern Christians invoke the assistance of the saints. Ancestor worship continues in modern times. Gods who began as indifferent evolved to fearful, and eventually become loving fathers and ancestors. “The slow progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.” As written history begins, exceptional individuals were deified, and their stories preserved.

The first method of religion was magic. The casting of spells and the making of sacrifices encouraged the fertility of woman and the earth herself. Festivals of promiscuity compensated for the infertility of (male) individuals. The earth was fertilized with the blood of beasts and almost every culture at one time appeased their gods through human sacrifice. Frequently the sacrifice (man as god) was consumed in order to confer its power to rest of the group. Magic made the priest when the knowledge needed to confer the rites grew large enough as to demand specialization. The priest has alternated with the warrior in ruling society, except when priest and warrior merged, and in so doing, transitioned from the creation to the use of religion as a means to power.

Religion uses tabu and myth to support morality. Tabu, the Polynesian word, places acts and objects off limits. Chief among these is woman. Myth seeks to reinforce behaviors that help society. The vast knowledge, and sometimes nearly as comprehensive ignorance, including knowledge of food and hygiene, of the ancients was codified in the tabus and myths of its religions. “The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather than create new ones.” Although for the practitioner, religion frequently serves as the basis of moral conduct, religion itself evolves not as the foundation of morality, but as an aid to it, by sanctioning the conduct demanded by environment, economic, and social circumstance.

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. … Institutions which were at first in the hands of clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and — after some hesitation — the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anti-clerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos, and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth.** In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.

SoC, p. 71
** We are here.

Durant has one section left in his ‘brief’ introduction. The tracing of the Mental elements of civilization: letters, science, and art that in turn support, enhance, and finally serve to help disassemble civilization, until after a period of darkness, a new one emerges.

Language likely emerged from gestures and sounds – probably concrete nouns and probably through imitation. The Tecuna tribe in ancient Brazil had the perfect verb for to sneeze – haitschu. In English we still retain roar, rush, murmur, hiss, hum, cackle, and many others. The killer app of early language was when we transitioned from the specific to the general, from that tree to all things that are like that tree. The ability to understand and communicate abstract concepts is critical to planning, and critical to writing itself. Without abstraction, how can we understand that marks on a clay pot indicate information about something other than the marks themselves?

The first writing is of course uncertain. Some believe that it was trade marks inscribed in clay vessels. Current thought (almost 100 years after Durant wrote) is that it was accounting ledgers in support of trade; records of transactions conducted and payment owed. It may be that writing was necessitated to prove debts incurred and paid. And immediately the intellectual class bemoaned its impact on the minds of youth. King Thamos, of Eqyptian legend, lamented: “Children and young people who had hitherto been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories.” The outsourcing of memory to writing may have lessened the mental dexterity of the individual, but at the level of civilization it enabled the accumulation of knowledge beyond what could be held in memory. At first, letters remained closely guarded by the priestly class. But eventually, and especially with the advent of movable type, it allowed knowledge to flow to any mind willing to grapple with it, challenge it, and improve it. Writing allowed us to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Durant traces the beginnings of science to counting, though one could certainly argue that the practical knowledge of edibles and poisons, tool-making and trade, hunting and coordination, migration and time-keeping came first. While counting was necessary for the beginning of measurement, our language (calculus – little stone) reveals the incredibly short distance between its beginnings and now. The root words for measure and month are almost certainly the same as for moon, that first God to regulate our understanding of time. Ancient man had no physics, but understood perfectly well (better than we moderns) how to construct a bow and aim an arrow. Ancient doctors knew little or no chemistry, but know which plants were beneficial and which poisonous. Ancient Peruvians had a 90% success rate trephining the skull to relieve pressure from injury; in Paris in 1786 the procedure was invariably fatal.

If modern primitive societies are representative of the ancient, Art seems to have originated in the decoration of the body through pigments, dyes, tattooing, and other forms of modification. Painting may then have moved to pottery, which seems to have rapidly progressed from practical to artistic itself, under the guidance of the first potters, who were likely women. Clothing may have been initially more ornamental than practical. Sculpture likely arose also from the potter’s art, music as an extension of dance, and drama and the opera as an extension of music. Art is the expression of beauty, and the only standard of beauty is the eye of the beholder. Those eyes are invariably influenced by their environment, economy, and social norms. And so it goes.

As we reach the end of Durant’ introduction to civilization, he concludes that pre-civilized man had already created every element of civilization but writing and the state (and it seems to me that Durant earlier included writing in the pre-history, though that may just be a quibble about semantics). Our civilization is built on the shoulders of “savages,” without whose “hundred thousand years of experiment and groping, civilization could not have been. We owe almost everything to them – as a fortunate, and possibly degenerate, youth inherits the means to culture, security, and ease through the long toil of an unlettered ancestry.”

In reading Durant’s beautiful prose and the patterns and connections he makes, I am struck most by one thought running through the entire narrative as an invisible thread holding it all together. Paradoxically, that invisible thread is this: there is no absolute good or bad, there is only that which is useful and practical for a culture in their time and environment. For a philosophy expert writing history to arrive in a position of moral relativism is only mildly interesting, since plenty of philosophers espouse relativism (though few want to live it, and fewer still are historians). Durant’s great gift was in answering relative to what: relative to what is needed. This seems to echo an answer Durant gave during an interview* near the end of his life: when discussing natural selection, he observed that Darwin was right, it is the survival of the fittest. The problem is that we can’t know ahead of time the definition of fittest. The fittest are those that survive. We may want to consider this before we judge those who went before us and upon whose shoulders we firmly, and often ungratefully, stand.

Note:
* The interview is published as part of the audiobook version of The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. Both Will and Ariel recorded many interviews, most of them together. It is a rare treat to listen to their answers, and a rare delight to hear them interact.

Pages i – x, 1-25
Preface
The Establishment of Civilization
Chapter 1: The Conditions of Civilization
Chapter 2: The Economic Elements of Civilization

How does one attack a work of this magnitude? I can imagine Will asking himself as he sat down to start volume 1 in 1927.

Does one start with the earliest known history? If so, when was that? It seems even today to be a fast-moving target, with new archaeological discoveries re-writing our pre-writing history almost weekly.

Does one start with an event, such as the first agriculture or the domestication of livestock? Again, it seems that these are moving targets.

Will (Ariel not yet being a co-author) chose to start by providing a brief (90 or so pages) of introduction defining what is meant by civilization. What are its necessary elements? How do we think those emerged? How did the establishment of each element influence the others? What did it mean for how our ancestors lived and related to each other and their environment.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol 1, pg. 1.

In the first seven words of his work, Durant provides definition and purpose. In his view, humanity builds social order for the purpose of creating cultures. He elaborates: civilization “begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.” An aspirational definition, perhaps shaped by his deep study of philosophy.

Chapter 1: The Conditions of Civilization

Durant briefly describes the external factors that ‘condition’ civilization: geological conditions and geographical conditions. The eras between ice ages encourage civilization; ice ages shrink it. Geological events disrupt civilization, or perhaps hasten its disruption, shaking off entire cities and empires with earthquakes and natural disasters. Geography shapes civilization by providing or denying natural resources; by providing or denying trade routes and commerce; by providing or denying safety from disease and predation. And geology interacts with geography, turning once fertile areas arid, creating harbors and passes for commerce. Durant, perhaps ahead of his time, takes the time to explicitly discount race as a condition of civilization, noting that advanced civilizations have arisen at every time, in every climate, and have been built by every race. He goes further to posit that race is more likely to emerge from the conditions of environment and civilization over time than to influence its development in any way.

In addition to external factors, there are other prerequisite conditions for the emergence of a civilization. Durant counts among these political order, common language, unifying moral code, unity of basic beliefs (perhaps – he is less sure on this one), and education of some type to transmit culture to the next generation. If any of these conditions are missing or becomes so, then civilization is in danger.

Upon this foundation then are built the four elements necessary to constitute a civilization: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. There is some overlap between Durant’s prerequisites for and elements of civilization, which I haven’t yet sorted out. It will be interesting to see if and how Durant proceeds to sort through these.

Chapter 2: The Economic Elements of Civilization

If man began with speech, and civilization with agriculture, industry began with fire.

Will Durant, SoC, pg 6

In this short chapter, Durant takes us on a journey from hunting and gathering to herding, domestication, agriculture, cooking, industry and specialization, to trade and the beginnings of economy. Along the way, we see a parallel journey from communism (little ‘c’ – living in groups that act as communes sharing all resources, owning no land and few personal possessions, greeting travelers with open hospitality) to agriculture as the cause of property rights and slavery and compelled labor (‘jobs’) to specialization of skills and uneven distribution of resources leading to the developments of markets, barter systems, transport of goods and eventually coinage and finally to the destination of politics as an emergent system to enforce property and trade rights. It is a journey alternately necessary, inspiring, and tragic.

Two powerful thoughts may serve well to encapsulate these journeys:

The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears.

SoC pg. 6

Durant takes care to differentiate between the term ‘savage,’ frequently used within his lifetime, and ‘primitive,’ denoting our ancestors who had not yet invented writing. And he acknowledges that while modern society may exceed our primitive ancestors in accumulated specialization, at the individual level, the primitives possessed greater ingenuity and were much more capable of survival and thriving in concert with the environment than any ‘civilized’ person today is likely to be.

Here, too, the main problems were solved before written history began.

SoC, pg 15

Written about the problem of building trade routes, a recurring theme of the first section of the book so far, and one that captures too the ingenuity of our species. The main problems, having all been solved before written history, suggest that for all of our pride in the advancements of modern society, they are but refinements of knowledge older than the millennia. We fund ourselves not smarter or more creative than the ancients, merely the beneficiaries of thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, much of which we might struggle to recreate (as has happened in the not-too-distant past) should the need arise. A humbling idea indeed.

Where to begin? That is always the first question, and the one that became the seed of Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume history entitled The Story of Civilization.

Will Durant, even before writing his exceptional The Story of Philosophy, had planned to write a history of the 19th century. Soon, he realized that in order to understand the 19th, he needed to build on the foundation of the 18th. In order to understand the 18th, the 17th. And it was turtles all the way down. Soon he had committed to attempting a history of civilization, and attempt that Durant himself calls “a venture which has no rational excuse, [that] is at best a brave stupidity.”

Embarking on what would become a life-long project, starting in 1927 and finishing 11 volumes later in 1975, Will (assisted by his wife Ariel for the last five volumes) sought to break through the “usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections” and instead to paint a view of the whole interwoven fabric of human culture. He realized at the outset that this would open him to criticisms from the experts and expressed this in his usual rich language – “any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for a myriad merry darts of specialist critique.” Of course, he knew that his was not an original thought:

Consider how thou mayest be opposed by an expert in council. It is foolish to speak on every kind of work.

Ptah Hotep, ca. 5000 years ago

I’m not sure how I first stumbled across Will and Ariel’s work. A few years ago, I read their The Lessons of History, in which they attempt to distill the story of our civilization into its key themes. I found the approach roughly similar to what Yuval Noah Harari attempted with some popular success in Sapiens, but found the scope and the insight of Lessons to be greater and more timeless that Harari’s popular version.

Reading Lessons of course made me aware of Story. Being a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work has made me shift my learning bias from current to Lindy. And viewing current events has made me painfully aware of modern society’s ignorance of our history, and the vast gaps in my own knowledge of history. I had little interest in history during most of my formal education, and a growing interest as I have gained experience in life and in the world.

As I approached my 50th birthday, I decided that I should fill in some of my historical gaps, and seek to understand more fully how the world in which we live became the world in which we live. How to do this? Of course there are as many approaches as there are opinions. Will Durant himself gave his best answer in an essay in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, in the form of a reading list designed to provide a classical education in an hour of daily reading across four years. Harvard has their 5-foot shelf of knowledge. The Long Now Foundation has curated lists of books to reboot civilization. Other options abound.

So today, I embark on a journey through the history of our civilization, a history written over half a century and completed nearly that long ago. There will be times when our modern sensitivities seek to overturn or reject the Durants’ view of history. There will be many instances where more is known than was available to the authors; some of which matters, and much of which may not; some of which serves to enhance, some to revise, still other discoveries that upend what was previously understood. There is danger in discarding too much in favor of our modern preferences, for the history of our civilization is vast, the experience of our ancestors deeper than our own, and the luxuries of our modern sensibilities recent, unusual, and quite likely fleeting. Let us not judge to hastily in our adolescence the wisdom of our forebears.

Today I start at the beginning…

There’s a great scene in the Big Bang Theory (S04E03) in which Sheldon (theoretical physics) and Amy (neuroscience) are arguing about the primacy of their respective fields. Sheldon’s case was that because physics governs the way the universe works, it subsumes all other fields. Amy’s case was that because the theories of physics were conceived by human minds, neuroscience subsumes all of physics.

Continue reading “Big Bang Theory, BH Liddell Hart, Ergodicity, STEM and Humanities”

Nova Spivak, founder of the Arch Mission Foundation is working on ways to preserve large volumes of information about our society in extremely durable formats. Potential uses – passing on our history to future/alien civilizations or planting guides for rebooting our civilization around the solar system in case of a major apocalyptic event. Spivak is working with technology that allows the encoding of up 300+ terabytes of data on quartz discs that can last for millions or even billions of years.  Why it may be important – Continue reading “Durable Information for Durable Civilization”