What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West

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Description

Our attachment to ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Egypt as the ‘birthplace of civilization’, where the foundations of our own societies were laid, is as strong nowadays as it has ever been. When the Iraq Museum in Baghdad used to be looted in 2003, our newspapers proclaimed ‘the death of history’. Yet the ancient Near East also remains a source of mystery: a space of the imagination where we explore the discontents of up to date civilization.

In What Makes Civilization? archaeologist David Wengrow investigates the origins of farming, writing, and cities in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the connections between them. That is the story of how people first created kingdoms and monuments to the gods – and, just as importantly, how they adopted on a regular basis practices that we would now take without any consideration, such as familiar ways of cooking food and keeping the house and body clean.

Why, he asks, have these ancient cultures, where such a lot of features of up to date life originated, come to symbolize the remote and the exotic? What challenge do they pose to our assumptions about power, progress, and civilization in human history? And are the sacrifices we now make in the name of ‘our’ civilization in reality so different from those once made by the peoples of Mesopotamia and Egypt at the altars of the gods?

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