Martin Green - A Landscape Revealed: 10,000 Years on a Chalkland Farm

While seemingly a rather specialised topic, Martin Green's history of the neolithic, bronze and iron ages as understood through studies of the pre-history of his farm in Cranborne Chase contains a wealth of information. The Chase, an area roughly north-east of Blanford Forum in Dorset contains hundreds of locations of archaeological interest. Many of these are part of what should be understood as a cultural landscape, with sites frequently placed in relation to others.

Green is a farmer, but he has an immense skill and knowledge as an archaeologist and decades of work has led him to make some extremely significant finds. While some of the locations mentioned in this book such as the two iron age forts at Hod Hill and Hambledon Hill are well know (and well worth visiting) many others are either less well visited, or simply exist as crop marks or excavations.

I was inspired enough by Green's account of Knowlton Henge to visit. As the author explains this ruined 12th century Norman church was built in the midst of a large Neolithic henge. It does not take much expertise to understand the way the Christian church was trying to usurp "pagan" traditions here.

The book is full of fascinating details; from the explanation of archaeological method (including a chapter by Dr. Michael Allen on the links between snails and archaeological investigations) to the way modern science allows us to follow the travels of individuals thousands of years ago through the study of their bones. It is also extremely well illustrated.

This isn't a book for the casual reader, but for someone exploring the pre-history of Dorset its invaluable.

David Lewis-Williams - The Mind in the Cave

This fascinating book is an attempt to answer a surprisingly complex question. Why did our Paleolithic ancestors make cave art? The beautiful images reproduced here frequently show a startling attention to detail, use of colour, the natural shape of the rocks and were often made in near complete darkness. But why was this done? David Lewis-Williams argues that this was not art in the sense that we understand it. Nor was it necessarily representational, but the art filled a social function for the communities that made the images.

Lewis-Williams begins with a fascinating history of the study of these images. I was surprised to find how important Marxism had been to this study, and the author's analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, including that of famous thinkers like Claude Levi-Strauss is a useful introduction to their ideas.

Lewis-Williams argues that while art varies in terms of meaning and use through history, and indeed how we perceive things such as the colour spectrum is socially determined, there is one universal for anatomically modern humans, which is that we all (and we all have) experience a the same "full spectrum of consciousness". Describing the various stages that people go through in altered consciousness states, Lewis-Williams points out that "all people experience the states characteristic of the autistic trajectory. And they experience them in terms of their own culture and value system; this is what has been called the 'domestication of trance'."

Lewis-Williams argues that this means that we can trace some universals to the images on cave-walls, and understand them in terms of how various cultures have related to states of altered consciousness. Discussing the San people who made rock painting into the modern time, as part of  shamanistic religion, he points out that

Much of the painted and engraved imagery, even that which appears relastic' is shot through with these metaphors and shows signs of having been 'processed' by the human mind as it shifted back and forth along the spectrum of consciousness. The same metaphors necessarily structured the explanations of images that San people provided. The San explained the images in their own terms, not the languages of anthropologists.

So the images made by the San people represented things that meant some thing to them collectively, which is not necessarily the same thing that we might "see" when we look at them. But because altered states, or trances, produced visions that the mind interprets in terms of how the world is understood, the images painted would be of things (or shapes) that originated in their world view.

Art, cosmos and spiritual experience coalesced. The San fused the 'abstract' experiences of altered states with the materiality of the world in which they lived.

So the paintings made in the "social space" of the caves were the result of interactions between the social ideas of the group and their world-view. Lewis-Williams argues that this meant that the images were more than images, they were insights into a spirit world, or actual embodiments of that world over-lapping with the contemporary world. He writes that a "set of animals already carried... symbolic meaning for west European anatomically modern communities. It now became important for those people to fix their images of another world, belief in which was one of the key traits that distinguished them from the Neanderthals."

Lewis-Williams argues that it was the process of doing this, creating the art, that paved the way for new social relations that "we consider fully modern". I remained unconvinced by this conclusion, as I think the "images" are more likely to represent the cultural output of a community and thus reflect social relations rather than create them. But as Lewis-Williams correctly points out, we cannot every know a correct answer when trying to understand what the images mean. His book however is a fascinating insight into the reasons that humans have created cave-art and painting through history and by hunter-gatherer communities in modern times. It is well worth a read.

Related Reviews

Mithen - After the Ice: A Global Human History
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Mary Beard - SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard's latest book is a excellent study of the Ancient Roman world. It is one that has much to offer everyone who reads it, from those who simply like history to those with an extensive knowledge of the texts that Beard discusses and the period covered. From discussing Roman sexuality to poetry; from political processes in the Roman world, to the rise of the emperors, Beard's book is informative, accessible and laced with the author's characteristic humour. Those on the left of the political spectrum will appreciate Beard's approach that argues that

for the most part the great divide in the Roman world was between the haves and the have-notes; between the tiny minority of people with substantial surplus wealth and a lifestyle somewhere on the scale between the very comfortable and extravagantly luxurious, and the vast majority of even the non-slave population, who at best had a modest amount of spare cash (for more food, for an extra room, for cheap jewellery, for simple tombstones), and at worst were destitute, jobless and homeless.

Referring to recent political movements Beard draws analogies with contemporary politics, writing that she will focus on the lives of the "99%" in particular chapters. This is a refreshing approach. All to often you can read history about Rome and conclude that this was a period when everyone but the slaves was wealthy and living a life of leisure. In actual fact, as Beard argues, the vast majority of the Roman population had to sell their labour power to survive, and they did so until they died, or became unable to work. Despite the free grain handed out for Roman citizens, there was no welfare state or pensions system. The majority worked until the end.

Children frequently failed to make it even to the age of ten, with over half dying before that birthday, though once birth and childhood had been successfully navigated, a Roman might have an age-span comparable to our's today. Beard is excellent in drawing out what this meant, for Rome, and for the women of Rome:

Simply to maintain the existing population, each woman on average would have needed to bear five or six children. In practice, that rises to something closer to nine when other factors, such as sterility and widowhood, are taken into account. It was hardly a recipe for widespread women's liberation.

The Rome in these pages is not the shiny marbled opulent capital of a relatively benign imperial power that we often get from Hollywood or novels from the period. It's a dirty, smelly, world, dominated by state violence and political confrontation. A world of hunger and poverty for many, class struggle and political tension. The Roman leadership understood this well, as illustrated by one example. During the reign of the Emperor Nero, a suggestion that all slaves should wear a uniform was rejected on the basis it would make clear precisely how many slaves there were. A piece of information that would have given everyone pause for thought.

Beard argues that there is an inherent difficulty with writing Roman history:

there is no single narrative that links, in any useful or revealing way, the story of Roman Britain with the story of Roman Africa. There are numerous microstories and different histories of different regions...But it is also because, after the establishment of one-man rule at the end of the first century BCE, for more than two hundred years there is no significant history of change at Rome.

Later she describes the Imperial period as one of a "remarkable stable structure of rule and... a remarkable stable set of problems and tensions across the whole period."

But if I had one issue that I found problematic with Mary Beard's book, it was her explanation of what the Roman Empire actually was. Undoubtedly there was stability in the Imperial period, but there must have been growing structural problems which meant that the Empire would eventually break down, or was ripe for collapse when a strong enough external force or forces arrived on the scene.

While Beard discuses in great detail what it meant to be Roman, for those who were in the Roman sphere of influence, what is lacking is clear explanation of the dynamics of Roman society. In fact, what was Roman society? What drove it forward? Was it the booty accrued from warfare? I find this an inadequate explanation. Was it the role of slavery? If so, then Beard's book doesn't really get to grips with this at all. Despite the excellent treatment of early Rome, there's nothing here that really clarifies the role of the slaves, or when Rome became a slave society. Was this a society that depended on the labour of the 99 percent? Or was it one that needed the slaves on the plantations and their mines? Was it both?

So while I enjoyed SPQR immensely and have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it to readers, there were important questions for me that weren't adequately answered.

Related Reviews

Beard - The Roman Triumph
Beard - Pompeii
Beard & Crawford - Rome in the Late Republic
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Peter Bellwood - First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies

The historical development of agriculture fundamentally transformed human societies. The surplus generated by farming could, for the first time in human history, allow groups within society to live from the labour of others. Thus, where, when and why agriculture developed and was taken up is of enormous interest to those trying to understand subsequent history.

Peter Bellwood's book on the Origin of Agricultural Societies is thus very important. He begins by exploring why certain hunter-gatherer communities became agricultural, and why many didn't. A key question is whether once agriculture had developed at various "points of origin" around the globe, it spread wave like, carried by the outward movement and spread of agriculturalists, or whether it was adopted by existing hunter-gatherer communities who then became sedentary.

Many societies didn't take up agriculture, and the encounters between the two types of early communities may often have been mutually beneficial. Though, as Bellwood explains, at a certain point the situation would become untenable. "Such interactive networks between farmers and hunter-gatherers, in situation of non-severe circumscription, are presumably stable until the farmers increase their numbers... and thus require more land. Then, the hunter-gatherers either join the farmers as an underclass of field workers, or, if they are lucky, they can adopt agriculture."

Bellwood points out that those missing the agricultural "train" can have a bleak future. But, as the author explains, "the ethnographic record with respect to ... hunter-gatherer societies offers few hints of eager and successful agricultural adoption. This seems to be the case regardless of whether societies were immediate or delayed return, encapsulated or unenclosed, ranked or egalitarian, sedentary or mobile, 'collectors' or 'foragers'."

Much of the earlier chapters of this book discuss exactly how and why agriculture was invented and developed. Bellwood gives an excellent over-view of the different transformations across the whole world. Looking at the different plants and animals that are domesticated around the world, and examining, in turn, the archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence builds up a picture of how agriculture was invented and spread.

Some of this research really fascinating. The author cites one study that demonstrates that "domestication [of grain] could be achieved within 20-30 years if the crop is harvested near-ripe by sickle-reaping or uprooting, and if it is sown on virgin land every year [with seed] taken from last year's new plots".

This implies that agriculture could have developed very quickly, though other studies noted point out that "wild and domesticated cereals occurred together for over a millennium before the latter became fully dominant". Hindsight plays an important role, but we can see that agriculture wouldn't have necessarily taken hundreds of years. Incidentally, the importance of sickle-reaping or uprooting is that harvesting plants like this, self-selects for the ones least likely to "burst" and deposit their seeds on the ground. It is a wonderful example of how the invention of a labour saving tool can have unexpected effects.

While this is fascinating, and Bellwood explains some difficult concepts well, much of the book is inaccessible to the non-specialist reader. Like David W. Anthony's book The Horse, The Wheel and Language, (an author cited often in Bellwood's work), the concepts of language evolution and spread are particularly difficult. In part this is because of the encyclopedic nature of the work, covering every part of the globe for thousands of years of history. But nonetheless the target audience is clearly students and academics rather than the popular reader. While even the most complex chapters have nuggets of information that will fascinate the persevering reader, this is probably a book that most readers will struggle with, which is a shame as the subject matter is historically of the greatest importance.

Related Reviews

Anthony - The Horse, The Wheel and Language
Flannery & Marcus - The Creation of Inequality
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Reynolds - Ancient Farming

David W. Anthony - The Horse, The Wheel and Language

David W. Anthony has produced an important, stimulating and very detailed book. It is likely, for those interested in the origins of language and the archaeology of early communities in eastern Europe, to be a standard work for many years to come.

Anthony begins by looking at where language comes from, and how languages change. By knowing a language at a particularly point in history, we can trace it backwards, recreating its predecessors, and in turn, using this discovered language to find further insights to its ancient speakers.

Some linguists remain skeptical, arguing that there are too many generalisations and too many unanswered questions. But Anthony makes a very strong case that we can, and have, reconstructed key parts of the Proto Indo European (PIE) language that is the far predecessor of most of the key European and Asian languages that exist today. "If we cannot regard reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as literally 'real', it is at least a close approximation of a prehistoric reality."

Since PIE was never written down, we can never know for sure. But one test is that work on PIE has lead to the reconstruction of further words in languages that developed from it. These have since been confirmed by archaeological evidence.

The discussion on language is merely the introduction to a much larger work. Having constructed PIE, the author then discusses the people who spoke it. How and where they lived. We can tell from the language something about them, they had cattle, sheep, pigs and most importantly horses. They lived in an area were the wildlife included otters, beaver, wolf and bees.

The biggest clue appears to be the words in PIE for wheeled vehicles and their component parts. Archaeology gives us accurate dates for the development of the wheel which mean that "late Proto-Indo-European was spoken after about 4000-3500 BCE", so PIE spread outwards into Europe into a landscape densely populated by people speaking "hundreds" of different languages, most of them farming.

Once Anthony has narrowed down the geographic area of the PIE speakers (which is roughly that of the Eurasian Steppes, north of the Black Sea) much of the remainder of the book is a detailed explanation of what we know about the various communities. These is heavily archaeological and in places becomes reduced to lists of the contents of various burial sites in such detail that the wider historical story is obscured somewhat. The non-specialist such as myself may find this confusing, but we can be distracted by the many maps, photographs and line drawings of graves and grave-goods.

Having said that, the book is worth sticking with. Some of the sections are real gems. I was particularly taken by the chapter that details the archaeology of ancient horses. The author has spent years studying the effects of bits upon horse teeth. With this knowledge he can try to say from animals remains which communities had domesticated the horse for riding (or use in chariots) and which hunted the animal for food. I was also taken by the description of the nomadic communities of wagon based pastrolists, whose economies involved groups of people who farmed and mined metal ores, as well as those moving about the steppes herding animals.

In places this book isn't an easy read. There is overwhelming detail in places, and this sometimes obscures the bigger picture. It will be an excellent resource for students of archaeology, and not just those interested in Eastern Europe. For the layman, there are plenty of fascinating nuggets and a general approach to history, language and archaeology that is well worth reading.

Steven Mithen - Thirst: Water & Power in the Ancient World

Steven Mithen is one of today's foremost popularisers of ancient history. Thirst is first and foremost a book about how ancient societies used and controlled water, but it clearly is influenced by wider contemporary questions of water and state power. As Mithen points out, two billion people today have inadequate sanitation, and by 2025 over half the world's nations are expected to face shortages of fresh water. So how can ancient history illuminate contemporary problems?

Firstly there is the obvious point, that access to water can be controlled. Those who control water can thus make others pay tribute in various ways. Indeed some historical studies have linked water very closely to state power. Karl Wittfogel's 1957 book Oriental Despotism argued that irrigation work could only have been done by large amounts of labour, and thus it must have needed a large centralised bureaucratic network.

For some societies this was undoubtably true. Mithen's book looks at the enormous aqueducts and water courses of the Roman Empire, the gigantic water courses and lakes of Angkor and South American civilisations such as the Maya and Inca to see how ancient states often did use water in this way. Water could be a tool to help control populations, but it also had a myriad of symbolic, religious or social uses too.

But Mithen argues very strongly that the existence of a political and bureucratic hierarchy is not a prerequisite for irrigation works. In fact, some of the most fascinating parts of this book, are ones that deal with the extensive water works and irrigation schemes of early farming communities. Frequently these are in places which are extremely arid today. Take for instance the Ubaid and early Uruk "pre-state" communities in the area now known as Iraq. These communities improved on natural features of existing water courses to irrigate their fields.

"Because of the natural braiding of the rivers, short off-shoot canals running for a few kilometres could be dug with minimal alteration of the water regime. The rivers were naturally elevated above the surrounding plain by the levees and hence by simply cutting an outlet through those banks, a sluice gate, water would flow into a channel by gravity. The water could then flow into a network of small channels surrounding the crops... with irrigation, the rich alluvial soils became highly productive and with greater reliability than those from the rain fed farming regions of Northern Mesopotamia."

While such works may not have needed centralised power, they would have required co-operation on a large scale, and archaeologists also suggest that in this case, according to translations of cuneiform texts, individuals that operated as "canal inspectors". Mithen doesn't point this out, but it is not difficult to imagine that such individuals could have ended up becoming the seeds of hieracrchical groups in society as their position in relation to a crucial resource gave them additional power within a community. Later when looking at Iraq's water history, Mithen notes the debates around salinity that may have contributed to the end of Sumerian civilisation. Interestingly he notes that pre-colonial farming was often better at dealing with salt than modern agriculture imposed during colonial times.

With more complex class societies, and more powerful states, water management was on much larger scales. Mithen describes some of the impressive water schemes. One Roman system brings water 551 kilometres to Constantinople. Such schemes led at least one Roman bureaucrat to consider his canals and aqueducts to be far more impressive than the "good for nothing tourist attractions of Greece".

Mithen avoids falling into the trap of arguing that we can simply impose experiences from 1000s of years ago onto contemporary societies. But while the outlook is gloomy, history has shown that we can use technological innovations to bring water to areas that need it.

The kings of Petra may have done this so that visitors experienced the shock of fountains in the middle of the desert, and heard the gurgling of water in underground pipes; today's rulers put golf courses in the centre of deserts to benefit the rich. Mithen notes that in the past, as with today, the wealthy section of the population were more likely to benefit from the technology and engineering solutions.

Steven Mithen's book is not without fault. On occasion I found some of his writing frivolous. To suggest that because the Maya rulers chose the "delicate" water-lily as their symbol it can "excuse the odd bit of rampant environmental degradation and gratuitous violence" is frankly silly. This aside, Mithen's book is an accessible introduction to questions of resource management, government and power in the ancient world that will help the reader to explore the rise of class societies and the nature of hierarchy in the past.

 Related Reviews

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Mary Beard & Michael Crawford - Rome in the Late Republic

The end of the Roman Republic and the transition to the Imperial era is a fascinating period of cultural and social change, civil war, and political chaos. As the authors point out, in a "swift and striking transformation, a political system founded upon principles fundamentally opposed to monarchy was replaced by a system monarchical in all but name."

Precisely why this change happened is the subject of enormous debate and Mary Beard and Michael Crawford's book is one of the single best short introductions to the material that I have read. First published in 1985 this 2012 edition has a new introduction and supplementary material where the authors in general stand by their original arguments.

Perhaps the most important part of the authors' approach is the sense of the Roman Republic as a society in constant change and development. This is not a static society that suddenly goes into crisis, but a one were all sorts of individuals and social groups are in constant motion. Take the famous "turning point" of the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC. Here a radical proposal to redistribute land to the landless poor was made by Tiberius. Unusually he made it to the popular assembly, instead of the Roman senate. Tiberius' method and his ideas brought murder upon him from other members of the governing elite, because

"By his use of the popular assembly, Tiberius gave that body the status of rival to the senate as a source.. of political authority.... the proposal concerning the Asian revenues [to finance redistribution of land] carried with it the implication that the people had some claim on the management of the fruits of the growing empire."

Elsewhere the authors argue that other factors in Roman society were changing, the "development... of moral and political philosophy in the late Republic, bringing with it new ways for the Roman governing class to understand and justify their own conduct." Rules of how Rome was to be governed, and by whom, became more codified, less reliant on custom, more on law.

Similar there was an explosion of culture (which "did not involve the poor or lower classes), though with the reign of Augustus, the authors suggest that this become less dynamic and tended towards a more uniform nature.

Key sections of the book look at social and cultural structures of Roman society. All of these in flux and changing - whether religious practice, or the closely related political process. All these changes were key to understanding what took place with the fall of the Republic. The authors argue hard that there is no single factor. Instead;

"The changes in late Republican society should not be seen just as the causes of the breakdown of the specifically Republican political system; they were also parts of the development of Roman society, which underwent no clean break between the 'fall' of the Republic and the 'advent' of Empire".

The problematic word "revolution" is always used in this context. The authors perhaps clarify this somewhat by pointing out there were two parts to the revolution. The first is the end of the republic, the second is the way that Augustus made himself the single ruler. That story is not part of this book, though it is illuminated by the material here.

This is an excellent short history, marred only by the unfortunate high price. Heavily footnoted and with an excellent summary of the material, it is a must for all students of the period. It is a history based on an attempt to clarify the different, and often competing parts, of Roman society and to understand how they related to each other. It also sees Rome as a evolving culture, whose development brought further, sometimes unexpected changes, that altered the interests and forces within society. Eventually the many internal contradictions broke through, and a new regime was needed, one that could solidify Roman society in its new form.

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Syme - The Roman Revolution
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Alan D. McMillan & Eldon Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada

Perhaps the first thing that strikes readers of this history of the Canadian First Nations peoples, is the sheer variety of ways of life that existed before the arrival of Europeans. From the Arctic peoples who lived in extreme cold, hunted seals, fished and gathered very little food, to those living on the plains, hunting bison or engaging in farming and those living from the vast salmon runs of the West Coast, or hunting and gathering in the extensive forests of the east.

An extremely crude version of Canadian (indeed North American) aboriginal history would simply separate the periods into that pre-European arrival and then post-European time. Some First Nations people have their own version of this, the "Dog Days" versus the "Horse Days", remembering a time when positions were moved with the help of Dogs and then, after European's had introduced horses, a time when travel (as well as hunting) was changed.

But what this book demonstrates is that there is an enormously history of those who arrived in the Americas via the Bering land bridge some 12,000 years ago. They arrived in a "Terra Nullius", a land empty of people, but stocked full of flora and fauna. The authors discuss at length how the first people arrived - contrasting the tradition view of an overland crossing with a suggestion that many people would have travelled along the coast lines. Over the intervening time span, humans spread to every corner of the continent, and adapted to live in a myriad of different ways.

Over time, the aboriginal cultures developed and changed. Some died out, victims of hunger or conflict with other groups. This process accelerated as Europeans arrived, particularly as a result of the diseases that came with them, but also as a result of violence and war. Thus the societies that existing at the point of European contact were not ones that had been fixed for thousands of years. They were the result of the First Nations own history, a history that would have continued on its own path had it not been interrupted by European arrival.

Contact with the global economy transformed aboriginal life. In part the existence of metal tools, guns and horses had an immediate effect on life. But so did the particular nature of the relationship. Many Europeans on the west and east coasts wanted enormous quantities of furs or skins. Purchasing these from the native people, transformed those societies. Now they hunted not for food, or to satisfy needs, but to produce commodities for trade. In one case mentioned in the book, warfare took place that may have annihilated the St. Lawrence Iroquois, as a rival group the Stadaconans tried to monopolise trade with the French.

At the core of this book is a detailed examination of the changing life of different First Nations peoples. This is rooted in archaeology and anthropology, but also the culture and knowledge that we have from encounters with these people since European Contact. Indeed, each section begins with an extensive look at the history of the different groups, then finishes with a history of the time of European contact and finishes by bringing the history up-to-date by discussing the group's experience during the "global era".

I found this later part quite illuminating. The struggles of the First Nations people against the emerging nation state of Canada, were struggles for survival. They were also struggles to protect a heritage. Even in the 20th and 21st centuries, First Nations peoples continue to have to fight for their rights and compensation for how they were treated in the past. Even as late as the 1980s remnants of old Indian Acts several restricted the rights of "Indians" to move, to drink or to work. Much has changed, but much must still change. The First Nations people are not a living museum, they are a people with a rich history which continues to develop. The great strength of this book is to link that history to today, and present a continuity of struggle.

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Ronald Syme - The Roman Revolution

First published in 1939 this classic study of the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of Imperial Rome still contains a wealth of scholarship for contemporary readers. The central thesis for Syme's is that a political revolution occurred which transformed the Roman city state into a Imperial nation, capable of fully developing its Empire and utilising the resources of the subjugated nations.

Like a more recent biographer of the first emperor, Syme's considers Augustus a revolutionary, helping to drive through the changes needed in Rome's political structures (notably the Senate) to allow the new Rome to prosper. As Syme's explains, the old order was unsuited to running the new Empire;

"The constitution served the purposes of generals or of demagogues well enough. When Pompeius returned from the East, he lacked the desire as well as the pretext to march on Rome; and Caesar did not conquer Gaul in the design of invading Italy with a great army to establish a military autocracy. Their ambitions and their rivalries might have been tolerated in a small city-state or in a Rome that was merely the head of an Italian confederation. In the capital of the world they were anachronistic and ruinous. To the bloodless but violent usurpations of 70 and 59 BC the logical end was armed conflict and despotism. As the soldiers were the proletariat of Italy, the revolution became social as well as political."

Caesar's victory began as "the triumph of a faction in civil war" but he was no social revolutionary. Despite wanting to curb some of the interests of the aristocracy, he was unable or unwilling to drive through the changes that many wanted to see. Augustus then, can in part be seen as a Bonapartist figure who, in the chaos following Caesar's death, was able to defeat all comers and then drive through the political changes needed to cement the regime in place. These changes began with a war on the old aristocracy, a "regular vendetta against the rich, whether dim, inactive senators or pacific knights". Thus the "foundations of the new order were cemented with the blood of citizens and buttressed with a despotism that made men recall the Dictatorship of Caesar as an age of gold." This may have been a revolution, but it was not one that radically transformed the social structure of Rome, nor that emancipated anyone from the lower echelons of Roman society. In fact, Augustus like those who preceded and followed him, claimed to be restoring things to an earlier Utopia. Those who fell at the battle of Philippi; the confrontation that ended the hopes of Caesar's assassins and ensured that Augustus and Antonious would be the sole figures vying for power, was "fought for a principle, a tradition and a class - narrow, imperfect and out-worn, but for all that, the soul and spirit of Rome."

Syme's analysis has much going for it. His book though suffers in part from the sheer scale of his material. With hundreds of references, quotes from original Latin sources, and enormous detail of the interlocking political alliances, this is almost impossible for the lay-person to follow. Syme's is more interested in the 100s of different senators and the long family trees of those in Augustus' circles, than with the lives of the majority of the population. Those more familiar with Roman history of the period might be surprised at how little mention there is of significant events (such as the death of Cleopatra).

Bigger problems are caused by Syme's refusal to translate any Latin quotes, which are sprinkled liberally through the text. One can only hope that modern readers have new editions which editors have not assumed that those interested have had a classical education.

Finally, Syme's is very much of his time. References to "Marches on Rome" and the importance of Rome having a strong leader to restore social stability smack very much of the late 1930s. That said, this doesn't read as an apology for dictatorship or contemporary fascism, but a scholarly attempt to grapple with enormous social change. A clearer understanding of the period can come from reading it, but those interested would be well advised to develop their knowledge of Roman history somewhat before attempting it.

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Anthony Everitt - The First Emperor: Caesar Augustus and the Triumph of Rome

The fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of Imperial Rome remains the central story that underpins all attempts to understand later-day Roman history.

Anthony Everitt's biography has at its heart the individual who personifies the historical transformation. Octavian, the man who became Caesar Augustus, was adopted posthumously by his great uncle, Julius Caesar. His adopted name gave him enormous gravitas in the years immediately following Caesar's murder, as did the enormous wealth that came with it. But Octavian was not an outsider to wealth and privileged. This was no upstart from the fields, or slave made good, Octavian was a Roman, and he fought to ensure the continuation of Rome.

The story of Octavian and his transformation into Augustus brings into play many of the great figures of Roman history. There is of course Julius Caesar, and Augustus' great rival, Mark Anthony. There is also Cleopatra, and to a lesser extent other wives and mistresses. Everitt also introduces many of the poets who were part of Augustus' circle. Though occasionally I felt lack of material meant that Everitt strays a little from his topic, delighting, on occasion, in salubrious detail. (Did we really need that Horace poem on his wet dream)?

That aside this is a useful and readable account of the period. A nice summary of Anthony and Cleopatra; the stories of Augustus' limitations as a military commander and the genius of those (Agrippa in particular) who laid the basis for Rome's Empire.

Whether named Octavian or Augustus, the subject of this biography is far from the fair minded ruler that some later Emperors claimed to wish to emulate. He was ruthless and violent. Whether or not he had Cleopatra murdered as some suggest, he certainly made sure her heirs were killed. Octavian was given "a personality makeover" even while alive. Stories were spread to convince the rest of the world that "the young revolutionary whose career had been founded on illegality and violence a respectable, conservative pedigree."

At the core of this book is this notion of revolution. To what extent did Augustus revolutionise Rome? There is no doubt that both Augustus and the other two members of his Triumvir engaged in a vicious, brutal fight to ensure they gained power. The destruction of much of the old Roman ruling class and the absorption of their wealth and land into the new Roman state seems, on the surface, revolutionary. Yet there seems more continuity in other respects. Roman remained a society based on slavery, and its political institutions, at least at a senate and regional level seemed very similar. And there was little between Augustus and his main rival Anthony, as Everitt comments, the "choice was simply between two kinds of autocracy: tidy and efficient, or laid-back and rowdy."

The Marxist historian of Rome, Neil Faulkner, has a different analysis. Rather than the revolutionary Augustus, he sees a stabilising force:

"Caesar’s brief rule in 45 to 44 BC was also ‘absolutist’-it was, in effect, that of a military dictator governing against the opposition of much of the ruling class but with strong popular backing. Caesarism was a form of what Marxists call ‘Bonapartism’. It arises when a clash of class forces produces chronic instability but no clear outcome-when there is no revolutionary class able to seize power for itself and remodel society in its own image. In such circumstances, revolutionary leadership can be ‘deflected’-it may devolve on ‘strongmen’ who lift themselves above the warring factions, building support by promising popular reform and a restoration of order, and maintaining power by balancing between evenly matched class forces. Caesar, the imperialist warlord and popular reformer, provided ‘deflected’ leadership to the Roman Revolution, and, once in power, ‘Bonapartist’ leadership to the fractured Roman state. His immediate successor, Octavian-Augustus (30 BC to AD 14), who became the first emperor, led a conservative reaction which largely restored the unity of a Roman ruling class that was now purged, enlarged and more open to recruitment from below. It was this that distinguished Caesar from Augustus, not that one was a democrat and the other an absolutist."

The "Roman Revolution" had begun some years earlier and Augustus was, in large part, consolidating earlier change. But it was less a revolution and more, in Faulkner's words, of "a struggle between aristocratic factions over the future of empire". By strengthening the Roman state, expanding and developing it, Augustus was making it into the system that could govern most of the known world. In this context Augustus was less of a revolutionary and more the figure who ensured that change became permanent.

It might be suggested that this is a minor part of Everitt's book. But it does get to the heart of who Augustus was. While much of the biography is readable and fascinating and an excellent introduction to Roman history, I felt the core argument lacked strength and undermined the viability of the whole work. That said, this is a complicated period that has challenged all those who have tried to understand those turbulent Roman years. While I don't agree with all of Everitt's conclusions, his book is an excellent introduction and will give readers a useful over-view of the subject.

Related Reviews

Symes - The Roman Revolution
Parenti - The Assassination of Julius Caesar 
Suetonius - The Twelve Caesars
Holland - Rubicon 

Felipe Fernández-Armesto - 1492: The Year Our World Began

The arrival of Columbus in the New World in 1492 is often seen as the date which changed history. But had  it been possible to have some sort of global over-view in the later half of the 15th century, few people would have bet that the rather uncouth, unlucky and insignificant admiral would have been the first to discover the Americas. Indeed, few would have put any money on the Spanish state doing it, or even anyone in Europe. Back in the 1490s, as this fascinating history shows, Europe was an economic, technological and scientific backwater compared to some parts of the world.

The years around 1492 had a whole series of "turning points" for world history and this overview of them demonstrates that the world may well have turned out remarkably different. It is also a useful book to demonstrate that European superiority has few historical roots, and violent conquest was the chief mechanism that made sure that Europeans dominated world politics for the next few centuries.

So this book covers some fascinating history. The period marks the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, that helped transform a whole number of countries. The point when Russia stopped being a group of fractious states and headed off down the road of becoming an Empire. A period when a whole series of sub-Saharan countries were at the peak of their prosperity and influence. 

The country that seemed most likely to dominate the future world back in 1492 was China. Her wealth was internationally famed. Travellers and traders did their best to get there and Europe found herself marginalised by local trade in the Indian Ocean. These "seas of milk and butter" linked the world's richest economies but were self contained, forcing European traders to either travel around Africa or find new ports.

China's explorers should have reached America first. Admiral He had made a number of voyages around the Indian ocean, creating Chinese trading sites and bringing embassies. He also brought back giraffes and other strange animals for the Chinese nobility to gawp at. Fernández-Armesto comments that: 

"An age of expansion did begin, but the phenomenon was of an expanding world not, as some historians say, of European expansion. The world did not simply wait for European outreach to transform it as if touched by a magic wand. Other societies were already working magic of their own, turning states into empires and cultures into civilisations. Some of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding societies of the fifteenth century were in the Americas, south-west and northern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, in terms of territorial expansion and military effectiveness... some African and American empires outclassed any state in western Europe."

But Europe did come out on top. Not because of inherent genius or superiority, but because other countries did not turn outwards, or turned in on themselves or succumbed to invasion, war or collapse. China recalled its enormous ships and never found the Americas. But because Europe did;

"The incorporation of the Americas - the resources, the opportunities - would turn Europe from a poor and marginal region into a nursery of potential global hegemonies. It might not have happened that way."

That's one factor. But to do it required guns, germs and steel. Indeed, the author makes the point that it was only the systematic and brutal conquest of the Canary islands by Spain that gave Columbus a launching off point that would allow him to utilise the Atlantic currents and reach America. 

While I don't agree with all of the author's historical analysis (or his historical approach), I found this a very useful introduction to non-European history. To places that have been forgotten or written out of history. A useful book that should prompt further thought and study.

Kent Flannery & Joyce Marcus - The Creation of Inequality

Subtitled How Our Prehistoric Ancestors set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire this is a very important, and extremely well researched book that traces the development of human society from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to class divided, unequal societies like monarchies.

The authors argue that the first human societies where ones dominated by generosity, sharing and altruism. These societies also hand numerous internal checks to try and protect that egalitarian nature. For instance, both Eskimo and !Kung people have been shown to have used marked hunting arrows to determine who killed an animal. But the !Kung mixed up these arrows so no one really knew who had been the successful hunter. These two societies, and many other hunter-gatherer communities used ridicule and humour to downplay success and prevent anyone gaining a position above others. While successful hunters were cherished, they were expected to downplay their skills and share the fruits of their victories.

Flannery and Marcus have tried not to use studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Understanding that almost all of these groups are now changed by their contact with globalised capitalism, the authors instead have looked at records from the earliest encounters with hunter-gatherers. They then attempt to look at historical evidence for similar behaviour in the past. In fact, the greatest strength of this book is its rigorous attempt to find evidence for all aspects of the author's theories at different stages of human history and in different places.

As hunter-gatherers developed technology and skills, their social organisation developed as well. With the development of clan based societies, it was possible for inequality to appear. At first this was simply the difference between someone who had skills or experience over those who didn't. But with the rise of agriculture, the ability to store surplus food meant that "Big Men" could arise who could give others food. In time, some of these people, or even whole lineages could crystallise out into a wider class.

The authors then explore how these early unequal societies might become monarchies or other types of stratified groups, discussing how groups learn from each other, destroy each other, or even revert back to different social organisations.

This is a very important book, and I encourage everyone who has an interest in early human societies to read it. This review deliberately doesn't do the book, or the authors justice as I have written a more detailed and lengthier review for elsewhere.

My extended review of this book for the International Socialism Journal 140 can be read here.

Related Reviews

Stringer - Homo Britannicus
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Engels - Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Chris Stringer - Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain

Chris Stringer's Homo Britannicus is a short, popular introduction to the history of humans living in the region that we now know as the British Isles. Anyone silly enough to infer from the title that this is a history that gives justification to the lunatics of the far right who believe that being British means tracing your ancestry back to some far distinct British caveman, will be disappointed. Instead what Stringer does is to present the evidence that humans in Britain have come and gone over an immense period of time, stretching back to well before the most recent Ice Age. In addition, the geography of Britain has changed substantially - not just from changing sea levels, but also through the erosion of a chalk ridge that connected south east England to north western France.

Human history goes back a long way, and Stringer takes us through the complex and often conflicting scientific evidence for our earliest history. The timescale is enormous. We have clear evidence that early species of humans were using stone tools in Africa more than two million years back. Even in British sites, evidence such as the "vole clock" place the tool use at one site as long ago as 700,000 years.

The "vole clock" is one of the fascinating examples of the archaeological process that Stringer uses to illustrate how scientists know so much about the ancient past. Here, the different species of voles, known to have evolved or gone extinct at specific points in the past, are used to date contemporary human remains. Much of the book is based on the work of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project. Indeed the last section is a series of descriptions of those involved in the project, and how they came to work in this career. It is notable that only one of the AHOB scientists is a woman, reflecting a wider problem of female under-representation in science.

Stringer tells us the story of human history (as well as that of our cousins such as the Neanderthals) but he also tells us about the voyage of discovery that science has also gone through. From early scientists trying to explain the presence of hippo bones in England or linking the age of the Earth to Noah's flood, Stringer shows us not just what we know, but how we know it.

For anyone wanting an entertaining introduction to our early history, as well as insights into the work of archaeologists, there probably isn't a better book. While the section on climate change at the end felt a little like a polemic shoe-horned in, it doesn't detract too much from a more general discussion on the position of humans in a wider natural world. It's also the first work of anthropology that I have ever read, which begins with the description of ancient women and children eating warm, moist hippo brains.

The paperback has some wonderful illustrations, but if possible you might want to try and get the hard-back which has even more photographs and diagrams.

Related Reviews

Stringer - The Origin of our Species

John Reader - Cities

Çatal Hüyük a large Turkish neolithic site has been described as the world's first city. Stretching back over 9000 years, at times up to 10,000 people might have lived there. Certainly it is a site of immense historic and social importance. John Reader argues it wasn't a city, more of an overgrown village, and indeed, after reading this sweeping history of "cities" it is hard to see how such a neolithic site could be a city in the sense that we understand today.

Nonetheless, permanent settlements like Çatal Hüyük were extremely important. True permanent settlement could only occur when agriculture developed. Only then could a surplus be provided that could support non-agricultural workers. Reader argues though that the dynamic was more complex and that early urban areas encouraged the further development of agriculture, rather than the other way around.

But Çatal Hüyük is remarkable in one other respect. It is the site of the first known example of art, where humans portrayed themselves within a recognisable landscape. The Çatal Hüyük wall painting includes the outline of a nearby volcano as well as buildings. The painters deliberately noted a site of economic importance - the volcano which provided the rich soil that enabled farmers to support the city.

Here then is the real importance of the city; once humanity moves towards an urban environment, that urbanisation dominates and shapes both people, and the world around them.

While much of Readers' book concentrates on the development of the modern city, the chapters on ancient cities are fascinating. An extended discussion of Rome, for instance, brings home just how much the economic dynamics of that Empire worked. In particular the way that Rome was absolutely in hock to countries that could supply the vast amounts of grain needed to feed the population. Here environment, politics and economics combine to give Rome both its power, but also its strategic weakness.

As early as 1200 CE a network of European cities was in place. Some of them came from older cities, many of them much newer, and again rooted in the development of agriculture and trading. The growth of these cities was rooted in the surrounding agriculture, but they were also dependent on the surroundings to maintain the population. As Reader explains:

"The fact is that until recently (and then only in the developed world) more people died in cities than were born in them. So here is another way that the city parasites the countryside.... Just as city-dwellers could not produce their own food, nor could they raise enough children to replace the citizens who died... the Agricultural Revolution had not only powered the Industrial Revolution - it had also fuelled the Demographic Revolution that filled the cities."

And fill them it did. London went from a population of about 80,000 in 1551 to 865,000 just 250 years later. This despite London's birthrate being 13% lower than in the countryside, and a 50% higher death rate.

Much of the discussion of modern cities concentrates on trends that we still see today - housing, pollution, transport and other "problems". There is a fascinating discussion about sewage that mirrors much of debates that inspired Karl Marx's own concerns around the degradation of agricultural soil and the "waste" of human excrement in the Thames. Reader looks at similar cases in Paris and notes a more rational approach to the question, which will fascinate anyone who has read John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology. 

This book was written in 2005 and in its ecological discussion it is perhaps most dated. Few today might share Reader's optimism that we can deal with environmental crisis through technological innovation. But that said, he does explore solutions in terms of solar cell technology.Similarly, Reader's discussions on the links between the urban environment (and the domestication of animals) with the growth of disease and epidemics are very interesting.

Unfortunately the greatest weakness of this book comes with the discussion of the future. Reader rightly concludes that the future lies in cities; but rather like Leo Hollis' more recent book on the city; he looks to enlightened planning procedures and politicians as the answer to over-crowding and pollution. No one should dismiss these factors and Reader rightly points to some of the weaknesses.

But what is missing here again is any sense of the city as a site of class struggle. This is not to simply glorify revolution, strikes or workers' protest. But a sense of the way that cities themselves have been shaped by mass movements. It was the fear of revolution, for instance, that lead to Baron Haussman designing Paris' enormous boulevards to make it harder to build barricades. 

Nor is there any sense of the collective struggles that fought to improve slums, reduce rents which helped lead to the building of public housing in Britain in the 20th century. Certainly there is no mention of the struggles that have come from those on the periphery of the developing worlds' great cities - struggles that have been fought over water and electricity, and problem stand more of a chance of shaping the future cities than many an enlightened planning officer.

Related Reviews

Hollis - Cities are Good for you
Harvey - Rebel Cities

Robert Harris - Imperium

Novels set in Ancient Rome are always hampered by the perceptions that people have of life there 2000 years ago. For many years Roman history has suffered from being the history of great men. Of senators, generals and of course Emperors. That's not to say that novels based around such individuals cannot be entertaining and informative.

Nonetheless because the history (and the documents) we have of the period tend to be those of “great” individuals, novels tend to follow similar paths, if only because the material available to form the backdrop for such lives is more readily accessible.

Robert Harris has now written a number of novels set in the ancient past. I wasn't overly impressed with the first of these Pompeii. But Imperium is a much stronger novel. Even though it centres on some of the most important figures of the late Republic, Harris avoids the trap of forgetting about the majority of the population because his narrator is Tiro, the extremely talented slave of the famous lawyer and counsel, Marcus Cicero.

Harris has done his research well. Many of the events in this book (which is in effect two linked shorter stories) are based in reality. The novel itself is supposed to be a biography of Cicero, and such a book (at least according to Plutarch) did exist, though tragically it has been lost to us since. Cicero is portrayed not simply as a brilliant orator. He also holds a mind of tactical genius and a singular determination to reach the peaks of power that were offered during Republican Rome.

Thus while centring on a particularly dramatic legal case (of extreme corruption and abuse of power by a Roman governor) and a political intrigue several years later, the main thread of the story is Cicero's struggle to achieve recognised greatness, seen through the eyes of his most important slave.

The backdrop to this is the decline of Republican Rome and the beginnings of the rise of the era of the Emperors. But behind all of this are the interests and struggles of Rome's different classes. The ruling class are aloof from the majority of the population, though a middling layer (of whom Cicero is a New Man) form a link between the top of the system and the masses below. Cicero's clients include those from the lower levels of society who often have been failed by the system as well as those who are more wealthy but seek redress. The masses by and large are a stage army, who give their loyalty to those politicians who have managed to either offer them the most in the way of bread and circuses or improved their lot. In Harris' telling Cicero is a man of the people, struggling against the excesses of the aristocracy and hence beloved by many ordinary people.

While Harris captures the limitations of Rome's democracy and brilliantly portrays the excesses and corruption of the majority of the ruling class, his portrayal of the dynamics of the mass of the population seems rather more one dimensional. This is very much exposed in the references to Grachuss, the reforming politician who was murdered by the ruling class for attempting to redistribute land in the interest of the masses. It is in these short paragraphs where you get a feel for how mass, class interests could shape Roman politics in a way that is absent elsewhere in the story.

Ultimately though this is the tale of a few individuals, despite Rome being the backdrop. Harris gives the reader a plausible tale of what life was like, the sights, smells, over-crowding and problems in the ancient capital. The dreams of freedom of Tiro are poignant and seem real, and if on occasion there are plot devices that seem a little contrived to ensure that our narrator can be present at some of the most important events in Roman history, this can be excused in the interest of a great storyline.

Unfortunately the afterword tells us nothing of what is based on known history and what is speculation and Robert Harris despite acknowledging his reliance on more recent scholarship he fails to direct the reader to more works that might allow those whose interest has been pricked in the history, to learn more. This is a shame because Imperium is an excellent read and could well put many on the path to a deeper study of Roman history.

Related Reading

Harris - Lustrum

Graves - I, Claudius

Graves - Claudius the God

Adrienne Mayor - The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

"The giant ogre Skiron used to throw victims off a rocky cliff near Megara until the hero Theseus threw Skiron over the precipice. After a very long period of time 'his bones were tossed between sea and earth and finally hardened into rock'." - Ovid, Metamorphoses.

"It is a matter of observation that the stature of the entire human race is becoming smaller... When a mountain in Crete was cleft by an Earthquake, a skeleton 46 cubits long was found, which some people thought must be that of Orion and others of [giant] Otus... Augustus preserved the bodies of two giants (Secundilla and Pusio) over 10 feet tall at Sallust's Gardens in Rome." - Pliny the Elder, Natural History.

I have to admit that when I first received Adrienne Mayor's book I assumed it was a work of pseudo-science, exploring perhaps some invented history of Greeks and Romans living simultaneously with extinct ancient creatures. However, despite the somewhat unusual presentation (I thought the book looked like a cheap self-published work, and several of the drawings are very amateurish and add little to the text) this turns out to be an exceedingly interesting book that rapidly convinced me of the authors' central thesis.

Mayor begins with a simple argument. In many of the areas of the ancient world around the Mediterranean fossils are easily found. In the wider areas that were influenced by the Greeks and Romans or known to them through travelers and traders, even more extensive remains are common. How did the ancient people understand these?

The two quotes above demonstrate that to a certain extent, many of the ancients had a surprisingly good grasp of how such remains might be formed. Lacking an understanding of the age of the world, they could not comprehend the timescales necessary to create fossils, but they could understand them as the remains of long dead creatures or races. Frequently the remains themselves were interpreted as human, though they were usually from mammoths or similar animals. In a lovely demonstration, Mayor rearranges the bones of a model mammoth to show how they could be altered to look like a large tall humanoid. An ogre, or an ancient hero.

In the Gobi desert remains of dinosaurs like Protoceratops are frequently found, often with eggs in their nests. Mayor shows how the shape of these dinosaurs with their curved beaks, long tales and crested skull could easily be morphed or interpreted as the classic ancient image of a griffin, with a bird like head and wings and lion's body. She then offers us evidence from ancient texts and archaeological remains to show how the ancients clearly thought that griffins did live in parts of the desert. With only a small amount of speculation Mayor adds that the legends that griffins guarded piles of gold could be understood by the flecks of the metal often found with the remains.

Some of the evidence that Mayor has produced is fairly convincing. A pottery vessel with depicting a hero fighting a monster easily resolves itself into an image of a dinosaur skull protruding from the earth. Another image of a human fighting a griffin seems unremarkable until you notice that the griffin, unlike the man, appears to be growing from the ground. A suggestion that the artist understood about bones found under the earth?

Mayor seems to know her classical sources well, and frequently lists sites were bones would have been found eroding from the ground, particularly on the Mediterranean coasts. It has to be said she builds an impressive argument.

But what did the ancients actually understand about these bones? Mayor demonstrates that many of them, including some of the most well known philosophers thought they were the remains of ancient beasts and the ogres who populated the earth before they died out at the hands of heroes like Hercules. While explaining this though, we learn that many of the ancients had a rudimentary understanding that species could evolve, change and go extinct. However while there were those in ancient times who understood these bones as remains of ancient humans or mythical creatures there were also those who saw them as being other animals. Mayor quotes a statement by Plutarch where he identifies some bones as those of a species of elephant (1,700 years before a modern scientist would make the same links). Notably though, prior to the discovery of contemporary elephants by the Greeks, these same remains were interpreted as a vanished monster known as Neades.

It is interesting to speculate whether the myths of giant humans or creatures like centaurs or griffins came first, or were they the result of people seeing fossil remains and creating myths. What it undoubtedly true though, is that in ancient times these remains were often venerated and debated as much as we would today. In fact, Mayor describes a period which is almost a "bone craze" as ancient cities and temples located remains and identified them as famous local heroes putting them on display.

What becomes clear from Mayor's fascinating book, is not simply the way that ancient people tried to understand the world around them, but also how their ideas developed and changed. Sadly we have lost much of the evidence that would enable us to understand how the bones were displayed, though tantalising comments in ancient books clearly indicate that they were gawped at by tourists much as museum visitors might today. Mayor's book seems to have spurred other writers and scientists to look at old materials and books with different eyes, for the non-expert reader however it is a stimulating and informative look, not simply at how our ancestors understood fossils but how their ideas shaped the view of their own history and myth.

Related Reviews

Ward - The Call of Distant Mammoths
Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters

John Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

The very idea of Ancient Egypt conjures up some obvious images; the pyramids and Sphinx in Giza, frescoes and carvings showing boats plying the Nile or impressive statues and grave goods. This is not surprising, as these monuments are both impressive and photogenic. Yet they make up only a small part of Egypt's ancient history, a culmination of thousands of years of life near the Nile and the history of the area continued long after the pyramids were built into the era of classical Greece and Rome.

John Romer's earlier books have looked at particularly aspects of ancient Egypt. In particularly I was impressed by his exploration of the daily life of a section of Egypt's more ordinary population, the tomb builders who worked in the Valley of the Kings. That book Ancient Lives included a detailed description of some extended strike action by the workers. But Romer's latest book takes on a far larger task, an account of the whole history of Ancient Egypt. He is well qualified to do this having spent many years excavating and studying the period and this, the first volume of two, is a wonderful book that will set the standards for writing about Egypt for a long time.

Romer begins his tale with the earliest of people who live in the area that we now think of as Egypt. We know a little about the hunter-gatherer nomads who lived in the area, but the real story begins with the farming communities that hunted, grew food and fished on the northern shores of the Faiyum Oasis, a few hundred miles west of modern Cairo. The climate then was different and one of the factors that shaped the eventual growth of the ancient population was a changing environment that helped force the earliest farmers to the banks of the Nile. The arid conditions of the Egyptian desert preserve the legacy of these farmers from perhaps 7000 years ago. When excavated their grain bins were found to not only to contain grain, so well preserved that curators tried to germinate them later, but also the tools and reed baskets had also survived. Thus begins the story of a people who transformed the Nile region using the most rudimentary of tools, yet produced stunning buildings, tombs and artworks. The pyramids after all, were made with bronze age technology.

At the heart of John Romers' story though, is the tale of the growth of the Egyptian State. It took many centuries before what we know as ancient Egypt came to exist. Romer takes pains to explain the neolithic revolution that led to farming becoming the dominant mode of production along the Nile. But he also argues that the particular nature of the Nile, the extreme fertility of the soil meant that those farmers could support a large non-agricultural work force at a very early point in history. Here-in lies the secret of the rapid growth of the Egyptian state, but also its ability to mobilise and sustain large numbers of workers in its monument building phase. During the building of the Great Pyramid, Romer estimates that a tenth of the working population were not working on the fields, but were engaged in building or providing the networks of exchange to support the pyramid builders.

Romer sees the development of this state as central to the development of the wider Egyptian world. While discussing King Narmer, the earliest Pharaoh who united Upper and Lower Egypt, Romer writes that:

"the formation of Narmer's state had provided the foundations of a truly orignal order for [a] society that would last for millennia and which, as Pharaoh's Egypt, became a wonder of the ancient world.... a commonly used term like 'kingdom' appears to be appropriate. Yet the Pharaonic state stands at the beginning of all that. It was created from the ground up, without the benefit of an exemplar and, indeed, without the aid of writing or the presence of a national faith."

In this development of the state, the King or Pharaoh comes to represent the very state itself. Indeed,

"when ancient Egyptian scribes referred to Pharaoh's kingdom in non-literary texts, they used terms like 'residence' - that is the royal residence - to denote the controlling centre of the networks of trade and traffic, tithing and taxing, that operated in the regions of the lower Nile."

Kings like Narmer were often portrayed as warlike and violent. Early Egyptian history certainly was violent, many of the kings of this period, including Narmer, where buried with hundreds of murdered people around them. They are often depicted in the act of vanquishing an enemy, yet much of the migration and spread of the people northwards from the sites where the early Egyptian state developed was marked by peaceful co-existence with those who had come from the Levant. Extensive trade networks developed and cultural ideas, such as design of buildings and farming were taken up and shared by communities from different areas. I liked for instance that in the midst of one enormous Naqqadrian cemetery lies a grave of an individual buried in a traditional way from the Middle East.

All this could only be supported by the agricultural produce from the Nile, and the earliest technological innovations were the irrigation channels and pools built along the banks to trap the annual flood. Such methods are still used in other parts of Africa and one reason we know something about ancient farming patterns is that they lasted until very recent times. The ancient state was never far from the farming and the water that allowed the desert kingdom to flourish. This is why on a giant mace head, archaeologists have found an image of "a man... wearing what would become the White Crown of Upper Egypt, in the act of opening a water channel with the stroke of a farmer's adze... it is improbable that this unique object.... does not reflect something of the age in which it had been made."

In the language of Historical Materialism, the immense surplus that could be obtained from agricultural on the banks of the Nile (sometimes two or three crops a year) meant that the forces of production developed rapidly. Within a few centuries of the early Naqqadrian state and the rule of Narmer, the enormous pyramids were being built. This required a complex and developed state to organise the networks of trade and distribution of food, as well as the movement of stone and metal from quarries and mines. Egypt then as an agricultural state and Romer argues convincingly that the ancient cities were not places as we might imagine them today, but places of residence of the state's workers. Those who oversaw the production process.

Towards the end of the book, Romer laments  that we know very little about these ancient people.

"Our real knowledge of these ancient people hardly extends beyond their pyramids, their tomb chapels and names and titularies. We know nothing, for example, of those who carried [Queen] Hetep-heres in her palanquin, and though we possess her very intestines, we know nothing of the woman or the queen at all."

It is for this reason that much of the this book is dominated by discussions of architecture, pottery or stonework. Yet this is never boring, Romer has tried to draw out a history of people based on what they did to shape the world around them in order to survive. As he aptly points out, the images they have left are less a depiction of what is taking place and more a depiction of the state itself. As the ancient Egyptian state matured, its monuments and buildings also evolved. The very act of building the enormous pyramids also shaped the state and created the conditions of further building works. Our vision of ancient Egypt is thus in turn a reflection of what the ancient state itself did. As Romer concludes, "the greater part of what survives from early Egypt is exactly what those ancient people took pains to store and thus preserve within the dryness of the desert."

John Romers' book is a unique and magnificent read. It is accessible and well written, though if I have one minor criticism it is that the pictures seem old and of low-quality, a few higher resolution images of the objects being described would have been welcome. But this is a minor complaint about what is an essentially materialist account of the rise of the ancient Egyptian state. I recommend it, and look forward to the companion volume with great anticipation.

Related Reviews

John Romer - Ancient Lives; The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers
Shaw - Ancient Egypt - A Very Short Introduction
Verner - The Pyramids: Their Archaeology and History
Kurth - The Temple of Edfu - A guide by an Ancient Egyptian Priest

Brian S. Roper - The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation

Just what "democracy" is has varied enormously throughout history. In the developed world we are told that "our" democracy is the envy of the world, yet as this new history demonstrates, at various times in the past people have had very different and often far more expanded franchises than we have today.

Indeed modern representative democracy is actually very limited. You only have to look at the way that the 2008 economic crisis was caused by completely unaccountable people. Bankers whose actions might have consequences for millions of people were completely unaccountable to wider society. Or, as Brain Roper points out, you could examine the 2004 US election were "business contributed $1,503 million to political parties compared with $61.6 million from trade unions". More recently you might muse on the fact that almost no-one in Britain voted for a Tory-Liberal coalition, yet the inadequate election system we have produced just that.

Roper begins his survey of the history of democracy with the ancient world. He argues that ancient Greece's democracy was surprisingly advanced. In fact, "for the first and only sustained period in history the producers or labouring citizens ruled." Citizens he says, "faced no major obstacles to significant involvement in public affairs based on social position or wealth". Though children, women or slaves were of course excluded. Nonetheless, this is far in advance of the rights of many early democracies such as Britain, which only extended the franchise to women in the early 20th century. Roper is absolutely correct to argue that:

"Athenian democracy... rested on historically specific social foundations in which the peasant citizen played a central role."

I stress this because one of the important themes of Roper's book is not just that "democracy" changes through history, but that it does so based on particular historical circumstances. With the decline of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, Roper argues that democracy effectively disappeared and it was only with the revolutionary struggles against feudalism that democracy reappears. This democracy then must itself be struggled for and extended.

At the heart of Roper's book is an examination of how this process takes place. He looks in detail at three bourgeois revolutions - England, America and France to try and understand how modern states appeared and how democracy became central to them. What might be termed bourgeois democracy is a direct product of these revolutions, in particular the American Revolution. Roper examines how the victorious American bourgeoisie constructed a democratic system that both protected the status quo and limited the potential for movements from below to challenge their authority. It was a democracy that had protecting property relations at its core.

But Roper doesn't ignore another aspect to these movements, which is the way that in revolutionary struggles democracy from below appears. During the English Civil War for instance, the mass of the population that took part in the fighting began to develop its own ideas for how society should be run. The Putney Debates in 1647 were an example of representatives of different social forces within the revolution trying to lay out their own visions of how people could partake in society. The more radical elements were destroyed by Cromwell, but the episode serves to show that the democratic traditions that came out of the bourgeois revolutions were not automatic. Instead they represent different class interests.

The strongest sections of this book are those where Roper shows how revolutionary movements throw up the potential for new forms of participatory democracy in the modern world. In particular he looks at the way the Paris Commune demonstrated to revolutionaries like Marx and Engels how a socialist society might be organised, based on representatives paid the same rate and working people and accountable through recall by their electors. Roper quotes Marx's pamphlet, The Civil War in France:

"[The Commune was] a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour."

The second example that the author discusses is the Russian Revolution. This is important he argues, because "it showed that it was possible for the working class to take power and run society." In a few pages Roper discusses the successes of the revolution and the functioning of the soviets, the gatherings of elected representatives that both led the revolution and then began to re-organise society. He also then shows how the revolution was isolated and destroyed by the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy.

It is easy to critique democracy. After all, democracy fails to deliver economic or political justice for the majority of those within society. But such criticisms are not necessarily revolutionary. The Marxist critique outlined by Roper is important because it points the way forward, to a society where democracy is based upon an entirely different method of organising society. Under capitalism he points out, democracy can never work properly because society is based on the fundamental antagonism between two classes, the exploitation of one by the other, true democracy can only flourish when this antagonism is destroyed.

While Ropers' book is excellent there are a number of criticisms I would make. Firstly Roper concentrates very much on democracy within class society. To this end he ignores the democratic decision making processes that must have existed within pre-class societies. Hunter-gatherer communities have frequently been shown to have high levels of participation in decision making.

Secondly, Roper argues that feudal society was fundamentally undemocratic. This is absolutely right. There was a strict social hierarchy that rested on brute force. Yet within feudal society there were, on a very localised level, often some examples of democracy. Peasants in feudal villages often met annually to redistribute strips of land. Another example might be the daily "parliament" of the community on the island of St. Kilda. We should be wary of arguing that this implied there was any sort of democratic base to feudalism, but it does demonstrate that once again ordinary people did try to organise to improve their lot.

Finally Roper quite rightly argues that democracy is a product of revolutionary times and that we see the best, participatory democracy evolve during moments of revolutionary struggle. This is not just a product of this high points, but also of most working class struggles - at the lowest level, the "strike committee" is one example.

These criticisms aside, Brian S. Roper has produced a useful and interesting over-view of the history of an idea. It is one that will be useful as we try to understand the processes taking place around the world, particularly in the Arab Revolutions, as millions struggle against dictators, for democracy, freedom and social justice.

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