Where better to start writing for Loonie Politics than in Babylon?
No, I'm not drawing an overwrought comparison from Revelation. I'm talking about the Western quality of openness and curiosity including about other cultures and civilizations. Our own leadership sometimes seems to feel that almost nothing good about Canada derives from our particular heritage. But I do not think they understand that heritage very well, including the weird way in which we are better connected to ancient Babylon than the people who now live there.
I recently acquired a copy of a history of the ancient Near East, H.W.E. Saggs' Civilization Before Greece and Rome. And it's full of stuff about Sargon of Akade and the rise and fall of Erech, a fascinating if sometimes baffling tale of the development of agriculture, writing, imperialism and so on. But what struck me most forcibly is that this story of other cultures is only known to us, and them, because we cared.
These ancient civilizations, from Egypt to the Indus Valley, loom massively if puzzlingly over us. I still don't know what the Sphinx wants or why, and ziggurats often conjure up Shelley's line about "look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" which were themselves inspired by a statue of Rameses II. But they are very present despite their remoteness.
We think and wonder about them, and what relevance the rise and fall of other civilizations might have to our own. Because we know about them. But why? Why do we know about Egyptian pharaohs and the code of Hammurabi and all that stuff?
Well duh. They left all these monuments, inscriptions and evidence including enormous pyramids. The Great Pyramid at Giza was the tallest building in the world for almost 4500 years and is still the 2nd-tallest stone building. Kind of hard to miss, right? I mean people have been living right in its shadow ever since.
Guess again. It's true that the pyramids are big and solid and hard to overlook. But it doesn't guarantee that anybody will be curious about it including those who now claim in some sense or another to be the proud inheritors of whatever its traditions were. And in fact for thousands of years they were not.
There is the big surprise from Saggs' book. It begins with an account of the "discovery" of the ancient world. Or rediscovery. Because believe it or not, almost all of it was forgotten until the 19th century. Nothing was known and nobody seemed to care. Especially not the people who lived there.
As Saggs explains, the first to be curious about these vanished civilizations were an odd collection of Victorian-era European eccentrics who became fascinated by the "romance of the East" that so offends postmodern scholars who scorn "orientalism". And perhaps it was patronizing that Napoleon invaded Egypt with 175 scholars and intellectuals in tow, from chemists to poets. And not just the invasion bit. Like most Napoleonic ventures, it ended in spectacular disaster, in this case Nelson's destruction of the French fleet in Aboukir Bay. But in the 15 months that he was there, his retinue of learned men began to study the Egyptian past in a way that nobody had since roughly when Cleopatra died.
Likewise a young Englishman named Henry Austen Layard, who was meant to be heading to Ceylon to practice law, instead stopped in Mesopotamia in the 1840s and started mucking about in a huge mound called "Nimrud" at a time when, as Saggs quotes Layard, a case in the British Museum "scarcely three feet square enclosed all that remained, not only of the great city, Nineveh, but of Babylon itself!"
Layard quickly unearthed all sorts of treasures, from spectacular relief carvings to statues to then-unreadable inscriptions. These, along with the work of a French amateur named Paul Emile Botta, caused a sensation in Europe and Layard's 1849 account of his finds was an instant best-seller.
In Europe, mind you. Not in Mesopotamia or the rest of what Saggs rightly calls "the ramshackle Turkish empire." They'd been sitting on this stuff for centuries and about as interested as anyone got was when the locals stripped stone from some pyramids to use for building material. And the same is true further East, where it was European railway engineers and then archeologists who discovered the once-spectacular urban "Harappan" civilization (c. 3300-1300 BC, with its high period from 2600-1900) whose ruins the locals were vaguely aware of but uninterested.
It is fashionable now to deplore the "cultural imperialism" of the West. And Third World nationalists routinely demand the return of treasures that, but for these now-despised explorers, adventurers and linguists, would still be buried in the sand. It was Europeans who dug them up and then, from Germany to Denmark to London, devoted their lives to deciphering the writing and reconstructing the history of these periods. And they did it because for all their supposed chauvinism, they cared far more about what men and women in other times, places and cultures had done, said and thought than almost anyone else.
Westerners were far more interested in ancient Egypt than Egyptians were about their own past, let alone about Europe. The West certainly had no monopoly on chauvinism. In the Ottoman Empire, where the printing press was banned as soon as it was discovered, and not allowed until the 18th century under tight censorship, Western ideas were scornfully rejected without even cursory examination. An old college text of mine matter-of-factly recounts the grand vizier of the Ottoman empire telling the French ambassador in 1666 "Do I not know that you are a Giaour [nonbeliever], that you are a hog, a dog, a turd eater?" As the UN's Arab Development Report noted with dismay in 2002, Spain translates about as many foreign books in a year as the entire Arab world has in a thousand years. (Not coincidentally, its GDP is also larger.)
Canada remains proudly part of this open society, open not just to men and women of talent including immigrants from any place and culture but also to ideas. It can be frustrating sometimes that we seem to have such open minds that our brains fall out. But over time we really do sort through ideas, compare them, and select the best.
We do not automatically embrace an idea because we thought of it first. Nor, I would add, should we automatically reject it on that basis as again has become an annoying modern habit. As Thomas Sowell once put it, "Cultures are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life." Which is why, paradoxically, our museums are full of other cultures' pasts and theirs are not.
We are the open society. And it's worth remembering and celebrating, from Babylon to Parliament Hill.
