History as a battlefield

Two recent history books expose the limitations of modern historians.

In a previous review of another title in the Lost Civilizations series on the Phoenician civilisation, I praised it as “a  clear, up-to-date and balanced assessment”. Sadly, I cannot say the same about either The Sumerians by Paul Collins or Egypt by Christina Riggs.  Both titles share similar approaches and failings.

Paul Collins sets out the difficulty of apprehending who the Sumerians are. As a sequence of overlapping civilisations, with different religions and main cities, inside fluctuating borders and speaking different languages, the people we call Sumerians may not even have been one ethnos. Collins explains how Sumerian civilisations – of the Uruk, Jemdet Nasr, Agade, Lagash, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian phases – were investigated by modern European scholars, with a major achievement being the decipherment of cuneiform script and subsequent translation of Sumerian. Partly due to the investment of European colonial administrators, collectors, savants and scholars, Europeans took up as the origin of Aryan civilisation as a key stage in European history. Debates raged about whether or not the Sumerians were a Semitic people. In the Nineteenth Century, anthropometrists measured skulls and statue heads in order to determine the genetic lineage of Sumerians. Sumerian historiography thereby became a political counter in the racial interpretation of culture. It was generally concluded that the Sumerians were not a Semitic people, although the definition who was classed as a member of the Sumerian nation is unclear.

For centuries, scribes were from childhood were trained in writing the Sumerian language. It seems that the Sumerian language, found in cuneiform (or arrow script) writing, was preserved as the language of officials, rulers, priests and administrators even as it faded as the vernacular language of the people. “The region’s ancient Sumerian language was now used by scribes of the royal court in the composition of inscriptions and hymns that honoured their royal masters.”[i] It was precisely the use of an ancient language that linked a ruler to previous eras and added legitimacy to later dynasties.     

The phases of Sumerian civilisations became a source of pride for the modern state of Iraq. Collins explains the use of Sumerian imagery, artefacts, sites and structures in Iraqi statecraft, including the erection of art work during the Ba’athist era of independence. Conversely, when Saddam Hussein saw the Marsh Arabs as a source of sedition, resistance and allyship with Iranian fellow-Shias, he embarked on a campaign to drain the marshes and eradicate the culture of the Marsh Arabs. The buildings and way of life of this group goes back (in part) to Sumerian times; reed bowers similar to those of the modern day have been detected in ancient imagery.   

Despite the many interesting and surprising facts that the author presents, there is such an emphatic denial of the possibility that the Sumerians viewed themselves as a single people and that their collective achievements were considered the fruits of their social unity, so much so that we suspect the author dismissed such possibilities a priori. Indeed, the index crystalises the author’s position: “race misunderstandings and prejudice, etc.”. There were deliberate distortions and omissions in modern archaeology and histories of Sumerian dynasties during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. However, who is Paul Collins to imply that he and his cohort are free of similar prejudices? Who is to say that his political positions do not colour his handling of evidence and task of summarisation? The Sumerians is a signal from one scholar to his colleagues and a general readership regarding what is acceptable and unacceptable; this is politically determined and tribal in basis. As such, those in search of a more impartial overview may consider the author more concerned with political approval than description of archaeological data, which has interfered with the task of narrating what is securely known about the subject.     

Professor Christina Riggs (Durham University) goes even further in her book, Egypt. This is made clear from the start. The second paragraph of the book includes the words “the horrific experience – and long legacy – of [North American] slavery” and the third paragraph “white police shooting unarmed black men”. In a book on ancient Egypt, we learn more about British academics’ attitudes towards to the North Atlantic slave trade than the reality of slavery in ancient Egypt. The book is more a sociological critique of the historiography of Egypt than a history of Egypt. There is much here that is useful evidence regarding the debates over the cultural appropriation of ancient Egypt by black Americans in search of a cultural touchstone. However, for those in search of a more direct description of the functions and reality of religion, warfare, agriculture, language and physical culture of ancient Egypt, this book will be frustrating.

The most illuminating parts are the contentious struggles between Western archaeologists and Egyptian authorities regarding the release of information and retention of artefacts. This dates back to the victory of Napoleon in Egypt in 1798-1801 and the consequential reversal to the British control, opening up the antiquities to scientific examination by outsiders. Westerners led the discovery and analysis of finds, deciphered hieroglyphics (with the aid of the Rosetta Stone) and applying scientific method to study of buildings, artefacts and the preserved bodies of Egyptian dignitaries. However, Egyptians did the labouring and claimed priority in preserving and keeping as much as possible of what was found. The politics of post-colonialism caused friction in the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Carter, who believed he should had more control of the announcements. He sold exclusive rights to photographs and reports to The Times, which antagonised the Egyptian government and rival newspapers.

At the core of the book is an argument advancing a non-racial reading of history, stripping from the Egyptians attribution of their civilisation to anything uniquely Egyptian in racial terms.

“[N]o culture exists in isolation. Historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to think in terms of ‘types’ or ‘races’ of peoples who developed in bounded geographic locations and displayed character traits. […] Although these essentialist categories have long been debunked, their stereotypes lurk just under the surface of contemporary society, and the idea that a group ‘belongs’ to one, delimited territory, has proved difficult to shake.”[ii] “Debunked”? By whom? How conclusively? What the author means is that Western liberal academics (in the post-1945 political world) have dismissed the idea of character, race and culture being linked as too dangerous, too powerful and too persuasive to be given credence by an elite founded on the unarguable tenets of the absolute fungibility of all humanity, no exclusivity, no borders, no links to ancestral privileges, no possibility of defending one’s culture as unique and as claiming it as springing from one’s people and place.

The championing of globalism and multiculturalism of this nature sounds like technocratic Western liberal colonialism. I cannot imagine Professor Riggs looking into the eyes of African, Canadian First Nations or Aboriginal historians and telling them that any conception of a people belonging to a land and land belonging to that people is fallacious and that their culture is not rooted in race. This is the sort of thing that a Western academic can get away with if the subject is a lost civilisation (where no ancient Egyptian can retort) or an indigenous European culture, where disagreement is dismissed as chauvinism or racism.

What we come to books such as Egypt for is information on what the Egyptians saw as true for themselves and how this manifested itself in their society. These conceptions may not fall along the our understanding of ethnos or the borders of a state; instead, the vision of Egyptians (or at least those recorded in the religious texts and kingly proclamations, which is all we have access to) may be vastly different from the way we see; it is those differences (however alien or “wrong”) that we yearn to understand. It is the job of a historian to present this information or the documentary absence of this information. Even accepting the inevitable blind spots and preferences of any historian, most of us wish to have an overall understanding of ancient Egypt as best the experts understand it now, not a commentary on how black creators in the Harlem Renaissance saw Egyptians and Ethiopians in the 1920s. Although there are occasional facts and some images of wonderful treasures, there is no way of responding to this book without having to engage with the political assumptions of the author.     

Often, we detect a reluctance of modern authors to address issues such as the ancient peoples’ attitudes towards authority, kingship, religion, empire, war, death, slavery, suffering, social structures, women and education; these are not described honestly and directly by modern historians because of the fundamental suspicion and disapproval they seem to harbour regarding past beliefs. To describe seriously and clearly value systems that are contrary to the Western academia would be to offer today’s readers ancient wisdom, powerful truths and independent ways of thinking. Any direct contradiction to the hegemony of liberalism, humanism, atheism, feminism, egalitarianism and so forth would implicitly open the door to dissent today. This is why some academics seem more content to engage in the sociology of history than actual history.

These authors will see their textbooks as considered assaults on the civilisation-from-race understanding of culture, which they are. As such, they seem prime examples of deracinated Western academics unwilling to describe foreign ways of living, thinking and believing, due to a (liberalist) superiority complex, just as overweening and imperious as the Victorians and National Socialists, whom they so readily condemn. These titles cannot be recommended as history but are valuable insights into the academia of today.

Christina Riggs, Egypt, Reaktion Books, London, 2022, 216pp, 31 col./15 mono illus., paperback, £12.95

Paul Collins, The Sumerians, Reaktion Books, London, 2021, 214pp, 37 col./15 mono illus., hardback, £18

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[i] P. 165

[ii] Pp. 44-5