On Weavers, Scribes, and Kings

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

This book is an incredible achievement, and it might actually be a cure for depression. I consider myself well-read in both breadth and depth, and it forced me to confront, honestly, how little I know about the past: the bulk of my knowledge runs from the fifteenth century on, with a bit more from the classical period, whereas Podany begins around 3500 BCE and ends with Alexander the Great’s conquest of Babylonia. Part of what makes it so powerful is that familiar names don’t even begin to crop up until the second half. Ur, Uruk, Sumer — we all learn these in world history — but they get a day and a bird’s-eye glance, a map and a few paragraphs about Sargon, Gilgamesh, and cuneiform, and little more; here the material only reaches the point of familiarity in the last section, Part 7.

It’s therapeutic because it shows how small our little problems are. Not that there aren’t serious problems: genocides are unfolding in Palestine, Myanmar, and Sudan; extractive wars are constant; history seems to have returned, with a great-power war in Ukraine, a desire for imperial conquest in the United States, and sabre-rattling between India and Pakistan; and there’s potentially exterminatory climate change. And yet these too will fade with the sands of time; the Earth will persist without us. Podany limits her discussion to places and times that used cuneiform, or proto-cuneiform, so the book is geographically bounded without her having to say “I’m only studying within these borders” — there’s little on the southern Levant, for instance, because those places used papyrus and alphabets (or abjads), and Egypt comes up only in international relations, since the pharaohs used Akkadian cuneiform to correspond with the states to their north but not within their own administration. Archaeological evidence is included to supplement the textual history; had archaeology been privileged, the book would have been more expansive but also more speculative.

One thing that works to Podany’s benefit is that she eschews the standard bird’s-eye view, trying instead to give us the Ancient Near East through the eyes of the people who lived it — mirroring this, there aren’t many maps, since ancient Near Eastern peoples didn’t have them. We learn about scribes, weavers, brewers, priestesses, even agricultural workers. Most of the preserved writing was produced for religious or political purposes, so there’s more attention to religious practice, dynastic struggles, and international relations than there would be in a social history of the twentieth century — but that’s a problem of the source base, not the author. The most interesting part was her coverage of diplomatic relations, her area of expertise (she’s written more on it in Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East). Honestly, I was surprised how fascinating it was; I have a prejudice against diplomatic history as stuffy and formulaic, and somehow this wasn’t — she gives life to the court, to the scribes and messengers, and I just wanted to read more about them. I also hadn’t realized how large the source base is. I’d expected something heavily speculative, built on archaeology, but it seems there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of cuneiform texts simply lying around — and the reason it had seemed such sketchy evidence to me is probably that there just aren’t enough scholars with the languages, and the material is hard to popularize given how unfamiliar it is, except to those interested in Biblical studies (whose work is quite late compared to most of what’s covered here). More than anything, I want to read more about the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, and I find myself wondering about the syncretism between Hellenic and Ancient Near Eastern traditions during the Hellenistic era; there’s a fair literature on Egypto-Hellenic syncretism, especially in religion and the “sciences,” but what about Babylon, Assyria, and Persia? I’d love to know more. I’ve digressed a fair amount, but this is essential reading for anyone curious about the ancient past.