Steve Burrow - Shadowland: Wales 3000-1500BC

Produced by the National Museum of Wales, this is a lavishly illustrated, short but comprehensive guide to a distinctive period of Welsh history. 3000BC to 1500BC effectively corresponds with the end of the stone age and the late bronze age.

The title of the book, Shadowland, sets the tone for Steve Burrow's explanation of these fifteen centuries. The people, he argues, are like shadows on the Welsh landscape. Almost nothing of their daily lives has been found. Few homes, few farms, few implements. Even the relatively common post-holes that normally mark the locations of ancients homes are few and far between. This is not to say the lands were unpopulated. What these people did leave us were extensive funerary remains. We also know a great deal about specific areas of their lives - extensive copper mining at Great Orme for instance. We can infer a great deal, but we cannot say much specifically about their lives.

Burrows takes us sytematically through what we do know. From the shapes of flint knives and tools, to the standardised burials we find, surprisingly, that there tended to be common styles or fashions across what is now Wales. It is tempting to view this as a common culture, but Burrows argues that it is unlikely that there was a single unified cultural set of beliefs across the area. Rather there was an extensive trading and communication network throughout Wales and England, stretching into the European continent.

This network is best imagined through the enormous distances that the stones for Stonehenge were brought from Wales. But goods, ore, designs and on occasion funeral soil appears to have been moved, often great distances, to places of use or symbolic importance.

This cultural unity is unusal when compared to even a few years later. At the end of the book, Burrow's makes the point that by the time of the Roman arrival, they described Wales as being dominated by just four tribes or kingdoms. Very different to the period under consideration.

The book takes up many recent debates and arguments in archaeology. Burrow's argues that there probably weren't a specific "beaker people" for instance, despite the preponderance of this style of pottery across the region.

Despite the occasional academic feel to the book, this is a readable introduction to the period. It's a tragedy of modern nationalism that we feel the need to examine an areas pre-history through the lens of a country that didn't exist thousands of years ago, whose people and economy couldn't have been seperated out geographically in the way, say the British Isle and Europe can be. Nonetheless, this is a good book to read if you're trying to get to grips with early human history in these isles. I shall look forward to reading the authors, earlier, companion book.

Related Reviews

Burrow - The Tomb Builders
Pryor - Britain BC

Steven Mithen - To the Islands

Before reviewing this book, I want to mention how I came about it. On holiday just south of Oban on the west coast of Scotland, I visited Kilmartin. This small village is the centre of an enormous concentration of neolithic sites, including several impressive cairns, a few stone circles and not a few standing stones and inscribed rocks. Kilmartin has a very impressive museum including an extraordinary bookshop specialising in particular ancient history. I encourage readers who are fascinated by the Mesolithic and neolithic periods of history to visit and support both the museum and its bookshop.

I was lucky to find Steven Mithen's book there, because holidaying on an island very near many of the places mentioned inside, helped me picture and understand his work more. Mithen is the author of After the Ice a book that I consider one of the best introduction to the lives of ancient humans living in the post ice-age world. His latest book, To the Islands is much less an academic work and more of a archaeological autobiography. Mithen describes how his career has been tied to the people of the Mesolithic era since the earliest days of his PhD studies. The Mesolithic people were the hunter-gathers who spread across the world at the end of the last ice-age. They lived, in a myriad of different ways depending on the landscape they inhabited, before with the arrival of agricultural practices, the “neolithic revolution” led to a new mode of production.

Mithen believes that to understand the people of the Mesolithic requires a detailed understanding of their lives in the context of the environment and landscape they inhabit. The fish they could catch, the deer they could hunt, the trees and plants that surrounded them, the way they would have been inspired by the land itself. His early research using computer models to predict how hunter-gatherers might exploit the natural resources, led to repeated visits to the Hebrides to try and understand the lives of these people.

Mithen is enchanted by the Hebrides, their culture, the environment and the modern people, as well as the historical inhabitants. The remoteness of many of the islands, despite the popularity of places like Jura as modern holiday destinations, has helped protect many important prehistoric sites. This remoteness leads to further problems. Mesolithic archaeology cannot rely on hunting for visible remains like stone circles. Rather, the archaeologists must look for more subtle clues. Shell middens – the piles of waste left by prehistoric peoples as they extracted food from limpets and mussels are gradually covered by grass. Rabbits can dig out the prehistoric shells, littering them outside the entrances to their warrens and provide a clue for archaeologists. Other clues can be found in subtle surface bumps, or as Mithen tries to show, simply looking at the landscape and trying to get the mindset of an ancient hunter-gatherer. What would you look for as a hunter-gatherer on a Scottish island? Easy access to fish, woodlands and shelter? Where might you sit?

In the decades of research and excavation that Mithen does, with dozens of students and helpers, he gradually comes to understand more about the prehistoric life. On several occasions, Mithen quotes an earlier archaeologist, Lewis Binford about how archaeologists must “recalibrate their perspective of hunters and gatherers from the five foot excavation unit at a single site to an area of more than 300,000 square kilometres”. 

With this view, Mithen shows how hunter-gatherer life in the Hebrides was spread over island after island. One a source for flint for tools, others a good place to fish or find shellfish, another a ideal hunting ground. Life then wasn't stagnant, nor was it necessarily based in one place, instead it was spread across time and space. The landscape was a living part of human life, not a separate thing.

Mithen's book is wonderful. By choosing the autobiographical format, he has shown how archaeological understanding must develop over time, how intellectual ideas must be challenged and developed regularly to allow for new data and information.

For those amateur archaeologists, two things will be particularly pleasing about Mithen's book and his work. One is the detailed descriptions of the archaeological processes, how and where they sink trenches, why it takes so long and costs so much. The other is the importance he gives to amateurs. Countless times he visits local people and is shown their collections of Mesolithic tools. He frequently relies on local knowledge from farmers and others to find the best sites and is clearly inspired by the way that people are interested in the history of their place, even thousands of years ago.

One thought popped into my head repeatedly while reading this book. The world of academia that Mithen inhabits, a world of grant applications and quests for funding, is one that must be getting tighter and tighter. In fact his search for funding and support for his work makes up an important theme of the book. I don't doubt it is easier to get money to dig up a site of national importance or a famous image. But archaoeological work must rest on all history, even the small charcoal remains and broken tools that dominate the historical record from our hunter-gatherer past.

As funding gets further squeezed by Tory cuts and as education gets still further restricted to those who can afford it, how will academic subjects like archaeology cope? Mithen describes the passion and enthusiasm of his students and helpers. But if there is no cash to fund digs, how will the next generation of archaeologists develop and learn? Mithen is clearly someone prepared to fight for his subject in the wider world. We'll need him and others like him in the struggle to understand our past, but also to ensure that in the future we can continue to learn.

Related Reviews

Mithen - The Singing Neanderthals
Mithen - After the Ice

Brian Fagan - Floods, Famines and Emperors - El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations

Environmental archaeologist and historian Brian Fagan has written a number of excellent books on the historical links between environmental and climatic change and human history. This early book of his, concentrates on the links between a particular aspect of the Earth's environmental systems and their wider influence on the global climate and thence, human civilisation.

El Niño is a semi-regular change in the temperature at the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Every five years or so, these temperature changes in the East of the Pacific cause a corresponding drop in air pressure in the West. This regular oscillation, which likely has no single cause, can have major impacts depending on the severity of the changes and other factors that can exacerbate the fluctuations in the climate / weather.

The sudden shifts in climate can wreak havoc on human society. Fagan wrote this book in the late 1990s when El Niño was already a household word as a result of a number of extreme periods of weather in the 1980s and 1990s. Scientific studies were launched by a number of governments to try and understand the process better, as extreme weather changes caused by El Niño spread famine, floods and drought around the globe. Some of the consequences were appalling. The 1992 drought threatened up to 80 million people in Southern Africa. An early famine in the Sahel in 1972, another El Niño year, killed up to 200,000 and destroyed 1.2 million cattle - the principle source of food and wealth the people there.

Much of the book is concerned with this historical impacts of El Niño, as well as the way that wider climatic shifts have altered civilisation. Fagan is particular keen to link particular periods of climatic changes with similar impacts around the globe. But mostly he is examining the way that different societies can reach the point when changes in the climate can have devastating consequences. Some societies survive or adapt. One of the most fascinating chapters is the Moche people of western Peru who, in around 1000 AD were destroyed as their world warmed and the waters they relied on in their dry homelands vanished. Their leaders became increasing authoritarian to try and survive and moved their whole kingdoms closer to the sources of water in an effort to survive and maintain power. Their much reduced society was a shadow of its more glorious past, their former lands swallowed by sand dunes.

Fagan marks the passing of a number of civilisations. One of the themes he comes to, is that some of these societies had reached or exceeded the carrying capacity of the lands they relied on. He then uses this to argue that we, in the modern world, are in danger off allowing our growing population to threaten our own survival. This is not to paint Fagan as some sort of neo-Malthusian. He is more subtle than that, understanding that other factors have a major impact upon environmental questions and so on. However he stops short I think of a clear understanding of the barriers to modern society dealing with climatic catastrophe. That's not to say he doesn't come close. In discussing the 1992 Famine in Southern Africa, he shows how the IMF imposed structural adjustment schemes had lead to that country selling all its grain reserve to raise cash. Meaning that when El Niño caused droughts, they had to rely on foreign aid.

Its this difference between modern civilisation and the past that needs developing. While there are of course similarities between us today and in the past, our ability to shape the world has grown a hundred fold, but the impact upon the natural world has also grown. The motivating forces of capitalism today are the biggest barrier to us having a rational relationship with nature, as well as dealing with the consequences of environmental crises. We saw that in Africa in 1992, and more recently in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Capitalism continues to cause environmental crisis, and remains a barrier to the struggle to prevent more.

Related Reviews

Fagan - The Long Summer; How Climate Changed Civilisation
Fagan - The First North Americans

Clive Finlayson - The Humans Who Went Extinct, Why Neanderthals died out and we survived

Why the world is dominated by us and not Neanderthals, is a surprisingly complex question. Traditionally, we've been given an image of Neanderthals as lumbering idiots, not capable of withstanding the superior brain power and agility of our own ancestors. The reality is of course, far more complex.

The fossil records doesn't show any evidence that Neanderthals were ruthlessly displaced by our ancestors. What it does show, is that Neanderthal society was surprisingly complex, lasted (in the case of a small group in Gibraltar) as recently as 28,000 years ago. These were tool makers and hunters, not the stupid brutes portrayed in countless cartoons.

This is a fascinating look at our own peculiar history - how we developed, how tools transformed our ability to survive, but also occasionally limited our ability to adapt. The surprising role of climate change in getting us to were we are now is clearly explained.

Finlayson looks at why the Neanderthals went extinct and we didn't. There is every evidence that our ancestors and Neanderthals lived close together at the same time, though no evidence that they interbreed. Certainly they would have encountered each other while hunting or moving to different scavenging grounds.

So what happened to the Neanderthals? At a time of extremely primitive technology, environmental changes would have forced great changes upon human societies. In particular, the favoured hunting grounds of the Neanderthals, where areas where small tree coverage allowed for "ambush hunting". A colder climate forced the trees back, reducing areas available for hunting.

Alternate periods of warming and cooling would repeatedly isolate and then reunite populations. Obviously, some populations might not survive the changes, and the process would gradually reduce the overall population.

Luck has played a great hand in our own evolution. While some populations of our ancestors would have died out, a combination of luck, further developed bodies and the development of better technologies, as well as a wider global spread helped us survive.

Ruminating further on what survival means, Finlayson sees worrying parallels with today's changing planet. However he also points out, that it is all too easy to think that we are were we are today, because we are the product of "successful genes". Our genes are successful, only in the sense that we have made it to this point. "There were many highly successful lineages that went extinct because their luck ran out - the Neanderthals and other populations of proto-Ancestors among them".

More of the branches of our ancestral tree vanished than survived. It is only a small fraction of human existence on the planet since the development of agriculture, the point that fundamentally changed us. In that time, Finlayson argues we've lost contact with our biological heritage. There is a mismatch he argues, between our current methods of organising our lives, and the biology that evolved over millions of years.

In a sense I agree. This is close to the argument that Marxists put about a "metabolic rift" - that we have become alienated from the natural world that we are utterly dependent on. But there is a danger with Finlayson's argument - that we are simply the products of our biology. We have a unique ability to transform the world around us. At the moment, the present society we have created threatens to undermine the very ecology that is the basis for life on this planet. But we do also have in our power to transform our way of organising society and avoiding the fate of the Neanderthals.

Related Reviews

Mithen - After the Ice, A Global Human History

Buy it here.

Francis Pryor - Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons

In the simplistic view of British History, there was a brief period around 2000 years ago of stability, civilisation and prosperity with the arrival of the Romans. Either side of these few centuries was chaos, poverty and war.

In particular, the departure of the Roman's we are led to believe led to the collapse of civilisation followed by the brutal arrival of the Anglo Saxons. These Saxon's pushed aside the natives and established themselves as the new British. From such noble stock are the current denizens of this island descended.

Francis Pryor's book, which might loosely form the middle part of a trilogy, sets out to argue that this view of history is nonsense. Partly his argument is common sense. Why, with the departure of the Roman's would people simply abandon the towns and cities they had lived in, and disappear back into an earlier mode of existence?

Instead, Pryor argues persuasively that reality was very different. Firstly he explains that the Roman invasion actually impacted very little on the vast bulk of the population. Most people continued to farm as they had done, with perhaps better goods or more variety of items being available in the local market. This is explained in terms of the archaeological record by the continuity that the remains show. There aren't a series of breaks as the Roman's arrive and then leave in most places. Even in the new towns, there is often continuity between pre-Roman and Roman buildings.

A similar process takes place as the Roman's leave. Most places are left relatively undisturbed with minor changes - in particular coins vanish as the Roman market disappears. Bartering would have returned. The most common archaeological remains - pots - revert to simpler and local designs.

It should be pointed out that these aren't just Francis Pryor's ideas. He quotes numerous other archaeologists to back up his case and builds an extensive case. Here he summarises a fellow archaeologist, Dr. Richard Reece;

"He [Reece] sees no evidence for chaos or social collapse, because communities were resuming a pattern of life that had not died out and that was already well-established prior to the Roman interlude."

Following the Roman departure, there simply wasn't an Anglo-Saxon invasion. Certainly there was an Anglo-Saxon influence. But this wasn't out of the ordinary. There must have been trading networks, as well as other contacts between people living on the British Islands and the Continent for thousands of years. Pryor shows that the evidence for an Anglo-Saxon invasion is more in the minds of chroniclers and their more modern followers, than in the archaeological record.

There are numerous examples. Perhaps the most interesting is that from a farming point of view there is a great continuation of farming methods from before Roman times to more recent eras. A series of invasions by a new people, that displaced the earlier inhabitants, would have led to a change in the pollen records. Instead, either any invaders immediately learnt traditional methods of crop growing, or they didn't exist.

Pryor's is a easy to follow account. Despite the book's subtitle, there is little in here about King Arthur. The evidence for this individual is very limited. More likely King Arthur was a propaganda figure, invented for the interests of a particular elite - elements of his story tie in with much longer established myths and traditions and it's not uncommon for those trying to establish legitimacy to add existing legends to their own newer tales.

Francis Pryor's version of British history is less exciting that the one that we are used too. There are less invasions and populations often stay in one place, quietly farming for dozens of generations. Yet it is clearly a more believable history - one which puts ordinary people at the heart of things for the last two thousand years.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain BC
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages

Eugene Linden - The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations

Just how civilizations have been altered by the climate is something that scientists, historians and archaeologists are happy to debate to a great extent. There is no doubt however, that climate (or rather changes in climate) has had a tremendous effect on the development (or retardation) of various historical societies.

Eugene Linden has summarized these discussions remarkably well. In particular, Linden has produced a useful account of just how the earth’s climate works – how air circulates in the atmosphere above us, how the great oceanic currents bring warmer water to parts of the North Atlantic, and cold water elsewhere, altering local temperatures. He paints a complex picture of an intricate system, where minor changes in on area can have dramatic consequences elsewhere.

Linden also tells us the story of the study of climate – in particular how modern scientists determine how the climate was in past ages. We meet the men and women who study ice cores from the Arctic, looking at the makeup of bubbles trapped in the ice from centuries ago.

This then would be a fairly useful introduction to the study of historic effects of climate. However it suffers very much from bad editing and overbearing writing. While this is minor, it’s really annoying in places – often for instance, Linden uses acronyms that aren’t immediately explained. Sometimes he makes the same point twice (as when he mentions the launching of an underwater measuring robot, shaped like a torpedo – he jokes twice on the same page that it was done on September 11th).

Additionally, I occasionally felt that the writer was trying to hard – for instance “milquetoast” is a word that is rare even in its native America. It certainly makes the writer sound pompous, when he really wants to be accessible and readable.

There are a couple of little errors in the science too, which are annoying in the context of a popular science book. The Maunder Minimum was not the “coldest period” of the Little Ice Age, a time of “dramatically reduced sunspot activity”. Rather it is the name given to the period when sunspots almost disappeared from the face of the sun. This isn’t hair splitting – it’s a silly error given that this is one subject that climate deniers go on about.

Climate Change did bring down ancient Pharaohs, Vikings and probably played a major role in the end of Mayan civilization. Eugene Linden brings the evidence together well, and is at his best when describing how the impact of climate events are hampered by the priorities of modern society. In an excellent chapter “El Nino meets empire”, Linden shows how the free-market priorities of the British Empire meant that climate related famines had a destructive result far greater than they should have. Linden dwells on Mike Davis’ well known book on El Nino, Late Victorian Holocausts to emphasize this and to lead into a discussion on the impact climate change could have on our modern society.

As I said, Linden is at his best at this point. How major and abrupt climate change would impact a planet of 6 billion people is horrific to imagine. The book is very much I think a polemic at a US audience blinded by corporate funded climate deniers and uncaring government, as such it’s an interesting read, but probably not the best starting place for someone interested in the topic who has already read some stuff on the subject.

Related Reviews

Foster - The Vulnerable Planet; A Short Economic History of the Environment
Lynas - Six Degrees
Pearce - The Last Generation

John Romer - Ancient Lives; The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers

Whenever you wander around an ancient place, be it Roman, Egyptian or Greek. Or visit some long ruined castle or cave, it is impossible not to gaze around and imagine what it must have been like for the people who lived there.

This is doubly problematic for those who have been lucky enough to visit the Pyramids. After all, no-one lived there. These were the tombs of the richest of Egyptian society. The people who made these places died, in the most, forgotten. The ordinary people of Egypt who created the wealth of the Egyptian Pharaohs leave few if any markers.

However for those who created the beautifully engraved and decorated tombs of the Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt. This is not true. For hundreds of years, men and women of the village that is now known as Deir El Medina lived and worked on the tombs and we are lucky enough to have a wealth of detailed accounts of their lives, as well as much more circumstantial evidence to back up the documents that have been discovered.

In the last hundred years or so, Archaeologists have discovered dozens of papyrus scrolls, which detail in minutiae the lives of these tomb builders. It seems that the foremen of the working gangs were meticulous in the day to day detail they recorded.

"Year one, on the twelfth day of the first month of summer, the boulder of flint was found on the right" wrote Scribe Kenhirkhopeshef, who was in charge of keeping the work journal of the tomb of the Great Ramses (who died in 1212BC). Each day he recorded the depth of digging, the number of wicks used by the quarrymen lamps and other details of the dig. Writing mostly on flakes of stone, the scribe recorded the 13 years work on the tomb of Rameses' successor. We know he sat and watched the workers from a niche cut into the rock above the tomb because he scratched "Sitting Place of the Scribe Kenhirkhopeshef" on the rock beside his seat.

While hard, the work was rewarding for the villagers. They held a priority place in Egyptian society - the important job of creating the resting place for the Pharaoh's corpse as the king travelled into the here-after. As such they got better food rations and more beer than most ordinary people. Though this didn't always mean the villagers lived in perfect harmony. Court records record the arguments and legal wrangling that must always occur in tight-knit communities where food might be short and possessions few. We hear about the rows and the fights, and the occasional murder.

Romer has brought together the most compelling stories of these people. To use a cliche, he brings them to life. For me though, the most lifelike the workers become is when they are forced, perhaps for the first time in history, to struggle together.

During the reign of King Ramesses III (around 1160BC to 1170BC) rations went short. Probably through robbery by bureaucrats in Thebes. The tombmakers did what their brothers and sisters of generations to come have done, they used the only weapon available to them - they downed tools.

"Tempers finally broke on 14 November 1152BC, in the 29th year of the King, when the two gangs stopped their work and marched together out of the Great Place. The senior men, the two foremen, their deputies and the Scribe Amennakht had no idea where they had gone."

They went and found the local elders to demand rations and the next day headed for the temple of Ramses II, where the Mayor promised food. However, this wasn't forthcoming (not the last time a bureaucrat's promises came to nothing) and the strike continued. The next day, we learn that the missing rations were given to the men, and they returned to work. This victory seems to have given them confidence as further strikes are recorded necessitating the Pharaohs' Vizier to visit the village later in the year to examine what was causing the problems.

I could go on in great detail about similar events. The rise and fall of the village, matching the rise and fall of the power of the Pharaohs is here in detail and the final chapter brings the story up to date - detailing the discovery of the village and it's records, as well as information on how the story was decoded.

This is a fascinating bit of history - my only minor quibble, is that there is little on how the works were decoded.... the scratch markings reproduced here, carrying so much information are impossible to understand... I'd love more information on how they related to hieroglyphics, and how we know what they say. This is a minor criticism though of a fascinating book - perfect for anyone who believes that history should not be about kings and queens, but those that created their wealth, and in the words of Brecht built "Thebes of the Seven Gates".

Steven Mithen - The Singing Neanderthals; The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body

Quite early on in the reading of this book, it becomes clear that just how humans communicate, how language developed and how our minds work are matters that keep specialist scientists arguing late into the night.

Steven Mithen's excellent introduction to the debates around these matters does a good job of introducing the basic ideas to an audience of non-specialists. At almost roller-coaster speed, we learn basic brain science, how babies use language, which parts of the mind are responsible for music and language, why we might have emotions and so on.

Mithen's central theory is one that I suspect is much more controversial though. He argues that music and I mean music in all it's forms - singing, rhythm, chanting and so on, formed a much more important part of the development of the human mind. He looks at how other apes react to music, the inter-relation between music and language, and how babies develop the capacity for speech.

I must admit to finding it all a little confusing. Mithen has an easy style, but the book ends up being, in my mind, a collection of fascinating anecdotes and nuggets of information, but I felt his general argument got lost in amongst it all.

Fot instance, I was fascinated to learn about the interactions between mothers and babies, and how "baby language" actually stimulates the child's ability to pick up language later. I'm sure though, that I'll remember this much longer than Mithen's much more detailed arguments about how music and singing by mothers is part of this too. Similarly, he has very interesting stuff to say about how emotions develop and how collective living has always been central to human existence, but it all got lost in a wealth of detail and bittiness.

In the end, while thoroughly enjoying this book, I was also very disappointed by it - part of this contradiction lies in my thorough enjoyment of Mithen's earlier work, After the Ice. This was for me one of the best works about human development at the end of the last ice-age ever written for non-professionals interested in archaeology and human development. That was a superb book which will long remain with me. This is clearly a much more developed, complex work, which unfortunately didn't stimulate the right bit of my brain.

Related Reviews

Mithen - To the Islands
Mithen - After the Ice

John Ray - The Rosetta Stone and the rebirth of Ancient Egypt

There is no doubt that the Rosetta Stone has captured the imagination of many thousands of people. It’s intriguing combination of scripts, unreadable except to the expert seem to conceal all the excitement of ancient Egypt. John Ray makes the point at the start of this little history of the Stone, that it is probably the British Museum’s most popular object. Certainly sales of Rosetta Stone postcards, mouse mats and t-shirts must bring in tremendous funds for the museum.

This is one of the excellent series of books on the “Wonders of the World”. However, I am not sure that it works in this context, as well as some of the others – however important the Rosetta Stone is to archaeology, it is not the Roman Colosseum or The Parthenon.

That said, the story of the stone (and the “rebirth of Ancient Egypt” that took place as a result of its study) is fascinating. While the inscription on the stone isn’t as exciting as perhaps we’d hope, the combination of three written languages allowed the unlocking of the language of the Ancient Egyptians. This in turn allowed scholars to read the words of the Egyptians for the first time since antiquity and in turn, re-opened their world to study.

John Ray does a superb job of bring the story of the translation into the open. Two main characters dominate, the Englishman Thomas Young, described accurately as a “polymath”, who started the process of unlocking the mysteries of Hieroglyphics and the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion, who perhaps single handed created the arena of history now known as Egyptology.

John Ray takes us through how they worked out the meaning of the words – first translating the ancient Greek, then gradually associating the different Hieroglyphics with the intermediary demotic script. We also read a potted history of other attempts to translate ancient writings and get a short breakdown of the step-by-step processes that are used. We also get a fleeting history of Egypt. The Egypt of the Pharaohs (and the sort of things they wrote about, including an amusing account of Egyptian erotica) and the Egypt that was fought over by French and British colonialism. A conflict that eventually lead to the Rosetta Stone spending the last two centuries in the British Museum.

John Ray also briefly examines the thorny question of who should own the Stone, or similar artefacts. Should they be returned to their country of origin? Can anyone really “own” such items? John ducks the issue slightly I feel .Certainly I think that Egypt has a greater claim on the Rosetta Stone than some of the more complex examples he raises. The Stone was imperial plunder from the region, and certainly Egypt’s museums are more than capable of looking after it and similar items.

But this is really a digression from what is an entertaining, informative and well-written account of one of the most important archaeological pieces in museums anywhere. Uniquely, its importance, as John Ray points out, isn’t simply about the information contained within its inscriptions, but it’s also about the history that has developed around the Stone and what it enabled historians to understand about the past.

Related Reviews

Keith Hopkins & Mary Beard - The Colosseum

Michael Grant - Cities of Vesuvius - Pompeii & Herculaneum

When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum stood little chance. Both were less than 10 miles from the volcano, and both were rapidly overcome by material from inside the earth. Thousands of people fled the volcanic mud and ash. Hundreds died and the archaeological record shows that many of them died because they returned for valuables, or tried to wait out the falling rocks in places of shelter.

Pompeii is one of the great tourist sites for those interested in history and though Michael Grant starts this wonderful book, with details of some of those who died in the eruption, the vast majority of the work is an illumination of the ancient town's streets, houses, shops, theatres and brothels. There's much of interest - and it's fun to compare and contrast our lives today, with those of the Roman's in AD 79. Surely if London was overcome by natural disaster many of use would die clutching our valued possessions. But we also find familar the love that the Roman's had for fine art, for good wine and for love and literature.

There is staggering evidence for how the Roman's lived. Having been to Pompeii, I've seen the cart tracks in the streets and stood in the fine rooms of the houses, you looked at the casts of those who died clutching their children to their breast. But I didn't know archaeologists had found the remains for bread in ancient ovens or tracked the artists responsible for different murals in Roman houses.

Grant's section on graffiti is amusing - not least because so much of it is reminisant of slogan's scrawled on walls today. "At least six inscriptions compare brunettes with blondes" he tells us and "a certain Septumius employes the same medium [graffiti] to launch obscene attacks on anyone who reads his scrawl." So much was written, that many walls had signs warning against the practice - to no avail. This certainly wasn't a practice limited to adults - the relative height of different graffiti show many children had a go, often as in the case of their adult scrawlers quoting famous works of literature.

Though first published in 1971, this appears to be the first paperback edition of this short book, dated 2001. I'd recommend anyone interested in ancient lives picks up a copy, particularly if you plan to visit the Naples region anytime soon.

Francis Pryor - Britain BC

The period of history before the Romans came to Britain gets little enough attention. Right at the end of his excellent and illuminating book, Francis Pryor makes the point that the British Museum devotes less than 2% of its space to items from pre-Roman Britain.

The periods of Neolithic, Bronze and Iron in the UK are surprisingly well understood, though as with many periods of ancient history, you can get a group of archaeologists to argue into the small hours over the exact meaning of small finds or the arrangement of uncovered stones.

Pryor takes us on a historical journey right through the “half million or so years that elapsed before the Romans introduced written records to the British Isles”. In doing so, we learn a surprisingly large amount about life in “prehistory” and about the people who study it. In particular, I was struck by the large scale nature of some of the work done by people who in the past have been thought of as quite backward. We have all seen images of Stonehenge, but Pryor makes the case that Stonehenge was part of a “ritual landscape” that included tombs, paths and other large ground markings called “cursuses”.

He also points out that the ancients would have cut down hundreds of acres to create this landscape and allow it to be seen from afar. This is all evidence for collective thinking that is quite unlike the image of small bands of people we often have heard about in the past. I also particularly like how he shows that for people that distant from us, we must avoid making assumptions based on our own society – as life and death, myth and reality, past and present, religion and life must have been much more intertwined than in our own society.

It’s rare that objects other than stone or metal survive for long. However there are some places where wooden posts, pathways and so on have survived – usually bogs or similar wetlands. I was amused to see that the nature of this preservation leads scientists to be able to pinpoint with great accuracy the moment they were made – the winter of 3806 – 3807 BC for one track uncovered in Somerset and pictured in the book.

Pryor’s creates a picture of tremendously complex societies and histories – and shows how the different ages (stone, bronze and iron) tended to merge gradually into each other, rather than having specific start and end dates. He shows how there must have been traditions and histories that linked the peoples of these times. However, I do think it gets taken too far.

His attempts to show a continuity with the past are interesting, and one has to agree with his argument that invasions of Romans and Normans failed to wipe out the indigenous society (arguments of an earlier Celtic invasion previously hold little sway for modern archaeologists). But too say that as he does that “I genuinely believe that the British belief in individual freedom has prehistoric roots” is to invite ridicule – particularly as there have been many points in history since prehistoric times where individual freedom has been oppressed.

What Pryor does, is to bring alive a thriving culture and society from Britain’s past, the people’s homes, their farms, their deaths and their monuments. But I think he narrowly avoids falling into a right-wing trap that roots today’s society in some long unbroken line into the distant past.

Keith Hopkins & Mary Beard - The Colosseum

Surely it must be a basic rule of archaeology and history that you can’t generalise from one small archaeological remain, one single excavation, or one building – in order to understand a whole society. But it must be an equally important rule, that you can say a lot about a society from what it has left behind. This book, along with a couple of others in the series including Mary Beard’s great one on The Parthenon in Athens, attempts to give the best round-up of accepted wisdom about some of the world’s greatest ancient buildings and how they fit into the ancient world.

The Colosseum has long been a building that has represented the power of ancient Rome. It is a building that has been the backdrop to many films and novels (and the authors give us a taste of some of these), has inspired poetry (Byron in particular) and fired the imagination of many of those who’ve been there (including Hitler and even ancient rulers themselves who made it to Rome).

It’s also a place with many myths about it. For centuries it was believed to be a place of Christian martyrdom and the writers take care to demonstrate how this wasn’t true. The myths aren’t just ancient – most modern day films (and tour guides) make some mistaken assumptions.

In sorting the fact from the fiction, we learn some surprising stuff. For instance, for much of the Middle Ages, the building was a ruin. It’s true purpose forgotten by those living in the Rome. The authors go to great lengths to use available historical data to work out how many gladiators must have fought in the arena – the answer, contrary to the vision painted by Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, is very few. Gladiators turn out to be highly expensive to train and keep – too expensive to risk in the arena.

We also learn how the Colosseum was built – and I was surprised to learn (as were archaeologists) about the complex drainage systems below the ground. This was an Imperial building built to last (with a price tag that approached £29 million of today’s money) and modern day archaeologists still have many unanswered questions.

Even if you’ve been to Rome and walked the passageways of the Colosseum, this book will teach you a lot and if you’re lucky enough to be returning this summer, it’ll give you much more stuff to look at that you missed the first time.

Steven Mithen - After the Ice – A Global Human History 20,000 – 5,000 BC

There are many “M” words to describe this work. Here are a few that I find particularly appropriate; Magnificent, Marvellous, Monumental.

Steven Mithen has created a masterpiece, to use a fourth. His history has a huge scope (and consequently it’s a big work, but it never reads like a cumbersome book, though it often feels like it while commuting around London). Covering the period from 20,000 BC a “time of global economic equality where everyone lived as hunter-gathers in a world of extensive ice-sheets, tundra and desert” to a period where many people lived as farmers, growing sometimes wheat and barley, but just as often rice or other foodstuffs. At the end of the period, not only had farming arrived, but the domestication of animals, trade and permanent towns and villages. What had also arrived of course, was the beginnings of inequality - the next thousands of years of human society would be dominated by class divisions.

But this is beyond the scope of the work. What Mithen does, is to take the reader on an odyssey through different parts of the world – the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa to show the similarities and the differences of the people who first lived there. His method for doing this, I have seen described in other reviews as “Sci-Fi” like. But this isn’t fair. He transplants a modern traveller into the past, a traveller who can interact with the physical world, yet remains unseen by the people he is sharing time and geography with. This traveller visits the different campsites, caves and villages that have since been found, picks up their tools, helps gather berries and hunt with Polar Bear or Antelope and describes what archaeologists can best imagine life was like.

At times this is tremendously fascinating. Time and again I found myself thinking – “we can’t possibly know that” about some ancient activity, only to find on the next page, Mithen explaining how we do actually know quite a bit about 10,000 year old sandals from a cave in Arizona, or how much archaeologists have found out about the precise methods for making an spear head.

Occasionally though the approach annoyed me – not least because Mithen is unwilling to let his imagination run riot too much, so we often get descriptions of our traveller leaving before finding out exactly how something happens. It seems a strange thing to do – put a traveller back in time to describe the surroundings that we know about, but remove him when we get close to describing something we don’t know about. Such are the perils of the use of time-travel in a serious work of archaeology I suppose!

Nevertheless, I recommend this book unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the far past. You will be surprised to find out exactly how much we do know, and certainly the next time you see a collection of flint knives or spearheads in a dusty cabinet in some musty museum, you’ll be able to imagine a little bit more about the complex people who made them.

Related Reviews


Mithen - The Singing Neanderthals
Mithen - To the Islands

Miroslav Verner - The Pyramids - Their Archaeology and History

For thousands of years people have travelled to Egypt to see the pyramids. Even when first built they must have attracted visitors from far and wide. These gigantic monuments that were thousands of years old when the ancient Greeks and Romans went to Egypt still have an unbelievable power to impress.

It seems that there is no end to the interest that the Pyramids, and ancient Egyptian society can generate - is there ever a day when the History channel doesn't have a programme about their mysteries? How many DVDs, books and films have been made?

Miroslav Verner is at the cutting edge of archaeological research into the Pyramids. For many years he has headed up the Czech research team at Abu Sir, a pyramid site 30 or so kilometres south of Cairo. His book is an attempt to bring together everything that we know about these monuments and the society that built them.

This is a massive task and credit should be due to Verner for making it so readable. Given the limited knowledge we can have about a civilisation that existed 5000 years ago, Verner lets us know precisely what is known, and were there is doubt, he explains the theories and ideas that exist.


While nothing can prepare anyone for the first time they see the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, or the Great Pyramid rising above Cairo's outskirts, Verner certainly creates an exciting read though - even when describing an empty tomb, you can smell the musty air! If there is one criticism of this book, there is too much detail about the number of rooms and corridors in some of the monuments - but this isn't a book aimed at the amateur - this is a text book and that needs to be taken into account by the reader. Saying that, Verner isn't above the odd bit of humour - like when he points out that while previous archaeologists used dynamite and slave labour to enter the tombs, this isn't standard practise these days.

It is unfortunate that Verner has to spend the last chapter of this work dismissing the lunatic ideas and theories that abound about the pyramids - but he does it with the same care and humour that he uses when telling us about burial procedures and discussing the methods that Egyptian builders may have used.

If you ever go to Egypt, take this book with you. There's nothing quite like seeing the Pyramids, except perhaps knowing exactly what you are looking at and there aren't many books that will make you feel as knowledgeable about the pyramids as this one.

Related Reviews

Romer - History of Ancient Egypt vol. 1
Romer - History of Ancient Egypt vol. 2

Dieter Kurth - The Temple of Edfu - A guide by an Ancient Egyptian Priest

The huge ancient Egyptian temple at Edfu in southern Egypt must be one of the best-preserved places of the many impressive buildings that have survived from that ancient civilisation. The temple is dedicated to the god Horus, and took many decades to build.

One of the unique aspects to the building is a long inscription, over 300 metres of hieroglyphics, around the wall of the temple. This inscription, made by an anonymous Egyptian priest are of great importance because they describe the building in great detail. It’s dimensions, it’s shape and layout, the purpose of the rooms.

The text’s language is strange to read, mingling references to kings and gods in an almost poetic way, which requires a detailed understanding of ancient Egyptian beliefs and history to get more than a rudimentary enjoyment and knowledge from it.

But this in itself is fascinating – the way clearly the Egyptians believed that there was a duality between rulers on Earth, and the Gods themselves. Dieter Kurth has done amateur Egyptologists a favour by bringing this fascinating text together with maps and a history of the temple. Kurth’s introduction to the history of Edfu’s exploration by later archaeologists and the role of religion in ancient Egyptian society is also very useful. He also documents and builds on previous attempts to understand the inscriptions.

For anyone trying to get a glimpse into life 2000 years ago, towards the end of the Egyptian civilisations domination of North Africa, this book will give you a start.

But the last word should surely go to that unknown priest who wrote the words for the side of the building that speak down the centuries to us about a monument to a different world.

They [the Gods] protect their beloved son (the king) because of his monument [Edfu] and they allow his image to endure on earth, the image of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt…whose Ka is granted power and strength on the Throne of Horus, at the head of the living, forever.

Related Reviews

Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt vol. 1
Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt vol. 2

John Rose - The Myths of Zionism

The most recent demonstration in London, against the ongoing occupation of Iraq once again showed that most of those who oppose the US and UK adventures in the Middle East also oppose the persecution of the Palestinian people by the Israeli State.

The huge anti-war demonstrations follow a tradition in this respect, because the great European anti-capitalist protests, in Prague and Genoa, closely followed by the European Social Forum events, also had numerous Palestinian flags, banners and badges.

John Rose’s book is a fantastic introduction to the arguments and historical basis for the existence of the Israeli state, and the consequent oppression of the Palestinians. Israel’s existence is down to the ideology of Zionism – the belief that there should be a Jewish state which would mean an end to the centuries of anti-Semitism and oppression that Jewish people have faced. The appalling genocide of the holocaust was for many, the final impetus for the creation of such a state.

Unfortunately, many of the assumptions and arguments in favour of Zionism are, as John Rose points out, based on half-truths and myths. The biggest lie, that Israel was a “Land without people, for a people without land”. This myth has been returned to, time and time again. Rose quotes, Israeli Prime Minister Peres in 1986,

”The land to which they came, while indeed the Holy Land was desolate and uninviting; a land that had been laid waste, thirsty for water, filled with swamps and malaria, lacking in natural resources. And in the land itself there lived another people; a people who neglected the land, but who lived on it. Indeed the return to Zion was accompanied by ceaseless violent clashes with the small Arab population”

While Peres at least acknowledges the existence of the Arab population, “small” is not the correct description of a people numbering at least 650,000. His description of their “neglect” of the land shows a level of racism towards a people who had successfully farmed and lived on the land for centuries.

The author is careful not to simply blame the Zionists for the current situation – he also points his finger at western imperialism and colonialism for its role. Notorious anti-Semites like Winston Churchill were quite happy to sponsor the aims of Zionism so that they could create a “Watch Dog” country, to support British (and later US) aims in the Middle East.

Rose’s book also looks at much historical and archaeological data to back his argument for a very different historical Israel, one far from the biblical myths that Zionism often uses to justify Israel’s existence. He documents how increasingly Israel archaeologists are finding it hard to “discover” the land they expect to find. But he also shows how historically, Jews and Arabs have lived together, often using the very differences of their religions to strengthen their mutual society.

Rose ends on an optimistic, if controversial point. His optimism, is that precisely because Jews and Arabs have lived together across the Middle East in the past (and the not to distant past) they could do so in the future. His controversy comes because he argues convincingly, that for this to happen Zionism as an ideology must be discredited and removed, just as apartheid was dismantled in South Africa.

If I can make one small criticism of this book, it’s simply to do with the design. Two things are very annoying – the references Rose cites are placed within the text, making reading difficult and the sub-chapter headings are often comical in their content, reading like stilted introductions to a GCSE essay.

But these are minor criticisms in a book that will no doubt be a source of impassioned debate and argument for many years.

Gordon Childe - What happened in history

First published in 1942, Gordon Childe’s classic work “What happened in history” is an attempt to explain to the ordinary, non-academic person a history of the world. Concentrating on early history, Childe looks at how the ancient economies, their development and growth (as well as their decline) allowed civilisations to develop, flourish and in some cases, disappear.

Childe starts his work by looking at the study of history, but quickly moves on to how societies move from small bands of people, to forming small communities and then the development of a class based economy.

Alongside all this, he charts how the development of rudimentary science, tool making and the associated trade created the basis for a bigger society.

It would take a far better review (and reviewer) to do this book justice. I suspect that some of what Childe writes has now been dated by later archaeological evidence or new insights from more contemporary scientists and historians. What makes Childes work almost unique is that he was applying a basic understanding of Marx’s theories of economics to the development of human society.

Marx based his understanding on all of human history on one simple fact – that people must eat, drink and have shelter before they can do anything else. The way that people in different societies have got those basics (whether through individual farms, small collectives, slaves or modern factories) he called the “forces of production”. By looking at these forces, and how they combined with different political and ideological systems, Marx and Marxists believe that you can understand the driving forces behind every stage of human society. Of course this is a gross simplification. Deliberately so. But I wanted to point it out, because it’s at this point that I think Childe’s work is both brilliant and slightly flawed.

Childe can be contrasted with those historians, whose work concentrates entirely on kings and queens, and other “great” men and women. His understanding of how societies like that of Ancient Greece or Rome can grow, and then collapse is based on an understanding of the basic contradictions in their economies.

Marx explained how the developing forces of production – which can be crudely explained by things like invention of new tools or machines, or new ways of organising production, (factories over cottage industries say) – eventually clash with the existing methods and a ruling class wedded to the old methods. At this point society can either move forward, or fall back.

Childe for instance draws our attention to how both Greek and Roman societies had developed machines such as water pumps that could do the work of many slaves, but to get rid of slaves and replace them with machinery would start to undermine to basis of the whole economy.

Further he points out that “the institution [slavery] continued to obstruct the progress of science by making labour-saving machinery un-profitable and contributed to the impoverishment of all producer by keeping down the purchasing power of the internal market”

This could only continue for so long, before things start to collapse inwards, and the Roman empire gradually declined over decades, while successive leaders attempting to debase the currency or stimulate the economy by public building but couldn’t save the once mighty empire.

This brings me to my only problem with the work. Childe argues right at the end of his work that “Progress is real if discontinuous. The upward curve resolves itself into a series of troughs and crests. But in those domains that archaeology as well as written history can survey, no trough ever declines to the low level of the preceding one, each crest out-tops its last precursor”.

He backs this up by pointing out how after the collapse of the Roman empire, Europeans didn’t return to living in mud huts and much of the knowledge of the ancients remained alive, if in the minds of a few individuals and sacred libraries.

But Childe ignores the fact that there are many examples of societies that did expand and then contract, leaving their grand children to scrabble in the mud while looking at monuments of their forefathers former glory – the civilisation on Easter Island springs to mind.

This aside, this is a readable, if dated introduction to early history whose approach has much to teach us today. The work must have been an introduction to archaeology and history that has inspired generations since, and the errors that do occur can only be built upon to further our understanding of the past to illuminate the future.