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On 28 November 2015, I had a reading and panel discussion at Médiathèque André Malraux, a library and media centre in Strasbourg, the main city of the Alsace region of France, adjoining Germany, traditionally one of the Christmas capitals of the continent, and currently the site of the European Parliament.

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Iran has long had a difficult relationship with the West. Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 overthrew the monarchy and established an Islamic Republic, Iran has been associated in the popular consciousness with militant Islam and radical anti-Westernism. ‘Persia’ by contrast has long been a source of fascination in the Western imagination eliciting both awe and contempt that only familiarity can bring. Indeed if ‘Iran’ seems altogether alien to us, ‘Persia’ seems strangely familiar. There are few cultural icons or aspirations that we would associate with Iran; there are by contrast quite a few we would relate to Persia, most obviously carpets, the occasional cat and for the truly affluent, caviar. That these two words would elicit such dramatically different associations is all the more striking because they are describing the same place. Persia is simply the name inherited from the Greeks and the Romans for the great empire to the East that its inhabitants came to know as ‘Iran’. Persia, from the province of Pars, was not unknown to the Iranians but they would not have used it to apply to the entirety of their state.

Yet Persia reminds us that Iran is not as unfamiliar to us as we might imagine. Quite the contrary. The Persians serve an almost unique function in the Western narrative, being present at the birth and some might argue, the creation of a distinctly Western civilisation. If the Greeks under the influence of Herodotus, first defined history as a conflict between ‘East’ and ‘West’, identified as the Persian and the Greeks, it was a model reinforced with some vigour by the Romans whose own political expediency ensured that many nuances in the relationship were smoothed out to provide a reassuring narrative of confrontation between an increasingly civilised West and barbaric East. Yet if the Romans held up the Persians as a mirror upon which to reflect their own glories, the mirror was never quite as untarnished as its proponents would have liked to believe: the Persians were never quite the antithesis of the West that some sought to portray. The relationship, as the Greeks might have protested, was a good deal more subtle and a great deal more intimate.

This is perhaps best exemplified by the attitude towards the Persian king Cyrus the Great, widely admired in the Greek world as the ideal king whose political wisdom was fictionalised for posterity by Xenophon in his Cyropaedia, or ‘Education of Cyrus’. Cyrus, real or imagined was to have a profound influence on the political elites of the Western world from the renaissance through to the Enlightenment, while his role as a ‘messiah’ in the Old Testament has ensured an enduring affection among Christians, intriguingly among the Protestant variety that populated North America where the name remains popular.

Indeed the ancient Persians, for all their antagonism retained nobility that made them attractive to their Western protagonists. So much so, that when Montesquieu sought ‘discussants’ to critique the condition of Western – in this case French – state and society, he produced his ‘Persian Letters’. The Persians in the Western imagination were sufficiently ‘civilised’ to perform this role. They were educated and had good ‘manners’; were proficient in poetry to the highest standard and, as Cyrus himself exemplified, were masters of the art of landscape gardening, indicative of man’s power over and connection with nature. Indeed the Old Persian word for walled garden has given us our word for ‘paradise’.

It is striking how many Renaissance princes sought to emulate these characteristics and achievements. Yet by the end of the Enlightenment, as Western power grew to surpass that of the Persians, and travellers became reacquainted with the country and its people, old prejudices were redefined for the modern era. The Iranians were not quite like the Persians of their imagination but there was a convenient explanation to hand. The Persians of old were undoubtedly civilised but they had succumbed to decadence and hence decay. They had in sum become excessively civilised and indulgent; exotic yet effete. This explained their predicament and reconciled the apparent contradiction of being both civilised and barbarous at the same time.

Gibbon, perhaps like Herodotus before him, had found a means of reconciling contradictory tendencies, not only in defining the Persians but in explaining the Western relationship with them. A relationship that has been far from confrontational and much more symbiotic than some might suspect. Persia represents at once an ideal and the dangers ever-present in the corruption of that ideal. Persia – and by extension Iran – has been part of the grand narrative of the ‘West’ since its inception: it is neither as alien, nor indeed as foreign, as we may like to think.

Featured image credit: Apadana of Persepolis, by F. Ameli A Persian. CC BY-SA-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

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Millard, Anne. 2012. A Street Through Time: A 12,000-Year Walk Through History. New York: DK. Illustrated by Steve Noon.

Though it was first published in 1998, this is the first time that I've seen A Street Through Time: A 12,000-Year Walk Through History, and now that I've seen it, I wonder why DK waited so long to issue a revised edition.


A Street Through Time recounts the entire history of Western Civilization through a cross-section view of a single street along a river.  From the "Stone Age" through "The street today," double spread illustrations show a changing street through each major period of Western history. Measuring roughly 12" x 10", this is an over-sized book so packed full of information that it could take days to absorb everything.

The illustrations are replete with detailed  figures engaged from every walk of life engaged in every manner of activity. Because there is so much detail, important activities or information are enlarged with explanation in the white space margins, as in this example from "Iron Age (600BCE),"

TOP MAN
After the warriors and the priests, the blacksmith is the most important man in the village.
 

The accompanying illustration may be found in smaller scale within the street's cross-section, offering the reader the opportunity to hunt (Where's Waldo-style) and find the highlighted people within the larger picture.  To add fun, a "time traveler" character is included on each spread.

It does not take a keen eye to see that the general landscape and the placement of important town features (places of worship, security and commerce or trade) change little over 12,000 years.  Modern buildings are often located in the exact same place as those from hundreds or even thousands of years earlier.  Churches are enlarged, amphitheaters decay, buildings are expanded and subdivided, but much remains from earlier days.

This is a fascinating way to look at history, and will make conceptual sense to children who are intensely familiar with their own streets.


I can't say that I know the proper audience for this book, but I loved it. The publisher suggests ages 10 and up, though I suspect some younger children will find it intriguing as well.

Includes prefatory information, contents, timeline, glossary, index, credits. One complaint - the descriptive phrases embedded within the illustrations are, given the small size and great detail of the artwork, extremely difficult to see.

Amazon.com offers its "Look Inside!" feature for A Street Through Time. Check it out.

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In What Makes Civilization?, archaeologist David Wengrow provides a vivid new account of the ‘birth of civilization’ in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). These two regions, where many foundations of modern life were laid, are usually treated in isolation. This book aims to bring them together within a unified history of how people first created cities, kingdoms, and monumental temples to the gods. In the original blog post below, David Wengrow writes about that isolated view of the Near and Middle East.

To talk of civilizations is not just to describe the past. It is also to reflect on what is different about the societies we live in, how they relate to one another, and the extent to which their futures are bound up with traditions inherited from previous ages. The ancient Near East—including Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) and Egypt—occupies a uniquely paradoxical place in our understanding of civilization. We freely acknowledge that many foundations of modern civilization were laid there, along the banks of the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile. Yet those same societies have come to symbolise the remote and the exotic: the world of walking mummies, possessive demons, unfathomable gods, and tyrannical kings. What is the source of this paradox? For answers we usually look to the legacy of the Old Testament, and the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. But as part of a generation that was no longer obliged to read the ‘Classics’ at school, I find something unsatisfying about the idea that we have simply inherited the cultural prejudices of the ancients, as though by osmosis.

Most people today, I would have thought, are more likely to encounter the ancient Near East through the lens of Hollywood than through the biblical and Greco-Roman literature that informed the views of earlier generations. Still, when the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003, eight decades after its foundation by the British diplomat and archaeologist Gertrude Bell, our newspapers proclaimed ‘the death of history’. The headlines, for once, were in my opinion proportionate to the truth. Ancient Mesopotamia and surrounding parts of the Middle East were the setting for some of the most momentous turning points in human history: the origins of farming, the invention of the first writing system, of mechanised transport, the birth of cities and centralised government, but also—and no less importantly—familiar ways of cooking food, consuming alcohol, branding commodities, and keeping our homes and bodies clean. That is what archaeologists and ancient historians mean when they talk (a little coyly, these days) about ‘the birth of civilization’, 5000 years ago, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.

As somebody who researches and teaches the archaeology of the Middle East for a living, I have often been struck by how little Mesopotamia is discussed outside a small circle of academics, by contrast with its ever-popular neighbour on Nile. Even less widely known are the other great urban centres of the Bronze Age: in the Indus Valley, the oases of Central Asia, on the Iranian Plateau, and along the shores of the Persian Gulf. Contrary to what most people think, the discovery of ‘lost civilizations’ did not end with the Victorian era. It has been going on, quietly and steadily, amid the turmoil of the 20th century, through fieldwork in remote and sometimes dangerous areas, and through the equally important work of analysis and translation that takes place in universities and museums. Why are the results of this steady increase in our knowledge about the ancient world not better known?

Academics and curators must themselves carry a c

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With a title like this, you know that this book will have shelf appeal! But will the readers keep with it after it’s on the table? Did the Romans poop in public?!

In this fast and gross history, readers will learn all sorts of interesting bits about the history of our bathroom habits. The first two chapters “Poop Matters” and “Bad Plumbing, Bad News” set the scene giving readers a sense of the sociology of waste, and making them hone their minds on to the idea the how and the why of poop and fashion and poop and class. Set at a furious pace, author Sarah Albee then gets to the history starting with the Romans and ending with disposable diapers and fitting all sorts of fascinating facts in between.

For example, if someone asked you who invented the toilet, chances are you would say Thomas Crapper. Guess what? You’d be wrong. In fact, in 1596 Sir John Harington invented a flush toilet for himself and Queen Elizabeth (p.132). It’s just too bad there weren’t any sewers. Thomas Crapper doesn’t come along until 1884! But go back 5000 years further and it turns out that the Harrapan civilization (in what is now Pakistan) built sewers, and private bathhouses that drained into covered sewers.

It’s not all about toilets either. Albee explores the frightful diseases that caused havok among cities like London, New York and Paris. Cholera, dysentery, escherichia coli (E. coli), polio, schistosomiasis and typhoid are all waste related and all took out large portions of the human population (and unfortunately continue to do so in poorer and developing nations).

There are highlighted boxes throughout the book that outline topics such as waste related jobs (Fullers, Paleoscatologists, Tanners, Gongfermors, Barber Surgeons, Knight’s Squires, Delousers, Chair Men), “Hygiene Heroes” (Florence Nightengales, Ambroise Pavé, Leonardo da Vinci, Sir John Harington, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. John Snow) and “Too Much Information” (filled with some fun, gross-out facts that are somehow related to poop). There is also an interesting look at fashion and the bathroom (for example, how do you go while wearing a hoop skirt?).

Overall, this is a fun and gross book that has many points of entry. It would make a fabulous book-talk or browsing book and has enough information to help out on projects dealing with diseases, fashion, ancient civilizations, tenement life, royalty, and even colonial times.

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In New York on Friday night, there were dire warnings of gusting winds and 10 inches of snow for Saturday night. Saturday morning we ran around gathering supplies--food, books, DVDs. Then we settled in to wait. I was panicking about the gusting winds. Never had to think about it before I moved here. For some reason, this area is powered by one flimsy power line that is extremely susceptible to wind. We frequently have power outages for half a day to a couple of days. No big deal in the spring/summer/fall, but winter!

Honestly, we're thisclose to the Dark Ages. No power in the winter means no heat, the well pump stops working so no running water, no lights, no way to cook the food. Roads are covered in snow/ice, so no cars. Suddenly I'm planning on how to store the water, gather wood to burn a fire, stashing nonperishable foods, walking on foot for help.

My corner of the civilized world--where I feel so far from our cavemen ancestors--comes crashing down with one little wire. We didn't end up having a power outage, and only got 6 inches of snow, but still I think getting closer to my cavewoman roots put everything in perspective. Basic needs and survival of the family trump all.

p.s. Saving for a back-up generator is now at the top of our list, since we'd rather not go primal.

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