How the West was spun

The notion that the 'civilised West' began with the Greeks and Romans ignores millennia of earlier cultural entanglements.

- BY NIK DIRGA

History is written by the winners, or so the saying goes. But is it actually just written by the winners with the best public relations skills? If you grew up in the last century, many of us were fed the notion that “civilisation” started only with the Greeks and then the Romans, and that everything before that was pretty much cavemen grunting and some stuff from The Bible.

Oxford professor Josephine Quinn's How The World Made The West, a thought-provoking reconsideration of ancient times, makes an authoritative case for how a broad tapestry of forgotten cultures stitched together over time led to what we now think of as “the Western world”.

As she puts it, “19th-century scholars decided, in the spirit of civilisational thinking, that ancient history happened first in the Greek Aegean and then moved west for a second act in Roman Italy.”

The theory was that Greeks and Romans “civilised” us, which ignores that Greek “democracy” was mostly for men or that Romans embraced slavery and public executions.

Quinn stakes her claim firmly at the outset, saying, “There has never been a single, pure Western or European culture.”

The monolith that has been called Western civilisation has a deeply ingrained tint of implied superiority, yet in her fast-paced and fact-filled gallop through 4000 years, Quinn lays out how Asia, Africa, the Middle East and India all contributed many of what we think of as solely “Western” inventions and systems.

“A narrative focused solely on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past, and impoverishes our understanding of our own world,” Quinn writes.