With some surprise, the history books I've been leafing through have sustained my interest and curiosity.  When I was young, even in high school, history lessons felt like more of a chore - something you had to wade through to move onto the next thing - maybe because of how it was taught, or maybe it was my teachers.  History is a difficult subject in general.  Hence, I imagine it's difficult to teach.  What do you teach and why?  From which perspective, and why?  How much detail do we want to cover?  Some topics have mountains of primary evidence and sources (Ancient Rome) whereas others have much less to go on (Native American tribes).  In this sense, whatever we teach or learn from history is always going to be fraught with <missing item>, cultural interpretation, political biases, and the worst of all, in my view: propaganda campaigns.  

Propaganda isn't a modern phenomenon, either.  We like to think that Operation Mockingbird, and the like, are only contemporary adjuncts to large bureaucratic governments to keep the official narrative within their grasp, but any history scholar knows this isn't true - nor should we.  History isn't necessarily written by the victors, but it's most definitely written by people with subjective worldviews, religious practices, and political ideals.  In other words, our understanding of history is only as good as our sources, and its only as broad as how many different ones we read.  This underlines part of my overall goal with the History section in the Letters to Logos project.  In other words: read a lot of famous history works from different eras and perspectives, and if they don't fit here, put them in the Miscellaneous section.  At worst, I'll become a radical bigot or bewildered by the very rotation of the Earth.  At best, the patterns of civilization and the human condition will emerge with more clarity by the pages on hand.  

As a preamble, and to prepare for some of the denser later works, I've included some popular "history" overviews.  These are books that touch on many of the major events and topics over the course of our known human civilization worldwide.  Except for A Brief History of Time and A Short History of Nearly Everything - which focuses more on science and physics - the other history books I've read so far cover broad periods of human civilization.  A Little History of the World, by E.H. Gombrich fits into this latter category covering major civilizations and events in history with brevity and clarity.

Gombrich begins his survey with a brief overview of early prehistoric groups and cave paintings, summarizing the Ice Age epoch with: "The Ice Age lasted for an unimaginably long time.  Many tens of thousands of years, which was just as well, for otherwise people would not have had time to invent all these things."  The other details of this unimaginably long period of ice ages and interstadials - when humans were more or less the species we are now - are sparse unexplored.  The focus of Gombrich's history isn't on this immense unknown period, precisely because there simply isn’t a lot of evidence, but I still wonder, often, if the story of our distant past is far more complicated and interesting than we can imagine.  The pyramids and Great Sphinx are great examples of this curious ambiguity.

For the purposes of our known history, and what it generally accepted as the beginning of human civilization, starts in ancient Egypt and the Fertile Crescent around what is modern day Iraq.  Gombrich expounds on the different dynasties that emerged and fell around the Nile over thousands of years.  An interesting point that is lost on many people is how far the Egyptian dynasties go back in time.  The oldest known dynasty is further away from Cleopatra than Cleopatra is from today. 

In parallel there are interesting alternative stories that have been gaining traction recently on the deep history of the pyramids and the Sphinx.  By some accounts, the pyramids and Sphinx are far older than the oldest known Egyptian dynasties.  The issue comes down to dating ancient stone.   We can date organic matter with carbon by looking at the rate of C-13 and C-14 radioactive decay which happens at a somewhat constant rate.  However, ancient stone structures don't have carbon in them, as they are constructed by stone materials like granite or gneiss.  These stones typically contain silicon, oxygen, and other minerals but not carbon.  Accurately dating the stone is very difficult.  Our current understanding is based on hieroglyphic interpretations inscribed on ancient Egyptian walls that account for pyramid commission and construction.  However, for all we know, ancient primitive tribes could have haphazardly come across these structures many thousands of years after they were built and conceded that:  "these must have been built by the gods".   They could have assumed the land was sacred and decided to settle in and around the stone structures.  Later, their carbon material - whether from mummified bodies, clothes, or food were discovered by archaeologists and, after using carbon dating, ascribed the foundation of the structures to the oldest carbon dating material they find.  This is true for other large structures as well including the walls in Peru, and perhaps the stone pyramids in the Yucatan peninsula.  The main point is to keep an open mind, because in the words of Graham Handock, "stuff just keeps getting older."

Gombrich brings us next to ancient Mesopotamia, Crete, the founding Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the rise of Persia.  Although permanent settlements were established many thousands of years before, with the rise of these cultures we see the establishment of writing, and with this, accounts of kings, rulers, myths and stories of a people.  From this material we can start to glean what life was like in deep antiquity and how the threads connect to what came later, like the Romans, the Byzantines, the Huns, the Mongols, the Ottomans, Medieval Europe, The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, and up through today etc.   

 

What is lost and likely to never to be found is what came before.  Without written accounts, or even hieroglyphics in the case of ancient Egypt or Mesoamerica, is merely secondhand evidence and piecemeal interpolation of where we came from before the more advanced settlements.  On top of this, the theory of catastrophism has gained traction in recent years.  What if there's been multiple advanced civilizations before today, but they were wiped out by comet impacts, or magnetic pole shifts, or super volcano eruptions?  What if 100,000 years ago, a global civilization was entirely wiped out and only small hunter-gatherer tribes in remote regions survived?  Hunter-gatherer tribes would have been a step ahead in the survival game compared to a society that was dependent on networks of suppliers and fragile farming soil that could be choked out by soot.  These are questions that perplex me and many others today regarding our deep history as a species.  Hopefully, with patience and perseverance we can piece together the truth on our deep history.  Who knows, maybe we still have the answers, they are just buried a mile below the pyramids of Giza.   

 

Summary:  A decidedly western biased account of world history, but nonetheless enjoyable and informative within its brevity.   

Rating:  7.5

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