Why Empires fall? Part 1
Will Durant’s book on our Oriental Heritage.
Primo
Rome, Athens, Carthage, The Holy Roman Empire…..
There exists a long list of great civilizations that although have disappeared for centuries, if not more than a millennium, continue to cast their shadows over us.
Our legal code is indebted to the Romans, our drama to the Greeks; but we often forget about the civilizations that were long extinguished before Caesar’s time. Till today, we cannot read the Indus Valley Script and portray in filmmaking the Persians as barbarians who invaded Greece.
Will Durant’s book takes a wonderful dive into numerous empires, transporting you to the bustle of Mesopotamian markets, crude Sumerian poetry, and the complaints of students against their teachers for forcing them to write too much in ancient Egypt.
But what more do the ancients offer us more than decaying monuments and conspiracy theories?
Are we more civilized than the “barbarians’ that surround us?
Is it in our best interests to wall ourselves to what we know, and stay away from the unknown?
What the book actually is about?
The book covers an in-depth history of numerous civilizations in the old world, documenting their rise from obscurity to their eventual fall into the ashes of history. Moreover, the book takes several twists and turns along the way. For example, it devotes several pages to the Upanishads, ancient Indian religious texts that dealt with moral issues that face us even today. The beauty of the Upanishads is the diversity of thought that is appreciated, ranging from a belief in karma to the inadequacy of the human intellect in mastering the mysteries of the universe. What struck me out is that the older Upanishads(the Upanishads, like the Bible, wasn’t written all at once), poked fun at Vedic rituals, proposing similarities in ritualistic ceremony towards vile acts I dare not mention.
Is this satire we see? Perhaps the ancients did have a sense of humour?
The book treats each civilization in isolation and strives to offer an unbiased view while still keeping the reader engaged. I would definitely buy this book and gift it if I had as much gold as Ramses the Second.
Overarching themes
One sees several themes in great civilizations.
They all had similar beginnings in an ancient agricultural society. There would be no civilization if humans did not start using the plough. City-states merged to create small kingdoms that then merged to create empires
One could roughly divide the ancient world into the Middle East(Egypt, Persia, Babylon), India, and Far East Asia. While these existed in isolation at the start, the beauty of trade united these civilizations as ships sailed with Indian pepper for Egyptian gold.
All empires had a rigid caste system, with surprisingly not traders but priests at the top of the hierarchy. Religious authorities have had close to absolute control for a huge part of human history, the results of which I shall leave the reader to decide.
A few men and women actually changed the world, while the rest of the world slaved sowing grain. The book delves into the wise decisions and shortcomings of several ancient kings and explains why idealistic thinking may often cause more harm than good.
The blood spilt by war has churned the wheels of civilization.
Structures that prop up governments eventually put its citizens in shackles.
To Conclude
Just as the pharaohs thought themselves Gods, we often see ourselves as the greatest creation of evolution. However, we must give credit to those who walked before us and set us on this path, whether it was Zoroaster of Persia or the Vedic stoics of India. It is foolish for us to assume that the ancient wonders of the world were built by some external force or visitors from outer space, just cause we can’t do it doesn’t mean that no one else could have done it. Perhaps, through the study of history, we too may find answers to the questions we face today while maintaining an adventurous spirit towards what we do not know about………….yet.
“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” — Will Durant
