Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Read Online Free PDF Page B

arable, without a single large navigable river, cursed with almost no abundance of natural resources other than a few deposits of gold, metals, and timber, its coastline vulnerable to the Persian fleet, its northern plains open to migrating nomads from Europe and southern Asia, its tiny and vulnerable island polities closer to Asia than Europe. Are we then to blame its mountains, which discouraged vast hydraulic farming and contained few riches, or commend the rocky terrain for ensuring political fragmentation that led to innovation? The old Victorian idea that Greece wore itself out with internecine killing is now to be replaced by the popular biological notion that such natural diversity led to “rivalry” that gave the West the advantages of embracing innovation.
    Grain harvests in Ptolemaic Egypt (305–31 B.C.) reached astounding levels of production. Far from an exhausted Nile valley ending the power of the Egyptian dynasties, it bloomed as never before under Greek and Roman agricultural practice. If the pharaohs were doomed because of the disadvantages of nature and an exhausted soil, the Ptolemies who walked their identical ancient ground most assuredly were not—Alexandria, in a way Karnak could not be, for nearly five hundred years was the cultural and economic hub of the entire Mediterranean. How was that possible when thousands of prior harvests should have exhausted the Nile basin for Greek colonialists? Why did not the pharaohs utilize the great delta of Alexandria to create an emporium on the Mediterranean to facilitate trade between Asia, Europe, and Africa? Clearly, culture in Egypt—not geography, not weather, and not resources—had changed from 1200 to 300 B.C.
    Vast cultural changes could also occur not only in the same place but among the same people. Mycenaean Linear B of the thirteenth century B.C. was a clumsy, largely pictographic script used by a small cadre to record royal inventories; the Greek language of the seventh century B.C. was widely disseminated and facilitated philosophy, science, literature, and poetry. Obviously, the climate, geography, and animals of central Greece did not mutate all that much in five hundred years. What allowed a written language in mainland Greece to evolve so differently from others elsewhere in the Mediterranean and from past Hellenic civilization was a radical revolution in social, political, and economic organization. Mycenaeans and polis Greeks lived in exactly the same place and spoke roughly the same language, but their respective values and ideas were a world apart. The biology and the environment of Greece may explain why both cultures farmed olive trees, herded sheep, relied on stone, mud brick, and tiles for construction materials, and even had the same words for mountains, cow, and sea, but it does not explain the vast difference between Mycenaean state agriculture and the family farms of the polis— much less why classical Greek militaries were far more dynamic than those of the earlier palaces.
    No one denies the great role that geography, climate, and natural history play in history—Scandinavians obviously developed ideas of time, travel, and war different from the natives of Java. The absence of horses ensured that the Incas and Aztecs would lack the mobility of their Spanish adversaries. Yet the fact is that the ancient civilizations of the Near East, India, China, and Asia often encompassed for long periods of time areas of similar latitude, climate, and terrain as the West, with more or less the same advantages and disadvantages in resources and location. Land, climate, weather, natural resources, fate, luck, a few rare individuals of brilliance, natural disaster, and more—all these play their role in the formation of a distinct culture, but it is impossible to determine exactly whether man, nature, or chance is the initial catalyst for the origins of Western civilization. What is clear, however, is that once developed, the West, ancient