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Josephine Crawley Quinn

How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History Kindle Edition

by Josephine Crawley Quinn (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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An award-winning Oxford history professor “makes a forceful argument and tells a story with great verve” (The Wall Street Journal)—that the West is, and always has been, truly global.

“Those archaic ‘Western Civ’ classes so many of us took in college should be updated, argues Quinn, [who] invites us to . . . revel in a richer, more polyglot inheritance.”—The Boston Globe

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE

In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.

According to Quinn, reducing the backstory of the modern West to a narrative that focuses on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past. This understanding of history would have made no sense to the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves, who understood and discussed their own connections to and borrowings from others. They consistently presented their own culture as the result of contact and exchange. Quinn builds on the writings they left behind with rich analyses of other ancient literary sources like the epic of Gilgamesh, holy texts, and newly discovered records revealing details of everyday life. A work of breathtaking scholarship, How the World Made the West also draws on the material culture of the times in art and artifacts as well as findings from the latest scientific advances in carbon dating and human genetics to thoroughly debunk the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle.

In lively prose and with bracing clarity, as well as through vivid maps and color illustrations, How the World Made the West challenges the stories the West continues to tell about itself. It redefines our understanding of the Western self and civilization in the cosmopolitan world of today.

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Sept. 3 2024
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Popular Highlights in this book

What are Popular Highlights?

More broadly, I want to make the case that it is connections, not civilizations, that drive historical change.
Highlighted by 134 Kindle readers
Civilizations are such a familiar way to see the world today that they can seem like natural facts, a universal model for the organization of human society. They are in fact a relatively recent European invention, part of a phenomenon I call “civilizational thinking.”
Highlighted by 92 Kindle readers
About four millennia separate the two revolutions that bookend my investigation: the adoption of open-sea sailing in the Mediterranean, which provided the first fast link west, and the development of new navigational tools that dramatically extended the western horizon.
Highlighted by 87 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

William Dalrymple says one of the most fascinating works of global history to appear for many years

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“As our leaders and pundits glorify ‘Western Civilization’ and excoriate migration and wokeness, Josephine Quinn offers a momentous correction: The Greeks and Romans were hodgepodge people, and if we are their heirs it is only because of globe-spanning connections that always produce multifarious ways of life. Brilliant and essential.”—Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

About the Author

Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. She has degrees from Oxford and University of California, Berkeley; has taught in America, Italy, and the UK; and co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, as well as to radio and television programs. She is the author of one previous book, the award-winning In Search of the Phoenicians, and lives in Oxford.

Chapter One

A Single Sail

Byblos, c. 2000 BCE

It is just after dawn on a warm morning about 4,000 years ago. We are at the port of Byblos, built across a promontory below the cool green slopes of Mount Lebanon. The fishing boats are already out, and the front is bustling: Barges stream in from merchant ships that dropped anchor the night before, young men joke around as they load up a donkey train with sacks and baskets and, south of the town’s stone walls, rafts loaded with tree trunks glide down the river to the coast. High above the harbor stands a new temple with a tower guiding sailors to safe mooring, and with anchors built into its staircase and walls for good fortune. The people of this compact, glittering little town honor their debt to the sea.

A couple of kilometers offshore a handsome sailing ship, larger than the rest, rides at anchor in the shallows. The northwesterly winds have dropped over the last few weeks, the temperature is cooling, and now the boat just awaits its passengers and crew.

Trade has taken these men far and wide across a web of cities and empires, artisans and poets, a network rooted in the river valleys of Egypt and western Asia but connected to a bigger world beyond. They can speak several languages, and if we had run into them last night they could have told us some stories over a jar or two of the excellent local wine.

One of the merchants has sailed down the coast and up the Nile, past more than a hundred of the pyramid tombs built by Egyptian priest-kings, to do business in the sandy trading city of Kerma, capital of the gold-rich land to the south that the Egyptians called Kush. From there he traveled across the eastern Sahara to the Red Sea, where he joined a convoy of ships traveling south to the Horn of Africa, in search of ivory, ebony, incense, and gold.

Two more traders have made the long donkey trek toward Mesopotamia. First they headed north across the mountains through the Akkar Gap (today guarded by the Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers) then east on flatter lands toward the Euphrates. One carried on overland to the Tigris to break bread with men who had hiked south through the Caucasus, leading fine horses and loaded with furs, and who told him of a flat plain farther north, stretching for months of riding time. The other shipped his wares down the Euphrates to the walled city of Ur just north of the Persian Gulf coast, a port far bigger than Byblos.

There he visited the sacred precinct in the northwest of the city dedicated to the moon god Nanna and his consort Ningal, filled with temples and courtyards, government offices and the king’s great palace. In the far corner he climbed the triple staircase of the new ziggurat, a stepped temple-mountain built of bitumen and brick; from the top he watched ships depart for Arabia and the Indian coast and return laden with copper and precious stones. Down at the harbor itself he compared notes with an old man who had been sent to the Gulf from the Indus decades earlier to run his family’s trading interests, and listened to his stories of a great green valley far to the east, with strange humped cattle and five enormous cities built of baked red clay.

The conversation in Byblos that night transports us around a vast connected world in constant flux, full of travelers to whom civilizational thinking would make little sense. When the crew head off in the morning they will head in a new direction, toward the setting sun. Before we follow them ourselves, however, we have to go back to the beginning, to find out how much human history depends on human contact, and how they got this far.

Humans have always sought one another out, even at species level: As a result of such encounters—friendly or otherwise—we all have a small but significant percentage of Neanderthal heritage in our genes, and the DNA of at least three other archaic human species survives in modern populations. Once Homo sapiens had supplanted other varieties across the planet, she kept on walking—and sometimes paddling too. Hunter-gatherers traveled with their prey and with the seasons, and they traveled to find one another, building mysterious megaliths together in the Taurus Mountains and celebrating feasts in halls made of mammoth bones along the Dnipro and the Don. They swapped raw materials: People in Cyprus and on the Red Sea obtained obsidian, a shiny, hard volcanic glass that made excellent cutting tools, from central Anatolia. They exchanged technical information as well: New designs for arrowheads spread quickly across a wide area from Mesopotamia to Syria.

As the global climate settled and warmed at the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, exchange became even more important in the so-called Fertile Crescent (which really looks more like a boomerang). There in the new temperate conditions, abundant local game and wild plants prompted the first experiments in agriculture. Pioneers took local wild grasses with small, easily dispersed seeds and by careful and repeated selection they nudged them into producing fat, firmly attached grains, easier for humans to harvest, eat, and process into flour but now in need of human intervention to reseed. Another form of selective breeding turned wild animals into human servants: Dogs had long been bred from wolves for hunting companions, but now aurochs were transformed into cows, boars into pigs, and sheep were coaxed out of their natural aggression.

Farming required a more sedentary lifestyle, but it still depended on contact and communication. Each domestication took place in a specific area of the Fertile Crescent—wheat, cattle, and sheep in the northern hills, barley and pigs in different areas west of the Euphrates, and goats in what is now Iran. By around 7000 BCE, however, all the new breeds are found throughout the region. This involved more than just swapping seeds and stock: People had to explain to one another how to sow, cultivate, harvest, and cook the new plants, and how to breed, feed, and care for the new animals.

Farming a wider range of crops and animals considerably reduced the risks of the agricultural lifestyle, dependent as it was on the weather and the gods. Agriculture still wouldn’t have appealed to everyone: It is harder work than hunting and foraging, and a sedentary workforce is a breeding ground for infectious disease. But the returns promote population growth, which encourages migration in search of new land. From the seventh millennium BCE agriculture expanded across a vast swath of the world. Farmers took their animals, seeds, and skills south to Egypt, east to Iran and the Indus Valley, north to Anatolia, and from there west into Europe. They established themselves wherever they could sustain crops by good luck or human ingenuity, and at the expense of the people who used to hunt and herd across the new fields.

The most successful experiments took place in the dry river valleys of Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers,” tucked inside the arc of the Fertile Crescent itself. Farming the rich alluvial soils between the Tigris and the Euphrates required the construction of an intricate network of canals and water channels, and rewarded the farmers with dramatic yields. They could now grow enough food to support others to become potters, priests, or administrators, and by the fifth millennium BCE towns had emerged. By the late fourth millennium BCE Uruk on the Euphrates was a true city of 250 hectares—about the size of London’s Soho—with canals, temples, and a population of between 20,000 and 40,000 people.

The administrative requirements of managing a large agricultural territory beyond the city walls meant that Uruk also developed the world’s first known system of standard weights and measures, based on the load an average man could carry (a talent) and on the length of his forearm (a cubit). The first writing appears here too. Initially this was just a counting system—circles for tens, lines for ones—but then scribes added pictograms to show what was being counted. By the end of the fourth millennium, they had extended this code to record the local language and then literature in signs imprinted into clay tablets with a stylus and now known as cuneiform, from the Latin for “wedge-shaped.”

By the mid-third millennium BCE a patchwork of cities ruled by kings covered southern Mesopotamia, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. We can tell a similar tale about Egypt, where farming arrived on the Nile in the sixth millennium BCE. Complex irrigation technology was needed here too to trap and divert the annual floods, and the yields were again impressive. By the late fourth millennium large cities had grown up along the Nile, and around 3000 BCE the communities of Upper and Lower Egypt came together under the “Old Kingdom” dynasties that wrote in hieroglyphs, built the pyramids, and ruled over more than a million people.

This is a story so familiar that it can sound like fate: the first steps on the ladder of progress assembled in the eighteenth century whereby hunters become herders become farmers, who build cities and acquire rulers, rules, and institutions—in short, civilization. But in fact it reveals the holes in the traditional narrative of self-development. Like earlier, smaller communities, the kingdoms of Mesopotamia and Egypt did not make themselves. Nor were they the only societies of interest in this era.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CQJLLWQ3
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ Sept. 3 2024
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 69.5 MB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 594 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593729816
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
�鶹�� Rank: #115,944 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #23 in Historiography (Kindle Store)
- #60 in Historiography (Books)
- #95 in History of Early Civilization (Kindle Store)
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Josephine Crawley Quinn

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Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, the first woman to hold this Chair. She has degrees from Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley, has taught in America, Italy and at Oxford, and co-directed the Tunisian–British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, as well as to radio and television programmes. She is the author of one previous book, the award-winning In Search of the Phoenicians.

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bob the shopper
helps to see history as spread evenly over the ancient world and its farthest periphery
Reviewed in Canada on March 19, 2025
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lots of little-known historical facts filling many gaps in non-systematic knowledge of a lay person. "the world" starts looking connected and logical in its practices. plus the geography of historical developments: how it all filled up from naval base to colony to permanent settlement around Mediterranean. not much politics or ideology, rather a history of commerce and transportation (if you try to ignore the savagery of it all). told lightly and wittingly.

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Andre Gilbert
A thorough review of world history
Reviewed in Canada on November 13, 2024
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This book contains a wealth of data, and the author has a profound knowledge of Antiquity. Each chapter moves on in the ladder of time, providing a map for each chapter. Everything seems covered. The reader gets the impression of mastering each era.

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Andrea
excellent book
Reviewed in Canada on November 14, 2024
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very thought provoking and interesting read

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Vlad Thelad
Dismantling entrenched truisms
Reviewed in Canada on October 21, 2024
Why do we read history books, why do we study it, and why are we so fascinated by it, are all very valid questions. Yet seldom does one find such a compelling answer as: history can question everything we take for granted, every truism, and every conception of our current world, forcing us to rethink what we otherwise thought obvious. That sounds like a grand statement, but it is one that this book proves beyond any doubt. A fascinating ride through 4,000 years of history, it conclusively makes the case that civilizational thinking is factually wrong. Separating peoples into self-contained civilizations has led, and leads, to entrenched distortions of history and creates the basis to some ugly thinking in our contemporary world, among them fuelling the notion of the superiority of the West. Reading history can be such a breath of fresh air and renewed thinking.

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Steve G
Fascinating
Reviewed in Canada on September 3, 2024
I enjoyed this book. The information is clearly presented and the writing fluid, although a little more literary than I usually prefer. The maps are excellent and really help tell the story. Josephine Quinn also uses humour to good advantage. The pacing is excellent and the book never gets bogged down in minutiae. I found this book well worth reading. Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the advance reader copy.

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Mike L
Ideology rather than history
Reviewed in Canada on April 18, 2024
The book provides lots of interesting information (thus it deserves at least one star :-) ). However, the argumentation and conclusion are ideological rather than historical. The logical argumentation is weak. For instance, saying that the Western civilisation does not really exist because it "borrowed" from "others", it's like saying that there's no such thing as the Atlantic Ocean, because it also gets its waters from the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, and maybe from some rivers too. Or arguing that because the Greeks and Romans did not think of their societies in terms of civilisations, there was no such thing as the Hellenistic civilisation, is like saying that because there was no (Western invented) theory of electromagnetism until the 19th century, there's no such thing as electromagnetism. There are many other logical fallacies in the book, but it is interesting to contrast it with the ideas of those who looked at human civilisations and history without ideological glasses.

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15 people found this helpful

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Filipe
Muito interessante!
Reviewed in Brazil on April 8, 2025
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Excelente leitura. Além da pesquisa e ideias interessantíssimas, há imagens muito legais para contextualização.

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James T.
Perfect
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2025
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Flawless service

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MarcoPolo
Auf "conquest" folgte "commerce"
Reviewed in Germany on July 12, 2025
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Die Autorin führt uns durch die Geschichte der "Alten Welt" bis zur Entdeckung Amerikas. Die ersten Kapitel kreisen um die Levante als den Schnittpunkt der Weltgegenden, lange noch bevor Identitäten wie "asiatisch", "europäisch" oder "afrikanisch" konstruiert waren. Später weitet sich die Perspektive über die antiken Imperien bis nach China und Zimbabwe.

Historische Feldzüge und Schlachten, in denen sich traditionelle Geschichtsbücher als Gegenstand oft erschöpfen, bilden für Josephine Quinn nur das Setting für eine differenziertere und spannendere Lesart der Zivilisationsgeschichte: Den unzähligen "conquests" folgte stets der "commerce". Eindrucksvoll führt sie vor Augen: Jeder technische, kulturelle oder philosophische Fortschritt fand seine "Abnehmer". Wenn die einen das Rad erfunden haben, haben die anderen den Karren daraus gemacht und wieder andere den Streitwagen. Sind an einem Ort Bildschriften entstanden, wurde andernorts und über viele Generationen daraus das Lautalphabet als eine Grundlage unserer heutigen Kultur.

Trotz der großen "Flughöhe" der Betrachtung versteht es die Autorin, den Text mit Anschaulichkeiten, Anekdoten und Überraschungen zu spicken. Gelegentlich blitzt ein durchaus sarkastischer Humor durch, wenn sie das "zivilisationale" Weltbild der späteren Geschichtswissenschaften aufs Korn nimmt. Ihre Botschaft weist überzeugend in eine ganz andere Richtung: Zivilisationen wie die antik griechische und römische taugen nicht als "reiner Brutboden" europäischen Geistes. Sie waren längst vollgesogen mit Errungenschaften der Inder, Ägypter, Assyrer, Perser, Chinesen, Phönizier, Nordafrikaner, Etrusker ...

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Anthony K.
Slim on theory, full of fascinating (hi)stories
Reviewed in Italy on April 30, 2025
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I have to say that my first reaction to the book was disappointment. Having read and watched a few fascinating interviews with Jo Quinn, I thought the book would concentrate more on deconstructing the myth of Graeco-Roman civilisational past and examining how the myth had developed. Instead, after a brief introduction, the book gives us the material to perform our own deconstruction!
But once I got over the fact that Jo Quinn had written the book that she wanted to write, I really enjoyed this work of epic scope, full of surprises and revelations. It's certainly one I'll be going back to.

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Peter W Evans
So much, so insightful.
Reviewed in Australia on August 14, 2024
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An beautifully told journey tying together thousands of years of cultural and societal evolution, pulling on strands and ideas and data with precision and zest. A massive mission of a book that just nails it.

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