The Trick to Understanding Ancient History, Really Getting it

“Every man, as to character, is the creature of the age in which he lives. Very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of their times.” – Voltaire

To learn about the past, the right way, is not to learn  dry facts. It’s to learn stories. Lusty, bawdy, hilarious, frighting stories. Inspiring tales, insipid tales, illuminating tales, heartbreaking and tragic tales. But to everything in life there’s a trick. The trick to understanding ancient history, or any history for that matter, is simple. It involves a trick of the imagination and the sympathies.

You have to basically put yourself in it, deeply, and immersively, while remembering that basic human drives do not change.

This isn’t presentism which is admittedly fallacious. We are not going to project present day concerns, indulge in a bit of whiggish bias. But we are going to try to use our lived experiences as human beings to try to understand how and why people did things in the last – without making the mistake of projecting the our present day cultural motives on the past.

The top level Memetic stuff changes over time, sometimes rapidly, sometimes not. This is the cultural inheritance that makes up our world and ideas of what’s normal, and desirable – or not. But this sits on top of  the stuff that really moves us on our deeper levels. Our deeper reptilian-like drives; to flee danger, to feed, to fuck, to find shelter to sleep in.. And then, the stuff on top of that. Our more sophisticated mammalian-like drives based on emotion. Drives to bond, find community and belong to our flocks or herds, and so on. But then, there are the even more sophisticated, and yet still quite basic and deeply buried,  quite human neocortex based needs and drives.

If you can just imagine yourself vividly in the place of someone from the past, no matter which race, ethnos, cultural group, or period – with your own basic drives, then you can start to get the knack of it. This presupposes actually being self-aware enough to know much of what makes you tick, anyway. If you can do this then you can almost predict behavior as you are turning the pages.

Imagine yourself in the situations you read of. When you read of the saqifah of Bani Sa’idah, imagine yourself with Abu Bakr and Umar bin al-Khattab. What did they want, what did they covet, what did they fear? What drove the Amorite king of Akkadia, Šarrukin -Sargon I what did he want, what did he covet, what did he fear?

Then imagine, what drives a modern corporate raider or hedge fund trader? What drives a present day terrorist, say Abu Bakr Baghdadi of ISIL/DAESH? Or say, what drove Sir John Lawrence or Lord Dalhousie in the British conquests of the Punjab? These things are not so different.

Naram-Sin, Solon the lawgiver;  Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. These were not mere names, they were human beings, who had diarrhea, headaches, pangs of desire, pangs of frustration deep childhood longings. Conquest, administration, ruling over large masses of bread and circuses, does much change over the ages? Yes, immense things change. The world today is entirely different than it was 2000 years ago, or even 500 years ago. But is humanity, at the core level of our beings, that different?

Love, sex, and power. Desire for fame, fears and insecurities.

The names of gods and goddesses, countries lands and people, clothing styles, and languages themselves all change over time. Our immediate top-level human motivations certainly change. But I am convinced that the basic fundamental needs, drives, and urges were the same 10,000 years ago as they are today. It’s just the top level neocortex stuff that may be fine-tuned. And even then only slightly. Then the actual top level programming running on it all. Languages, cultures, religions. All this being a matter of stuff that we’ve steadily accumulated and inherited for 40000 some years anyway.

When you think about it, what has progressed outside of our stuff, and our skills at gaining, making, and understanding stuff? On the most vital levels of what moves us have we grown? Steven Pinker may think we have grown as a species. But when you really think about it, I mean, people are still doing stuff that was old when the Babylonians were around. And yet they have no idea as to how old the scripts they run on are. It’s just part of their daily culture. Like why are there 360 days in a year? why are there 7 days in a week, why are there roughly 30 days in a month?

None of us question this sort of stuff. And why should we question it?

Why indeed. But, at some point of time in pre-history what we now take for granted was quite new. I wonder, sometimes, why were banks in the Anglo-American West designed like temples for a very long time? They only really stopped doing that in the 60s and 70s. Which is practically yesterday.

Well, if you look at the fact that the word money you will find that it actually comes from a particular Roman Temple, and then this cultural quirk makes sense. Or at least it seems to make sense.

But does it? Actually? Or is it much deeper? The original Banks were the temples in Sumeria and ancient Egypt. Priests were the international bankers of that age. For over five thousand years wherever banks have appeared in a civilization or culture they have always took on a temple like aspect. One of utmost sanctity. Which says a lot about banking when you think about it.

Here is something funny. Go look at locations around London connected with the word Temple. Go wander around the City of London itself. The Square Mile. Take in the significance of it all.

This is something Londoners will understand but, perhaps, few outside the UK will really get. The City of London is not London in the sense that we know it. It’s the square mile. Know think of history, and look at the predominant role that the Temple played in London finance. Look at the role in the history of commerce that the Templars played.

Think about it a little bit.

In the United States of America today, a decade and two years after a banking-industry triggered financial crash, this most profitable sector of the economy, banking, is actually – interestingly enough – massively subsidized by the government itself. The very organs of American financial capitalism are paradoxically kept afloat by public subsidies. They no longer build branch banks to resemble GRaeco-Roman temples, but they still have a sort of gravitas. The feel, almost, of neighborhood churches. Study their architecture closely.

Just think about it for a bit.

_FIN