Four Thousand Years Ago: A World Panorama of Life in the Second Millenium BC

by Geoffrey Bibby

Als Troja brannte und Babylon fiel - bk704; Rowohlt Verlag; Geoggrey Bibby; pocket_book; 1972

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History

398 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Thomas Geoffrey Bibby was an English-born archaeologist. He is best known for discovering the ancient state of Dilmun, referred to in Mesopotamian mythology as a paradise.

He studied archaeology at Cambridge University, but because he could find no place in that profession, he lived in Bahrain and worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company from 1947 to 1950. On a return visit to Britain he met his future wife, whom he married in 1949. Through her he met the Danish professor Peter Vilhelm Glob and so acquired a position at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. In 1953 he and professor Glob led a team of archaeologists who discovered the ancient city of Dilmun, beneath Manama, Bahrain.

Bibby also wrote about stone and Bronze Age Europe, particularly the bog peoples of Denmark.

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Four Thousand Years Ago lacks by being dated, it makes up for with its uniqueness and self-awareness. Geoffrey Bibby, an archaeologist writing in the 1960s, was working with then-current evaluations of life in the 2nd millennium BC. Crucially, he was aware of the fact that those evaluations might change, of the existence of gaps in knowledge and of the dearth of archaeological investigation in many parts of the world.

He never makes a claim that he is presenting anything other than an educated person's best guess at civilizations from Memphis to Harappa, at lifestyles of people in the Arctic Circle and the Amazon basin. But his project is so novel, these stretches and guesses are reasonable and even welcome.

Essentially, in Four Thousand Years Ago Bibby has attempted to give a synchronic picture of life on earth during the millennium 2000 BC-1000 BC. He has adopted a narrative style that purposefully is not authoritative, but propositional. He chronicles the events, influence and trade of well-known civilizations like Mesopotamia and Mycenae, but also tries to piece together the lifestyles and industry of non-literate cultures like the fishermen of Scandinavia and the plains Indians of North America. The gaps are large, but Bibby draws attention to these - bemoans them - rather than trying to patch over or elide them. In Bibby’s idea world, there would be archaeologists diligently excavating all over the globe, unearthing details about of lives of hunter-gatherers and Egyptian pharaohs equally.

For Bibby is no snob, which is another thing that makes this book so enjoyable. He frequently reminds his reader not to mistake the wealth of knowledge we have about the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean, for the idea that these civilizations were more important than those in India or China, or than the cultures the world over that remained small-village dwelling agriculturalists, hunters or herder nomads and never built a single city.

More than anything this book provides the image of an ancient world interconnected, rather than the more typical picture we get of islands of civilization existing in a sea of nothingness. And it’s a very engaging read at that.

[Stephanie Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well that there was fun. I didn't expect to speed read through a history book even if I find it interesting.

There's a historical fiction aspect to this because of how the author goes about telling the story of history (like taking key people from history and writing of what they would have seen or heard about in their lifetime).

What's neat is how he incorporates some of the stories from the Bible. Like "oh this bit here isnt provable but we can say that thanks to archaeology this did indeed happen and probably like I describe it here" (after every chapter there's a little blurb that explores what was fiction, what was fact, and what's somewhere in the middle)

Anywho. Really fun read actually. Oh! I love how every so often he goes away from Mesopatamia and Greece and those areas that we hear so much about in Western Civ. Classes in college - and actually takes time to explore the Indus river valley or China or even civilizations that existed in Peru and Central America... Does a nice job of trying to hit a little bit of everywhere with the knowledge and information that is available to him at the time. Only makes me wonder how much more we know now 50 years after the publication of this book.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is certainly outdated. But it is very interesting to see how while some theories and chronologies have been completely disproven, particularly in relation to Northern and Western Europe (Celts migrating directly from the steppe in the second millenium bc, bell beaker folk coming from Africa, a neolithic cult of Mediterranean origin in bronze age Scandinavia) others which have subsequently fallen out of fashion in the last fifty years after the book was written, have recently been proven correct by genetic evidence (the Indo-European kurgan theory, the relationship between the steppe cultures and Corded Ware/Fatyanovo/battle axe cultures in Europe and the Aryan invasion of India).

[Liam Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book on the early history of civilsations, covering the Egyptians, the Akkadians, Hittites, Jews, Greeks and more.

In this excerpt, Bibby explains the shipping routes of the ancient Mediterranean:

actual objects made in Crete do not penetrate (or at least do not penetrate in sufficient numbers to appear in the archaeological record) more than a quarter of the distance reached by the burial practice. It has been suggested that this circumstance must mean that the voyagers who reached the north were not traders but missionaries. However the difficulties involved in financing a voyage of such a length for purely missionary purposes would probably have been even greater then than now, and the ships must at least have paid their own running costs by trade. The most probable explanation of the lack of Aegean trade goods in Northern Europe during the spread of the pass-grave religion is that, in coastal trade voyages of that length, there would be several complete turnovers of cargo. Like the Arab coastal trader of Muscat and Dubai today,..the Cretan traders of four thousand years ago probably exchanged their cargo at the first port of call, taking on local products, perhaps things so prosaic (and perishable) as wheat or hides or broadcloth, which would command a market at the next port of call. Thus the process would go on, and at each turnover the captain would bank a profit - converted to more easily transported valuables such as gold and tin and semi-precious stones. It is in fact only the possibility of making a profit several times over which could make a voyage of this length, to parts of the world still poor in this world's goods, commercially feasible at all. And thus we would expect to find, at the end of the voyage in Denmark, not copper daggers or silver chalices of Cretan origin, but the products of the last port of call, the flat-cast copper halberds and axes and the golden lunulae of Ireland. And this is in fact what we find. p.76

Typical of Bibby's style, in this excerpt he recounts the early consilidation of the jewish nation, and the growing Hurrian power, both from an outsider's perspective, the Egyptians's, at one slice of time - 1720BC:

For a while conversations [amongst the Egyptians] turned to a discussion of whether it had been these "children of Abraham" [, Amorites,] that had suppplied the mercenary swordsmen who had driven back the southern [Egyptians] usurpers... But the Amorite travellers had talked [themselves] of foreign invaders. It sounded interesting, and they were urged to explain.

Well the Egyptians should understand that the Amorites of Canaan were no parochial villagers. Admittedly many of their number had now married into the families of the original [Canaanite] inhabitants and settled down to farming, but the majority of the tribes still moved around, and had retained close contact with their landsmen up north, even as far as their old home of Harran, in the shadow of the Turkish mountains. And it was there, in the north, that the invaders had first appeared. They were tribes of mountaineers calling themselves Hurrians, and the spearhead of their attacks was a corps of elite warriors fighting from horse chariots. That they had to explain; for the Egyptian villagers had only a vague idea of what a cart looked like and had never heard of a horse before.

...under threat from the north both the townsfolk and the pastoral tribes [of "Abraham"] were uniting, energetic chieftains were being given the military command over large areas, and there was even talk of a unified command in time of danger. They had already captured both horses and drivers during the skirmishes, and were organizing their own squadrons of chariots. The Amorites had always been warriors to reckon with, they boasted, and in their new unity they would prove more than a match for the Hurrian armies - or for anyone else who opposed them.

The [Egyptian] children of 1720BC listened avidly, wriggly their feet. And for months to come they played Amorites and Hurrians up and down the embankments, charging and wheeling imaginary chariots drawn by fantastic fire-breathing monsters.

And life went on, with the yearly inundation followed by the spring sowing and the harvest and the collection of taxes and the next inundation. The children went out to help in the fields, to scare birds with their throwing sticks and ,as they grew taller, to help bear the barley home, to thresh and flail the ears, and to winnow the grain from the chaff. And before they really knew of it they were grown men, sitting themselves around the courtyard fires of the inn, drinking barley beer as they listened to new tales from the travellers from the north-east. p.149-150

The last paragraph typifies a nice feature of this book: although great movements of history are building on the horizon here, the participants in these histories experience them either as times of wealth or poverty, of love or lovesickness and so on. Shifting between these views within the pages of the book, I appreciated a certain duality of history that I hadn't noticed before: half the time the historical reality seems to lie in the meta-concepts built out of events - such as the threat of the Hurrians or the growing strength of the Jewish nation - and sometimes the reality seems to lie in the individual historical actors and their situations:

The number of "royal and divine" ladies within [the palace] was the subject of comment, and of daring jokes, along the river. It was of course right and proper, and enjoined by law and custom, that Amenhotep should marry his full sister, for it was after all the daughter even more than the son of divine rulers who contained within herself the spark of divinity. But Amenhotep carried it rather to extremes. [His parents] Amose and Nefertari had three daughters, Ahotep, Merit-Amon and Sat-Kamose, all full sisters of Amenhotep, and it was undoubtedly because he knew that anyone whom one of his sisters married would thereby become a not impossible rival to the throne that he proceeded to marry all three of them himself. As royal princesses they all three, of course, counted as divine wives and reigning queens, and the problem of precedence among the five queens [including his mother and aunt as queenly advisors] must, it was agreed, give perioic headaches to the master of the household.

Amenhotep reigned for twenty years, and, historically speaking, his reign was uneventful and prosperous. The new system of delegation of authority instituted by Amose worked well, taxes came in regularly, and there was little discontent and no civil disturbance. On and beyond the frontiers there was peace, though not always a completely easy peace. The Hyksos pretender to the north east held his hand... campaigns against the Sudan.... Amenhotep defeated a Nubian army and captured its chief.... he campaigned deep into Libya... Otherwise he kept the peace, with a well-equipped army and a watchful eye in the direction of Syria.

...It was an uneventful twenty years. But of course for the for the men and women who had been born in 1580BC, it was the most important twenty years of their lives, the period when they grew from being young men and women of twenty two to being middle-aged men and women of forty-two. It was the time when their families were growing up, and when their families were growing up, and when they themselves made either a success or a failure of their lives. p. 209-210

Here, after telling the story of the Athenian conquest of Knossos, Bibby mentons symbols of Greek Mythology in his justification for his narrative on the Athenian conquest of the rich Cretean capital of Knossos:

It is generally agreed that some historic truth lies behind the story of Theseus, son of the king of Athens, who volunteered to join the tribute of youths and maidens sent yearly to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, in the Labyrinth at Knossos, and who was aided by Ariadne, daughter of the king of Knossos, to slay the Minotaur and to escape, with Ariadne, from Crete. It seems probable that the story mirrors in some way the conquest, archaeologicaally attested, of Crete by the Achaeans of Greece around the year 1400BC. p.269

It is typical of the book to use phrases like "probable that" and "some historical truth." I appreciated that Bibby took so many sources of information, including mere hints of mythology, in his narrative because I think this imaginative speculaton made the book far more interesting than books for beginners that still try to be "respectable" scholarly works.

The story he tells takes full advantage of such hints from history, but also of lots of emotional or dramatic details, otherwise rare in the history books: the cheering of crowds, their excitement or exhaustion, the flames and screams of war, their despondency, their bitter rumours of intrigue and so on and so on:

If the crowd gave acclaim to the best of the teams [of toreadors], they did not at the same time forget to give due honour to the bulls. Their points were eagerly discussed and their spirit and agility cheered equally with the spirit and agility of the toreadors. After all, the bulls were the chief performers, and the main point of the day's sport was the selection of the premier bull, the Bull of Minos, the Minotaur, which would prove its worthiness to be sacrificed on the morrow. [256] ...The festival of the bulls [in Knossos, Crete] that year was of unparalelled splendour. May teams of toreadors had come from Greece to take par, and many Achaean princes, with their retinues, were there to watch their champions. Among them Prince Theseu of Attica was the most magnificent, and he distinguished himself by a polished amateur display in the arena against the chosen of the bulls, the Minotaur itself. and the burghers of Knossos retired to their beds that night tired and excited, looking forward to the great sacrifice on the morrow.

In the middle of the night they were awakened by shouting in the streets, the clash of arms, and the roar of flames. As men and women rushed out half dressed and only half awake into the streets, they saw the great palace on the slope above the town in flames. ... and armed men, in small groups with determined officers at their head, were moving purposefully through the streets towards the houses of the richest citizens, the barracs of the police troops, and the exits from the city.

In that night of the long knives many of the citizens of Knossos lost their lives, struck down in half-hearted resistance to the occupation and looting of their homes, or trapped in the flames that spread rapidly through the tight-packed houses. [262]

It was even said that there had been traitors within the palace, too, and certainly, when Theseus sailed for home a week or so later, with his captured fleet of heavy-laden ships, the state in which Princess Ariadne, daughter of the fallen ing, travelled suggested to many that she was by no means an unwilling captive. p. 256-264

Much-vaunted subjects such as the beginning of The Iron Age are sometimes dificult to know how to regard, being a beginner historian. Bibby imbues this clearly significant historical development with perhaps the most meaningful of contexts: that from the point of view of an observer:

The nobles of the Egyptian court were little interested in the tales of Hatti-land. But they examined with interest the swords which the Hittite envoys wore. For they were of iron, and exceedingly rare metal long considered too brittle to stand up against weapons of bronze. It appeared that the Hitties had mastered a new process of forging iron which produced a metal that need not be cast to shape but could be wrought, hammered, and tempered to a toughness and sharpness which made it superior even to the best bronze. It was a new and highly secret process, said the envoys, but before long even the ordinary soldiers of the Hittite army would be equipped with this irresistible weapon.

In the meantime they were pleased to present to Tutankhamon, with the compliments of the Great [Hittite] King Suppiluliumas a dagger of iron with gold and crystal hilt and golden sheath, and a set of iron awls and chisels, which would introduce his majesty's craftsmen to the advantages of this new metal. p. 283

Bibby finishes the book with the story of the Iliad, retold using variously colliding expert theories and inconclusive scraps of evidence. He unites it with the history of Knossos that we've already been told, and unites it in a personal perspective, yet again, and within a timeframe that we can relate to:

"the merchant who was just about the biggest importer in Mycenae" to the princes Menelaus and Agemenon regarding "the increasing scarcity of prizes to be picked up at sea":

When my great great grandfather founded the business after Knossos fell, things were different. The merchantmen whad the legs - and the teeth - of most other craft, and anyway the Cretans had policed the seas from Trieste to the Nile. You could sail for years and never meet a pirate. It was in my father's time, with all the new people pushing down from the north, that the long ships began really pushing down from the north, that the long ships began really large-scale raiding. And it's not merely the merchant-men who suffer. Any town near the sea is fair game, and a port is lucky if it doesn't get plundered and burnt at least once in a generation. Of course it keeps goods in circulation - I make a good thing out of selling your plunder for you - but it isn't the same thing as steady trade. You're living on the accumulated fat of generations of steady trade. One o these days there's going to be no fat left."

The two princes laughed. "It'll last our time out," said Agamemnon. p.350

Bibbey is clearly not afraid of finding a historical conclusion at the expense of painting the Greek princes Menelaus and Agemenon as little more than pirates. I don't think that Bibbey would defend his interpretation as necessarily the most researched or historically sound, but by positively choosing this depiction, he puts the passage of time into a meaningful frame: things have gotten worse - people have failed to heed some lesson and might only much later be able to repair it.

[Hillary · Rating 4 out of 5]

whimsical