Cult of beauty - Minerva

Photo: courtesy of jastrow.
Photo: courtesy of xuan che.
Asian history
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The awakening
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With the publication of his most recent book Asia:
A Concise History, Arthur Cotterell takes Minerva on a
whirlwind tour of some of the great civilisations of Asia
Appreciation of Asia’s antiquity by
Western scholars is relatively recent.
Apart from China, whose continuous
civilisation kept a record of
its own ancient origin, the rest of Asia had to
wait for modern archaeology to reveal the cultural
achievements of the earliest city-dwellers.
Excavations over the past century and a
half have uncovered lost civilisations in West
Asia as well as India. Near Mosul, in northern
Iraq, exploration of a mound at the site of
ancient Nineveh resulted in the recovery of a
library belonging to the Assyrian kings, a treasure
trove for understanding the Sumerians,
who established the world’s first cities in the 4 th
millennium BC. Hardly surprising then was the
keen interest shown in the translation of texts
preserved in the royal library. No one could
have anticipated, however, the sensation caused
in 1872 by the Babylonian story of the Flood,
an event that originally appears in Atrahasis,
the name of the Noah-like hero of this oldest
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2
3
Sumerian epic. There is no mention of sinfulness
as in the later biblical account. Instead, the gods
inundated the world to stop the noise made by
humans. The sky god Enlil found sleep impossible,
so plague, famine and flood were employed
to reduce the numbers then overcrowding the
Earth. Warning of the final disaster was given to
Atrahasis by Enki, the Sumerian god with water
as well as intelligence within his remit.
Here was one of the oldest ideas surviving
anywhere on the planet, a consequence of the
early civilisation in Sumer. This entailed settlements
as well as an early writing system. About
3000 BC, the Sumerians in the city of Uruk hit
upon the notion of creating hundreds of pictograms,
in addition to signs for numbers and
measures. These were pressed into clay tablets
with a reed stylus to compose the cuneiform
system of writing (Fig 1). Some scholars suggest
that ancient writing spread from Sumer to India
and then to China. However, these diffusionist
theories are not supported by the evidence.
4
For instance, the inhabitants of Banpo, a fortified
village close to present-day Xi’an, in
Shannxi province, inscribed their pottery
with the antecedents of Chinese characters at
about the same time the Sumerians began writing
with clay tablets (Fig 2). Although fully
developed words are not in evidence until the
Shang kings recorded queries to their exulted
ancestors on oracle bones in the late 2 nd millennium
BC, the extreme antiquity of the Banpo
signs argues against diffusion to Asia’s third oldest
cradle of civilisation.
In the 1920s discoveries of mounds in the
Indus Valley had led to the excavation of two
ruined cities at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh (Figs 5,
6) and Harappa in the western Punjab, both in
modern Pakistan. In the process scholars have
redrawn the world map of ancient civilisations.
The finds in Asia were less dramatic than the
earlier Mesopotamian ones, in part because
of our inability to decipher the Indus script.
In spite of this problem, the material remains
Minerva May/June 2011