Past Mistakes

How We Misinterpret History and Why it Matters

David Mountain

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781785786617
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

'A welcome ally in the fight against fake history' Eleanor Janega, author of The Middle AgesFrom the fall of Rome to the rise of the Wild West, David Mountain brings colour and perspective to historical mythmaking. The stories we tell about our past matter. But those stories have been shaped by prejudice, hoaxes and misinterpretations that have whitewashed entire chapters of history, erased women and invented civilisations. Today history is often used to justify xenophobia, nationalism and inequality as we cling to grand origin stories and heroic tales of extraordinary men.Exploring myths, mysteries and misconceptions about the past - from the legacies of figures like Pythagoras and Christopher Columbus, to the realities of life in the gun-toting Wild West, to the archaeological digs that have upset our understanding of the birth of civilisation - David Mountain reveals how ongoing revolutions in history and archaeology are shedding light on the truth.Full of adventures, and based on detailed research and interviews, Past Mistakes will make you reconsider your understanding of history - and of the world today. 'Past Mistakes takes what we think we remember from history class and sets the record straight! Definitely worth reading if you're ready to have your mind blown and then be filled with rage that you've been hoodwinked for this long.' The Tiny Activist

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CHAPTER 1

The false dawn of civilisation

The history of civilisation used to be a simple thing. The curtains rose some 10,000 years ago on the grasslands and woodlands of Southwest Asia. Humans had just emerged from the grievous rigours of the Ice Age, where they eked out a meagre existence hunting wild game and gathering fruits and roots, much like their predecessors had done for millions of years. It made for a brutal, and brutally short, life. Technology was limited to wood, bone and stone. Artistic expression amounted to small pieces of jewellery and the occasional cave painting. People were almost certainly spiritual, but what religious beliefs they had were undoubtedly simplistic.

The world was changing, however, and the retreat of the ice sheets and permafrost opened up new possibilities for our distant ancestors. Somewhere in the fertile hills east of the Mediterranean, people began to realise that they could make a better living for themselves if they farmed animals rather than hunted them and harvested plants rather than foraged for them. As it happened, the ancient Near East was full of domesticable plants and animals. Cereals like wild wheat and barley, and pulses such as lentils and chickpeas grew freely on the plains. In the mountains to the north, the ancestors of cows, pigs, sheep and goats could be found. A few forward-thinking groups set down their spears, picked up their sickles, and set to work on the long process of domestication. 14

The effect is revolutionary – perhaps the greatest turning point in humanity’s history. Agriculture ties farmers to the land, ending aeons of restless wandering. Permanent houses and settlements soon build up in fertile areas. With a steady food supply, people are living longer and healthier lives than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Farmers are able to amass surplus food which they can store for the future, allowing agricultural communities to survive tough years that might wipe out a band of hunters. With food in reserve, they use their free time to develop new skills such as pottery, artwork, carpentry and masonry. Inventions soon come thick and fast: sophisticated tools, metalworking and the wheel, the epitome of ancient ingenuity. Agricultural surpluses also allow individuals to accumulate more resources than they could otherwise acquire by their own efforts, thus beginning the rise of political power and a religious and bureaucratic aristocracy. Villages grow into sprawling cities with elaborate palaces, tombs and temples, where a nascent priestly class presides over complex religious rites and mysteries. Commerce between cities prospers as trade routes reach further afield in search of new and exciting goods. In order to keep track of these ever-growing networks, merchants begin to use little pictures and symbols to record their transactions, paving the way for the emergence of the first writing systems sometime around 3000 BCE. Within a few thousand years, humans have transformed themselves from nomadic hunters, living in bands of no more than 40 individuals, to literate urbanites in cities teeming with tens of thousands. Civilisation has dawned.

Most of us have heard this story before, at least in outline. It’s a familiar and compelling image of humanity’s irreversible and inevitable progress. And, as we’ll see, it’s an image that’s proved enormously influential – not just in history and archaeology, but philosophy and politics in general. 15

It’s also completely wrong.

People have always been fascinated about their origins. Where did we come from? How did societies, cities and civilisations arise? Today we attempt to answer these questions with evidence-based history and archaeology, but this wasn’t always the case: for much of humanity’s history, religion and mythology provided the answers to such questions. The ancient Greeks told of how Prometheus, the Titan, incurred the wrath of the Olympian gods by imparting the secrets of fire, medicine and mathematics to the first humans. In Inca mythology, the god Viracocha willingly taught people the arts of civilisation as he wandered the Earth. For ancient Mesopotamians, meanwhile, humans were created solely to relieve the gods from the burden of physical toil.

In Christian Europe, the Bible and its old Hebrew myths were the sole authority on the matter. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth, raising land out of the oceans and populating it with plants and animals. Humanity, banished from paradise, found themselves huddling together in the first cities for protection against the fearsome world beyond Eden. The discoveries of agriculture, music and metallurgy soon followed, each invented by one of three brothers. It was a simple, if simplistic, answer to questions about the origin of civilisation. And, for a few thousand years, it was as good a guess as anyone’s.

So long as the biblical account held supreme authority, Christians felt no need to investigate the prehistoric past. After all, prehistory – the time before writing and recorded history – simply didn’t exist, given that people in medieval Europe had a written account of history reaching all the way back to the very first day of creation. Evidence of a distant past not described in 16Genesis often surfaced, but these finds were regarded as natural or fantastical curiosities. When farmers in Central Europe kept unearthing ancient potshards, they assumed that pottery must grow naturally in the soil. Teardrop-shaped hand axes were widely known as thunderstones and believed to be the result of lightning striking the earth. Stone arrowheads and other weapons, meanwhile, were variously ascribed to elves or angels and believed to have magical properties.1

It wasn’t until the 16th century that these ideas began to be challenged. By this time, Europeans were starting to explore the Americas, and were returning home with tales of ‘barbarous Nations’ wielding stone tools and weapons remarkably similar to the thunderstones and elf bolts being unearthed back home. If people were using such items today, might Europeans have once done the same? Might they once have lived like Native Americans? And, if so, might the Bible be wrong?2

These questions fundamentally changed our understanding of the distant past. Inspired by the half-terrified accounts of the New World reaching Europe, the primaeval Earth was no longer the paradise of Genesis or the Arcadia of classical legend, but a howling wilderness of beasts and savages. As the English philosopher John Locke opined in 1689: ‘in the beginning all the world was America’.3 This new view of humanity’s beginnings was most famously expressed by Locke’s contemporary Thomas Hobbes, who described ‘the Naturall Condition of Mankind’ as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. Before civilisation, insisted Hobbes, ‘there is no place for Industry … no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death.’4 17

With serious doubts now hanging over the biblical account of civilisation’s origins, European scholars made the first attempts to study prehistoric artefacts and monuments in a scientific manner – ‘to make the Stones give Evidence for themselves’, as the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey put it.5 Early prehistorians like Aubrey began to carry out deliberate excavations, carefully documenting not only the artefacts they found but the locations in which they were unearthed. From these efforts emerged, slowly and fitfully, the bare bones of prehistoric archaeology. By the late 1700s it was becoming clear that ancient tools and weapons in Europe tended to be made out of one of three materials – stone, bronze or iron – and archaeologists began to order the distant past into successive ages based on these three substances. The subsequent development of typology – the study of an artefact’s appearance – allowed scholars to construct relative chronologies for arrowheads, brooches and other ancient items based on the change in their designs over time.6

The decisive break with the version of history described by scripture came in the early 19th century, when antiquarians abandoned the biblical chronology they had relied on up until now. By this time the sheer quantity of prehistoric finds was becoming difficult to squeeze into the few thousand years of history allowed for by Genesis, which, if its dates and genealogies were to be believed, insisted that the world could be no more than 7,000 years old. (In 1650, the Archbishop of Ireland even managed to calculate the very moment of creation: the evening of Saturday 24 October, 4004 BC.7) This was especially problematic for stone and bronze artefacts, given that the Old Testament made no mention of either a Stone Age or a Bronze Age; Adam’s descendants are said to be working with iron in little more than a century after the creation of the world. Archaeologists turned instead to the new science of 18geology, which had shown through the study of the unfathomably slow processes of deposition and erosion that the Earth must be much older than the Bible asserted. As the pioneering geologist James Hutton concluded in 1788: ‘we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’8

The understanding that the Earth must be millions, if not billions, of years old transformed prehistory. It was no longer a few hundred or thousand years long, but hundreds of thousands of years long, stretching back into the deepest past. This was terra incognita for 19th-century archaeology – a vast expanse of time for which religion and mythology had no answers. And somewhere in this uncharted territory were the secrets to the origin of civilisation.

To understand 19th-century archaeology, it helps to understand the 19th-century archaeologist. He – and it was a he – was almost without exception a wealthy white Westerner. He was among the lucky few for whom the ongoing upheavals of the Industrial Revolution were a wholly positive experience; the working-class world of choking pollution, rampant poverty and appalling labour conditions was out of sight and out of mind. For him, the age of coal was an age of cheaper goods, faster transport and increasing convenience, where each g...