Ebook Download Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, by William F. McCants
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Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, by William F. McCants
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From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests of the Near East, William McCants looks at the ways the conquerors and those they conquered reshaped their myths of civilization's origins in response to the social and political consequences of empire.
The Greek and Roman conquests brought with them a learned culture that competed with that of native elites. The conquering Arabs, in contrast, had no learned culture, which led to three hundred years of Muslim competition over the cultural orientation of Islam, a contest reflected in the culture myths of that time. What we know today as Islamic culture is the product of this contest, whose protagonists drew heavily on the lore of non-Arab and pagan antiquity.
McCants argues that authors in all three periods did not write about civilization's origins solely out of pure antiquarian interest--they also sought to address the social and political tensions of the day. The strategies they employed and the postcolonial dilemmas they confronted provide invaluable context for understanding how authors today use myth and history to locate themselves in the confusing aftermath of empire.
- Sales Rank: #984340 in Books
- Published on: 2011-11-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x .80" w x 6.10" l, .92 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 192 pages
Review
"McCants's richly textured analysis points to some cultural anomalies that can lead to provocative reflections."--Donald J. Dietrich, European Legacy
From the Back Cover
"This innovative book tackles the fascinating subject of how and by whom culture was invented, and discusses this phenomenon by looking at the ancient, Greco-Roman, pre-Islamic Arabian, and Muslim worlds. Examining various texts that have rarely been analyzed in the same place, the book will appeal to a diversity of readers and fields."--Robert Hoyland, University of Oxford
"McCants explores culture myths over a long period--from Sumerian literature of the third millennium BCE to Arabic works of the ninth century CE--and over a wide but interconnected geographical area spanning the Mediterranean basin to the Near East as far as Persia. The breadth of this undertaking and the materials gathered together, especially from the Arabic side, are quite original."--Ian S. Moyer, University of Michigan
About the Author
William F. McCants received his PhD from Princeton University and is currently adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Challenging, But Rewarding
By Diana Wueger
Founding Gods isn't an easy read - it's very much an academic work, and assumes a degree of familiarity with the history of several early civilizations - but it's rewarding, and very much worth the read.
Caveat lector: you need a dictionary handy - there are many, many Big Words, some of which Will may have made up (probably not) (maybe). You may wish to have Wikipedia close by as well, unless you're already very familiar with the histories of most early civilizations. Also, I recommend reading this backwards - read the book's conclusion first, then go back to Chapter 1 and read the conclusion of that, then read the full chapter, etc. Founding Gods is short but dense, and it's easy to get caught up in the details and lose sight of the broader arguments. This is Serious Academic Stuff, though McCants does use the phrase "new kids on the Mediterranean block" and makes a sly reference to "winter is coming" (p. 15) (apparently the ancient conception of that idea requires people to build greenhouses, not armies and fortresses - see, you'll learn things!).
McCants' central idea - that elites used their interpretations of the origins of culture and civilization to shape their political, social, and intellectual environment - seems fundamentally reasonable. I personally have no basis of knowledge from which to evaluate his scholarship or evidence as presented, but if the origins of a cultural artifact or technai do matter, then it's logical to assume that elites will interpret or modify those origins to suit their needs as he describes. In antiquity, the question of whether a technology or type of knowledge was human-derived (and therefore less acceptable and possibly sinful) or taught to humans by a divine being (and therefore assumed to be beneficial to humanity) was worthy of debate, because the origin of the technology determined the acceptability of its pursuit or study. There are modern parallels to suggest that origins continue to matter - see [...] for that argument, plus a few additional thoughts on Founding Gods.
Overall, Founding Gods is a neat little piece of scholarship, and I highly recommend it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting discussion of ancient conquests with relevance to modern power and influence
By caidid
Will McCants' Founding Gods, Inventing Nations is not a simple history of rulers and conquests but something subtler, a history of the perceptions and cultural contests inside ancient conquests. Concentrating on the Greek, Roman, and Arab empires, McCants looks at the many interpretations and re-interpretations of the roots of culture - cities and medicine and tool use and philosophy and ironwork and geometry and agriculture and astronomy - touching on myths and origin stories in those cultures after outlining some of the culture myths as they existed in more ancient empires such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian.
McCants uses the lens of these culture myths to try to understand the interactions between conquerors and conquered, how peoples assimilate or assert themselves. He makes the point that times of conquest and the aftermath thereof are periods of flux for all parties involved. Conquerors do not universally impose their will or their way on the conquered. Cultural influence is a negotiation: it goes both ways, and the way culture myths are told, especially at these times of flux, is instructive of the social and political needs of the day. He compares the approaches to culture myths of individuals at the times of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests in four categories - divine providence, "firsts," founders of native civilizations, and the origins of the sciences - and discusses the contexts and motivations in each era for each category.
We can see some parallels in all the periods discussed. All three conquering empires - Greek, Roman, and Arab - soon saw native elites writing histories of their (the natives') forefathers' contributions to civilization in their own languages, and for a similar range of reasons: to instill or boost local pride, to show the conquerors what they owed the conquered, to persuade the conquerors to behave like native rulers, to discredit local rivals, or to elevate themselves above other conquered peoples.
However, similar paths could lead to different places in each period. For example, there are lists of `firsts' surviving from all three periods, but the type of activities and inventions on the lists, and the attributions for them, differed greatly. Writers in all three periods dealt with some of the same questions, including whether the Greeks had originated anything or borrowed from other cultures, and whether humans could develop complex sciences on their own or if divine inspiration of some kind was required, but the conclusions they reached depended on the cultural context and requirements of the time.
Perhaps the area of most divergence was on the origin of the sciences, as even within each culture there existed debate on whether the sciences were given to man by divine intercession or earned through his own ingenuity, as well as contention over which civilizations were the first to use certain sciences, regardless of whether the initial providence was human or divine.
I won't get into his specific conclusions about each conquest, because you should read it yourself, but McCants tells us in his introduction:
In recounting these culture myths, authors worked out their place in post-conquest society. By describing the origin and transmission of science, they tell us where they stand in relation to that tradition, to their contemporaries who practice it, and to those who detract from it. By writing histories of the cultural exploits of ancient heroes, they tell us how they think of their ethnic origins and how others can join or be excluded from their group. By making lists of beneficial arts and sciences, they encode the ideal cultural genealogy of their societies and provide the knowledge needed to navigate it. By demonstrating how God works in the world, they explain how society should be ordered and who should maintain it. These scholarly activities were at no time more important than after conquest, when the place of the conqueror and the conquered were both unstable and in need of mooring to the ancient past.
Though the book's focus is on ancient times, its insights into power, perception, and persuasion are relevant down to the present day. The early Islamic empires saw both conquerors and conquered grappling with the establishment of an Islamic culture in negotiation with the Qur'anic values of the conquerors, and the established high cultures of the Greeks, Iranians, and others whom they conquered. In the modern post-colonial period, populations are still defining and re-defining Islamic culture, no longer in relation to conquered elites, but to liberalism, democracy, and the legacy of colonial powers. The solutions thus far have included forms of government from Iranian velayat-e faqih to the Turkish secular parliamentary system to the religiously-backed monarchy of Saudi Arabia, with many nations currently in flux; and intellectual approaches that run the whole gamut from salafi movements such as that of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab which seek to return Islam to a perceived pure original state, to the work of intellectuals such as Khaled Abou El Fadl who seek to derive an Islamic context for democracy. Living within borders drawn and re-drawn by the Ottomans, then the French and British, and living with the legacy of colonial occupiers, as well as contemporary resource issues and the long shadow of American interests, it is again a time of renewal and redefinition.
And it is not just relevant to Islamic culture. This book is not about one single culture, nor does it speak only to the concerns of empires; it is about negotiations between cultures, the projection of power, and the exercise of influence. As an American, I can't help but consider things in terms of American power. There is food for thought here in how our sway shows in the world at large, and how we in turn can be impacted by the cultures with which we interact, and the culture of those we occupy or influence.
The author has stated that if you (the reasonably educated reader) can't understand this book, then he has failed. The book is clearly written, structured in a way that makes sense, and quite digestible in terms of both format and length. McCants does a creditable job of providing enough context that a reader who is not familiar with all of his sources can understand it but not so much that it bogs the book down. You don't have to be a scholar of antiquity, or religion, or any other particular field in order to benefit from this book.
That being said, my own familiarity with the at least the rudiments of a lot of the material provided me with a good measure of my personal enjoyment of it. For me, the fun of reading diversely is in the connections your mind makes between things, especially things that seem disparate at first glance. It was a pleasure seeing the connections made by McCants - known to many for his expertise in counterterrorism and modern jihadi movements - among many disciplines including ancient history, religion, anthropology, poetry, modern religious scholarship, and mythology. I have a lifelong love of mythology of all kinds, and I have studied ancient history, Middle Eastern history, the Bible, and Islam, so McCants' wide variety of sources were also a delight. The book is peppered with excerpts from Babylonian tablets, Sumerian poetry, Egyptian scrolls, the works of Homer and Aeschylus and Hesiod and Herodotus, Jewish/Christian apocrypha in which wayward angels sleep with humans and spread corruption, the Iranian epic Shahnamih, the Bible, and the Qur'an, just to name a few.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history or mythology, or a penchant for thinking about complex ideas like the blurred lines of influence between conquerors and conquered. It is well-written, rich with wonderful source materials, educational on the cultural milieux of these ancient conquests, and thought-provoking in terms of how we perceive culture, power, and influence.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent primer on the role of the culture myth in the post-conquest Near East
By Amazon Customer
WHAT ROLE DO culture myths - the stories civilizations tell about the beginning of law, medicine, arts and sciences, and civilization itself - have in defining a group's legitimacy within society? In Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, Will McCants, a Middle East expert at CNA's Center for Strategic Students and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, addresses this issue with an emphasis on explaining the unique development of Muslim cultural beliefs and traditions in the wake of the Arab conquest.
Rather than a dry, linear history, the author presents his study in a comparative format, contrasting the competition for social relevance through control of cultural heritage in three periods of Ancient Near Eastern history: the Hellenistic period following the Alexandrian conquest; the hegemony of imperial Rome; and, of course, the Arab conquest and subsequent Islamic period.
THE CORE COMPARISON that drives Founding Gods is the difference between the existing "high culture" possessed by Greeks and Romans alike from the beginning of their hegemony and the lack of such a culture on the part of the conquering Arabs, and how that difference influenced the cultural actions of conquered elites seeking their role in the new post-conquest society. At the time of Alexander's conquest, the Greeks had a centuries-long history of philosophical, medicinal, legal, and other cultural knowledge, which was well-known and well-respected in the Near East (in no small part because of the centuries of close communication and exchange between the Near East and the Aegean, which took place during the period of - and played a significant role in - that culture's development, as Greek protographers acknowledged). Because of this, the local reaction to the Greek conquest consisted in part of the composition of etiologies which, while necessarily crediting the Greeks with the high culture they were known to possess, attributed the origin of key elements of that `Greek' culture to predecessors of the indigenous elites themselves. The coming of the Romans, who in many respects also adopted Hellenic cultural heritage as their own, spurred a similar response on the part of indigenous elites who needed once again to secure their place in the new order created by the latest conquering power.
The indigenous response to the Arab conquest, on the other hand, was very different from that sparked by the Alexandrian conquest and by the advent of post-Hellenistic (but still largely Hellenized) Roman domination that preceded it. Unlike the Greeks, McCants writes, the conquering Arabs were not associated by native Near Easterners with any specific, respected culture prior to their arrival. As a result, when seeking to solidify their cultural place the new order that followed the Arab conquest, native elites did not concern themselves with who was responsible for the high culture brought by the conquerors (there was none, so responding to the Arab conquest in the same way that their forebears responded to the Greek conquest would have been very cart-before-horse). Instead, they concerned themselves with that which would constitute the new culture that had to be developed in the wake of the conquest - a process that took four centuries to complete.
[...]
At under 200 pages including bibliography and index, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations is a short but dense work, though it would be incorrect to assume that necessary detail and argumentation have been sacrificed for the sake of brevity. Rather, McCants limits his discussion to only that which is directly relevant to the topic at hand. In doing so, he wisely avoids a pitfall many others encounter, particularly when it comes to transforming dissertations into initial book-length publications: needlessly filling additional pages with comprehensive (and repetitious) translations of ancient material, much of which is already available elsewhere, and much of which is often only tangentially related to the core subject of the work. McCants does quote from some ancient cultural myths - as might be expected, given the centrality of that genre to his work - but each translation is relevant to the discussion surrounding it.
Founding Gods, Inventing Nations is a solidly-researched and well-presented book that holds value for students, scholars, and other individuals who are interested in cultural history, culture myths, and the role of the conquered elites in their development. Additionally, its comparative format gives it particular value for individuals who are seeking a compact introduction to the development of culture myths in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Islamic periods in the Near East.
Read the rest of this review here: [...]
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