Walls

ldquo;A humorous and profound exploration of a central tension of history—our competing desires for security and freedom. With a novelist’s eye for the illuminating detail, Frye illustrates the great paradox of walls—that fear builds them, but it’s only behind them that civilizations develop. It’s a lesson both relevant and timeless. Love your neighbor, but don’t pull down the hedge.”
—Lars Brownworth, author of Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization

Autorentext

David Frye received his PhD from Duke University and currently teaches ancient and medieval history at Eastern Connecticut State University. The author of Walls, he has participated in several international archeological digs and has contributed to Military History, MHQ, Archeological Odyssey, and McSweeney’s.

Klappentext

"A survey of walls throughout history and their role in shaping society."--Provided by publisher.

Zusammenfassung
“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” (Library Journal)—walls—and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live.

With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed—to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out.

The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves—rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia's steppes; learn of bizarre Spartan rituals; watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes; witness the epic siege of Constantinople; chill at the fate of French explorers; marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line; tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin; gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty; and contemplate the wall mania of our own era.

Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “provocative, well-written, and—with walls rising everywhere on the planet—timely,” Walls gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them? Find out in this masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling.

Leseprobe
Walls

Midwife to Civilization: Wall Builders at the Dawn of History

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST, 2500–500 BC

The great wall of Shulgi has not survived, but then, how could it? Time lay heavily across the landscape of Mesopotamia. Like some relentlessly pressing weight, it sought to smother everything that would rise up out of the flat alluvial plains of ancient Iraq. Its effects there were uncharacteristically swift, almost impatient; it destroyed things before it could age them. As early as the third millennium BC, the Mesopotamians already had a word—dul—for the shapeless lumps of dead cities that even then dotted the horizons, having long ago melted like wax under the sun. Dul eventually gave way to an Arabic word, tell, which reflected the growing obscurity shrouding the region’s past. To the Bedouins whose animals meandered around the unsightly mounds, the tells were nothing more than insignificant heaps of dirt. Only later did archaeologists realize that every one of those strange landmarks represented the ruins of a lost world.

In Shulgi’s day, some four thousand years ago, Mesopotamians battled ceaselessly against the work of time. They lived as if in sand castles, forever building and rebuilding a world that would inevitably be washed away. Nothing endured. The great fertile fields that fed the cities were a mirage. If the workers neglected the cleaning and repair of their vast irrigation systems for even a few seasons, the ditches would silt up, and the land would return to desert. Their buildings were no more permanent. For construction materials, the Mesopotamians had little more than the dirt beneath their feet. In this hot land made of silt deposited by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, there were no stones and few trees. Lacking sufficient fuel to bake all their mud bricks, the Mesopotamians settled for drying them in the sun, a process that created building blocks of such dubious quality that they could not withstand even occasional rain. To protect their brick walls, the Mesopotamians slathered them with a plaster of mud, and when that first outer coat washed away, they slathered them with mud again. If they were diligent at maintaining their walls, the resulting accumulation of washed-off plaster would eventually clog the streets, forcing them to knock down the buildings and start over. If they were interrupted in their maintenance, the result was much the same as for the unirrigated fields: temples, palaces, and even city walls crumbled away. Another city became a tell.

The impermanence of their mud-built world clearly troubled the Mesopotamians. A popular legend—possibly the most popular, judging from the variety of copies that have survived—tells of a king who refused to accept that he, like all mortals, must someday die and return to clay. The mythical Gilgamesh searched far and wide for a way to cheat death, but his efforts went for nothing. The Mesopotamian storytellers couldn’t conceive of any ending for their hero that didn’t require him to sink back into the soil.

In the end, the Mesopotamians defeated time in only one activity. The clay tablets upon which they inscribed their cuneiform writing have survived the passing centuries completely unchanged. If the planet endures another million years, those tablets will also endure, remaining in exactly the same condition.

Successful, therefore, in overcoming time only in their record keeping, the Mesopotamians naturally developed the bureaucratic urge to assign dates to events, and this led to the habit of kings giving names to years. Though perhaps not so elegant a system of chronology as our current one, it did serve a second purpose that has become quite useful to historians. It allowed the kings to commemorate their achievements—including the building of structures that they surely realized could not last.

Shulgi—who, as king of Ur around 2000 BC, ruled over much of Mesopotamia—was a builder of many things that didn’t last, and he was a few other things besides. It’s probably best to let his own words speak for him. The long-reigning monarch composed several extant hymns of self-praise, and these tell us a great deal about him, if we can shake the nagging suspicion that he has padded his résumé somewhat. Shulgi clearly wrestled with the constraints of modesty. In one hymn, he described himself as “a powerful man who enjoys using his thighs.” This was the sort of boast that probably shouldn’t have been committed to a medium that could still be read after four thousand years. Then again, Shulgi also referred to himself as the “god of manliness,” so it would seem he wasn’t easily embarrassed. He assures us that, as a youth, he excelled all other students. Grown to manhood, he slew every lion in Mesopotamia and defeated every human enemy as well. He master…