Reconstructing Western Civilization Irreverent Essays on Antiquity

These essays reveal ancient history through a lens ironic, skeptical, playful. While textbooks numb curiosity and stifle humor, Barbara Sher Tinsley humorously confronts the past, encouraging readers to enjoy exploring the tragicomic aspects of men-and women-from Paleolithic through early Christian times. Readers get a chronological account from Gilgamesh to the rise of Christianity. Intolerance and spirituality, science and irrationality, sex and gender, poverty and greed, hold mirrors to a different past than any textbook provides. Here, history is thought provoking, relevant, and often hilarious. The essays suggest how the past was hewn by writers with axes to grind.

Why does man call himself Homo sapiens (wise man) when he cannot coexist peacefully? Why does the definition of civilization omit civility? In Genesis God shapes man, and man asks "why." Were his answers correct? Would science validate those theories now? How did patriarchal societies conceive of fertility goddesses? Why does goddess literature give women confidence? Who had greater faith, or scanter resources? For two millennia Summer gave Hebrews and others law, ethics, literature. The Hebrews eventually needed just one God, unlike Sumer , but He would need the Hebrews too! They had a contract with Him, still hotly debated, of arguable validity. Egypt mummified the dead to save their souls, but wound up embalming itself-without first taking the usual precaution of dying!

The author thinks historians rarely objective. Just as some dog owners come to resemble their pets, so some historians reflected assumptions of elite patrons. The same holds true for theologians. Saints and sinners wrestled Christianity into shape. The sinners lost, though some were more appealing than the saints who won. Is superstition the same as ignorance? Heresy? Piety? From our Hebrew ancestors and from classical Greece derives our racism, our fear of foreign speech (babel) and speakers. We persecute those unlike us, and like the Hebrews and Greeks, call them names-gentiles, barbarians, and aliens. How could those good people have taught us so badly? Language influenced behavior, justifying misdeeds. The Hebrews, into good deeds, gave us one God. The Greeks, into heroic deeds, democracy. Forceful imposition of these beliefs caused pain.

Was Alexander the Great a multiculturalist or just a megalomaniac? The brotherhood of man proves as elusive an ideal for us as it did for Hellenistic and Roman pagans. Western civilization was what happened when east and west met and merged (or clashed) from cultural disagreement. The usual complications, some far-reaching, ensued.

LC: 2005010889
ISBN: 1-57591-095-0

About the Author

Table of Contents