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How the world made the West : a 4,000-year history  Cover Image Book Book

How the world made the West : a 4,000-year history / Josephine Quinn.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9780593729793
  • ISBN: 059372979X
  • Physical Description: pages cm
  • Edition: First edition.
  • Publisher: New York : Random House, [2024]

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:
A single sail -- The palace of Minos -- The amber routes -- The erupting sea -- Band of brothers -- Alphabet city -- Regime change -- I am not your servant -- Through the pillars -- The invention of Greece -- The Assyrian Mediterranean -- He who saw the deep -- The bitter river -- The king of kings -- The Persian version -- Continental thinking -- Of elephants and kings -- Clouds in the West -- Fighting for freedom -- Rome, open city -- Trade winds -- Salt roads -- The rise of the barbarians -- Kings of the world -- The father of Europe -- The translation movement -- The sign of the cross -- Kalila wa-Dimna -- The land of darkness -- A new world.
Summary, etc.:
"In How the World Made the West, Oxford historian and classicist Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the "civilizational" thinking regarding the origins of Western culture and thought-that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Upending two centuries of conventional historiography and troubling the waters of our Western origin story, she locates the roots of the West in everything from literature from Sumeria, the law codes of Babylon, metallurgy from the Hittites, to sculpture from Egypt, irrigation from Assyria, and the art of navigation and the alphabet from Phoenicia, to name just a few examples. Rather than the very popular "West and the rest" view of history, Quinn demonstrates that cultures come to life by borrowing heavily from others, near and far. Reducing the backstory of the modern west to a narrative that focuses on, or even begins with, Greece and Rome reveals an impoverished view of the past. Our west-centric understanding of modern history would have made no sense to the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves. Instead, ancient authors understood and talked about their own connections to and borrowings from others, and they consistently present their own history as the result of contact and exchange. Quinn builds on the writings they left behind, through rich analyses of ancient literary sources like the epic of Gilgamesh, holy texts, and newly discovered records revealing details about ancient life that are constantly emerging from archival research in the waterlogged sites of the north and the sands of the desert. A work of breath-taking scholarship, How the World Made the West also draws on the material culture of the times in art and artifacts as well as findings from the latest scientific advances in carbon dating and human genetics to thoroughly debunk the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle"-- Provided by publisher.
Subject: Civilization, Western > History.
East and West.

Available copies

  • 4 of 5 copies available at Bibliomation. (Show)
  • 1 of 1 copy available at Hall Memorial Library - Ellington.

Holds

  • 0 current holds with 5 total copies.
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Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Hall Memorial Library - Ellington 909.0982 QUINN (Text) 34037150845651 Adult New Nonfiction Available -


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