How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn. Random House (ISBN: 9780593729793) 2024.

Summary: An argument that Western civilization reflects a 4000 year history of the mixing of global cultures.

Josephine Quinn sets out in this book to puncture at least two myths about Western civilization. One is the the story of Western civilization is the story of the influences of Greek and Roman cultures. The second is the myth of the “clash” of “civilizations.” Quinn instead argues that the story of the West is the story of a global human civilization (singular) incessantly in contact with the far reaches of the world via travel and trade (and sometimes warfare) resulting in the commingling of cultures.

Quinn begins with ancient Byblos, a port city that traded with peoples from the Nile region all the way to the Asian steppes. In turn, Byblos traders travel to the kingdom of Crete, which reaches from the Aegean to Mesopotamia. As the focus shifts to Mycenae, we learn of trade routes reaching as far as Wales and Scandinavia, through Germany and the Hungarian plains and throughout Italy.

Artifacts from the small town of Akrotiri, buried in a volcano reveal items from around the Mediterranean. Tablets from Amarna in Egypt reveal trade relationships with the Aegean, Crete, and Rhodes.

Civilizational contributions consist of Ugaritic, an alphabet anticipating our own. Babylonians formulated what we call the Pythagorean theorem more than a thousand years before Pythagoras.

And on it goes. Quinn ranges from one end of the Mediterranean to another, along Asian trade routes, into and around Africa, circumnavigated by the navy of an Egyptian king, and into Europe and the British isles. This unfolding history traces a continuous commingling of cultures that ultimately formed our “Western” civilization. She shows the cultural influences shaping Greece and Rome and the wars between powers.

Quinn amasses an impressive amount of artifacts, carbon dating, genetic testing, and other sources to make her argument. The one challenge at times in reading is that it felt difficult to keep track of the forest for the trees as Quinn moves from place to place, detailing trade relationships between places. But perhaps this is part of her argument. It is not a neat story of just Greece and Rome. Nor is it the West versus the rest.

It impresses me that the story of civilization is simply a human story. While culturally diverse, human beings have been intersecting, sharing culture, beliefs, and technology, throughout our history. We are the product of this and the purveyors of what human civilization will become for future generations. While we erect barriers and borders, we also seem driven to cross them in travel and trade and learning. It seems me might do well to give ourselves to thinking about how that may be best channeled to the ends of human flourishing rather than conflict or exploitation.