The Copernicus of Antiquity: Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath

Very brief and awfully arcane

In his popular book and television series of 1980, Cosmos, astronomer and author Carl Sagan includes a chapter/episode on Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek scientist. In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus conceived the heliocentric model of our solar system, meaning the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. We know this because Archimedes informs us of Aristarchus’s accomplishment in one of his scientific publications written about a century later. Aristarchus was not able to convince many of his contemporaries, however, and, like much of ancient Greek scholarship, his work was forgotten for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus established and mathematically proved the heliocentric model in his publication On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and the rest, as they say, is history. In Sagan’s summary of Aristarchus’s career, his heliocentric theory was only one of the ancient Greek’s precocious discoveries. In many ways he was a scientist way ahead of his time.

A desire to learn more about this interesting character led me to The Copernicus of Antiquity, published in 1920, a brief biography of Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath. This book is only about 60 pages long, and the biography is further shortened by the fact that only the second half of the book is actually about Aristarchus. The first half of the book is a brief recap of earlier Greek astronomers and their discoveries, including such ancient cosmographers as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and roughly a dozen others.

The Copernicus of Antiquity was published in a series of books entitled Pioneers of Progress: Men of Science, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London. It was likely adapted from an earlier, more extensive book by Heath from 1913. I would assume the Men of Science series was intended for a general non-academic reading audience, but this book certainly isn’t written that way. A great deal of prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader. Heath writes as if he expects his audience to have read much ancient scientific literature in the original Greek. He also expects the reader to have memorized all of the mathematical operations in The Elements, Euclid’s classic book on geometry. Granted, many college students of 1920 would have studied Greek, but most were neither professional classicists nor mathematicians. While it’s a well-known fact these days that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, few, if asked, could conjure up the angle at which the Sun subtends the zodiac circle, but Heath writes as if this and many similar astronomical measurements were common knowledge. The book is full of complex mathematical computations that will be over the head of curious casual readers.

Of course, the fault is probably not with Heath but rather with whoever edited the Pioneers of Progress series. They took a full-length scholarly monograph intended for classical philologists and mathematicians and condensed it down to a pamphlet size, but they didn’t adjust the content for a pamphlet audience. I learned much more about Aristarchus from Sagan’s chapter in Cosmos than I did from this book by Heath. With the exception of a few facts here and there, I found it a waste of time. If an overview of ancient Greek astronomy is what you’re looking for, undoubtedly better texts exist than this.

Marcus Aurelius: A Life by Frank McLynn

More historical context than biography

British historian and author Frank McLynn has written over two dozen books of history and biography including books on Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Carl Jung. His biography Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor was published in 2010 and has since been rereleased as Marcus Aurelius: A Life. Marcus is often cited as the best of all the Roman emperors (or at least the least cruel and crazy) and is highly regarded as a paragon of leadership and wisdom. In this in-depth life history, McLynn sets out to investigate whether Marcus actually deserves such praise.

Besides being a Roman emperor, Marcus was also a philosopher. Many regard him as perhaps the closest anyone has come to the ideal of the philosopher-king that Plato put forth in his Republic. Marcus’s brand of philosophy was Stoicism, and he is considered one of the big three of that school (along with Epictetus and Seneca) because of his book Meditations, a classic Stoic text. If you’re considering reading McLynn’s biography because you are a modern disciple of Stoicism, prepare to be disappointed. McLynn despises Stoicism, calling it “nonsense” and “gibberish.” He thinks Marcus’s philosophical pursuits were a waste of time. Marcus should have concentrated on military and economical matters, as McLynn mostly does in this book. To McLynn’s credit, however, he does give some thoughtful and intelligent discussion to Marcus’s views on philosophy and religion, at least three solid chapters worth, plus a relentlessly negative appendix on Stoicism. Although tens of thousands of books have been published disputing contradictory views on Christian theology, McLynn thinks any time two Stoics disagree with each other, such inconsistency renders the whole school of thought null and void. I don’t agree with everything (or much) that McLynn has to say about Stoicism, but he’s certainly done his research, and I learned a lot about Marcus from this analysis of his philosophical thought.

The biggest complaint I have about McLynn’s biography of Marcus Aurelius is that only about a third of the book is actually about Marcus Aurelius. As the book opens, we get biographies of other figures who were connected to Marcus: a chapter on Hadrian, a chapter on Antoninus Pius, one on Lucius Verus, and maybe two on Fronto, Marcus’s tutor. McLynn provides historical context about what was going on in Rome at the time of Marcus’s reign, but he goes way overboard with it. For example, when he informs us that a war against the Parthians was underway during Marcus’s reign, we then get a complete detailed history of Rome’s relations with the Parthians going back two or three centuries, then a discussion of the Parthians themselves—their governmental structure, internal conflicts, the various nations and peoples surrounding them—then a primer on the organization of the Roman military, before we ever even get to talking about Marcus. After all that, what Marcus actually did about the Parthians, I couldn’t tell you. The Germanic tribes get a similar background treatment, but then you actually do get a pretty detailed blow-by-blow account of Marcus’s relations with them. McLynn sometimes wanders pretty far afield in his digressions, particularly towards the end of the book. In a book about Marcus Aurelius, did we really need the whole life story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

McLynn’s books have achieved a wide popular audience, but if this book is any indication, he writes with the scholarly rigor of a historian. This is not Marcus Aurelius for Dummies. Part of the historian’s job is to bust myths, and McLynn does some of that here. Given all the adulation that has been heaped upon Marcus over the centuries, the truth can’t help but be less flattering than the legend. McLynn points out that life was not so fine under the Marcus administration, and of all the Roman emperors, he was one of the most severe in persecuting Christians. McLynn certainly does admire Marcus as a leader, and he shows his respect for his subject by conducting a fair and thorough character analysis, neither a panegyric nor a hatchet job. He should have narrowed his focus more tightly on the man himself, however, instead of cramming in so much extraneous detail.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Big universe, big thoughts

The 1980 PBS TV series Cosmos was a landmark in the history of television. The companion book to that series, also published in 1980, was the bestselling science book of all time (until Stephen Hawking beat it a few years later). The Cosmos book has 13 chapters that parallel the 13 episodes of the TV program. Alexander von Humboldt published the original Cosmos book back in 1845 to 1862, and Sagan does mention Humboldt in a footnote. The intent by both authors was to summarize and encapsulate in one volume the state of scientific knowledge on the heavens and the earth. Though Humboldt’s Cosmos was popular in its day, his was a pretty dry scientific text compared to Sagan’s more accessible and inspirational book. The way Sagan combines science writing with philosophy, skepticism, and freethought reminds me of another book from the end of the 19th century: Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe.

As one would expect from an astronomer and planetary scientist, Sagan spends much of Cosmos discussing the planets and other bodies in our solar system, as well as galaxies, the universe as a whole, space travel, the Big Bang, and the search for extraterrestrial life. In addition, however, he discusses particle physics, the origin of life, DNA, evolution, the history of science and astronomy (particularly in ancient Greece), and the human brain. The final chapter of Cosmos is about nuclear war. Although still a threat, Armageddon is not on people’s minds as much as it was in the ‘80s, and disarmament now seems further from reality.

Like any science book of years gone by, the obvious drawback to Cosmos is that it’s outdated. Sagan doesn’t really say anything wrong in this book, but what’s omitted is notable. There’s no mention of quantum physics or dark matter, for example. Sagan wrote Cosmos after Voyager 2 had performed its flyby of Jupiter but before it had reached Saturn. There was no Hubble Space Telescope. The existence of exoplanets was still suspected, not confirmed. The nearly fifty intervening years since publication, however, didn’t really bother me. I consider myself pretty well-versed in astronomical matters for a general reader, but I still learned many interesting scientific facts from Sagan’s Cosmos. Sagan is great at putting things into perspective, both humanity’s insignificance in the universe and the immensity of space and time. (He’s much more eloquent than the “billions and billions” catch phrase for which he’s known.)

I’d read much of this information before, but never as succinctly nor as elegantly put as Sagan presents things here. The other famous science book of this era was, of course, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Though also aimed at the general reader, Hawking’s book is not easy to understand and his explanations aren’t quite user-friendly for the layman. Sagan, on the other hand, is great at explaining complex scientific phenomena in simple terms that anyone with a high school education can understand, without dumbing down the scientific content or the philosophical implications of the matters discussed.

Sagan stopped short of declaring himself an atheist, but for readers of a freethinking persuasion, he is one of the best areligious writers out there, if not the best. He is a superb rationalist preacher, without the pretensions or cynicism of Richard Dawkins and other “neo-atheists.” Since Sagan’s death, others have tried to assume his role as leading spokesman for science—most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye—but no one has quite matched his passion, eloquence, and trustworthiness as a public intellectual. Cosmos, although published in the middle of his career, is Sagan’s magnum opus, the distillation of his entire career. His other books may focus in more detail on some of the topics presented here, but no book better encapsulates his thought in its totality as this one. In the 1980s, this book was a must-read, and today it’s still an important and rewarding work for anyone who cares about science.

Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas

Dylan the classicist (i.e. ancient Greece and Rome)

Richard F. Thomas is a professor of classics at Harvard University, “classics” in this context meaning the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome (in Thomas’s case, more Rome than Greece, I believe). Thomas is also an avid and diehard fan of Bob Dylan. Thomas’s 2017 book Why Bob Dylan Matters arises from the Venn-diagram intersection where those two circles of interest overlap. Thomas uses his prodigious knowledge of classical texts and Dylan lyrics to point out parallels between the two, asserting that Dylan frequently makes references to the works of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and other classical writers in his songs.

The bulk of this book discusses intertextuality in Dylan’s work, what laymen might call borrowing, sampling, or stealing from prior works of literature and music. To those of us who aren’t professors of classics or literature, where that’s most apparent is when Dylan recycles snippets of lyrics from traditional folk songs and old blues tunes. Thomas, however, has uncovered and enumerated many instances where Dylan has borrowed from ancient Greek and Roman poetry, in particular the epics The Aeneid and The Odyssey. Thomas asserts that Dylan is somewhat obsessed with Rome: “Clearly Dylan feels a connection to the antiquity of Rome, as he does with no other place.” That seems like a bit of a stretch to me—wishful thinking for a classics professor, perhaps—but there certainly is some merit to Thomas’s point. He states his case well by making many side-by-side lyrical comparisons that are quite interesting interpretations of Dylan’s art.

Thomas focuses primarily on the periods in Dylan’s career that most scholars and commentators emphasize: the ‘60s classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War,” the 1976 album Blood on the Tracks, and Dylan’s renaissance of the late ‘90s and early 2000s from Time Out of Mind to Tempest (the last Dylan album released before this book was published). It is in the latter period in particular that Thomas finds many references to ancient Rome and The Odyssey, so Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” Modern Times, and Tempest are all examined in detail.

One big problem I have with this book is the way it’s packaged—the title and the cover design. There’s nothing to indicate that this book has anything to do with the Greek and Roman classics. Why Bob Dylan Matters is an incredibly generic title for such a specific approach to Dylan’s music. Before buying the book, I browsed through the table of contents and got the idea this was a lit-crit book defending Dylan’s right to win the Nobel prize. Right up front in chapter one, however, Thomas makes it clear that this is a book about Dylan’s relationship to ancient Rome. Shouldn’t the title and/or subtitle make that clear? Why not call the book Dylan and the Classics, or Dylan and Ancient Rome, or Bob Dylan and the Early Roman Kings (to quote a song title)? I get the feeling the publisher William Morrow deliberately tried to hide what this book is about in hopes of misleading more people into buying it. I like what Thomas has to say about Dylan, but not every Dylan fan is going to get into a book about Cicero, Virgil, and Catullus.

Like any book on Dylanology, Why Bob Dylan Matters gets into much parsing of words, hair-splitting of trivial facts, and conjectural mind-reading of the Bard from Hibbing. That can be annoying at times, but if you’re a Dylan fan, that’s also part of the fun. I wasn’t blown away by Thomas’s revelations, but I did learn quite a bit and gained insight into Dylan’s songs and writing process. This book renewed my enthusiasm for music that I already loved. It made me want to go back and listen closely to those albums discussed. If a book of music criticism can manage to do that, then in my opinion it’s accomplished its mission.

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Long-lost cousins with vastly different upbringings

When Europeans first discovered the Americas, it was the meeting of two vastly different cultures, two populations that were entirely alien to one another. In his 2012 book, The Great Divide, British intellectual historian Peter Watson investigates how and why the peoples of the Old and New Worlds developed so differently. Watson makes the case that differing environmental conditions in the two hemispheres—climate, topography, flora and fauna—forged two diverging trajectories of civilization and culture. In The Great Divide, he has compiled compelling evidence to that effect into a sweeping overview of human history. Some factors that he considers are the role that natural disasters played in the creation of gods and religions, how different flora and fauna affected the rates at which agriculture and cities developed, how the use of psychotropic plants influenced cultural ideologies, and why was human sacrifice such a widespread practice in the Americas?

As I’ve come to learn from previously reading his books Ideas and The Modern Mind, Watson is a master generalist who can pull together concepts and data from a wide variety of fields in the sciences, humanities, and the arts and unify them into a remarkably cohesive whole. The Great Divide, however, is pretty much all about archeology, anthropology, and paleontology. I thought this book would have something to say about the cultures of the Old World and the New after the first transatlantic contact, but with the exception of some brief coverage of the Spanish Conquest, it is entirely concerned with events prior to 1492. Watson’s investigation begins with the dawn of humans and spends a lot of time in the Ice Age. Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius don’t show up until chapter 18, and the Spaniards don’t reach America until the 23rd and final chapter. The Great Divide is basically a comprehensive summary of world archaeology, as much as we knew in 2012. I enjoy reading about archaeology, but because I read quite a bit on that subject, a lot of this was review for me. Nevertheless, as is always the case with Watson’s books, he enriches the general narrative with plenty of interesting facts and connections that will be new and intriguing to most general readers.

If the purpose of this book is to compare and contrast the pre-1492 trajectories of the Old and New Worlds, it is not entirely successful. Watson presents a few chapters on the history of the Old World, followed by a couple chapters on the history of the New World, and back and forth, and back and forth. Only in the conclusion of the book, when recapping all the evidence presented, does Watson really take the time to make side-by-side comparisons between the two domains and draw generalizations and theories from their differences. The two hemispheres, not surprisingly, do not get equal time and consideration. It seems like the book is about two-thirds Old World and one-third New World, simply because there’s so much more pre-16th-century information available on Eurasia than there is on the Americas.

The Great Divide is an excellent synthesis of human history that draws interesting parallels and deviations between the peoples of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. This book will not, however, captivate the general reader to the same extent as Charles Mann’s excellent 1491 or perhaps Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I haven’t read, but it was a popular bestseller). Although Watson does generate similar wow-factor by delivering insightful revelations to curious readers, The Great Divide has more of a textbook execution to it, rather than the more investigative science journalism feel of Mann’s work. Notwithstanding, if you are at all interested in the ancient history of world cultures, this book’s breadth and depth make it a must-read.

The ebook claims that an Appendix 2 is available online at the Harper Collins website, but it’s not there, and that’s really annoying.  

Lazarus Laughed by Eugene O’Neill

Strange multi-masked biblical tragedy

Lazarus Laughed is a full-length drama by American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill wrote the play in 1925. It was published in book form in 1927 and first performed on stage at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in 1928.

Set in ancient times, Lazarus Laughed is based on the biblical story of Jesus Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Or rather, it’s O’Neill’s speculation on what might have happened after that miracle took place. Christ does not appear in the play. He has already departed Lazarus’s house before the curtain opens, though he is discussed and debated in absentia. Here in O’Neill’s take on things, the resurrected Lazarus ascends to the height of a messiah to rival Christ himself. Lazarus defies Christian and Jewish teachings by leading a cult whose members deny the existence of death and live for laughter and pleasure. 

The drama begins in Lazarus’s hometown of Bethany, in present-day Palestine. Subsequent scenes take place in Athens and Rome, where Lazarus meets Emperor Tiberius and his successor Caligula. Stylistically, this drama is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy. O’Neill tries to evoke the experience of an ancient theatrical production. A chorus (actually more than one) chants narration and commentary throughout the play, and almost all of the actors are masked. Soon after completing Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill used such stylistic elements to again emulate Greek tragedy in The Great God Brown, a play set in modern times.

Lazarus Laughed has only been staged a few times over the past century, probably because O’Neill really didn’t make it easy to produce this drama. In some scenes, his stage directions call for as many as 150 actors on stage at once. Other than Lazarus and his wife, just about everyone else is wearing masks. One scene asks for 49 different male masks and 49 different female masks, and the actors change masks in each scene. O’Neill calls for masks varying in size, emotional expression, age, and ethnicity, and specifies multiple combinations of those characteristics, thus probably at least 500 detailed and well-crafted masks are required to pull this off the way he wanted it. I would imagine the few theatres and schools who actually staged this play likely cut corners in mask manufacturing because O’Neill’s specifications would be cost prohibitive and near impossible to follow to the letter.

Other than simply telling a story about Lazarus and Tiberius, what is the point of all this? I don’t know what literary critics might say about it, but for me personally, I get a message similar to that taught by the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, that fear of death prevents us from truly living our lives. Lazarus’s repeated assertions in this play that there is no death can be taken two ways: 1) that eternal life in Heaven means there is no death, or 2) that death simply brings a nothingness that is neither to be felt nor feared, so enjoy yourself and live your life on Earth to the fullest. Based on the behavior of Lazarus’s followers in this play, and on how O’Neill lived his life, I’m guessing he meant the latter. There has to be a better way to get that across, however, than having Lazarus and his crowd of followers laughing and yelling, “There is no death!” many times over. If staged with all the grandeur that O’Neill intended, Lazarus Laughed might have been a sight to see, but on the page it mostly comes across as a bit silly.

Maya History by Tatiana Proskouriakoff

For expert epigraphers only

Russian-American scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff is one of the stellar names in the field of Maya studies and was an instrumental contributor to the decipherment of the Maya’s written language. The book Maya History, a summation of her life’s work, was incomplete at the time of her death and published posthumously in 1993. Prior to Proskouriakoff, the prevailing view among Maya scholars was that the hieroglyphic carvings left behind by the Maya civilization were largely devoted to astronomical, calendrical, and mythological content. Proskouriakoff, on the other hand, proved that the Maya carvings were historical records of political events and dynastic lineages. Although the Maya’s written carvings were not completely deciphered, Proskouriakoff was able to recognize the names and titles of rulers and enough verbs to connect royal family trees and diplomatic relations between various Maya city-states. In Maya History, Proskouriakoff examines almost every Mayan stela catalogued during her lifetime, as well as lintels, staircases, and other carved monuments. She presents her findings largely in chronological order while bouncing back and forth between just about every Maya city in Guatemala and Southern Mexico.

This is an important and fascinating book, but it’s not for general readers. Here’s a typical sentence: “The second hand glyph holds a ‘hook-scroll’ (T19), associated with death expressions, and refers to a rare ahau compound such as that inscribed on a vessel from the Tzakol III burial 22 at Uaxactun (R. E. Smith 1955:2:Fig. 7)”. Proskouriakoff’s intended audience of university professors would have had access to a library of books with illustrations and photographs of Mayan stelae and texts, as well as J. Eric S. Thompson’s catalog of Maya glyphs (where one would find the “T19” mentioned above, for example). Very few illustrations of stelae are actually included in this book (though many single glyphs are pictured alone), so she’s constantly describing monuments that the reader can’t see. Dates are all presented in Maya notation (e.g. 9.12.9.17.16 5 Cib 14 Zotz’), which is no surprise, but no Gregorian equivalents are given. To fully understand everything in this book, one would need not only a faultless understanding of the Maya calendar but also a professional familiarity with all the archaeological sites discussed, or at least a wealth of PhD-level reference materials with illustrations of every stela. Proskouriakoff’s scholarship is sound, but this book could really use a publisher that will go the extra mile to illustrate it to the extent it deserves.

While Proskouriakoff outlines a great deal of Maya chronology in this book, she continually admits that much of what she is stating is speculative or unresolved. The reading of Maya hieroglyphs has no doubt come a long way since much of Maya History was written. Since then, I’m sure that many of Proskouriakoff’s conjectures have been confirmed, but probably a few have been proved erroneous. This book is really more about the process of decipherment, however, than the results. The amount of actual historical information in this book could have been summarized in a two- or three-page chronological table (unfortunately it isn’t). The bulk of the text, on the other hand, is Proskouriakoff’s explanatory examination of Maya glyphs and text.

Proskouriakoff’s Maya History is a five-star book in the history of Maya studies. For the general reader, however, it’s not a five-star reading experience. For nonacademic readers like myself looking for a deeper dive into the arcane details of this subject, I would recommend Forest of Kings by Linda Schele and David Freidel. Like Maya History, it combines historical narrative with a detailed examination of glyphs and iconography, but it’s more accessible to the general reader and more generously illustrated.
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Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

Prehistoric life was horny and boring

California author Kim Stanley Robinson is known for his science-fiction visions of the future, but his 2013 novel Shaman is set in prehistoric times. During the Ice Age, a young man named Loon reluctantly undergoes training to become his tribe’s shaman. Like many a teenager coming of age, he feels forced into a future he didn’t choose. The only aspect of the job that really interests him is cave painting. The story takes place at a time when homo sapiens, such as Loon and his people, coexisted with Neanderthals, referred to here as “the Old Ones,” so maybe around 45,000 years ago. Though no place names are stated, geographical features indicate that the story takes place in Europe.

Shaman is science fiction only in the sense that it is based on archaeological and anthropological science. The book contains no elements of fantasy or speculative fiction, with the exception of Robinson’s ridiculous choice of a supernatural narrator. For the most part, Robinson aims for a realistic depiction of prehistoric man. In fact, his take on Ice Age living is so realistic that, but for the fact that the characters have names, more often than not Shaman reads very much like a textbook: This is the way early man hunted and preserved their food. This is the way they executed cave paintings. This is how they undertook their seasonal migrations. This is the way they made snowshoes. The characters perform these actions for the reader as if they were mannequins in a natural history museum diorama. If I want to know about how ancient man lived, I would rather read an actual textbook, such as Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe by Jane McIntosh. Fiction, on the other hand, should offer drama, characterization, and plot, all of which are scanty qualities in Shaman.

Nothing resembling a plot shows up until halfway through the book, at which point some characters travel to distant lands, where we get another textbook on another tribe’s way of living. The fictional content of the book is sparse and rather dull. There is a chase scene, for example, that lasts eight chapters, and it’s largely just descriptions of snow and ice. I like the fact that Robinson didn’t go in for soap-opera melodrama or new-age mysticism like The Clan of the Cave Bear, but he should have done more to make this story interesting. He wants to convince us that stone-age humans were people too, but then he delivers very little conflict between the shallowly drawn characters as they act out some questionably Edenic caveman fantasy camp.

Something else Robinson wants you to know about prehistoric people is that apparently they were obsessed with genitalia and bodily functions. I don’t know why it is that when authors these days write about the ancient world, they feel compelled to load their prose with bodily fluids of the reproductive and digestive systems, but Robinson is only one of many who have gone that route in recent years. Is that supposed to be cutting-edge realism? Prehistoric communities probably had more open attitudes about sex and sanitation than we do, but I also think they had other things to think about, like survival.

Robinson is so concerned with describing everything in minute detail that there is little room left for a story, and what there is moves at a glacial pace. As a result, reading Shaman feels like a very long haul. The time period and subject matter would seem to offer some interesting narrative possibilities, so it’s hard to understand why this book turned out to be so boring.
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Writing (Ancient Peoples and Places series) by David Diringer

Broad, shallow overview of ancient scripts

In 1957, the London publisher Thames & Hudson began publishing a series of books on archaeology entitled Ancient Peoples and Places, which eventually grew to 113 volumes. In most cases, each book synthesizes the current research on a particular region or ancient civilization. The 25th book in the series, however, was the first volume to break that rule by focusing instead on the worldwide ancient history of a particular cultural phenomenon: Writing. That book entitled Writing, written by David Diringer, was first published in 1962.

Diringer starts by explaining the distinctions between pictographic, ideographic, transitional, phonetic or syllabic, and alphabetic forms of writing. He then goes on to examine individual scripts of different regions of the world and their chronological development. He starts by discussing the first pictographic symbols of prehistoric peoples. He then examines ancient writing styles of the Near East, including cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hittite hieroglyphics, and the Minoan or Cretan scripts Linear A and B. This is followed by a chapter on East Asian scripts, which only covers Chinese and Japanese, with a brief addendum on Easter Island writing. Then follows a chapter on the pre-Colombian writing of the Maya and Aztecs. Not surprisingly, the most coverage is reserved for the ancient languages that were precursors to our own alphabet, which arose out of Semitic scripts that precursed the Phoenician, Greek, and finally Latin alphabets. Multiple side trips are taken into other written languages, such as Aramaic, Arabic, and Indian scripts. The book is illustrated with many transcriptions of ancient writing, photographs of inscribed artifacts, and phonetic and alphabetic tables of the languages covered.

The books in the Ancient People and Places series are meant to be concise introductory texts for students and general readers. They typically run about 200 pages, with many illustrations and charts, plus another 60 pages of photographs. In a book of that size, Diringer can’t provide a comprehensive history of every ancient script, so he had to make choices about what to feature and what to omit. Nevertheless, he covers a surprisingly large number and broad variety of languages here. What you get in this book is a little bit of knowledge about a lot of different scripts and their cultures. Diringer provides enough information to pique one’s interest, so the reader can seek out further information on specific languages in more specialized texts.

I read the first edition of this book from 1962. At that time, the Minoan script Linear B had just been deciphered, and the Mayan glyphs had not been completely deciphered. Soviet scholar Yuri Knozorov would put the finishing touches on cracking that code a few years later. I’m sure a lot of other discoveries have been made regarding ancient scripts in the past 60 years. Nevertheless, as emphasized before, this is a basic introduction to the field, and much of the fundamentals have survived the test of time. There’s not enough space here for Diringer to teach you how to read any of these scripts anyway, so if you require that level of detail and accuracy, look for a more advanced text. As a general overview, I enjoyed this book. It provides a clear outline of the development of alphabets over millennia, and it brought to my attention a few ancient civilizations and their scripts with which I was unfamiliar. I have been pleased with the volumes of the Ancient Peoples and Places Series that I have seen thus far, and I look forward to reading more of them.
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Mexico (Ancient Peoples and Places series) by Michael D. Coe

Great concise overview of everyone northwest of the Maya

In 1957, the London publisher Thames & Hudson began publishing a series of books on archaeology entitled Ancient Peoples and Places. These books were republished in America by Frederick A. Praeger. In most cases, each book synthesized the current research on a particular region or ancient civilization. These books are authoritative enough to perhaps be used in undergraduate courses but accessible enough to educate general readers. The series eventually included at least 112 volumes. Some of these books are still in print and have been updated over the years.

Mexico, the 29th book in the Ancient Peoples and Places series, was first published in 1962 and is now in its eighth edition. It was written by Michael D. Coe, a distinguished archaeologist of pre-Colombian Mexico and Mesoamerica. Of the major scholars of Mexico’s ancient peoples, Coe has perhaps done the most to educate non-academics by writing books accessible to the general public, such as his popular 1992 book Breaking the Maya Code, which won a National Book Award. The reader won’t find any Maya here, however. Coe explains that the Maya need their own book in the series, which he wrote and published a few years later. Here Coe makes a cultural distinction between Mesoamerica, home of the Maya, and Mexico proper, being everything northwest of the Yucatán. Much of the ancient history presented here centers around the Valley of Mexico, location of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (site of modern Mexico City).

Later editions of this book are subtitled From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, but the book is really a broad overview of all the ancient cultures that inhabited Mexico from the first humans who walked down from the Bering Land Bridge thousands of years ago to the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish conquistadores in 1521. The Olmecs and the Aztecs only get one chapter each. (They both later got their own books in the Ancient Peoples and Places series.) The absence of the Maya and the brevity with which the Olmecs and Aztecs are treated may be perceived by some as a detriment to the book, but I actually see it as a strength. One can find hundreds of books on those three civilizations, while the rest of Mexico’s ancient peoples go ignored or neglected. Here Coe provides a concise but comprehensive overview that gives everyone their due consideration. Centuries before the rise of the Aztecs, Native Mexican peoples had already left monumental testaments to their great civilizations, such as the metropolis of Teotihuacán northeast of Mexico City, Monte Albán in Oaxaca, and El Tajín in Veracruz. An archaeologically curious traveler wandering around Mexico today will hear all about the ancient histories of the Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Chichimec peoples, and many more. It is hard to grasp the broader picture of where and when these different cultures lived, and how they interacted and influenced one another. This book provides a clear key to how they all fit together geographically, chronologically, and culturally.

The content is a combination of historical synopses and mini-field reports of what was found at particular archaeological digs. Although this is an introductory text, Coe doesn’t dumb down the subject matter. The reader is expected to quickly grasp archaeological terminology, for example the official designations for specific Ice Age periods, pottery cultures, or styles of spear points. The many photographs, illustrations, charts, and maps are helpful. I’m not an archaeologist, just a layman and tourist, but I have read much on Mexican history, and I still learned a lot of fascinating facts from this book. If this is an indication of the quality one can expect from the Ancient Peoples and Places series, then I look forward to reading many more of these books.
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Aztec by Gary Jennings

Fascinating history retold with inappropriate kinks

I have an avid interest in Mexico and its pre-Colombian history, and I have often wondered why there aren’t more historical novels set in that world. When I heard about Gary Jennings’s novel Aztec, published in 1980, it sounded like that Mexican epic I had long been looking for, but in some respects it turned out to be a case of “Be careful what you wish for.”

Aztec is ostensibly the autobiography of an elderly Mexica man named Mixtli. His narrative is transcribed verbatim by a team of Spanish clergymen in the year 1529, under the direction of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga. This clever structure allows the bishop to provide brief commentaries from a Spanish perspective in his letters home to King Carlos. In a wise choice by Jennings, Mixtli is not an Aztec king, high priest, or great warrior, but rather a minor noble with a talent for languages. Through his work as a scribe, interpreter, and diplomat, he is able to move in all circles of Aztec society and is present at some of the most important events in Mexican history. The book takes place mostly in the ancient metropolis of Tenochtitlan and focuses on the culture of the Aztecs, Mexica, or Triple Alliance (three names for the same civilization), but if you are interested in other cultures of ancient Mexico, have no fear. Mixtli travels quite a bit, so the reader also gets glimpses of the Maya, Olmecs, Tarahumara, and several other peoples of ancient Mexico.

Unfortunately, one aspect of the book that’s really awful are its sex scenes, of which there are many. One minute you’re deeply involved in the history of ancient Mesoamerica, and the next minute you’re reading Penthouse Forum. These scenes are almost all totally unnecessary and positively juvenile in their boyish glee over salacious details of reproductive anatomy. Did you know that earthquakes make people horny? Well, if you didn’t, Jennings manages to work that into the story not once but twice. The sex scenes are not only annoying but unrealistic. If an Aztec were recounting his life story to a bunch of Spaniards, would he describe everything in minute detail as if his listeners had never seen genitalia before? I don’t know if incest and pedophilia were common in ancient Mexico, but even if they were, the giddiness with which Jennings recalls such incidents is uncalled for. As one would expect, there’s also plenty of violence in this novel, which is more excusable. Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism were part of Aztec culture, and the gore inherent in their description is justified, but beyond that Jennings also includes a few over-the-top scenes of gratuitous torture porn.

Something else that’s exasperating about this novel is its inordinate length. I could have read five or six other books in the time I spent on this one, and the meandering plot, repetitious dialogue, and unnecessary scenes (see previous paragraph) do not justify its overly protracted duration. If it’s the Spanish conquest you’re interested in, Cortés doesn’t show up until about 80 percent of the way through, but the book does move pretty briskly after that. The conquest of Tenochtitlan is a familiar story, but Jennings does a good job of bringing it to life.

To his credit, Jennings strikes a good balance between research and storytelling. Some writers of historical novels rely too heavily on research to the point where you feel like you’re reading a textbook. Jennings, however, puts the fiction on an equal footing with the facts, resulting in a novel that reads like a novel. It’s possible that Aztec may be one of the best novels (in English) about pre-Colombian Mexico (because there aren’t many), but that still doesn’t excuse its faults and excesses. If you’re interested in ancient Mexican history, you’re going to want to read this, but expect to be periodically frustrated, annoyed, disappointed, and bored by it.

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