Through out the history, the Europeans have proclaimed their civilization as the best. They believed that they were born to educate an illiterate world and they were the ones who invented and discovered everything. However, Professor Josephine Quinn believes the western civilization’s achievements were nothing more than borrowed patchwork from different civilizations.
When Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at the Oxford University and the author of the book ‘How the world made the West- A, 4000-year history’ said that the racial hierarchies and colonial expansions of the 19th century were a result of this civilizational thinking that made Europeans believe that they were a supreme race born to bring civilization to the ignorant world, people at the Jaipur Literature Festival were spell bound. She argued that societies of the ‘West’ cooked up their material and conceptual world using the wheel from the Central-Asian steppe, poetry from Persia, legal codes from Mesopotamia, mathematics from Babylon and India, Mongolian stirrups, gold from sub-Saharan Africa, maritime skills from the people of the Levant and the far north, and Asian religion. The founders of ‘Western civilisation’ didn’t limit themselves to any hemisphere, geographically or intellectually, and without their intermingling’s the mongrel culture we have inherited would have been infinitely poorer and less dynamic.
Talking to Professor Quinn is like jumping into the pensieve of memories in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. When she speaks, you feel as if you have stepped into a time machine that will take you back to where it all first began. She was visiting the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024 and I had the opportunity to interview her.
No matter, what kind of history you read, each culture seems to be saying that they came first or their people discovered or invented everything or even created the first civilization. What is the truth?
(Laugh) That’s great, I think as a historian you end up realising that the idea of coming first never works because then you always, there’s always so much of stuff from earlier. Even if we just stick to human history, what we actually have records of, it’s only the last tiny, tiny minimal proportion of what’s going on. The stories people are telling each other, the wars that are happening, there’s so much that is only preserved, interestingly, in places which retained an oral culture for a really long time. So if you go to places like Australia or Polynesia and so on, where oral traditions remained the main way of passing on memory until really the last century or two, that’s the kind of place where you can begin to see stories that are reaching back tens of thousands of years in some cases, where you begin to see climate change from the Ice Age coming up into the myths that are being told and so on. But I think apart from that, and again it’s a very big picture, if you’re looking at sort of ideologies and the lights people give the world and so on, I think it’s impossible to say that any particular place or thing comes first, because from the very beginning people are interacting with each other, they’re interacting across it. I know it very inconvenient for the leaders of modern nations, but people just didn’t organise themselves neatly into those same structures in the past.
But I read somewhere that there was a woman called Eve and she was in Africa. Is that true?
So, the truth is all humans are interrelated, which means that on some level we all share the same ancestry. The idea of, I think what you’re talking about is mitochondrial Eve, who was this character created by scientists who working on DNA couple of decades ago to describe the fact that everyone is interconnected. The theory was that you could connect it all back to one person who would have been in Africa. Today, the studies on DNA have progressed quite a lot further than that and quite recently, scientists have discovered that is we’re actually all interconnected.
I mean the way people say is everyone is everyone’s 11th cousin within quite large geographical areas. So, you probably don’t even need to go back as far as Eve to find people who everyone alive today are connected to each other.
Generally children find history very boring and you are into ancient history. How do you find it interesting? Why are you in this profession and what makes it interesting for you?
Actually, when I first went to university I was a languages person, I was doing classical languages, I have done a lot of modern languages before that and I never expected to be in history. In fact, I had given up history at school because it was so boring. At that time, there was an experiment going on in British schooling system where they introduced us to very local history. But I wanted to know about the whole world and I was being forced to learn about interesting but local stories but I wanted to know a much bigger picture than that.
It was only when I started studying in the university that I realised it was possible to do a kind of history that told you about people who were nothing like you. In school, the idea behind teaching us local history was so that they could help us to relate to people who came from the same place as us but what I suddenly realised at university through amazing teachers and great courses that actually what’s more amazing are the people who aren’t like us, the people who bring something new and different and that’s why I love teaching about Greece and Rome in the Classics Faculty at Oxford.
I absolutely love teaching my students about the Greeks and Romans. Sometimes my students tend to think that the Greeks and Romans are quite similar to us-they kind of imagine that a Roman senator might be rather like a British politician or something. But I tell them that they were nothing like today’s people, these were very strange and different people. I think that’s so important for children at school in particular to learn that all these categories that we think of as being completely natural, whether it’s sexuality, nation, ethnicity, all sorts of preferences, were seen completely differently in the past and the people thought differently, saw themselves differently. I find that so liberating and the idea that you can say to kids, you think that the world you’re brought up in, that the categories you encounter, the way that your parents, your teachers live their lives, it gives you the parameters, you can only make choices within them, am I going to be you know go the majority way or do whatever is the kind of minority alternative and so on. I want to say to them you can completely rethink your lives, look at these people who are utterly different to you, see the world in completely different ways, you can take that and make the world you want to.
Has the idea of God evolved through the history? Has the human mind evolved through the ages?
I have yet in my career as a historian to see any evidence that the human mind has evolved over the ages (laughs), I’m afraid, I mean I wish it was different but I really don’t think so, I do have moments of revelation where, for instance, where you can see that the context has changed and this maybe explains a little bit about religion sometimes.
So there was a moment when I went to visit some colleagues who were digging on a site at the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean Sea. It’s a beautiful Greek island, very deserted, importantly for this particular anecdote, quite remote and there’s not a lot of towns on Lemnos. It wasn’t the tourist season at the time. I remember going out the first evening, the sun had set, the stars were out and they were everywhere.
I wasn’t just seeing the Milky Way, which you don’t see very often in England, or many places these days, but it was, the whole sky was carpeted with stars. In a way it wasn’t stars in the sky, it was stars and then tiny bits of black space in between them. A thought struck me that if I lived in a world before the invention of electricity and every time I looked in the sky after the sun went down, I saw this, then I might be maybe a little scared but also just very impressed with whatever it is that is creating that fact for me and this was a revelation for me because they I realized why all societies develop some kind of religion. I think the idea that there is something very powerful and strange beyond our reach and that’s just not available. But these days, we don’t even have time for these kind of revelations unfortunately, so in that sense the human mind has devolved.
Did the mythic island of Atlantis exist in the ancient world?
No. The truth is that the story of Atlantis was made up as a myth and it’s a very deliberate one, not a myth that grew up in time but was actually written down by the philosopher Plato in the 4th century BC and he specifically says, I am using this as an example, imagine if there was an island like this, so from the very beginning, it was supposed to be a non-existent thing, this enormous island in the Atlantic. He was using it to do some thought experiments about what if there was this kind of place that worked this sort of way, sort of utopian idea, but then what happened was people loved this idea so much, they wanted it to be real and so people started to say, well, what island was he thinking of and everyone forgot that he actually had specifically said this is not a real place, this is an imaginary place. So, I do, I love when people kind of try and say, oh, we finally found Atlantis, you know, this volcano or this, that and the other. It’s like, well, brilliant, but if you do then the person who made Atlantis up knew nothing about it. But it’s been such an interesting idea since, I’m so glad that he made it up and also that some people have kind of taken it more seriously than he intended because it’s very revealing what people say about Atlantis, where they imagine it, how they imagine it.
When you study history as a subject, do you see any human behaviour repeating through out the ages?
Yes, and then of course, one wants to leap to the very negative things, like somehow, we still managed to have war and so on, even though we have many examples of it not being very helpful.
But on a positive note, I think there is a universal desire for connection and that is something that you can see over and over again in different societies, that no matter what the really physical barriers often to contact, to meeting other people and that kind of thing, the technological barriers and so on, people continue to overcome them. So, now there are many fewer physical or technological barriers to travelling around the earth and people want to go into space and people are imagining there might be aliens and so on to meet. So, I think there’s a that kind of desire to constantly expand the human horizon. I think it’s that something that repeats.
This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on July 6, 2024.
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