To quote Private Frazer in Dad’s Army, ‘We’re doomed, doomed!’ That seems to be the message of Paul Cooper’s eminently readable series of essays about how and why 14 civilisations rose to greatness and then collapsed.
He begins with the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BC, at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, and he finishes with Easter Island in the 18th century. He then concludes with dark prophecies about how a few centuries from now an overheated planet will look in a simpler post-industrial age. The style is informal, based on a series of popular podcasts, and one can almost hear the spoken word as one reads. Yet Cooper has built his narrative out of close reading of the original sources and the writings of the explorers and archaeologists who opened up such sites as Ur in Iraq, Chichen Itza in Guatemala and Angkor in Cambodia during the last couple of centuries.
Some chapters are more successful than others. One of the author’s strengths is his ability to evoke the physical setting of the great cities that lay at the heart of empires. If he has not actually visited these places, he gives a very good impression of having done so. And he is at his best when he is dealing with physical remains, whether artefacts surviving from Hadrian’s Wall, or monumental temples such as the ziggurats of Ur and Nineveh and the enormous Hindu and Buddhist sites at Angkor.
Deftly placing the pyramid temples of the ancient Maya next to his discussion of Angkor, Cooper shows how it is possible to reconstruct the glory days of two lost civilisations from sculptures and inscriptions: the libraries of these civilisations long ago disappeared, through wanton destruction or because the materials on which it was customary to write, such as palm leaves, have perished over the ages. But even wanton destruction has its silver lining. Sumerian and Assyrian clay tablets inscribed with minutely written cuneiform texts were baked hard in fires set off by invaders. As a result, we can read poems written 3,000 years ago. Far from obliterating these civilisations, the would-be destroyers perpetuated knowledge of them. In one chapter after another we enter unfamiliar worlds of religious thought portraying sometimes terrifying gods who, in the case of the Maya and the Aztecs, made ferocious demands for human sacrificial blood – as did the gods of the Carthaginians.
Cooper’s choice of Roman Britain, rather than the entire Roman Empire, as one of his civilisations offers the opportunity to show, in one remote corner of the empire, the devastating effect on society of raiding parties coming down from Scotland and across the North Sea. Internecine conflict between ambitious Roman generals accentuated the difficulties. Britannia became the base from which some of them set out across the continent to assert their claim to the imperial throne, most famously Constantine the Great, first acclaimed as emperor at York.
This intriguing local picture of the fall of the Roman Empire is not well matched by Cooper’s choice of Byzantium as another failed empire. In the end it did fail, but what was impressive was its ability to survive so long. The problem is that here Cooper is dealing with 1,100 years of history that largely revolved around Constantinople, and was characterised by sharp ups and downs – powerful 12th-century emperors succeeded by grasping rivals who helped bring disaster on the capital city when it was seized by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Cooper becomes prone to imprecise generalisations about the crusades and about the cultural impact of Byzantium on the West. The spiritual rewards for joining the First Crusade were not quite what he indicates. And no one now argues that the flight of Greek scholars to Italy in the dying days of Byzantium set off the European Renaissance.
In his Chinese chapter, concerned with the Han period (202 BC-AD 220), he exaggerates the impact of Chinese technological advances on the wider world. China made little or no use of the compass in navigation until the 12th century, by which time magnetic compasses had been invented in western Europe. For the previous one and a half millennia the Chinese were not much interested in the sea and used their compasses for quite another purpose: constructing buildings according to the rules of feng shui.
Although Cooper often cites climate change as a factor in the collapse of empires, he judiciously treats it as a possible factor rather than an exclusive cause. Looking at the sudden collapse of the Easter Island culture, famous for its large moai statues, he has other, very plausible, explanations of what caused the island’s rapid depopulation in the 18th century, accompanied by the toppling of the statues. Western diseases ravaged this island, as they had ravaged the Americas after 1492. Here and elsewhere he is up to date in his use of new evidence from DNA, which shows that Polynesians reached South America in the 12th century and got back to the Marquesas Islands from there.
Civilisations collapsed for a good number of reasons, including internal strife, invading armies, plague and natural disasters, possibly including volcanic eruptions that darkened the skies for years. Each of these factors was more dangerous when combined with another one. Sensibly, Cooper does not offer a grand theory of civilisational collapse, except in explaining the mysterious decline of Angkor.
This was what he calls ‘a cascading systems failure’. As the capital lost its influence as a centre of efficient administration and of religious devotion, fewer resources were spent on maintaining its infrastructure. The water supply failed, sanitation broke down, and the declining population was unable to cope with the maintenance of supply networks that had, at their peak, fed a vast population 40 times larger than 12th-century London. Canals, reservoirs and other vital elements began to show their age and the city entered an unstoppable spiral of decline.
Alas, this sounds all too familiar in our own world, where basic infrastructure is taken for granted, so that it surprises us when, inevitably, it breaks down more and more often, as we have seen happen with the NHS, our utilities and our various transport networks.
Cooper’s book provides several examples of sudden cataclysms, but gradual obsolescence seems the most common form of decline. We would do well to think about how things can go wrong and eventually spin out of control, if we intend to preserve the civilisation of the industrial age.
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