First there was Sir Walter Raleigh, who after ‘getting one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood’ went on to write The Historie of the World. Then there was H.G.Wells, who cut a swathe through the high-minded girl intellectuals of the early 20th century, a new species, before writing The Outline of History. World history and women may sound an odd pairing, but they seem to go together. For now there is Andrew Marr, who, after apologising in the papers for his misdemeanours, has written A History of the World. And when you have stopped sniggering consider this: it is a wonderful book.
Forget the series that accompanies it, with the inevitable gory re-enactments on which television insists; also Alexander the Great astride Bucephalus, his stirrups flashing in the sunlight, though it would be 1,000 years before these reached Macedonia. Marr himself pointedly writes: ‘His cavalry fought in a V-formation without stirrups,’ which makes it seem as though the author and the presenter were two different men. Forget all these, for the series is nothing special.
But the book is, and is startlingly different; here Marr’s writing and his control of the material are remarkable. It should be required reading for all students of history, even more so for those who teach it in universities.
My daughter read history at York. That is, in one year she studied Robin Hood, King Arthur and Joan of Arc, in another Ivan the Terrible, the Tudors, and, if I remember aright, the first world war. ‘I hardly knew whether I was coming or going, or when.’ As the director of the National Trust said recently, the young emerge not knowing what joined historical topics or even what order they came in. This is history as it might be taught by Doctor Who.
So where do you start with a history of the world? Should the ships ever come from deep space, their occupants may assume it to be a history of its most successful species, the great lizards which roamed it for 92 million years. Marr, with the BBC and his publisher looking over his shoulder, restricts himself to a mere fragment of time, to 70,000 years of human history, and then to a fragment of this again, the 5,000 years which is recorded history in writing. These 5,000 years occupy over 90 per cent of his book, and to write it he claims to have read 2,000 books. But it is the one chapter on ‘the endless savannahs of human prehistory’ I found most fascinating.
‘Human history starts when we move from just being another form of prey.’ And so it turns on just one group and one common female survivor in this, migrating out of Africa and from whose DNA everyone now alive shares descent. There had been other forms of people who had not survived, of whom the Neanderthalers were just one, some of whom were eaten by us, destroyed by climate change, but who, according to the remarkable editor of The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, ‘suitably dressed, would have passed unnoticed along the banks of the Liffey’. But of course they never could have been because, as Marr remarks, we had the needle and they did not, and by sewing clothes we triumphed over the cold. He is good on such throwaway facts.
His book starts with that one group of hunter-gatherers moving on and on, on and on (‘Declare anywhere “home”, and you would die of hunger’). Then 10,000 years ago there was agriculture. This produced surplus, which made towns possible, the first of them, Catalhöyück in Turkey, lasting from 9,500 to 7,700 years ago with a population of between 7,000 and 10,000. It was a honeycomb development which you entered downwards with ladders from a flat roof. It had no streets, and archaeology has turned up no evident signs of priests or kings.
These came not long after in a rush in the great cities of Sumer with their populations of 80,000, as did writing, which made it possible to record the religions and the wars they brought. Still they liked dogs, and the skeletons of Labrador-like creatures and terriers show these were kept on long after their working lives were over. So for 2,000 years in Catalhöyück there had been that dream of mankind, peace in a classless little society. It did not come again. Instead the killers and the fanatics came.
And all subsequent history entered the dark ages of organisation and blood which we, having just emerged from the massacres of the 20th century, are still living through. Marr attributes the great advances of the last 5,000 years, mankind’s discoveries in engineering and science, to its enthusiasm for war, and does this most tellingly without irony. Thus Egypt is ‘the great death cult on the edge of the desert’, and our heroes get skewered one by one.
The aqueducts of Rome go up, central heating comes, but in the process Caesar makes a third of the population of Gaul disappear, ‘a slaughter rate that rivals the worst butchers of the 20th century’.
Somehow Marr ends hopefully, but he does this by suggesting that some day artificial intelligence may be perfected, and take responsibility for the history of the world out of the hands of human beings who cannot be trusted with it. This may just be the heavy black humour which made him write, ‘Socrates could hold his drink, especially his last drink’, and describe the killer whales tattooed on the genitalia of the Nazca women of Peru as ‘a formidable warning sign, presumably’.
But at least you know what happened and when.