Reflection on The Lost World of Byzantium by Jonathan Harris

The Byzantine Empire (which the Byzantines themselves would have called the Roman Empire) is fundamentally the history of a city. It begins in 330, with the founding of Constantinople and lasts until 1453, when it finally falls to the Ottoman Turks. While it is generally compared to the Roman Empire (truthfully) as a sort of lesser version and a rump state, you’ve still gotta consider it to be one of the most successful empires of all time just for that duration. Also, remember that any empire compared to Rome isn’t gonna look that good.

             

From the point when Eastern Rome and Western Rome permanently split in 395 upon the death of Theodosius I, there will never be a state as big as the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. However, Byzantium will, under Justinian I, achieve some serious gains, conquering parts of Italy, Africa, and Spain while maintaining the Greek peninsula, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and Egypt. Byzantium is so impressive because of the pressure it withstood for over a thousand years. Rome was lucky enough to not have massive pressure at its borders for centuries, yet Byzantium faced pressure constantly from Sassanid Persia, Viking Russia, barbarian Bulgaria, insanely powerful Muslim Arabs, and the Turks from Central Asia that would end it all and settle Asia Minor, which now just so happens to be called Turkey.

Constantinople the City

In 381, Theodosius I invited the Gothic leader Athanaric to Constantinople. Having been from a barbarian society and lived in huts his whole life, Athanaric is said to have exclaimed that the emperor must be a god on earth and that if anyone laid a hand against him he would be asking for death. He would not be the last. The Byzantines used the power of Constantinople as one of their most powerful diplomatic tools for the entire 1,000+ years of their existence, using the awe-inspiring city to win over Bulgars, Russians, and others to join them in alliances and also in the Orthodox Church. Especially in the 900’s onwards, as Byzantine power waned, they spoke of their emperor as the head of a family of princes, with favored nations and friends finding a place in the hierarchy. The author argues that one aspect of this, the conversion of Russia to Eastern Orthodoxy to be the Empire’s greatest achievement. They took a group of settled Vikings who severely threatened their empire and turned them into allies through the force of their culture- a different type of conquest.

The walls of Constantinople were a fearsome site that saved the city and the empire on what looked to me like several dozen occasions. The main inner wall was 12 meters high with 96 towers. In front of that was a lower outer wall with only a five-meter corridor between them to trap any would-be invaders. In front of that was a 15-meter-wide and 5-7-meter-deep ditch. Constantinople was literally impossible to capture for a thousand years until the Ottoman Turks attacked it with the biggest army and navy (at the same time) that it ever faced, as well as with a new invention called the cannon, which tore holes in the Theodosian walls that enabled their conquest in 1453. They didn’t finish the job though and parts of the walls can still be seen today. One of the Byzantines’ best strategies throughout the end of the empire was to retreat behind the walls and wait out their enemies.

In the Great Palace of Constantinople there was a room overlooking the Bosporus Straits (I kind of imagine the palace looked like the Red Keep from Game of Thrones) that was made of the extremely rare purple stone named porphyry. It was said during the Macedonian Dynasty that only someone porphyrogenitos, or born-in-the-purple, could rule. Even when rulers weren’t “born in the purple,” legitimacy was always given to he who controlled Constantinople.

Why did it end?

The main point of the book is that we shouldn’t ask why the Byzantine empire fell so much as why it lasted as long as it did. In short, the empire survived because it had the greatest city in the world both in terms of architectural beauty and strategic location, because it used its culture and religion to forge powerful alliances, and because it was able to successfully incorporate disparate peoples into itself and adapt to a world that changed drastically in the 1,000 years of its existence.

One problem the Byzantine Empire faced for its last several hundred years was the relationship between the strategos of the themes (states/provinces) in Asia Minor and the Emperor. They were always at odds and would eventually break away in the 1000s to become independent warlords before being conquered by Seljuk Turks.

The end was hastened by the Crusaders, who took over Constantinople in 1204 and ruled for a half century over the empire. They were “Latins” or Catholics who conquered the city from the inside due to some issues over payment and Byzantine instability. The Empire, because of sheer momentum continued on for nearly another 200 years, eventually being reduced in scope to the walls of Constantinople as a vassal of the Ottoman Turks. In 1453, it was taken and Byzantium was no more.

Christianity in Byzantium (just to throw this in here)

• Early on, the church had trouble differentiating itself from Judaism and many Christians attended synagogues as well as churches.
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• In 533, legislation forbade sexual relations between men
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• It was Christian missionaries who created the Slavic alphabet to translate the bible, a great example of the influence Byzantium maintains today. Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and others are all inheritors of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman culture just as the French, Italians, Spanish, and others are the inheritors of the Latin-speaking Western Roman culture.

Reflection on Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

               I was left with a much better impression of Benjamin Franklin from this biography than I was of Thomas Jefferson of his biography. There may be author bias at work- the subtitle of the Jefferson biography is, after all, “The Art of Power.” In comparing the two, I would say that Jefferson and Franklin were both extraordinarily intelligent- Franklin as a humorist, an inventor, a scientist, and a pragmatist; Jefferson as a philosopher and also as a scientist. As men, I prefer Franklin, who has his own faults, but largely seems like a good person. Franklin had a lot of issues with his family, as a son and a brother, and later as a husband and a father. With him, as opposed to Jefferson, I can cut some more slack because it’s an inability to show affection. With Jefferson on the other hand, it’s some pretty heinous moral crimes like rape and the enslavement of his own children.

               This book, like the Jefferson biography, reminded me of how closely related the American Revolution was to the Glorious Revolution. The restoration of the monarchy in Britain occurred in just 1660, a short 104 years before the Stamp Act. In fact, it was the end of Puritan rule and the restrictions on Puritans that came with the restoration that drove the Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. Franklin was always a sort of social butterfly, and for all his life would avoid disagreement and promote compromise. In a sort of educated tradesmen’s society he founded in Philadelphia, the Junto, they would mostly debate issues using questions, using the Socratic method to avoid heated disagreements. Franklin also rarely voiced opinions in his own name in the newspaper’s he published, though he would publish his own opinions with great frequency. He would always use a pseudonym, though sometimes would hint at who it really was.

               In the decade before the Revolutionary War, Franklin was already an old man, and he was living in England at that point, away from his family and his wife, who he would not see in the several years before her death. He argued strenuously to keep the colonies and mother country together until shots were fired and colonists were killed. His son, William, was the governor of New Jersey and a British loyalist. Franklin would be stoic and unemotional about his son being on the opposing side of the war, but of the separation of England and America itself, he was despondent. On one occasion, reading newspapers about the issue with a friend, “the tears in his eyes made it impossible for him to read.”

               Franklin’s significance in American history is enormous. As a politician, he signed the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, and the peace treaty with England. He led the Albany Convention and signed the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, having drafted an earlier version in the 1770’s that did not passed but influenced the latter. As a scientist, he made major discoveries in the field of electricity. As an inventor, he introduced the world to bifocals, flippers, and many other things. As a writer, he was sort of a proto-Mark Twain, developing a n early form of American humor. He is one of the last men of the Enlightenment and one of the most influential Americans of the 18^th century, being revered by nearly all his contemporaries upon his death. The author points out that he doesn’t represent the American character, but rather a side of it that is rational and tolerant in a dichotomy against the religiously fervent and the xenophobic, such as Jonathan Edwards at the time.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the early 18^th century, Harvard spent 11 percent of its budget on financial aid, which is more than it does today.
• Inoculation was introduced to America by black slaves from Africa, where inoculation was common.
• Franklin owned a few slaves, though he would become more liberal later in life and oppose slavery, proposing a formal abolition petition to congress in 1790, though it failed to pass.
• For scale, Franklin’s Philadelphia was the largest city in America in the 1750’s with just 23,000 inhabitants, while London boasted 750,000, the second largest city in the world behind Beijing with 900,000.
• French support in the Revolutionary War was truly critical. At the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, the French fleet blocked the sea and Lafayette’s column of Frenchmen covered the south of the town as Washington’s force was nearly half French.

Reflection on Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

You have to think of the Revolutionary War was a result of men who saw themselves as Englishmen being denied their rights as Englishmen. They were defending rights they believed won at the end of the Glorious Revolution. You also have to think of the Revolutionary War as a struggle that lasts from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 until the End of the War of 1812 in 1815. When the Revolution did come, it was a rich, propertied man’s revolution and a philosopher’s revolution, making it appeal tremendously to Jefferson, who embodied all those attributes. In Virginia, many were radicalized by an English order in late 1775 to offer freedom to slaves who fought against American Revolutionaries. This pushed many slaveowners into the Revolutionary camp.

You can sum up early revolutionary priorities with the three committees formed by the Continental Congress in 1776: “one for the Declaration of Independence, another for preparing articles of confederation, and another for preparing a treaty to be proposed to France.” Jefferson was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence as a Virginian and a good writer. He set out “not to find out new principles, or new arguments… but to place before making the common sense of the subject; in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we were compelled to take. Congress removed from the original document condemnations on the people of England due to the idea that there were still friends in England and on slavery due to the objections of South Carolina and Georgia.

Jefferson and Slavery

               Early on, Jefferson seems like a liberal who opposed slavery, though never calling for its abolition. However, he did attempt to pass legislation in the Virginia House of Burgesses to limit slavery’s excesses and defended a mixed-race man from servitude. However, with age he became less sympathetic. The author alleges that to Jefferson, popularity was more important than a moral argument he doubted could be won, and so he abandoned the cause and went on to own dozens upon dozens of slaves, including his own children. On that topic, Mary Chestnut wrote of southern wives in the 19^th century that “Any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own. Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.”

               Jefferson believed the only solution was abolition paired with deportation, as it was inconceivable to him that free whites and free blacks could live together in peace. He said, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Jefferson Between the Declaration of Independence and the Presidency

Jefferson was Governor of Virginia from June 1779 to June 1781. America wins the war in October 1781 at Yorktown. He considered himself a failure as governor as the capital of Virginia, Richmond, was burned by the British. He was a delegate to create the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781. The Articles of Confederation created no institutions of national government except the Congress- that means no President, no Post Office, no Immigration Service, no nothing at the national level but a congress- a weaker institution than the EU.

Jefferson supported the Ordinance of 1784 that attempted to organize Northwestern territories and significantly banned the expansion of slavery into new territories, failing by a single vote (a delegate from New Jersey was sick and missed the vote). Congress eventually passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, instead banning slavery west of the Mississippi and North of the Ohio rivers. This shows you how weak the slavery position was in the early United States; in truth, slavery forces grew in power in 1820 and 1850 enacting compromises that reflected a growing strength up until the Civil War! The founders really missed a crucial opportunity to end slavery but appeased pro-slavery forces, for which America would pay the price years later.

Miscellaneous Facts

• ·        Also, in exchange for the federal assumption of state debts, which were greater in the North, the South demanded, to get even, that the capital be put in the South.
• ·        Jefferson was the Ambassador to France from 1784 to 1789, a witness to the early French Revolution, and even helped to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
• ·        Hamilton said the greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar. Hamilton allegedly said after a dinner party once that “there was no stability, no security, in any kind of government but a monarchy.” Whatta fuckin horrible set of opinions.
• ·        As President, Jefferson made the Louisiana purchase for about $15 million, or 3 cents an acre. It more than doubled the size of the United States at the time.
• ·        Jefferson used pieces of scrap paper as toilet paper and examples were collected from his bathroom on the day of his death and now lie with his many books in the Library of Congress.
• ·        Sally Hemings and children were freed some years after his death.
• ·        Adams’ last words: “Thomas Jefferson survives”
• ·        “The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of Mankind” Thomas Paine
• ·        Jeremy Bentham rejected the idea that every man had a natural, God-given right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as “absurd and visionary.”
• ·        Jefferson was an early proponent of what would eventually become the Trail of Tears, advocating in the 1770’s for removing every Indian east of the Mississippi river.

Jefferson and Adams

Jefferson reunited with John Adams after a long estrangement after seeing a quote in the news that Adams had said “I always loved Jefferson, and I still love him.” They began a correspondence that lasted until their deaths, which would come on the same day, July 4^th, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had asked his doctor several times on the night of the third if the fourth had come yet, and when told it was, he said “ahh, just as I wished.”

Jefferson wrote to Adams in 1815, “On the subject of the history of the American revolution, you ask who shall write it?... Nobody; except merely its external facts. All its councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, making notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown.”

Jefferson the Man

               I was unimpressed with Jefferson the man. He strikes me as a great intellectual but also a hypocrite who desired the approval of others far too much and conducted himself inappropriately in his romantic life. He is a hypocrite for allowing slavery to continue and for keeping his own lover and their children as slaves. Keeping one’s own children of slaves is pure evil. He also compromised many of his values, like the abolition of slavery (and others), in the face of opposition when he thought he could be more popular. Finally, he on various occasions attempted to seduce the wives of his acquaintances and friends, generally making an ass of himself in the process. He is still a great man but all of the reasons above make me see that he had some very tremendous faults and moral failings. I appreciate him for his mind, but I don’t like his heart nearly as much.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

This book is a collection of the author’s experiences as a foreign journalist in China. It focuses on politics as well as economics and social issues as they relate to politics. It doesn’t have one chronological narrative but features several stories (probably over a dozen) of Chinese people over the last 40 years and how their lives have changed in the era of Deng Xioping’s modernization. If there is any one narrative, it is the author seeking to answer the question, “What has become of communist China now that it no longer practices communism?”

A major value held by the people the author speaks with is stability. Most people interviewed are happy that the Party has been able to maintain stable economic growth over time, but the biggest complaints are the lack of political freedoms and the economic separation into rich and poor that has come from China’s move towards capitalism. Together, these create a hard society to live in. It seems especially difficult for young people in China today, who are expected to achieve success before they marry, but are unable to do either, making them pariahs. The author mentions that people are riskier economically in China. People can start a business and fail and then start again. In one study, Chinese investors described themselves as much more cautious than Americans, but then when tested with hypothetical financial decisions, the Chinese investors were riskier. This could either be because traditional Chinese family networks offer a greater cushion or because of the new economic system, which in itself was a gamble, inspiring people to gamble more now that they see that it worked.

The way people view the revolution now is strange. The government says officially that Mao was 70% correct and 30% incorrect, which is pretty funny to imagine as an American. It is so strange to think of the government making an official rating of George Washington. In the revolution, the enemy was based on class- the rich. But now, the Chinese government focuses their efforts on stoking nationalism against “the West.” There is a big emphasis on the “Century of Shame,” from the Opium Wars to the Communist Revolution and how China declined but will rise again by using the West’s own inventions against it. Chinese foreign policy reflects this, as China more and more frequently denounces the actions of other governments, doing so only 3 times from 1949 to 1978 and now up to 5 times per year.

It seems like today China and America face two of the same challenges/opportunities and history will determine which people, which style of government, and which economic system were able to overcome them. One is nationalism. A Chinese supporter of anti-Japan demonstrations said, “Growing up in China, there are very few chances for you to feel like that- to be lifted spiritually, to be working on something bigger than yourself, more important than you immediate, ordinary life circle.” In China, the cult of Communism is gone and while some have turned to religion with the greater freedoms of the new era, the government has promoted nationalism. We see the same in America and it is disturbing to see the power of both movements. Parallel, nationalist movements in the two strongest countries on Earth could lead to war.  The second is the Internet. A Chinese newspaper printed that the biggest threat to China today is the internet for the following reasons: “Every day, microbloggers and their mentors spread rumors, fabricate bad news about society, create an apocalyptic vision of China’s demise, and denigrate the socialist system- all to promote the Euro-American model of capitalism and constitutionalism.” This sounds a lot like “fake news” to me. In America we also deal with the same problem where people have access to all sorts of misinformation and disinformation that erodes our trust in each other and our government.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about modern China.

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

This book traces the buildup to 9/11, going deep into the 1940’s to cover the people who influenced Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Kalid Sheikh Mohammed. It is interesting for the style of writing, which is like a novel, and for some really deep analysis. The book bounces from character to character, as they meet one another, chase one another, and have conflicts with each other. Every character is brought closer and closer until they all “meet” on 9/11.

An important theme in the book and in the motivation for radical Islamists is humiliation. As I understand it, humiliation, pride, and honor, play a big part in Arab culture, so this may have to do with Arabs more than Muslims. That said, it is very important for understanding Bin Laden and others’ rage at the United States and the West for colonizing the Arab world, keeping troops in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War, etc. It should not be underestimated in future foreign policy decisions. In all dealings, you want your adversary to feel good when you’ve finished, but especially in the Arab world, where humiliation is justification for vengeance.

The book begins with Sayyed Qutb, an Egyptian who spent several years living in America in the 1940s and 50s and wrote influential works about the evils of American society. He was wealthy and fundamentalist in his religious outlook and he argued that there was little difference between capitalism and communism, in that both neglected the spiritual needs, which he believed only Islam could satisfy. I think it is very interesting to see the world ideological debate in this light- in the West we normally would consider religion to be outside of the debate or on the side of the West due to freedom of religion in capitalist society. However, in the fundamentalist, Wahhabi (Salafist) outlook, freedom of religion is spiritual emptiness that only a strict interpretation of Islam that engulfs your entire life can fill.

It also covers Osama Bin-Laden’s father, Mohammed Bin-Laden, an incredibly successful real estate developer in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Very influential, and very rich. He was well paid for his loyalty to the Saud family, as he would be patient when they owed him money and stop jobs for others immediately to work on jobs for the Saudis. When we get to Osama, he is a deeply religious boy by 14 years old. He fasts two days a week and he refuses to associate with people he decides are sinners. His career as a terrorist gets started in earnest during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when all the Saudi money that went to Afghanistan (and there was a lot) went through him.

After the Soviets left Afghanistan, Bin Laden set up camp in Sudan, acting as a major real estate developer and land holder, not to mention providing employment to the Arab Afghans who fought with him as the Mujahideen. At this point, Al- Qaeda was more of a business than a terrorist organization, providing employment to young men who had a jihad-sized hole on their resumes. During this same time, the royal family of Saudi Arabia had come to take over much of Sunni Islam. By the 1980s, Saudi Arabia, just one percent of the world Muslim population, was covering 90% of the expenses of the entire religion, overriding other traditions and replacing them with Salafism (Wahhabism) a form of extremist fundamentalism. However, when Iraq invaded Kuwait (and appeared as if it had its eyes set on Saudi Arabia), none of the other Muslim countries came to aid it. Its only ally was the United States.

Two forces came together to create Al-Qaeda as a modern terrorist organization. The will came from the American presence in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden, and many others interpreted a statement from Muhammad to mean that only Muslims could be permitted on the Arabian Peninsula, yet American forces stayed for years after the First Gulf War (and I believe are still there to this day). The means to create Al-Qaeda came from the thousands of veterans from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, who returned to find themselves unable to reintegrate back into regular society. They came home with physical and mental wounds, as well as a new and dangerous ideology.

In the hunt for Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, it appears from the book that the CIA and other intelligence agencies share much of the blame for not giving enough information to the FBI. The problem was that any intelligence given to the FBI would become public in a trial, therefore disclosing secret matters. This created huge problems, because, to make a long story short, if the FBI had all the information the CIA had already obtained months and years earlier, they surely would have prevented 9/11. In fact, they are able to confirm it was Bin Laden within days of 9/11 because the CIA releases the information on an order to catch the perpetrators by any means necessary.
In sum, this is a great book with a frustrating ending. It ends right after 9/11, really the beginning of the whole story of the War of Terrorism that continues today. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to learn more about Saudi Arabia, Radical Islam, Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and the way that the FBI and intelligence agencies work.

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson

Reading the history of Ancient Egypt really puts things in perspective. This book covers the pre-dynastic period of Egypt briefly before entering the history of the Pharaohs from the Time Narmer united Upper and Lower Egypt in 2950 BC until the death of Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt (although she was ethnically Macedonian) in 30 BC. The scope is immense In three thousand years, you watch Egypt, rise, fall, rise again, and fall again about a dozen times. Some of these Pharaohs would send expeditions out into the desert and they would find ancient temples and tombs over a thousand years old! They had their own ancient history, and now they're ancient history to us. By the time Caesar lived, and Alexander before him, clearly ancient times for us, they could travel the Nile and admire ancient temples, tombs, and shrines just like we do now, and they did. Even when Narmer seized the throne of united Egypt, he explicitly acknowledged cornerstones of Egyptian civilization that existed long before his time and Pharaohs whose names are lost to history.

Egyptian civilization didn’t fully emerge until the Sahara Desert dried out about 5,400 years ago (3400 BC, 500 years before Narmer), and it is expected to be green again in just a short 15,000 years, meaning that it should be really nice in the year 17000 CE. There are artifacts found in the desert from the fifth millennium BC, likely left by nomadic peoples of the not-yet-fully-desert. When the Sahara dried, nomadic peoples settled along the Nile, giving birth to a cohesive civilization. The Nile was a perfect river- it flooded regularly, providing natural irrigation, and because of all the levees built on it, it came to rise above the valley it inhabited, meaning that the locations of lower elevation were the ones further from the river, nicely balancing the flood and extending the inundation to farmable lands that would otherwise be sand.

Egyptians had a very different view of the world than us. They called the South “Upper Egypt” and the North “Lower Egypt,” because from the South came the Nile, which for them was the top of the world. They also divided the world into the Red Land and the Black Land. The Black land referred to the dark alluvial soil that gave the country its fertility, and the Red land referred to the hot sands that surrounded the good, rich Black Land. Egypt itself was called “the Two Banks,” as it was synonymous with the Nile Valley.

Egyptians invented the modern state as we know it. It was basically a group of men who were parasites on society, using armed bands to take food surpluses from peasants and use them to feed themselves and obtain great wealth. A Pharaoh generally didn’t fear an uprising from the people, rather the danger was the small group of literate officials or generals at the top of Egyptian society. Writing was crucial to the Egyptians, who recorded everything the government did at basically all levels. The earliest Egyptian writing is found in a predynastic tomb that predates Narmer by 150 years, and therefore predates the Epic of Gilgamesh by about 2,000 years.

The largest of the pyramids were built by the Fourth Dynasty and are unique to early Egypt. The Pyramid of Khufu was the tallest building in the world for forty-four centuries, until the Eiffel Tower was constructed. There is an Arabic saying that “Man fears time, but time fears the Pyramids,” and Giza is where Napoleon declared to his troops, “Forty centuries of history look down upon you.”
The Old Kingdom ended with a century of civil war from 2080 BC to 1970 BC, with Thebes, the city led by the Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, victorious over Herakleopolis. This civil war created theological innovations that would endure into the times of the Romans and past the last of the Pharaohs. The sharp distinction that existed between the king and his subjects was diminished and Egyptian people adopted the religion of the state as it democratized. Since this era we find tombs of everyday Egyptians that are small and have various trinkets that were believed to protect them in the afterlife. For example, one doll was buried with many and believed to be a sort of slave to its owner in the afterlife, so that it would do the owner’s share of work in harvesting wheat and other crops, because there was still agriculture in the afterlife. People were buried with scarab beetle amulets and figurines, as it was a symbol of rebirth, due to the fact that it hatches from a ball of dung, a symbol of death and decay.

The Twelfth Dynasty was the most stable to rule over Egypt, and it did so for 180 years between 1938 and 1755. They produced greater literary works than Egypt ever had before, using literature as a form of propaganda. In this dynasty, Egypt’s reach extended through trade across their world, gaining “lapis lazuli… from Mesopotamia and the distant mines of Badakshan, while the silver cups were of Minoan design and must have come from Crete or a Minoan mercantile community in Syria.” The Thirteenth Dynasty, by contrast, was a mess of fifty kings in just 150 years, it being likely rotated between the most powerful families in the land. They were then conquered by Asiatic peoples, the Hyksos, or at least just the northern delta was conquered. Various dynasties rose and fall, and the end of the Middle Kingdom is marked by the invasion of Kush, a Nubian kingdom from modern day Sudan, toppling the Seventeenth Dynasty. It was the lowest Egypt had ever sunk. However, it was to be followed by the New Kingdom, and the Eighteenth Dynasty was the peak of Egyptian civilization, lasting eight generations.

The Hyksos were expelled to begin the Eighteenth Dynasty, though the Hyksos brought administrative as well as technological innovations to Egypt, for example, they introduced Egypt to the chariot. The Eighteenth Dynasty favored incestuous relationships and married brother to sister for several generations. By this point, they stopped building pyramids and large tombs because it was basically an advertisement for grave robbers, so instead they hid their still-magnificent-but-now-secret tombs in the Valley of Kings on the west side of the Nile near Thebes. They were buried on the west side because the sun sets in the west, a symbol of death.

The Eighteenth Dynasty conquered most of the Near East through Lebanon and far south into Nubia. It featured great conquerors from Thutmose to Amenhotep, and even a woman Pharaoh, Hatshepsut. At the end, things got weird. Amenhotep III got really into the cult of the Pharaoh being God and had big celebrations about him being the human incarnation of the sun. His son took the sun stuff a little too seriously. Akhenaten went nuts and tried to make Egypt a monotheistic country and even made his own new capital, named Akhetaten after him. However, his reforms were reversed when he died and his nine-year-old son took over, Tutankhamen, whose name was originally Tutankhaten (Aten meaning sun), but was changed to be more Amun (the old Egyptian God) and less Aten.

The throne passed to a general, and then to the lieutenant he adopted as his heir, Ramesses the First. The Nineteenth Dynast, or the Ramesside Dynasty continued Egyptian hegemony, with Ramesses II and III being great warrior-kings. Ramesses II is the alleged Pharaoh of the Exodus story. Egypt would peak in military might in these centuries from about 1300-1000 BC. Egyptian power would slide again in the Bronze Age Collapse, when nearly all civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed by the mysterious Sea Peoples, who invaded the entire region and pillaged it.
Egypt went on to be conquered by the Libyans, the Nubians, the Assyrians, and the Persians. The Pharaohs were no longer the only super powerful godlike men in the area. Other, newer, younger states had risen to overthrow them. Eventually Alexander would conquer Egypt in the 300s BC and then Rome in the 30s BC. Cleopatra was the last queen of Egypt, her and Marc Antony being overthrown by Octavian, the founder of the Roman Empire.

What is there to learn from the history of the Pharaohs. One theme that we shouldn’t forget is that the Pharaohs were autocrats. They were dictators. They enslaved and raped and killed and they should all be remembered as such. They were largely evil men who contributed little and stole much. Something consoling in Egyptian history is the permanence of it, and the way that some things just never change. Something disconcerting is that Egypt passed over 2000 years without an actual Egyptian-born ruler, from the Pharaohs defeated by the Persians to Nasser. Another understanding gotten from studying Egypt is how human progress ebbs and flows. The Egyptians built a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea by Darius I of Persia, a great feat, though it’s important to remember that thousands of slaves likely died in forced labor building it.

It was a good book, if extremely long. I would have liked more focus on the lives of daily Egyptians, as this book was truly about the Pharaohs.

Maps of Time by David Christian

I finished Maps of Time and I think it’s one of the most interesting and impressive books I’ve ever read. It belonged to my grandmother, who was a genius, and I picked it up from her house after she passed, and I’m extremely glad that I did. It is an introduction to “big history,” which means that it starts at the Big Bang, describes the creation of the universe, galaxies, solar systems, and our Earth. Then it continues to narrow scope to the development of life, the development of humans, and the construction of modern human society. Reading history on this time scale is incredible because of the perspective it gives you, the biggest being that humans are an incredibly significant genus and Homo Sapiens are an incredible form of matter and energy and life. We are really speeding along. I will be quoting heavily from the book. Here are a few fun facts before I get into the analysis.

In the Milky Way, ten new stars are formed every year

Black holes are so dense that if you formed one from the Earth, it would be a ball with a diameter of 0.7 inches

The Crab Nebula contains a neutron star that spins 30 times per second and is the result of a supernova explosion that Chinese astronomers detected in 1054 CE.

A jumbo jet cruising at 550 mph would take 20 years to reach the Sun and 5 million years to the next star (double the history of the genus Homo)

In the past 500 million years there have been 5 different times where over 75% of living species have died off- we are living in the sixth one right now.

The Mediterranean was formed 6 million years ago and trapped 6 percent of the salt of the world’s oceans, enabling the oceans to become colder and form ice on the poles and enter the “ice ages”
Neanderthals left archaeological evidence from 130,000 to 25,000 years ago and diverged from modern humans 700 to 500 thousand years ago

Modern humans were more nomadic than Neanderthals and could adapt more when they were contemporaries, allowing more contact between groups

Dogs, goats, and sheep were domesticated in Southwest Asia about 12-11 thousand years ago and 13-12 thousand years ago in the Americas

PART 1. THE INANIMATE UNIVERSE
This section covered the second longest amount of time in the book, from the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago to the beginnings of life on Earth, Earth having been formed 4.5 billion years ago, with life emerging about 4.1 billion years ago. This section detailed the creation of stars, which are clouds of gas brought together by gravity. The immense pressure of gravity causes them to ignite helium and other basic elements and burn them. By continuing to burn, they create more elements, like the ones we find on Earth today.

I’ll just focus on one thing. A theory mentioned is that black holes are themselves forms of “big bangs” that are creating new universes. If this is true, that would mean there is a sort of evolution of universes, where only the universes that create black holes will “reproduce” and that our universe is sort of a mother to many other universes, that may or may not have their own black holes and so on.
Also, if you blew up an apple to be the size of Earth, each atom would be about the size of the original apple. Woah!

PART 2. LIFE ON EARTH
The development of life is a process without any end. It follows naturally from the mixing of elements in “the wild” to the creation of DNA and RNA and continues basically forever, if unimpeded. Therefore, complex is not better. Humans are more complex than single-celled organisms, but it’s not like the stopped existing when more complex forms came around. Many creatures are nearly perfectly adapted and will continue in their current state for millions of years if not more.

Also, oxygen in the air is not that old on Earth. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, but only accounted for 3 percent of Earth’s gases 2 billion years ago, though today it makes up 21 percent. Why did this happen? During the Age of Bacteria, small bacteria spread and spread, producing oxygen as a waste product. By doing this, they terraformed their own planet and made it habitable by plants. Plants began in the sea, as land has always been harsher, and the first dry land colonizers were similar to modern liverworts and ferns.

The first seed-bearing trees appeared 410-360 million years ago (really recently!), shortly after arthropods, like modern lobsters, who first walked on land 440 to 410 million years ago. These guys had shells, but not spines. The earliest vertebrates (animals with spines) evolved in the oceans 510-440 million years ago, and included early forms of fish and sharks. The first animals on land were amphibians, like frogs, but the problem with being an amphibian is that you have to lay your eggs in the water. This was the innovation of reptiles. Reptiles are basically amphibians that are full-time land livers, and their big “discovery” was developing hard shells, that could survive harsh, out-of-water environments. Reptiles thrived greatly after the “Great Dying,” when, 250 million years ago, massive numbers of species went extinct. This led to the age of the dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, it led to the age of the mammals, which have ruled the world ever since. In the most recent few years, we have entered the Anthropocene, during which we face even more massive extinctions, this time not due to the arrival of an asteroid, but a supremely evolved mammal, the Homo sapiens, which today extracts 25% of all the energy generated by photosynthesis on Earth, leaving little room for other creatures.

Some perspective: for the first 3 billion years of life on Earth, there were only single-celled organisms. Humans have only existed for less than 1/1000 of that time, and have only had civilization for 1/1,000,000 of that time.

PART 3. EARLY HUMAN HISTORY: MANY WORLDS
The genus Homo emerged 2.5 million years ago with the species Homo habilis and it has been a disaster for everyone else living here, but quite good for us. If alien paleontologists in one billion years’ time studied our planet, they would find a massive extinction event much like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs to be occurring in our time.

The book focuses on the development of language as a key motivator in human success. There are obviously many traits that came together to contribute to the development of language and then other traits that also had influence like language, but this book identifies language as the big one. This is because human power comes not from the knowledge stored in a brain, but the collective knowledge stored in all of our brains, passed along to each other, and down through the generations.
By this point, humans were already having a major impact on the environment. For example, in Australia, indigenous peoples were setting fire to massive areas to plant other crops, which game rise to fire-loving plants like the Eucalyptus.

PART 4. THE HOLOCENE: FEW WORLDS
The Holocene begins 11,500 years ago, when the last Ice Age ended. It was by this time that humans had already domesticated dogs and goats, and during this period that modern humans would invent agriculture, organized religion, writing, the state, the electrical grid, the nuclear bomb, and the internet. Though far more human history came before these recent 11,500 years, the majority of humans, and the majority of human progress, has come during these years.

Settling down from a nomadic lifestyle was not an obvious choice. There were benefits, but also major problems that came with settlement. The benefits included females reaching puberty earlier, enhanced knowledge about their local surroundings and crops, surpluses of food, and an increased ability to mold their surroundings, as they would live in them all year round. Mainly, it would lead to the development of powerful states. On the other hand, it meant that they would lose valuable skills that came from nomadism, it would create greater hierarchy and destroy the egalitarianism of the nomadic tribe, and that they would press the limits of regions that were abundant when they first settled. Up until very recently (the 1600s or so), nomadic groups (the Huns, the Mongols, Scythia) were just as powerful as settled groups (Persia, Greek City States, German States, the Roman Empire). They were periodically able to overthrow the settled agriculturalists, just as the settled peoples were able fend them off sometimes. In the last 300 years or so, this conflict has tilted significantly towards the agriculturalists.

Settled agriculture resulted in agricultural surpluses, which created the first “societies,” where there were hierarchies, class, and some people did not have to dedicate themselves to growing crops. People were able to specialize more, and this meant that some would specialize in war, using their arms to extract tribute from others. These people were called pharaohs, kings, chiefs, and shahs. In a way, they are parasites that contribute little to society, but suck out its nutrients, only keeping it alive to suck out more in the future.

The first cities appeared in Mesopotamia and around 3500 to 3200 BC, Sumer (modern day southern Iraq) became the most densely populated region in the world. From this point through the Afro-Eurasian contact with the Americas and the development of worldwide trade networks, the Earth operated as many human worlds, interacting mostly within themselves and rarely with each other. The last to meet would be the Americas with the Afro-Eurasian world, briefly in the 1000s CE in Newfoundland, but more permanently after 1492.

PART 5. THE MODERN ERA: ONE WORLD
By even a recent year, like 1000, we can group the world into four major economic-societal groups. They are independent farmers, pastoralists, foragers, and agrarian civilizations. At this point, agrarian civilizations only controlled 15 percent of the land that modern states rule. The largest empire ever was a pastoral empire, that of Genghis Khan, who ruled from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, a feat never before or since accomplished.

Even by this time, Europe was not yet dominant, In 1776, Adam Smith remarked that “China is much richer than any part of Europe.” Two things could be said to be responsible for the rise of European states. The first is geography. Formerly on the periphery of the Afro-Eurasian world, Europe’s discovery of the Americas put it in the middle. Second, Europe (especially the north) was not civilized after the Roman empire until the middle ages, and the political environment was good for pushing progress. Small, commercial states competed in trade and war and only the most efficient could survive. These states would ride from 1492 onward and dominate the world from the mid-19^th century until 1945, when the United States, a new country formerly settled by Europeans, moved world power to North America. The era of European dominance was incredibly short, and much shorter than is taught to those in “The West” today.

The truly significant thing about Europe and “The West” is the speed of these countries’ rise. In 1750, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy accounted for about 11 percent of global industrial production. By 1880, they accounted for over 40 percent! Today’s “developed world” went from 27 percent in 1750 to 63 percent in 1860 and 94 percent in 1953! At no point in any history that we know have has any group of people advanced so quickly to the top, though China’s last 50 years or so may show us another example. Today, as Europe recedes further and further, it is worth remembering that European power is not a law of nature, but an anomaly in human development.

PART 6. PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE
This chapter covers the largest amount of time by far- the future- stretching thousands of billions of years (and farther) into the inconceivable darkness of what has not yet come. I can’t really do it justice, so I’ll quote the author, who is describing the distant, distant future that will take place after the death of our sun and all stars:
“From the standpoint of an inconceivably distant future, when the universe contains no more than a depressingly thin sprinkling of photons and subatomic particles, the 13 billion years covered in this book will seem like a brief, exuberant springtime.”

MORE FACTS:
Between 10,000 and 5500 BC, increased humidity made what is now the Sahara Desert a kush region of lakes and woodlands. When it dried, its nomadic peoples settled in the Nile Valley.

Narmer unites Egypt: 2950 BC and Hammurabi writes legal code: 1792 BC. These events would have been ancient history to the people we study in ancient history.

There was nearly an industrial revolution in Song Dynasty China in the 1200’s CE but it didn’t take hold.

Populations of people in the Americas fell by as much as 50-70 percent because of the spread of disease upon the arrival of Europeans.

The 20^th century term third world would have made no sense in 1750, when the “third world” accounted for 75% of global economic output. By the late 20^th century it was less than 15%

Economic growth in the three years from 1995 to 1998 is estimated to be greater than the 10,000 years before 1900

90% of the material from which stars are manufactured has already been used, so the era of new stars is coming to a close

The universe is currently almost 14 billion years old but will survive for way longer. A few thousands of billions of years from now, it will become completely dark as all the stars will have died.

U.S. Policy Toward Latin America by Lars Schoultz

The central argument of the book is that U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America has been based largely on a feeling of superiority over Latin Americans either due to their higher proportions of black and indigenous peoples, their Spanish descent, or their Catholicism. It's a really unique relationship, I think, because it mirrors the colonizer-colonized relationship in actual substance, but not in fact. Our government often treats Latin American countries as if they belong to us (The Monroe Doctrine) but in terms of the law, the only one that does is Puerto Rico.

After the Spanish American War, Puerto Rico became a US colony but not Cuba. Why? Cuba had a very strong sugar economy, and Utah senators who wanted to protect the sugar beet industry couldn't accept a new state that would be producing more sugar than the other 50 combined (I may be exaggerating) and so Cuba became more or less independent with a hefty sugar tariff while Puerto Rico, which had no such industry, became a colony. This is a main theme of the book-- short-term domestic politics often have a big impact on long-term foreign policy.

American policy spent a little over a hundred years from the founding of the United States in the 1780's until the end of the Spanish American War in 1898 attempting to take land from Latin American countries, planning to make states out of Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, or parts of Mexico (which succeeded), mainly to expand slavery at the will of southern politicians before the Civil War and then as a matter of prestige and to control key military bases in the Caribbean afterwards. Canal politics have always been critical. The shift came with Taft to Dollar Diplomacy, which basically meant the fusing of the economies of the Americas, a process that continues a century later thanks to NAFTA. Dollar Diplomacy was largely continued by the Wilson administration with the addition of the need to establish democracies in Latin America. Later administrations realized that this meant that Latin peoples might choose something not in American interests and decided to install dictators, which would be the policy of the government through the 1980's at least, and it's definitely not completely over. In 2004 the United States assisted in a coup in Haiti and likely did the same in Venezuela in 2002.

One problem with US policy is that since the fall of the Soviet Union, we've justified creeping hegemony in the region by arguing that problems such as drug trafficking are just as threatening as the old Soviet adventurism and influence in Central America, Cuba, and Peru. The problem is that policy makers have seen it as a list of problems rather than a definite amount of "threat" which can increase and decrease as a total amount. In the real world, sometimes you are in great danger and sometimes you are not. When you are in a car flying at 80 miles per hour into another car you are in more danger than when you are cruising at 40 and not about to hit someone. The same goes for foreign policy- at the end of the Cold War, there were fewer foreign threats to the USA, and the biggest one was removed. However, policy makers failed to see that for what it was. When your full-time job is to solve foreign policy threats globally, you end up justifying creeping hegemony by not seeing total threats, but by seeing a long list of threats, where nothing changes when a threat is removed, the rest just jump up a spot. People with greater expertise would have been able to warn that nothing had really changed in most of Latin America, except for maybe Cuba. This is extremely important because it proves that the US government, at least in this sphere of foreign policy, has so much momentum in one direction (expanding US influence and hegemony) that its own bureaucrats are incapable of reversing it.

Before I continue, here are some facts:

Fact #1.
In 1854, rumors spread to Europe that the Pierce administration was planning to purchase a Mediterranean naval base from the prince of Monaco, and although it never happened, at least one British official said, "The annexation of Piedmont [(a region of northwestern Italy that would actually lead the country's unification just five months later)] would be their first objective," and that Americans would be jumping on steam ships to avenge some imaginary Sardinian insult. It's an amazing quote because it almost exactly predicts the war with Spain over 40 years later.

Fact #2.
Thomas Jefferson was interested in building a canal across Panama in 1787! That's over a hundred years before it would be built.

Fact #3.
In the 1930's, much of Central America reverted to being run by Caudillos (military strongmen) because the USA stopped using the Marines to stop coups de etat in the region. As a result, the only people who could keep power were those with military support, AKA strongmen. This aided the transition away from democracy to dictatorships mentioned above.

Dwight Morrow, the former US Ambassador to Mexico, wrote something that I think was especially prescient, "I think I become more and more convinced that good government is not a substitute for self-government. The kind of mistakes that America would make in running Cuba would be different from those that the Cubans themselves make, but they would probably cause a new kind of trouble and a new kind of suffering." I guess it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to make a country strong and independent, you let them run themselves, but if you want them weak and subservient to you, you can intervene. It's obviously a complicated choice, because there are atrocities that governments can commit against their people that deserve intervention from abroad like genocide and torture, but it is clear that this has not been the main reason for US intervention in the past.

To conclude, American policy in regards to Latin America has been successful at keeping the United States dominant in the region, but it has come at the expense of Latin America. I have to believe that by allowing Latin American countries to strengthen their own institutions and by building economic links with them, that we are all better off. Our policy has kept us #1 on the list of powers in the hemisphere, but it has made us worse off in absolute terms. If Latin Americans were richer they would buy more US products and we'd all be better off. To borrow from the author, Lars Schoultz, the United States is extremely bad at military occupation and extremely good at business. It would be far more productive and merciful to focus on the latter. No one wants to be occupied by our military, but just about everyone wants cheaper products and better paying jobs. It would benefit us as well to extend our economic influence because it would extend cultural influence, leaving us with a region of friends who respect us out of love, rather than subservient peoples who respect us only out of fear.
"The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive."- Harry Truman

Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life

I finished my book on TR and I figured I would write a few thoughts here.

TR's Personal Life:

Teddy strikes me as a man who grew up fundamentally insecure about his masculinity. He spends his youth looking up to his father, Thee, who is an early devotee of the Victorian ideal of "Muscular Christianity," the idea that it's virtuous to be a strong and vigorous man. As such, Thee is tormented his whole life by his failure to fight in the Civil War (though he does give massive support to the troops) as well as the fact that he was able to pay poorer men to be his substitutes. The relationship with his father is basically one of living to serve and even though Teddy was a sickly boy who couldn't keep up with the others in physical activities, he was the smartest and most pious. When his father died while he was at college (Harvard), he was crushed.

Teddy spent the first 15 years or so of his life as a complete weakling (his word not mine) and was regularly beaten up by other boys and his father even told him that his sickness was proof of sin. He never drank until his father died and even though he claimed that he beat his asthma with vigorous exercise, this is bullshit. He lived with it his whole life as well as other health problems, though I have a lot of respect for how he just kept on keeping on.

Otherwise, he strikes me as selfish in many ways. When he got into a fight with his future-wife, he shot a dog that barked at him as he galloped home. When he was married to his wife Edith, he regularly abandoned her to go out west, or to Africa, or Brazil, or elsewhere to camp and hunt and collect specimens for scientific research. He did so many dangerous things that I feel like are really selfish in that he would deprive his family of a son, brother, father, husband, etc. When his wife saw him thrown off a horse (which he said was nothing) she had a miscarriage. He loved his wife and sons but he encouraged his sons to all go off and fight in World War One, and his youngest, Quentin, was killed in action. He regretted this later on, but beforehand he said something to my recollection like, "I'd like to see the five of you come back losing 3 arms and 2 legs between you." I would dismiss it as a joke if this wasn't the man's entire life philosophy.
In sum, his personal life is vigorous and brave and admirable in many ways, but he's also a selfish and insecure dude.

TR's Political Life

I really enjoyed reading about Teddy's transformation politically. He started out in the 1880's or so as a young man (early 20's, wow!) in the New York State Assembly where he was a wealthy, conservative Republican. By the end of his life he was forced out of the Republican party and was a radical progressive fighting hard for the power of government to do good.
One thing that doesn't get enough credit is the role of women in aiding his career. His sisters, Bamie and Corinne, and his wife, Edith, dedicated themselves fully to making him succeed just as much as he did, if not more, and he would have never reached the heights he did without them. He was also integral in the women's movements of the time (Suffrage, Temperance, etc.) and advocated public whipping for wife beaters. Women played a much bigger role in this story than I expected.
The stuff about his political life is overwhelming in detail and is incredibly interesting, but the author, Kathleen Dalton summarized it very well in the epilogue:

• "Not a picture-perfect hero... He represents America's aggressiveness as well as its profoundly democratic spirit. Most of all, his life proved the malleability and importance of character and the need for the individual to feel an obligation to the community. Economic justice was his final ideal for America. In his maturity he thought the United States would be a less 'backward' and more democratic country if it equalized wealth and tamed its corporations. People came first, property second. Theodore Roosevelt's life, then, stands as prophecy unheard, yet even prophets speaking in the wilderness can be resurrected."Emphasis mine.