Review: Will McCants’ Founding Gods, Inventing Nations

Will McCants’ Founding Gods, Inventing Nations is not a simple history of rulers and conquests but something subtler, a history of the perceptions and cultural contests inside ancient conquests. Concentrating on the Greek, Roman, and Arab empires, McCants looks at the many interpretations and re-interpretations of the roots of culture - cities and medicine and tool use and philosophy and ironwork and geometry and agriculture and astronomy - touching on myths and origin stories in those cultures after outlining some of the culture myths as they existed in more ancient empires such as the Sumerian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian.

McCants uses the lens of these culture myths to try to understand the interactions between conquerors and conquered, how peoples assimilate or assert themselves. He makes the point that times of conquest and the aftermath thereof are periods of flux for all parties involved. Conquerors do not universally impose their will or their way on the conquered. Cultural influence is a negotiation: it goes both ways, and the way culture myths are told, especially at these times of flux, is instructive of the social and political needs of the day. He compares the approaches to culture myths of individuals at the times of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests in four categories - divine providence, “firsts,” founders of native civilizations, and the origins of the sciences – and discusses the contexts and motivations in each era for each category.

We can see some parallels in all the periods discussed. All three conquering empires – Greek, Roman, and Arab – soon saw native elites writing histories of their (the natives’) forefathers’ contributions to civilization in their own languages, and for a similar range of reasons: to instill or boost local pride, to show the conquerors what they owed the conquered, to persuade the conquerors to behave like native rulers, to discredit local rivals, or to elevate themselves above other conquered peoples.

However, similar paths could lead to different places in each period. For example, there are lists of ‘firsts’ surviving from all three periods, but the type of activities and inventions on the lists, and the attributions for them, differed greatly. Writers in all three periods dealt with some of the same questions, including whether the Greeks had originated anything or borrowed from other cultures, and whether humans could develop complex sciences on their own or if divine inspiration of some kind was required, but the conclusions they reached depended on the cultural context and requirements of the time.

Perhaps the area of most divergence was on the origin of the sciences, as even within each culture there existed debate on whether the sciences were given to man by divine intercession or earned through his own ingenuity, as well as contention over which civilizations were the first to use certain sciences, regardless of whether the initial providence was human or divine.

I won’t get into his specific conclusions about each conquest, because you should read it yourself, but McCants tells us in his introduction:

In recounting these culture myths, authors worked out their place in post-conquest society. By describing the origin and transmission of science, they tell us where they stand in relation to that tradition, to their contemporaries who practice it, and to those who detract from it. By writing histories of the cultural exploits of ancient heroes, they tell us how they think of their ethnic origins and how others can join or be excluded from their group. By making lists of beneficial arts and sciences, they encode the ideal cultural genealogy of their societies and provide the knowledge needed to navigate it. By demonstrating how God works in the world, they explain how society should be ordered and who should maintain it. These scholarly activities were at no time more important than after conquest, when the place of the conqueror and the conquered were both unstable and in need of mooring to the ancient past.

Though the book’s focus is on ancient times, its insights into power, perception, and persuasion are relevant down to the present day. The early Islamic empires saw both conquerors and conquered grappling with the establishment of an Islamic culture in negotiation with the Qur’anic values of the conquerors, and the established high cultures of the Greeks, Iranians, and others whom they conquered. In the modern post-colonial period, populations are still defining and re-defining Islamic culture, no longer in relation to conquered elites, but to liberalism, democracy, and the legacy of colonial powers. The solutions thus far have included forms of government from Iranian velayat-e faqih to the Turkish secular parliamentary system to the religiously-backed monarchy of Saudi Arabia, with many nations currently in flux; and intellectual approaches that run the whole gamut from salafi movements such as that of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab which seek to return Islam to a perceived pure original state, to the work of intellectuals such as Khaled Abou El Fadl who seek to derive an Islamic context for democracy. Living within borders drawn and re-drawn by the Ottomans, then the French and British, and living with the legacy of colonial occupiers, as well as contemporary resource issues and the long shadow of American interests, it is again a time of renewal and redefinition.

And it is not just relevant to Islamic culture. This book is not about one single culture, nor does it speak only to the concerns of empires; it is about negotiations between cultures, the projection of power, and the exercise of influence. As an American, I can’t help but consider things in terms of American power. There is food for thought here in how our sway shows in the world at large, and how we in turn can be impacted by the cultures with which we interact, and the culture of those we occupy or influence.

The author has stated that if you (the reasonably educated reader) can’t understand this book, then he has failed. The book is clearly written, structured in a way that makes sense, and quite digestible in terms of both format and length. McCants does a creditable job of providing enough context that a reader who is not familiar with all of his sources can understand it but not so much that it bogs the book down. You don’t have to be a scholar of antiquity, or religion, or any other particular field in order to benefit from this book.

That being said, my own familiarity with the at least the rudiments of a lot of the material provided me with a good measure of my personal enjoyment of it. For me, the fun of reading diversely is in the connections your mind makes between things, especially things that seem disparate at first glance. It was a pleasure seeing the connections made by McCants - known to many for his expertise in counterterrorism and modern jihadi movements - among many disciplines including ancient history, religion, anthropology, poetry, modern religious scholarship, and mythology. I have a lifelong love of mythology of all kinds, and I have studied ancient history, Middle Eastern history, the Bible, and Islam, so McCants’ wide variety of sources were also a delight. The book is peppered with excerpts from Babylonian tablets, Sumerian poetry, Egyptian scrolls, the works of Homer and Aeschylus and Hesiod and Herodotus, Jewish/Christian apocrypha in which wayward angels sleep with humans and spread corruption, the Iranian epic Shahnamih, the Bible, and the Qur’an, just to name a few.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history or mythology, or a penchant for thinking about complex ideas like the blurred lines of influence between conquerors and conquered. It is well-written, rich with wonderful source materials, educational on the cultural milieux of these ancient conquests, and thought-provoking in terms of how we perceive culture, power, and influence.

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My one tiny quibble with the book is purely geekery-based and has nothing to do with writing or scholarship, but I just can’t help myself from mentioning it: McCants devastatingly missed an opportunity to reference the greatest science fiction film ever made (and my favorite movie) Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner, in his conclusion. He uses the phrase “more Arab than Arab” and references a 2002 book’s use of the term “more English than the English” rather than Blade Runner‘s Tyrell Corporation’s motto “More Human Than Human,” an oversight that I’m sure will haunt him until the end of his days.