Some Observations and Future Directions
At a time of heightened conflict and turmoil in the Middle East, a deeper understanding of the region’s civilizational foundations is both timely and critically important. The Middle East today is seen to be an intractable source of conflict and political
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Some Observations and Future Directions Timothy P. Harrison
Archaeology is perhaps the best tool we have for looking ahead, because it provides a deep reading of the direction and momentum of our course through time: what we are, where we have come from, and therefore where we are most likely to be going. (Ronald Wright, Massey Lectures 2004: 56)
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Introduction
At a time of heightened conflict and turmoil in the Middle East, a deeper understanding of the region’s civilizational foundations is both timely and critically important. As noted by Akira Tsuneki in his introduction, the Middle East today is seen to be an intractable source of conflict and political instability, resistant in particular to Western attempts to institute Western ideals of liberal democracy and political economy. Typically characterized as a clash of civilizations, as most famously quipped by Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996), between an Islamic Middle East and a (largely) Judeo-Christian West, their engagement is all too commonly seen to be at an impasse, and ultimately irreconcilable. Yet, as the theme of this volume appropriately highlights, the Middle East, or ancient West Asia, has been the source of many of the great civilizational accomplishments the modern world now enjoys. It witnessed the emergence of the first sedentary human communities, the domestication of plant and animal life, the innovation of multiple craft technologies, urbanization, the first formal social, political and religious institutions, complex writing systems and bureaucracies, specialized large-scale economies, and the first interregional commercial and political networks. Put simply, ancient West Asia was the birthplace of civilization. Moreover, the roots of Western civilization are inextricably linked to this ancient West Asian civilizational history. The study of this civilizational history is therefore critical to an understanding of the cultural and institutional foundations of the West, and ultimately of the modern world.
T.P. Harrison (*) Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, 4 Bancroft Avenue, 2nd floor, Toronto M5S 1C1, Ontario, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 A. Tsuneki et al. (eds.), Ancient West Asian Civilization, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0554-1_15
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I believe such a deepened understanding will not only provide much needed insight into the root dynamics that continue to inform the social, economic and political forces that drive the modern era, it will also create an opportunity to foster a comparative intellectual framework within which more collaborative intercultural interaction and civilizational dialogue might be possible. In what follows, I will first summarize briefly the principal topics explored in this volume, highlighting a number of recurring themes, followed by a review of several prevailing methodological perspectives. I will then identify areas of contemporary concern where I believe the deep-time perspective of ancient West Asi
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