HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS - The Revenge of Geography - page 32

generally blowing from north to south carried boats, with the help of sail, southward. Thus
was civilization able to dawn in Egypt. “By contrast,” McNeill writes, “Mesopotamian
rulers could avail themselves of no ready-made natural instrument for securing their cent-
ralized authority, but had slowly and painfully to develop [oppressive] law and bureaucratic
administration as an artificial substitute for the natural articulation which geography gave
to Egypt.” Mesopotamia's heavy-handed bureaucracy had further to deal with the capri-
cious rate of flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates, which was not the case with the Nile,
and which complexified further the organization of the irrigation system. 7 Even today, both
Egypt and Iraq have had dictatorial regimes for long periods, but the fact that Iraq's have
been far worse is something that, in part, we can trace to antiquity, and to geography.
Beyond the Middle East were what McNeill calls the “peripheral” civilizations of India,
Greece, and China, “on the fringes of the anciently civilized world,” which in the cases of
the first two derived a good portion of their vitality from the cultures of the Indus River
and Minoan Crete. But all three also drew from their interaction with barbarian invaders,
even as they were partially protected from them by virtue of geography. For Greece and
India on account of their northerly mountains were both “effectively sheltered from the
direct impact of steppe cavalry.” China was even more isolated, by inhospitable deserts,
high peaks, and sheer distance, as thousands of miles separated the Yellow River valley,
where Chinese civilization began, from the Middle East and Indian heartlands. The result
was three utterly original civilizations, particularly that of the Chinese, that were able to
develop separately from the increasingly cultural uniformity of the Greater Desert Middle
East, which stretched from North Africa to Turkestan. 8
McNeill explains that throughout antiquity the ebb and flow of the frontiers between
Hellenic, Middle Eastern, and Indian civilizations made for a delicate cultural balance in
Eurasia, which, later in the medieval centuries, would be undone by the inundation of
steppe peoples from the north, notably the Mongols. 9 It is largely through the Mongols that
the Silk Route flourished, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bringing
Eurasian civilizations from the Pacific to the Mediterranean into modest contact with one
another. Nevertheless, China formed its own separate sphere geographically compared to
the civilizations further west, with Tibet, Mongolia, Japan, and Korea all directing their
gazes toward the Middle Kingdom, each forging in varying degrees its own civilization.
And yet the severe limitations of a high desert environment “made anything more than
a protocivilization impossible in Tibet and Mongolia,” McNeill writes. Tibetan Lamaists,
“always conscious of the Indian Buddhist origins of their faith,” in effect opposed Sinific-
ation by appealing to the traditions of the rival civilization next door. 10 History, according
to McNeill, is a study in fluidity, in which things only seem secure and neatly geograph-
ically ordered: more crucially we are always in a state of smaller transitions and cultural
interchanges.