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Book Review
| Breakout: The Origins of Civilization. Edited by MARTHA LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY. Peabody Museum Monographs, 9. Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 2000. xx + 131 pp. $ 25.00 (paper).
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This book is a collection of articles on the origins of civilizations, beginning with a remarkable article by the American-Chinese archaeologist K. C. Chang (1931–2001). In 1983 he had published a small book, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China,1 in which he described the origin of civilization in China as the rise of political authority and explained this rise in terms that were almost purely nonmaterial. In the Bronze Age of China (perhaps 2200–500 B.C.) the two great technological advances, bronze and writing, were insignificant for the economy and served only to support the ideological underpinnings of political authority. Agriculture remained essentially Neolithic, and writing was used for purposes related to religion and politics rather than production and economics. Stated in this bald way, Chang's thesis is difficult to accept—bronze weaponry must have been important, the question of bronze implements has still not been settled to everyone's satisfaction, and we cannot know what sort of things might have been written on perishable materials. Nevertheless the case he makes for this view of the early Chinese polity has proved to have lasting heuristic value. |
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In the article reprinted in the present book, originally published in 1984,2 Chang summarizes the findings of the 1983 book with the statement that in ancient China the rise of civilization was associated with a differentiated access to the means of communication rather than the means of production (p.3), then makes a breathtaking speculative leap. He points out a number of similarities between ancient China as he describes it and several other ancient civilizations, specifically the Maya and the Mesopotamian, and goes on to suggest that communication was more important than production in all ancient civilizations except one, the Mesopotamian civilization from which the modern West derives. It was there that the "breakout" of this book's title occurred: "The ancient inhabitants of Mesopotomia of the late fourth millenniumB.C. underwent a transformative process, which too resulted in a civilized state, but nevertheless involved a wholly new set of changes ..." (p.9). These included new production technologies, long-distance trade, and the use of writing to facilitate economic transactions. |
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