Transcript of A Very Brief History of Western Civilization – Dr. Roy Casagranda

And one of the categories that’s always struck me as sort of odd was this east-west category that we have.

If you were here on Thursday, I took this on a little bit, and I talked about how that category formed and why it mattered in terms of foreign relations. But I’m going to take this thing even further back and dig into it a little bit deeper because that’s pretty much all this is about.

So even though this talk is a brief history of Western civilization, to do that, there has to be an east, right, to compare it to because you can’t really understand what the west is unless you have an other to look at. And then you say, “Oh, really what the West is is not that.”

Usually, you define something by what it is, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. But when you define it by what it’s not, it brings it into light a little bit. So I want to take this thing and also look at the very notion of the idea of the word civilization. So we’re going to do the east-west divide, but we’re also going to do civilization versus non-civilization.

Defining Civilization

Historians have traditionally—I’m going to start with civilization. And historians have traditionally defined civilization as starting with the advent of writing. Now the reason historians have picked writing is just it’s actually really simple. It’s that all a historian really is at the end of the day is a person who does nonfiction literature. Right? The difference between the history department and the English department is that the historian is doing nonfiction and the English department’s doing fiction.

That’s the primary difference between the two. Because at the end of the day, all a historian is doing is reading historical text and maybe trying to put them to memory and then trying to create a narrative based on what they’ve read. Because at the end of the day, there are lots of holes when you read history. There’s lots of gaps, so you have to fill them in. So you’re kind of constructing a fictional story to fill in the gaps for the nonfictional parts that you know.

And so when a historian says, “Oh, this is what I think happened,” what they’re really saying is we really don’t know what happened. But based on the bits that we do know, this is the narrative I’ve come up with. If you make history go back to the advent of writing, then history is roughly five thousand one hundred years old now. And at the same time, that makes civilization five thousand one hundred years old, right, if you couple the two together. So history and civilization are co-defined.

Having said that, I, as a political scientist, don’t like that. I love history. I do history. When I was teaching for the University of Maryland University College, I was in their history department. I consider myself to be at least somewhat of a historian.

So I’m not saying this to bash on history. I just think it’s really arbitrary. Because as a political scientist, one of the questions I ask is, why did writing even come into being?

The Origins of Writing and Government

It looked like the reason writing came into being was that there was a state, and in this case, the state in Sumer, but also there was a state in Egypt. And these two states had a problem, and that was they had a certain amount of cattle. They had a certain amount of grain. They had a certain amount of fruit. They had wine. They had beer.

They needed to actually categorize and keep track of what they had. They needed to be able to take the resources and pool them. They needed to be able to distribute their resources. To do that, they needed some way of writing down what they had. To do that, they needed numbers and they needed letters, right, or characters.

So in Sumer and in Egypt, a character system formed. The problem with the character system is right away you get into this trouble of what if we get into a new concept and then we have a word, but we don’t have a character for it.

So the Egyptians also began doing phonetic letters. So there’s this kind of misconception that the first phonetic alphabet ever was the Phoenician alphabet, hence, phonetic Phoenician. But, really, actually, it was the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that were the first phonetic alphabet. It’s just that at the same time, they also used characters. So they did both.

In any case, it means government came before writing. Right? Because government made writing happen out of necessity. So then my next question is, well, when did government come into being? We think now that it was somewhere around six thousand five hundred years ago or four thousand five hundred BC in Egypt.

Egypt did it first, we think, and then Mesopotamia did it shortly afterwards. So Mesopotamia beat Egypt to writing, but Egypt beat Mesopotamia to government. The two kind of did things in tandem. One would do one, and then the other one would catch up shortly afterwards.

The Necessity of Government in Egypt

The reason that the government came into being, again, was probably out of necessity. In the case of Egypt, it was probably tied to the flood cycle. So Egypt doesn’t get much annual rain. They have instead these annual floods. What happens is it snows in Central Africa. It snows in Equatorial Africa.

Right? Just the sentence doesn’t fit. Right? It’s just what the heck? And then the snows melt, and then they flood and create the Nile flood, the annual Nile floods, and that’s what created this cycle in Egypt, that made Egypt this incredibly fertile place.

Per acre, Egypt is probably the most fertile place on earth when you’re in the Nile Valley. And what that did was that made it so Egypt could produce crazy amounts of food with almost no effort without worrying about burning out their soil. The problem was weather is weather. And sometimes weather cooperates, and sometimes weather goes haywire. And they were susceptible to droughts.

And as a result, there was the possibility of famine. But also the other was true. They could get a flood that lasted too long, and it caused the crops to rot in the field. And so they had to constantly worry about the weather.

Here’s the thing. If they could pool their resources together, they could build granaries. And then in the granaries, they could store the grain. So what probably created the first government in Egypt was they probably went through this terrible famine event. You know, a significant portion of the population died. And then the next harvest, they’re bringing in the grain, and they’re like, “Wow. We’re leaving a lot of this grain here in the field to rot because we can just casually produce so much food. Wouldn’t it be cool if this grain was around the next time there was a famine?”

The Birth of Government and Religion

And then somebody probably had the brilliant idea, “Oh my god. Let’s create a granary” and tried to talk everybody into it. In the act of talking everybody into it, they, as a community, got together, made the decision to do this. They pooled their resources. They made the granary. The problem is the granary requires upkeep. So once they initially got together and made the decision to make the granary, now they have to make the decision to allocate the resources to sustaining the granary. And in that moment, government probably formed.

But then there’s this problem that humanity always suffers from. You know what the right thing to do is, but you’re motivated by emotions, by addiction, by laziness, by habit, by desire, and you’ll do the wrong thing anyway. Right? So even after they got the granary up and running and even after they’ve allocated the resources to sustain the granary, there is this propensity of humans to go, “Jeez, I should really bring that grain this year. What if I don’t?”

“I’m going to take the year off.” And then, you know, the next year comes along, and you don’t bring it again. There’s no consequence. The next year comes along, you don’t bring it again. But then little by little, more and more people bring less and less grain because the memory, the horror of the famine kind of fades.

Next thing you know, it’s the next generation. They didn’t experience it, so they don’t know what you’re talking about when you go, “Yeah. It’s a bad famine. You should really put grain in that granary.” And then the next famine hits, and there’s no grain.

And people die in really large numbers, and they’re like, “Wow. Our ancestors built this granary, and we didn’t do upkeep. How do we do this?” And at some point, somebody must have had this idea. And it’s kind of a fascinating idea when you think about it.

And that was to lie, to manipulate, to twist the truth. Because they realized that the rational brain wasn’t enough to motivate people to do the right thing. That if you just walked up to a person and said to them, “You should do the following because of a, b, c, d. You should drive a smaller car because it’s better for the environment.” And then next time I see you, you’re in an SUV touring around with absolutely no passengers and never off-roading. So no one knows why you have an SUV. Right?

Because we’re not rational beings. Humans have never been rational beings. All the science shows humans aren’t rational beings.

You just put that aside. We are rationalizing beings. Right? We make a decision, and then afterwards, we create a story to make what we did not seem completely insane to the people we’re going to have to explain this to later. And you were taught to do that probably by your mother.

Every time you did something really stupid, she’d go, “Why’d you do that?” You know, “I don’t know.” “You better come up with a reason” and then sends you off to your room. So now you’re like, “What is my reason? What is my reason? I have to anticipate the next time I get into trouble for doing something stupid.”

So when you come home with that giant red SUV, right, and all your friends are like, “What’d you get that for? You don’t even have family or go off road.” You’re like, “Well, I just really like the idea of being paralyzed in a car accident, and I heard you’re six times more likely to be paralyzed in an SUV than in a regular car. And so that’s what I’m going for.” And people are “Oh, okay.”

Religion as Social Control

So I’ve got this problem. If I lay it out to you and I say, “Look. You really need to bring the grain because there’s going to be a famine, and we’re all going to die.” We know you won’t bring the damn grain because humans don’t work that way. But what if I told you this? “If you bring the grain—I had a dream last night, and in it, the god Amun came to me, and he said he would reward people who brought the grain and punish people who didn’t.”

You bring the grain, the drought happens. Next thing you know, the priest is doling out the grain. Because right, we just invented the priesthood. A group of people who had direct contact with a god. You didn’t bring the grain, the drought happens, and the next thing you know, the priest is like, “Guess what, guys? Some of us are going to starve to death.”

In other words, no matter what happens, that priest looks prescient. That priest looks like they can look into the future. Now your incentive to bring the grain is to establish a closer link to your best imaginary friend. Right? It’s that you can have this direct link with, in this case, the god Amun.

So it turns out that the advent of government probably was totally tied to an economic situation and also a religious situation where the goal was by a community or an individual to intentionally manipulate your economic behavior using religion, using a normative method for manipulating your behavior to create some desired economic outcome.

The Transition to Agriculture

In this case, a giant insurance policy, a giant community-wide insurance policy so that the next time the weather went to shit, we didn’t all starve. That’s what I used to think would be an amazing marker for the start of civilization. And then we started making some really unusual discoveries.

Let me just clarify that the reason I had picked that period six thousand five hundred years ago was in part based on a bias that I had. The bias was that human beings didn’t do anything worth noting until we started doing agriculture.

That agriculture was sort of this major change, this major shift in our way of being. Now not that agriculture was necessarily a good thing. If you looked at what gathering and hunting societies did before agriculture, they moved from location to location, especially once they started to put too much pressure on the local environment. Right? You’ve eaten too many mongongo nuts.

It’s time to move so that there’s enough mongongo nuts left to create the next generation of mongongo trees. That’s the goal. The goal for a gatherer and hunter is to have no impact on the environment. We killed a bunch of gazelles here. We killed just as many as we can to not affect the size of the herd next year. It’s time to move and find a new source for food. That’s your goal. We’ve been at this watering hole just long enough that we’ve put too much pressure on it. It’s time to move and find another watering hole.

Your goal is to have no impact. The gathering and hunting culture that has an impact breaks their ecosystem, and they starve to death the next year. But in that system, you don’t own anything. You’re migratory because you move from place to place, tapping into seasonal foods, but also avoiding overtaxing whatever specific food that it is that you rely upon.

The Reluctant Adoption of Agriculture

Agriculture doesn’t happen because we invent it and we go, “oh my god. This is better.” Because think about it. In gathering and hunting, you have a wide variety of foods.

One of the problems with the modern diet is that a lot of people, especially in the United States, just keep eating the same food over and over and over again. That can lead to food allergies for one thing. One of the reasons why we’ve seen an increase in the number of people who are gluten intolerant is we basically have a monoculture when it comes to wheat. If you were to look at how we planted wheat fields just two hundred years ago, there were probably a hundred different strains of wheat. So when you ate wheat, you weren’t eating the same wheat every single time.

But, also, you ate other things other than wheat. You had some barley in the mix. There were all kinds of variety of foods. But a gatherer and hunter, you’re eating berries for part of the year, and you’re eating tubers another part of the year, and next thing you know, you’re eating legumes.

And then you have this steady source of meat coming into your diet. So there’s a little bit of deer, a little bit of rabbit, a little bit of giraffe, whatever happens to be available and in the proper quantities. That makes for a really healthy diet. If you just ate macaroni and cheese every day for, like, four years, maybe supplement it with ramen or something, you will die of malnutrition.

It will kill you. You can’t—at some point, you’re going to need to eat, like, something from the broccoli family or something. I know it’s actually the cabbage family. It’s just funnier to say it. Especially because have you noticed all the weird broccolis?

Like, what’s with that purple broccoli? What did they do? Like, was it fish DNA they spliced in there to get it to turn purple? I want to know what weird DNA they put in that plant to get it to flip. There was an experiment at one point with putting fish DNA into strawberries to keep them from freezing in the winter.

“These strawberries taste funny.”

The Slow Transition to Agriculture

When we started doing agriculture, it wasn’t because we wanted to. We did it kicking and screaming. So the ancient Egyptians—probably the prehistoric Egyptians—probably began doing agriculture about eleven thousand years ago. They weren’t the first. The Mesopotamians beat the Egyptians by seven or so centuries. But the Egyptians started doing it about eleven thousand years ago.

By about five thousand years ago, so over a six thousand year span of time, they went from zero percent dependent on agriculture to about sixty percent dependent on agriculture. In other words, it took them six thousand years to get sixty percent dependent on agriculture.

Six thousand years, that’s a remarkably long chunk of time. Talk about incremental. They were doing it so slowly. It took millennia.

And the reason is this. It is true that per acre, you can get more calories out of your soil with agriculture. So if I have forty acres and I’m doing agriculture, I can sustain myself on it. But to do gathering and hunting, I probably need four hundred acres.

So as population densities increase, they reach this point where we are forced to do agriculture. We actually think there was a shock event that caused the straw to break the camel’s back, so to speak.

The Younger Dryas Event

What had happened was Europe had an event called the Younger Dryas. It was a miniature ice age, which is always cool. Who doesn’t like those?

What had happened was the Laurentian ice sheet melted, and we now think quite catastrophically. For years, we just assumed it took hundreds of years for the Laurentian ice sheet to melt. The Laurentian ice sheet was massive. It was the size of a really large country. It probably covered about twenty percent of the United States and about twenty percent of Canada.

So it’s this really massive chunk of ice sitting on top of what is today the Great Lakes. And now there are some people who suspect it may have melted in as short a period as eight years, and it’s why there’s the Saint Lawrence River. All that fresh water suddenly had to go somewhere, and it literally cut a straight line to the Atlantic Ocean in the form of the Saint Lawrence River. And when it did that, all that fresh water catastrophically ended up in the North Atlantic.

Now there is a giant underwater river in the Atlantic of hot water, and it flows from the equator to the North Atlantic, and it surfaces pretty close to Iceland. And when it surfaces, it heats the atmosphere. So think about this. Cairo, Egypt is right about north-south, right about where Austin is. We’re on the same latitude—we’re about as far north as Cairo, Egypt is. Rome, Italy, is about as far north as New York City.

When I think of Rome, I don’t think of a city anywhere near as cold as New York City. Berlin is about where Winnipeg, Canada is. Stockholm is about where Anchorage, Alaska is. Europe is remarkably warmer than North America because of this hot water current that comes to the surface in the North Atlantic, and it makes Europe this pretty balmy, fun place to be in.

And all of a sudden, all that cold water from the Laurentian ice sheet catastrophic melt dumps into the North Atlantic. It turned off that hot water current and froze Europe. It just froze it. Massive ice sheet formed over the top of Scandinavia and Britain, and the population of people that were living there literally had to run south. And we now know because of genetics.

Population Migrations and Cultural Shifts

Genetics have become so fun that the men in Europe abandoned the place and poured into what is today Iraq. And probably there were so many that it forced the population in Iraq to adapt. They had to increase the caloric output of the land they were using. And so they had to switch from gathering and hunting to agriculture to sustain this massive refugee problem of Europeans pouring into Syria and Iraq. How obnoxious.

The really crazy thing is it resulted in one of the world’s first ever cities, and it was a really large city because the women who got left behind by those deadbeat dads had to figure out how to survive. And historically, most gathering and hunting cultures, the men do the hunting, the women do the gathering. You’re in the middle of an ice age, there aren’t a lot of plants to gather. So all of a sudden, the women that were left behind had to switch over to hunting because that was the only food available.

They needed to switch over to meat. And so instead of remaining scattered, they actually went into what is today the Czech Republic, and they founded a large town. And they began working together in this cooperative to help each other hunt so that they could raise their families in this massive cooperative.

Eventually, though, and this is centuries later, men start to migrate back out of the Middle East and into Europe. And so if you’re a European, this is fun, you’re genetically—you have a huge genetic stock that down your mother’s line that’s actually native European, and then your father’s line is probably mostly Mesopotamian just to make things really confusing.

Anyway, it’s not part of your identity, but it’s better that you know the truth. So you know that whom you hate is yourself. It just makes you more honest. Keep hating yourself. That’s fine.

Whatever it takes to wake up in the morning. I prefer hot tea, but it’s okay. That’s what works for you. You know what I mean? Like, you gotta be a productive member of society. Figure out how.

The Downsides of Agriculture

I’m telling you all of this because I want to blow up this agriculture thing a little bit. First of all, agriculture sucked once people started doing it. It meant you couldn’t keep moving, and it meant you now had a monoculture. Instead of eating a little bit of this and eating a little bit of that and eating a little bit of this like we do today with the grocery store.

The grocery store has created the gathering and hunting environment. You can walk in. “Oh, that looks good.” In cart. “Oh, look at that.” It’s like we’ve made—it’s like in our hearts, we just want to be gathering hunters, so we made the grocery store.

But before the grocery store, before we had this luxurious, convenient, crazy, opulent grocery store experience, and you’re doing agriculture: “What are we having for breakfast, hon?” “I was thinking about cracked wheat for breakfast and then maybe with some beer.” “Oh, what’s for lunch?” “How about some bread and some beer?” “Oh, cool. What’s for dinner?” “How about wheat soup and beer?”

You’re going to eat a lot of whatever you’re growing because that’s what you have available. So there goes your dietary variety. Not only is it probably boring and makes you suicidal, but it’s also really unhealthy for you. To make things worse, the number one way we processed wheat was we would grind the wheat between two stones.

Well, then we would make bread out of it. So we just basically gave you sandpaper, and then you chew on that because the two stones are grinding together. It’s not just the two stones are grinding the wheat in between them. And so by the time you’re done, there’s little fine particles of dust in your bread, and you eat that. It takes the enamel off your teeth.

And bread means no teeth after age thirty-five. As if that wasn’t enough, prior to that, we had medicine. Gathering and hunting societies had medicine. We now think they had acupuncture. Well, one of the reasons we know that is the ice man.

He was found in Northern Italy or Switzerland. I don’t remember where, but they found this guy that was frozen. He’s like, what, five, six thousand years old, and he has these tattoo tracks all across his back. And, you know, they don’t make any obvious picture. It looks like a map.

It looks like somebody has made this map on his back. And then somebody thought, “You know what? I’m going to look at acupuncture.” And it turns out they’re the exact acupuncture sites you would do for a person who has a bad back and a bad digestive tract. And we know from examining him that he had stomach issues and a bad back.

And so it turns out there’s apparently universal truth in acupuncture and ancient Europeans. Prehistoric Europeans were even doing it. He was murdered, by the way. So it’s also a crime scene investigation. Somebody stabbed him in the back.

Jerks. But thank god because now we have him to examine. Not morbid. It’s weird to think that by the way, that’s the part of Europe that my dad’s—my grandfather, my dad’s dad’s family is from, so I’m sure I’m actually related to the iceman somehow. And I feel like we should just examine him a little bit more and give him the good burial that he deserves.

No. Let’s keep him frozen. That’s really cool.

The Social Consequences of Agriculture

Switching over to agriculture also means that that piece of land that I’ve planted, I have to stick around and wait for it to harvest. It’s not just I can’t keep moving. I’m tied to that land because I gotta keep Bambi and Thumper out of my farm. Right?

But then there’s my neighbors. They’re a bunch of slacker lazy bastards. They haven’t planted their own field, and they’re really hungry now. And so they’re coming onto my field and stealing my food, So I need to smash them in the head with a club and try and push them away from my farm field. And so we’ve just invented warfare. We’ve just invented private property.

To make things worse, we’re now living in these densely populated areas or at least more densely populated areas. So if a disease breaks out, we’re more likely to transmit it to each other.

The Origins of Civilization Reconsidered

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] Whereas before, if a disease broke out in the gathering and hunting band, they would just die before they had a chance to pass it on because they were still isolated from each other. So we’re now having rampant diseases, no teeth, our diet sucks, our food tastes like crap, and we’re doing warfare. But I thought, like probably most people, that’s the key ingredient to starting civilization. Next thing you know, we have government, organized religion, and boom.

We now think based on a finding in 2007 that something else may be going on. The finding was in Syria. And as you know, four years later, there was this inconvenient little civil war. We found archaeological sites in Syria where religious monuments were built that predated agriculture by as much as maybe two thousand years. So not predated agriculture by twenty years or a hundred years or two hundred years, but possibly as much as two thousand years, one to two thousand years. It’s not close. Right? It might as well be a million years away, actually, at that point. It means that monumental structures weren’t dependent on agriculture as we had thought, that bringing people together into densely populated areas wasn’t apparently as dependent on agriculture as we thought.

We’ve since found some archaeological sites that are similar in Turkey, and we’ve been sort of going through the ones in Turkey, but we can’t do any of the archaeology on Syria. In other words, I’m eager for the Syrian civil war to end—and not just so that Syrians could stop murdering each other, but so we could send archaeologists to go in there and dig these sites up because I have a feeling that they’re going to reveal something remarkable.

One of the interesting things is we found bones, and we can test bones to see what your diet was. You really are literally what you eat. And the bones confirm that these were not farmers. They were gatherer and hunters. They really were on this preform diet. So we’re not just relying on carbon dating to confirm this.

In any case, I just want you to know that where we peg the start of civilization and how we define what it is should be something that we question. I certainly think we need to throw out, and we need to throw it out as fast as we can, the advent of writing—that’s absurdity. Archaeology makes that clear just because archaeology has told us all these other remarkable stories. Whether we peg it to government like my original assumptions were told to do or we peg it to the advent of organized religion as these sites in Turkey and Syria are clearly indicating happened fourteen thousand years ago, I don’t know. I don’t know where to go with this. I just need the Syrian war to end so we can get more data.

The East-West Divide and Historical Focus

So that’s one of the questions here. The other one is this notion of east-west. So I want to get back to that because I find it really strange.

Think about your average history class, whether it was in high school or maybe it was Western Civ One or Western Civ Two in college. Let’s do Western Civ One. So you go in, and your textbook and your professor—let’s say it’s a sixteen-week class. You’re going to meet thirty-two times. And in the process, you’re going to start off with Mesopotamia. Right? Every textbook starts off with Mesopotamia. Why? Because 5,100 years ago, they started writing. Okay.

And your professor probably spends one day on Mesopotamia, maybe two. And next thing you know, you’re doing Egypt. And you spend one, maybe two days on Egypt. The next thing you know, you’re doing the Greeks, and you’re spending five weeks on the Greeks. And before you know it, you’re doing the Romans, and you’re spending, like, eight weeks on the Romans. And at this point, you probably have a week left after you take all the tests out. You jump into the medieval period and quickly say it was terrible. The peasants suffered. Done. Western Civ One out of the way.

Western Civ Two miraculously starts in the year 1300, and it’s basically, you know, Petrarch and Galileo, and we have skyscrapers, and it’s done. We’re on the moon. It’s great. It’s great.

Here’s where I get lost. So—and you’ve probably already figured this out about me by now—when do you want to talk about your starting point a little bit more? I mean, when you start something, isn’t the starting moment kind of one of the most important moments? Because doesn’t it frame every single thing you will do afterwards? That one or two class periods on Mesopotamia and the one or two class periods on Egypt doesn’t quite seem like it’s enough.

Because listen to what the textbook and the professor are admitting: Egypt and Mesopotamia founded Western civilization. Even if you say, “No, no, no. It happened in Syria.” Right? Syria’s part of—Syria is in Mesopotamia, and the rest of Syria is immediately adjacent to Mesopotamia. So clearly, the foundational moment for Western civilization has at least something to do with what is today Iraq and Syria.

On top of it all, we know that around 11,700 years ago, Iraq did agriculture before anybody else. So even if you buy the thing that I’m asking you the question—that agriculture was a key component to starting civilization—it’s still Iraq. But then if you do what I do and you go, “No, no. It’s government,” although I’m questioning this, then it’s Egypt and then Iraq because they did it next anyway.

In other words, I completely agree with starting with Mesopotamia and Egypt. Where I’m lost is, why are you walking away from the founders of your civilization so quickly? Especially when you consider the breadth and depth of Egyptian history.

The Depth of Egyptian History

The oldest continuously lived-in city on Earth is the city of Luxor. It was founded 3200 BC. It is 5,200 years old, and it’s been continuously lived in that entire 5,200 years. I mean, that’s that in and of itself is shockingly remarkable. Right?

When you think about it this way: Alexander the Great went to Egypt 2,300 years ago. So when he went to Egypt, Luxor was already 2,900 years old. Luxor was already almost three thousand years old. Like, just the depth and breadth of Egyptian history. How can you cover anything worth mentioning in two or three classroom periods?

Let alone the fact that, you know, there was the great library, and that was really late in Egyptian history. If Egypt is 6,500 years old, as I’m asserting with the advent of government, then by the time they did the great library, which was just 2,300 years ago, they were already 4,200 years old compared to our 240 years. Dude, make it 410 and start us with Jamestown. It’s still a joke. You know?

The Overlooked Persian Empire

But there’s another really weird big problem here. So there is this other civilization that just completely got left out. I mean, it gets talked about a little bit when you were doing the Greeks, and it gets talked about a little bit when you’re doing the Romans, but just barely. It’s almost like, “Oh, jeez. Okay. I guess we have to talk about it.” The Persians.

And then when they get portrayed in our movies, right, the leader of the Persians is this tall, gay, black man. Right? Because everybody hates tall men, gay men, and black men. So they made him the most evil imaginable person the world has ever seen, a tall, gay, black man, which is ironic since he’s fighting the Greeks. The men who not only wore skirts, but they wore them so that they could have quick access after battle. You know?

What was—forget the Greeks. Julius Caesar, the Roman. His name wasn’t Julius Caesar, by the way. It was Gaius Julius Caesar, but it’s okay. You don’t need to know that. What did his men say about him? They said, “Julius Caesar is a husband to all women and a wife to all men.”

Anyway, back to Persia. So first of all, Persia is on the Iranian plateau. The Iranian plateau was named because that’s where the Aryans ended up, as in the Aryans, as in the thing Hitler was obsessed with, as in what we think of as the quintessential human.

You go, “Oh, I don’t. Yeah. Whatever. It’s not true.” You know what? Right? I mean, our society thinks that the average European male, to be precise, is the neutral person in the universe, the perfect person, the person that we look to, the person—so much so that they have to include one of these in every movie. Right?

So there’s the “Seven Years in Tibet.” Like, they want to tell a story about Tibet, and they’re like, “Oh god. People won’t watch it unless we include a Nazi. Here, let’s put this German in Tibet.” He really was in Tibet, but no one cared. But then they made the whole movie revolve around Brad Pitt so that you could be lured into watching a movie about Tibet. Right?

“Last Samurai,” they had to stick Tom Cruise in there somewhere so you would go watch the movie about the Japanese being amazing. They didn’t need a white guy to make that happen. But, of course, if the white guy isn’t there, it’s so bad.

It’s so bad, this thing that I’m talking about, that they made a movie about the British stealing the Enigma machine. The way they got it was they captured a German sub. They didn’t sink it. They caught the damn thing. And when they got on board, they had an Enigma machine.

Just for the record, it’s not the British or the Americans who cracked the Enigma code during World War Two. It was the Poles who did it. And right before Poland was conquered, they sent all their data to the British because it was like their last act: “Alright. We’re going to get conquered, but we’re not going to go down without hurting you first.”

And the British had this data that the Poles had been compiling, and they just needed a machine to have that last piece to crack the code. They needed a machine. And so the British go and they capture the sub. In the Hollywood movie, it’s an American sub. It’s an American crew that captures the German sub. Really? You couldn’t have made—they speak English. They’re white. You couldn’t have made them English? How alien are the English to us that we couldn’t make a movie that was at least remotely somewhat similar to history?

The Persian Legacy

So back to the Persians. The Persians, those Aryans whom you hate so much that you cast them as tall gay black men, the Persians did really amazing things.

Kurosh, Cyrus the Great. When the Romans transliterated k, the Greek letter kappa, which looks just like a k, they transliterated it as a c because in Latin, c is pronounced k always. They never—in Latin, you don’t ever pronounce the c as a “sa.” It’s always “ka.” That’s why it’s Kaiser, not Caesar. It’s just that—and it’s C-A-E. It’s not C-E-A. How did we get Caesar out of that? Anyway—and then “ae” was probably pronounced “i.” That’s why it’s Kaiser.

So Cyrus the Great is this Persian who 2,600 years ago comes up with this brilliant idea. He wants to create a massive multicultural empire. And he almost does it before he dies. I mean, he does do it, but it doesn’t reach its high watermark. It’ll get bigger after he dies.

By the time they’re done, they had actually conquered the Indus River Valley, and they had named one of the Satrapis “India” after the Indus River, which is today in Pakistan, just to make things confusing. They had conquered Central Asia, like almost all of it. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, that whole zone, they conquered it. All of Persia, all of Afghanistan, they conquered Egypt, the entire Middle East, except for the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, and they had even conquered huge swaths of what is today Greece. Greece and even a little bit of Bulgaria.

They put this empire together, and then instead of subjugating everybody and taking slaves and taking tribute and plundering people’s cities, they went, “Welcome. Welcome to the Persian Empire. You’re now members, which means you get the benefits of the empire.”

And instead of saying, “Okay. We want you to all learn Persian,” they said, “Keep speaking whatever language you speak. That’s great.” Instead of saying, “Okay. We all want you to have our religion”—they were Zoroastrian, and “you’re going to worship our god, Ahura Mazda, before it became a car company”—instead of doing that, they said, “Not only do you have freedom of religion, not only will we let you worship your own gods and have your own religion, we will actually fund your temples. We will actually do the maintenance on your temples. And if your temples are in terrible disrepair, we’ll help you rebuild them.”

This becomes a biblical story at this point. Right? The Jews show up and they go, “Hey. The Neo-Babylonian empire, when they conquered Palestine and took us into slavery, they blew up our Temple of Solomon. Were you serious that you’ll rebuild our stuff?” And the Persians go, “Absolutely.” And so the Jews show them the plans. They go, “Here. This is what the Babylonians destroyed.” And the Persians are like, “What the hell? That’s a man-made mountain. How did they destroy that?”

The Persian Empire of Tolerance

They really hated us. They stuck in an upgrade. And the Persians went, “Well, we have to rebuild it, I guess.” But they realized the only people on earth who had the ability to build something like that were the Egyptians. So they went and grabbed Egyptian engineers, brought them to Palestine, and with Persian gold, built the second temple of Solomon that the Romans eventually destroyed to punish the Jews.

This is that empire, that Persian empire. It was an empire of tolerance. It was an empire that celebrated the different cultures. If you get a chance to go to Iran, it’s very hard to do because it’s hard to get a visa, go to Persepolis. In Persian, they call it Takhte Jamshid. There is this staircase called the Apadana. Go and look at it.

What you will see is men dressed in their native dress carrying gifts. They’re carrying tribute to the emperor Darius. But the men don’t look like they’re in despair and beaten down. The men are in their native dress, and the reason that the Persians did this is they wanted to show the diversity. At one point, there’s a group of men who are holding hands.

They’re walking in a chain holding hands. Because the Persians wanted the symbolism of “we’re in this together” – Armenians and Jews and Arabs and Babylonians and Assyrians and Egyptians and Greeks and Tajiks and Afghans and Indians. It’s one empire, but it’s many people. And the way they codified all this: a bill of rights. The world’s first ever bill of rights.

It not only guaranteed freedom of religion, but it guaranteed you no slavery. They banned slavery. They outlawed it. And so “we won’t do this. We won’t reduce whole populations to subservience.”

If you go to New York City, go to the UN building. As you’re walking in the front door, above the door in six languages is a text. English is one of them, so you can read it. That text is that first ever bill of rights from twenty-six centuries ago. It’s written also in Persian, which is only fitting since the Persians made it.

My point in bringing this up is this is the idea that some of you, anyway, have embraced of multiculturalism. This is the idea that some of you have embraced with the notion of the United States as a melting pot. This is the idea that some of you have embraced that you should have the right to have your own religion. It’s from Persia. It spreads from Persia to the Greeks.

Alexander and the Persian Legacy

When the Greeks execute Socrates, one of the things that they nailed him for, one of the reasons he got the death penalty was defaming the gods. In other words, the Athenian democracy didn’t have freedom of religion like the Persian Empire did when they were executing Socrates for defaming the gods. The other one was corrupting the youth by giving them bad ideas and making them question the civilization they lived in because he thought it was deeply flawed. So how did Persia get left out of this story? Now Persia does collapse, but then it’s resurrected.

It doesn’t just randomly collapse. It’s destroyed by a guy named Alexander the Great. But then it gets resurrected. And that resurrection is so utterly complete that you can go to Iran today and find Persians named Iskander (Alexander) because even though he destroys their empire, Persian empire sub one, they replace it with three more. They will be the Seleucids, and after that, the Parthians, and after that, the Sassanians.

And so even though they have to replace their empire, they don’t see him as a villain. They see him as an integral part of their history, somebody to be celebrated, somebody extraordinary. Because they saw this as this merger of civilizations, that they had become a little bit Greek in the process of Alexander conquering them, and the Greeks had become a little bit Persian in that process as well. That it wasn’t a one-way exchange – it was a mutual exchange of ideas and information. We don’t look at it that way.

We see it as this evil, dark, gross empire being destroyed by our hero, Alexander, a megalomaniac who believed that Zeus was his dad, which is why he took fifteen thousand men on a violent rampage through a stable empire and destroyed it and burnt their capital, destroying their library in the process, wiping out history that we’ll never be able to read because it’s gone, because he was a narcissist. But somehow, he’s the good guy, and they’re the bad guys even though they’re clearly the victims here.

The Great Library of Alexandria

But there’s something even stranger in all of this. So in the aftermath of Alexander, the Ptolemies are going to build a great library and then maintain it. Well, the great library becomes the massive repository for the world’s knowledge.

In a way, it was our first ever attempt at an Internet. Right? One location you could go to and find everything there was that was known. And they got to a million books. It was an extraordinary experiment, and it lasted a long time.

The library was founded right around 290 BC, and it was destroyed in 391 AD. So we’re talking six hundred and eighty years, which is almost seven centuries. And at that place, they made one incredible discovery after the other. The world’s first ever static rocket, the world’s first ever mechanical play. You turn it on, it was steam powered.

It would do scenes and sounds. They invented geometry. That’s at the great library. Euclid did it.

And you can go on and on. They figured out the size of the Earth. Not only did they know it was a sphere, but they knew its size. They figured out that the Earth wobbled. It does one full wobble every twenty-six thousand years.

Think about that. In one year, you’re only measuring one twenty-six thousandth of the wobble. They had done such amazingly precise star measurements that they, after a few years of observation, noticed this imperceptible wobble. It’s called a parallax. It goes on and on.

Well, our library was in Egypt. That was literally the heart of Western civilization and the brain. And somehow, we don’t think of Egypt as being in the West even though Egypt is one of the two founding civilizations. It was the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. But somehow, Egypt gets left out.

The Persian Preservation of Knowledge

Now it is true. The great library gets burnt, which means we’re going to have to start over again. But the place we’re starting over again is actually in the Persian Empire. Because just before the great library gets burnt in Alexandria, the Persians had decided they wanted a library of their own, and the people who escaped from the Roman Empire with their books trying to get away from Theodosius, the Roman emperor who decides to purge Roman Empire of all its non-Christians, including its non-Christian ideas. He’s, by the way, the guy who ended the Olympics.

He went, “No. We won’t do that anymore. It’s pagan.” Like, everything had to go. All the knowledge, all the traditions.

If you look at the text of the time period of Emperor Theodosius, he treated the pre-Christian Romans as if they were aliens, not as if he was the descendant of them. Right? It’s like they tried to destroy all the pre-Christian statues. So they would find a statue to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. They’d melt it.

They were purging the earth of everything pre-Christian. They wanted to erase it. Well, that pre-Christian stuff included Aristotle and Plato and Aristophanes and Sophocles. It included Heron and Euclid and Eratosthenes. And they were doing this at the same time the Persians were greedily gobbling that stuff up and adding it to their collection of knowledge and starting a new library at Gondi Shapur.

The Missing Middle East in Western History

But then that brings us to the next really weird moment in this east-west divide, this western civilization thing where we’ve left it out. And I didn’t discover it until I was probably about eighteen or nineteen. I’ll just admit I was already obsessed with history. I realized something, and that was I didn’t know anything about the Middle East during the medieval period. I knew a little bit about ancient Egypt.

I knew a little bit about Mesopotamia. I knew I remember Hammurabi, writing his crazy code. Everybody’s blind and toothless. God is sick. So that was what we focused on, of course.

Not Cyrus the Great and his, “Hey. Worship the gods you want. I will support that monetarily.” No. No. We focused on Hammurabi. I knew a lot about Rome. I was obsessed as a kid, and I knew a little bit about the Greeks. I didn’t know anything about the Persians.

I knew a little bit about the Vikings. Right? But I didn’t know anything about medieval Middle East. And I found this book at the library, and I found this book.

Was written by Sir John Bagot Glubb Pasha. His name is John Glubb. But you know how sometimes people get a little carried away with their names and start adding stuff to it. So Sir John Bagot Glubb Pasha. Pasha is the title, obviously, so is Sir.

And he had been in the British military. And when the British pulled out of what was then called Transjordan Palestine, but they got renamed Transjordan, and then they got renamed as Jordan. So today, it’s the Kingdom of Jordan. When the British pulled out of Jordan, he stayed behind. He went to the Jordanians and went, “I don’t ever want to leave. I was born British, but in my heart, I’m an Arab. Let me stay.” And they went, “Yeah. We need skilled officers,” and he became a general in the Transjordanian army. And he stayed behind.

The Arab Empire and Its Contributions

And he wrote a series of books. And I got ahold of one of these books, I read it. I couldn’t believe the hole in my knowledge base. And I went and found another one of his books, and I read it. And I started trying to fill this hole.

The hole was the Arabs. The Arabs, it turns out, had built this massive empire overnight that embraced knowledge and was shockingly tolerant. It was similar to the Persian empire. In fact, it’s really remarkable because if you look at the area that the Arabs conquered, they conquered everything from Spain to Pakistan when they built their empire. It was like the Persian empire plus most of the Roman empire combined.

So it was bigger than any empire that had preceded it. One of the things that’s remarkable about it was the majority of the world’s Christian population was in that empire. Sixty percent of all of Christendom was in that Muslim ruled Arab empire. In its first couple of centuries, there were almost no Muslims in the Arab empire. They were the rulers, but they were, like, five percent of the population because they didn’t force anybody to convert.

So not only did they end up with the majority of the Christian population of Earth, but they were majority Christian also. And it was okay. They were tolerated. That Christian population was tolerated and integrated into their society because they were a tolerant empire. Now what’s remarkable about this is they began to advance human knowledge.

The lens invented by Ibn al-Haytham, the same guy who invented the camera. He’s also the guy who realized that light traveled at a finite speed in waves and could be broken down into its constituent colors and that all objects in the universe exert gravity on each other. He also invented the world’s first ever scientific method. He stated Newton’s first law of motion six hundred years before Newton, dabbled in calculus six hundred years before Leibniz and Newton, stated Kepler’s first law of planetary motion five hundred years before Kepler.

There was Ibn Sina, the guy who invented modern medicine. He’s also the guy who came up with the idea of singularities. He effectively postulated the Big Bang. He’s the guy who kicked off phenomenology that Husserl and Heidegger will later on take on and develop further. Right? There was this huge blossoming of scientific and philosophical knowledge in that time period.

The father of political science, the father of history, the father of sociology. The Arabs invented literary studies where you would look at literary sources for the purposes of trying to figure out what the truth was, for the purpose of trying to understand – in other words, the English departments all owe their existence to these guys. How can that much be carved out of your historical knowledge when all of it is western? That’s the key to this. The knowledge that the Arabs were building off of was western.

The knowledge that they made was western. And the answer is that what we did was we intentionally created this east-west paradigm to divorce the Arabs and the Persians from the rest of the west, that this was an intentional thing. Right? Al-Khwarizmi invented algebra, algorithms, zero, Arabic numerals. You can’t jettison these guys.

They’re too much of our foundational understanding of the universe. Right? What would we be without algebra and algorithms to mine your Internet activity and then launch really nice ads directly aimed at you, customized for you to get you to buy stuff you don’t need. How many times have you flipped open an app or something and saw the ad that was exactly about what you were just talking to somebody? Creepy.

The Rise of Intolerance

Here’s what happened in a nutshell. Europe had gone through a phase of massive intolerance under the leadership of the Romans, especially epitomized by Emperor Theodosius the First. Theodosius the First declared that the Roman Empire was a Christian only empire. In other words, he was a fundamentalist Christian who decided to jettison any concept of tolerance that existed. In the process, he set into motion this idea that it was Christianity versus the rest of the world.

The Fall of Rome and Historical Revisionism

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] Now the Romans had already had enormous trouble with the Jewish population. Right? And they ultimately burnt or destroyed the second temple of Solomon in the process. But for that matter, the Romans had had trouble with the Christian population. We all know about Romans feeding Christians to the lions.

But Rome is now converted to Christianity. And now they’ve taken all that intolerance that they had been directing towards Christianity, and now they’re directing it towards everybody else. Islam is born shortly afterwards. Theodosius, right, is the late three hundreds, early four hundreds, and then Islam is born in the early six hundreds. So there’s about two centuries later, Islam comes into being.

And so all of that religious intolerance that had been brewing in the Roman Empire gets focused on Muslims at a time when the Muslims are conquering whole swaths of the Roman Empire. And so the Roman Empire sees itself as the victim of these people. But here’s the twist. That period of time that I just referred to where I said that Muslims were conquering the whole swath of the Roman Empire, we have actually undone that. We’ve undone that conquest.

The Byzantine Empire Myth

And here’s how it’s done. About five hundred years ago, a German historian came up with the concept of the Byzantine Empire. The original name of Constantinople was Byzantion. When the Romans got there, they turned Byzantion into Byzantium. And so that’s where we get the term Byzantine Empire, as in from Byzant or in this case, Byzantium.

Constantinople had been called Constantinople for centuries by the time the Roman Empire collapsed in 1453, and it was about a hundred years later that this German historian came up with the term Byzantium. The Roman Empire, he’s told us, died on September 4, 476 AD. He gave us a very precise date. So this is when the Roman Empire died. So then when the Roman Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Empire on May 29, 1453, it wasn’t the Roman Empire that the Ottoman Empire conquered.

It was the Byzantine Empire, something that never existed. At the moment that the Roman Empire is surrendering on May 29, 1453, it called itself the Roman Empire. In other words, the Roman Empire collapsed, and then years later, it gets renamed. Woah. Just its last thousand years of existence.

It would be like if the United States changed its capital from Washington DC to San Francisco. Right? Because that’s what the Romans did. They moved their capital to Constantinople. And then a thousand years from now, historians come back.

Let’s say we change our capital to San Francisco next year. Trump decides to do it. We move the capital to San Francisco. And in a thousand years from now, a historian comes back and renames the United States from that moment that our capital’s in San Francisco on, and he calls the United States the Republic of Yerba Buena, which you all love. Sorry.

I was just—it’s just mint. It’s mint. Everybody loves mint. That was the original name of San Francisco. So I came up with that, for those of you wondering what I was really implying.

Well, right, San Francisco was called Yerba Buena at the time that the United States invaded it and conquered it, and they went, this is a terrible name. Good mint or good herb? Who would call a city that and then flip the name to San Francisco because it sounded cooler? I have to admit I kind of agree. But do you see what I mean?

Like, it’s weird. Like, wow. You’re going back and resurrecting this old name? We don’t use it anymore. And you’re calling the whole republic after that weird name that doesn’t get used anymore?

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire

Where did this come from? And here’s where it came from. I told you it was a German who came up with this. In 476 AD, there was a German named Odoacer. Isn’t that a cool name?

Odoacer. And Odoacer had decided that he was going to take over Italy. That’s tough for the Roman Empire, though, because Italy was like the symbolic core of the Roman Empire. For all intents and purposes, the Roman Empire’s capital was in Constantinople. It did have a secondary capital in Ravenna, and it had two emperors.

There was the emperor of the east and the emperor in the west. The emperor in the east was Emperor Zeno, and the emperor in the west was this guy named Romulus Augustus. And Odoacer takes his armies up and down Italy, conquers it, captures Romulus Augustus, forces the Roman senate of the west because there were two senates, two emperors, two senates, forces the Roman imperial senate to form up, and then he gets up in front of them on September 4, 476, and he goes, “I am creating the kingdom of Italy. I am the new king.” He didn’t say, “And I’m taking it out of the Roman Empire.”

He’s not saying that. Italy will remain as part of the Roman Empire. “I’m just the new king. I’m just the German king of the kingdom of Italy, it’s still in the Roman Empire. But now there’s no need to have a Western Roman emperor.”

So he tells Romulus Augustus, who I think was like sixteen, “Take off your robe.” He had a purple robe. He takes it off. The senate agrees to this. They vote for this to happen.

They take off the robe. They stick it in a box. They call FedEx. FedEx comes and picks up the box, and they deliver it to Constantinople with a note saying (they probably emailed it), saying, “We don’t need two emperors. Emperor Zeno is enough. Romulus Augustus is abdicating.”

In fact, what happened on September 4, 476 is Rome sort of reunified. The Roman Empire sort of switched back to having one capital, one emperor. It still had two senates. The Western Roman senate died somewhere in the early six hundreds. We’re not exactly sure what year. It died with such a whimper, we don’t know. It didn’t even vote to dissolve itself. It just sort of dissolved and never came back. Emperor Heraclius was emperor when it went away. That’s all we know. Government shut down. They ran out of money, and they just stopped. They stopped meeting. They stopped doing their job.

So they raised the debt ceiling or changed the calendar to accommodate the fact that they weren’t allowed to have debt so that they could have a year with ten months in it and forever ruin my understanding of the names of the months. Right? Just so irritating. Oct is eight. October should be the eighth month, and there it is, the tenth month. Really? Really? Anyway, why is this important? Okay. Great question.

Rewriting History for Political Purposes

So this German is rewriting history to make it so that the Roman Empire doesn’t die at the hands of the Ottoman Empire or Muslim Empire. It’s the Byzantine Empire that dies at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. And instead, the Germans destroy the Roman Empire. And the reason he wants this to happen is there’s an institution called the Holy Roman Empire.

When Napoleon Bonaparte destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, he declared the Holy Roman Empire as “neither Holy, Roman, nor an empire.” And by the way, I agree. It was definitely not holy. It was very much not Roman, although it did have parts of Italy. And it wasn’t an empire at all. It was a confederacy.

It was a confederacy of German and Italian states, mostly city states. They were sort of clumped together. The kings in the Holy Roman Empire with the electors would elect an emperor, and the emperor did have some sway. He did have some control over things, but not in the way that you would think of an emperor. Like, we’re not talking Star Wars emperor here. We’re not even talking like Emperor Theodosius emperor. What we’re really talking about is, like, president of the Confederate States of America. Right? There’s eleven states, and we’re not really sure how closely linked they are. And the guy doesn’t really actually do much except get statues erected to him in 1965. And counties named after him, sometimes.

This German wants the Holy Roman Empire, which is this German Confederacy, to have legitimacy. If the Germans destroyed the Roman Empire, then it’s the Germans who are the heirs to the Roman Empire. So then the name Holy Roman Empire has some meaning. But then to make things more interesting, the Ottomans had as their specified goal to create a new Roman empire.

Their goal was to create a Muslim Roman empire. Their goal was to replace the old decrepit, corrupt, dying Christian Roman Empire with a new vibrant Muslim Roman Empire. That’s why they wanted Constantinople so badly. Because once they had the capital of the Roman Empire, that would not only become their capital and it would become a splendid capital, but it would also be enormous symbolic gesture. We have Rome. It’s done. We’ve done it. We’ve made this Muslim Roman empire.

So to delegitimize the Ottoman empire, it became useful to have: “Oh, no. You thought you conquered Rome? You didn’t. You conquered the Byzantine Empire. We Germans, we took out Rome a thousand years ago. Sorry. You missed it.”

Right? We were literally in the act of rewriting history to mean something it didn’t mean, to be something it wasn’t for ideological reasons, to create this east-west divide.

Cultural Connections Between East and West

This east-west divide that is so weird. Catch this. Crescent moon and star is the symbol of the Ottomans for sure. Who else? The Pakistani flag has it, but why does the Pakistani flag have it? It’s the symbol of Islam. It’s also the symbol of the city of Constantinople, the last capital of the Roman Empire. When the Muslims took that as their holy symbol, the crescent moon and the star, it had been the symbol. It had been the banner for the capital of the Roman Empire. In other words, the Muslims weren’t creating something new. They were taking something that existed and went, “That’s cool. We’ll take that for ourselves.”

If you look at the original coins that the Muslims minted, they have an emperor standing with a cross in one hand and a globus cruciger. A globus cruciger is a globe with a cross sticking out of it. The original Muslim coins had two crosses on them. And the Muslims didn’t see any contradiction in the fact that they were minting Roman coins. They didn’t have any Arabic script on them anywhere.

The civilization that the Muslims created had indoor plumbing. Sewage water was pumped out. They created a coffee industry, a sugar industry. They created—they resurrected ice cream. It had existed in some shape or form, went out of existence. The Arabs brought it back. It wasn’t really ice cream. It was sherbet. It was ice with fruit juice. In fact, that’s where we get the word sherbet from. It’s from “sharbat,” which is just juice in Arabic. Right?

Coffee comes from the Arabic word “qahwa.” “Sukkar” comes originally from a Hindi word, but through Arabic, which is sugar—sukkar. “Sifr,” zero, comes from Arabic. Algebra, algorithm, admiral, apricot, all of those are Arabic words that were brought in. Zenith, nadir. Right? All brought in to our language and enriched our language in the process.

The Vikings and Their Expansion

So I’m going to go back a little bit, though. I want to talk about one other weird thing in this story. So you know the Vikings—so just disclaimer. I am a quarter Scandinavian. So when I talk about the Vikings, like, chunks of pride come welling up, and if I sound gross, it’s because I am. Right? Just for the record, I can’t help it. Who here doesn’t like the Vikings? Nobody raised their hand. Okay. So some of you are dishonest. Oh, okay. There. That’s good. Thanks. Really appreciate it. They were really mean.

So the Vikings go on this terror. Now the terror that they go on is shockingly similar to what the Arabs do, except that the Arabs do it suddenly, and they end up conquering a huge empire in the process. What the Vikings do takes about three centuries, so it’s not very sudden. And the Vikings had a little bit of a cruel edge to them just for the record, whereas the Arabs just didn’t. They weren’t so into the cruelty thing.

But they had one thing really in common, and that was that they thought of their homeland as merely a starting point, that it was sacred. There was some religious value to it. But from an economic standpoint, from a political standpoint, it wasn’t very useful. And the reason is, think about it, what is today Saudi Arabia as the starting point for the Arabs, there are no rivers. Like, right there. Oh my god. Crappy piece of real estate. How do you function with no rivers? Where do you get your water? How do you do agriculture? Like, oh my god. You wouldn’t even know the name Saudi Arabia if it wasn’t for oil because the place is basically uninhabitable.

And the Arabs kind of saw it that way. They were like, “Oh god. Here I go another day in river-free land.” The Vikings saw Scandinavia the same way. They saw it as a chunk of land that you could get trees from. You could go fishing from. You could raise dairy cows in parts of it, but you couldn’t farm it. It’s just too cold. And as a result, it was actually really crappy land.

So one of the goals really, one of two goals that the Vikings had when they began leaving Scandinavia and attacking places like Scotland and Ireland and England and Germany and France and Poland and Spain and Italy and Russia and Lithuania and Estonia and Latvia and Finland.

# A Very Brief History of Western Civilization (Continued)

Viking Expansion and Trade

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] Their goal was to get some agricultural land to just be able to get out there and work the soil and plant some plants and eat some vegetables because they were really sick of fish, beef, and cheese wheels. The other thing that the Vikings were really interested in was trade. They really thought, unlike today in the United States, that trade was the pathway to wealth. Right? That your ability to interact with other countries in a peaceful manner where you would exchange goods would generate huge amounts of wealth.

Now one of the reasons why the Vikings turned so violent was they were having a hard time trading with the rest of Europe because Europe was, twelve hundred years ago, extremely poor. By extremely poor, I mean, Charlemagne didn’t have any gold, so he had to mint all his coins in silver. Like, Europe just didn’t have any resources. Paris was a city of ten thousand people. Right? Like, UT is five times bigger.

The Vikings turned a little vicious on their neighbors, not just to grab their land, but also to steal goods worth selling. And one of the reasons they did this was they wanted to be able to trade with homeland. According to the Viking sagas, the Vikings were originally from Persia, and they wanted to go back to Persia and trade with them. But by the time they’re getting back to Persia in the eight hundreds, Persia has already been conquered by Muslims.

Vikings and Muslim Persia

So they’re actually arriving in Muslim Persia. And those Muslims not only had street lamps lit up by oil, and not only did they have silk and linen and cotton, but they were experimenting with modern technology like modern medicine and modern agriculture and private property ownership and different ways of doing metal. For example, what the Arabs had realized was that the Indians knew how to make steel, not iron, steel. And so the Arabs would go to India. They’d buy steel ingots from India, and they’d bring it back, and they’d make steel tools, steel swords, steel armor.

And that gave them an edge on everything. The Vikings were like, “Oh my god. We need a piece of this. How do we get into this?” And interestingly enough, they began enslaving Northern Europe and taking those slave populations and selling them into the Persian Empire in exchange for this technology and these goods. But then something remarkable happens, and that is they start to succeed in actually conquering chunks of land.

Viking Conquests

They conquer the northern part of northern France. They will conquer England twice. They do it, lose it, and get it back. Right? The first time they captured it is under Knut the Great, and then the second time they captured it is under William the Conqueror.

But one of the things that happens to the Vikings as they’re conquering—by the way, they invented Russia. The Vikings invented Russia. The word Russia is a Viking word. It’s from Rus, R-U-S. And what had happened was the Rus were a Viking tribe that had gotten hired by what are today Ukrainians, Ukrainian lords to create order in the area.

The Rus show up. They beat everybody up. They create order. Right? And then they realize, “Why are we submitting to these Ukrainians? We’re taking over.” And the next thing you know, the Rus are ruling Ukraine, the original Russia. And before you know it, they create Russia. And now today, Ukraine wants nothing to do with Russia. The irony is too weird.

Vikings in Spain and Sicily

A group of these Vikings end up in Barbados, which you know today is Saragossa. It’s in Spain. It’s on the Ebro River. It’s in Northern Spain. And the Vikings took it from the Arabs.

When the Vikings conquered Northern France, they dumped their Viking languages and switched over to French. When the Vikings did the Rus thing, they dumped that, and they switched over to Russian. Right? Because the peasants were too uneducable. You couldn’t teach them Swedish. So you just learn their language. It was easier.

Well, when they end up in Northern Spain capturing this Muslim town from the Muslims, the next thing you know, the Vikings are dressed like Muslims. They’re talking like Muslims. They’re adopting Muslim society.

And eventually, they get it in their head. “Why stop here? Let’s keep going.” And they go, and in 1050, they conquer Sicily. Ravgar, the Viking. Ravgar, the Norman. You know him as Roger the First. He conquers Sicily. They decide because the Muslims own Sicily. Arabic was the dominant language in Sicily at the time.

They decide to adopt Arabic ways. The coins that are minted by the descendants of Rothgar and by the descendants of Roger the First right up until Henry the Sixth, there were a few Sicilian kings. The coins on one side have Latin, on the other side have Arabic. So these guys are Catholic Vikings, ruling Arabic Sicily, which, by the way, was a multiethnic place to begin with. There were Greeks, and there were Phoenicians, and there were Romans.

And then the Arabs came, and they sort of mingled with them. Now there’s Vikings running around Sicily and just adding another weird nation into the mix. And the Vikings, by the way, start marrying into German royal families. And the next thing you know, Sicily is basically ruled by these Germans who are mixed Viking and mixed German. And it’s very complicated.

Frederick II and Cultural Exchange

In the mix, this guy comes about. His name is Frederick the Second, not the Great. That’s a different guy. Frederick the Second. Friedrich the Second.

Friedrich spoke Latin, French, Sicilian. It was six languages, Arabic and two other languages. He read Arabic texts. He conducted scientific experiments because he had learned from Arabic. He had learned from Arabic texts.

He was reading the scientific method. He embraced this Arab civilization, and he began advancing it. By the way, this is the thirteenth century. He wrote his own scientific treatise on falconry. He appears twice in the book.

He had himself painted, and he puts himself twice in his own book. He wrote it in Latin just for the record, but the guy that he cites the most, the biggest source is an Arabic thinker. Friedrich the Second is so intent on being this guy that’s between the two civilizations, between this Arab civilization and this Christian civilization, that not only does he continue the policies of tolerance towards Arabs that his predecessors had, he actually will take on the pope in Rome himself. And he got excommunicated, I think it was three times.

He ends up as the Holy Roman Emperor, so he owned basically everything from Southern Denmark to Sicily. Just a huge swath of land right through the middle of Europe. Now owned in a loose sense because the Holy Roman Empire, which he’s the leader of, was really more of a confederacy, but he’s also the king of Sicily.

East and West: False Divisions

In other words, through most of history, when the east and the west clashed together, the people at the center knew that both sides were just part of the same civilization, especially when they were in the Mediterranean. When the Greek philosopher and historian Hecateus made his first atlas, he said there are three continents, Europe, Asia, and Libya. Asia was today what the Middle East is, including India, by the way. He included India in that. Libya is just Africa. That was the Greek name for Africa. And then Europe was approximately what Europe is today.

He didn’t see those as three dividing lines that separated the three. He himself was from Asia according to the way he defined it. He was actually born in the Persian Empire. He was ethnically Greek, but born in the Persian Empire. He didn’t see that as a contradiction. There was nothing weird about that. That was just how things were. He saw Europe, Asia, and Libya as regions within a whole.

Today, we see Africa, Europe, and Asia as three separate distinct places with—you know, it might as well be a thousand foot tall wall dividing them. And there are European countries that now wish there was as people are pouring in. Well, of course, the people are pouring in because of the wars United States and Europe has waged in the Middle East, destabilizing the whole area.

And now the Europeans are like, “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. What are you coming here for?” And they’re like, “Well, because you blew up my house.”

“Yeah. It’d be great if you stayed over there.”

The Mediterranean was always a highway. It was never a divider. It didn’t separate. But what happened was we started to get into the mindset that there was this separation, and Europe really pushed. Christian Europe really pushed for the separation.

The Crusades and Cultural Division

And, of course, no single event did this more than the crusades. Because at the moment that the crusades happened, Christian Europe made it clear to the rest of the West that there was no way to reconcile, that the division was too great, that Christian Europe was willing to do anything and everything it could to take Jerusalem back, including just absolute cruel depravities in the crusades. Right?

They would slaughter whole populations. They went on these rape fests. At one point, they captured Saladin’s sister, and they raped her to death for no other reason than just to antagonize him. Of course, they’ll pay because he kicks their ass afterwards. But that recalcitrant division is the division that we’re facing today.

Cultural Exchange and False Boundaries

So first of all, if you have ever meditated or done yoga, right, you know that there’s been an infusion of Indian culture or Buddhist culture into the United States, that the boundary between the two is already fuzzy at that point. That if you ever travel to any part of Asia, people walk around with cell phones. That is to say that the exchange goes both directions. But when you look at the difference between, say, Turkey and Italy or Persia and Spain, that division is even thinner.

So first of all, this idea that there’s an “East” is absurd because you’re going to lump Vietnam with India, with Japan, with China. These are shockingly different cultures from each other. Now, obviously, Japan and China have had a lot of cultural exchange back and forth, but Japan and India have not. In other words, this idea that there’s this Asia with this monolithic culture doesn’t make any sense, not to mention that there’s no similarity between Japan and Syria.

Although Persians love Japanese movies, Akira Kurosawa movies, like, think Seven Samurai—the Seven Samurai might be one of Persia’s favorite ever movies, but that’s clearly not the same thing as they should be lumped in the same category.

By the way, just for the record, Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest all-time filmmakers, period. And if you don’t know who he is, you really need to look him up. I think he was involved in the making of, like, a hundred and thirty films, including Star Wars, it turns out. George Lucas stole the idea of Star Wars from Akira Kurosawa. It was Hidden Fortress. Totally look it up, and then go watch the Akira Kurosawa movie. There’s even a C-3PO and an R2-D2 in it. There’s this short guy and this tall guy, and the dialogue is almost identical. It’s really weird.

The Myth of Western Civilization

My point is that by doing this, by insisting that there’s this division, we make the division. The division becomes true. This notion that there’s a Western civilization is absurd. Right? Pulp paper comes from China. The stirrup comes from India. Steel comes from India. The Arabs invented algebra. Do you see what I mean? Like, this notion that somehow our civilizations are separated and they don’t interact with each other doesn’t make any geographical or historical sense.

Now it is true some civilizations are closer to each other than others. Like Greece and Turkey are obviously very close to each other because the Turks ruled the Greeks for so long. But even when you go further out, it becomes a little bit on the absurd side.

And so I guess at the end of the day, what I would say to you is there is no such thing specifically as Western civilization, but I think you could make an argument that there was such a thing as Mediterranean civilization. I think you could make an argument that there was such a thing as Indian civilization or Chinese civilization. Does that make sense?

So that it’s not an east-west thing. It’s that throughout Africa and Asia and Europe, there are these clusters of civilizations that are similar to each other that have interacted with each other more than, say, their next door neighbors. Like, obviously, India and China and India and Persia have interacted with each other, but it’s not like they’re one cultural region. There’s clearly a distinction there. Anyway, I hope at least I gave you some food for thought.

I’ll take some questions, and let’s call it a day. I’m not feeling good. I’m pretty sure I’ve got bubonic plague. Is that no joke? What’s happening in Madagascar?

Q&A Session

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] What’s your favorite Kurosawa film?

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] That’s a really hard question. I mean, I think Rashomon is just so brilliantly made. It’s hard to not pick it as one of my favorites. It’s either that or Seven Samurai. I also like Kagemusha, but I don’t think it’s as good a movie by any means. And then Ran. Ran is cinematographically one of the best movies ever made. It’s just gorgeous. I put it with Blade Runner. The original one and the new one. I was blown away by the new one. Wow. That Ridley Scott. Although he produced it, but he didn’t direct it. Denis Villeneuve.

The Byzantine Empire and Roman Identity

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] Yeah. What happened was – so the question is that the Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire died claiming it was the Roman Empire. It never surrendered that idea. Under the emperor Heraclius, he took over in 610 AD. He’s the one who flipped the official language of the Roman Empire from Latin to Greek. But the reason he did that was because, with the empire’s capital being in Thrace, most of the top bureaucrats were Greek.

So it was this moment of “we should really just streamline things.” The interesting thing is if a person that we would think of as an ethnic Greek were to meet a person from Italy – so you would think the Italian is the real Roman, and the Greek guy is the sort of fake Roman – the Greek guy would refer to himself as a Roman and then refer to the Italian as an “ethnikos,” which literally means an ethnic, which is what we do. We even use the same terminology.

But that Greek guy would insist he was a genuine Roman. He would not see the contradiction. We think we want there to be a contradiction because we want to divorce Rome from its last thousand years. The last thousand years weren’t particularly glorious. The Roman empire just shrank and shrank and shrank.

There’s no such thing as a Byzantine empire. Rome was born on April 21, 753 BC and died on May 29, 1453 AD and had a 2,200 year run with the last thousand years being a little rough.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] When they captured Constantinople, didn’t they put the ships over and drag them over land?

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] Yeah. The Ottomans did that so they could get around the chain because they had a chain at the Golden Horn, and that’s how they got around the chain.

Yeah. The Vikings also liked to drag ships across land too. Technically, I guess the Vikings put them on their shoulders, but still, that’s kind of a manly thing to do. Feeling like that would kill most of us.

Early Cities and Social Organization

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] How far advanced are these cities?

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] That’s a great question. The city that formed in what is today the Czech Republic, as a gatherer hunter group – I think you need to think of it as a series of huts. Don’t go too far with this. There’s definitely no paved roads. But the way to think of it is it had become a gathering and hunting coop. And part of the reason was just out of necessity.

Because all of a sudden, all these women are left behind with all these kids that they have to raise. And in the process, they need to help each other because when women are out on the hunt, they’re going to have to send more women than the men would have gone because this is a very physical thing. Not only are you going to bring the animal down, but then you’ve got to chop it up and lug it back to your settlement. It’s going to take more women just because of the strength differentiator. I’m sure they’d kick our ass. But relative to the men at the time, obviously, this means more work. But then who’s going to take care of the kids while this is happening? And so they literally just took care of each other. They just turned themselves into a massive family.

When you think of what was going on in Syria, it looks like organized religion. It looks like organized religion that convinced people for the purposes of religion to build these sacred spaces. Some of it is these monoliths, these stones that stick up. Think kind of Stonehenge-like, but even more complicated in the sense that some of them are in the form of Ts. So there’s a stone that comes up and then a long stone that’s stacked on top. They had to make this grooved slot to put them in. And they built these structures all over the place.

But then there’s also these ritual burial sites where they buried stuff like I’ve described in this pit where they took a bunch of arrowheads and axe heads and just flint-knapped stone, and they piled it and made these burial spots that lasted tens of thousands of years until archaeologists are like, “What is this?” and start digging and find them.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] They were fixed in one location?

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] Yeah. And now the cities, like the way we think of them today, the first one would have been more like Luxor where you’re building out of stone. You’re building these temples. You’ve got this government structure. It’s a 5,200-year-old continuously lived-in town. There’s actually a lot of those cities in Egypt that are like that. They’re frequently built on a hill because the old city gets buried over time, and the city literally goes up in the air as you build on top of the old city, which is great for flooding purposes because now you’ve pulled your town out of the floodplain.

Advanced Arab Cities and Cultural Exchange

The Arabs, when they built their cities, they not only had fresh water piped in and then sewage water piped out, they had oil lamps to light the streets up at night. They had a fast food industry. And in fact, the fast food was cheaper than going to the grocery store and buying it and then taking it home and cooking it yourself. So when you wanted to show off for guests, instead of ordering your food from a restaurant, you would say, “I’ll cook you a home-cooked meal” because it was more expensive.

When the Spanish came to Mexico, the Spanish were eating Arabic food, which was a piece of bread folded over a series of ingredients, and they went to the Aztecs that they had just conquered and said, “Make these.” And the Aztecs said, “We don’t have those ingredients. We have these,” and that’s why we have the taco. The taco is the Aztec attempt with Aztec ingredients to make Arabic food.

Agriculture Across Cultures

But we’ve got this boundary, this separation, which is imaginary. The Mongols did agriculture. They didn’t do this type of plant agriculture. They were herdsmen. They were herders. So they were still, by the definition of agriculture, doing agriculture.

Native Americans were also doing agriculture. So those warring Native American nations that went at it with each other – and they got vicious – were probably mostly doing it for good agriculture land as well. Now some Native American nations tended to be more nomadic and less agriculture, and some tended to be more agriculture. So there was a little bit of variation there, but I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the North American population pre-Columbian did agriculture.

Obviously, they would take breaks if they were going to follow the bison. They would take breaks from what farming they did. And if you lived on the Great Plains, the Great Plains sucked for agricultural purposes, so they weren’t doing much. But if you’re around the Great Lakes or on the East Coast or around the Mississippi or even in the Southwest, like the Anasazi, they were totally doing agriculture, and they were doing it on grand scales.

And then by the time you get to the Aztec empire, they had created a type of agriculture that was so advanced that when the Spanish conquered them, it meant a catastrophic caloric drop. And one of the reasons so many Aztecs died was they literally starved to death because the Spanish couldn’t keep up with the food demand. Because the Aztecs had a superior agriculture system to the Spanish.

Race Classification in America

It’s actually a legal issue here. What happened was, I think it was around 1908. There was a Lebanese immigrant to the United States who was a security guard who wanted to apply for US citizenship. According to the laws at the time until 1952, the only people eligible to become a naturalized US citizen were whites. So if you were from Asia and you lived in the United States for twenty-five years and you had children who were born here, you could not become a naturalized US citizen. If you were from Africa, you could not become a naturalized US citizen. There was no path for citizenship for you.

So this Lebanese American wants to become a citizen. He’d been here for a long time. By the way, there was a huge number of Lebanese. They really started coming over in the 1880s, and a lot of them ended up in Austin. If you’re from Austin and your people have been here for a century or more, you should totally take 23andMe. I think you’re going to find out that a lot of you are part Lebanese.

In any case, this guy sued and went to the court. He walks into the courtroom, and he goes, “I have a question for you. What was Jesus?” And the court went, “Jesus was white. It’s obvious.” And the Lebanese guy goes, “Well, I’m from where Jesus was from.”

He won that case instantaneously. “Dude, you’re white.” And then they declare that everybody from North Africa and the Middle East, therefore, was white. So if you’re Persian, if you’re Turkish, if you’re Arab, if you’re Jewish, if you’re Egyptian, if you’re Sudanese, if you’re Libyan, you’re Algerian, you’re Moroccan, you have to put white. That is how American race law works.

And so it doesn’t matter what color your skin is, it matters the place of your origin. You have to put white. Now having said that, in February of this year, the Census Bureau has suggested the creation of a new race, and we’re still in the process of determining that, but they want it ready to be put on the census for 2020. And that sixth race, because right now it’s Hispanic, white, black, Asian, and then Native American/Pacific Islander, the sixth race would be Middle East and North African.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Africa doesn’t count as African?

[DR. ROY CASAGRANDA:] No. North African counts as white. Having said that, one of the problems that Middle East studies programs have always had was when it came time to hire faculty, if the person interviewing for the job was from Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Morocco – all from the Middle East and North Africa – and you’re doing a Middle East studies program, you would think you would want those guys. They were reluctant to hire them because they didn’t count as a minority because they just checked the box off for white.

So what they would do is they would hire somebody from Pakistan or India because if that person was Muslim, at least they were the right religion. That person doesn’t know anything about the Middle East. They’re not from the Middle East. But that’s, again, back to this east-west paradigm where you just lump everybody together, and you’re like, “Yeah. They’re all the same. Let God sort them all.”

And so what we’ve had is we’ve had this really strange situation where in the United States, Middle East studies programs are overrun by Pakistanis and Indians who are not from the Middle East, and there’s a tragic shortage of Arabs and Turks and Persians in those programs.

So one of the things that might be nice about the census change is if they do create the new category, then there’ll be an incentive at least to hire people from the Middle East for Middle East studies programs. That’s the only positive I could see. Unless, of course, you’re for ethnically cleansing the United States of its Middle East population because that’s how Hitler found out where the Jews were – he bought the census data from IBM. IBM made money off of the Holocaust.

Doesn’t that just warm your heart? It’s the American way. Make money off of the suffering of others. Pretty sure that’s our motto. We should dump “In God We Trust.” E capital? E capital.

Any other questions? One more, and I’ll let you go. Okay. Fine. I’ll just let you go.

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