Inspirational Quotes About Ancient Mesopotamia

Part 1/2. Just finished reading Paul Kriwaczek's "Babylon", which has just one problem : it's far too short. I would have been perfectly happy if it had been about three times longer. As much a commentary on modern society as it as a description of the ancient Mesopotamians, I suspect I could enjoy Kriwaczek waxing lyrical on almost anything. Here he is on why pure research and science outreach are important :

"Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world.... To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind."

EDIT : In its proper context, this is not an attack by a less-holy-than-thou atheist against religion - far from it. In fact he talks quite a bit about the role of religion in advancing civilization. The point is really directed against dogmatic, conservative viewpoints. This is about freedom of thought (particularly science) rather than attacking beliefs.


Part 2/2. Babylon can be a depressing book. Spanning 3,000 years of history, it seems that all civilisations - from the ultra capitalist to uber-communist, from enlightened utopias to the terrifyingly cruel and misogynistic - are destined for ruin. And yet Kriwaczek even manages to cast this in a positive light : drastic change can lead to renewal and improvement, and while one civilisation falls, its successor may learn from it.

"When, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, our civilization finally lies dying in the gutter, some of us will still be looking, as the ancient Mesopotamians taught us to do, at the stars."

Such poetry ! I practically swooned.

[I was unaware that this is a very minor modification to an Oscar Wilde quote, but it's still a good one.]


Part 3/3. On how ideology is necessary to spur human advancement :

"In this light it seems the momentous change to agriculture as the basis of life can only have been driven by the spread of a powerful new ideology, necessarily in those days expressed in the form of a new religion, propagated with... "messianic self-confidence"...  it must have been a very powerful belief that persuaded them to follow a dream whose full working-out was both unforeseeable and unforeseeably far ahead, a belief that could persuade men and women that the sacrifice was worth making."

[There was a very interesting discussion on how this is not correct when applied, as Kriwaczek does, to the Agrigultural Revolution. Nevertheless, more broadly it's hard to disagree with the notion that it takes more than curiosity and facts to drive development.]