The Invention of Yesterday
A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age
Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative.
Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.
Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chatty, breezy, and capacious, this global history of humanity by journalist Ansary (Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes) focuses on the power of narrative to shape human behavior and on the interconnectedness of people across the globe. Ansary starts off with the beginnings of human societies, nimbly summarizing the development of tools, languages, trade networks, belief systems, and empires: a page on the religious beliefs of ancient Mesopotamians is followed by another on those of Egyptians, and cuneiform and hieroglyphics are summarized in several paragraphs. Next, he describes the West overtaking the East in ideological and technical innovations after 1000 CE; the eastern peoples crafted societal narratives focused on restoring their former glories, while Europeans' narratives highlighted the benefits of progress. Their emphasis on Christianity and progress motivated, for example, the conquistadors to subjugate Native Americans. Western mechanical inventions in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries only increased the region's power. Today, Ansary, concludes, humankind edges toward singularity when humans and machines effectively merge and nation-states's primacy is eroded by globalization. This overview paints a cogent and superficially impressive picture of world history, but it doesn't have much room for depth, complexity, and argumentation. Readers willing to take Ansary's word for things, however, can sit back and enjoy the ride.
