My ongoing exploration of ancient art keeps digging ever deeper into human history. At Spring Equinox I was burrowing into the Roman Empire and the early years of the Common Era (fig. 1 below).


Figure 1. Ancient Roman ruins. Photo: public domain.

With the approach of Summer Solstice I find myself peering about as far back as the Stone Age years of the Ancient Near East (roughly 50,000 to 10,000 BCE) (fig. 2 below).


Figure 2. Goddess of Brassempouy, mammoth ivory, 23,000 BCE.  Photo: public domain.

I’ve been speeding through so many cultures so quickly that recurring reflections on the nature of cultural change have finally stopped me in my tracks. So now, when the light of the sun shines most brightly into dark places, I want to share with you some of my wandering thoughts on time, change, and Western culture, born of encounters with the work of long-dead artists (fig. 3 below).


Figure 3. Mother-Goddess giving birth enthroned between 2 leopards, baked clay, 6000 BCE, Catalhoyuk, Anatolia.  Photo credit: Roweromaniak, Wikimedia Commons.

Before Quantum Leap, or Back to the Future, or Contact, people in Western culture tended to conceive of time as a single line which connected the beginning and end of all things. This model of linear time emerged from the early cultures of the Ancient Near East and held an essential place in Judaism’s understanding of reality (fig. 4 below).


Figure 4. Adam and Eve, 359 CE, Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, Marble, Rome.  Photo credit: Giovanni Dall' Orto, Wikimedia Commons.

Judeo-Christian culture embraced linear time as its own, and structured history and reality accordingly. Wherever the Church—and later Western culture—extended its influence through colonialism and conversion, linear time was a non-negotiable part of the package.

But many cultures prior to Judeo-Christian contact tended toward circular or spiraling ideas of time. These ideas took various forms, from the cyclical rebirth of the entire universe to models more directly reflecting the turning seasons and skies. Cycles of death and rebirth were generally part of these worldviews, and human burials in fetal position may have expressed this expectation (fig. 5 below).


Figure 5. Neolithic Burial, 7th millenium BCE, Catalhoyuk, Anatolia.  Photo credit: catalhoyuk, Flickr Creative Commons.

For those of us firmly planted in a linear model of time, however, truly experiencing a circular model can be difficult.

Oddly enough, I can offer an example of time as a circle/spiral from my own experience. I’ve always thought in images—when I thought of time just as with everything else. For as long as I can remember, at least back into my elementary school years, whenever I have tried to recall memories in sequential order, I have imagined years as circles in an ascending counterclockwise spiral (fig. 6 below).


Figure 6. Etruscan Spirals, 700 BCE.  Photo: public domain.

Winter begins each new circle at the top, moving into spring on the left, summer at the bottom side, and fall on the right, all rising toward a new winter and a new circle on the upward spiral. The spiral’s circles are formed of rather misty mosaics of memory-images from the seasons and events of the year. I offer this example simply to suggest that if a thoroughly Western child of elementary-school years could spontaneously create such a circular model—one that persists on into adulthood alongside a standard linear model of time—then cyclical time might not be all that alien to any of us.

Linear time as it came to be understood in the Christian world defined history as the stage upon which God acted to lead Creation to its divinely ordained conclusion--thus contributing, if indirectly, to the Western idea of progress. Also moving onto the stage at some point was the idea of a divinely chosen people whose own culture set the standard for all other peoples. The commonplace acronyms BC and AD exemplify this bias, proclaiming that for people of all times and cultures, history is either a line moving toward Jesus’ birth, or away from it toward the completion of time marked by his return (fig. 7 below).


Figure 7. Christian Apocalypse, 1530 CE, Ottheinrich Bible Folio 291r.  Photo: public domain.

By the 19th C, Western culture was producing theories of cultural evolution with “primitives” on the bottom and privileged Western society on the top. Immeasurable pain and violence were inflicted on other cultures as a result, and the damage is ongoing today. Although most reputable scholars rejected such ideas of cultural evolution by the mid-20th C, similar notions do still linger in the popular mind (fig. 8 below).


Figure 8. Anthropologist with indigenous man of Sepik, Papua New Guinea, 1920s.  Photo: public domain.  Notice patronizing posture of the anthropologist.

Almost any person raised within a Western worldview is, at the very least, a carrier of embryonic presuppositions regarding progress and “primitivism,” whether they wish to carry them or not. It’s in the air, in our mothers’ milk.

So what does all this have to do with my excursions through the Stone and Bronze Ages? Well, I found myself asking, “Why do cultures change?” When Stone Age humans began domesticating animals, was it “development,” “progress,” or simply change based on long-vanished circumstances? Cultural innovations which led to dynastic civilizations and large-scale warfare can only be called progress (with any certainty) if where we stand today is the intended and best possible result in an overall plan of history (fig. 9 below).


Figure 9. Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, 2300 BCE, stone relief, Akkadian.  Photo credit: Rama, Wikimedia Commons.

When Neolithic groups moved toward urbanization and the beginnings of metallurgy, was it progress, or simply change? What other paths existed in prehistory as possibilities—what waves had not yet collapsed? In Western Asia and Eastern Europe cultures adhering to traditional ways disappeared—or were wiped out by the widespread wars, plagues, and famines of the last half of the Bronze Age. And here a possibility began to grow in my mind (fig. 10 below).


Figure 10. 12 sword-bearing gods of the Underworld at Yazılıkaya, Turkey. 14th century BCE, Hittite.  Photo Credit: Klaus-Peter Simon, Wikimedia Commons

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I considered the course of events in recent centuries when Traditional, or Earth-based, cultures encountered Western civilization. One thing I had never considered before now demanded my full attention: African Traditional peoples, Native Americans, South Sea Islanders, Aborigines—these peoples did not progress, or develop, or evolve—their cultures were annihilated. They were not in the process of change when first contact was made. Change was not offered to them as an option. Whether they were killed with weapons, pestilence, starvation, or all three together, their cultures were extinguished (fig. 11 below).


Figure 11. Indigenous man wearing leopard fur, possibly Rukai people, ca 1900, Taiwan.  Photo: public domain.

Greed for land and resources, brutally efficient weaponry with the sense of power born of it, and the tantalizing possibility of “might makes right”—these human factors undergirded the conquest of “new worlds.” Would it be unreasonable to suppose that these same human factors sealed the fate of indigenous peoples whose lands adjoined the Fertile Crescent and the civilization it cradled (fig. 12 below)?


Figure 12.Assyrians besieging a walled city, 865 BCE, stone relief from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud.  Photo: public domain.

This line of thought led to disturbing questions often debated among academics—but for me, these questions have become personal. What is progress? Does it really exist? Why is change a good thing, if an existing situation is good already (fig. 13 below)?


Figure 13.Goddess figure, Naqada Culture, 4400-3000 BCE, Predynastic Egypt.  Photo credit: Keith Schengili-Roberts, Wikimedia Commons.

Is it possible that unlovely traits like greed, abusive power, and fear have always been the most common motive forces in human change?

Now that the Western world is beginning to perceive the number and variety of plagues spawned in its long shadow, some people have begun to look with yearning and regret at Earth’s remaining Indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, when we look we tend to see through the lenses of our own worldview, darkly. We do not see these fellow-humans as people who belong to themselves, with their own lives and concerns, but as solutions to our problems, romanticized projections of our notions of a paradisal age. Our long habit of objectifying those unlike ourselves refuses to die.

Perhaps wisdom remains for the healing of the Earth. Perhaps sustainability is something we can learn. Perhaps if we ask with respect, elders may share their wisdom. But first we of Western culture need to look to our own house, and try to halt the toxic juggernaut of progress that may yet destroy us all.