The Greeks are well suited for helping us to think about the complexity of the Middle East’s political future because they began their political journey influenced by the civilizations of the ancient Near East, found ways to innovate politically and faced some of the same internal divisions Middle Eastern societies confront.
On a rainy evening along the banks of the Tigris river soon after U.S. forces had entered Iraq and defeated Saddam Hussein’s army, I began to search for one of the U.S. soldiers—a sergeant—who regularly patrolled the streets of Baghdad. He was the tip of a U.S. spear planted in the Middle East. His duty meant encountering face-to-face the political, linguistic, cultural and religious cauldron about which I had to write more abstract reports back to Washington. He had ground truths—albeit anecdotal and his alone—that went beyond the assiduously curated information digitized on my computer screen. He reminded me of the early days of intelligence gathering in the ancient Near East by military scouts of Achaemenid Persia and Alexander the Great. I envied his immediacy. I recalled that the earliest histories of the ancient Near East are preserved in an ancient Greek prose in which the verbs “to see” and “to know” have the same root—a useful linguistic truth for an analyst to remember and a reason for searching out the sergeant.
I caught up with my scout as he was returning from his patrol with the taut expression of a professional operating in a high-threat environment. When the pillars of law and political order crumble to dust in war, it is the soldier on patrol with one leg hanging out of a jeep and a finger on the trigger of his long weapon that fills the space. The burden is visible on each soldier’s face. That night he sighed as he recounted how little communication he had with those locals around him. He pulled out a thin metal extension rod from his pocket and confessed that he often had to resort to threatening people with it to gain compliance from those confused by his incomprehensible commands. He was thoughtful and troubled by his failure and, turning to me, he asked pointedly, “Do you have any suggestions on how this could go better?”
There we stood, the most recent, modern, lawful and civilized invaders of the land between the rivers—Mesopotamia, the Tigris-Euphrates basin—and I, the supposed government expert, struggled to respond. The one thing I knew not to do was to ask him if he was familiar with Michel Foucault—the twentieth-century French social theorist and influencer of academic approaches to the Middle East—a postmodern assault on meaning seemed grossly ill-suited for a soldier in search of understanding. Nor would I ask if he had considered the virtues of aggregating the interests of competing groups within political parties or appreciated the need to develop the organs of civil society between rulers and ruled. Perhaps a reminder of the universal appeal of liberalism and the proven stability and wealth generation of democratic capitalism would serve as counsel for my mission partner. In every potential syllogism, however, there was a disturbing lack of coherence and relevance as we sought to explain the moment in which we were living.
There are many important approaches to thinking about the Middle East well underway in the public domain, but the use of ancient history to conceptualize contemporary problems in the region has generally not been among them. Scholarly aversion to anything that hints at “Orientalism;” a modest and often shrinking presence within the academy of classics and other disciplines associated with the study of antiquity; a new turn to algorithms and massive data sets; and the general dominance of social science methods in our approach to the region—all have left the study of ancient history on the sidelines of strategic thinking about the contemporary Middle East. The extent of upheaval in the Middle East though requires a reconsideration of these intellectual strictures. It is not sufficient to approach the ferment in the region with only the intellectual tools and constraints of the last century—an era that in many respects no longer exists.
The revival of ancient history as an analytic tool offers the possibility for thinking in new ways about the role of the United States in the region by mapping the ancient communities, identities, and patterns which U.S. policies and actions will inevitably affect. The United States has been engaged in the Middle East since its early nineteenth-century wars with the Barbary pirates, inheriting much of the political and military influence of a collapsing British empire, confronting Soviet regional ambitions in the Cold War and eventually serving as guarantor of the region’s supply of oil to global energy markets. Throughout these two centuries, the United States has rarely had to face directly the complexity of the region’s internal political and religious culture. No longer.
The echo of ancient patterns and precedents has already been audible in the region’s political and cultural trends in the post-Cold-War era. An Arab Egyptian president in 2002, for example, recreated the Library of Alexandria of the third century BC and invited the world to attend its grand opening. Saddam Hussein named his elite Republican Guard divisions after Babylonian kings. The Khorasan region of eastern Iran and western Afghanistan, where the revolt against Umayyad rule in the eighth century began, became a brand label for contemporary Islamic extremists.
The examination of the ways in which the past echoes into the present in the Middle East is to take history as seriously as the peoples of the region do. It means showing deference to the possibility of diverse ways of political organization and expressions of religious identity that are indigenous to the region and not always fully discernible with an analytic tool kit that privileges the political assumptions and analytic methods of the post-Enlightenment world. An analytic method that takes ihtiram (“respect” in both Arabic and Persian) as a starting point also might lead to understanding and policy outcomes for the United States that can endure in the region.
In politics, going back to conceptual beginnings makes sense in a region that is starting anew after a century of ideas, institutions and social compacts have failed or begun to fail. The ancient Greek experience, in particular, offers insights on: how to conceptualize the complex overlay of past, present and future in the politics of the Arab world today; the importance of building citizenship over tribal and clan allegiances; and the primacy of law for a stable political order. The Greeks are well suited for helping us to think about the complexity of the Middle East’s political future because they began their political journey influenced by the civilizations of the ancient Near East, found ways to innovate politically and faced some of the same internal divisions Middle Eastern societies confront.
The region faces the daunting task of developing, adapting or recovering its own set of governing structures and political ideas to make societies, states and religious and ethnic identity cohere enough for the region to recover and advance. According to the medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, human communities of various scope develop when they have social cohesion, or asabiyyah—a bond that inevitably falters and then regroups in a new way under a new political order. It is the quest for new asabiyyah, a binding social compact, that preoccupies the Middle East—a quest that will almost certainly have to take place within the region and on its own terms to be enduring.
The path the Greek world took to arrive at the rule of law and the placing of sovereign power in a popular assembly—albeit of limited male membership—is a tale of kings, aristocrats, blood feuds, persistent conflicts, religion, and only gradual progress toward a stable and freer order governed by law. It is a story of the difficulty of building and maintaining a social compact amid differing groups and coping with foreign influence and invasion. It is a world that would be familiar to the inhabitants of the Middle East today who rebelled against undemocratic rule in the mostly ill-fated “Arab Spring,” became subject to foreign military intervention and fell into various degrees of internecine conflict. The struggle to emerge from conflict by creating institutions that can mediate and claim the allegiance of citizens over tribes and sects was central to the Greek political experience and makes that experience conceptually powerful for understanding the challenges of political development in the Middle East.
Homer is always a good place to begin. The Iliad’s description of the Greek military camp along the shores of Troy includes political processes and nascent institutions that are helpful for conceptualizing change in the contemporary Middle East. This political community—not quite city-state—has political elements of the Greek Bronze Age of Mycenaean kings, the armed aristocracy of the archaic age of the eighth century BC and a foreshadowing of the democratic Greek polis of the classical fifth century BC. In Homer’s poetic conception, the community of Greeks inhabit simultaneously multiple political phases of past, present and future. This is a useful way to also think strategically about the politics of the contemporary Middle East.
Across the region, past identities of religion or empire blend with modern political institutions, ideas and technologies to hint at nascent political futures. Turkey, for example, is at once heir to European ideas and practices of secular nationalism, republican government and industrialization and to the Middle East’s Ottoman Caliphate and Sultanate, Central Asia’s nomadic Steppe warriors and ancient civilizations that projected influence in the Middle East. In Egypt, the patterns and precedents of Egypt’s ancient and medieval histories present a unique combination of political stature, Islamic scholarship and ties to the West that could position Egypt to lead the development of new political thinking in the Arab world. Throughout the region, Islamic extremists, for their part, embrace early medieval battlefield successes to define modern political and territorial goals and rely on the tools of the digital age to achieve such aims.
Like Homer’s proto-Greek city-state encamped along the shores of Troy, political actors are operating in more than one time and space, making their actions difficult to assess on a single political continuum. The political bargains forged in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire and the dominance of European ideas and institutions that pervaded the region through most of the twentieth century have given way to a transitional period that defies—like Homer’s Greek encampment—a single branding.
Just as we can see in the Greek encampment the seeds of the developed polis so too we can look now for the ideas and institutions that could emerge from the current conflicts to forge new social compacts. Like the Greeks on the shores of Troy, the Middle East’s inhabitants today represent the messy beginning of a political process whose future is potentially visible in the contours of the present. We need to look for it with the aid of a conceptual framework for politics that comes from the archaic age of Greece and the literary imagination of Homer. The past, present and future are again all in play.
Ancient Athens, like the Arab world of today, faced the daunting task of forging a social compact on more than just dominant family groups. The Athenian solution was equivalent to an ambitious redistricting program that created ten new tribes, each of which drew members from the city of Athens, coastal areas and the rural interior. Politics was no longer tied to dominant local families from one geographic region. Instead, newly diverse tribes had to forge a common set of interests when each new tribe’s constituent members were drawn from different regions. The unifying political idea of Athenian citizenship emerged from the creation of inclusive political institutions that transcended narrow allegiances.
The reforms in Athens provide a conceptual framework for thinking about how states in the Middle East—especially the secular nationalist regimes that have lost their social compacts—can bind in a single state disparate religious and ethnic groups by creating a political identity that is larger than the sum of its parts. The Athenian political project helped create what in modern times we would recognize as an Athenian nationalism—an identity which all Athenian citizens would accept and accord preeminent political allegiance. The analytic challenge for observers of the contemporary Middle East is to identify how—in a political environment that looks backward and forward simultaneously—states can establish reforms to bind fragmented political communities into stable, well-functioning states.
The Athenian tragic poet Aeschylus helps us answer the contemporary political challenge of establishing the primacy of law. In a trilogy of tragic plays—the Oresteia—first performed in Athens in 458 BC, Aeschylus demonstrates the role of law as a conceptual tool we can use for thinking about the political challenges of the contemporary Middle East. The Oresteia tells the story of a cycle of bloody vengeance in the Bronze Age house of Atreus. The clear message from Aeschylus is that the rule of law justly administered by the state is the only way to escape the cycle of retributive bloodletting that has plagued the house of Atreus. The play is an allegory of political development that helped inform Athenians attempting to steer their polity from class conflicts and the rule of tyrants to a partially democratic order under the rule of law.
The Oresteia’s emphatic call for the rule of law is a reminder of the fundamental political and societal challenges facing much of the contemporary Middle East. The failure of social compacts has led to a cycle of bloodletting between a range of protagonists in a lawless environment. The region is awash in armed combatants professing a range of tribal, political, ethnic and sectarian loyalties. Within the failed secular nationalist republics, reestablishing the rule of law with some degree of popular legitimacy is the beginning of binding disparate communities under a new social compact and channeling their rivalries into durable institutions.
The rule of law will be necessary for any stable outcomes in the region, and a clear focus on the sources of law and how much democratic power will determine how those laws will be administered will be part of ending the costly conflicts plaguing the region. The project of establishing the supremacy of the rule of law will face resistance in the region’s Arab monarchies, in Iran, and perhaps in Turkey and Egypt, where new modes of authoritarian leadership are becoming entrenched. Nonetheless, the ancient Aeschylean insight that law is the road to civilized life is worth remembering in the political landscape of the Middle East. In a region of centrifugal political forces that struggles for an idea around which competing parties might agree, the primacy of the rule of law could serve as such an organizing principle. Aeschylus is ancient but he is also highly relevant to the ways we ought to conceive of the region’s contemporary political challenges.
In harnessing Homer and Aeschylus to conceptualize the political landscape of the contemporary Middle East, one might be accused of committing the error—political and intellectual—of imposing Eurocentric frameworks on the region’s troubles. Yet the work of scholars since the late nineteenth century in deciphering texts in Akkadian, Hittite and other ancient Near Eastern languages has demonstrated that the literatures of the ancient Near East have strong parallels with Greek epic and other Greek literary forms. These parallels, alongside the demonstrated trade linkages and transportation corridors between West Asia and the Greek world, raise the possibility that the ancient Greeks absorbed substantial influences from ancient Near Eastern literature.
Allowing insights from the ancient world to inform our analysis is to recognize the mixing of ideas in ancient international literary currents from the Near East and not to imply or assert the primacy of the Greek corpus over the Near East’s own traditions. Homer and Aeschylus offer useful conceptual frameworks for the contemporary Middle East because they permit us to think beyond our traditional analytic frameworks. They are among the authors who may have been overlooked in most contemporary analysis of the region because of their association with the Western literary tradition and because of a reluctance to open the door more broadly to a renewed study of the ancient world and its relevance to the modern Middle East.
A final conceptual challenge associated with the forging of new social compacts will be how to think about the region’s political geography—again, ancient perspectives can inform our analysis. The quest for new social compacts will not only entail the multilayered political process that the Greek encampment in the Iliad invites us to contemplate, the redistricting methods of Athens to build a wider political identity, or the pursuit of the rule of law that Aeschylus exhorts. The renewal of social compacts will also require a reckoning with the underlying geographic boundaries of the Middle East and the patterns of settlement and political community that have attended these divisions since antiquity. This ancient physical map helps us understand the constituent parts of any political order. Where rivers flow, where rain falls, where mountains rise and where deserts divide influence early settlement and subsequent national identity and will, in turn, affect the renewal of social compacts.
The major geographic nodes of the region—the Anatolian Plateau, the Nile Basin, the upper and lower Tigris-Euphrates Basin, the Iranian Plateau and the eastern Mediterranean, repeatedly gave rise to distinct ancient civilizations. These civilizations established spheres of influence, national identities and strategic priorities which serve as precedents that modern successor states and non-state actors can seek to revive. Historic memory is not necessarily the cause of these actions and geography is not destiny—environmental conditions are not deterministic as proposed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by strategists such as Alfred T. Mahan and Halford Mackinder. Nonetheless, the study of the region’s ancient civilizations invites consideration of how the past can influence the strategic choices that the region’s contemporary actors face and encourages analytic thinking that goes beyond the mostly ahistorical methods that shape current Western perceptions of the region. If there is a reasonable chance that the region’s key players care about the past when they act, it is reasonable to ask what that past might mean to them.
Ancient geography echoes loudly into the region’s contemporary political and territorial challenges because the distribution of combatants—state and non-state—after nearly a decade of civil conflicts across the Middle East, corresponds roughly to the region’s underlying geographic divisions and ancient settlement patterns. In Libya, the main political and military divisions today between Tripoli and Benghazi are the same divisions that separated Phoenician and Greek colonies in antiquity. One can conceive of modern Libya in many ways but not without recognizing these enduring geographic antecedents. In Yemen, failing modern borders have again sifted into ancient underlying geographic zones with combatants in the highlands, including Sanaa, often contesting with rivals in and from the desert coastal areas, including Aden.
In Syria, similar ancient geographic divisions are now resurgent with the regime holding the eastern Mediterranean highlands—the traditional locus of urban centers, rainfed agriculture and maritime trade routes to Europe—while Damascus has struggled to reassert itself in the upper Tigris-Euphrates basin. Also known as the grasslands of the Jazirah, the upper Tigris-Euphrates has long acted as a separate zone wedged between the Anatolian plateau, the eastern Mediterranean highlands and the lower Tigris-Euphrates Basin. This remote area—where states have always struggled to assert their writ—became the brief redoubt of a self-declared Caliphate in 2014. One can speculate whether the ambitions of the attempted Caliphate drew inspiration from the Neo-Assyrian empire of the seventh century BC which managed to rule most of the Middle East from the same remote area.
In these ways, political communities in the former secular Arab nationalist republics have sought to demarcate new borders either within or across the twentieth-century Middle East political map. The long-term status of these de facto attempts to redraw boundaries will be likely to remain uncertain, but de jure changes to the political map face the reality that no military power is willing and able to unilaterally impose new borders, and there is no consensus among the various regional and external state powers or non-state actors to effect changes to the existing political map. Under these circumstances, the status quo is likely to endure.
Nonetheless, durable political compacts will have to address the distribution of combatants along ancient geographic boundaries that have political and historical resonance. Ancient patterns and precedents can inform this project. The region’s chaotic and fragile political environment summons us to think imaginatively and differently about the challenges that lie ahead. The twentieth-century discourse on the Middle East gave us ways of thinking that were inevitably shaped by the politics of European colonization and decolonization, the Cold War, an overreliance on elite palaces to mediate our understanding of societal change, and by an assumption that the demarcated state borders of the post-Ottoman era were permanent and politically viable. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the attacks of 9/11 and the ongoing tumult unleashed in the “Arab Spring,” we need to think differently about the region’s political recovery.
As the secular nationalism of the last century has deteriorated or vanished from the region, policymakers are left with the task of deciding what ideologies will help to advance the West’s interests as the region rebuilds its social compacts. What ideas will lead to a stable political order that can help secure energy supplies, combat religiously inspired terrorism, stem the flow of refugees, and promote the region’s reconstruction and economic growth? Will the placing of sovereignty among citizens—the core idea of democracy which Athens invented—appear in the region in a new, Islamically-legitimated way and how should the United States respond? What ideas might create allegiance to the state and transcend religious and ethnic identities? These are policy challenges borne of analysis that incorporates an understanding of the ancient world.
