By Barry Cunliffe

Yale University Press.

480 pp. $45

Reviewed by Chris Hedges

Barry Cunliffe is the emeritus professor of European archaeology at Oxford, and Europe Between the Oceans is perhaps the boldest work of ancient history in recent memory. It draws on an impressive array of scholarship to paint a 10,000-year portrait of European civilization from 9000 B.C. to A.D. 1000.

Cunliffe sees the vast human mutations and advances from the end of the last ice age to the emergence of the European nation states as primarily the result of favorable geography. And he draws on an astonishing array of scholarship, from finds in Nordic burial mounds to DNA studies, to present a compelling and fascinating read.

Ancient human history, even to those who spend their careers dissecting it, is largely an enigma. Conjecture often takes the place of fact. Theory has to replace evidence. The momentous shifts in human civilization must be examined through puzzling and often grossly inadequate shards and fragments. Those who investigate prehistory, where by definition there were no written records, either rely on intuition and creativity or are forced to retreat into the very narrow spectrum of the knowable. Such scholarship often resembles a negative form of knowledge. It draws on imprints, shell mounds, or wall carvings for its understanding, rather than on recorded deeds, personalities, and definable human events.

Cunliffe believes that, rather than being the result of great leadership, specific intellectual traditions, religion, philosophy, or even the accidents of history, European advancement is rooted in particular environmental influences and expansive historical continuity. He argues that Europe's unique geography is the key to unlocking its unique civilization.

This is a highly Eurocentric book. Cunliffe has little time for competing civilizations, even the highly advanced Chinese and Japanese empires. The seas surrounding Europe and the rivers within, which facilitated trade and communication, cross-pollinated Europe with the latest ideas, discoveries, and inventions of varied cultures. Europe, he writes, was geographically and culturally "the western excrescence of the continent of Asia," from which it drew much of its early inspiration. The steppes linked central Asia to the Great Hungarian plain for thousands of years. It provided access from China to the Atlantic Ocean.

The array of technological innovations that passed through sea and land corridors into Europe include the two-wheeled chariot. The chariot appears to have come from the forest steppe region of Russia between the Urals and the river Volga as early as 2800 B.C. The technology then spread south to the Near East into the Carpathian Basin. By the 16th century B.C., horse-drawn chariots are being painted on Mycenaean shaft graves. Nordic grave sites have yielded artifacts from across the Mediterranean. Sarmatian horsemen, originally from central Asia, served in northwestern Britain in the Roman army.

Political upheavals and experiments in self-governing, once they come into view, however, are often dismissed as little more than stagecraft. Great leaders and philosophers are largely irrelevant. When the topic is the early millennia, such theories are hard to dispute, since we know almost nothing about individual personalities or beliefs. But Cunliffe's line of thinking runs into problems when the topic is ancient Athens or the rise of the city-states of the Middle Ages.

In other words, geography alone is not enough. Ideas matter. Human beings, prior to the development of Greek philosophy in the sixth century B.C., for example, had thought of themselves and of society as integral parts of nature, and subject to the same natural and supernatural forces. But this attitude was shattered by the radical Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Nature and the external world became for the Greeks open to rational explanation. And yet this revolution - as seismic as any technological change - is sidelined by Cunliffe.

The Roman Empire, likewise, is dismissed as "an interlude." Cunliffe writes:

The century of political turmoil and military conflict that engulfed Italy and spread to its provinces in the period from 133 to 27 B.C. is usually explained in terms of the "big men" who inspired the factions and led the armies - people such as the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Augustus - but really they were only helpless human beings caught up on the deep swell of change set in motion by the rise of acquisitive elites vying for space in a peninsula too small to contain them.

This is an example of how Cunliffe retreats somewhat too often into his own orthodoxy. He sacrifices complexity on the altar of consistency.

Europe Between the Oceans, lavishly illustrated, nevertheless provides readers with a brilliant and fascinating interweaving of cultures and traditions. Cunliffe draws on archaeological finds that indicate direct contact between the societies of Homeric Greece and those of prehistoric Britain. He holds up identical images of warriors depicted in ruins in Sardinia, Egypt, and Scandinavia. He explores Dark Ages sites in Sweden that have yielded coins from the eastern and western Roman empires, a ladle from Egypt, a bishop's crosier from Ireland, and a bronze statue of Buddha from India. Even if he too often ignores the indisputable role of human beings in their own history, Cunliffe magisterially shows how the interweaving of civilizations, made possible by geography, has, indeed, always been a powerful engine for human advancement.