Andrew Robinson was literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement from 1994-2006 and is now a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Story of Writing, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B and Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts. His latest book is Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction. Below is an original post by Andrew asking whether the internet will create a universal writing system.

The internet appears to suggest that the dream of universal communication across the barriers of language, nation, and culture by means of writing is within reach. Three centuries ago, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote: “As regards signs, I see … clearly that it is to the interest of the Republic of Letters and especially of students, that learned men should reach agreement on signs.” But the nature of writing systems means that Leibniz’s vision remains an impossible illusion. There is no such thing as a universal writing system, and there never will be.

In the mid-1970s, with increasing international travel, the American Institute of Graphic Arts cooperated with the United States Department of Transportation to design a set of symbols for airports and other travel facilities that would be clear both to travellers in a hurry and those without a command of English. They invented 34 iconic symbols. The design committee made a significant observation: “We are convinced that the effectiveness of symbols is strictly limited. They are most effective when they represent a service or concession that can be represented by an object, such a bus or bar glass. They are much less effective when used to represent a process or activity, such as Ticket Purchase…”.

Pictographic and logographic signs at airports and beside highways are a limited language of universal communication, which belongs to proto-writing, not full writing. Mathematics, too, is a universal language, but it is no use for most purposes of written communication. Painting and music communicate powerfully across cultures, but their meaning is diffuse and ambiguous. To communicate any and all thought always requires phonetic symbols. Wikipedia may have started in English, but it subsequently evolved versions written in over two dozen languages, including Esperanto. Full writing and reading depend on knowing a spoken language. This fact has not been altered by the internet—however many computer icons (and emoticons) we may encounter online.

Until the last few decades, it was generally agreed that over the centuries western civilisation had tried to make writing a closer and closer representation of speech. The alphabet was naturally regarded as the pinnacle of this conscious search; the Chinese script, conversely, was widely thought of as hopelessly defective. The corollary was the belief that as the alphabet spread through the world, so eventually would mass literacy and democracy. Surely, one might think, if a script is easy to learn, then more people will grasp it; and if they come to understand public affairs better, they will be more likely to take part in them and indeed demand a part in them. Scholars thus had a clear conception of writing progressing from cumbersome ancient scripts with multiple signs to simple and superior modern alphabets.

Few are now quite as confident. The superiority of alphabets is no longer taken for granted. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had an ‘alphabet’ of 24 signs nearly 5000 years ago, but apparently chose not to use it alone, and instead developed a logo-consonantal system with over 700 signs in regular use. The Japanese, rather than using their simple syllabic kana more and more frequently, chose to import more and more kanji from the Chinese script, creating a writing system of unrivalled complexity. Mayan glyphs show that the Maya could have used far more purely syllabic spellings, if they had wished, instead of their elaborate logographic and logo-syllabic equivalents.

We might also mention the notorious irregularity of modern English spelling, which is by no means a logical and straightforward representation of speech. George Bernard Shaw left money in his will to invent a rational alphabet for spelling English. But the Shaw alphabet, though ingenious and simple to write, has never been used. It is almost impossible to imagine public acceptance of a wholesale change in English orthography of the kind that was introduced in Turkey in 1928, when the country changed from writing in the Arabic script to writing in the Roman alphabet, or in Korea, with the less abrupt changeover from Chinese characters to Hangul.

The reason why scripts flourish or vanish has more to do with political and cultural considerations than purely linguistic ones. Literacy concerns far more than merely learning how to read and write. A Japanese physics student once outlined for me the genuine linguistic disadvantages of writing only in kana, without kanji, and then added: ‘After all, a long tradition cannot change like that. It will NEVER happen!!’ In other words, writing Japanese in kanji is a key part of Japanese identity.

Many scholars of writing today have an increasing respect for the intelligence behind ancient scripts. Down with the monolithic ‘triumph of the alphabet’, they say, and up with Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan glyphs, with their hybrid mixtures of pictographic, logographic and phonetic signs. Their conviction has in turn nurtured a new awareness of writing systems as being enmeshed within societies, rather than viewing them somewhat aridly as different kinds of technical solution to the problem of efficient visual representation of a particular language.

While I personally remain sceptical about the expressive virtues of pictograms and logograms, this growing holistic view of writing systems strikes me as a healthy development that reflects the real relationship between writing and society in all its subtlety and complexity. The transmission of my intimate thoughts to the minds of others in many cultures via intricate marks on a piece of paper or a computer screen, continues to amaze me as a kind of barely explicable magic.

All of us at OUP UK are thrilled that Feast: Why Humans Share Food won the Food Book of the Year Award at this year’s Guild of Food Writers Awards in London last week. Author Martin Jones has kindly written a blog for us, telling us all about how even at the ceremony he could trace the eating trends he discusses in his prize-winning book.

After receiving my Food Book of the Year award from Prue Leith at London’s Tamesa Restaurant last Thursday, I suggested that Feast: Why Humans Share Food, may have been their first of their winning volumes whose recipes included ingredients that were extinct.

Ironic, as we had just heard from the event’s sponsor, Alaska Seafood, that none of their products were from endangered species – but my point was to highlight the sheer range of topics that had brought authors together that evening, all with the common theme of food.

As a writing archaeologist, I actually get some of the most thought-provoking feedback from readers outside archaeology; Thursday evening was no exception. It was good to share words with one of the judges about our mutual admiration of the late Mary Douglas, an exceptional anthropologist. I also got valuable advice from fellow prize-winner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on possible sources for gazelle meat, an important ingredient in a 12,000 year old meal featured in my book.

Having written about meals as bridges between our biological and social selves, I can’t help looking for new evidence of that enduring theme. At the awards ceremony, we enjoyed our seafood and fine wines as a hand-held buffet, but as with every meal since the appearance of our species, nourishment was intimately embedded within the performance, etiquette, and constant chatter of a social marketplace.

A few diners had taken their halibut goujons and Prosecco away from the chatter to the balcony, to enjoy a great view of the Thames and use their mobile phones. They had left one metaphorical ‘campfire’ to join another, something that has been happening in various ways for millennia. Our social history may be charted through the manner in we switch campfires, a theme my book follows from a Palaeolithic hunt through to a TV dinner. I didn’t actually write about the ‘mobile meal’ – surely the global campfire of the future – as I didn’t think it had yet found form. I was corrected by an American journalist, who explained her kids were already accustomed to taking their pizza to the screen, to share food with their friends on SKYPE. Perhaps you too are enjoying a bite as you read this.

For the first time since his death in 1322 BCE King Tut’s face was seen in early November when he was unwrapped in Egypt. King Tutankhamun has fascinated the masses since his intact tomb was first discovered on this day in 1922. Below, in an excerpt from the Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt by Rosalie David, we learn why tombs were so very important in ancient Egypt.

Importance of the Tomb

Because tombs and temples were built of stone, evidence relating to burials and sate religious customs has survived better than evidence relating to domestic buildings, which were constructed primarily of mud brink. This tends to present an inaccurate and partly misleading view of Egyptian society, perhaps placing undue emphasis with its preoccupation with death and preparation for the afterlife. Nevertheless, funerary beliefs and customs were obviously extremely important and influenced many of the concepts and developments of the civilization.

Central to Egyptian mortuary practices was the belief that life continued after death. Although this at first applied only to the king, it was assumed by the Middle Kingdom that all worthy people could aspire to individual immortality. That classes maintained somewhat different views about the location of the afterlife and what they would experience there, but everyone planned to prepare a burial place that had the function not only of protecting the body but also of providing a location to which the owner’s free-roaming spirit could return to obtain sustenance.

The Egyptians believed that the burial site was a home for the spirit, and in the mastaba tomb this idea was developed so that the features of a house–reception area, bedroom, storerooms–were reproduced. Indeed, the dead were believed to have the same needs as the living–a home, possessions, and food and drink. These were supplied for the deceased by means of tomb, funerary goods, and a funerary offering ritual.

The provisioning of the tomb was also regarded as essential to the owner’s continued existence after death. A man’s heir was expected to bring food and drink to his tomb on a daily basis to feed his spirit (ka). His descendants inherited this obligation to bring the offerings to the tomb chapel and present them to the owner by means of the funerary ritual. Accompanied by the recitation of prayers, they were offered on a flat altar table. It was believed that the essence of their sustaining qualities would be absorbed through the mummy or the owner’s statue on behalf of his spirit.

This obligation, however, became a burden to later generations. As tombs grew increasingly neglected, it was feared that the ka would experience starvation. Other means of securing a food supply were sought, and a ka servant was often employed. This priest had the duty of presenting the offerings, and the tomb owner set aside an area of land in his estate from which the produce would supply perpetual offering for his tomb and also payment for the ka servant and his descendants who inherited this commitment. Again, however, duties were often neglected, and the Egyptians resorted to magic.

Wall scenes within the tomb re-created a pleasant hereafter for the deceased and included representations o food production (harvesting, butchering, brewing, and baking) an offering rites. They were later augmented by states and models that were shown engaged in similar activities. All these inanimate figures would, it was believed, be activated by a special ceremony carried out at the funeral. Once the life force entered them, they would be able to serve the owner. There was also an offering list inscribed within the tomb that provided an eternal substitute menu for the deceased; this was intended to lessen his reliance on food brought by relatives or the ka servant.

Coordinates: 43 59 N 18 10 E

Population: 15,310 (1991 census)

There are plenty of cases where tourists have been lured to destinations to see replicas of ancient architecture, or commercial complexes masquerading as cultural monuments, but how about sites that are arguably hoaxes? Residents of Visoko, a short distance northwest of Sarajevo on the Bosna River, have noticed a sharp increase in visitors of late, largely due to a hill that some say conceals the world’s largest pyramid. Although signs of settlement in the area date back to before the common era, experts remain unconvinced that the alleged Pyramid of the Sun is anything more than a natural geologic formation. With an elevation of 720 feet, the summit won’t be altogether disappointing to curious travelers: it does offer nice views of Visoko and the eastern foothills of the Dinaric Alps.

It’s that time of week where I rummage through my bookshelf and share with you. This week I have been playing with Ireland: An Oxford Archaeological Guide by Andy Halpin and Conor Newman, and dreaming of being on vacation. It’s not hard to dream with a book like this, which covers the entire island from Antrim to Wexford, Dublin to Sligo and has over 250 plans and illustration of major treasures and sites. I thought it would be nice if you could dream of trips to Ireland also, so below is an excerpt.

Christ Church cathedral

The church of Holy Trinity (Christ Church) was founded c.1030 as the cathedral of recently Christianized Dublin—probably its first church. Nothing is known of the early form of Christ Church, as all traces were swept away in a complete rebuilding of the cathedral, which probably began in the late 1180s under John Cumin, the first English archbishop. The present form of the cathedral is based almost entirely on this late 12th-/early 13th-century rebuilding. However, this is largely due to extreme late 19th-century restoration, which removed many later features in order to re-establish the ‘original’ form. Among the features lost were the extended ‘long choir’ of the 14th century and the entire south side of the nave, which had been rebuilt (admittedly rather poorly) following the disastrous collapse of the original south side and nave vaulting in 1562. As a result, relatively little of what is visible in Christ Church today is original medieval fabric, but the restoration has at least provided a reasonably accurate impression of the cathedral’s form in the 13th century.

The earliest parts of the cathedral (c.1185–1200) are the transepts and choir, with the crypt below. Apart from the westernmost bay, the choir is a 19th-century restoration. The transepts and choir were built in a late Romanesque style with a clear south-western English flavour, reflecting the political changes in Dublin since 1171, when Henry II granted the city to the men of Bristol. Indeed, the very stones of the new cathedral reflected the political realities, for the architectural detailing was rendered in a fine, creamy limestone imported from Dundry, near Bristol. There was probably a crossing tower from the beginning, but the present tower is substantially a rebuilding of c.1600. The overall architectural design of this phase of building is undistinguished, but there are many well-carved capitals, especially on the north side. There is also a fine, substantially original round-headed doorway in the south transept, although it was moved here from the north transept in 1831.

The nave is later, although its date is less certain—previously dated c.1215–35, a date of c.1230–40 has recently been suggested. It is not particularly large—there are only six bays, of which the westernmost seems to be a slightly later addition. However, it contrasts with the choir and transepts, not only because it is built in Gothic style (again with definite west English influences) but because of its quality. Although the southern side of the nave is a restoration, the north elevation is almost entirely original and has rightly been described as ‘the most distinguished piece of Gothic architecture in Ireland’. It is a sophisticated design with an early and very successful vertical integration of triforium and clerestory elements above the arcade, outlined by dark marble shafts. The arcade arches are deeply moulded and each bay is defined by a wall shaft running vertically from floor to vault. Again there is substantial use of imported Dundry stone for architectural detailing, and Purbeck marble (also from southern England) is used in the banded shafts which adorn the nave elevation. The upper parts of the north wall of the nave still lean markedly out of the vertical—a dramatic testimony to the lateral thrust of the original vault, which pushed the walls out and eventually led to its collapse in 1562.

One of the most interesting features of Christ Church is its crypt, which—unlike most British cathedrals runs under the entire length of the cathedral (apart from the westernmost bay of the nave) and has recently been conserved. Its east end is almost certainly late 12th century, contemporary with the choir and transepts above, but the chronology of the west end is less clear. Most probably it was constructed after the east end, but prior to the construction of the nave overhead in the 1230s. Two other points of interest in the cathedral are the brass lectern at the east end of the nave—probably the only medieval lectern surviving in Ireland and the so-called tomb of Strongbow under an arch of the south nave arcade. Strongbow—Richard de Clare, lord of Leinster—is thought to have been buried here on his death in 1176, but the effigy of a knight, traditionally said to be his, is at least a century later. A late 16thcentury plaque on the aisle wall nearby records the destruction of Strongbow’s tomb in the roof collapse of 1562, and it seems that another effigy was subsequently pressed into service as a replacement, because of the importance the original tomb had acquired in the medieval city’s business life. Another monument of an important figure is in the chapel of St Lawrence (on the east side of the south transept)—a worn, early 13th-century effigy of an archbishop, probably the first English incumbent John Cumin (d. 1212). Outside the south transept are the remains of the 13th-century chapter house, the only visible remnant of the cloisters, which originally stood on the south side of the cathedral. The chapter house was originally a fine structure, with a three-light east window and elaborately moulded west doorway of two orders, flanked by smaller windows. There was also a ribbed vault in four bays overhead, supported by moulded wall shafts, parts of which survive.

Bart Ehrman, author of Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible and Why, and Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code among many others, has gracefully answered some questions for OUP about his newest book, The Lost Gospels of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed. The book recounts the discovery of the Lost Gospels as well as providing a complete account of what the Gospel of Judas teaches and how it reflects on the historical character Judas Iscariot.

OUP: What is the most common misconception about Judas?

Bart Ehrman: The biggest mistake is to think that he was always the rotten apple in the apostolic barrel. In fact, the best evidence suggests that he became a follower of Jesus because he completely agreed with his message and supported his mission at first, and was as faithfully devoted to “the cause” as anyone. That’s why Jesus chose him to become one of the inner circle, the “twelve.” Only later did he decide – for reasons I spell out in my book – that he had to turn Jesus over to the authorities. But that was much later!

OUP: How have the discoveries of these new gospels shaped or changed your beliefs in Christianity?

Ehrman: They have helped me see that early Christianity was remarkably, almost unbelievably, diverse. There were different Christians all saying different things – about God, Christ, the world, salvation, the Jews, in fact, about just everything. And all these Christians believed they were right and that all others were wrong. And all of them had sacred books to prove their claims, books allegedly written by the disciples of Jesus himself. Only some of these books became the New Testament, and so only some of the beliefs survived down through the ages. The others were eventually ruled out as heresies.

OUP: What is the one lesson laymen can take away from the Gospels and their new teachings?

Ehrman: That just as Christianity today is incredibly diverse (compare the Roman Catholics with the Mormons with the Pentecostals with the Seventh Day Adventists with the Eastern Orthodox… and so on!), it was even more diverse in the early centuries, when the most important aspects of the new faith were debated and fought over.

OUP: What do the gospels show us about Judas’s relationship to gnosticism?

Ehrman: I don’t think they show us anything about what the historical Judas thought about Gnosticism – in part because Gnosticism did not yet exist in Judas’s (or Jesus’) day! Only later did Gnosticism arise, and then the Gnostic Christians retold the stories of Judas (and Jesus) in light of their own beliefs. The newly discovered Gospel of Judas is one of these retellings.

OUP:In your opinion, and knowing what you know from studying these gospels, what place does Judas hold in the history of Christianity? Is he the betrayer? Or has his legacy, like much of the bible, been reconstructed through time?

Ehrman: Yes, he certainly was the betrayer. But the question is what did he betray, and why. In my book I try to show why most Christians today completely misunderstand what was going on in the betrayal. The story is intricate but intriguing. Here I’ll simply give a couple of hints: why would the authorities need Judas to identify Jesus? Wouldn’t they already know who he was? Why would then need him to lead them to Jesus? Couldn’t they just have him followed? Why was Jesus killed for calling himself the King of the Jews if that is not what he called himself? How did the authorities know that he thought he was the (future) king? Answer these historical questions, and you can solve an important historical problem: what did Judas betray, and why?

OUP:When were your first thoughts when you saw the Gospel of Judas in the small room above a pizza parlor in Switzerland?

Ehrman: My first thought was: My God this is amazing!!

When I sat down to compile my latest book From Stonehenge to Samarkand, I found my greatest inspiration in the writings of a virtually forgotten English writer, Rose Macaulay. Her classic book, Pleasure of Ruins, first appeared in the 1950s and was reprinted with evocative photographs by Reny Beloff a decade later. Macaulay got me thinking about the sheer excitement of seeing an archaeological site with your own eyes. She fell in love with ruins—something I have never been able to do—but, like her, I have been lucky enough to experience remarkably intense emotional connections with archaeological sites both ancient and relatively recent, spectacular and seemingly inconspicuous.

This kind of emotion is something that seems alien to a scientist, but it shouldn’t be. Archaeology is not the study of deserted earthworks and abandoned cities, of artifacts and statuary. It’s the study of people, people like us who loved and hated, were born, grew up, fell in love, got married, had families, and eventually died. Anyone who quests for the past, even scientists, is searching for the people of the past—and there’s nothing wrong about feeling an emotional connection with them. Visiting a deserted Great Zimbabwe in Central Africa during a full moon was a truly extraordinary moment in my own life. So was gazing over the ramparts of the Iron Age hill fort at Maiden Castle in southern England on a foggy, lowering day, a place with serried earthworks attacked by a Roman legion in 43 AD. I could almost hear the war cries of the attackers, the screams and yells of the defenders, and the crackling flames of huts torched in the melee. It was all a dream, of course, but for a brief moment the deserted hill fort came alive.

Modern archaeological travelers have a very different experience from those of their predecessors. I was lucky enough to visit many of the great sites in the 1950s, when getting to many of them was still a mild adventure and you were likely to have places like the Valley of the Kings, Petra, and Angkor Wat virtually to yourself. I find that solitude and antiquity go well together, for it is then that you can make an emotional connection with the past. Walking alone along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England on a winter’s day with a promise of snow, exploring the deserted lake beds and their chronicle of early human evolution at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania on a blazing hot day, finding Jean François Champollion’s name high on a column at the Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt—these rank among the many archaeological experiences that I will never forget.

In recent years, I’ve had the opportunity to visit many of the same sites again, only to find them completely changed. The experience is still unforgettable, but starkly different because of the sheer mass of visitors. Package tours and crowds transform these situations into events that are simultaneously less memorable and also rather sobering from a conservation standpoint. Instead of profound soundlessness, I now recall the roar of diesel buses in the Valley of the Kings, or standing in line in the defile of a royal tomb sweating profusely and literally watching the priceless paintings peel off the wall. Just last year I accompanied a tour to the Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey. We shuffled down the main street in dense groups, each with our own guide, each waiting for the group in front of us to move on. At Angkor Wat, a sacred complex on a scale that beggars the imagination, there are few facilities for visitors—the Cambodian government cannot afford them. The already-worn temple steps are slippery smooth from thousands of visitors a day, the magnificent friezes worn shiny by generations of massaging hands. Instead of exhilaration, I came away feeling deeply depressed. Yes, the Parthenon is still magnificent to behold, Machu Picchu high in the Andes remains an unforgettable place, but much of the magic is gone now that cultural tourism with its cruise ships, jumbo jets, and diesel buses has become a booming international business.

Over the years, I’ve developed an informal list of sites to avoid because of the crowds: the Parthenon (alas), the Valley of the Kings, Stonehenge (you cannot get near the stones), the temples at Sounion and Aegina in Greece, Ephesus (the most visited archaeological site in the world), the Colosseum in Rome, Pompeii (where you’ll swim through crowds in high season), and Mesa Verde, Colorado, (only in the summertime). However, there remain plenty of sites that still intoxicate me: Avebury (only a few miles from Stonehenge, where you can walk through the stone circles), Hadrian’s Wall, Palmyra in Syria and Petra in Jordan, Olympia in Greece, site of the original Games (an expansive field of ruins that is strangely moving), the amphitheater at Epidauros, also in Greece (in spring and fall, a place where the acoustics enchant), Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (which is truly spectacular), Ta Proem, a Khmer temple near Angkor Wat (where serpentine tree roots envelop the ruins in a romantic frenzy), the brooding moiae of Easter Island, massive ancestral statues that ring the coast, the huge city of Teotihuacán on the edge of the Valley of Mexico (much visited, but large enough to swallow crowds and a brilliant statement of ideological and supernatural power that humbles you) and, finally, well off the beaten track, the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar on the Orkney Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean north of Scotland, where you will step into the heart of a deeply evocative ancient landscape.

From Stonehenge to Samarkand recalls more leisured times when archaeological travel and enjoying these famous sites still involved a modest degree of adventure. I hope the writings therein will encourage a new generation of archaeological travelers to wander away from the familiar and overcrowded to places where our forebears still haunt the landscape and even unspectacular archaeological sites can come alive with a little imagination.

How important was the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of its consequences for the history of Europe?

WARD-PERKINS: Peter is primarily a historian of the state and of the army, while my background and intellectual roots are mainly in Archaeology; so our approaches to this question inevitably do differ. Peter prioritizes the collapse of a great power, in terms of its political and social consequences – above all, how landed aristocrats, once operating within a finely tuned and empire-wide system of patronage and status, had to adjust to life under heavily militarized and locally-based Germanic kings.

My book, and this is its major novelty, concentrates on the impact of the fall of the West on daily life, as revealed by a mass of new archaeological research over the last few decades (which I hope is presented in a readable and approachable manner). I argue what is currently an unfashionable view (though, in my opinion, it is blindingly obvious) – that the Roman world brought remarkable levels of sophistication and comfort, and spread them widely in society (and not just to a tiny elite); and that the fall of Rome saw the dismantling of this complexity, and a return to what can reasonably be termed ‘prehistoric’ levels of material comfort. Furthermore, I believe that this change was not just at the level of pots and pans, important though these are, but also affected sophisticated skills like reading and writing. Pompeii, with its ubiquitous inscriptions, painted signs, and graffiti, was a city that revolved around writing – after the fall of the empire, the same cannot be said for any settlement in the West for many centuries to come.

I recommend caution in praising ‘Civilizations’ (whether Roman, or our own), and I do emphasize that ‘civilizations’ have their downsides. But, equally, I think the current fashion for treating all cultures as essentially the same – and all dramatic changes (like the end of the Roman world) as mere ‘transformations’ from one system, to another equally valid one – is not only wrong, but also dangerous. It evens out the dramatic ups and downs of human history, into a smooth trajectory. This risks blinding us to the fact that things have often gone terribly wrong in the past, and to the near certainty that, in time, our own ‘civilization’, and the comforts we enjoy from it, will also collapse.

HEATHER: I never know, really, how to judge good & bad in global terms when looking at any societies. I am very sure, though, that the effects of Rome’s fall were huge and felt right across the board. It’s quite common now, for instance, while describing the history of subjects as diverse as Christianity or literacy in this period, to view Rome’s fall as incidental or unimportant. In my view, that is straightforwardly wrong. Late Antique Christianity evolved a series of authority structures, both centrally and locally, which were shaped around and based upon the existence of the Roman state. When that went, these authority structures, even when they survived, changed their nature fundamentally. In shorthand, the medieval monarchical Papacy is inconceivable had powerful western Emperors survived. So too literacy. Patterns of elite literacy, for instance, were based upon the career structures generated by the Empire’s bureaucracy – lots of jobs for those knowing a particular kind of Latin well – and once that bureaucracy went, so did the jobs and the patterns of education and literacy attached to them.

Why two books on the ‘Fall of Rome’ now?

WARD-PERKINS: Even curioser, both books are by scholars from the same university who know each other well. A number of potential explanations spring to mind. Firstly, that the authors hadn’t communicated with each other and were rather cross to learn that the other had just finished a book on the same subject. Secondly, that it was part of a dark plot to overwhelm opposing views, and to ensure decent review coverage – since journals prefer discussing pairs of books to singletons. Thirdly, that this is a really important subject – the fall of a very great power, that dominated the Mediterranean and most of Europe for over five hundred years – that hasn’t been examined in detail for some time, and which cried out for two books, each with a different slant. Peter’s book is an immaculately researched (and highly readable) blow-by-blow account of the events that brought the western empire down; while mine contains only a brief look at the causes of the fall of the West, and spends most of its pages investigating the consequences of this fall (hence my subtitle ‘And the End of Civilization’).

HEATHER: We both knew we were doing them, I think, but there was a huge amount of chance involved in when our research leaves fell, and hence when we were able to write them. And, as Bryan says, they are to our eyes very different and complimentary books (although it would be interesting to find out if readers thought so too). In broader terms, we are certainly both responding to huge wave of interest in the late Roman period, which has unfolded since the early to mid-1970s. I myself am certainly part of this wave, but, so far, it has tended to carry scholarship forward in lots of different areas at once (mine was barbarians) and hence the energy has generated the raw material for new overviews rather than the new overviews themselves. Bryan and I are both, I think, in part pulling these many different findings together in ways that make sense to us. I would myself expect other people to start wanting to generate new, broader takes on the subject as well.

Bryan Ward-Perkins is the author of The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization and teaches at Trinity College, University of Oxford.

Peter Heather is the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and teaches at Worcester College, University of Oxford.

Recent scholarship has argued that the Western Roman Empire did not “decline” or “fall,” but was “transformed” by accommodating new barbarian populations within the Empire’s political and economic structure. You both seem to oppose this argument and view it as a more cataclysmic affair. How would you characterise what happened in Western Europe between 376 and 476 AD?

HEATHER: I am entirely convinced by all the evidence that shows that the late Empire was not being torn apart by irrevocable processes of decline by the fourth century. Where I do part company with some revisionist scholarship, however, is over the argument that, because some Roman institutions ideologies and elites survived beyond 476, therefore the fall of the western Empire was not a revolutionary moment in European history. The most influential statement of this, perhaps, is Walter Goffart’s brilliant aphorism that the fall of the Western Empire was just ‘an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand’. Goffart means that changes in Roman policy towards the barbarians led to the emergence of the successor states, dependant on barbarian military power and incorporating Roman institutions, and that the process which brought this out was not a particularly violent one.

To my mind, this view of the end of the Western Empire is deeply mistaken. Surely, there were plenty of Roman elements in the successor states, but one key institution was missing: the central authority structure of the Western Roman Empire itself. This had unified much of Western Europe for 500 years, but by 500 AD, had entirely ceased to exist.

Despite some assertions to the contrary, the central empire did not give up land voluntarily to the immigrant groups around whom the successor states formed. Every act of immigration except the first, in 376, was opposed to the best of the Empire’s strength, and even that was an attempt to make the best of an impossible situation. Likewise, every subsequent attempt by the immigrants to expand their position was resisted with determination, and for very good reason. Every loss of territory to an outside group represented a loss of vital, agricultural, tax base, and therefore of the Empire’s capacity to maintain its armies.

What emerges from all this is that the central Empire did not pass away quietly but was fought to extinction over a 70 year period of intense struggle. As the power of the imperial centre collapsed, local Romans had no choice but to make their peace with the new immigrant powers in the land, and their survival made it possible for some (but not all) of the successor states to use some Roman governmental mechanisms. But this kind of post de facto negotiation process absolutely does not mean that the Empire went peacefully. As all the recent evidence for fourth-century economic, cultural, and political vigour might lead us to suspect, the fifth-century Empire fought a long and determined, if ultimately unavailing, struggle for survival.

WARD-PERKINS: Disappointingly (perhaps) I basically agree with Peter here – neither of us have much time for the theory that the empire was quietly ‘transformed’, by the peaceful ‘accommodation’ into it of some Germanic barbarians. We both believe in invasions that were violent and unpleasant, rather than what I have termed the ‘tea party at the Roman vicarage’ theory of settlement by invitation. I probably share Peter’s views, because I have heard him lecture on the subject many times, always with great conviction! Anyway, the idea that the fifth century was more peaceful than violent, just doesn’t fit the facts. Some degree of accommodation between invaders and invaded was possible, particularly over time. But I argue that the horrors of invasion are undeniable, and were often protracted, and that adjusting to rule under Germanic masters was painful and difficult for the Romans, used as they were to lording it over the known world.

Why was the Western Empire unable to fight off the fifth-century military challenge?

HEATHER: The old view was essentially that internal decline had destroyed its capacity to resist: moral decadence, depopulation, lead poisoning, the debilitating effects of its recent conversion to Christianity, or another internal cause of your choice. It is important to remember that the Empire had always had important limitations. The inherent limits of its largely agricultural economy meant that output could not be increased dramatically should new revenues and manpower be required to face new threats (the Romans failed, in other words, to invent either the tractor or chemical fertilizers). It had bureaucratic limits which affected its capacity to mobilise resources, and, perhaps above all, political limits. Its sheer size, especially after the rise of Persia to superpower status from the third century (see below), meant that power needed to be shared for administrative reasons, but political stability was immensely difficult to achieve. Any period of unity was always likely to be succeeded by another of internal rivalry or even civil war. But all of this had always been true, and won’t explain the catastrophic collapse of the fifth century. In my view, the roots of collapse have to be sought in the outside world, among the barbarians. I should say that I use ‘barbarian’ here only in the sense of ‘outsider’ (one of its Roman connotations).

First, in the third century, a new dynasty, the Sassanians, united what is now largely Iran and Iraq with the overt aim of overthrowing Roman hegemony in the Near East. Rome, for the first time, faced a rival superpower, which quickly inflicted three huge defeats on the Empire’s existing military establishment. New and bigger armies needed to be raised, therefore, as well as the funds to pay for them, and one Emperor was now required more or less permanently on the Persian front. The result was the so-called Third Century Crisis, which saw the Roman Empire go through 50 years of painful adjustment until, by c.300 AD, this new Persian threat was parried. Parried, though, not defeated, and this is a key point. After 300 AD, Persia remained a superpower and about a third of the Empire’s forces had always to be stationed on the eastern front. This directly affected its capacity to deal with further crises elsewhere, as did the fact that most of the available fiscal slack in its generally rigid agricultural economy had already been used up to fund the larger military establishment raised to face down the Persians.

This further ‘barbarian’ crisis duly unfolded towards the end of the fourth century on the Empire’s European frontiers brought on by the intersection of two separate phenomena. First, the Germanic world had been through a social, political, and economic revolution since the first century. Germanic socio-political units were now larger and more powerful than they ever had been before. Second, the Huns – the latest of what were clearly, in the ancient through to the later medieval period, periodic intrusions into central Europe of originally steppe nomadic groups – convulsed this hinterland in the generation after 375, especially in two particular moments of crisis, 376-80 and 405-8. By 410, enough barbarians were inside the western Empire to push it into a vicious circle of decline as its military assets were burned up in battle and its agricultural tax base eroded by warfare and forced grants of territory made to different barbarian groups.

Once inside the Empire, the barbarian immigrant groups continued to unify, producing still larger and yet more powerful entities that the Empire could not hope to dismantle. The result was a reversal of the strategic power advantage that had brought the Empire into being, so that these new, and more powerful, barbarian groups were able to carve out kingdoms for themselves from the Empire’s living body politic. This was no peaceful process, even if, in its aftermath, some local Roman elites came to terms with the new powers in the land, and hence made it possible for these kingdoms to show some Roman features.

The existence of odd Roman elements must not, however, mislead us into thinking that we are looking at anything other than a revolution. The new states that emerged were not mini-Roman Empires. Key institutional differences – the absence of professional armies funded by large-scale taxation amongst others – as well as entirely different cultural patterns in areas such as elite literacy – the Classics – mark them out as entirely different kinds of entity from the Empire which preceded them. This was a highly violent process which both marked the culmination of long-term patterns of development in the periphery of the Empire and set European history off on a new course.

WARD-PERKINS: When it comes to explaining the fall of the Western Roman Empire, we both believe that a series of unfortunate events was central to the story. Events (such as the arrival of the Huns), and chance play bigger parts in both our accounts, than deep structural weaknesses. I even argue that the eastern Roman Empire, which survived until Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, was saved, not because it was structurally stronger than the West, but mainly because it happened to have been dealt a favourable geographical hand. A thin band of sea separated and protected the heartlands of eastern prosperity (in Asia Minor and the Near East) from the barbarian-infested Balkans.

It is interesting that both of us should prioritize events and chance over structural change, because this seems to be the way that historians are moving right across the spectrum of historical thought. When I was a student, in the early seventies, we were all into profound structural changes, that swept people along inexorably; and we viewed events as banal and superficial. Nowadays (and probably it is just another fashion), individuals and concatenations of events, all of which might have gone differently, are seen as central to human history. In theory at least, according to modern thinking, I might be writing this sentence, not in England, but in a still-extant province of Britannia – if a few things had only gone better in the fifth century.

HEATHER: Here, there’s maybe a bit of difference between us because I do believe in the importance of structural change outside the Empire. It’s the argument I start to develop in the last chapter of my book, but much more elsewhere, namely that having to co-exist with a large and aggressive Empire pushes neighbouring populations into processes of socio-economic and political change, the end result of which is to generate societies more capable of parrying the Empire that started everything off. There is, in other words, a kind of Newton’s Third Law: to every Empire there is an opposite and equal reaction which undermines the preponderance of power in one locality on which the original Empire was based. This, in my view, is what happens in spades in the Near East with the Sassanians, and is already happening in important ways in non-Roman Europe, when the Huns come along to generate a precocious unity among the Germani. But, given enough time, the Germani might have got there anyway!

Click here to read the rest of the dialogue.

Bryan Ward-Perkins is the author of The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization and teaches at Trinity College, University of Oxford.

Peter Heather is the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and teaches at Worcester College, University of Oxford.

This is the last of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK

The economic change that I have outlined was an extraordinary one. What we observe at the end of the Roman world is not a ‘recession’ or – to use a term that has recently been suggested – an ‘abatement’, with an essentially similar economy continuing to work at a reduced pace. Instead, what we see is a remarkable qualitative change, with the disappearance of entire industries and commercial networks. The economy of the post-Roman West is not that of the fourth century reduced in scale, but a very different and far less sophisticated entity.

This is at its starkest and most obvious in Britain. A number of basic skills disappeared entirely during the fifth century, to be reintroduced only centuries later. Some of these, such as the technique of building in mortared stone or brick, can perhaps be seen as products of specifically Roman styles of display, and therefore peculiarly susceptible to political and cultural change, rather than economic deadline, are impossible to uphold. All over Britain, the art of making pottery on a wheel disappeared in the early fifth century, and was not reintroduced for almost 300 years. The potter’s wheel is not an instrument of cultural identity. Rather, it is a functional innovation that facilitates the rapid production of thin-walled ceramics; and yet it disappeared from Britain. Presumably, though I would be the first to admit that it is hard to credit, this was because there were no longer enough consumers around to sustain any specialized potting. Sophistication in production and exchange did survive in post-Roman Britain, but only at the very highest levels of society and the highest level of artefacts. In the early seventh century an East Anglian ruler was buried at Sutton Hoo with an extraordinarily rich and exotic accompaniment of treasure: silver and copper dishes from the eastern Mediterranean; an enamelled bronze bowl, probably from West Britain; some splendid weaponry, some of it perhaps from Scandinavia; gold coins from the Frankish kingdoms; and some wonderful native gold jewellery, incorporating garnets and millefiore glasswork from the Continent (or, possibly, from even further afield). The jewellery, which was certainly made in Anglo-Saxon Britain, displays levels of craftsmanship and design that are extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated. But these are all rare elite items, made or imported for the highest levels of society. At this level, beautiful objects were still being made, and traded or gifted across long distances. What had totally disappeared, however, were the good-quality, low-value items, made in bulk, and available so widely in the Roman period. An object from the Sutton Hoo ship burial that attracts very little attention in its British Museum showcase speaks volumes: the pottery bottle. In the context of seventh-century East Anglia, it was almost certainly a high-status item, imported from abroad (since it was shaped on a wheel, at a time when all pottery in Britain was hand-formed). But in any context of the Roman period, even a rural peasant context, it would be entirely unremarkable, or notable only for its porous fabric and rough finish. The economy that sustained and supplied a massive middle and lower market for low-value functional goods had disappeared, leaving sophisticated production and exchange for only a tiny number of high-status objects.

It may initially be hard to believe, but post-Roman Britain in fact sank to a level of economic complexity well below that of the pre-Roman Iron Age. Southern Britain, in the years before the Roman conquest of AD 43, was importing quantities of Gaulish wine and Gaulish pottery; it had its own native pottery industries with regional distribution of their wares; it even had native silver coinages, which may well have been used to facilitate exchange, as well as for purposes of prestige and gift-giving. The settlement pattern of later iron-age Britain also reflects emerging economic complexity, with substantial coastal settlements, like Hengistbury in modern Hampshire, which were at least partly dependent on trade. None of these features can be found reliably in fifth- and sixth-century post-Roman Britain. It is really only in about AD 700, three centuries after the disintegration of the Romano-British economy, that southern Britain crawled back to the level of economic complexity found in the pre-Roman Iron Age, with evidence of pots imported from the Continent, the first substantial and wheel-turned Anglo-Saxon pottery industry (at Ipswich), the striking of silver coins, and the emergence of coastal trading towns, such as Hamwic (Saxon Southampton) and London. All these features were new, or only just beginning, in around AD 700; but all had existed in Southern Britain during the pre-Roman Iron Age.

In the western Mediterranean, the economic regression was by no means as total as it was in Britain. As we have seen, some trade, some trading towns, some coinage, and some local and regional industries persisted throughout the post-Roman centuries. But it must be remembered that in the Mediterranean world the level of economic complexity and sophistication reached in the Roman period was considerably higher than anything ever attained in Britain. The fall in economic complexity may in fact have been as remarkable as that in Britain; but, since in the Mediterranean it started from a much higher point, it also bottomed out at a higher level. If, as we have done for Britain, we compare pre-Roman and post-Roman Mediterranean economies, in some areas at least a very similar picture can be found to that sketched out above – of a regression, taking the economy way below levels of complexity reached in the pre-Roman period. In southern and central Italy, for example, both the Greek colonies and the Etruscan territories have provided much more evidence of trade and sophisticated native industries than can be found in post-Roman Italy. The pre-Roman past, in the temples of Agrigento and Paestum, the tombs of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, and a mass of imported and native pottery and jewellery, has left enough material remains to serve as a major tourist attraction. The same cannot be said of the immediately post-Roman centuries.

The case of central and southern Italy raises a very important point. The complex system of production and distribution, whose disappearance we have been considering, was an older and more deeply rooted phenomenon than an exclusively ‘Roman’ economy. Rather, it was an ‘ancient’ economy that in the eastern and southern Mediterranean was flourishing long before Rome became at all significant, and that even in the northwestern Mediterranean was developing steadily before the centuries of Roman domination. It is true that in some distant northern provinces – the interior of the Balkans, northern Gaul, the Rhineland, and Britain – Roman power and economic complexity were more or less chronologically coterminous. But, even in these regions, as we have seen in looking at iron-age Britain, the result of the Roman conquest was perhaps more to intensify older developments than completely to change the direction of economic life. What was destroyed in the post-Roman centuries, and then only very slowly re-created, was a sophisticated world with very deep roots indeed.