Ancients vs. Moderns

• Published in: The National interest no. 164; pp. 69 - 76
• Main Author: Gilmour, Andrew Skitt
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Center for the National Interest 01.11.2019; The National Interest, Inc; The National Interest Inc
• Subjects: 20th century; American soldiers; Ancient civilizations; Ancient history; Antiquity; Army; Banking; Cold War; Contemporary problems; Government agencies; Greek civilization; Hussein, Saddam; Intelligence gathering; Military personnel; Orientalism; Politics; Public domain; Religion; Rivers; Soldiers; Middle East; Greece; United States > US
• ISSN: 0884-9382; 1938-1573

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 US soldiers--a sergeant--who regularly patrolled the streets of Baghdad. He was the tip of a US 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. 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.