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Forgotten cultures – Il Sole 24 ORE

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Although the flap exhibits the author’s academic credentials, this book (the first in Italian) can be read like a novel. A novel in twenty-five chapters, with protagonists who change from one to the other, in a story that goes from the very remote homo heidelbergensis of the first chapter to the settlements of six hundred years ago in the Amazon rainforest of the last pages.

Moving from one continent to another and from one age to another, this travelogue he outlines examples of “mysterious Cinderella in the history of the world“, civilizations neglected by historians because they are marginal in the “political and cultural developments that led to modern Europe”. Hence the two words of the title (“forgotten”) and the subtitle (“lost”). But how to forget the famous Minoan ruins of Crete, the Etruscans whose exhibitions multiply, the celebrated goldsmiths of the Scythians, the Moai of Easter Island, Palmyra with the destruction suffered by Isis, or Angkor Wat in Cambodia? Perhaps the author was counting on the curious effect produced by the alternation of these places (often lucky tourist destinations) with very little known cultures? Among these, we find in the book the eight hunting javelins excavated in 1994 not far from Helmstedt, which perhaps open a window on hominids of 320,000 years ago, much older than the species homo sapiens to which we belong. Or the legendary Dilmun, where in the meantime Roberto Calasso in his just released book (The tablet of destinies, Adelphi 2020) has landed, shipwrecked, Sindbad the Sailor; or the “Cyclopean” walls of “Great Zimbabwe”, a city that flourished between the 11th and 15th centuries but neglected by the governments of the then Rhodesia, unwilling to recognize native Africans as an indigenous urban development.

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Haarmann intertwines disciplines, from archeology to linguistics, to investigations on the DNA sequences of more or less “mysterious” populations. It points us, from one culture to another, to this or that pattern that unites them, and not only to be (if they are) considered peripheral by our Eurocentrism. The range of knowledge mobilized from page to page is so vast and varied that it is impossible to judge to what extent the interpretations and links offered here are guaranteed or without alternatives. But while the narrative machine is in motion, it is increasingly clear that the author proposes to explore with him these “twenty-five lost paths” to share the rejection of what he calls “stereotyped thinking”. For example, the one according to which the cradle of the most ancient advanced agrarian civilizations must be sought in Mesopotamia and Egypt and not in Balkan Europe as Marija Gimbutas wanted, with her famous and controversial theses on “Ancient Europe”, which Haarmann faithfully embraces.

Thus some are aligned leitmotif transversal, which correspond to areas in which according to the author the cultures called to witness have something to teach us. In “Ancient Europe” (which includes Albania, Hungary, Carpathians, Transylvania), for example, “according to current knowledge we can infer that the Danubian civilization was constituted by an egalitarian society”, devoid of any hierarchy and with perfectly balanced relationships between women and men. Deduction: with a social model based on cooperation between the two sexes and on the total absence of hierarchies “it is possible to reach high socio-economic and technological standards”, indeed a “first model of Commonwealth”. According to Haarmann, the society of Çatalhöyük (in Turkey), “the oldest metropolis in the world” (VIII-VI millennium BC), was also devoid of social hierarchies, with no differentiation between public and private buildings even in a large urban context. The same he thinks of the Indus civilizations (2800-1800 BC), characterized by social and economic equality as well as by the “social model of an integrated economic area, a Commonwealth, which does not lead to the constitution of a political empire”. Similar hints are found elsewhere in the book, for example with regard to the archaeological site of Loulan in the Xinjiang province of China (2nd-1st millennium BC), where the equality between women and men is argued with the similarity of the grave goods, and are if anything, women sometimes have richer graves. The same goes for the Chachapoyas of the Andes (VIII-XV century AD), a «substantially egalitarian society» where «perhaps women had a preponderant role».

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It is difficult to silence the suspicion that these statements suffer from anachronism, or at least from an excess of modernization, and that the author is exaggerating for the sake of thesis. Is it really true that after the mortuary temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut (c. 1450 BC) “we will have to wait a thousand years to see another perfectly symmetrical building, the Parthenon”? Or that the ancient Greeks “removed from cultural memory” the civilization of the Pelasgians, when what little we know about them – starting with the name – is handed down from Greek sources? Here we see a tendentious use of documentation at work, which somewhat resembles the political uses of archeology he often mentioned, such as the peace treaty in cuneiform script between a Hittite king and a pharaoh of 1258 BC copied to the Nations United. Thus we end up understanding that in this book we are the real protagonists, the present in which we live. We must learn, the author suggests, from the “peaceful character of Minoan society”, or from the environmental disasters that caused the decline of Dilmun, the decline of the Indus cultures, the depopulation of Easter Island, the abandonment of the city. walled of Great Zimbabwe.

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