The Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of Culture in Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient East

360 Pages·2012·2.56 MB·English

by  Christopher Dawson

The age of The gods
the works of christopher dawson
General Editor: Don J. Briel
Christopher Dawson
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The Age of
The gods
A Study in the Origins
of Culture in Prehistoric Europe
and the Ancient East
with an introduction by dermot Quinn
The Catholic University of America Press
Washington, d.C.
first published in 1928 by John Murray
This edition is published by arrangement with Mr. Julian scott,
literary executor of the author
Copyright © 1928 Julian scott
Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Catholic University of america Press
all rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
american National standards for Information science—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
dawson, Christopher, 1889–1970.
The age of the gods : a study in the origins of culture in prehistoric europe
and the ancient near east / Christopher dawson ; with an introduction by
dermot Quinn.
p. cm. — (The works of Christopher dawson)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8132-1977-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Civilization, ancient.
2. Prehistoric peoples. I. Title.
cb301.d3 2012
930.1--dc23 2012010574
Contents
Introduction by dermot Quinn vii
Preface xxi
Introduction xxiii
i. The glacial age and the Beginnings of human Life
in europe 1
ii. Later Palæolithic Culture and the Religion
of the hunter 15
iii. The dawn of the Neolithic age and the Rise of
the Peasant Culture in europe 32
iv. asia and the origins of the higher Civilisation 46
v. Neolithic Culture and the Religion of the Peasant 64
vi. The City state and the development of the
sumerian Culture 81
vii. The archaic Culture in egypt and the development
of the great state 103
viii. The dawn of the higher Civilisation in europe:
Crete and the Ægean Culture 123
ix. The origins of the Megalithic Culture and Its
expansion in Western europe 141
x. spain and the Later development of the
Megalithic Culture in Western europe 154
xi. The Warrior Peoples and the decline of the
archaic Civilisation 174
xii. The Nordic Culture and the origins of the
Warrior Peoples in europe 192
vi Contents
xiii. The age of empire in the Near east: egypt,
asia Minor, and syria 213
xiv. The Bronze age in Central europe and the
formation of the Indo-european Peoples 230
xv. The Mycenæan Culture of greece and the age
of the Invasions 253
xvi. Italy and the Beginnings of the Iron age
in europe 268
Bibliography 285
Chronological Tables 305
Index of Names 319
Index of subjects 323
Introduction
dermot Quinn
The Age of the Gods is an astonishing book by an extraordinary writer.
Nearly forty years old when it was published, Christopher dawson was
no longer young for a first-time author. he had worked on the book
for nearly fifteen years and had thought about its major themes even
longer. Nor, as a part-time lecturer at exeter University in the south-
west of england, was he a figure of much academic standing. Nor was
he likely to make much of a splash. Quiet, shy, and reserved, he was
a scholar’s scholar, an improbable popularizer. Yet The Age of the Gods
helped change that picture. In scope and erudition, imagination and
seriousness, judgment and verve, it stands unrivaled, as does its author,
in early-twentieth-century english historical writing. ernest Barker,
his oxford tutor, thought dawson “without exaggeration” the most
learned student he had ever taught—“a man who was of the company
of acton and Baron von hügel.” The Age of the Gods, with its sweeping
survey of the spiritual and material life of man from the earliest civiliza-
tions to the beginning of the greek city states, gives some sense of the
range and depth of that learning. When it appeared in 1928, the first
in a projected series of books on the Life of Civilizations, The Times
Literary Supplement proclaimed it “the best short account of our knowl-
edge of pre-historic man, especially since the dawn of the Bronze age,
that has so far been written.” The anonymous reviewer of The Journal
of Hellenic Studies thought it “admirable.” J. L. Myres in The Classical
Review found it “constructive.” gordon Childe in Antiquity considered
it “the most successful effort” he had ever come across to “reanimate
the frame of prehistoric humanity.” even C. daryll forde, a somewhat
pedantic anthropologist who offered trivial criticisms, conceded that
The Age of the Gods was “clear and well balanced,” “skillful and conscien-
vii
viii Dermot Quinn
tious,” “suggestive and illuminating”—qualities obvious to readers ever
since, who have marveled at its combination of poetry and prose, care-
ful scholarship, and intoxicating religious beauty.1 They have seen in it
an almost mystical quality, as if the author, knowing his materials with
such intimacy, has entered into deeper communion with them, so that
he is no longer a commentator on ancient peoples but, in a way, their
companion. “a culture can only be understood from within,” he tells us
at the beginning of the book. “It is a spiritual community which owes
its unity to common beliefs and a common attitude to life.” almost
contradicting his own thesis, dawson, an outsider, seems to enter “the
inner life of primitive culture.”2 There are few books more deeply felt
or imaginatively realized in recent historical writing. It is good that a
new generation is being introduced to it.
Yet, The Age of the Gods is not an easy book to read or to categorize.
some will find its detail daunting (although others will be fascinat-
ed), but they will wonder, as they make their way through Megalithic
tombs and Beaker People, through peasant cultures and warrior cul-
tures, what precisely it is that they are reading. It is not a popular work
nor a specialist one but one that lies somewhere in between: a highly
erudite and even, at times, obscure cultural history of the first civiliza-
tions, pitched at the intelligent general reader who must be prepared
to do some work to receive his reward. In fact, The Age of the Gods bril-
liantly exemplifies dawson’s double ability to analyze and to synthe-
size, to break down and to build up, to offer extremely close readings
and exceptionally broad ones, so that, by the end of the book, the read-
er has scrutinized the smallest detail of an egyptian vase and thought
about its place in the huge sweep of man’s search for the divine. That
is why Myres applauded dawson’s capacity “to clarify his presentation
of a very large mass of facts and to suggest fresh aspects in which they
deserve to be examined carefully.” he gets to the heart of things. Nearly
1. Times Literary Supplement, June 28, 1928, 478; Journal of Hellenic Studies 49, Part 1
(1929):122–24; Classical Review 42, no. 5 (November 1928): 172–74; American Anthropolo-
gist 34, New series, no. 2 (april–June 1932): 340–41.
2. The citations to Christopher dawson, The Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of
Culture in Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient East (London: sheed and Ward, 1934), are most
often referred to by chapter and section numbers. for these quotations see chap. 2, sec. 1.
Introduction ix
a century on, the work of other historians, ethnographers, and philolo-
gists has done little to dislodge this acclaim. The Age of the Gods, wel-
comed in 1928, re-issued in 1970, has stood the test of time, a test daw-
son himself considered a crucial indicator of depth and authenticity. Its
latest publication is an opportunity to enjoy once more a major work
and to reconsider its place in dawson’s thought as a whole.
so what, then, are we reading? The Age of the Gods is certainly pre-
history. Its methods may be those of the historian, the archæologist,
the ethnographer, the anthropologist, the philologist, even the art
critic, but its subject-matter lies in the mysterious dawn of unwritten
human deeds that are not in a technical sense historical, however much
they may have occurred in the past. Yet dawson was, self-consciously,
a historian—not an ethnographer, not an archæologist—and he wished
his book to be thought of as a contribution to that field. “We are wit-
nessing the rise of a new science which will study man’s past,” he said,
“not as an inorganic mass of isolated events, but as the manifestation of
the growth and mutual interaction of living cultural wholes.”3 In this
sense, The Age of the Gods, examining ancient cultures as synthetic cre-
ations of multiple spiritual and material impulses, was itself a synthe-
sis, a blend of different insights from many areas of study. The “new
science” was a different way of doing history that appropriated the
subject-matter and methods of disciplines that were not convention-
ally historical and, out of them, fashioned new and more creative ways
of understanding the past as a living, dynamic reality. “history,” the
anonymous reviewer of The Times Literary Supplement put it, “once be-
yond the narrow bounds of the written record, is winning its ground
bit-by-bit in the shifting mists and morasses of pre-history. . . . Knowl-
edge of mankind is knowledge only insofar as it is historical.” If its
methods were “still young” (as dawson acknowledged in his preface
to the book), he had high hopes for this new science, on the one hand
rescuing the past from mere antiquarianism or political partisanship,
and giving it professional respectability and moral value on the other.
In some ways, then, The Age of the Gods was of its time and place,
growing out of a particular moment and responding to it, a contribu-
3. see dawson’s “Preface.”