Book Review: The Beautiful West

Title: The Beautiful West 

Author: Rowan Campbell Millar

Date: 2022

Publisher: Rowan Campbell Millar

Length: 288 pages

ISBN: 979-8444577677

Quote:  "It is significant that so many peoples put the abode of the dead beyond the ocean." 

In the "Old World," Africa, Europe, and Asia, the metaphor of dying as "going west" seems to predate the invention of writing. In this very speculative, but provocative, "compilation with commentary," Rowan Campbell Millar suggests that there was a real reason for this. Much of what people believe about the afterlife comes from near-death visions people have reported, but there could have been another source of belief: sailors' stories.

Many sailors have reported perilous adventures at sea in which they may have dreamed, or may actually have found, themselves in some exotically attractive place where they rehydrated and recovered. Real or imaginary, such places would naturally have seemed like paradise to people who had collapsed from thirst and exposure. Or like the reverse: places of exile, places impossibly far away from where the sailors were trying to get to. 

Emphasis on Columbus being the first European to document the Americas has led historians to assume too quickly that all the sailors' stories were dreams or fictions. In fact the islands in both oceans, and the Americas, became populated. While lack of consistent physical differences between the Asian and American "races" led to an historical theory that all Native Americans were descended from Asians who crossed the Bering Strait, differences in the gene pools support an alternative claim that some Native Americans were also descended from Asians, Africans, and Europeans who drifted across the oceans. Certainly groups living on the east coast of South America showed some incidence of African-type DNA and historians know that Malian ships sailed west about the same time European ships started doing that. 

Millar shows similarities in ancient artefacts that don't prove, but suggest, other contacts betweem the "Old" and "New" (or "Western") hemispheres. Ancient Central American art shares motifs and seems to share symbolism with ancient Egyptian art. Is it a coincidence that both places developed written language before people to the north and south did, or that people in both places tended to be shorter than people to the north and south? That "first contact" between European and indigenous American people found some evidence of undocumented earlier contact, including a Welsh Bible that had been preserved by a midwestern tribe? Millar's study of ancient art and mythology shows additional evidence that a few people, even before St Brendan or Leif Ericsson, may have crossed the Atlantic Ocean on sailboats or even rafts. Such people would not have been able to document where they had been or persuade anyone to try going back there, but in vague mystical descriptions of the afterworld Millar finds some suggestions that early explorations of the American coast may have been made. 

Millar's findings dig back into prehistory and won't become part of the official summaries of history taught in schools. They won't be "suppressed"; they'll just remain on the fringe, material that is interesting but lies outside of history as such. The Beautiful West may be most valuable as a collection of ancient art. Much of ancient art was symbolic more than representational, and what Millar proves is that some of the symbolism in Egyptian and Mesoamerican artefacts seems to overlap. 

Millar also gives some examples of the difficulty of figuring out just what Egyptian and Sumerian words meant to their authors, whether an early document was a hymn or a recipe (or perhaps both).

The comments are on the academic side, and sometimes seem to assert as facts what Millar elsewhere admits can only be accepted as valid educated guesswork, but they are readable and they lay to rest the racist idea that only Europeans were clever enough to guess that the world might be round and try to sail to the other hemisphere. Most of humankind have always found enough to do, where they are, to be uninterested in sailing far away. Living in colder, less-rich climates probably encouraged western European and British people to take more interest in sailing and exploring than Indian and Chinese people did; still, all people living near coasts liked to sail around coasts rather than haul freight over land, and people intending to sail around coasts sometimes found themselves far out at sea.

In fact, as C.S. Lewis observed in The Allegory of Love from his reading of other historians' work, educated people before Columbus' time generally thought the world and the space around it were round; they imagined the universe as made up of concentric spheres. Columbus' revolutionary idea that he could reach the East by sailing west was not new, as some have imagined. What was new and bold in Spain, at the end of the fifteenth century, was not the idea that such a thing might be done by superhuman powers, but the idea that the technology of that era made it something people might be able to plan on doing as part of regular business.

If you're looking for documentation that, despite the distrust between countries whose religious differences had been politicized, African and Asian voices were part of the pre-Columbian world's idea of mysterious, mostly unreachable "isles of the blessed" west of Britain, here it is. 

While The Beautiful West didn't revolutionize my view of ancient history so much as it supports some suspicions historians have long entertained, its compilation of ancient art belongs in any school or museum where art history is studied.