Ancient lessons and modern dangers considered in Dr Cooper’s talk

By Sophie MacDonald

Dr Paul Cooper presented his new book, Fall of Civilisations: Stories of Greatness and Decline, at the Gibraltar Literary Festival.

He both compellingly and poignantly detailed the fragility of human existence, the lessons to be learned from the past and, although conceding that “history has made fools of those who try” to predict the future, prophetically considered what lies in the future of the Earth.

The world, Dr Cooper explains, is in ruins. As we apprehensively march towards the dire effects of climate change, Dr Cooper also looks back to how ancient civilisations, from Mesopotamia to the Maya, left messages for us and how we should be heeding their warnings.

Dr Cooper began his talk with an image of The New Zealander by Gustav Doré (1872), showing a foreigner in a distant future journeying to see the sprawling ruins of London - a roofless St. Paul's Cathedral and London Bridge in rubble. Through this image, Dr Cooper contemplated the dreaded question: “what will become of us?”.

Next, followed an anecdote from 2016, when Dr Cooper’s research took him to Iraq.
He remembered visiting Saddam Hussein’s palace, built on top of the archeological ruins of Babylon.

Today, the palace is abandoned and crumbling - it stands “on the ruins of Babylon like a bad joke”. He used this example to show how civilisations can be “rubbed out and inscribed again” - especially if they are placed in the wrong hands.

Dr Cooper’s talk was full of allusions to how palimpsestic history is: we build on top of the ruins that came before us, and almost vertiginously place our own meanings on spaces previously occupied by those who came before.

Dr Cooper describes a ruin as a “paradox” showing the effects of time in a place where “the mind can’t stay quiet”.

They are, as he describes, places of “historical rupture, where one day the future was cancelled”.

Ruins - created by wars and turmoil and ravaged by time - remind us what could await our own civilisations.

This reminder was stark for Dr Cooper’s next example: he detailed how, after witnessing the destruction of Carthage, Scipio Aemilanus broke out weeping and cited a passage from Homer’s Iliad, quoting “the day will come when sacred Ilium shall perish, / with Priam and his people”.

He was reflecting on the unpredictable nature of fortune and saw a parallel between Carthage’s fate and the potential future downfall of Rome – which, we know, did come.

It is ironic how neatly Dr Cooper was able to tie in these ancient stories of destruction with the reality of global warming threatening our own civilisations.

He cited chilling statistics about the future and noted how walls have “already been built to separate empires and those less likely to survive”.

He described how we are “fast heading towards, or have already passed various tipping points of global warming”, and considered how durable messages from our digital world will be - will our stories survive as long as those written down on clay if future civilisations can’t unlock our iPhones? Will we be remembered as another civilisation that let destruction happen?

However, he emphasised that it is not a “matter of abandoning hope, but changing it”.

He noted how, across these ancient civilisations, “where there is collapse, there is rebuilding”, and this is what we must learn from - from the “ruins of the great cities of the fallen world”.