The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves-rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected on the other, those the walls kept out. With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed-to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. The history of walls becomes more than a tale of bricks and stone it becomes the story of who we are and how we came to be.“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” ( Library Journal)-walls- and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live. As Frye guides us through a maze of exotic locales, investigating the coldest of cold cases, he gradually exposes a broader story with implications for the present as well as the past. Drawing on evidence from around the world, as well as his own experiences on archaeological digs, Frye takes us on a provocative and occasionally humorous journey across windswept deserts and grassy, Northumbrian hills. In Walls, David Frye makes a powerful case for rewriting history.
And yet they rarely appear in our history books. They have accompanied the rise of cities, nations, and empires. Great walls have appeared on every continent, the handiwork of Persians, Romans, Chinese, Inca, Ukrainians, and dozens of other peoples. In a brisk and compulsively readable narrative of invasions, empires, kings, and khans, David Frye presents a bold new theory: walls haven't just influenced the course of history they have profoundly shaped the human psyche.įor thousands of years, people have built walls and assaulted them, admired walls and reviled them. Walls have protected us and divided us, but have they also affected the way we think, work, and create? For over ten thousand years, much of humankind has lived inside walls behind walls behind still more walls.
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