But the wallless brutes and the subsequent conquerors weren’t really leading enviable lives either, their lives essentially lacking any pleasure outside of rape, pillaging and murder. The walled in civilized society got soft and weak over time, making it easily conquerable. But Frye really puts forth a compelling argument and empirical evidence to support it. Some may dismiss it as an oversimplification. So it’s the basic brain and brawn dichotomy.

Frye’s perspective on the matter is fairy binary and best represented in the Athens/Sparta duality…those who built walls, enjoys a relatively safe environment where sciences and arts would emerge and thrive, those who didn’t build walls relying instead on their sheer muscles for safety were uncivilized barbarians. Walls have been around since the early days of civilization, in fact an argument made in this book is that walls are very much responsible for civilization as we know it.

With the balkanization and increased nationalism of the world…there is no more apt physical representation of it than an actual wall. (Aug.The subject of walls is all the rage nowadays. Agent: Peter Steinberg, Foundry Literary + Media. Readers will find Frye’s rumination-on the reasons walls exist and will continue to exist, what they can and cannot do, and their contribution to the growth of civilization-informative, relevant, and thought-provoking. And he considers the psychological impact of 21st-century walls on both migrants and refugees and the wall-builders trying to turn them away. He notes that the walls constructed by the Chinese Empire paradoxically fostered early globalization by imparting to travelers and merchants the safety that made the Silk Road possible, but also encouraged isolation that left an opening for Western empires to conquer the rest of the world. Early societies, Frye writes, built walls as a security measure against the barbarism of raiding tribes from the Eurasian steppe (here described in needlessly graphic detail). Starting at the 4,000-year-old Great Wall of Shulgi, in Sumer, Frye-writing in a breezy and often humorous style (he calls Hadrian “the old drama queen”)-skips across history to ancient Greek walls, Hadrian’s Wall in England, the border walls of China, France’s Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall, and the proliferating walls in 21st-century Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Frye, a teacher of ancient and medieval history, offers an accessible history of walls and wall builders.

Walls david frye