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? As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia’s steppes learn of bizarre Spartan rituals watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes witness the epic siege of Constantinople chill at the fate of French explorers marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty and contemplate the wall mania of our own era.Ī masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling, Walls is alternately evocative, amusing, chilling, and deeply insightful as it gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches.For over ten thousand years, much of humankind has lived inside walls behind walls behind still more walls. 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 Frye as our raconteur-guide, 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. It is a haunting and frequently eye-opening saga - one that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live. In Walls historian David Frye tells the epic story of history’s greatest man-made barriers, from ancient times to the present.
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