From walls of necessity to walls of human engineering

SALISBURY — David Frye, professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University and author of the recently published “Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick,” said he did not set out to write a political book, and backed it up by not talking about politics — at least, not contemporary politics.

Frye spoke at Noble Horizons on Saturday, March 30.

He said the effort that eventually produced “Walls” began as he considered the idea of civilization vs. outsiders.

“But along the way I kept finding …,” and he showed the first of a series of photographs of walls.

The photos included walls in China and Tunisia, England and Vietnam. He said he noticed there was no general history of walls, which struck him as odd, considering there are “micro-histories” about water, salt, cod.

And perhaps such a history was overdue — especially considering that “millions of people participated in the construction” of the world’s walls, and millions more lived on one side or the other.

He ran the idea past a colleague, who opined that the reason nobody had written a history of walls was “because nobody gives a flip.”

Then came the 2016 presidential election, and suddenly everybody was talking about a wall on the southern border of the United States.

“Maybe people at this point gave a flip about walls.”

So he shelved a perfectly good, 450-page manuscript on civilization and outsiders and began working on “Walls.”

The book is divided into three main sections. The first examines the role of walls in making civilization possible. The middle section concerns the “Great Age of Walls,” especially the role of walls in imperial civilizations. And the third deals with the decline and subsequent return of border walls, and how walls become symbols.

There are many of them 

Frye said the 21st century thus far has been marked by a “proliferation” of border walls, sometimes with little or no fanfare (in Saudi Arabia, India, Thailand and Jordan) and sometimes with considerable publicity (Israel, Hungary and the U.S.). 

“There is nothing new in this,” said Frye. 

What is thought to be the earliest example of a city wall is in what is now Syria. Frye showed a picture and conceded that after 10,000 years, there’s not much left of it except a line of rocks in a desert that clearly didn’t get that way by themselves. Frye said there is no historical record of this wall.

Walls that have some documentation date back to at least 4,000 years ago.

Old walls vs. new

The technology of walls has changed, Frye said. A modern wall relies on razor wire and electronic sensors; an ancient wall was constructed of mud bricks and tamped earth.

“What is new is the nature of conflict. For thousands of years real battles were fought at walls. The outcomes determined the fate of cities and kingdoms.”

“The battles today are political — but with an equal level of viciousness.”

Frye said a relatively new phenomenon is “a tendency to put things in moralistic terms” when discussing border walls.

Ancient city walls were “regarded as necessary, part of the urban landscape.”

(An exception to this in the ancient world was the Spartans, who refused to put a wall around their city and ridiculed their Greek rival city-states for cowering behind their city walls.)

Walls and neighbors

There were detractors. Frye said to the workers who built China’s many border walls, going back to the third century B.C., walls were a symbol of forced labor.

But for most of history there has been a general sense that defining and defending boundaries is a good thing for a civilization, or a city, or even between farms.

The Berlin Wall

Frye then shifted to the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. 

Thar wall was built to stop the large numbers of East Germans and others within the Soviet bloc from making their way to the western part of the city (controlled by the U.K., France and the U.S., and still completely within East Germany) and eventually to West Germany

Or elsewhere.

This was no trickle of refugees, either. Frye said some four million people left Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe for the West after World War II.

The USSR had effectively walled off most of Eastern Europe. By 1961, Berlin was the last remaining point.

The worry among top government officials in the West was that the Soviet response would be nuclear if the western allies did not abandon West Berlin.

So to President John F. Kennedy and his counterparts, the construction of the wall came as a relief.

Frye said what happened next was interesting.

“The politicians lost control of the narrative.”

Western news reports of brave and desperate East Germans risking their lives to get around, over, or under the Berlin Wall received a lot of attention and “sensationalized the story.”

The Berlin Wall became a global symbol of oppression — of a government that built a wall not to deter invaders, but to keep its own citizens from leaving.

 

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