Michael Galaty is a senior Mediterranean archaeologist well known for his fieldwork in Albania and Greece. In this ambitious undertaking, he develops a model for the role of collective memory in the rise and fall of states. Closely following Halbwachs and Assmann, Galaty defines collective memory as ‘a symbolic, social-structural system that situates cultural behaviors in space and time by linking them to a constructed past’ (p. 2). The central premise of the book is that would-be leaders of states—ancient and modern—consolidate and maintain power by controlling collective memory. Galaty illustrates his ideas using case studies from three regions of the Mediterranean—Egypt, Greece and Albania. In the opening pages, Galaty tells us that his book is a positivist response to the work of Laurent Olivier (Reference Olivier and Greenspan2012). Fair warning: this reviewer's proclivities align more with Olivier than with Assmann. But Galaty's aims are laudable, and I respect the breadth of the scholarship on display here, so I provide a description of the work before voicing a few of my most critical concerns.

Galaty's book is elegantly constructed. Well-chosen literary epigraphs open most chapters, and he personalizes the work at beginning and end with his own memory narratives. In the first chapter, Galaty lays out his model for collective memory and political control in states. Collective memories are individual memories writ large, he says. Following neuropsychologist Daniel Schacter (Reference Schacter1996), collective memories can be characterized as ‘engrams’, or patterns in the brain. Galaty tells us that in ‘simple’ societies, people create collective memories and group identities through oral histories, ancestor worship and repetitive rituals (i.e. Assmann's ‘communicative memories’). Galaty argues that as states arise, leaders must forcefully destabilize and disrupt traditional, localized memory regimes and replace them with state-sponsored rituals, texts and monuments to create a shared national identity (i.e. Assmann's ‘cultural memory’). Thus, memory building and nation building happen hand-in-hand. Galaty diagrams an ‘agentive model’ characterized by six variables—crisis, nostalgia, imagination, identity, nationalism and time—that interact within the Bourdieusian fields of doxa and opinion. States with low levels of political control ‘allow broad systems of collective memory production’ (p. 30), and the converse is also true. Resistance to the state happens through the creation of counter-memories and the challenging of official narratives.

Galaty applies his model to the rise of the state in three areas of the Mediterranean world: Egypt, Greece and Albania. In each region, Galaty traces the workings of memory engrams from the Neolithic to the twentieth century. Chapter 2 covers Egypt, where Predynastic leaders co-opted a Neolithic, family-centred focus on death and mortuary ritual and turned it into a ‘collective memory engram’ in which elite mortuary practices represented stability and unification. This stable memory regime lasted thousands of years, surviving challenges such as Akhenaten's New Kingdom attempt at disruption. It was not until seventh-century Arab conquest that Egypt's identity faltered, because Islam ‘afforded strict political control and did not depend on collective memory making’ (p.59). In the nineteenth century, Ottoman ruler Mehmed Ali revived Egypt's ancient collective memory regime as part of nation building.

In chapter 3, Galaty visits Greece, with a focus on the poorly studied Mani region. By contrast with Egypt, which has centripetal memory engrams of unification and solidarity, Greek memory is about centrifugal ‘unfolding’ or ‘becoming’ that never quite arrives. From Neolithic times onwards, he argues, Greek political organization and memory regimes have been diverse. The decentralized nature of Greek city-states allowed for competitive memory production and counter-memories. The lack of centralized political structure meant that Greek memory practices (although fragmented) could persist through thousands of years, despite foreign domination. In modernity, Greek nationalist movements have drawn on imagined common Greek heritage, racial purity, Greek language and membership in the Greek Orthodox Church.

In chapter 4, Galaty argues that in Albania, ‘traditional memory systems survived intact into modern times … precisely because the Albanians, and their ancestors, the Illyrians, did not experience processes of state formation’ (p. 102). In medieval tribal Albania, a body of oral customary law called kanun dictated the basis for correct behaviour, which was grounded in honour. Both stone landscape boundaries and rules of behaviour were extremely rigid and fixed; the honour of a family ‘could be measured, like water in a glass’ (p. 100). The history of a tribe was inscribed on the landscape, and families balanced the scales of honour with blood. The origins of the kanun stretch back to the Late Bronze/ Early Iron Age, where a burial tumulus with a preponderance of males who died violently may be evidence of a feud (p. 102). When Illyrians (ancient Albanians) met other peoples, such as Greek colonists, there was no major impact on Illyrian memory regimes. Rather, Albanian collective memory was flexible but conservative and thus persisted across millennia, defying even Ottoman invasion. In the twentieth century, Communist leaders worked hard to destroy all forms of local collective memory and force the erasure of traditional ways, hoping to re-imagine Albania as a nation-state. However, with the fall of Communism, the old ways have re-emerged.

In a final chapter, Galaty reviews his memory model and ties each region to the politics of the present. Nations must access and control the memories of their citizens, and archaeologists are needed to understand how collective memory works. Galaty invokes his model to explain the rise of ISIS, arguing that ISIS is using the same nation-building strategies as formative states have done across time. When ISIS destroys archaeological sites such as Palmyra, what they are really doing is attempting to remove the possibility of the revival of any alternative counter-memory.

Galaty is sincere about deploying the craft of archaeology to make sense of the violence and upheaval in our times. Colleagues of a processual bent who value large-scale comparative studies and who study the rise of states, nationalism and memory may well find much to interest them here. I, however, am given pause by the following concerns.

Each chapter brings together a staggering amount of information gleaned from ancient historians and archaeologists, but the (linear) temporal sweep is so vast that we are asked to accept Galaty's broad generalizations at face value—the non-specialist is given both too much, and too little, to assess whether Galaty's arguments work. And each of Galaty's cases are from the Mediterranean world, with which he is familiar, but his work purports to develop what is presumably meant as a universal model for collective memory and the rise of states. But why should the Mediterranean stand in for the rest of the world? And would the model apply in, say, the ancient Andes, or China?

Galaty purports to be testing his model through his presentation of the three case studies (p. 29), but nothing is actually tested, as there are no alternative hypotheses. Rather, Galaty seems simply to be fitting a long litany of archaeological and historical information to his model as he describes each of the three cases. The method becomes circular. For example, he says Albanian memory systems were unchanging for millennia because there was no ancient state (p. 102), but at the same time, states did not form in Albania because ‘collective memories and memory systems were structured differently there’ (p. 109). At times, the discussion contradicts itself. For example, we are told that states must control collective memory, and that totalitarian regimes have the most stable collective memory systems (p. xx), yet the totalitarian Arab regime in Egypt ‘did not depend on collective memory making’ (p. 59).

Sometimes Galaty seems to be conflating the modern nation-state with ancient states (e.g. p. 15), although in other passages he clearly knows the concept of the nation-state is a relatively recent invention. But this elision of the concept of the modern nation and the ancient state is symptomatic of what to me is the most serious problem here … an underlying essentialist notion that we can project regional ‘memory engrams’ back thousands of years into the past. For Galaty, the political pasts of Egypt, Greece, and Albania are explained by (or can be described by—for him, it's the same thing) memory ‘systems’ or ‘regimes’ that persist over millennia in each place.

In Galaty's characterization, collective memory is always something forcefully manipulated and imposed from above. All change, or attempted change, is driven by aggrandisers or invaders. This is Great Man history, from Akhenaten in Egypt to Enver Hoxha in Albania, with occasional cameos by Alexander the Great. The faceless inhabitants of Galaty's states collectively accept (or in some cases, collectively resist) would-be leaders’ machinations. There are no subjects here struggling with contradictory, multiple allegiances, beliefs and identities. But particularly in the current climate, we need to understand why and how subjects support, ignore, or resist would-be totalitarian leaders. Surely the constructed pasts that interest Galaty are but one dimension of a larger assemblage of shared beliefs and social and material relationships that enable particular kinds of power imbalances to develop, and to be challenged. A good concept for tackling these power dynamics—and a term that does not appear in Galaty's book—is ideology.