by Kevin Reilly
The problem with all these associations is that they reflect the viewpoint of people in city-based societies. It is a self-congratulatory view that originated in the first cities themselves. The Epic of Gilgamesh presents such a perspective:
. . . ramparted Uruk,
Where fellows are resplendent in holiday
clothing,
Where every day is set for celebration.
Moreover, it is the view that the upper class and literate class developed of itself. The ideas of civilization, progress, and perhaps even change were urban inventions, created to denigrate the people of farm and pasture as “uncivilized” or “barbaric.” Thus, to ask if city society was an improvement is to open a huge can of worms.
Clearly, we are well advised to ask “good for whom?” The Egyptian official described above lived far better than his chief fowler; he, in turn, lived far more comfortably than the rowers in the master’s ship. But did the rise of cities and state societies improve the lives of most people? Did it raise the level of living for future generations?
There are many reasons to say “no”: increased inequality, suppression of women, slavery, organized warfare, conscription, heavy taxation, and forced labor, to name some of the most obvious. A list like this is enough to make one wonder if anything good came out of the first state societies. But we do not have to wonder long.
Achievements of Ancient Civilizations . Our museums are full of the art and artifacts of the ancient civilizations. The monuments of the ancient world, the pyramids of Egypt and of Mexico, and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia are among the wonders of the world. Does it matter that the great pyramids of Egypt were built from the forced labor of thousands to provide a resting place for a single person (and those who were entombed alive in order to serve him)? We can view them today as a remarkable achievement of engineering and organization while still condemning their manner of execution. We can admire the art in the tombs, thrill to the revealing detail of ancient Egyptian life, and marvel at the persistence of vivid colors mixed almost 5,000 years ago and still detest their purpose.
We can do this because these monuments have become something different for us than what they were for the ancients. They have become testaments to human achievement, regardless of the cost. These ancient city-based societies were the first in which humans produced abundant works of art and architecture that still astound us in their range, scope, and design.
The significance of the urban revolution is that it produced things that lasted beyond their utility or meaning—thanks to new techniques in stonecutting and hauling; baking brick, tile, and glass; and smelting tin, copper, and bronze—as a legacy for future generations. Even 3,000 years ago, Egyptian engineers studied the ancient pyramids to understand a very distant past, 1,500 years before, and to learn, adapt, revive, or revise ancient techniques. In short, the achievement of the urban revolution is that it made knowledge cumulative so that each generation could stand on the shoulders of its predecessors.
Writing . The invention of writing was the single most important step in the urban revolution. Almost all the ancient city societies created some form of writing. The techniques and symbols differed widely. The earliest system in Mesopotamia, called cuneiform, began with wedge markings in clay, sun-dried or oven-baked to form a permanent record. Egyptians and Mesoamericans developed hieroglyphic systems of pictures and symbols painted on a sort of paper that the Egyptians made from papyrus leaves and the Mexicans made from bark. The Inca of Peru devised one of the most unusual systems for recording information; they tied knots at particular intervals on strings of different colors and weaves and hung dozens of these strings from a horizontal belt called a khipu. The combination of knot placement and color and weave of string gave an Inca khipu maker 1,500 separate units of information, like digital bits according to a recent study,8 a number equal to the approximately 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs.
Remarkably, writing was invented for different purposes in different societies, and creating literature was not one of them. The first writing in Mesopotamia registered economic information about temple workers, such as work schedules and ration payments. In Egypt, writing designated kinship relations and property ownership. Mayan writing related the ancestors and achievements of Mayan kings. The earliest examples of Chinese writing that we have are the inscriptions written on animal bones that were used in the Shang dynasty about 4,000 years ago. Priests would inscribe their questions on the bones and then put them in a fire until they cracked. The lines of the cracks were interpreted as answers to their questions.
Control and Change . In these and other ancient state societies, writing was invented as a means of social control and administration by the wealthy and powerful. In its origins, writing had nothing to do with self-expression or literature, and it served only the interests of a tiny portion of the population. But writing was too powerful an invention to be contained within a narrow class. Despite frequent efforts by priests and scribes to preserve their monopoly, they could not control the spread or use of reading and writing. By 1700 BCE, at the latest, the story of Gilgamesh had been written down, and Egyptian scribes were copying sample letters and descriptions of society to learn to write.
Writing was one of the most important forces for change in the Bronze Age. Even if it had been limited to the scribes, it would have inevitably led to innovation. Writing enabled a range of other crucial breakthroughs. Calendars were written representations of the changes in evening light (lunar) and the seasons (solar). At first an aid to determine the time of planting, especially in Egypt, where the river rose predictably, solar calendars became complex records of the movement of the stars and in Mayan society remarkably accurate measures of time. In conjunction with written observations about the movement of the stars and the natural rhythms of the earth, the beginnings of astronomy and earth science evolved.
There were other important forces of change in state societies. All technological innovation takes on a certain momentum of its own as improvements are made and problems lead to new breakthroughs. In ancient societies, however, such improvements were by no means as rapid as they have become in modern times. The class divisions of the ancient world generally divided manual labor and technical knowledge on the one hand from science and the power to innovate on the other. Markets were a richer source of change in the Bronze Age, as was the meeting of traders in market areas, especially in city-states, where markets played a greater role than they did in territorial states. Before the invention of coinage in the seventh century BCE in Lydia (modern Turkey), however, the range of trade and markets was limited.
Not all forces of change in ancient society came from inside the society. Traders often came from distant lands, for example, and their very presence would encourage thoughts about different ways of doing things. In addition, there was a very powerful force of change restlessly looking on from the frontiers of ancient states. Perhaps the most important of these frontier societies consisted of the people of the pasture.
Pasture and Empire
The urban revolution began with the transformation of some highly productive or well-placed agricultural villages into cities 5,000 years ago. While some prospered as city-states, others turned outward and created larger territorial states. Warfare punctuated the relations of them all.
Across Eurasia, an additional threat to the stability of city societies came from the grasslands, where people specialized in animal husbandry and traveled with their animals from one grazing land to another. In most of Eurasia, a revolution that began with cities ended with empires that were made possible by changes outside the city walls in the pasture.
People domesticated animals almost everywhere they domesticated plants, beginning 10,000 years ago. Early communities like Catal Huyuk lived on both food sources. Village and later city settlements continued to keep chickens, goats, sheep, ducks, turkeys, and other domesticates within the city walls. The rooster’s announcement of sunrise can still be heard in most cities of
the world. But at some point, the raising of animals became a specialized activity, and the growth of herds required a continual search for grasslands instead of settlement. This was especially the case over the huge grasslands that run across Eurasia, from eastern Europe across Turkey, Russia, Mongolia, and China.
Agriculture and the settled life flourished especially in well-watered places and times. Pasture expanded across the dry, treeless grasslands of central Asia—and farther during times of drought. Most of the period between 3000 and 2200 BCE provided ample moisture to feed the agricultural settlements of the Middle East. From 2200 to 1900 BCE, however, low rainfall reduced the number and size of northern Mesopotamian settlements by about a third, turning many of the farmers who did not flee to the south into pastoral nomads. Similar conditions may have aided the spread of pastoral lands elsewhere.
Nomads Put the Horse before the Cart . A catalyst for this change to a migratory life in the central Asian steppe was the horse. Before the domestication of the horse about 3500 BCE in southern Russia, people in the grasslands of Eurasia lived along rivers, where they farmed and raised sheep, goats, and cattle. Near these settlements, archaeologists have even found the remains of domesticated pigs, which are never kept by nomads.
After 2000 BCE, horses gave the people of the Eurasian grasslands easy movement and a much greater range, allowing them to increase vastly the size of their herds. Evidence of bit marks on horses’ teeth suggests the early use of bridles and of horseback riding, but it was the invention of spoked wheels, carts, and chariots (see Map 2.2) that transformed the economy of the grasslands from mixed farming and grazing to nomadic animal raising. With horse-drawn carts, people could comfortably take themselves and their belongings over an almost endless supply of pasture. Sheep and goats remained the staples of their herds, supplying most of the peoples’ needs for food, hides, wool, and even dung for fuel, but horses put their previously settled world in motion. The change was somewhat akin to fishermen who were used to casting their lines from the shore suddenly getting ships to fish the open seas.
Everyone took up the new nomadic life, from forest dwellers in Siberia to settled farmers along the southern border of the grasslands. A world of different isolated cultures became a single culture of nomadic pastoralism. The similar transformation of the North American plains when the Spanish introduced the horse after 1500 shows how rapid such a change could be. Within a century, widely differing tribal cultures all seized on the advantage of horseback riding for hunting bison, creating a “Plains Indian” culture that was entirely new.
New Balance between City and Pasture . The new nomads of Eurasia brought change to city societies in a number of important ways. Their mobility brought them physically closer to new cities. They entered a closer relationship of reciprocal wants and needs. The herdsmen desired the fine clothes, jewels, and precious products of the cities as well as wheat for bread. City rulers recognized the value of horses and horse-drawn vehicles. But the relationship between farm and pasture could verge from fraternal to fratricidal. Gilgamesh both battles and befriends the wild man En-kidu from the grasslands, and in the Bible, Cain the farmer slays his brother Abel the herdsmen.
As city societies built walls and trained armies to raid others, the nomadic peoples forged military formations of their own with horse-drawn chariots. In clashes with settled societies, charioteers with bows and arrows enjoyed the advantage of speed and surprise. Their forces transformed the balance of power from southern Europe to China. The settled communities closest to the Eurasian grasslands were the first to recognize the value of the new technology and make it their own.
Nomads Conquer and Create Empires . Tribal leaders and kings of border states in what is today Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and central Asia were instrumental in creating the new technology that melded horses and wheels into a powerful force for change. In some cases, as in India, the new technology gave an edge to Indo-Aryan-speaking nomadic peoples who already lived in the subcontinent. In other cases, the combination of horses and wheels created a devastating war machine of trained archers and chariot drivers that overcame the cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Indo-Aryan nomads probably lived among the Indus cities long before they were abandoned around 1500 BCE. These people introduced camels before 1500 BCE, but horses and chariots did not come until later when the center of urban life had shifted east toward the area of the Ganges River.
Since the writing of Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and the other Indus cities has not been translated, we do not know how similar or different their culture was from the Indo-Aryan Sanskrit culture that emerged after 1500 BCE. Nevertheless, the great Indian epic Mahab-harata tells stories of battles between archers on chariots. In one famous passage, the god Krishna, incarnated as a charioteer, explains that members of the military caste must not shirk their obligation to wage war. Similarly, the oldest extant Sanskrit document of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, laid out the prayers and sacrifices of tribes skilled in horsemanship whose leaders were charioteers. In fact, the spoked wheel of the chariot became an enduring symbol of India, transformed into a symbol of eternal return in Hindu and Buddhist imagery and displayed on the modern flag of India after independence in 1947.
The conquest of Mesopotamia by the charioteers of the Kassite kingdom of Iran was more of a military affair. While the Kassites were still able to defeat the cities of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, they could not or chose not to impose their culture on the more sophisticated one they conquered. Instead, they learned Akkadian (the educated language of Mesopotamia), copied the stories of gods like Marduk and heroes like Gilgamesh, and revived the law codes of Hammurabi. As the Kassites became like Babylonians, new kingdoms arose to take advantage of the chariot military technology, like the Hittites and the Assyrians.
The Egyptians were conquered by a chariot-based military kingdom called the Hyksos, who came from the area of Syria and Palestine. The Hyksos imposed a regime that was partly foreign and partly respectful of Egyptian traditions. They moved the capital from Thebes to Avaris and partnered with the Nubian kingdom of Kush, south of Egypt. In response, a prince of Thebes led a successful Egyptian rebellion against the Hyksos and established an Egyptian New Kingdom that reconquered Nubia and used Nubian gold to pay for the best horses, chariots, and charioteers that money could buy. Horses do not breed easily close to the equator because their estrous cycle is triggered by changing hours of sunlight, so the Egyptians got their horses from the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia (present-day Turkey). A letter from the period reveals that, for Nubian gold, the Hittites supplied not only the horses but the equivalent number of chariots as well. It was today’s equivalent of getting a fleet of jet planes, complete with trained pilots and spare parts.
States Regain Empires with Chariots . In Egypt and then in Mesopotamia, native chariot-based states created empires larger than any that had ever existed before. Earlier ancient Egypt had looked inward, protected by miles of desert. By contrast, the Egyptian New Kingdom after 1600 BCE created an empire that extended from Nubia to Syria. Similarly, the Kassites, Hittites, and Assyrians controlled all of Turkey and the northern Middle East. Horse-drawn chariots vastly increased the range of military conquest and administration. It was an international age. Akkadian became the first transnational language, used in diplomatic correspondence from Egypt to Iran.
Chariots gave the Bronze Age states of Eurasia a new lease on life. By increasing the size of states and turning them into empires, chariots vastly expanded the number and size of dependent villages, cities, and kingdoms that the great states could tax and exploit. The Egyptian New Kingdom (1570-1085 BCE) was marked by some of the greatest cultural achievements (though the period of the pyramids was long past): Queen Hatshepsut established trade relations with Punt in East Africa in 1493, Akhetaton initiated the monotheistic worship of Aten around 1362, and Ramesis II carried Egyptian armies to their widest boundaries by 1283.
The success of these empires was temporary, however. T
he imbalances that characterized Bronze Age states remained. In fact, in some important ways, they increased. Kings became richer and more remote from their subjects. Farming communities were exploited more and more. Military occupations became more brutal and slavery more pervasive. The greatest of the new empires, the Assyrian, prided itself on the brutality of its armies. At some point, the farmers and other producing classes of Bronze Age society were squeezed beyond the point of return. Between 1200 BCE and 1000 BCE, many of these empires declined. By 1000, many in the eastern Mediterranean were in a state of collapse.
Empires and Collapse
Ruined cities are evocative sights. The barest of them evokes the life of a distant time far more persuasively than the most thorough Disneyesque re-creation. But one question they usually leave unanswered is “why?” Why did they decline? Why were they abandoned? A frequent answer is “earthquake,” and often the stones of ancient ruins seem to have been tossed by a careless Earth. But earthquakes were often final indignities that followed curable catastrophes.
The Bronze Age city of Ugarit, a rich kingdom at the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, was destroyed by an earthquake, fire, and tidal wave around 1300 BCE. The entire port and half the city laid in ruins. But not for long. With the help of the wealthy merchant families and possibly its Hittite overlord, Ugarit was rebuilt and prospered anew. But then around 1200 BCE, Ugarit suffered pirate raids, and the declining Hittite Empire was in no position to help. A poem suggests the mood of the times:
