by Kevin Reilly
Confucius
Legalism and the Unification of China
Qin Creates China
The Solution of Han
Empire and Dynastic Succession
The Mandate of Heaven
A Government of Experts
Salt and Iron
Palace, Consort Families, and Taxes
Strains of Empire
Conclusion
The Great Traditions
of the Classical Age
The Classical Age
WHAT IS a classic? The great American humorist Mark Twain once quipped that a classic was a book that everyone praised but no one read. There is much truth in that. Classic books, read or not, are often praised for what they symbolize as sources of a people’s culture or civilization. What is interesting is that many of the world’s people find their classics in the same historical period. That period spans no more than the few hundred years from about 600 BCE to 200 CE. In that brief period of 800 years, one could date the great Chinese classics of Confucius and Lao Tze (Laozi); the sacred books of Indian Hinduism and Buddhism; the work of the Persians Zoroaster and Mani; the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament; the classics of Greek philosophy, theater, and science; and the literature of ancient Rome.
Why do so many of the world’s cultures see their classical ages in the same period about 2,000 years ago? The Eurasian Iron Age brought far more people into public participation than had the Bronze Age. Iron, the widely available metal, gave ordinary farmers and soldiers the tools to claim a stake in the world. The larger states of the Iron Age, united by fast cavalries and administered by laws, required masses of people from varying backgrounds to share some common culture, sufficient at least to accept and obey. Writing was the glue of the new order.
Scribes and people newly exposed to writing often thought that words were sacred. They cultivated writing as an act of devotion and cultural identification. These were book people, or, rather, the writers inscribed the beliefs and values of the ruling classes—the priests, tribal elders, and chiefs—and propagated those values by writing. Most people could not read, but everyone could be read to. In India, the priests could read the holy books and practice the sacrifices on behalf of the people. In Greece, where public literacy was greater, even the illiterate could understand the language and message of the theater. No wonder so many cultures trace their origins back to the writings of their formative era. But the similarities among these cultures end there. Their writings are actually quite different, so different in fact that we can use them to distinguish the styles of some of the great cultures of the world.
The Great Divergence
It is likely that the world’s people took different paths long before the age of iron, alphabets, and mass migrations. But without the record of written works, we cannot know how those paths might have diverged. The writings of the Bronze Age are generally too limited, beyond Mesopotamia and Egypt, to show cultural differences. The Bronze Age writings of India have not even been deciphered. The writings of the classical Iron Age are the first to allow us to see in some detail how the cultures of India, Greece, Rome, and China differed. But a couple of provisos are in order.
Interpreting Literature . We have to be very careful in using literary writings as a tool to understanding a people’s beliefs and behavior. There is always the question of who a particular author speaks for or represents. By using works that are considered classics, we at least can assume that the ideas have some general relevance or resonance. But classics are often such because they are used by the elite to indoctrinate others, and the illiterate of a society may not be easily indoctrinated by books. Further, we may not be aware of the meaning or purpose of a writing that has since become a classic. Many holy books, for instance, were memorized and recited by rote so that the words became frozen in time, divorced from the changing world in which they were spoken.
Differences Not Permanent . Some people find the discovery of cultural differences distasteful, as if cultural differences implied racial differences or disparagement. Nothing like that is implied here. In fact, since culture is entirely learned, cultural differences cannot be biologically based. Nor are cultural differences permanent. They are changing all the time. The variety of human cultures is a testament to human variability and possibility: the opposite of a stereotype. As we try to understand the differences between Indian, Greek, Roman, and Chinese acculturation more than 2,000 years ago, we should not assume that these same differences operate today. Some may; many will not.
The Ways of India and Greece
The classical civilizations of both Iron Age India and Greece supplanted earlier Bronze Age civilizations that collapsed in the first half of the second millennium (about 1700 BCE). The earliest Indian and Greek civilizations, the Harappan on the Indus River (in modern Pakistan) and the Minoan on the island of Crete in the eastern Mediterranean, evolved in similar ways after 3000 BCE. Both seem to have lacked city walls, major fortifications, or evidence of large armies. The remains of the Indus cities even suggest the absence of kings or imperial palaces—a feature that the excavated Minoan city of Knossos displays prominently. If both Indus and Minoan societies enjoyed relative peace, it may be because their prosperity was based on trade rather than conquest. We are unable as yet to translate the early writing of either society, but the artistic representations of both (e.g., dancing figures) suggest a grace and lightness that we do not find in their successors.
Knossos and much of the Cretan shipping fleet was probably destroyed by a volcanic eruption around 1628 BCE. Soon afterward, Crete was conquered by the Mycenaean civilization that had grown up on the Greek mainland in its shadow. Mycenae was also a port city that prospered through trade and shipping, but the high fortifications of its cities and the stories of its epic battles, told later in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, indicate a more militarized society or less peaceful times.
Historians used to believe that the Indus civilization of India and the Mycenaean civilization of Greece were suddenly overrun by invaders from central Asia, usually referred to as Aryans or Indo-Europeans, who were credited with bringing Iron Age and classical ideas from afar. This theory has been largely rejected by current historical research in favor of a view that sees greater continuity between the peoples of the Bronze Age and the classical age. Nevertheless, there was a significant lapse of time between the effective collapse of the Bronze Age Indus River cities and the Mycenaean civilization, all by around 1600 BCE, and the stirrings of Indian and Greek classical civilization around 700 BCE. This “dark age” was enough time for the populations to be enhanced by peoples from central Asia as well.
The new peoples were descended from or influenced by nomadic horse breeders who originated in the grasslands of central Asia. During the second millennium (2000-1000 BCE), these Indo European horse people spread their ways, genes, and language across southern Europe and Asia with the aid of chariots. We can trace their influence by the way in which the earliest Indo-European language appeared, displaced earlier languages, and eventually broke up into separate languages. In northern Syria, we have a document that tells part of this story. It is a treaty between the Hittites and the Mittani, dated 1380 BCE, that uses the names of gods that are ancestral to what they became in Persian and Indian Sanscrit. Another document from this period shows the same common names of horses, charioteers, and numbers. Therefore, it is sometime after 1380 that ancestral Persian and Indian developed into separate Indo-European languages. Greek and Sanscrit also went their separate ways, but the movement of languages is not the same as the migration of people. Languages travel in many ways. Think of the global spread of modern English through the Internet or the influence of American culture. Similarly, in the ancient world, people who borrowed plants or inventions would often borrow their names and sometimes eventually learn a new language. We cannot say that Indians and Greeks were descended from the same people; we can say only that their languages descended from a common proto Indo-European.
But we might also wonder what elements of that ancestral culture—with its horses, chariots, and deities—continued among the speakers of Greek and Sanscrit.
We do know that Greek and Indian societies developed different social structures and different cultures. Indian society based itself on groupings of families and occupations that have come to be known as castes. Beginning in the sixth century BCE, Greece changed from a mainly tribal society to one organized by territory. From the Indian choice came occupational and religious institutions, guilds, and monasteries that quickened seemingly opposite impulses toward economic development and spiritual transcendence. They prospered without state intervention because Indian culture shunned politics and provided a sanctioned place for princes and kings. From the Greek organization by territory came city-states, intense political participation, civic identity, and ideals of patriotism. The idea that one was subject to the rule of the law of the land rather than the tribe encouraged the development of a culture of political debate, intellectual competition, individual speculation, philosophy, and natural science.
India
Vedic Civilization . Classical Indian civilization is sometimes called “Vedic” because of the centrality of the religious writings called vedas. These were written in Sanscrit and serve as the foundation of Indian religion. In addition, a Sanscrit epic called the Mahabharata celebrates the stories and traditions of warring families of horsemen and charioteers, possibly in reflection of their history in India.
Beyond these books we know very little of the people who composed them or their lives. We know little of their relationship to the remaining inhabitants of Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and the other Indus cities. We do know, however, that they engaged in frequent cattle raids (probably mostly among themselves), preyed on settled farmers, took some captives as slaves, and forced a darker-skinned people, called Dravidians, to move farther south.
Four Varnas. If like other Indo-Europeans these Vedic Indians initially thought of themselves as three kinds of people—priests, protectors, and providers—they added a fourth group to account for the Dravidians or other local coerced laborers. They theorized this social scheme as the four varnas (literally, “colors”): Brahmin priests, Rajana (later Kshatriya) warriors, Vaishya producers, and Sudra dependent laborers. The Brahmin priests, who lived on offerings from the other groups, enshrined this distinction with a passage from the earliest of the Vedas. The Rig Veda told of the primeval sacrifice of the god Purusha, from which all things were created: the sacred hymns, horses, cattle, as well as human beings. And so that no one could doubt their place in the world, it declared that the Brahmin came from the god’s mouth, the Rajana from the arms, the Vaishya from the thighs, and the Sudra from the feet.
Karma and Reincarnation . The importance of varna was also stressed by the vedic doctrine of karma, the idea that one gained merit from doing the duties of one’s station. Combined with the doctrine of reincarnation, Brahmins could argue that those who fully followed the obligations of their particular varna would be reborn to a higher state in the next life. Even a lowly Sudra might, through proper obedience and hard work, become one of the higher orders but only in the next life and only by accepting one’s fate in this life. This Brahmin religion came to be known as Hinduism.
A section of the Mahabharata, known as the Bhagavad Gita, tells the story of the conflict between two great lineages. The leader of one is the young Kshatriya, Arjuna, who is faced with the predicament of war. He knows that the enemy forces include many friends, former teachers, and people he respects. Why should he fight and kill them? he asks himself. His question is answered by none other than the god Krishna, who has taken the form of Arjuna’s charioteer. Krishna’s answer is that the dead will be reincarnated as the living and that, in any case, it is the duty of a Kshatriya to wage war:
Death is certain for anyone born
and birth is certain for the dead;
since the cycle is inevitable,
you have no cause to grieve. . . .
Look to your own duty;
do not tremble before it;
nothing is better for a warrior
than a battle of sacred duty1
Farmers and Jatis. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, the descendants of these pastoralists had settled in the upper Ganges plain, cleared forests, and become farmers, planting wheat and barley and, increasingly, rice. Their pastoral traditions never disappeared. Horses and cows remained especially valuable to them: 100 horses figured as the worth of a man’s life.
Society was becoming more complex and in one way simpler than a world of four varnas. The complexity came from the appearance of new groups: products of mixed marriages, strangers, and assimilated people. The members of these new groups, called jatis because they did not fit in to one of the varnas, were expected to keep to themselves when sharing food or arranging marriages. Eventually, every occupation or group of relatives who shared food and intermarried constituted a new jati. Today in India, there are thousands of jatis, subgroups of varnas and what are also called (after the Portuguese word) castes.
The way in which the new agricultural world was becoming simpler was that it was becoming a peasant society; the four varnas mattered less as some Vaishyas became wealthy, bought land, and hired others, regardless of varna, to work the land. Increasingly after 500 BCE, the India of the Ganges plain became like other agricultural societies where the private ownership of land created a world of two classes.
Cities, States, and Buddhism . After 500 BCE, some agricultural settlements became important trading cities, and different lineages merged into states, with particularly powerful lineage chiefs as kings. Sometimes, the new kings were Vaishyas or even Sudras.
The commercialization of Indian cities and the rise of cities and states owed much to the rise of Buddhism. The Buddha (ca. 563-483 BCE) was born a prince, the son of a Kshatriya. But, according to legend, the young Gautama Siddhartha’s temperament was more philosophical than political. It was said that he was consumed at an early age by the problem of suffering and increasingly drawn to a life of meditation and withdrawal.
The Buddha’s preaching was radically equalitarian since the enlightenment he prized was unrestricted by birth or status. The early Buddhists felt Brahmin Hinduism to be rigidly hierarchical. In addition to the ranking of varna and jati, Brahmins taught a religion in which any action was governed by rules of purity and pollution, and the greatest pollution was spread by a class of people lower than Sudras, who were called “untouchables.” An early Buddhist work complained that an upper-caste woman washes her eyes on seeing an untouchable, and “a brahman is worried that a breeze that blows past [the untouchable] will blow on him as well.”2 To underscore the Buddhist distaste for such prejudice, the Buddhist author suggests that the untouchable in the story might be the Buddha himself in a previous incarnation.
In cities, wealth mattered more than birth, a fact that bothered Brahmins but appealed to Buddhists. The Vedas disparaged mercantile activity and forbade usury, while Buddhism favored commerce and investment. The Buddha advised his followers to avoid expenditures on ritual (Brahminical expenses) and devote only a quarter of their income to daily expenses. Another quarter was to be saved and the remaining half invested.3
Mauryan Dynasty . Buddhism both reflected and encouraged the new urban state society of the Mauryan dynasty (321-184 BCE). Trade and artisan guilds (shreni) administered their members and gathered considerable resources to their workshops despite their varna status as Sudras. A Greek ambassador to Mauryan India in 302 BCE, Megasthenes, said that Pataliputra, the capital city, was governed by a committee of 30. Its six subcommittees were involved with economic matters: industry, trade, manufactures, taxes, the welfare of foreigners, and recording births and deaths.
Ashoka . In fact, Mauryan cities were governed by the kings of the dynasty: first the founder, Chandragupta Maurya (321-297 BCE), and then his descendants. Perhaps the most famous of these was the king Ashoka (268-232 BCE),
who united all of northern India (including modern Afghanistan and Pakistan) into a single empire. But Ashoka’s fame does not rest on the fact that he ruled more of the subcontinent than anyone before modern times. Nor does it stem from his brutal defeat of the Kalingas, the last unconquered people north of central India. Rather, the memory of Ashoka is honored for what he did after the victory over the Kalingas. Remorseful of the human cost of his victory, Ashoka converted to Buddhism and renounced warfare. Instead of soldiers, he sent out ministers of dharma (goodness) to administer the kingdom.
Buddhism, Politics, and Commerce . Ashoka’s benevolence may not have been as effective as his grandfather Chandragupta’s reliance on almost a million soldiers, thousands of spies, and the advice of his aide, Kautilya, on the uses of deceit and treachery. The empire fell apart after Ashoka’s death, and Hinduism replaced Buddhism in India. Hindu ideas of divinely endowed kingship were more useful to kings and Kshatriyas throughout South Asia. Buddhists preferred the quiet and direct dharma of monasteries to the messiness of politics. But Buddhists gave ascent to Hindu rulers in return for a free hand in their religious endeavors. It was a good compromise. Hinduism was a tolerant system that took no interest in people’s beliefs as long as rulers were obeyed and priests were compensated. Buddhist monasteries, hospitals, and schools were jewels of the kingdom that performed needed services. The Buddhist embrace of poverty was oddly a route to general prosperity. Monks and scholars worked hard for little return, investing their energies in the needs of the community, even encouraging production and trade. It was a recipe for economic growth and indifference to politics.
