A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Many social historians and anthropologists saw these assertions as too sweeping. They emphasized that, until the last several centuries, only a tiny share of the population could read or write, and most people’s worlds were oral ones. Institutions to support oral culture were created and expanded long after writing was invented: high altars, pulpits, and towers were constructed in or on religious buildings so that people could hear priests or the call to prayer more clearly; outdoor platforms and balconies were built on palaces and town halls where laws and rules were proclaimed; theatres were established for oral performances. Even in classical Athens—the prime example in Goody’s argument about the revolutionary impact of writing—adult male citizens gathered for speeches and debate at the assembly known as the ekklesia, which was held outdoors on a hill in central Athens. Written texts became central in certain religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, but the monks, priests, merchants, and teachers who spread these might not have been able to read themselves.

  World historians, especially those who concentrate their research on parts of the world where writing did not develop, have also disputed the idea that there was a sharp divide between oral and written cultures. They note that oral traditions could also be formal and ritualized and require a long period of training, giving those with this training social and political power, or close connections to those with power. In the Mande societies of West Africa, for example, oral historians known as griots preserved and transmitted cultural memory, serving as advisers to kings and promoters of royal authority, and among the Luba of Central Africa, bana balute (“men of memory”) did this as well.

  Oral traditions might also be enhanced by physical mnemonic devices that were not writing, but served many of its functions. The bana balute used lukasa, hourglass-shaped wooden memory boards covered with beads, shells, and incised symbols that helped them remember royal genealogies, events, places, and migration routes. Peruvian peoples, most prominently the Inca, used khipu (also spelled quipu), knotted string devices with sometimes hundreds of cords, to record information. Spanish colonial-era records indicate that these were used to keep track of tax and labor obligations, the output of fields, land transfers, census records, and other numeric data. They were created and read by older male specialists, and were carried by runners and officials on the vast highway system of the Inca, proving to local communities that whoever carried them had authorization from above for his demands, and allowing the official to report back with more detail to his superiors. Scholars have decoded the way numbers were recorded on khipu, and are currently working on deciphering words, which may have been recorded in numbers, similar to the way postal codes today represent places and various types of identification numbers represent persons. Khipu were not connected to spoken language, and knowledge of how to read them died out after the Spanish conquest. Spanish officials and soldiers destroyed khipu in the Andes because they thought they might contain religious messages and encourage people to resist Spanish authority. About 600 Inca khipu survive today, more than half in museums in Europe or the United States. They—and other aids to memory—suggest to those who study them that writing may not have been such a dramatic change, that other types of recording systems also provided their users with the ability to sort, quantify, keep order, and assert power.

  Since the 1990s, media and cultural studies scholars and some neurologists have returned to viewing writing as revolutionary, however. Not only did writing lead to greater cultural uniformity, tighter political control, and new social institutions, but it also shaped the human brain itself, affecting left brain/right brain lateralization and other brain features. Media scholars tend to focus on today (and tomorrow) rather than the past as they examine what the first issue of Wired magazine in 1993 described as “the Digital Revolution [that] is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon,” but their assertions that the way in which we acquire information shapes (or, as some would argue, determines) us as individuals and as societies supports the view that writing really mattered.

  States and lineages

  Just as writing has been judged a major break in the human past, so have the political forms that first emerged in the cities of Sumer: these were the world’s first states, the sociopolitical form in which a small share of the population is able to coerce resources out of everyone else in order to gain and then maintain power. States are large and complex; they coerce people through violence, or the threat of violence, and also through bureaucracies and systems of taxation. In contrast to kin groups and chiefdoms, states have formalized rules, norms, and ways of distributing power, more elaborate social and gender hierarchies through which certain groups are privileged and others subordinated, and cultural institutions and practices that have allowed them to be judged “civilizations.”

  States grew in scale in the ancient world. In Southwest Asia, the individual city-states of Sumer grew into kingdoms controlling more than one urban center such as that of Sargon of Akkad, and then into empires, large multi-ethnic states created by military force. The kingdom established by Sargon collapsed, perhaps because of a period of extended drought, and this area became part of various other kingdoms and empires over the next several millennia: Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Neo-Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, Persian, Alexandrian, Seleucid, Roman. In between eras in which empires unified large territories under their rule were periods of instability and decentralization. Other parts of the world saw similar long-term political patterns. In China, armies of the Shang rulers were defeated in about 1050 by those of the Zhou, who expanded the size of Chinese territory significantly; Zhou rule fell apart in what became known as the “Warring States Period” (403–221 BCE), then the Qin and Han rulers (221 BCE–220 CE) restored unity and increased the size of China’s empire still further, but then this also collapsed into the “Age of Division” (220–589 CE). In Egypt, unity and disunity structure the entire understanding of history, which is described as three periods of stability and expansion—the Old (2660–2180 BCE), Middle (2080–1640 BCE) and New (1570–1070 BCE) Kingdoms—each followed by a time of fragmentation and disorder: the First, Second, and Third Intermediate Periods. On the western coast of South America and in the Andes, urban societies ruled by kings built monumental architecture and became regional powers that dominated ever-larger territories, but then collapsed: Caral (2500–1600 BCE), Chavin (1000–200 BCE), Moche (200 BCE–700 CE), Tiwanaku (100 CE–1100 CE).

  Accounts of the rise and fall of city-states, kingdoms, and empires, and their conflicts and rivalries with one another, have been the primary story told by historians since the invention of writing. This is understandable: empires did become empires through conquest. But empires only stayed empires by establishing some means through which power was handed on, and almost all of the states established in the ancient world—first in Southwest Asia and the Nile Valley, and then in India, China, the Mediterranean, Central and South America, and ultimately other areas—did so in the same way. They were hereditary monarchies, in which those who held power were regarded as members of one kin group, and the legitimate handing on of authority was understood to proceed through a dynastic succession. Chinese history came to be told as a series of named dynasties (Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Xing) and Egyptian as a series of thirty-one numbered ones, a system invented in the third century BCE by the Egyptian historian Manetho from existing king lists. Even in those few states that were not hereditary monarchies, such as the city-states of classical-era Greece or the Roman Republic (in which authority was exercised by a Senate of aristocratic landowners), membership in the group that made political and military decisions was determined by birth. Thus the rise and fall of states is also a story of the rise and fall of lineages, that is, social groups maintained through sexual relationships that produced children who could legitimately inherit. This connection between politics and (hetero)sexuality in most of recorded history is so close that it has often been invisible to historian
s, but it was not to those who held power.

  The idea that authority should proceed within a lineage was so compelling that when there was no heir (or no competent heir) available or on the horizon, one was often created, with a ruler adopting a likely young man as his son. Norms of succession were also flexible; brothers or nephews inherited, and sometimes a royal lineage passed down to the male children of daughters if there were no sons. Although in most places women were excluded from actual rule, in extraordinary cases there were female rulers. Even rules regarding legitimate birth could be malleable. In some hereditary monarchies, having a mother who was not officially a wife of the ruler barred a son absolutely from inheriting the throne, but in others it did not. His mother’s status was simply ignored, or he might be adopted by an official wife as hers. Just as kin relations within ethnic groups were sometimes invented, so were those in hereditary dynasties, but this is evidence of the power, not the weakness, of the state/lineage link.

  China provides an excellent example of how this connection operated in both theory and practice. In both the Shang and the Zhou dynasties, rulers carried out rituals to a range of deities, which they declared included their own ancestors, from whom they sought guidance and assistance. The Zhou also portrayed their victory over the Shang in 1050 BCE as justified by the fact that the sky deity Heaven (Tien) had removed support from the Shang because they were oppressive and inept, and transferred legitimate rule to the virtuous Zhou. The king is understood to be the Son of Heaven in Zhou documents, but Heaven gives him the mandate to rule only as long as he rules wisely and in the interests of the people. This political theory of the Mandate of Heaven was new, and it lasted for millennia. Succession was hereditary and kings were linked in a family relationship with divine forces, but there was also a sense that kings were to act ethically, or Heaven would take the mandate away and entrust it to a ruler who was virtuous.

  Along with religious rituals and political theories, both the Shang and the Zhou cemented their dynastic rule through more prosaic methods. Kings married multiple times, with the size of their households a demonstration of their wealth and power. The majority of their wives came from other states, for marriage was an important tool in forming political networks and consolidating territory. Gradually the Lineage Law (zongfa) system coalesced, which privileged the eldest son of the principal wife, and the pattern became one primary wife along with concubines, who were legal spouses but of lower rank. This patrilineal system came to encompass other elite families as well; for great nobles and the lower ranks of the aristocracy known as shi, family and clan names were transmitted along patrilineal lines, as were administrative positions, property, titles, and traditions of sacrificing to the ancestors.

  Neither military superiority nor smart marriage alliances last forever, and China broke apart into rival states about 400 BCE. The next long-lasting dynasty, the Han, was established in 206 BCE by a charismatic leader from a relatively ordinary family, but he and his advisers and successors successfully linked the Han dynasty with earlier strong rulers. They promoted the veneration of Huangdi (the Yellow Emperor)—a remarkable early ruler now known to be mythical—as the founder of China, and claimed descent from him through one of his twenty-five sons. They also promoted the philosophical system known as Confucianism, based on the ideas of the fifth-century BCE thinker Confucius as recorded and spread by his followers. Confucius considered the family the basic unit of society, and emphasized the importance of filial piety, and the reverence and obedience that children owe their parents, and in particular that sons owe their fathers. The father/son relationship was one of the key hierarchies in society, along with those of ruler/subject, husband/wife, and elder brother/younger brother, all of which reflected the cosmic hierarchical relationship between Heaven and earth. In these hierarchies one element is clearly superior and the other inferior, but both are necessary, and harmony and order depend on the balance between the two.

  2.3 A lacquered basket from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–222 CE) shows model sons whose names are taken from the Xiao Jing, a Confucian classic giving advice on filial piety. This basket was found in a tomb in the Chinese colony of Lelang in northern Korea.

  In Confucian teachings, the ultimate goal for a man—at least for those who could afford it—was to become a sage, a highly educated and wise individual who, in words attributed to Confucius, “seeks also to enlarge others,” that is, to serve the broader political order. In addition, men were expected to carry out specific rituals honoring their ancestors and parents throughout their lives, have sons so that these rituals could continue, and place the interests of the family line above their own. The ultimate goal for a woman was to be regarded as a “Treasure of the House,” who willingly submitted to the “three obediences” to which women were subject: to her father as a daughter, to her husband as a wife, and to her son as a widow. Han rulers recruited men such as Ban Gu trained in the Confucian classics as officials to run their growing empire. These scholar-officials in turn wrote commentaries emphasizing that the emperor alone connected Heaven and earth, and that all proper human relationships were hierarchical and orderly. Confucianism became a state ideology, and a publicly acknowledged ethical system for many elite families as well. All aspects of family relationships had proper etiquette and rituals attached, which became more elaborate over the centuries.

  Unfortunately Han rulers were not always as blessed with sons as Huangdi had been, nor were all relationships what Confucian scholars wanted them to be. The wife of the first Han emperor had a son, but he was a child when he inherited the throne, and his mother served as regent (termed an “empress dowager” in China), ruling on his behalf. The reign of Empress Dowager Lü was apparently stable and popular, but historians at the courts of later Chinese emperors invented stories that she killed all her rivals, and the “Evil Empress Lü” became a prime example of the terrible things that would happen when a woman ruled.

  The collapse of the Han dynasty provides another instance of the close relationship between sexual reproduction—or its absence—and the state. In the late second century CE a succession of Han rulers died without leaving an adult son, and the mothers of the boy-emperors served as regents. The empresses and their families formed one faction at court, scholar-officials another, and a third faction was made up of eunuchs—castrated men—who held important official positions. Eunuchs appear in historical records nearly as early as states, with the first in Sumerian cities about 2000 BCE. They were common in the ancient world in the Assyrian, Persian, and Eastern Roman empires as well as in China, and later in other states as well. Some were captives of war or rebels castrated as punishment, but others had been castrated as boys by their families because this opened up opportunities for employment. In China and elsewhere, eunuchs were granted positions in the bureaucracy, army, and royal palace in part because they could not marry and father children; as the theory went, they would be more loyal to the ruling family than to their own, so could be trusted. Eunuchs sometimes rose to high rank and had illustrious careers; the fifteenth-century Chinese admiral Zheng He, for example, who led several enormous expeditions to the Indian Ocean, was a eunuch, castrated as a boy after being taken as a prisoner of war. Eunuchs were not always as reliable as rulers hoped, however, as they still had broader family connections and personal ambitions. In the case of the Han dynasty, eunuchs, empresses, and court officials all plotted against one another, and engaged generals with armies to back up their aims. Those generals had their own ambitions, however, and by the early third century China was torn apart and the Han dynasty was no more.

  The state/lineage connections developed in other hereditary monarchies show many of the same characteristics as those in China. Ruling lineages elsewhere also justified their authority through ties with an ancestral heroic figure. Rulers worked closely with religious authorities and relied on ideas about their connections with the gods, as well as the rulers’ military might, for their power. Rulers everywhere used marriag
e as a way to make or cement alliances, and as a symbol of conquest. They often had large numbers of wives, concubines, slaves, and other types of female dependants as a sign of status, a pattern termed “resource polygyny.” Rulers depended on their family members for many aspects of government.

  The growth of hereditary monarchies and larger-scale states affected relations between power and gender in ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ways. In many cases it led to restrictions on women and greater gender differentiation. Because the right to rule—or for nobles, other privileges of rank—was handed down through inheritance, it was extremely important to male elites that the children their wives bore were theirs. Elite women in many states were thus increasingly secluded, and strict laws were passed regarding adultery, which in some cases affected non-elite women as well. Women’s own kin connections often became less important than those of their husbands, which made their status more derivative and dependent than it had been in tribes or chiefdoms.

  The development of hereditary monarchies did not uniformly limit women’s power and status, however, but increased those of a small group of women and occasionally gave them legitimately sanctioned authority as members of a lineage.

  In Egypt, the ruler—who was eventually called the pharaoh—was regarded as divine, and the divine force was found in all members of his family. Rulers or rulers-to-be occasionally married their sisters or other close relatives in order to increase the amount of divine blood in the royal household, and to imitate the gods, who in Egyptian mythology often married their siblings. The familial connection with the divine allowed a handful of women to rule in their own right in Egypt’s long history, including Hatshepsut (r. 1479–1458 bce), the daughter of King Thutmose I, and the half-sister and wife of King Thutmose II. Just as male rulers did, she had herself depicted in ceremonial representations with the standard pharaonic regalia—a kilt, a false beard, and a headdress topped by a cobra—or as the god Osiris, although in other official portraits she wears the normal clothing of a wealthy Egyptian woman, and she made no attempt to hide the fact that she was a woman in any inscriptions. Her adopting the same garb that male rulers did suggests that she understood her lineage to be more important than her gender, as would later female rulers throughout the world.