by Andrew Marr
So did the Xia kings even exist, never mind Da Yu himself? Until recently the general view was that this was an entirely mythic story – with, after all, a gap of almost two thousand years before it was written down. But the discovery of what seems to be a Longshan-culture capital city, at Erlitou, has changed minds. The Xia may not have been a big dynasty but they probably did exist on the banks of the Yellow River, and emerged from the Longshan culture itself. Erlitou, discovered in 1959 in Henan Province, has produced examples of beautiful bronze-cast wine vessels, or jue, which have the spindly delicacy of modernist designs. The city was centred on a large palace complex of rammed-down earth walls, a way of building that was very labour-intensive but produced rock-hard structures which still exist across China.22
Chinese archaeology is very exciting just now, because so much remains to be discovered: recent excavations of tombs have found beautiful vases, jade ornaments, bronze weapons, very early writing, evidence of the cultivation of silk and the worship of ancestors. Unlike Catalhoyuk, this was a hierarchical civilization, run by kings, or priest-kings, and able to mobilize large numbers of workers.
We know that Chinese farming was heavily based on the rich alluvial plains of the Yellow River and its tributaries. In this, the early growth of human settlement was no different here than around the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile or the Indus – all of which produced cities, kings and complex religions. Rivers make rich soil, but they also bring danger. As we have seen, they flood, and their waters need to be unravelled and spread about for maximum farming success. As much as wild plants or wild animals, they need to be tamed. But the necessary work calls for leadership and organization, which in turn means hierarchy and rulers. Farming villages do not need to combine in large numbers simply to grow crops or tend animals. But they do if they want to divert rivers, create networks of irrigation channels and flood-protection systems. The role of civil engineering in human history is often overlooked.
So Da Yu’s story is a kind of explanation for the growth of political authority. He becomes king of the Xia because he has earned it by organizing the people for their own good. It is hardly a radical proposition that, in general, kings and emperors bring oppression; they may start small with labour-gangs building dykes, but they progress to fortress walls and armies and tax-collectors. The underlying message of the Da Yu tale is that this imposition of authority is still better than disorder – in this case, the chaos unleashed by rivers that change their direction, or floods that wipe away the livelihoods of millions. In other words, rulers are better than the alternative. It is a message that would have pharaohs and Babylonian priests nodding in agreement.
But the fact that the story of Da Yu, and then the ups and downs of the dynasties that followed the Xia, were written down and made part of a national narrative matters almost as much. Authority, imposed early on because of the need to mobilize the masses to control nature, is then passed down, generation by generation. And as in the West, the Chinese rulers claim their authority not simply because they are good at organizing, or able to scare their subjects, but because they have a special link with the gods. They can have a quiet word and help end the famine, or stop the rains. So the great leaps forward in Chinese art and technology are closely related to religious rites. Ever more ingeniously cast and elaborately carved bronze vessels, musical instruments and animal bones, baked then broken to read the future, turn up in Chinese archaeological sites. Great squat tripods and bronze drinking vessels whose sides are as mazed and rippled as coral reefs may seem strange things for early cultures to invest so much energy in. In fact they are ruthlessly political: they are about power.
Nile Nightmares
Ancient Egypt, our third river civilization, often seems a culture to gape at, not to love. It touches the modern world hardly at all. Sphinxes and pyramids have become globalized visual kitsch. Museum audiences queue around the world to stare at gold or painted relics. Cultural tourists descend by the planeload to see the temples and funeral complexes of the Valley of the Kings. But for such a long-lasting and successful culture, the Egyptians have left relatively few marks on later ways of thinking. The religion of Horus and Osiris enjoyed a brief revival of interest during the twentieth century among occult dabblers and circus-tent crooks. Pharaonic mysteries have briefly enthused the makers of movie mystery capers. But compared with the deep influence of Judaism and its later developments, or the power of Greek thought, or Roman politics – or even, across Asia, the continuing influence of early Chinese and Indian thinkers – ancient Egypt has little left alive. The Mesopotamians’ stumpy relics of powdered brick are pathetic compared with the physical remains of the Egyptians, but they produced more in the way of science, mathematics and technology to pass on than the creators of this great death cult on the edge of the desert.
Egyptologists (not to mention Egyptians) would say that this impression is ignorant and unfair. The people of ancient Egypt were formidable artists and builders, and they developed a complex religion, sustaining them for millennia. Many humbler grave-sites than those of the rulers show evidence of a colourful culture that had more respect for women than had its rivals and whose people loved life, revelling in the natural world, enjoying beer, food, sex and gossip. Their obsession with the afterlife came about because they liked this one so much, believing that with proper preparation they could have more of the same.
And yet we are left with those forbidding bird- or dog-headed deities, the scarabs and the blank stares of superkings whose vast monuments still insist on awe, but nothing more. Why is this? The culture’s lack of portability through time and space seems to be linked with its relative absence of physical movement in its own time – it was just remarkably self-sufficient. Ancient Egypt proper lasted for more than three thousand years, from the pre-dynastic kingdoms to the final disappearance of the Greek pharaohs in Roman times. Very early art from the Nile has an earthy directness that sets it apart; some of the simple clay models of farmers and animals are similar to the attractively human early art of Mesoamerican people. But quite soon an Egyptian style becomes fixed and hardened, and although a practised eye can distinguish between dynasties and even reigns, it barely evolves for two millennia.
There is a well made sculpture of a king (Khasakhemwy) from 2675 BC which would not look out of place among those of his successors fifteen hundred years later.23 In the great temple of Luxor is a little inner temple built to celebrate Alexander the Great being declared pharaoh in 332 BC. The artwork on one wall faces images from the early so-called New Kingdom of more than a thousand years before; and the two look very similar, though there has been a certain falling-off in subtlety. One obvious reason is that, for the ancient Egyptians, there was no art for art’s sake. Art was an expression of religion and of earthly power. Its job was to describe the hidden world of powerful gods; to record man’s relationship with them; and to intimidate travellers or rebels through the power of its kings. This required an art of repetition and sometimes gigantism, not of humanism or realism.
The culprit is also the hero of the Egyptian story, the Nile. The world’s longest river, it is unusual in flowing from south to north. Since its prevailing winds blow from north to south, people with simple sailboats found it an excellent two-way conveyor belt. Better still, it not only provided its people with ample fish and wildfowl, but (before Nasser’s Aswan Dam in modern times) it flooded regularly every year, bringing fresh water and silt to produce remarkably rich soil. The floods were not entirely regular. If they came late, or too early, or if they were too strong or too weak, they could disrupt the planting and cause hunger.
Ancient Egyptian history is marked by periodic disruptions, revolts and fallings-back; and these seem to have to do with times when the flooding Nile misbehaved. Yet compared with the civilizations on the Tigris, Euphrates, Yellow River and the Indus, in today’s Pakistan, the Egyptians were blessed. Not only did they enjoy a four-thousand-mile streak of remarkable fecundity, culminating in a grea
t flood-plain delta on the shores of the Mediterranean. But they were also well protected by deserts and mountains to east and west and by a relatively unpopulated African hinterland in the south. Egypt was invaded, by Libyans and Persians and the mysterious ‘sea peoples’; but this happened relatively rarely. The flatter plains of Mesopotamia, or the land highway of Palestine, were much easier prey for armies of chariots and horsemen.
Egypt was a hard place to attack and almost impossible to hold for long; and so, in the ancient world, it always recovered.
The Nile had a political effect too. Though we speak of ‘Egypt’ there were really two Egypts. The two-way transit system knitted together people along a huge expanse, bringing black African Nubians and Mediterranean dwellers together in a single state. We cannot get a full sense of how ancient Egyptians saw their geography without understanding that for most of the time Upper Egypt, the more African south, dominated Lower Egypt, the more Mediterranean north. Egyptians today are still quick to note the difference, marked in the shape and colour of bodies. Egypt was a late starter compared with the Mesopotamians, partly because the land around it stayed so rich in plants and wildlife for so long that peoples were not forced to settle. Then the desert encroached further and the first unifying kings arrived from the south, bearing wonderful names such as Narmer, or ‘Baleful Catfish’.24
As with the story of Da Yu and the Xia, only centralized royal power could have made a single nation of such a strung-out series of settlements. To use the river’s bounty effectively, people here too needed a complex network of canals and irrigation systems, which had to be carefully cleaned, dug out and restored every year. So the habit of communal working, people’s readiness to dig and build together away from their fields, was set early on.
This would later become very useful when it came to the Pharaonic temples. The Egyptians believed the Nile flowed from the underworld. They spent a lot of time – quite reasonably – worrying about the annual flood. Nile gods featured early in their belief system, so when their kings associated themselves with the flow of the river they acquired huge symbolic power. Geography isn’t everything. Often in human history the power of an individual or of an idea turns upside down what we might have expected from the position of rivers, or the shape of a coastline. But if geographical determinism works anywhere, it works for this land made by the Nile, protected by the Nile, serving the Nile’s rulers – and eventually limited by the Nile.
Of the monuments of ancient Egypt few are as moving as Deir el-Medina, just round the mountainous corner from the Valley of the Kings and across the river from Luxor. All about are vast monuments. There is the awesome Temple of Karnak at Thebes; then the intimidating one of Rameses III at Medinet Habu, which celebrates that pharaoh’s military victories with a manic sense of scale that would leave any twentieth-century dictator jealously gaping. There are the ‘Colossi of Memnon’, a pair of faceless monsters commemorating King Amenhotep III; and the stage-set remains of Queen Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple. All embody everything we have come to expect of the ancient Egyptians; all are intimidating places, impressive in a Nazi or Stalinist way.
Deir el-Medina is very different, a grey maze of stone and mud-brick walls now only a few feet high, looking rather like a very large sheep-pen, or an abandoned village from Gaelic Scotland, somehow lost in the baking desert hills. Above it, on higher ground and cut into the face of a reddish cliff, are numerous holes, some with tiny brick pyramids near by. Compared to the other sites in the vicinity, Deir-el-Medina has very few visitors. This, though, was where the craftsmen who worked for the priests and the pharaohs lived with their families. They were not slaves.25 They worked hard, often labouring underground as they struggled to finish a tomb before its patron died. They were paid in wheat, clothes and honey-flavoured beer. They had the weekends off (an Egyptian week lasted ten days, so the break was less frequent). They worked for two four-hour shifts and could call on the work of poorer peasants and slaves to make their lives easier. Organized under two overseers, who lived in the village, they celebrated the death of a pharaoh because it meant more work for them in the years to come. They enjoyed feast days, when there was drunkenness and the occasional orgy, and they passed down their skills from one generation to the next. The Egyptian skill in mummifying corpses, too, was the domain of these artisan workers.
Most remarkably, they found time to build their own funeral temples to take them to the afterlife. The day job meant raising great structures and tunnelling deep into the rock to prepare a final resting place for the great ones of the New Dynasty. But meanwhile they were building their own versions, complete with small pyramids and beautiful painted chambers twenty or thirty feet below ground. Their surfaces, still astonishingly brightly coloured, celebrate the love of a man and wife; the families of the workmen; the surrounding natural world of waving corn, ducks and monkeys; and food in plenty. Here ordinary people were buried and, remote from the grand ‘come and get me’ monuments that lured grave-robbers to the pharaohs even in ancient times, many of them rested untouched until excavations began in the modern era.
This would be interesting enough. But these people also recorded many of their thoughts on small pieces of limestone, often the waste from all that digging, and on broken pieces of pot, and on papyrus. Written in simplified popular script, then thrown away three thousand years ago, a lot of it has survived. These ostraca record popular stories, legal complaints, love poems, books of dreams, gossip, feuds, wise sayings, the angry disinheriting of children by a woman who feels they did not look after her well enough in her old age, laundry lists, problems with defective donkeys, and even a cure for piles (flour, goose fat, salt, honey and green beans: mix into a paste and apply to the backside for four days).
One particular bad character, a foreman called Paneb, seems to have been constantly making murderous threats to other workers, stealing from royal tombs, harassing other women into making clothes for him, and having illicit sex with another man’s wife, a lady called Tuy, and other married women. He was eventually tried by the pharaoh’s vizier and removed from his job, though we do not know what eventually happened to him. This may have been the result of a village feud, but it shows there was a trusted and effective system of justice at work.
The story of this village is not only a refreshing and unusual instance of the voices of ordinary workers – skilled and valued people, but manual workers nevertheless – and their families emerging from distant history. It also shows that they shared the religious convictions of their rulers and, as soon as it was possible, aspired to share their underworld too. Indeed, when we consider the lives of such people – proud of their skills as stonemasons, painters, carpenters, makers of clothing and cooks, who ate reasonably well, mixing fish and meat with a basic diet of vegetables, bread and beer; who had a rich spiritual life that made sense of their world; and who trusted in a system of fair law – the idea of a downtrodden semi-enslaved world of ancient toilers falls away. Were the lives of these villagers not better in most ways than the lives of millions of poorer-paid or unemployed people in tower blocks today?
Back to the Bull
The Minoans were the first European civilization (from around 3600 to 1160 BC, though only just, since their island of Crete lies in the far south of the jagged Greek peninsula. They were trading and seafaring people, whose pottery turns up in Egypt and whose art was influenced by the Egyptians. They were literate, though their form of writing has never been deciphered. They seem to have been relatively unwarlike. Their art and architecture are instantly attractive, giving an initial impression of an airy, tranquil, female-dominated society whose palace walls ripple with dancing dolphins. Amid the fat red columns and excellent sewerage systems are images of a little bull-dancing here, a moment of saffron-gathering there. But the Minoans are particularly useful as a warning not from history – but about history and how we romanticize it.
The great Minoan palace of Knossos is one of the most popular tourism sites in
the eastern Mediterranean, and has been for a century. Sightseers already half in love with this hot, rosemary-scented island idyll learn that it was destroyed in the aftermath of a terrible earthquake at Santorini. The words ‘lost civilization of Atlantis’ are muttered. This is how many modern Europeans like to think of their earlier selves – peaceable, artistic, liberated and romantically doomed – a story that is half-Eden and half the Titanic. But it is almost all bull.
Knossos is an old building, at least by our standards. It dates back to between 1905 and 1930 – AD – and has been described by one archaeologist as one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on Crete, bearing unsettling echoes of Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square and the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier. Cathy Gere found it suited to the urban sprawl now encroaching on the site: ‘today all of Greece is liberally studded with half-built, low-rise, skeletal modernist ruins, stairs climbing to nowhere’.26
