Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  The “vile Chief of Hatti,” says Ramses, then begged for peace (as well he might).

  Extracting military history from a god-king’s bombast is tricky, but all our other evidence suggests that, contrary to his boasts, Ramses barely escaped the Hittite ambush that day. The Hittites kept advancing down the coast until 1258 BCE, stopping only because they had picked new fights, one with Assyria in the mountains of southeast Anatolia and another with Greek adventurers on Anatolia’s west coast. Some historians think that Homer’s Iliad, the Greek epic poem written down five centuries later, dimly reflects a war in the 1220s BCE in which a Greek alliance besieged the Hittite vassal city of Troy; and far to the southeast, an even more terrible siege was under way, ending with Assyria sacking Babylon in 1225 BCE.

  These were savage struggles. Defeat could mean annihilation—men slaughtered, women and children carried into slavery, cities reduced to rubble and condemned to oblivion. Everything, therefore, was sacrificed for victory. More militarized elites emerged, far richer than their predecessors, and their internal feuds took on a new edge. Kings fortified their palaces or built themselves whole new cities where the lower orders would not disturb their tranquillity. Taxes and demands for forced labor rose sharply and debt spiraled as aristocrats borrowed to finance lavish lifestyles and peasants mortgaged harvests to stay alive. Kings described themselves as their people’s shepherds but spent more time fleecing their flocks than protecting them, fighting to control labor and carrying off whole peoples to work on their building projects. The Hebrews toiling on pharaoh’s cities, distant descendants of Jacob’s sons who had migrated to Egypt with such high hopes, are merely the best known of these slave populations.

  So it was that state power grew after 1500 BCE and the Western core expanded with it. Pottery made in Greece has been found around the shores of Sicily, Sardinia, and northern Italy, suggesting that other, more valuable (but archaeologically less visible) goods were moving long distances too. Archaeologists diving off the Anatolian coast have recovered astonishing snapshots of the mechanics of trade. A ship wrecked at Uluburun around 1316 BCE, for instance, was carrying enough copper and tin to make ten tons of bronze, as well as ebony and ivory from tropical Africa, cedar from Lebanon, glass from Syria, and weapons from Greece and what is now Israel; in short, a little of everything that might fetch a profit, probably gathered, a few objects at a time, in every port along the ship’s route by a crew as mixed as its cargo.

  The shores of the Mediterranean Sea were being drawn into the core. Rich graves containing bronze weapons suggest that village chiefs were turning into kings in Sardinia and Sicily, and texts reveal that young men left their villages on these islands to seek their fortunes as mercenaries in the core’s wars. Sardinians wound up in Babylon and even in what is now Sudan, where Egyptian armies pushed south in search of gold, smashing native states and building temples as they went. Still farther afield, chiefs in Sweden were being buried with chariots, the ultimate status symbols from the core, and were putting other imported military hardware—particularly sharp bronze swords—to deadly use.

  As the Mediterranean turned into a new frontier, rising social development once again changed what geography meant. In the fourth millennium BCE the rise of irrigation and cities had made the great river valleys in Egypt and Mesopotamia into more valuable real estate than the old core in the Hilly Flanks, and in the second millennium the explosion of long-distance trade made access to the Mediterranean’s broad waterways more valuable still. After 1500 BCE the turbulent Western core entered a whole new age of expansion.

  TEN THOUSAND GUO UNDER HEAVEN

  Archaeologists often suffer from an affliction that I like to call Egypt envy. No matter where we dig or what we dig up, we always suspect we would find better things if we were digging in Egypt. So it is a relief to know that Egypt envy affects people in other walks of life too. In 1995 State Councillor Song Jian, one of China’s top scientific administrators, made an official visit to Egypt. He was not happy when archaeologists told him that its antiquities were older than China’s, so on returning to Beijing he launched the Three Dynasties Chronology Project to look into the matter. Four years and $2 million later, it announced its findings: Egypt’s antiquities really are older than China’s. But now at least we know exactly how much older.

  As we saw in Chapter 2, agricultural lifestyles began developing in the West around 9500 BCE, a good two thousand years earlier than in China. By 4000 BCE farming had spread into marginal areas such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, and when the monsoons shifted southward after 3800 BCE these new farmers created cities and states out of self-preservation. The East had plenty of dry, marginal zones too, but farming had barely touched them by 3800, So the arrival of cooler, drier weather did not lead to the rise of cities and states. Instead, it probably made life easier for villagers by making the warm, wet Yangzi and Yellow river valleys a little drier and more manageable. Hard as it is to imagine today, the Yellow River valley was mostly subtropical forest around 4000 BCE; elephants trumpeted down what are now the car-choked streets of Beijing.

  Instead of a transition to cities and states like Egypt and Mesopotamia, fourth-millennium-BCE China saw steady, unspectacular population growth. Forests were cleared and new villages founded; old villages grew into towns. The better people did at capturing energy, the more they multiplied and the greater pressure they put on themselves; so, like Westerners, they tinkered and experimented, finding new ways to squeeze more from the soil, to organize themselves more effectively, and to grab what they wanted from others. Thick fortifications of pounded earth sprouted around the bigger sites, suggesting conflict, and some settlements were laid out in more organized ways, suggesting community-level planning. Houses got bigger and we find more objects in them, pointing to slowly rising standards of living; but differences between houses also increased, perhaps meaning that richer peasants were distinguishing themselves from their neighbors. Some archaeologists think that the distribution of tools within houses reveals emerging gender distinctions too. In a few places, notably Shandong (Figure 4.5), some people—mostly men—found their last resting place in big graves with more offerings than others, and a few even had elaborate carved jade ornaments.

  Beautiful as these jades can be, it must still be hard for archaeologists excavating Chinese sites of around 2500 BCE to avoid the odd pang of Egypt envy. They find no Great Pyramids or royal inscriptions. Their discoveries in fact look more like what archaeologists find on sites in the Western core that date around 4000 BCE, shortly before the first cities and states emerged. The East was moving along a path like the West’s, but at least fifteen hundred years behind; and, staying on schedule, between 2500 and 2000 BCE the East went through transformations rather like those the West had seen between 4000 and 3500 BCE.

  Figure 4.5. The expansion of the Eastern core, 3500–1000 BCE: sites mentioned in this chapter

  All along the great river valleys the pace of change accelerated, but an interesting pattern emerged. The fastest changes came not on the broadest plains with the richest soils but in cramped spaces, where it was hard for people to run away and find new homes if they lost struggles for resources within villages or wars between them. On one of Shandong’s small plains, for instance, archaeologists found a new settlement pattern taking shape between 2500 and 2000 BCE. A single large town grew up, with perhaps five thousand residents, surrounded by smaller satellite towns, which had their own smaller satellite villages. Surveys around Susa in southwest Iran found a similar pattern there some fifteen hundred years earlier; this, perhaps, is the way things always go when one community wins political control.

  To judge from the lavish send-offs some men got in their funerals, genuine kings may have been clawing their way up the greasy pole in Shandong after 2500 BCE. A few graves contain truly spectacular jades and one has a turquoise headdress that looks a lot like a crown. The most remarkable find, though, is a humble potsherd from Dinggong. When this apparently unremarkable
fragment of gray pottery initially came out of the ground the excavators just tossed it in a bucket with their other finds, but when they cleaned it back at the lab they found eleven symbols, related to yet different from later Chinese scripts, scratched on its surface. Is this, the excavators asked, the tip of an iceberg of widespread writing on perishable materials? Did Shandong’s kings have bureaucrats managing their affairs, like the rulers of Uruk in Mesopotamia a thousand years earlier? Maybe; but other archaeologists, pointing to the unusual way the inscription was identified, wonder whether it has been wrongly dated or is even a fake. Only further discoveries will clear this up. Yet writing or no, whoever ran the Shandong communities was certainly powerful. By 2200 BCE human sacrifices were common and some graves received ancestor worship.

  Who were these top people? Taosi, a site four hundred miles away in the Fen River valley, may provide some clues. This is the biggest settlement known from these times, with perhaps ten thousand inhabitants. A huge pounded-earth platform may have supported one of China’s first palaces, though the only direct evidence is a decorated fragment of a destroyed wall found in a pit. (I will return to this in a moment.)

  Thousands of burials have been excavated at Taosi, and these hint at a steep social hierarchy. Nearly nine out of every ten graves were small, with just a few offerings. Roughly one in ten was bigger, but about one in a hundred (always male) was enormous. Some of the giant graves held two hundred offerings, including vases painted with dragons, jade ornaments, and entire pigs, sacrificed but not eaten. In a striking parallel to Jiahu, the prehistoric cemetery discussed in Chapter 2, the very richest graves contained musical instruments: clay or wood drums with crocodile skins, large stone chimes, and an odd-looking copper bell.

  When I talked about Jiahu in Chapter 2, I mentioned the archaeologist Kwang-chih Chang’s theory that Eastern kings developed from prehistoric shamans who used alcohol, music, and repetitive rituals to convince themselves (and others) that they traveled to spirit worlds and talked to ancestors and gods. Jiahu had not been excavated when Chang developed this idea, and he could trace evidence only back to about 3500 BCE; but pointing to Taosi and similar sites, he suggested that it was between 2500 and 2000 BCE that ancient China’s religious and royal symbols crystallized. About two thousand years later the Rites of Zhou, a Confucian handbook on ceremonies, would still list all the instrument types found in the Taosi graves as appropriate for elite rituals.

  Chang believed that other literature produced around the same time as the Rites of Zhou also reveals memories of the period before 2000 BCE. One of the most significant, if also most cryptic, passages may come in the Springs and Autumns of Mr. Lü,* a survey of useful knowledge compiled in 239 BCE by one Lü Buwei, chief minister of the state of Qin. Lü pronounced, “The Way of Heaven is round; the Way of Earth is square. The sage kings took this as their model.” The sage kings were said to be descendants of the high god Di, and the last of these sage kings, Yu, was supposed to have saved mankind by digging drainage ditches when the Yellow River flooded. “But for Yu,” another text said, “we should have been fishes.” The grateful people made Yu their king, the story runs, and he founded China’s first fully human dynasty, the Xia.

  Lü Buwei believed in his book’s accuracy, reportedly suspending a thousand pieces of gold above it outside his city’s main market and offering the money to anyone who could show that he needed to add or remove a single word. (Fortunately, publishers no longer require this of authors.) But despite Lü’s touching faith, King Yu sounds about as credible as Noah, the West’s version of a blameless man who saved humanity from floods. Most historians think the sage kings were entirely fictional. Kwang-chih Chang, though, suggested that Lü’s book preserved genuine, albeit distorted, information about the late third millennium BCE, the age when something resembling kingship was taking shape in the East.

  Chang saw a link between Lü’s story that the sage kings took the roundness of heaven and squareness of earth as their model and the cong, a type of jade vessel that appeared in rich graves in the Yangzi Delta region around 2500 BCE then spread to Taosi and other sites. A cong is a square block of jade with a cylindrical opening drilled through it, the circle and square expressing the union of heaven and earth. The circle-square remained a potent emblem of royal power until the fall of China’s last dynasty in 1912 CE. If you brave the crowds at the Forbidden City in Beijing and peer into the dark interiors of the palaces, you will see the same symbols—square throne base, round ceiling—repeated over and over again.

  Perhaps, Chang suggested, memories of ancient priest-kings, men who claimed to move between this and the spirit world and used cong to symbolize their power, survived into Lü’s day. Chang called the years 2500–2000 BCE “the Age of Jade Cong, the period when shamanism and politics joined forces and when an elite class based on its shamanistic monopoly came into being.” The most spectacular cong were surely royal treasures; the biggest example, engraved with images of spirits and animals, has been dubbed by archaeologists (whose humor is nothing if not predictable) the King Cong.

  If Chang was right, religious specialists turned themselves into a ruling elite between 2500 and 2000 BCE, much as they had done in Mesopotamia a thousand-plus years earlier, with jade, music, and temples on beaten-earth platforms as amplifiers for their messages to the gods. One site even had a shrine (admittedly small, just twenty feet across, and only on a low platform) shaped like a cong.

  By 2300 BCE Taosi looked like an Uruk in the making, complete with palaces, platforms, and chiefs on their way to becoming godlike. And then, suddenly, it didn’t. The elite compound was destroyed, which is why the only trace of a palace is the fragment of a painted wall found in a garbage pit that I mentioned earlier. Forty skeletons, some dismembered or with weapons stuck in them, were dumped in a ditch where the palace had stood, and some of the biggest graves in the cemetery were looted. Taosi shrank to half its previous size and a big new town grew up just a few miles away.

  One of the frustrating things about archaeology is that we often see the results of what people did but not the causes. We can spin yarns (Barbarians burn Taosi! Civil war destroys Taosi! Internal feuds tear Taosi in two! New neighbor sacks Taosi! And so on.) but can rarely tell which is true. In this case, the best we can do is to observe that the fall of Taosi was part of a larger process. By 2000 BCE the biggest sites in Shandong had also been abandoned and population was falling across northern China—at just the same time, of course, that drought, famine, and political collapse were racking Egypt and Mesopotamia. Could climate change have brought on an Old World–wide crisis?

  If Taosi had recorded flood levels with a Yellow Riverometer like Egypt’s Nilometer, or if Chinese archaeologists had done micromorphological studies like those at Tell Leilan in Syria, we might be able to say, but these kinds of evidence do not exist. We might scour the literary accounts written two thousand years after these events for information, though as with the stories about sage kings, we cannot tell how much their authors really knew about such early times.

  “During the reign of Yu,” the Springs and Autumns of Mr. Lü says, “there were ten thousand guo under heaven.” Translating guo as “chiefdom,” a small political unit based on a walled town, many archaeologists think this is quite a good description of the Yellow River valley between 2500 and 2000 BCE. Some scholars go on to argue that there really was a King Yu, who ended the age of ten thousand guo and imposed the rule of a Xia dynasty on them. The literary sources even provide a climatic cause, though instead of a Mesopotamian-style dust bowl they speak of torrential rain in nine out of ten years, which was why Yu needed to drain the Yellow River valley. Something like this certainly could have happened; until two decades ago, when the Yellow River started running dry in places, people regularly called it “China’s sorrow” because it flooded most years and changed course on average once each century, ruining or killing peasants by the thousands.

  Maybe the story of Yu is based on a real ca
tastrophe around 2000 BCE. Or maybe it is just a folktale. We simply don’t know. Once again, though, while the causes of change are obscure, its consequences are clear. While the towns of Shandong and the Fen Valley bounced back by 2000 BCE (Taosi even got a monumental platform twenty feet tall and two hundred feet across), the advantages of backwardness—so important in Western history—now kicked in, and even more impressive monuments began filling a former backwater, the Yiluo Valley.

  We do not have enough evidence to know why, but the Yiluoans did not simply copy Taosi. Instead they created a whole new architectural style, replacing the big buildings that were easy to see and approach from every angle, which had been customary for a thousand years in northern China, with closed-in palaces, their courtyards surrounded by roofed corridors with only a few points of entry. They then tucked the palaces away behind tall rammed-earth walls. Interpreting architecture is a tricky business, but the Yiluo style may mean that relationships between rulers and ruled mutated in new and perhaps more hierarchical directions as priestly leadership spread to the fluid frontier in the Yiluo Valley.

  We might think of this as the East’s Uruk moment, when one community left all rivals behind and turned itself into a state with rulers who could use force to impose their decisions on and raise taxes from their subjects. That community was Erlitou, which exploded into a true city with 25,000 residents between 1900 and 1700 BCE. Many Chinese archaeologists believe Erlitou was the capital of the Xia dynasty said to have been established by the sage king Yu. Non-Chinese scholars on the whole disagree, pointing out that the literary references to the Xia only begin a thousand years after Erlitou was abandoned. Perhaps, they suggest, the Xia—along with King Yu—were made up. These critics accuse Chinese scholars of at best being gullible about mythology and at worst of peddling propaganda, bolstering modern China’s national identity by pushing its origins as far into antiquity as possible. Not surprisingly, these arguments get nasty.