Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  These are troubled waters. Not having a bodyguard, I will get out of them quickly. It seems to me that the biblical account, like the Chinese traditions about the Xia and Shang discussed in Chapter 4, may be exaggerated but is unlikely to be totally fanciful; and evidence from other parts of the Western core also suggests that revival was under way by the late tenth century BCE. In 926 Sheshonq I, a Libyan warlord who had seized the Egyptian throne, led an army through Judah (the southern part of modern Israel and the West Bank) in what looks like an attempt to restore the old Egyptian Empire. He failed, but in the north a still greater power was also stirring. After a hundred-year gap during the dark age, Assyrian royal records restarted in 934 BCE under King Ashur-dan II, giving us a glimpse of a gangster state that made the Zhou look angelic.

  Ashur-dan was very conscious that Assyria was recovering from a dark age. “I brought back the exhausted peoples of Assyria who had abandoned their cities and houses in the face of want, hunger, and famine, and had gone up to other lands,” he wrote. “I settled them in cities and houses … and they dwelt in peace.” In some ways Ashur-dan was an old-fashioned king, seeing himself as the earthly representative of Assyria’s patron god Ashur, much as Mesopotamian kings had been doing for two thousand years. Ashur, though, had had a makeover during the dark age. He had become an angry god; in fact, a very angry god, because although he knew he was top god, most mortals failed to grasp this. Ashur-dan’s job was to make them grasp it by turning the world into Ashur’s hunting ground. And if hunting for Ashur made Ashur-dan rich, that was fine too.

  Within Assyria’s heartland the king commanded a small bureaucracy and appointed governors called Sons of Heaven, giving them huge estates and labor forces. These were high-end practices that would have been familiar to any International Age ruler, but the Assyrian king’s real power had low-end sources. Rather than taxing Assyria to pay for an army to do Ashur’s hunting, the king relied on the Sons of Heaven to provide troops, rewarding them—as Zhou kings did with their lords—with plunder, exotic gifts, and a place in royal rituals. The Sons of Heaven leveraged this position to win thirty-year terms of office, effectively turning their estates into hereditary fiefs and their laborers into serfs.

  Just like Zhou rulers, Assyrian kings were hostages to the lords’ goodwill, but so long as they won wars that did not matter. The Sons of Heaven provided much bigger armies than Zhou vassal kings (according to royal accounts, fifty thousand infantry in the 870s BCE and more than a hundred thousand in 845, plus thousands of chariots), and the kings’ relatively high-end bureaucracy provided the logistical support to feed and move these hosts.

  Not surprisingly, the rulers of Assyria’s smaller, weaker neighbors generally preferred buying protection to being impaled on pointed sticks while their cities burned. An offer from the Assyrians was normally one they couldn’t refuse, particularly since Assyria often left submissive local kings in power rather than using the Zhou strategy of replacing them with colonists. Defeated kings could even end up profiting; if they loaned Assyria troops for its next war, they could get a cut of the plunder.

  Client kings might be tempted to back out of their deals, though, so Assyria focused their minds with holy terror. Those who submitted did not have to worship Ashur, but they did have to recognize that Ashur ruled heaven and told their own gods what to do—which made rebellion a religious offense against Ashur as well as a political one, giving the Assyrians no choice but to punish it as savagely as possible. Assyrian kings decorated their palaces with carved scenes of horrific brutality, and their glee in cataloguing massacres rapidly becomes mind-numbing. Take, for instance, Ashurnasirpal II’s account of the punishments meted out to rebels around 870 BCE:

  I built a tower over against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the tower with their skin. Some I walled up within the tower, some I impaled upon the tower on stakes, and others I bound to stakes around the tower …

  Many captives from among them I burned with fire, and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out the eyes. I made one pile of the living and another of heads, and I hung their heads from tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I burned up in the fire. Twenty men I captured alive and I walled them up in his palace … The rest of the warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert.

  The political fortunes of the Eastern and Western cores were moving in different directions in the ninth century BCE, with Zhou rule unraveling while Assyria was reviving after the dark age, but both cores experienced constant warfare, growing cities, more trade, and new, low-cost ways to run states. And in the eighth century BCE they found something else in common: both discovered the limits of kingship on the cheap.

  THE WINDS OF CHANGE

  It’s an ill wind, the saying goes, that blows nobody any good. Never was this truer than around 800 BCE, when minor wobbles in Earth’s axis generated stronger winter winds all over the northern hemisphere (Figure 5.4). In western Eurasia, where the main winter winds are “westerlies” blowing from the Atlantic, this meant more winter rain. This was good for people in the Mediterranean Basin, where the commonest cause of death had always been intestinal viruses that flourish in hot, dry weather, and the main problem for farmers was that the winter winds might not bring enough rain for good harvests. Cold and rain were better than sickness and hunger.

  The new climate regime was bad, though, for people north of the Alps, where the main killers were respiratory diseases that flourished in the cold and damp and the main agricultural problem was a short summer growing season. As the weather changed between 800 and 500 BCE population fell in northern and western Europe but rose around the Mediterranean.

  Figure 5.4. The chill winds of winter: climate change in the early first millennium BCE

  In China the winter winds blow mainly from Siberia, so when they grew stronger after 800 BCE they made the weather drier as well as cooler. This probably made agriculture easier around the Yangzi and Yellow rivers by reducing flooding, and population kept growing in both valleys, but it made life harder for people on the increasingly arid plateau north of the Yellow River.

  Within these broad patterns there were countless local variations, but the main result was like the episodes of climate change we saw in Chapter 4; the balances within and between regions shifted, forcing people to respond. The author of a standard textbook on paleoclimatology says of these years, “If such a disruption of the climate system were to occur today, the social, economic, and political consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic.”

  In East and West alike the same amount of land had to feed more mouths as population grew. This generated both conflicts and innovations. Both could potentially be good for rulers; more conflicts meant more chances to help friends and punish enemies, more innovations meant more wealth being generated, and the engine behind both—more people—meant more laborers, more warriors, and more plunder.

  All these good things could come to kings who kept control, but the low-end kings of the eighth century BCE found that difficult. The big winners, best placed to exploit new opportunities, were often local bosses—the governors, landlords, and garrison commanders on whom low-end kings relied to get things done. This was bad news for kings.

  In the 770s BCE Eastern and Western kings alike lost control of their vassals. The Egyptian state, more or less unified since 945 BCE, split into three principalities in 804 and devolved by 770 into a dozen virtually independent dukedoms. In Assyria, Shamshi-Adad V had to fight to secure his succession to the throne in 823 BCE, then lost control of his client kings and governors. Some Sons of Heaven even waged wars in their own names. Assyriologists call the years 783 through 744 BCE “the interval,” a time when kings counted for little, coups were common, and governors did what they liked.

  For local aristocrats, minor princes, and little city-states, this was a golden age. The most interesting case is Phoe
nicia, a string of cities along the modern Lebanese coast, whose inhabitants had been prospering as middlemen since the Western core revived in the tenth century BCE, carrying goods between Egypt and Assyria. Their wealth attracted Assyrian attention, though, and by 850 the Phoenicians were paying protection money. Some historians think this pushed Phoenicians to venture into the Mediterranean in search of profits to buy peace; others suspect that the growing population and pull of new markets in the Mediterranean was more important. Either way, by 800 BCE Phoenicians were voyaging far afield, setting up trade enclaves on Cyprus and even building a little shrine on Crete. By 750 the Greek poet Homer could take it for granted that his audience knew (and mistrusted) “Phoenician men, famous for their ships, gnawers at profit, bringing countless pretty things in each dark hull.”

  The Greek population grew fastest of all, though, and Phoenician explorers and traders may have pulled hungry Greeks along in their wake. By 800 BCE someone was carrying Greek pottery to southern Italy, and by 750 Greeks as well as Phoenicians were settling permanently in the western Mediterranean (see Figure 5.3). Both groups liked good harbors with access via rivers to markets in the interior, but the Greeks, who came in much greater numbers than the Phoenicians, also settled as farmers and grabbed some of the best coastal land.

  Native groups sometimes resisted. Some, such as the tribesmen of Etruria and Sardinia in Italy, already had towns and long-distance trade before the colonists came; now they built cities and monuments, organized low-end states, and intensified agriculture. They created alphabets based on the Greek model (which the Greeks, in turn, had adapted from Phoenicia between 800 and 750 BCE). These alphabets were easier to learn and use than most earlier scripts, which had needed hundreds of signs, each representing a consonant-plus-vowel syllable; and much easier than the Egyptian hieroglyphic or Chinese scripts, which needed thousands of signs, each expressing a separate word. By the best guess, in the fifth century BCE 10 percent of Athenian men could read simple statements or write their own name—far more than anywhere in the East or West at any earlier time.

  We know much more about the spread of cities, states, trade, and writing into first-millennium-BCE Europe than about the spread of agriculture four or five thousand years earlier (discussed in Chapter 2), but the arguments over what happened in each case are strangely similar. Some archaeologists claim that colonization from the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE caused the rise of cities and states farther west; others respond that native peoples transformed their own societies in resistance to colonialism. Members of the latter group, mostly younger scholars, sometimes accuse the former group of projecting onto the ancient world nostalgia for the self-proclaimed civilizing missions of modern colonial regimes; while some of the former group, mostly of an older generation, reply that their critics are more interested in posing as champions of the oppressed than in finding out what really happened.

  The name-calling is admittedly tame compared to the rage that the archaeology of Israel generates (so far as I know no one has needed a bodyguard yet), but by the genteel standards of classical scholarship it counts as bitter controversy. It was enough to draw me in, anyway, and in an effort to make sense of the issues I spent my summers between 2000 and 2006 excavating a Sicilian site called Monte Polizzo.* This was an indigenous town occupied between 650 and 525 BCE by people called Elymians. It was so close to Phoenician and Greek colonies that we could see them from the summit of our hill, making it an ideal place to test competing theories of whether colonization or indigenous development caused the western Mediterranean takeoff. And after seven summers of picking, troweling, sieving, counting, weighing, and eating too much pasta, our conclusion is: it was a bit of both.

  This is, of course, pretty much the same conclusion archaeologists have reached about the expansion of agriculture thousands of years earlier. In each case, social development rose in both the core and in the peripheries around it. Traders and colonists left the core, whether pushed out by rivals or pulled by tempting opportunities, and some people in the peripheries actively copied core practices or independently created their own versions. The result was that higher levels of social development spread outward from the core, overlaying earlier systems and being transformed in the process as people in the peripheries added their own twists and discovered the advantages in their backwardness.

  At Monte Polizzo local initiatives were clearly important. For one thing, we suspect that our site was destroyed by fellow Elymians from Segesta, who created their own city-state in the sixth century BCE. But the arrival of Greek colonists was also critical, since Segestan state formation was partly a response to Greek competition for land and was massively shaped by Greek culture. Segestan aristocrats struggled to look like serious rivals to the Greeks, borrowing Greek practices to do so. In fact, they built such a perfect example of a Greek-style temple in the 430s BCE that many art historians think they must have hired the architects who designed the Parthenon at Athens. Segestans also inserted themselves into Greek mythology, claiming (as Romans did too) to be descendants of Aeneas, a refugee from the fall of Troy. By the fifth century BCE colonial cities in the western Mediterranean such as Carthage (a Phoenician settlement) and Syracuse (a Greek one) rivaled any in the old core. Etruscan social development was not far behind, and dozens of groups like the Elymians trailed not far behind them.

  A rather similar process of state breakdown in the core combined with expansion on the periphery also unfolded in the East as population grew. Around 810 BCE the Zhou king Xuan lost control of his lords, who saw less and less reason to cooperate with him as they themselves grew richer and stronger. Xuan’s capital in the Plain of Zhou slid into factional conflicts and raiders from the northwest plundered deep into his kingdom. When Xuan’s son You inherited the throne in 781 BCE he tried to stop the rot, apparently engineering a showdown with his surly vassals and his father’s too-powerful ministers, who may have been conspiring with You’s firstborn son and the boy’s mother.

  At this point the story descends into the kind of folktale that fills so many of our ancient sources. Sima Qian, the great historical scholar of the first century BCE, recounts a bizarre tale that an earlier Zhou king had once opened a thousand-year-old box of dragon saliva, from which a black reptile appeared. For reasons that Sima Qian leaves unclear, the king’s response was to have several palace women strip naked and yell at the monster. Rather than running away, it impregnated one of them, who gave birth to a reptilian daughter but then abandoned her. Another couple, fleeing the Zhou capital to escape the king’s anger over a wholly unrelated matter, carried this snake-child off to Bao, one of the rebellious vassal states in the Zhou kingdom.

  The point of this odd story is that in 780 BCE the people of Bao decided to try to broker a deal with King You by sending him the dragon’s offspring—now grown into a beautiful young woman named Bao Si—as a concubine. You was very happy about this, and the next year Bao Si bore him a son. This, apparently, was why You decided to get rid of his firstborn son and senior wife.

  All went well for You until 777 BCE, when his exiled son fled to another restless Zhou vassal state and You’s most senior minister joined the boy there. At this point a group of vassals made an alliance with northwestern people whom the Zhou called the Rong (the name simply means “hostile foreigners”).

  King You, heedless of all this, had turned his attention to a more immediate problem: how to make Bao Si laugh (not surprisingly, given her background, she was rather humorless). Only one thing seemed to work. You’s predecessors had set up watchtowers so that if the Rong attacked, drums and fires could warn the many lords, who would rush to the rescue with their retinues. Sima Qian says,

  King You lit the beacons and beat the great drums. As the beacons were to be lit only when intruders drew near, the many lords all came. Upon their arrival, there were no intruders, thus Lady Bao Si laughed out loud. The king was pleased, so he lit the beacons several times. Afterwards, since this was no
t reliable, the many lords became more reluctant to come.

  King You was the original boy who cried wolf, and when the Rong and rebellious Shen really did attack in 771 BCE, the many lords ignored the beacons. The rebels killed You, burned his capital, and put his estranged son on the throne with the title King Ping.

  It is hard to take this story too seriously, but many historians think it does preserve memories of real events. In the 770s BCE, the same decade that Egyptian and Assyrian rulers lost control, it would seem that population growth, resurgent local power, dynastic politics, and external pressures came together in China to produce an even sharper setback for monarchy.

  The vassals who left King You to his fate in 771 BCE perhaps wanted only to demonstrate their strength, install Ping as a figurehead, and carry on ignoring the monarchy. Their decision to bury their bronze ritual vessels all around the Wei valley, where archaeologists have recovered them in huge numbers since the 1970s, suggests that they planned to return as soon as the Rong went home laden with plunder from You’s palace. But if this was their thinking, they were badly mistaken. The Rong came to stay, and the many lords were forced to install King Ping as head of a government-in-exile at Luoyi in the Yellow River valley.* It soon became clear that the Zhou king, Son of Heaven as he might be, was impotent now he had lost his estates in the Wei Valley, and the earls of Zheng, the strongest of the “vassals,” started to test their erstwhile kings. In 719 BCE one earl took the heir to the throne hostage; in 707 another earl even shot the king with an arrow.