4.1 Upper and Lower Egypt
4.1 Scorpion King Macehead. On this ritual macehead, the “Scorpion King” is identified by the scorpion just to the left of his head. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Photo credit Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY
The name Narmer means “Raging Catfish,” or, more poetically, “Baleful Catfish.” It is a compliment, as the catfish was the bravest and most aggressive of all fish. On the back of the Narmer Palette, Narmer, in his role as White King, holds a warrior of the Red Kingdom by the hair. On the front, Narmer—having doffed the White Crown and put on the Red Crown instead—parades in victory past the bodies of decapitated warriors. He has drawn the Red Kingdom under White Kingdom rule at last.
4.2. Narmer Palette. The unifier of Egypt strikes a conquered Egyptian enemy, while the Horus falcon delivers another captive to him. Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Photo credit Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY
It seems likely that Narmer is another name for Menes, who appears in the Egyptian king lists as the first human king of Egypt. 11 Of him, the Egyptian priest Manetho writes:
After the [gods] and the demigods,
the First Dynasty comes, with eight kings.
Menes was the first.
He led the army across the frontier and won great glory.4
The breach of the frontier—the border between the kingdoms—created the first empire, and one of the world’s longest lived: great glory indeed.
Manetho’s account comes long after the fact. Manetho served in the temple of the sun-god Ra at Heliopolis twenty-seven centuries later; around 300 BC, he took it upon himself to reconcile different versions of the Egyptian king lists into one document, using (among other records) a papyrus called the Turin Canon, which also identifies Menes (“Men”) as the first king of Egypt.12 When he compiled his list, Manetho organized the scores of Egyptian rulers since 3100 into groups, beginning a new group each time a new family rose to power, or the kingship changed locations. He called these groups dynasteia, a Greek term for “power of rule.” Manetho’s “dynasties” are not always accurate, but they have become traditional markers in Egyptian history.
The First Dynasty begins, for Manetho, when the two parts of Egypt were united under the first king of all Egypt. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Menes/Narmer celebrated his victory by building a brand new capital at Memphis, the central point of his brand new kingdom. Memphis means “White Walls” the walls were plastered so that they shone in the sun. From the white city, the ruler of united Egypt could control both the southern valley and the northern delta. Memphis was the fulcrum point on which the two kingdoms balanced.
Another scene, carved on a macehead, shows Narmer/Menes wearing the Red Crown and taking part in some ceremony that looks much like a wedding; possibly the victorious founder of the First Dynasty married the princess of the Red Kingdom in order to unite both kingdoms in the bodies of the Double Crown’s heirs.
For the rest of Egypt’s history, the doubleness of its origin was enshrined in its king. He was called the Lord of Two Lands, and his Double Crown was made up of the Red Crown of Lower Egypt set on top of the White Crown of Upper Egypt. The southern vulture and the northern cobra, one crawling on the earth and the other inhabiting the sky, guarded the united kingdom. Two contrary powers had been brought together into a mighty and balanced whole.
Narmer himself reigned for sixty-four years and then went out on a hippo hunt, a quest traditionally undertaken by the king as a display of his power over civilization-threatening enemies. According to Manetho, he was cornered by the hippopotamus, and killed on the spot.
Chapter Five
The Age of Iron
In the Indus river valley, in 3102 BC, northern wanderers settle and build towns
IN THE YEARS when the king of Kish collected tribute from the ships sailing up and down the Euphrates, and when the white walls of Memphis rose at the balanced center of Egypt, the third great civilization of ancient times was still a string of tiny villages on a river plain. There would be no great cities and no empire-building in India for at least six hundred years.
The people who settled along the length of the Indus river were not city-dwellers. Nor were they list-keepers, as the Sumerians were. They did not carve the likeness of their leaders on stone, or set down their achievements on tablets. So we know very little about the first centuries of India.
We can try to mine the Indian epics for clues. Although they were written down very late (thousands, not hundreds, of years after the first settlements), they likely preserve a much older tradition. But even in this tradition, only one king, and one date, stand out with any clarity. In the year 3102, the wise king Manu presided over the beginning of the present age, and his age still has well over four hundred thousand years to go.
LONG BEFORE 3102, shepherds and nomads wandered into India. Some came down from central Asia, through the gap in the northern mountains now called the Khyber Pass. Others may have climbed straight over the Himalaya themselves (the occasional skeleton suggests that this route was as treacherous then as now).
They found both warmth and water on the other side of the mountains. The Himalaya acted as a barrier to frost, so that even in winter the temperature barely dropped below fifty degrees. In summer, the sun lit the Indian countryside into blazing heat. But two great rivers kept the subcontinent from desert barrenness. Melted snow and ice streamed down from the mountains into the Indus, which flowed northwest through India into the Arabian Sea; the mountains also fed the Ganga, which poured down from the Himalayan slopes and into the Bay of Bengal, far on the eastern coast. In the days when the Sahara was green, the Thar desert east of the Indus river was also green, and yet another river, now long dry, ran through it into the Arabian Sea.1
5.1 India
Perhaps two thousand years after crops were first grown in Mesopotamia and Egypt, northern wanderers settled in the hilly land just west of the Indus, today called Baluchistan. Tiny villages spread along the lower Indus river, and along the five branches of its upper end: the Punjab (the panj-ab, the “Five Rivers”). Other villages grew up along the Ganga. Down in the south of India, tools much like those used in southern Africa suggest that a few intrepid souls may have shoved off from the coast of Africa, sailed to India’s southwest shores, and settled there.
But these three areas—the south, the east, and the northwest—were divided from each other by enormous physical barriers. Hundreds of miles of plains and two mountain ranges, the Vindhya and Satpura, separated the north from the peoples of the south, whose known history comes much later. As the weather warmed, a desert three hundred miles wide spread its sands between the Ganga valley and the settlements in the northwest. From the very beginning of Indian history, the peoples of the south, the east, and the northwest lived independent of each other.
The villages near the Indus, in the northwest, grew into towns first.
The earliest houses in the Indus river valley were built on the river plain, perhaps a mile away from the river, well above the line of the flood. Mud bricks would dissolve in river water, and crops would wash away. The first reality of life in the Indus valley—as in Egypt and Sumer—was that water brought both life and death.
Which brings us to the first king of India, Manu Vaivaswata. Before Manu Vaivaswata, so the story goes, six semidivine kings had reigned in India. Each bore the name-title of Manu, and each ruled for a Manwantara, an age longer than four million years.
We are here clearly in the realm of mythology, but according to tradition, myth began to cross history during the reign of the seventh Manu. This Manu, sometimes simply called “Manu” and sometimes known by his full name of Manu Vaivaswata, was washing his hands one morning when a tiny fish came wriggling up to him, begging for protection from the stronger and larger fish who preyed on the weak, as was “the custom of the river.” Manu had pity and saved the fish.
Past danger of being eaten, the fish repaid his kindness by warning him of a coming flood that would
sweep away the heavens and the earth. So Manu built a wooden ark and went on board with seven wise sages, known as the Rishis. When the flood subsided, Manu anchored his ship to a far northern mountain, disembarked, and became the first king of historical India; the seven Rishis, meanwhile, became the seven stars of the Big Dipper. The year was 3102.
5.2 Indian Trade Routes
For the purposes of reconstructing Indian history, this story is more smoke than fire. Manu Vaivaswata has less claim to actual existence than the Scorpion King of Egypt, even though they seem to occupy the same century, and the oddly precise date 3102 is a result of backfiguring done by literary scholars at least two thousand years later, when the oral traditions began to be set down in writing. But the date itself appears in many histories of India; firm dates in ancient Indian history are hard to come by, so historians who cling to this one do so more from relief than from certainty. (“It is the first credible date in India’s history,” John Keay writes, “and being one of such improbable exactitude, it deserves respect.”)2
The only certainty about 3102 is that, around this date, villages in the Indus valley did indeed start to grow into towns. Two-story houses began to rise; the Indus settlers began to throw pots on wheels and to make tools of copper. They began to cut the forests and bake their clay in kilns. Oven-burned brick, more durable than brick dried in the sun, was less vulnerable to the swirling waters of floods. After 3102, water no longer had quite so destructive a power.
Turquoise and lapis lazuli, brought from the plains north of Mesopotamia, lie in the ruins of the richest houses. The townspeople had left their valley to trade above the Tigris and the Euphrates, with those same merchants who supplied semiprecious stones to the kings of Kish and Nippur and Ur.
But despite the growing prosperity and reach of the Indus towns, the epics of India tell not of advance, but of decline. The flood had washed away the previous age and begun a new one; the age of towns was the Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. It began when Manu descended from the mountain, and it was an age of wealth and industry. It was also an age in which truthfulness, compassion, charity, and devotion dwindled to a quarter of their previous strength.13 In the Iron Age, the sacred writings warned, leaders would commandeer the goods that belonged to their people, pleading financial need. The strong would take property from the vulnerable, and seize hard-won wealth for themselves. Rich men would abandon their fields and herds and spend their days protecting their money, becoming slaves of their earthly possessions rather than free men who knew how to use the earth.
Given the relatively late date at which these dreadful warnings were put down, they probably reflect the worries of a more mature society—one which already had a large, unproductive bureaucracy draining the national coffers. But the storytellers themselves put the beginnings of this declension all the way back to 3102, the year when villages along the Indus began to grow into towns.
Manu himself, kneeling down by the water that will soon wash away the previous age and bring on the decline of the Kali Yuga, finds himself speaking to a little fish forced to beg for protection from the larger and stronger who prey upon the weak. In India, the journey towards civilization had just begun; but as in Sumer itself, it was a journey which took its people that much farther from paradise.
Chapter Six
The Philosopher King
In the Yellow river valley, between 2852 and 2205 BC, the early villages of China acquire kings but reject their heirs
FAR EAST OF MESOPOTAMIA AND INDIA, the familiar pattern repeated itself once more.
This time, settlement began around the Yellow river, which ran east from the high plateau now called Qing Zang Gaoyuan—the Plateau of Tibet—and ended in the Yellow Sea. Farther south, the Yangtze river also ran to the eastern coast.
In the days when the Sahara was green and the Thar desert watered by a river, the wide expanse of land between the two great rivers of China was probably an earth-and-water patchwork of swamps, lakes, and mud. The peninsula of Shandong, between the two rivers, was almost an island. Hunters and gatherers might wander through the marshes, but there was little reason to settle on the water-soaked land.
Then the Sahara warmed; the Nile floods lessened; the river that once watered the Thar Desert disappeared; the braided stream of Mesopotamia slowly became two separate rivers as soil built up between them. Between the two great rivers of China, the land dried.
By 5000 BC, the expanse between the rivers was a wide plain, with forests on its high places. The wanderers had begun to settle, planting rice in the wet ground around the rivers. Houses multiplied and villages grew up. Archaeology reveals the first significant clusters of houses near the Yellow river. Here, settlement slowly became something like a culture: people with the same customs, the same methods of building houses, the same style of pottery, and presumably the same language.
This Yellow river culture, which we now call the Yang-shao, was not the only cluster of settlements in China. On the southeast coast of China, facing the East China Sea, another culture called Dapenkeng appeared; in the Yangtze river valley farther to the south, the Qinglian’gang grew up.1 Beneath the great southern bend of the Yellow river, a fourth cluster of settlements, the Longshan, sprang up. Excavations show Longshan ruins overtop of Yang-shao remains, suggesting that the Longshan may have peacefully overwhelmed at least part of the Yellow river culture.
6.1 China’s Early Settlements
We know almost nothing about the lives and customs of any of these four groups of people. All we can do is label them with different names because they have different styles of pottery and different methods of farming and building; a Yang-shao settlement might be surrounded by a ditch, while a Longshan village might be set off from the surrounding waste by a wall of earth. But apart from very general speculations (perhaps the arrangement of a cemetery near a village on the south bank of the Yellow river hints at a very early form of ancestor worship; perhaps the burial of food along with the dead shows belief in a pleasant afterlife), we have no clues: only the stories which claim to tell of China’s beginnings.
Like the stories of the Mahabharata, the stories of early China were set down several thousand years after the times they describe. But insofar as they keep older traditions alive, they tell of a first king who discovered the essential order of all things. His name was Fu Xi.
Sima Qian, the Grand Historian who collected the traditional tales of China into an epic history, tells us that Fu Xi began his rule in 2850. He invented the Eight Trigrams, a pattern of straight and broken lines used for record-keeping, divination, and interpretation of events. As he meditated on the appearance of birds and beasts, Fu Xi
drew directly from his own person,
and indirectly he drew upon external objects.
And so it was that he created the Eight Trigrams
in order to communicate the virtue of divine intelligence
and to classify the phenomenon of all living things.2
The patterns of the Eight Trigrams are modelled after the markings on turtle shells. The first Chinese king didn’t save his people from a flood, receive authority from heaven, or bring two countries into one. No; his great accomplishment was, for the Chinese, far more important. He found a connection between the world and the self, between the patterns of nature and the impulse of the human mind to order everything around it.
IN CHINESE LEGEND, Fu Xi is followed by the second great king, Shennong, who first made a plow from wood and dug in the earth. The Huai-nan Tzu says that he taught people to find the best soil, to sow and grow the five grains that sustain life, to thresh them, and to eat good herbs and avoid the poisonous. The Farmer King was followed by the third great king, perhaps the greatest of all: Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor.14
Huangdi is traditionally thought to have ruled from 2696 to 2598 BC. In his reign, he first conquered his brother, the Flame King, and spread his rule over his brother’s land. Then the southern warleader Chi You, who had been faithful to the Flame K
ing, launched a rebellion against the victorious Yellow Emperor. Chi You was an unpleasant character; he invented war, forged the first metal swords, ate pebbles and stones with his unbreakable teeth, and led an army of evildoers and giants. He charged against the army of Huangdi on a battlefield covered with fog; Huangdi had to use a magic chariot, equipped with a compass, to find his way to the center of the fight (which he won).
This is anachronistic. There were no compasses in China in 2696, magic or otherwise. Nor were there any cities. When Memphis and Kish were flourishing, the Yellow river settlements were still wood-posted, wattle-and-daub clusters surrounded by earthen ditches and walls. The people who lived in these settlements had learned to fish, to plant and harvest grain, and (we assume) to fight against invaders. Huangdi, if he fought for his empire against his brother and his brother’s warleader, won not an empire of thriving cities and merchants, but rural clusters of huts surrounded by rice and millet fields.
But some kind of transition in the structure of Chinese government took place after Huangdi’s conquests. Back in Sumer, the idea of hereditary power was well-established by this time. Apparently, the same issue reared its head in China almost at once. Huangdi, the last of the three great kings, was followed by a king called Yao. Yao, who was filled with wisdom (he is the first of the Three Sage Kings), apparently lived in a China where it was already customary for a king to pass his power to his son. Yao, though, realized that his own son was unworthy to inherit his throne. Instead, he chose as his successor a poor but wise peasant named Shun, who was famous not only for his virtue, but for his dedication to his father. Shun, who became a wise and just king (and the second of the Three Sage Kings), followed his own king’s model; he passed over his son and chose another worthy man, Yü, as his heir. Yü, the third Sage King, is credited with establishing the first dynasty of China, the Xia.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 5
