by Gideon Defoe
* Hope bumped into the UN Secretary-General on a plane and tried to argue her country’s case, but she’d taken a pill to calm her nerves and ended up garbling it.
† When Indira Gandhi was persuaded to visit Sikkim for a meeting about the country’s future, a badly timed protest, featuring a lot of school kids holding a sign that read ‘WE ARE A BUFFER, NOT A DUFFER’, didn’t improve her attitude.
The Kingdom of Axum
circa 100–940
Population: unknown
Capital: Axum (or Aksum)
Language: Ge’ez
Currency: gold, silver and bronze coins
Cause of death: a strained economy, climate change, invasion, or most likely a mix of all three
Today: part of Ethiopia
///mimes.bookmark.corrode
Because fashion is cyclical and Twitter is bad, Nazis are making quite the comeback right now. A sensible precaution would be to know where you could get hold of an ancient biblical super-weapon, just in case you need to melt their stupid Nazi faces off. There is a monk in Ethiopia who swears he has exactly that, the genuine, 100 per cent original Ark of the Covenant, but he definitely won’t let you see it.
For a lot of the West, Ethiopia and Eritrea mean famine and civil war, and if we bother to think about the region’s history at all then we tend to skip 4 million years back to our most famous ancestor, Lucy the australopithecine. But this part of Africa was home to a kingdom that lasted the best part of a millennium – and which by the third century CE was one of the four great powers on the planet.*
Ethiopian tradition has it that Axum was founded by the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Legendarily, the queen had a goat’s hoof instead of a regular foot, because her mother, while pregnant, had stared covetously at a goat, ‘after the manner of women who are with child’ (not a medically recognised fact). When she travelled from Ethiopia to visit him in Israel, Solomon had his floor polished until it was ‘as reflective as glass’ in order to see if this rumour was true. Polishing your floor to surreptitiously look at women’s legs apparently counted as ‘very wise’ rather than ‘a bit much’; still, it was a different time back then, #notallprophets, etc.
In a convoluted tale, the queen goes home pregnant, her son Menelik grows up, visits his dad, semi-accidentally nicks the Ark and takes it back to Axum, where it remains to this day, in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. A little conveniently, nobody is allowed to see the Ark except for one monk whose sole duty it is to look after it until he dies, and the job is passed to another. This sounds suspiciously like the kid at every school who claims to have that rare Pokémon/Star Wars figure/Lego Hogwarts but can’t bring it in because it’s at home behind some boxes and their arms are tired.
The problem is that the story doesn’t match up with the archaeological record, which places the founding of Axum at about 100 CE, a full thousand years too late for Solomon. Even in vague prehistory terms, a thousand years is a pretty big miss. Though, before Axum there was the D‘mt civilisation, about which we know very little, so possibly the two became conflated. Or possibly biblical archaeology is a mug’s game because very little of anything ever matches up. What is certain is that Axum minted its own currency, expanded into the Arabian Peninsula, grew fabulously rich from trade and erected spectacular stone obelisks, known as ‘stelae’, the skyscrapers of their day.†
The death of Axum is up for debate, though it seems likely the Axumites were victims of their own success: an ever-growing population had to farm more and more intensively in order to sustain themselves, especially once their trade network started to wobble. Soil erosion became catastrophic. Jared Diamond calls this kind of wilful short-termism ‘landscape amnesia’ – ‘Didn’t there used to be more trees and stuff here?’ ‘Oh, it’s fine, I’m sure it’s always been like this’ – the same thing that helped do for Easter Island. Climate change in the eighth century, when the rains started to falter, made things even worse. And, at some point, Axum simply became easy pickings for a warrior queen whose identity we can’t ever be sure of.
* When Italy invaded the city in the 1930s, for some weird reason the monks didn’t use their anti-fascist weapon of mass destruction. The Italians stole one of the giant stelae and shipped it back to Rome, where it was erected as a monument to celebrate Benito Mussolini’s fifteenth year in power. In 2005, after years of complaints, they finally took action to give it back, which proved tricky: it was too heavy to go via Ethiopia’s roads, so it had to be loaded onto an Antonov An-124, the only plane big enough to lift it. Which itself could only land at the exact moment of dawn – there were no runway lights, so a night-time landing was impossible, and the air is so thin on the Ethiopian plateau that the plane would only be able to stay airborne when the temperature was below 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
† The tallest of the stelae still standing in Axum is 23 metres (five and a bit double-decker buses). The largest collapsed stelae is 33 metres.
Dahomey
circa 1600–1904
Population: 300,000 (in 1700)
Capital: Abomey
Language: Fon
Currency: cowry shells
Cause of death: the scramble for Africa
Today: Benin
///cheek.roosters.funky
The Amazons of Greek myth were intended as a cautionary tale, a warning against messing with the patriarchal status quo.* ‘Look what happened to them! Extinct! That’s what you get for role reversal and not sticking to gender norms! Pass me that papyrus, Socrates, I want to write an angry play about feckless millennials …’ etc., and so on, down through the ages.
Dubiously motivated myths aside, we have a more recent, real-life version of the Amazons: the West African Kingdom of Dahomey,† unique for boasting a substantially female army. The origin of these warriors (or ‘Mothers’, as they called themselves) is disputed. Like a lot of African history, it has to be filtered through the accounts of visitors who were racist, misogynist, sleazy or – most often – a charming combination of all three.
One story has the King of Dahomey praising his ‘wives’ for a successful elephant hunt, and them responding that ‘a nice man-hunt would be even better’. Another suggests that a depleted army was padded out with women to make it look bigger, but that those women then turned out to be much better soldiers than the men. What isn’t disputed is that by the eighteenth century they numbered in their thousands, they were fierce and terrifying, and if needs be (according to one French observer) they ‘could tear apart a cow in less time than it would take a European abattoir’.
Their harsh military training was typical of a country that seems to have enjoyed making life difficult for itself. The women would run through great big piles of two-inch-long acacia thorns. Then they’d do some ‘mime’ fighting, which, like all mime, would have been annoying. After that, they’d run through another pile of thorns, just to prove a point. The reward for completing this would be a belt – which seems nice, everyone likes a free belt, except the belts were made out of a load more thorns. Finally, they’d get to practise ‘insensitivity training’ by throwing baskets of prisoners off high walls. One snooty early visitor criticised the women for shooting their imported vintage muskets from the hip, somehow missing the point that this is obviously the most stylish way to shoot your imported vintage musket.
It’s worth noting that Dahomey wasn’t entirely some proto-feminist nation. The forcibly conscripted soldiers, some as young as eight, were technically all married to the king, and their main purpose – the main purpose of the whole country, really – was to help keep a booming slave trade ticking along. Every year Dahomey would go to war on some flimsy pretext (usually an imagined insult to the king’s mother), but the real business was capturing human beings to sell, the hot commodity of the day.
‘Black Sparta’, as it came to be known in England, made its neighbours’ lives hell for over a century a
nd a half, but eventually Dahomey ran up against the colonising French, who had machine guns. Most of the ‘Amazons’ were massacred in a series of bloody battles towards the end of the nineteenth century. Though a few warriors evaded death and then stealthily substituted themselves for the civilian Dahomey women already captured by the French soldiers – whose throats they then slit in their beds.
* Whether the original ‘mythological’ Amazons existed is questionable, though archaeological digs in Russia have thrown up some evidence that they might have done, in the form of the Scythians.
† Probably lies: Dahomey’s name was supposedly a bad gag. Sometime around the early 1600s, the young King Dakodonu demanded a chunk of forest-savannah from a rival local chieftain. The chieftain, unimpressed, replied: ‘Should I open my belly and build you a house in it?’ In an impressive demonstration of taking things much too literally, Dakodonu instantly disembowelled him and started to build a palace right there on his entrails, giving the new kingdom the name ‘Dahomey’, which in the native language breaks down as dan (‘chief’), xo (‘belly’) and me (‘inside of’). Like all origin stories, this is almost certainly a crock, created to give later rulers a spurious legitimacy.
The Most Serene Republic of Venice
697–1797
Population: circa 180,000 (by 1490)
Capital: Venice
Languages: Italian, Venetian
Currency: Venetian ducat, lira
Cause of death: Napoleon
Today: part of Italy
///shrimps.bribing.pulp
In 2018, four Japanese students sat down at a restaurant in Venice and ordered lunch. The bill came to 1,100 euros. When the story went viral, the Venetian tourist authorities pulled their best Claude-Rains-in-Casablanca faces – ‘I’m shocked – shocked – to find that people are being overcharged in this establishment!’ – and slapped the restaurant with a steep fine to ensure it would never happen again. Six months later a nearby café hit the news when it charged a tourist 43 euros for two coffees and some water.
A more honest reaction might have been a shrug and a wave towards Venice’s glorious 800-year history of ripping people off. ‘I wrote you a long letter from Venice but the laudable love of gain … which burns with zealous heat in the breast of every Italian caused the hotel keeper to charge the postage and to throw the letter in the fire together with several others’ – this was Mary Shelley complaining of being fleeced back in the nineteenth century.* Charging extortionate prices is what had made the city the most powerful maritime republic in the world.
It started off with salt. When their salt ponds flooded, the Venetians had to start importing it. The city paid well, and so local merchants eagerly sailed off to collect the stuff but, in the process, they brought other exotic items back with them. And quickly discovered that they could make a boatload more money acting as the middleman – buying low from the East and selling high to the West, or vice versa – than in producing the goods themselves.
Where other countries got side-tracked by religious and ethnic strife, the Serene Republic kept its eyes on the prize: naked capitalism.† The Venetians nobbled competitors. They set up some of the earliest banks. They sold the first coffee in Europe. Moneylenders, banned in most places, could operate in the city with impunity. The head of state, the doge, had all the usual spiritual trappings but was really the head of Venice Inc., presiding over an aristocratic boardroom. A merchant fleet of some 1,500 ships helped this country-shaped company to gradually expand as far as Padua, Vicenza and Cyprus. For the most part though, the republic grew not through conquest but sheer reliability. Venetian contracts were more dependable, and their networks better, than those of their competitors. Given the choice, they’d rather stay friendly with a neighbour – all the better to bleed their wallets.
The studied neutrality that was so great for business came back to bite them. When Venice tried to stay on good trading terms with Napoleon’s France as well as his bitter enemy Austria, it only succeeded in annoying both sides. With 11 boats in Venice’s official navy at this point, Bonaparte marched in unopposed, the panicking doge abdicated, and the republic was carved up by the Austrians and the French. Venice Inc. found itself victim of a hostile takeover.‡
* Shelley’s pal Lord Byron lived in Venice for three years, where he kept a menagerie including dogs, a wolf, a fox, some cats and a monkey.
† Unsurprisingly, this love of the bottom line went hand-in-hand with a dark underbelly. There was a widespread belief in witches and curses, one of which involved stealing someone’s hair, wrapping it around a scorpion and burying it in some sand – as the scorpion died, so would the victim. The local Murano glass became popular in part because people thought it was sensitive to the presence of poison and would tremble or even shatter if any were poured into it.
‡ ‘A man without money is a corpse who walks’ – old Venetian proverb.
The Golden Kingdom of Silla
57 BCE–935 CE
Population: 2 million (in the eighth century)
Capital: Gyeongju
Language: Old Korean
Currency: Oshuchon
Cause of death: an obsession with class
Today: part of North and South Korea
///bachelor.singers.conga
As origin stories go, it’s not totally convincing. Villagers see an eerie light one evening and head off to investigate. They find a giant red egg, out of which hatches a bouncing baby with a ‘radiant visage’. The glowing infant is anointed as a future monarch, the first of a line that will last for centuries. A kingdom is born. Nearby animals start to dance, Disney-style.
Historians tend not to accept egg-based explanations for the birth of countries, and a more likely story is that Silla (literal meaning: ‘encompassing the four directions by its virtuous achievements’) evolved from one of 12 city states that dominated the Korean peninsula 2,000 years ago. Well-stocked burial mounds tell us that the kingdom gradually grew an extensive trading network – stretching as far as the Middle East – and that the citizens of Silla really liked whacking great piles of gold (hence the bling ‘golden kingdom’ nickname), but beyond that the details get vague. One thing we do have is a fairly complete list of the kingdom’s rulers, which is where Silla managed an inadvertently progressive achievement.
The kingdom based its entire society on ‘bone rank’. Like a royal bloodline, but more extreme, your bone rank dictated the colours you wore, the maximum dimensions of your house, your job, and pretty much everything else. The top rank – Sacred Bone – meant that you were descended from the royal line on both sides. Beneath that was True Bone (bit shabbier – one side royal, one side noble). And after that a variety of non-bone ranks of diminishing importance. Only those from the Sacred Bone caste could sit on the throne.
This ultra-rigid hierarchy ran into a problem halfway through the seventh century when there were suddenly no more Sacred Bone males left. The country had to choose between having a female ruler (not a thing this part of the world had even considered back then) or lowering the entry requirements. They decided gender mattered slightly less than class, and so, in 632 CE, Seondeok, daughter of King Jinpyeong, was crowned queen.
Said to be wise enough to predict the arrival of an enemy army because she’d ‘seen some frogs’, she was also so beautiful that when she met a peasant with an unrequited crush on her, his heart exploded into flames – burning down a royal pagoda, which is the kind of embarrassing social death we can all identify with. Myths aside, by 643 CE Silla found itself besieged. The peninsula was divided into three warring kingdoms: Silla, Baekje and Goguryeo. Queen Seondeok sent an envoy to China, to ask the Tang emperor for help. Emperor Taizong’s reply was a patronising mansplain: it seemed obvious, he argued, that things were out of balance in Silla. The heavenly principles of the hard male yang and the soft female yin meant any right-thinking person would realise that women were sub
ordinate, and this was why Silla’s enemies were giving it such grief. A solution, Taizong went on to suggest, might be for him to send a man over to rule in Seondeok’s place?
To Seondeok’s credit, she somehow refused this idea politely enough that the alliance was later agreed, and over the subsequent few years Silla successfully conquered its two rivals, unifying the Korean peninsula for the first time.* Moreover, Seondeok achieved the ultimate accolade for any great leader – she made it into Civilization VI (well, the expansion pack – still counts), which is something Taizong never managed.†
* Seondeok also built the first dedicated astronomical observatory in the Far East – Cheomseongdae, which still stands today. Though, because it predates telescopes by a thousand years, the actual observatory element is basically ‘a hole to look out of’.
† Silla had two subsequent queens, until the nobility decided that maybe keeping women in their place was more important than class after all and let the Sacred Bone requirement slide. The rest of the bone rank system remained in place. The increasing frustration this caused at all levels of society, kept from advancement by their birth, probably contributed to the kingdom’s fall after a thousand years, when it splintered back into three separate kingdoms.
Khwarezmia
1212–20 (in its final form)
Population: 5 million
Capital: Gurganj, Samarkand, Ghazna and Tabriz
Languages: Persian, Kipchak
Currency: drachm
Cause of death: a total lack of manners
