The Great Divide
Page 34
Libraries undoubtedly existed in ancient Egypt, but because they wrote on papyrus (the ‘bullrushes’ in which the infant Moses was supposed to have been sequestered), little has survived. In describing the building complex of Ramses ii (1279–1213 BC), the Greek historian Diodorus says that it included a sacred library which bore the inscription, ‘Clinic for the Soul’.12
One of the duties of the king in Mesopotamia was the administration of justice and, with the invention of writing, the first law codes were written down, often carved in stone and displayed publicly where everyone could see what the law was or have it read to them. The oldest known codes are Sumerian, dated to the second millennium BC and from them we can see that these laws take one of two forms, apodictic and casuistic. Apodictic laws are absolute prohibitions, such as ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Casuistic laws are of the type: ‘If a man delivers to his neighbour money or goods to keep, and it is stolen out of the man’s house, then, if the thief is found, he shall pay double.’ The prologue makes it plain that Hammurabi’s well-preserved law code, created ~1790 BC, was indeed intended to be exhibited in public. They are not what we would understand as statutes: they are royal decisions, a range of typical examples rather than a formal statement of principles. Hammurabi meant the code to apply across all of Babylonia, replacing earlier local laws that differed from area to area.13
A final early effect of writing was that it helped remove authority from the shamanistic type of religious leader: ritual, sacred and supernatural experiences could be written down now, meaning that tradition, rather than personal charisma, began to count for something.
Although archaeologists now order the ‘ages’ of man into the Stone, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, in that order, the first use of a metallic substance was almost certainly iron, around 300,000 years ago, when ochre found favour as decoration. Haematite in particular was popular, possibly because of its colour – red, the colour of blood and life. If the colour, lustre and even the weight of metals made their impact on early humans, it was as raw rocks, or in the beds of rivers and streams that they first encountered them. From this, they would have discovered that some rocks, such as flints and cherts, became easier to work with on heating and that others, like native copper, were easier to hammer into serviceable tools. Gradually, therefore, as time passed, the advantages of metals over stone, wood and bone would have become apparent. However, when we think of metallurgy in antiquity we mainly mean one thing – smelting, the apparently magical transformation by which solid rock, when treated in a certain way through heat, can be transformed into a molten metal. One can easily imagine the awesome impact this would have had on early humans.14
Copper ores are found all over the Fertile Crescent region but invariably in hilly and mountainous regions. Archaeologists are inclined therefore to think this is where metallurgy began, rather than in river valleys. The area favoured nowadays is a region ‘whose inhabitants, in addition to possessing ore and fuel, had adopted some form of settled life and were enjoying a chalcolithic culture’. This area, between the Elburz mountains and the Caspian Sea, is the front-runner for the origin of metallurgy, though the Hindu Kush and other areas have their adherents too. ‘That the discovery was fortuitously made can hardly be doubted, for it is inconceivable that men, simply by taking thought, would have realised the relationship existing between malachite – a rich-blue, friable stone – and the red, malleable substance, which we call copper.’ Because such a link was regarded then as magical, the early copper-smiths were believed to have super-human powers.15
At one stage it was believed that ‘the camp-fire was the original smelting furnace’. No more. Quite simply, the hearths at around 4000 BC were not hot enough. It is not only the temperature that acts against campfires. Not being enclosed, the atmosphere would not have been conducive to ‘reducing’ (separation). On the other hand, well before the discovery of smelting, much higher temperatures would have been obtained in some pottery kilns. The atmosphere in these baking chambers would have been of a strongly reducing character and modern experiments have confirmed that a spongy copper could be smelted in this way. The accident may have happened when ancient potters used malachite to colour pottery – ‘and then got the shock of their lives, when the colour delivered was very different from that anticipated’.16
We know that by 4000 BC knowledge of the process had spread to a number of regions in western Asia and that, by 3800 BC, copper smelting was being practised ‘comparatively widely’ in the ancient world. ‘By the early years of the third millennium BC, the people of Sumer had created the first important civilisation known to us in which metals played a conspicuous role.’ (The oldest known stock of metal tools dates from 2900 BC). From these dates onward copper was the dominant metal in western Asia and North Africa until after 2000 BC.17
Insofar as early metallurgy was concerned, after the discovery of smelting two advances were crucial. These were the discovery first of bronze and second of iron (iron will be considered later). There are two mysteries surrounding the advent of the Bronze Age, certainly so far as the Middle East is concerned, where it occurred first. One mystery lies in the fact that tin, the alloy with copper that makes it much harder, as bronze, is relatively rare in nature. How did this particular alloy, therefore, come to be made for the first time? And second, why, despite this, were advances so rapid, with the result that, between about 3000 BC and 2600 BC, all the important advances in metallurgical history, save for the hardening of steel, were introduced?18
In one sense, we should call the early Bronze Age the alloy age. This is because for many years, either side of 2000 BC, and despite what was said above, objects that might be called bronze had a very varied chemical make-up. Alloyed with copper, and ranging from less than 1 per cent to 15 per cent, there could be found tin, lead, iron and arsenic, suggesting that although early people had some idea of what made copper harder, more malleable and gave its tools and weapons a better edge, they weren’t entirely comfortable with the precise details of the process. The exact composition of bronze also varied from area to area – between Cyprus, Sumer and Crete, for example. The all-important change-over from copper to real bronze occurred in the first quarter of the second millennium BC.‘Tindiffers from copper – and the precious metals – in that it is never found in nature in a pure state. Instead, it is always in chemical combination. It must therefore have been smelted, though (and this is another mystery) hardly any metallic tin has ever been found in excavations by archaeologists. (In fact, only one piece of pure tin older than 1500 BC has ever been found.)’19
Though the exact origins of bronze are obscure, its attractions over copper were real enough, once its method of production could be stabilised, and its increasing popularity brought about considerable changes in the economy of the ancient world. Whereas copper was found in a fairly large number of localities, this was not the case with bronze for, as was said above, in neither Asia nor Europe is tin ore widely distributed. This limitation meant that the places where tin was mined grew considerably in importance and, since they were situated almost entirely in Europe, that continent had advantages denied to Asia and Africa. The fact that bronze was much more fluid than copper made it far more suitable for casting while its widespread use in weapons and tools reflects the fact that, provided the tin content could be kept at 9–10 per cent, hammered bronze is usually a good 70 per cent stronger than hammered copper.20 The edges of bronze tools were at least twice as hard as copper, very important because that meant the edges of daggers became as important as their points, encouraging the development of swords.21
Metallurgy was quite sophisticated from early on. Welding, nails and rivets were early inventions, in use from 3000 BC. Gold-plating began as early as the third millennium, soon followed by the lost-wax technique, for making bronze sculptures. In terms of ideas, three uses to which metals were put seem to have been most profound. These were the dagger, as was mentioned above, the mirror, and coins. Mirrors were particularly
popular among the Chinese, and the Romans excelled at making them, finding that an alloy of 23–28 per cent tin, 5–7 per cent lead, and the rest copper, served best. Reflections were later considered to be linked to man’s soul. As early as the third millennium BC, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia began using ingots of precious metals in exchange for goods. The ingots, of gold or silver and of uniform weight, were called minas or shekels or talents. Money was to have a profound effect on humankind’s thinking, but not until later.22
The Bronze Age reached its peak around 1400 BC. It was a time when iron was scarce and valuable. Tutankhamun reigned for only a very few years as a pharaoh in Egypt, and died about 1350 BC, but his tomb, famously discovered and excavated by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922, contained – besides vast quantities of gold, jewels and fabulous ornaments – a dagger, headrest and bracelet all made of iron. There were also some very small models of tools, barely an inch long, also made of iron. In all cases this was smelted iron, not meteoric.23
The final and all-important fact about the development of bronze metallurgy is that it coincided with the domestication of the horse in the steppe countries of Europe, and with the wheel. Warfare was therefore suddenly transformed – in fact, it changed more rapidly in the late Bronze Age than at any other time until gunpowder was used in anger in China in the tenth century AD.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CHARIOT
The wheel, another momentous innovation of the Bronze Age, has already been introduced, in chapter 8. The first vehicles – sledges – were used by early hunter-fisher societies in near-Arctic northern Europe by 7000 BC, presumably pulled by dogs. ‘Vehicle’ signs occur in the pictographic script of Uruk in the late fourth millennium BC, at the very beginning of the Bronze Age, and actual remains of an axle-and-wheel unit were found at a similar date at a site in Zurich in Switzerland. These vehicles had solid wheels, made either from one or three pieces of wood. From archaeological remains at sites before 2000 BC, the use of these so-called disc wheels stretched from Denmark to Persia, with the greatest density in the area immediately north of the Black Sea. So this may indicate where the wheel was first introduced. Oxen and donkeys appear to have been used at first.24
These (four-wheeled) wagons were very slow – 3.2 kph, on one estimate. The (two-wheeled) chariot, however, was a good deal faster –12–14 kph when trotting, 17–20 kph when galloping. In the cuneiform texts, Sumerian refers to the ‘equid of the desert’, meaning an ass or donkey, and to the ‘equid of the mountains’, meaning horse. Three words were used for wheeled vehicles, mar-gid-da, for four-wheeled wagons, gigir, for two-wheeled vehicles, and narkabtu which, as time went by, came to mean chariot. With narkabtu, says the British archaeologist Stuart Piggott, ‘We come to the beginning of one of the great chapters of ancient history: the development of the light two-wheeled chariot drawn by paired horses as a piece of technology and as an institution within the social order as an emblem of power and prestige.’ After the first solid wheels were invented, the spoked wheel was conceived. This had to be built under tension, with shaped wood, but its lightness made much greater speeds possible. Chariot warfare flourished between 1700 and 1200 BC – i.e., the end of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age.25
Robert Drews, emeritus professor of classics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, describes the chariot as ‘a technological triumph of the early second millennium’. Made of light hardwood, with a ‘leather-mesh’ platform where the driver stood, it weighed barely thirty kilograms.26 Recent excavations, he says, have enabled us to establish that the chariot became militarily significant in the seventeenth century BC. Before this time they had been used mainly for display and what appears to have made the difference is its coupling with the composite bow, invented on the central Eurasian steppes and made of aged wood, sinew and horn, which together store more energy than wood alone and therefore had a range three times that of the simple (or self ) bow. Several score of chariots, says Drews, each manned by an expert driver and a bowman, could overcome a conventional army of infantrymen.27
By the middle of the fifteenth century BC, at such battles as Megiddo, kings could deploy as many as a thousand chariots. At Kadesh, in the fourteenth century BC, the Hittite king is said to have deployed 3,500 chariots, though most palace polities would have had armies of several hundred. Chariots were expensive to build and maintain and many armies, Drews concludes, were far smaller in reality than on paper. Composite bows could take years to make (the wood had to age properly) and body armour, or corslets, made from as many as 500 copper scales, were also expensive and took time to manufacture. But while the chariot was the military machine par excellence, it was precious and had its own dedicated bureaucracy – the ‘scribes of the stable’ and the ‘scribes of the chariotry’. ‘Everywhere the charioteers have names, while infantrymen are merely numbered.’28
Chariots are not plentiful in the archaeological record but in their heyday they were used as mobile platforms for archers, the arrows fired while the chariot was at full speed, a practice that extended from the Near East to India and to China at this time.29 Records from Nuzi (northern Iraq, half-way between Babylon and Nineveh) show that charioteers were issued with helmets, corslets, a whip, a sword, a bow and quiver with 30–40 arrows. In his Karnak annals, Thutmose (1479– 1425 BC), the sixth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty in ancient Egypt, specifies that he captured 924 chariots and 502 bows from the enemy. In other accounts of Minoan or Mycenaean battles, records and excavations show that the bow was far more important from 1600 to 1200 BC than it had been before or would be again. In all the kingdoms of the late Bronze Age the composite bow, and the chariot, were the principal offensive weapons. In the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata the chariot dominates the battlefield.30 The smallest tactical unit appears to have been ten chariots – when they are ordered in the records they are always in units of ten.
The chariot developed as a response to the expanding states, which themselves were an evolution owing to the increased surpluses produced by agriculture. As states expanded in size, they became more likely to encroach on the territory of others, and at the same time needed to exert control – militarily – over their own more widespread peoples. Now, therefore, with the expanded territories, and greater numbers, wheeled traffic became superior to infantry. Carts could transport more logistic material to distant parts of the state, or empire, but it was only when the horse took over from the ox and donkey, about 1800 BC, and the spoked wheel was developed, that the chariot became the prime weapon in Bronze Age warfare. Only now could the much lighter vehicle be driven faster than a man could run and only now was it so light that it could be easily floated across rivers, which otherwise formed natural barriers. The composite bow had traditionally been too costly and took too long – five years-plus – to manufacture, but allied with the chariot the investment was now worth the effort. With a range of 175 metres as opposed to 60–90 metres for a simple bow, chariot armies could bombard infantry (who couldn’t afford composite bows in such numbers) from outside their range, and escape comfortably.
As we shall see, this predominance didn’t last beyond about 1200 BC but before then the advent of the chariot, and chariot warfare, had brought with it another profound change in the way early peoples thought of themselves.
THE DECLINE OF THE GREAT GODDESS
For what we see in the course of the Bronze Age is a key change in ideology. As was noted before, albeit in a footnote, religious icon-ography, especially of ancient religions, can be extremely complex, with many overlapping and contradictory meanings. Nonetheless, scholars are agreed that what we see in the Bronze Age – partly as a result of the rise of warfare, as epitomised by the increased role of the chariot – is a gradual change from worship of the Great Goddess to the worship of male gods. It would be wrong to put this down entirely to the chariot, but the rise of warfare certainly had a role, and we shall see shortly what other factors came into play.
But it remains true overall
that, in what are sometimes called the great Palace States of Mycenae (Greece), the Minoan Palaces of Crete, in Egypt, Sumer and the Indus Valley civilisation, from 3500 BC into the beginning of the second millennium BC, worship was mainly devoted to one version or another of the Great Goddess. In Crete the goddesses take the form of the Great Snake Goddess, often shown bare-breasted (and with large breasts), sometimes in a trance-like state, the Goddess of the Double Axe, also bare-breasted sometimes, and sometimes with the double axe in the form of the curving horns of the bull, or associated with the tree of life. On other occasions, the goddess is shown emerging from the earth, clasping corn or poppy seeds, an image familiar in mainland Greece as well, in the form of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, the Corn Goddess, who lives for the winter months in the underworld.31
The Bee Goddess, the Goddess of the Sacred Knot, the Goddess of the Animals, the Bird Goddess, the Goddess with the Poppy Crown, the Goddess with the Crown of Doves and Bull’s Horns, an image of Two Goddesses and a Child – all these show both old and new ideas, but in all cases the deity worshipped is female. In some cases, at some times, the goddesses were milk goddesses: one sip from the nipple of Juno could confer divinity and immortality. Traces of shamanism are discernible in the images of the World Tree, linking the underworld to the sky, the underworld itself being a shamanistic trace also. A further glimpse is perhaps afforded by the labyrinth drawn on the ground-floor corridor of the Palace at Knossos – an image that lasted across a thousand years. The labyrinth, which has a lady or goddess associated with it, is believed to describe the path of a ritual dance, used as a way to communicate with the goddess, very possibly as a means of inducing trance.32