by Peter Watson
The cow was much less potent than the bull but still worshipped widely, again most notably in India, which has a special day in November, called Gosthastami, set aside for the cow and where the most powerful sacred substance known to Hindus is Pancha-gavya, a solution made from the five products of the live cow: milk, ghee, curds, urine and dung, said to have purification properties that can avert evil and bestow blessings on marriage. All Vedic rituals use the products of cattle, Shiva is a bull god, and Vishnu, the preserver of the world, is depicted also as the Lord of the Herdsmen and Govinda, ‘one who brings satisfaction to the cows’.57
Nor should we forget that Bos exists in a third ‘version’, in the form of the ox, a castrated male, who retained his strength even as he lost his wildness, making him eminently suitable for ploughing and pulling carts. To begin with, oxen pulled ploughs by ropes hitched to their most obvious feature, their horns, but the yoke – attached to the animal’s even stronger shoulders – was introduced about 3000 BC. Spacious thoroughfares in Mohenjo-Daro suggest that ox carts were used there, as is supported by the discoveries of crude terracotta models of bullock wagons.58
Whether or not the Bronze Age sky was as disturbed as the catastrophists say, what does seem to be agreed is that important climatic change occurred in the second half of the second millennium. And it would appear that this change was the final stimulus for pastoralists to abandon agriculture and become fully nomadic. More than that, just as pastoral nomadism was a response to a drier climate, so the great palace states of Eurasia formed as a different response to the same climate variation. This coincidence would come to matter.
In some of the art of the early second millennium people are shown sitting on horses but without saddles and bridles and therefore, says Khazanov, they could not be called real horsemen, who could not have used horses for war or pasturing. Herds at that stage were probably small and manoeuvred with the help of dogs, never straying too far. The appearance of the first real horsemen, he says, occurs towards the middle of the second millennium BC, a time which saw the emergence of the so-called ‘steppe-bronze cultures’, when pastoralists occupied zones quite deep into the steppe at sites which could be up to 90 kilometres from rivers. But at that time the steppe environment was more humid than it is now, life was more mobile, with families following their herds on foot or in carts drawn by oxen or horses, and perhaps with some people riding.
The best known of these cultures is the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, perhaps more widely known as the Andronovo culture, located to the north-east of the Caspian and Aral Seas, flourishing at ~2300–1000 BC. The pig was completely absent from the Andronovo areas (meaning they were not fully settled) but four important innovations are attributed to them: the smelting of copper and tin, to make bronze; fortified settlements (for a time), to protect their mines; the light war chariot; and three different breeds of horse, one suitable for pulling carts, one suitable for riding and one for pulling chariots. They were typified by their aristocratic warrior class, horse sacrifice, and burials of the warriors with their horses. They were the prototype of the nomadic ‘barbarians’ that were to become such a feature of Eurasian life from the Iron Age on.59
THE ‘ZONE OF TURBULENCE’ – THE ESSENTIAL FOUNDATION OF WORLD POLITICS
But, no less important, the economic system of nomadic pastoralism is, ultimately, limited. As Khazanov puts it, it is not exactly an evolutionary blind alley but ‘the ecological foundations of pastoral nomadism are such that they leave little scope for the development of a complex economy . . . pastoral nomadism is doomed to stagnation because its economy is extensive and allows no permanent solution to the problem of balance at the expense of intensification of production. For example, the number of livestock per head among the Hsiung-nu, who in ancient times occupied the territory which now constitutes Mongolia, corresponds almost exactly with the number found in a study carried out in 1918.’60
Put more simply, the elements of nomadic pastoralism are self-limiting. When you are travelling round, fodder and hay cannot be stored. One person on horseback can look after a hundred horses – yes, but to feed them you have to keep moving. This in itself brings further problems: in the course of 20–25 years the productivity of pastures can fall by up to a factor of four and their regeneration takes half a century.61 New territory was needed, therefore, every generation. Travelling constantly in antiquity meant high infant mortality, which further limited population. Milk was the chief source of protein (for if they killed animals regularly, for meat, they destroyed their wealth base) and keeping mammals lactating prevented them from conceiving until lactation was over. Moving around means you need light goods to take with you, and you can’t carry much anyway; this, plus the fact that surplus is hard to build up in a nomadic society, meant that craftspeople did not emerge in substantial numbers, so handicrafts or luxury goods were not highly developed, meaning in turn there was less to exchange.62
It was this self-limiting quality of pastoral nomadism that created what Gérard Chaliand, one-time professor in the École Supérieur de Guerre in France, called the ‘zone of turbulence’, an all-important element in Old World history for as much as two thousand years, beginning at the end of the Bronze Age. This zone ‘threatened settled peoples from China to Russia to Hungary, including Iran, India, the Byzantine empire and even Egypt . . . Over the Eurasian landmass, the opposition between nomads emerging from central Asia, and settled societies, was, for two millennia, the essential foundation of world politics. They were people without a common language, most of them without writing, of diverse ethnic origins although belonging to a number of major branches (Turks, Mongols, Manchus) . . . but united by a common strategic culture, a culture of the steppe, based on the mobility of the mounted archer using harassment and indirect manoeuvre before delivering the blow. It was a strategic culture that developed the capacity to concentrate far from bases and overcome problems of logistics infinitely more easily than did settled peoples.’63
Chaliand was right and Ernest Gellner agreed. ‘Minding flocks against depredations by wild animals or, above all, by other shepherds . . . constitutes a permanent training in violence.’64 As we shall have ample opportunity to observe, the instability and self-limitations inherent in the economy of pastoral nomads was to have important consequences for the political, social and ideological development of the Old World, in ways that were not always predictable. And the first time was at the end of the second millennium BC, when the Bronze Age was giving way to the Iron Age.
In normal times, or quiet times, the nomads traded their horses – the hardy, thickset horses of the steppe – and wool, for grain, tea or silk. Their centre of gravity was between northern Mongolia and Lake Baikal but when they needed to they travelled vast distances. As a result, they became superb horsemen, children being taught to ride from a very early age, and equally accomplished bowmen because their chief fall-back tactic, when times turned harsh, was the raid, in which they harassed settled people without risking frontal attack. Temperatures on the various regions of the steppe could vary from +35 degrees to -40, making the nomads adaptable and hardy. After the enemy had been weakened by these harassments, the nomads would attack more frontally, on horseback, with swords and lances – both invented by them – as were, in time, the horse bit, reins and stirrup.65 They attacked according to the decimal system – in hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands.
Although the migration routes of nomads, as they emerged over 2,000 years between 3000 BC and 1000 BC, were fairly settled, the vast distances they travelled, and their requirement of so much pasture to sustain their large herds, inevitably provoked conflict when times were harsh, as they were – increasingly – towards the end of the second millennium BC. Elena Kuzmina tells us that the steppe had been fully exploited by the twelfth century BC and there was no more territory for pastoral peoples to expand into.66 These conflicts occurred between the different groups of nomads themselves, but as Chaliand says the more important confli
cts were with the settled peoples living on the edges of the steppes, all the way from the Black Sea and the northern fringes of Mesopotamia across to China. These conflicts were sharpened by the increasing size of settled societies, aided by their use of the chariot to keep their further-flung territories in line.
Nicola di Cosmo agrees that there was a great expansion at this time, right across central Eurasia, of mounted, warlike nomads.67 ‘The emergence of this new anthropological type,’ he writes, ‘is attested to by the iconography of tenth-century BC Iran and ninth-century BC Assyria and is confirmed by Assyrian and Greek sources of the ninth and eighth centuries BC, who assign these groups names such as Cimmerians, Scythians and Sakas.’68 The first riders shown in monumental art were those at the battle of Kadesh, in Tell el Amarna and Saqqara, dating to the fourteenth century bc; armed riders were known in Assyria in the twelfth century BC (divided into those wielding bows and those with lances), and mounted warriors formed part of the Israelites’ army in the first Book of Kings.69
Robert Drews, in his account of The End of the Bronze Age, puts the attacks of the barbarians at the beginning of the twelfth century BC. His barbarians are not always nomads but whether they are or not they did share with them a violent disposition born of climatic change which drove them into conflict with the palace states of the eastern Mediterranean region and in both cases they displayed advances in military technology and tactics, the chief achievement of which was the overcoming of the hitherto all-conquering chariot. This was achieved either by the development of the cavalry, or new weapons which transformed the infantry. So far as the cavalry were concerned, people had finally learned how to ride as we understand the term, and thanks mainly to a horseback life on the steppe, aided by the invention of the horse bridle and harness (and later the stirrup), giving people much more control over the horse. Traditionally, firing a bow on horseback had been far more difficult than firing from the platform of a chariot but as horsemen (like the Parthians) became more and more adept, this difficulty was overcome.
At the same time, the invention of the sword, spear, two-bladed javelins and arrows, and the lance – which first appeared in the Andronovo culture in the seventeenth century BC – improved the efficiency of infantries and these, combined with the rise of the metal shield, meant that foot soldiers were no longer as vulnerable as they had been in combat with chariots.
And so, beginning in the twelfth century BC, the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, there was what would now be called ‘a perfect storm’, when developments in weapons, in riding, in climate, in political organisation all came together to provoke a sudden shift across huge areas of the Old World. The most important element in this shift, at least to begin with, was the sudden change in the character of warfare, resulting in the sacking of – according to Drews, though he is not alone in this – some 300 cities of antiquity in a pattern that was repeated from Greece to the Indus Valley.70 Echoes of this age of destruction are found in both the Mahabharata and the Iliad, even in the Old Testament. One Sumerian scribe wrote of the nomads as ‘a host whose onslaught was like a hurricane, a people who had never known a city’.71
A NEW ATTITUDE TO DEATH
These ‘tribes’ are known to historians as Semites and Aryans (and later as ‘barbarians’) and they brought with them, we are told, their herds of sheep and goats and, the second most important aspect, after the changed character of warfare, their gods. Ideologically, the nomads were very different from settled peoples. Despite their ethnic differences, they shared a similar magical-religious foundation based on a belief in a supreme deity, Tengri, the sky god, plus a host of minor gods, with numerous rituals and prohibitions, and with widespread shamanism, the shaman’s task being to question the gods, interpret the signs of the gods’ response, and cure the sick.72 It is this transformation that is represented in the defeat of the Mother Goddess by Marduk, mentioned earlier.
This change in ideology, which would turn out to be momentous (it has been described as ‘a crucial pivot in the evolution of human consciousness’), had several interlinked elements. Male gods had begun to grow in importance from the middle of the Bronze Age (2200– 1550 BC): in city life, as opposed to village life, and in expanding states, with more far-flung territories, where wheeled transport was needed, and the chariot was the most effective fighting machine, the male role became ever more prominent, the concept of the ‘hero’ – men with greater powers than others – was born, and the character of the deities followed suit. Furthermore, this development made people more individualistic and was built on by the warrior ethos of the pastoral nomads who, not being settled in any one place, and not being agriculturalists, worshipped the unpredictable forces that mattered to them: storms, wind, lightning (which frightened the cattle even more than it frightened the nomads themselves), the sun and fire (the latter harder to preserve in a nomadic way of life). As was described in chapter 10, they used hallucinogens to visit other regions of the cosmos.
The nomads also lived an essentially animal life, in close proximity to the horse and cattle and subsisting on milk, meat and blood (the Scythians, we are told, even ‘coaxed’ milk from their mares). This meant they had a much less close relationship with vegetation, with the cycles of plant growth. Furthermore, their relationship with horses and cattle was predominantly one of control, even domination, all of which encouraged among them the separation of nature from human life – this was in effect the desacralisation of nature. With life on the steppes and the desert so harsh, constantly on the move, often fighting, the storm and wind gods took on these characteristics as well.
This was underlined by the changing attitudes to death at that time. Because of the conflicts, the constant raiding, violent death became much more common, life was experienced as untrustworthy, and death at the hands of humans became for the first time as likely as death from famine or other natural catastrophes. As a result, death was now looked upon as final, the absolute end of life.73 The old idea, of death and rebirth, based initially on the regeneration of the moon after its ‘death’, disappeared in many locations. Just as warfare was widespread on earth, so the sky gods took on a more terrifying aspect in which killing and fighting were common and death the end.
‘The moral order of the god culture,’ write Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, ‘derived from the Aryan and Semitic tribes, was based on a paradigm of opposition and conquest: a view of life, and particularly of nature, as something “other” to be conquered. The manifest world was seen as intrinsically separate from the unmanifest world, which was now placed outside or beyond nature in the realm of the transcendent gods.’74
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), the American mythologist, agreed. In his book The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, he wrote: ‘It is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy.’75
Flowery prose maybe, but these developments would lead in time to the most profound spiritual innovation the world had (and has) ever seen, one that never occurred in the New World, and which is explored in chapter 18.
But not even this completes the account of the transformations that took place in the remarkable epoch we call the Bronze Age. For whereas the chariot was expensive, so that only the most accomplished individuals were able to take part in chariot warfare, and where hundreds were in use most of the time, with cavalry – and especially with infantry – tens of thousands of ordinary men were involved. Under this new system, warrior values were perpetuated but now far more men, in fact almost any able-bodied man who was willing, could be a warrior. While the advent of pastor
al nomadic warriors transformed ideology, the advent of large infantries would, in time, provoke its own transformation, this time in politics.
• 17 •
THE DAY OF THE JAGUAR
At around the time the Bronze Age was giving way to the Iron Age in the Old World, when momentous changes were taking place in both material conditions and in ideology, two civilisations were emerging in tropical America. Although we now know that Aspero/ Caral, at Chico Norte, emerged as a proto-urban entity not so long after similar urban structures appeared in Mesopotamia, the urban phenomena did not spread through the New World to anywhere near the same extent as it did through Eurasia. This had something to do with the fact, discussed in chapter eleven, that maize, the New World’s most important grain, needed a great deal more manipulation to convert it into a cereal that could produce surpluses, but also because its earliest purpose was to make beer, for use in religious ritual. The trajectory was, therefore, very different. Another reason was that, given the absence of domesticated mammals, and only stone tools, there was a limit in the New World to the amount of forest that could be cleared, and marginal land could not benefit from ploughing.
We have at present no evidence that there were any urban structures built in the New World between the decline of Norte Chico and the rise of the two civilisations that are the subject of this chapter. As Brian Fagan has put it, a vast chasm separates the thousands of farming villages scattered throughout Mesoamerica in 2000 BC and the sophisticated civilisations that arose ‘with dramatic suddenness’ just a thousand or so years later.1 This timing has fascinated and perplexed archaeologists because they have long wondered whether there was, in Central America at least, one ancestral culture that gave rise to later states or whether these later states developed independently.
