Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  The Greek historian Herodotus recorded for posterity the heroic deeds of a Spartan general named Pausanias in the final, decisive battle between the Greek city-states and the Persians. Through his accounts we can witness the dramatic events preceding the battle of Plataea in 479.

  SPARTAN WARRIORS

  YOUNG PAUSANIAS, A RISING SPARTAN COMMANDER, is still relatively untested as he prepares his unit to do battle against the Persian superpower. For the city’s elite, the impending fight is about proving their military superiority and maintaining Sparta’s independence. For Pausanias, it is also a personal vendetta. The Persians killed his uncle, and he is set on revenge.

  Pausanias drills several hundred of his men in formation, a sea of helmets and red cloaks spanned out against the parched foothills outside the city. Each fighter carries an iron-tipped spear in one hand and a sword in the other. Marching together, they form an impregnable hedge of spikes. Those on the front line hold interlocked shields and move as a single wall of iron and synchronized might. The phalanx requires strict military discipline. If one man breaks rank, the entire unit is threatened.

  Unhappy with the performance of one young soldier, whose shield is not in alignment, Pausanias orders his men to halt and pulls the errant man out of the line to make an example of him. Pausanias proceeds to humiliate him by forcing a fellow soldier to fight him. Bloodied but chastened, the young recruit takes his position again, this time holding his shield in lockstep with the others.

  At this moment, the Persians—three hundred thousand strong—are camped north of Sparta in Central Greece. Their commander, Mardonius, second in command after King Xerxes, leads an army of conscripts, fighting under the threat of the lash. They are in stark contrast to both the militant Spartans and the citizen soldiers of Athens.

  To break the fragile alliance between the two Greek rivals, Mardonius attempts to isolate the Spartans by negotiating separate terms of surrender with the Athenians. He sends an emissary, Alexander I of Macedon, to Athens to offer its residents the right to maintain self-governance as long as they submit to the ultimate rule of the Persian king. Acceptance will constitute surrender in no uncertain terms.

  Such a major decision requires public debate and a vote by the people in the assembly. Sophanes, an Athenian citizen, witnesses and participates in these events. He has heard news of the Persian bid for peace and is adamant that his city not accept the yoke of Persian rule under any circumstances. On the day of the assembly, Sophanes joins two thousand Athenians already standing shoulder to shoulder in oppressive summer heat. They are average citizens like him: farmers, tradesmen, vintners, along with the city’s scholars, actors, and playwrights; few practiced politicians or soldiers are among them. They form an agitated crowd, shouting back and forth arguments to accept or reject Persia’s terms with equally righteous passion. The war-weary make pleas for peace over more bloodshed, returned by counterpleas declaring death is better than submission to any foreign king.

  A group of four Spartan nonvoting representatives watches and listens to the proceedings. Their presence reflects Athens’ desire to remain united with the neighboring Greek state—despite the fact that the Spartans have already made clear their preference for war over negotiation.

  From a central raised stage, a presiding Athenian leader invites Alexander of Macedon to personally deliver Mardonius’s offer to the assembled crowd. Alexander reads the proposed terms for Athens’ surrender from a scroll: the Athenians will be subsumed into the Persian Empire, he announces, thereby allowing its citizens the freedom to take part in all of the empire’s delights and riches.

  The response to Alexander of Macedon is decidedly mixed. Sophanes is among those shouting him down. He knows that if he and his brethren accept the Persian king’s offer, they will lose one precious freedom they are about to exercise: a democratic vote on the decision between war and peace.

  Finally, debate is exhausted, and the time for the ballot arrives. Sophanes joins the long line of men forming to mount the stage and exercise their right to self-governance. When his turn comes, Sophanes picks up a pebble and places it in the cask for those opposed to the Persian peace offer. Then he returns to the throng and patiently awaits the outcome.

  Hours later, as thousands remain in the city center to watch, the casks are emptied, their stones counted by a council of the people. When tabulation is completed, the announcement Sophanes had hoped for rings out: “Such is our love of liberty, that we will never surrender.”

  The Athenians opt to fight alongside their Spartan rivals to preserve their shared Greek independence. The stunned Persian envoy is sent away to deliver this decision to Mardonius. Soon, though not a trained soldier, Sophanes will don the tools of combat and distinguish himself in the most important clash of a war that will last for decades.

  THE DATE: AUGUST 749. TWO UNEVENLY MATCHED armies face off on the plains near Marathon. Three hundred thousand professional soldiers on horseback make up the Persian side. One hundred thousand Spartan and Athenian foot soldiers oppose them, making excellent use of their unity and the military prowess of the Spartans. Put to the test, the phalanx formation proves to be a capable fighting machine that will soon turn an unlikely Greek victory into an inevitability.

  Rank after rank of Persian infantry crash ineffectually against the Spartans’ interlocked shields, only to meet the girded spears and swords of the full Greek force. The enemy scarcely knows what has hit him, and falls en masse. Having gained the upper hand, the Greek force breaks out of formation to slay the Persians in hand-to-hand combat. To add to the Persian king’s humiliation, his deputy, Mardonius, is hit by a stone thrown by a lowly Greek citizen-soldier, and knocked from his horse. Spartan general Pausanias is then given the satisfaction of finishing Mardonius off with a swift sword stroke. The frenzied Persians attempt to flee, but are cut down by the Greeks.

  It is a glorious victory, but the fledgling idea of people power is the true victor of the battle of Plataea. Nurtured in the ancient Greek world, democracy will re-appear in the Roman Republic and later blossom in colonial North America.

  The destruction caused by the Sea Peoples left a political void along the Mediterranean coast, creating an opportunity for a new age of seaborne exploration. Just north of Israel, in what is now Lebanon, autonomous Phoenician city-states appeared along the coast after 1200 BCE: most notably Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre. Over the course of a century, they grew from small settlements into a sea-based power that dominated the Mediterranean trade routes between 1100 and 800 BCE. The Greeks sneeringly called them Phoinikes, meaning “the purple land,” after Phoenicia’s most valued commodity, a precious purple dye produced from the murex, a type of sea snail.

  Tyrian purple wasn’t the Phoenicians’ only trading commodity. They exported pine and cedar, linen, wine, metalwork, and glass. They traded in papyrus and ivory from Egypt, wool from Anatolia, resins from Arabia, copper from Cyprus, and silver and tin from Spain. Phoenicia was part of the amber trade that stretched from the Baltic to the Indus. In addition to long-distance trade in luxury goods, their ships carried foodstuffs, like olive oil, grain, and wine, over the short trade routes of the Aegean.

  The Phoenicians sailed farther than any other ancient people, traveling through the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, where they sailed down the coast of Africa. A trove of Phoenician coins found in the Azores suggests the Phoenicians may even have reached the mid-Atlantic. They kept tight control over their knowledge of the ocean currents and winds on the Atlantic side of the “Pillars of Hercules,” the ancient name for the Straits of Gibraltar.

  At the end of the ninth century BCE, the Phoenicians founded colonies in North Africa, Spain, and Sardinia, including Carthage, which later became the most important sea power in the western Mediterranean.

  Phoenician mariners expanded the boundaries of the Mediterranean world, sailing into the Atlantic and down the coast of Africa.

  THE ALPHABET

  The Phoenicians’ most imp
ortant contribution to modern life was their alphabet.

  Like the Sumerians before them, the Phoenicians needed a way to keep records of their extensive trading. In 1100 BCE, cuneiform still dominated international correspondence. Like all syllabic scripts, it was difficult to learn and cumbersome to use. Over time, the Phoenicians replaced it with the first true alphabet, in which characters corresponded to sounds. Like later alphabets for other Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the twenty-two characters of the Phoenician alphabet consisted entirely of consonants. Some of our own letters are believed to take their shape from the ancient world as seen by Phoenician seamen; for example, the letter M represents the peaks and troughs of the ocean.

  Today there are hundreds of alphabets, but the Phoenician system of letters and numerals is one of few still in use after three thousand years. It was borrowed and adapted first by the Greeks (who added vowels) and later by the Romans. The Roman adaptation of the Phoenician system is the basis for the alphabet we use in the West today.

  AT THE SAME TIME THAT THE Phoenicians were pushing the boundaries of the Mediterranean world, a new people moved into what would become some of the world’s most coveted and fought-over lands.

  The Israelites were a federation of tribes when they migrated into Canaan in the mid-thirteenth century BCE, farmers and herders who terraced the inhospitable hillsides to produce level farmland and collected water in plaster-lined cisterns to irrigate it. Two centuries later, threatened by neighboring tribes, the Israelites chose their first king: Saul. He defeated the Moabites, Edomites, and Philistines, but proved to be unsuited for rule. His successor, David, united the Israelite tribes into a single state, with Jerusalem as its religious and political center. King David expanded the kingdom’s territories until they reached from the Euphrates River to the Red Sea. Under David and his son Solomon, the kingdom prospered.

  Tensions mounted between the northern and southern tribes, however. After Solomon’s death in 926 BCE, the kingdom split into two parts over the claims of rival successors, with Judah in the south centered on the city of Jerusalem, and Israel to its north. The more prosperous Israel became a military power, ruled by a succession of generals who seized the throne from one another in bloody coups. But the kingdoms of Judah and Israel flourished only as long the great powers of the Near East were rebuilding. When first Assyria and then Babylon were restored under new dynasties, the Israelite kingdoms, like the rest of Near East, became prizes to be conquered. Israel was first to fall. Judah and the city of Jerusalem were next.

  The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar first conquered Judah in 597 BCE, taking the king of Jerusalem and ten thousand of his nobles captive and placing the exiled king’s nephew, Zedekiah, on the throne. Zedekiah swore an oath of allegiance to the Babylonian ruler, but three years later he rebelled. The Babylonians marched on Judah again, ravaging the countryside before closing in on Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar took the city in 586, after a siege that reduced even the wealthy to digging in the dunghills for food. From Nebuchadnezzar’s perspective, the Judean king was an oath breaker and a rebel. Nebuchadnezzar killed Zedekiah’s sons before his eyes, blinded him, and took him in shackles to Babylon, along with most of the inhabitants of Judah. Solomon’s Temple was destroyed, and Jerusalem was razed.

  NEBUCHADNEZZAR

  Most of us know Nebuchadnezzar only from the perspective of the Old Testament: the tyrant who first plundered and then razed the city of Jerusalem, destroyed King Solomon’s Temple, and took the Israelites into captivity.

  But from the Babylonians’ point of view, Nebuchadnezzar was a great ruler. His father was the Chaldean general who joined forces with the Medes to win Babylon’s freedom from their Assyrian oppressors. Nebuchadnezzar, in his turn, restored the kingdom to its former glory. He conquered Egypt, Palestine, and most of the Phoenician city-states. He turned the city of Babylon—which had been destroyed seventy-some years before by the Assyrians—into a showplace. The main gate to the inner city and the processional way that led to it were faced with blue-glazed brick and decorated with golden dragons and bulls. The king’s palace was covered with glazed tile reliefs of golden lions. Nebuchadnezzar himself created the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, an enormous pyramid of vaulted terraces, to comfort a young wife who was homesick for the green hills of her Median home.

  Nebuchadnezzar remembered his gods as well. He dedicated the city’s main gate to the goddess Ishtar, and built an enormous seven-story ziggurat to honor the kingdom’s primary god, Marduk. He named the temple Etemenanki, “the house which is the foundation of heaven and earth.” It appeared in the Old Testament as the Tower of Babel, the ultimate symbol of human pride.

  “Godless conqueror” is in the eye of the beholder.

  The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, lithograph by Ferdinand Knab, 1886

  With the forty-year forced exile of Judah’s king and his people in Babylon, Judah’s culture should have been wiped from the face of the earth. Instead, the period of Babylonian captivity defined the Judeans as a nation in a new way. It also changed the course of Western civilization by laying the foundation for the first monotheistic religion, Judaism, and the moral code laid out in its Ten Commandments.

  While some Judeans were absorbed into their new culture in Babylon, others kept their commitments to their god and dreamed of return to Israel. With no temple in which to worship, they replaced their former rituals with prayers, fasts, and study of the Torah. During this period the Hebrew Bible took its shape, as scribes and priests in exile refined and collated the Five Books of Moses with the histories of their people.

  Things deteriorated in Babylon after the days of King Nebuchadnezzar. In 556 CE his successors lost the throne to King Nabonidus.

  Nabonidus spent much of his reign on campaign, but he was in Babylon itself long enough to alienate the powerful Babylonian priesthood. He refused to worship the city’s primary god, Marduk, raising the moon goddess, Sin, above him. This created tension in the capital, so in 550 he installed his son Belshazzar as regent in Babylon and withdrew to the oasis of Tayma in the Arabian Desert.

  The Persian king Cyrus II used the dissatisfaction of the Babylonians, or at least the priests of Marduk, as an excuse to invade in 539 BCE. The city fell almost without resistance, and Cyrus entered Babylon as a liberator. He shrewdly chose to worship at the temple of Marduk, the neglected god of Babylon. Cyrus later claimed that Marduk had chosen him to be “king of all the world.” He took the title Shahanshah—King of Kings.

  SAVING THE SCROLLS

  ON A TEEMING STREET IN THE CAPITAL CITY OF BABYLON, a Judean man named Zerubbabel pushes his way through the crowd. Zerubbabel is the grandson of the last king of Jerusalem, who ruled before the capital city of Judah was destroyed and its people taken to live as exiles in Babylon.

  Zerubbabel learns from another Jewish man in the crowd that Babylon will soon be under siege by the army of Persian king Cyrus. Word in Babylon has spread, the man tells him, of thousands of Persian soldiers assembling to storm the city’s walls and plunder its treasures. As one of a handful of Judeans working secretly to preserve written copies of Judean history for future generations, this news greatly alarms Zerubbabel. Among the secret scrolls, kept in a small library in Babylon, is the only surviving record of the Hebrew alphabet, the Judean culture’s code and lifeline. It would be disastrous for these scrolls to be lost or to land in Persian hands!

  As Zerubbabel hurries to reach the library building, three Judean scribes leave their desks and rush to a small window to ascertain the reason for the commotion they hear outside. There is a loud knock at the library door. The scholars hurry to see who is there. It is Zerubbabel, and he has come to warn them: they must immediately gather up the hidden scrolls for safekeeping. The men busy themselves emptying stacks, storing scrolls in baskets, boxes, whatever they can carry. Then Zerubbabel ushers them and their treasure out of the library through a back alley.

  The Persian king had always shown mercy toward the cities h
e captured. In Babylon, he went one step further. He not only freed the Jews; he guaranteed their rights and laws. Zerubbabel, descendant of King David and King Solomon, was granted a wish he dared never express, a return to the city of his ancestors: Jerusalem. As a last gesture, King Cyrus gave the Judeans money to rebuild Solomon’s Temple, destroyed forty years earlier by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

  In time, the records and writings of this small tribe rescued from Babylon and taken back to Judea and Jerusalem will come together to construct one of the most important books in the world: the Torah. In the centuries to come, more than six billion copies will be sold. It will become the foundation stone of Judaism, of Christianity, and of Islam.

  THE JUDEAN PEOPLE RETURNED to Jerusalem in small waves, rebuilding first their city and then their temple. More conquerors followed. But no matter how many times it was conquered, Jerusalem remained the sacred city of Judaism, with the site of Solomon’s Temple at its heart. Over time, it became the Holy City for Christians and Muslims as well. For Christians, Jerusalem was the center of the Holy Land, where Jesus lived, preached, and died. For Muslims, it was third only to Mecca and Medina in importance. As the home of the prophets, it played a role in one of Muhammad’s visions. In it, he flew with the Archangel Gabriel on a winged horse from Mecca to Jerusalem, where the prophets of the past, including Jesus, entertained him at a lavish feast. At the end of the night, he ascended from Jerusalem into the heavens on a celestial ladder.