Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

  the Jewish Western Wall (a.k.a. Wailing Wall)

  the Dome of the Rock

  Today Jerusalem is host to millions of visitors from all three traditions.

  AFTER CYRUS THE GREAT BUILT the Persian Empire on those of the Medes and the Babylonians before him, his successors maintained his policy of expansion. Cyrus’s son, Cambyses II, took Egypt in 525. Cambyses’ successor, his cousin, Darius I, expanded the empire to its greatest extent.

  Under Darius’s rule, the Persian Empire spanned three thousand miles from east to west. To maintain closer control over his ever-rebellious western provinces, Darius built a paved road connecting his capital in Susa with the provincial capital of Sardis, sixteen hundred miles away on the west coast of Anatolia. It was an unprecedented project. Workers used layers of clay, sand, and gravel, to build the ancient highway, then topped it with a surface layer of large cobblestones.

  When it was completed, Darius constructed 111 lodges along the road, one roughly every fifteen miles—the distance a man on foot could travel in a day. These lodges provided travelers with free food, water, and bedding. According to Greek traveler and historian Herodotus, Darius personally guaranteed the travelers’ safety.

  The Royal Road was an imperial administrator’s dream. It made it easier to collect taxes, to send messages to provincial rulers, and to send armies when armies were needed. However, in time Darius’s Royal Road would become the very route his enemies would take to defeat him, when the Persian Empire was disassembled at the hands of another, more ambitious ruler and commander, this time from the small kingdom of Macedonia.

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  In 331 BCE, Alexander III of Macedon, known as Alexander the Great, defeated Darius, and briefly ruled the largest empire then known to man—only to meet his match in 326 BCE, when he invaded northern India.

  Alexander’s army crossed the Hindu Kush, fought its way across the Indus River and through the Punjab, defeating an Indian army supported by war elephants. But when they reached the banks of the Hyphasis (now the Beas), Alexander’s troops refused to go further. Alexander reluctantly led his army back to his new capital at Babylon, leaving garrisons behind to rule the conquered Indian provinces. He later claimed that the only military defeat he ever suffered was at the hands of his own men.

  When Alexander died unexpectedly in 323 BCE, his empire crumbled. The generals he left behind as provincial governors found themselves rulers of small states in northern India and Afghanistan.

  IN ANOTHER CORNER OF THE world, far from the turmoil of the Mediterranean, a new civilization was taking hold in China. There too, man’s new ability to forge iron brought rapid transformation of the social and political order.

  In the late fifth century BCE, in a chaotic period known as the Era of Warring States, seven major kingdoms fought among themselves for control over China. In these fights, the use of several new weapons changed the nature of warfare, most notably the crossbow. In addition, iron swords and armor replaced bronze. Cavalry replaced war chariots. Conquerors, primarily using siege warfare, made cities their main targets.

  Qin Shi Huang

  The Qin (pronounced Chin) dynasty of northwest China was considered less cultured than its rivals, but it made up for lack of culture with a powerful army, needed to fight the mounted nomads that threatened its western border. Shortly after Ying Zheng took the Qin throne in 246 BCE at the age of thirteen, he led his armies against the other kingdoms of the “Warring States.” He soon earned the nickname “the tiger of Qin” for his ferocity on the battlefield. By 221 BCE, Ying Zheng had united the Warring States and proclaimed himself Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor Qin.

  Once Huang had conquered his rivals, he set out to build a powerful centralized state. Using the same principle that governs modern efforts to remap voting districts, he divided the kingdoms of the Warring States Period into new administrative districts, changing their boundaries and moving hereditary aristocrats away from their power bases. To create a uniform culture, he banished local customs, introduced language reforms designed to diminish regional differences, standardized writing, and burned all books in private libraries. He replaced the hereditary feudal hierarchy with a centralized bureaucratic administration and gave peasants the right to buy land. He then constructed an imperial highway system, rivaling the one later built by the Romans, connecting the capital to the frontier. He built waterways and canals to facilitate transportation from the Yangtze to Canton.

  At the same time, Huang was quick to kill his critics, particularly the Confucians and Taoists who questioned the legal basis of his rule. He imposed heavy taxes and drafted millions of workers to work on public projects, including the massive tomb that he built for himself.

  After Huang’s death in 210 BCE, outlying provinces rose in revolt. Huang’s son survived him on the throne for only four years before his own prime minister forced him to commit suicide. The dynasty was overthrown by the Chinese peasant general Liu Bang, who reunited the empire and founded the Han dynasty.

  WHILE THE ANCIENT DARK AGE is most often remembered for the escalation of violence and the mass production of the tools of war, at the latter end of the era, the fifth century BCE, important thinkers in many different traditions created philosophical systems that would shape human thought for centuries. In China, Lao Tse (604–531) and Confucius (551–479) were the best-known members of a flowering of philosophical thought known as “Hundred Schools,” which searched for the foundation of social order during the Warring States Period. In India, the Buddha (ca 500 BCE) preached enlightenment. In Persia, Zarathustra, known in the West as Zoroaster, was a century ahead of the rest. He taught that the world is a struggle between the forces of light and dark, good and evil. He believed that in the end the world would be consumed by fire, and good would banish evil. In Greece, Plato (429–347), Aristotle (384–321), Socrates (469–399), and other classical philosophers questioned the nature of things. Some scholars refer to this later period as the “axial age,” during which basic ways of thinking were established for early civilizations. It could just as easily be called the ancient Age of Enlightenment.

  CAST IRON

  Cast iron is made by melting iron ore in a furnace. Liquid iron is then poured or hardened into ingots, which are later remelted along with alloy elements and cast into molds. The process takes less labor than wrought iron, but requires higher temperatures.

  Chinese craftsmen routinely produced cast iron by the sixth century BCE. The process did not reach Europe until the fourteenth century—two thousand years later.

  CHINESE CROSSBOWS

  The power of the traditional bow varies tremendously from person to person because it is dependent on an individual’s physical strength. The Chinese invention of the crossbow in the sixth or fifth century BCE transformed Chinese warfare, increasing the individual archer’s power and speed by fixing the bowstring on a notched trigger mechanism that allowed the soldier to draw the bowstring, load the arrow, and aim in three separate motions instead of one. The first crossbows were wooden bows mounted horizontally on a wooden stock with a metal trigger.

  Combining the principle of the crossbow with the ability to produce high-quality cast bronze and iron allowed the Chinese to make the first mass-produced weapons. By 209 BCE, the Qin army—soon to rise as victors among those armies vying for control of China—fielded fifty thousand crossbowmen.

  Human ingenuity allowed warfare and destruction on a scale never seen before, but the crossbow was only one step in humanity’s creation of more sophisticated and deadly weapons. In retrospect, it was not such a long distance from China’s first mass-produced crossbows to the twentieth-century assembly lines that turned out the modern rifles, aircraft engines, and tanks that enabled wars to be fought on a truly global scale.

  By the end of the Ancient Dark Ages, mankind has reshaped the social and political landscape of the Mediterranean world. Ancient empires have fallen to com
mon men wielding iron weapons. New city-states, built by traders, rebels, and refugees, have risen in their place. In the Far East, mass production and one man’s driving ambition have created the foundations of a new empire.

  Soon another great empire will rise to power on the Italian peninsula.

  Within one hundred years, more than half the world’s population will live under the rule of these two empires, which will find common ground in a rare commodity—silk.

  3

  CITIZENS

  TWO SUPERPOWERS RULE THE WORLD. ONE CONTROLS THE EAST, WHILE THE OTHER DOMINATES THE WEST. ONE IS A HIGHLY CENTRALIZED STATE WITH A CENTRALLY MANDATED CULTURE; the other is a melting pot of peoples and cultures. Sound familiar? Welcome to the third century BCE.

  Two great empires control more than half of the population of the ancient world from opposite ends of Eurasia. Almost five thousand miles of some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet separates the Romans from the Han Chinese. In time, they will be linked by the trading routes collectively called the “Silk Road.” As we begin, neither has more than a faint impression of the other; in fact, each believes it alone dominates the globe.

  THE ROMANS AND HAN CHINESE may have been very different culturally, but in other ways they were very much the same. Both conquered vast territories and organized new ways to govern them. Both battled attacks by “barbarians” from the lands outside their control. And both practiced cultural as well as political imperialism.

  Roman and Chinese Empires 200 BCE

  Roman towns from Palestine to Britain looked the same—and offered the same benefits to local rulers prepared to make an alliance with their conquerors. The Han dynasty continued the ruthless drive to create a uniform culture, which was started by Qin Shi Huang. The Romans, from Britain to Syria, spoke Latin and Greek. The Han Chinese communicated using a standardized written version of Chinese that bridged the differences between China’s mutually incomprehensible dialects. Each culture at its mightiest reflected centuries of conquest and assimilation, and both empires left legacies that shaped the political ambitions of the states that followed them.

  That these two superpowers existed as equals ultimately created an environment in which longdistance trade and exchange networks flourished on a scale never seen before—to the benefit of both. Two empires, separated by thousands of miles and substantial culture gaps, somehow made the world a little smaller.

  DISCONTENT WAS WIDESPREAD in the final years of China’s Qin dynasty, the last imperial regime before the Han. The nobility were enraged by the dynasty’s attacks on privileges and power. At the other end of the social ladder, peasants were angered by heavy taxes, harsh laws, and the excessive burden of providing forced labor for Qin Shi Huang’s public works. In 209 BCE, a group of peasant workers, delayed by rain, abandoned their involuntary assignment, choosing to become outlaws rather than face the death penalty. Thousands joined them. More rebellions broke out across the empire. Qin generals defected. Nobles raised private armies. The struggle to overthrow the Qin dynasty turned into a tussle between rival groups of insurgents, eager to seize the throne.

  Liu Bang, a charismatic general of peasant origin, emerged as the victor and became the first Han emperor. He had previously served the Qin as a minor official in charge of a postal relay station. In 206 BCE, he founded the Han dynasty. Like American president Abraham Lincoln, Liu Bang demonstrated his humble origins with modest, sometimes shockingly simple manners and speech. Liu Bang would comfortably squat down on the floor to meet with his official visitors. In one popular anecdote, some scholars came to visit him dressed in ceremonial robes, including elaborate headgear. Liu Bang snatched off one of the scholars’ hats and urinated in it. In another story, he commissioned a new court ceremonial to bring order to the daily life of the palace, giving him one instruction—“Make it easy.”

  Liu Bang, first emperor of the Han Dynasty

  The Han dynasty played a key role in expanding Chinese trade, beginning with its Near East neighbors in the second century BCE, when the dynasty needed to defend its borders against the Xiongnu, Han’s nomadic neighbors to the north. In 138 BCE, Han emperor Wudi sent an officer of the palace, named Zhang Qian, to make alliances with the kingdoms of Central Asia that the Chinese called the “Western Territories.” He was captured on the way by the army of one of those kingdoms and held prisoner. Only two members of the hundred-man mission survived. After thirteen years, Zhang Qian escaped and made his way back to China. He brought news of people and lands of which the Chinese had never heard: Ferghana, Parthia, Bactria, Babylonia, Syria, and India.

  The central challenge for the Han dynasty as it grew from a kingdom into an empire was how to maintain the centralized state created by Qin Shi Huang without the harshness that had characterized the previous Qin rulers. The Han based their government on the ideas of Confucius. Confucianism stresses the moral basis of duties between subordinates and superiors, defined in terms of three basic relationships: ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife. The most important duty was loyalty.

  Under the Han emperor Wudi, Confucianism became the official philosophy and religion of China. Whereas Confucian books and ideas had previously been burned and banned by Qin rulers, under the Han, Confucian texts were again at the heart of political and ethical thought. Scholars wrote commentaries designed to make the texts more useful as sources of moral guidance.

  In 130 BCE, Wudi established a civil service of Confucian scholars, who earned their positions by passing a standardized examination. The examinations tested candidates’ understanding of the tenets of Confucian moral and ethical thought on which Han dynasty government was based. Standardized testing requires a system of training. In 124 BCE Wudi established an imperial academy in the capital city of Chang’an. Intended as a training program for imperial officials, the curriculum was based on the Confucian canon, with specialists in the five classics of Confucian thought. During Wudi’s reign, the number of students in the imperial university was limited to fifty; by the mid-second century CE, thirty thousand scholars had gone through the academy.

  PAPER

  The Han dynasty’s most lasting contribution to the story of mankind was paper.

  Classical Chinese historians credit a Han official named Cai Lun, chief eunuch and director of the imperial workshops in the reign of the emperor He, with the invention of paper. In 105 CE, he created the first sheet of paper intended as a writing surface, made from bamboo fibers and the inner bark of the mulberry tree. Emperor He rewarded him for his efforts with titles and wealth.

  Cai Lun’s writing paper was a clever innovation, but it wasn’t the first paper invented in China. Archaeologists have discovered remains of paper in northern China that predate Cai Lun by almost two hundred years.

  The basic papermaking process is simple: create a slurry from fibrous material and water, spread the slurry out flat, drain off the excess water, and let it dry. The end result is a dry, light sheet of matted fibers. The trick is finding the right combination of fibers. The earliest Chinese paper was made primarily from hemp. Over the years, papermakers experimented with various barks, bamboo, and rattan.

  At first the Chinese used paper for wrapping, packing, decoration—and toilet paper. It was only when paper began to be used as a writing and printing medium that its true possibilities appeared. Paper changed civilization’s relationship to knowledge. It inspired new forms of notation: building plans, written music, street maps, and paper currency (a Chinese invention from the seventh century CE).

  Picture a world without paper. A man named Gutenberg would have had no reason to invent a printing press. Without a way to print on paper cheaply, there would be no widespread distribution of books. Only religious scholars and the wealthy would be reading and writing the expensive, hand-copied books that remain in limited circulation from long ago; the rest of us would still be illiterate. Forget newspapers, the Protestant Reformation, or modern democracy. Nearly everything that makes civilizatio
n modern is traceable to the invention of paper by a Han bureaucrat in 105 CE.

  Paper making in early China

  TARQUIN THE PROUD

  AWEALTHY ETRUSCAN TRADER’S WIFE SITS WITH a female companion of the same rank in the family’s open-air living quarters in a palatial estate on a Roman hilltop. Splendidly dressed in silks and brocades, the ladies wear baubles made of copper, ivory, and amber. A slave removes the remains of their midday meal from a low stone slab, which holds a vase carved with Greek iconography, and a gleaming bronze statue depicting Adonis and Aphrodite. Through arched windows, stone walls enclose the estate, giving way to fields of grapevines reaching to the Tiber River. The man of the house is gone, off to sell lumber, furs, and slaves to his eastern and southern trading partners. It is not unusual for an Etruscan trader to be away for several months, but this absence comes at a precarious time for his wife and the three-generation household she oversees.

  With her lady friend, the woman of the house gossips, but their news is not idle. A new wave of political turmoil is sweeping Rome. Their unpopular Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, is being threatened. The appellation Superbus, meaning “proud and haughty,” is indicative of the public attitude toward Tarquinius’s despotic reign. However, this current crisis has nothing to do with the king’s imperial manner.

  Following an indiscretion by royal son Tarquinius Sextus, Romans are openly discussing possible dire consequences. Word has it that Sextus raped Lucretia, his cousin’s wife, leading Lucretia to stab herself to death in shame. Before taking her own life, Lucretia told her husband, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, about the terrible act committed against her and elicited a promise of revenge for her dishonoring. True to his word, Lucius Junius Brutus—the king’s own nephew—leads the revolt against the crown.