SOMETIME AROUND 1770 BC, Zimri-Lim, king of the walled city of Mari on the banks of the Euphrates, got exasperated with his youngest daughter.
A decade earlier, Zimri-Lim had married his older daughter Shimatum to the king of another walled and sovereign city called Ilansura. It was a good match, celebrated with enormous feasts and heaps of presents (mostly from the bride’s family to the groom). Zimri-Lim’s grandchildren would eventually be in line for the throne of Ilansura, and in the meantime the king of Ilansura would become an ally, rather than another competitor among the crowd of independent cities fighting for territory along the limited fertile stretches of the Euphrates.
Unfortunately, grandchildren didn’t arrive as soon as hoped. Three years later Zimri-Lim, still hoping to make the alliance with Ilansura permanent, sent the king another daughter: Shimatum’s younger sister Kirum. Kirum, sharp-tongued and ambitious, was expected to take her lawful place as second wife and servant to her sister. Instead, she decided to lobby for a position as the king’s first wife. She involved herself in politics, commandeered servants for her personal use, sneered at her sister, and generally queened it about the palace—until Shimatum gave birth to twins.
Immediately the childless Kirum plummeted in the palace hierarchy. “No one asks my opinion any more,” she complained, in letter after letter to her father. “My husband has taken away my very last servants. My sister says that she will do whatever she wants to me!”
Given Kirum’s behavior to her sister in the early years of her marriage, it is unlikely that “whatever she wants” involved anything good; and indeed, Kirum’s letters soon begged her father for rescue. The plea “Bring me home or I shall surely die!” progressed to “If you do not bring me back home to Mari, I will throw myself from the highest roof in Ilansura!”
Zimri-Lim had hoped to make the king of Ilansura his friend. Unfortunately, leaving Kirum in the the man’s household wasn’t doing much to increase the goodwill between the two families. Seven years after the wedding, Zimri-Lim gave up, made a royal journey north, and in the words of his own court records, “liberated the palace of Ilansura” by bringing Kirum home.1
THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, groups of hunters and gatherers roamed across Asia and Europe, following mammoth herds that fed on the wild grasses. Slowly the ice began to retreat; the patterns of the grass growth changed; the herds wandered north and diminished. Some hunters followed. Others, deprived of the meat that was central to their diet, harvested those wild grasses and, in time, began to plant some of the grasses for themselves.
Probably.
EVEN THOUGH world histories routinely begin with prehistoric times, I suspect that prehistory is the wrong starting place for the historian. Other specialists are better equipped to dig into the murk of the very distant past. Archaeologists unearth the remnants of villages built from mammoth bones; anthropologists try to reconstruct the lost world of the villagers. Both are searching for a hypothesis that fits the evidence, a lens that will reveal groups of people moving from east to west, abandoning mammoth meat for barley, and digging pits for their extra grain.
But for the historian who hopes not just to explain what people do, but in some measure why and how they do it, prehistory—the time before people began to write and tell stories about their kings, their heroes, and themselves—remains opaque. Whatever the archaeologist concludes about that group called “Neolithic man,” I know nothing about the days and nights of a Neolithic potter, constructing his ring-rimmed pots in a village in the south of France. The tracks of the hunters and gatherers (pots, stone flakes, bones of people and animals, paintings on cliffs and cave walls) reveal a pattern of life, but no story emerges. There are no kings and wives in prehistory. Stripped of personality, prehistoric peoples too often appear as blocks of shifting color on a map: moving north, moving west, generating a field of cultivated grain or corralling a herd of newly domesticated animals. The story of these nameless people must be told in the impersonal voice that mars too many histories: “Civilization arose in the Fertile Crescent, where wheat was planted for the first time on the banks of the Euphrates. The development of writing soon followed, and cities were established.”
Any time the historian is forced to resort to hugely general statements about “human behavior,” she has left her native land and is speaking a foreign language—usually with a total lack of fluency and grace. This kind of impersonal history (heavy on the passive verbs) is stupefyingly dull. Worse, it is inaccurate. The Fertile Crescent had no monopoly on farming; small groups all over Asia and Europe began planting grain as the weather warmed, and in any case the Fertile Crescent was mostly a howling waste.
Anthropologists can speculate about human behavior; archaeologists, about patterns of settlement; philosophers and theologians, about the motivations of “humanity” as an undifferentiated mass. But the historian’s task is different: to look for particular human lives that give flesh and spirit to abstract assertions about human behavior.
It was not easy to be a petty king in the ancient Near East. Zimri-Lim spends half of his time fighting the kings of other cities, and the other half trying to negotiate his complicated personal life. His queen, competent and politically astute Shiptu, runs the city of Mari while her husband goes off to fight yet another war. She writes to him, in the height of a Mediterranean summer, “Be sure to take care of yourself when you are in the full rays of the sun!…Wear the robe and cloak that I have made for you!…My heart has been greatly alarmed; write me and tell me that you are safe!” And Zimri-Lim writes back: “The enemy has not threatened me with weapons. All is well. Let your heart no longer be afflicted.”2 In thousands of cuneiform tablets unearthed on the banks of the Euphrates, Zimri-Lim emerges both as a typical Mesopotamian king, and as an individual: a much-married man with little talent for fatherhood.
So rather than beginning with cave paintings, or anonymous groups of nomads wandering across the plains, I have chosen to begin this history at the point where particular human lives and audible human voices emerge from the indistinct crowds of prehistory. You will find some prehistory, borrowed from archaeology and anthropology, in the chapters that follow (and along with it, some inevitable use of the impersonal voice). But where this prehistory appears, it serves only to set the stage for the characters who wait in the wings.
I have made careful use of epic tales and myths to flesh out this prehistory. The first personalities that bob up from the surface of ancient history seem to be part man and part god; the earliest kings rule for thousands of years, and the first heroes ascend to the heavens on eagle’s wings. Since the eighteenth century (at least), western historians have been suspicious of such tales. Trained in a university system where science was revered as practically infallible, historians too often tried to position themselves as scientists: searching for cold hard facts and dismissing any historical material which seemed to depart from the realities of Newton’s universe. After all, any document which begins, as the Sumerian king list does, “Kingship descended from heaven” can’t possibly be trustworthy as history. Much better to rely on the science of archaeology, and to reconstruct the earliest days of Sumer and Egypt and the Indus valley settlements around tangible physical evidence.
But for the historian who concerns herself with the why and how of human behavior, potsherds and the foundations of houses are of limited use. They give no window into the soul. Epic tales, on the other hand, display the fears and hopes of the people who tell them—and these are central to any explanation of their behavior. Myth, as the historian John Keay says, is the “smoke of history.” You may have to fan at it a good deal before you get a glimpse of the flame beneath; but when you see smoke, it is wisest not to pretend that it isn’t there.
In any case, we should remember that all histories of ancient times involve a great deal of speculation. Speculation anchored by physical evidence isn’t, somehow, more reliable than speculation anchored by the stories that people choose to preserve and tell to their children. Every historian sorts through evidence, discards what seems irrelevant, and arranges the rest into a pattern. The evidence provided by ancient tales is no less important than the evidence left behind by merchants on a trade route. Both need to be collected, sifted, evaluated, and put to use. To concentrate on physical evidence to the exclusion of myth and story is to put all of our faith in the explanations for human behavior in that which can be touched, smelled, seen, and weighed: it shows a mechanical view of human nature, and a blind faith in the methods of science to explain the mysteries of human behavior.
Nevertheless, history constructed around very ancient stories involves just as much theorizing as history constructed around very ancient ruins. So I have tried to indicate the point at which written records begin to multiply, and conjecture becomes a little less conjectural (“Part Two”). Historians don’t always bother to give the reader this kind of heads-up; many leap from “Mesolithic man grew steadily better at making weapons” to “Sargon spread his rule across Mesopotamia” without noting that those two statements are based on very different kinds of evidence, and bear very different degrees of ambiguity.
In this volume, we will not spend a great deal of time in Australia, or the Americas, or for that matter Africa, but for a slightly different reason. The oral histories of these cultures, old as they are, don’t stretch back nearly as far as the oldest lists of kings from Mesopotamia, or the first memorial tablets to Egyptian kings. However, the whole idea of linear time that gives us such a neat outline for history—prehistory, ancient history, medieval history, and on towards the future—is not African or Native American; it is a very western creation (which in no way diminishes its usefulness). As archaeologist Chris Gosden points out in his primer on prehistory, native peoples such as the Aborigines of Australia had no native concept of “prehistory.” So far as we can tell, they thought of past and present as one until Westerners arrived, bringing “history” with them—at which point their prehistory came to a sudden end. We will meet them then: an approach which may not be ideal, but at least avoids doing violence to their own sense of time.
One additional note: Dating anything that happened before Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC) is problematic. Even Hammurabi’s accession has an error factor of fifty years or so on either side, and by the time we go back to 7000 BC the error factor is closer to five or six hundred years. Before 7000 BC, assigning dates takes place in a polite free-for-all. Writing about anything that happened from the beginning of time through about 4000 BC is further complicated by the fact that there are several different systems in place for labelling the eras of “prehistory,” none of which is in total agreement with any other, and at least one of which is just plain wrongheaded.
I have chosen to use the traditional designations BC and AD for dates. I understand why many historians choose to use BCE and CE in an attempt to avoid seeing history entirely from a Judeo-Christian point of view, but using BCE while still reckoning from Christ’s birth seems, to me, fairly pointless.