5

NECK AND NECK

THE ADVANTAGES OF DULLNESS

Figure 5.1 may be the dullest diagram ever. Unlike Figure 4.2, it has no great divergences, disruptions, or convergences—just two lines drifting along in parallel for nearly a thousand years.

Yet while Figure 5.1 may be plain vanilla, the things that don’t happen in it are crucial for our story. We saw in Chapter 4 that when the Western core collapsed around 1200 BCE, its lead in social development shrank sharply. It took Western development five centuries to claw its way back up to twenty-four points, where it had stood around 1300 BCE; if it had collapsed again when it hit this level, that would have wiped out the East-West gap altogether. If, on the other hand, Eastern development had collapsed when it reached twenty-four points, that would have restored the West’s pre-1200 BCE lead. In reality, as Figure 5.1 shows, neither of these things happened. Eastern and Western social development kept rising in parallel, in a neck-and-neck race. The mid first millennium BCE was one of history’s turning points because history failed to turn.

But what does happen in Figure 5.1 matters too. Social development almost doubled in both East and West between 1000 and 100 BCE. Western development passed thirty-five points; it was higher when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon than it would be when Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

Figure 5.1. The dullest diagram in history? Social development, 1000–100 BCE

Why did the Western core not collapse around 700 BCE, or the Eastern around 500 BCE, when each hit twenty-four points? Why did social development rise so high by 100 BCE? Why were the Eastern and Western cores so alike by this point? These are the questions I try to answer in this chapter, although the obvious follow-up questions—why, if social development was so high in 100 BCE, did ancient Rome or China not colonize the New World? Or have an industrial revolution?—must wait till Chapters 9 and 10, when we can compare what happened after 1500 CE and what didn’t happen in antiquity. Right now, though, we need to see what did happen.

KINGSHIP ON THE CHEAP

In a nutshell, the Eastern and Western cores avoided collapse in the first millennium BCE by restructuring themselves, inventing new institutions that kept them one step ahead of the disruptions that their continuing expansion itself generated.

There are basically two ways to run a state, what we might call high-end and low-end strategies. The high end, as its name suggests, is expensive. It involves leaders who centralize power, hiring and firing underlings who serve them in return for salaries in a bureaucracy or army. Paying salaries requires a big income, but the bureaucrats’ main job is to generate that income through taxes, and the army’s job is to enforce its collection. The goal is a balance: a lot of revenue goes out but even more comes in, and the rulers and their employees live off the difference.

The low-end model is cheap. Leaders do not need huge tax revenues because they do not spend much. They get other people to do the work. Instead of paying an army, rulers rely on local elites—who may well be their kinsmen—to raise troops from their own estates. The rulers reward these lords by sharing plunder with them. Rulers who keep winning wars establish a low-end balance: not much revenue comes in but even less goes out, and the leaders and their kin live off the difference.

The biggest event in the first millennium BCE in both East and West was a shift from low-end toward high-end states. States had been drifting that way since the days of Uruk; mid-third-millennium-BCE Egyptian pharaohs already had enough bureaucratic muscle to build pyramids, and a thousand years later their successors organized complex armies of chariots. But the scale and scope of first-millennium-BCE states dwarfed all earlier efforts. The activities of states—management and fighting—therefore dominate this chapter.

Eastern and Western states took different routes toward the high end during the first millennium BCE, but both were bumpy. Eastern states, created so much later than Western ones, were still near the low end of the spectrum around 1000 BCE. The Shang state had been a loose collection of allies who sent turtles and horses to Anyang and sometimes showed up for wars; and when King Wu overthrew the Shang in 1046 BCE his Zhou state was perhaps even looser. Wu did not annex the Shang kingdom, because he had no one to run it. He simply put a puppet king over the Shang and went home to the Wei Valley (Figure 5.2).

This is a cheap way to control former enemies when it works, but in this case sibling rivalry, a perennial problem in low-end organizations, soon undid it. Wu could not rely on his family to do what he wanted. He died in 1043 BCE, leaving behind three brothers and a son. According to the Zhou dynasty’s official version, written of course by the winners, Wu’s son Cheng was too young to rule, so the Duke of Zhou, Wu’s younger brother, loyally agreed to serve as regent (many historians think the duke actually launched a coup). King Wu’s two elder brothers reacted by joining forces with the remnants of the Shang regime to resist the duke.

Figure 5.2. Low-end kingship in the East: sites from the first half of the first millennium BCE mentioned in the text. Triangles mark major Zhou colonies.

In 1041 BCE the Duke of Zhou won this civil war and killed his elder brothers, but he realized he could neither rule the Shang as cheaply as Wu had hoped nor leave them to plot against him. He came up with a brilliant low-end solution: he would send members of the Zhou royal clan to set up virtually independent city-states along the Yellow River valley (between twenty-six and seventy-three of them, depending on which ancient author we believe). These cities did not pay taxes to him, but he did not have to pay them to be there either.

The Zhou kingdom really was a family business—one that had much in common with that most famous of family businesses, the Mafia. The king, effectively the Zhou family’s capo di tutti capi, lived off huge estates in the Plain of Zhou, running them with a rudimentary bureaucracy, while his subsidiary rulers—“made men,” in the Mob’s terms—lived in their own fortified cities. When the king called on them, these lords provided him with muscle, showing up with chariots and troops so the king could shake down his enemies. When the fighting was over the mobsters shared the plunder and went home. Everyone was happy (except the plundered enemies).

Like bosses in la cosa nostra, Zhou kings offered emotional as well as material incentives to keep their captains loyal. In fact, they invested heavily in legitimacy, which is often the only thing that separates kings from gangsters. They convinced the subsidiary rulers that the king—as head of the family, master of divination and the ancestor cult, and the contact point between this and the divine world—had a right to call on them.

The more a king could rely on his kinsmen’s loyalty, of course, the less he had to rely on sharing plunder. Zhou kings actively promoted a new theory of kingship: that Di, the high god in heaven, chose earthly rulers and had bestowed his mandate on the virtuous Zhou because he was disgusted by the Shang’s moral failings. Stories about King Wu’s virtue grew so elaborate that by the fourth century BCE the philosopher Mencius was claiming that rather than fighting the Shang, Wu had merely proclaimed, “I come to bring peace, not to wage war on the people.” Immediately, “the sound of people knocking their heads on the ground [in submission] was like the toppling of a mountain.”

Few—if any—Zhou lords can have believed such silliness, but the mandate-of-heaven theory did encourage them to go along with the kings. It could also be turned on its head, though: if the Zhou ceased to behave virtuously, heaven could withdraw its mandate and bestow it on someone else. And who, if not the lords, was to say whether the kings’ behavior met heaven’s standard?

Zhou aristocrats liked to inscribe lists of the honors they received on the bronze vessels they used in rituals to honor their ancestors, revealing nicely the combination of material and psychological rewards. One, for instance, describes how King Cheng (reigned 1035–1006 BCE) “made” a follower in an elaborate ceremony, granting him his own lordship and lands. “In the evening,” the inscription says, “the lord was awarded many ax-man vassals, two hundred families, and was offered use of the chariot team in which the king rode; bronze harness-trappings, a dustcoat, a robe, cloth, and slippers.”

While it worked, the Zhou racket was highly effective. Kings mobilized quite large armies (hundreds of chariots by the ninth century BCE) and won general agreement that the ancestors wanted them to squeeze protection money from “barbarian enemies” who surrounded the Zhou world. Farmers within the Zhou realm, increasingly safe from attack, worked their fields and fed growing cities. Instead of taxing the farmers, the lords extracted labor dues. In theory, fields were laid out in three-by-three grids, like tic-tac-toe boards, with eight families working the outer fields for themselves and taking turns to work the ninth field, in the middle, for their lord. Reality was doubtless messier, but the combination of peasant labor, plunder, and extortion made the elite rich. They buried one another in spectacular tombs, and while they sacrificed fewer people than the Shang aristocrats, they buried far more chariots. They cast and inscribed astounding numbers of bronze vessels (some thirteen thousand examples have been excavated and published), and although writing remained an elite tool, it spread beyond its narrow Shang-era uses.

The system had one weakness, however; it depended on a steady diet of victories. The rulers delivered for nearly a century, but in 957 BCE King Zhao failed. Failure was not something anyone wanted to write down, so all we know about it comes from a throwaway comment in the Bamboo Annals, a chronicle buried in a tomb in 296 BCE and rediscovered when the tomb was plundered nearly six centuries later. It says that two great lords followed King Zhao against Chu, a region south of the Zhou realm. “The heavens were dark and tempestuous,” says the chronicler. “Pheasants and hares were terrified. The king’s six armies perished in the River Han. The king died.”

All at once the Zhou lost their army, their king, and the mystique of the mandate of heaven. Maybe, the lords apparently concluded, the Zhou were not so virtuous after all. Their problems compounded: after 950 BCE inscriptions on bronze vessels found at the eastern end of the Yellow River stop professing loyalty to the Zhou, and as the kings struggled to keep these vassals in line they lost control of “barbarian enemies” in the west, who began threatening the Zhou cities.

With the supply of newly conquered territories running low, elite conflict over land apparently increased. Faced with a meltdown in his low-end state, King Mu turned toward higher-cost solutions by building up a bureaucracy after 950 BCE. Some Zhou kings (we aren’t sure which ones) then used their administrators to transfer land between families, perhaps to reward loyalty and punish betrayal, but the aristocracy pushed back. Piecing together the story from brief accounts on bronze vessels, it sounds like someone deposed King Yih in 885 BCE, only for the “many lords” to restore him; and then Yih went to war with the greatest of these lords, Marquis Ai of Qi, boiling him alive in a bronze cauldron in 863. In 842 the “many lords” struck back, and King Li, like some Mob boss going to the mattresses as treacherous captains try to take him out, fled into exile.

At the other end of Eurasia, Western kings were also building low-end states in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. How the Western core pulled out of its post-1200 BCE slump is almost as unclear as how the slump began, but the inventiveness born of desperation probably played a part. The collapse of long-distance trade had forced people to fall back on local resources, but some vital goods—above all tin, essential for making bronze—were just not available in many places.* Westerners therefore learned to use iron instead. Smiths on Cyprus, which had long been home to the world’s most advanced metallurgy, had already figured out before 1200 BCE how to extract a serviceable metal from the ugly red and black iron ores that crop up all around the Mediterranean, but so long as bronze was available iron remained merely a novelty item. The drying up of the tin supply changed all that, making it iron or nothing, and by 1000 BCE the new, cheap metal was in use from Greece to what is now Israel (Figure 5.3).

Back in the 1940s Gordon Childe, one of the giants of European archaeology, suggested, “Cheap iron democratized agriculture and industry and warfare too.” Another sixty years of excavations has left us little clearer about exactly how this worked, but Childe was certainly right that iron’s easy availability made metal weapons and tools more common in the first millennium BCE than they had been in the second; and when trade routes revived, no one went back to bronze for weapons or tools.

Figure 5.3. Low-end kingship in the West: sites of the first half of the first millennium BCE mentioned in the text. Triangles mark major Greek colonies; open circles, major Phoenician colonies. The Greek homeland is shaded.

The first part of the Western core to revive after the dark age may have been Israel, where, the Hebrew Bible says, the tenth-century BCE kings David and Solomon created a “United Monarchy” stretching from the borders of Egypt to the Euphrates. Its capital at Jerusalem boomed, we are told, and Solomon feted the queen of distant Sheba (perhaps in Yemen) and sent trading missions across the Mediterranean. While smaller and weaker than the International Age kingdoms, the United Monarchy sounds more centralized than the contemporary Zhou family business, extracting taxes and drawing in tribute from all around. It may have been the strongest state in the world until its components, the peoples of Israel and Judah, abruptly parted ways on Solomon’s death around 931 BCE.

Unless, that is, none of these things actually happened. Many biblical scholars believe there was no United Monarchy. The whole thing was a fantasy, they argue, dreamed up by Israelites centuries later to console themselves about the dire situation in their own day. Archaeologists have certainly had trouble finding the great building projects that the Bible says David and Solomon undertook, and debates have become alarmingly fierce. In the normal run of things, even the most dedicated archaeologists have been known to doze off in seminars about the chronology of ancient storage vessels, but when one archaeologist suggested in the 1990s that pots normally dated to the tenth century BCE were in fact made in the ninth century—which would mean that monumental buildings previously associated with Solomon, in the tenth century, must also date a hundred years later, in turn meaning that Solomon’s kingdom was a poor and undistinguished place and the Hebrew Bible has the story wrong—he provoked such rage that he had to hire a bodyguard.

These are troubled waters. Not having a bodyguard, I will get out of them quickly. It seems to me that the biblical account, like the Chinese traditions about the Xia and Shang discussed in Chapter 4, may be exaggerated but is unlikely to be totally fanciful; and evidence from other parts of the Western core also suggests that revival was under way by the late tenth century BCE. In 926 Sheshonq I, a Libyan warlord who had seized the Egyptian throne, led an army through Judah (the southern part of modern Israel and the West Bank) in what looks like an attempt to restore the old Egyptian Empire. He failed, but in the north a still greater power was also stirring. After a hundred-year gap during the dark age, Assyrian royal records restarted in 934 BCE under King Ashur-dan II, giving us a glimpse of a gangster state that made the Zhou look angelic.

Ashur-dan was very conscious that Assyria was recovering from a dark age. “I brought back the exhausted peoples of Assyria who had abandoned their cities and houses in the face of want, hunger, and famine, and had gone up to other lands,” he wrote. “I settled them in cities and houses … and they dwelt in peace.” In some ways Ashur-dan was an old-fashioned king, seeing himself as the earthly representative of Assyria’s patron god Ashur, much as Mesopotamian kings had been doing for two thousand years. Ashur, though, had had a makeover during the dark age. He had become an angry god; in fact, a very angry god, because although he knew he was top god, most mortals failed to grasp this. Ashur-dan’s job was to make them grasp it by turning the world into Ashur’s hunting ground. And if hunting for Ashur made Ashur-dan rich, that was fine too.

Within Assyria’s heartland the king commanded a small bureaucracy and appointed governors called Sons of Heaven, giving them huge estates and labor forces. These were high-end practices that would have been familiar to any International Age ruler, but the Assyrian king’s real power had low-end sources. Rather than taxing Assyria to pay for an army to do Ashur’s hunting, the king relied on the Sons of Heaven to provide troops, rewarding them—as Zhou kings did with their lords—with plunder, exotic gifts, and a place in royal rituals. The Sons of Heaven leveraged this position to win thirty-year terms of office, effectively turning their estates into hereditary fiefs and their laborers into serfs.

Just like Zhou rulers, Assyrian kings were hostages to the lords’ goodwill, but so long as they won wars that did not matter. The Sons of Heaven provided much bigger armies than Zhou vassal kings (according to royal accounts, fifty thousand infantry in the 870s BCE and more than a hundred thousand in 845, plus thousands of chariots), and the kings’ relatively high-end bureaucracy provided the logistical support to feed and move these hosts.

Not surprisingly, the rulers of Assyria’s smaller, weaker neighbors generally preferred buying protection to being impaled on pointed sticks while their cities burned. An offer from the Assyrians was normally one they couldn’t refuse, particularly since Assyria often left submissive local kings in power rather than using the Zhou strategy of replacing them with colonists. Defeated kings could even end up profiting; if they loaned Assyria troops for its next war, they could get a cut of the plunder.

Client kings might be tempted to back out of their deals, though, so Assyria focused their minds with holy terror. Those who submitted did not have to worship Ashur, but they did have to recognize that Ashur ruled heaven and told their own gods what to do—which made rebellion a religious offense against Ashur as well as a political one, giving the Assyrians no choice but to punish it as savagely as possible. Assyrian kings decorated their palaces with carved scenes of horrific brutality, and their glee in cataloguing massacres rapidly becomes mind-numbing. Take, for instance, Ashurnasirpal II’s account of the punishments meted out to rebels around 870 BCE:

I built a tower over against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the tower with their skin. Some I walled up within the tower, some I impaled upon the tower on stakes, and others I bound to stakes around the tower …

Many captives from among them I burned with fire, and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out the eyes. I made one pile of the living and another of heads, and I hung their heads from tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I burned up in the fire. Twenty men I captured alive and I walled them up in his palace … The rest of the warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert.

The political fortunes of the Eastern and Western cores were moving in different directions in the ninth century BCE, with Zhou rule unraveling while Assyria was reviving after the dark age, but both cores experienced constant warfare, growing cities, more trade, and new, low-cost ways to run states. And in the eighth century BCE they found something else in common: both discovered the limits of kingship on the cheap.

THE WINDS OF CHANGE

It’s an ill wind, the saying goes, that blows nobody any good. Never was this truer than around 800 BCE, when minor wobbles in Earth’s axis generated stronger winter winds all over the northern hemisphere (Figure 5.4). In western Eurasia, where the main winter winds are “westerlies” blowing from the Atlantic, this meant more winter rain. This was good for people in the Mediterranean Basin, where the commonest cause of death had always been intestinal viruses that flourish in hot, dry weather, and the main problem for farmers was that the winter winds might not bring enough rain for good harvests. Cold and rain were better than sickness and hunger.

The new climate regime was bad, though, for people north of the Alps, where the main killers were respiratory diseases that flourished in the cold and damp and the main agricultural problem was a short summer growing season. As the weather changed between 800 and 500 BCE population fell in northern and western Europe but rose around the Mediterranean.

Figure 5.4. The chill winds of winter: climate change in the early first millennium BCE

In China the winter winds blow mainly from Siberia, so when they grew stronger after 800 BCE they made the weather drier as well as cooler. This probably made agriculture easier around the Yangzi and Yellow rivers by reducing flooding, and population kept growing in both valleys, but it made life harder for people on the increasingly arid plateau north of the Yellow River.

Within these broad patterns there were countless local variations, but the main result was like the episodes of climate change we saw in Chapter 4; the balances within and between regions shifted, forcing people to respond. The author of a standard textbook on paleoclimatology says of these years, “If such a disruption of the climate system were to occur today, the social, economic, and political consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic.”

In East and West alike the same amount of land had to feed more mouths as population grew. This generated both conflicts and innovations. Both could potentially be good for rulers; more conflicts meant more chances to help friends and punish enemies, more innovations meant more wealth being generated, and the engine behind both—more people—meant more laborers, more warriors, and more plunder.

All these good things could come to kings who kept control, but the low-end kings of the eighth century BCE found that difficult. The big winners, best placed to exploit new opportunities, were often local bosses—the governors, landlords, and garrison commanders on whom low-end kings relied to get things done. This was bad news for kings.

In the 770s BCE Eastern and Western kings alike lost control of their vassals. The Egyptian state, more or less unified since 945 BCE, split into three principalities in 804 and devolved by 770 into a dozen virtually independent dukedoms. In Assyria, Shamshi-Adad V had to fight to secure his succession to the throne in 823 BCE, then lost control of his client kings and governors. Some Sons of Heaven even waged wars in their own names. Assyriologists call the years 783 through 744 BCE “the interval,” a time when kings counted for little, coups were common, and governors did what they liked.

For local aristocrats, minor princes, and little city-states, this was a golden age. The most interesting case is Phoenicia, a string of cities along the modern Lebanese coast, whose inhabitants had been prospering as middlemen since the Western core revived in the tenth century BCE, carrying goods between Egypt and Assyria. Their wealth attracted Assyrian attention, though, and by 850 the Phoenicians were paying protection money. Some historians think this pushed Phoenicians to venture into the Mediterranean in search of profits to buy peace; others suspect that the growing population and pull of new markets in the Mediterranean was more important. Either way, by 800 BCE Phoenicians were voyaging far afield, setting up trade enclaves on Cyprus and even building a little shrine on Crete. By 750 the Greek poet Homer could take it for granted that his audience knew (and mistrusted) “Phoenician men, famous for their ships, gnawers at profit, bringing countless pretty things in each dark hull.”

The Greek population grew fastest of all, though, and Phoenician explorers and traders may have pulled hungry Greeks along in their wake. By 800 BCE someone was carrying Greek pottery to southern Italy, and by 750 Greeks as well as Phoenicians were settling permanently in the western Mediterranean (see Figure 5.3). Both groups liked good harbors with access via rivers to markets in the interior, but the Greeks, who came in much greater numbers than the Phoenicians, also settled as farmers and grabbed some of the best coastal land.

Native groups sometimes resisted. Some, such as the tribesmen of Etruria and Sardinia in Italy, already had towns and long-distance trade before the colonists came; now they built cities and monuments, organized low-end states, and intensified agriculture. They created alphabets based on the Greek model (which the Greeks, in turn, had adapted from Phoenicia between 800 and 750 BCE). These alphabets were easier to learn and use than most earlier scripts, which had needed hundreds of signs, each representing a consonant-plus-vowel syllable; and much easier than the Egyptian hieroglyphic or Chinese scripts, which needed thousands of signs, each expressing a separate word. By the best guess, in the fifth century BCE 10 percent of Athenian men could read simple statements or write their own name—far more than anywhere in the East or West at any earlier time.

We know much more about the spread of cities, states, trade, and writing into first-millennium-BCE Europe than about the spread of agriculture four or five thousand years earlier (discussed in Chapter 2), but the arguments over what happened in each case are strangely similar. Some archaeologists claim that colonization from the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE caused the rise of cities and states farther west; others respond that native peoples transformed their own societies in resistance to colonialism. Members of the latter group, mostly younger scholars, sometimes accuse the former group of projecting onto the ancient world nostalgia for the self-proclaimed civilizing missions of modern colonial regimes; while some of the former group, mostly of an older generation, reply that their critics are more interested in posing as champions of the oppressed than in finding out what really happened.

The name-calling is admittedly tame compared to the rage that the archaeology of Israel generates (so far as I know no one has needed a bodyguard yet), but by the genteel standards of classical scholarship it counts as bitter controversy. It was enough to draw me in, anyway, and in an effort to make sense of the issues I spent my summers between 2000 and 2006 excavating a Sicilian site called Monte Polizzo.* This was an indigenous town occupied between 650 and 525 BCE by people called Elymians. It was so close to Phoenician and Greek colonies that we could see them from the summit of our hill, making it an ideal place to test competing theories of whether colonization or indigenous development caused the western Mediterranean takeoff. And after seven summers of picking, troweling, sieving, counting, weighing, and eating too much pasta, our conclusion is: it was a bit of both.

This is, of course, pretty much the same conclusion archaeologists have reached about the expansion of agriculture thousands of years earlier. In each case, social development rose in both the core and in the peripheries around it. Traders and colonists left the core, whether pushed out by rivals or pulled by tempting opportunities, and some people in the peripheries actively copied core practices or independently created their own versions. The result was that higher levels of social development spread outward from the core, overlaying earlier systems and being transformed in the process as people in the peripheries added their own twists and discovered the advantages in their backwardness.

At Monte Polizzo local initiatives were clearly important. For one thing, we suspect that our site was destroyed by fellow Elymians from Segesta, who created their own city-state in the sixth century BCE. But the arrival of Greek colonists was also critical, since Segestan state formation was partly a response to Greek competition for land and was massively shaped by Greek culture. Segestan aristocrats struggled to look like serious rivals to the Greeks, borrowing Greek practices to do so. In fact, they built such a perfect example of a Greek-style temple in the 430s BCE that many art historians think they must have hired the architects who designed the Parthenon at Athens. Segestans also inserted themselves into Greek mythology, claiming (as Romans did too) to be descendants of Aeneas, a refugee from the fall of Troy. By the fifth century BCE colonial cities in the western Mediterranean such as Carthage (a Phoenician settlement) and Syracuse (a Greek one) rivaled any in the old core. Etruscan social development was not far behind, and dozens of groups like the Elymians trailed not far behind them.

A rather similar process of state breakdown in the core combined with expansion on the periphery also unfolded in the East as population grew. Around 810 BCE the Zhou king Xuan lost control of his lords, who saw less and less reason to cooperate with him as they themselves grew richer and stronger. Xuan’s capital in the Plain of Zhou slid into factional conflicts and raiders from the northwest plundered deep into his kingdom. When Xuan’s son You inherited the throne in 781 BCE he tried to stop the rot, apparently engineering a showdown with his surly vassals and his father’s too-powerful ministers, who may have been conspiring with You’s firstborn son and the boy’s mother.

At this point the story descends into the kind of folktale that fills so many of our ancient sources. Sima Qian, the great historical scholar of the first century BCE, recounts a bizarre tale that an earlier Zhou king had once opened a thousand-year-old box of dragon saliva, from which a black reptile appeared. For reasons that Sima Qian leaves unclear, the king’s response was to have several palace women strip naked and yell at the monster. Rather than running away, it impregnated one of them, who gave birth to a reptilian daughter but then abandoned her. Another couple, fleeing the Zhou capital to escape the king’s anger over a wholly unrelated matter, carried this snake-child off to Bao, one of the rebellious vassal states in the Zhou kingdom.

The point of this odd story is that in 780 BCE the people of Bao decided to try to broker a deal with King You by sending him the dragon’s offspring—now grown into a beautiful young woman named Bao Si—as a concubine. You was very happy about this, and the next year Bao Si bore him a son. This, apparently, was why You decided to get rid of his firstborn son and senior wife.

All went well for You until 777 BCE, when his exiled son fled to another restless Zhou vassal state and You’s most senior minister joined the boy there. At this point a group of vassals made an alliance with northwestern people whom the Zhou called the Rong (the name simply means “hostile foreigners”).

King You, heedless of all this, had turned his attention to a more immediate problem: how to make Bao Si laugh (not surprisingly, given her background, she was rather humorless). Only one thing seemed to work. You’s predecessors had set up watchtowers so that if the Rong attacked, drums and fires could warn the many lords, who would rush to the rescue with their retinues. Sima Qian says,

King You lit the beacons and beat the great drums. As the beacons were to be lit only when intruders drew near, the many lords all came. Upon their arrival, there were no intruders, thus Lady Bao Si laughed out loud. The king was pleased, so he lit the beacons several times. Afterwards, since this was not reliable, the many lords became more reluctant to come.

King You was the original boy who cried wolf, and when the Rong and rebellious Shen really did attack in 771 BCE, the many lords ignored the beacons. The rebels killed You, burned his capital, and put his estranged son on the throne with the title King Ping.

It is hard to take this story too seriously, but many historians think it does preserve memories of real events. In the 770s BCE, the same decade that Egyptian and Assyrian rulers lost control, it would seem that population growth, resurgent local power, dynastic politics, and external pressures came together in China to produce an even sharper setback for monarchy.

The vassals who left King You to his fate in 771 BCE perhaps wanted only to demonstrate their strength, install Ping as a figurehead, and carry on ignoring the monarchy. Their decision to bury their bronze ritual vessels all around the Wei valley, where archaeologists have recovered them in huge numbers since the 1970s, suggests that they planned to return as soon as the Rong went home laden with plunder from You’s palace. But if this was their thinking, they were badly mistaken. The Rong came to stay, and the many lords were forced to install King Ping as head of a government-in-exile at Luoyi in the Yellow River valley.* It soon became clear that the Zhou king, Son of Heaven as he might be, was impotent now he had lost his estates in the Wei Valley, and the earls of Zheng, the strongest of the “vassals,” started to test their erstwhile kings. In 719 BCE one earl took the heir to the throne hostage; in 707 another earl even shot the king with an arrow.

By 700 BCE the Zhou court was almost irrelevant to the dukes, earls, viscounts, and marquises of the former colonies (one ancient source says there were now 148 of them). The leading “vassals” still claimed to be acting on behalf of the Zhou king, but in reality fought one another for supremacy without consulting their supposed ruler, making and breaking treaties at will. In 667 BCE Marquis Huan of Qi, temporarily dominant, even summoned his rivals to a conference where they acknowledged him as their leader (though they continued to fight him and everyone else). The next year Marquis Huan browbeat the king of Zhou into naming him ba, an “overlord” who would (theoretically) represent Zhou’s interests.

Marquis Huan earned this standing largely by protecting weaker states from attacks by peoples they considered foreign—in the north, the Rong and Di, and in the south, groups known as Man. Yet the main (and surely unintended) consequence of these wars was rather similar to Phoenician and Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean, drawing the Rong, Di, and Man into the core and hugely expanding it in the process.

In the seventh century BCE states along the northern edge of the core recruited Rong and Di as allies, cementing these ties by intermarriage. Many Rong and Di leaders became versed in Zhou literature and deliberately attached themselves to border states such as Qi, Jin, and Qin, which grew much larger. In the south some Man created their own large state, Chu, as they fought with Jin and Qi in the seventh century. By the 650s BCE Chu was a full member of the interstate community, attending its conferences; and, rather like the Segestans and Romans in the West who claimed to descend from Aeneas, Chu’s leaders started saying that they, like the other states in the Eastern core, had begun as a colony of Zhou. A distinct Chu material culture emerged by 600 BCE, combining core and southern elements.

Chu became such a power that in 583 BCE the state of Jin decided to make alliances with other Man peoples to build up enemies in Chu’s rear. In 506 one of these allies, the state of Wu, was strong enough to smash Chu’s army; so strong, in fact, that in 482 the Marquis of Jin yielded his status as ba to Viscount Fuchai of Wu—who, like the kings of Chu, now claimed Zhou ancestry. By then yet another southern state, Yue, had also become a major power. Its viscounts tried to trump Wu ideologically by claiming descent from the earliest dynasty of all, the Xia; and in 473 BCE, after Viscount Fuchai of Wu hanged himself while Yue’s armies besieged his capital, Yue’s viscount took his place as ba. Despite its political breakdown, the Eastern core had expanded just as dramatically as the Western.

TOWARD THE HIGH END

The years 750–500 BCE were the turning point when history didn’t turn. In 750 BCE Western social development was pushing twenty-four points, just where it had been on the eve of the great collapse in 1200 BCE; by 500 BCE so, too, was the East’s. Just as happened around 1200, the climate was changing, peoples were migrating, conflict was escalating, new states were pushing into the cores, and old states were coming apart. New collapses seemed entirely possible, but both cores instead restructured themselves, developing the economic, political, and intellectual resources to manage the challenges that faced them. That is what makes Figure 5.1 so dull—and so interesting.

We see the changes first in Assyria. The upstart who usurped the throne in 744 BCE under the name Tiglath-Pileser III at first looked much like all the other pretenders who had pulled the same stunt since the 780s, yet in less than twenty years he catapulted Assyria from a broken, low-end state to a dynamic, high-end one. Along the way he converted himself, like some mafioso going legitimate, from a gangster boss into a great (but brutal) king.

His secret was cutting the aristocratic Sons of Heaven out of the deal. Tiglath-Pileser did this by creating a standing army, paid by and loyal to him alone, instead of having his lords provide troops. The surviving texts do not say how he did this, but somehow he dragooned prisoners of war into forming a personal army. When it won battles, Tiglath-Pileser used the loot to pay his own troops directly instead of sharing it with his lords. Supported by the army, he then broke the nobles’ power, subdividing top offices and filling many with captured eunuchs. Eunuchs had two advantages—they could not have sons to pass their positions to, and were held in such contempt by the traditional aristocracy that they were unlikely to lead rebellions. Above all, Tiglath-Pileser hugely expanded the bureaucracy to run his state, stepping over the old elite to create administrators loyal entirely to him.

All this was expensive, so Tiglath-Pileser regularized his finances. Instead of shaking down foreigners by showing up periodically and demanding payoffs, he insisted on regular contributions—basically, taxes. If a client king argued, Tiglath-Pileser replaced him with an Assyrian governor. In 735 BCE, for instance, King Pekah of Israel joined Damascus and other Syrian cities in a tax revolt (Figure 5.5). Tiglath-Pileser came down on them like a wolf on the fold. He destroyed Damascus in 732 BCE, installed a governor, and annexed Israel’s fertile northern valleys. Pekah’s unhappy subjects assassinated him and enthroned the pro-Assyrian King Hoshea instead.

Figure 5.5. The first high-end empires. The broken line marks the maximum extent of the Assyrian Empire, around 660 BCE, and the solid line the maximum extent of the Persian Empire, around 490 BCE.

All went well until Tiglath-Pileser died in 727 BCE. Hoshea, assuming that the new Assyrian system would die with him, stopped paying, but Tiglath-Pileser’s institutions proved robust enough to survive a change at the top. In 722 Assyria’s new king, Shalmaneser, devastated Israel, killed Hoshea, installed a governor, and deported tens of thousands of Israelites. Between 934 and 612 BCE Assyria in fact forcibly moved some 4.5 million people from one place to another. Deportees filled Assyria’s armies, built its cities, and worked on projects to raise the empire’s productivity—damming rivers, planting trees, tending olives, and digging canals. The labor of the dispossessed fed Nineveh and Babylon, each of which grew to a hundred thousand residents, dwarfing earlier cities and sucking in resources from all around. Social development surged upward; by 700 BCE Assyria was stronger than any previous state in history.

Did Tiglath-Pileser change the course of history by heading off collapse in the eighth century? At one time historians unhesitatingly said yes, but nowadays most shy away from attributing so much to the will of unique great men. In this case, they are probably right. Great Tiglath-Pileser might have been, if that is the label we want to use for ruthlessness, but he was not unique. All over the Western core late-eighth-century-BCE rulers hit on centralization as the solution to their woes. In Egypt, Nubians from what is now Sudan reunited the country even before Tiglath-Pileser seized Assyria’s throne, and over the next thirty years instituted reforms he would have recognized. By the 710s BCE even little Judah’s King Hezekiah was doing the same.

Rather than a single genius changing history, this looks like desperate men trying out every idea that came along, with the best solutions winning. It was centralize or perish; rulers who failed to get local chiefs under control were crushed by those who succeeded. Hezekiah, worried about Assyria, felt compelled to strengthen Judah; Assyria’s new king, Sennacherib, worried about Hezekiah’s strength, felt compelled to stop him. In 701 BCE Sennacherib plundered Judah and carried off its people. He spared Jerusalem, whether because (as the Hebrew Bible says) the Angel of the Lord smote the Assyrians or because (as Sennacherib’s account says) Hezekiah agreed to pay more tribute.

Either way, Sennacherib’s victory brought him face-to-face with a harsh new reality: every war that Assyria won simply generated new enemies. When Tiglath-Pileser annexed northern Syria in the early 730s BCE, Damascus and Israel organized against him; when Shalmaneser conquered Damascus and Israel between 732 and 722 BCE, Judah became the front line; and cowing Judah in 701 BCE merely made Egypt a threat, so in the 670s Assyria overran the Nile Valley. Egypt, though, turned out to be a country too far, and by the time the Assyrians withdrew ten years later, problems were plaguing all their frontiers. Destroying Urartu, their main enemy to the north, had exposed them to devastating raids from the Caucasus; sacking Babylon, their main enemy to the south, only generated wars with Elam, farther southeast; and destroying Elam in the 640s BCE merely freed the Medes of the Zagros Mountains to become a threat and allowed Babylon to regain its strength.

In his influential book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the Yale University historian Paul Kennedy argued that in the past five hundred years, the need to fight great wars has consistently forced European states to overreach, undermining their strength so much that they collapsed. Despite leaping to a high-end model with huge revenue flows, a professional army, and a bureaucracy, and despite defeating all rivals, Assyria ended up as a poster child for such imperial overreach. By 630 BCE it was in retreat everywhere, and in 612 BCE a league of Medes and Babylonians sacked Nineveh and divided its empire.

Assyria’s abrupt fall repeated a pattern we saw in Chapter 4, in which military upheavals enlarge a core by giving previously peripheral peoples the chance to push their way in. Media adopted many of Assyria’s institutions and policies; Babylon once again became a great power; and Egypt tried to re-create its long-lost empire in the Levant. The tussle over Assyria’s carcass also kept the expansionary dynamic going. Median centralization turned another peripheral people, the Persians of southwest Iran, into a formidable power. In 550 BCE the Persian warlord Cyrus overthrew the Medes, his path smoothed by Median factional fighting. (The Median king rather foolishly put the army he sent against Cyrus under a general whom he had previously forced to eat the flesh of his own murdered son. The general promptly defected, the army collapsed, and Cyrus took over.)

Like Assyrian kings before them, Persia’s rulers believed they were on a mission from God. As they saw it, their family, the Achaemenids, represented the earthly interests of Ahuramazda, the god of light and truth, in his eternal struggle with darkness and evil. Other people’s gods, they convinced themselves, saw the justice of their cause, and wanted them to win. Thus, when Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE he claimed (apparently sincerely) to have done so to liberate Babylon’s gods from corrupt rulers who neglected them. When he followed this up by sending the Jews back to Jerusalem, whence the Babylonians had carried them into captivity in 586 BCE, the authors of the Hebrew Bible even confirmed Cyrus’ high opinion of himself. Their own god, they insisted, thought of Cyrus as “my shepherd … my anointed … whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes.”

Cyrus led his armies to the Aegean Sea and the borders of what are now Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His son Cambyses conquered and held Egypt, then, in a story quite as bizarre as anything in Sima Qian, his distant relative Darius seized the throne in 521 BCE. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Cambyses misinterpreted a dream as meaning that his brother Smerdis was plotting against him, and had Smerdis secretly murdered. To Cambyses’ horror, though, a priest—who happened to be named Smerdis too, and happened to look exactly like the dead Smerdis—now seized the throne, pretending to be the real Smerdis. Cambyses jumped onto his horse to rush home and reveal the fraud (and the fact that he had murdered his own brother) but accidentally stabbed himself in the thigh and died. Meanwhile, Fake Smerdis was exposed when one of his wives discovered that he had no ears (Fake Smerdis’ ears having been cut off as a punishment some time earlier). Seven noblemen then murdered Fake Smerdis and held a contest for the throne: each plotter brought his horse to a chosen place, the plan being that whoever’s horse neighed first when the sun rose would become king. Darius won (he cheated).

Remarkably, this turned out to be as good a way to choose a king as any,* and Darius quickly proved himself to be a new Tiglath-Pileser. So effectively did he maximize revenue from his realm of perhaps 30 million subjects, Herodotus recorded, that “the Persians like to say that Darius was a shopkeeper … [who] made a profit on everything.”

Darius followed the money, which drew him west, to where rising social development had revived the Mediterranean frontier. By 500 BCE traders acting for themselves rather than working for palaces and temples had created a vibrant economy, driving the costs of seaborne transport down so much that they could make profits by shipping bulk goods such as food as well as luxuries. Around 600 BCE people in Lydia, in western Anatolia, started stamping lumps of metal to guarantee their weight, and by Darius’ day this innovation—coinage—was in widespread use, speeding up commerce still further. Living standards rose: by 400 BCE the average Greek consumed perhaps 25–50 percent more than his or her predecessor had done three centuries earlier. Houses were bigger, diets more varied, and people lived longer.

Darius tapped into this Mediterranean economy by hiring Phoenicians to man Persia’s first fleet, cutting a Suez canal linking the Mediterranean and Red seas, and grabbing control of Greek cities. According to Herodotus, he sent spies to scope out Italy and even considered attacking Carthage.

By the time Darius died in 486 BCE, Western social development was a good 10 percent higher than the twenty-four points it had reached around 1200 BCE. Irrigation farming in Egypt and Mesopotamia had steadily increased yields; Babylon may have had 150,000 residents (the city was so big, says Herodotus, that when Cyrus captured it, it took days for the news to reach some neighborhoods); Persian armies were so big (again, according to Herodotus) that they drank whole rivers dry; and, as we have already seen, perhaps as many as one Athenian man in ten could write his name.

Eastern scores were also reaching twenty-four points, and processes of state restructuring and centralization much like those the West had known since the eighth century BCE were under way. The breakdown of Zhou authority since 771 BCE had been a mixed blessing for the rulers of the former vassal states. It set them free to fight one another, which they did with a vengeance, but breakdown did not stop at that point. The dukes and viscounts who had formerly been unruly vassals, obligated to the Zhou king but exploiting the fact that he relied on them for troops, now found that their own aristocrats were every bit as unruly as they had been. One solution was to end-run the aristocrats by bringing outsiders into the state, as Tiglath-Pileser had done when he filled his army with prisoners of war. Four big states on the edges of the Zhou world (Jin, Qi, Chu, and Qin; see Figure 5.2) started doing this in the seventh century and grew strong.

As early as 690 BCE Chu, less fettered by Zhou-era aristocratic norms than states in the Yellow River valley, created new administrative districts with governors reporting directly to the palace. Other states copied this. In the 660s BCE Marquis Xian, ruler of Jin, tried a more drastic solution, massacring the heads of his state’s leading families and appointing ministers who, he hoped, would be more obedient. Other states copied this too. In 594 Marquis Xuan of Lu found another path around his peers; by remitting the peasants’ labor dues to their local lords, he effectively gave them title to the land they worked, in return for military service and taxes paid directly to him. Other states, I hardly need add, rushed to copy this policy as well.

Modernizing rulers created bigger armies, fought harsher wars, and capitalized on economic growth like that in the West. Peasants, more willing to work to improve land when it was their own, pushed up yields by developing better crops and investing in ox-drawn plows. Iron farm tools spread, and fifth-century-BCE blacksmiths learned to use bellows to heat iron ore to 2,800°F, at which point it melted and could be cast.* Craftsmen in Wu even manipulated iron’s carbon content to produce true steel.

Cities boomed—Linzi in Lu probably had fifty thousand residents by 500 BCE—and as in the West, their demand encouraged private merchants to bring them food. In 625 BCE a minister in Lu abolished border checkpoints to make trade easier. Waterborne commerce flourished and Jin and the Zhou court at Luoyi introduced bronze coins, independent from their invention in the West. In another parallel with the West, economic growth raised living standards but also increased inequality. Tax rates drifted upward, from 10 percent in the early sixth century to 20 percent a hundred years later. Lords built icehouses in their palaces; peasants slid into debt.

When Western economic expansion took off in the sixth century BCE, kings had already reasserted their power, but in the East growth just exacerbated the rulers’ problems, since the ministers who replaced their fractious lords normally themselves came from powerful lineages. Ministers were often better placed than their masters to capture the fruits of growth, and regularly developed into rivals. In 562 BCE three ministerial lineages in Lu effectively sidelined the marquis, and in the 480s one took over the state. In Jin ministers waged a fifty-year, three-way civil war, partitioning the state in 453 BCE.

By this time, though, rulers (and those ministers who usurped power from them) had found a solution. If aristocratic ministers were as problematic as the nobles they replaced, why not go outside the state altogether, recruiting administrators from other states? These hired hands, known as shi—usually translated “gentlemen”—lacked the political connections to become rivals. Many, in fact, came from quite humble backgrounds, which was why they were looking for employment in the first place. The proliferation ofshi attests to both the centralization of power and the spread of literacy. In their thousands shi shuffled scrolls and counted beans in quiet county offices, drifting from state to state as jobs opened up.

A happy few shi caught the attention of earls or marquises and rose to high station. In an interesting contrast with Western bureaucracies it was these men, rather than the rulers who hired them, who became the main characters in the literature of the day, cast as virtuous advisers helping rulers prosper by keeping them on the straight and narrow. The Zuozhuan, a commentary on historical documents assembled around 300 BCE, is full of such characters. My favorite is Zhaodun, a high minister to Duke Ling of Jin. “Duke Ling was no true ruler,” the Zuozhuan says, with some understatement. “From his terrace he shot at people with a crossbow and watched them flee the bolts.* When his cook prepared a dish of bears’ paws that was not thoroughly done, he killed him, stuffed the body in a casket, and had his women carry it through the audience chamber.”

Zhaodun remonstrated so much with Duke Ling that the ruler finally sent an assassin to silence the tiresome adviser. But when the hit man reached Zhaodun’s house at dawn, the worthy shi was already dressed in his court robes and hard at work. Caught between horror at murdering such a good man and shame at disobeying his ruler, the killer took the only decent way out, committing suicide by smashing his head against a tree.

Further adventures followed. Duke Ling set an ambush, but Zhaodun escaped when his footman killed an attack dog with one punch and it turned out that one of the duke’s troops was a man Zhaodun had saved from starvation years before. In the end, as in allZuozhuan stories, Duke Ling gets his comeuppance, although as also often happens in this moralistic text, Zhaodun got blamed for not preventing it.

Other (presumably better-behaved) rulers prospered, though, and new styles of architecture speak of their growing power in the fifth century BCE. Whereas Zhou kings had built palaces on beaten-earth platforms just three or four feet high, the lords now went vertical, moving toward the high end in the most literal sense. One palace in Chu reportedly sat on a platform five hundred feet tall, said (implausibly) to reach the clouds. Another, in northern China, was called “The Platform Reaching Midway to Heaven.” Rulers fortified their palaces, apparently fearing their own people as much as enemy states.

By 450 BCE Eastern rulers, like Western ones, were moving toward high-end models, raising taxes and permanent armies and managing these complex transactions with bureaucracies loyal to them alone but also independent enough to survive their deaths. Their economies were booming and social development had passed twenty-four points. In the West the core had expanded and the Persian Empire had united most of it; in the East similar processes were under way. Of the 148 states that emerged from the fall of the Zhou in 771 BCE, only 14 remained standing by 450 BCE, and just 4—Jin, Qi, Chu, and Qin—dominated the scene.

In Chapter 4, I imagined von Däniken’s spacemen predicting around 1250 BCE that the cores would keep expanding and that a single empire would emerge in each. If they had come back around 450 BCEthey might have felt vindicated; their prediction had not been wrong after all. Just the timing had been off.

THE CLASSICS

The aliens might also have been interested to see that earthlings were losing their taste for pretending to have hotlines to superhumans. For thousands of years godlike kings had anchored the moral order in chains of ritual, linking the humblest villager to rulers who touched heaven by sacrificing on ziggurats or slaughtering captives in cemeteries. But now, as godlike kings reinvented themselves as chief executives, the enchantment was going out of the world. “Would that I had died before or been born later,” complained the seventh-century Greek poet Hesiod, “for now is truly an age of iron … Righteousness and Indignation, their loveliness wrapped in robes of white, depart the wide-avenued earth. They abandon mankind to join the deathless gods on Olympus; bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men; and there will be no more aid against evil.”

But that was only one way of seeing things. From the shores of the Aegean to the Yellow River basin, other thinkers began developing radical new views of how the world worked. They spoke from the margins—socially, because most stood on the lower rungs of the elite; and geographically, because most came from small states on the fringes of power.* Despair not, they said (more or less); we do not need godlike kings to transcend this sullied world. Salvation is within us, not in the hands of corrupt, violent rulers.

Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher struggling at the end of World War II to make sense of the moral crisis of his own day, called the centuries around 500 BCE the “Axial Age,” meaning they formed an axis around which history turned. In the Axial Age, Jaspers portentously declared, “Man, as we know him today, came into being.” Axial Age writings—Confucian and Daoist texts in the East, Buddhist and Jain documents in South Asia, and Greek philosophy and the Hebrew Bible (with its descendants the New Testament and the Koran) in the West—became the classics, timeless masterpieces that have defined the meaning of life for countless millions ever since.

This was quite an achievement for men like the Buddha and Socrates who wrote little or nothing down. It was their successors, sometimes distant ones, who recorded, embellished, or just plain made up their words. Often no one really knew what the founders themselves had thought, and their bitterly feuding heirs held councils, issued anathemas, and cast one another into the outer darkness over this question. The greatest triumph of modern philology has been to reveal that in between splitting, fighting, damning, and persecuting one another, the successors found time to write and rewrite their sacred books so many times that sifting the texts for their original meaning can be virtually impossible.

The Axial texts are also very varied. Some are collections of obscure aphorisms; others, witty dialogues; others still, poems, histories, or polemics. Some texts combine all these genres. And as a final challenge, the classics all agree that their ultimate subject, a transcendent realm beyond our own sordid world, is indefinable. Nirvana—literally “blowing out,” a state of mind in which the passions of this world are snuffed out like a candle—cannot be described, said the Buddha; even trying is inappropriate. For Confucius, ren—often translated “humaneness”—was similarly beyond language. “The more I look up to it, the higher it is; the more I penetrate it, the harder it becomes; I see it ahead of me and suddenly it is behind … in speaking about it can one avoid being hesitant?” Likewise, when pressed to define to kalon, “the good,” Socrates threw up his hands: “it’s beyond me, and if I try I’ll only make a fool of myself.” All he could do was tell parables: the good is like a fire that casts shadows that we mistake for reality. Jesus was equally allusive about the Kingdom of Heaven, and equally fond of parables.

Most indefinable of all was dao, the “Way” that Daoists follow:

The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way;

The name that can be named is not the true name …

Both may be called mysterious.

Mysterious and still more mysterious,

The gateway of all subtleties!

The second thing the classics agreed on was how to attain transcendence. There is more to Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on than bumper-sticker slogans, but one I saw on a car outside my favorite coffee shop while I was writing this chapter summed things up nicely: “Compassion is revolution.” Live ethically, renounce desire, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you will change the world. All the classics urge us to turn the other cheek and offer techniques to train the self in this discipline. The Buddha used meditation; Socrates favored conversation. Jewish rabbis* urged study; Confucius agreed, and added punctilious observation of ritual and music. And within each tradition, some followers leaned toward mysticism while others took a down-to-earth, folksy line.

The process was always one of self-fashioning, an internal, personal reorientation toward transcendence that did not depend on godlike kings—or even, for that matter, gods. Supernatural powers, in fact, often seem beside the point in Axial thought. Confucius and the Buddha refused to talk about divinities; Socrates, though professing piety, was condemned partly for failing to believe in Athens’s gods; and rabbis warned Jews that God was so ineffable that they should not mention his name or praise him too much.

Kings fared even worse than gods in Axial thought. Daoists and the Buddha were largely indifferent to them, but Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus openly upbraided rulers for ethical shortcomings. Axial critiques troubled the good and the great, and the new questions being raised about birth, wealth, gender, race, and caste could be positively countercultural.

In picking out these similarities between the Eastern, Western, and South Asian classics I am not trying to gloss over their equally real differences. No one would mistake the Tripitaka (the “Three Baskets” of the Buddhist canon) for Plato’s Republic or Confucius’ Analects, but neither would anyone mistake Confucius’ Analects for competing Chinese classics such as the Daoist Zhuangzi or the “Legalist” Book of Lord Shang. The years 500–300 BCE were, in Chinese tradition, “the age when a hundred schools of thought contended,” and I want to take a moment to look at the extraordinary range of ideas within this single regional tradition.

Confucius took the eleventh-century-BCE Duke of Zhou as his model of virtue and defined his goal as being to restore the moral excellence of the duke’s time by reinstating its system of ritual. “I transmit but do not create,” Confucius said. “I am an admirer of antiquity.” Archaeology, though, suggests that Confucius actually knew rather little about the duke’s distant era. It was not the duke but a broad and much later “ritual revolution” around 850 BCE that had given Zhou society restrained, carefully graded rites, assigning all members of a broad elite to places in a hierarchy. Then, around 600 BCE, rituals had changed again as a few superpowerful men began being buried with huge wealth, setting themselves above the rest of the elite.

Confucius, one of the educated but not particularly rich shi, was probably reacting against this second change, idealizing the stable ritual order that flourished between 850 and 600 BCE and projecting it back onto the Duke of Zhou. “To subdue oneself and return to ritual,” Confucius insisted, “is to practice humaneness (ren).” This meant caring more about the living family than about ancestors; valuing honest reverence over showy sanctimony; esteeming virtue, not descent; performing rituals accurately with simple equipment; and following precedent. Confucius insisted that if he could persuade just one ruler to practice ren, everyone would imitate him and the world would find peace.

The fifth-century-BCE thinker Mozi, however, disagreed completely. As he saw it, Confucius had misunderstood ren. It meant doing good, not being good, and was about everyone, not just your family. Mozi rejected rituals, music, and the Duke of Zhou. Even though people are hungry and suffering violence, he said, Confucians “act like beggars, scoff food like hamsters, ogle like he-goats, and waddle about like castrated pigs.” Dressing in coarse clothes, sleeping rough, and eating gruel, Mozi went among the poor and preached jian ai, a combination of universal sympathy and rigid egalitarianism. “Regard another’s state as you regard your own, another’s family as you regard your own, and another’s person as you regard your own,” he said. “The reason why the world’s calamities, dispossessions, resentments, and hatreds arise is lack of jian ai.” Mozi undertook diplomacy to avert wars, walking until his sandals disintegrated. He even sent his cultlike following of 180 young men to fight to the death to defend an unjustly attacked state.

The thinkers who are normally grouped under the heading of Daoists, however, were as unimpressed by Mozi as they were by Confucius. The Way of the Universe is change, they argued: night into day, joy into sorrow, life into death. Nothing is fixed, nothing definable. Humans eat beef, deer eat grass, centipedes eat snakes, owls eat rats; who can say which is the best diet? What Confucians call true, Daoists noted, followers of Mozi call false, but in reality everything is connected to everything else. No one knows where the Way leads. We must become one with the Way, but cannot do so through frantic activity.

Zhuangzi, one of the Daoist masters, told a story about another great Daoist named Liezi. After seeking the Way for years, Liezi realized he was learning nothing, and returned home.

For three years [says Zhuangzi] he did not go out. He cooked for his wife and tended the pigs as if they were humans. He showed no interest in his studies. He cast aside his desires and sought the truth. In his body he became like the ground itself. In the midst of everything he remained enclosed with the One and that is how he remained until the end.

Zhuangzi thought that Liezi made Confucius’ and Mozi’s activism look ridiculous—and dangerous. “You can’t bear the sufferings of this one generation,” Zhuangzi imagined someone saying to Confucius, “therefore you go and cause trouble for ten thousand generations to come. Do you set out to be this miserable, or don’t you realize what you are doing? … What is wrong cannot but harm and what is active cannot fail to be wrong.” Mozi, by contrast, struck Zhuangzi as “one of the good of this world,” but someone who took the fun out of life. “Mohists wear skins and coarse cloth, wooden shoes or hemp sandals, never stop night and day, and view such fervent activity as their highest achievement.” Yet this only produced “A life that is laborious and a death that is insignificant … Even if Mozi himself could stand it,” Zhuangzi asked, “how can the rest of the world be expected to live this way?”

Mozi rejected Confucius; Zhuangzi rejected Confucius and Mozi; but the so-called Legalist Tradition rejected them all. Legalism was the anti-Axial option, more Machiavellian than Machiavelli. Ren, jian ai, and dao, Legalists felt, all missed the point. Trying to transcend reality was stupid: godlike kings had yielded to managerial, efficiency-seeking ones, and the rest of us should get with the program. For Lord Shang, a fourth-century-BCE chief minister of Qin and Legalism’s guiding light, the goal was not humaneness; it was “the enrichment of the state and the strengthening of its military capacity.” Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, said Lord Shang, because “If in enterprises you undertake what the enemy would be ashamed to do, you have the advantage.” Neither be good nor do good, because “A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys order and becomes strong.” And waste no time on rituals, activism, or fatalism. Instead draw up comprehensive law codes with brutal penalties (beheading, burial alive, hard labor) and impose them rigidly on everyone. Like a carpenter’s square, Legalists liked to say, laws force messy materials to conform.

Chinese Axial thought ranged from mysticism to authoritarianism, and was constantly evolving. The third-century-BCE scholar Xunzi, for instance, combined Confucianism with Mozi’s ideas and Daoism and sought middle ground with Legalism. Plenty of Legalists welcomed Mozi’s work ethic and the Daoists’ acceptance of things. Over the centuries ideas were combined and recombined in kaleidoscopic complexity.

Much the same was true of Axial thought in South Asia and the West. I will not work through these traditions in detail, but even a quick look at the small land of Greece gives a sense of the bubbling cauldron of ideas. Godlike kingship may have been weaker in Greece before 1200 BCE than in the older states of southwest Asia, and by 700 Greeks had rejected it decisively. That, perhaps, was why they went on to confront even more starkly than others in the Axial Age the question of what a good society should look like in the absence of rulers who tapped into another world.

One Greek response was to seek the good through collective politics. If no one had access to supernatural wisdom, some Greeks asked, why not pool the limited knowledge each man does have to create a (male) democracy? This was a distinctive idea—not even Mozi had thought of it—and long-term lock-in theorists often suggest that the Greek invention of male democracy marks a decisive rupture between the West and the rest.

By this point in the book it will probably be no surprise to hear that I am not convinced. Western social development had been higher than Eastern for fourteen thousand years before Greeks started voting on things, and the West’s lead barely changed during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the golden age of Greek democracy. Only in the first century BCE, when the Roman Empire had made democracy redundant, did the West’s lead over the East rise sharply. An even greater problem with the Greek-rupture theory (as will become clear in Chapters 6 through 9) is that democracy disappeared from the West almost completely in the two thousand years separating classical Greece from the American and French revolutions. Nineteenth-century radicals certainly found ancient Athens a useful foil in their debates over how modern democracies might work, but it takes a heroically selective reading of history to see a continuous spirit of democratic freedom stretching from classical Greece to the Founding Fathers (who, incidentally, tended to use the word “democracy” as a term of abuse, just one step above mob rule).

In any case, Greece’s real contribution to Axial thought came not from democrats but from the critics of democracy, led by Socrates. Greece, he argued, did not need democracies, which merely pooled the ignorance of men who judged everything by appearances; what it needed was men like himself, who knew that when it came to the one thing that mattered—the nature of the good—they knew nothing. Only such men could hope to understand the good (if, indeed, anyone could; Socrates was not sure) through reason, honed in philosophical debate.

Plato, one of Socrates’ followers, produced two versions of the master’s model for the good society: The Republic, idealistic enough for any Confucian, and The Laws, authoritarian enough to warm Lord Shang’s heart. Aristotle (one of Plato’s pupils) covered a similar range, from the humane Ethics to the coldly analytical Politics. Some of the fifth-century-BCE thinkers known as Sophists could match Daoists for relativism, just as the visionaries Parmenides and Empedocles matched them for mysticism; and Protagoras was as much a champion of the common man as Mozi.

In the introduction to this book I talked about another long-term lock-in theory, which holds that the West rules today not because ancient Greeks invented democracy per se but because they created a uniquely rational, dynamic culture while ancient China was obscurantist and conservative.* I think this theory is wrong too. It caricatures Eastern, Western, and South Asian thought and ignores their internal variety. Eastern thought can be just as rational, liberal, realist, and cynical as Western; Western thought can be just as mystical, authoritarian, relativist, and obscure as Eastern. The real unity of Axial thought is unity in diversity. For all the differences among Eastern, Western, and South Asian thought, the range of ideas, arguments, and conflicts was remarkably similar in each region. In the Axial Age, thinkers staked out the same terrain for debate regardless of whether they lived in the Yellow River valley, the Ganges plain, or the cities of the eastern Mediterranean.

The real break with the past was the shape of this intellectual terrain as a whole, not any single feature (such as Greek philosophy) within it. No one was having Axial arguments in 1300 BCE, when the West’s social development score first approached twenty-four points. The closest candidate is Akhenaten, pharaoh of Egypt between 1364 and 1347 BCE, who swept aside traditional gods and installed a trinity of himself, his wife, Nefertiti, and the sun disk, Aten. He built a new city full of temples to Aten, composed haunting hymns, and promoted a deeply strange art style.

For a hundred years Egyptologists have argued over what Akhenaten was doing. Some think he was trying to invent monotheism; no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud argued that Moses stole this concept from Akhenaten while the Hebrews were in Egypt. There are certainly striking parallels between Akhenaten’s “Great Hymn to the Aten” and the Hebrew Bible’s Psalm 104, the “Hymn to God the Creator.” Yet Akhenaten’s religious revolution was anything but Axial. It had no room for personal transcendence; in fact, Akhenaten banned mere mortals from worshipping Aten at all, making the pharaoh even more of a bridge between this world and the divine than he had been before.

If anything, Atenism illustrates the difficulty of making major intellectual changes in societies where god-kings are firmly ensconced. His new religion won no following, and as soon as he died the old gods were brought back. Akhenaten’s temples were smashed and his revolution forgotten until archaeologists dug his city up in 1891.

So is Axial thought the secret ingredient that makes Figure 5.1 so dull? Did Confucius, Socrates, and the Buddha guide societies through some intellectual barrier when social development reached twenty-four points in the mid first millennium BCE, while the absence of such geniuses blocked social development in the second millennium?

Probably not. For one thing, chronology is against it. In the West, Assyria became a high-end state and pushed past twenty-four points in the eighth century BCE, but it is hard to see much that is strikingly Axial in Western thought before Socrates, three hundred years later. It is a closer call in the East; there Qin, Chu, Qi, and Jin reached twenty-four points around 500 BCE, just when Confucius was most active, but the main wave of Eastern Axial thought falls later, in the fourth and third centuries BCE. And if South Asianists are right in redating the Buddha to the late fifth century BCE, high-end state formation seems to precede Axial thought there, too.

Geography is also against it. The most important Axial thinkers came from small, marginal communities such as Greece, Israel, the Buddha’s home state of Sakya, or Confucius’ of Lu; it is hard to see how transcendent breakthroughs in political backwaters affected social development in the great powers.

Finally, logic is against it. Axial thought was a reaction against the high-end state, at best indifferent to great kings and their bureaucrats and often downright hostile to their power. Axial thought’s real contribution to raising social development, I suspect, came later in the first millennium BCE, when all the great states learned to tame it, making it work for them. In the East, the Han dynasty emasculated Confucianism to the point it became an official ideology, guiding a loyal class of bureaucrats. In India, the great king Ashoka, apparently genuinely horrified by his own violent conquests, converted to Buddhism around 257 BCE, yet somehow managed not to renounce war. And in the West the Romans first neutralized Greek philosophy, then turned Christianity into a prop for their empire.

The more rational strands within Axial thought encouraged law, mathematics, science, history, logic, and rhetoric, which all increased people’s intellectual mastery of their world, but the real motor behind Figure 5.1 was the same as it had been since the end of the Ice Age. Lazy, greedy, and frightened people found easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things, in the process building stronger states, trading farther afield, and settling in greater cities. In a pattern we will see repeated many times in the next five chapters, as social development rose the new age got the culture it needed. Axial thought was just one of the things that happened when people created high-end states and disenchanted the world.

EDGE EMPIRES

If further proof is needed that Axial thought was more a consequence than a cause of state restructuring, we need only look at Qin, the ferocious state at the western edge of the Eastern core (Figure 5.6). “Qin has the same customs as the [barbarians] Rong and Di,” said the anonymous author of The Stratagems of the Warring States, a kind of how-to book on diplomatic chicanery. “It has the heart of a tiger or wolf; greedy, loving profit, and untrustworthy, knowing nothing of ritual, duty, or virtuous conduct.” Yet despite being the antithesis of everything Confucian gentlemen held dear, Qin exploded from the edge of the Eastern core to conquer the whole of it in the third century BCE.

Something rather similar also happened at the other end of Eurasia, where the Romans—also regularly likened to wolves—came from the edge of the Western core to overthrow it and enslave the philosophers who called them barbarians. Polybius, a Greek gentleman taken to Rome as a hostage in 167 BCE, wrote a forty-volume Universal History to explain all this to his fellow countrymen. “Who,” he asked, “can be so narrow-minded or lazy that he does not want to know how … in less than fifty-three years [220–167 BCE] the Romans brought under their rule almost the whole inhabited world,* something without parallel in history?”

Figure 5.6. The triumph of Qin: the East in the era of Warring States, 300–221 BCE (dates in parentheses show when the main states fell to Qin)

Qin and Rome had a lot in common. Each was a spectacular example of the advantages of backwardness, combining organizational methods pioneered in an older core with military methods honed on a violent frontier; each slaughtered, enslaved, and dispossessed millions; and each drove social development up faster than ever before. Qin and Rome also exemplify what we might call the paradox of violence: when the rivers of blood dried, their imperialism left most people, in both East and West, better off.

For both Qin and Rome, the secret of success was simple—numbers. Qin and Rome got there by different paths, but each was just better at raising, arming, feeding, and replacing armies than any rival.

In the East, Qin had for centuries been the weakest of the six great warring states.* It started moving toward high-end organization late, introducing land taxes only in 408 BCE. By then relentless fighting had forced the other states to conscript their subjects, tax them, and use Legalist methods to discipline them. Rulers did everything possible to increase revenues, and the best practices spread quickly, since the alternative to copying was destruction. Around 430 BCE the state of Wei had begun rounding up laborers and digging vast irrigation channels to raise farm output; the other states, including (eventually) Qin, followed suit. Zhao and Wei built walls to protect their valuable irrigated land; so did the others.

In the fourth century BCE Qin caught up. Lord Shang made his name there in the 340s, advising Qin’s ruler on how to turn his state into a nightmare of surveillance and discipline:

[Lord Shang] commanded that the people be divided into tens and fives and that they supervise each other and be mutually liable. Anyone who failed to report criminal activity would be chopped in two at the waist, while those who reported it would receive the same reward as that for obtaining the head of an enemy …

This was no mere authoritarian fantasy; records on bamboo strips recovered from the tombs of Qin magistrates show that the laws were enforced in all their savagery.

If it is any consolation, Lord Shang was eventually hoist with his own petard, condemned to be torn apart with his ankles and wrists tied to chariots. By then, though, the high-end Legalist state had triumphed and the Eastern core had become an armed camp. Thirty thousand men had counted as a big army in 500 BCE, but by 250 BCE a hundred thousand was normal. Two hundred thousand was nothing special, and really strong armies were twice that size. Casualties were correspondingly enormous. One text says that a Qin army killed sixty thousand troops from Wei in 364 BCE. The numbers may be exaggerated, but since Qin soldiers were paid by the head (literally; they turned in severed ears to claim bonuses), they cannot be too far from the truth.

So alarming were the forces being unleashed that in 361 BCE the great powers set up regular conferences to negotiate their differences, and diplomats-for-hire, known as “persuaders,” appeared in the 350s. A single man might shuttle among several great kingdoms, serving as chief minister for all of them at once, weaving webs of intrigue worthy of Henry Kissinger.

“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” said Winston Churchill, but brute force still beat out bargaining in the fourth century BCE. The problem was Qin. Secure behind mountainous borders that made it hard to attack, and free to use its position at the edge of the core to bolster its manpower by drawing in people from the stateless societies even farther west, its armies constantly pressed into the core. “Qin is the mortal enemy of ‘All Under Heaven,’” said The Stratagems of the Warring States; it wants “to swallow the whole world.”

The other states recognized that they needed to combine against Qin, but four centuries of war had created such mistrust that they could not resist stabbing one another in the back. Between 353 and 322 BCE Wei led a series of coalitions, but as soon as the allies won a few victories they turned on Wei, terrified that it might do better than the rest of them. Wei responded like many a spurned lover or leader, switching its affections to the old enemy, Qin. Between 310 and 284 BCE Qi led a new set of alliances, only to be brought down as Wei had been; then Zhao took the mantle. In 269 BCE Zhao won two great victories over Qin and hope flared in every heart, but it was too little, too late. Qin’s King Zheng discovered a terrible new strategy: simply kill so many people that other states could not rebuild their armies. Qin had invented the body count.

Qin generals killed about a million enemy soldiers over the next thirty years. A dismal record of massacres fills the annals, then ends suddenly in 234 BCE, when, we are told, Qin beheaded a hundred thousand men of Zhao. After that no credible enemies remained and the surrender of states replaced slaughters in the annals.

With neither jaw-jaw nor war-war working, Qin’s remaining enemies pinned their hopes on murder. In 227 BCE a hit man talked his way past the Qin king Zheng’s minders, grabbed Zheng’s arm, and lunged at him with a poisoned dagger—only for Zheng’s sleeve to tear off in his hand. Zheng ducked behind a pillar, thrashed around to get his ridiculously long ceremonial sword out of its scabbard, then hacked the assassin to bits.

There were no more chances, and Qi, the last independent state, fell in 221 BCE. King Zheng now took the name Shihuangdi, or August First Emperor. “We are the First Emperor,” he thundered, “and our successors shall be known as Second Emperor, Third Emperor, and so on, for endless generations.” No one argued.

Rome’s path to empire was different (Figure 5.7). Persia had already united most of what was then the Western core by the time Darius won the throne in 521 BCE, but his desire to tap the wealth of the Mediterranean frontier set off waves of defensive state formation and created forces that would eventually destroy the Persian Empire. Greek and Italian cities were already very developed, scoring high on energy capture and information technology but less so on organization and military power. So long as Darius tackled them one by one he could bully them into submission, but the bullying itself drove the cities to combine, ratcheting up their organizational and military powers.

Figure 5.7. Ancient empires in the West: from Persia to Rome, 500–1 BCE. The broken line shows the maximum extent of the western end of the Persian Empire, around 490 BCE, and the solid line shows the extent of the Roman Empire in 1 BCE.

Thus, when Darius’ son Xerxes led a huge force into Greece in 480 BCE, Athens and Sparta set aside their differences to resist him. The historian Herodotus (and, rather differently, the film 300) immortalized their extraordinary victory, which left Athens a great power at the head of a league of cities. Rather like what happened when Eastern states tried to ally against Qin, Athenian power scared Sparta even more than the Persians did, and in 431 BCE the terrible Athenian-Spartan conflict known as the Peloponnesian War broke out (immortalized by Thucydides, but so far no movie). By the time the defeated and starving Athenians surrendered their fleet and pulled down their walls in 404 BCE the war had drawn in Sicily and Carthage, and its tentacles had turned parts of the Mediterranean, notably Macedon, into Greek economic dependencies.

Macedon was a sort of ancient banana republic, rich in resources (especially timber and silver) but chaotic. For fifty years Greek cities pushed it around, backing rival claimants to its throne and turning its politics into a soap opera of adultery, incest, and murder, but in 359 BCE Philip II, a Macedonian version of Tiglath-Pileser, seized the kingdom’s throne. Philip did not need social scientists to explain the advantages of backwardness to him: instinctively understanding, he adapted Greek institutions to his large, rich, but anarchic kingdom. He dug up silver, hired mercenaries, and got the riotous aristocracy to work with him, then brushed the Greek cities aside. He would surely have done the same to Persia had not a mysterious assassin—driven to the act, rumors said, by Philip’s drunken rages and/or a love feud ending in a homosexual gang rape—struck him down in 336 BCE. Not missing a beat, Philip’s son Alexander fulfilled Philip’s plans in just four years (334–330 BCE), hounding Persia’s king to his death, burning his sacred city, and marching as far as the borders of India. Only his troops’ refusal to march any farther could stop his conquests.

Alexander was a child of the new, disenchanted world (Aristotle had been one of his tutors) and probably did not realize how difficult it was to fill a godlike king’s shoes.* Devout Persians held that their kings were Ahuramazda’s earthly representatives in his eternal struggle with darkness; Alexander, therefore, must be an agent of evil. This image problem doubtless lay behind Alexander’s tortured efforts (mentioned in Chapter 4) to convince Persians he was godlike. Maybe, given time, he would have succeeded, although the more he tried to impress Persians with his divinity, the more insane he looked to Greeks and Macedonians. And time was short: Alexander dropped dead, perhaps poisoned, in 323 BCE, and his generals fought civil wars, broke up the empire, and gradually became kings (edging toward divinity) in their own right.

Eventually one of their kingdoms might have conquered the others, following Qin’s route, but Alexander’s successors were as short of time as the great king had been. In the fourth century BCE Macedon had been drawn into Greek conflicts, adapted Greek institutions to its own needs, defeated the Greeks, and then destroyed the great empire of the day; in the second century Rome virtually reran the script.

Rome is a perfect example of how colonization and developments on the periphery combine to expand cores. The city had been heavily influenced by Greece since the eighth century BCE, but grew strong in local struggles with its neighbors and created an odd mix of high- and low-end organization. An aristocratic senate made most big decisions, while assemblies dominated by middling farmers voted on matters of peace and war. Like Qin, Rome was late in moving toward the high end; it began paying its soldiers only in 406 BCE, and probably instituted its first taxes at the same time. For centuries Rome’s budget relied mostly on plunder, and instead of taxing defeated enemies it made deals with them, extracting troops to fight more wars.

Romans were as averse to godlike kings as Greeks, but understood all too well the link between conquest and divinity. Really successful generals were awarded triumphs, ticker-tape parades through Rome in chariots pulled by white horses, festooned with images of sanctity, but accompanied by slaves whispering in their ears, “Remember, you are a mortal.” The triumph effectively put divine kingship in a box, making the mighty conqueror god for a day—but no more than that.

Old-fashioned as this system looked to Greeks in the third century BCE, its combination of high- and low-end practices generated manpower on a scale to match even Qin. Persia had raised perhaps 200,000 troops to invade Greece in 480 BCE, but after losing them needed decades to refill its treasuries. Rome faced no such constraints. A century of war gave it all the manpower of Italy, and in 264 BCE the senate began a titanic struggle with Carthage to control the western Mediterranean.

The Carthaginians lured Rome’s first fleet into a storm, sending it—and a hundred thousand sailors—to the bottom. Rome simply built a bigger fleet. This went down in another storm two years later, so Rome sent out a third armada, only to lose that as well. A fourth fleet finally won the war in 241 BCE because Carthage could not replace its own huge losses. Carthage needed twenty-three years to recuperate, whereupon its general Hannibal marched his elephants over the Alps to attack Italy from the rear. Between 218 and 216 BCE he killed or captured a hundred thousand Romans, but Rome just raised more men and ground him down in a war of attrition. And like Qin, Rome redefined brutality. “The Roman custom,” said Polybius, was “to exterminate every form of life they encountered, sparing none … so when cities are taken by the Romans you may often see not only the corpses of human beings but also dogs cut in half, and the dismembered limbs of other animals.” Carthage finally gave up in 201 BCE.

War-war struck the senate as much better than jaw-jaw. After just one summer’s rest, Rome turned on the kingdoms of Alexander’s successors in the eastern Mediterranean and by 167 BCE had smashed them. Another generation of grueling wars against guerrillas took its armies deep into Spain, North Africa, and northern Italy. Rome had become the West’s sole superpower.

FIRST CONTACT

By 200 BCE the East and West had more in common than at any time since the Ice Age. Each was dominated by a single great empire with tens of millions of subjects. Each had a literate, sophisticated elite schooled in Axial thought, living in great cities fed by highly productive farmers and supplied by elaborate trade networks. And in each core social development was 50 percent higher than it had been in 1000 BCE.

This chapter has illustrated nicely the principle that people (in large groups) are all much the same. Divided by the vast expanses of central Asia and the Indian Ocean, East and West had followed separate but similar histories in virtual isolation from each other, differing chiefly in the fact that the West still narrowly kept the lead in social development that the geography of domesticable plants and animals had given it at the end of the Ice Age.

This chapter also illustrates a second major principle, though—that while geography determines the course of social development, social development also changes the meanings of geography. The expansion of the cores was eating away at the distance between them, folding East and West into a single Eurasian story. This was to have dramatic consequences.

As late as 326 BCE, when Alexander of Macedon led his troops into the Punjab (Figure 5.8), even the best-educated Easterners and Westerners knew almost nothing of each other’s existence. Alexander assured his men that they would soon bathe in the waters of Ocean, the great river that encircled the world (when instead of Ocean the Ganges plain unfolded before them, bristling with fortified cities, they mutinied).

Alexander did a U-turn and headed home, but left various malcontents behind as settlers. In what is now Afghanistan one group set up a kingdom called Bactria, which by 150 BCE had conquered parts of the Ganges plain and begun a remarkable fusion of Greek and Indian culture. One Indian text claims to record a Greek-speaking Bactrian king’s conversations with a Buddhist monk, after which the king, along with plenty of his subjects, converted.

Bactria has a remarkable claim to fame: its disintegration around 130 BCE is the earliest historical event to be mentioned in both Eastern and Western documents. An ambassador from the Chinese court who wandered into the kingdom’s wreckage just a couple of years later took wonderful stories back to his emperor, particularly about central Asia’s horses, and in 101 BCE a Chinese expedition battled its way into the region. Some historians think that the local troops that resisted it may have included Romans, prisoners of war taken in far-off Mesopotamia and traded through countless hands until they found themselves fighting China in the mountains of central Asia.

Figure 5.8. Between East and West: the late-first-millennium-BCE tissue of trade linking East and West across the Indian Ocean, Silk Roads, and steppe highway

Less-romantic historians think another two centuries passed before Chinese and Romans actually met. According to an official Chinese history, in 97 CE a Chinese general “dispatched his adjutant Gan Ying all the way to the coast of the Western Sea and back.” On this distant shore, wherever exactly it was, Gan visited the kingdom of Da Qin—literally, “Great Qin,” so-called because it struck the Chinese as being a grand, distant reflection of their own empire. Whether the Western Sea was the Mediterranean and Da Qin was Rome remain open questions. The least-romantic historians of all think that it was only in 166 CE, when ambassadors from Da Qin’s King Andun (surely the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) reached the Chinese capital at Luoyang, that Chinese and Romans finally stood in the same room.

There may, though, have been more productive meetings, involving kinds of people who struck the educated gentlemen who wrote most of the surviving texts as too despicable to notice—slaves, for instance. In 2010, geneticists announced that mitochondrial DNA from the bones of a man buried at Vagnari in southern Italy in the second century CE suggested that his maternal ancestors had come from East Asia; and archaeologists added that the circumstances of his burial implied that he was an agricultural slave. What miseries carried him or his ancestors so far from home are anyone’s guess.

A second such group of despised wanderers consisted of traders—for all we know, the very traders who brought an East Asian slave to Italy. Pliny the Elder, a Roman aristocrat who wrote an immense description of the world and its peculiarities (he was killed in 79 CE, too fascinated by the eruption of Vesuvius to run away from the lava), did bring himself to mention the annual departure of a merchant fleet from Egypt’s Red Sea coast for Sri Lanka, and one actual merchant document survives, a roughly contemporary Greek text called The Voyage on the Red Sea. This was a kind of traders’ handbook, describing the Indian Ocean’s ports and winds.

Roman merchants certainly left their mark on India. Almost as soon as British and French colonists settled there in the eighteenth century, in fact, people started bringing them ancient Roman coins, but not until 1943 did the scale of contact become clear. That summer, after decades of neglecting India’s cultural heritage—at the height of World War II and with the end of the Raj in sight—the British Colonial Office decided that it was time to overhaul Indian archaeology. It promptly plucked Brigadier Mortimer Wheeler off the beach at Salerno, where an Anglo-American force had just invaded Italy, and dropped him into New Delhi to administer a million and a half square miles of territory that was almost as archaeologically rich as Egypt.

Wheeler was a larger-than-life character. He fought in both world wars, left a trail of broken hearts across three continents, and revolutionized British archaeology with his meticulous excavations of Roman sites. All the same, eyebrows were raised at this appointment. The British Empire was clearly on its last legs, so why, Indian nationalists asked, inflict on us some pensioned-off Colonel Blimp, more at home on muddy Roman sites in Britain than in the land of the Buddha?

Wheeler had a lot to prove, and as soon as he landed in Mumbai (known to the British as Bombay) he set off on a whirlwind archaeological tour. Arriving at Chennai (colonial Madras) as it sweltered in the heat of the impending monsoon, Wheeler found the government offices closed and decided to kill time at the local museum. “In a workshop cupboard,” he wrote in his memoirs,

my hand closed upon the neck and long handle of a pottery vessel strangely alien to that tropical environment. As I looked upon it I remember recalling that provocative question in the Legislative Assembly at New Delhi: “What has Roman Britain got to do with India?” Here was the complete answer.

Wheeler was holding a fragment of a Roman wine jar dug up at Arikamedu (Pondicherry), eighty miles down the coast. He took the overnight train and after a long, alcoholic breakfast at the town’s French legation, went looking for Romans.

An inner room of the public library contained three or four museum cases. I strode hopefully forward, and, removing the dust with an excessively sweaty arm, peered into them. For the second time within the month, my eyes started in their sockets. Crowded together were fragments of a dozen more Roman amphorae [wine jars], part of a Roman lamp, a Roman intaglio [cameo brooch], a mass of Indian material—potsherds, beads, terracottas—and several fragments of a red-glazed ware no one trained in the school of classical archaeology could mistake.

As a little bonus, when Wheeler got back to New Delhi with one of the red potsherds in his pocket he ran into two more giants of British archaeology doing war work on aerial photographs. “I casually produced an Arretine sherd,” he says, referring to the red-glazed ware from the Arikamedu museum, “and the effect was gratifying—how childishly rewarding is a comprehending audience!”

Excavations soon showed that Mediterranean goods were reaching Arikamedu (and several other ports) by 200 BCE. They increased in quantity for the next three centuries, and recent digs on Egypt’s Red Sea coast have also found dried-out coconuts, rice, and black pepper that can only have come from India. By the first century CE goods were also moving between China and India, and from both places to Southeast Asia.

It would be an exaggeration to say that East and West had joined hands across the oceans. This was less a web of connections than a few gossamer-thin threads strung end to end. One trader might ship wine from Italy to Egypt; another might take it overland to the Red Sea; a third might move it on to Arabia; and a fourth might cross the Indian Ocean to Arikamedu. There he might sit down with a local merchant selling silks that had passed through even more hands in their journey from the Yellow River valley.

It was a beginning, though. The Voyage on the Red Sea mentions a place called “Thin,” probably a corruption of Qin (pronounced Chin), from which the Western name China comes; and a generation later a Greek named Alexander claimed to have visited Sinae, again probably China. By about 100 BCE, thanks partly to China’s military advance to Bactria, silks and spices were moving westward and gold and silver eastward along the famous Silk Roads. Only lightweight, expensive goods—such as silk, of course—could remain profitable after being carried for six months across five thousand miles, but within a century or two no self-respecting Roman noblewoman would be caught dead without her silk shawl, and central Asian merchants had set up branch offices in all China’s major cities.

There was much for the wealthy aristocrats who ran the Eastern and Western cores to celebrate in these first contacts, but there was much to worry about too, for some of the people on the move struck them as being even nastier than merchants. “They have squat bodies, strong limbs, and thick necks, and are so hideous and deformed that they might be two-legged beasts,” the Roman historian Ammianus wrote about these people around 390 CE. He continued:

Their shape, while horrible, is still human, but their lives are so rough that they do not use fire or cooked food, but live on the wild roots and any kind of half-raw flesh, which they warm slightly by sticking it between their thighs and the backs of their horses.

These people were nomads, utterly alien to landowners such as Ammianus. We have already met their ancestors, the herders of central Asia who domesticated horses around 3500 BCE and hitched them to carts around 2000 BCE, giving birth to the horse-drawn chariots that threw the Western core into chaos after 1750 BCE and reached the East five hundred years later. Climbing onto horses’ backs and riding them around sounds easier than attaching them to vehicles, but it was not until about 1000 BCE that the breeding of bigger horses, improvements in horse harnesses, and the invention of small, powerful bows that could be fired from the saddle combined to create a whole new way of life: mounted pastoral nomadism. Taking to horseback transformed geography once again, gradually turning the unbroken band of arid plains stretching from Mongolia to Hungary (both named after nomad peoples) into a “steppe highway” linking East and West.

In some ways these steppe nomads were no different from any other relatively mobile, relatively underdeveloped peoples living along the edges of great empires, going all the way back to Jacob and his sons in the Hebrew Bible. They traded animals and skins for the products of settled society. There could be profits all around: Chinese silks and a Persian carpet adorn the lavish fifth-century-BCE tombs at Pazyryk in Siberia, while in the ninth century BCE the Assyrians imported horses and bows from the steppes and replaced their chariots with cavalry.

But there could also be problems all around. As well as silks and carpets, the Pazyryk tombs contain piles of iron weapons and cups made from the gold-plated skulls of scalped enemies, hinting that the line between trading and fighting was fine. Particularly after 800 BCE, when colder, drier weather reduced pastureland on the steppes, herders who could move their flocks quickly across long distances and fight when they arrived had huge advantages. Entire tribes took to horseback, riding hundreds of miles between winter and summer pastures.

Their migrations created a domino effect. In the eighth century BCE a group called the Massagetae migrated west across what is now Kazakhstan, confronting the Scythian people in their path with the same choice that prehistoric hunter-gatherers had had to make when farmers moved into their foraging lands or Sicilian villagers had had to make when Greek colonists landed on their coasts: they could stand their ground, organizing themselves to fight back and even electing kings, or they could run away. Those who yielded fled across the Volga River, presenting the Cimmerians who already lived there with the same fight-or-flight choice.

In the 710s BCE bands of Cimmerian refugees started moving into the Western core. There were not many of them, but they could do a lot of damage. In agrarian states, many peasants have to toil in the fields to support a few soldiers. At the height of their wars, Rome and Qin had mobilized maybe one man in six, but in peacetime they mustered barely one in twenty. Among nomads, by contrast, every man (and many a woman, too) could be a warrior, born and raised with a horse and bow. This was the original example of asymmetric warfare. The great empires had money, quartermasters, and siege weapons, but the nomads had speed, terror, and the fact that their sedentary victims were often busy fighting one another.

In these years climate change and rising social development once again combined to disrupt the Western core’s frontiers, and violence and upheaval were once more the results. The Assyrian Empire, which was still the greatest power in the West around 700 BCE, invited the Cimmerians into the core to help it fight its rivals. At first that worked well, and in 695 BCE King Midas of Phrygia in central Turkey, so rich that Greek legends said he could turn objects to gold just by touching them, committed suicide as the Cimmerians closed in on his capital.

By eliminating buffer states such as Phrygia, though, the Assyrians exposed their heartland to nomad raids, and by 650 BCE Scythians virtually controlled northern Mesopotamia. Their “violence and neglect of law led to total chaos,” the Greek historian Herodotus wrote. “They acted like mere robbers, riding up and down the land, stealing everyone’s property.” The nomads destabilized the Assyrian Empire and helped the Medes and Babylonians sack Nineveh in 612 BCE, then immediately turned on the Medes, too. Not until about 590 BCE did the Medes figure out how to fight such wily, fast-moving foes—according to Herodotus, by getting their leaders drunk at a banquet and murdering them.

The kings of Media, Babylon, and Persia experimented with how to handle nomads. One option was to do nothing, but then nomad raids ruined frontier provinces, cutting the tax take. Buying the nomads off was another possibility, but paying protection could get as pricey as being raided. Preemptive war was a third response, striking into the steppes and occupying the pastures nomads needed to survive, but that was even costlier and riskier. With little to defend, nomads could retreat into the treeless, waterless waste, luring the invaders to destruction when their supplies ran out.

Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, tried preemptive war against the Massagetae in 530 BCE. Like the Medes before him, he fought with the grape: he let the Massagetan vanguard loot his camp, and when they were drunk, slaughtered them and captured their queen’s son. “Glutton as you are for blood,” Queen Tomyris wrote to Cyrus, “give me back my son and get out of my country with your forces intact … If you refuse, I swear by the sun our master to give you more blood than you can drink.” True to her word, Tomyris defeated the Persians, cut off Cyrus’ head, and stuffed it in a bag of gore.

It was a bad start for preemptive strikes, but in 519 BCE Darius of Persia showed that they could work, defeating a confederation that Persians called the “Pointy-Hatted Scythians” and imposing tribute and a puppet king on them. Five years later he tried it again, crossing the Danube and pursuing other Scythians deep into Ukraine. But like so many asymmetric wars in our own day, it is hard to say who won. Herodotus thought it was a disaster, from which Darius was lucky to escape alive, but the Scythians never again threatened Persia, so clearly something went right.

It took longer for cavalry from the steppes to become a fact of life in the East, just as it had taken chariots longer to reach China than the West, but when the nomadic domino effect did arrive it worked just as viciously. The eastward spread of nomadism had probably been behind the Rong people’s attacks on the Zhou in the eighth century BCE, and the northern people absorbed by the states of Qin and Jin in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE must often have been choosing assimilation over fighting incoming nomads. When they did so, the combined pressure of nomad incursions and Chinese states’ expansion eliminated buffer societies, just as had happened in the West.

The state of Zhao now became the frontier. Like the Assyrians when they faced the Scythians, Zhao immediately recruited nomadic horsemen to fight its neighbors and trained its own subjects as cavalry. Zhao also developed an antinomad strategy little used in the West, the war of attrition, building walls to keep nomads out (or at least to channel where they traded and raided). This seemed to work less badly than fighting or paying protection, and in the third century BCE walls proliferated. The Qin First Emperor’s wall stretched for two thousand miles, costing (according to legend, anyway) one laborer’s life for every yard built.*

Being the kind of man he was, the First Emperor lost no sleep over this. In fact, he so appreciated wall-building that he turned this defensive strategy into a weapon, extending his Great Wall to enclose a vast sweep of pasture where nomads had traditionally grazed. Then, in 215 BCE, he followed up with a preemptive war.

The Great Wall sent a clear signal: geography was changing meaning again. The forces that drove the dull upward march of social development in Figure 5.1—rising energy capture, more effective organization, widespread literacy, ever-deadlier armies—were transforming the world. By 200 BCE a single great empire dominated each core, its warriors and traders reaching even into the spaces between the cores. The steppes had gone from being a vast barrier between East and West to a highway linking them, and instead of separate but similar histories, the Eastern and Western cores were beginning to be intertwined. Very few goods, people, or ideas were as yet traveling the whole way from one end of Eurasia to the other, but new geographical realities were taking shape. Over the next few centuries, these would sweep away the great empires that dominated the cores in 200 BCE, throw the upward trends of social development into reverse, and end the West’s lead. The paradox of development was entering a whole new phase.