Cradles of Civilisation

The **Cradles of Civilisation** is the first major chronological division of world history, and lasted from about 3360 BC until 539 BC. It began with the end of prehistory, when a particular mix of human potential and natural factors came together to make possible a new order of life; the earliest civilization known to us, that of Sumer. It then ended with the appearance of the classical world, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Classical Persia and the Greco-Roman world. Although "classical antiquity" is a wholly Eurocentric concept, India and China also crossed an important boundary somewhere in the middle of the first millennia BC; empires of unprecedented size and complexity - such as Han China, Maurya and Gupta India - that set standards for later times.

Civilization has been one of the great accelerators of mankind’s unique power to produce change. It began, according to most historians, at least seven times; meaning that they can identified seven ancient civilizations which emerged independently, or with a minimum of outside stimulus. It will be helpful to set out a rough chronology. We begin with the first recognizable civilization, Sumer in Mesopotamia (now part of modern-day Iraq), where civilized life is observable sometime around 3360 BC. It is credited with a great many "firsts", including the first true cities, the first writing system and literature, the first wheeled vehicles, and even the first recipe for beer. The next example is Ancient Egypt about 3100 BC, whose rich physical remains have fascinated men’s minds and stirred their imaginations ever since. Then, further east and perhaps in 2600 BC, another civilization has appeared along the length of the Indus River (straddling the present India–Pakistan border), which was to some degree literate. Another marker in the Near East is Minoan Crete from 1900 BC, after which, this part of the world was already a coherent system of complex cultures in interplay with one another. China’s first civilization may have started later, perhaps around 1600 BC, but it left a startling legacy; from tiny beginnings to the subcontinent of today, an uninterrupted thread runs through its entire history, making for arguably the longest-lasting complex civilisation on earth. Once we are past that date, only the examples in the Americas - Mesoamerica around 1200 BC and Peru in 900 BC - are sufficiently isolated for stimulus or inheritance not to be a big part of explaining the appearance of new civilizations. We should note, for clarity's sake, that assigning dates to anything that happened before, say, Hammurabi of Babylon (d. 1750 BC), has an error factor of at very least fifty years.

About civilizations it is very difficult to generalize. Clearly, a favourable geographical setting was essential, after-all, everything in antiquity rested on an agricultural surplus. Many appeared on great river valleys, which provided fertile soil, and easy irrigation. This was the case with Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. But civilizations have also arisen away from river valleys; on the island of Crete, on the tropical coast of Mexico, in the highlands of Peru, the rugged terrain of Hittite Anatolia (the major part of modern Turkey), and, later, on mainland Greece. Other factors were just as important: the capacity of the peoples to work together to master their environment, to rise to a challenge, or to exploit an advantage. In the Aegean, for example, the multitude of islands, which made for short sea-crossings and easy trade, seems to have been crucial. It is easier to say something about common characteristics of early civilization than about the way it happened. One historian had listed eleven: an urban way of life; the concentration of surplus; full-time specialists not engaged in agriculture; formalized social hierarchies; state-level organization; extensive trading networks, monumental architecture; a distinct art style; writing and recording information; developments in technology; and organised religion (some still very important today such as Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Daoism), Again, no absolute and universal statements are possible; civilisations have existed without writing and without the wheel. All of these early civilizations turned out very differently. Some of them raced ahead to lasting achievement, while others others declined and disappeared, even if after spectacular flowerings. Nonetheless, together they determined much of the cultural ground-plan of the world we still inhabit.

## History

### The Potential for Civilisation

When does **history** begin? Like many seemingly simple and obvious questions, the answer soon turns out to be difficult. History is one subject where you cannot simply begin at the beginning; there are no neat dividing lines. We could try to reconstruct the lost world of nomadic hunter-gatherers, following the bison and now-extinct mammoth herds across the plains. We could go back further still, to trace the chain of human descent back to the appearance of *Homo sapiens* as a distinct species of the primate family. or even to the origins of photosynthetic cells which lie at the start of life itself. Yet this is not "history". Common sense helps here: history is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed. The historian hopes not just to explain what people did, but in some measure why and how they did it. This suggests that prehistory - the time before people began to write and tell stories about themselves - is the wrong starting place. Whatever archaeologists conclude about Neolithic tools, pottery, or paintings on cave walls, no story emerges. There are no kings and no wives in prehistory. Stripped of personality, the historian is forced to resort to hugely general statements about “human behaviour”. Archaeologists and anthropologists are better equipped to dig into the murk of the very distant past. The historian’s task is different: to give flesh and spirit to abstract assertions about human behaviour.

The waning of the last *Ice Age*, about 11,700 years ago, allowed the long march to civilization to be completed, and is the immediate prelude to history. Within the next seven thousand years or so a succession of momentous changes took place, of which, unquestionably, the most important was the introduction of **agriculture**. The importance of this was so great that it has been aptly called the "Neolithic Revolution". Agriculture - the growing of crops and the practice of animal husbandry - is the pre-condition of civilization. In terms of population growth alone, a huge acceleration became possible. An assured, or virtually assured, food supply meant humans were liberated from the need to follow herds about, and could live more settled lives. It also eased the way to specialization of function, as people not engaged in food production could be tolerated; weavers, leatherworkers, carpenters, masons, potters, and priests. How it came into being is a matter of speculation. It has been suggested that hunter-gatherers sometimes developed increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and agriculture arose as a response to population pressure; rather than coming into being "naturally", and then serving as a stimulus to more permanent settlement. Whatever may have happened, it is apparent that agriculture began in more than one place and in different forms. It has been claimed that the earliest instance, based on the cultivation of primitive forms of rise and millet, occurred in South-East Asia and China, somewhere about 10,000 BC. Yet the accident of surviving evidence and the direction of scholarly effort have meant that much more is known about early agriculture in the region later called the "*Fertile Crescent*"; this is the arc of territory running northwards from Egypt through the Levant (modern Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon), up to Anatolia (the major part of modern Turkey), and then south to enclose the two river valleys of Mesopotamia (Iraq, Kuwait, and western portions of Iran). Much of it now looks very different from the same area’s lush vegetation when the climate was at its best, six thousand o so years ago. A wild barley-like cereal then grew in southern Turkey, and emmer, a wild wheat, in the Jordan valley. Egypt enjoyed enough rainfall for the hunting of big game well into historical times, and elephants were still to be found in Syrian forests in 1000 BC. There is evidence of agricultural methods, though only slowly discovered, and in rudimentary form, in the Near East in about 9500 BC. New land was broken-in for crops, elementary observation and selection began the conscious modification of plants, species were transferred to new locations, and labour was applied to cultivation through digging, draining and irrigating. From the Near East, the new foods and techniques seem to have spread into Europe in about 7000 BC. But diffusion need not have been the only process at work; agriculture later appeared in the Americas without any import of techniques from outside. The jump from hunting game to animal husbandry was almost as momentous. The first traces of the domestication of animals comes from northern Iraq, in about 9000 BC. Over such hilly, grassy country the wild forebears of the cow, goat, and pig roamed untroubled for thousands of years, except for the occasional contact with hunters. From their systematic exploitation would follow the control of their breeding, and the use of their hides, wool, and milk. Riding and the use of animals for traction would come later. So would domesticated poultry.

Suddenly, with the coming of agriculture, the whole material basis of human history was transformed. An assured, or virtually assured, food surplus meant settlements of a new solidity, and true **towns** could appear. Sites such as Çatal Hüyük in southern Anatolia and Jericho, farther south and close to the Dead Sea, usually claim the honour of being the oldest towns in the world. Jericho stands out; before 6800 BC, its inhabitants had built themselves a startlingly stone tower, thirty-five feet high, as part of elaborate defences. Clearly, the people of Jericho thought they had something worth defending. It is a long time before we can discern much of the social organization of early settled communities. It seems likely that, within them, distinctions of role multiplied, and new collective disciplines had to be accepted. We may even speculate that settled communities encouraged mankind’s oldest sport (after hunting); warfare. The vulnerability of the farmers, tied to their areas of cultivation, must have made raids and conquest tempting. Political power may have an origin in the need to organize protection for crops and stock. It certainly seems likely that.social distinctions became more marked. In the long run, metallurgy changed things as much as did agriculture, though it was in the very long run. Copper was the first widely-used metal. At some time after 7000 BC, it was being hammered into shape without heating at Çatal Hüyük. Once the technique of blending copper with tin to produce bronze was discovered, about 3,500 BC, a metal was available which was both relatively easy to cast and retained a much better cutting-edge. On bronze much was to be built. Its obvious military value springs to the eye, but it had just as much importance when turned into agricultural tools. It made possible a huge extension of food-production, especially when the invention of ploughing, in about 3000 BC, brought animal muscle-power to the assistance of humans; though the digging of heavy soil began to be possible only when iron tools became common, in about 1000 BC. Metallurgy was also to give a new twist to trade, to markets, and to trade-routes.

It is already clear that, by about 5000 BC, at least in a few areas of the world, there existed all the essential constituents of civilization, Ahead lay faster development in every field, in the technical control of environment, in the elaboration of mental patterns, in the changing of social organization, in the accumulation of wealth, in the growth of population.

### Civilization in Mesopotamia

The best case for the first appearance of something which is recognisably civilisation has been made by Sumer, an ancient name for the southern part of **Mesopotamia**; the seven-hundred mile long land formed by the two river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. This end of the *Fertile Crescent* was thickly studded with agricultural villages in Neolithic times, where centuries of drainage from up-country and annual flooding had built-up a soil of wonderful richness. It must always have been much easier to grow crops here than elsewhere. Such a setting was a challenge, as well as an opportunity. The Tigris and (less so) the Euphrates were prone to sudden and violent flooding. The marshy, low-lying land of the delta had to be raised above flood level by banking and ditching, and canals had to be built to carry water away. Once the floods subsided, Sumer received almost no rainfall, and agriculture required large scale irrigation works. The drainage and irrigation system could be managed properly only if managed collectively. This suggests a new complexity in the way men lived together. As the population rose, more land was taken to grow food. Sooner or later, men of different villages would have come face to face with each other, intent on reclaiming the same marsh. There was a choice: to fight or to cooperate. Each meant further collective organization; to band together in bigger units for self-protection or management of the environment. One physical result was the town, mud-walled at first to keep out floods and enemies. It was logical for the local deity’s cult centre to be the place chosen; and its chief priest became the ruler of a little theocracy competing with others. Something like this – we cannot know what – explains the difference between Lower Mesopotamia. and the other Neolithic cultures of the *Fertile Crescent* in the fourth millennia BC. They all had much in common; village life, shrines, characteristic pottery. But only one relatively small area began to grow faster and harden into something new. From this background emerged the first true urbanism, and the first observable civilization. The Near East of early civilized times was a great confusion of peoples, moving about for reasons we often do not understand. By about 4000 BC, "Semitic" language speakers had already begun wandering up from the Arabian peninsula to finish in Mesopotamia; their pressure grew until, by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, they were well-established in central Mesopotamia, as well as further west in the Levant. Probably "Caucasian" peoples (a confusing term which here refers to people originally from the Caucasus Mountains) had also entered on the scene, pushing into the higher lands which enclosed Mesopotamia from the north-east. No doubt the stimulating effect of different cultures upon one another is much of the story of the appearance of the earliest civilization.

**Sumerian Civilisation** (3300-2000 BC) had deep roots. One of its cult centre, at a place called Eridu, probably originated around 5400 BC. A temple there grew steadily into historic times, and may have provided the original model for Sumerian monumental architecture. By about 3300 BC, the first true cities had arisen across Sumer. A dozen or so separate city-states, each comprising of a walled city and its surrounding villages and land, each worshipping its own deity whose temple was the central structure, jostled each other for power: Eridu, Ur, Uruk (called Erech in the Bible), Nippur, Adab, Lagash, Kish, and more. One city alone is said to have had thirty-six thousand males. Pottery provides one of the first clues that something culturally important was going on. The so-called *Uruk pots* are often duller, less decorative than earlier examples. They were, in fact, mass-produced, made by specialized craftsmen on a potters-wheel. It is with this change that the story of Sumerian civilization can conveniently be begun. Virtually at the beginning, in about 3200 BC, came the invention of writing, perhaps the most useful tool comparable to agriculture in human history. The earliest writings followed the form of pictographs, or simplified pictures, inscribed on clay tablets with a reed stalk and then hardened in the sun. The oldest examples can be seen to be economic transactions; list of trade goods, or offerings to the temple in return for divine favour. Trade was very important in Sumerian society. Southern Mesopotamia had few natural resources to speak of; no stone, no metals, and no wood (except for palm trees, which makes for a third-rate building material). Even in Neolithic times, the region must have obtained from elsewhere the flint and obsidian it needed for the first agricultural implements. Clearly a remarkably wide-ranging network of trade was in the background; copper from Anatolia; gold from Iran; incense and resins from Yemen; the most prized wood, cedar, from Lebanon; and lapis lazuli (a blue gemstone) from places as far away as Afghanistan. Before 2000 BC, Mesopotamia would be obtaining goods, though probably indirectly, from the Indus Valley. As writing develops, a new wedge-shapes stylus was introduced, with all signs made-up of combinations of the same basic wedge shape; this made writing quicker and easier. At this stage, many pictographs began to lose their original function, and came to be used for their phonetic value. This style of writing has been given the name *Cuneiform Script*, from the Latin word *Cuneus* ("wedge"). A fair amount is therefore known about the Sumerian language. A few of its words have survived to the this day; among them is the origin form of the word "alcohol". The invention of writing opens more of the past to the historian. This is because writing preserves literature. The oldest story in the world is the *Epic of Gilgamesh*. It relates the earthly exploits of the eponymous Gilgamesh, possibly a historic king of Uruk, beneath the fancy dress of supernatural adversaries. There is, for example, an ideal creature of nature, the wild-man Enkidu, created by the gods as a rival to the cultured, city-bred king; the pair, in the end, become friends, though the outcome for Enkidu is civilized life, and the loss of his happy association with the nature. To modern readers, the most striking part may be the story of a great flood, which washed away mankind, except for a favoured family who survive by building a boat; a likely source for the Bible story of *Noah*. A sombre mood dominates the *Epic*. Gilgamesh does great things, but his relentless quest to assert himself against the gods ultimately ends in failure; he too must die. Apart from this mood, there is much information about the religious temperament of ancient Mesopotamia in the *Epic*. Originally, each city had its own god, more or less personifying natural forces such as wind, rain, and storm. They were in the end organized into a pantheon of gods, whose importance waxed and waned with the political fortunes of the associated cities. No other ancient society devoted so much of its collective resources to religion; except perhaps the Egyptians. By the end of their history as an independent civilization, some Sumerian cities had very big temples indeed; *ziggurats*, a step-pyramid-like structure with a sanctuary at the top. The most impressive, the *Great Ziggurat of Ur* (remembered in the biblical Tower of Babel), measured 210 feet in length, 150 feet in width, and over 100 feet in height. It has been suggested that this was because no other ancient society left men feeling so utterly dependent on the will-of-the-gods. Lower Mesopotamia must always have had much trouble with flooding, which would undoubtedly put a heavy strain on the fragile system of irrigation on which its prosperity depended. The Sumerians saw themselves as a people created to labour for the gods; to conquer the forces-of-chaos and bring order to the world. In return, they would grant protection and length of days, but nothing more. The Sumerians can hardly have derived much comfort from their beliefs; they seem to have seen the afterlife as a gloomy, sad netherworld. It was, "*The house where they sit in darkness, where dust is their food and clay their bread, they are clothed like birds with feathers for garments, over bolt and door lie silence*". In it lies the origin of the later notions of Hell. This hints at the importance of the diffusion of Sumerian ideas long after the focus of history has moved away from southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerians laid the foundations of mathematics, using a sexagesimal counting system which has passed on to us our circle of 360 degrees and hour of sixty minutes. We first encounter the seven-day week in the Gilgamesh epic. They were among the first astronomers, mapping the stars into sets of constellations, many of which survived in the zodiac. And they left the world innumerable other technological and cultural "firsts", including the first codified law and the first recipe for beer.

The **history** of Sumer spans more than thirteen hundred years. Scholars have recovered much of the story to this huge stretch of time, though much is still debated, and even its dating is only approximate. The first Sumerian ruler (probably a king-priest as much as a warrior-leader) whose deeds are recorded, if only in the briefest kind of statement, was a man called Etana of Kish, who may have come to the throne as early as 3000 BC. The cities of Lower Mesopotamia were independent. But the northern city of Kish lay at the narrowest point between the Tigris and Euphrates, a position which simply cried out for some exercise of hegemony. A huge proportion of trade, after all, went up and down the two rivers. By the time of Etana’s death, Kish, collecting tribute from the traffic passing by the city, was the most powerful city on the plain. After its early supremacy, Kish gradually declined, but retained a strong symbolic significance; other cities sometimes claim the title “*king of Kish*” as though it was an honorary title. Thereafter, the narrative content for hundreds of years is a matter of constant wars between city-states for ascendancy. Fortified cities, increasing use of bronze weaponry, and the application of the wheel to military technology in clumsy four-wheeled chariots are some of the evidence of this. Towards the middle of this period, a more modern-day concept of "king", distinct from the temple establishment, began to establish itself with some success; probably they began as military leaders appointed by cities to command their forces who did not give up their power when the emergency which called them forth had passed. The evidence is physically apparent in the appearance of palaces beside the temples in the Sumerian cities. A military-minded king of Lagash named Eannatum, who ruled around 2450 BC, made the most ambitious effort yet to bring the scattered cities of Sumer under his control. We know more about Eannatum than most other Sumerian kings because he was much inclined to inscriptions and left behind him one of the most famous monuments of Sumer, the *Stele of Vultures*, carve to celebrate his triumphs. This stone slab shows an advanced state of warfare, with disciplined infantry, armed identically, arranged in what resembles a phalanx formation. After a lifetime of war, Eannatum apparently used this well-organised to reduce to tribute Lagash's arch rival Umma, and practically every other city on the Sumerian plain, occasionally interrupted by the odd squabble with invading Elamites; a people had been living in their own small cities, just east of the Persian Gulf, almost as long as Sumerians. Collecting tribute is one thing though, and actual conquest another. The difficulty of moving armies may have dissuaded the king of Lagash from actually extending imperial rule over other cities. The the first of a long line of empire-builders would come from another nation entirely.

    **Sargon of Akkad** (d. 2279 BC) was of Semitic stock rather than Sumerian. His people, who lived mostly in the north, had mingled with Sumerians on the Mesopotamian plain for hundreds of years. The birth legend of Sargon might seem familiar to those versed in the Bible story of the Prophet Moses. The claim is that he was the secret child of a priestess, who set him in a basket, and cast him off into a river; a gardener at the palace of Kish found him and raised him as his own. Like Moses, this foundling child rose to high position, becoming cup-bearer to Ur-Zababa of Kish; an ancient cup-bearer was more than a mere servant, but a highly influential person at court. While Sargon was serving in Kish, an ambitious ruler named Lugalzaggesi ascended to the throne in Umma. He first conquered Uruk, where he established his new capital, before leading the final victory of Umma in the three-generation-long rivalry with Lagash Encouraged by his victories, he spent twenty years expanding his realm, and establishing the first reliably documented kingdom in Sumer. Finally, Lugalzaggesi turned his eyes towards Kish. A fragmentary account tells us what happened then. In the face of the coming attack, Ur-Zababa sank deeper and deeper into paranoia. Something in his cup-bearer's bearing had made him wonder if he was in fact on his side. So he sent Sargon to Lugalzaggesi with a message, ostensibly seeking peace terms. Instead, the message asked his enemy to kill the bearer. This part of the story may be apocryphal; it gave Sargon a justification to usurp the throne. For whatever reason, Lugalzaggesi declined the request and marched triumphantly on Kish, forcing Ur-Zababa to flee. While Lugalzaggesi was revelling in his victory in the north, Sargon gathered an army of his own (perhaps from Ur-Zababa's shattered forces), marched south towards Uruk, and took the city by surprise. Immediately, Lugazaggesi headed home to meet this threat to his power in battle, only to be defeated. With both Ur-Zababa and Lugalzagesi out of the way, Sargon was unstoppable, blowing through all the remaining Sumerian resistance. The speed of his conquest probably reflects a combination of his own strength and Sumerian weakness. In Sargon, there is something of a climax to early militarism. It was boasted that he had 5,400 soldiers eating before him in his palace. His army also made heavy use of a new weapon, the composite bow made of strips of wood and horn. In addition, the Sumerians were probably crippled by strife within their cities. As in every age up to our own, Sumerian cities suffered from a growing resentment of the lower classes for the wealthy elite. Tales of Sargon's humble origins may reveal a successful appeal to the downtrodden members of Sumerian society. Whatever the reason, the outcome was something new. Sargon did what no Sumerian king had yet done successfully; he turned a loose collection of cities into an empire. As part of his strategy for ruling far-flung cities, Sargon built a new capital, Akkad; its location is unknown, but most attention has focused on an area a little north of Kish, near present-day Baghdad. From this position, Sargon could control river traffic. Unlike his predecessors, Sargon was willing to run roughshod over the native elite. When he took over a city, it became an Akkadian stronghold, staffed with Akkadian officials, and garrisoned with Akkadian troops. Most importantly, he appointed his daughter, Enheduanna, as high priestess of Ur, and, through her, seems to have been able to manipulate religious, political, and cultural affairs from afar; Enheduanna is famous in her own right as the world's first author known by name. In this kingdom, the Sumerians rapidly found themselves living as foreigners in their own cities. Sargon’s followers were Semites from the northern plain; their speech and customs were unlike those of the southern Sumerians. They took over from its culture what they wanted as they imposed themselves; *Cuneiform Script* was adapted to meet the needs of a Semitic language, demonstrating the splendid flexibility of the writing system. With Sumer under his control, Sargon set out on campaign after campaign, creating an empire that reached westwards as far as the Mediterranean, eastward over Elam, and as far north as the city of Purushanda, well into Anatolia. Keeping control of this vast expanse of land required a bureaucracy far beyond anything developed to this point in Sumer.

The Akkadian hegemony was relatively short, a century or so. Under Sargon’s great-grandson, the empire began to disintegrate and collapse in the face of invading barbarians called the Gutians, down from the Zagros Mountains, east of the Tigris. Inscriptions lament the fall of Akkad itself, sometime around 2150 BC; we haven't found the ruins which suggests a thorough destruction. For half-a-century, the Gutian horde ranged across the entire Mesopotamian plain. They left little behind them to suggest that they developed a culture of their own: no inscriptions, no record-keeping, no cut centres. The old Sumerian cities did not long tolerate the rule of barbarians. By the time they were expelled, rule had passed again to native Sumerians. This time its centre was Ur, though what that meant in a political sense is hard to see. This period is known as the *Sumerian Renaissance* due to the remarkable advances in culture. This left behind a new style of Sumerian art marked by the theme of royal power. The Great Ziggurat of Ur was built again, bigger and better, as kings sought to embody their grandeur in the temple. The *Code of Ur-Nammu*, the oldest surviving law code yet discovered, provided a precedent for the much later and better known *Code of Hammurabi*. This was the sunset of the first people to achieve civilization. Sumer faced a threat which had been steadily growing; infertile land. For centuries now, perhaps for millennia, the cities on the plain had grown enough wheat to support their burgeoning populations through irrigation. But the waters of the delta, though fresh enough, were ever so slightly salty. This eventually led to such a concentration of salt in the ground that crops began to fail. Accounts show, in the years after 2100 BC, a progressive switchover from wheat to barley, which is less sensitive to salt in the soil. But in time, even barley refused to grow. Grain grew scarce. So did meat, since animals had to be taken farther and farther afield to find fodder. Enemies abounded on the frontiers. In 2004 BC, the vultures landed. The Elamites, now united into one, hungered to revenge themselves for decades of domination. They swept over the Tigris, broke down the walls of Ur, and brought a final and shattering end to the Sumerian era.

The horizons of history are about to expand beyond a relatively small area; now a world of more than one civilization. All over the *Fertile Crescent* new kingdoms and cities had been appearing, stimulated by what they saw in the south. This makes it hard to find any central narrative. Worse still, the Near East continued to be disputed by migrating group of people moving to and fro, The Akkadians themselves had been one of them, pushing up from great Semitic reservoir of Arabia. The Gutians, who overthrew them, were Caucasians. The most successful of all of these peoples were the Amorites, of Semitic stock, who joined the Elamites to destroy the supremacy of Ur. They established a series of petty kingdom which stretched from central Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast. The vigorous Indo-European peoples have also entered on the scene, and from two directions. One of these peoples, the Hittites, pushed into Anatolia from Europe, while their advance was matched from the east by another group, filling up Iran. At the edges of this huge confusion stood another old civilization, Egypt. The main processes grow hard to distinguish. Fortunately, a convenient landmark is provided by the appearance of a new empire in Mesopotamia, one which has left behind a famous name; **Babylon**. Another famous name is inseparably linked with it; their sixth kings, Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC). He would have a secure place in history if we knew nothing of him except his reputation as a law-giver.

When Hammurabi became king, Babylon was just one of many Amorite cities, struggling for power or for survival in Central Mesopotamia. Through a combination of successful military campaigns, and careful alliances made and broken, he brought almost all of Mesopotamia under central control, for the first time since the Akkadians, four-hundred years earlier. Of the major cities, only Assyria, high on the Tigris, maintained its independence. Seven hundred or so miles long and about a hundred miles wide, this was no unruly empire; it was ruled by law. The *Code of Hammurabi* is justly famous, though it owes something of its pre-eminence to chance. While earlier collections of laws have only survived in fragments, Hammurabi’s was carved on stone slabs (or *steles*), and set up in the courtyard of temples for the public to consult. In a more ordered way than earlier collections, his laws dealt comprehensively with a wide range of concerns; penalties for murder, for robbery, for adultery, for injury (the oldest statement of the legal principle of an "eye for an eye"); regulations on marriage, on divorce, on inheritance (widows can inherit land but can’t sell it; they must keep it for their sons); together with standard fees for everything from hiring a cart to medical attention; and many other matters. Sadly, perhaps, the penalties seem to have harshened by comparison with older Sumerian practice; the death penalty is common for a wide array of crimes. The code’s provisions included, of course, laws about slaves. Babylon, like every other ancient civilization (and many of modern times), rested on the great exploitation of man by man. By Hammurabi's day, there was a steadiness of price which suggests regular trade markets; slaves from certain areas were especially prized for their reliability. All of these laws, handed down and reinforced from the centre of the empire, were meant to convince conquered peoples of the justice and rightness of Babylonian rule.

The city of Babylon in due time became renowned for its magnificence. Its surviving image from the Bible - the worldly, wicked city of pleasure and consumption - speaks to the scale and richness of its city-life, though that mostly refers to a later period. The royal palace at Mari is an outstanding example of Babylonian architecture; thick walls surround a complex measuring over 150 by 200 yards, with more that 300 rooms decorated with frescoes and statues, and several courtyards drained by pipes thirty feet deep. In this palace were found great quantities of clay tablets whose writing reveal an elaborate administrative structure. The Babylonians gave *Cuneiform Script* a syllabic form, thus enormously more flexible and useful. They worked out mathematical tables and formula of great practical use. Their astrology pushed forward the observation of the heavens, plotting the path of the sun and five observable planets with remarkable accuracy; the prediction of lunar eclipses was possible before 1000 BC. It also seems likely that they invented the sundial, the earliest known instrument for measuring time.

Hammurabi’s achievement did not long survive him. His successors gradually lost control of peripheral lands - In the north to the Assyrians, in the east to the Elamites, and in the south to wave of revolts - and Babylon reverted back to a small kingdom. The waning of one power coincided with the waxing of another. Back in the late 3rd millennium BC, the **Hittites**, an Indo-European people, had wandered down (probably from Ukraine) into Anatolia, and settled along the Halys river. Their capital, at Hattusa, was a dramatically fortified city on a steep slope among ravines. The Hittites carried on a healthy trade with the islands to the west, and with the peoples to the south, especially the Assyrians, from whom they learned to write in the *Cuneiform Script*. By 1650 BC, the Hittites had established themselves as the dominant power in Anatolia from the Black Sea to the Syrian coast. Then, one of their kings, Mursilis (d. 1590 BC), turned southwards against an already weakened and shrunken Babylon; the city was taken and plundered. But then the Hittites withdrew - the city was too far from Hattusa to be governed securely - and other people, the Kassites, ruled Babylon for four obscure centuries. The key to Hittite success was their introduction of the chariot to Near Eastern battlefields. Horses were at first rare in the river valleys, the prized possession of kings and great leaders; the Sumerian are depicted trundling about in four-wheeled carts, but these were probably a means of simply moving generals about. The true chariot is a two-wheeled fighting vehicle, usually crewed by two men; the one driving, the other using it as a platform for missile weapons. The Hittites, with access to a reservoir of horses in the high pastures north of the Fertile Crescent, thus enjoyed a great military and psychological advantage. Eventually, though, chariots were used in the armies of all the great kingdoms of the Near East; they were too valuable a weapon to be ignored. The raid that had cut-down Babylon was something of a high-water mark for the first Hittite kingdom. Mursili was assassinated shortly after his return, and his kingdom was plunged into chaos, A century or so of obscurity followed. Then, in the early 14th century BC, came a second and even more splendid Hittite era, when they once again dominated Anatolia, destroyed the Syrian kingdom of Mittani, and even challenged the might of Egypt under Ramesses the Great (d. 1213 BC) for control of the Levant. The Hittites were probably the first people to work iron, around 1500 BC, though they likely saw it as an inferior metal. In its simple form iron is less hard than bronze, and therefore of less use as a weapon. But gradually people discovered that iron could be hardened, by repeatedly heating and hammering, until the impurities are literally forced out, and then rapidly reducing its temperature by quenching in water. Iron ore, though scarce enough, was much more plentiful than copper or tin, so it is not surprising to find its uses rapidly spreading through the Near East and far beyond; despite attempts by the Hittites to restrict it. The diffusion of iron must surely be part of the story of the swing of power against the Hittites, which fractured into several independent states around 1190 BC. By that time, a very confused era had opened; the so-called Late Bronze Age Collapse.

### Civilisation in Egypt

**Ancient Egypt** (3100-1077 BC) has always been our greatest visible inheritance from antiquity. For thousands of years after its demise, the physical remains of the first civilization in the Nile Valley fascinated men’s minds and stirred their imaginations. Even the Classical Greeks were bemused by the legend of the occult wisdom in a land where gods were half men, half beasts. And people today still waste their time trying to discern a supernatural significance in the arrangement of the pyramids.

Egypt was defined by the **River Nile** and the deserts which flanked it; one drawn-out straggling oasis, six-hundred miles long, and, except in the Delta, never more than a few miles wide. In Neolithic times, the region was already beginning to feel the effects of hotter, dryer weather patterns. As desiccation set in, the people of the Sahara migrated east towards the well-watered Nile valley. These new settlers found that they could manage the predictable annual flooding, and farming took root in the rich beds of silt deposited higher year by year. This was a setting in which agriculture gave rich return with relative ease, and mineral resources were bountiful; stone, copper, gold, gemstones, flax, papyrus. And because the Nile flowed from south to north, while the prevailing winds blew in the opposite direction, it was uncommonly easy to navigate. From the start, then, the river set the rhythm of life. It was a benevolent deity whose never failing bounty was to be thankfully received, rather than the source of dangerous, menacing inundations like those in which the Sumerians toiled. From the earliest times, the Egyptians buried their dead at the edge of the desert, with their heads pointed south and their faces turned west; life came from the south, but the Land of the Dead was westward, towards the Saharan waste they had fled. Then, in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, signs of trade and contact with other lands multiply, notably with Mesopotamia. That Egypt benefited from Sumerian influence and example seems incontestable, though exactly what this meant has been much debated. Mesopotamian contributions have been seen in the motifs of early Egyptian art, in similar techniques of monumental building in brick, and in the debt of Egyptian hieroglyphs to the earliest Sumerian script. Yet it cannot be said that it was decisive. There always existed a potential for civilization in the Nile Valley that needed no external stimulus to discharge it. It is at least obvious, when Egyptian civilization finally did emerged, that it was unique, unlike anything we can find elsewhere.

The deepest roots of Egyptian civilization have to be pieced together from archaeology and later tradition. They reveal that, at some point around 3200 BC, there had solidified two kingdoms, one of the northern delta and one of the southern river valley; one of Lower Egypt and one of Upper. This is interestingly different from Sumer; there were no city-states. Egypt seems to move straight from pre-civilization to the government of large areas. Her early "cities" were market places and storage centres of barely two thousand people. Even later, Egypt would have only a restricted experience of an urban way of life; Memphis and Thebes were religious centres and palace complexes, rather than true cities. Of the kings of the two Egypts we know almost nothing; even their names at lost. It was about the same time that the written records begin and this must have been important in the consolidation of power. In Egypt, writing was used from the beginning, not merely as an administrative and economic convenience, but to record events on monuments intended to survive. These records tell us that, in about 3100 BC, a great king of Upper Egypt conquered the north, **uniting Egypt into a single kingdom** running from the Mediterranean coast to the First Cataract (or waterfall) at Abu Simbel. A new capital was built at Memphis, just south of the Delta, a strategic location from which to control both Upper and Lower Egypt. Egyptian tradition credits both these things to the first Egyptian Pharaoh, Menes, though that is merely an honorific meaning "founder". It is likely that "Menes" was an important northern ruler named Narmer, who is featured on an inscription found at Hierakonpolis wearing the symbol of power over the two lands, the double crown; the Red Crown of Lower Egypt set atop the White Crown of Upper Egypt. This was effectively the beginning of a civilization which was to survive more than two-thousand years; roughly speaking, its greatest days were over by 1077 BC. That is about as much time as separates us from the birth of Christ. Egyptian history can most easily be understood in six big chronological divisions. Three of these are called respectively the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. They are preceded by a six-hundred-year long Archaic Period that is more than a little obscure, and separated by two periods called the First and Second Intermediate. Very roughly, the three "Kingdoms" are periods of success or at least of consolidated government; the two "Intermediate" stages are interludes of weakness and upheaval to which the overworked word "crisis" can reasonably be applied. This is by no means the only way of visualizing Egyptian history; many Egyptologists prefer to set out the chronology in terms of thirty-one dynasties of Pharaohs. Nonetheless, the six-part scheme is sufficient for our purpose.

The **Old Kingdom** (2686–2160) traditionally understood to begin with the second Pharaoh of the Third Dynasty, Djoser (d. 2648 BC). Strictly speaking, the title "Pharaoh" was only applied personally to king under the New Kingdom; before that, it referred to the buildings of the royal palace and court. Nonetheless, by Djoser’s day, Egyptian rulers already wielded a startling autocracy which was so to impress the ancient world. They had not emerged like Sumer’s as simply men, subject to the will-of-the-gods like all men, great or small. They were living gods, mediators between their subjects and the divine. The Pharaohs were believed to control the annual rise and fall of the Nile no less; life itself to an agricultural society. The theological underpinnings of Egyptian kingship underwent many later elaborations, but the central story is simple. The god Osiris was given the dominion over heaven and earth, and taught mankind the arts of civilisation, including agriculture. But his brother, Set, god-of-the-deserts, was jealous of his power, and plotted his death. Set killed Osiris, and mutilated his corpse, scattering the pieces across Egypt. Osiris' wife and sister, the mother-godess Isis, reassembled his body, and half-resurrected him; alive enough to impregnate her, but not quite enough to remain on earth. Instead Osiris became ruler of the underworld, while his posthumous son, Horus, became the ruler of the living realm. In life, the Pharaohs claimed to be the earthly embodiment of Horus. When he died, as all men must, he took on a new role, as the incarnate Osiris, while the son of the dead Pharaoh now became the incarnate Horus. Thus, the new Pharaoh was, in a sense, his father’s reincarnation; a neat way to legitimise succession. And if the old Pharaoh was still going to be waiting for you in the afterlife, then his power became all-encompassing. Beneath the Pharaoh, an elaborate and orderly bureaucracy managed his affairs. At its head were viziers (chief ministers), provincial governors and other senior officials who came from the Egyptian nobility; less eminent families provided the thousands of scribes, This bureaucracy directed a country most of whose inhabitants were peasants. They cannot have lived wholly comfortable lives, for they provided both the conscript labour for great public-works projects, and the agricultural surplus upon which the state and religious establishment subsisted. Yet the land was rich and increasingly mastered with irrigation techniques; with little change, this agriculture would be sufficient to make her the "bread-basket" of the Roman Empire. Upon the surplus there also rested Egypt’s own spectacular form of conspicuous consumption; a range of palaces, temples, tombs, and memorials unsurpassed in antiquity. The most famous are the pyramids, and they were began under Djoser. When he died, he was not buried in the traditional graveyard at Abydos, far to the south. He had already built his own tomb at Saqqara, near Memphis; the 200-foot-tall *Step Pyramid*. It was the masterpiece of the first architect whose name is recorded; Imhotep, chancellor to the Pharaoh. We don’t know exactly what inspired Imhotep to come up with this novel tomb, although, given the extent of trade routes in the ancient world, Egyptians had undoubtedly seen Sumarian Ziggurats. It was a century or so later that the greatest of the pyramids were completed at Giza. The first pharaoh of the Fouth Dystasty, Snefru (d. 2589), got things off with a bang, by introducing some innovations that later became standard. For one thing, the burial chamber was inside the pyramid itself, rather than in the ground beneath, as had been the case with the pyramids that preceded it. He also gave the pyramid a causeway, a broad path leading east to a “mortuary temple” where offerings could be made. But most interesting of all, he covered the steps of his pyramid with a smooth layer of facing stones, thus creating the familiar smooth-sided pyramid that we know. In fact, Snefru built no less that three pyramids; he finished-off his predecessor's, and undertook two of his own. His second effort was completed, but never used, for the unfortunate reason that their measurements were off, lending the pyramid a visibly "bent" appearance. This suggests that Egypt had now become even richer, more stable, and more subject to the authority of the pharaoh, than ever before. Snefru son, Khufu (d. 2566 BC), inherited this power and exercised it to the full. His pyramid, the Great Pyramid, was twenty years in the building, employing many thousands of men, and using huge quantities of stone - some fifteen tons apiece - brought from as far away as five-hundred miles. This colossal construction, peaking at 481 feet, was the tallest structure built by man for more than 3,800 years. Khufu was succeeded by his son, Khafre (2532 BC), who left perhaps Egypt's most recognisable monument, the Great Sphinx; a mysterious limestone sculpture, part lion and part falcon, with a man’s face (probably Khafre himself, though there is still plenty of argument over that point). These still-startling monuments make it less surprising that the Egyptians were later reputed to have been great architects. In truth, the technology of pyramid-building is far from complicated. What was required was exacting competence in measurement, the manipulation of certain elementary formulae for calculating volumes and weights, and an unprecedented and almost unsurpassed concentration of human labour, under the direction of official who, by the standards of any age, must have been outstanding civil servants.

From the outset, the Egyptians seem obsessed with death. They believed that, in the afterlife, a man could expect judgement before Osiris; if the verdict was favourable, he would happily live in Osiris’ underworld; if not, he was abandoned to a monstrous destroyer, part crocodile, part hippopotamus. The struggle to assure a favourable outcome explains, not only the building of the pyramids, but the obsessive care shown in conducting the deceased to his eternal resting-place. It took seventy days, under the supervision of temple priests, to carry out the funerary embalming and mummification of a Pharaoh's corpse. This did not mean, though, that in life human beings need do no more than placate Osiris, for the Egyptian pantheon was huge and immensely complicated. Much of Egyptian history is the story of ebbings and flowings of major cults, as the Pharaohs sought through cult-consolidation to achieve political ends; politics and religion were always bedfellows in Ancient Egypt. Not only the Pharaohs were interested. The institutions which maintained these beliefs were in the hands of a hereditary priestly class, who acquired vested interest in the popularity of their cults. The gods loom large in the subject-matter of ancient Egyptian art; depicted with animal heads stuck on human bodies. But it contains much more besides: realistic portrayals of rural life, craftsmen at work, scribes at their duties, and later, in a more decadent period, Pharaohs in their chariots, mighty men-of-war, confidently trampling down their enemies. Neither its content nor technique is the most striking characteristic of the Egyptian art, but its recognizably continuous style. For some two thousand years, artists were able to work satisfyingly within a classical tradition; what a visitor saw looked so much of a piece. Another great artistic achievement of the Egyptians was calligraphy. It seems the Egyptians learned the technique of pictograms from Mesopotamia, but rejected the later Cuneiform Script. Hieroglyphs retained their lifelike little picture (or near-picture) form, even after phonetic elements were added. It was much more decorative than Cuneiform, but also much harder to master. None of the writers of classical antiquity ever learnt to read hieroglyph, it seems. The last example of which we know were written in 394 AD; it could not be read for another fourteen centuries, until a French scholar deciphered the inscription on the "Rosetta Stone", brought back from Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. The first hieroglyphs appear before 3000 BC, and, soon after, the invention of papyrus provided a convenient medium. Papyrus may be our greatest debt to the Egyptians; more convenient that clay tablets, and cheaper than parchment (made from skins), papyrus was the most general medium for writing until well into the Middle Ages, when paper reached the Near East and Europe from China.

The Old Kingdom was to be looked back upon as a golden age of peace and stability, when the Pharaohs were impregnable. Egypt faced no serious threats from abroad. There were successful raids to the south into Nubia (modern Sudan), west against Libyan desert-dwellers, and north into the southern Levant. Far flung trade expeditions are recorded to Anatolia and to Punt (a mysterious land probably in modern-day Eritrea). However, during the Fifth Dynasty, the Pharaoh became more closely identified with the sun-god Ra, and consequentially under the influence of that cult’s high priests; fewer efforts were devoted to pyramid building, and more to the great sun temples at Abu Gorab and Abusir. As the priests gained more power, so too did the high officials. Towards the end of the dynasty, provincial governors, who had always been appointed by the crown, seized on periods of chaos at Memphis to pass their power to their sons, and asserted their independence from central authority. By the next dynasty, the Pharaohs, in essence, ruled an Egypt that contained small hereditary states. The extremely long reign of Pepi II (d. 2184 BC), said to be 94-years, marked the collapse of central authority. The level of the Nile floods began diminishing year on year, bringing famine and causing difficulties for the Pharaoh’s claim to divinity; Pepi's death, well past that of his intended heirs, may have caused a succession crisis within the royal family. After the wasteful Fourth Dynasty squandering of Egyptian lives and money, political weakness and environmental issues combined to push the Old Kingdom over the edge; the **First Intermediate** (2184-2021 BC). For more than a hundred years, Egypt descended into anarchy, as effectively small kingdoms began raiding each other's territories. The Egyptian king list records the Tenth Dynasty, neatly followed by an Eleventh Dynasty. In truth, rival dynasties "ruled" simultaneously over different parts of Egypt, while other provincial governors went on doing as they pleased. Meanwhile, rather than being the invader, Egypt was invaded, as Western Semitic peoples established themselves in the Nile Delta. Towards the end of the period, two great power centres had emerged; Hierakonpolis in Lower Egypt and Thebes in Upper Egypt. This struggle was finally brought to a end by Mentuhotep II (2060-09 BC), who fought his way north and took Hierakonpolis in the fourteenth year of his reign. Now he held both Thebes and Herakleopolis, but Egypt was far from united.; battles with provincial governors continued for years. But by 2021 BC, Mentuhotep felt confident enough to alter the writing of his title; he was, unsurprisingly, *Shematawy* ("Uniter of the Two Lands"). Not long after, his name began appearing in inscriptions next to that of Menes/Narmer himself; the semi-legendary king who had first pulled Upper and Lower Egypt into one.

During the **Middle Kingdom** (2021-1786 BC), Egypt once again flourished, as it had during the Old Kingdom. There was a new emphasis on order and social cohesion. An efficient bureaucracy was created that concentrated wealth and power with the crown, but generously rewarded high officials for their loyalty. This was reflected in the quality of artistic production for elite members of society, which gives the Middle Kingdom its reputation as Egypt's "Classical Age". The Temple of Karnak was begun under Senruset I (d. 1926 BC); Egyptian literature featured sophisticated themes written in a confident, eloquent style; and relief and portrait sculpture reached a high point that was, perhaps equalled, but never surpassed. The divine status of the Pharaoh also subtly changed After the bad times made it impossible to believe that he was the earthly incarnation of a god, he was now descended from a god, a subtle but meaningful demotion. Theological change followed, with something of a consolidation of cults under the god Amun-Ra; the Theban patron deity, Amun, acquired national importance, expressed in his fusion with the sun-god, Ra. It is clear, too, that there was expansion and material growth. Far sighted reclamation work was achieved in the marshes of the Delta. Copper mining operations in the Sinai, which had previously been intermittent expeditions, became permanent camps. With peace and stability at home, Middle Kingdom Egypt pursued an aggressive foreign policy, colonizing Nubia, to the south, between the first and third Cataracts, and fully exploiting its rich gold mines and stone quarries. The reign of Amenemhat III (d. 1797 BC) was the high point of the Middle Kingdom; and of the Nile floods, which once again began to decrease year by year. As always in Egypt, a slump in the Nile and royal power went hand in hand. Amenemhat's son died almost as soon as he was crowned, and his wife, Queen Sobeknefru (d. 1786), took his place; a woman on the throne was a sign of serious palace intrigue. Few details from the queen’s reign have survived; nor for the obscure figure who succeeded her, beginning the ineffectual Thirteenth Dynasty.

The **Second Intermediate** (1674–1549) was marked by another and far more dangerous incursion of foreigners. These were the Hyksos, a Western Semitic people, who, for a generation or two, had been wandering into the Delta in increasing numbers. Some of them settled down to live side by side with the Egyptians. Others were less civilised; around 1720, one particularly aggressive band sacked and burned Memphis, the old Egyptian capital. Unlike the Egyptians, they fought with the composite bow, the horse and the iron-fitted chariot, an advantage that offset their relatively small numbers. After this humiliation, the Pharaoh's power wilted so dramatically that, some fourty years later, the Hyksos established their own capital at Avaris, on the eastern fringe of the Delta. From there, they spread their rule to the west and south by force. By around 1663 BC, they ruled supreme. Not much is known about the Hyksos. Apparently, they retained Egyptian models of government; their kings identified as Pharaohs; the Egyptian language continued to be the official language of inscriptions and records; Egyptian officials served them as administrators and priests. But this did not lead to assimilation. Despite their success, the Hyksos were never in sole control of Egypt. The Egyptian governors of Thebes, to the south, announced that they would not submit to Hyksos rule. The Hyksos, aware of their own limitations, do not appear to have made a serious push to the south, The Theban Pharaohs clung on for decades, trapped between the Hyksos controlled north and a resurgent Nubia to the south, But eventually Thebes gathered enough strength to challenge the Hyksos, in a conflict that lasted more than thirty years, until Ahmose I (d. 1544 BC) completed the task, battling all the way to Avaris, and permanently evicted the Hyksos from Egypt. He followed-up this first great success by pursuing the Hyksos to their strongholds the southern Levant, finally halting his march near Gaza.

    The **New Kingdom** (1554-1077) in its prime was internationally so successful that it is difficult not to conclude that Hyksos domination must have had a fertilizing effect. There was a transformation of military techniques by the adoption of Near Eastern devices such as the chariot. Tuthmosis I d. 1492 BC) and his grandson Tuthmosis III (d. 1425 BC) expanded the boundaries of Egypt in the south to the Fourth Cataract in Nubia, and to the north, through the Levant and Syria almost to the Euphrates. It was between their reigns that Queen Hatshepsut (d. 1458 BC), Egypt's most successful female Pharaoh, occupied the throne in a reign notable for greatly expanding Egyptian trade, including a mission to the mysterious Land of Punt. Monuments recording the arrival of tribute testify to an Egyptian pre-eminence, matched at home by a veritable renaissance of the arts. The New Kingdom provided the bulk of the art, artefacts and architecture (apart from the pyramids) for which ancient Egypt is famous. The Pharaohs created at Thebes the great temples to Amun-Ra at Karnak and Luxor, and were buried in splendour on the other side of the Nile in the Valley of the Kings. Foreign influences touched Egyptian art at this time; they came from Minoan Crete. In the same year that Tuthmosis III died, a king named Saustatar came to the throne of Mitanni, a kingdom that dominated eastern Syria and northern Mesopotamia, and began his own empire-building. Amenhotep II (d. 1400 BC) and his successors changed tact; they made treaties with the Mitanni, married Mitanni princesses, and came to rely on their friendship to protected Egyptian interests in the region. Under Amenhotep III (d. 1352 BC), the New Kingdom reached its peak of power, prestige, and prosperity. He sponsored building at Karnak and Luxor on a colossal scale, and was fittingly buried in a tomb which was the largest ever prepared for a Pharaoh; little remains of it today, but its famous Colossi of Memnon testify to its proportions. The resulting reforming zeal on his son, Amenhotep IV (1336 BC), shock Egypt's old political and religious certainties to their very foundations. He was determined to break the influence of the priests of Amun-Ra (and avoid contributing any more wealth to their temples), by assert his own preferred choice of deities, the sun-disk Aten. Aten had not gone unrecognized in the past; it was one aspect of the sun-god Amun-Ra. But in the Pharaoh's hands, it became something new; the manifestation of a single divine power. Amenhotep was on his way to becoming a monotheist. To mark his seriousness, Amenhotep moved the capital away from Thebes to a site, never before built on, about halfway between Thebes and Memphis. Here, he built the planned city of Akhet-Aten, around a great temple to Aten with a roofless sanctuary open to the sun’s rays that was to be the centre of the new religion. Though there can be no doubt of Akhnaton’s seriousness, his religious revolution must have been doomed from the outset given the innate conservatism of Egypt. Akhnaton was succeeded by his two sons, the second of which. Tutankhamun (d. 1323), fully reversed his religious reforms. This probably explains his magnificent burial in the Valley of the Kings, after a short and otherwise unremarkable reign; the 1922 discovery of his largely intact tomb has made him one of the most famous of all Egyptian Pharaohs.

    When Tutankhamun died, the New Kingdom still had two centuries of life ahead, but their atmosphere was one of steadily increasing decline, only occasionally interrupted. The Egyptian sphere of influence was crumbling in the face of growing pressure in the north from the resurgent Hittites. The Mitanni could not be saved; losing all their lands west of the Euphrates in 1372 BC, and dissolving in civil war some thirty years later. By the time Ramesses II (d. 1213 BC), sometimes called **Ramesses the Great**, came to the throne, Egypt had lost her northern holdings as far as Kadesh, a city that had become more than a battle front; a symbolic football kicked back and forth to determine whichever empire could boast of superior strength. Only three years into his reign, Ramesses marched north with an unheard of number of soldiers to get Kadesh back; according to his own count, twenty thousand. The resulting Battle of Kadesh (1275 BC) is generally regarded as the largest chariot battle ever fought. Though Ramesses proclaimed victory, the battle was more of a draw, and he did not even attempt to recapture Kadesh, which henceforth remained in Hittite hands; later confirmed in a lasting Egyptian–Hittite peace agreement. If this doesn’t sound like an overwhelming triumph, it soon mutated into one, when Ramesses had flattering accounts of the battle carved onto the walls of Egyptian temples, with plenty of graphic illustrations of Egyptians slaughtering Hittites. Ramesses built more temples, palaces, statues, and monuments than any other Pharaoh - most notably completing the great hall of columns at Karnak, planned by his grandfather and started by his father; the vast mortuary temple complex known known as the Ramesseum at Thebes; and the most spectacular of all rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel, famous for the four colossal seated statues of the Pharaoh himself (each sixty-five feet high) flanking its entrance. This only shows how far Egypt had come from its former greatness; it had become an empire that depended on reputation and symbols of grandeur, rather than actual strength. For Ramesses II's successors, even a Hittite alliance was no longer a safeguard. The Aegean was in uproar, the islands "poured out their people all together" and "no land stood before them", wrote Ramesses III (d. 1155 BC) on his temple wall. Like the Vikings some 2,000 years later, sea-borne invaders and raiders plunged down on the Delta again and again, undeterred by the occasional defeat. These *Sea Peoples* were eventually beaten off, but the struggle was hard. The signs of internal disorder are plentiful too. Ramesses III was killed as a result of a conspiracy in the harem; he was the last Pharaoh to achieve some measure of success in offsetting the swelling tide of disaster. Over the next eighty years, eight kings named Ramesses ruled, most of them in such obscurity and chaos that only fragments of records survive. We hear of on-again, off-again drought and famine; of the first labour strike in recorded history; and of corrupt officials. There is the ominous symptom of the looting of royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Meanwhile, the priests of Amun-Ra had grown rich. Re-enthroned as chief god under Tutankhamun, Pharaoh after Pharaoh made rich offerings to their temple. By Ramesses III's day, the priests may have controlled a third of all the cropland in Egypt. Rameses XI (d. 1077 BC) was in effect a prisoner in his own palace, while a High Priest of Amun named Herihor acted as de-facto ruler of Egypt. When both men died within a few years of each other, neither leaving a son, their son-in-laws began a civil war; one enthroned himself in Upper Egypt, the other claimed a divine right to rule Lower Egypt. This time, no great unifier appeared; the great days of Ancient Egypt were over. So in fact were those of the Hittites, and of other empires of the late second millennium BC; the Late Bronze Age Collapse. In the centuries that followed, Egypt's wealth and prestige made her a tempting target to invaders: a line of Libyan Pharaohs appeared in the tenth century BC; a line of Nubian pharaohs in the eighth; and then Egypt fell before the armies of the Neo-Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians, and the Persians in turn, to become a mere province of empires.

In reflecting on the demise of Ancient Egypt, it is hard to resist the feeling that the last centuries of the New Kingdom expose weaknesses present from the very beginning. This is not easy to discern at first; the spectacular legacy of her monuments and a history counted, not in centuries, but in millennia, stagger the critical sense. Yet behind this glittering tour de force, Egypt's creative quality seems strangely to miscarry. Colossal resources of labour were massed, and its ends were the creation of the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality was employed, and its masterpieces were grave-goods. A highly literate elite utilised a complex and subtle language, and a medium (papyrus) of unsurpassed convenience, but had no philosophical or religious idea comparable to those of Greek or Jew to give to the world. It is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility, a nothingness, at the heart of Egyptian civilisation. On the other scale must be placed her sheer staying-power. Though Egypt underwent at least two phases of considerable eclipse, it recovered with little fundamental change; survival on such a scale is a great historical success. What remains unclear is why it should have stopped there. Technology is by no means an infallible test, but, if it is looked at comparatively, it suggests a civilisation slow to adopt new skills and reluctant to innovate. Egypt had been in contact with Mesopotamia for getting on for 500 years before adopting the potter’s wheel; there is no evidence of the well-sweep during the Old Kingdom, by then long in use to irrigate land in the other river valleys; bronze-making did not appear until the second millennium BC; and the lathe has to wait for the Hellenistic Age. Modern mathematicians do not think much of the Egypt's endeavours; they certainly did not match the Babylonians in this art. No doubt primitive mathematics is a part of the explanation for the sterility of the Egyptian astronomy; another field in which posterity, paradoxically, was to credit them with great things. Only in medicine is there indisputably originality and lasting achievement. By the second millennium BC, an Egyptian pre-eminence in this art was internationally recognized. Though medicine in Egypt was never wholly separable from magic (magical amulets survive in great numbers), it had substantial rational content based on empirical observation. Much of our knowledge of medicinal plants was first established by the Egyptians and passed, through the Greeks to medieval Europe and the Islamic world. It is a considerable thing to have initiated the use of a remedy effective as long as castor oil. Apart from this, Egyptian civilisation made little permanent difference to the world. Her monuments have continuously fascinated artists and architects, but her style never took root elsewhere; only one great contribution was made by Egyptian art to the future, the fluted column. Egyptian cults popped up from time to time down the ages - Imperial Roman had to tolerate them - but the result was always superficial and exotic. As the world-shaping wars of the Fertile Crescent raged across the centuries, on the banks of the Nile, a grateful and passive people gathered the richness it bestowed, and set aside what they thought necessary for the real business of living; the proper preparation for death.

### Early Civilised Life in the Aegean

North of the Nile Delta, far up in the Mediterranean Sea, Crete is the largest of the Aegean islands. Several centuries before 2000 BC, towns and villages were being built there of stone and brick. Their inhabitants practised metal-working, made attractive pottery and jewellery, and exchanged goods with other Aegean communities. Virtually all the inhabited areas of the Aegean grew sufficient food for their own needs, but Crete seems then, as today, to have been better for the production of olives and vines than the other islands or mainland Greece. The cultivation of the olive and vine changed the possibilities of Aegean life; they could be grown where grains could not; and made new demands for regulating a more complex agriculture, for handling their processing in oil and wine; and for organisation and government.

At this stage, the Cretans shared much of the culture of the whole Aegean. There then came a change. Around 1900 BC, they began to build a great palace at Knossos, a settlement just inland from the very centre of the northern coastline, well situated to keep tabs on the east and west ends of the island. Not long afterwards, other slightly smaller palaces went up at other strategic locations: at Mallia, east of Knossos on the northern coast itself; at Zakros, on the eastern extreme; and at Phaistos, just inland from the southern coast. These palaces are the greatest relics of what we call **Minoan Civilization** (1900-1500 BC). Since their writing system has not yet been deciphered, we still know very little about the Minoans of Crete. Even the name comes from a King Minos who, though celebrated in legend, may never have existed. Much later, the Greeks said he was a great king, whose wife Pasiphae enjoyed a monstrous coition with a bull from which was born the half-bull, half-man Minotaur, who devoured sacrificial youths and maids, sent as tribute from abroad, at the heart of a labyrinth; eventually penetrated successfully by the hero Theseus. The Minotaur story, with its exchange of goods and tribute, reflects the ongoing international sea trade carried out by the Minoan people all around the ancient world. The Aegean was an important meeting-place of diverse cultures, with its abundance of islands making for short crossings and easy communication. Contacts with Hittite Anatolia and the Western Semitic lands of the Levant were regular. An alabaster jar uncovered at Knossos is marked with the name of the third Hyksos king of Egypt. And their brightly painted pottery jars (probably once holding wine or oil) have been uncovered as far away as Mesopotamia. It may have been Near Eastern stimulus which explains Minoan Civilization’s leap forward. This civilization lasted some 400 years, but only the outlines of its organisation and history can be put together. The palaces were not only a royal residence, but in some sense an economic centre with very large storage spaces for agricultural surplus. Each stood at the centre of sprawling cities, with elaborate water and sewage facilities unsurpassed until Roman times. These main centres were connected to dozens of smaller towns and village by a network of narrow roads paved with blocks. The absence of fortifications in the settlements suggests a relatively peaceful society that felt sufficiently sure of the protection the sea gave them. The sophistication of the Minoan governance is evidenced by a huge quantity of administrative records on clay tablets uncovered all over the island; though these don't take us very far since they cannot be read. The religion of the Minoans remains unclear, but sketchy details are revealed through art and artefacts. The palace at Knossos was ornamented with frescoes depicting ceremonial processions, festivals, food offerings, and the worship of bulls; which is suggestive of the later Minotaur legend. Bull-leaping is thought to have been a key ritual; worshippers would spring over the lowered horns of a sacred bulls, onto its back and then to the ground. The Minoans also practiced human sacrifice, though not very often. Archaeology does not tell us what horrible dilemma drove them to such an extreme act of worship. But we can make a good guess. The island of Crete and the sea around it were periodically shaken by earthquakes; only constant pleading to the gods could stave-off such disasters. Sometime around 1720, one earthquake knocked down the palace of Knossos, and a new more elaborate one was built overtop of it. It was during the Second Palace period that Minoan Civilization reached the full extent of its power. Piracy had always been a problem in the Mediterranean - scholars suggest Knossos was built inland on account of this - but the Minoan fleet put an end to the pirates, and exercised something like political hegemony over more or less the whole of the Aegean. Trade flourished in this new peace, towns grew, and painting and sculpture reached a new level of sophistication. Here is a really original style, that was to shape fashion elsewhere; the art of New Kingdom Egypt shows Minoan influence. Then, in the mid-fifteenth century, Minoan palace culture was destroyed. The mystery of this end is tantalizing. There had been earthquakes in the past, so perhaps this was another of them. Recent scholarship has identifies a great volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Thera at a suitable time, which may have been accompanied by tidal waves, and followed by ash clouds that blighted the land. Even if the volcano was not directly responsible for the Minoan collapse, it left Crete vulnerable to invasion from mainland Greece. Sometime around 1450, the Minoan cities were sacked, and their palaces flattened; only the palace at Knossos remained standing.

The mainland Greeks were no doubt stimulated by their contact with Minoan Crete and other Mediterranean civilisations to develop a more sophisticated culture of their own. Their most important cities was at Mycenae, which gave its name to **Mycenaean Civilization** (1650-1100 BC). Other majors centres included Thebes, Pylos, and Athens. These cities were not very large, no more than a few thousand people, and their inhabitants were barbarians by comparison with the Minoans, with no art of their own. And it was from the Cretans that they learned to write. More aware of the role of violence and war in society than were the islanders - no doubt because they lacked the protection of the sea - they fortified their cities heavily, and had already contributed one enduring image to future Greek life; the acropolis, a defensive citadel on the highest place of the city. Royal burial add to the impression of a military society. The shaft graves at Mycenae contain a profusion of bronze swords and daggers, together with a great variety of luxurious objects. Each considerable city had its own king, presiding over a society of landed warrior elites. But there are Hittite diplomatic records which suggest some sort of federation of kings, headed by the king at Mycenae. By 1400 BC, the culture represented most spectacularly at Mycenae had spread over much of mainland Greece, the large island of Crete, and many smaller islands as far as Rhodes; this was a civilisation that encompassed almost the whole Aegean. Mycenaeans traded the length of the Mediterranean, from the traditional markets of the eastern coasts, to new ones in southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and southern Spain. Yet there are signs of flagging from about 1300 BC. War seems to have been one answer. According to oral tradition, the rulers of Mycenaean Greece combined forces to assault a wealthy city on the other side of the Aegean Sea. The city was Troy, which stood in a corner of Anatolia that had never been reached by the Hittites, not even at their greatest extent. Some four centuries later the oral tradition would be written down as Homer's *Iliad* and *Odyssey*, which makes clear that it took many years before Troy was finally subdued; the Mycenaean attackers ran out of supplies, and had to spend part of their time growing food. If there is truth to the Trojan War, then it was the sort of victory to which King Pyrrhus would later lend his name; damaging the victors almost as much as the vanquished. What can be called the *Dark Ages* of the Aegean were about to close in, and they are as obscure as what was happening elsewhere in the Late Bronze Age Collapse. At the very end of the thirteenth century Mycenaean civilization comes to an abrupt end, and their cities were resettled by a new barbarian people from the north, who had no knowledge of writing, and no skill in building with brick or stone. Later Greeks called them the Dorians, and credit them with overwhelming military might; they could not conceive of any other reason why the land of heroes should be defeated. But archaeology suggests a slightly different story; Mycenae and Pylos were burned to the ground eighty years apart, which suggests that the newcomers spread slowly down the peninsula over the course of a century. The Mycenaean Greeks had plenty of time to mount some sort of defence, but it proved too feeble. In some places the established residents hung on successfully; Athens was one, but, even so, the city shrank alarmingly to a mere village. Elsewhere the Mycenaeans were driven out or ruled as serfs by the new conquerors. There is a picture of confusion everywhere; no king and court, no taxes and tributes, no foreign sea trade, and no particular need to write anything down. Only in the ninth century BC are there a few signs that the ground-plan of a new social pattern was emerging; the rise of Classical Greece.

### Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Near East

By the middle of second millennia BC, the whole Mediterranean and Near East can almost be viewed as one interconnected system. The great kingdoms and empires of the day - including Hittite Anatolia, New Kingdom Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Mycenaean Greece, and the Semitic states of the Levant - were closely tied to one another in a network of lucrative trade, marriage alliances, and often cordial diplomacy. Then in a matter of a few decades after the year 1200 BC this whole way of life was swept away. There is a closeness of timing in the collapse of so many Bronze Age civilizations that historians have thought too pronounced to be mere coincidence; the so-called ***Late Bronze Age Collapse***. Almost everywhere archaeology reports depopulation, cities abandoned, and severely reduced literacy. Even the survivors of the collapse, like Egypt and Assyria, were weakened considerably. The precise cause has been debated by historians for a century now, but no consensus has been reached. It was probably a "perfect storm" of multiple stressors - a huge drought event, desperate famine, internal failures, roving marauders, and more - that toppled these interdependent realms like dominoes. Another interesting feature is a coincidence with the diffusion of ironworking technology, with the year 1200 BC serving as a rough division between the Bronze and Iron Ages; though that is no more than a helpful prop to memory. The sweeping upheavals and rearrangements which stud this confusion are hard even to map in outline, let alone to explain. Fortunately, there soon appear two threads through the turmoil. One is that some people, notably the Phoenicians and the Hebrews, enjoyed new independence and power with the waning military presence of great powers, The other is an old theme renewed, that of the continuing Mesopotamian tradition about to enter its final phase; the Neo-Assyrian and then Neo-Babylonian empires.

    The **Phoenicians** (1800-64 BC), a particular mix of Western Semitic and Aegean cultures, had a long and troubled history. They were already settled on the coast of modern Lebanon by the middle of the third millennium BC, when the Sumerians and Egyptians were getting supplies of cedarwood from them. The Phoenicians became merchants and seafarers because geography urged them to look outwards rather than inland. Behind their coastal strip lay a narrow hinterland, cut up by hills running down from the Lebanese mountains to the sea. This also made it difficult to unite. There was no Phoenician kingdom; nor a Phoenician high king. The cities of Sidon, Tyre, Arwad, Byblos, and Berot (modern Beirut) were politically independent, united only by a shared culture and language. Weak and divided at home - these city-states came under the sway of Egyptian and Hittite in turn - it cannot be entirely coincidental that the Phoenicians emerge from the historical shadows only after 1100 BC, when the great era of Minoan and Mycenaean trade was long past. Their importance then is attested by copious evidence; the Bible relates that Phoenician craftsmen and materials played an important part in the building of *Solomon’s Temple*; one of the characters in an Egyptian tale, the *Story of Wen-Amen*, is a Phoenician merchant, who claimed more than fifty ships plying back and forth between Sidon and the Nile. Ancient writers all stress their skill as traders, ship-builders, and long-distance navigators. No doubt commercial need stimulated Phoenician inventiveness. Cedarwood was the earliest export, but, unable to rely solely on this limited resource, the Phoenicians developed an industrial base manufacturing a variety of commodities. Timber was not only exported, but skilfully carved, and the same skills were adapted to even more luxurious goods in ivory and metal, particularly gold. The most prized Phoenician export was fine textiles dyed with "Tyrian purple", deriving from marine snail, which remained much sought after well into Classical times. Sidon was the leading source of glassware in antiquity. But it was in the field of writing that the Phoenicians made their most lasting contribution to world history. The scripts in use in the world then had all required the scribe to learn a large number of separate characters, each expressing either a whole word or a syllable. It was at Byblos, in about 1500 BC, that an entirely new approach to writing was developed, a phonetic one, based on an alphabet representing the basic sounds of a word. This was a change with monumental potential. It could liberate writing from an arcane skill requiring years of study, and made possible the ideal of a literate. The Classical Greeks would borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, turned it sideways, and passed it on to the Romans, and thence to us. And yet no noteworthy Phoenician literature survives, while Phoenician art tended to borrow and copy Near Eastern and Egyptian forms, perhaps reflecting their role as middlemen; as the customers demanded. Trade was the Phoenician passion, and, to facilitate their commercial ventures, they established colonies and trading posts all across the Mediterranean. The first was probably at Citium on Cyprus, established in the tenth century BC. But the main expansion came from the eighth century onwards, as their home cities came under increasing pressure from the Neo-Assyrian Empire. A century later Sidon was razed to the ground, and the daughters of the king of Tyre were carried off to an Assyrian king's harem. The Phoenicians were then reduced to only their colonies on Crete, Corsica, the Balearics, Sardinia, and Sicily, as well as on the European mainland at Genoa and Marseilles. The furthest west was just beyond the entrance to the Mediterranean at Cadiz in southern Spain, to link Mediterranean and Atlantic trade, especially in British tin and Spanish silver. Few colonies had more than 1,000 inhabitants, but, in time, Carthage, on the coast of north Africa, would grow into a seat of power more formidable by far than Tyre and Sidon had ever been.

While the Phoenicians by their resumption of intercourse between Europe and the Near East were important, the people whom the Egyptians called **Hebrews** (and the world later called the Jews) were something more entirely. For many people over many centuries, mankind’s history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews, as written down in the books of the Old Testament, and subsequently diffused worldwide in many languages by the Christian missionary impulse. The Hebrews somehow arrived at a unique religious vision, a coherent and uncompromising monotheism based on the worship of one all-powerful God, whom they called Yahweh; just and merciful, stern to punish sin but ready to welcome the repentant. No ancient people produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources. The history of the early Jews begins among the Semitic people, nomads of Arabia, whose prehistoric and historic tendency had been to press north into the richer lands of the Fertile Crescent. Sometime around the time that the Sumerians were struggling against the Gutians, roughly 2150 BC, a Semitic citizen of Ur named **Abraham** decided (understandably) to gather his wife Sarah, his sons, their families, servants, and livestock, and set off westwards towards “Canaan”; the Western Semitic land of the Levant. The theological explanation for the journey, according to Genesis, was that Abraham had heard the voice of God, who gave him both a promise and a command. The promise was that Abraham and his descendants were blessed, and would be a great nation; the command was to leave his birthplace, and go with his household to the “*land I will show you*”. This *Covenant* is fundamental to an understanding of Judaism, the agreement that the Hebrews believed to exist between God and his chosen people. There does not seem to be good grounds for historians to deny that Abraham actually existed; countless peoples throughout history have traced their origins to a semi-legendary founding-father. If he did, his story is part of the confusion following the collapse of Akkadian Sumer as the population shifted away from southern Mesopotamia. When Abraham's clan arrived in Canaan, they cannot be blamed for wondering how this unpromising land was ever going to be theirs. This was a particularly rough time to be in the Western Semitic lands. The region had no unified culture, but had been moving towards increasing urbanization, building up independent cities, and quarrelling with neighbours over territory, wells, and grazing. But archaeology shows that, in the century or so before 2000 BC, things took a turn back towards a more nomadic lifestyle, due to a combination of over-planting, drought, and loss of lucrative trade after the collapse of Old Kingdom Egypt to the south. Several cities were temporarily abandoned, and the walls of Jericho were damaged and repaired at least seventeen times. In a time of particularly severe famine, one group of Hebrews left Canaan and moved down into well-watered Egypt, led by Abraham's grandson **Jacob**. On the journey, the *Covenant* between God and his chosen people was renewed, after a mysterious incident in which Jacob wrestled all night with the angel. God gave Jacob a new name "Israel", and from each of his twelve sons descend the "*twelve tribes of Israel*". The Hebrews / Israelites settled in the eastern Nile Delta, and prospered for a time. It was probably in Egypt that the Jews adopted circumcision as a distinctive mark of their community, because it was normal practice there. However, after the Second Intermediate, the Egyptian population grew understandably uncomfortable about the vigorous Israelites; after-all, they had in recent memory been dominated by the Hyksos, another group of Western Semites. The book of Exodus tells us that the Egyptian pharaoh rounded up the Israelites as slave labour for his building projects, and ordered all male Hebrew children thrown into the Nile. One mother, however, sealed her baby boy in a papyrus basket, and set it in reeds by the river, right near the place where the Egyptian princesses came down to bathe. A princess found the baby, recognized him as one of the Hebrews, but decided to adopt him as her own, under the name of **Moses**. On the face of it, the adoption seems unlikely, but we do know that Pharaohs often married the daughters of eastern royalty at this time; this princess could easily have been of Western Semitic stock; or perhaps she knew the story of Sargon’s birth, which served as a proof of divine chosenness. Raised in the palace, Moses, as a grown man, heard the call of God; he was to lead the *Children of Israel* out of slavery, back up to the land promised to Abraham. Inevitably, the Pharaoh refused, but each refusal was followed by divine reprisal - the *Ten Plagues* - until his resistance finally buckled. At this point we might hope for help from Egyptian sources, but, after a century of research, most scholars have abandoned the search for evidence of an Egyptian captivity and escape as a fruitless pursuit. There is only tradition, as there is only tradition for all Jewish history until the twelfth century BC. The *Exodus* became the central event in the history of the Jews. It is a story dominated by Moses, who managed the exodus, and held the Israelites together in the Sinai wilderness for fourty years. He did so by founding the Law, bringing down the *Ten Commandments* from his encounter with Yahweh on Mount Sinai; Jews were to worship Yahweh alone, to showed their devotion to Him through rituals, and to please Him by living up to high moral standards. This renewal of the *Covenant* was the bedrock of Jewish national identity, and led to a political reorganization; the formal recognition of the twelve tribes. Moses died just before the Israelites entered Canaan, but he had prepared them well for their inheritance.

Archaeology finally comes to the historians’ aid with the arrival of the Israelites at the southern border of the Western Semitic lands. The Biblical account of the **conquest of Canaan** fits evidence that the region was disputed between two religious traditions and two peoples throughout the twelfth century BC. Despite the resounding story of the walls of Jericho falling down when Joshua, the chosen successor of Moses, marched around them, the texts makes it plain that the conquest was a long and fiercely contested process. With the twelve tribes united only by their worship of Yahweh, each enjoyed their own small victories under their own local heroes. This, of course, again illustrates the collapse of Egyptian power, because such an important region could not have fallen prey to a minor Semitic people otherwise. The Israelites took as well as destroyed. They were in many ways less culturally sophisticated than the Canaanites, adopting their writing system and building practices, though without always reaching the same level of urban life as their predecessors. It seems to have been the challenge from the formidable Philistines, living along the Mediterranean coast, that spurred the next stage in the consolidation of a nation. During the settlement period the only Israelite political institution was a series of chief judges, prophets said to be chosen by God to guide them through crises. The penultimate and most famous was the supernaturally strong Samson, who "ruled" for twenty years, until betrayed by his lover Delilah. Captured and hauled off to Gaza, he prayed to God, and recovered his strength, allowing him to bring down the temple on himself and thousands of the enemy. This sort of Pyrrhic victory reflected a stalemate. No Philistine leader was powerful enough to pull together an army from all of their five cities, while the judges of Israel, their theological authority notwithstanding, had even less authority. Finally, the Israelites decided that they needed a king, and the last judge Samuel chose the impressively tall Saul (d. 1010 BC). The **Kingdom of Israel** (1037-587 BC) was thus established, but royal power was not universally accepted. Disagreement over several issues lost Saul the support of Samuel. And he had a dangerous rival in the young David (d. 970 BC), who won fame by defeating the Philistine champion Goliath in single combat. Paranoid that David was seeking to usurp the throne, Saul attempted to have him killed, forcing him to go into hiding. After Saul's death, the people of Judah, to the south, chose David as their king, while Saul's son struggled to maintain his inheritance in the north. After seven years of chaos, the northern tribes invited David to become their king as well. David's first act as king of all twelve tibes was to seize the Canaanite stronghold of Jerusalem, and make it his capital. To give the city religious significance, he had the *Ark of the Covenant* - containing the two stone tablets of the *Ten Commandments* - moved there. He intended to build a temple to house it, but God denied him this, because of his well-known flews such as greed, lust, selfishness. Yet David went on the decisively defeat the Philistines, and conducted a series of successful campaigns that extend his control over almost all of the Western Semitic lands. He chose Solomon (d. 931 BC), from among his many sons by many wives, to be his successor. The Biblical portrayal of Solomon is paradoxical. On the one hand, he is credited with great wisdom, wealth, and power. Certainly the building of the *"First" Temple* in Jerusalem was just one part of the largest building program ever seen in Western Semitic lands. On the other hand, Solomon's heavy taxes and conscript labour caused disaffection among the populace, especially of the northern tribes. Moreover, his tendency to secure friendly relations with the neighbouring kingdoms through marriage - according to tradition he had 700 wives and 300 concubines - led him into idolatry; foreign wives meant tolerating the cults of their gods. Solomon’s ambition to turn Israel into an great kingdom instead helped destroyed it.

Upon Solomon's death, his son Rehoboam was unable to prevent the kingdom splitting in two. The ten northern tribes seceded and proclaimed an official named Jeroboam as their king; the Kingdom of Israel (930-720 BC). Only Rehoboam’s own tribe, Judah, and the tiny tribe of Benjamin remained loyal to Jerusalem; the Kingdom of Judah (930–587 BC). The weakness and division of the Israelites did not go unnoticed by their neighbours. The Egyptians were enjoying a very brief renaissance under a Libyan warlord named Shishak. He marched up the coast, and laid siege to Jerusalem. The city-walls remained intact, though. In other words, the southern kingdom bought off the attackers with the palace treasure, and became an Egyptian vassal for a time. In contrast, the northern kingdom was regarded as an important power in the region, as evidenced by successfully fended-off a series of Neo-Assyrian invasions from the late-ninth century BC onwards. This doesn’t get much play in the Biblical account, which is more concerned with presenting its story as a parable about the danger of idolatry. No northern king, not even the strongest, would pull down the ancient Canaanite shrines at Bethel and Dan, remembered for the idol of the golden calf. This eventually invited God's wrath, and , in 722 BC, the Kingdom of Israel fell to the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II (d. 705 BC). As per Assyrian policy, the population was deported en masse across Mesopotamia, giving rise to the persistent legend of the *Ten Lost Tribes of Israel*. Judah lasted longer. It was more compact and somewhat less in the path of great powers; though, it did become a Neo-Assyrian vassal state from 701 BC. By the sixth century BC, the international situation had changed; Babylon, rather than Assyria, was once again the dominant power in Mesopotamia. In 598 BC, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (d. 562 BC) conquered the Kingdom of Judah, plundered Jerusalem, and systematically destroyed Solomon's Temple; not a trace could later be found. The Judaeans then suffered mass deportation too; large numbers were carried away to captivity in Babylon, while others escaped into exile in Egypt. This was the great defining experience of ***The Exile***, a period so important that afterwards we may properly speak of "the Jews". This period saw the last high point of Biblical prophecy in the person of Ezekiel, whose faith in the ultimate establishment of a new *Covenant* with God had a profound influence on the reconstruction and reorganization of Judaism. The authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible (or *Torah*), and the synagogue as an institution, can be traced to the Babylonian exile; crucial elements in the Jewish ability worship anywhere, and to retain their identity regardless of circumstance. It is also believed that the concept of the Messiah first entered Jewish tradition at this time, a beacon of light in dark times; and of course crucial to the beginnings of Christianity. There was a narrowing of the Jewish community, too. According to Ezekiel, redemption must lie though purification. Hebrew laws on marriage were more rigidly enforced; a Jew, already married to a gentile wife, was obliged to divorce her. This became more obvious after the Persians conquered Babylon in 539 BC, and the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem, as a self-governing vassal state,

The circumstances which had favoured the appearance of a Jewish state had disappeared. Since the days of Hammurabi, the Mesopotamian valley had been the seat of no great empire, though such a sweeping statement conceals much. One king of Assyria, Tukulti-Ninurta (d. 1207 BC), conquered Hittite Syria and Kassite Babylon, and defeated the Elamites, who had themselves been coveting Babylon. But his empire was soon swept a cluster of Semitic desert-dwellers whom scholars call the Aramaeans, together with a new line of Kassite kings in Babylon, For the next two-centuries or so, these three peoples made awkward and touchy neighbours, until shape began to reappear in this turmoil of events in the ninth century BC. Then, as the Bible account tells us, Assyrian armies were once again on the move; the **Neo-Assyrian Empire** (911–609 BC). This was an important and particularly unpleasant phase of Near Eastern history. Assyria was the first society to make militarism the central policy of state. Fed by conscription of all males, and armed with siege engines able to breach walls until this time impregnable, the Assyrian war-machine moved outwards through unconquered territory each spring. Resistance was often brief, for their custom was to make an example of any city which refused to capitulate. Siege artillery was brought up, and the end was usually swift. Soon the ruling elites were dangling from poles around the city-walls, while their people were taken as slaves, and others would be moved into the new territory; the probable fate of the *Ten Tribes of Israel*. Other cities understand the message, and open their gates. The Assyrian peak followed 729 BC, when Babylon was seized. Israel, Syria, Lower Egypt, Cilicia (southern Anatolia), Cyprus, and northern Arabia were soon annexed. Finally, in 646 BC, the Assyrians made their last important conquest, the northern part of the lands of Elam. The consequences for the Near East were of great importance. A standardized system of government and law spanned the whole region. Conscript soldiers and deported populations were moved about within it, sapping its provincialism. Aramaic spread widely as a common language. A new cosmopolitanism became possible after the Assyrian age. Meanwhile, the profits of conquest financed the building of a new and spectacular capital at Nineveh by Sargon II (d. 705 BC). His son, Sennacherib (d. 681 BC), added a great palace, which he called *ekallu ša šānina la išu ("the* *Palace without Rival*"); it covered more than half a square-mile of land, ornamented throughout with superbly sculpted reliefs commemorating the great deeds of Assyrian kings, as well as another theme monotonously repeated; sackings, enslavement, impalement, torture and the final solution of mass deportation. Ashurbanipal (668–626 BC ) left his own monuments, but his finest relic was the world's first great library. In it he accumulated copies of all that he could discover of the records and literature of ancient Mesopotamia; more than 30,000 tablets and fragments (now mostly in the British Museum), including the famous *Epic of Gilgamesh* in its fullest edition. But the death of Ashurbanipal, in 631 BC, was close to Assyria's end.

    One of the fundamental reasons was the inability of the Neo-Assyrian kings to resolve the "*Babylonian problem*"; a brutal sack of the ancient city in 689 BC led to prolonged unrest, frequent periods of outright revolt, and, eventually, to devastating revenge. Ashurbanipal's son was immediately faced by the revolt of his brother. In the middle of this mess, another revolt of Babylon under Nabopolassar (d. 605 BC), combined with an invasion by a dangerous new neighbour, the Kingdom of the Medes, to swiftly sweep the Neo-Assyrians away. In 612 BC, Nineveh was captured and destroyed after a three-month siege. Assyria's collapse left the Fertile Crescent open to new masters. The Medes were content with the eastern territory (for now), so the **Neo-Babylonian Empire** (626–539 BC) became the dominant power in Mesopotamia for the first time in a thousand years. Nabopolassar's son, Nebuchadnezzar II (d. 562 BC), gave Mesopotamian civilization an Indian summer of grandeur. If for nothing else, he would be remembered as the destroyer of the Jerusalem in 587 BC, and then carrying of the Jews into their Babylonian captivity, to carry out the embellishment of his capital. According to tradition, he was also the creator of the *Hanging Gardens of Babylon,* one of the *Seven Wonders of the World*. And he was the greatest king of his time, perhaps of any time until his own. The great glory of the empire was an annual New Year's Festival, celebrated in honour of the city's patron deity, Marduk. Each year, all the Mesopotamian gods - the idols and statues of provincial shrines - were borne down the rivers and canals to take counsel with Marduk at his temple. The destiny of the entire whole world was then debated and determined for another year. Thus theology reflected the political reality; Marduk's eternal supremacy endorsed the absolute monarchy of Babylon. But Nebuchadnezzar’s successors were less effective. And they had the misfortune to be close neighbours of the greatest empire-builder to have emerged by this stage in history; Cyrus the Great,of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. On 12 October 539 BC, Cyrus' army entered Babylon without the need for battle, after his engineers diverted the waters of the Euphrates. In so far as the story of antiquity has a turning-point, this is it. An independent Mesopotamian tradition going back to Sumer was over. We are at the edge of a new age, in which the Persian East or Greco-Roman West would dispute mastery of the "civilised world".

### Civilisation in India

In the years when the Egyptian *Pharaohs* were building the earliest pyramids, and the Sumerian kings of Kish collected tribute from the shipping up and down the Euphrates, another great civilisation of ancient times had appeared on the Indian subcontinent. Even now, the diversity of Indian life is enormous. The subcontinent is, after-all, about the size of Europe and divided into regions clearly distinguished by climate and terrain. From the very beginning of Indian history, the peoples of the south, the northeast, and the northwest lived independent of each other. The north and south were divided from each other by two mountain ranges, the Vindhya and Satpura. As the weather warmed, a desert three hundred miles wide spread its sands between the two great river valleys of the north, the Indus and Ganges systems. When written history begins, its racial complexity, too, was already very great: scholars identify six main ethnic groups. Many others were to arrive later and make themselves at home within Indian society. All this makes it hard to find a focus. Yet, Indian history has a unity in the fact of its large measure of insulation from the outside world by geography. Until the oceans began to be opened-up in the sixteenth century AD, India had only to grapple with occasional, though often irresistible, incursions by alien peoples. To the north, she was protected by some of the highest mountains in the world; to the north-east lay belts of jungle. The other two sides of the sub-continent opened-out into the huge expanses of the Indian Ocean. This natural definition not only restricted external forces, it also gave India a distinctive climate. Much of it does not lie in the tropics, but nonetheless the climate is tropical. The mountains keep away the icy winds of Central Asia; rain-laden clouds roll in from the oceans, which cannot go beyond the northern ranges. The climatic clock is the annual monsoon, bringing the rain during the hottest months of the year. Although protected in some measure from the outside world, India's north-western corner is more open. The mountain passes of the Hindu Kush were the most important zones of encounter between India and other peoples; even India’s contacts with China were first made by this roundabout route. This is suggestive when we consider the first Indian civilizations.

    We do not know much about **Indus Valley Civilisation** (2600-1900); also called "Harappan" civilisation after its earliest-discovered site, the city of Harappa. The people who settled along the length of the Indus river (straddling the modern India–Pakistan border) did not set down their achievements on tablets. Nor did they carve the likeness of their leaders on stone. What remains of their civilization consists of city ruins, a whole assortment of seals used to identify goods for trading, and a few brief inscriptions that no one can read, since the script has never been deciphered. Archaeological evidence shows that agriculture came later to India than to the Fertile Crescent. It, too, can first be traced in the north-west corner of the sub-continent from about 6000 BC; there is the reasonable possibility of direct Mesopotamian influence, though it would be rash to be assertive about that. Three thousand years later, a string of farming villages had spread along the lower Indus River, and along the five branches of its upper end. Parallels with other river-valley cultures begin to be found, such as wheel-thrown pottery, copper implements, and baked bricks. When at last indisputable evidence of civilized life is available, the change is startling. By about 2600 BC, the villages along the Indus had turned into a network of cities. The great cities of the Mature Harappan period were Harappa itself on a northern branch of the Indus; Mohenjo-Daro, farther to the south; and Lothal, near modern Ahmedabad on the Gujarāt coast. More than seventy other sites have been uncovered. Harappan cities were astoundingly uniform, despite being spread across more than a quarter-million square miles; an area greater than either Sumer or Egypt. Even their bricks were of standard size. Each had a citadel and a residential area, with streets laid out on a rectangular grid pattern, wide enough for two oxcarts to pass each other. There was an elaborate sewage system with household drains leading into main sewers, and inspection holes for maintenance. The great granary at Harappa, for feeding the populace, was designed with bays to receive carts of grain, and air ducts to dry it; estimates put the population at some thirty-thousand at its peak. At Mohenjo-Daro, close to its granary, there was a great public bath-house. Perhaps it is not fanciful to see in this the first manifestations of an enduring feature of Indian life; the ritual ablutions still so important to Hindus. It is clear the Harappans had a well-developed economic life. Weights and measures seem to have been standardized over a large area. Evidence survives of specialist craftsmen drawing materials from far afield, and subsequently sending-out their finished-goods again. This civilization had cotton cloth - the first of which we have evidence - which was plentiful enough to wrap bales of goods for export. Harappan seals, of which thousands survive, turn up in the far corners of the Near East, Eastern Africa, and Central Asia. These seals, and a few inscriptions on fragments of pottery, provides our first evidence of Indian writing. Yet it has no message for us; the lack of long texts suggests that the script was limited to trading. With an effort we can imagine Harappan Civilization with faceless artisans, merchants, and labourers, but it has no recorded kings, battles, power struggles, or tales of heroes. Ideas and techniques from the Indus spread west through Sind (now southern Pakistan), north to the Punjab, and down the west coast of India. Where its influence did not reach – the Ganges valley and the south-east – different cultural processes were at work; there are traces of Chinese influence. Rice, for example, began to be grown in India in the Ganges valley from about 3000 BC. We do not know why the India's first civilization crumbled, though its passing can be roughly dated. The sense of order, so evident in the Indus cities, began to diminish after about 1900 BC. The Harappans were not brought down by hostile invasion. The ruins show no dropped weapons, no systematic destruction, and no signs of struggle around the citadel; which had, after-all, been built for just such an occasion. We have to assume that some kind of natural disaster; an epic flood, drought, or earthquake. Recent examination of skeletons show evidence of severe illnesses like anemia, leprosy, and tuberculosis, probably caused by severe malnutrition. Whatever the cause, most Harappan cities had been abandoned by sometime around 1700 BC.

A violent intrusion did come down into India from Central Asia, but not until about 1600 BC. These newcomers were the **Aryans** - from their own word for "noble" - an Indo-European people, who made their way through the Hindu Kush down into the Punjab in several waves. Their civilization was, at first, barely civilized at all. As a pastoral nomads of the steppes, they were accustomed to living in roving bands grouped around a war-leader; they did not farm; they did not build; they did not write; they had no culture so advanced as that of the Harappans. What they could do was fight, bringing bronze weapons, horses, chariots, and bows with range unlike anything India had seen. This was the beginning of centuries during which these migrants washed deeper and deeper into the Indus valley, and eventually reached the upper Ganges. No doubt much violence marked their coming, but there is plenty of evidence that the native populations lived on with them. Instead, there was a fusion of Aryan with earlier ways; the arriving Aryans adopted lives that were patterned much more after the vanished Harappans, while elements of Aryan culture were adopted by the peoples already there. This was process that took centuries; not until the coming of iron, after 1000 BC, was the Ganges valley fully colonized in a sprawl of villages. Meanwhile, the invaders had made two decisive contributions to Indian history, in its religious and in its social institutions. The deepest roots of Hinduism go very deep indeed. Practically every prehistoric people and nomadic tribe honoured a goddess of fertility, a guardian of farmers and herdsmen, a patroness of motherhood and childbirth. Many of these have been brought together in Shiva, one of the great popular cult figures today. Seals depicting a figure like an early Shiva, and stones like the phallic *lingam* (a symbol of Shiva), have been found in the Harappan cities. Vishnu, another focus of modern devotion, is much more an Aryan. Most historians believe Hinduism is a fusion or synthesis of beliefs from various sources. As Aryan culture spread over northern India, they did not obliterate indigenous cultures and practices. Instead, hundreds of local cults came to join their own gods and goddesses to form the Hindu pantheon. There is some debate over who influenced who more during this time. Whatever survived from the pre-Aryan past, the major philosophical and speculative traditions of Hinduism stem from the Aryan legacy; their language, Sanskrit, is the language of religious learning to this day. Around 1200 BC or so, they began to set-down in writing their own myths and ritual hymns, passed-down orally for many centuries, in the *Rig-Veda*, the earliest Hindu sacred text. Within the early pantheon of gods, the most important were: the fire-god *Agni*, through whose sacrificial flames men could reach the gods; the war-god *Indra*, who, year after year, slew a demon, and thus released the heavenly waters which came with the breaking of the monsoon; and the sky-god *Varuna*, embodiment of justice and the natural order. In the long term, none of these were to play a major role in Hinduism, but two minor characters in the *Rig-Veda* were waiting in the wings: *Vishnu* appears as a sun-god who occasionally helps *Indra* in slaying demons; and *Shiva* has a small and sinister part. Any society with complicated gods who make complicated demands stands in need of priests, as well as warlords. By the later verses, priests had become something more than simply specialists in god-care, but a hereditary class (*Brahman*); priests fathered sons who were trained to become priests, and who married daughters of other priests. Together with a hereditary class of warrior-chiefs (*Kshatriyas*), they were India's first true aristocracy, distinct from ordinary peasant-farmers (*Vaishyas*). These social divisions have survived to our own day, in what the Portuguese later gave the name we use, the *Caste System*. About the early history of this vast and complicated subject, it is impossible to speak with assurance. Once the rules of *Caste* were written down, they appeared as a hard and solid structure; movement between divisions was impossible. Yet this did not happen until *Caste* had been in existence for hundreds of years. As society became more complicated, two new categories were soon added to the earliest divisions: a class of landowners and merchants (*Gahapata*), and a voiceless and powerless class of people, the "unclean" (*Shudras*), whose origin is unclear, but the word eventually came to denote slave. This structure has been elaborated almost ever since, as a vast number of Castes and sub-Castes slowly inserted themselves.

By the seventh-century BC, Aryan culture had established something like a cultural unity in northern India. Its centre of gravity had also shifted from the Punjab to the Ganges Valley, which was already what it was to remain, the great centre of Indian population, its cultural domination assured as the centre of Indian civilization. A second age of Indian cities began there, together with the development of larger and better-equipped armies; we hear of war-elephants. By about 600 BC, the warlike clans had battled, negotiated, and treatied their way into a semi-stable arrangement of sixteen kingdoms; known as the *Mahajanapadas*. The processes in which they emerged are touched on in two great Indian epics, the *Ramayana* and the *Mahabharata*. Together with the *Upanishads*, sacred texts dating from about 700 BC, they mark the next important evolution towards **Classic Hinduism**. Although Hinduism, with its colourful pantheon of gods and goddesses, is usually viewed as a polytheistic religion, it can be interpreted as monotheistic. *Brahma* is, in a sense, the one supreme divinity, who sets all else in motion and in whose essence all human souls take part. He is too immense a concept for the human mind to comprehend, though, so presents himself in many different aspects and manifestations which people recognize as the gods. Of these, the most important are *Vishnu* and *Shiva*, who together with *Brahma* form the central "Hindu Trinity": Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer). An immense, all-embracing world view slowly emerged, in which all things are linked in a web of being. Souls might pass through different forms of this immense whole; they might move up or down between *Castes*, or even between the human and animal world. The duty of the devout Hindu is the observation of *Dharma* – a virtually untranslatable concept, but one which embodies carrying-out religious duties, behaving virtuously, striving to be the best version of oneself, and obedience to one's station in life. In the short term a good *Dharma* will lead to reincarnation in more fortunate circumstances, The ultimate purpose is to achieved *Moksha*; release from the recurring pattern of death and rebirth.

    During the days of the *Mahajanapadas* kingdoms, the *Kshatriya* held political power, but this must always have depended on a nice balance of relations with the *Brahman* priestly class. In almost every other ancient society, the kings dominated the rest; even those who paid lip service to the gods were likely to throw-in-jail or even execute their priests. But in India, the *Brahman* wielded a peculiar power of their own. It was still possible, at this time, for a man who had not been born *Kshatriya* to become king if the priests carried out the rituals bestowing sacred power upon him. But no one who was not born *Brahman* could become a priest. In such a rigidly hierarchical society, someone was bound to be discontent. In the sixth century BC, the rise of new ascetic movements challenged the formalism of orthodox Hinduism One very successful cult which did not require communication with the gods through the agency of the priests was **Jainism**, based on the teachings of Nataputta Vardhamana (d. 477 BC); also known as *Mahavira* ("Great Hero"). At the heart of the Jain doctrine is the principle of *Ahimsa*: non-violence against all living things, since any forms of life share with mankind the possession of a soul. This, of course, made agriculture or animal husbandry impossible, so Jains tended to become merchants and later bankers, with the result that, in modern times, the Jain community is one of the wealthiest in India. A few years later, an even more important reformer appeared; Siddhartha Gautama (d. 483 BC), better known as the Buddha ("Enlightened One"), founder of **Buddhism**. Gautama was born into wealth and privilege, a prince of the Shakya clan on the northern edge of the Ganges plain. After a comfortable and gentlemanly upbringing, he found his life unsatisfying and left home. His first recourse was extreme asceticism, divesting himself of all possessions except for a single garment, and spending his time in silence and meditation. Seven years of this proved to him that he was on the wrong path. He began instead to pursued a *Middle Way*, of reflecting on life in modest comfort. Following this decision, Gautama sat down with the determination under a pipal tree (known as the "Bodhi tree") in Bodh Gaya, a village in Bihar.

After seven days he had attained enlightenment, also called *Nirvana*; the knowledge of a truth which is caused by nothing, dependent on nothing, and leads to nothing (a way of existence impossible to define in words). Like other contemporary religious leaders, Gautama began preaching and gathering disciples. His message was plain to the point of bluntness; most Indians faced a lifetime of weary suffering, with no hope of escape except through rebirth, which might face them with another long life of suffering. It was an existence which, as one historian put it, did not so much promise hope, as threatened even worse. The Buddha taught his disciples that no obstacle prevented the soul from attaining *Moksha*, a concept common to Hinduism and Jainism. In the older two religion, the cycle of death and rebirth eventually leads *Moksha*, and release from the endless cycle. In Buddhism, it can be achieved in this life by following the *Eightfold Path*; that reasoning, mindfulness, and concentration would lead the mind to enlightenment. The Buddha apparently had great practical and organizational ability, as well as insight. By his death, at the age of about eighty, communities of Buddhist monks had been established across northern India. Wandering through villages and towns with their begging bowls, eager to describe the path to the truth, they were familiar figures. But so were many other such groups, including the Jains. The advance of Buddhism beyond the others was largely due to the enthusiastic support of a king of the 3rd century BC; Asoka the Great, ruler of much of the Indian subcontinent.

While Mahavira and the Buddha were preaching the freeing of the self from the material world, the rejection of material possessions, the kings of the Mahajanapadas were fighting to gain as much territory as possible. Vatsa, Avanti, and Kosala, to the north of the Ganga, were the major rivals in the wars of supremacy, trading off power with each other; none keeping it for long. But Magadha, below the Ganges, grew steadily in strength. Bimbisāra of Magadha (d. 492 BC) became the first Indian empire-builder, albeit in a minor way. He conquered the delta kingdom of Anga, which controlled the river’s access to the ocean; by way of the Bay of Bengal. It was also the first of the sixteen kingdoms to be permanently absorbed into another. Bimbisāra is also remembered as a great friend and protector of the Buddha. This was not merely a religious position, but a political one; any doctrine which reduced the power of the Brahmans was bound to increase the power of the king. By the late fourth century BC, Magadha was well on the way to becoming the centre of the first great Indian empire; the Maurya Empire.

### Civilisation in China

The most striking fact about Chinese history is that it has gone on for so long. For about 3,500 years, there has been a Chinese nation using a Chinese language. Its government as a single unit has long been taken to be normal, despite long periods of grievous division and confusion. China has had a continuing experience of civilization almost unrivalled in history. Somehow, at a very early date, it crystallized certain institutions and attitudes which were to endure; some of them even to transcend the revolution of the 20th century.

We must begin with the land itself, which, at first glance, does not suggest much that makes for unity. The physical setting of Chinese history is vast - almost three times bigger than India. From the Great Wall, which came to guard the northern frontier, to Hong Kong, more or less the southern tip, is 1,250 miles as the crow flies. This huge expanse contains many climates and many landscapes. Above all, northern and southern China are very different. In summer the north is scorching hot and arid, while the south is semi-tropical and prone to flooding; the north is cold and barren in the winter, while the south is always green. China’s major internal divisions are set by three great river valleys, which drain the interior, and run across the country, roughly from west to east. These are, from north to south, the Yellow River (or Huang He), the Yangtze River, and the Pearl River (or Zhu Jiang). It is surprising that a country so vast and so divided should form a unity at all. And yet, China is geographically isolated too; a world unto herself. It seemed inaccessible to outside influence, far removed from other great civilizations. Mesopotamia made more difference to India than any empire's rise or fall made to China. Moreover, her frontiers still sprawl across and along great mountain ranges and plateaux. These highlands are a great insulator. This arc is broken only where the Yellow River flows into northern China from Inner Mongolia. Originating in the High Kunlun, north of Tibet, the Yellow River loops north, skirting the Ordos Desert, itself separated by another mountain range from the desolate wastes of the Gobi, before turning south, and then flowing generally eastward across the North China Plain to the Bohai Sea. Through it have flowed people, ideas, and soil; and it is on the banks of this river that the story of civilization in China begins. As in other parts of the world, the coming of agriculture meant a revolution. It has been argued that peoples who lived in the semi-tropical south coast were clearing forests to make fields as far back as 10,000 BC. Certainly, rice was being farmed along the Yangtze around 7000 BC. In the north, people cultivated millet, a grain well-adapted to the sometimes arid climate. By the fifth millennium BC, four complex cultures can be identified; the Longshan culture, beneath the great southern bend of the Yellow River; the better-known Yang-shao on the river’s middle and lower reaches; the Qinglian’gang appeared further south on the Yangtze; and another culture, called Dapenken, sprang up on the south-east coast. We know almost nothing about these four groups. All we can do is label them with different names because they had different styles of pottery. Already things were being made which cannot have been intended for the rough and tumble of everyday use. The crafting of ceremonial vessels in forms which were to become traditional, the carving of turquoise and appallingly hard jade into intricate jewellery, and perhaps even the use of chopsticks. A fragment of silk from the Yellow River valley, the oldest in the world, shows that the Chinese domesticated the silk-worm as early as 3630 BC. In Neolithic times, then, this was already the home of much that is characteristic of the later Chinese culture.

    According to the Chinese myth, the world had its origin in a primordial creator, Pangu, who separated heaven and earth, and became geographic features such as the sun, the moon, mountains and rivers Afterwards, a succession of three divine and five earthly rulers helped create mankind, and imparted to them the essential skills and knowledge of human society. Because of their lofty moral character, they lived to great age, and ruled over a *golden age* in Chinese history. Perhaps the most famous of these rulers was the last, Yu the Great, the Chinese “Noah”, who controlled the flooding to render China habitable, It is at this point that China's prehistory begins to merge with history, for Yu is said to have founded the **Xia Dynasty** (2200-1766 BC), the first of the three dynasties of Ancient China. The Xia are generally regarded as more myth than fact, despite considerable effort to identify certain *Bronze Age* sites - such as Erlitou, just below the southern bend of the Yellow River - with the dynasty. It is more certain that, somewhere about 1766 BC, a tribe called the Shang, who enjoyed the military advantage of chariots, imposed themselves over a sizeable stretch of the middle Yellow River valley. The area the **Shang Dynasty** (1766-1046 BC) controlled was tiny, a matter of about 40,000 square miles; this made it somewhat smaller than half modern Henan province, though its cultural influences reached far beyond that. The political arrangements of the Shang seem to have been a matter of uniting the landholdings of tribe leaders with obligations to the king, including labour services and military duties. It has been described as "*feudal*". The ruins of Shang cities reveal that, in the first half of the dynasty, the Shang kings had no fixed capital city. Sima Quin (d. 86 BC), the historian who collected the traditional tales of ancient times into the seminal *Records of the Grand Historian*. tells us that the capital moved moved five, before finally settling at Yin (near modern Anyang) around 1400 BC, which inaugurated the dynasty's *golden age*. These shifts suggest a dynasty whose power was anything but unquestioned. Rather than resist over-mighty subjects around them, the Shang shifted their ground, and, in this way, managed to keep the crown in the family. The Shang kings may not have governed with the power of an Egyptian pharaoh, but what they could do when at full strength is shown in their ability to compel the labour of many hundreds of men. Excavations at one of the earlier capitals, near modern Zhengzhou, reveal walls of stamped earth some thirty feet high and forty thick enclosing a sizeable settlement. Outside Yin, eleven very deep and lavish tombs have been uncovered, which presumably belong to the eleven Shang kings who were recorded as having reigned there. The Shang court was sophisticated enough to use scribes and archivists, for this was the first truly literate civilisation east of Mesopotamia. All the great decisions of state, and many lesser ones, were taken by consulting oracles. A man or woman who sought guidance went to the Shang court to pose a question. This was done by engraving the shoulder-blade of an oxen (or less commonly the shell of a tortoise) with an inscription, and then applying a heated metal point so as to produce cracks. The path of the crack through the inscription was "read", and interpreted as a message, sent by departed ancestors, who now passed their wisdom back to the living. The veneration of ancestors does not imply the deification of the dead, but rather the dead, as spirits, merged with the divine, and became a means of connection to unseen forces. The goodwill of the ancestors was sought through offerings, including animal and human sacrifices. Excavations at Yin reveal that a ruler cannot be buried, or a building consecrated, without a retinue of ghostly retainers. Beneath each column of the largest buildings is a kneeling human, together with a dog, sheep, or oxen. Royal tombs demonstrate a similar reckless disregard for human life. The victims were likely prisoners of war. Religion had considerable repercussions on political forms. The heart of the ruling house’s claim to obedience was its religious superiority. In Shang times, few ancestors were thought likely to survive into the spirit world; only the spirits of particularly important persons, above all, the kings themselves. The oracle bones show that the questions, no matter who asked them, were always posed in the name of the king. The characters on the bones also provide us with evidence about the foundation of Chinese language, for they are basically those of classical Chinese. The Shang had over 4,600 different pictographic characters, some of which evolved, with only minor modifications, into the characters used in written Chinese today. There can be no better example of the continuity underpinning Chinese civilization. Apart from *oracle bones*, the most famous Shang artefacts are beautifully turned bronze-ware. Like pyramid-building, the mining and casting of bronze requires many multitudes of men, both hard-labourers and skilled craftsmen, to do nasty and labour-intensive work. No other ancient civilisation was able to cast bronze on such a scale; nor in such sophisticated forms. Bronze was used for the fittings of spoke-wheeled chariots; bronze buckles fastened the bridles of horses; soldiers were equipped with an assortment of bronze weaponry. Ritual vessels, the most elaborate of the bronze-ware, were often shaped like fantastical beast and birds. The production of bronze was controlled by the king, and suggests a great deal of autocratic authority. Yet Sima Qian makes constant mention of court officials and noblemen with clout of their own. This conflicting portrait boils-down to a simple reality: the Shang king was the spiritual head of all his people, but his real and earthly power existed inside a much smaller domain. His nobles governed farther-flung provinces in his name, but acted more or less as they pleased. Farther out lay peoples who sent tribute to the king only to avoid arousing his anger.

Shang China succumbed in the end to another tribe from the west of the Yellow River valley; the **Zhou Dynasty** (1046-256). The Zhou were not foreign invaders; nor were they exactly vassals of the Shang kings. Their land, after all, lay across the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River, some four hundred miles from Yin. The name "Zhou" appears often in the *oracle bone* inscriptions, sometimes as a friendly tribute-paying neighbour, and at other times as a hostile one. They came to adopt many aspects of Shang culture. The ancient chronicles make it very clear that the Shang brought rebellion on themselves, entering a cycle that would repeat again and again throughout Chinese history. The early kings earned their right to rule by hard-work and virtue. They passed their rule to their sons, but, as time went on, those sons grew corrupt, negligent, and cruel, and the people suffered under misrule. Conflict reached a head during the reign of the last Shang king, Chou (1075–1046 BC), who slowly alienated his people by committing all manner of immoral behaviour. According to Sima Quin, he created a new form of execution, known as the "*Burning Pillar*" punishment; officials or noblemen, suspected of disloyalty, were forced to hug a large hollow bronze cylinder stuffed with burning charcoal. He was challenged by Wen of Zhou (d. 1050 BC), and finally defeated by his son Wu (1046-1043 BC) in a great battle at a place called Muye. It was said that the Zhou headed a coalition of eight nations, but were still considerably outnumbered, and gained victory only because the Shang troops were driven to mutiny by the cruelty of their king. Chou fled back to his capital, where he donned jade armour in preparation for a last stand, but the invading Zhou forces burned down the palace around his ears. The new dynasty was not yet secure, however. King Wu died just three years after the conquest, leaving a young and inexperienced heir, Ch'eng (1042-1021 BC), and a huge territory to consolidate. This was accomplished by one of his brothers, Duke Dan of Zhou, who served as regent. The Duke of Zhou is one of the most celebrated figures of early Chinese history. Almost at once, rebellion broke-out in the east, led by a surviving prince of the Shang royal family. Even though it garnered the support of old Shang loyalists and several discontented Zhou nobles, the Duke of Zhou managed to quell the rebellion, and further expand the Zhou domain into the east. If the Zhou kings were to rule without constantly using the army to whip rebels into shape, then his divine authority needed to be clear. To counter the Zhou crisis of legitimacy, the Duke of Zhou introduced what was to prove one of China's most enduring political doctrines: the "*Mandate of Heaven*". No one wanted the Shang back, but their overthrow had to be justified with care. According to the doctrine, there exists a power, *Tian* ("Heaven"), superior to all the other gods and ancestral spirits of the dynasty, from which derived a mandate to rule. In return, the king had a moral obligation to use power for the good of his people, which spreads harmony throughout the land, and in turn demonstrates harmony with the divine. If he did not, he would lose the mandate, and harmony could only be restored by removal of the king. The concept is somewhat similar to the later European doctrine of "*divine right of kings"*, but with one key difference; the mandate was not unconditional. The right of rebellion against an unjust ruler existed in China, as it never did in Europe. On a more practical level, the Duke of Zhou organized the Chinese state into an efficient bureaucracy, perhaps for the first time. No divine mandate was going to convince peoples who lived a day’s ride or more from the capital city at Fenghao (near present-day Xi’an) that the Zhou king must be obeyed. That would have to be done by force. The eastern side of the kingdom was, perhaps, the most worrying, where the remnant of the Shang needed to be watched. So the Duke of Zhou built a fortress on the middle reaches of the Yellow River, to guard the eastern approach to the capital; a fortress that became the centre of the new city of Luoyang. Members of the ruling dynasty and trusted allies were sent-out to build similar centres of Zhou watchfulness at strategic spots along the periphery of the kingdom. Each of these became a hereditary fiefs, ruled by a royal relative, while still owing loyalty to the king. Sima Qian called these noblemen the “*Lords of the Nine Lands*”, though inscriptions on ceremonial gifts given and loyalties claimed suggest a still more complicated picture; a pyramid-like structure with as many as five ranks of noblemen sloping downwards from the throne. The Zhou position at the top was represented by the *Nine Cauldrons*, nine ceremonial vessels used to offer ritual sacrifices to the ancestors, which resided in the capital.

The Zhou Dynasty was the longest lasting of any in China's history. However, the great longevity of the royal line was not marched by a similar continuity of its rule. The early halcyon days of the Zhou became known as the **Western Zhou** (1046-771). It was characterized by rapid but unstable expansion of what may now be called Chinese civilisation. To begin with, Chinese culture was a matter of tiny islands in a sea of barbarism. Yet by the end of the period, it was the common possession of scores of what have been termed "states" scattered across the north, and as far south as the Yangtze valley. At first, the appointment of royal relatives and trusted allies to semi-independent fiefs created a viable political structure. However, by the ninth century BC, the stability of that arrangement began to collapse. The longer expansion went on, the more diluted the blood tie between king and lords became, and the more dependent the ruler became on the combined strength of his vassals. Inevitably, the "*Lord of Nine Lands*" acted with more and more independence. Bickering between the king and fief lords escalated, and more than once erupted into actual fighting. In 841 BC, the noblemen jointly expelled the tenth Zhou king, a tyrant, and power was held for fourteen years by the two most influential nobles, until the crown prince came of age. In 771 BC, the Zhou royal line was broken again, when King Yu (781–771 BC) was killed by invading barbarian nomads from the northern steppes. The barbarians may have been beaten away, but the western border was insecure, and the capital at Fenghao clearly no place for the king. The surviving crown prince, P’ing (770–720 BC), decided to withdraw to the east, to the safer city of Luoyang, which had been founded centuries before by the Duke of Zhou. The Western Zhou had ended; the era of the **Eastern Zhou** (771-221 BC) had begun, a violent and volatile time, which further subdivides into the *Spring and Autumn* (771-481 BC) and the *Warring States* (403-221 BC) periods. The former is named after the *Spring and Autumn Annals*, a chronicle of these years in the small state of Lu. As a result of the shift east, the royal domain and its influence shrank. Real power thereafter passed into the hands of the various feudal lords, who asserted their political autonomy, and waged war against one another. The Zhou kingdom now consisted of perhaps 160 states, of which many were tiny; a single city and surrounding land. Since more powerful states tended to conquer and incorporate weaker ones, the number of states declined over time. All the while, the Zhou kings cowered in the middle, clinging to a power which had become almost entirely ceremonial. The general agreement among the lords was that, even if the king did not actually rule, he stood at the centre of some sort of cosmic order that they would prefer not to disrupt.

    The Chinese world of the *Spring and Autumn* *Period* was both warlike and intellectually fertile, in a way similar to Classical Greece at roughly the same time. For the lords who disputed China, the price of survival was the development of better administrations to mobilize more soldiers and resources. The era was to remain famous as the time of the "***Hundred Schools of Thought***", when wandering thinkers moved about from patron to patron, expounding their ideas. One sign of this was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the appearance of the most famous treatise on military strategy; Sun-Tzu's *The Art of War*. Sun-Tzu (496 BC), a military advisor in the Wu state, had few illusions about what constant warfare was doing to his country; his central theme was to conquer your enemies, while avoiding as much actual fighting as possible. In a world where force-of-arms seemed to be the only glue holding a state together, the most famous of all Chinese thinkers offered another way. It is convenient to call him **Confucius** (d. 479 BC), though that is only a Latinized version of his Chinese name, *Kong Fuzi* ("Master Kong"). He was to be more profoundly respected in China than any other philosopher. What he said - or was said to have said - would shape his countrymen’s thinking for two thousand years; and was to be paid the dubious compliment of bitter attacks from the Marxist regime of the 20th century. Confucius came from the lesser nobility in the small north-eastern state of Lu. By the time he was twenty-one, he had married, fathered a son, and landed a job overseeing the granaries in his own state. This was a post that required attention to detail and perfect record-keeping, both of which young Confucius found himself naturally suited for. But his real passion was the rituals and ceremonies carried out in the state court, and the court of the Zhou king. He gained a reputation as a sort of walking thesaurus of ritual performance, which led to more important appointments in the Lu court. In his early thirties, Confucius was forced to go into exile, when internal turmoil flared-up in Lu. For several years, he wandered from state to state, trying to find a ruler who would put into practice his recommendations for just government. He reputedly asked 72 different rulers if he could advise them, before returning home, where he devoted the rest of his life to teaching, proclaiming his school open to talent regardless of birth or wealth. He is also traditionally credited with having authored or edited the *Five Classics* of the traditional Confucian canon; though modern historians are cautious about attributing them to Confucius himself. Confucius was deeply conservative. In fact, his love of past was so strong that he saw himself, not as the "inventor" of a new philosophy, but rather a "transmitter" of ancient moral traditions. He believed that, in the early Zhou period, China had experienced a golden age. He frequently cited the actions of Kings Wen and Wu, and especially those of the Duke of Zhou, as examples of appropriate behaviour. Confucius taught his pupils how to find both tranquillity and virtue in a world where neither was on conspicuous display. The man who knew his place and scrupulously performed his duties became the anchor for an orderly state and society. The practical expression of this was the strong Confucian predisposition towards hierarchies, and the due respect upwards to those higher in rank; older members of a family, senior members of government. He was not easy on those at the top, either. They must be benevolent in order to win the affection and respect of their juniors, and serve as an example of high moral standing. Confucius placed particular stress on the importance of self-cultivation. Self-cultivation was not only a matter of book-learning, but the value of good form and proper behaviour. The Confucian ideal was the *Junzi*, a term often translated as "gentleman". One aspect of *Junzi* was the "Golden Mean"; moderation in all things. Vulgar displays of wealth were frowned upon as distasteful and socially disruptive. Confucius' teachings were immediately successful in the sense that his pupils were much in demand as advisers among the competing states of China. And so his ideas were spread, and his disciples began, as they would continue - as civil servants. Confucian texts were to be treated with something like religious awe. And yet, it is striking that Confucius had so little to say about the supernatural; apart from the importance of ritual and ceremony, which he thought reinforced moral teachings and embedded them in daily life. Confucianism is so emphatically practical a creed that it can scarcely be called a religion. It was ill-equipped to satisfy the natural human need for something more mysterious. Chinese thought provided this in the form of **Daoism** (or Taoism)***.*** Its formulation is traditionally attributed to the semi-legendary sage, Laozi ("Old Master"), the supposed author of the *Tao Te Ching* ("the Way and its Power"), the foundational text of the philosophy (and later religion); though we know virtually nothing about him. Sima Qian tells us that Lǎozǐ grew weary of the division, chaos, and endless wars in China, and ventured west to live as a hermit in the *barbarian wilds*, leaving this small book with the gatekeeper of a western pass. Daoism urges submission to a conception already familiar in Chinese thought, that of *Dao* ("The Way"), an unknowable cosmic force which flows through all things, and sustains the harmoniously ordered universe. How this is achieved is a subtle mystery. Whereas Confucians were obsessed with the correct course of action in any situation, Daoists champions *Wúwéi* ("inaction"), allowing things to naturally occur without interference - to flow like water does in nature, effortlessly flowing around obstacles. Confucians yearned to serve a ruler; Daoists were famously uninterested in taking part in government. Followers of Daoism developed a diverse set of rituals and practices, ranging from monasticism to meditation, from energy healing to the pursuit of immortality through alchemy. Daoists were to irritate straight-laced Confucians for millennia, and yet the two systems of thought became like two sides of the same Chinese coin; opposites and complementary, the practical and the spiritual. A Chinese official is a Confucian while going about the business of government; if he loses his job, he may retire to a monastery as a Daoist; but a new job offer will rapidly restore him to Confucianism.

Although the *Spring and Autumn Period* was the cradle of the two most enduring schools of Chinese thought, Confucianism and Daoism, it was brought to an end by a more brutal philosophy, which historians refer to as *Legalism*. The Legalist responded to the lawlessness of the age by demanding more teeth for the law. They maintained that human nature was incorrigibly selfish; accordingly, the only way to preserve the social order was to impose discipline from above, by strictly enforcing a system of rewards and punishments. Legalism exalted the state above all, seeking its prosperity and martial prowess over the welfare of the common people. "*The object of rewards is to encourage desirable behaviour; that of punishments, to prevent undesirable behaviour,*" proclaimed a 4th century Legalist work. It was read with attention by the rulers of the Ch'in state, which emerged as one of the seven dominant powers of the *Warring States Period*, and ultimately unified China into a centralized political structure for the first time in history under Ch'in Dynasty.

### Civilisation in the Americas

The only other area where a startlingly high level of achievement was reached was the Americas. It is clear that the history of man on this vast landmass is much shorter than almost anywhere else. The first inhabitants of the Americas arrived from Siberia in several migrations, perhaps thirty-thousand years ago, crossing the land bridge (now submerged beneath the Bering Strait), which had formed due to glaciation and significantly lower sea-levels. They then filtered slowly southwards for thousands of years. Traces of cave-dwellers have been found in Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, from about 12,500 BC; the impression of a human footprint, probably from a child. The Americas contain very varied climates and environments. and it is scarcely surprising that evidence shows almost equally varied patterns of life, based on different opportunities for hunting, food-gathering and fishing. What is more certain is that some of these cultures arrived at the invention of agriculture without any import of techniques from the Old World. Maize (corn) began to be cultivated in Mexico before the third millennium BC, and, towards the end of it, had been domesticated. from ears about 5cm-in-length, into something like the plant we know today. Further south, evidence of potatoes and other starchy root vegetables appears at around the same time, and a little later there are signs that maize had spread southwards from Mexico.

The earliest recognized civilisation in Central America is that of the **Olmec Civilization** (1200-400 BC), on the eastern Mexican coast (now the states of Veracruz and Tabasco). It appears, apparently without antecedents, in a humid, swampy, forested region, which makes it hard to explain why civilization, which elsewhere required the relative plenty of the river valleys, should in America have sprung from such seemingly unpromising soil. Yet reliable rainfall and year-round warmth meant that crops could be harvested twice or even three-times a year. They also no doubt gathered the plentiful supply of local forest-foods and sea-life, including avocados, cacao, palm nuts, clams, and turtles. With an agricultural surplus, the Olmecs set about trading their crops for obsidian from the central highland to make tools, jade from the southeastern lowlands to create magnificently carved ornaments, and iron-ore from the rugged west to make polished mirrors (used by later Mesopotamian shamans to communicate with the gods). By 1200 BC, significant cities had developed, first at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, and then at La Venta and Laguna de los Cerros. While other areas were mere villages of wattle and daub, the Olmecs of San Lorenzo constructed the first monumental architecture of Mesoamerica; a massive earthen plateau rose fifty meters above the plain, with ceremonial buildings on top. Around 900 BC, San Lorenzo displays evidence of decline, at which point the the centre of Olmec civilization shifted to La Venta, which eventually boasted a population of some 18,000. La Venta initiated one of Mesoamerica's most long-lasting traditions, the construction of a great pyramid, one-hundred feet high and shaped life an effigy to a nearby volcano. But the best known Olmec artefacts are their colossal stone heads, basalt sculptures up to three-meters high with grim pug-nosed faces, and wearing curious helmets. The nearest basalt to San Lorenzo was thirty-miles away; eighty-miles from La Venta. The stone, of up to fifty tons, had to be cut without metal (probably rope-�and-water abrasion assisted by drilling), and transported without the wheel or pack animals (most likely on rafts), All this suggests a highly centralized and hierarchical society able to mobilize large amounts of labour, and support skilled artisans. Olmec cultural influence seems to have prevailed right across Central America, as far south as what is now El Salvador. It remains unknown why their civilization ended in about 400 BC. Its hallmark art style - snarling jaguar-human figurines and jade face masks - gradually disappear. Archaeological evidence shows that the population of their heartland dropped precipitously, and their centres were abandoned one by one. Olmec civilization transmitted something to the future, for their gods, such as the feathered serpent, persisted right through the pre-Columbian era. It seems likely that the hieroglyphic writing, system of Central America originated in Olmec times, though surviving evidence appears a century or so after its disappearance. They are also credited with, or speculatively credited with, the Mesoamerican Long Count calender, the invention of the zero concept, the ball-games, and the ritual of human sacrifice, which reached its grisly peak in the ceremonies of the Aztecs.

Much further south, in Peru, another complex culture appeared and survived a little later than the Olmecs. It, too, spread vigorously only to dry up mysteriously. The **Chavín Culture** (900-250 BC) had long been regarded as the "mother culture" of South America. But in recent decades, archaeologists have discovered new evidence of a far earlier complex society in the Norte Chico region of Peru, along the Supe River. Aspero was the first of many such sites to be discovered, of which Caral is the largest. They reveal sophisticated architecture, including pyramids and raised platforms, dating from around 3000 BC; contemporary with the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But we know much more about Chavín Culture, which was much more of a religious and cultural phenomenon, than a political one. By 900 BC, a settled agricultural way of life had spread across much of Peru. Until the Chavin, numerous local cultures of considerable diversity achieved importance at a regional level, but tended to have little interaction with one another, apart from quarrelling with neighbours over water sources. The main Chavin site, the magnificent temple complex of Chavín de Huántar, is about 10,000 feet above sea level, in the Andean highlands of central Peru. It became an important pilgrimage site throughout the region, transcending local rivalries. Ancient landslides had left natural terracing, and an ample supply of stone, that ensured the growth of the site. At its peak, Chavín de Huántar had a population of up to 3,000, and covered an area of 100 acres. Associated with agricultural fertility, Chavin religious ceremonies involved a multi-sensory spectacle. Two staircases descend into the labyrinthine temple interior of passageways, galleries, and rooms. An added aura of religious mystery was achieved with stone reliefs depicting fantastical or transformational creatures, priests suddenly appearing from secret passages, and a cacophony of sound. Shells were carved into trumpets, and the temple itself had many water channels, through which water would have run under pressure, creating an impressive noise in the confined inner. The ritual activity of the Chavín is not fully understood, but it is believed the priests were oracles, who gave answers to pilgrims in return for offerings. Chavin art was equally influential, and its style of architecture, sculpture, pottery, and textiles represents the first widespread, recognizable artistic form in the Andes. For the first time, most of the local or regional cultures of Peru were unified by a common iconography, religion, and ideas.

In the Americas, the Olmec and Chavin foundations proved very important. When the Spanish landed in the New World nearly two-thousand years after their disappearance, they would find most of its inhabitants still working with stone tools. They would also find remarkable civilisations, and the relics of others, in the same two culturally important areas.

### The Rest of the World

So far, huge areas of the world have still hardly been mentioned. This is, in the main, because none of them had achieved levels of civilization comparable to those already reached in the Mediterranean and Asia by the first millennia BC. The story of Africa, of the Pacific peoples, and of western Europe is not history but still prehistory, even if one or two instances may reopen the argument about what constitutes "civilization". Africa is a good place to start, because, after its importance in the story of human evolution, its history has often been overlooked. When New Kingdom Egypt was in the final stages of decline, it empowered the first independent African state (other than Egypt) of which we have information; the **Kingdom of Kush** (1000 BC-350 AB), high up the Nile, in present-day Sudan. This had been the extreme frontier of Egyptian activity after Nubia had been absorbed. The Kushites, free from Egyptian incursions into their territory, founded the kingdom with its capital at Napata (now modern Karima), Kush became the power in the region as Egypt floundered, and, by 730 BC, was strong enough to conquer southern Egypt; five of its kings ruled as the Pharaohs, known as the Twenty-Fifth (or "Kushite") Dynasty. When the Assyrians fell on Egypt, the Kushites turned their attention to pushing their frontiers southwards, which resulted in two important changes; its culture became less clearly influenced by the Egyptians, and it extended over territory containing iron ore. Having learned the technique of iron smelting from the Assyrians, this became the basis for another three centuries of prosperity and civilization.

To the great civilizations which rose and fell in the river valleys of the Near East, Europe the was largely an irrelevance, except as a supplier of metals. For the sake of clarity, two Europes must be distinguished; the Mediterranean coasts, where literate, urban cultures came fairly quickly once we are into the Iron Age; and north of this line, where literacy was never achieved in antiquity, but imposed much later by conquerors. Yet, western Europe had one art form which remains indisputably impressive. It is preserved in the thousands of megalithic monuments to be found in a broad arc from Malta, Sardinia and Corsica, around through Spain and northern France, to the British Isles and Scandinavia. Megaliths are not unique to Europe, but are more plentiful than on other continents, and seem to have been erected earlier; a stone passage grave at Finistère in Brittany dates from around 4800 BC. Over the centuries, an astronomical theme is added; they begin to be aligned in relation to the sun. An outstanding example is at Newgrange in Ireland, dating from about 3400 BC. At sunrise on the winter solstice, the rays penetrate the length of the passage grave to illuminate the innermost sanctum. In the later stage of this mysterious tradition, the megaliths emerge in their own right as great standing stones, often arranged in circles; sometimes laid out in patterns which run for miles. The most striking site is *Stonehenge*, in southern England, whose function is not easy to say, though it has been argued that the cluster of stone operated as a giant calendar or solar observatory. These relics represent huge concentrations of labour and argue for well-developed social organization. This has led some enthusiasts to claim Western Europe as another seat of early "civilization", almost as if its inhabitants were some sort of depressed class needing historical rehabilitation. But even at the beginning of the Christian era, Europe had little of its own to offer the world except its minerals. Europe’s time was still to come; hers would be the last great civilization to appear.