End of Classical Antiquity

The **Classical Antiquity** lasted from about 776 BC until 476 AD. The choice of these dates is, of course, a wholly Eurocentric view, covering the centuries from the emergence of the Greco-Roman civilisation, until it finally cracked apart with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

The Romans had thought their civilisation was the best conceivable, and were proud of it. They were not unique in this. Most great civilizations have had *classical* ages from which they draw the standards by which they assess their own later achievements. They were neither simultaneous, nor equally successful. Some of them racing ahead to lasting achievements, while others declined in a few generations, even if after spectacular flowerings. All faced common problems associated with the maintenance large armies and bureaucracies, the cost of which fell heavily on the population; a peasantry prone to rebellion; hostility of the nobility to centralized rule; *barbarian* pressure on the frontiers; and an ever-present tendency for the whole thing to fly apart.

In China, the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC) succeeded in reuniting this great land mass after the gradual collapse of the ancient Zhou Dynasty. While harsh autocracy was effective in creating an empire in a military fashion, it proved perhaps unworkable for governing it in peacetime. The Qin lasted only fifteen years, before collapsing into widespread civil war, from which emerged the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). Later dynasties would looked back to the Han period as a *Golden Age*, that created a cultural identity among its populace still remembered in the term "*Han Chinese*", used today to signify someone who is ethnically Chinese. At its peak, their empire spanned the whole of modern China, and penetrated Korea in the east, Mongolia in the north, Vietnam in the south, and as far west as the Pamir Mountains (modern day Tajikistan). Han involvement in Central Asian prompted them to seek new allies against the troublesome steppe-nomads, most famously the 13-year journey of Zhang Qian (d. 113 BC); the first fully documented contact between China and the Greco-Roman world. Twenty years after his return, the Silk Roadwas an established thoroughfare of transcontinental trade. Han China gradually became the largest economy of the classical world. Science and technology during the period saw significant advances too, including the process of papermaking, junk ship capable of venturing into the open ocean, the use of negative numbers in mathematics, the raised-relief map, a three-dimensional representation of the celestial sphere in astronomy, and a seismometer to discern the direction of distant earthquakes. In China, dynasties would rise and fall, but, by sharp contrast to the Mediterranean-European world, dynastic unity would be restored. After 92 AD, palace power struggles combined with large peasant revolts to cause the Han's slow decline and ultimate downfall. In China, by sharp contrast to the Mediterranean-European world, there was nothing like the scale of cultural and economic collapse of the so-called *Dark Ages.* Dynasties would rise and fall, but political unity would eventually be restored with a striking level of continuity. Two factors were crucial in this: the enduring Confucian bureaucracy, and China’s remarkable powers of cultural assimilation. *Barbarian* invaders invariably lost their own identities in time, and became only another kind of Chinese.

For India, classical antiquity encompasses the period from the Maurya Empire (322-185 BC), up until the end of the Gupta Empire (320-550 AD). Soon after the departure of Alexander the Great from north-western India, Chandragupta Maurya founded the first great Indian empire, the Maurya Empire. It reached it's peak under his grandson Ashoka, one of India's most illustrious rulers; the Lion Capital of Ashoka is the national emblem of the modern Republic of India. He controlled all the Indian subcontinent except for the extreme southern part, the largest political entity to have existed in the Indian subcontinent until the 20th-century. He is remembered for his vigorous patronage of Buddhism, whose vitality during this time may be seen in the religion's first great expansion to Burma and Sri Lanka. His empire began to crumble soon after his death, and India descended into four centuries of regionalism. The most important process during this time was a fresh infusion of Greco-Persian and Central Asian influences into Indian culture, and vice versa: the sculpture of the era shows a Hellenistic flavour, trade along the Silk Road became substantial; Buddhism spread to China; and Christianity reach India. India's classical antiquity reached its zenith in the Gupta Empire of northern India. During the Golden Age of the Guptas, virtually every aspect of culture flourished; philosophy, literature, science, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, technology, art, engineering, religion, and astronomy. A layman can perhaps glimpse its importance from the invention of the decimal system by Indian mathematicians in the 5th century AD. Strong trade ties saw India's cultural influence felt as far away as Burma, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. It was also during this era that Hinduism asserted a new strictness of conservative religious practice, whose outstanding expression was the Caste System and increasing subordination of women.

The Romans had thought their civilisation was the best conceivable, and were proud of it. They were not unique in this. The same was true of men in other parts of the world. Most of the globe’s surface was then still without civilization, but what was civilized fell into relatively few zones in each of which powerful, distinctive, often self-conscious and largely independent traditions were at work. One result was that Chinese, Indian, western European and Persian Islamic civilizations all lived independently long enough to leave ineradicable traces in the ground-plan of our world.

## History

### Classical Antiquity in India

Alexander the Great had only hazy ideas of what he would find in India; he seems to have thought that the Indus was part of the Nile. A fair amount had long been known by the Persians about the Indian north-west, neighbouring the satrapy of Gandhara (now northern Pakistan). But beyond that all was darkness. So far as political geography is concerned, the obscurity has remained; the relations between, and, for that matter, the nature of the Mahajanapada kingdoms of the Ganges valley at the time of Alexander’s invasion are still hard to get at. The Kingdom of Magadha, based on the lower river, had been the richest and most important state for a century or more, and exercised some sort of hegemony over the rest of the valley; but not much is known about its institutions or history. Indian sources say nothing of Alexander’s arrival in India. Since the great conqueror was forced to confine his campaign to the Punjab and Sindh, we can learn from Greek accounts only of his disruption of the petty kingdoms there, not about the heartland of Indian power. Under Alexander's successors in the region, Seleucid Persia, more reliable information becomes available. This roughly coincided with the rise of the greatest Indian empire-builder yet. Chandragupta Maurya (324-295 BC) came to power in his own small kingdom of Maurya. Not long after his accession, he made war on the last Nanda king of Magadha, whose brutality had made him unpopular; Chandragupta found plenty of support. The conquest of Magadha turned his little kingdom into an empire; the **Maurya Empire** (322-184 BC). Chandragupta's rise to power was partly due to the savvy of his closest advisor, Kautilya (d. 283 BC). Kautilya is traditionally credited with writing the ancient Indian political treatise, the *Arthashastra*; the surviving text was probably set down somewhat later, but Kautilya’s kernal remains. The ruler, Kautilya wrote, had two tasks; to enforce internal order, by ensuring his subjects properly observed their own *caste* and duties; and to preserve external order, by suspecting every neighbour of planning on conquest and taking appropriate precautions. Whether Chandragupta's neighbours were planning conquest or not, he himself certainly was, rapidly expanding his power westwards across central and western India. This eventually brought him into conflict with Seleucus I, the Macedonian general who had claimed Alexander’s Indian gains, along with his other Asian territory. The result was a treaty by which Seleucus ceded his Indian territory (and most of Afghanistan) to the Mauryas. and the latter presented him with five-hundred war-elephants, a military asset which would play a decisive role in the wars with other Hellenistic states. A marriage alliance is also mentioned, but no details are recorded. The treaty ushered in an era of friendly relations between the Mauryas and the Seleucids, with exchanges of envoys. One among them, Megasthenes (d. 290 BC), recorded his impressions of India at this time; which has survived in Greek texts that quote him. Some later writers found him a credulous and unreliable reporter; dwelling upon his fanciful tales of men who subsisted on odours instead of food, of others who were cyclopean or pygmies or without mouths. But such tales were not necessarily without foundation. They may well represent only the highly developed Aryan Indian prejudice against aboriginal neighbours or remoter acquaintances with peoples of the Burmese jungles. Megasthenes described the capital at *Pataliputra* (modern-day Patna), where Chandragupta inhabited a magnificent palace; made of wood unfortunately, so archaeology still cannot help us. The Mauryan Empire was a centralised bureaucratic state, or at least something that aspired to be one; massive public works brought large areas of wasteland under cultivation, thereby feeding a growing population and increasing the tax base; internal trade expanded greatly, if we may judge from the way northern pottery spread throughout India in the next century; there was a large and powerful army; and diplomatic missions which ranged as far afield as Epirus in western Greece. When not holding court, the king could be found hunting, shooting arrows from a raised platform, or out in the wild on the back of his favourite elephant. About the empire’s inhabitants, Megasthenes is informative too. He distinguishes the three major religious traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), mentions the habit of eating rice, and remarked on the surprising fact, to Greek eyes, that in India there were no slaves; he was wrong but understandably so. Though Indians were not bought and sold in absolute servitude, they were strictly bound to their status by the *Caste System*. According to Jain sources, Chandragupta became a Jain toward the end of his reign. He abdicated in favour of his son Bindusara (297-273), and lived as an ascetic monk for several years, before dying, in the orthodox Jain manner, by deliberate slow starvation. Bindusara's twenty-five year reign is not well documented. The Greeks called him *Amitrochates* (“slayer of enemies”), a name for a conqueror. According to Buddhist texts, written several centuries later, Bindusara conquered “the land between the two seas,” which suggests that the empire expanded south into the Deccan. Beyond that lay other friendly kingdoms; Chera on the south-western coast of the subcontinent; Andhra in the central south; and a collection of small Tamil states at the southern tip. Apart from these southern states, Kalinga, to the east, was the only kingdom in India to resist the spread of the Mauryan rule. When Bindusara died, his son Ashoka was left the task of subduing it.

Under Ashoka (268-232 BC), popularly known as **Ashoka the Great**, a documented history of India at last begins to be possible. He issued a large number of edicts, which were inscribed on rocks (the *Rock Edicts*), and later on sandstone pillars (the *Pillar Edicts*), dispersed throughout the empire. These Edicts give glimpses of Ashoka’s early life. His father sent him to Taxila, in the Punjab, to put down a rebellion when he was a very young man. Having succeeded at Taxila, his father next sent him to govern Ujjain, one of the four provinces (or *janapada*) into which the empire had been divided. There, he fell in love with a beautiful woman named Devi, the daughter of a merchant. The pair never married, although he fathered two children by her; one of whom later became a Buddhist monk, which suggests Devi may have been a Buddhist herself. But if she told Ashoka about the principles of Buddhism, they made no impression on the early years of his reign. When his father died, Ashoka had to fight his brothers for the throne, prevailing after a four-year struggle. Buddhist accounts claim he murdered them all, though this may be a pious legend; a great sinner is the most welcome of converts. As king, Ashoka carried on his father’s campaign against Kalinga, and finally conquered the region in 260 BC. His own Edict gives a bleak picture of his cruelty to its people; “*A hundred and fifty thousand people were deported,*” it reads, *“a hundred thousand were killed, and many times that number perished*”. This horrific suffering seems to have preyed on caused Ashoka's mind until it brought about a conversion. From this point on, he renounced violence. and embraced the teachings of Buddha. Under its influence, he devoted himself to the propagation of "*Dhamma*", or righteous conduct; the major theme of his edicts. His precepts were general rather than precise. They suggest less a wish to advance the ideas of Buddhism (this is something Asoka did in other ways) than a wish to allay differences; they look very much like a device for governing a huge, heterogeneous and religiously divided empire. He enjoined respect for the dignity of all men and, above all, religious toleration. "*All men,*" said one of his inscriptions, "*are my children*". To practice *Dharma* actively, Ashoka went out on periodic tours of the empire, relieving the suffering of the common people. Among his "welfare" activities were the founding of hospitals for people and animals, the planting of roadside trees, the digging of wells, and the construction of rest houses. Ashoka's most enduring achievements were to Buddhism. He built a large number of stupas, and lavished patronage on monasteries. Around 245, he called together the Third Buddhist Council to suppress schisms within the *sangha* (the Buddhist religious community). At the council’s end, nine missions were sent to spread Buddhism in the "border areas". The mission tp Burma did well; in Sri Lanka others did better still, and, from this time, the island has been predominantly Buddhist. Those sent, more optimistically, to Hellenistic world were less successful, though Buddhist ideas left their mark on some of the philosophy of the day. Before Ashoka's reign, Buddhism was a small sect confined to north-eastern India. Afterwards, it began to grow into the world religion it is today. But *Dharma* was perhaps not a valid long-term policy for imperial power. Ashoka ruled for thirty-seven years. After his death, the Mauryan Empire begins to crumble. The last of Maurya lost his diminished kingdom, sometime around 185 BC, to the commander of his armies, and the story of India for the five hundred years is once more one of confusion and political disunity.

The fall of the Mauryas left the Khyber Pass unguarded, and a new wave of foreign invasions followed. The first intruders were Greeks from the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (256-120 BC), the easternmost outpost of the Hellenistic world on the upper Oxus river. The diminished threat from the Seleucids, after the Roman–Seleucid War (192–188 BC), gave the Bactrians a chance to expand their own territory. Our knowledge of this mysterious realm is largely drawn from the trail of coins they left behind them; each king struck his own coins with his own portrait. This has left grave gaps, but, as far as we can tell, a Bactrian king named Demetrius (d. 167 BC) took his armies into the Punjab, and finally down the Indus valley, to gain control of north-western India. They brought fresh foreign influences once more into Indian culture, as a new Hellenistic flavour of stone sculpture shows. If we are to judge by what survives, the major deployment of these influences was found in Buddhist art, with depictions of the Buddha gradually evolving into the form familiar today. Among those who followed the Greeks and established themselves in the Punjab were the Parthians and the Scythians (roaming nomadic tribes from north of the Black Sea). One Scythian king, Gondophares (d. 46 AD), is remembered from the Bible as having received St Thomas the Apostle at his court. For centuries, this story was dismissed as entirely mythical, but the discovery of coins reveal that Gondophernes did indeed exist. A more lasting link between India and the West was introduced in the Kushan Kingdom (30–230 AD). It was formed on the ruins of Bactria by a nomadic tribe called the Yuezhi, who had come all the way from the borders of China; pushed west by the determination of the Han Dynasty to keep the Central Asian nomads out of China. Under Kanishka I (127–150 AD), the Kushan Kingdom reached its zenith, stretching from the Aral Sea (modern-day Uzbekistan) to beyond Varanasi on the middle Ganges. This straddled the *Silk Road*, the trade route from China to the Mediterranean; a fact of great significance for Buddhism. The religion found favour with Kanishka, and his active support was instrumental to the spread of Buddhism from India to China. The Kushans became affluent through trade. Indeed, Pliny blamed them (wrongly) for draining gold out of the Roman Empire. But the remark suggests that one feature of Asian trade with the West was already established; what Mediterranean markets sought were luxuries which only India and China could supply, and there was little they could offer in return except bullion. This pattern held until the eighteenth century. In the end, the Kushanas succumbed to a greater power. Sassanid Persia took control of much of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early third century. While the north-west of India was conquered and conquered again, the Ganges plain remained a patchwork of jostling petty-kingdoms and tribal sates. The south of India has always laid claim to its own unique history. Insulated by distance from the political developments in the north, a separate set of powerful kingdoms emerged, among them the Satavahanas, who managed to keep control over the Deccan for centuries after the Maurya break-up. Even farther south, the Tamil states continued unabated, and, in the fourth century AD, were united under a line of kings called the Kalabhra. After the Maurya era, the south was not again truly integrated politically with the north until the coming of the Mughals. Its cultural distinction persists even today.

Political unity did not appear again even in the north until hundreds of years had passed. The third king of the little-known Guptas, another Chandragupta I (319-335 AD), came to prominence by a fortuitous marriage to a Liccavis princess, the state to his north. We are not even certain where the original territory of the Gupta state lay; perhaps in the ancient Magadha kingdom near the mouth of the Gange, or a little farther to the west. The alliance with Liccavis gave Chandragupta a little bit more than the other petty-kings on the Ganges. This proved just enough. He extend his territory so successfully that he granted himself an appropriate new title; his father had been called *Maharaja* ("great king"), while he was *Maharajadhiraja* (“king of great kings”). This claim somewhat anticipated the reality of the still modest **Gupta Empire** (319-550 AD). But his successors, Samudragupta (335-375 AD) and Chandragupta II (375-415 AD), brought almost all of northern India under their rule. They also campaigned their way south, where the Satavahana and various petty-kings along the eastern coast were forced one by one to pay them tribute on an annual basis. The Gupta Empire was not so big as Ashoka's one; barely a quarter of the subcontinent. But if tributary states were counted, the empire tripled in size, covering all but the south-west quarter. Great tact and foresight were shown in the governance of the vast territory. The Chinese monk Faxian, on a pilgrimage to collect Buddhist scriptures for his monastery, visited India during the reign of Chandragupta II. He was struck by the peace and prosperity that Gupta rule brought. Criminal law was mild, and capital punishment almost unheard of; "*even in cases of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion, they only have their right hands cut off*". He praised Chandragupta II for his religious tolerance. The Gupta kings were devout Hindus themselves; Sanskrit (the ancient language of Hindu scripture) was the language of court, government, scholarship, and even economics. But they allowed followers of Buddhism and Jainism to freely practice their religions.

    For some two centuries, India enjoyed a sort of golden age, later to be looked back upon as the classical period of India civilisation. The Gupta period is generally regarded as the mature form of Indian art for all the major religions. Although painting was evidently widespread, the surviving works are almost all carved-stone sculpture. It saw the emergence of Hindu deities in iconic form, as well as depictions of the Buddha; the latter often on a massive scale. The finest examples of the period are found at Ajanta, Elephanta, and Ellora; respectively Buddhist, Hindu, and mixed including Jain. From before the Gupta era, hardly any monumental architecture survives; other than excavated and embellished caves. In this times, there began to be built the great many stone temples, which are the great glories of Indian art. The final flowering of Sanskrit literature also belonged to this period. The great epics were given their canonical form, and Kālidāsa, the greatest of Sanskrit poets, graced the court of Chandragupta II. Kālidāsa was also a playwright, and in his work emerged from the shadowy past the Indian theatre whose traditions have been carried into the popular Indian film industry of the twentieth century. Another famous work is the *Kama Sutra* by Vatsyayana, a manual on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfilment in life. Intellectually, too, the Gupta era was a great one. Indian mathematician invented the first positional decimal numeral system in the world; what English-speakers know as “Arabic numbers” are actually an Indian achievement. Genius polymath Aryabhata (d. 550) calculated the value of pi, the exact length of the solar year, and postulated that the earth moved around the sun while rotating on its own axis. The *Sushruta Samhita*, a foundational text on the Indian medicinal system of *ayurveda,* was compiled, including impressive chapters on surgery. And Chess probably developed in this period. The earliest known sixth century form is called *Caturaṅga* ("four divisions"), referring to the infantry, cavalry, elephant, and chariot divisions of the military; which evolved into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively.

Kumaragupta I (415-455 AD), son of Chandragupta II, seems to have brought the empire to its peak; though details of his reign are scarce. One royal inscription boasts that his domain stretched from Mount Kailasa in the north, to the slopes of the Vindhya Range in the south. This would be the largest area that the Guptas ever claimed for their own. But the end of his reign seems to have been clouded by troubles. The Hephthalites began to invade the Indian subcontinent across the Hindu Kush. The Indians called them "Hunas", though they were not related to Huns in the west. Rather, the Hunas were most likely a branch of the Turkic peoples; Central Asian nomads that had begun to spread out from their homeland in Mongolia during the fifth century AD. They had been fighting off and on with the Sassanid Persians for forty years already. Kumaragupta's son Skandagupta (455-467 AD) inherited these troubles. He successfully resisted the Hunas, but the fight took a heavy toll. Coins from Skandagupta’s reign are no longer made from gold; instead they are made of copper, with a thin coating of gold concealing the inferior metal. The royal treasury had been thoroughly drained. Following Skandagupta's death, events become increasingly muddled, but a hazy picture of decline emerges: dissensions within the royal family, the loss of control over the edges of the empire. By 550 AD, when the Gupta Dynasty apparently came to an end, the illustrious empire had dwindled to one of numerous smaller Indian powers in northern India, while the north-west was in the hands of the Hunas. In the south, where the Gupta reach never extended, a patchwork of kings ruled too. We know little of them except what we can glean from coins: names and dates of rule. It was a low point for empires, but an important time for religion; sometimes called the ***Late Classical Period***. Both Hinduism and Buddhism (and to a lesser extent Jainism) were marked by changes which broadened their appeal. One symptom was the appearance, by 600 AD or so, of rural and devotional movements within Hinduism, focused on the two leading deities, Shiva or Vishnu, as well as the mother-goddess Devi. In Buddhism, the new school of Mahayana Buddhism arose. The main distinction is that, in the more orthodox Theravada Buddhism, the historical Buddha, Gautama, is a teacher who by his example shows the way towards *Nirvana*; the cult is essentially a human system of self-discipline. For its adherents, the nearest thing to worship is the veneration of relics of the Buddha, whose hair or tooth were made the central feature of temples. In Mahayana, the Buddha is effectively a divine saviour, who, entitled to the bliss of *Nirvana*, nevertheless chose to remain in the world and teach men the way to salvation. He might be worshipped and followed in faith; devotional practices include ritual prayer, prostration, offerings, and pilgrimage. Mahayana Buddhism won followers in the north-west of India, and eventually spread along the Central Asian trade routes to China. The earlier Theravada tradition was dominant in the rest of India. With its greater emphasis on individual enlightenment, Theravada Buddhism placed a higher value on the monastic existence, which allowed the believer to put all of his energies into study and meditation. Certainly, it gave no help to a minor king who wanted to conquer an empire, which is exactly what the landscape of India in the fifth century reflected. This regionalisation of power led to religious rivalry. The Hindu religion prospered better. The Brahmin priestly-classes were willing and able administrators, and had clearer ideas about statecraft. As a result, Buddhism went into decline in its homeland. These changes provoke a sense of culmination and climax. They matured only shortly before Islam arrived on the subcontinent.

### Classical Antiquity in China

In the profound and prolonged crisis of the decaying centuries of Zhou China, the next distinguishable epoch is significantly known as the ***Warring States Period*** (481-221 BC). A tentative reconstruction of the map of China was underway at the onset of the fifth century BC. After decades of unending fighting against neighbours, barbarians, and its own noblemen, the powerful northern state of Jin finally cracked apart. Eventually, three rival families of the old Jin state each claimed part of the Jin territory for themselves; Han, Wei, and Chao. When they demanded that the Zhou king recognize them as lords over their newly defined states, he had no power to refuse. The event is recorded by historian Sima Qian in cryptic fashion, "*In the twenty-fourth year of King Wei-lieh, the Nine Cauldrons shook*"; the Zhou king had lost his authority even over his own sacred sanction. In the *Warring States Period*, historical selection by conflict reached its culmination. The big fish ate the little fish until the scores of states of the *Spring and Autumn Period* had become seven, of which four deserve particular mention. The Qi state, along the lower reaches of the Yellow River, was the most prosperous; thanks to an unusual run of competent dukes, it collected taxes in an orderly manner, and managed to corner a salt monopoly. The Wei, created from the three-way partition of Jin, had the edge in military might; finding the mountainous north unsuitable for chariots, it was the first to developed massed infantry armies. To the south, with its core territory around the Yangtze. the massive state of Chu was a potential superpower, but its government was often distracted by internal division, corruption, and inefficiency. All the way to the west, the Ch’in, in possession of the old Western Zhou lands along the Wei River,, was another huge state, but a backwater, far from the centre of power. The other states looked upon the Ch’in as semi-barbaric. As late as 266 BC, a Wei nobleman could sniff, "*It is greedy, untrustworthy, and ignorant of polite manners, proper relationships, and upright behaviour”.*

This began to change in 361 BC, when a young nobleman arrived at the court of the **Ch’in state**, offering to help turn Ch’in into a major power. Shang Yang (d. 338 BC) was born as the son of a concubine to the ruling family in the Wei state; and so barred from rule. He felt himself deserving of more than his lowly position in Wei, so left his native land, and journeyed west, where it was known the ambitious duke of Ch’in, Hsiao (361–338 BC), welcomed all capable men. Duke Hsiao was so impressed by Shang Yang’s ideas that he gave the man free rein to make whatever changes he thought necessary. At once, Shang Yang instituted a series of *Legalist* reforms. A comprehensive system of laws was introduced, with draconian punishments meted out for the slightest of offences. To enforce this, the state was divided into a whole network of administrative units, each containing no more than ten households, with each household encouraged to inform on one another; knowledge of a crime but failing to inform the state was punishable by law. Nor was anyone allowed to escape the watchful eye of officials and neighbours by going into hiding; innkeepers were forbidden to offer rooms to travellers unless they carried official permits. With this mutual control mechanism in place, Shang Yang set about making Ch’in into a meritocracy. Rank and privilege would, from now on, be awarded by the duke solely on the basis of useful service to the state, especially in the military; a nobleman unwilling to fight would be a nobleman no more. Common soldiers could look forwards to being rewarded with tracts of land. This was probably the first officially sanctioned private ownership of land in all of China, and was backed up with its own set of regulations. No farmer could move to a new home without official permission, meaning that the land had to be managed properly; they could not exhaust their land and then shift attention elsewhere. Even convicted criminals could to earn their freedom by bringing wasteland under cultivation. On the other hand, Ch’in citizen would be allowed to duck useful labour. As far as Shang Yang was concerned, merchants were parasites who sold goods made by other men; music and poetry were dismissed as unproductive; philosophy was scorned. He burned all of the teachings of Confucius that he could find. Most ancient historians disliked Shang Yang intensely; Sima Qian thought the despotic Ch’in state a wretched place to live. Despite this, the new policies attracted more and more poor peasants from neighbouring states. In Ch'in, they at least had the opportunity to rise in the hierarchy through military service. Not everyone was pleased with the reforms. Shang Yang was deeply despised by the Qin nobility. In 338 BC, after the death of his patron, the next duke of Ch'in, Huiwen (338–311 BC), ordered the minister arrested and executed. According to Sima Qian, Shang Yang fled the Ch'in court, but, when he sought shelter at an inn, the innkeeper refused to admit him. Nor would anyone else. He had no permit, as his own law required. Shang Yang was soon caught and executed by dismemberment; being fastened to five chariots and torn apart. With the minister’s irritating presence gone, Duke Huiwen decided not to revoke any of his reforms. They had, after all, made Ch’in more powerful than it had ever been; so powerful, in fact, that in 325 BC he proclaimed himself king. The other dukes reacted as one might expect: “*Thereafter,*” Sima Qian wrote, “*all the feudal lords became kings*”.

The wars and manoeuvrings of the seven *Warring States* continued as before, except now conducted by kings, rather than dukes. Qi defeated Wei soundly, after which Wei diminished in power, and Chao, another of the three states formed by the Jin breakup, rose to taken its place as one of the "Big Four"; now Ch’in, Chao, Qi, and Chu. For some years, none of them seemed to have a clear path to the very top. But the Ch’in armies, conditioned by Shang Yang, were the most ruthless. In 265 BC, King Zhaoxiang of Ch’in (325–251 BC) made the first move by invading Chao. After a bitter five-year stalemate, he won a decisive victory, followed by the massacre of a huge number of prisoners of war. Ch’in was too exhausted to follow up its victory, however. A Chao remnant survived, but there was no longer a state that could resist Qin on its own. When, in 256 BC, the Zhou joined a five-state coalition to repel Ch'in, the Ch'in overran their territory, and brought an abrupt end to centuries of sacred Zhou rule. It is a measure of the Zhou lapse into irrelevance that no one really noticed. Sima Qian contradicts himself regarding the ultimate fate of the *Nine Cauldrons*; the sign of the king's divinely ordained *Mandate*. According to one chapter, they were lost in the Si River en-route to the Ch'in capital; in to another, he implied that they were melted down and recast into weapons. In 247 BC, a new king came to the Ch’in throne, Ying Zheng (247-210 BC). His father had died before his time, after a two-year reign, and he was only 13 years-old. Zheng was more fortunate than other young kings had been. Two ministers, Lü Buwei and Li Si, acted as capable and loyal regents, beat-off attacks from Ch’in’s neighbours, and, at twenty-two, Zheng assumed full power. He turn out to be a brilliant commander, and the other six *Warring States* of China began to fall, one by one. In 230 BC, Han, the weakest of the states, surrendered without a fight; Chao followed suit two years later. Yen, worried that its would be next, sent an assassin, disguised as an ambassador, to murder Ying Zheng, but the attempt failed. The following year Zheng marched into Yen, captured the king, and dismembered him. This ruthlessness would characterize the rest of his reign. The states continued to fall: Wei in 225 BC, Chu in 223 BC, Qi, reluctantly, in 221 BC. “*Twenty-six years after Ying Zheng, the King of Ch’in, was enthroned,*” wrote Sima Qian, “*he unified the world for the first time*”.

Ying Zheng (221-210 BC) was now more than a king, and granted himself an appropriate new title, *Shǐ Huáng-Dì*; which literally means, "*the first emperor*". From this date we can actually speak of China, a country which derives its name from this first imperial dynasty; the short-lived **Ch'in Dynasty** (221-206 BC). This new country had never before been a single state, which meant that Shǐ Huáng-Dì had to create a central imperial bureaucracy from an unwieldy mass of existing customs and bureaucracies, laid at cross-purposes against each other. He broke down old lines of family influence, inherited wealth, and clan loyalties by dividing his empire into easily run administrative units - thirty-six *Jun* (provinces), with each *Jun* divided into *Xian* (counties) - under a hierarchy of officials appointed by the central government. The emperor's distrust of those who served him was apparent in the arrangement in which a paired military commander and civilian administrator governed each *Jun*, and a government inspector (which is to say, a spy) kept tabs on each pair. In addition, he ordered former noblemen of every state to move to the capital city at Xianyang (near present-day Xi'an). There, they lived very comfortably; and very close to his watchful eye. Other reforms followed. All aspects of life were forcibly standardized, from weights-and-measurements and coinage to a uniform system of writing; the calendar was restarted so that everyone would follow the same system. Even such practical details as cart axles were prescribed a standard width. All of China felt the burden of these eleven years of change. Hundreds of thousands of workers were conscripted to huge construction projects; and an unknown number died. Shǐ Huáng-Dì built an extensive network of roads out to every edge of China, including a 500 miles straight highway between northern and southern China to aid Qin southward expansion. He is also traditionally credited with building what later became the *Great Wall of China*. In fact, the various Warring States had built walls against nomadic barbarians for generations. His innovation was in deciding that they should all be linked together. The *Great Wall* of today dates mainly from the Ming period, and little of the Qin wall remains. Like Shang Yang, Shǐ Huáng-Dì had no patience for the teachings of Confucius, or other philosophical musings. Beginning 213 BC, it was ordered that all books were to be burnt. with the exception of those on *Legalism*, astrology, agriculture, medicine, and divination. If that was not enough to earn him the enduring ire of later generations, then the allegedly incident the following year certainly was. According to Sima Qian, the emperor had 460 Confucian scholars buried alive for possessing forbidden books, though modern historians doubt the story; more probably, the victims were alchemists, since the school had not yet been formed as such. Shǐ Huáng-Dì had left his mark on China during his life; he planned to make a similar mark in death. According to Sima Qian, he began to prepare his underground tomb long before he took imperial power. Most startling of all, he filled his grave with life-size pottery soldiers, chariots, and horses in battle formation; more than eight thousand of them. They were armed with real bronze weapons, and sculpted from life; in the famous *Terracotta Army*, not a single face is alike. Shi Huang-Di went to this tomb in 210 BC, after thirty-seven years as king of Ch’in, and eleven as emperor of China. His dynasty barely lasted past his death. The legitimate heir was compelled to commit suicide, when his younger brother, Hu-hai (210-207 BC), usurped the throne. Capable and loyal servants, including Li Si and the general Meng Tian, were put to death. Before the new emperor had been on the throne a year, the army stationed down on the Yangtze River mutinied. The revolt spread rapidly from *Jun* to *Jun* as old ruling elements of the six states rose to claim their former titles; first a nobleman proclaimed himself to be king of Chao, then another of Wei, and a third of Qi. When the second emperor was killed in a palace coup, the Ch’in government had deteriorated so drastically that his successor, Tzu Ying, ruled as a king, not emperor. Tzu Ying ruled for all of forty-six days before a Chu nobleman, Hsiang Yu (d. 202 BC), overran the capital; killing Tzu Ying, massacring the court, burning the palace, and dividing the Ch'in territory into three new kingdoms.Despite the long shadow it would cast, the Ch'in Dynasty lasted less than two decades.

For five years, China returned to its old divided, warring kingdom ways. Then a new vigorous leader appeared, and fought his way to the head of the pack. His name was Liu Bang (d. 195 BC). He had benefited from the Ch’in reforms in his own way; though born into a peasant family, he had become a minor official (a county sheriff, in charge of a penal labour force), the sort of position which would have been unthinkable for him in the old order. He had joined Hsiang Yu’s army at the beginning of the rebellion, and quickly became his most effective general. Having completely extinguished the Ch’in, Hsiang Yu attempted to revive the old feudal structure of China, himself assuming the title *Hegemon-King* of Chu, and appointing nineteen of his supporters to distant territories. One of these was Liu Bang, who styled himself Duke of Han, after a river in his fief. The erstwhile allies soon turned against each other; Hsiang Yu was an ill-tempered character, aristocratic and arrogant, and his wholesale slaughter of the Ch'in count had earned him a reputation for savagery. Over the next four years, the pair fought a series of campaigns, in which Liu Bang was often defeated,, but nevertheless his ability to pick able allies, and then to trust them, allowed him to raise fresh armies. By 203 BC, the tide of the war had turned against Hsiang Yu, and he offered to split China into political halves: the west would belong to Han and the east to Chu. Although Liu Bang accepted the truce, it proved short-lived, and, at the Battle of Gaixia (December 203 BC), Liu Bang's army managed to manoeuvre Xiang Yu into a hopeless position. Legend has it that, to further demoralize the enemy, Liu Bang ordered his men to sing traditional songs of Chu, giving the impression that many Chu soldiers had already defected to the Han; Hemorrhaging soldiers through defections, Xiang Yu sank into a depression and composed the *Song of Gaixia*; a lament still sung today. His beloved consort, Lady Yu, then committed suicide, and he himself fled with a small cavalry force, but was hunted down and chose to make a dramatic last stand at the Wu River. Xiang Yu fought to the end, having lost most of his remaining followers, avoided capture by cutting his own throat. The famous episode is subject of the novel (and later film) *Farewell My Concubine*.

Liu Bang claimed the title of emperor, and gave himself the royal name Gao-Zu (202-195 BC); which literally means "*exalted founder*". His dynasty, he decreed, would be named after the original territory granted him by Hsiang Yu, the **Han Dynasty** (221 BC-220 AD), Its legacy is so profound that "Han" is used to this day to signify someone who is ethnically Chinese. Confronted by the practical problems of running the empire, Gao-Zu overcame his aversion to the Qin's harsh methods and Legalist ideology, and borrowed much from the previous government structures, including the organisation of the empire as provinces and counties. At the same time, he lightened the burden of its onerous taxes, softened its harshest laws, and allowed banned books to circulate once more. His one important innovation was to formalise the court bureaucratic structure. The emperor was advised by three senior officials, known as the *Three Excellencies*, who were in turn assisted by nine ministers, each responsible for different areas of government; though the boundaries were often blurred which made them mutually dependent. Gao-Zu did not entirely follow the example of the Qin. He had to reward the more powerful allies who had helped him to power, and therefore accepted the existence of ten semi-autonomous kingdoms in the eastern portion of the empire. Later, in a piecemeal fashion, he replaced almost all the rulers of these kingdoms with members of his own family. The greatest battles of Gao-Zu's reign were fought against outsiders. Steppe people had roamed along the northern borders for centuries. In fact, these nomads were not quite so barbaric as the Chinese liked to think. The nearest tribes had begun to organize themselves into a tribal confederation (a nation of sorts), the Xiongnu, a tribal confederation under a supreme leader, or *Chanyu*. After the Ch'in collapse, they had seized the opportunity to raid any Chinese territory beyond the *Great Wall*. Gao-Zu led a large army against the Xiongnu. The *Chanyu* did not line up for battle. however; instead, the tribes retreated constantly, until the emperor's forces found themselves in the rocky mountain passes, and then they attacked. It took seven days for the emperor to fight his way free. Afterwards, Gao-Zu decided that it would be best to pursue a policy of diplomacy and appeasement; known as *Heqin*, He sent tribute to pacify them, and, in a startling admission of Xiongnu power, he also sent one of his daughters to be the *Chanyu*’s bride. The early years of the Han succession were less than smooth. Gao-Zu died in 195 BC, after a reign of only seven years. He was succeeded by his young son, Hui-Yi (195–188 BC), but the real power was held by Gao Zu’s widow, Lü Zhi (d. 180 BC), now empress dowager. Lü Zhi was not the emperor’s only wife; he also had a whole constellation of sons born to concubines. She had several royal son and their mothers poisoned, in an display of cruelty that sickened her son; “*Emperor Hui gave himself up each day to drink,*” Sima Qian says, “*and no longer took part in affairs of state*”. Lü Zhi meanwhile cemented her own power by installing her relatives as ministers and officials. When Hui-Yi died at twenty-three, his mother was less than heartbroken, simply choosing a new puppet-emperor from among her grandsons. By her death in 180 BC, she was so unpopular that the court rose up and slaughtered every member of her family that they could get their hands on.

The Han Dynasty, unlike the Ch'in, survived this particular crisis, because the chaos did not reach beyond the court, and left the people alone to conduct their own lives. As a result of this laissez-faire attitude, China was prospering. It was during this period that the Chinese economy first exhibited its characteristic features: intensive cultivation involving sophisticated irrigation, seed selection, and alternating field techniques; a free peasantry producing goods primarily for market, and supplementing its income through domestic handicrafts. With the Lü family cleared-out, another son of the dead Gao Zu by a concubine was proclaimed emperor. After a reign of over twenty years, he managed to pass the crown, without incident, to his son, who in turn passed it along to his son. This was **Emperor Wudi** (156-87 BC). and he brought Han China to its zenith. He had decades of relatively peaceful Han rule behind him, and could put his hand to shaping the empire into something more like a centralized state. Not long after taking the throne, Wudi ordered officials to carry out a rigorous census. This revealed a population of some thirty-six million, and would form the basis for an efficient system of taxation. The kingdoms, which had been established at the start of the dynasty, lost all vestiges of their independence, their courts staffed with central government officials; kings were not abolished but became nominal heads of regular provinces. The most significant of his reforms was to introduce, for the first time, a competitive examination to recruit men of merit into the imperial bureaucracy. Having been recommended by officials, most of the scholars were commoners with no noble background, This event would have a major impact on Chinese history, marking the start of the institutionalisation of Confucian norms in government. In 136 BC, the emperor established what became the Imperial University, a college for classical scholars that supplied the Han's need for well-trained bureaucrats. Despite Gao-Zu's policy of appeasement, the Xiongnu continued to menace the northern borders. Although Wudi won a number of victories, and push them back from the Ordos Desert, he could not subjugate the Xiongnu. The failure prompted the emperor to send an ambassador named Zhang Qian (d. 113 BC) into the distant west to seek a military alliance with the Yuezhi; a rival nomadic confederation to the Xiongnu. Zhang Qian’s journey did not go particularly well at first. He was captured and enslaved by the Xiongnu; he was even given a wife. After living there for ten years, he was less closely watched, and managed to escape with his wife, his son, and his faithful guide. The little group eventually made their way to the land of the Yuezhi, but they were too settled to desire war against the Xiongnu. After that he travelled further west, visiting Greco-Bactria and Parthian Persia, before returning home to great acclaim. It was the first lasting contacts between peoples from the Far East and the Greco-Roman world. More men were dispatched west from the Han court; "*After Zhang Qian achieved honour and position by opening up communications with the lands of the west,*” says Sima Qian, “*all the officials and soldiers vied with one another…. to become envoys*”. These journeys involved some fighting, as Han armies put down resistance from various tribes in the lands through which the new trade route ran. Outposts along the road, staffed by Chinese garrisons, protected traders from bandits. But by 110 BC, the *Silk Road* was thoroughly established, a bridge between the two great and growing empires of the west and east. Meanwhile expansion had taken place in other directions. In 128 BC, an expedition was sent to Korea, and, twenty years later, a longer campaign led to the establishment of four provinces in the north of the peninsula. Nor was the south neglected, for the conquest of local kingdoms in 111 BC expanded the Han realm into what are now modern Guangdong, Guangxi, and northern Vietnam. Expansion came at a cost, though. When Wudi died, after a long and distinguished fifty-seven year reign, the Han army was exhausted, the treasury drained,. The next two Han emperors, Zhaodi and Xuandi, would do little to advance the empire further.

After two hundred years, Han rule was interrupted briefly by family dramas. Emperor Chengdi (33-7 BC) came to the throne at eighteen, which in Chinese tradition was not quite old enough for full independent rule. His mother, Wang Zhengyuan (d. 13 AD) , as empress dowager assumed regent-like powers, She ensured that her relatives would be appointed, one after another, to the highest offices of government. Chengdi reigned for over two decades, but died without a son of his own. After this, the Han emperors grow suspiciously young and short-lived; a twenty year-old cousin, Aiti, who sat on the throne for only six years; and then the eight-year old Ping who reigned for seven. The empress dowager was still alive, having outlived four Han rulers. Now she arranged the succession of an infant named Ruzi, under the regency of her own nephew **Wang Mang** (d. 23 AD), a well-respected and educated man who had been serving as a minister for years already. It took him only three years to convince the court that the extraordinary bad luck of the Han succession showed that the *Mandate of Heaven* had turned against the Han, and to declare himself emperor of the new Xin Dynasty (9–23 AD); "*The omens have indicated the clear commands of the Spirits,*" he announced, "*and entrust to me the people of the empire"*. Wang Mang was not a cruel man; he spared little Ruzi's life, though, it was said, that he had been so carefully guarded that he did not know a chicken when he saw one. He had a grand vision to restore China to a fabled golden age achieved in the early Zhou Dynasty; the era which Confucius had idealized. But his reign was an unmitigated disaster. Part of the problem was that, since he himself had usurped the throne, he feared giving his advisors too much power. As a result, he tried to make all important decisions himself, which completely paralysed the government. And when it came to putting his bold ideas into practice, Wang Mang ran into further problems. He annoyed the landowning elite by nationalising and redistributing land; he annoyed the peasantry by giving the noble families some of their old feudal powers back. His reforms were so sweeping, and so sudden, that the outcome was chaos. But Wang Mang's real undoing came from one China's most dangerous and unpredictable natural forces. In 11 AD, the Yellow River overflowed its banks, killing thousands and flooding the surrounding land. The omens that Wang Mang had depended on to seize power, turned against him. The ensuing famine gave rise to one of the first large-scale peasant rebellions; a phenomenon which came to punctuate Chinese history almost as rhythmically as the passing of dynasties. The rebels, who became known as the *Red Eyebrows* because they painted their foreheads red, attacked the soldiers who came out into the countryside to enforce Wang Mang’s decrees. In 23 AD, with fighting reaching the outskirts of the capital Chang'an, the populace rose up and stormed the imperial palace, Wang Mang was killed in the chaos, leaving behind him a mess of Han relatives, none of whom had a clear right to the throne. Battles between them dragged on for two years, until one of them, Liu Xiu, proclaimed himself emperor of a restored Han Dynasty.

Liu Xiu, better known by his imperial name Guang Wudi (25-57 AD), moved his capital city from Chang’an to Loyang, two hundred miles east; thus the later Han period is sometimes called the **Eastern Han** (25-220 AD). During the reign of Guang Wudi, and his successors Mingdi (57–75 AD) and Zhangdi (75-88 AD), the Han Dynasty regained most of its former glory. The Xiongnu had suffered an internal split, and, after a series of defeats, their influence dwindled. This allowed the conquest of the western states almost as far as the Parthian border, and trade along the *Silk Road* filled the empire with prosperity. With prosperity and social stability came a remarkable number of technological advances, including the process of papermaking, the crossbow, the raised-relief map, the magnetic compass (used first in divination and only much later adapted to navigation), and how to cast iron (fifteen hundred years before Europeans), to name only a few. Dynastic decline can be dated from the reign of Hedi (88–105 AD), when the court once more came under the influence of consorts’ families. The weakness of the throne can be judged from a whole succession of too-young emperors put on the throne by one ambitious mother, uncle, or cousin after another. Of greater consequence for the dynasty, however, was the growing number and influence of palace eunuchs. Castration had been a common punishment in Ch'in times, and, under the Han, became a means of gaining employment in the imperial service; eunuchs were seen as more trustworthy, and less ambitious to seize power and wealth on behalf of their families. They entered into the struggles at court, thanks to a gradual shift in their legal status. Around 115 AD, for the first time, one loyal eunuch had been permitted to adopted a son. Two decades later, they gained the right to pass down their land and titles to their adopted heirs. These were not small changes; they allowed palace eunuchs to create powerful families of their own. And like consorts’ family, the eunuchs tended to place their own interests above those of the state. While these intrigues dominated court affairs, the scholar officials felt excluded from influence, and some of them became greedy and corrupt. It was perfectly legal for a provincial official to seize the land of those who could not pay their taxes, But over time, they slowly accumulated vast estates, worked by debtors who had become a kind of feudal peasant. These powerful landowners had even begun to hire guards to protect their estates; guards which grew to look more and more like private armies. It wasn't until the reign of Emperor Lingdi (168–189 AD) that the collapse of Han China began. Rivalry between his mother's family and the palace eunuch was eventually resolved by a coup in which a cabal of powerful eunuchs, referred to as the *Ten Regular Attendants*, seized the reins of power. In fact, Lingdi became so trusting of the *Ten* that he called one of them, the much-hated Zhang Rang, “*My Foster Father*”. Mounting grievances against government corruption spawn peasant rebellions which quickly emptied the imperial treasury. Increasing strapped for funds, the government exacerbated the situation by offering minor titles and positions for money. Corruption now trickled down to every level, from the royal court to the lowest officials. Most of these rebellions were easily put down, but other popular movements arose in their place.. Perhaps the worst was the *Yellow Turbans*. The *Yellow Turbans* were much more than a new band of rebels; they were a religious sect. The millions of downtrodden Chinese were looking not just for political solutions, but for immediate hope. The movement leader, a Daoist mystic named Zhang Jue, offered exactly this. He foretold the coming of a golden age. He claimed that his medicinal herbs could make a man immune from wounds; they could fight in battles without fear. By 182 AD, the *Yellow Turbans* had a following of over three hundred thousand poor, desperate, and angry Chinese. By 184 AD, they were ready to rise up against their oppressors. The *Yellow Turbans* conquered much in the early years of the rebellion, but then could not hold out against battle-hardened Han forces. But the revolutionaries soon regathered themselves, and pushed forwards again. By 189 AD, fighting had reached the capital Loyang itself. In May of that same year, Emperor Lingdi died in May of that year, leaving the throne and all of these problems to his fifteen-year-old son Shaodi (May-September 189 AD). The palace eunuchs now made plans for a private purge; they would kill He Jin, Lingdi's brother-in-law and Shaodi's maternal uncle, who had been appointed the Han chief general. Word of this got back to He Jin himself, who began to plan a wholesale extermination of the eunuchs; a plot which was discovered in turn by the eunuchs. The eunuchs moved first, seizing and beheading He Jin, upon which the commanders of armed forces in Loyang ordered the gates of the palace locked, and all of the eunuchs slaughtered. “*Altogether some two thousand people died,*” says historian Sima Guang, “*including several whole men, who had no beards and were killed by mistake*”. The fifteen-year-old emperor and his younger brother fled from the capital, fearing for their lives. The general Dong Zhuo (d. 192 AD) found the brothers wandering in the countryside, and saw his opportunity to take over. He escorted them safely back to Loyang, where he pronounced the younger brother, Xiandi (189–220 AD), the new emperor, under his protection. But Dong Zhuo was not the only general with hopes of bettering himself. To defeat *Yellow Turban Rebellion*, the government had granted military leaders and regional governors unprecedented levels of autonomy, who now emerged as regional warlords. Dong Zhuo was forced to retreat from Loyang, hauling the young Xiandi along with him. Another able general, Cao Cao (d. 220), who had inherited his own estate from the adopted son of a eunuch, cornered him in Chang’an and killed him. Cao Cao then offered his protection to Xiandi, who had little choice but to agree; he was as powerless and unimportant as the later Zhou rulers had been. Cao Cao finally managed to defeat the last *Yellow Turbans* in 205 AD, but the years of war, following on from decades of corruption and mismanagement had already destroyed the country. He had mostly gained control over the north, but failed in his quest to unify the Han lands. In 208, Cao Cao’s army met those of his two greatest rivals, Sun Quan (d. 252 AD) and Liu Bei (d. 223 AD), on the Yangtze River, at the famous Battle of the Red Cliff. The two armies lingered on opposite banks for days; both sides were exhausted from the unending fighting of the last years. When Cao Cao finally launched an attack, he found that the wind had turned against him. The opposing commanders took the opportunity to launch a clever ruse. First they sent a letter of surrender, and then prepared a squadron of ten fire-ships. As the "defecting" squadron approached the far bank, the sailors applied fire before taking to small boats. The whole northern fleet was set ablaze, and the fire spread to the camps on the bank. Following the initial shock, a lightly-armed force was sent to capitalise on the confusion, Seeing the situation was hopeless, Cao Cao issued a general retreat, and, although fighting continued, he never seriously challenged his competitors again. Emperor Xiandi clearly knew that his title was a fraud. When Cao Cao died in 220 AD, Xiandi abdicated, handing power to Cao Cao’s son.

The centuries after the collapse of the Han Dynasty were a time of chaos. It is sometimes known as the *Northern and Southern* period, or more accurately the *Period of Disunity* (220-589 AD). China was initially split into three dynastic states; Cao Wei (220–266 AD) dominated the north; Shu Han (221–263 AD) the south-west; and Wu (222–280 AD) the south-east. The *Three Kingdoms* period lasted a mere seventy years or so. Yet its personalities, battles and politics have lived on in the national imagination. *The* *Romance of the Three Kingdoms*, more than the third-century history on which it is based, has inspired popular culture for centuries, from classical operas to contemporary film. In 263 AD, Cao Wei absorbed Shu Han, and then, following the usurpation of a general named Sima Yan, subdued Wu. Sima Yan established the Jin Dynasty (280-317 AD), and briefly ruled over a unified China. However, after his death in 290 AD, conflict over the succession caused the devastating *Rebellion of the Eight Princes*, During the unrest, the Jin court lost control of the North China Plain, and subsequently fled to Jiankang (modern-day Nanjing) on the Yangtze, where the dynasty re-established itself as the Eastern Jin (317–420 AD). Northern China fragmented into a series of independent states known as the *Sixteen Kingdoms*, many of which were founded by non-Han rulers. A number of nomadic peoples (Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jie, Di and Qiang), that had been allowed to settle within the Great Wall in late Han times, exploited the chaos to seize power. As far as the Eastern Jin were concerned, its northern frontiers now marked the boundary between real Chinese civilization, and the northern realms of the barbarians. "Barbarian" here was a moveable term; the harder the Jin fought to distinguish themselves from the uncivilized warlords to the north, the more those uncivilized warlords wanted to be just like the Jin, losing their own identity and becoming only another kind of Chinese. In the meantime, warfare ravaged the north, and prompted large-scale migration of ethnic Han Chinese to the lands south of the Yangtze. The local aristocrat families of the south were often at odds with these northern refugees, and, as tension between the old and new settlers increased, the political situation became very unstable. In 420 AD, the throne was usurped by a general named Liu Yu, establishing the second of six short-lived southern dynasties. The whole of China was in constant flux. As in many chaotic times, much was achieved. One of the most important developments was the flourishing of Chinese Buddhism. The first Buddhist missionaries reached China along the Silk Road in the 1st-century AD. One of the keys to its success a well-established indigenous religion, Daoism. The Daoists saw the Buddhists as kindred souls; with good reason. Both religions had ascetic meditative traditions, and some form of clerical hierarchy. Both believed in a withdrawal from the everyday business of life. And both were profoundly different from the religion which had come to dominate Chinese culture and thought during Han times; the practical and worldly philosophy of Confucianism. Soon the two religions become so closely linked that some said the Buddha was actually Laozi, who had journeyed all the way to India. To join a Buddhist monastic community provided a way of removing oneself completely from the disorder of the times. By the sixth century, Buddhism rivalled Daoism in popularity and political influence. In fact, the man who finally succeeded in reuniting China in 589 AD, forming the Sui Dynasty (589-618 AD), was an enthusiastic patron of Buddhism.

### Classical Antiquity in the Americas

The first two American civilizations, the Olmecs in Mexico and Chavin culture of Peru, set a pattern which was to last for more than two-thousand years. A succession of highly developed cultures, all strongly influenced by the traditions of their predecessors, followed in the same two limited regions of the continent. The only ones known about in any great detail are those surviving when the Spaniards arrived; to marvel and destroy. These were the ancient but past-their-prime Maya, and the relatively upstart dominant cultures of the time, the Aztecs and the Incas. Archaeologists can trace the rise and fall of various cultures, the carving out of trade routes, and the exchange of goods, but the historian has very little raw material to shape into a narrative. There are monuments and inceptions, but no written histories. We can piece together the broad outline of a history, but nothing more,

    In Mesoamerica, three classical kingdoms developed distinctive variations of their shared Olmec heritage. In the Yucatán, the peninsula that jutted out from Central America into the Gulf of Mexico, a group of tribal peoples, loosely related by language and culture, building cities that tended to act in alliance, became distinct enough for us to give them a name: the **Maya** (250-1539 AD). Southwest of the Mayan territory, in the fertile Oaxaca valley, another collection of tribal territories was united, mostly by force, under the leadership of the strongest city, Monte Alban: which allows us to see them as a single people, the **Zapotec** (700 BC-650 AD). Both the Maya and the Zapotec wrote. Their records are terse and enigmatic, but gives us a glimpse of a very different mindset than the pristine civilisations of the Old World. There, the development of writing was driven by economics, by the need to keep track of goods and payments. In Mesoamerica, writing had a different function; it helped them keep track of time. This was no simple matter. These two peoples shared a sacred calendar; one that, to us, seems almost unusably complex. It was based on a twenty-day "week", that recurred thirteen time, yielding a 260-day "year"; known as the *Sacred Round*. This, of course, did not coincide with the solar year, so it ran side by side with a 365-day calendar. It took roughly fifty-two years for every permutation of the two calendars to play out, and each day was significant. The Maya and Zapotec records fit each birth and death, each marriage and conquest, the accession of each ruler, into this framework. The cyclical calendar meant that each king ruled in the footprints of his predecessor. Each milestone occupied a particular slot that was already crowded; the day of his coronation might be the same day, in a previous cycle, that a king had died. In this way of thinking, the past was ever present; the king kept their power by connecting themselves to the legendary past. The third kingdom, to their west, worked out the passage of time in a slightly different way. This was centred around the city of **Teotihuacán** (150 AD-550 AD), which by 500 AD, was home to perhaps 125,000 people; making it the sixth largest city in the world. Many of its citizens had once farmed the hinterlands, until moved by force within the city walls, to prevent any nearby villages from growing into cities that might challenge Teotihuacán. The Teotihuacan empire was thus entirely centred on one city, with the edges almost empty. There, the *Sacred Round* was built directly into the city itself. Its greatest structure, the Pyramid of the Sun, stood at its centre, facing west towards the setting sun; an east-west canal flowed though the city's centre; the main thoroughfare ran north to south, with the Pyramid of the Moon at the northern end, and at the southern end the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, honouring the city's patron god Quetzalcoatl. He played a central role in the cyclical creation myth; when the world was destroyed in an apocalypse, Quetzalcoatl went down into the Land of the Dead to retrieve a man and a woman, and then used his own blood to restore them to life. The people of Teotihuacan, like the Maya and the Zapotec, practised human sacrifice, echoing the shedding of blood that first gave life back to humanity. Unfortunately for the kingdoms of the mid-sixth century, these ritual sacrifices were to gods of the elements. Quetzalcoatl was also the god of wind; another important deity, Tlaloc, was the god of rain. A deadly cycle of drought and flood began in the 530s AD. Sometime around 550 AD, a riot broke out in Teotihuacan.aimed directly at the king, aristocracy, and priestly class, who had failed to appease the angry gods; the city never recovered. The bad weather affected the entire central American land bridge. Archaeology shows that, between 550 and 650 AD, the population of Monte Alban began to bleed out into the surrounding countryside; the Zapotec people survived, but the Zapotec kingdom died. What happened to the Maya is less clear. Unlike their neighbours, the Mayan cities had remained independent of each other; they fought each other for prominence, as often as they acted in alliance. Ruins testify to the ingenuity of the Mayan people: Cancuen stands out for the enormous size of its royal palace; Chichen Itza had one of the most elaborate ball courts of any Mesoamerican city. Most of the Mayan records, calendars, and inscriptions break-off at 534 AD, a silence that lasts for nearly a century. Then, in the ninth century AD, the southern Mayan cities began to collapse, brought down in part by their own success. Over-population forced farmers to make use of every scrap of land; forests were slashed and burned to create new fields, flood plains cultivated, and swamps drained. Food production kept up with demand, but just barely. When a egional drought hit, the Maya began to starve. Excavations in cemeteries show slowly escalating signs of malnutrition. The last Mayan monument in the south was erected in 909 AD; after that, silence. The Maya who were still strong enough moved north, where the population of the northern Mayan cities, such as Chichen Itza, surged dramatically. With the collapse of old cities, energy shifted elsewhere. The city of Tula, north-west of ancient Teotihuacan, began to grow. The newcomers probably came from the south, because many of them where skilled craftsmen and merchants. The beauty and wealth of the city earned it the honorific *Tōllān*, a mythical name suggesting paradise; we call them **Toltecs** (950-1150 AD). The walls of its temples were carved with jaguars and eagles, clasping human hearts; it was a paradise where human blood was regularly shed. As a physical city, Tula flourished for less than a century. Around 1050, large swathes of the city burned; columns of ceremonial buildings wee toppled by human hands. The Toltecs left the ruins but still clung to their name, Some joined nearby cities peacefully, but one ambitious group conquered Chichen Itza. Chichen Itza was a holy city, where pilgrims came from all over Mesoamerica to visit its sacred well, an enormous sinkhole nearly two hundred feet across and over a hundred feet deep. They threw offerings into it, hoping for divine guidance from the gods. Once the city was in Toltec hands, human sacrifices were hurled into the sacred well too, hoping that this time the sacred blood shed would keep disaster at bay. The stories of Chichen Itza's demise i in the mid twelfth century come down to us broken and incomplete. But they agree that newcomers conquered the city and seized its throne. According to Aztec tradition, they were led by a prince named Hunac Ceel, who prophesied his own rise to power. If a victim thrown into the sacred well survived, they were believed to gain the power of prophecy. At one such ceremony, there were no survivors, so Hunac Ceel leaped into the sinkhole, and, when removed, prophesied his own ascension. There followed a period where numerous states vied for supremacy, until 1428 AD, when the Aztecs became the dominant force in Mesoamerica.

    Since Andean civilizations did not have a true written language, our knowledge about them comes almost entirely from archaeology, and has grave gaps. Some of these lost kingdoms may well have been more interesting and surprising than the civilizations that had the luck to write and thus be remembered. One of the most intriguing was a people living along the southern coast of Peru, the **Nazca** (100–550 AD). Its setting is extraordinary. Even today, hardly anything grows in the deserts on the coastal plain. And yet, there are rivers, and underground water is surprisingly close to the surface. Like the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the Nazca were a river civilization. Like them, irrigation systems depended on large numbers of people working together, leading to a more centralized and hierarchical culture. But the most remarkable aspect of their culture are the so-called *Nazca Lines*, mysterious drawings that were created by removing red stones lying on the desert floor, revealing the whiter earth beneath. Early Nazca drawings were geometric patterns or representational; birds, monkeys, fish, and a goggle-eyed human figure. Later they evolved into long, straight lines pointing for miles in different directions. The purpose of the *Nazca Lines* continues to be debated. Contemporary with the Nazca, but inhabiting the northern coast, were the **Moche** (100-700 AD). Their pottery was sensational, beautifully coloured and increasingly complex as their society developed. Perhaps the most famous vessels are in the form of highly realistic human faces, which appear to represent real individuals. The Moche were also ambitious builders of brick "pyramids"; really platforms. The *Temple of the Sun*, with an original height of fifty meters, was constructed entirely of unfired bricks, dried in the sun; archaeologists estimate over 130 million of them. From the sixth century, the centre of Andean civilisation shifted from the coastal plain to the highlands. The **Wari** (600-1100 AD), based at their capital Huari (near modern Ayacucho), emerged as a force to be reckoned with. They were vigorous conquerors who built and maintained an empire covering much of the highlands and coast of Peru. As with many expansionist cultures, the Wari attempted to subdue local traditions and beliefs by emphasizing their own. Thus, Wari influence is noted in the two major Andean crafts of most areas; metalworking by men, and textile weaving by women. They are most significant, however, for developing an extensive network of roads, and for greatly expanding the terrace agriculture system; infrastructure that would serve the Incas well when they came into power in the early 15th century. The Wari were eventually replaced by a gaggle of local cultures that thrived until the Inca conquest. One of the best known of these were the **Chimú** (900-1470) of Chan Chan, the largest pre-Columbian city in South America.

### Worlds Apart of Classical Antiquity

By the end of Classical Antiquity, most of the globe’s surface was then still without civilisation, but what was civilised fell into relatively few zones in each of which powerful, distinctive, often self-conscious and largely independent traditions were at work. Their differences were to go on deepening for another thousand years or so, until by about 1453 AD mankind was probably more diversified than ever before or since. One result was that Chinese, Indian, Western European and later Islamic civilizations all lived independently long enough to leave ineradicable traces in the ground-plan of our world. Everywhere, the weight of tradition was enormous and unquestionable, if different. The Middle Ages would see the expansion and growth of civilization into new geographic areas across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Of course, variety in cultural development had already produced different technologies. In this, Chinese thinkers made among the most important advances, particularly the so-called *Five Great Inventions of China*. The first, the process for paper-making, had already been discovered before the end of Classical Antiquity. Clear evidence of the second, the stirrup which was crucial in the development of heavy cavalry, only appears during the period of chaos following the decline of the Han. The other three had made considerable strides: gunpowder, the printing press, and the compass. The discovery of gunpowder is often attributed to experimentation in Chinese alchemy by Taoists during Han times, in their pursuit of the answer to eternal life; it wasn't truly understood or applied to warfare until after 1000 AD. In the 4th-century AD, Confucian scholars made copies of important texts, by laying sheets of black paper on slabs of engraved text and rubbing all over with charcoal to leave white letters; an early stepping-stone on the long journey to the printing press. Mankind everywhere has long speculated upon the phenomenon observed in Lodestone, naturally occurring magnetic iron oxide, which attracts small pieces of iron, but it was the Chinese in the 11th-century AD who discovered that a magnet allowed to move freely points north, thus inventing the compass.