What Makes Civilization Read online

  A Little Background

  The study of Egypt and Mesopotamia does not begin on an equal footing. As one ancient historian observes, there has ‘never been a “Babylonia-mania” in Western art, literature, architecture, or design to rival Egypt’s hold on pre-modern Europe’ (Lundquist 1995: 67). Certain features and memories of ancient Egyptian culture were known, celebrated, and imitated in the West long before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script in the early nineteenth century, notably through the medium of biblical and Greco-Roman texts, as well as travellers’ reports of the impressive stone monuments still visible on the Giza plateau and elsewhere in the valley of the Nile. The same sources also preserved a memory of the great empires of Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia were recalled, if only through the eyes of those they subjugated. But by contrast, the earliest literate culture of the region—that of ancient Sumer, occupying today’s southern Iraq—was completely unknown to European scholarship just a century ago. Its cities, temples, and scribal archives lay buried deep within the artificial mounds known as tells, formed by the accumulation of mud-brick architecture over millennia of human habitation.

  Today we are aware that during the third millennium BC, which forms the chronological focus of this book, Egypt and Mesopotamia witnessed—more or less simultaneously—the emergence of dynastic polities on a scale then unprecedented in human history. Like their associated systems of writing, the earliest in the world, these polities took on strikingly different forms. The heartland of urban societies in Mesopotamia lay between the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, on the alluvial plains extending south of modern Baghdad to the marshy head of the Persian Gulf. By the end of the third millennium BC, written sources routinely refer to the southern part of this area as Sumer, a region made up of politically independent city-states in which a variety of languages (including Sumerian and Akkadian) were spoken, but whose inhabitants nevertheless recognized a common religious and cultural identity. By contrast, the ‘Two Lands’ of Upper and Lower Egypt—as hieroglyphic sources refer to the valley and delta of the Nile—constituted a single unified kingdom, held together by a sacred monarch whose territorial control extended from the First Cataract of the Nile at Elephantine (near modern Aswan) to the Mediterranean Sea.

  Since Henri Frankfort wrote his The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (1951) (the last major comparative study of early Egypt and Mesopotamia) our understanding of these societies has increased exponentially. So too has the loss and destruction of ancient sites and artefacts through industrial dam construction, conflict, and looting. Dramatic increases in knowledge have nevertheless taken place, notably in the field of prehistoric archaeology, providing a much fuller account of the background to the emergence of the first dynastic states in each region. And the spaces between and adjacent to them have been gradually filled in by evidence for societies of comparable scale and organizational complexity, such as the remarkable kingdom of Ebla in western Syria (whose capital, at Tell Mardikh, was discovered by Italian scholars in the 1960s), and the previously unsuspected Oxus (or ‘Bactria-Margiana’) civilization of central Asia (uncovered by Russian archaeologists in the 1970s). These new revelations, and the dense web of connections which they reveal between the societies of the ancient Near East, serve only to reinforce the interpretive challenge posed by ‘the birth of civilization’:

  For a comparison between Egypt and Mesopotamia discloses, not only that writing, representational art, monumental architecture, and a new kind of political coherence were introduced in the two countries; it also reveals the striking fact that the purpose of their writing, the contents of their representations, the functions of their monumental buildings, and the structure of their new societies differed completely. What we observe is not merely the establishment of civilized life, but the emergence, concretely, of the distinctive ‘forms’ of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization.

  (Frankfort 1951: 49)

  PART I

  THE CAULDRON OF CIVILIZATION

  1

  CAMOUFLAGED BORROWINGS

  The history of civilization, from the point of view that concerns us, is the history of the circulation between societies of the various goods and achievements of each. … Societies live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.

  Marcel Mauss, The Nation (1920)

  A n Egyptian literary text dating to the end of the Bronze Age (around 1100 BC) relates the journey of Wenamun, an emissary of the Temple of Amon at Thebes, to the port of Byblos, modern Jbeil, on the coast of Lebanon. He is received by a local prince who refuses to grant him the object of his mission: a consignment of cedar wood, cut from the Lebanese mountains, for the ceremonial river barge of the god Amon. An affronted Wenamun reminds the prince that his royal ancestors had always offered what is due to the supreme god of Thebes: ‘His is the sea, and his is Lebanon, which you claim is yours.’ The prince acknowledges Amon’s dominion over ‘all the lands’, but then goes on to remind Wenamun that ‘technical skill’—the humanly learned skills of shipbuilding and maritime travel, for which Byblos was famed—has also spread ‘as far as this place where I am’, and with it the power conferred by mastery of the sea. He then proceeds to trade with Wenamun on his own, highly commercial, terms.

  Marooned on the shores of Byblos, Wenamun was forced to learn a lesson that modern writers on the ancient world have often seen fit to ignore. We tend to portray ancient societies as existing rather like Shelley’s famous description of Ozymandias, in splendid but desolate isolation. Regional specialists are not averse to claiming some elevated status for their particular area of expertise; and the layout of modern museums often militates against an understanding of the relationships between societies. Most seem to be planned on a principle of cultural quarantine, segregating the remains of once-connected civilizations into a series of artificial components: the isolated ‘garden cultures’ of Quigley’s diagram. In consequence, we are easily startled by each new revelation of contact between peoples remote in time from ourselves. Like latter-day Wenamuns, caged within our particular world-views, we take for granted that isolation and stasis were the natural conditions of past societies, and that interaction between them was intermittent and exceptional—a series of ‘encounters’, as Huntington puts it.

  In reflecting upon these assumptions, let us return to the narrow coastal strip of the northern Levant (modern-day Syria and Lebanon) and its mountainous hinterland, raised high above the Mediterranean by the Great Rift Valley on its passage from the lakes of East Africa to the foothills of southern Turkey. In the vicinity of these mountains, with their lofty stands of cedar and juniper, the political imaginations and economic interests of the world’s first states converged. Hereabouts, and most probably in the Amanus Mountains of northern Syria, lay the inspiration for the ‘Cedar Forest’ of Mesopotamian literature, where Gilgamesh—the exemplary king of Mesopotamian legend—slew the monstrous guardian of the woods and, together with his bounty of fine timber, made the long return journey down the Euphrates to the city of Uruk, near the head of the Persian Gulf. A short way to the south, along the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges, was located a domain of the goddess Ba’alat Gebal, also recognized as the Egyptian Hathor in her guise of the ‘Lady of the Mountain’. Many centuries before Wenamun, emissaries of the Egyptian court docked at the harbour of Byblos to worship at her sanctuary and obtain a variety of exotic trade goods. Most important among them were timber, and also the resins of coniferous trees, which were applied to the bodies of the elite dead during their preparation for the tomb.

  Today the denuded slopes of the Syrian and Lebanese mountains stand as testimony to millennia of exploitation, their deeper scars reaching back to a time when the products of the Canaanite coast fed the demands of distant gods on the Nile and the Euphrates. But how typical or frequent were such long-distance transfers of goods
and knowledge between the ancient states of the Near East? What role did they play in the ancient economy? Despite their impressive scale and sophistication, there is no written evidence that the kingdom of Egypt and the city-states of Mesopotamia were directly aware of one another during their first thousand years of existence, which correspond roughly to the third millennium BC. The horizons of the known world, when traced from the official records of either region, appear more limited: ships that passed in the night. Can we then conclude, with Huntington, that the flow of interaction between them was negligible and inconsequential?

  False Horizons

  Ancient Egyptian written sources identify a variety of foreign territories and peoples beyond, and subservient to, the ‘Two Lands’; a term which referred both to the political frontiers of the kingdom and to the cultivable parts of the Nile valley and delta. Among them we find the pastoral tribes of the Eastern and Western Deserts of Egypt; the people of Nubia, beyond the First Cataract of the Nile; the towns of the Levantine coast, among which Byblos was accorded special status as an appendage of the royal court and a domain of Hathor; the Sinai Desert, with its mines of turquoise and copper; and Punt, a land of natural wonders along the southern reaches of the Red Sea, and a supplier of aromatic incense for the purification of temples and tombs.

  Map 2. Probable locations of foreign lands, from Mesopotamian sources

  Mesopotamian royal inscriptions, from the late third millennium BC onwards, routinely assert the conquest of ‘all the peoples and mountain lands from across the Lower Sea to the Upper Sea’, referring respectively to the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, or possibly Lake Urmia to the west. The northerly limits of the cosmos were also fixed by the ‘Cedar Forest’ and ‘Silver Mountain’, places of heroic battles and supernatural encounters beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. The main maritime arena lay to the south, within and beyond the ‘Lower Sea’. The name Dilmun, already mentioned in cuneiform documents of the late fourth millennium BC, refers at various times to the islands of Bahrain and Tarut, and to the adjoining Arabian littoral of the central Gulf; and by the end of the third millennium, more distant locations had been added: Magan (the Gulf of Oman, rich in copper ores) and Meluha (most probably the coastal sweep between Makran and the mouths of the Indus, identified as a supplier of exotic goods such as ivory, lapis lazuli, carnelian, gold, and fine woods). The kingdom of Elam, with its lowland capital at Susa in south-west Iran, and the more distant territories of Anshan and Marhashi in the Iranian highlands to the east are acknowledged in Mesopotamian sources as political equals and rivals to the cities of the Sumerian plain.

  The scope of these geographical designations was not rigidly fixed, changing with experience and perhaps also with the contexts in which they were used. At times the ‘Upper Sea’ seems to refer to the Mediterranean, rather than Caspian, as in a victory inscription of Sargon of Akkad (c.2300 BC) which places it near the Silver Mountain (most likely the Bolkardağ mines on the slopes of the Taurus in southern Turkey, overlooking the Cilician Gates). From the internal perspective of Mesopotamian royal rhetoric, the distinction between these two bodies of water—Mediterranean and Caspian—need not always have been significant. The political imagination has a timeless habit of polarizing space into ‘Upper/ Lower’, ‘Inner/Outer’, ‘East/West’. But there are other reasons why toponyms of this kind should not be taken as an accurate guide to the extent of cross-cultural interaction in the ancient Near East. These reasons become clearer when we consider the principal functions and distribution of the early writing systems from which they derive.

  In Egypt the ceremonial hieroglyphic script and its cursive variant, known as hieratic, appeared together around 3300 BC. Cuneiform writing was invented around the same time in Sumer, where its use was initially restricted to the notation of economic accounts. The signs of the cuneiform script, impressed with a reed stylus onto tablets of damp clay, were initially pictorial in character, but over a period of centuries they were reduced to more abstract forms for speed and ease of execution. By contrast, the hieroglyphic script of Egypt never lost its pictorial character. It was carved on a wide variety of display media, whose overwhelmingly royal functions reflect the restricted social context of the script’s invention. The more informal hieratic script was used in Egypt for administration and was executed with ink on papyrus, which rarely survives from such early periods, or on the surface of ceramic containers. Inscribed Egyptian objects occasionally made their way abroad as a result of trading ventures and diplomatic activity. By the beginning of the second millennium BC small numbers were carried as far as the island of Crete where distinct systems of pictorial and linear (non-pictorial) writing—probably unrelated to those of Egypt, but with possible antecedents on the Levantine coast—subsequently developed. Regular use of the Egyptian writing system, however, remained firmly confined to the territory of the Egyptian state, including its garrisons in Nubia, and its oasis colonies in the Eastern Sahara where clay tablets were sometimes employed as a convenient substitute for papyrus.

  Of the two systems, Egyptian and Mesopotamian, cuneiform was by far the more promiscuous. By 3000 BC its use in Sumer had stimulated the development of a closely related writing system to the east, in the lowland towns of neighbouring Khuzestan (south-west Iran), and from there an independent network of literate communities—smaller in scale than those of Sumer—extended into highland Iran and beyond to the vicinity of modern-day Tehran. This latter script, known as ‘Proto-Elamite’, is still far from being deciphered, but its early uses seem to have been largely restricted to administration and accounting. By no later than 2400 BC cuneiform writing was also employed in palatial centres on the Middle Euphrates (Mari) and beyond the Syrian steppe (Ebla), where it was used to record languages of the Semitic family (to which Sumerian, the earliest written language of southern Mesopotamia, is an outsider). The Harappan civilization of the Indus valley—a contemporary of Old Kingdom Egypt and Early Dynastic Mesopotamia—also developed its own script. Unrelated to cuneiform and known largely from engravings on stone commodity seals, the early Indus script remains undeciphered.

  This may seem an impressive roster of script-using societies clustered within a relatively small portion of the globe. (The term ‘literate societies’ is not ideal, since the restricted groups that used scripts were, in Benedict Anderson’s words, ‘tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans’.) Yet, with the exception of the palatial archive at Ebla, the surviving administrative records of early states provide only vague and sporadic clues regarding their relationships with societies beyond their political frontiers. Nor do they reveal much about the manner in which technological skills—including the skill of writing itself—were learned and transmitted within and between societies. Most of the economic archives which have been studied are narrowly concerned with the internal affairs of urban institutions, rather than with long-distance trade.

  Both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, official representations of the outside world are more commonly preserved on royal monuments erected in temples, tombs, and palaces. Their messages were directed towards the inner elite and to the gods, and their cartography is cosmic rather than secular in nature. Contact and exchange with foreign lands played an integral role in such representations, but it was a role defined first and foremost by ritual and political concerns. They tell us much about the internal workings and needs of Egyptian and Sumerian society, and especially their institutions of sacral kingship, which I explore in Chapter 8. But they are of limited value in reconstructing the true extent of contact between ancient societies. Given these limitations to our written evidence for cross-cultural interaction, it is necessary to stress the social and ecological imperatives that compelled early states into constant interaction with the outside world.

  Imperatives to Interaction

  The agrarian economies of Egypt and Sumer were entirely dependent on the fertile alluvial soils deposited by their major river systems, which passed through
otherwise arid regions that experienced negligible rainfall. The flood regimes of the Tigris and Euphrates were much less favourable to irrigation agriculture than that of the Nile, rising with the spring harvest rather than in the autumn sowing season, when water is most in demand. Accordingly they required a higher investment of labour to maintain artificial water channels and dykes, and to prevent the build-up of toxic salts in the soil. Under stable climatic conditions, both regions nevertheless enjoyed rich annual yields of cereals, legumes, and tree crops, supplemented by abundant wild resources. Their respective locations on major floodplains, however, also rendered the polities of Egypt and Mesopotamia dependent on outside sources for a wide variety of raw materials. Metals, hard stones, and high quality timber had to be regularly obtained from remote regions, often located hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away, and inhabited by non-literate societies whose histories must be reconstructed primarily from their surviving material cultures.

  With their limited military capacity, Old Kingdom Egypt and the Early Dynastic city-states of Sumer resorted only sporadically to direct force as a means of directing the activities of smaller groups on their margins, which developed their own forms of resistance to outside interference (discussed in Chapter 6). Formal empires were not a feature of this period, although from the closing centuries of the third millennium BC the trend of development in both regions was towards their formation on ever-larger scales. The importance of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates therefore lay as much in their role as arteries of trade and communication between the urban and non-urban worlds, as in the agricultural surpluses afforded by their annual floods.