Why the West Rules--For Now (30 page)

So many advantages accrued to Mesopotamia that people in the old core back in the Hilly Flanks started emulating the dynamic new societies in the floodplains. Around 4000
BCE
inhabitants of Susa, in a plain nestling in the Hilly Flanks in southwest Iran, outdid even Eridu by building a brick platform 250 feet long and 30 feet high. It probably supported a grand temple, although its nineteenth-century excavators, a little vague on the finer points of archaeological technique, hacked through the site and destroyed the evidence. But even they could not miss all the signs of increasingly complex organization, including some
of the world’s earliest copper ornaments as well as stamps and clay impressions that may indicate administrative control of goods, and images that some scholars interpret as “priest-kings.” Archaeologists often imagine that a regional chief lived at Susa, which was much bigger than the villages around it. The outlying villagers may have come to Susa to worship the gods, acknowledge their lord, and exchange food for ornaments and weapons.

Or, of course, they may not have—it is hard to tell from such a poorly excavated site. But archaeologists are forced to rely on Susa to understand this period because contemporary Mesopotamian towns are deeply buried under silt from six thousand years of Euphrates and Tigris floods, making them hard to study (plus there has, for obvious reasons, been little new research in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution or in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait). Comparable changes were probably under way all along the Euphrates and Tigris after 4500
BCE
, but only after 3800 do they become clearly visible to archaeologists.

Just why towns got bigger and more complex remains controversial. The sixth millennium
BCE
, when farmers first moved into Mesopotamia, saw Earth reaching the warmest, wettest point in its endlessly changing orbit round the sun and its wobbly rotation around its own axis, but by 3800
BCE
the world was cooling again. Good news for Mesopotamian farmers, you might think; but you would be wrong. Cooler summers meant that the rain-bearing monsoons blowing off the Indian Ocean got weaker. Rain fell less often and less predictably, and Mesopotamia started looking more like the parched place we see on CNN. Problems compounded one another: declining spring rains meant shorter growing seasons, which meant that crops ripened before the Euphrates and Tigris flooded each summer. The systems Mesopotamian farmers had painstakingly built up across two thousand years no longer worked.

Climate change forced tough choices on Mesopotamians. They could bury their heads in the sand as it encroached on their fields and carry on as usual, but the price of doing nothing would be hunger, poverty, and perhaps starvation. Or they could migrate to regions less dependent on the monsoon; but it is no small thing for farmers to abandon their well-tended fields. In any case, the Hilly Flanks—the obvious place to go—was already packed with villages. In 2006 archaeologists
at Tell Brak in northeast Syria uncovered two mass graves of young men dating to around 3800
BCE
, apparently the victims of massacres. Moving back to the crowded, violent Hilly Flanks might not have been a very attractive option.

If enough Mesopotamians had done nothing or run away, this new core would have collapsed. However, a third possibility presented itself. People could abandon their villages but stay in Mesopotamia, congregating in a few big sites. That seems counterintuitive: if crop yields are falling, cramming more people into smaller spaces should make things worse. But some Mesopotamians seem to have figured out that if more of them worked together they could run larger irrigation systems and store floodwaters until the crops were ready. They could feed more miners to dig copper from the ground; more smiths to make ornaments, weapons, and tools; and more traders to carry these goods around. So successful were they that by 3000
BCE
bronze (an alloy of copper and a little tin) had largely replaced stone for weapons and most tools, sharply increasing fighters’ and workers’ effectiveness.

Getting to that point, though, required organization. Centralized administration was the answer. By 3300
BCE
people were scratching onto little clay tablets such sophisticated records of their activities that most archaeologists call the symbols writing (even if as yet only a tiny scribal elite could read them). Little villages that could not support such sophisticated activities went to the wall while one site, Uruk, turned into a true city with maybe twenty thousand residents.

Mesopotamians were inventing management, meetings, and memoranda—the curses of life for so many of us today, and hardly the stuff of soaring narratives of human achievement. Yet as will become clear in the next few chapters, these were often the most important motors of social development. Organization turned villages in the Hilly Flanks and along the banks of the Yellow River into cities, states, and empires; failures of organization caused their fall. Managers are simultaneously the heroes and the villains of our story.

The birth of management as the monsoons dried up must have been traumatic. We should probably picture bedraggled, defeated columns of the hungry slouching toward Uruk under a dusty sky, like Okies but without the jalopies, let alone the New Deal. We should probably also imagine angry villagers refusing to cede power to self-important bureaucrats who tried to requisition their fields or crops. Violence must
often have been the outcome. Uruk could easily have broken apart; perhaps plenty of rival towns did.

We will never know the stories of the ancient managers who pulled Uruk through, but archaeologists suspect that they were tied to temples. Many pieces of evidence point this way, propping one another up like the poles in a tepee. For instance, excavations at temples have uncovered stacks of uniform-sized dishes known as “bevel-rimmed bowls,” probably for distributing food. The earliest clay tablets scratched with crude symbols come mostly from temples, and the symbol for “rations” on them is a sketch of a bevel-rimmed bowl. And when writing systems developed to the point they could record such information, they tell us that temples controlled broad acres of irrigated land and the labor to work them.

The temples themselves mushroomed into huge monuments, dwarfing the communities that built them. Long flights of stairs led to hundred-foot-high enclosures where specialists took counsel with the gods. If the tenth-millennium shrines that we saw in
Chapter 2
were amplifiers for messages to the spirits, the mighty sanctuary of fourth-millennium Uruk was a public address system worthy of Led Zeppelin. The gods would have to be deaf not to hear.

It was these shouts to the gods that originally drew me to archaeology. In 1970 my parents took my sister and me to see a film of Edith Nesbit’s Edwardian classic
The Railway Children
. I think I liked it, but the short feature that ran before it blew my mind (as people used to say in those days). Until that evening I had been obsessed with Apollo 11 and wanted to be an astronaut, but the B movie—a documentary (of a sort) based on Erich von Däniken’s book
Chariots of the Gods?
—made me realize that archaeology was the way to go.

Like Arthur C. Clarke in
2001
(which, like
Chariots of the Gods?
, was published in 1968), von Däniken claimed that space aliens had visited Earth in ancient times and taught humans great secrets. Von Däniken differed from Clarke, though, in insisting that (a) he was not making this up and (b) the aliens kept coming back. They had inspired Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids; the Hebrew Bible and Indian epics had described their spacecraft and nuclear weapons. The reason so many early civilizations had kings who claimed to talk to superhuman beings in the sky, von Däniken insisted, was that early kings
did
talk to superhuman beings in the sky.

While the evidence is thin (to put it mildly), the argument is certainly economical. Plenty of people believe it, and von Däniken sold 60 million books. He still has plenty of fans. Just a few years ago, while minding my own business standing over a barbeque, I was accused—in all seriousness—of belonging to a secret cabal of archaeologists that suppresses these facts.

Scientists are often criticized for taking the wonder out of the world, but they generally do so in the hope of putting truth in its place. In this case the truth of the matter is that we do not need spacemen to explain Mesopotamia’s godlike kings any more than we need a
2001
moment to explain the evolution of
Homo sapiens
. Religious specialists had been important since agriculture began, and all the signs are that now, when the mighty ones seemed to have forsaken humanity by taking rain away, Mesopotamians instinctively looked to priests claiming special access to the gods to tell them what to do. Organization was the key to survival in those tough times, so the more that people did what the priests said, the better things would go (provided the priests gave reasonably sound advice).

Two processes must have fed back on each other, their logic just as circular as von Däniken’s but even more convincing. Ambitious men claiming to have special access to the gods said they needed wonderful temples, elaborate ceremonies, and great wealth to make the gods hear them. Once they got these, they could turn around and point to their wonderful temples, elaborate ceremonies, and great wealth to prove that they were indeed close to the gods—after all, who but someone the gods loved would have such things? By the time scribes were recording such matters, around 2700
BCE
, Mesopotamian kings even claimed gods as their ancestors. Sometimes, as (I suspect) at Uruk, entrusting power to men who had hotlines to the gods worked wonders; and when it failed, as it often must have done, it of course left little for archaeologists to dig up.

Uruk became not only a city but also a state, with centralized institutions imposing taxes, making decisions binding the whole community, and backing them up with force. A few men (but apparently no women) occupied the top positions, and a larger group of warriors, landowners, merchants, and literate bureaucrats assisted them. For nearly everyone the rise of the state meant surrendering freedoms, but that was the price of success in hard times. Communities that paid
the price could muster more people, wealth, and power than pre-state societies.

Cities and states drove social development upward in Mesopotamia after 3500
BCE
and then spread outward, just as farming villages had once done in the Hilly Flanks. Uruk-style material culture (bevel-rimmed bowls, writing tablets, lavish temples) spread into Syria and Iran. The debates over how this happened are much like those over the initial spread of farming. There was probably colonization from the densely populated, highly organized south of Mesopotamia to the lightly settled, less centralized north: Habuba Kabira in central Syria, for instance, looks like someone cloned an Uruk neighborhood and dropped it down a thousand miles away. Tell Brak, by contrast, which was a large town long before bevel-rimmed bowls were dreamed up, looks more like a local community picking and choosing among customs invented at Uruk. Villagers struggling to make ends meet and seeing Mesopotamian cities’ success may have allowed local priests to turn themselves into kings; and ambitious priests, seeing Uruk’s religious leaders flourishing, perhaps talked, tricked, or bullied fellow villagers into giving them similar powers. Either way, people who preferred village life must have found state formation just as hard to resist as foragers had found farming all those thousands of years before.

THE GODS MADE FLESH

While the first farmers were sweating to make crops grow on Mesopotamia’s plains around 5000
BCE
, even more intrepid folk were striking out from the Jordan Valley across the Sinai Desert to try their luck along the Nile River. Egypt had few domesticable native plants and had lagged behind the Hilly Flanks in adopting agriculture, but once the right seeds and animals were imported, the new lifestyle flourished. The Nile flooded at just the right time for crops each year, and large, rainfed oases supported farming far into what is now desert.

These advantages meant, though, that the retreat of the monsoon around 3800
BCE
hit Egypt even harder than Mesopotamia. Many Egyptians abandoned their oases and squeezed into the Nile Valley, where water was plentiful but land was scarce, particularly where the
valley narrowed in Upper Egypt.
*
As in Mesopotamia, management was the answer. Excavated tombs suggest that Upper Egyptian village leaders had both military and religious roles. Successful chiefs grew rich as their villages captured more land; unsuccessful chiefs disappeared; and by 3300
BCE
three small states had formed. Each had a rich cemetery where its early kings—if that is not too grand a title for them—were laid to rest in tombs that aped Mesopotamian architecture, accompanied by gold, weapons, and Mesopotamian imports.

The kingdoms fought until, by 3100
BCE
, only one still stood. At that point, the scale of royal monuments exploded and the distinctive Egyptian hieroglyphic script abruptly appeared. Writing was probably limited to a narrow scribal group, as in Mesopotamia, but right from the beginning Egyptian texts contain narratives as well as bureaucratic accounts. One remarkable carving says that an Upper Egyptian king named Narmer conquered Lower Egypt around 3100
BCE
, while another suggests the involvement of someone called the Scorpion King.
^†
Later texts also mention a conqueror named Menes (perhaps the same person as Narmer). But although the details are confused, the basic story is clear: around 3100
BCE
the Nile Valley was united into the largest kingdom the world had yet seen, with maybe a million subjects.