A History of the World (10 page)

One particular bad character, a foreman called Paneb, seems to have been constantly making murderous threats to other workers, stealing from royal tombs, harassing other women into making clothes for him, and having illicit sex with another man’s wife, a lady called Tuy, and other married women. He was eventually tried by the pharaoh’s vizier and removed from his job, though we do not know what eventually happened to him. This may have been the result of a village feud, but it shows there was a trusted and effective system of justice at work.

The story of this village is not only a refreshing and unusual instance of the voices of ordinary workers – skilled and valued people, but manual workers nevertheless – and their families emerging from distant history. It also shows that they shared the religious convictions of their rulers and, as soon as it was possible, aspired to share their underworld too. Indeed, when we consider the lives of such people – proud of their skills as stonemasons, painters, carpenters, makers of clothing and cooks, who ate reasonably well, mixing fish and meat with a basic diet of vegetables, bread and beer; who had a rich spiritual life that made sense of their world; and who trusted in a system of fair law – the idea of a downtrodden semi-enslaved world of ancient toilers falls away. Were the lives of these villagers not better in most ways than the lives of millions of poorer-paid or unemployed people in tower blocks today?

Back to the Bull

The Minoans were the first European civilization (from around 3600 to 1160
BC
, though only just, since their island of Crete lies in the far south of the jagged Greek peninsula. They were trading and seafaring people, whose pottery turns up in Egypt and whose art was influenced by the Egyptians. They were literate, though their form of writing has never been deciphered. They seem to have been relatively unwarlike. Their art and architecture are instantly attractive, giving an initial impression of an airy, tranquil, female-dominated society whose palace walls ripple with dancing dolphins. Amid the fat red columns
and excellent sewerage systems are images of a little bull-dancing here, a moment of saffron-gathering there. But the Minoans are particularly useful as a warning not from history – but about history and how we romanticize it.

The great Minoan palace of Knossos is one of the most popular tourism sites in the eastern Mediterranean, and has been for a century. Sightseers already half in love with this hot, rosemary-scented island idyll learn that it was destroyed in the aftermath of a terrible earthquake at Santorini. The words ‘lost civilization of Atlantis’ are muttered. This is how many modern Europeans like to think of their earlier selves – peaceable, artistic, liberated and romantically doomed – a story that is half-Eden and half the
Titanic
. But it is almost all bull.

Knossos is an old building, at least by our standards. It dates back to between 1905 and 1930 –
AD
– and has been described by one archaeologist as one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on Crete, bearing unsettling echoes of Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square and the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier. Cathy Gere found it suited to the urban sprawl now encroaching on the site: ‘today all of Greece is liberally studded with half-built, low-rise, skeletal modernist ruins, stairs climbing to nowhere’.
²⁶

The dubious reconstruction of a Bronze Age palace, filled with faked-up pictures, was the lifetime achievement of a British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans. Knossos had been discovered by a local Greek antiquarian, who had started to dig in the 1870s. But with an excellent classical education and wealthy from the family’s paper-mill business, Evans bought the entire site when Crete became independent of the Ottoman Empire. Like his friend the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann who had discovered (and accidentally partly destroyed) Troy in 1871, Evans saw himself as reconnecting the modern and ancient worlds and cleansing the dirty industrial mess of modern Europe through the revived memory of simpler, nobler times. As Gere puts it, Evans was infused and animated by spiritual hunger and he wanted nothing less than ‘the pagan re-enchantment’ of the modern world.

To achieve this, in his hunger, Evans first supported the ruined buildings he was excavating with wood and plaster, and then slowly began to ‘improve’ them with the flexible and useful recent invention of reinforced concrete. The extent to which his re-imagining of the
Knossos complex is an accurate and reasonable guess, or merely a modernist fantasy, divides even the experts. Evans was searching for a pacific, sexually relaxed paradise and, in Crete, avoiding any evidence of military fortification; later on, he commissioned modern artists to ‘touch up’ ancient wall paintings so comprehensively that they produced new ones. The Swiss–French father-and-son team, both called Émile Gilliéron, produced reconstructions that go far beyond the evidence, yet are now reproduced around the world, and they probably went on to make full-scale fakes.

The reconstructions included images of black African warriors used by the Minoans, according to Evans’s fantasy, to invade the mainland Greeks, whom he associated with Germanic militarism. Shrewd observers noticed something odd. The English novelist Evelyn Waugh, visiting the Heraklion museum where the paintings were on show, wrote of his suspicion that ‘their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for the covers of
Vogue
’.
²⁷
Even the name ‘Minoan’ came from Evans’s belief that he had discovered the original site of King Minos’s famous labyrinth, where according to classical myth the hero Theseus killed the half-bull and half-man Minotaur. The myth placed King Minos on Crete and had it that the Minotaur devoured fresh Athenian children; there is something sadistic about the story. And what the Minoans really called themselves, we cannot say.

So from this rubble, what can we know for sure about the people we call Minoans? Their civilization lasted for around thirteen hundred years and survived not one but a series of natural disasters including a hugely destructive earthquake and two volcanic eruptions, and a tsunami which devastated coastal settlements and their all-important shipping. Recent archaeology, influenced by the huge destructive power of the 2004 tsunami in Asia, suggests similar devastation in Crete. The Minoan ‘palaces’ that scatter the island, linked by stone roads, are probably urban, religious and trading centres. They traded in tin, very well made and painted (and unfaked) pottery, as well as a wide range of foods, oils and other staples. Their agriculture was sophisticated and it does seem that their religion was dominated by priestesses and by some form of bull-worship. A game or ritual involving leaping over bulls, grasping them by their horns – which must have been far more dangerous than modern bull-fighting – is seen on
genuine images. Even if their art was not quite as sexily exuberant as that of the reconstructors, it was sinuous and immediately attractive.

But there is a darker side to the culture. It is now thought that they did go to war and did protect their citadels with defensive walls. At Anemospilia, a temple near Knossos, as stark and unadorned an excavation as the other is rebuilt and imagined, three skeletons were found by a Greek-led team in 1979. They had apparently all died in the immediate aftermath of the later volcanic eruption. One is thought to be of a twenty-eight-year-old priestess and another of a priest; the third is the skeleton of an eighteen-year-old boy, tethered in a foetal position and with an ornate knife sticking through him. The arrangement of blackened and white bones suggests he was still bleeding to death when the final disaster struck, and the obvious conclusion is that he was a human sacrifice designed to appease the volcano.

Far from being a society of peace and love, wafting about in gossamer garments and admiring the dolphins, the Minoans seem to have been as bloody as anyone else. Just as the first Cro-Magnons were able to combine beautiful art and cannibalism, so the first civilization in Europe combined beauty and human sacrifice. The hunter-gatherers had struggled with the natural challenges produced by an erratic and difficult climate; their Minoan descendants were still struggling with natural threats big enough to overwhelm their way of life. In between, man had begun to learn how to reshape nature; but outside a few specially favoured river valleys this remained a precarious and uncertain victory.

The end of the Minoan story is messy; most scholars now believe they were not wiped out by a single cataclysm as the tourist guides say, but were sufficiently weakened by eruptions and earthquakes to make them relatively easy meat for invading Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland. Certainly, Greek-speakers replaced the late Minoan elites not very long before their civilization, too, mysteriously disappeared. As we shall see later, the end of a lively and sophisticated Bronze Age Mediterranean world is one of history’s more tantalizing puzzles.

By this point, Eve’s children have already laid the foundations of the modern world. Most of the spadework has been done over a span of fifty thousand years by people whose names we will never know and most of whose languages remain a mystery. They have cleared forests, invented agriculture, raised the first towns and cities, and
advanced enough in learning to use mathematics and writing, preserving their names and stories. They have also begun to develop a class system and fighting elites. They have invented war.

The First Great Age of Empire, from the Assyrians to Alexander, and How Civil Conflict Produced Radical Advances in Religion, Writing and Philosophy

War, and more war: a dreary chronicle of swollen-headed butcher kings, charcoaled cities, and flies buzzing on silent flesh? It is true that the early Mediterranean, Indian and Asian worlds saw almost incessant warfare, a great churning of empires and armies which, you might have thought, would push civilization back to a dark age. And indeed, around three thousand years ago there
was
a dark age, a mysterious collapse across what had been a cradle of civilization. Everywhere archaeologists report depopulation, palaces abandoned, and the widespread loss of skills, including writing.

But out of the disaster arose new empires, now with iron weapons, about to write down their own history and chronicle their own wars. And however terrible war may be, the awkward truth is that war has been a huge driver of change in human history. When we reach into a purse or pocket for coins, when we argue about dangerous extremists in our democracies, or about the mingling of cultures; when we write our thoughts down using the alphabet or read headlines about threats to the traditional family, we are using tools and thoughts given to us by this apparently remote age of empires, thinkers and warrior-kings.

So here, from Greece to India and China, is the case for war.

Greek Glory and the First Empires

Into written history strides a story we still read today. It begins in the middle of a war, with the rage of the warrior Achilles, and it comprises just two weeks’ worth of bickering, sand, heat and very bloody death in front of the walls of a city. The action takes place near the end of a decade-long siege, a pointless stalemate. This is the
Iliad
of Homer. With that and his other great poem of journeying and heartache, the
Odyssey
, Homer began to make Greece. For the classical Greeks, these books were the Bible and Shakespeare combined, a source of cultural identity, a vast storehouse of expressions and a treasury for orators.

Educated Greeks of the fifth century
BC
prided themselves on knowing these huge poems by heart. Since then, Homer’s tales and the surrounding myths of Helen’s abduction and the Trojan Horse have dug their way into the world’s imagination, their influence extending from Roman generals to the poets of Shakespeare’s England and modern film-makers. Here is one place where a true world culture begins; and it is the earliest known work of Western literature. Not only is the
Iliad
a war story, but it is an unusually convincing one, about an army whose leaders are petty and sometimes mutinous, where disease stalks the camp and wounds are frightful and the enemy is to be admired, not merely hated. And in which the good guys die. It glories in violence, this poem, yet it was written by someone who found the human lust for war silly and bitter. He was deeply conflicted about conflict, and thus a deathless poet of the human condition.

These are the centuries when mankind’s core civilizations moved from bronze weapons to iron ones, and from oral tales to stories written down. The role of war as a dark driver of change is unavoidable. Advances in metalworking, wheels, horsemanship, sailing, mathematics and counting, architecture and religion, are driven by confrontation – in China, India and the Mediterranean. This is, obviously, an ambiguous story. Greece is a good place to start it, both because of what will happen there and what had happened just before the Iron Age, when we get a tantalizing glimpse of a better future that would be snuffed out. Across the Mycenaean Greek world of Homer’s heroes a dark shadow would soon fall, scattering the people, destroying the palaces and cities, until even the ability to write was lost. The Greeks who followed, using Homer to recall their identity, blamed war for their predicament.

We do not know quite what happened. Around 1000
BC
some great disaster or string of disasters hit the eastern Mediterranean, causing a dramatic depopulation. If the Greeks coming later, in early classical times, thought this was somehow connected with the Trojan conflict, then perhaps war was part of the story. Historians think invasions of Dorian tribes from the north, coming upon Greek statelets weakened by local conflicts, and wiping them out, may have been responsible. Alternatively, this collapse might have been driven by natural disasters – climate change or a series of terrible earthquakes, provoking local wars of mere survival. One single cause seems unlikely.