A History of the World (12 page)

Once you knew the sounds of the letters you could work out the sounds of words, and thus read messages without having to know the meaning of thousands of little drawings. The messages could be carved quite quickly because the alphabet was simple, and they could also be written on wax tablets, like the one discovered on the trading vessel – they were surely for commercial messages and record-keeping by busy traders with no time to waste. And, of course, the sounds could be used for different languages, just as German and Portuguese, for instance, are written with the same letters. So the Phoenician experiment could spread around the Mediterranean world and be quickly adapted. We believe the Greeks took it up by about 800
BC
, just before Homer was at work, and they quickly improved it by adding vowel sounds.

The Samaritans had their version, derived from a joint and even older script; and Hebrew writing came from that same source. So not only Homer, but the Bible too, pay tribute to these little-known people. Here is perhaps the greatest case in world history of an invention devised for humdrum purposes, traders’ notations in a multilingual market, outstripping its origins and altering human life. In a similar way, the development of a US military communications system into the World Wide Web is a parallel – but it is a
smaller
achievement than alphabetic writing. Poignantly, the Phoenicians themselves have left us very little writing of interest – some rather dull religious verses, lists, and cross injunctions from long-dead kings.

The Hebrew Idea

The Hebrews would be rather marginal to world history, just another Middle Eastern people of somewhat obscure origins, were it not for their great idea, monotheism. They came to believe in a single universal god who has a personal relationship with everyone who believes in him. This developed in written texts, and was transmitted through writing; and it so outleaped its origins, detonating around the world like a series of mental explosions, that it has come to seem normal. Monotheism changed the world far more than any mere emperor, technology or scientific discovery.

Belief in a universal god who lives not in one particular temple, or by one gurgling stream or atop a particular misty mountain, and who listens to the believer, seems to respond to a deep human need, even though when the Hebrews developed the idea it seemed very odd. Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, argues that the shift is from religions rooted in the world, towards a source of meaning lying outside any world that can be seen or touched: ‘The gods of polytheism, in all their buzzing, boisterous confusion, were within the universe. They were subject to nature. They did not create it.’ The Jewish god, by contrast, gave life meaning from outside, and also allowed a new politics of the Covenant, ‘of a people pledging themselves to one another and to the common good, a politics of “we, the people” ’.
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This new way of understanding would bind people together with a new intensity. Sadly, it would divide them with a fresh ferocity, too.

Historians argue fiercely about how the Hebrew people discovered one-godism. We do not even know quite where they themselves first came from. According to their tales the man named as their original prophet, Abraham, who may really have existed, was born in Ur, that decaying imperial river city of baked-brick terraces and Mesopotamian gods. The religion of the Mesopotamians has pre-echoes of Judaism. It is possible that the Jews did spend around four hundred years in captivity in Egypt before breaking free under a leader with an Egyptian name, Moses, and trekking to the Promised Land where they ousted local tribes and settled down. But there are no Egyptian records to
show this, nor any archaeological evidence, and the Old Testament story seems to have been written down seven centuries later.

We do know that a people called ‘Israel’ were living in the hills and valleys of present-day Israel around 1200
BC
, thanks to a boastful inscription by the pharaoh Merneptah listing the peoples of the area who have just been crushed. Among them, ‘Israel is laid waste: his seed is not!’
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(This probably means that the farmers’ crops, rather than all the males, have been destroyed.) Archaeologists find the culture of these people to be very similar to that of the coastal dwellers near by in the land generally called Canaan. They had the same kinds of utensils, houses and writing. More to the point, they seem to have had similar gods. The northern group of Hebrews did not call their god Yahweh but El, which was the name of the chief god of the Canaanites. There were a dozen of these Hebrew tribes living in the area. Some might have arrived recently, but they probably originated in Arabia and had been a desert people, pushing towards slightly more fertile land. The word ‘Hebrew’ means ‘someone from the other side’ of the Euphrates river, hence ‘immigrant’ or perhaps just ‘wanderer’, and from early on they distinguished themselves from their neighbours.

To start with, the Hebrew god was not alone in his universe. El (as in Isra-el) was the father god, the Zeus, of a divine family. His wife was Asherah, his children were the storm-god Baal, who also brought fertility, and his sister Anat. Baal in particular continued to be worshipped for a long time as, slowly, the tribes of Israel began to differentiate themselves from their neighbours. Yahweh replaced El. The idea of ‘god’ as a Greek-style being walking on the earth, speaking and intervening personally in human life – the bickering deities that we find in Homer following human affairs like football spectators – faded in favour of a more transcendent, obscure and alarming presence. This took centuries, and is traced by scholars of the oldest parts of Jewish writing in what Christians now call the Old Testament.

The strip of coastal land which is now Israel, Palestine and Lebanon was as bitterly fought over in ancient times as it is today. Then, it had the misfortune to find itself between the two great river peoples, the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, including the Assyrians of the River Tigris. We have seen with the Phoenicians how trade can spur invention. The wider theme of this section, as noted earlier,
is that war does too, and of this the Israelites are a prime example. Conflict pushed them on the next step to full-blown monotheism.

Around three thousand years ago a kingdom was established, with a royal house that included such famous figures as Saul, David and Solomon. It had fought off another advanced coastal people, the Philistines. This kingdom is remembered as the high point of ancient independent Israel. There, an elite of teacher-preachers, the prophets, developed a new way of thinking about religion and ethics. Isaiah, Jeremiah and others spoke of justice and of the equality of men under the unchanging laws of a universal god, which were more important than the laws of kings or empires.

By the 700s
BC
, however, the kingdom had broken into two, a northern state called Israel, with its capital city of Samaria, and a southern one, Judah, based at Jerusalem. At the time, a favoured byproduct of war was the deportation of defeated elites. Instead of simply being slaughtered, kings, teachers, craftsmen and their families were carried off to the victors’ city to work. This left the defeated territory leaderless and in a sense de-civilized. In 722
BC
this happened to the northern kingdom, effectively wiping out ten of the twelve tribes of Israel and deporting around twenty-five thousand people. The Assyrian empire, with its huge capital at Nineveh, produced a series of hugely successful warrior kings, who carved out most of the Middle East as their fiefdom through a mixture of intimidation and raw terror-tactics. Their army was by far the most professional and well-equipped of the age and their punishments for anyone who stood against them included decapitation, flaying alive, impaling and deportation. We know the details of their brutal behaviour because they boasted about it on clay tablets and memorialised it with stone-slab carvings. These manage to be both beautifully made and entirely horrible, war propaganda intended to intimidate visitors to Nineveh.

Twenty years after the fall of Israel, Judah rebelled against the Assyrians, and faced another massive army. The city of Lachish was wiped out and Jerusalem was saved only by huge bribes to the conquerors and, perhaps, by an outbreak of disease among the besiegers. Then the high priest Hilkiah announced he had discovered a scroll of the laws given by Yahweh to Moses, in a corner of the Temple. Under the king Josiah a fresh period of religious development began, based on written documents, as the priests were set the task of telling the
complete story of the Jews. The tone was more aggressive, more strident.
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Idols of the old Canaanite gods Baal and Astarte were destroyed. Male prostitutes were expelled from the Temple. But Judah was still a small, soft nut between the pincers of rival empires, and Josiah was defeated by the Egyptians, not long before the next empire arrived.

These conquerors were the formidable Babylonians, led by their king Nebuchadnezzar. There were two phases to their attack. In the first, the Jewish king and ten thousand of his people were taken into captivity. But this did not finish Judah off. There was a revolt, led in part by the prophet Jeremiah. The Babylonian army came back in 586
BC
for a fearful siege of Jerusalem. After many months of being driven to starvation and perhaps even cannibalism, the inhabitants were overrun and the city almost completely destroyed. A further twenty thousand people were taken off, not to Nineveh this time, but to Babylon. The Temple, where Yahweh had resided, was almost obliterated.
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The famous ‘Babylonian exile’ during which, by the waters, the captives lay down and wept, remembering Zion, had begun.

For the people of Jerusalem, led east from their small dusty city, Babylon must have been an awesome spectacle. It was one of the world’s great centres, a melting-pot of Middle Eastern peoples, mingling under its huge gates, by its ziggurats, in its temples and hanging gardens. It was a glittering spectacle of blue- and yellow-glazed tiles, statues of bulls and lions and dragons, and great processional roads. Here, sensible exiles would adapt and conform. The Jews, however, refused. Their scribes and priests consulted written scrolls and decided that Yahweh had not, after all, been destroyed with his Temple. Instead, he had followed his people like a giant shadow and was with them in their exile. He was with them, however, for only so long as they observed purity laws, which had originally been just for the priests. They must keep themselves apart from heathens.

Circumcision, refraining from pork, regular prayers, and a further refining of the holy texts, all helped give the exiled Jews a stronger sense of group identity. They were in the melting-pot, but they did not melt. The Jews were influenced by Babylon, of course. Biblical stories including the Flood, which echoes a famous Mesopotamian myth, and the multilingual building project of the Tower of Babel, are surely echoes of stories they picked up there. Meanwhile, the horror of what
had happened to Jerusalem darkened the religion, bringing a stronger sense of divine wrath and final judgements.

All this is central to the history of world religion. Under the influence of war and exile, the Hebrews evolved a notion of God which was based on written scripts, which treated all believers equally – while dividing them from the rest of unbelieving humanity – and which was mobile. Religion involved a text, an idea of equality and oneness in faith, and had a claim to universality. There had been other monotheistic cults and full religions, such as Persian Zoroastrianism, but there had been nothing remotely like this before. Later Judaism, Christianity and Islam would follow this pattern. For the post-exile Jews, Yahweh had his Temple with its empty room, its holy-of-holies, whence he would return and again be worshipped. But he was not, like other gods, rooted to one spot, or one land. He did not need to communicate through a single holy place.

Modern monotheism had arrived. The Babylonian captivity did not last so very long. After just forty-five years (compared with the four hundred of the fabled Egyptian exile), as soon as Persia’s King Cyrus had defeated Babylon, he sent the Hebrews home. They carried with them something new.

Cyrus, Cross-dresser

One man, and one man alone, was responsible for the Jews returning to Judah and thus for the development of their faith, and the faiths of Christianity and Islam that grew from it. He is the only Gentile given the honorific title of ‘Messiah’. On a pillar at the dusty remnants of his once great capital of Pasargadae in today’s Iran is carved what is believed to be his image. A bearded man with a bizarre crown and four wings stands dressed in a flowing gown. The inscription once above it read simply: ‘I, Cyrus the King, an Achaemenian’.

But he is clearly a cultural cross-dresser. His gown is one of those worn by the Elamites, a people dwelling in the highlands of southwestern Iran. His crown is an Egyptian one, but with Assyrian and Phoenician twists. His wings are Persian.
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What message is he trying to send? A rather wordier message from Cyrus helps us out. It comes on the side-drum-shaped clay ‘Cyrus cylinder’ found at Babylon and
now in the British Museum in London. It was made after he had captured Babylon (peacefully, he insists) and released the Jews from exile. Like the winged relief, this is propaganda. It is how Cyrus II wanted to be seen. It begins with the conventional ‘look at me’, top-dog rhetoric: ‘I am Cyrus, King of the globe, great king, mighty king, King of Babylon, king of the land of Sumer and Akad . . . king of the four quarters of the earth . . .’

So far, so standard. But the next thing Cyrus wants us to know is that this champion of the god of the Jews also favours the Babylonians’ god Marduk – ‘and I sought daily to worship him’. Along with freeing slaves and rebuilding houses he had restored sanctuaries, and not only for Marduk but for many other lesser gods across his new empire ‘beyond the Tigris river, whose sanctuaries had been in ruins over a long period[;] the gods whose abode is in the midst of them, I returned to their places and housed them in lasting abodes’.