A History of the World (20 page)

Seventy years later, according to Chinese records, a Roman delegation arrived by sea in Vietnam, then part of the Chinese empire, possibly sent by the great philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. They were sent away; the only links remained distant trading ones. Around the time of Christ, Roman women were wearing scandalously semitransparent silk dresses, which caused much head-shaking amongst Roman moralists. This silk came from China, via long sea voyages from Vietnam to what is now Sri Lanka and then on to Egypt. Roman glassware and coins have been found in China. There is even a faint possibility that Roman legionaries and Han soldiers fought one
another in Kyrgyzstan, the Romans in ‘fish-scale formation’, after being captured by Parthians in 54
BC
.

The empires lasted a similar length of time. The Romans, who had started as unimportant town-dwellers in central Italy, grew partly by attracting migrants and partly thanks to their astonishingly successful and very violent military campaigns. Their rise to hegemony began with the fall of the Greek kingdoms established after Alexander’s career, and with the destruction of their North African rival, Carthage, in 149–6
BC
. Some seventy years earlier, China’s first emperor had united the former warring states there. The Roman world would fall apart into two empires: the Western, which dissolved after
AD
400, and the Eastern (or Byzantine), which lasted until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. The Han empire was gone by
AD
220, though united China only really disintegrated in 317. (Even then, the southern half, less damaged by invasion and culturally more conservative, bears comparison with the long survival of the Eastern Roman Empire.)

So each of these great empires lasted for around half a millennium, not such a long time compared with the earlier civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, but impressive by modern democratic standards. A question that is being increasingly asked by historians, as today’s China rises, is whether our world, with a single united China but a fragmented Europe, derives in any way from the Roman and Han foundational experiences. After all, China remained broadly politically united for around half the time after the rise of its first emperor, while the Mediterranean and European west was never again united after the fall of Rome. Why?

Geography, say some. China is divided by river valleys and mountains but is also surrounded and cut off from the rest of the world by deserts and seas. Achieving political unity was no easy job. It has been calculated that between 656 and 221
BC
there were no fewer than 256 separate wars in China. But once that phase had passed there was a strong topographical logic to this single area, with its long belly-shaped coast. As soon as roads, canals and walls had drawn the lines of communication and defence, they tended to stay put. Invasions from outside would keep challenging the country, but they failed to wipe away the cultural map of the One China.

The Mediterranean and European world is very different. True,
the ‘middle sea’ made it easier to move around the classical Roman Empire, but there were fewer natural barriers to halt invaders, while Europe was divided by innumerable rivers, flowing in all directions, and by mountain ranges. Geographically it was an awkward, rumpled, riven peninsula, and therefore always less likely to hold together politically.

While instantly satisfying, this explanation seems a little too slick. For centuries China was divided. Her people in the north and south pursued very different lives, spoke different languages and at times were ruled by different empires. China very nearly pushed out into the world with great ocean-going fleets. That she did not was a political decision. Meanwhile in the West, for a time it seemed as if the Eastern Roman Empire might eventually reunite the Mediterranean. Much later, rulers such as the Habsburg Charles V and the Corsican adventurer Napoleon Bonaparte came close to uniting Europe, despite those rivers and mountain ranges.

What other forces are relevant? The role played by outsiders was certainly important. The nomadic and herding people of central Asia, armed and militant, produced waves of forced migration that washed across Europe. Many settled, before being pushed to move again by another wave. In China, the steppe peoples were kept out more effectively until, with the Mongols, they utterly overwhelmed the empire. But they did so so swiftly and comprehensively that they could replace it with their own imperial rule, and therefore could maintain its unity.

Though both the Chinese and European worlds would be shaken by the arrival of challenging religions, the effect of monotheism – both Christianity and Islam – was more dramatic in the West than was the impact of Buddhism on China, where emperors were able to repress it. This meant there was an edge, a desperation, to Europe’s wars of religion which China did not experience. Monotheism would divide Western mankind into believers and outsiders, again and again, though following different patterns. Nothing quite like this happened in China where, as we shall see, law and conservative social thinking had more impact than religion. Then there are cultural differences, such as the greater difficulty of learning written Chinese, which kept a bureaucratic elite self-contained and powerful in ways not experienced in the West. These are all issues we will come back to.

The story in both China and the Roman world is, however,
similarly bloody and brutal, replete with tales of cynical rulers, state terror and the persecution of dissenters. Attractively humane thinkers emerge in both worlds, and some gloriously beautiful buildings (though Han China was built mostly in wood and pounded earth, materials which, as mentioned earlier, do not survive). Yet these were also power structures erected by force and fear, able to express their beauty and philosophy only on the sweating backs of the vast majority, who were farmworkers. The Roman imperial achievement relied on the incorporation of local elites and the reputation of the legions; the Chinese more on pure force. But whether the educated elites studied the sayings of Confucius or of Christ, whether they kowtowed to an emperor or read the proclamations of a senate, armies marching under central control slaughtered rebel peoples and proclaimed their authority by means of public and deliberately repellent punishments. If might was right, centrally organized and mobilized might was righter still.

Ashoka

Before either Rome or Han China rose to its zenith, there existed another great empire, with a very different story. The third empire, which embraced perhaps a quarter of the world’s people, was that of Mauryan India. It covered almost all of modern India, excepting the far south, plus what is now Pakistan and much of Afghanistan too. Its population in the second century
BC
is guessed at fifty million and it began in 322
AD
, when the Romans were still struggling to get to grips with central Italy and the Chinese were enduring a vicious and seemingly endless war between rival states. Yet this third empire had collapsed again by 185
BC
, despite the brilliance of its greatest ruler, Ashoka. After the Mauryas, who took on the classical world and defeated it, India was never able to reach out and dominate anywhere else. Much of the political and religious shape of the modern world was first settled two thousand years ago, by historical figures whose names we know.

The Mauryan rulers are on the edge of visible history, however. Ashoka was only properly identified, as a historical rather than a mythical figure, by an eighteenth-century amateur philologist called James
Prinsep whose day job was running the British mint at Calcutta. Ashoka’s empire is less known and less documented than those of the Romans and Chinese, and always will be. There are three main sources. One was a Greek historian, Megasthenes, who worked for Seleucus Nicator, Alexander the Great’s general who carved his own mini-empire, centred on Persia and what is now Pakistan. Megas-thenes probably visited the great Mauryan capital city Pataliputra, which is now buried somewhere under modern Patna, undoubtedly one of the most chaotic and polluted metropolises in the world. Unfortunately, his own book has long disappeared and is known only from what later historians lifted from it. The second source is an Indian manual on how to rule, which may have been written, at least in part, by one of the advisers to the Mauryan court. And the third source is Ashoka’s own words, carved in stone and on pillars across much of India.

Ashoka’s grandfather, Chandragupta, is now believed to be the same Indian ruler identified by Megasthenes as ‘Sandrokottos’, who had met Alexander the Great. Chandragupta rose up against the previous dynasty of north India, the Nanda. With the help of an apparently wily and ruthless adviser he defeated them, and founded his own dynasty in 321
BC
. His strategy had been to wear the enemy down from the outlying areas before moving towards the centre, in a long war of attrition as the former empire gradually shrank. The legend has it that he did this after hearing a woman tell her child not to eat from the middle of a dish because the centre was bound to be hotter than the edges.

Chandragupta now turned on the Greeks, so recently unbeatable, and about 303
BC
defeated Seleucus. It clearly was no wipe-out, because in return for the new territories he won, Chandragupta gave Seleucus five hundred of the many thousands of war elephants he owned.
⁴
Alexander’s had been the first Western army to face the awesome sight of Indian war elephants, and he had brought some back to Baghdad as his personal guard. For the Greeks, such a gift to Seleucus was like being given several regiments of Tiger tanks or attack-helicopters. The elephants were traded, borrowed and gifted by Greek kings: the Egyptian kings, for instance, used Indian war elephants against the Jews during their revolt, and later on they would be used against the rising power of Rome.

If the ancient texts concerning government are to be believed, Chandragupta’s empire was not only warlike but highly interventionist, bureaucratic and paranoid, as he spread it across most of the Indian subcontinent. Yet we know very little about the ruler described as an Indian Julius Caesar; and less about his son, who took over after Chandragupta abdicated in 297
BC
and reputedly starved himself to death as an act of pious self-denial. It is, rather, his grandson Ashoka who concerns us. He ruled from around 268
BC
to 233, and was known from Buddhist writings well before a breakthrough translation of the mysterious written rock and pillar ‘edicts’ scattered across India gave him a voice in the modern world. Quite who he really was, was less clear. But these edicts, decoded in 1837 by the British mint supervisor, revealed a surprising story.

Ashoka, whose name can be translated as ‘without remorse’, began by living up to it. First there was the bloody succession battle. He may not have actually killed ninety-nine rival brothers, as the scriptures say, but the gap between his father’s death and his enthronement as king suggests a hard tussle. He then turned on one of the few parts of India not under his direct control, Kalinga, and after a terrible battle reconquered it. According to his own inscriptions, 100,000 soldiers were killed in the fight and many more people died, either from wounds or from the aftermath of the slaughter; a further 150,000 were deported.

A Caesar would have boasted of the death-toll; so would a Chinese warlord or indeed Chandragupta. Ashoka, however, seems to have had a dramatic change of heart, including a conversion to full Buddhism, perhaps at the instigation of his wife. In one of his inscriptions Ashoka said he felt remorse for this war, ‘for when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of the people [are] extremely grievous . . . Today, if a hundredth or a thousandth part of those people who were killed or died or deported . . . were to suffer similarly, it would weigh heavily on the mind of the Beloved of the Gods [meaning himself].’ Ashoka went on, in this thirteenth rock edict, to warn his own descendants against new conquests, and called on them to impose only ‘light punishments’.

Had Ashoka gone no further, this would have been a remarkable moment in human history, the first and last recorded instance of a remorseful conqueror apologizing for his victories. It is as if Napoleon,
after the battle of Austerlitz, had announced he was disgusted by his politically incontinent behaviour and was going to become a Quaker. But Ashoka then went on to try to create an empire based on the Buddhist notion of
dhamma
, which means something like virtue, good conduct and decency. It implied kindly behaviour towards underlings and relatives, the avoidance of killing – not only human animals, but all animals – and religious toleration. In carved edicts ranging from the frozen mountains of the north to the hot forests of the south, Ashoka urged vegetarianism, a ban on sacrifices, respect for different religious sects; and described all mankind as his children.

These sayings were inscribed in various languages, including forms of Aramaic in the north-west, on the edge of the Greek world, as well as versions of Sanskrit and local dialects, in a script known as Brahmi. The first edicts were carved on rock faces and boulders where travellers might gather, sit down and listen to whoever could read them out. Later on, at Pataliputra Ashoka set up a factory of sorts to manufacture huge pillars, topped with lions, to be floated down the Ganges and other rivers so they could be erected all over central India. It was as near as an early king could get to broadcasting, through loudspeakers of polished sandstone. Ashoka, no more modest than most emperors, boasts in these edicts of planting shade trees by the sides of roads, setting up regular rest-houses and digging wells. He abjures war and violence, he says. Later still he spread the word yet further, sending out Buddhist monks to take his message of peace to Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt and even Greece.