A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (6 page)

But the trading class mostly existed on the margin of the wider society, even if the margin grew over time. As with the artisans, there is little indication of the merchants developing a view of their own as to how society should be run.

The result of the underdevelopment of the artisan and merchant classes was that when society entered great crises there was no social group with the power or the programme to fight to reorganise it. The existing ruling class was no longer capable of developing human control over nature sufficiently to ward off widespread immiseration and starvation. But there were no other groups capable of doing so either. The mass of cultivators could rise up against their exploiters. But their response to starvation was to consume the whole harvest, leaving nothing to sustain the structures of civilisation—the towns, the literate strata, the groups caring for the canals and dams.

The result can be seen most clearly in the case of the civilisations which collapsed—Crete and Mycenae, Harsappa and Mohenjo-dero, Teotihuacan, Monte Alban and the Mayas. The cities were abandoned, the flowering cultures all but forgotten, as the mass of people returned to the purely agricultural life of their ancestors half a millennium or more before.

Karl Marx wrote in his famous Preface to the
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
at a time when little was known about any of the civilisations we have discussed:

But such an epoch could have more than one outcome. As Marx noted in the
Communist Manifesto
, class struggles historically could end ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes’.
⁹⁵

These cases confirm his account. A ruling class which once played a part in developing the ‘forces of production’ did indeed become a fetter on their subsequent growth, leading society as a whole into a period of social upheaval. But because a class did not emerge which was associated with new, more advanced ways of carrying out production and capable of imposing its will on society as a whole by overthrowing the old ruling class, the crisis did not lead to a further growth of the productive forces. Instead, there was the ‘mutual ruin of the contending classes’ and a reversion, quite literally, to ‘barbarism’, to societies without towns, literacy or advanced techniques.

Conquest and change

The histories of Egypt and Mesopotamia do not fit as neatly into Marx’s pattern. In these cases a re-establishment of order and the old rhythms of social life followed a period of a century or more of disorder, civil war and famine. Shifts of power within the ruling class (from priests to warriors in Mesopotamia, from Memphis to Thebes in the case of Egypt), combined with an influx of wealth from foreign conquest in Mesopotamia’s case and an improvement in the level of the Nile in Egypt’s, were enough to overcome the immediate economic crisis and get society proceeding along basically its old lines for several hundred years more. But the fundamental causes of the crisis were not removed. The societies still lacked the innovative push of the early years of the urban revolution, still could not develop new ways of providing a livelihood except at the slowest pace, and were still prone to new catastrophic crises. In Mesopotamia conquerors emerged (either from existing cities or from the pastoralists around the periphery of the region) who established great, centralised empires and held them together by marching their armies from one urban centre to another to crush any resistance to their rule. But this further exhausted society’s resources and drained the imperial coffers until the central ruler opted to allow local aristocracies to maintain ‘order’ in their patches, and to absorb much of the surplus. The result was to weaken the defence of the whole empire, leaving it open to seizure either by a rebel military leader from within or by a conqueror from outside.

Hence the succession of conquerors whose march through the history of the Fertile Crescent is detailed in the Old Testament—the Amorites, Kassites, Assyrians, Hittites, Medes and Persians.

Egypt was protected by the deserts from military incursion from outside for several hundred years. But this did not prevent another great crisis, the ‘second intermediate period’ around 1700-1600 BC. Now foreign influences were at work with a vengeance. In the north the ‘Hyksos’ people—almost certainly from Palestine—established themselves as pharaohs, while in the south the Nubian kingdom of Kush exercised hegemony. Both Palestine and Nubia were the location of fast-developing societies at a time when Egypt was stagnating. Significantly, the Hyksos made use of technical innovations not previously adopted in Egypt, especially the wheel. The Egyptian rulers who threw out the Hyksos and established the ‘New Kingdom’ in 1582 BC were only able to do so by adopting these innovations and, it seems, allowing a greater leeway for the development of artisan and merchant groups.

Childe claimed that both ‘the rejuvenated civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt differed from their parents most significantly in the greater prominence of their middle class of merchants, professional soldiers, clerks, priests and skilled artisans, no longer embedded in the “great households” but subsisting independently alongside these’.
⁹⁶

Certainly there is a sharp contrast between the stagnation that characterises the later Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom on the one hand and the dynamism of the early centuries of the New Kingdom on the other. This was a period of foreign conquests by the pharaohs into Palestine and Syria and south into Africa. The conquests brought a flow of new raw materials and luxury goods. At the same time the domestic surplus was now large enough to provide for the most elaborate tombs and luxurious palaces, not only for the pharaohs but also for chief priests and regional officials. Underlying this seems to have been a spurt in the development of production. Bronze—with its harder, less easily blunted cutting edge—increasingly replaced copper. Horse-drawn wheeled vehicles were mainly used in warfare, but also speeded up internal communications. For the peasant, irrigation became easier with the introduction of the
shaduf
, a pole and bucket lever that could raise water a metre out of a ditch or stream.
⁹⁷

Foreign invasion had shaken up the Egyptian social structure just enough to allow improved means of making a livelihood to break through after close on 1,000 years of near-stagnation. It suggests that in certain circumstances, even when an emerging social class based on new relations of production is not strong, external force can overcome, at least temporarily, the suffocation of social life by an old superstructure.

1000 to 500 BC

Spread of iron making, weapons and tools across Asia, Europe, and west and central Africa. Phonetically based scripts in Middle East, Indian subcontinent and Mediterranean area.

Clearing and cultivation of Ganges valley in India, new civilisation, rise of four caste system, Vedic religion.

Phoenician, Greek and Italian city states. Unification of Middle East into rival empires based on Mesopotamia or Nile. Emergence of a small number of ‘warring states’ in China.

600 to 300 BC

Flowering of ‘classical’ civilisations. Confucius and Mencius in China. The Buddha in India. Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Democritus in Greece. Class struggles in Greece.

Conquest of Middle East by Macedonian armies of Alexander and of most of Indian subcontinent by Mauryan Empire of Ashoka.

Struggles between Plebeians and Patricians in Rome. City conquers most of Italy.

300 to 1 BC

Disintegration of Mauryan Empire in India, but continued growth of trade and handicraft industry. Hindu Brahmans turn against cow slaughter.

First Ch’in emperor unifies north China. Massive growth of iron working, handicraft industries and trade. Building of Great Wall and of canal and road systems. Peasant revolt brings Han Dynasty to power.

Rome conquers whole Mediterranean region and Europe south of Rhine. Spread of slavery and impoverishment of peasantry in Italy. Peasants support Gracchus brothers, murdered in 133 and 121. Slave revolts in Sicily (130s) and in Italy under Spartacus (70s). Civil wars. Julius Caesar takes power 45. Augustus becomes emperor 27.

AD 1 to 200

Peak of Roman Empire. Crushes revolt in Palestine AD 70. Paul of Tarsus splits new sect of ‘Christians’ away from Judaism.

Discovery of steel making in China. Extension of Han Empire into Korea, central Asia, south China, Indochina. Confucianism state ideology.

Spread of peasant agriculture and Hinduism into south India and then to Malay peninsular and Cambodia. Indian merchants finance great Buddhist monasteries, carry religion to Tibet and Ceylon.

AD 200 to 500

Chinese Han Empire disintegrates. Collapse of urban economy, fragmentation of countryside into aristocratic estates, loss of interest in ‘classic’ literature. Buddhism spreads among certain groups.

Gupta Empire unites much of in India in 5th century, flowering of art and science.

Growing crises in Roman Empire. Technological and economic stagnation. Trade declines. Slavery gives way to taxes and rents from peasants bound to land. Peasant revolts in France and Spain. Increased problems in defending empire’s borders. Rise of cults of Osiris, Mithraism and Christianity.

Constantine moves capital to Greek city of Byzantium (330), makes Christianity the empire’s official religion. Persecution of pagan religions, other Christian beliefs and Jews. Rise of monasticism. Division of empire. Loss of England to empire (407). Alarick’s Goths sack Rome (410).

AD 500 and after

‘Dark Ages’ in western Europe. Population falls by half. Collapse of trade, town life and literacy.

Eastern empire survives to reach peak under Justinian in 530s-550s, with building of Saint Sophia cathedral, then declines.

Collapse of Gupta Empire in India. Decline of trade, towns, use of money and Buddhist religion. Agriculture and artisan trades carried out in virtually self contained villages for benefit of feudal rulers. Ideological domination by Brahman priests. Full establishment of elaborate hierarchy of many castes. Decline in literature, art and science.

Continued fragmentation of China until rise of Sui Dynasty (581) and then T’ang Dynasty (618) see revival of economy and trade.

The second great phase in the history of civilisation began among the peasants and pastoralists who lived in the lands around the great empires, not in the states dominated by the priests and pharaohs. It depended on the efforts of people who could learn from the achievements of the urban revolution—use copper and bronze, employ the wheel, even adapt foreign scripts to write down their own languages—without being sucked dry by extortion and brainwashed by tradition.

There were societies across wide swathes of Eurasia and Africa which began to make use of the technological advances of the ‘urban revolution’. Some developed into smaller imitations of the great empires—as seems to have been the case with Solomon’s empire in Palestine, described in the Old Testament. Others were much less burdened, at first, with elaborate, expensive and stultifying superstructures. There was greater freedom for people to innovate; and also greater incentive for them to do so.

The adoption of these techniques was accompanied by concentration of the surplus in the hands of ruling classes, much as had happened in the original urban revolutions. But these were new ruling classes, from lands with lower natural fertility than those of the early civilisations. Only if they encouraged new techniques could they obtain a level of surplus comparable to that of those civilisations.

They could then take advantage of the crises of the ancient civilisations, tearing at them from the outside just as class tensions weakened them from within. ‘Aryans’ from the Caspian region fell upon the decaying Indus civilisation; people from south east Europe, speaking a related ‘Indo-European’ language, tore at Mycenaean Greece; a little known group, the ‘Sea People’, attacked Egypt; the Hittites captured Mesopotamia; and a new Chou dynasty ousted the Shang from China.

In Mesopotamia, Egypt and China the essential continuity of civilisation was unaffected and empires soon re-emerged, revitalised by new techniques. The conquest of the Indus and Mycenaean civilisations led to the complete disappearance both of urban life and of literacy. Yet external incursion was not wholly negative even in these cases. It played a contradictory role. On the one hand, the conquerors destroyed part of the old productive apparatus—for instance, the irrigation works that allowed the Indus cities to feed themselves. On the other, they brought with them new technologies, such as the ox-drawn plough which made possible the cultivation of the heavy soil of north India’s plains. There was an expansion of peasant production, and eventually a much larger surplus than previously in the region.

The most important new technique emerged around 2000 BC in the Armenian mountains—and several hundred years later in west Africa.
¹
This was the smelting of iron. Its slow diffusion transformed production and warfare.

Copper and its alloy, bronze, had been in use since the early stages of the urban revolution. But their production was expensive and depended on obtaining relatively rare ores from distant locations. What is more, their cutting edges were quickly blunted. As a result, they were ideal as weapons or ornaments for the minority who controlled the wealth, but much less useful as tools with which the mass of people could work. So even the workers on the pyramids, tombs and temples often used stone tools a millennium and a half after the urban revolution, and copper and bronze implements seem to have been little used by cultivators.

Iron ore was very much more abundant than copper. Turning it into metal required more elaborate processes. But once smiths knew how to do so, they could turn out knives, axes, arrowheads, plough tips and nails for the masses. The effect on agriculture was massive. The iron axe enabled cultivators to clear the thickest woodlands, the iron-tipped plough to break up the heaviest soil. And the relative cheapness of the iron spear and iron sword weakened the hold of the military aristocracies, allowing peasant infantry to cut down knights in bronze armour.

By the 7th century BC new civilisations based on the new techniques were on the ascendant. The Assyrian Empire stretched from the Nile to eastern Mesopotamia, welding an unprecedented number and diversity of peoples into a single civilisation, with a single script for the different languages. A new civilisation began to develop in northern India, with the regrowth of trade and the building of cities after a lapse of nearly 1,000 years. A handful of kingdoms began to emerge in northern China out of the chaotic warfare of 170 rival statelets. And around the Mediterranean—in Palestine, Lebanon, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and north Africa—city states grew up free of the extreme political and ideological centralisation of the old Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires.

New productive techniques were matched by scientific advance and ideological ferment. There had been a growth in certain areas of scientific learning, especially mathematics and astronomy, in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Egypt. But these advances were based on the persistence of priesthoods which, over two millennia, were increasingly cut off from material life, their findings embedded in complex and abstruse religious systems. Renewed advance depended on breaking with these. It came, not in the centres of the old civilisations—the Mesopotamian cities of Ashur and Babylon or the Egyptian cities of Memphis or Thebes—but in the new cities of northern India, northern China and the Mediterranean coast.

The new and reinvigorated civilisations shared certain common features as well as the use of iron. They saw a proliferation of new crafts; a growth of long distance trade; a rise in the importance of merchants as a social class; the use of coins to make it easy even for lowly cultivators and artisans to trade with each other; the adoption (except in China) of new, more or less phonetically based, alphabets which made literacy possible for much wider numbers of people; and the rise of ‘universalistic’ religions based on adherence to a dominant god, principle of life or code of conduct. Finally, all the new civilisations were, like the old, based on class divisions. There was no other way of pumping a surplus out of cultivators who were often hungry. But there were considerable differences between the civilisations. Material factors—environment, climate, the pool of already domesticated species, geographical location—affected how people made a livelihood and how the rulers took control of the surplus. These, in turn, influenced everything else that happened.