Peace (6 page)

Intra-city peace and prosperity were primarily predicated upon links between land and social structures, or
geo-social configurations
, significantly more complex than in villages. Sumerian land was divided into that belonging to the state, given temporarily to officials as part of their salaries and rented out. Babylon, which succeeded Sumerian hegemony, had three classes: those to whom the leader granted full liberty and all privileges of citizenship; those who, though free, were subject to legal restrictions related to land; and those who had no rights or freedoms, or slaves. As one's place in the social order was synonymous with one's place in the land, one's obligations towards and benefits from state warfare or civilized peace were entrenched in the earth. Geo-social configurations were top peacekeeping priorities in Mesopotamia because they kept conflicts of interest in check by balancing (or not) public and private needs. Nowhere is the import of this balance to peace and prosperity more clear than in the rises and falls of Babylon's religious centre, Nippur. The city flourished in peace for centuries by balancing between being an integrative public place and a social space delimited by distinctions based on private property. Granting land to government officials as salaries led to the privatization of public property, the principal cause of the city's
decline into the disorder of civil war. When the balance was restored through geo-social engineering, Nippur's peace and prosperity returned. At the other end of the public-private spectrum, the Jewish prophet Isaiah (
c
. 700 BCE) protested to his fellow Mesopotamians: “woe to those who join house to house/ who add field to field/ until there is no more room.”
²⁹
Latifundization, creations of progressively larger public estates by dispossessing private landowners usually tied to an increase in social stratification, was as potent a sign of cities' decline as over-privatization. The Assyrian and Persian states began declining after systematically expunging farmers from their lands, who were frequently sold into slavery to recover their debts in order to assuage their life-threatening poverty.

Researchers studying social stratification agree that with it comes a form of
structural violence
which can compromise peaceful coexistence, such as systemic inequality and injustice, and on this point Mesopotamian cities are no exception.
³⁰
Textual evidence suggests that the distinctions between slave/free and native/foreign may have a common origin. While slaves and foreigners were denied many of the privileges of civilized peace citizens took for granted, native freemen could enjoy them in full. Yet, slaves and foreigners were often conscripted or otherwise forced to participate in state warfare regardless of their non-citizen status, creating a dangerous double standard states depend upon like a thorny crutch. The crippling effects over-privatization, latifundization and structural violence had on the welfare of Mesopotamians were similar. Balanced geo-social configurations offset them in the short term by sustaining the material abundance necessary to the very existence of cities, states and civilization. In the long term, only by balancing public and private needs did Mesopotamians enjoy peace, prosperity and technological advances unrivalled in the world at the time. Snippets of economic theory show that they knew equitable economic policies are directly related to domestic peace. Rulers attempted to prevent civil war by issuing edicts, like one by a king of Babylon (
c
. 1600 BCE) which declared certain loans illegal and some taxes temporarily suspended. A millennium earlier, a ruler issued similar edicts just two years after he came to power. He sought to restore prosperity by prohibiting the exploitation of the poor, ending oppressive taxes and limiting state regulation of the economy, described as necessary in wartime but detrimental in times of peace.

In the Sumerian tradition, leaders' activities “concentrated upon the works of peace,” already discussed, and “the building of temples;” one complemented rather than contradicted the other.
³¹
By far the largest buildings in Mesopotamia were steppe temples, or ziggurats, religious and administrative centers of cities and states. The organized religions they represented created new justifications for war, but also new possibilities in peacemaking. Secular life and religious life were apparently inseparable, as
officials combined “what we would see as priestly and civil authority.”
³²
Yet, organized religions contributed to the history of peace in their own right. Leaders customarily doubled as religious and political, leveraging their war- and peacemaking powers. Leaders backed military campaigns with the joint forces of Church and State, but they also prevented and resolved conflicts in the same way. Another major consequence of expanding inter-city relations was that local gods, who had reigned supreme for centuries, now had to contend other religious beliefs, practices and figureheads. Peacemaking among competing organized religions frequently took the form of two or more local gods being fused into one regional god either at once or over time, as in the prominent god Ahura-Mazda. As long as regional authority rested with the religious and political representatives of Ahura-Mazda, local beliefs could go on as they had for centuries.

Degrees of religious amalgamation ranged from all-inclusive religious synthesis, known as
syncretism
, to worshiping one god without denying others, or
henotheism
, which generally outproportioned syncretism in Mesopotamia. When they failed preemptively, such procedures could further post-war peace. Typical of these religious peace processes, Assyrian armies would return religious objects to the citizens of a conquered city, and post-war peace terms were finalized by oaths evoking both Assyrian and non-Assyrian gods. Following anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who proposed that a civilization's myths can serve as allegorical maps of its social structures and cultural assumptions, multiple versions of the same Mesopotamian myths can be read as reflecting the pacific fluidity syncretic and henotheistic peace processes imply. For instance, many editions of
Enuma Elish
(
c
. 1200 BCE), the era's most widespread cosmogony, from different places and in a variety of languages have been found, each adapted to local traditions, indicating that a conscious effort was made to foster common regional identities through rather than against local ones. An earlier narrative loosely based on a Babylonian ruler,
Gilgamesh
(
c
. 2700 BCE), was passed down orally in the region for seven hundred years before it was set in stone with local variations. The moral of
Gilgamesh
is that violence, whether structural or outright, by rulers like the story's namesake, leads inevitably to their downfall. Conversely, those who live and lead peacefully can avert disasters as great as floods, as did Utnapishtim, the man Gilgamesh takes as his mentor but from whom he does not learn.

In Mesopotamia, then, “king and god reinforced each other's legitimacy,” if legitimacy is taken to mean the perception that power is moderately exercised according to moral and cultural norms.
³³
Sociohistorical studies show that the legitimacy of leaders generates socially cohesive group loyalty and collective identity so that, statistically, warfare occurs less frequently in the earlier than in the later stages of states, when
the legitimacy of leaders is less likely to be fully intact. The centripetal propensity of political legitimization was of particular importance to the peace and peacemaking of the early large-scale empires in Mesopotamia. For example, at its zenith, the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus II (r.
c
. 559–30 BCE) covered roughly 6 million kilometers in size, enclosed about 35 million people and lasted for more than 200 years. In order to maintain peace in such vast territories and among such a diversity of people, leaders like Cyrus sought legitimacy in meaningful and effective ways. This meant affirming “strength in peace and war, by his justice in upholding a fair and benevolent law, and by sharing and investing the enormous capital at his disposal to the benefit of his poorer subjects.”
³⁴
The issuance of coins by the state was also developed as a way to reduce transactional friction and for non-violently “asserting its fiscal if not political independence,” the designs of which could serve as propaganda for takes on civilized peace.
³⁵
But implementing these plans and public relations campaigns for the prosperity upon which peace depends were inadequate on their own.

Overextended empires without effective political systems and leaders who promised more than they could deliver often fell in civil war or by invasion, precluding any kind of peace. Governmental decentralization, balancing regional authority and local autonomy, was one way leaders of larger and more complex states maintained peace and power legitimately. To this end, the Persian Empire was divided into twenty administrative districts, each of which kept its own surpluses, records and police force. Persian rulers earned the loyalty of foreign subjects by leaving their traditions intact, making selective non-interference another legitimate cross-cultural peacekeeping option. Post-war political integration was perhaps the surest path to peacemaking taken by Cyrus. Not only did he adapt Persian practices to foreign customs, he cultivated natives capable of wielding power on his behalf. Cyrus is also credited with being the first known ruler to enlarge his holdings not by attacking neighbors, but by being attacked by them. The clichés that the best offense is the best defense, and that preparing for war is the best way to prepare for peace, can thus in retrospect be validly applied as far back as the first civilizations.

More than a thousand years before Cyrus was Hammurabi (
c
. 1810– 1750 BCE), first emperor of the Babylonian Empire he founded. An early study claims that “peace and prosperity prevailed during his reign,” though more recent research confines this preponderantly peaceful period to the first two decades Hammurabi ruled.
³⁶
He improved agricultural practices, balanced geo-social configurations and put equitable economic policies. The god Marduk's syncretic and henotheistic ascendancy has also been attributed to Hammurabi. The earliest known non-military uses
of military personnel are his army's expeditions aimed not at defeating enemies, but at collecting materials for ziggurats. Successes in these respects prompted the military expansion of the second half of his reign, but conquests complete he continued to rule according to peaceful principles. Hammurabi set forth these principles in his famous
Code of Laws
(
c
. 1780 BCE), carved on black stone monuments eight feet in height and strategically placed across his empire. The importance of Hammurabi's legislation lies in its codification of Mesopotamian legal tradition rather than in the originality of its content. While literacy was far from common, all Babylonians were subject to the
Code
, which broadly regulated society and prescribed specific punishments for particular crimes. Laws cover theft and bodily harm, pastoral practices, as well as the rights of women, children and slaves, among other issues, which invaluably contributed to the future history of peace by influencing “all subsequent legislation.”
³⁷

2

Peace in the Ancient West: Egypt, Greece and Rome

A Tale of Two Worlds: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient Egypt

If the peace and peacemaking of Ancient Egyptians seem infeasible or impracticable in retrospect, the rift between modern mindsets and their religious beliefs accounts for much of this perception. Maat and
Ka
, the two religious concepts most relevant to the history of peace in Ancient Egypt, may serve to bridge the gap. According to the religious beliefs that permeated Ancient Egyptian life, peace and peacemaking in this world were directly related to those in the next. Pharaohs were considered gods who protect the heavens but also ones who maintain peace on earth.
Maat
, initially the word for truth/justice and later personified as a goddess, invoked the idea of cosmic order and was considered the Pharaoh's primary duty to uphold.
Maat
was the Pharaohs' active and ongoing pledge that the universe would be conducive to their subjects' welfare by their transformation of the “cosmic divine
Maat
into the
Maat
of a firmly established social order with good government maintaining peace, justice and stability.”
¹
This pledge to defend their people's peace and prosperity became the justification for Pharaohs' absolute power over them, the consistent logic of
oppressive peace
ever since and everywhere.

While
Maat
was a collective force mediated by Pharaohs,
Ka
was the Ancient Egyptian term for the peaceful life-force tied to an individual's body. Spectacular sepulchers like the Pyramids and highly elaborate burial rites represent Ancient Egyptians' attempts to assure
Ka'
s individual, and
Maat'
s collective, spiritual peacebefore and after physical death, the two
being as inseparable as life and the afterlife was for them. Texts like
The Loyalist Instruction from the Sehetepibre Stela
(
c
. 1800 BCE) substantiate the links between the eternal life-force (
Ka
), an orthodox way of life (
Maat
) and physical as well as spiritual peace. In the case of Pharaohs,
Ka
was in addition seen as the divine essence of their authority and the source of their power to which all their subjects owed allegiance, the spiritual element of which partly continued to exist independently and partly transferred to the successor upon a Pharaoh's physical death. When Pharaohs died, they became Osiris, who presided over peace on earth. Like their predecessors, new Pharaohs then became Horus, protector of the heavens, completing a conservative cycle symbolized by the rising and setting of the sun. While earlier and later monarchs were often considered their deities' representatives or petitioners in the physical world, Pharaohs were believed to embody them. So whereas the god Thoth acted as
moderator
between conflicting deities as among humans, Pharaohs were first and foremost
mediators
between the spiritual and physical realms. Pharaohs' legitimacy, and with it the peace of the people, started and ended with fulfillment of their cosmically indispensable role through the performance of prescribed rituals and the implementation of particular policies, upon which two worlds' prosperity rested.