The Book of Ancient Bastards (2 page)

When I wrote the original
Book of Bastards
, I pointed out the fact that no one is all good or all bad, that even Hitler loved kids and dogs, and that many truly “Great Men” of history had a touch of the bastard in them. As with American history (the subject area of the original book), so with the ancient world.

In fact, the ancient Greeks, who gave us such words as “history” and such notions as “democracy,” also gave us the concept of the “hero.” But where the modern interpretation of what makes a hero includes being on the good side of a given moral question, the original Greek concept of what makes a hero contains no such moral judgment.

For the Greeks, a willingness to risk and an impulse toward greatness was the major portion of what constituted a hero (that and of course the doing of great deeds, slaying of monsters, etc.). Such character traits can be found in spades among the ancient bastards in this book.

And while reptilian monsters such as Ptolemy VIII (a parricide who killed his own son, had him dismembered, and then shipped to his mother as a present) abound within these pages, there are, as was the case with the original
Book of Bastards
, plenty “Great Men” who showed plenty of innate bastardry in addition to (sometimes in support of) the great things they did in order to make names for themselves.

Perhaps that’s part of the appeal. As I’ve written before, perhaps our own inner bastards respond to learning about the bastardry (usually on an epic scale) of those gone before. Because who doesn’t love a good scoundrel and the scandals that attend them?

Either way, these are stories that we continue to tell hundreds, even thousands of years after those involved returned to the dust that spawned them. Say what you will about historical bastards—they’ve certainly got staying power!

Just Like Moses, Only Bloodier,
and Not Egyptian

(REIGNED 2334–2279 B.C.)

But because of the evil which [Sargon] had committed, the great lord Marduk [personal god of the city of Babylon] was angry, and he destroyed his people by famine. From the rising of the sun unto the setting of the sun they opposed him and gave him no rest.
—The Chronicle of Early Kings

Imagine what it takes to forge a collection of petty, warring city-states into a unified, multiethnic empire. In a word: “bastardry”! Not necessarily out-and-out evil, but definitely bastardry.

Empire-builders down through the ages have been veritable poster children for the notion of “bastardry”: Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler—the list is long. But who set the first example that so many conquerors have followed?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sargon of Akkad, the first bastard (but hardly the last) to build an empire through conquest.

Everything we know about Sargon screams “tough guy”: his rise from humble origins to serve as cupbearer to the king of the city of Kish (a job not as effete as it might sound; it was an influential post in the ancient Near East); how that king grew to fear him and his popularity, so sent him to the court of a neighboring king in Uruk, asking that king to kill him, only to have Sargon overthrow the king of Uruk, turn around and go home to conquer Kish, and by extension, the rest of Sumer, Mesopotamia, and the Fertile Crescent all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. You don’t get these sorts of things done without having a bit of the bastard in you.

Legendary Bastard

Whether you’re a devoted daily reader of the Bible or merely have seen the Cecil B. DeMille movie, you’ve likely heard this story: woman has baby, for debatable reasons woman decides to get rid of said baby, and rather than killing it outright, sets it adrift in a basket on a great river, hoping it will be found and taken in by some kindly soul. Moses, right? Well, yes, but the story of the foundling-who-goes-on-to-be-great is first told in the legendary birth story of Sargon of Akkad. In his case, he is the son not of an Israelite slave but of a temple priestess, and raised, not by the royal family of Egypt, but by a humble gardener. Still, the whole “baby in a basket in the river” thing is virtually the same (Sargon was adrift on the Euphrates, though, not on the Nile).

Willing to play politics, the man who became known as “Sargon” to us changed his birth name from whatever it was originally (we have no idea) to Sharru-kin (Akkadian for “rightful king”), a brilliant PR move, especially in light of the fact that Sargon was a usurper twice over (in other words, not the rightful king).

Once he’d built up his empire, the “rightful king” ordered the construction of a capital city from which to rule it: Agade. (“Akkad” was a geographic region in central Mesopotamia so-named for the people who invaded and settled there. “Agade” was the capital city that Sargon built.) So not just a conqueror, but also a builder. And more than that, a survivor. The king’s own words show that he was most proud of that aspect of his personality. Sargon wrote in his autobiography: “In my old age of 55, all the lands revolted against me, and they besieged me in Agade ‘but the old lion still had teeth and claws’, I went forth to battle and defeated them: I knocked them over and destroyed their vast army. ‘Now, any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go’!”

Tough Old World bastard.

Sometimes You Really Don’t
Want to Lick the Spoon

(REIGNED 1792–1750 B.C.)

If a man destroys the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.
—Hammurabi’s Code

Hammurabi: a semimythical king of Babylon (a city-state in present-day Iraq) who handed down the first code of written laws more than 1,700 years before the birth of Christ. Hammurabi, the law-giver. Hammurabi, one tough bastard.

Let’s face it, anyone who has ever been pulled over by a cop or spent a day in court (even if it’s just traffic court) knows the open secret surrounding laws: those who make and enforce them are frequently bastards.

It’s easy to forget that someone, somewhere, came up with the notion not just of justice but of punishment. And while Hammurabi certainly wasn’t the first guy to mete out swift and terrible retribution for crimes real or imaginary, he was certainly the first one to make sure the rules of punishment got written down. In so doing, he intentionally codified quite a ledger of laws intended to protect both life and property. Unintentionally, he also preserved evidence of a fiendish imagination able to (with apologies to Shakespeare) “devise brave punishments” for the guilty.

The “eye-for-an-eye” punishment quoted above is a decidedly harsh penalty for an admittedly heinous crime, but “eye-for-an-eye” is a day at the beach compared to other rules laid down by Hammurabi in his code, including the notorious “trial by ordeal,” wherein people suspected of a crime underwent torture to assess their guilt or innocence. In one example, thieves were expected to lick a red-hot spoon, and then their tongues were checked to see whether they had blistered. If the blister burst when pressed by the judge with a finger, then they were found guilty; if it didn’t, then innocent. Cold comfort when facing the possibility of having your taste buds singed off regardless of the verdict.

Hammurabi’s Code is rife with examples of this form of “jurisprudence.” For example, if a woman who sells wine in her establishment (and it clearly states that this applies solely to women) is charged with inflating the price of her drinks, “she shall be convicted and thrown into the water,” meaning that the Euphrates River would be her final judge: if the woman floated, she was deemed innocent; if she sank, she was found guilty. Never mind whether or not the woman in question knew how to swim. Most people in the ancient Near East didn’t! Another portion of the code that gave the Euphrates the final say stated that if a woman “leaves her husband, and ruins her house, neglecting her husband, this woman shall be cast into the water,” and we all know how that turns out.

The code didn’t require the Euphrates to mete out
all
ultimate penalties. Other methods were used as well: “if a ‘sister of a god’[nun] opens a tavern, or enters a tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned to death.” What sort of bastard dreams up punishments such as these? Hammurabi of Babylon, that’s who!

Bastards & Sons

Under Hammurabi’s Code, fathers exercised enormous power within their immediate families. Fathers named their daughters’ dowry price, and kept the money to use as they saw fit. Sons who struck their fathers for any reason had their hands cut off. Wives had some protection. If a husband tired of his wife, he could set her aside, as long as he gave her the price of the house he’d just turned her out of.

Or How to Get Your Own People to Destroy Every Trace of You After You’re Gone

(REIGNED ca. 1351–1334 B.C.)

Akhenaton: the criminal of Amarna.
—Ancient Egyptian saying

Akhenaton, the unexpected heir to the Egyptian throne, unsettled his people by glorifying one god instead of a pantheon. In return, they tried to pretend he never existed.

The “criminal of Amarna” didn’t start out as a criminal, or even as a pharaoh. Likely suffering from Marfan syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissue (which would explain the elongated facial features and long, thin fingers on the statues of him that have come down to us extant), Akhenaton began life as a younger son of the great pharaoh Amenhotep III, whose rule lasted thirty-nine years, one of the most prosperous periods in Egyptian history.

Named Amenhotep after his father, the young boy was probably initially intended for the priesthood. But when his elder brother suddenly died, young Amenhotep became heir to the throne, and succeeded his father in 1351 B.C. as Amenhotep IV.

For five years his reign was fairly conventional. Then in 1346 B.C., everything changed.

Amenhotep IV changed his named to “Akhenaton” (which means “The servant of the Aton”), stating that there were no other gods, that the Aton (the Sun itself, as opposed to the sun-god Re) was the sole holy being, and that he himself, as pharaoh, was the Aton’s voice on earth. Then he shut down the temples of the other gods, declared their priesthoods dissolved and illegal, and made it clear how things were going to be in his new order: He would worship and serve his god, the Aton, and the people of Egypt would in turn worship and serve him. Akhenaton even cleared out of the capital city of Memphis, taking his family and royal retinue with him, founding a new capital city in the desert, about 200 miles south of present-day Cairo. The ancient name of the city, Akhetaton, means “horizon of the Aton” or “horizon of the Sun.” The city was later given the name “Amarna” by Bedouin tribes who settled nearby.

Oddly Insightful Bastard

Modern-day American presidents have made much of the fact that they live in a “bubble,” insulated from contact with most of the people in their country, and talk about how they try to pierce that bubble, to be able to understand their people, in order to better serve as their leader. Not so Akhenaton. He embraced the “bubble,” and if anything, made it harder to pierce. Not a very bright move for someone trying to make a sweeping fundamental change to a religious system that had flourished in the Nile Valley for millennia. In light of this, one of his homilies is oddly insightful, without demonstrating any actual insight on his part at all: “True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.”

For the next decade, Akhenaton ignored his neighbors, didn’t bother with diplomacy, and showed not the slightest interest in doing anything other than glorifying the Aton in his new capital out in the desert, out of touch with everything earthbound, a veritable hermit in the midst of his own people. In the end, it cost him his very identity as king of Egypt.

After he died, Akhenaton’s subjects rebelled against his very memory, smashing his idols, abandoning both his cult and his new city, returning to Memphis and to Thebes, and to the old gods and their temples. His very name was scratched out of every place in the country where it had been chiseled into stone, be it stele or monument.

Akhenaton himself faded from Egypt’s memory for millennia. Quite a comeuppance for such a religious rebel bastard.