The New Penguin History of the World (14 page)

Many more tablets survive from the first Babylonian empire than from its predecessors or immediate successors. They provide the detail which enables us to know this civilization better, it has been pointed out, than we know some European countries of a thousand years ago. They contribute evidence of the life of the mind in Babylon, too. It was then that the Epic of Gilgamesh took the shape in which we know it. The Babylonians gave cuneiform script a syllabic form, thus enormously increasing its flexibility and usefulness. Their astrology pushed forward the observation of nature and left another myth behind, that of the wisdom of the Chaldeans, a name sometimes misleadingly given to the Babylonians. Hoping to understand their destinies by scanning the stars, the Babylonians built up a science, astronomy, and established an important series of observations which was another major legacy of their culture. It took centuries to accumulate after its remote beginnings in Ur but by 1000
BC
the prediction of lunar eclipses was possible and within another two or three centuries the path of the sun and some of the planets had been plotted with remarkable accuracy against the positions of the apparently fixed stars. This was a scientific tradition reflected in Babylonian mathematics, which has passed on to us the sexagesimal system of Sumer in our circle of 360 degrees and the hour of sixty minutes. The Babylonians also worked out mathematical tables and an algebraic geometry of great practical utility and it seems likely they invented the sundial, the earliest known instrument for measuring the passage of time.

Astronomy began in the temple, in the contemplation of celestial movements announcing the advent of festivals of fertility and sowing, and Babylonian religion held close to the Sumerian tradition. Like the old cities,
Babylon had a civic god, Marduk; gradually he elbowed his way to the front among his Mesopotamian rivals. This took a long time. Hammurabi said (significantly) that Anu and Enlil, the Sumerian gods, had conferred the headship of the Mesopotamian pantheon upon Marduk, much as they had bidden him to rule over all men for their good. Subsequent vicissitudes (sometimes accompanied by the abduction of his statue by invaders) obscured Marduk’s status, but after the twelfth century
BC
it was usually unquestioned. Meanwhile, Sumerian tradition remained alive well into the first millennium
BC
in the use of Sumerian in the Babylonian liturgies, in the names of the gods and the attributions they enjoyed. Babylonian cosmogony began, like that of Sumer, with the creation of the world from watery waste (the name of one god meant ‘silt’) and the eventual fabrication of Man as the slave of the gods. In one version, gods turned men out like bricks, from clay moulds. It was a world picture suited to absolute monarchy, where kings exercised power like that of gods over the men who toiled to build their palaces and sustained a hierarchy of officials and great men which mirrored that of the heavens.

Hammurabi’s achievement did not long survive him. Events in northern Mesopotamia indicated the appearance of a new power even before he formed his empire. Hammurabi had overthrown an Amorite kingdom which had established itself in Assyria at the end of the hegemony of Ur. This was a temporary success. There followed nearly a thousand years during which Assyria was to be a battleground and prize, eventually overshadowing a Babylon from which it was separated; the centre of gravity of Mesopotamian history had decisively moved northwards from old Sumer. The Hittites who were establishing themselves in Anatolia in the last quarter of the third millennium
BC
, were pushing slowly forwards in the next few centuries; during this time they took up the cuneiform script, which they adapted to their own Indo-European language. By 1700
BC
they ruled the lands between Syria and the Black Sea. Then, one of their kings turned southwards against a Babylonia already weakened and shrunken to the old land of Akkad. His successor carried the advance to completion; Babylon was taken and plundered and Hammurabi’s dynasty and achievement finally came to an end. But then the Hittites withdrew and other peoples ruled and disputed Mesopotamia for a mysterious four centuries of which we know little except that during them the separation of Assyria and Babylonia which was to be so important in the next millennium was made final.

In 1162
BC
the statue of Marduk was again taken away from Babylon by Elamite conquerors. By that time, a very confused era has opened and the focus of world history has shifted away from Mesopotamia. The story
of the Assyrian empire still lies ahead, but its background is a new wave of migrations in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries
BC
which involve other civilizations far more directly and deeply than the successors of the Sumerians. Those successors, their conquerors and displacers, none the less built on the foundations laid in Sumer. Technically, intellectually, legally, theologically, the Near East, which by 1000
BC
was sucked into the vortex of world politics – the term is by then not too strong – still bore the stamp of the makers of the first civilization. Their heritage would pass in strangely transmuted forms to others in turn.

3
Ancient Egypt

Mesopotamia was not the only great river valley to cradle a civilization, but the only early example to rival it in the antiquity and staying-power of what was created was that of Egypt. For thousands of years after it had died, the physical remains of the first civilization in the Nile valley fascinated men’s minds and stirred their imaginations; even the Greeks were bemused by the legend of the occult wisdom of a land where gods were half men, half beasts, and people still waste their time trying to discern a supernatural significance in the arrangement of the pyramids. Ancient Egypt has always been our greatest visible inheritance from antiquity.

The richness of its remains is one reason why we know more about Egyptian than about much of Mesopotamian history. In another way, too, there is an important difference between these civilizations: because Sumerian civilization appeared first, Egypt could benefit from its experience and example. Exactly what this meant has been much debated. Mesopotamian contributions have been seen in the motifs of early Egyptian art, in the presence of cylinder seals at the outset of Egyptian records, in similar techniques of monumental building in brick and in the debt of hieroglyph, the pictorial writing of Egypt, to early Sumerian script. That there were important and fruitful connections between early Egypt and Mesopotamia seems incontestable, but how and why their first encounters came about may never be known. The earliest archaeological evidence of contact comes from the fourth millenium
BC
and when Sumerian influence first came to bear it was probably by way of the peoples settled in the delta of the Nile. It operated there at the very north of the feature which above all differentiated Egypt’s history from that of any other centre of civilization, the Nile itself, the heart of Egypt’s prehistory as of its history.

Egypt was defined by the Nile and the deserts which flanked it; it was the country the river watered, one drawn-out straggling oasis. In prehistoric times it must also have been one great marsh, 600 miles long, and, except in the delta, never more than a few miles wide. From the start the annual floods of the river were the basic mechanism of the economy and set the
rhythm of life on its banks. Farming gradually took root in the beds of mud deposited higher and higher year by year, but the first communities must have been precarious and their environment semi-aquatic; much of their life has been irrecoverably swept away to the delta silt-beds. What remain of the earliest times are things made and used by the peoples who lived on the edge of the flood areas or on occasional rocky projections within it or at the valley sides. Before 4000
BC
they began to feel the impact of an important climatic change. Sand drifted in from the deserts and desiccation set in. Armed with elementary agricultural techniques, these people could move down to work the rich soils of the flood-plain.

From the start, therefore, the river was the bringer of life to Egypt. It was a benevolent deity whose never-failing bounty was to be thankfully received, rather than the dangerous, menacing source of sudden, ruinous inundations like those in which the men of Sumer struggled to make land out of a watery waste. It was a setting in which agriculture (though introduced later than in the Levant or Anatolia) gave a quick and rich return and perhaps made possible a population ‘explosion’ which released its human and natural resources. Although, as signs of contact in the fourth millennium
BC
show, Sumerian experience may have been available as a fertilizing element, it cannot be said that it was decisive; there always existed a potential for civilization in the Nile valley and it may have needed no external stimulus to discharge it. It is at least obvious, when Egyptian civilization finally emerged, that it is unique, unlike anything we can find elsewhere.

The deepest roots of this civilization have to be pieced together from archaeology and later tradition. They reveal settled peoples in Upper Egypt (the south, that is, up the Nile) in Neolithic times. From about 5000
BC
such peoples were hunting, fishing, gathering crops and finally embarking on purposeful cultivation in the valley. They lived in villages grouped around market centres and seem to have belonged to clans which had animals as symbols or totems; these they copied on their pottery. This was the basis of the eventual political organization of Egypt which began with the emergence of clan chiefs controlling the regions inhabited by their followers.

At an early stage these peoples already had several important technological accomplishments to their credit, though they do not seem such advanced farmers as those of other parts of the ancient Near East. They knew how to make papyrus boats, how to work hard materials such as basalt, and how to hammer copper into small articles for daily use. They were, that is to say, pretty accomplished well before the dawn of written record, with specialist craftsmen and, to judge by their jewels, well-marked
distinctions of class or status. Then, somewhere about the middle of the fourth millennium, there is an intensification of foreign influences, apparent first in the north, the delta. Signs of trade and contact with other regions multiply, notably with Mesopotamia, whose influence is shown in the art of this era. Meanwhile, hunting and occasional farming give way to a more intense cultivation. In art, the bas-relief appears which is to be so important later in the Egyptian tradition; copper goods become more plentiful. Everything seems suddenly to be emerging at once, almost without antecedents, and to this epoch belongs the basic political structure of the future kingdom.

It was twofold; at some time in the fourth millennium there solidified two kingdoms, one northern, one southern, one of Lower and one of Upper Egypt. This is interestingly different from Sumer; there were no city-states. Egypt seems to move straight from precivilization to the government of large areas. Egypt’s early ‘towns’ were the market-places of agriculturalists; the agricultural communities and clans coalesced into groups which were the foundation of later provinces. Egypt was to be a political entity 700 years before Mesopotamia, but even later she would have only a restricted experience of city life.

Of the kings of the two Egypts we know little until about 3200
BC
, but we may guess that they were the eventual winners in centuries of struggles to consolidate power over larger and larger groups of people. It is about the same time that the written record begins and this must have been important in the consolidation of power. Because writing is already there at the beginning of the Egyptian story, furthermore, something more like a continuous historical account of the Egyptian civilization can be put together than in the case of Sumer. In Egypt, writing was used from its first appearance not merely as an administrative and economic convenience but to record events on monuments and relics intended to survive.

In about 3200
BC
, the records tell us, a great king of Upper Egypt, Menes, conquered the north. Egypt was thus unified in a huge state 600 miles long, running up the river as far as Abu Simbel. It was to be even bigger and to extend even further up the great river which was its heart, and it was also to undergo disruption from time to time, but this is effectively the beginning of a civilization which was to survive into the age of classical Greece and Rome. For nearly 3000 years – one and a half times the life of Christianity – Egypt was a historical entity, for much of it a source of wonder and focus of admiration. In so long a period much happened and we by no means know all of it. Yet the stability and conservative power of Egyptian civilization are more striking than its vicissitudes.

Roughly speaking, that civilization’s greatest days were over by about 1000
BC
. Before that date, Egyptian history can most easily be visualized
in five big traditional divisions. Three of these are called respectively the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms; they are separated by two others called the First and Second Intermediate periods. Very roughly, the three ‘kingdoms’ are periods of success or at least of consolidated government; the two intermediate stages are interludes of weakness and disruption from external and internal causes. The whole scheme can be envisaged as a kind of layer cake, with three tiers of different flavours separated by two of somewhat formless jam.

This is by no means the only way of understanding Egyptian history, nor for all purposes the best. Many scholars prefer to set out ancient Egyptian chronology in terms of thirty-one dynasties of kings, a system which has the great advantage of being related to objective criteria; it avoids perfectly proper but awkward disagreements about whether (for example) the first dynasties should be put in the ‘Old Kingdom’ or distinguished as a separate ‘archaic’ period, or about the line to be drawn at the beginning or end of the intermediate era. None the less, the five-part scheme is sufficient for our purposes, if we also distinguish an archaic prelude. A recent dating presentation and dynastic synchronization, is as follows: