THE TIMES
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Richard Overy

TIMES BOOKS

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contributors

Introduction

ONE HUMAN ORIGINS AND EARLY CULTURES

TWO THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS

THREE THE CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS OF EURASIA

FOUR THE WORLD OF DIVIDED REGIONS

FIVE THE WORLD OF THE EMERGING WEST

SIX THE AGE OF EUROPEAN DOMINANCE

SEVEN THE AGE OF GLOBAL CIVILIZATION

CHRONOLOGY OF SIGNIFICANT EVENTS I N WORLD HISTORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORS:

Geoffrey Barraclough

Late President, Historical

Association

Chichele Professor of Modern

History

University of Oxford

Norman Stone

Professor of History

Bilkent University, Ankara

Geoffrey Parker FBA

Andreas Dorpalen

Distinguished Professor of History

The Ohio State University

Richard Overy

Professor in History

University of Exeter

CONSULTANTS:

David Abulafia

Daud Ali

F R Allchin

R W Van Alstyne

David Arnold

John Barber

James R Barrett

Iris Barry

Peter Bauer

Christopher Bayly

W G Beasley

Ralph Bennett

Amira K Bennison

A D H Bivar

Brian Bond

Hugh Borton

Hugh Bowden

David Brading

Warwick Bray

John Breen

Carl Bridge

F R Bridge

Michael G Broers

Hugh Brogan

Tom Brooking

Ian Brown

Anthony Bryer

Muriel E Chamberlain

David G Chandler

John Cannon

Eric Christiansen

Colin Coates

Peter Coates

Frank Cogliano

Irene Collins

Michael Crawford

James Cronin

Douglas Dakin

John Darwin

Ralph Davis

Kent Deng

Robin Dunbar

I E S Edwards

Robert Evans

John Ferguson

Felipe Fernándo-Armesto

Stefan Fisch

David H Fischer

John R Fisher

Kate Fleet

Michael Flinn

Timothy Fox

Alan Frost

Robert I Frost

Clive Gamble

W J Gardner

Carol Geldart

John Gillingham

Ian Glover

Martin Goodman

Graham Gould

D G E Hall

Norman Hammond

John D Hargreaves

Tim Harper

David R Harris

Jonathan Haslam

Ragnhild Hatton

M Havinden

Harry Hearder

W O Henderson

Colin J Heywood

Sinclair Hood

Albert Hourani

Henry Hurst

Jonathan Israel

Edward James

Nicholas James

Richard H Jones

Ulrich Kemper

Hugh Kennedy

David Killingray

George Lane

Mark H Leff

Karl Leyser

Colin Lewis

James B Lewis

Wolfgang Liebeschuetz

D Anthony Low

David Luscombe

John Lynch

Rosamond McKitterick

James M McPherson

Isabel de Madriaga

J P Mallory

P J Marshall

A R Michell

Christopher D Morris

A E Musson

Thomas Nelson

Linda A Newson

F S Northedge

Joan Oates

David Ormrod

Caroline Orwin

J H Parry

Thomas M Perry

David Phillipson

Sidney Pollard

Andrew Porter

Avril Powell

T G E Powell

John Poynter

Benjamin Ravid

Tapan Raychaudhuri

B H Reid

Michael Roaf

Francis Robinson

A N Ryan

Gören Rystad

H W F Saggs

S B Saul

Peter Sawyer

Chris Scarre

Roger Schofield

D J Schove

H M Scott

H H Scullard

Andrew Sharf

Stephen Shennan

Andrew Sherratt

Peter Sluglett

R B Smith

Frank C Spooner

Jocelyn Statler

L S Stavrianos

Zara Steiner

Sarah Stockwell

Melvyn Stokes

W C Sturtevant

Julian Swann

Alan Sykes

Martin Thomas

E A Thompson

Hugh Tinker

Malcolm Todd

R C Trebilcock

Hugh R Trevor-Roper

Denis C Twitchett

Frans von der Dunk

F R von der Mehden

Ernst Wangermann

Geoffrey Warner

Anne Waswo

D Cameron Watt

Bodo Wiethoff

D S M Williams

Glyn Williams

H P Willmott

David M Wilson

Jon E Wilson

Peter Wilson

George D Winius

INTRODUCTION
‘The State of the World’

The choice of Beijing, capital of China, as the host city for the 2008 Olympic Games has produced an extraordinary, if brief, historic marriage of East and West. The games symbolize the world of classical Greece, whose legacy has played such an exceptional part in the development of the Western world. Greek civilization gave the West professional medicine, geometry, ethical speculation, democracy, an ideal of participatory citizenship, codified law, the first history, a science of politics and an artistic heritage imitated again and again down the ages. Many of our common terms today—from economics to psychiatry—are Greek in origin.

China, on the other hand, is seat of the most ancient and continuous of civilizations. Always the site of the largest fraction of the world’s population, China for thousands of years, despite waves of invasions, sustained a way of life and a social structure which proved remarkably enduring. Chinese values and intellectual life were not, unlike Greek civilization, diffused widely outside the frontiers of what was loosely defined as ‘China’. Western critics in the 19th century regarded China as a stagnant culture, unmoved for centuries, but the artistic, scientific and intellectual life of China, though very different from that of the West, was rich and diverse. A good case can be made for arguing that China has been a fixed point throughout the period of recorded history, where Greek culture has been anything but continuous, relying for much of its survival on the intercession of the Arab cultures of the Middle East that succeeded the Roman Empire, in which aspects of Greek thought were kept alive and then re-exported to late medieval Europe.

The China of the 2008 Olympics is still a central part of the world story, but it has come part way to meet the West. From the late 19th century traditional Chinese society crumbled under Western impact. A nationalist revolution overthrew the emperors and the old way of life after 1911. A second communist revolution transformed China into a more modern industrial state after 1949. Over the past 25 years China has undergone a third revolutionary wave by embracing the fruits of modern global capitalism and becoming one of the world’s major economic players. China has not become an Asian ‘West’, but has adapted what the West has had to offer and has turned China into a world ‘superpower’. The relationship between East and West has come full circle. For centuries the West pushed outwards into the world exporting, usually violently, a version of Western civilization. China was long resistant to this pressure; now China can exert pressure of its own, challenging the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the remorseless march of Western economics, political models, consumerism and popular culture.

The meeting of Greece and China weaves together two of the central threads of world history. But the Olympics are also a symbolic fusion of ancient and modern. Although the original games are far removed from the glossy, commercialized, technically sophisticated and ruinously expensive modern version, their revival is a reminder that there are easily understood reference points back to the Europe of more than 2,000 years ago. Boxing, wrestling, javelin-throwing and running are simply what they are, the same for a modern audience as they were for the Greeks. Even the marathon, the icon of the current Western obsession with keeping fit, describes a Greek legend, when a soldier runner covered 26 miles non-stop under a gruelling sun from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to warn of the approaching Persian fleet, only to drop dead from the effort on his arrival. Distant though the ancient world seems, the span of recorded human history is remarkably short in relation to the long history of prehistoric man and the infinitely longer history of the earth. The span can be covered by just a hundred human lives of 60 years, stretched out one after the other. Only 50 human lives will take you back to those first Olympic Games.

To think about the past as something connected by a continuous thread of human activity runs the danger of imposing a false sense of unity, but for much of the earth’s surface, over long periods of time, fundamental change has been absent. Anthropological evidence has for a long time been able to describe practices and beliefs that are clearly connected with a world so distant that it has been transmuted into myth. One hundred human lives laid end-to-end is not very many. To put it another way: it is possible to house an artefact from every major civilization of the past 5,000 years in a single cabinet and to recognize that until the last few hundred years those artefacts—whether a pot, a fertility doll, an arrow-head, a shoe, a coin—bear a remarkable underlying similarity. The recorded history of the world can be read at one level as a unitary experience, a brief 4 percent of the time modern hominids have been evolving, a hundred human lives.

Of course these lives were not the same wherever they were lived. Whatever homologies can be detected between peoples and civilizations, the experience of world history over the past 6,000 years is a series of fractured narratives, divided geographically and segmented by differing cultures, religious practices and political orders. The whole course of world history has been a process of cultural exchange and discovery, of imperial expansion and decline; sometimes links once made were then ruptured again; at other times communication enriched both cultures. In the past 500 years that process of discovering, mapping and understanding the world as a whole has accelerated, but for most previous civilizations the ‘known world’ was only what was immediately known. The modern concept of ‘world history’ which this book encapsulates was meaningless to most human civilizations through most of human history. For large areas of the globe there was no written culture so that ‘history’ survived as myth or folk memory, dating was arbitrary or non-existent, and the world was circumscribed by the very limited geographical reach of particular peoples. Rome was an exception, but even for Romans the known world was centred on the Mediterranean and the barbarous (meaning alien) outside was scarcely understood or valued. China for centuries regarded itself as the centre of the universe, and the outside world, to the extent that it intruded at all, was supposed to revolve like so many blighted planets around the Chinese sun. The history of the world is a very Western idea and it has become knowable only in the last century or so as Europeans and their descendants overseas produced sophisticated archaeological techniques and scholarly skills to unlock many of the remaining secrets of the past. When the English novelist H. G. Wells wrote his famous Outline of History, published in 1920, he was able to do so only on the foundation of an outpouring of new research in the last decades of the 19th century. Wells was preoccupied, he wrote in his introduction, with ‘history as one whole’, and he was one of the first to attempt it.

The more that came to be known about the many civilizations and cultures that made up human history, the more tempting it was, like Wells, to try to see history as a whole and to explain the process of historical change as a uniform one. This ambition had roots in the 19th century, where it was famously attempted by the German thinkers Georg Hegel and his erstwhile disciple Karl Marx, who both suggested that historical change was dynamic, the result of shifting patterns of thought or the transition from one economic system to another, each stage of human development incorporating the best from the past but each an advance on the one before it, until humankind finally reached an ideal society. The 19th-century view, coloured by the remarkable technical progress of the age, was to try to see a purpose behind historical change—not a mere random set of events, or a set of parables or myths to educate the present, but a triumphant account of the ascent of man. Neither Hegel nor Marx was a historian, and they both regarded China as a backwater that had somehow failed to move like the rest of the world. The 20th century witnessed more historically sophisticated attempts to find a unity in world history. The German philosopher Oswald Spengler published just after the First World War two volumes of an ambitious study of the pattern of all world history. Each civilization, Spengler argued, had a natural life-cycle, like any organism, of birth, growth, maturity and death, a run of approximately 1,000 years each. He called his volumes The Decline of the West in order to argue against the optimism of the previous century and to demonstrate that Western civilization, for all its belief that it represented the full flowering of human history, was doomed to go the way of the rest. The British historian Arnold Toynbee thought Spengler’s view of history too schematic, but he produced 10 volumes of A Study of History between 1934 and 1954 in which he too detected a common pattern in all previous civilizations which explained their birth, rise to cultural fruition and eventual collapse. Both Spengler and Toynbee rejected the idea that the purpose of history was the triumph of the West, but they both thought that history could be understood as a single, repeated pattern, from ancient Egypt to the modern West.

Few historians now accept that world history works like this. The rise and fall of civilizations evidently has causes, many of which are explored in the pages that follow. But it does not follow from this that history ought to progress, or that it follows internal laws or patterns of development. History does not move forward entirely blindly, but its progress is more often than not accidental, not patterned, and the circumstances of its development contingent rather than purposive—a product of a particular set of circumstances at a particular time rather than a necessary progress from one stage to the next. The same objection can be raised to the popular idea that there are turning points in history, key battles or events that have determined the course of history. Some events are clearly more important than others. History might now be written differently if the Roman army had not defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BC, but this was just one event in a much wider world of human activity, insignificant in India or China of the 3rd century BC. On balance human history moves forward on a broad front, less affected by ‘turning points’ than might be expected. If one set of events had never happened, there would just be a different narrative which would now be accepted as part of the past as readily as any other. History has neither pattern nor purpose. It is simply the record of what has been.

There are nonetheless broad common factors that have shaped the development of human communities wherever they have settled. The most important element has been the continuous and complex relationship between mankind and the natural world. Natural phenomena have defined a great deal of the human story. Until quite recently most natural forces were beyond human capacity to control or mediate or even to understand. Some still remain so. In the spring of 2008 a ferocious cyclone, which laid waste large parts of southern Myanmar, and a powerful earthquake in China, killed at least 150,000 people between them. Natural disasters—earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, soil erosion, rising sea levels, crop failure—have been a constant feature of all history. The shaping of the landscape determined patterns of settlement, forms of husbandry, the possibility of exploration and trade. The seas and rivers have been both barrier and pathway. The siting of cities, artificial additions to the landscape, has been determined by access to river communications, or the existence of a natural harbour, or the natural defensive walls provided by high outcrops of rock or hillside. For the past 5,000 years and the introduction of widespread agriculture, the relationship between population size and food supply has added a further natural factor restricting or enhancing the prospects of particular societies, or creating violent tensions between communities that lived by hunting and those with settled pastoral traditions. This competition is not confined to the ancient past, when, for example, waves of hunters from the plains of Eurasia descended on Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries; the near extermination of the North American buffalo in the 19th century by white hunters, an animal on which some Native American tribal societies depended, opened the way for the vast grain-growing prairie belt and the emasculation of the Native American population.

The supply of food, or its absence, famine, is a constant through human history. It exercised the ancient Egyptians, who developed complex irrigation systems to compensate for a buoyant population surrounded by desert; 3,000 years later Adolf Hitler argued that Germans needed ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe to provide a proper balance between population and food supply; the contemporary world, trying to support a vastly greater population, witnesses famines in Africa side-by-side with an overabundance of food in the richer West. A new food crisis in 2008 has prompted the bleak conclusion that food output must expand 50 per cent by 2030 to meet demand. For most people through most of recorded history the search for food has been unyielding. In hunting communities, as long as there existed a wealth of animal life or fish, food was not a problem. In settled, agricultural communities, on the other hand, the supply of food was restricted either by problems of soil or changeable climate or by the maldistribution of food between rich and poor, or both. Tilling the soil was no guarantee of a decent diet; a Roman feast or a groaning Victorian banquet gives no clue as to how inadequate was the food supply for the slaves who grew and garnered it in Roman Italy, or for the Victorian poor, most of them cut off from the land and dependent on a monotonous starch-rich diet. In post-Renaissance Italy there developed one of the most sophisticated cuisines in the world, informed by a wealth of gastronomic master-works, but the later peasant workers of the Po Valley suffered debilitating pellagra from eating a stodgy maize-based diet that inflated their abdomens and eventually killed them. In settled civilizations, an adequate, varied, artistically presented or innovative diet was the preserve of the rich. It was no accident that the Russian Revolution of February 1917 began with a demonstration for bread by hungry women in St Petersburg (Petrograd).

The relationship between mankind and environment has changed a good deal over the past 200 years. Larger and more regular food supplies together with changes in healthcare have provoked a population explosion. Global population was around 800 million in the 18th century; currently it is an astonishing 6.7 billion. A result has been the massive expansion of the agricultural base, partly from utilising virgin lands, partly from raising yields artificially through plant- and stock-breeding or the addition of chemical fertiliser. These changes have provoked deforestation and the transformation of natural habitat. Heavy hunting has brought thousands of land and sea creatures to the edge of extinction. The world’s urban population has grown dramatically since 1900 and now stands at just over 50 per cent of the whole, producing huge sprawling cities and high levels of human pollution. To meet the daily needs of such a population has meant expanding industrial production, depleting the earth’s natural resources, and creating a growing chemical imbalance in the atmosphere that has damaged the ozone layer and threatens through so-called ‘global warming’ to undermine the fragile basis on which 6 billion people can subsist. Demands for a higher living standard from Western populations already rich in resources, and for catch-up living standards in much of the rest of the world, has accelerated the depletion of resources, the transformation of the landscape and the unnatural climate change. The rich United States has 5 per cent of the world’s population but generates annually 25 per cent of the ‘greenhouse gases’ that cause climate change. The most alarming scenarios are now painted of the capacity of man to forge new natural disasters to which there will be no answer—enough methane gas perhaps to cause a global explosion in a century’s time, or the release of bacteria from the frozen icecaps millions of years old, from which current populations would have no prospect of immunity. The relationship between man and nature has about it a profound irony. The attempt to master the natural world has simply given nature new and more terrible powers.

Only in one respect has it proved possible to tame nature sufficiently to alter human society for the good. Over the past 150 years, in itself a fraction of the long history of man, it has proved possible to understand and then prevent or cure most medical conditions. For all the rest of human history, disease and disability were an ever-present reality for which there was almost no effective relief. The establishment of cities and animal husbandry combined to create ideal conditions for the establishment of a cluster of endemic epidemic diseases which periodically killed off wide swathes of the human host. The earliest epidemics in the cities of the first civilizations in China, Egypt or Mesopotamia included smallpox, diphtheria, influenza, chickenpox and mumps. With the opening of trade routes and regular invasions, disease could be spread from populations that had developed some immunity to those biologically vulnerable. Athens was struck by a devastating plague in 430 BC which undermined its political power; the Antonine plague in the late-2nd-century AD Roman Empire killed around one-quarter of the populations it infected, probably with smallpox. Bubonic plague, transmitted by fleas carried on rats, killed around two-thirds of its victims. Plague originating in Egypt in 540 AD spread to the Eastern Mediterranean where again one-quarter of the population died. The famous Black Death in the 14th century swept from Asia to Europe, killing an estimated 20 million and reducing Europe’s population by one-quarter. Epidemics died out partly because the pathogens had no other victims to kill. Modernity was no safeguard either. Cholera coincided with the industrialization and urbanization of Europe and produced regular pandemics in Asia, the Middle East and Europe between the 1820s and the 1890s. ‘Spanish influenza’ struck Europe at the end of the First World War with populations unnaturally weakened by lack of food; it was the world’s worst pandemic, killing 60 million people in just two years.

The attempt to understand and explain the nature of disease, and if possible cure it, goes back to the very earliest periods of recorded history. Classic Chinese medicine (now usually described as Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM) is thought to date back almost 5,000 years. The standard text on ‘Basic Questions of Internal Medicine’ (known as Neijing Suwen) was written, according to legend, by the Yellow Emperor around 2,600 BC; the earliest surviving version dates from at least 2,000 years ago. Early Chinese medicine was rooted in a broader philosophical system based in one case on Confucianism, in the second on Taoism. Confucianism rejected the idea of anatomical or surgical invasion in the belief that the body was sacred; instead the use of acupuncture or massage was preferred, influencing internal disease by external means. Taoism saw health related entirely to achieving harmony between the different elements of the world, the Yin and the Yang. Disease was a consequence of lack of harmony. Chinese medicine focused on herbal remedies and acupuncture as means to restore that harmony rather than more violent medical intervention. Close observation of morbid symptoms was regarded as essential to understand what combination of remedies was needed. During the brief Sui dynasty (581–618 AD) a group of doctors composed The General Treatise on the Causes and Symptoms of Disease which comprised 50 volumes and described some 1,700 conditions. The classic texts retained an enduring influence down to the 20th century when successive modernising regimes tried to substitute Western medicine with only limited success.

The other classic tradition arose in Greece from the 5th century BC based on the teachings of the secular theorist Hippocrates, born around 460, whose famous ‘oath’, that doctors should at the least do no harm, is still sworn by Western doctors today. Like Chinese medicine, Greek medicine relied on explaining disease as an absence of harmony in the body between four elements or ‘humours’ that composed it. The elements were blood, choler (yellow bile), phlegm and black bile. These humours corresponded to the elements identified by Greek science as universal components—air (blood), fire (choler), water (phlegm) and earth (black bile). Cure for any imbalance was based on a range of options—bleeding, diet, exercise and occasional surgery. These views, revived in medieval Europe, exercised a continuing influence down to the time when modern medical science made its first appearance in the European Renaissance, and even beyond it. The problem for Greek as for Chinese medicine was the strong prejudice against direct anatomical research on human cadavers. In all pre-scientific medical systems an absence of proper understanding of the function of the body and the cause of disease meant that cures were largely accidental. Recent tests on 200 Chinese traditional herbal remedies for malaria found that only one, by chance, contained anything that might contribute to a cure.

Only the onset of serious research on how the body worked—perhaps the most famous example was William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, published in 1628—made it possible to understand how the body was affected by particular conditions and to suggest prophylaxis. Even then the growing understanding of the body did little to help prevent epidemics until the onset of vaccination (introduced in late-18th-century Britain for smallpox) and the path-breaking research of the French chemist, Louis Pasteur, and the German doctor Robert Koch, which by the 1880s had confirmed that disease was caused by bacteria, each different micro-organism responsible for a particular disease. The discovery of antibiotic properties in penicillin mould in 1928 completed the therapeutic revolution. From the mid-19th century onwards the older medical traditions, which had limited or no medical efficacy, were superseded by a science-based medicine which has pushed the frontiers of biochemistry, neurology, physiology and pharmacology almost to their limits and has, at least temporarily, conquered almost all known diseases and a large number of internal medical disorders.

Only the identification of the HIV virus in the 1980s, which attacks the body’s immune system, made it clear that even the most scientifically advanced medicine may not in the future be able to stem new and unexpected forms of epidemic. For the fortunate few generations in the West who have been the full beneficiaries of the medical revolution, the transformation has been extraordinary. For all the rest of recorded human history there was no effective cure for most diseases and humans survived only because of a complex struggle between the micro-organisms and the human immune system. Death was ever-present and social attitudes and religious beliefs had to be rooted in the expectation of high levels of mortality. For those who survived there were disfiguring illnesses, crippling medical conditions, poor eyesight, chronic toothache, and so on. For women throughout history there was the debilitating cycle of births and the ever-present risk of maternal death. Pain, like premature death, was a permanent visitor.

To make matters worse, throughout human history both death and pain have been inflicted unnaturally, the product of deliberate violence on the part of human communities. Man, and almost always the male of the species, is a uniquely aggressive and punitive creature. Although attempts have been made over the past century to demonstrate that other animal species indulge in deliberate violence, animal violence is instinctive, not conscious. Mankind, on the other hand, has throughout recorded history, and evidently long before that, been able to premeditate the use of violence directed at other humans. Some anthropologists, following the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, have tried to argue that early man was most likely peaceable, and that only the tensions generated by more complex forms of social life introduced higher levels of violence. But the range and sophistication of pre-historic weapons, first stone, then iron and bronze, makes the idea of a pacific prehistoric state implausible. It is of course true that with settled communities, centred on cities, violence came to be organized through the use of armies. The evolution of a specialized human function for organising and legitimating the use of violence is evident in the very earliest recorded history. The soldier, armed with an ever more lethal armoury, runs in an unbroken line from all corners of the ancient world where complex civilizations arose. In tribal communities, without settled urban life, inter-tribal and intra-tribal violence was often ritualized, the young males of the tribe using violence as a rite of passage or a sacred obligation.

There is no single answer to the question of why violence should be such a hallmark of world history, but it can be found on almost every page. The German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, writing in the 1920s, claimed that the human community has always been divided between ‘friend’ and ‘foe’, those who are included in the group and those who are excluded. Simplistic though the distinction might seem, the concept of the alien, the other, the barbarian, the enemy, or the excluded also runs as a thread through all history. Treatment of the ‘other’ has always been harsh, even in the modern age with its vain efforts to impose some kind of restraints or norms on military behaviour and state violence. Yet even this distinction leaves a great deal unexplained. Human beings do not just fight each other in pitched battles using soldiers who know what to expect. They punish human victims in hideously painful and savage ways. Coercive social relationships have been far more common than consensual ones. Victims, even those from among ‘the included’ who are guilty of crime, have been tortured, executed, beaten, imprisoned in ways so ingeniously atrocious and gratuitously cruel that it is difficult not to assume that violence is the normal human condition and the very recent and limited experience of peace and respect for the individual a merciful historical anomaly. Violence is also universal, not some characteristic of ‘savage society’ as self-righteous Victorian imperialists like to think. Civilizations, however sophisticated, have indulged in violence of every kind. Religions have often led the way in devising grotesque ways to seek out heresies and exorcize devils. At the Museum of Torture Instruments in Guadalest in Spain (by no means the only such museum) are displayed roomfuls of fearful devices designed to extract confessions from across early-modern Europe, including the unhappy victims of the notorious Spanish Inquisition—iron crowns with spikes which tighten around the victim’s head, sharp stakes that could impale the whole length of a human body without killing the victim immediately. Human beings have devoted a deplorable amount of effort to inflicting suffering, and seem to have done so with few moral qualms.

There have been many attempts to explain why wars happen, or why human history is so soaked in blood. There is no single concept of war (though there is ‘warfare’, the art of fighting) that can embrace all the many forms of war or the thousands of separate historical reasons why particular wars break out, evident from the pages that follow. Early-20th-century anthropologists were inclined to argue that war might have had some important function in primitive societies or in the age of early state formation but they could see no justification for it in the modern age. The idea that war, and other forms of violence, were a throwback to a past age now thinly papered over with ‘civilization’ was urged by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud when he reflected on the reasons for the prolonged and deadly fighting in the First World War: ‘the primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual, but continue their existence, although in a repressed state’. Freud thought war rapidly exposed the savage persona inside and later argued that the more ‘civilized’ a people became, the more likely it was that the dam of repression would burst and uncontrollable violence result.

Whether this really is the mechanism that releases violence, Freud proved all too right in his prediction. In the late 19th century it was still just possible to imagine that the barbarities of earlier history, when cities were sacked, their populations put to the sword, fine buildings burned, was a thing of the past (though this did not prevent European troops on a punitive expedition from destroying the stunning Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, an act of wanton vandalism that witnesses compared with the sack of Rome by the Goths). But the 20th century has been the bloodiest in all of human history, witness to somewhere between 85 and 100 million violent deaths, and millions more wounded, maimed, tortured, raped and dispossessed. It includes the deliberate murder of the European Jews which must rank with anything else in scale and horror from the past 6,000 years. It will be difficult for historians in a few hundred years’ time to see what separates the Mongol sack of Samarkand in 1220, which left only a few of the inhabitants alive, from the Allies’ destruction of Hamburg in 1943, which burnt the city to the ground and killed 40,000 people in hideous ways in just two days. The second was, of course, quicker and more efficient, but the moral defence usually mounted, that war is war, is a maxim as comprehensible in the ancient world as it would have been to Genghis Khan or Napoleon. So-called civilization displays precisely Freud’s divided self—capable of self-restraint and social progress, but capable of sudden lapses into barbarism.

The impact of famine, disease and war on human history was famously illustrated by the English 18th-century clergyman, Thomas Malthus, who argued in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, that throughout history the dangers of overpopulation were always checked by the operation of these three elements. It is tempting to turn this argument on its head and wonder how it is that the human species survived at all under the multiple assault of violence, hunger and epidemic but it took another English biologist, Charles Darwin, with the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, to explain that species survived through natural selection. The survival of Homo sapiens was thus biologically explicable; the stronger survived, the weaker perished. In a crude sense that was true, and for decades thereafter it was assumed that harsh though the realities of history had been, they had been necessary hardships to produce a biologically and intellectually progressive species. Both writers have in the end been confounded by a further paradox of the modern age: population has risen to levels often predicted as insupportable, but growth has scarcely been dented by the incidence of disease or violence or hunger, while natural selection has been overturned by modern medicine and welfare policies. The most violent and deadly century has at the same time been the century with the highest survival rates.

Grim though the past has often been, history has not been an unmediated story of suffering borne by an uncomprehending and victimized humanity. From the very earliest times human societies needed to make sense of the chaos and dangers around them, or to justify the hardships they faced, or the reality of unpredictable or premature death or to find some wider moral universe which sanctioned acceptable forms of behaviour and penalized others. Religion was able to satisfy all these needs and religious beliefs, like warfare, have been a constant for at least six millennia. Consideration of religion raises awkward questions about the nature of ‘world history’ because for most human societies through most of time, the material world described by modern historians has only been one part of the universe of human experience. Religious communities are connected to other unseen states and unknowable sites which have been, and for many still are, as profound a part of reality as the political structures and economic systems of the visible world. Belief in a world of spirits or an afterlife, or in unseen and divine guardians, or in a sublime universal ‘other’ has made historical experience multi-dimensional, natural as well as supernatural. For medieval Christians the world was one link in a complex chain between heaven and hell, which included the nether world of purgatory where souls were left to wait entry to paradise. For ancient Egyptians the other world was so real that kings talked and walked with the gods, and when they died took with them their household, animals, and furnishings. So widespread was the belief that the dead, or at least the kings, nobles and priests, needed to take possessions with them beyond the grave that modern knowledge of past cultures has been enormously expanded by the votive offerings and funerary furnishings found in excavated graves.

Belief in the supernatural, the divine, a world of the spirit, the reality of a soul that could live on beyond the decay of the earthly body, magic, superstition and witchcraft created for the inhabitants of all but the most recent communities a sphere of experience that was always larger than the material world around them. Belief was used to explain the apparently inexplicable, to ward off evil, to promote well-being, induce harmony of being and to prepare the mortal body for the world or worlds to come. The link with a world beyond mere physical observation has proved remarkably enduring, even in the secular, liberal West. In southern Italy images of saints and the Madonna are still carried through villages to offer protection against floods or volcanic eruptions or to encourage rainfall. The concept of ‘the Limbo of the Infants’, introduced as a term by the Catholic Church around 1300 to describe a haven for the souls of babies who died before there was time for baptism, in which they enjoyed a natural happiness, but were denied access to heaven, was all but set aside in 2007 when the Church announced that unbaptized infants should be entrusted to the possible mercy of God. Protests from parents anxious that their dead children should have a sure destination forced the Church to admit that Limbo was still a possibility. All attempts to provide a secular alternative to traditional Islam have foundered on the continuing vitality of the values and practices of the faith which is bound to a world beyond this one. Suicide bombers are recruited on the promise that they will be welcomed at once by the souls of the faithful when they cross the threshold of death.

Religions of every kind have exerted an extraordinary psychological power. This has been served in a number of ways. For thousands of years the finest buildings and monuments have been dedicated to religious purposes; in tribal societies the sacred—totems, ancestral graveyards—have exerted powerful fears and provoked an instinctive reverence. The numerous cathedrals, mosques and temples built in Christian, Islamic and Buddhist communities from medieval times onwards as gateways to the divine are among the richest architecture in the world, constructed in societies where for the poor the monumental buildings were awe-inspiring expressions of the spiritual. Religions were also the source of sanctioned behaviour. The rules laid down for social practice, custom, family life, or sexual conduct, are almost all religious in origin. A great many religions have been vehicles for constructing a male-centred society in which women were compelled to accept an ascribed and restricted gender role or risk severe forms of punishment or social discrimination. Many moral codes or legal systems were constructed by lay authorities—for example, Justinian’s Codex, or the Code Napoleon—but they relied on a conception of acceptable behaviour that was derived from the core moral teaching of the Church. In traditional Islam there should ideally be no distinction between religious precept and state law. In early Chinese history the emperors were accorded divine status, making the law, but making it as gods. In Japanese society, where the emperors also enjoyed quasi-divine status, to die willingly for the emperor was a moral obligation that overrode all others.

Religious belief was always difficult to challenge because the threat that unbelief or heresy posed was a threat to an entire way of viewing the world. For a great many communities governed by animist or polytheistic systems of belief there were no reasons, and usually no means, for questioning the ground in which such belief was rooted. There was no question of earning salvation, but simply obeying the customary rites and endorsing the beliefs of a given system. Monotheistic religions, in which respect for the deity and reverence for doctrine earned the right to salvation, were altogether more problematic. Arguments about Christian doctrine brought regular schism, provoking the rift between Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe and Western Catholic Christianity in 1054, and further schism between Catholic and Protestant Christianity in the 16th century. Fear of heterodoxy, or of the diabolical, provoked Catholicism into regular heresy hunts and the extraction of confessions through torture. Protestant and Catholic were burnt at the stake for their faith in the struggle over the Reformation. Radical Protestantism was also fearful of idolatry or witchcraft and the last witches were famously burnt in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Islam was also schismatic. In 680 AD the faith divided between Sunni and Shiite sects over disagreements on doctrine (including the Shia insistence that Allah could take human form), and the two branches are still engaged in violent confrontation throughout the Middle East. Convinced of the rightness of their cause, monotheistic religions enjoy a strong imperative to convert; those outside the pale, regarded as pagans or infidels, are damned. Conversion was seen as an obligation, part of God’s purpose to ensure that among the many competing claims to a divine order only one could be the right one.

To claim no religious allegiance has been a recent and limited option, confined largely to the Western world. Atheism became publicly admissible in the 19th century without fear of punishment but the public denial of God still attracts outrage. Secularists over the past two centuries have been keen to separate Church and state, but have not necessarily been irreligious. The strident rejection of the supernatural was identified with 19th-century socialism whose world view was materialist. Atheism appealed to a progressive intelligentsia hostile to what they saw as stale Christian convention. When the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously announced in Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in 1888, that ‘God is dead!’, he challenged what he saw as the great lie, dating back 2,000 years, and found a limited intellectual audience more than willing to accept a godless reality. In the early 20th century atheism was formally adopted by the Soviet Union, and communist China after 1949, but in neither case was it possible to eradicate belief. Atheism is now widely regarded as a declining intellectual force in an age of religious revivalism. The wide popular hostility to Richard Dawkins’s recently published The God Delusion (2006) is testament to how necessary it is even for societies where church attendance is moribund that the material world is not just all there is.

For much of recorded history what was known or believed to be knowable was bound up with religion. Religious institutions and the priesthood were the depositories of knowledge passed down, like the famous Jewish Talmud, from generation to generation. The earliest work of ‘wisdom literature’ in ancient Egypt, perhaps in the world, was attributed to Imhotep, high priest of Heliopolis under Djoser, king between 2,654 and 2,635 BC. Religious buildings housed valuable manuscripts, not only sacred books but treatises on many subjects. During the early Christian era in Europe, in what use to be known as the ‘Dark Ages’, monasteries and churches kept alive traditions of teaching, writing and recording. The Venerable Bede, based at the monastery in Wearmouth-Jarrow in the north-east of England in the early 8th century, helped to collect together an estimated 300–500 volumes, one of the largest libraries of books in the then Western world. Western education was dominated by the Church until the 18th century. Knowledge of this kind was limited in several ways. First, it was confined to a very small elite who could read and write. A distinct literary or official language was developed which could be fully understood only by the favoured few. Although the earliest writing can be dated back to the Sumerian civilization in present-day Iraq around 5,000 years ago, and then appearing in Egypt and China, the overwhelming majority of all humans who lived between then and the last few centuries were illiterate. Knowledge for them was limited to what could be conveyed orally, or crudely illustrated. For most people information was passed on through rumour, superstition, ritual, songs, sagas and folk tales. Second, it was limited by the theological or philosophical priorities of those who held the key to knowledge, reinforcing existing views of the known world, or of man’s relation to the universe, or of social hierarchy. Knowledge was used instrumentally, rather than for its own sake, confirming the existing order rather than encouraging critical or subversive discourse.

Knowledge in this sense did not inhibit technique. From the earliest settled communities onwards rapid strides were made in the practical skills associated with metallurgy, construction, irrigation, sculpture, and the production of artefacts of often stunning originality and beauty. The contrast between the last 6,000 years and the previous tens of thousands of years is remarkable. Early man made painfully slow progress in the development of sophisticated tools of stone or bone; humans in settled communities, with a division of labour and access to trade, could transfer technologies or fashions in a matter of years. By the time of the late Roman Empire, as any visit to a museum of classical archaeology will confirm, the range and sophistication of everything from daily products to major pieces of engineering was as advanced as anything that could be found for another thousand years. Practical skill was not, nevertheless, knowledge. Understanding of the natural world, like understanding of the supernatural, was conditional. It was possible to build the most technically remarkable and artistically splendid cathedral but still to believe that the earth was flat and hell really existed.

The development of a critical, sceptical, speculative science that did not endorse existing beliefs but deliberately undermined them, was a historical development of exceptional importance. The foundations of a speculative intellectual life were to be found in ancient Greece, whose philosophers, poets and playwrights produced work of real originality whose central concerns, despite the passage of 2,000 years, engaged the enthusiasm of educated Europeans when the classics were rediscovered in the late medieval period. Nineteenth-century intellectuals could write as if little separated their age from that of Plato or Aristotle or Aeschylus. The critical breakthrough in understanding the nature of material reality by thinking critically about accepted world-views was begun, however, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and associated mainly with the rise of a body of experimental or deductive science based on close observation. The key names are well-known. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus dared to argue that the earth revolved around the sun in a book only published the year of his death, in 1543; the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei extended these observations and in many other ways paved the way for much modern physical science, utilising recent developments in the mechanical sciences; the Englishman Thomas Hobbes laid the foundations of modern political science and human psychology in his Leviathan, published in 1651; in 1687 the mathematician Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica announced the law of gravity and ushered in a new age of mechanical physics. The scientific and philosophical revolution precipitated by the late 17th century in Europe opened the way to developing a modern understanding of nature and natural laws and above all accepting that such things were intrinsically knowable, not part of a Divine Plan whose purpose was not to be questioned. The new principle, according to the late 18th-century Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was sapere aude—‘dare to know’.

Those who pioneered a critical, scientific view of the world ran great risks. In 1616 the Catholic Church banned Copernican teaching, and placed Galileo under house arrest for challenging scripture. Galileo was fortunate: a few years before, in 1600, Giordano Bruno, another Copernican, was burnt at the stake in Rome. Hobbes was forced into exile, suspected of atheism; John Locke, who wrote the founding text of modern liberal representative government in the 1680s was also forced to write in exile, and his works circulated in parts of Europe in secret, too subversive for open sale. Writers of the 18th-century ‘Enlightenment’, during which critical thinking began to flourish for the first time, had to steer a careful line between what could or could not be said. Rousseau was also banned for life from his native city of Geneva for his radical democratic views. But it was a tide that could not be held back. By the early 19th century most of the modern Western sciences had been established on a firm scientific basis; political and social theory exploded traditional claims to authority (expressed most clearly in the founding of the American Republic in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789); organized religion in its Western guise was shown to be unable to defend its major contentions about the nature of the universe and of man’s place in it and an alternative, naturalistic, rational model of the world was substituted. The triumph of free expression now seems irreversible, but the revolution represented by modern thought was not inevitable and its progress was subject to fits and starts. It is still not entirely clear why the prevailing authorities in Europe came to tolerate the new intellectual wave when a century before it might have been violently suppressed. The publication in 1859 of On Liberty by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill summed up what had been achieved in modern Europe. There was no other freedom, Mill asserted, more fundamental than the right to say what you like without fear that you will be silenced.

The formal acquisition of scientific, material knowledge about all aspects of the natural world and its application to human societies has been responsible for transforming world history more fundamentally than any other development in the past 6,000 years. Whatever case can be made for showing that there are strong lines of continuity throughout world history, the possibilities opened up by transcending the narrow world view of a God-centred and God-given universe have been unprecedented. It is a story intimately bound to the wider history of the rise of Europe (which with European expansion to America came to be regarded as the Western world) over the past 500 years. Historians have often been tempted to see this is as a happily progressive narrative while the rest of the world stagnated. From a Western perspective the idea of ‘the triumph of the West’ has an evident plausibility. Yet it begs the larger question of why Europe did evolve in very different ways, not only from the other civilizations existing alongside, but from all previous civilizations. What has been distinctive about the West, as Karl Marx argued in the mid-19th century, is the fact that it proved capable of expanding world-wide; Marx thought that no other culture or civilization would be capable of withstanding what Europe had to offer or what it forced upon them.

There is no agreed or straightforward answer to the question ‘why Europe?’ Geography was clearly favourable—a temperate climate, generally adequate food supplies, population growth steady but not excessively large, few of the debilitating, parasite-borne diseases that affected large parts of Africa and Asia with elephantiasis, river-blindness, bilharzia or malaria. The long European shoreline, never very far from any human habitation, encouraged the development of seaborne trade and exploration and the development of early sea power. Seafaring technology was one of the earliest and most important of the technical revolutions and Europeans exploited it fully. Europe also succeeded in stemming the tide of regular invasion which had characterized European history for almost a thousand years from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The Tatar invasions of the 13th century and the expansion of the Ottoman Turkish Empire into south-eastern Europe during the early modern period were checked sufficiently to allow central and western Europe to consolidate the state system, to build a settled network of cities, and a regular trading network. The military organization of Europe was transformed by the application of gunpowder and the development of cannon and musket-fire. Although these innovations were usually used against other Europeans, they gave Europeans a clear advantage whenever they found themselves fighting non-European peoples. It is sometimes argued that post-Reformation Protestantism, with its emphasis on individualism, played an important part in making Europe different, but the earliest explorers and imperialists were Catholic Portuguese and Spanish, while the Americas were discovered by an Italian from Genoa, Cristoforo Colombo. The long history of the Crusades against the Arab Middle East showed that there was nothing passive about Catholic Christianity.

The distinctive characteristic of European societies as they solidified into an early version of the modern states’ system was their willingness to look outwards towards the wider world. The voyages of discovery were not isolated examples of a lucky piece of exploration, but rapidly embraced the whole globe, making it clear in the process that the earth was round rather than flat. Only Europeans embraced the world in this way: map-making, navigation, inland exploration, elaborate descriptions of native communities and exotic fauna and flora, all contributed to creating a view of the world fundamentally different from the view from Constantinople or Beijing. Not only did Europeans discover large areas of the hitherto unknown (at least to Europeans) but they began a process of aggressive settlement across the Americas, in parts of Africa and India and into the archipelagos of the western Pacific ‘spice islands’. If occasionally briefly reversed, European expansion proved irresistible and European appetites insatiable. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés captured the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán in 1520 with 300 Spanish troops and some local allies aided by the fact that around half the city’s 300,000 inhabitants had died of imported smallpox. Once the imperial toeholds were established across the oceans, Europeans never abandoned them. They became a source of remarkable wealth, helping eventually to make Europe richer than any rival civilization, and making it possible to defend and extend the imperial frontier.

Wealth itself would not have made Europe distinctive. The rulers of China and India were fabulously rich. What made the difference was how that wealth was used. The application of rational organization and scientific technique made possible a remarkable economic revolution. An important fraction of the wealth generated in Europe was mobile wealth, mobilized to develop yet further wealth by banks and commercial houses, which developed across Europe from the late 17th century. This was the engine that made commercial capitalism possible and it was fuelled by an acquisitive urge that was subject to few customary or religious restrictions. From the late 18th century the mobile wealth was used to fund a second revolution of technique. Although inventiveness was nothing strictly European—Chinese scientists and engineers had anticipated many European discoveries, including gunpowder—the critical difference was the application of invention. The development of steam technology in Britain made possible the mobilization of new and efficient forms of energy quite distinct from the water or horse-powered technologies of other cultures. The development of gas and later generated electricity as an energy source, the mastery of turbine technology, the perfection of rail locomotion, were all uniquely Western, a blend of European and American innovation. In a mere hundred years the gap between Western technique and the rest of the world was unbridgeable, making possible the rapid expansion of European states as imperial powers. The British American colonies won their independence in 1783, and European settlers, enjoying the same technical advantages and territorial ambitions, occupied the whole area of North America between Mexico and Canada by the middle years of the 19th century.

The economic and technical revolutions relied on a high level of social and spatial mobility. Europeans moved abroad in large numbers, bringing with them Christianity, guns, and trade. In western Europe there were few barriers to social mobility, allowing new classes of successful bankers, merchants and manufacturers to play an influential part in public affairs. The establishment of secure property rights and respect for individual wealth-making removed any legal inhibitions on the right to make money. The publication of Adam Smith’s classic The Wealth of Nations in 1776 provided a sound intellectual basis for the claim that the interests of communities were best served by allowing the free play of market forces and individual pursuit of economic well-being. Economic individualism and belief in the benign concept of the market had no equivalent in other cultures. Internal mobility was also important. The new industries attracted large numbers of rural workers who were no longer tied to the soil, at least in western Europe. Rapid population growth from the late 18th century, which threatened to put a severe strain on food supplies, was absorbed into the new cities; at the same time rising agricultural yields and the application of modern techniques (fertiliser cycles, threshing machines, stock breeding) made it just possible for the mobile urban population to be fed. The new wealth could then be used to fund overseas food production and imported foodstuffs. In 1877 the first refrigerated food was carried on board ship between Argentina and France making it possible to bring meat and fruit half-way across the world.

The economic revolution was accompanied by other important changes. In Europe and the United States the idea of education for all replaced the traditional distinction between illiterate mass and the educated few. Education was basic for most people, but opportunities for higher forms of training or for university expanded throughout the 19th century and became general in the twentieth. Civil rights and the rule of law were applied in most European states and the settler communities overseas, and limited progress was made towards representative forms of government. One of the most striking aspects of the move to greater emancipation was the gradual recognition in the liberal West that women should have equal rights—social, sexual, political—with men, even if the principle has not always worked as it should. Finally, the idea of the modern nation-state, in which identity was derived from being a citizen of a particular nation, defined by territory, shared culture and language, although far from universal even in Europe in the 19th century (and certainly not applied to Europe’s empires), set the model that has been subsequently established worldwide. The United Nations now counts 195 sovereign states, all but three as members.

The impact of Western wealth, military advantage, technology and ambition on the rest of the world was catastrophic. India was conquered, the Mughal emperors overthrown, and British rule imposed. China succeeded in keeping the West at bay, but at the cost of regular punitive expeditions, and the final sapping of China’s traditional political system by Western-educated Chinese who wanted China to adopt modern politics and economics. The Ottoman Empire crumbled under the remorseless pressure of Europe, which took over the whole of North Africa and encroached on the Ottoman Middle East. The Empire finally collapsed in 1919 at the end of the First World War. Everywhere else traditional societies, long isolated from any contact with a wider world, were visited, annexed, fought over and incorporated into the Western orbit. What resulted was usually an unstable mix of tradition and novelty, the old order sufficiently challenged or undermined that it could no longer function effectively, the new order mediated by surviving social traditions, religious practices and native cultures. The one exception was Japan. Contact with the West in the 1850s was perceived to be an immediate threat. In 1868 the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown, the Meiji emperor restored, and a rapid process of modernization undertaken to shield Japan from Western imperialism. Within forty years Japan’s modern armed forces could defeat the much larger Russian army and navy in the war of 1904–5; in the 1930s Japan invaded large parts of China and in 1941 Japanese forces launched a swift and successful campaign against American and European territories in the Pacific and South-East Asia which was reversed only by the exploitation of Western technologies yet more advanced.

The changes ushered in by the rise of European and American power have developed exponentially. The history of the past 250 years shows a dizzying transformation: global horizons have narrowed with mass communication and the development of a homogenized consumer culture; a level of knowledge and technical achievement unimaginable a century ago makes it possible to explore planets millions of miles distant, to revisit the earliest moments of the universe, to understand the genetic codes that dictate human biology, to harness lasers and micro-electronic components to produce a technical base not only of exceptional sophistication, but one that is also democratic in its reach. Some sense of the sheer speed of change can be illustrated in numerous ways, but few examples are more remarkable than the difference between the colonial wars of the late 19th century, fought with Gatling machine guns, rifles and small artillery pieces and the Second World War fought only forty years later with tanks, high-speed aircraft, radar, radio, missiles, and, in its late stages, with jet aircraft and nuclear weapons.

The Western experience, for all its technical and social achievements, has nonetheless been profoundly ambiguous. There have been perhaps no other civilizations which have been so publicly anxious about the prospects for their survival, so fearful of pride before a fall. The two world wars, both generated in Europe, compromised that claim to be the heartland of modern civilization and a source of social progress and moral authority, which had been relayed throughout the last decades of the 19th century. Exporting ideas about civil rights and nationhood accelerated the decline and disappearance of the old European empires. The transfer of the British crown colony of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997 marked a symbolic end to a long history of coercive European expansion and acknowledged China’s growing international stature. The export of Western technology and commercial skills resulted in the collapse of many European industries and the transfer of large-scale manufacturing to the rapidly growing economies of eastern and south-eastern Asia. The global reach of Western commerce and the remorseless march of English as the global language has produced a backlash against what are perceived to be new forms of imperialism, and against the crass failure of Western states to understand the complex differences that still mark off communities in Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East from the Western model. Islamic terrorism is only one of the many fruits of hostility to the idea that somehow the Western model ought to be appropriate in any cultural or geographical context.

Where, then, is this history going? Accelerated change can be read several ways: it could either mean speeding downhill to the edge of the precipice, or climbing rapidly to a richer, more secure and more peaceable world. Historians would do well do be humble in the face of the future. The unpredictable and unpredicted can be found throughout the chapters that follow. How few commentators and Sovietologists thought in the late 1980s that the Soviet bloc would possibly collapse in a matter of a few years; how many observers thought, wrongly, that HIV/AIDS would provoke an unstoppable pandemic which would decimate the world’s population. One thing can be said with certainty: for all the talk of a new unipolar world built around the massive military power of the United States and the appeal of the Western model, the foreseeable future will have China, Russia, India and the Middle East, the great bulk of the world’s population, developing in ways that are not consistent with an ideal Western model, capable of exerting a growing influence on global economic structures and the distribution of political influence, able perhaps to restore at least some of that diversity in historical experience characteristic of all recorded history up to the 19th century.

Taking the longer view there is little to be said. A hundred human lives of 60 years will take us to 8,000 AD. Perhaps the acceleration of history will provoke a sudden crash long before that. There remain the awful paradoxes that the more ‘progress’ there has been, the more violence, discrimination and crime has been generated and the more economic desires are satisfied, the nearer the earth moves to ecological crisis. As Nietzsche remarked more than a century ago, ‘the universe does not need man’. Human history may well be finite. On the other hand, the history of the world hitherto has shown man to be a remarkably adaptable, ambitious, unscrupulous, technically adept creature. This history so far is no simple parable of survival and triumph; the future of the world may have to be just that.

Richard Overy, 2008

ONE HUMAN ORIGINS AND EARLY CULTURES

Recorded history is only the tip of an iceberg reaching back to the first appearance on earth of the human species. Anthropologists, prehistorians and archaeologists have extended our vista of the past by hundreds of thousands of years: we cannot understand human history without taking account of their findings. The transformation of humankind (or, more accurately, of certain groups of humans in certain areas) from hunters and fishers to agriculturists, and from a migratory to a sedentary life, constitutes the most decisive revolution in the whole of human history. The climatic and ecological changes which made it possible have left their mark on the historical record down to the present day.

Agriculture made possible not merely a phenomenal growth of human population, which is thought to have increased some 16-fold between 8000 and 4000 BC, but also gave rise to the familiar landscape of village communities which still characterized Europe as late as the middle of the 19th century and which even today prevails in many parts of the world. Nowhere are the continuities of history more visible. The enduring structures of human society, which transcend and outlive political change, carry us back to the end of the Ice Age, to the changes which began when the shrinking ice-cap left a new world to be explored and tamed.

FROM c. 5 MILLION YEARS AGO
HUMAN ORIGINS

Global cooling between five and six million years ago saw savannahs replace the tropical forests of sub-Saharan Africa. The appearance of this new environment was in turn matched by an evolutionary pulse that gave rise to new carnivores and omnivores. Among them were the hominines, the ancestors of modern man.

The earliest hominine fossils, discovered in the Afar region of Ethiopia, are the fragmentary 4.5-million-year-old remains of Ardipithecus ramidus. Better evidence is available of the later and more widespread Australopithecenes, or “southern apes”. Skeletal and fossilized footprints of Australopithecus afarensis, dated to between three and four million years ago, indicate a serviceable if not fully bipedal gait, hands still partly adapted for specialized tree climbing and a brain approximately one-third the size of ours. This species is the probable ancestor both of the robustly built Australopithecines boisei, aethiopicus and robustus, all with large teeth and herbivorous diets, and of our genus, Homo, meaning “man”. A major discovery thrown up by fieldwork since the 1950s has revealed that these closely related but nonetheless distinctive species not only lived at the same time but side by side in the same habitats. Finds of more species are expected.

From between two and three million years ago, there is evidence of important evolutionary trends in Homo: brains became much bigger, a process known as encephalization; and full bipedalism was attained—as the 1974 discovery of the fossil skeleton known as ‘Lucy’ shows. As larger brains need better diets to sustain them, the increase in brain size could only have occurred as a result of significant evolutionary pressures. The problem was compounded because hominines stayed the same size, with the result that their bigger brains could be achieved only by reducing the size of another organ, the stomach, a trade-off which in turn reduced the efficiency of the digestive tract, which in turn demanded a still better diet.

EARLY TECHNOLOGIES

The most convincing explanation of this development—the expensive tissue hypothesis—holds that a move towards an energy-rich diet, particularly animal proteins, was responsible. And indeed the earliest-known stone tools, found in Gona, Ethiopia, suggest that 2.5 million years ago meat was a central part of hominines’ diet, with the sharpened stones used to cut flesh and pound marrowrich bones from carcasses either scavenged or brought down and then defended against carnivores. Burnt bones found in southern Africa indicate that by 1.5 million years ago hominines had learned to “cook” their food, a development which again would have compensated for smaller stomachs by breaking down animal proteins before digestion took place.

OUT OF AFRICA

This pattern of development was the basis for the first colonization, by Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago of areas outside sub-Saharan Africa. Then, around 500,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis migrated into north Africa and the Near East, reaching northern Europe about 400,000 years ago (however there is also good evidence in northern Europe for hominines 700,000 years ago). Homo erectus and heidelbergensis are sometimes considered to have shared a common ancestor, a type designated as Homo ergaster, and best known from the skeleton found at Nariokotome in Kenya’s Rift valley. By perhaps 1.5 million years ago, all three had brains of about 1000cc (61cu in) and an adaptable stone technology: the weight and careful shaping of the edges of their distinctive handaxes, whether pointed or oval, made them effective butchery tools.

Stone technology was not the only factor in the evolutionary pressures that led to larger brains. It was also to do with allowing hominines to remember, to manipulate, to support and to organize others in more complex ways. Perhaps paradoxically, as hominines developed these more sophisticated social structures, so they simultaneously became less reliant on one another and better adapted to living in smaller groups. This in turn allowed them to colonize harsher barrier habitats such as the Sahara at the margins of their homelands from where they could colonize new, more temperate areas beyond.

MODERN HUMANS

From about 500,000 years ago, this early burst of colonization came to a halt. Instead, though there were undoubtedly many dispersals of populations and much intermingling of genes, regional groups of separate populations living side by side such as the Neanderthals developed. But from 100,000 years ago, another major dispersal began when anatomically modern people—Homo sapiens sapiens—emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa. By 50,000 years ago, Australia had been reached, by boat; 33,000 years ago, the western Pacific islands were colonized; 15,000 years ago, the Americas were reached. Major expansion into the Arctic began about 4500 years ago as the continental ice sheets retreated. Finally, 2000 years ago, humans began to settle the deep Pacific islands from where they reached New Zealand around 1200 years ago, 1000 years before the island’s discovery by Captain Cook.

FROM c. 200,000 YEARS AGO
THE SPREAD OF MODERN HUMANS

DNA studies have revealed that the first anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens—arose in Africa between 200,000 and 140,000 years ago. Though much has still to be discovered about their origins and dispersal, by almost 28,000 years ago Homo sapiens had become not only the sole human species but the first truly global one.

The earliest modern-looking human skulls yet found are about 130,000 years old and come from the Omo basin in Ethiopia and Klasies River Mouth in southern Africa, the latter one of the best-researched sites of early human habitation. Perhaps 100,000 years ago, these early populations began to disperse, migrating northwards out of Africa. These migrations were followed by a process known as “bottlenecking” in which population levels among the dispersed peoples remained small for thousands of years. It is possible that a contributory factor to bottlenecking was the eruption of Toba in northwest Sumatra 71,000 years ago, an environmental catastrophe on an extraordinary scale: parts of India were covered with ash up to 3m (10ft) deep, global temperatures were lowered for a millennium. At the same time, the restricted populations generated by bottlenecking had the side effect of encouraging rapid changes in genetic structures thereby increasing the pace of evolutionary change.

Archaeological and genetic evidence then point to a further rapid expansion of modern human populations about 50,000 years ago. The archaeological evidence in particular highlights growing sophistication and the mastery of a wide and increasing range of skills. In some regions, lighter, multi-component weapons have been found, including spears made from skilfully produced stone blades fixed to wooden shafts and handles. There is evidence, too, of textiles and baskets, and of more orderly layouts of camp-sites, including cold-weather dwellings and underground food stores. Trading networks also increased dramatically. Raw materials, particularly stone, which had previously been traded over distances of less than 80km (50 miles), were now traded over several hundreds of kilometres (there is good evidence for this in eastern Europe).

THE NEANDERTHALS

Homo sapiens was by no means the only human species in the world of 50,000 years ago. In East and southeast Asia lived the descendants of those Homo erectus populations who had colonized the region over a million years earlier. Among other human populations the best known are the Neanderthals, distinguished from modern humans by their distinctive large and low-crowned heads with prominent brows and big teeth and powerful stocky bodies well adapted to cold. By contrast, the incoming modern people had an African body pattern—slender with long legs and small torsos—that copes better with heat stress. The Neanderthals had brains as large as modern humans and were in many ways highly successful. They adapted well to a wide range of habitats and climates ranging from the relatively arid Middle East to the cold of central Europe; their use of tools was sophisticated; and they were effective hunters of animals in prime condition such as bison, horse and reindeer. The burial of their dead, often with some elaboration, also indicates signs of a recognizably modern humanity. They almost certainly had language, too. But what the Neanderthals seem not to have possessed is the degree of social flexibility and cultural tradition that more than any other characteristic singles out Homo sapiens and explains our ultimate success in becoming the only global hominine.

This social and intellectual sophistication reveals itself in a number of ways but the result of it was almost always the same: the evolution of more complex social relations which allowed early humans to thrive in a much wider range of habitats and societies than previous hominine species had managed before. Whether living in large or small groups, Homo sapiens was able to overcome its environment to an unprecedented degree. The most striking evidence is provided by the wide variety of artefacts that have been discovered: engraved stones, ornaments, figurines, exotic shells, amber and ivory and, most famously, cave paintings. That the latter were frequently inaccessible and could have been seen only with ladders and artificial light suggests that a variety of factors motivated their creators. Whatever the explanation, these early works of art are an evocative monument to the humanity of these early hunters.

It is significant that the Neanderthals had almost no cultural traditions of this kind. A few incised bones have been found; similarly, the very occasional exotic piece of raw material occurs. By almost 28,000 years ago, both Neanderthals and Homo erectus were extinct. Modern humans had already colonized Australia 20,000 years before, and were set to colonize the Americas before 12,000 years ago. Henceforth modern humans were the sole surviving hominine in the world.

20,000 TO 10,000 BC
THE ICE AGE WORLD

By 10,000 years ago, humans had colonized almost the whole of the habitable world. It was an achievement made in the face of the last of a series of Ice Ages, when vast sheets of ice periodically advanced and retreated. The human species today is the product of this long process of adaptation to the varied conditions of the Ice Ages.

There have been eight Ice Ages in the last 800,000 years, each interspersed with warmer periods from 30,000 to 10,000 years known as interglacials, brief and extreme parts of this cycle. The Ice Ages were periods of exceptional cold away from the equator. Ice sheets advanced across the frozen wastes of the northern hemisphere as temperatures fell by up to 15 degrees centigrade. With so much of the earth’s water locked into the ice sheets, sea levels fell by up to 150m (500ft). As they did so, land bridges appeared, linking many major land areas and present-day islands into larger continental land masses.

Equatorial regions were also affected: as rainfall diminished, half the land area between the tropics became desert. With each advance of the ice, the plants and animals of the northern hemisphere withdrew to warmer latitudes. As the ice retreated, so they moved northwards again. Humans, too, must have migrated with these changing climates. Yet despite the extremes of cold, the human species continued to develop, spreading from its original African homeland to east and southeast Asia and to Europe. Mastery of fire and the invention of clothing were crucial to this achievement, as were new social and communication skills.

ICE AGE HUMANS

The height of the last Ice Age or LGM (last glacial maximum) was reached about 20,000 years ago. As the ice expanded, human populations contracted into a small number of more favourable habitats. Across almost the whole of the Eurasian landmass between the ice to the north and the deserts to the south, from the glacial cul-de-sac of Alaska to southern France, productive grasslands and steppes were created. Rich in seasonal grasses, they sustained large herds of mammoth, bison, horse and reindeer, all of them important food sources for Palaeolithic (the period of the emergence of modern man, about 2.5–3 million years ago to 12,000 BC) hunters.

Much the same sort of habitat seems to have developed in North America. By the time modern humans migrated there about 15,000 years ago, the rolling grasslands were teeming with animal life: giant bison with a six-foot horn spread; towering beaver-like creatures called casteroides; camels; ground sloths; stag moose; two types of musk-oxen; several varieties of large, often lion-sized cats; mastodons; and three types of mammoth. So effectively did the new human population hunt them that by about 10,000 years ago almost all of them were extinct, including the horse, re-introduced to the New World only by Europeans following in the wake of Columbus.

South of the Eurasian mammoth steppe lay an extensive zone of drier conditions. Indeed parts of the Sahara, the Near East and India became almost entirely arid, forcing their populations along permanent watercourses such as the Nile. Similar patterns of settlement are found in Australia, where cemeteries discovered along the Murray River bear marked resemblances to those along the Nile.

Modern humans were late arrivals in western Europe, replacing Neanderthal populations only from about 35,000 years ago. Yet the new communities developed remarkable levels of cultural expression. In southwest France, the Pyrenees and northern Spain, hundreds of caves decorated with paintings of symbols and animals have been discovered, evidence of a rich cultural tradition.

By 12,000 years ago, the last Ice Age was drawing to a close. As temperatures rose, vegetation spread and animals re-colonized the cold northern wastes. With them went hunters and gatherers. By 10,000 BC in Central America and the Near East, people had begun to move beyond their existing resources and to investigate new ways of producing food and manipulating plants and animals in the first experiments in farming.

8000 TO 4000 BC
FROM HUNTING TO FARMING: THE ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture irreversibly changed human society, but it involved the domestication (selective cropping and planting, or herding and rearing) of relatively few plants and animals and occurred independently in a very few areas. The earliest evidence of agriculture comes from the Levant 10,000 years ago, from where it spread to Europe, northern Africa and central Asia.

Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the human population numbered only a few millions and all their food came from wild plants and animals. Then people began to domesticate some species, so that today almost the entire world population depends for food on a relatively small range of crops and domestic animals. During the 150,000 years that preceded the “agricultural revolution”, anatomically modern humans had colonized most of the the globe and had learned to survive as foragers, subsisting on a great diversity of plant and animal foods. Foragers moved seasonally in small groups to obtain their food supplies and population densities remained low for many millennia.

FORAGING TO FARMING

By 8000 BC, some groups of foragers had settled down and occupied favourable sites year-round. Their populations increased, as restraints on fertility imposed by the seasonally mobile way of life were relaxed, and they ranged less far for their food. This profound change in human behaviour led to the beginnings of agriculture, enabling more people to be supported on a given area of land—although at the cost of the greater effort needed to cultivate crops and raise domestic animals. The effects of settling down, population increase, and growing dependence on agriculture led to increases in the number and size of settlements, to the development of more complex, less egalitarian societies, and, eventually, to urban life and civilization.

The earliest evidence of agriculture consists of the remains of wild species that have been altered in their morphology or behaviour by human intervention. Foremost among the crops are the cereals and pulses (peas, beans and other herbaceous legumes), the seeds of which provide carbohydrate and some protein and are easily stored. They sustained early civilizations and are still staples today. They were domesticated from wild grasses in subtropical regions, for example wheat, barley, lentil, pea and chickpea in southwestern Asia; rice, soya and mung bean in southern and eastern Asia; sorghum, other millets and cowpea in tropical Africa; and maize and the common bean in Mexico. Root crops have also become staples in many areas, such as the potato, which was domesticated in the Andes and is now a major crop of temperate areas, and manioc (cassava), yams, taro and sweet potato, all of which were native to the tropics.

DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS

Whereas cereals and root crops were brought into cultivation and domesticated in all the habitable continents except Australia (where agriculture was introduced by European settlers in the 18th century AD), animals were domesticated in relatively few areas, principally in western Asia, where there is evidence for the early domestication of sheep, goats, pigs and cattle, followed later by asses, horses and camels. Some forms of cattle and pigs, as well as chickens, were domesticated in southern and eastern Asia, and cattle and pigs may also have been domesticated independently in Europe. Very few animals were domesticated in the Americas—turkey in North America and llama, alpaca and guinea pig in South America—and none in tropical Africa or Australia.

THE SPREAD OF FARMING

The earliest known transition to agriculture took place in the “Fertile Crescent” of southwestern Asia during the Neolithic period starting about 8000 BC. Sites in the Levant have yielded charred seeds and chaff of barley, wheat and various pulses, as well as the bones of domestic goats and sheep. Grain cultivation began here about 1000 years before goat and sheep pastoralism. Dependence on agriculture increased very gradually, paralleled by the spread of village settlement, the development of techniques of irrigation and terracing, and the cultivation of fruits. By the end of the Neolithic in southwestern Asia, about 6000 years ago, agriculture had spread west and east into Europe, northern Africa and central and southern Asia.

Agriculture began independently in China between 7000 and 6000 BC, in the Americas by about 3000 BC and in tropical Africa by about 2000 BC. By the time of the 16th century AD European expansion in the agricultural and pastoral economies occupied most of Eurasia, Africa and Central and South America.

10,000 TO 4000 BC
BEFORE THE FIRST CITIES: SOUTHWEST ASIA

The period 10,000 to 4000 BC witnessed three critical developments: the origins of settled life; the first farming; and the first cities. The origin of agriculture is often referred to as the “Neolithic revolution”, but archaeology reveals only gradual changes in techniques of food acquisition over thousands of years, which by 8000 BC led to villages dependent on food production.

The earliest changes visible in the archaeological record relate not to food production but to social relations, indicated not only in the tendency to reside in one location over longer periods and in the investment of labour in more substantial and more permanent structures, but also in the growth of ritual, an important factor in social cohesion. Indeed it is possible that this “symbolic revolution” was of greater immediate significance than the economic changes we associate with the origins of agriculture.

Lakeshore and riverine sites were important for their rich and varied resources, while the utilitarian date palm flourished in marsh areas in southern Mesopotamia, rich also in fish and waterfowl. The earliest permanent settlements tend to be found at the junctions of discrete environmental zones, with greater access to a variety of resources (for example Abu Hureyra on the boundary of the dry steppe and the Euphrates flood plain, and Ain Mallaha in the Jordan valley). The importance of ritual house fittings and skull cults, perhaps suggestive of the increasing importance of the family and property, is attested at some of the earliest sites (Qermez Dere), while 9th-millennium villages in Anatolia, with early evidence for the cultivation of cereals, contain impressive ritual buildings (Çayönü, Nevali Çori). The carving of stone (Göbekli Tepe, Jerf al Ahmar, Nemrik) and the working of copper (Çayönü) are found well before the appearance of true farming villages. The early use of clay for containers is attested at Mureybet on the Euphrates (9000 BC) and at Ganj Dareh in the Zagros; white lime plaster vessels are characteristic of the latest pre-pottery Neolithic phases, especially at sites in the Levant and Anatolia.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF VILLAGES

Among the best-known pre-pottery Neolithic sites is Jericho, in the 9th millennium BC already a settlement of some 1.5ha (4 acres) with, uniquely, a rock-cut ditch and stone wall with a huge circular tower ascended by means of an internal circular stair. A millennium later Basta and Ain Ghazal in Jordan are farming settlements of over 9.5ha (24 acres). Human skulls on which faces had been realistically modelled were kept by the inhabitants of these sites, while at Ain Ghazal deposits of cultic statues have been recovered.

In the 7th and 6th millennia BC, developed Neolithic villages appear over much of the landscape. They are characterized by economies dependent on domesticated plants and animals, and on sophisticated technological developments (for example an “industrial” area of two-stage pottery kilns, and the presence of lead and copper at Yarim Tepe around 6000 BC). Well-fired painted pottery characterizes these villages, which are often classified by their ceramic styles. One of the most spectacular early pottery sites is Çatalhöyük, 13ha (32 acres) in area, with extensive evidence for wealth in the form of valuable commodities such as obsidian and semi-precious stones. The house fittings bear elaborate ornaments including wall paintings and the plastered skulls of wild cattle.

TRADE AND TEMPLES

An important development attested in the Neolithic villages of north Mesopotamia and Syria is the earliest record-keeping, effected by the use of combinations of small clay tokens and the stamping of distinctive clay or stone seals onto clay lids and other fastenings (most importantly at Sabi Abyad in the Samarran period and slightly later at Arpachiyah). Such simple methods of validating social contracts and other transactions formed the basis of later literate urban recording systems.

Mesopotamia had no metals or semi-precious stones, and by the 5th millennium BC demand for such luxury goods led to the establishment of small colonies in Anatolia, even as far as the Malatya plain (Değirmentepe) and the sea-borne exploitation of the resources of the Persian Gulf (Dosariyah, Abu Khamis), even as far as the Musandam peninsula. The first temples were built at this time in southern Mesopotamia, precursors of the institutions around which the earliest urban states were organized. There was a temple on the same site at Eridu for 3500 years, striking evidence of the continuity of tradition which was one remarkable feature of the world’s earliest city-states.

Despite their precocious development, sites like Jericho and Çatalhöyük did not form the focus of more complex polities. By 4000 BC the foundations of literate, urban civilization had been laid in Mesopotamia, where it was the organizational and economic potential of the highly productive irrigation economy in the south and the powerful, strategic positions of sites like Nineveh in the north, controlling access to areas rich in raw materials, that saw the growth of the world’s first complex states.

7000 TO 2000 BC
EARLY EUROPE: THE COLONIZATION OF A CONTINENT

Farming first spread from the Near East to southeast Europe c. 7000 BC and then along the Mediterranean coast and across central Europe, reaching the Low Countries by 5000 BC. After a brief pause it spread to Britain and northern continental Europe by 4000 BC. It was only c. 2000 BC that farming reached the more northerly parts of European Russia and the Baltic.

The earliest farming villages in Europe, dating to immediately after 7000 BC, were on the western side of the Aegean (eg Argissa) and on Crete (eg Knossos), but by 5500 BC such villages were distributed widely across the Balkans. They consisted of clusters of mudbrick buildings, each with a similar layout of hearth and cooking and sleeping areas. Their economy was based on keeping sheep and cultivating wheat and legumes. Such villages were situated in areas of good soil with a plentiful water supply and were often occupied for hundreds of years.

AGRICULTURAL VILLAGES

Villages of this kind spread inland as far as Hungary but from here northwards a new pattern developed. The mudbrick dwellings were replaced by wooden long-houses whose remains did not build up into settlement mounds. Agricultural settlement spread in a broad band from northeast France to southwest Russia on soils produced by the weathering of loess—a highly fertile windblown dust laid down during the Ice Age. Over this area the characteristic pottery was decorated with incised lines in spiral or meandering bands, a uniformity which reflects the rapid spread of settlement between 5500 and 5000 BC. Cattle were more important than sheep in the forested interior of Europe but wheat continued as the main cereal crop. The settlers did not clear wide areas of land but practised intensive horticulture in the valleys around their settlements.

At the same time as it was spreading into continental Europe, aspects of an agricultural way of life were also spreading westwards along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, reaching Spain by around 5500 BC; in this zone environmental conditions were much closer to those where agriculture started and fewer adjustments had to be made.

Alongside the early agricultural communities, small groups of foragers pursued their way of life in areas untouched by the new economy. Hunting populations were rather sparse in the areas first selected by agriculturists, and the rapidity with which farming spread across the loess lands may in part reflect a lack of local competition, but elsewhere foragers were more numerous. They were especially well-established in the lake-strewn landscapes left by the retreating ice sheets around the Alps and on the northern edge of the North European Plain.

There has been much debate about whether the spread of agriculture was due to the expansion of colonizing populations from the southeast or to the adoption of the new way of life by existing foragers. Current evidence from archaeology and the analysis of the DNA of modern populations suggests that there was a colonizing element, probably associated with the expansion through the Balkans and the loess lands of central Europe, but that in most of Europe the dominant process was the adoption of agriculture and its material attributes by existing populations, perhaps in part because of the prestige of the new way of life.

MEGALITHIC EUROPE

In much of western Europe, farming was first adopted around 4000 BC and the clearance of land in rocky terrain provided the opportunity to build large stone (megalithic) monuments as burial places and mortuary shrines for the scattered hamlets of early farmers. Some of the earliest megalithic tombs were built in Brittany and Portugal around 4500 BC, but particularly elaborate forms were made in Ireland and Spain up to 2000 years later. Alongside the tombs, other kinds of megalithic monuments were constructed in some regions, such as the stone circles of the British Isles.

From 4500 to 2500 BC, important developments occurred which were to change the established pattern of life. Early metallurgy of copper and gold developed in the Balkans from 4500 BC, although whether this was an independent invention or came from the Near East is still in dispute. Fine examples of the products come from the rich Copper Age cemetery of Varna on the Black Sea coast.

From around 3500 BC there is evidence of contact between eastern Europe and the steppe zone north of the Black Sea; some link this to the spread of Indo-European languages to Europe. The time around 3500 BC also saw the rapid spread across Europe of wheeled vehicles and the plough, both associated with the first large-scale use of draught animals. These slowly changed the nature of agricultural production. Widespread clearance of forests took place and flint mines produced stone for large quantities of axes. It was only after 2000 BC that stone axes were superseded by metal ones in western Europe.

TO 900 BC
AFRICAN PEOPLES AND CULTURES

Archaeology is revealing evidence that strongly suggests that the evolution of humans began in Africa. Virtually every stage of our development—stretching back over 5 million years—can be traced in the African record. Almost throughout this vast span of prehistory our ancestors lived in mobile groups engaged in scavenging, gathering and hunting.

From about the 10th millennium BC onwards, conditions in large parts of Africa were wetter than they are today, and human settlements began to spring up by lakes and rivers, from the Rift valley and Sudanese Nile valley in the east, across what are now the central and southern Saharan regions, to the Senegal River in the west. These earliest African settlements were based on fishing and were characterized by certain shared aspects of material culture, most notably barbed, bone harpoon heads. Such similarities between the disparate settlements have led to the view that these communities were part of one cultural complex. However, there is considerable local variation in associated stone-tool industries, and it may therefore be more accurate to consider the appearance of these sedentary hunting-gathering-fishing communities as the result of a broadly contemporary, but independent, adaptation of different groups of people to the changing environment.

It was this ability to adapt to changing circumstances that led to the gradual transition to food production, that is, the cultivation of domesticated plants and herding of domesticated animals. It must be stressed that our current understanding of African food production is far from comprehensive. However, the view that food-producing techniques spread from the Fertile Crescent via the Nile valley to the rest of Africa is no longer tenable as far as plant cultivation (with the exception of wheat and barley) is concerned, and it may not be so for cattle domestication. From the 7th millennium BC onwards there is evidence of cattle-herding in present-day Algeria and the Egyptian Western Desert at Nabta Playa, which may be indicative of local domestication. At about the same time barley, wheat and domestic small stock, such as sheep and goats, were introduced from the Near East into the Nile delta. In central and southern Sahara early food production involved a move from fishing to livestock herding. The domestication of plants in these regions seems to be associated with progressive dessication after about the 5th millennium BC. As water and grazing land disappeared in the emerging desert, cattle-herding communities dispersed. These climatic and demographic factors initiated, or perhaps accelerated, the independent development of tropical agriculture.

However, it was only in the Nile valley that the advantages of food production led to state formation before about the 1st millennium BC. This is seen most spectacularly in the rise of dynastic Egypt at the end of the 4th millennium; but as early as about 2400 BC there is evidence of a substantial town at Kerma, near the third cataract, which includes fortifications, facilities for copper-smelting and eight large mound graves. Because of the many Egyptian artefacts recovered from the site, Kerma was once thought to have been an Egyptian colony. But there is plentiful evidence to support the view that it was a Nubian site and that the indigenous people had a prolonged, primarily commercial, contact with Egypt. Kerma reached a political and cultural peak during Egypt’s Second Intermediate Period (c. 1720–1550 BC) but failed to survive the militaristic imperialism of the New Kingdom. The kingdom of Napata, which succeeded Kerma, did not emerge until about 900 BC.

TO 300 BC
PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS

First colonized by Siberians during the Ice Age, the Americas then developed in complete isolation from the rest of the world. Nonetheless, ways of life and forms of social organization evolved in much the same ways as in the Old World, though languages and customs were distinct as was much of the technology that was developed.

When were the Americas first peopled and by whom? Long controversy is now deepening with the results of new research on genetics. But the general view remains that humans first entered the Americas from Siberia around 15,000 years ago. A second Asiatic immigration in about 8000 BC brought the first speakers of the Na-Dene languages of northern and western North America, and then came the ancestors of the Aleuts and Inuit. From this point on, the Americas remained almost entirely isolated from further human contact until the European discovery of the continent 500 years ago.

Linguistic diversity today shows that these early colonists soon spread. Archaeology confirms that the southernmost tip of South America was inhabited by 9000 BC and northernmost Greenland by 1750 BC (by “Independence” cultures). The way of life—travelling in small bands, gathering, fishing and hunting—encouraged such wide dispersal. Yet in some areas large groups assembled regularly. Buffalo hunts on the Great Plains of North America called for extensive cooperation. Gatherings on this scale would have been annual highlights for the people involved. They continued in remoter areas into the early 1900s, allowing anthropologists to discover something of the organization, knowledge and skills of this largely unchanged way of life.

THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS

With the end of the Ice Age, peoples in the temperate and tropical zones of the region came to rely increasingly on both non-migratory prey and migratory wildfowl, on shellfish beds and on seasonal farming, all of which encouraged settled ways of life and population growth. Along the west coast of North America and the southeast coast of South America, fishing was to remain a mainstay but elsewhere—in Mesoamerica, the Central Andes and Amazonia—gathering and hunting gradually declined in favour of farming. Both cause and effect, villages were flourishing in many areas by 1500 BC.

The most widely grown crop was maize, though manioc (cassava) became important in lowland South America and potatoes and cotton in the Andes. Other early crops included gourds, squashes, beans, tomatoes, avocados, chillies and aloes. Turkeys and dogs were kept for food in Mesoamerica, guinea pigs in the Andes. Herding was restricted to the Andes, where llamas were important as pack animals, and both llamas and alpacas were raised for wool.

Settled village life did not preclude long-distance trade. Sea shells and metal tools and ornaments were circulated widely in eastern North America. Pottery provides evidence that sailors ranged along much of the west coast of South America as well as north to Central America. It is not known whether it is diffusion of this kind or a common and older Siberian heritage that explains the cultural similarities widespread among native Americans even today.

EARLY CIVILIZATIONS

Settled life permitted rising populations. Similarly, the need for farm labour may have encouraged the trend. But how were larger groups to live together? Across the continent, political leaders emerged. They used religious institutions to reflect and mould new forms of organization. Across the eastern half of North America, families gathered around ceremonial earthworks for festivals. Their tombs suggest that funerals were political occasions, too. There is evidence from these burial places of distinctions between rich and poor, governors and governed.

In the Central Andes, temples stood guard over warehouses built to store seasonal surpluses and precious imports. Community assets were the objects not only of local rivalry but of outsiders’ jealousy as well. Gruesome sculptures at Cerro Sechín may depict warfare. Later, around 700–400 BC, the Chavín cult transcended local rivalries. Associated with ideas about supernatural spirits, its rites, architecture, sculpture, goldwork and fine textiles were used in many districts, probably partly to justify the privileges of chieftains. These ideas were to last long (see p. 36).

In Mesoamerica during the same period religion was almost certainly used to the same ends by the Olmecs, whose cult was also widespread and also part of a tradition that lived on. Chiefs seem to have claimed pivotal roles in the organization of the cosmos. Earthworks, rock art, sculpture and decorated pottery served the cult and illustrated it. Again probably for the same reasons, the Maya adorned their pyramids with similar religious and political symbols.

All the while, chiefs were supposed not to order their people but to depend on them. The break came in Mexico, in about 500 BC, with the foundation of Monte Albán as a new capital for the Zapotecs. Whether or not this move was prompted by a need for local cooperation in managing water resources or by common interests in defence, it was soon evident—from the site’s architecture, its symbolism, and the rulers’ effects on the surrounding villages and their conquests further afield—that a more powerful and centralized form of rule had arisen: the state. From the same period at Monte Albán is the earliest evidence for hieroglyphic writing: dated records of conquest.

TO 500 BC
SOUTHEAST ASIA BEFORE CIVILIZATION

With its long coastlines, mountain ranges and great river valleys fed by heavy seasonal rains, both the mainland and islands of southeast Asia provided a wealth of resources for early humankind. The diversity of flora and the abundance of metal ores allowed the growth of agricultural communities from at least the 4th millennium BC.

There seems little doubt that Homo erectus, the ancestor of all modern humans, was established in southeast Asia west of the biogeographical boundary “Wallace Line” more than one million years ago. But only Java, with its favourable geological conditions, has provided the skeletal evidence; elsewhere only discoveries of stone tools along river terraces and in some limestone fissure deposits reveal his passing.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

Abundant archaeological evidence for modern human hunter-gatherers comes only in the Late Pleistocene, and mainly from sites in the limestone mountains: among the best known are Tham Khuong and Nguom in northern Vietnam, Lang Rongrien in Thailand, Leang Burung in Celebes, and Tabon Cave in the island of Palawan in the Philippines. From about 40,000 years ago a varied range of flake stone tools have been found in these caves, left by people who exploited a wide range of plants, small and large animals and molluscs. This way of life persisted until about the 6th millennium BC, with changes in the toolkit from flake tools to pebble choppers—the Hoabinhian tradition, called after the region in north Vietnam where it was first described.

From at least 6000 BC village settlements with evidence for rice-growing and pottery-making have been found in southern China, but perhaps because there has been relatively little research on early village sites in southeast Asia no settlements of rice farmers older than 3000 BC have been found in northern Vietnam and inland areas of Thailand, although Phung Nguyen in the Red River valley of Vietnam and Ban Chiang and Non Nok Tha in northern Thailand have all been well investigated. But the best evidence for late Neolithic occupation of southeast Asia comes from Khok Phanom Di, a 7m (23ft)-deep village mound occupying about 5ha (12 acres) near the coast southeast of modern-day Bangkok. Here over 150 burials and rich occupation layers dated to between 2000 and 1400 BC provide evidence of intensive exploitation of the sea and adjacent mangrove forests, and the beginnings of social differentiation.

METAL TECHNOLOGIES

From early in the 2nd millennium BC bronze tools were added to the existing stone, bone and antler toolkits in central and northeast Thailand and northern Vietnam, where we can refer to a true Bronze Age from about 1500 to 500 BC. The best known Bronze Age locations in Thailand are Ban Chiang and Ban Na Di in the northeast and Nil Kham Haeng near Lopburi in the Chao Phraya valley. In Vietnam more sites of this phase are known including Dong Dau, Viet Khe, Cau Chan, Trang Khen, Lang Vac and Dong Son on the Ma river where a rich burial ground has been excavated since the 1920s and given its name to the late Bronze Age culture of the region, best known for its great bronze drums. These are widely distributed from Yunnan in southwest China to Thailand, Malaya and many parts of Indonesia where they seem to have been traded in antiquity as objects of great prestige and magical power.

INFLUENCE FROM INDIA

In western and peninsular Thailand, Malaysia, Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia and the Philippines bronze metallurgy seems to have arrived only with iron after about 500 BC and to have been introduced from India as maritime trade routes were extended across the Bay of Bengal. In graves of this period are found glass and semi-precious stone jewellery of great aesthetic and technical sophistication together with iron tools and weapons, while in inland areas large moated-mound settlements and well laid-out cemeteries mark the emergence of powerful chiefdoms whose rulers, attracted by the rituals and prestige of Indian culture, soon adapted these to enhance their own status and power. Sites such as Ban Don Ta Phet, Khao Jamook, Khuan Lukpad, Ban Prasat, Non U-Loke, Ban Lum Khao and Ban Chieng Hian in Thailand, and Giong Ca Vo, Giong Phet, Doc Chua, Long Giao, Hang Gon and Hau Xa in southern and central Vietnam have all produced rich examples from this last stage of prehistoric culture on the mainland of southeast Asia, as have Plawangan and Lamongan in Java and Gilimanuk and Sembiran in Bali, where glass beads imported from south India and a potsherd with a Brahmi inscription serve to mark the end of prehistory.

TO 1770
AUSTRALIA

About 40,000 years ago, when lower sea levels linked Tasmania, Australia and New Guinea, man first ventured onto Sahul, the greater Australian continent. That journey from a southeast Asian homeland was a pioneering one, as it involved at least one major sea crossing. The original Australians were therefore among the world’s earliest mariners.

PLEISTOCENE AUSTRALIA

The strange new world that greeted these newcomers was of enormous size, and ranged from tropical north to temperate south. Some of the edible plants found in more northerly latitudes were related to those of Asia and were therefore familiar; but this was not so of the animals. In addition to the mammals that have survived until today, there was a bewildering assortment of giant forms: 3m (10ft) tall kangaroos, various enormous ox-like beasts, a large native lion and rangy, ostrich-like birds. This megafauna was a rich and easily available food source but it was reduced and eventually killed off by the advancing human tide.

Consequently, it was on the plentiful supply of fish and shellfish along the coasts and in the rivers that the newcomers focused their attention, and it was in these areas of Australia that the first human settlements were concentrated. Most of the sites are lost to us, for between 40,000 and 5000 years ago the sea level was lower than it is at present, and the sites now lie offshore, on the continental shelf.

The Pleistocene inhabitants of Australia used red ochre to create elaborate rock paintings, thus laying the foundations of a rich and long-lived Aboriginal custom. Their stone core implements and crude scrapers belong to what is known as the Australian Core Tool Tradition. This tradition, which underwent remarkably little change in more than 40,000 years, is pan-Australian, but there are a number of regional elements that have links with New Guinea and southeast Asia. One of these is the edge-ground axe, which has been dated to 22,000 years in Arnhem Land. Similar ground-stone tools found in Japan are up to 30,000 years old. Ground-stone tools were ultimately developed in most other parts of the world also, but only in a much later period.

ABORIGINAL SOCIETY

About 5000 years ago, following the end of the last ice age, the sea rose to its present level; and while Aboriginal settlements were still concentrated along the coasts there was a rapid increase in the exploitation of inland resources. At about this time a range of small, finely finished flake implements especially developed for hafting sharp tools, and known as the Australian Small Tool Tradition, appeared across the continent. The dingo was also introduced.

Political, economic and religious development continued and by the time the first European settlement arrived in the 18th century, there were about 750,000 Aborigines living in around 500 tribal territories. Although the Aborigines’ way of life was still based on hunting and gathering (they never became full-scale agriculturists) they had developed very intricate and finely balanced relationships with their environment. In desert areas, small nomadic groups ranged over thousands of square kilometres, while in richer parts of the continent there were settled, permanent villages. Fish traps were constructed, grasses and tubers were replanted to assist nature, and fire was used systematically to burn old vegetation and encourage the growth of rich new plant cover and the abundant new game it attracted. Rare goods, such as ceremonial axes, shells and ochres, were traded from one side of the vast continent to the other, as were stories down the accompanying “song lines”.

TO THE 1700S
MELANESIA AND POLYNESIA

Melanesia and Polynesia were first settled, from around 50,000 years ago, by modern people from southeast Asia. These adventurous people were the world’s first great blue-water sailors and seaborne colonists. They moved in waves, initially into New Guinea and its adjacent islands, and over time they gave birth to the Melanesian and then the Polynesian traditions. There were many great migrations, and the furthermost Pacific islands were reached as late as AD 750.

The Pacific islanders’ ancient ancestors, the early people or Homo erectus, lived in southeast Asia two million years ago. During this period, the Pleistocene, sea levels meant that the land mass of southeast Asia included much of the western part of what is now the archipelago. Remains of these people have been found in Java, part of the ancient continent known as the Sunda shelf, which is, for the most part, submerged today.

FIRST MIGRANTS

Around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, or modern people, arrived in the region. These people were hunters and gatherers who drifted the short distance to the ancient continent of Sahul (modern-day Melanesia, which at the time was attached to Australia) around 40,000 years ago. Skulls of Homo sapiens found in the area date back to this time. These people had settled the New Guinea highlands by 25,000 years ago. Eight thousand years ago rising seas following the end of the last ice age caused the separation of New Guinea from the continent of Australia.

A second wave of southeast Asian immigrants known as the Austronesians, or Lapita people, arrived in New Guinea 6000 years ago. Lapita is their distinct, red-slipped pottery, often intricately decorated with geometric patterns, which can be traced right across the western Pacific. These new migrants were aided by their revolutionary new technologies, such as the sail and the outrigger canoe, and the development of root crops (taro) and pig and chicken farming. These advances made it possible for the Austronesians to discover and settle the islands across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Recent archaeology, genetic mapping and linguistic analysis show that this was not a rapid “express-train” migration, as initially thought, but rather a “slow-boat” penetration. Most of the rest of island Melanesia was settled as recently as 4000 years ago, and Fiji (the blurred boundary between Melanesia and Polynesia) was reached as late as 3500 years ago.

In the Tonga (reached 3200 BP (before present)) and Samoan (3000 BP) regions, the Melanesian material culture gradually evolved over a thousand years of relative isolation into what we now call Polynesian. Polynesian mariners using sophisticated navigation techniques and large ocean-going canoes reached and settled the Marquesas as late as AD 300, and from there the remaining Polynesian islands were discovered and settled. Early evidence shows settlement of Easter Island by AD 400, there to give birth to an extraordinary culture. The Society, Cook and Hawaiian Islands were settled by AD 600 and New Zealand by AD 750. Coconuts from southeast Asia reached Panama by AD 1500, and the sweet potato, though native to eastern Polynesia, travelled in the other direction, reaching highland New Guinea in the 16th century.

ISLAND RESOURCES

Between AD 750 and 1300, a multitude of largely independent cultures evolved on these little “island universes”. In the New Guinea highlands, where farming flourished, population density was the greatest in the world and easily sustainable. On most Pacific islands a balance was reached between population and natural resources; in less hospitable places, such as Easter Island and New Zealand, initially abundant resources became very depleted and, by the time of European contact in the 17th and 18th centuries, populations were in conflict and decline. When the Maoris arrived in Aotearoa (New Zealand) from about AD 750, they found large numbers of a flightless bird, the Moa. Some of these were gigantic, up to 3m (10ft) high and weighing up to 250kg (550lb). Unafraid of man, the Moa proved a readily available food source, and over the next 400 years they were hunted to extinction. The first Maoris thus established themselves with a Moa-fed burst in population numbers, while succeeding generations had to battle hard to sustain themselves.

TWO THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS

About 6000 years ago, in a few areas of particularly intensive agriculture, the dispersed villages of Neolithic peoples gave way to more complex societies. These were the first civilizations, and their emergence marks the start of a new phase of world history. They arose, apparently independently, in four widely dispersed areas (the early civilizations of America emerged considerably later): the lower Tigris and Euphrates valleys; the valley of the Nile; the Indus valley around Harrappa and Mohenjo-Daro; and the Yellow River around An-yang. The characteristic feature of them all was the city, which now became an increasingly dominant social form, gradually encroaching on the surrounding countryside, until today urban civilization has become the criterion of social progress. But the city possessed other important connotations: a complex division of labour; literacy and a literate class (usually the priesthood); monumental public buildings; political and religious hierarchies; a kingship descended from the gods; and ultimately empire, or the claim to universal rule. A dichotomy already existed between the civilized world and the barbarian world outside. The onslaught of nomadic peoples eager to enjoy the fruits of civilization became a recurrent theme of world history until the advent of effective firearms in the 15th century AD tilted the balance in favour of the civilized peoples.

3500 TO 1500 BC
THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION IN THE EURASIAN WORLD

Urban civilizations developed independently in four different areas of Eurasia, as the exploitation of fertile river valleys allowed complex forms of social organization. The sudden growth of cities was a dramatic development in human history, and was accompanied by the beginnings of literacy. From this period it becomes possible to write true history.

The development of urban societies seems to have been triggered by a sudden concentration of population in certain river valleys, which in some cases may have been a result of climate change which made the surrounding areas outside the valleys less attractive for habitation. The need to exploit the fertile land of these valleys and their alluvial plains to feed a growing population then led to the development of irrigation and flood-control mechanisms. In Mesopotamia and China this involved the construction of canals to carry water away to the land around the Tigris-Euphrates and the Yellow River, while in Egypt and India the annual flooding of the Nile and Indus provided fertile silt in which crops were grown.

THE FIRST CITIES

The concentrated populations were able to produce surplus crops which could be exported to areas beyond the rivers in return for raw materials and precious items not locally available, above all bronze. The food surplus also made possible social groups not directly involved in agriculture, whether specialized craftsmen or rulers and military leaders. It was when ambitious individuals and families succeeded in diverting resources into the construction of monumental ceremonial centres that provided a focus for the populations living near them that the first true cities appeared. This took place in Mesopotamia in c. 3500 BC and in Egypt in c. 3100 BC, while the Indus valley cities appeared in c. 2500 BC, and in China urbanism began in c. 1800 BC.

The political development of these different regions was not uniform: in Egypt a single unified kingdom emerged almost immediately, extending from the Nile delta south to the first cataract; in China the earliest civilization is associated with the Shang dynasty, although the Shang rulers may have just been leaders of a loose confederacy. In Mesopotamia, by contrast, no one city was able to establish control for any period, and competition for dominance between the leading cities characterized the history of the area for nearly three millennia. The situation in the Indus valley is less clear, but the major cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro appear to have coexisted until the decline of the Indus cities after about 2000 BC. It appears that in all these civilizations, religious, political and military power was concentrated in the hands of a few ruling families.

Trade and exchange were important in the expansion of the first civilizations. The possession of prestige goods and the desire to acquire more resources were instrumental in the emergence of the first empires in Mesopotamia. During the 3rd millennium BC goods were being traded between the Indus and the Mediterranean. In the 2nd millennium BC urbanization spread to Anatolia and the Aegean, and the cultural influence of the Near East can be seen in the bronze-working of the Balkan communities. However, in many parts of Eurasia, including the fertile river deltas of the Ganges and Mekong, the landscape did not favour concentrations of population, and village communities remained the norm until the 1st millennium BC.

The development of writing occurred almost at the start of each of the four civilizations. The earliest known use of writing in China was for divination: the Shang rulers used prepared turtle shells and ox scapulae heated in a fire to establish the will of the gods, and the result of the enquiry was scratched onto the shell or bone. In Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus valley writing was used mainly for administrative activities, with inventories and accounts being inscribed on clay. Early examples of writing have often survived because clay tablets were accidentally baked, fixing the messages permanently. Clay inscriptions spread to Crete and Greece by around 1500 BC. In Egypt and Mesopotamia the use of writing developed rapidly, as large public inscriptions, including law-codes, were erected by the rulers as monuments to their wisdom, justice and power. It is from monuments such as these, celebrating their victories or their public works, that the earliest true history can be reconstructed.

c. 3500 TO 1600 BC
THE EARLY EMPIRES OF
MESOPOTAMIA

The broad plain through which the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow gave birth to the world’s first cities. Irrigation systems made it possible to support substantial populations and complex administrative structures. With urbanization came more developed economies and trade, while competition between cities led to warfare and the first empires.

The earliest cities appeared in Mesopotamia in the second half of the 4th millennium BC: at Uruk, Ur, Tell ‘Uqair and Susa vast and elaborately decorated ceremonial complexes were built as the centres of urban settlements, probably under the leadership of families eager to display their power and their respect for the gods. The fertile plains and valleys watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates produced food surpluses sufficient to support these elaborate new centres and their complex social structures.

The cities were the basic political units of Mesopotamia. Religion was fundamental to their social organization: the rulers of cities presented themselves as favoured servants of the gods, while lower down the social scale agricultural workers had a necessary role in producing the materials for sacrifices and offerings to the gods. The cities established diplomatic and trade relationships with each other, although little is known of the mechanisms for this. Finds of goods from Uruk, the predominant city in Mespotamia from around 3500 BC, have come from as far afield as Susa and Syria. The effect of trade and gift-exchange between cities encouraged the development of a common culture from the edges of the Persian Gulf to Mari in the northwest and Ashur in the north. Although other languages were spoken, the early use of Sumerian as a written language has led to the use of the term “Sumerian” to describe the culture and society of early and middle 3rd millennium.

THE EMPIRE OF AGADE

Towards the end of the 3rd millennium powerful leaders attempted to expand their influence over a wider area. The first was Sargon (c. 2296–2240 BC), who created a new political centre at Agade, also known as Akkad, before conquering the cities of southern Mesopotamia and claiming authority over areas as far west as Byblos. The empire of Agade was enlarged by Sargon’s grandson Naram-Sin (2213–2176 BC), but within a generation of his death it had disappeared, as its subject cities reasserted their independence. The rise of Agade had long-lasting effects on the region, with Akkadian (whose variants included Babylonian and Assyrian) replacing Sumerian as the main language of Mesopotamia.

A century later the rulers of the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III: 2047–1940 BC), beginning with Ur-Nammu, built an empire in southern Mesopotamia, but in common with the other early Mesopotamian empires it was not long-lasting and its decline left a number of important cities competing for power. The centre of activity moved to northern Mesopotamia, and a new elite emerged—the Amorites—who had previously been excluded from power. The most successful Amorite leader was Shamshi-Adad I, who established a short-lived empire in Assyria in the years after 1750 BC. After his death the region returned to a period of competing rulers, as reflected by the assessment of an advisor to Zimri-Lim of Mari (c. 1714–1700 BC): “There is no king who is strong by himself: 10 or 15 kings follow Hammurabi of Babylon, as many follow Rim-Sin of Larsa, Ibalpiel of Eshnunna and Amutpiel of Qatna, while 20 kings follow Yarim-Lim of Yamkhad.” Soon after this Hammurabi was able to establish an empire of his own, and Babylon became a leading power in the region for the first time.

THE LAW CODE OF HAMMURABI

Hammurabi is most famous for his law code, inscribed on a large stone with a carving of the king in the presence of Shamash, the Babylonian sun god. Although it is presented as a practical collection of laws including the principle of punishment with “an eye for an eye”, the primary function of the document was probably to advertise the achievements of Hammurabi’s reign. After his death, his successors in the First Dynasty of Babylon ruled for about 90 years before the city was raided by the Hittites, and a new phase in the history of Mesopotamia began (see p. 34).

c. 3100–1000 BC
ANCIENT EGYPT

The history of the ancient Egyptian state is one of successive periods of unification and fragmentation. Counterbalancing this is a pattern of civilization—characterized by such features as the use of writing, an organized system of religion and divine kingship, and dependence on the annual Nile floods for the fertility of the land—which links the different periods together through a span of 3000 years.

Tradition dates the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt to 3100 BC, but it is more accurate to see the emergence of a unified state around this time as the outcome of formative processes stretching back into prehistory. The 4th-Dynasty pyramids at Giza, the largest of which was built by Khufu (Cheops), are the most famous examples of Egypt’s monumental funerary architecture, which expressed the divine status and power of the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom. Construction projects on this scale were possible only because of the enormous wealth of the state, derived mainly from agriculture. The pharaohs controlled this resource through a system of assessment, taxation, collection and redistribution. Central rule broke down at the end of the 6th Dynasty. Although the reasons for this are not entirely clear, it is probable that a series of low Nile floods and consequent famines were one factor in the loss of political and social stability that marks the onset of the First Intermediate Period (from c. 2181 BC).

MIDDLE KINGDOM REUNIFICATION

Egypt was reunified under Mentuhotep of Thebes, and a new era, known as the Middle Kingdom, began. Thebes became an important centre, and its god, Amun, was identified with the sun god, Re, who had been closely connected with royalty since Old Kingdom times. During the 12th Dynasty, which represented the high point of the Middle Kingdom, trading expeditions were sent to Palestine, Syria, and south to Nubia, where the Egyptian presence was consolidated by the construction of several forts clustered around the second cataract. During the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1720–1550 BC) power devolved to various local rulers until foreigners from the east, known as the Hyksos, extended their authority over a large part of Egypt. The Hyksos were eventually expelled by the independent rulers of Thebes, who reunified Egypt from the south.

EXPANSION AND DISUNITY

During the New Kingdom, military conquests created an Egyptian empire stretching from the Euphrates in the north to Nubia in the south. Within Egypt, imperial expansion was matched by magnificent construction works of tombs and temples. The cult of the most important god Amun-Re was temporarily set back when Akhenaten (c. 1364–1347 BC) built a new capital at Amarna, where the worship of the Aten or solar disc was promoted.

Under Rameses II Egypt reached a pinnacle of wealth and power, but there are clear indications that from the reign of Rameses III onwards there were growing external and internal problems. Egypt’s empire in Syria and Palestine was lost. Its eastern and seaward borders were threatened by the sea peoples. On the western border, despite the victories of Rameses III, the Libyans posed a continuing and destabilizing problem. Internally, royal power was eroded by such factors as weak rulers, administrative inefficiency and the growing authority of the high priests of Amun at Thebes. By the end of the 20th Dynasty (c. 1069 BC) Egypt was once again a disunited land.

1600–1000 BC
THE NEAR EAST

The period after 1600 BC saw the fertile lands of Mesopotamia and the Levant become the battleground between rival empires: Hittites, Mitannians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Elamites and Egyptians. After 1200 BC, however, these powers collapsed in a dramatic sequence of events that is still not fully understood by historians. The resulting two centuries of upheaval marked the end of the Bronze Age in the Near East.

Much of the detailed knowledge of the relationships between the warring empires comes from the “Amarna letters”. This collection of documents written in Akkadian (the international language of diplomacy in this period), consists of correspondence between the Egyptian pharaohs Amenophis III, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun (1390–1327 BC) and the rulers of the other great powers. The letters reveal the dynastic marriages and gift-giving that typify relations between rulers: the personal and the political were intimately bound together.

The most important new power in the region was the Hittite empire in central Anatolia. The Hittites had been expanding their power from their centre at Hattushash since the reign of Hattusili I (c. 1650–1620 BC). Mursili I (c. 1620-c. 1590 BC) led an expedition that destroyed Aleppo and Babylon, but it was Tudhaliya I (c. 1420–1400 BC) and Suppiluliuma I (1344–1322 BC) who made the Hittites an imperial power. The empire consisted of a large number of small territories governed by client kings who owed their position entirely to the “Great King” who ruled from the capital, Hattusa. Client rulers were required to raise troops for the king’s campaigns, and to provide labour and goods for the central administration. They were often bound to the king by marriage ties.

The Hittites faced frequent pressure on their borders from Arzawa to the west and the Gasga to the north, but their biggest rivals were Egypt and the kingdom of Mitanni to the south. Mitanni first appears in the historical record in c. 1480 BC, when its ruler, Parrattarna, is described as controlling Aleppo. For the next 140 years Mitanni was a major power, controlling Assyria by 1400 BC. Mutual concern about Hittite power saw an alliance between Mitanni and Egypt, and the last independent ruler of Mitanni, Tushratta, married his daughter to Amenophis III and, after the pharaoh’s death, to his son Amenophis IV (Akhenaten). Tushratta was assassinated in c. 1340 BC, and his son Shattiwaza was installed as a vassal of the Hittites. Hostility continued between the Hittites and the Egyptians, leading to the great but inconclusive battle of Kadesh in 1275 BC between the pharaoh Rameses II (1279–1213 BC) and the Hittite king Muwatalli (1295–1271 BC).

Assyrian expansion began under Ashur-uballit I (1353–1318 BC), as Mitanni began to collapse under Hittite pressure. Adad-nirari I (1295–1264 BC) seized what was left of Mitanni from the Hittites, and Assyrian power grew to its greatest extent in the reign of Tikulti-ninurta I (1233–1197 BC), who conquered Babylon and installed a series of puppet rulers. Up until then Mesopotamia had been through a period of stability, ruled from Babylon, which came under the control of the Kassites in c. 1595 BC. Little is known about their origins, but they were noted for their horses and chariots, and maintained power for four centuries.

The Assyrian attack on Babylon led to counter-attacks from Elam to the southeast. The Elamite kings Kiden-Hutran (c. 1235–1210 BC) and Shutruk-Nahunte (1185–1155 BC) led campaigns into Mesopotamia, the latter capturing Babylon. Despite a Babylonian revival under Nebuchadnezzar I (1126–1205 BC), the general upheaval that brought an end to the Bronze Age saw both Babylon and Elam more or less disappear from the historical record within a few years.

Around 1200 BC there was a wave of destruction throughout the eastern Mediterranean from Greece to Syria and Palestine. Fifty years later several cities in Mesopotamia were also destroyed. There are reports from the city of Ugarit of attacks from the sea, and the Egyptian pharaohs Merneptah (1213–1203 BC) and Rameses III (1184–1150 BC) describe battles with “sea peoples”. Although this obscure group was once considered the cause of widespread destruction it is now thought that they were merely taking advantage of a widespread breakdown in political organization. Earthquakes, drought, interruption to the supply of metals, and many other things, have been suggested as the cause of the collapse. It is likely that no one explanation will suffice, and that a number of external factors, combined with the fragility of the centralized power structures of the Bronze Age kingdoms, led to the dramatic end of the civilizations of the Bronze Age.

300 BC TO AD 1300
PEOPLES OF SOUTH AMERICA AND
THE CARIBBEAN

By 300 BC most people in South America had become farmers, although some hunter-gathering persisted in the southern part of the continent where farming was difficult. By 750 BC, complex societies were developing in the Andes. As in Mesoamerica, they went through phases of growth and decline, but in the central Andes there was a degree of cultural unity in that artistic differences between the highlands and lowlands were not as marked.

SOUTH AMERICA

The coast of the central Andes is best known, archaeologically, for the graphic pottery of the Moche, dating from AD 100 to 600. It reveals much about daily life and religion. The Moche were the first to assert themselves more widely by conquest. Both pottery and tombs show that, like their contemporaries in Mesoamerica, Moche kings exhibited their authority in elaborate rites.

Yet from about AD 600 the coast succumbed to conquest from the Tiahuanaco and the Huari. Both these civilizations developed elements of the earlier Chavín cult (see p. 19). The city of Tiahuanaco was centred on the Titicaca Basin in Bolivia where the people grew potatoes and herded llamas and alpacas. Renowned for their stone buildings and sculpture, their expansion seems to have been achieved through the establishment of religious and commercial colonies. The reasons for its collapse about AD 1200 are not fully understood, but may have been related to climate change that affected agricultural production. The Huari are often considered to have been the precursors of the Inca. Among the hallmarks of Huari civilization was a network of roads and logistical, perhaps administrative, bases. Following two centuries of political fragmentation, the Moche tradition was revived among the Chimú, consummate engineers who developed vast irrigation systems. They controlled parts of the Andean coast until their destruction by the Incas (see p. 143).

In the northern Andes and southern Central America, along the Amazon and in the plains southwest of the Amazon, there were other large populations. Much of the most telling evidence for them is in the form of extensive field systems. In northwestern South America chiefdoms had emerged, and in the southernmost parts of Central America superb sculpture, goldwork and pottery indicate powerful patrons.

THE CARIBBEAN

There is some evidence that peoples exploiting wild food resources occupied Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic about 4000 BC. However, it was between 500 and 250 BC that farmers began migrating to the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico from the Orinoco and other rivers in northeast South America. They introduced the cultivation of manioc (cassava) and brought with them dogs and a distinctive red and white pottery known as Saladoid. Between AD 500 and AD 1000, the population in these islands expanded and spread to parts of the islands of Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Cuba and Jamaica. Most of these people were probably Arawak speakers. With population growth the societies became more complex and chiefdoms emerged. These people were later known as Tainos.

300 BC TO AD 1300
PEOPLES OF MESOAMERICA

Many societies in the Americas changed little in the 2000 years before 1300. In Mesoamerica, however, complex societies were developing by the end of the first millennium BC. They then underwent cycles of growth and decline that included periods of outstanding intellectual and artistic achievement.

By 300 BC, almost every way of life that the Europeans would later encounter had developed in Mesoamerica: while some societies in northern Mexico continued to live by hunting, fishing and gathering, most had adopted farming and some were developing into states that extended their influence by trade or force.

THE RISE OF TEOTIHUACÁN

Earlier developments in Mesoamerica were eclipsed in about AD 100 by the sudden rise of Teotihuacán. The city grew to about 200,000, much larger than cities in the Old World at the time. There are doubts about the nature of the city’s economy but the centre—with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon—was clearly planned for rites that involved human sacrifices. The city also possessed thousands of artisans who produced many items for foreign trade, including many articles made of obsidian, which they obtained from mines they controlled at Pachuca. Whether or not in association with trade, the Teotihuacános’ influence spread widely through present-day Mexico and Guatemala and was apparent in their distinctive pottery, crafts and architecture. In the 7th century AD Teotihuacán was attacked either by insiders or outsiders, or both, and its power destroyed, although it continued to function as a town.

THE RISE OF THE MAYA

At the same time the small but brilliant kingdoms of the Maya flourished. Their capitals were pyramid-studded ceremonial centres with densely settled suburbs. Voluminous inscriptions reveal a sophisticated but typically Mesoamerican concern with astrology. For a long time it was not understood how these cities in a tropical forest were supplied with food. It now seems they built terraces, drained fields and made extensive use of game and fish. However, whether it was on account of the chronic wars that are recorded, or of popular discontent, or of environmental degradation by excessive population—or of all of these factors—most of the towns were abandoned between AD 790 and the mid-9th century. Many districts revived later in what is known as the Post-Classic period, but the Maya never regained their grandeur.

THE RISE OF THE TOLTECS

The Maya “collapse” followed the dissolution of Teotihuacán in about 700. But between these poles of power a new generation of thriving towns had emerged, including some of Teotihuacán’s protégés, such as Cholula, which established their independence from the traditional order. They appear to have been eclipsed in turn by the Toltecs, soldiers and probably traders, whose influence subsequently extended throughout Mesoamerica and beyond. In about 1175 their reign, too, ended, possibly on account of refugees from the north driven south by changing climatic conditions. Meanwhile, two Nahua-speaking migrations from central Mexico had extended Mesoamerican influence to societies on the Pacific coastal plain as far south as Costa Rica.

300 BC TO AD 1300
PEOPLES OF EARLY NORTH
AMERICA

The early cultures of North America were predominantly agrarian-based, with small communities developing in and around areas where the natural environment provided rich sources of food. By AD 700 three distinct cultures had developed. These were more urban and culturally diverse, and they were heavily influenced by Mexican civilizations. By the beginning of the 15th century, however, these cultures were in decline.

By 300 BC, the area stretching from Ohio to West Virginia had already been settled. Small communities and villages developed in river valleys, where natural food resources (such as mammals, birds, fish and vegetable foods) were both abundant and close at hand. Horticulture also developed around this time: sunflowers, marsh elder and squashes were cultivated.

Archaeological evidence from this period points to the existence of chiefdoms: the elaborate burial sites, such as that at Hopewell in Ohio, are excellent indicators of the social, religious and trade networks through which imported goods, as well as ideas, filtered. By AD 700, three distinct cultural traditions had emerged in southwestern North America: the Hohokam, Mogollon and Anasazi. Their area of influence covered much of the territory that is now Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, and also extended south into Sonora and Chihuahua.

The Hohokam, Mogollon and Anasazi cultures all had contact with Mexico, and this contact became a significant influence on their development. Excavations have revealed ball courts and Mesoamerican-style mosaics, bracelets, effigy vessels and figurines. The architectural layout of the towns (which were used as economic, religious and trading centres) also reveals Mexican influence, and the Mexicans may even have established Casas Grandes in Chihuahua as the “capital” of the Mogollon culture.

The first true towns in North America appeared in the Middle Mississippi Valley from AD 700. They were characteristically built on large, flat-topped, rectangular mounds, which supported temples and mortuary houses for the elite society and more modest timber houses for the town’s merchants and officials. A town generally consisted of up to 20 mounds grouped together around a plaza and enclosed by a defensive wooden stockade. The towns had substantial populations: it is estimated that some reached 10,000 inhabitants.

The large rural population (about 200 people per square km) was based predominantly in the fertile river valleys surrounding the towns. Again, Mexican influence here is evident: after AD 700, a hardier strain of maize, popular in Mexico, was introduced and cultivated. In addition, the introduction of the bow and arrow to replace the spear-thrower and dart meant more efficient hunting of the abundant game on the uplands.

By the time 16th-century French explorers discovered the area, the population had advanced to a ranked, matrilineal society headed by a chief who ruled four well-defined classes. Archaeological evidence from Mississippi to Minnesota and from Oklahoma to the Atlantic coast also bears witness to the widespread existence of a religion known as the Southern Cult. Reaching its peak in 1250, the cult was strongly influenced by Mexican practice, especially in regard to the importance of the four cardinal points and the significance placed upon death.

Disease, caused by unhealthy overcrowding and poor sanitation, heralded the slow decline of the early North American cultures after AD 1300. However, their demise was a but a pale foreshadowing of the destruction that was to befall these cultures when Europeans arrived in the New World.

TO 475 BC
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION

Geographically and climatically China has a range of favourable conditions for human settlement, which took place 500,000 years ago. A turning point was reached at about 1600 BC when China entered the Bronze Age. It was then that Chinese culture took shape, as written languages, philosophies and stable socio-political and economic structures gradually emerged.

China has been inhabited continuously by humans since very early times. Remains of early hominines, which are similar to those from Java, have been found across large areas of southeast China. In about 500,000 BC Peking Man—Homo erectus—was living around Pohai and in the southeast and possibly in central and southern China as well. Homo sapiens first appeared in Palaeolithic cultures in the Ordos region, in the north and in the southwest in about 30,000 BC. Later Mesolithic cultures flourished in the north, south and southwest and in Taiwan.

EARLY AGRICULTURALISTS

Neolithic agricultural communities, the immediate ancestors of Chinese civilization, arose around 7500 BC in what is now southern China and in the loess-covered lands of the north and northeast, where the well-drained soil of the river terraces was ideal for primitive agriculture. One of the best early sites is Pan-p’o, with round and rectangular houses, pottery kilns and a cemetery area. In the valley of the Yellow River, early agriculture depended heavily on millet, but in the Yangtze delta area evidence of rice-paddies dates from the 5th millennium BC. By 3000 BC, more sophisticated skills developed, including the carving of jade, and small townships rather than villages began to emerge.

Around 1600 BC China entered the Bronze Age with its first archaeologically proven dynasty, the Shang (c. 1520–1030 BC). Chasing copper mines, the Shang moved their capital at least six times, and three, at Cheng-chou, Erh-li-t’ou and An-yang, have been excavated. Many smaller Shang sites have been found and some are now known from the Yangtze valley in central China indicating the Shang expansion southward. In addition, the Shang had trade relations with most of the northern and central east Asian mainland.

THE CHOU DYNASTY

In the 11th century BC the Shang territory was conquered by the Chou, of different ethnic origin, who inhabited the northwest border of the Shang domain. The Chou gradually extended their sovereignty, including the entire middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River and parts of the middle basin of the Yangtze. At first their capital lay near Hsi-an. The Chou territory was divided into numerous domains among the king and the elites—a system of delegated authority similar to the later European feudal system.

Until the 8th century BC the Chou constantly extended their territory. About 770 BC, however, internal disorders broke the kingdom into numerous units and forced the Chou king to abandon his homeland in the Wei valley and move to the eastern capital at Lo-yang, where his power diminished. Over the next two and a half centuries wars caused more than 100 petty units to be swallowed up by some 20 of the more powerful ones, among whom there emerged a clear pecking order.

The Shang and early Chou periods were differentiated from their predecessors by their political organization and their bronze technology, and also by the use of writing; their culture was already recognizably “Chinese”. Their cities maintained a hierarchy of nobles, royal officers and court servants. They drew support from communities of craftsmen working in bronze, jade, wood, stone, ceramics and textiles. Peasants working the various domains that belonged to the landed classes produced revenues and foodstuffs. Market activities were common and mint currencies were in use.

Bronze was used for ritual objects and a wide range of weapons and tools, with the exception of farming equipment. Farmers working in the fields continued to use stone implements, growing rice, millet, barley and hemp and raising pigs, poultry and silkworms.

Towards the end of the period, the old social order began to collapse. The more powerful units employed bureaucrats rather than the hereditary nobility of older times. A new group of administrators (shih) emerged. A leading figure among this group, Confucius, formulated a new ethos, which was to have currency far into the future and far beyond China’s territory.

TO 1392
KOREA

The area now known as Korea was the mountainous eastern edge of the Eurasian continent until the Yellow Sea formed and the west coast emerged to define a peninsula. Peoples migrated into and through the peninsula to the islands. Chinese political culture and Buddhism followed on, and states emerged. With Chinese aid, one of three competing kingdoms conquered the peninsula, but instability led to anarchy by the late 9th century. The successful kingdom created a bureaucratic state with strong aristocratic characteristics and established a Korean identity.

During the last glacial maximum, “Korea” was high ground across a low plain (Yellow Sea) at the eastern end of Eurasia. Sea levels rose and a peninsula appeared between 14,000 BC and 6000 BC. Humans from 22,000 BC; villages from 10,000 BC; rice between 6000 and 4500 BC. Bronze was worked from 1000 BC and dolmens appeared.

By 108 BC, the Han Empire had established colonies to trade for iron. Only the Lelang colony near Pyŏngyang survived until AD 313, when it was destroyed by a tribe from the middle reaches of the Yalu River, the Koguryo, who first revolted against the Chinese in AD 12. Over several centuries, the south politically evolved into Paekche in the southwest, Silla in the southeast, and the iron-rich principalities of Kaya in between.

By the 6th century, the peninsular states were importing Chinese law, bureaucratic government, and land was monopolized by the state to centralize power. Koreans and Japanese fashioned compromises between the Chinese ideal of centralization and the native system of aristocracy, which resulted in semi-centralized political orders based on inheritance. Buddhism permeated every corner of the peninsula by 540 and was exported to Japan.

An alliance between T’ang China and Silla destroyed Paekche in 660 and Koguryo in 668. The T’ang had promised to withdraw but betrayed Silla, attempting to seize the whole peninsula. By 676, Silla drove T’ang out, demonstrating that outside powers were unable to succeed on the peninsula without a local ally. T’ang completely retreated, and a new state called Pohai (Korean Parhae, 712–926) formed in Manchuria from tribal elements and Koguryo refugees.

From the 8th century, northeast Asia saw peace: great cities, long-distance trade, and a cosmopolitan, state-oriented Buddhism. Kyŏngju, Silla’s capital, was a world city known to Arab traders. Ch’ang-an may have had nearly two million inhabitants, and Kyŏngju approached 900,000, swollen by slaves from the wars. Monks, merchants and diplomats wandered among Ch’ang-an, Kyŏngju, and Nara in Japan. Thereafter, “Korea” and “Japan” began to form separate identities.

Sillan central control lapsed, and in 918, Wang Kŏn, a general outside the old aristocratic order, emerged to found a new dynasty named Koryŏ. Wang Kŏn peacefully absorbed the Sillan court in 935. His successors inherited the aristocratic pretensions of Silla and the desire to centralize. During the 10th century, a bureaucratic state was created, with examinations, ideology, salary ranks and centralized provincial appointments. Where Silla had conquered, Koryŏ unified. In 1126, the Liao (Jurchen) destroyed the Chinese Song Empire and Koryŏ faced a dilemma of identity: take the opportunity to expand out of the peninsula or accept its limitations. A rebellious faction argued for continental destiny in Manchuria. Kim Pu-sik, the general who suppressed them, produced an official history (Samguk sagi, c. 1145) that defined Koryŏ’s heritage as peninsular. After the Mongols invaded in 1232, an unofficial history (Samguk yusa, c. 1283) reaffirmed a peninsular identity and recorded foundation myths.

Koryŏ nearly slipped into feudalism when abuse of civil privilege sparked a military coup d’etat in 1170. Military dictators did not create a new government, but ruled through the central government. Perhaps Koryŏ never disintegrated into feudalism because of the threat from northern barbarians, a threat Japan never faced. The Mongols invaded in 1232, but the Korean court resisted until 1270. The Koryŏ kings became sons-in-law to the Mongol Khans, and Koryŏ was press-ganged into supporting Mongol efforts to conquer Japan in 1274 and 1281. Both invasions failed.

From the mid-14th century, Japanese piracy appeared to ravage Korea. In the north, the Mongols weakened and, in 1368, the new Ming dynasty dislodged the Mongols. Indecision at the Koryŏ court over whether to support the Mongols or the Ming resulted in a coup d’etat in 1388 and a new dynasty, the Chosŏn, was founded in 1392.

TO 500 BC
THE BEGINNINGS OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION

India was the home of one of the oldest civilizations of history, which grew up along the banks of the Indus river. The Indus valley culture and the Vedic culture, which succeeded and was influenced by it, were the basis for the development of later Indian society, in particular for the major religious systems of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

The early history of India is very difficult to recover. Archaeology can reveal something about the way of life of its earliest inhabitants, but little can be learned from written evidence. The earliest works of Indian literature, the Vedas, were composed in the centuries after 1200 BC, but they were not written down until probably the 5th century.

HARAPPA AND MOHENJO-DARO

Although the subcontinent had substantial human occupation from the Stone Age onwards, the first great Indian civilization was the Harappan culture which emerged in the Indus valley in the 3rd millennium BC. Like the slightly older civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt it was based on flood-plain agriculture, as the cultivation of the fertile land on either side of the Indus was able to provide enough of a surplus to support a complex urban society. Several substantial cities were built, of which the best explored are Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

The Indus civilization also developed writing, and about 2000 seals with short pictographic inscriptions on them have been discovered. The script has not been deciphered, and until it is, little will be known about the political structure or religious beliefs of the Indus civilization.

The presence of cylinder seals from Mesopotamia at Mohenjo-Daro and of Indus seals in Mesopotamia is evidence of trade between the two areas via the Persian Gulf, and tin and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and Central Asia also made their way to the Indus. However around 2000 BC the ‘Harappan period’ came to an end, as the cities ceased to function and were replaced by a settlement pattern of agricultural villages and pastoral camps.

POST-INDUS INDIA

From around 1500 BC a new culture becomes apparent in India, characterized by a new language and rituals, and the use of horses and two-wheeled chariots. The traditional way to explain the changes was to talk of an “Aryan invasion”, with mounted bands of warriors riding in from the northwest and conquering the indigenous Indus population before moving eastwards to the Ganges. Support for this picture was claimed from one of the Vedas, the Rig Veda, where the Aryans are presented as conquering the cities of the darker skinned indigenous Dasas. Archaeological evidence offers little support for this theory however. The styles of pottery associated with the Indo-Aryans, known as Painted Grey Ware, which appears from c. 1100 BC, is similar to earlier Painted Black and Red Ware, and this may indicate that Indo-Aryan speakers were indigenous to the Indus plain. Whatever their origins, Indo-Aryan languages, from which Sanskrit developed, became widespread through Northern India.

THE SOUTH

Southern India was left largely untouched by the civilizations of the north. There were probably trading links between the Indus valley and the southern tip of the peninsula, but there was no urbanism in the south, where villages were the normal form of social organization. However, some limited form of common culture in the south is suggested by the distinctive megalithic tombs found over most of the area.

In the north, where, unlike the hilly, fragmented geography of the south, great plains lent themselves to large-scale agriculture and the growth of substantial kingdoms, cultural coherence became more widespread as, in the period after 1000 BC, the new civilization spread gradually east from the Indus to the Ganges. Evidence from finds of pottery characteristic of particular periods suggests that there was also movement southwards. The late Vedic texts depict the early first millennium BC as a period of frequent warfare between rival tribal territories. During this period the society of Northern India became increasingly stratified, and this culminated around 600 BC in the emergence of states ruled by hereditary monarchs. Trading networks developed, agricultural activity increased, and this led to a new phase of urbanism in India. Once again cities began to be built, although they were not on the scale of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, being constructed largely from mud-bricks. No known public buildings survive from this period. Yet by the 5th century BC there were political entities that might be called states or polities, most significantly Magadha, with its substantial fortified capital at Pataliputra (see p. 69).

VEDIC RELIGION

Religious practices in India in the first millennium BC were influenced in part by the earlier culture of the Vedas, and animal sacrifice had a central role in it. The religion was polytheistic, and the Rig Veda includes hymns to a number of deities, including the warrior god Indra, the fire god Agni, and Soma, identified with a mind-altering drug of some kind, possibly derived from mushrooms. These cults were the forerunner of Hinduism, and the urban societies that developed along the Ganges were the communities among whom appeared in the 5th century Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, and the Buddha himself.

c. 3000 TO 950 BC
MINOAN AND MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATIONS

In the late 19th century, Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans unearthed the remains of previously unknown civilizations. Although the names of Troy, Mycenae and Knossos were familiar from the poems of Homer, the Bronze Age societies of the Aegean revealed by these excavations had much more in common with contemporary Near Eastern societies than they had with later Greece.

Substantial settlements appeared in mainland Greece and Crete by the end of the 3rd millennium BC. These were subsistence farmers, with households producing goods for their own consumption. The subsequent appearance in Crete of large stone-built complexes marked the emergence of a new form of social organization. There are some parallels between these “First Palaces” and Near Eastern buildings, and they are accompanied by other signs of such influence, including the appearance of a form of hieroglyphic writing in Crete. However, it is likely that local needs as much as outside influence determined the island’s overall development.

There is no agreed explanation for the later destruction of the “First Palaces”, but in their place the large complexes of the “Second Palace Period” emerged. These were not fortified, but they were the focus of the economic and religious life of the Minoan communities.

By 1700 BC Knossos had achieved a dominant position within Crete, and the palace there reveals much information about Minoan society. Surviving frescoes depict scenes of communal activity including processions, bull-leaping, dining and dancing. It is clear from Knossos and other palaces that Cretan society depended upon intensive agriculture—the palaces incorporate large storage areas where crops could be gathered for later redistribution to the population. Outside the towns, especially in eastern Crete, large “villas” had a similar role, and acted as processing centres for grape and olive crops.

The two hundred years of the Second Palace Period witnessed considerable destruction and rebuilding at a number of sites. The eruption of Thera in 1628 BC left its mark on sites in eastern Crete but otherwise appears to have had little long-term impact. More significantly, a little over a century later many Cretan settlements were widely devastated, possibly as a result of invasion from the Greek mainland.

MYCENAEAN GREECE

Mainland Greece did not share in the prosperity of Crete and the Aegean islands until after c. 1700 BC, when rich burials, especially in the “shaft-graves” at Mycenae and in tholos tombs, point to the emergence of a powerful warlike elite. After 1500 BC mainlanders, called Mycenaeans, appear to have been in control of Knossos, where the palace functioned for another century. It was only after then that palaces started to appear on the mainland. While they owed something to Minoan models, and, like them, acted as centres for agricultural storage and redistribution, they were fortified and less luxurious. The Mycenaeans spoke a form of Greek, and wrote in a syllabic script, Linear B, adapted from the still-undeciphered script in use in Crete, Linear A. Documents inscribed on clay tablets reveal a strongly hierarchical society, with the ruler (wanax) at the top, lesser lords below and the mass of the people at the bottom.

Soon after 1200 BC, more or less simultaneously, the palaces on the mainland were destroyed. In the centuries following there is no trace of Linear B writing, nor of the figurative decoration that characterizes Mycenaean art. When written Greek appears again in the 8th century, it uses a version of the Phoenician alphabet.

The absence of firm evidence—mirrored by the lack of firm dates for this period—has led historians to examine myths in the search for historical facts. On this basis it has been suggested that the Mycenaeans fell victim to Dorian invaders from the north, or that a long war against Troy caused revolution in the Greek homeland. Neither finds support from archaeology, and an agreed explanation for the complete social breakdown of Mycenaean society is yet to emerge. One contributing factor may have been major political upheavals further east, cutting off access to the tin needed to make the bronze on which the Mycenaean rulers based their power. Certainly the society which emerged from the “dark age” that followed the collapse was reliant on the more widely available iron.

The massive ruins of the Mycenaean palaces remained visible to the Greeks of later times, and these, together with a tradition of oral poetry that developed over the following centuries, led to the invention of a heroic world, most famously celebrated in the epic poems of Homer, that was very different from Bronze Age reality.

THREE THE CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS OF EURASIA

The earliest civilizations arose at a few scattered points in the vast and sparsely inhabited Eurasian landmass. Between 1000 BC and AD 500 the pattern began to change. Although America, Australasia and Africa south of the Sahara still stood outside the mainstream of world history, and were to stay so for a further thousand years, the civilizations of Europe and Asia now formed a continuous belt. By AD 100, when the classical era was at its height, a chain of empires extended from Rome via Parthia and the Kushana empire to China, constituting an unbroken zone of civilized life from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

This was a new and important fact in the history of the Eurasian world. The area of civilization remained narrow and exposed to unrelenting barbarian pressures, and developments in the different regions remained largely autonomous. But with the expansion of the major civilizations and the elimination of the geographical gaps between them, the way lay open for inter-regional contacts and cultural exchanges which left a lasting imprint. In the west, the expansion of Hellenism created a single cultural area which extended from the frontiers of India to Britain; in the east, the expansion of the Chinese and Indian civilizations resulted in a kind of cultural symbiosis in Indo-China. These wider cultural areas provided a vehicle not only for trade but for the transmission of ideas, technology and institutions, and above all for the diffusion of the great world religions. Beginning with Buddhism, and continuing with Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam, religion became a powerful unifying bond in the Eurasian world.

550 BC TO AD 752
THE COMMERCIAL AND CULTURAL BONDS OF EURASIA

The rulers of the empires of the ancient world had no commercial policies, and were seldom interested in trade. Yet the activities of traders, operating at the margins of society, and rarely mentioned in ancient literature, had a profound effect on the development of the world, transmitting not only goods, but also cultural ideas—and occasionally deadly organisms.

The quantity of goods passing across the Eurasian landmass varied enormously depending on the political conditions of the time. Between 200 BC and AD 200 stable regimes in the Roman Mediterranean, the Persian Parthian empire, the Kushan empire and China under the Han dynasty, helped to stabilize the routes between Europe, Persia and China. Such favourable conditions for the movement of goods and people did not recur until the 8th century AD. These earlier empires, however, were not directly interested in facilitating trade. Chinese campaigns in the area of the Silk Road in Sinkiang, north of Tibet, such as that of Pan Ch’ao against the Kushans in c. AD 90, confronted a military rather than a commercial threat. The Han emperors certainly wanted valuable commodities like horses from Ferghana, but they expected to receive them as diplomatic gifts, tribute or booty from war.

Since the time of Assyrian merchants in Anatolia in the second millennium BC there are examples of communities of traders who settled in foreign territories to import goods from their homelands. In the 8th century BC Greek and Phoenician trading posts were established across the Mediterranean for the same purpose. These “trade diasporas” made possible effective communication between different cultural groups. The people who made up the diaspora communities were not wealthy merchants, but of much lower status. The “Roman” traders who sailed across the Indian Ocean or visited the Chinese court would not have been Italians, but inhabitants of the eastern provinces, who were probably not even Roman citizens.

Trade was not the only way in which goods travelled across this route. The Han rulers of China maintained peace on their northwest frontier by regular gifts of large quantities of silk and lacquerware to the Hsiungnu tribes outside the Great Wall. Some items would have been passed on in dowries or as gifts, and gradually made their way to the Mediterranean where silken clothing was sought by Roman senators, much to the distaste of more austere emperors.

While silk was the major import from China to the Mediterranean, a variety of goods found their way westwards. The Roman writer Pliny (AD 23–79) complains that the desire for eastern goods was draining the empire of its gold and silver, but this is not supported by the archaeological evidence. Glass was certainly sought after, but slaves were probably also a significant item of trade, and there are references in Chinese sources to “Syrian jugglers” reaching the Chinese court.

MARITIME TRADE

Maritime trade developed at the same time as the overland routes, making increased use of the monsoons for trade between southern Arabia and south India. Vital information about the goods traded between the Roman empire and the east comes from A Voyage around the Red Sea, an anonymous handbook for traders written in the 1st century AD, which describes the coastal routes from the Egyptian Red Sea ports of Myos Hormus and Berenice to east Africa and the Ganges delta. The author knows of China as a vast city, but east of India his geographical knowledge is hazy.

The exchange of goods might have profound cultural effects. Begram in Gandhara was the location of the summer palace of the Kushan emperors. A rich hoard from there dating from around AD 100 included lacquer from China and ivory from India, as well as bronzes, glassware and pottery from the Mediterranean. The Kushan interest in Mediterranean artefacts illustrated by the Begram hoard had a profound effect on local practices, acting as a catalyst for the development of Gandharan art which emerged in the 2nd century AD, in part modelled on Greco-Roman styles.

1000–539 BC
THE NEAR EAST

As the Near East recovered from the upheavals of the late Bronze Age, Assyria re-emerged as the great regional power. At its greatest extent Assyrian territory stretched from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and from southern Egypt to Lake Van. At the height of Assyrian power, internal conflict saw the Babylonians replace the Assyrians as the rulers of the empire, but less than a century later they, in their turn, were overthrown by the Persians.

Our knowledge of this period is drawn largely from Assyrian, and later Babylonian, documents, but some idea of how neighbouring states saw Assyria can be gained from the Hebrew Bible, which contains historical material from the 8th century BC onwards. Although its narrative was revised several times in later centuries, the Bible provides information about the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which emerged in the area of Palestine in around 1000 BC, initially as a single kingdom with its centre at Jerusalem. Over the next 300 years Israel and Judah came increasingly into the Assyrian sphere of influence, with their kings adopting varying attitudes to the neighbouring superpower.

Assyrian expansion started in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC), who rebuilt and expanded the city and palace of Nimrud to be his capital. His successor Shalmaneser III (858–824 BC) extended the power of the kingdom westwards, partly by conquest and partly by accepting tribute from the local rulers in Syria and the Levant. In the following century Assyrian expansion turned south and east under three powerful rulers, Tiglath-pileser III (744–727 BC), Sargon II (721–705 BC) and Sennacherib (704–681 BC). Repeating the achievements of the 13th-century kings they conquered the city of Babylon and brought Mesopotamia under Assyrian control.

At this time a new power was growing on Assyria’s northern border in the shape of Urartu. Little is known about this state, which had its capital at Tushpa on Lake Van. Many Urartian sites were heavily fortified, and the state flourished from the 9th to the 7th centuries BC. If the Assyrians did try to conquer it, they had little success. Along with its western neighbours, Phrygia and Lydia, Urartu had grown up after the collapse of the Hittite empire, but a number of “neo-Hittite” city-states also emerged in the region of northern Syria.

A little before 700 BC Egypt was beginning to recover from the disorganization of the Third Intermediate Period after the end of the New Kingdom, and attempted to influence affairs in the Levant. In response Esarhaddon (680–669 BC) and Ashurbanipal (668–627 BC) led campaigns into Egypt, going as far south as Thebes and more or less installing pro-Assyrian rulers in the country. Ashurbanipal also invaded Elam, extending his empire further than ever before. His death in 627 BC however marked the end of Assyrian power: within 15 years his capital, Nineveh, had been sacked, and his empire had come under the control of Babylon.

It has been suggested that the transformation of the neo-Assyrian empire into the neo-Babylonian empire should be seen as the result more of an internal dynastic conflict than of conquest. With the help of the Medes, who were settled on the northeastern borders of Assyria, the first neo-Babylonian ruler, Nabopolassar (626–605 BC), took advantage of quarrels within the Assyrian ruling house to seize control of the whole empire. In the process, Median and Babylonian armies destroyed Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh, but, with the exception of Egypt, the empire that these cities controlled held together under its new rulers.

When the Egyptians tried to take advantage of the upheaval, Nabopolassar and his successor Nebuchadnezzar (604–562 BC) marched to the Levant, drove the Egyptians away, and at the same time captured Jerusalem and deported its leaders. The wealth of the empire was used to rebuild the cities of Mesopotamia, and above all Babylon. Excavation in the early 20th century revealed the splendour and the sheer size of the city as it was rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar.

After Nebuchadnezzar’s death there was a period of instability, which ended with a palace coup that placed Nabonidus (555–539 BC) on the throne. Although he had a long reign, his religious reforms appear to have made him unpopular with many leading members of the kingdom. This may have critically weakened Babylonian military strength when, in 539 BC, the city was taken by the Persians under Cyrus I (752).

550 BC TO AD 637
THE EMPIRES OF PERSIA

The Iranian plateau was the heartland of three great empires whose territory stretched from the ancient centres of civilization in Mesopotamia to India. For more than a millennium, the Persian empire was governed successively by the Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sasanid ruling families, and offered a constant challenge to the Mediterranean lands to the west.

The downfall of the Assyrian empire around 612 BC was brought about by the Babylonians and the Medes, a loose confederacy of tribes in western Iran. It was the Persians, however, who proved to be the main beneficiaries. The Persian state emerged in the 7th century BC on the edge of the area dominated by Assyria, and in 550 BC its ruler, Cyrus (559–530 BC), defeated an invading Median army at Pasargadae. The next 11 years saw attempts to stop the growth of Persian power by both Croesus of Lydia and Nabonidus of Babylon. Both were defeated, leaving Cyrus in possession of Anatolia, the Levant and Mesopotamia.

The absorption of Lydian territory into Cyrus’s empire brought Persia into contact with the Greeks. He then turned his attention eastwards, gaining control of much of Afghanistan and south central Asia. Though Cyrus’s successor, Cambyses (530–522 BC), added Egypt to the empire in 525 BC, his death was followed by the first of several upheavals within the empire as uncertainty over the succession encouraged widespread revolts.

These were quickly suppressed by Darius (522–486 BC), who also incorporated northwest India into the empire. The northwestern boundary of the empire remained a problem, but after the failure of expeditions into Europe by Darius and Xerxes (486–465 BC), the Persians protected their interests by a series of peace treaties with the Greek states.

Achaemenid rule was brought to an end by the invasion of Alexander the Great in 334 BC. Dynastic struggles in the 330s may have had an effect, but no entirely satisfactory explanation has been given for the rapidity with which the Achaemenid empire fell.

THE PARTHIAN EMPIRE

After Alexander’s death, Iran and its neighbouring territories became part of the Seleucid kingdom. In the 3rd century BC internal disputes and conflict with other Hellenistic kingdoms weakened Seleucid control of their eastern territories. Bactria broke away to become an independent kingdom, and the provinces of Parthia and Hyrcania were taken over by Arsaces, leader of the Parni in 238.

The early history of the new kingdom of Parthia is uncertain, but under Mithradates I (171–138 BC) its territory was extended into Mesopotamia and as far east as the mouth of the Indus, its success, like that of Sasanid Persia later, largely the result of the use of mounted archers and armoured cavalry. In the years after Mithradates’s death the empire was threatened by the Tocharians and the Shakas in the east, but order was restored by Mithradates II (123–87 BC). From the 1st century BC onwards, in spite of further severe Shaka incursions from the east, the main threat to Parthian security was Rome. But although there were a number of wars between the two empires, they were well matched militarily and Arsacid, or Parthian, rule remained secure until it was challenged from within.

SASANID PERSIA

Considerable autonomy was left in the hands of local ruling families, and it was from one of these in Persis that the new rulers of Persia arose. The first Sasanid ruler, Ardashir, defeated his Arsacid overlord Ardavan in AD 224 and rapidly took control of the whole of Parthia’s empire and the areas beyond. Roman and Byzantine rule in Mesopotamia, Syria and eastern Anatolia was constantly challenged over the next centuries. The last century of Parthian rule had seen the rise of the Kushana empire in the east (see p. 68). This ended in 225 and Gandhara, Bactria and Sogdiana were brought under Sasanid control. From the 4th century this territory was threatened by Hephthalite and Chionite Huns and in the 6th century by the Turks.

The Arabs were a constant presence to the southwest of Persia’s empires. The Achaemenids had established some control over northern Arabia, but in the Parthian period an independent state of Characene emerged at the head of the Persian Gulf, whose rulers styled themselves “kings of the Arabs”. The Sasanids ended the independence of Characene, but maintained friendly relations with the Lakhmid Arab kingdom of Hira in western Mesopotamia which supported them against the Romans. Southern Arabia was never brought under Persian control, and in c. 604, after the Sasanid Chosroes II had ended Lakhmid independence, the Persians were defeated in battle by a confederacy of Arabs from the south. Success created confidence and increased Arab unity to such an extent that with further victories at Al Qadisiyya (637) and Nihavand (642) they brought Sasanid power to an end.

800 TO 336 BC
THE SPREAD OF GREEK
CIVILIZATION

The Greek heartland is an area of islands and plains divided by mountains. After the collapse of the Mycenaean palace system, a new form of political and religious community emerged here, the polis, or city-state, which became the Mediterranean world’s dominant form of political organization.

The 8th century BC was a period of great transformation in Greece. It saw the appearance of the first monumental public buildings, and with them other indications of the emergence of new communities, including changes in burial practices and artistic styles. At the same time literacy was reintroduced into Greece, with a new alphabet. Though contact with the wider world had not been totally broken in previous centuries, it now increased dramatically, above all on the island of Euboea. Although it is impossible to be certain what produced this transformation, one important factor was the activities of the Phoenicians, who at this time began to explore and settle throughout the Mediterranean.

THE AGE OF EXPANSION

From the middle of the century, following in the wake of the Phoenicians, groups of Greeks began to create settlements around the Mediterranean. The earliest were in Italy and Sicily, but by the middle of the 6th century there were numerous Greek communities in north Africa and, to the east, along the Black Sea coast. These colonies were set up for a variety of reasons. Some of the earliest were trading posts, which over time developed into permanent settlements. Others were formally dispatched as a response to land shortage in the mother city. Others may have been founded by bands of discontented young men looking for a new and better life away from old Greece. It is probable that the experience of the colonists had an effect on the political development of their mother cities.

From its earliest existence, decision-making in the Greek polis lay with an assembly of adult male citizens. Leadership, however, would have been in the hands of the wealthy elite. Increasing wealth and overseas contact in the 7th and 6th centuries led to the emergence in many city-states of powerful individuals, known as tyrants, who were able to impose their will on the community, usually with popular support. The “age of the tyrants” was a period of urban development, with new buildings, in particular enormous temples such as those of Hera on Samos, Artemis at Ephesus and Olympian Zeus at Athens. Citystates published law-codes on large stone tablets, advertising to the world that they were communities governed by the rule of law. Poetry flourished, with the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and the poems of Hesiod appearing in the early 7th century, followed by the great lyric poets, among them Archilochus, Anacreon and Sappho. Certain religious sanctuaries, above all Olympia and Delphi, gained “pan-Hellenic” status, and became meeting places for the leading members of the different Greek communities.

THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE

The experience of the Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes encouraged the Greeks in the Aegean and Asia Minor to join together to defend themselves from future threats. Athens, which had by far the largest fleet, took command, turning this alliance of city-states into an Athenian empire. Member states were required to pay tribute to finance the Athenian fleet, which guaranteed security. The existence of the Athenian empire considerably affected life in Athens. The fleet gave employment and status to the poorer citizens, who served as oarsmen and were able to participate in political activity to an extent unequalled elsewhere in the Greek world. A proportion of the tribute, along with some of the booty from successful naval campaigns, was given to the gods, funding great building programmes in Athens. The last three decades of the 5th century were also the period of Athens’ most enduring literary achievements. Following the work of Aeschylus earlier in the century, Sophocles and Euripides wrote tragedies, and Aristophanes his comedies, for performance at the great dramatic festivals, the City Dionysia and the Lenaea. Herodotus, the first historian, lived in Athens for some time, while sophists, philosophers and rhetoricians flocked there to make their names and their fortunes. Athens also produced its own great historian, Thucydides.

At the same time, Athens’ growing power was seen as a threat by the states of the Peloponnese, above all Sparta. After some inconclusive conflicts in the mid-century, in 431 BC Sparta declared war on Athens. This, the Peloponnesian War, developed into a conflict which ended 27 years later in the defeat of Athens and the disbanding of its empire.

THE RISE OF MACEDON

The economies of all Greek city-states were dominated by agriculture, and, except perhaps in Sparta, which relied on the labour of its conquered Messenian subjects (the “helots”), most of the population was made up of small-scale farmers, who were available for military service in the periods of less intense agricultural activity. One effect of this was that even prolonged periods of warfare had little long-term impact on the economies of the city-states involved. Thus within a decade of surrendering to the Peloponnesians, Athens was again at war with Sparta, this time supported by several of her former opponents.

The Spartans had originally defeated the Athenians with Persia’s help. In 387 BC the Persian king attempted to impose a peace settlement on Greece, and the next 30 years saw Athens, Sparta and Thebes vying for dominance in Greece, looking always for backing from Persia. In 359 BC Philip II became king of Macedon. He united the country and took advantage of conflicts elsewhere in Greece to gain control of Thrace to the east and Thessaly to the south. This gave him a firm base for involvement in Greek affairs, and, after Philip had brought to an end the “Sacred War” of 356–46, Macedon was left as the major power in Greece. In 338 BC Philip defeated the Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea, and imposed a settlement on the whole of Greece, the “League of Corinth”. His death two years later left his son Alexander a more or less united Greece, from which he was able to launch his invasion of the Persian empire.

336 TO 30 BC
THE HELLENISTIC WORLD

Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian empire transformed the eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world. The spread of Greek culture and political organisation which followed in his wake shaped the region for a millennium. Greek became the common language, and the city-state the common form of social organisation.

Along with the kingdom of Macedon, in 336 BC Alexander inherited from his father the leadership of a league of Greek states that he had intended to use to campaign against the Persian empire. Through his ambition and brilliant generalship, by the time of his death less than 13 years later at the age of 32, he was recognized as legitimate ruler of an empire stretching from Egypt to India. From the moment he died there was competition between his closest companions and generals. Until the assassination of Alexander’s young son in 307 BC, the contenders, for all that each had ambitions to take over the whole empire, could at least claim to be acting as regents. Thereafter, they were fighting for themselves, rapidly styling themselves as kings, and attempting to carve out areas of personal influence. By 276 BC, a division of the empire into three main kingdoms—Antigonid Macedon, Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt—had been established.

CULTURAL LIFE IN THE SUCCESSOR STATES

The basic political units of these new kingdoms was the city-state, some nominally independent, but most owing allegiance to one of the successor kings. The cities of old Greece, such as Athens, retained their prestige, but they were eclipsed by the newly created or reorganized cities of the east, named inevitably after their founders or rulers: Alexandria, Seleucia, Antioch. The new cities had all the elements of their older counterparts, with gymnasia, theatres and temples to the gods, and regular festivals, some including athletics, which might be attended by Greeks from far afield. Citizenship was restricted almost entirely to the Greek and Macedonian minority, and the land was in the hands of citizens or of the kings and their friends. The local populations might farm the land as tenants or as labourers, but they were excluded from administrative positions. The network of cities helped the spread of a common Greek culture and language throughout the region: Clearchus, a pupil of Aristotle, brought a collection of maxims from Delphi in central Greece to the city of Ai Khanoum in eastern Afghanistan. In a number of cities, but above all in Alexandria, with its access to papyrus, and Pergamum, from where parchment got its name, the kings established great libraries, and these became centres for literary work.

Even before Alexander’s conquest, some communities within the Persian empire had adopted aspects of Greek culture. This “Hellenization” continued, at least among the elites: conflict between “Hellenizers” and “traditionalists” in the 2nd century led to violence in Jerusalem. However, especially in Seleucid territories, elements of older cultures, including cuneiform writing, remained important, and in those areas which were to become the Parthian empire (see p. 57), Greek culture was never firmly established.

There were advances in geometry and mathematics, especially with Euclid of Alexandria and Archimedes. The great Alexandrian librarian, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, attempted with some success to calculate the circumference of the earth. However, this was not a period of great technological change. The basis of the Hellenistic economy was agriculture, and this changed little. Merchants continued to trade, and writers of the time praise the range of goods available in the great cities, but there is evidence too of an increasing gulf between rich and poor. Only in warfare were there major developments, with the creation of ever more advanced artillery and siege engines, and the introduction by the Seleucids and the Ptolemies of elephants onto the battlefield.

From the late 3rd century, a new player entered the game. Threats to Roman operations in the Adriatic, and Macedonian support for the Carthaginian Hannibal, led to a Roman invasion of Greece and Asia Minor. The Macedonian phalanx proved inferior to the Roman legions.

THE GROWTH OF ROMAN POWER

Wars gave Roman commanders an opportunity for booty and glory, and initially they withdrew their forces after each campaign; but as Rome acquired more allies in the east, the reasons for maintaining their presence grew. After the battle of Pydna (168) the kingdom of Macedon was divided into four independent republics. 18 years later it was made a Roman province. The involvement of Cleopatra VII in the civil war between Mark Antony and the future emperor Augustus led after the battle of Actium (see p. 75) to the Roman annexation of Egypt, the last major successor kingdom. A few small client kingdoms, tolerated by the Romans for a while, were all that remained of Alexander’s territorial inheritance.

475 BC TO AD 220
THE UNIFICATION OF CHINA

The process of China’s nation- and empire-building began with the political anarchy of the Warring States period but ended with a highly centralized state headed by a single monarch and an efficient bureaucracy that reached village level. The new system attained its full glory under the Han, whose wealth and territory matched the Roman empire.

Throughout the Warring States period (475–221 BC) seven major rivals contended for supremacy. At first, following the decline of the power of the Chou king, the principal contenders were the old-established dukedoms of Ch’i, Ch’u, Han and Wei. But from the beginning of the 3rd century BC the border state of Ch’in established firm control over the northwest and west, adopting the title “king” in 325 BC, and during the latter half of the 3rd century BC it began gradually destroying its rivals.

Throughout China, it was a period of constant warfare, waged on a massive scale by powerful and well-organized political units. But at the same time, this Warring States period coincided with major economic and social changes. The introduction of iron tools from about 500 BC and the use of animal power for cultivation greatly increased agricultural productivity. Population multiplied, commerce and industry flourished and large cities emerged. It was also a period of innovation in technology and science, and of philosophical ferment, in which the main schools of thought—Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism—took shape.

That the Ch’in emerged from this period to unify China under their leadership was at least in part due to the success of the “Legalist” system adopted by them in the 4th century, whereby a universal code of rewards and punishments was established that induced a high level of popular obedience and military discipline. Under this system, a centralized bureaucracy took measures to improve the production and distribution of grain, and organized the population to provide manpower for construction works and for the army, enforcing the system through a ruthless penal code.

THE FIRST EMPEROR

When the Ch’in king, Shih Huang-ti, was crowned the first emperor of China in 221 BC, the “Legalist” institutions were extended throughout the country. But although the emperor tried to eliminate all hostile factions, under the burdens imposed on the people by his military campaigns and vast construction works, his dynasty collapsed in a nationwide rebellion in 206 BC, shortly after his death.

After a period of civil war a new dynasty, the Han, was established by Liu Pang (256–195 BC). Copying the general outlines of the Ch’in system, but softening its harshness and in part restoring a system of feudal principalities, the Han gradually evolved an effective central government and system of local administration. The “Legalist” approach was replaced by Confucianism which emphasized benevolent rule and good statesmanship.

HAN EXPANSION

The Ch’in had taken strong defensive measures against the nomad Hsiungnu (Huns) in the north. Under the emperor Wu-ti (140–87 BC), though probably driven by his generals in the north, Han China again took the offensive against the Hsiungnu, and opened up the route to central Asia known as the Silk Road. A large export trade, mainly in silk, reached as far as the Roman empire. The Han also reaffirmed the Ch’in conquests in the southern region, eliminated the Yüeh kingdoms of the southeast coast, and occupied northern Vietnam. Chinese armies also drove deep into the southwest, seeking to establish Han control. In addition, Wu-ti’s armies placed parts of northern Korea under Chinese administration.

The Han empire grew extremely prosperous and China’s population reached some 57 million. Many large cities grew up and the largest, the capital Ch’ang-an, housed a population of a quarter of a million and was the centre of a brilliant culture. At the beginning of the Christian era the Han empire rivalled that of Rome in size and wealth.

But under a series of weak emperors during the latter half of the 1st century BC, the authority of the throne was challenged by powerful court families. In AD 9 Wang Mang usurped the throne. His reign (the Hsin dynasty, AD 9–23) ended in a widespread rebellion that restored the Han (Later Han, AD 25–220), and the capital was moved to Lo-yang.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE HAN EMPIRE

After some decades of consolidation, in the late 1st century the Chinese resumed active hostilities to drive the Hsiungnu westward to central Asia. But trouble with the Chiang tribes of the northwest and virulent factionalism at court had seriously weakened the Han state by AD 160. A wave of agrarian distress culminated in 184 in a massive uprising led by the “Yellow Turbans”, a religious movement based on popular cults. Although the Han survived in name until 220, power now lay with regional commanders. In 220 the empire was divided into three independent kingdoms, ushering in a long period of territorial fragmentation.

220 TO 618
CHINA AND EAST ASIA

The period after 220 was one of the most chaotic and bloody in Chinese history. Not only was the north lost for long periods to non-Chinese regimes, but the governments in the south often lost effective control as well. Political instability was the norm across the country, and economic growth was minimal until the advent of the Sui dynasty.

The Han empire broke up into three kingdoms in 220: the Wei in the north; the Wu in the south; and the Shu in the west. The militarily strong Wei had conquered the Shu in the southwest by 263, but in 265 a military family, the Ssu-uma, took over the Wei kingdom through a coup d’état. They then proceeded with a series of military campaigns to unify China under the name of the Western Chin dynasty. The target of unification was finally achieved in 280.

THE WESTERN CHIN

The new authorities granted farmers land-holding rights to re-establish household farming in accordance with the Han model. “Salary land” for officials was granted and cultivated by tenants. Overall, this helped the recovery of the agricultural economy. The adoption of a laissez-faire Daoism by the new rulers as the state philosophy was also precedented in the Han. At the same time Buddhism became increasingly widespread.

Politically, however, the ruling class was deeply divided. In the period from 291 to 306, there were numerous assassinations and violent struggles within the royal family, known as the “Wars between Eight Princes”. The unitary empire existed only in name. The weakness of the Western Chin regime created opportunities for the non-Chinese peoples within and on the borders of the empire—the Hsienpei, Hsiungnu, Chieh, Ti and Ch’iang—to move in and establish their own kingdoms, as many as 16 at one time. This was known as the “Five Barbarians’ Disruption of China” and practically ended the Western Chin. The Chinese regime survived under the Eastern Chin only in south China. Its territory was much smaller than the area controlled by the non-Chinese regimes in the north and its authority over the population severely weakened. Tax avoidance became endemic.

During the years of the Eastern Chin, north China saw near permanent conflict among the non-Chinese regimes. The unification of the north finally arrived in 382 under the Ch’ien Ch’in and after their failed invasion of the south in the following year an era of co-existence was ushered in between the non-Chinese regime in the north and the Chinese one in the south. Based on this ethnic division, the period is called the “Northern and Southern Dynasties”.

In the south the Eastern Chin dynasty ended with its overthrow in 420 by one of its generals, who established the Sung dynasty. There followed another three short-lived dynasties, each in turn brought down by either a general or another member of the ruling family, although outside the court there was a measure of peace and prosperity.

THE NORTHERN WEI

In the north a dynasty of Hsienpei descent, the Northern Wei, managed to conquer all of north China in the early 5th century, but split into two lines in 534, to become, in 550 and 557 respectively, the Northern Ch’i and Northern Chou. Although the latter was smaller and poorer, it had a more efficient military organization, and overcame the Northern Ch’i in 577. Within a few years, however, its ruling family was overthrown by one of its partly-Chinese generals, Yang Chien, who went on to conquer the south and establish the Sui dynasty. Although it was itself short-lived, the Sui had at last reunified China.

500 BC TO AD 550
INDIA: THE FIRST EMPIRES

From 500 BC to AD 550 south Asia witnessed a succession of metropolitan empires centred in north India—the Mauryas, the Kushanas and the Guptas. Although centralized political control was often weak, for the first time the entire subcontinent was integrated within a single but diverse cultural field.

By about 500 BC north India sustained 16 well-articulated polities, or “mahajanapadas”, some of which were still essentially tribal republics and others were already monarchies. This region witnessed tremendous change, as the consolidation of settled agriculture led to the emergence of cities and more complex political systems. Such changes made the older sacrificial cult of the Vedas, which had its origins in the pastoral communities of the Aryan tribes, increasingly obsolete. In its place, at the end of the 5th century BC in the heart of the Gangetic plains, the founders of Buddhism and Jainism formulated their radical new teachings.

THE FIRST EMPIRE

During the 5th century BC the number of mahajanapadas diminished to four—Vajji, Kosala, Kasi and Magadha. After a century of wars, the single kingdom of Magadha dominated, with its splendid new capital of Pataliputra. This was to be the nucleus of the first Indian empire. Shortly after Alexander’s incursion into India in 327 BC, the Mauryan prince Chandragupta seized the Magadhan throne. Chandragupta then conquered the land east of the Indus, swung south to occupy much of central India, and in 305 BC decisively defeated Alexander’s successor in the northwest, Seleucus Nicator. The Mauryan empire that Chandragupta founded reached its zenith under his grandson, Ashoka, who established his rule over most of the subcontinent. Ashoka’s empire was composed of a centralized administrative system spread over a number of thriving cities and their hinterlands. After his conquest of Kalinga in 260 BC, Ashoka publicly converted to Buddhism and adopted a policy of “conquest through righteousness”, or dhammavijaya. In a number of public orders inscribed on pillars and rockfaces throughout the subcontinent, Ashoka called for peace, propagated moral teachings (dhamma), and prohibited Vedic animal sacrifices. These edicts, written in Prakrit, are the first specimens of royal decrees in south Asia.

THE KUSHANA EMPIRE

Mauryan rule did not long survive Ashoka’s death in 232 BC. In the 2nd century bc, the northwest was repeatedly invaded, both by Greeks from Bactria and Parthia, and then by new nomad groups themselves displaced from central Asia. First among these were Scythian tribes called the Shakas who overran Bactria and the Indus valley in the 1st century BC. Then the Kushana branch of the Yüeh-chih horde, who had settled in the Oxus valley after 165 BC, gradually extended their rule inland, subduing the Shakas in western India and reaching Varanasi in the 1st century AD. As well as the Oxus and Indus valleys, large parts of Khotan were included in their cosmopolitan empire, centred in Purusapura. Kushana India was a melting pot of cultures. The empire reached its height of power and influence under Kanishka, who patronized Buddhism and became extensively involved in political conflicts in central Asia.

Both the Shakas and the Kushanas took Indian names and were the first kings to adopt Sanskrit at their courts—the first courtly poems in Sanskrit date from this period—though the native kingdom of the Satavahanas of the Deccan continued to use Prakrit. In the northwest Mahayana Buddhism emerged at this time from more conservative teachings known as Theravada, and developed a more eclectic outlook, emphasizing compassion and worship in an enlarged Buddhist pantheon.

In the same period, India’s ancient trading links with the west were revitalized and greatly extended as the Roman empire rose to power. Ports such as Barbaricum, on the Indus delta, and the entrepot of Barygaza exported turquoise, diamonds, indigo and tortoise-shell, receiving in return a flow of pearls, copper, gold and slaves from the Arab and Mediterranean worlds. Much of the Chinese silk traffic found its way to the city of Taxila, before caravans took it further west. Trade led to other exchanges, as Buddhism spread to central Asia and China.

By the middle of the 2nd century AD the south had also witnessed economic development. The Satavahanas of the Deccan developed a powerful empire and established overland and coastal trading networks and the weaker Tamilspeaking kingdoms of the south established ports on both coasts of the peninsula.

THE GUPTAS

In the 4th century, the native dynasty of the Guptas imposed a new rule, based again in Pataliputra. Following the campaigns of Samudragupta and his son Chandragupta II, their suzerainty was acknowledged over an area almost as great as that of the Mauryan empire. Until repeated Hun incursions ended Gupta power in the 6th century, the Gupta period saw the blossoming of earlier cultural trends, and has become known as the “classical” or “epic” age of Indian history.

2300 TO 50 BC
THE PEOPLES OF NORTHERN
EUROPE

The late Bronze Age saw a number of developments in northern Europe. The use of metals increased, new crops were cultivated, and burial practices were transformed. The “urnfield culture”, with which these changes are associated, spread over a large part of Europe and laid the foundations for the rise of the Celts, whose warrior bands briefly threatened the Mediterranean world.

Central Europe had rich supplies of copper ores, which for several centuries had been exploited to produce bronze for tools and weapons. After 1300 BC the extent of bronze-working increased dramatically, and new techniques, including the lost-wax method of casting, led to major developments in art. Delicately worked gold ornaments found in some rich graves indicate that there were also improvements in gold-working at the same time. In agriculture, the staples of wheat and barley were supplemented by legumes and oil-rich crops such as linseed. There was also an increase in the domestication of animals, with horses having a greater presence, especially to the east.

THE URNFIELD PERIOD

The most dramatic change, however, was in burial practices, and it is this that has given the urnfield period its name. Inhumation had been the usual practice in earlier centuries, but from 1300 BC there was a move towards cremation and the burial of ashes in large communal cemeteries known as urnfields. Although there were differences from region to region, and even within cemeteries, there was a considerable decrease in the quantity of grave goods buried with the dead. Some burials, such as the so-called King’s Grave at Seddin, were particularly rich, and presumably belonged to local chieftains, but most were simple. A change of practice like this may in part have reflected a change in attitudes to death, but it probably also reflected changes in social organization. Large cemeteries containing graves with little social differentiation suggest the emergence of large communities and more developed social structures.

Another feature that points to social change during this period is the large number of fortified sites. These were centuries in which there was fighting between rival communities, and the archaeological evidence points to a growing warrior culture.

THE CELTIC WORLD

The 8th century BC saw the re-establishment of contact with the centres of civilization in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond as well as with the new Greek and Phoenician colonies in the western Mediterranean and the emerging Etruscans in Italy. At the same time the techniques of iron-working were widely adopted. This development had little impact on the Atlantic coasts of Europe, which were still characterized by small-scale trade between communities with little interest in Mediterranean luxury goods. But to the east the Rhône valley provided a trade-route from the Mediterranean, especially after the foundation of the Greek colony of Massilia (Marseilles). It was this that led to the development of a “prestige goods economy” in Burgundy, seen in the rich finds from Mont Lassois and Vix, which acted as staging posts between the Mediterranean and central Europe, as well as farther east at the hill fort at the Heuneburg on the upper Danube. Contact with the steppe communities on the eastern flank of the Celtic world also continued, and by this route goods from the Far East could reach central Europe. This is well illustrated by the discovery in a burial mound beside the Heuneburg site of textiles embroidered with Chinese silk.

Among the chief exports to the Mediterranean from this period onwards was slaves, which raised the status of warriors who were able to trade prisoners of war for prestige goods from Etruria and Greece. This “West Hallstatt system” collapsed when the Etruscans started to make direct contact with the area around the Marne and Moselle. The same period also saw the emergence of a distinctive decorative aristocratic style known as “Celtic” art. Spectacular finds have been made at sites such as Somme-Bionne and Basse-Yutz.

The Celts are the first peoples of northern Europe to appear in the historical record. They are mentioned by several Greek and Roman historians, and these writings give us some insight into their social organization and their religious practices—although they have to be used with caution. Later Celtic traditions are recorded in the epic literature of Ireland and Wales, but it is not clear how much they can tell us about early Celtic Europe. What is not in question is the Celtic interest—and skill—in warfare.

After 600 BC, Celtic war-bands spread out from central Europe into Italy and Greece—Rome was attacked in 390 BC, Delphi in 279 BC—and settled as far south as Galatia in Anatolia and Galicia in Spain. Other areas, such as western France and Britain, were absorbed into the Celtic world by peaceful means, with the native aristocracies adopting the new continental fashions of art and warfare. From the 3rd century BC fortified urban settlements known as “oppida” became more common, and unified Celtic states began to appear.

Celtic social organization was increasingly influenced by the growing power of Rome, and the Celts were the first peoples of northern Europe to be incorporated within the Roman empire. Already by the end of the 2nd century BC the Mediterranean part of Gaul was a Roman province. Julius Caesar’s conquests in Gaul then brought the western Celtic world under Roman control as far as the English Channel by 50 BC. Thus the most economically advanced areas of the barbarian world were rapidly integrated within the Roman world.

900 BC–AD 700
AFRICA

Written sources from this period increasingly help to reconstruct the history of north Africa, the Nilotic Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. For the rest of Africa, archaeology remains the primary source and, since research and evidence are currently meagre, for large parts of the continent the past still awaits discovery.

In the last millennium BC, north Africa was inhabited by the ancestors of the modern Berbers. At the coast these people came into contact with a variety of foreigners. The first were the Phoenicians, seafaring merchants who established trading settlements westwards from Tripoli and founded Carthage towards the end of the 9th century. Egypt at this time was politically weak and succumbed to a variety of foreign powers, among them the kingdom of Kush, based at Napata, whose kings ruled as the 25th Dynasty (c. 770–664). From the 3rd century BC, Rome began to assert its power in the region, successfully challenging Carthaginian supremacy in the western Mediterranean. Thereafter Roman control was extended along the north African coast and, in 30 BC, Egypt was conquered. By the time the Roman empire began to weaken in the 4th and early 5th centuries AD, Christianity was widespread in its African provinces and remained unchallenged until the Arab invasions of the 7th century brought Islam to Africa.

By the 4th century BC the Kushite kingdom had moved south to Meroë, where it flourished until the 2nd century AD. Its subsequent decline was probably owed, in part, to the rise of the Aksumite kingdom in northern Ethiopia. In the mid-4th century, Aksum adopted Christianity as its official religion. Although Christian influences must have spread southwards from Egypt into Nubia towards the end of the Meroitic period, it was not until the 6th century that Christianity was introduced into the region. In the following century, the Arab invasion of Egypt began a process of Islamization that spread slowly southwards into Nubia. The rise of Islam was also a factor in the decline of Aksum, which had ceased to exist as a political entity by about AD 700.

IRON-WORKING AND FARMING

Almost certainly it was the Phoenicians who introduced bronze- and ironworking to north Africa. In west Africa, iron was being used by the mid-first millennium BC. The development of an urban settlement at Jenne-Jeno from about 250 BC onwards, was probably facilitated by the use of iron tools, which helped agriculturalists to till the heavy clay soils of the inland Niger delta. The earliest evidence of iron use in southern west Africa is associated with the Nok culture, famous for its terracotta sculptures. The early iron-using communities of eastern and southern Africa show such a remarkable degree of homogeneity that they are viewed as a single cultural complex, which first appeared on the western side of Lake Victoria around the mid-1st millennium BC and had spread as far south as Natal by the 3rd century AD. In addition to iron technology, this complex is associated with the beginnings of crop cultivation, livestock herding and settlement. South of Tanzania it is also linked to the manufacture of pottery. In Namibia and Cape Province, which were not settled by these ironusing farmers, some groups had acquired domestic sheep as early as the first two centuries AD. At about the same time a distinctive Cape coastal pottery appears, but others continued with their ancient way of life, living in mobile groups, hunting, gathering and making stone tools.

TO 31 BC
THE EXPANSION OF ROMAN POWER

Rome, a city-state governed by aristocratic families leading an army of peasant soldiers, came to control an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Euphrates and from the English Channel to the Sahara. But military success brought social disorder; rivalries between warlords led to civil war; and republican institutions became an autocracy.

The city of Rome grew up on the Tiber at the lowest point the river could be bridged. Although several of Rome’s hills were settled from around 1000 BC, the earliest signs of urbanization date from the 7th century. According to tradition, Rome was ruled by a line of seven kings, and the expulsion of the last of these in 511 BC resulted in the creation of a republic ruled by two annually elected consuls or magistrates. It is probable, however, that the government of the emerging city-state was less formalized than tradition suggests and that republican systems reached their developed form only in the 4th century BC.

Consuls held office for no more than a single year and ruled with the support of the Senate, a council of former magistrates and priests. Legislation proposed by them had also to be ratified by a popular assembly. However, their main task was to protect the city, which in effect meant to lead military campaigns. Success in war brought material gains to the people of Rome and prestige to the commanders making imperialism an inevitable feature of Roman policy.

THE PUNIC WARS

By 264 BC Rome controlled the whole of the Italian peninsula and had emerged as a powerful confederacy and the principal rival to the other major power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. The Romans were forced to develop naval skills to defeat Carthage in the First Punic War (264–241 BC), in which Rome drove the Carthaginians out of Sicily; soon after Corsica and Sardinia were seized as well. In the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), Rome was invaded from the north, when Hannibal brought his army and elephants from Spain over the Alps into Italy. Though Rome suffered devastating defeats at Lake Trasimene (217 BC) and Cannae (216 BC) it was able to draw on great reserves of Italian manpower to drive Hannibal out of Italy and defeat him at Zama in north Africa (202 BC). With Spain added to Rome’s provinces, the city now commanded the whole of the western and central Mediterranean.

EXPANSION TO THE EAST

In the following 50 years, Roman commanders turned their attention eastwards, leading expeditions into Greece, but withdrawing their troops once victory was assured, in part from fear that Italy, always most vulnerable to attack from the north, would be invaded. Nonetheless, in 146 BC Macedonia was added to the empire, with the province of Asia following in 133 BC.

Among the consequences of Roman victories abroad was an influx of goods and people into Italy. Works of art were taken from Greek temples to adorn private Roman villas, while Greek literature, rhetoric and philosophy had a profound effect on the nature of Roman politics. Wars also provided cheap slaves, who were brought to Italy as agricultural labourers, threatening the livelihoods of Italian peasant farmers and leading to the rapid growth of the urban population of Rome itself.

FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE

The period from 133 BC saw increasing turbulence within Rome and Italy. Rome’s continuing expansion provided opportunities for ambitious men to use their military commands to dominate Roman politics, and the institutions of the republic were powerless to regulate the competition between them. Slave revolts and the Social War with Rome’s Italian allies (91–89 BC) increased disorder within Italy. The last generation of the republic saw the system collapse in a series of civil wars which ended only in 31 BC when Octavian emerged triumphant at the battle of Actium and found himself in a position of such dominance that he was able to rebuild the government of Rome and make it capable of administering an empire.

31 BC TO AD 235
THE HEIGHT OF ROMAN POWER

Augustus, the first emperor, transformed the government of the Roman empire. He brought an end to internal conflicts and created a standing army to guard the empire’s frontiers and extend its power. As Roman culture and organization spread throughout the empire, it laid the foundations for the development of the Mediterranean world.

In 31 BC Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, was undisputed master of Rome. His popularity as adopted son of Julius Caesar and victor over Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the battle of Actium allowed him to rebuild the shattered Roman republic into a system of government capable of controlling a vast empire, reforms which were to bring Rome a new and intense surge of life and two and a half centuries of almost uninterrupted peace and prosperity.

Augustus’s reforms were far-reaching. He restored the prestige of the Senate, though not, in practice, its influence. He reorganized the army and, in 27 BC, took command of those parts of the empire where legions were stationed. From then on responsibility for the defence of the empire lay with the emperor alone. At the same time he took the religiously significant name Augustus, and stressed his relationship to the now deified Julius Caesar. Among his many priesthoods was that of Pontifex Maximus, chief priest, and from the time of Augustus onward the emperor became the focus of all Roman religious ritual.

In 19 BC Augustus was given the power to rule by decree, and although he continued to pay due respect to the Senate, whose members he needed to command the legions and to administer the provinces, his authority was now absolute. The vast wealth he had inherited and won (his defeat of Antony and Cleopatra left Egypt as his personal domain) was further increased by bequests from the rich throughout the empire. At his death his property was worth thousands of times as much as that of even the richest senator. That his heir should also inherit his position as head of the empire was inevitable.

In the event, Augustus had great difficulty in finding an heir, eventually settling on his stepson Tiberius (AD 14–37), who had been a successful military commander but took on the role of emperor with reluctance. Neither he nor his successors were able to maintain good relations with the Senate, and the failure of Nero (54–68) to prevent revolt in the provinces led to his enforced suicide and the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. After a year of civil war, Vespasian (69–79) restored order. He was succeeded by his sons, Titus (79–81) and Domitian (81–96). Though the latter was generally regarded as a cruel and probably insane tyrant, many of his imperial policies were adopted by his successors, especially Trajan (98–117), who began the practice of appearing before the Senate not in a toga but in the purple cloak and armour of a triumphant general. This was to become the uniform of the emperor for the next thousand years.

STABILITY AND STRIFE

Domitian’s assassination was followed by nearly a century of stability as emperors without sons of their own chose their successors from the Senate. Civil war returned in 193, from which Septimius Severus (193–211) emerged victorious. He ruled with his sons Caracalla (198–217) and Geta (209–12), setting a pattern that was to be followed in the following centuries. Caracalla was murdered, and after him came a series of short-lived emperors, of whom Severus Alexander (222–35) was the last who could claim a dynastic link to his predecessors.

THE NATURE OF ROME

The emperor’s figure was central to the empire: everywhere statues and coins were constant reminders of his presence. In the former Hellenistic kingdoms the kings had been the objects of religious worship, a practice which continued with the cult of the emperors. In the western provinces, temples and altars dedicated to the emperor became focuses of Romanization.

The early 2nd century saw important cultural developments: Greek and Latin literature flourished; and the distinction between Italy and the provinces dissolved as rich men from all over the empire were admitted to the Senate, with some, such as Trajan and Hadrian (117–38), even becoming emperor. For the poor there were fewer benefits, and differences in the rights and privileges of rich and poor grew. By the time Caracalla extended Roman citizenship throughout the empire in AD 212, it gave little advantage to the newly enfranchised citizens. Later in the 2nd century, pressures grew on the frontiers. Marcus Aurelius (161–80) spent much of his reign at war with barbarian invaders, and his successors faced threats both from the north, and, after 224, from the rejuvenated Persian empire under the Sasanids.

AD 235 TO 565
FROM ROME TO BYZANTIUM

The 4th century AD saw Roman emperors still ruling an empire that stretched from Spain to Syria. In the 5th century the two halves of the empire experienced different fortunes. Roman administration in the west dissolved in the face of increasing barbarian settlement, but in the east Byzantine civilization, combining Greek and Roman practices and culture, grew and flourished.

The empire emerged from the storms of the 3rd century intact but not unchanged. Diocletian and his successors owed their position to the army, not the Senate, and the military now provided most of the provincial governors. Rome itself ceased to be the centre of empire, as the emperors based themselves in cities nearer the frontiers: Mediolanum (Milan) in Italy; and, after AD 330, Constantinople in the east. The emperors were surrounded by large courts, increasingly turning to eunuchs as their closest advisors. To maintain the army, the taxation system was reformed and military service became a hereditary obligation. But as the senators in Italy and other rich landowners were increasingly excluded from power, so they became less inclined to support the emperor, a development which was to have a profound effect on the western half of the empire.

THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

But the greatest change to the empire was religious. In 312 Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius outside Rome, and he came to attribute his victory to the support of the Christian god. In his reign and that of his son Constantius II the churches received many favours from the emperor, and Christianity began to establish itself as the dominant religion of the empire. The last pagan emperor, Julian, died in AD 363 on campaign against the Persians before he had the opportunity to reverse the trend. Bishops such as St Ambrose in Milan (374–97) became increasingly powerful figures in the empire.

Barbarian incursions continued to erode central control of the empire. The arrival of the Huns in eastern Europe in 376 drove many Goths across the Danube, forcing them into Roman territory. Having in 378 defeated the Romans at Adrianople, in 405 they invaded Italy. In the winter of 406 German tribes then crossed the frozen river Rhine in unstoppable masses. The situation deteriorated throughout the century. The Vandals marched through Gaul and Spain before crossing to Africa where they captured Carthage, the chief city, in 439 and set up their own kingdom.

Where in the 4th century the Roman army had made use of barbarian officers, now the western emperors had little choice but to make grants of land for the invaders to settle on and to employ them in the army. With landowners unwilling to allow their tenants to fight, what had been a Roman citizen army became a barbarian mercenary one. Since the frontiers were no longer preventing barbarians from entering the western empire, and since the army was itself largely barbarian, the role of the emperor in the west was effectively redundant.

In 476 the magister militum (the chief military officer of the western empire) Odoacer, a German, deposed the emperor Romulus Augustulus, and did not replace him. With the eastern emperor making no attempt to resist this, the western empire ceased to exist. In 490 the Ostrogoths took control of Italy, and by 507 the Franks had established an extensive kingdom in Gaul (see p. 94). Yet Roman institutions survived: the Roman Senate continued to sit, and Latin remained the language of government.

THE RECONQUESTS OF JUSTINIAN

The eastern part of the empire possessed greater resources than the west, and eastern emperors could use their wealth to persuade would-be invaders to move away westwards. Although Roman culture continued to flourish in the eastern part of the empire, there were growing cultural differences between east and west: when Justinian launched his attempt to reconquer the former western empire, he was trying to impose a Greek-speaking administration on Latinspeaking territories.

Justinian’s reign was a mixture of triumph and disaster. In Constantinople it saw the building of the great church of St Sophia (532–63) as well as a devastating plague in 542. His general Belisarius took Africa from the Vandals in 533–4 while in 554, after a campaign lasting 20 years, Ostrogothic rule in Italy was ended. But Justinian’s successes in Italy were short-lived: the Lombard invasion of 568 left only Ravenna in Byzantine hands. Meanwhile in the east there was war with Persia (540–62): Antioch was sacked in 540 and peace was eventually bought only at great financial cost. Justinian’s wars left Byzantium seriously weakened. The dream of a reunited empire died with him.

TO AD 600
THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

Christianity began as a small sect within Judaism, but gradually established itself as a significant religious and intellectual force throughout the Roman empire. It offered both a promise of eternal salvation to individuals and, from the 4th century onwards, a powerful new vision of an empire united under a Christian ruler which was to be of enormous significance for the future of Europe.

The earliest Christians did not see themselves as founders of a new religion but as witnesses to the fulfilment of God’s promise to provide his people, the Jews, with a Messiah or redeemer. By raising him from the dead, they believed that God had shown that Jesus of Nazareth was this Messiah and that the risen Jesus had commissioned his disciples to preach the good news of God’s kingdom.

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