Why the West Rules--For Now (31 page)

Upper Egyptian material culture spread rapidly down the Nile Valley after 3100
BCE
. As with the expansion of farming thousands of years earlier and the spread of Uruk culture in contemporary Mesopotamia, Lower Egyptians may (voluntarily or out of the need to compete) have emulated Upper Egyptian lifestyles. This time, though, there is also clear evidence that the Upper Egyptian population, organized into a state, had grown faster than the village-based peoples of Lower Egypt and that political unification consisted partly of south-to-north colonization.

Despite having so much in common, the Uruk expansion in Mesopotamia after 3500
BCE
and the Upper Egyptian expansion after 3300 had different consequences. First, just as Narmer/Menes/the Scorpion
King was subduing Lower Egypt around 3100
BCE
, the Uruk expansion was abruptly ending. Uruk itself burned and most of the new sites with Uruk-style material culture were abandoned. Why is a mystery. When texts start recording more information, around 2700
BCE
, the southern Mesopotamians, now calling themselves Sumerians, were divided into thirty-five city-states, each with its own godlike king. Uruk’s unraveling left unified Egypt as the major Western core.

Why Egypt and Mesopotamia diverged remains unexplained. Maybe Egypt, with its single river valley and delta, a few oases, and desert all around it was just easier to conquer and hold than Mesopotamia, with its two rivers, multiple tributaries where resistance could fester, and surrounding hills full of viable rivals. Or maybe Narmer
et al.
just made better decisions than the now-nameless kings of Uruk. Or maybe some entirely different factor was decisive. (I will come back to this question below.)

There is a further big difference between Mesopotamia and Egypt. While Sumerian kings claimed to be
like
gods, Egyptian kings claimed to
be
gods. The movie and TV series
Stargate
, spun off from von Däniken’s books, offer a simple explanation: Narmer and company really were spacemen, while Uruk’s kings were merely friends of spacemen. But appealingly straightforward as that is, there is just no evidence for it, and quite a lot suggesting that the pharaohs (as Egypt’s kings were called) in fact worked very hard to promote the image of their own divinity.

Self-divinization strikes most of us as psychotic, and was no trivial thing five thousand years ago either. So how did it happen? Narmer and his friends left no accounts (gods do not need to explain themselves), and our best clue comes from much later stories about Alexander the Great of Macedon. Alexander conquered Egypt in 332
BCE
and had himself proclaimed pharaoh. Caught up in a power struggle with his own generals, he found it useful to spread the rumor that he, like earlier pharaohs, really was a god. Few Macedonians took this very seriously, so Alexander raised the stakes. When his army reached what is now Pakistan, he rounded up ten local sages and ordered them—on pain of death—to answer his deepest questions. When he got to sage number seven, Alexander asked, “
How can a man
become a god?” The philosopher answered simply: “By doing something a man cannot do.” It is easy to imagine Alexander scratching his head and wondering:
Do
I know anyone who’s done something lately that no man could do?
The answer, he may have told himself, was obvious:
Yes. Me. I just overthrew the Persian Empire. No mere mortal could do that. I am a god and I should stop feeling bad about killing my friends when they contradict me.

Alternatively, Alexander or his supporters may have made the whole story up, but in a way its reality matters less than the fact that in the 320s
BCE
the best way for a king to sell the idea he was divine was through superhuman military prowess. We can only guess whether this was already the best way three thousand years earlier, but in unifying the Nile Valley the Scorpion King, Narmer, and/or Menes had certainly done things no mortal could be expected to do. Perhaps fusing a godlike king with a great conqueror made self-divinization plausible.

Nor was this the only coup the pharaohs pulled off. Upper Egypt’s first kings must have developed managerial skills like Uruk’s, getting people to give them resources and to accept central management, but the pharaohs now co-opted local elites from the whole Nile Valley to be their managers. The pharaohs built a new capital at Memphis, strategically placed between Upper and Lower Egypt, and had regional grandees come to them. At Memphis the pharaohs dispensed patronage, giving petty aristocrats who bought into the system incentives to keep it going. Local lords extracted revenues from the peasants, trying to take as much as they could without making the peasants’ lives impossible, then passed income up the chain, in return for which royal favor came back down it again.

The pharaohs’ success depended partly on politicking and back-scratching and partly on pageantry, and for that being gods, rather than just friends of gods, surely made things easier. What local bigwig would not want to work for a god? To be on the safe side, though, the pharaohs also created a powerful symbolic language. Soon after 2700
BCE
the artists of King Djoser designed styles for carving hieroglyphs and representing god-kings that survived for five hundred years. Djoser understood the theological delicacy of an immortal being seen to die, and designed the ultimate symbol of Egyptian kingship—the pyramid—to hold the sacred corpse. King Khufu’s 450-foot-high Great Pyramid, built around 2550
BCE
, remained the world’s tallest building until Cologne Cathedral in Germany nudged past it in 1880
CE
. It is still the heaviest, weighing something like a million tons.
Thousands of laborers worked on it for decades, quarrying stone, floating it down the Nile, and dragging it into place. The so-called workmen’s village at the foot of the pyramids was among the world’s biggest cities in its day. Feeding workers and moving them around required a quantum leap in the size and reach of the bureaucracy, and joining the gangs must have been a transformative experience for villagers who had perhaps never left home before. If anyone doubted pharaoh’s divinity before the pyramids, they surely did not afterward.

The Sumerian city-states in Mesopotamia moved in similar directions but more slowly and cautiously. Each city, the texts say, was divided into “households” containing many monogamous families. Each household had one family at its head, organizing its land and labor, with the other families ranked, some working in the fields and others in crafts, fulfilling quotas in return for rations. The biggest and richest households were theoretically headed by gods, and might command thousands of acres and hundreds of workers. The men who ran these households for the gods were normally the city’s leaders, with the king heading the household of the city’s patron god. It was the king’s job to promote his patron god’s interests. If the king did well, his god must be flourishing too; if he performed poorly, the god’s stock fell.

After 2500
BCE
this began to be a problem. Improved agriculture allowed people to rear larger families, and population growth drove competition for good land and more effective ways to fight for it. Some cities defeated and took over others. The theological implications were as thorny as the death of Egyptian god-kings: if a king looked after his patron god’s interests, what did it mean if another king, acting for a different god, took over? Some priests proposed a “temple-city” theory, making the religious hierarchy and gods’ interests independent from kings. Successful kings responded by claiming to be more than merely gods’ representatives. Around 2440
BCE
one king announced that he was his patron god’s son, and poems began circulating about how King Gilgamesh of Uruk had traveled beyond this world in search of immortality. These coalesced into the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, the world’s oldest surviving literary masterpiece.

Rulers sought new venues to display their majesty, and the greatest archaeological find ever made in Mesopotamia, the Royal Cemetery of Ur, was probably one of these. Its spectacular gold and silver grave
goods, like the pharaohs’ pyramids, hint at more-than-mortal stature for the dead; and the seventy-four people poisoned to accompany Queen Puabi to the next world suggest that struggles over rulers’ relationships to the gods could be bad news for ordinary Sumerians.

Conflict came to a head around 2350
BCE
. There were violent coups, armed conquests, and revolutionary redistributions of property and sacred rights. In 2334 a man called Sargon (which, rather suspiciously, means “legitimate ruler”; he probably took this name after he seized power) founded a new city called Akkad. It may lie under Baghdad, and—no surprise—remains unexcavated, but clay tablets from other sites say that rather than fighting other Sumerian kings Sargon plundered Syria and Lebanon until he could pay for a full-time army of five thousand men. He then turned on the other Sumerians, subduing their cities through diplomacy and violence.

Textbooks often call Sargon the world’s first empire-builder, but what he and his Akkadian successors did was really not so different from what Egypt’s unifiers had done eight centuries earlier. Sargon himself did not become a god, but after defeating a rebellion around 2240
BCE
his grandson Naram-Sin announced that eight of Sumer’s gods wanted him to join their ranks. Sumerian artists started representing Naram-Sin as horned and larger than life, traditional attributes of divinity.

By 2230
BCE
the twin Western cores in Sumer and Egypt had massively eclipsed the original core in the Hilly Flanks. Responding to ecological problems, people had created cities; responding to competition between cities, they had created million-strong states, ruled by gods or godlike kings and managed by bureaucracies. As struggles in the core drove social development upward, a network of cities spread over the simpler farming villages of Syria and the Levant and through Iran to the borders of modern Turkmenistan. On Crete people would soon start building palaces too; imposing stone temples rose upward on Malta; and fortified towns began dotting the southeastern coast of Spain. Farther north and west farmers had filled every ecologically viable niche, and on the farthest fringe of the Western world, where the Atlantic pounds Britain’s cold shores, people invested an estimated 30 million hours of labor in the most enigmatic monument of all, Stonehenge. One of von Däniken’s spacemen visiting Earth around 2230
BCE
would probably have concluded that there was little further need
for alien interventions: these clever chimps were pushing social development steadily upward.

THE WILD WEST

A return trip fifty years later might have shocked the spaceman. From one end of the Western core to the other states were falling apart and people were fighting and leaving their homes. For the next thousand years a series of disruptions (a neutral-sounding word covering a horrible variety of massacres, misery, flight, and want) sent the West on a wild ride. And when we ask who or what disrupted social development, we get a surprising answer: social development was itself to blame.

One of the main ways people try to improve their lot has always been by moving information, goods, and themselves around. What is abundant here may be scarce—and valuable—over there. The result has been increasingly complex webs tying communities together, operating at every level of society. Four thousand years ago temples and palaces owned some of the best land, and instead of dividing it among peasant families, each trying to grow everything they needed, centralized bureaucracies hung on to this land and told people what to grow. A village with good cropland might grow just wheat, while one on a hillside could tend vines, with a third specializing in metalwork; and bureaucrats could redistribute the products, skimming off what they needed, storing some against emergencies and parceling the rest out as rations. This had begun at Uruk by 3500
BCE
; a thousand years later it was the norm.

Kings also gave one another self-interested gifts. Egypt’s pharaohs, rich in gold and grain, gave these goods to minor rulers of Lebanese cities, who reciprocated with fragrant cedar, since Egypt lacked good wood. Failing to give an appropriate gift was a major faux pas. Gift exchange was rooted as much in psychology and status anxiety as in economics, but it moved goods, people, and ideas around quite effectively. The kings at each end of these chains and plenty of merchants in between got rich.

Nowadays we tend to assume that “command economies” with a king, dictator, or politburo telling everyone what to do must be inefficient, but most early civilizations depended on them. Perhaps in a
world lacking the trust and laws that make markets work, they may be the best option available. But they were never the only option, and humbler independent traders always flourished alongside royal and priestly enterprises. Neighbors bartered, swapping cheese for bread or help digging a latrine for babysitting. Town and country folk traded at fairs. Tinkers loaded pots and pans on donkeys and plied their routes. And at a kingdom’s edges, where sown fields faded into deserts or mountains, villagers exchanged bread and bronze weapons with shepherds or foragers for milk, cheese, wool, and animals.

The best-known account of this comes from the Hebrew Bible. Jacob was a successful shepherd in the hills near Hebron in what is now the West Bank. He had twelve sons, but played favorites, giving the eleventh—Joseph—a coat of many colors. In a fit of pique, Joseph’s ten older brothers sold the gaudily dressed apple of their father’s eye to passing slave traders headed for Egypt. Some years later, when food was scarce in Hebron, Jacob sent his ten oldest sons to Egypt to trade for grain. Unknown to them, the governor they confronted there was their brother Joseph, who, although a slave, had risen high in pharaoh’s service (admittedly after a spell in jail for attempted rape; he was, of course, framed). In a perfect illustration of the difficulty of knowing when to trust traders, the brothers showed no surprise when the disguised Joseph pretended to think they were spies and threw them in prison. The story ends happily, though, with Jacob, his sons, and all his flocks moving into Egypt. “
And they gained
possessions in it,” says the Good Book, “and were fruitful and multiplied exceedingly.”