Why the West Rules--For Now (36 page)

The average Egyptian or Mesopotamian harnessed probably 20,000 kilocalories per day, as compared to 8,000 around 5000
BCE
, and the biggest cities, such as Thebes in Egypt or Babylon, had maybe eighty thousand residents. There were thousands of literate scribes and burgeoning libraries. The greatest armies could muster five thousand chariots, and it would have been a fair guess that one state (maybe Egypt, or perhaps the Hittites) would soon create a core-wide empire. New states, with their own palaces, temples, and godlike kings, would develop in Italy, Spain, and beyond; then the empire in the core would swallow these, too, until one great realm filled the map in
Figure 4.3
. The East would continue tracking Western developments a millennium
or two behind. It would probably go through disruptions like the West’s, and the West would probably face more upsets too; but like the earlier episodes, these would barely slow the rising tide of social development. The West would retain its lead, figure out fossil fuels within a couple of thousand years, and go on to global rule.

So when nearly every major city in the Western core, from Greece to what we now call the Gaza Strip, went up in flames around 1200
BCE
, the aliens would have assumed it was another disruption like 2200 or 1750
BCE
—a big one, to be sure, but nothing to worry about in the long term. Even when disaster engulfed the palaces so suddenly that their scribes barely had time to record it, the aliens would lose no sleep.

An unusual clay tablet from around 1200
BCE
found in the ruined palace at Pylos in Greece opens with the ominous line “
the watchers
are guarding the coasts”; another from the same site, written in evident haste, seems to be describing human sacrifices meant to forestall an emergency, but then trails off, unfinished. At Ugarit, a rich trading city on the Syrian coast, archaeologists found a batch of clay letters lying in a kiln where scribes had intended to dry them before they were filed. Ugarit was sacked before anyone could come back and get the texts. These letters from the city’s dying days make grim reading. One is from the Hittite king, begging for food: “
it is a matter
of life and death!” In another, Ugarit’s king writes that while his troops and ships were away supporting the Hittites, “the enemy’s ships came here; my cities were burned, and they did evil things in my country.”

Darkness fell all around, yet so long as Egypt still stood, hope remained. In a temple he built in his own honor, Pharaoh Ramses III set up an inscription that seems to pick up the story from Ugarit: “
The foreign countries
had made a conspiracy in their islands,” it says. “No land could stand before their arms.” These foreigners—the Peoples of the Sea, Ramses calls them—had overwhelmed the Hittites, Cyprus, and Syria. Now, in 1176
BCE
, they came against Egypt. But they had not reckoned with the god-king:

Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and their soul are finished for ever and ever … They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed, and made into heaps from tail to head … I have made
the land
s turn back from [even] mentioning Egypt; for when they pronounce my name in their land, then they are burned up.

Ramses III’s Peoples of the Sea were probably also the villains in the Pylos and Ugarit stories. They included, Ramses says, Shrdn, Shkrsh, Dnyn, and Prst. Egyptian hieroglyphics did not record vowels, and identifying who these names refer to is a cottage industry among historians. Most think Shrdn was pronounced “Sherden,” an ancient name for Sardinians, and the Shkrsh were Sheklesh, Egyptian for Sikels (Sicilians). Dnyn is less clear, but could mean Danaans, a name Homer would later use for Greeks. With Prst we are on firmer ground: it means Peleset, the Egyptian name for the Philistines of biblical fame.

This is quite a cocktail of Mediterranean peoples, and historians argue endlessly over what brought them to the Nile Delta. The evidence is spotty, but some archaeologists point to signs of higher temperatures and lower rainfall in every part of the Western core after 1300
BCE
. Drought, they suggest, reran the 2200
BCE
scenario, setting off migrations and state failure. Others think that earthquakes threw the core into turmoil, providing opportunities for plunder and pulling raiders in from the frontier. There were also changes in how people fought; new swords for slashing and deadlier javelins might have given swarms of irregular, lightly armed infantry from the peripheries the weapons they needed to defeat the core’s gleaming but inflexible chariot armies. And disease might have played a part too. A terrible plague had spread from Egypt to the Hittites in the 1320s
BCE
. “The Land of Hatti, all of it, is dying,” one prayer said, and although surviving texts do not mention plague again, if it was anything like epidemics in better-documented periods it would have kept returning. By 1200
BCE
populations were apparently falling in the core.

The hard truth is that we just don’t know the specific causes of the crisis, although the underlying dynamic seems clear enough: a sudden shift in relations between the core and its expanding frontiers. As had been the case so often before, expansion was a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the new frontier in the Mediterranean fueled surging social development, but on the other, it unveiled new advantages of backwardness and set off disruptions—migrations, mercenaries, and
unmanageable new tactics—that challenged the established order. And in the thirteenth century
BCE
, it seems that the great powers in the core began losing control of the frontier they had created.

Whether they were pushed or pulled and whether the motor was climate change, earthquakes, changes on the battlefield, or plagues, people began moving into the core in overwhelming numbers. Already in the 1220s
BCE
Ramses II had fortified Egypt’s borders, settling migrants in closely controlled towns or enlisting them in his army, but it was not enough. In 1209
BCE
Pharaoh Merneptah had to fight not only the Sherden and Sheklesh, whom Ramses III would confront again in the 1170s
BCE
, but also Libyans and people named Akaiwasha—perhaps Ahhiyawans from Greece?—who joined forces to raid Egypt from the west.

The victorious Merneptah joyfully recorded that he cut off 6,239 uncircumcised penises to tally the enemy dead, but even while he was counting them the storm was engulfing the north. Greek, Hittite, and Syrian cities burned. Later legends talk of migrations into Greece around this time, and archaeology hints at out-migration too. Pottery found around Gaza, where the Philistines settled in the twelfth century
BCE
, is almost identical to vases from Greece, suggesting that the Philistines began as Greek refugees; and more Greeks settled on Cyprus.

Migration may have snowballed as refugees from devastated areas joined it. It looks like it was a shapeless movement, with disconnected plundering and fighting going on everywhere at once. The Syrian collapse apparently pushed people called Arameans into Mesopotamia, and despite Ramses’ claims of victory, former Peoples of the Sea settled in Egypt. Like Greece, Egypt experienced out-as well as in-migration. The biblical story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt and eventually settling in what is now the West Bank probably reflects these chaotic years. It may not be a coincidence that the first nonbiblical reference to Israel is Merneptah’s pronouncement in his 1209
BCE
inscription that he left that land “
wasted, bare
of seed.”

The sheer scale of the migrations that began in the 1220s
BCE
dwarfed earlier disruptions, but as late as the 1170s aliens watching from their flying saucers could still plausibly have hoped that this episode might turn out like earlier ones. After all, Egypt had not been
pillaged, and in Mesopotamia the Assyrians actually expanded their kingdom as rival states folded. But as the twelfth century wore on and the upheavals continued, it slowly became clear that this disruption was something altogether new.

In Greece the palaces destroyed after 1200
BCE
were not reoccupied and the old bureaucracy disappeared. Fairly wealthy aristocrats did preserve something like the old ways, often relocating to easily defended sites on mountains or small islands, but a new wave of destructions hit them around 1125
BCE
. When I was a graduate student I had the doubly good fortune (not only was the archaeology fascinating, but I also met my future wife there) to dig on one of these sites, a fortified hilltop at Koukounaries on the island of Paros.
*
Its chief had enjoyed a fine lifestyle with great views, wonderful beaches, and a throne decorated with ivory inlays, but around 1100
BCE
disaster struck him down. His villagers had stockpiled stones to fling at attackers and brought their animals behind the walls (we found donkey skeletons amid the ruins), but fled ahead of the flames when someone—we never learned who—stormed the citadel. Similar scenes played out all over Greece, and in the eleventh century
BCE
the survivors built only simple mud huts. Population, craftsmanship, and life expectancy all declined; a dark age set in.

Greece was the extreme case, but the Hittite Empire also went under, and Egypt and Babylon struggled to control migrants and raiders. Famines spread as villagers abandoned their fields. Because farmers could not pay taxes, states could not raise troops; and because there were no troops, raids went unchecked and local strongmen carved out little dukedoms. By 1140
BCE
Egypt’s empire in what is now Israel faded away. Abandoned by their paymasters, garrison troops turned into peasants or bandits. “
In those days
there was no king in Israel,” says the book of Judges, the Israelites’ account of their own part in this breakdown; “all the people did what was right in their own eyes.”

By 1100
BCE
Egypt itself was fragmenting. Thebes broke away; immigrants created principalities in the Nile Delta; and soon Ramses XI, the official god-king, was being told what to do by his own vizier,
who seized the throne in 1069. For several centuries few of Egypt’s shadowy pharaohs fielded large armies, put up monuments, or even wrote much down.

Assyria, which early on looked like the big winner, lost control of the countryside as movements of Aramean peoples increased. By 1100
BCE
the fields lay fallow, the treasury had run empty, and hunger stalked the land. The situation gets harder to read as the bureaucrats committed less to writing, rather suddenly stopping altogether after 1050. By then Assyria’s cities were empty and its empire just a memory.

The Western core had contracted by 1000
BCE
. Sardinia, Sicily, and Greece largely lost contact with the wider world, and warrior chiefs carved up the carcasses of the Hittite and Assyrian empires. Cities survived in Syria and Babylonia, but were a sad comedown from second-millennium-
BCE
metropolitan centers such as Ugarit. A cluster of little states survived in Egypt, but these were weaker and poorer than the glorious empire of Ramses II. And for the first time, social development actually fell. The numbers for every trait slid: by 1000
BCE
people captured less energy, lived in smaller cities, fielded weaker armies, and used less writing than their predecessors had done around 1250. Scores fell back to where they had been six hundred years before.

CHARIOTS, NOT OF THE GODS

Around 1200
BCE
, while King Wuding still sat on the throne, the Shang elite found something new to destroy in their funerals: chariots. These show up in a couple of dozen twelfth-and eleventh-century tombs at Anyang (complete, needless to say, with slaughtered horses and crews). Shang chariots are so like those that appeared in the Western core five hundred years earlier
*
that most archaeologists agree that both must have shared an origin in the chariots invented in Kazakhstan around 2000
BCE
. Chariots took two or three centuries to reach the Hurrians and to alter the balance of power in the West; they needed eight to cross the greater distance to the Yellow River valley.

Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Shang were slow to adopt the new weapon. They must have learned about chariots from the peoples they called the Gui and Qiang who lived to their north and west, and oracle bones mention these neighbors using chariots in battle. In Wuding’s day the Shang themselves used chariots only for hunting, and even then not very well. The fullest account describes Wuding crashing while chasing rhinoceros. He walked away, but a certain Prince Yang was hurt so badly that a whole set of oracle bones records efforts to exorcise the spirits causing his pain. A hundred years later the Shang were using a few chariots in battle, but instead of massing them like the Hittites and Egyptians, they scattered them among the infantry, probably for officers to ride around in.

Shang relations with their northwestern neighbors seem rather like Mesopotamian relations with the Hurrians and Hittites five hundred years earlier. Like the Mesopotamians, the Shang traded and fought with their neighbors, playing them off against one another. One of these groups, the Zhou, is first mentioned in the oracle bones as an enemy around 1200
BCE
. They then show up as allies, but by 1150
BCE
they were enemies again, now apparently living in the Wei Valley. While they were falling in and out of friendship with the Shang, the Zhou seem also to have been adapting and adopting those elements of Shang culture that suited them. By 1100
BCE
they were forming their own state, complete with palaces, bronze vessels, divination, and rich tombs. One Zhou nobleman had a chariot team slaughtered, Shang-style, at his funeral, and Zhou kings even married Shang princesses. But then—again like the Mesopotamians dealing with their chariot-riding Hurrian and Hittite neighbors—the Shang lost control of the situation. The Zhou apparently put together an alliance of northwestern peoples, and by 1050
BCE
were threatening the great Shang capital of Anyang itself.