Why the West Rules--For Now (40 page)

Native groups sometimes resisted. Some, such as the tribesmen of Etruria and Sardinia in Italy, already had towns and long-distance trade before the colonists came; now they built cities and monuments, organized low-end states, and intensified agriculture. They created alphabets based on the Greek model (which the Greeks, in turn, had adapted from Phoenicia between 800 and 750
BCE
). These alphabets were easier to learn and use than most earlier scripts, which had needed hundreds of signs, each representing a consonant-plus-vowel syllable; and much easier than the Egyptian hieroglyphic or Chinese scripts, which needed thousands of signs, each expressing a separate word. By the best guess, in the fifth century
BCE
10 percent of Athenian men could read simple statements or write their own name—far more than anywhere in the East or West at any earlier time.

We know much more about the spread of cities, states, trade, and writing into first-millennium-
BCE
Europe than about the spread of agriculture four or five thousand years earlier (discussed in
Chapter 2
), but the arguments over what happened in each case are strangely similar. Some archaeologists claim that colonization from the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium
BCE
caused the rise of cities and states farther west; others respond that native peoples transformed their own societies in resistance to colonialism. Members of the latter group, mostly younger scholars, sometimes accuse the former group of projecting onto the ancient world nostalgia for the self-proclaimed civilizing missions of modern colonial regimes; while some of the former group, mostly of an older generation, reply that their critics are more interested in posing as champions of the oppressed than in finding out what really happened.

The name-calling is admittedly tame compared to the rage that the archaeology of Israel generates (so far as I know no one has needed a bodyguard yet), but by the genteel standards of classical scholarship it counts as bitter controversy. It was enough to draw me in, anyway, and in an effort to make sense of the issues I spent my summers between 2000 and 2006 excavating a Sicilian site called Monte
Polizzo.
*
This was an indigenous town occupied between 650 and 525
BCE
by people called Elymians. It was so close to Phoenician and Greek colonies that we could see them from the summit of our hill, making it an ideal place to test competing theories of whether colonization or indigenous development caused the western Mediterranean takeoff. And after seven summers of picking, troweling, sieving, counting, weighing, and eating too much pasta, our conclusion is: it was a bit of both.

This is, of course, pretty much the same conclusion archaeologists have reached about the expansion of agriculture thousands of years earlier. In each case, social development rose in both the core and in the peripheries around it. Traders and colonists left the core, whether pushed out by rivals or pulled by tempting opportunities, and some people in the peripheries actively copied core practices or independently created their own versions. The result was that higher levels of social development spread outward from the core, overlaying earlier systems and being transformed in the process as people in the peripheries added their own twists and discovered the advantages in their backwardness.

At Monte Polizzo local initiatives were clearly important. For one thing, we suspect that our site was destroyed by fellow Elymians from Segesta, who created their own city-state in the sixth century
BCE
. But the arrival of Greek colonists was also critical, since Segestan state formation was partly a response to Greek competition for land and was massively shaped by Greek culture. Segestan aristocrats struggled to look like serious rivals to the Greeks, borrowing Greek practices to do so. In fact, they built such a perfect example of a Greek-style temple in the 430s
BCE
that many art historians think they must have hired the architects who designed the Parthenon at Athens. Segestans also inserted themselves into Greek mythology, claiming (as Romans did too) to be descendants of Aeneas, a refugee from the fall of Troy. By
the fifth century
BCE
colonial cities in the western Mediterranean such as Carthage (a Phoenician settlement) and Syracuse (a Greek one) rivaled any in the old core. Etruscan social development was not far behind, and dozens of groups like the Elymians trailed not far behind them.

A rather similar process of state breakdown in the core combined with expansion on the periphery also unfolded in the East as population grew. Around 810
BCE
the Zhou king Xuan lost control of his lords, who saw less and less reason to cooperate with him as they themselves grew richer and stronger. Xuan’s capital in the Plain of Zhou slid into factional conflicts and raiders from the northwest plundered deep into his kingdom. When Xuan’s son You inherited the throne in 781
BCE
he tried to stop the rot, apparently engineering a showdown with his surly vassals and his father’s too-powerful ministers, who may have been conspiring with You’s firstborn son and the boy’s mother.

At this point the story descends into the kind of folktale that fills so many of our ancient sources. Sima Qian, the great historical scholar of the first century
BCE
, recounts a bizarre tale that an earlier Zhou king had once opened a thousand-year-old box of dragon saliva, from which a black reptile appeared. For reasons that Sima Qian leaves unclear, the king’s response was to have several palace women strip naked and yell at the monster. Rather than running away, it impregnated one of them, who gave birth to a reptilian daughter but then abandoned her. Another couple, fleeing the Zhou capital to escape the king’s anger over a wholly unrelated matter, carried this snake-child off to Bao, one of the rebellious vassal states in the Zhou kingdom.

The point of this odd story is that in 780
BCE
the people of Bao decided to try to broker a deal with King You by sending him the dragon’s offspring—now grown into a beautiful young woman named Bao Si—as a concubine. You was very happy about this, and the next year Bao Si bore him a son. This, apparently, was why You decided to get rid of his firstborn son and senior wife.

All went well for You until 777
BCE
, when his exiled son fled to another restless Zhou vassal state and You’s most senior minister joined the boy there. At this point a group of vassals made an alliance with northwestern people whom the Zhou called the Rong (the name simply means “hostile foreigners”).

King You
, heedless of all this, had turned his attention to a more immediate problem: how to make Bao Si laugh (not surprisingly, given her background, she was rather humorless). Only one thing seemed to work. You’s predecessors had set up watchtowers so that if the Rong attacked, drums and fires could warn the many lords, who would rush to the rescue with their retinues. Sima Qian says,

King You lit the beacons and beat the great drums. As the beacons were to be lit only when intruders drew near, the many lords all came. Upon their arrival, there were no intruders, thus Lady Bao Si laughed out loud. The king was pleased, so he lit the beacons several times. Afterwards, since this was not reliable, the many lords became more reluctant to come.

King You was the original boy who cried wolf, and when the Rong and rebellious Shen really did attack in 771
BCE
, the many lords ignored the beacons. The rebels killed You, burned his capital, and put his estranged son on the throne with the title King Ping.

It is hard to take this story too seriously, but many historians think it does preserve memories of real events. In the 770s
BCE
, the same decade that Egyptian and Assyrian rulers lost control, it would seem that population growth, resurgent local power, dynastic politics, and external pressures came together in China to produce an even sharper setback for monarchy.

The vassals who left King You to his fate in 771
BCE
perhaps wanted only to demonstrate their strength, install Ping as a figurehead, and carry on ignoring the monarchy. Their decision to bury their bronze ritual vessels all around the Wei valley, where archaeologists have recovered them in huge numbers since the 1970s, suggests that they planned to return as soon as the Rong went home laden with plunder from You’s palace. But if this was their thinking, they were badly mistaken. The Rong came to stay, and the many lords were forced to install King Ping as head of a government-in-exile at Luoyi in the Yellow River valley.
*
It soon became clear that the Zhou king, Son of Heaven
as he might be, was impotent now he had lost his estates in the Wei Valley, and the earls of Zheng, the strongest of the “vassals,” started to test their erstwhile kings. In 719
BCE
one earl took the heir to the throne hostage; in 707 another earl even shot the king with an arrow.

By 700
BCE
the Zhou court was almost irrelevant to the dukes, earls, viscounts, and marquises of the former colonies (one ancient source says there were now 148 of them). The leading “vassals” still claimed to be acting on behalf of the Zhou king, but in reality fought one another for supremacy without consulting their supposed ruler, making and breaking treaties at will. In 667
BCE
Marquis Huan of Qi, temporarily dominant, even summoned his rivals to a conference where they acknowledged him as their leader (though they continued to fight him and everyone else). The next year Marquis Huan browbeat the king of Zhou into naming him
ba
, an “overlord” who would (theoretically) represent Zhou’s interests.

Marquis Huan earned this standing largely by protecting weaker states from attacks by peoples they considered foreign—in the north, the Rong and Di, and in the south, groups known as Man. Yet the main (and surely unintended) consequence of these wars was rather similar to Phoenician and Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean, drawing the Rong, Di, and Man into the core and hugely expanding it in the process.

In the seventh century
BCE
states along the northern edge of the core recruited Rong and Di as allies, cementing these ties by intermarriage. Many Rong and Di leaders became versed in Zhou literature and deliberately attached themselves to border states such as Qi, Jin, and Qin, which grew much larger. In the south some Man created their own large state, Chu, as they fought with Jin and Qi in the seventh century. By the 650s
BCE
Chu was a full member of the interstate community, attending its conferences; and, rather like the Segestans and Romans in the West who claimed to descend from Aeneas, Chu’s leaders started saying that they, like the other states in the Eastern core, had begun as a colony of Zhou. A distinct Chu material culture emerged by 600
BCE
, combining core and southern elements.

Chu became such a power that in 583
BCE
the state of Jin decided to make alliances with other Man peoples to build up enemies in Chu’s rear. In 506 one of these allies, the state of Wu, was strong enough to smash Chu’s army; so strong, in fact, that in 482 the Marquis of Jin yielded his status as
ba
to Viscount Fuchai of Wu—who, like the kings of Chu, now claimed Zhou ancestry. By then yet another southern state, Yue, had also become a major power. Its viscounts tried to trump Wu ideologically by claiming descent from the earliest dynasty of all, the Xia; and in 473
BCE
, after Viscount Fuchai of Wu hanged himself while Yue’s armies besieged his capital, Yue’s viscount took his place as
ba
. Despite its political breakdown, the Eastern core had expanded just as dramatically as the Western.

TOWARD THE HIGH END

The years 750–500
BCE
were the turning point when history didn’t turn. In 750
BCE
Western social development was pushing twenty-four points, just where it had been on the eve of the great collapse in 1200
BCE
; by 500
BCE
so, too, was the East’s. Just as happened around 1200, the climate was changing, peoples were migrating, conflict was escalating, new states were pushing into the cores, and old states were coming apart. New collapses seemed entirely possible, but both cores instead restructured themselves, developing the economic, political, and intellectual resources to manage the challenges that faced them. That is what makes
Figure 5.1
so dull—and so interesting.

We see the changes first in Assyria. The upstart who usurped the throne in 744
BCE
under the name Tiglath-Pileser III at first looked much like all the other pretenders who had pulled the same stunt since the 780s, yet in less than twenty years he catapulted Assyria from a broken, low-end state to a dynamic, high-end one. Along the way he converted himself, like some mafioso going legitimate, from a gangster boss into a great (but brutal) king.

His secret was cutting the aristocratic Sons of Heaven out of the deal. Tiglath-Pileser did this by creating a standing army, paid by and loyal to him alone, instead of having his lords provide troops. The surviving texts do not say how he did this, but somehow he dragooned prisoners of war into forming a personal army. When it won battles,
Tiglath-Pileser used the loot to pay his own troops directly instead of sharing it with his lords. Supported by the army, he then broke the nobles’ power, subdividing top offices and filling many with captured eunuchs. Eunuchs had two advantages—they could not have sons to pass their positions to, and were held in such contempt by the traditional aristocracy that they were unlikely to lead rebellions. Above all, Tiglath-Pileser hugely expanded the bureaucracy to run his state, stepping over the old elite to create administrators loyal entirely to him.

All this was expensive, so Tiglath-Pileser regularized his finances. Instead of shaking down foreigners by showing up periodically and demanding payoffs, he insisted on regular contributions—basically, taxes. If a client king argued, Tiglath-Pileser replaced him with an Assyrian governor. In 735
BCE
, for instance, King Pekah of Israel joined Damascus and other Syrian cities in a tax revolt (
Figure 5.5
). Tiglath-Pileser came down on them
like a wolf
on the fold. He destroyed Damascus in 732
BCE
, installed a governor, and annexed Israel’s fertile
northern valleys. Pekah’s unhappy subjects assassinated him and enthroned the pro-Assyrian King Hoshea instead.