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by
Ian Morris
In a nutshell, the Eastern and Western cores avoided collapse in the first millennium BCE by restructuring themselves, inventing new institutions that kept them one step ahead of the disruptions that their continuing expansion itself generated.
Mencius
The drying up of the tin supply changed all that, making it iron or nothing, and by 1000 BCE the new, cheap metal was in use from Greece to what is now Israel (Figure 5.3
Gordon Childe,
good. Never was this truer than around 800 BCE, when minor wobbles in Earth’s axis generated stronger winter winds all over the northern hemisphere (Figure 5.4
In China the winter winds blow mainly from Siberia, so when they grew stronger after 800 BCE they made the weather drier as well as cooler.
In East and West alike the same amount of land had to feed more mouths as population grew. This generated both conflicts and innovations. Both could potentially be good for rulers; more conflicts meant more chances to help friends and punish enemies, more innovations meant more wealth being generated, and the engine behind both—more people—meant more laborers, more warriors, and more plunder.
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.
A rather similar process of state breakdown in the core combined with expansion on the periphery also unfolded in the East as population grew.
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.
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.
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
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Between 934 and 612 BCE Assyria in fact forcibly moved some 4.5 million people from one place to another.
in the 670s Assyria overran the Nile Valley. Egypt, though, turned out to be a country too far, and by the time the Assyrians withdrew ten years later, problems were plaguing all their frontiers. Destroying Urartu, their main enemy to the north, had exposed them to devastating raids from the Caucasus; sacking Babylon, their main enemy to the south, only generated wars with Elam, farther southeast; and destroying Elam in the 640s BCE merely freed the Medes of the Zagros Mountains to become a threat and allowed Babylon to regain its strength.
Paul Kennedy
Cambyses
Around 600 BCE people in Lydia, in western Anatolia, started stamping lumps of metal to guarantee their weight, and by Darius’ day this innovation—coinage—was in widespread use, speeding up commerce still further.
Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher struggling at the end of World War II to make sense of the moral crisis of his own day, called the centuries around 500 BCE the “Axial Age,” meaning they formed an axis around which history turned. In the Axial Age, Jaspers portentously declared, “Man, as we know him today, came into being.” Axial Age writings—Confucian and Daoist texts in the East, Buddhist and Jain documents in South Asia, and Greek philosophy and the Hebrew Bible (with its descendants the New Testament and the Koran) in the West—became the classics, timeless masterpieces that have defined
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The Buddha used meditation; Socrates favored conversation. Jewish rabbis* urged study; Confucius agreed, and added punctilious observation of ritual and music. And within each tradition, some followers leaned toward mysticism while others took a down-to-earth, folksy line.
Mozi,
Daoists,
Zhuangzi,
Legalist Tradition
Did Confucius, Socrates, and the Buddha guide societies through some intellectual barrier when social development reached twenty-four points in the mid first millennium BCE, while the absence of such geniuses blocked social development in the second millennium?
So alarming were the forces being unleashed that in 361 BCE the great powers set up regular conferences to negotiate their differences, and diplomats-for-hire, known as “persuaders,” appeared in the 350s. A single man might shuttle among several great kingdoms, serving as chief minister for all of them at once, weaving webs of intrigue worthy of Henry Kissinger.
Alexander was a child of the new, disenchanted world (Aristotle had been one of his tutors) and probably did not realize how difficult it was to fill a godlike king’s shoes.* Devout Persians held that their kings were Ahuramazda’s earthly representatives in his eternal struggle with darkness; Alexander, therefore, must be an agent of evil. This image problem doubtless lay behind Alexander’s tortured efforts (mentioned in Chapter 4) to convince Persians he was godlike. Maybe, given time, he would have succeeded, although the more he tried to impress Persians with his divinity, the more insane
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By 200 BCE the East and West had more in common than at any time since the Ice Age. Each was dominated by a single great empire with tens of millions of subjects. Each had a literate, sophisticated elite schooled in Axial thought, living in great cities fed by highly productive farmers and supplied by elaborate trade networks. And in each core social development was 50 percent higher than it had been in 1000 BCE
The least-romantic historians of all think that it was only in 166 CE, when ambassadors from Da Qin’s King Andun (surely the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) reached the Chinese capital at Luoyang, that Chinese and Romans finally stood in the same room.
Brigadier Mortimer Wheeler
Excavations soon showed that Mediterranean goods were reaching Arikamedu (and several other ports) by 200 BCE. They increased in quantity for the next three centuries, and recent digs on Egypt’s Red Sea coast have also found dried-out coconuts, rice, and black pepper that can only have come from India. By the first century CE goods were also moving between China and India, and from both places to Southeast Asia.
Voltaire’s
After peaking around 1 BCE/CE, social development fell in both East and West. This was collapse on a whole new scale. Not only was it broader than ever before, affecting both ends of Eurasia, but it was also longer and deeper. Century after century it dragged on, cutting more than 10 percent off the East’s development score by 400 CE and 20 percent off the West’s by 500. How this happened, ushering in the end of the West’s fourteen-thousand-year-long lead in social development, is this chapter’s subject.
It took hundreds of years of wars and millions of deaths before the paradox of violence that I mentioned in Chapter 5—the fact that war eventually brought peace and prosperity—made itself clear; and no sooner had the wars of unification ended than the Qin and Roman superstates both turned on themselves in horrific civil wars. Qin got down to this immediately; Rome, more gradually.
The reign of terror imploded almost the moment the First Emperor died. One day in 209 BCE, the story runs, heavy rain prevented two lowly officials from delivering conscripts to a garrison on time. The penalty for lateness was, of course, death. “As things stand, we face death whether we stay or run away,” Sima Qian reports one of them saying, “while if we were to start a revolt we would likewise face death. Since we must die in any case, would it not be better to die fighting for our country [by rebelling]?”
Liu Bang
Mauryan Empire,
Han emperors backed away from claiming immortality and divinity, though they did hang on to the Shang and Zhou kings’ role as intermediary between this and the supernatural worlds.
at this point it really does start making sense to think of the Eastern core as a single entity that modern Westerners, in their own mispronunciation of “Qin,” call China. Huge cultural differences remained within All Under Heaven, but the Eastern core had started becoming Chinese.
Egyptian records show that Roman-era farmers could harvest ten pounds of wheat for every pound sown as seed, a spectacular level for premodern agriculture. No statistics survive from China, but archaeological finds and accounts in agricultural handbooks suggest that yields were high here, too, particularly in the Yellow River basin.
sources—coal, natural gas, water, and wind.
I show lead pollution, a by-product of silver processing, because lead is the easiest isotope for geochemists to study.) The curves rise together to twin peaks in the first century BCE, showing how strongly trade and industry were linked (and that ancient Rome was no golden age for the environment).
trade boomed in the Eastern core after 300 BCE, but not as much as in the Western core. one recent study, for instance, concludes that the Roman Empire had roughly twice as much coinage in circulation as the Han and that the richest Romans were twice as rich as the richest Chinese.
Qin and Han conquests did this only on a much smaller scale. Some Han emperors worked furiously to improve transport by dredging the Yellow and Wei rivers and bypassing the worst stretches with canals, but centuries would pass before China solved the problem of not having its own Mediterranean Sea.
Roman and Han conquerors taxed vast areas, spending most of their income on armies along the frontiers (probably 350,000 troops in Rome and at least 200,000 in China) and gigantic capital cities (probably a million people at Rome and half that number at Chang’an, the Han capital). Both needed to move food, goods, and money from rich, taxpaying provinces to hungry, revenue-consuming concentrations of humanity.
Roman Warm Period.
When I began going on archaeological excavations, in 1970s England, I dug on several Roman sites. It could be exhausting work, clearing huge foundations of poured concrete (another Roman invention) with pickaxes and racing to keep the log books one step ahead of the flood of finds. But then I started doing a PhD on Greek society around 700 BCE, and in 1983 dug for the first time on a site of that date. It was a shock. These people just didn’t have anything.
Alexander the Great’s generals built on the ruins of the Persian Empire after 300 BCE could never match the might of their illustrious predecessor, and Scythian raiders were soon plundering Bactria and northern India. Another central Asian group, the Parthians, began infiltrating Iran; and when the Macedonian kingdoms fell apart under the weight of Roman attacks after 200 BCE, the Parthians took full advantage.
Parthia’s horsemen were famous for the “Parthian shot,” where a rider pretended to flee, then turned in his saddle to loose arrows at his pursuer. Tactics such as these allowed Parthia to see off the Roman general Crassus, who lost his army and his life in a rash attack in 53 BCE
Maodun
