Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris

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 c...

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 unifica...

Despite having so much in common, the Uruk expansion in Mesopotamia after 3500 BCE and the Upper Egyptian expansion afte...

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 ...

Why is a m...

When texts start recording more information, around 2700 BCE, the southern Mesopotamians, now calling themselves Sumerians, were divided into thirty-five c...

Uruk’s unraveling left unified Egypt as the maj...

Why Egypt and Mesopotamia diverged remain...

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 co...

There is a further big difference between Mesopotamia and Egypt.

While Sumerian kings claimed to be like gods, Egyptian kings claimed to be gods.

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.

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 ...

When he got to sage number seven, Alexander asked, “How can ...

The philosopher answered simply: “By doing something ...

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 ...

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.

Perhaps fusing a godlike king with a great conqueror made self-divinization plausible.

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.

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.

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—t...

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...

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.

if a king looked after his patron god’s interests, what did it mean if another king, acting for...

Some priests proposed a “temple-city” theory, making the religious hierarchy and gods’ interests independent from kings. Successful kings responded by claiming t...

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 G...

Conflict came to a head around 2350 BCE. There were violent coups, armed conquests, and revolutionary redistributions of property and sacred rights.

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 Sumeri...

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 ...

By 2230 BCE the twin Western cores in Sumer and Egypt had massively eclipsed the original core in the Hilly Flanks.

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.

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.

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 late...

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.

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 Joseph story is probably set in the sixteenth century BCE, by which time people whose names are now lost had been following the same script for two thousand years.

Rising social development intertwined the cores’ economies, societies, and cultures with those of neighboring regions, enlarging the cores, increasing their mastery of their environments, and driving up social development.