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

by Ian Morris

The Hurrians’ steppe connections gave them easy access to the new weapons, and their looser social structure probably raised fewer barriers to adoption. Neither they nor the Kassites of western Iran, the Hittites of Anatolia,41 the Hyksos of modern Israel and Jordan, and the Mycenaeans of Greece were as organized as Egypt or the Mesopotamian city of Babylon, but for a while that did not matter, because chariots gave these formerly peripheral peoples such an edge in war-making that they could plunder or even take over their older, richer neighbors.

The Hyksos steadily moved into Egypt, building their own city around 1720 BCE and seizing the throne in 1674. In 1595 Hittites sacked Babylon, and soon Kassites were taking over Mesopotamia’s cities. By 1500 BCE the Hurrians had carved out a kingdom called Mittani and Mycenaeans had conquered Crete (Figure 4.4).

These were turbulent times, but in the long run the upheavals served only to enlarge the core, no...

In Mesopotamia, the main upshot of the enslavements, deportations, massacres, and dispossessions was that northern immigrants replaced local rulers. In Egypt, where Theban-led rebels kicked the...

But by 1500 BCE new kingdoms had taken shape around the northern fringe of the old core, their development rising so quickly that they forced their way into an enlarged version of that core. So tightly were the great states now linked that hi...

Trade boomed. Royal texts are full of it, and fourteenth-century letters found at Amarna in Egypt show the kings of Babylon, Egypt, and the newly powerful states of Assyria, Mittani, and the Hittites jockeying for...

They created a shared diplomatic language and addressed one a...

Figure 4.4. The band of brothers: the Western core’s International Age kingdoms as they stood around 1350 BCE, after the Hittites and Mittani had gobbled up Kizzuwatna but before the Hittites and Assyrians destroyed Mittani. The gray areas in Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy show where Mycenaean Greek pottery has been found.

The more the “brothers” had to do with one another, the tougher their sibling rivalry got.

The Hyksos invasion in the eighteenth century BCE had traumatized the Egyptian elite, shattering their sense that impassable deserts shielded them from attack; determined to prevent any repeat, they upgraded their rather ramshackle militias into a permanent army with career officers and a modern chariot corps. By 1500 BC...

An ancient arms race broke out by 1400 BCE and the devil ...

Between 1350 and 1320 BCE the Hittites and Assyrians swallowed up Mittani. Assyria intervened in a Babylonian civil war, and by 1300 the Hittites had destroyed Arzawa, another neighbor. Hittite and Egyptian kings waged a deadly cold war, ful...

In 1274 BCE it turned hot, and the biggest armies the world had yet seen—perhaps thirty thousand infantry and five thousand char...

Ramses II, the Egyptian pharoah, apparently blundered into a trap. Since he was a god, this naturally presented no problem, and in an account posted in no fewer than seven temples, Ram...

The Hittites kept advancing down the coast until 1258 BCE, stopping only because they had picked new fights, one with Assyria in the mountains of southeast Anatolia and another with Greek adventurers on Anatolia’s west coast.

Some historians think that Homer’s Iliad, the Greek epic poem written down five centuries later, dimly reflects a war in the 1220s BCE in which a Greek alliance besieged the Hittite vassal city of Troy; and far to the southeast, an even more terrible siege was under way, ending with Assyria sacking Babylon in 1225 BCE.

Defeat could mean annihilation—men slaughtered, women and children carried into slavery, cities reduced to rubble and condemned to oblivion. Everythi...

More militarized elites emerged, far richer than their predecessors, and their internal feuds took on a new edge. Kings fortified their palaces or built themselves whole new cities where th...

So it was that state power grew after 1500 BCE and the Western core expanded with it.

Pottery made in Greece has been found around the shores of Sicily, Sardinia, and northern Italy, suggesting that other, more valuable (but archaeologically less visible) goods were moving long distances too.

ship wrecked at Uluburun

around 1316 BCE, for instance, was carrying enough copper and tin to make ten tons of bronze, as well as ebony and ivory from tropical Africa, cedar from Lebanon, glass from Syria, and weapons from Greece and what is now Israel;

short, a little of everything that might fetch a profit, probably gathered, a few objects at a time, in every port along the ship’s r...

The shores of the Mediterranean Sea were being dra...

Rich graves containing bronze weapons suggest that village chiefs were turning into kings in Sardinia and Sicily, and texts reveal that young men left their villages on these islands to see...

Sardinians wound up in Babylon and even in what is now Sudan, where Egyptian armies pushed south in search of gold, smashing native sta...

As the Mediterranean turned into a new frontier, rising social development once again changed what geography meant.

In the fourth millennium BCE the rise of irrigation and cities had made the great river valleys in Egypt and Mesopotamia into more valuable real estate than the old core in the Hilly Flanks,

and in the second millennium the explosion of long-distance trade made access to the Mediterranean’s broad...

After 1500 BCE the turbulent Western core entered a whole ne...

He was not happy when archaeologists told him that its antiquities were older than China’s, so on returning to Beijing he launched the Three Dynasties Chronology Project to look into the matter.

Four years and $2 million later, it announced its findings: Egypt’s antiquities really are older than China’s. But now at least we know exactly how much older.

As we saw in Chapter 2, agricultural lifestyles began developing in the West around 9500 BCE, a good two thous...

By 4000 BCE farming had spread into marginal areas such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, and when the monsoons shifted southward after 3800 BCE these new farmers create...

East had plenty of dry, marginal zones too, but farming had barely touched them by 3800, so the arrival of cooler, drier weather did not lead to the rise of cities and states. Instead, it probably made life easier for villagers by making the warm, wet ...

Instead of a transition to cities and states like Egypt and Mesopotamia, fourth-millennium-BCE China saw steady, unspectacular population growth.

The better people did at capturing energy, the more they multiplied and the greater pressure they put on themselves; so, like Westerners, they tinkered and experimented, finding new ways to squeeze more from the soil, to organize themselves more effectively, and to grab what they wanted from others.

Houses got bigger and we find more objects in them, pointing to slowly rising standards of living; but differences between houses also increased, perhaps meaning that richer peasants were distinguishing themselves from their neighbors.

In a few places, notably Shandong (Figure 4.5), some people—mostly men—found their last resting place in big graves with more offerings than others, and a few even had elaborate carved jade ornaments.

The East was moving along a path like the West’s, but at least fifteen hundred years behind; and, staying on schedule, between 2500 and 2000 BCE the East went through transformations rather like those the West had seen between 4000 and 3500 BCE.

All along the great river valleys the pace of change accelerated, but an interesting pattern emerged.

The fastest changes came not on the broadest plains with the richest soils but in cramped spaces, where it was hard for people to run away and find new homes if they lost struggles f...

On one of Shandong’s small plains, for instance, archaeologists found a new settlement pattern taking shape between 2500 and 2000 BCE. A single large town grew up, with perhaps five thousand residents, surrounded by smaller sat...

Yet writing or no, whoever ran the Shandong communities was certainly powerful. By 2200 BCE human sacrifices were common and some graves received ancestor worship.

Thousands of burials have been excavated at Taosi, and these hint at a steep social hierarchy. Nearly nine out of every ten graves were small, with just a few offerings. Roughly one in ten was bigger, but about one in a hundred (always male) was enormous.

About two thousand years later the Rites of Zhou, a Confucian handbook on ceremonies, would still list all the instrument types found in the Taosi graves as appropriate for elite rituals.

Chang believed that other literature produced around the same time as the Rites of Zhou also reveals memories of the period before 2000 BCE

The sage kings were said to be descendants of the high god Di, and the last of these sage kings, Yu, was supposed to have saved mankind by digging drainage ditches when the Yellow River flooded.

The grateful people made Yu their king, the story runs, and he founded China’s first fully human dynasty, the Xia.

Most historians think the sage kings were entirely fictional.