More pertinently, he is also depicted in a superb victory stele, which was discovered at Susa, north of the Persian Gulf. This has deservedly been characterised as ‘a masterpiece of Mesopotamian sculpture’. Besides its realistic depiction in relief of surprisingly lifelike human figures, it has a number of significant features. For instance, Narâm-Sin is depicted as being almost twice as tall as the other human figures beneath him, and he is wearing a two-horned helmet, a sign of his divinity. (Later, this would become the sign of a minor deity; as a major deity, his helmet would sprout four horns.)6
Such regular end-of-reign uprisings allow us to make certain deductions. As the twentieth-century author Paul Kriwaczek pointed out:
Empires based solely on power and domination, while allowing their subjects to do as they will, can last for centuries. Those that try to control the everyday lives of their people are much harder to sustain.
Such considerations certainly help account for the brevity of this first empire, which lasted for less than two centuries.7 The Akkadian imposition of alien gods upon their conquered cities would seem to have been but the outward manifestation of a more heavy-handed communal control. Even so, other factors must certainly have contributed. For a start, the sheer novelty of this highly complex human-social creation must certainly have made it difficult to sustain. Obvious though it may seem, one should always bear in mind the sheer difficulty presented by the fact that the Akkadians had no blueprint for what they were doing. They were obliged to make up the rules as they went along.
Following the death of Narâm-Sin in 2218 BC, he was succeeded by his son, Shar-kali-sharri (‘King of All Kings’), who would rule for the next twenty-five years. Shar-kali-sharri appears to have presided over a period of almost continuous provincial revolts, even one by the governor of Elam, who had been appointed by his father. In 2193 BC, Shar-kali-sharri would be murdered in a palace revolt, whereupon the empire descended into anarchy. The Sumerian King List, which was compiled around 2100 BC, evocatively says of this period: ‘Who was king? Who was not king?’
Excavations carried out at the end of the twentieth century indicate that from c.2220–2000 BC the entire Eastern Mediterranean region was subject to a severe climate change, bringing with it droughts and famine. During this period, fertile regions in Sinai became deserts, and archaeological evidence indicates that ‘nearly all Palestinian . . . towns and villages were destroyed around 2200 BC and lay abandoned for about two centuries.’ Some posit a sensational explanation for this climate change: ‘Aerial photographs of southern Iraq revealed a two-milewide circular depression with the classic hallmarks of a meteor crater.’ This would possibly explain recent archaeological evidence that on some sites there was ‘construction seemingly going well when, apparently overnight, all work suddenly stopped.’
Either way, this change marked the end of the Akkadian Empire, regarded by many as ‘The First World Empire’.
However, not all concur with this assessment. The twentieth-century Italian scholar, Mario Liverani, vehemently insists: ‘In no case is the Akkad empire an absolute novelty [. . .] “Akkad the first empire” is therefore subject to criticism not only as for the adjective “first” but especially as for the noun “empire”.’ Liverani argues that earlier the Sumerians developed ‘proto-imperial states’, adding somewhat anomalously that the term ‘empire’ with regard to the Akkadians is ‘simplistic’.
This argument is convincingly countered by Kriwaczek, who points out a fundamental transformation that came about with this ‘first empire’: ‘Up until now, civilisation based itself on the belief that humanity was created by the gods for their own purposes . . . Each city was the creation and home of a particular god.’ With the conquests of Sargon, all this changed. This was how Inanna, goddess of the city of Ur, came to be addressed by Sargon’s daughter Enheduana as ‘lady of all foreign lands’. The gods and goddesses of the rulers would become the supreme gods and goddesses of the entire Akkadian Empire.
The Akkadian world witnessed the proliferation, if not always the origin, of many features of early civilisation. Sophisticated realistic sculptures were carved in relief on stone stele, or gouged in relief into cylinders, which, when rolled, left an impression in clay. Similarly, silver gathered from mines at the outposts of the empire was melted into ingots. These were then stamped with a name (the seal of approval) and weight; they were thus used for trade: a proto-form of money, guaranteed by the world’s first bankers.
The Akkadians also built the first ziggurats: stepped asymmetrical flat-topped pyramidal structures with temples at their summit. The very word ziggurat is an anglicised form of the original Akkadian ‘ziqquratu’, and in time one of the greatest of these would be a 300-foot-high Babylonian ziggurat named Etemenanki. Although this huge structure is now reduced to nothing but rubble, its name translates as ‘home of the platform between heaven and earthy’, confirming that these were the edifices that gave rise to the legend of the Tower of Babel. Although no temples have yet been found at the summit of any extant ziggurats, we know of their existence.
The Ziggurat of Ur, which rises to 100 feet. Some such structures are known to have been three times this size.
Herodotus describes the furnishing of the shrine on top of the ziggurat at Babylon and says it contained a great golden couch, on which a woman spent the night alone. The god Marduk was also said to come and sleep in his shrine. Thus, the son of god was the issue of a god and a human woman, an early example of the story that would persist through Zeus in the Greek myths into the Christian era.
Speculations on the precise origins of the ziggurats are equally intriguing. Some claim that they represent a sacred mountain, a folk-memory from the original Sumerian homelands, which according to some sources was ‘the mountains of the north-east’. This suggests the Zagros Mountains, which occupy western Persia and border the Fertile Crescent. A similarly plausible suggestion, which in no way contradicts the mountain myth, claims these ziggurats were raised as protection for the temples against the seasonal floods, some of which could be extreme.
As their architecture grew, there is no doubt that they were intended to become increasingly awesome and forbidding to the common people gathered below. The complicated sets of staircases worked into their design would have made them easy to defend against intruders, at the same time preventing any secular spies from discovering the secrets of the temple ceremonies and initiation rituals. Once again, echoes of such practices have come down to us in the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Ancient Greeks, later ritual sacrifices of many kinds, and remnants can even be detected in the high altars of Christian churches.
Only priests were permitted to ascend to the top of ziggurats, and one of their duties was to observe the movements of the stars in the night heavens. Here astronomy was certainly entwined with astrology: yet the astronomical understanding of the movements of the planets developed by these priests would later enable the Babylonians accurately to predict eclipses of the sun many centuries into the future. These used advanced geometric techniques that would not be rediscovered in Europe until the fourteenth century AD.
Sequence
What originated with the Akkadians would be developed by the Babylonians, who gave the world further distinctive features of early civilisation and empire. Not least of these was the Code of Hammurabi, the world’s earliest comprehensive code of laws. This was inscribed in Akkadian on a seven-foot-high stele dating from around 1754 BC during the reign of the Babylonian king Hammurabi. It contains 282 laws, covering aspects of civil life ranging from slander to theft and divorce, as well as most famously the legal principle paraphrased as ‘an eye for an eye . . .’
Meanwhile some 700 miles or so to the west of Babylon, a parallel empire was developing in the form of Ancient Egypt. Here too a civilisation evolved its own similar, yet distinctive hallmarks, such as pyramids, the successive rule of pharaonic god-kings, and hieroglyphic writing, in this case on papyrus. The Egyptians also developed their own
more down-to-earth, but equally impressive, form of mathematics. Each year the Nile flood would recede, leaving bare mudflats, which would have to be divided into plots of land precisely commensurate with those occupied prior to the rising flood. This led to a mathematics involving immensely complicated algebraic fractions (whereas the Babylonian mathematics had more of a tendency towards abstract geometric precision).
H.G. Wells, writing a century ago, would claim of these empires:
We know that life for prosperous and influential people in such cities as Babylon and the Egyptian Thebes, was already almost as refined and as luxurious as that of comfortable and prosperous people today.
This may well be, yet it is always worth bearing in mind P.J. O’Rourke’s advice: ‘When you are thinking of the good old days, think one word: Dentistry.’ Quite aside from this painful art, it is worth considering another significant dental fact. The teeth of Ancient Egyptian mummies (i.e. the fortunate few described above) are invariably flat. This was initially ascribed to evolutionary reasons. It is now known that they were ground down by the amount of desert sand and grit that could not be prevented from entering prepared food. And to dental hardships one could add life expectancy, virulent disfiguring diseases, the vice-like conformity required by such societies . . . sufficient imagination can always add to this list.
Such strictures will apply, in more or less a degree, to all empires great and small, before and after Ancient Egypt. It is the ethos that can be rosy, instructive, inspirational, and so forth – seldom the nitty-teeth-gritty facts. But this should not be a cause for pessimism. History scrutinises the past, and seeks to learn from it: it does not seek to live in it.
Egyptian influences would spread to Crete, with Babylonian influences dispersing through Anatolia and Persia, while the Phoenicians transported such ideas throughout the Mediterranean. Amongst the Greekspeaking city states that occupied the islands and coasts of the Aegean, this would produce a transformation. Uniquely, Ancient Greek civilisation was fragmented, while its learning was divorced from religion. Liberated from an oppressive all-embracing imperial and religious hierarchy, individualistic thought blossomed, giving birth to what we now see as Western civilisation.
Examples of evolving alphabet
Philosophy, democracy, citizens’ rights, the perfection of realistic sculpture, architecture, science, tragedy, comedy even, the list goes on . . . such creative individual freedom (for all but women and slaves) would become a template for Western civilisation. Once this strain of mentality had become established, it would never quite be eliminated from Western human evolution. Over the following two and a half millennia, it would survive tyranny, state terror, empires, barbarism, and even centuries of intellectual stagnation. However, from the outset, this mental trait would prove ineffective in combatting sheer physical power. For all its glories, the Greek world would quickly succumb to the military might of the expanding Roman Empire.
Despite such radical developments, there was no clear-cut break with earlier empires. This is perhaps most significantly illustrated by an unmistakable thread of continuity in the evolution of alphabetical writing, which gradually replaced cuneiform scripts such as Akkadian and Babylonian.
1 Owing to silting and the Tigris-Euprates delta, the north-western coast of the Persian Gulf has now moved some 100
miles south-east of its location in ancient times.
2 In time, this became a ritual of Akkadian rulers, marking the successful end of a campaign or war.
3 In fact, Shelley based his poem upon the pharaoh Ramesses II, who would rule in Ancient Egypt a millennium or so later.
4 Spoken Ancient Hebrew fell into disuse around AD 300, remaining only in written Biblical and religious usage. It was revived in its modern form in the early twentieth century by the Russian-born scholar Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and became the official language of the state of Israel.
5 Mesopotamia is in fact the later Greek word for this region, meaning ‘the land between between two rivers’, i.e. the Tigris and the Euphrates.
6 Narâm-Sin’s stele can be seen at the Louvre in Paris.
7 To put this into context: such a period constitutes around half the length of the British Empire, and is the equivalent of the entire British Empire at its zenith.
2
The Roman Empire
The founding legend of Rome is replete with familiar echoes. A vestal virgin named Rhea Silvia, one of the priestesses who tended the sacred flame, was seduced by Mars, the god of war. When she gave birth to twins, named Romulus and Remus, these were placed in a reed basket, which floated away down the River Tiber. The twins were rescued by a she-wolf, who suckled them. Later Romulus would slay Remus (just as the biblical Cain had slain Abel), and in 753 BC he would found the city named after him on the Palatine Hill overlooking the Tiber.
To encourage the growth of this new settlement, its king Romulus welcomed colonists, giving refuge to fugitives and slaves. Most of these colonists were young men, so Romulus invited the nearby Sabines to a festival, where the Romans abducted and raped the young Sabine women. Consequently, the Romans found themselves plunged into a series of wars against neighbouring tribes in order to ensure their continuing existence. To assist him in his rule, Romulus appointed a hundred old men. The Latin for old man is ‘senex’, and this group became known as the Senate, an institution that would survive throughout the entire era of the Roman Empire.
As we shall see, these early legends contain in embryo an uncanny resemblance to many of the fundamental elements that would characterise the Roman Empire. In particular, ruthlessness and aggression. Militarism would be central to Rome’s social structure – enabling it first to survive, and then to thrive. Of all the empires we shall describe, it is the Roman which casts the longest shadow over ensuing history. Indeed, some elements would even persist into that very perpetuity dreamt of by all empires. To this day, the traditional depiction of the she-wolf suckling the infants Romulus and Remus remains an iconic image in the city of Rome. And over a millennium and a half after the fall of Ancient Rome, its proud acronym SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus: "The Senate and People of Rome’) remains the official emblem of the municipality, visible on everything from manhole covers to pavement refuse bins.
A modern Roman manhole cover.
Of course, the city – which would spread from the Palatine Hill to the traditional seven hills of Rome – is also filled with monuments to its ancient imperial past: ruins, complete sites, roads, aqueducts and so forth. Much the same is true throughout the former territory of the empire, which in a recurrent theme its poet Virgil named the ‘Empire without limit’. Remnants stretch across Europe and beyond, from Hadrian’s Wall near the border of Scotland to the Hadrian’s Arch on the fringes of the Arabian Desert (in modern-day Jordan). And most pervasive of all, the Latin language, which remains more or less recognisable in the many European languages that evolved from the original mother tongue – such as Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, and a considerable part of English. So many words in all these languages would be easily discernible to any educated Ancient Roman.
Then there are the legal systems, weights and measures, municipal baths even, architecture – to name but a few formative influences. For example, Peter Charles L’Enfant, the French military engineer who originally designed Washington DC in the early 1790s, intended its government buildings to resemble a neo-classical Rome.
From the early years, the people of Rome and its senators adopted a constitution, consisting of an unwritten set of principles, mainly established through precedent. At least in theory, the king was appointed by the senate. And the constitution contained many elements that remain the sine qua non of national constitutions to this day, i.e. the notion of checks and balances, to ensure that no power group can gain undue influence.8 Also, the separation of powers, such as the independence of government and justice, religion and state, and so forth. And, perhaps most important of all, the notion of impeachment, by which the legisl
ature could lay formal charge against its leader.
The king was accompanied by an armed guard of lictors, each bearing the fasces, a bundle of rods strapped around an axe. This symbol of power has reverberated through the ages – appearing on the back of the pre-Second World War US dime, as well as behind the podium in the US House of Representatives. It also gave its name to the modern term fascism.
During the initial Kingdom of Rome period (753–476 BC) the city gradually overcame the powerful Etruscan civilisation, which occupied the swathe of territory north of Rome, running through Tuscany and beyond, and to the south as far as modern Naples. When the seventh king, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), attempted to institute a hereditary monarchy, the kings were overthrown and the senate established a republic (from res publica: the ‘public thing’).This was ruled by the senate, now expanded to several hundred patricians (upper class families), which appointed two consuls, who held office for a year each. The republic also included an assembly of tribunes, elected by the plebeians (the common people). This lower house could propose laws to be voted on by the senate. Such a bi-cameral structure of government remains a recognisable feature of democracies to this day.
The consuls would often become military commanders, leading the army during times of war. As Roman power expanded through southern Italy and Sicily, it soon came up against the Phoenician people, who controlled the Mediterranean from their capital Carthage, in modern Tunisia. This would result in a war for the control of the Mediterranean, no less – to all intents and purposes, the civilised world as they knew it. The ensuing titanic conflict against the Carthaginians would continue for over a century, and became known as the Three Punic Wars (264–146 BC). It was during the second of these wars that the Carthaginian general Hannibal led his army, including cavalry elephants, across the ‘impenetrable’ Alps. His surprise invasion wreaked havoc through Italy for fifteen years, at one point even besieging Rome itself.
Empire Page 3