Founded around the turn of the third millennium, the Indus Valley Civilisation – often referred to at its peak as the Harappan Civilisation after its major city of Harappa – covered a huge area of land almost the size of western Europe. Although a number of unanswered questions still remain about this society, partly due to the fact that its writing has still not been deciphered, we do know that Harappa and its sister city, Mohenjo-Daro, were major conurbations, supporting populations of over 30,000 people and trading with each other as well as with Mesopotamia. Their people were clearly advanced as they lived in brick and stone houses, cultivated wheat and barley, and irrigated fields. Moreover, both cities were laid out in grids and similarly constructed, thus suggesting a unified government.
While this civilisation flourished between 2600 and 2000 BC, its major cities were suddenly abandoned between 1700–1600 BC, with the entire civilisation ceasing to exist by around 1300 BC. Although nobody is sure what the exact causes for this were, suggestions range from climate change, erosion of the soil that pushed its people further east, and invasion by Indo-Europeans10 from the north-west.
Further east, the earliest dynasty for which we have written evidence is the Bronze Age Shang Dynasty, which established a kingdom along the banks of the Yellow River around 1700 BC. The Shang Dynasty covered an area of approximately one-tenth of modern-day China and lasted for roughly 700 years until it was overthrown by the Chou (or Zhou) Dynasty, which saw China move into the Iron Age.
Notwithstanding a few barbarian interruptions, the Chous retained power for a similar length of time. Yet for most of this time, the area consisted of over a hundred quasi-independent principalities, of which the Chous were only the most powerful. However, unlike the Harappan Civilisation in India that suddenly disappeared, the beliefs and rule of the early Chinese dynasties formed the foundations on which successive dynasties would rule the region until well into the 20th century.
The Stone, Bronze & Iron Ages
Before 5000 BC, tools and weapons were predominantly made from stone, wood and bone, hence the term ‘the Stone Age’. When humans discovered that metals could be extracted from ore by using high temperatures, copper began to be used for tools, albeit to a limited degree.11 However, sometime around 3300 BC, it was discovered that heating a mixture of copper and tin ore at the ratio 9:1 could produce an even more durable material – bronze. This began what we now refer to as the ‘Bronze Age’.
The different ages did not emerge or end everywhere simultaneously; the British Isles, for example, only entered the Bronze Age in around 800 BC, and even into the 20th century several Stone Age civilisations were still being discovered.
Iron began to be used in significant quantities in the Middle East and south-east Europe around the 13th century BC, shortly after people discovered how to produce the necessary heat to smelt the iron ore from the rock. Much stronger and more ubiquitous than copper and tin, iron gradually overtook bronze as the most sought after metal. As with the Bronze Age, the Iron Age began at different times across the world, only reaching northern Europe around 600 BC.
The Hittites: Early Ironmongers (1400–1200 BC)
Iron played a large part in the emergence of another major empire that surfaced in the second millennium BC – that of the Hittites. By the mid-14th century BC they had carved out an empire comprising present-day Turkey and parts of present-day Lebanon and Iraq. It was the Hittites who discovered how to smelt iron ore to make iron; this was recognised as an extremely important development as armies possessing more resilient iron weapons could vanquish those poorly armed with bronze. Although the Hittites sold iron tools to other countries, they opted not to share knowledge of how to make them, and it was this that made them the chief power in western Asia from roughly 1400 to 1200 BC.
The Olmecs of Central America (1400–400 BC)
Over on the other side of the world, a civilisation of its own developed in Central America: that of the Olmecs. We know less about the Olmecs than we know about the major civilisations that developed in Asia as they left very few written records before all traces ceased in circa 400 BC for reasons unknown (although very possibly due to environmental change). We know that they had a calendar, carved gigantic stone heads, built large pyramid-like structures and that they traded extensively. Bloodletting and human sacrifice were a part of their religious life and the rituals and beliefs of the Olmecs formed the basis of the rituals and beliefs of the civilisations that would inhabit the area after them, including those of the Mayans and the Aztecs.
The Invasion of the Sea Peoples (1200 BC)
A turning point in the history of the old Mediterranean world came around 1200 BC, when a confederacy of predominantly sea-faring raiders from the north and the west emigrated eastwards, taking over Crete, attempting to invade Egypt and eventually settling in Canaan – an area corresponding roughly to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and southern Syria. Egyptian texts refer to them as the ‘Sea Peoples’.
The northern group of invaders settled on the coast of present-day Lebanon, an area that the Greeks later referred to as ‘Phoenicia’. The southern group of invaders, the Peleste, subsequently known as the Philistines, was prevented from entering Egypt and ended up in Canaan. Like other peoples in the region, the Philistines suffered the pressures of the great powers around them and disappeared from history in the 7th century BC, leaving only their name, Philistia (or Palestine), to designate the territory they had occupied.
Today it remains unclear who the Sea Peoples were, from where they originally came12 or even why they came. They may have migrated due to dramatic climate change, earthquakes, or famine, or may have been pushed out by invasions of other tribes from the north. Equally, they may simply have been one of successive waves of invaders looking for land. What we do know is that they wreaked havoc and destruction all the way down the east coast of the Mediterranean and that following violent conquests, they generally burnt cities to the ground.
The Hittites were one of a number of civilisations in the area that came to an abrupt end during this time and never again threatened their neighbours. From this time onwards, the history of ancient Egypt is also marked by gradual decline.
The Hebrews
It was in Canaan that the Hebrews, who had recently settled there after escaping slavery in Egypt, looked to build their own kingdom. Under attack from the Philistines, the Hebrews put aside their quarrels and at some point in the 10th century BC appointed Saul as the first king of their territory, Israel. The biblical stories of Samson, Samuel, Saul, and David and Goliath are all concerned with Philistine-Hebrew conflicts.
Finding themselves in a state of permanent war, and fearing that their culture might be lost, the Hebrews began to record their history, and continued to do so over the following centuries in writings that came to be known as the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Christians and Muslims base many of their religious beliefs on what is written in the Tanakh, with the Christians even taking the collection of the books therein – albeit in a slightly different order – as their Old Testament.
We read in the Torah, the first five books of the Tanakh, that Abraham and his people had been driven out of southern Mesopotamia by invading tribes a thousand years prior to that, some four thousand years ago. At some point, possibly to escape a famine, they had taken refuge in Egypt, only to be enslaved by the Egyptians. In the 1200s BC – at roughly the same time as the Sea Peoples and as recalled in the book of Exodus – the Hebrew leader, Moses, rallied his people and led them out of Egypt. It was then, according to the Torah, that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, with the promise that as long as the Hebrews obeyed them, God would favour the Hebrews as his chosen people and bring them into the promised land of Canaan.
The period during which the Hebrews were led by Saul13 and the reigns of his son-in-law, David, and David’s youngest son, Solomon, in the 10th century BC, were a high point for the Hebrew state, during which Israel became rich and prospered. Followin
g the death of Solomon, however, the Hebrews fell back into quarrelling and the land was divided into two kingdoms: the northern and more wealthy kingdom of Israel, with its capital in Samaria, and the smaller southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem. Too weak to resist invaders, Israel was eventually overrun by the Assyrians from the east.
The Phoenicians Explore the Mediterranean (1000–500 BC)
The eastern Mediterranean area was not very rich in metals, which meant that the local inhabitants were required to move westwards in search of a new supply. Between the turn of the millennium and 500 BC, the Phoenicians, who descended from the northern group of Sea Peoples that had settled in present-day Lebanon, and the sea-faring Greeks established settlements at strategic points along trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. One of the Phoenician settlements, Carthage, would end up playing an important role in Roman history.
The Great Assyrian Empire
As the Sumerian civilisation in Mesopotamia slowly died around the turn of the second millennium BC, the kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria, together with a number of tribes from present-day Iran and the Hittites from present-day Turkey, battled it out for predominance. The kingdom of Babylonia generally predominated under various guises for much of the second millennium BC until power moved to the Assyrians in around 910 BC. From this point until around 625 BC, the Assyrian Empire, with an army known for efficient ruthlessness, became the strongest and greatest empire in south-west Asia.
Waging a war of conquest, the Assyrians conquered Babylon, destroyed Israel and the Phoenician cities and attacked Egypt. However, like all over-extended empires, their luck finally ran out. A dynastic squabble around 630 BC opened the empire to attack by a tribe called the Medes (from present-day Iran) in the east, who were aided by other tribes from the north and the south. Between them they succeeded in conquering much of the Assyrian Empire, completely defeating it in 605 BC and burning its capital, Nineveh, to the ground.
During this war Jerusalem was destroyed and many of its inhabitants taken into captivity in the city of Babylon. Yet the Babylonian civilisation managed only a brief resurgence under its king, Nabopolassar and under that of his son Nebuchadnezzar II (of Hanging Gardens of Babylon fame), before being conquered by the Persians in the 6th century BC and then disappearing from history.
The Empire of Ancient Persia (550–330 BC)
The Parsa, or Persians, were a people who were initially vassals of the Medes until Cyrus II became their king in 559 BC. It was Cyrus who rebelled against the Medes, captured their king and built the Achaemenid Persian Empire into the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Spanning from Egypt to present-day Afghanistan, the empire was built at a speed and on a scale as had never been seen. When Cyrus and his army occupied Babylon in 539 BC, he freed the Hebrews from slavery and permitted them to return to their ancestral homeland, an action for which he was hailed as a liberator in the Book of Isaiah. Known as being benevolent and tolerant, Cyrus also declared the first Charter of Human Rights known to mankind. The ‘Cyrus Cylinder’, a baked clay cylinder on which the charter is written, is now kept in the British Museum in London.
After Cyrus and his son died, a nobleman named Darius claimed descent from an ancestor of Cyrus and stepped into the resulting power vacuum in a bloodless coup. With due modesty, he named himself ‘King of Kings’ and founded the city at Persepolis, which became the Persian capital. He is important because his campaigns and those of his son, Xerxes, which sought to bring the rebellious Greeks into submission, are some of the most written-about episodes of the time and lead us into the history of Ancient Greece.
Ancient Greece and the Greek City States (1000–330 BC)
No real history book existed until Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote one in circa 450 BC, which means that we know very little about early Greece before it. The ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’, a collection of writings from c. the 8th century BC allegedly written by the Greek poet Homer, have provided us with much of what we do know about early Greece. However, a large part of these writings include what are clearly myths and therefore cannot be read as historical text. The Iliad tells of the Mycenaean14 attack on Troy (in today’s west Turkey) led by Agamemnon. The Odyssey describes the ten-year journey home of the hero Odysseus - or Ulysses in Latin - after the fall of Troy and includes the story of how he helped the Greeks to victory over the Trojans by sneaking a small army into the city in the belly of a wooden horse. The Iliad and the Odyssey remain two of the most celebrated and widely read stories ever told.
We do know that the 8th century BC was generally an era of peace and prosperity for the Greeks. In their search for arable land, a search driven by living in a mountainous area surrounded by islands, they created settlements on all the islands in the Aegean Sea and along the coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) and the Black Sea.
At this time there was no united Greece, but Aeolian, Dorian and Ionian Greeks, and small fiercely patriotic city-states such as Athens were the norm. Generally trading with each other, but often at war, they came together for defensive purposes against non-Greeks, whom they referred to as ‘barbarians’ due to the unintelligible ‘bar-bar’ sounds they made when speaking.
Beginning in 776 BC, the Greeks also came together every four years to compete at games in Olympia in south-west Greece, a time during which wars were halted.15 Athens grew to such an extent through trade and alliance that by 500 BC it had become the cultural, political and economic centre of Ancient Greece and was recognised as such by other city-states.
In around 500 BC the Ionian Greeks, located on the shores of present-day Turkey, rebelled against Persian attempts to govern them. Frustrated by Athenian support given to the Ionians, the Persians, under Darius, invaded, landing on the plains of Marathon, just north of Athens. The Athenians sent a runner to Sparta, a city-state renowned for the strength and valour of its soldiers, to request help.16 The Spartans agreed to help, but they arrived after the battle. Nevertheless, the Ionian Greeks still managed to defeat the invading and numerically superior Persian army in 490 BC, and Darius’ army was forced to return to Asia Minor.
Darius died before he could launch another invasion, but his defeat was not forgotten by the Persians. Ten years later his son, Xerxes, invaded Greece for the second time in an attempt to avenge the losses at Marathon. This time the Persians reached a narrow pass at the valley of Thermopylae on the eastern coast of Greece, where legend has it they were held off by three hundred Spartans under their king, Leonidas, and only managed to find a way through with the help of a Greek traitor.
Encouraged by their success, the Persians entered and destroyed Athens, whose population fled to the neighbouring island of Salamis. Despite possessing a vastly superior navy, the Persians were overcome at the sea battle of Salamis, which went down in history as the first great naval conflict, and they never threatened Greece again. Xerxes was eventually murdered, as was the last of the Persian Achaemenids, Darius III, in 330BC.
But the Greek victory was important for another reason: it meant that in the end it was Greek culture, not Persian, that was bequeathed to the wider world, with Greek, along with Latin, gradually becoming the language of the educated classes throughout the Mediterranean.
With the Persian threat out of the way, Greece entered its classical period and witnessed a blossoming of culture, architecture and philosophy, during which the Greeks questioned the world around them. This search for knowledge resulted in Ancient Greece becoming known as the birthplace of philosophy and democracy. Philosophy comes from the Greek words ‘philo’ and ‘sophia’, meaning ‘love’ and ‘wisdom’, and democracy comes from the words ‘demos’ and ‘kratia’, meaning ‘people’ and ‘rule’.
Some of the most famous philosophers in history lived at this time: Socrates, who was sentenced to death for disbelief in the state's gods and corrupting the youth; his most famous student, Plato, from whose writing we learn about Socrates and who started the first school of learning w
hich he named the Academy; and Aristotle, the Academy’s most famous student. Aristotle’s father was the personal physician to Philip of Macedonia, and Aristotle himself was, for a time at least, the personal tutor of Alexander the Great, lecturing him on astronomy, physics, logic, politics, ethics, music, drama, poetry, and a range of other subjects.
Keen to avenge themselves and prevent further Persian incursions onto Greek territory, the Athenians persuaded a number of other Greek city-states to form a Naval League. The Greeks, however, were unable to stop their infighting, and the League crumbled during wars between the states that lasted over 20 years. While these wars predominantly took place between the Spartans and the Athenians, they nevertheless took their toll on the entire area, including Persia, which had aided the Spartans.
The king of neighbouring Macedon, Philip II, who had wisely decided to stay out of the war, recognised an opportunity when he saw one. While the Greek states were quarrelling, he transformed Macedon into a state so strong that not only was it able to crush an alliance of Greek states, but it was also soon confident enough to declare war on Persia. Philip was assassinated before he was able to see his plans fulfilled, but his son, Alexander, ensured that they saw the light of day, amassing the largest army ever to leave Greek soil.
Alexander the Great (356–323 BC)
Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, united quarrelling Greek city states, conquered Egypt, defeated the Persians and joined vast regions of Europe and Asia into the greatest empire the world had ever seen, and all before the age of 33. By doing so he became one of the most admired leaders in antiquity. Alexander’s armies never lost a battle and because of this, Alexander was recognised as a military genius.
A Short History of the World Page 2