Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Kings also gave one another self-interested gifts. Egypt’s pharaohs, rich in gold and grain, gave these goods to minor rulers of Lebanese cities, who reciprocated with fragrant cedar, since Egypt lacked good wood. Failing to give an appropriate gift was a major faux pas. 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. Perhaps in a world lacking the trust and laws that make markets work, they may be the best option available. But they were never the only option, and humbler independent traders always flourished alongside royal and priestly enterprises. Neighbors bartered, swapping cheese for bread or help digging a latrine for babysitting. Town and country folk traded at fairs. Tinkers loaded pots and pans on donkeys and plied their routes. 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 best-known account of this comes from the Hebrew Bible. Jacob was a successful shepherd in the hills near Hebron in what is now the West Bank. He had twelve sons, but played favorites, giving the eleventh—Joseph—a coat of many colors. In a fit of pique, Joseph’s ten older brothers sold the gaudily dressed apple of their father’s eye to passing slave traders headed for Egypt. Some years later, when food was scarce in Hebron, Jacob sent his ten oldest sons to Egypt to trade for grain. Unknown to them, the governor they confronted there was their brother Joseph, who, although a slave, had risen high in pharaoh’s service (admittedly after a spell in jail for attempted rape; he was, of course, framed). In a perfect illustration of the difficulty of knowing when to trust traders, the brothers showed no surprise when the disguised Joseph pretended to think they were spies and threw them in prison. The story ends happily, though, with Jacob, his sons, and all his flocks moving into Egypt. “And they gained possessions in it,” says the Good Book, “and were fruitful and multiplied exceedingly.”

  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. Amorites from the fringes of the Syrian Desert and Gutians from the mountains of Iran, coming as traders and laborers, were familiar faces in Mesopotamia’s cities; so, too, “Asiatics,” to use the Egyptians’ contemptuous catch-all term, in the Nile Valley. 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. But the price of growing complexity was growing fragility. This was, and remains, a central piece of the paradox of social development.

  Around 2200 BCE, when the god-king Naram-Sin’s equally divine son Sharkalisharri ruled much of Mesopotamia from his throne room in Akkad, something started going wrong, and Harvey Weiss, a Yale University archaeologist who excavated the site of Tell Leilan in Syria, thinks he knows what it was. Tell Leilan was a city of twenty thousand people in Sargon’s day, around 2300 BCE, but a ghost town a century later. Searching for explanations, the geologists on Weiss’s team discovered from microscopic studies of sediments that the amount of dust in the soil at Tell Leilan and neighboring sites increased sharply just before 2200 BCE. Irrigation canals silted up, probably because of declining rainfall, and people drifted away.

  A thousand miles away, in the Nile Valley, something was also going wrong. In the story of Joseph the pharaoh relied on dream interpreters to predict agricultural yields, but real pharaohs had a device called the Nilometer, which measured the river’s floods and gave advance warning of good and bad harvests. Inscriptions recording some of its readings show that floods fell sharply around 2200 BCE. Egypt, too, was getting drier.

  Back around 3800 BCE drier weather had propelled Uruk to greatness and set off wars that unified Egypt, but in the more complicated, interconnected world of the late third millennium BCE, abandoning sites such as Tell Leilan also meant taking away the business that Amorites and Asiatics depended on. It would have been as if Joseph’s brothers had come down to Egypt to buy grain but found no one home. They could have gone back to Hebron and told their father he had to starve, or they could have pushed farther into pharaoh’s land, trading or working for food when they could, fighting for it or stealing it when they could not.

  Under other circumstances the Akkadian and Egyptian militias might have slaughtered such nuisances (economic migrants or criminals, depending on your point of view), but by 2200 BCE these armed forces were themselves unraveling. Some Mesopotamians saw their Akkadian kings as cruel conquerors, and when the supposedly divine Sharkalisharri failed to cope very well with the problems he faced in the 2190s BCE many priestly families stopped cooperating with him. His armies melted away; generals proclaimed themselves kings in their own right; and Amorite gangs took over entire cities. In less than a decade the empire disintegrated. It was every town for itself—as a Sumerian chronicler put it, “Who then was king? Who was not king?”

  In Egypt tensions between court and aristocracy had also been mounting, and King Pepy II, who had sat on the throne for sixty years, proved unequal to the challenges. While his courtiers schemed against him and one another, local elites took matters into their own hands. By the time a coup set up a new dynasty in Lower Egypt around 2160 BCE there were dozens of independent lords and ungovernable Asiatic bands rampaging around the countryside. Worse still, the high priests of the great temple of Amen at Thebes in Upper Egypt took on progressively grander titles, eventually sliding in and out of civil war with the Lower Egyptian pharaoh.

  By about 2150 BCE Egypt and Akkad had decomposed into petty statelets, fighting outlaws and each other for shares of the peasants’ shrinking output. Some warlords prospered but the general tone of the few surviving texts is desperate. There are also hints that the crisis reverberated beyond the core. It is hard for archaeologists to tell when events in one region are linked to those in another, and we should never underestimate simple coincidence, but it is hard not to detect a broader pattern in the fiery destruction of the biggest buildings in Greece, the end of the Maltese temples, and the abandonment of Spain’s coastal fortresses, all between 2200 and 2150 BCE.

  The larger, more complex systems of the Western core depended on regular flows of people, goods, and information, and sudden changes—like the drier weather at Tell Leilan or Pepy’s senility—disrupted these. Disruptions such as the drought and migrations after 2200 BCE did not have to produce chaos, but they effectively rolled the dice of history. In the short term, at least, anything could have happened. If Pepy had had an adviser like Joseph he might have turned hard times to his advantage; if Sharkalisharri had cut better deals with his generals and priests his empire might have endured. Instead, the main result in Mesopotamia was that the city of Ur exploited Akkad’s collapse, carving out a new empire, smaller than Akkad’s but better known to us because its compulsive bureaucrats produced so many tax receipts. Forty thousand have been published, and thousands more await study.

  Shulgi, who took Ur’s throne in 2094 BCE, pronounced himself a god and instituted a cult of personality. He even gave Ur a new musical form, the “Shulgi Hymn,” praising his skill at everything from singing to prophesy and making him sound unnervingly like North Korea’s dictator-cum-movie director Kim Jong Il. Yet despite Shulgi’s talents, within a few years of his death in 2047 BCE his empire, too, imploded. In the 2030s raiding became such a problem that Ur built a hundred-mile wall to keep the Amorites out, but in 2028 cities started pulling out of Ur’s tax system anyway, and state finances collapsed around 2020. In a rerun of the fall of Akkad, famines raged as some generals tried to requisition grain for Ur and others declared themselves independent.
“Hunger filled the city like water,” says the Sumerian poem The Lamentation over Ur. “Its people are as if surrounded by water, they gasp for breath. Its king breathed heavily in his palace, all alone, its people dropped their weapons …” In 2004 BCE raiders sacked Ur and carried its last king into slavery.

  While Mesopotamia fell apart, however, Egypt came together again. The Theban high priests of Upper Egypt, now acting as kings in their own right, defeated their main rivals in 2056 BCE and mastered the whole Nile Valley in 2040. By 2000 BCE the Western core looked much like it had done a thousand years earlier, with Egypt unified under a god-king and Mesopotamia split into city-states under kings who were at best merely godlike.

  By this point, more than four thousand years ago, the Western core’s dizzy, wild ride had already laid bare some of the fundamental forces that drive social development. Social development is not a gift or curse laid on humanity by Clarke’s monolith or von Däniken’s aliens; it is something we make ourselves, just not in ways of our own choosing. As I suggested in the introduction, the bottom line is that we are lazy, greedy, and fearful, always looking for easier, more profitable, or safer ways to do things. From the rise of Uruk to the Theban reunification of Egypt, sloth, avarice, and/or fright drove every upward nudge of social development. But people cannot nudge things any way they like; each nudge builds on all the earlier nudges. Social development is cumulative, a matter of incremental steps that have to be taken in the right order. The chiefs of Uruk around 3100 BCE could no more have organized the kind of bureaucracy that Ur boasted under Shulgi a millennium later than William the Conqueror could have built computers in medieval England. As the Yankee saying goes, you can’t get there from here. This cumulative pattern also explains why increases in social development keep speeding up: each innovation builds on earlier ones and contributes to later ones, meaning that the higher social development rises, the faster it can continue rising.

  Yet the course of innovation never did run smooth. Innovation means change, bringing joy and pain in equal measures. Social development creates winners and losers, new classes of rich and poor, new relations between men and women and old and young. It even creates whole new cores when the advantages of backwardness empower those who had previously been marginal. Its growth depends on societies becoming larger, more complicated, and harder to manage; the higher it rises, the more threats to itself it creates. Hence the paradox: social development creates the very forces that undermine it. When these slip out of control—and particularly when a changing environment multiplies uncertainty—chaos, ruin, and collapse may follow, as came to pass around 2200 BCE. And as we will see in the chapters that follow, the paradox of social development largely explains why long-term lock-in theories cannot be correct.

  THE BAND OF BROTHERS

  Despite the chaos that swept over the Western core after 2200 BCE, this was no Nightfall moment. The collapses after 2200 do not even register on the graph in Figure 4.2.* That may understate the scale of the disruptions, but even so, one thing is very clear: by 2000 BCE Western social development was almost 50 percent higher than it had been in 3000 BCE. Social development kept rising and Western societies got bigger and more sophisticated.

  The cores changed in other ways, too. No Mesopotamian ruler ever again claimed to be a god after 2000 BCE, and even in Egypt some of the shine came off the pharaohs. Second-millennium-BCE statues and poetry portray pharaohs as more warlike, world-weary, and disappointed than those of the third millennium. And in what must be a related process, state power contracted: although palaces and temples remained important, more land and trade were now in private hands.

  The most important reason why the disruptions did not set the clock back, though, was that the core kept expanding through the crises, drawing in peripheries that found new advantages in their backwardness and pushed their way into the core. From Iran to Crete people adapted Egyptian- and Mesopotamian-style palaces and redistributive economies to fluid, often-violent frontiers with rain-fed agriculture. On the whole, frontier kings relied more on military power than those in the irrigation-fed cores and made fewer claims to divinity; it was perhaps hard to seem godlike when the rulers of Egypt and Sumer looked so much grander.

  Once again, rising social development changed the meanings of geography. Access to a great river basin was crucial for development in the third millennium BCE, but in the second millennium living on the old core’s northern edge became an even greater advantage. Herders in what is now Ukraine had domesticated horses around 4000 BCE, and two thousand years later horse tamers on the steppes of modern Kazakhstan started yoking these powerful beasts to light, two-wheeled chariots. A few steppe herders riding around in chariots did not concern the core, but if someone with the resources to pay for thousands of chariots got hold of them it would be a different story. Chariots were not tanks, crashing through enemy lines (the way directors of sword-and-sandals movies like to portray them), but armies with masses of fast-moving chariot-mounted archers could make old-fashioned shoving matches between infantry obsolete.

  Chariots’ advantages seem obvious, but armies that have done well with one tactical system are often slow to adopt another. Setting up a corps of well-trained charioteers would throw the pecking order of all-infantry armies into chaos, empowering a whole new elite, and though the evidence is patchy, the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, with their entrenched hierarchies, seem to have adopted the new battle systems only sluggishly. New northern states such as the mysterious Hurrians, who apparently migrated into northern Mesopotamia and Syria from the Caucasus after 2200 BCE, were more flexible. 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,* 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, not to drive development down. 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 Hyksos out in 1552 BCE, not even that much changed. 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 historians call the next three hundred years the International Age.

  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 position, asking for gifts, and marrying off princesses. They created a shared diplomatic language and addressed one another as “brother.” Second-tier rulers, excluded from the club of great powers, they called “servants,” but rank could be renegotiated. Ahhiyawa (probably Greece), for instance, was a borderline great power. There are no Ahhiyawan letters in the Amarna archive, but when a Hittite king listed “the kings who are equal to me in rank” in a thirteenth-century treaty he named “the king of Egypt, the king of Babylonia, the king of Assyria, and the king of Ahhiyawa”—only to think better of it and scratch Ahhiyawa off the list.

  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 Assyrian
s 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 BCE they had pushed up the Mediterranean coast into Syria, building forts as they went.

  An ancient arms race broke out by 1400 BCE and the devil took the hindmost. 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, full of spies and covert operations, to control Syria’s city-states. In 1274 BCE it turned hot, and the biggest armies the world had yet seen—perhaps thirty thousand infantry and five thousand chariots on each side—clashed at Kadesh. 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, Ramses tells us that he went on a Rambo-like rampage:

  His Majesty [Ramses] slew the entire force of the Foe of Hatti [another name for the Hittites], together with his great chiefs and all his brothers, as well as all the chiefs of all the countries that had come with him, their infantry and their chariotry falling on their faces one upon the other. His Majesty slaughtered them in their places; they sprawled before his horses; and his majesty was alone, none other with him.