by Morris, Ian;
So when nearly every major city in the Western core, from Greece to what we now call the Gaza Strip, went up in flames around 1200 BCE, the aliens would have assumed it was another disruption like 2200 or 1750 BCE—a big one, to be sure, but nothing to worry about in the long term. Even when disaster engulfed the palaces so suddenly that their scribes barely had time to record it, the aliens would lose no sleep.
An unusual clay tablet from around 1200 BCE found in the ruined palace at Pylos in Greece opens with the ominous line “the watchers are guarding the coasts”; another from the same site, written in evident haste, seems to be describing human sacrifices meant to forestall an emergency, but then trails off, unfinished. At Ugarit, a rich trading city on the Syrian coast, archaeologists found a batch of clay letters lying in a kiln where scribes had intended to dry them before they were filed. Ugarit was sacked before anyone could come back and get the texts. These letters from the city’s dying days make grim reading. One is from the Hittite king, begging for food: “it is a matter of life and death!” In another, Ugarit’s king writes that while his troops and ships were away supporting the Hittites, “the enemy’s ships came here; my cities were burned, and they did evil things in my country.”
Darkness fell all around, yet so long as Egypt still stood, hope remained. In a temple he built in his own honor, Pharaoh Ramses III set up an inscription that seems to pick up the story from Ugarit: “The foreign countries had made a conspiracy in their islands,” it says. “No land could stand before their arms.” These foreigners—the Peoples of the Sea, Ramses calls them—had overwhelmed the Hittites, Cyprus, and Syria. Now, in 1176 BCE, they came against Egypt. But they had not reckoned with the god-king:
Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and their soul are finished for ever and ever … They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed, and made into heaps from tail to head … I have made the lands turn back from [even] mentioning Egypt; for when they pronounce my name in their land, then they are burned up.
Ramses III’s Peoples of the Sea were probably also the villains in the Pylos and Ugarit stories. They included, Ramses says, Shrdn, Shkrsh, Dnyn, and Prst. Egyptian hieroglyphics did not record vowels, and identifying who these names refer to is a cottage industry among historians. Most think Shrdn was pronounced “Sherden,” an ancient name for Sardinians, and the Shkrsh were Sheklesh, Egyptian for Sikels (Sicilians). Dnyn is less clear, but could mean Danaans, a name Homer would later use for Greeks. With Prst we are on firmer ground: it means Peleset, the Egyptian name for the Philistines of biblical fame.
This is quite a cocktail of Mediterranean peoples, and historians argue endlessly over what brought them to the Nile Delta. The evidence is spotty, but some archaeologists point to signs of higher temperatures and lower rainfall in every part of the Western core after 1300 BCE. Drought, they suggest, reran the 2200 BCE scenario, setting off migrations and state failure. Others think that earthquakes threw the core into turmoil, providing opportunities for plunder and pulling raiders in from the frontier. There were also changes in how people fought; new swords for slashing and deadlier javelins might have given swarms of irregular, lightly armed infantry from the peripheries the weapons they needed to defeat the core’s gleaming but inflexible chariot armies. And disease might have played a part too. A terrible plague had spread from Egypt to the Hittites in the 1320s BCE. “The Land of Hatti, all of it, is dying,” one prayer said, and although surviving texts do not mention plague again, if it was anything like epidemics in better-documented periods it would have kept returning. By 1200 BCE populations were apparently falling in the core.
The hard truth is that we just don’t know the specific causes of the crisis, although the underlying dynamic seems clear enough: a sudden shift in relations between the core and its expanding frontiers. As had been the case so often before, expansion was a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the new frontier in the Mediterranean fueled surging social development, but on the other, it unveiled new advantages of backwardness and set off disruptions—migrations, mercenaries, and unmanageable new tactics—that challenged the established order. And in the thirteenth century BCE, it seems that the great powers in the core began losing control of the frontier they had created.
Whether they were pushed or pulled and whether the motor was climate change, earthquakes, changes on the battlefield, or plagues, people began moving into the core in overwhelming numbers. Already in the 1220s BCE Ramses II had fortified Egypt’s borders, settling migrants in closely controlled towns or enlisting them in his army, but it was not enough. In 1209 BCE Pharaoh Merneptah had to fight not only the Sherden and Sheklesh, whom Ramses III would confront again in the 1170s BCE, but also Libyans and people named Akaiwasha—perhaps Ahhiyawans from Greece?—who joined forces to raid Egypt from the west.
The victorious Merneptah joyfully recorded that he cut off 6,239 uncircumcised penises to tally the enemy dead, but even while he was counting them the storm was engulfing the north. Greek, Hittite, and Syrian cities burned. Later legends talk of migrations into Greece around this time, and archaeology hints at out-migration too. Pottery found around Gaza, where the Philistines settled in the twelfth century BCE, is almost identical to vases from Greece, suggesting that the Philistines began as Greek refugees; and more Greeks settled on Cyprus.
Migration may have snowballed as refugees from devastated areas joined it. It looks like it was a shapeless movement, with disconnected plundering and fighting going on everywhere at once. The Syrian collapse apparently pushed people called Arameans into Mesopotamia, and despite Ramses’ claims of victory, former Peoples of the Sea settled in Egypt. Like Greece, Egypt experienced out- as well as in-migration. The biblical story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt and eventually settling in what is now the West Bank probably reflects these chaotic years. It may not be a coincidence that the first nonbiblical reference to Israel is Merneptah’s pronouncement in his 1209 BCE inscription that he left that land “wasted, bare of seed.”
The sheer scale of the migrations that began in the 1220s BCE dwarfed earlier disruptions, but as late as the 1170s aliens watching from their flying saucers could still plausibly have hoped that this episode might turn out like earlier ones. After all, Egypt had not been pillaged, and in Mesopotamia the Assyrians actually expanded their kingdom as rival states folded. But as the twelfth century wore on and the upheavals continued, it slowly became clear that this disruption was something altogether new.
In Greece the palaces destroyed after 1200 BCE were not reoccupied and the old bureaucracy disappeared. Fairly wealthy aristocrats did preserve something like the old ways, often relocating to easily defended sites on mountains or small islands, but a new wave of destructions hit them around 1125 BCE. When I was a graduate student I had the doubly good fortune (not only was the archaeology fascinating, but I also met my future wife there) to dig on one of these sites, a fortified hilltop at Koukounaries on the island of Paros.* Its chief had enjoyed a fine lifestyle with great views, wonderful beaches, and a throne decorated with ivory inlays, but around 1100 BCE disaster struck him down. His villagers had stockpiled stones to fling at attackers and brought their animals behind the walls (we found donkey skeletons amid the ruins), but fled ahead of the flames when someone—we never learned who—stormed the citadel. Similar scenes played out all over Greece, and in the eleventh century BCE the survivors built only simple mud huts. Population, craftsmanship, and life expectancy all declined; a dark age set in.
Greece was the extreme case, but the Hittite Empire also went under, and Egypt and Babylon struggled to control migrants and raiders. Famines spread as villagers abandoned their fields. Because farmers could not pay taxes, states could not raise troops; and because there were no troops, raids went unchecked and local strongmen carved out little dukedoms. By 1140 BCE Egypt’s empire in what is now Israel faded away. Abandoned by their paymasters, garrison troops turned into peasants or bandits. “In those days
there was no king in Israel,” says the book of Judges, the Israelites’ account of their own part in this breakdown; “all the people did what was right in their own eyes.”
By 1100 BCE Egypt itself was fragmenting. Thebes broke away; immigrants created principalities in the Nile Delta; and soon Ramses XI, the official god-king, was being told what to do by his own vizier, who seized the throne in 1069. For several centuries few of Egypt’s shadowy pharaohs fielded large armies, put up monuments, or even wrote much down.
Assyria, which early on looked like the big winner, lost control of the countryside as movements of Aramean peoples increased. By 1100 BCE the fields lay fallow, the treasury had run empty, and hunger stalked the land. The situation gets harder to read as the bureaucrats committed less to writing, rather suddenly stopping altogether after 1050. By then Assyria’s cities were empty and its empire just a memory.
The Western core had contracted by 1000 BCE. Sardinia, Sicily, and Greece largely lost contact with the wider world, and warrior chiefs carved up the carcasses of the Hittite and Assyrian empires. Cities survived in Syria and Babylonia, but were a sad comedown from second-millennium-BCE metropolitan centers such as Ugarit. A cluster of little states survived in Egypt, but these were weaker and poorer than the glorious empire of Ramses II. And for the first time, social development actually fell. The numbers for every trait slid: by 1000 BCE people captured less energy, lived in smaller cities, fielded weaker armies, and used less writing than their predecessors had done around 1250. Scores fell back to where they had been six hundred years before.
CHARIOTS, NOT OF THE GODS
Around 1200 BCE, while King Wuding still sat on the throne, the Shang elite found something new to destroy in their funerals: chariots. These show up in a couple of dozen twelfth- and eleventh-century tombs at Anyang (complete, needless to say, with slaughtered horses and crews). Shang chariots are so like those that appeared in the Western core five hundred years earlier* that most archaeologists agree that both must have shared an origin in the chariots invented in Kazakhstan around 2000 BCE. Chariots took two or three centuries to reach the Hurrians and to alter the balance of power in the West; they needed eight to cross the greater distance to the Yellow River valley.
Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Shang were slow to adopt the new weapon. They must have learned about chariots from the peoples they called the Gui and Qiang who lived to their north and west, and oracle bones mention these neighbors using chariots in battle. In Wuding’s day the Shang themselves used chariots only for hunting, and even then not very well. The fullest account describes Wuding crashing while chasing rhinoceros. He walked away, but a certain Prince Yang was hurt so badly that a whole set of oracle bones records efforts to exorcise the spirits causing his pain. A hundred years later the Shang were using a few chariots in battle, but instead of massing them like the Hittites and Egyptians, they scattered them among the infantry, probably for officers to ride around in.
Shang relations with their northwestern neighbors seem rather like Mesopotamian relations with the Hurrians and Hittites five hundred years earlier. Like the Mesopotamians, the Shang traded and fought with their neighbors, playing them off against one another. One of these groups, the Zhou, is first mentioned in the oracle bones as an enemy around 1200 BCE. They then show up as allies, but by 1150 BCE they were enemies again, now apparently living in the Wei Valley. While they were falling in and out of friendship with the Shang, the Zhou seem also to have been adapting and adopting those elements of Shang culture that suited them. By 1100 BCE they were forming their own state, complete with palaces, bronze vessels, divination, and rich tombs. One Zhou nobleman had a chariot team slaughtered, Shang-style, at his funeral, and Zhou kings even married Shang princesses. But then—again like the Mesopotamians dealing with their chariot-riding Hurrian and Hittite neighbors—the Shang lost control of the situation. The Zhou apparently put together an alliance of northwestern peoples, and by 1050 BCE were threatening the great Shang capital of Anyang itself.
Like the ancient Western states, the Shang state unraveled rather quickly when things went wrong. The oracle bones suggest that the Shang elite’s internal dynamics had been in turmoil since about 1150 BCE, leaving the king more powerful but with fewer aristocratic supporters. By 1100 the Shang colonies in the south may have broken away, and many allies closer to home (like the Zhou) had defected.
In 1048 BCE the Shang king Di Xin could still muster eight hundred lords to block a Zhou attack, but two years later it was a different story. The Zhou king Wu massed three hundred chariots and swung around to take Anyang from the rear. A probably contemporary poem makes it sound like these Zhou chariots were decisive:
The war chariots gleamed,
The team of white-bellies*was tough …
Ah, that King Wu
Swiftly fell upon Great Shang,
Who before daybreak begged for a truce.
Di Xin committed suicide. Wu won over some Shang leaders, executed others, and left Di Xin’s son as a vassal king. Wu’s political arrangements soon ran into trouble, as we will see in Chapter 5, but by then the gap in social development between East and West had narrowed sharply. The West had got a two-thousand-year head start over the East in agriculture, villages, cities, and states, but across the third and second millennia BCE the West’s lead steadily shrank to just a thousand years.
As long ago as the 1920s most Western archaeologists thought they knew why China had started catching up: it was because the Chinese had copied almost everything—agriculture, pottery, building, metallurgy, chariots—from the West. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, a British anatomist in Cairo, was so enthusiastic that he even managed to give Egypt envy a bad name. Wherever in the world he looked and whatever he looked at—pyramids, tattooing, stories about dwarfs and giants—Elliot Smith saw the copying of Egyptian archetypes, because, he convinced himself, Egyptian “Children of the Sun” had carried a “heliolithic” (“sun and stone”) culture around the world. When we get right down to it, Elliot Smith concluded, we are all Egyptians.
Some of this seemed fairly nutty even at the time, and since the 1950s archaeology has steadily disproved nearly all Elliot Smith’s claims. Eastern agriculture arose independently; Easterners used pottery thousands of years before Westerners; the East had its own traditions of monumental building; even human sacrifice was an independent Eastern invention. Yet despite all these findings, some important ideas clearly did move from West to East, above all bronzeworking. That metal, so important at Erlitou, is first seen in China not in the developed Yiluo Valley but in arid, windswept Xinjiang far to the northwest, probably after being brought across the steppes by the Western-looking people whose burials in the Tarim Basin I mentioned earlier. Chariots, as we have seen, probably entered the same way, just five hundred years after they had reached the Western core from the steppes.
But while West-to-East diffusion probably explains some of China’s catch-up, the most important factor by far was not Eastern copying but the Western collapse. Eastern social development was still a thousand years behind the West’s in 1200 BCE, but the Western core’s implosion effectively wiped out six centuries’ worth of gains. By 1000 BCE the East’s development score was only a few hundred years behind the West’s. The great Western collapse of 1200–1000 BCE began the first turning point in our story.
HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
Just why the Western core broke down, though, remains one of history’s greatest mysteries. If I had a cast-iron answer, I would of course have mentioned it by now, but the sad fact is that unless some stroke of luck provides a whole new kind of evidence, we will probably never know.
All the same, looking systematically at the disruptions of social development described in this chapter is rather illuminating. Table 4.1 summarizes what strike me as their most important features.
We know so little about the disruptions that undid the Uruk expansion in the West around 3100 BCE and Taosi in the East around 2300 that we
should probably leave them out of the discussion, but the four cases of upheavals that remain break down into two pairs. The first pair—the Western crisis after 1750 BCE and the Eastern crisis around 1050—was, we might say, man-made. Chariot warfare shifted the balance of power; ambitious newcomers pushed into the cores; violence, migration, and regime change ensued. The main outcome, in both cases, was a shift in power toward formerly peripheral groups, with development continuing to move upward.
The second pair—the Western crises of 2200–2000 and 1200–1000 BCE—was quite different, most obviously because nature magnified human folly. Climate change was largely beyond human control, and was at least partly responsible for the famines in these periods (though if the biblical story of Joseph is any guide, poor planning probably contributed too). This second pair of disruptions was much more severe than the first, and we might draw a tentative conclusion from this: that when the four horsemen of the apocalypse—climate change, famine, state failure, and migration—ride together, and especially when a fifth horseman of disease joins them, disruptions can turn into collapses, sometimes even driving social development down.
Table 4.1. The horsemen of the apocalypse: the documented dimensions of disasters, 3100–1050 BCE