Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  *In their 1999 book Noah’s Flood, the geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman suggested that the Black Sea flood did inspire the Bible story. They dated the flood around 5600 BCE, but more recent studies have shown that the basin was probably flooded by freshwater between 16,000 and 14,000 BCE and then turned salty after the Mediterranean broke through, somewhere around 7400 BCE. It is unlikely that such an early catastrophe inspired the Noah story, and the submergence of what is now the Persian Gulf may be a more plausible source for the flood narratives in ancient literature.

  *Some people believe that wondrous civilizations, richer than Atlantis, flourished on the coastal plains of the Ice Age but were forgotten after 12,700 BCE when the rising sea engulfed them. Archaeologists generally ignore this idea, not because they are trying to hide the truth, but because it is just not plausible. Apart from anything else, it requires us to believe that no one from the interior highlands (that is, areas that still lie above the water) ever traded with the lost cities or imitated their achievements. Despite more than a hundred years of excavations, no wonderful works from lost civilizations have turned up. Trawlers regularly dredge up Ice Age stone tools and mammoth bones from the seabed but advanced artifacts stubbornly refuse to come to light.

  *A touching scene, so long as we do not ask how the puppy came to be available for burial at just the same time as its mistress.

  *Some archaeologists tell a different story. Tiny beads of glass, carbon, and iridium found on several North Americans sites dating to around 11,000 BCE could only, they suggest, have been produced by intense heat—the kind of heat we would get if debris in a comet’s tail hit the earth. These archaeologists picture not gradual melting of glaciers but a sudden blast at the North Pole turning the Gulf Stream off. Not even that, though, would have produced The Day After Tomorrow’s superstorm.

  *This sounds like an obvious thing to do, but yoking animals so they can pull carts without strangling themselves while also remaining under a driver’s control is a lot harder than it looks.

  *As opposed to nonfood crops—a 2005 DNA study suggests that the first colonists of the Americas brought with them from Asia cultivated bottle gourds, which they used as containers.

  *Like Peking Man, discussed in Chapter 1, Peking University has kept the older form of its name. In this case, administrators made a conscious decision in the 1980s to keep translating “Beijing Daxue” into Western languages as “Peking University.”

  *The mean difference was just under 1,700 years; the median, 2,250 years.

  *That said, Darwin’s vision of evolution was rather different from Spencer’s. Spencer believed that evolution applied to everything, was progressive, and would perfect the universe; Darwin restricted evolution to biology and defined it as “descent with modification,” the modifications supplied by random genetic mutations and therefore directionless, sometimes producing complexity out of simplicity and sometimes not.

  *Stanford recognized this in 2007 and staged a shotgun second wedding, putting the two anthropologies back together.

  *Psychologists use the term “social development” very differently, to refer to children learning the norms of the societies they grow up in.

  *When a member of the Royal Astronomical Society in London tried to compliment Eddington by calling him one of only three people in the world who really understood Einstein’s theory, Eddington fell silent; “I’m just wondering,” he finally said, “who the third might be.”

  *I also collected data on the size of population within the largest political unit, standards of living (using adult stature as a proxy), speed of transportation, and scale of largest buildings. Each of these had problems (overlap with other traits, gaps in the data) that made them seem less useful than the four traits I ended up with; but each of them also followed much the same pattern as the four traits I selected.

  *www.ianmorris.org.

  *The figure of 35 million I gave for Tokyo on p. 149 was for the year 2009—and means that between 2000 and 2009 the East’s score for organization/urbanism soared from 250 to 327.72 points. I will come back to the acceleration of social development in the twenty-first century, taking Eastern and Western scores well beyond 1,000 points, at the end of this chapter and in Chapter 12.

  *I have made only one substantial modification to Cook’s numbers; I think he overestimated the rate of increase in energy capture in southwest Asia after the beginnings of plant domestication, and that his “early agricultural” figure of 12,000 kilocalories per person per day fits better around 3000 BCE than around 5000 BCE, where he placed it.

  *The 1,000-point maximum score I set for the year 2000 CE does not, of course, mean that that is the highest development will ever rise. By my calculations, between 2000 and 2010, the year in which I am writing, Western development climbed from about 906 to about 1,060 points, and Eastern from about 565 to about 680 points.

  *Confusingly for those of us used to modern maps with north at the top, Egyptians thought in terms of the Nile; the river flowed down from “Upper Egypt” in the south toward “Lower Egypt” in the north.

  †The Scorpion King movies, sad to say, bear not even a passing resemblance to the little we know of the real Scorpion King.

  *This is partly because our archaeological data are very coarse-grained and partly for technical reasons. Because the data are so patchy, I have measured social development in the third millennium BCE at quarter-millennium intervals, and the points at 2250 and 2000 BCE happen to miss much of the chaos. Second, the Western region had two separate cores, one in Mesopotamia and one in Egypt, where the collapses followed slightly different rhythms. In 2100 BCE Egyptian social development was lower than it had been in 2200 BCE, but Mesopotamia had recovered from its initial collapse; by 2000 BCE Mesopotamia had collapsed again, but Egypt had recovered.

  *Ancient historians generally call the land that is now Turkey by the Greek name Anatolia (meaning “Land of the East”), since the Turks—who originally came from central Asia—settled Anatolia only in the eleventh century CE.

  *Springs and Autumns was a popular name for Chinese history books, meaning in effect “Years.” “Annals” might be a good translation.

  *I say “according to legend” because the trail leading to Zhoukoudian, the great prehistoric site discussed in Chapter 1, is said to have begun the same year in much the same way, when a German naturalist, trapped in Beijing by civil unrest, recognized a “dragon bone” in a druggist’s store as an early human tooth. The coincidence is slightly suspicious.

  *I’d like to thank Dr. Demetrius Schilardi of the Archaeological Society of Athens once again for his generosity in inviting us onto his excavation from 1983 through 1989.

  *The only real difference is that Chinese chariots had more spokes in their wheels than Western ones.

  *Horses, that is.

  *The Western core’s main tin source was in southeastern Anatolia.

  *I’d like to take this opportunity to thank once again for all their support my codirectors Sebastiano Tusa (formerly superintendent of archaeology for Trapani Province), Kristian Kristiansen (University of Gothenburg), Christopher Prescott (University of Oslo), Michael Kolb (Northern Illinois University), and Emma Blake (University of Arizona), superintendents Rossella Giglio and Caterina Greco, the people of Salemi (especially Giovanni Bascone and Nicola Spagnolo), the many donors who made the Stanford project possible, and all the students and staff who took part in the project.

  *Historians conventionally call the years 1046–771 BCE the Western Zhou period; the period from the royal family’s eastward migration in 771 until 481, 453, or 403 BCE (different historians choose different end-points) they speak of as the Eastern Zhou. To make things more confusing, historians also regularly call 722–481 BCE the Spring and Autumn period after the main chronicle of these years, The Springs and Autumns of the State of Lu, and call 480–221 BCE the Warring States period.

  *If it’s true, that is. Most historians suspect that Darius actually
murdered the genuine Smerdis and overthrew a priestly clique around him.

  *By the first century BCE cast iron was common in China; wrought iron, made by heating ore to 1,650°F and repeatedly hammering the soft “bloom” this produces, was the only technique known in the West until the fourteenth century CE.

  *There is a problem here: Zhaodun’s story is set around 610 BCE, but crossbows became common only in the mid fifth century. Some historians conclude from such discrepancies that the Zuozhuan is really a bundle of folktales, growing by accretions as they were retold over the centuries, expressing generalized ideals but telling us little about real advisers and rulers. This, though, may be too skeptical. While much in the Zhaodun story is clearly fantastic, the compilers of the Zuozhuan apparently had access to good sources and seem to give us at least some sense of institutional and intellectual changes.

  *Not all, though. The Mahavira (roughly 497–425 BCE), founding father of Jainism, came from Magadha, India’s most powerful state. Zoroaster, whom some historians include among the Axial Age masters, was Iranian, although he lived—probably some time between 1400 and 600 BCE—while Persia was still marginal to the Western core. (I do not discuss Zoroaster here because the evidence is so messy.)

  *The rabbinic schools flourished particularly in the first century BCE and the first few centuries CE.

  *Some intellectual historians and many New Age devotees turn this on its head, keeping the East-West distinction but arguing that Eastern/South Asian thought liberates the human spirit while Western abstraction puts a straitjacket on it.

  *That is, the whole world that Polybius knew about; he had no idea what Qin was doing.

  *The four great powers (Jin, Qi, Chu, and Qin) of the sixth century BCE became six when Jin split into three states (Hann, Wei, and Zhao) after a civil war. Some historians include Yan, around modern Beijing, as a seventh great power.

  *Literally: Alexander was a foot shorter than the Persian king, and the first time he jumped on the throne his feet did not reach the ground. They dangled in a most ungodlike way until a courtier rushed up with a footstool.

  *The Qin Great Wall is not the iconic stone barrier you can visit on day trips from Beijing (that one dates mostly to the sixteenth century CE). Nor is it true that the Great Wall can be seen from orbiting spacecraft, let alone from the moon.

  *This is what Confucian scholars claimed, at least; many modern historians suspect that the gentry embellished the story. The cutting-in-two of peasants, however, seems indisputable.

  *There are a lot of different ways to refer to Chinese emperors. Each had one or more names of his own (Liu Bang was also known as Liu Ji) and each was also assigned at least one “temple name” (Liu became Gaodi, but was also known as Gaozu, “High Progenitor”). To avoid confusion, I will refer to all emperors by the temple name used in Anne Paludan’s useful book The Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors. Where there are multiple emperors with the same names, I add the name of their dynasty too (for example, Han Wudi, Liang Wudi, and so on).

  *In those days before soap, people who could afford it got clean by oiling up, then scraping themselves down. That may not be to everyone’s taste, but compared to using urine as toothpaste (which one Roman poet mentions, albeit in mockery), it was positively hygienic. Genuine soap, and toothpaste, were invented a thousand years later in China.

  *This is how the poet Chuci described the luxuries in an account of Chang’an’s palaces in 208 BCE, although these particular delights have not yet turned up in excavations.

  *Historians often call the period 202 BCE–9 CE the Western Han, because the capital was at Chang’an in the west, and the period 25–220 CE the Eastern Han, because the capital was at Luoyang in the east. Others prefer to speak of Former and Later Han.

  *Jin had been the name of one of the great warring states of the eighth through fifth centuries BCE. Most of the new states created in the period of disunion in 220–589 CE reused older names to make their rule seem legitimate, apparently unconcerned by the confusion this would cause for students today.

  *So called to distinguish it from the “Western Jin” who had ruled all China from Chang’an between 280 and 316 CE.

  *He did, though, take the evenings off to write The Meditations, one of the classics of Stoic philosophy.

  *This assumes, of course, that Basiliskos actually was a bungling idiot. The Romans preferred conspiracy theories, accusing Basiliskos of taking bribes and almost lynching him.

  *Once again, the terminology is confusing. The Xianbei borrowed their name from the ancient kingdom of Wei (445–225 BCE) mentioned in Chapter 5. To distinguish the Xianbei state from the earlier kingdom, some historians call it Tuoba Wei (named after the Xianbei clan that ran the state); others prefer Northern Wei, the usage I follow here.

  *“Paperwork” is the right word. Genuine paper, invented in Han China, became widespread in the seventh century.

  *When Britain reorganized its civil service in the 1880s it introduced self-consciously similar examinations, testing bright young men on their knowledge of Greek and Latin classics before sending them off to govern India, and even now British civil servants are still known as mandarins. Nineteenth-century conservatives saw exams as part of a sinister plot to “Chinesify” Britain.

  *Humans, not rats, spread the plague. Moving on foot, the average rat relocates barely a quarter of a mile during its two-year lifespan; left to rats, the plague would have advanced merely twelve miles per century.

  *Historians use “Turkic” to describe steppe nomads ancestral to the modern Turks, who migrated to what we now call Turkey only in the eleventh century.

  *The technical term is Monophysite, from the Greek for “one nature.”

  *Distant relatives of the Turks at the other end of the steppe highway whom Heraclius hired to invade Mesopotamia in the 620s.

  *Guifei actually means “consort”; Yang’s own name was Yuhuan, but the title Guifeihas stuck.

  *As was mentioned earlier, historians generally switch from the Greek name Mesopotamia to the Arabic name Iraq for the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with the seventh-century Muslim conquest.

  *Caliphs continued in Baghdad until 1258 (and “shadow caliphs” carried on even later in Cairo), but like the kings of Zhou China after 771 BCE, they were mere figure-heads. Emirs would normally mention the caliph in their Friday prayers but otherwise ignore him.

  *Charlemagne’s actual name was Carolus; Charlemagne is a Gallicized version of Carolus Magnus, “Charles the Great.”

  *Irene was a worthy rival to Theodora and Wu; she seized the throne in 797 after having her own son’s eyes gouged out to disqualify him from ruling.

  *Ifriqiya is an Arabized version of Africa, the Roman name for Tunisia.

  †Radical in the sense that they belonged to the Isma‘ili Shiite sect, which often used violence to oppose what it saw as illegitimate Sunni regimes, rather than the “Twelver” Shiites, who awaited more peacefully the return of the hidden twelfth imam.

  *I would like to thank Dr. Hans-Peter Stika for his analysis of these finds.

  *There are several ways to transliterate Turkic names; some historians prefer Qarluq to Karluk, Qarakhanid to Karakhanid, and Saljuq to Seljuk.

  *In most years the Song issued about a billion bronze coins plus notes valued at 1.25 billion coins. The notes were fully convertible back to bronze, guaranteed by a reserve of 360 million coins.

  *A hundred catties are roughly 130 pounds; rovings are twisted fibers.

  * Eleventh-century tax registers are extraordinarily difficult to interpret, and some historians think the increase was smaller. None, however, denies that it rose significantly or disputes its consequences for energy use.