Even if Tuthmosis IV didn’t beg for it, the alliance was very good for Egypt, which thereafter dominated its Canaanite holdings with the promised alliance of its good friends. No Western Semitic city, glancing at the huge empire to the south and the equally huge one to the north, dared to revolt, and a frightened peace followed.
Chapter Thirty
The Shifting Capitals of the Shang
In China, between 1753 and 1400 BC, the Shang kings move their capital city five different times and finally settle at Yin
TO THE EAST, the Shang dynasty was ruling, in conspicuous virtue, over the territory once held by the Xia.
Little detail survives from these early years of the Shang Dynasty. But the ruins of Shang cities reveal that in the first half of the dynasty’s rule—from its traditional beginnings in 1766 until around 1400—the Shang rulers had no single capital. Tradition tells us that the capital city moved five different times in these 350 years. The sites cannot be identified with complete certainty, but archaeologists believe that all of them fell within a circle drawn around the Yellow river, east of the Xia capital, in the land which was most likely Tang’s ancestral home.
These shifts reveal a dynasty which, although it managed to keep the crown in the family, did not yet rule with complete authority. During the reign of Tang’s heirs, the chaos that had marked the last years of the Xia Dynasty still rippled through the new regime.
TANG’S MOST POWERFUL OFFICIAL was Yi Yin, a man who rose to power either because he gained such a reputation for wisdom, while farming outside the capital Po, that Tang begged him to come and serve in the court; or because he served as Tang’s cook and produced extraordinary meals (the Grand Historian Sima Qian records both stories).1
Whatever his origins, Yi Yin was a capable administrator but a wild card in the Tang court. A later story suggests that he temporarily defected at one point, going over to the Xia enemy for some time before returning to his previous loyalty.2 More ominously, he was at the helm of the palace during a wholesale dying off of the Shang heirs.
When Tang died, after a respectably long rule of thirty years, Yi Yin was still serving as chief court official. Tang had appointed his oldest son to be his heir, but the young man “died before he was enthroned.” The second son (presumably younger and more malleable) took the throne instead, but died after two years; then the third and final son was coronated and, after four years, died as well. Barring hemophilia or suicidal tendencies, this pattern of deaths is more than a little odd.
Sima Qian, who relates these details, attaches no suspicion to Yi Yin; and indeed, Yi Yin made no direct attempt to seize the throne after the death of the final son. Instead, he presided over the accession of Tang’s grandson T’ai Jia, the child of the oldest son who had died six years before. But his actions suggest canniness, not loyalty. Yi Yin knew that the nobles of China would not accept the enthronement of an ex-cook (or ex-farmer); he was working his way towards a kingship in all but name. Thanks to the rapid decease of all of Tang’s sons, the throne was now held by a child, and that child was under Yi Yin’s guidance.
According to Sima Qian, Yi Yin spent the first year of T’ai Jia’s rule writing out precepts for the young king to follow. These precepts were apparently not followed: three years after T’ai Jia’s coronation, “he became dull and tyrannical; he did not follow Tang’s precepts and discredited Tang’s prestige.”3 As the boy was probably still very young, it’s difficult to see how tyrannical he could have been. More likely, he had yanked with impatience at the puppetmaster’s strings. In response, Yi Yin promptly declared that the virtue of the throne was in danger, and sent the young king off into detention at a palace twenty-five miles out of town. For the next three years, “Yi Yin was in charge of the administration on the emperor’s behalf, and in doing so received the feudal lords.”
30.1 The Shang Capitals
Sima Qian ends the story on a happy note. After three years in exile, the young emperor “repented his errors, accepted the blame himself, and returned to good behavior.” Presumably this means he was now ready to be guided by Yi Yin, who welcomed him back and turned the kingdom over to him. “Yi Yin,” Sima Qian concludes, “thought him to be excellent.”
A variant on this story, told in other sources, may be closer to the truth; T’ai Jia escaped from the palace where he was guarded, returned to his capital city, and assassinated the kingmaker.
NO DETAILED ACCOUNTS of the reigns of the next fourteen Shang kings have survived, but we know that under the tenth Shang king, Chung Ting, a certain unrest seized the dynasty. Chung Ting moved his capital to Hsiao. Excavations at the site thought to be Hsiao have revealed a city surrounded by a stamped earth wall ninety feet thick in places, and nearly thirty feet high. The wall took, perhaps, eighteen years for ten thousand laborers to complete.4 The Shang king may not have governed his realm with the authority of the Egyptian pharaoh, but he had enough power to compel labor from the multitudes.
Despite the immense Shang investment in this wall, less than two generations later, the twelfth Shang king moved the capital again, this time to Hsiang. His heir, the thirteenth Shang king Tsu Yi, packed up and went to a fourth capital, Keng. When Keng was destroyed by a flood, Tsu Yi transferred the Shang headquarters to the city of Yen, thus becoming the only Shang king to occupy three capital cities during his reign.
This constant migration of the Shang capital city is puzzling. Every other ancient kingdom (so far as we know) tried to maintain a particular city as a capital, only deserting it in the face of hostile invasion or natural disaster. Yellow river flooding may have had something to do with the wandering Shang capital. But Shang China was even more isolated than Egypt had been centuries before; it had no water trade with other nations, no land routes to the outside.
The hostility of nearby village patriarchs may have been the nearest equivalent to foreign invasion. Sima Qian says that these were years of rising and falling power. During the reigns of some Shang kings, the feudal lords “came to pay homage,” but other monarchs found that the feudal lords stayed away and refused to visit the capital with tribute.5 The power of the Shang king was anything but unquestioned. Possibly that huge stamped wall was built for protection against the Shang’s own countrymen.
Sometime around 1400, the nineteenth Shang king, P’an Keng, decided to move the capital city to the other side of the Yellow river. The courtiers objected, resisting to the point of revolt. But P’an Keng was adamant.
A story surviving from P’an Keng’s reign hints at the wily flexibility that preserved the Shang crown, even in the face of upheaval. Three different ancient texts record P’an Keng’s response to his courtiers when they balked at his announcement that it was time to desert the old capital city:
I have consulted the [oracle] and obtained the reply: “This is no place for us.” When the former kings had any important business, they gave reverent heed to the commands of Heaven. In a case like this especially they did not indulge the wish for constant repose; they did not abide ever in the same city. Up to this time the capital has been in five regions…. [We must] follow the example of these old times…following the meritorious course of the former kings.6
In this tale, P’an Keng takes the constant shifting of the capital from city to city—a history which surely demonstrates weakness—and offers it as a tradition hallowed by age and stamped with divine approval. His ancestors did not move their seat of government because they could not control the turmoil around them. Instead, they moved because they refused to wallow in “constant repose.” The difficulties of the past are recast as proof of strength.
The strategy worked, and Yin became the center of a newly strong court. “The Yin way of government again prospered,” Sima Qian writes, “and all the feudal lords came to court to pay homage, for [P’an Keng] followed Tang’s virtuous conduct.”7 P’an Keng himself, despite forcing his followers into an unwanted migration, became the object of his people’s love. After his reign, his younger
brother took his place, at which point those same noblemen of China who had “borne resentment, not wanting to move,” instead “longed for P’an Keng.”
The Hittite kings tore their kingdom apart fighting over the seat of power. Instead of resisting, the Shang bent. Instead of taking up arms against opposition, they shifted and changed their ground, and held China’s throne for centuries.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Mycenaeans of Greece
On the Greek peninsula, between 1600 and 1400 BC, Mycenaean cities fight with their neighbors and carry on trade by sea
WHILE THE MINOANS of Crete were descending into increasing shabbiness and disorder, the cities on the peninsula north of the island were growing greater.
By 1600, the people of Mycenae had begun to bury their rulers in graves well stocked with treasure, high on a central hill. Whoever these kings were, they had gained enough power over their subjects to be treated with honor in death. But their authority didn’t extend very far beyond Mycenae’s walls. The royal palace at Mycenae was matched by another that dominated the city of Thebes, to the northeast; a third palace stood at Pylos, on the southwest coast, and a fourth was built at Athens, just across a short expanse of land.1 The cities on the Greek peninsula, divided from each other by mountain ridges, ruled over themselves from their earliest days.80
Despite this independence, the cities shared trade, a language, and a culture. It is from the city of Mycenae, the largest on the peninsula, that the culture takes its name; as far as the historian is concerned, Thebes, Athens, and Pylos were all inhabited by Mycenaeans.
A tradition preserved by the Greek historian Plutarch (among others) tells us that the Minoans and the Mycenaeans fell out with each other very early. One of Minos’s sons, wandering around on the northern peninsula for some unknown reason, was killed by Mycenaeans; as blood-price for his son, Minos ordered the Mycenaean cities to take up the burden of supplying live boys and girls for the upkeep of the bull-man beneath the Knossos palace.
31.1 The Mycenaeans
According to Plutarch, this burden was borne by the city of Athens, on the southeastern coast. For two years the people of Athens sent their sons and daughters to the Minotaur. By the third year, though, the Athenian parents were muttering with increasing bitterness against their king Aegeus, who seemed helpless against the Minoan tyrant. In the face of their swelling rage, the prince Theseus—eldest son of Aegeus—stepped forwards; he would join the third shipful of tribute, the seventh of the young men, and try to fight the Minotaur.
Aegeus, without a lot of hope that his son would return, nevertheless gave the black-sailed tribute ship an additional sail of white. Theseus promised to hoist the white sail if he overcame the Minotaur and came back unharmed. If he fell, like the others, to the Minotaur’s appetite, the pilot would unfurl the black sail, so that the father would know the worst before the ship reached port.
Once in Crete, Theseus and the other victims were sent into the Labyrinth, to be hunted through the passages by the Minotaur until they were either eaten or died from exhaustion, unable to find their way out. But Theseus caught the eye of Minos’s daughter, Ariadne. She gave him, in secret, a ball of string; when he was taken to the maze, he placed the ball on the ground at the Labyrinth’s gate and followed it as it rolled slowly down towards the sunken center. He reached the monster’s lair, killed the Minotaur, and then traced the string back out (having had the forethought to attach the end of it to the doorpost).
He then collected the other prisoners and fled back towards home, having first “bored holes in the bottom of the Cretan ships to hinder their pursuit.”2 But in the flush of triumph, Theseus forgot to change the ship’s sail. Seeing the ominous black triangle on the horizon, Aegeus threw himself off the cliff near Athens into the sea. Theseus arrived, in victory, to a weeping city; the emerald sea just beyond it was known as the Aegean afterwards, in his father’s memory.
BITS OF HISTORY glint from the facets of this myth. The Mycenaean skill at sea is on display in Theseus, staving in ship bottoms and piloting his ship home. In the Iliad, set down in writing some eight centuries later, the city of Mycenae is credited with sending a hundred ships to the combined Greek fleet: an enormous number of ships which makes Mycenae’s king one of the most powerful leaders of the expedition against Troy. But in Homer’s day, Mycenae was a shabby little town with no might.3 The catalogue of ships in the Iliad preserves a much older tradition of Mycenaean naval might.81
The Mycenaean ships were more likely to be loaded with merchandise than with living tribute. Mycenaean pottery made it as far east as Carchemish, and up northeast as far as Masat, to the north of Hattusas; Mycenaean ships sailed south to Egypt, where a cup from Mycenae was buried in style with an official of Tuthmosis III.4
But the Mycenaean trade went on chiefly with Minoans of Crete. The kingly graves of Mycenae, the burial places of the so-called Royal Grave Circle, are filled with Minoan pottery, paintings done in Minoan style, and portraits of Mycenaeans in Minoan clothing. The oxhide shields of the soldiers of Knossos are painted with dapples that mimic animal hide; the shields of Mycenae bear the same pattern.5 And it was from the Minoans that the Mycenaeans learned to write. The Minoans had evolved their own distinct script, following the old pattern that had developed thousands of years before: from seals on goods to pictograms, from pictograms to a streamlined pictographic script. The earliest form of this script survives on a scattering of tablets and stone engravings across Crete, and is generally called “Linear A” to distinguish it from its more sophisticated descendent: “Linear B,” the version of Minoan script which spread north to the Mycenaeans.6
Despite some shared culture, there was war between the two peoples from the earliest times. The victory of Theseus—a victory of wits and civilization over a brutal and unsophisticated people—mirrors the later Greek disdain for other civilizations. Herodotus himself voices this scorn, explaining that the Greek ruler Polycrates was the first man to field a navy, and establish his rule over the sea: “I discount Minos of Knossos and anyone earlier than Minos who gained control of the sea,” Herodotus remarks, in passing; “it remains the case that Polycrates was the first member of what we recognize as the human race to do so.”7
This dislike was sharpened by the competition between the two peoples. The navies of both patrolled the Mediterranean, and it is unlikely that the two fleets existed in perfect peace. The trade with Egypt, which had gold and ivory, was too valuable; any king would have seen the advantage of a monopoly. And Crete boasted a strategic location, right on the trade route south into Egypt.
The Minoan goods found in Mycenaean graves reflect a temporary Cretan dominance. But after the eruption of Thera, the cultural influence between Crete and Greece began to run the other way. Distinctively Mycenaean pottery and cups appeared with greater frequency in Minoan houses, and by 1500 or so, Cretan tombs began to show a distinctively Mycenaean design that had not appeared on the island before.8 The tribute of Athens to Knossos had reversed itself. Like the victorious Theseus, the Mycenaean cities had gained the upper hand over the island to the south.
Sometime around 1450, the city of Knossos was sacked, although its palace remained standing. The palaces of Mallia and Phaistos were flattened. Across Crete, some towns were abandoned; others shrank, abruptly, as if their young men had fought and fallen, or fled.
No traces of a new culture appear on the landscape. We can only assume that the Mycenaean-Minoan relationship had degenerated still further, from thorny jousting into out-and-out war. The survival of the Knossos palace implies that someone in the invading force needed the Minoan center of government for his own uses; whatever Mycenaean king led the invasion may have used Knossos as his own headquarters.9
But life in Crete after the invasion does not appear to have changed remarkably. The tombs remained more or less the same in design, Linear B continued in use, the pottery of the Minoans did not suddenly alter.10 By the time of the takeover, the Mycenaean
invaders were much like the Minoans. Their arrival was more like a sibling takeover, a formal change in leadership between two countries that had already been exchanging breath for centuries. The Minoans had been infiltrated, changed from within; the Labyrinth had been breached.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Struggle of the Gods
Between 1386 and 1340 BC, one pharaoh makes strategic alliances, the next changes the religion of Egypt, and the captive Hebrews disappear into the desert
THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN the Mitanni princess and the Egyptian pharaoh Tuthmosis IV, which sealed the treaty between the two countries, was apparently a success; their son Amenhotep became the next pharaoh.82
Judging from the length of his reign, Amenhotep III was still in his teens when he came to the throne around 1386. His reign was marked by the growing peace and wealth of Egypt’s cities. Amenhotep III’s inscriptions don’t record battles; they describe the feats of a king with plenty of leisure time on his hands. According to one inscription, he killed 102 lions in the first ten years of his reign, a favorite sport of Egyptian kings.1 Another credits him with killing fifty-six wild bulls in a single day on a wild-cattle hunt. (Apparently the bulls were penned into an enclosure before he started hunting, which made the task a little easier.)2
Egypt’s trade flourished; among the objects found at Mycenae are several with Amenhotep III’s name inscribed on them. And although the king made the obligatory trip down into Nubia to put down yet another revolt, the battle was small in scope. The palace account of the campaign tells us that Amenhotep,
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