The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Babylon was in hardship too, and the city’s suffering grew more intense as Nebuchadnezzar’s twenty-year reign drew to an end. The city’s troubles are described in the Erra Epic, a long poem in which the god Marduk complains that his statue is unpolished, his temple in disrepair, but he can’t leave Babylon long enough to do anything about it, because every time he departs the city, something horrendous happens to it. The current horrendousness is the hovering mischief of another god, Erra, who because of his nature can’t resist afflicting the city: “I shall finish off the land and count it as ruins,” he says. “I shall fell the cattle, I shall fell the people.” Babylon itself, shrivelled by the wind, had become like a “luxuriant orchard” whose fruit had withered before ripening. “Woe to Babylon,” Marduk mourns, “I filled it with seeds like a pine cone, but its abundance did not come to harvest.”12

  The dryness and failed crops suggest famine; the falling of people and cattle, a repeat visitation of the arrows of Apollo Sminthian. Sickness and hunger did nothing to improve the defenses of either city. By the time that Tiglath-Pileser’s son succeeded his father, the Aramaean problem had become so acute that he was forced to make a treaty with the new king of Babylon. Together, the two kingdoms hoped to beat off their common enemy.

  The attempt failed. Not long after, Aramaeans rampaged across Assyria, seizing for themselves all but the very center of the empire. They invaded Babylon as well; the son of Nebuchadnezzar, the great king, lost his throne to an Aramaean usurper.

  The Aramaeans, like the Dorians, did not write. And so as Egypt descended into fractured disorder and darkness spread across the Greek peninsula, a similar fog rolled from the old Hittite lands to cover Mesopotamia. The land between the two rivers entered its own dark age, and for a hundred years or so, no history emerges from the blackness.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The Fall of the Shang

  In China, between 1073 and 1040 BC,

  the Shang Dynasty falls to the virtue of the Zhou

  FARTHER TO THE EAST, Wu Ting had passed his throne, after a sixty-year reign, to his son. The Shang kingship went on, for some years, from brother to brother or father to son, more or less in peace. The center of the Shang empire was the Yellow river, and the Shang capital remained at Yin.

  By the time that the Mesopotamian kingdoms had begun to crumble, though, the kingship of China was also in crisis.

  It was a very different crisis than any faced by Nebuchadnezzar I or Tiglath-Pileser. The Shang kings and their people were not dealing with the invasions of unknown foreign tribes; the Shang king’s enemies were the cousins of his own people.

  Just west of the Shang lands, the Zhou tribe lay across the Wei river valley. They were not exactly subjects of the Shang king, although their chief—the “Lord of the West”—paid lip service to the authority of the crown. Their land, after all, lay almost four hundred miles distant from the capital. Oracle bones travelled back and forth between the Lord of the West and the Shang palace, keeping a path of shared language and customs open.1 But the Zhou noblemen were loyal first to their own lord, not to the distant Shang monarch. When rebellion broke out, they looked to the Lord of the West for their orders.

  THE ANCIENT CHRONICLES make it very clear that the Shang kings brought this rebellion on themselves. They abandoned wisdom, and this wisdom (not military might, as in the west) was the foundation of their power.

  The emperor Wu-yi, the fifth ruler to follow Wu Ting, showed the first signs of decay. His offenses, according to Sima Qian, were primarily against the gods: he made idols, “called them heavenly gods,” and played lots with them. When he won, he mocked the idols as lousy gamblers.

  42.1 Shang and Zhou

  This was a serious breach of his royal responsibilities. With more and more weight being placed on the oracle-bone ritual, the royal court had become the center of divine revelations from the ancestors to the living. All queries to the ancestors were carried out in the name of the king; he was the conduit for the messages from the divine powers. For him to mock those powers was appalling.

  The punishment fit the crime; Wu-yi was struck by lightning while out hunting. He was succeeded by his son and then his grandson, under whom (according to Sima Qian) the country declined still more. Then his great-grandson Chou inherited, and the Shang authority crashed.

  Chou was gifted with natural graces—Sima Qian praises him for his strength, intelligence, articulateness, and perception—but he used them all for ill. “His knowledge was sufficient to resist remonstrance,” Qian writes, “and his speech was adequate to cover up his wrongdoing…. He considered everyone beneath him. He was fond of wine, licentious in pleasure, and doted on women.” Chou’s love of wine and pleasure led him to raise taxes so that he could stock his hunting forests and pleasure parks with game; his love of women put him under the spell of a cruel and domineering courtesan named Ta Chi, whose words became the only ones he would hear. His love of spectacle grew so great that he built a pool and filled it with wine, hung meat like a forest around it, and “made naked men and women chase one another” around the pool and through the forest.2

  Weird frivolity gave way to serious tyranny. Noblemen suspected of disloyalty were forced to lie on a red-hot rack. Chou had one court official flayed, and another carved up into meat strips and hung to dry. When his uncle remonstrated with him, he remarked that since the heart of a wise man had seven chambers, he would need to examine his uncle’s heart with his own eyes before heeding his advice—and then carried out the threat. His cruelty worsened until “it knew no end.” The noblemen—the “families of the hundred cognomens,” those with honorable names—were “filled with resentment and hatred.”

  Finally he overstepped himself. The Zhou chief Wen, the Lord of the West, was in the capital on business, and Chou had set his spies to follow him. When the spies reported that the Lord of the West had “sighed in secret” over the behavior of the king, Chou had Wen arrested and thrown into jail.101

  Hearing that their lord was in jail, the Zhou tribes brought Chou the kind of tribute likely to soften his heart: fine objects and beautiful women. Chou, properly touched, set Wen free. But the Lord of the West refused to return home without making some effort to shield Chou’s oppressed subjects from the king’s brutality. He told Chou that he had a proposition for him; if he would promise to stop using his red-hot rack, Wen would gift him with the fertile Zhou land around the Lo river, which flowed south to join the Wei. Chou, who had done very well out of Wen’s imprisonment, agreed to the deal, took ownership of the land, and sent Wen home.

  This turned out to be a mistake. Wen was much loved in his own lands as a warrior-king who was both good (as shown by his willingness to sacrifice his own lands for the people) and mighty (the later Chinese historian and philosopher Mengzi mentions, offhand, that he was ten feet tall).3 Back in the west, he began quietly to round up opposition to the king. “Many of the feudal lords rebelled,” Qian writes, “and turned to the Lord of the West.” They were joined by the sages of the court who read the oracle bones and divine prophecies; they rose up en masse with all their instruments of ritual, left the court, and marched west.

  Wen, by this time an elderly man (a hundred years old, according to Mengzi), died before he could lead his followers into the Shang capital.4 But his son Wu took up his banner. Eight hundred of the feudal lords lined up behind him, each with their own soldiers. The Zhou army of fifty thousand marched towards the Shang palace at Yin. And Chou ordered his own troops out to meet the attack: seven hundred thousand strong.

  The two armies met about twenty miles outside Yin, at the Battle of Muye. By any measure, the imperial army should have crushed the tiny rebel force, but the Zhou had two advantages. The first was tactical: Zhou noblemen had provided three hundred war-chariots, while the royal army had none at all.5 But it was the second advantage—the Zhou possession of the moral high ground—that turned the battle against the king. The king’s men, disgusted with their leader’s cr
uelty, were ripe for defection. As the Zhou line thundered towards them, the Shang soldiers in the front line reversed the direction of their attack and drove the men behind them back, turning the entire army around and throwing it into flight.6

  Seeing the inevitable defeat looming, Chou retreated to his palace, where he donned jade armor in preparation for a last stand. But the invading Zhou forces burned the palace down around his ears. He died in flames, a poetic end for the man who had used fire to torture and kill.

  There is in this story a strong whiff of discomfort with Wen’s revolt. The ancient historians do not celebrate the overthrow of the tyrant, and Wu makes no boast of reigning from horizon to horizon, or of piling enemy heads by the gates. He is praised not for his skill at fighting, but for his restoration of proper order.

  The rebellion of the Zhou is not exactly the disobedience of a governed people. Even before the revolt, the Shang king had an ambiguous power over the Zhou. Wen was a king in his own right, but the Shang king was able to throw him in jail and force a ransom. On the other hand, when Wen offered Chou a gift of land, the king recognized it happily as a present, rather than pointing out indignantly that he already ruled it.

  But the ancient historians still find themselves forced to justify the Zhou defiance. The Zhou and Shang were sibling cultures, and battles between them were as disconcerting as the hostility between Set and Osiris in the early years of Egypt. It is positively necessary that the first Zhou king be, not a lawless subject, but rather a virtuous man who rises up to overthrow vice and begin the cycle again. For this reason, the Zhou rule is dated not from the victorious Wu, but from his father, who was unjustly imprisoned and who willingly sacrificed land for the good of his people. He, not his warlike son, is considered to be the first Zhou king. The Shang rule is said to have ended not at the gates of the burning palace, but back when the noblemen and the oracle-readers gathered under the leadership of the Lord of the West. And the Zhou takeover was not the invasion of an enemy people. Chou’s own lawlessness was the cause of his death. For the Chinese chroniclers, rot always came from within.

  Virtue notwithstanding, Wu of the Zhou claimed his new title by thrusting a pike into Chou’s singed head and staking it out in front of Yin’s gates for all to see. The old order had perished in fire; the new order had arrived.

  Part Four

  EMPIRES

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The Mandate of Heaven

  Between 1040 and 918 BC,

  the Zhou kings of China come up with a justification for empire-building

  and discover its shortcomings

  ALTHOUGH WU was the first Zhou king, Wen (who died before the final conquest of the Shang) very soon became the symbolic beginning of the new dynasty. Much later, Confucius would remark that although the music by which Emperor Wen celebrated his victories was perfectly beautiful and perfectly good, the victory music of the Emperor Wu “though perfectly beautiful, was not perfectly good.”1 Wu’s violent scouring of the Shang capital was a dangerous violation of the emperor’s divine authority.

  No one wanted the Shang back, but Wu’s new dynasty had to be justified with care. At the start of his reign, Sima Qian tells us, Wu sacrificed to the heavens to make up for the misdeeds of the last Shang ruler; he “put aside shields and pole-axes, stored his weapons, and discharged his soldiers, to show to the world that he would no longer use them.”2 The resulting peace was intended to make up for the frenzy of his accession.

  This was all very ethical, but also a practical necessity. To keep his throne, Wu would have to rule by influence and tact, not sheer force. The Shang king had been unable to fight off the united force of the feudal lords, and Wu also had to face facts: he ruled over a kingdom filled with strong personalities who would resent too autocratic a rule. Sima Qian refers to the “Lords of the Nine Lands”—noblemen who governed their own territories, while still owing loyalty to the king. But there were many more than nine lands; the Record of Rites, written several hundred years later, counts up a total of 1,763 separately governed territories at the beginning of the Zhou Period.1023

  Inscriptions of gifts given and loyalties claimed seem to show a complicated pyramid-like structure with as many as five ranks of officials sloping down from the Zhou throne to a second rank of “enfeoffed” lords who had control of the states, through three more ranks of noblemen with decreasing territory and power.4

  Many histories call these noblemen “feudal lords.” The Zhou king did possess some sort of claim to the whole country; he did not “own” China’s land, as a medieval feudal lord might, but he did claim the right to run it properly. This right of administration he granted to his noblemen, in exchange for their loyalty and (when necessary) military support. When a “lord” was “enfeoffed” by the king of the Zhou, he wasn’t given a gift of his land; instead he was given gifts as a symbol that the Zhou king had awarded him a portion of sacred authority. Most often, these gifts were bronze vessels with inscriptions. A gift of bronze symbolized both wealth and power: enough power to control the miners who dug the metal out of the earth, the craftsmen who cast it into shape, and the priests who inscribed it.5 The Zhou position at the top of the power ladder was represented by nine of these ceremonial vessels: the Nine Cauldrons, which resided in the Zhou capital city.

  There’s a big difference between this sort of “feudal” relationship and the feudalism practiced in later times. For one thing, later feudal lords would claim actual possession of the land, not mere moral authority over it. Moral authority can disappear in an awful hurry. Wu himself leaned heavily on the justice of his court to prop up his power. “To secure Heaven’s protection,” he tells one of his younger brothers, not long after gaining the throne, “…we must single out the evil people and remove them….Day and night we must reward and comfort the people to secure our western land.”6 He also did his best to pay homage to the divine authority which the Shang had held before him. He did move his capital city to the double city of Feng and Hao, separated by the Fenghe river;103 but he appointed Chou’s own son, the deposed heir to the throne, as one of his subject lords, with authority over a vassal center of the old Shang domain. According to Sima Qian, this son, Lu-fu, was given the old capital city of Yin as his base, and put in charge of the surrounding area, because “Yin had just been pacified, and [the situation] was not yet settled.” Wu also detailed two of his younger brothers to “assist” the ex-prince; two watchdogs to make sure that Lu-fu behaved himself.7

  43.1 The Western Zhou

  As soon as Wu died, the shakiness of his authority became clear. His son was still young, and so his brother Tan took charge as regent. Almost at once, though, the two brothers who were supposed to be supervising Lu-fu organized an armed uprising in the middle of the old Shang territory. They intended to put Lu-fu back on the throne as their puppet-ruler.

  Tan turned out the army in the name of the young king and overwhelmed the rebels with numbers. Lu-fu died in the fight, as did one of the brothers; and Tan then did his best to break up the remaining Shang resistance by deporting the obstinate Shang loyalists who lived around Yin to other parts of the empire.8 Granting any recognition to the divine authority of the Shang was simply too dangerous.

  Ancient accounts tell us that, after seven years of regency, Tan willingly stepped down as regent and turned the reins of power over to the now-grown Ch’eng. Perhaps he actually did. On the other hand, this relinquishment of power goes even further towards solving the knotty problem of the Zhou rise to power. The young king Ch’eng held his power only because his father was a regicide. When Tan, a man praised across his entire country for both wisdom and virtue, willingly handed authority over to him, his power was shifted onto a different foundation.9 A virtuous man gives his power away only to a more virtuous man, and that man was Ch’eng.

  Tan stayed on as one of the young king’s ministers. As the “Duke of Zhou,” he is credited with organizing the Chinese state into an efficient bureaucracy, perhaps f
or the first time. This organization involved the proper oversight of land, a tax system, appointments of officials, and other mundane details. But the Duke of Zhou’s most important job was the gathering together of all the ceremonies surrounding the royal court into a book of ritual. If the Zhou king was to rule without constantly using his army to whip rebels into shape, his divine authority needed to be clearly on view. The rituals that surrounded him would be the outward show of his moral authority, the visible shadow cast by his invisible right to rule.

  With his power at the center of the kingdom established, Ch’eng now had to worry about the edges of it. No book of ritual was going to convince peoples who lived a day’s ride or more from the capital city that the Zhou king must be obeyed. That would have to be done by force.

  The eastern side of his empire was, perhaps, the most worrying; the Shang remnant had been settled out there and needed to be watched. So the Duke of Zhou built a fortress to the east, in a strategic spot: it would dominate the Yellow river ford (which could be crossed by a hostile army) and protect the eastern approach to the Zhou capital.10 This fortress became the center of a new city: Loyang.104

  Ch’eng then sent his brothers out to build similar centers of Zhou watchfulness along the other edges of his domain. This had the additional advantage of getting them out of the capital and away from any temptation to steal his crown. As a result, the outer ring of the Zhou kingdom became a set of Zhou colonies, each ruled by a royal relative. The largest were at Jin, Wey, Lu, Qi, and Yen (the original city of the ancient Yen colony lay at the modern site of Peking).