It’s probably not a coincidence that coinage was invented at pretty much the same time in China and in Turkey. Both developments were responses to the fundamental changes seen across the world around 3,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. These military, political and economic upheavals brought us not only modern coinage, but something else that’s resonated till the present day – new ideas about how people and their rulers saw themselves. In short, the beginning of modern political thinking, the world of Confucius and Classical Athens. The next stage of that journey starts with the empire that toppled Croesus – the Persians.
PART SIX
The World in the Age of Confucius
500–300 BC
Across the world different civilizations were evolving models for the government of society that would remain influential for thousands of years. While Socrates taught the people of Athens how to disagree, Confucius was propounding his political philosophy of harmony in China and the Persians found a way for different peoples to coexist under their vast empire. In Central America the Olmecs created the sophisticated calendars, religion and art that would characterize Central American civilizations for over a thousand years. In northern Europe there were no towns or cities, states or empires, no writing or coinage, but the objects that were made there nevertheless show that these civilizations had a sophisticated vision of themselves and their place in the wider world.
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Oxus Chariot Model
Gold model, found near the Oxus river, on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan
500–300 BC
In the fifth century BC, societies across the world were beginning to articulate very clear ideas about themselves and about others. They were inventing and defining what we would now call statecraft. This is the era of what some have called the ‘empires of the mind’. The world superpower of 2,500 years ago was Persia, an empire that was run on a rather different principle from previous empires. As Dr Michael Axworthy, the Director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Exeter, has put it, up to that time they had generally been based on naked might being right; the Persian Empire was based on the principle of the iron fist in the velvet glove.
I want to explore that empire in this tiny golden chariot, pulled by four golden horses. It’s easy to imagine a chariot like this racing along the great Persian imperial roads. There are two figures in it: the driver, who stands holding the reins, and the much larger and clearly very important passenger, who sits on a bench at his side. He is probably meant to be a senior administrator, visiting the distant province that he rules on behalf of the king of Persia.
The model was indeed found in a very distant province, on the far eastern edge of the empire, near the borders of modern Tajikistan and Afghanistan. It’s part of a huge hoard of gold and silver objects, known as the Oxus treasure, that for more than a hundred years have formed one of the great collections at the British Museum.
This exquisite chariot sits quite comfortably on the palm of the hand, where it looks like an expensive toy for a privileged child. We can’t, however, be certain that it was in fact a toy; it could have been made as an offering to the gods, either asking them for a favour or thanking them for one. But whatever it meant then, this chariot today allows us today to conjure up an empire.
What kind of an empire was it? About 70 miles north of Shiraz, in Iran, the low camel-coloured hills open out into a flat windy plain. In this featureless landscape is a huge stone plinth, rising in six gigantic steps to what looks like a gabled hermit’s cell. It dominates the entire landscape. It is the tomb of Cyrus, the first Persian emperor, the man who 2,500 years ago built the largest empire that the world had then seen, and changed the world – or at least the Middle East – for ever.
Centred on modern Iran, the vast Persian Empire ran from Turkey and Egypt in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. To control an empire like this required land transport on a quite unprecedented scale; the Persian Empire is the first great ‘road’ empire of history.
The Persian Empire was more a collection of kingdoms than what we might immediately think of as an empire. Cyrus called himself the Shahanshah – the King of Kings – making clear that this was a confederation of allied states, each with its own ruler but all under firm Persian control. It was a model that allowed a great deal of local autonomy and all sorts of diversity – very different from the later Roman model. The historian and writer Tom Holland elaborates:
Persian occupation could be compared to a light morning mist settling over the contours of their empire – you were aware of it, but it was never obtrusive.
The Roman approach was to encourage those they had conquered to identify with their conquerors, so that ultimately everyone within the borders of the Roman Empire came to consider themselves to be Romans. Persians went for a very different approach. So as long as you paid your taxes, and you didn’t revolt, then you’d pretty much be left alone. That said, however, you do not conquer a vast empire without spilling an immense amount of blood, and there was no question that if you dared to stand up to the Persian kings then you would be obliterated.
They obliterated troublesome people by sending armies along those wonderfully straight and fast imperial roads. But inside the empire bloodshed was generally avoided, thanks to a huge – and hugely effective – administrative machine. The King of Kings ultimately controlled everything, but at the local level he was represented by a governor – a satrap – who would keep a close eye on what was going on in the subordinate kingdoms. He would enforce law and order, levy taxes and raise armies.
The tomb of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia
Which brings us back to our golden toy, because the passenger in our chariot must be a satrap on tour. He sports a stylishly patterned overcoat – he’s obviously spent a great deal of money on it – and his headdress leaves you in no doubt that this is a man who is used to being in charge. His chariot is made for serious travel: the large-spoked wheels are as high as the horses themselves, and are clearly designed for long distances.
You can tell a lot about a state from its transport system, and our chariot tells us a great deal about imperial Persia. Public order was so secure that people could travel long distances without armed guards. And they could travel fast. With its horses specially bred for strength and speed, and with its large, steadying wheels, this chariot was the Ferrari or Porsche of its time. Broad dirt roads were kept wheel-worthy in all weathers, and there were frequent staging posts. Commands from the centre could be transmitted at speed across the whole territory, thanks to an entirely reliable royal postal service that used horsemen, runners and express messengers. Foreign visitors were deeply impressed, among them the Greek historian Herodotus:
There is nothing in the world which travels faster than these Persian couriers … it is said that men and horses are stationed along the road, equal in number to the number of days the journey takes – a man and a horse for each day. Nothing stops these couriers from covering their allotted stage in the quickest possible time – neither snow, rain, heat, nor darkness.
But our chariot doesn’t just tell us about travel and communications; it sums up the acceptance of diversity that was at the heart of the Persian imperial system. Although found on the eastern frontier near Afghanistan, it must have been made in central Persia because of the technique of its metalworking. The driver and his passenger wear the costume of the Medes, an ancient people who lived in the north-west of what is now Iran, while on the front of the chariot, prominently displayed, is the head of the Egyptian god Bes. Bes, a dwarf with bow legs, is perhaps not your most likely candidate for a divine protector, but he looked after children and people in trouble, and he was a good god to have guarding your chariot on long journeys. I suppose he’s the equivalent of a modern-day St Christopher or talisman dangling from the car mirror.
But what is an Egyptian god doing protecting a Persian on the frontiers of Afghanistan? It’s a perfect dem
onstration of the Persian Empire’s striking capacity for tolerating different religions and indeed, on occasion, adopting them from the people that they conquered. This unusually inclusive empire was also perfectly happy to use foreign languages for official proclamations. Here is Herodotus again:
No race is so ready to adopt foreign ways as the Persian; for instance, they wear the Median costume as they think it handsomer than their own, and their soldiers wear the Egyptian corselet.
The multi-faith, multicultural approach that’s summed up in our little chariot, when combined with well-organized military power, created a flexible imperial system that lasted for more than 200 years. It enabled the king to present to his subjects the image of a tolerant, accommodating empire, whatever the specific facts on the ground might have been. So, when Cyrus invaded Babylon, near modern Baghdad, in 539 BC, he could issue a grandiloquently generous decree – in Babylonian – presenting himself as the defender of the peoples that he had just conquered. He restored the cults of different gods and allowed the people taken prisoner by the Babylonians to return to their homelands. In his own words:
When my soldiers in great numbers peacefully entered Babylon … I did not allow anyone to terrorize the people … I kept in view the needs of the people and all their sanctuaries to promote their well-being … I freed all slaves.
The most famous beneficiaries of Cyrus’s shrewd political judgement after the conquest of Babylon were the Jews. Taken prisoner a generation before by Nebuchadnezzar, they were now allowed to return home to Jerusalem and to rebuild their temple. It was an act of generosity that they never forgot. In the Hebrew scriptures Cyrus is hailed as a divinely inspired benefactor and hero. In 1917, when the British government declared that it would establish in Palestine a national home to which Jews could once again return, images of Cyrus were displayed alongside photographs of George V throughout eastern Europe. Not many political gambits are still paying dividends 2,500 years later.
One of the perplexing things about the Persian Empire, though, is that the Persians themselves wrote very little about how they managed it. Most of our information comes from Greek sources. As the Greeks were for long the enemies of the Persians, it’s rather as if we knew the history of the British Empire only through documents written by the French. But modern archaeology has provided new sources of information, and in the past fifty years the Iranians themselves have rediscovered and reappropriated their great imperial past. Any visitor to Iran today feels it at once. Michael Axworthy explains:
There is a huge and unavoidable pride in the past in Iran … It’s a culture that is at ease with complexity, that has faced the complexity of different races, different religions, different languages, and has found ways to encompass them and to relate them to each other and to organize them. Not in a loose way or in a relativistic way, necessarily, but in a principled way that keeps things together. And Iranians are very keen for people to understand that they have this long, long, long history and this ancient heritage.
Axworthy’s phrase ‘empires of the mind’ sums up pretty well the theme that I’m trying to tackle in these chapters, but perhaps ‘states of mind’ would be more accurate – because I’m discussing objects that show us how different people imagine and devise an effective state. For Persia I’ve been looking at a toy chariot; for Athens I’ll be looking at a temple. As you’d imagine, because they for so long were at war, Greeks and Persians had very different ideas of what a state should be. But precisely because they were at war, each tended to define the ideal state in opposition to the other. In 480 BC Persian troops destroyed the temples on the Athenian Acropolis. In its place the Athenians built the Parthenon that we know today.
There are few objects that over the last 200 years have been so widely seen as embodying a set of ideas as the Parthenon. And I’ll be discussing one of the sculptures that decorated it next.
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Parthenon Sculpture: Centaur and Lapith
Marble relief, from the Parthenon, Athens, Greece
AROUND 440 BC
Around 1800, Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed some of the sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens, and a few years later put them on public show in London. For most western Europeans it was the first time they had ever been able to look closely at Greek sculpture, and they were overwhelmed and inspired by the vitality and the beauty of these works. But in the twenty-first century, the Elgin Marbles, as they have long been known, are famous less as art objects than as the focus of political controversy. For most people today, the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum provoke only one question: should they be in London or in Athens? The Greek government insists they should be in Athens; the British Museum’s Trustees believe that in London they’re an integral part of the story of world cultures.
It’s a passionate debate in which everyone has a view; but I want to focus on one sculpture in particular, and what that sculpture meant to the people who made it and looked at it in Athens in the fifth century BC.
The Parthenon sculptures set out to present an Athenian universe made up of gods, heroes and mortals, woven together in complex scenes drawn from myth and daily life. They are some of the most moving and uplifting sculptures ever made. They’ve become so familiar, and have shaped so much of European thinking, that it’s hard now to recover their original impact. But at the time of their making they were a quite new vision of what it meant, intellectually and physically, to be human and, indeed, Athenian. They’re the first, and supreme, achievements of a new visual language. Olga Palagia, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Athens, puts them in perspective:
The idea of the new style was to create a new equilibrium between the human body, human movement and the garments … The object was to achieve the perfect proportions of the human body. The key words for the new Classical style were harmony and balance – that is why the sculptures of the Parthenon are so timeless, because the figures they created are indeed timeless.
The sculptures were, however, made at a particular time and with a particular purpose. They sum up how this society thought about itself. The Parthenon was a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena Parthenos, meaning Athena the Virgin. It was built on the Acropolis – a rocky citadel at the heart of the city, with a central hall that housed a colossal statue of the goddess herself, made of gold and ivory. And everywhere there was sculpture.
Around all four sides of the building, above the columns and easily seen by everybody approaching it, was a series of ninety-two square relief carvings, known as metopes. Like all the other sculpture in the building, these would originally have been brightly coloured in red and blue and gold; it’s one of these metopes, now without its colour, that I have chosen as our object through which to think about Athens around 440 BC.
The metopes are all about battles – battles between the Olympian gods and the Giants, between Athenians and Amazons, and, in the ones I want to focus on, between Lapiths and Centaurs. The figures are almost free-standing, and the human ones are rather more than a metre (about 4 feet) tall. Centaurs – half-horse, half-human – are attacking the Lapiths, who are a legendary Greek people. According to the story, the Lapiths made the mistake of giving the Centaurs wine at the marriage feast of their king. The Centaurs got horribly drunk and attempted to rape the women, while their leader tried to carry off the bride. A bitter general battle ensued, and the Lapiths – the Greeks – were ultimately victorious over their half-animal Centaur enemies.
This sculpture is particularly moving; there are only two figures – a Centaur rearing triumphantly over a fallen Lapith, who lies dying on the ground. As with so many of the Parthenon sculptures, this one is damaged, and we can no longer see the expression in the dying Lapith’s face, or the aggression in the eyes of the Centaur. Nonetheless, it remains a wonderful and moving piece of sculpture. But what does it mean? And how can it sum up, in itself, a view of the Athenian state?
We are fairly cer
tain that these sculptures are using myths to present a heroic version of recent events. A generation before the sculptures were made, Athens was one of several fiercely competitive city-states, forced into a coalition with each other by the Persian invasion of the Greek mainland. So, in the metopes, when we see Greeks fighting Centaurs, these mythical battles stand proxy for the real-life struggle between Greeks and Persians. The classicist Mary Beard, from the University of Cambridge, explains what the sculptures would have meant to the people who first saw them:
Ancient Greece is a world which sees issues in terms of conflict, of winning, and losing. It’s a conflictual society, and one of the ways that Athenians thought about their position in the world, and their relationship to those they conquered, or abominated, was to see the ‘enemy’ or the ‘other’ in terms that were not, in a sense, human. So what you have on the Parthenon is different ways of understanding the ‘otherness’ of your enemy. The best interpretation of the metopes is that you see the heroic conflicts as necessary in order to ensure order. Part of that is a feeling that we can very easily empathize with. We don’t want to live in Centaur World. We want to live in Greek World, and Athenian World.
‘Centaur World’ for the Athenians would have meant not just the Persian Empire, but other competing Greek city-states, and above all Sparta, with whom Athens was frequently at war. The struggle against the Centaurs that we see on the metopes becomes an emblem of the perpetual battle that, for the Athenians, every civilized state has to fight. Rational man has to keep struggling against brute irrationality. Dehumanizing your enemy like this takes you down a dangerous path, but it’s a magnificent rallying call if you’re waging war. If chaos is to be kept at bay, so the message goes, reason will have to fight un-reason again and again.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 16