The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  The destiny of a given town or city depended on a double balance of activity and exchange: the balance it created by its own efforts for the greater good of its little world; and the balance which might be imposed upon it by the economic and political forces of a greater world beyond. In Egypt, the towns do not seem to have had autonomous careers, except in the pre-dynastic era – and in those days any development was very modest. Who now remembers Hierakonpolis, the city of the falcon-god, or the strange city of Heliopolis, which specialized in inventing great myths, explanations of the Egyptian religion? Very soon, the all-powerful authority of the pharaohs was to exert its rule over the Egyptian cities, for their benefit, since the general level of prosperity thereby increased. Possibly there was something there which we cannot quite understand today, a kind of arrested development of urban life on the banks of the Nile. It is as if the old towns clung on with difficulty to sites which were all equally inappropriate, and as if the large capitals drew towards them all the urban potential of the country and exhausted it.

  At any rate, when, for reasons external to Egypt, the Old Kingdom fell apart, it is striking to note that the country fragmented into nomes, or rural districts, becoming ‘feudalized’ as historians often say, and that in this fragmentation, the leading role was played not by cities but by princes, temples and priests.

  Mesopotamia provides no examples of this semi-silence, this urbandecay – far from it. Sumer consisted of a galaxy of bustling cities in a small space; they grew up densely and had close communications – of necessity, since roads, whether local or long-distance, had to remain open to all. But all these cities – Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Eridu, Kish, Mari, or Nippur, a holy city like Heliopolis in Egypt – competed for power, promoting their various tutelary gods. And each of them manifested that urban patriotism with which Uruk is credited in the epic of Gilgamesh, the legendary founder of the city: ‘Look upon it even today: the outer wall bearing the tower, see how it gleams with copper; and the inner wall has no parallel. Touch the threshold, it is ancient… Climb on the city wall of Uruk and walk upon it… See how well it is built: are its bricks not fine and fairly baked?’

  The Mesopotamian world always seemed to centre on a city, which might be built and rebuilt in the course of a stormy history. At the worst moments – which were never feudal – there was always an urban flame ready to rise from the ashes. Why should this be? Firstly, because Mesopotamia was less unified than Egypt, far more varied in composition, any attempt to construct a single political unit had always ended in failure (Sargon’s empire did not appear until Z335 and lasted less than 150 years). Situated at the meeting point of every route, Mesopotamia was necessarily more open to the outside world, more dynamic than any other region. Its ‘bourgeois merchants’ were to take the first known steps in history down the road marked ‘capitalism’. I am inclined to think that it was copper, bought in the Bahrain islands, which provided the first impetus for the Sumerian cities. It launched them into the adventure of long-distance trade which, in every age, has been a revolutionary force.

  Two Egypts into one will go

  In Egypt there was just the one river, and only one thing that mattered: the annual flood. Everything that happened on or around the Nile, from the first cataract at Aswan down to the sea, had an impact on the entire life of the country. Despite what has been suggested then, and despite differences visible to individuals (for someone from Lower Egypt, the Elephantine island was another world), the Egyptian people was essentially a single people, or very nearly so, from Upper to Lower Egypt. The notnes might have led independent lives at first, but regrouping took place very soon. The landscape, the people, the local gods, the towns, all resembled each other. The Delta became unified as Lower Egypt – the kingdom of the Bee and the Uraeus (the cobra); its prince wore a red tiara. Upper Egypt too, the narrow Nile valley, became established as a political unit – the kingdom of the Lily and the Vulture, its sovereign distinguished by a white cap. Eventually, Menes-Harmer, the master of the Upper Nile, brought the two together in about 3200, and wore as a sign of unity a double crown, red and white. Was he the first pharaoh? The title comes from the Egyptian per aa or Great House, the palace towards which all people turn. Only much later was it used to denote the ruler himself, some fourteen or fifteen centuries after Narmer’s reign. But we might note that the confusion between house, palace and sovereign is significant.

  Narmer’s Palette [see Figure 5] shows from the beginning a pharaoh cloaked in the extraordinary dignity of a living god. His attitudes, his representative nature, his tall stature towering above other men – all these aspects would remain the same thereafter, at least in formal terms. The divine right of the monarch was in fact Egypt’s ‘political theory’ as S. Morenz has suggested. Upon it was founded the order of a society with an intensely religious consciousness. This right, rooted in religion, and this miraculous form of royalty came from the depths of Egypt’s pre-dynastic and prehistoric past, from a magical and wild universe in which the gods were frightening and dangerous beings. The pharaoh became a god himself through his coronation, acquiring the strength of the crowns in the most realistic fashion, by eating them. In similar fashion, he acquired divine substance. In the Texts of the Pyramids is found the ‘famous hymn to the cannibal pharaoh who feeds on the gods, eating the big ones for breakfast, the middle-sized ones for dinner and the small ones for supper, breaking their backbones and tearing out their hearts, eating alive all those he meets on his way’. In other words, the pharaoh is the greatest of all gods, or at least their equal, the master of men and objects, the master too of the waters of the Nile, of the land and even of the growing harvest. ‘I was someone who made the barley grow’ were the words later put into the mouth of a dead pharaoh. This concept of a living god was to remain formally unassailable. Ramses II, in the twelfth century BC could still cry out, ‘Listen… for I am Ra, lord of heaven, come to earth’.

  But we should not over-simplify an institution which despite its longevity had been subtly transformed over the millennia. At first the pharaoh was Horus himself, the falcon-god, then he became his earthly incarnation, and the statue of Chephren is very significant in this context. When, finally, he became the son of Ra, of the lord of the gods, from the fourth dynasty onwards, did he perhaps lose some of his original grandeur? In the first place he was no longer the equal of the gods, but the son of a divine father. In the second, he was responsible before his father, as any son is, and on earth to carry out his father’s commandments. Ramses III, the last great man to rule Egypt, told Amon: ‘I did not disobey the command’. In short, Morenz thinks that we can distinguish ‘a progressive diminution of the divinity of the throne:… from identity to incarnation to filiality’.

  The pharaoh was nevertheless responsible for universal order. The word ma’at which meant rectitude, truth, justice, took on the meaning of the natural order of the world. The living god was the guarantor of that order and when he gave up his earthly life it was to be born into another existence, where he would continue with his beneficial task. The great pyramids of the fourth dynasty were built with religious fervour by a people who thought that by so doing they would preserve this active beneficence. The Egyptologist Cyril Aldred even concluded, paraphrasing a famous aphorism, that ‘Ancient Egypt was a gift from the pharaoh’. The sovereign provided the strength and cohesion of a civilization which often worked with a unity of spirit.

  Political unity meant that Egypt was reduced to obedience. But the Nile valley machinery operated so much better under this order that its superiority seemed to have been demonstrated, to the advantage of the Living God. When an internally inspired cultural revolution brought down the grandiose construction of the Old Kingdom during the first intermediate period (between 2185 and 1040), it was ultimately realized that the best course of action would be to rebuild what had been destroyed.

  Life on earth, eternal life

  So it was that Egypt accepted discipline as unavoidable. But what kind of
Egypt was it? A mass of ordinary people, whose everyday toil can be seen on the bas-reliefs on the tombs of Saqqarah, and in the clay statuettes and paintings of the eighteenth dynasty: peasants in their fields, sowing, reaping, loading sheaves of corn on to the backs of asses, hauling up a millstone, carrying grain to the granary, binding flax, driving a herd across a ford, harvesting papyrus, drawing in a net, unloading a boat; craftsmen working with wood and metal; slaves brewing beer, grinding corn, or kneading dough with their feet, harvesting and trampling grapes. The hieroglyphs which accompany these images are full of familiar terms: ‘Haul away!’ or ‘Come on, lads, faster’, while a flute player provides music in time to the movements of the workers. Archives which have survived from the village of Deir-el-Medineh give a detailed account of the workmen on the site of the necropolis of Thebes (nineteenth dynasty), the tools they were provided with and the excuses for absence: ‘A scorpion bit him’; ‘Was drinking in company with X’ (G. Posener). Was the drinker punished? One scene from the mastaba of Amenhotep is explicit: peasants who had not paid their dues were bastinadoed. The reason might change but the punishment was usually the same. This was the reality of Egypt: a people in a state of constant anxiety, whose lives were short and lived entirely under the sign of obedience, as strict as China under the mandarins.

  Around the pharaoh were the vizier and princes of the blood. Man-dated by him throughout all Egypt were the scribes, a privileged mandarin class, well aware of their status. At the bottom of the heap came the countless numbers of peasant slaves. In fact slave status did not become legally established until the New Kingdom when there was a plentiful supply of prisoners of war. But even before it was official, slavery had surely existed since time immemorial. Every year, when the flooded valley disappeared under the waters of the Nile, the peasant had a moment of respite – and this was the moment when he was called on to labour for the royal household, to build the colossal pyramids. This was one form of slavery. Another was the tax system – which was the issue every time (very rarely) that a complaint isrecorded. The excuses dating from about 1500 BC seem timeless in fact: there has been no harvest, ‘because there were too many rats, the locusts came, herds ate the crop, sparrows have devastated the fields, and the hippos ate the rest’. The tax men did not give up: ‘they told the peasant: give us the grain – even when there was none. Then they beat the peasant savagely, tied him up and threw him down a well’. The account is too literary to be true, but too circumstantial to be entirely false.

  This was an over-obedient society, no doubt. But this was surely the fate of those early civilizations which Alfred Weber described as ‘blueprints’. The gods were simply too present. Through their priests, they explained the origin of the world, revealed themselves in the celestial bodies or in sacred animals, told humans what to do – in short, ‘they wrote history’. The many gods jostled for position, and changed with dynasties, cities or clergies. From among their names– Isis, Osiris, Horus, Bes, Hathor, Thoth, Ptah, Seth, Amon Ra and many more – every town, indeed every individual could choose a protective deity. With their appearance, mythology entered human existence: the many adventures of these gods, with their human dimensions, brought them closer to ordinary mortals.

  J. M. Keynes, the economist’s economist, joked about ancient Egypt that it represented human and economic perfection since any surplus production, agricultural or urban, was systematically consumed by putting up huge and ‘useless’ pyramids. So the Egyptian economy ran no risk of ‘overheating’ – but only on condition that it was self-contained. The Egypt of the Old Kingdom had little contact with the outside world except that it sent expeditions to Libya, Sinai or Nubia in search of precious or rare stones, gold, slaves and black mercenaries – and that it sent a few boats to Byblos to fetch oil and wood from Lebanon. Everything was to change when Egypt was forcibly drawn into the international scene in the second millennium BC, and had to defend its own gates. Then the army began to consume what had earlier fuelled the peaceful building programme of the pyramids.

  Lords of earthly life, the gods could dispense eternal life. For a long while, only the pharaoh could enjoy the precious survival which was achieved by a multitude of precautions: the embalming of the body, the many funeral rites, the tomb, the statues, frescoes, and images of his servants in case he needed assistance in the after-life. It was during the Middle Kingdom that the wider immortality of the human soul’s ‘double’ was held to be acquired, at first only by the high and mighty, and then by all Egyptians who could make the ultimate journey to the kingdom of the dead by undergoing the trials of purification and the last judgment. Records survive of Sinouhe, an Egyptian born twenty centuries before Christ, and a traveller against his will, who lived in Syria. He made a fortune there, married the daughter of a local chief, and described the delights of this land of wine and fruit and abundant herds. But he came home at last, troubled by homesickness but even more by the fear of being buried one day ‘with a mere sheepskin for a shroud’, and thus forgoing eternal life.

  Societies, religions and empires: the eventful destiny of Mesopotamia

  Mesopotamia was a place of constant turmoil: the powers that presided at its birth forgot to protect it from its neighbours, whether those of the surrounding mountains ‘which both guarded and menaced’ it to the east and north, or those of the burning Syrian desert, to the west and south. The land between the two rivers had a history interrupted by many episodes, often dramatic ones. It was in Eden, in Mesopotamia, that the book of Genesis located the earthly paradise. Nomads from the uninhabited desert, mountain peoples and hungry travellers across the high plateaux were constantly tempted by the fields, gardens and cities of Mesopotamia. This blessed region, absorbed in its labours, was a fruit that everyone wanted to seize or share. The destiny of Egypt by contrast seems to have been a sheltered one, developing smoothly – though that is no doubt a simplification. To one specialist, Mesopotamian civilization seems like a tree forever putting out new branches or vigorous shoots from its very trunk. But every fresh flowering was bought at a high cost – war, exodus, destruction of cities, pillage and upheaval.

  Nevertheless, a single civilization survived through all these vicissitudes. And all the regions surrounding the ‘land between the rivers’ were so many offshoots of this civilization which acted as an unchallenged centre of influence. At the centre of a brillant and variableconstellation, Mesopotamia was always the star, through all the storms. Every invasion ended with the newcomers being absorbed into local life, so that Semitic dynasties from the desert might succeed Sumerians, or vice versa, at the whim of history. Such changes were in the end marked only by cultural differences – some of them quite striking, it is true.

  So Mesopotamia had a singular destiny. But the outside world, mountain or desert, was not solely responsible. The house was itself divided. Exaggerating only a little, we might compare it to Renaissance Italy. Sumer, like Italy, flourished under a plurality of powers, with fierce rivalries between cities. These cities – Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Kish, Larsa, Isin, Mari, Adab, Lagash – had taken the place of tribes and primitive societies. Each one had its particular divinities and its priest-kings (something very different from a king identified with a god). They fought each other unremittingly and hegemony passed from one to another: from Kish to Ur, then to Uruk, Lagash and Adab. The first serious unification took place under the Akkadian Empire, created by Semitic peoples. This state had a brilliant flowering with Sargon the Elder, but only a short life (2340-2230). Ur then took the lead for a while, before passing the torch to Isin, Larsa and eventually Babylon.

  Did Mesopotamia suffer from some kind of political weakness, making it impossible to invent stable royal institutions, prince, king or monarchy? That is probably not the point. Let us say rather that the cities, enriched by agriculture and trade from the early Sumerian period onwards, became so prosperous that they were propelled forward by their original impetus, carrying all before them. The political instability of the regio
n probably did not as a rule touch them deeply. It did not necessarily affect foreign trade which carried on operating across the whole area, from north to south and east to west. A change in dynasty could be accepted as long as tranquillity returned, and so long as each city, along with the labourers in the surrounding countryside and the workshops in town, was once more in control of its own sphere of influence and trading links.

  So some forms of obedience on the Egyptian model were possible, particularly since early Mesopotamia was an even more god-fearing place than Egypt: its gods were dominant even if they were seen to be quarrelling amongst themselves, with some waxing and others waning, depending on human fortunes. Enlil had reigned over Ur; then, when Babylon triumphed, its own god Marduk imposed his superiority over all others. Later again, Assyria took its name from Assur, a god who also came originally from the old Sumerian pantheon of the third millennium. To have the superiority of its gods proclaimed was one way for a city to assert its authority. But such a triumph did not mean dispossessing the other gods of their particular functions: thus Inanna (the future Ishtar of the Babylonians) represented fertility, Enlil controlled the destiny and the order of the universe, Anu was the redoubtable god of the heavens, Enki the wise and kindly bringer of springs and life-giving water.

  These numerous and ever-present gods ruled everything and were never forgotten in the rhythm of everyday life. With their staring hypnotic eyes, they frightened and tormented human beings, without leaving them even the hope of the longed-for eternal life, as they did in Egypt. Even the hero Gilgamesh despaired at the thought of his own death. As owners of the city and all its lands, of all the fruits it brought forth, the gods left it to the priests to distribute plots of land to humans and to decide how much of the harvest should be brought to the temples. First the priests, and later the kings of city-states and early empires, were seen as the gods’ representatives on earth. They were charged with carrying out the divine will and interpreting it through omens and oracles. These auguries were the mystery of the temple, and the sovereign was often a prisoner of his role. Like his subjects, he lived in fear of failing to understand the messages of the gods. The latter, according to the Mesopotamian world view, desired order and prosperity on earth, as a condition of their own happiness. It was natural therefore that the digging of canals, the ordering of trade, the great craft workshops and the administrative reforms, such as those of Hammurabi, always referred to a god as the original inspiration, for the greater glory of the community and the glory of the sovereign.