Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  Despite its superficial appearance of geographic unity, however, the Indian subcontinent was really a checkerboard of disparate hydrological and topographical environments that fostered local economic and cultural autonomy and defied easy political unification. No arterial waterway linked India’s independent regions into a coherent, politically unified society. Until the coming of the British colonial overlords in the nineteenth century’s age of steamships and railroads, no one managed to rule over all of India. Yet even Britain’s unification of the subcontinent would be short-lived. Following its independence after World War II, the three distinctive hydrological regions of the northern India heartland fractured asunder into three separate nations: Pakistan, along the spine of the Indus; India, along the main Ganges valley; and Bangladesh, in the swampy Ganges-Brahmaputra delta.

  In the center and south of the subcontinent there were other distinctive Indias, too. Coastal India, with its face to the sea, flourished as a key link in the ancient world’s expanding Indian Ocean trade network. Goods had moved by sea among India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Southeast Asia from the early rise of civilized societies. India traded by sea in the first millennium BC with the Sabaeans from the Arabian Peninsula in modern Yemen. The Sabaeans carried cargo, including precious frankincense and myrrh grown on trees only there and in Punt in Africa’s Horn, journeying overland by caravan to the Levant and Egypt.

  This east-west sea trade intensified in the first century BC when Mediterranean-world sailors in the Red Sea made the historic breakthrough of mastering the Indian Ocean’s two-way, seasonal monsoons to reach southern India. Shortly thereafter, sea trade routes were extended to the Malayan peninsula and the Spice Islands of modern Indonesia. In the waters of Southeast Asia travelers from the West exchanged goods with Chinese ships, creating a permanent sea link across the Old World, from China to the Mediterranean. In Muslim and colonial European times, the long-distance Indian Ocean trade route would become history’s single greatest highway to world power and empire. It would be paralleled by the overland central Asian Silk Roads that also connected China, India, and the Levant. Together, the sea and land trade routes from the Far East to the Mediterranean became the axis of a market-driven international economy, with India as both a central hub and a coveted object of subjugation in the ongoing power struggle for wealth and world leadership that accompanied the rise of a new maritime civilization based principally upon sea trade.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Seafaring, Trade, and the Making of the Mediterranean World

  On the dry, hilly, island-flecked eastern Mediterranean fringes of antiquity’s irrigated empires arose a cluster of seafaring societies that secured their wealth and defense primarily through maritime commerce and naval power. Over time these small states spawned a different kind of civilization that contrasted starkly with that of the centralized, authoritarian hydraulic societies. Its distinctive characteristics were a private-sector market economy, individual property and legal rights, and a representative democracy for those who qualified as citizens. Taking form first in ancient Greece, its traditions spread through the Mediterranean world with the Hellenist diaspora, the reach of the Roman Empire, and later through the activities of the small seafaring republics Venice and Genoa. With the eventual breakthrough of global ocean sailing in the sixteenth century, it rose to world prominence through the influence of leading Western liberal market democracies, the Dutch United Provinces, the British Empire, and the United States. Today, its imprint informs many prevailing norms of the integrated global economy.

  The small, ancient maritime trading states of the eastern Mediterranean were forced to international seafaring not by preferred choice, but because of their domestic agricultural and water resource limitations. Their scant rainfall, hilly terrains, small strips of arable land, and short rivers unsuitable both for long inland navigation and mass-irrigated farming simply were inadequate to produce enough food to sustain large, prosperous populations. Yet the challenges of their harsh geography did present one opportune route to increase economic surplus. The sea itself, for those able to master the art of navigating its waters, offered a ready and cheap highway to link societies along its length that were willing to exchange their grain and other basic resources for the specialized goods produced indigenously around the Aegean—above all, its prized olive oil and wine. The region’s jagged coastlines also presented good harbors conducive to maritime trade and fishing. The formidable natural sea barrier itself, furthermore, helped defend the independence of small states against the superior armies of the land-based hydraulic empires nearby.

  For ancient Aegean civilizations, transport by sea came to play a role analogous to that of river transportation in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Despite its 2,500-mile length and stormy dangers, the tideless, shallow, and relatively tranquil Mediterranean (Greek for “sea between the land”) was one of Earth’s most welcoming seascapes for sailors. Save for the narrow eight-mile-wide passage at the Strait of Gibraltar—known in antiquity as the Pillars of Hercules—opening to the Atlantic Ocean, it was virtually an immense, enclosed lake. At its northeast extremity a pair of twin straits, the Dardanelles (known as the Hellespont in antiquity) and the Bosporus, separated Europe from Asia and led to the huge inland Black Sea and the resources of central Asia. In the southeast, between Egypt’s Nile delta and the Sinai Peninsula, only a small neck of land separated it from the Red Sea and beyond to the Indian Ocean. On its eastern rim the wealthy ports of the Levant offered access to goods arriving by overland caravans from all over the Near East and beyond. Within its civilized circumference arrived all the food, raw materials, manufactured goods, and luxuries necessary to support an accomplished maritime trading civilization.

  In antiquity three main sea trade routes traversed the length of the Mediterranean: one sailed along the shoreline ports of southern Europe; a parallel southern route tracked the harbors of North Africa; the third, central route sailed the open waters between major islands such as Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearics. Each could be navigated simply by following a series of visual landmarks without need of a compass or sextant. The gravest peril was frequent winter gales, which changed direction rapidly and created treacherous crosscurrents. Thus, for most of ancient history, the main sailing season was confined to April to October. Due to the unidirectional, west-to-east direction of the winds, easterly sailing toward Levantine entrepôts was speedy by the travel-time measures of the ancient world. Distances in the opposite direction, by contrast, seemed immense and required laborious and skillful effort of oar and sail—it commonly took up to sixty days to navigate from the Levant to the Mediterranean’s midway point, where the sea was nearly land-bridged by the large island of Sicily. Indeed, the Sicilian bar effectively created two Mediterranean basins, a western and an eastern, that developed as more-or-less self-contained worlds. In the western Mediterranean in the third and second millennia BC, a vanished, ancient seafaring people laid thousands of puzzling religious stone megaliths on the arc of islands and shorelines stretching from Malta, Sardinia, Spain, and Morocco, up the North Atlantic coast to Brittany, Ireland, and Stonehenge, and into the northern seas as far as Scandinavia. In the eastern Mediterranean basin an enduring, robust seafaring civilization developed that shaped the course of history.

  Mediterranean World

  Sea trade in the Mediterranean advanced during the fourth millennium BC with the development of large cargo vessels constructed of planks and powered by sails as well as traditional oars. By combining the force of the winds with the water’s properties of low friction and buoyancy, sails enabled cargoes to be shipped efficiently over long distances in an age when overland transport was slow, perilous, and often impossible. Thus was established the large cost advantages of sea transport over land that has endured to the present day, and with it an international marketplace that gave societies a chance to increase wealth through economic specialization, including those specialized in facilitating trade.
A further advance came after 2200 BC when the rudder was introduced to supplement the steering oar.

  The distinction of being history’s first true great Mediterranean maritime civilization belonged not to the precocious but timidly shore-hugging Egyptians, but instead to an island people born on the sea—the Minoans of Crete. It was the Minoans who blazed many of the early Mediterranean trade routes. By 2000 BC, Crete was the trade crossroads of the region and for over half a millennium exerted a powerful economic, cultural, and naval influence throughout the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean. The slender, 160-mile-long island’s most important natural asset was its strategic location between the lucrative markets of the Levant, Asia Minor, and Egypt and the raw materials of the western Mediterranean. The Minoans were especially well positioned to profit from the Bronze Age because from Crete they could easily bring together both bronze’s constituent metals—copper from the traditional deposits of neighboring Cyprus and Cilicia on the southern Anatolian coast, and tin from the mines of Etruria (Italy), Spain, and overland from distant Gaul and Cornwall, England. Bronze had first appeared in Mesopotamia around 2800 BC, and in Egypt by 2000 BC. Minoan workshops added further wealth by producing outstanding metalwork, weapons, tools, and pottery that were desired throughout the Old World. Minoan sea power rested on two kinds of vessels—a commodious, rounded, slow-sailing merchantman for commerce and a sleek and nimble long ship for raiding and defense that cruised under a single sail until battle, when its lone bank of oarsmen maneuvered its pointed ram into its enemy’s hull.

  As their wealth accumulated, the Minoans constructed lavish, multistoried palaces and large cities, and devoted themselves to the arts of civilization. One striking feature of their greatest city, Knossos, was that in an age of heavy fortification, it remained unwalled. This was one of history’s earliest testimonies to the major defensive advantage provided by the open sea throughout the age of sail, as well as to the supremacy of the Minoan navy. Their domestic waterworks were sophisticated. Water tanks at the palaces of King Minos—probably a title, like Pharaoh, that applied to every ruler—flushed away human waste from indoor lavatories, while its cities were underlain with terra-cotta drainpipes and sewers. Agriculturally, terraces and dams maximized Minoans’ potential to grow olives and grapevines on their island’s semiarid, mountainous terrain. As the Minoans settled the Aegean, they passed much of their civilization, including an early form of Greek writing, on to the ancient Greeks who followed them.

  Minoan life was cataclysmically disrupted around 1470 BC by a huge volcano 70 miles to the north that vaporized most of the island of Thíra (Santorin). The explosion rocked Crete with earthquakes, clouds of ash that buried some of its cities, and a huge tidal wave that decimated the harbors along its northern coast. Greatly weakened, the Minoans survived only a century more before succumbing to a rising culture on mainland Greece that they had helped nurture, the Mycenaens.

  Until about 1200 BC, the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans flourished on the trade routes and predatory naval power acquired from the Minoans. Mycenae itself was the city-state, according to Homer’s Iliad, ruled by King Agamemnon, who led the Greek city-states in their concerted naval and armed forces campaign from about 1184 BC against the walled fortress city of Troy to retrieve the beautiful wife of his brother, King Menelaus of Sparta. But it wasn’t Helen’s face alone that launched the Greeks’ celebrated thousand ships. It was the lure of booty. Perched on a hill in northwest Asia Minor overlooking the mouth of the Hellespont, Troy possessed great wealth from tolls on passage through that strategic strait, its silver mines, and payment of tribute from its weaker neighbors. Nor was it the artifice of the wooden Trojan Horse that was chiefly responsible for Troy’s ultimate defeat. It was the Mycenaeans’ incomparable fleet, which gave them uncontested control of the sea supply lines and the ability to sustain the ten-year-long siege that ended with the sack of Troy.

  Yet even by the time of the Trojan War, Bronze Age Mycenaeans and other Aegean mainlanders were being displaced from their homes by invaders from the north armed with superior iron weapons. Many took to the seas and became the Sea Peoples who raided Egypt at the end of the New Kingdom. Many Mycenaean refugees ultimately resettled on the Aegean Islands and the rugged Ionian coast of Asia Minor and endured the dark age that disrupted civilized life throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East for three centuries.

  When advanced civilization reemerged, three great powers competed for control of the sea-lanes across the entire length of the Mediterranean: the Phoenicians of the Levant; the Etruscans, who emerged in Italy and provided the first kings of Rome, but whose provenance remains mysterious to the present day; and the classic Greek city-states, which ultimately became the cradle of modern Western civilization. Of these, the earliest to rise were the Semitic Phoenicians, who left the West their modern alphabet.

  The Phoenicians had two advantageous assets to launch their Mediterranean seafaring career: good harbors at Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos and abundant cedar and other wood resources for shipbuilding and export from Levantine forests that were greatly coveted by great powers in Mesopotamia and Egypt. From 1000 to 800 BC, Phoenician traders had the Mediterranean virtually to themselves. Phoenician ports were crowded with large cargo ships. They created one of the most daring seafaring trade societies in history. On their long sea voyages, Phoenicians even sailed by night and ventured far out of sight from the coasts. They established great colonies across the Mediterranean, including at Carthage at the southern gateway to the western Mediterranean near modern Tunis. They sailed through the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic Ocean to set up a settlement at the fine harbor at Gades, modern Cádiz in Spain. Thanks to their blockading grip over the strategic Pillars of Hercules from the late sixth century BC, Phoenician vessels for four centuries exploited a virtual trade monopoly in the raw material resources available along Europe’s Atlantic coast and northern seas. Phoenician vessels sailing under commission by Egyptian Pharaoh Neko may have attempted in about 600 BC to circumnavigate Africa by sailing south through the Red Sea, and a century later Phoenicians of Carthage successfully colonized Africa’s west coast—all two millennia before the Portuguese changed world history by accomplishing the circumnavigation feat. For a long while, the Phoenicians’ domestic assets and adventurously earned sea-trading wealth were sufficient to offset their major geostrategic liability of being located adjacent to the powerful land empires of the Near East. After the eighth century BC, however, the Phoenician homeland was overrun by the armies of Assyria and the enduring heart of Punic civilization migrated westward to Carthage.

  Where the Phoenicians were first and foremost traders, the loose conglomeration of sovereign Greek city-states that arose by the eighth century BC along the Ionian coasts and neighboring Aegean islands were great colonists. Between 750 and 550 BC, they founded some 250 colonies, including at Syracuse on wheat-growing Sicily and in 658 BC at Byzantium, the future Constantinople and Istanbul, on the Bosporus Strait gateway to the Black Sea and the golden wheat fields of the Crimea on its northern coast. Their economy was initially based on trading their homeland’s highly prized wine and olive oil for basic grains and raw materials, although their comparative advantage gradually diminished as competing colonists transplanted vineyards and olive trees throughout the Mediterranean.

  The leading Greek Ionian city-state was Miletus. In the eighth century BC, mariners from Miletus discovered how to reliably navigate during the warm sailing season to the Black Sea through the Hellespont and Bosporus straits, which for much of the year were barred by sudden, racing currents, difficult eddies, and strong northeasterly headwinds. Although the city’s famous harbor has long since silted up, in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, Miletus was the leading trader of goods between the Mediterranean and Black seas. The latter was almost a Milesian lake. Tons of wheat and fish were transshipped from the Black Sea on Milesian vessels, financed by Milesian bankers and traded at great profit to the grain-poor city-states of the
Aegean.

  The wealth and urbanity of Miletus produced some of the formative thinkers of early Greek civilization, including the renowned father of Greek philosophy, Thales. One of the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece, Thales was also a mathematician, a statesman, and an astronomer; he famously predicted the total eclipse of the Sun of May 25, 585 BC. Thales philosophized that there was a single primal substance of all things—water. Observing water’s protean forms—ice, liquid, and gas—and natural processes, such as evaporation, in which water seemed to turn into air, rainfall where water appeared out of air, the ongoing silting up of river mouths, and the existence of freshwater springs that bubbled up out of the ground, he reasoned that everything on Earth was a manifestation of water in some transformed aspect. Later Greek philosophers such as Aristotle downgraded water to only one of four primary elements—water, air, fire, and earth. Thales’ hypothesis of water’s primacy, which had a parallel in early Babylonian cosmology’s placement of water as the first element of creation, left a profound imprint on Greek thinking in which reason and scientific observation became an exalted means to knowledge.

  Miletus also played an instigating political role in the events that culminated in the rise of Athens and the most celebrated flowering of Greek civilization in the fifth century BC. By the mid-sixth century BC, the land-based Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great had gained hegemony over much of Asia Minor, including Ionia. In 499 BC, following a series of intrigues, Miletus led a rebellion of Ionian Greek cities against Persian overlordship. It enlisted the alliance of Athens, which sent a few ships across the Aegean to assist. Within five years King Darius’s Persian army crushed the rebellion and ransacked troublemaking Miletus. In 490 BC Darius sent a modest fleet of Persian soldiers to punish tiny upstart Athens for its complicity. But the plan, which depended upon traitors opening Athens’s gates from inside, failed when the Persians lost a battle upon landing at the plain of Marathon and speedy runners carried the news to Athens some 26 miles away before the regrouped Persian fleet arrived—the genesis of the modern “marathon” race.