In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  ONE

  IRAQ: The Cradle of Civilization

  TWO

  INDIA: Empire of the Spirit

  THREE

  CHINA: The Mandate of Heaven

  FOUR

  EGYPT: The Habit of Civilization

  FIVE

  CENTRAL AMERICA: The Burden of Time

  SIX

  THE BARBARIAN WEST

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Picture Credits

  Copyright

  For Rebecca

  PREFACE

  IN THE YEAR 1000, if you were a traveller or trader with the contacts and the curiosity, you could have seen all the ancient civilizations of the Old World at the very height of their traditional culture. If you were a Western European you would have needed the Arabic language too, for this was the lingua franca of sailors between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. But with spoken Arabic (and a lot of luck to avoid pirates, shipwreck and disease) you could have hitched a series of passages from Anglo-Saxon England to the Yellow Sea, bartering your way along well-trodden trade routes: with Arabs in the Arabian Sea, Tamils across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia, and then Chinese captains who traded the whole vast area between Mombasa and Japan. And what a wonderful journey! You could have visited Byzantium, Cairo, Abbasid Baghdad, Cholan South India, Cambodia and Sung dynasty China. These civilizations had arisen in the Bronze Age. The oldest had developed their religion and philosophy, science and technology over four millennia, and all were now at the peak of their achievement in arts, science and humanistic culture. You could have visited glittering courts, magnificent churches, mosques and temples, and seen wonderful treasures of art and architecture. If there is one moment in time to which one might wish to travel, it would surely be this.

  Move on five hundred years, and the picture changes. The descendants of the ancient civilizations are still there in Persia, Ming China, and Moghul India. But by 1500 AD, the axis of history is shifting, its centre of gravity no longer in its Asiatic heartland. As we see it now, the opening up of the sea route to India and the discovery of the New World were indeed, as Adam Smith said, ‘the greatest events in the history of the world.’ At the time the idea would have been laughed at by Chinese mandarins at court in Peking. Their ships had, after all, already explored the African coast, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and landed in Australia. Huge fleets with giant ships, dwarfing the boats of Columbus, Magellan and Vasco de Gama; vessels equipped with stern rudders, the compass and gunpowder, with shipboard kitchen gardens growing fresh vegetables. But history was in fact against them. In the 1520s and 30s the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas in Mexico and Peru were overthrown by European adventurers armed with new technology. The European appropriation of the American continent and its natural resources rapidly followed, with the virtual extermination of the native population. This set the stage for the era of European world domination, at the end of which we still live. The colonial epoch has seen the demolition of most of the traditional civilizations and societies, ending in the twentieth century with the disintegration of imperial China and the undermining of the last traditional Muslim civilization in Persia. Of all the classical cultures, perhaps only the Tamil survived in anything like a recognizable form at the end of the twentieth century. Now, I suspect we have reached the point of no return in the advance of globalization and modernism. The battles against modernity fought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the Mayan Revolt, the Iranian Revolution, the Hindu revival are only three of the most typical – now look like a rearguard action as the global hegemony of the free market and TV culture scrubs away encoded identities built up over several millennia.

  This trajectory is the background to this book, and has become all the more clear in the years since it was first written. Expanded from the scripts of a series of film essays, it attempts a sketch of how we got here: the first 5000 years of civilization. It is a portrait of the first civilizations and their continuing legacy, beginning with the revolution which took place in the Fertile Crescent five thousand years ago when human beings first began to live in cities. It focuses on the city civilizations which developed independently in Iraq, Egypt, India, China and Central America: the ancient civilizations which made us what we are – in our modes of thinking, in our religious beliefs, in our ways of organizing human society – and which still affect the lives of everyone on earth today.

  The films involved long journeys inside these cultures. We stayed in mudbrick villages in the wheatfields of northern China and in tents among millions of pilgrims at India’s Kumbh Mela; we slept in the reed huts of the Marsh Arabs in South Iraq. These were the kind of journeys and experiences which opened new vistas on the relative importance of one’s own culture and history. To find oneself, for example, in the old Jewish quarter in Kaifeng in China in the place which led the world in industry, science and printing in the tenth century; to listen to Tamil oduvars singing sixth-century hymns to a huge and appreciative festival audience in the enormous temple at Chidambaram in South India; to be present at Momostenago in Highland Guatemala on the festival of ‘Eight Monkey’ when new Mayan shamans are initiated who will keep their pre-Christian calendar: such experiences make history come alive in a way which no book can. And of course they also offer an entirely different perspective on the world. China’s history, to use an example almost too obvious to need stating, is as rich and diverse as that of the West.

  Visits to Baghdad on the eve of the Gulf War were equally illuminating and exciting. There are very few surviving physical remains of that most astonishing epoch of pluralist culture which flourished in Baghdad also in that same tenth century. But in conversation with Iraqi scholars and friends both there and in exile, I was constantly reminded that the brilliant literature and philosophy of that time is still common currency in educated Arabic culture in a way that comparable material in the West simply is not. We all have much to learn about, and from, each other’s civilizations.

  The word ‘civilization’ is used throughout this book. It is a problematic term these days with its connotations of racial and cultural superiority, as when Western politicians speak of the ‘civilized world’, when they mean their own liberal democratic culture. The definition of civilization commonly used by anthropologists and archaeologists is a material one. For them civilization means, literally, ‘life in cities’. We speak of the ‘rise of civilization’ or the ‘first civilizations’ on this basis. As we shall see, the moral and spiritual character of the world’s early civilizations was very diverse. But their common markers in material terms are virtually universal: cities, bronze technology, writing, great ceremonial buildings, temples, monumental art, hierarchies and class division, all sanctioned by some form of law, and held together by organized military force. Of the six primary civilizations, Iraq, Egypt, India, China, Central America and Peru, only the last, which is not treated in this book, did not develop all these features (most notably, the early Peruvians did not have writing). Nevertheless, these common material factors hide very different conceptions of what civilization actually is, that is, the ultimate goals of organized human life on earth, moral, intellectual, political and spiritual, and therein lies the fascination of this kind of comparative history.

  The choice of the civilizations in this book, it should be stressed, depends on the independent rise of large-scale urban life. Hence the exclusion of other no less fascinating cultures, in Japan for example, Cambodia, Crete or West Africa, which are not ge
nerally regarded as primary. This point about the independent origins of civilization has particular significance for us now, for only when we look at the beginnings and the long and continuing influence of the first civilizations can we hope to understand what is universally relevant in our own history and what is merely Western idiosyncrasy. Now at the beginning of a new millennium, it is a good time to reflect on the great historical questions raised by the pace of change in our own time. The histories and identities of the civilizations and peoples in this book are in the process of being erased as surely as the rainforests are being felled. One of the great battles of the twenty-first century will be whether these traditional worlds will survive at all in the face of modernism’s massive and deliberate assault on the givenness of what has come down to us from the past. If not, we may be the last generation to see much of what is described in this book.

  ONE

  IRAQ

  THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION

  IN THE WINTER of 1849, a young Englishman, William Loftus, led a small party on horseback south from Baghdad into the plains of southern Iraq. Once famous as ancient Chaldaea or Babylonia, the country was now a wasteland of desert and swamps inhabited by Bedouin or semi-nomadic tribes, who had proved virtually ungovernable under the long period of Turkish rule in Iraq. The first part of Loftus’ journey led down the palm-fringed banks of the river Euphrates. There in the decaying mudbrick towns old communities of Jews and Mandaean baptists lived alongside their Muslim brethren, still preserving some of the ancient folk customs of Babylonia. With some trepidation, Loftus entered the sacred cities of the Shia Muslims, and was deeply impressed by their strange and forbidding rituals. The sombre and glittering magnificence of their shrines and their archaic burial rites seemed to him to hark back to a past older still than Islam. He saw too communities of Nestorian Christians who traced their presence in Iraq back to the earliest days of Christianity and whose beliefs and forms of worship were a far cry from the Roman and Orthodox churches of the Mediterranean world. Everywhere were signs of deep continuities. Indeed, all three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – claimed a point of origin here in the land of Abraham. For educated Christian Europeans in the nineteenth century, fascinated by the origins of their own culture which was now dominant across the world, it seemed that their roots must lie here, even before the classical legacy of Greece. As Loftus wrote, ‘Here from our childhood we have been led to regard as the cradle of the human race.’ Here had been the garden of Eden, the tower of Babel, Noah’s ark and the great Flood. And here, according to the Book of Genesis, the first cities had been built out of mudbrick, ‘in the Land of Shinar,’ apparently a garbled recollection of southern Iraq’s ancient name, S(h)umer. The author of Genesis even named some of those cities: Babylon, Akkad and Erech.

  Much of the deep south of the plain was now covered by swamps, and except in the dry season the heartland of the ancient civilization was only reachable by boat. Its inhabitants were the mysterious Madan, the Marsh Arabs, who lived a semi-aquatic existence on artificial islands, fishing and cultivating the reed beds in their bitumen-covered boats. Guided by them, Loftus crossed ‘a dead sea with salt-encrusted shores.’ Everywhere he saw the mounds of ancient settlements. He was not the first European to come this way: in the 1750s the German, Karsten Niebuhr, had stayed among the Marsh Arabs, and J. Baillie Fraser in the 1820s had seen some of the sites in the southern plain. But now Loftus was to test the ancient stories by excavation. His goal was ‘the most extraordinary and important of all the mounds of Chaldaea,’ a place known to the local Arabs as Warka.

  ‘I know of nothing more exciting or impressive,’ he wrote later, ‘than the first sight of one of these great Chaldaean piles, looming in solitary grandeur from the surrounding plains and marshes; especially in the hazy atmosphere of early morning when its faery-like effect is heightened by mirages, its forms strangely and fantastically magnified, elevating it from the ground and causing it to dance and quiver in the rarefied air.’

  Under a scorching sun, and whipped by ‘tornadoes of sand’, Loftus finally reached the mound of Warka. He was astonished to find a six-mile circuit of walls silted with great dunes of wind-blown sand, but still standing, 50 feet high in places: in the centre huge eroded pyramids of mudbrick had been platforms for the temples of the city gods. ‘Of all the desolate sights I ever beheld,’ he said later, ‘that of Warka incomparably surpasses all.’

  Loftus had found the ancient city of Uruk, the Biblical Erech of the Book of Genesis. In the Arabic ‘Warka’, the local tribes-people had preserved the memory of its ancient name even though the city had been abandoned for over a thousand years. In places the site was over 100 feet deep in debris, the accumulated layers of human habitation. Loftus was able to see that it had been lived in for thousands of years, till well into the first millennium AD when Greeks, Parthians and Sassanian Persians had made their homes there, leaving tell-tale traces in their pottery, coins, burial offerings, and also in their writing. For although Loftus could not have known it, the first proper writing on earth comes from southern Iraq. Indeed it is just conceivable that it was first invented in Uruk itself!

  ‘A thousand thoughts and surmises present themselves to the mind,’ wrote Loftus as he surveyed the ruins, ‘concerning its past history and origin – its gradual rise and its rapid fall.’ Over 150 years on, those questions are still being asked, and with increasing urgency, as we modern people try to understand the causes of the beginning of urban life on earth. For Loftus had found the first true city in the world, a vast and complex living organism which had lasted for millennia before it died. And many of the key questions are still unanswered surrounding that revolutionary period in history which changed the whole history of the planet, for good and ill.

  THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION

  ‘The land,’ as the Sumerians called it, is a flat alluvial plain 300 miles long and never more than 150 miles wide. It was created by the silt of the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, which flow down the plain, hence its Greek name Mesopotamia, ‘the land between the rivers.’ Rising in the hills of Armenia, the Tigris is the bigger, faster and more unpredictable of the two, more dangerous in flood: even in the last hundred years it has devastated Baghdad on several occasions after bursting its banks. The Euphrates is smaller and less violent, and most of the early cities were clustered along its lower course. The two rivers were the foundation of the achievement built up in the south over 150 generations: great brown arteries carrying life-giving silt in their waters, flowing through what in the summer is a burning dun-coloured flat land. Without irrigation, any farming is impossible in such a landscape, and the irrigation necessary to sustain big populations in cities was impossible without large-scale co-operative enterprise. Nor was the plain endowed with any other natural resources: there was little stone, no wood or precious metals. Apart from reeds and palm trees, the only building material was mudbrick, with which the people became brilliantly adept, inventing the dome and the arch and constructing some of the largest and most impressive brick structures in the world.

  The creation of an artificial landscape in the southern plain, with the elaborate irrigation systems needed to sustain city civilization, made the Sumerians peculiarly vulnerable to outside attack. This has been one of the key factors in their history. With no natural frontiers, Mesopotamia was always at risk from its neighbours, especially to the east, from the Elamites and, later, the Persians, the ancient enemies from beyond the Zagros mountains which crowd Iraq’s eastern flank, forming a harsh rugged plateau, austere and arid, extending as far as Afghanistan and the Indus. Hill peoples against peoples of the plain; nomads against sedentary farmers: these are two of the most ancient confrontations in human history.

  To the west and south were the desert peoples, ‘people who have never known a city,’ as the Sumerians liked to call them, who also mounted periodic raids to plunder the stored wealth of the cities. Such were the perennial equations of Ir
aqi history. And this age-old drama is still being played out on our TV screens today. The nomads of the desert may no longer be a force to reckon with, but even in the 1980s the population of Mesopotamia fought its wars with its traditional enemies in Persia, and the hill peoples to the north, the Kurds, retreated to their mountains after battles with the despot in Baghdad.

  Southern Iraq, showing the old courses of the Tigris and Euphrates. Sumer extended from Nippur to the sea, then at Ur and Eridu; some of the ancient cities continued into the Middle Ages, but none is now inhabited.

  In landscape and climate, then, we can see the long-term patterns which have shaped the region’s history. Against such deep continuities its peoples have lived their lives and created their civilizations which in their turn have risen and fallen. And there is no question that landscape and climate were key determining factors in the rise of civilization. All four great civilizations of the Old World arose on rivers, all of them in a narrow band around 30 degrees latitude in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere: on the Euphrates and Tigris, the Nile, the Indus, and the Yellow River. In their character they may have differed widely. But in the material basis of their development, they shared very similar conditions and similar concerns.

  The first condition of civilization of course is food. Then, as now, cities and large populations cannot exist without the ability to feed people. So the domestication and cultivation of certain staple cereals and grains (such as wheat and barley) was the first step towards large-scale settled societies. The development of agriculture, which made this possible for the first time in human history, seems to have begun around ten to twelve thousand years ago in the wide belt of foothills stretching round the Fertile Crescent, from Palestine, Jordan, Israel and Syria, through south-eastern Turkey, across northern Iraq, and into western Iran. In the eighth millennium BC these Neolithic agricultural communities created small towns such as Jericho in the Jordan valley, which had stone defences enclosing about 11 acres. The remarkable (and still only partially excavated) site at Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia covered 32 acres in the sixth millennium BC, a sizeable place with as many as a thousand houses and five thousand people, looking very much like the little flat-roofed towns to be seen today in the Kurdish uplands.