In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  Moving eastwards into Asia, the Greeks conquered the ancient civilization of Babylonia; the old cities of Uruk and Babylon became Greek colonies in a foreign land. It was, said a Babylonian oracle, ‘a time of misfortune for our people. But one day it will pass.’ Passing the Zagros mountains the Greeks now crossed the Oxus river into Central Asia, founding cities which still flourish today, as far as Samarkand. Through the Khyber Pass they poured into India, building their colonies on the north-west frontier, which formed the basis of a long-lasting Indo-Greek culture in these parts.

  In one of the least known episodes in ancient history, Alexander’s successors went further still. In the second century BC they sent devastating expeditions down the Ganges, sacking the ancient religious centres of Benares and Patna. In the village of Kausambi modern archaeology has uncovered graphic evidence of the trail of destruction. Here a Buddhist monastery has been excavated which was swept by a Greek firestorm, torched by Greek mercenaries sweltering by the Jumna, so far from home. (Strangely enough, the Hellenistic generalissimo responsible for this, Menander, ended his days as a Buddhist, according to Indian tradition!)

  ‘These were terrible times,’ said the Indians. ‘The vicious but valiant Greeks ruined our land with fire and famine, killing women and children and even our cows.’ Theirs was a revolutionary epoch, an age like our own: restless, cosmopolitan, self-aware, fascinated by sex and violence. And at its heart, just as in the last three centuries, was the brutal appropriation of other cultures. In India they saw the writing on the wall. ‘With such strength, implacable will, and cruelty, the heirs of the Greeks will rule the world in a future age.’ As Europeans see their history, this was the first time the West went out to the world.

  THE BEGINNINGS OF ONE WORLD

  But the Greek conquests liberated tremendous historical energies. The dazzling internationalism of the Hellenistic era laid the foundations of a common culture, with common ways of seeing, to much of the land between Egypt and India, which may have played a key role in the formation of the later Islamic world. The Hellenistic age also opened up the economies of the Old World civilizations. Trade routes now opened through Central Asia on the Silk Route to China. ‘In earlier times,’ said the second century BC historian Polybius, ‘the world’s history had been a series of unrelated episodes, but from now on history becomes an organic whole. The affairs of Europe and Africa are connected with those of Asia and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end.’

  In the second century BC the Chinese sent missions into Western Asia, where they became aware of the Parthian Empire in Persia, and heard of the Greeks beyond. This had a tremendous effect on their view of the world. Moving in the other direction, in the first century BC, Greek navigators discovered the secret of the timing of the monsoons. Then Greek and Roman merchants could sail every year across the Indian Ocean to trade in spices, pearls and Chinese silk. Soon the Roman balance of payments ran millions into the red to fill the pepper barns by the River Tiber. Greek colonies could be found as far away as Afghanistan; according to Tamil poems their merchants also resided in South India, organized on lines not unlike the ‘factories’ of the seventeenth-century India trade. One of the most fascinating books to come down to us from the ancient world is the first-century manual of an Alexandrian merchant describing all the ports of East Africa and India, listing their produce: spices, pearls, silk, ivory. Not surprisingly in the first two centuries AD there were also official embassies between the Romans and the Indian kingdoms: the numerous finds of Roman bullion in Tamil Nadu date from this time. In 166 AD there was even a Roman embassy to China. Archaeological evidence for the staging posts in the East–West trade by sea has now come to light; including a Roman entrepôt near Pondicherry in South India with warehouses full of Arretine wine, and a remarkable town in the Mekong Delta, Oc-eo, where a large Indian colony dealt in goods from as far away as Persia and the Mediterranean. Through such connections a statue of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi could find its way to a house in Pompeii (79 AD) and a statue of Poseidon could end up in Kolhapur south of Bombay! Such exchanges also took place on land routes. The astonishing storeroom excavated at Begram near Kabul and dating from around 100–300 AD, contained Chinese lacquer work, Egyptian porphyry vessels, Greek glass, and Hindu carvings from the Jumna valley! Soon enough, even temples in Japan would be adorned with treasures from Persia and Byzantium.

  So the last centuries BC and the early centuries AD were the beginnings of a vast exchange of cultures and ideas across the Old World. And it is no accident that the great universalist religions arose out of this era – Christianity from the first century, Manichaeism from the third, Islam from the seventh: all had reached China by the late seventh century, travelling along with all the other commerce and exotica, both by the Indian sea route and the Silk Route through Central Asia. The first glimmering of a world economy also appeared at this time, an economy centred in Asia which would begin to take off in the tenth to twelfth centuries, only to be cut short by the Mongol invasions, then to be overtaken by the rising commercial and maritime power of Western Europe.

  THE RISE OF ROME

  It was not the Greeks but the Romans who laid the foundations of the Western domination of the world. For it was they who first united the Mediterranean world and Western Europe, the core of what we mean by the West still today. Their empire like all empires was built on military might, on slavery and on cruelty. Well organized administrators, brilliant architects, engineers and military planners, the Romans conquered the ancient ‘undeveloped’ regional cultures of Europe, the Iron Age natives of Gaul and Britain, along with the sophisticated citizens of Greece, Egypt, Syria and North Africa. For the first time, Western Europe was directly brought into the influence of Mediterranean, African and Asiatic civilizations. In places the Romanization was only slight; in Britain for example, after Rome, the cities were abandoned and the élites went back to native traditions of organization. But it was a start.

  At its height the Roman Empire extended from Hadrian’s Wall in Britain to the Persian Gulf and you could call yourself a citizen of Rome whether you lived in Manchester, Athens, Luxor or even briefly Uruk, in the baking south of Iraq. But unlike India or China, there was no binding religious or social ethic to hold such disparate parts together and in the fourth century it entered a great crisis, economic, social and especially spiritual. It was a time when many different new religious cults and sects were in rivalry, most of them drawing on the old traditions of the Near East and Persia: Judaism, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism. But out of this spiritual ferment the Christians were in the right place at the right time and, sponsored by the newly converted Emperor Constantine, theirs became the official religion of the Roman Empire in AD 330. From then on, the ideologies of earthly and heavenly empire would be inextricably bound up in Western culture.

  The triumph of Christianity is another example of the extraordinary fertility of ideas born in the intractable landscapes of Judaea, Syria, Palestine and Iraq: a testimony to the continuing inspiration which the West has drawn from the more ancient cultures to the East. For the first time in history a religion with universalist ambitions had taken firm root in lands and cultures far from, and unrelated to, those of its birth. A set of beliefs, myths and taboos deriving from the Iron Age people of Palestine and ultimately the Bronze Age cities of Iraq, was accepted by the rulers of Western Europe as the final revelation of history! And even though the Roman Empire itself fell to the northern barbarians in AD 410, this sense of historical mission was never lost. Indeed there is a sense in which Rome has never fallen. For Roman cultural ideals, Roman imperialism and Roman Christianity have remained at the heart of the ideals and the ideologies of the West. And the several renaissances in Western history have been attempts at the rebirth of those ideals. Even the moves to unite Europe that began in the 1990s can be seen in this light: in that sense all Europeans, and most Americans, are heirs to this culture. But unlike China and India, which show an esse
ntial continuity of vision throughout their long history, it was only at this comparatively late moment that the West acquired its self, for now the barbarians became the Romans and created a new culture which is the basis of ours even today: the barbarian West.

  THE DARK AGES

  After the fall of the Roman Empire, tribes of Germanic barbarians made their new home in the ruined provinces. Out on the wild shores of Britain, with a religion from the Near East, a monasticism from Egypt and a written language from Italy, the Anglo-Saxons started to build their new order with the optimism of all immigrants thrown on strange shores.

  On the River Tyne in Northumbria, the searcher for that past has to travel back through many histories, through the ruins of later empires built on coal, steel and ships. But at Jarrow is a place as crucial as any in the Western story. Here in the monastery of SS. Peter and Paul, one of the first great histories of the West was written. It spelt out the West’s view of its own destiny and was written in Latin by a descendant of the barbarians. The author was a monk here, the Venerable Bede. Bede was the first to popularize the Anno Domini system of dating history from Christ’s birth, which is now used throughout the world. The books written here give clues to his world. The biblical hero David, for example, was a model for the rulers of the new dynasties of the barbarian West, portrayed as the psalmist, the teacher of his people. In the same manuscript, David is shown with the spear of God waging just wars against non-believers. Put the two ideas together and you have an image of the ideal Western ruler from the Crusades to the Gulf War of 2003.

  Bede’s history was the most remarkable and the most successful attempt to show how the peoples of the barbarian West, in the Dark Ages, transformed themselves through the agency of civilization: Christian, Latin, Mediterranean civilization. Bede was a thorough-going European in that respect. In comparison with say contemporary Tang China, Bede’s Anglo-Saxons and the people of Europe were indeed barbarians. They were, as we would say today in the patronizing language of the rich, impoverished, underdeveloped, Third World immigrants; and yet here on the Northumbrian coast in the eighth century were already the key elements out of which the culture of the modern West would emerge: Judaeo-Christian religion and ethics, the remains of Greek and Roman humanism and law, native Germanic society and language. In the hands of an historian like Bede, that mixture could be made to tell a powerful story, the story that kings and peoples of the barbarian West were appointed Christian heirs of the Roman Empire, a chosen people destined to lead us on into the last phase of human history from the city of man to the city of God. And that idea, that history is purposive and leads to an appointed end, would become one of the driving themes of world culture from St Augustine to Marx, and from Jarrow to Tiananmen Square.

  THE ROOTS OF THE MODERN WEST

  In the medieval era between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries the barbarians came of age. They created one of the greatest epochs of art and architecture which the world has ever seen: the age of cathedrals. But even then, social forces were at work which would eventually loosen the hold of the church of Rome on the former barbarians. In eastern England, eight hundred years ago, changes can be detected in ordinary people’s lives which would have a crucial bearing on the future. This is not the history of great events, but the intimate human story of birth, marriage, and childbearing, and it brings us to one of the most fascinating questions in the story of the rise of the West. How was it that such small-scale countries and economies could end up dominating the world as they have done? As late as 1550, England only had two and a half million people. China and India with their vast and highly developed economies had passed 100 million centuries before. They had made all the great inventions necessary for scientific and industrial revolutions. How did the Western European countries overtake them? Was there something distinctive about the character of the West? Or was it just historical chance?

  Across north-west Europe, and especially in eastern England, records of birth, marriage and death suggest that as early as the twelfth century a distinctive character was emerging; of late marriage, of small mobile nuclear families, but also of a possessive property-based individualism. Here too are signs of a free market philosophy, which looks uncannily like the seeds of later Western ideology – of the ideology which through the English, French and American revolutions became the dominant philosophy of the West, and which rules our lives even today. In England in particular such ideas may be very deeply rooted. Why is not clear; its insularity may have helped preserve the lineaments of more archaic egalitarian traditions of Iron Age northern peasant farmers. It was also only lightly Romanized. But English common law is certainly Anglo-Saxon in origin; so are the ‘democratic’ institutions in which it was enacted, the shire and hundred courts. In the tenth century already we can trace the parallel developments of local government, a strong currency and personal freedom, as against slavery. Numerous cases of manumission of slaves for cash indicate that slavery was now being rejected in favour of freedom and money as a more useful basis for society: the nexus of law, currency, personal freedom and representative government with which we are so familiar today may have deep roots in the West.

  People were also marrying later, a crucial factor in economic growth and population control. For the younger you marry, the more generations there are in a century. In poor countries, people marry young and have large families: this is the real trigger to overpopulation, and it is at the heart of the world’s population problems today. In parts of medieval Western Europe however, men and women were already making ‘prudential marriages’ – marrying in their late twenties, having small families and practising impartible inheritance. So Western people were beginning to do what today’s Chinese, for example, have had to enforce by law.

  This was the key not just to population control but to the accumulation of wealth. For with security of life, inheritance, and property, you do not need big families. So the West was already becoming a mobile property-based society, moving away from the extended family and the old continuities of residence and occupation. It is the first sign of a revolution in values which would see the modern West diverge from all traditional societies, the first sign of Western individualism. These individualistic agrarian societies could be found in other parts of northern Europe, especially in Germany and Holland. Theirs was a distinctive way of seeing the world, no doubt, as with India or China, deeply rooted in climate, landscape and soil, the influences which mould the way people organize themselves in history. Theirs was a conception of freedom based on property and common law, the rights of the ordinary man: a conception which derived from Europe, not from ancient Athens. It gave birth to one of the glories of the Western tradition, the idea of an open society. It centred on individual rather than on collective rights and it was a philosophy which, for a time at least, would inherit the earth.

  RENAISSANCES IN ISLAM AND THE WEST

  Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries the great powerhouse of culture in western Asia was still the Fertile Crescent. The Muslims had inherited the legacy of the ancients and it was in medieval Baghdad that the first attempt was made to bridge the religions and philosophies of East and West. Through the universities and libraries there, Babylonian astronomy, Hindu mathematics and Chinese science were transmitted to Europe by Arab humanists. Here Arab scholars created a brilliant synthesis of Persian, Greek, Jewish and Muslim philosophy and metaphysics; it was one of the great multi-cultural epochs of all time. In tenth century Basra a circle of scholars known as the ‘Brethren of Purity’ expressed their aims in words which would scarcely be thinkable today. ‘If one could combine Arabic faith and Jewish intelligence,’ said one, ‘with an Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism and a Sufi way of life, this would be the perfection of humanity.’ That dream still stands as one of the greatest of all declarations of faith in an international civilization.

  When Western humanism revived in Italy in the Renaissance it would owe much to th
e Muslim transmission of the ancient Greek legacy, and to these great waves of civilization which still came out of Asia to fertilize the spiritual and philosophical life of the West. Modern studies of the rise of colleges and universities in late medieval Europe suggest that in their organization and curricula they were influenced by their Islamic contemporaries. When the famous fifteenth-century Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola reformulated the old Greek maxim about the greatness of man, he expressed it in a characteristic way. ‘There is nothing more wonderful on the world’s stage than man himself: I have read so in the works of the Arabs.’

  In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries then, in Italy and other parts of Europe, the path was taken which scholars in Baghdad had trodden four hundred years before: the assimilation to a still predominantly religious culture and theocratic rule of classical learning, Hellenism, sceptical and rational science, Neoplatonic philosophy, and even of older magical and gnostic traditions. ‘We have heard of late,’ wrote Ibn Khaldun in 1377, ‘that in Western Europe the philosophical sciences are thriving, their works reviving, their sessions of study increasing, with abundant teachers and students.’ The effects of this tremendous psychological shift in Western culture are still with us, dealing a potentially fatal blow to the religious view of the world which had been the controlling ethos in Western society since the Dark Ages, leading ultimately, for good and ill, to the triumph of today’s secular civilization. The reason why this did not happen in Islam is one of the most important questions of our time, though outside the scope of a book such as this. It may, though, be relevant to note that the humanistic vision of life and the dictates of the Christian religion, with its determinist view of history, were perhaps at root irreconcilable. But in the contradiction between the two lies the very heart of the West’s view of itself, its greatest triumphs and its worst disasters. Through exploring that contradiction it reached sublime heights in art, music and drama which stand comparison with any in the world. And yet perhaps more than any other civilization it fell prey to the deep-rooted contradiction in its character, the perennial Manichaean struggle in its soul which reached its awful climax in Europe in our own time.