A History of the World Read online

  The dubious reconstruction of a Bronze Age palace, filled with faked-up pictures, was the lifetime achievement of a British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans. Knossos had been discovered by a local Greek antiquarian, who had started to dig in the 1870s. But with an excellent classical education and wealthy from the family’s paper-mill business, Evans bought the entire site when Crete became independent of the Ottoman Empire. Like his friend the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann who had discovered (and accidentally partly destroyed) Troy in 1871, Evans saw himself as reconnecting the modern and ancient worlds and cleansing the dirty industrial mess of modern Europe through the revived memory of simpler, nobler times. As Gere puts it, Evans was infused and animated by spiritual hunger and he wanted nothing less than ‘the pagan re-enchantment’ of the modern world.

  To achieve this, in his hunger, Evans first supported the ruined buildings he was excavating with wood and plaster, and then slowly began to ‘improve’ them with the flexible and useful recent invention of reinforced concrete. The extent to which his re-imagining of the Knossos complex is an accurate and reasonable guess, or merely a modernist fantasy, divides even the experts. Evans was searching for a pacific, sexually relaxed paradise and, in Crete, avoiding any evidence of military fortification; later on, he commissioned modern artists to ‘touch up’ ancient wall paintings so comprehensively that they produced new ones. The Swiss–French father-and-son team, both called Émile Gilliéron, produced reconstructions that go far beyond the evidence, yet are now reproduced around the world, and they probably went on to make full-scale fakes.

  The reconstructions included images of black African warriors used by the Minoans, according to Evans’s fantasy, to invade the mainland Greeks, whom he associated with Germanic militarism. Shrewd observers noticed something odd. The English novelist Evelyn Waugh, visiting the Heraklion museum where the paintings were on show, wrote of his suspicion that ‘their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for the covers of Vogue’.27 Even the name ‘Minoan’ came from Evans’s belief that he had discovered the original site of King Minos’s famous labyrinth, where according to classical myth the hero Theseus killed the half-bull and half-man Minotaur. The myth placed King Minos on Crete and had it that the Minotaur devoured fresh Athenian children; there is something sadistic about the story. And what the Minoans really called themselves, we cannot say.

  So from this rubble, what can we know for sure about the people we call Minoans? Their civilization lasted for around thirteen hundred years and survived not one but a series of natural disasters including a hugely destructive earthquake and two volcanic eruptions, and a tsunami which devastated coastal settlements and their all-important shipping. Recent archaeology, influenced by the huge destructive power of the 2004 tsunami in Asia, suggests similar devastation in Crete. The Minoan ‘palaces’ that scatter the island, linked by stone roads, are probably urban, religious and trading centres. They traded in tin, very well made and painted (and unfaked) pottery, as well as a wide range of foods, oils and other staples. Their agriculture was sophisticated and it does seem that their religion was dominated by priestesses and by some form of bull-worship. A game or ritual involving leaping over bulls, grasping them by their horns – which must have been far more dangerous than modern bull-fighting – is seen on genuine images. Even if their art was not quite as sexily exuberant as that of the reconstructors, it was sinuous and immediately attractive.

  But there is a darker side to the culture. It is now thought that they did go to war and did protect their citadels with defensive walls. At Anemospilia, a temple near Knossos, as stark and unadorned an excavation as the other is rebuilt and imagined, three skeletons were found by a Greek-led team in 1979. They had apparently all died in the immediate aftermath of the later volcanic eruption. One is thought to be of a twenty-eight-year-old priestess and another of a priest; the third is the skeleton of an eighteen-year-old boy, tethered in a foetal position and with an ornate knife sticking through him. The arrangement of blackened and white bones suggests he was still bleeding to death when the final disaster struck, and the obvious conclusion is that he was a human sacrifice designed to appease the volcano.

  Far from being a society of peace and love, wafting about in gossamer garments and admiring the dolphins, the Minoans seem to have been as bloody as anyone else. Just as the first Cro-Magnons were able to combine beautiful art and cannibalism, so the first civilization in Europe combined beauty and human sacrifice. The hunter-gatherers had struggled with the natural challenges produced by an erratic and difficult climate; their Minoan descendants were still struggling with natural threats big enough to overwhelm their way of life. In between, man had begun to learn how to reshape nature; but outside a few specially favoured river valleys this remained a precarious and uncertain victory.

  The end of the Minoan story is messy; most scholars now believe they were not wiped out by a single cataclysm as the tourist guides say, but were sufficiently weakened by eruptions and earthquakes to make them relatively easy meat for invading Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland. Certainly, Greek-speakers replaced the late Minoan elites not very long before their civilization, too, mysteriously disappeared. As we shall see later, the end of a lively and sophisticated Bronze Age Mediterranean world is one of history’s more tantalizing puzzles.

  By this point, Eve’s children have already laid the foundations of the modern world. Most of the spadework has been done over a span of fifty thousand years by people whose names we will never know and most of whose languages remain a mystery. They have cleared forests, invented agriculture, raised the first towns and cities, and advanced enough in learning to use mathematics and writing, preserving their names and stories. They have also begun to develop a class system and fighting elites. They have invented war.

  Part Two

  THE CASE FOR WAR

  The First Great Age of Empire, from the Assyrians to Alexander, and How Civil Conflict Produced Radical Advances in Religion, Writing and Philosophy

  War, and more war: a dreary chronicle of swollen-headed butcher kings, charcoaled cities, and flies buzzing on silent flesh? It is true that the early Mediterranean, Indian and Asian worlds saw almost incessant warfare, a great churning of empires and armies which, you might have thought, would push civilization back to a dark age. And indeed, around three thousand years ago there was a dark age, a mysterious collapse across what had been a cradle of civilization. Everywhere archaeologists report depopulation, palaces abandoned, and the widespread loss of skills, including writing.

  But out of the disaster arose new empires, now with iron weapons, about to write down their own history and chronicle their own wars. And however terrible war may be, the awkward truth is that war has been a huge driver of change in human history. When we reach into a purse or pocket for coins, when we argue about dangerous extremists in our democracies, or about the mingling of cultures; when we write our thoughts down using the alphabet or read headlines about threats to the traditional family, we are using tools and thoughts given to us by this apparently remote age of empires, thinkers and warrior-kings.

  So here, from Greece to India and China, is the case for war.

  Greek Glory and the First Empires

  murderous, doomed . . .

  hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,

  great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion

  feasts for the dogs and birds

  Homer, Iliad

  Into written history strides a story we still read today. It begins in the middle of a war, with the rage of the warrior Achilles, and it comprises just two weeks’ worth of bickering, sand, heat and very bloody death in front of the walls of a city. The action takes place near the end of a decade-long siege, a pointless stalemate. This is the Iliad of Homer. With that and his other great poem of journeying and heartache, the Odyssey, Homer began to make Greece. For the classical Greeks, these books
were the Bible and Shakespeare combined, a source of cultural identity, a vast storehouse of expressions and a treasury for orators.

  Educated Greeks of the fifth century BC prided themselves on knowing these huge poems by heart. Since then, Homer’s tales and the surrounding myths of Helen’s abduction and the Trojan Horse have dug their way into the world’s imagination, their influence extending from Roman generals to the poets of Shakespeare’s England and modern film-makers. Here is one place where a true world culture begins; and it is the earliest known work of Western literature. Not only is the Iliad a war story, but it is an unusually convincing one, about an army whose leaders are petty and sometimes mutinous, where disease stalks the camp and wounds are frightful and the enemy is to be admired, not merely hated. And in which the good guys die. It glories in violence, this poem, yet it was written by someone who found the human lust for war silly and bitter. He was deeply conflicted about conflict, and thus a deathless poet of the human condition.

  These are the centuries when mankind’s core civilizations moved from bronze weapons to iron ones, and from oral tales to stories written down. The role of war as a dark driver of change is unavoidable. Advances in metalworking, wheels, horsemanship, sailing, mathematics and counting, architecture and religion, are driven by confrontation – in China, India and the Mediterranean. This is, obviously, an ambiguous story. Greece is a good place to start it, both because of what will happen there and what had happened just before the Iron Age, when we get a tantalizing glimpse of a better future that would be snuffed out. Across the Mycenaean Greek world of Homer’s heroes a dark shadow would soon fall, scattering the people, destroying the palaces and cities, until even the ability to write was lost. The Greeks who followed, using Homer to recall their identity, blamed war for their predicament.

  We do not know quite what happened. Around 1000 BC some great disaster or string of disasters hit the eastern Mediterranean, causing a dramatic depopulation. If the Greeks coming later, in early classical times, thought this was somehow connected with the Trojan conflict, then perhaps war was part of the story. Historians think invasions of Dorian tribes from the north, coming upon Greek statelets weakened by local conflicts, and wiping them out, may have been responsible. Alternatively, this collapse might have been driven by natural disasters – climate change or a series of terrible earthquakes, provoking local wars of mere survival. One single cause seems unlikely.

  We do know that before this great and mysterious disaster, the Bronze Age world of the Mediterranean was booming. Excavations and written inscriptions are filling in some of our knowledge. Few finds have been as outstanding as that of a merchant ship, cruising off the Turkish coast a century or so before the Trojan war. It was discovered by a local diver and then recovered by underwater archaeologists during 1984–94. Known as the Uluburun shipwreck, the boat has been dated (from the analysis of firewood it carried) to around 1310 BC. Built of cedar and oak from Lebanon, it was probably travelling from Cyprus or Palestine, perhaps to Rhodes or to the Hittite empire, when it suddenly went down close to shore. Bones from the meal the sailors were eating when it happened have been recovered.1

  More amazing, though, was its cargo. There was a huge haul of carefully made copper ingots from the mines on Cyprus, shaped to be easily carried on pack-animal saddles, and tin ingots too, for the manufacture of the bronze used for armour, weapons and tools. There were sacks of cobalt, turquoise and lavender-coloured glass, many musical instruments, jars of beads, olives and dye from Canaan, hard black wood from Africa, exquisite gold jewellery from Egypt, elephant tusks and hippopotamus teeth, ostrich-egg shells and turtle shells, swords from Italy, Palestine and Greece as well as other weapons thought to have come from Bulgaria and the Alps. The many tools included axes, drill-bits, tongs and saws. There was food too, including pine nuts, figs, coriander, almonds and pomegranates, as well as amber from the Baltic, the seal of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, and even two writing-books made of boxwood, ivory and beeswax, with a stylus for writing – a kind of notebook described by Homer.

  This was the find from just one ship, quite small and miraculously preserved for 3,300 years. Its hold was like a knot with threads reaching out to Italy and the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, the Baltic, the Assyrian world, Mycenae and Egypt. It is vivid evidence of the relative wealth, sophistication and cosmopolitan culture that disappeared. The chance discovery of a single boat overturned many old ideas about the Bronze Age, and makes one wonder about the civilizations that might have emerged out of centuries of commercial rivalry rather than military confrontation.

  It was not to be. In the Iron Age, war rather than trade would be the repeated trigger for change. The wars dimly remembered by Homer’s listeners would eventually give way to a time of conflict that gave today’s human civilizations the alphabets of the West, the sophisticated writing of the East; the great philosophies of classical Greece and Confucian China; architectural styles we still use and religious ideas that inspire billions of modern people.

  Democracy was an idea forced on phalanxes of fighting men, all on the same level, protecting one another against richer men on horses. Monotheism emerged from the brutal invasion and enslavement of a small tribal people caught between empires. Chinese ideas about order and duty came only after the hideous experience of interminable disorder between states. By contrast, the cultures least directly affected by the pressures of war or invasion, like that of Egypt, changed least and gave less back to the common human story. So we have to ask: would a peaceful Mediterranean, trading raw materials and luxuries but mainly tending goats and fishing, have produced a Sophocles or a Pericles? Few collective human experiences are as bad as war, with its train of rape, starvation, mutilation and physical destruction. Yet war brings change, including sometimes, change for the better.

  Uncertainty about war is knotted through Homer’s poetry. His Greek and Trojan heroes are larger than life – young, magnificent animals, brimmingly alive. Looking back to the age of heroes, many of his listeners believed that the Greeks who landed on the sandy shore of the Troad had literally been giants. The bones of prehistoric beasts were claimed as relics of dead superheroes, whose doings interrupted the never-ending afternoon tea of the gods on Olympus. Yet Homer shows these men as all too human, when they sulk, bitch, boast and have petty quarrels about status. And in the end when they die they go not to a glorious southern Valhalla, or to be comforted by teams of virgins, but fade away into a grim, spectral underworld and pithless semi-existence.2

  To understand this brilliant combination of excitement and grief-stricken wisdom we need to remember Homer’s audience, and what had happened to the Greeks of his own time, who lived between the Bronze Age heroics of Mycenae and the beginnings of the classical Greece of city-states. About Homer himself we know next to nothing. He was said to have been blind. Some scholars think he did not even exist – that ‘Homer’ is a neat shorthand for an anonymous group or tradition of storytellers – though others rebut them by pointing to the crafty shaping and coherence of the poems. Whoever he was, or they were (and I will use the singular for simplicity), Homer used a particular dialect of Greek called Ionic, from what is now the western coast of Turkey, where Troy stands too.

  Building on hints embedded in the poems, historians now think he lived around 750 BC, which is some five hundred years after the war he purports to describe. Yet there are parts of the Iliad that seem much older, above all the famous ‘Catalogue of the Ships’, which lists the city-states and the peoples making up the Greek force and which describes a Bronze Age political world, not one from Homer’s time. Homer could have written the poems, rather than composed them in his head to be spoken, since around fifty years earlier the Greeks had begun to use an adapted alphabet to note down their own words.

  Troy was real. The series of ancient settlements and fortresses uncovered first by the already mentioned German adventurer Heinrich Schliemann in 1871–3 match the geography and setting of the siege that Homer descr
ibes. Unfortunately, as an inexperienced archaeologist, Schliemann dug so deeply and so quickly he probably destroyed most of the Trojan city, which formed one of the layers of excavations (and there are still arguments about exactly which). Walls made of big limestone blocks protected ‘Troy VI’ of around 1350 BC, though, and it had seven-metre-high towers, a grand inner citadel and a deep well. The site’s amazing gold treasures, including what Schliemann thought was the crown of Helen of Troy, date from much earlier. But this was certainly a powerful, important place, perfectly situated for trade and for extorting tribute from passing ships.

  Troy, or Ilium, was a city of the Hittite world, under the protection of the great empire that ruled all of Anatolia. The Hittites themselves, early users of iron, and chariot-imperialists, have only recently, after major archaeological finds, fully reappeared in history. Troy to them was a vassal state on the extreme western edge of their world. They were literate: Hittite tablets, mainly diplomatic and other records, unearthed at their capital city of Hattusa make clear that Troy was part of a wealthy, complicated network of military and trading links – the Hittites called it Wilusa.

  We also know about the Greeks who besieged Troy because they have left towns; and they too were literate, using a primitive script called Linear B. They are often known as the Mycenaeans, after Mycenae, the impressive citadel with lion-decorated gates that Homer tells us was King Agamemnon’s capital. It was one of these early Greeks’ main fortified bases – though recent scholarship suggests Thebes may have been at least as important. The Greeks? They had swept down into the valleys and islands named after them around five hundred years before the Trojan conflict. They were warriors based on a clan system who built defensive hilltop forts across the mainland. They swiftly became effective sailors and raiders, and would help to destroy the Minoans.