A History of the World (11 page)

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 describes. 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.

The Mycenaean Greeks seized defeated people as slaves and were probably some of the mysterious ‘sea peoples’ who so terrified ancient Egyptians. They developed colonies and traded – their pottery turns up across the eastern Mediterranean. Hittite records treat them as a single people and complain about their poor behaviour, including the transportation of seven thousand people from Anatolia to Mycenae.
³
Greek records there also refer to lists of loot and slaves: ‘Twenty-one women from Cnidus with their twelve girls and ten boys, captives. Women of Miletus. To-ro-ja – Women of Troy.’
⁴

Did a great alliance of Mycenae-era Greeks go to war with the Trojans? It is likely. Troy was close and rich. Historians today suggest it was a war over trade levies rather than the abduction of a beautiful Spartan queen called Helen. Yet women had high status and were often taken captive in Bronze Age fighting, and there was a Helen cult in Sparta well into classical times, so that part of the story might have some distant factual basis. Sadly, only a couple of generations after the war Homer describes, that great black curtain fell across the Mediterranean
world. The palaces are abandoned. The superb gold-working skills of the Mycenaean Greeks disappear. Written words vanish.

Homer’s first audience was a migrant and impoverished one, a scattering of refugees remembering the good old days and asking repeatedly, What went wrong? The
Iliad
was part of a longer cycle of at least six epic poems, which have now been lost, telling of the origins of the war and how it ended – with the taking and destroying of Troy.
⁵
Homer’s 15,700-line poem could not have been recited or heard at one sitting; perhaps it was meant for festivals of several days, or perhaps it was delivered like modern television dramas, in episodes.

However it was heard, though, it demonstrates the great irony that war gives as well as taking away. No Trojan war, no Homer. No Homer, no (or at least much less) familiar classical Greek culture. For by the time these people re-emerge in history, reciting their tales of Achilles and Hector, Paris and Helen, they will be forming the most impressive civilization of ancient times.

Concerning Knowledge – Be Humble

And they will be doing it with a new invention, something simple, clever and which shaped the Western world. It has no single inventor we know of, and appeared quite mysteriously among a people who have left the world little else.

‘Concerning knowledge: here and now be humble (you yourself!) in this basement!’ Thus the short, peppery order halfway down a tunnel leading to the tomb of a king. His sarcophagus was discovered in 1925 in the Lebanese port city of Byblos. King Ahiram is shown sitting on a throne, being offered a lotus flower by a priestess – just another day in the life of just another king. Around him are sphinxes. There is a longer inscription, which seems to suggest a father-and-son burial and warns in rather obscure terms against grave-robbery: ‘One should cancel his registration concerning the libation tube of the memorial sacrifice.’ Perhaps, when it was carved, this was a terrifying threat. Another translation suggests more directly that the son buried the father and is warning off anyone who digs him up: ‘may the sceptre of his rule be torn away, may the throne of his kingdom be overturned.’

What makes Ahiram’s sarcophagus remarkable, however, is not the art or the words, but how the words are written. For this is the earliest example known of the Phoenician alphabet, written in Byblos about three thousand years ago. From this script of twenty-two stark letters, simple and memorable, all of them consonants, derived the writing of the ancient Greeks, and Aramaic, and the script of the Etruscans of Italy, and thus Latin, and every European language. Many scholars believe Indic and Brahmi scripts come from Aramaic too, which would mean the Phoenicians’ invention has covered almost every part of the world except China and the Far East. It is not quite a coincidence that ‘Byblos’ gives us the word ‘Bible’: the city was a trading city for papyrus to write on, and the Greek word for papyrus became the name for book, hence Bible.

Who were the Phoenicians? This is again a Greek name, for the trading and coastal people originally from Canaan. Living around modern Lebanon, Syria and Israel, they had been driven to the coast, probably by the relentlessly unpleasant Assyrian war machine, the great people-stirrers of the age. The coastal Canaanites were great shipbuilders and sailors, turning their ports of Tyre and Byblos, and later the great colony of Carthage, into hubs for Mediterranean trade. The old Egyptian word for a vessel that could venture out into deep sea was ‘Byblos boat’, and there were stories that by 600
BC
the Phoenicians had sailed around Africa – a tall tale made more credible by the strange fact that they claimed they had eventually found the midday sun coming up on the right-hand side of their vessel. We know a little about their gods, and what they looked like – they wore conical caps, simple cotton gowns, adored gold jewellery, and the men had combed, oiled beards. The women, according to carvings and inscriptions, seem to have had more power and freedom than was common in the ancient world.

The most famous, though probably mythical, Phoenician was Dido of Tyre, also known as Elissa, who founded Carthage in 813
BC
after tricking the North African locals. They had said she could have as much land as she could fit into an ox-hide, so she cut it into such a thin single strip that she had a sizeable area for a settlement. Dido also fell in love with Aeneas, making his way from the Trojan disaster to Italy, and when he insisted on leaving her, killed herself on a funeral pyre. That, at any rate, is what the Romans said. The ox-hide story may
refer to a Bronze Age view of the Phoenicians as wily double-crossers, the fate of traders throughout time. Later, the Phoenicians would be used by the Persians and even the Macedonians to provide ships from which their armies could fight. They were useful go-betweens who needed, therefore, easy ways of keeping track of sales and bartering.

Their alphabet used very simplified versions of hieroglyphs, pictures-standing-for-the-thing, and turned them into sounds, one sign for each sound. The names of their letters (such as
gimel
,
dalet
,
sin
) came from the original images (here, camel, door, tooth). They sound vaguely familiar even now; the Phoenician alphabet starts
aleph
,
beth
,
gimel
,
daleth
. The letters look odder to us, though a little more like Greek or Hebrew. Once the marks’ correspondence with tongue and lip sounds was established, they could be arranged to mimic real speech. This may sound obvious, but it was a huge leap of logic.