A History of the World (22 page)

He travelled his new realms, showing himself and his army to the subjects of the new empire, and raising triumphal columns. His self-aggrandizement led to him ‘punishing’ a hill that had been struck by lightning, cutting down its trees and painting it red; and to a fruitless search for immortality that involved hunting large and probably mythical sea creatures with a crossbow. He may have contributed to his own death by swallowing mercury pills that a doctor had suggested as a short cut to immortality.

Which, in a way, they were, for Zheng is known today outside China mainly for his huge funeral monument with its estimated eight thousand warriors – the ‘terracotta army’ – its horses, chariots and administrators, buried under a vast mound near Xian. We have to go back, one final time, to our historian, who tells us that at the centre lies the man himself, surrounded by a model of the Chinese world, with rivers made of mercury and a constellation of stars above him. It is possible that this is all true. There is indeed evidence of abnormal quantities of mercury under a nearby hill, suspiciously regular in shape and about the right size for the funeral palace itself. Perhaps, over the next few decades, the greatest archaeological excavation in world history will reveal Zheng himself.

Zheng, like other Chinese, believed in a shadow world after death, similar to this world and which had to be carefully prepared for. Under earlier local dynasties many other Chinese kings and nobles had been buried with specially killed servants and specially made replica goods. Nor would Zheng’s beliefs have seemed outlandish to Egyptians, Greeks, Vikings and other ancient peoples who believed in sending off mortal bodies well geared up for a life to come. Religious ideas involving human equality before a god, or a moral judgement awaiting the living, would have seemed ridiculous to him – as ridiculous as a clay army to protect you from devils seems to us.

Yet Zheng also had a second and subtler idea about immortality. He called himself ‘the First Emperor’ because he intended to be followed by the second emperor, the third, and so on, for thousands of generations. He did not expect his Ch’in dynasty to collapse as rapidly as it did, and the numbering stopped almost immediately. But the notion of an unbroken succession of emperors held the Chinese imagination right up to the Nationalist and Communist insurrections of the twentieth century; and the idea kept Zheng’s memory as its originator for ever alive, in itself a kind of life-in-death. With a common script and a common language, secure communications, and a sense of themselves as one people under one ruler, the Chinese would produce the longest-lasting and most unified of the ancient civilizations. The price they paid for this was that they were not exposed to the liberating, unsettling, destabilizing idea of monotheism – those personal, universal, mobile religions that would rip apart the only real rival the Ch’in and Han empires had, far away to the West.

The Maccabees’ Sting

Of all the nations to the west of the Chinese, none would have puzzled them more than the people of Judah. We last met the Israelites after their Babylonian exile, while they were refining their unusual religion. Judah, a small blob of a country centred on Jerusalem and Jericho, was squeezed between two of the Greek states that Alexander had spawned, that of the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. By around 200
BC
Judah had fallen under the control of the Seleucid Greeks, and a culture war now began between the Greeks, with their sophisticated, pleasure-loving, philosophical traditions, and the intense, inward-looking Israelites under their high priests.

Greek, or Hellenistic, culture was by now the common property of much of the Western world, providing access to a single set of stories, heroes, ways of thinking, eating and behaving. In cities all over the eastern Mediterranean, statues, paintings and buildings – including theatres and gymnasia – gave Greek culture great allure. It can be fairly compared to the magnetism of the film, the music and the food of twentieth-century America. To reject it required great strength of purpose. Inevitably many Jews, particularly richer ones, ‘Greeked’ themselves, competing in athletic games, dressing like Hellenes and even – apparently – managing to reverse their circumcisions. The Greek Seleucid kings wanted Jerusalem’s high priest to serve as their colonial governor. An unseemly series of dodges, bribes and even a murder degraded the holy office, as the Greeks tried to turn Judah into a normal Greek society. From 167
BC
the Seleucid king Antiochus IV banned many Jewish rites, outlawing circumcision, Jewish feasts and sacrifices. Worst of all, Zeus was brought, in statue form, into the Temple itself.

At this point one of the books of the Old Testament that Protestant Christians are rarely familiar with, that of the Maccabees, continues the heroic story of the Israelites’ resistance to the would-be modernizers. The accounts start with Alexander the Great, whom the Israelites rightly saw as the initial cause of the trouble: ‘And he subdued countries of nations and princes, and they became tributaries to him. And after these things, he fell down upon his bed, and knew that he should die.’ A long line of horrors committed by Antiochus is then
enumerated, including the slaughter of mothers who circumcised their children (the children too were hanged). But then a priest, Mattathias, appeared who refused to bow to the Greeks. When ‘a certain Jew’ who had clearly become semi-Greek arrived in the Temple to sacrifice to a pagan idol, as Antiochus had ordered, Mattathias killed him – and the king’s messenger too – then fled into the mountains.

There, a resistance army was formed. To start with, religion trumped military common sense and a thousand Jews died because they had refused to fight on the Sabbath. The no-fighting-on-the-Sabbath rule was quickly suspended. When old Mattathias died at the ripe old age (apparently) of 146, his son Judas Maccabeus took over as commander. Much of the rest of the narrative, written soon after the event, recounted the guerrilla war waged by the Jews against the Greek armies, which, armed with their elephants, seemed terrifyingly powerful. Jewish militants seized and forcibly circumcised children, pagan altars were overthrown; and eventually Jerusalem itself was recaptured by the Jewish insurgency. Compared with many parts of the conventional Bible, it is an exciting war story.

Mattathias’s other sons, Jonathan and Simon, became kings in their new – Hasmonean – kingdom. They expanded Judah’s territory, smiting unfortunate and weaker neighbours in their path, and made a powerful if dangerous friend by allying with a rising city of which they knew little, Rome. The Maccabees’ war of independence had been a new thing for the Jews, a great political triumph. It had, however, come at a fearful price in terms of deaths. It seems to be around now that Jewish theology started to grapple properly with the notion of an afterlife, something earlier Judaism had said little about. Presumably there was a feeling that these martyrs must have died for something.
⁸

The Book of Daniel, written at around this time, says that ‘many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awaken – these for eternal life, and those for disgrace, for eternal abhorrence’. This was a new idea that would leave a heavy imprint on two thousand years of Christian teaching; and it seems to have emerged out of a guerrilla war.

Strikingly, though, the success of the revolt did not push back Greek influence. Under the Hasmonean kings the Greek language became widely used, alongside Hebrew and Aramaic. Jewish communities began to trade and spread throughout the Greek world, until it was said that there were around a million Jews living in Alexandria
alone. This must be an exaggeration, but it shows how large Jewish communities loomed. Damascus became another big Jewish centre. Most large ports had Jewish communities, with their meeting-houses known by the Greek word ‘synagogue’, in which their sacred books were edited and codified and taught. The books were translated into Greek, and many believers seem to have spoken languages other than Hebrew and Aramaic. Non-Jews who supported synagogues and adopted the religion had a special name of their own, ‘God-fearers’.

The short life of the independent Jewish kingdom came to an end in 63
BC
thanks to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (‘Magnus’ in homage to Alexander the Great), a bull-faced superstar general whose glitter was blinding the late Roman republic. Pompey, as we know him, was a charismatic career soldier with a brutal edge. He could be sentimental, not least about Julia, Julius Caesar’s daughter, but he notched up five wives, and a mistress who boasted that he liked to bite her, leaving marks, when they made love. He had won his first big victories in North Africa as a young man, and had put down first a Spanish rebellion, then pirates in the Mediterranean. In his latest campaign he had swept through Pontus and Asia Minor, almost reached the Caspian Sea and then turned on Syria, where he had snuffed out the kingdom of Antiochus XIII, descendant of the man who had provoked the Maccabee revolt.

Unfortunately for the Jews, they were busily engaged in a civil war of their own between two brothers, the princely sons of Queen Salome, each supported by one of the main sects, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. One brother, Aristobulus, bribed the Romans for help while he was being besieged in the Temple at Jerusalem, which was by now a massive fortified structure. Pompey’s general arrived, and took large amounts of gold and silver. Pompey himself now became suspicious of his new ally: arriving in Jerusalem, he sided with the other brother, Hyrcanus, and besieged the Temple himself. His troops used catapults, siege towers and battering rams to break their way through. They then marched into the ‘holy of holies’, the sanctuary in the centre of the Temple restricted to the high priest, and sacked it. Some of the Jewish defenders were so appalled that they killed themselves. As part of his vast train of loot, Pompey took many Jewish prisoners back to Rome, where some were freed and settled, living near what is now St Peter’s Basilica.

Judah was now merely another Roman possession, which would soon have a puppet king called Herod imposed on it. Oddly, though, Jewish influence on other people continued to grow. De-kinged, pushed out of their own little world, Jews continued to thrive elsewhere in the Mediterranean. An argument rages between Jewish historians about the extent to which Jews now went out to convert others. The conventional wisdom is that they do not, and never did, proselytize – but if so, how can one account for the huge expansion of Judaism in this period? The great Jewish historian Salo Baron points out that, having been a people of around only 150,000 in the fifth century
BC
, they accounted for around 10 per cent of the Roman Empire by the first century
AD
. Norman Cantor, another US-based Jewish historian, reckons: ‘At the time Jesus of Nazareth lived and died and Herod’s Temple was destroyed, some six million Jews lived in the Roman empire . . . Of these, two-thirds were living in the Diaspora.’
⁹
This seems too large a proportion to be accounted for by birth rate or journeys made.

Because Jews themselves were later on the sharp end of Christian and Muslim missions, there is a reluctance to accept that Judaism was itself a missionary religion. Yet as early as 139
BC
, Jews were being expelled from Rome for trying to convert Roman citizens. A little later the great lawyer-politician Cicero complained about proselytizing Jews. Two emperors, Tiberius and Claudius, transported Jews from Rome for the crime of trying to convert Romans.
¹⁰
Roman writers such as Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus all discuss the issue. Later, the emperor Theodosius published ferocious decrees in the Christian era against anyone who attempted to make converts to Judaism.

Judaism, and then Christianity (initially seen by Romans as a version of the same), were disruptive creeds because of their emphasis on equality before God, and their denial of the divinity of emperors. They argued for a reality outside the reality of daily life in the empire. They became popular beliefs among the literate middle classes of the Roman world, the traders and small landowners remote from real power; Jews (though not, to start with, Christians) served as soldiers too. They represented a restless, ceaseless force. The Jewish historian Shlomo Sand makes the point that ‘every monotheism contains a potential element of mission. Unlike the tolerant polytheisms, which accept the existence of other deities, the very belief in the existence of
a single god . . . impels the believers to spread the idea of divine singularity . . . The acceptance by others of the worship of the single god proves his might and his power over the world.’
¹¹

This is such an important story to the West, and such a complicated one, that it is worth trying to summarize it so far.

The Hebrew people had first separated themselves from what had been common in the Mediterranean, the worship of many gods. Very slowly and with much argument they had narrowed their focus to a single god, Yahweh. Many Jews had disagreed over this, but with time their one-god prophets won the argument. When their first kingdoms were destroyed and their leaders exiled to Babylon, the priests developed this thinking further. God was both the only god and the potentially universal god, unconfined to a single area. Instead of walking only his own land, he was everywhere and nowhere. This god had a relationship with every believer, and his laws were written down; they could be carried around and easily disseminated.

The later Judean kingdom fought a vicious war of liberation, as we have seen, and in contemplating its many martyrs it developed another powerful idea, that there might be an individual, personal life after death. Because of the military politics of the ancient world – Greek conquest, then Roman Empire – the people who held these beliefs became widely scattered around the Mediterranean, as traders and merchants with their own communities and buildings. Believing themselves to be in possession of a vital truth, they spread the word and tried to convert others. Conventional Jews were later elbowed aside as the main monotheistic influence, by radical breakaways who believed everyone should convert to their faith – the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, of whom more later.